Feigned neutrality and the misunderstanding of the political

As we near the finish line of the federal election and Carneygeddon/Markmentum/the unbelievably hilarious implosion of Pierre Poilievre's political prospects seems to be continuing unabated, the tedious 'heterodox' thinkers over on Twitter have been baying for Skippy to "do podcasts". How podcasts have, over 20 years into their existence as a medium, suddenly become the cultural touchpoint for "real" news among the tech-right is a mystery I would love to understand, but regardless, this week he did it, going on The Knowledge Project, a self-described 'entrepreneurship' podcast hosted by Shane Parrish. Shane Parrish is, and I'm sure this is a total coincidence with no relevance, also one of the entrepreneurial supporters of Build Canada, and the episode was quickly boosted by Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, Build Canada team member/former Shopify exec Daniel Debow, and others of that ideological set. What I found particularly remarkable however was that Mr Parrish made a point of asserting, in promoting the episode, that The Knowledge Project "is not a political podcast – and won't become one." I confess I wasn't familiar with the podcast prior to the promotion of this episode, but on principle I thought that was pretty improbable, so I took a look.

The Knowledge Project has published 224 episodes as of the time of this writing (Poilievre is episode 223). Its Youtube page (please, someone, take me back to the era where podcasts were not videos) describes it as "[p]acked with self-improvement strategies, insights, and fresh perspectives, each episode teaches you the small changes that lead to big results", and an accompanying website categorizes the episodes by broad theme, with labels like "Business & Leadership", "Decision Making", "Persuasion", "Philosophy". So far, so "non-political".

Now here I was, thinking I'd have to look at the various guests and carefully weave the threads together to illustrate the inherently political nature of any curated selection of conversations with public figures, but no, Shane made things easy for me. Episode #134, Balaji Srinivasan on The Network State. Yes, that's not 'state' as in "of matter" but rather as in "sovereign". Gil Duran at The New Republic has done a much better dive into Srinivasan than I can cover here (summary: he's a nightmare plutocrat and an acolyte of neofeudalist writer Curtis Yarvin), but suffice it to say that the very subject matter of this podcast episode is overtly political. The episode description itself concedes this, hinting at "[Srinivasan's] unfiltered thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of established democracies."

So what does Parrish mean when he says it's "not a political podcast?" Because it's not just that he doesn't understand that his choice of guests (bro-science supplement hawkers, tech-libertarian Trump boosters, anti-trans cranks) create an implicit political milieu, he's literally had a guy on to talk about his zany idea of restructuring the world around oligarchic geographically dislocated city-states! Is it just that not all of the guests are on to specifically discuss politics? Is it that it's not explicitly partisan? Is it that it doesn't belong to the "politics" genre in the Apple Podcasts app because it's not another fucking tedious American current events podcast? Because I confess, if the shared cultural meaning of "political podcast" is "of the same category as Pod Save America", then I understand the aversion to the label. But I don't think it's that, or at least I don't think it's superficially that. There seems to be a widely held bullshit belief that "political" is solely a descriptor of what happens in Washington and Ottawa, and that even explicit discussions of how societies should organize and function are 'non-political' if they don't check specific boxes for terminology. I'm just not sure whether Parrish knows that it's bullshit.