Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays)

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

      Hello, Michael.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger0:12

      Hey, Joe.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      What's happening? Good to see you again.

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger0:14

      Thanks for having me back.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      My pleasure.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger0:15

      Appreciate it.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      So, um, first of all, what was it like, uh, to get ahold of the Twitter files? Like, what- what was that experience like? How did that go down?

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger0:27

      Exciting as hell, man. I mean, t- seriously, uh, there's been a lot of misinformation about that itself but Bari Weiss contacted me. Um, she lives in LA, and she got in, and she's like, "How soon can you get over here?" And I was like, "Let me finish this interview I'm on, and I'm over." And yeah, it was incredible. Um, you know, I'd never met Elon before. You know, I met him at the coffee station, just making himself a cup of coffee. He had no idea who I was and... Yeah, we just got into it. It was, uh, you know, I was sort of the- the- the least known of the big three journalists that were there. It was Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi who was on. And they'd already started thinking about how to, kinda what to go after, and Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already, um, and then we were starting to look at January 6th, because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8th. And so because I'm, like, the junior member of that, uh, threesome, so to speak, they gave me January 7th, so the first thing we... One of the first things we did was just to look at how they made a decision to get, to pull Trump off the platform. And it turned out that the 7th was an important day, because that was when they started to rationalize this decision to deplatform Trump, even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their terms of service, so they were sort of stuck making up a reason-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:45

       Hmm.

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger1:46

       ... to deplatform him. And that was an important theme, was that they just kept changing the rules, basically, to- to do what they wanted to do. And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop. The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of service. So, I mean, look, it was crazy. I mean, it was, uh... You know, 'cause people always ask questions about the, about the files themselves but, you know, the experience was, we would ask for these searches and we'd just get back huge amounts of data. It was lots of, thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal messages on their Slack messaging system. And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was... You know, some of it was very boring, 'cause you have to just read tons and tons of stuff, but, you know, we, I think the big theme was, we start by seeing a real, it was super progressive, it's like 99% of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats. You know, the head of safety at- at Twitter, this guy named Yoel Roth, who, you know, sa-, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in, he was very progressive. But over time, we just kept finding, like, this weird, like, "FBI wants us to do this," you know? "There's these other government agencies. Oh, you know, this, uh, all these people used to work at the FBI. Uh, the CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security." And we're kind of like, "What the hell is going on?" And this story quickly shifted from us, sort of... And I think what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring, to there is a huge operation by US government officials, US government contractors, and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people. And at that moment, the story shifted for all of us. And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important, and sort of the lead, because he had had so much experience on- on sort of looking at how the US government during the War on Terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns. And it became clear to us, you know, over time, that the US government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that it had been waging abroad. It turned them against the American people, and that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine, and you were like, "This, something r- seriously sinister is going on."

   12. JRJoe Rogan4:07

       Do we know when this began? Like, when did they infiltrate these organizations? A- 'cause I'm, I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right?

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger4:15

       Right.

   14. JRJoe Rogan4:15

       I'm sure it's...

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger4:17

       Oh no, absolutely not. That's part of what was so terrifying, is that it was all of the social media companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about, but also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized. So when does it start? You know, it really, what you're looking at is the apparatus that was created by the War on Terror over the last 20 years, starting after 9/11, then there was a battle against ISIS, because ISIS was successfully recruiting on social media, so there was sort of a counter-ISIS recruiting campaign that occurred. Then you get the big event is Brexit 2016, Trump's election in 2016, and the establishment just freaks out. Absolutely freaks out. And they... There's a lot of different motivations here, so one of the motivations is just to blame Facebook, blame social media for Trump's victory. It was never true. I don't really think anybody really believed it. There's just, you know, it just, there was just, for a variety of reasons we can talk about, there was never any good evidence that the, whatever Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome of the campaign. But they started to scapegoat the- the social media companies as a way to get control over them. And so then they started, then in 2017, they set up... Well, two things happened, or many things happened. The Department of Homeland Security d- declares election infrastructure to be part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure, and that meant protecting the media environment. Protecting.

   16. JRJoe Rogan5:47

       Protecting.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger5:48

       I put that in quotes, you know?

   18. JRJoe Rogan5:50

       Yeah.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger5:50

       It's creepy, it's patronizing. It's a power move. So that's the first thing that happens. They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security.... to supposedly protect (laughs) the media environment from foreign influence. They create something called the, the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms. They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these meetings. So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here, and he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter Biden laptop, and he goes, "Well yeah, um, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys come to us saying there's gonna be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden," which is super suspicious because as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019.

   20. JRJoe Rogan6:48

       Mm.

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger6:50

       What freaked me out, and I was, I had... So by the way, I was a victim of the Hunter Biden laptop disinformation. I thought that... I, I voted for Biden. I thought that it was a, I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation. I just bought the whole thing. And this is some, from somebody who-

   22. JRJoe Rogan7:05

       You're a journalist. (laughs)

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger7:06

       I'm supposedly a journalist, right? (laughs) I'm-

   24. JRJoe Rogan7:09

       (laughs)

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger7:10

       So-called journalist. I bought it, you know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways and everybody I knew was like, "Oh you know," and besides Trump, he was just, he's so... For all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake, I bought that it was fake. So, so then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New York Post story in October 14th, 2020 was, was accurate, I started seeing stuff in the emails. The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, uh, uh, they called, it's called a tabletop exercise, and it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack and leak around Hunter Biden. This is like in June of 2020. So this is like months before the New York, before, months before Rudy Giuliani gets that lap- the laptop, b- before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York Post. Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre-bunk... Basically they are training or brainwashing all these journalists, and I mean it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia, uh, Foundation, the Wikipedia fi- folks, um, the networks, all of the social media companies, all coming together to be like, "Okay well, if something is, if w- something is leaked, then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it." Meanwhile, Stanford University, a few, a few months earlier had put out a report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle. Well the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode, it was Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it, where the Washington Post and New York Times published these internal Pentagon documents showing that the US government was losing the war in Vietnam, right? This is Daniel Ellsberg, and he just releases it, uh, he steals these documents, he breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers, the newspapers publish them. It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like, the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish, uh, hacked (laughs) , so-called hacked, but leaked information, and here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute, saying, "Oh no, no, no, that's all, we should stop doing that. Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way. Instead we should focus on the person who leaked it."

   26. JRJoe Rogan9:26

       (laughs)

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger9:27

       So it's, it, it really sent chills up my spine. Uh, you know, it was just, it was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. And, and this is of course, you gotta remember, Aspen Institute's funded by the US government.

   28. JRJoe Rogan9:35

       Yeah.

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger9:36

       Stanford's funded by the US government. So this is, people go, "Oh well, you're just..." One of the responses we've got is they go, "Oh you're just talking about, you know, content moderation by private companies." No, we're talking about US government-funded organizations. You can't... If the US government is censoring information, that's obviously a violation of the First Amendment, but if the US government's funding somebody else to censor information, that's also a violation of the First Amendment. You can't indirectly... It's still a violation if you're, if you're funding somebody to demand censorship. So, that was quite a steeplechase, but there's a lot here. I mean, it's a lot, a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack, and that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, we just, I need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.

   30. JRJoe Rogan10:16

       Yeah well, I'm very happy to provide that. Um, eh here's the question. The, obviously the laptop would harm, uh, w- eh, the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden, obviously, and if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other way.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   And what was the…

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger15:00

      also for some reason, someone to blame for their own failures. You know, for the dislikeability of Hillary. And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social media platforms. They felt like they had lost control of them.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:15

      And what was the attitude of these social media platforms when they were exchanging emails back and forth with these intelligence agencies? Was there any understanding of the implications of allowing this web of influence to infiltrate and control narratives and how kind of creepy and dangerous that is? Did they understand how other people would perceive that? 'Cause I would assume this is all, so the emails were exchanged and there was Slack messages and all this stuff is recorded, right? So it's, there's, there's a record of it.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger15:54

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:55

      Did they have an understanding of how other people would view this?

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger15:58

      Yeah, I mean, just to back up even further, it's a m- So there's two interesting dynamics going on. You know, the first is that the internet itself was created by the US Department of Defense, and, and Google is a spinoff of Defense Department projects. You know, so on the one hand, the internet is a function of the US military. I mean, it's a spinoff of the US military. It's a great one, we're glad to have it, but, but I think the US military and the, and the deep state and whatever, they felt like they had control over the internet until Trump basically, or really maybe until ISIS around 2014, 2015. That's the first dynamic. The second dynamic is culturally, Silicon Valley is libertarian.

   6. JRJoe Rogan16:37

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger16:37

      Right? So you have the Electronic Freedom Foundation, or I'm sorry, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You have a libertarian ethos. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is very much a manifestation of that libertarian ethos. Mark Zuckerberg less. Um, but, but even Mark Zuckerberg after the 2016 elections when everyone's accusing him of throwing the election to Trump, he's like, "This is ridiculous." He's like, "Our own data doesn't, doesn't support..." There just wasn't enough, the Russians clearly did not have this influence. They just beat the crap out of him so much and threatened to take away their ability to operate, which is known as Section 230, which is this huge liability protection in the law passed in 1996, which allows Google, Facebook, Twitter to exist.

   8. JRJoe Rogan17:20

      Can I, can I stop you there?

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger17:21

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan17:21

       When you say they threatened to take it, like, in what way?

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger17:25

       Directly. I mean-

   12. JRJoe Rogan17:26

       Directly.

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger17:27

       Including Biden himself, I mean, but basically Democratic politicians, they would just say, you know, "We're gonna, we're gonna remove your Section 230 status." That's just like saying, "We're gonna destroy your company." I mean, it's just, it's not.

   14. JRJoe Rogan17:40

       And they were saying this because they were, their assertion was that Russian disinformation and propaganda led to Donald Trump being a, being elected.

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger17:51

       Yes.

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:52

       Arrested. Being elected, and there was no evidence of this.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger17:56

       No, I mean, they, there was, I mean, there was some evidence of it, but nothing-

   18. JRJoe Rogan18:01

       Well, there was certainly-

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger18:02

       ... to this-

   20. JRJoe Rogan18:02

       ... evidence of like these troll farms.

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger18:05

       Yes.

   22. JRJoe Rogan18:06

       Right?

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger18:06

       Yes.

   24. JRJoe Rogan18:07

       We know they exist.

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger18:08

       Yes. Yeah, but it's, it's trivial.

   26. JRJoe Rogan18:10

       Yeah.

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger18:10

       I mean, it was, they would exaggerate, they would say things like, you know, 140, I think it was like 146 million Americans had Russian propaganda in their newsfeeds. That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads.

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:24

       Right.

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger18:24

       Because it's like your feed, is a memory, that was social-

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:26

       Of course.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Hmm. …

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger30:00

      this conversation, like, we were talking about this even before I started talking to her right when I started looking at the Twitter files, and we did this long interview. I was on Sam Harris's podcast with her. But then she starts showing up in the Twitter files in all these weird ways and we started looking into her. It's a sh- a very... So she's also, the reason we're, she's so important is, like, like, when you read the, you know, when you, when you follow the meetings or watch the YouTube videos, whatever, she's like one of the smartest people, like there's something going on with her. She's like a real leader. She's al- she's always sort of the number two. The other thing about these people is that they move around a lot, they move in between organizations and she's always sort of the number two but she always seems a bit smarter than the person that she's reporting to.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:38

      Hmm.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger30:38

      But so she's somebody that she goes to, she gets a computer science degree from...... uh, State University of New York at Stony Brook. That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA. She then goes and ha- she gets a job at Janes Trading, which is, like, one of the, the, the great, it's like up there with Goldman or maybe better. It's where SBF from FTX was at. Um, she was there, then she had a couple of companies that did, like, logistics and cyber, very s- high-powered successful executive. And then, according to her story and the public story, she gets obsessed with anti-vaxxers. She's got young kids, she's obsessed with anti-vaxxers, spreading anti-vax misinformation. This is long before COVID. I think it's around 2014, 2015. Next thing she, you know, she's, like, advising President Obama on counter-ISIS disinformation strategy in the White House, and advising on the expansion of something called the Global, um, uh, the Global Education Center, which is part of the State Department to counter disinfo. So suddenly, she's, like, like the senior person. It's very suspicious, very rapid rise. If you know anything about those communities, they're very hierarchical and, like, you have to work your way up over many years. She's instantly, like, at the top. She, in 2017, she is at a consulting firm called New Knowledge that is then caught doing disinformation against an Alabama Trumpian Republican candidate named Roy Moore. They are caught doing fake Facebook pages accusing Roy Moore of wanting to basically, uh, restrict alcohol consumption, um, in Alabama, which is deeply unpopular position. It was false. And also, uh, creating the perception of Russian bots supporting Roy Moore. Her firm runs that campaign. Afterwards, she sort of tries to distance herself from it, suggests that she wasn't involved, even though when you read the Washington Post and New York Times articles about her, about that, about the scandal, um, she's sort of, she makes it, it makes it clear that she was actually the person that brought the funding in to run the program, and also kind of conceived of much of the strategy. After that, she becomes the top researcher to the Senate Intelligence Report of 2018 on Russian disinformation in the 2016 election. So, she's not, not only is she not punished for her role in it, she's rewarded by the Democrats with this incredibly powerful position. So, she becomes, like, the lead witness, the lead author for Senate Democrat Adam Schiff in promoting the whole, you know, narrative that somehow Russians swung the election to Trump.

   4. NANarrator33:23

      And there's no repercussions for promoting this false information?

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger33:26

      No. I mean, she's rewarded for it.

   6. NANarrator33:28

      And no one talks about it? It's never-

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger33:31

      Well, I mean, we're starting to, right? But I mean, l- I'll point out a couple other things.

   8. NANarrator33:35

      But before the Twitter files, I'm sorry to interrupt.

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger33:37

      No.

   10. NANarrator33:37

       But you didn't even know, right?

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger33:39

       Oh. (laughs)

   12. NANarrator33:39

       Like so, most people don't know.

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger33:41

       No. There's one guy we discovered, uh, Matt, Matt Taibbi discovers him. And it only, I only dis- and I only, like whatever, like a week or two before my testimony in Congress, which was, uh, a couple, few weeks ago, not the one I did yesterday. Um, we discover this, this guy who was the head of cyber at the State Department, a senior guy named Mike Benz, and he is, like, super deep into this stuff. He's amazing. I highly recommend him coming on. But he runs something, he basically leaves State Department and starts something called the Foundation for Freedom Online, and he has been documenting this more than anybody. So, he had it, but he's not, um, he's just really in the weeds. Like, it's really detailed. You have to really, it was hard to understand. You have to really go through and unpack it. I used a bunch of it in my testimony. I talked to him, I interviewed him a lot. But I mean, you know, basically a media blackout on all of this stuff. Renee DiResta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory, that organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Graphika, and University of Washington has a think tank on this, they get government funding and they run something called the el- the Election Integrity Project in 2020 to basically demand censorship.

   14. NANarrator34:57

       By the way, if I just read the Election Integrity Committee, I get super suspicious.

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger35:02

       Oh, yeah. (laughs)

   16. NANarrator35:03

       (laughs) Just the, just the name of that.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger35:05

       I mean, Joe, it's, they, they, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets. I believe that their database-

   18. NANarrator35:14

       Whoa.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger35:15

       ... they had, they had over a billion, uh, social media posts, Facebook, Twitter, that they flagged-

   20. NANarrator35:22

       So-

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger35:22

       ... and tens of millions of them were censored-

   22. NANarrator35:24

       Are they running ... That's insane.

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger35:26

       ... by the social media companies.

   24. NANarrator35:27

       Are they running some sort of a program that allows-

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger35:30

       Yeah.

   26. NANarrator35:30

       ... them to find those tweets?

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger35:32

       Yeah. Um, (laughs) you see it a lot. They do these maps, they have these maps where they just, they, they locate the super spreaders. So, like, you and me-

   28. NANarrator35:41

       Oh.

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger35:41

       ... would be super spreaders, (laughs) Jordan P., I'm in a, I mean, I'm p- they, they attack me in this disinformation, this little, these, these sensors.

   30. NANarrator35:49

       Really?
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Right. …

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger45:00

      it's like, you know, it's not even... I mean, I, I think mostly, like I said, I think the Western alliance and NATO have brought peace, you know, since World War II, and I don't think we should be pulling out. And, you know, honestly, to the extent that I've rethought my position on Ukraine is just because of these nefarious actors.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:15

      Right.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger45:15

      Like, what are they really doing here? So yeah, I mean, for sure it's, it's, you know, it is what kind of we all have known it is, is you're trying to... The US is, is part of this empire and we're trying to make the world safer, Western capitalism and Western corporations, and you know, that's actually lifted a bunch of people outta poverty. It's not totally negative. But obviously you also get the Iraq invasion, which was terrible, and the Afghanistan occupation, which resulted in horrors.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:43

      But you also get some things that aren't beneficial to anybody. If you're censoring information about the lab leak hypothesis-

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger45:48

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan45:49

      ... that's a real problem-

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger45:50

      Right.

   8. JRJoe Rogan45:50

      ... because if we are still funding gain-of-function research or if we are funding it through a proxy-

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger45:56

      Right.

   10. JRJoe Rogan45:56

       ... and they're denying this-

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger45:58

       Yes.

   12. JRJoe Rogan45:58

       ... and lying about this and covering this up through emails, and then p- When you find out that certain physicians ch- and doctors change their testimony or change their opinion and then received enormous grants-

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger46:11

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan46:11

       ... like this is, this is like, this is, you're following a very obvious paper trail.

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger46:17

       Let's, let's, let's, can we, let's, let's spend a minute on this 'cause this is crazy.

   16. JRJoe Rogan46:21

       Yes.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger46:21

       So, and by the way, the New York Times finally ran a good story on this just yesterday, and particularly around Fauci. So Fauci, of course, is famous for saying, "I am science."

   18. JRJoe Rogan46:31

       Yeah.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger46:32

       Let's just pause-

   20. JRJoe Rogan46:32

       "If you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science."

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger46:40

       It's, I mean, first of all-

   22. JRJoe Rogan46:41

       Which is a crazy thing-

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger46:42

       It's crazy.

   24. JRJoe Rogan46:42

       ... for a human to say.

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger46:43

       It's a crazy thing. That is... So first of all, the word science, I was thinking the other day, like, it should just not be a noun. Like, science is a process.

   26. JRJoe Rogan46:51

       Yes.

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger46:51

       It's about, it's, you should... A, a better word would be investigations-

   28. JRJoe Rogan46:54

       Right.

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger46:54

       ... or investigating. I mean, there are-

   30. JRJoe Rogan46:56

       Just science.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Right. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      can't get rid of me.

   2. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:01

      Right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:01

      And second of all, I have a lot of money. So I can just like, even if I stop working, you're not gonna hurt me.

   4. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:07

      No.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:07

      I'll just, uh, I'll find something. I'll, I'll figure something out. Like, this is not a thing like the 1970s when you could just get someone removed from a television show, like when they attacked the Smothers Brothers for the criticism of the Vietnam War.

   6. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:20

      Right.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:20

      This is a different thing.

   8. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:21

      Right.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:00:22

      Like, you're in a different landscape and I don't think you understand where, w- where you're at. Like, you're playing this game where you don't even understand the numbers.

   10. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:31

       Well, and you s- I think you said too, you benefited, right? They came after you-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:00:34

       Hugely.

   12. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:34

       ... and you had a big boost. So I think-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:00:36

       2 million subscribers in a month, I gained.

   14. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:39

       Thank God for the Streisand effect.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:00:40

       Yes.

   16. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:41

       It also sold my book.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:00:42

       Yeah.

   18. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:43

       Like, I mean, it was like-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:00:43

       Yeah.

   20. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:43

       ... I mean, on the one hand that's really... Being censored is such a horrible experience. It really feels dehumanizing to be deprived your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like, "Shellenberger is spreading disinformation." It's just like, "Oh my God!" You know?

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:00:58

       Was this the San Francisco?

   22. MSMichael Shellenberger1:00:59

       No, that was the Apocalypse Now-

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:01:00

       The Climate. Yeah.

   24. MSMichael Shellenberger1:01:01

       ... Apocalypse Now. But on the other hand, you know, I think the response from people was, "Well, I wanna go read that book."

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:01:07

       Yeah.

   26. MSMichael Shellenberger1:01:08

       And, and so there is a way in which w-Eh, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting thing, where, where the regime goes too far-

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:01:15

       It also-

   28. MSMichael Shellenberger1:01:15

       ... and people don't like that.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:01:16

       ... made me question scientific papers for the first time. When, when I, when I was informed by people who don't wanna talk about it, it publicly, how these things work, like from... When I talked to people who are physicians, who said, "Listen, this is why I can't talk about this publicly. This is why I can't discuss this, and this is why when you l- read a scientific paper, and you read the conclusion, what you don't understand is that this, this was designed, the study was designed to show one very specific outcome. And if it didn't, you would never see it."

   30. MSMichael Shellenberger1:01:50

       That happens all the time, like-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:17:40

   (sighs) …

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:00

      was a symptom of cult, of civilizations-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:15:03

      (sighs)

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:03

      ... in decline.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:15:04

      Yeah. Well, it was, I got it from Douglas Murray.

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:06

      Oh, Douglas Murray.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:15:07

      Yeah.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:07

      He raised this.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:15:07

      Douglas Murray, uh, talked about this, that it seems like every civilization, when they're at the brink of collapse, becomes obsessed with gender. And he talked about Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and it just seems like a thing that people do when there's no real, like, like, physical conflict.

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:28

      Right.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:15:29

       So, people look for conflict that doesn't exist, and they find conflict in standard norms. They find conflict in societal norms.

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger1:15:38

       I was, uh, we did a thing, I did a thing with Peter Boghossian on wokeism as a religion, because we had read, I had read John McWhorter's book, Woke Racism, which came out right around the time that San Fransicko came out. And I just was like, and he argues that wokeism is a religion. He argues that, like, the obsession with race is a religion. So I just, we just created this taxonomy. We just listed, you know, climate change, race-

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:16:03

       Mm.

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger1:16:04

       ... trans-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:16:04

       Yeah.

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger1:16:05

       ... drugs, whatever, all these things, and then we create all these religious categories, and it was, like, really easy to fill it out. They all looked like a religion. I called Abigail, and I was like, "What's the, like, what is the, what is trans as a religion? Is trans a kind of religion?" She was like, "Lemme get back to you." Uh, a year later, she calls me and she goes, "Hey, I think I figured it out." And I was like, "All right, what is it?" She goes, she goes, "The new gender is a soul for secular people. It's something that, you can't see it, it doesn't, there's no physical basis to it."

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:16:37

       Mm.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger1:16:38

       "You have a sex. Like, you can, you know, take off all your clothes and, and-"

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:16:42

       Right.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger1:16:42

       "... you don't even need to do that, actually. Just like we can, we know that, like, we can recognize someone's sex very quickly and easily, actually." So then what is the ... So it's a new soul. So for me, I'm a huge ... I think the secularization explains a lot, because we know that people get a lot of psychological comfort out of believing that they have an afterlife, that they have a soul, that they go to heaven, or they go, they go, they get reincarnated, that their lives have purpose and meaning, and that they don't really die, and that we live on. We just know that that provides a huge amount of psychological comfort. So there's always been this thinking that, that when you don't have that anymore, if you are taught to believe that at the end of your life, you just become worm food, and that's it, and you're dead. There's some people, my friend Steven Pinker is a atheist, and that's what he thinks, and he still believes, but he's still, he also has a kind of spirituality around reason and the Enlightenment. But I, I think all this stuff, it's sort of end of civilization, but it's also the end of this, uh, end of belief in religion.

Episode duration: 2:48:09