Michael Shellenberger
speaker
1,228 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 18 Feb
Michael Shellenberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's right. Well, of course, it's happening at a moment when I think Europe has started to at least comprehend just how behind it is on technology. The speech that J.D. Vance gave a couple of days ago was on AI, at least ostensibly on AI, and how the framing that they want, the Trump administration wants, is of technology.
AI as possibility, as potential, as innovation, not as apocalypse, repression, you know, the sort of the European approach to try to gain control over the technology. Yeah, good luck. Yeah. I mean, so, look, you know, America is, I mean, sounds so corny, but I mean, America's back in just a big way.
I mean, you've just got a character there in the White House that is, they are moving faster than anybody. I mean, I was just there talking to folks, you know, it was... various places, and everybody's surprised at how fast they're moving. And of course, Elon has accelerated that, the number of things that are happening.
The thing that we were ostensibly going to talk about today, for example, not to, we don't have to go to it right away, but just the whole reason there's a debate in the United States right now about the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, is simply because Elon was seeking to basically gain access to the
the computer systems, the servers, the buildings themselves that these agencies occupy. And that was the agency that wouldn't give them access. It wouldn't give them clearance. So that was when, you know, Trump just, they just shut it down. They just were like, if we can't get...
We were the democratically – he's the democratically elected president of the United States who has full authority, according to Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, over every single executive branch agency, and that includes Agency for International Development, when they are refusing access to the representative of the president of the United States, who happens to be our greatest technologist –
They just were like, fine, if you're gonna play that, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And the stupid prize they got was that they got shut down, including pulling back all of their people. And I only mentioned it to say, What you're seeing them bringing into government, which none of us could have imagined, is first of all, this awareness that you can't really reform institutions.
People talk about that, but really you have to just shut them down and build something fresh. That's the only way you can get the old guard out and you have to have new leadership and a new constitution or a new set of rules. but also that you don't really know what's going on until you move fast and break things.
And so like, this is something that I experienced too, which is like, you just have to go out there and sort of do things in the world to figure out what is the federal government You sort of think you know what the federal government is because we have lists of agencies and employees and whatever. But we saw with the U.S. Agency for International Development, we didn't know what they were doing.
And what we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of U.S. counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counterpopulism that was – pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back.
And that those characters that led the censorship, disinformation, lawfare, and other dirty tricks that they used for regime change abroad brought those tactics and strategies to the United States and weaponized them against Trump, MAGA, Republicans. And again, you play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and that's what they got.
And so when they broke open AID, suddenly it was available for all of us to see. And there's been some very good research and scholarship by some of our allies on what was going on there and making sense of it. And so we've been in a process of sense-making as a country for about whatever it's been, a week, a week and a half, about what exactly is this agency doing wrong?
How did it become so deranged that it would use the weapons of regime change against our own democratically elected president from 2016 to 2020, including, you know, many of us suspect but can't yet prove in January 6th? How did that happen? And then the subsequent question is, what do we do now?
I mean, Jordan, after we've spent billions of dollars creating this elaborate foreign policy establishment, otherwise known as the blob, which includes many academic journals, academic divisions of universities, whole think tanks, parts of the federal government. Nobody has theorized what comes now. Nobody has theorized what happens if the United States shuts down its main agency for soft power.
That's what USAID was, Agency for National Development. It was just a mechanism of soft power alongside the CIA. It was really supposed to be State Department, AID, CIA, all supposed to be run by the National Security Council, all supposed to be run by the President of the United States. What happens when that's not there anymore? And I think there's some real questions.
I mean, I'm fairly anti-interventionist, anti-imperialist, have been really for all my adult life. But there's a real vacuum that does get created. The critics of what they've done are not wrong in being concerned about, well, what happens when Russia and China... move into those places. And maybe that's fine. I mean, let the Chinese get involved in trying to build nations in Africa.
But I do think it raises some existential questions about what is the United States? What is the United States in the world? Because we are entering, as you mentioned, 75 to 80 years of Pax Americana, where the United States has been holding together a global system. And people talk about multipolarity, but China and Russia are not the United States. I mean, we are still the center of action.
We have all the talent. We have the AI. We have all the energy. We remain the most secure country in the world, not just because of our nuclear weapons and military, but also because we're protected on both coastlines by huge bodies of water. So, I mean, the United States is still arguably the big superpower. Obviously, China's a superpower, but it's not...
it's not playing anything, you can't even imagine China playing anything close to the role of the United States played after World War II. So we're in a moment of, You know, we're just trying to figure out what's going on. I think everybody's trying to figure out what's going on. And much less, we've got to spend some time figuring out what do we want the United States to be. And J.D.
Vance and Trump are further along in that thinking than anybody. But honestly, it's not like there's a consensus even within the Republican Party about what the United States' role in the world should be in this post-Pax Americana, post-Cold War period. Yeah.
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