#2211 - Michael Shellenberger

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Mr. Shellenberger, good to see you.

Michael Shellenberger (0:14)

Good to see you, man.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

How you been, man? Every day, every day. You've been neck deep in the chaos of the world.

Michael Shellenberger (0:21)

I made it to Brazil and back, so put it that way.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

What was that like?

Michael Shellenberger (0:25)

It was intense, man. I mean, it's still going on. We did Twitter Files Brazil.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

Right.

Michael Shellenberger (0:32)

And three days later, that was back in March, three days later, Elon just throws down and starts to attack this main Supreme Court justice, who's the guy that's now banned X. So X is banned in Brazil. They're in negotiations, but it was very exciting to be there because, and the Brazilians were just relieved. They were like, everything that we thought was happening is proven by the Twitter Files Brazil. And they were just very grateful to Elon.

Joe Rogan (1:01)

What did the Twitter Files, I know about the Twitter Files of America, I don't know about the Twitter Files in Brazil.

Michael Shellenberger (1:07)

So this is like one of the most extreme forms of censorship we've seen in democratic countries. India has been pretty bad too, but the worst of it was that they were...

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Pull that sucker up.

Michael Shellenberger (1:20)

Is it too...

Joe Rogan (1:20)

Yeah, sorry, just bring it up to you.

Michael Shellenberger (1:21)

How's that?

Joe Rogan (1:22)

Is it better?

SPEAKER_2 (1:22)

Good to go.

Michael Shellenberger (1:24)

This is... The most dramatic part is that they were the judge... This is a Supreme Court justice who is basically the dictator of Brazil, was demanding that particular journalists and politicians just be banned, not only from X, but from every other social media platform, which is a tactic that we had seen in earlier censorship files. We had done something on something called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League with Taibii showing this, it was an early military censorship operation, and they had had a list of tactics, and one of them was to get people banned on every platform. So you're basically just depersoning people, just destroying their career. You can't make a career as a journalist or a politician if you're banned from every platform. So that was one of the most dramatic parts. It was all in secret, all open investigations, ongoing, and basically nobody had, there's no checks and balances, there's no chance to argue with it. So that came out, and Elon responded like three days later and was like, yeah, Brazil's like the worst in the world, and just starts attacking the Supreme Court justice as like Darth Vader and Voldemort and doing what Elon does. Fast forward to last month, and they had a huge protest in Sao Paulo, one of the largest free speech protests in history, which was itself just amazing and inspiring, because free speech has been something that we didn't really think we had to fight for. So to see like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Sao Paulo was amazing. I was there with the former president. He sort of sees me, brings me up. I'm up on top of the stage. He's just yelling at the crowd. Everyone's worked up. He kind of looks over at me and covers the mic, and he's like, it's Shellenberger, right? He's like, Michael Shellenberger's up here. And the crowd's just, they knew about the Twitter files. Afterwards, we go down and it's just, it's just a lot of emotion and anger, but also hope. The Brazilian people are, for me, it's like one of the most exciting cultures in the world because they're so expressive. The president, while he's speaking, he's like crying. It's a very emotionally open culture. So now, the question for Elon, they're having to negotiate this, is do you out of principle keep X banned in Brazil to defend the several dozen people that the government is requiring be banned permanently? But that means that 20 million Brazilians are denied X as a platform. Or do you go along with what the government's demanding and hope to fight for another day? And that's what's happening now.

Joe Rogan (4:05)

12 people, it's 12 people?

Michael Shellenberger (4:08)

We actually don't know, but it probably under 100

Joe Rogan (4:11)

And what are they being accused of? That the government is saying is so important that they need to be banned?

Michael Shellenberger (4:19)

Misinformation. You know, it particularly, you can see every country in the world is particularly obsessed with COVID misinformation and election misinformation. So, but to give you an example of how arbitrary and unjust it is, there's one of the members of Congress is one of the most dynamic. He's not actually in the party of Bolsonaro. That's the controversial former president. He's in a different party. His name is Marcel von Hatton. And he didn't even know this until the Twitter Files Brazil came out. And then Elon did release, because the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan asked for these internal files from Axe, he subpoenaed them. So we even learned more information from those files.