0:04

Oh my gosh, welcome back to

0:07

Behind the Bastards, a podcast that

0:09

you are legally required to be

0:11

listening to in at least four

0:14

US states. Six, if

0:16

you have a criminal record and

0:18

are currently working through

0:20

probation. Which four? Huh? Which

0:23

four? Sophie, I don't have that information ahead

0:25

of me right now. I was not prepared

0:27

for a deeper bit than this. Oh,

0:29

well, for some reason I know

0:31

it's Idaho. That's because I'm

0:33

not, I am not a professional comedic

0:36

actor, but you know who is Sophie?

0:38

Oh. Our guest

0:40

today, Ed Helms. Ed,

0:43

I mean, I don't need to introduce you.

0:45

You've been on The Daily Show, you were

0:47

a major cast member on The Office, you

0:50

were in the Hangover movies. You've been in

0:52

like a ton of things that I'm sure

0:54

basically everybody watching or listening to this has

0:57

watched. But today

0:59

we're here to talk about your show,

1:01

Snafu, which has just entered season two.

1:04

Thank you for coming on the show. I'm so

1:06

psyched to be here. Your show

1:08

is awesome. And this is

1:11

going to be fun. I hope it better be. I

1:14

wanted to say your, so Snafu season

1:16

two, you talk like your show, you

1:19

talk about like major fuckups

1:21

in American history. And season

1:23

two is about the

1:25

raid on the FBI building in 1971 that

1:27

revealed a huge amount of

1:30

information about how the FBI was conducting

1:33

clandestine operations targeting

1:35

antiwar protesters and civil rights protesters.

1:37

It's like one of the coolest

1:39

chapters in American radical political history.

1:41

And I thought you guys did a great

1:43

job of breaking it down and bringing on

1:45

some of the major players talking through it.

1:48

Yeah, thanks. We were incredibly

1:51

lucky. It's a

1:53

wild story as you're getting at these, these

1:56

citizens who

1:58

were not at all professional. thieves

2:00

or criminals staged this

2:03

incredible heist on

2:05

the night of the Ali Frazier

2:07

fight, which is very Oceans 11.

2:10

Yeah, we actually

2:12

got Steven Soderbergh on the podcast

2:14

to comment on that. But yeah,

2:16

and they pulled off this elaborate

2:18

heist, they broke into that FBI

2:20

office in media Pennsylvania, stole

2:23

every file and started

2:25

leaking them to a very courageous reporter

2:27

at the Washington Post named Betty Medsker.

2:31

They kept it secret for decades.

2:33

These documents led to

2:35

the revelation of Coentell

2:37

Pro, which basically

2:39

massive. Yeah, and demolished

2:42

J. Edgar Hoover's legacy

2:44

for good reason and

2:48

led to the church hearings, which is the

2:50

only reason why we have any congressional

2:52

oversight over the FBI, the CIA,

2:55

the NSA, and all the other

2:57

alphabet agencies. Like it's it was

2:59

an incredible moment.

3:02

Yeah, it's so amazing to me

3:04

because like you couldn't do

3:06

it like it was kind of the last moment you

3:08

could have gotten away with something like that, right? There

3:10

just wasn't the kind of surveillance. There wasn't the kind

3:12

of capability for it. And it

3:14

was the kind of thing that a group

3:16

of people was only going to get away

3:18

with once before everything changed about how these

3:20

buildings did their security. And they picked like

3:23

the this was the most important time to

3:25

be able to get in there and get

3:27

files like that. But it was also kind

3:29

of the most important time to break into

3:31

the FBI, an FBI building and get a

3:33

bunch of files. Yeah, just

3:35

a wonderful moment people should know

3:37

more about. I think it didn't get as much

3:39

attention. It doesn't get as much attention as maybe

3:41

it ought to have because of how close it

3:44

was to Watergate. But I think it's just as

3:46

important. And the Pentagon files. And the Pentagon, right.

3:48

The Pentagon Papers. All of which were giant Washington

3:50

Post stories. This was Washington

3:52

Post as well. And you're

3:54

right. But what's really cool about this one

3:56

is that it it predates Watergate and the

3:59

Pentagon Papers by just a year or so.

4:01

Yeah. It was all the

4:03

same major

4:05

players at the Washington Post. And

4:09

in a cool way, this was the first

4:12

time they really confronted the legal issues around

4:16

publishing this kind of thing. And they

4:18

decided to do it. And they against, you

4:21

know, they had the

4:23

Attorney General calling them saying, don't

4:25

you dare publish these FBI files.

4:28

And they did it anyway, because it

4:32

was newsworthy and it wasn't it didn't

4:35

compromise national security in any way. So

4:39

I like to think this is what sort of gave Ben

4:42

Bradley and the Washington Post brass the sort

4:44

of like dry

4:46

run that set

4:48

him up to do the right thing

4:50

for Watergate and really like, I

4:52

don't know. Yeah, it started

4:54

that kind of there's this inertia

4:56

and momentum behind actually like we're

4:59

not just speaking truth to power, but

5:01

like prying truth out of

5:03

powers grasp and forcing it in front of

5:05

the country. Yeah, well put. Yeah. Yeah. And

5:08

I so today, you know, that I thought

5:10

long and hard about what kind of episodes

5:12

I wanted to talk to you about. And

5:14

I there's the guy that we're going to

5:16

be talking about today is a fellow who

5:18

I kind of debated

5:21

for several years whether or not

5:23

we should cover because he's a

5:25

quietly important monster. He's

5:28

somebody who, you know, if

5:30

we were just talking about like, you

5:32

know, the FBI overreach of

5:34

the civil rights era, the anti warriors

5:36

and whatnot, which was very much like

5:38

a real authoritarian moment in our country's

5:40

past. And we're currently confronting another. And

5:43

the guy we're talking about today, Curtis Yarvin,

5:45

is sort of the prophet of taking

5:48

America down a completely authoritarian

5:50

path. He is an advocate

5:53

for changing this country into what

5:55

is effectively a dictatorship. And

5:58

unfortunately, he's a guy who's had a lot

6:00

of influence in in in speaking to that.

6:03

Have you have you heard of Curtis Yarbund

6:05

before we started these episodes? No.

6:09

I read a tiny bit about him yesterday,

6:11

but that was. Yeah, that's

6:13

fine. That is the case with most people

6:16

who are not intro who are not like

6:18

actual followers of his philosophy. But unfortunately, you

6:20

have heard of some of the people who

6:22

are big fans of Curtis. One

6:25

of them is current US vice

6:27

presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody

6:29

J.D. Vance, who back in September

6:31

20th of 2021 went

6:33

on the Moment of Truth podcast

6:36

run by the conservative organization American

6:38

Moment, which is an organizational partner

6:40

for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.

6:43

In a wide ranging interview, he accused

6:46

his female classmates at Yale Law of

6:48

pursuing racial or gender equality as, quote,

6:50

a value system that gives their life

6:52

meaning and then said that

6:54

value system leads to misery. At

6:57

another point in the interview, he asked if certain

6:59

groups of people, particularly those

7:01

from Muslim majority countries can,

7:03

quote, successfully become American citizens.

7:06

And then he alleged that the region's reason

7:08

so many journalists are angry was not the

7:10

rapid destruction of their industry, but

7:13

because they didn't have any children, which

7:15

inevitably, he says, leads to psychotic breaks.

7:17

Now, a lot of this stuff has

7:19

come out about Vance. This is when

7:21

was that interview? 2021. That's really. That's

7:26

wild because. For

7:30

some reason, I sort of thought that like

7:32

he was kind of normal and then just

7:35

saw a very cynical opportunity to to get

7:37

elevated if he endorsed Trump. And so he

7:39

did that. And then everything else has been

7:41

the kind of a cynical like

7:45

trip down the Trump rabbit

7:48

hole, just like so many Republicans

7:50

have done, but that privately like he's

7:52

kind of smarter than that. But

7:55

what you're saying now is that. Is

7:57

that he's like Trump, you're

7:59

the. on his own. He's

8:02

a little bit so Trump. I don't know

8:04

how much Trump believes other than that Trump

8:06

should have power. Vance has

8:08

strong beliefs about the fact that

8:10

like democracy is a

8:12

mistake, right? And that a lot of

8:14

things that have recently like the most

8:16

of the last century in

8:19

terms of like social progress, women getting

8:21

the right to vote, the civil rights

8:23

movement, like reforming the ability to vote

8:25

for people who are not like white

8:27

American men, that that was all horribly

8:29

mistaken. Right. And it was horribly mistaken

8:32

because it led to this situation whereby

8:34

too many regular people have any say

8:36

whatsoever in how they're governed. And and

8:38

like to to what I was saying before,

8:40

it's like in a lot of ways,

8:43

J.D. Vance has more extreme views on

8:46

things, which is why during the most

8:48

recent debate, Donald Trump alludes to not

8:50

discussing certain extreme policies that J.D. Vance

8:52

claims to have with J.D. And

8:55

and so he tries to distance himself,

8:58

whereas J.D. is catering to a certain

9:00

category of human. But Trump's like, oh,

9:02

I didn't discuss it with him. And

9:05

that's intentional. Yeah. And it's

9:07

it's what's interesting is that if you're looking

9:09

at like what his background is, Vance is

9:11

a guy whose entire career has been bankrolled

9:13

by Peter Thiel, who's the Facebook billi. He

9:16

made a lot of money on Facebook, made

9:18

a lot a lot of money on PayPal.

9:20

And he sunk about 15 million into Vance's congressional

9:23

campaign, which is the most ever

9:25

spent on a single congressional candidate. And

9:28

Thiel in 2009 went on the record

9:30

as saying he doesn't believe democracy can be

9:32

compatible with freedom, by which he means

9:34

like the freedom of people with lots

9:36

of money to basically

9:38

govern the rest of us. Right. And

9:41

Thiel and Vance, they're not just kind

9:43

of reactionaries when they express those things.

9:45

They are quoting a guy. They are

9:47

referring to the work of a political

9:49

philosopher named Curtis Yarvin, who

9:52

they first encountered when he blogged

9:54

under a pseudonym Minsius mold bug,

9:56

which is kind of deliberately arch.

10:00

But this is the guy who has been

10:02

like the prophet of a sizable chunk of

10:04

the authoritarian right. Teal

10:06

sunk a lot of money into

10:08

him. J.D. Vance quotes him repeatedly.

10:10

So does Blake Masters, who is

10:12

the guy who's been running repeatedly

10:14

to try to beat Mark Kelly

10:16

in Arizona. And all

10:18

of these guys and more are followers

10:21

of Yarvan, who's probably the most influential

10:23

theoretician of the radical right in the

10:25

US today. This

10:27

has never killed anybody in any legally actionable

10:29

sense or advocated for murder. And as far

10:31

as I'm aware, he has never broken a

10:33

law. But he advocates

10:36

for the overthrow of democracy and the

10:38

installation of a dictatorial regime that would

10:40

by necessity kill and imprison large numbers

10:42

of people. And his influence is great

10:44

enough that the whole alt right and

10:46

everything that came from the

10:48

art right into our current era, right, owes

10:51

something to Yarvan's work. So when you're thinking

10:53

about everything that's happened on

10:55

the right that's gotten so deranged

10:57

since 2015, all of it

10:59

has bits of Curtis Yarvan in it. Right.

11:02

And his thinking has had a massive impact

11:05

even on some guys like Elon Musk, who

11:07

several days ago shared a post where a

11:09

reader suggested only high testosterone, alpha males and

11:11

a neurotypical people should be allowed to vote.

11:14

This is also a thought with some Yarvan

11:16

DNA behind it. Oh, yes. Oh,

11:19

this was quite a moment that that

11:21

only alpha males. So,

11:23

you know, stereotypical like alpha male

11:26

guys and then a neurotypical people,

11:28

people who are not like it.

11:31

I have a good deal. Can I

11:33

still vote? I think I think maybe

11:35

so because a lot of these guys are

11:37

big about ADHD and making them superhuman, which

11:39

I also have. And it just makes me

11:41

really bad at cleaning my house. And

11:45

occasionally, in short bursts, very good

11:47

at cleaning my house. Yeah. But

11:50

yeah. So these are these are the

11:53

kind of like political ideas that you get when

11:55

you take too much, read too much Curtis Yarvan

11:57

or listen too much to the people who have

11:59

read a lot. of Curtis Yarvan. And

12:02

he's a kind of guy, because he's so

12:04

kind of shadowed as a figure, I had

12:06

always worried about like, is covering this guy

12:08

going to bring more attention to him than

12:10

is necessary? And now that like one of

12:12

his followers is maybe going to be a

12:14

heartbeat away from the presidency, I think it's

12:17

probably time to talk about him. I

12:19

kind of think we have to. So that's

12:22

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14:30

There's a lot of pros to drinking health aid

14:32

kombucha. No cons that I can think of. Pro?

14:35

Amazing taste. Pro? Pairs

14:38

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it and try a health aid kombucha today. Curtis

15:04

Yarvan was born probably in Brooklyn in 1973.

15:08

On about June 25th of that year,

15:10

likely, his normal wiki doesn't give a

15:12

birth date, but Google's AI summary bot

15:14

does. And it seems to be basing

15:16

this on a bio of Yarvan in

15:19

another wiki, which seems to pull from

15:21

earlier versions of the original. It's

15:23

like this AI slop stuff. The gist

15:25

of it is, I don't know his actual birth date,

15:27

right? I'm just trying to

15:29

remind everyone not to trust AI summaries

15:31

that various search engines give you because

15:34

most of them don't have actual sources behind.

15:37

Like most radical intellectuals, Yarvan was born in

15:40

a place of wealth, comfort, and high social

15:42

standing in his own society. His parents are

15:44

highly educated. His dad had an Ivy League

15:46

degree and worked for the US government as

15:49

a foreign service worker. Yarvan

15:51

was a WASP from Westchester County, the daughter

15:53

of a prominent lawyer, and injured civil service

15:55

herself as an adult. Yarvan

15:58

today describes the social class of his birth. as

16:00

Brahman, referring to the highest caste

16:02

in Hindu society. And he

16:04

does this because he thinks that

16:07

inequality is a fundamental and immutable

16:09

thing, right? People are unequal fundamentally,

16:11

and so any sort of social

16:13

stratification in society is justified by

16:15

that. And he's drawn to descriptions

16:17

from other cultures that harken back

16:19

to other fixed hierarchies. Sorry,

16:21

it's justified by its inevitability. Right,

16:23

exactly. Like people are genetically, some

16:25

people are better than others. They're

16:27

more intelligent than others, higher IQ

16:30

than others. Therefore, we are

16:32

justified in leaning into that. Yes,

16:35

yes. And in fact, yeah, yeah,

16:37

we have a moral responsibility.

16:39

Because that's a separate thing. Like its inevitability

16:42

is a, maybe

16:44

that's a fixed condition of human

16:47

existence, but leaning

16:50

into it, exacerbating it, that's

16:52

just a arbitrary choice. Yeah,

16:55

yeah, yeah, it's this idea that like, and it's

16:57

also this belief that like, something

16:59

like intelligence is one thing, right? Like intelligence is

17:01

a number, and if it's higher, you're smarter, as

17:03

opposed to like, well, you can have an IQ

17:06

of 180, but if your

17:08

car breaks down, the guy who knows how

17:10

to fix your car is a lot smarter

17:12

than you in that moment. That's how I

17:14

tend to think about intelligence, as opposed to

17:16

like this objective thing. Like is a farmer

17:18

smarter than a finance bro in

17:21

New York City? Well, when it comes to

17:23

like making stock choices maybe, when it comes

17:25

to growing food, certainly not. I don't

17:27

know, I think that's a better way to look at

17:29

it. It's a weird thing, like

17:31

just the existence of

17:33

something is then, it makes

17:36

it okay to then, wherever

17:38

it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because

17:42

it exists, it is therefore okay

17:44

to do and heighten. Yeah,

17:48

yeah. Like murder, murder happens.

17:52

It's a fundamental part

17:55

of the human condition that people get

17:57

murdered and murder one another, therefore, I'm

17:59

sorry. Like, so therefore,

18:01

like, I can murder anybody. Is that is that a

18:04

comparable? Am I making is that comparable? I

18:07

think it actually is a very

18:09

comparable comparison, right? That

18:11

just because like there are like individuals are

18:14

not the same that we should like have

18:16

some sort of and you're always picking when

18:18

you're when you're trying to acknowledge that, like,

18:20

OK, people are not like people

18:23

don't all have the same abilities naturally. Right.

18:25

Like that's a thing that's objectively true. Michael

18:27

Phelps is was always going to be a

18:29

better swimmer than me, for example. But

18:32

we don't base our society based on

18:34

who's best at swimming. Right. Yavin is

18:36

basically saying I can there's one thing

18:38

that I actually value when it comes

18:40

to the ways in which people are

18:42

different from each other. And it's a

18:44

very specific kind of intelligence that correlates

18:46

to how I think I'm intelligent. And

18:48

that's how we should stratify

18:51

society. Right. Yeah,

18:54

he's he's that kind of a dude. And

18:56

I also kind of think it's interesting to

18:58

me that he's so obsessed with this idea

19:01

of like identifying as a Brahmin, because in

19:03

Hindu culture, Brahmins are the castes

19:05

that like traditionally were most involved

19:08

in the priesthood and religious instruction.

19:11

And it is like a very closed

19:13

loop system. Right. The caste system traditionally.

19:15

But that's not the kind of system

19:17

that his family succeeded in. His dad

19:19

was like a member of the U.S.

19:21

Foreign Service and became pretty highly placed

19:23

in the government. But his dad wasn't

19:25

born into that role. He was the

19:27

son of Jewish American communists who like

19:29

came to this country and he had

19:31

to like fight to make a place

19:33

for himself in the higher ranks of

19:35

society, which is a very

19:37

clear example of like mobility and the

19:39

fact that we have a reasonably open

19:41

society that allows for some mobility, which

19:43

he doesn't want to exist. I always

19:45

find it interesting when guys like that,

19:47

you can see a clear example of

19:49

like, oh, well, you only have what

19:51

you have because our society allows for

19:53

mobility. Wait. So

19:56

where is he from again? Brooklyn? Yeah,

19:58

he's from around Brooklyn. Okay, yeah,

20:00

cuz there is there's also a brahmin Social

20:05

class in New England Yeah,

20:09

the Boston Brahmins right yeah, wait

20:11

and that's but that's not what

20:13

he's talking about I

20:16

mean It's a little unclear to

20:18

me because he is his mom is kind

20:20

of like you could probably call a Boston

20:22

brahmin But he's referring to like when he

20:25

talks about his family being Brahmins He's referring

20:27

to the fact that his dad was also

20:29

highly placed in the State Department and his

20:31

dad is definitely not a Boston Brahmin right

20:34

like his parents were Jewish Stalinists, which is

20:36

not like a Boston Brahmin thing Oh, because

20:38

that was like the Kennedy's and like yeah

20:40

that that ilk So that's

20:42

so interesting. All right. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's a

20:45

little weird to me the way he kind of

20:47

like talks about it but definitely it's kind of

20:49

key to see that a big chunk of his

20:51

family's comfort at least comes from the fact that

20:53

like He is his his

20:56

dad's side of the family entered into

20:58

a fairly open society that allows for

21:00

some mobility So can I clarify one

21:02

thing? So absolutely I

21:05

feel like the and and I don't know enough

21:07

about this So I'm glad to be learning as

21:09

I go But I just have I've kind of

21:11

I guess I'm realizing that I've assumed that

21:14

the Peter Teals of the world When

21:16

they advocate for more of a

21:18

dictatorial structure to our

21:21

Government, they're not saying

21:23

that that part of that

21:26

is also a free market capitalism Which

21:28

presumably allows for mobility,

21:31

right? Yeah, it's opposed to yeah And

21:33

and that that if anything it encourages

21:35

the the best and the brightest to

21:38

rise And that's

21:40

how they see themselves as the best

21:42

and the brightest that have risen So

21:46

I guess I'm just splitting hairs a little bit like

21:48

are are you sure that they? That

21:51

also They are

21:53

anti social mobility or they're

21:56

very much like close the door

21:58

after you get up, right? Like kick the

22:00

ladder out from underneath you types, right? And

22:04

I think it's because they do believe that

22:06

their success was not purely based on the

22:08

fact that they came up in a system

22:11

where they gained certain benefits that were the

22:13

result of public spending. All of these guys

22:15

who made money in the tech industry went

22:18

to schools that were generally publicly funded,

22:20

at least at some point. Their parents

22:23

drove on roads that were publicly, they

22:25

benefited from the security infrastructure that exists

22:27

in this country in a

22:29

lot of different ways and their companies all

22:31

benefited to some extent from government spending and

22:33

incentives, but they see

22:35

that their success was like the result

22:38

of something inherently superior within themselves and

22:40

often in like a genetic level in

22:42

some ways. And so the

22:44

fact that they have achieved such success is

22:48

not the result of a society that enabled

22:50

them, it's a result of like they're

22:52

members of a natural aristocracy. And the

22:55

best thing they can do is legally

22:57

work to codify that aristocracy. That's

23:01

the, we'll get into like some more of kind

23:03

of how Curtis arrives by this because

23:05

he's really a big part in kind of

23:07

lending an intellectual heir to this, but that

23:10

very much is how these folks see themselves.

23:12

And he grows up as a kid, his

23:15

dad's working for the State Department, they travel

23:17

around the world a lot, he spends a

23:19

decent chunk of his childhood in like Cyprus

23:21

and the Dominican Republic. And

23:24

so that's a lot of disruption in his schooling.

23:26

He's not one of these kids who stays in

23:28

the same school for a long period of time,

23:30

but he excels in academics.

23:33

He skips a grade back before his family goes

23:35

overseas. And when they move back to the US,

23:37

he skips two more grades and he winds up

23:39

a sophomore at age 12, which I think is

23:41

probably never a great idea. That's

23:44

a little young to be a sophomore. Sounds

23:46

hard. Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't

23:49

great being a sophomore at the normal age.

23:51

Yeah, that is not

23:54

when humanity, at

23:56

that age is not when humanity is

23:58

at its most benevolent and common. and

24:00

supportive. Yeah,

24:02

definitely. A

24:05

mild way to put it. In

24:07

one interview, I found Yarvan basically says like,

24:09

yeah, it was it was it was whack

24:11

that I was skipped ahead so far. Right.

24:14

Which was because of academic achievement that he

24:16

bounced ahead. OK, so very bright

24:18

kid, very bright kid, very good at

24:20

specifically the

24:22

kind of academics that like, you know, the

24:24

schools reward. And you can kind of read

24:26

between the lines that he was the recipient

24:29

of a decent amount of bullying, right? And

24:31

that's especially I think it actually might be a little less

24:33

common for kids in school now. But

24:36

like, you know, even if you didn't get skipped

24:38

ahead in school, the high school has

24:40

a lot of bullying in it. So I'm not I'm not

24:42

surprised. That's we're about

24:44

the same age. Yeah, he and I.

24:46

And yeah, that was I

24:49

mean, there was just like good

24:52

old hazing. All

24:54

the just all the gross,

24:57

horrible, traumatic stuff. Yeah.

25:01

Yeah, I'm thinking through some fun memories that I

25:03

have myself right now. Right. So we all it's

25:05

one of those things you could like

25:07

read a lot into that to kind of the guy that he becomes.

25:09

But also, I think we all kind of went through a version of

25:11

that. So maybe it's not super useful

25:14

to like theorize too much about what it

25:16

meant to him. But what what does definitely

25:18

mean a lot to him is that in

25:20

the late 80s and early 90s, he becomes

25:22

one of the first online people. Right. This

25:24

is back before most people know there's an

25:26

Internet. So he is an early adopter. I

25:30

think 1989 is when he first

25:32

starts getting online regularly. Oh, yeah.

25:35

And this is not this is the precursor

25:38

to the Internet that we know. And he's

25:40

spending all of his time in a place

25:42

called Usenet, which if you remember, like Web

25:44

forums is kind of like the first Web

25:47

forum. Right. It's for you Gen Z kids.

25:49

It's tick tock without any videos or hot

25:51

people. And everyone has very strong opinions about

25:54

Star Trek audio equipment or race science. Right.

25:56

Like it's an interesting place to be

25:59

like. Yeah. Yes. Like

26:01

race science was like they were just getting it.

26:03

It was like 4chan or like these these sort

26:06

of. Yeah. Dark corners of.

26:09

Yeah, there was actually a white

26:12

supremacist terrorist group in the late 80s

26:14

that robbed banks, stole a bunch of

26:16

money and then donated a bunch of

26:18

it to other Nazi groups that spent

26:20

it buying computer systems to link up

26:23

different white power groups so that they

26:25

could share information. And, you

26:27

know, there's there's evidence from as early as like

26:29

the mid 90s of them

26:31

talking about going into places where you

26:33

can find fans of stuff like different

26:35

kind of like sci fi media who

26:37

might be socially isolated and try to

26:40

push propaganda onto them. So that that

26:42

actually does go back pretty far. Oh.

26:45

And, you know, it's hard to say like, I

26:47

don't know exactly. We don't know entirely what Yavin

26:50

got up to when he was on Usenet. You

26:52

know, to some extent, that's a bit of a

26:54

black box. But his favorite board was a place

26:56

called Talk Dot Bazaar. And I've

26:58

spent some time trawling the Usenet archives

27:00

for Talk Dot Bazaar, which you can

27:02

find still bizarre talk. That's like the

27:05

names of like there's different talk boards.

27:07

And one of them is like

27:09

the bizarre. Right. OK. OK.

27:12

And it's like kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I

27:14

think it's where I would have spent time if I

27:16

had been a little bit older. It's it's like the

27:19

first place where you would find like

27:21

internet humor. Right. The kind of stuff

27:23

you eventually you would see on boards

27:26

like something awful and then 4chan and

27:28

now like all of Twitter. Right. So

27:30

it's it's inside jokes and memes and

27:32

what we now call shitposting. Right. And

27:35

and Yavin is like one of the first

27:37

generation of shitposters. And he says this of

27:39

his time on Usenet. It

27:41

was a decentralized system. And more importantly, it

27:44

had this amazing form of admission control because

27:46

everyone on it was an engineering student or

27:48

worked at a tech company or something. So

27:51

critically, it's not an

27:53

open platform. The only people here

27:56

are to some extent involved

27:58

in academics, involved in. in the tech

28:00

industry and very smart, right? In

28:03

1985- Just to get access

28:05

to it at that time. Yes. You

28:07

had to have it. You had to

28:10

be in, yeah. So they're the elite

28:12

in a way, right? And that's how,

28:14

really how he comes to see them.

28:16

And Yavin is definitely part of that

28:18

elite. In 1985, he'd entered a Johns

28:20

Hopkins study for mathematically precocious youth. And

28:22

then he had started taking classes at Brown

28:25

University. Even at this early

28:27

stage of development, he showed a distinct interest

28:29

in authoritarian leaders and just as critically and

28:31

being very wrong about them. In 1991, he

28:33

wrote in a discussion on Usenet, I

28:37

wonder if the Soviet power ladder

28:39

of vicious bureaucratic backbiting brings stronger

28:41

men to the top than the

28:43

American system of feel-good soundbites. Now,

28:46

given that the USSR collapsed the next

28:48

year, not a great prediction. Yeah.

28:52

This is so, this is like, you

28:56

should have had Rainn Wilson on this episode

28:58

because you're describing Dwight Schrute. Yeah.

29:01

He's got more than a little

29:04

bit of that, right? A precociousness

29:06

and a sort of very specific

29:09

kind of brilliance and a

29:12

preoccupation with stern

29:14

leadership. And

29:16

can you just imagine Dwight just

29:19

telling everybody that he entered a

29:21

Johns Hopkins study of mathematical precocious

29:23

youth. That would be brought up

29:25

constantly. By the way, if there

29:27

is one way to

29:30

guarantee you're gonna get your

29:32

ass kicked on a playground. It's

29:35

so true, it's so true.

29:37

So true with precocious math.

29:40

You're not even gonna get out the first

29:42

syllable of precocious before they start

29:45

swinging. Yeah. Yeah,

29:49

so while he is at college, Yarvan

29:51

shows minimal interest in the humanities. He

29:53

only takes five undergraduate courses in these

29:55

subjects focused on history and writing. Where

29:57

is he in college now? is

30:00

where he starts at college, right? And

30:03

he graduates in 92, he goes on to

30:05

be a grad student in a comp sci

30:07

PhD program at Berkeley. And his goal at

30:09

that point is to enter the tech industry,

30:12

right, which is just starting

30:14

to really explode from as the internet,

30:16

this is kind of the very, the

30:18

immediate precursor to the big.com boom. And

30:21

as he moves from high school to college, and

30:24

then from college to grad school

30:26

and starts flirting with big tech,

30:28

he continues spending his time online,

30:30

exploring his first political ideology. And

30:32

he is initially a libertarian. And

30:34

I wanna quote from a profile

30:36

Joshua Tate wrote about Yarvan for

30:38

a book on the radical right.

30:40

Quote, engineers like Yarvan are

30:42

typically sorted through competitive academic programs,

30:45

which they consider analogous to the

30:47

competition imagined in a libertarian society.

30:49

Their world is rational, rule bound

30:51

and solvable. Within the subculture, computer

30:53

software and hardware are the dominant

30:56

metaphors for society. Such thinking dovetails

30:58

with the ironclad assumptions about human

31:00

and market behavior of the Austrian

31:02

school of economics, led by Ludwig

31:04

von Mies. Tech culture

31:06

systems focus also accords with

31:09

libertarianism's concentration on efficiency and

31:11

solving government. And

31:13

so he's one of these guys who number

31:15

one comes to think, I am, I

31:17

again, I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy

31:20

based on my skill that I've earned.

31:22

And the world around me, he sees

31:24

like seems so chaotic, but the computer systems

31:26

I'm working with are so sensible and

31:28

ordered. And the companies that I am interested

31:30

in all seem to be so much

31:32

more efficient than the government. Couldn't

31:35

we fix the government if we made it

31:37

more like a computer program and more like

31:39

the tech industry? Which

31:42

you can't because people don't work

31:44

that way. But there's always guys

31:46

who think this way, right? And

31:49

hopefully most of them I think it doesn't

31:51

lead anywhere but like some bad opinions on

31:53

the internet. Unfortunately for Yarvan, it's going to

31:55

go a little bit further than that. Speaking

31:58

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32:01

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36:24

So, we're back. Right. Now,

36:28

the kind of thinking that Yarvin has

36:30

about libertarianism, about being a part of

36:32

this natural aristocracy, is not really congruent

36:35

with human liberty in the broad sense,

36:37

right? Because, you know, if

36:40

you are able to, as a

36:42

business owner, use your liberty, like

36:44

unconstrained by government regulations, to dump

36:46

poison in a waterway, right? That

36:48

is, you are more free as

36:50

the person running that business, but

36:52

you're also destroying life and, you

36:55

know, one would say harming the liberty of

36:57

thousands of other people who rely on that

36:59

waterway, right? So, I would

37:01

say, as someone who is like inclined

37:03

to some libertarian ideas, I don't really

37:05

understand why so many libertarians are obsessed

37:07

with this kind of like ending of

37:10

government restrictions on corporations. Yeah.

37:13

Yeah, and also, and

37:16

another version of that, I

37:19

find the anti-union rhetoric so, Oh

37:22

yeah. So hilarious to me because the

37:25

formation of a union to

37:29

collectively bargain with a CEO

37:33

is the most like,

37:37

the most natural expression

37:40

of free speech. It

37:43

is. Yeah, absolutely. It is such a natural,

37:46

and so to be like, you know,

37:48

free speech, I'm a

37:50

constitutional, you

37:52

know, libertarian or whatever. And

37:55

then also in the same breath be like,

37:57

unions should be illegal. Yeah,

38:00

the math doesn't add up. Yeah. Unions are a natural growth and

38:02

a natural oppositional

38:10

force to exploitation. Yeah.

38:12

And I think they also like very,

38:15

like very objectively increase the amount

38:17

of like freedom, right? Like if

38:20

you're kind of looking at it that

38:22

way, when people have a way to

38:24

band together to oppose a much larger,

38:26

more powerful, you know, more moneyed interest,

38:29

then they have more agency, you know,

38:31

in their lives, right? Like that's, that's,

38:33

I mean, definitely how I look at

38:35

it. And I will say, Yarvan, he

38:38

actually is pretty good at not getting lost

38:40

in this part of the discourse, right? Because

38:42

he drops this idea that liberty is a

38:44

value in any way, shape or form pretty

38:46

early on. Like he's not one of these

38:48

guys who preaches libertarianism because he

38:50

thinks that it's or because he's trying to

38:52

convince people that it's somehow better for human

38:54

freedom. He's someone who just kind of drops

38:57

the idea that there's any value in human

38:59

freedom pretty early on, right? So there's no

39:01

point in paying lip service to it, which

39:03

is at least more honest than a lot

39:05

of these guys. Now,

39:08

the major pivot point, which leads to

39:10

him dropping his libertarian trappings and embracing

39:12

this more authoritarian belief system hinges on

39:14

the place that he was and kind

39:16

of remains his mental home, which is

39:19

the early internet. The old

39:21

days of Usenet were a simulacrum of

39:23

what is today Yarvan's ideal society. As

39:25

I stated before, back then you couldn't

39:28

post unless you were someone with a

39:30

degree of like skill, money or access

39:32

to a large institution. And

39:34

so you would only get new users

39:36

in any large amount every September when you

39:39

get new college classes of kids who would

39:41

get onboarded and start posting, right? And so

39:43

for a few years, every September, the internet

39:45

would be annoying for a while. All these

39:47

newbies came in who don't know like the

39:49

social mores and they would have to get

39:51

acclimatized, right? But there were always more old

39:53

heads, people who had been there a long

39:56

time to keep the new people in line.

39:58

And there was this natural hierarchy. based

40:00

on age and technical skill. And then

40:02

one year, late 1993, Usenet

40:05

opens up to anyone with an Internet

40:07

connection. And suddenly you have what people

40:10

call eternal September. Right. Like it's never

40:12

ended since 1993 because

40:14

there were no there's not been any kind

40:17

of like guardrails to block new people from

40:19

coming on after that point. This

40:21

is you know, it's an important moment

40:23

in Internet history. It's a catastrophic moment

40:25

for Curtis Yarvin. Right. And the mental

40:27

impact this has is key to understanding

40:29

him. In one interview with Tablet magazine,

40:32

he complained, you had this sort of

40:34

de facto aristocracy that didn't know it

40:36

was an aristocracy. And then it fell

40:38

apart. These are all big

40:40

Lord of the Rings guys. So I'll use the

40:42

Lord of the Rings analogy. They talk about this

40:44

like the like the the the the

40:47

period of time when the elves ruled everything

40:49

before Sauron had his big war. Right. Like

40:51

before the breaking of the world. That's that's

40:53

eternal September that ruins this kind of like

40:56

the more noble Golden Age and brings about

40:58

this dirty, grubby age of men. So

41:00

I'll take your word for it. I'm not a Lord of

41:03

the Rings guy. I mean, I respect

41:05

it, but I just don't have that

41:07

level of knowledge. Yeah,

41:09

I do. I'm wearing a Lord of the Rings hat right

41:11

now. You know, can

41:14

back that claim. All these

41:16

guys are big. J.D. Vance, his company,

41:18

his venture capital company was named after

41:20

one of the rings in the Lord

41:23

of the Rings. Peter Teal's surveillance company

41:25

is named Palantir from the Lord of

41:27

the Rings. So this is very

41:29

much the language that they all speak. Funny.

41:32

That's also one of Stephen Colbert's

41:34

obsessions. And I wonder if if

41:38

they might find common ground and have like

41:40

a fun chat on that side. I

41:43

certainly could have a chat about it. I

41:45

think Colbert would probably be kind of horrified

41:48

of some of the things that they're referencing. And

41:50

they're like, like you named your

41:52

company after this thing that is specifically a

41:54

device that only the evil wizard uses. OK.

41:57

Yeah. Yeah. But

42:00

I don't know that would be an interesting conversation So

42:03

I think this period of time this kind

42:05

of collapse of this natural heiress what he

42:07

sees as a natural aristocracy is key To

42:10

understanding why Yarvan comes to hate democracy,

42:12

right? Because it kind of ruined his

42:15

internet playground the first place where he

42:17

ever felt that he fit in right

42:19

That's that's sort of what I see as like

42:22

the er moment of his Like

42:24

coming to hate this kind of idea of any

42:26

kind of democratic society Now

42:28

if you're gonna claim that you and your friends

42:30

on the internet back in the day were like

42:32

the aristocracy of some Long-lost

42:35

utopia of logic that

42:37

invites people to look at what you were

42:39

posting on the internet back then and I've

42:41

looked at some Of Yarvan's old posts and

42:43

Socrates he wasn't He does seem

42:46

to have spent some of it writing comedy

42:48

for a hacking and DIY media collective called

42:50

the cult of the dead cow This

42:52

is where we get to like the weirdest connection

42:54

here because if you've heard of the cult of

42:57

the dead cow Recently, it's because Beto O'Rourke was

42:59

also a member So

43:01

yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

43:03

so he and Beto have a very

43:06

very strange connection to each other Now

43:10

the cult of the dead cow was like a

43:12

complicated thing. It's it's one Reuters article

43:14

I found describes it as the oldest group

43:16

of computer hackers in US history I think

43:19

that oversells how cool Yarvan's involvement

43:21

in it is because I

43:23

think he was mostly they were also like

43:25

a media collective So they put out like

43:27

pieces of writing and whatnot And

43:29

I think that's mostly what Yarvan's involvement

43:32

was right and the best evidence I

43:34

have of what he was writing for

43:36

them is a satiric piece a satiric

43:38

piece of badger human hybrid erotica Which

43:42

I think might hold a little bit of

43:44

evidence of his future interest in race science

43:46

Although it's hard to say do you want

43:48

to hear some of his badger human hybrid

43:51

erotica? Hold on. Let me get Love

43:57

me for my genes says Antonia own kneeling.

43:59

If you cannot love me for myself, you

44:01

must love me for my genes. I've never

44:04

told anyone this before. I've always kept it

44:06

to myself. I have always let them think

44:08

it but an accident of cruel nature that

44:10

I have white hair on my cheekbones and

44:12

a thoroughly disreputable looking nose. But the fact

44:14

is that I am part badger on my

44:16

father's side." So

44:19

I don't know. I don't know

44:22

what to say about that. I know it's a joke. It's

44:24

a bit, I don't think

44:26

it lands. Maybe it was

44:28

funnier back in the early internet, although

44:30

maybe the bar was just a lot

44:32

lower there. It feels like there's some

44:34

context we're missing. Like, just

44:37

I'm digging hard for some people out here.

44:39

So am I. It

44:41

just seems like there was some

44:43

inside joke about badger fucking or

44:45

something that we're not, that was

44:48

sort of like came before this.

44:51

This has to be part of a

44:53

dialogue that we've lost pieces of over

44:56

the years, right? It is like about

44:58

two pages of badger erotica.

45:00

That is, it's weirdly, the love me for my

45:02

genes line stands out to me, but I may

45:05

be reading more into that that is necessary. But

45:07

yeah, so

45:10

that's the kind of stuff he's doing.

45:12

It's pretty lighthearted comedy, right? Or it's

45:14

at least attempting to be. So

45:17

he's not, as far as I can tell, on

45:19

the serious hacking side of what the cult of

45:21

the dead cow is cow is doing at this

45:23

period of time. The

45:25

eternal September began. He dropped out of Berkeley

45:27

for a job at a tech company. He started

45:30

flirting with the specific strains of

45:32

more authoritarian, money-centered, libertarian ideology as

45:34

opposed to like, you know, the

45:36

old school guys who actually like,

45:38

you know, really were

45:40

pretty focused on human liberty. I think

45:43

pretty focused on human liberty. I think

45:46

kind of the last dregs of those guys

45:48

are you saw it like a pen and

45:50

teller would be a great evidence of that,

45:52

right? Like that, that kind of libertarian was

45:54

was a lot more prominent back then. And

45:56

he sort of Yarvan is sort

45:58

of right on the edge of the the Folks

46:00

who got a lot of money in the tech

46:02

industry and started getting angry that they have to

46:04

still pay tax that he delights in them. In

46:07

the act of recognition, he finds proof that

46:10

his faculties have not decayed to that state

46:12

of contented oblivion, which he believes a sure

46:14

precursor to death." This

46:17

is kind of noteworthy in part because the

46:19

term cathedral is going to be really important

46:21

for Yarov and he's going to come to

46:23

use it as a term to refer to

46:25

the news media, the political

46:28

establishment, and academia,

46:30

right? Everyone who annoys him, right, is

46:32

the cathedral. And this is sort of

46:34

like the evil regime

46:37

that he's going to set himself to the

46:39

task of destroying. And this is how a

46:41

lot of these guys think. It's why there's

46:43

so much focus, why guys like Vance spend

46:46

so much time attacking schools, attacking like professors

46:48

and academia. It's why

46:50

there's so much hatred of journalists, right? These are

46:52

the people who, in his eyes,

46:55

are invested in propping up a

46:57

clearly dysfunctional, failing society, right? And

46:59

so you have to destroy the

47:02

cathedral in order to build anything

47:04

new. That's what he's going to come

47:06

to believe, right? In

47:08

the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble bursts. And at

47:10

some point after that, Yarvin wound up with several

47:12

hundred grand as the result of a buyout of

47:14

a company he worked at. So not

47:16

enough to retire, but enough to sit around and really think

47:19

about what he wants to do next. What

47:21

year is this? This would be like in

47:23

the early 2000s. So this is all happening

47:25

sometime between like 2001 and 2004. You

47:29

know, the dot-com bubble bursts sometime after 9-11, I

47:31

think is when he gets bought out and by

47:33

2003 or 4, he's

47:36

kind of sitting around on a pile of

47:38

money, reading a lot, trying to figure

47:40

out what he wants to do next with his life. What

47:43

he kind of decides is that he wants

47:45

to think about politics and economics. Yarvin

47:47

had made some friends during his

47:49

tech years, and he'd gotten interested

47:51

in Austrian school economists, mostly because

47:53

of this University of Tennessee law

47:55

professor, Glenn Reynolds, who was like

47:57

an early blogger who had gotten

48:00

Yarvin interested. a guy named Ludwig

48:02

von Mies. And eventually through this,

48:04

Jarvan gets interested in a fan

48:07

of Mies, another theoretician named Murray

48:09

Rothbard. Rothbard was a

48:11

foundational anarcho-capitalist thinker. I don't really

48:13

like that term, but that's what

48:15

they called themselves. He

48:18

basically believes there should not be a

48:20

state, right? There should not be any

48:22

power higher than individuals and corporations spending

48:24

their money to make things happen, right?

48:27

That's kind of the gist of it.

48:29

Being an anarchist. Yeah. Yeah.

48:31

And I think a more,

48:36

an anarchist would argue the fact that

48:38

you have a bunch of money is

48:40

as much a problematic hierarchy as anything

48:42

that the state does. And you can't

48:46

really be an anarcho-capitalist, a lot of people

48:48

would argue. But Rothbard is one who feels

48:50

like, basically, that

48:53

the state, the primary reason the state is unethical

48:55

is that it stops people from doing what they

48:57

want to do with their money, right? Whereas an

48:59

anarchist would be like, well, the reason that the

49:01

state is unethical is that states can do a

49:03

lot of harm to people at scale, right? Anyway,

49:08

none of that really matters to the point, which is

49:10

that he gets really interested in this guy, Rothbard. And

49:13

Rothbard, one of the things he writes about

49:16

is this kind of anger at

49:18

the concept of people advocating for

49:20

civil rights, right? Anyone

49:22

advocating for civil rights in Rothbard's mind

49:25

is an enemy, right? Because the only

49:27

way to advocate for

49:29

civil rights is to advocate for the

49:31

state to make rules about those rights.

49:34

And that leads inevitably to tyranny.

49:36

Rothbard wrote, behind the honey, but

49:38

patently absurd pleas for equality is

49:40

a ruthless drive for placing themselves

49:43

the elites at the top of a new hierarchy

49:45

of power. And this is something you

49:47

see a lot on the right today. This idea that

49:49

like any group of people who are advocating for their

49:51

own advocating for civil

49:53

rights because they're being oppressed under

49:55

the present system are secretly trying

49:57

to make themselves rulers, right? All

50:00

they really want to do is oppress you by, I

50:02

don't know, getting the right to vote or

50:05

own credit cards or whatever. So

50:08

that's kind of like a big part of

50:10

Rothbard's belief system. And Yarvan really takes to

50:12

that. And that quote that I just

50:14

read from him came out in 95. So

50:16

you get the kind of feeling like this is

50:19

the sort of thinking Yarvan is hoovering up in

50:21

that period right before the dot-com

50:23

boom and then the dot-com bust. And

50:25

ultimately, his reading of these Austrian school

50:27

guys leads him to another dude named

50:29

Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle has been dead for

50:31

a while. He's a Scottish philosopher from the

50:34

1800s. And he's

50:36

kind of seen as a proto to

50:38

a lot of these kind of

50:40

more modern thinkers that he's reading.

50:43

And Carlyle is an authoritarian who

50:46

believes that you need a strong man to stop

50:49

groups of marginalized people from making

50:51

themselves the new tyrants. And

50:55

he's also, as we'll talk about, a

50:57

massive racist. He's one of these guys

50:59

who justifies slavery as being a fundamentally

51:01

ethical system for reasons of like, basically,

51:05

certain groups of people are different

51:07

genetically. So slavery is a natural

51:10

hierarchy in society. So

51:12

these are the kind of people that Yarvan

51:14

is digesting. When he comes upon the work

51:16

of a fellow named Hans Hermann, Hoppe. Hoppe

51:19

is a German-born political theorist and

51:21

a leading Austrian school economist.

51:24

He's another anarcho-capitalist. And

51:26

Hoppe is a big advocate of monarchy

51:28

in a way that he defines monarchy

51:31

as a privately owned government as opposed

51:33

to a democracy, which he calls a

51:35

publicly owned government. And

51:38

Hoppe believes that the transition from monarchy

51:40

to democracy over the 20th century was

51:42

like the big mistake that we made

51:44

as humans and has caused nothing but

51:46

civilizational decline ever since. And

51:49

from Hoppe, Yarvan gets the idea that the

51:51

best way to run anything is to have

51:54

one guy be in charge of it. You

51:56

can't effectively run an organization if there's any

51:58

power sharing. The only way to do

52:00

anything is to have a single

52:02

person be invested with absolute power.

52:05

Right. I know that's kind of like a tortured

52:08

logical route, but those are sort of

52:10

the ingredients that eventually cook up to

52:12

him becoming a monarchist, right? Now,

52:15

we might say that's not the most logical thing,

52:17

right? If you look at what happened to all

52:19

of the absolute monarchies, they kind of destroyed each

52:22

other's circle, World War One. And

52:24

Yavin would argue, no, no, no, those weren't

52:26

real absolute monarchies. They had they all made

52:29

too many compromises with with different sort of

52:31

like Democratical instruments within those

52:33

societies. And that's the reason why Austria-Hungary

52:35

fell. That's the reason why the Czar

52:38

fell, right? They didn't have quite enough

52:40

power. I think that's silly. Well,

52:43

sure. I mean, it

52:46

places such an unreasonable amount of faith

52:48

in one

52:50

person or in just like the

52:53

integrity of of of humans. Like,

52:56

yeah, like people, the reason that

52:58

it's the reason that you have to

53:01

embrace a messy system is because

53:03

people are inherently messy. Yeah. I

53:07

think that's a great way to put it. A

53:09

monarchy is a wonderful

53:11

fantasy. But like, how do you pick

53:13

the guy? Or the woman?

53:15

Right. You pick that person. And then and then

53:18

like, what if he gets hit on the head? What's

53:21

wrong? And

53:23

right. What are these? The Dalai Lama thing

53:25

where where it's a it's a birthright thing.

53:27

And then like, what if what

53:30

if they're just like a narcissistic,

53:32

suicidal or

53:35

depressive or whatever, like what

53:39

if they want nothing to do with it? I don't know. It just seems nuts.

53:43

It's this wild. It's this thing that

53:45

like everyone understands the frustration with democracy.

53:47

Right. Like it's really messy and really

53:49

annoying a lot of the time. And

53:51

like people make a lot

53:53

of bad decisions, especially even as collectives.

53:55

Groups of people make really bad decisions

53:57

a lot of the time. Right. But

54:00

then saying like the solution to this is to

54:02

have one guy be in charge.

54:04

It's like, well, number one, how do

54:06

you pick that guy? Number two, like

54:08

we've all seen it like people change

54:10

over the course of their lives, right?

54:12

Like what happens if that guy, like

54:14

his mental capacity gets declined or whatever,

54:16

or he gets obsessed with something weird

54:18

and crazy and dangerous, which is what

54:21

happens to every monarchy, right? They all

54:23

wind up ruled by like maniacs who

54:25

make terrible decisions, which is like why

54:27

we had World War One. You have

54:29

all these like monarchs who were

54:31

obsessed with these very silly attitudes

54:35

with the and these very silly petty

54:37

grievances between each other and had made

54:39

like generations of terrible decisions when it

54:42

came to like purchasing arms and building

54:44

their military machines. And like it

54:47

just turns out that the bad decisions

54:49

of one guy are certainly

54:51

not like any less catastrophic than

54:53

the bad decisions of like groups

54:55

of people. Right. Anytime you've

54:57

got people who spend all of their time

54:59

like theorizing about the way things ought to

55:01

be, as opposed to like dealing with the

55:03

way people are, you're going to

55:06

wind up with with nonsense. Right. And

55:08

like that's that unfortunately, every now

55:10

and then we get to see like what

55:12

that nonsense looks like, you know, when when

55:14

people actually put it in place, you know,

55:16

in the case of like absolute monarchies like

55:18

this, we got the trenches in World War

55:20

One. In the case of

55:23

like a very authoritarian communism, you know,

55:25

we got Stalin. And

55:27

I guess kind of like part of part of why

55:29

I think Yavin is important to understand is that as

55:31

as kooky as a lot of this stuff is, he

55:34

is a guy who wants to take these theories

55:36

that he made himself when he was like sitting

55:39

alone in his apartment reading books

55:41

and not really any interacting with real people.

55:43

He's a guy who wants those theories to

55:45

govern the lives of hundreds

55:47

of millions, ideally billions. Right. And

55:51

that's a real dangerous kind of person,

55:53

you know, like we can regular people

55:55

can sit around and like read their

55:57

books and talk about like, well, this might

55:59

be an eater. This might be neat, but whenever

56:01

you're talking about like, I know how

56:03

to reorder all of society, you've

56:07

become dangerous. That's

56:09

kind of what Yavin is doing during this period of

56:11

time where he's sitting at home and he's reading his

56:13

books. So

56:16

the kind of, the system that

56:18

he pulls out of this period where he's just like

56:20

reading everything he can get his hands on is

56:23

that monarchs are the, a monarchy is

56:25

the ideal kind of system of government

56:27

because it's the best at maximizing long-term

56:30

profits within a society because monarchs have

56:32

to think long-term, right? They can't be

56:34

destructive in the short-term like, you know,

56:37

leaders in a democracy are because they

56:39

have a limited term limit and, you

56:41

know, maybe they only care about benefiting

56:43

themselves. A monarch wouldn't act that way

56:46

because they have no desire to destroy their own property.

56:48

And again, I would point you back to World War

56:50

I. We

56:54

could talk about like the Saudi royal family too,

56:57

right? Entirely propped up by oil.

56:59

Roman emperors or whoever. Roman emperors. Like

57:01

literally most of the monarchies that have

57:03

ever been have like collapsed as a

57:05

result of the fact that that's also

57:07

an inherently destructive thing. You know,

57:09

some of that just comes down to human nature, but he

57:12

does try to deal with this, the fact

57:14

that monarchies clearly don't work the way that

57:16

he thinks that they should. He

57:19

thinks that a big part of the issue is

57:21

that they all make

57:23

too many compromises, right? All of these

57:25

monarchies that collapsed during the turn of

57:28

the century had allowed some democratic elements

57:30

into society. And, you know, they had

57:32

allowed that because there were revolutions, right?

57:34

People like occupied Vienna for

57:36

a period of time in 48. Like

57:38

there were a bunch of like socialist uprisings in

57:41

the middle of the 19th century. And

57:43

as a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies introduced

57:46

reforms, you know? And

57:49

he sees those reforms as this was like

57:51

a terrible step that ensured their demise as

57:53

opposed to like, well, the absolute

57:55

monarch chose to make those reforms because they

57:58

could not hold on to power. But

58:00

again, there's never a perfect logical consistency with

58:03

guys. Can I ask a question? Yeah. So

58:06

like, if you're an absolute monarch, are

58:10

you delegating anything? And

58:12

then who are you delegating to? Like what are

58:15

the struck? What is the, is

58:19

the, like, do you have to be

58:21

just like an insane micromanager to be?

58:24

Yeah, but I think the key is, the

58:26

key is to him, the difference would be

58:28

like a bureaucratic structure wherein there are other

58:30

centers of power, right? Like if you've got

58:33

a constitutional monarch, but there's still some kind

58:35

of like Congress or Senate or whatever that

58:37

has some things that are within its scope

58:39

of jobs. More of a CEO than a

58:41

monarch. Right. He

58:44

wants, he does actually view it as

58:46

a CEO where they do delegate, but

58:48

the CEO is ultimately the guy in

58:50

power, right? Who thinks all the delegates?

58:55

I mean, I think the CEO

58:57

in his ideal like situation, right? Like his,

58:59

his ideal system of government that he kind

59:01

of comes around to is like the way

59:03

Facebook is run, right? Where you do have

59:06

like a board of directors technically, but Zuckerberg

59:08

has enough control of stock that like no

59:10

one can force him out. The buck stops

59:13

with him. Like he ultimately has

59:15

all of the power in that organization. That's

59:18

how Yavin thinks countries should be run.

59:22

Right. Which in his

59:24

defense, Facebook is a flawless organization. Yeah.

59:27

We all know that nothing ever goes wrong

59:29

there. So

59:32

the final straw for Yarvan's tolerance of democracy

59:35

came in 2004 as a result of the

59:37

Swift boats, veterans for the Swift boat

59:40

veterans for truth scandal. You remember this,

59:42

I'm sure, right? Oh yeah, of course.

59:45

Yeah. Yeah. This is

59:47

back in the 2004 election, John Kerry was

59:49

the Democratic nominee. Kerry had been wounded three

59:51

times in Vietnam. And then after

59:53

he had left the service, he had become an

59:55

anti-war activist, right? He like testified in Congress. This

59:57

was a really big deal. So,

1:00:00

number one, as a result, conservatives had

1:00:02

never really forgiven John Kerry for as

1:00:05

they saw betraying the country in Vietnam.

1:00:08

And also, obviously, Bush was

1:00:11

running on the back of two wars that

1:00:13

he had gotten the country and Kerry had

1:00:15

been against those. So there was this pretty

1:00:17

hideous conflict. And the way that a lot

1:00:20

of folks on the right chose to, particularly

1:00:22

those within Bush's campaign chose to respond, was

1:00:25

by arguing and bringing up people who

1:00:27

claimed, people who had served in Vietnam,

1:00:29

who claimed that Kerry had lied about

1:00:31

his service, right? That he hadn't really

1:00:33

done the things he'd done, that his

1:00:35

purple hearts were essentially due

1:00:37

to exaggerations. And none of this was

1:00:39

true. And in fact,

1:00:41

when journalists actually talked to people who

1:00:43

had served with Kerry, they're like, no,

1:00:45

he was a very good soldier who

1:00:49

was wounded repeatedly doing his

1:00:51

job. But the

1:00:53

propaganda campaign largely worked, right? And

1:00:56

Yarvan, critically, he bought the propaganda

1:00:58

campaign. And he was angry that

1:01:00

the media in his eyes worked

1:01:02

to protect Kerry, which proved that

1:01:04

it was fundamentally evil and allied

1:01:06

with academia and what people now

1:01:09

call the deep state career government

1:01:11

employees, operating the sort

1:01:13

of shadow government that really ran things,

1:01:15

right? His attitude is that because John

1:01:17

Kerry didn't suffer enough from the Swiftboat

1:01:20

scandal, that means that the whole

1:01:22

media complex in the United States was corrupt

1:01:24

and needed to be destroyed, which is a

1:01:26

crazy thing to lead you to that conclusion.

1:01:30

Like, it's just it's one of the it's

1:01:32

interesting to me because this guy really does.

1:01:35

He tries to portray himself as this

1:01:38

like dark philosopher, this

1:01:40

like esoteric, almost political

1:01:43

madman. But when you get right down

1:01:45

to it, he's like your crank uncle

1:01:47

who's angry about John Kerry on Facebook.

1:01:51

Well, also the Swiftboating. It's

1:01:53

a weird thing to it's

1:01:56

a weird thing to take from that

1:01:58

whole chapter. of American

1:02:01

political history because swift

1:02:03

boating worked. Yeah. And

1:02:05

the media, by the way, took the bait

1:02:07

and just like amplified

1:02:09

the story and. And

1:02:13

if they tried to protect Kerry, which

1:02:15

I'm I'm sure a

1:02:18

few journalists probably wanted, certainly

1:02:20

individuals. Yeah, they failed. Yeah,

1:02:23

they didn't work. Like

1:02:25

that's like and that's how I would

1:02:28

say is like, I think if you're

1:02:30

saying what happened, the swift boating thing

1:02:32

is why I lost faith in the

1:02:34

media. That's reasonable, but not for the

1:02:36

reason he did. Right. Yeah. But

1:02:39

anyway, that's what that's where he goes. Right. Speaking

1:02:42

of the shadow government

1:02:44

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good stuff effortlessly. We're

1:05:29

back. So now the

1:05:31

years that Yarvin is kind of doing his all

1:05:33

having his like period in the wilderness coming up

1:05:35

with his political ideology, largely like 2003 or 4

1:05:37

to like 2007 or so, are the years

1:05:42

that the tech industry like that brings

1:05:44

us Web 2.0 is starting to emerge.

1:05:46

You get Google, you get, you know,

1:05:48

Apple had been around for a while,

1:05:50

right? But they, you know, we start

1:05:52

to see like the what's going to

1:05:54

become this the smartphone era, like grind

1:05:57

towards, you know, coming into being. Facebook

1:06:01

also starts like 2006 or 2007, I think, is

1:06:04

when it very first starts out. This

1:06:06

is kind of the early birth of the Web 2.0

1:06:08

era, which are all of these founder-driven

1:06:11

startups, for the most part, right?

1:06:14

And Yarvan comes to see this system

1:06:17

that gives us Google and Facebook as

1:06:19

inherently better than the system that governs

1:06:21

the country, right? And it's

1:06:23

more akin to his kind of idealized

1:06:26

absolute monarchy. So by this point in

1:06:28

time, around 2007, Yarvan

1:06:30

has more or less come across

1:06:32

all the ingredients of his new

1:06:34

ideology, this kind of reactionary monarchism

1:06:37

with Austrian economic tendencies. The

1:06:39

problem is that none of these philosophers that

1:06:41

he likes, these guys like Rothbard and Hoppe,

1:06:43

have quite gotten it right. And

1:06:46

so he decides, I've got to start

1:06:48

putting my ideas out there. I've finally

1:06:50

figured it out. I've consolidated the contradictions

1:06:52

between all these systems. And

1:06:55

now I'm going to start putting it out for people

1:06:57

to see, right? So

1:07:00

in 2007, he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis

1:07:02

of reading that he'd put himself in. And

1:07:04

he comes up with a blog under

1:07:06

a pin name, Mincius Moldbug. And

1:07:08

it's under this pin name that he's going to

1:07:10

start writing a bunch of essays of political theory.

1:07:13

In an interview with Max Raskin, Yarvan

1:07:15

describes the origin of this nickname, Mincius

1:07:17

Moldbug, this way. It came

1:07:20

from two different handles I was using in different

1:07:22

places. I would post occasionally on Reddit or Hacker

1:07:24

News. Sometimes I would get banned and I would

1:07:26

choose the name of a new classical figure. And

1:07:28

I just happened to land on Mincius. And

1:07:30

then I was doing some economics posting and

1:07:32

I posted something about gold, but I said

1:07:34

mold instead of gold because I was talking

1:07:36

about something with a hypothetical restricted supply. So

1:07:40

it's just kind of like a foreign name,

1:07:42

but it sounds like a little bit sinister.

1:07:44

And it's interesting to me, Mincius, the first

1:07:46

name comes from a Confucian philosopher from the

1:07:48

300s BC, who

1:07:51

was a major figure in that kind of thought.

1:07:53

And he had, during the warring states period,

1:07:56

interviewed a bunch of different kings and written

1:07:58

a book about like what he'd learned. about

1:08:00

ruling. Now, Mincius was kind of focused

1:08:02

on getting monarchs to act more benevolently

1:08:04

towards the poor and the downtrodden. So

1:08:06

he's not really a figure

1:08:09

that has a lot to do with the kind

1:08:11

of politics Yavin is about to espouse. I think

1:08:13

he largely picked the name because it makes him

1:08:15

sound kind of sinister. But

1:08:18

he starts putting out his new

1:08:20

thoughts on politics in this blog

1:08:22

in a series of essays called

1:08:24

Unqualified Reservations, all geared at

1:08:26

getting his readers on board with the idea

1:08:28

of reorganizing society away from democracy and towards

1:08:30

a kind of enlightened one-man rule that he

1:08:33

believes is going to work a lot better.

1:08:36

Unlike most philosophers, Yavin peppers

1:08:38

his essays with casual slurs.

1:08:41

In reading one where he talks about World War

1:08:43

II, he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a

1:08:45

common slur at the time, and in

1:08:47

another he makes a satiric statement about

1:08:49

how the indigent poor should be destroyed

1:08:51

and turned into biodiesel fuel. This

1:08:53

kind of stuff, it has the impact

1:08:55

of getting like, on the rare occasions

1:08:58

in these early days that like major news

1:09:00

outlets will look at his work, they'll kind

1:09:02

of decide to ignore him because it's this

1:09:04

guy dropping a bunch of racial slurs and

1:09:06

crude jokes. He's clearly not a serious thinker.

1:09:09

But the other thing that this style

1:09:12

of discourse does is

1:09:14

it's very attractive to young men,

1:09:16

particularly young kind of intelligent auto-didact

1:09:18

in the tech industry who spend

1:09:20

a lot of time reading the

1:09:22

internet, right? And it is kind

1:09:25

of in the same way that

1:09:27

a lot of like the way people talk

1:09:29

on 4chan is going to be attractive to

1:09:31

these kinds of guys, right? And what you're

1:09:33

seeing in these early mold bug episodes with

1:09:35

this use of slurs and these kind of

1:09:37

like joking, not joking statements about killing poor

1:09:39

people is the precursor to

1:09:41

the way the alt-right is going to

1:09:44

talk about issues, right? And use kind

1:09:46

of humor and jokes that aren't really

1:09:48

jokes to kind of push more extreme

1:09:51

ideas, right? Mold bug is really the

1:09:53

guy who starts doing that

1:09:55

in, I don't know if

1:09:57

you'd say he was the first, but he's certainly the first with

1:09:59

a platform. to be doing that in a

1:10:01

way that's really influential to a lot of these people. Now,

1:10:04

can I ask another real, I have

1:10:06

two questions. Is

1:10:08

the precursor to the way the

1:10:10

alt-right is going to talk about

1:10:12

issues, right? And use kind of

1:10:14

humor and jokes that aren't really

1:10:16

jokes to kind of push more

1:10:18

extreme ideas, right? Moldbug is really

1:10:20

the guy who starts doing

1:10:23

that in, I don't

1:10:25

know if you'd say he was the first, but he's certainly

1:10:27

the first with a platform to be doing that in a

1:10:29

way that's really influential to a lot of these people. Can

1:10:32

I ask another real, I have two

1:10:34

questions. Yeah, yeah. One is,

1:10:37

are we sure we're pronouncing minceus correctly?

1:10:39

Is it not minchus? I

1:10:42

think it is minchus, sorry. Minchus. Yes,

1:10:44

yes. But it spelled yeah. The other

1:10:46

way. And I

1:10:48

have no idea. I just, when you said

1:10:50

it was a confusion, suddenly

1:10:53

thought, well, maybe, anyway. Yeah, I

1:10:55

think it is minchus, yeah. And

1:10:57

then my second question is, to

1:11:01

what extent, I

1:11:06

find the humor aspect

1:11:08

of this fascinating because it

1:11:10

raises the possibility, or

1:11:14

I guess my question is, where on the

1:11:17

spectrum of just

1:11:19

kind of very mendacious and

1:11:23

angry person who wants

1:11:25

to reshape the world

1:11:29

versus all the way to the other end

1:11:32

of just being a

1:11:35

really giddy shit stirrer,

1:11:37

gadfly, who

1:11:39

just wants to throw crazy ideas out

1:11:41

there and get

1:11:44

a reaction out of people the way

1:11:46

90% of Twitter is. Where

1:11:48

on that spectrum is he?

1:11:52

Because it does sound like there's, churning

1:11:57

up poor people to create bio.

1:12:00

Diesel is is

1:12:02

a it's a tasteless joke. It's like

1:12:04

a Swifty Thomas Swift or it's like

1:12:06

Jonathan Swift type joke. Right. Like, but

1:12:09

it it could be construed

1:12:11

as just like trolling. Right.

1:12:13

Right. Well, I think that's kind

1:12:16

of the key point. So like, so like what

1:12:18

you're talking about is like the term we use

1:12:20

for it is shitposting. Right. And

1:12:22

and Yavin is very much a shitposter.

1:12:24

Right. But he's also using that as

1:12:26

a tool where he understands that this

1:12:29

is how young men particularly talk

1:12:31

on the Internet. And it is something

1:12:33

that inherently, if you're talking this way,

1:12:35

if you're engaging this way, you

1:12:37

have more credibility with them than, you

1:12:40

know, people who are trying to

1:12:42

be more respectable, who largely

1:12:44

like this chunk of folks doesn't

1:12:46

think highly of. Right. These like kind

1:12:49

of like these traditional sort of like

1:12:51

intellectual elites, you know, academics and

1:12:53

journalists and the like, they have a

1:12:55

lot of disdain for. But

1:12:57

they trust someone who communicates like

1:13:00

them. And so by using

1:13:02

these kind of like by basically

1:13:04

peppering and sort of trolling language

1:13:06

in these very serious articles arguing

1:13:09

for anti-democratic politics, he makes

1:13:11

himself credible to them. And

1:13:13

he also there's also a

1:13:15

sense that because he's including

1:13:17

some of this this stuff that is

1:13:19

a lot racier, he's.

1:13:23

There's something almost forbidden knowledge about the stuff

1:13:25

that he's putting out. Right. That makes them

1:13:27

want to share it with each other. And

1:13:29

and that's very much like a factor in

1:13:31

his success. What he's doing here is like

1:13:33

very much intentional and very intelligent and very

1:13:36

effective. And it you know, if you want

1:13:38

to look at kind of the ultimate like

1:13:42

evolution of this, these sort of tactics,

1:13:44

I think a great touch point would

1:13:47

be the Christ Church Shooters Manifesto, which

1:13:49

included a lot of these like inside

1:13:51

jokes, a lot of like forum troll

1:13:54

language wrapped around

1:13:56

serious arguments for like why people should

1:13:58

carry out white supremacists. attacks. And it's

1:14:01

a kind of tactic that is really

1:14:03

what gave us the alt right as a

1:14:05

political force. And it's still very much how

1:14:08

these people communicate. Now, I think it started

1:14:10

to hurt them recently. The whole the

1:14:13

weird stuff that Tim Walls began pulling out

1:14:15

has actually been a really effective

1:14:17

thing because when you actually like take the

1:14:20

way these people talk amongst each other and

1:14:22

put it up in front of an audience,

1:14:24

it's deeply off putting to most people. But

1:14:29

it also kind of led to this establishment

1:14:31

of like an internal language for these folks

1:14:33

that that kind of led to a an

1:14:36

ossification of their ideological tendencies. Right. We're

1:14:38

all using the same kind of terms

1:14:40

and words that we've come to recognize

1:14:43

as like dog whistles for different things.

1:14:46

And Yarvan is really doing that in a

1:14:48

very organized way. He's good at developing terms

1:14:50

for people to use that get adopted on

1:14:52

a large scale. You know, one of the

1:14:54

best example, this would be his term, the

1:14:56

cathedral, right, which, you

1:14:58

know, he he uses to be mean

1:15:01

this nexus of everything he doesn't like

1:15:03

the liberal media, the university system, academia,

1:15:05

you know, like career government employees, everything

1:15:08

he considers bad and everything his ideal

1:15:10

monarch would destroy. Right. In his ideal

1:15:12

world, there's not going to be an

1:15:15

independent academic community. There's not going to

1:15:17

be newspapers or journalists, just a king

1:15:19

in an aristocracy. And of course, he's

1:15:22

going to be a natural member of

1:15:24

that aristocracy. Right. Now,

1:15:28

he does kind of the last piece of

1:15:30

this ideology he's putting together is he has

1:15:32

to explain why a lot

1:15:34

of these real world feudalist governments that

1:15:36

fell apart all fell apart. And part

1:15:38

of it is obviously they gave too

1:15:40

much freedom to people who weren't the

1:15:43

monarch. But the other thing he comes

1:15:45

up with is that old monarchies denied

1:15:47

citizens the freedom to exit. And so

1:15:49

in this ideal world, he supposes countries

1:15:51

will be small like the size of

1:15:53

a city in most cases, and they'll

1:15:55

compete with citizens who would have the

1:15:57

freedom to leave. Right. So it's fine.

1:15:59

Now, There's a lot of questions that aren't

1:16:01

answered here. How do you make a

1:16:03

society function that way

1:16:05

in a world as interconnected as

1:16:08

ours? How do you

1:16:10

stop one monarch from repeatedly taking

1:16:12

over other... Why

1:16:14

wouldn't they use force? Why would people

1:16:16

just let valuable subjects leave? How do

1:16:18

people leave if the monarch can stop

1:16:20

them from taking their assets out? All

1:16:22

of these things that would be actual

1:16:24

problems if anyone tried to do this

1:16:26

sort of thing. There's

1:16:28

not actually an answer to this, but that's

1:16:30

kind of his idealized version

1:16:32

of a society. It's

1:16:35

a bunch of small monarchies all over the

1:16:37

world that people can theoretically leave and move

1:16:39

between the way people leave companies and go

1:16:41

to work for other companies. You

1:16:43

know how much everybody loves work? That's how the whole

1:16:45

government should be. That's

1:16:49

wild. I hadn't thought of it

1:16:53

on such a small scale. Here's

1:16:55

another question. In the same way that a

1:16:58

company will have a

1:17:00

board that can oust

1:17:02

a CEO or... Is

1:17:07

there any stopgap measure for a

1:17:09

disastrous leader? No. Let's

1:17:13

say someone has a brain

1:17:15

eating worm. Yeah, right.

1:17:17

Right. But they are

1:17:19

showing no symptoms when they are

1:17:22

appointed or ascend to the monarchy.

1:17:25

But then over the next five years,

1:17:27

they become absolutely batshit crazy. Is there

1:17:29

any stopgap

1:17:32

there? The only

1:17:34

stopgap he builds in is the idea that,

1:17:36

well, theoretically, if the ruler's bad,

1:17:39

everyone would be able to leave. And

1:17:42

then their system would collapse. Oh, it's

1:17:44

that thing. Yeah, it's

1:17:46

that thing where it's like, well, what if he wants

1:17:48

to shoot people who try to leave? And

1:17:51

then they're all saying, like,

1:17:53

yeah, civil rights are dumb because if

1:17:55

you put a whites-only sign

1:17:57

in front of your store, you're going to lose

1:17:59

business. and you're gonna go out of business and

1:18:02

the market will keep you from being racist.

1:18:04

Meanwhile, like, what? It

1:18:07

didn't back when people did that. Yeah,

1:18:10

back when people did that, it was,

1:18:12

didn't work until the laws kicked

1:18:14

in. Yeah. Yeah. No,

1:18:17

and it's this weird mix

1:18:20

of like naivete and

1:18:22

like starry eyed thinking that

1:18:26

to a degree, I think he's just

1:18:28

kind of being dishonest with the naivete.

1:18:31

He knows any state like this would

1:18:33

just be a dictatorship, like enforced through

1:18:35

violence, right? But that's what

1:18:37

he wants as long as he's a part of

1:18:39

the aristocracy and he's just kind of built in

1:18:41

this, well, people would just leave if they didn't

1:18:43

like it as because he has to have some

1:18:45

answer for it, right? But I kind of think

1:18:47

he knows how ugly a system like this would

1:18:50

be in practice. He's just more or less fine

1:18:52

with it. Right. Now,

1:18:54

the last kind of ingredient to the

1:18:57

ideological system Yavin is cooking up is

1:18:59

of course racism. And I want

1:19:01

to read a passage from an article

1:19:04

in TechCrunch about Yavin and his followers

1:19:06

and how they are, quote, obsessed with

1:19:08

a concept called human biodiversity, what used

1:19:10

to be called scientific racism. Specifically, they

1:19:12

believe that IQ is one of, if

1:19:14

not the most important personal traits and

1:19:17

that it's predominantly genetic. Theoreactionaries

1:19:19

would replace or supplement the divine

1:19:21

right of kings and the aristocracy

1:19:23

with the genetic right of elites.

1:19:26

Right. So this is another element of

1:19:28

how he tries to justify, well, my system's smarter

1:19:30

than the old school of monarchies, right? It's not

1:19:32

just these bunch of families are the people who

1:19:34

are in charge. Our aristocracy is

1:19:37

people who naturally are superior because

1:19:39

of their IQ. Because obviously

1:19:41

that tells you everything about a person. Right.

1:19:45

Emotional IQ? Are we? Yeah.

1:19:49

No, no, no. No, no, no. That's not

1:19:51

worth much to be said. Absolutely not. I'm

1:19:54

for people with very strong emotional IQs

1:19:57

being in charge of things. Yeah.

1:20:00

No, no, no, that's that's not the system we're going to

1:20:02

have. Just a bunch of guys who are really good at

1:20:04

coding, running everything, you know,

1:20:07

that way, everything can finally work the way Uber

1:20:09

does. Oh, so I'll feel

1:20:11

unsafe all the time. OK, cool. So

1:20:17

it's probably not surprising. Mobugs

1:20:19

theories take off among specifically

1:20:21

a lot of Silicon Valley

1:20:23

young men, right? Who

1:20:25

are excessively online. And it also starts to

1:20:28

take off. He begins being spread by a

1:20:30

lot of like far right folks on the

1:20:32

Internet and kind of the mid aughts who

1:20:35

find his work and share it amongst themselves.

1:20:38

It's just two years after Mobugs

1:20:40

starts his blog that Peter Thiel

1:20:42

gives a speech about democracy being

1:20:44

incompatible with liberty. And Thiel starts

1:20:47

putting money Yarvin's way, right? He's

1:20:49

probably the number one guy sending

1:20:51

money towards Yarvin backing. He backs

1:20:53

a tech company that

1:20:55

Yarvin starts. And he's just generally

1:20:57

sort of like some like his

1:20:59

early sort of money backer, right?

1:21:03

And Yarvin kind of as a result, he starts

1:21:05

getting shared, almost like people are like handing out

1:21:07

drugs to each other. Like like we want to

1:21:09

keep this on the down low. You don't want

1:21:11

like people, too many people to know publicly that

1:21:13

you're reading mold bug. But like, have you read

1:21:16

this latest article? If you checked out this blog,

1:21:18

right? And he starts getting invited

1:21:20

to give talks and he

1:21:22

starts saying things in these talks like

1:21:24

speeches at these schools to these conservative

1:21:26

clubs and the like, like if Americans

1:21:28

want to change their government, they're going

1:21:30

to have to get over their dictator

1:21:32

phobia. There's really no other solution. And

1:21:36

that's kind of the thinking that

1:21:38

is going to lead directly into the

1:21:40

alt right and its embrace of Donald

1:21:42

Trump. Yarvin is one of the key

1:21:44

ideological pieces there. He is he is

1:21:46

building a bridge that is eventually going

1:21:48

to lead to how a lot of

1:21:50

these people think about what Trump should

1:21:52

be. Right. It's part of why there's

1:21:54

a lot of this joking, not joking

1:21:56

talk about wanting Trump to be like

1:21:58

a God King. Right. Is it's a

1:22:00

lot of. these guys who are knowingly

1:22:02

or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of

1:22:04

came initially into the right from Yavin.

1:22:08

And yeah, that's part one. In part

1:22:10

two, we're going to talk about like

1:22:12

how he actually gets connected to politics

1:22:14

and kind of where we are today with

1:22:17

this guy. But yeah, how are you

1:22:19

feeling, Ed? I'm a little rattled.

1:22:22

It's dark stuff, right? Yeah.

1:22:25

That's the right reaction. What

1:22:28

happens if he

1:22:32

is like in the court,

1:22:34

the high court of this

1:22:38

monarch and gets

1:22:41

a stomach flu and throws

1:22:43

up during a

1:22:45

ceremony of some kind and

1:22:47

is like sent to

1:22:49

a dungeon for the rest of his life at

1:22:52

no fault of his own? Like what

1:22:54

which is a very reasonable expectation

1:22:58

of a monarch whole system. And

1:23:01

so is he then sitting in

1:23:03

the dungeon saying it's still the best? This

1:23:05

is still the best. This

1:23:07

is still the best system. I don't think

1:23:09

he thinks that could happen because I think he

1:23:11

doesn't believe something that you and I believe in.

1:23:13

I think most rational people believe,

1:23:16

which is that like power corrupts. So

1:23:18

like, even if you are not the kind of

1:23:20

guy who would throw people in a dungeon when

1:23:23

you become king, just the

1:23:25

fact that being a king is deranging,

1:23:27

right? Having that kind of power, you

1:23:29

will eventually get used to exercising it and

1:23:32

doing things like punishing people who just annoy

1:23:34

you. And we know that this happens because

1:23:36

we have a lot of examples of like

1:23:38

when people are made dictators, how

1:23:41

folks who were at least more normal

1:23:43

at one point become like more violent

1:23:46

and dangerous to be around. Right. Like

1:23:48

this is a very well-documented thing that comes

1:23:51

with power. And I think

1:23:53

he doesn't believe that fundamentally because

1:23:55

he thinks that power naturally accumulates

1:23:58

in natural. systems of

1:24:00

elites, right? So it can't be

1:24:02

bad for them. Or I

1:24:05

suppose an argument might be, well, if

1:24:07

I started to see those tendencies in

1:24:09

the leader, I would then go to

1:24:12

a different monarchy with a better leader.

1:24:15

But what if it's like, what if you're the

1:24:17

first one? What if you're the first

1:24:19

example of that monarch? Of

1:24:21

a guy going crazy? Yeah, of a guy going

1:24:24

crazy. I think

1:24:26

it's also like a failure. These guys all

1:24:28

consider themselves historians, but they don't study history

1:24:31

in any kind of rigorous academic

1:24:33

fashion. And every time I hear this argument

1:24:35

about, well, people would just leave, I think

1:24:37

about what happened to Jewish

1:24:39

people in Nazi Germany where if

1:24:42

they wanted to leave, the state would

1:24:44

take all of their property effectively, right?

1:24:46

Some people did get to leave, but

1:24:48

they didn't get to take their assets

1:24:51

with them, right? That was a... Theft

1:24:53

was a part of the system. And

1:24:55

it's a thing that a state operated

1:24:57

by a single man with absolute power

1:24:59

and a grudge can do. And

1:25:02

there's no reason in his system that it wouldn't

1:25:04

happen to anyone trying to leave a bad CEO

1:25:07

king, right? But I either,

1:25:10

again, he's just not bringing this up because he

1:25:12

doesn't care about the people he thinks this would

1:25:14

happen to, or he just isn't

1:25:16

read enough on the kind of history that's

1:25:19

actually relevant to how a system like this

1:25:21

would work in real life. You know, that's

1:25:23

what I would kind of suspect. Yeah. Yeah.

1:25:25

Yeah. People have tried this, Curtis. Which

1:25:29

he may very well be fully aware of and

1:25:31

just kind of trying to do a little sleight

1:25:33

of hand here, right? Because he's more or less

1:25:35

fine with who he thinks would be the people

1:25:37

targeted unfairly in this system, which is like he's

1:25:39

one of these guys who is annoyed

1:25:41

with the left and progressives, right? He

1:25:43

hates social justice and advocates for social

1:25:45

justice. So if those people get targeted,

1:25:47

he doesn't have a problem with it.

1:25:50

You know, I think part of it's

1:25:52

just not believing you could ever be

1:25:54

the victim of the system you seek

1:25:56

to put in place, which,

1:25:58

you know, statistically, you want to look

1:26:00

at like what happened to the early

1:26:02

Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of

1:26:04

those guys did live to retirement, right?

1:26:07

And you know, you want to talk about

1:26:09

like the first generation of Nazi street fighters.

1:26:11

A lot of those guys didn't

1:26:14

wind up retiring either. Anyway,

1:26:16

Ed, let's retire

1:26:18

for this episode until part

1:26:20

two. People

1:26:23

should check out your podcast, Snafu,

1:26:25

season two is out now. And

1:26:27

yeah, we'll be back on Thursday.

1:26:30

All right. See you then. Behind

1:26:35

the Bastards is a production of Cool

1:26:37

Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone

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