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

Published Sep 17, 2024, 9:00 AM

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Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you are legally required to be listening to in at least four US states six if you have a criminal record and are currently working through probation. I'm huh four, Sophie. I don't have that information ahead of me right now. I was not prepared for a deeper bit than this.

Oh well, for some reason, I know it's Idaho.

That's because I am not a professional comedic actor. But you know who is, Sophie.

Oh.

Our guest today Ed Helms. Ed. I mean, I don't need to introduce you. You've been on The Daily Show, you were a major cast member on the Office. You were in the Hangover movies. You've been in like a ton of things that I'm sure basically everybody watching or listening to this has watched. But today we're here to talk talk about your show Snaffoo, which has just entered season two. Thank you for coming on the show.

I'm so psyched to be here. Your show is awesome, and thank you. This is going to be fun. I hope it'd better be.

I wanted to say, you're so snafo season two. You talk like your show you talk about like major fuck ups in American history, and season two is about the raid on the FBI building in nineteen seventy one that revealed a huge amount of information about how the FBI was conducting clandestine operations targeting anti war protesters and civil rights protesters. It's like one of the coolest chapters in American radical political history. And I thought you guys did a great job of breaking it down and bringing on some of the major players talking through it.

Yeah. Thanks, We were incredibly lucky. It's a wild story as you're getting at. These citizens who were not at all professional thieves or criminals, staged this incredible heist on the night of the Ali Fraser Flat, which is very Ocean's eleven. We actually got Steven Soderberg on the podcast to comment on that. But but yeah, and and they pulled off this elaborate heist. They broke into that FBI office in Media Pennsylvania, stole every file and started leaking them to the to a very courageous reporter at the Washington Post named Betty metzger Uh. They kept its secret for decades. These documents led to the revelation of co Intel pro which basically yeah, and demolished jade Gar Hoover's legacy, uh for for good reason. And yeah, and led to the church hearings, which is the only reason why we have any congressional oversight over over the FBI, the CIA, the n s A, and all the other alphabet agencies. Like it's it was an credible moment.

Yeah, it's so amazing to me because like, you couldn't do it, Like it was kind of the last moment you could have gotten away with something like that, right there just wasn't the kind of surveillance, There wasn't the kind of capability for it, And it was the kind of thing that a group of people was only going to get away with once before everything changed about how these buildings did their security, and they picked like this was the most important time to be able to get in there and get files like that, But it was also kind of the most important time to break into the FBI an FBI building and get a bunch of files. Yeah, just a wonderful moment people should know more about. I think it didn't get as much attention. It doesn't get as much attention as maybe it ought to have because of how close it was to Watergate, but I think it's just as important.

And the Pentagon Files and the Pentagon right, all of which were giant Washington Post stories. This was Washington Post as well, And you're right. But what's really cool about this one is that it pre dates Watergate and the Pentagon Papers just a year or so. It was all the same major players at the Washington Post. And in a cool way, this was the first time they really confronted the legal issues around publishing this kind of thing, and they decided to do it, and they against you know, they had the Attorney General calling them saying, don't you dare publish these FBI files, And they did it anyway because it was newsworthy and it wasn't it didn't compromise national security in any way. So I like to think this is what sort of gave Ben Bradley and the Washington Post brass the sort of like dry run that set them up to do the right thing for Watergate. And really like, I don't know.

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

Yeah, well put yeah, yeah.

And I so today you know that the I thought long and hard about what kind of episodes I wanted to talk to you about, and I there's the guy that we're going to be talking about today is a fellow who I kind of debated for several years whether or not we should cover because he's a quietly important monster. He's somebody who, you know, if we were just talking about, like, you know, the FBI overreach of the civil rights era, the anti warriors and whatnot, which was very much like a real authoritarian moment in our country's past, and we're currently confronting another. And the guy we're talking about today, Curtis Jarvin, is sort of the profit of taking America down a completely authoritarian path. He is an advocate for changing this country into what is effectively a dictatorship. And unfortunately he's a guy who's had a lot of influence in speaking to that. Have you heard of Curtis Yarvin before we started these episodes.

No, Ill read a tiny bit about him yesterday, but that was yeah.

That's fine. That is the case with most people who are not who are not like actual followers of his philosophy. But unfortunately you have heard of some of the people who are big fans of Curtis. One of them is current US Vice presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody JD. Vance, who back in September twentieth of twenty twenty one, went on the Moment of Truth podcast run by the conservative organization American Moment, which is an organizational partner for the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five. In a wide ranging interview, he accused his female classmates at Yale Law of pursuing racial or gender equality as quote a value system that gives their life meaning, and then said that value system leads to misery. At another point in the interview, he asked if certain groups of people, particularly those from Muslim majority countries, can quote successfully become American citizens, and then he alleged that the region's reason so many journalists are angry was not the rapid destruction of their industry, but because they didn't have any children, which inevitably, he says, leads to psychotic breaks. Now a lot of this stuff has come out about Vance. This was when when was that interview twenty one?

That's really that's wild because for some reason I sort of thought that, like he was kind of normal and then just saw a very cynical opportunity to get elevated if he endorsed Trump, and so he did that, and then everything else has been the kind of a cynical like trip down the Trump rabbit hole, just like so many Republicans have done. But that privately, like he's kind of smarter than that. But what you're saying now is that is that he's like trumpier than on his own He's a little bit so Trump. I don't know how much Trump believes other than that Trump should have power. Vance has strong beliefs about the fact that democracy is a mistake right, and that a lot of things that have like most of the last century in terms of like social progress, women getting the right to vote, the civil rights movement, like reforming the ability to vote for people who are not like white American men, that that was all horribly mistaken, right, and it was horribly mistaken because it led to this situation whereby too many regular people have any say whatsoever and how they're governed.

And like to what I was saying before, it is like in a lot of ways JD. Vance has more extreme views on things, which is why during the most recent debate, Donald Trump alludes to not discussing certain extreme policies that JD. Vance claims to have with JD. And so he tries to distance himself whereas JD is catering to a certain category of human But Trump's like, oh, I didn't discuss it with him, and that's intentional.

Yeah.

And It's what's interesting is that if you're looking at like what his background is, Vance is a guy whose entire career has been bankrolled by Peter Teel, who's the Facebook billion He made a lot of money on Facebook, made a lot of money on PayPal, and he sunk about fifteen million into Vance's congressional campaign, which is the most ever spent on a single congressional candidate. And Teal in two thousand and nine, when on the record as saying he doesn't believe democracy can be compatible with freedom, by which he means like the freedom of people with lots of money to basically govern the rest of us.

Right, and Teal and.

Vance, they're not just kind of reactionaries when they express those things. They are quoting a guy, they are referring to the work of a political philosopher and named Curtis Jarvin, who they first encountered when he blogged under a pseudonym Mincius Moldbug, which is kind of deliberately arch. But this is the guy who has been like the profit of a sizable chunk of the authoritarian right. Teel sunk a lot of money into him. Jd. Vance quotes him repeatedly, so does Blake Masters, who is the guy who's been running repeatedly to try to beat Mark Kelly in Arizona. And all of these guys and more are followers of Jarvin, who's probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right in the US today. Curtis has never killed anybody in any legally actionable sense or advocated from murder, and as far as I'm aware, he has never broken a law. But he advocates for the overthrow of democracy and the installation of a dictatorial regime that would by necessity kill and imprison large numbers of people. And his influence is great enough that the whole alt right and everything that came from the Art Right and to our current era right owes something to Jarvin's work. So when you're thinking about everything that's happened on the right that's gotten so deranged since twenty fifteen. All of it has bits of Curtis Jarvin in it, right, and his thinking has had a massive impact even on some guys like Elon Musk, who several days ago shared a post where readers suggested only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should be allowed to vote. This is also a thought with some Jarvin DNA behind it. That again, oh yes, this was quite a moment that that only alpha males, so you know, stereotypical like alpha male guys, and then a neurotypical people people who are not like it.

Indeed, can I still vote?

I think? I think maybe so, because a lot of these guys are a big about ADHD and making them superhuman, which I also have, and it just makes me really bad at cleaning my house and occasionally, in short bursts, very good at cleaning my house. But yeah, so these are these are the kind of like political ideas that you get when you take too much read too much Curtis Yarvin, or listen too much to the people who have read a lot of Curtis Jarvin. And he's a kind of guy because He's so kind of shadowed as a figure I had always worried about, like, is covering this guy going to bring more attention to him than is necessary. And now that like one of his followers is maybe going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, I think it's probably time to talk about him. I kind of think we have to. So that's the introduction. Curtis Jarvin was born probably in Brooklyn in nineteen seventy three, on about June twenty fifth of that year. Likely his normal wiki doesn't give a birth date, but Google's AI summary bot does, and it seems to be basing this on a bio of Yarvin in another wiki, which seems to pull from earlier versions of the original. It's like this AI slop stuff. So the gist of it is I don't know his actual birth date, right, I'm just trying to remind everyone not to trust AI summaries that various search engines give you, because most of them don't have actual source behind. Like most radical intellectuals, Jarvin was born in a place of wealth, comfort, and high social standing in his own society. His parents are highly educated. His dad had an Ivy League degree and worked for the US government as a foreign service worker. His mom was a WASP from Westchester County, the daughter of a prominent lawyer, and entered civil service herself as an adult. Jarvin today describes the social class of his birth as Brahmin, referring to the highest caste in Hindu society. And he does this because he thinks that inequality is a fundamental and immutable thing. Right, people are unequal fundamentally, and so any sort of social stratification in society is justified by that. And he's drawn to descriptions from other cultures that harken back to other fixed hierarchies.

Sorry, it's justified by its inevitability.

Right, exactly, like people are genetically some people are better than others, they're more intelligent than others, higher IQ than others.

We're therefore, we are justified in leaning into that.

Yeah, and in fact, yeah, yeah, we have a more because that's a separate thing.

Like, it's inevitability is a maybe that's a fixed condition of human existence. But leaning into it, exacerbating it, that's just an arbitrary choice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this idea that like, and it's also this belief that like something like intelligence is one thing, right, Like intelligence is a number, and if it's higher, you're smarter, as opposed to like, well, you can have an IQ of one to eighty, but if your car breaks down, the guy who knows how to fix your car is a lot smarter than you in that moment. That's how I tend to think about intelligence as opposed to like this subjective thing, like is a is a farmer smarter than a finance bro in New York City? Well, when it comes to like making stock choices, maybe when it comes to growing food, certainly not like I don't know that's that. I think that's a better way to look at it.

It's a weird thing. Like just the existence of something is then it makes it okay to then whether wherever it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because it exists, it is therefore okay to to do and heighten. Yeah, murder, murders back, murder happens. It's a fundamental, uh, part of the human condition that people get murdered and murder one another. Therefore, like so therefore, like I can murder anybody. Is that is that a comparable? Am I making? Is that comparable?

I think it actually is a very comparable comparison, right that, just because like there are like individuals are not the same that we should like have some sort of and you're you're always picking when you're when you're trying to acknowledge it, like, Okay, people are not like people don't all have the same abilities naturally, right, Like that's a thing that's subjectively true. Michael Phelps was always going to be a better swimmer than me, for example, But we don't base our society based on who's best at swimming, right, Yarvin is basically saying, there's one thing that I actually value when it comes to the ways in which people are different from each other, and it's a very specific kind of intelligence that's correlates to how I think I'm intelligent, and that's how we should stratify society.

Right.

Yeah, he's that kind of a dude. And I also kind of think it's interesting to me that he's so obsessed with this idea of like identifying as a Brahmin, because in Hindu culture, Brahmins are the castes that like traditionally were most involved in the priesthood and religious instruction, and it is like a very closed loop system right, the cast system traditionally, but that's not the kind of system that his family succeeded in. His dad was like a member of the US Foreign Service and became pretty highly placed in the government. But his dad wasn't born into that role. He was the son of Jewish American communists who came to this country and he had to fight to make a place for himself in the higher rungs of society, which is a very clear example of like mobility and the fact that we have a reasonably open society that allows for some mobility, which he doesn't want to exist. I always find it interesting when guys like that, you can see a clear example of like, oh, well, you only have what you have because our society allows for mobility.

Well, so where's he from again? Brooklyn?

He's yeah, he's from around Brooklyn.

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

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

The Kennedy's and like, yeah, that that ilk. So that's so interesting, all right.

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

So can I clarify one thing? So absolutely, I feel like the and I don't know enough about this, so I'm glad to be learning as I go, but I just have I've kind of I guess I'm realizing that I've assumed that the Peter Teels of the world, when they advocate for more of a dictatorial structure to our government, they're not saying that that part of that is also a free market capitalism which presumably allows for mobility, right, So mobility supposed to and that, if anything, it encouraged the best and the brightest to rise. And that's how they see themselves as the best in the brightest that have risen. So I guess I'm just splitting hairs a little bit, like are you sure that they that also they are anti social mobility or.

They're very much like close the door after you get up, right, like kick the ladder out from underneath you types, right, And I think it's because they do believe that, like there's a that their success was not purely based on the fact that they came up in a system where they gained certain benefits that were the result of like public spending. Right, Like all of these guys who made money in the tech industry went to schools that were generally publicly funded at least at some point, you know, their parents drove on roads that were publicly benefited from, like the security infrastructure that exists in this country in a lot of different ways. And their companies all benefited to some extent from government spending and incentives. But they see that their success was like the result of something inherently superior within themselves and often in like a genetic level in some ways. And so they're they're there Aristotle. The fact that they have achieved such success is not the result of a society that enabled them. It's a result of like, they're members of a natural aristocracy, and the best thing they can do is legally work to codify that aristocracy. That's the that's that's the we'll get into like some more of kind of how Curtis arrives by this, because he's really a big part in kind of lending an intellectual air to this. But that that very much is how these folks see themselves. And he grows up as a kid. You know, his dad's working for the State Department. They travel around the world a lot. He spends a decent chunk of his childhood in like Cyprus and the Dominican Republic, and you know, so that's a lot of disruption in his schooling. You know, he's not one of these kids who stays in the same school for a long period of time. But he excels in academics. He skips a grade back before his family goes overseas, and when they move back to the US, he skips two more grades and he winds up a sophomore at age twelve, which I think is probably never a great idea. Right, that's a little young.

Sounds hard.

Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't great being a sophomore at the normal age.

Yeah, that is not when when humanity at that age is not when humanity is at its most benevolent and kind and supportive. Yeah.

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

Of academic achievement that he bounced ahead?

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

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

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

Right.

This is back before most people know there's an internet, so he is an early adopter. I think nineteen eighty nine is when he first starts getting online regularly. Wow, and yeah, and this is not this is the precursor to the Internet that we know. And he's spending all of this time in a place called usenet, which, if you remember, like web forums, is kind of like the first web forum. Right, it's for eugen z kids. It's TikTok without any videos or hot people. And everyone has very strong opinions about Star Trek audio equipment or race science, right, like it's an interesting place to be, like yeah, yes.

Like race science was like they were just getting it. It was like four chan or like these these sort of yeh dark corners of Yeah.

There was actually a white supremacist terrorist group in the late eighties that robbed banks, stole a bunch of money, and then donated a bunch of it to other Nazi groups that spent it buying computer systems to link up different white power groups so that they could share information. And you know, there's there's evidence from as early as like the mid nineties of them talking about going into places where you can find fans of stuff, like different kind of like sci fi media who might be socially isolated and try to push propaganda onto them. So that actually does go back pretty far. And you know, it's hard to say, like I don't know exact we don't know entirely what Jarvin got up to when he was on usenet. You know, to some extent that's a bit of a black box. But his favorite board was a place called talk dot bizarre, And I've spent some time trawling the Usenet archives for talk dot bizarre, which.

You can find still Bizarre.

Talk that's like the names of like there's different talkboards and one of them is like the Bizarre right, Okay, and it's like kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's where I would have spent time if I had been a little bit older. It's like the first place where you would find like Internet humor, right, the kind of stuff you eventually you would see on boards like something Awful, and then four Chan and now like all of Twitter culture. Right, So it's it's inside jokes and memes and what we now call shit posting, right, And Yarvin is like one of the first generation of ship posters, and he says this of his time on usenet, it was a decentralized system, and more importantly, it had this amazing form of admission control because everyone on it was an engineering student or worked at a tech company or something. So critically, it's not an open platform. The only people here are to some extent involved in academics, involved in the tech industry, and very smart. Right in nineteen eighty five, just.

To get access to it at that time, yes, you had to have had to be in.

Yeah, so they're they're the elite in a way, right, and that's how, really how he comes to see them, and Yarvin is definitely part of that elite. In nineteen eighty five, he'd entered a Johns Hopkins study for mathematically Precocious Youth, and then he had started taking classes at Brown University. Even at this early stage of development, he showed a distinct interest in authoritarian leaders and just as critically and being very wrong about them. In nineteen ninety one, he wrote in a discussion on us NEET, I wonder if the Soviet power ladder, a vicious bureaucratic backbiting, brings stronger him into the top than the American system of feel good soundbites. Now, given that the USSR collapsed the next year, not a great prediction.

Yeah, this is so, this is like you should have had Rain Wilson on this episode, because you're describing Dwight shrut.

Yeah, he's got he's got more than a little.

Bit of that, right, a precociousness and a sort of very specific kind of brilliance and a preoccupation with with with like stern leadership.

And can you just imagine Dwight just telling everybody that he entered a Johns Hopkins study of mathematical precocious youth that would be brought up constantly.

By the way, if there is one way to guarantee you're gonna get your ass kicked on a playground.

True, I'm not even going to get out the first syllable of precocious before they start swinging.

Yeah.

So, while he is at college, Jarvin shows minimal interest in the humanities. He only takes five undergraduate courses in these subjects, focused on history and in college now Brown is where he starts at college, right, and he graduates in ninety two. He goes on to be a grad student in a COMPSI PhD program at Berkeley, and his goal at that point is to enter the tech industry, right, which is just starting to really explode from as the Internet. This is kind of the very the immediate precursor to the big dot com boom. And as he moves from high school to college and then from college to grad school and starts flirting with big tech, he continues spending his time online exploring his first political ideology, and he is initially a libertarian. I want to quote from a profile Joshua Tit wrote about Jarvin for a book on the radical right quote. Engineers like Jarvin are typically sorted through competitive academic programs, which they consider analogous to the competition imagined in a libertarian society. Their world is rational, rule bound, and solvable. Within the subculture, computer software and hardware are the dominant metaphors for society. Such thinking dovetails with the ironclad assumptions about human and market behavior of the Austrian school of economics led by Ludwig von mess Tech culture systems focus also accords with libertarianism's concentration on efficiency and solving government. And so he's one of these guys who number one comes to think, I am again, I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy based on my skill that I've earned, and the world around may he sees like, seems so chaotic. But the computer systems I'm working with are so sensible and ordered, and the companies that I am interested in all seem to be so much more efficient than the government. Couldn't we fix the government if we made it more like a computer program and more like the tech industry, right, which you can't because people don't work that way. But there's always guys who think this way, right, And you know, hopefully most of them, I think it doesn't lead anywhere, but like some bad opinions on the internet, unfortunately for Jarvin, it's going to go a little bit further than that. Speaking of disastrous ideological conclusions, you know who's never had any of those are sponsors electedly So we're back right now. The kind of thinking that Jarvin has about libertarianism, about being a part of this natural aristocracy, is not really congruent with human liberty in the broad sense, right, because you know, if you are able to, as a business owner, use your liberty like unconstrained by government regulations to dump poisonous in a waterway, right, that is, you are more free as the person running that business, but you're also destroying life, and you know, one would say, harming the liberty of thousands of other people who rely on that waterway.

Right.

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

Yeah yeah, and also and and and another version of that I find the anti union rhetoric. So oh yeah, it's so hilarious to me because the formation of a union to collectively bargain with a CEO is the most like, the most natural expression of free spreech a free speech. It is, it is, it is such a natural and so to be like, you know, free speech, I'm a constitutional you know, libertarian or whatever, and then also in the same breath be like unions are should be illegal. It's yeah, unions are a natural growth and a natural oppositional force to exploitation.

Yeah. And I think they also, like very real, like very objectively increase the amount of like freedom, right, Like if you're kind of looking at it that way, when people have a way to band together to oppose a much larger, more powerful, you know, more moneyed interest, then they have more agency, you know, in their lives, right Like that's that's I mean definitely how I look at it. And I will say Jarvin, he actually is pretty good at not getting lost in this part of the discourse, right because he drops this idea that liberty is a value in any way, shape or form pretty early on. Like he's not one of these guys who preaches libertarianism because he thinks that it's or because he's trying to convince people that it's somehow better for human freedom. He's someone who just kind of drops the idea that there's any value in human freedom pretty early on, right, so there's no point in paying lip service to it, which is at least more honest than a lot of these guys.

Now.

The major pivot point which leads to him dropping his libertarian trappings and embracing this more authoritarian belief system hinges on the place that he was and kind of remains his mental home, which is the early Internet. The old days of usenet were a simulacrum of what is today Jarvin's ideal society. As I stated before, back then you couldn't post unless you were someone with a degree of like skill, money, or access to a large institution, And so you would only get new users in any large amount every September, when you get new college classes of kids who would get onboarded and start posting, right. And so for a few years, every September the Internet would be an annoying for a while while all these newbies came in who don't know like the social mores, and they would have to get acclimatized, right, But there were always more old heads, people who had been there a long time to keep the new people in line, and there was this natural hierarchy based on age and technical skill. And then one year late nineteen ninety three, Usenet opens up to anyone with an Internet connection, and suddenly you have what people call eternal September. Right, like, it's never ended since nineteen ninety three because there were no there's not been any kind of like guard rails to block new people from coming on after that point. This is you know, it's an important moment in Internet history. It's a catastrophic moment for Curtis Yarbin, right, and the mental impact this has is key to understanding him. In one interview with Tablet magazine, he complained, you had this sort of de facto aristocracy that didn't know it was an aristocracy, and then it fell apart. These are all big Lord of the Rings guys, So I'll use the Lord of the Rings analogy. They talk about this like the like the the period of time when the elves ruled everything before Sauron had his big war, right like before the breaking of the world. That's eternal September that ruins this kind of like more noble Golden age and brings about this dirty, grubby age of men.

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

Yeah I do. I'm wearing a Lord of the Rings hat right now. Can back that claim.

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

Funny.

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

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

Okay, yeah, yeah, but.

I don't know that would be an interesting conversation. So I think this period of time, this kind of collapse of this natural aress, what he sees as a natural aristocracy is key to understanding why Jarvin comes to hate democracy, right because it kind of ruined his Internet playground, the first place where he ever felt that he fit in rights. That's sort of what I see as like the er moment of his like coming to hate this kind of idea of any kind of democratic society. Now, if you're going to claim that you and your friends on the Internet back in the day were like the aristocracy of some long lost utopia of logic that invites people to look at what you were posting on the Internet back then, And I've looked at some of Jarvin's old posts, and Socrates he wasn't. He does seem to have spent some of it writing comedy for a hacking and DIY media collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow. This is where we get to like the weirdest connection here, because if you've heard of the Cult of the Dead Cow recently, it's because Beto O'Rourke was also a member. So yeah, yeah, yeah, So he and Beto have a very very strange connection to each other. Now, the Cult of the Dead Cow was like a complicated thing. It's it's one Reuter's article I found describes it as the oldest group of computer hackers in US history. I think that over sells how cool Jarvin's involvement in it is, because I think he was mostly They were also like a media collective, so they put out like pieces of writing and whatnot, and I think that's mostly what Yarvin's involvement was, right, And the best evidence I have of what he was writing for them is a satiric piece of Badger human hybrid erotica, which I think might hold a little bit of evidence of his future interest in race science, although it's hard to say. Do you want to hear some of his human hybrid erotica?

Hold on, let me get some lube.

Love me for my genes, says Antonio Kneeling. If you cannot love me for myself, you must love me for my jeans. I've never told anyone this before. I've always kept it to myself. I have always let them think it but an accident of cruel nature that I have white hair on my cheekbones and a thoroughly disreputable looking nose. But the fact is that I am part badger on my father's side. So I don't know. I don't know what to say about that. I know it's a joke. It's a bit, right, I don't think it lands Maybe it was funnier back in the early Internet, although maybe the bar was just a lot lower there.

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

This has to be part of a dialogue that we've lost pieces of over the years, right, It is like about two pages of like Badger erotica. That is, it's weirdly the love Me for my jenes line stands out to me. But I may be reading more into that that is necessary. But yeah, so you know that's the kind of stuff he's doing. He's like, it's it's pretty lighthearted comedy, right, or it's at least attempting to be. So he's not, as far as I can tell, on like the serious hacking side of what the Cult of the Dead Cow is doing at this period of time. Now, Jarvin weathered the fall of Usenet and not long after the Eternal September began he dropped out of Berkeley for a job at a tech company. He started flirting with the specific strains of more authoritarian money simptered libertarian ideology as opposed to like, you know, the old school guys who actually, like you know, really were pretty focused on human liberty. I think kind of the last dregs of those guys, or you saw it, like Penin Teller would be a great evidence of that, right, Like that kind of libertarian was a lot more prominent back then. And he's sort of Yarvin is sort of right on the edge of the folks who got a lot of money in the tech industry and started getting angry that, like they have to still pay taxes to keep the roads up right. That's kind of where he moves into. And Yarvin is eventually going to kind of come out of that as a monarchist. And it behooves us to look at how that happened. Now there are some signs of his ideological turn. And another short story he wrote for the Cult of the Dead Cow the year after that Badger story in nineteen ninety four. This piece is titled The Bishop, and it opens with the lines no one has come into the cathedral in some time. It's about an old bishop who exists out of time in a moldering cathedral that no one has visited in years, and at one point Jarvin, possibly describing himself, writes, the bishop is a man of logic. Unlike many older people, he is unwilling to repaint the world he sees around him to make it a more comfortable place in which to live. He recognizes unpleasant facts, indeed he delights in them for the in the act of recognition he finds proof that his faculties have not decayed to that state of contented oblivion, which he believes a sheer precursor to death. And this is kind of noteworthy in part because the term cathedral is going to be really influential important for Jarv and he's going to come to use it as a term to refer to the news media, the political establishment, and academia.

Right.

Everyone who annoys him, right is the cathedral. And this is sort of like the evil regime that he's going to set himself to the task of destroying. And this is how a lot of these guys think. It's why there's so much focused why guys like Vance spends so much time attacking schools, attacking like professors and academia. It's why there's so much hatred of journalists, right, These are the people who, in his eyes, are invested in propping up a clearly dysfunctnctional, failing society. Right, and so you have to destroy the cathedral in order to build anything new. That's that's what he's going to come to believe. Right In the early two thousands, the dot com bubble bursts, and at some point after that, Yarvin wound up with several hundred grand as the result of a buyout of a company he worked at, So not enough to retire, but enough to sit around and really think about what he wants to do next.

What year is this?

This would be like in the early two thousands, So this is all happening sometime between like two thousand and one and two thousand and four, you know, the dot com bubble bursts. Sometime after nine to eleven, I think is when he gets bought out, And by two thousand and three or four, he's kind of sitting around on a pile of money, reading a lot, trying to figure out what he wants to do next with his life. What he kind of decides is that he wants to think about politics and economics. Now, Yarvin had made some friends during his tech years, and he'd gotten interested in Austrian school economists, mostly because of this University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, who was like an early blogger, who had gotten Jarvin interested in a guy named Ludwig von Meses, and eventually through this Jarvin gets interested in a fan of Meaes another theoretician named Marie Rothbard. Rothbard was a foundational a narco capitalist thinker. I don't really like that term, but that's what they called themselves, and he basically believes like there should not be a state, right, there should not be any power higher than individuals and corporations spending their money to make things happen. Right, That's kind of the gist of anarchist. Yeah, yeah, and you know, I think like a more like an anarchist would argue the fact that you have a bunch of money is like as much a problematic hierarchy as, you know, anything that the state does, and not, like you can't really be an anarcho capitalist. A lot of people would argue, but Rothbard is one who feels like, basically that the state, the primary reason the state is unethical is that it stops people from doing what they want to do with their money. Right, Whereas an anarchist would be like, well, the reason that the state is an ethical is that states can do a lot of harm to people at scale. Right, Anyway, none of that really matters to the point, which is that he gets really interested in this guy Rothbard and Rothbard. One of the things the Rights about is this kind of anger at the concept of people advocating for civil rights.

Right.

Anyone advocating for civil rights, in Rothbard's mind, is an enemy right because the only way to advocate for civil rights is to advocate for the state to make rules about those rights, and that leads inevitably to tyranny. Rothbard wrote, behind the honeyed but patently absurd pleads for equality is a ruthless drive for placing themselves the elites, at the top of a new hierarchy of power. And this is something you see a lot on the right today, this idea that like any group of people who are advocating for their own civil who are advocating for civil rights because they're being oppressed under the present system are secretly trying to make themselves rulers, right. All they really want to do is a press you by, I don't know, getting the right to vote or own credit cards or whatever. So that's kind of like a big part of Rothbard's belief system, and Jarvin really takes to that now. And that quote that I just read from him came out in ninety five, so you get the kind of feeling like this is the sort of thinking Jarvin is hoovering up in that period right before you know, the dot com boom and then the dot com bust. And ultimately his reading of these Austrian school guys leads him to another dude named Thomas Carlyle. Now Carlyle's been dead for a while. He's a Scottish philosopher from the eighteen hundreds, and he's kind of seen as a proto to these a lot of these kind of like more modern thinkers that he's reading. And Carlyle is, you know, he's a he's an authoritarian who believes that you need a strong man to stop groups of marginalized people from making themselves the new tyrants, right. And he's also as we'll talk about a massive racist. He's one of the these guys who justify slavery as being a fundamentally ethical system for reasons of like, basically, certain groups of people are different genetically, so slavery is a natural like hierarchy in society. So these are the kind of people that Jarvin is digesting when he comes upon the work of a fellow named Hans Herman Hop. Hop is a German born political theorist and a leading Austrian School economist. He's another anarcho capitalist, and hop is a big advocate of monarchy in a way that he defines monarchy as a privately owned government as opposed to a democracy, which he calls a publicly owned government. And Hopp believes that the transition from monarchy to democracy over the twentieth century was like the big mistake that we made as humans and has caused nothing but civilizational decline ever since. And from Hop Jarvin gets the idea that the best way to run anything is to have one guy be in charge of it. Right, You can't effectively run an organization if there's any power sharing. The only way to do anything is to have a single person be invested with absolute power right. I know that's kind of like a tortured logical route, but those are sort of the ingredients that eventually cook up to him becoming a monarchist. Right now, we might say that's not the most logical thing, right if you look at what happened to all of the absolute monarchies, they kind of destroyed each other circle World War One, And Jarvin would argue, no, no, no, those weren't real absolute monarchies. They had they all made too many compromises with different sort of like democratical instruments within those societies. And that's the reason why Austria Hungary fell, and that's the reason why the czar fell, right, they didn't have quite enough power. I think that's silly.

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

Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

A monarchy is a wonderful fantasy. But like, how do you pick the guy? How do you pick that person? And then and then what if he gets hit on the head wrong if he's wrong and n Dali Lama thing where where it's it's a birthright thing. And then like what if what if they're just like a narcissistic, suicidal or depressive or whatever, Like, uh, what if they want nothing to do with it?

I don't know.

It just seems nuts.

It's this wild It's this thing that like everyone understands the frustration with democracy, right, Like it's really messy and really annoying a lot of the time, and like people make a lot of bad decisions, especially even as collectives. Groups of people make really bad decisions a lot of the time. Right, But then saying like the solution to this is to have one guy be in charge. It's like, well, number one, how do you pick that guy? Number two? Like we've all seen it, Like people change over the course of their lives, right, Like what happens if that guy, like his mental decapacity gets declined or whatever, or he gets obsessed with something weird and crazy and dangerous, which is what happens to every monarchy, Right, They all wind up ruled by like maniacs who make terrible decisions, which is like why we had World War One. You have all these like monarchs who were obsessed with these very silly attitudes with the and these very silly, petty grievances between each other, and had made like generations of terrible decisions when it came to like purchasing arms and building their military machines, and like, it just turns out that the bad decisions of one guy are certainly not like any less catastrophic than the bad decisions of like groups of people. Right, anytime you've got people who spend all of their time like theorizing about the way things ought to be, as opposed to like dealing with the way people are, you're going to wind up with with nonsense, right, And like that's that. Unfortunately, every now and then we get to see like what that nonsense looks like, you know, when when people actually put it in place. You know, in the case of like absolute monarchies like this, we got the trenches in World War One. In the case of like a very authoritarian communism, you know, we got Stalin, And I guess kind of like part of part of why I think Jarvin is important to understand is that as kooky as a lot of this stuff is, he is a guy who wants to take these theories that he made himself when he was like sitting alone in his apartment reading books and not really any interacting with real people. He's a guy who wants those theories to govern the lives of hundreds of millions, ideally billions, right, And that's a real dangerous kind of person. You know, Like we can regular people can sit around and like read their books and and talk about like, well, this might be neat or this might be neat. But whenever you're talking about, like, I know, how to reorder all of society, you've become dangerous. And you know, that's kind of what Yarvin is doing during this period of time where he's sitting at home and he's reading his books. So the kind of the system that he pulls out of this period where he's just like get reading everything he can get his hands on, is that monarchs are. A monarchy is the ideal kind of system of government because it's the best at maximizing long term profits within a society. Because monarchs have to think long term, right, they can't be destructive in the short term, like you know leaders in a democracy are because they have a limited term limit. You know, maybe they only care about benefiting themselves. A monarch wouldn't act that way because they have no desire to destroy their own property. And again, I would I would point you, yeah, I would point you back to Yeah, we could talk about like the Saudi royal family too, right, entirely bio oil or Roman emperors, like literally most of the monarchies that have ever been have like collapsed as a result of the fact that that's also an inherently destructive thing. You know, some of that just comes down to human nature. But he does try to deal with this, the fact that monarchies clearly don't work the way that he thinks that they should. And he thinks that a big part of the issue is that, you you, they all make too many compromises. Right, all of these monarchies that collapsed during the turn of the century had allowed some democratic elements into society. And you know, they had allowed that because there were revolutions, right, people like occupied Vienna for a period of time in forty eight, Like, there were a bunch of like socialist uprisings in the middle of the nineteenth century, and as a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies into introduced reforms, you know, and he sees those reforms as this was like a terrible step that ensured their demise as opposed to like, well, the absolute monarch chose to make those reforms because they could not hold on to power otherwise. But again, there's never a perfect logical consistency with guys.

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

I think the key is the key is to him. The difference would be like a bureaucratic structure, wherein there are other centers of power, right like if you've got a constitutional monarch, but there's still some kind of like Congress or Senate or whatever that has some things that are within its scope. And with right, he he he wants, he wants. He does actually view it as a CEO where they do delegate, but the CEO is ultimately the guy in power, right who they saw the delegatees. I mean, I think the CEO in his ideal like situation, right, like his ideal system of government that he kind of comes around to is like the way Facebook is run right, where you do have like a border directors technically, but Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that like no one can force him out. The buck stops with him, like he ultimately has all of the power in that organization. That's how Jarvin thinks country should be run right, which.

In his defense, Facebook is a flawless organization.

Yeah, yeah, we all know that nothing ever goes wrong there. So the final straw for Jarvin's tolerance of democracy came in two thousand and four as a result of the swift Boat's Veteran for swift Boat Veterans for Truth scandal. You remember this, I'm sure right, Oh yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, this is back in the two thousand and four election John Kerry with the Democratic nominee. Kerrie had been wounded three times in Vietnam, and then after he had left the service, he had become an anti war activist, right he like testified in Congress this was a really big deal, and so as number one. As a result, conservatives had never really forgiven John Kerry for as they saw betraying the country in Vietnam, and also obviously, like Bush was running on the back of two wars that he had gotten the country and Carrie had been against those. So there was this like pretty hideous conflict. And the way that a lot of folks on the right chose to, like particularly those within Bush's campaign, chose to respond was by arguing and bringing up, you know, people who claimed people who had served in Vietnam, who claimed that Kerry had lied about his service right, that he hadn't really done the things he'd done, that his purple hearts were essentially like due to exaggerations, and none of this was true, and in fact, like when journalists actually talk to people who had served with carry, they're like, no, he was like a very good soldier who was wounded repeatedly doing his job. But the propat Canada campaign largely worked right, and Yarvin that critically he bought the propit Ganda campaign, and he was angry that the media, in his eyes, worked to protect Carrie, which proved that it was fundamentally evil and allied with Academia and what people now call the deep state, career government employees operating this sort of shadow government that really ran things right. His attitude is that because John Kerrey didn't suffer enough from the swift boat scandal. That means that the whole media complex in the United States was corrupt and needed to be destroyed, which is a crazy thing to lead you to that conclusion. Like it's just it's one of the it's interesting to me because this guy really does he tries to portray himself as this like dark philosopher, like esoteric almost political mad man, but when you get right down to it, he's like your crank uncle who's angry about John Carrey on Facebook.

Well, also the swift voting. It's a weird thing to it's a weird thing to take from that whole chapter of political American political history because it because swift boating worked. Yeah, and then and then media, by the way, took the bait and just like amplified the story and uh yeah, and if they tried to protect Carrie, which I'm I'm sure a few journalists probably.

Wanted, certainly individuals.

Yeah they failed. Yeah, they didn't work.

Like that's like and that's how I would say, is like I think if you're saying what happened the swift Boating thing is why I lost faith in the media, that's reasonable, but not for the reason that he did, right, Yeah, but anyway, that's what that's where he goes, right, speaking of the shadow government that really runs things. That's all of our sponsors are affiliated with. We're back. So now the years that Yarvin is kind of doing his having his like period in the wilderness, coming up with his political ideology largely like two thousand and three or four to like two thousand and seven or so, are the years that the tech industry like that brings us Web two point zero is starting to emerge. You get Google, you get you know, Apple had been around for a while, right, but they you know, we start to see like the what's going to become the smartphone era like grind towards you know, coming into being. Facebook also starts like two thousand and six or seven, I think, is like when it very first starts out. So like this is kind of the early birth of the Web two point zero era, which are all of these founder driven startups for the most part, right, And Yarvin comes to see this, this system that gives us Google and Facebook as inherently better than the system that governs the country. Right, it's and it's more akin to his kind of idealized absolute monarchy. So by this point in time, around two thousand and seven, Vin has more or less come across all the ingredients of his new ideology, this kind of reactionary monarchism with Austrian economic tendencies. The problem is that none of these philosophers that he likes, these guys like Roth barden Hopp, have quite gotten it right. And so he decides, I've got to start putting my ideas out there. I finally figured it out. I've consolidated the contradictions between all these systems, and now I'm going to start putting it out for people to see. Right. So in two thousand and seven he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis of reading that he'd put himself in, and he comes up with a blog under a pen name, Minsius Moldbug. And it's under this pen name that he's going to start writing a bunch of essays of political theory. In an interview with Max Raskin, Yarvin describes the origin of this nickname Minsius Moldbug. This way, it came from two different handles I was using in different places. I would post occasionally on Reddit or hacker News. Sometimes I would get banned, and I would choose the name of a new classical figure, and I just happened to land on Minsius. And then I was doing some economics posting, and I posted something about gold, but I said mold instead of gold, because I was talking about something with a hypothetical restricted supply. So it's just kind of like a foreign name, but it sounds like a little bit sinister, and it's interesting to me. Minsius the first name comes from a Confucian philosopher from the three hundreds BC who was a major figure in that kind of thought, and he had, during the Warring States period, interviewed a bunch of different kings and written a book about like what he'd learned about ruling. Now, Minsius was kind of focused on getting monarchs to act more benevolently towards the poor and the downtrodden. So he's not really a figure that has a lot to do with the kind of politics Jarvin is about to espouse. I think he'd largely picked the name because it makes him sound kind of sinister. But he starts putting out his new thoughts on politics in this blog, in a series of essays called Unqualified Reservations, all geared at getting his readers on board with the idea of reorganizing society away from democracy and towards a kind of enlightened one man rule that he believes is going to work a lot better. Unlike most philosophers, Jarvin Peppers's essays with casual slurs. In reading one, where he talks about World War Two, he refers to the Japanese repeatedly by a common slur at the time, and in another he makes a satiric statement about how the indigent poor should be destroyed and turned into biodiesel fuel. This kind of stuff, it hasn't the impact of getting like on the rare occasions in these early days that like major news outlets will look at his work, they'll kind of decide to ignore him because it's this guy dropping a bunch of racial slurs and crude jokes. He's clearly not a serious thinker. But the other thing that this style of discourse does is it's very attractive to young men, particularly young kind of intelligent autodid acts in the tech industry who spend a lot of time reading the internet. Right, And it is kind of in the same way that a lot of like the way people talk on four Chan is going to be attractive to these kinds of guys, right, And what you're seeing in these early Moldbug episodes, with this use of slurs and these kind of like joking not joking statements about killing poor people is the precursor to the way the alt right is going to talk about issues right and use kind of humor and jokes that aren't really jokes to kind of push more extreme ideas.

Right.

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

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

I think it is Menshus sorry Menshus, yes, yes, but it spelled yeah the other way.

And I have no idea. I just when you said it was a confusion, suddenly thought no, maybe anyway.

Yeah, I think it is Menshus. Yeah.

And then my second question is to what extent I find the humor aspect of this fascinating because it raises the possibility or I guess I should. I guess My question is like where on the spectrum of like just kind of like very mendacious and angry person who wants to reshape the world versus like like all the way to the other end of just being like a really giddy shitster gadfly with who just wants to throw crazy ideas out there and and get a reaction out of people the way like ninety percent of Twitter is like, where on that spectrum is he? Because it's that does sound like there's like, like, you know, churning up poor people to create biodiesel is a it's a tasteless joke.

It's it's like a swifty Thomas Swift or it's like Jonathan Swift type joke, right, Like, but it could.

Be construed as just like trolling, right right.

Well, I think that's kind of the key point. So, like what you're talking about is like the term we use for it is shit posting, right and and Yarvin is very much a shit poster, right, But he's also using that as a tool where he understands that this is how young men particularly talk on the Internet, and It is something that inherently, if you're talking this way, if you're engaging this way, you have more credibility with them than you know, people who are trying to be more respectable, who largely like this chunk of folks doesn't think highly of right these like kind of like these traditional sort of like intellectual elites, you know, academics and journalists and alike, they have a lot of disdain for, but they trust someone who communicates like them. And so by using these kind of like by by basically peppering in sort of trolling language in these very serious articles arguing for anti democratic politics, he makes himself credible to them. And he also there's also a sense that because he's including some of this this stuff that is a lot racier, he's there's something almost forbidden knowledge about the stuff that he's putting out right that makes them want to share it with each other. And that's very much like a factor in his success. What he's doing here is like very much intentional and very intelligent and very effective, and it you know, if you want to look at kind of the ultimate uh uh like evolution of these sort of tactics, I think a great touch point would be the christ Church Church shooters manifesto, which included a lot of these like inside jokes, a lot of like forum troll language wrapped around serious arguments for like why people should carry out white supremacist attacks. And it's a kind of tactic that is really what gave us the alt right as a political force, and it's still very much how these people communicate now. I think it started to hurt them recently. The whole the weird stuff that Tim Walls began pulling out has actually been a really effective thing because when you actually, like take the way these people talk amongst each other and put it up in front of an audience, it's deeply off putting to most people. But it also kind of led to this establishment of like an internal language for these folks that kind of led to an ossification of their ideological tendencies. Right, we're all using the same kind of terms and words that we've come to recognize as like dog whistles for different things, and Jarvin is really doing that in a very organized way. He's good at developing terms for people to use that get adopted on a large scale. You know. One of the best example this would be his term the cathedral, right, which you know he uses to be mean this nexus of everything he doesn't like, the liberal media, the university system, academia, you know, like career of government employees, everything he considers bad, and everything his ideal monarch would destroy. Right, in his ideal world, there's not going to be an independent academic community, there's not going to be newspapers or journalists, just a king and an aristocracy, and of course he's going to be a natural member of that aristocracy. Right now, he does kind of the last piece of this ideology he's putting together is he has to explain why a lot of these real world feudalist governments that fell apart all fell apart. And part of it is obviously they gave too much freedom to people who weren't the monarch. But the other thing he comes up with is that old monarchies denied citizens the freedom to exit. And so in this ideal world, he supposes countries will be small, like the size of a city in most cases, and they'll compete with citizens who would have the freedom to leave. Right, So it's fine. Now, there's a lot of questions that aren't answered here, like how do you make a society like function that way, and a world is interconnected as ours. How do you stop you know, one monarch from repeatedly taking over other a like how do you stop Why wouldn't they use force? Why would people just let valuable subjects leave? How do people leave if the monarch can stop them from taking their assets out? All of these things that like would be actual problems if anyone tried to do this sort of thing. Like there's not actually an answer to this, but like that's that's kind of his idealized version of a society. It's a bunch of small monarchies all over the world that people can theoretically leave and move between. The way people leave companies and go to work for other companies. So like, you know how much everybody loves work. That's how the whole government should be.

That's it. That's wild. I hadn't thought of it as on such a small scale. Here's another question, like in the same way that like company will have a board that can like ousta ceo or like, like is there any is there any stopgap measure for like a disastrous or someone like let's say someone has like a brain eating worm. Yeah, right, but they are showing no symptoms when they are appointed or ascend to the the monarchy, but then over the next five years they become like absolutely batshit crazy. Is there any any stopgap there?

The only stock gap he builds in is the idea that well, theoretically, if the if the if the ruler's bad, everyone would be able to leave and then their system.

Will right right, Oh, it's that thing.

Yeah, it's like it's that thing where it's like, well, but what if he wants to shoot people who tries.

It's like rand Paul saying, like civil rights are are dumb because if you put like a whites only sign in front of your store, you're gonna lose business and you're gonna go out of business and the market will keep you from being racist. Meanwhile, like that, yeah, back when people did that, it was didn't work until the laws kicked in. Yeah. Yeah no.

And it's it's this, it's these it's this weird mix of like naivete uh and like starry eyed thinking that to a degree, I think he's just kind of being dishonest with the naivete, like he knows any state like this would just be a dictatorship like enforced through violence. Right, But that's what he wants as long as he's a part of the aristocracy. And he's just kind of built in this. Well, people would just leave if they didn't like it, because he has to have some answer for it, right, But I kind of think he knows how ugly a system like this would be in practice. He's just more or less fine with it right now. The last kind of ingredient to the ideological system year Vin is cooking up is, of course racism. And I want to read a passage from an article in tech Crunch about Jarvin and his followers and how they are quote obsessed with a concept called human biodiversity what used to be called scientific racism. Specifically, they believe that IQ is one of, if not the most important personal traits, and that it's predominantly genetic. Neo reactionaries would replace or supplement the divine right of kings and the aristocracy with the genetic right of elites.

Right.

So this is another element of how he tries to justify, well, my system's smarter than the old school of monarchies.

Right.

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

Right, emotional IQ are we Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's not where that could be good.

Absolutely not.

I'm for that. I'm for people with like very strong emotional IQs being in charge of things.

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

Oh so I'll feel unsafe all the time.

Yeah, okay, cool.

So it's probably not surprising muldbugs theories take off among specifically a lot of Silicon Valley young men right who are excessively online, and it also starts to take off. He begins being spread by a lot of like far right folks on the Internet and kind of the mid aughts who find his work and share it amongst themselves. It's just two years after Muldbug starts his blog that Peter Teal gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with liberty and Teal starts putting money Jarvin's way, right. He's probably the number one guy sending money towards Yarvin backing. He backs a tech company that Yarvin starts, and he's just generally sort of like but like his early sort of moneyed backer, right, and Yarvin kind of as a result, he starts getting shared almost like people are like handing out drugs to each other. Like, we want to keep this on the down low. You don't want like people too many people to know publicly that you're reading Moldbug, but like, have you read this latest article if you checked out this blog, right, And he starts getting invited to give talks, and he starts saying things in these talks that like speeches at these schools to these conservative clubs and the like, like if Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia. There's really no other solution. And that's kind of the thinking that is going to lead directly into the alt right, and it's embrace of Donald Trump. Yarvin is one of the key ideological pieces there. He is building a bridge that is eventually going to lead to how a lot of these people think about what Trump should be.

Right.

It's part of why there's a lot of this joking not joking talk about wanting Trump to be like a god king, right, is it's a lot of these guys who are knowingly or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of came initially into the right from Jarvin. And yeah, that's that's part one and part two we're going to talk about like how he actually gets connected to politics and kind of where we are today with this guy. But uh, yeah, how are you feeling ed?

I'm a little rattled.

It's dark stuff, right.

Yeah, that's the right reaction.

Where what happens if if he is like in the court, the high court of this monarch and uh and gets a stomach flu and throws up in during a ceremony of some kind, and is like sent to a dungeon for the rest of his life at no fault of his own, Like what which is a very reasonable expectation of of a monarchical system. And so is he then sitting in the dungeon saying it's still the best, This is still the best, this is still the best system.

I don't think he thinks that could happen, because I think he doesn't believe something that you and I believe in that I think most rational people believe, which is that like power corrupts, so like, even if you are not the kind of guy who would throw people in a dungeon when you become king, just the fact that being a king is deranging, right, having that kind of power, you will eventually get used to exercising it and doing things like punishing people who just annoy you. And we know that this happens because we have a lot of examples of like when people are made dictators, how folks who were at least more normal at one point become like more violent and dangerous to be around, right, Like, this is a very well documented thing that comes with power. And I think he doesn't believe that fundamentally because he thinks that power naturally accumulates in natural systems of elites, right, so it can't be bad for them.

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

I think it's it's also like a failure. These guys all consider themselves historians, but they don't study history in any kind of like rigorous academic fashion. And like, every time I hear this argument about well people would just leave, I think about like what happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany, where if they wanted to leave, the state would take all of their property effectively. Right, Some people did get to leave, but they didn't get to take their assets with them, right, Like that was a theft, was a part of the system. And it's a thing that a state operated by a single man with absolute power and to grudge can do. And there's no reason in his system that it wouldn't happen to anyone trying to leave a bad you know, Ceo King. Right, But I either again, he's just not bringing this up because he doesn't care about the people he thinks this would happen to, or he just isn't read enough on the kind of history that's actually relevant to how a system like this would work in real life. You know, that's what I would kind of respect. Yeah, yeah, people have tried this, Curtis, which he may very well be fully aware of, and just kind of trying to do a little sleight of hand here, right, because he's more or less fine with who he thinks would be the people targeted unfairly in this system, which is like he's one of these guys who is annoyed with the left and progressives, right, he hates social justice and advocates for social justice, so if those people get targeted, he doesn't have a problem with it. You know, I think part of it's just not believing you could ever be the victim of the system you seek to put in place, which you know, statistically you want to look at like what happened to the early Bolsheviks after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of those guys delivered a retirement, right, and you know you don't want to talk about like the first generation of Nazi street fighters. A lot of those guys didn't wind up retiring either. Anyway, Ed, let's retire for this episode until part two. People should check out your podcast SNAPFO Season two is out now and yeah, we'll be back on Thursday.

All right, see you then.

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

Behind the Bastards

There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a  
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