← "YOUR WELCOME" with Michael Malice
"YOUR WELCOME" with Michael Malice
Michael Shellenberger Reacts to His Rogan Interview, Running against Newsom, and How the Left has Gone Insane | “YOUR WELCOME” #413
01:07:04
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- [00:01]
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Michael Shellenberger
with VRBoCare. Help is always ready before, during and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so
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support is always available the Because a
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Michael Malice
great trip starts with peace of mind, folks. My new graphic novel, A Tall Tale of the Old west of the New Wave is out for pre order now. I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior. Please check it out@unwantedbook.com. And there's nothing going on tonight. Good afternoon. Michael Malice here. Let that be a welcome for the next hour. You guys, we are in for a treat. We have Michael Shellenberger here. Michael is the author of San Francisco Apocalypse Never. Independent journalist. You were heavily involved in the Twitter files. I feel like you represent a side of nonpartisan rationality in the social media space. You're kind of hard to pigeonhole and I think you're doing a very useful service in that. I've seen you now for a couple of years, a long time, even being kind of this like splash of cold water when things are boiling over and being like, let's take a deep breath and not be. And I think, I feel also a lot of the work you do is involved with finding rational solutions, social problems, as opposed to finger pointing and partisanship. Is that, is that a fair assessment?
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Michael Shellenberger
That's lovely. That's a lovely assessment. Thank you.
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Michael Malice
So you just, well, I'm excited to talk to you is you recently just moved here from the Bay Area. You had previously ran for governor against Gavin Newsom for California. Do you plan on losing the Texas gubernatorial race as well?
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Michael Shellenberger
Hell no. No way. No, no. And I'm not even sure where I'm living. I mean, this is the thing is like we sold our residents in California. We kept our house there. My wife doesn't really want to be here. You know, she's agreed to like, four months a year. I'm looking at more like. I'd love to be more like nine. So we're somewhere between four to nine months a year here. And yeah, I have a lot of, as you can imagine, some. Some mixed feelings about California. Much more mixed than I do about Texas.
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Michael Malice
Well, let me hear. Well, let me hear the pros. So give me the steel man for California and then the straw man.
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Michael Shellenberger
I mean, it's nothing that would surprise you. I mean, just the things that everybody loves. I mean, the climate, the geography, it's just. There's nowhere on earth, you know, I mean, it's like. It's like probably the greatest strip of land, you know, anywhere in the world, in my view, in terms of, like, what's there and what you can do. And I love the cities. I love San Francisco. I love Los Angeles. I've wanted to live in Los Angeles for a really long time. I still. There's big parts of me that don't know a lot of parts of California. So when I would get taken around la, for example, it's all these mystery neighborhoods, and you're just like, this is incredible. These leafy, you know, beautiful places. So just the stuff that people in general love about California and then the things I hate is that it has had as its policy and has had for a long time to basically let drug dealers murder mentally ill people on the street in the name of harm reduction. So that was like, what San Francisco is really about is sort of how do you get to a place where you're literally chopping the feet off of mentally ill women living on the streets whose feet had become so, you know, gangrenous, so they just take her to the hospital, chop her feet off, and then put her back on the sidewalk. How do you, as a person that says you're compassionate and empathic, how is that consistent with your values? So trying to understand that particular derangement. And then. And before that was the environment. Similarly, like, how do you go and try to deprive people of cheap energy when that's, you know, the, the, the main. It's the master resource that overall economic prosperity requires. So having come from the left, having come from the radical left, some of it's also just been a journey of understanding who I was and what I believed and why I believed those things.
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Michael Malice
So this is something I really want you to speak on, because working in that space and having come from that space, there is a big dispute, disagreement, I think, in discourse about, okay, if. If I am a person and my Policies result in, as you're saying, like homeless women having their feet chopped off. And I'm not taking a step back and being like, okay, I took a wrong turn somewhere. So the question comes to how do you mentally model that person? Right now there's the one group which is, well, people are tied up in their ideology and they're kind of oblivious to data that's contrary to it. The second, which is this is death cult, where, you know, what happens as a consequence is exactly the goal. And the goal is, you know, anti human and destructive. So, and I'm sure it's a mix, but which of those do you think is more accurate to portray the mindset of these hardcore progressives?
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, I mean, I think the basic picture that I've had in the last two books I've done and then certainly in the next book which will come out next January, and sort of a culmination of a cycle for me of really trying to go through these left wing issues. Because for me it really starts with nuclear power. Once as a Gen Xer growing up under the fear of nuclear war, where nuclear power plants were actually synonymous for me with nuclear weapons, or at least continuous. And so when you realize that that was wrong and that nuclear power is really good and in fact, like, if you really care about climate change, then you would want a lot of nuclear power. And yet the people trying to shut down the nuclear plants are climate change activists. So what was that about? And then you get to San Francisco and it's similarly like, how do the people that say they're compassionate end up doing these cool things? But the story that we, I mean the, the big prey that I've been hunting is a very familiar idea, which is that, you know, as we've moved away from a more traditional religious societies and in this process that some people call secularization, and Friedrich Nietzsche famously calls the death of God, that people then are not. They don't just become. Most people don't become like my friend Steve Pinker, they don't. Most people don't become just happy atheists like Michael Shermer or like, you know, kind of think of the rational, the new atheist movement, which was sort of like, we're the rational ones, we don't believe in God. And, and most people ended up needing to create some sort of new faith or some sort of new religion. And what the left wing ones almost all have in common is a particular embrace of Rousseau, who's of course the great 18th century philosopher. And his view, simplified as people know, is you Know, people were born free and then everywhere were in chains. In other words, in the jungle, in the pre modern life, we were in these happy collectives and we danced and played music and we were all equal. And then you get into modern civilization and these hierarchies and that's where everything goes wrong. And therefore the solution to oppression, inequality, even death, you know, is to tear down the civilization that's the source of the oppression. And that is really at root of almost all, I'm going to say all of them. But a lot of these left wing religions.
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Michael Malice
I cannot overstate my hatred for Rousseau in terms of thinkers. I think he might be the most consistently evil thinker in history. I, I would say his thoughts, though not his actions, of course, are actually probably worse than Hitler in many ways. Because Hitler had would at least you could say, okay, he's for national. I could kind of steel man. It's. I say this is a Jewish person, but Rousseau, his evil speaks to hatred of humanity as a whole, hatred of civilization as a whole. This idea that if we're enclosed, we're somehow evil is really, if you walk it through as many people have through history, you can't get through the totalitarianism and genocide, except through Rousseau.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
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Michael Malice
And this idea of the public will and general.
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Michael Shellenberger
The general will. Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, I think for me it's like, because I know enough philosophers who are like, there's a lot in Rousseau, you know, there's a lot in his thinking. There's good stuff in there. The idea of.
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Michael Malice
I don't think.
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Michael Shellenberger
How about. What about the idea that. That we're all endowed by our Creator to have certain inalienable rights?
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Michael Malice
I don't think that that's really of. I don't think that that has much utility as a statement.
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Michael Shellenberger
Well, but it's the basis of our entire constitution and form of government.
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Michael Malice
Well, I don't believe in our constitution of form of government.
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Michael Shellenberger
Okay, well, we can get to that. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, on the broader point, I mean the politicized version of, of Husseau and the picture of him as sort of attributing all these things that I think we, that most of us, a lot of us think are tragic parts of life, like the fact that it ends and the fact that we're born unequal, like some of us are born into, you know, with just. Some people can do math, I can't. You know, like things like that we're just born unequally and these things are a tragedy. And, and religion has Provided ways to sort of explain them.
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Michael Malice
Sure.
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Michael Shellenberger
And to cope with them. That were really important and powerful psychologically to deal with your, you know, your fears of death, but also just, you know, the reality of suffering. You know, it's the experience of Buddha when he leave, when he was a young man, he leaves the, and he leaves the, the royal courtyard and goes out and sees people dying and suffering and sick and, and trying to make sense of that world. And he creates a, a philosophy, someone might say a religion to deal with it. And who. So's Rousseau's view of it was that basically it was to tear it all down. I mean, that's the underlying motive of it. And then I think I agree, it's like when you get to Marx and you get a much more complex explanation of it. Supposedly objective, analyzing capitalism as this terrible thing, as this exploitative thing, although of course at the same time superior to feudalism, but nonetheless it's all premised on the idea that civilization is the underlying source of our problems. And I think my view is that these left wing religions are all downstream from Rousseau and Rousseau is downstream from really just no longer believing that older Judeo Christian mythology.
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Michael Malice
Well, so, but, but my question to you is when they see that woman with their feet cut off, is it like this is civilization? Like what's their thought process? As best as you can explain, they
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Michael Shellenberger
go, well, the first thing they'll say is they go, they go, well, we should be offering her services.
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Michael Malice
Okay.
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Michael Shellenberger
You know, and then you'll say, well, she's psychotic because she looks like. I mean it appears. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I suspect that it's either, you know, it's probably appears in that case it appeared to be something like schizophrenia, you know, maybe it'd be bipolar, you know, some other serious mental illness. In some cases on the street, you find people that are psychotic and it's meth induced.
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Michael Malice
Sure. Oh yeah, yeah.
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Michael Shellenberger
Smoke methamphetamine for, you know, three months straight and don't sleep very much and you become psychotic. And it's indistinguishable from psychosis, from underlying mental illnesses. So they would say we should offer her services. And you go well, but she's psychotic. And she goes, well, we shouldn't. Well, why would we punish her because she's psychotic and you go, well, she's mentally ill and needs care. And the idea is that she's a victim of civilization in one way or another. And so if she's a victim of civilization, then you absolutely can't impose more Civilization on her in the form of mandatory court ordered, judge ordered, some sort of mandate that she has to stay in a hospital either until she gets better or is no longer a threat to herself and others. And what you got in California was a whole set of bad ideas that come after World War II. There were other things going on. We didn't take care of our psychiatric hospitals, we didn't fund them. Well, the depression, World War II, all these things hurt them. So after World War II, they were in pretty bad shape. So you had a bunch of publicity. But the idiot, the ideological intellectuals that were seeking to shut down the mental health, the mental hospitals and not replace them with anything, including any court order or mandate to go and get care if you're really sick. That comes from the Rousseauian radical left. And then it gets. We can talk about the difference between like the radical left and the liberal left, but like, basically the liberal left just ends up absorbing that anti civilization discourse which says, no, if you're, if we label you a victim of civilization, then you should be allowed to basically undermine various aspects of civilization.
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Michael Malice
It's interesting because binary thinkers can't wrap their heads around this because they will say correctly that if you have the government in a position, institutionalized people like slippery slope. Look at the Soviet Union. You know, someone doesn't want to get their Covid shot, you know, lock them up in the nuthouse. You can very easily see a regime that would do that. And I think they have a valid point. But then the argument being that like, well, no one should be institutionalized. It's just like, go to New York and walk around the street. Like, you will find several people, not just necessarily homeless people, who should absolutely are not safe to be walking the street. I understand this is a delicate balance between civil liberties and constitutional rights, so on and so forth, but it's really this, like, to your point, this shouldn't. And I know shouldn't. It's a blue pill word. This shouldn't be a partisan political issue. Like if someone's mentally ill, it doesn't really matter who they're voting for if they think they're Abe Lincoln.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. And we just saw this. So Mom, Donnie comes in. Mom, Donnie said, I'm not going to require sweeps. You know, even the term sounds negative. Sweeps. That's just a police officer saying to a mentally ill person in a psychotic state in the middle of a, you know, severe winter cold storm, you, hey, honey, you have to come inside to the shelter. That's all that is. You know, I mean, I Guess there'd be a situation where the person would say, no, whatever, and they'd have to be arrested. But they're still. It's not like they're going to, you know, they're just trying to get them inside to save their life. Mamdani said that that's too much civilization. That's too much police. We don't want the police playing that role. Well, I think it was 13 people ended up dying on the streets before he reversed his policy.
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Michael Malice
He did reverse it.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, he did. They started bringing them in.
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Michael Malice
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's talk about this.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
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Michael Malice
Because I was. I've had this argument with people, and I don't care what people's rhetoric is. I care what they do. Especially a politician. A politician says X, Y, and Z, and they do abc. And I want abc. Let them say what they want. Right. To some extent. So there was the big fear in conservative circles. Oh, my God. Mamdani, Democratic Socialist. I thought that fear was very valid. His inaugural address was very much like he explicitly said, we're going to repudiate the cold winds of capitalism with the warm hug of collectivism. I thought day one, he's going to put his member on the table, be like, I'm here, I'm mayor now. Right. Because he owes nothing to Democratic Party. He got his way doing end run around them. Just like Trump owed nothing to the Republican establishment in 2016. But so far he's governed not as bad as de Blasio. The fact that he's shaking hands with Trump tells me this guy is more of a hustler than he is an ideologue. And the fact that I didn't know this till now, to backpedal on a policy says something positive about any politician. If they're like, okay, this is wrong. I took knowledge, a mistake. I think that's. I'm shocked because ideologues don't do that. There's double down.
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Michael Shellenberger
I mean, the media was just uniform. I mean, even the left wing media was like, you know, I mean, it's a really clear case. I put it that way.
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Michael Malice
Yeah, but so was the nursing home stuff on Covid. Yeah.
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Michael Shellenberger
Oh, yeah.
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Michael Malice
No consequences there.
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Michael Shellenberger
No, that's true. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. Although it's a slightly different situation. I mean, in this case, it's like, yeah. Anyway, they just died. I mean, that was like. And I was like, nobody was like, why did. You know, why did. Why did they die? You know, what happened? You know, it was like, really, like, there's a really Clear causality. And yeah, I mean, I agree with you. In other words, I mean, that's one of the reasons I support democracy, you know, because I was reading your earlier book and you're dealing with your 2019 book on the right and you're going through these ideas of courtesy Arvin and the cathedral and the sort of backlash against liberal democracy. And you know, my response, and I've said this to, you know, I've said this, made this point to various folks that say those things, which is like, that's the nice thing about democracy is it's supposed to be self corrective like that. A combination of free speech and opportunistic politicians who would, you know, presumably like to have a political career after his four years in office. He doesn't want to let you know, homeless people die. I mean, you could just, I don't mean to be like, I'm not suggesting that he has no heart or something like that at all, but I do think it was, it became politically unviable for him to do that similarly when he was going to raise the taxes on landlords and realized I was going to increase rents. And I think he backed off of that a little bit and is trying to sort it out. So, yeah, I mean, that's one of the things we can, we can count on him, you know, for is hopefully that his political ambition will take precedence over, you know, doing things ideologically. But we'll see.
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Michael Malice
Yeah, but are you not surprised that he didn't you, weren't you scared he'd be worse than he is?
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Michael Shellenberger
As me, you know, I was, I don't know if we were talking about earlier, but it's like, I think the thing that really freaks me out with him for the first time was because, you know, I'm like, everybody's like, it was like, guy's an incredible smiler and like incredible charisma and charm and he's really like the moment that I was like. The only two moments where I got really weirded out by him was when he told that story about his, his aunt apparently who had the hijab and was harassed and apparently were a bunch of problems in that story. And I just remember him having a kind of anger, displaying a kind of anger that almost seemed like a kind of hatred of America. And that was the part where you're like, and it's a funny thing, it's not always obvious like when that, like when are you just angry, when are you full of hatred? But there was something there that at just an intuitive level I was like, that seems like he really hates our country, which is like, bad. Like you don't want that guy in charge. And then the other one was his acceptance speech where he really, you know, there's like a flat. There's a micro expressions, you know, you see, we pick up on them. And there was like a flash of something in his face where it struck me as an inappropriate, appropriate level of, you know, like hatred and anger around the stuff. And that kind of weirded me out because it made me wonder if that was sort of the true. That was what was beneath the smiling face.
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Michael Malice
I. I think there's that super villain thing of I got over on you and now I'm here like this and.
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Michael Shellenberger
Oh, that was the face. Don't you think that's like a smug face, though? Right.
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Michael Malice
But I feel like that anger is kind of like a resentment that he's had to smile and nod for people he despises.
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Michael Shellenberger
Wow.
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Michael Malice
And now he's not in a position to do so. To not do so.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
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Michael Malice
But.
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Michael Shellenberger
And he's going to show his true underlying. Because I think that the. That's what I think when we go thinking back to Rousseau, I mean, I think that's. That's underneath Rousseau really something. I mean, if you read the biographies, too. I mean, there's something.
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Michael Malice
He's a very evil person on a personal level too.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. He really hated. He was resentful. He was always sort of resentful. And he's striving. He was really resentful. Of course, he abandons his five children in orphanages and then goes on and writes a book about how to educate children. But there was something really, like, angry, resentful.
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Michael Malice
Yes.
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Michael Shellenberger
About him. And then, you know, if you kind of, you know, like a Nietzschean view of it would be sort of like, well, that's what's being. That's what's being expressed in the ideas. The ideas are always coming from something. So there's an underlying hatred of civilization for, like, he was mistreated and. Oh, I was mistreated. As it struck me as a little bit also of just a little bit like Untitled.
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Michael Malice
Oh, yeah.
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Michael Shellenberger
Like, he was probably really, really bright, but yet didn't maybe didn't feel like he got all the respect he needed.
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Michael Malice
He was that bright again in Columbia.
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Michael Shellenberger
Rousseau.
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Michael Malice
No, I'm saying Gamdani.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That whole time. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. The whole time you're like, oh, yeah, yeah.
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Michael Malice
Sorry.
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Michael Shellenberger
I was like, wow, dude, Rousseau applied. It was. I was like, was Columbia Around. I was like, might have been. Harvard is like, what, 17th century? Yeah, yeah. I mean, momdani was just such a star, but he was so radical. I mean, that was the thing that came out with all the videos. They didn't. And the tweets, they didn't bother. It's like he was just saying things like seizing the meat. He was just saying Marxist communist stuff like a few years earlier. So that's radical.
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Michael Malice
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- [21:55]
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- [22:25]
Michael Malice
Let's get back to the show. The other reason I'm not worried about Mamdani as much as other people is. There were three elections that day. Right. It was Mamdani, New Jersey and Virginia. So the Democratic Party is at its lowest point in quite some time. So they have to look, okay, what's the future Democratic Party going to be? Both parties have to do this. Like, okay, are we going to attack toward the center and try to appeal to Karen, who's the swing vote, or are we going to double down on our base? Right. And the Jersey, New Jersey gut trial race, the Virginia Gubertron race, were both blowouts for the Democratic Party.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
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Michael Malice
Virginia, the Democrat, had their biggest win since it became a bipartisan state.
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Michael Shellenberger
This is spaming Spamberger.
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Michael Malice
Yes. And they have their biggest House or legislature majority since, like, the 70s New Jersey. It was the same candidates four years earlier. And now she increased her lead over him to, like, you know, double digits. The guy's a strong candidate. So if I'm the Democratic Party operative, Mamdani squeaks at her four or five points over this old Partizan hack who'd been driven from office.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
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Michael Malice
But then I look at these two races which were. Which are kind of purpley, and they went hard blue. I'd be like, that is the message to sell. And they both were very big on pocketbook issues, paying the rent, so on and so forth. So that's why I'm not as concerned about where the Democratic Party Party's gonna go. But I think WOKE is just on pause, and I think this whole thing about Woke's dead is a joke, and they're just waiting out Trump's term. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.
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Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, well, it really depends on the issue. Right. So certainly on trans, it's 71% of the public is against trans medicine. On minors, 79% is against trans identified males and female sports. You know, you start to get to things like the border. It's like huge majorities for closing the border. And then that support goes way down when you start getting into ice race. And then it goes even further if it's ice raised for people that didn't commit crimes beyond coming into the country illegally. And then when you get to the chaos of Minneapolis, then it goes down even further. So it depends. And also the migration one, because we did look at all the polling for each of these, it was like, it has got. It fluctuates a surprising amount. I think, like, I think around 20 points.
- [24:34]
Michael Malice
Yeah, it's really weird. Yeah.
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Michael Shellenberger
So there's some big swings on that. I Mean, I think that, like, this is interesting, this, the New York Times, we. Because you're always like, you're reading. It's like the tea leaves, you know, it's like, oh, like the tea leaf moves a little bit. Like, the New York Times does one story and you're like, okay, does this mean it's. But the Times did a piece on dei and it was like, I think there was, like, one person was totally against and like, a couple more people that were sort of to her left. And it was sort of like, did DEI go too far? You know what I mean? So you kind of expect to see some sort of elite kind of trying to reposition things, certainly to, you know, retcon. Covid is a classic one where it's like, well, we didn't know at the time that we could open up the schools. It was like. Except for everybody in Europe had opened up the schools by, you know, fall of 2020. So you did know, but. So it depends on what the issue is. But I mean, certainly, like, yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting question, you know, like. Like, like, on race, like, part of me kind of maybe is overly optimistic. I'm kind of like, I think it could finally go away. Like, there's a part of me that goes. It's really. I don't wish to talk about it.
- [25:36]
Michael Malice
Yeah.
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Michael Shellenberger
Like, there's a part of me that just goes. There's something different that happened this time in the backlash against wokeism and DEI that was different than the 90s, because you and I are. I think you remember the 90s. Of course I do. And, like, there was a bit. There was a backlash to political correctness and stuff.
- [25:52]
Michael Malice
Very much so.
- [25:53]
Michael Shellenberger
But it wasn't like, it didn't really go deep enough. It didn't really have enough of an impact. And I think this last round was so people. I think people hate it so much. I just think people really, really hate it. And there's a preference cascade, I think, more on yes on race than on other ones. Meaning there's a lot of people that really hated it all the time, but they didn't want to say anything to everybody else. We see that on trans, too, but I mean, on race, I think it had been building up, but it'll be interesting to see, you know, how much the left. I mean, it's like when you get rid of, like. I mean, you know, the left got repudiated by Trump on, you know, trans race climate. Let's say those are the top three, arguably, then you Add border for. These are pretty big chunks of the Democrats agenda. And so the Democrats, by the time you get to ICE raids in Minneapolis, like, oh, thank God, we can get back to, you know, talking about how terrible ICE raids are. And then they had got. They have kind of. They felt like they have Gaza and Israel. But that's not something that people are going to, like, vote on. You know, I think most people agree it's not something to vote on. So I was with, actually a senior Democratic pollster and a senior Democratic fundraiser, and I was like, this was like, like two or three weeks ago. So it was really recently. And I was like, you guys must be feeling really optimistic. I mean, it seems like Trump's in trouble with Iran. And, you know, the whole Epstein files thing was, like, had a negative impact. You guys must be super stoked about the fall. And they were like, not, you know, they were just like, no, it's like, we still have really low approval ratings. You know, the, the presidential map still looks bad for Democrats. Now, people said that about Trump, you know, about how the presidential map looks bad for populism. So I'm, I take it with a grain of salt. But, no, I don't think that the Democrats are not optimistic, but they're also not really hard correcting in the way that like Bill Clinton did with Sister Soulja.
- [27:27]
Michael Malice
Right.
- [27:28]
Michael Shellenberger
And so, and you saw, I mean, saw Gavin tries, like, Gavin goes, I'm going to go into a podcast with Charlie Kirk and I'm going to say that I'm uncomfortable with, you know, males and female sports. Huge backlash to Gavin on that. Like, big backlash. So, like, since then, it's just been like, oh, I love trans kids, you know, yeah, I want a trans kids, you know, and like, you know, okay, not that far, but. But, like, that was the idea. You know, he just was like, always now he's got to say that. So it doesn't seem like these candidates are going to try to break from that. So that means that they're in a tough position because that means that they have to then. Whereas the Trump core agenda for the party base is actually really popular with swing voters closing the borders and ending dei. And these things are. Whereas, like, the, the progressive views on trans and race and climate and stuff are not. I mean, climate's a little bit more of a mixed bag, but they're not super popular with the swing voters. And so then you end up with these guys potentially, you know, with a divide, you know, with a big divide between the majority that they need to, to get in order to become president.
- [28:21]
Michael Malice
The reason I just had a brain fart a second ago, we're talking about Rousseau was there was a Rand quote that applies to Mamdani that I was trying to rack my brain to get down. I still don't remember it, but she was describing one of her antagonists and she was saying that they were very smiley. But I wish I had the quote on top of my head. But something about, like, when he smiled, it was like he was bearing his teeth like an animal. And you could see behind his eyes there was something evil.
- [28:46]
Michael Shellenberger
And I think I saw that somewhere. Yeah, yeah.
- [28:48]
Michael Malice
And that when the Mamdani smile, it's not a smile of warmth.
- [28:52]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [28:52]
Michael Malice
It's a sign of almost like it feels like he's giving you the finger. It's a sign of like, antagonism. Like, I remember I just saw that video this morning of when he was in front of that CEO's penthouse, which is. Oh, yeah, that's 38 million. He's like, we're taxing the rich. But it wasn't like it would be a time for seriousness. It'd be like, look, we're taxing this guy and that's going to pay for food. It's going to pay.
- [29:15]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [29:16]
Michael Malice
You could give the speech, but the fact that he's smirking like that is something. There's something sinister about it.
- [29:21]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. It betrayed that there was a motivation of resentment. Yes, resentment. And. And you know, the root. And, you know, Nietzsche uses this idea of resentment a lot, but he, It's. He's the French term resantiment, which has a lot.
- [29:33]
Michael Malice
That's the word. Yes.
- [29:34]
Michael Shellenberger
A lot more.
- [29:35]
Michael Malice
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:36]
Michael Shellenberger
More anger to his. More like. It's more like resentment is like a combination of like anger and hatred and resentment.
- [29:41]
Michael Malice
Yeah.
- [29:42]
Michael Shellenberger
You know, and I think that's there. So you get a sense to go, wait a second, I thought you were trying to. To. When I think you wanted to tax the rich to help the poor. Sounds like you want to tax the rich because you hate the rich. And I think that he does, and I think he hates capitalism. So I think that you kind of go, there's. Before you get to, you know, like, kind of what it all means is like there's an underlying emotion there that I think we should be really suspicious. Suspicious of. You want your policymakers to love the American people and love the American system, and it's been a capitalist system from the beginning, or at least, you know, my friend Mike Lind would point out that it's more of a mixed system. I mean, you have a really big public sector of this country. So, so even the word cat, I mean, we talked about that. We're like, capitalism doesn't really describe what the system is anyway. So you're already sort of framing this all in, in a kind of misleading way. Not even get to like the policy itself. But it did seem like then there was a backlash from Ken Griffin or he said something and then it seemed like Mom, Donnie then had his people try to soften it. But yeah, you sort of go, there's Jekyll and Hyde kind of going on there, isn't there? Where there's like probably a guy that could be a pretty, you know, guy goes out and shovel snow when it snows. A guy that could probably be. He's, he's young, he's energetic. What you want from a mayor, you want him out there riding herd on his, on his employees and being like, let's make, let's deliver or let's really be a good manager day to day. And then this other side of him, you know, which is that darker Rousseau in know, Rantimont side.
- [31:01]
Michael Malice
So this forthcoming book, we, you and I, I, I came up with the. So you and I went back and forth. You have a title, right?
- [31:09]
Michael Shellenberger
I have what I think is a
- [31:10]
Michael Malice
title, but the title is public.
- [31:11]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. So what's on Amazon?
- [31:12]
Michael Malice
What's the title?
- [31:13]
Michael Shellenberger
The title is the Left's War on Reality.
- [31:15]
Michael Malice
Now I told you that was a subtitle. And you agree that's a subtitle. And I came up with what I think is the perfect title.
- [31:21]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay, okay.
- [31:22]
Michael Malice
Which is either Dementia the Left's War in Reality or Demented the Left's War in Reality. And it also then subtly. Dog whistles. What happened with the Biden stuff?
- [31:35]
Michael Shellenberger
Uh huh. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean it's, we had played with something, you know, even with San Francisco, I had played with something more around mental illness like Sanford Psycho.
- [31:44]
Michael Malice
Oh yeah.
- [31:45]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay. And, and then we had, with this book, we had played with some titles like that. And there's, and that's in the book. Like the book has, you know, it deals with, you know, we're not, we're not psychologists, we're not diagnosing anybody, blah, blah, blah. All those caveats. There you sort of go, there's traits here of, you know, things that you see in various kinds of mental illness. I kind of point out those traits at a group level and, and not. So that's definitely in there. The, the essence of the book is about what that title's about, you know, which is that there's something going on where. Let's say. I promise not to say too much about the book.
- [32:17]
Michael Malice
Okay.
- [32:17]
Michael Shellenberger
We can.
- [32:17]
Michael Malice
We don't have to talk about the book. Yeah, but that. I just.
- [32:20]
Michael Shellenberger
The title has a. There's a. Well, here's what I'll say is like, I think that the. The part we were talking about before of how people without a religion need to create one and they find Rousseau and a thousand variants of Rousseau. That's really what we think is at bottom. And that the demented stuff that comes from it is downstream from that prior construction of a.
- [32:41]
Michael Malice
Are you familiar with the social gospel?
- [32:43]
Michael Shellenberger
Sure, yeah. In America.
- [32:45]
Michael Malice
Yeah. Because I feel like that's where I mean, kind of indisputably, that's how. So it's hard to talk about this with people because most people are binary thinkers and they think religion, Christianity, conservative, Republican, or interchangeable terms.
- [32:58]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [32:58]
Michael Malice
And then progressive liberal, like atheist, Democrat or leftist, buckets.
- [33:03]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [33:03]
Michael Malice
And when you tell them socialism came to the US through Christianity, they think either you're attacking Christianity or you're just talking out of your ass. And when I explained to them what would Jesus do Was a slogan written by an explicit socialist, they can't wrap their heads around it. So there was this book in the 1800s called in his Steps. Right. And it's about a guy who's a newspaperman and decides to run his newspaper. Has. Jesus would do it and as best he can deduce. Do you know this book? That's right. You know where this come from? That's where it comes from. No. And what's fascinating about it is in the 1800s, this book is written and it exactly mirrors Cancel culture because he decides because boxing is barbaric and unchristian, which I can understand that argument pretty well. Not only will they not cover it, they also won't take advertisements for it. So basically we're just going to pretend it doesn't exist. And it's the same thing, I think, with this kind of progressive spaces now platforming, like, I'm not going to platform boxing, you know, so whenever people have that wwjd, I'm like, you don't know. Which is a great message. You don't know where it comes from. And then Woodrow Wilson, who I think is really like patient zero of progressivism, was fanatically religious and downright messianic in his thinking.
- [34:18]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. I mean, there's. I was having this conversation with a friend who was Sharing who is very very. Is very like probably not for open borders but very upset by the ice raids. Right. And really views them as unchristian. Sure. And like this is very unprincipled that Christian, you know. And my point was there's a lot of different ways to read it. I mean Jesus, you know, he, when he says, you know, let that which belongs to Caesar beyond a Caesar, he's sort of. Which appears to be, you know, if you believe the historians, one of the authentic Jesus statements. And, and really I think he's suggesting there that you know, and of course we have in the Christian tradition Augustine's idea there's a city of man, there's a city of God and that they're not the same and that yeah there will be, you know, revelations that sort of, it'll come in the future. But really a lot of Christianity has been like we're not trying, we, we think we're sinners and we're going to have a flawed system. And so we're trying to minimize the sin. And it's not a. They don't think you can. They think be hubristic to, to try to do what I think a lot of these Christians are doing. Now I come from a tradition of very, very. They weren't Puritans, they were Anabaptists, but they were anti statists, they were anarchists. This is the Mennonite tradition, the Amish tradition. And they really did not, I mean they really were like, it's all, you know, it's all gods, it's all. Everything should belong to Jesus. And I mean they had some way of explaining why but they were very anti status. They wouldn't go to war, they'd be passive as that kind of thing.
- [35:37]
Michael Malice
And they were allowed not to go to war.
- [35:39]
Michael Shellenberger
They got legally but they would have to work in like a mental hospital or they'd have to do something. But I, yeah, I mean I'm not that so I mean I'm not part of, I've, I. There's parts of that tradition I admire. But you know, my view is that like, well, you need borders like because you, you know and you know, Jesus's most kind of violent act was kicking the money changers out of the temple. But he wasn't saying we shouldn't have money, you know what I mean? Like so, so I think that, yeah for me, I think and for most Christians you have to that like that's. They go too far, you know, with trying to impose what would Jesus do on things that Jesus Was like, I'm not doing those things. Well, no, I. Jesus is like, I'm not running the economy or the state or whatever.
- [36:18]
Michael Malice
Well, I think a lot of times when people use that expression disingenuously, right. And they just, since they decide they're a good person and obviously Jesus is not a good person, he's the best person. He's going to agree with me. And it's kind of like, oh, if Martin Luther King were alive today, he'd have my exact same political views. Like, you don't know that. You're just saying that to kind of have this authority through a Ouija board of someone who's accomplished great things that you have no contact with, but just using to buttress position very disingenuously. I want to change text a little.
- [36:47]
Michael Shellenberger
Let me say one more thing about this if I don't mind. I think the other thing is that the left will use these things to advance an underlying anti civilization goal. So if you want to, if you're going to use Christianity, you can use Judaism, you can use whatever, Buddhism. But underneath it, it's like, are they really trying to advance like the Christian, you know, mission or are they really trying to undo civilization? Because those aren't the same things.
- [37:08]
Michael Malice
I'll give you one of my quotes which sums that up. It always comes down to what do I need to say to get you to do what I want. That's all it is. Yeah, it's all disingenuous and a bad faith.
- [37:19]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [37:19]
Michael Malice
There's that very famous meme of pajama boy. And he goes, we should let in refugees because Jesus said to be nice to poor people in the Bible somewhere. No, those ridiculous arguments won't work on you. On me. But since you believe in it, maybe if I tell to you'll do what I want. Like, that's just the thinking there.
- [37:34]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:34]
Michael Malice
And it's, it's completely shameless.
- [37:37]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [37:38]
Michael Malice
And offensive and.
- [37:40]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [37:40]
Michael Malice
They don't really care.
- [37:41]
Michael Shellenberger
No, I mean it was. People would always ask me, they're like, how is it that they. How is it that the progressives who say we are concerned with the bodily autonomy of homeless people and that's why we can't mandate care on them, but we can mandate a COVID vaccine on everybody. And people are like, how is that? It's like, well, because they don't actually care about bodily autonomy.
- [37:59]
Sponsor Voice
They're doing.
- [37:59]
Michael Shellenberger
They're just using that as an excuse. Yeah, no, I mean, I think people, I mean these are all. I mean, I think people Don't. I mean, obviously they don't because otherwise it wouldn't be so powerful.
- [38:07]
Michael Malice
No. I think they're increasingly. Yeah. Figuring out people arguing that and they're like, oh, this is not being done in good faith and there's no point in me arguing with this person.
- [38:15]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [38:16]
Michael Malice
And. And I'm gl. I've had a. Somewhat of a part to play in that. And I'm very glad that more people are like, I. Oh, I'm not arguing with them. There's. There's no, like, when they talk about gun violence and they include people who use weapons on themselves. You know, I can't say the word. Like, I guess. Sorry, we'll bleep it.
- [38:34]
Michael Shellenberger
It's fine.
- [38:35]
Michael Malice
But the point is you're not acting good faith. When people talk about, you know, Muslim terrorism and they start the calendar 2002, it's like, did anything happen 2001 that skew this data? Maybe like, you know, this. And so much of it is being done. And I don't think just leftism is being done disingenuously. It's kind of, oh, yeah, let's. Let's talk about discourse. Because you got Tracy pilled. I've had Michael Tracy as a guest on the show. I've also had people like Kurt Metzger Lubricowski who have the complete opposite view on the Epstein files. You got into it a bit with Rogan. I'm assuming you did your homework on the Epstein files and read a lot of this stuff. Is that correct? Yes, because that's the thing.
- [39:13]
Michael Shellenberger
Why I was actually more files pilled. I mean, I respect.
- [39:16]
Michael Malice
Okay.
- [39:18]
Michael Shellenberger
Honestly, it was like. It was like reading the files files and being like I was looking for. I think the stuff wasn't there. And there was stuff there that sort of disproved what I had been thinking. But we can.
- [39:27]
Michael Malice
Yeah, let's talk about this because I am not going to sit and read through. So I will.
- [39:30]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [39:30]
Michael Malice
I always want to talk to someone who's done their homework and has a coherent narrative about it.
- [39:34]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [39:34]
Michael Malice
There are a couple of points that I could not get past. One is the idea that a. If there were these smoking guns, they'd be sitting in a drawer for a decade and no one's going to expunge them. Second that. You know, they said some things got out that they didn't want, but if I'm Mr. Bad Guy, I'm going to know, okay, take care of these 10 things. These are the important ones. Maybe the lesser stuff will get through. That's not going to matter. And also I did not believe and I think a lot of people who this is something that they have an act of faith. I don't believe every House Democrat spontaneously cared about the well being of children. And the reason I know that's not true is, and I bring this up all the time, Dennis Hastert was the longest serving Republican speaker of the House in history. He was speaker of the house in the 2000s under Bush. He went to jail because of stuff he did with boys and they never bring him up. And you would think if they really cared about this, this would be a cudgel that they could use very effectively against the Republicans. And he's a trivia question now. So I really want to hear where you started on this issue and what you were looking for and what wasn't there.
- [40:33]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, well, I mean, where I started was it was really. Gosh, when was it? It was years ago. It must have been 2023, 2024. We were very primed to the conspiracies that the intelligence community had committed. So this is the thing about conspiracy. I think it's like, I'm a conspiracy. I try to be a conspiracy realist in the sense that like there are conspiracies, like for sure, in the sense that there are secret illegal activities by deep state actors to do things. And the most famous one of recent memory is Russiagate.
- [41:05]
Michael Malice
Oh yeah.
- [41:06]
Michael Shellenberger
Had as it's related to it, the Hunter Biden laptop and also the censorship industrial complex. Those are 100% proven in my view. Like 100%. There's some details, but does anyone deny them? I mean, yeah, I mean Democrats, kind of, some partisan Democrats, they kind of fuss around the edges and make it sound. Often it's. That's a whole separate interesting issue, which is, I mean, on the censorship stuff, people will say one of the things they say because we'll go, well, you guys at. Stan, these all you people at Stanford demanded that Twitter censor all these things and Twitter acted on 75% of them. You know, and they'll be like, oh, they exaggerated how many things we got censored. And I was like, okay, well, but what are we talking about here? Like, we're against censorship, right? So like that's often how it happens. Or, or they'll go, but there was a lot of suspicious information about Trump. You know, they'll be like, you know, he was thinking about getting a Trump, you know, hotel there, you know, but, but not really. Like, it's like, not like, not when you get to Something like Epstein and UFOs, which are much more contested and active and live and open and still open in my view. But so, okay, so, so for Epstein. So I was very primed to that. I was, I had read about, I'd read the Chaos book about MK Ultra, you know, which involved prostitutes. I honestly, I think it was like influenced probably by some pop culture, you know, the honey pot, you know, there's sort of, it's sort of. It was in Munich, the movie Munich might remember. There's a. He was like, oh, I watched how there's a honey pot in the bar. He was killed by the girl. And just really, I think having a very, you know, dark view of the intelligence community. So I, I was sympathetic to, I wasn't definitive, but I was like, it appears as though the intelligence community is somehow involved in a sex blackmail operation to potentially control powerful people.
- [42:47]
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Michael Shellenberger
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- [45:19]
Michael Malice
Let's get back to the show. Didn't what's his name get caught with what's his name? Who's Sasquatch? Who's the tall one? I'm black. And his name. Who. They just fired Comey. Didn't he get. Didn't he get caught doing. Trying to do a honeypot operation on some of Trump's people? Gosh.
- [45:35]
Michael Shellenberger
Do I maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure of that one.
- [45:38]
Michael Malice
No, that was just recent Comey. No, I mean, when Trump came in, I think they were saying, comey's gonna get threatened with jail for this because. Let me look this up.
- [45:46]
Michael Shellenberger
Oh, yeah, that's good. I would love to know about that
- [45:48]
Michael Malice
because this, I think this is widely discussed.
- [45:50]
Michael Shellenberger
I didn't cover it.
- [45:51]
Michael Malice
And the reason why it was so interesting to me is because it spoke that he has this whole air of Mother Teresa.
- [46:00]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [46:00]
Michael Malice
And it's like you're a filthy spook. Like, even if you're innocent of what you're being accused of at this moment, you're still not a good person. Here we go.
- [46:07]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay.
- [46:08]
Michael Malice
Based on reports from early 2025, the FBI was their investing allegation that he authorized an off the books operation in 2015, 2016, to target using Honeypot agents, Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, that he directed two female undercover FBI employee employees to act as honeypots. Okay, so this is he.
- [46:27]
Michael Shellenberger
He and were they aimed at George Papadopoulos?
- [46:29]
Michael Malice
I believe so. Okay.
- [46:31]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay.
- [46:31]
Michael Malice
And bore it maybe.
- [46:32]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay. There. Because there was a woman we were looking at. That's interesting because we were looking last year at a potential Honey Pot related George Papadopoulos. And I can't even remember. I was like, sometimes you'll go down these rabbit holes. Yeah. Like, where am I? So, yeah, I'd be interested. Like, yeah, that, yeah. So there's some of that. Like there's some of that, you know, and it's not like there's a bunch of reasons I think it'd be hard to carry out a long term sex blackmail operation now. I should say they, you know, there was also this. There was like part of the thing that made it really confusing and hard to know if Michael Tracy or who was right, because Michael Tracy would be like, there's no evidence of any of this. And then the New York Times would publish a photograph where we have a camera pointing right out of bed in Epstein's penthouse, you know, or just there's a big apartment in New York. And then we now know from the Epstein files that he was asking for hidden cameras to be put into Kleenex boxes. You know, why would you want to do that if you're not going to film people having sex? And what are you filming? Compromising situations. We also don't have all the files, so more could come out. The picture though, that I, for me emerges without any additional information is of a sex addict who was remarkably gifted and brilliant at fixing problems for super wealthy people. And so for me, the prototypical case that comes out of the files is that one of the Rothschilds is under indictment from the Justice Department for some sort of tax evasion. And Epstein knows that he needs to hire the former White House counsel under Obama. He figures it out that that's the one person he needs that will most be in the right position with the right knowledge and the right relationships. This is after she's left obviously to then go and broker that deal. And she does. And the settlement is 45 million. Oh, wow. Fined by the Rothschilds. And then Epstein in the email says that'd be 10 for Katherine Rummler and 25 for me. And so you see right away, like who's really running this thing? It's definitely Epstein. So Epstein is not clearly in that situation. There's no evidence that he's like working for somebody else. Like he's working for himself. So that's the first thing about it. Second thing is he's clearly in charge. He gets the 25 million and the woman that actually did the work going to the DOJ and whatever gets the 10. But he's a deal maker. He's putting stuff together. It also answers legal. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Why wouldn't you be able to do that? He just hired a. An attorney for. He works for the Roth. He works for the Rothschild.
- [48:57]
Michael Malice
Yeah. Right. Okay. I'm. I'm an attorney. It's my job to get you off. I got you off. Here's my fee. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [49:02]
Michael Shellenberger
Okay.
- [49:02]
Michael Malice
Logically. Okay, I get it.
- [49:03]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. You don't have to charge $700 an hour. You can charge 10 million. You charge whatever you want.
- [49:07]
Michael Malice
And she. And she earned that money. It worked.
- [49:09]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, probably.
- [49:09]
Michael Malice
She delivered. Yeah, probably.
- [49:10]
Michael Shellenberger
I mean, I don't know what they would have done with that, but. Yeah. So. So then people were like, oh, where did he get his money? Well, you know, we think if he was worth half a billion.
- [49:18]
Michael Malice
I'm sorry. Like, this is my anarchist brain. This is the part where I agree with Mom, Donnie.
- [49:21]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [49:22]
Michael Malice
The fact that if you're wealthy enough, you could just write a check and just not have to worry about, like, legal consequences. Like, again, one of the reasons I'm an anarchist is this idea of equality under the law is something that is ridiculous on its face.
- [49:34]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [49:35]
Michael Malice
And this is such, like, an extreme example of that. It just.
- [49:37]
Michael Shellenberger
It's. Yeah. It's infuriating.
- [49:39]
Michael Malice
Right.
- [49:39]
Michael Shellenberger
And I have two systems of justice. I mean, at least two.
- [49:42]
Michael Malice
Yeah. And I don't think anyone should go to jail for tax evasion. I think they're heroic. Keep your money. But it's just like, come on, if it was something else, that they would be able to get off just as easily.
- [49:50]
Michael Shellenberger
It's very much like. And Joe and I actually talked about this part, and it's like. Like we've known that rich people can, you know, buy a lot of advantages in our legal system. It's not obvious what the solution to that is. That would be anything other than denying people with money their equal rights. Do you know what I mean? So. Because everything they're doing is all legally allowable for good reasons. It's not like there's something truly corrupt in the way that you would see it in places like Sub Saharan Africa or South Asia or these countries that are just really just. It's literally just paying off.
- [50:23]
Michael Malice
Right, Right.
- [50:23]
Michael Shellenberger
There's no pretense of it. You know what? Or you don't have to pay the $45 million fine, you know, in those countries.
- [50:28]
Michael Malice
Right.
- [50:29]
Michael Shellenberger
But that case, for me, really, I go, that really gives me some real insight into what he's doing, because the other question was, like, well, where do you get his money from? You know, he's if he's worth like, 500 million or some between 500 and a billion, we don't know. It's like, well, 20 deals at 25 billion, 25 million will get you there, you know, and he was. He was always on the emails, always talking on the phone. He's always mean. He's incredibly active. Um, so could he. So then the question is, could a. An intelligence community agency or a foreign agency be, you know, paying him to get compromising information on people? I think so. I mean, I think it's. Of course, you know, there's no reason there's. Anything there says it's not happening.
- [51:10]
Michael Malice
And it would not. Just him. They do that all the time, I'm sure. Yeah, you pay. You pay your sources. Get me the goods. Yeah.
- [51:16]
Michael Shellenberger
I mean, it's interesting that, like, Swalwell. Let's just take the current case. Swalwell's, you know, just plummet from the. From the atmosphere. Is going to be governor of California now he's out of Congress, out of a job, and maybe out of a relationship, marriage, we'll see. But. But it's like if anybody. If there's anybody you really wanted to have compromise Wallwell. It doesn't appear that anybody used it. Like, it appears that his opponents used it, or I'm assuming somebody.
- [51:42]
Michael Malice
Sure. The. The.
- [51:43]
Michael Shellenberger
The. The theory I've heard, and I haven't proven it at all, is that the Democrats actually had it. There was just Democrat people, like senior Democrats, who knew it's a ticking time bomb that could be used by a Republican if he gets. If you get into a Republican. So they wanted to set the bomb off before. That was what I heard.
- [51:59]
Michael Malice
Oh, that's smart of them.
- [52:00]
Michael Shellenberger
It'd be smart. Yeah. But, you know, it just seems like,
- [52:02]
Michael Malice
oh, that's really smart.
- [52:03]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. So I just don't. I suspect it happens. I don't see a lot of evidence for it. That's the only thing I would say. Now, I did have a friend of mine who's a. Who's a legislator in a foreign country for the national legislature, and he said that when they were first being sort of briefed on how to be a legislator, you know, you get elected, but you don't really think you're from the country or whatever. And there was a guy that said, look, if some really hot woman, like, wants to try to sleep with you, he goes, y' all are real ugly. Like, she's not gonna. She's not trying to sleep with you because she just wants to have sex with you. Like There is that. So there's definitely talk of a lot of it, but we don't have a lot of cases of it. Now, the one that we have in the files is the Bill Gates thing, which is a very strange one to begin with because it appears to be. It's an email from Jeffrey to Jeffrey that appears to be in the voice of this guy Boris Karsich, I think, who was the Gates science advisor with Boris, saying, I want my expensive penthouse, and you should give it to me. And if you don't, then maybe I'll tell Melinda that you snuck antibiotics in her drink to counteract the STD that you gave her and that you were saying all these people. Well, what do we know? I mean, we know that Gates did have an affair with, I think, a Russian backgammon player. Or is it bridge? No bridge. Right. And so there was some, obviously, adultery. Obviously. Melinda was. I think it's clear she was one that was leaking all this stuff about Epstein to the Wall Street Journal while they're negotiating their divorce settlement. You know, the whole time, you're like, dude, just settle the divorce and make her stop. You know, release all this. So she clearly knew a lot of what was going on, so that would be, like, the best case of it. And then you're sort of like. And then the question is sort of like, was the IC paying for it, or was that just Gates using. I mean. I mean. Sorry, was that just Epstein using it? So, of course, Epstein was always trying to. He wanted to represent all of these guys trying to get to Thiel, trying to get to Gates. He wanted to represent their money. He wanted to get their money. He wanted to make money off of them. He wanted to offer his services to them. So I think that I would just say we don't have evidence of IC control. Now, there's a couple other things. Mike Benz has drawn attention to. The fact that he worked for Bear stearns in the 1980s, and then he had Adnan Khashoggi as a client. Adnan Khashoggi was the Saudi arms dealer who brokered the arms from the Israelis to the Iranians, where the money then was used to fund the Contras and the very famous Iran Contra conspiracy. Proven conspiracy. And he suggests that. That Jeffrey Epstein was sort of a money guy, Crane, you know, moving money around. He's in the. He's obviously in the Caribbean hiding money, moving money, helping with tax evasion, helping with tax avoidance, whatever, or just, you know, a conduit. And that's totally plausible. I could totally see that given who he was and what he did, that would mean that he was a contractor, though, you know, so you're sort of like, well, what are we doing here? And so like, like there's a lot of contractors. You know what I mean? It wouldn't be so on the one hand, he seems to be operating for himself overwhelmingly, and then there's. Maybe this idea is not proven, but there's reason to think it could be true that he was working as a contractor sometimes for the ic. That's still a very different picture than a picture of a guy running a pedophilia ring. Pedophilia technically meaning children before puberty running a pedophile ring for satanic, you know, cannibals eating them. And I mean, and you know, the files, they just got so crazy. I mean, people, they were. The rich are weird. I mean, the rich love talking about food. You know what I mean? So the richer. Because people are like all. They talk about food so much. And you're like, have you ever been around really rich people? They're obsessed. They're gluten free and it's like they talk about it all the time. So he was like obsessed with beef jerky. And the guy that made it ran a restaurant called Cannibal. Bad optics, obviously. But I don't see any evidence in the files that they were sacrificing children and making beef jerky out of them. And like, like, that's just, that's just clearly a hallucination. Now I will say I do think there's this one.
- [55:54]
Michael Malice
Which piece of evidence for that where I, I feel like, am I in crazy land? Because there was one person. The expression food baby is. It's on urbandictionary.com. it's a very common expression. It's like you eat a pizza, you're. You're blowing. You have a food baby, right? And then you have to give birth. Like, and someone in these Epstein files was saying something like, I feel I'm pregnant. I just had my food. And. And people like, look, it shows you kids. I'm like, but this is a common colloquialism like this in some like, obscure 4chan reference that you have to do a rabbit hole. This is something people. If I say it's raining cats and dogs, that's not evidence that I have pets in my yard. It's. It's an expression.
- [56:32]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was. I'm like 95% confident that they were using shrimp in a couple of exchanges as a euphemism. For woman. And they were talking about them in a way that was, I think, just clearly talking about, you know, having sex with women and being dehumanized women. Then you get to the pizza and grape soda. There's a very strange set of texts between Epstein and his urologist about pizza and grape soda. And at one point, his urologist, who's prescribing him erectile dysfunction medicine, says, take your erectile dysfunction medicine. I can't remember the. It was like, a particular name of it, which is fast acting. This is the other thing about it. Take your fast acting erectile dysfunction. Let's go get some pizza and grape soda. Well, in the lore of, like, the conspiracy theory world, pizza and grape soda is code for child molestation and child abuse. And then people point out that there was. They were talking about other food in the same thread and that they took. Someone took, like, the guy took a picture of pizza and grape soda. And so was it innocent? It still struck me as weird, but it was like I wasn't. Like, I actually put a thread on X about it saying it was weird, and then I took it down because I just lost confidence that it was anything that I could say. So either I'm like a total wimp and I wimped out on the conspiracy theory, or I'm a conspiracy theorist and lost my mind. But that's kind of where I landed on a lot of those things, where I was like, oh, I'm sure the shrimps are referring to women. Very sure. I don't know what the pizza and grape soda is, but I'm not sure it was pizza and grape soda because of the context of how they were talking about it.
- [58:01]
Michael Malice
Whenever I hear a conspiracy theory, I'm never like, this is ridiculous. I always have to ask myself what would need to be true for this to be true. So if pizza and grape soda is a euphemism, it could be euphemism for we have an adult female and we're gonna run a train on her. It could be lots of evil things. I'm not saying it's nothing, but the guarantee that it has to be kids is. Has not been demonstrated.
- [58:22]
Michael Shellenberger
Or maybe the two of them were in a. In a. Maybe they both liked having sex at the same time, or they were having
- [58:26]
Michael Malice
orgies or doing opium. Yeah, it could be a lot. A million nefarious things.
- [58:32]
Michael Shellenberger
That's right. That's right.
- [58:33]
Michael Malice
But I all. I think I. I'm gladdened, I guess, to some extent, that when I was in Rogan a couple times, Back, I had a friend, Matt, He. He had asked me or allowed me to use his name, and he had come out to me as being a victim of childhood sexual abuse. And when I. And I, I want to talk about Rogan so people don't feel uncomfortable outing themselves, because I think it's kind of horrific that if you had this awful thing happening as a kid, you feel like you can't tell people, and now you're suffering your entire life. And the point I made in the show is it's a comment on those of us who hadn't had that happen to create a space where it's like, if my friend tells me this, I'm not going to treat them differently. Like, if you tell me your mom was a drunk or your dad hit you, I'd feel sorry for you, but I'm going to treat you exactly the same thing. And when I did that, several other of my friends came out to me, and then I had all these DMs, and I'm like, this is a huge problem, and there's not the social space to discuss it. So I'm glad in that regard that people are aware that evil things happen to kids on a far more frequent basis than people believe. But that does not mean, you know, I had this tweet, whatever it was, not every pedophile is a cannibal. Right? So not every person who's doing something evil is doing this one specific evil thing. And, and with the, with this.
- [59:43]
Michael Shellenberger
And by the way, in your book, you said not every rapist is a murderer.
- [59:46]
Michael Malice
So there was someone from the Innocence Project.
- [59:48]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah.
- [59:48]
Michael Malice
Yeah. So the Innocence Project, I've since learned, is actually more nefarious than it sounds. But their point was allegedly to use DNA to exonerate murderers.
- [59:56]
Michael Shellenberger
Right.
- [59:57]
Michael Malice
And I said to one that I work in there, I go, your slogan should be, because not every rapist is a murderer. But, yeah, So I also, the thing, I think you and I discussed this when I met also is I, I, I wouldn't you want to live in a world where this stuff isn't happening and that, like, okay, Epstein wasn't literally eating kids? I feel like there's this sense where people relief, but people are hoping that it's. Yeah, it's true. And I don't know. Where is that.
- [60:28]
Michael Shellenberger
That's an interesting question.
- [60:28]
Michael Malice
Right? Where's that information coming from? Yeah, when you want to know, like, oh, it's. This has been. It's. He's a bad guy. He's a trafficker. You know, there are escorts and all this other stuff. A lot of powerful people doing nefarious things. Don't you want to know, like, oh, it's not literally cannibals in the kids. And I feel like they don't want that to be true.
- [60:45]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, yeah. And I mean the conventional academic view of why that is is that it creates order. It creates. That's right, of order.
- [60:53]
Michael Malice
That's right.
- [60:54]
Michael Shellenberger
I share with you experience we had of a colleague in my. Of mine got a girl who was 14 at the time, turned 15 while we were working on the case who was orphaned and was being trafficked and horrible case. And at one point the private investigators we were with figured out where she was. They called the San Francisco pd. They just couldn't get it together to get there in time, which was like, not even like, it wasn't like five minutes. I mean it was like, it was like several hours or something. And they couldn't send anybody due to incompetence. I called the police chief and talked to the deputy police chief and made a big stink of it. They get her off the street, she goes back with her. I think it was her aunt or her grandmother and then she's back on the street a few months later. And so the really awful. Because you know, she's probably a dick, an addict, you know, it's her community. She's just lost, you know, and so that's the awful reality of these things. Or just take the women. A lot of the women we know, you know, that Jeffrey Epstein abused, were hired as women to give them a so called massage, but a sexual massage. And, and that doesn't mean they're not victims. But it probably started earlier, right? It probably started with like an uncle or a father or a brother or something, you know, molesting them. That's a lot of prostitute, you know, women that are sex workers. That's why I'm not such a liberty. I'm not just like, oh yeah, sex work. It's like, well, but these are women that were often abused and they're often addicted to drugs and suffering from addiction. So I think that's like the awful reality of it and that complexity of it and the fact that it's like, you know, the idea is if you discover, we discovered that it's this ring and then we've got the list and then we can go arrest them and they can prosecute them and put them in jail. And then we've, we've read the World of, of Evil and it is a, it is a. I keep doing you know, it's a kind of a scapegoating thing where. Where the scapegoat carries all the sins of this. Of the civilization. And we're. Our society is just deeply messed up around sex, Right?
- [62:43]
Michael Malice
Yes.
- [62:43]
Michael Shellenberger
And it arguably has been since the pill. But you know, it's. You know, there's a lot. We know a lot of like false accusations under me too were maybe motivated because women are not given permission to sort of not like promiscuity in the same way that men do.
- [62:59]
Michael Malice
I have to interrupt here because one of the other things about this issue that makes me like shake my head is that everyone sat through believe women. Right. And Christy, Christine, Blasey Ford and all that. So the people who are the most pro Kavanaugh and the most, like, skeptical about believe all women, understandably. Because women are evil, just like men are evil. And men can be evil physically, but women can be evil with their words. It's a differential there with every Epstein so called victim. Every word she's saying is the truth. It's like five minutes ago you were aware that sometimes people, you know, especially because as an Epstein victim, you get millions of dollars. Correct. Like just.
- [63:33]
Michael Shellenberger
Oh, I mean, there's entire fortune was paid out. Right, Right. Being paid out. Yeah.
- [63:37]
Michael Malice
So it's just like maybe some of these older women weren't trapped. And I think some of them weren't even alleged to have been trafficked as kids. Correct?
- [63:45]
Michael Shellenberger
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it was. It's basically a picture of him moving down, like getting these sexual massages and then going younger and younger.
- [63:55]
Michael Malice
Okay.
- [63:55]
Michael Shellenberger
That's the picture of it. And then he gets arrested and he serves his time. And then afterwards I. My understanding. I have not seen the evidence contrary. Is that he did not go below 18 after he was his conviction.
- [64:07]
Michael Malice
Which is still scuzzy.
- [64:08]
Michael Shellenberger
No. Yeah. No one's defending it. It's just saying. But. But people in your comments will say, I'm defending it, so it doesn't matter. But, um, you know, and after that, he. You know, the stuff that it was getting him trouble was the previous stuff that he already served time for. So then you kind of get to some really important questions of criminal justice. Like once someone has served their time, are we going to keep punishing them? Because that's not actually how our system is set up. Our system is set up so that we don't have mob rule. And you have a rational system evaluating evidence and using reason to calculate what a person's time has been. And then. And then they're Left out. And they're clean. Now. There is an exception in the case of sexual predators, and in which case you have a list. Yeah, but that doesn't. I don't. My view is that. That first of all, we don't. Like, all the people that were being canceled for even having an association with Epstein after he served time are being canceled, even though it's not clear that they knew anything about the previous period. Remember, he was convicted for. With a minor and he told everybody that she was 17. And in 30 US states, the age of consent is 16. So it's not like I'm particularly incensed about, like, someone like Peter Attia, who I think is just did not do anything wrong and has been completely, you know, you know, scapegoated for this because the society is so messed up and can't seem to have a proper conversation or an honest conversation or a mature conversation about what are you going to do about, like, this romantic recession, the problems that kids are having with dating. Like, it's just. And the fact that feminism has been communicating things to men and women that are just false and that are dehumanizing and that are depressing and creating anxiety. We. We haven't gotten over that. Me too. Period. I mean, that's probably what. We have a chapter on a book about it. And it's like, that is. I think we're still seeing the consequences of never having dealt with this stuff, with this scapegoating of innocent people around Epstein.
- [65:56]
Michael Malice
Folks, head over to mouse.locals.com where Michael took questions from the fans. So were you last, I want to ask you, were you surprised, disappointed you didn't get to the runoff with Gabby?
- [66:06]
Michael Shellenberger
Yes, very. Of course.
- [66:07]
Michael Malice
Okay.
- [66:08]
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah. Yeah. Because that was the whole dream. I mean, the concern now is you get another Republican and Democrat running. The Republican, you know, is at risk of just getting 39% right. The last two Republicans got. And the hope with an independent is that people are not going to close you off right away and that you can. You know, my views on homelessness do have some liberal elements to them, particularly around care that I think go beyond classification. And, uh. So, yeah, I was disappointed. I am heartened, though, in the sense that San Francisco's starting to make some pretty big changes. Yeah. Moving away from harm reduction and towards recovery. Oh, and the. And on stage, the Republicans were great. They said great things. They said they gave Gavin an F, which is why he deserves. On homelessness, Matt Mahan, mayor of San Jose, had a great message and is trying to do many of the things that I think are the right thing to do in terms of mental illness, addiction and homelessness. So I think there's things that are moving. But yeah, California is just as the frustration that we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation.
- [67:09]
Michael Malice
I think Thomas Dyer will be a superior governor to Newsom. And I also think he is infinitely preferable to Katie Porter, who I think is actually a literally mentally ill person. So I am gladdened that he's at least taken the lead in the polling.
- [67:26]
Michael Shellenberger
He would definitely be more independent of the special interest groups because he'd have infinite money to spend.
- [67:31]
Michael Malice
But I also think he'd be more understanding of how businesses work and making an environment that works for everybody as opposed to someone who's a political hack like Evan.
- [67:39]
Michael Shellenberger
He would have to change, though, because I think his messages have been. His messaging has been very radical. And yeah, I mean, isn't. I think he's endorsed the billionaires tax.
- [67:49]
Michael Malice
All right, all right, it's. But I did.
- [67:51]
Michael Shellenberger
But I actually think you're. I mean, I think your instincts are right that I think if you're a business guy, you know, you are. I think less. I think Gavin was. Is a island. And I don't even mean this in a bad way. I mean, he's truly a tool. Like, I mean, I know that's a criticism, but it's like. No, but I mean, like, really a tool. Like, like, like it gets thrown around a lot. But I mean, in this for Gavin, it's literally like his. There's like a decision making framework which is like, what does this do for the people that support me? In every. In that sense, it's like, it's not transactional necessarily that he already knows what George Soros wants him to do on homelessness and crime, but his decisions on homelessness and crime are clearly being driven by the support from Soros. Why do I know that? Well, because it's unpopular. I mean, we passed legislation to crack down on fentanyl drug dealing 6832. And Gavin has refused to fund it. I don't think that that's not because he doesn't want to be popular, obviously, because it would be popular to fund it. It's because he's beholden to George Soros. And I think you'll have less of that with a Tom Steyer. He's got other huge problems.
- [68:53]
Michael Malice
By the way, did you see Curtis Yarvin met with Alex Doris?
- [68:56]
Michael Shellenberger
No, I did not see that.
- [68:57]
Michael Malice
He put a rage bait photo of the two of them together on Instagram. And everyone got salty about it.
- [69:01]
Michael Shellenberger
And how did they meet?
- [69:03]
Michael Malice
I don't. I think they were.
- [69:04]
Michael Shellenberger
I don't remember where the White House corresponds to her.
- [69:06]
Michael Malice
No, no. This was in. Somewhere in Europe, I believe.
- [69:08]
Michael Shellenberger
Well, I did not see that happening.
- [69:10]
Michael Malice
So it was very kind of interesting. And lots of many tears were shed. Michael, we're running out of time. What has been your favorite part of this interview?
- [69:16]
Michael Shellenberger
Just spending time with you, Michael.
- [69:18]
Michael Malice
You are welcome.
- [69:30]
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Michael Malice
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- [69:38]
Michael Shellenberger
This is the mantra.
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