Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 2: podcast that you are legally required to be listening to
Speaker 2: in at least four US states six if you have
Speaker 2: a criminal record and are currently working through probation. I'm
Speaker 2: huh four, Sophie. I don't have that information ahead of
Speaker 2: me right now. I was not prepared for a deeper
Speaker 2: bit than this.
Speaker 1: Oh well, for some reason, I know it's Idaho.
Speaker 2: That's because I am not a professional comedic actor. But
Speaker 2: you know who is, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: Our guest today Ed Helms. Ed. I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: need to introduce you. You've been on The Daily Show,
Speaker 2: you were a major cast member on the Office. You
Speaker 2: were in the Hangover movies. You've been in like a
Speaker 2: ton of things that I'm sure basically everybody watching or
Speaker 2: listening to this has watched. But today we're here to
Speaker 2: talk talk about your show Snaffoo, which has just entered
Speaker 2: season two. Thank you for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: I'm so psyched to be here. Your show is awesome,
Speaker 3: and thank you. This is going to be fun. I
Speaker 3: hope it'd better be.
Speaker 2: I wanted to say, you're so snafo season two. You
Speaker 2: talk like your show you talk about like major fuck
Speaker 2: ups in American history, and season two is about the
Speaker 2: raid on the FBI building in nineteen seventy one that
Speaker 2: revealed a huge amount of information about how the FBI
Speaker 2: was conducting clandestine operations targeting anti war protesters and civil
Speaker 2: rights protesters. It's like one of the coolest chapters in
Speaker 2: American radical political history. And I thought you guys did
Speaker 2: a great job of breaking it down and bringing on
Speaker 2: some of the major players talking through it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Thanks, We were incredibly lucky. It's a wild story
Speaker 3: as you're getting at. These citizens who were not at
Speaker 3: all professional thieves or criminals, staged this incredible heist on
Speaker 3: the night of the Ali Fraser Flat, which is very
Speaker 3: Ocean's eleven. We actually got Steven Soderberg on the podcast
Speaker 3: to comment on that. But but yeah, and and they
Speaker 3: pulled off this elaborate heist. They broke into that FBI
Speaker 3: office in Media Pennsylvania, stole every file and started leaking
Speaker 3: them to the to a very courageous reporter at the
Speaker 3: Washington Post named Betty metzger Uh. They kept its secret
Speaker 3: for decades. These documents led to the revelation of co
Speaker 3: Intel pro which basically yeah, and demolished jade Gar Hoover's legacy,
Speaker 3: uh for for good reason. And yeah, and led to
Speaker 3: the church hearings, which is the only reason why we
Speaker 3: have any congressional oversight over over the FBI, the CIA,
Speaker 3: the n s A, and all the other alphabet agencies.
Speaker 3: Like it's it was an credible moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so amazing to me because like, you couldn't
Speaker 2: do it, Like it was kind of the last moment
Speaker 2: you could have gotten away with something like that, right
Speaker 2: there just wasn't the kind of surveillance, There wasn't the
Speaker 2: kind of capability for it, And it was the kind
Speaker 2: of thing that a group of people was only going
Speaker 2: to get away with once before everything changed about how
Speaker 2: these buildings did their security, and they picked like this
Speaker 2: was the most important time to be able to get
Speaker 2: in there and get files like that, But it was
Speaker 2: also kind of the most important time to break into
Speaker 2: the FBI an FBI building and get a bunch of files. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just a wonderful moment people should know more about. I
Speaker 2: think it didn't get as much attention. It doesn't get
Speaker 2: as much attention as maybe it ought to have because
Speaker 2: of how close it was to Watergate, but I think
Speaker 2: it's just as important.
Speaker 3: And the Pentagon Files and the Pentagon right, all of
Speaker 3: which were giant Washington Post stories. This was Washington Post
Speaker 3: as well, And you're right. But what's really cool about
Speaker 3: this one is that it pre dates Watergate and the
Speaker 3: Pentagon Papers just a year or so. It was all
Speaker 3: the same major players at the Washington Post. And in
Speaker 3: a cool way, this was the first time they really
Speaker 3: confronted the legal issues around publishing this kind of thing,
Speaker 3: and they decided to do it, and they against you know,
Speaker 3: they had the Attorney General calling them saying, don't you
Speaker 3: dare publish these FBI files, And they did it anyway
Speaker 3: because it was newsworthy and it wasn't it didn't compromise
Speaker 3: national security in any way. So I like to think
Speaker 3: this is what sort of gave Ben Bradley and the
Speaker 3: Washington Post brass the sort of like dry run that
Speaker 3: set them up to do the right thing for Watergate.
Speaker 3: And really like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it started that kind of there was this inertia
Speaker 2: and momentum behind actually like we're not just speaking truth
Speaker 2: to power, but like prying truth out of powers grasp
Speaker 2: and forcing it in front of the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well put yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I so today you know that the I thought
Speaker 2: long and hard about what kind of episodes I wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to you about, and I there's the guy
Speaker 2: that we're going to be talking about today is a
Speaker 2: fellow who I kind of debated for several years whether
Speaker 2: or not we should cover because he's a quietly important monster.
Speaker 2: He's somebody who, you know, if we were just talking about, like,
Speaker 2: you know, the FBI overreach of the civil rights era,
Speaker 2: the anti warriors and whatnot, which was very much like
Speaker 2: a real authoritarian moment in our country's past, and we're
Speaker 2: currently confronting another. And the guy we're talking about today,
Speaker 2: Curtis Jarvin, is sort of the profit of taking America
Speaker 2: down a completely authoritarian path. He is an advocate for
Speaker 2: changing this country into what is effectively a dictatorship. And
Speaker 2: unfortunately he's a guy who's had a lot of influence
Speaker 2: in speaking to that. Have you heard of Curtis Yarvin
Speaker 2: before we started these episodes.
Speaker 3: No, Ill read a tiny bit about him yesterday, but
Speaker 3: that was yeah.
Speaker 2: That's fine. That is the case with most people who
Speaker 2: are not who are not like actual followers of his philosophy.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately you have heard of some of the people
Speaker 2: who are big fans of Curtis. One of them is
Speaker 2: current US Vice presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody JD. Vance,
Speaker 2: who back in September twentieth of twenty twenty one, went
Speaker 2: on the Moment of Truth podcast run by the conservative
Speaker 2: organization American Moment, which is an organizational partner for the
Speaker 2: Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five. In a wide ranging interview,
Speaker 2: he accused his female classmates at Yale Law of pursuing
Speaker 2: racial or gender equality as quote a value system that
Speaker 2: gives their life meaning, and then said that value system
Speaker 2: leads to misery. At another point in the interview, he
Speaker 2: asked if certain groups of people, particularly those from Muslim
Speaker 2: majority countries, can quote successfully become American citizens, and then
Speaker 2: he alleged that the region's reason so many journalists are
Speaker 2: angry was not the rapid destruction of their industry, but
Speaker 2: because they didn't have any children, which inevitably, he says,
Speaker 2: leads to psychotic breaks. Now a lot of this stuff
Speaker 2: has come out about Vance. This was when when was
Speaker 2: that interview twenty one?
Speaker 3: That's really that's wild because for some reason I sort
Speaker 3: of thought that, like he was kind of normal and
Speaker 3: then just saw a very cynical opportunity to get elevated
Speaker 3: if he endorsed Trump, and so he did that, and
Speaker 3: then everything else has been the kind of a cynical
Speaker 3: like trip down the Trump rabbit hole, just like so
Speaker 3: many Republicans have done. But that privately, like he's kind
Speaker 3: of smarter than that. But what you're saying now is
Speaker 3: that is that he's like trumpier than on his own
Speaker 3: He's a little bit so Trump. I don't know how
Speaker 3: much Trump believes other than that Trump should have power.
Speaker 3: Vance has strong beliefs about the fact that democracy is
Speaker 3: a mistake right, and that a lot of things that
Speaker 3: have like most of the last century in terms of
Speaker 3: like social progress, women getting the right to vote, the
Speaker 3: civil rights movement, like reforming the ability to vote for
Speaker 3: people who are not like white American men, that that
Speaker 3: was all horribly mistaken, right, and it was horribly mistaken
Speaker 3: because it led to this situation whereby too many regular
Speaker 3: people have any say whatsoever and how they're governed.
Speaker 1: And like to what I was saying before, it is
Speaker 1: like in a lot of ways JD. Vance has more
Speaker 1: extreme views on things, which is why during the most
Speaker 1: recent debate, Donald Trump alludes to not discussing certain extreme
Speaker 1: policies that JD. Vance claims to have with JD. And
Speaker 1: so he tries to distance himself whereas JD is catering
Speaker 1: to a certain category of human But Trump's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't discuss it with him, and that's intentional.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And It's what's interesting is that if you're looking at
Speaker 2: like what his background is, Vance is a guy whose
Speaker 2: entire career has been bankrolled by Peter Teel, who's the
Speaker 2: Facebook billion He made a lot of money on Facebook,
Speaker 2: made a lot of money on PayPal, and he sunk
Speaker 2: about fifteen million into Vance's congressional campaign, which is the
Speaker 2: most ever spent on a single congressional candidate. And Teal
Speaker 2: in two thousand and nine, when on the record as
Speaker 2: saying he doesn't believe democracy can be compatible with freedom,
Speaker 2: by which he means like the freedom of people with
Speaker 2: lots of money to basically govern the rest of us.
Speaker 3: Right, and Teal and.
Speaker 2: Vance, they're not just kind of reactionaries when they express
Speaker 2: those things. They are quoting a guy, they are referring
Speaker 2: to the work of a political philosopher and named Curtis Jarvin,
Speaker 2: who they first encountered when he blogged under a pseudonym
Speaker 2: Mincius Moldbug, which is kind of deliberately arch. But this
Speaker 2: is the guy who has been like the profit of
Speaker 2: a sizable chunk of the authoritarian right. Teel sunk a
Speaker 2: lot of money into him. Jd. Vance quotes him repeatedly,
Speaker 2: so does Blake Masters, who is the guy who's been
Speaker 2: running repeatedly to try to beat Mark Kelly in Arizona.
Speaker 2: And all of these guys and more are followers of Jarvin,
Speaker 2: who's probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right
Speaker 2: in the US today. Curtis has never killed anybody in
Speaker 2: any legally actionable sense or advocated from murder, and as
Speaker 2: far as I'm aware, he has never broken a law.
Speaker 2: But he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and the
Speaker 2: installation of a dictatorial regime that would by necessity kill
Speaker 2: and imprison large numbers of people. And his influence is
Speaker 2: great enough that the whole alt right and everything that
Speaker 2: came from the Art Right and to our current era
Speaker 2: right owes something to Jarvin's work. So when you're thinking
Speaker 2: about everything that's happened on the right that's gotten so
Speaker 2: deranged since twenty fifteen. All of it has bits of
Speaker 2: Curtis Jarvin in it, right, and his thinking has had
Speaker 2: a massive impact even on some guys like Elon Musk,
Speaker 2: who several days ago shared a post where readers suggested
Speaker 2: only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should
Speaker 2: be allowed to vote. This is also a thought with
Speaker 2: some Jarvin DNA behind it. That again, oh yes, this
Speaker 2: was quite a moment that that only alpha males, so
Speaker 2: you know, stereotypical like alpha male guys, and then a
Speaker 2: neurotypical people people who are not like it.
Speaker 3: Indeed, can I still vote?
Speaker 2: I think? I think maybe so, because a lot of
Speaker 2: these guys are a big about ADHD and making them superhuman,
Speaker 2: which I also have, and it just makes me really
Speaker 2: bad at cleaning my house and occasionally, in short bursts,
Speaker 2: very good at cleaning my house. But yeah, so these
Speaker 2: are these are the kind of like political ideas that
Speaker 2: you get when you take too much read too much
Speaker 2: Curtis Yarvin, or listen too much to the people who
Speaker 2: have read a lot of Curtis Jarvin. And he's a
Speaker 2: kind of guy because He's so kind of shadowed as
Speaker 2: a figure I had always worried about, like, is covering
Speaker 2: this guy going to bring more attention to him than
Speaker 2: is necessary. And now that like one of his followers
Speaker 2: is maybe going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency,
Speaker 2: I think it's probably time to talk about him. I
Speaker 2: kind of think we have to. So that's the introduction.
Speaker 2: Curtis Jarvin was born probably in Brooklyn in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 2: on about June twenty fifth of that year. Likely his
Speaker 2: normal wiki doesn't give a birth date, but Google's AI
Speaker 2: summary bot does, and it seems to be basing this
Speaker 2: on a bio of Yarvin in another wiki, which seems
Speaker 2: to pull from earlier versions of the original. It's like
Speaker 2: this AI slop stuff. So the gist of it is
Speaker 2: I don't know his actual birth date, right, I'm just
Speaker 2: trying to remind everyone not to trust AI summaries that
Speaker 2: various search engines give you, because most of them don't
Speaker 2: have actual source behind. Like most radical intellectuals, Jarvin was
Speaker 2: born in a place of wealth, comfort, and high social
Speaker 2: standing in his own society. His parents are highly educated.
Speaker 2: His dad had an Ivy League degree and worked for
Speaker 2: the US government as a foreign service worker. His mom
Speaker 2: was a WASP from Westchester County, the daughter of a
Speaker 2: prominent lawyer, and entered civil service herself as an adult.
Speaker 2: Jarvin today describes the social class of his birth as Brahmin,
Speaker 2: referring to the highest caste in Hindu society. And he
Speaker 2: does this because he thinks that inequality is a fundamental
Speaker 2: and immutable thing. Right, people are unequal fundamentally, and so
Speaker 2: any sort of social stratification in society is justified by that.
Speaker 2: And he's drawn to descriptions from other cultures that harken
Speaker 2: back to other fixed hierarchies.
Speaker 3: Sorry, it's justified by its inevitability.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, like people are genetically some people are better
Speaker 2: than others, they're more intelligent than others, higher IQ than others.
Speaker 3: We're therefore, we are justified in leaning into that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in fact, yeah, yeah, we have a more
Speaker 2: because that's a separate thing.
Speaker 3: Like, it's inevitability is a maybe that's a fixed condition
Speaker 3: of human existence. But leaning into it, exacerbating it, that's
Speaker 3: just an arbitrary choice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this idea that like, and it's
Speaker 2: also this belief that like something like intelligence is one thing, right,
Speaker 2: Like intelligence is a number, and if it's higher, you're smarter,
Speaker 2: as opposed to like, well, you can have an IQ
Speaker 2: of one to eighty, but if your car breaks down,
Speaker 2: the guy who knows how to fix your car is
Speaker 2: a lot smarter than you in that moment. That's how
Speaker 2: I tend to think about intelligence as opposed to like
Speaker 2: this subjective thing, like is a is a farmer smarter
Speaker 2: than a finance bro in New York City? Well, when
Speaker 2: it comes to like making stock choices, maybe when it
Speaker 2: comes to growing food, certainly not like I don't know
Speaker 2: that's that. I think that's a better way to look
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 3: It's a weird thing. Like just the existence of something
Speaker 3: is then it makes it okay to then whether wherever
Speaker 3: it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because
Speaker 3: it exists, it is therefore okay to to do and heighten. Yeah, murder,
Speaker 3: murders back, murder happens. It's a fundamental, uh, part of
Speaker 3: the human condition that people get murdered and murder one another. Therefore,
Speaker 3: like so therefore, like I can murder anybody. Is that
Speaker 3: is that a comparable? Am I making? Is that comparable?
Speaker 2: I think it actually is a very comparable comparison, right that,
Speaker 2: just because like there are like individuals are not the
Speaker 2: same that we should like have some sort of and
Speaker 2: you're you're always picking when you're when you're trying to
Speaker 2: acknowledge it, like, Okay, people are not like people don't
Speaker 2: all have the same abilities naturally, right, Like that's a
Speaker 2: thing that's subjectively true. Michael Phelps was always going to
Speaker 2: be a better swimmer than me, for example, But we
Speaker 2: don't base our society based on who's best at swimming, right,
Speaker 2: Yarvin is basically saying, there's one thing that I actually
Speaker 2: value when it comes to the ways in which people
Speaker 2: are different from each other, and it's a very specific
Speaker 2: kind of intelligence that's correlates to how I think I'm intelligent,
Speaker 2: and that's how we should stratify society.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's that kind of a dude. And I also
Speaker 2: kind of think it's interesting to me that he's so
Speaker 2: obsessed with this idea of like identifying as a Brahmin,
Speaker 2: because in Hindu culture, Brahmins are the castes that like
Speaker 2: traditionally were most involved in the priesthood and religious instruction,
Speaker 2: and it is like a very closed loop system right,
Speaker 2: the cast system traditionally, but that's not the kind of
Speaker 2: system that his family succeeded in. His dad was like
Speaker 2: a member of the US Foreign Service and became pretty
Speaker 2: highly placed in the government. But his dad wasn't born
Speaker 2: into that role. He was the son of Jewish American
Speaker 2: communists who came to this country and he had to
Speaker 2: fight to make a place for himself in the higher
Speaker 2: rungs of society, which is a very clear example of
Speaker 2: like mobility and the fact that we have a reasonably
Speaker 2: open society that allows for some mobility, which he doesn't
Speaker 2: want to exist. I always find it interesting when guys
Speaker 2: like that, you can see a clear example of like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: you only have what you have because our society allows
Speaker 2: for mobility.
Speaker 3: Well, so where's he from again? Brooklyn?
Speaker 2: He's yeah, he's from around Brooklyn.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, because there is there's also a Brahmin social
Speaker 3: class in New England, Yeah, the Boston Brahmins, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's but that's not what he's talking about. Uh.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a little unclear to me because he
Speaker 2: is his mom is kind of like you could probably
Speaker 2: call a Boston Brahmin. But he's referring to like, when
Speaker 2: he talks about his family being Brahmins, he's referring to
Speaker 2: the fact that his dad was also highly placed in
Speaker 2: the State Department, and his dad is definitely not a
Speaker 2: Boston Brahmen, right, Like his parents were Jewish Stalinists, which
Speaker 2: is not like a Boston Brahmin thing, right, because that
Speaker 2: was like.
Speaker 3: The Kennedy's and like, yeah, that that ilk. So that's
Speaker 3: so interesting, all right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's a little weird to me the
Speaker 2: way he kind of like talks about it, but definitely
Speaker 2: it's it's kind of key to see that a big
Speaker 2: chunk of his family's comfort at least comes from the
Speaker 2: fact that, like his his his dad's side of the
Speaker 2: family entered into a fairly open society that allows for
Speaker 2: some mobility.
Speaker 3: So can I clarify one thing? So absolutely, I feel
Speaker 3: like the and I don't know enough about this, so
Speaker 3: I'm glad to be learning as I go, but I
Speaker 3: just have I've kind of I guess I'm realizing that
Speaker 3: I've assumed that the Peter Teels of the world, when
Speaker 3: they advocate for more of a dictatorial structure to our government,
Speaker 3: they're not saying that that part of that is also
Speaker 3: a free market capitalism which presumably allows for mobility, right,
Speaker 3: So mobility supposed to and that, if anything, it encouraged
Speaker 3: the best and the brightest to rise. And that's how
Speaker 3: they see themselves as the best in the brightest that
Speaker 3: have risen. So I guess I'm just splitting hairs a
Speaker 3: little bit, like are you sure that they that also
Speaker 3: they are anti social mobility or.
Speaker 2: They're very much like close the door after you get up, right,
Speaker 2: like kick the ladder out from underneath you types, right,
Speaker 2: And I think it's because they do believe that, like
Speaker 2: there's a that their success was not purely based on
Speaker 2: the fact that they came up in a system where
Speaker 2: they gained certain benefits that were the result of like
Speaker 2: public spending. Right, Like all of these guys who made
Speaker 2: money in the tech industry went to schools that were
Speaker 2: generally publicly funded at least at some point, you know,
Speaker 2: their parents drove on roads that were publicly benefited from,
Speaker 2: like the security infrastructure that exists in this country in
Speaker 2: a lot of different ways. And their companies all benefited
Speaker 2: to some extent from government spending and incentives. But they
Speaker 2: see that their success was like the result of something
Speaker 2: inherently superior within themselves and often in like a genetic
Speaker 2: level in some ways. And so they're they're there Aristotle.
Speaker 2: The fact that they have achieved such success is not
Speaker 2: the result of a society that enabled them. It's a
Speaker 2: result of like, they're members of a natural aristocracy, and
Speaker 2: the best thing they can do is legally work to
Speaker 2: codify that aristocracy. That's the that's that's the we'll get
Speaker 2: into like some more of kind of how Curtis arrives
Speaker 2: by this, because he's really a big part in kind
Speaker 2: of lending an intellectual air to this. But that that
Speaker 2: very much is how these folks see themselves. And he
Speaker 2: grows up as a kid. You know, his dad's working
Speaker 2: for the State Department. They travel around the world a lot.
Speaker 2: He spends a decent chunk of his childhood in like
Speaker 2: Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and you know, so that's
Speaker 2: a lot of disruption in his schooling. You know, he's
Speaker 2: not one of these kids who stays in the same
Speaker 2: school for a long period of time. But he excels
Speaker 2: in academics. He skips a grade back before his family
Speaker 2: goes overseas, and when they move back to the US,
Speaker 2: he skips two more grades and he winds up a
Speaker 2: sophomore at age twelve, which I think is probably never
Speaker 2: a great idea. Right, that's a little young.
Speaker 3: Sounds hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't great being a sophomore at
Speaker 2: the normal age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is not when when humanity at that age
Speaker 3: is not when humanity is at its most benevolent and
Speaker 3: kind and supportive. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a mild way to put it. In one
Speaker 2: interview I found Yarvin basically says like, yeah, it was
Speaker 2: it was. It was whack that I was skipped ahead
Speaker 2: so far right, which was.
Speaker 3: Of academic achievement that he bounced ahead?
Speaker 2: Okay, so very bright kid, very bright kid, very good
Speaker 2: at specifically the kind of academics that like, you know,
Speaker 2: the school's reward. And you can kind of read between
Speaker 2: the lines that he was the recipient of a decent
Speaker 2: amount of bullying, right, And and that's especially I think
Speaker 2: it actually might be a little less common for kids
Speaker 2: in school now, but like you know, even if you
Speaker 2: didn't get skipped ahead in school, high school has a
Speaker 2: lot of bullying in it. So I'm not surprised.
Speaker 3: That's we're about the same age. He and I and
Speaker 3: yeah that was I mean, there was just like good
Speaker 3: old hazing all just all the gross, horrible traumatic stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm thinking through some fun memories that I have
Speaker 2: myself right now. Right, So it's one of those things
Speaker 2: you could like read a lot into that to kind
Speaker 2: of the guy that he becomes. But also I think
Speaker 2: we all kind of went through a version of that,
Speaker 2: So maybe it's not super useful to like theorize too
Speaker 2: much about what it meant to him. But what does
Speaker 2: definitely mean a lot to him is that in the
Speaker 2: late eighties and early nineties, he becomes one of the
Speaker 2: first online people.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is back before most people know there's an internet,
Speaker 2: so he is an early adopter. I think nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: nine is when he first starts getting online regularly. Wow,
Speaker 2: and yeah, and this is not this is the precursor
Speaker 2: to the Internet that we know. And he's spending all
Speaker 2: of this time in a place called usenet, which, if
Speaker 2: you remember, like web forums, is kind of like the
Speaker 2: first web forum. Right, it's for eugen z kids. It's
Speaker 2: TikTok without any videos or hot people. And everyone has
Speaker 2: very strong opinions about Star Trek audio equipment or race science, right,
Speaker 2: like it's an interesting place to be, like yeah, yes.
Speaker 3: Like race science was like they were just getting it.
Speaker 3: It was like four chan or like these these sort
Speaker 3: of yeh dark corners of Yeah.
Speaker 2: There was actually a white supremacist terrorist group in the
Speaker 2: late eighties that robbed banks, stole a bunch of money,
Speaker 2: and then donated a bunch of it to other Nazi
Speaker 2: groups that spent it buying computer systems to link up
Speaker 2: different white power groups so that they could share information.
Speaker 2: And you know, there's there's evidence from as early as
Speaker 2: like the mid nineties of them talking about going into
Speaker 2: places where you can find fans of stuff, like different
Speaker 2: kind of like sci fi media who might be socially
Speaker 2: isolated and try to push propaganda onto them. So that
Speaker 2: actually does go back pretty far. And you know, it's
Speaker 2: hard to say, like I don't know exact we don't
Speaker 2: know entirely what Jarvin got up to when he was
Speaker 2: on usenet. You know, to some extent that's a bit
Speaker 2: of a black box. But his favorite board was a
Speaker 2: place called talk dot bizarre, And I've spent some time
Speaker 2: trawling the Usenet archives for talk dot bizarre, which.
Speaker 3: You can find still Bizarre.
Speaker 2: Talk that's like the names of like there's different talkboards
Speaker 2: and one of them is like the Bizarre right, Okay,
Speaker 2: and it's like kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think it's where I would have spent time if I
Speaker 2: had been a little bit older. It's like the first
Speaker 2: place where you would find like Internet humor, right, the
Speaker 2: kind of stuff you eventually you would see on boards
Speaker 2: like something Awful, and then four Chan and now like
Speaker 2: all of Twitter culture. Right, So it's it's inside jokes
Speaker 2: and memes and what we now call shit posting, right,
Speaker 2: And Yarvin is like one of the first generation of
Speaker 2: ship posters, and he says this of his time on usenet,
Speaker 2: it was a decentralized system, and more importantly, it had
Speaker 2: this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it
Speaker 2: was an engineering student or worked at a tech company
Speaker 2: or something. So critically, it's not an open platform. The
Speaker 2: only people here are to some extent involved in academics,
Speaker 2: involved in the tech industry, and very smart. Right in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five, just.
Speaker 3: To get access to it at that time, yes, you
Speaker 3: had to have had to be in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're they're the elite in a way, right,
Speaker 2: and that's how, really how he comes to see them,
Speaker 2: and Yarvin is definitely part of that elite. In nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five, he'd entered a Johns Hopkins study for mathematically
Speaker 2: Precocious Youth, and then he had started taking classes at
Speaker 2: Brown University. Even at this early stage of development, he
Speaker 2: showed a distinct interest in authoritarian leaders and just as
Speaker 2: critically and being very wrong about them. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: he wrote in a discussion on us NEET, I wonder
Speaker 2: if the Soviet power ladder, a vicious bureaucratic backbiting, brings
Speaker 2: stronger him into the top than the American system of
Speaker 2: feel good soundbites. Now, given that the USSR collapsed the
Speaker 2: next year, not a great prediction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is so, this is like you should have
Speaker 3: had Rain Wilson on this episode, because you're describing Dwight shrut.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got he's got more than a little.
Speaker 3: Bit of that, right, a precociousness and a sort of
Speaker 3: very specific kind of brilliance and a preoccupation with with
Speaker 3: with like stern leadership.
Speaker 1: And can you just imagine Dwight just telling everybody that
Speaker 1: he entered a Johns Hopkins study of mathematical precocious youth
Speaker 1: that would be brought up constantly.
Speaker 3: By the way, if there is one way to guarantee
Speaker 3: you're gonna get your ass kicked on a playground.
Speaker 2: True, I'm not even going to get out the first
Speaker 2: syllable of precocious before they start swinging.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, while he is at college, Jarvin shows minimal interest
Speaker 2: in the humanities. He only takes five undergraduate courses in
Speaker 2: these subjects, focused on history and in college now Brown
Speaker 2: is where he starts at college, right, and he graduates
Speaker 2: in ninety two. He goes on to be a grad
Speaker 2: student in a COMPSI PhD program at Berkeley, and his
Speaker 2: goal at that point is to enter the tech industry, right,
Speaker 2: which is just starting to really explode from as the Internet.
Speaker 2: This is kind of the very the immediate precursor to
Speaker 2: the big dot com boom. And as he moves from
Speaker 2: high school to college and then from college to grad
Speaker 2: school and starts flirting with big tech, he continues spending
Speaker 2: his time online exploring his first political ideology, and he
Speaker 2: is initially a libertarian. I want to quote from a
Speaker 2: profile Joshua Tit wrote about Jarvin for a book on
Speaker 2: the radical right quote. Engineers like Jarvin are typically sorted
Speaker 2: through competitive academic programs, which they consider analogous to the
Speaker 2: competition imagined in a libertarian society. Their world is rational,
Speaker 2: rule bound, and solvable. Within the subculture, computer software and
Speaker 2: hardware are the dominant metaphors for society. Such thinking dovetails
Speaker 2: with the ironclad assumptions about human and market behavior of
Speaker 2: the Austrian school of economics led by Ludwig von mess
Speaker 2: Tech culture systems focus also accords with libertarianism's concentration on
Speaker 2: efficiency and solving government. And so he's one of these
Speaker 2: guys who number one comes to think, I am again,
Speaker 2: I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy based on my
Speaker 2: skill that I've earned, and the world around may he
Speaker 2: sees like, seems so chaotic. But the computer systems I'm
Speaker 2: working with are so sensible and ordered, and the companies
Speaker 2: that I am interested in all seem to be so
Speaker 2: much more efficient than the government. Couldn't we fix the
Speaker 2: government if we made it more like a computer program
Speaker 2: and more like the tech industry, right, which you can't
Speaker 2: because people don't work that way. But there's always guys
Speaker 2: who think this way, right, And you know, hopefully most
Speaker 2: of them, I think it doesn't lead anywhere, but like
Speaker 2: some bad opinions on the internet, unfortunately for Jarvin, it's
Speaker 2: going to go a little bit further than that. Speaking
Speaker 2: of disastrous ideological conclusions, you know who's never had any
Speaker 2: of those are sponsors electedly So we're back right now.
Speaker 2: The kind of thinking that Jarvin has about libertarianism, about
Speaker 2: being a part of this natural aristocracy, is not really
Speaker 2: congruent with human liberty in the broad sense, right, because
Speaker 2: you know, if you are able to, as a business owner,
Speaker 2: use your liberty like unconstrained by government regulations to dump
Speaker 2: poisonous in a waterway, right, that is, you are more
Speaker 2: free as the person running that business, but you're also
Speaker 2: destroying life, and you know, one would say, harming the
Speaker 2: liberty of thousands of other people who rely on that waterway.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So I would say, as someone who is like inclined
Speaker 2: to some libertarian ideas, I don't really understand why so
Speaker 2: many libertarians are obsessed with this kind of like ending
Speaker 2: of government restrictions on corporations.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, and also and and and another version of
Speaker 3: that I find the anti union rhetoric. So oh yeah,
Speaker 3: it's so hilarious to me because the formation of a
Speaker 3: union to collectively bargain with a CEO is the most like,
Speaker 3: the most natural expression of free spreech a free speech.
Speaker 3: It is, it is, it is such a natural and
Speaker 3: so to be like, you know, free speech, I'm a
Speaker 3: constitutional you know, libertarian or whatever, and then also in
Speaker 3: the same breath be like unions are should be illegal.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, unions are a natural growth and a natural
Speaker 3: oppositional force to exploitation.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think they also, like very real, like
Speaker 2: very objectively increase the amount of like freedom, right, Like
Speaker 2: if you're kind of looking at it that way, when
Speaker 2: people have a way to band together to oppose a
Speaker 2: much larger, more powerful, you know, more moneyed interest, then
Speaker 2: they have more agency, you know, in their lives, right
Speaker 2: Like that's that's I mean definitely how I look at it.
Speaker 2: And I will say Jarvin, he actually is pretty good
Speaker 2: at not getting lost in this part of the discourse,
Speaker 2: right because he drops this idea that liberty is a
Speaker 2: value in any way, shape or form pretty early on.
Speaker 2: Like he's not one of these guys who preaches libertarianism
Speaker 2: because he thinks that it's or because he's trying to
Speaker 2: convince people that it's somehow better for human freedom. He's
Speaker 2: someone who just kind of drops the idea that there's
Speaker 2: any value in human freedom pretty early on, right, so
Speaker 2: there's no point in paying lip service to it, which
Speaker 2: is at least more honest than a lot of these guys.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The major pivot point which leads to him dropping his
Speaker 2: libertarian trappings and embracing this more authoritarian belief system hinges
Speaker 2: on the place that he was and kind of remains
Speaker 2: his mental home, which is the early Internet. The old
Speaker 2: days of usenet were a simulacrum of what is today
Speaker 2: Jarvin's ideal society. As I stated before, back then you
Speaker 2: couldn't post unless you were someone with a degree of
Speaker 2: like skill, money, or access to a large institution, And
Speaker 2: so you would only get new users in any large
Speaker 2: amount every September, when you get new college classes of
Speaker 2: kids who would get onboarded and start posting, right. And
Speaker 2: so for a few years, every September the Internet would
Speaker 2: be an annoying for a while while all these newbies
Speaker 2: came in who don't know like the social mores, and
Speaker 2: they would have to get acclimatized, right, But there were
Speaker 2: always more old heads, people who had been there a
Speaker 2: long time to keep the new people in line, and
Speaker 2: there was this natural hierarchy based on age and technical skill.
Speaker 2: And then one year late nineteen ninety three, Usenet opens
Speaker 2: up to anyone with an Internet connection, and suddenly you
Speaker 2: have what people call eternal September. Right, like, it's never
Speaker 2: ended since nineteen ninety three because there were no there's
Speaker 2: not been any kind of like guard rails to block
Speaker 2: new people from coming on after that point. This is
Speaker 2: you know, it's an important moment in Internet history. It's
Speaker 2: a catastrophic moment for Curtis Yarbin, right, and the mental
Speaker 2: impact this has is key to understanding him. In one
Speaker 2: interview with Tablet magazine, he complained, you had this sort
Speaker 2: of de facto aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy,
Speaker 2: and then it fell apart. These are all big Lord
Speaker 2: of the Rings guys, So I'll use the Lord of
Speaker 2: the Rings analogy. They talk about this like the like
Speaker 2: the the period of time when the elves ruled everything
Speaker 2: before Sauron had his big war, right like before the
Speaker 2: breaking of the world. That's eternal September that ruins this
Speaker 2: kind of like more noble Golden age and brings about
Speaker 2: this dirty, grubby age of men.
Speaker 3: So we'll take care work for it. I'm not a
Speaker 3: Lord of the Rings guy. I mean, I respect it,
Speaker 3: but I just don't have that level of knowledge.
Speaker 1: Yeah I do. I'm wearing a Lord of the Rings
Speaker 1: hat right now. Can back that claim.
Speaker 2: All these guys are big jd Vance his company, his
Speaker 2: venture capital company, was named after one of the rings
Speaker 2: in the Lord of the Rings. Peter Thiel's surveillance company
Speaker 2: is named Palanteer from the Lord of the Rings. So
Speaker 2: this is very much the language that they all speak.
Speaker 1: Funny.
Speaker 3: That's also one of Stephen Colbert's obsessions, and I wonder
Speaker 3: if if they might find common ground and have like
Speaker 3: a fun chat on that subject.
Speaker 2: I certainly could have a chat about it. I think
Speaker 2: Colbert would probably probably be kind of horrified of some
Speaker 2: of the things that they're referencing, and they're like, like,
Speaker 2: you named your company after this thing that is specifically
Speaker 2: a device that only the evil Wizard uses.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 2: I don't know that would be an interesting conversation. So
Speaker 2: I think this period of time, this kind of collapse
Speaker 2: of this natural aress, what he sees as a natural
Speaker 2: aristocracy is key to understanding why Jarvin comes to hate democracy,
Speaker 2: right because it kind of ruined his Internet playground, the
Speaker 2: first place where he ever felt that he fit in rights.
Speaker 2: That's sort of what I see as like the er
Speaker 2: moment of his like coming to hate this kind of
Speaker 2: idea of any kind of democratic society. Now, if you're
Speaker 2: going to claim that you and your friends on the
Speaker 2: Internet back in the day were like the aristocracy of
Speaker 2: some long lost utopia of logic that invites people to
Speaker 2: look at what you were posting on the Internet back then,
Speaker 2: And I've looked at some of Jarvin's old posts, and
Speaker 2: Socrates he wasn't. He does seem to have spent some
Speaker 2: of it writing comedy for a hacking and DIY media
Speaker 2: collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow. This is
Speaker 2: where we get to like the weirdest connection here, because
Speaker 2: if you've heard of the Cult of the Dead Cow recently,
Speaker 2: it's because Beto O'Rourke was also a member. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So he and Beto have a very very strange connection
Speaker 2: to each other. Now, the Cult of the Dead Cow
Speaker 2: was like a complicated thing. It's it's one Reuter's article
Speaker 2: I found describes it as the oldest group of computer
Speaker 2: hackers in US history. I think that over sells how
Speaker 2: cool Jarvin's involvement in it is, because I think he
Speaker 2: was mostly They were also like a media collective, so
Speaker 2: they put out like pieces of writing and whatnot, and
Speaker 2: I think that's mostly what Yarvin's involvement was, right, And
Speaker 2: the best evidence I have of what he was writing
Speaker 2: for them is a satiric piece of Badger human hybrid erotica,
Speaker 2: which I think might hold a little bit of evidence
Speaker 2: of his future interest in race science, although it's hard
Speaker 2: to say. Do you want to hear some of his
Speaker 2: human hybrid erotica?
Speaker 3: Hold on, let me get some lube.
Speaker 2: Love me for my genes, says Antonio Kneeling. If you
Speaker 2: cannot love me for myself, you must love me for
Speaker 2: my jeans. I've never told anyone this before. I've always
Speaker 2: kept it to myself. I have always let them think
Speaker 2: it but an accident of cruel nature that I have
Speaker 2: white hair on my cheekbones and a thoroughly disreputable looking nose.
Speaker 2: But the fact is that I am part badger on
Speaker 2: my father's side. So I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 2: what to say about that. I know it's a joke.
Speaker 2: It's a bit, right, I don't think it lands Maybe
Speaker 2: it was funnier back in the early Internet, although maybe
Speaker 2: the bar was just a lot lower there.
Speaker 3: It feels like there's some context we're missing, like just
Speaker 3: just I'm digging hard for some out here, like so
Speaker 3: am I. It just seems like there was some inside
Speaker 3: joke about Badger fucking or something that we're not that
Speaker 3: was sort of came before this.
Speaker 2: This has to be part of a dialogue that we've
Speaker 2: lost pieces of over the years, right, It is like
Speaker 2: about two pages of like Badger erotica. That is, it's
Speaker 2: weirdly the love Me for my jenes line stands out
Speaker 2: to me. But I may be reading more into that
Speaker 2: that is necessary. But yeah, so you know that's the
Speaker 2: kind of stuff he's doing. He's like, it's it's pretty
Speaker 2: lighthearted comedy, right, or it's at least attempting to be.
Speaker 2: So he's not, as far as I can tell, on
Speaker 2: like the serious hacking side of what the Cult of
Speaker 2: the Dead Cow is doing at this period of time. Now,
Speaker 2: Jarvin weathered the fall of Usenet and not long after
Speaker 2: the Eternal September began he dropped out of Berkeley for
Speaker 2: a job at a tech company. He started flirting with
Speaker 2: the specific strains of more authoritarian money simptered libertarian ideology
Speaker 2: as opposed to like, you know, the old school guys
Speaker 2: who actually, like you know, really were pretty focused on
Speaker 2: human liberty. I think kind of the last dregs of
Speaker 2: those guys, or you saw it, like Penin Teller would
Speaker 2: be a great evidence of that, right, Like that kind
Speaker 2: of libertarian was a lot more prominent back then. And
Speaker 2: he's sort of Yarvin is sort of right on the
Speaker 2: edge of the folks who got a lot of money
Speaker 2: in the tech industry and started getting angry that, like
Speaker 2: they have to still pay taxes to keep the roads
Speaker 2: up right. That's kind of where he moves into. And
Speaker 2: Yarvin is eventually going to kind of come out of
Speaker 2: that as a monarchist. And it behooves us to look
Speaker 2: at how that happened. Now there are some signs of
Speaker 2: his ideological turn. And another short story he wrote for
Speaker 2: the Cult of the Dead Cow the year after that
Speaker 2: Badger story in nineteen ninety four. This piece is titled
Speaker 2: The Bishop, and it opens with the lines no one
Speaker 2: has come into the cathedral in some time. It's about
Speaker 2: an old bishop who exists out of time in a
Speaker 2: moldering cathedral that no one has visited in years, and
Speaker 2: at one point Jarvin, possibly describing himself, writes, the bishop
Speaker 2: is a man of logic. Unlike many older people, he
Speaker 2: is unwilling to repaint the world he sees around him
Speaker 2: to make it a more comfortable place in which to live.
Speaker 2: He recognizes unpleasant facts, indeed he delights in them for
Speaker 2: the in the act of recognition he finds proof that
Speaker 2: his faculties have not decayed to that state of contented oblivion,
Speaker 2: which he believes a sheer precursor to death. And this
Speaker 2: is kind of noteworthy in part because the term cathedral
Speaker 2: is going to be really influential important for Jarv and
Speaker 2: he's going to come to use it as a term
Speaker 2: to refer to the news media, the political establishment, and academia.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Everyone who annoys him, right is the cathedral. And this
Speaker 2: is sort of like the evil regime that he's going
Speaker 2: to set himself to the task of destroying. And this
Speaker 2: is how a lot of these guys think. It's why
Speaker 2: there's so much focused why guys like Vance spends so
Speaker 2: much time attacking schools, attacking like professors and academia. It's
Speaker 2: why there's so much hatred of journalists, right, These are
Speaker 2: the people who, in his eyes, are invested in propping
Speaker 2: up a clearly dysfunctnctional, failing society. Right, and so you
Speaker 2: have to destroy the cathedral in order to build anything new.
Speaker 2: That's that's what he's going to come to believe. Right
Speaker 2: In the early two thousands, the dot com bubble bursts,
Speaker 2: and at some point after that, Yarvin wound up with
Speaker 2: several hundred grand as the result of a buyout of
Speaker 2: a company he worked at, So not enough to retire,
Speaker 2: but enough to sit around and really think about what
Speaker 2: he wants to do next.
Speaker 3: What year is this?
Speaker 2: This would be like in the early two thousands, So
Speaker 2: this is all happening sometime between like two thousand and
Speaker 2: one and two thousand and four, you know, the dot
Speaker 2: com bubble bursts. Sometime after nine to eleven, I think
Speaker 2: is when he gets bought out, And by two thousand
Speaker 2: and three or four, he's kind of sitting around on
Speaker 2: a pile of money, reading a lot, trying to figure
Speaker 2: out what he wants to do next with his life.
Speaker 2: What he kind of decides is that he wants to
Speaker 2: think about politics and economics. Now, Yarvin had made some
Speaker 2: friends during his tech years, and he'd gotten interested in
Speaker 2: Austrian school economists, mostly because of this University of Tennessee
Speaker 2: law professor Glenn Reynolds, who was like an early blogger,
Speaker 2: who had gotten Jarvin interested in a guy named Ludwig
Speaker 2: von Meses, and eventually through this Jarvin gets interested in
Speaker 2: a fan of Meaes another theoretician named Marie Rothbard. Rothbard
Speaker 2: was a foundational a narco capitalist thinker. I don't really
Speaker 2: like that term, but that's what they called themselves, and
Speaker 2: he basically believes like there should not be a state, right,
Speaker 2: there should not be any power higher than individuals and
Speaker 2: corporations spending their money to make things happen. Right, That's
Speaker 2: kind of the gist of anarchist. Yeah, yeah, and you know,
Speaker 2: I think like a more like an anarchist would argue
Speaker 2: the fact that you have a bunch of money is
Speaker 2: like as much a problematic hierarchy as, you know, anything
Speaker 2: that the state does, and not, like you can't really
Speaker 2: be an anarcho capitalist. A lot of people would argue,
Speaker 2: but Rothbard is one who feels like, basically that the state,
Speaker 2: the primary reason the state is unethical is that it
Speaker 2: stops people from doing what they want to do with
Speaker 2: their money. Right, Whereas an anarchist would be like, well,
Speaker 2: the reason that the state is an ethical is that
Speaker 2: states can do a lot of harm to people at scale. Right, Anyway,
Speaker 2: none of that really matters to the point, which is
Speaker 2: that he gets really interested in this guy Rothbard and Rothbard.
Speaker 2: One of the things the Rights about is this kind
Speaker 2: of anger at the concept of people advocating for civil rights.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Anyone advocating for civil rights, in Rothbard's mind, is an
Speaker 2: enemy right because the only way to advocate for civil
Speaker 2: rights is to advocate for the state to make rules
Speaker 2: about those rights, and that leads inevitably to tyranny. Rothbard wrote,
Speaker 2: behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleads for equality is
Speaker 2: a ruthless drive for placing themselves the elites, at the
Speaker 2: top of a new hierarchy of power. And this is
Speaker 2: something you see a lot on the right today, this
Speaker 2: idea that like any group of people who are advocating
Speaker 2: for their own civil who are advocating for civil rights
Speaker 2: because they're being oppressed under the present system are secretly
Speaker 2: trying to make themselves rulers, right. All they really want
Speaker 2: to do is a press you by, I don't know,
Speaker 2: getting the right to vote or own credit cards or whatever.
Speaker 2: So that's kind of like a big part of Rothbard's
Speaker 2: belief system, and Jarvin really takes to that now. And
Speaker 2: that quote that I just read from him came out
Speaker 2: in ninety five, so you get the kind of feeling
Speaker 2: like this is the sort of thinking Jarvin is hoovering
Speaker 2: up in that period right before you know, the dot
Speaker 2: com boom and then the dot com bust. And ultimately
Speaker 2: his reading of these Austrian school guys leads him to
Speaker 2: another dude named Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle's been dead for
Speaker 2: a while. He's a Scottish philosopher from the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: and he's kind of seen as a proto to these
Speaker 2: a lot of these kind of like more modern thinkers
Speaker 2: that he's reading. And Carlyle is, you know, he's a
Speaker 2: he's an authoritarian who believes that you need a strong
Speaker 2: man to stop groups of marginalized people from making themselves
Speaker 2: the new tyrants, right. And he's also as we'll talk
Speaker 2: about a massive racist. He's one of the these guys
Speaker 2: who justify slavery as being a fundamentally ethical system for
Speaker 2: reasons of like, basically, certain groups of people are different genetically,
Speaker 2: so slavery is a natural like hierarchy in society. So
Speaker 2: these are the kind of people that Jarvin is digesting
Speaker 2: when he comes upon the work of a fellow named
Speaker 2: Hans Herman Hop. Hop is a German born political theorist
Speaker 2: and a leading Austrian School economist. He's another anarcho capitalist,
Speaker 2: and hop is a big advocate of monarchy in a
Speaker 2: way that he defines monarchy as a privately owned government
Speaker 2: as opposed to a democracy, which he calls a publicly
Speaker 2: owned government. And Hopp believes that the transition from monarchy
Speaker 2: to democracy over the twentieth century was like the big
Speaker 2: mistake that we made as humans and has caused nothing
Speaker 2: but civilizational decline ever since. And from Hop Jarvin gets
Speaker 2: the idea that the best way to run anything is
Speaker 2: to have one guy be in charge of it. Right,
Speaker 2: You can't effectively run an organization if there's any power sharing.
Speaker 2: The only way to do anything is to have a
Speaker 2: single person be invested with absolute power right. I know
Speaker 2: that's kind of like a tortured logical route, but those
Speaker 2: are sort of the ingredients that eventually cook up to
Speaker 2: him becoming a monarchist. Right now, we might say that's
Speaker 2: not the most logical thing, right if you look at
Speaker 2: what happened to all of the absolute monarchies, they kind
Speaker 2: of destroyed each other circle World War One, And Jarvin
Speaker 2: would argue, no, no, no, those weren't real absolute monarchies.
Speaker 2: They had they all made too many compromises with different
Speaker 2: sort of like democratical instruments within those societies. And that's
Speaker 2: the reason why Austria Hungary fell, and that's the reason
Speaker 2: why the czar fell, right, they didn't have quite enough power.
Speaker 2: I think that's silly.
Speaker 3: Well, sure, it places such an unreasonable amount of faith
Speaker 3: in one person or in just like, yeah, the integrity
Speaker 3: of humans, like yeah, like people. The reason that it's
Speaker 3: the reason that you have to embrace a messy system
Speaker 3: is because people are inherently messy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
Speaker 3: A monarchy is a wonderful fantasy. But like, how do
Speaker 3: you pick the guy? How do you pick that person?
Speaker 3: And then and then what if he gets hit on
Speaker 3: the head wrong if he's wrong and n Dali Lama
Speaker 3: thing where where it's it's a birthright thing. And then
Speaker 3: like what if what if they're just like a narcissistic,
Speaker 3: suicidal or depressive or whatever, Like, uh, what if they
Speaker 3: want nothing to do with it?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It just seems nuts.
Speaker 2: It's this wild It's this thing that like everyone understands
Speaker 2: the frustration with democracy, right, Like it's really messy and
Speaker 2: really annoying a lot of the time, and like people
Speaker 2: make a lot of bad decisions, especially even as collectives.
Speaker 2: Groups of people make really bad decisions a lot of
Speaker 2: the time. Right, But then saying like the solution to
Speaker 2: this is to have one guy be in charge. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: number one, how do you pick that guy? Number two?
Speaker 2: Like we've all seen it, Like people change over the
Speaker 2: course of their lives, right, Like what happens if that guy,
Speaker 2: like his mental decapacity gets declined or whatever, or he
Speaker 2: gets obsessed with something weird and crazy and dangerous, which
Speaker 2: is what happens to every monarchy, Right, They all wind
Speaker 2: up ruled by like maniacs who make terrible decisions, which
Speaker 2: is like why we had World War One. You have
Speaker 2: all these like monarchs who were obsessed with these very
Speaker 2: silly attitudes with the and these very silly, petty grievances
Speaker 2: between each other, and had made like generations of terrible
Speaker 2: decisions when it came to like purchasing arms and building
Speaker 2: their military machines, and like, it just turns out that
Speaker 2: the bad decisions of one guy are certainly not like
Speaker 2: any less catastrophic than the bad decisions of like groups
Speaker 2: of people. Right, anytime you've got people who spend all
Speaker 2: of their time like theorizing about the way things ought
Speaker 2: to be, as opposed to like dealing with the way
Speaker 2: people are, you're going to wind up with with nonsense, right,
Speaker 2: And like that's that. Unfortunately, every now and then we
Speaker 2: get to see like what that nonsense looks like, you know,
Speaker 2: when when people actually put it in place. You know,
Speaker 2: in the case of like absolute monarchies like this, we
Speaker 2: got the trenches in World War One. In the case
Speaker 2: of like a very authoritarian communism, you know, we got Stalin,
Speaker 2: And I guess kind of like part of part of
Speaker 2: why I think Jarvin is important to understand is that
Speaker 2: as kooky as a lot of this stuff is, he
Speaker 2: is a guy who wants to take these theories that
Speaker 2: he made himself when he was like sitting alone in
Speaker 2: his apartment reading books and not really any interacting with
Speaker 2: real people. He's a guy who wants those theories to
Speaker 2: govern the lives of hundreds of millions, ideally billions, right,
Speaker 2: And that's a real dangerous kind of person. You know,
Speaker 2: Like we can regular people can sit around and like
Speaker 2: read their books and and talk about like, well, this
Speaker 2: might be neat or this might be neat. But whenever
Speaker 2: you're talking about, like, I know, how to reorder all
Speaker 2: of society, you've become dangerous. And you know, that's kind
Speaker 2: of what Yarvin is doing during this period of time
Speaker 2: where he's sitting at home and he's reading his books.
Speaker 2: So the kind of the system that he pulls out
Speaker 2: of this period where he's just like get reading everything
Speaker 2: he can get his hands on, is that monarchs are.
Speaker 2: A monarchy is the ideal kind of system of government
Speaker 2: because it's the best at maximizing long term profits within
Speaker 2: a society. Because monarchs have to think long term, right,
Speaker 2: they can't be destructive in the short term, like you
Speaker 2: know leaders in a democracy are because they have a
Speaker 2: limited term limit. You know, maybe they only care about
Speaker 2: benefiting themselves. A monarch wouldn't act that way because they
Speaker 2: have no desire to destroy their own property. And again,
Speaker 2: I would I would point you, yeah, I would point
Speaker 2: you back to Yeah, we could talk about like the
Speaker 2: Saudi royal family too, right, entirely bio oil or Roman emperors,
Speaker 2: like literally most of the monarchies that have ever been
Speaker 2: have like collapsed as a result of the fact that
Speaker 2: that's also an inherently destructive thing. You know, some of
Speaker 2: that just comes down to human nature. But he does
Speaker 2: try to deal with this, the fact that monarchies clearly
Speaker 2: don't work the way that he thinks that they should.
Speaker 2: And he thinks that a big part of the issue
Speaker 2: is that, you you, they all make too many compromises. Right,
Speaker 2: all of these monarchies that collapsed during the turn of
Speaker 2: the century had allowed some democratic elements into society. And
Speaker 2: you know, they had allowed that because there were revolutions, right,
Speaker 2: people like occupied Vienna for a period of time in
Speaker 2: forty eight, Like, there were a bunch of like socialist
Speaker 2: uprisings in the middle of the nineteenth century, and as
Speaker 2: a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies into introduced reforms,
Speaker 2: you know, and he sees those reforms as this was
Speaker 2: like a terrible step that ensured their demise as opposed
Speaker 2: to like, well, the absolute monarch chose to make those
Speaker 2: reforms because they could not hold on to power otherwise.
Speaker 2: But again, there's never a perfect logical consistency with guys.
Speaker 3: I asked this question. Yeah, so like, if you're an
Speaker 3: absolute monarch, are you delegating anything you're are delegating to?
Speaker 3: Like what are the strung? What is the is the
Speaker 3: like do you have to be just like an insane
Speaker 3: micromanager to be Yeah, but.
Speaker 2: I think the key is the key is to him.
Speaker 2: The difference would be like a bureaucratic structure, wherein there
Speaker 2: are other centers of power, right like if you've got
Speaker 2: a constitutional monarch, but there's still some kind of like
Speaker 2: Congress or Senate or whatever that has some things that
Speaker 2: are within its scope. And with right, he he he wants,
Speaker 2: he wants. He does actually view it as a CEO
Speaker 2: where they do delegate, but the CEO is ultimately the
Speaker 2: guy in power, right who they saw the delegatees. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think the CEO in his ideal like situation, right,
Speaker 2: like his ideal system of government that he kind of
Speaker 2: comes around to is like the way Facebook is run right,
Speaker 2: where you do have like a border directors technically, but
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that like no one
Speaker 2: can force him out. The buck stops with him, like
Speaker 2: he ultimately has all of the power in that organization.
Speaker 2: That's how Jarvin thinks country should be run right, which.
Speaker 3: In his defense, Facebook is a flawless organization.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we all know that nothing ever goes wrong there.
Speaker 2: So the final straw for Jarvin's tolerance of democracy came
Speaker 2: in two thousand and four as a result of the
Speaker 2: swift Boat's Veteran for swift Boat Veterans for Truth scandal.
Speaker 2: You remember this, I'm sure right, Oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is back in the two thousand and four election
Speaker 2: John Kerry with the Democratic nominee. Kerrie had been wounded
Speaker 2: three times in Vietnam, and then after he had left
Speaker 2: the service, he had become an anti war activist, right
Speaker 2: he like testified in Congress this was a really big deal,
Speaker 2: and so as number one. As a result, conservatives had
Speaker 2: never really forgiven John Kerry for as they saw betraying
Speaker 2: the country in Vietnam, and also obviously, like Bush was
Speaker 2: running on the back of two wars that he had
Speaker 2: gotten the country and Carrie had been against those. So
Speaker 2: there was this like pretty hideous conflict. And the way
Speaker 2: that a lot of folks on the right chose to,
Speaker 2: like particularly those within Bush's campaign, chose to respond was
Speaker 2: by arguing and bringing up, you know, people who claimed
Speaker 2: people who had served in Vietnam, who claimed that Kerry
Speaker 2: had lied about his service right, that he hadn't really
Speaker 2: done the things he'd done, that his purple hearts were
Speaker 2: essentially like due to exaggerations, and none of this was true,
Speaker 2: and in fact, like when journalists actually talk to people
Speaker 2: who had served with carry, they're like, no, he was
Speaker 2: like a very good soldier who was wounded repeatedly doing
Speaker 2: his job. But the propat Canada campaign largely worked right,
Speaker 2: and Yarvin that critically he bought the propit Ganda campaign,
Speaker 2: and he was angry that the media, in his eyes,
Speaker 2: worked to protect Carrie, which proved that it was fundamentally
Speaker 2: evil and allied with Academia and what people now call
Speaker 2: the deep state, career government employees operating this sort of
Speaker 2: shadow government that really ran things right. His attitude is
Speaker 2: that because John Kerrey didn't suffer enough from the swift
Speaker 2: boat scandal. That means that the whole media complex in
Speaker 2: the United States was corrupt and needed to be destroyed,
Speaker 2: which is a crazy thing to lead you to that conclusion.
Speaker 2: Like it's just it's one of the it's interesting to
Speaker 2: me because this guy really does he tries to portray
Speaker 2: himself as this like dark philosopher, like esoteric almost political
Speaker 2: mad man, but when you get right down to it,
Speaker 2: he's like your crank uncle who's angry about John Carrey
Speaker 2: on Facebook.
Speaker 3: Well, also the swift voting. It's a weird thing to
Speaker 3: it's a weird thing to take from that whole chapter
Speaker 3: of political American political history because it because swift boating worked. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then and then media, by the way, took the
Speaker 3: bait and just like amplified the story and uh yeah,
Speaker 3: and if they tried to protect Carrie, which I'm I'm
Speaker 3: sure a few journalists probably.
Speaker 2: Wanted, certainly individuals.
Speaker 3: Yeah they failed. Yeah, they didn't work.
Speaker 2: Like that's like and that's how I would say, is
Speaker 2: like I think if you're saying what happened the swift
Speaker 2: Boating thing is why I lost faith in the media,
Speaker 2: that's reasonable, but not for the reason that he did, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but anyway, that's what that's where he goes, right, speaking
Speaker 2: of the shadow government that really runs things. That's all
Speaker 2: of our sponsors are affiliated with. We're back. So now
Speaker 2: the years that Yarvin is kind of doing his having
Speaker 2: his like period in the wilderness, coming up with his
Speaker 2: political ideology largely like two thousand and three or four
Speaker 2: to like two thousand and seven or so, are the
Speaker 2: years that the tech industry like that brings us Web
Speaker 2: two point zero is starting to emerge. You get Google,
Speaker 2: you get you know, Apple had been around for a while, right,
Speaker 2: but they you know, we start to see like the
Speaker 2: what's going to become the smartphone era like grind towards
Speaker 2: you know, coming into being. Facebook also starts like two
Speaker 2: thousand and six or seven, I think, is like when
Speaker 2: it very first starts out. So like this is kind
Speaker 2: of the early birth of the Web two point zero era,
Speaker 2: which are all of these founder driven startups for the
Speaker 2: most part, right, And Yarvin comes to see this, this
Speaker 2: system that gives us Google and Facebook as inherently better
Speaker 2: than the system that governs the country. Right, it's and
Speaker 2: it's more akin to his kind of idealized absolute monarchy.
Speaker 2: So by this point in time, around two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: Vin has more or less come across all the ingredients
Speaker 2: of his new ideology, this kind of reactionary monarchism with
Speaker 2: Austrian economic tendencies. The problem is that none of these
Speaker 2: philosophers that he likes, these guys like Roth barden Hopp,
Speaker 2: have quite gotten it right. And so he decides, I've
Speaker 2: got to start putting my ideas out there. I finally
Speaker 2: figured it out. I've consolidated the contradictions between all these systems,
Speaker 2: and now I'm going to start putting it out for
Speaker 2: people to see. Right. So in two thousand and seven
Speaker 2: he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis of reading
Speaker 2: that he'd put himself in, and he comes up with
Speaker 2: a blog under a pen name, Minsius Moldbug. And it's
Speaker 2: under this pen name that he's going to start writing
Speaker 2: a bunch of essays of political theory. In an interview
Speaker 2: with Max Raskin, Yarvin describes the origin of this nickname
Speaker 2: Minsius Moldbug. This way, it came from two different handles
Speaker 2: I was using in different places. I would post occasionally
Speaker 2: on Reddit or hacker News. Sometimes I would get banned,
Speaker 2: and I would choose the name of a new classical figure,
Speaker 2: and I just happened to land on Minsius. And then
Speaker 2: I was doing some economics posting, and I posted something
Speaker 2: about gold, but I said mold instead of gold, because
Speaker 2: I was talking about something with a hypothetical restricted supply.
Speaker 2: So it's just kind of like a foreign name, but
Speaker 2: it sounds like a little bit sinister, and it's interesting
Speaker 2: to me. Minsius the first name comes from a Confucian
Speaker 2: philosopher from the three hundreds BC who was a major
Speaker 2: figure in that kind of thought, and he had, during
Speaker 2: the Warring States period, interviewed a bunch of different kings
Speaker 2: and written a book about like what he'd learned about ruling. Now,
Speaker 2: Minsius was kind of focused on getting monarchs to act
Speaker 2: more benevolently towards the poor and the downtrodden. So he's
Speaker 2: not really a figure that has a lot to do
Speaker 2: with the kind of politics Jarvin is about to espouse.
Speaker 2: I think he'd largely picked the name because it makes
Speaker 2: him sound kind of sinister. But he starts putting out
Speaker 2: his new thoughts on politics in this blog, in a
Speaker 2: series of essays called Unqualified Reservations, all geared at getting
Speaker 2: his readers on board with the idea of reorganizing society
Speaker 2: away from democracy and towards a kind of enlightened one
Speaker 2: man rule that he believes is going to work a
Speaker 2: lot better. Unlike most philosophers, Jarvin Peppers's essays with casual slurs.
Speaker 2: In reading one, where he talks about World War Two,
Speaker 2: he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a common slur
Speaker 2: at the time, and in another he makes a satiric
Speaker 2: statement about how the indigent poor should be destroyed and
Speaker 2: turned into biodiesel fuel. This kind of stuff, it hasn't
Speaker 2: the impact of getting like on the rare occasions in
Speaker 2: these early days that like major news outlets will look
Speaker 2: at his work, they'll kind of decide to ignore him
Speaker 2: because it's this guy dropping a bunch of racial slurs
Speaker 2: and crude jokes. He's clearly not a serious thinker. But
Speaker 2: the other thing that this style of discourse does is
Speaker 2: it's very attractive to young men, particularly young kind of
Speaker 2: intelligent autodid acts in the tech industry who spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time reading the internet. Right, And it is
Speaker 2: kind of in the same way that a lot of
Speaker 2: like the way people talk on four Chan is going
Speaker 2: to be attractive to these kinds of guys, right, And
Speaker 2: what you're seeing in these early Moldbug episodes, with this
Speaker 2: use of slurs and these kind of like joking not
Speaker 2: joking statements about killing poor people is the precursor to
Speaker 2: the way the alt right is going to talk about
Speaker 2: issues right and use kind of humor and jokes that
Speaker 2: aren't really jokes to kind of push more extreme ideas.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Moldbug is really the guy who starts doing that in
Speaker 2: I don't know if you'd say he was the first,
Speaker 2: but he's certainly the first with a platform to be
Speaker 2: doing that in a way that's really influential to a
Speaker 2: lot of these people.
Speaker 3: Now, can I ask another real I'm gonna I have
Speaker 3: two questions, Yeah, yeah. One is, are we sure we're
Speaker 3: pronouncing Mencius correctly? Is it not Menstus?
Speaker 2: I think it is Menshus sorry Menshus, yes, yes, but
Speaker 2: it spelled yeah the other way.
Speaker 3: And I have no idea. I just when you said
Speaker 3: it was a confusion, suddenly thought no, maybe anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it is Menshus. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then my second question is to what extent I
Speaker 3: find the humor aspect of this fascinating because it raises
Speaker 3: the possibility or I guess I should. I guess My
Speaker 3: question is like where on the spectrum of like just
Speaker 3: kind of like very mendacious and angry person who wants
Speaker 3: to reshape the world versus like like all the way
Speaker 3: to the other end of just being like a really
Speaker 3: giddy shitster gadfly with who just wants to throw crazy
Speaker 3: ideas out there and and get a reaction out of
Speaker 3: people the way like ninety percent of Twitter is like,
Speaker 3: where on that spectrum is he? Because it's that does
Speaker 3: sound like there's like, like, you know, churning up poor
Speaker 3: people to create biodiesel is a it's a tasteless joke.
Speaker 2: It's it's like a swifty Thomas Swift or it's like
Speaker 2: Jonathan Swift type joke, right, Like, but it could.
Speaker 3: Be construed as just like trolling, right right.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that's kind of the key point. So,
Speaker 2: like what you're talking about is like the term we
Speaker 2: use for it is shit posting, right and and Yarvin
Speaker 2: is very much a shit poster, right, But he's also
Speaker 2: using that as a tool where he understands that this
Speaker 2: is how young men particularly talk on the Internet, and
Speaker 2: It is something that inherently, if you're talking this way,
Speaker 2: if you're engaging this way, you have more credibility with
Speaker 2: them than you know, people who are trying to be
Speaker 2: more respectable, who largely like this chunk of folks doesn't
Speaker 2: think highly of right these like kind of like these
Speaker 2: traditional sort of like intellectual elites, you know, academics and
Speaker 2: journalists and alike, they have a lot of disdain for,
Speaker 2: but they trust someone who communicates like them. And so
Speaker 2: by using these kind of like by by basically peppering
Speaker 2: in sort of trolling language in these very serious articles
Speaker 2: arguing for anti democratic politics, he makes himself credible to them.
Speaker 2: And he also there's also a sense that because he's
Speaker 2: including some of this this stuff that is a lot racier,
Speaker 2: he's there's something almost forbidden knowledge about the stuff that
Speaker 2: he's putting out right that makes them want to share
Speaker 2: it with each other. And that's very much like a
Speaker 2: factor in his success. What he's doing here is like
Speaker 2: very much intentional and very intelligent and very effective, and
Speaker 2: it you know, if you want to look at kind
Speaker 2: of the ultimate uh uh like evolution of these sort
Speaker 2: of tactics, I think a great touch point would be
Speaker 2: the christ Church Church shooters manifesto, which included a lot
Speaker 2: of these like inside jokes, a lot of like forum
Speaker 2: troll language wrapped around serious arguments for like why people
Speaker 2: should carry out white supremacist attacks. And it's a kind
Speaker 2: of tactic that is really what gave us the alt
Speaker 2: right as a political force, and it's still very much
Speaker 2: how these people communicate now. I think it started to
Speaker 2: hurt them recently. The whole the weird stuff that Tim
Speaker 2: Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective
Speaker 2: thing because when you actually, like take the way these
Speaker 2: people talk amongst each other and put it up in
Speaker 2: front of an audience, it's deeply off putting to most people.
Speaker 2: But it also kind of led to this establishment of
Speaker 2: like an internal language for these folks that kind of
Speaker 2: led to an ossification of their ideological tendencies. Right, we're
Speaker 2: all using the same kind of terms and words that
Speaker 2: we've come to recognize as like dog whistles for different things,
Speaker 2: and Jarvin is really doing that in a very organized way.
Speaker 2: He's good at developing terms for people to use that
Speaker 2: get adopted on a large scale. You know. One of
Speaker 2: the best example this would be his term the cathedral, right,
Speaker 2: which you know he uses to be mean this nexus
Speaker 2: of everything he doesn't like, the liberal media, the university system, academia,
Speaker 2: you know, like career of government employees, everything he considers bad,
Speaker 2: and everything his ideal monarch would destroy. Right, in his
Speaker 2: ideal world, there's not going to be an independent academic community,
Speaker 2: there's not going to be newspapers or journalists, just a
Speaker 2: king and an aristocracy, and of course he's going to
Speaker 2: be a natural member of that aristocracy. Right now, he
Speaker 2: does kind of the last piece of this ideology he's
Speaker 2: putting together is he has to explain why a lot
Speaker 2: of these real world feudalist governments that fell apart all
Speaker 2: fell apart. And part of it is obviously they gave
Speaker 2: too much freedom to people who weren't the monarch. But
Speaker 2: the other thing he comes up with is that old
Speaker 2: monarchies denied citizens the freedom to exit. And so in
Speaker 2: this ideal world, he supposes countries will be small, like
Speaker 2: the size of a city in most cases, and they'll
Speaker 2: compete with citizens who would have the freedom to leave. Right,
Speaker 2: So it's fine. Now, there's a lot of questions that
Speaker 2: aren't answered here, like how do you make a society
Speaker 2: like function that way, and a world is interconnected as ours.
Speaker 2: How do you stop you know, one monarch from repeatedly
Speaker 2: taking over other a like how do you stop Why
Speaker 2: wouldn't they use force? Why would people just let valuable
Speaker 2: subjects leave? How do people leave if the monarch can
Speaker 2: stop them from taking their assets out? All of these
Speaker 2: things that like would be actual problems if anyone tried
Speaker 2: to do this sort of thing. Like there's not actually
Speaker 2: an answer to this, but like that's that's kind of
Speaker 2: his idealized version of a society. It's a bunch of
Speaker 2: small monarchies all over the world that people can theoretically
Speaker 2: leave and move between. The way people leave companies and
Speaker 2: go to work for other companies. So like, you know
Speaker 2: how much everybody loves work. That's how the whole government
Speaker 2: should be.
Speaker 3: That's it. That's wild. I hadn't thought of it as
Speaker 3: on such a small scale. Here's another question, like in
Speaker 3: the same way that like company will have a board
Speaker 3: that can like ousta ceo or like, like is there
Speaker 3: any is there any stopgap measure for like a disastrous
Speaker 3: or someone like let's say someone has like a brain
Speaker 3: eating worm. Yeah, right, but they are showing no symptoms
Speaker 3: when they are appointed or ascend to the the monarchy,
Speaker 3: but then over the next five years they become like
Speaker 3: absolutely batshit crazy. Is there any any stopgap there?
Speaker 2: The only stock gap he builds in is the idea
Speaker 2: that well, theoretically, if the if the if the ruler's bad,
Speaker 2: everyone would be able to leave and then their system.
Speaker 3: Will right right, Oh, it's that thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like it's that thing where it's like, well,
Speaker 2: but what if he wants to shoot people who tries.
Speaker 3: It's like rand Paul saying, like civil rights are are
Speaker 3: dumb because if you put like a whites only sign
Speaker 3: in front of your store, you're gonna lose business and
Speaker 3: you're gonna go out of business and the market will
Speaker 3: keep you from being racist. Meanwhile, like that, yeah, back
Speaker 3: when people did that, it was didn't work until the
Speaker 3: laws kicked in. Yeah. Yeah no.
Speaker 2: And it's it's this, it's these it's this weird mix
Speaker 2: of like naivete uh and like starry eyed thinking that
Speaker 2: to a degree, I think he's just kind of being
Speaker 2: dishonest with the naivete, like he knows any state like
Speaker 2: this would just be a dictatorship like enforced through violence. Right,
Speaker 2: But that's what he wants as long as he's a
Speaker 2: part of the aristocracy. And he's just kind of built
Speaker 2: in this. Well, people would just leave if they didn't
Speaker 2: like it, because he has to have some answer for it, right,
Speaker 2: But I kind of think he knows how ugly a
Speaker 2: system like this would be in practice. He's just more
Speaker 2: or less fine with it right now. The last kind
Speaker 2: of ingredient to the ideological system year Vin is cooking
Speaker 2: up is, of course racism. And I want to read
Speaker 2: a passage from an article in tech Crunch about Jarvin
Speaker 2: and his followers and how they are quote obsessed with
Speaker 2: a concept called human biodiversity what used to be called
Speaker 2: scientific racism. Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of,
Speaker 2: if not the most important personal traits, and that it's
Speaker 2: predominantly genetic. Neo reactionaries would replace or supplement the divine
Speaker 2: right of kings and the aristocracy with the genetic right
Speaker 2: of elites.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So this is another element of how he tries to justify, well,
Speaker 2: my system's smarter than the old school of monarchies.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's not just these bunch of families are the people
Speaker 2: who are in charge. Our aristocracy is people who naturally
Speaker 2: are superior because of their IQ, because obviously that tells
Speaker 2: you everything about a person.
Speaker 3: Right, emotional IQ are we Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's
Speaker 3: not where that could be good.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not.
Speaker 3: I'm for that. I'm for people with like very strong
Speaker 3: emotional IQs being in charge of things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, that's not the system. We're
Speaker 2: going to have just a bunch of guys who are
Speaker 2: really good at coding running everything. You know, that way
Speaker 2: everything can finally work the way uber does.
Speaker 1: Oh so I'll feel unsafe all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, cool.
Speaker 2: So it's probably not surprising muldbugs theories take off among
Speaker 2: specifically a lot of Silicon Valley young men right who
Speaker 2: are excessively online, and it also starts to take off.
Speaker 2: He begins being spread by a lot of like far
Speaker 2: right folks on the Internet and kind of the mid
Speaker 2: aughts who find his work and share it amongst themselves.
Speaker 2: It's just two years after Muldbug starts his blog that
Speaker 2: Peter Teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with
Speaker 2: liberty and Teal starts putting money Jarvin's way, right. He's
Speaker 2: probably the number one guy sending money towards Yarvin backing.
Speaker 2: He backs a tech company that Yarvin starts, and he's
Speaker 2: just generally sort of like but like his early sort
Speaker 2: of moneyed backer, right, and Yarvin kind of as a result,
Speaker 2: he starts getting shared almost like people are like handing
Speaker 2: out drugs to each other. Like, we want to keep
Speaker 2: this on the down low. You don't want like people
Speaker 2: too many people to know publicly that you're reading Moldbug,
Speaker 2: but like, have you read this latest article if you
Speaker 2: checked out this blog, right, And he starts getting invited
Speaker 2: to give talks, and he starts saying things in these
Speaker 2: talks that like speeches at these schools to these conservative
Speaker 2: clubs and the like, like if Americans want to change
Speaker 2: their government, they're going to have to get over their
Speaker 2: dictator phobia. There's really no other solution. And that's kind
Speaker 2: of the thinking that is going to lead directly into
Speaker 2: the alt right, and it's embrace of Donald Trump. Yarvin
Speaker 2: is one of the key ideological pieces there. He is
Speaker 2: building a bridge that is eventually going to lead to
Speaker 2: how a lot of these people think about what Trump
Speaker 2: should be.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's part of why there's a lot of this joking
Speaker 2: not joking talk about wanting Trump to be like a
Speaker 2: god king, right, is it's a lot of these guys
Speaker 2: who are knowingly or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of
Speaker 2: came initially into the right from Jarvin. And yeah, that's
Speaker 2: that's part one and part two we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about like how he actually gets connected to politics and
Speaker 2: kind of where we are today with this guy. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: how are you feeling ed?
Speaker 3: I'm a little rattled.
Speaker 2: It's dark stuff, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the right reaction.
Speaker 3: Where what happens if if he is like in the court,
Speaker 3: the high court of this monarch and uh and gets
Speaker 3: a stomach flu and throws up in during a ceremony
Speaker 3: of some kind, and is like sent to a dungeon
Speaker 3: for the rest of his life at no fault of
Speaker 3: his own, Like what which is a very reasonable expectation
Speaker 3: of of a monarchical system. And so is he then
Speaker 3: sitting in the dungeon saying it's still the best, This
Speaker 3: is still the best, this is still the best system.
Speaker 2: I don't think he thinks that could happen, because I
Speaker 2: think he doesn't believe something that you and I believe
Speaker 2: in that I think most rational people believe, which is
Speaker 2: that like power corrupts, so like, even if you are
Speaker 2: not the kind of guy who would throw people in
Speaker 2: a dungeon when you become king, just the fact that
Speaker 2: being a king is deranging, right, having that kind of power,
Speaker 2: you will eventually get used to exercising it and doing
Speaker 2: things like punishing people who just annoy you. And we
Speaker 2: know that this happens because we have a lot of
Speaker 2: examples of like when people are made dictators, how folks
Speaker 2: who were at least more normal at one point become
Speaker 2: like more violent and dangerous to be around, right, Like,
Speaker 2: this is a very well documented thing that comes with power.
Speaker 2: And I think he doesn't believe that fundamentally because he
Speaker 2: thinks that power naturally accumulates in natural systems of elites, right,
Speaker 2: so it can't be bad for them.
Speaker 3: Or I suppose an argument might be, well, if I
Speaker 3: started to see those tendencies in the leader, I would
Speaker 3: then go to a different monarchy with But what if
Speaker 3: it is like what if you're the first one? What
Speaker 3: if you're the first example of that that guy going crazy?
Speaker 2: I think it's it's also like a failure. These guys
Speaker 2: all consider themselves historians, but they don't study history in
Speaker 2: any kind of like rigorous academic fashion. And like, every
Speaker 2: time I hear this argument about well people would just leave,
Speaker 2: I think about like what happened to Jewish people in
Speaker 2: Nazi Germany, where if they wanted to leave, the state
Speaker 2: would take all of their property effectively. Right, Some people
Speaker 2: did get to leave, but they didn't get to take
Speaker 2: their assets with them, right, Like that was a theft,
Speaker 2: was a part of the system. And it's a thing
Speaker 2: that a state operated by a single man with absolute
Speaker 2: power and to grudge can do. And there's no reason
Speaker 2: in his system that it wouldn't happen to anyone trying
Speaker 2: to leave a bad you know, Ceo King. Right, But
Speaker 2: I either again, he's just not bringing this up because
Speaker 2: he doesn't care about the people he thinks this would
Speaker 2: happen to, or he just isn't read enough on the
Speaker 2: kind of history that's actually relevant to how a system
Speaker 2: like this would work in real life. You know, that's
Speaker 2: what I would kind of respect. Yeah, yeah, people have
Speaker 2: tried this, Curtis, which he may very well be fully
Speaker 2: aware of, and just kind of trying to do a
Speaker 2: little sleight of hand here, right, because he's more or
Speaker 2: less fine with who he thinks would be the people
Speaker 2: targeted unfairly in this system, which is like he's one
Speaker 2: of these guys who is annoyed with the left and progressives, right,
Speaker 2: he hates social justice and advocates for social justice, so
Speaker 2: if those people get targeted, he doesn't have a problem
Speaker 2: with it. You know, I think part of it's just
Speaker 2: not believing you could ever be the victim of the
Speaker 2: system you seek to put in place, which you know,
Speaker 2: statistically you want to look at like what happened to
Speaker 2: the early Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of those
Speaker 2: guys delivered a retirement, right, and you know you don't
Speaker 2: want to talk about like the first generation of Nazi
Speaker 2: street fighters. A lot of those guys didn't wind up
Speaker 2: retiring either. Anyway, Ed, let's retire for this episode until
Speaker 2: part two. People should check out your podcast SNAPFO Season
Speaker 2: two is out now and yeah, we'll be back on Thursday.
Speaker 3: All right, see you then.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,