#2211 - Michael Shellenberger
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Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Mr. Schellenberger, good to see you.
Good to see you, man.
How you been, man?
Every day, every day. You've been neck deep in the chaos of the world. I made it to Brazil and back, so I'll put it that way. What was that like? It was intense, man. I mean, it's still going on. We did Twitter Files Brazil. Right. 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, 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.
So it's been what did the Twitter fires. I know about the Twitter files America. I don't know about the Twitter files in Brazil.
So they this is like one of the most extreme forms of censorship we've seen in democratic countries. India has been pretty bad too. But this what they were the worst of it was that they were a sucker.
Is it too. Yeah. It's hard to bring it up to you.
How's that better.
Good to go.
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 is had 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 Taibbi showing this. And it was an early military censorship operation. And they 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, all in secret, all open investigations ongoing. And basically, 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 justices 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. He's like, it's Schellenberger, right? He's like, Michael Schellenberger's up here. And the crowds just, you know, they knew about the Twitter files.
Afterwards, we go down and it's just, you know, 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, like while he's speaking, he's like crying. You know, it's a very like emotionally open culture. So now, I mean, 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.
The 12 people, it's 12 people?
We actually don't know, but probably under 100.
And what are they being accused of that the government is saying is so important that they need to be banned?
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