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Oct. 19, 2021 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:03:47
Timcast IRL - Southwest LOSING Vax Mandate Battle, Cancels Unpaid Leave Plan w/Michael Shellenberger
Participants
Main voices
i
ian crossland
07:42
l
luke rudkowski
18:13
m
michael shellenberger
37:17
t
tim pool
58:01
Appearances
Clips
l
lydia smith
00:54
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
The freedom flu is apparently working.
tim pool
As much as the establishment tried to deny its existence, and there were some technicality to the, uh, technically the truth things to what they were saying, there was no, as my understanding, very large and organized sick outs or protests, but there were some small protests we did see.
There were many individuals taking paid time off, taking sick time, and we're seeing this in police departments as well.
Now, in Chicago, they're threatening police officers.
If you try to take time off, you're being blocked.
If you try to retire instead of getting the vaccine, they will go after your benefits.
Southwest, however, has lost one major battle, though the vaccine mandates are still there.
They are now saying they have ended the plan to put people on unpaid leave if they are pending an exemption.
Not exactly getting rid of their vaccine mandates, so a little correction in the headline we put up, but still, they're slowly backing down.
With Chicago police, This is where it gets crazy.
A judge has ordered the president of the police union to stop encouraging people to defy the mandates.
The beast is shaken.
It's getting scared.
And we got to talk about that.
We got to talk about what happens when you demonize, defund, remove the police.
Because we can take a look at the crime in San Francisco.
And we've got someone here to actually talk about how progressives are destroying cities.
We have author Michael Schellenberger.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
michael shellenberger
Oh yeah, thanks for having me.
I'm the author of Apocalypse Never, and also the new book, San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
tim pool
Right on.
So you're the perfect person to talk about San Francisco being ruined.
michael shellenberger
Absolutely.
I just was looking at the news just now and apparently they're now offering rewards funded by private individuals to solve some of the crime cases.
It's pretty absurd.
tim pool
$100,000 I'm hearing?
michael shellenberger
Yeah.
unidentified
Wow.
tim pool
Maybe that won't do anything.
But it's a private individual trying to do something.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, it's just we're dealing with the breakdown of civilization.
I mean, it sounds hyperbolic, but civilization requires that laws are enforced.
It requires that people, you know, that there be consequences for behaviors that are incompatible with city life.
I talk about how the current DA was proposing to basically just reimburse people whose car windows had been smashed in.
I mean, what could go wrong, right?
tim pool
When you get a poop department, you should really reflect on your leadership instead of being like, we have a problem with human waste.
I have an idea.
Let's create the poop department.
Problem solved.
Maybe something else is going on.
Maybe that's a symptom of the problem.
michael shellenberger
People will come and they see the tents and they see the people, including the public defecation is very famous, and they will compare it to shanty towns in poor countries.
I've lived in Brazil, been in shanties, I know favelas, I've been in very shanty towns in poor parts of the world, India.
It's different.
San Francisco is one of the richest places in the world.
tim pool
But even in the favelas, I didn't see people taking dumps on the stairs or the sidewalks.
People all lived there and it was like, Yeah.
I saw pretty bad conditions.
I saw those channels they have in the hill that go down because they don't have a sewer and it just, you know, their waste goes in there.
But they, it's all going in the same place.
The craziest thing I saw was someone's tortoise broke out of their apartment.
And I was like, yeah, they were, I gotta tell you, man, going to a Brazilian favela and seeing the conditions and being like, wow, it's bad.
And then going to San Francisco, I'm like, wow, it's worse.
So that's something.
We'll talk about all that.
We also got Luke.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, before we begin, I wanted to tell our loving viewing audience to always trust the science no matter what because, you know, they're never wrong.
You should never question it.
The scientific method is sort of like a suggestion and our carefully curated, selected, highly paid scientists who have conflict of interest and connections to big industries never lie to us.
And oh, I also have a a cloth on myself, which you could exclusively... Hold on there, Luke.
tim pool
Let me look at that.
DDT, no flies on me, thanks to DDT.
Well, there are no flies on that baby, as you can clearly see.
Cigarettes were recommended by doctors.
unidentified
Yes.
tim pool
That nursery water you have there is still for sale today.
luke rudkowski
At Walmart.
tim pool
Hold on, hold on.
What's that one?
Asbestos.
Well, my understanding is that asbestos is only bad if you're trying to remove it.
And as it ages and cracks.
Glyphosate.
I'm not super familiar with that one.
luke rudkowski
Well, there's a big lawsuit with Montana and Glycophate.
tim pool
Sugar's bad.
Don't eat sugar.
unidentified
Exactly.
luke rudkowski
So, yeah.
This is just a random cloth that I have on that you could also exclusively get on TheBestPoliticalShirts.com and at the same time support me being here.
So, thanks for having me.
ian crossland
Thanks for coming, Luke.
Hey, me and Michael were just talking before the show.
We both lived on coal in San Francisco over there by Hate Street.
So, I think I've got a little bit of a similar maybe perspective of what you were saying.
You were talking about the guy screaming outside.
It might have been the same guy.
luke rudkowski
Different year.
ian crossland
Very likely.
Very possible.
tim pool
Old, famous Screamin' Joe!
ian crossland
Wildly overpriced.
I thought it was overpriced when I was there in 2016.
It was $3,000 for a one-bedroom, which was the most I'd ever paid.
Way beyond anything else.
And got offered to buy mushrooms and weed every day, walking down the street.
Unique city.
And then there's Golden Gate Park and all the people sleeping in the park, like two blocks away or three blocks away.
tim pool
There's a big difference between.
Well, I'll just put it up.
I'll just we'll get into it.
Poop department.
Yeah, there we go.
lydia smith
Indeed.
Yeah.
So San Francisco sounds like it started beautiful and then some super progressive policies got into place.
I'm really looking forward to talking about that this evening.
tim pool
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And that being said, don't forget to smash the like button, subscribe to this channel, and let's jump into the first story, Southwest Airlines.
From CNBC, Southwest drops plan to put unvaccinated staff on unpaid leave starting in December.
Southwest scrapped a plan to put their unvaccinated workers with pending exemptions on unpaid leave after the December 8th deadline.
Both American and Southwest require their new hire employees to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination before their first day.
Large airlines are federal contractors and subject to a Biden administration order that requires their employees to be vaccinated or receive an exemption for medical or religious reasons.
Now, I can respect the exemptions for medical and religious reasons.
The problem is a lot of these companies are just outright denying them no matter what.
luke rudkowski
But this is a different case here because there's ... reports of Southwest executives literally going ... around the company asking people to please get the ... exemption paperwork please fill it out either for medical ... or religious purposes they want so there's been an ... effort that people are reporting that that they want ... them to get these exceptions but this is a huge ... announcement this is big I mean they're pretty much ... announcing that they're not going to be going along with ... this Tim you disagree with the disagree disagree here but ...
They're not going to fire employees or in other words put them on unpaid leave if they don't get vaccinated.
They're not going to do that.
That's a huge step to me that has been demonstrated through the Freedom Flu, through all the protests, through all the demonstrations and through all the massive disruptions that we saw a couple days ago.
tim pool
The people opposing the mandates are gaining ground.
So this is a battle being won, but the war is still very much on.
Of course, 100%.
And here's what you've got to understand.
When they say new hires are still under the VAX mandate, they're basically going to appease those who currently work.
They're saying, well, it doesn't affect me anymore, so I'm good.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
tim pool
And then new employees will have to be mandated.
So what happens in 10, 20 years?
The VAX mandate stands.
luke rudkowski
We'll see how long the vax mandates are going to be implemented.
I definitely agree with you.
A lot of people think they're going to be temporary as long as COVID's going to be around.
But as me and you know, and a lot of other people know, this is a long game.
It's not going to be ending anytime soon.
It benefits too many people.
It benefits too many billionaires for it to stop.
But this is still a major victory because the workers united here came together and said, hey, we don't like this policy.
We don't want it.
Go ahead.
tim pool
I mean, there were some protests.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
But we basically just saw people disorganized being like, nah.
luke rudkowski
Exactly.
tim pool
That was scarier to this company.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
tim pool
Southwest is like, we're gonna do this mandate.
Oh, Biden's making us do it.
And then a bunch of employees just called in sick.
luke rudkowski
Well, they knew- They didn't organize it.
They knew forcing this would be worse for them than not forcing it.
So this realization, that's the big story to me.
And that's why I led with it.
That's why I've been talking about it all day.
Because this is huge.
And there's going to be reverberations of this all over the place, because now people know that their voice actually matters when they come together and they speak up together.
tim pool
As long as they don't back down.
luke rudkowski
Exactly.
And they don't.
tim pool
Because I genuinely think most people, the smartest thing they could do was, oh, only new hires have to be vaccinated.
Because then people who already hired are just going to be like, I'm good.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
Later down the line, that's going to have its effects.
tim pool
It's doing it right now.
luke rudkowski
Exactly.
tim pool
So the vaccine mandate's there.
This is an attempt to redirect But it's probably still gonna happen.
It's probably still gonna happen.
And I'll tell you, I really don't think that the vaccines are the goal of the mandate, as people who listen probably have heard me say a million times.
Because if you look at the Chicago police, they're like, if you try and retire right now, instead of getting vaccinated, we will take your benefits.
We will go after your benefits.
So very clearly, they're just trying to force people.
It's about the mandate, not about the vaccine part of it.
luke rudkowski
Also, it's also important in that specific case that a judge actually put a restraining order on the Chicago Police Union chief that's barring him from talking about the vaccine publicly.
So this is a major fight that's happening between the police union, the mayor of Chicago, and this is not just in Chicago.
There was also Police and firefighters today in Seattle that decided that they were going to feed the homeless because they were fired from their public service jobs.
And they came out, they went on the steps of City Hall, took off their boots, left them there at City Hall.
So there's been a lot of different demonstrations.
There's been a lot of big protests in California.
A lot of people took their kids out of school today because the kids are mandated to be vaccinated and they took them to a protest.
And there was protests all over California saying, no, we're not going to go along with these mandates.
tim pool
Here's what I think is interesting about Southwest is that initially they denied there was any
unidentified
Right.
tim pool
kind of sick out, right?
Not happening.
Then, all of a sudden, the CEO comes out and says, we didn't want to do a mandate.
Biden made us do it.
And it's kind of like, why are you bringing up mandates?
I thought the narrative was that there was no, you know, that there was no protest or
anything about this.
So they're clearly trying to now blame, you know, Joe Biden.
But I'm wondering, Michael, what you think about, you know, do you think Trump would have done something similar?
Is this an issue of progressives enacting policies that are damaging to business and first responders?
michael shellenberger
I mean, at this point, honestly, what freaks me out is that we've had such a morale hit
for the police in the United States over the last year and a half, ever since the George
Floyd protests.
You know, we've lost, you know, a lot of these police forces are understaffed right now.
One of the things that I became very, I was so surprised to find was that the evidence
of the importance of police, because I come from the left, and so I've always been somewhat
skeptical of the police as part of the criminal justice establishment.
But the evidence that police prevent homicides is just really strong, and the relationship
between cops and potential killers, just interacting with them every day in the neighborhood, very
strong evidence that that works.
And so after 2015, after the Ferguson protests, there was a pretty sharp increase in homicides.
One of the police chiefs in Ferguson said, we're calling this the Ferguson effect because we think that both the cops are pulling back from their policing and the criminals are more emboldened.
A lot of people on the left dismissed that, but we saw it again after the George Floyd protests last year.
So clearly, anything that would basically dampen the morale of police right now, I think would contribute to increasing crime.
tim pool
I mean, it's just at the federal level, federal contractors, federal employees, right?
So it's, I don't know, is it just a direct correlation between this is affecting the morale of the officers or is this just failed policy?
michael shellenberger
I'm a little bit on the fence on this one.
I mean, I'm vaccinated.
I think vaccines are important.
I also think that this issue is sort of that there's no real explanation of what the end game here is.
You know, like how long are we wearing masks for?
What is going to be the deal with vaccine requirements?
tim pool
Forever.
michael shellenberger
Hasn't felt like we've had a proper conversation about it.
tim pool
I mean, we do all the time.
And, you know, the funny thing is, 15 days to slow the spread has quickly turned into nearly two years of harsh restrictions, mandates, requirements.
And there's one prediction right now that what's going to happen is there will be a wave of fake vaccine cards.
We've already seen some stories.
And then all of a sudden you're hearing in the media, people want digital passports and they've already started making them.
And then what really happens is a social credit system.
So they track more than just your vaccine.
One of the reasons I'm very much opposed to this is they're trying to use something that most people find reasonable, like getting a vaccine.
I've got a ton.
I've traveled all over, so I just had to get all these cards, and when you go to Venezuela, you need one.
And then they're going to use that as they're in to get you to carry your passport.
What are they doing in New York?
You need your ID as well as your medical card.
Well, for a lot of people, it's going to be easier just to download the app.
What's the app going to do?
The app's going to track you in many, many different ways.
It's going to give the government access to data that, you know, only Facebook has, for instance, and shouldn't.
luke rudkowski
So that's... Well, for me, this is a big loyalty test.
Because a lot of officers who are skeptical of the federal government, who want bodily autonomy, who...
think that they should have the right to decide what is right for them.
There's a lot of people who are vaccinated who are against the vaccine mandates that are still not even talked about widely and publicly, but there's a big sector of these individuals out there.
So, you know, we had a guest on a couple days ago that said it's very easy to fake a lot of this compliance, a lot of these passports, and the people who are standing up, the people who are vocal, are deciding to do it on principles, are deciding to do it on morale, And that's why seeing a lot of these officers being purged a lot of these officers being fired only will help I believe the federal government in the long run because they'll have more compliant officers that will always do what they want them to do no matter what the consequences are and you always start with something little and you keep escalating it that's why we started with.
You know, just two weeks to stay home, and then masks, and then vaccines, and then second vaccines, and the passport systems, and now booster shots, and then it's only going to get worse from here unless the American people stand up and say enough is enough.
We're not going along with this, and that's why I think this Southwest story is so big.
It deserves a lot more mentions, and someone in the comment section wrote that Southwest decided to do this because of the weather conditions, which I thought was Absolutely hilarious, because that was their initial line.
Jen Psaki said that nothing existed, that this wasn't a protest, nothing was happening here.
Well, obviously it was, because why did Southwest change their major decision here?
So these are going to have far-reaching implications, not just with the police, not just in the corporate world, but this is, I think, deliberately done as a loyalty test to see who's going to obey government the most.
michael shellenberger
And so your vision is basically we should just, you know, basically have no vaccine requirements, no vaccine mandates, no mask requirements, and just make it like the flu shot.
In other words, if you want to get the flu shot, you get the flu shot.
Same thing with coronavirus.
tim pool
Yeah, I certainly think so.
We had a really interesting conversation.
You know, Ian asked about the morality of mandates.
Like, what if you had Ebola?
This is a good question.
And I'm like, it is tough.
I think with like an airborne Ebola with like a massively high infectivity and you'd like it would self-regulate in a lot of ways.
But ultimately, regardless of whether or not it does, I think even if that is the case, we shouldn't have mandates.
It should self-regulate.
People should say, I'm concerned about this, I will protect myself.
But now all of a sudden we're getting just the argument changes every single time it comes out, right?
First, Fauci has gone back and forth on masks, I think, two or three times.
He went back and forth on double masking a couple times.
Then the CDC said, wear double masks.
And I think a lot of people at this point are just like, When you get a Fauci coming out who can't give you a straight answer, but he keeps being touted and championed, eventually people just say, enough!
One of the biggest issues with the mandates is it's forcing people to disclose medical conditions.
It's forcing people to disclose private personal details.
And if you're concerned about it, you need to assume the risks of your life to go out and live and work.
From the beginning, one of the problems we've seen with COVID Is that we've decided to do a one-size-fits-all approach to literally everything.
Hey, the people above 40 are the highest risk factor, so let's lock down everything including schools.
And now we're in a major economic crisis, which is only being exacerbated by ridiculous Joe Biden policies and ignorance and Pete Buttigieg being on vacation.
So they're really good at making things worse.
Maybe we should have had a surgical approach where we said, okay, if you're in a vulnerable population, we'll do special accommodations, we'll do what we can to have skeleton crews keeping the economy running so we don't just shut everything down.
But we went one size fits all.
Now we're doing the same thing.
And you'll have people who have very deep religious or moral convictions as to why they're
not interested in this, notably the use of fetal cells in the experimentation process
for the Pfizer vaccine, and Johnson & Johnson uses fetal cells for the growth of the virus
to produce it.
I can certainly understand why a lot of people are like, you cannot force me to take something
like that.
And then you have medical conditions in which already in New York, there's no exceptions
for medical conditions.
And many of these businesses are saying, oh, your doctor said no?
We reject that logic.
And so I'm seeing stories of... We had this woman, I believe it was from ESPN, who said that she's trying to have a baby with her husband, and for that, she's been recommended not to get the... I believe that's what it is.
Well, she says she's not going to be in the vaccine, and they said, we don't care whether you want to have a kid or not.
There have been a few stories of women who have said their doctors advised them not to get the vaccine while they're currently or about to, you know, try and have a kid.
Even though, I think the FDA said it's safe for women who are pregnant.
Their doctors still gave them personal advice based on maybe their blood pressure.
And now because of the FDA, because of the establishment, these women are being told, choose to have a kid or quit your job.
Like, this whole thing is completely broken.
That's why I'm like, it's bad across the board.
michael shellenberger
And where do you stand?
What about things like measles vaccines that are mandated for kids before coronavirus, obviously, or polio?
What about those vaccines?
tim pool
Yeah, so those are particularly different, but there is an interesting overlap.
I would oppose, in some respects, vaccine mandates in that area.
However, we're talking about vaccines that have been tested for decades.
The production of some of these is 20-30 years.
And these mandates were all implemented through long legislative processes, as opposed to the mayor said, do it or else.
The president says, do it or else.
And now people who are trying to get legitimate exemptions are being told no.
And now the interesting thing is that this is all starting.
This is why, again, man, talk about bad policy from Democrats.
By mandating This, uh, the COVID vaccine, which is just entering now, the long-term trials, according to the FDA insert for the community vaccine.
You have people now looking into MMR vaccines and the other, you know, other standard vaccines, and they're discovering that not only do we use fetal cells in the production of the viruses from aborted babies, we're learning that they use that for like ibuprofen and stuff.
So now you're getting people actually starting to challenge past vaccine mandates, which most of us didn't have a problem with because we were like, long-standing research, legislative process, legislative approach.
Okay, some of us don't like that it's happening, but we agree we went through that process.
Now you have Bill de Blasio being like, do it or else with no exemptions.
And so you get people who have underlying medical conditions being denied access to restaurants.
You have people who are just concerned about trusting the government, namely a lot of people in the black community, Billy Prempeh made a great video talking about why the black community is untrusting of this.
They're being told they can't go into these businesses.
And now because of the politics of it, you actually have Republicans saying, maybe we should look into all of the mandates.
And I'm like, oh, geez.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
I mean, they've been lying through their teeth about so many of these issues.
They've been flip-flopping, they've been inconsistent, they've been censoring scientists, they've been censoring studies, they've been censoring actual real debate that we never had about this.
Fauci only does softball interviews where they, a family-friendly show, pleasure him with words in many different possible ways that I never thought was even possible.
So when we're not even having a real conversation, when we're told 100% safe and effective, and then we're finding out, oh, 3% after a few months, and a lot of the data that's still coming that we don't know, it brings up a lot more questions than answers.
But to kind of put the question back on to you, that you asked Tim, how would you approach everything?
michael shellenberger
Well, yeah, I mean, here's the thing, guys.
I'm not a great person to ask about this, because I As soon as COVID hit, I decided to work on this book, and I'm flat out on this book.
It was drugs, crime, homelessness for the last several hundred years.
All I would say is that I think it's interesting because, of course, we have two mental models of vaccines.
One is, as a parent, I've got two kids, both have been through school already, but you have to get vaccines to go to public schools.
But then you have a flu vaccine, You know, every year we get the shot for the flu vaccine.
That's not mandated.
So we have two different models.
So it's kind of like, is coronavirus like polio and measles or is it like a flu?
Obviously, it's probably somewhere in between.
tim pool
Yeah, that's interesting.
Long COVID is interesting because you've got these lingering health effects and that's why they're saying, OK, you know, maybe people should get this.
I don't think, you know, I'll put it this way, while COVID is very obviously serious and dangerous, somewhere in between I think is a good way to put it.
I look at the data and I'm just like, I don't see this as being on that level of mandating vaccines for this, but more importantly, You know, you can choose not to put your kid in these schools.
You can go to private schools.
You can go other places.
You can homeschool.
To say you can't go to a restaurant or hold a job is where we're starting to get very serious.
Because right now, this is really where the big dividing line is.
You could go and get a job anywhere and they're not going to demand your medical papers.
You know, they'll ask for your government papers, which already is, you know, pretty interesting, I think.
There should be an argument about that.
But now, we're getting to the point where it's, if you want to get a job, you have to undergo a state-mandated medical procedure.
And that's where I'm like, yeah, I'm not a big fan of that.
It's one thing to be like, this is a school.
You don't have to put your kid in this school.
You can find other ways to educate your kid.
Now they're saying, well, if you've got Joe Biden doing federal mandates, if you've got New York City doing citywide mandates, that's passing just business mandates.
Now as for private businesses, there's an interesting argument here, and I think non-discrimination is where it becomes, there's a question about whether or not a business like Southwest could do this.
So, does a business have a right to discriminate on the basis of medical or religious practices?
And the answer is no.
Overwhelmingly no.
I know that conservatives used to be on the other side of this to a great degree, like, you know, the famous story of the baker.
The argument was the baker was told he had to write a message he didn't want to write.
He ended up winning on free speech grounds, I guess, but they still harass him, the left does.
So I've always been on the side of, if you're using public spaces, funded by the public, you have a right to serve the public and provide public accommodation to everyone, you can't make up arbitrary reasons to discriminate.
If someone comes in screaming or threatening people, yeah, by all means kick them out.
If someone's got a disability, I don't think you should be able to say no.
However, what are we seeing with a lot of these companies?
They don't care about what your doctor said.
What are we seeing in New York?
In New York, I called a couple dozen restaurants who outright told me they did not care if you had a disability barring vaccination, like maybe you have Guillain-Barré syndrome, like the drummer from The Offspring.
He got kicked out of the band because he could not get the vaccine due to Guillain-Barré syndrome.
So this is where people have just straight up been like, we have now violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
We don't care and no one will enforce it.
I just, not a fan.
Not a fan.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, it seems like you have these two extremes between Australia and Sweden, you know, that have been sort of out there as these two visible mental models.
And I mean, what I can, what I totally agree with is the idea that Americans are, we're really bad at, this is one of the points I make in San Francisco, we're just bad at the gray areas and a more surgical approach to these things.
We just tend to be, it tends to be an on or off switch for us.
luke rudkowski
Yeah, I definitely agree with that assessment because from the very beginning there was so much fear-mongering, there was so much drama, there was so much emotional manipulation that literally people shut down and Democratic politicians and also other politicians said close down those small mom-and-pop businesses.
Police officers ran around, shut down those businesses, meanwhile the big multinational corporations were allowed to be open the whole time.
And I think to add to your point, that's why there was also a sentiment against the police officers that was very negative on the right because of that.
And they didn't get a lot of support when Black Lives Matter kicked up during that summer because everyone's like, these are the same guys that kicked down my door and shut down my business while allowing Walmart and Costco to do whatever they wanted to.
So where does this end?
It doesn't.
There's too many billionaires benefiting from it.
It's going to proceed to lead to a situation that we're seeing in Australia, that we're seeing in Italy.
There's a viral video that I played in my YouTube video today of an old grandma outside of a hospital.
And a security guard is kicking her out.
And he's like, I want, I want, you know, he wants the VAX mandate.
She didn't have her right paperwork.
She needed treatment at the hospital.
She couldn't get it.
She was told to go away.
And this poor elderly grandmother walked away.
unidentified
Yeah.
luke rudkowski
Because she didn't have the paperwork.
tim pool
But she was vaccinated?
luke rudkowski
I have no idea about that.
But these are the vaccine mandates.
You don't have your paperwork.
You can't get food.
You can't get services that are basic human rights services that shouldn't be denied to anyone.
And this is going to lead to an Australian-Italian-like situation.
They're just ramping up.
They're just ahead of the curve more than we are on this phase.
And that's where it's headed unless people wake up here in the United States.
michael shellenberger
My wife and I just...
Oh, sorry.
ian crossland
Oh, sorry.
They're not actually human rights, like the right to buy someone's food and stuff like that.
Those are actually those are civil.
Some of them are civil rights that are being violated, but I don't think any basic human rights are at this point.
tim pool
You don't think human right humans have a right to like, trade with each other?
luke rudkowski
A state coming in and saying you can't be a part of society, is that not a violation of human rights?
Saying you can't get water or you can't get food.
tim pool
Let's put it this way, Ian, are you saying that like if a black dude went to a restaurant
and they said you're not allowed to buy from this restaurant, that's not a violation of
human rights?
ian crossland
If a private company wants to not serve someone, yeah, they can not serve someone.
tim pool
So you're on the side of like, was that William F. Buckley back in the anti-civil rights movement in the 50s?
You would oppose Martin Luther King?
luke rudkowski
But it's not a company.
It's a government.
It's a centralized big force that everyone is forced to pay that is discriminating against people for their own personal medical decisions.
It's not a private company.
Don't conflate it that way.
It's a big centralized government intervening in people's personal lives saying, you can't get water, you can't get food.
tim pool
But yes, there's also a big government intervening in private businesses saying you can't deny services to someone on these bases.
luke rudkowski
That's a whole different argument than what Ian's making now.
tim pool
So I'm on the side of civil rights.
The civil rights protests, where they said you should not be allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion.
And then we have the ADA, which is medical reasons.
But you're more on the side of the opposition, like the Klan and the Democratic Party.
ian crossland
No, I'm just saying that you said that they were not being able to go to a restaurant is a basic human right.
I think it's not.
luke rudkowski
I'm saying your access to be able to get food and water.
lydia smith
So the example that Luke was giving was this lady who's trying to go to the hospital.
Now if you recall, we just had that story from DC where the warden was held in contempt for not following through with the human rights of a prisoner who broke his wrist.
tim pool
Healthcare is not a human right.
If you're in prison and you're being detained by someone, they have an obligation, a responsibility to make sure you are not going through undue suffering.
lydia smith
But shouldn't you be able to like seek medical care?
Like at least have an opportunity to go in and talk to somebody about care?
ian crossland
That's a human right is the freedom.
Well, when you're in prison, you don't have human rights, I don't think.
They take them away from you when you're in prison.
tim pool
So you're saying that they should be allowed to buy the service of medical care, but not buy a cheeseburger.
ian crossland
No, you don't have a right to medical care.
That's not a human right.
tim pool
I just thought you were saying you should have a right to seek that out.
ian crossland
I don't know.
unidentified
No, I don't know.
tim pool
That's an interesting, like Ian, you're an interesting guy.
ian crossland
Like, your human rights are not your right to other people's services is my point.
tim pool
So this is actually like, I think Ron Paul's position was very much the Civil Rights Act
should have never have been passed.
Private businesses have a right to discriminate.
I very much disagree with that.
I think that they're occupying space in the commons that we pay for.
ian crossland
Yeah, civil rights are like, I paid my taxes so the fire department has to come and put
my fire out.
That's a civil right.
But you don't have a basic human right to that fire.
luke rudkowski
Now you're confiding it.
You don't have a basic human right.
ian crossland
You're confusing the subject of the law.
Do you understand your human rights are not a right to other people's services?
luke rudkowski
That's not what I'm arguing.
I'm arguing that your government mandating a domestic permission slip passport system where you have to get their acceptance in order to go to the supermarket or in order to get food and water is a violation of that.
That's the government of doing that.
ian crossland
It depends on how dangerous the disease is.
tim pool
I don't think so.
unidentified
No.
ian crossland
Of course it does.
tim pool
No, I don't think so.
luke rudkowski
I don't think so.
tim pool
I think I literally just mentioned all of that.
Like, people need to self-regulate if there is a very serious risk.
They need to decide what risk they're willing to accept or not.
ian crossland
Except if, you know, George Washington inoculates his troops against syphilis.
tim pool
His troops?
People who are enlisted or conscripted?
ian crossland
Or polio is crippling kids and so they vaccinate the population.
unidentified
What was polio?
tim pool
Like 20 to 80 percent?
ian crossland
Smallpox is killing a giant percentage of the population so they mandate, like, at some point, If the angry horde won't get healthy, then what do you do?
tim pool
Yeah, stomp it with the boot.
luke rudkowski
Now do that with fat people.
Now do that with people with STDs.
unidentified
Dude, you're such an authoritarian.
ian crossland
We've had this conversation before.
I think there is a time and a place to exert authority.
My personal feeling is that when you look at the, according to Sanjay Gupta, 99.5% recovery rate for COVID and of that 0.5% that people aren't recovering, usually a lot of those people are obese, that it doesn't look like a polio level problem.
So now we're talking like ethics and is it ethical to mandate a vaccine?
luke rudkowski
I don't think so.
It's like you're arguing for freedom in one argument and then fascism in another sentence.
It's very confusing.
ian crossland
because it's like, it's jumbled.
unidentified
I don't know what the left does though.
tim pool
I don't.
They say, you know, oh, you can't have free speech if there's hate speech because hate
speech stops people from speaking.
Therefore, banning hate speech is actually free speech.
You see how they do these semantic manipulations.
Like that's what Ian does.
luke rudkowski
Someone wrote in the comment section, authoritative Ian.
Authority Ian?
And that's what's being said here.
michael shellenberger
Well, just to defend, I'll defend Ian because I think I'm probably closer to your view on
this, which is, I mean, obviously we have restrictions on all sorts of freedoms, including
freedom of speech.
You're not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater.
tim pool
That's not true.
luke rudkowski
No.
michael shellenberger
That isn't true?
tim pool
You're actually allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater.
Yeah, that was Brandenburg v. Ohio, I think, where they set that.
Got overturned in the 60s.
michael shellenberger
You're not allowed to threaten people.
Uh, you're not allowed to threaten people with killing them.
That's illegal.
You can report to the police and they'll be investigated.
You're not allowed to go up to people and be like, I'm gonna kill you tonight and kill all your family members.
That's not legal.
tim pool
Direct threats though aren't an expression of opinion.
You know, you are allowed to say, I hope you die, or I think someone should do X to you.
You're not allowed to incite or direct violence.
michael shellenberger
You're not allowed to say, if you keep tweeting that, I'm going to come over to your house and kill you and your family.
You're not allowed to do that.
Right.
So there is a restriction on speech.
And I think I agree with you about the severity of this.
I think this issue does turn on the severity.
I think if it were more severe, Um, you would be in a very, you'd be in a minority of people that were like, Hey, we shall self-regulate.
I just think most people would be calling for, I mean, I live in Berkeley where people would give me like the skunk eye for not wearing a mask while walking in the nature trails.
I mean, it was like the demands for, I mean, I think one of the most interesting parts of this phenomenon is that like the, the governance response is being demanded by those local cultures.
Right.
So it's like.
Right.
Do you ever see the movie Midsommar, the horror movie?
I always think about that because you're like, those guys are hardcore.
That's coming from within Swedish culture.
I mean, there's obviously some mediating influences like the kind of government they have, but similarly, they're very moralizing in Australia, I find.
It's very much like, This is a dangerous disease, and therefore we're going to clamp down on anybody.
And Sweden, when they interviewed the guy that oversaw the COVID response, he was very much like, look, it's very complex, and there's shades of gray.
So I do think that if COVID were a much more deadly disease, a much more contagious disease, and if it killed a lot more young people, then we would have seen a more severe response.
regardless of the kind of academic arguments about it, we would have been dealing with a much more severe
tim pool
governmental response.
I think people would have been much more accepting of mandates, even in opposition,
if the rates were really, really high, like way higher.
Like initially we thought, like the New York Times was like six million and the United States might die,
and so people were like, 15 days, all right, we get it.
And then after a while we were kind of like, well, Cuomo killed 15,000 people,
and then you got Wolf, and you got Whitmer, They kept putting sick people in nursing homes, so their policies were literally killing people, and maybe we need to stop doing the things we're doing.
luke rudkowski
I think there's an argument to be made here that with the more government intervention there was, the more problems that came of it.
Whether it's lockdowns making billionaires richer than ever, making people poor, Whether it's the the lockdowns, the mandates, the implications, they have severe ramifications.
And I would say those were far off worse.
And I think there's arguments to be made here than the actual sickness itself.
And I think we still haven't quantified the data.
We still haven't found everything out.
But I think 10 years from now or 20 years from now, when we find out the truth of what's happening now, I think a lot of us are going to be shocked and disgusted.
tim pool
Maybe history is written by the victors, Luke.
luke rudkowski
It is.
But but I think mainstream media will write what they write.
The truth somehow still has a way of coming out, and even though it's suppressed a lot of the times, it still finds a way of seeping up somehow.
michael shellenberger
I've done Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, now I'm doing the Timcast.
It's funny because the response... So Joe Rogan has 11 million followers.
It's the biggest media presence I've had in eight years.
And eight years ago I did the Colbert Report.
And when I went on Colbert Report, I was like, how many people watch this?
And they were like a million, plus maybe another couple of million on YouTube
and streaming, 3 million viewers of that.
And that was huge.
Like that was the one, like my high school buddies were like,
hey man, you really made, you know, like that.
Whereas now it's Joe Rogan and he has a completely counter establishment view of COVID.
You know, he's pro UFOs.
He's pro psychedelics.
I mean, so in some ways you go, you guys are pretty darn mainstream for being supposedly marginal voices, right?
And the podcast as an author, I can tell you This is so much fun for me.
I mean, I get to go on podcasts and you can actually make a mistake and correct it.
There's nobody playing gotcha with you.
People are actually interested in what you have to say.
Two or three hours for authors.
If you spend a year or two slaving away on a book, And then you get to go on a podcast.
I mean, it's what we prefer.
And so I find myself watching, 80% of my time watching TV is watching YouTube and watching podcasts like this.
So I think you guys might be the victors that write the history.
Maybe it won't be somebody else.
tim pool
Have you guys heard about Aussie media?
lydia smith
Yeah, I've heard of it.
tim pool
No.
michael shellenberger
I've never heard of it.
tim pool
No?
lydia smith
OZY?
Yeah.
tim pool
I've heard of it.
But I mean like the breaking news.
unidentified
Don't tell me about it.
tim pool
No one has any ideas?
michael shellenberger
No.
tim pool
Yeah, well you see what's going on with New York.
These people are in a cult and they're egocentric and so I love, I follow a lot of these journalists and they're tweeting about the great scandal that is the vaporware of Aussie media and I'm just watching this like wow.
Talk about thinking people care about garbage that no one cares about.
This is what happens.
Someone in New York who works in media will write a story and they'll be like, guys, did you hear about this?
And they'll all get excited because they all play inside baseball.
And then regular viewers, like regular readers, are like on the New York Times like, the hell are they talking about?
The politics of a media company I know nothing about?
lydia smith
Who cares?
tim pool
Why is this news?
They do that all the time.
They don't... So I think my favorite example is Sanjay Gupta being like, I've never had a conversation more than three hours.
lydia smith
Amazing.
tim pool
These people don't talk.
They sit in rooms, they read books, and then they watch TV, and then they might say a few words in passing.
lydia smith
So weird.
michael shellenberger
I think you're really on to something.
First of all, I thought that the Joe Rogan confrontation of Sanjay Gupta was—you don't want to overstate it—it was a turning point for me.
It was a moment where clearly Rogan was right, and everybody was like, Rogan's right, and CNN's backpedaling.
But it felt like a moment for me where—because we have this question of who do you trust?
And I kind of go, I end up, I think a lot of us are like, we trust individuals now.
I trust, and on different things, like I trust Barry Weiss on cancel culture.
You know, I trust Abigail Schreier on trans kids, you know.
tim pool
I don't trust Barry Weiss on cancel culture.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, interesting.
tim pool
Because she called Tulsi Gabbard a toady for Assad and didn't know what she was talking about.
Now, with all due respect, I think Barry's cool and everything.
But, you know, it's like I mentioned with the New York phenomenon, where it's like they're still very insular and very much self-promoting.
And so even after Barry, you know, leaves the New York Times or whatever, CNN still has her on.
Brian Stelter had her on, and they had a good conversation.
There's a viral clip on it.
But Brian Stelter would never have any real opposition, a strong opponent to anything he's done who could call him out.
It's not going to happen.
luke rudkowski
That was a great clip that is going viral right now.
It's a fantastic clip.
And I think she surmised a lot of the crazy things in our society very well and very eloquently.
So, I mean, just to have that, my reaction to it, wait, wait, wait, I thought common sense was banned on mainstream media.
unidentified
Right.
luke rudkowski
Because the mainstream media has their doctrine, has their agenda, has their narrative.
They're in an extremely small echo chamber where they keep repeating the same insane claims.
Like for an example, Colin Powell passed away.
He was double vaxxed.
He died allegedly of COVID.
He was also very old.
He also, I believe, had cancer.
So again, you know, we don't know what happened.
I don't know.
I'm here to say I don't know if it was the vax.
I don't know if it was COVID.
I don't know if it was cancer.
I don't know if it was old age.
But the mainstream media, look at the narrative that they're running.
CNN had the former Surgeon General on that was saying it was the unvaxxed that definitely did it.
Jeff Tiedrich on Twitter said it's definitely the unvaxxed that did this.
The New York governor just came out with a statement saying that history can't be hijacked by the quote anti-vaxxers and it's definitely anti-vaxxers that got him sick.
How do they know?
Are they medical scientists?
Do they know the exact person that came into contact with them?
Do they have any evidence?
Do they have any proof?
Do they have any data?
No, they don't.
They're running with the same insane talking point that's regurgitated from one prominent establishment figure, from another tool, from another sellout, from another just basic human being that is given a script and regurgitating it back to you because they pay him a lot of money.
michael shellenberger
But doesn't the fact that Cena had Barry Weiss on show It looks to me like there's a full-blown backlash underway against cancel culture, and that's just beginning.
CNN having Barry Weiss on is a way of saying, hey, we know we took a hit over the Sanjay Gupta thing and the Ivermectin thing with Joe Rogan.
We're going to have Barry Weiss on.
I noticed the New York Times just recently gave a column to my friend John McWhorter You got your start in alternative journalism.
I mean, I was in the 90s.
woke politics, his new book is Woke Racism.
You know, I kind of look at that and I go, that's the establishment responding to this long form podcasting
alternative journalism.
I mean, you got your start in alternative journalism.
I mean, I was in the 90s.
Alternative journalism was hot, but it's almost like it's become where the intellectual center of American life is
now where you don't kind of go.
I wanted I watched a really thoughtful segment.
No one says I watched a really thoughtful segment on CNN.
They say I listened to a really thoughtful podcast with Tim Kast or Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan.
luke rudkowski
I disagree with you because after the Rogan-Sanjay Gupta thing, CNN doubled down and tripled down on those same exact defunct talking points.
tim pool
And Sanjay Gupta came on. Effectively rolled back what he had said on Rogan
when he was like they shouldn't have said that.
He went out with Don Lemon. Don Lemon said it is horse medicine. He goes, you're right. And he's like, you're
unidentified
right.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny because of course, though, then like then that's talked about. And so I don't, I don't
know that CNN doing that helped its own credibility any.
I think it probably undermined it. Do they have any credibility is the question.
luke rudkowski
And I think that Barry Weisting was a hiccup.
It was a glitch in the matrix and they're going to go back to their regularly scheduled programming, doubling down, tripling down on whatever the lie that they need to sell the American people on is.
michael shellenberger
I mean, you might be right.
I mean, we have this debate because we I would always have this debate with my colleagues over because, you know, we would point out, look, people are becoming more pro nuclear.
I'm a big advocate of nuclear power, including for climate change, but not just for climate change.
And I've been up against the vast majority of environmentalists and boomers on this issue.
And we have seen a huge change in attitudes on nuclear over the last five years, ten years.
That's why I went on Colbert for eight years ago.
I've seen just a massive change.
And at the same time, people will respond to me and they'll go, well, but the Sierra Club is still anti-nuclear.
And it's like, well, yeah, but those are like the last guys that are going to change their mind.
tim pool
Greenpeace will never change their mind.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, Greenpeace is not going to change their mind, but you wouldn't measure our success by being like, you wouldn't be like, Well, there's still a Pope, even while acknowledging that Catholicism has significantly declined as a religion in the Western world over the last 500 years.
tim pool
But there is the issue that CNN could say something and then YouTube will panic and then implement policy based on CNN's lies.
michael shellenberger
That's very scary.
I don't know if you guys have a view of it.
I was censored by Facebook.
Last year, and it was very upsetting.
It wasn't that, because when you read about censorship in the past, and also some of my favorite Brazilian musicians were censored, you'd always be like, that's so, those guys were badass.
Can I say that?
Those guys were real heroes, but when you're censored, it just feels terrible.
Like you're just angry and upset.
My friend John Stossel just sued Facebook over this, and you just feel angry and like, you know.
tim pool
Well that was defamation though.
michael shellenberger
Yes.
tim pool
He's suing over defamation because they accuse him of being fake news.
michael shellenberger
And it's an interesting thing, though, because when they say they censored me and when they censored me and they say Michael Schellenberger said false things, it did feel defamatory to me.
I was like, I said true things and now you're saying I'm saying false things.
tim pool
You gotta sue him.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, what's disappointing is that I knew people at Facebook, and of course they were just of zero help whatsoever.
So you just feel really alone, and of course you're sort of ostracized.
luke rudkowski
And there's no recourse.
There's no way to even apologize.
There's no way to even have retribution in any way, shape, or form, or even forgiveness.
michael shellenberger
You can appeal to the same judge that sentenced you.
Then that's not an appeals process.
luke rudkowski
Exactly.
So this is another layer to it that's cruel and evil in so many ways because the rules are very kind of generic.
They implement them on some people and not on others.
And then when they do hit you, they destroy your livelihood.
They destroy your reputation.
They create consequences that could have almost everything taken away from you, not just your Twitter page or TikTok
page.
I mean, there are some people that can't have an Uber, can't have an Airbnb, can't have a bank account because of their
political ideas in this country.
michael shellenberger
And so what do you do about that?
ian crossland
You build decentralized internet technology where you can also appeal to a jury like the Mines system if you go for
it.
luke rudkowski
Bitcoin is an answer to the financial situation.
michael shellenberger
What about social media?
luke rudkowski
There's alternatives to social media, but again, the big tech monopolies, with the help of government, control the major highways.
They were able to build their infrastructure with tax dollars.
These are not private entities.
They have connections to intelligence agencies.
They have connections to governments.
They work hand-in-hand.
They worked in tandem.
And there's an argument of direct government intervention, but I don't believe that the same government that created this problem will be solving it anytime soon.
tim pool
I think it was what the Democrats in California were sending names to Twitter to ban.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
michael shellenberger
Oh, sure.
I mean, so I'm interested in Glenn Greenwald.
A lot of people are interested in Glenn Greenwald.
It became more interesting to me in recent years.
He's signed up for this new platform, Rumble.
tim pool
Rumble.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
michael shellenberger
I have.
I watch YouTube.
I'm 50, so I'm a lot older than you guys, and maybe I'm just too square, but like, I sit down and watch YouTube, and I see you, and I see Jordan Peterson, and I see Joe Rogan.
I don't see Glenn Greenwald, and so what do I gotta do?
I gotta go into my smart TV, and what, reprogram it to get Rumble?
I mean, it was a little bit like, what was the alternative to Twitter that was there for like five minutes?
tim pool
Parlor.
michael shellenberger
Last year, Parlor.
tim pool
And then they colluded to destroy it.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, so you kind of go, there's a problem because, you know, we were all sold on these platforms for their ease of use.
And the idea that you would get to see, I mean, that's what's so exciting about Twitter still, is you still get to argue with liberals and conservatives.
So now what are we going to do?
We're going to have a platform for liberals and a platform for conservatives.
It's already what it is.
tim pool
It's already what it is.
Twitter is, the people on Twitter who are prominent are like center-right.
People who are, like, staunch conservative have been purged or banned.
People who are, like, the far right was nuked a long time ago, except for, like, some specific individuals.
The far left, however, can call for violence, no problem.
Then you have the mainstream establishment left, can literally advocate for violence, tell people to be violent, advocate for people being thrown into woodchippers like the Covington kids, no problem.
And then you could tweet as a joke, learn to code, and get banned.
So we see, it's basically Twitter is center right to far left.
And what that does is it shapes the view of these journalists who think they're centrists because they're in the middle of that.
When in reality, they're leftists.
michael shellenberger
So what do you do about that?
ian crossland
We're building up the Fediverse right now.
Are you familiar with it?
michael shellenberger
No.
ian crossland
It's a federated network of networks, basically.
tim pool
So like things like Mastodon, but basically it's a, you, it, the way we're doing it is Yeah, it's a social media protocol, so you can create your own social media platform where your content exists.
I'll use Gab as an example.
You know Gab?
michael shellenberger
Heard of it.
tim pool
Gab is like one of the first alternatives to Twitter because of the censorship.
They exist on the Fediverse in that you can use any Fediverse app and follow Luke on Gab.
So Luke's username might be like lukeatgab.com.
I don't know if Luke is on Gab or whatever.
But then I could go on, you know, Super Web and then say I'm going to follow Luke at Gab.com and see his posts from a different website appearing on my feed on this website.
So what happens is there's no central authority to ban Luke.
michael shellenberger
OK, but you have so you have like almost a million Twitter followers.
You do.
I have one-tenth of yours.
And so why would you want to go to a platform where you and I would have the same number of Twitter followers?
Or the same number of followers.
Wouldn't you want to maintain your status superiority on a new platform?
tim pool
I don't care about the followers.
michael shellenberger
I think a lot of people do.
In terms of the social credit system, it already exists.
It's the number of followers you have on Twitter.
luke rudkowski
Well, no, no, no.
It doesn't depend because the algorithm decides who sees what now.
tim pool
I tweeted a picture of a hairless rabbit once.
You did, it was weird.
You know, I'll put it this way.
There's two different kinds of people who become prominent.
I was talking to a friend who does day trading stuff, and I'm like, there are people who just want to be rich, who will eventually become rich because they want to be rich.
But I think most people who become rich do it because there's something they're passionate about that they pursue, which leads them to being well-off.
michael shellenberger
I agree.
tim pool
There are people who have Twitter followers because they're genuinely interesting, smart people, or they're, you know, uh, observant, so they can see things for other people, and they're good followers for that reason.
And then there are people who try to manipulate and game the system to try and gain followers and are worried, is my tweet getting enough retweets or whatever?
I don't care about any of that.
I don't- I tweet random jokes, nonsense, garbled whatever, cause Twitter is just hilarious, and so, uh...
michael shellenberger
But for a lot of people, their Twitter followers is really important social capital for their work.
tim pool
I feel sorry for those people.
luke rudkowski
It's their identity for many of them.
michael shellenberger
So setting aside your views of those people, that's a material reality in the sense that it's an economic reality for people.
So I guess I'm raising a nut to sort of say, is that good or bad?
But just to say, I think that's an obstacle to wanting to migrate, you know, over to a different social platform.
tim pool
So we're on, these videos are on Odyssey, they're on Rumble, they're on...
Yeah, BitChute.
ian crossland
And the thing about Fediverse, once you start building it out, you blast out one post to the Fediverse, and it goes to your Minds account, and your library account, and anybody else that wants to federate.
So it could blast out to your Twitter, and you could kind of centralize your own funnel.
tim pool
Self-centralizing.
As this project expands, you'll have more access to bigger networks, because you'll be hitting 50 instead of 1.
So we use YouTube, but I cut down the amount of content I was producing on YouTube substantially to try and focus on building our own website so that we could have a user base there.
When we started doing the show, we were getting like 1,000 viewers or 2,000 viewers.
And if I was the kind of person who was like, we're not getting enough clicks, then we probably wouldn't be where we are.
I wanted to do the show because I had fun doing the show.
I wanted to do it.
I make YouTube videos because I have fun making videos.
I make podcasts because I have fun doing it.
If I wanted to make money, there's a bunch of other stuff I could have done.
I have friends who work for political campaigns.
I'd make way more money.
You know, I used to work in non-profit fundraising, and all of a sudden I had these people wanting to consult because I was making so much money for a lot of these companies, and I hated doing it.
It was awful.
Just selling stuff and tricking them.
And so I just stopped doing it, and then a period of things happened, Occupy happens, I start working in this, and I enjoy doing it, so I keep doing it.
When I was traveling around filming breaking news events, I don't know, sometimes you wouldn't get many views or make much money, but it was like I wanted to be there doing something.
So it's true, there are a lot of people who are driven by a desire for ego, and that's why you get the New York City establishment media, because these are people who are like, I'm a worthless human being, but if I get hired by the New York Times, then people will think I'm cool.
There you go.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, I just I think there's that.
But there's just also a lot of people like, you know, for like, a lot of people like Twitter is too complex.
And Facebook is like, about where a lot I mean, it's the Facebook is where a lot of people have arrived.
And it's hard to see them.
It's older adding apps using apps.
It's true.
tim pool
Although, yeah, the young people are on TikTok.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, although I even see young people just reducing their social media platforms to Instagram.
You know, and so the idea that we're going to go and make that work more complex for people and that we're going to get mass uptake of it, I'm skeptical of.
ian crossland
You need to simplify it.
It needs to be as easy to use or easier than whatever's out there right now.
tim pool
No, I disagree.
So we're not making modular without without calling out any individual
company.
I can just tell you the strategy used by social media companies to become big is
so obvious and ridiculously easy.
It's simple what they've done again, not naming any individual company, but more
than one is they'll create an app.
They'll advertise it to high school kids.
They will then give those high school kids fake followers quickly.
And they will give them fake likes, and they will give them fake comments.
And then all of a sudden, you have a new app called SuperWeb.
And some kid shows up to his school, and they're like, where do I follow you?
Oh, dude, I'm on SuperWeb.
And they're like, what's that?
You're not on SuperWeb?
I already got 10,000 followers.
And they go, Dude, Jon's got 10,000 followers and they all want to download it because they all want followers too.
A bunch of companies have done this.
Some people have admitted to doing things like this.
I think it was Alexis Ohanian who said that in the early days of Reddit, it was him and Steve Huffman pretending to be different people to make it seem like the site had users.
Otherwise, no one would want to be there.
Bigger companies discovered this and started convincing young people they had followers.
And then all of a sudden, what happens?
Like you mentioned, having that follower count matters to people.
So if someone's on Twitter with 3,000 followers, and then they download this new SuperWeb app, and within two weeks they have 10,000, they abandon Twitter, switch to SuperWeb because that's where their core audience is, so they think.
All of a sudden now, they're not producing content on other platforms.
They talk to people, where can I find you?
Oh, I'm on SuperWeb, I'm getting way more views, way more traffic.
That then drives a mass exodus because people think, you know, FOMO.
I'm gonna go to the other platform, A couple new apps have used this strategy very, very effectively.
And I actually had this conversation with some political groups about wanting to do an app like this.
This is like seven years ago.
And it's painfully obvious how it works.
So if you really want to play those games and do that, cheaters win.
michael shellenberger
But it seems like it's not.
I mean, if there's a bunch of new challengers, they haven't really risen to the level of an Instagram or a Twitter or Facebook.
tim pool
TikTok has.
TikTok took over.
michael shellenberger
TikTok did.
You're right.
I mean, I even find myself just being like, I should post that in LinkedIn, but it's like, why bother?
You know what I mean?
You get some more views, but who cares?
There's diminishing returns so often on these platforms.
tim pool
It's one of the reasons why we thought we need to build our own website up.
We can't just keep being a background actor for someone else's website.
We need our own platform.
ian crossland
It's an indication that there's a monopoly.
And that's a big problem.
We've been tossing around ways to break it up.
tim pool
It's an oligopoly.
ian crossland
It sure is.
tim pool
It's not just one company.
It's a cabal.
ian crossland
I don't think that splitting Facebook into five different companies at this point, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Prime, Facebook Messenger, and whatever else they got.
I don't think that that's going to work because Zuck's still going to have all the code and he's still going to control it all.
But I've tossed around the idea of freeing software code for any social media network that gets over like a billion users a day or a hundred million users a day or something.
I treat it as part of the commons.
luke rudkowski
I disagree with you, Ian, because we had MySpace.
It came and went all because people said I had enough of this crap.
ian crossland
MySpace actually in 2007, I think I was using it heavily with YouTube and blogging, but then their site started to grind to a halt for like 30 days.
You couldn't use the site either because mismanagement on their end.
It was before AWS, before you could like had elastic server space.
So I think they just couldn't handle the load.
And then Facebook was there.
Everyone went to Facebook.
tim pool
Look at Parler.
Parler started taking off and then the cabal came and shot him down.
ian crossland
The government shot him down.
tim pool
Alex Jones was wildly popular and the cabal came and went after him and nuked him.
As a cascade, they all banned him around the same exact time.
michael shellenberger
So what's the solution to that?
tim pool
Oh, man.
Potential regulation.
luke rudkowski
Look at Alex Jones.
Some people love him.
Some people hate him.
But if you look at the amount of views he has, he built his own platform.
He's doing pretty well.
Oh, yeah.
tim pool
And the dude's still great on the radio.
luke rudkowski
He's still kicking butt.
So there's a lot of different alternatives.
And we have to remember that these social media platforms are only as popular as we make them.
So, they're only prominent if we make them prominent.
And at the end of the day, we have to understand that they're fake.
They're creating a perception of reality that's not true.
It's a bunch of people controlling people's minds by curating the algorithm, curating the timeline, curating what they see, and manipulating them for their own personal benefit.
As soon as people snap out of this psychosis, they'll understand that, wow, there's other alternatives out there.
The internet was once great, and free, and amazing, and incredible, and you could find exactly what you subscribe to.
You can't do that anymore.
Building up your own website, what Tim did with Timcast, I got my own website with Luke Uncensored, is essentially really incredibly important.
Alex Jones has, I think, Band.Video, and there's other people who are Deplatform that have their own platforms, their own website, their own video services, and they're kicking butt.
And they have something that social media doesn't have and that's authenticity and people who actually do want to listen to it.
tim pool
So one of the issues, you know, that started this conversation was that CNN might not be as prominent anymore.
YouTube still puts them on the front page.
If you open a brand new computer, pull up YouTube, you'll be like, what reality is this?
Because it's crazy.
But CNN, CBS, ABC, all of these establishment media organizations that are wrong a substantial amount of time are given preferential access and they're all thumbs down.
People despise this content, but it's there in front of your face.
So it's quite amazing when you have on top of that, you also have a lot of progressive YouTubers who also get things Very, very wrong on basic facts for tribal partisan reasons.
I don't got a problem if your opinion is Trump sucks.
I got a problem if you're like, Donald Trump did X and he didn't.
Or, you know, for example, David Pakman, shout out, he said Donald Trump encouraged his Republicans not to vote, which is just flat out not true.
So, but I get it.
Look, we probably make mistakes as well.
I can't blame him for, you know, having an error.
But he doesn't, he's, there's a lot of people that just recite what they see on mainstream media.
Hey, I got another shout-out for David Pakman.
When, I think it was, who was it?
Chuck Todd, maybe?
Meet the Press?
Ask Ted Cruz if he thought Ukraine meddled in the election in 2016.
And Ted Cruz was like, Politico reported it and so did the New York Times.
And then they start laughing on MSNBC, just laughing.
And then David Pakman runs that clip and just agrees that without any level of fact-checking at all.
For us, I actually think we have like eight or nine reporters who do the actual legwork and make the phone calls.
I make phone calls all the time to try and fact check things.
One of the best stories I think was Mayo Gate, where Democrats ran a story claiming that mayonnaise, that a restaurant was lying about the cost of mayonnaise to make Biden look bad, when in reality they were telling the truth.
Mayonnaise was up like hundreds of dollars per week for this restaurant.
So, when you have a mainstream media that doesn't fact-check in lies, then you have a progressive and establishment YouTube presence from independent alternative creators who also just regurgitate those lies, it's a very serious uphill battle.
And then, taking into consideration that YouTube will prop up, The Young Turks, for instance, are on YouTube TV, and one of my favorite segments they've done was when we had a conversation on this show about Republicans being more attractive than Democrats.
And it was, or I should say liberals versus conservatives.
There were like five studies we went over that said, why are conservatives typically considered more attractive than liberals are?
And I said, because of attractive privilege.
People who grow up, who are beautiful, are treated better and then say to themselves, if I could do it, why can't you?
Well, you were treated better.
You had an easier life.
The Young Turks ran a segment saying that I was wrong, I was ugly, posting pictures of me and insulting my appearance, and then ultimately conceded, well, actually, I was right and the studies are true.
That goes up on YouTube TV.
That's what's propped up.
So we may have a big show.
Joe may have a big show.
It's still every day struggling against hundreds of millions of views that CNN has given, just given.
So, if you go to, like, CNN's YouTube analytics, you can see they get 100 to 200 million views per month.
michael shellenberger
Oh, I totally agree.
tim pool
50?
michael shellenberger
I mean, my whole book, Apocalypse Never, and also San Francisco, are basically debunkings of what's been in the New York Times and on CNN around climate change, plastic waste, extinctions, drug addiction, homelessness, housing, the whole thing.
The question is, what do you do about it?
You know, I mean, I thought it was, I mean, I was very disturbed that Twitter can remove a sitting president of the United States from its platform.
tim pool
And ban a breaking news story about Hunter Biden.
And then you get Andy Stone from Facebook coming out and saying, we have deranked this story so it's harder to share.
Right.
It was all true.
michael shellenberger
Right.
So what do you do about that?
I mean, I come out of the energy, I have a lot of background in energy.
We had a regulated utility model in the electricity sector that we then experimented with not doing, starting in the early 2000s.
And when you look at the performance of a regulated utility model, monopoly utility, versus the unregulated model, most of us in the space go, the regulated monopoly utility model worked better.
This is totally different, obviously.
This is not utilities or trains or electric utilities.
This is information.
ian crossland
Yeah.
You need to free the software code.
I don't know if need is the right word, but if you could force federate these companies so that you could interoperate with them.
tim pool
Force federate is a good idea.
michael shellenberger
And then you would destroy their share value.
ian crossland
Not really, because they make ad revenue.
No, their money is off of ads, which they'll still make.
michael shellenberger
I mean, Facebook killed—under Obama, they killed this very modest legislation to regulate content, to have some government oversight of content aimed at kids, and Facebook quashed it.
They have lobbyists for each party and each branch of government.
They squash that. Those guys are just keeping a lid on anything. I don't know what the solution is,
but I thought it was interesting after Trump was taken off of Twitter, after Twitter took
him off Trump, took Trump off, that there were a number of world leaders that were like,
like, what's the deal? And I don't like if you're running for political office,
and you don't have a lot of money, and you want to be able to be able to have a voice in there,
I don't think it's I don't think it's good enough to be like, hey, I'm not on Facebook,
but go to johnsmith.com and check out my platform. That's just not going to cut it
tim pool
in today's environment. Actually, I think Ian may have just solved everything. Forced federation.
So what does that mean?
It means that you can make your own server, your own website, and then someone on Facebook can follow you on your site.
Now Facebook can still ban you from their platform, but your platform never gets shut down.
So you may lose access to Facebook's user base, but you will keep your platform and your followers can still choose to follow you because it's your website.
ian crossland
What concerns me is if the banks start to, like the Swift payment system wants to cancel you, that's very concerning.
We still have crypto, but it's not quite implemented yet.
And if the ISP wants to cut off your access to the internet, that's really concerning to me too.
I know we have like Starlink coming out, Elon's thing, but that's, Elon owns that as far as I know.
So we maybe utilitize that as well.
tim pool
Imagine if Twitter was, by regulation, these companies were opened up to the federated network.
Is that like, would that be like net neutrality?
know, or Tim at Twitter dot com, TimCast at Twitter dot com and then get my feed on that
website and I could be like, well, I still have the bulk of my followers on Twitter,
so I'll post here.
But now anyone from any other site can choose to just see my tweets.
michael shellenberger
Is that like net, would that be like net neutrality?
Is that the same thing as platform neutrality?
tim pool
No, net neutrality is about restricting access based on how much you pay, essentially.
The idea behind net neutrality was that you can't pay for faster access to certain websites.
So that whole thing was one of the most ridiculous political battles that made no sense, and I'm pretty sure you ask most people, they're not going to be able to tell you what it means, or what side won with what.
michael shellenberger
But under that model, let's say I wanted to follow a John Smith candidate for mayor of my hometown.
You could follow him, you're saying, through Twitter, but you couldn't see him have an argument with other candidates on Twitter.
Well, you'd have to mandate it then.
I mean, the government would have to require that.
tim pool
No, no, what do you mean?
michael shellenberger
Well, in other words, if Twitter wants to say John Smith can't be on Twitter, even though he's a candidate for mayor of Denver, because we don't like what he said, John Smith has no recourse right now.
tim pool
The problem is that Twitter dominates the political space, the political conversation, and Facebook and YouTube very much this cabal in Silicon Valley does.
And so they can pick winners and losers.
Facebook actually did experiments on people where they showed them certain content to see if they would be happy or sad.
Sure enough, showing sad content made people sad.
Well, I think it was Steve Huffman of Reddit who said, we could swing an election if we really wanted to.
michael shellenberger
Oh, sure.
tim pool
They know they can, and they probably do.
michael shellenberger
But what if you just kept the candidate off of all the platforms?
As far as I can tell, that's not violating any laws.
Like Twitter, Google, Facebook can keep John Smith, mayoral candidate of Denver, off of all their platforms.
tim pool
This is the funny thing.
michael shellenberger
I mean, that's like, that's terrifying.
tim pool
The funny thing, the right is just so bad at this.
It's amazing.
Like, when there are some individuals running for office, but they're banned from Twitter, and so then Twitter says, like, you're not allowed to have a presence, it's like, create a super PAC.
Or, you know, not even a super PAC, create a PAC, a political action committee, and you'll call it, like, you know, John Smith for Congress PAC.
and it's not run by the candidate, and then you can absolutely advocate for him.
If we were to say the candidate can't be on the platform, all that would happen is
Democratic groups would set up PACs and they would still get favorable treatment.
So Twitter would be like, we're not going to ban the PAC for, you know, Joe Biden,
but that Donald Trump one, that's offensive. So you're gone.
There's no real way to ban politics.
michael shellenberger
What if John Smith is running for president on a platform to regulate the internet companies?
tim pool
They'll destroy him.
michael shellenberger
And then they were just like, they were like, well, he's not gonna be on the platform.
I mean, what does that do to American democracy?
tim pool
Oh, that's exactly where we are right now.
ian crossland
It's definitely not democratic.
They're corporate fascists.
Right now I struggle with this.
Every, all these websites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have like a clause in their terms to say we can ban anyone at any time for no reason.
michael shellenberger
Right.
ian crossland
So I don't want to legislate their terms of service.
I find that fascist.
If we use the government to decide what their terms, that's why I think we need the software code freed so that other people could spin up an identical copy of Twitter with access to all the Twitter info on their version of it.
And then they could make their own terms of service.
And then you'd start to have a market of terms as opposed to a market of who has the best code.
tim pool
That's just too communist for me though.
Seizing the work and the intellectual property of a company.
ian crossland
Antitrust is kinda communist.
tim pool
Well, regulation isn't communism, right?
Not everything is communism.
Seizing the means of production from a company to distribute among the masses is pretty communist.
ian crossland
I'm not going to take their servers, but the code isn't really the means of production.
michael shellenberger
I mean, the electric utility model is that electric utilities were allowed to make a certain amount of profits a year, and that was it.
And they had to get permission to raise electrical rates.
The dynamic that was created is that the electric utilities would constantly try to justify expensive activities.
so they could make more money for themselves. But they're called natural monopolies,
railroads, electrical utilities, the power grid. There are some things where you kind of go,
we can't figure out how breaking that up is in anybody's interest. And so we're going to keep
it together, but regulate it. Now, I'm not sure what that looks like on the internet.
tim pool
Force federation.
ian crossland
The code is the means of production, but I don't want to steal it.
I want to copy the production.
No, it's very different.
I think very different.
I don't want to take it away from them.
I want to copy it.
tim pool
If you were on Twitter, and someone on Gab could follow your Twitter account, and you could follow them on Gab, and then Twitter decides to ban you, well, you chose to be on Twitter.
But these other platforms still exist.
Ultimately, the idea I see for how we solve this is, with what we're building with the Fediverse project, you can set up your own website, have your own social media feed and subscription service, and people can follow you through any Fediverse network that supports it.
No one can ban you because it's your website.
So then your followers will just be following you.
I mean, if you look at how email works, like newsletters, I have a huge list of email accounts, and then I can email them, no one can ban you from that, ever.
Because if they delete your email account, you can make a new email account and be like, hey guys, here's another email.
I created a new account.
ian crossland
So no matter what network I'm on, I can subscribe to Tim at Timcast, from my Twitter, from my YouTube, from Facebook, from Mindsgap, and then if Twitter wants to ban Timcast, then I can still, you still have all your stuff.
That's excellent.
tim pool
And you can go on any other platform and see it, or go right to my website to see it.
No one will be able to ban you.
ian crossland
Except that the ISPs can blockade your website.
That's weird.
tim pool
Yep, yep, yep.
It's not perfect.
There's many links in that chain that can be broken.
Well, there you go.
michael shellenberger
Under-theorized is my view.
I think you're right when you said that conservatives haven't done a very good job thinking about it.
I interviewed one guy who did a piece for Harvard Business Review on this, proposing a sort of regulated utility model, but it's complicated.
It's much more simple to do this with an electric utility or railroad than it is with information.
luke rudkowski
Well, also the lobbies that they have are also very big, very powerful.
They have a lot of influence.
They buy it.
They work hand-in-hand.
I think the government created this problem.
And I think the problems that are created by big tech social media directly help the government in many different ways.
michael shellenberger
Well, think about it.
Like, the funny thing is when they were seeking to regulate the, like, you know, when they were, like, regulating the railroad industry or the electric utility industry, the railroad and electric utility industry didn't also control the newspapers.
luke rudkowski
Exactly.
michael shellenberger
That's what we're talking about here.
And so how do you even have a debate about this?
tim pool
Zuckerberg's the real president.
ian crossland
Maybe you could mesh network all the server space so like everyone would have a server in their house and so all my website would be on my server and on your server and on your server.
So if one of us goes down because Verizon wants to cut us off or so there's no real web host or either because the web host can knock your website off.
luke rudkowski
This is like Revenge of the Nerds meets 1984 come together.
And this is the reality that we're living in, where unelected, shadowy, secretive nerds are literally calling the shots, creating culture, dominating and controlling people's minds in so many different ways, in so many different aspects, and there's no way to even have any accountability here.
tim pool
Here's a story that I love, and maybe you guys heard me talk about it before.
Michael, did you know that... Let me ask you a question.
Do you have a Facebook profile?
michael shellenberger
I do.
tim pool
Do you know... Is someone in your family... Have they not signed up for Facebook?
michael shellenberger
Not a single one.
Everybody has Facebook.
tim pool
They all have a Facebook.
Do you know anyone who hasn't signed up for Facebook?
michael shellenberger
I do not.
tim pool
Really?
Everyone you know?
michael shellenberger
Well, I mean, I haven't asked them all.
tim pool
What if I told you that regardless of whether or not you sign up, you do have a Facebook profile?
michael shellenberger
That would both blow my mind and not be surprising at the same time.
tim pool
Here's how it works.
So you have Facebook Messenger?
Yes.
And when you sign in it says sync your contacts with your phone?
michael shellenberger
Uh huh.
There you go.
tim pool
Did you do that?
michael shellenberger
Yeah.
tim pool
So here's what happens.
They're called shadow profiles.
So you have stored in your phone a number that probably says mom.
I don't know.
Maybe the kind of guy who calls her mother.
I don't know.
I actually do that.
that word and the phone number because I don't think you're going to put your mom as like
Janet.
michael shellenberger
I don't know your mom's name.
tim pool
I actually do that.
Oh, you do.
michael shellenberger
You put your mom's full name in.
tim pool
I put my mom's actual name.
Yeah.
So either way, it still works.
But here's what happens.
You'll sync your account, your contacts.
Let's say your mom never signed up.
They now see Facebook sees a list of phone numbers and they see, you know, 555-1234 and
Janice.
They then see, you have any siblings?
ian crossland
Yes.
tim pool
Alright, so sibling A signs up, but they do say mom.
Now they know Janice is actually the mother of John.
michael shellenberger
Right.
tim pool
John is the brother of Michael.
Now your mom has a profile that lists your kids.
Lists her phone number.
They can collect little bits of information from every Facebook profile to build what's called a shadow profile.
Now they know who your mom is, where she lives, how old she is.
They know what she's talking about.
And yes, the best part is they know when you poop.
Facebook's system has so much information on you, they can actually predict when you will go to the bathroom.
They can actually, I don't know if you've ever seen the ads, but I remember I was on Messenger and an ad popped up in Messenger about like food network or something.
As I was talking to somebody about something, like about to, like I didn't actually say anything and we were talking about it.
People have all these stories all day and night where it's like, I remember I went to Walmart and they had a big thing of TVs in the middle of the aisle.
They were on sale.
When I got home and went to my computer, there was an ad for the exact photo of the stack of TVs at the Walmart and I went, What the?
Like, are they spying on me?
Are they listening?
Everybody thinks they're listening.
That's not it.
They have all of these data points, which allow them to predict your behaviors.
They knew where I lived.
They knew the stuff I'd been talking about.
They easily said, this guy needs a TV.
Or, this is the kind of guy, like, we didn't actually buy, actually, no, we did buy a TV.
That's, yeah.
And so, they advertised this stack of TVs from the exact Walmart to us.
michael shellenberger
And yet they still won't tell me when my favorite bands are coming to town.
I mean, after like a decade of that, we still don't know when my favorite bands are coming to town.
tim pool
Well, is the band paying them money?
michael shellenberger
Probably not.
Exactly.
tim pool
So they will tell you, you know, they'll give you recommended restaurants.
So it's really amazing when they have location data and map data, and they can see where you work, the proximity to what restaurants that exist.
They can tell if you're fit.
They can tell how many steps you take.
And then they say, this is a guy who likes to walk.
The computer just calculates it.
So he's gonna, he could choose any one of these restaurants.
Now let's say you are sedentary, lazy, never move.
They would probably just be like, we predict he's gonna go next door for a burger.
And because it's the easiest path.
There's a million and one different reasons.
You know, they know everything about you.
luke rudkowski
They know your address.
They know your location.
They know where the closest murder burger is right next to you.
They know what you buy.
I mean, everything is interconnected and they sell your data like entrepreneurial drug dealers.
And they sell it to the creepiest, sleaziest, nastiest, disgusting entities out there that are willing to do anything for a buck.
And they do.
tim pool
Here's the best part.
I don't know which company it was, but the companies that take your DNA and then they'll send it back like a medical report or history.
And then they were like, we'll never sell your data.
But then the company got bought.
michael shellenberger
Right.
ian crossland
People should get paid for their data, perhaps.
Something that a good, really smart friend of mine from Naval Intelligence keeps telling me is that we should at least get a large percentage of our data when Facebook sells it.
They're making a lot of money off that stuff.
tim pool
Let's at least get one conversation going about what's going on in San Francisco, because we have this story from SFGate.
Car break-ins in San Francisco are rampant.
Will a $100,000 reward help?
You know what I love about this?
Let me read.
They say, on Tuesday morning, Mayor London Breed announced a new privately funded reward of up to $100,000 leading to the arrest and conviction of individuals involved in organized crime rings, which the mayor's office says fuels automobile burglaries.
The reward is funded by private donors in the hospitality and tourism industry.
luke rudkowski
Wow!
tim pool
Per a press release.
The mayor's office did not immediately return a request for more information about these private donors.
So, San Francisco has become this nightmare dystopia of failed policy, oligarchs funding bounties.
I have to imagine the $100,000 could just go to like, I don't know, hiring police?
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, this is this is a disturbing trend.
It's also rise of private security in San Francisco has been very prominent.
We're in a huge crisis of morale with the police that's been there ever since last summer.
And it's resulting in greater homicides and greater crime overall.
And, you know, one of the interesting questions I had when I was working on San Francisco was because so much of what is justified in San Francisco in terms of open air drug use, public defecation, public camping, These things are defended as ways of not blaming the victim, helping the victim.
So one question is why would then do progressive support policies that end up creating so many more victims?
And the answer, it turns out, is that progressives are really focused on saving the victims of the system.
They're not.
So this is why, you know, 30 times more African-Americans are killed by civilians than by police officers.
So why the disproportionate attention on police killings?
Because those are killings by people that are perceived as the system.
So progressive, you know, the word progressive really was a way to both change, move away from the word liberal, which was demonized in the late 1980s.
It was also, though, a way to kind of unite both the radical left and more moderate liberals.
But one of the things that it inherited is this idea that the system itself is evil and corrupt, and that we should only care and make a big deal out of the victims of that system.
And so you just see all these efforts to basically do anything other than do what needs to be done, which is restore confidence in the institutions of civilization, in the institutions of the so-called system.
tim pool
You, I guess, I don't know if... Well, I'll just ask.
You used to be, I guess, a lefty, leftist, or liberal.
How would you describe yourself?
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I would have described myself as radical left, certainly in the 90s.
I worked on... And now you're far right, of course.
I'm here, aren't I?
Yeah, I worked on environmental causes, climate change.
I worked on criminal justice issues in the 1990s.
luke rudkowski
There's some people in the comment section saying that you are connected to Soros, George Soros.
michael shellenberger
Is that true?
Yeah, I worked for George Soros' funded organizations, but also his foundation itself, the Open Society Institute.
luke rudkowski
How was that?
Was it impactful for your political ideology?
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Because I'm getting a lot of comments about that in the comment section.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, so we have to remember in the late 80s and 1990s we're coming out of a big war on drugs and a widely held view that we had overreacted to things like crack and that what we should have been doing is drug treatment, is mandating rehab rather than sending guys off to the prisons for decades.
And that's still mostly a view I hold.
There was also other things going on.
There was liberalization of opioid pharmaceuticals because it was viewed as we were under treating pain.
And then we were also promoting the decriminalization of marijuana, which we viewed as a relatively benign drug, particularly in comparison to alcohol and cigarettes.
And then also we were advocating for providing clean needles to addicts because it would way to stop HIV AIDS transmissions.
When I got out of that work around the year 2000, my understanding was that we were seeking to make drug rehabilitation, including work, including taking your psychiatric meds, doing what you need to do to live a healthy life.
My understanding was that we were going to continue to mandate those things as an alternative to prison.
What ended up happening, not in a single law, but in a set of laws and ballot initiatives, is that we basically just said, no, we've decriminalized stealing $950 worth of items from Walgreens.
We've decriminalized 3 grams of hard drugs.
That was in the same ballot initiative I voted for.
62% of Californians voted for Prop 47 in the year 2014.
But you put those two things together, decriminalizing three grams of fentanyl and meth, and stealing $950 worth of items, and you get, yes, organized crime, but crimes that are being committed to feed people's addictions.
tim pool
I hear it all the time from the progressives, there are more empty houses than homeless people.
Having actually worked with homeless shelters, more than one, you learn a lot about why people are homeless, and it's not this fantasy idea of people being like, pardon me, sir, I'm desperate for a place to live.
It's actually people who are like, get away from me, I want to be homeless, and they're drinking.
And you try and be nice, respectful, you try to help people, but a lot of them, you know, outside of mental illness, there are people who are literally like, don't come near me or else.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, you got it.
I mean, basically what happens is in the 1980s, you see multiple things going on, but basically you have a crack epidemic, which is really crack and alcohol.
Those are the two drugs that would get paired a lot.
Resulting in homelessness, meaning that people would be – they would quit their jobs and dedicate their day hours to their addictions.
They would then disaffiliate.
This is the academic word, disaffiliation.
They would basically become alienated from friends and family who they had stolen from or borrowed money from and finally friends and family are like, you got to leave.
They're kicking you out.
So you basically – that is how people became homeless.
There was also then deinstitutionalization of our psychiatric hospitals.
A lot of those folks were dumped on the streets.
So that was what was going on in the 80s.
The radical left, really working with liberals, basically said the problem with these folks is that they don't have housing.
And there was always a move for socialized housing and basically free public housing.
So they literally invented this propaganda word.
There's no other way to say it.
Homelessness itself is a propaganda word designed to trick your brain into putting people with totally different problems in the same category, including people with schizophrenia, people with a heroin problem, and the proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband.
The mother escaping the abusive husband who doesn't have a drug or alcohol problem and is not mentally ill, we do a great job of helping that woman.
That's not a problem.
Okay.
The person with schizophrenia and the person with an addiction, those folks on the street, that's a huge problem.
Both for them, it's immoral the way we treat them, but also it degrades the fabric of a city.
luke rudkowski
Do you think living in San Francisco led to kind of a political transition for you?
And are there any kind of policies you advocated for under the kind of Soros influence that you kind of regret now?
michael shellenberger
Great question.
I have become more conservative around drugs and alcohol.
I still support the decriminalization of marijuana, but I would like to see it more heavily regulated.
I still support alcohol being legal, but I actually come to see things like not being able to buy it at the grocery store, not being able to buy it on Sunday.
Things that restrict consumption I think is good.
Psychedelics, I worry that we're just diving headlong into basically decriminalizing psychedelics without any thought about what the implications of that are.
You know, when in the 90s, I still remember very vividly being in progressive non-profits.
It was Global Exchange in San Francisco, Brain Force Action Network.
We all hung out together.
And the homeless advocates struck me as – it just struck me as bizarre because I always knew just because I was pretty street savvy even in my 20s because I had done a fair amount of just traveling and I talked to people.
I just knew that these folks were addicts and that they had mental illness.
And so this sort of, the kind of emotional defense of the right of these people to sleep on the sidewalks, I always sort of viewed as bizarre.
Like it never made any sense to me.
tim pool
Still to this day, you'll see progressives, high profile YouTubers posting things like, that's proof of the dysfunctional nature of capitalism.
And I'm like, someone saying they don't want to be in a building is not anything to do with capitalism.
michael shellenberger
at all. Well, it's sad too. I mean, these are often what they're, they're defending the right
of psychotic people in psychotic states, whether from underlying schizophrenia or from heavy meth
use, it always manifests the same way. Defending, you know, we don't, we don't let grandma with
dementia and Alzheimer's live on the street. So why do we do that with people in a psychotic state?
tim pool
Well, let's take their argument where they say there are more empty houses than homeless people.
Do we just take a, you know, 30 year old schizophrenic man, put him in a house and say, have a nice day?
What do you think would happen to that person in that house?
If we just put, they have no food.
They have, how are they going to afford utilities?
How are they going to maintain the building?
What's going to happen to it?
michael shellenberger
Well, we know.
I mean, we've actually been doing an ongoing experiments on this question.
And then we had a big one during covid because we had to because they reduced the shelter population and they people in hotels, the hotel.
First of all, a lot of people died because there wasn't another user with them to revive them with Narcan after they overdosed.
It's multifactorial, obviously.
We're also dealing with a fentanyl epidemic, which is incredibly deadly.
So first, that happened.
I mean, the propaganda has been—and this is the propaganda coming from the big foundations, Rockefeller, but it also comes from Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker, and it also came from George W. Bush in the early 2000s, which was just give people housing.
That's the cure.
The evidence was never there for any of it.
In fact, it doesn't over at Harvard just published a major study on this over a 12-year period
Those folks do not retain their housing any better than anybody else does
But it doesn't do anything to address the underlying causes of homelessness, which are mostly addiction untreated
luke rudkowski
mental illness There's a lot of political commentators that directly point
the finger at individuals like George Soros when they got involved in local politics
appointing DA's and implementing a lot of these policies
What's your kind of train of thought with his involvement with the things that he called for, that he paid for, that he kind of caused in major cities?
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, so George Soros, his orientation is around, I would call him a left libertarian.
Left libertarian would encompass kind of the anarchists, the anarchists that took over Seattle, for example, which is something I discuss in the book.
But it also includes people like Soros.
I quote the person who worked for Soros for a long time, somebody that I knew pretty well, I've known for almost 25 years.
And he said, you know, he goes, George's view is that people should, if people want something, they should have access to it.
You know, and so it's a kind of, that's a kind of libertarian mentality.
You want heroin or fentanyl?
Well, you should be able to buy it.
Like, why should we restrict your freedom?
So that's part of it.
But then there's the more liberal or the more left part is also this idea, well, those people are probably victims too.
So there's two separate conceptual universes that are being married in this.
So it kind of goes, you want access to fentanyl and you're a victim.
And therefore we should give you whatever you want, not just the needles, but a place to sleep and we should give you medical care, but we shouldn't do anything to persuade you not to use fentanyl or meth, much less like enforce laws against you, because that would be immoral because you're a victim.
That's the basic picture.
luke rudkowski
A lot of the DAs in a lot of very important places are directly backed by him.
He gives a lot of money.
And this buys him a lot of influence.
Like in Loudoun County, a county not far away from us, where a big story broke.
Some people are being censored.
A few days ago, the prosecutor tried to give the father, who was the victim in this case, a prison sentence.
for showing up at a school board meeting and raising concerns about this.
And this prosecutor had $860,000 given to him by Soros PAC.
His name is Buta Benjari.
And he's literally implementing policy on the local level in such a way where it's extremely political, extremely divisive, a lot of times very hardened criminals get off, and a lot of people for political crimes go to jail for very hard sentences.
So that's why I was kind of hinting, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about it because you seem to have kind of experience in it.
But a lot of people are pointing to this as some of the main reasons why there's such urban decay happening all over the United States, and that's why I kind of wanted your feedback on it.
michael shellenberger
Soros has a lot to answer for.
He's supporting progressive DAs who have just clearly gone too far into victimology.
I think he's just deeply out of touch.
He's very old at this point.
I don't think he has, you know, a lot of these guys are.
Like, they don't, you know, I say that this is the edge of the problem.
Part of the problem in California is you knew, I'll describe, I would describe what I'm working on to people
that I knew.
And they go, yeah, well, that's why I don't go downtown.
And you're kind of like, yeah, but aren't we like, what about like the whole thing about how we're kind of a single community in a single country or a single city or have some, whatever happened to like brotherly love or, you know, you are your brother's keeper.
I mean, that's all gone.
It's like, or I once after the recall failed against the current governor, I tweeted out
something that was like, this is a problem because we've got this human rights crisis
on the streets.
And somebody responded by putting a picture of them in their just kind of douchey little
bicycle shorts on a bicycle, like taking a selfie of them with the Golden Gate Bridge
in the background being like, but look at how beautiful it is.
And I was like, well, yeah, my house is nice too, but like 712 people died unnecessarily
last year on the streets of San Francisco out of your supposed compassion.
So pull your head out of your ass and let's do something about this as opposed to just being like, I don't go downtown.
tim pool
When I went to Sweden several years ago, you know, Donald Trump goes on TV, says last night in Sweden and then created this huge thing.
So I was like, I'll go there.
We went to a place called Rinkeby.
Initially, everything was fine.
We went to Rosengard, and they were like, it's dangerous, but it was fine.
In Rinkeby, in the middle of the day at lunchtime, it was crowded.
We actually started getting threats.
People were yelling at us, and the police told us we should probably leave.
The cop said to me, look, if these people start throwing stones, we can't protect you.
And then I was like, okay, so we'll go, because we had cameras.
And so they were yelling stuff at us, like Expressen.
They thought we were a news outlet from Sweden.
Because we had a small camera.
One of the cameras we use here, actually, the same kind.
And so one of these other journalists said, oh, he's exaggerating.
It's not dangerous.
I'll prove it.
I'll go there.
And so this woman shows up there, does not go into the center shopping area of Rinkeby, where we were.
Stands outside the arches in the middle of the night wearing a full coat that covered her hands You couldn't see the color of her skin You couldn't see anything about her with her back to the entrance and said see look I'm here in the middle of the night And and it's just that's that's how the media manipulates and plays these dirty games to say there's no problem here Nothing to see here.
The reality was yes a small blonde woman at 2 in the morning when no one's around wearing a coat covering every inch of her body and not actually going in We'll make a lot of people think there's no problem because people assume the middle of the night's when it's dangerous.
No, the middle of the day is when it was dangerous.
When there was a hundred plus people there and they didn't like the press and they took issue with people based on their skin color.
So they'll sweep it under the rug using assumptions, tropes, and manipulation.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
michael shellenberger
I mean, we've seen that.
There's basically been an effort to deny that crime has been increasing in California over the last 10 or 20 years.
We've seen a huge decline in arrests per reports for shoplifting.
And so one of the things we'll say is we'll say, well, we were seeing, you know, fewer arrests.
Well, that doesn't mean there's less crime.
tim pool
We do that.
I got one more question for you on the subject.
Real quick.
Have murders in San Francisco gone up or down?
michael shellenberger
They've gone up over the last two years, certainly since the George Floyd protests.
tim pool
Do you want to know why that's so substantial?
Murder rates around the world have been going down for one reason, and do you know what it is?
If you had to guess, why would murder rates be going down for the past, I believe it's about the past 13 or so years?
Until now.
michael shellenberger
Well, I mean, in the book I describe a variety of factors, but I mean, the two big ones I looked at were better policing and rising legitimacy.
tim pool
The answer is actually cell phones.
The crimes are still being committed, but people have the ability to call EMS within seconds, as opposed to before the era of the ubiquitous smartphone.
People would see an emergency and then run to find a phone, which dramatically increased response time.
So I actually learned this when I was in Sweden.
What they were saying was, the progressives were trying to say, oh no, look, you know, like, even though crime is going up, it's not that much.
Except when you look at homicide rates in other countries, they were all in a downward trend.
And what we ended up discovering was, since cell phones became something everyone had, when a lethal crime was committed, a crime that could be potentially lethal, people immediately called the police.
The ambulance got there within minutes.
This decreases the amount of murders, but increases the amount of attempted murders or aggravated crimes.
So the United States, we've seen murders going down in a lot of ways.
For places where murders are going up, that's in spite of the fact that people now have the opportunity to call emergency services, which is exacerbated by the fact when you defund the police and now calling gets you nothing.
So now we start seeing it go back up.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean certainly.
I think it's a complicated area.
I tend to side with two basic strands of research.
One showing that declining belief in the legitimacy of the government and the system corresponds with increasing homicides.
This is all based on this work from a book called American Homicide by Randolph Roth.
But then I also, you know, the growing consensus among a lot of criminologists is that the rise in homicides after Ferguson in 2015, and then after the George Floyd killing and the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, was due to basically what we call the Ferguson effect, which is the emboldenment of criminals out of declining legitimacy, but also the pulling back of police from The kind of street, you know, walking the streets, interacting with the folks, including the folks that are more likely to commit homicide.
tim pool
We gotta go to Superchats.
ian crossland
What's declining legitimacy?
tim pool
We gotta go to Superchats because we're way, way, way past time.
michael shellenberger
Can you define that?
luke rudkowski
We could talk about this in the after segment.
ian crossland
Definitely.
tim pool
So if you haven't already, smash that like button and we definitely went a little late and we have a hard stop so we're gonna try and read as many Superchats as we can.
Alright, Matthew Hammond says, has he seen the nuclear battery technology that never needs to be charged in the last 20,000 years?
michael shellenberger
Yeah, that doesn't exist.
ian crossland
It does.
tim pool
I mean, there was a news report about it, but I think it's grossly, greatly exaggerated.
michael shellenberger
There's a lot of reports for designs, and even design is a bit of a strong word for it.
These are more like ideas.
These are spitballing.
I mean, the history of nuclear is a history of a lot of enthusiasts, a lot of technical enthusiasts, and very few successful real-world innovations.
Mostly we've succeeded with nuclear.
It's similar to jet planes.
I think one day we will have hydrogen-fueled jet planes that will get us from L.A.
to Australia in an hour.
That's that day's a long ways off.
And until then, we should stick with the kerosene powered jet planes that we have.
Or rocket planes.
That's basically my view of nuclear.
That's what basically they would be.
Yeah, that's what they would be.
So but I mean, nuclear is just extremely, it's obviously a super complex technology.
It's also heavily regulated, both for national security and for radiological reasons.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
John R. says, nice shelf.
Why it was John R. the other day who said, you should put up a shelf.
So we have, uh, Michael's books, uh, San Francisco and Apocalypse Never.
And it was actually like five minutes before the show.
We were like, can Andy put up the shelf real quick?
And then he drilled the shelf in because we were trying to like put the books up and we were like, John had a good idea.
And so we rolled, we, we, we went with it.
All right.
Let's see what we got.
Let's try and find some good questions.
All right, let's see.
We got some Let's Go Brandons.
All right, Let's Go Brandon.
Okay.
King Tesseract says, this one's to Michael.
I hear you advocating for nuclear all the time.
Why haven't you told people about thorium and LFTR reactors?
They seem pretty awesome, especially since the US sits on a lot of thorium.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, this is the same kind of question around the nuclear battery or about fusion.
So we originally had experimented with a number of different designs.
What is often called thorium is basically a new fuel coolant combination.
You don't need thorium for it. Thorium is an alternative to uranium, but it doesn't
offer many of the benefits that people have said it would.
You can still make weapons-grade materials out of these technologies.
The idea was that if it's already melted, if the fuel-coolant combination is already
melted, then you won't have a meltdown, and so we would add some safety benefits.
But the problem is that that particular fuel-coolant combination, the coolants are
usually made out of chemicals, either fluoride or beryllium or lithium or some combination of them.
The problem is that they create different problems for the metals and also for the
process of creating them. In the first place, you have to have a chemical combination and
separation system.
So it's just proven to be really expensive and difficult, and so that's why they don't exist.
I've been focused on trying to keep the nuclear reactors that we have, that are running, continue to be running and not shut down early.
Most of them can run for 80 or 100 years or more.
ian crossland
Are these the ones that use corium in the reactor, in the core of the thing?
michael shellenberger
They use uranium.
ian crossland
And then if it melts down, it's considered, is it corium?
Is that what, these rods?
michael shellenberger
Well, I mean, if it melts down, it turns into a big mess, you know, but I thought about if could you pour a superconductor into the mess and allow it to cool over time like gold?
I do not have an answer to that question, but I can say that every time we've had the mess, whether the big ones like in Chernobyl or Fukushima, it's just been a huge headache to deal with.
If there were some simple technical fix to it, then we would have it.
ian crossland
The trouble is getting in there once it's melted.
All the drones shut down, so they've had a hard time getting in.
But I wonder if you could get a superconductor in the core and allow it to cool down.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, there's a lot of research on it.
And that's obviously the desire for some radically different technology.
My view is that these accidents are not unusual for a new technology, that new technologies, we should expect some amount of accidents.
The ones that we had were not the big public health disasters that people think that they were.
You know, best estimates are somewhere around 200 people total will have died from Chernobyl after an 80-year period.
That's nothing compared to the six million lives we think are shortened every year from
air pollution.
Then much of the fear and panic around nuclear stems from anxiety around the bomb, which
remains the only real technological way to create an apocalyptic scenario or the destruction
of civilization that we have other than asteroids or supervolcanoes.
So my view is that – and then it was also politicized, and the opposition to nuclear
came from a lot of different areas.
But my view is that I tend to be technologically more conservative because every time they
have tried to significantly change the ways in which nuclear reactors operate, the costs
have gone up significantly because it's just the workers.
The work of building a nuclear plant is mostly pouring cement and rebar and welding pipes, but the demands are that that work be done at a level that's much higher than for natural gas or coal plants.
And so my concern is just that when we start radically changing the technology, you start getting big cost overruns and we want to keep the nuclear cheap.
tim pool
I once read a story about a scuba diver, I think it was, who got sucked into an intake pipe at a nuclear power plant and was fine because the water blocks radiation.
michael shellenberger
Uh-huh.
tim pool
So it was just, like, warm water.
unidentified
That's interesting.
tim pool
I wonder where that was.
michael shellenberger
Maybe it's not true, though.
tim pool
I was like, it was one of those books you reread in the bathroom or something like that.
All right, let's read a little bit more.
unidentified
A.O.
tim pool
Shooter says, please shout out Stop Button Barcade.
Bar plus arcade equals awesome.
Hey, very, very cool.
Alright, um, many people are saying Ian, the hippie authoritarian, and they're saying things like that.
Alright, let's see.
Zach D'Arce says, Website member here, thank god Luke is back.
Ian clearly doesn't understand rights at all, and always conflates the issue into nonsense.
Your human rights to not be aggressed upon is inherent and immutable.
Authoritarian.
unidentified
Ooh!
ian crossland
No, Luke said that it was his human right to go shopping.
luke rudkowski
No, that's not what I said.
Don't you dare defunct my messaging.
I said government intervening in your life is not good.
ian crossland
I probably misinterpreted what you said.
I'll go listen to it later.
tim pool
Cold water says, I also live in the SF Bay area and my daughter and I were yelled at on a nature trail.
We were both masked, but we were going the wrong way to reduce transmission.
My response, call the police.
luke rudkowski
Well, if you're in Australia, you get arrested for being on a nature walk and not having a mask.
There's been tons of videos, tons of incidences of people getting brutalized by thugs with badges for simply walking in nature by themselves with their family emerged without a mask.
In the UK, they sent helicopters hunting people down in the middle of nature by themselves to go after them and arrest them.
tim pool
Oh, weird.
Bones says, I just sent this $20 Super Chat and YouTube removed my comment.
I didn't even violate TOS.
I just happened to mention the Book of Revelation.
lydia smith
Huh.
tim pool
Interesting.
unidentified
Weird.
lydia smith
It's a conspiracy.
tim pool
Kev says, Ian, you're wrong.
Australia did violate basic human rights.
The Daily Wire did a piece.
Four newborn babies die after Australian COVID-19 restrictions prevent travel.
Look it up.
unidentified
Jeez.
tim pool
Interesting.
lydia smith
That sucks.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
Let's see what we got.
Ish That Offends People podcast says, Idaho mom here.
We took my six year old to hockey tonight after two years of being robbed of it.
Kid was told he couldn't skate without mask, mandated to be on ice.
For children who rarely die from the vid, they're muzzling kids like animals.
This is insanity and abuse won't go back.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
In Colorado Springs, a teacher masked sixth graders with tape over their face because she said that the kids weren't wearing the masks properly.
unidentified
Wow.
luke rudkowski
So there's a lot of insanity out there.
tim pool
We do have a bit of an update as well.
Steambub says, you can threaten someone in the U.S.
It's only illegal if you intend to follow through, which is an interesting line.
But you can also threaten people in response to things or as statements of logical follow through in that if you do X, I will do X to you.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, I'm not sure how you would determine intent in that way.
I think we're looking at speech.
tim pool
Well, the interesting thing is it's also typically discretion of the cop and most threats will never be prosecuted or, you know, unless it's against like a public official.
Then you're in the territory of like, yo, we don't want to do that.
michael shellenberger
And you're not allowed to stalk people.
You know, I mean, it's definitely, it gets into gray areas.
tim pool
Well, hold on.
It's depending on the legal line of what stalking is.
So when you're like outside their house on their property, looking through the window, calling them repeatedly, So if, but if you were watching someone leave and you followed them, they could file like a civil action and say, you know, stop following me or something, but you're never gonna get arrested for that.
So can't is more so, uh, it's frowned upon.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, you're right.
In a sense, you have to be violating other laws.
tim pool
You can get a protective order.
You know?
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
Bad B says, we are living in a Herbert Marcuse world right now.
If you check him on every, check him out, everything going on right now will make sense.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
Well, there you go.
lydia smith
True.
tim pool
Bruno Bronowski says, I'm driving to the event from Chicago.
If anyone wants a ride, I'll give them my plus one ticket.
My info is on my GitHub resume.
And that is Bruno Bronowski.
Wow, driving from Chicago.
That's fun.
It's going to be in Harper's Ferry.
We're doing this event on Saturday with Ryan and Danny.
lydia smith
Yeah.
tim pool
It's going to be a whole lot of fun.
Joe says corporate fascism, like Zillow buying up homes and reselling them for $100K more one week later, not flipping them, just reselling to price us out.
unidentified
Yikes.
Wow.
That's crazy.
tim pool
Gideon says, Hey team, I live in New Zealand.
The government is bringing out the digital passports, digital IDs.
Unvaccinated will be restricted to essential services only.
Keep up the good work.
luke rudkowski
Yep.
tim pool
Here we go.
It's like black mirror.
You're going to have your social credit score.
Have you seen the Chinese social credit score stuff?
luke rudkowski
Yeah?
unidentified
Yeah, it's insane.
luke rudkowski
The World Economic Forum literally released videos talking about how great it is to have a domestic passport system that's gonna be checked everywhere with your health and it's gonna control you with every aspect of your existence.
The video's creepy as hell.
tim pool
Mike Bloomberg, you know what he says, tax the poor.
They're too stupid to buy their own stuff, so we gotta do it for them.
Well, that's the life everyone's hoping to live.
Your pursuit of happiness, based on what Michael Bloomberg has decided, is best for you.
All right, let's see.
Carson Liebarger says, I can vouch for Tim here on the Facebook profile thing.
I've had a shadow account for over five years and I've never made an account.
Learned about it, learned about the account from friends.
Well, the shadow profiles aren't public.
And there was a glitch that happened one day where apparently Facebook made them publicly visible to people and everyone was like, what is this?
What is this weird account with my information on it?
And that's basically how people discovered shadow profiles are a real thing.
unidentified
Alright.
tim pool
The issue is, your data is worthless.
follow up on being paid for our personal data like realties.
Costly and administratively cumbersome.
Make Facebook disclose each time they sell, share, trade our data.
The issue is your data is worthless.
However, the data of a million people in one area is worth full.
So I've heard people say, we got to get paid for our data.
Facebook should be paying us for our data.
And I'm like, oh yeah, the 0.00001 cent that you would get from the information they have
Combine it all, and when you have a pool of a million people, well they can sell that for not even that much, but it's incentive to go with Facebook for advertising.
So they do make money off it, but...
I guess the bigger issue is people assume that Facebook takes your data and then sells it to big companies for experiments or stuff like that and they've done things like that.
That's partly what the Cambridge Analytica thing was all about.
But Reginald Enterprises says Facebook does give you money for your data.
They do so by offering a free service that costs them money.
Well, interesting.
I get it.
ian crossland
That's different, though.
tim pool
Yeah.
luke rudkowski
When something's free, you're the product.
lydia smith
That's what they say.
tim pool
Yep.
Alright, let's see what we got here.
We got a bunch of new Super Chats coming in.
Jeffrey McCorbin says his name was David Dorn.
Someone sent us a picture of David Dorn.
We have it hanging in the green room.
lydia smith
That's right.
tim pool
Jonathan Galtarini says, I gave a speech on net neutrality for law school.
Who has the power to control access?
The government or your service provider?
Can AT&T slow the speed of sites they do not like themselves?
Can the government force them to do the same?
One must have the power.
Well, why should one must have the power?
Shouldn't people have equal access to the internet?
lydia smith
I would think so.
tim pool
I guess the issue is, the argument against net neutrality was, if I got the money, I should be able to buy better access, right?
I should be able to get faster access to AT&T.
AT&T should be able to pay the provider and say, make it easier to get to our website.
But if you do that, it's scary because then all of a sudden, well, if you're conservative, you're not going to be able to go to InfoWars.
It'll be really difficult to load, you know, sites like that and the things you want to read.
All right, let's see.
Steve Otten says, you should look into getting Ben Davidson on as a guest from Suspicious Observers.
The science he presents as rock solid and he needs to be heard.
Interesting, we'll look it up.
Toby Walker says, Ian is right.
We should crowdsource to buy out these platforms and open the code.
The societal impact of social media is more than tech moguls can manage.
Open algorithms are the only way we can ever guarantee a fair system.
Or no algorithms.
Just get rid of them outright.
You follow the people you want to follow.
And if you follow a million people, your feed will just be an endless stream of contents just cycling through and that's what you want, that's what you get.
ian crossland
I think that guy's, uh, your suggestion to crowdsource is, I think crowdsourcing is underutilized right now because if we can pool a hundred thousand people together and throw ten bucks at something, that's a million.
We could buy a huge piece of land and then turn it into a public park or something.
We could do the same thing with, ultimately, companies.
tim pool
All right, Austin Walters says, the issue isn't where they post, it's how you follow.
Make an RSS feed in the browser, pull a person's post from the various sites, then make a news feed.
Who you follow is stored in a browser extension.
Interesting.
Interesting.
unidentified
We could, uh, you know, yeah.
All right.
tim pool
Let's see.
DH says forced federation is the true solution to big tech and antitrust is the way it needs to be enforced.
I definitely think forced federation is a good idea for those that don't understand or just to re-conceptualize.
This would mean that Twitter has to allow you to follow Gab accounts.
So you could be on Twitter and you could follow someone on Gab.
Oh, but we'll ban the Gab network.
It's like, okay, well then, as long as you're hosting your own platform, people on Twitter can follow you.
Twitter can ban your website from their website, but your account would still exist.
You'd still keep your subscribers and all that good stuff.
ian crossland
And maybe you can't ban a network.
Maybe that's something that could be worked on.
Right now you can ban a user, but banning a network, that's a...
tim pool
I think banning a network is totally fine.
If TimCast.com says we don't want these posts appearing on our site, then we just say this one doesn't count.
ian crossland
But then Facebook could ban every network that's not Facebook.
tim pool
Twitter could ban... And then people are going to be like, I can't follow people I want to follow.
ian crossland
It would just not be federated.
It would be like a bypassing the federation if they ban everything other than their own network.
tim pool
So I see what you're saying.
It would have to be for like specific things, you know.
I guess it's tough.
ian crossland
This is a good conversation.
tim pool
Yeah, they'd still try and find a way to ban external networks.
So yeah, maybe you can't.
But then... Yeah, that's interesting because then Facebook's like, we don't want this stuff appearing on our site.
It's like, don't worry, it's not.
It's appearing on their site.
And then Facebook would have to, like, file a complaint.
Maybe... I don't know, man.
It's tough.
I do think censorship is important.
People, people, we usually have like a black and white approach, but, you know, Ian talks about censoring criminal content, very disgusting images.
Yeah, we want censors to be like, we're not going to show that, that involves children, no dice, that can't be there.
And so the problem is when the censorship is political and used to weaponize the system for one, you know, one group's political gain or something like that.
That's the, that's the challenge.
ian crossland
Yeah, it's really a parent's job to censor what their kids see.
But man, in this world, that's a whole other conversation.
Ballgame.
tim pool
Justin Meyer says, I've been told that unvaccinated Delta employees have a $200 surcharge for health care.
Have you guys heard about this?
Yeah, that's Delta, right?
luke rudkowski
It's weird because I don't know.
We have to fact check that.
But Delta was, I think, the only airline that wasn't implementing mandates, from what I heard.
lydia smith
One of them was doing $200 fees, yeah.
tim pool
I'm pretty sure Delta does have some mandates, just not in the traditional sense.
luke rudkowski
Yeah.
tim pool
So a lot of people are still criticizing them.
luke rudkowski
All right.
tim pool
Stephen Taylor says, Much love and update from Utah.
Elk hunt successful.
Filled both my spike and cow tag.
Winter's meat secured.
Ooh, very nice.
lydia smith
Nice.
tim pool
All right, Alex Maggiore, from someone who was once homeless, trust me, if you don't want to be homeless, you don't have to be.
There are too many government programs that will put you back on your feet.
And a lot of these homeless shelters, often empty.
Yeah, this is a lot of, what else a lot of these leftists don't understand when they're like, why aren't we putting homeless people in homes?
Why are homeless shelters empty?
And there are many of them that, or at the very least, why are they not at capacity?
There are many shelters that I've personally experienced that were, like, straight empty.
And they would go out and they would be like, sir, please, like, we have a space for you, and they'd be like, get away from me.
I'm not going to whatever it is you're doing.
They might come in, take a shower, and leave sometimes.
They'll show up, knock on the door, be like, yeah, I'm gonna come and take a shower, and then they would leave.
michael shellenberger
Yeah, it depends.
I mean, one of the reasons that people don't like standing shelters is because you can't use drugs in the shelter.
tim pool
That's right.
And they sometimes will make you do certain things, get clean, change your clothes.
michael shellenberger
Yeah.
But the point, you know, like New York had, at least before the pandemic, they'd been sheltering, you know, 99% of the homeless.
But yeah, you have to decide that you're not going to allow public camping.
One of the things I discovered that was striking was that it had been homeless advocates themselves who had opposed building sufficient shelter space in California out of the belief that everybody deserved housing and that the shelters just weren't good enough for people.
tim pool
And people need to understand, there's a lot of homeless people who go to California specifically because it's really nice weather and you can sleep outside.
There's not going to be a solution.
michael shellenberger
And you can have three grams of hard drugs and still $950 worth of goods.
It's really a recipe for disaster.
tim pool
I remember when I was living in Seattle, there were a bunch of homeless kids, like late teens, that hung out near UW, University of Washington, and they would ride the freight rails to make it there.
They wanted to be homeless.
There was no changing their minds.
This was their life, their passion, their fun, their community, and that's it.
michael shellenberger
There's something, I mean, there's a part, there's a wildness to it.
There's a part of it that's very romantic, and I don't object to it, but I don't think you have a right to sleep wherever you want.
That's the difference, is that like, I'm sort of, and I have the same way about drugs, which is that if you want to kill yourself, In the privacy of your own apartment, I don't think that we should dedicate public resources to chasing you down, but you don't get to overdose and use hard drugs in public because that's a violation of public space.
ian crossland
My friend was working with homeless and I believe she told me that at some point the San Francisco City was going through with fire hoses at 4 a.m.
and just hosing all the homeless people off the side of the road.
Did you ever hear anything about that?
michael shellenberger
No, I never.
The language that's used, it's not great language, I don't use it myself, is the idea of sweeps.
But I think the way you have to think about it is that these are open drug scenes, meaning that these are places where there's an open-air drug market and users who are living there.
We only know one way to close open-air drug scenes.
It's the same way the Europeans have done it, which is that you use a combination of police and social services.
You require people to be in shelter, so it's shelter first, treatment first, housing is earned.
I almost feel like I saw a video of it.
I gotta confirm.
and I never came across that.
And that sounds like the kind of rhetoric that honestly the radical left might use.
ian crossland
I almost feel like I saw a video of it.
I got to confirm.
michael shellenberger
I would be shocked if they were spraying cold water on people.
I'm not saying it, maybe it happened, but if it did, that is absolutely not OK.
And that could not have been sustainable.
ian crossland
But they'll sweep, like, just the cops will go in and grab people and be like, you gotta go, we're taking you on a bus, like, what do they do?
michael shellenberger
Like, usually you give several days of warning that you have to stop being there.
Social services are offered.
Most people take the offer or they leave.
And go somewhere else, and then there's a few hardcore people that won't leave, and sure, then they get arrested.
I mean, you don't have a right to sleep wherever you want.
We have designated camping areas, and if you don't want to sleep there, then my view is that we should have sufficient shelter space for you, but it's not a thing where you just get to sleep in the playground and use heroin wherever you want and defecate wherever you want.
That's not compatible with civilization.
unidentified
Agreed.
tim pool
All right, Danny Douglas says, trying to get my ticket.
I'm in the area temporarily before getting shipped out to Guam.
This is my only chance to come and meet you guys before 2024.
So, um, man, it's tough because, you know, we chose a smaller venue with a couple hundred capacity and the tickets sold out instantly.
We're doing an auction now and the goal is to do it, you know, um, Probably, we have one going right now.
So if you're a member at TimCast.com, you can go in and people are bidding.
Last I checked, I think it was like $175 was the bid.
And we did this because we were just trying to do like, some people happen to see, you know, they're able to be on the website, they see the post, they're able to get the ticket because tickets were free for members at $25 or more.
Some people are too busy and didn't have the opportunity to, so they have the opportunity to just buy, like, use the auction, you know, purchase a ticket.
But we're going to do an auction.
We have an auction today, tomorrow, and I think we're going to do it Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
We'll probably do two separate auctions on Friday, because we're going to have a total of 10 tickets that you can just bid for, and we're going to be ending the auctions randomly.
We're going to let them stay up for a little while, but we're going to end them randomly because we don't want people to be avoiding bidding.
We want you to just be like, here's my bid.
I want to come.
And then we'll ultimately just be like, we're going to cut it off at like 10 p.m.
or something.
So we're trying to find a way to do it as fair as possible.
It's very difficult.
Typically, when you do auctions, people say, oh, wait till the last five seconds and then bid whatever the next bid is.
And so then everyone's got to sit there and wait.
And it's really annoying.
Oh man, we're trying to figure it out to make it the best possible we can and the fairest we can, but it's certainly not that easy.
All right, let's just do, uh, we'll do one more funny one.
Garhent says, Tim, this is my third time being broadcasted for this point.
Could you please get one of Ian's personalities to take the political compass test?
His spirit guide was born in Gorey, Georgia.
ian crossland
I did take the political compass test.
Guess what I was?
tim pool
Fascist.
ian crossland
You liar!
Your guess was a lie!
luke rudkowski
Commie fascist.
You inverted the whole chart.
You made it explode.
ian crossland
Do you want me to tell you?
It was libertarian left.
unidentified
Left libertarian on this one.
ian crossland
Just like George Soros.
michael shellenberger
I doubt you would be comfortable with the things that get passed as left libertarian in the Bay Area.
tim pool
Oh, I'm sure they're not.
They're authoritarians.
That's the craziest thing to me.
I always describe it like left libertarian would be hippies on a farm sharing their watermelon together.
You know, no one's exchanged.
There's no hard currency.
They have a community and understanding and agreement.
But this stuff, left libertarianism only really works when you have a homogenous culture and ideology.
ian crossland
I used to, I talked with Bob Murphy about this today, I used to want to help people.
Now I want to give them tools so that they can help themselves.
I want to give them the opportunity to help themselves.
And if they don't, that's it.
I can't force help upon them.
tim pool
Ian's turn to the dark side is, you know... I'm a grey Jedi.
ian crossland
I wield both the dark and the light.
luke rudkowski
That's what all the bad guys say.
tim pool
No, the bad guys all think they're the good guys.
All right, man.
Michael, it's been a blast.
michael shellenberger
Thanks for having me, guys.
tim pool
For everybody else, smash that like button, subscribe to the channel.
You can follow us at TimCastIRL.
You can follow me at TimCast.
We'll have a bonus segment for members coming up at around 11 or so p.m., but do you want to shout out your books one more time?
michael shellenberger
Yeah, sure.
Go buy my new book, San Francisco, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
And while you're at it, buy Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
luke rudkowski
I want to thank the chat members for the Luke Newcomb comments.
I appreciate those very much.
A lot of times I'm laughing here and people are like, why are you laughing?
I got the chat open.
I love you guys.
You guys are awesome.
I released two videos today, one on YouTube.com forward slash WeAreChanged and another very spicy one on LukeUncensored.com.
If you're interested in those, check those out.
ian crossland
I'm Ian Crossland.
Thanks again, Michael, for coming.
This was fantastic.
And I want to shout out Jacob Geometrics on Instagram and Etsy for sending me this.
Thank you so much for sending this to me, man.
luke rudkowski
I love it.
That Ian gave to me and then took back.
ian crossland
Yeah, Luke was like, can I have this?
luke rudkowski
He's like, yes, yes.
And then I'm like, oh, this is gonna be so cool on my wall.
I wanted him to have it.
I'm posting everything up on my wall that you guys sent me that was in the vlog today.
And then like 10 minutes later, Ian comes back and I need that back.
I want it back.
ian crossland
I do want you to have it though, Luke.
It's fine.
luke rudkowski
It's fine.
It's a great design.
unidentified
It is.
ian crossland
I'm glad the world sees it.
lydia smith
And yes, thank you guys for tuning in.
It was really enlightening to hear more about California and homelessness.
I'm really glad Michael's able to join us tonight.
You guys may follow me on Twitter at Sour Patch Lids.
tim pool
Make sure you go to TimCast.com for that member segment and we will see you all there.
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