Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger
Uploaded: 2023-03-30T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
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?
Like, what was that experience like?
How did that go down?
Exciting as hell, man.
I mean, seriously.
And there's been a lot of misinformation about that itself.
But Barry Weiss contacted me.
She lives in L.A. 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 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'd already started thinking about how to kind of what 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 deplatform Trump, even though their own people inside had
decided that he had not
violated their terms of service.
So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to deplatform 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, you know,
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 Yoel 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, there's all these people used to work at the FBI.
The 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 U.S.
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, it just 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 happen or
many things happen.
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, put it that in
quotes, you know, 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?
I'm a so-called journalist.
I bought it.
You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, besides Trump, it was just he's so
for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake.
I bought that it was fake.
So. So then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New
York Post story in October 14th, 2020 was was accurate, I started seeing stuff
in the emails.
The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, a
call it's called a tabletop exercise.
And it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack
and leak around Hunter Biden.
This is like in June of 2020.
So this is like months before the New York before months before Rudy Giuliani
gets that laptop, the laptop before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York
Post.
Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre bunk?
Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.
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 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
US 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's it really sent chills on my spine.
You know, it was just it was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
And this is, of course, you got to remember, Aspen Institute is funded by the
US government.
Yeah.
Stanford is funded by the US government.
So this is people go, oh, well, you're just one of the responses we've got.
It's like, oh, you're just talking about, you know, content moderation by
private companies.
No, we're talking about US government funded organizations.
You can't.
If the US government is censoring information, that's obviously a violation of
the First Amendment.
But if the US government 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 if you're funding somebody to demand
censorship.
So that was quite a steeplechase.
But there's a lot here.
I mean, it's a lot a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack.
And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, we just I
need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.
Here's the question that 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 a
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 either stop information or
propagate misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?
Yeah.
Yes, that is exactly the right question.
So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that that that Trump
was viewed by the deep state, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon, you know, I
mean, all of the elites and this and you're right.
It's bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and
Democrats.
What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull
the U.S. out of NATO.
I don't think that that was I just think that was bluster.
Like, that's insane.
Again, by the way, I should say, I actually I support what we call the Western