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
Yeah.
Well, there's 88 cities and there's 29 fire departments in counting the county. No, no, that's fine. But, yeah, so like literally like once the fire starts, I didn't even understand this until I started investigating it. The county fire chief has to call all these cities and be like, hey, can you send a couple of trucks? We're putting together a strike team.
You know, can you send some engines or whatever? And they have to call around and they're like, okay, we're all going to meet. The fire's like blazing away. And they're like, okay, well, we're all going to meet, you know, wherever, you know, Sepulveda or whatever the streets are in LA. You know, we'll meet in this place and we'll all get together and we'll sync the radios and we'll develop a plan.
I mean, this is all happening like while the city's burning. I mean, it's madness, right? The other thing is that it's, I mean, there's like- So they didn't have any preparation for this?
I mean, there might've been something that we, but obviously if there was, it wasn't enough. I mean, it's a little bit like when they go, when the people that are like, when the nihilists are defending what happened, they're like, well, there was nothing else we could have done or we did everything we could have. It's like, well, no, obviously you didn't. Like, it doesn't matter what it is.
It obviously was, there's only one right answer, which is that you didn't do enough. You know, the fatalism is, You know, it's a way to disavow responsibility on the one hand. Again, I think it expresses that nihilism. But I think it's like people just have been out of practice. But you have to – this is part of the journalism too.
You know, it's that you kind of – it has to be like, no, no, we're not accepting that as an answer. Like the right attitude for the journalist – Is to basically be no excuses. Of course. It makes for like, I mean, maybe the journalists are being too much of a hard ass and too much of a dick about it. Maybe they need to be a little bit whatever. That's fine. That's their role.
It's like your role is to be the prosecutor against the on the case of the failure. Your role is to be the investigator.
Yeah, the public defender or the prosecutor or the politician, you know. But your point is to be like, oh, no, that can't be right. Because when they go, well, we ran out of water. Well, why did you run out of water? Well, there wasn't enough water. No, well, why wasn't it? Well, because actually it turned out one of the reservoirs didn't have any water in it.
Isn't it your job to make sure there's enough water? You know, I mean, and this is what they do when they go after Trump and stuff. Is that like, because Trump will often be like directionally correct. Right. You know, like, oh, but Trump was referring to the wrong kind of reservoir. You know, the other reservoirs were full. Right.
It's like, okay, fine, but the reservoir right next to the Pacific Palisades was empty. So, you know, the basic intuition, which is, I think, I often talk about the importance of, you know, like if you're defending civilization, it's a physical thing, right? So I'm always thinking of myself as like... Like there's a physicalism in my worldview, which is like, okay, that's a person. That's a body.
They're in somewhere they shouldn't be. They need to be somewhere else. So we can have a debate about how to move them somewhere else. That's a totally reasonable debate to have. But they can't be there. They can't be there because they're creating fires. They're breaking the law. They're hurting themselves and others. Similarly, there wasn't water there. There needed to be more water.
And if you go, okay, well, let's say that they had – All the reservoirs, the potable water reservoirs, let's say they had all been full and they'd still run out of water. Well, then there was some other problem you needed to solve. Maybe you needed more reservoirs or maybe you needed the preparation there.
So you just have to have, I mean, you know, the Bukele type that you'd want to see or somebody. You just have to have somebody that's just like literally no excuses all the way down the line.
Oh, well, this is, yeah, this is exactly, it's like, first of all, it's like, I mean, it's just so symbolic. It's the city of angels, you know? So it's like, we're up here and you want it, like the wealthier you get in LA, and I guess with some exceptions like Venice Beach, but mostly you're getting up higher. Oh, yeah. You're moving up, up, up, up, up.
You're trying to get away from- To the cliffs of Malibu. Yeah. And you end up in the heavens and people talk about, I live in a little tree house. I mean, I get it. I love it. It's like, I live in the Berkeley Hills. I'm not like, you know, but it's like, I'm above all that. I'm away from all that. Like, I'm connected to nature up here, but also, you know, away from all the, you know, the plebes.
And so you actually, I think they do, it's that whole thing. We talk about people being in a bubble. You know, I mean, it's like the most bubbly place in the world, except for that it's not. And you're in a massive fire zone that must be constantly managed. There's consequences of living in these spectacular places. But you've got people that are, it's the whole industry is a fantasy industry.
I mean, it's just exists to construct a fantasy reality. And yeah, you would hope that people would be able to compartmentalize. Yeah, my day job is constructing fantasies that we charge. you know, $20 to stream. But I know that when I go home that like all the brush has to be cleared around my house and I have to vote for candidates that are physicalists. I mean, look at physicalists. Yeah.
I mean, I don't, I mean, I don't know if that's the right word. There's something there. Yeah. Important. They're fantasists. I mean, the other people. I mean, I don't want to use the word idealist because there's too many other connotations to it. But it's just the difference between being your heads up in the clouds as opposed to just being really... You need the firefighter view of the world.
You need the cop view of the world. Frankly, you need the homeless guy's view. The homeless people... I mean, they're high a lot, so they're switching in and out, but they have to get their physical needs met.
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