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
I'm sure. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And also, like, parents, we all, I did it too, so I'm not, like, judging. But, like, we talk too much to the kids. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And you see, like, new parents talking to their kid, and the kid's like, what? It's like the peanuts is right. Like, what they hear is the wah-wah, wah-wah. It's so true.
As opposed to, like, could you set the table, you know? Could you, you know, like, the kids like, I mean, the kids like to have a job. They want to have a chore. Chores are super, like, kids love that, you know? And so, you know, you're teaching the kids to clean the classroom every morning. Yes. I mean, the problem is the specialization and the wealth. They sort of get disconnected from it.
Do you know what I mean, though? That's why I'm laughing. And dogs, too. People do it with their dogs. You ever see people with like, you know, whatever. I live in the Berkeley Hills. It's like, you know, older ladies and their dogs and they're just like blah, blah, blah with the dogs. It's like, well, you're not holding the leash tight enough, lady.
You know, you rewarded the dog when he did something bad. You should have rewarded it when it came to you. Anyway, so all these things break down. So deep and true.
Yeah, I think it's because it's like people say things like practical, which is good and pragmatic. But some pragmatic got started to mean things like making shitty political compromises. Do you know what I mean? Or it's an American linguistic tradition or philosophical tradition.
But yeah, physicalist, it's like, yeah, somebody's got to clean up all the, you know, if you have all the homeless people, you're going to have to spend millions of dollars on cleaning up crap. Right. All the time.
And, you know, the homeless, one of the things you probably have observed is that I think it's like probably a compensating mechanism, but they're just, they're obsessed with collecting tons and tons of garbage. Yes, yes. So they'll, you know, you'll clean up these homeless encampments and you'll be like, oh, wow. Yeah, they're not minimalists. No, no, they're not living the Zen lifestyle.
No, it's not banging Ulfsen life. It's like very much. No, no, it's very cluttered, you know. And so they're probably over it. But so, yeah, I mean, they need, you need to, we need to reimpose some limits. You know, there's a, I'm also, I just became really obsessed with the scholar I just discovered who wrote a trilogy on nationalism named Leah Greenfeld. Highly recommend her books.
Her first book is called Nationalism. Second book is called Spirit of Capitalism. And the third book is called Mind, Madness, and Modernity. And these books are just incredible. But basically, it's actually L-I-A-H and then Greenfeld. Common spelling. Yeah. L-I-A-H. L-I-A-H. Yeah, she's a Russian. I think she's a Russian Jew who went to Israel, lived in Israel for a long time.
And then her mentor was Edward Schills, the sociologist. Yeah. So she's a sociologist, but the nationalism book is beautiful. I mean, it's like the famous book on nationalism is called Imaginary Communities by Benedict Anderson, and he's a Marxist. And so it's all the whole thing is like him trying to explain how nationalism, why it's so powerful when Marx thought it should wither away.
And but she describes now so she defines nationalism. The picture that people have of nationalism is completely wrong. Yes. She describes nationalism as a sovereign community of fundamentally equal individuals who have a shared identity. And so she's like nationalism is fundamentally democratic. Now, you might have some systems that are nationalist, but they don't have proper democracy.
But really, the basic idea is that egalitarian idea that we're Americans, we live here, we have the same solidarity. I've also become – I'll come back to the Greenfield, but I've also been obsessed with Hannah Arendt, who I had never read until recently. I don't think you're allowed to read her anymore. Well, I know.
She's too honest. Well, yeah, yeah. She was very, well, it's really in, I read her two books. One is the On Totalitarianism book and the other one is Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann in Jerusalem, it's rough because she describes how the Jewish council participated with the Nazis. I mean, that was what was really controversial there.
But what really blew me away from reading Hannah Arendt, because I was coming to the nationalism conversation. I mean, self-confession, because I should have been reading nationalism starting in 2016.
But, you know, I finally was reading on it and it was like, she was like, nationalism is a barrier to totalitarianism because totalitarianism is attempting to destroy all relationships between people other than the relationship with the state. Exactly. Exactly. And so religion, nationalism, you know, the classic de Tocqueville associative ties. You know, all of that is a threat to totalitarianism.
And so that really struck me. And Leah Greenfield kind of, she has, I just interviewed her, so she has like a difference of opinion with Arendt on this issue. But nonetheless, I was just struck by how
I don't know what the right, I must like, like for me, like nationalism, because I come from the left, you know, from the radical left, and we would code our socialist yearnings as the public interest.
You know, Ralph Nader kind of took all of the Chomsky and left-wing views of the early 60s and packaged them for moderate, he kind of made it all seem very reasonable, you know, and the environmentalists did the same thing. So the brilliance of the left in general, but the radical left in particular, Was of just cross-dressing as mainstream issues.
So, it became... So, really, what is the socialist movement became a consumer rights public interest. The women's rights movement. Yep. And you get these really radical ideologies. I mean, I'm just obsessed with this... The ways in which, like... So, Marxism... You look back on it, it's like, wow, I can't believe the things I believed in.
Marxism has this idea that the capitalists, like what's distinct about them is that they're just super greedy and they're thieves and that they're stealing from their workers. And there's really no difference between the entrepreneur, the capitalist entrepreneur like Elon Musk or Thomas Edison or Henry Ford and their workers. They're just meaner and they steal from them.
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