Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

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

Hello, Michael.

Hey, Joe.

What's happening? Good to see you again.

Thanks for having me back.

My pleasure.

Appreciate it.

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?

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-

Hmm.

... 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."