#1963 - Michael Shellenberger

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Good to see you again.

Michael Shellenberger (0:14)

Thanks for having me back.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

My pleasure.

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?

Michael Shellenberger (0:27)

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 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 seventh 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, there's people always ask questions about the 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, this guy named Joel Roth, who, you know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in, he was very progressive. But over time, we just kept finding like this weird, like, FBI wants us to do this, you know, there's these other government agencies, oh, you know, this, 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 US government officials, US government contractors, and all of these super sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people. 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 US government during the War on Terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns, and it became clear to us 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.

Joe Rogan (4:07)

Do we know when this began?

When did they infiltrate these organizations? Because I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right?

Michael Shellenberger (4:16)

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.