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Mar 3, 2025 The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist, bestselling author, and founder of Public.News, Michael Shellenberger. They discuss the key moments that ushered in rapid transparency for the U.S., from the Twitter Files to Donald Trump taking the white house. They also explore how new generations can take political responsibility for the future of the West, the need to rebuild trust in public institutions, and how to make every desert bloom.

Michael Shellenberger is the founder of Public, the C.B.R. Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin, and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020). He is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, Dao Journalism Prize-winner, and Founder of Civilization Works.

Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for journalism; the Censorship Industrial Complex; San Francisco’s cash incentives for homelessness; the “Amazon Forest are the lungs of the world” myth; climate pseudoscience; climate anxiety; the U.S. government support for fracking; and forest management, climate change, and California’s fires.

This episode was filmed on January 14th, 2025

| Chapters |

(0:00) Coming up
(0:49) Intro
(4:12) Free speech is a “must have” for America, a “nice to have” for Europe
(7:12) Europe was the birthplace of the enlightenment - it’s worth saving
(8:54) What Jordan learned travelling across Europe
(13:53) JD Vance showed Europe how behind they are on innovation and tech, meanwhile America is back
(14:55) Why there is a fierce debate around DOGE gaining institutional access
(17:57) What happens after the U.S. shuts down its agency for soft power? The vacuum that cleaning house creates
(21:40) The mythological trope of the king’s evil brother: camouflage, corruption, and the modern Horus
(28:12) Magatte Wade: foreign aid does more harm than good
(31:30) Waste, fraud, and abuse: how to balance needed cuts while safeguarding necessities
(34:45) Trust is the only natural resource: “if everyone can cooperate… then every desert can bloom”
(38:51) The three levels of masculinity - and which one ruins civilization
(44:10) What constitutes a weak man
(51:07) The Enlightenment, our long fall to darkness, and the way back
(54:39) The power dynamics of hedonism
(1:00:19) How hubris wrecked modernity
(1:02:43) They projected Hitler onto Trump hoping it would stop him, the huckster salesman archetype
(1:06:13) Where government propaganda began, “they forgot what America was about”
(1:09:35) The WEF’s fall to irrelevancy and ridicule, the new political age
(1:14:08) The betrayal of the elites
(1:17:28) The revolution of new nationalism
(1:20:10) Tyranny, slavery, and the Exodus
(1:23:52) Where the greatest pleasures come from, what Globalism stripped from the world’s great nations
(1:26:05) A great rebalancing is underway - why Shellenberger is optimistic