Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

1. 0:00 – 0:16

   Welcome back: What it was like accessing the Twitter Files with Bari Weiss and Elon

   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.

2. 0:16 – 4:07

   How Twitter justified banning Trump: rule-changing and retroactive rationales

   1. 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?

   2. 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-

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:45

      Hmm.

   4. 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."

3. 4:07 – 4:17

   From partisan bias to government involvement: the story “shifts”

   1. 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?

   2. MSMichael Shellenberger4:15

      Right.

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:15

      I'm sure it's...

4. 4:17 – 7:10

   Origins of the censorship apparatus: 9/11, ISIS recruiting, Brexit/2016, and DHS/CISA

   1. 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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan5:47

      Protecting.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger5:48

      I put that in quotes, you know?

   4. JRJoe Rogan5:50

      Yeah.

   5. 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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan6:48

      Mm.

   7. 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-

   8. JRJoe Rogan7:05

      You're a journalist. (laughs)

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger7:06

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

   10. JRJoe Rogan7:09

       (laughs)

5. 7:10 – 15:15

   Hunter Biden laptop: pre-bunking, media coordination, and First Amendment questions

   1. 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."

   2. JRJoe Rogan9:26

      (laughs)

   3. 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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan9:35

      Yeah.

   5. 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.

   6. 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.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger10:33

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan10:33

      Is this a direct result of the things that Trump said when he was in office that went against the intelligence community? Like how did they decide... I would always assume that, you know, the, the so-called Deep State is essentially bipartisan, that they, they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the Republicans, that really, you know, they're just in charge of... They're supposed to be gathering information to protect the country. So how did they decide specifically to either, um, either stop information or propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger11:14

      Yeah (laughs) . Yes, that is exactly the right question. So I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that, that, that Trump was viewed by the Deep State, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon-

   10. JRJoe Rogan11:29

       NSA.

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger11:30

       ... and you know, I mean, all-

   12. JRJoe Rogan11:31

       Yeah.

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger11:31

       ... of the elites. And, and this, and you're right, it's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats. What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull the US out of NATO. I don't think that that was, I just think that was bluster, like that's insane. Like and by the way, I should say, I actually, I support what we call the Western alliance, I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe. I'm not a, um, I mean there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm also, I don't, I don't think we should pull out of NATO. I think NATO has provided peace in the world and, and mostly been a good thing. It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq. This whole experience has made me rethink my support for, for Ukraine, but I think it's important to understand that...Trump terrified the deep state and the national security establishment. So did Brexit. There's this sense in which... You had a guy on here named Peter Zeihan-

   14. JRJoe Rogan12:28

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger12:28

       ... who wrote this book called, this really apocalyptic book about how the world is gonna fall apart. And his whole argument, which I don't agree with, I think he's brilliant, but the book is, I think the argument's wrong. His whole argument is based on the idea that the United States is gonna stop providing military security to our allies in Asia and Europe. It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some, the US withdrawing from its traditional role since World War II. There's a bunch of people who, obviously their, their ideology, their, their livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with providing, the United States providing this protect, this protection for, you know, Europe and Asia, and, and they view Trump as threatening that. I also think they just really hated the guy. They looked down on him. You know?

   16. JRJoe Rogan13:12

       Yeah.

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger13:12

       He was crude and all the things that, that-

   18. JRJoe Rogan13:15

       Yeah.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger13:15

       ... people don't like about him.

   20. JRJoe Rogan13:16

       And he spoke disparagingly-

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger13:18

       Oh.

   22. JRJoe Rogan13:18

       ... about the intelligence community.

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger13:19

       Yeah. I mean, he was-

   24. JRJoe Rogan13:20

       Which is crazy.

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger13:21

       Absolutely. He was against the war in Iraq. He, he was, uh, different, he was a nationalist Republican and what's so interesting is that, you know, if you read people like, you know, people on the left, like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of US, or Glenn Greenwald, who are critics of, or and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of US government, you know, military invasions around the world since World War II. I mean, we've overthrown many governments, right? Uh, you know, um, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, you know, and, and then what the pattern is, is that these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just nationalists who are trying to control their economies and they didn't want foreign interference were coming to power. And the US government would see that as a threat to providing, you know, having this, this liberal global order, as it's called. And so they saw what Trump, they saw Trump as an existential threat to this post-war liberal order and they needed to, they, and, and they viewed social media as the means to his power, which I think was exaggerated. So on the one hand they saw a threat, I think they also saw an opportunity. You know, the war on terror we, we won. I mean, like, it just, I mean, we, huge, huge victory. I mean, it's shocking how successful it was in some ways. So you have a bunch of people that suddenly need something to do.

   26. JRJoe Rogan14:41

       Mm.

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger14:42

       So there's a lot of motivations there, and then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign. John Podesta, he was her, chair of her campaign. He runs the most powerful progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the world, or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress. They were looking also for some reason, someone to blame for their own failures. You know, for the 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.

6. 15:15 – 18:27

   Section 230 and pressure tactics: how politicians “threatened to destroy your company”

   1. 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.

   2. MSMichael Shellenberger15:54

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:55

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

   4. 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.

   5. JRJoe Rogan16:37

      Mm-hmm.

   6. 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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan17:20

      Can I, can I stop you there?

   8. MSMichael Shellenberger17:21

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan17:21

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

   10. MSMichael Shellenberger17:25

       Directly. I mean-

   11. JRJoe Rogan17:26

       Directly.

   12. 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.

   13. 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.

   14. MSMichael Shellenberger17:51

       Yes.

   15. JRJoe Rogan17:52

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

   16. MSMichael Shellenberger17:56

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

   17. JRJoe Rogan18:01

       Well, there was certainly-

   18. MSMichael Shellenberger18:02

       ... to this-

   19. JRJoe Rogan18:02

       ... evidence of like these troll farms.

   20. MSMichael Shellenberger18:05

       Yes.

   21. JRJoe Rogan18:06

       Right?

   22. MSMichael Shellenberger18:06

       Yes.

   23. JRJoe Rogan18:07

       We know they exist.

   24. MSMichael Shellenberger18:08

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

   25. JRJoe Rogan18:10

       Yeah.

   26. 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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan18:24

       Right.

   28. MSMichael Shellenberger18:24

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

   29. JRJoe Rogan18:26

       Of course.

7. 18:27 – 26:57

   Three major ‘disinformation’ episodes and the problem of zero accountability

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger18:27

      ... Facebook has changed. So yeah, I mean there's, there's, I mean, look, there's three big-... disinformation campaigns that were run by, frankly, the US government and their allies. The first was the Russia hoax, the idea the Russians, that Russians controlled Donald Trump and won him the election. The second was the Hunter Biden laptop, and the third is that COVID origi-... you know, uh, the, the idea that, that, um, it's a conspiracy theory to even imagine that COVID could have emerged from a lab.

   2. JRJoe Rogan18:58

      Yeah.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger18:58

      There's others including, you know, we can talk about there's a, there was this effort to basically smear a bunch of ordinary conservative or Trump-supporting Twitter users as Russian bots.

   4. JRJoe Rogan19:11

      Yeah.

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger19:11

      Um, but, but basically you have active disinformation campaigns being run by the US government and US government contractors against the American people on these issues at the same time that they're act- demanding censorship. So, you have propaganda on the one hand and censorship on the other.

   6. JRJoe Rogan19:26

      Well, here's what appears to be dangerous to me. There doesn't seem to be any repercussions for doing these things. Th- this is scary because it's shifting a nar-... So, l- l- in step one, the Hunter Biden lap- laptop, for example one rather, the Hunter Biden laptop, no one's in trouble, right?

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger19:45

      No.

   8. JRJoe Rogan19:46

      No one's in trouble. No one from the FBI's in trouble.

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger19:48

      No.

   10. JRJoe Rogan19:48

       No one loses their job.

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger19:49

       No.

   12. JRJoe Rogan19:49

       No one gets reprimanded.

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger19:51

       No.

   14. JRJoe Rogan19:51

       No one gets, you know, brought before the American people and said, "You failed us. Not only did you fail us, you betrayed us-"

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger19:58

       Right.

   16. JRJoe Rogan19:58

       "... because you knew this was not true and you allowed someone whose son has deep ties to both Ukrainian and Chinese companies that were paying him for influence," and it appears, at least by some of these emails, that some of that money went to the actual Vice President of the United States, which is fucking wild-

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger20:24

       Yes.

   18. JRJoe Rogan20:24

       ... that no one is ta-... And then, the crazy thing is, one of the things about having a right and a left is that whenever there's information that's inconveniently bad for that one side, particularly the left, you don't hear a fucking peep about it on the media.

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger20:45

       Right.

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:45

       It's, it's dismissed. It's like, you know, they'll, they'll talk about it like, uh, uh, what did, uh, who d-... Someone said, uh, it's, uh, that, uh, someone talked about the Hunter Biden laptop and said it was, like, half fake. That was, like, a term.

   21. MSMichael Shellenberger21:00

       AOC.

   22. JRJoe Rogan21:01

       AOC.

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger21:01

       AOC said it.

   24. JRJoe Rogan21:01

       Half fake, that's right.

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger21:03

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan21:03

       What is, that is a, that is such a horrible violation of the trust that the people who elected you put in you. They, you have access to all the informa-... You have access to that actual fucking laptop.

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger21:21

       Oh, yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan21:21

       By the way, I have access to it, too.

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger21:23

       Yeah.

   30. JRJoe Rogan21:23

       A lot of people have access to it. If you wanted to. I said, "I don't wanna look at it." I was like, "I don't wanna look at that fucking thing."
8. 26:57 – 29:04

   COVID-era censorship pressure: vaccine side effects, White House tone, and ongoing litigation

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger26:57

      But there is a chance. I mean, so we do... The attorneys general of Louisiany, Louisiana and Missouri, um, are moving forward in the courts in suing the, in suing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment. You know, this is, of course, this Hunter Biden laptop thing is one of many things. I mean, the other craziest thing of all, maybe the m- some of the most crazy stuff of all is that Facebook censored accurate COVID vaccine side effect information because it didn't wanna promote vaccine hesitancy.

   2. JRJoe Rogan27:30

      Yeah.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger27:30

      In other words, the White House is, like, just pressuring them. I mean, this guy Andy Slavitt, in particular, is just this malign actor just pressuring, pressuring, threatening them. They're nasty in these emails. The f- the White House, nasty.

   4. JRJoe Rogan27:41

      In what way?

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger27:42

      Oh, just, um, just being, just, just basically, you know, it's a cont- I mean, Biden does it publicly. He sa- they're killing people.

   6. JRJoe Rogan27:50

      Yeah.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger27:50

      They're basically accusing people of... I mean, these guys, they don't, the gloves are off. I mean, they're just like, "You're killing people by letting this information out." I mean, the information is people telling their own story of vaccine side effects. We always point out, like, it was one of the great public interest progressive victories in recent memory that the drug companies have to name the side effects of their drugs in their TV ads.

   8. JRJoe Rogan28:13

      Yeah.

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger28:14

      Like, that's a big part of it, right? It's like a running joke-

   10. JRJoe Rogan28:16

       Yeah.

   11. MSMichael Shellenberger28:16

       ... you have to name the side effects in the TV ads. Well, here they, like, here were ordinary people trying to tell stories of the side effects that they had from the vaccine on Facebook and Twitter, and the White House is demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor that stuff. This is the, this is just the, the worst. I mean, that is, uh, I mean, that's just Soviet/Chinese-style censorship, like full-on. I mean, so it's not over. And I think that, you know, we've already seen there's other things going on, like that agency I mentioned, that cyber, that part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, they changed their website over the last few months to remove references to domestic, uh, counter-disinformation efforts, to emphasize countering foreign disinformation.

   12. JRJoe Rogan29:04

       Mm-hmm.

9. 29:04 – 54:19

   Renee DiResta and the ‘censorship industrial complex’: NGOs, universities, and election projects

   1. MSMichael Shellenberger29:04

      They, um, you know, we, we talk a lot about this. There's one of the big leaders of the censorship industrial complex is this person named Renee DiResta at Stanford Internet Observatory who we had on.

   2. JRJoe Rogan29:14

      Yeah. Let's talk about that because, uh, I had her on and what she essentially was talking about was all these Russian troll farms and how interesting it is that they created all these funny memes and they used all these resources to try to shift the narrative and change public opinion on certain things.

   3. MSMichael Shellenberger29:34

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan29:34

      And that, that it was very effective.

   5. MSMichael Shellenberger29:35

      Yeah. Well, so let's just (laughs) re-, let's start with-

   6. JRJoe Rogan29:38

      Yeah.

   7. MSMichael Shellenberger29:38

      ... Renee. (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan29:38

      Yeah.

   9. MSMichael Shellenberger29:38

      So first of all, Renee is somebody who I only k- I came across because she's actually kind of moderate on a bunch of stuff that I'm moderate on, like dealing with homelessness, on COVID. She's actually, like, a moderate voice. She's not super woke or anything. And she's critical of, like, she moved out of San Francisco because it's just too crazy. She, so she and I had this conversation, like, we were talking about this even before I started talking to her right when I started looking at the Twitter files, and we did this long interview. I was on Sam Harris's podcast with her. But then she starts showing up in the Twitter files in all these weird ways and we 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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan30:38

       Hmm.

   11. 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.

   12. NANarrator33:23

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

   13. MSMichael Shellenberger33:26

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

   14. NANarrator33:28

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

   15. MSMichael Shellenberger33:31

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

   16. NANarrator33:35

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

   17. MSMichael Shellenberger33:37

       No.

   18. NANarrator33:37

       But you didn't even know, right?

   19. MSMichael Shellenberger33:39

       Oh. (laughs)

   20. NANarrator33:39

       Like so, most people don't know.

   21. 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.

   22. NANarrator34:57

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

   23. MSMichael Shellenberger35:02

       Oh, yeah. (laughs)

   24. NANarrator35:03

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

   25. MSMichael Shellenberger35:05

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

   26. NANarrator35:14

       Whoa.

   27. MSMichael Shellenberger35:15

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

   28. NANarrator35:22

       So-

   29. MSMichael Shellenberger35:22

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

   30. NANarrator35:24

       Are they running ... That's insane.
10. 54:19 – 1:05:11

    Incremental totalitarian drift, intimidation claims, and why ‘sunlight’ matters

    1. JRJoe Rogan54:19

       And we're back. Okay, where were we?

    2. MSMichael Shellenberger54:22

       So much to talk about.

    3. JRJoe Rogan54:24

       So, something's bad. Something's bad. (laughs)

    4. MSMichael Shellenberger54:26

       (laughs) The long march to totalitarianism.

    5. JRJoe Rogan54:29

       Yeah. It's disturbing because it seems like that's just how it goes. Like, we ... They just d- keep acquiring more power and no one notices and no one says anything and then it just ... It moves very slowly. Like, Jordan Peterson outlined this. He, he outlined this. He, he was talking about how change doesn't happen in these big jumps. What they do is they move you and push you just incrementally, ver-

    6. MSMichael Shellenberger54:55

       Right.

    7. JRJoe Rogan54:55

       And you don't say anything and they push you a little f- and before you know it, you're f- so far removed from where you started.

    8. MSMichael Shellenberger55:02

       Right.

    9. JRJoe Rogan55:02

       And you didn't even notice it.

    10. MSMichael Shellenberger55:03

        Right.

    11. JRJoe Rogan55:04

        Yeah.

    12. MSMichael Shellenberger55:04

        It's changing the, it's changing the norms. That's why I think ... You know, we were talking about this person, Renee DiResta, but these other groups in the censorship industrial complex, they're constantly promoting the idea that it's okay and necessary...... to have more censorship. So both times, I've testified now o- th- you know, twice in the last three weeks. Both times, the Democrats were like... I mean, the Republicans were like, "Why are you taking... Why are we taking stuff down?" And the Democrats were like, "We're not taking enough stuff down." I mean, there's this sense in which more stuff needs to be censored. That's the idea they're trying to promote. It's, it's bizarre.

    13. JRJoe Rogan55:39

        It's so spooky.

    14. MSMichael Shellenberger55:39

        Again, this is the party that defended flag burning.

    15. JRJoe Rogan55:42

        Yes. It's r- it's really spooky too that it's so transparently ev- uh, it's so transparently evolving around money and power. It's not like... There's no real protection, especially when you look at what happened during the COVID crisis. If you could just, like, look at it now and go over it and say, "What were you trying to do really?" It seems like what you're trying to do is make as much money as possible for the pharmaceutical companies. That seems like what you were doing. Like this whole idea of vaccine hesitancy, once enough data was out there, espe- particularly when you're talking about vaccinating people that had already had COVID, like, that's preposterous. It doesn't even make sense. It doesn't make sense medically. It doesn't jive with the studies. Like, all of this is very strange. And this, this i- idea that you're, you're, you're stopping vaccine hesitancy, like, m- from, because of real data? Like, uh, uh, wha- that term is so creepy, because what you're saying is, side effects. You're talking about not telling people about the dangers of something, which has always been something that we considered with every drug.

    16. MSMichael Shellenberger56:49

        Right.

    17. JRJoe Rogan56:49

        And you're hiding it.

    18. MSMichael Shellenberger56:50

        A- absolutely. And also, not only that, but like, this is not the same as measles or mumps. This is very different than that. And you don't get herd immunity with the COVID vaccine. And so it's like... I mean, you have to remember that like what's crazy about it too is, you go from this, "Well, we're gonna have a vaccine and then we're not gonna get it."

    19. JRJoe Rogan57:08

        Right.

    20. MSMichael Shellenberger57:08

        To, "And then we're not gonna spread it." To, "Okay, well, you m- you might still get it, but it won't be as bad, but you won't spread it." And then you go, "Well, you're not gonna g- y- you might, y- you might get it, but it won't be as bad and y- but you might still spread it." (laughs) So then it's kinda like, well then why, like, why the man- why mandating this? Like, why not just let it be personal choice?

    21. JRJoe Rogan57:26

        Did you see the video that was released recently of Fauci in the hood?

    22. MSMichael Shellenberger57:30

        Yes.

    23. JRJoe Rogan57:30

        Where... It's amazing.

    24. MSMichael Shellenberger57:31

        With those Black residents?

    25. JRJoe Rogan57:32

        It's amazing.

    26. MSMichael Shellenberger57:33

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan57:33

        The one guy's like, "Something else is going on."

    28. MSMichael Shellenberger57:35

        Yeah.

    29. JRJoe Rogan57:36

        You know, Fauci, and, and Fauci's explaining, "If you get it, it would... You barely notice it," which is just a fucking lie.

    30. MSMichael Shellenberger57:44

        Right.
11. 1:05:11 – 1:19:39

    Gender ideology and social contagion: Tavistock, detransitioners, and media ‘misgendering’ debates

    1. MSMichael Shellenberger1:05:11

       So the big one, I mean, the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is this, is the trans issue-

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:05:17

       Mm-hmm.

    3. MSMichael Shellenberger1:05:18

       ... where we're now seeing this... And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, you know, and particularly in Britain where there's a big new book out, A Time to Think: About the Tavistock Gender Clinic. But basically it looks as though a lot of autistic kids or kids on autism s- with autism spectrum, they, who are just uncomfortable in their bodies, are more prone to be thinking in black and white, are basically being misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria. And then you also have a, you know, a, a different group of folks, maybe kids that are, would end up being gay or lesbian if they didn't transition-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:05:50

       Yes.

    5. MSMichael Shellenberger1:05:50

       ... who become convinced that they are the opposite sex. This is one of the k- ideas is, some of it's a social contagion in other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually caused by the medical profession. So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people. I mean, this is something that we just published a piece on this, where this was what happens with anorexia and bulimia, you know, these doctors identify eating disorders and then they publicize them and it gets all this publicity about it-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:06:19

       Mm.

    7. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:19

       ... and then the disorder spreads.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:06:21

       Yes.

    9. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:23

       So it's really tricky. I mean, it's not, um-

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:06:26

        But then there's all these gender-affirming care clinics-

    11. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:29

        Right.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:06:29

        ... that pop up and they're-

    13. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:30

        Right.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:06:30

        ... enormously profitable-

    15. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:31

        Right.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:06:31

        ... which is terrifying.

    17. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:32

        Right.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:06:33

        That they have a, uh, same as Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex, they have a vested interest in going to war.

    19. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:41

        Yes.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:06:41

        Th- these people have an interest in diagnosing people with gender dysphoria-

    21. MSMichael Shellenberger1:06:45

        Right.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:06:45

        ... which is terrifying to think that their opinions and their diagnosis would be based on something other than what do you, uh, what's going on with you? Like, it was like they have an incentive. And that was also during COVID, there was, they were incentivized to, to, like, give people certain medications, they were financially incentivized-

    23. MSMichael Shellenberger1:07:06

        Yeah.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:07:06

        ... to put people on ventilators, financially incentivized to mark deaths as COVID deaths. Like, all that, all of this is so enlightening because I never would have expected that. I never would have suspected that at all before COVID, before the pandemic and all this chaos and, uh, all the things that I've seen, I, I, I, my whole view of, like, how the world runs is completely different.

    25. MSMichael Shellenberger1:07:33

        Oh, absolutely. I mean, I, it's funny because you had Abigail Shrier on.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:07:36

        Yes.

    27. MSMichael Shellenberger1:07:36

        Who wrote this big book on, on transgenderism as a social contagion, and I think it was in 2020. I remember at the time being like, "I think she's... I mean, what she's saying makes sense, but it's so horrible to consider." I just was kind of-

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:07:48

        Right.

    29. MSMichael Shellenberger1:07:48

        ... it took me like three years to finally work on it or write on it. But I thought, you know, part of what's... I mean, the people, like first of all, people with autism spectrum should be up in arms and outraged about the mistreatment of people with autism by these gender clinics. The other group that would be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:08:06

        Yes.

Episode duration: 2:48:09