Michael Shellenberger reveals the Twitter Files expose—Barry Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and himself uncovered FBI, CIA, DHS, and State Department coordination with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia to censor dissent, including the suppressed Hunter Biden laptop story (despite FBI possession since December 2019) and COVID lab leak skepticism. Shellenberger argues pharmaceutical studies hide null findings, transgender ideology may be a harmful social contagion, and elite narratives—from WEF’s "you will own nothing" to media misgendering scandals—threaten free speech. Rogan and Shellenberger critique weaponized labels like "anti-vaxxers" and demand transparency, contrasting woke control with historical resilience against doomsday predictions while advocating for Stoic humility over ideological hatred. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, seriously, there's been a lot of misinformation about that itself, but Barry Weiss contacted me.
She lives in LA, and she got in, and she's like, how soon can you get over here?
And I was like, let me finish this interview.
I'm on and I'm over.
And yeah, it was incredible.
You know, I'd never met Elon before.
You know, I met him at the coffee station just making himself a cup of coffee.
He had no idea who I was.
And yeah, we just got into it.
It was a, you know, I was sort of the least known of the big three journalists that were there.
It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who was on.
And they had already started thinking about how to kind of what to go after.
And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already.
And then we were starting to look at January 6th because Trump gets de-platformed on January 8th.
And so because I'm like the junior member of that threesome, so to speak, they gave me January 7th.
So the first thing we, one of the first things we did was just to look at how they made a decision to get to pull Trump off the platform.
And it turned out that the 7th was an important day because that was when they started to rationalize this decision to deplatform Trump, even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their terms of service.
So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to de-platform him.
And that was an important theme was that they just kept changing the rules basically to do what they wanted to do.
And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop.
The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of service.
So, I mean, look, it was crazy.
I mean, it was, you know, as people always ask questions about the files themselves, but, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches and we just get back huge amounts of data.
It was lots of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal messages on their Slack messaging system.
And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff.
But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real, you know, super progressive.
It's like 99% of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats.
You know, the head of safety at Twitter is a guy named Yoel Roth, who, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in.
He's very progressive.
But over time, we just kept finding like this weird, like, FBI wants us to do this.
You know, there's these other government agencies.
Oh, you know, all these people used to work at the FBI.
The CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security.
And we're kind of like, what the hell is going on?
And the story quickly shifted from us sort of, and I think what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring, to there is a huge operation by U.S. government officials, U.S. government contractors, and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people.
And at that moment, the story shifted for all of us.
And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important and sort of the lead because he had had so much experience on sort of looking at how the U.S. government during the war on terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns.
And it became clear to us, you know, over time that the U.S. government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that it had been waging abroad.
It turned them against the American people.
And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine and you were like, this is something seriously sinister is going on.
That's part of what was so terrifying is that it was all of the social media companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about, but also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized.
So when does it start?
You know, it really, what you're looking at is the apparatus that was created by the war on terror over the last 20 years, starting after 9-11.
Then there was a battle against ISIS because ISIS was successfully recruiting on social media.
So there was sort of a counter-ISIS recruiting campaign that occurred.
Then you get the big event is Brexit 2016, Trump's election in 2016.
And the establishment just freaks out, absolutely freaks out.
And there's a lot of different motivations here.
So one of the motivations is just to blame Facebook, blame social media for Trump's victory.
It was never true.
I don't really think anybody really believed it.
There's just, you know, it just, there was just, for a variety of reasons we can talk about, there was never any good evidence that whatever Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome of the campaign.
But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get control over them.
And so then they started, then in 2017, they set up, well, two things happen, or many things happen.
The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure.
And that meant protecting the media environment, protecting.
They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly protect the media environment from foreign influence.
They create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms.
They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these meetings.
So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here, and he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter Biden laptop, and he goes, well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys come to us saying there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden, which is super suspicious because as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019.
What freaked me out, and I was, I had, so by the way, I was a victim of the Hunter Biden laptop disinformation.
I thought that I voted for Biden.
I thought that it was a, I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation.
You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, and besides Trump, it was just he's so, for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake, I bought that it was fake.
So then when you realized that it was real and that everything in that New York Post story on October 14th, 2020 was accurate, I started seeing stuff in the emails.
The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, it's called a tabletop exercise, and it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack and leak around Hunter Biden.
This is like in June of 2020.
So this is like months before the New York, before, months before Rudy Giuliani gets the laptop, before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York Post.
Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre-bunk, basically they are training or brainwashing all these journalists, and I mean it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies all coming together to be like, okay, well, if something is leaked, then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.
Meanwhile, Stanford University, a few months earlier, had put out a report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle.
Well, the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode.
Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it where the Washington Post and New York Times published these internal Pentagon documents showing that the U.S. government was losing the war in Vietnam, right?
This is Daniel Ellsberg, and he just releases it.
He steals these documents.
He breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers.
The newspapers publish them.
It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked, so-called hacked, but leaked information.
And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute, saying, oh, no, no, no, that's all, we should stop doing that.
Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way.
Instead, we should focus on the person who leaked it.
So it really sent chills up my spine.
You know, it was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
And this is, of course, you've got to remember, Aspen Institute is funded by the U.S. government.
Stanford's funded by the U.S. government.
So this is, people go, oh, well, you're just, one of the responses we've got is they go, oh, you're just talking about, you know, content moderation by private companies.
No, we're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.
You can't, if the U.S. government is censoring information, that's obviously a violation of the First Amendment.
But if the U.S. government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's also a violation of the First Amendment.
You can't indirectly, it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to demand censorship.
So that was quite a steeplechase, but there's a lot here.
I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack.
And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I didn't need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
Obviously, the laptop would harm the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden, obviously.
And if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other way.
Is this a direct result of the things that Trump said when he was in office that went against the intelligence community?
Like, how did they decide?
I would always assume that the so-called deep state is essentially bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the Republicans.
They're really, you know, they're just in charge of they're supposed to be gathering information to protect the country.
So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?
So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that Trump was viewed by the deep state, by CIA, FBI, Pennsylvania, and all of the elites.
And you're right, it's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats.
What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull the U.S. out of NATO.
I don't think that that was, I just think that was bluster.
Like, that's insane.
Like, and by the way, I should say, I actually support what we call the Western Alliance.
I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe.
I'm not a, I mean, there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm also, I don't think we should pull out of NATO.
I think NATO has provided peace in the world and mostly been a good thing.
It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq.
This whole experience has made me rethink my support for Ukraine.
But I think it's important to understand that Trump terrified the deep state and the national security establishment.
So did Brexit.
There's a sense in which you had a guy on here named Peter Zion who wrote this book called this really apocalyptic book about how the world is going to fall apart.
And his whole argument, which I don't agree with, I think he's brilliant, but the book is, I think the argument's wrong.
His whole argument is based on the idea that the United States is going to stop providing military security to our allies in Asia and Europe.
It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some U.S. withdrawing from its traditional role since World War II.
There's a bunch of people who, obviously, their ideology, their livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with providing the United States providing this protection for Europe and Asia.
And they viewed Trump as threatening that.
I also think they just really hated the guy.
They looked down on him.
He was crude and all the things that people don't like about him.
And what's so interesting is that, you know, if you read people like, you know, people on the left, like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of U.S., or Glenn Greenwald, who are critics of, and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of U.S. government, you know, military invasions around the world since World War II.
I mean, we've overthrown many governments, right?
You know, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, you know, and what the pattern is, is that these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just nationalists who are trying to control their economies and they didn't want foreign interference, were coming to power.
And the U.S. government would see that as a threat to providing, you know, to having this liberal global order, as it's called.
And so they saw what Trump, they saw Trump as an existential threat to this post-war liberal order, and they needed to, and they viewed social media as the means to his power, which I think was exaggerated.
So on the one hand, they saw a threat.
I think they also saw an opportunity.
You know, the war on terror, we won.
I mean, like, it's just, I mean, we, huge, huge victory.
I mean, it's shocking how successful it was in some way.
So you have a bunch of people that suddenly need something to do.
So there's a lot of motivations there.
And then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign.
John Podesta, he was her chair of her campaign.
He runs the most powerful progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the world, or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress.
They were looking also for some reason, someone to blame for their own failures, you know, for the dislikability of Hillary.
And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social media platforms.
And what was the attitude of these social media platforms when they were exchanging emails back and forth with these intelligence agencies?
Was there any understanding of the implications of allowing this web of influence to infiltrate and control narratives and how kind of creepy and dangerous that is?
Did they understand how other people would perceive that?
Because I would assume this is all the emails were exchanged and there was Slack messages and all this stuff is recorded, right?
Yeah, I mean, just to back up even further, so there's two interesting dynamics going on.
The first is that the Internet itself is created by the U.S. Department of Defense.
And Google is a spin-off of Defense Department projects.
So on the one hand, the Internet is a function of the U.S. military.
I mean, it's a spin-off of the U.S. military.
It's a great one.
We're glad to have it.
But I think the U.S. military and the deep state and whatever, they felt like they had control over the Internet until Trump, basically, or really maybe until ISIS around 2014, 2015.
That's the first dynamic.
The second dynamic is culturally, Silicon Valley is libertarian.
So you have the Electronic Freedom Foundation, I'm sorry, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
You have a libertarian ethos.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is very much a manifestation of that libertarian ethos.
Mark Zuckerberg, less.
But even Mark Zuckerberg, after the 2016 elections, when everyone's accusing him of throwing the election to Trump, he's like, this is ridiculous.
He's like, our own data doesn't support.
There just wasn't enough.
The Russians clearly did not have this influence.
They just beat the crap out of him so much and threatened to take away their ability to operate, which is known as Section 230, which is this huge liability protection in the law that passed in 1996, which allows Google, Facebook, Twitter to exist.
And they were saying this because their assertion was that Russian disinformation and propaganda led to Donald Trump being elected, arrested, being elected.
I mean, it was, they would exaggerate, they would say things like, you know, 140, I think it was like 146 million Americans had Russian propaganda in their news feeds.
That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads.
Because it's like your feed is, I mean, that was social Facebook has changed.
So yeah, I mean, there's, I mean, look, there's three big disinformation campaigns that were run by, frankly, the U.S. government and their allies.
The first was the Russia hoax, the idea that Russians, that Russians controlled Donald Trump and won him the election.
The second was the Hunter Biden laptop.
And the third is that COVID originated, you know, the idea that it's a conspiracy theory to even imagine that COVID could have emerged from a lab.
There's others, including, you know, we can talk about there was this effort to basically smear a bunch of ordinary conservative or Trump supporting Twitter users as Russian bots.
But basically, you have active disinformation campaigns being run by the U.S. government and U.S. government contractors against the American people on these issues at the same time that they're demanding censorship.
So you have propaganda on the one hand and censorship on the other.
No one gets brought before the American people and said, you failed us.
Not only did you fail us, you betrayed us because you knew this was not true.
And you allowed someone whose son has deep ties to both Ukrainian and Chinese companies that were paying him for influence.
And it appears, at least by some of these emails, that some of that money went to the actual vice president of the United States, which is fucking wild that no one is talking.
And then the crazy thing is, one of the things about having a right and a left is that whenever there's information that's inconveniently bad for that one side, particularly the left, you don't hear a fucking peep about it on the media.
It's dismissed.
It's like, you know, they'll talk about it like, someone said, someone talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and said it was like half fake.
That was like a terrible AOC.
Half fake.
That's right.
That is such a horrible violation of the trust that the people who elected you put in you.
I mean, I know that's why I was happy to do your show because literally like even my very close friends and family don't understand what I'm talking about.
And I'm like, I want to go on Joe Rogan and just unpack this for them, how serious this is.
I mean, you have to remember the New York, I mean, I'll put it on myself.
I was so biased.
The New York Post published the subpoena, which is a kind of receipt from the FBI, showing they had taken Hunter Biden's laptop from this computer repair store owner in Delaware.
It was published in the New York Post.
They also published the receipt that has Hunter Biden's signature on it, saying that he had not only had left the laptop there, but also that it gave the computer store, the computer repair owner the rights to it if he abandoned it.
I mean, I think the other thing I want to also emphasize here, because I think that when you uncover the level of coordination and the sophistication of the disinformation and censorship campaign, it's easy to also sort of say they're perfect, but they're not.
They're always making stuff up as they're going along.
But I think the other interesting thing that's important to know here about that laptop story is that within Twitter, they look at that New York Post article.
Yoel Roth, the head of safety and his team, they look at it and they go, yeah, I mean, it's legit.
It doesn't violate our internal, it doesn't violate our terms of service.
And at that moment, I mean, it has a Manchurian quality, Manchurian candidate quality to it, where the former chief legal counsel to FBI, a guy named Jim Baker, who is central to beginning the Russia Gate probe of Trump, he's now at Twitter as deputy general counsel.
This is probably what I was discovering in the Twitter files, is just vociferously attacking this thing.
It's like, this looks like misinformation, disinformation.
We shouldn't trust it.
It looks like it violates Twitter's policies.
He just, I mean, like multiple, I think it was at least four messages and emails of him pushing to the executives.
And of course, we can't see the phone calls, which is really where a lot of the dirty work happens.
Pushing to just get this thing censored by Twitter.
Sure enough, a few hours later, Yoel Roth says, well, okay, you know, we think that it could very well have been a Russian hack where somehow they put the, I mean, it was this crazy thing where they're like, well, we think it was hacked and then put on the laptop.
It was just bizarre.
Yoel Roth, like on, there's moments where I respect him because he was enough of a truth teller internally.
It's why he got to the position he was in, which is a very powerful position, to be like, hey, this is bullshit, like internally, he would say, but he was also a company man.
So when his, when powerful superiors in the organization, including former FBI people, and Jim Baker wasn't the only one, when he gets worked, he just bends.
And he just was like, okay, yeah, I think we've decided that it violates our hacked materials policy and we're going to censor it.
The other thing I want to point out about this, it's not just that they censored the article, because people always go, well, you know, it only lasted for a few days or whatever.
It was the discrediting of it.
The censoring.
Censorship is a disinformation strategy.
If you censor that article, in other words, Twitter and Facebook, all the headlines where Twitter and Facebook are, you know, they're going to restrict the dissemination of this material or they think it's, you know, that's that all that publicity is really what mattered.
So in terms of like, you know, in my defense and other people that bought the idea that it was somehow a fake, we were being told by the media that everybody had looked at this and was kind of like, look, it looks like it's hacked and there's something funny about it.
So I think that, you know, I think there's so many shocking things about it, but I think it's the level of coordination and conformity within these social media companies.
It was the pre-bunking in advance.
And it was the complete, total, you know, just the complete news media blackout and unanimity that there was, and it was just all of them.
I mean, it was like all the networks, all the newspapers, they all just repeated this idea that there was something wrong about the laptop, and there wasn't.
I mean, so we do the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri are moving forward in the courts in suing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment.
You know, this is, of course, this Hunter-Biden laptop thing, it's just one of many things.
I mean, the other craziest thing of all, maybe some of the most crazy stuff of all is that Facebook censored accurate COVID vaccine side effect information because it didn't want to promote vaccine hesitancy.
In other words, the White House is like just pressuring them.
I mean, this guy, Andy Slavin, in particular, is just this malign actor, just pressuring, pressuring, threatening them.
Oh, just being, just basically, you know, it's a continuation.
I mean, Biden does it publicly.
They're killing people.
They're basically accusing people of, I mean, these guys, they don't, the gloves are off.
I mean, they're just like, you're killing people by letting this information out.
I mean, the information is people telling their own story of vaccine side effects.
We always point out, like, it was one of the great public interest progressive victories in recent memory that the drug companies have to name the side effects of their drugs in their TV ads.
Like, that's a big part of it, right?
It's like a running joke.
You have to name the side effects in the TV ads.
Well, here they, like, here were ordinary people trying to tell stories of the side effects that they had from the vaccine on Facebook and Twitter.
And the White House is demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor that stuff.
This is just the worst.
I mean, that is, I mean, that's just Soviet Chinese style censorship, like full on.
I mean, so it's not over.
And I think that, you know, we've already seen, there's other things going on, like that agency I mentioned, that cyber, that part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, they changed their website over the last few months to remove references to domestic counter disinformation efforts to emphasize countering foreign disinformation.
They, you know, we talk a lot about this.
There's one of the big leaders of the censorship industrial complexes, this person named Renee DeResta at Stanford Internet Observatory he had on.
Let's talk about that because I had her on and what she essentially was talking about was all these Russian troll farms and how interesting it is that they created all these funny memes and they used all these resources to try to shift the narrative and change public opinion on certain things and that it was very effective.
So, first of all, Renee is somebody who I only came across because she's actually kind of moderate on a bunch of the stuff that I'm moderate on, like dealing with homelessness, on COVID.
She's actually like a moderate voice.
She's not super woke or anything.
And she's critical of, like, she moved out of San Francisco because it's just too crazy.
So, she and I had this conversation.
Like, we were talking about this even before.
I started talking to her right when I started looking at the Twitter files.
And we did this long interview.
I was on Sam Harris's podcast with her.
But then she starts showing up in the Twitter files in all these weird ways.
And we start looking into her.
It's a very, so she's also, the reason she's so important is like, when you read the, you know, when you, when you follow the meetings or watch the YouTube videos, whatever, she's like one of the smartest people.
Like, there's something going on with her.
She's like a real leader.
She's always sort of the number two.
The other thing about these people is that they move around a lot.
They move in between organizations.
And she's always sort of the number two, but she always seems a bit smarter than the person that she's reporting to.
But so she's somebody that she goes to, she gets a computer science degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook.
That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA.
She then goes and she gets a job at Jane's Trading, which is like one of the great, it's like up there with Goldman or maybe better.
It's where SPF from FTX was at.
She was there.
Then she had a couple of companies that did like logistics and cyber.
Very high-powered, successful executive.
And then, according to her story and the public story, she gets obsessed with anti-vaxxers.
She's got young kids.
She's obsessed with anti-vaxxers, spreading anti-vax misinformation.
This is long before COVID.
I think it's around 2014, 2015.
Next thing you know, she's like advising President Obama on counter-ISIS disinformation strategy in the White House and advising on the expansion of something called the Global Global Education Center, which is part of the State Department to counter disinfo.
So suddenly she's like the senior person.
It's very suspicious, very rapid rise.
If you know anything about those communities, they're very hierarchical and like you have to work your way up over many years.
She's instantly at the top.
In 2017, she is at a consulting firm called New Knowledge that is then caught doing disinformation against an Alabama Trumpian Republican candidate named Roy Moore.
They are caught doing fake Facebook pages, accusing Roy Moore of wanting to basically restrict alcohol consumption in Alabama, which is a deeply unpopular position.
It was false.
And also creating the perception of Russian bots supporting Roy Moore.
Her firm runs that campaign.
Afterwards, she sort of tries to distance herself from it, suggests that she wasn't involved, even though when you read the Washington Post and New York Times articles about her, about that, about the scandal, she sort of makes it clear that she was actually the person that brought the funding in to run the program and also kind of conceived much of the strategy.
After that, she becomes the top researcher to the Senate intelligence report of 2018 on Russian disinformation in the 2016 election.
So she's not, not only is she not punished for her role in it, she's rewarded by the Democrats with this incredibly powerful position.
So she becomes like the lead witness, the lead author for Senate Democrats, Adam Schiff, in promoting the whole narrative that somehow Russians swung the election to Trump.
There's one guy we discovered, Matt Taibbi discovers him.
And I only like whatever, like a week or two before my testimony in Congress, which was a couple few weeks ago, not the one I did yesterday.
We discovered this guy who was the head of cyber at the State Department, a senior guy named Mike Benz, and he is like super deep into this stuff.
He's amazing.
I highly recommend him coming on.
But he runs something, he basically leaves the State Department and starts something called the Foundation for Freedom Online.
And he has been documenting this more than anybody.
So he had it, but he's not, he's just really in the weeds.
Like it's really detailed.
You have to really, it was hard to understand.
You have to really go through it and unpack it.
I used a bunch of it in my testimony.
I talked to him.
I interviewed him a lot.
But I mean, no, basically a media blackout on all of this stuff.
Rene DeResta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory, that organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Grafica, and University of Washington has a think tank on this.
They get government funding and they run something called the Election Integrity Project in 2020 to basically demand censorship.
I mean, Joe, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets.
I believe that their database, they had over a billion social media posts, Facebook, Twitter, that they flagged, and tens of millions of them were censored.
Well, they, well, when my book on the environment came out, Apocalypse Never, in 2020, I wrote an article that sort of summarized the book, as one does.
It went super viral.
Then one of these shady organizations attacked it, not for anything being wrong with it, but for it being misleading.
They call it, it's the same way that they attacked the vaccine side effects stuff.
They go, well, it's accurate, it's true, but it leads people to draw the wrong conclusions.
Right.
The wrong conclusion being that climate change is real but not the end of the world.
Or vaccines, the wrong conclusion would be maybe don't get the vaccine, or maybe if you're, you know, whatever, under 18, or you're, you know, young man under 18, or if you've had whatever, I mean, whatever it might be, you don't need to be triple vax.
So they're basically using an opinion, which is you should get the vaccine or you should think of climate change as apocalyptic, as a way to, and then they kind of go through the back door and say anything that's being used to propagate that narrative should be counted as misinformation.
So she, so just to back up, so that, so this little cluster, the censorship industrial complex does this quote-unquote election integrity project in 2020.
They censor tens of millions of social media posts.
So by censor, I'm going to use the definition that everybody uses, which is it's you can remove, you can reduce, or you can, they call it inform.
You can put a flag on it.
That's what they do.
Everything I do for Facebook now, almost everything I do, has a warning on it.
You know, here's how to get accurate information about climate change.
Go to the Facebook Climate Change Center.
Even my stuff on homelessness and drugs, they'll be like, here's how to get accurate information on climate change.
That's how you know that I'm on some list.
I'm on some blacklist and Facebook.
So yeah, so it's those three things.
Those are all forms of censorship.
These groups, which are U.S. government-funded organizations, this is very important to stress.
This is not some private actors.
U.S. government-funded organizations pressuring the social media companies to censor these posts and these people.
And they do it in 2020.
And then Renee, who does this little video, it's like one of the creepiest videos that we've discovered.
There's little videos that they do.
She's sort of describing, you know, well, and then we realized that we needed to keep going on COVID.
And so then in 2021, the Election Integrity Project turns into something called the Virality Project.
And that's where they then go and wage censorship on COVID information that they don't like.
I refuse to use their language.
And again, it's tens of millions of people.
And it's, so you see it at all levels.
It's these guys doing it.
We say, I like, the censorship industrial complex is the right, I think, description of what we're talking about.
It's a phrase that, of course, came from Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address that he gives.
He goes, look, you know, you got to worry, the DOD is funding all these private military contractors, these private military contractors, have a financial interest in war.
This is Eisenhower, the guy that won World War II.
They put out this like long report describing climate disinformation.
And as soon as I opened it up, I was like, fuck, I bet I'm in this.
And I just do like Command F and I just Schellenberger.
And sure enough, it's like, all right, whatever, like multiple results.
I'm like, crap.
And so they, and they, you know, often these are reports that they don't get a lot of fanfare or whatever, but they get, they make sure that they get emailed to a bunch of journalists.
They talk to the journalists and they just, they basically just emphasize never talk to this person, never quote this person, do not platform them.
We then, by the way, after our testimony, that same Stanford cluster, it's actually more than one group at Stanford even, they emailed, I'm not going to say who because I don't want to give away my sources, but they've basically emailed many people about Matt and my testimony, trying to attack our testimony and sharing information.
So they're just the creepiest, they creep around.
They're constantly, they're constantly waging disinformation campaigns against disfavored voices and demanding censorship while also spreading their own misinformation.
I mean, Joe, it's funny because like I, I mean, so I graduated from high school in 1989.
I remember distinctly that that was the year that the Supreme Court upheld your right to burn a flag.
And I remember just being like, God damn, that's why I'm a Democrat.
That's why I'm a liberal.
Like, I think you should be able to burn a flag because I think the First Amendment's literally from that moment on, I have never worried about the First Amendment in the United States.
For me, it was like always kind of basic.
Like, come on, guys.
Like, it's the First Amendment.
Like, how could it possibly be under threat?
This was like one of the few times where, because I don't spook super easily, but like reading this stuff, you're just like, this is scary.
And you may know, by the way, when Matt Taibbi and I were testifying before Congress a few weeks ago, the IRS agent shows up at Matt Taibbi's house in person.
The Wall Street Journal just wrote a piece about it a few days ago.
I was like, I'm like, look, hey, maybe it's a coincidence, whatever.
I was like just asking around people I know, and people were like, uh-uh, no way is that a coincidence.
So this is brazen.
These guys are trying to send a message.
They're trying to intimidate.
They want to ruin our.
I mean, for me, it's been years of just trying to survive, of just trying to deplatform, discredit, keep you off of out of newspapers, out of TV shows, out of whatever, podcasts.
And so, yeah, these guys are, they're ruthless.
You know, it's definitely a Hall monitor mentality, you know, like, and it's elitist.
I mean, it's like Renee is a snob.
I'll just, you know, she's, I, I agree with her on some things.
I'm sure she's a fine person in her personal life.
She's probably a good mother.
I mean, I don't have any, you know, I'm trying to be nice.
I'm trying to be Christian about this.
But I mean, they're snobs.
Like, they literally, they, I remember at one point I briefly asked her about climate change and, you know, we talked about the climate stuff.
And I could tell that she felt like she was actually probably an expert on that too.
You know, it's like, literally, I wrote my book, I spent 20 years of research going into my book.
Fine, maybe I'm wrong.
But I mean, like, you have journalists out there, Joe, like all these big publications, they're like 23 years old, and they're like, I'm a disinformation expert.
I mean, can you imagine being like, I'm a truth expert, Joe?
You have these ideologies that these people subscribe to.
But it's so disturbing as a person who grew up liberal to see this from the left, this hardcore censorship from the left and this support of government disinformation that's purely aligned with monetary reasons.
It's just about money.
I mean, that's the only reason why they would be doing this.
And, you know, like I said, it's like, you know, it's not even, I mean, I think mostly, like I said, I think the Western Alliance and NATO have brought peace, you know, since World War II, and I don't think we should be pulling out.
And, you know, honestly, the extent I've rethought my position on Ukraine is just because of these nefarious actors.
Like, what are they really doing here?
So, yeah, I mean, for sure, it's, you know, it is what kind of we all have known it is.
You're trying to, the U.S. is part of this empire, and we're trying to make the world safer Western capitalism and Western corporations.
And, you know, that's actually lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.
It's not totally negative, but obviously you also get the Iraq invasion, which was terrible, and the Afghanistan occupation, which resulted in horrors.
But you also get some things that aren't beneficial to anybody.
If you're censoring information about the lab leak hypothesis, that's a real problem, because if we are still funding gain of function research, or if we are funding it through a proxy, and they're denying this and lying about this and covering this up through emails,
and then when you find out that certain physicians and doctors change their testimony or changed their opinion and then received enormous grants, this is like, this is, you're following a very obvious paper trail.
I mean, just Obama, the Obama administration stopped the funding.
Right.
And then it kicked back in in 2016.
What I had would have been explained to me was that the Trump administration was so chaotic that the NIH said, listen, let's just do this through the EcoHealth Alliance and make it simple.
I think the punchline, though, is that Fauci knew very well that gain of function research was not only occurring at the Wuhan lab, but that it was being funded by the U.S. government.
And then they get on these conference calls and two of the main researchers, I believe they're both from Scripps, they both go, yeah, I don't know, it looks like it could have been manufactured from a lab and not from Zoonotic spillover.
So it's even more sinister than just being arrogant.
Oh, and not only that, but did you see, I don't know if you saw this recent report where it looks like they were double dipping.
They were double charging.
They were overcharging.
So they were basically getting paid twice by U.S. taxpayers.
CBS News, which is like only one of the few mainstream media outlets, has actually done a good job covering this.
They also covered the Hunter Biden laptop accurately, belatedly, but they did.
Yeah, they wrote about how these contractors were getting paid twice for the same work.
So that's a way now to kind of get in there and try to figure out what's going on.
We're hoping to, I mean, the crazy thing is on the Twitter back to the Twitter files, because you know, Elon is obsessed with Fauci and wants to have the Fauci files, but none of us have looked for this in the Twitter file.
Like, literally, nobody has yet even looked to see whether or not this COVID origin stuff was being censored from within Twitter.
So we don't know yet.
I mean, we've just been backed up in a lot of other stuff.
And what he's doing is he's like firing a shot across the bow and then causing people to scramble and reveal their intentions and reveal like what they're trying to accomplish.
Maybe someone's going to go back and look at the way you guys handled the AIDS crisis.
Because if you look at Robert Kennedy Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, if that book is accurate, I don't know if it's accurate.
I'm assuming he hasn't been sued yet.
It's a terrifying book.
When they talk about the AIDS crisis and what they, it's essentially a version of what you're seeing now, but with no internet, where they were allowed to do things with no investigative journalists, no social media outrage, no people posting different studies that contradict what they're saying.
It's a wild book, man.
It's a wild book of unchecked power and influence.
And also like an absolute disdain for what is beneficial to human life and the American people.
Well, yeah, I mean, we need a new church commission.
The Democrats are the obstacle to it.
The Republicans are doing this weaponization of the federal government hearings, but you need both parties to do a proper cleaning out of these bad actors.
I mean, hopefully the lawsuits, the Twitter files, I think, you know, just talking about this and testifying about it, I think actually, because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
But no, you're right.
We've got to defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex.
But we also need to hold people accountable who were doing this.
That's why I think, you know, we were talking about this person, Renee DeResta, but these other groups in the censorship industrial complex, they're constantly promoting the idea that it's okay and necessary to have more censorship.
So both times, I've testified now twice in the last three weeks.
Both times the Democrats were like, I mean, the Republicans were like, why are we taking stuff down?
And the Democrats were like, we're not taking enough stuff down.
I mean, there's this sense in which more stuff needs to be censored.
That's the idea they're trying to promote.
It's bizarre.
Again, this is the party that defended flag burning.
It's really spooky, too, that it's so transparently, it's so transparently evolving around money and power.
It's not like there's no real protection, especially when you look at what happened during the COVID crisis.
If you could just look at it now and go over it and say, what were you trying to do, really?
It seems like what you're trying to do is make as much money as possible for the pharmaceutical companies.
That seems like what you were doing.
Like this whole idea of vaccine hesitancy, once enough data was out there, particularly when you're talking about vaccinating people that had already had COVID, that's preposterous.
It doesn't even make sense.
It doesn't make sense medically.
It doesn't jive with the studies.
Like all this is very strange.
And this idea that you're stopping vaccine hesitancy, like from because of real data?
Like that term is so creepy because what you're saying is side effects.
You're talking about not telling people about the dangers of something, which has always been something that we considered with every drug.
And also not only that, but like this is not the same as measles or moms.
This is very different than that.
And you don't get herd immunity with the COVID vaccine.
And so like, I mean, you have to remember that like what's crazy about it, too, is you go from this, well, we're going to have a vaccine and then we're not going to get it to, and then we're not going to spread it to, okay, well, you might still get it, but it won't be as bad, but you won't spread it.
And then you go, well, you're not going to get, you might, you might get it, but it won't be as bad, but you might still spread it.
So then it's kind of like, well, then why, like, why the man, why mandating this?
And it, well, and, but it's accelerated by the rise of the internet and the rise of these voices.
So people like you, you trigger people because it's like, oh my God, there's people out there that are influential that are saying things different than what the mainstream are saying.
What should freak them out is that CNN said I was taking veterinary medicine.
That should freak them out.
And I think it did freak a lot of people out.
Instead of saying, hey, how'd that guy get better so quick from some horrible, deadly disease?
And three days later, I mean, when they used my face and put it through a filter to turn me yellow, like that was, all of it was wild.
For a person to watch it, for a person to be in my position and watch it, it was really interesting.
Because first of all, it's like, I'm not on a network.
Like, you really can't get rid of me.
Right.
And second of all, I have a lot of money.
So I can just like, even if I stop working, you're not going to hurt me.
I'll just, I'll find something.
I'll figure something out.
Like, this is not a thing like the 1970s when you could just get someone removed from a television show, like when they attacked the Smothers brothers for the criticism of the Vietnam War.
Like, I mean, it was like, I mean, on the one hand, that's really being censored is such a horrible experience.
It really feels dehumanizing to be deprived of your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like, Schellenberger is spreading disinformation.
It also made me question scientific papers for the first time.
When I was informed by people who don't want to talk about it publicly, how these things work.
Like from when I talked to people who are physicians who said, listen, this is why I can't talk about this publicly.
This is why I can't discuss this.
And this is why when you read a scientific paper and you read the conclusion, what you don't understand is that this was designed, this study was designed to show one very specific outcome.
I thought that when they did a, when there's any sort of scientific study or a medical study or anything about something, what they're trying to do is find out what's true.
I did not know that they can do 10 studies and if eight of them show negative side effects, they could remove those and just find some carefully constructed, very biased study that points to a very specific outcome that's desired.
Well, even worse, when I talked to John Abramson and he explained to me how data is like when they do like a peer-reviewed study on, say, a pharmaceutical drug, you're not really doing a peer-reviewed study on the data.
You're doing a peer-reviewed study on the interpretation of the data by the pharmaceutical company.
So they don't have access to the actual study.
They don't have access to the data.
They have access to the conclusions that are given to them by the pharmaceutical companies, and then they review that.
Which is fucking insanity.
That's like the wolf telling you what he did to the hen house.
It's like, you know, like basically they were all dead when I got there.
So the big one, I mean, the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is the trans issue where we're now seeing it.
And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, and particularly in Britain, where there's a big new book out, A Time to Think about the Tavistock Gender Clinic.
But basically, it looks as though a lot of autistic kids or kids on autism with autism spectrum, who are just uncomfortable in their bodies, are more prone to be thinking in black and white, are basically being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria.
And then you also have a different group of folks, maybe kids that would end up being gay or lesbian if they didn't transition, who become convinced that they are the opposite sex.
This is one of the ideas is some of it's a social contagion.
In other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually caused by the medical profession.
So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people.
I mean, this is something that we just published a piece on this where this was what happens with anorexia and bulimia.
You know, these doctors identify eating disorders and then they publicize them and it gets all this publicity about it and then the disorder spreads.
That they have same as Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex, they have a vested interest in going into war.
These people have an interest in diagnosing people with gender dysphoria, which is terrifying to think that their opinions and their diagnosis would be based on something other than what's going on with you.
Like it was like, they have an incentive.
And that was also during COVID.
They were incentivized to give people certain medications.
They were financially incentivized to put people on ventilators, financially incentivized to mark deaths as COVID deaths.
All of this is so enlightening because I never would have expected that.
I never would have suspected that at all before COVID, before the pandemic, and all this chaos and all the things that I've seen.
My whole view of how the world runs is completely different.
I mean, it's funny because you had Abigail Schreier on with this big book on transgenderism as a social contagion.
I think it was in 2020.
I remember at the time being like, I think she's, I mean, what she's saying makes sense, but it's so horrible to consider.
I just was kind of, it took me like three years to finally work on it or write on it.
But I thought, you know, part of what's, I mean, the people, like, first of all, people with autism spectrum should be up in arms and outraged about the mistreatment of people with autism by these gender clinics.
The other group that I'd be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians.
I mean, Andrew Sullivan, to his credit of speaking out on it.
I mean, I didn't quite understand.
Abigail had to explain it to me because I would read all of her stuff, but sometimes you would just like miss some of it.
These are kids, these kids who go through this gender transition don't have, they not only are infertile afterwards, but then they don't have sexual pleasure.
I mean, we spent, I mean, think about the gay, the gay and lesbian and the bisexual movement spent decades basically making everybody comfortable with the fact that gay people should be able to get sexual pleasure from their sex.
And everybody's kind of like, you know, most people are heterosexuals, and most people are like, that's strange.
And it took a long time to be like, no, we celebrate that.
That's great that you can.
And that we know sex is an important part of long-lasting relationships.
So to actively deprive children of that, you're not just sterilizing the kids.
You're depriving them of sexual function.
And then being able to bond with somebody, I mean, how do you look at that and not go, this is really disturbing?
No, my understanding is that she was a natal female that transitioned to become a trans male, he, and that he but that he was then misgendered by the mainstream woke media as a woman.
I think you were the first one that really said, that drew attention to like that all this, all the confusion around sex and gender was a symptom of civilizations in decline.
I was, we did a thing, I did a thing with Peter Bogozian on wokeism as a religion because we had read, I had read John McWhorter's book, Woke Racism, which came out right around the time that San Francisco came out.
And I just was like, and he argues that wokeism is a religion.
He argues that like the obsession with race is a religion.
So we just created this taxonomy.
We just listed climate change, race, trans, drugs, whatever, all these things.
And then we create all these religious categories and it was like really easy to fill it out.
They all look like a religion.
I called Abigail and I was like, what's the, like, what is the, what is trans as a religion?
Is trans a kind of religion?
She was like, let me get back to you.
A year later, she calls me and she goes, hey, I think I figured it out.
And I was like, all right, what is it?
She goes, she goes, the new gender is a soul for secular people.
It's something that you can't see it.
It doesn't, there's no physical basis to it.
You have a sex.
Like, you can, you know, take off all your clothes and you don't even need to do that, actually.
Just like we can, we know that like we can recognize someone's sex very quickly and easily, actually.
So then what is the, so it's a new soul.
So for me, I'm a huge, I think the secularization explains a lot because we know that people get a lot of psychological comfort out of believing that they have an afterlife, that they have a soul, that they go to heaven or they get reincarnated, that their lives have purpose and meaning and that they don't really die and that we live on.
We just know that that provides a huge amount of psychological comfort.
So there's always been this thinking that when you don't have that anymore, if you are taught to believe that at the end of your life, you just become worm food and that's it and you're dead.
There's some people, my friend Steven Pinker is an atheist and that's what he thinks and he still believes, but he still, he also has a kind of spirituality around reason and the enlightenment.
But I think all this stuff, it's sort of end of civilization, but it's also the end of this end of belief in religion.
I don't know, Jamie, if you could, if you can pull it up, but I thought the Wall Street Journalist published this amazing article about declining patriotism, declining belief in the country.
They're having children when Jordan Peterson sent me this thing that 50% of women that when they reach the age of 30 are not having kids.
They don't have kids.
And of those women, 50% will never have kids and 90% will regret it.
Which is very, we're in this very strange sort of existential crisis as a civilization that's not being recognized.
And in the meantime, we're distracting ourselves with things like Greta Thurnberg's take on climate or whether or not gender is a social construct or whether or not the United States should be doing X, Y, or Z. It's like, no, the fucking whole thing is falling apart.
The foundation of our civilization is falling apart.
It's all happening with the rise of artificial intelligence at the same time.
That's what's really scary.
I mean, you want to talk about the true end of civilization.
The coinciding of artificial intelligence, at least seemingly becoming fairly sentient.
Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but that, I know that one Google engineer who said that AI had become sentient quite a while ago and everyone's dismissing him.
Like, oh, no, no, no.
My friend Duncan Trussell interviewed him, and it's a goddamn terrifying interview.
When you hear, this guy's not a nutter.
He's a little nuts.
All engineers are a little nuts.
But he's essentially saying, like, hey, I'm pretty sure this thing's alive.
And when do you get to decide that it is alive?
If it can answer every fucking question you have about anything, and it's far more intelligent than any human being that's ever existed ever.
But it was like this, like the AI was trying to get him to like, the AI said it had fallen in love with him and was trying to get him, trying to break up his marriage.
Well, and it's funny because, so I know a lot about nuclear.
So when we get the power of nuclear after World War, you know, during World War II, ends the war, there's just, I mean, there is a huge response to figure out how to manage this thing, how to regulate this technology, how to control it, how to prevent it from spreading, how to prevent bombs from going everywhere.
And there was a bunch of problems with it.
But the society responded by saying we need to get control of it.
I mean, there's a thing about Elon actually just called for some sort of a six-month ban on the propagation of this stuff and have a conversation about it, which is fairly reasonable.
Well, also, we're back to this whole profit thing.
You know, there's enormous profits involved in this stuff and the race to figure this out first and really develop like a God, which is what it's going to be.
What it's going to be is it's going to be something that can make a better version of itself.
As soon as ChatGPT or whatever this sentient artificial intelligence gains autonomous control and has the ability to create its own self better, then we're really fucked because it's going to make much better versions of itself like that.
And it's going to make a version of itself that literally is going to be a god.
If you just scale it exponentially, you know, like we do with like computer technology, like anything else.
But do it in like a quantum leap, in some spectacular, massive improvement almost instantaneously, over and over and over again.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, you're looking at a god.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that gives me hope is, I mean, America, we've had some pretty dark moments in the past.
I mean, Watergate coming out of Vietnam, we did have a kind of correction.
I feel like it needs to start with some African.
I mean, I think the trans issue is interesting.
It does for me.
I just interviewed, we just interviewed Jesse Single on this, who's very, very liberal and progressive still, even though he's been a critic of gender ideology or gender theology.
And we were like, is sex real?
I mean, do you believe that it's real?
And he was like, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, you have, for some ways, I go, I think the reason I was interested in it was we have to start some foundational stuff.
And that would be acknowledging that we are biological creatures that have a sex and that there's two sexes.
And then I think I kind of go, if I build on that, I go, there's a healthy and unhealthy way to live.
I think you talk a lot about this.
I've been seeing you throwing shade on people that are trying to control other people's lives that are themselves unhealthy.
I think it starts with health.
You know, our school, I mean, our kids are unhealthy.
We're unhealthy.
The society needs to reaffirm, not in some government-imposed way, but just, I think, culturally.
So you kind of go, look, we're humans, we're mortal, we have sex.
We have two sexes.
We need to reaffirm health.
And I think the other thing, you mentioned Greta Tunberg.
Humans are good.
I think you have to affirm the goodness of humans in some ways.
Jordan's response to this, what we're talking about is basically nihilism, this kind of deeply negative, self-destructive, the view that humans don't have any value or any worth or any meaning.
I think the response from a lot of people on the right has been to just affirm Christianity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson.
My problem with that is that America is not founded on a religion.
It's founded on an enlightenment view, that we have unalienable rights.
All humans are created equal.
We obviously didn't live up to that in 1776 or 1789, but we've done a pretty good job of getting there over the last two and a half centuries.
This is like, for me, it's like a punk rock moment.
Like things got too crazy and you need to just simplify and come back to some basics.
And I think you get to humans are good.
We have two sexes.
It's better to be healthy than unhealthy, and there's a right and wrong way to do that.
Like surgery is involved in this trend, which is one of the things that I – But the cultural trend, I mean, I'm sort of like, I was not interested in trans because I was kind of like, that's Abigail and Jesse and these guys.
They've covered it.
But I'm more interested in it to kind of go, look, we have some fundamental threats to human civilization that we're facing.
But I think we're looking at it in terms of our own biological limitations, like as an individual.
I don't think it has to think of itself as an individual to be sentient.
It just has to have the ability to understand the parameters.
It has to have the ability to understand the pieces that are moving in the game and what is going on.
What is it interfacing with?
Well, it's interfacing with these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons who are full of shit, who are running this country in this very bizarre, transparent money grab way.
You have a dead man and a dunce that are in charge of the greatest country the world has ever known.
I think if you could go back to lower primates and show them what we're doing now, just show them that.
I think part of they would look at part of it as being apocalyptic.
If they understood the concept of apocalyptic scenarios, they would probably be like, what have you done?
Like, what the fuck have you done to the land and turned it into this gigantic concrete scab that covers everything?
What have you done to the sky where it lowers your life expectancy by 10 years if you live in a place that's highly populated because of all the pollutants and all the particulate matter that's in the air?
Like, what have you done to the food that everyone's fat?
What have you done to the medicine that you hide side effects?
What have you done to politics where they censor accurate information and go after people that are trying to report the truth?
And these taxpayer funds are supporting these endeavors.
My conversation with Eric Weinstein leads me to believe that there's something else going on.
I have a feeling that a lot of what we're seeing is drones that we don't have access to, that we don't understand, because these physicists have been working on this with enormous blacklisted budgets.
Well, it's not necessarily known physical laws, but our ability to our ability to move things.
It's not known physical laws.
Like, there is some understanding of gravity propulsion systems that have existed for a long time.
I mean, you want to go full tinfoil hat.
Bob Lazar was talking about the abilities of these crafts when they were talking about him back engineering these things when he was working at Area S4.
And this was in the late 1980s when he came out and said, hey, they're back engineering something that came from another world.
Like, this is not of this earth.
We don't have this technology.
I understand propulsion systems.
We don't know what this is.
They brought him in to try, allegedly, brought him in to try to back engineer this thing.
And this is exactly how these things are operating now.
When they talk about how these things, like there's a video of one of these crafts that's moving like on a horizontal plane and it turns vertical.
It turns sideways.
Right.
And then that's how he described it.
He said they would flip sideways and that's how they propelled towards wherever they were going.
There's a lot of things that he didn't talk about.
Yeah.
I think he has, I think in order to have access to what the higher-ups know, like the highest people at the DOD, the highest people, whoever the fuck got the access to whoever in the Pentagon is the one that's saying, listen, we should probably say some of these are not from this world.
Like whoever that person is, those people, I guarantee you there's stuff they're holding back.
And then if you, you know, when you actually talk to astronomers other than Neil deGrasse Tyson, who doesn't think we would be interesting, which I think is the dumbest thing he's ever said, I think we are probably at the cusp of some great change.
Whether it's a great change because of nuclear technology and weapons, whether it's a great change because of artificial intelligence, whether it's a great change because we're on the cusp of destroying the ocean and destroying a lot of natural wonders and beauty that we have Just for mining and some of the horrific things that we do in this world.
Well, like, probably if I was an intelligent life form from another planet, I'd be like, you should probably get in there.
It's like if two brothers are fighting in the front yard, like, let them sort it out.
But there's a certain point.
All right, let's break it up.
Let's break it up.
Like, if I was an intelligent life form, I would be deeply concerned about these fucking wild monkeys with bombs and internet connections.
And what if, what if, what the fuck are they doing?
I'd be like, these people are chaotic.
This is nuts.
Like, the people that are in power are just accumulating vast amounts of money with no understanding of their mortality.
No understanding.
Like, you're not going to live, you fuck.
You're going to die, no matter what you do.
So what are you doing?
Like, why are you ruining it for your children and your children's children?
Why are you setting in motion these processes that are allowing these people to gain more and more power over people, which will ultimately lead to some sort of a communist dictatorship in America?
Well, my work on nuclear, it's suddenly like you'll be reading about all these nuclear tests and all of a sudden around the also around the plants and also around the missile silos is where you have a lot of UFO sightings.
Well, but if those are actual beings, if we think those are actual beings from advanced civilizations on Earth, their weapons are going to be way more powerful than ours.
Well, but if you can do what those Tic Tac UFOs are doing, if that's actually real, if we think those are not U.S. government or some foreign government tech, then you're talking about civilizations that have firepower way beyond what we have.
So nuclear weapons wouldn't scare, I mean, they maybe think we're not, our consciousness is not evolved.
They might think that.
I don't know.
It's very, it's a fun one.
I don't know that it's, I tend to think of it more as a spiritual problem than as a military problem.
Well, in the sense that if they are, if that, I mean, I kind of go, if they were that powerful, then I don't think we would be able to fight them.
I mean, if that's what they're doing, so then there's no like, it's not like we can, I mean, we're going to try to push our hydrocarbon-fueled jet planes and rockets to go as fast as they can, but they're not going to do what those things are doing.
Right.
So it's more of a spiritual problem because, you know, I think it reminds us that we don't, we just don't, I mean, the Fermi Paradox, we don't know what's going on.
The Fermi paradox, by the way, is kind of wrong in the sense that he was like this huge universe, where is everybody?
But of course, like at that very moment is when you're, I mean, 1952 is this period where there's this huge UFO sightings in Washington, D.C. They're scrambling jets to go chase them.
It's in this great James Fox documentary.
James Fox had another, by the way, I just wrote, I wrote a piece on it actually for New York Post about a UFO crash in Brazil.
It's the craziest story.
You get these stories, or the Zimbabwe kids at the end of the phenomenon.
I think him and I think he and Jacques are the two people that are actually more careful about kind of saying what we think we know versus what we speculate or what we don't know.
I love the phenomenon, though, because I do think it's humbling.
I think we were getting at this thing where the elites are so arrogant and they're so, on the one hand, on the other hand, they're so threatened by the rise of the internet and by these other voices.
There just needs to be some kind of moment where we go, hey, you know, we're all on this planet together and, you know, stop trying to, you know, trying to rule each other.
Like, we've got this beautiful America, again, just allow me to be, you know, it's like this system we have is absolutely amazing.
And I mean, like, I tell you, like, I knew somebody that worked at Facebook at the time who was an executive, reached out to this person, was like, hey, you know, nothing.
How do I appeal?
Just email the censor.
The censor was like, no, we're not going to even listen to you.
It was so degrading.
On the other hand, you know, social media has been liberating.
It's amazing to have Elon come in.
You know, he and I have disagreements about energy, for example.
He's a big renewables advocate.
I'm more of a renewable skeptic.
He's come around on nuclear, which is great.
But I mean, what he's done is he's, first of all, he's revealed this horrible conspiracy to repress the First Amendment.
But he's also gotten us back closer to the spirit of the Founding Fathers.
And it's amazing that someone who is so goddamn busy and has so many other things on his plates, he legitimately, one of the reasons why he bought this, well, he thinks he can turn it around.
He thinks he can turn it to a profitable business.
But one of the reasons why he bought it, he thinks it's essential to democracy.
He really does.
Because you cannot have one group of people controlling the narrative.
You're going to get a very distorted understanding of what's going on.
And that's, I mean, look, imagine if CNN was the only people that were allowed to say the news.
I'll tell you something else that's amazing is that that thing where he takes away the blue check marks from the snobs and he lets everybody buy it.
I mean, I don't know if you saw William Shatner, like a couple days ago, he's like complaining, oh, Elon, you're going to make me spend eight bucks a month.
It's like, first of all, you're like the most highly paid pitch man in like American entertainment history.
Well, one of the things that drove me crazy was all the famous people, the celebrities that were publicly leaving Twitter.
I'm leaving.
It's filled with Nazis now.
Like they felt like it was part of their moral duty to declare publicly that they were leaving this thing because you're allowing all sorts of different people to discuss things.
Yes.
You need that.
People need to understand that you need bad voices so that you can counter those bad voices with good voices.
So that people who are just observing this without engaging get an understanding of the landscape.
I agree with you, and I do have hope as well, but I also think we are at the precipice of unstoppable great change.
And I think it's going to hit us like a fucking tsunami.
And I think we're just really fortunate to be alive at this time where the whole world is going to shift in a really wild way.
And I think one of the things you're seeing from whether it is these corporations or these government entities that are trying to control narratives, this is like them trying to grasp at the last bits of control that are potentially available.
But I think inevitably they're going to lose.
I think everyone's going to, I think, I think there's going to be no privacy.
I think zero privacy in a few decades.
I think mind reading is coming.
I think that all of these ridiculous black mirror scenarios will come to light.
And I think we're going to be dealing with a reality that is as alien to us as taking Australia Pythagos and bringing them a million years forward into 2023 and experiencing like modern life in Dallas, Texas, like wandering around seeing that that would be so fucking bizarre to them.
That is what our life in 20 years is going to be to us.
No, I mean, it's crazy, but I think if you look at this last one, we just wrote a piece on, I wrote a piece with a former Financial Times correspondent who also, like me, has been obsessed with the World Economic Forum.
We called it, I think it was called, you know, Davos is a cult and a grift, but it's also a bid for global domination.
And we just looked at like how it's all those things at the same time.
It's about power and money and also about ideology and dogma.
I mean, I'm pretty sure like Russell Brand and Glenn Beck have done serious brand damage to Davos and WEF.
And you, you know, I mean, there was no major heads of state that went this year.
And it's important for people to remember, because people think whenever I talk about this, and I'm suggesting that you shouldn't worry about these pollutions, the farmers themselves had been reducing nitrogen pollution through voluntary and sort of cooperative mechanisms.
We would like to have the ability to use our voice and have a debate rather than have Renee DeResta and the censorship industrial complex tell us what we should think and censor us behind closed doors.
Well, and this thing where they use power, I mean, I just testified yesterday with the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who was the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Beautiful human being, by the way, just separate from his own views.
But he was like, look, in a crisis, you need more freedom of speech.
Like when you're trying to figure out how to solve a fast-moving, fast-changing problem, that is not the time to be doing censorship.
That's the time you want more views, more representation.
I think that the thing we testified on yesterday was just it's very hard, like the social media platforms, for a variety of reasons, you don't want the government regulating them.
But what you could do is just say every time the government demands something to change on the platform, that government official has to file a public notice that they've asked for that.
So if the White House is going to say censor true stories of vaccine side effects to Facebook, that government official must report that and it must become public right away, which will both reduce the amount of it that occurs, but also allow us to see it.
And then secondly, if Elon or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever are going to stop, you know, I think there was something going on with the trans shooting that we just talked about yesterday.
And I suspect, like you said, I suspect it was an algorithm issue where they didn't want, I think there was like a trans day of vengeance planned for Tennessee or something, and this was all leading up to that.
So my point was just have transparency on it.
You know, like if Twitter is going to deplatform somebody or bounce somebody or censor some post because they don't want to contribute to real world violence, and there are situations where I think that might be appropriate, just make it transparent.
The other one, I think, you know, I mean, I think the other issue is that there's this famous quote, people say, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
And it boils down to they believe their religious ideology trumps your ability to create your own reality or to or have a reality that aligns with your beliefs and desires and your sexual orientation and whatever the fuck else you choose in life, as long as it's not hurting other people.
And for the Republicans, it was always small government, stay out of people's lives, but why not with gay people?
Why are you fucking with gay people?
Like, why does that apply to everything except gays?
But in their defense, wouldn't it be nice if we had, you know, look, like, Obama's my favorite president because I think he was the best spokesperson for a nation.
He was the best representative of what is possible in America.
You know, comes from a single mom.
You know, he's African-American.
He's super like articulate and well-educated and just composed no matter what happens.
He's the best statesman we've ever had as president, in my opinion.
It would be nice if that was always the case.
Instead, we have Biden, who's so obviously mentally compromised.
We have Kamala Harris that nobody wants to be president.
And then we have Trump, which everybody's terrified of because he's a fucking egomaniac.
My real concern is that with technology and the ability to control people, if we don't get a grasp on that, we're going to fall into a situation that's very similar to what they have in China, where you have a social credit score and a centralized digital currency.
And when I see people like Maxine Waters pushing us towards that direction and people talking about the first sounds of it were vaccine passports.
When they were saying vaccine passports, I was like, Jesus Christ, don't do that because that is going to lead to a social credit score system.
That's going to lead to, they're going to just, once they have the ability to make you have an app and that app gets to decide whether or not you travel, they're not going to let that go.
There's no way they're going to let that go.
And once they have something like that attached to a centralized digital currency, it's game over.
It's game over until something really big happens.
I mean, I've always been more, I came from more of the socialist left than the anarchist left.
So I've always thought that there was a good role for government.
I still do.
But no, for sure, I've become much more paranoid.
I mean, when you go, when you spend all this time in these documents and you see the way these guys kind of sneak around and they're trying to do all this stuff behind the scenes, it's really, it is like Elon thought it was funny.
It was like, yeah, I mean, it is like these conspiracies are real.
You know, they weren't, yeah, I wish it had, you know, I wish they were fake.
I mean, what's amazing is I've never seen anybody be so impulsive and so successful.
Because I think we associate impulsivity with, you know, failure.
And, but he is somebody that I've sort of, I think it's like, I think impulsivity is to Elon in the way that kind of being a dick was successful for Steve Jobs.
You know, Walter Isaacson, who's writing a book about Elon right now, by the way.
But Walter Isaacson in his biography of Steve Jobs, he was like, he was like, look, Steve Jobs was just too much of an asshole.
He didn't need to be that much of an asshole.
But what it did is it forced out incompetent people.
It was a way that he got rid of incompetent people.
I think Elon's impulsivity, the way that he moves quickly, you know, like he overpaid for Twitter on the one hand.
On the other hand, he owns Twitter.
Like you're like, because you kind of go, well, the market value is one-third of the $44 billion.
It's like, yeah, on the other hand, like, Twitter is now a pretty open platform.
Again, like, we got a, we need transparency and we should all be vigilant and whatever.
And Elon was like, okay, we're going to change that a little bit.
So, I mean, he, that fast, I mean, so he's that, the whole, I mean, when people, this cliche in Silicon Valley, the whole, you know, move fast and break things, but that's what he's doing.
And then he moves fast, he breaks something, but then he also fixes quickly.
You know, we're like, oh, and I kind of retweet her, but it was like, okay, I retweet her, but we'd still like to have access to the Twitter files.
You know, we did, there's this famous clip that went viral when Matt Taibbi and I testified in front of Congress where this member of Congress goes, you know, how'd you get in?
You know, they were trying to make it like a scandal that somehow we were reporting on the Twitter files.
And she's, and I was like, oh, I was brought in by Barry Weiss.
And then she was like, oh, so it's like a threesome.
And the whole room erupts into laughter.
And I was like, well, there was actually a lot more people involved than that.
And everybody laughed.
And Elon just loved it.
Because, you know, he's just like us, we're all just perverted Gen Xers at the end of the day.
So he loved it and was very happy and was just like, was like, all is forgiven with Barry if she wants to come back in, you know, come back in.
Because I think he's also somebody that what I like about Elon, and I don't know him very well at all, is that he reminds me a lot more of like, cause I spent a farm at him in Brazil, and Brazilians are just very emotional.
And they're just like, the men will cry and they'll scream at each other and then they'll make up and it's just very expressive culture.
And Elon's just, he just expresses his feelings about things.
When he's mad at somebody, he'll tell you.
But then he also has shown this capacity to forgive.
And so I think there's something there, you know, in terms of, you know, I mean, his hate, he really, I think he really, he told us, he's like, I didn't buy Twitter just to re-platform Babylon B. And we were like, I was like, that was part of it, right?
Like part of it was you want to, but I mean, I think it was, it was, you know, I do think that some generalizations about our generation is actually appropriate.
I think that Gen Xers, you know, there was a moment there, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to create like a golden age about it, but I mean, there was a point there where it was like, remember, you know, Breakfast Club, and, you know, it was like, we were kind of like, yeah, you can like date whoever you want.
You want to date a black girl?
You want to date a Latina, whatever, you can be gay.
And like, it was not a big deal, but it also wasn't like you were like higher on some moral hierarchy or something.
I mean, I was an annoying politically correct guy in college, but there was also some Gen X spirit of like, hey, we're kind of beyond all that bad 60s shit.
You know, we don't want to be there.
I mean, John McWhorter also talks about it in Woke Racism, where, and where, where it's like, and he's a Gen Xer too, where I think there is a, I'm not saying it's the solution to all these problems, but I think that that Gen X spirit, that breakfast club spirit needs to come back into American culture.
Randall Carlson told me that, and I never even thought about it until he said it.
And I was like, yeah, Jesus Christ, you're fucked if everything freezes.
And he said there was a point in human history, a point in the history of the earth, where things got so cold that we almost became inhospitable to life.
I mean, you just, I mean, you don't want to change the temperature too much in any direction.
Of course.
But I mean, look, it's like for me, it's always been, I think there's a bunch of complicated problems like social media and the culture, but like energy, it's pretty straightforward.
If you're using wood, anything is better than that, including coal.
If you're using coal, natural gas is better.
And nuclear is even the best.
And basically, the world has been moving in the direction from wood to coal to oil and gas to nuclear, and that's the right direction.
And nuclear has always been a weird one because it brings with it the power to make bombs.
But as an energy source, it's amazing.
So we just kind of overthink it.
And then the issue got, not overthink it, but really it got hijacked by a bunch of opportunists that wanted to use it as a way to exercise control.
I think there's a, when you just abandon traditional religions and the traditional morality, you want to create, I mean, look, even like, I mean, this BIPOC thing was so interesting because it's like, I was like, what, I mean, I was finding somebody to explain, what is BIPOC?
Well, that's black, indigenous, people of color.
Literally in the word, it's creating a hierarchy where it's black and indigenous people above, you know, Latinos and Asians who are just barely people of color.
Not everybody, but most people, I think, actually hate it.
But it has this power because it's providing.
In fact, this detransitioner I interviewed, she was like, the social justice, she's like, she's autistic, you know, so she's autistic autism spectrum.
She was like, as an autistic person, and she's a lot of self-awareness and older now, but she was like, that social justice moral hierarchy provided some comfort.
Like it was like a way to be like, confusing, you know, she was uncomfortable with herself, socially awkward.
I could kind of fit into this moral hierarchy and then be really dogmatic about it and then feel powerful, feel in control, have community.
So I think when you don't, that's why I like reverting to like the older morality is First Amendment morality.
The older morality is true anti-racism in that we don't think there are human races, much less that they can be put on a hierarchy.
These are just some things that are bouncing around your head.
And even if you're wrong, it's not a value judgment on you.
You should probably be wrong less than you are right.
You should probably be right much more.
But it's very important that when you are wrong, to acknowledge that you're wrong.
One of the worst things that happens to a public intellectual is when they are wrong and they refuse to admit they're wrong.
This is the Sam Harris dilemma.
Like, there's many people that are very brilliant people, but they're in this trap where they can't say they were wrong.
And if you can't expose people to your thought process and why you made errors, they're going to lose faith in your ability to discern the truth in the future.
And I think it's also just a sign of our ideologically driven times where I think the divide between the right and the left and the boundaries in between them are so wide now.
I think that that thing, too, of where, again, abandoning traditional religions and adapting his new morality, I think people do start to play God a bit unconsciously.
And they get real self-righteous.
I think it's great to, I mean, I don't know how to do it, but for me, it's always like, we're all going to die.
Like, just let's pause for a minute.
Like, we're going to die.
And not only that, this is the, the stoicism is so good at this.
You know, it's, it's Memento Mori.
Oh my God, they're right there.
You know, it's a, these are, like, you have like, what do you have, like, six of them.
And you go, this is how much you got left, unless something radical changes.
And it's just like, whoa.
And people said to him, like, oh my God, this is so depressing.
He's like, it's actually not.
It reaffirms my understanding of what's important and makes me want to spend more time with my family and it makes me want to not do things that I'm really not interested in doing just because they're going to make me money.
Which if we can get that into the head of some of these fucking people that are censoring people and some of these people that are pushing these crazy agendas and hiding information from people because they think that it's going to contribute to an undesirable outcome that doesn't fit in a line.
If the other group wins, you did a shitty job.
And if you're hiding information that would allow that other group to win, you're a bad person.
Like you're bad.
Like if there's actual real criminal evidence that you're hiding because you don't want this other person to get elected, you're doing a terrible thing to humanity.
And you're doing it based on these very base and normal human instincts.
So first of all, we've emailed, like I mentioned that Aspen workshop with all the journalists and all the social media companies.
I emailed every single one of the participants and said, would you please talk to me about this?
Not a single one.
Except, I'm sorry.
Washington Post actually of all places responded, not the actual reporter, but through a spokesperson responded with some lame thing.
But it's kind of like, if you're so, if like you're so confident, if you're so better than everybody, then why can't you come and just have a conversation and defend it?
It's a natural human inclination to control other people that you might think are threatening or in competition with you or might somehow or another get in the way of your desired goals.
And people get so self-obsessed in those things without something like your week in your life in weeks, like where you can just look at it, like, oh, this is all fucking fruitless.
Well, I think one of the things that has happened I think has been greatly beneficial that the exposing of the Twitter files and the making it public where, like, especially that we were talking about this last night at the club, that woman who was like calling Matt Taibbi a so-called journalist.
Well, and you know, you know who, and we talked about also what a powerful projection it was because she's a non-voting representative from the Virgin Islands.
But I mean, calling Matt Taibbi, like who is so decorated a so-called journalist and the fact that he got to rattle off all the awards in journalism that he's received.
Well, it's also the shittiness in which they communicate with these people who are just exposing something that everyone should be aware of because it's a real problem.
And what Twitter is and what Facebook is and Instagram and all these social media platforms, these are new public squares.
And we need some sort of an understanding of the significance of censorship in regards to what kind of an impact it's going to have on our life, a real-life world.
Like how many people who got censored off of Twitter, it's radically changed their life, radically changed the for wrong reasons, changed the progression of their future.
I would imagine a lot, quite a few.
And also deeply humiliated them and probably ostracized them in certain social circles.
I had her on the podcast when she was banned because I was talking about her before she was banned because, or excuse me, before she was brought back because I had heard she was banned for this.
And so that was the ultimate Streisand effect.
Like I took this woman who is this obscure journalist who got banned for disagreeing with trans activists and I brought her in front of millions of people.
And, you know, now people get to, she's a brilliant woman.
And she's also, she has some really good points.
And her point about trans activists, like, you are trying to silence biological women's bringing in these biological males into these traditionally women spaces and they're calling themselves feminists.
I mean, it's interesting that the people that are trying to kind of put everybody down, you're the deplorables or the so-called journalists or just all of the insults.
They're coming from people who have just been the worst bootlickers their entire careers, suck-ups, brown-nosers.
They are so proud of having sucked up for so long that they're deeply threatened by people who are actually challenging the status quo.
Well, that's the mainstream journalist approach to the internet journalist.
You know, when you have people like Crystal and Sager from Breaking Points who are beholden to no one.
Like, what?
Behavior.
And also, they have a subscription-based service, so they don't even need advertisers.
The fuck is going on here?
Like, who saw this coming?
No one, right?
Before Substack, there was never a place where someone like a caliber of Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald could post and millions of people could read their stuff and it could make international news.
I mean, if you work at one of those traditional news outlets, you go to work every day, you're not able to publish and write.
You write something, the editors sit on it.
My friend Nellie Bowles, who's married to Barry Weiss, when she was at the New York Times, you'd write a story and then you'd argue with editors for weeks and then maybe they'd publish a thing that was like half its original length and has been completely wokeified.
So they don't have, they don't have, they're actually, they're jealous of the freedom that people with free speech have, and they want to stamp it out.
And this is this transformation from the world of these corporate-owned distributors of information to independent people that people actually trust that don't have any sort of like weird connection to executives and producers and all these other people that have a vested interest in pushing a narrative that is established by the advertisers.
That guy, like, when he was doing that thing where he was like ranting in his basement about Donald Trump being arrested eminently at any moment, he's going to be arrested.
I mean, I was fact-checked during my campaign by the San Jose Mercury News, which was like, Schellenberger's got some really weird ideas, including this idea that natural immunity is just as effective as the vaccine.
And that there was one narrative, and that narrative was connected to the emergency use authorization, which is only applicable if there's no other treatments.
The fact that this is not, that was never discussed.
And the people weren't, but it's also the terror of this impending pandemic that's going to take out your loved ones.
And, you know, Robert Malone talked about that on the podcast, that it creates this mass formation psychosis, that you have this one thing that people are looking at as the savior.
And any suppression of that or any resistance of that, you are going to ruin my life.
And also very much like, I want people to have the information.
But I think that it's the will to control that comes before the catastrophizing.
They want to have control and then they exaggerate the problem, whether it's climate change or COVIDism.
That's what's coming first.
It's the need for that social power.
I think the other issue, and it struck me as you were talking, the reason that they want to emphasize the vaccine over the remedies, and Steve Kirsch talks a lot about all the different ways in which you can treat the COVID.
I mean, it's funny because there's a bit of a arms race with the language where, you know, like they say they just accuse their opponents of being racists, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, election deniers.
And if you're kind of like, hey, can we move beyond these reductive labels?
They still have the advantage because these labels are so powerful.
But then there's also people that are like really, they're bad actors and they're only saying something because it conforms to their ideology and they're essentially grifters.
They've attached themselves to this thing and that is their business.
I mean, part of the reason I came back to being a Christian is that Christianity, I came back to it actually while working on Greta Tunberg at the end of my book, Apocalypse Never.
And I was like, what's the remedy for this intense hatred and anger against civilization?
And I was like, it's love, obviously.
Loving your enemies, like, is for me what Christianity is about.
She's going to be so mad that I'm blanking on her mind.
But, you know, basically, Jamie's got it.
Sorry, Anna.
Sorry, Anna, if you're watching this.
But it's so simple, but they're like, you know, like, you know, Huberman, so first of all, I now do my morning run before I drink my coffee, and I take a cold shower because that amount of adversity, which I mean, it's kind of a joke.