Curtis Yarvin, the philosopher behind J.D. Vance, traces his authoritarian shift from libertarianism to monarchism via the 1993 "Eternal September" collapse of Usenet and his 2004 Swift Boat scandal analysis. Influenced by Austrian economists like Mises and Rothbard, he coined "the cathedral" to describe corrupt institutions, promoting human biodiversity and IQ-based aristocracy through his 2007 blog "Unqualified Reservations." Backed by Peter Thiel, Yarvin argues democracy is a mistake, yet his proposed competing small monarchies lack safeguards against tyranny, potentially leading to violence and asset confiscation. Ultimately, his ideas challenge democratic norms while risking the very instability he claims to prevent. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Prying Truth From Power00:05:04
Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you are legally required to be listening to in at least four U.S. states.
Six, if you have a criminal record and are currently working through probation.
Which four?
I'm, huh?
Which for?
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 about your show, Snafu, which has just entered season two.
Thank you for coming on the show.
I am so psyched to be here.
Your show is awesome.
And this is going to be fun.
I hope it better be.
I wanted to say you're so Snafu 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 1971 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 it.
These citizens who were not at all professional thieves or criminals staged this incredible heist on the night of the Ali Fraser fuck, which is very Ocean's 11.
Yeah.
We actually got Steven Soderberg on the podcast to comment on that.
But yeah, and they pulled off this elaborate heist.
They broke into that FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole every file, and then started leaking them to a very courageous reporter at the Washington Post named Betty Medzker.
They kept it secret for decades.
These documents led to the revelation of COINTELPRO, which basically massively and demolished J. Edgar Hoover's legacy for good reason.
Yeah.
And led to the church hearings, which is the only reason why we have any congressional oversight over the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and all the other alphabet agencies.
It was an incredible moment.
Yeah, it's so amazing to me because you couldn't do it.
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 the, 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.
The Pentagon water.
All 12 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 predates Watergate and the Pentagon Papers by 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 him up to do the right thing for Watergate and really like, I don't know.
Yeah, it started that kind of, there's this inertia and momentum behind actually like we're not just speaking truth to power, but like prying truth out of power's grasp and forcing it in front of the country.
Yeah.
Well put.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Prophet of the Right00:09:57
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, I, there's a, the guy that we're going to be talking about today is a fella 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-war years 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 Yarvin, is sort of the prophet 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.
I mean, I read a tiny bit about him yesterday, but that was that's fine.
That is the case with most people 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 U.S. vice presidential candidate and hopefully future nobody, JD Vance, who back in September 20th of 2021 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 2025.
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 was that interview?
2021.
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 kind of a cynical 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 Trump 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 like democracy is a mistake.
Right.
And that a lot of things that have recent, 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 in how they're governed.
And like to what I was saying before, it's 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 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 Thiel, who's the Facebook billion.
He made a lot of money on Facebook, made a lot of money on PayPal.
And he sunk about 15 million into Vance's congressional campaign, which is the most ever spent on a single congressional candidate.
And Thiel in 2009 went 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 Thiel 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 named Curtis Yarvin, 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 prophet of a sizable chunk of the authoritarian right.
Thiel 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 Yarvin, who's probably the most influential theoretician of the radical right in the U.S. today.
Curtis has never killed anybody in any legally actionable sense or advocated for 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 into our current era, right, owes something to Yarvin's work.
So when you're thinking about everything that's happened on the right that's gotten so deranged since 2015, all of it has bits of Curtis Yarvin 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 a reader suggested only high testosterone alpha males and a neurotypical people should be allowed to vote.
This is also a thought with some Yarvin DNA behind it.
Say that again?
Oh, yes.
Oh, this was quite a moment.
That only alpha males, so, you know, stereotypical like alpha male guys, and then a neurotypical people, people who are not like...
I have a physical indeed.
Can I still vote?
I think maybe so, because a lot of these guys are 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 Yarvin.
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.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Genetic Mobility and Brahmins00:10:08
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Curtis Yarvin was born probably in Brooklyn in 1973 on about June 25th 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 sources behind it.
Like most radical intellectuals, Yarvin 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 U.S. 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.
Yarvin 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.
Therefore, we are justified in leaning into that.
Yes, presumably.
And in fact, yeah.
Yeah, we have a moral reason.
Because that's a separate thing.
Like its 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 180, 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 objective thing.
Like 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 makes it okay to then, whether, wherever it falls on the spectrum of good and evil, because it exists, it is therefore okay to do and heightened murder.
Murder is bad.
Murder happens.
It's a fundamental part of the human condition that people get murdered and murder one another.
Therefore, absolutely.
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 a and you're, you're always picking when you're, when you're trying to acknowledge that, like, okay, people are not, like, people don't all have the same abilities naturally, right?
Like, that's a thing that's objectively 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, I can, 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 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 caste system traditionally.
But that's not the kind of system that his family succeeded in.
His dad was like a member of the U.S. 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 like came to this country and he had to like 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.
Wait, so where is he from again?
Brooklyn?
Yeah, he's from around Brooklyn.
Okay.
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.
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 Brahmin, right?
Like his parents were Jewish Stalinists, which is not like a Boston Brahmin thing.
No, right?
Because that was like the Kennedys and like 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 kind of key to see that a big chunk of his family's comfort, at least, comes from the fact that like he, 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 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 Thiels of the world, when they advocate for more of a dictatorial structure to our government, they're not saying that part of that is also a free market capitalism, which presumably allows for mobility, right?
Social mobility.
Supposed to.
And that if anything, it encourages the best and the brightest to rise.
And that's how they see themselves as the best and the brightest that have risen.
So I guess I'm just splitting hairs a little bit.
Like, are you sure that also they are anti-social mobility?
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 public.
They 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 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 U.S., he skips two more grades and he winds up a sophomore at age 12, which I think is probably never a great idea, right?
That's a little young to be a sophomore.
Sounds hard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like it wasn't great being a sophomore at the normal age.
Yeah.
That is not when humanity, 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 it because 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 schools reward.
And you can kind of read between the lines that he was the recipient of a decent amount of bullying, right?
You know, 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, the high school has a lot of bullying in it.
So I'm not, I'm not surprised.
That's, we're about the same age, he and I.
And yeah, that was, I mean, that was just like good old hazing, all the, just all the gross, horrible, traumatic stuff.
Precocious Propaganda on Usenet00:07:13
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm thinking through some fun memories that I have myself right now, right?
So we all, 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 80s and early 90s, 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 1989 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 his 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.
Yeah.
Yes.
Like race science was a like they were just getting it.
It was like 4chan or like these sort of dark corners of.
Yeah.
There was actually a white supremacist terrorist group in the late 80s 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 90s 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.
Wow.
And, you know, it's hard to say, like, I don't know exactly, we don't know entirely what Yarvin 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.bazaar.
And I've spent some time trawling the Usenet archives for talk.bazaar, which you can find still.
Talk bizarre.
Talk.
That's like the names of like there's different talk boards, and one of them is like the bizarre, right?
Okay, 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 it's like the first place where you would find like internet humor, right?
The kind of stuff eventually you would see on boards like Something Awful and then 4chan and now like all of Twitter culture, right?
So it's inside jokes and memes and what we now call shit posting, right?
And Yarvin is like one of the first generation of shit 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 1985.
Just to get access to it at that time.
Yes.
You had to have to be in.
Yeah.
So 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 1985, 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 in being very wrong about them.
In 1991, he wrote in a discussion on Usenet, I wonder if the Soviet power ladder of vicious bureaucratic backbiting brings stronger men to the top than the American system of feel-good sound bites.
Now, given that the USSR collapsed the next year, not a great prediction.
Yeah.
This is so interesting.
This is like you should have had Rain Wilson on this episode because you're describing Dwight Schroot.
Yeah.
He's got more than a little bit of that, right?
Having a precociousness and a sort of very specific kind of brilliance and a preoccupation 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 going to get your ass kicked on a playground.
So true.
So true.
With precocious math headaches.
You're not even going to get out the first syllable of precocious before they start swinging.
Yeah.
So while he is at college, Yarvin shows minimal interest in the humanities.
He only takes five undergraduate courses in these subjects, focused on history and where is he in college now?
Brown is where he starts at college, right?
And he graduates in 92.
He goes on to be a grad student in a comp sci 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 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.
And I want to quote from a profile Joshua Tate wrote about Yarvin for a book on the radical right.
Quote, engineers like Yarvin 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 Mies.
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, I, again, I've been sorted into this natural aristocracy based on my skill that I've earned.
And the world around me, 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, you know, 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.
And unfortunately for Yarvin, 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?
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Luck in a Competitive World00:04:55
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A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
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I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
Unions vs. Powerful Interests00:03:25
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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So we're back.
Right.
Now, the kind of thinking that Yarvin 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 poison 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 another version of that, I find the anti-union rhetoric so hilarious.
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 speech.
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, it should be illegal.
It's the math doesn't add up.
Yeah.
Unions are a natural growth and a natural oppositional force to exploitation.
Yeah.
And I think they also 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, Yarvin, 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.
Rothbard's Belief System00:14:55
The old days of Usenet were a simulacrum of what is today Yarvin'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 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 1993, 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 1993 because there's not been any kind of like guardrails 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 Yarvin, 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 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.
I'll take your word 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 Palantir 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 they might find common ground and have like a fun chat on that subject.
I'm certain they could have a chat about it.
I think Colbert would probably be kind of horrified of some of the things that they're referencing.
And they're like, you named your company after this thing that is specifically a device that only the evil wizard uses.
Okay.
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 era, what he sees as a natural aristocracy, is key to understanding why Yarvin comes to hate democracy, right?
Because it kind of ruined his internet playground, the first place where he ever felt that he fit in, right?
That's sort of what I see as like the er moment of his 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 Yarvin'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, a very strange connection to each other.
Now, the Cult of the Dead Cow was like a complicated thing.
It's one Reuters article I found describes it as the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history.
I think that oversells how cool Yarvin'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 Badger 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 genes.
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 than that.
It feels like there's some context we're missing.
Like, just, I'm digging hard for some people out here.
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 that 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 genes 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.
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, Yarvin 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-centered 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 like Penn and Teller would be a great evidence of that, right?
Like that, 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 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 in another short story he wrote for the cult of the dead cow, the year after that Badger story in 1994.
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, Yarvin, 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 in the act of recognition, he finds proof that his faculties have not decayed to that state of contented oblivion, which he believes a sure precursor to death.
And this is kind of noteworthy in part because the term cathedral is going to be really important for Jarvin.
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 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 focus, why guys like Vance spend 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 dysfunctional failing society, right?
And so you have to destroy the cathedral in order to build anything new.
That's what he's going to come to believe, right?
In the early 2000s, 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 2000s.
So this is all happening sometime between like 2001 and 2004.
You know, the dot-com bubble bursts sometime after 9-11, I think is when he gets bought out.
And by 2003 or 4, 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, Jarvin 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 Mies.
And eventually, through this, Yarvin gets interested in a fan of Mies, another theoretician named Marie Rothbard.
Rothbard was a foundational anarcho-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 it.
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 necessarily 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 unethical 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 that he writes 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 pleas 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 oppress 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 95.
So you get the kind of feeling like this is the sort of thinking Yarvin 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, Carlisle has been dead for a while.
He's a Scottish philosopher from the 1800s, 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 Carlisle is, you know, he's a, he's, 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 these guys who justifies slavery as being a fundamentally like 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 Hermann Hoppe.
Hoppe is a German-born political theorist and a leading Austrian school economist.
He's another anarcho-capitalist.
And Hoppe is a big advocate of monarchy in a way that like he defines monarchy as a privately owned government as opposed to a democracy, which he calls a publicly owned government.
And Hoppe believes that the transition from monarchy to democracy over the 20th century was like the big mistake that we made as humans and has caused nothing but civilizational decline ever since.
And from Hoppe, 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, circa World War I.
And Jarvin would argue, no, no, no, those weren't real absolute monarchies.
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.
That's the reason why the Tsar fell, right?
They didn't have quite enough power.
I think that's silly.
Well, sure.
I mean, It places such an unreasonable amount of faith in one person or in just like the integrity of humans.
The reason that you have to embrace a messy system is because people are inherently messy.
Yeah.
I think that's a great way to put it.
A monarchy is a wonderful fantasy, but like, how do you pick the guy?
Or the woman?
How do you pick that person?
And then, and then like, what if he gets hit on the head?
What if it gets wrong?
And maybe it's like the Dalai Lama thing where it's a birthright thing.
Bad Decisions and Monarchies00:09:11
And then like, what if, what if they're just like a narcissistic, suicidal or depressive or whatever.
Like, 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?
Yeah.
But then saying like, the solution to this is to have one guy be in charge.
And 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 capacity 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 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 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 people actually put it in place.
You know, in the case of like absolute monarchies like this, we got the trenches in World War I. 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.
Um, but whenever you're talking about, like, I know how to reorder all of society, um, you've you've become dangerous.
Uh, and I, 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.
Um, 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 the 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 point you back to World War I.
Yeah, we could talk about like the Saudi royal family, too, right?
Entirely profited by oil 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've, you, they all make too many compromises, right?
All of these monarchies that collapsed around the turn of the century had allowed some democratic elements into society.
And he, you know, they had allowed that because there were revolutions, right?
People like occupied Vienna for a period of time in 48.
Like there were a bunch of like socialist uprisings in the middle of the 19th century.
And as a result, a lot of these absolute monarchies 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 Geyser.
Can I ask the question?
Yeah.
So like if you're an absolute monarch, are you delegating anything?
And then who are you delegating to?
Like, what are the strong, what 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 of democracy.
Right.
He does actually view it as a CEO where they do delegate, but the CEO is ultimately the guy in power.
Who picks all the delegates?
I mean, I think the CEO in his ideal 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 board of directors technically, but Zuckerberg has enough control of stock that 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 Yarvin thinks countries should be run, right?
In his defense, Facebook is a flawless organization.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We all know that.
Nothing ever goes wrong there.
So the final straw for Yarvin's tolerance of democracy came in 2004 as a result of the Swift Boats 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 2004 election.
John Kerry was the Democratic nominee.
Kerry had been wounded three times in Vietnam.
And then after he had left the service, he had become an anti-war activist, right?
He'd like testified in Congress.
This was a really big deal.
And so, as a 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 got in the country, and Kerry 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 talked to people who had served with Kerry, they're like, no, he was like a very good soldier who was wounded repeatedly doing his job.
But the propaganda campaign largely worked, right?
And Yarvin, critically, he bought the propaganda campaign.
And he was angry that the media, in his eyes, worked to protect Kerry, 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 Kerry didn't suffer enough from the Swiftboat 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 this like esoteric, almost political madman.
But when you get right down to it, he's like your crank uncle who's angry about John Kerry on Facebook.
Well, also the Swiftboating, 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 Swiftboating worked.
Yeah.
And the media.
And the media, by the way, took the bait and just like amplified the story.
And if they tried to protect Kerry, which I'm, I'm sure a few journalists probably wanted to.
Certainly individuals, yeah.
They failed.
Yeah.
It 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 he did, right?
Yeah.
Media Amplifying the Story00:04:42
But anyway, that's what, that's where he goes, right?
Speaking of the shadow government that really runs things, that's who all of our sponsors are affiliated with.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
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I'm Ego War.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Small Global Monarchies00:15:18
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
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This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out a Mostly Human.
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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 2003 or 4 to like 2007 or so, are the years that the tech industry like that brings us Web 2.0 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 what's going to become the smartphone era like grind towards, you know, coming into being.
Facebook also starts like 2006 or 7, I think is like when it very first starts out.
So like this is kind of the early birth of the Web 2.0 era, which are all of these founder-driven startups for the most part, right?
And Jarvin comes to see this system that gives us Google and Facebook as inherently better than the system that governs the country, right?
And it's more akin to his kind of idealized absolute monarchy.
So by this point in time, around 2007, Yarvin 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 Rothbard and Hoppe, have quite gotten it right.
And so he decides, I've got to start putting my ideas out there.
I've 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 2007, he breaks out of this kind of chrysalis of reading that he put himself in, and he comes up with a blog under a pin name, Mincius Moldbug.
And it's under this pin 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, Mincius 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 Mincius.
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, Mincius, the first name, comes from a Confucian philosopher from the 300s 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, Mincius 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 Yarvin is about to espouse.
I think he'd largely pick 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, Yarvin peppers his essays with casual slurs.
In reading one where he talks about World War II, 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 this, 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 autodidacts in the tech industry who spend a lot of time reading the internet, right?
And it is, it is kind of in the same way that a lot of like the way people talk on 4chan 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.
Can I ask now the real?
I have two questions.
Yeah, yeah.
One is, are we sure we're pronouncing Mincius correctly?
Is it not Minchus?
I think it is Mincius.
Sorry.
Minchus.
Yes.
Yes.
But it's spelled the other way.
And I have no idea.
I just, when you said it was a Confucian, suddenly thought, well, maybe anyway.
Yeah, I think it is Mincius.
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 my question is like we're on the spectrum of like, just kind of like very mendacious and angry person who wants to reshape the world, versus 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 get a reaction
out.
out of people, the way like 90% of Twitter is like.
Where on that spectrum is he?
Because it's at, does sound like, there's like like you know, churning up poor people to create biodiesel is is a joke, it's a tasteless joke.
It's like a swifty Thomas Swift or it's like Jonathan Swift type joke right like um uh, but but it it, it?
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 um, 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 That inherently, if you're talking this way, if you're engaging this way, you have more credibility with them than 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 the like, they have a lot of disdain for, but they trust someone who communicates like them.
And so, by using these kind of like by basically peppering and 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 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 like evolution of this, these sort of tactics, I think a great touch point would be the Christchurch 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 weird stuff that Tim Walz 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 of 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 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 in 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 in a world as interconnected as ours?
How do you stop one monarch from repeatedly taking over other?
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 is 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 a company will have a board that can like oust a CEO or like, like, is there any is there any stopgap measure for like a disastrous leader?
No.
Or someone, like, let's say someone has like a brain-eating worm.
Yeah.
Right, right.
But they are showing no symptoms when they are appointed or ascend to the monarchy.
But then over the next five years, they become like absolutely batshit crazy.
Is there any stopgap there?
The only stopgap 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 would lose, 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 try to do that?
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 going to lose business and you're going to go out of business and the market will keep you from being racist.
Meanwhile, like back when people did that.
Yeah, back when people did that, it didn't work until the laws kicked in.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's this, it's these, it's this weird mix of like naivete 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 as 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 Yarvin is cooking up is, of course, racism.
And I want to read a passage from an article in TechCrunch about Yarvin 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?
Yeah.
Is he talking about that?
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 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.
Okay, cool.
Kings Who Derange Society00:05:06
So it's probably not surprising.
Moldbug's 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 Moldbug starts his blog that Peter Thiel gives a speech about democracy being incompatible with liberty.
And Teal starts putting money Yarvin'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 his early sort of money 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 too many people to know publicly that you're reading Moldbug, but like, have you read this latest article?
Have you checked out this blog?
Right.
And he starts getting invited to give talks.
And he starts saying things in these talks, 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 its 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?
It's a lot of these guys who are knowingly or unknowingly parroting thoughts that kind of came initially into the right from Yarvin.
And yeah, that's part one.
In 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 yeah, how are you feeling, Ed?
I'm a little rattled.
It's dark stuff, right?
Yeah.
That's the right reaction.
What happens if he is like in the court, the high court of this monarch and gets a stomach flu and throws up 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 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 and 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 the leader.
But what if it's like, what if you're the first one?
What if you're the first example of that modern guy going crazy?
Yeah, of a guy going crazy.
I think 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 a 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.
Targeting Social Justice00:04:18
You know, that's what I would kind of suspect.
Yeah.
People have tried this, Curtis.
Um, 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's 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 lived in retirement, right?
And, you know, you 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, Snafu.
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 CoolZone Media.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night each morning?
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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