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
It's out of Greek tragedy, Jordan, where, of course, I mean, I think everybody on the right in the United States right now is secretly—they won't say it, but they're secretly happy that Trump lost in 2020 because he comes into much more power now than he would have had in 2020, capable of eliminating—
You know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cut out, our most important, you know, covert, overt, you know, regime change agency.
Yeah, and hope. Well, let's hope. We'll hope.
And so... No, I mean, look, it's an incredible story. It's an incredible story arc. I just don't think Trump really believed in God until he almost died from a bullet. I mean, all of which remains mysterious, unsolved. You have maybe the greatest innovator in American history working to reform government. You have...
These incredible story arcs with Tulsi and Bobby coming from the left, even the radical left, really, if you're being honest, coming to this place, which, you know, to kind of even get that story arc of our villains in the story, you know, the characters who have been abusing power in the ways that we've been looking at. These are people who forgot what America was. I mean...
The United States has been very reluctant to do foreign entanglements. I mean, the rise of the media industrial complex, of the kind of mass media complex, it's so recent. It's 100 years old in the United States. It sort of gets created by U.S. elites in order to persuade young men to go fight in World War I. That was when we really start with government propaganda.
By the time you get after, you know, World War II, of course, it just goes on steroids. You get out after World War II. But the media is very controlled after World War II all the way through the rise of social media. But you have the people running those foreign policy institutions, Jordan. I mean—
and I mean the whole foreign policy establishment, just think big, you know, the elites, let's just say all of them, they forgot what America was about. They forgot that, like, literally free speech is number one, literally and figuratively. Like, you don't mess with that. That is the third rail of American life.
If you start to step on someone else's free speech rights in the United States, this is a country that defends the... It's like, as far as I can tell, I can't find another country that allows Nazis to march in neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors. That is... U.S. law from Supreme Court, from the Brandenburg decision in the 1960s, reinforced in the Skokie decision.
That's how seriously we take that. These guys went and messed with the First Amendment. They then went and tried to incarcerate their political opponent, making up just phony thing after phony thing about him misstating, him misdescribing the payment to the porn star, and that that was somehow...
Five felonies or that somehow he had some papers, you know, even though he's the only person that can declassify, I mean, it can sort of declassify documents. Somehow he took some papers to his house and it merited an FBI raid. on the house of a former president, these are bonkers behaviors. You look at them in retrospect, that is a kind of madness.
These are people that forgot what the United States was, and they had got conditioned to thinking that their power, they thought that they were the United States. They thought that in their narcissism and their nihilism and power, but they forgot that, like, you just go back to that period of 1776, The founders of our country were hardcore.
They were hardcore in their demand for democracy and free speech. Our establishment forgot it. They turned on their own people. They became swept up in their power, their narcissism, their elitism, their nihilism. And I mean, I love this. I mean, I'm in a great mood. I mean, I mean, this is, by the way, I also want to say we're headed to ARC. We have seen the complete collapse.
destruction of the World Economic Forum. It has no legitimacy. It's embarrassing for world leaders to go there. It's run by a cartoon character villain, a character who's literally in Joe Rogan's toilet. Like you go to do a Joe Rogan podcast, he's in the toilet. That's how seriously In the pop culture, he is a ridiculous villain.
World Economic Forum, because I know you founded ARC in part, I'm sure you had a lot of motivations, but certainly in part as a counterweight to world. You're not the counterweight. ARC is not the counterweight anymore.
ARC is the main event for intellectual life in the West oriented around a continuation and, first of all, a celebration of human specialness, a continuation of Western civilization as the best and only way to to help all humans achieve their internal potential. It's this, I mean, so for me, what a year for ARK.
I mean, and it's a moment to kind of, I think you look back and it's not January, but you knew the Janus phase. You look back, you look forward, we're clearly entering a new era, you know, and it's not totally clear what it is at all. And look at what we've got on our table. We're coming to a new era. It's a new media ecosystem. You get elected in different ways. It's social media and podcasting.
You have to be able to sit. In 1960, you had to be able to be handsome on television. That's what the television revolution was about. The podcasting revolution is you must be able to sit for three hours with Joe Rogan and answer questions. And if you are unable to do that, as Kamala Harris was, you can't be president. OK, so you've got to have some intellectual fortitude and stamina.
And then we've got this massive technological question in front of us in terms of AI. We have two wars that are about to be wound down, need to be wound down. Big questions around NATO. Existential questions around our commitment to NATO. So I can't think of a kind of, you know, more important—I mean, I think it was prescient to set up ARC— I think Ark has so much gravity as a center for this.
It is the twilight. It's not even the twilight of the idols. We are zero dark 30 of the idols, and I think we're coming to daybreak. A new dawn is coming, but it's still very dark.
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