TRIGGERnometry - "Twitter Files Were the Tip of the Iceberg" - Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Receive 20% off Manscaped products when you use the code Trigger20. Check out their products: https://www.manscaped.com This is the first part of a 2 part episode. To check out part 2 go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVeaNSSYxpY Michael Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional whose writing has focused on the intersection of politics, the environment, climate change and nuclear power, as well as more recently on how he believes progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Watch the first TRIGGERnometry interview with him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wbg6MAgMy4 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro 04:25 The Real Meaning Behind the Twitter Files 18:03 How Shocked was Michael when Researching the Twitter Files? 22:53 Sponsor Message: Manscaped 24:17 Collusion Between Government & Big Tech 28:43 Are the Twitter Files Applicable to Other Social Media Platforms? 32:17 Will the Twitter Files Be Covered Up & Forgotten About? 36:51 Why the Twitter Files Didn’t Get Mass Media Coverage 39:57 To Be Continued… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was shocked by how many people at FBI were at Twitter. I mean, we're not talking just low-level people, although they were there, too. But we're talking the former general counsel to FBI. This is like one of the most senior executives. We're talking the deputy chief of staff. I discovered a set of other extremely troubling behaviors, including by former FBI executives, including the former general counsel to FBI, who was then the second, the deputy general counsel within Twitter,

basically, you know, him arguing for censoring the laptop within Twitter. And this is the same person who was involved in initiating the whole Russia gate FBI investigation of Trump in the first place when he was at Twitter. We know that there was that FBI and the intelligence agencies organized a little group of all the social media companies and they would have regular meetings, particularly in the run up to elections. The journalists themselves are behaving and really weird behavior. I mean, when you imagine journalists get together to talk about how not to cover an issue

or how to kind of squelch an issue, you know, so by the time the 100 buying laptop came out, they had all been mentally programmed to view it as disinformation. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you

if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the author of a number of books and the co-founder of the public substack publication, which I read almost every day. Michael Schellenberger, welcome back to Trigonometry. Good to be with you guys again.

It's great to have you on. Listen, we obviously had the first conversation with you, and people can go back and watch that to talk about San Francisco, your book and things like that. But tell us what you've been up to since we last spoke because you've been doing quite a lot of good journalistic work, particularly the Twitter files, which we'll talk about. What have you been up to?

Yeah, I mean, the big news personally is that I was under contract to do two additional books, one on nuclear energy and then a third for Harper Collins. That was sort of going to be the last of a series on the ways in which civilizations undermine themselves from within, which is kind of where Apocalypse Never in San Francisco ended up. And I just gave back both book advances because I decided that I wanted to be writing full-time on substack. I just love the, I love being in the news. I love publishing on topics that are in the news. I think it's a really great way to, you know, for me, it's good personally.

I love the investigative work. And I love, we're doing this kind of combination of investigative. And then we do explanatory journalism after that. And then we also have a fair amount of, you know, trying to inspire people about a more positive project and not just be totally negative. So my friend Layton Woodhouse joined. And since January 1st, It's been, we are now just doing public at substack full time.

And then I'm also continuing to do work with my research organization, environmental progress, really working on two big campaigns. The first is to have a much stronger response to the addiction-driven homelessness crisis, which is particularly acute in the west of the United States, but is also in other big cities. And then the other is to protect endangered species that are being threatened by industrial renewable energy projects, particularly a large industrial wind farm off the coast of the East Coast, which threatens the North Atlantic right whale, of which there's only 340 left in the world, and they can experience no more population declines without risk of extinction. The whipping cranes,

which are threatened by big wind transmission projects in the Midwest, and the desert tortoises in California, which are threatened by a big industrial, well, not one, but many industrial solar projects. So that's what I'm up to. And it's, we're having a great time. And, you know, as you guys know, we were involved in the Twitter files. I've also been a big critic of the World Economic Forum. So I'm excited to get into those topics with you guys. Well, we're going to talk to you about both the cabal of pido lizards or whatever, whatever it is at Davos. But first, let's talk about the Twitter files because I don't know what happened exactly. I spent quite a bit of time going, why is no media covering this?

But it was literally a complete blackout. And if you just watch the BBC, CNN, if you read the Times, the telegraph, the whatever, you would not have had any idea that any of this was happening. So first of all, tell us what the Twitter files reveal, what were there about? And secondly, what does this mean? Sure.

So everyone knows that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, bought Twitter at a much inflated price. told us that he probably paid about three times more than it was worth. He's taken over the company. It's been a chaotic situation by his account, trying to figure out the algorithms. And he wanted to have a fresh start. So he invited in a number of journalists to basically go through the emails and internal records of Twitter executives to understand how Twitter was responding on some pretty big events. I was brought in by my friend Barry Weiss, who runs the Substack Publication, The Free Press. I was a bit of an odd choice in the sense that I was the only one of the

journalists involved that have ever explicitly criticized Elon Musk in print. I'd done so actually for almost a decade, including in Mother Jones Magazine, but also I criticized his statements around solar panels in Apocalypse Never. So some of the people kind of jump to some assumptions that he picked us, picked each of us. That's not the case. When I met him, he said he didn't know who I was. So if that's true, then he wasn't cherry picking the reporters. And even if he did know who I was, then he was picking somebody who had been a critic of his. We had pretty free access to the files. We would ask for searches related to particular topics, time periods, and executives. And the big picture is just that many of the things that people had suspected,

that there was a explicit throttling or what they call de-amplification in popular parlance is called shadow banning. That was definitely occurring with disfavored voices. Certainly with people right of center, it was occurring, but it was also occurring with critics of the COVID lockdowns with vaccine mandates.

You know, some of the most egregious was having, I mean, here you have Twitter executives responding under pressure from the White House or from just other advocates, including CDC and others, to basically censor or label tweets by people with reasonably different points of view on COVID mandates. To give you one example, Martin Kildorf at Harvard University tweeted, you know, not everybody needs to get a vaccine, you know, particularly young kids like zero to five don't probably need it.

Maybe the most reasonable thing one could say about the vaccine. He was not suggesting that vaccines are involved in some conspiracy. I think he even says that some people, you know, that people should get them. And it was labeled by Twitter, by people at Twitter who, frankly, were not nearly as qualified as Martin Kildorf. I was involved in, I did two Twitter threads, the first on the decision to de-platform President Trump. And then the second on the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop. So those are the two topics I know best. These are topics I had not written on before.

And so there was the, on the one hand, a kind of crash course on learning both issues. And then also, I think, bringing what Buddhists call beginner's mind to those topics, which is something that as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate more because there's a shock when you see what's going on that I think people that are more jaded that I'm in a longer don't have. And the first is, I think the key thing for people to understand about both is that the internal Twitter staff analysis, both of the Hunter Biden and laptop, and of the Trump tweets that got him banned from the platform, the internal decision was that they had not violated Twitter's own terms of service. In other words, the staff looked at it and went all the way up to the head of trust and safety, and they said these were tweets that were not in violation of Twitter's rules. So they changed the rules in order to be able to achieve the objective,

first of de-platforming Trump and then of censoring Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, I am a bit more sympathetic to the position that there's some amount of content moderation that must occur inside these platforms for reasons both good and bad. But there is some of content moderation that occurs. So I'm not suggesting that there's no content moderation. And I'm also, I also think the fact of the matter is these guys were just making up the rules as they went, and there's no other way it could be because there were no rules. And rules were also being adjusted to real world events. And that's also understandable. So not, so the fact that they changed the rules is in itself not necessarily problematic. However, in the case of the Trump

deplatforming, my view, and this is now, I think, probably a majority or mainstream view, at least among, certainly the Jack Dorsey, the former CEO and founder of Twitter shares this view, is that they should not have de-platformed him and that they really had many tools in their disposal to be able to control what Trump was saying, including taking down tweets, including giving him a kind of timeout, what they call bouncing somebody, and that that decision was not justified and had really serious ramifications where you're taking, obviously, the head of the free world, someone who was democratically elected and not allowing them to communicate in ways that, you know, really they should arguably be able to communicate, at least if they're

not in gross violation. And it seemed to me that Twitter violated the public's trust in that decision. The other decision, I think, was even more of a violation, and that was the decision to censor, effectively, the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post on October 14th. Excuse me. This was a decision, of course, that also CEO Jack Dorsey said was the wrong decision. It was a decision that they reversed. Nonetheless, what's important about the episode is that the censorship of the peace and then the and other things going on, including former intelligence community representatives, claiming that the laptop was probably a result of Russian disinformation

and Facebook censoring of the piece and widespread denunciations of the laptop story by others in the news media all contributed to the perception that the laptop's information was not legitimate. You know, if you, I mean, I reason I'm so confident of that is because that's how I viewed it personally. And that's how other people viewed it at the time, including my family members. They did not think that this was, who were all Democrats, who do not think that this is, that the laptop was legitimate or that it was pointing to legitimate information. And moreover, I discovered a set of other extremely troubling behaviors, including by former FBI executives, including the former General Counsel to FBI, who was then the second, the Deputy General Counsel

So within Twitter, basically, you know, him arguing for censoring the laptop within Twitter. And this is the same person who was involved in initiating the whole Russia gate FBI investigation of Trump in the first place when he was at Twitter. There's a lot of FBI people in Twitter engaging activities that we still don't totally understand. We also saw what was a kind of pre-bunking effort to discredit the Hunter Biden and before it became publicly known by FBI agents going to Twitter and Facebook and warning that there would be potentially a hack and leak operation by Russians that would involve Hunter Biden.

And it's important to understand that FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019. So almost a full year before the laptop was coming out, you have FBI warning Twitter and Facebook of some sort of a leak operation. I'm not saying, I don't have proof that there was a conspiracy by existing and former FBI agents to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop knowingly in order to help Biden and hurt Trump. But there is a pattern of behavior that is so suspicious, that is so bizarre and weirdly coincidental that it merits congressional investigation. And that is, of course, or maybe not of course, but that is what is occurring now in Congress,

is that they are taking a look at this pattern of behavior. But at a minimum, what you have is the entire intelligence community, many private actors, including some funded by the federal government, most Democrats and others whipping up an absolute hysteria around Russian influence operations. They used to call them psychological operations or misinformation campaigns. And there was never any very good evidence that much was occurring after 20, And even in terms of 2016, it wasn't that there was a lot of Russian misinformation that

reached the American people. The main event was its role in hacking the DNC and John Podesta's emails and generating media attention. So there was, at best, grotesque threat inflation of Russian disinformation and I think some confusion around what that means, along with a kind of... you know, constant escalation of what was meant by Russian misinformation. You know, as Martin Guri, who is the author of Revolt of the Public, which I think is one of the best books ever written on the Internet,

points out, you should want to know what Russians think. Like, you should want to know what Iranians think. The idea that if Iranians are making, the Iranian government, like the people we may not like, are making their views known in the United States, in ways that you could potentially label misinformation, you know, if the Iranians are saying, you know, all, and lesbians should be persecuted. Like, we don't agree with that.

I don't know that you wouldn't call that exactly misinformation, but you'd had this constantly expanding definition, and this wasn't just in the research I did, but in others, that would then allow FBI and other agencies to play an absolutely inappropriate role of pressuring the social media companies to censor content that they didn't like censor users who were not linked to the Russians in any way whatsoever,

but were saying similar things or engaged in similar kind of arguments. You hear this kind of creeping, you know, McCarthyism, I would say, all the time where people people say to me, they go, well, what you're saying sounds like something the fossil fuel companies would say. Well, I mean, it's like the kind of classic, you know, who else had, who liked German Shepherds, Hitler liked Germany. You know, so you would sort of get this widening view of misinformation as this, like,

menace, this kind of boogeyman that I think merits significant investigation. And then the final thing I'll say for me that came out of it was just that there has to be transparency on content moderation. And I've told this to Elon as well, by the way, and hopefully he does it. He hasn't yet. But there have to be transparency around what the decisions that are being made and how they're being made. It's absolutely not proprietary. It needs to be a condition of the right that is established in U.S. law for these social media companies to operate with liability from things like law. for sharing copywritten information or slanderous material.

It's known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They need to have transparency about how these decisions are made. And I say this is somebody that has been personally censored by Facebook for writing accurate information about forest fires that Facebook censors argued would be misleading, that there was misleading because it could lead people to believe things, that they didn't want them to believe, that's a very slippery slope. And that's unrelated to Twitter.

It was a piece of an email from Facebook executives telling the White House, under pressure from White House, and showing the White House saying we have been censoring accurate information about the COVID vaccines because of the concern that people will draw conclusions from it that we don't like, namely, to not get the vaccination. So that's a very dangerous thing when you have people censoring accurate information because they're concerned what people might be doing with it. It's also potentially dangerous to censor inaccurate information in situations where counter speech were simply participating in the discourse and the dialogue of debunking things is much better. I'm not saying you can always do that. It seems like most platforms do not want to allow, for example, Kanye West to post the swastika and have that next to the advertiser content, you know, because,

Versace doesn't want to see its handbag advertised next to a swastika. So I get that. But we're talking about issues of major public importance, COVID climate change, whether to de-platformer president, whether the president is involved in his son's business dealings. These are things that are absolutely in the public interest. And we should err on the side of more, not less information. And when they are making censorship decisions,

they just need to be public about it. they need to be transparent about it. It needs to be someplace where people can see what those decisions were and why they were made. Michael, were you shocked by what you found out with the Twitter files? Because I remember reading it when it was first release. And I couldn't believe it, the FBI, the CIA. Now, look, I'm half South American. This is what you do to my culture of my country. I didn't expect it to happen with the FBI to its own people. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, the way that that people dismissed the Twitter files is they said, well, we always knew there was content moderation going on.

First of all, nobody had any idea that this amount of censorship was going on of legitimate speech. That's just a fact. It was simply not reported. There was no evidence, anything where it was just suspicions. And they were being dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream news media and others who wanted to see more censorship by the social media platforms. But yeah, I mean, there is something, there's multiple shocks. I mean, the first one, is just to see how often FBI was asking for content to be, for users to be investigated, the kind of normalization of FBI and other intelligence agencies interacting with senior Twitter executives. I will say in particular, there were some cases where there were Twitter executives who I think behaved nobly. Yol Roth is somebody who was the head of trust and safety at Twitter

and he was demonized kind of early on in the Twitter files process. But there were many times where he pushed back against the intelligence agencies. However, he did ultimately cave in on two of the big issues. I view Yol Roth as a very interesting kind of company man. You know, like he was kind of a real professional, but it shows the limits of what real professionals do in situations where they're under really intense pressure. And all the way to the point where I was describing where you see the Facebook executive

sort of being like, oh, please, White House, see how good of a job we've done censoring content on vaccines. So that's very, very shocking. I was shocked by how many people at FBI were at Twitter. I mean, we're not talking just low-level people, although they were there too, but we're talking the former general counsel to FBI. This is like one of the most senior executives. We're talking the deputy chief of staff. That's arguably the third most important person. I mean, both of them are arguably the third most important people at FBI, when you really understand how political the director is and how, and the kind of the lack of clarity we have about whether things are being compartmentalized or not,

it is shocking. To give you one example, I mean, just to come back to the laptop, there's this problem in intelligence agencies where we know after, during 9-11 and the run up to 9-11, that there were people in intelligence agencies who knew that an attack on the Twin Towers was being planned, but they were so compartmentalized or stovepiped that that information, didn't get to the right people. So this huge effort after 9-11 to go and to go and break down those stove pipes. That's why they, part of the reason, they created the Department of Homeland Security. Where here you have a situation where FBI is in the possession of the Hunter Biden laptop on the one hand. And there are other FBI agents who are telling Facebook and Twitter that there could be a leak,

a Russian hack and leak operation of information relating to Hunter Biden. That is extremely suspicious. Now, response, the mainstream response would be, well, that's okay because those, that's compartmentalized. The people who were warning of the Russian disinformation probably had no idea or had no idea that they had the Hunter Biden laptop. But then that raises other concerns. Like if you have the Hunter Biden laptop and you've got people going around, they're saying, oh, we have Russian disinfo on Hunter Biden. Wouldn't you want to know that other people in the agency had the Hunter Biden laptop?

That's an important question that would need to be asked. Nobody's asked it. No one's investigated it. So I found that really shocking. You know, I mean, there's other stuff that I think other people have found shocking, like the level of just conformity and unanimity around issues like gender ideology, around the kind of conflating of conservative views with hate speech, the kind of conflating of questioning whether the vaccine is appropriate for everybody,

with vaccine misinformation or denial, that surprised me less because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, I mean, like, I think Matt Taii posted, I think I reposted, something like it was like 98 or 99% of Twitter staff political donations are to Democrats. So, I mean, the culture is just monolithically, hegemonically woke. So that surprised me less, but definitely the engagement. of the intelligence agencies, I found rather shocking and disturbing. groomed for the ladies.

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Michael, one of the things that I find very, very concerning. Indeed, you've talked a little bit about it, but it's the collusion. between government, intelligence agencies, and big tech companies to the point where it's kind of hard to know where one ends and another begins because there will be a revolving door between them. And, you know, I didn't realize America was a country

in which the White House told, you know, journalists what they're allowed to say in the public space, which is effectively what happened, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So this is, there's a lot of, to unpack actually in that. So we have Supreme Court rulings that are basically there to prevent the, and there's a lot of them over hundreds of years, right? So it's not, I'm not going to say the

final word on it. But generally, you don't, we don't allow the federal government to exercise undue pressure on people to censor their speech. So then the question is kind of what is that? of course, the people that work at the government, the president, the press secretary, the heads of different agencies, they have speech rights too. And so they can go out and they can say, Facebook shouldn't publish this. You know, so you kind of go, are you free to say that? You know, you kind of go, well, I guess so. I mean, the sense that they can kind of say, they say the New York Times, you know, shouldn't say that or the Washington. You just sort of, that's what politicians do. And we actually give politicians.

and elected officials quite a bit of freedom of speech for themselves. You know, so it's also, so I guess it's more of a kind of, you know, the definition of pornography, as you know, when you see it, when you see the White House doing, I'll give you this, this really specific kind of series of events, you see the White House and members of Congress threatening to take away from Facebook and Twitter this Section 230 provision, which means that they, which is basically what allowed, the legal basis for. for the existence of social media companies. If Washington Posts makes some outrageous accusation

against me and it harms me, I can sue. Those laws are obviously much more strong in Britain than in the United States, but we still have the same rules. If somebody does that on Twitter, I can ask Twitter to take it down, but Twitter is not responsible for that. That's a big difference between a traditional media organization and a media platform.

When you start getting, so you can see how quickly and how easily you move from, the New York Times is wrong when they said that to Facebook shouldn't, you know, or Twitter shouldn't publish that New York Post piece. You're moving from media to platform. And most people just are regular experience of it. We don't experience those as sort of different things. It's kind of like, yeah, I go read Twitter. I read the New York Times.

These are all the same thing. You get them sort of threatening to take away that Section 230 because of concerns around so-called vaccine misinformation. And then it's relentless, and there's other people that were just more aggressive. There's this guy in particular, Andy Slavitt, who's just a demagogic activist, zealot, frankly, demanding that this guy, Alex Berenson, who, by the way, I mostly don't agree with, or maybe I agree with him on like 50% of his writings, just demanding that he be deep platform from Twitter, which they did, Berenson actually sued.

And so we actually have all of his internal information from Twitter from his lawsuit, and we were able to see how it related to the stuff that we saw. But you see them pressuring that or saying to Facebook, you've got to stop this accurate information about vaccines from spreading because it could lead to vaccine hesitancy. You kind of go, that just like, you know, it has to get in front of a court and there is court cases on it. But I just think as an ordinary, you kind of go, that crossed the line, you know,

that sort of population of events. It's not to say it's always going to cross. the line or that there's some easy thing, but you kind of go, this intense pressure, particularly to censor accurate information and with the threat of taking away what is the legal basis of these corporations strikes me as potential First Amendment violations. Right. And Michael, the other thing I wanted to ask you is in this situation, one of the big concerns for me is that we know for a fact that all of these social media companies, not just Twitter but Facebook and, you know, obviously Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and others,

they would meet together and come up with strategy. So it's not an accident that Donald Trump was deplatform from several things at once, right? So is it reasonable to assume that what was happening at Twitter, and we now know what was happening in Twitter because a guy that wasn't part of the system bought it, is almost certainly what was happening at Facebook and what was happening at YouTube and probably continues to happen on those platforms. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we know that there was that FBI and the intelligence agencies organized a little

group of all the social media companies, and they would have regular meetings, particularly in the run-up to elections. And just as a kind of, I'm a trained anthropologist. And so as an anthropologist, you kind of go, what they're sort of doing is they're kind of trying to create a culture. And the culture they're trying to create, or a sort of a tribe, you know, and there's trying to, and we know how that works psychologically, right? So you're starting to kind of get this inappropriate levels of identification with the intelligence agencies, and it's sort of like

all of us good people on the side of protecting the, you know, the children, you know, the public. It's very paternalistic from this dangerous misinformation from malevolent actors. You know, that was kind of the picture that they're sort of trying to construct deliberately or accidentally. That's sort of coming from these intelligence agencies. It's also coming from these, frankly, very suspicious and in many cases, noxious bad actors who are private organizations receiving federal funding, includes the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization called Graphica. Some of them did some probably okay work, but they were involved in this thing of like, there's something really fundamentally wrong where it's like you kind of go, and I see it with journalists too, they go,

oh, I'm an expert on misinformation. It's like, no, you're 25 years old. You don't have any. You can't just go and be like, I'm an expert in all misinformation. I mean, like, it's so weird when you think about it. It's sort of like, I'm the truth teller. You know, I'm here to, and you guys are all suspicious. It's like, I worked on like Apocalypse Never, my book on the environment was literally

20 years of life experience. It has 1,200 footnotes. You can imagine it's like, you might disagree with it or whatever. we can disagree over the evidence, but to go and have some, you know, like just someone that doesn't know the topic at all, they're basically just going, they're allowing basically special interest to then control what is allowable. So I don't even get, it's not like I even get to have a debate with my, with my star chamber of accusers. You know, I tried to appeal their censorship of me and they said, would go talk to the censor. I mean, the Inquisition had a better

appellate process than that, you know? So, So you sort of get this kind of creepy organization of this kind of star chamber or star chambers. And then like you said, yeah, there's people revolving in and out. It's both from the government to the social media companies to these nonprofits that are funded by the government. You get a strong alliance with the Democrats in the Senate who were really trying to control it. I'm not saying there weren't some bad things done by Republicans, even Trump when he was president. but it was clearly coming from the woke, progressive national security left, as strange as that may seem. It's such a bizarre thing.

And also as well, Michael, the thing that I find really troubling about this entire story is that it didn't get basically the response that it deserved. And there's a part of me thinking, do you think that this is just going to go away and we're never going to really find a, out the answer and there's going to be a cover-up. Well, that's a very interesting question. So, I mean, if you look at how it's developing, there's so many different kind of threads here as well. But so, I mean, I think we know like historians, you know, I've done a lot of stuff on nuclear, as you guys know, like after World War II and whatever. And it's like, there's just a lot of information would come out decades later and years later. So as a historian, you look back, you do have some confidence that more and more information will come out. And so we're still in early

days, right? I mean, Elon, we were just there in December. So we were like two months, less than two months from when we started looking through the files. You have congressional investigations beginning. And then there's other things that are sort of, there's other things that are not exactly like investigative work. Like I was making a big deal of, we're going on a piece that we're going to publish today about a major four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review, which is like the most important kind of journalist magazine in the United States, in part because it's at Columbia University, which gives out the Pulitzer Prize, which is our highest journalism award. It was a four-part series just absolutely

just trashing the media's coverage of alleged Trump-Russia collusion, sometimes called Russia-Gate. That piece was, I mean, for me, too, it just was sort of game-changing in the ways in which it not only debunked a lot of that stuff, because some of it had been debunked already, but the way it kind of put it together and exposed how the media was doing it. So, Francis, I guess an answer to your question, I'm actually pretty confident that more information is going to come out through these investigations and other investigations. I also think that you sort of, like, because there was a thing where we were sort of just trying to kind of, there's a way, because like, people were like, how did it work? And it was like, it was kind of a smash and grab operation

at Twitter. You know, we'd be like, can we need these files? And you get these files and you're going through them in because people were like, were they filtering the files for you. And there was no way. I mean, they were giving us these huge, like, they just didn't have enough staff barely to do the searches. And they were. giving them to us. And then we're kind of going through them and we're reporting on them. But it's taken me some time, and I've got more to say about it, of what I think some of the implications are and how these things kind of were connected to each other over time. You know, one of the things I discovered in the Twitter files was that the Aspen Institute

had organized what they call a tabletop exercise, which is like a workshop that included the heads of trust and safety at Facebook and Twitter, the top national security. journalist at the New York Times and the Washington Post to basically do an exercise about how to how to not cover a Russian leak of information relating to Hunter Biden. They did it on a phone call and in person, I believe, in August and October. And it was the weirdest. I mean, it gave me chills. It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. I was kind of like, boy, if that was being really run by FBI, that's election interference and interference in their operations. of a journalist organization.

The journalists themselves are behaving in really weird behavior. I mean, when you imagine journalists get together to talk about how not to cover an issue or how to kind of squelch an issue, you know, so by the time the 100 buying laptop came out, they had all been mentally programmed to view it as disinformation. I have still, just because of other things, I still have not yet reached out to the people involved in that tabletop exercise to ask them what the fuck was going on. because they need to be asked. So it's a long way of answering question, Francis,

but I don't think that this is over at all. I do think we're still at the very beginning. I think there's a lot of work here for historians, for journalists, for media critics, and others. You know, even my own reporting, I have to go back and reread my Twitter files to remember there's so many details. There's so many things that you discover later.

So, no, I think we're at the very beginning. I think it's very exciting too because, you know, Elon, who obviously I don't agree with on everything, is still making those Twitter files available. So more searches are still possible. Yeah. And Michael, I want to move on to Davos, the WF and the Great Reset and all that. But before we do, one final question, just on the journalism side of things, I'm not naive as naive as I was five years ago when we started the show. and yet I still thought this story coming out would get massive coverage in the mainstream media

around the world. And I put it on my Twitter and the tweets were very popular because I think a lot of people felt the same. Day after day, Twitter files after Twitter files, I would look on the BBC, the Telegraph, the Times, the Guardian, all the big newspapers in the UK

and a lot of the ones in the United States. and they would talk about, you know, Elon Musk fired some cleaners who are upset now. You know, here's 10 cool things you didn't know about Elon Musk and whatever, but not one of them covered the Twitter files at all. How is that possible? How did that happen? Are the three of us insane? Are we the crazy ones?

Are we obsessed about this stuff that no one cares about? Is that what's happening here? Because either I'm insane or something seriously weird is going on here. No. I mean, not like that, but there was some polling done by Harvard around the Twitter file. So first of all, the shocking thing is how many people did hear about the Twitter files, despite it not being in the news media. On my Twitter thread, which was not the biggest, but one of the top biggest ones, 100 million people viewed it. And I was like, when I was at Christmas with my family, I was like, yeah, 100 million people read my Twitter thread and not one of them is in my family. Literally like nobody in my like literally like nobody in my family knew about the Twitter files.

Even though I had done it and I already sent it out to my email, they just literally, so you kind of go, who's censoring what? I mean, my progressive friends and family are censoring. Then the news media are censoring. You know, and you know, it was covered in the Washington Post very dismissively, just sort of saying that there was nothing new here. you know, that we always knew there's content moderation or Michael Schellenberger is alleging a conspiracy and there's no evidence of a conspiracy, you know, as opposed to like, you know, I'm very clear, I'm not saying I have proof. I'm saying there's a pattern of events and information that is extremely suspicious and merits further investigation. And then, of course,

they say these investigations are just witch hunts. So yeah, I mean, it's shocking. We should continue to be outraged. I think it's a permanent feature now of the media environment, that there's this level of fragmentation and censorship. And, you know, like I mentioned this Columbia Journalism Review article about Russia Gate that came out yesterday, media haven't written about that either. I suspect they won't. And so I think that older journalism, which was attempting to be fair and objective and give voice to both sides, is really gone. And that to the extent to which people want diversity in their media diet, they just have to get it from different outlets. Davos is a grift and a cult,

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