James Pogue
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
James Pogue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And, you know, he would have said, well, the way we fix this is by unleashing capitalism. Graeber thought it was by building a more communal society where people had more agency amongst each other. But the trick here is that when you talk, for example, about masculinity.
There's a really fundamental question that you're seeing even people like Mark Zuckerberg wrestle with now, where he's saying, you know, masculine culture has been excluded from American corporate culture and things like this. And what people are wondering is, you know, do men need violence to feel good?
Like, are men supposed to be ultra competitive and, you know, the best men get the best women and the others are sort of shunted aside? And, You know, that's sort of the Bronze Age pervert kind of thing. Do men need a physical culture in order to feel good in their lives and progress and do excellent work in whatever field they've chosen? And like...
You know, what we're seeing is that turns out to be quite compelling even to bring back Zuckerberg to someone who has discovered, as I did many years ago, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And if you're in the world of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, like, suddenly you are in a very masculinist culture. And it's not a super violent, competitive, bad thing.
I don't know, misogynist world, but it is a world where I think everybody gets on the mat and goes, if I didn't have this, like I wouldn't be okay in my life. And so, you know, you could argue, and I will argue here that probably Mark Zuckerberg is pretty far into these new right-ish conversations about masculinity. And I think this sort of goes back to the tech skepticism.
Can you build technologies that in fact help people, in this case men, as they're very preoccupied with, can you help men work in tech fields that are going to build things, that are going to go Mars, that are going to answer that sort of thing they believe about men need a searching quest, men need violence, men need competition, are we going to go take Panama?
Some of this is literally going back to just understanding tribal societies and thinking like, If men don't have a project to go to war and do something for their collective nation or tribe, they're going to feel lost.
And behind the scenes, you will hear people, I did, this has been years I've been hearing this, like we have to invade Mexico and take out the cartels, not because it's good policy, but because if we fight China, it's going to get really bad. But if we don't have a war, nobody's going to have anything to do or shape us. War is a force that gives men meaning. Exactly.
And so that's kind of how you square that circle, at least how I understand it. And just to jump in here, I know this is a long answer, but I think it's relevant.
And so RFK is a super, super compelling addition to this coalition. I think it's actually, in a weird way, the most interesting part of this coalition. But, you know, RFK, you could think of a strong ally of the worldview that RFK is bringing as being someone like Thomas Massey, who's not really new right. Do you want to say who Thomas Massey is?
So Thomas Massey is a Kentucky congressman who actually he represents a district right across the river from where J.D. and I grew up. And he built his own home, you know, from limestone he hewed from his land. But he lives off grid. He drives a Tesla. He powers his home with a Tesla battery that he repurposed. But he's also a regenerative farmer. And he raises beef.
And Micah Metacroft, who's I think one of the smartest people in all of this world, and not by any means a true radical, Micah described this to me as really an attempt to rebuild a sense of yeomanry. in the United States, a sense of agency that you have control over your physical environment.
So they'll talk about right to repair, which, you know, people on the left talk about as well, but the right to actually get into your highly complex new Toyota Tacoma and have the government say, no, you're supposed to be allowed to work on this thing. Have the right to manipulate your land in ways that, you know, certain environmental policies do make
a little bit difficult depending on where you are. And so yet again, it's all of a piece of sort of like, I don't want to say purely masculine agency, but it's a way of rebuilding a sense of yeomanry and agency in this new golden American dynamic dawn that everyone's now promising.
Yeah. I mean, to go back to Uncle Ted, as people call him, a lot of what people like in that manifesto in the right-wing world is actually not purely the tech critique. It's the parts where Kaczynski talks about how over-socialized the left is. And what he means there is... you know, sort of vague if you're not already a little bit in the headspace and understanding where he's getting to.
But I mean, I'll start by saying that I don't think you could possibly be more right about that fundamental dividing line. I think broadly speaking, it's not even just a leftist project. Liberalism is to some degree an idea of, you know, we got to a point where we almost thought we can reduce harms as a societal project almost to a millenarian extent.
The left really did feel like, you know, men can just be better. Like we don't have to, we can suddenly have a societal conversation and suddenly men are going to behave in ways where in the workplace, we no longer have interpersonal sexual issues and we can get rid of this.
And the idea of reshaping human people into some, into forms that actually just like fit into collective structures well, and then policing the bounds of their behavior when they don't fit into those collective structures is, I do think that like really came to shape, not just leftism, but liberal centrism across the Western world.
And so it becomes a very, very difficult conversation to have suddenly an election where half the country has via Twitter and podcasts and all kinds of different things that liberals are not even aware of 90% of the time. And suddenly people are saying, no, no, we actually have a different conception of human nature than you. And I'm 38.
For most of my lifetime, you know, living under this kind of neoliberal establishment consensus, that conversation wasn't even possible to have in the public realm. And arguably, it's still not possible to have in the public realm because the media spheres are so separate.
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