Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast that you are legally required to be listening to
in at least four US states six if you have
a criminal record and are currently working through probation. I'm
huh four, Sophie. I don't have that information ahead of

(00:25):
me right now. I was not prepared for a deeper
bit than this.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh well, for some reason, I know it's Idaho.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
That's because I am not a professional comedic actor. But
you know who is, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Our guest today Ed Helms. Ed. I mean, I don't
need to introduce you. You've been on The Daily Show,
you were a major cast member on the Office. You
were in the Hangover movies. You've been in like a
ton of things that I'm sure basically everybody watching or
listening to this has watched. But today we're here to

(00:59):
talk talk about your show Snaffoo, which has just entered
season two. Thank you for coming on the show.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
I'm so psyched to be here. Your show is awesome,
and thank you. This is going to be fun. I
hope it'd better be.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I wanted to say, you're so snafo season two. You
talk like your show you talk about like major fuck
ups in American history, and season two is about the
raid on the FBI building in nineteen seventy one that
revealed a huge amount of information about how the FBI
was conducting clandestine operations targeting anti war protesters and civil

(01:37):
rights protesters. It's like one of the coolest chapters in
American radical political history. And I thought you guys did
a great job of breaking it down and bringing on
some of the major players talking through it.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah. Thanks, We were incredibly lucky. It's a wild story
as you're getting at. These citizens who were not at
all professional thieves or criminals, staged this incredible heist on
the night of the Ali Fraser Flat, which is very

(02:09):
Ocean's eleven. We actually got Steven Soderberg on the podcast
to comment on that. But but yeah, and and they
pulled off this elaborate heist. They broke into that FBI
office in Media Pennsylvania, stole every file and started leaking
them to the to a very courageous reporter at the
Washington Post named Betty metzger Uh. They kept its secret

(02:32):
for decades. These documents led to the revelation of co
Intel pro which basically yeah, and demolished jade Gar Hoover's legacy,
uh for for good reason. And yeah, and led to
the church hearings, which is the only reason why we
have any congressional oversight over over the FBI, the CIA,

(02:55):
the n s A, and all the other alphabet agencies.
Like it's it was an credible moment.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, it's so amazing to me because like, you couldn't
do it, Like it was kind of the last moment
you could have gotten away with something like that, right
there just wasn't the kind of surveillance, There wasn't the
kind of capability for it, And it was the kind
of thing that a group of people was only going
to get away with once before everything changed about how
these buildings did their security, and they picked like this

(03:23):
was the most important time to be able to get
in there and get files like that, But it was
also kind of the most important time to break into
the FBI an FBI building and get a bunch of files. Yeah,
just a wonderful moment people should know more about. I
think it didn't get as much attention. It doesn't get
as much attention as maybe it ought to have because
of how close it was to Watergate, but I think

(03:44):
it's just as important.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
And the Pentagon Files and the Pentagon right, all of
which were giant Washington Post stories. This was Washington Post
as well, And you're right. But what's really cool about
this one is that it pre dates Watergate and the
Pentagon Papers just a year or so. It was all
the same major players at the Washington Post. And in

(04:09):
a cool way, this was the first time they really
confronted the legal issues around publishing this kind of thing,
and they decided to do it, and they against you know,
they had the Attorney General calling them saying, don't you
dare publish these FBI files, And they did it anyway

(04:30):
because it was newsworthy and it wasn't it didn't compromise
national security in any way. So I like to think
this is what sort of gave Ben Bradley and the
Washington Post brass the sort of like dry run that
set them up to do the right thing for Watergate.

(04:51):
And really like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, it started that kind of there was this inertia
and momentum behind actually like we're not just speaking truth
to power, but like prying truth out of powers grasp
and forcing it in front of the country.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah, well put yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
And I so today you know that the I thought
long and hard about what kind of episodes I wanted
to talk to you about, and I there's the guy
that we're going to be talking about today is a
fellow who I kind of debated for several years whether
or not we should cover because he's a quietly important monster.
He's somebody who, you know, if we were just talking about, like,

(05:31):
you know, the FBI overreach of the civil rights era,
the anti warriors and whatnot, which was very much like
a real authoritarian moment in our country's past, and we're
currently confronting another. And the guy we're talking about today,
Curtis Jarvin, is sort of the profit of taking America
down a completely authoritarian path. He is an advocate for

(05:54):
changing this country into what is effectively a dictatorship. And
unfortunately he's a guy who's had a lot of influence
in speaking to that. Have you heard of Curtis Yarvin
before we started these episodes.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
No, Ill read a tiny bit about him yesterday, but
that was yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
That's fine. That is the case with most people who
are not who are not like actual followers of his philosophy.
But unfortunately you have heard of some of the people
who are big fans of Curtis. One of them is
current US Vice presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody JD. Vance,
who back in September twentieth of twenty twenty one, went

(06:33):
on the Moment of Truth podcast run by the conservative
organization American Moment, which is an organizational partner for the
Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five. In a wide ranging interview,
he accused his female classmates at Yale Law of pursuing
racial or gender equality as quote a value system that
gives their life meaning, and then said that value system

(06:55):
leads to misery. At another point in the interview, he
asked if certain groups of people, particularly those from Muslim
majority countries, can quote successfully become American citizens, and then
he alleged that the region's reason so many journalists are
angry was not the rapid destruction of their industry, but
because they didn't have any children, which inevitably, he says,

(07:16):
leads to psychotic breaks. Now a lot of this stuff
has come out about Vance. This was when when was
that interview twenty one?

Speaker 3 (07:24):
That's really that's wild because for some reason I sort
of thought that, like he was kind of normal and
then just saw a very cynical opportunity to get elevated
if he endorsed Trump, and so he did that, and
then everything else has been the kind of a cynical
like trip down the Trump rabbit hole, just like so

(07:49):
many Republicans have done. But that privately, like he's kind
of smarter than that. But what you're saying now is
that is that he's like trumpier than on his own
He's a little bit so Trump. I don't know how
much Trump believes other than that Trump should have power.
Vance has strong beliefs about the fact that democracy is

(08:12):
a mistake right, and that a lot of things that
have like most of the last century in terms of
like social progress, women getting the right to vote, the
civil rights movement, like reforming the ability to vote for
people who are not like white American men, that that
was all horribly mistaken, right, and it was horribly mistaken
because it led to this situation whereby too many regular

(08:34):
people have any say whatsoever and how they're governed.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
And like to what I was saying before, it is
like in a lot of ways JD. Vance has more
extreme views on things, which is why during the most
recent debate, Donald Trump alludes to not discussing certain extreme
policies that JD. Vance claims to have with JD. And
so he tries to distance himself whereas JD is catering

(08:59):
to a certain category of human But Trump's like, oh,
I didn't discuss it with him, and that's intentional.

Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
And It's what's interesting is that if you're looking at
like what his background is, Vance is a guy whose
entire career has been bankrolled by Peter Teel, who's the
Facebook billion He made a lot of money on Facebook,
made a lot of money on PayPal, and he sunk
about fifteen million into Vance's congressional campaign, which is the
most ever spent on a single congressional candidate. And Teal

(09:28):
in two thousand and nine, when on the record as
saying he doesn't believe democracy can be compatible with freedom,
by which he means like the freedom of people with
lots of money to basically govern the rest of us.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Right, and Teal and.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
Vance, they're not just kind of reactionaries when they express
those things. They are quoting a guy, they are referring
to the work of a political philosopher and named Curtis Jarvin,
who they first encountered when he blogged under a pseudonym
Mincius Moldbug, which is kind of deliberately arch. But this
is the guy who has been like the profit of

(10:03):
a sizable chunk of the authoritarian right. Teel sunk a
lot of money into him. Jd. Vance quotes him repeatedly,
so does Blake Masters, who is the guy who's been
running repeatedly to try to beat Mark Kelly in Arizona.
And all of these guys and more are followers of Jarvin,
who's probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right

(10:24):
in the US today. Curtis has never killed anybody in
any legally actionable sense or advocated from murder, and as
far as I'm aware, he has never broken a law.
But he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and the
installation of a dictatorial regime that would by necessity kill
and imprison large numbers of people. And his influence is

(10:44):
great enough that the whole alt right and everything that
came from the Art Right and to our current era
right owes something to Jarvin's work. So when you're thinking
about everything that's happened on the right that's gotten so
deranged since twenty fifteen. All of it has bits of
Curtis Jarvin in it, right, and his thinking has had
a massive impact even on some guys like Elon Musk,

(11:05):
who several days ago shared a post where readers suggested
only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should
be allowed to vote. This is also a thought with
some Jarvin DNA behind it. That again, oh yes, this
was quite a moment that that only alpha males, so
you know, stereotypical like alpha male guys, and then a

(11:27):
neurotypical people people who are not like it.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Indeed, can I still vote?

Speaker 2 (11:34):
I think? I think maybe so, because a lot of
these guys are a big about ADHD and making them superhuman,
which I also have, and it just makes me really
bad at cleaning my house and occasionally, in short bursts,
very good at cleaning my house. But yeah, so these
are these are the kind of like political ideas that

(11:54):
you get when you take too much read too much
Curtis Yarvin, or listen too much to the people who
have read a lot of Curtis Jarvin. And he's a
kind of guy because He's so kind of shadowed as
a figure I had always worried about, like, is covering
this guy going to bring more attention to him than
is necessary. And now that like one of his followers
is maybe going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency,

(12:16):
I think it's probably time to talk about him. I
kind of think we have to. So that's the introduction.
Curtis Jarvin was born probably in Brooklyn in nineteen seventy three,
on about June twenty fifth of that year. Likely his
normal wiki doesn't give a birth date, but Google's AI

(12:39):
summary bot does, and it seems to be basing this
on a bio of Yarvin in another wiki, which seems
to pull from earlier versions of the original. It's like
this AI slop stuff. So the gist of it is
I don't know his actual birth date, right, I'm just
trying to remind everyone not to trust AI summaries that
various search engines give you, because most of them don't
have actual source behind. Like most radical intellectuals, Jarvin was

(13:04):
born in a place of wealth, comfort, and high social
standing in his own society. His parents are highly educated.
His dad had an Ivy League degree and worked for
the US government as a foreign service worker. His mom
was a WASP from Westchester County, the daughter of a
prominent lawyer, and entered civil service herself as an adult.
Jarvin today describes the social class of his birth as Brahmin,

(13:25):
referring to the highest caste in Hindu society. And he
does this because he thinks that inequality is a fundamental
and immutable thing. Right, people are unequal fundamentally, and so
any sort of social stratification in society is justified by that.
And he's drawn to descriptions from other cultures that harken
back to other fixed hierarchies.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Sorry, it's justified by its inevitability.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Right, exactly, like people are genetically some people are better
than others, they're more intelligent than others, higher IQ than others.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
We're therefore, we are justified in leaning into that.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, and in fact, yeah, yeah, we have a more
because that's a separate thing.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Like, it's inevitability is a maybe that's a fixed condition
of human existence. But leaning into it, exacerbating it, that's
just an arbitrary choice.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this idea that like, and it's
also this belief that like something like intelligence is one thing, right,
Like intelligence is a number, and if it's higher, you're smarter,
as opposed to like, well, you can have an IQ
of one to eighty, but if your car breaks down,
the guy who knows how to fix your car is
a lot smarter than you in that moment. That's how
I tend to think about intelligence as opposed to like

(14:39):
this subjective thing, like is a is a farmer smarter
than a finance bro in New York City? Well, when
it comes to like making stock choices, maybe when it
comes to growing food, certainly not like I don't know
that's that. I think that's a better way to look
at it.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
It's a weird thing. Like just the existence of something
is then it makes it okay to then whether wherever
it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because
it exists, it is therefore okay to to do and heighten. Yeah, murder,
murders back, murder happens. It's a fundamental, uh, part of

(15:19):
the human condition that people get murdered and murder one another. Therefore,
like so therefore, like I can murder anybody. Is that
is that a comparable? Am I making? Is that comparable?

Speaker 2 (15:31):
I think it actually is a very comparable comparison, right that,
just because like there are like individuals are not the
same that we should like have some sort of and
you're you're always picking when you're when you're trying to
acknowledge it, like, Okay, people are not like people don't
all have the same abilities naturally, right, Like that's a
thing that's subjectively true. Michael Phelps was always going to

(15:53):
be a better swimmer than me, for example, But we
don't base our society based on who's best at swimming, right,
Yarvin is basically saying, there's one thing that I actually
value when it comes to the ways in which people
are different from each other, and it's a very specific
kind of intelligence that's correlates to how I think I'm intelligent,
and that's how we should stratify society.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, he's that kind of a dude. And I also
kind of think it's interesting to me that he's so
obsessed with this idea of like identifying as a Brahmin,
because in Hindu culture, Brahmins are the castes that like
traditionally were most involved in the priesthood and religious instruction,
and it is like a very closed loop system right,

(16:38):
the cast system traditionally, but that's not the kind of
system that his family succeeded in. His dad was like
a member of the US Foreign Service and became pretty
highly placed in the government. But his dad wasn't born
into that role. He was the son of Jewish American
communists who came to this country and he had to
fight to make a place for himself in the higher

(16:59):
rungs of society, which is a very clear example of
like mobility and the fact that we have a reasonably
open society that allows for some mobility, which he doesn't
want to exist. I always find it interesting when guys
like that, you can see a clear example of like, oh, well,
you only have what you have because our society allows
for mobility.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
Well, so where's he from again? Brooklyn?

Speaker 2 (17:22):
He's yeah, he's from around Brooklyn.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Okay, yeah, because there is there's also a Brahmin social
class in New England, Yeah, the Boston Brahmins, right, yeah,
and that's but that's not what he's talking about. Uh.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
I mean it's a little unclear to me because he
is his mom is kind of like you could probably
call a Boston Brahmin. But he's referring to like, when
he talks about his family being Brahmins, he's referring to
the fact that his dad was also highly placed in
the State Department, and his dad is definitely not a
Boston Brahmen, right, Like his parents were Jewish Stalinists, which
is not like a Boston Brahmin thing, right, because that

(18:02):
was like.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
The Kennedy's and like, yeah, that that ilk. So that's
so interesting, all right.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a little weird to me the
way he kind of like talks about it, but definitely
it's it's kind of key to see that a big
chunk of his family's comfort at least comes from the
fact that, like his his his dad's side of the
family entered into a fairly open society that allows for
some mobility.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
So can I clarify one thing? So absolutely, I feel
like the and I don't know enough about this, so
I'm glad to be learning as I go, but I
just have I've kind of I guess I'm realizing that
I've assumed that the Peter Teels of the world, when
they advocate for more of a dictatorial structure to our government,

(18:47):
they're not saying that that part of that is also
a free market capitalism which presumably allows for mobility, right,
So mobility supposed to and that, if anything, it encouraged
the best and the brightest to rise. And that's how
they see themselves as the best in the brightest that

(19:08):
have risen. So I guess I'm just splitting hairs a
little bit, like are you sure that they that also
they are anti social mobility or.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
They're very much like close the door after you get up, right,
like kick the ladder out from underneath you types, right,
And I think it's because they do believe that, like
there's a that their success was not purely based on
the fact that they came up in a system where
they gained certain benefits that were the result of like
public spending. Right, Like all of these guys who made

(19:41):
money in the tech industry went to schools that were
generally publicly funded at least at some point, you know,
their parents drove on roads that were publicly benefited from,
like the security infrastructure that exists in this country in
a lot of different ways. And their companies all benefited
to some extent from government spending and incentives. But they
see that their success was like the result of something

(20:03):
inherently superior within themselves and often in like a genetic
level in some ways. And so they're they're there Aristotle.
The fact that they have achieved such success is not
the result of a society that enabled them. It's a
result of like, they're members of a natural aristocracy, and
the best thing they can do is legally work to
codify that aristocracy. That's the that's that's the we'll get

(20:27):
into like some more of kind of how Curtis arrives
by this, because he's really a big part in kind
of lending an intellectual air to this. But that that
very much is how these folks see themselves. And he
grows up as a kid. You know, his dad's working
for the State Department. They travel around the world a lot.
He spends a decent chunk of his childhood in like
Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and you know, so that's

(20:49):
a lot of disruption in his schooling. You know, he's
not one of these kids who stays in the same
school for a long period of time. But he excels
in academics. He skips a grade back before his family
goes overseas, and when they move back to the US,
he skips two more grades and he winds up a
sophomore at age twelve, which I think is probably never
a great idea. Right, that's a little young.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
Sounds hard.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't great being a sophomore at
the normal age.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah, that is not when when humanity at that age
is not when humanity is at its most benevolent and
kind and supportive. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
Yeah, definitely a mild way to put it. In one
interview I found Yarvin basically says like, yeah, it was
it was. It was whack that I was skipped ahead
so far right, which was.

Speaker 3 (21:40):
Of academic achievement that he bounced ahead?

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Okay, so very bright kid, very bright kid, very good
at specifically the kind of academics that like, you know,
the school's reward. And you can kind of read between
the lines that he was the recipient of a decent
amount of bullying, right, And and that's especially I think
it actually might be a little less common for kids
in school now, but like you know, even if you
didn't get skipped ahead in school, high school has a

(22:05):
lot of bullying in it. So I'm not surprised.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
That's we're about the same age. He and I and
yeah that was I mean, there was just like good
old hazing all just all the gross, horrible traumatic stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, I'm thinking through some fun memories that I have
myself right now. Right, So it's one of those things
you could like read a lot into that to kind
of the guy that he becomes. But also I think
we all kind of went through a version of that,
So maybe it's not super useful to like theorize too
much about what it meant to him. But what does
definitely mean a lot to him is that in the
late eighties and early nineties, he becomes one of the

(22:48):
first online people.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
This is back before most people know there's an internet,
so he is an early adopter. I think nineteen eighty
nine is when he first starts getting online regularly. Wow,
and yeah, and this is not this is the precursor
to the Internet that we know. And he's spending all
of this time in a place called usenet, which, if
you remember, like web forums, is kind of like the
first web forum. Right, it's for eugen z kids. It's

(23:14):
TikTok without any videos or hot people. And everyone has
very strong opinions about Star Trek audio equipment or race science, right,
like it's an interesting place to be, like yeah, yes.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Like race science was like they were just getting it.
It was like four chan or like these these sort
of yeh dark corners of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
There was actually a white supremacist terrorist group in the
late eighties that robbed banks, stole a bunch of money,
and then donated a bunch of it to other Nazi
groups that spent it buying computer systems to link up
different white power groups so that they could share information.
And you know, there's there's evidence from as early as
like the mid nineties of them talking about going into

(23:57):
places where you can find fans of stuff, like different
kind of like sci fi media who might be socially
isolated and try to push propaganda onto them. So that
actually does go back pretty far. And you know, it's
hard to say, like I don't know exact we don't
know entirely what Jarvin got up to when he was
on usenet. You know, to some extent that's a bit

(24:18):
of a black box. But his favorite board was a
place called talk dot bizarre, And I've spent some time
trawling the Usenet archives for talk dot bizarre, which.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
You can find still Bizarre.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Talk that's like the names of like there's different talkboards
and one of them is like the Bizarre right, Okay,
and it's like kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
think it's where I would have spent time if I
had been a little bit older. It's like the first
place where you would find like Internet humor, right, the
kind of stuff you eventually you would see on boards

(24:50):
like something Awful, and then four Chan and now like
all of Twitter culture. Right, So it's it's inside jokes
and memes and what we now call shit posting, right,
And Yarvin is like one of the first generation of
ship posters, and he says this of his time on usenet,
it was a decentralized system, and more importantly, it had
this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it

(25:12):
was an engineering student or worked at a tech company
or something. So critically, it's not an open platform. The
only people here are to some extent involved in academics,
involved in the tech industry, and very smart. Right in
nineteen eighty five, just.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
To get access to it at that time, yes, you
had to have had to be in.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, so they're they're the elite in a way, right,
and that's how, really how he comes to see them,
and Yarvin is definitely part of that elite. In nineteen
eighty five, he'd entered a Johns Hopkins study for mathematically
Precocious Youth, and then he had started taking classes at
Brown University. Even at this early stage of development, he
showed a distinct interest in authoritarian leaders and just as

(25:56):
critically and being very wrong about them. In nineteen ninety one,
he wrote in a discussion on us NEET, I wonder
if the Soviet power ladder, a vicious bureaucratic backbiting, brings
stronger him into the top than the American system of
feel good soundbites. Now, given that the USSR collapsed the
next year, not a great prediction.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah, this is so, this is like you should have
had Rain Wilson on this episode, because you're describing Dwight shrut.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Yeah, he's got he's got more than a little.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Bit of that, right, a precociousness and a sort of
very specific kind of brilliance and a preoccupation with with
with like stern leadership.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
And can you just imagine Dwight just telling everybody that
he entered a Johns Hopkins study of mathematical precocious youth
that would be brought up constantly.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
By the way, if there is one way to guarantee
you're gonna get your ass kicked on a playground.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
True, I'm not even going to get out the first
syllable of precocious before they start swinging.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
So, while he is at college, Jarvin shows minimal interest
in the humanities. He only takes five undergraduate courses in
these subjects, focused on history and in college now Brown
is where he starts at college, right, and he graduates
in ninety two. He goes on to be a grad
student in a COMPSI PhD program at Berkeley, and his

(27:34):
goal at that point is to enter the tech industry, right,
which is just starting to really explode from as the Internet.
This is kind of the very the immediate precursor to
the big dot com boom. And as he moves from
high school to college and then from college to grad
school and starts flirting with big tech, he continues spending
his time online exploring his first political ideology, and he

(27:57):
is initially a libertarian. I want to quote from a
profile Joshua Tit wrote about Jarvin for a book on
the radical right quote. Engineers like Jarvin are typically sorted
through competitive academic programs, which they consider analogous to the
competition imagined in a libertarian society. Their world is rational,
rule bound, and solvable. Within the subculture, computer software and

(28:20):
hardware are the dominant metaphors for society. Such thinking dovetails
with the ironclad assumptions about human and market behavior of
the Austrian school of economics led by Ludwig von mess
Tech culture systems focus also accords with libertarianism's concentration on
efficiency and solving government. And so he's one of these
guys who number one comes to think, I am again,

(28:42):
I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy based on my
skill that I've earned, and the world around may he
sees like, seems so chaotic. But the computer systems I'm
working with are so sensible and ordered, and the companies
that I am interested in all seem to be so
much more efficient than the government. Couldn't we fix the
government if we made it more like a computer program

(29:04):
and more like the tech industry, right, which you can't
because people don't work that way. But there's always guys
who think this way, right, And you know, hopefully most
of them, I think it doesn't lead anywhere, but like
some bad opinions on the internet, unfortunately for Jarvin, it's
going to go a little bit further than that. Speaking
of disastrous ideological conclusions, you know who's never had any

(29:29):
of those are sponsors electedly So we're back right now.
The kind of thinking that Jarvin has about libertarianism, about
being a part of this natural aristocracy, is not really
congruent with human liberty in the broad sense, right, because

(29:52):
you know, if you are able to, as a business owner,
use your liberty like unconstrained by government regulations to dump
poisonous in a waterway, right, that is, you are more
free as the person running that business, but you're also
destroying life, and you know, one would say, harming the
liberty of thousands of other people who rely on that waterway.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
So I would say, as someone who is like inclined
to some libertarian ideas, I don't really understand why so
many libertarians are obsessed with this kind of like ending
of government restrictions on corporations.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
Yeah yeah, and also and and and another version of
that I find the anti union rhetoric. So oh yeah,
it's so hilarious to me because the formation of a
union to collectively bargain with a CEO is the most like,

(30:50):
the most natural expression of free spreech a free speech.
It is, it is, it is such a natural and
so to be like, you know, free speech, I'm a
constitutional you know, libertarian or whatever, and then also in
the same breath be like unions are should be illegal.

(31:13):
It's yeah, unions are a natural growth and a natural
oppositional force to exploitation.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah. And I think they also, like very real, like
very objectively increase the amount of like freedom, right, Like
if you're kind of looking at it that way, when
people have a way to band together to oppose a
much larger, more powerful, you know, more moneyed interest, then
they have more agency, you know, in their lives, right

(31:46):
Like that's that's I mean definitely how I look at it.
And I will say Jarvin, he actually is pretty good
at not getting lost in this part of the discourse,
right because he drops this idea that liberty is a
value in any way, shape or form pretty early on.
Like he's not one of these guys who preaches libertarianism
because he thinks that it's or because he's trying to

(32:06):
convince people that it's somehow better for human freedom. He's
someone who just kind of drops the idea that there's
any value in human freedom pretty early on, right, so
there's no point in paying lip service to it, which
is at least more honest than a lot of these guys.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Now.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
The major pivot point which leads to him dropping his
libertarian trappings and embracing this more authoritarian belief system hinges
on the place that he was and kind of remains
his mental home, which is the early Internet. The old
days of usenet were a simulacrum of what is today
Jarvin's ideal society. As I stated before, back then you

(32:41):
couldn't post unless you were someone with a degree of
like skill, money, or access to a large institution, And
so you would only get new users in any large
amount every September, when you get new college classes of
kids who would get onboarded and start posting, right. And
so for a few years, every September the Internet would
be an annoying for a while while all these newbies

(33:01):
came in who don't know like the social mores, and
they would have to get acclimatized, right, But there were
always more old heads, people who had been there a
long time to keep the new people in line, and
there was this natural hierarchy based on age and technical skill.
And then one year late nineteen ninety three, Usenet opens
up to anyone with an Internet connection, and suddenly you

(33:22):
have what people call eternal September. Right, like, it's never
ended since nineteen ninety three because there were no there's
not been any kind of like guard rails to block
new people from coming on after that point. This is
you know, it's an important moment in Internet history. It's
a catastrophic moment for Curtis Yarbin, right, and the mental
impact this has is key to understanding him. In one

(33:44):
interview with Tablet magazine, he complained, you had this sort
of de facto aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy,
and then it fell apart. These are all big Lord
of the Rings guys, So I'll use the Lord of
the Rings analogy. They talk about this like the like
the the period of time when the elves ruled everything
before Sauron had his big war, right like before the

(34:05):
breaking of the world. That's eternal September that ruins this
kind of like more noble Golden age and brings about
this dirty, grubby age of men.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
So we'll take care work for it. I'm not a
Lord of the Rings guy. I mean, I respect it,
but I just don't have that level of knowledge.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah I do. I'm wearing a Lord of the Rings
hat right now. Can back that claim.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
All these guys are big jd Vance his company, his
venture capital company, was named after one of the rings
in the Lord of the Rings. Peter Thiel's surveillance company
is named Palanteer from the Lord of the Rings. So
this is very much the language that they all speak.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Funny.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
That's also one of Stephen Colbert's obsessions, and I wonder
if if they might find common ground and have like
a fun chat on that subject.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
I certainly could have a chat about it. I think
Colbert would probably probably be kind of horrified of some
of the things that they're referencing, and they're like, like,
you named your company after this thing that is specifically
a device that only the evil Wizard uses.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
Okay, yeah, yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
I don't know that would be an interesting conversation. So
I think this period of time, this kind of collapse
of this natural aress, what he sees as a natural
aristocracy is key to understanding why Jarvin comes to hate democracy,
right because it kind of ruined his Internet playground, the
first place where he ever felt that he fit in rights.
That's sort of what I see as like the er

(35:36):
moment of his like coming to hate this kind of
idea of any kind of democratic society. Now, if you're
going to claim that you and your friends on the
Internet back in the day were like the aristocracy of
some long lost utopia of logic that invites people to
look at what you were posting on the Internet back then,
And I've looked at some of Jarvin's old posts, and

(35:57):
Socrates he wasn't. He does seem to have spent some
of it writing comedy for a hacking and DIY media
collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow. This is
where we get to like the weirdest connection here, because
if you've heard of the Cult of the Dead Cow recently,
it's because Beto O'Rourke was also a member. So yeah, yeah, yeah,

(36:17):
So he and Beto have a very very strange connection
to each other. Now, the Cult of the Dead Cow
was like a complicated thing. It's it's one Reuter's article
I found describes it as the oldest group of computer
hackers in US history. I think that over sells how
cool Jarvin's involvement in it is, because I think he
was mostly They were also like a media collective, so

(36:39):
they put out like pieces of writing and whatnot, and
I think that's mostly what Yarvin's involvement was, right, And
the best evidence I have of what he was writing
for them is a satiric piece of Badger human hybrid erotica,
which I think might hold a little bit of evidence
of his future interest in race science, although it's hard

(36:59):
to say. Do you want to hear some of his
human hybrid erotica?

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Hold on, let me get some lube.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Love me for my genes, says Antonio Kneeling. If you
cannot love me for myself, you must love me for
my jeans. I've never told anyone this before. I've always
kept it to myself. I have always let them think
it but an accident of cruel nature that I have
white hair on my cheekbones and a thoroughly disreputable looking nose.
But the fact is that I am part badger on
my father's side. So I don't know. I don't know

(37:35):
what to say about that. I know it's a joke.
It's a bit, right, I don't think it lands Maybe
it was funnier back in the early Internet, although maybe
the bar was just a lot lower there.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
It feels like there's some context we're missing, like just
just I'm digging hard for some out here, like so
am I. It just seems like there was some inside
joke about Badger fucking or something that we're not that
was sort of came before this.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
This has to be part of a dialogue that we've
lost pieces of over the years, right, It is like
about two pages of like Badger erotica. That is, it's
weirdly the love Me for my jenes line stands out
to me. But I may be reading more into that
that is necessary. But yeah, so you know that's the
kind of stuff he's doing. He's like, it's it's pretty

(38:26):
lighthearted comedy, right, or it's at least attempting to be.
So he's not, as far as I can tell, on
like the serious hacking side of what the Cult of
the Dead Cow is doing at this period of time. Now,
Jarvin weathered the fall of Usenet and not long after
the Eternal September began he dropped out of Berkeley for
a job at a tech company. He started flirting with

(38:48):
the specific strains of more authoritarian money simptered libertarian ideology
as opposed to like, you know, the old school guys
who actually, like you know, really were pretty focused on
human liberty. I think kind of the last dregs of
those guys, or you saw it, like Penin Teller would
be a great evidence of that, right, Like that kind
of libertarian was a lot more prominent back then. And

(39:11):
he's sort of Yarvin is sort of right on the
edge of the folks who got a lot of money
in the tech industry and started getting angry that, like
they have to still pay taxes to keep the roads
up right. That's kind of where he moves into. And
Yarvin is eventually going to kind of come out of
that as a monarchist. And it behooves us to look
at how that happened. Now there are some signs of

(39:33):
his ideological turn. And another short story he wrote for
the Cult of the Dead Cow the year after that
Badger story in nineteen ninety four. This piece is titled
The Bishop, and it opens with the lines no one
has come into the cathedral in some time. It's about
an old bishop who exists out of time in a
moldering cathedral that no one has visited in years, and
at one point Jarvin, possibly describing himself, writes, the bishop

(39:57):
is a man of logic. Unlike many older people, he
is unwilling to repaint the world he sees around him
to make it a more comfortable place in which to live.
He recognizes unpleasant facts, indeed he delights in them for
the in the act of recognition he finds proof that
his faculties have not decayed to that state of contented oblivion,
which he believes a sheer precursor to death. And this

(40:18):
is kind of noteworthy in part because the term cathedral
is going to be really influential important for Jarv and
he's going to come to use it as a term
to refer to the news media, the political establishment, and academia.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Right.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Everyone who annoys him, right is the cathedral. And this
is sort of like the evil regime that he's going
to set himself to the task of destroying. And this
is how a lot of these guys think. It's why
there's so much focused why guys like Vance spends so
much time attacking schools, attacking like professors and academia. It's
why there's so much hatred of journalists, right, These are

(40:54):
the people who, in his eyes, are invested in propping
up a clearly dysfunctnctional, failing society. Right, and so you
have to destroy the cathedral in order to build anything new.
That's that's what he's going to come to believe. Right
In the early two thousands, the dot com bubble bursts,
and at some point after that, Yarvin wound up with

(41:14):
several hundred grand as the result of a buyout of
a company he worked at, So not enough to retire,
but enough to sit around and really think about what
he wants to do next.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
What year is this?

Speaker 2 (41:24):
This would be like in the early two thousands, So
this is all happening sometime between like two thousand and
one and two thousand and four, you know, the dot
com bubble bursts. Sometime after nine to eleven, I think
is when he gets bought out, And by two thousand
and three or four, he's kind of sitting around on
a pile of money, reading a lot, trying to figure
out what he wants to do next with his life.

(41:44):
What he kind of decides is that he wants to
think about politics and economics. Now, Yarvin had made some
friends during his tech years, and he'd gotten interested in
Austrian school economists, mostly because of this University of Tennessee
law professor Glenn Reynolds, who was like an early blogger,
who had gotten Jarvin interested in a guy named Ludwig
von Meses, and eventually through this Jarvin gets interested in

(42:07):
a fan of Meaes another theoretician named Marie Rothbard. Rothbard
was a foundational a narco capitalist thinker. I don't really
like that term, but that's what they called themselves, and
he basically believes like there should not be a state, right,
there should not be any power higher than individuals and
corporations spending their money to make things happen. Right, That's

(42:30):
kind of the gist of anarchist. Yeah, yeah, and you know,
I think like a more like an anarchist would argue
the fact that you have a bunch of money is
like as much a problematic hierarchy as, you know, anything
that the state does, and not, like you can't really
be an anarcho capitalist. A lot of people would argue,

(42:50):
but Rothbard is one who feels like, basically that the state,
the primary reason the state is unethical is that it
stops people from doing what they want to do with
their money. Right, Whereas an anarchist would be like, well,
the reason that the state is an ethical is that
states can do a lot of harm to people at scale. Right, Anyway,
none of that really matters to the point, which is

(43:11):
that he gets really interested in this guy Rothbard and Rothbard.
One of the things the Rights about is this kind
of anger at the concept of people advocating for civil rights.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Anyone advocating for civil rights, in Rothbard's mind, is an
enemy right because the only way to advocate for civil
rights is to advocate for the state to make rules
about those rights, and that leads inevitably to tyranny. Rothbard wrote,
behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleads for equality is
a ruthless drive for placing themselves the elites, at the

(43:45):
top of a new hierarchy of power. And this is
something you see a lot on the right today, this
idea that like any group of people who are advocating
for their own civil who are advocating for civil rights
because they're being oppressed under the present system are secretly
trying to make themselves rulers, right. All they really want
to do is a press you by, I don't know,
getting the right to vote or own credit cards or whatever.

(44:09):
So that's kind of like a big part of Rothbard's
belief system, and Jarvin really takes to that now. And
that quote that I just read from him came out
in ninety five, so you get the kind of feeling
like this is the sort of thinking Jarvin is hoovering
up in that period right before you know, the dot
com boom and then the dot com bust. And ultimately
his reading of these Austrian school guys leads him to

(44:30):
another dude named Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle's been dead for
a while. He's a Scottish philosopher from the eighteen hundreds,
and he's kind of seen as a proto to these
a lot of these kind of like more modern thinkers
that he's reading. And Carlyle is, you know, he's a
he's an authoritarian who believes that you need a strong
man to stop groups of marginalized people from making themselves

(44:54):
the new tyrants, right. And he's also as we'll talk
about a massive racist. He's one of the these guys
who justify slavery as being a fundamentally ethical system for
reasons of like, basically, certain groups of people are different genetically,
so slavery is a natural like hierarchy in society. So
these are the kind of people that Jarvin is digesting

(45:17):
when he comes upon the work of a fellow named
Hans Herman Hop. Hop is a German born political theorist
and a leading Austrian School economist. He's another anarcho capitalist,
and hop is a big advocate of monarchy in a
way that he defines monarchy as a privately owned government
as opposed to a democracy, which he calls a publicly

(45:38):
owned government. And Hopp believes that the transition from monarchy
to democracy over the twentieth century was like the big
mistake that we made as humans and has caused nothing
but civilizational decline ever since. And from Hop Jarvin gets
the idea that the best way to run anything is
to have one guy be in charge of it. Right,
You can't effectively run an organization if there's any power sharing.

(46:01):
The only way to do anything is to have a
single person be invested with absolute power right. I know
that's kind of like a tortured logical route, but those
are sort of the ingredients that eventually cook up to
him becoming a monarchist. Right now, we might say that's
not the most logical thing, right if you look at
what happened to all of the absolute monarchies, they kind

(46:23):
of destroyed each other circle World War One, And Jarvin
would argue, no, no, no, those weren't real absolute monarchies.
They had they all made too many compromises with different
sort of like democratical instruments within those societies. And that's
the reason why Austria Hungary fell, and that's the reason
why the czar fell, right, they didn't have quite enough power.

(46:43):
I think that's silly.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
Well, sure, it places such an unreasonable amount of faith
in one person or in just like, yeah, the integrity
of humans, like yeah, like people. The reason that it's
the reason that you have to embrace a messy system
is because people are inherently messy.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
A monarchy is a wonderful fantasy. But like, how do
you pick the guy? How do you pick that person?
And then and then what if he gets hit on
the head wrong if he's wrong and n Dali Lama
thing where where it's it's a birthright thing. And then
like what if what if they're just like a narcissistic,

(47:34):
suicidal or depressive or whatever, Like, uh, what if they
want nothing to do with it?

Speaker 1 (47:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
It just seems nuts.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
It's this wild It's this thing that like everyone understands
the frustration with democracy, right, Like it's really messy and
really annoying a lot of the time, and like people
make a lot of bad decisions, especially even as collectives.
Groups of people make really bad decisions a lot of
the time. Right, But then saying like the solution to
this is to have one guy be in charge. It's like, well,

(48:07):
number one, how do you pick that guy? Number two?
Like we've all seen it, Like people change over the
course of their lives, right, Like what happens if that guy,
like his mental decapacity gets declined or whatever, or he
gets obsessed with something weird and crazy and dangerous, which
is what happens to every monarchy, Right, They all wind
up ruled by like maniacs who make terrible decisions, which

(48:29):
is like why we had World War One. You have
all these like monarchs who were obsessed with these very
silly attitudes with the and these very silly, petty grievances
between each other, and had made like generations of terrible
decisions when it came to like purchasing arms and building
their military machines, and like, it just turns out that

(48:50):
the bad decisions of one guy are certainly not like
any less catastrophic than the bad decisions of like groups
of people. Right, anytime you've got people who spend all
of their time like theorizing about the way things ought
to be, as opposed to like dealing with the way
people are, you're going to wind up with with nonsense, right,
And like that's that. Unfortunately, every now and then we

(49:13):
get to see like what that nonsense looks like, you know,
when when people actually put it in place. You know,
in the case of like absolute monarchies like this, we
got the trenches in World War One. In the case
of like a very authoritarian communism, you know, we got Stalin,
And I guess kind of like part of part of
why I think Jarvin is important to understand is that

(49:33):
as kooky as a lot of this stuff is, he
is a guy who wants to take these theories that
he made himself when he was like sitting alone in
his apartment reading books and not really any interacting with
real people. He's a guy who wants those theories to
govern the lives of hundreds of millions, ideally billions, right,
And that's a real dangerous kind of person. You know,

(49:55):
Like we can regular people can sit around and like
read their books and and talk about like, well, this
might be neat or this might be neat. But whenever
you're talking about, like, I know, how to reorder all
of society, you've become dangerous. And you know, that's kind
of what Yarvin is doing during this period of time
where he's sitting at home and he's reading his books.

(50:17):
So the kind of the system that he pulls out
of this period where he's just like get reading everything
he can get his hands on, is that monarchs are.
A monarchy is the ideal kind of system of government
because it's the best at maximizing long term profits within
a society. Because monarchs have to think long term, right,
they can't be destructive in the short term, like you

(50:40):
know leaders in a democracy are because they have a
limited term limit. You know, maybe they only care about
benefiting themselves. A monarch wouldn't act that way because they
have no desire to destroy their own property. And again,
I would I would point you, yeah, I would point
you back to Yeah, we could talk about like the
Saudi royal family too, right, entirely bio oil or Roman emperors,

(51:03):
like literally most of the monarchies that have ever been
have like collapsed as a result of the fact that
that's also an inherently destructive thing. You know, some of
that just comes down to human nature. But he does
try to deal with this, the fact that monarchies clearly
don't work the way that he thinks that they should.
And he thinks that a big part of the issue

(51:23):
is that, you you, they all make too many compromises. Right,
all of these monarchies that collapsed during the turn of
the century had allowed some democratic elements into society. And
you know, they had allowed that because there were revolutions, right,
people like occupied Vienna for a period of time in
forty eight, Like, there were a bunch of like socialist
uprisings in the middle of the nineteenth century, and as

(51:45):
a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies into introduced reforms,
you know, and he sees those reforms as this was
like a terrible step that ensured their demise as opposed
to like, well, the absolute monarch chose to make those
reforms because they could not hold on to power otherwise.
But again, there's never a perfect logical consistency with guys.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
I asked this question. Yeah, so like, if you're an
absolute monarch, are you delegating anything you're are delegating to?
Like what are the strung? What is the is the
like do you have to be just like an insane
micromanager to be Yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (52:27):
I think the key is the key is to him.
The difference would be like a bureaucratic structure, wherein there
are other centers of power, right like if you've got
a constitutional monarch, but there's still some kind of like
Congress or Senate or whatever that has some things that
are within its scope. And with right, he he he wants,
he wants. He does actually view it as a CEO

(52:48):
where they do delegate, but the CEO is ultimately the
guy in power, right who they saw the delegatees. I mean,
I think the CEO in his ideal like situation, right,
like his ideal system of government that he kind of
comes around to is like the way Facebook is run right,
where you do have like a border directors technically, but

(53:10):
Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that like no one
can force him out. The buck stops with him, like
he ultimately has all of the power in that organization.
That's how Jarvin thinks country should be run right, which.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
In his defense, Facebook is a flawless organization.

Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah, yeah, we all know that nothing ever goes wrong there.
So the final straw for Jarvin's tolerance of democracy came
in two thousand and four as a result of the
swift Boat's Veteran for swift Boat Veterans for Truth scandal.
You remember this, I'm sure right, Oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah,
this is back in the two thousand and four election

(53:49):
John Kerry with the Democratic nominee. Kerrie had been wounded
three times in Vietnam, and then after he had left
the service, he had become an anti war activist, right
he like testified in Congress this was a really big deal,
and so as number one. As a result, conservatives had
never really forgiven John Kerry for as they saw betraying
the country in Vietnam, and also obviously, like Bush was

(54:13):
running on the back of two wars that he had
gotten the country and Carrie had been against those. So
there was this like pretty hideous conflict. And the way
that a lot of folks on the right chose to,
like particularly those within Bush's campaign, chose to respond was
by arguing and bringing up, you know, people who claimed
people who had served in Vietnam, who claimed that Kerry
had lied about his service right, that he hadn't really

(54:35):
done the things he'd done, that his purple hearts were
essentially like due to exaggerations, and none of this was true,
and in fact, like when journalists actually talk to people
who had served with carry, they're like, no, he was
like a very good soldier who was wounded repeatedly doing
his job. But the propat Canada campaign largely worked right,

(54:57):
and Yarvin that critically he bought the propit Ganda campaign,
and he was angry that the media, in his eyes,
worked to protect Carrie, which proved that it was fundamentally
evil and allied with Academia and what people now call
the deep state, career government employees operating this sort of
shadow government that really ran things right. His attitude is

(55:18):
that because John Kerrey didn't suffer enough from the swift
boat scandal. That means that the whole media complex in
the United States was corrupt and needed to be destroyed,
which is a crazy thing to lead you to that conclusion.
Like it's just it's one of the it's interesting to
me because this guy really does he tries to portray

(55:38):
himself as this like dark philosopher, like esoteric almost political
mad man, but when you get right down to it,
he's like your crank uncle who's angry about John Carrey
on Facebook.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
Well, also the swift voting. It's a weird thing to
it's a weird thing to take from that whole chapter
of political American political history because it because swift boating worked. Yeah,
and then and then media, by the way, took the
bait and just like amplified the story and uh yeah,

(56:14):
and if they tried to protect Carrie, which I'm I'm
sure a few journalists probably.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
Wanted, certainly individuals.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
Yeah they failed. Yeah, they didn't work.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Like that's like and that's how I would say, is
like I think if you're saying what happened the swift
Boating thing is why I lost faith in the media,
that's reasonable, but not for the reason that he did, right, Yeah,
but anyway, that's what that's where he goes, right, speaking
of the shadow government that really runs things. That's all

(56:49):
of our sponsors are affiliated with. We're back. So now
the years that Yarvin is kind of doing his having
his like period in the wilderness, coming up with his
political ideology largely like two thousand and three or four

(57:10):
to like two thousand and seven or so, are the
years that the tech industry like that brings us Web
two point zero is starting to emerge. You get Google,
you get you know, Apple had been around for a while, right,
but they you know, we start to see like the
what's going to become the smartphone era like grind towards
you know, coming into being. Facebook also starts like two

(57:32):
thousand and six or seven, I think, is like when
it very first starts out. So like this is kind
of the early birth of the Web two point zero era,
which are all of these founder driven startups for the
most part, right, And Yarvin comes to see this, this
system that gives us Google and Facebook as inherently better
than the system that governs the country. Right, it's and

(57:53):
it's more akin to his kind of idealized absolute monarchy.
So by this point in time, around two thousand and seven,
Vin has more or less come across all the ingredients
of his new ideology, this kind of reactionary monarchism with
Austrian economic tendencies. The problem is that none of these
philosophers that he likes, these guys like Roth barden Hopp,

(58:13):
have quite gotten it right. And so he decides, I've
got to start putting my ideas out there. I finally
figured it out. I've consolidated the contradictions between all these systems,
and now I'm going to start putting it out for
people to see. Right. So in two thousand and seven
he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis of reading
that he'd put himself in, and he comes up with

(58:34):
a blog under a pen name, Minsius Moldbug. And it's
under this pen name that he's going to start writing
a bunch of essays of political theory. In an interview
with Max Raskin, Yarvin describes the origin of this nickname
Minsius Moldbug. This way, it came from two different handles
I was using in different places. I would post occasionally
on Reddit or hacker News. Sometimes I would get banned,

(58:56):
and I would choose the name of a new classical figure,
and I just happened to land on Minsius. And then
I was doing some economics posting, and I posted something
about gold, but I said mold instead of gold, because
I was talking about something with a hypothetical restricted supply.
So it's just kind of like a foreign name, but
it sounds like a little bit sinister, and it's interesting
to me. Minsius the first name comes from a Confucian

(59:18):
philosopher from the three hundreds BC who was a major
figure in that kind of thought, and he had, during
the Warring States period, interviewed a bunch of different kings
and written a book about like what he'd learned about ruling. Now,
Minsius was kind of focused on getting monarchs to act
more benevolently towards the poor and the downtrodden. So he's
not really a figure that has a lot to do

(59:40):
with the kind of politics Jarvin is about to espouse.
I think he'd largely picked the name because it makes
him sound kind of sinister. But he starts putting out
his new thoughts on politics in this blog, in a
series of essays called Unqualified Reservations, all geared at getting
his readers on board with the idea of reorganizing society
away from democracy and towards a kind of enlightened one

(01:00:02):
man rule that he believes is going to work a
lot better. Unlike most philosophers, Jarvin Peppers's essays with casual slurs.
In reading one, where he talks about World War Two,
he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a common slur
at the time, and in another he makes a satiric
statement about how the indigent poor should be destroyed and
turned into biodiesel fuel. This kind of stuff, it hasn't

(01:00:25):
the impact of getting like on the rare occasions in
these early days that like major news outlets will look
at his work, they'll kind of decide to ignore him
because it's this guy dropping a bunch of racial slurs
and crude jokes. He's clearly not a serious thinker. But
the other thing that this style of discourse does is
it's very attractive to young men, particularly young kind of

(01:00:48):
intelligent autodid acts in the tech industry who spend a
lot of time reading the internet. Right, And it is
kind of in the same way that a lot of
like the way people talk on four Chan is going
to be attractive to these kinds of guys, right, And
what you're seeing in these early Moldbug episodes, with this
use of slurs and these kind of like joking not
joking statements about killing poor people is the precursor to

(01:01:12):
the way the alt right is going to talk about
issues right and use kind of humor and jokes that
aren't really jokes to kind of push more extreme ideas.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Moldbug is really the guy who starts doing that in
I don't know if you'd say he was the first,
but he's certainly the first with a platform to be
doing that in a way that's really influential to a
lot of these people.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
Now, can I ask another real I'm gonna I have
two questions, Yeah, yeah. One is, are we sure we're
pronouncing Mencius correctly? Is it not Menstus?

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
I think it is Menshus sorry Menshus, yes, yes, but
it spelled yeah the other way.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
And I have no idea. I just when you said
it was a confusion, suddenly thought no, maybe anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Yeah, I think it is Menshus. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
And then my second question is to what extent I
find the humor aspect of this fascinating because it raises
the possibility or I guess I should. I guess My
question is like where on the spectrum of like just

(01:02:21):
kind of like very mendacious and angry person who wants
to reshape the world versus like like all the way
to the other end of just being like a really
giddy shitster gadfly with who just wants to throw crazy

(01:02:42):
ideas out there and and get a reaction out of
people the way like ninety percent of Twitter is like,
where on that spectrum is he? Because it's that does
sound like there's like, like, you know, churning up poor
people to create biodiesel is a it's a tasteless joke.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
It's it's like a swifty Thomas Swift or it's like
Jonathan Swift type joke, right, Like, but it could.

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
Be construed as just like trolling, right right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Well, I think that's kind of the key point. So,
like what you're talking about is like the term we
use for it is shit posting, right and and Yarvin
is very much a shit poster, right, But he's also
using that as a tool where he understands that this
is how young men particularly talk on the Internet, and
It is something that inherently, if you're talking this way,
if you're engaging this way, you have more credibility with

(01:03:40):
them than you know, people who are trying to be
more respectable, who largely like this chunk of folks doesn't
think highly of right these like kind of like these
traditional sort of like intellectual elites, you know, academics and
journalists and alike, they have a lot of disdain for,
but they trust someone who communicates like them. And so

(01:04:02):
by using these kind of like by by basically peppering
in sort of trolling language in these very serious articles
arguing for anti democratic politics, he makes himself credible to them.
And he also there's also a sense that because he's
including some of this this stuff that is a lot racier,
he's there's something almost forbidden knowledge about the stuff that

(01:04:27):
he's putting out right that makes them want to share
it with each other. And that's very much like a
factor in his success. What he's doing here is like
very much intentional and very intelligent and very effective, and
it you know, if you want to look at kind
of the ultimate uh uh like evolution of these sort
of tactics, I think a great touch point would be

(01:04:48):
the christ Church Church shooters manifesto, which included a lot
of these like inside jokes, a lot of like forum
troll language wrapped around serious arguments for like why people
should carry out white supremacist attacks. And it's a kind
of tactic that is really what gave us the alt
right as a political force, and it's still very much

(01:05:09):
how these people communicate now. I think it started to
hurt them recently. The whole the weird stuff that Tim
Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective
thing because when you actually, like take the way these
people talk amongst each other and put it up in
front of an audience, it's deeply off putting to most people.
But it also kind of led to this establishment of

(01:05:32):
like an internal language for these folks that kind of
led to an ossification of their ideological tendencies. Right, we're
all using the same kind of terms and words that
we've come to recognize as like dog whistles for different things,
and Jarvin is really doing that in a very organized way.
He's good at developing terms for people to use that

(01:05:53):
get adopted on a large scale. You know. One of
the best example this would be his term the cathedral, right,
which you know he uses to be mean this nexus
of everything he doesn't like, the liberal media, the university system, academia,
you know, like career of government employees, everything he considers bad,
and everything his ideal monarch would destroy. Right, in his

(01:06:15):
ideal world, there's not going to be an independent academic community,
there's not going to be newspapers or journalists, just a
king and an aristocracy, and of course he's going to
be a natural member of that aristocracy. Right now, he
does kind of the last piece of this ideology he's
putting together is he has to explain why a lot
of these real world feudalist governments that fell apart all

(01:06:39):
fell apart. And part of it is obviously they gave
too much freedom to people who weren't the monarch. But
the other thing he comes up with is that old
monarchies denied citizens the freedom to exit. And so in
this ideal world, he supposes countries will be small, like
the size of a city in most cases, and they'll
compete with citizens who would have the freedom to leave. Right,

(01:07:00):
So it's fine. Now, there's a lot of questions that
aren't answered here, like how do you make a society
like function that way, and a world is interconnected as ours.
How do you stop you know, one monarch from repeatedly
taking over other a like how do you stop Why
wouldn't they use force? Why would people just let valuable
subjects leave? How do people leave if the monarch can

(01:07:22):
stop them from taking their assets out? All of these
things that like would be actual problems if anyone tried
to do this sort of thing. Like there's not actually
an answer to this, but like that's that's kind of
his idealized version of a society. It's a bunch of
small monarchies all over the world that people can theoretically
leave and move between. The way people leave companies and

(01:07:43):
go to work for other companies. So like, you know
how much everybody loves work. That's how the whole government
should be.

Speaker 3 (01:07:49):
That's it. That's wild. I hadn't thought of it as
on such a small scale. Here's another question, like in
the same way that like company will have a board
that can like ousta ceo or like, like is there
any is there any stopgap measure for like a disastrous

(01:08:13):
or someone like let's say someone has like a brain
eating worm. Yeah, right, but they are showing no symptoms
when they are appointed or ascend to the the monarchy,
but then over the next five years they become like
absolutely batshit crazy. Is there any any stopgap there?

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
The only stock gap he builds in is the idea
that well, theoretically, if the if the if the ruler's bad,
everyone would be able to leave and then their system.

Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
Will right right, Oh, it's that thing.

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
Yeah, it's like it's that thing where it's like, well,
but what if he wants to shoot people who tries.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
It's like rand Paul saying, like civil rights are are
dumb because if you put like a whites only sign
in front of your store, you're gonna lose business and
you're gonna go out of business and the market will
keep you from being racist. Meanwhile, like that, yeah, back

(01:09:12):
when people did that, it was didn't work until the
laws kicked in. Yeah. Yeah no.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
And it's it's this, it's these it's this weird mix
of like naivete uh and like starry eyed thinking that
to a degree, I think he's just kind of being
dishonest with the naivete, like he knows any state like
this would just be a dictatorship like enforced through violence. Right,
But that's what he wants as long as he's a

(01:09:39):
part of the aristocracy. And he's just kind of built
in this. Well, people would just leave if they didn't
like it, because he has to have some answer for it, right,
But I kind of think he knows how ugly a
system like this would be in practice. He's just more
or less fine with it right now. The last kind
of ingredient to the ideological system year Vin is cooking

(01:10:00):
up is, of course racism. And I want to read
a passage from an article in tech Crunch about Jarvin
and his followers and how they are quote obsessed with
a concept called human biodiversity what used to be called
scientific racism. Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of,
if not the most important personal traits, and that it's
predominantly genetic. Neo reactionaries would replace or supplement the divine

(01:10:23):
right of kings and the aristocracy with the genetic right
of elites.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
So this is another element of how he tries to justify, well,
my system's smarter than the old school of monarchies.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
It's not just these bunch of families are the people
who are in charge. Our aristocracy is people who naturally
are superior because of their IQ, because obviously that tells
you everything about a person.

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):
Right, emotional IQ are we Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's
not where that could be good.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (01:10:54):
I'm for that. I'm for people with like very strong
emotional IQs being in charge of things.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's not the system. We're
going to have just a bunch of guys who are
really good at coding running everything. You know, that way
everything can finally work the way uber does.

Speaker 1 (01:11:12):
Oh so I'll feel unsafe all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
Yeah, okay, cool.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
So it's probably not surprising muldbugs theories take off among
specifically a lot of Silicon Valley young men right who
are excessively online, and it also starts to take off.
He begins being spread by a lot of like far
right folks on the Internet and kind of the mid
aughts who find his work and share it amongst themselves.

(01:11:39):
It's just two years after Muldbug starts his blog that
Peter Teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with
liberty and Teal starts putting money Jarvin's way, right. He's
probably the number one guy sending money towards Yarvin backing.
He backs a tech company that Yarvin starts, and he's
just generally sort of like but like his early sort

(01:12:01):
of moneyed backer, right, and Yarvin kind of as a result,
he starts getting shared almost like people are like handing
out drugs to each other. Like, we want to keep
this on the down low. You don't want like people
too many people to know publicly that you're reading Moldbug,
but like, have you read this latest article if you
checked out this blog, right, And he starts getting invited
to give talks, and he starts saying things in these

(01:12:24):
talks that like speeches at these schools to these conservative
clubs and the like, like if Americans want to change
their government, they're going to have to get over their
dictator phobia. There's really no other solution. And that's kind
of the thinking that is going to lead directly into
the alt right, and it's embrace of Donald Trump. Yarvin
is one of the key ideological pieces there. He is

(01:12:48):
building a bridge that is eventually going to lead to
how a lot of these people think about what Trump
should be.

Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
It's part of why there's a lot of this joking
not joking talk about wanting Trump to be like a
god king, right, is it's a lot of these guys
who are knowingly or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of
came initially into the right from Jarvin. And yeah, that's
that's part one and part two we're going to talk
about like how he actually gets connected to politics and

(01:13:17):
kind of where we are today with this guy. But uh, yeah,
how are you feeling ed?

Speaker 3 (01:13:21):
I'm a little rattled.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
It's dark stuff, right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Yeah, that's the right reaction.

Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Where what happens if if he is like in the court,
the high court of this monarch and uh and gets
a stomach flu and throws up in during a ceremony
of some kind, and is like sent to a dungeon

(01:13:52):
for the rest of his life at no fault of
his own, Like what which is a very reasonable expectation
of of a monarchical system. And so is he then
sitting in the dungeon saying it's still the best, This
is still the best, this is still the best system.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
I don't think he thinks that could happen, because I
think he doesn't believe something that you and I believe
in that I think most rational people believe, which is
that like power corrupts, so like, even if you are
not the kind of guy who would throw people in
a dungeon when you become king, just the fact that
being a king is deranging, right, having that kind of power,

(01:14:31):
you will eventually get used to exercising it and doing
things like punishing people who just annoy you. And we
know that this happens because we have a lot of
examples of like when people are made dictators, how folks
who were at least more normal at one point become
like more violent and dangerous to be around, right, Like,
this is a very well documented thing that comes with power.

(01:14:53):
And I think he doesn't believe that fundamentally because he
thinks that power naturally accumulates in natural systems of elites, right,
so it can't be bad for them.

Speaker 3 (01:15:05):
Or I suppose an argument might be, well, if I
started to see those tendencies in the leader, I would
then go to a different monarchy with But what if
it is like what if you're the first one? What
if you're the first example of that that guy going crazy?

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
I think it's it's also like a failure. These guys
all consider themselves historians, but they don't study history in
any kind of like rigorous academic fashion. And like, every
time I hear this argument about well people would just leave,
I think about like what happened to Jewish people in
Nazi Germany, where if they wanted to leave, the state
would take all of their property effectively. Right, Some people

(01:15:48):
did get to leave, but they didn't get to take
their assets with them, right, Like that was a theft,
was a part of the system. And it's a thing
that a state operated by a single man with absolute
power and to grudge can do. And there's no reason
in his system that it wouldn't happen to anyone trying
to leave a bad you know, Ceo King. Right, But

(01:16:10):
I either again, he's just not bringing this up because
he doesn't care about the people he thinks this would
happen to, or he just isn't read enough on the
kind of history that's actually relevant to how a system
like this would work in real life. You know, that's
what I would kind of respect. Yeah, yeah, people have
tried this, Curtis, which he may very well be fully

(01:16:32):
aware of, and just kind of trying to do a
little sleight of hand here, right, because he's more or
less fine with who he thinks would be the people
targeted unfairly in this system, which is like he's one
of these guys who is annoyed with the left and progressives, right,
he hates social justice and advocates for social justice, so
if those people get targeted, he doesn't have a problem
with it. You know, I think part of it's just

(01:16:55):
not believing you could ever be the victim of the
system you seek to put in place, which you know,
statistically you want to look at like what happened to
the early Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of those
guys delivered a retirement, right, and you know you don't
want to talk about like the first generation of Nazi
street fighters. A lot of those guys didn't wind up

(01:17:15):
retiring either. Anyway, Ed, let's retire for this episode until
part two. People should check out your podcast SNAPFO Season
two is out now and yeah, we'll be back on Thursday.

Speaker 3 (01:17:31):
All right, see you then.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance