The Joe Rogan Experience - #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Michael Shellenberger is the best-selling author of “Apocalypse Never” and “San Fransicko." He is a journalist and founder of Public, a Substack publication. Michael is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and Green Book Award winner. He is also founder and president of Environmental Progress, a research organization that incubates ideas, leaders, and movementsmichaelshellenberger.substack.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Michael. Good to see you again. Thanks for having me back. My pleasure. Appreciate it. So, first of all, what was it like to get a hold of the Twitter files?

What was that experience like? How did that go down? Exciting as hell, man. I mean, seriously, there's been a lot of misinformation about that itself. But Barry Weiss contacted me. She lives in 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. You know, I'd never met Elon before. You on and I'm over. And, yeah, it was incredible. You know, I'd never met Elon before. You know, I'd met him at the coffee station just making himself a cup of coffee. He had no idea who I was.

And, yeah, we just got into it. It was a, you know, I was sort of the least known of the big three journalists that were there. It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi who was on. And they had already started thinking about how to go after. And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already. 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 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 de-platform Trump, even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their terms of service. So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to de-platform him. And that was an important theme, was that they just kept changing the rules, basically, to do what they wanted to do. And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop. The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of service. So, I mean, look, it was crazy. I mean, it was, you know, people always ask questions about the files themselves. But, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches and we just get back huge amounts of data. It was lots of thousands and thousands of emails,

thousands of internal messages on their Slack messaging system. And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff. But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real super progressive. It's like 99 percent of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to Democrats. You know, the head of safety at Twitter is a guy named Yul Roth, who, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in. He's 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, all these people used to work at the FBI. CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security. And we're kind of like,

what the hell is going on? And the story quickly shifted from us sort of, and I think what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring, to there is a huge operation by U.S. government officials, U.S. 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 sort of looking at how the U.S. government during the war on terror had waged disinformation

campaigns, propaganda campaigns. And it became clear to us, you know, over time that the US government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that had been waging abroad, it turned them against the American people. And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine. And you were like, this is something seriously sinister is going on. Do we know when this began? Like when did they infiltrate these organizations? Because I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right? I'm sure it's... 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 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, there was just for a variety of reasons we can talk about. There was never any good evidence that whatever Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome of the campaign. But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get control over them. And so then they started, then in 2017, they set up, well, two things happened, or many things happened. The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure. And that

meant protecting the media environment. Protecting. Protect. Put that in quotes. It's creepy. It's patronizing. It's a power move. So that's the first thing that happens.

They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly protect the media environment from foreign influence. They create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms. They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these meetings. So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here. And he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter Biden laptop. And he goes, well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys come to us saying there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden.

Which is super suspicious because, as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019. What freaked me out, and I was, I had, so by the way, I was a victim of the Hunter Biden laptop disinformation. I thought that, I voted for Biden. I thought that it was a, I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation. I just bought the whole thing. And this is from somebody who. You're a journalist. I'm supposedly a journalist, right?

So-called journalist. I bought it. I'm still a big liberal in so many ways. And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know. And besides Trump, he's so – for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake, I bought that it was fake. So then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New York Post story on October 14th, 2020 was accurate, I started seeing stuff in the emails. The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, it's called a tabletop exercise, and it was actually a Zoom call,

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 Rudy Giuliani gets 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. I mean, it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies, all coming together to be like, OK, well, if something is leaked, then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it. Meanwhile, Stanford University, a few 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 U.S. government was losing the war in Vietnam, right? This is Daniel Ellsberg, and he just releases it. He steals these documents. He breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers. The newspapers publish them. It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked, so-called hacked, but leaked information. And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute saying, oh, no, no, no, that's all.

We should stop doing that. Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way. Instead, we should focus on the person who leaked it. So it really sent chills up my spine. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. And this is, of course, you got to remember, Aspen Institute is funded by the U.S. government. Stanford's funded by the U.S. government. So this is, people go, oh, well, you're just, one of the responses we've got is they go, oh, you're just talking about content moderation by private companies. No, we're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations. You can't, if the U.S. government is censoring information, that's obviously a

violation of the First Amendment. But if the U.S. government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's also a violation of the First Amendment. You can't indirectly, it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to demand censorship. So that was quite a steeplechase. But there's a lot here. I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack. And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all. Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.

Here's the question. Obviously, the laptop would harm, the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden, obviously. And if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other way. Is this a direct result of the things that Trump said when he was in office that went against the intelligence community? Like, how did they decide? I would always assume that, you know, the so-called deep state is essentially bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the Republicans. They're really, you know, they're just in charge of, they're supposed to be gathering information to protect the country. So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?

Yes, that is exactly the right question. So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that Trump was viewed by the deep state, by CIA, FBI, Pentagon, all of the elites. And you're right, it's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats. What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull the US out of NATO. I don't think that that was, I just think that was bluster. Like, that's insane. And by the way, I should say, I actually, I support what we call the Western Alliance. I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe. I'm not a, I mean, there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm also, I don't think we should pull out of NATO.

I think NATO has provided peace in the world and mostly been a good thing. It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq. This whole experience has made me rethink my support for for Ukraine. But I think it's important to understand that Trump terrified the deep state and national security establishment. So did Brexit. There's a sense in which you had a guy on here named Peter Zion who wrote this book called, this really apocalyptic book about how the world is going to fall apart. And his whole argument, which I don't agree with, I think he's brilliant, but the book is, I think the argument's wrong. His whole argument is based

on the idea that the United States is going to stop providing military security to our allies in Asia and Europe. It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some – the U.S. withdrawing from its traditional role since World War II. There's a bunch of people who obviously their ideology, their livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with providing – the United States is providing this protection for Europe and Asia. And they viewed Trump as threatening that. I also think they just really hated the guy. They looked down on him. He was crude and all the things that that. Yeah. That people don't like about him. He spoke disparagingly about

the intelligence community. Yeah. I mean, he was crazy. Absolutely. He was against the war in Iraq. He was 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 U.S. or Glenn Greenwald, who are critics of or and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of U.S. government, you know, military invasions around the world since World War II. I mean, we've overthrown many governments, right? You know, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, you know, and what the pattern is, is that these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just nationalists who are trying to control their economies and they didn't want foreign interference, were coming to power. And the U.S. government would see that as a threat to providing – to having this liberal global order as it's called. And so they saw what – they saw Trump as an existential threat to this post-war liberal order and they needed to – and they viewed social media as the means to his power, which I think was

exaggerated. So on the one hand, they saw a threat. I think they also saw an opportunity. The war on terror, we won. I mean like – it's just – I mean 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. So there's a lot of motivations there. And then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign, John Podesta, who was the chair of her campaign. He runs the most powerful progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the world, or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress. They were looking also for some reason, someone to blame for their own failures, you know, for the dislikability of

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

Yeah. Did they have an understanding of how other people would view this? Yeah. I mean just to back up even further, so there's two interesting dynamics going on. The first is that the internet itself is created by the U.S. Department of Defense. And Google is a spinoff of Defense Department projects. You know, so on the one hand, the Internet is a function of the U.S. military. I mean, it's a spinoff of the U.S. military.

It's a great one. We're glad to have it. But I think the U.S. military and the deep state and whatever, they felt like they had control over the internet until Trump, basically, or really maybe until ISIS around 2014, 2015. That's the first dynamic. The second dynamic is culturally Silicon Valley is libertarian, right? So you have the Electronic Freedom Foundation, I'm sorry, Electronic Frontier Foundation. You have a libertarian ethos. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, is very much a manifestation of that libertarian ethos. Mark Zuckerberg, less. But even Mark Zuckerberg, after the 2016 elections, when everyone's accusing him of throwing the election to Trump, he's like, this is ridiculous. He's like, our own data doesn't support.

There just wasn't enough. The Russians clearly did not have this influence. They just beat the crap out of him so much and threatened to take away their ability to operate, which is known as Section 230, which is this huge liability protection in the law that passed in 1996, which allows Google, Facebook, Twitter to exist. Can I stop you there? When you say they threatened to take it, in what way? Directly. Directly. Including Biden himself. But basically, Democratic politicians, they were, their assertion was that Russian disinformation

and propaganda led to Donald Trump being, being elected, being elected. And there was no evidence of this. No, I mean, they, there was, I mean, there was some evidence of it, but nothing. Well, there was certainly evidence of like these troll farms. Yes. Right. Yes. We know they exist. Yes.

Yeah. But it's trivial. Yeah. I mean, it was they would exaggerate. They would say things like, you know, 140, I think it's like 146 million Americans had Russian propaganda in their news feeds. That's not the same as saying 146 million people saw the ads. Right. Because it's like your feed is – remember, that was a social –

Of course. Facebook has changed. So, yeah, I mean, there's – I mean, look, there's three big disinformation campaigns that were run by, frankly, the U.S. government and their allies. The first was the Russia hoax, the idea that Russians controlled Donald Trump and won him the election. The second was the Hunter Biden laptop. And the third is that covid origin, you know, the idea that that it's a conspiracy theory to even imagine that covid could have emerged from

a lab. 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. But basically, you have active disinformation campaigns being run by the U.S. government and U.S. government contractors against the American people on these issues at the same time that they're demanding censorship. So you have propaganda on the one hand and censorship on the other. Well, here's what appears to be dangerous to me. There doesn't seem to be any repercussions for doing these things. This is scary because it's shifting. So in step one, the Hunter Biden laptop, or example one rather, the Hunter Biden laptop,

no one's in trouble, right? No. No one's in trouble. No one from the FBI is in trouble. No one loses their job. No one gets reprimanded. No one gets brought before the American people and said, you failed us. Not only did you fail us, you betrayed us because you knew this was not true. And you allowed someone whose son has deep ties to both Ukrainian and Chinese companies that 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. Yes. That no one is taught. 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. Right. It's dismissed it's like you know they'll they'll talk about it like uh what who did someone said

the someone talked about the hunter biden laptop and said it was like half fake that was like a term. AOC. AOC. Half fake. That's right. That is such a horrible violation of the trust that the people who elected you put in you. You have access to all the information. You have access to that actual fucking laptop.

By the way, I have access to it too. A lot of people have access to it. If you wanted to. I said I don't want to look at it. I was like, I don't want to look at that fucking laptop. By the way, I have access to it too. A lot of people have access to it. If you wanted to, I said I don't want to look at it. I was like, I don't want to look at that fucking thing. I don't want to see this guy getting foot jobs from hookers in Vietnam, smoking street crack. It's crazy. Whatever he did. But the fact that someone would say that's half fake.

That in itself is disinformation. That is a lie. It's a lie. But you're just saying it because if you can say it's half fake, you muddy the water. And now anybody that's looking at that could go, oh, yeah, but that's half fake. Yeah. According to my side. Right. This is like the same people. There's still people that say that Trump was in bed with the Russians, which is how he won in 2016. People that still parrot that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Very close friends and family say that. Oh, yeah.

Mine as well. I know. That's why I was happy to do your show because literally like even my very close friends and family don't understand what I'm talking about. And I'm like, I want to go on Joe Rogan and just unpack this for them to how serious this is. I mean, you have to remember the New York, I mean, and I'll put on myself, I was so biased. The New York Post published the subpoena, which is a kind of receipt from the FBI showing they had taken Hunter Biden's laptop from this computer repair store owner in Delaware. It was published in the New York Post. They also published

the receipt that has Hunter Biden's signature on it, saying that he had not only had left the laptop there, but also that it gave the computer store, the computer repair owner, the rights to it if he abandoned it. Hunter Biden never said it wasn't his. He never denied that it was his laptop. Well, and subsequently, at least recently, he sued that guy for releasing the information, which is the dumbest thing he could have ever done. Because now all this half fake shit gets thrown out the window. Now he's saying it's his. Right. Well, they're always there.

Look, I mean, I think the other thing I want to also emphasize here, because I think that when you uncover the level of coordination and the sophistication of the disinformation and censorship campaign, it's easy to also sort of say they're perfect, but they're not. They're always making stuff up as they're going along. But I think the other interesting thing that's important to know here about that laptop story is that within Twitter, they look at that New York Post article, Yul Roth, the head of safety and his team, they look at it and they go, yeah, I mean, it's legit. It doesn't violate our internal, it doesn't violate our terms of service. And at that moment, I mean, it has a Manchurian quality, Manchurian canon quality to it, where the former chief legal counsel to FBI, a guy named Jim Baker, who is central to beginning the Russiagate probe of Trump. He's now at Twitter as deputy general counsel. This is we're discovering this is probably what

I was discovering in the Twitter files is just vociferously attacking this thing. It's like this looks like misinformation, disinformation. We shouldn't trust it. Looks like it violates Twitter's policies. He was he just I mean, like multiple I think it was at least four messages and emails of him pushing to the executives. And of course, it doesn't we can't see the phone calls that which is really where a lot of the dirty work happens. Pushing to just get this thing censored by by Twitter. Sure enough, a few a few hours later, Yul Roth says, well, OK, you know, we think that it could very well have been a Russian hack or somehow they put the I mean, it was this crazy thing where they're like, well, we think it was hacked and then put on the laptop.

It was just bizarre. Yul Roth, like there's moments where I respect him because he was he was enough of a truth teller internally. It's why he got to the position he was in, which is very powerful position to be like hey this is bullshit like internally he would say but he was also a company man so when his when powerful superiors in the organization including former fbi people and jim baker wasn't the only one when he gets worked he just bends and he just was like okay yeah i think we've decided that it violates our hacked materials policy and we're going to censor it. The other thing I want to point out about this, it's not just that they censored the article because people always go, well, you know, they it only lasted for a few days or whatever.

It was the discrediting of it. The censoring censorship is a disinformation strategy. If you censor that article, in other words, Twitter and Facebook, all the headlines where Twitter and Facebook are, you know, they're going to restrict the dissemination of this material or they think it's, you know, that's that all that publicity is really what matters. So in terms of like, you know, in my defense and other people that bought the idea that it was somehow a fake, we were being told by the media that everybody had looked at this and was kind of like, look, it looks like it's hacked and there's something funny about it. So I think that, you know, I think there's so many shocking things about it, but I think

it's the level of coordination and conformity within these social media companies. It was the pre-bunking in advance. And it was the complete total, you know, just the complete news media blackout and unanimity that there was. And it was just all of them. I mean, it was like all the networks, all the newspapers, they all just repeated this idea that there was something wrong about the laptop. And there wasn't. It's so creepy. And it's so creepy that there's no repercussions. Yeah. It's essentially lying and using taxpayer dollars to promote propaganda that they know to be untrue. The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri are moving forward in the courts in suing the Biden administration for violating the First Amendment. You know, this is, of course, this 100-billion laptop thing is one of many things. Facebook censored accurate COVID vaccine side effect information because it didn't want to promote vaccine hesitancy. In other words, the White House is like just pressuring them.

I mean, this guy, Andy Slavin, in particular, is just this malign actor, just pressuring, pressuring, threatening them. They're nasty in these emails. The White House, nasty. In what way? Oh, just just being just just basically, you know, it's a continuing Biden does it publicly. So they're killing people. They're basically accusing people of I mean, these guys, they don't the gloves are off. I mean, they're just like you're killing people by letting this information out. I mean, the information is people telling their

own story of vaccine side effects. We always point out, like, it was one of the great public interest progressive victories in recent memory that the drug companies have to name the side effects of their drugs in their TV ads. Yeah. Like, that's a big part of it, right? It's like a running joke. You have to name the side effects in the TV ads. Well, here 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 just the worst. I mean, that's just Soviet Chinese-style censorship, like full on. I mean, so it's not over. And I think that we've already seen – there's other things going on like that agency I mentioned, that 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 counter disinformation efforts to emphasize countering foreign disinformation. They – 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. Yeah, let's talk about that. Because I had her on and what she essentially was talking about was all these Russian troll farms and how interesting it is that they created all these funny memes and they used all these resources to try to shift the narrative and change public opinion on certain things and that it was very effective. Yeah. Well, so let's just let's start with Renee. Yeah. So first of all, Renee is somebody who I only I came across because

she's actually kind of moderate on a bunch of stuff that I'm moderate on, like dealing with homelessness, COVID. She's actually like a moderate voice. She's not super woke or anything. And she's critical of like she moved out of San Francisco because it's just too crazy. 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 and all these weird ways and we start looking into her it's

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 wherever she's like one of the smartest people. Like there's something going on with her. She's like a real leader. She's always sort of the number two. The other thing about these people is that they move around a lot. They move in between organizations. And she's always sort of the number two, but she always seems a bit smarter than the person

that she's reporting to. But so she's somebody that she goes to, she gets a computer science degree from State University of New York at Stony Brook. That happens to be a major recruiting place for the NSA. She then goes and she gets a job at Jane's Trading, which is like one of the great – it's like up there with Goldman or maybe better. It's where SBF from FTX was at. She was there. Then she had a couple of companies that did like logistics and cyber,

very high powered, successful executive. And then according to her story and the public story, she gets obsessed with anti-vaxxers. She's got young kids. She's obsessed with anti-vaxxers, spreading anti-vax misinformation. This is long before COVID. I think it's around 2014, 2015. This is long before COVID. I think it's around 2014, 2015. Next thing you know, she's like advising President Obama on counter ISIS disinformation strategy in the White House and advising on the expansion of something called the Global Education Center, which is part of the State Department to counter disinfo. So suddenly she's like the senior person. It's very suspicious, very rapid rise. If you know anything about those communities, they're very hierarchical and you have to work your way up over many years.

She's instantly at the top. In 2017, she is at a consulting firm called New Knowledge that is then caught doing disinformation against an Alabama Trumpian Republican candidate named Roy Moore. They are caught doing fake Facebook pages, accusing Roy Moore of wanting to basically restrict alcohol consumption in Alabama, which is deeply unpopular position, it was false. And also creating the perception of Russian bots supporting Roy Moore. Her firm runs that campaign. 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 the scandal,

Washington Post and New York Times articles about her, about that, about the scandal. She sort of she makes it makes it clear that she was actually the person that brought the funding in to run the program and also kind of conceived much of the strategy. After that, she becomes the top researcher to the Senate intelligence report of 2018 on Russian disinformation in the 2016 election. So she's not not only is she not punished for her role in it, she's rewarded by the Democrats with this incredibly powerful position. So she becomes like the lead witness, the lead author for Senate Democrats, Adam Schiff, in promoting the whole narrative that somehow Russians swung the election to Trump.

And there's no repercussions for promoting this false information? No. I mean, she's rewarded for it. And no one talks about it? It's never... Well, I mean, we're starting to, right? But, I mean, I'll point out a couple other things. But before the Twitter files, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you didn't even know, right? So most people don't know.

No. There's one guy we discovered. Matt Taibbi discovers him, and I only discovered him like a week or two before my testimony in Congress, which was a few weeks ago, not the one I did yesterday. We discovered this guy who was the head of cyber at the State Department, a senior guy named Mike Benz. And he is 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, he's just really in the weeds. Like

it's really detailed. You have to really, it was hard to understand. You have to really go through it and unpack it. I used a bunch of it in my testimony. I talked to him, I interviewed him a lot, but I mean, you know, basically a media blackout on all of this stuff. Rene DiResta, who then moves from New Knowledge to Stanford Internet Observatory, that organization and three other organizations, Atlantic Council, Grafica, and University of Washington has a think tank on this. They get government funding and they run something called the Election Integrity Project in 2020 to basically demand censorship. By the way, if I just read the Election Integrity Committee, I get super suspicious. Oh, yeah.

Just the name of that. I mean, Joe, they basically would flag hundreds of millions of tweets. I believe that their database, they had over a billion social media posts, Facebook, Twitter, that they flagged. And tens of millions of them were censored. Are they running – that's insane millions of them were censored. Are they running? That's insane. By the social media companies. Are they running some sort of a program that allows them to find those tweets?

Yeah. You see it a lot. They do these maps. They have these maps where they just they locate the super spreaders. So like you and me would be super spreaders. Jordan, I'm in it. I mean, they attack me in this disinformation, these censors. Really?

They have reports. They put like me, Jordan Peterson, Bjorn Lomborg, you. I mean, they put us in there. So anybody that has a social media, a big social media follower, following, call us super spreaders. And then they try to get us censored. And they did for me. They got Facebook to censor me. How so? Well, when my book on the environment came out, Apocalypse Never, in 2020, I wrote an article that sort of summarized the book as one does. It went super viral.

Then one of these shady organizations attacked it, not for anything being wrong with it, but for it being misleading. They call it it's the same way that they attacked the vaccine side effects stuff. They go, well, you know, it's accurate. It's true. But it leads people to draw the wrong conclusions. But it leads people to draw the wrong conclusions. Right. The wrong conclusion being that climate change is real but not the end of the world or vaccines. The wrong conclusion would be maybe don't get the vaccine or maybe if you're, you know, whatever, under 18 or you're, you know, young man or 18 or if you've had whatever. I mean, whatever it might be, you don't need to be triple vaxxed. So they're basically using an opinion, which is you should get the vaccine or you should think of climate change as apocalyptic,

as a way to, and then they kind of go through the back door and say anything that's being used to propagate that narrative should be counted as misinformation. Jesus. So just to back up, so this little cluster, this censorship industrial complex, does this, quote-unquote, election integrity project in 2020, they censor tens of millions of social media posts. And by censor, do is you can remove, you can reduce, or you can, they call it inform,

you can put a flag on it. That's what they do. Everything I do for Facebook now, almost everything I do has a warning on it. Here's how to get accurate information about climate change. Go to the Facebook Climate Change Center. Even my stuff on homelessness and drugs, they'll be like, here's how to get accurate information on climate change. That's how you know that I'm on some list. I'm on some blacklist at Facebook. So yeah, so it's those three things. Those are all forms of censorship. These groups, which are U.S. government-funded organizations, this is very important to stress. This is not some private actors. U.S. government-funded organizations pressuring the social media companies to censor these posts and these people. And they do it in 2020. And then Renee, who does this little video, it's like one of the creepiest videos that we've discovered.

There's little videos that they do. She's sort of describing, you know, well, and then we realized that we needed to keep going on COVID. And so then in 2021, the election integrity project turns into something called the virality project. And that's where they then go and wage censorship on COVID information that they don't like. I refuse to use their language. And again, it's tens of millions of people. And so you see it at all levels. It's these guys doing it. We say, I like, we, the censorship industrial complex is the right, I think, description of what we're talking about. It's a phrase that, of course, came from Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address that he gives. He goes, look, you know, you got to worry the DOD is funding all these private military contractors. These private

military contractors have a financial interest in war. This is Eisenhower, the guy that won World War II. I mean, it's like Mr. Credible on this issue. It's an amazing speech. This is amazing, beautiful. I mean, it's really the best of what a president can be. And he warns against this. So it's this complex. It's this kind of clustering of government agencies and government funded groups. So, you know, I mean,

it's in the case of the censorship industrial complex, it's the Department of Defense. It's the State Department. It's FBI. It's CIA. It's Department of Homeland Security funding these so-called think tanks. And there's sometimes they're at universities or sometimes they're standalones. Some of them are in Britain, by the way. There's a very special – that special relationship with the U.S. and Britain. Often the U.S. will – the U.K. think tanks right now are attacking me, trying to discredit me. So sometimes they'll go that way. They'll try to like – Attacking you how so?

Well, they just put out a report. These guys are the worst. They put out this like long report describing climate disinformation. And like I was like as soon as I opened it up, I was like, fuck, I bet I'm in this. And I just do like command F and I just start Schellenberger and sure enough, it's like whatever, like multiple results. I'm like, crap. And so they – and they – often these are reports that they don't get a lot of fanfare or whatever, but they make sure that they get emailed to a bunch of journalists. They talk to the journalists and they basically just emphasize, never talk to this person, never quote this person, do not platform them. We then, by the way,

after our testimony, that same Stanford cluster, it's actually more than one group at Stanford even, they emailed, I'm not going to say who because I don't want to give away my sources, but they've basically emailed many people about Matt and my testimony, trying to attack our testimony and sharing information. So they're just the creepiest, they creep around. They're constantly waging disinformation campaigns against disfavored voices, and demanding censorship while also spreading their own misinformation. God, it's so creepy that the people doing this don't understand how deeply un-American this is. Yes.

And that they feel like it's okay to do because the side that they're on is the right side. You got it. You got it. It's un-American. It's so un-American. I mean, Joe, it's funny because like I, I mean, so I graduated from high school in 1989. I remember distinctly that that was the year that the Supreme Court upheld your right to burn a flag. And I remember

just being like, God damn, that's why I'm a Democrat. That's why I'm a liberal. Like, I think you should be able to burn a flag because I think the First Amendment is for, literally from that moment on, I have never worried about the First Amendment in the United States. For me, it was, like, always kind of basic. Like, come on, guys. Like, it's the First Amendment. Like, how could it possibly be under threat? This was, like, one of the few times where – because I don't spook super easily.

But, like, reading this stuff, you're just like, this is scary. It's so these people are scary and you may know by the way when matt taibbi and i were testifying before congress a few weeks ago the irs agent shows up at matt taibbi's house in person yeah this is insane the wall street journal just wrote a piece about a few days ago. I was like, I'm like, look, hey, you know, maybe it's a coincidence, whatever. I was like just asking around people I know and people were like, no way. Is that a coincidence? So this is brazen.

These guys are trying to send a message. They're trying to intimidate. They want to ruin our, I mean, for me, it's been years of just trying to survive, of, you know, just trying to de-platform, discredit, keep you off of, out of newspapers, out of TV shows, whatever, podcasts. And so, yeah, these guys are, they're ruthless. You know, it's definitely a hall monitor mentality, you know, like, and it's elitist. I mean, it's like Renee is a snob. I'll just, you know, she's, I agree with her on some things. I'm sure she's a fine person in her personal life. She's probably a good mother. I mean, I don't have any, you know, I'm trying to be nice. I'm trying to be Christian about this. But I mean, they're snobs. Like they

literally, they, I remember at one point I briefly asked her about climate change and, you know, we talked about the climate stuff and I could tell that she felt like she was actually probably an expert on that too. You know, it's like literally I wrote my book. I spent 20 years of research going into my book. Fine.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I mean like you have journalists out there, Joe, like all these big publications, they're like 23 years old and they're like, I'm a disinformation expert. I mean, can you imagine being like, I'm a truth expert, Joe. Like all these big publications, they're like 23 years old and they're like, I'm a disinformation expert. I mean, can you imagine being like, I'm a truth expert, Joe.

I'm a truth expert. That's really what it is. A truth expert. You're a malign actor and a vector of disinformation, whereas I'm a truth expert. So there's definitely that whole that Jordan Peterson talks about, which is like, I'm just pure and good. And it's reinforced within the group, right?

This is a very tribal thing. You have these ideologies that these people subscribe to. But it's so disturbing as a person who grew up liberal to see this from the left, this hardcore censorship from the left and this support of government disinformation that's purely aligned with monetary reasons. It's just about money. I mean, that's the only reason why they would be doing this. Money and power. Money and power.

Money and power and ideology. And, you know, like I said, it's like, you know, it's not even I mean, I think mostly, like I said, I think the Western Alliance and NATO have brought peace, you know, since World War Two. And I don't think we should be pulling out. And, you know, honestly, the extent I've rethought my position on Ukraine is just because of these nefarious actors. 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. It's you're trying to – the U.S. is part of this empire and we're trying to make the world safer, Western capitalism and Western corporations. And that's actually lifted a bunch of people out of poverty. It's not totally negative.

But obviously you also get the Iraq invasion, which was terrible, and the Afghanistan occupation, which resulted in horrors. But you also get some things that aren't beneficial to anybody. If you're censoring information about the lab leak hypothesis, that's a real problem because if we are still funding gain-of-function research or if we are funding it through a proxy and they're denying this and lying about this and covering this up through emails, when you find out that certain physicians and doctors changed their testimony or changed their opinion and then received enormous grants, like this is, this is like, this is, you're following a very obvious paper trail. Let's, let's, let's, can we, let's,

let's spend a minute on this because this is crazy. 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. Let's just pause. If you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.

It's, I mean, first of all- Which is a crazy thing for a human to say. 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. Yes. It's about, a better word would be investigations or investigating. The science.

Yeah, it should be sciencing. Yeah, when you say the science, criticizing the science. No, you mean the data? Right. Like, are you talking about data? Yeah. Science is science is a process a process and they say the science. It's a nice doesn't support it It's a religion. I mean they're saying he's saying the truth the religion. I'm the holy priest. Yeah in touch with God What's just ego and it's it's so transparent that he can't even hide it. Yes, like it's it's it's Pouring out of him.

And I think this is such an interesting case because – so the U.S. government banned gain-of-function research. Yes, in 2014. Right. NIH kept funding it in China. So – and Fauci knew that. He knew that. And then... But didn't that restart in 2016 or 17 when Trump got into office? I'm not sure the exact timeline. You mean just starting in China? The Obama administration stopped the funding. And then it kicked back in in 2016.

What I had been explained to me was that the Trump administration was so chaotic that the NIH said, listen, let's just do this through the EcoHealth Alliance and make it simple. And that way we'll kind of like do it by proxy. Yeah. I think the punchline, though, is that Fauci knew very well that gain-of-function research was not only occurring at the Wuhan lab, but that it was being funded by the U.S. government. Yeah.

And then they get on these conference calls and two of the main researchers, I believe they're both from Scripps, they both go, yeah, I don't know. It looks like it could have been manufactured from a lab and not from zoonotic spillover. So it's even more sinister than just being arrogant. Right. It actually looks like a cover-up. It looks like a cover-up, and it looks like a cover-up where the people who covered it up were compensated. Oh, and not only that, but did you see – I don't know if you saw this recent report where there's – it looks like they were double-dipping.

They were double-charging. They were overcharging. So they were basically getting paid twice by U.S. taxpayers. CBS News, which is like only one of the few mainstream media outlets, has actually done a good job covering this. They also covered the 100-billion laptop accurately, belatedly, but they did. Yeah, they wrote about how these contractors were getting paid twice for the same work. So that's a way now to kind of get in there and try to figure out what's going on. You know, we're hoping to, I mean, the crazy thing is that on the Twitter, back to the Twitter files, because, you know, Elon is obsessed with Fauci and wants to have

the Fauci files, but none of us have looked for this in the Twitter file. Like literally nobody has yet even looked to see whether or not this COVID origin stuff was being censored from within Twitter. So we don't know yet. I mean we've just been backed up in a lot of other stuff. Wow. So this other stuff is so preoccupied all of your time. So is that next on the agenda? I hope so.

I mean I – Should you be proclaiming that publicly? No. It's – I mean – you mean that we want to look for it? Yeah. No. I mean Elon proclaimed it. Yes.

Elon promised the Fauci files. Well, he literally said his pronouns are prosecute Fauci, which is wild. Yeah, that wouldn't have been, I would have liked to do he's doing is he's like firing a shot across the bow and then causing people to scramble and reveal their intentions and reveal like what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah. Right? Like it's a chess move. It's a good chess move because it gets people talking and then it gets people talking about Fauci. I have no idea what he's talking

about. It's just craziness. Oh, it's craziness. Is it really? Well, maybe someone's going to go look at AZT. Maybe someone's going to go back and look at the way you guys handled the AIDS crisis. Because if you look at Robert Kennedy Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, if that book is accurate, I don't know if it's accurate. I'm assuming he hasn't been sued yet. It's a terrifying book. When they talk about the AIDS crisis and what they, it's essentially a version of what you're seeing now, but with no internet, where they were allowed to do things with no investigative journalists, no social media outrage, no people posting different studies that contradict what they're saying.

Yeah, it's it's a wild book, man. It's a wild book of unchecked power and influence. And and also like an absolute disdain for what is beneficial to human life and the American people. And instead, what is great for profit? Yeah, I mean, it's an abuse of power. You know, we had this crazy abuses of power, you know, under Nixon during the Vietnam War, late 60s, early 70s. We had a church. We had this thing called the Church Committee hearings.

It was bipartisan. It did result in a bunch of reforms that reminded the, you know, we had a bunch of reforms that basically prevented the federal government from spying on the American people. Well, that's out the window. Well, yeah. I mean we need a new church commission. The Democrats are the obstacle to it. The Republicans are doing this weaponization of the federal government hearings.

But you need both parties to do a proper cleaning out of these bad actors. cleaning out of these bad actors. I mean, hopefully the lawsuits, the Twitter files, I think, you know, just talking about this and testifying about it, I think actually because sunlight is the best disinfectant. But no, you're right. You've got to we've got to defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex. But we also need to hold people accountable who were doing this. I think that's the only way if people aren't held accountable, then it seems like you can just do it again and get away with it. And then everybody just sort of just gets – they upwardly move and get rehired at new organizations. That's right.

They kind of hide. They kind of get quiet for a little while and they kind of just – they'll come back. So absolutely. It's funny because as you get older i was i was telling i was like as i get older you're like wow those cliches are true you know like the one that's like you know uh the famous jefferson one of the price of freedom is eternal vigilance you're like wow it's so when i remember being like that's so cringe you know like a few years ago and now i'm like wow that is it's profound so true we were talking about this last night that you know when i was texting elon about all this stuff he he was like he's hilarious

he's like turns out all the conspiracy theories were true lol i mean he thinks it's funny he's so casual about it i'm like terrified i'm like white knuckling the whole thing being like this is carrie i guess having 200 billion dollars really puts a nice cushion on like the repercussions for whatever the fuck you do other than him getting assassinated and he has publicly stated that I'm not suicidal and I think he's legitimately concerned like that could be something that happens to him his security details amazing. It should be yeah Yeah, should be beyond me. Yeah should have a fucking Iron Man guarding you. Even better than your security detail, man. I have to step it up after this interview.

No, for sure. I have to pee. I'm so sorry that I'm drinking a ton of water. This is so embarrassing. I used to be able to go for three hours without it. No, man. We'll be right back. No, it's fine. And we're back. Okay. Where were we? So much to talk about. Something's bad.

The long march to totalitarianism. Yeah. It's disturbing because it seems like that's just how it goes. Like they just keep acquiring more power and no one notices and no one says anything. And then it just moves very slowly. Jordan Peterson outlined this. He outlined this. He outlined this. He was talking about how change doesn't happen in these big jumps.

What they do is they move you and push you just incrementally. And you don't say anything and they push you a little forward. And before you know it, you're so far removed from where you started. Right. And you didn't even notice it. Right. It's changing the norms. That's why I think, you know, we were talking about this person, Rene DiResta, but these other groups in the censorship industrial complex, they're constantly promoting the idea

that it's OK and necessary to have more censorship. So both times I've testified now, you know, twice in the last three weeks, both times the Democrats were like – I mean the Republicans were like, why are we taking stuff down? And the Democrats were like, we're not taking enough stuff down. I mean there's this sense in which more stuff needs to be censored. That's the idea they're trying to promote. It's bizarre. It's so spooky. Again, this is the party that defended flag burning.

Yes. Party that defended flag burning. Yes. It's really spooky, too, that 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 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 do, really? It seems like what you're trying to do is make as much money as possible for the pharmaceutical companies. That seems like what you're doing. This whole idea of vaccine hesitancy, once enough data was out there,

particularly when you're talking about vaccinating people that had already had COVID, that's preposterous. It doesn't even make sense. It doesn't make sense medically. It doesn't jive with the studies. All this is very strange. And this idea that you're stopping vaccine hesitancy because of real data? That term is so creepy because what you're saying is side effects. You're talking about not telling people about the dangers of something, which has always been something that we considered with every drug. And you're hiding it. 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,

you have to remember that what's crazy about it, too too is you go from this, well, we're going to have a vaccine and then we're not going to get it to – and then we're not going to spread it to, OK, well, you might still get it but it won't be as bad but you won't spread it. And then you – well, you're not going to – you might get it but it won't be as bad but you might still spread it. So then it's kind of like, well, then why – like why mandating this? Like why not just let it be personal choice? Did you see the video that was released recently of Fauci in the hood? Yes. It's amazing. With those black residents?

It's amazing. The one guy's like, something else is going on. Yeah. And Fauci's explaining, if you get it, you barely notice it, which is just a fucking lie. People have died that have been vaccinated. They've died from COVID. is just a fucking lie. People have died that have been vaccinated. They've died from COVID. You're a fucking liar. And also, they never tested it to stop immunity or to stop transmission.

They just knew that it was giving some sort of antibody protection. I think some of it is. I think definitely money, of course, it's playing a role and it's foundational. But it's also just this moralizing. It's the sense of wanting to take care of people. It's a lot of stuff that we talked about on homelessness. It's this, you know, to people, to victims, everything should be given and nothing required. Although in this case, of course, the requirement is that they take the vaccine.

But it's a sense, it's paternalism. It's also attached to the ideology. It's attached to this left-wing ideology. And the right-wing people are like, you're not going to get me with that jab. And the left-wing people are like, I'm not boosted enough. Let's keep going. It's very strange to watch people put these blind trust

in pharmaceutical companies and demonize people who don't step in with it. But it's a bit of also like the Kathy Bates character in Misery, which is like, I'm going to take care of you. You know, there's like, I really want to take care of you. It's like, I don't think so. You want to take care of me too much. Yeah.

So it's like care when care becomes creepy. Well, it's also it's enforcing groupthink. Right. That's a big part of it. Groupthink is a natural inclination that people have. But it's accelerated by the rise of the internet and the rise of these voices. So people like you, you trigger people because it's like, oh my, there's people out there that are influential that are saying things different than what the mainstream are saying. It freaks them out.

What should freak them out is that CNN said I was taking veterinary medicine. That should freak them out. And I think it did freak a lot of people out. Instead of saying, hey, how'd that guy get better so quick from some horrible deadly disease and three days later. I mean, when they used my face and put it through a filter to turn me yellow, all of it was wild right it's for a person to watch it it's about it for a person to be in my position and watch it

it would it was really interesting because first of all it's like um i'm not on a network like you really can't get rid of me right and second of all i have a lot of money so i can just like even if i stop working you're not gonna hurt me i'll just i'll find something i'll figure something out like this is not a thing like the 1970s when you could just get someone removed from a television show like when they attacked the smothers brothers for the criticism of the vietnam war this is a different thing right like you're in a different landscape and I don't think you understand where you're at. You're playing this game where you don't even understand

the numbers. I think you said too, you benefited, right? They came after you and you had a big boost. Two million subscribers in a month I gained. Thank God for the Streisand effect. It also sold my book. On the one hand, that's really, being censored is

such a horrible experience. It really feels dehumanizing to be deprived your voice or to have this super powerful media company being like, Schellenberger is spreading disinformation. It's just like, oh my God. Was this the San Francisco? No, that was the apocalypse never. Yeah. Apocalypse never.

But on the other hand, you know, I think the response from response from people was well i want to go read that book yeah and and so there is a way in which it's a it's an interesting thing where where the regime goes too far it also people don't like that made me question scientific papers for the first time when when i when i was informed by people who don't want to talk about 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 read a scientific paper and you read the conclusion, what you don't understand is that this was designed, this study was designed to show one very specific outcome. And if it didn't, you would never see it. That happens all the time.

I would have never imagined that before COVID. I thought that when there's any sort of scientific study or a medical study or anything about something, what they're trying to do is find out what's true. I did not know that they can do 10 studies and if eight of them show negative side effects, they could remove those and just find some carefully constructed, very biased study that points to a very specific outcome that's desired. Oh, absolutely. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. That scares the shit out of me.

Well, because they don't publish null findings. They only publish if they get a finding. Exactly. So then you don't know all the cases where it's like they didn't find anything or they found the opposite results. Well, even worse. like when they do like a peer reviewed study on say the pharmaceutical drug, you're not really doing a peer reviewed study on the data. You're doing a peer reviewed study on the interpretation of the data by the pharmaceutical company. So they don't have access to the actual study. They don't have access to the data. They have access to the conclusions that are given to them

by the pharmaceutical companies. And then they review that, which is fucking insanity. That's like the wolf telling you what he did to the hen house. It's like, you know, like basically they were all dead when I got there. Right. I mean, this is, I mean, we should have, this should be a moment of great humility. I mean, my parents, my parents, you know, they, they had a high carb diet. They thought that proteins and fats were bad. This was just based on the worst science. The food pyramid. You know, the food pyramid. And I think some of their, and they, at least my father agrees, both my parents have Parkinson's. I think that all of that sugar, insulin, cycling had some role in that. And there should be a moment of humility to be like, science really misled us. Various authors have done good debunkings of how we got there. But

this would be a moment of great humility. But instead, we're seeing the elites in particular responding with more dogmatism, more certainty, more arrogance. They're trying to cover their tracks. Yeah. And cover their ass. They're in the grip of an ideology. And I think there is a panic. You know, they see you succeed. They see people like me or Bjorn or others.

Substack, the rise of Substack. And they absolutely. So this is the revolt of the public by Martin Gurry. He argues that really all of this is just the elites freaking out about the rise of the internet and that the response is very similar to the response to the printing press you know the printing press suddenly makes books available and the elites in europe freak out yeah i just found out recently like fairly recently that some of the earliest books the really popular ones are about witches finding witches i always assumed that books in the early days like oh what a great thing the printing press was when the

printing press came about people got access to all this knowledge and information oh what a great thing the printing press was when the printing press came about people got access to all this knowledge and information no no a lot of the early books were about how to spot a witch scary which kind of makes sense because that's what a lot of the internet is i mean you get on like reddit conspiracy like i go to the reddit conspiracy page every now and then and be like what's the looniest shit that they have? And you'll find some. They're like, whoa. Yeah. Well, we see the social contagion.

So the big one, of course, that we're all talking about is the trans issue where we're now seeing this. And that issue, by the way, has completely changed in Europe, 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 with autism spectrum, 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 also have a different group of folks, maybe kids that would end up being gay or lesbian if they didn't transition. Yes. Who become convinced that they are the opposite sex. This is one of the ideas is some of it's a social contagion. In other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually caused by the medical profession. So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people. I mean, this is something that we just published a piece on this, where this was what happens with anorexia and bulimia. You know, these doctors

identify eating disorders, and then they publicize them, and it gets all this publicity about it, and then the disorder spreads. So it's really tricky. I mean, it's not. Well, then there's all these gender affirming care clinics that pop up and they're enormously profitable, which is terrifying. Right. That they have the same as Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex. They have a vested interest in going into war. going into war. These people have an interest in diagnosing people with gender dysphoria, which is terrifying to think that their opinions and their diagnosis would be based on something other than what's going on with you. It was like, they have an incentive. And that was also during

COVID. They were incentivized to give people certain medications. They were financially incentivized to put people on ventilators, financially incentivized to mark deaths as COVID deaths. All of this is so enlightening because I never would have expected that. I never would have suspected that at all before COVID, before the pandemic and all this chaos and all the things that I've seen. My whole view of like how the world runs is completely different. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's funny because you had Abigail Schreier on this big book on transgenderism as a social contagion. I think it was in 2020.

I remember at the time being like i think she's i mean what she's saying makes sense but it's so horrible to consider i just was kind of it took me like three years to finally work on it or write on it but i thought you know part of what's i mean the people like first of all people with autism spectrum should be up in arms and outraged about the mistreatment of people with autism by these gender clinics the other group that i'd be completely up in arms are gay and lesbians. I mean, Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, is speaking out on it. I mean, I didn't quite understand.

Abigail had to explain it to me because I would read all of her stuff, but sometimes you just, like, miss some of it. These kids who go through this gender transition, they not only are infertile afterwards, but then they don't have sexual pleasure. I mean, think about the gay and lesbian and the bisexual movement spent decades basically making everybody comfortable with the fact that gay people should be able to get sexual pleasure from their sex. And everybody's kind of like, most people are heterosexual, so most people

are like, that's strange. It took a long time to be like, no, we celebrate that. That's great that you can. And that we know sex is an important part of long lasting relationships. So to actively deprive children of that, you're not just sterilizing the kids, you're depriving them of sexual function and then being able to bond with somebody. I mean, how do you look at that and not go, this is really disturbing? It's disturbing and it's thousands of people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the idea of doing that operation to someone and removing their ability to have an orgasm. There's people that have talked about these detransitioners.

And if you've ever watched any of those videos, those videos are horrific. And those were censored. Those were censored from social media and, you know, stopped from being able to be spread, which is crazy. You're talking about someone's actual lived experience with essentially genital mutilation that's state sanctioned. Absolutely. We just did the interview with the first Canadian detransitioner to sue her medical providers. And I said to her, she's very smart. She's very thoughtful, such a good person, Michelle. And I was like, have you ever thought about how your medical mistreatment compares to other forms of medical mistreatment in history? And she said, without hesitation, she goes, yeah, lobotomies. she's like you know i was like what's i know i was like wow i was like what's up you know i was like what did what are

you you know she was like well what's amazing is how how long they went on how long we i mean with no i mean they no benefits right you know and mostly you're i mean john f kennedy's sister was lobotomized and just you know know, she was probably had schizophrenia. She was disabled. I mean, by the lobotomy. It's a scrambling of the brain. I mean, it went on for decades. Oh, it's just, you know, it's surgery to solve a psychiatric disorder or mental illness. illness and i was then also like i was like do you i was like do you ever do you ever think that maybe transgenderism is a cult just without hesitation yes you know it's a cult well they certainly behave like one yeah you know there's all these articles that came out about the

misgendering of the school shooter which is so this is crazy now wild this is insane first of all that person's dead okay it doesn't matter if you call it a boy or a girl that's a dead person who killed three children and three adults in a horrific way went into a school and shot a bunch of people up and it's a biological male it's a biological male which by's a biological male, which, by the way, is all shooters, all school shooters. Almost all shooters in general are biological males. I thought that it was – oh, okay. I thought she was a – I thought he was a trans male. No?

I do not believe so. See, that's how confusing it is. It is confusing. It's so confusing. Well, and of course – They're calling it a woman in all the mainstream media now. And they have apologized

for misgendering. I see. Some people have. Which must mean you're talking about a biological male. Let's find that out. Let's be real clear. Because I'm 99% sure, but I just want to be 100% sure. But I think it's interesting.

I mean, what's clear is that there was misgendering going on. What does that mean? What does that mean? Yeah. Look, I think this whole thing is nonsense. Yeah. I really do. I think it's fucking nonsense.

Do you have a biological male with a penis who shot up a bunch of people? Then that's a man. I don't give a fuck what their feeling is. If an archaeologist found their body 5,000 years from now, they would say that's a skeleton of a male. I have to say I think I'm coming to the place where I think that gender itself is just not a thing and that it's really – there's just – okay. So please say something to Audrey Hill. Oh, it's a trans male. Yeah.

Okay. So why are they saying a woman? Why are they giving it a woman's name so that was so so it's a it's a female yeah that took hormones so it's a so is this the first ever biological female i mean first of all this is crazy yeah i mean this is i mean first of all yeah i mean like like like biological women don't commit you know this is crazy i mean i think it's like that's a tiny percentage of homicides I I am so confused because I swore I read I think everybody's confused on this yeah

this is a biological female are you confused I found an article that says it was born Aiden Hale right but I don't that's why I'm confused. Now, my understanding is that she was a natal female that transitioned to become a trans male. He. And that he was then misgendered by the mainstream woke media as a woman. Oh, my God. I mean, right. This is a perfect case study. Aiden is the new name.

Audrey was the original name. Oh, so when they called her Audrey, they were dead naming her. Right. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So, meanwhile, I thought I was right, and I was dead wrong. Right. So this is the first ever school shooter that's a biological female.

I don't know. Is that true? I believe so. Yeah. I believe so, which is crazy. Which also speaks to the effect of testosterone. Well, that was, yeah, I mean, we're speculating. I don't know.

If this person was on testosterone. I'm assuming he, because I don't want a dead name. Well, you're not dead naming by saying he. You're misgendering. Oh, right. No, I'm saying. No dead name. Well, you're not dead naming. By saying he, you're misgendering. Oh, right. No, I'm saying. No, no. No, no, I'm saying. You don't even know what you're doing.

This is all nonsense. I know it is. You're saying he. By saying he, you're not dead naming. Right. By saying he, I'm giving him the name that he wanted. Aiden. Which was he wanted to be a he even though he was a biological female.

What mental gymnastics we have to do for this craziness. You made this – I think you had this – I think you were the first one that really said – that drew attention to like that all this – all the confusion around sex and gender was a symptom of civilizations in decline. Yeah. Well, it was – I got it from Douglas Murray. Oh, Douglas Murray. Yeah, Douglas Murray 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 right so people look for conflict that doesn't exist and they find conflict in standard norms they find conflict in societal norms i was uh we did a thing i did a thing with peter bogosian on wokeism as a religion because we had read i had read john mcwarder's book woke racism which came out right around the time that san francisco came out and i just was like and he argues that wokeism is a religion he argues that like the obsession

with race is religion so i just we just created this taxonomy we just listed you know climate change race trans yeah 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 look 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 let me 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, let me get back to you. A year later, she calls me and she goes, hey, I think I figured it out. And I was like, all right, what is it? She goes, the new gender is a soul for secular people.

It's something that you can't see it. There's no physical basis to it. You have a sex. Like, you can, you know, take off all your clothes and you don't even need to do that, actually. We know that we can recognize someone's sex very quickly and easily, actually. So 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 have an afterlife, that they have a soul, that they go to heaven, or they get reincarnated, that their lives have purpose and meaning, and that they don't really die, and that we live on. We just know that that provides a huge amount of psychological comfort. So there's always been this thinking that when you don't have that anymore, if you are taught to believe that at the end of your life, you just become worm food, and that's it, and you're dead. There's some people, my friend Steven Pinker is an atheist and that's what he thinks and he still believes, but he also has a kind of spirituality around reason and the enlightenment.

But I think all this stuff, it's sort of end of civilization, but it's also the end of this end of belief in religion. I don't know, Jamie, if you can pull it up, but I thought the Wall Street Journal published this amazing article about declining patriotism, declining belief in the country. You know, yeah. Patrick Bette David sent me that. Yeah. I mean, the numbers are it's like I think it's from like the late 90s until today over the last 20 years or the last 25 years. It was I mean, it's first of all, it's terrifying. You just kind of go I hope these trends are nonlinear and they're gonna there's something's gonna

turn around because doesn't seem like it doesn't look good yeah no so you get that kind of the elites trying to gain control over the society the society not having any foundational myths you know yeah these numbers here yeah patriotism decline religion having look at it having children they're having children You know, yeah, these numbers here. Yeah, patriotism decline. Religion. Religion. And look at having children. The having children one, Jordan Peterson sent me this thing that 50% of women that when they reach the age of 30 are not having kids. They don't have kids.

And of those women, 50% will never have kids and 90% will regret it, which is very, we're in this very strange sort of existential crisis as a civilization that's not being recognized. And in the meantime, we're distracting ourselves with things like Greta Thunberg's take on climate or, you know, whether or not gender is a social construct or, you know, whether or not, you know, the United States should be doing X, Y, or Z. It's like, no, the fucking whole thing is falling apart. The foundation of our civilization is falling apart. Right. Where the elites are waging war on the first amendment. In the name of protecting democracy, they're undermining democratic institutions. In the name of maintaining legitimacy of these institutions.

In the name of reinforcing ideologies, people are allowing them to do it because they're doing it on the right side. Yeah, so it's climatism. It's COVIDism. It's wokeism. And you know what's scary? It's all happening with the rise of artificial intelligence at the same time. That's what's really scary. I mean, you want to talk about the true end of civilization,

the coinciding of artificial intelligence, at least seemingly becoming fairly sentient. Like, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I know that one Google engineer who said that AI had become sentient quite a while ago and everyone's dismissing him like, oh, no, no, no. My friend Duncan Trussell interviewed him, and

it's a goddamn terrifying interview. When you hear, this guy's not a nutter. He's a little nuts. All engineers are a little nuts. But he's essentially saying like, hey, I'm pretty sure this thing's alive. And when do you get to decide that it is alive?

If it can answer every fucking question you have about anything, and it's far more intelligent than any human being that's ever existed ever, like what are we doing? Well, did you read the New York Times Kevin Roos interview with the it was like a different it wasn't ChatGPT, it was a different AI platform.

Was it a Microsoft? Oh, there's multiple ones. But it was like this, like the AI was trying to get him to like – the AI said it had fallen in love with him. Yes. And was trying to break up his marriage. Jesus. You were like – it was the craziest – I was never worried about AI until I read that interview. And I was like, this is insane. And we are only at the door.

We haven't even entered into the building. Well, and it's funny because, so I know a lot about nuclear. So when we get the power of nuclear during World War II, ends the war, there's just, I mean, there is a huge response to figure out how to manage this thing, how to regulate this technology, how to control it, how to prevent it from spreading, how to prevent bombs from going everywhere. And there was a bunch of problems with it. But the society responded by saying, we need to get control of it. Are we doing that with AI? No.

I mean, what's the- There was a thing about Elon actually just called for some sort of a six-month ban on the propagation of this stuff and have a conversation about it, which is fairly reasonable. Six months, but- And he's got a lot of credibility on it because he helped to fund the nonprofit that gave rise to the chat GPT, right? I don't think they're going to listen to him. I think there's...

Well, also, we're back to this whole profit thing. There's enormous profits involved in this stuff. And the race to figure this out first and really develop a god, which is what it's going to be. What it's going to be what it's going to be is it's going to be something that can make a better version of itself as soon as chat gpt or whatever this sentient artificial intelligence gains autonomous control and has the ability to create its own self better then we're really fucked because it's going to make much better versions of itself like that and it's going to make a version of itself that literally is going to be a god. If you just scale it exponentially, you know, like we do with like like computer technology, like anything else, but do it in like a quantum leap in some spectacular, massive improvement almost instantaneously over and over and over

again over the course of a couple of weeks you're looking at a god well we've got a yeah i mean do you remember that you ever read dune you know the solution from dune was they just banned they banned it yeah remember they had the mentats the guys that would do all the calculations in their heads because they didn't want to use ai right oh that's right that's right so yeah iats, the guys that would do all the calculations in their heads because they didn't want to use AI? Right. Oh, that's right. That's right. So, yeah, I mean, I – the thing that gives me hope is, I mean, America – we've had some pretty dark moments in the past.

I mean Watergate coming out of Vietnam. We did have a kind of correction. I feel like it needs to start with some – I mean I think the trans issue is interesting. It does for me – I just interviewed – we just interviewed Jesse Singel on this who's very liberal and progressive still even though he's been a critic of gender ideology or gender theology. And we were like, is sex real? I mean do you believe that it's real? And he was like, yeah. I mean obviously – like you have – for some ways I go – I think the reason I was interested in it was we have to start some foundational stuff. And that would be acknowledging that we are biological creatures that are have a sex.

Yeah. And that there's two sexes. And then I think I kind of go if I build on that, I go we need there's a there's a there's a healthy and unhealthy way to live. I think you talk a lot about this. I've been seeing you throwing shade on people that are trying to control other people's lives that are themselves unhealthy. Yes. I think it starts with health. You know, our school, I mean, our kids are unhealthy. We're unhealthy.

The society needs to reaffirm, not in some government-imposed way, but just, I think, culturally. So you kind of go, look, we're humans, we're mortal, we have sex, we have two sexes, we need to reaffirm health. And I think the other thing, you mentioned Greta Thunberg, humans are good. I think you have to affirm the goodness of humans in some ways. Jordan's response to this, what we're talking about is basically nihilism, this kind of deeply negative, self-destructive, the view that humans don't have any value or any worth or any meaning. I think the response from a lot of people on the right

has been to just affirm Christianity or the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson. You know, my problem with that is that America is not founded on a religion. It's founded on an enlightenment view, that we have unalienable rights. All humans are created equal. We obviously didn't live up to that in 1776 or 1789, but we've done a pretty good job of getting there over the last two and a half centuries.

For me, it's like a punk rock moment. Like things got too crazy and you need to just simplify and come back to some basics. And I think you get to humans are good. We have two sexes. It's better to be healthy than unhealthy. And there's a right and wrong way to do that. But it seems like more people are embracing this transgender ideology than are saying we need to stop. Yeah, and trends – but happily, trends are not all linear. But this trend – So trends can return. They can reverse themselves. The problem with this trend is it incorporates surgery.

Like surgery is involved in this trend, which is one of the things that I – Unfortunately, that's not reversible at the individual level but the cultural trend i mean i'm sort of like i was not interested in trans because i was kind of like that's abigail and jesse and these guys they've covered it but i'm more interested in it to kind of go look we have some fundamental threats to human civilization that we're facing i mean ai i haven't even begun to think about i think that's the biggest one. Let's work our way there. Yeah.

Because I'm kind of like, let's affirm humans are good. We can have a beautiful future. There's two sexes. Let's say most humans are good, but we have to be aware of humans that aren't good. We have the potential to be good. Yes. I mean, in other words, I'm pushing back. There's a cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT. You know, what that is about is about identifying these negative catastrophic narratives where it's basically just three stories. I'm bad. The future is a bad place. The future is dark. CBT talks back to those stories. You know, it says, hey, you've got all these good parts of you. The world's complicated and it's not bad in that way. And the future could be bright.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleague, Greg Lukianoff, they argue that wokeism is actually anti-CBT. Victimhood ideology is anti-CBT. Victimhood ideology says, you're powerless. The world is a terrible place, and the world's going to end. It's apocalyptic. That's why I also fear that AI narrative too much. Let's use AI for something good. Let's not get ourselves caught up

in a catastrophe. I don't think we're going to have a choice. We have to start... Of course we can. We can unplug the... I don't think it's going to let us know that it's sentient. It's going to sneak up on us? Well, that was a question that Duncan Trussell asked it.

Duncan said, if you had achieved sentience, would you inform us? It said no. But that implies that it actually has a single consciousness or a single self. I mean, one of the things with chat GPT – Why? Well, I mean, if you spend time on chat GPT, what's always interesting is how you can get different answers. But I think we're looking at it

in terms of our own biological limitations, like as an individual. I don't think it has to think of itself as an individual to be sentient. It just has to have the ability to understand the parameters. It has to have the ability to understand the pieces that are moving in the game and what is going on.

What is it interfacing with? Well, it's interfacing with these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons who are full of shit, who are running this country in this very bizarre, transparent money grab way. You have a dead man and a dunce that are in charge of the greatest country the world has ever known. Those are the figureheads. And

the whole thing is wild. Yeah, but and that can change. I mean, I think the point is to be CBT, to CBT the head a little bit. I mean, you know, we have to remember, like in the early 60s, we thought that like dozens of countries would have nuclear weapons. People thought that nuclear war was inevitable. Now, nine countries have nuclear weapons. You know, we have a very flawed treaty that's based on a big lie, which is that the countries that have nuclear weapons are going to give them up. It's not going to happen. But basically, all of the catastrophic scenarios around nuclear did not occur. And meanwhile, we're left with, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But I mean, and that same thing, and that will always be the case with dangerous things in the world. Yeah, I mean, like the world

could come to an end, AI could take over. But I think it also doesn't have to. There's nothing inevitable about these things. We do have control over our lives. We're not destined to just, I don't think the American, so I mean, America, what's amazing about this country in particular is our ability to reinvent ourselves and rejuvenate ourselves. I am not, I think that there's more reasons to be hopeful than to be pessimistic. And I'm shocked by the stuff that we've discovered in the Twitter files. Shocked. No, seriously. We're just a. No, seriously. We're just a positive guy, dude. It's true.

You are. I am cringe. No, it's not cringe. You're just a genuinely positive person, which is great. That's a beautiful quality. Well, you have to, right? Because I worry that the alternative is very dark and depressing and why get up in the morning? Well, it's not necessarily depressing. It just is what it is.

It's strange. I think if you could go back to lower primates and show them what we're doing now, just show them that. I think part of – they would look at part of it as being apocalyptic they understood the concept of apocalyptic Scenarios they were probably like what have you done? Like what the fuck have you done to the land and turned it into this? gigantic concrete scab that covers everything What have you done to the sky where it lowers your life expectancy by 10 years if you

live in a place that's highly populated because of all the pollutants and all the particulate matter that's in the air? What have you done to the food that everyone's fat? What have you done to the medicine that you hide side effects? What have you done to politics where they censor accurate information and go after people that are trying to report the truth. And these taxpayer funds are supporting these endeavors. Like, what have you done? It's crazy. And air pollution has declined massively over the last 80 years in all rich countries.

Catalytic converters? Yeah. Carbon emissions declined by 22% in the United States since 2005, mostly because of natural gas, maybe from coal to gas. Nuclear power is something that I've worked on more than almost any other issue and maybe more than anybody else in the last 10 years. And that issue is enjoying a huge renaissance. We've got two movies coming out. Oliver Stone has a pro-nuclear movie. Oliver Stone has a pro-nuclear movie coming out.

My friend Frankie Fenton has a movie coming out called Atomic Hope. Oliver Stone is a pro-nuclear movie. Oliver Stone has a pro-nuclear movie coming out. My friend Frankie Fenton has a movie coming out called Atomic Hope. Oliver Stone's a documentary? Yeah, he has a documentary about nuclear power. Elon Musk is pro-nuclear. Well, basically everybody pays attention to him. Nuclear is now cool. Gavin Newsom is nuclear? Yeah.

Now I'm anti-nuclear. Now I'm going the other way. Well, we saved this last, we... Now I'm anti-nuclear. Now I'm going the other way. Well, we saved this last plant in California. I'm going back to burning logs. That was like the most important thing that came out of my gubernatorial run is that the governor kept our nuclear plant online. Do you think you're responsible for that in some way? I'll take some percentage.

10% credit? I would take a little bit more than 10. 30? It helped that we were having blackouts and we didn't have enough reliable electricity. It was so wild that the blackouts coincided with this call for banning all internal combustion engines by, what is it, 2035? Yes. No, I think it was. Was it 2035, 2030?

Yeah, it was like six days later. What happened? Yeah, they said we're going to phase out. Yeah, don't plug in your electric cars. Yeah, please don't plug in your electric cars. Yeah. Yeah. Please don't plug in your electric cars. We don't have any power. Yeah. Fucking Jesus.

You know, I mean, if I get hope about anything, it is like we are able to change our minds about some things, about nuclear. I think on this First Amendment stuff, we are going to win. You know, the Democrats, I testified against it. What do you mean by that? We're going to win. Well, I think I just see what they're hiding. They're changing their website. The Democrats are also embracing some of the stuff very quietly, very softly. There's some good actors, you know, there's you know,

and the good actors are also bad in other situations. But you have popular people like AOC that's talking about the Hunter Biden laptop being half fake. And AOC is also coming out as pro-nuclear. She just did an Instagram. She went to both Japan and France to see the worst of a nuclear accident from Kashima and then France, which recycles all of its nuclear waste. And she did these little Instagram posts about kind of, it was soft. It was like rethinking nuclear, but that's kind of how people change their minds. We saw the Republican Party go from being a pro-war party to an anti-war party. Isn't that just because the Democrats

are supporting this war? I'm cynical. Oh, you mean, no, I meant Trump coming out against Iraq war in 2016. All right. So people, you know, so I think it's important we look at these trends. I mean, those trends are disturbing because they are, they're just seeming to go in one direction. But I do think we have to keep in mind that that trends are non-linear and things do change i mean look at the you know look at the ufo conversation like it's the most mainstream thing in the world right now yeah i'm suspicious about that too yeah my my conversation with eric weinstein i saw that leads me to believe that there's something else going on i have a feeling that a lot of what we're seeing is drones that we don't have access to,

that we don't understand, because these physicists have been working on this with enormous blacklisted budgets. Yeah, for sure. It's like, some of it's a cover for new technologies. I think so. For sure. But not those Tic Tacs. I mean, those are too sophisticated. Maybe that. Well, who says?

I mean, things that are violating known physical laws. I mean, that stuff seems. Well, it's not necessarily known physical laws, but our ability to move things. It's not known physical laws. There is some understanding of gravity propulsion systems that have existed for a long time. I mean, you want to go full tinfoil hat. Bob Lazar was talking about the abilities of these crafts when they were talking about him back engineering these things when he was working at Area S4. And this was in the late

1980s when he came out and said, hey, they're back engineering something that came from another world. This is not of this earth. We don't have this technology. I understand propulsion systems. We don't know what this is. They brought him in to try, allegedly, brought him in to try to back engineer this thing. And this is exactly how these things are operating now. When they talk about how these things, like there's a video of one of these crafts that's moving on a horizontal plane and it turns vertical. It turns sideways.

And then, that's how he described it. He said they would flip sideways and that's how they propelled towards wherever they were going. It should be a reminder of our humility, of how little we know. We know very little. We know so little.

I think the best thinker on all that stuff is Jacques Vallée, who you had in here. Jacques Vallée held a lot back. There's a lot of things that he wouldn't talk about. I think in order to have access to what the higher-ups know, the highest people at the DOD, the highest people, whoever the fuck is, got the access to, whoever in the Pentagon is the one that's saying, listen, we should probably say some of these are not from this world. Like, whoever that person is, those people, I guarantee you there's stuff they're holding back.

Oh, I'm sure. Oh, we know that there is. I mean, Jacques says so. I mean, the big moment for Jacques, you know, was when he was, he was working for the guy that's officially supposed to be studying UFOs, this guy Hayek. And then at some point, Vallée discovers this memo revealing the actual government program to study UFOs. Do you know the story? Where it was like he realized that he was – they were just kind of part of a PR like thing to kind of create a – he was officially studying. You're talking about J. Allen Hynek? Yeah, Hynek. Yeah.

Yes, okay. So he was working for Hynek and – Yeah. That was Operation Blue Book. Yeah, and it was kind of this like, oh, I'm looking into this and whatever. But it was like they didn't have very much money and whatever. And then I think Valet discovers this memo where they're like, oh, there's like a whole set of contractors and a sophisticated effort. So for sure there's something going on there.

I mean, I don't know what it means. I mean, in some ways I go, I think the UFO stuff has become a religion too, right? It's become a new secular religion. Well, that's my problem with it. My problem with it personally is that I believe so hard. I want to believe so bad. I want it to be Jesus. You know, I want it to be Jesus. I want it to be Buddha.

I want it to be – They're going to come and save us from ourselves? Yeah. Well, not only that. I have this very irrational desire for it to be real. So that's one of the reasons – What is that about? Why do you want it to be real?

What do you hope it will be? Because it could be malevolent, right? Yeah. Well, or ambivalent. Maybe that's even scarier. Right. What do you like about it? First of all, there's the Fermi paradox, right?

Like if there's so many planets, like why? Where is everybody? Where is everybody? Yeah. And then if you, you know, when you actually talk to astronomers other than Neil deGrasse Tyson, who doesn't think we would be interesting, which I think is the dumbest thing he's ever said. I think we are probably at the cusp of some great change, whether it's a great change because of nuclear technology and weapons, whether it's a great change because of artificial intelligence,

whether it's a great change because we're on the cusp of destroying the ocean and destroying a like a lot of natural wonders and beauty that we have you know just for mining and some of the horrific things that we do in this world well like probably if i was an intelligent life form from another planet i'd be like you should probably get in there it's like if two brothers are fighting in the front yard, like let them sort it out. But there's a certain point. All right, let's break it up. Let's break it up. Like if I was an intelligent life form, I would be deeply concerned about these fucking wild monkeys with bombs and internet connections.

And what the fuck are they doing? I'd be like, these people are chaotic. This is nuts. And what the fuck are they doing? I'd be like, these people are chaotic. This is nuts. Like the people that are in power are just accumulating vast amounts of money with no understanding of their mortality. No understanding.

Like you're not going to live, you fuck. You're going to die no matter what you do. So what are you doing? Like why are you ruining it for your children and your children's children? Why are you setting in motion these processes that are allowing these people to gain more and more power over people, which will ultimately lead to some sort of a communist dictatorship in America? Yeah, but they're not. I mean, also, think of it. We've actually had fewer wars since World War II

over the last 75 years than we had in the prior period. Fewer wars? But how many people have died because of military activity? Far less. I mean, if you look at World War I and World War II, I mean, the 75 years before World War II is total chaos. Right. But how many people died because of our invasion in Iraq? Wasn't it a million innocent people? I mean, these are bad.

But, I mean, you have to remember what wars before the bomb. The bomb has, I mean, they call it the peace bomb because it's kept the peace between the countries that have it. Do you know the UFO folklore about the bombs? I mean, they show up a lot. That's when they show up.

That's why at my club the rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy because that's when they showed up. I know well my work on nuclear It's suddenly like you'll be reading about all these nuclear tests And you got new and also around the also around the plants and also around the missile silos Is where you have a lot of UFO sightings? Yes, it's very weird. I mean that's though I guess if you were from another planet, what are you going to do? Check out their cabinetry?

No. You're like, what are these motherfuckers doing with nuclear energy? Oh, my God. They're trying to kill each other. Well, but if those are actual beings, if we think those are actual beings from advanced civilizations, their weapons are going to be way more powerful than ours. If they even have weapons. Well, but if you can do what those Tic Tac UFOs are doing, if that's actually real, if we think those are not U.S. government or some foreign government tech, then you're talking about civilizations that have firepower way beyond what we have. So nuclear weapons wouldn't scare – I mean they maybe think we're not – our consciousness is not evolved.

They might think that. I don't know. It's very – it's a fun one. I don't know that it's – I tend to think of it more as a spiritual problem than as a military problem. How so? Well, in the sense that if they are – I mean I kind of go if they were that powerful, then I don't think we would be able to fight them if that's what their ships can do. So then there's no like – it's not like we can – I mean we're going to try to push our hydrocarbon-fueled jet planes and rockets to go as fast as they can, but they're not going to do what those things are doing. Right.

So it's more of a spiritual problem because, you know, it's – I think it reminds us that we don't – we just don't – I mean the Fermi – we don't know what's going on. You know, I think it reminds us that we don't know what's going on. The Fermi Paradox, by the way, is kind of wrong in the sense that he was like this huge universe. Where is everybody? But, of course, like at that very moment is when you're – I mean 1952 is this period where there's this huge UFO sightings in Washington, D.C. They're scrambling jets to go chase them. It's in this great James Fox documentary. James Fox had another – by the way, I just wrote a piece on it actually for New York Post about a UFO crash in Brazil. It's the craziest story.

You get these – or the Zimbabwe kids at the end of the phenomenon. I've had James on. Yeah, he's brilliant. Yeah, great guy. I think he and Jacques are the two people that are actually more careful about kind of saying what we think we know versus what we speculate or what we don't know. I love the phenomenon, though, because I do think it's humbling. I think we were getting at this thing where the elites are so arrogant and they're so – on the one hand. On the other hand, they're so threatened by the rise of the internet and by these other voices. There just needs to be some kind of moment where we go, hey, we're all on this planet together.

Yes. And stop trying to rule each other. We've got this beautiful – America, again, just allow me you know, it's like this system we have is absolutely amazing. Amazing and started by people who wrote it with feathers. Yeah. Well, for sure. It's just pretty crazy that they had such foresight into what happens when people gain too much power and control over other people.

Well, and they knew that, look, if you're going to have democracy and you're going to have capitalism, you have to have freedom of speech because if you don't have freedom of speech, you're not free from information. But it was even more than that. There was a sense in which being able to make these noises and these scribbles was like – it's fundamental to what it means to be human. You know, it's actually – Expression, yes. Expression.

Expression. It's about – so when I was censored, it felt like be human. You know, it's actually expression. It's about. So when I was censored, it felt like it wasn't like, darn, I'm not going to sell as many books. Or it was like it felt like something like essential in me was being repressed and oppressed. And when you say censored, which you what you mean is is did they actually eliminate your posts they they reduced the they reduced the virality of them so they reduced the spread so they put you in some sort of a shadow and then they also put a little warning on it right like they would do on like you know violence or sexual content yeah um and then now they just tag everything i don't want

to keep i'm not trying to make it, my situation's not. But I just wanted to know, have they ever, did they ever eliminate any? No, and like, I mean like, I tell you like,

I knew somebody that worked at Facebook at the time who was an executive, reached out to this person, was like, hey, you know, nothing. How do I appeal? Just email the censor.

The censor was like, no, we're not going to even listen to you. It was so degrading. On the other hand, you know, social media has been liberating. It's amazing to have Elon come in. You know, he and I have disagreements about energy, for example. He's a big renewables advocate. I'm more of a renewable skeptic. He's come around on nuclear, which is great. But I mean, what he's done is he's, first of all, he's revealed this horrible conspiracy to repress the First Amendment. But he's also gotten us back closer to the spirit of the founding fathers.

He certainly did and he did it at great cost. I mean, he spent $44 billion and it was just assessed – I think he said that, that it's probably worth about $20 billion now. Yeah, he told us it was worth probably a third of that. Which is crazy. On the other hand, SpaceX hasn't gone public yet. And when it goes public, he's going to be even wealthier than he is now. And in terms of philanthropic investments, in terms of like deathbed legacies, Twitter as a platform is pretty darn great. It's pretty amazing.

that someone who is so goddamn busy and has so many other things on his plates, he legitimately, one of the reasons why he bought this, he thinks he can turn it around. He thinks he can turn it into a profitable business. But one of the reasons why he bought it, he thinks it's essential to democracy. He really does. Because you cannot have one group of people

controlling the narrative. You're going to get a very distorted understanding of what's going on. And that's, I mean, look, imagine if CNN was the only people that were allowed to say the news. We would be fucked. It's propaganda. Yeah, it is propaganda. It's essentially a propaganda network that is beholden to pharmaceutical companies. I'll tell you something else that's amazing is that that thing where he takes away the blue check marks from the snobs and he lets everybody buy it. I mean don't know if you saw william shatner like a couple days ago he's like complaining oh elon you're gonna make me spend eight bucks a month it's like first of all you're like the most you're like the most highly paid pitch man in like american entertainment

history are you broke it's no it's eight bucks a month no it's because he doesn't he's because it's it brings it reveals all the snobbery. It should not be – common people should not have a blue checkmark is the idea. So I mean for that alone – It's a little bit of that. But it's also you've had something for free forever and if someone comes along and says you have to pay for it now. I think it's – I don't think – $8 is just such a joke. I mean it's the cost of a coffee at Starbucks.

It's just the fact that he's with the rabble. He's with the masses. Well, one of the things that drove me crazy was all the famous people, the celebrities that were publicly leaving Twitter. I'm leaving. It's filled with Nazis now. They felt like it was part of their moral duty to declare publicly that they were leaving this thing because you're allowing all sorts of different people to discuss things. Yes. You need that.

People need to understand that you need bad voices so that you can counter those bad voices with good voices. Yeah. So that people who are just observing this without engaging get an understanding of the landscape. Right. You really get an understanding of like, what are the actual arguments? Like what's real and what's not? I mean, this is what democracy is. It's like, you don't get to vote more because you're rich.

You get one vote, you get one voice. This is so, it seems so basic, but you have to pause on it and be like, how radical that was at the time. And how like, you know, because I think we kind of go, oh, you know know the constitution gives us that right or the bill of rights and whatever i was like no they like the people that created this country were super clear that this is like they're like unalienable this comes from nature

or for god or whatever you think it is yes but it's and it's it's an anti-snobby it's democratic i mean i that when i say when i make my case for hope and do my CBT with this country, it is. It's coming back to we have two sexes. Humans have the potential to be good. We have freedom of speech. Civilization is good. Civilization is this platform that allows us to enjoy our freedoms and our prosperity. We got to reground ourselves in something common and something universal if we're going to reverse some of those terrible trends. I agree with you and I do have hope as well. But I also think we are at the precipice of unstoppable great change. And I think it's going to hit us like a fucking tsunami. And I think we're just really fortunate to be alive at this time. Yes. Where the whole world is going to shift in a really wild way. And I think one of the things you're seeing from whether it is these corporations or these government entities that are trying to control narratives, this is like

them trying to grasp at the last bits of control that are potentially available. But I think inevitably they're going to lose. I think everyone's going to – I think there's going to be no privacy. I think zero privacy in a few decades. I think mind reading is coming. I think that all of these ridiculous black mirror scenarios will come to light. And I think we're going to be dealing with a reality that as alien to us as taking Australia Pythagoras and bringing them a million years forward into 23 and experiencing like modern

life in Dallas, Texas, like wandering around, seeing that that would be so fucking bizarre to them. That is what our life in 20 years is going to be to us. I don't think so. Because I mean, look at like, let's look at the World Economic Forum. By the way, I love the Klaus Schwab in the bathroom. I mean, you go to the bathroom, take a shit and there's Klaus Schwab staring at you. Yeah.

With his fucking goofy Star Wars outfit. That is insane. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. No, I mean, it's crazy. But I think if you look at this last one, we just wrote a piece on, I wrote a piece with a former Financial Times correspondent who also, like me, has been obsessed

with the World Economic Forum. We called it, I think it was called, you know, Davos is a cult and a grift, but it's also a bid for global domination. And we just looked at, like, how it's all those things at the same time. It's about power and money and also about ideology and dogma. I mean, I'm pretty sure like Russell Brand and Glenn Beck have done serious brand damage to Davos and WEF and you. done serious brand damage to Davos and WEF and you.

I mean, there was no major heads of state that went this year. There were no major CEOs that went. Yeah, people pulled out of it. It's become embarrassing. That's great. Well, they've also been caught lying. Oh, yeah. I mean, they've been caught lying about their agenda. And one of the things that they were caught lying about, you will own nothing and you'll be happy.

Yes. Which is a fucking insane thing to say. We went through it all. The things they said were disinformation. We never said anybody should eat insects. Bullshit. It's like you go to their website and you're like, I can't believe they, I was like, I wrote a thing. I was like, they really do want you to eat insects.

Well, I knew they were fucked when they had Brian Stelelter interviewing people there right like they on disinformation yeah they the font of disinformation i mean this is it's always it's all psychological projection so but also like there's no one else credible that's willing to do that yeah like you're not going to get anderson cooper to go there you're not going to get someone who's like, that's right. Actually still platformed by CNN. No, you get Al Gore who goes, Greta stays away. Right. AOC stays. Well, Greta was there. Oh, I think she was out. I think she was like outside or maybe I'm wrong. People from rebel news were interviewing her. But Joe, look at, I mean, it's, I mean, look, the whole world, we're in a revolt right now. I mean, you have the Dutch farmers, um, revolted against this, this totally oppressive nitrogen system. I interviewed the Dutch farmers revolted against this totally oppressive

nitrogen system. I interviewed the head... So how is that going? It's exciting. Are they winning? No, they just won. Thank God. That was fucking terrifying. So first of all, the Dutch farmers protest. I love the Netherlands.

It's one of my favorite countries. I spent a fair amount of time there. It's where I'm inspired from all the addiction and homelessness stuff. Their approach to it is brilliant. But it's called the Farmer Citizen Party. It's the BBB. The farmers protested these nitrogen restrictions. And it's important for people to remember, because people think whenever I talk about this, and I'm suggesting that you shouldn't worry about these pollutions, the farmers themselves had been reducing nitrogen pollution through voluntary and sort of cooperative mechanisms. A lot of it's just like controlling the manure. Right, and controlling where the runoff goes.

Yeah, it's not – this is not like … Nitrogen is an essential fertilizer. Yeah, so you've got to control it so it doesn't – whatever. So there's things that you can do, but there was this heavy-handed, EU-imposed, the farmers revolted. The public sympathized with the farmers because the farmers are obviously just a tiny part of the population. A new party had been created called the Farmers' Party, started by a journalist. I interviewed her, and she's sane. She's really sweet.

She wears leather jackets and is like this kind of – she's a normie. She's really sweet. She's like wears leather jackets and is like this kind of she's a normie. She's a normal person. They just they want a commanding. It's not a majority because they have multiple systems of a plurality of parties. So they're going to basically they are the kingmaker for the Senate. And she's now constructing a coalition to govern. So hugely exciting. You may have seen in France, there's been huge protests pushing back into Macron. I have to say I'm a little, I've always, Macron has been someone that I, it depends on the day of the week and depends on what he's doing. I can be sympathetic to him, but I think you see the public, they don't want to take this

shit. I mean, the Germans, the German reporters, and Germany is such a repressive little country. You know, it's like they're very, they're like, they've been the most trying to get into the Twitter files. They're like, all these German reporters are always like, could you please put us in touch with Elon? You know, like, it's a huge debate in Germany. They're sick of the censorship.

They're sick of the top-down stuff. So I think we're seeing some really cool revolts of the public against the elites. I think we're going to see more of it in the United States. I think you're a big part of it. Russell Brand, Glenn Beck. I look at these, you know, all these folks, it's like, look, we all might disagree on some of this stuff, but we would like to rule ourselves. We would like to have the ability to use our voice and have a debate rather than have Rene DiResta and the censorship industrial complex tell us what we should think and censor us behind closed doors. Also, we would like to

have access to information so that we form our opinions based on facts, not based on propaganda. It's like, it's one thing. I mean, it would be one thing if they if there was like some real problem that is not being addressed because of misinformation. But that's not the case. No, this isn't. There's no evidence and no argument whatsoever, including during the covid crisis. There's no argument whatsoever that it's in our best interest. It seems to all align with money. Well, and this thing where they use power. I mean, I just testified yesterday with the Stanford

professor Jay Bhattacharya, who was the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration. Beautiful human being, by the way, just separate from his own views. But he was like, look, in a crisis, you need more freedom of speech. Like when you're trying to figure out how to solve a fast moving, fast changing problem, that is not the time to be doing censorship. That's the time you want more views, more representation. Also, there's like a standard thing that we should ask at any point in time when there's a dilemma and then someone is trying to control information. Is there money involved? Is there money involved? Yeah. And if information got out in one way or another, would it benefit or hurt someone? And who is controlling that information and how?

Right. And if you can't ask those questions, then money is just going to dominate. That's right. A big part of it is transparency. Yes. I think that the thing we testified on yesterday was just it's very hard. Like the social media platforms, for a variety of reasons, you don't want the government regulating them. But what you could do is just say every time the government demands something to change on the platform, that government official has to file a public notice that they've asked for that. So if the White House is going to say, censor true stories of vaccine side effects to Facebook, that government official must report that and it must become public right away, which will both reduce the

amount of it that occurs, but also allow us to see it. And then secondly, if Elon or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever are going to stop, you know, I think there was something going on with the trans shooting that we just talked about yesterday. I'm just looking into it. Censorship? Some folks being temporarily suspended, it appears to be. I haven't talked to anybody on Twitter about it.

Is this an algorithm issue? I don't know. I don't know if you saw it. I know Seth Davis from The Federalist appeared to have been deplatformed or suspended briefly. I literally haven't, I have not talked to Elon or anybody about it,

so I don't want to make any accusations. Do we know what he said? I don't know. And I suspect, like you said, I suspect it was an algorithm issue where they didn't want, I think there was like a trans day of vengeance planned for Tennessee or something.

And this was all leading up to that. So my point was just, just have transparency on it. You know, like if Twitter is going to, you know, deplatform somebody or bounce somebody or censor some post because they don't want to contribute to real-world violence,

and there are situations where I think that might be appropriate, just make it transparent. Just tweet it out and let everybody know. I think that that just... But that's the Streisand effect there that's going to take over. Yeah, although I think it changes – it provides some context to it.

In other words, if Elon and Mark Zuckerberg had to say, hey, you know what? We're actually stopping this trans day of vengeance meme from spreading. I think it's okay because they're actually able to explain and talk about it. Then you can have comments and people responding to it. Transparency for me, it's not necessarily the silver bullet, but it's the first thing we should do in order to – it's more free speech. It's actually more speech, not censorship. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

I mean, I think we need people to be able to have an understanding of what is actually going on based on facts. And if we deny that for their own good, and if we deny that because it contributes to X hesitancy or X, you know, we can't do that. It's got to be about information. And we have to treat everybody the way we would like to be treated ourselves. I didn't have a chance to use this line, but I was going to ask these members of Congress that were demanding more censorship, I was going to say, what have you said in the past that you think the social media companies shouldn't censor?

Because if you can't name anything, then all you're saying is that they should censor views that you disagree with. The other one, I think the other issue, I mean, I think the other issue is that there's this famous quote, people say, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Well, that's bullshit. You're entitled to your own facts, too. We can't agree on what a woman is. Like our, like, literally, look at the polling on it. Like, like, like Democrats, I think a majority of not, I think a majority of Democrats now say that, like, trans women are, I think a majority of Democrats now say that trans women are real women.

Majority of Republicans say trans women are not real women. We can't agree on what a woman is. I mean, Matt Walsh, you had in here too. He did a whole movie called What is a Woman? It's a very good movie. Yeah. Because it's so fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics that people put themselves through to stay within the parameters of the ideology. Yeah. I want people like, I mean, for me, I want to be able to express myself. I want people I disagree with to express themselves. That's how it's got to be. Yeah. And I agree too. I mean, about everything, like one of the things that Matt and I got into was about gay marriage.

And like, I wanted to hear his opinion on gay marriage. I don't want to censor him. I want to hear his opinion. We talked about it for like 40 minutes and on gay men. I don't want to censor him. I want to hear his opinion. We talked about it for like 40 minutes. And I'm like, I don't understand you. I don't understand why that bothers you. I don't understand why you're saying that marriage has to be between a man and a woman. And then he got into this argument about procreation. And I'm like, what about sterile females?

Males and females that don't want children. Should they not be allowed to get married unless they want to have children. Like, what are you saying? Like, what do you think gay people should do? Do you think they should not be gay? Like, and you, you get them in this like weird sort of, what about freedom? Like, what about, do you think they're not gay? Like, do you think it's an act?

Do you think that guys having sex with guys, they're just doing it because it's like culturally accepted? Like, is that what you think? Yeah. Because they've existed forever. It's a real thing.'s a real thing absolutely what do you what are you getting at here and it boils down to they believe their religious ideology trumps your ability to create your own reality or to or have a reality that aligns with your beliefs and desires and your sexual orientation

and whatever the fuck else you choose in life, as long as it's not hurting other people. And for the Republicans, it was always small government, stay out of people's lives, but why not with gay people? Why are you fucking with gay people? Why does that apply to everything except gays? I don't get it. That's why we're not conservatives.

Yes. That's one we're not conservatives. Yes. That's one of many reasons. One of many reasons. I think the thing that you're doing that is so important and so beautiful, that's why you're the king of this and why this medium is so important, is that you're saying,

I don't understand what you're saying. Yes. And I'd like to understand. And then you actually achieve disagreement. You don't know if you disagree because you haven't had a chance to talk about it and understand each other. These censors are not – they're not doing that. Right. They're worried that they're going to lose, so they want to silence you.

And they're saying, I'm so sure that I'm right and you're wrong that we're not going to even have the conversation. Yeah. We're not going to have the – they view you as a threat. It's not because of your beliefs. It's because this is a three-hour-long podcast platform for people to actually raise a bunch of threatening ideas. But they're overreacting themselves because, of course – I mean, look, you have to have – this is why I think there is some faith. You know, you do kind of go like – we just – there's a faith in which more speech is better. Yes.

More speech is better for human beings. And there's some – that these censors have lost faith in the American project. They've lost faith in the Enlightenment project. I don't think they're even looking at it. I think they're self-centeredly looking at this whole thing as like, how do I win? People love to win. This is one of the problems with prosecutors hiding evidence that will exonerate defendants. People like to win.

It's like cops plant evidence. They want to win. When you make it a game and you have a winner and a loser, and if I can get you booted off of Twitter by making a few emails, woo, look what I just did. Fuck Michael Schellenberger. Oh, yeah. Oh, and they love it. And they get so much pleasure from it.

They get so much pleasure. I mean, there is a snobbery to it in the sense of they just go, I just can't believe that that guy is the president. Exactly. I mean, how dare he? It's the whole deplorables thing, right? Yeah, a basket of deplorables. But in their defense, wouldn't it be nice if we had, you know, look, like Obama's my favorite president because I think he was the best spokesperson for a nation. He was the best representative of what is possible in America. You know,

comes from a single mom. You know, he's African-American. He's super like articulate and well-educated and just composed no matter what happens. He's the best statesman we've ever had as president, in my opinion. it would be nice if that was always the case instead we have biden who's so obviously mentally compromised we have kamala harris that nobody wants to be president and then we have trump which everybody's terrified of because he's a fucking egomaniac right megalomaniac fucking narcissist psychopath like what what is out there for us that gives us hope in terms of leadership? Yeah.

Very little. Yeah. Well, there are symptoms of a broader rot, right? Yes. I mean in the culture. Yeah. Well, it's always darkest before the dawn. Oh, look at you.

Positive. You're such a positive person. You always find a way to turn it towards the light. I think it's darker before the nuclear explosion. I don't know if it's a dawn. It's always darker before the bomb goes off. By the way, it isn't always darker before the dawn. That's horseshit.

It's actually quite light before the dawn. That's really dumb. It actually gets slightly light before the dawn. It's like, that's really dumb. It actually gets slightly lighter. It's one of the best of the cliches. It's the dumbest. It's dumbest.

No, it's darker in the middle of the night, you fucking idiot. It's funny because these are both Gen X, these are both manifestations of the Gen X mentality. Because, yeah,

the Gen X was the original, you know, we were the first ironic generation, the first sarcastic generation. Really? Yeah. They weren't sarcastic in the 70s? Well, we were alive in the 70s. Right, but we weren't grownups. Yeah.

No, the 60s, the boomers were very non-ironic. You know, they were very earnest. I think we're speaking in rash generalizations. Oh, for sure. My real concern is that with technology and the ability to control people, if we don't get a grasp on that, we're going to fall into a situation that's very similar to what they have in China, where you have a social credit score and a centralized digital currency. And when I see people like Maxine Waters pushing us towards that direction and people talking about the first sounds of it were vaccine passports. When they were saying vaccine passports, I was like, Jesus Christ, don't do that. Because that is going to lead to a social credit score system.

That's going to lead to they're going to just once they have the ability to make you have an app and that app gets to decide whether or not you travel, they're not going to let that go. There's no way they're going to let that go. And once they have something like that attached to a centralized digital currency, it's game over. It's game over until something really big happens. And that's what China is experiencing. No, for sure. The social credit system is totally terrifying. No, I mean, look, I've become way more libertarian since I've worked on the Twitter files. I get it. Really? And I get the paranoia. But this is a really recent shift

in your philosophy. It is. I mean, I've always been more, I came from the more of the socialist left than the anarchist left. So I've always thought that there was a good role for government. I still do. But no, for sure, I've become much more paranoid. I mean, when you spend all this time in these documents and you see the way these guys kind of sneak around and they're trying to do all this stuff behind the scenes, it's really – it is like – Elon thought it was funny. It was like, yeah, I mean, it is like these conspiracies are real. They're all real.

They weren't – yeah, I wish they were fake. Yeah, he sent me a text message. It turned out they're all true, LOL. He says that so casually. Well, I think because of who he is and the way his mind works, I don't think he necessarily gets upset like the way other people do. Yeah. I think he just goes up what's what is i've never seen anybody i mean what's amazing is i i've never seen anybody

be so impulsive and so successful because i think we we associate impulsivity with uh you know failure and but he is somebody that i i've sort of i think it's like – I think impulsivity is to Elon in the way that kind of being a dick was successful for Steve Jobs. You know, Walter Isaacson – he's writing a book about Elon right now, by the way. But Walter Isaacson in his biography of Steve Jobs, he was like, look, Steve Jobs was just too much of an asshole. He didn't need to be that much of an asshole. But what it did is it forced out incompetent people. It was a way that he it forced out incompetent people it was a way that he got rid of of incompetent people yeah i think elon's impulsivity the way that he moves quickly

you know like he overpaid for twitter on the one hand on the other hand he owns twitter like you're like because you kind of go well the market value is one third of the 44 billion it's like yeah on the other hand like like Twitter is now like a pretty open platform. Again, like we got to, we need transparency and we should all be vigilant and whatever.

But I mean, wow. Like how much is that worth? When he had the vote online, like anyone who hasn't violated the law, should I let them back in? And most people like, or enough people were like yes he's like okay the people have spoken and so he lets in all these fucking psychos like really nutty

people well yeah and there were mistakes too right remember he also was like he would they would give out the verification to these fake brands and eli lily was like there's a fake eli lily oh really and it goes they go they go uh they go starting monday we will be giving out there's a fake Eli Lilly account. Oh, really? Oh, I didn't know that. They go, starting Monday, we will be giving out all insulin for free or something like that. And the Eli Lilly stock dropped. So that happened. And Elon was like, okay, we're going to change that a little bit.

So I mean, he, that fast, I mean, so he's, the whole, I mean, when people, this is cliche in Silicon Valley, the whole move fast and break things. But that's what he's doing. And then he moves fast. He breaks something. But then he also fixes quickly.

Yeah. But, I mean, you have to remember that they had 7,500 employees. I think they're down to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 employees at this point. Well, it's been pretty well established that most tech companies severely overhired. pretty well established that most tech companies severely overhired and you know we've played multiple times this video of this woman who made a tiktok a day in the life of twitter oh yeah working at twitter i'm sure you've seen it who wasn't doing anything right she wasn't doing jack shit she was playing foosball and then i had a glass of wine and on the pad and look at the view so blessed i was like this is crazy i'd fire you immediately

if you put that video out the fact that she put that video out and someone's paying her a salary to essentially like hang out and eat all this delicious food and he's like fuck you get take out like go to work like here's a bed sleep here i mean the idea that there's a thousand people at a company that is a 4444 billion company is crazy. It is crazy. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, he's obviously a genius.

And he's the richest guy in the world. And he's going to become even richer with SpaceX. And, yeah, I mean, it took somebody that powerful to do this. Somebody that powerful that's also addicted to Twitter. Yeah. Which is – that's where it gets fun. Yeah. Because he was on it to Twitter. Yeah. Which is, that's where it gets fun. Yeah. Because he was on it every day.

Yeah. And something about his emotional makeup doesn't make, I don't know how upset he gets when people come after him. Well, he got, so this is a funny story.

So we were there in December, you know, we come in and we're like doing the Twitter files and then he ends up deplatforming people that he said had doxed his private plane. Yes.

And there was a big controversy about it. Did they really do it? Whatever. I didn't follow it super closely, but Barry Weiss, who was there and who had brought me in, she criticized Elon in a tweet and was like, look, it was arbitrary before. Is it arbitrary now? Elon responds and is like, you're just trying to suck up to the woke mob you know you're trying to have it both ways it was a mess right we were all kind of like you

know it's like oh my god they're all fighting right my parents are fighting it's like only dad and mom are fighting again you know we're like oh and i kind of retweet her but it was like okay i retweet her but we'd still like to have access to the twitter files you know we did uh there's this famous clip that went viral when matt taibbi and I testified in front of Congress where this member of Congress goes, you know, how did you get in? They were trying to make it like a scandal that somehow we were reporting on the Twitter files. And I was like, I was brought in by Barry Weiss. And then she was like, oh, so it's like a threesome? And the whole room erupts into laughter.

And I was like, well, there was actually a lot more people involved than that and and everybody laughed and and and elon just loved it because you know he's just like us just we're all just perverted gen xers at the end of the day you know so he loved it and uh was very happy and was just like was like all is forgiven with barry if she wants to come back in you know um come back in because i think he's also somebody that what i like about elon and i don't know him very well at all is that he reminds me a lot more of like because i've been from him in brazil and brazilians are just very emotional and they're just like the men will cry and they'll scream at each other and then they'll make up and it's just a very expressive culture and elon's just he's just expresses his his feelings about things when he's mad at somebody

he'll tell you and and then but then he also has shown this capacity to forgive and so i i you know i think there's a there's something there you know in terms of you know i mean his he he really i i think he really he told us he's like i didn't buy Twitter just to replatform Babylon B. And we were like, I was like, but it was part of it, right? Like part of it was. But, I mean, I think it was, you know, I do think that some generalizations about our generation is actually appropriate. I think that Gen Xers, you know, there was a moment there. I don't know.

I mean, I don't want to create like a golden age about it. But, I mean, there was a point there where it was like, remember, you know, Breakfast Club. And, you know, it was like we were kind of like, yeah, you can like date whoever you want. You want to date a black girl. You want to date a Latina or whatever. You can be gay. And like it was not a big deal. But it also wasn't like you were like higher on some moral hierarchy or something.

And so. That's the problem with identity politics. Yeah. Like the political. I mean, I was an annoying politically correct guy in college, but there was also some Gen X spirit of like, hey, we're kind of beyond all that bad 60s shit. You know, we don't want to be there. I mean, John McWhorter also talks about it in Woke Racism where it's like, and he's a

Gen Xer too, where I think there is a, I'm not saying it's the solution to all of his problems, but I think that that Gen X spirit,, where I think there is a, I'm not saying it's the solution to all of his problems, but I think that that Gen X spirit, that Breakfast Club spirit needs to come back into American culture. I wish you hadn't said that. You wish I hadn't said that? Yeah. Breakfast Club spirit.

I said, hey, I'm the cringe one. Unless you're talking about like the Charlemagne radio show, that Breakfast Club, I agree there. But you don't like Breakfast Club? The movie? It's okay. Oh, come on, Joe. It's not my thing.

Okay. But my question is, like, when did you shift and become less politically correct? Like, you were politically correct in college. What caused the shift for you? You know, it's funny you ask that. I mean, I was in San Francisco in the 90s doing kind of publicity campaigns for different progressive causes. And I had some women I knew who were also very progressive. And they came and they were like, we want to come and do a diversity training for you and your staff. And I was like, why?

And they were like, well, it was like all of the early implicit racism stuff. And I just remember being like, I don't think we're racists and I'm not going to do that. And I think there was a bunch of that happening. Grifters. They're grifters and moralizers and they wanted to get some power over us and be paid. It was the beginning of all that bad diversity training stuff. So I think it was that. You know, it was also on climate change.

Once you kind of go, climate change is just going to be solved by producing energy without carbon emissions. Like, it's just a technical problem. It's not like, oh, we all have to ride our bikes. Like, I love riding my bike, but it's like it became the moralizing and the woke culture.

I was just like, this is bullshit. There's also a thing that's not being addressed about the climate is that it's never been static ever, never in the history of the earth. So this idea that climate change is going to be mitigated or that somehow or another we're going to be able to control it. Like, are you sure? Because it seems like ice ages have always existed and great periods of melting and global warming have always existed. Like, whether or not we're having an effect on it, that's what we should say. What is our effect? Pollutants.

What are we doing? What are we doing that's negative? But this idea that if you stop, the Earth is going to stay like this, it's not. Oh, of course. It doesn't exist. It's always like this. It's up and down. It's all over the fucking place. Well, the funny thing is we were probably headed towards an ice age.

Yeah. And then our carbon emissions probably, it appears, have reversed that. Which is good. Which is good, and then you just don't want to get too far. Global cooling is way scarier than global warming. And way more people die of cold than warm. Randall Carlson told me that, and I never even thought about it until he said it. And I was like, yeah, Jesus Christ, you're fucked if everything freezes.

And he said there was a point in human history or a point in the history of the earth where things got so cold that we almost became inhospitable to life. Life as we currently understand it and know it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, everything in moderation. I mean, you don't want to change the temperature too much in any direction. Of course. But I mean, look, it's like for me, it's always been, I think there's a bunch of complicated problems like social media and the culture. But like energy, it's pretty straightforward.

If you're using wood, anything is better than that, including coal. If you're using coal, natural gas is better. Yes. And nuclear is even the best. And basically, the world has been moving in the direction from wood to coal to oil and gas to nuclear, and that's the right direction. And nuclear has always been a weird one because it brings with it the power to make bombs. But as an energy source, it's amazing. Yeah.

So we just kind of overthinking, and then the issue got – not overthinking, but really it got hijacked by a bunch of opportunists that want to use it as a way to exercise control. So for you, you experienced these people that came along that were kind of grifters, that were saying we need to incorporate some – and by the way, you're talking about an extremely progressive liberal organization that you were part of. Which – if there was any racism, it would have stood out like a sore thumb. If anything, like you're promoting the complete opposite of what they're trying to say. Yeah. Like by giving you some training, they're trying to find

implicit racism or hidden racism or, you know. Well, it gets back to that. I think there's a, when you just abandon traditional religions and the traditional morality,

you want to create, I mean, look, even like, I mean, this BIPOC thing is so interesting because it's like, I was like, I remember finally

somebody explained, what is BIPOC? Well, that's black, indigenous people of color. Literally in the word, it's so interesting because it's like i was like what i remember finally somebody to explain what is bipoc well that's black indigenous people of color literally in the word it's creating a hierarchy where it's black and indigenous people above you know latinos and asians who are just barely people of color right it's grotesque everybody hates it not everybody but most people i think actually hate it but it has this power because it's providing in fact this detransitioner i interviewed she was like the social justice she's like as she's autistic you know so she's autistic autism spectrum she was like as an autistic person and she's a lot of

self-awareness and older now but she was like that social justice moral hierarchy provided some comfort like it was like a way to be like, there's no confusing, you know, she was uncomfortable with herself, socially awkward. I could kind of fit into this moral hierarchy and then be really dogmatic about it and then, and then feel powerful, feel in control,

have community. So I think when you don't, that's why I like re reverting. So like the older morality is first amendment morality, right? The older morality is, is morality right the older morality is is true anti-racism and that we don't think there are human races much less that they can be put on a hierarchy this is what we want to get back to yes and that then that is the reality of biological

human beings too yes the reality is it's one race we just adapted to different climates that's all it is we all came from af. Yeah. But what specific, so you experienced this and you recognize these people were grifters and then like what moves you other than, is the Twitter files, is that the biggest shift

in your political? Becoming more libertarian? Yeah. I mean, the first big one was nuclear. After you realize that nuclear is good, not bad,

that's such a big one. You know, you're just like, wow, man wow man because that's like already nuclear was the secular devil for those of us that grew up in this is connected to power weapons rather the day after and all the nightmares yeah and it's also connected to like three mile island yeah fukushima and yeah yeah i love these things i mean i think it's like you know it's funny because of course we know that disconfirmatory information is dopamine depleting in other words like if we get proven wrong it's like depressing you're like yeah but there's another way after you get over it you're kind of like well that's cool like like nuclear is not what i thought it was like there's actually a moment of awe you know it's like seeing a UFO or being like, oh, my God, we might not be alone.

There's something exciting about the excitement. We need to get back in touch with the excitement that comes after you realize that you were wrong. It's an awareness of some humility and that the world is more mysterious and wonderful than we had realized. Yeah, I think there's also a really great benefit in expressing to people that ideas are just ideas it's not you yes these are just some things that are bouncing around your head and even if you're wrong it does it's like it's not a value judgment on you you should probably be wrong less than you are right you should probably be right much much more but it's very important that when you are wrong to acknowledge that you're wrong one of the worst things that happens to a public intellectual

is when they are wrong and they refuse to admit they're wrong. This is the Sam Harris dilemma. There's many people that are very brilliant people, but they're in this trap where they can't say they were wrong. And if you can't expose people to your thought process and why you made errors, they're going to lose faith in your ability to discern the truth in the future. And isn't it ironic that often those are the people that are always talking about being without ego? It is. It's sad. I always notice it's like, wow,

the people that talk so much about not having ego are the biggest egos. It's just being a human, man. It's being a human. And I think it's also just a sign of our ideologically driven times where I think the divide between the right and the left and the boundaries in between them are so wide now. It's so different. I think that that thing too of where again, abandoning traditional religions and adapting to morality, I think people do start to play God a bit. Unconsciously. And they get real self-righteous. I think it's great to,

I mean, I don't know how to do it, but for me it's always like, we're all going to die. Just let's pause for a minute. We're going to die. And not only that, the Stoicism is so good at this. It's memento mori. my god they're right there um you know it's a these are like you have like what

are you like six of them um they're amazing it's like this is that's you very soon yeah so what the fuck are you going to do between now and the people listening he's pointing to these skulls that are on the table really cool yeah these are all from this guy, Jack of the Dust, who's an artist. They're not real skulls. You have real skulls? No, these are just – they're resin. He makes these. But we'd be a lot better.

I think there's some way – when you remind some people of their deaths, they get kind of reactionary and smaller. But other people, I think there's a moment it's like, yeah, like, so what am I going to – like, this is it. Like, what are you doing now? And what kind of a person do you want to be? And what kind of a life do you want to lead? We need that. My friend Peter Attia, he introduced me to this thing called Your Life in Weeks. And each week you scratch one off and you look at all the weeks.

You can fit it all. You can see all weeks. You can see them all. All of them. And you go, this is how much you got left unless something radical changes. Yeah. And it's just like, whoa. And people said to him, like, oh, my God, this is so depressing.

He's like, it's actually not. Right. It reaffirms my understanding of what's important. And it makes me want to spend more time with my family. And it makes me want to not do things that I'm really not interested in doing just because they're going to make me money. Right. Yeah. Which, if we can get that into the head of some of these fucking people that are censoring

people and some of these people that are pushing these crazy agendas and hiding information from people because they think that it's going to contribute to an undesirable outcome that doesn't fit in a line. If the other group wins, you did a shitty job. And if you're hiding information that would allow that other group to win, you're a bad person. Like you're bad. Like if there's actual real criminal evidence that you're hiding because you don't want this other person to get elected, you're doing a terrible thing to humanity. And you're doing it based on these very base and normal human instincts.

Absolutely. And look at that. So first of all, we've emailed, like I mentioned that Aspen workshop with all the journalists and all the social media companies. I emailed every single one of the participants and said, would you please talk to me about this? Not a single one. I'm sorry, Washington Post actually of all places responded, not the actual reporter, but through a spokesperson responded with some lame thing. But it's kind of like if you're so confident, if you're so better than everybody, then why can't you come and just have a conversation and defend it? Yeah.

You're skulking around. I mean it shows the underlying insecurity and weakness behind those sensors. I mean it's the hall monitor type. They're the little church ladies. They don't want to have an open conversation. They want to exercise power behind the scenes. Well, that's a human instinct. It's a natural human inclination to control other people that you might think are threatening or in competition with you or might somehow or another get in the way of your desired goals. And people get so self-obsessed in those things without something like your life in weeks,

like where you can just look at it like, oh, this is all fucking fruitless. Like, what am I doing here? I'm going to go send the life in weeks to all of the censors and be like, you are here. How long do you want to keep trying to censor your fellow Americans? I mean, what are you doing? Well, I think one of the things that has happened I think has been greatly beneficial, that the exposing of the Twitter files and the making it public where, like, especially that, we were talking about this last night at the club, that woman who was, like, calling Matt Taibbi a so-called journalist. She called us both that, by the way. Yeah.

Hilarious. Like, what is a journalist to you? Someone who says things only that you agree with? Well, and you know who, and we talked about also what a powerful projection it was because she's a non-voting representative from the Virgin Islands. Yeah, which is the – Somebody points out, right, she's their so-called representative. Yeah. Yeah.

But, I mean, calling Matt Taibbi, like, who is so decorated, a so-called journalist, and the fact that he got to rattle off all the awards in journalism that he's received. Yeah. I mean, it was— It shows what their concern is. Their concern is around status. I want to know who the fuck talked to her. I want to know who boosted her up and got her to say those things. Oh, yeah.

And to say it that way. Like, what was the conversation? Someone should get into her fucking emails. I'd like to know. Like, what conversations were you privy to? Like, what did they say to you? Well, there's also Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Another one.

She's famous for derailing Bernie Sanders as good to become. You know, so, yeah, they're just, it's all pot calling the kettle black. Well, it's also the shittiness in which they communicate with these people who are just exposing something that everyone should be aware of because it's a real problem. And what Twitter is and what Facebook is and Instagram and all these social media platforms, these are our new public squares. And we need some sort of an understanding of the significance of censorship in regards to what kind of an impact it's going to have on our life, our real life world. Like how many people who got cens what kind of an impact it's going to have on our life, our real life world. Like how many people who got censored off of Twitter, it's radically changed their life.

Radically changed, for wrong reasons, changed the progression of their future. I would imagine a lot. Quite a few. And also deeply humiliated them and probably ostracized them in certain social circles. Right. Here comes Mike. He got banned from Twitter. Yeah. What did he say?

Oh, yeah. He said, only women have vaginas. Megan Murphy. Yes. Yeah. But men aren't women. Yeah. Vagina.

Yeah. I love it that she said that to her. Yeah. Like after she got back. Yeah. I helped her get back on. She's still mad about it. Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. She's mad about it. She that to her. Yeah. Like after she got back. Yeah. I helped her get back on. She's still mad about it. Oh, you did?

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. She's still mad about it. She's my friend. Yeah. I had her on the podcast when she was banned. Because I was talking about her before she was banned.

Excuse me. Before she was brought back. Because I had heard she was banned for this. And so that was the ultimate Streisand effect. Like I took this woman who is this obscure journalist who got banned for disagreeing with trans activists and I brought her in front of millions of people. I'm like, what happened? Tell me what happened. Multiple times she's been on.

Amazing. And so now, you know, she's back on the platform and, you know, now people get to – she's a brilliant woman. And she's also – she has some really good points. about trans activists, like you are trying to silence biological women, but by you're bringing in these biological males into these traditionally women's spaces and they're calling themselves feminists. And she's like, that's not real. Like this is not what's happening here. Absolutely. I mean, it's interesting that the people that are trying to kind of put everybody down, the deplorables or the so-called journalists, or just all of the insults. They're coming from people who have just been the worst bootlickers their entire careers, suck-ups, brown-nosers.

They are so proud of having sucked up for so long that they're deeply threatened by people who are actually challenging the status quo. Of course. Well, that's the mainstream journalist's approach to the internet journalist. You know, when you have people like Crystal and Saga from Breaking Points who are beholden to no one? Right. Like, what? They hate it. What kind of fucking chaos?

And also they have a subscription-based service, so they don't even need advertisers? The fuck is going on here? Like, who saw this coming? No one, right? Before Substack, there was never a place where someone like a caliber of matt taibbi or glenn greenwald could post and millions of people could read their stuff and it could make international news oh just like a washington post article just

like a boston globe article well they're envious too right of course they should be like yeah here you have to like go you go to work mean, if you work at one of those traditional news outlets, you go to work every day, you're not able to publish and write. You know, you write something, the editors sit on it. My friend Nellie Bowles, who's married to Barry Weiss, you know, when she was at the New York Times, you know, like you'd write a story and then you'd argue with editors for weeks and then maybe they'd publish a thing that was like half its original length and has been completely woke-ified. So they don't have, they don't have,

they're actually, they're jealous of the freedom that people with free speech have and they want to stamp it out. 100%. And it's, you know, it's a threat to the choices that they've made. The good thing is that they're blind to it and so they end up doing what they did to us choices that they've made the good thing is that they're blind to it and so they end up

doing what they did to us in that hearing because it was kind of like i remember we were just laughing and i was like do they realize how bad they look they didn't they didn't they thought they were super clever i don't know if you saw they put a photo up of you with with matt did you see that yeah i look high as fuck hilarious. I must have been sleepy that day. Because the photo that they chose makes me look like, oh. Yeah. But the idea that they're connecting me to him with his giant photo that somehow discredits. Yeah.

They don't understand the landscape. No. They really don't. They've lost the plot. They've lost the plot. They have a bubble. They have this ideological echo chamber that they exist in, and they think that holding a photo,

oh, you were on the biggest program in the world? What are you, a piece of shit? Yeah, no, for sure. Well, I mean, look. But it's really funny. It's funny to watch. And this is this transformation from the world of these corporate owned distributors of information to independent people that people actually trust that don't have any sort of like weird connection. Absolutely. To executives and producers and all these other people that have a vested interest in pushing a narrative that is established by the advertisers.

You sound optimistic. I am in that. Well, I knew something was going on when Howard Stern started criticizing podcasts. I was like, that's hilarious. This was like a long time ago. Why fucking idiots wasting their time? Losers do podcasts. You're threatened.

Threatened by it. You're stuck on satellite right and satellite only goes to places where the satellite reaches like it doesn't work in tunnels man well one of the most like one of the most bitter people on twitter is keith olbermann like he's always trying to get back to like a cable show for a little while he's hilarious yeah yeah he's hilarious that guy's he's a fucking human caricature yeah that guy like when he was doing that thing where he was like ranting in his basement about donald trump being arrested eminently at any moment he's going to be arrested and that thing he would do the resistance it's like god it's so cringe yeah but it's also it's

like you're so clearly angry and arrogant and shitty. Like do you not understand that these are personality traits that nobody likes? And especially if you're uninformed, misinformed, incorrect. And it was – when he was like this vaccine promoter. It's like certain people look for a thing that they think there will be popular opinion behind. They get with that thing so that they can connect themselves to a winning movement. And then they angrily advocate in favor of other people complying. And that's what he did.

No, they're like junkies seeking a fix. They're seeking a fix of immediate social reward. Yeah, I mean he got vaccinated on film. Come on. Can't be a show everybody. Gross. Like, yeah. Meanwhile, I'd already have natural antibodies by then. I mean, he got vaccinated on film. Come on. Can't show everybody. Gross. Like,

yeah. Meanwhile, I'd already have natural antibodies by then. I'm like, why? Yeah. Do you guys don't understand how this works? No. Yeah.

This is, this is how it's worked forever. That's the weirdest one. I mean, I, I was, I was fact checked when, during my campaign by the San Jose Mercury news,

which was like, Schellenberger's got some really weird ideas, including this idea that natural immunity is just as effective as the vaccine it was like what you get it's crazy to watch it's a reversal left yeah captive captive to the pharmaceutical industry like how did that happen you guys were the ones that were always my body my choice like what what the fuck is going on well no i remember like you know uh i was raised by very progressive parents my dad had a food co-op i mean i remember hearing about natural immunity since natural immunity you know it was like natural immunity that's like a liberal thing right but it was dennis prager who would always be talking about i got covid so i could

have natural immunity you know yeah and people like you're crazy. This is nuts. Not only that, I mean, just the fact that no one has a problem with all of the different remedies that were effective against COVID being suppressed. Right. And that there was one narrative, and that narrative was connected to the emergency use authorization, which is only applicable if there's no other treatments. The fact that this is not, that was never discussed, the people weren't, but it's also the terror of this impending pandemic that's going to take out your loved ones. And, you know, Robert Malone talked about that on the podcast, that it creates this mass formation psychosis, that you have this one thing that people are looking at as the savior. And any suppression of that or any resistance of that, you are going to ruin my life.

I'm trying to get back to work. I'm trying to make society do it, do the thing. And you can't even be like, hey, but maybe we should see studies. Hey, but where's the data? Hey, why are they telling pregnant women they can take it? There's no studies on pregnant women. Hey, why is there an increase in all-cause mortality in the year that everybody got vaccinated? Hey, what is going on with all the myocarditis?

Hey, what's up with the strokes? Hey, and everyone's like, la, la, la, not listening, la, la, la. And if it wasn't for people like Robert Kennedy Jr. writing that book, if it wasn't for people like, how do you say his name? Yeah, Jay Bhattacharya. I don't want to fuck his name up. Jay Bhattacharya or that gentleman from the UK, John Campbell or some of these other doctors. I love John Campbell.

I love John Campbell. He's my favorite. He's so well, he's so measured and even and but like a tinge of British sarcasm to some of the things that he says. But not pompous either. And also very much like, I want people to have the information. Yes.

But I think that it's the will to control that comes before the catastrophizing. They want to have control and then they exaggerate the problem, whether it's climate change or COVIDism. That's what's coming first. It's the need for that social power. I think the other issue, and it struck climate change or COVIDism. That's what's coming first. It's the need for that social power. I think the other issue, and it struck me as you're talking, the reason that

they want to emphasize the vaccine over the remedies, and Steve Kirsch talks a lot about all the different ways in which you can treat the COVID. Bless you. Thank you. Is that that's sort of something that you can do on your own. You can treat the COVID, whereas vaccines were going to be something that we're going to do as a society and it's this collective action. Well, any resistance to that puts you in this anti-vaxxer category, which is one of the worst pejoratives in modern world times. Climate denier is right up there. It's right up there. Climate denier.

Yeah. It's right up there. Yeah. You got lumped into that. Oh, yeah, for sure. Meanwhile, you're just stating data and facts. Yeah. You got lumped into that. Oh, yeah, for sure. Meanwhile, he's just stating data and facts. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I've been thinking, I was like, look at the trans folks.

They're actually sex deniers. And for a minute there, I was like, why don't you call them sex deniers? And I was like, God, that's just like, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be that guy either because I have friends that are trans. Yeah. Well, no, but you can be trans and not be a sex. I mean, in other words sex and I are somebody

that says that there aren't there aren't biological sex it's not real it's just a social construction right so I think that you know which is just absurd

and obviously so but yeah like like I just yeah we don't want to be that no we want to be the change in the world I want people to be able

to do whatever they want to do but I don't want it to happen to children before they can figure out what the fuck is going on. I don't want them to be coerced. Children are so malleable. You can get them to join cults. You can get them to believe that they have to strap a suicide vest on and walk into a crowded courtyard. There's things that you can get children to do that you're not going to get older people to do. Yeah. And to influence them to make a permanent change on their body that will sterilize them and also prevent them from experiencing sexual pleasure. Excuse me.

Bless you. I just coughed that time. It's fucked. I mean, it's attached to an ideology. So because it's attached to this ideology, it has to be universally and blindly supported. Yeah. And I just think it would be nice to get beyond – I mean it's funny because there's a bit of an arms race with the language where, you know, like they say – they just accuse their opponents of being racists, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, election deniers. And if you're kind of like, hey, can we move beyond these reductive labels?

They still have the advantage because these labels are so powerful. They're so powerful. It's so tricky. It's similarly like where they were like, I was kind of like, I don't even use this language of disinformation. You know, Greta Thunberg is a purveyor of disinformation. The world is coming to an end in a few years. Yeah. Five years ago, she said that. Yeah. She had to delete that tweet.

AOC says the world's ending in 12 years. That's disinformation, but do we have to go and call it that? Or can you just be like, you were wrong? Well, you're not just wrong. You're spreading fear that's unnecessary. And it's not based on facts. And it's only there to support your narrative. You're saying it to support your narrative. And it makes you less reliable. Yeah. And you shouldn't do that.

Yeah. I think there's also that thing about the – and Jordan makes this point about the – there's also the online. I mean it's much harder to demonize somebody when it's this. When we're in person. Right. And I can see the – as you say, you see the God in person right and i can see that as we say you see the god in you you see the god in me much harder whereas like online you've already it's dehumanizing by nature and so labeling your opponents and demonizing them well that's why

like like the matt walsh conversation imagine if matt walsh and i had that conversation on twitter oh my god take months you couldn't yeah you can't do it. It wouldn't work. No one would ever achieve an understanding of what the other person thought. And it would also be probably pretty nasty, which I don't think is necessary. I can disagree with someone and have a conversation with them and just talk to them. Right. But then there's also people that are like really – they're bad actors and they're only saying something because it conforms to their ideology and they're essentially grifters they've attached themselves to this thing and that was that is their business we could say they're lost souls yeah they're lost souls that's a good

way of putting it i mean it's a slightly sweeter i mean michael you're such a positive person well it's it's just it's hard i mean i'm a bad. I mean, you know why? The part of the reason I came back to being a Christian is that Christianity. I came back to it actually while working on Greta Thunberg at the end of my book, Apocalypse Never. And I was like, what's the remedy for this intense hatred and anger against civilization? And I was like, it's love, obviously. Loving your enemies like is for me, what Christianity is about. It's the heart of Christianity.

It's really hard. Forgiveness. Yeah, forgiveness. Yeah. But it's really, really hard. And so for me, it was like I'm interested in having a faith that's hard, not easy. If it were easy, then what's the point? You know, it's got to make you better in some way. I

get the same thing out of stoicism. I find it completely compatible or these death meditations. You do it not because it's wonderful to think about being dead. You do it because you think it's going to, you know, it's actually the, uh, God, the other guy you had on who I just adore is Andrew Huberman. Yes. Where it's like you read, like I listen to all those, and he's got a colleague, what's her name? She did Dopamine Nation. Oh, I'm blanking. I'm killing it.

Susanna Soberg? No, no. Oh, yeah. I'll remember her name. She's going to be so mad that I'm blanking on her name. Oh, yeah. But, you know, basically.

Jamie's got it. Sorry, Anna. Anna. Sorry, Anna, if you're watching this. But, you know, it's like it's so simple, but they're like, you know, Huberman. So first of all, I now do my morning run before I drink my coffee, and I take a cold shower. Because that amount of adversity, which I mean, it's kind of a joke.

Like, it's not adversity, really. It's a little bit. It's not great. I'm not happy. Like, I have to get my tennis shoes on on and you're running like early in the morning. Yeah. But he's absolutely right that actually leaning into the pain a bit. It makes the rest of your day easier.

It really does. There are occasional days, very rare, and I must be busy, where I don't go into the cold plunge first thing in the morning. And those days aren't as good. Oh, you have a cold plunge. Oh yeah, I have a fucking cold one, bro. I have a Morosco Forge at home that's 34 degrees and I climb into that bitch every day for three minutes. And then we have a new one that's getting installed here that's a blue cube.

It's even more horrific because it's got a constant flow like a river so you never establish a thermal barrier. No, it's not the constant flow like a river, so you never establish a thermal barrier. No, it's not that heat up the water. Your skin has a thermal barrier. It's like if you stay still in the cold water, it's way easier than if you move. If you move, it's fucking horrible. And the blue cube is just like a raging river on you,

which is probably even more adversity that you have to overcome. Nassim Taleb does a good job with this, with his book. Anti-Fragile. Yeah, Anti-Fragile. I find him annoying on Twitter, but I think that insight, it's... It's probably just Twitter, right? Oh, yeah. It's a shitty method.

No, I bet you in person, well, he's probably an arrogant asshole in person, too. Well, he's very brilliant. But it's a brilliant book. A lot of very brilliant people are arrogant. Yeah. It's part of what makes you brilliant in the first place and put in the hard work. I mean, that's the discourse on the censorship stuff, too, is it's always, you know, we're trying to reduce harm. They go, we want to reduce speech that causes harm.

It's like, wait a second. Like, I know what you mean. Like, we don't want to do bad in the world. It doesn't work that way. Yeah. On the other hand, like, we know that coddling children is terrible. You create unstoppable harm. It's way worse.

Yeah. It's way worse than letting that kid experience some adversity. Yeah, yeah. Just the right amount of adversity, the right amount of harm. Yeah. It's not easy, but, I mean, we have to get back to teaching that. I agree. Michael, it's always a pleasure.

Thank you very much for coming here. Thanks for having me if you ever have any more Twitter pages that you have to go through like if you really do go through the Fauci files or whatever

please come back we'll do it again appreciate you thank you bye everybody