#87 Michael Shellenberger - Elon Musk, Twitter Files and Media Collapse | Part 2

Michael Shellenberger is an award winning Journalist and best selling Author. He is best known for his book "San Fransicko," a cautionary tale of how progressives ruin cities. In part two, Michael and Shawn discuss the dissolution of partisan lines in the U. S. political system. Michael outlines the damage disinformation has done to the country's institutions and the erosion of public trust. Shawn and Michael cover the infamous "Twitter files" and the roles of faith and free will in a modern democracy. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://1sthphorm.com/srs https://puretalk.com/ryan Michael Shellenberger Links: X - https://twitter.com/shellenberger IG - https://www.instagram.com/shellenberger Substack - Public. Substack.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Previously on The Sean Ryan Show.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  We've got to clean up these institutions. You've got to remove the narcissists and the psychopaths who run them. Got to remove the narcissists and psychopaths from political office because they only serve themselves and they're weaponizing these institutions. So for me, that's the right path forward. And you need it at every level of our society, federal, state, and local. And you need it in the culture. And that's why, I mean, it's why I love talking to you and love seeing the stuff that you're doing is to rehumanize the people that are doing the hard work, the people that are protecting our country, you know, the people that are serving in our military, serving as police officers, working at the power plants, working at the feedlots, you know, doing the Lord's work and not getting the respect that they deserve from the society.

• 1:53Shawn Ryan?

  I think that, you know, we were batting around right and left stuff. I think that, I think the party lines are just becoming very blurred and it's, anybody who actually takes a moment to think about how things are panning out. I mean, it's, it's starting to look like one big team to me, one big uniparty.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:20Shawn Ryan?

  And, and in, in, the major question I have is we see extremism on the right, we see extremism on the left, we don't see, we don't see a lot of middle of the rotors. Now, I think that the middle of the rotors, you know, the moderates on both sides are, I just don't feel like it's being covered, you know? What do you think? Are the, are the moderates still the majority? Or is the majority of the left extreme left? Is the majority of the right extreme right? Because that's all we're being fed.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the moderates have disappeared. I mean, the original moderates, and it's in part because they were overtaken by reality.

• 3:12Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  You know, the moderates among Republicans got us into a really bad war.

• 3:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  You know, the so-called moderates on the left enabled addiction. You know, they, I mean, remember Biden, who was always considered a moderate Democrat, has done more to weaponize the federal government than any president I can remember. I mean, people look back at Nixon and they go, he was really corrupt. He weaponized federal government. I mean, the stuff that we see Biden doing, the stuff with the FBI whistleblowers, you know, the stuff with the covering up of the Biden influence peddling scheme with his son and... You know, the media, which supposedly is the mainstream moderate news media behaves in absolutely horrendous ways, basically participating in disinformation campaigns.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  I mean, just to pause on that for a minute, you know, we've seen constantly, we've seen very scary disinformation efforts by the federal government with the work of the media, paid for by major corporations. They basically lied about the origins of COVID. They said there was no way it could have come from a lab, even though there had been thousands of lab leaks up until then. And there had been a huge debate about whether or not to even do coronavirus research in a lab because of the concerns about it spilling over. They came out right after, you know, early 2020, said there's no way it was a lab leak. That was a lie. We know it was a lie. Our sources tell us that it was from the Wuhan lab.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  And yet you had Anthony Fauci, you had, you know, top people saying, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. They said that the vaccine would prevent infection and transmission, did neither thing. Now, I think for elderly people and vulnerable people, it did prevent hospitalization. I took the vaccine myself, I'm in favor of it, but the amount of lying about the vaccine is really quite incredible. Hunter Biden laptop. It was, it was always obvious that it was what it appeared to be. And yet you had all these former CIA directors and others come out and say it had all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation, spreading disinformation, demanding censorship of their opponents. We see the White House demanding censorship by Facebook and Twitter.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  The entire time that my colleagues and I have been exposing the censorship that we've discovered that occurred at Twitter before Elon Musk took over and that occurred at Facebook, since, really particularly since Biden took office, but before then. The mainstream news media for the last year has been saying that we were conspiracy theorists. There is no censorship going on. It was just content moderation and there should be more of it.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  That's all now been exposed. I mean, we have the Supreme Court just announced last week that it's going to hear as a First Amendment challenge, Missouri versus Biden, a lawsuit by the Attorney General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for its demands for censorship. Everybody knows that if you get the COVID vaccine, you could still get COVID, still be transmissible. We've seen, you know, we broke the story of the first people, according to our sources, to get COVID that worked in the lab in China. Wall Street Journal came out a couple of weeks later, came to the same conclusions. We've, you know, we see with the FBI whistleblowers and we obviously have seen with some of the UFO

• 6:35Speaker 03

  stuff where we have for decades, the government saying that they're not studying it, they're not covering anything up. And we know that they've been covering up a lot and still are covering up a lot. So I worry because when people say that it's a problem to have all this distrust of the government, I agree with them. But the solution is not for us to just start blindly trusting the government. The solution is to have more transparency, is to have some accountability. You know, like, why can't we get the JFK files? Why can't we get the UFO files? Why can't you tell us the truth about COVID origins? Why can't you tell us the truth about the vaccine? I think, you know, there's obviously powerful

• 7:17Speaker 03

  interests that have an interest in maintaining these lies. But I also think it's just, it's just short sighted and dumb and like, stop treating us like children. You know, the, you know, America was always special because we weren't, we didn't come from kings. You know, in Europe, it was always the kings who would gradually allow more freedom of speech and then gradually allow more rights for the accused. In the United States, we started with free speech as sacrosanct and we started with innocent until proven guilty and everybody is equal before the law. You know, no matter your, you know, your color or your wealth or whatever. And obviously, you know, we had to get over some terrible things, including

• 8:00Speaker 03

  slavery and all this horrible stuff. But we got to a place where we had equal justice in the law. We want to protect that. So I think that something's got to break. We're at a, I think, a pivotal moment in, in human history and American history. The distrust is at an all time high. People don't trust the media. They don't trust the government. They don't trust our institutions. So we need to start seeing some big changes before we can win that trust back. And then it's going to be a long road because I think we all know this experience where you can have a lot of trust takes, it takes a long time to build up trust, but it doesn't take very long to lose it.

• 8:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, I'm getting a little off topic here because I want to stick with California, but I want to run with this. You know, I will, I mean, California definitely seems to be leading the way in dismantling itself. Country right behind it. But this isn't just a, this isn't just a, this isn't just an American problem. This is a, this is a world problem. The entire world seems to be just coming and glued at the hinges, no matter, I mean, it's, it's everywhere. The woke stuff, it's everywhere. The, the, the government overreach, it's everywhere.

• 9:15Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, we see UK is, you know, going after Russell Brand, trying to get all of his money. I mean, it's, it's every corner of the world seems to be going through something. What, what do you think is at the root of all of this?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Hmm. That's the right question. It's a really powerful question. You're absolutely right. I mean, clearly we're a single species of humans, you know, and we're connected in a lot of different ways. You see it at different points in period, in, in history, right? You see the 30s, it's a period of major change. Again, in the kind of late 60s, early 70s, clearly we're in that new phase, kind of every 50 years or so, something's going on. There are leaders are weak. You know, it's very weak leaders. We have a president of the most powerful country in the world who is barely there, very much struggling, struggling to walk, struggling to think, struggling to.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Struggling to speak, um, the head of the opposition party, the Republican Party.

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  Mitch McConnell.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  He literally freezes when he speaks.

• 10:28Shawn Ryan?

  Said two, two, two, I'll call them strokes. They said, they said, they said it wasn't, but I'll call them strokes, two strokes in two months on camera.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:39Shawn Ryan?

  That's just on camera.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 10:41Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody's, nobody's counting how many times this happens off camera. We have people dying in office, reading their notes for them at Senate hearings.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:54Shawn Ryan?

  We, I mean.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:57Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  I mean, boy is a symbol, you know, a symbol of a civilization in crisis. Leaders that should no longer be leaders, that are too old, are too unhealthy. Uh, we look at Israel, you know, we think that the solution is, you know, he, the, the head of Israel, the prime minister thought the solution was to support, uh, the more radical Palestinian group Hamas as a way to divide the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. That obviously failed. He thought he could control the Palestinians that way. We, we look around the world and we see weak leaders.

• 11:40Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not familiar with that. So, so Netanyahu was doing, was, was, was funding Hamas?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  That's right. And, and authorizing the funding through Qatar of Hamas, supporting Hamas as a counterweight against Fatah, which was the more moderate party that controlled the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu is, um, you know, he, there's other things he did. I mean, he moved the security from Gaza to the West Bank that should have been there. They over relied on this fence that turned out to be very flimsy. They could just take a little bulldozer through it. So the miscalculation on the part of Netanyahu, it's reminiscent of the, of the, of the miscalculation uh, by the neo cons in the United States under Bush and Cheney.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  So you see poor decision making by leaders. You see delusions of being able to control chaotic actors that they're simply not able to control. We see borders that are porous or open in the United States. We see borders in Europe where they can't control who comes in, caught between being cruel or allowing chaos. So the system is unraveling right now. And that's the most dangerous time. It's the period in between regimes.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  So we're clearly the regime that you might call it the neoliberal era on the kind of left and center-left, or the neoconservative era on the right and center-right. Both are failing. We sent too much of our industry to China. We thought we could just have everybody else manufacture for us and not manufacture alone. We failed to deal with serious medical problems, mental illness addiction. We allowed our children to consume toxic amounts of social media and develop psychiatric disorders, including anxiety and depression. We see all this weird behaviors where people think that they can change their biological

• 13:58Speaker 03

  sex. There's no debate that there's two biological sexes among scientists. It's like gravity, it's uncontroversial. Somehow, people got in their minds that they could change it through drugs and surgeries. So you see a set of disorders in the society, and it's in part because we're not oriented in any way. And I think part of it has to do with a spiritual crisis that comes out of the belief that we're all alone, that nothing else is going on, that the scientists have figured out precisely what it's all about, that it all started with the Big Bang, and then there was evolution, and that we're all alone in the universe, and everybody knows that.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And then when you die, nothing lives on, and you have no soul. It's obviously wrong, like, like it doesn't make any sense. It's not working out very good. And then the consequences are awful of this. You know, as opposed to, I mean, what's interesting for me about the UAP thing. Everybody worries, you know, the UAP thing is a new religion or kind of a cult. Maybe, but it's also a chance to have some sense of wonder and some mystery and excitement. Such an interesting topic. It's the reason why so many people want to read, you know, listen to your podcast on the topic or read the articles that we do on it.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  It shows that we don't really know what's going on, you know? We can't explain a lot of phenomena in the world. There's a lot of anomalous phenomena that we can't explain. And that there are people that are clearly telling the truth. Who are, if, that, that there's, then there are, there is disinformation. So I don't want to say there's not, there is disinformation. But it's not like the disinformation that I've seen. It's not, it's not, you know, and when Anthony Fauci says there's no way that the coronavirus came from a lab, or we know the vaccine will prevent infection and transmission. That's disinformation coming from the heads of government. On the UFO thing, mostly it's been disinformation in the form of the government saying that

• 16:10Speaker 03

  we're not looking at, there's nothing there. So we're seeing all these things fall apart, you know? A sense of trust in science, trust in the government. I think it's a really powerful moment to kind of come, come back to a kind of core spiritual and existential moment, which is just that we're all human. We're all in this incredibly mysterious, we have no idea how we got here.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  We, we, we don't know what our prehistory is. These stories that people tell, they use chicken bones and wood to make the pyramids and.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  All these complicated hieroglyphs. And anybody that goes there sees that we don't know what was going on. And that should be a source of excitement, I think, a sense of wonder and of wanting to explore and to be less dogmatic and less certain and more open-minded to the ways in which maybe we got things wrong or the experts might be wrong. So I think in this really dark moment, there's also a chance to allow for some new light to come in. You know, it's the cracks that allow the light to come through and we're starting to get little beams of light. We can't tell exactly what it all means, but something's going on.

• 17:26Shawn Ryan?

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• 18:10Shawn Ryan?

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• 18:55Shawn Ryan?

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• 19:30Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 19:51Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about? How long have you been following this UFO stuff? About 40 years. 40 years? What? We discussed a little bit about this earlier, but what is your? I mean, what are you finding now? Like for me, and I get a ton of hate for covering this topic, but I don't care what anybody says. There's something, there is something to this. And, um, and, uh, I don't care about the hate. But, um, what I've found is there seems to be, it's a very clickish topic. And there seems to be a couple of different camps. And everybody in each camp

• 20:36Shawn Ryan?

  seems to think they know everything about the, they're the resident expert. They know everything. Everybody else, they don't know. They don't know, they're full of, they're full of crap. Yep. You know, and, and, and then you go talk to that person and it's the exact same thing. I know it all and just talk to me and, and I'll be the one that comes on your podcast to talk about it. And don't listen to these guys. They're all disinformation agents and, Right. And, and it's, it's, it's almost all of them. The only one that I have. Spoken with that is not in any particular camp is Brandon Fugel, the owner of Skim Walker Ranch.

• 21:22Shawn Ryan?

  He seems to be, he wants to hear everybody.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:26Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, and I, I, it just seems to be a topic to, that everybody would want to come together and share information. I mean, we're all living on one planet here.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:38Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think we all have, we're all concerned.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:45Shawn Ryan?

  About what is going on, but nobody's sharing. What, what have you dug up?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. And Sean, I should say, I mean, that's why I was, that's why I was excited to make contact with you finally and come on the show. Cause I think you're bringing, um, a real humanity to the topic and to the, to the folks that have had experiences that I don't think are lying. I think it's very hard for people to, most people are not very good actors. Most actors aren't very good actors. And so when you see people share these stories, it's clear that they believe what they're saying. And that doesn't mean that it happened exactly like they think it did, or that it wasn't some sort of, you know, psychological or some psychogenic part of it, or that the US government or some other government

• 22:32Speaker 03

  isn't using some new technology to create experiences in some way. I think these are all possibilities. And there's been various forms of disinformation as well. But I think that the spirit that you're talking about is very important right now. And it's a, this is a humanizing spirit because I think it's wrong to, to tell, to dismiss people's experiences. I think it's the right approach is to hear them out. There's definitely some of the grabbiness and the, and the snobbery in the space that I've seen in other spaces. The sort of, oh, I know the truth. I don't think anybody knows. Like I, I don't think that the big bang explains, I don't think it really explains much of anything.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  If you want to get down to it, I don't think we know everything about our prehistory or the ancient history, or even our evolution. I think there's a lot of mysteries. Every time you have an answer to something, there's always another question of, well, what became, what came before that? Or why did that happen? So I've tried in my writing, I've done, I've done four big pieces on the topic. I did three pieces this year. I really enjoyed the experience of working on all of them. And my last one, I wrote about how, you know, around three dozen or so, or 30 or more, people have come forward and given testimony, either to the, the DOD department called

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Arrow, or to the inspector generals of the DOD, or to the inspector general of the intelligence community. So this is not a, it's not just one guy, David Grush, who's telling stories. There's actually a lot of other people that have been giving testimony. I feel very confident in that. And in that piece, I made sure to interview and quote the, some of the most famous skeptics. You know, one of them is Mick West, and it's not somebody that UFO believers tend to appreciate very much. But when I spoke to him, I said, you know, if you don't think there's anything there, it seems like you would be one of the first person to want the government to share what

• 24:42Speaker 03

  it does know, and to have disclosure. And he said, absolutely. And if there's more people sharing the information, then there's a higher chance that it's true. I thought that was very big of him to say. So what I was trying to do in that piece, because of course, as an outsider to this issue, you come in, even though I've fought for a long time, I've not written on it, not had the courage to write on it until recently. When you come to, you kind of go, well, I mean, let me see if I have this straight. It seems like basically, everybody wants the government to share what it knows, because it's not the property of the US government. It's not the property of Lockheed Martin, or of Aerospace Corporation. If there's information about what's going on with all these anomalous phenomena, then we, the people, have a right to know it. I mean, this is, this is why America is the greatest country.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  That's ever existed in the entire world. It's because we control our government. We don't, we're not controlled by our government. This isn't a kingdom. We don't have the people in power, not just the strongest and most able to dominate. It's a will of the people. And so we would like to know what you've discovered. And, you know, pretty soon I'll be coming out with some more information about some of the retrieved, you know, craft that people believe to be from non-human intelligences. Is it from non-humans? I don't know, but we should all have a chance to look at it. And I respect the need for the US military to do experiments, you know, and develop next generation stealth craft or propulsion. Um,

• 26:10Speaker 03

  you know, at the same time, I think if there's some evidence that there's non-human life in the world or in the universe, that's the right of the people to know that and we should be able to know it. At the same time, if there is, if there's been an effort, if it's just a disinformation campaign, using highly sophisticated technologies that appear to violate the, the known laws of physics, then we should not be victims of a government disinformation campaign. We should be able to know about that, too. So I try broadly on this issue. I try to think in probabilities, which is probably the right way to think about all issues, but I feel the need to do it on this one more than anything. There's some chance that the conventional story that we hear about UFOs is true, that there's

• 26:51Speaker 03

  been a cover up since World War II, has something to do with nuclear, there's some sort of reverse engineering and maybe contact has been made. That's kind of, maybe that's true. Maybe it's all a disinformation campaign plus a social contagion or folkloric contagion. And maybe it's a secret, you know, and relatedly some sort of secret weapons programs or whatnot. And then maybe it's unknown unknowns. Um, but, you know, whatever it is, it's a reminder of our mortality and of our common humanity and of the importance of having democracy and of having free speech and not allowing a small group of people to control information

• 27:31Speaker 03

  and have secrecy. And so, you know, I'm, I'm, I would just accepted an invitation from... An organization called MUFON, which is a big organization of UFO investigators, to give a keynote next July at their annual convention. And I'm also speaking to a group of UFO skeptics in December. And I hope to, I hope to continue to talk to both sides, because it seems like we all have a greater interest in knowing what the government knows, rather than having it kept a secret from us.

• 27:59Shawn Ryan?

  When, when is the, you had mentioned you have a piece coming out about the non-human biologics and crash retrievals. When is that coming out?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Well, I did, it's, I'm doing a story about a particular case, which I don't want to say too much about, but I did do an earlier story about with multiple witnesses, or sorry, multiple sources, I should say. And because on the UFO story, like usually as a journalist, you want to have at least two sources for every fact. On UFOs, our standard is three or more, because it's so out there. But no, we had, we had multiple sources and they're well placed in a position to know that says that the US government has really between 12 and 30 or so retrieved craft of non-humans. I did not report non-human biologics, but

• 28:51Speaker 03

  David Grushin's congressional testimony did report that. I have also heard that. I have not reported it. I was happy to let someone else say that. But yes, that is coming up in the reports. I wrote about a crash in Brazil that occurred in the 90s. It's a pretty well-studied crash, where there was multiple witnesses that say they saw non-human entity, including, you know, alive and dead. And so that is not easy to dismiss, particularly the character of the witnesses and the fact they haven't changed their story and they didn't say what they said for money. In fact, they, they claimed to have been, have turned down money to change their story. So there's just a lot more there than I think most people realize.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  And, um, and it's good for that it be a source of fascination because it's super interesting and important. If humans are indeed, you know, we, we know that we don't evolve around the sun, you know, and we know the earth is not flat, and it may turn out that we're not alone in the universe. And if that's the case, then it'd be really fun to find out while we're all still alive.

• 29:55Shawn Ryan?

  Are these skeptics? You had mentioned a skeptic. Who was, uh, what was the gentleman's name?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Mick West is, I think, one of the best.

• 30:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mick West, is Mick West a Christian? Do you know? Have any idea?

• 30:03Speaker 03

  I think, I don't know, I don't think so.

• 30:05Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  But I suspect not. I, I find the UFO skeptics to also be atheists as a rule. I have a friend, I won't say his name, who was very mad at me. I had many, just like you, I had many people, uh, that were very upset with my first article and begging me not to do this or talk about it. And, and you know, it's interesting because it's a little bit like, you know, like, why are you, why do you feel so strongly about it? Like, what, what's so upsetting about it to you? Is it really that I'm talking about it? Because certainly, there's a lot of people that talk about it. And one of the things that you and I experienced, I was saying what happened, we both know that ordinary folks in the world have had these experiences. This is not a small group of people.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Like, you can find people that have experiences, but haven't been comfortable sharing them with you. So, but, you know, like, like, I'm a Christian, and I also write about UFOs. I don't know how they fit together. They may not. Maybe I'll learn something that will make me question my Christianity. I don't know.

• 31:10Shawn Ryan?

  My, my-

• 31:11Speaker 03

  But why be so upset about it? Why be so emotionally intense about it?

• 31:14Shawn Ryan?

  Where I was going with this is, is, you know, if you are a Christian, do you really think that we are the best creation that, that, that, that God could make? I mean, come on, look at what's- Look at us.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:29Shawn Ryan?

  We're a disaster.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:31Shawn Ryan?

  And so it's, it's interesting that all the skeptics are, seem to be atheists. That takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  I actually had, and I should say, I have also some Christian, some Christian friends are absolutely horrified by this. And they think it's, it's either doesn't, it's not, it's either not real or it's demonic.

• 31:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  I think another thing I've been interested in is the way that, uh, is the way that, that we, we think about free will in the context of this. So in the Christian story, free will is part of how you deal with the fact that there's evil in the world. And yet we believe in a God that is ostensibly all powerful and all good. How can you have a God that's all powerful and all good and still have evil in the world? One of the answers that's been given is that we have free will. And so there's something on us to choose a better world. And so we're sort of realizing God's will through our actions and behavior, but we're doing it freely. We're not just God's puppets.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  We're not just, we're not, because that would make it really easy then, or just then we're not responsible. If we're just being manipulated by somebody else. That same sort of debate shows up on the UFO thing, which is that, you know, if there are non-humans, how come they're not helping us? You know, like, why are they allowed, you know, if there's non-humans, why are they letting us kill each other? Or why are they allowing, you know, all these bad things? And there's sort of a similar story that emerges, at least in the conventional story from people that follow this, which is that there's free will and, and that we're actually, and that.

• 33:08Shawn Ryan?

  What do you believe about free will? This is interesting. I literally just had this discussion last night.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 33:15Shawn Ryan?

  And so it was the last discussion of the night. But I'm, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this and I'll share mine.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  No, I'd love to. I mean, free will's, it's one of the most important conversations in philosophy. It might be the most important question because you can tell a story where we don't have free will. And the story kind of goes, hey, you don't, you didn't choose your genetics. You didn't choose your body. You didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose the time and place in which you were born. So what, to what extent can you say that you choose anything? Everything was chosen for you.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  And the problem with that story, setting aside whether the truth of it, just setting aside the truth, the problem with that story, when you deny free will, or you're actually taking away someone's responsibility. I've been obsessed with this guy Sam Bankman-Fried, who is the cryptocurrency king. He's in court in trial right now for fraud and kind of a pyramid scheme similar to Bernie Madoff. His, his mother did not believe in free will and had sort of the same story that I'm describing, which is something that, I mean, it's been on the right and the left and mostly on the, I mean, the left recently has been sort of saying it around criminal justice, like you didn't choose your

• 34:37Speaker 03

  time and place or your circumstances, you're a victim of your circumstances, you don't have free will. Free will is just something that people talk about in order to punish and to give you a sense of control. That's the story that Sam Bankman-Fried's mother gave him. And then his father had the story of utilitarianism, which is that you should use your brain to figure out maximum good for maximum number of people. The result is you have somebody that doesn't take responsibility. So, so one possibility is that the belief in free will is actually what really matters. Because if you believe in free will, then you're more likely to take responsibility for your actions.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  You're less likely to engage in the kind of antisocial behaviors that are so destructive of society and of yourself. So maybe free will is a myth, but it's a good myth to have. Because if you don't have that myth, then people are going to do all sorts of horrible things. I think that's kind of where I come out with it, which is that you have free will if you believe you have free will. If you deny that you have free will, Then to some extent, you're deciding not to take responsibility. I think that you're a, I think, I think if you, if you, if someone were to tell me that, that they don't have free will and they're not responsible for their actions, I would be very careful around them. I would not trust them. Be more likely to trust somebody who takes responsibility,

• 36:03Speaker 03

  who says, yes, I didn't choose my, my body, or my brain, or my parents, or my circumstances. But I have consciousness. I'm aware that I make my own choices. I'm gonna slow down. I'm gonna think about things. I'm gonna think about what's good for not just myself, but for other people. So I think where I land is that, and I do have a little discussion of it in here, too. Uh, maybe free will is a myth, but it's a good myth to have, and we should affirm it.

• 36:30Shawn Ryan?

  I think we had this discussion last night, as I mentioned, and I,

• 36:35Shawn Ryan?

  as a Christian, you know, it's, it is, it's like the, it's the one question that nobody seems to have an answer to. And, and I'm new at the Christianity stuff. So I'm diving in and, uh, but what it, you know,

• 36:51Shawn Ryan?

  what I think is, you know, everybody talks about, you know, surrender to Jesus, surrender yourself to God. Or, and so I think that you have the free will to choose which side you're gonna be on. You're gonna be on God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit side, and you're going to surrender. You know, you have the free will to surrender to that. Or you have the free will to surrender to the other side, to Satanism, devil worshiping, whatever you wanna call it. And, but you're going to serve one or the other. There is no, there is no in-between.

• 37:32Shawn Ryan?

  And so I, I think that maybe that is the, that is the free will. What do you think about that?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  That's, that's basically where I land. I think it's important to affirm free will. Viktor Frankl, who's this amazing psychologist, who was a Holocaust survivor, and he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a book, after he survived the death camps. And he was somebody who, while he was in the death camp, said, I'm gonna take control of my experience because mentality is everything. That it's not, the meaning of something is determined by my own view of it. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn this horrible experience into a chance to become a stronger,

• 38:21Speaker 03

  better person, rather than allowing this experience to make me a worse person. We've been talking with my colleagues about Israel, about the Hamas attacks. And the Hamas attacks happened, and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is happening. So the question is, what do you do now? There's nothing, I think it's dangerous to suggest that it doesn't matter what we do. It matters incredibly what we do. So Frankl has this great saying, which is, in between stimulus and response is free will.

• 38:56Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  You know, and we're not, you know, we're not like other animals, you know, that we're not just knee jerk. We have, we're able to think slowly, not just quickly. You know, I was interviewing people in Ireland about free speech issues because they have this terrible censorship law they're proposing, they're debating. And I interviewed people on the street, and I would, if I, if I kind of like, you know, should we censor hate speech? Oh, yeah, we should definitely, you know, absolutely. And then I'd be like, well, what would that, you know, what is hate speech? You know, what would count as hate speech? What kind of things? And I would say that because they're Irish, so I'd be like, do you think James Joyce and Oscar Wilde ever wrote anything that might be considered today to be hate speech?

• 39:39Speaker 03

  You know, people go, oh, yeah, probably, you know? And I, I came away from it, and I was like, I don't think you can go around Ireland and be like, that person's, you know, for free speech, that person's against it. I don't think that, I don't think anybody's like that. I think it's more like, you can You can be free speech and you can also be pro censorship. And the main difference is whether you're thinking about it quickly or whether you're slowing down. Because free speech actually turns out to be a really hard thing for people. You know, we saw it here on the Hamas and Palestine and stuff. You know, somebody gets up there and chants "Death to Israel", and it's offensive, you know?

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Or somebody says they support Hamas and they support terrorism. It's so horrible. There's a fair number of people that think that that should be illegal. But when you kind of go, "So if we make that illegal, what else do you think might be illegal?" If people slow down about it, they, you know, this is, this is, I'm borrowing this from this guy, Daniel Kahneman, this, uh, he was, I think, a psychologist. We're very different people when we, when we think slowly than we think quickly. That's why I love this, that's why I love this format. You know, like, I'll go on Fox News or I'll go on News Nation or somewhere. And I'm like, I gotta, it's a test. You gotta be, what can you say in 30 seconds? But that's a different kind of thinking.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  And the people that are watching this are, I think their brains are working differently than when they're watching something quickly. And I think that when you slow down, it allows for the humanity to reemerge. I think it ultimately makes us more in favor of free speech, more in favor of universal values. Because I always point out, if it's just, if you just want the right for your group to speak, or if you just want your civilians to be protected, that's not human rights. Those are just group rights for your group. Human rights means that you think that there's rights that all humans should have, even humans that you might really hate at the moment. And so for, so for me, that's where I come out with the free will thing is,

• 41:49Speaker 03

  free will is real when we affirm that it's real and then when we slow down enough to really take advantage of it.

• 41:56Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Speaking of censorship, I mean, I know you were, you're on the forefront of the Twitter files and, um, and, um, so is, where do you kind of stand on censorship? And, I mean, it seems like Elon Musk is, is free speech all the way. Anything goes, am I correct on that, on, on, on X?

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so to answer that question, we have to go back a little bit in time. I mean, so first of all, I'd never thought about First Amendment issues, which may seem surprising, but I never, I just assumed it was fine, right? Like, we have a First Amendment to the Constitution, like, like, nobody wants censorship. Like, I'd never heard anybody advocate censorship. And then, well, actually, I then got my book, Apocalypse Never Came Out in 2020, and Facebook censored me. And they've maintained some sort of algorithms that when you, so when I show up on YouTube, like, which is owned by Google, so I'm censored, actually, by Google, I should say, and Facebook. So when something comes up to me, like, I'll be talking about drug addiction on YouTube, and there'll be, like, a little warning about being like, here, get accurate information

• 43:06Speaker 03

  on climate change, because there's some algorithm that's, has me as a climate change denier, or, you know, some, whatever it is. And there's no, I've tried to appeal it, there's no way to appeal, it's like a star chamber, it's all completely unjust, unfair, and I was very upset at the time. I think people don't realize, like, when you're censored, it feels so bad, like, you're so angry, and it feels really unfair, and, just, just, I mean, almost like a kind of self-destructive anger, I felt. And then that kind of went asleep for a while, I just kind of moved on, and I was like, I can't do anything about it, so move on. And then we were invited to do the Twitter Files in December last year, and I've been

• 43:51Speaker 03

  working on censorship issues ever since. And, yeah, I mean, I was just shocked to learn there's a huge number of people, you know, they're, they're elites, it's not the people that bag your groceries, or, you know, work at the gas station, or work at the factory floor, or who, it's not cops and nurses, it's people that work at universities, they work at think tanks, they work at news companies, and they want the social media companies to censor speech that they don't like, legal permitted speech. And it's shocking.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  We owe Elon Musk a debt of gratitude because we wouldn't have known about how much censorship there was if he had not opened up their files to us. He gave us pretty open access to the files. We were never denied any files. We uncovered a lot of censorship, you know, a lot on different things. We also discovered these disinformation campaigns, the disinformation campaigns around Hunter Biden's laptop, around COVID. And it's not just Twitter, it was also Facebook. So then you get to the question of what is Elon's position? You know, at first he would say, I'm a free speech absolutist. You know, the US, which is the freest country in the world, even we're not free speech absolutists. We don't allow immediate incitement to violence. You know, I can't get a bunch of friends and

• 45:09Speaker 03

  say, hey, let's all go kill that person. I can't threaten to kill somebody. That's illegal. I can't commit fraud. I can't use my words to lie to you, to commit fraud, to steal your money. And I'm also not allowed to engage in libel and defamation, although those is a very high bar. You're allowed to say terrible things about other people in the United States, very much protected. So very limit, very, very small limits. So nobody's technically a free speech absolutist. But I'm with him in spirit, which is that I think we should have very strong protections for free speech, much stronger than they have in Europe. Elon has also said that he wants to follow the local laws of different

• 45:50Speaker 03

  countries. That's been controversial because other countries engage in a lot more censorship. And so if you want X, formerly Twitter, to operate in Turkey, for example, he has to accept some censorship. That's a case I know because I wrote on it and researched it. Elon was criticized for allowing the Turkish government to demand that certain people be taken off the platform. He did that. He complied with the law. I and others encouraged him to release the, to just be transparent about it. You know, if you have to do censorship, it's better to be transparent because like in the case I was describing with YouTube and Facebook, I don't even know the ways in which I'm being censored, you know, and so it's a little crazy making. You kind of don't know, like you become paranoid. So at least you're transparent about here's

• 46:35Speaker 03

  the censorship that we've done. Mostly, I think he's done a good job on it. I'm sure I think there's, you know, some cases that are on the line, but much better than Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook had done and others. But I think the short and long of it is that there's really like a shocking number of people in the United States of America today that want to see more censorship. They justify it in all sorts of ways. They say they're protecting people from harm. That's kind of what everybody says. But I don't really know if I, I mean, psychological harm, you know, people say terrible. I mean, I mean, you're a public figure and we're public figures. I mean, people say awful

• 47:17Speaker 03

  things. People have wished me death and all sorts of terrible things. I think they should have the right to do that. I don't think they should have the right to organize a mob to come to my house and threaten to kill me. That's where I draw the line. But pretty much beyond that, I think there should be freedom. And I mean, and the crazy thing about it is that we actually have to speak up for it because I think there's so many people that, that, that, that really don't believe in free speech.

• 47:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's getting to be a tricky topic, I think. I mean, I'm, I am definitely pro First Amendment, pro freedom of speech.

• 48:26Speaker 01

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• 49:26Shawn Ryan?

  Man, though, there's, um, I mean, so we're both, what, somewhat in the, in the, in the truth space, right? Yeah. I hope that's what you want to call it.

• 49:39Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot of weirdos in the truth space, is what I'm finding. I've had a couple show up here.

• 49:46Shawn Ryan?

  Some of the interviews will never be released, because I, I don't necessarily know if it's factual, and, and, and, and, but kind of where I'm, so what I do here, I, I, I mean, a lot of people watch this. I mean, we hit number two, the number two podcast in, in, in the world a couple of months back. Congratulations. Well, with that comes a lot of responsibility, and, and what I don't want to do is just bring everybody on and just say, hey, let's hear what everybody has to say, because everybody thinks that, just because I have somebody on, that this is, this is 100% factual information. Right.

• 50:31Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so the way I kind of try to navigate it is, is, is whatever the information that's being put out, is that going to affect somebody's decision-making process that could, that could, that could affect their life in a negative way? And so, let's bring up the UFO whistleblowers. Got a ton of hate about that. Lots of hate.

• 50:55Shawn Ryan?

  Whether those guys were telling the truth or whether they were lying, that's not gonna affect anybody's decision-making process on the day-to-day. It's not gonna affect medical decisions, it's not gonna affect legal decisions, it's not gonna affect financial decisions. You know, you can take that information and what are you gonna do with it?

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:16Shawn Ryan?

  You either believe them, or you don't. Or maybe you're just in there for entertainment, I don't know. You know what I mean? But it's not gonna affect anybody. When it comes to something like, like, financial situations, or, or, or medical stuff like COVID, I mean, with the, with the vaccine, I mean, that's, you're playing with people's...

• 51:41Shawn Ryan?

  You're, you're, you're, you're playing with people's well-being, especially if you have a reputable reputation, like you, or, I mean, I think I have a pretty reputable reputation, you know, and so what I would hate to do is actually put out information that is infactual. You know, whether it goes along with my agenda, or my beliefs, or not, I don't wanna manipulate the population into doing something that, that could potentially cause them harm, you know, on the day-to-day in their, in their lives. And so, you know, it's, it's a, it's a responsibility, you know, that I wish a lot more people, including the mainstream media, would take seriously.

• 52:25Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know, and, and there, there, when it comes to freedom of speech, I mean, there are a lot of people that are, I mean, they're master manipulators out there, and, and, and they're out there just to build a following, or just to get some notoriety, and just for financial gain, whatever it may be. You know, and so it's, it gets, it gets tricky.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think it gets tricky. What are, I mean...

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, it's great that you take it so seriously. That's a sign that you deserve the status that you've achieved with this podcast in the long form.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Obviously, I agree, and it's a really...

• 53:09Speaker 03

  I can feel the weight of it, you know, even as you were talking, I could feel it, you know, the responsibility, right? Because what if you say something, you know,

• 53:18Speaker 03

  that's wrong and it results in someone's, you know, harm to them or death or whatnot? And, you know, like even on the UFO one, you know, which I think is right, there's a way in which I agree. It's kind of, it's not obvious how somebody would be hurt by it. But I always emphasize, like, what I know, try to emphasize what I know, what I suspect to be true but can't prove, and what I really have no idea on. And, you know, if you take the vaccines, the COVID vaccine as an example, there's danger on both sides, right? Clearly, the, I think the evidence shows the vaccines, you know, kept people out of hospital

• 54:00Speaker 03

  and, and likely prevented a significant number of deaths. We also have some evidence coming back of causing myocarditis, you know, heart, long-term heart problems. So that's there too. The solution, in my view, is coming back to the thing we just talked about, slowing down and providing the information for people. On the vaccines, for example, we saw people not really providing the full picture. And we also saw government officials saying things were safe, even though they really didn't have the science to show it, in part because the sample sizes were too small, in part because not enough time had passed.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  And it's complicated. I mean, vaccine science is challenging, difficult science for laypeople to do. You know, I, I hired one of my colleagues, Alex Gutentag, who I think is one of the best journalists in America right now on COVID vaccines. You know, she was deplatformed from Twitter, I think for like 48 hours, it wasn't the worst, for literally repeating the information in a Pfizer press release about its own science. Are you serious? Yes. And, and that's not the only case of that. We would see censorship of what they themselves would acknowledge

• 55:22Speaker 03

  was accurate information that they worried would cause vaccine hesitancy. I think it's an important example because I see this on a lot of other issues. We would see the White House demanding this of Facebook. Saying, yes, that's accurate information. But we don't want it to get out there. We want you to censor it because it could lead to vaccine hesitancy. Facebook came back to the White House and said, "Our research shows that if you censor this information and you prevent the conversation, it will make people more vaccine hesitant because they will be suspicious that they're not getting the full picture." And the White House said, "Do it anyway." Why did the White House say, "Do it anyway"?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Well, in part, I'm not saying entirely, but in part, because the news media, the reporters, were asking the White House why this accurate information was being allowed to be shared on Facebook and social media. And so I share that example because it's even worse than you think. There's sort of, there's some risk that people that care about the truth will get it wrong. And that's just always going to be there. And we have to do our best. You know, we have to prepare as you've prepared. You have to, you know, do a book with a lot of end notes and a lot of research. I mean, books are, for me, they're a way of really slowing down your thinking. I mean, I have 1,200 end notes in each of my books, a lot of research. Being very careful with what I say about,

• 56:51Speaker 03

  and not misrepresenting my own certainty about certain things. But then there's this whole other thing going on, where there's people that have a really clear agenda, which is to get everybody to take the vaccine. And they're gonna just, you know, bulldoze the truth in order to get that out there. And it doesn't have to be that way, I don't think. I think that we're capable, some of this is the thing, the same thing I was talking about in terms of the treating the public like children. I think people can handle the complexity, that like older Americans, you know, people over 70, really are gonna benefit from getting the vaccine. It's really important, you know, and people with pre-existing conditions and whatnot.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  But that, kids probably don't need it. Like, I don't think that's that hard. So you had the Covidians just become very dogmatic. And so I think that, um, yeah, for people, like for us, that are trying to make sense of information and different sources.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  There's some, there's some, some tools you can use. You know, I mentioned one of them on the, on the, on the, on the UAP whistleblowers is having multiple sources. You know, doing your research, you know, providing the caveats, asking the hard questions, you know, pushing back when it feels like somebody's overgeneralizing or going too far. But then I do think there's definitely people in the society that are engaging in, you know, influence operations, disinformation campaigns aimed at advancing an agenda, kind of regardless of what the facts are.

• 58:31Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. Do you think that the US government has our best interest?

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Define US government.

• 58:45Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Mostly, right now, my answer is, is no. I mean, I have very little confidence in our leaders. I mean, I, we can go through all the institutions, you know, I don't have much.

• 58:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, let's just look at the FDA. There's, there's a, there's a, a, a bipartisan, I mean, there's, it's food and drugs, you know? And look at all the things that we, you mean, there's a, now the life expectancy for an American, 76 years old. Our food is shit. Canada, I mean, they have a, what they have like another six-year life expectancy. Their, whatever their version of FDA is, is a lot more meticulous than ours. Look at all the shit in our food. The hormones and, and, how did everything get approved?

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, our toothpaste is poison, our deodorant's poison, our shampoo's poison, our food is poison, our cleaning products are poison, our, a lot of our medicines wound up being poison. I mean, what, what did they do? Why, you know, what is the point of the FDA?

• 59:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, obviously it's to make money. I'm not really sure, and I haven't dug in that much on how, but.

• 1:00:08Shawn Ryan?

  There's, there's, there's, there is one organization that's, that's, that's, you know, pretty non-political. And in, I think that the majority of people would agree, if you look into it, yeah, this is, we've been lied to.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the case of the FDA, we are seeing just too much power from the pharmaceutical industry. Just too much power. I mean, it's not, it's supposed to check the power of the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, the purpose of the FDA is to make sure that the drug industry is not able to just sell whatever they want and misrepresent it. You know, I point out that it was a huge victory to require the drug companies to have to list the side effects of their drugs. You know, when the guy starts talking really fast on the TV shows, you know, you see it in the T, in the ads. You know, if you're not going to ban ads, which I think might be the best thing to do, like, I don't know why, like, if it's a good drug, then let your doctor recommend it. I don't

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  know why the advertising, why they have to advertise it directly at consumers. That seems, that seems unwise to me, but nonetheless, that is the system we have right now. But it took us a lot just to name the side effects of those drugs. That was a big victory. Well, when people started talking about the side effects of the COVID vaccine on social media, there was an effort to censor them. That's how crazy it got. You know, when you look at the big advertisers of the big mainstream news media, a lot of it was Pfizer. So it's the brokenness, it's includes the FDA, it's not limited to the FDA.

• 1:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, even the stuff that they approved, though. I mean, everybody, I mean, I remember growing up, my parents, you know, just supplements that I would take because I want to get big when I'm 16 years old. Is that FDA approved? Is that, now I'm I don't even care because

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  What is it?

• 1:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  So what, it's FDA approved. How much did they pay to get that approval?

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know, who cares?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  No, we looked at it. We did a piece on remdesivir, which was heavily promoted as a as a treatment for COVID and it has very toxic effects. We can't quite believe that it ever got approved. I was, I was actually shocked by it and you know, we had multiple people working on it and you know, went back and looked at the actual science of it and I mean, mainstream science raising serious concerns around the impacts on kidneys from remdesivir. So I, you know, and it appeared that it was both sort of the influence of the, of the pharmaceutical companies. It's also just the power of these government agencies. They get their, you know, they kind of get their brains oriented on a particular path. I think another thing is just, um,

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  you know, we would just probably rely too much on the, on the pharmaceutical medical model. You know, I mean, we know when you look at what the factors for human health, you know, it's the stuff that we've known forever, you know, it's a, um, you know, you know, exercise, which just, I love always as an example, because it's like, because everybody knows that exercise is amazing, both for your physical health, but also for your mental health. I mean, for me, the mental health benefits of physical exercise are as great as the physical benefits. Eating right, you know? You know, people were promoted, we promoted a high carb diet that we now think is quite toxic for people.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  You know, the diets that our grandparents ate, you know? My grandfather lived to 101 and he ate animal fats and it was a traditional farm diet. He was thin as a rail. We know that, you know, community, sociality, having a purpose in life, a reason to get up in the morning, believing in something more important than yourself, whether it's God or some other higher power, it's just civilization or in service of humanity, that these are things, these are the basics that we need. And so kind of constantly looking for some medicine to make ourselves feel better, I don't think is the right mentality. And that's another thing I think that needs to change. If we're going to go through some sort of a transformation as a society.

• 1:04:18Shawn Ryan?

  Switching gears here with back to X. I mean, I don't know how close you are with Elon, but what can we expect X to turn into? It sounds like it's turning into the everything app. What does that mean?

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a good question. And, you know, obviously, I don't work for X. And, you know, and in fact, I do have subscribers there, but X takes some of my subscriber money. So if anything, X works for me. I'm a content provider on it. And so, I mean, I have, you know, I text with Elon. And it's been, it's always an interesting relationship with one of the richest people in the world. I guess he is the richest person in the world and controls this huge platform. I'm a skeptic of renewables and electric cars. And I've written about that. And our relationship has been OK despite that. So he's kind of who he appears to be. I think, you know, sometimes people think, who was he really?

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  And it kind of is what it looks like. He's a Gen Xer. You know, I think he's very much oriented towards freedom. He's been, you know, I think he was a former liberal, like me, refugee, as we say.

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  That's a term?

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Left, yeah. A friend of mine, actually, I don't know, I didn't make it up, but somebody else made it up. And then as soon as I heard it, I was like, that, that really describes, we're all refugees. So, I mean, look, I think that he's in the middle of a, they're in the middle of an information and economic war right now. I mean, it's, I mean, you see it on the platform. I mean, he's having, they're competing, you know, so he's competing with the big newspapers over for advertisers. And so it's this, there's an economic incentives behind the war that's going on between X and The New York Times, Washington Post, other publications.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Now, The New York Times is a very profitable, very successful company. The Washington Post lost, will lose $100 million this year.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Both Facebook and X are sending fewer people from their platforms to the news media outlets. If I have the numbers correctly, I want to say it was something like 180 million people were being referred every month from each, 100 million referrals each month back in early 2021. And I think today it's down to something like 40 or 45. Oh, wow. So there's been a huge decline and the decline is due to different reasons. In the case of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg restricted news content from being shared on the platform just because he was under so much political pressure, mostly from the

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  left, but a little bit from both sides. I think he just said, hey, forget it. I'm just gonna, we're just not gonna do as much news. We're gonna double down on weddings and, you know, sharing photos of your grandkids and in the VR stuff that he's doing. In the case of Twitter, it was also going down, I think just as a function of more people staying on X rather than clicking through to the news articles. And Elon has clearly wanted to encourage that. So there was sort of a famous moment where, you know, Elon got into sort of a public spat with another one of the Twitter Files authors, Matt Taibbi. And I think Elon wanted, you know, Elon wanted Matt to come and publish at X.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  I think Matt felt like, hey, I'm already published at Substack, you know, which, because your viewers know, is a subscription newsletter. Same thing with me. I'm on Substack and Elon wanted me to also publish at X. And I was like, well, I get paid to publish at Substack. I need to make my living. And then he said, oh, well, no, you can do, you can have subscriber only content at X. And so I was like, that's fine by me. I'll just charge the same amount to be a subscriber at X as at Substack. It actually ended up influencing our whole business model because my view is I want my content on every social media platform. I would like it at X. I would like it at Substack. I would like it at Facebook. I would like to be treated fairly by Facebook and Google and YouTube.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  And if they're gonna censor and engage in bias, then I'm gonna call that out. But I do think that there's been, there's an evolution that's happening very quickly now, where the social media platforms are becoming a little bit more like publishers. And the publishers are becoming a little bit more like platforms where the New York Times is so successful, I think in part because it's not just news, it's also got, you know, product reviews and, and, and sports and, and, you know, games and all sorts of other stuff that keep people on the platform where you can advertise to them. But I think that we're in the midst of a, of a huge shakeup in the way, in the whole news business.

• 1:09:22Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  It's been there for a while, but for a while Twitter reinforced the older model, which was that there are some trusted sources, like the New York Times and CNN and Washington Post. And then there were other sources, the citizen journalists who were not as trusted. I think now that's all changing and now we're on more level playing fields so that a small, you know, news organization like my own, public can compete with the New York Times. I mean, obviously not exactly level playing field, we're tiny, we have a million in revenue a year, New York Times is 2.3 billion. But on X, it's a much more level playing field. So you'll see our social media posts will get a lot more traffic than, than posts from the New York Times.

• 1:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Where, where do you see the, I mean, where do you think this news stuff is going to wind up? I mean, it's so, it seems like, I mean, I think Fox News, I think they have what, 1.7 million daily viewers? Am I right on that? Are you familiar?

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I think that sounds right.

• 1:10:29Shawn Ryan?

  That's nothing.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  And yet it's bigger than the other cable stations.

• 1:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  What, what's gonna, and then, and then on the flip side, you know, you see, you see all these like really good investigative, independent journalists and they're just, I mean, they're, you never see them, I don't see them very often on, actually I never, I don't really watch the news, so I guess that's not, I quit watching the news a long time ago. But I don't see, I, I interview investigative journalists all the time. They don't get any TV time. Every once in a while I'll get one, but I, I'll, I'll give you an example. I got this guy, Luis Chaparro.

• 1:11:12Shawn Ryan?

  The best investigative journalist on cartel activity, hands down. I mean, the guy in beds with the Sinaloa cartel, he's Wow. He's got, I mean, he brought, he brought one of my hats with my brand on it down to a fentanyl lab in Sinaloa and had the chemists wear my hats while they're cutting pills. Wow. Just to prove to me that He can get in there. Here it is. Wow. This is it. Amazing. Here's the footage, you know, and nobody will touch him. Nobody will touch that guy. Amazing. And he's put stuff out, he put out, he, he put it out on this show.

• 1:11:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it would, I'm not bragging, I'm just trying to make a point. Two years ago, he, he, he's the first person I ever talked to, ever heard talk about how China's sending in chemists, he had video of it, um, and, and supplies, uh, to make fentanyl, the, the most deadly fentanyl imaginable. Two years later, today, it's hit the mainstream. This guy isn't anywhere. I mean, I had another interview, it's coming out, um, it'll have already been out by the time this airs, a, a former CIA analyst slash targeter. And she's been tracked, I had her on to talk, uh, to unpack some of the stuff that went on uh, behind the scenes with Benghazi.

• 1:12:39Shawn Ryan?

  And we got in and she's been tracking these guys. You know, I mean, she's a targeter, that's what she does. Now she works for DOD, guess what? Oh, yep, they're coming up through the southern border. She's still tracking them. Wow. And, but it, it's like, why are, why, why is the media not talking to people like that? I mean, they're out there, they're trying to get in and they're not, they're not giving them the time of day and, and then the American public listens to some talking head when we got the real deal. We, hey, we have a real central intelligence agency targeter, the best of the best, you know? And nobody's, nobody wants to hear what she has to say.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's frustrating because I know the experience of you'll work on a story that you think is super important and it doesn't get the audience, the excitement that they, that you wish that they would show to it, or then I might do something that's a lot easier and it gets a lot more attention. So that's definitely always been a part of journalism.

• 1:13:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's not the attention though. That's not what I'm complaining about. I know the people want to hear it because what Luis is one of my top up, I've had him on three times now.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Shawn Ryan?

  And every time I, he knocks it out of the park with the audience. It's, it's a, I mean, it's the cartel subject, you know, and I mean, but the media won't touch him.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  That's interesting. I don't know why, because it seems like Fox loves that stuff. So I'm not sure about that particular case. I think some of it's, um, you know, I will say, I do think that, that can, I think some of it may just also be on that. I don't know. But I mean, my experience sometimes with the cartel story is that it feels like we've heard it before. It feels like, and it can be a little depressing.

• 1:14:31Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Especially if you're like, oh, they've been fighting the cartels and whatever. And then you're like, oh, it's just as bad as always.

• 1:14:36Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that, you know, I, this, the old, the old rule was the content is king. And I think that's still true. I mean, when we have something really new, you know, whether it's on COVID origins or UAPs or, you know, DHS censorship and is genuinely has not been reported before, we get big numbers on it. You know, if you just take UAPs, you know, we were both talking about, we just get a big audience. When we do a UAP story, if we were, if we do the same story a year from now, it won't have as big of an audience. I think the other thing that I'm excited about is, I mean, newcomers like

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  you and me are relatively new. I mean, I'm older than you, but, but we're both kind of new to having, in particular to this issue. And we're actually able to achieve some amount of success without. You know, ma- mega mass audiences, you know, I can still walk through the airport without being spotted, you know, um, and, and yet we can make a living, you know, even with, I mean, it's amazing, like, we have,

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  about 10,000 paid subscribers, you know, but a single person with a thousand paid subscribers, you know, can, can earn a living as a, as a journalist, you know, arguably even with 500 subscribers, depending on how much you're charging and how much you want to live on. That's amazing, like, in the history of, of civilization, where like, it always used to be that you had to own the printing press, which was expensive, you know, or you had to own the cable TV stations, or you had to own the satellites or something. But now you can be a journalist and, and kind of work for yourself, because the technology has evolved to the point where I can just report a story,

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  put it on my Substack and charge you to read the last third of it, or the last two thirds of it, and people will pay. And that's, and I don't have to have like a, a boss who just happens to own the printing press. Like, why, like, like, you, like, you and I shouldn't have bosses just because they happen to own a printing press. We should be able to publish what we want to publish and be able to capture most of the revenue. You know, with like Substack, I get 80, we get 85% of the revenue. That's amazing. Like, in the history of, in the history of, you know, truth tellers, or, or journalists, or whatever we are,

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  to be able to capture that amount of the revenue, it's incredible. It's a little bit less on YouTube, obviously, or maybe not obviously, so there's different ways of monetizing it. Substack in some ways feels like the final frontier, where you're like, you're just paying Substack 10%, and you're paying Stripe, the, the payment processor, 5%, a little bit less than 5%. That's amazing to be able to keep that amount of the money that people are paying for your newsletter.

• 1:17:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I did, I love doing this. It's, I just wonder, you know, what, what is mainstream gonna look like in the next, what's it gonna look like in the next year?

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny, because I, I think Joe Rogan is, is what the new mainstream looks like.

• 1:17:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Who saw that coming?

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  You know, 12 million Twitter followers.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  I don't know, does it have 10 million YouTube followers? Probably.

• 1:17:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Um, so you get guys like Joe Rogan or Russell Brand that have, that are much bigger than, than any show on CNN or Fox. And arguably more influential, you know, because I think people, you trust Joe and you don't think that there's somebody else behind the curtain. Whereas I think at Fox, you have a correspondent, but you know that the Murdoch family is ultimately deciding what's going to be the priority.

• 1:18:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:18:28Shawn Ryan?

  I've been kicking Tucker Carlson off just,

• 1:18:32Shawn Ryan?

  what was that?

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  And Tucker's, I mean, and Tucker's landed at Twitter and done super well, right? Every time he does a broadcast, it has, you know, many millions of more views than he would have had on Fox.

• 1:18:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:18:49Shawn Ryan?

  Well, well, Michael, I just want to say, I know you got a dinner you gotta be at, so I'll, I'll wrap it up. But one last question before you head out. And if there are, do you have three recommendations of people you'd like to see on my show?

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  That's, yeah, absolutely. Um, have you had the FBI whistleblowers on?

• 1:19:13Shawn Ryan?

  I haven't.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  I think they're all wonderful. So if I were to single one of them out, then they, then they might get mad at me. But there's, I think there's at least three and maybe four that would be great. I would definitely recommend one of them. We have to have an FBI that we can trust and that we don't think is full of sociopaths that are abusing their police and investigative powers, particularly to entrap people. We've seen things that are very suspicious, including January 6th. We know that there was literally hundreds of undercover informants in January 6th. That's crazy. There's a bunch of stuff about January 6th we haven't understood, we haven't properly understood. I might recommend Julie Kelly

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  as a journalist, particularly on January 6th, has done a really strong investigation as another journalist.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Gosh, there's so many people I love and recommend. I mean, Matt Taibbi is incredible.

• 1:20:13Shawn Ryan?

  I've tried to get him.

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Shawn Ryan?

  Trying to get him.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Let me know if I can help.

• 1:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  And then I think the most important person on, the most important researcher on UAPs is Jacques Vallée. He's, he's a bit older now, but I saw him on Rogan and he had, he was very cogent. And then James Fox has done the best documentaries on UAPs.

• 1:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  The Phenomenon and Moment of Contact, and highly recommend him.

• 1:20:43Shawn Ryan?

  I will hit you offline and, and ask for your connections.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  I'm happy to connect you.

• 1:20:52Shawn Ryan?

  But, well, Michael, I, I, I hope to see you again. I really do.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:20:57Shawn Ryan?

  This was a great conversation that took a lot of turns that I wasn't planning on doing. And, and I just, I love what you're doing.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:21:06Shawn Ryan?

  Where could people find you?

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  People can find me on X, @Schellenberger, no C in Schellenberger. And also my Substack is public.substack.com.

• 1:21:20Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. We'll link those below and in the meantime, I, I really hope you guys turn that state around.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  I appreciate it. Thank you, Sean. And thank you for your important work, particularly for Championing Veterans.

• 1:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  You're a really terrific advocate.

• 1:21:35Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. God bless.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  God bless you.