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 as myself, a tech skeptic, I'm sometimes like, I've tried to push him on this a little bit. I think you're right as well to look at the somewhat confusing question about Peter Thiel, who, you know, did not, He didn't just not back Trump this time. He has really taken a step back from politics in a really extreme way. And that is because Thiel is skeptical, actually, that
The political movement such that we're seeing now can actually do the kind of stuff that they're talking about. He's very skeptical about whether or not we can actually handle the debt. He's very skeptical about the idea that America's not going to face a gigantic fiscal crisis in a very short period of time. Thiel is a bit of a doomer, actually. And so he's an outlier, and I don't want to...
I don't want to repeat stuff from off-the-record conversations, but you can get a very distinct impression from him that he doesn't necessarily share a lot of the views that you're getting from some of these public figures who are coming to bend the knee. And he doesn't need to bend the knee. I mean, he's Peter Thiel, right?
Um, the person who I would say actually has a thought out philosophy that he articulates in very serious ways that is fundamentally in certain ways, like completely opposed to a lot of what the MAGA movement wants is Marc Andreessen, who is very popular in these worlds. But, you know, Marc Andreessen is the author of something titled a techno-optimist manifesto, you know?
So he's the one who's really articulating this stuff. And We should probably keep in mind, yes, Musk was the big one who made it look like suddenly there was a massive shift in tech to run towards Trump. But Andreessen was already there. David Sachs was already there. Famous host of this All In podcast and, you know, a big skeptic of American involvement in backing of Ukraine.
So there were a lot more of these people who were kind of in Trump headspace before. before Musk officially made his grand sort of jump onto the train and gave the money and put on the dark MAGA hat. This was already happening.
Yeah. So I would say that as regards the counterestablishment versus establishment question, just to sort of set up like how a Donald Trump would view this. Yeah. We saw a real process of, frankly, like people who are truly in the American establishment, people who have offices on Billionaire's Row, who are looking out over Central Park, who know all the right people there and that kind of thing.
I mean, Bill Ackman is a good example, the hedge fund manager. We saw Bill Ackman contort himself into just very strange places, trying to say, like, I don't really like the direction of the country. I don't like where this is all going. So we're going to try to get an alternative to Biden.
And, you know, I'm not like a Trump person, but like I agree, like this is all really crazy and this sort of thing. Right. Whereas a Musk, in so much as we're talking about this counterestablishment, his worldview, the worldview of these people coming from tech actually just is different. He doesn't need to be explained. He doesn't need to contort himself in anything. He gets it.
intuitively just because he's exposed to the cloud of ideas on Twitter at all times.
But I would argue that, yes, the counter-establishment thing is a little bit real in so much as even if these are the most powerful people on Earth, which they are, and even if they do represent perhaps a new establishment, they're not coming from a place where they understand the world in the way that the establishments of finance and energy and things like that that funded the Republican Party for a
And so I do think it's very, very important to Donald Trump to surround himself with people like that. I also think it's very important for Donald Trump to just surround himself with people he likes and with people he knows well and with people who are really rich and can help him. And so this always surprises people when they hear it.
But like amongst people I know who cover Trump pretty intimately, which I don't, but who are really like sort of there in the inner circle talking to people all the time. He's a very loyal guy. And so we have these backstories of Roy Cohn being abandoned back in the early days of Michael Cohen, that falling out, that kind of thing.
But for the people who look like they share the idea of the project, that is Donald Trump. He's extremely loyal and likes to keep them around. And so I think with Musk, it's a pretty natural pairing because Musk just really likes being around Donald Trump. You can kind of see it. There was a statement, I believe, where Donald Trump was like tweeting like, Elon's been gone from Mar-a-Lago.
Where's Elon? It's almost like he misses him.
Yeah. I mean, that is a very Trumpian thing that I think a lot of Americans don't understand. The flip side, of course, is that frequently Donald Trump falls out with the people he's closest with because they challenge him or they get too close or they fly too high. But we're talking around this nuance here. But it's like frequently hard as a reporter to explain this.
No, Donald Trump doesn't really know that much about any of these grand plans, whether it's to remake a heritage America where people remember Appalachian ballads and we've reestablished this land where we can have our children buried in the same plots as our grandparents. I don't think he has a great sense of that. I also don't think he has a great sense of like what Stargate means for America.
Right. And I think he thinks both are like directionally pretty good and directionally pretty aligned with what he's trying to do. But as long as you're demonstrating loyalty and it's not causing friction within the coalition, he'll be fine. He doesn't really care. What will end up mattering here?
Yeah, I think that's why you see the intervention that you saw from Steve Bannon. I think that's why Bannon actually sees it being worth going to war on some of this stuff at an early stage so that he can get in there and say like, hey, we're the ones who hold power. And this is going to sound very ironic, but I actually genuinely think this is true.
There's a poll here that we're not talking about per se because it's more interesting to talk about the tech billionaires and the populists and they're the people with ideas that are generally out there in what the context of American politics has been before. But you're right.
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