WEBVTT - Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. Vance 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:04.680 Also media. 0:00:04.840 --> 0:00:08.039 Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a 0:00:08.160 --> 0:00:12.600 podcast that you are legally required to be listening to 0:00:12.920 --> 0:00:16.840 in at least four US states six if you have 0:00:16.960 --> 0:00:21.799 a criminal record and are currently working through probation. I'm 0:00:22.239 --> 0:00:25.400 huh four, Sophie. I don't have that information ahead of 0:00:25.440 --> 0:00:28.040 me right now. I was not prepared for a deeper 0:00:28.080 --> 0:00:28.600 bit than this. 0:00:29.200 --> 0:00:32.280 Oh well, for some reason, I know it's Idaho. 0:00:32.840 --> 0:00:36.400 That's because I am not a professional comedic actor. But 0:00:36.479 --> 0:00:38.160 you know who is, Sophie. 0:00:38.320 --> 0:00:38.840 Oh. 0:00:39.520 --> 0:00:43.960 Our guest today Ed Helms. Ed. I mean, I don't 0:00:44.000 --> 0:00:47.080 need to introduce you. You've been on The Daily Show, 0:00:47.280 --> 0:00:50.280 you were a major cast member on the Office. You 0:00:50.320 --> 0:00:53.000 were in the Hangover movies. You've been in like a 0:00:53.040 --> 0:00:55.920 ton of things that I'm sure basically everybody watching or 0:00:55.960 --> 0:00:59.840 listening to this has watched. But today we're here to 0:00:59.840 --> 0:01:03.320 talk talk about your show Snaffoo, which has just entered 0:01:03.320 --> 0:01:05.680 season two. Thank you for coming on the show. 0:01:06.440 --> 0:01:09.280 I'm so psyched to be here. Your show is awesome, 0:01:09.840 --> 0:01:11.880 and thank you. This is going to be fun. I 0:01:11.920 --> 0:01:12.800 hope it'd better be. 0:01:13.480 --> 0:01:17.240 I wanted to say, you're so snafo season two. You 0:01:17.280 --> 0:01:20.360 talk like your show you talk about like major fuck 0:01:20.440 --> 0:01:25.479 ups in American history, and season two is about the 0:01:25.600 --> 0:01:29.200 raid on the FBI building in nineteen seventy one that 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:31.800 revealed a huge amount of information about how the FBI 0:01:31.959 --> 0:01:37.720 was conducting clandestine operations targeting anti war protesters and civil 0:01:37.800 --> 0:01:40.600 rights protesters. It's like one of the coolest chapters in 0:01:40.680 --> 0:01:43.280 American radical political history. And I thought you guys did 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:46.160 a great job of breaking it down and bringing on 0:01:46.200 --> 0:01:48.040 some of the major players talking through it. 0:01:48.560 --> 0:01:53.760 Yeah. Thanks, We were incredibly lucky. It's a wild story 0:01:53.800 --> 0:01:59.160 as you're getting at. These citizens who were not at 0:01:59.200 --> 0:02:05.000 all professional thieves or criminals, staged this incredible heist on 0:02:05.160 --> 0:02:09.480 the night of the Ali Fraser Flat, which is very 0:02:09.560 --> 0:02:13.920 Ocean's eleven. We actually got Steven Soderberg on the podcast 0:02:14.000 --> 0:02:17.799 to comment on that. But but yeah, and and they 0:02:17.840 --> 0:02:20.400 pulled off this elaborate heist. They broke into that FBI 0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:25.919 office in Media Pennsylvania, stole every file and started leaking 0:02:25.960 --> 0:02:28.200 them to the to a very courageous reporter at the 0:02:28.280 --> 0:02:32.040 Washington Post named Betty metzger Uh. They kept its secret 0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:37.040 for decades. These documents led to the revelation of co 0:02:37.120 --> 0:02:44.200 Intel pro which basically yeah, and demolished jade Gar Hoover's legacy, 0:02:44.840 --> 0:02:48.480 uh for for good reason. And yeah, and led to 0:02:48.560 --> 0:02:51.240 the church hearings, which is the only reason why we 0:02:51.400 --> 0:02:55.720 have any congressional oversight over over the FBI, the CIA, 0:02:55.919 --> 0:02:58.240 the n s A, and all the other alphabet agencies. 0:02:58.320 --> 0:03:02.040 Like it's it was an credible moment. 0:03:02.320 --> 0:03:06.079 Yeah, it's so amazing to me because like, you couldn't 0:03:06.160 --> 0:03:08.120 do it, Like it was kind of the last moment 0:03:08.160 --> 0:03:10.200 you could have gotten away with something like that, right 0:03:10.280 --> 0:03:12.360 there just wasn't the kind of surveillance, There wasn't the 0:03:12.400 --> 0:03:15.200 kind of capability for it, And it was the kind 0:03:15.200 --> 0:03:17.160 of thing that a group of people was only going 0:03:17.200 --> 0:03:20.120 to get away with once before everything changed about how 0:03:20.120 --> 0:03:23.400 these buildings did their security, and they picked like this 0:03:23.560 --> 0:03:26.280 was the most important time to be able to get 0:03:26.280 --> 0:03:28.240 in there and get files like that, But it was 0:03:28.280 --> 0:03:31.160 also kind of the most important time to break into 0:03:31.240 --> 0:03:35.920 the FBI an FBI building and get a bunch of files. Yeah, 0:03:35.200 --> 0:03:38.040 just a wonderful moment people should know more about. I 0:03:38.040 --> 0:03:40.280 think it didn't get as much attention. It doesn't get 0:03:40.280 --> 0:03:42.120 as much attention as maybe it ought to have because 0:03:42.120 --> 0:03:44.160 of how close it was to Watergate, but I think 0:03:44.200 --> 0:03:45.120 it's just as important. 0:03:45.280 --> 0:03:48.960 And the Pentagon Files and the Pentagon right, all of 0:03:48.960 --> 0:03:52.960 which were giant Washington Post stories. This was Washington Post 0:03:53.000 --> 0:03:56.160 as well, And you're right. But what's really cool about 0:03:56.160 --> 0:03:58.920 this one is that it pre dates Watergate and the 0:03:58.960 --> 0:04:02.960 Pentagon Papers just a year or so. It was all 0:04:03.000 --> 0:04:09.200 the same major players at the Washington Post. And in 0:04:09.800 --> 0:04:11.920 a cool way, this was the first time they really 0:04:11.960 --> 0:04:17.600 confronted the legal issues around publishing this kind of thing, 0:04:18.160 --> 0:04:21.520 and they decided to do it, and they against you know, 0:04:21.600 --> 0:04:26.159 they had the Attorney General calling them saying, don't you 0:04:26.240 --> 0:04:29.479 dare publish these FBI files, And they did it anyway 0:04:30.040 --> 0:04:35.640 because it was newsworthy and it wasn't it didn't compromise 0:04:35.720 --> 0:04:40.000 national security in any way. So I like to think 0:04:40.040 --> 0:04:42.720 this is what sort of gave Ben Bradley and the 0:04:43.160 --> 0:04:48.080 Washington Post brass the sort of like dry run that 0:04:48.360 --> 0:04:51.240 set them up to do the right thing for Watergate. 0:04:51.279 --> 0:04:53.360 And really like, I don't know. 0:04:53.920 --> 0:04:56.480 Yeah, it started that kind of there was this inertia 0:04:56.480 --> 0:05:00.880 and momentum behind actually like we're not just speaking truth 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:04.960 to power, but like prying truth out of powers grasp 0:05:05.080 --> 0:05:06.680 and forcing it in front of the country. 0:05:06.839 --> 0:05:09.360 Yeah, well put yeah, yeah. 0:05:09.040 --> 0:05:11.600 And I so today you know that the I thought 0:05:11.680 --> 0:05:14.159 long and hard about what kind of episodes I wanted 0:05:14.160 --> 0:05:16.360 to talk to you about, and I there's the guy 0:05:16.360 --> 0:05:18.440 that we're going to be talking about today is a 0:05:18.440 --> 0:05:22.880 fellow who I kind of debated for several years whether 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:26.840 or not we should cover because he's a quietly important monster. 0:05:27.839 --> 0:05:31.760 He's somebody who, you know, if we were just talking about, like, 0:05:31.920 --> 0:05:35.200 you know, the FBI overreach of the civil rights era, 0:05:35.320 --> 0:05:37.680 the anti warriors and whatnot, which was very much like 0:05:38.040 --> 0:05:41.120 a real authoritarian moment in our country's past, and we're 0:05:41.160 --> 0:05:44.760 currently confronting another. And the guy we're talking about today, 0:05:44.880 --> 0:05:49.320 Curtis Jarvin, is sort of the profit of taking America 0:05:49.560 --> 0:05:53.880 down a completely authoritarian path. He is an advocate for 0:05:54.040 --> 0:05:58.440 changing this country into what is effectively a dictatorship. And 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:01.240 unfortunately he's a guy who's had a lot of influence 0:06:01.839 --> 0:06:05.200 in speaking to that. Have you heard of Curtis Yarvin 0:06:05.279 --> 0:06:06.719 before we started these episodes. 0:06:07.440 --> 0:06:11.680 No, Ill read a tiny bit about him yesterday, but 0:06:11.920 --> 0:06:14.720 that was yeah. 0:06:13.520 --> 0:06:16.080 That's fine. That is the case with most people who 0:06:16.160 --> 0:06:20.120 are not who are not like actual followers of his philosophy. 0:06:20.160 --> 0:06:22.440 But unfortunately you have heard of some of the people 0:06:22.760 --> 0:06:25.440 who are big fans of Curtis. One of them is 0:06:25.560 --> 0:06:30.240 current US Vice presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody JD. Vance, 0:06:30.720 --> 0:06:33.760 who back in September twentieth of twenty twenty one, went 0:06:33.800 --> 0:06:37.120 on the Moment of Truth podcast run by the conservative 0:06:37.200 --> 0:06:40.919 organization American Moment, which is an organizational partner for the 0:06:40.920 --> 0:06:45.239 Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five. In a wide ranging interview, 0:06:45.279 --> 0:06:48.720 he accused his female classmates at Yale Law of pursuing 0:06:48.839 --> 0:06:51.920 racial or gender equality as quote a value system that 0:06:52.000 --> 0:06:55.440 gives their life meaning, and then said that value system 0:06:55.520 --> 0:06:58.160 leads to misery. At another point in the interview, he 0:06:58.200 --> 0:07:02.040 asked if certain groups of people, particularly those from Muslim 0:07:02.080 --> 0:07:06.600 majority countries, can quote successfully become American citizens, and then 0:07:06.640 --> 0:07:09.640 he alleged that the region's reason so many journalists are 0:07:09.720 --> 0:07:13.160 angry was not the rapid destruction of their industry, but 0:07:13.280 --> 0:07:16.119 because they didn't have any children, which inevitably, he says, 0:07:16.320 --> 0:07:18.920 leads to psychotic breaks. Now a lot of this stuff 0:07:18.960 --> 0:07:21.720 has come out about Vance. This was when when was 0:07:21.760 --> 0:07:23.760 that interview twenty one? 0:07:24.720 --> 0:07:31.000 That's really that's wild because for some reason I sort 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:33.800 of thought that, like he was kind of normal and 0:07:33.840 --> 0:07:39.200 then just saw a very cynical opportunity to get elevated 0:07:39.240 --> 0:07:41.320 if he endorsed Trump, and so he did that, and 0:07:41.360 --> 0:07:43.240 then everything else has been the kind of a cynical 0:07:44.600 --> 0:07:48.920 like trip down the Trump rabbit hole, just like so 0:07:49.080 --> 0:07:53.120 many Republicans have done. But that privately, like he's kind 0:07:53.120 --> 0:07:56.080 of smarter than that. But what you're saying now is 0:07:56.120 --> 0:08:01.360 that is that he's like trumpier than on his own 0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:04.680 He's a little bit so Trump. I don't know how 0:08:04.760 --> 0:08:07.440 much Trump believes other than that Trump should have power. 0:08:08.000 --> 0:08:12.600 Vance has strong beliefs about the fact that democracy is 0:08:12.640 --> 0:08:15.760 a mistake right, and that a lot of things that 0:08:15.800 --> 0:08:19.360 have like most of the last century in terms of 0:08:19.400 --> 0:08:21.920 like social progress, women getting the right to vote, the 0:08:21.920 --> 0:08:24.680 civil rights movement, like reforming the ability to vote for 0:08:24.720 --> 0:08:27.360 people who are not like white American men, that that 0:08:27.480 --> 0:08:30.720 was all horribly mistaken, right, and it was horribly mistaken 0:08:31.080 --> 0:08:34.600 because it led to this situation whereby too many regular 0:08:34.679 --> 0:08:37.760 people have any say whatsoever and how they're governed. 0:08:37.920 --> 0:08:41.080 And like to what I was saying before, it is 0:08:41.120 --> 0:08:44.959 like in a lot of ways JD. Vance has more 0:08:45.000 --> 0:08:47.600 extreme views on things, which is why during the most 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:51.480 recent debate, Donald Trump alludes to not discussing certain extreme 0:08:51.520 --> 0:08:55.640 policies that JD. Vance claims to have with JD. And 0:08:56.080 --> 0:08:59.439 so he tries to distance himself whereas JD is catering 0:08:59.440 --> 0:09:02.680 to a certain category of human But Trump's like, oh, 0:09:03.360 --> 0:09:06.359 I didn't discuss it with him, and that's intentional. 0:09:07.040 --> 0:09:07.319 Yeah. 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:09.679 And It's what's interesting is that if you're looking at 0:09:09.720 --> 0:09:12.880 like what his background is, Vance is a guy whose 0:09:13.040 --> 0:09:15.960 entire career has been bankrolled by Peter Teel, who's the 0:09:16.000 --> 0:09:18.400 Facebook billion He made a lot of money on Facebook, 0:09:18.440 --> 0:09:21.120 made a lot of money on PayPal, and he sunk 0:09:21.160 --> 0:09:24.240 about fifteen million into Vance's congressional campaign, which is the 0:09:24.240 --> 0:09:28.319 most ever spent on a single congressional candidate. And Teal 0:09:28.520 --> 0:09:30.520 in two thousand and nine, when on the record as 0:09:30.559 --> 0:09:33.840 saying he doesn't believe democracy can be compatible with freedom, 0:09:34.120 --> 0:09:36.200 by which he means like the freedom of people with 0:09:36.280 --> 0:09:39.800 lots of money to basically govern the rest of us. 0:09:39.880 --> 0:09:41.320 Right, and Teal and. 0:09:41.400 --> 0:09:44.400 Vance, they're not just kind of reactionaries when they express 0:09:44.480 --> 0:09:47.479 those things. They are quoting a guy, they are referring 0:09:47.559 --> 0:09:50.960 to the work of a political philosopher and named Curtis Jarvin, 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:55.600 who they first encountered when he blogged under a pseudonym 0:09:55.840 --> 0:10:00.560 Mincius Moldbug, which is kind of deliberately arch. But this 0:10:00.760 --> 0:10:03.000 is the guy who has been like the profit of 0:10:03.040 --> 0:10:06.960 a sizable chunk of the authoritarian right. Teel sunk a 0:10:06.960 --> 0:10:09.960 lot of money into him. Jd. Vance quotes him repeatedly, 0:10:10.040 --> 0:10:13.000 so does Blake Masters, who is the guy who's been 0:10:13.080 --> 0:10:17.520 running repeatedly to try to beat Mark Kelly in Arizona. 0:10:18.200 --> 0:10:21.120 And all of these guys and more are followers of Jarvin, 0:10:21.120 --> 0:10:24.760 who's probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right 0:10:24.800 --> 0:10:29.360 in the US today. Curtis has never killed anybody in 0:10:29.400 --> 0:10:32.400 any legally actionable sense or advocated from murder, and as 0:10:32.400 --> 0:10:35.040 far as I'm aware, he has never broken a law. 0:10:35.200 --> 0:10:38.080 But he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and the 0:10:38.120 --> 0:10:41.880 installation of a dictatorial regime that would by necessity kill 0:10:41.920 --> 0:10:44.800 and imprison large numbers of people. And his influence is 0:10:44.840 --> 0:10:47.360 great enough that the whole alt right and everything that 0:10:47.480 --> 0:10:50.240 came from the Art Right and to our current era 0:10:50.400 --> 0:10:53.520 right owes something to Jarvin's work. So when you're thinking 0:10:53.559 --> 0:10:56.960 about everything that's happened on the right that's gotten so 0:10:57.080 --> 0:11:00.480 deranged since twenty fifteen. All of it has bits of 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:03.439 Curtis Jarvin in it, right, and his thinking has had 0:11:03.440 --> 0:11:05.880 a massive impact even on some guys like Elon Musk, 0:11:05.880 --> 0:11:08.760 who several days ago shared a post where readers suggested 0:11:08.840 --> 0:11:13.199 only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should 0:11:13.240 --> 0:11:15.960 be allowed to vote. This is also a thought with 0:11:16.000 --> 0:11:19.480 some Jarvin DNA behind it. That again, oh yes, this 0:11:19.600 --> 0:11:23.600 was quite a moment that that only alpha males, so 0:11:23.920 --> 0:11:26.880 you know, stereotypical like alpha male guys, and then a 0:11:27.000 --> 0:11:32.319 neurotypical people people who are not like it. 0:11:32.600 --> 0:11:33.800 Indeed, can I still vote? 0:11:34.200 --> 0:11:36.199 I think? I think maybe so, because a lot of 0:11:36.280 --> 0:11:39.680 these guys are a big about ADHD and making them superhuman, 0:11:40.160 --> 0:11:42.400 which I also have, and it just makes me really 0:11:42.440 --> 0:11:46.959 bad at cleaning my house and occasionally, in short bursts, 0:11:47.160 --> 0:11:51.880 very good at cleaning my house. But yeah, so these 0:11:51.920 --> 0:11:54.880 are these are the kind of like political ideas that 0:11:54.920 --> 0:11:57.319 you get when you take too much read too much 0:11:57.360 --> 0:11:59.320 Curtis Yarvin, or listen too much to the people who 0:11:59.320 --> 0:12:03.199 have read a lot of Curtis Jarvin. And he's a 0:12:03.280 --> 0:12:06.439 kind of guy because He's so kind of shadowed as 0:12:06.480 --> 0:12:08.760 a figure I had always worried about, like, is covering 0:12:08.840 --> 0:12:11.439 this guy going to bring more attention to him than 0:12:11.520 --> 0:12:14.480 is necessary. And now that like one of his followers 0:12:14.520 --> 0:12:16.760 is maybe going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, 0:12:16.800 --> 0:12:19.280 I think it's probably time to talk about him. I 0:12:19.320 --> 0:12:22.720 kind of think we have to. So that's the introduction. 0:12:28.720 --> 0:12:32.560 Curtis Jarvin was born probably in Brooklyn in nineteen seventy three, 0:12:32.760 --> 0:12:35.960 on about June twenty fifth of that year. Likely his 0:12:36.080 --> 0:12:39.200 normal wiki doesn't give a birth date, but Google's AI 0:12:39.280 --> 0:12:41.680 summary bot does, and it seems to be basing this 0:12:41.880 --> 0:12:45.079 on a bio of Yarvin in another wiki, which seems 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:48.000 to pull from earlier versions of the original. It's like 0:12:48.040 --> 0:12:50.400 this AI slop stuff. So the gist of it is 0:12:50.440 --> 0:12:53.640 I don't know his actual birth date, right, I'm just 0:12:53.679 --> 0:12:56.840 trying to remind everyone not to trust AI summaries that 0:12:56.920 --> 0:12:59.200 various search engines give you, because most of them don't 0:12:59.240 --> 0:13:04.360 have actual source behind. Like most radical intellectuals, Jarvin was 0:13:04.400 --> 0:13:06.920 born in a place of wealth, comfort, and high social 0:13:06.960 --> 0:13:10.120 standing in his own society. His parents are highly educated. 0:13:10.400 --> 0:13:12.720 His dad had an Ivy League degree and worked for 0:13:12.720 --> 0:13:15.680 the US government as a foreign service worker. His mom 0:13:15.800 --> 0:13:18.320 was a WASP from Westchester County, the daughter of a 0:13:18.320 --> 0:13:21.319 prominent lawyer, and entered civil service herself as an adult. 0:13:21.880 --> 0:13:25.319 Jarvin today describes the social class of his birth as Brahmin, 0:13:25.720 --> 0:13:28.920 referring to the highest caste in Hindu society. And he 0:13:29.000 --> 0:13:32.040 does this because he thinks that inequality is a fundamental 0:13:32.080 --> 0:13:36.000 and immutable thing. Right, people are unequal fundamentally, and so 0:13:36.040 --> 0:13:39.960 any sort of social stratification in society is justified by that. 0:13:40.320 --> 0:13:43.240 And he's drawn to descriptions from other cultures that harken 0:13:43.360 --> 0:13:45.160 back to other fixed hierarchies. 0:13:45.559 --> 0:13:48.839 Sorry, it's justified by its inevitability. 0:13:48.400 --> 0:13:52.240 Right, exactly, like people are genetically some people are better 0:13:52.280 --> 0:13:55.280 than others, they're more intelligent than others, higher IQ than others. 0:13:55.440 --> 0:13:59.160 We're therefore, we are justified in leaning into that. 0:13:59.760 --> 0:14:03.959 Yeah, and in fact, yeah, yeah, we have a more 0:14:04.160 --> 0:14:05.280 because that's a separate thing. 0:14:05.559 --> 0:14:10.640 Like, it's inevitability is a maybe that's a fixed condition 0:14:10.760 --> 0:14:17.120 of human existence. But leaning into it, exacerbating it, that's 0:14:17.360 --> 0:14:19.320 just an arbitrary choice. 0:14:19.600 --> 0:14:22.040 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this idea that like, and it's 0:14:22.080 --> 0:14:25.880 also this belief that like something like intelligence is one thing, right, 0:14:25.960 --> 0:14:28.640 Like intelligence is a number, and if it's higher, you're smarter, 0:14:28.760 --> 0:14:30.720 as opposed to like, well, you can have an IQ 0:14:30.880 --> 0:14:32.880 of one to eighty, but if your car breaks down, 0:14:32.880 --> 0:14:34.920 the guy who knows how to fix your car is 0:14:34.960 --> 0:14:36.920 a lot smarter than you in that moment. That's how 0:14:36.920 --> 0:14:39.240 I tend to think about intelligence as opposed to like 0:14:39.680 --> 0:14:42.560 this subjective thing, like is a is a farmer smarter 0:14:42.680 --> 0:14:46.920 than a finance bro in New York City? Well, when 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:49.200 it comes to like making stock choices, maybe when it 0:14:49.240 --> 0:14:51.640 comes to growing food, certainly not like I don't know 0:14:51.800 --> 0:14:53.920 that's that. I think that's a better way to look 0:14:53.960 --> 0:14:55.040 at it. 0:14:55.040 --> 0:14:58.880 It's a weird thing. Like just the existence of something 0:14:59.160 --> 0:15:03.520 is then it makes it okay to then whether wherever 0:15:03.560 --> 0:15:06.680 it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because 0:15:06.720 --> 0:15:14.640 it exists, it is therefore okay to to do and heighten. Yeah, murder, 0:15:14.760 --> 0:15:19.840 murders back, murder happens. It's a fundamental, uh, part of 0:15:19.880 --> 0:15:24.120 the human condition that people get murdered and murder one another. Therefore, 0:15:24.800 --> 0:15:27.840 like so therefore, like I can murder anybody. Is that 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:30.160 is that a comparable? Am I making? Is that comparable? 0:15:31.160 --> 0:15:36.120 I think it actually is a very comparable comparison, right that, 0:15:36.320 --> 0:15:39.520 just because like there are like individuals are not the 0:15:39.560 --> 0:15:42.280 same that we should like have some sort of and 0:15:42.320 --> 0:15:44.720 you're you're always picking when you're when you're trying to 0:15:44.720 --> 0:15:47.640 acknowledge it, like, Okay, people are not like people don't 0:15:47.640 --> 0:15:50.320 all have the same abilities naturally, right, Like that's a 0:15:50.360 --> 0:15:53.320 thing that's subjectively true. Michael Phelps was always going to 0:15:53.320 --> 0:15:56.720 be a better swimmer than me, for example, But we 0:15:56.760 --> 0:15:59.720 don't base our society based on who's best at swimming, right, 0:16:00.080 --> 0:16:03.720 Yarvin is basically saying, there's one thing that I actually 0:16:03.800 --> 0:16:06.120 value when it comes to the ways in which people 0:16:06.240 --> 0:16:08.920 are different from each other, and it's a very specific 0:16:09.400 --> 0:16:12.840 kind of intelligence that's correlates to how I think I'm intelligent, 0:16:12.920 --> 0:16:16.119 and that's how we should stratify society. 0:16:16.280 --> 0:16:16.480 Right. 0:16:18.440 --> 0:16:21.600 Yeah, he's that kind of a dude. And I also 0:16:21.720 --> 0:16:23.680 kind of think it's interesting to me that he's so 0:16:23.800 --> 0:16:27.040 obsessed with this idea of like identifying as a Brahmin, 0:16:27.200 --> 0:16:31.000 because in Hindu culture, Brahmins are the castes that like 0:16:31.040 --> 0:16:34.440 traditionally were most involved in the priesthood and religious instruction, 0:16:35.360 --> 0:16:38.560 and it is like a very closed loop system right, 0:16:38.640 --> 0:16:42.000 the cast system traditionally, but that's not the kind of 0:16:42.080 --> 0:16:45.440 system that his family succeeded in. His dad was like 0:16:45.480 --> 0:16:48.280 a member of the US Foreign Service and became pretty 0:16:48.320 --> 0:16:51.400 highly placed in the government. But his dad wasn't born 0:16:51.520 --> 0:16:54.080 into that role. He was the son of Jewish American 0:16:54.160 --> 0:16:57.160 communists who came to this country and he had to 0:16:57.360 --> 0:16:59.280 fight to make a place for himself in the higher 0:16:59.360 --> 0:17:02.720 rungs of society, which is a very clear example of 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:05.520 like mobility and the fact that we have a reasonably 0:17:05.560 --> 0:17:08.800 open society that allows for some mobility, which he doesn't 0:17:08.840 --> 0:17:12.240 want to exist. I always find it interesting when guys 0:17:12.400 --> 0:17:14.840 like that, you can see a clear example of like, oh, well, 0:17:14.840 --> 0:17:17.880 you only have what you have because our society allows 0:17:17.920 --> 0:17:18.679 for mobility. 0:17:19.200 --> 0:17:22.640 Well, so where's he from again? Brooklyn? 0:17:22.680 --> 0:17:24.400 He's yeah, he's from around Brooklyn. 0:17:24.640 --> 0:17:30.120 Okay, yeah, because there is there's also a Brahmin social 0:17:30.240 --> 0:17:37.840 class in New England, Yeah, the Boston Brahmins, right, yeah, 0:17:37.880 --> 0:17:40.479 and that's but that's not what he's talking about. Uh. 0:17:40.680 --> 0:17:43.000 I mean it's a little unclear to me because he 0:17:43.080 --> 0:17:46.240 is his mom is kind of like you could probably 0:17:46.240 --> 0:17:48.960 call a Boston Brahmin. But he's referring to like, when 0:17:48.960 --> 0:17:51.040 he talks about his family being Brahmins, he's referring to 0:17:51.080 --> 0:17:53.240 the fact that his dad was also highly placed in 0:17:53.240 --> 0:17:55.680 the State Department, and his dad is definitely not a 0:17:55.720 --> 0:17:59.560 Boston Brahmen, right, Like his parents were Jewish Stalinists, which 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:02.720 is not like a Boston Brahmin thing, right, because that 0:18:02.840 --> 0:18:03.200 was like. 0:18:03.119 --> 0:18:07.960 The Kennedy's and like, yeah, that that ilk. So that's 0:18:07.960 --> 0:18:09.400 so interesting, all right. 0:18:09.240 --> 0:18:11.240 Yeah, yeah, it's it's a little weird to me the 0:18:11.240 --> 0:18:13.600 way he kind of like talks about it, but definitely 0:18:13.680 --> 0:18:15.600 it's it's kind of key to see that a big 0:18:15.680 --> 0:18:18.040 chunk of his family's comfort at least comes from the 0:18:18.040 --> 0:18:21.280 fact that, like his his his dad's side of the 0:18:21.280 --> 0:18:24.240 family entered into a fairly open society that allows for 0:18:24.320 --> 0:18:25.080 some mobility. 0:18:25.320 --> 0:18:29.800 So can I clarify one thing? So absolutely, I feel 0:18:29.880 --> 0:18:32.960 like the and I don't know enough about this, so 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:35.280 I'm glad to be learning as I go, but I 0:18:35.400 --> 0:18:37.879 just have I've kind of I guess I'm realizing that 0:18:37.920 --> 0:18:41.160 I've assumed that the Peter Teels of the world, when 0:18:41.200 --> 0:18:46.639 they advocate for more of a dictatorial structure to our government, 0:18:47.359 --> 0:18:50.800 they're not saying that that part of that is also 0:18:51.000 --> 0:18:56.040 a free market capitalism which presumably allows for mobility, right, 0:18:56.080 --> 0:19:00.000 So mobility supposed to and that, if anything, it encouraged 0:19:00.520 --> 0:19:05.960 the best and the brightest to rise. And that's how 0:19:05.960 --> 0:19:08.159 they see themselves as the best in the brightest that 0:19:08.320 --> 0:19:12.960 have risen. So I guess I'm just splitting hairs a 0:19:13.000 --> 0:19:16.679 little bit, like are you sure that they that also 0:19:17.800 --> 0:19:20.400 they are anti social mobility or. 0:19:21.000 --> 0:19:24.680 They're very much like close the door after you get up, right, 0:19:24.800 --> 0:19:27.480 like kick the ladder out from underneath you types, right, 0:19:28.960 --> 0:19:31.280 And I think it's because they do believe that, like 0:19:31.359 --> 0:19:34.199 there's a that their success was not purely based on 0:19:34.240 --> 0:19:36.840 the fact that they came up in a system where 0:19:36.880 --> 0:19:39.520 they gained certain benefits that were the result of like 0:19:39.600 --> 0:19:41.720 public spending. Right, Like all of these guys who made 0:19:41.760 --> 0:19:45.040 money in the tech industry went to schools that were 0:19:45.240 --> 0:19:47.840 generally publicly funded at least at some point, you know, 0:19:47.880 --> 0:19:50.720 their parents drove on roads that were publicly benefited from, 0:19:50.720 --> 0:19:54.040 like the security infrastructure that exists in this country in 0:19:54.080 --> 0:19:56.800 a lot of different ways. And their companies all benefited 0:19:56.800 --> 0:20:00.480 to some extent from government spending and incentives. But they 0:20:00.560 --> 0:20:03.399 see that their success was like the result of something 0:20:03.400 --> 0:20:06.920 inherently superior within themselves and often in like a genetic 0:20:07.000 --> 0:20:11.199 level in some ways. And so they're they're there Aristotle. 0:20:11.240 --> 0:20:13.720 The fact that they have achieved such success is not 0:20:14.000 --> 0:20:16.440 the result of a society that enabled them. It's a 0:20:16.480 --> 0:20:20.240 result of like, they're members of a natural aristocracy, and 0:20:20.280 --> 0:20:22.359 the best thing they can do is legally work to 0:20:22.400 --> 0:20:27.480 codify that aristocracy. That's the that's that's the we'll get 0:20:27.480 --> 0:20:30.320 into like some more of kind of how Curtis arrives 0:20:30.359 --> 0:20:32.720 by this, because he's really a big part in kind 0:20:32.760 --> 0:20:35.320 of lending an intellectual air to this. But that that 0:20:35.480 --> 0:20:38.240 very much is how these folks see themselves. And he 0:20:38.280 --> 0:20:40.480 grows up as a kid. You know, his dad's working 0:20:40.520 --> 0:20:43.560 for the State Department. They travel around the world a lot. 0:20:43.600 --> 0:20:45.560 He spends a decent chunk of his childhood in like 0:20:45.600 --> 0:20:49.720 Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and you know, so that's 0:20:49.720 --> 0:20:52.200 a lot of disruption in his schooling. You know, he's 0:20:52.200 --> 0:20:54.000 not one of these kids who stays in the same 0:20:54.040 --> 0:20:56.600 school for a long period of time. But he excels 0:20:56.600 --> 0:21:00.399 in academics. He skips a grade back before his family 0:21:00.440 --> 0:21:02.760 goes overseas, and when they move back to the US, 0:21:02.760 --> 0:21:04.760 he skips two more grades and he winds up a 0:21:04.800 --> 0:21:06.960 sophomore at age twelve, which I think is probably never 0:21:07.040 --> 0:21:10.080 a great idea. Right, that's a little young. 0:21:11.840 --> 0:21:12.359 Sounds hard. 0:21:12.880 --> 0:21:15.800 Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't great being a sophomore at 0:21:15.800 --> 0:21:16.680 the normal age. 0:21:16.920 --> 0:21:21.600 Yeah, that is not when when humanity at that age 0:21:21.720 --> 0:21:24.880 is not when humanity is at its most benevolent and 0:21:24.960 --> 0:21:26.560 kind and supportive. Yeah. 0:21:27.240 --> 0:21:32.600 Yeah, definitely a mild way to put it. In one 0:21:32.680 --> 0:21:35.399 interview I found Yarvin basically says like, yeah, it was 0:21:35.680 --> 0:21:38.160 it was. It was whack that I was skipped ahead 0:21:38.240 --> 0:21:39.639 so far right, which was. 0:21:40.119 --> 0:21:42.800 Of academic achievement that he bounced ahead? 0:21:43.119 --> 0:21:46.920 Okay, so very bright kid, very bright kid, very good 0:21:47.000 --> 0:21:49.679 at specifically the kind of academics that like, you know, 0:21:49.880 --> 0:21:53.280 the school's reward. And you can kind of read between 0:21:53.320 --> 0:21:55.320 the lines that he was the recipient of a decent 0:21:55.359 --> 0:21:58.320 amount of bullying, right, And and that's especially I think 0:21:58.320 --> 0:22:00.359 it actually might be a little less common for kids 0:22:00.359 --> 0:22:02.920 in school now, but like you know, even if you 0:22:02.960 --> 0:22:05.600 didn't get skipped ahead in school, high school has a 0:22:05.600 --> 0:22:09.119 lot of bullying in it. So I'm not surprised. 0:22:09.080 --> 0:22:12.360 That's we're about the same age. He and I and 0:22:13.240 --> 0:22:17.320 yeah that was I mean, there was just like good 0:22:17.320 --> 0:22:26.120 old hazing all just all the gross, horrible traumatic stuff. Yeah. 0:22:26.240 --> 0:22:28.560 Yeah, I'm thinking through some fun memories that I have 0:22:28.720 --> 0:22:31.520 myself right now. Right, So it's one of those things 0:22:32.080 --> 0:22:34.280 you could like read a lot into that to kind 0:22:34.320 --> 0:22:36.160 of the guy that he becomes. But also I think 0:22:36.200 --> 0:22:38.000 we all kind of went through a version of that, 0:22:38.040 --> 0:22:41.160 So maybe it's not super useful to like theorize too 0:22:41.200 --> 0:22:43.480 much about what it meant to him. But what does 0:22:43.520 --> 0:22:45.639 definitely mean a lot to him is that in the 0:22:45.680 --> 0:22:48.399 late eighties and early nineties, he becomes one of the 0:22:48.440 --> 0:22:49.879 first online people. 0:22:50.160 --> 0:22:50.320 Right. 0:22:50.440 --> 0:22:53.080 This is back before most people know there's an internet, 0:22:53.160 --> 0:22:55.720 so he is an early adopter. I think nineteen eighty 0:22:55.840 --> 0:22:59.080 nine is when he first starts getting online regularly. Wow, 0:22:59.200 --> 0:23:03.280 and yeah, and this is not this is the precursor 0:23:03.359 --> 0:23:05.199 to the Internet that we know. And he's spending all 0:23:05.240 --> 0:23:07.840 of this time in a place called usenet, which, if 0:23:07.880 --> 0:23:10.320 you remember, like web forums, is kind of like the 0:23:10.359 --> 0:23:14.040 first web forum. Right, it's for eugen z kids. It's 0:23:14.080 --> 0:23:17.320 TikTok without any videos or hot people. And everyone has 0:23:17.680 --> 0:23:21.920 very strong opinions about Star Trek audio equipment or race science, right, 0:23:22.240 --> 0:23:26.360 like it's an interesting place to be, like yeah, yes. 0:23:26.680 --> 0:23:29.120 Like race science was like they were just getting it. 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:31.320 It was like four chan or like these these sort 0:23:31.280 --> 0:23:35.320 of yeh dark corners of Yeah. 0:23:35.000 --> 0:23:38.760 There was actually a white supremacist terrorist group in the 0:23:38.840 --> 0:23:41.719 late eighties that robbed banks, stole a bunch of money, 0:23:41.760 --> 0:23:44.480 and then donated a bunch of it to other Nazi 0:23:44.520 --> 0:23:47.760 groups that spent it buying computer systems to link up 0:23:48.080 --> 0:23:51.119 different white power groups so that they could share information. 0:23:51.800 --> 0:23:54.400 And you know, there's there's evidence from as early as 0:23:54.480 --> 0:23:57.320 like the mid nineties of them talking about going into 0:23:57.400 --> 0:24:00.840 places where you can find fans of stuff, like different 0:24:00.920 --> 0:24:03.600 kind of like sci fi media who might be socially 0:24:03.640 --> 0:24:06.960 isolated and try to push propaganda onto them. So that 0:24:07.280 --> 0:24:11.920 actually does go back pretty far. And you know, it's 0:24:11.920 --> 0:24:13.840 hard to say, like I don't know exact we don't 0:24:13.840 --> 0:24:16.520 know entirely what Jarvin got up to when he was 0:24:16.520 --> 0:24:18.560 on usenet. You know, to some extent that's a bit 0:24:18.600 --> 0:24:20.720 of a black box. But his favorite board was a 0:24:20.760 --> 0:24:24.440 place called talk dot bizarre, And I've spent some time 0:24:24.560 --> 0:24:27.720 trawling the Usenet archives for talk dot bizarre, which. 0:24:27.520 --> 0:24:30.080 You can find still Bizarre. 0:24:29.920 --> 0:24:33.080 Talk that's like the names of like there's different talkboards 0:24:33.119 --> 0:24:36.800 and one of them is like the Bizarre right, Okay, 0:24:37.560 --> 0:24:40.000 and it's like kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I 0:24:40.000 --> 0:24:41.800 think it's where I would have spent time if I 0:24:41.840 --> 0:24:44.600 had been a little bit older. It's like the first 0:24:44.840 --> 0:24:47.520 place where you would find like Internet humor, right, the 0:24:47.600 --> 0:24:50.200 kind of stuff you eventually you would see on boards 0:24:50.240 --> 0:24:52.679 like something Awful, and then four Chan and now like 0:24:52.960 --> 0:24:56.399 all of Twitter culture. Right, So it's it's inside jokes 0:24:56.480 --> 0:24:59.640 and memes and what we now call shit posting, right, 0:25:00.160 --> 0:25:03.080 And Yarvin is like one of the first generation of 0:25:03.119 --> 0:25:06.200 ship posters, and he says this of his time on usenet, 0:25:06.680 --> 0:25:09.400 it was a decentralized system, and more importantly, it had 0:25:09.400 --> 0:25:12.399 this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it 0:25:12.440 --> 0:25:14.800 was an engineering student or worked at a tech company 0:25:14.880 --> 0:25:20.080 or something. So critically, it's not an open platform. The 0:25:20.119 --> 0:25:24.560 only people here are to some extent involved in academics, 0:25:24.640 --> 0:25:28.800 involved in the tech industry, and very smart. Right in 0:25:28.880 --> 0:25:30.360 nineteen eighty five, just. 0:25:30.320 --> 0:25:32.280 To get access to it at that time, yes, you 0:25:32.320 --> 0:25:33.520 had to have had to be in. 0:25:34.000 --> 0:25:37.240 Yeah, so they're they're the elite in a way, right, 0:25:37.280 --> 0:25:39.600 and that's how, really how he comes to see them, 0:25:39.680 --> 0:25:42.439 and Yarvin is definitely part of that elite. In nineteen 0:25:42.520 --> 0:25:46.240 eighty five, he'd entered a Johns Hopkins study for mathematically 0:25:46.280 --> 0:25:49.400 Precocious Youth, and then he had started taking classes at 0:25:49.440 --> 0:25:52.879 Brown University. Even at this early stage of development, he 0:25:53.000 --> 0:25:56.440 showed a distinct interest in authoritarian leaders and just as 0:25:56.440 --> 0:26:00.159 critically and being very wrong about them. In nineteen ninety one, 0:26:00.200 --> 0:26:02.560 he wrote in a discussion on us NEET, I wonder 0:26:02.600 --> 0:26:06.119 if the Soviet power ladder, a vicious bureaucratic backbiting, brings 0:26:06.119 --> 0:26:08.639 stronger him into the top than the American system of 0:26:08.720 --> 0:26:13.280 feel good soundbites. Now, given that the USSR collapsed the 0:26:13.320 --> 0:26:15.360 next year, not a great prediction. 0:26:16.160 --> 0:26:21.480 Yeah, this is so, this is like you should have 0:26:21.480 --> 0:26:24.960 had Rain Wilson on this episode, because you're describing Dwight shrut. 0:26:25.680 --> 0:26:28.400 Yeah, he's got he's got more than a little. 0:26:28.200 --> 0:26:33.119 Bit of that, right, a precociousness and a sort of 0:26:33.880 --> 0:26:39.680 very specific kind of brilliance and a preoccupation with with 0:26:39.680 --> 0:26:41.159 with like stern leadership. 0:26:41.440 --> 0:26:45.080 And can you just imagine Dwight just telling everybody that 0:26:45.160 --> 0:26:49.520 he entered a Johns Hopkins study of mathematical precocious youth 0:26:49.880 --> 0:26:52.560 that would be brought up constantly. 0:26:52.119 --> 0:26:55.840 By the way, if there is one way to guarantee 0:26:56.280 --> 0:26:59.720 you're gonna get your ass kicked on a playground. 0:27:01.520 --> 0:27:07.560 True, I'm not even going to get out the first 0:27:07.560 --> 0:27:10.720 syllable of precocious before they start swinging. 0:27:14.200 --> 0:27:14.520 Yeah. 0:27:14.600 --> 0:27:18.119 So, while he is at college, Jarvin shows minimal interest 0:27:18.160 --> 0:27:21.320 in the humanities. He only takes five undergraduate courses in 0:27:21.400 --> 0:27:25.280 these subjects, focused on history and in college now Brown 0:27:25.480 --> 0:27:28.800 is where he starts at college, right, and he graduates 0:27:28.800 --> 0:27:30.720 in ninety two. He goes on to be a grad 0:27:30.760 --> 0:27:34.399 student in a COMPSI PhD program at Berkeley, and his 0:27:34.760 --> 0:27:37.480 goal at that point is to enter the tech industry, right, 0:27:37.960 --> 0:27:41.320 which is just starting to really explode from as the Internet. 0:27:41.359 --> 0:27:44.439 This is kind of the very the immediate precursor to 0:27:44.480 --> 0:27:47.200 the big dot com boom. And as he moves from 0:27:47.280 --> 0:27:50.160 high school to college and then from college to grad 0:27:50.200 --> 0:27:53.240 school and starts flirting with big tech, he continues spending 0:27:53.280 --> 0:27:57.040 his time online exploring his first political ideology, and he 0:27:57.119 --> 0:28:01.040 is initially a libertarian. I want to quote from a 0:28:01.080 --> 0:28:04.520 profile Joshua Tit wrote about Jarvin for a book on 0:28:04.520 --> 0:28:08.719 the radical right quote. Engineers like Jarvin are typically sorted 0:28:08.720 --> 0:28:12.240 through competitive academic programs, which they consider analogous to the 0:28:12.280 --> 0:28:16.360 competition imagined in a libertarian society. Their world is rational, 0:28:16.520 --> 0:28:20.159 rule bound, and solvable. Within the subculture, computer software and 0:28:20.240 --> 0:28:24.400 hardware are the dominant metaphors for society. Such thinking dovetails 0:28:24.400 --> 0:28:27.280 with the ironclad assumptions about human and market behavior of 0:28:27.320 --> 0:28:30.680 the Austrian school of economics led by Ludwig von mess 0:28:31.080 --> 0:28:35.600 Tech culture systems focus also accords with libertarianism's concentration on 0:28:35.680 --> 0:28:39.680 efficiency and solving government. And so he's one of these 0:28:39.720 --> 0:28:42.240 guys who number one comes to think, I am again, 0:28:42.320 --> 0:28:45.560 I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy based on my 0:28:45.680 --> 0:28:48.360 skill that I've earned, and the world around may he 0:28:48.440 --> 0:28:51.440 sees like, seems so chaotic. But the computer systems I'm 0:28:51.440 --> 0:28:55.320 working with are so sensible and ordered, and the companies 0:28:55.480 --> 0:28:57.880 that I am interested in all seem to be so 0:28:58.000 --> 0:29:01.080 much more efficient than the government. Couldn't we fix the 0:29:01.160 --> 0:29:04.360 government if we made it more like a computer program 0:29:04.360 --> 0:29:08.120 and more like the tech industry, right, which you can't 0:29:08.200 --> 0:29:11.400 because people don't work that way. But there's always guys 0:29:11.400 --> 0:29:15.560 who think this way, right, And you know, hopefully most 0:29:15.600 --> 0:29:17.800 of them, I think it doesn't lead anywhere, but like 0:29:17.880 --> 0:29:21.040 some bad opinions on the internet, unfortunately for Jarvin, it's 0:29:21.080 --> 0:29:23.880 going to go a little bit further than that. Speaking 0:29:24.000 --> 0:29:29.680 of disastrous ideological conclusions, you know who's never had any 0:29:29.720 --> 0:29:41.400 of those are sponsors electedly So we're back right now. 0:29:41.800 --> 0:29:45.360 The kind of thinking that Jarvin has about libertarianism, about 0:29:45.360 --> 0:29:48.200 being a part of this natural aristocracy, is not really 0:29:48.240 --> 0:29:51.880 congruent with human liberty in the broad sense, right, because 0:29:52.400 --> 0:29:56.160 you know, if you are able to, as a business owner, 0:29:56.280 --> 0:29:59.560 use your liberty like unconstrained by government regulations to dump 0:29:59.560 --> 0:30:02.840 poisonous in a waterway, right, that is, you are more 0:30:02.920 --> 0:30:06.680 free as the person running that business, but you're also 0:30:06.840 --> 0:30:10.040 destroying life, and you know, one would say, harming the 0:30:10.040 --> 0:30:13.000 liberty of thousands of other people who rely on that waterway. 0:30:13.120 --> 0:30:13.280 Right. 0:30:13.320 --> 0:30:16.160 So I would say, as someone who is like inclined 0:30:16.200 --> 0:30:20.280 to some libertarian ideas, I don't really understand why so 0:30:20.360 --> 0:30:22.840 many libertarians are obsessed with this kind of like ending 0:30:22.880 --> 0:30:25.120 of government restrictions on corporations. 0:30:26.040 --> 0:30:30.240 Yeah yeah, and also and and and another version of 0:30:30.280 --> 0:30:36.440 that I find the anti union rhetoric. So oh yeah, 0:30:36.520 --> 0:30:40.400 it's so hilarious to me because the formation of a 0:30:40.560 --> 0:30:49.120 union to collectively bargain with a CEO is the most like, 0:30:50.720 --> 0:30:56.000 the most natural expression of free spreech a free speech. 0:30:56.560 --> 0:30:59.640 It is, it is, it is such a natural and 0:30:59.760 --> 0:31:03.680 so to be like, you know, free speech, I'm a 0:31:03.720 --> 0:31:09.080 constitutional you know, libertarian or whatever, and then also in 0:31:09.120 --> 0:31:12.520 the same breath be like unions are should be illegal. 0:31:13.400 --> 0:31:22.600 It's yeah, unions are a natural growth and a natural 0:31:23.320 --> 0:31:25.200 oppositional force to exploitation. 0:31:25.880 --> 0:31:28.840 Yeah. And I think they also, like very real, like 0:31:29.040 --> 0:31:32.840 very objectively increase the amount of like freedom, right, Like 0:31:33.320 --> 0:31:35.720 if you're kind of looking at it that way, when 0:31:35.760 --> 0:31:38.680 people have a way to band together to oppose a 0:31:38.800 --> 0:31:43.040 much larger, more powerful, you know, more moneyed interest, then 0:31:43.360 --> 0:31:46.240 they have more agency, you know, in their lives, right 0:31:46.320 --> 0:31:49.000 Like that's that's I mean definitely how I look at it. 0:31:49.040 --> 0:31:52.720 And I will say Jarvin, he actually is pretty good 0:31:52.720 --> 0:31:55.760 at not getting lost in this part of the discourse, 0:31:55.840 --> 0:31:58.840 right because he drops this idea that liberty is a 0:31:58.960 --> 0:32:01.280 value in any way, shape or form pretty early on. 0:32:01.360 --> 0:32:04.560 Like he's not one of these guys who preaches libertarianism 0:32:04.600 --> 0:32:06.840 because he thinks that it's or because he's trying to 0:32:06.840 --> 0:32:10.080 convince people that it's somehow better for human freedom. He's 0:32:10.120 --> 0:32:12.240 someone who just kind of drops the idea that there's 0:32:12.240 --> 0:32:15.160 any value in human freedom pretty early on, right, so 0:32:15.200 --> 0:32:17.240 there's no point in paying lip service to it, which 0:32:17.280 --> 0:32:20.120 is at least more honest than a lot of these guys. 0:32:21.320 --> 0:32:21.480 Now. 0:32:21.480 --> 0:32:24.080 The major pivot point which leads to him dropping his 0:32:24.160 --> 0:32:28.240 libertarian trappings and embracing this more authoritarian belief system hinges 0:32:28.280 --> 0:32:30.960 on the place that he was and kind of remains 0:32:31.000 --> 0:32:34.520 his mental home, which is the early Internet. The old 0:32:34.600 --> 0:32:38.320 days of usenet were a simulacrum of what is today 0:32:38.440 --> 0:32:41.600 Jarvin's ideal society. As I stated before, back then you 0:32:41.600 --> 0:32:44.000 couldn't post unless you were someone with a degree of 0:32:44.040 --> 0:32:48.160 like skill, money, or access to a large institution, And 0:32:48.240 --> 0:32:51.280 so you would only get new users in any large 0:32:51.320 --> 0:32:54.240 amount every September, when you get new college classes of 0:32:54.280 --> 0:32:57.400 kids who would get onboarded and start posting, right. And 0:32:57.440 --> 0:32:59.800 so for a few years, every September the Internet would 0:32:59.800 --> 0:33:01.920 be an annoying for a while while all these newbies 0:33:01.960 --> 0:33:04.640 came in who don't know like the social mores, and 0:33:04.680 --> 0:33:07.160 they would have to get acclimatized, right, But there were 0:33:07.160 --> 0:33:09.400 always more old heads, people who had been there a 0:33:09.440 --> 0:33:11.640 long time to keep the new people in line, and 0:33:11.680 --> 0:33:15.440 there was this natural hierarchy based on age and technical skill. 0:33:15.880 --> 0:33:19.640 And then one year late nineteen ninety three, Usenet opens 0:33:19.720 --> 0:33:22.720 up to anyone with an Internet connection, and suddenly you 0:33:22.800 --> 0:33:26.120 have what people call eternal September. Right, like, it's never 0:33:26.280 --> 0:33:29.320 ended since nineteen ninety three because there were no there's 0:33:29.360 --> 0:33:31.880 not been any kind of like guard rails to block 0:33:32.000 --> 0:33:35.160 new people from coming on after that point. This is 0:33:35.400 --> 0:33:37.960 you know, it's an important moment in Internet history. It's 0:33:38.000 --> 0:33:42.080 a catastrophic moment for Curtis Yarbin, right, and the mental 0:33:42.120 --> 0:33:44.880 impact this has is key to understanding him. In one 0:33:44.960 --> 0:33:47.760 interview with Tablet magazine, he complained, you had this sort 0:33:47.800 --> 0:33:51.360 of de facto aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy, 0:33:51.400 --> 0:33:54.080 and then it fell apart. These are all big Lord 0:33:54.080 --> 0:33:55.680 of the Rings guys, So I'll use the Lord of 0:33:55.680 --> 0:33:58.760 the Rings analogy. They talk about this like the like 0:33:58.840 --> 0:34:02.520 the the period of time when the elves ruled everything 0:34:02.560 --> 0:34:05.160 before Sauron had his big war, right like before the 0:34:05.160 --> 0:34:09.080 breaking of the world. That's eternal September that ruins this 0:34:09.200 --> 0:34:11.840 kind of like more noble Golden age and brings about 0:34:11.880 --> 0:34:13.800 this dirty, grubby age of men. 0:34:14.280 --> 0:34:16.560 So we'll take care work for it. I'm not a 0:34:16.560 --> 0:34:19.600 Lord of the Rings guy. I mean, I respect it, 0:34:19.920 --> 0:34:22.360 but I just don't have that level of knowledge. 0:34:23.120 --> 0:34:25.239 Yeah I do. I'm wearing a Lord of the Rings 0:34:25.239 --> 0:34:28.680 hat right now. Can back that claim. 0:34:29.440 --> 0:34:32.719 All these guys are big jd Vance his company, his 0:34:33.200 --> 0:34:36.440 venture capital company, was named after one of the rings 0:34:36.560 --> 0:34:39.600 in the Lord of the Rings. Peter Thiel's surveillance company 0:34:39.680 --> 0:34:41.719 is named Palanteer from the Lord of the Rings. So 0:34:42.280 --> 0:34:44.680 this is very much the language that they all speak. 0:34:45.280 --> 0:34:45.600 Funny. 0:34:46.120 --> 0:34:49.680 That's also one of Stephen Colbert's obsessions, and I wonder 0:34:49.719 --> 0:34:53.920 if if they might find common ground and have like 0:34:53.960 --> 0:34:56.040 a fun chat on that subject. 0:34:56.800 --> 0:34:58.960 I certainly could have a chat about it. I think 0:34:59.000 --> 0:35:02.359 Colbert would probably probably be kind of horrified of some 0:35:02.440 --> 0:35:05.319 of the things that they're referencing, and they're like, like, 0:35:05.400 --> 0:35:08.000 you named your company after this thing that is specifically 0:35:08.000 --> 0:35:10.280 a device that only the evil Wizard uses. 0:35:10.719 --> 0:35:14.000 Okay, yeah, yeah, but. 0:35:14.000 --> 0:35:16.719 I don't know that would be an interesting conversation. So 0:35:17.200 --> 0:35:20.239 I think this period of time, this kind of collapse 0:35:20.280 --> 0:35:22.359 of this natural aress, what he sees as a natural 0:35:22.360 --> 0:35:27.439 aristocracy is key to understanding why Jarvin comes to hate democracy, 0:35:27.560 --> 0:35:30.480 right because it kind of ruined his Internet playground, the 0:35:30.520 --> 0:35:33.640 first place where he ever felt that he fit in rights. 0:35:33.840 --> 0:35:35.960 That's sort of what I see as like the er 0:35:36.120 --> 0:35:39.120 moment of his like coming to hate this kind of 0:35:39.160 --> 0:35:42.600 idea of any kind of democratic society. Now, if you're 0:35:42.640 --> 0:35:44.560 going to claim that you and your friends on the 0:35:44.600 --> 0:35:47.319 Internet back in the day were like the aristocracy of 0:35:47.400 --> 0:35:51.680 some long lost utopia of logic that invites people to 0:35:51.760 --> 0:35:54.399 look at what you were posting on the Internet back then, 0:35:54.719 --> 0:35:57.000 And I've looked at some of Jarvin's old posts, and 0:35:57.120 --> 0:36:00.120 Socrates he wasn't. He does seem to have spent some 0:36:00.160 --> 0:36:03.320 of it writing comedy for a hacking and DIY media 0:36:03.360 --> 0:36:06.520 collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow. This is 0:36:06.520 --> 0:36:08.640 where we get to like the weirdest connection here, because 0:36:08.640 --> 0:36:10.880 if you've heard of the Cult of the Dead Cow recently, 0:36:11.120 --> 0:36:17.480 it's because Beto O'Rourke was also a member. So yeah, yeah, yeah, 0:36:17.520 --> 0:36:21.640 So he and Beto have a very very strange connection 0:36:21.760 --> 0:36:24.719 to each other. Now, the Cult of the Dead Cow 0:36:24.840 --> 0:36:28.240 was like a complicated thing. It's it's one Reuter's article 0:36:28.280 --> 0:36:30.520 I found describes it as the oldest group of computer 0:36:30.600 --> 0:36:33.640 hackers in US history. I think that over sells how 0:36:33.680 --> 0:36:37.360 cool Jarvin's involvement in it is, because I think he 0:36:37.520 --> 0:36:39.840 was mostly They were also like a media collective, so 0:36:39.840 --> 0:36:43.200 they put out like pieces of writing and whatnot, and 0:36:43.280 --> 0:36:46.239 I think that's mostly what Yarvin's involvement was, right, And 0:36:46.560 --> 0:36:49.080 the best evidence I have of what he was writing 0:36:49.120 --> 0:36:53.040 for them is a satiric piece of Badger human hybrid erotica, 0:36:54.280 --> 0:36:56.920 which I think might hold a little bit of evidence 0:36:56.920 --> 0:36:59.839 of his future interest in race science, although it's hard 0:36:59.880 --> 0:37:01.719 to say. Do you want to hear some of his 0:37:02.800 --> 0:37:04.719 human hybrid erotica? 0:37:04.840 --> 0:37:09.400 Hold on, let me get some lube. 0:37:11.120 --> 0:37:14.400 Love me for my genes, says Antonio Kneeling. If you 0:37:14.440 --> 0:37:16.640 cannot love me for myself, you must love me for 0:37:16.719 --> 0:37:19.960 my jeans. I've never told anyone this before. I've always 0:37:20.040 --> 0:37:22.160 kept it to myself. I have always let them think 0:37:22.160 --> 0:37:24.080 it but an accident of cruel nature that I have 0:37:24.120 --> 0:37:27.440 white hair on my cheekbones and a thoroughly disreputable looking nose. 0:37:27.719 --> 0:37:29.759 But the fact is that I am part badger on 0:37:29.800 --> 0:37:35.279 my father's side. So I don't know. I don't know 0:37:35.320 --> 0:37:37.439 what to say about that. I know it's a joke. 0:37:37.520 --> 0:37:41.120 It's a bit, right, I don't think it lands Maybe 0:37:41.160 --> 0:37:44.520 it was funnier back in the early Internet, although maybe 0:37:44.520 --> 0:37:46.080 the bar was just a lot lower there. 0:37:46.120 --> 0:37:50.080 It feels like there's some context we're missing, like just 0:37:50.400 --> 0:37:53.920 just I'm digging hard for some out here, like so 0:37:54.080 --> 0:37:57.160 am I. It just seems like there was some inside 0:37:57.280 --> 0:38:02.200 joke about Badger fucking or something that we're not that 0:38:02.280 --> 0:38:05.120 was sort of came before this. 0:38:05.120 --> 0:38:07.359 This has to be part of a dialogue that we've 0:38:07.400 --> 0:38:10.600 lost pieces of over the years, right, It is like 0:38:10.719 --> 0:38:15.239 about two pages of like Badger erotica. That is, it's 0:38:15.239 --> 0:38:18.080 weirdly the love Me for my jenes line stands out 0:38:18.120 --> 0:38:19.799 to me. But I may be reading more into that 0:38:19.800 --> 0:38:24.000 that is necessary. But yeah, so you know that's the 0:38:24.080 --> 0:38:26.279 kind of stuff he's doing. He's like, it's it's pretty 0:38:26.360 --> 0:38:29.560 lighthearted comedy, right, or it's at least attempting to be. 0:38:30.560 --> 0:38:32.239 So he's not, as far as I can tell, on 0:38:32.400 --> 0:38:34.960 like the serious hacking side of what the Cult of 0:38:35.000 --> 0:38:39.279 the Dead Cow is doing at this period of time. Now, 0:38:39.480 --> 0:38:42.360 Jarvin weathered the fall of Usenet and not long after 0:38:42.400 --> 0:38:45.200 the Eternal September began he dropped out of Berkeley for 0:38:45.239 --> 0:38:48.080 a job at a tech company. He started flirting with 0:38:48.160 --> 0:38:52.600 the specific strains of more authoritarian money simptered libertarian ideology 0:38:52.600 --> 0:38:55.120 as opposed to like, you know, the old school guys 0:38:55.120 --> 0:38:59.040 who actually, like you know, really were pretty focused on 0:38:59.160 --> 0:39:01.759 human liberty. I think kind of the last dregs of 0:39:01.800 --> 0:39:04.560 those guys, or you saw it, like Penin Teller would 0:39:04.600 --> 0:39:07.439 be a great evidence of that, right, Like that kind 0:39:07.440 --> 0:39:11.040 of libertarian was a lot more prominent back then. And 0:39:11.320 --> 0:39:13.480 he's sort of Yarvin is sort of right on the 0:39:13.600 --> 0:39:16.240 edge of the folks who got a lot of money 0:39:16.360 --> 0:39:19.000 in the tech industry and started getting angry that, like 0:39:19.040 --> 0:39:21.320 they have to still pay taxes to keep the roads 0:39:21.400 --> 0:39:25.440 up right. That's kind of where he moves into. And 0:39:25.520 --> 0:39:28.239 Yarvin is eventually going to kind of come out of 0:39:28.239 --> 0:39:30.719 that as a monarchist. And it behooves us to look 0:39:30.719 --> 0:39:33.680 at how that happened. Now there are some signs of 0:39:33.719 --> 0:39:36.560 his ideological turn. And another short story he wrote for 0:39:36.600 --> 0:39:38.799 the Cult of the Dead Cow the year after that 0:39:38.880 --> 0:39:42.560 Badger story in nineteen ninety four. This piece is titled 0:39:42.560 --> 0:39:45.080 The Bishop, and it opens with the lines no one 0:39:45.120 --> 0:39:48.359 has come into the cathedral in some time. It's about 0:39:48.400 --> 0:39:50.600 an old bishop who exists out of time in a 0:39:50.640 --> 0:39:53.160 moldering cathedral that no one has visited in years, and 0:39:53.200 --> 0:39:57.280 at one point Jarvin, possibly describing himself, writes, the bishop 0:39:57.360 --> 0:39:59.799 is a man of logic. Unlike many older people, he 0:39:59.880 --> 0:40:02.480 is unwilling to repaint the world he sees around him 0:40:02.680 --> 0:40:04.839 to make it a more comfortable place in which to live. 0:40:05.160 --> 0:40:08.480 He recognizes unpleasant facts, indeed he delights in them for 0:40:08.520 --> 0:40:11.200 the in the act of recognition he finds proof that 0:40:11.239 --> 0:40:14.400 his faculties have not decayed to that state of contented oblivion, 0:40:14.600 --> 0:40:18.440 which he believes a sheer precursor to death. And this 0:40:18.520 --> 0:40:21.480 is kind of noteworthy in part because the term cathedral 0:40:21.640 --> 0:40:24.799 is going to be really influential important for Jarv and 0:40:24.800 --> 0:40:26.239 he's going to come to use it as a term 0:40:26.280 --> 0:40:32.240 to refer to the news media, the political establishment, and academia. 0:40:32.400 --> 0:40:32.560 Right. 0:40:32.640 --> 0:40:35.879 Everyone who annoys him, right is the cathedral. And this 0:40:35.960 --> 0:40:39.560 is sort of like the evil regime that he's going 0:40:39.600 --> 0:40:41.759 to set himself to the task of destroying. And this 0:40:41.880 --> 0:40:44.160 is how a lot of these guys think. It's why 0:40:44.160 --> 0:40:46.560 there's so much focused why guys like Vance spends so 0:40:46.640 --> 0:40:51.440 much time attacking schools, attacking like professors and academia. It's 0:40:51.560 --> 0:40:54.040 why there's so much hatred of journalists, right, These are 0:40:54.040 --> 0:40:58.400 the people who, in his eyes, are invested in propping 0:40:58.520 --> 0:41:02.279 up a clearly dysfunctnctional, failing society. Right, and so you 0:41:02.360 --> 0:41:06.040 have to destroy the cathedral in order to build anything new. 0:41:06.160 --> 0:41:08.600 That's that's what he's going to come to believe. Right 0:41:09.280 --> 0:41:12.320 In the early two thousands, the dot com bubble bursts, 0:41:12.440 --> 0:41:14.400 and at some point after that, Yarvin wound up with 0:41:14.400 --> 0:41:16.520 several hundred grand as the result of a buyout of 0:41:16.560 --> 0:41:19.000 a company he worked at, So not enough to retire, 0:41:19.040 --> 0:41:20.960 but enough to sit around and really think about what 0:41:21.000 --> 0:41:22.080 he wants to do next. 0:41:22.520 --> 0:41:24.000 What year is this? 0:41:24.000 --> 0:41:26.080 This would be like in the early two thousands, So 0:41:26.080 --> 0:41:28.160 this is all happening sometime between like two thousand and 0:41:28.200 --> 0:41:31.359 one and two thousand and four, you know, the dot 0:41:31.400 --> 0:41:33.879 com bubble bursts. Sometime after nine to eleven, I think 0:41:33.920 --> 0:41:36.120 is when he gets bought out, And by two thousand 0:41:36.160 --> 0:41:38.799 and three or four, he's kind of sitting around on 0:41:38.880 --> 0:41:41.920 a pile of money, reading a lot, trying to figure 0:41:41.920 --> 0:41:43.520 out what he wants to do next with his life. 0:41:44.280 --> 0:41:46.400 What he kind of decides is that he wants to 0:41:46.400 --> 0:41:49.880 think about politics and economics. Now, Yarvin had made some 0:41:50.040 --> 0:41:52.560 friends during his tech years, and he'd gotten interested in 0:41:52.640 --> 0:41:56.760 Austrian school economists, mostly because of this University of Tennessee 0:41:56.800 --> 0:41:59.720 law professor Glenn Reynolds, who was like an early blogger, 0:41:59.760 --> 0:42:02.320 who had gotten Jarvin interested in a guy named Ludwig 0:42:02.400 --> 0:42:07.440 von Meses, and eventually through this Jarvin gets interested in 0:42:07.680 --> 0:42:12.280 a fan of Meaes another theoretician named Marie Rothbard. Rothbard 0:42:12.360 --> 0:42:16.439 was a foundational a narco capitalist thinker. I don't really 0:42:16.520 --> 0:42:19.080 like that term, but that's what they called themselves, and 0:42:19.719 --> 0:42:22.799 he basically believes like there should not be a state, right, 0:42:22.840 --> 0:42:26.600 there should not be any power higher than individuals and 0:42:26.800 --> 0:42:30.239 corporations spending their money to make things happen. Right, That's 0:42:30.320 --> 0:42:34.560 kind of the gist of anarchist. Yeah, yeah, and you know, 0:42:34.840 --> 0:42:39.760 I think like a more like an anarchist would argue 0:42:40.080 --> 0:42:42.000 the fact that you have a bunch of money is 0:42:42.080 --> 0:42:45.280 like as much a problematic hierarchy as, you know, anything 0:42:45.320 --> 0:42:48.359 that the state does, and not, like you can't really 0:42:48.360 --> 0:42:50.719 be an anarcho capitalist. A lot of people would argue, 0:42:50.760 --> 0:42:55.440 but Rothbard is one who feels like, basically that the state, 0:42:55.600 --> 0:42:57.719 the primary reason the state is unethical is that it 0:42:57.719 --> 0:42:59.400 stops people from doing what they want to do with 0:42:59.440 --> 0:43:02.160 their money. Right, Whereas an anarchist would be like, well, 0:43:02.160 --> 0:43:03.920 the reason that the state is an ethical is that 0:43:04.160 --> 0:43:09.280 states can do a lot of harm to people at scale. Right, Anyway, 0:43:10.040 --> 0:43:11.799 none of that really matters to the point, which is 0:43:11.840 --> 0:43:16.400 that he gets really interested in this guy Rothbard and Rothbard. 0:43:16.440 --> 0:43:19.439 One of the things the Rights about is this kind 0:43:19.440 --> 0:43:23.480 of anger at the concept of people advocating for civil rights. 0:43:23.640 --> 0:43:23.839 Right. 0:43:24.480 --> 0:43:27.920 Anyone advocating for civil rights, in Rothbard's mind, is an 0:43:28.040 --> 0:43:31.800 enemy right because the only way to advocate for civil 0:43:31.880 --> 0:43:34.640 rights is to advocate for the state to make rules 0:43:34.800 --> 0:43:39.360 about those rights, and that leads inevitably to tyranny. Rothbard wrote, 0:43:39.400 --> 0:43:42.560 behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleads for equality is 0:43:42.600 --> 0:43:45.960 a ruthless drive for placing themselves the elites, at the 0:43:45.960 --> 0:43:48.560 top of a new hierarchy of power. And this is 0:43:48.560 --> 0:43:50.040 something you see a lot on the right today, this 0:43:50.160 --> 0:43:53.319 idea that like any group of people who are advocating 0:43:53.400 --> 0:43:55.840 for their own civil who are advocating for civil rights 0:43:55.880 --> 0:43:59.760 because they're being oppressed under the present system are secretly 0:43:59.760 --> 0:44:02.719 trying to make themselves rulers, right. All they really want 0:44:02.760 --> 0:44:04.719 to do is a press you by, I don't know, 0:44:04.719 --> 0:44:08.560 getting the right to vote or own credit cards or whatever. 0:44:09.960 --> 0:44:12.359 So that's kind of like a big part of Rothbard's 0:44:12.480 --> 0:44:15.840 belief system, and Jarvin really takes to that now. And 0:44:16.239 --> 0:44:17.879 that quote that I just read from him came out 0:44:17.880 --> 0:44:19.680 in ninety five, so you get the kind of feeling 0:44:19.760 --> 0:44:22.400 like this is the sort of thinking Jarvin is hoovering 0:44:22.480 --> 0:44:24.839 up in that period right before you know, the dot 0:44:24.880 --> 0:44:27.880 com boom and then the dot com bust. And ultimately 0:44:27.920 --> 0:44:30.680 his reading of these Austrian school guys leads him to 0:44:30.719 --> 0:44:34.319 another dude named Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle's been dead for 0:44:34.400 --> 0:44:37.320 a while. He's a Scottish philosopher from the eighteen hundreds, 0:44:37.600 --> 0:44:40.719 and he's kind of seen as a proto to these 0:44:41.120 --> 0:44:43.760 a lot of these kind of like more modern thinkers 0:44:43.760 --> 0:44:47.239 that he's reading. And Carlyle is, you know, he's a 0:44:46.960 --> 0:44:49.920 he's an authoritarian who believes that you need a strong 0:44:49.960 --> 0:44:54.279 man to stop groups of marginalized people from making themselves 0:44:54.320 --> 0:44:58.000 the new tyrants, right. And he's also as we'll talk 0:44:58.000 --> 0:45:00.399 about a massive racist. He's one of the these guys 0:45:00.440 --> 0:45:05.080 who justify slavery as being a fundamentally ethical system for 0:45:05.160 --> 0:45:10.200 reasons of like, basically, certain groups of people are different genetically, 0:45:10.320 --> 0:45:13.920 so slavery is a natural like hierarchy in society. So 0:45:13.960 --> 0:45:17.160 these are the kind of people that Jarvin is digesting 0:45:17.280 --> 0:45:19.040 when he comes upon the work of a fellow named 0:45:19.040 --> 0:45:23.160 Hans Herman Hop. Hop is a German born political theorist 0:45:23.280 --> 0:45:27.560 and a leading Austrian School economist. He's another anarcho capitalist, 0:45:28.080 --> 0:45:31.320 and hop is a big advocate of monarchy in a 0:45:31.360 --> 0:45:34.880 way that he defines monarchy as a privately owned government 0:45:35.200 --> 0:45:37.960 as opposed to a democracy, which he calls a publicly 0:45:38.000 --> 0:45:42.200 owned government. And Hopp believes that the transition from monarchy 0:45:42.239 --> 0:45:45.120 to democracy over the twentieth century was like the big 0:45:45.160 --> 0:45:47.680 mistake that we made as humans and has caused nothing 0:45:47.719 --> 0:45:52.640 but civilizational decline ever since. And from Hop Jarvin gets 0:45:52.680 --> 0:45:55.040 the idea that the best way to run anything is 0:45:55.080 --> 0:45:57.319 to have one guy be in charge of it. Right, 0:45:57.360 --> 0:46:00.920 You can't effectively run an organization if there's any power sharing. 0:46:01.239 --> 0:46:03.560 The only way to do anything is to have a 0:46:03.560 --> 0:46:08.239 single person be invested with absolute power right. I know 0:46:08.280 --> 0:46:11.359 that's kind of like a tortured logical route, but those 0:46:11.360 --> 0:46:13.719 are sort of the ingredients that eventually cook up to 0:46:13.800 --> 0:46:17.960 him becoming a monarchist. Right now, we might say that's 0:46:17.960 --> 0:46:20.160 not the most logical thing, right if you look at 0:46:20.160 --> 0:46:23.000 what happened to all of the absolute monarchies, they kind 0:46:23.000 --> 0:46:26.880 of destroyed each other circle World War One, And Jarvin 0:46:26.920 --> 0:46:29.840 would argue, no, no, no, those weren't real absolute monarchies. 0:46:29.880 --> 0:46:33.080 They had they all made too many compromises with different 0:46:33.160 --> 0:46:37.319 sort of like democratical instruments within those societies. And that's 0:46:37.360 --> 0:46:39.759 the reason why Austria Hungary fell, and that's the reason 0:46:39.760 --> 0:46:42.920 why the czar fell, right, they didn't have quite enough power. 0:46:43.400 --> 0:46:44.320 I think that's silly. 0:46:45.080 --> 0:46:50.840 Well, sure, it places such an unreasonable amount of faith 0:46:51.040 --> 0:46:55.880 in one person or in just like, yeah, the integrity 0:46:55.120 --> 0:47:00.719 of humans, like yeah, like people. The reason that it's 0:47:01.080 --> 0:47:04.960 the reason that you have to embrace a messy system 0:47:05.040 --> 0:47:07.040 is because people are inherently messy. 0:47:07.360 --> 0:47:10.359 Yeah, that's a great way to put it. 0:47:10.719 --> 0:47:14.920 A monarchy is a wonderful fantasy. But like, how do 0:47:14.960 --> 0:47:18.440 you pick the guy? How do you pick that person? 0:47:18.680 --> 0:47:21.600 And then and then what if he gets hit on 0:47:21.640 --> 0:47:26.760 the head wrong if he's wrong and n Dali Lama 0:47:26.800 --> 0:47:30.279 thing where where it's it's a birthright thing. And then 0:47:30.400 --> 0:47:34.160 like what if what if they're just like a narcissistic, 0:47:34.880 --> 0:47:41.719 suicidal or depressive or whatever, Like, uh, what if they 0:47:41.719 --> 0:47:42.600 want nothing to do with it? 0:47:42.640 --> 0:47:43.000 I don't know. 0:47:43.040 --> 0:47:44.480 It just seems nuts. 0:47:45.239 --> 0:47:48.320 It's this wild It's this thing that like everyone understands 0:47:48.360 --> 0:47:51.839 the frustration with democracy, right, Like it's really messy and 0:47:51.920 --> 0:47:54.880 really annoying a lot of the time, and like people 0:47:54.920 --> 0:47:58.520 make a lot of bad decisions, especially even as collectives. 0:47:58.520 --> 0:48:01.080 Groups of people make really bad decisions a lot of 0:48:01.120 --> 0:48:03.960 the time. Right, But then saying like the solution to 0:48:04.000 --> 0:48:07.680 this is to have one guy be in charge. It's like, well, 0:48:07.880 --> 0:48:10.279 number one, how do you pick that guy? Number two? 0:48:10.440 --> 0:48:12.799 Like we've all seen it, Like people change over the 0:48:12.840 --> 0:48:15.720 course of their lives, right, Like what happens if that guy, 0:48:16.360 --> 0:48:19.239 like his mental decapacity gets declined or whatever, or he 0:48:19.239 --> 0:48:22.600 gets obsessed with something weird and crazy and dangerous, which 0:48:22.600 --> 0:48:25.520 is what happens to every monarchy, Right, They all wind 0:48:25.600 --> 0:48:29.279 up ruled by like maniacs who make terrible decisions, which 0:48:29.320 --> 0:48:31.360 is like why we had World War One. You have 0:48:31.440 --> 0:48:34.319 all these like monarchs who were obsessed with these very 0:48:34.360 --> 0:48:40.040 silly attitudes with the and these very silly, petty grievances 0:48:40.080 --> 0:48:43.480 between each other, and had made like generations of terrible 0:48:43.480 --> 0:48:46.240 decisions when it came to like purchasing arms and building 0:48:46.239 --> 0:48:49.920 their military machines, and like, it just turns out that 0:48:50.280 --> 0:48:54.040 the bad decisions of one guy are certainly not like 0:48:54.280 --> 0:48:57.640 any less catastrophic than the bad decisions of like groups 0:48:57.640 --> 0:49:01.239 of people. Right, anytime you've got people who spend all 0:49:01.280 --> 0:49:03.919 of their time like theorizing about the way things ought 0:49:03.960 --> 0:49:06.040 to be, as opposed to like dealing with the way 0:49:06.080 --> 0:49:10.040 people are, you're going to wind up with with nonsense, right, 0:49:10.200 --> 0:49:13.440 And like that's that. Unfortunately, every now and then we 0:49:13.480 --> 0:49:16.359 get to see like what that nonsense looks like, you know, 0:49:16.560 --> 0:49:18.719 when when people actually put it in place. You know, 0:49:18.760 --> 0:49:21.480 in the case of like absolute monarchies like this, we 0:49:21.560 --> 0:49:24.280 got the trenches in World War One. In the case 0:49:24.320 --> 0:49:28.320 of like a very authoritarian communism, you know, we got Stalin, 0:49:29.360 --> 0:49:31.560 And I guess kind of like part of part of 0:49:31.560 --> 0:49:33.839 why I think Jarvin is important to understand is that 0:49:33.880 --> 0:49:36.440 as kooky as a lot of this stuff is, he 0:49:36.560 --> 0:49:39.239 is a guy who wants to take these theories that 0:49:39.280 --> 0:49:41.400 he made himself when he was like sitting alone in 0:49:41.440 --> 0:49:44.799 his apartment reading books and not really any interacting with 0:49:44.840 --> 0:49:47.600 real people. He's a guy who wants those theories to 0:49:47.680 --> 0:49:51.480 govern the lives of hundreds of millions, ideally billions, right, 0:49:52.800 --> 0:49:55.319 And that's a real dangerous kind of person. You know, 0:49:55.840 --> 0:49:58.719 Like we can regular people can sit around and like 0:49:58.800 --> 0:50:01.160 read their books and and talk about like, well, this 0:50:01.280 --> 0:50:04.000 might be neat or this might be neat. But whenever 0:50:04.000 --> 0:50:06.640 you're talking about, like, I know, how to reorder all 0:50:06.680 --> 0:50:11.719 of society, you've become dangerous. And you know, that's kind 0:50:11.760 --> 0:50:14.120 of what Yarvin is doing during this period of time 0:50:14.120 --> 0:50:16.240 where he's sitting at home and he's reading his books. 0:50:17.760 --> 0:50:20.919 So the kind of the system that he pulls out 0:50:20.920 --> 0:50:23.120 of this period where he's just like get reading everything 0:50:23.120 --> 0:50:26.520 he can get his hands on, is that monarchs are. 0:50:26.960 --> 0:50:29.920 A monarchy is the ideal kind of system of government 0:50:29.920 --> 0:50:33.239 because it's the best at maximizing long term profits within 0:50:33.280 --> 0:50:37.080 a society. Because monarchs have to think long term, right, 0:50:37.120 --> 0:50:40.480 they can't be destructive in the short term, like you 0:50:40.520 --> 0:50:42.640 know leaders in a democracy are because they have a 0:50:42.680 --> 0:50:45.040 limited term limit. You know, maybe they only care about 0:50:45.160 --> 0:50:48.680 benefiting themselves. A monarch wouldn't act that way because they 0:50:48.680 --> 0:50:51.160 have no desire to destroy their own property. And again, 0:50:51.160 --> 0:50:53.040 I would I would point you, yeah, I would point 0:50:53.080 --> 0:50:57.480 you back to Yeah, we could talk about like the 0:50:57.520 --> 0:51:02.040 Saudi royal family too, right, entirely bio oil or Roman emperors, 0:51:03.120 --> 0:51:05.879 like literally most of the monarchies that have ever been 0:51:06.000 --> 0:51:08.440 have like collapsed as a result of the fact that 0:51:08.440 --> 0:51:11.440 that's also an inherently destructive thing. You know, some of 0:51:11.480 --> 0:51:14.160 that just comes down to human nature. But he does 0:51:14.239 --> 0:51:16.960 try to deal with this, the fact that monarchies clearly 0:51:17.000 --> 0:51:19.720 don't work the way that he thinks that they should. 0:51:20.760 --> 0:51:22.920 And he thinks that a big part of the issue 0:51:23.160 --> 0:51:26.919 is that, you you, they all make too many compromises. Right, 0:51:26.960 --> 0:51:29.160 all of these monarchies that collapsed during the turn of 0:51:29.160 --> 0:51:33.080 the century had allowed some democratic elements into society. And 0:51:33.600 --> 0:51:36.480 you know, they had allowed that because there were revolutions, right, 0:51:36.560 --> 0:51:40.040 people like occupied Vienna for a period of time in 0:51:40.120 --> 0:51:42.680 forty eight, Like, there were a bunch of like socialist 0:51:42.800 --> 0:51:45.759 uprisings in the middle of the nineteenth century, and as 0:51:45.760 --> 0:51:49.719 a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies into introduced reforms, 0:51:49.840 --> 0:51:52.600 you know, and he sees those reforms as this was 0:51:52.640 --> 0:51:56.240 like a terrible step that ensured their demise as opposed 0:51:56.239 --> 0:51:59.600 to like, well, the absolute monarch chose to make those 0:51:59.640 --> 0:52:02.480 reforms because they could not hold on to power otherwise. 0:52:02.560 --> 0:52:06.120 But again, there's never a perfect logical consistency with guys. 0:52:06.160 --> 0:52:08.759 I asked this question. Yeah, so like, if you're an 0:52:08.800 --> 0:52:16.239 absolute monarch, are you delegating anything you're are delegating to? 0:52:16.400 --> 0:52:21.319 Like what are the strung? What is the is the 0:52:22.800 --> 0:52:24.440 like do you have to be just like an insane 0:52:24.440 --> 0:52:26.960 micromanager to be Yeah, but. 0:52:27.400 --> 0:52:29.120 I think the key is the key is to him. 0:52:29.520 --> 0:52:32.480 The difference would be like a bureaucratic structure, wherein there 0:52:32.520 --> 0:52:34.960 are other centers of power, right like if you've got 0:52:35.160 --> 0:52:37.719 a constitutional monarch, but there's still some kind of like 0:52:37.800 --> 0:52:41.000 Congress or Senate or whatever that has some things that 0:52:41.040 --> 0:52:46.200 are within its scope. And with right, he he he wants, 0:52:46.280 --> 0:52:48.680 he wants. He does actually view it as a CEO 0:52:48.800 --> 0:52:52.120 where they do delegate, but the CEO is ultimately the 0:52:52.160 --> 0:52:57.399 guy in power, right who they saw the delegatees. I mean, 0:52:57.920 --> 0:53:01.440 I think the CEO in his ideal like situation, right, 0:53:01.560 --> 0:53:04.400 like his ideal system of government that he kind of 0:53:04.400 --> 0:53:07.600 comes around to is like the way Facebook is run right, 0:53:07.680 --> 0:53:10.319 where you do have like a border directors technically, but 0:53:10.440 --> 0:53:13.439 Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that like no one 0:53:13.480 --> 0:53:16.080 can force him out. The buck stops with him, like 0:53:16.200 --> 0:53:19.120 he ultimately has all of the power in that organization. 0:53:19.719 --> 0:53:25.640 That's how Jarvin thinks country should be run right, which. 0:53:25.520 --> 0:53:28.040 In his defense, Facebook is a flawless organization. 0:53:28.160 --> 0:53:31.680 Yeah, yeah, we all know that nothing ever goes wrong there. 0:53:34.440 --> 0:53:38.279 So the final straw for Jarvin's tolerance of democracy came 0:53:38.280 --> 0:53:39.799 in two thousand and four as a result of the 0:53:39.840 --> 0:53:43.680 swift Boat's Veteran for swift Boat Veterans for Truth scandal. 0:53:43.920 --> 0:53:47.440 You remember this, I'm sure right, Oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, 0:53:47.440 --> 0:53:49.640 this is back in the two thousand and four election 0:53:49.800 --> 0:53:52.680 John Kerry with the Democratic nominee. Kerrie had been wounded 0:53:52.719 --> 0:53:56.040 three times in Vietnam, and then after he had left 0:53:56.040 --> 0:53:58.560 the service, he had become an anti war activist, right 0:53:58.560 --> 0:54:00.879 he like testified in Congress this was a really big deal, 0:54:01.480 --> 0:54:04.440 and so as number one. As a result, conservatives had 0:54:04.520 --> 0:54:07.640 never really forgiven John Kerry for as they saw betraying 0:54:07.920 --> 0:54:12.560 the country in Vietnam, and also obviously, like Bush was 0:54:13.080 --> 0:54:15.000 running on the back of two wars that he had 0:54:15.040 --> 0:54:18.520 gotten the country and Carrie had been against those. So 0:54:18.560 --> 0:54:21.319 there was this like pretty hideous conflict. And the way 0:54:21.360 --> 0:54:23.160 that a lot of folks on the right chose to, 0:54:23.480 --> 0:54:26.960 like particularly those within Bush's campaign, chose to respond was 0:54:27.000 --> 0:54:30.600 by arguing and bringing up, you know, people who claimed 0:54:30.960 --> 0:54:32.919 people who had served in Vietnam, who claimed that Kerry 0:54:32.960 --> 0:54:35.759 had lied about his service right, that he hadn't really 0:54:35.760 --> 0:54:37.879 done the things he'd done, that his purple hearts were 0:54:37.960 --> 0:54:41.840 essentially like due to exaggerations, and none of this was true, 0:54:42.600 --> 0:54:46.040 and in fact, like when journalists actually talk to people 0:54:46.080 --> 0:54:47.839 who had served with carry, they're like, no, he was 0:54:47.960 --> 0:54:53.080 like a very good soldier who was wounded repeatedly doing 0:54:53.120 --> 0:54:57.120 his job. But the propat Canada campaign largely worked right, 0:54:57.480 --> 0:55:00.880 and Yarvin that critically he bought the propit Ganda campaign, 0:55:00.960 --> 0:55:03.760 and he was angry that the media, in his eyes, 0:55:03.880 --> 0:55:07.520 worked to protect Carrie, which proved that it was fundamentally 0:55:07.640 --> 0:55:11.120 evil and allied with Academia and what people now call 0:55:11.200 --> 0:55:15.239 the deep state, career government employees operating this sort of 0:55:15.280 --> 0:55:18.400 shadow government that really ran things right. His attitude is 0:55:18.400 --> 0:55:21.720 that because John Kerrey didn't suffer enough from the swift 0:55:21.760 --> 0:55:25.000 boat scandal. That means that the whole media complex in 0:55:25.040 --> 0:55:27.719 the United States was corrupt and needed to be destroyed, 0:55:27.760 --> 0:55:30.480 which is a crazy thing to lead you to that conclusion. 0:55:32.600 --> 0:55:35.440 Like it's just it's one of the it's interesting to 0:55:35.520 --> 0:55:38.480 me because this guy really does he tries to portray 0:55:38.600 --> 0:55:45.640 himself as this like dark philosopher, like esoteric almost political 0:55:45.719 --> 0:55:47.879 mad man, but when you get right down to it, 0:55:47.920 --> 0:55:51.760 he's like your crank uncle who's angry about John Carrey 0:55:51.800 --> 0:55:52.560 on Facebook. 0:55:53.360 --> 0:55:56.640 Well, also the swift voting. It's a weird thing to 0:55:57.960 --> 0:56:01.160 it's a weird thing to take from that whole chapter 0:56:02.080 --> 0:56:06.919 of political American political history because it because swift boating worked. Yeah, 0:56:06.960 --> 0:56:09.120 and then and then media, by the way, took the 0:56:09.160 --> 0:56:14.799 bait and just like amplified the story and uh yeah, 0:56:14.880 --> 0:56:18.920 and if they tried to protect Carrie, which I'm I'm 0:56:18.960 --> 0:56:21.640 sure a few journalists probably. 0:56:21.280 --> 0:56:23.400 Wanted, certainly individuals. 0:56:22.800 --> 0:56:26.640 Yeah they failed. Yeah, they didn't work. 0:56:27.680 --> 0:56:29.920 Like that's like and that's how I would say, is 0:56:29.960 --> 0:56:32.360 like I think if you're saying what happened the swift 0:56:32.400 --> 0:56:35.120 Boating thing is why I lost faith in the media, 0:56:35.200 --> 0:56:41.279 that's reasonable, but not for the reason that he did, right, Yeah, 0:56:41.320 --> 0:56:44.760 but anyway, that's what that's where he goes, right, speaking 0:56:44.840 --> 0:56:49.879 of the shadow government that really runs things. That's all 0:56:49.920 --> 0:57:01.000 of our sponsors are affiliated with. We're back. So now 0:57:01.400 --> 0:57:04.359 the years that Yarvin is kind of doing his having 0:57:04.360 --> 0:57:06.560 his like period in the wilderness, coming up with his 0:57:06.600 --> 0:57:10.080 political ideology largely like two thousand and three or four 0:57:10.120 --> 0:57:12.400 to like two thousand and seven or so, are the 0:57:12.480 --> 0:57:15.160 years that the tech industry like that brings us Web 0:57:15.200 --> 0:57:18.160 two point zero is starting to emerge. You get Google, 0:57:18.720 --> 0:57:21.440 you get you know, Apple had been around for a while, right, 0:57:21.560 --> 0:57:24.000 but they you know, we start to see like the 0:57:24.080 --> 0:57:28.360 what's going to become the smartphone era like grind towards 0:57:28.440 --> 0:57:32.480 you know, coming into being. Facebook also starts like two 0:57:32.520 --> 0:57:34.120 thousand and six or seven, I think, is like when 0:57:34.160 --> 0:57:36.680 it very first starts out. So like this is kind 0:57:36.680 --> 0:57:39.560 of the early birth of the Web two point zero era, 0:57:39.640 --> 0:57:43.080 which are all of these founder driven startups for the 0:57:43.120 --> 0:57:46.920 most part, right, And Yarvin comes to see this, this 0:57:47.000 --> 0:57:50.400 system that gives us Google and Facebook as inherently better 0:57:50.560 --> 0:57:53.280 than the system that governs the country. Right, it's and 0:57:53.320 --> 0:57:56.760 it's more akin to his kind of idealized absolute monarchy. 0:57:57.320 --> 0:57:59.440 So by this point in time, around two thousand and seven, 0:58:00.040 --> 0:58:02.840 Vin has more or less come across all the ingredients 0:58:02.880 --> 0:58:06.480 of his new ideology, this kind of reactionary monarchism with 0:58:06.600 --> 0:58:10.520 Austrian economic tendencies. The problem is that none of these 0:58:10.560 --> 0:58:13.320 philosophers that he likes, these guys like Roth barden Hopp, 0:58:13.600 --> 0:58:17.320 have quite gotten it right. And so he decides, I've 0:58:17.360 --> 0:58:19.840 got to start putting my ideas out there. I finally 0:58:19.880 --> 0:58:24.160 figured it out. I've consolidated the contradictions between all these systems, 0:58:24.920 --> 0:58:26.760 and now I'm going to start putting it out for 0:58:26.800 --> 0:58:30.080 people to see. Right. So in two thousand and seven 0:58:30.120 --> 0:58:32.240 he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis of reading 0:58:32.320 --> 0:58:34.720 that he'd put himself in, and he comes up with 0:58:34.760 --> 0:58:38.640 a blog under a pen name, Minsius Moldbug. And it's 0:58:38.720 --> 0:58:40.920 under this pen name that he's going to start writing 0:58:40.960 --> 0:58:43.920 a bunch of essays of political theory. In an interview 0:58:43.960 --> 0:58:47.360 with Max Raskin, Yarvin describes the origin of this nickname 0:58:47.400 --> 0:58:51.120 Minsius Moldbug. This way, it came from two different handles 0:58:51.120 --> 0:58:53.720 I was using in different places. I would post occasionally 0:58:53.760 --> 0:58:56.040 on Reddit or hacker News. Sometimes I would get banned, 0:58:56.040 --> 0:58:58.200 and I would choose the name of a new classical figure, 0:58:58.240 --> 0:59:00.520 and I just happened to land on Minsius. And then 0:59:00.560 --> 0:59:03.000 I was doing some economics posting, and I posted something 0:59:03.040 --> 0:59:05.600 about gold, but I said mold instead of gold, because 0:59:05.600 --> 0:59:08.640 I was talking about something with a hypothetical restricted supply. 0:59:09.680 --> 0:59:12.080 So it's just kind of like a foreign name, but 0:59:12.280 --> 0:59:15.520 it sounds like a little bit sinister, and it's interesting 0:59:15.560 --> 0:59:18.320 to me. Minsius the first name comes from a Confucian 0:59:18.320 --> 0:59:21.640 philosopher from the three hundreds BC who was a major 0:59:21.680 --> 0:59:24.919 figure in that kind of thought, and he had, during 0:59:24.960 --> 0:59:27.880 the Warring States period, interviewed a bunch of different kings 0:59:27.920 --> 0:59:31.600 and written a book about like what he'd learned about ruling. Now, 0:59:31.640 --> 0:59:34.200 Minsius was kind of focused on getting monarchs to act 0:59:34.240 --> 0:59:37.600 more benevolently towards the poor and the downtrodden. So he's 0:59:37.600 --> 0:59:40.200 not really a figure that has a lot to do 0:59:40.280 --> 0:59:42.600 with the kind of politics Jarvin is about to espouse. 0:59:42.640 --> 0:59:45.280 I think he'd largely picked the name because it makes 0:59:45.320 --> 0:59:49.080 him sound kind of sinister. But he starts putting out 0:59:49.120 --> 0:59:52.280 his new thoughts on politics in this blog, in a 0:59:52.320 --> 0:59:56.520 series of essays called Unqualified Reservations, all geared at getting 0:59:56.560 --> 0:59:59.640 his readers on board with the idea of reorganizing society 0:59:59.680 --> 1:00:02.760 away from democracy and towards a kind of enlightened one 1:00:02.840 --> 1:00:04.920 man rule that he believes is going to work a 1:00:04.920 --> 1:00:10.440 lot better. Unlike most philosophers, Jarvin Peppers's essays with casual slurs. 1:00:11.120 --> 1:00:12.880 In reading one, where he talks about World War Two, 1:00:12.920 --> 1:00:15.680 he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a common slur 1:00:15.760 --> 1:00:18.600 at the time, and in another he makes a satiric 1:00:18.640 --> 1:00:21.360 statement about how the indigent poor should be destroyed and 1:00:21.400 --> 1:00:25.400 turned into biodiesel fuel. This kind of stuff, it hasn't 1:00:25.520 --> 1:00:28.120 the impact of getting like on the rare occasions in 1:00:28.160 --> 1:00:30.720 these early days that like major news outlets will look 1:00:30.720 --> 1:00:32.800 at his work, they'll kind of decide to ignore him 1:00:32.840 --> 1:00:35.680 because it's this guy dropping a bunch of racial slurs 1:00:35.680 --> 1:00:39.240 and crude jokes. He's clearly not a serious thinker. But 1:00:39.640 --> 1:00:43.840 the other thing that this style of discourse does is 1:00:43.880 --> 1:00:48.440 it's very attractive to young men, particularly young kind of 1:00:48.440 --> 1:00:51.760 intelligent autodid acts in the tech industry who spend a 1:00:51.760 --> 1:00:54.560 lot of time reading the internet. Right, And it is 1:00:55.080 --> 1:00:57.400 kind of in the same way that a lot of 1:00:57.520 --> 1:00:59.800 like the way people talk on four Chan is going 1:00:59.800 --> 1:01:02.200 to be attractive to these kinds of guys, right, And 1:01:02.240 --> 1:01:05.280 what you're seeing in these early Moldbug episodes, with this 1:01:05.440 --> 1:01:07.720 use of slurs and these kind of like joking not 1:01:07.840 --> 1:01:11.960 joking statements about killing poor people is the precursor to 1:01:12.040 --> 1:01:15.000 the way the alt right is going to talk about 1:01:15.000 --> 1:01:17.920 issues right and use kind of humor and jokes that 1:01:17.960 --> 1:01:21.440 aren't really jokes to kind of push more extreme ideas. 1:01:21.600 --> 1:01:21.800 Right. 1:01:22.240 --> 1:01:25.800 Moldbug is really the guy who starts doing that in 1:01:26.840 --> 1:01:28.320 I don't know if you'd say he was the first, 1:01:28.360 --> 1:01:30.720 but he's certainly the first with a platform to be 1:01:30.800 --> 1:01:32.720 doing that in a way that's really influential to a 1:01:32.760 --> 1:01:33.520 lot of these people. 1:01:34.160 --> 1:01:36.680 Now, can I ask another real I'm gonna I have 1:01:36.680 --> 1:01:40.360 two questions, Yeah, yeah. One is, are we sure we're 1:01:40.400 --> 1:01:43.280 pronouncing Mencius correctly? Is it not Menstus? 1:01:44.320 --> 1:01:47.120 I think it is Menshus sorry Menshus, yes, yes, but 1:01:47.160 --> 1:01:49.480 it spelled yeah the other way. 1:01:49.680 --> 1:01:52.919 And I have no idea. I just when you said 1:01:52.960 --> 1:01:56.760 it was a confusion, suddenly thought no, maybe anyway. 1:01:56.880 --> 1:01:59.440 Yeah, I think it is Menshus. Yeah. 1:01:59.480 --> 1:02:07.960 And then my second question is to what extent I 1:02:08.000 --> 1:02:13.080 find the humor aspect of this fascinating because it raises 1:02:13.160 --> 1:02:17.480 the possibility or I guess I should. I guess My 1:02:17.560 --> 1:02:20.920 question is like where on the spectrum of like just 1:02:21.120 --> 1:02:29.920 kind of like very mendacious and angry person who wants 1:02:29.960 --> 1:02:34.280 to reshape the world versus like like all the way 1:02:34.320 --> 1:02:37.160 to the other end of just being like a really 1:02:37.320 --> 1:02:42.920 giddy shitster gadfly with who just wants to throw crazy 1:02:42.960 --> 1:02:46.960 ideas out there and and get a reaction out of 1:02:47.000 --> 1:02:50.280 people the way like ninety percent of Twitter is like, 1:02:50.640 --> 1:02:55.040 where on that spectrum is he? Because it's that does 1:02:55.080 --> 1:03:00.840 sound like there's like, like, you know, churning up poor 1:03:00.920 --> 1:03:05.800 people to create biodiesel is a it's a tasteless joke. 1:03:05.840 --> 1:03:08.200 It's it's like a swifty Thomas Swift or it's like 1:03:08.280 --> 1:03:13.760 Jonathan Swift type joke, right, Like, but it could. 1:03:13.600 --> 1:03:16.400 Be construed as just like trolling, right right. 1:03:16.960 --> 1:03:19.240 Well, I think that's kind of the key point. So, 1:03:19.320 --> 1:03:21.200 like what you're talking about is like the term we 1:03:21.280 --> 1:03:24.920 use for it is shit posting, right and and Yarvin 1:03:24.960 --> 1:03:27.360 is very much a shit poster, right, But he's also 1:03:27.520 --> 1:03:30.320 using that as a tool where he understands that this 1:03:30.520 --> 1:03:34.280 is how young men particularly talk on the Internet, and 1:03:34.320 --> 1:03:36.920 It is something that inherently, if you're talking this way, 1:03:36.920 --> 1:03:40.160 if you're engaging this way, you have more credibility with 1:03:40.200 --> 1:03:43.640 them than you know, people who are trying to be 1:03:43.760 --> 1:03:48.520 more respectable, who largely like this chunk of folks doesn't 1:03:48.560 --> 1:03:51.280 think highly of right these like kind of like these 1:03:51.320 --> 1:03:55.400 traditional sort of like intellectual elites, you know, academics and 1:03:55.480 --> 1:03:58.439 journalists and alike, they have a lot of disdain for, 1:03:59.080 --> 1:04:02.760 but they trust someone who communicates like them. And so 1:04:02.960 --> 1:04:05.920 by using these kind of like by by basically peppering 1:04:05.960 --> 1:04:09.600 in sort of trolling language in these very serious articles 1:04:10.160 --> 1:04:14.919 arguing for anti democratic politics, he makes himself credible to them. 1:04:14.960 --> 1:04:18.880 And he also there's also a sense that because he's 1:04:19.000 --> 1:04:21.840 including some of this this stuff that is a lot racier, 1:04:22.800 --> 1:04:27.640 he's there's something almost forbidden knowledge about the stuff that 1:04:27.680 --> 1:04:29.600 he's putting out right that makes them want to share 1:04:29.640 --> 1:04:32.360 it with each other. And that's very much like a 1:04:32.400 --> 1:04:34.800 factor in his success. What he's doing here is like 1:04:35.400 --> 1:04:38.840 very much intentional and very intelligent and very effective, and 1:04:38.880 --> 1:04:40.760 it you know, if you want to look at kind 1:04:40.760 --> 1:04:45.880 of the ultimate uh uh like evolution of these sort 1:04:45.920 --> 1:04:48.080 of tactics, I think a great touch point would be 1:04:48.120 --> 1:04:52.120 the christ Church Church shooters manifesto, which included a lot 1:04:52.120 --> 1:04:54.600 of these like inside jokes, a lot of like forum 1:04:54.840 --> 1:04:59.960 troll language wrapped around serious arguments for like why people 1:05:00.040 --> 1:05:03.160 should carry out white supremacist attacks. And it's a kind 1:05:03.200 --> 1:05:06.640 of tactic that is really what gave us the alt 1:05:06.720 --> 1:05:09.439 right as a political force, and it's still very much 1:05:09.880 --> 1:05:12.480 how these people communicate now. I think it started to 1:05:12.560 --> 1:05:16.240 hurt them recently. The whole the weird stuff that Tim 1:05:16.280 --> 1:05:19.680 Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective 1:05:19.720 --> 1:05:22.600 thing because when you actually, like take the way these 1:05:22.640 --> 1:05:24.760 people talk amongst each other and put it up in 1:05:24.760 --> 1:05:28.200 front of an audience, it's deeply off putting to most people. 1:05:29.440 --> 1:05:32.760 But it also kind of led to this establishment of 1:05:32.800 --> 1:05:36.080 like an internal language for these folks that kind of 1:05:36.160 --> 1:05:41.200 led to an ossification of their ideological tendencies. Right, we're 1:05:41.200 --> 1:05:43.640 all using the same kind of terms and words that 1:05:43.680 --> 1:05:46.840 we've come to recognize as like dog whistles for different things, 1:05:47.840 --> 1:05:50.360 and Jarvin is really doing that in a very organized way. 1:05:50.400 --> 1:05:53.640 He's good at developing terms for people to use that 1:05:53.680 --> 1:05:56.360 get adopted on a large scale. You know. One of 1:05:56.400 --> 1:05:58.960 the best example this would be his term the cathedral, right, 1:05:59.480 --> 1:06:02.840 which you know he uses to be mean this nexus 1:06:02.880 --> 1:06:07.160 of everything he doesn't like, the liberal media, the university system, academia, 1:06:07.600 --> 1:06:11.840 you know, like career of government employees, everything he considers bad, 1:06:11.840 --> 1:06:15.880 and everything his ideal monarch would destroy. Right, in his 1:06:15.960 --> 1:06:19.320 ideal world, there's not going to be an independent academic community, 1:06:19.320 --> 1:06:21.960 there's not going to be newspapers or journalists, just a 1:06:22.040 --> 1:06:24.480 king and an aristocracy, and of course he's going to 1:06:24.480 --> 1:06:30.040 be a natural member of that aristocracy. Right now, he 1:06:30.080 --> 1:06:32.800 does kind of the last piece of this ideology he's 1:06:32.800 --> 1:06:35.960 putting together is he has to explain why a lot 1:06:35.960 --> 1:06:39.120 of these real world feudalist governments that fell apart all 1:06:39.200 --> 1:06:41.959 fell apart. And part of it is obviously they gave 1:06:42.080 --> 1:06:44.400 too much freedom to people who weren't the monarch. But 1:06:44.480 --> 1:06:46.480 the other thing he comes up with is that old 1:06:46.520 --> 1:06:50.200 monarchies denied citizens the freedom to exit. And so in 1:06:50.240 --> 1:06:53.840 this ideal world, he supposes countries will be small, like 1:06:54.080 --> 1:06:56.680 the size of a city in most cases, and they'll 1:06:56.720 --> 1:07:00.320 compete with citizens who would have the freedom to leave. Right, 1:07:00.400 --> 1:07:02.720 So it's fine. Now, there's a lot of questions that 1:07:02.760 --> 1:07:05.440 aren't answered here, like how do you make a society 1:07:05.920 --> 1:07:10.000 like function that way, and a world is interconnected as ours. 1:07:10.600 --> 1:07:13.480 How do you stop you know, one monarch from repeatedly 1:07:13.560 --> 1:07:15.720 taking over other a like how do you stop Why 1:07:15.800 --> 1:07:19.400 wouldn't they use force? Why would people just let valuable 1:07:19.440 --> 1:07:22.360 subjects leave? How do people leave if the monarch can 1:07:22.400 --> 1:07:24.560 stop them from taking their assets out? All of these 1:07:24.560 --> 1:07:27.800 things that like would be actual problems if anyone tried 1:07:27.840 --> 1:07:30.520 to do this sort of thing. Like there's not actually 1:07:30.520 --> 1:07:32.840 an answer to this, but like that's that's kind of 1:07:32.880 --> 1:07:36.360 his idealized version of a society. It's a bunch of 1:07:36.400 --> 1:07:39.800 small monarchies all over the world that people can theoretically 1:07:39.920 --> 1:07:42.840 leave and move between. The way people leave companies and 1:07:43.120 --> 1:07:45.360 go to work for other companies. So like, you know 1:07:45.400 --> 1:07:47.760 how much everybody loves work. That's how the whole government 1:07:47.800 --> 1:07:48.200 should be. 1:07:49.880 --> 1:07:52.480 That's it. That's wild. I hadn't thought of it as 1:07:54.480 --> 1:07:58.160 on such a small scale. Here's another question, like in 1:07:58.200 --> 1:08:02.280 the same way that like company will have a board 1:08:02.960 --> 1:08:07.520 that can like ousta ceo or like, like is there 1:08:07.520 --> 1:08:11.920 any is there any stopgap measure for like a disastrous 1:08:13.800 --> 1:08:16.880 or someone like let's say someone has like a brain 1:08:16.920 --> 1:08:21.200 eating worm. Yeah, right, but they are showing no symptoms 1:08:21.439 --> 1:08:26.000 when they are appointed or ascend to the the monarchy, 1:08:26.640 --> 1:08:29.160 but then over the next five years they become like 1:08:29.360 --> 1:08:34.160 absolutely batshit crazy. Is there any any stopgap there? 1:08:35.120 --> 1:08:37.599 The only stock gap he builds in is the idea 1:08:37.680 --> 1:08:41.200 that well, theoretically, if the if the if the ruler's bad, 1:08:41.560 --> 1:08:44.640 everyone would be able to leave and then their system. 1:08:44.280 --> 1:08:46.479 Will right right, Oh, it's that thing. 1:08:47.439 --> 1:08:49.200 Yeah, it's like it's that thing where it's like, well, 1:08:49.240 --> 1:08:51.200 but what if he wants to shoot people who tries. 1:08:51.280 --> 1:08:55.320 It's like rand Paul saying, like civil rights are are 1:08:55.439 --> 1:08:59.439 dumb because if you put like a whites only sign 1:08:59.479 --> 1:09:01.800 in front of your store, you're gonna lose business and 1:09:01.800 --> 1:09:04.439 you're gonna go out of business and the market will 1:09:04.520 --> 1:09:12.559 keep you from being racist. Meanwhile, like that, yeah, back 1:09:12.600 --> 1:09:16.040 when people did that, it was didn't work until the 1:09:16.120 --> 1:09:19.160 laws kicked in. Yeah. Yeah no. 1:09:19.240 --> 1:09:21.800 And it's it's this, it's these it's this weird mix 1:09:21.840 --> 1:09:27.439 of like naivete uh and like starry eyed thinking that 1:09:27.960 --> 1:09:30.160 to a degree, I think he's just kind of being 1:09:30.200 --> 1:09:33.519 dishonest with the naivete, like he knows any state like 1:09:33.600 --> 1:09:37.639 this would just be a dictatorship like enforced through violence. Right, 1:09:37.960 --> 1:09:39.880 But that's what he wants as long as he's a 1:09:39.880 --> 1:09:42.000 part of the aristocracy. And he's just kind of built 1:09:42.040 --> 1:09:44.559 in this. Well, people would just leave if they didn't 1:09:44.680 --> 1:09:47.679 like it, because he has to have some answer for it, right, 1:09:47.720 --> 1:09:50.800 But I kind of think he knows how ugly a 1:09:50.880 --> 1:09:53.040 system like this would be in practice. He's just more 1:09:53.120 --> 1:09:57.240 or less fine with it right now. The last kind 1:09:57.320 --> 1:10:00.400 of ingredient to the ideological system year Vin is cooking 1:10:00.479 --> 1:10:03.880 up is, of course racism. And I want to read 1:10:03.880 --> 1:10:06.439 a passage from an article in tech Crunch about Jarvin 1:10:06.479 --> 1:10:08.960 and his followers and how they are quote obsessed with 1:10:09.000 --> 1:10:12.320 a concept called human biodiversity what used to be called 1:10:12.360 --> 1:10:15.920 scientific racism. Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of, 1:10:15.960 --> 1:10:18.760 if not the most important personal traits, and that it's 1:10:18.760 --> 1:10:23.559 predominantly genetic. Neo reactionaries would replace or supplement the divine 1:10:23.680 --> 1:10:26.760 right of kings and the aristocracy with the genetic right 1:10:26.840 --> 1:10:27.440 of elites. 1:10:27.880 --> 1:10:28.160 Right. 1:10:28.320 --> 1:10:31.000 So this is another element of how he tries to justify, well, 1:10:31.000 --> 1:10:33.919 my system's smarter than the old school of monarchies. 1:10:34.000 --> 1:10:34.120 Right. 1:10:34.160 --> 1:10:36.360 It's not just these bunch of families are the people 1:10:36.360 --> 1:10:40.080 who are in charge. Our aristocracy is people who naturally 1:10:40.120 --> 1:10:43.639 are superior because of their IQ, because obviously that tells 1:10:43.680 --> 1:10:45.200 you everything about a person. 1:10:46.040 --> 1:10:51.599 Right, emotional IQ are we Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's 1:10:51.600 --> 1:10:52.479 not where that could be good. 1:10:52.680 --> 1:10:53.439 Absolutely not. 1:10:54.920 --> 1:10:57.280 I'm for that. I'm for people with like very strong 1:10:57.320 --> 1:11:00.240 emotional IQs being in charge of things. 1:11:00.760 --> 1:11:03.320 Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's not the system. We're 1:11:03.360 --> 1:11:04.960 going to have just a bunch of guys who are 1:11:05.000 --> 1:11:09.120 really good at coding running everything. You know, that way 1:11:09.200 --> 1:11:11.360 everything can finally work the way uber does. 1:11:12.280 --> 1:11:14.120 Oh so I'll feel unsafe all the time. 1:11:14.640 --> 1:11:15.559 Yeah, okay, cool. 1:11:17.880 --> 1:11:22.639 So it's probably not surprising muldbugs theories take off among 1:11:22.720 --> 1:11:27.200 specifically a lot of Silicon Valley young men right who 1:11:27.200 --> 1:11:30.400 are excessively online, and it also starts to take off. 1:11:30.400 --> 1:11:33.240 He begins being spread by a lot of like far 1:11:33.400 --> 1:11:35.800 right folks on the Internet and kind of the mid 1:11:35.880 --> 1:11:38.680 aughts who find his work and share it amongst themselves. 1:11:39.680 --> 1:11:43.200 It's just two years after Muldbug starts his blog that 1:11:43.320 --> 1:11:46.880 Peter Teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with 1:11:46.920 --> 1:11:50.839 liberty and Teal starts putting money Jarvin's way, right. He's 1:11:50.960 --> 1:11:54.559 probably the number one guy sending money towards Yarvin backing. 1:11:54.800 --> 1:11:58.320 He backs a tech company that Yarvin starts, and he's 1:11:58.400 --> 1:12:01.639 just generally sort of like but like his early sort 1:12:01.680 --> 1:12:06.559 of moneyed backer, right, and Yarvin kind of as a result, 1:12:06.600 --> 1:12:09.240 he starts getting shared almost like people are like handing 1:12:09.280 --> 1:12:11.599 out drugs to each other. Like, we want to keep 1:12:11.600 --> 1:12:13.400 this on the down low. You don't want like people 1:12:13.439 --> 1:12:16.720 too many people to know publicly that you're reading Moldbug, 1:12:16.760 --> 1:12:18.640 but like, have you read this latest article if you 1:12:18.720 --> 1:12:21.639 checked out this blog, right, And he starts getting invited 1:12:21.680 --> 1:12:24.880 to give talks, and he starts saying things in these 1:12:24.920 --> 1:12:27.600 talks that like speeches at these schools to these conservative 1:12:27.640 --> 1:12:30.719 clubs and the like, like if Americans want to change 1:12:30.720 --> 1:12:32.800 their government, they're going to have to get over their 1:12:32.800 --> 1:12:38.679 dictator phobia. There's really no other solution. And that's kind 1:12:38.760 --> 1:12:41.599 of the thinking that is going to lead directly into 1:12:41.720 --> 1:12:44.439 the alt right, and it's embrace of Donald Trump. Yarvin 1:12:44.600 --> 1:12:48.240 is one of the key ideological pieces there. He is 1:12:48.280 --> 1:12:50.920 building a bridge that is eventually going to lead to 1:12:50.960 --> 1:12:53.200 how a lot of these people think about what Trump 1:12:53.240 --> 1:12:53.760 should be. 1:12:53.920 --> 1:12:54.120 Right. 1:12:54.160 --> 1:12:56.719 It's part of why there's a lot of this joking 1:12:56.800 --> 1:12:59.160 not joking talk about wanting Trump to be like a 1:12:59.200 --> 1:13:02.200 god king, right, is it's a lot of these guys 1:13:02.240 --> 1:13:06.160 who are knowingly or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of 1:13:06.200 --> 1:13:10.080 came initially into the right from Jarvin. And yeah, that's 1:13:10.200 --> 1:13:12.280 that's part one and part two we're going to talk 1:13:12.320 --> 1:13:17.040 about like how he actually gets connected to politics and 1:13:17.280 --> 1:13:20.080 kind of where we are today with this guy. But uh, yeah, 1:13:20.120 --> 1:13:21.200 how are you feeling ed? 1:13:21.720 --> 1:13:22.759 I'm a little rattled. 1:13:25.120 --> 1:13:26.559 It's dark stuff, right. 1:13:26.479 --> 1:13:28.200 Yeah, that's the right reaction. 1:13:29.240 --> 1:13:35.280 Where what happens if if he is like in the court, 1:13:35.720 --> 1:13:42.960 the high court of this monarch and uh and gets 1:13:42.960 --> 1:13:47.680 a stomach flu and throws up in during a ceremony 1:13:47.680 --> 1:13:52.280 of some kind, and is like sent to a dungeon 1:13:52.320 --> 1:13:54.640 for the rest of his life at no fault of 1:13:54.640 --> 1:13:59.240 his own, Like what which is a very reasonable expectation 1:13:59.479 --> 1:14:04.240 of of a monarchical system. And so is he then 1:14:04.360 --> 1:14:07.200 sitting in the dungeon saying it's still the best, This 1:14:07.280 --> 1:14:09.960 is still the best, this is still the best system. 1:14:10.400 --> 1:14:12.880 I don't think he thinks that could happen, because I 1:14:12.920 --> 1:14:15.080 think he doesn't believe something that you and I believe 1:14:15.080 --> 1:14:18.080 in that I think most rational people believe, which is 1:14:18.080 --> 1:14:20.960 that like power corrupts, so like, even if you are 1:14:21.040 --> 1:14:23.360 not the kind of guy who would throw people in 1:14:23.400 --> 1:14:26.960 a dungeon when you become king, just the fact that 1:14:27.080 --> 1:14:30.719 being a king is deranging, right, having that kind of power, 1:14:31.160 --> 1:14:34.719 you will eventually get used to exercising it and doing 1:14:34.800 --> 1:14:37.200 things like punishing people who just annoy you. And we 1:14:37.280 --> 1:14:39.200 know that this happens because we have a lot of 1:14:39.240 --> 1:14:43.360 examples of like when people are made dictators, how folks 1:14:43.400 --> 1:14:46.200 who were at least more normal at one point become 1:14:46.400 --> 1:14:49.599 like more violent and dangerous to be around, right, Like, 1:14:49.640 --> 1:14:53.160 this is a very well documented thing that comes with power. 1:14:53.680 --> 1:14:56.760 And I think he doesn't believe that fundamentally because he 1:14:56.840 --> 1:15:03.360 thinks that power naturally accumulates in natural systems of elites, right, 1:15:03.760 --> 1:15:05.240 so it can't be bad for them. 1:15:05.439 --> 1:15:09.400 Or I suppose an argument might be, well, if I 1:15:09.439 --> 1:15:12.840 started to see those tendencies in the leader, I would 1:15:12.840 --> 1:15:18.000 then go to a different monarchy with But what if 1:15:18.000 --> 1:15:20.320 it is like what if you're the first one? What 1:15:20.360 --> 1:15:25.960 if you're the first example of that that guy going crazy? 1:15:27.439 --> 1:15:29.800 I think it's it's also like a failure. These guys 1:15:29.840 --> 1:15:32.640 all consider themselves historians, but they don't study history in 1:15:32.680 --> 1:15:36.000 any kind of like rigorous academic fashion. And like, every 1:15:36.000 --> 1:15:38.559 time I hear this argument about well people would just leave, 1:15:38.720 --> 1:15:41.760 I think about like what happened to Jewish people in 1:15:41.840 --> 1:15:45.599 Nazi Germany, where if they wanted to leave, the state 1:15:45.640 --> 1:15:48.920 would take all of their property effectively. Right, Some people 1:15:48.960 --> 1:15:51.240 did get to leave, but they didn't get to take 1:15:51.280 --> 1:15:54.040 their assets with them, right, Like that was a theft, 1:15:54.240 --> 1:15:56.679 was a part of the system. And it's a thing 1:15:56.760 --> 1:16:00.760 that a state operated by a single man with absolute 1:16:00.880 --> 1:16:04.599 power and to grudge can do. And there's no reason 1:16:04.680 --> 1:16:07.200 in his system that it wouldn't happen to anyone trying 1:16:07.200 --> 1:16:10.800 to leave a bad you know, Ceo King. Right, But 1:16:10.840 --> 1:16:14.160 I either again, he's just not bringing this up because 1:16:14.200 --> 1:16:16.080 he doesn't care about the people he thinks this would 1:16:16.160 --> 1:16:19.880 happen to, or he just isn't read enough on the 1:16:19.960 --> 1:16:22.400 kind of history that's actually relevant to how a system 1:16:22.439 --> 1:16:25.120 like this would work in real life. You know, that's 1:16:25.160 --> 1:16:28.160 what I would kind of respect. Yeah, yeah, people have 1:16:28.240 --> 1:16:32.080 tried this, Curtis, which he may very well be fully 1:16:32.120 --> 1:16:33.800 aware of, and just kind of trying to do a 1:16:33.800 --> 1:16:36.040 little sleight of hand here, right, because he's more or 1:16:36.120 --> 1:16:38.559 less fine with who he thinks would be the people 1:16:38.600 --> 1:16:41.720 targeted unfairly in this system, which is like he's one 1:16:41.720 --> 1:16:45.479 of these guys who is annoyed with the left and progressives, right, 1:16:45.479 --> 1:16:49.240 he hates social justice and advocates for social justice, so 1:16:49.720 --> 1:16:52.000 if those people get targeted, he doesn't have a problem 1:16:52.040 --> 1:16:55.040 with it. You know, I think part of it's just 1:16:55.120 --> 1:16:57.320 not believing you could ever be the victim of the 1:16:57.320 --> 1:17:00.280 system you seek to put in place, which you know, 1:17:00.560 --> 1:17:03.080 statistically you want to look at like what happened to 1:17:03.120 --> 1:17:06.320 the early Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of those 1:17:06.360 --> 1:17:09.680 guys delivered a retirement, right, and you know you don't 1:17:09.720 --> 1:17:12.519 want to talk about like the first generation of Nazi 1:17:12.560 --> 1:17:15.920 street fighters. A lot of those guys didn't wind up 1:17:15.960 --> 1:17:22.080 retiring either. Anyway, Ed, let's retire for this episode until 1:17:22.160 --> 1:17:27.200 part two. People should check out your podcast SNAPFO Season 1:17:27.280 --> 1:17:31.360 two is out now and yeah, we'll be back on Thursday. 1:17:31.840 --> 1:17:33.080 All right, see you then. 1:17:36.560 --> 1:17:39.280 Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. 1:17:39.640 --> 1:17:42.920 For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia 1:17:43.080 --> 1:17:46.280 dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, 1:17:46.360 --> 1:17:48.720 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,