by Derek Neal
I was recently subjected to an hour of the “All In” Podcast while on a long car ride. This podcast is not the sort I normally listen to. I prefer sports podcasts—primarily European soccer—and that’s about the extent of my consumption. I like my podcasts to be background noise and idle chatter, something to listen to while I do the dishes or sweep the floor, just something to fill the void of silence. On the way to work this morning I had sports talk radio on—the pre-podcast way to fill silence—and they were discussing the physical differences between two football wide receivers—Calvin Johnson and DK Metcalfe—before switching to two running backs—Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram.
You think DK Metcalfe is big, one host said, but then you see Calvin Johnson and you’re like, whoa, this guy is massive! How does a human get that big? Yeah, another host said, and then you see Derrick Henry next to Mark Ingram, and you’re like, how do these guys even play the same position? Ingram is tiny next to Henry! It doesn’t make sense! After this exchange, the first host remarked sarcastically that this was great radio—just naming some guys and talking about their physical stature. Yes, I nodded my head, this is great radio, this is what I want on a frigid December morning, the first morning I’ve had to sweep the snow off my car and let it idle in the driveway to warm up. The silence is deeper in winter, and I remembered padding down the stairs of my childhood home before the sun had risen, 15 or 16 years old, hearing Mike & Mike on ESPN Radio blaring out of the living room speakers as I quickly ate cereal before rushing off to school, wondering why in the hell my dad was blasting this stupid sports talk radio at six in the morning. But now I know. When you get older, sometimes the silence is too much, and the only remedy is the sweet nothings of sports talk radio.
The All In Podcast also had a lot of chatter, but the topic was finance and politics rather than sports. The hosts, who were all venture capital millionaires/billionaires in the tech industry, cracked jokes and were occasionally self-deprecating, but I was left with the disconcerting feeling that the four hosts believed in their own importance. These guys think they have something important to say, I realized, and even worse, this is the sort of podcast people listen to to learn something. Reader, I have a general suspicion of people who claim to have something important to say, especially those who claim to be able to teach me something. The only people I immediately trust are the ones who foreground their own stupidity and failures, like the journalists on my rotation of European soccer podcasts. One such journalist, Barry Glendenning—affectionately known as “Baz”—was asked on a recent episode why retired players want to be managers:
“I wonder, Baz, if we overplay the surprise that someone like Frank Lampard can be bothered to be a manager. Same goes for Wayne Rooney. You know, we sort of go, why would they bother with that? They could both be pundits, earn lots of money, have a nice life, but you know, the thirst to do something interesting with your life. You know, it doesn’t stop when you hit 37, even if you have limitless money.”
Baz then sarcastically referenced his own work:
“Are you suggesting that spouting banalities about football matches on a weekly basis is in some way boring and tedious?” he said.
Laughter ensued, and everyone present on the podcast acknowledged that they do the same thing as retired soccer players who become television pundits—they talk nonsense about athletes. On the All In podcast, the hosts do not understand themselves to be talking nonsense, however; they are talking business.
As the podcast began, I learned that two hosts were democrats while two were republicans. There was some back-and-forth banter, but it also became clear that their political differences were mostly superficial. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink mentioned in the lead up to the election, it “really doesn’t matter” for markets who is president. For the All In hosts, it really didn’t matter either. They are not members of society like you and me, and as such, political decisions do not affect them, besides the addition or subtraction of yet another zero when calculating their net worth.
One host happened to be in Milan, had been in Singapore a few days earlier, and would later stop in London before returning to the USA. He said he was “literally flying around the world, moving west.” It seemed that he’d solved the American issue of the Pacific Ocean—when you have a private jet, you can go west forever, nothing can stop you, and your destiny can be made manifest. What are you doing out there, another host asked him. “Little selling, little closing,” he replied. Always Be Closing, I thought, recalling Alec Baldwin’s speech in Glengarry Glenn Ross. A. B. C. They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money, Baldwin says—are you gonna take it?
The hosts then started mentioning “M&A,” which I learned meant “Mergers and Acquisitions,” although at first, like Bret Easton Ellis, I heard “Murders and Executions.” They seemed to be upset that the government had been preventing large companies, such as Google, from buying smaller companies, which perplexed me. I thought capitalists liked competition, but according to the All In lot, this was a mistake, as it prevented the smaller companies, which “move fast and break things,” like the law, from being able to pay out their investors, like the All In financiers.
Another topic of conversation was the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” helmed by Elon Musk, whom they simply referred to as Elon. They all agreed it was a great idea. As one host put it, “Who’s not against more efficiency? I mean, you have to be an idiot to be against efficiency.”
You have to be an idiot to be against efficiency.
There it is, I thought. The All In hosts were for efficiency, whereas my European soccer podcasts, my sports talk show hosts, were inefficient. Spouting banalities about football matches was certainly not efficient—it didn’t really produce anything, it rarely deepened our understanding of what had occurred in a match, it simply passed the time. Yet I preferred these podcasts to the All In podcast. Why was that?
I hear the word “efficiency” a lot in my day job as an ESL teacher. Whenever a student doesn’t know the correct word to use, whenever they come to a halt in the middle of a sentence, unsure of how to continue, the most common word they will say next is “efficiency.” Certain words attain this status among ESL speakers because they’ve been told they are words that can improve their IELTS score (a common test used for immigration and study purposes), or simply because the word has a positive connotation and a vague meaning that could apply in many different contexts. “Innovation” is another one of these amorphous, meaningless, feel-good words that I frequently hear. Efficiency and innovation—it is hard to contest these words because they have attained talismanic stature in our society, but in practice, they often refer to the elimination of jobs, wage suppression, and crimes, all used to enrich people like the All In hosts at the expense of everyone else.
When I first heard of the Department of Government Efficiency, it reminded me of other infamous government departments—particularly those in 1984: “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” The Department of Government Efficiency seems that it will concern itself with the destruction of the government, as the most efficient government is the one that doesn’t exist. While there are no clear details on what this department will do, it is obvious that people will lose their jobs and governmental organizations will be shut down (Musk has said he would like to reduce the more than 400 governmental departments to just 99). The neoliberal playbook is in order: cut funding to public programs, like education and healthcare, decreasing the quality of their offerings through austerity; force the public to look to private solutions if they want to actually learn something or treat an illness; then use this as proof of the “inefficiency” of public programs—even though the situation has been intentionally induced—and allow the programs to fail while private businesses are enriched and the people who can’t afford services are left with nothing. The difference this time is that the target is the government itself. But only an idiot would be against efficiency, right?
An idiot is not only a “a foolish, or stupid person,” but also, in the sense of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, someone who has maintained their goodness in the face of a corrupt world. The idiot is innocent, naïve, and childlike, while the worldly person is vain, selfish, and ambitious. The idiot, or the fool—particularly the Holy Fool—reveals the hypocrisy of society in their very behavior, refusing to play the game that everyone else is and revealing the striving which structures so much of life to ultimately constitute an empty and meaningless pursuit. If only idiots are against efficiency, then count me in, along with Baz and the rest of my sports podcasters and radio hosts: I am an idiot against efficiency.
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