I have been worrying about my neck size. It’s 16-and-a-half since you ask, and I have a full collection of M&S shirts to prove it. But I’m not sure my neck is… OK, I’m going to say it, masculine enough. And, in this day and age, that’s not good.
What has provoked this bout of insecurity? A very long conversation between master of the universe Mark Zuckerberg and famed podcast host Joe Rogan—all two hours, 50 minutes and 36 seconds of it. There are shorter Wagner operas.
I have been gradually absorbing the dialogue between the two men. As with Montaigne’s essays, it is sometimes best to consume a little, often.
About an hour and four minutes in the two men start discussing Mark’s neck. “You look like a jiu-jitsu guy,” says Joe, commending Mike Tyson’s neck for being bigger than his face. Mike’s neck was 20 inches, which, on reflection, is fine because M&S goes up to 21 inches.
Mark agrees. “I’m going to be running [Meta] for a while,” he says, “and the number one thing you need to do in addition to having great partners is have a strong neck. So I take that pretty seriously.”
Now, Mark is one of the most successful and richest people on the planet, so it is as well to listen carefully to his advice.
Joe asked Mark if he had been “using iron neck”. I had to google “neck iron”—sorry, Iron Neck, which turns out to be a contraption for building a neck like Mark’s, even if he doesn’t use one himself. Amazon Prime has promised it by tomorrow.
But that’s just the start because all that jiu-jitsu has made Mark think about masculine energy in general. I will try to do justice to his line of argument. Masculine energy is good. Corporate culture was trying to get away from it. You want women to succeed, of course you do. But now, in the second age of Trump, maybe it is time for an adjustment.
“I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive um and that’s that has been that has been a kind of a positive experience for me just like having a thing that I can just like do with my guy friends and, like, yeah, and it’s just like we just like beat each other a bit.”
(Thus reads the transcript accompanying the YouTube video of the conversation.)
“I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing and I didn’t really feel that until I got involved in martial arts… and I just kind of realised it’s like, oh this that’s how you become successful at martial arts, you have to be at least somewhat aggressive, yeah.”
What Mark is saying is that the pendulum has swung too far and it’s time for blokes to be able to talk about whether Arsenal needs a new striker PDQ first thing in the morning without feeling they’re about to be reported by the diversity, equality and inclusion team. Which, in Meta’s case, Mark has just fired.
This, he insists, is the real Mark. He really does want to crush the people he’s competing with. And who is to say that’s wrong?
But the jiu-jitsu segment was just the start for Joe and Mark as they warmed to their theme, because what really unlocked it for Mark was hunting. He has a ranch in Hawaii, where there are apparently far too many pigs.
The answer is to kill them, and Mark agrees with Joe that this is more primal and tangible (and therefore less emasculating) “than um, you know… sitting in product reviews or something for some, like, piece of software that we’re writing.”
This leads into a discussion about whether it is better to shoot the pigs or use a bow and arrow. The latter is Mark’s preferred method, though he concedes that a rifle is more efficient and “your conversion rate is so much higher.” There followed a long discussion about types of bow and the ideal distance to shoot a pig. Mark’s maximum kill with an arrow is from 50 yards, whereas Joe has managed 79.
This was invigorating stuff, and I walked into the Prospect office the following morning to announce that we needed to up the masculine energy a bit. I was met with looks that ranged from pitying to solicitous, which tells you all you need to know. Neutered! Way to go.
The thing is, I remember what it was like to work in a masculine office, even if this was before the age when we had to worry about neck sizes. There was, indeed, a bit of old-fashioned testosterone in the air at the morning editorial conference. You stood to drink your pints round at the Coach and Horses of an evening: sitting down was for wokies, not that we had a label then. Only very occasionally would there be actual fistfights, but then this was the Guardian.
My young Prospect colleagues have much to learn. But, now we are entering the second age of Trump, there is no time to lose. Apparently, there was somewhere in the Scottish Borders where they had driven pigs for corporate away days, but some of the porkers walked towards the guns expecting to be fed. This is not what we need. We may need an editorial team-building exercise in Hawaii.
The Mark and Joe love-in coincided with the Financial Times inviting another master of the universe, Peter Thiel, to write an op-ed column. How best to summarise it: for much of the past 600 years since the age of Gutenberg, there has been something called a Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC), which kept us from knowing important things such as who killed JFK and whether Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, worked for the Deep State and/or Xi Jinping.
Thankfully, the internet came along and liberated us from the control of the DISC (aka the media, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs) and we can now relish the new reality, which includes the apparent knowledge that 65 per cent of Americans doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Once upon a time, there were things called facts, or at least fact-checkers. But first Elon, and then Mark, decided that fact-checking was woke. And so now we have community notes—and who is to say that the 65 per cent is wrong?
We’re on our own. Which is fine by me. I’m going to start with Iron Neck, launch compulsory jiu-jitsu classes and generally rebuild a more virile office culture. Stand by for Prospect on steroids. First guest editor: Peter Thiel. The guy talks a lot of sense. Buckle up, lads. It’s gonna be wild.
