Joe Rogan Experience #1963 - Michael Shellenberger

Shellenberger recounts how he was brought in by Bari Weiss to report on Elon Musk's Twitter Files and what he found: a sprawling 'censorship industrial complex' of US government agencies, contractors, and government-funded nonprofits pressuring social media platforms to censor Americans. He walks through three major disinformation campaigns he says were run by the government and its allies, the Russia 'hoax,' the Hunter Biden laptop, and COVID origins and vaccine side effects. He profiles figures like Renee DiResta and Stanford's Election Integrity and Virality Projects, arguing they flagged and got tens of millions of posts censored with no accountability. The conversation broadens into nuclear power's renaissance, gender ideology and detransitioners, the decline of patriotism and religion, AI risk, UFOs, and Shellenberger's shift toward libertarianism. Throughout he frames free speech and biological reality as foundations a fracturing civilization must reclaim.

• DHS created CISA and the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force to police domestic speech on social platforms.
  00:05:43
• The Aspen Institute ran a June 2020 'tabletop exercise' to pre-bunk a Hunter Biden hack-and-leak months before the laptop surfaced.
  00:07:47
• Former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, then at Twitter, repeatedly pushed to censor the New York Post Hunter Biden story.
  00:23:59
• Facebook censored accurate COVID vaccine side-effect information under pressure from the Biden White House.
  00:27:06
• A firm tied to Renee DiResta, New Knowledge, was caught running fake Facebook pages and fake Russian-bot activity against Roy Moore in Alabama.
  00:31:49
• The Election Integrity Project flagged a database of over a billion social media posts and got tens of millions censored in 2020.
  00:34:55
• Facebook censored Shellenberger's own viral climate article after his book Apocalypse Never came out.
  00:35:56
• An IRS agent showed up at Matt Taibbi's house in person the day he testified to Congress.
  00:42:39

• The internet and Google originated as spin-offs of US Department of Defense projects.
  00:16:09
• Section 230, passed in 1996, is the liability protection that allows Google, Facebook, and Twitter to exist.
  00:17:10
• DiResta got a computer science degree from SUNY Stony Brook, a major NSA recruiting school, and worked at Jane Street.
  00:30:45
• The phrase 'censorship industrial complex' echoes Eisenhower's farewell warning about the military-industrial complex.
  00:39:01
• A statistic cited from Jordan Peterson: ~50% of women are childless at 30, half of them never have kids, and 90% regret it.
  01:18:32
• Nuclear power is enjoying a renaissance, with pro-nuclear documentaries from Oliver Stone and Frankie Fenton (Atomic Hope).
  01:31:37
• There have been fewer wars and far fewer war deaths since WWII; nine countries have nuclear weapons versus 1960s predictions of dozens.
  01:39:32
• Walter Isaacson was writing a biography of Elon Musk at the time of recording.
  02:09:42
• A fake verified Eli Lilly account tweeting free insulin caused the company's stock to drop after Twitter's verification rollout.
  02:11:15
• Shellenberger adopted an Andrew Huberman-inspired routine: a morning run before coffee plus a cold shower for beneficial adversity.
  02:45:23

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