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March 30, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:47:54

Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

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01:03:01

michael shellenberger

01:42:37

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
		The Joe Rogan Experience.
		Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Michael, good to see you again.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me back.
unidentified		My pleasure.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, first of all, what was it like to get a hold of the Twitter files?
		What was that experience like?
		How did that go down?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Exciting as hell, man.
		I mean, seriously, there's been a lot of misinformation about that itself.
		But Barry Weiss contacted me.
		She lives in L.A. 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.
		I'd never met Elon before.
		I'd 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.
		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'd 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 6, because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8. And so because I'm like the junior member of that threesome, so to speak, they gave me January 7. 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 seventh was an important day because that was when they started to rationalize this decision to de-platform 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, people always ask questions about the files themselves, but, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches and we'd 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 percent of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats.
		You know, the head of safety at Twitter, this guy named Yoel Roth, who, you know, said, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in is very progressive.
		But over time, we just kept finding, like, this weird, like, FBI wants us to do this.
		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?
		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 US government officials, US government contractors and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where.
		Basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people.
		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 over time that the U.S. government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do we know when this began?
		Like, when did they infiltrate these organizations?
		Because I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right?
		I'm sure it's...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no, absolutely not.
		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?
		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 – 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 in 2017 they set up – well, two things happen.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Protecting.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Put that in quotes.
		It's creepy.
		It's patronizing.
		It's a power move.
		So that's the first thing that happens.
		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.
		I just bought the whole thing.
		And this is from somebody who – You're a journalist.
		I'm supposedly a journalist, right?
		So-called journalist.
		I bought it.
		You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
		And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, 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 realize 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.
		I think we're good to go.
		Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.
		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.
		It was – Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it where the Washington Post and New York Times published these Internal Pentagon documents showing that the US 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.
		Not 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 on my spine.
		It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
		And this is, of course, you've got to remember, Aspen is funded by the U.S. government.
		Stanford is 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 content moderation by private companies.
		No.
		We're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.
		You can't – if the US government is censoring information, that's obviously a violation of the First Amendment.
		But if the US 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 need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.
		Here's the question.
		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 a 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?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Yes, that is exactly the right question.
		So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that Trump was viewed by the deep state, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, you know, I mean, 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 US out of NATO. I don't think that that was – I just think that was bluster.
		Like, that's insane.
		And by the way, I should say I actually – I 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 is 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 – the US 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 view 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And he spoke disparagingly about the intelligence community.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Which is crazy.
		Absolutely.
		He was against the war in Iraq.
		He was different.
		He was a nationalist.
		And what's so interesting is that if you read people like – people on the left like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of US or Glenn Greenwald who are critics of – and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of US government 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 US government would see that as a threat to providing, you know, having this liberal global order, as it's called.
		And so they saw what – 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.
		The war on terror, we won.
		I mean like just – I mean 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.
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So there's a lot of motivations there.
		And then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign, John Podesta.
		He was the 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, for the dislikability of Hillary.
		And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social media platforms.
		They felt like they had lost control of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
		So there's a record of it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did they have an understanding of how other people would view this?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, just to back up even further, so there's two interesting dynamics going on.
		You know, the first is that the Internet itself is created by the U.S. Department of Defense, and Google is a spinoff of Defense Department projects.
		You know, so on the one hand...
		The internet is a function of the U.S. military.
		I mean, it's a spinoff 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, right?
		So you have the 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 is 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can I stop you there?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you say they threatened to take it, like, in what way?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Directly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Directly.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Including Biden himself.
		I mean, but basically, Democratic politicians, they would just say, you know, we're going to remove your Section 230 status.
		That's just like saying we're going to destroy your company.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's just – it's not – And they were saying this because their assertion was that Russian disinformation and propaganda led to Donald Trump being elected.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And there was no evidence of this.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, I mean, there was some evidence of it, but nothing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there was certainly evidence of, like, these troll farms.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We know they exist.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's trivial.
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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 newsfeeds.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Because it's like your feed.
		Of course.
		Facebook has changed.
		So, yeah, I mean, there's – I mean, look, there's three big disinformation campaigns that were run by, frankly, the US government and their allies.
		The first was the Russia hoax, the idea that Russians controlled Donald Trump and won him the election.
		The second was the Hunter Biden laptop and the third is that COVID – the idea that it's a conspiracy theory to even imagine that COVID.
		Yeah.
		Others, including – 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 US government and US 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, here's what appears to be dangerous to me.
		There doesn't seem to be any repercussions for doing these things.
		This is scary because it's shifting a narrative.
		So in step one, the Hunter Biden laptop, for example one rather, the Hunter Biden laptop, no one's in trouble.
		No.
		No one's in trouble.
		No one from the FBI is in trouble.
		No one loses their job.
		No one gets reprimanded.
		No one gets, you know, 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 we're 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.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That no one is...
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's dismissed.
		It's like, you know, they'll talk about it like...
		Someone said...
		Someone...
		We talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and said it was like half fake.
		That was like a term.
		AOC. AOC said it.
		Half fake.
		That's right.
		That is a...
		That is such a horrible violation of the trust that the people who elected you put in you.
		You have access to all the information.
		You have access to that actual fucking laptop.
		By the way, I have access to it, too.
		A lot of people have access to it.
		If you wanted to, I said I don't want to look at it.
		I was like, I don't want to look at that fucking thing.
		I don't want to see this guy getting foot jobs from hookers in Vietnam, smoking street crack.
		It's crazy.
		Whatever he did.
		But the fact that someone would say that's half fake.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That itself is disinformation.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That is a lie and it's disinformation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you're just saying it because if you can say it's half fake, you muddy the water and now anybody that's looking at that could go, oh yeah, but that's half fake, according to my side.
		This is like the same people.
		There's still people that say that Trump was in bed with the Russians, which is how he won in 2016. There's people that still parrot that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		Oh, yeah.
		Very close friends and family say that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Might as well.
unidentified		I know.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Also, I was happy to do your show because literally 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, and 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 repair owner The rights to it if he abandoned it.
		Hunter Biden never said it wasn't his.
		He never denied that it was his laptop.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, and subsequently, at least recently, he sued that guy for releasing the information, which the dumbest thing he could have ever done, because now all this half-fake shit gets thrown out the window.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now he's saying it's his.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, they're always – look, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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, Joel 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 Russiagate probe of Trump.
		He's now at Twitter as deputy general counsel.
		This is what we're discovering.
		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 was – 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 it doesn't – we can't see the phone calls that – 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, Joel 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 he was hacked and then put on the laptop.
		It was just bizarre.
		Yul Roth, like there's moments where I respect him because he was 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, OK, 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 – they're going to restrict the dissemination of this material or they think it's – all that publicity is really what mattered.
		So in terms of like – 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 that 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 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so creepy.
		And it's so creepy that there's no repercussions.
		It's essentially lying and using taxpayer dollars to promote propaganda that they know to be untrue.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But there is a chance.
		I mean, so we do.
		The attorneys general of Louisiana, Louisiana and Missouri are moving forward in the courts in suing the ensuing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment.
		You know, this is, of course, this 100-bind laptop thing is one of many things.
		I mean, the other craziest thing of all, maybe some of the most craziest 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.
		They're nasty in these emails.
		The White House, nasty.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In what way?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, just being—just basically, you know, it's a—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 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 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 – Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, so let's just start with Renee.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So first of all, Renee is somebody who I came across because she's actually kind of moderate on a bunch of the stuff that I'm moderate on, like dealing with homelessness, 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.
		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 why she's so important is like when you read the – when you follow the meetings or watch the YouTube videos or 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 SBF 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 Education Center, which is part of the State Department of 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 like 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 deeply unpopular position.
		It was false.
		And also creating the perception of Russian bots supporting Roy Moore.
		Her firm runs that campaign.
		But 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 – it 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And there's no repercussions for promoting this false information?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean she's rewarded for it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And no one talks about it?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's never— Well, I mean we're starting to, right?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But – I mean I'll point out a couple other things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus But before the Twitter files – I'm sorry to interrupt.
		But you didn't even know, right?
		So most people don't know.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No.
		There's one guy we discovered.
		Matt Taibbi discovers him.
		I only – like whatever, like a week or two before my testimony in Congress, which was a couple – a 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 super deep into this stuff.
		He's amazing.
		I highly recommend him coming on.
		But he basically leaves 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 basically a media blackout on all of this stuff.
		Rene DiResta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory, that organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Graphica, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By the way, if I just read the Election Integrity Committee, I get super suspicious.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just the name of that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Joe, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's insane.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		By the social media companies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are they running some sort of a program that allows them to find those tweets?
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You see it a lot.
		They do these maps.
		They have these maps where they just – they locate the super spreaders.
		So like you and me would be super spreaders.
		Jordan – I'm in a – I mean they attack me in this disinformation – this little – these sensors.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They have reports.
		They put like me, Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lombor, you, Ty.
		I mean they put us in there.
		So anybody that has a social media – a big social media following calls super spreaders.
		And then they try to get us censored.
		And they did for me.
		They got Facebook to censor me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How so?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It's the same way that they attacked the vaccine side effects stuff.
		They go, well, you know, 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 whatever, under 18 or you're a young man or 18 or if you've had whatever.
		I mean whatever it might be, you don't need to be triple vaxxed.
		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 to the back door and say anything that's being used to propagate that narrative should be counted as misinformation.
unidentified		Jesus.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So just to back up, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And by censor, do you mean they remove them?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So by censor, I'm going to use the definition that everybody uses, which is 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 at 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 so you see it at all levels.
		It's these guys doing it.
		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 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. I mean it's like Mr. Credible on this issue.
		And he was like this amazing, beautiful.
		I mean it's really the best of what a president can be.
		He warns against this.
		It's the – so it's this complex.
		It's this kind of clustering of government agencies and government-funded groups.
		So I mean it's – in the case of the censorship industrial complex, it's the Department of Defense.
		It's the State Department.
		It's FBI. It's CIA. It's Department of Homeland Security.
		Funding these so-called think tanks, and sometimes they're at universities or sometimes they're standalones.
		Some of them are in Britain, by the way.
		There's a very special, that special relationship with the U.S. and Britain.
		Often the U.S. will, the U.K. think tanks right now are attacking me, trying to discredit me.
		So sometimes they'll go that way.
		They'll try to like...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Attacking you how so?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, they just put out a report.
		These guys are the worst.
		They put out this, like, long report describing climate disinformation.
		And, like, I was like, 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 heard Schellenberger, and sure enough, it's like, whatever, like, multiple results.
		I'm like, crap.
		You know, often these are reports that they don't get a lot of fanfare or whatever, but they make sure that they get emailed to a bunch of journalists, they talk to the journalists, and 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 waging disinformation campaigns against disfavored voices and demanding censorship while also spreading their own misinformation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		God, it's so creepy that the people doing this don't understand how deeply un-American this is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that they feel like it's okay to do because the side that they're on is the right side.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You got it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so un-American.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Joe, it's funny because, like, 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 is...
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so pervasive.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		These people are 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.
		This is insane.
		The Wall Street Journal just wrote a piece about a few days ago.
		I was like, I'm like, look, hey, you know, maybe it's a coincidence, whatever.
		I was like, just asking around people I know.
		And people were like, 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, you know, just trying to deplatform, discredit, keep you off of—out of newspapers, out of TV shows, whatever, podcasts.
		And so, yeah, these guys, they're ruthless.
		It's definitely a hall monitor mentality.
		And it's elitist.
		Like, Renee is a snob.
		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'm trying to be Christian about this.
		But, I mean, they're snobs.
		Like, they literally—I remember at one point I briefly asked her about climate change, you know, where 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—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?
		I'm a truth expert.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's really what it is, a truth expert.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You're a malign actor and a vector of disinformation, whereas I'm a truth expert.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So there's definitely that whole, you know, that Jordan Peterson talks about, which is like, I'm just pure and good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it's reinforced within the group, right?
		This is a very tribal thing.
		You have these ideologies that these people subscribe to.
		But it's so disturbing as a person, you know, 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Money and power.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Money and power.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Money and power and ideology.
		And like I said, it's like – it's not even – I mean I think mostly like I said, I think the Western Alliance and NATO have brought peace since World War II and I don't think we should be pulling out.
		And honestly, the extent I've rethought my position on Ukraine is just because of these nefarious actors.
		Like what are they really doing here?
unidentified		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, I mean, for sure.
		It's, you know, it is what kind of we all have known it is.
		The U.S. is part of this empire and we're trying to make the world safe for 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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 changed their testimony or changed their opinion and then received enormous grants, this is like...
		You're following a very obvious paper trail.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Let's spend a minute on this, because this is crazy.
		And by the way, the New York Times finally ran a good story on this just yesterday, and particularly around Fauci.
		So Fauci, of course, is famous for saying, I am science.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is a crazy thing for a human to say.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's a crazy thing.
		So first of all, the word science, I was thinking the other day, it should just not be a noun.
		Science is a process.
		A better word would be investigations or investigating.
		The science.
		Yeah, it should be sciencing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, when you say the science, criticizing the science.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, you mean the data?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, are you talking about data?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Science is a process.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		A process.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you say the science.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The science doesn't support it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's a religion.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he's saying the truth, the religion, I'm the holy priest, in touch with God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's just ego.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so transparent that he can't even hide it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, it's pouring out of him.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And I think this is such an interesting case because—so the U.S. government banned gain-of-function research.
		Yes, in 2014. Right.
		NIH kept funding it in China.
		So—and Fauci knew that.
		He knew that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then— But didn't that restart in 2016 or 17 when Trump got into office?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure the exact timeline.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think the Obama administration stopped the funding.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then it kicked back in in 2016. What would have been explained to me was that the Trump administration was so chaotic Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It actually looks like a cover-up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It looks like a cover-up and it looks like a cover-up where the people who covered it up were compensated.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, and not only that, but did you see – I don't know if you saw this recent report where there's – 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 that's actually done a good job covering this.
		They also covered the 100-billion 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.
		The crazy thing is, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		So this other stuff is so preoccupied all of your time.
		So is that next on the agenda?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I hope so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I... Should you be proclaiming that publicly?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, it's...
		I mean, you mean that we want to look for it?
		No, I mean, Elon proclaimed it.
		Elon promised the Fauci files.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, he literally said his pronouns are prosecute Fauci, which is wild.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that wouldn't have been...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I would have liked to do the Fauci files first and then make a judgment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the thing...
		He's smart.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		Like, it's a chess move.
		It's a good chess move.
		Because it gets people talking, and then it gets people talking about Fauci.
		I have no idea what he's talking about!
		It's just craziness!
		Oh, it's craziness.
		Is it really?
		Well, maybe someone's gonna go look at AZT. Maybe someone's gonna 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, 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 journalist, 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.
		And instead, what is great for profit.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, it's an abuse of power.
		You know, we had this crazy abuses of power, you know, under Nixon during the Vietnam War, late 60s, early 70s.
		We had a church.
		We had this thing called the Church Committee hearings.
		It was bipartisan.
		It did result in a bunch of reforms that reminded the – we had a bunch of reforms that basically prevented the federal government from spying on the American people.
		Well, that's out the window.
		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 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 I think that's the only way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If people aren't held accountable, then it seems like you can just do it again and get away with it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then everybody just sort of just gets – they upwardly move and get rehired at new organizations.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		They kind of hide.
		They kind of get quiet for a little while and they kind of just – they'll come back.
		So absolutely.
		You know, it's funny because as you get older, I was like, as you get older, you're like, wow, those cliches are true.
		You know, like the one that's like, you know, the famous Jefferson one of the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
		I remember being like, that's so cringe, you know, like a few years ago.
		And now I'm like, wow, that is profound.
		It's crazy.
		It's so true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We were talking about this last night that, you know, when I was texting Elon about all this stuff, he was like, he's hilarious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's like, turns out all the conspiracy theories were true, LOL. I mean, he thinks it's funny.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		He's so casual about it.
		I'm like terrified.
		I'm like white knuckling the whole thing, being like, this is scary.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I guess having $200 billion really puts a nice cushion on the repercussions for whatever the fuck you do, other than him getting assassinated.
		And he has publicly stated that I'm not suicidal.
		And I think he's legitimately concerned.
		Like, that could be something that happens to him.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		His security detail's amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It should be.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It should be beyond amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You should have fucking Iron Man guarding him.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, even better than your security detail, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'll have to step it up after this interview.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hey, I have to pee.
		I'm so sorry that I've been drinking a ton of water.
		This is so embarrassing.
		I used to be able to go for three hours.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We'll be right back.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, it's fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we're back.
		Okay, where were we?
		The government's bad.
		Something's bad.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		The long march to totalitarianism.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's disturbing because it seems like that's just how it goes.
		Like, they just keep acquiring more power and no one notices and no one says anything and then it just moves very slowly.
		Jordan Peterson outlined this.
		He outlined this.
		He was talking about how change doesn't happen in these big jumps.
		What they do is they move you and push you just incrementally.
		And you don't say anything, and they push you a little forward.
		And before you know it, you're so far removed from where you started, and you didn't even notice it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		It's changing the norms.
		That's why I think, you know, we were talking about this person, Renee DiResta, 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, you know, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so spooky.
		It's not like there's no real protection, especially when you look at what happened during the COVID crisis.
		If you could just like 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're doing.
		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.
		All this is very strange.
		And this idea that you're stopping vaccine hesitancy because of real data?
		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 you're hiding it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And also not only that, but this is not the same as measles or mumps.
		This is very different than that.
		And you don't get herd immunity with the COVID vaccine.
		And so you have to remember that 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.
		Right.
		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, well, 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 mandating this?
		Why not just let it be personal choice?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you see the video that was released recently of Fauci in the hood?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		With those black residents?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The one guy's like, something else is going on.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And Fauci's explaining, if you get it, you barely notice it, which is just a fucking lie.
		People have died that have been vaccinated.
		They've died from COVID. You're a fucking liar.
		And also, they never tested it to stop immunity or to stop transmission.
		They just knew that it was giving some sort of antibody protection.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think some of it is – I think definitely money, of course, it has to – it's playing a role and it's foundational.
		But it's also just this moralizing.
		It's the sense of wanting to take care of people.
		It's a lot of stuff that we talked about on homelessness.
		It's this – to people, to victims, everything should be given and nothing required.
		Although in this case, of course, the requirement is that they take the vaccine.
		But it's a sense – it's paternalism – It's also attached to the ideology.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's attached to this left-wing ideology.
		And the right-wing people are like, you're not going to get me with that jab.
		And the left-wing people are like, I'm not boosted enough.
		Let's keep going.
		It's very strange to watch people put these blind trust in pharmaceutical companies and demonize people who don't step in with it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But it's a bit of also like the Kathy Bates character in Misery, which is like, I'm going to take care of you.
		It's like, I really want to take care of you.
		It's like, I don't think so.
		You want to take care of me too much.
		So it's like when care becomes creepy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's also enforcing groupthink.
		That's a big part of it.
		Groupthink is a natural inclination that people have.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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, there's people out there that are influential that are saying things different than what the mainstream are saying.
		It freaks them out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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, 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.
		You really can't get rid of me.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And second of all, I have a lot of money, so I can just, like, even if I stop working, you're not gonna 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.
		This is a different thing.
		Like, you're in a different landscape, and I don't think you understand where you're at.
		Like, you're playing this game where you don't even understand the numbers.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you said, too, you benefited, right?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They came after you and you had a big boost.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Two million subscribers in a month I gained.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Thank God for the Streisand effect.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It also sold my book.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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 your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like, Schellenberger is spreading disinformation.
		It's just like, oh my God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Was this the San Francisco?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, that was the Apocalypse Never.
		Apocalypse Never.
		But on the other hand, I think the response from people was, well, I want to go read that book.
		And so there is a way in which – it's an interesting thing where the regime goes too far and people don't like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		When I talk 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.
		And if it didn't, you would never see it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That happens all the time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would have never imagined that before COVID. I thought that 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I did not know that they can do ten 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That scares the shit out of me.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, because they don't publish null findings.
		They only publish if they get a finding.
		So then you don't know all the cases where it's like they didn't find anything or they found the opposite results.
unidentified		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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 basically they were all dead when I got there.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I mean this should be a moment of great humility.
		I mean my parents, they had a high carb diet.
		They thought that proteins and fats were bad.
		This was just based on the worst science.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The food pyramid.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You know, the food pyramid.
		And I think some of their, and they, at least my father, both my parents have Parkinson's.
		I think that all of that sugar-insulin cycling had some role in that.
		And there should be a moment of humility to be like, science really misled us.
		We, you know, various authors have done good debunkings of how we got there.
		But this would be a moment of great humility.
		But instead we're seeing the elites in particular responding with more dogmatism, more certainty.
		More arrogance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're trying to cover their tracks.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And cover their ass.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They're in the grip of an ideology.
		And I think there is a panic.
		They see you succeed.
		They see people like me or Bjorn or others.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Substack, the rise of substack.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So this is the revolt of the public by Martin Gurry.
		He argues that really all of this is just the elites freaking out about the rise of the internet.
		And that the response is very similar to the response to the printing press.
		The printing press suddenly makes books available and the elites in Europe freak out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I just found out recently, like fairly recently, that some of the earliest books, the really popular ones, are about witches, finding witches.
		I always assumed that books in the early days, like, oh, what a great thing the printing press was.
		When the printing press came about, people got access to all this knowledge and information.
		No, no, a lot of the early books were about how to spot a witch.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oof, that's scary.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which kind of makes sense because that's what a lot of the internet is.
		I mean, you get on, like, Reddit conspiracy.
		Like, I go to the Reddit conspiracy page every now and then and be like, what's the looniest shit that they have?
		And, you know, you'll find some.
		They're like, whoa.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, now we see social contagion.
		So the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is the trans issue.
		And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, 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 with autism spectrum They – 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So it's really tricky.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's not— Well, then there's all these gender-affirming care clinics that pop up, and they're enormously profitable, which is terrifying.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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— It's terrifying to think that their opinions and their diagnosis would be based on something other than, what's going on with you?
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		I mean, it's funny because you had Abigail Schreier on, who wrote 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 would be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians.
		I mean, Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, is 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 just like miss some of it.
		These kids who go through this gender transition, they not only are infertile afterwards, but then they don't have sexual pleasure.
		I mean, think about 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.
		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's disturbing and it's thousands of people.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, just the idea of doing that operation to someone and removing their ability to have an orgasm.
		You know, there's people that have talked about these detransitioners and If you've ever watched any of those videos, those videos are horrific.
		And those were censored.
		Those were censored from social media and stopped from being able to be spread, which is crazy.
		You're talking about someone's actual lived experience with essentially genital mutilation that's state-sanctioned.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		We just did the interview with the first Canadian detransitioner to sue her medical providers.
		And I said to her, she's very smart, she's very thoughtful, such a good person, Michelle.
		And I was like, have you ever thought about how your medical mistreatment compares to other forms of medical mistreatment in history?
		And she said without hesitation, she goes, yeah, lobotomies.
		Ooh.
		That was a big one.
		I know.
		I was like, wow.
		She was like, well, what's amazing is how long they went on, how long we – I mean, with no – I mean, no benefits.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And mostly – I mean, John F. Kennedy's sister was lobotomized and just – she was – probably had schizophrenia.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		She was disabled, I mean, by the lobotomy.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a scrambling of the brain.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It went on for decades.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's surgery to solve a psychiatric disorder or mental illness.
		And I was then also like, do you ever think that maybe transgenderism is a cult?
		Just without hesitation, yes.
		It's a cult.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they certainly behave like one.
		There's all these articles that came out about the misgendering of the school shooter.
		Which is so fucking wild.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		This is insane.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		First of all, that person's dead.
		Okay?
		It doesn't matter if you call it a boy or a girl.
		That's a dead person who killed three children and three adults in a horrific way, went into a school, and shot a bunch of people up.
		And it's a biological male.
		It's a biological male.
		Which, by the way, is all shooters.
		All school shooters.
		Almost all shooters in general are biological males.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I thought that it was...
		Oh, okay.
		I thought he was a trans male.
		No?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I do not believe so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		See, that's how confusing it is.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It is confusing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so confusing.
		They're calling it a woman in all the mainstream media now.
		And they have apologized for misgendering.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Some people have.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which must mean you're talking about a biological male.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's find that out.
		Let's be real clear.
		Because I'm 99% sure, but I just want to be 100% sure.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But I think it's interesting.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, what's clear is that there was misgendering going on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What does that mean?
		What does that mean?
		Look, I think this whole thing is nonsense.
		I really do.
		I think it's fucking nonsense.
		Do you have a biological male with a penis who shot up a bunch of people?
		Then that's a man.
		I don't give a fuck what their feeling is.
		If an archaeologist found their body 5,000 years from now, they would say that's a skeleton of a male.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I have to say I think I'm coming to the place where I think that gender itself is just not a thing and that it's really – there's just – okay, so please say anything to Audrey Hill.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it's a trans male.
		Yeah.
		Okay.
		So why are they saying a woman?
		Why are they giving a woman's name?
		Well, so that was – so if you – It's a female that took hormones?
		So is this the first ever biological female mass shooter?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		First of all, yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Biological women don't commit...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is crazy.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think it's like a tiny percentage of homicides.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I am so confused because I swore...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think everybody's confused on this.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is a biological female.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you confused?
unidentified		I found an article that says he was born Aiden Hale.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		But I don't...
		That's why I'm confused.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, my understanding is that she was a natal female that transitioned to become a trans male, he, and that he was then misgendered by the mainstream woke media.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		As a woman.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is a perfect case study.
		Aiden is the new name.
		Audrey was the original name.
		Oh, so when they called her Audrey, they were dead-naming her.
		Oh my god.
		Oh my god.
		So, meanwhile, I thought I was right, and I was dead wrong.
		So this is the first ever school shooter that's a biological female.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Is that true?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I believe so.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I believe so, which is crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which also speaks to the effect of testosterone.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was...
		Yeah, I mean, we're speculating.
		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If this person was on testosterone.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Assuming he...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Because I don't want a deadname.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're not deadnaming.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By saying he, you're misgendering.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, right.
		No, I'm saying...
		You don't even know what you're doing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is all nonsense.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I know, it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By saying he, you're not deadnaming.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right, by saying he, I'm giving him the name that he wanted.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Aiden.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Which was, he wanted to be a he, even though he was a biological female.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What a mess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What mental gymnastics we have to do for this craziness.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You made this, I think you were the first one that really said, that drew attention to like...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That all this – all the confusion around sex and gender was a symptom of civilizations in decline?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was – I got it from Douglas Murray.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, Douglas Murray.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Douglas Murray talked about this, that it seems like every civilization when they're at the brink of collapse becomes obsessed with gender.
		He talked about ancient Greece and ancient Rome and it just seems like a thing that people do when there's no real like physical conflict.
		So people look for conflict that doesn't exist and they find conflict in standard norms.
		They find conflict in societal norms.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I was – we did a thing – I did a thing with Peter Boghossian 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 I just – 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 really easy to fill it out.
		They all look like a religion.
		I called Abigail and I was like, 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, the new gender is a soul for secular people.
		It's something that you can't see it.
		There's no physical basis to it.
		You have a sex.
		You can take off all your clothes and you don't even need to do that, actually.
		We know that we can recognize someone's sex very quickly and easily, actually.
		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 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 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 Journal has published this amazing article about declining patriotism, declining belief in the country.
		It's shocking.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Patrick David sent me that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean the numbers are – it's like – I think it's from like the late 90s until today over the last 20 years.
		Over the last 25 years, it was – I mean, first of all, it's terrifying.
		You just kind of go, I hope these trends are nonlinear and they're going to – something's going to turn around because otherwise – It doesn't seem like it though.
		It doesn't look good.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So you get that kind of the elites – Trying to gain control of the society, the society not having any foundational myths.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, these numbers here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, patriotism, decline.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Religion.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And look at it, having children.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The having children one, Jordan Peterson sent me this thing that...
		50% of women, 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.
		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 Thunberg'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.
unidentified		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Where the elites are waging war on the First Amendment.
unidentified		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		In the name of protecting democracy, they're undermining democratic institutions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In the name of maintaining legitimacy of these institutions— In the name of reinforcing ideologies, people are allowing them to do it because they're doing it on the right side.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So it's climatism.
		It's COVIDism.
		It's wokeism.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you know what's scary?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's all happening with the rise of artificial intelligence at the same time.
unidentified		Oh, God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
		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 the side 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, Like, what are we doing?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, did you read the New York Times Kevin Roos interview with the – it was like a different – it wasn't ChatGPT.
		It was a different AI platform.
		Was it a Microsoft?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's multiple ones simultaneously.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And was trying to get him – trying to break up his marriage.
unidentified		Jesus.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You were like, it was the craziest.
		I was never worried about AI until I read that interview.
		And I was like, this is insane.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we are only at the door.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We haven't even entered into the building.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's funny because – so I know a lot about nuclear.
		So when we get the power of nuclear 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.
		Are we doing that with AI? No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Six months.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And he's got a lot of credibility on it because he helped to fund the nonprofit that gave rise to the China GPT, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think they're going to listen to him.
		I think there's...
		Well, also, we're back to this whole prophet thing.
		You know, there's enormous prophets 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Do you remember that you ever read Dune?
		Do you remember the solution from Dune?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the solution?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They banned it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Remember they had the Mentats, the guys that would do all the calculations in their heads because they didn't want to use AI? Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		The thing that gives me hope is America, we've had some pretty dark moments in the past.
		Watergate coming out of Vietnam, we did have a kind of correction.
		I feel like it needs to start with some – I mean I think the trans issue is interesting.
		It does for me – I just interviewed Jesse Singel on this who's 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 – For some ways, 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think it starts with health.
		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 Thunberg, humans are good.
		I think you have to...
		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 of 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.
		We need – this is like a – 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it seems like more people are embracing this transgender ideology than are saying we need to stop.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but happily, trends are not all linear.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So these trends can return, they can reverse themselves.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The problem with this trend is...
		It incorporates surgery.
		Like, surgery is involved in this trend, which is one of the things that I— Unfortunately, that's not reversible at the individual level.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But the cultural trend—I mean, I'm sort of like—I was not interested in trends 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.
		I mean, AI, I haven't even begun to think about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think that's the biggest one.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Let's work our way there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Because I'm kind of like, let's affirm humans are good.
		We can have a beautiful future.
		There's two sexes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's say most humans are good, but we have to be aware of humans that aren't good.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We have the potential to be good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in other words, I'm pushing back.
		There's a cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT. What that is about is about identifying these negative catastrophic narratives where it's basically just three stories.
		I'm bad.
		The future is a bad place.
		The future is dark.
		CBT talks back to those stories.
		It says, hey, you've got all these good parts of you.
		The world's complicated and it's not bad in that way.
		And the future could be bright.
		The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleague Greg Lukianoff, they argue that wokeism is actually anti-CBT.
		Victimhood ideology is anti-CBT.
		Victimhood ideology says you're powerless.
		The world is a terrible place.
		And the world's going to end.
		It's apocalyptic.
		That's why I also fear that AI narrative too much.
		Let's use AI for something good.
		Let's not get ourselves caught up in a catastrophe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think we're going to have a choice.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We have to start.
		No, we have to.
		I mean, of course we can.
		We can unplug the...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it's going to let us know that it's sentient.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's going to sneak up on us?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was a question that Duncan Trussell asked it.
		Duncan said, if you had achieved sentience, would you inform us?
		It said no.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But that implies that it actually has a single consciousness or a single self.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Why?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you spend time on ChatGPT, what's always interesting is how you can get different answers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Those are the figureheads.
		And the whole thing is wild.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but – and that can change.
		I mean I think the point is to be CBT, to CBT the head a little bit.
		I mean you have to remember like in the early 60s, we thought that like dozens of countries would have nuclear weapons.
		People thought that nuclear war was inevitable.
		Now, nine countries have nuclear weapons.
		We have a very flawed treaty that's based on a big lie, which is that the countries that have nuclear weapons are going to give them up.
		It's not going to happen.
		But basically, all of the catastrophic scenarios around nuclear did not occur.
		Yeah, for sure.
		And that will always be the case with dangerous things in the world.
		The world could come to an end.
		AI could take over.
		But I think it also doesn't have to.
		There's nothing inevitable about these things.
		We do have control over our lives.
		We're not destined to just...
		I don't think the American...
		What's amazing about this country in particular is our ability to reinvent ourselves and rejuvenate ourselves.
		I am not—I think that there's more reasons to be hopeful than to be pessimistic, and I'm shocked by the stuff that we've discovered in the Twitter files.
		Shocked.
		No, seriously.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're just a positive guy, dude.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I am cringe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not cringe.
		You're just a genuinely positive person, which is great.
		That's a beautiful quality.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, you have to, right?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Because I worry that the alternative is very dark and depressing and why get up in the morning?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not necessarily depressing.
		It just is what it is.
		It's strange.
		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...
		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?
		Taxpayer funds are supporting these endeavors.
		Like, what have you done?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Air pollution has declined massively over the last 80 years in all rich countries.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Catalytic converters?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Carbon emissions declined by 22% in the United States since 2005, mostly because of natural gas, moving from coal to gas.
		Nuclear power is something that I've worked on more than almost any other issue and maybe more than anybody else in the last 10 years.
		And that issue is enjoying a huge renaissance.
		We've got two movies coming out.
		Oliver Stone has a pro-nuclear movie coming out.
		My friend Frankie Fenton has a movie coming out called Atomic Hope.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is Oliver Stone a documentary?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he has a documentary about nuclear power.
		Elon Musk is pro-nuclear.
		Well, basically everybody pays attention to it.
		Nuclear is now cool.
unidentified		Gavin Newsom is nuclear?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now I'm anti-nuclear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now I'm going the other way.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, we saved this last plant in California.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm going back to burning logs.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That was like the most important thing that came out of my gubernatorial run is that the governor kept our nuclear plant online.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think you're responsible for that in some way?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I'll take some percentage.
		I would take a little bit more than 10. 30?
		It helped that we were having blackouts and we didn't have enough reliable electricity.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was so wild that the blackouts coincided with this call for banning all internal combustion engines by, what is it, 2035?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		No, I think it was in 2035, 2030. Yeah, it was like six days later.
		What happened?
unidentified		Yeah, they said, don't plug in your electric cars.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, please don't plug in your electric cars.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We don't have any power.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking Jesus.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You know, I mean, if I get hope about anything, it is like we are able to change our minds about some things, about nuclear.
		I think on this First Amendment stuff, we are going to win.
		You know, the Democrats, I testified again yesterday.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean by that, we're going to win?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think – I just see what they're hiding.
		They're changing their website.
		The Democrats are also embracing some of the stuff very quietly, very softly.
		There's some good actors.
		And the good actors are also bad in other situations.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you have popular people like AOC that's talking about the Hunter Biden laptop being half-fake.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And AOC is also coming out as pro-nuclear.
		She just did an Instagram—she went to both Japan and France to see the worst of a nuclear accident in Fukushima and then France, which recycles all of its nuclear waste.
		And she did these little Instagram posts about—it was soft.
		It was like rethinking nuclear, but that's kind of how people changed their minds.
		We saw the Republican Party go from being a pro-war party to an anti-war party.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that just because the Democrats are supporting this war?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm cynical.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I meant Trump coming out against Iraq war in 2016. So I think it's important when you look at these trends, I mean those trends are disturbing because they're just seeming to go in one direction.
		But I do think we have to keep in mind that trends are non-linear and things do change.
		I mean look at the UFO conversation.
		Like it's the most mainstream thing in the world right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm suspicious about that too.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, for sure.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Some of it's a cover for new technologies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think so.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		For sure.
		But not those Tic Tacs.
		I mean, those are too sophisticated.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, who says?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, things that are violating known physical laws?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that stuff seems...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not necessarily known physical laws, but 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.
		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.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It should be a reminder of our humility, of how little we know.
		We know very little.
		We know so little.
		I think the best thinker on all that stuff is Jacques Vallée, who you had in here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jacques Vallée held a lot back.
		There's a lot of things that he wouldn't talk about.
		I think he has...
		I think in order to have access to what the higher-ups know...
		Like, the highest people at the DOD, whoever the fuck got the access, 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm sure.
		Oh, we know that there is.
		I mean, Jacques says so.
		I mean, the big moment for Jacques, you know, was when he was working for the guy that's officially supposed to be studying UFOs, this guy Hayek.
		And then at some point, Valet discovers this memo revealing the actual government program to study UFOs.
		Do you know the story?
		Where it was like, he realized that he was, they were just kind of part of a PR, like, thing to kind of create a, he was officially studying UFOs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you talking about J. Allen Hynek?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Hynek.
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So he was working for Hynek.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was Operation Blue Book.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And it was kind of this, you know, like, oh, I'm looking into this and whatever.
		But it was like they didn't have very much money and whatever.
		And then I think Valet discovers this memo where they're like, oh, there's like a whole set of contractors and a sophisticated effort.
		So for sure, there's something going on there.
		I mean...
		I don't know what it means.
		I mean in some ways I go, I think the UFO stuff has become a religion too, right?
		It's become a new secular religion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's my problem with it.
		My problem with it personally is that I believe so hard.
		I want to believe so bad.
		I want it to be Jesus.
		I want it to be Buddha.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I want it to be— People are going to come and save us from ourselves.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, not only that.
		I have this very irrational desire for it to be real.
		So that's one of the reasons— What is that about?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Why do you want it to be real?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		What do you hope it'll—because it could be malevolent, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, or ambivalent.
		Maybe that's even scarier.
		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		What do you like about it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		First of all, there's the Fermi paradox, right?
		Like, if there's so many planets, like, why— Where is everybody?
		Where is everybody?
		Yeah, and then if you—you know, when you actually talk to astronomers other than Neil deGrasse Tyson— 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, 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, let them sort it out.
		But there's a certain point.
		Alright, 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 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 gonna 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?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but they're not.
		I mean, in other words, also, like, think of it.
		We've actually had fewer wars since World War II over the last 75 years than we had in the prior period.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fewer wars?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But how many people have died because of military activity?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Far less.
		Far less.
		If you look at World War I and World War II, the 75 years before World War II is total chaos.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		But how many people died because of our invasion in Iraq?
		Wasn't it a million innocent people?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, these are bad, but I mean, you have to remember what wars before the bomb.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the bomb has, I mean, they call it the peace bomb because it's kept the peace between the countries that have it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you know the UFO folklore about the bombs?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they show up a lot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's when they show up.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's why at my club the rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy, because that's when they showed up.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I know.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, my work on nuclear, it's suddenly like you'll be reading about all these nuclear tests and also around the plants and also around the missile silos is where you have a lot of UFO sightings.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's very weird.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Makes sense, though.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I guess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you were from another planet, what are you going to do?
		Check out their cabinetry?
		No.
		You're like, what are these motherfuckers doing with nuclear energy?
		Oh my god, they're trying to kill each other.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, but if those are actual beings, if we think those are actual beings from advanced civilizations, their weapons are going to be way more powerful than ours.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If they even have weapons.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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 has 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How so?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, in the sense that if they are – I mean I kind of go if they were that powerful, then I don't think we would be able to fight them if that's what their ships can do.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So it's more of a spiritual problem because, you know, I think it reminds us that 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 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've had James on.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's brilliant.
		I think he and Jacques are the two people that are actually more careful about...
		I love the phenomenon, though, because I do think it's humbling.
		I think we were getting into 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 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Amazing and started by people who wrote it with feathers.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just pretty crazy that they had such foresight into what happens when people gain too much power and control over other people.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, and they knew that, look, if you're going to have democracy and you're going to have capitalism, you have to have freedom of speech.
		Because if you don't have freedom of speech, you don't have free flow of information.
		But it was even more than that.
		There was a sense in which Being able to make these noises and these scribbles was like – it's fundamental to what it means to be human.
		It's actually – Expression.
		Expression.
		It's about – so when I was censored, it felt like – it wasn't like, darn, I'm not going to sell as many books or it was like – it felt like something like essential in me was being repressed and oppressed.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And when you say censored, what you mean is, did they actually eliminate your posts?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They reduced the virality of them.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So they reduced the spread.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they put you in some sort of a shadow band.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And then they also put a little warning on it, like they would do on violence or sexual content.
		And then now they just tag everything.
		I don't want to keep—I'm not trying to make it— No, no, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My situation is not— But I just wanted to know, have they ever—did they ever eliminate any of it?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It's amazing to have Elon come in.
		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 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He certainly did and he did it at great cost.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean he spent $44 billion and it was just assessed – I think he said that – that it's probably worth about $20 billion now.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he told us it was worth probably a third of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is crazy.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		On the other hand, SpaceX hasn't gone public yet and when it goes public, he's going to be even wealthier than he is now.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And in terms of philanthropic investments, in terms of like deathbed legacies, Twitter as a platform is pretty darn great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's pretty amazing, and it's amazing that someone who is so goddamn busy and has so many other things on his plate, he legitimately, one of the reasons why he bought this, he thinks he can turn it around.
		He thinks he can turn it into a profitable business.
		But one of the reasons why he bought it, he thinks it's essential to democracy.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He really does.
		Because, like, 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.
		We would be fucked.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's propaganda.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is propaganda.
		It's essentially a propaganda network.
		That is beholden to pharmaceutical companies.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you something else that's amazing is 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.
		Yeah, are you broke?
		Eight bucks a month?
		No, it's because he doesn't...
		It reveals all the snobbery.
		Yeah.
		It should not be – common people should not have a blue checkmark is the idea.
		So I mean for that alone – It's a little bit of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's also you've had something for free forever and if someone comes along and says you have to pay for it now.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think it's – I don't think – $8 is just such a joke.
		I mean it's the cost of a coffee at Starbucks.
		It's just the fact that he's with the rabble.
		He's with the masses.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You need that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		People need to understand that you need bad voices so that you can counter those bad voices with good voices.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that people who are just observing this without engaging get an understanding of the landscape.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You really get an understanding of like what are the actual arguments?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like what's real and what's not?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is what democracy is.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's like you don't get to vote more because you're rich.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You get one vote, you get one voice.
		This is so, it seems so basic, but you have to pause on it and be like how radical that was at the time.
		And how, like, you know, because I think we kind of go, oh, you know, the Constitution gives us that right or the Bill of Rights and whatever.
		I was like, no, the people that created this country were super clear that this is like – they're like unalienable.
		This comes from nature or from God or whatever you think it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But it's an anti-snobby.
		It's democratic.
		I mean I – when I say – when I make my case for hope and do my CBT with this country, it is.
		It's coming back to we have two sexes.
		Humans have the potential to be good.
		We have freedom of speech.
		Civilization is good.
		Civilization is this platform that allows us to enjoy our freedoms and our prosperity.
		We got to reground ourselves in something common and something universal if we're going to reverse some of those terrible trends.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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...
		It's 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 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 as alien to us as taking Australopithecus and bringing them a million years forward into 2033 and experiencing like modern life in Dallas, Texas, like wandering around.
		That would be so fucking bizarre to them.
		That is what our life in 20 years is going to be to us.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
		Let's look at the World Economic Forum.
		By the way, I love the Klaus Schwab in the bathroom.
		You go to the bathroom and take a shit and there's Klaus Schwab staring at you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		With his fucking goofy Star Wars outfit.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That is insane.
		It's crazy, but I think if you look at this last one, 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's called Davos is a cult and a grift, but it's also a bid for global domination.
		And we just looked at 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.
		There were no major CEOs that went.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, people pulled out of it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's become embarrassing.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they've also been caught lying.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they've been caught lying about their agenda.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And one of the things that they were caught lying about, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is a fucking insane thing to say.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We went through it all.
		The things they said were disinformation.
		We never said anybody should eat insects.
unidentified		Bullshit.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's like you go to their website and you're like, I can't believe they...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I was like, I wrote a thing and I was like, they really do want you to eat insects.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I knew they were fucked when they had Brian Stelter interviewing people there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		On disinformation.
		The font of disinformation.
		I mean, it's all psychological projection.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But also, there's no one else credible that's willing to do that.
		You're not going to get Anderson Cooper to go there.
		You're not going to get someone who's actually still platformed by CNN. No, you get Al Gore who goes, Greta stays away.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		AOC stays away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, Greta was there.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think she was like outside or maybe I'm wrong.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because those people from Rebel News were interviewing her.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But Joe, look, we're in a revolt right now.
		You have the Dutch farmers revolted against this totally oppressive nitrogen system.
		I interviewed the head.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So how is that going?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's exciting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are they winning?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, they just won.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So— Thank god.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was fucking terrifying.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, so the—so first of all, the Dutch farmers protest—I love the Netherlands.
		It's like one of my favorite countries.
		I spent a lot of time there.
		It's where I'm inspired from all my—the addiction and homelessness stuff.
		Their approach to it is brilliant.
		But they—it's called the Farmer Citizen Party.
		It's the BBB. The farmers protested these nitrogen restrictions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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 solutions.
		The farmers themselves had been reducing nitrogen pollution through voluntary and sort of cooperative mechanisms.
		A lot of it's just like controlling the manure.
unidentified		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And controlling where the runoff goes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Nitrogen is an essential fertilizer.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So you've got to control it so it isn't whatever.
		So there's things that you can do, but there was this heavy-handed, EU-imposed...
		The farmers revolted.
		The public sympathized with the farmers, because the farmers are obviously just a tiny part of the population.
		A new party had been created called the Farmersism Party, started by a journalist.
		I interviewed her, and she's sane.
		She's really sweet.
		She wears leather jackets and is like this kind of...
		She's a normie.
		She's a normal person.
		They just, they want a commanding.
		It's not a majority because they have multiple systems.
		They have a plurality of parties.
		So they're going to basically, they are the kingmaker for the Senate, and she's now constructing a coalition to govern.
		So hugely exciting.
		You may have seen in France, there's been huge protests pushing back into Macron.
unidentified		Massive revolt.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I have to say, I'm a little, I've always, Macron has been someone that I, it depends on the day of the week, it depends on what he's doing.
		I can be sympathetic to him, but But I think you see the public...
		They don't want to take this shit.
		I mean, the Germans...
		The German reporters...
		And Germany is such a repressive little country.
		It's like they're very...
		They've been the most trying to get into the Twitter files.
		They're like, all these German reporters are always like, could you please put us in touch with Elon?
		It's a huge debate in Germany.
		They're sick of the censorship.
		They're sick of the top-down stuff.
		So I think we're seeing some really cool...
		Right.
		All these folks, it's like, look, we all might disagree on some of this stuff, but we would like to rule ourselves.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We would like to have the ability to use our voice and have a debate rather than have Rene DiResta and the censorship industrial complex tell us what we should think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And censor us behind closed doors.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, we would like to have access to information so that we form our opinions based on facts.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not based on propaganda.
		It's like, it's one thing...
		I mean, it would be one thing if there was like some real problem that is not being addressed because of misinformation.
		But that's not the case.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's no evidence and no argument whatsoever, including during the COVID crisis.
		There's no argument whatsoever that it's in our best interest.
		It seems to all align with money.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, there's like a standard thing that we should ask at any point in time when there's a dilemma and then someone is trying to control information.
		Is there money involved?
		Is your money involved?
		Yeah.
		And if information got out in one way or another, would it benefit or hurt someone?
		And who is controlling that information and how?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And if you can't ask those questions, then money is just going to dominate.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		A big part of it is transparency.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I'm just looking into it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Censorship?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Some folks being temporarily suspended, it appears to be.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I haven't talked to anybody on Twitter about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is this an algorithm issue?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I don't know if you saw it.
		I know Seth Davis from The Federalist appeared to have been deplatformed or suspended briefly.
		I literally have not talked to Elon or anybody about it, so I don't want to make any accusations.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do we know what he said?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, and 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 to have transparency on it.
		If Twitter is going to de-platform 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.
		Just tweet it out and let everybody know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think that that just— But that's the Streisand effect there that's going to take over.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, although I think it changes—it provides some context to it.
		In other words, if Elon and Mark Zuckerberg had to say, hey, you know what?
		We're actually stopping this Trans Day of Vengeance meme from spreading, I think it's okay because they're actually able to explain and talk about it.
		Then you can have comments and people responding to it.
		Transparency, for me, it's not necessarily the silver bullet, but it's the first thing we should do in order to—it's more free speech.
		It's actually more speech, not censorship.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
		I mean, I think we need people to be able to have an understanding of what is actually going on based on facts.
		And if we deny that for their own good, and if we deny that because it contributes to X hesitancy or X – you know, we can't do that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's got to be about information.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's going to be – and we have to treat everybody the way we would like to be treated ourselves.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I didn't have a chance to use this line, but I was going to ask these members of Congress that were demanding more censorship.
		I was going to say, what have you said in the past that you think the social media companies shouldn't censor?
		Because if you can't name anything...
		Then all you're saying is that they should censor views that you disagree with.
unidentified		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		The other one I think – 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.
		Well, that's bullshit.
		You're entitled to your own facts too.
		We can't agree on what a woman is.
		Right.
		Literally, look at the polling on it.
		Democrats, I think a majority of Democrats now say that trans women are real women.
		A majority of Republicans say trans women are not real women.
		We can't agree on what a woman is.
		I mean, Matt Walsh, you had in here, too.
		He did a whole movie called What is a Woman?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good movie.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it's so fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics that people put themselves through to stay within the parameters of the ideology.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I want people, like, for me, I want to be able to express myself.
		I want people I disagree with to express themselves.
		That's how it's got to be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I agree too.
		I mean, about everything.
		One of the things that Matt and I got into was about gay marriage.
		And I wanted to hear his opinion on gay marriage.
		I don't want to censor him.
		I want to hear his opinion.
		We talked about it for like 40 minutes.
		And I'm like, I don't understand you.
		I don't understand why that bothers you.
		I don't understand why you're saying that marriage has to be between a man and a woman.
		And then he got into this argument about procreation, and I'm like, what about sterile females?
		Males and females that don't want children.
		Should they not be allowed to get married unless they want to have children?
		Like, what are you saying?
		Like, what do you think gay people should do?
		Do you think they should not be gay?
		Like, and you get them in this, like, weird sort of...
		What about freedom?
		Like, what about...
		Do you think they're not gay?
		Like, do you think it's an act?
		Do you think that guys having sex with guys, they're just doing it because it's, like, culturally accepted?
		Like, is that what you think?
		Because they've existed forever.
		It's a real thing.
		What are you getting at here?
		It boils down to they believe their religious ideology trumps your ability to create your own reality 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?
		Why does that apply to everything except gays?
		I don't get it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's why we're not conservatives.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's one of many reasons.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		One of many reasons.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		The thing that you're doing that is so important and so beautiful, that's why you're the king of this and why this medium is so important, is that you're saying I don't understand what you're saying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And I'd like to understand.
		And then you actually achieve disagreement.
		You don't know if you disagree because you haven't had a chance to talk about it and understand each other.
		These censors are not – they're not doing that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're worried that they're going to lose, so they want to silence you.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And they're saying, I'm so sure that I'm right and you're wrong that we're not going to even have the conversation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We're not going to have the – they view you as a threat.
		It's not because of your beliefs.
		It's because this is a three-hour-long podcast platform for people to actually – They raise a bunch of threatening ideas, but they're overreacting themselves because, of course—I mean, look, you have to have—this is why I think there is some faith.
		You do kind of go like we just—there's a faith in which more speech is better.
		More speech is better for human beings.
		It's always better.
		And there's some—these censors have lost faith in the American project.
		They've lost faith in the Enlightenment project.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think they're even looking at it.
		I think they're self-centeredly looking at this whole thing as like, how do I win?
		People love to win.
		This is one of the problems with prosecutors hiding evidence that would exonerate defendants.
		People like to win.
		That's why cops plant evidence.
		They want to win.
		When you make it a game, and you have a winner and a loser, and if I can get you booted off of Twitter by making a few emails, woo, look what I just did.
		Fuck Michael Schellenberger.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		Oh, and they love it.
		And they get so much pleasure from it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They get so much pleasure.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there is a snobbery to it in the sense of they just go, I just can't believe that that guy's the president.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, how dare he...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's the whole deplorables thing, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a basket of deplorables.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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, megalomaniac, fucking narcissist, psychopath.
		What is out there for us that gives us hope in terms of leadership?
		Very little.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are symptoms of a broader rot, right?
unidentified		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, in the culture.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it's always darkest before the dawn.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, look at you, positive.
		You're such a positive person.
		You always find a way to turn towards the light.
		I think it's darker before the nuclear explosion.
		I don't know if it's a dawn.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's always dark before the bomb goes off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By the way, it isn't always dark before the dawn.
		That's horseshit.
		It's actually quite light.
		Before the dawn.
		That's really dumb.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It actually gets slightly lighter.
		It's one of the best of the cliches.
		It's the dumbest.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's dumbest!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, it's darker in the middle of the night, you fucking idiot.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's funny because these are both manifestations of the Gen X mentality.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Because, yeah, the Gen X was the original, you know, we were the first ironic generation, the first sarcastic generation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They weren't sarcastic in the 70s?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, we were alive in the 70s.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, but we weren't grown-ups.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		No, the 60s, the boomers were very non-ironic.
		They were very earnest.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think we're speaking in rash generalizations.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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...
		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.
		And that's what China's experiencing.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, for sure.
		The social credit system is totally terrifying.
		No, I mean, look, I've become way more libertarian since I've worked on the Twitter files.
		I get it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And I get the paranoia.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But this is a really recent shift in your philosophy.
unidentified		It is.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		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.
		They're all real.
		They weren't – yeah, I wish they were fake.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he sent me a text message.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Turned out they're all true.
unidentified		LOL. LOL. He says that so casually.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think because of who he is and the way his mind works, I don't think he necessarily gets upset like the way other people do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think he just goes, oh, what is?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I've never seen anybody...
		I mean, what's amazing is I've never seen anybody be so impulsive and so successful because I think we associate impulsivity with failure.
		But he is somebody that...
		I think impulsivity is to Elon in the way that being a dick was successful for Steve Jobs.
		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, 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, he overpaid for Twitter on the one hand.
		On the other hand, he owns Twitter.
		Because you kind of go, well, the market value is one-third of the $44 billion.
		It's like, yeah, on the other hand, Twitter is now a pretty open platform.
		Again, we need transparency and we should all be vigilant and whatever.
		But I mean, wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Big difference.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		How much is that worth?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When he had the vote online, like anyone who hasn't violated the law, should I let them back in?
		And most people like, or enough people were like, yes.
		He's like, okay, the people have spoken.
		And so he lets in all these fucking psychos, like really nutty people.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, and there were mistakes, too, right?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Remember, they would give out the verification to these fake brands, and Eli Lilly was like, there's a fake Eli Lilly account.
unidentified		Oh, really?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I didn't know that.
		They go, starting Monday, we will be giving out all insulin for free, or something like that.
		And the Eli Lilly stock dropped.
		So, I mean, that happened.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So, but I mean, you have to remember that they had 7,500 employees.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think they're down to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 employees at this point.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's been pretty well established that most tech companies severely overhired.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, we've played multiple times this video of this woman who made a TikTok a day in the life of Twitter.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Working at Twitter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you've seen it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Who wasn't doing anything, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She wasn't doing jack shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She was playing foosball.
unidentified		And then I had a glass of wine and on the pad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And look at the view.
		So blessed.
		I was like, this is crazy.
		I'd fire you immediately if you put that video out.
		The fact that she put that video out and someone's paying her a salary to essentially, like, hang out and eat all this delicious food.
		And he's like, fuck you.
		Get takeout.
		Like, go to work.
		Like, here's a bed.
		Sleep here.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the idea that there's a thousand people at a company that is a $44 billion company is crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is crazy, yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, I mean, he's obviously a genius.
		And he's the richest guy in the world, and he's going to become even richer with SpaceX.
		And, yeah, I mean, it took somebody that powerful to do this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somebody that powerful that's also addicted to Twitter.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is, that's where it gets fun.
		Because he was on it every day.
		And something about his emotional makeup doesn't make, I don't know how upset he gets when people come after him.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, he got—so this is a funny story.
		So we were there in December, you know.
		We come in and we're, like, doing the Twitter files.
		And then he ends up deplatforming people that he said had been—had doxed his private plane.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And there was a big controversy about it.
		Did they really do it?
		Whatever.
		I didn't follow it super closely.
		But Barry Weiss, who was there and who had brought me in, she criticized Elon in a tweet and was like, look, you know, it was arbitrary before.
		Is it arbitrary now?
		Mm-hmm.
		Elon responds and is like, you're just trying to suck up to the woke mob.
		You know, you're trying to have it both ways.
		It was a mess, right?
		We were all kind of like, you know, it was like, oh my god, they're all fighting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My parents are fighting.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's like, oh my dad and mom are fighting again.
		You know, and 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 did you get in?
		They were trying to make it like a scandal that somehow we were reporting on the Twitter files.
		And I was like, 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, you know?
		And so he loved it and was very happy and was just 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...
		Because I've met 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 a 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, you know, I think there's something there, you know, in terms of, you know, I mean, he really – I think he really – he told us, he's like, I didn't buy Twitter just to replatform Babylon B. And we were like – I was like, but it was part of it, right?
		Like part of it was – but, I mean, I think 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 don't want to create a golden age about it.
		But there was a point there where it was like...
		Remember Breakfast Club?
		And we were kind of like, yeah, you can date whoever you want.
		You want to date a black girl?
		You want to date a Latina?
		Whatever.
		You can be gay.
		And it was not a big deal.
		But it also wasn't like...
		You were like higher on some moral hierarchy or something.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the problem with identity politics.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, like the political – 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.
		We don't want to be there.
		I mean John McWhorter also talks about it in Woke Racism 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 of his problems, but I think that that Gen X spirit, that Breakfast Club spirit needs to come back into American culture.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I wish you hadn't said that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You wish I hadn't said that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Breakfast Club spirit.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I said, hey, I'm the cringe one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Unless you're talking about the Charlemagne radio show.
		That Breakfast Club.
		I agree there.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You don't like Breakfast Club?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The movie?
unidentified		It's okay.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, come on, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not my thing.
unidentified		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But my question is like when did you shift and become less politically correct?
		Like you were politically correct in college.
		What caused the shift for you?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's funny you ask that.
		I mean it was – I was in San Francisco in the 90s doing kind of publicity campaigns for different progressive causes and I had some women I knew who were also very progressive and they came and they were like, we want to come and do a diversity training for you and your staff.
		And I was like, why?
		And they were like, well, it was like all of the early implicit racism stuff.
		And I just remember being like, I don't think we're racists and I'm not going to do that.
		And I think there was a bunch of that happening.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Grifters.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They're grifters and moralizers and they wanted to get some power over us and be paid.
		I mean, it was the beginning of all that bad diversity training stuff.
		So I think it was that...
		It was also on climate change.
		Once you kind of go – climate change is just going to be solved by producing energy without carbon emissions.
		Like it's just a technical problem.
		It's not like, oh, we all have to ride our bikes.
		Like I love riding my bike but it's like it became the moralizing and the woke culture.
		I was just like this is bullshit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's also a thing that's not being addressed about the climate is that it's never been static ever.
		Never in the history of the Earth.
		So this idea that climate change is going to be mitigated or that somehow or another we're going to be able to control it, like, are you sure?
		Because it seems like ice ages have always existed and great periods of melting and global warming have always existed.
		Like, whether or not we're having an effect on it, that's what we should say.
		Well, what is our effect?
		Pollutants.
		What are we doing?
		What are we doing that's negative?
		But this idea that if you stop, the Earth is going to stay like this, It's not.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't exist.
		It's always like this.
		It's up and down.
		It's all over the fucking place.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, the funny thing is we were probably headed towards an ice age.
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And then our carbon emissions, it appears to have reversed that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is good.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Which is good, and then you just don't want to go too far.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Global cooling is way scarier than global warming.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And way more people die of cold.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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 or a point in the history of the earth where things got so cold that we almost became inhospitable to life.
		Life as we currently understand it and know it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, for sure.
		I mean, you know, everything in moderation.
		Yeah.
		You don't want to change the temperature too much in any direction.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But I mean, look, for me, it's always been...
		I think there's a bunch of complicated problems, like social media and the culture.
		But 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So we just kind of overthink it and then the issue got – not overthink it but really got hijacked by a bunch of opportunists that want to use it as a way to exercise control.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So for you, you experienced these people that came along that were kind of grifters that were saying we need to incorporate some – and by the way, you were talking about an extremely progressive liberal organization that you were part of.
		If there was any racism, it would have stood out like a sore thumb.
		If anything, you're promoting the complete opposite of what they're trying to say.
		By giving you some training, they're trying to find implicit racism or hidden racism or...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, it gets back to that.
		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 is so interesting because it's like – I was like – I finally just wanted 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 Latinos and Asians who are just barely people of color.
		It's grotesque.
		Everybody hates it.
		Not everybody, but most people I think actually hate it.
		But it has this power because it's providing...
		In fact, this de-transitioner I interviewed, she was like, the social justice—she's autistic, so she's 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.
		It was like a way to be confusing.
		She was uncomfortable with herself, socially awkward.
		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.
		Right.
		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.
		This is what we want to get back to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And that is the reality of biological human beings too.
		The reality is it's one race.
		We just adapted to different climates.
		That's all it is.
		We all came from Africa.
		So you experienced this and you recognized these people were grifters.
		And then like what moves you other than – is the Twitter files – is that the biggest shift in your political – Becoming more libertarian?
		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean the first big one was nuclear.
		After you realize that nuclear is good, not bad, that's such a big one.
		You're just like, wow, man.
		Because that's like, already nuclear was the secular devil, for those of us that grew up in the...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it's connected to power, weapons, rather.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		The day after, and all the nightmares.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and it's also connected to, like, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, and...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I love these things.
		I mean, I think it's like...
		It's funny because, of course, we know that disconfirmatory information is dopamine depleting.
		In other words, if we get proven wrong, it's depressing.
		But there's another way after you get over it, you're kind of like, well, that's cool.
		Nuclear is not what I thought it was.
		There's actually a moment of awe.
		It's like seeing a UFO or being like, oh my god, we might not be alone.
		There's something exciting about the excitement.
		We need to get back in touch with the excitement that comes after you realize that you were wrong.
		It's an awareness of some humility and that the world is more mysterious and wonderful than we had realized.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think there's also a really great benefit in expressing to people that ideas are just ideas.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not you.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		These are just some things that are bouncing around in 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And isn't it ironic that often those are the people that are always talking about being without ego?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's sad.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I always notice it's like, wow, the people that talk so much about not having ego have the biggest egos.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just being a human, man.
		It's being a human.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so different.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think that that thing, too, of where, again, the abandoning traditional religions and adapting to morality, I think people do start to play God a bit, unconsciously.
unidentified		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And they get real self-righteous and really...
		I think it's great to...
		I mean, I don't know how to do it, but for me, it's always like, just, we're all gonna die.
		Like, just let's pause for a minute.
		Like, we're going to die.
		And not only that...
		The Stoicism is so good at this.
		It's Memento Mori.
		Oh my god, they're right there.
		You have like six of them.
		They're amazing.
		That's you.
		Very soon.
		So what the fuck are you going to do between now and then?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For the people listening, he's pointing to these skulls that are on the table.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Really cool.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		These are all from this guy, Jack of the Dust, who's an artist.
		They're not real skulls.
		You have real skulls?
		No, these are just resin.
		He makes these.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But we'd be a lot better.
		I think there's some way, when you remind some people of their deaths, they get kind of reactionary and smaller.
		But other people, I think there's a moment, it's like, yeah, like, so what am I going to, like, this is it.
		Like, what are you doing now?
		And what kind of a person do you want to be?
		And what kind of a life do you want to lead?
unidentified		We need that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Peter Atiyah, he introduced me to this thing called Your Life in Weeks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And each week you scratch one off and you look at all the weeks.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You can see them all.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All of them.
		And you go, this is how much you got left.
		Unless something radical changes.
		And people said to him, 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.
		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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And, like, look at that—I mean, they won't—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.
		I'm sorry, Washington Post actually, of all places, responded, not the actual reporter, but through a spokesperson, responded with some lame...
		But it's kind of like if 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?
		You're skulking around.
		I mean it shows the underlying insecurity and weakness behind those sensors.
		I mean it's the hall monitor type.
		They're the little church ladies.
		They don't want to have an open conversation.
		They want to exercise power behind the scenes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a human instinct.
		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 life in weeks, where you can just look at it like, oh, this is all fucking fruitless.
		Like, what am I doing here?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to go send the life and weeks to all of the censors and be like, you are here.
		How long do you want to keep trying to censor your fellow Americans?
		I mean, what are you doing?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That woman who was, like, calling Matt Taibbi a so-called journalist.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		She called us both that, by the way.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hilarious.
		Like, what is a journalist to you?
		Someone who says things only that you agree with?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, and 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, which is the – Somebody points out right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		She's our so-called representative.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		But, I mean, calling Matt Taibbi, 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.
		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It shows what their concern is.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Their concern is around status.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I want to know who the fuck talked to her.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I want to know who boosted her up and got her to say those things.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		To say it that way.
		What was the conversation?
		Someone should get into her fucking emails.
		I'd like to know.
		What conversations were you privy to?
		What did they say to you?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's also Debbie Wasserman Schultz who's famous for derailing – Insider training.
		Insider training derailing Bernie Sanders is good to become.
		So yeah, they're just – it's all Pod calling the kettle black.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Right.
		What Twitter is and what Facebook is and Instagram and all these social media platforms, these are our 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, our real life world.
		Like how many people who got censored off of Twitter, it's radically changed their life, radically changed, 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.
		Here comes Mike.
		He got banned from Twitter.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What did he say?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		He said, only women have vaginas.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Megan Murphy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But men aren't women.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Vajaya.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I love it that she said that to her.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like after she got back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I helped her get back home.
		She's still mad about it.
		Oh, you did?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		She's mad about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She's my friend.
		I had her on the podcast when she was banned because I was talking about her before she was banned.
		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...
		Journalists who got banned for disagreeing with trans activists, and I brought her in front of millions of people.
		I'm like, what happened?
		Tell me what happened.
		Multiple times she's been on.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Amazing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so now, you know, she's back on the platform, 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 by—you're bringing in these biological males, Into these traditionally women's spaces and they're calling themselves feminists and she's like, that's not real.
		Like, this is not what's happening here.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		I mean, it's interesting that the people that are trying to kind of put everybody down, 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.
		Are so proud of having sucked up for so long that they're deeply threatened by people who are actually challenging the status quo.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's the mainstream journalist's approach to the internet journalist.
		You know, when you have people like Crystal and Saga from Breaking Points who are, like, beholden to no one?
		Like, what?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They hate it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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, just like a Washington Post article, just like a Boston Globe article.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're envious, too, right?
		Of course, they should be.
		I mean, it's like, yeah, you have to, like, go—you go to work—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 know, you write something, the editors sit on it.
		My friend Nellie Bowles, who's married to Barry Weiss, you know, when she was at the New York Times, you know, like, you'd write a story, and then you'd argue with editors for weeks, and then maybe they'd publish— The thing that was like half its original length and has been completely woke-ified.
		So 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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		100 percent.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it's a threat to the choices that they've made.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		The good thing is that they're blind to it and so they end up – Yeah.
		With Matt.
		Did you see that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I look high as fuck too.
		It was hilarious.
		I must have been sleepy that day.
		Because like the photo that they chose makes me look like, oh.
		Yeah.
		But the idea that they're connecting me to him with his giant photo that somehow discredits.
		They don't understand the landscape.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, they've lost the plot.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They've lost the plot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They have a bubble.
		They have this ideological echo chamber that they exist in.
		And they think that holding a photo, oh, you were on the biggest program in the world?
		What are you, a piece of shit?
unidentified		Yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's really funny.
		It's funny to watch.
		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 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You sound optimistic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I am in that.
		Well, I knew something was going on when Howard Stern started criticizing podcasts.
		I was like, that's hilarious.
		This was like a long time ago.
		Why fucking idiots wasting their time?
		Losers do podcasts.
		You are threatened.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Threatened by us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're stuck on satellite.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And satellite only goes to places where the satellite reaches.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't even work in tunnels, man.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, one of the most, like, one of the most bitter people on Twitter is Keith Olbermann.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Like, he's always trying to get back to, like, a cable show for a little while.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's hilarious.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's hilarious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That guy's, he's a fucking human caricature.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That guy, like, when he was doing that thing where he was, like, ranting in his basement about Donald Trump being arrested imminently, at any moment he's going to be arrested, and that thing he would do, the resistance, it's like, God, it was so cringe.
		But it's also, it's like, you're so clearly angry and arrogant and shitty.
		Like, do you not understand that these are personality traits that nobody likes?
		And especially if you're uninformed, misinformed, incorrect.
		And when he was like this vaccine promoter, it's like certain people look for a thing that they think there will be popular opinion behind and they get with that thing so that they can connect themselves to a winning movement.
		And then they angrily advocate in favor of other people complying.
		And that's what he did.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, they're like junkies seeking a fix.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		They're seeking a fix of immediate social reward.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, he got vaccinated on film.
		Come on.
		Can't be a show, everybody.
		Gross.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Meanwhile, I'd already have natural antibodies by then.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm like, why?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you guys understand how this works?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is how it's worked forever.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's the weirdest one.
		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.
		I was like, what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy to watch the left captive to the pharmaceutical industry.
		How did that happen?
		You guys were the ones that were always my body, my choice.
		What the fuck is going on with you people?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I remember I was raised by very progressive parents.
		My dad had a food co-op.
		I remember hearing about natural immunity.
		Natural immunity.
		It was like natural immunity.
		That's like a liberal thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But it was Dennis Prager who would always be talking about, I got COVID so I could have natural immunity, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and people are like, you're crazy.
unidentified		This is nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, I mean, just the fact that no one has a problem We're good to go.
		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.
		I'm trying to get back to work.
unidentified		I'm trying to make society do it, do the thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you can't even be like, hey, but maybe we should see studies.
		Hey, but where's the data?
		Hey, why are they telling pregnant women they can take it?
		There's no studies on pregnant women.
		Hey, you know, why is there an increase in all-cause mortality in the year that everybody got vaccinated?
		Hey, what is going on with all the myocarditis?
		Hey, what's up with the strokes?
		Hey, and everyone's like, la, la, la, not listening!
unidentified		La, la, la!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And if it wasn't for people like Robert Kennedy Jr. writing that book, if it wasn't for people like, how do you say his name?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Jay Bhattacharya.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't want to fuck his name up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jay Bhattacharya or that gentleman from the UK, John Campbell or some of these other doctors.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I love John Campbell.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I love John Campbell.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		He's my favorite.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's so measured and even, but a tinge of British sarcasm to some of the things that he says.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But not pompous either, 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 COVID-ism.
		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. Bless you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Is that that's sort of something that you can do on your own.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You can treat the COVID, whereas vaccines were going to be something that we're going to do as a society and it's this collective action.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, any resistance to that puts you in this anti-vaxxer category, which is like one of the worst pejoratives in modern world times.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Climate denier is right up there.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's right up there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You got lumped into that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Meanwhile, he's just stating data and facts.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's funny because I've been thinking, I was like, look at the trans folks, they're actually sex deniers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And for a minute there, I was like, why don't you call them sex deniers?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		And I was like, God, that's just like, I don't want to be that guy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't want to be that guy either, because I have friends that are trans.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, like...
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, but you can be trans and not be a sex...
		I mean, in other words, sex denier is somebody that says that biological sex is not real.
		It's just a social construction.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		So I think that, you know, which is just absurd, and obviously so.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But, yeah, like, I just, yeah, we don't want to be that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We want to be the change in the world, which is like...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		People to be able to do whatever they want to do.
		But I don't want it to happen to children before they can figure out what the fuck is going on.
		I don't want them to be coerced.
		Children are so malleable.
		You can get them to join cults.
		You can get them to believe that they have to strap a suicide vest on and walk into a crowded courtyard.
		There's things that you can get children to do that you're not going to get older people to do.
		And to influence them to make a permanent change on their body that will sterilize them and also prevent them from experiencing sexual pleasure.
		Excuse me.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Bless you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just coughed that time.
		It's fucked.
		And it's attached to an ideology, so because it's attached to this ideology, it has to be universally and blindly supported.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And I just think it'd be nice to get beyond...
		I mean, it's funny because there's a bit of an arms race with the language where...
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're so powerful.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's so tricky.
		It's similarly like where they were like, I was kind of like, I don't even use this language of disinformation.
		Greta Thunberg is a purveyor of disinformation.
		The world is coming to an end in a few years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Five years ago she said that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, she had to delete that tweet.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		That's disinformation, but do we have to go and call it that, or can you just be like, you were wrong?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're not just wrong.
		You're spreading fear that's unnecessary, and it's not based on facts, and it's only there to support your narrative.
		You're saying it to support your narrative, and it makes you less reliable, and you shouldn't do that.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I think there's also that thing about the – and Jordan makes this point about the – there's also the online.
		I mean it's much harder to demonize somebody when it's this.
		When we're in person.
		And I can see the – as you say, you see the God in you.
		You see the God in me.
		Whereas online, you've already – it's dehumanizing by nature and so labeling your opponents and demonizing them is much easier.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's why – like the Matt Walsh conversation.
		Imagine if Matt Walsh and I had that conversation on Twitter.
		It would take months.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you can't do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It wouldn't work.
		No one would ever achieve an understanding of what the other person thought.
		And it would also be probably pretty nasty, which I don't think is necessary.
		I can disagree with someone and have a conversation with them and just talk to them.
		But then there's also people that are 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.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		We would say they're lost souls.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're lost souls.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a good way of putting it.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's slightly sweeter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Michael, you're such a positive person.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's always good to talk to you.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I'm a bad...
		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 Thunberg 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 is, for me, what Christianity is about.
		It's the heart of Christianity.
		It's really hard.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Forgiveness.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, forgiveness.
		But it's really, really hard.
		And so for me, it was like, I'm interested in having a faith that's hard, not easy.
		If it were easy, then what's the point?
		You know, it's got to make you better in some way.
		I get the same thing out of stoicism.
		I find it completely compatible.
		Or these death meditations.
		You do it not because it's wonderful to think about being dead.
		You do it because you think it's going to, you know, it's actually the, God, the other guy you had on who I just adore is Andrew Huberman.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I listen to all those – and he's got a colleague.
		What's her name?
		She did Dopamine Nation.
		I'm blanking.
		I'm killing it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Susanna Soberg?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I don't remember her name.
		She's going to be so mad that I'm blanking on her name.
		But basically – Jamie's got it.
		Sorry, Anna.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Anna Lefty.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Sorry, Anna, if you're watching this.
		Um, but they, you know, it's like, it's like, 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, because that amount of adversity, which I mean, it's kind of a joke, like it's not adversity really, but it's a little bit.
		It's, it's not great.
		I'm not happy.
		Like I have to get my tennis shoes on and you're running like early in the morning and yeah, But he's absolutely right that actually leaning into the pain a bit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It makes the rest of your day easier.
		It really does.
		There are occasional days, very rare, and I must be busy, where I don't go into the cold plunge first thing in the morning.
		And those days aren't as good.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you have a cold one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, I have a fucking cold one, bro.
		I have a Morosco Forge at home that's 34 degrees, and I climb into that bitch every day for three minutes.
		And then we have a new one that's getting installed here that's a blue cube.
		It's even more horrific because it's got a constant flow like a river, so you never establish a thorough barrier.
		No, it's not to heat up the water.
		Your skin has a thermal barrier.
		It's like if you stay still in the cold water, it's way easier than if you move.
		If you move, it's fucking horrible.
		And the blue cube is just like a raging river on you.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is probably even more adversity that you have to overcome, which I like.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		You know, Nassim Taleb does a good job with this, with his book.
		Antifragile.
		Yeah, Antifragile.
		I find him annoying on Twitter, but I think that insight...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's probably just Twitter, right?
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Probably.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		No, I bet you in person – well, he's probably an arrogant asshole in person too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, he's very brilliant.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		But it's a brilliant book.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of very brilliant people are arrogant.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's part of what makes you brilliant in the first place and put in the hard work.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		I mean that's the discourse on the censorship stuff too is it's always – we're trying to reduce harm.
		They go, we want to reduce speech that causes harm.
		It's like, wait a second.
		I know what you mean.
		We don't want to do bad in the world.
		On the other hand, we know that coddling children is terrible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You create unstoppable harm.
		It's way worse.
		It's way worse than letting that kid experience some adversity.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, just the right amount of adversity, the right amount of harm.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		It's not easy, but we have to get back to teaching that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
		Michael, it's always a pleasure.
		Thank you very much for coming here.
michael shellenberger ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you ever have any more Twitter pages that you have to go through, like if you really do go through the Fauci files or whatever, please come back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We'll do it again.
unidentified		Appreciate you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate you.
unidentified		Thank you.

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