Curtis Yarvin: The Edgelord's Guide to Monarchy 40K
In this long-anticipated episode, Matt and Chris venture into the peculiar world of Curtis Yarvin—a reactionary blogger, tech entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed monarchist. Known to his early followers by the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug," Yarvin has become a prominent figure in the "dark enlightenment" and neo-reactionary circles. Some have even hailed him as an "intellectual powerhouse" of the modern far-right, with endorsements from influential figures like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance.But what is Curtis really all about? In this episode, the decoders revisit the Triggernometry swamp to examine the political insights unearthed by the hard-nosed journalists Konstantin and Francis during their ferocious intellectual exchange with Yarvin.Prepare for thrilling revelations, including the historical figures and movements Yarvin has catalogued in his encyclopedic memory, his pick for the best Elizabethan monarch, and the surprising number of non-monarchs he believes are secretly running monarchical regimes. True to form, Yarvin’s rhetorical style is nothing if not meandering. So get ready for a whirlwind tour through his "mind palace," exploring topics like Soviet Russia, Elizabethan England, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a fantasy world of reactionary and techno-libertarian musings—not to mention the obligatory lab-leak narratives.Is Yarvin an edgy intellectual, a provocative contrarian, or just a verbose windbag with run-of-the-mill conspiratorial takes and a moody teenager's perspective on history? Matt and Chris tackle these questions, striving to decode Yarvin’s vision for society—and hoping, against all odds, that he might in the end just answer a single question.LinksTriggernometry: Curtis Yarvin- The Case Against DemocracyUnHerd: Curtis Yarvin: Welcome to the Dark EnlightenmentBehind the Bastards Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. VanceBehind the Bastards Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. VanceThe Guardian: He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest clients the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
The co-host here, my assistant, junior partner, is Chris Kavanagh.
G'day Chris from Chattanooga.
Chattanooga to Tokyo.
That's how we're doing it today.
International podcasting at its finest.
Premium grid, the good stuff.
Well, come on.
It's been a while.
We haven't been in these decoding seats in a while.
You know, it's good to get back in the mix.
Yeah, we've been taking it easy.
We've been doing quizzes, having Christmas specials, doing supplementary materials, which are more freeform.
But this is the real thing.
This is what the people want.
This is our contribution to society.
I think this is someone that we promised to do for years.
So in that sense, it is what the people want.
But I will say, Matt, I just need to mention on the back of the Christmas quizzes that I put the team selections to the vote on the Patreon.
So I can report back to you whose team...
From Guru Survivor was the winner.
And there was an overwhelming winner from the three teams.
Do you need them recapped for you?
Yeah, yeah.
Remind me of the teams.
Okay.
So we had Team Science Saboteurs.
That was you, Sabine Hossenfelder, Andrew Huberman, and Nassim Taleb.
Okay.
A bit of a science-heavy, science-critique-heavy.
Team, nonetheless.
That was your choice.
Dream Team.
That's how I think of them.
Then we had Team Devious Love.
Lex Friedman, Scott Adams, Jimmy Wheel, and myself.
A high-risk, high-reward selection there.
Scott Adams and Lex Friedman.
You would only survive on that island if your team betrayed the rest of us before they betrayed each other.
Interesting choices you made.
That's fine.
That's right.
And then Team Spiritual Evolution from Dan.
Now, I do think that Brett Weinstein was a choice here purely because Dan wanted to accost Brett for a year.
He's a Brett aficionado.
But he also had Dark Horse, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Dr. K. Dr. K, that was a good spiritual warfare, intellectual warfare, and evolutionary knowledge.
In the one team, a potent package.
A potent?
Well, I don't know.
I think those are interesting choices.
None of them seem like people that would survive on a desert island.
Chris, but hey, that's just me.
What do I know?
I'm just a co-host of a very successful podcast for Gurus.
That's right.
I'm at 424 votes, okay?
This is a significant sample size that we've got here.
And there is one team with a 73%.
Selections, rate, or whatever.
I don't know.
Percentage, right?
So, would you like to guess who that is?
Who got 74% of the votes?
I'm sure it's my team.
It's got to be my team.
Is it me?
It is.
That's right.
Yeah.
He's the best.
Surely some of that.
What a guy.
Some of that is going to be sympathy votes.
Some of it is going to be sympathy votes.
Because I scored.
Now, remind me, what score did I get in the first quiz?
I think you got one.
Didn't you get one, right?
Did I get one?
I think I got one sympathy.
I think I may have gotten zero.
So that's fair.
I think it's fair.
Swings and roundabouts, right?
Bad at quizzes.
Good at selecting teams of gurus to survive on Desert Islands.
We all have our specialities, Chris.
Yeah, even if I take in the account, the sympathy vote, I can't account for that level.
It's a landslide.
Your team is...
Yeah, but I wonder, Matt, I do wonder, were people picking the team that they liked the best rather than thinking about the scenario, right, that they need to survive on the island?
Maybe.
Maybe I'm just throwing out possibilities, right?
It's just an alternative.
You're like, hang on, hang on.
Don't try to Donald Trump this election result.
This is, you know, Lou, just take the L. Was that the weave?
Well, okay.
Okay.
I will say that.
And can I also mention, Matt, you know, we don't mention the Patreon much here, right?
I mean, we do.
We do it at the end of every episode.
But do we promote it?
We just do the cutoff thing for the supplementary material.
That's what we do.
But I will say, if you were on the Patreon, you would have got the Christmas special early.
You would get the Decoding Academia if you're at the $5 and up tier.
And Matt, now, I don't want to...
I don't want to get too many new patrons, but I did upload an indulgent video of myself bouldering.
So, you know, look, is that available to the public?
No, it's only available to the people on Instagram, like the 50 or so people who have known me since childhood, who are now inundated with my records of bouldering and our patrons.
So if you wanted to see middle-aged bouldering action, as somebody described it, oldering.
That's on the Patreon.
That's right.
The wall is his ground, people.
Yeah, if you're not swayed by all those excellent reasons, you know, you'd also, if you were a patron, you would have listened to the Christmas special in its entirety, and you would have understood what we were just talking about then.
So, massive advantages.
Well, but that's obviously because I've done this, I have to release the Christmas one before this.
So, yeah.
Don't worry.
Don't worry about it.
It's fine.
That's all right.
I will also say that the other advantage, which we've never advertised, this is like a secret bonus advantage, is that sometimes I have to commute and I'm bored, right?
And you're over in America, you're asleep, or my family are bothered too many times.
So now there's a little function on Patreon that lets you...
Like do an audio call with people.
So that's why I've been passing the time on my commutes, answering questions and getting commentary and feedback.
That's where that Guru Survivor Island scenario came from, was discussing with people.
So is that a selling point?
Well, I can see it's very appealing.
Everyone should take advantage of the fact that you are just...
Can't be at peace with yourself.
Can't simply sit in silence for more than 10 minutes at a stretch and you desperately need to be engaging with other people to give you some sense of validation every minute of the day.
So yeah, that's another big benefit.
That's not what it's about.
That's not what it's about.
It's mental stimulation, Matt, on the long and dreary road.
I've consumed too much nonsense.
I need intellectual engagement.
That is what I need, right?
So you can't join the picture unless you're an intellectual.
Yeah, that's right.
If you think you can give that to Chris on his commute, then join up.
Otherwise, please don't.
Yeah.
And there's also like a flaw with Patreon where it sends tons of notifications about that.
So like that's a downtime as well.
So anyway, anyway, we have a Patreon.
That's where it is.
That's where the advanced releases and all that kind of stuff goes.
So that's our annual promotion of the Patreon.
All right.
That's it.
It's done.
Good.
Done.
All right.
We'll do another one next year.
Good.
Well, this is going to be the final decoding for this year, 2024.
Oh, you have little fear, Matt.
You have little fear.
You think we can't wedge in another one?
Let's see.
All right.
Maybe it is.
If you're listening to this, and it is the last one, Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year to you.
And if there's another one before it, just recognize how productive we are.
Okay?
That is impressive.
Impressive productivity.
Matt doesn't think it can be done.
I think it can.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Okay.
Good, good, good, good, good.
So we're doing Curtis Yavin, Chris.
We're doing Curtis Yavin.
We are.
This is a coding episode, Matt.
No faffing around, okay?
Yeah.
That's right.
No banter.
Yeah.
Heaven for fend.
Right.
Like, who is this guy?
What's his deal?
Ah, he's a stupid...
Reactionary blogger who used to go by the pen named Menchus Moldebug.
And he is known for the dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary movement.
He's sometimes referred to as an intellectual powerhouse, a philosopher of that movement.
And one of his claim to fame is that he invented the red pill terminology, like applied to right wing, seen through the matrix kind of crap.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we can thank him for that.
Yeah, so what else?
He hasn't written any books or anything, but apparently he's been quite influential, right?
Steve Bannon has talked about him.
J.D. Vance has cited him as an influence.
He's had these blogs and things.
Did he write a book?
He didn't write a book.
He had some tech thing.
He had a tech company or tech product of a computer platform.
Decentralized network of personal servers, the URBIT computer practice.
Who hasn't got a startup at this point in time or two on their resume?
Yeah, but it's not really that important.
His main thing is that he's a blogger who's influenced the bunch of the current crop of, you know, MAGA, Republicans and neo-reactionaries before that.
But he was around before MAGA.
He kind of was like a substacker before there was substack.
You know, he wrote these really long, indulgent, very wordy and literary pieces outlining his views on various topics and his philosophy and political ideologies and whatnot.
So he's sometimes presented as like the intellectual powerhouse of the neo-reactionary movement.
He also is responsible for the cathedral.
Do you remember that thing that the...
Sense speakers used to always talk about the blue cathedral.
Oh, well, they used to talk about the blue church.
And I saw that he was talking about the cathedral.
So that's connected, right?
That's where they picked that up from him, did they?
I'm pretty sure that's the genealogy there, but it's the same idea.
And Matt, if he is a neo-enlightenment against, like his view is that left-wing progressive values are a new...
Orthodoxy, a new religion.
So he is the neo-reactionary enlightenment movement, the dark enlightenment, because he's going to take us back to a kind of weird monarchy system.
Yeah, we'll get into it.
We'll get into it.
And he was interviewed repeatedly on a bunch of different places, but it doesn't matter which interview that you look at, because it's essentially all the same stuff.
The one that we are looking at...
Is his interview on trigonometry with our friends, Francis Foster and Constantine Kissin, intellectual powerhouses of the center-left map.
Well, they're politically homeless, those two.
So it stands to reason that they would have Kurdish Arvin on.
They'll have anyone.
They'll have anyone.
Yeah, that's right.
They're not afraid to talk to people.
Okay.
All right.
Let's start with that one.
Yeah.
As you said, it's probably better to let...
Good old Curtis, speak for himself.
And he can explain his ideas about monarchism and techno-anarcho-capitalism and stuff.
I'm sure it'll all make sense.
Yes.
Okay.
So here's him being introduced on Trigonometry.
Our brilliant guest today has gone from an anonymous blogger to one of the intellectual godfathers of the so-called new right.
Curtis Yavin, welcome to Trigonometry.
Thank you so much.
And I'm enjoying being here and being in the UK.
Well, it's great to have you on the show.
We'll get into whether new right is the right term.
But before we do that and all the rest of it, tell us who are you?
How are you, where you are?
What's been the journey that brings you to be sitting here?
Can I just mention as well, it's always the case, right, where they're like, oh, you know, you're the intellectual godfather of the new right.
But are you right?
Is that even the right thing to say?
Can we say that you're right?
You know, they're just like, yes.
Yes, he's obviously right-wing.
But, you know, it's just that thing in the head of an arc space where they're always so afraid about somebody objecting to a label.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they don't really get into whether or not he's right-wing or left-wing in the end.
But, yeah, right-wing, left-wing, let's find out.
Who cares, really?
He's an exciting guy with powerful ideas.
Let's hear them.
Yeah, let's hear what he...
What is he?
He was about to introduce himself.
Introduce yourself, Curtis.
I'm actually a retired computer programmer, computer scientist, some people might even say.
And after 2000, I started working on a computer science research project.
And, you know, research is hard.
You read a lot of books.
And, you know, it'll pass the time when your brain isn't on the computer science.
And I started to sort of, really through the reading of libertarians, such as Mises and Rothbard, and Rothbard's student, Hans Hermann Hoppe, I don't know if you know the name, he wrote this book, Democracy, The God That Failed.
And, you know, he was a libertarian, but he's sort of bringing me, you know, bringing in this worldview from kind of before the democratic revolution.
And really opening you to the very difficult question of how our ancestors would see us.
You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question.
You know, we know what we think of Elizabeth I. Well, what would Elizabeth I think of us?
You know, we're sitting here right next to Westminster Abbey.
You know, what would she think?
What would she say if she could see Britain today?
And our attitude toward the past, you know...
As I started to read the writers of the past, I got into a huge admirer of Thomas Carlyle, who's now, you know, very unknown and very misunderstood.
There you go, Chris.
Some references to some obscure books and slightly less obscure thinkers.
Democracy, The God That Failed and Thomas Carlyle.
Yeah, so he talks about a bunch of other sort of literary and historical...
And things throughout this.
But why don't we just let people know what he's referring to?
Because he doesn't say much apart from, oh, it invites us to think about what an ancient ruler like Elizabeth I would think about us, which isn't super helpful.
So Democracy, The God That Failed.
It's a book in which this guy, Hans Hermann Hopp, critiques modern democratic systems.
He says that democracy is flawed, that it's sort of inherently...
It's going to be corrupted and it's going to inevitably erode people's personal freedoms and undermines individual liberties.
Thomas Carlyle, who, a name that I know, but I have to admit, I needed to sort of check what his deal was.
You know, he's more ambiguous, I guess.
More of a, I don't know, he's hard to actually pigeonhole.
You know, he wrote novels and sort of with...
Some philosophical ideas in them, I guess, but it's sort of hard to describe.
He wasn't a fan of democracy.
He was something of a romantic, I suppose, sort of had authoritarian leanings, like the romance of people like Bonaparte, I suppose, and didn't like the industrialization and all of this new technological developments in society.
I think it's good that you described a bit of detail about that, but I also don't think that you should assume from his...
Dropping of references that it really matters because he picks and chooses what he wants to emphasize, right?
And basically, if you imagine that most of the people he's citing, it's because he wants to pull out these ideas, you know, about regressive, anti-democratic stuff or like racist elements in various parts as well that he likes from Thomas Carlyle.
That is the case.
So yes, it's romanticism.
Yes, he does know a bunch of relatively well-known and some more obscure figures and whatnot, but it's all in service of his waffly views about anti-democracy.
So it's kind of like, you know, this is going to come up repeatedly, so I'll just say it now.
Whenever you're in academia, you become very familiar with people dropping references to be performative.
We've talked about it in various other gurus that we've looked at, and that's absolutely what happens here.
It's not that he doesn't know everyone that he's referencing, but it is hugely performative, and it is in large part just to demonstrate what a wide-read and deeply philosophical thinker.
He is.
And that's what you should take it to be, right?
Like, so if you're like, oh, does he elaborate this?
Sometimes he does.
Sometimes he doesn't.
But it's all performative bullshit.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we're not playing, like, the entire interview for people.
We listen to it, so listeners don't have to.
So I just take our word for it, I guess.
Like, he drops those names.
He mentions them.
Oh, no, you're going to hear loads of clips.
You're going to hear loads of clips.
You don't need to take our word for it, Matt.
You need to remember how this works.
They'll hear him do it.
Constantly.
Well, you didn't let me finish.
I was going to say, you will hear him drop more names, but take my word for it that he doesn't really describe in detail what these people said and why he's citing them in order to sort of build up some sort of argument.
He does exactly what you said, which is he drops their names and they say something completely different, which is what would Elizabeth I think about our society today, which actually isn't related to...
The two names he just dropped very much, except in the most oblique sense.
So anyway, we can continue.
Yeah, so the Elizabeth I, was it the second?
Which Elizabeth was it?
Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I reference was, you know, I think this is supposed to be a clever thought experiment.
And there's an aspect to it which is valid and reasonable, Matt, right?
People often judge the past.
Or other countries and whatnot from a kind of provincial presentist perspective, right?
They don't look at things the other way around, or they don't consider that, you know, society was fundamentally different, countries were different, all that kind of thing, right?
There is an aspect of that that is true, but also it's a very simple point, right?
It's a very simple point, but he presents it as deeply profound, and it's essentially historical and cultural relativism.
Is what he's getting at here.
So listen to this.
And as I started to sort of read the past, I started to get a sense of kind of stepping outside, you know, whether it's the Overton window or Plato's cave or whatever, I started to get a sense of how the past would see the present.
You know, we live in a time that considers itself very, very superior.
to all of human history in a number of respects.
And, you know, when you look at our cell phones, our computers, you know, these things are sort of clearly superior, but are we as superior as human beings?
Are our values and perspectives superior?
This seems to me to be a subject well worthy of debate.
And especially what started to concern me is that there's a sort of almost a sort of provincialism to the present, because when you're in a very provincial society,
You tend to be very centered on where you are, and you dismiss sort of the rest of the world as heathens, barbarians, you know.
And, you know, you seldom, in this sort of provincial context, you basically seldom sort of flip the script and say, what would they think of us?
Yeah, I mean, so I guess one version of that is, like you said, that sort of relativism, which is to invite people to say, Hey, just remember that we live at a particular point in time, in a particular civilization, and not everyone who has lived thought the same way we do.
And we might possibly not be 100% correct.
Although, you know, it feels like the way we think about things is clearly better than how, I don't know, Julius Caesar, Romans, or Elizabethans, or you name it.
Even religious Iranians, say, if you want to go to different geographic places instead of times.
You know, other people see things differently.
They might value different things we did.
It's good to think about that, perhaps.
That seems fine as far as it goes.
But, yeah, like you said, there's the kind of relativism there, which is just because, I don't know, Elizabeth I would have probably very much disapproved of many things about modern culture.
She certainly wouldn't have approved of atheism, that's for sure.
Doesn't necessarily mean we're wrong, does it?
No, no.
And, you know, this is echoing arguments that are well-troddened in...
Historical analysis, right?
Or in anthropology, for that matter, about recognizing your own ethnocentric and presentist projections and that kind of thing.
And I think it's the presentation of these kind of ideas that lends like an air of intellectual depth to what is going to follow, right?
And let me just jump to why he wants to make this kind of thought experiment.
Right. So at this point, he is talking about why he's not a Nazi.
OK, so he's not a Nazi.
All right.
But but let's consider, you know, why that is.
It seems wrong.
It seems very strange.
This obsession with race seems very odd and very unpleasant.
And we're taught, you know, at the same time in the US to believe we have these two concepts of equal protection of the law.
And protected classes.
How do these things, you know, interact?
You know, it's very Orwellian.
But, you know, if I don't believe in this, what do I believe in?
And the teacher says to them, well, it's very simple.
The opposite of this is being a Nazi.
And at that point, your 15-year-old says, well, then I'm a Nazi.
And I'm using the British pronunciation, you know, just because I'm here in the UK.
And that's a sort of, like, that...
Antagonism, where basically you're part of the kind of stereotyped, you're sort of, when you do that, and, you know, I like to warn people against that choice because it's not that to be a Nazi is to be too radical, actually.
I think you must be much more radical than that.
But it's like the sort of, you know, you're inhabiting this caricatured opposition to the frame, whereas actually to be outside the frame...
Well, let's talk about that.
So he doesn't like identity politics or affirmative action.
He describes those things as Orwellian, which I think is up of a stretch.
I mean, Orwellian generally refers to a kind of Stalinist.
A kind of totalitarian total control, which might be taking it a bit far.
But anyway, that's the anti-woke position.
That's the dominant anti-woke position though, right?
Exactly.
And that is now their main talking point.
I'm sure the trigonometry folks would agree that it is Orwellian, that things like affirmative action are preferred.
And apart from that, his point is that, hey, you can not like that and not be a Nazi.
You know, there are other options available.
Well, yeah, but the way he frames it is if the mainstream is telling you, like, it's affirmative action and it's DEI and all this, that, you know, this is going to naturally incur the rebellion of people who want to think outside the box.
And then when you say, you know, what if you don't believe in all that kind of thing is good, then the only option is you're a Nazi.
And then he's like, but if you become a Nazi, that is just playing into that.
Predictable binary.
And we need to be more edgier than Nazis.
There's a more interesting, more edgy take than being a Nazi.
Because everybody expects you to be a Nazi.
So that's boring.
And that's a very stupid...
It's a stupid reason not to be a Nazi.
It's also a stupid view about why people would be drawn towards Nazism.
It's perfectly possible to be annoyed.
With the excesses of social justice, without becoming a Nazi, right?
Yeah, I'm sure there's many people listening who might have ambivalent feelings or even negative feelings about affirmative action or what's called identity politics without feeling any temptation to become a Nazi.
And he says we need to be more radical than the Nazis, which is a worrying statement to me.
Well, we all know what the exciting, edgy alternative is, and it's monarchism, but we'll get to that.
Yeah, maybe people are going to be surprised that that's what it is.
So the trigonometry people, by the side.
Let's talk about that.
I want to give you an opportunity to also clarify what you said, being more radical than a Nazi.
What are you talking about?
So, you know, I would say, for example, to take Shakespeare seriously.
It's much more radical than being a Nazi.
And so, you know, when you look at the world of Elizabeth I, it's a world that when we take it seriously, we can barely understand.
So, for example, you know, it's a digression, but I happen to be, like many very intellectual people, I happen to be an Oxfordian.
I believe that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford.
And so, for example, to take the world of Elizabethan court poetry seriously and to take, there's a wonderful speech in 2026.
and Cressida, where Ulysses sort of has this kind of defense of inequality and his defense of rank and his defense of like nobility, you'll not find an ounce of democratic sentiment in Shakespeare.
So, following along there, it's much more edgy and much more interesting not to be like a boring old...
Neo-Nazi.
Reactionary neo-Nazi, but rather to take Elizabethan mores and mores and political thinking and the drama of the period.
Let's remember that Shakespeare is not so much a political writer as a dramatist.
Writing plays for the entertainment of people.
We should take that extremely seriously.
I suppose he's referring to Chris.
What do you think?
He's referring to the romance that's involved in Shakespearean plays, the interest in character and drama and prestige, social status.
What?
No.
Well, I mean, yes, but basically he's talking about, you know, the pandering to monarchy and divine rule and all that kind of anti-democratic, et cetera.
What about the Tempest?
What about the Tempest?
The Tempest involves a wizard.
Or King Lear.
Well, but I guess you could take those kind of things, right?
Because you could say, well, but look, King Lear was about the order being upset by these grasping daughters.
Yeah, you could do a Jordan Peterson fine reading of Shakespeare and develop a political philosophy around it, I'm sure.
But you know what it reminds me of, Matt?
You know the Mighty Boosh, the comedy series in the UK?
Yeah, so they did this episode and they had taking retro to its logical conclusion.
And they were, instead of doing like 80s retro or 70s, they were doing like Tudor music with big liars and, you know, like dressed like peasants from the medieval and retro to its logical conclusion.
Calm down.
We have to be logical here, okay?
If it's the past that's in, maybe I should step up, huh?
What if we were to look further back into the past than anyone has looked before?
Bring it down now.
Smash it up now.
We are looking backwards.
We are running backwards.
Running through time into the past.
Taking retro to its logical conclusion.
Question.
This is it.
This is taking political hipsterism.
Oh, conservatism.
Yeah, like, you know, traditional values right back.
But is he edgy enough?
Has he considered going back to, like, caveman politics?
Like, he can be out-edged, I think, by somebody going to prehistory.
Or what about Egyptian politics?
Maybe that's what we should have pharaohs, right?
And then the other part, I mean, it's actually painful to listen to.
Because of the pretentiousness of it.
It's like the worst parts of academia combined with the blowhards of the guru sphere.
And he mentions, Matt, like many intellectuals, he believes in the Oxfordian theory of William Shakespeare, right?
That he was the Earl of Oxford.
And if you look that up, the first thing it says is, while historians and literary scholars overwhelmingly reject alternative authorship candidates, Including the Earl of Oxford.
Public interest in the Oxfordian theory continues.
So this is the thing.
He's often presenting it as, oh, I have this devious, delicious theory, which you probably haven't heard of it.
But actually, it's the bog standard conspiracists just dressed up.
So like that, there are alternative identity theories about who Shakespeare was.
Yes, that's fairly common.
It's like saying, you know, I believe we didn't land on the moon.
And I have very good reasons for it.
Many intellectuals have entertained that thought.
Yeah, I hear you.
I hear you.
Well, there's going to be more of this.
There's going to be more of this name-dropping and references to abstruse lines of thought.
So let's move on.
Yes.
So more, though, to explain why he's not for Hitler.
He's more complex than that, Matt.
Whereas, for example...
Hitler is a demagogue.
You know, he's a very, and if you look at, for example, the relationship between Hitler and the German nationalist right, great writers like Ernst Jünger, who, you know, there's recently, I don't know, do you know Jünger?
There's recently been a Jünger revival.
Amazing, amazing writer.
And these people look down upon Hitler as a sort of peasant, you know, and anti-Semitism, you know, in German society.
In 1900, you know, was a sort of peasant belief.
You know, the idea that it could become a serious thing that would result in serious consequences for people was unthinkable to these German aristocrats.
And so, for example, if I, you know, place myself in that time, I'm sort of with much more with a kind of Steufenberg, kind of the old German aristocratic, right, who tried to eventually try to blow up Hitler with a bomb.
And failed.
And Jünger himself is almost caught up in these purges and killed.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's being relatively clear.
He's not aligned with Hitler, but more with the old Prussian aristocracy.
A much cooler frame of reference.
Yeah, although, again, he often does this kind of thing, Matt, where he makes this claim, you know, these grand historical claims and just throws them in.
And he says that, you know, anti-Semitism was a kind of peasant.
I believe the aristocracy looked down on it.
And yes, I know that the aristocracy might have looked down on Hitler, right?
This upstart little demagogue.
But the notion that German aristocrats didn't harbor anti-Semitism in the pre-World War II period.
Oh, I think that's a questionable.
I think that there would be plenty of historical sources which would speak that that might not exactly be as rock solid a historical fact as he claims there.
Yeah, and though the Prussian aristocracy may not have been populist in the same way Hitler was, they were most certainly authoritarian and militaristic, right?
So, you know, it wasn't all peaches and cream.
But he likes them because they're aristocrats, right?
Yeah, that's it.
It's like this stupid anti-elite elite or the outside elite.
I can't remember how Barry Weiss recently framed Peter Thiel.
They are billionaires and have influence over media and government contacts and all this, but...
They're the anti-elites, even though they're all hanging around in elite circles and whatnot.
They're the cool, like, so old-fashioned that it's come full circle and it's cool again now.
Yeah.
Like, the bell-bottom jeans are due for a rerun, right?
Okay, cool.
So, just to round off this point, I mean, it's going to come back because this is essentially it.
This is the depth of his foot.
That's it, right?
We can pack up shop here because that is it.
This is just what he's going to explain.
He likes anti-democratic monarchy things because he thinks they're better.
And he has various ways that he wants to make this sound deeper than it is.
But that's it.
That's it.
And it's because it's edgy.
It's more edgy than being an open Nazi.
So here's him explaining why this is actually a more intellectual, edgy idea to be pro-Elizabethan than a neo-Nazi.
Basically, once you say, going back to my example of the 15-year-old kid, to say, okay, I'm not woke.
I'm post-woke.
Whatever.
You know, what does that mean?
You know, this word woke dates to 2012 as though we invented these ideas in 2012, which is absolute nonsense.
They were being taught in American universities in the 70s.
They were actually, you know, go back solidly to the 30s.
And, you know, so to say that I'm not this.
You know, once you say that not this means that, you're sort of making the mistake of saying Gentiles believe this.
And to escape from that pattern and say, no, actually, you know, to say, I don't believe, for example, you know, to say, you know, the meaning of I don't believe in democracy, you know, that can be,
have a huge number of meanings.
But to group, for example, Hitler and Elizabeth I, Either of whom believed in democracy.
I mean, I can't imagine that, you know, Queen Elizabeth would have let that little man in her presence for more than a few minutes.
And, you know, and so sort of it's so crucial to basically say, okay, I'm escaping from this, you know, dichotomy.
And even to sort of view this dichotomy as kind of a single line and say, okay, well, I don't believe in woke, so, but I'm not Hitler, but let's go, you know, 10% toward Hitler.
I'm a moderate.
I'm a moderate, you know.
You know, as they say, the best way to fight, you know, radical racist terrorism is to support moderate racists.
And, oh, no, wait, they don't say that.
And so there are all these other different, fascinating, amazing directions to go to when you kind of let yourself out of the very narrow prison of the present and kind of into the past.
Yeah, I mean, like we're doing him a lot of credit by actually checking the...
Name drops, checking the references and seeing what he's referring to.
But he's not spelling anything out except what you said, Chris, which is that he likes old-fashioned, oldie-worldie, aristocratic order.
And he's correct, I suppose, in saying that it's not specifically Nazism.
He is against democracy, liberal democracies.
He likes the oldie-worldie stuff.
He likes the stupid, edgy, edgelord stuff, though.
Like, let's go 10% towards Hitler and 90% Elizabethan monarchy, right?
Or, like, the little, I want to support moderate racists to combat radical racist terrorism.
Oh, ha ha ha.
You know, it's all, it's tongue-in-cheek, but there's a point to it.
Like, how droll, how droll, right?
But also, that thing about, you know, he's imagining how Elizabeth would react to Hitler and say, no, she would dismiss that little man.
And it strikes me as, like, intellectual, warhammer, 40k, neo-Nazi versus, like, you know, like, it is of that caliber.
Really, it is.
Like, what faction do you like in this little intellectual playground you have of anti-democratic?
Oh, I don't like the Sisters of Mercy.
I prefer the Space Marines.
Like, I want to be a 40% Orc and 60% this.
And Kurdish Arban is exactly that kind of person.
If he were not fantasizing about his anti-democratic regimes and influencing MAGA Republicans, he would be painting his Warhammer 40k and writing about the lore.
Of the various factions that he supports and why it's important, you know, the Tyranids actually have an important message to send to the Space Marines or whatever.
And God, it's so, it's like, this is your intellectual powerhouse.
Is this pre-neem poser?
God damn.
It's just depressing.
Yeah, when I heard that he was advocating for a kind of monarchy, a kind of aristocracy, and it was somehow connected to anarcho-techno-libertarianism.
I thought, well, this will be interesting.
At the very least, we'll have some sort of interesting rationale for this point of view.
But it never actually happens in this discussion on trigonometry.
He says that he's a fan of these things and he does a lot of name dropping, but he doesn't really provide any arguments for that point of view.
Like, Chris, I mean, if you put me on the spot and said, Matt, try to argue for the case that liberal democracy is fundamentally flawed and we should have a monarchy instead, right?
I could, as an intellectual exercise, I could say, okay, modern democracies involve politicians who need to be elected, so they're always going to be motivated to...
To lie and be dishonest because that's the best way to get elected and they're always going to be in need of campaign funds and so on in order to, again, get themselves elected.
So they're going to be beholden to moneyed interests.
And most people are going to become disengaged or whatever with democracy and aren't going to think about it very much.
And as a result, we're going to end up with misrule.
I think that we should have actually, I know it sounds crazy, but a hereditary monarchy.
Yes, there'll be a fixed cost, like the UK suffers with their monarchy.
But the flip side is that these are people who are guaranteed to be the heads of state.
And they're not going to be subject to these corrupting influences because their position is guaranteed and they're going to be in a position.
It's a bit like having tenure, right, at a university.
They're going to be guaranteed to be able to put the interests of the country first.
I mean, that's an example of an argument, right, of a justification for this edgy point of view that monarchy would be better.
I just want to be clear.
He never does that.
He never explains any reasons for why he thinks this is better.
He just cites a bunch of obscure stuff.
In his writing, he does do this, but it falls apart if you dig into it.
It's very much all about the superficial presentation of depth.
He is better at making specific arguments in writing.
But they're extremely long-winded, and they rest on the same kind of cheeky historical and intellectual foundations.
I take that point.
I kind of assumed that in his blog and stuff like that, he would have spelled things out more.
But he had an hour and a half with the trigonometry.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.
This is his chance to explain to people why he thinks monarchism is the best idea.
And, you know, I gave you a potted version of one, and it took, what, 30 seconds?
You know, he didn't do that.
No, he's very bad at that.
And you get the impression that he's very used to being indulged, like Jordan Peterson, like so many of the gurus, with going on these extended monologues or illustrative stories.
And I'll play some examples of that.
But before that, Matt, just before we get out of this Holocaust point, you remember the guy Martyr Maid, the podcast historian guy that was doing the alternative history of World War II?
So there's a part where he talks about conspiracy theories and World War II, right?
And he wants to be clear that he's not denying the Holocaust and that that is a silly conspiracy theory.
But listen to what he says while making that point, right?
Because he has to make it edgy.
It would be too normie reactionary to deny the Holocaust.
Like my example of the, you know, the 15-year-old, the brilliant 15-year-old kid who becomes a Nazi, which I've seen millions and millions of cases of, okay, not millions, but very many.
And it's sort of very sad because you get sort of trapped in that space.
And especially you're sort of looking for what is the most taboo belief in the modern world.
You end up in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
You know, the Holocaust is one of the best attested facts, you know, in history.
But if you're looking for the truth about World War II, actually, almost every other World War II conspiracy theory is true, except Holocaust denial.
And so President Roosevelt had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor, totally believed this.
For example, I, you know, I don't want to go into details on this, but, you know, and so when we understand this sort of enemy, like, if you look at kind of...
Pop history, professional history, kind of studies of the Third Reich, you know, we understand it clearly as glass.
We see Hitler almost perfectly.
Understanding Stalin, you know, have you read, there's a recent book, Stalin's War, by Sean McMeekin that came out, a lovely history, you know, kind of a revisionist history or something, but impeccably academic of, you know, sort of Stalin's perspective in the war.
Kind of recapitulates the icebreaker hypothesis.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, Chris.
So he sounds a lot like this Marta Maid guy.
Every other conspiracy theory that you've heard about World War II is correct.
But what's this icebreaker hypothesis thing?
That's like that Hitler had a grand strategy to, you know, like, use Stalinist Russia.
Like, the non-aggression pact was actually like a plot to...
It's like, you know, he was playing nine-dimensional chess, right?
But it is not a view that is accepted by the majority of historians, because it is generally assumed that the non-aggression pact, although it was something that was going to be abandoned when it was strategically convenient, was temporarily useful,
right, for the Soviets and the Nazis.
So that's the strategy.
But in the same way...
He mentions, oh yeah, President Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor.
That's totally, I won't go into the reasons, but no, sorry, again, no, it isn't actually a completely, well, you know, like this is actually the 150 IQ thing.
No, that is a bog standard conspiracy theory to the extent that it was in a Michael Bay.
Movie called Pearl Harbor, right?
But he presents it as, oh, yes, this is a, you know, the people that really understand the history knew that, you know, the Americans knew the attack was coming in.
They allowed to happen so that they could get involved.
But he presents it as if the really, the proper understanding, you know, it doesn't fall for the obvious conspiracies.
It knows the deeper ones are real.
And no, he just buys into conspiracy theories.
The notion that, like, history is complex and some of the simplistic portrayals of World War II and World War I are wrong, that is the kernel of truth, which is true in, like, Marder Mead's presentation as well, but that is actually not that incredibly,
you know, like, that the cartoon Hollywood version of World War II, it actually was more complex.
No shit, Sherlock, but that doesn't mean...
Pearl Harbor, actually, they did know about that and they let the attack happen.
No, all the evidence suggests that is not true.
Yeah, exactly right.
Yeah, so the implication with this kind of thing, apart from the fact everything you said is true, that, you know, no, not every conspiracy theory about World War II is true, except for the Holocaust.
But it does play into that, I guess, ignorant point of view, where unless you accept the Hollywood...
Ultra simplified version of it.
That actually was a little bit complicated.
Like maybe some intelligence official was suspecting that there might be an attack on Pearl Harbor.
Maybe it wasn't taken seriously enough.
Like those are the little grains of truth here.
But that's not what the point is, that history is complicated.
Rather, the point is, is that this narrative...
That you've been sold about World War II in which the liberal democracies were the good guys and the fascist totalitarians were the bad guys.
You've been totally misled and actually, you know, you're going to be red-pilled or black-pilled into some totally alternative view of history in which everything you thought you knew is wrong.
I mean, that's kind of the implication that people like him and Marta Maid, I think, would like people to come away with.
Yeah, I'm not like...
The things that are presented here is incredibly, you know, oh, this will blow your mind, right?
Like, one of the things that he points out was, you know, in the 1930s, communism was popular amongst, like, counterculture and revolutionary figures, right?
Can you imagine that, Matt?
That, like, communism was something that intellectuals and was the kind of cool...
A new ideology.
George Bernard Shaw?
Oh my God, really?
That nice old man?
There's no longer a party.
You know, it's now this sort of movement that sweeps through society.
But if you look at the connections between what people who were communists in the 1930s, and everyone cool in the 1930s was communist.
Almost exclusively.
And it was just an amazing group of people.
I mean, they were brilliant.
They were like, you know, when I try to explain 30s communism to people today, I'm like, you know, okay, maybe you went to gifted school.
Maybe you're a little smart.
You're watching, you know, a very intellectual podcast.
Probably, you know, you've got a little bit up top.
Imagine all the gifted kids in the world decided to form a party to take over the world.
That was American communism.
An amazing, amazing experience.
And what this experience sort of, you know, devolves into is, you know, first of all, it becomes like progressivism and people sort of forget where progressivism comes from.
There's a sort of history of American anti-communism, which sort of takes on these kind of nationalist overtones and thinks of it as like this, you know, sort of infection stemming from Moscow.
I'm like, how'd it get to Moscow?
How to get to Moscow.
Because, of course, in Russian intellectual history, you have the spectrum of easternizers versus westernizers.
So on the one hand, you have Lenin, Nechev, Kropotkin, people like that.
And on the other hand, you have Dostoevsky, Poverinosev.
Do you know Poverinosev?
Yeah, the name dropping and the let me blow your mind with these historical movements.
I mean, like Chris, Do you know about the Fabians?
Have you heard about the Fabians?
Yeah, well, I probably don't know them that well, but I know the basic idea of them.
And there's modern people that have adopted that name.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you know, that was another one of these, you know, movements from pre-Bolshevik type communists from the 19th century.
And, you know, it was a weird little movement, had some, you know, names you could name drop with that.
H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, people like that.
And you could point out that as well as having these sort of progressive and socialist type ideas, they also had some ideas that would have been deeply politically incorrect.
These days about colonialism and elitism and so on.
You could waffle about that for a little bit and blow people's minds with this stuff, but who cares?
He's not making any point with this apart from showing that he's aware of some relatively obscure historical narratives.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, you raised the point, Matt, about like his inability to answer questions directly or to, you know, just lay out his point of view in a coherent fashion.
So I'm going to play, this is a kind of bunch of connected clips, but it starts here with one which highlights the trigonometry dynamic.
So here's Constantine noticing that it's been a while since Francis.
And so maybe he wants to ask a question, so listen to this.
I know the dichotomy that you're talking about.
I'm just aware that Francis hasn't asked a question about how...
You can hear me.
First of all, it's because I'm really enjoying you talk about it, and I'm really enjoying the way that you analyse what has happened, and it's through a very different lens.
I guess my question to you, Curtis, is you've identified...
The problems?
Yes.
So what is your vision?
What isn't my vision?
Poor Francis.
He's so good, though.
He's doing his best.
But my question to you...
He's got it.
Anyway...
It wasn't a bad question.
It wasn't a bad question.
No, and actually, Francis is my hero in this because he does ask some simple but needful questions.
Simple Jack.
It's like simple Jack.
But why is...
Why is monarchism better than democracy?
You haven't explained that yet.
And he's right.
Francis is right.
And I don't know, you'll probably play some excerpts of it.
I've got more.
He proceeds to blather on without answering Francis's question.
Oh, don't spoil it, Matt.
Don't spoil it.
Sorry.
Maybe he doesn't.
Maybe he lays out his vision coherently.
So he was asked, what's his vision?
You've described the problem.
What is the solution then?
What is your vision?
So my vision is essentially to see the present as sort of continuous with the past.
And my vision is to kind of, in a way, break out of kind of, not even, you know, as a progressive, the 20th century revolution, but really to ask questions about the 19th century revolution and the 18th century revolution.
And so...
You know, for example, one of my favorite writers is, you know, named Joseph de Maistre.
So de Maistre is, he was trained as an Enlightenment man.
He was trained basically in the School of Voltaire.
And he basically sort of, you know, criticizes the French Revolution from his somewhat safe position as a minister in Savoy.
And, you know, to sort of find the French Revolution discussed...
In a book, you know, published in 1797 that could as well apply to the Russian Revolution to sort of, you know, even although so much of the 20th century bloodthirstiness has vanished, which is, I think, absolutely wonderful.
We're very peaceful people.
And, you know, this is one of the reasons why I can imagine kind of very great political change happening in a peaceful way, whereas most people see it as sort of violent.
You know, imagine sort of, you know, The fall of the Soviet Union from the perspective of a 1920s Bolshevik of, like, the era of, like, war communism.
Ah, there you go.
That's his vision, isn't it, so far?
Well, that's the start.
That's the start, yeah.
Let me tell you about Joseph de Mestre.
Yeah, and also, what about, you know, all the people in the heterodox sphere got so much mileage out of Kamala Harris having, like, waffly answers, looking to the future, and not...
With Holden to the past or whatever.
What about this?
What the hell is this?
He's gearing up the answer.
But first, we must consider the reaction of the Bolsheviks if they were looking at this reaction.
And 1797 was when it was published.
You remember we covered the philosopher John Gray?
I feel he gave Sam Harris something of a taste of his own medicine whenever he was asked to explain his arguments, you know, against atheism.
And he went on a Mind Palace tour where he just kept doing that thing where he linked on to the next point.
And it was a very indulgent, like...
And yes, of course, he had a mistress.
Who in the 15th century, you know, she wouldn't have been able to do that.
And that leads me to another point about a different Scottish philosopher.
And he liked haggis on a Sunday night.
That was, of course, because you're losing the will to live.
But this is the start, right?
So Francis asked a straightforward question.
We've got now the beginnings of an answer.
I'm obviously not going to play it all because it...
Continues on.
So this is like leaping forward in time to the next part of this.
But believe me that this is all the same answer.
And you'll see him say, okay, now get him back to my answer.
And if you'd ask basically, you know, and this is why I'm sort of, you know, in a way of leading up to, you know, this answer is that most people imagine a kind of political change like this only coming, you know, at the expense of great violence.
And if you'd asked, and I don't believe that's necessary or desirable, even possible.
And if you'd asked, basically, the Bolshevik of the 1920s to look at the events of 1989 to 1991, he would have been very confused.
Because what he would have seen is this, basically, the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by a windbag and a drunk.
That is Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Sometimes I think Yakovlev was, most of the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika came from Yakovlev.
These are not great individuals.
These are not violent individuals.
There's a crowd of a few thousand people in front of the Russian presidential palace, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this old Bolshevik would be like, well, where's the Soviet youth?
Where's the Komsomol?
You know, what is the Komsomol doing?
How many people are in the Komsomol?
And you'd be like, well, there's about 100,000 people in the Komsomol.
And where are they?
There you go.
He's still working towards some kind of answer.
And to remind everyone, the setup here is that he makes clear he's not a Nazi.
He likes oldy-worldy stuff.
I can't remember when he mentioned monarchism.
It might have been after this or before this.
He gets us, okay, so you don't like liberal democracy.
What are you proposing?
And we have had this Mind Palace tour.
Yeah, around Soviets and like what 1920s Bolshevik would think of the fall of the Soviet Union and, you know, revolutions don't need to be violent and, okay, okay, so let's see where this is leading up to, right?
This was, you know, he's coming back, he's rounding to Francis's question.
And so, you know, to answer your question very directly, I'm a monarchist.
I used to say I was a royalist and, you know, distinguished myself from...
The people here who believe in costumes and so on, you know, what we have is this, in this country, what you have in this country is this kind of costume monarchy, you know, which is purely symbolic in nature.
And, you know, one of the questions I ask is very simply, what would Elizabeth I have thought of Elizabeth II?
And, you know, and that's a, like...
Once you put yourself in that framework, you know, the answer is obvious.
You know, so when I say I'm a monarchist, I'm a believer in essentially absolute, though accountable monarchy, which strikes everyone as very, very strange.
Right.
So we finally got the answer.
This was the point that he mentioned in being a monarch.
It's great.
I mean, we finally have an answer.
This is his vision, right?
Yeah.
We had the Mind Palace tour.
We had Joseph Demestra.
We had a little thought experiments about a Bolshevik.
Thinking about revolutions that happened later on.
We think about what Elizabeth I would think of Elizabeth II.
And now he just tells us flatly, okay, he's in favor of like a real monarchy, like a real absolute monarch.
Great.
I'm happy we finally have an answer.
But with accountability.
With accountability.
Yeah, and it can't...
An accountable monarch.
Yes, that's right.
So, and this strikes people as very, very strange, Matt.
It's so edgy.
It's so out of people's fucking, you know, mental boxes that it blows their mind.
Like, you can see him so excited and pleased with himself that he finds, you know, like, oh, this is so edgy that the Nazis are even confused what I am.
And, oh, God.
Calm down.
Calm down, Kodesh.
You've just...
Happen to have struck gold by telling edgy teenagers that they've got this deep intellectual knowledge about, you know, the dark revolution and stuff.
He's good at coining terms that are, like, satisfying for edgy teenagers who see themselves as, you know, the intellectual elite, the misunderstood people who are willing to look in the dark places, Matt, where normies fear to look.
That's what he is very good at.
But we have our champion.
Francis Foster.
He is the man of the people here, right?
So he's got his answer, but this is not fully satisfying.
Like, it took a while to get there, but Francis needs more elaboration on this point.
So he asks for more detail.
Who would be your idea of an effective absolute monarchy?
Are we talking about something like Saudi Arabia?
Are we talking about the UAE, the crown prince?
You know, these are very foreign.
You know, one of the difficulties is that you have to go to sort of very foreign countries to look for an equivalent at the sovereign level.
So, you know, if you're looking at 20th century political leaders who are essentially monarchs who I admire greatly, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who is in a way an Englishman.
He's a sort of Englishman.
Is because Singapore is the strange half-Asian thing, you know, did an amazing job with that country.
Deng Xiaoping, you know, is arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century.
If you look at kind of the transformation of China under his leadership, he takes this absolute crap power that's created by Mao, who was a nut, an absolute nut.
And then, you know, the power of Mao, he's an absolute nut.
And like Stalin, you know, the revolution needs its own.
He needs to destroy kind of all the people who brought him to power so that he can rule alone.
And Mao is this, you know, crazed Chinese emperor.
And somehow through the turmoil of Chinese politics, he's replaced by this intensely practical person, Deng Xiaoping, who sort of turns this deranged third world country.
As I look around this room, think about all the things in this room that were made in a monarchy.
Right, Chris.
So, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Lee Kuan Yew was elected.
Yes, Singapore has a more authoritarian style of doing things.
Lee Kuan Yew had authoritarian tendencies, but he was elected, right?
He is not a hereditary monarch.
Deng Xiaoping, of course, coming out of that party centralized control of the CCP.
Yes, he was effective in many ways, and I agree with him that Mao was a lunatic.
But these are not actually absolute monarchs.
These are two random authoritarian-ish, at least, leaders, one of whom was elected and one of whom rose to power within a Communist Party framework.
Yeah, and he's kind of just picking people.
Like, I guess this is his point, right?
Because he's selecting countries that have had successful economic transformations, right?
Like, yeah, Singapore is economically very successful, right?
And emerged from a colonial regime to, yeah, a kind of managed democracy of a way.
And Deng Xiaoping opened up China.
In terms of allowing more market activities, right?
Basically making China highly capitalist, but with a communist, repressive, authoritarian government.
But so he likes them.
He likes them as examples of this kind of rule that he's talking about, which is it produces success and it is very focused around an individual who wields a lot of power.
Yeah.
Like, in a centralized way.
But that's the thing which doesn't make sense for his argument, which is, like, it's not controversial to say they were both very effective leaders, right?
But it's not enough to say, like, he's proposing some sort of system, right?
Like, you can't just pick people.
Like, I like Julius Caesar.
Julius Caesar is the kind of leader that I want.
So, you know, let's do it like the Romans did.
The system that produced Julius Caesar also produced a bunch of other leaders that were nowhere near as good.
Also, the system that produced other Chinese leaders who he may well not like very much, right?
Like, you can't just pick individuals that you think...
So what he wants to do is pick the individuals that were successful and say those are the kind of things, but they weren't monarchs.
They are not the head of monarchy systems.
The leaders of these countries are not now their children.
So it's like stolen.
In a way, like saying, well, these are, obviously they're not perfect examples, but they're kind of successful individuals.
And you're like, right, yeah, but they're not successful monarchies, right?
Yes.
And now, if you're going to praise the communists on trigonometry, obviously there's a bit of an issue there, right?
Because they're anti-communists, Matt.
That's part of their thing.
So Francis is going to...
Bring up a point to consider here.
But hang on a second, Curtis.
You're talking about innovation here.
But what about the Uyghurs?
What about the Uyghurs?
And so, you know, when you look at, and this is one of the points about 20th century, you know, monarchies, essentially, is that when you look at 20th century monarchies, or as we like to say, dictatorships, and you're seeing,
essentially, you see all of these kind of atrocities.
And basically, one of the things that, you know, Lord Acton, a great Englishman, said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And I used to believe that.
I used to be a kind of a classical liberal, even a libertarian.
And I started to realize at a certain point why, you know, you have, you know, these sort of new monarchies, these fascisms in the 20th century, Hitler being the worst.
Probably, you know, the best of the 20th century fascist leaders is Salazar of Portugal.
And, you know, Salazar is a very, you know, like a very mild fascist, but he still has a secret police.
He still has, you know, and, you know, if you're even in Mussolini's, you know, Italy before the war, if you're, you know, an anti-fascist in Mussolini's Italy, you get like sent to an island, you know, and it's not Auschwitz, right?
And so, you know...
The, like, sense of, you know, the reason, you know, when you say, like, what about the Uyghurs, you know, for example, you're basically looking at a regime which is insecure at a certain level.
Again, Matt, you get Curtis saying Constantine.
Oh yeah, you know, classical, I think you're a classical liberal and then constantly saying, well, I've never actually, I don't think I've described myself as that, like just that complete unwillingness to ever acknowledge that you have a very straightforward ideology or,
you know, identifiable category that you belong to.
So yes, he is exactly the kind of person that you can affirm is a classical.
Liberal.
But, you know, he doesn't want to be pigeonholed, Matt.
You can't put him in your box.
No, he's uncategorizable.
Yeah.
And I know he goes on to say, well, what about the Americans in Afghanistan?
Yeah, I'm going to play that.
You can't just keep it back.
I know you're trying to avoid hearing it.
Yes, I don't want to hear it.
But why?
Like, he went on that big thing about, look, you know.
In the 20th century, these kind of new monarchies, which again, he's now defined fascism as like a new form of monarchyism.
But then he's like, they did these kind of atrocities and, you know, but some of them weren't so bad.
And he talks about Salazar and what, you know, like it's this big rambly thing, right?
And remember, he's going to be talking about the Uyghurs, right?
And then he comes back to saying...
Well, so they're insecure at a certain level.
So maybe this explains, but like, wait a minute.
So is this argument that if you're a secure monarchy, that you don't engage in atrocities?
Because they did.
Like historically, there's plenty of examples of roller-secure monarchs performing horrific atrocities on conquered people, right?
What even is the argument there?
It is incredibly difficult to figure out what the argument is because he supposedly is a fan of a benevolent monarchism, but then he cites a managed democracy and the Chinese Communist Party as examples of this,
little periods at least in their history where he thought they did well.
Like, what do they have in common, apart from perhaps some degree of authoritarianism?
That's the thing that he likes.
You're basically guessing at what it is he's aiming for.
No, wait, Matt.
Let's not be unfair.
Now, you tried to preempt it, but he's going to pull it all together.
So, the Uyghurs, what about the Uyghurs?
Come on, we need to get back to them.
What's the solution?
Let's see what he has to say.
And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, tempered by...
The kind of level of insecurity there.
And that level of insecurity also, you know, we're very fortunate to live in a relatively, you know, nonviolent age.
And so when you look, for example, at the Uyghurs, you know, of course there are Central Asian people and like many people around the turn of the century, kind of a lot of Saudi money and sort of went in and they developed a...
A terrorist movement there, which I think what really kicked that off was this, a bunch of Uyghurs went to, I forget what city, on a train station and like started massacring people with knives.
And the response of the Chinese government is not, you know, certainly it's not, I mean, this is of course post-eng, you know, it's not a response that, you know, sort of matches what I would do.
At the same time, basically, there's another country which has a land border with China, which is Afghanistan.
And when you look at basically the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, and you're like, okay, would I rather be a Uyghur in Xinjiang, or would I rather live in Afghanistan for 20 years of war?
And watch this being done the American way in which we spend two trillion dollars and countless lives of ours and theirs to basically take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it to the Taliban.
I'm not even going to respond to this, Chris.
It's just such a mess.
It's such a waffly, wanky, just like, it's just wandering all over.
The police with this argument.
And you can hear, like, the amount of ums and ahs, right?
You know, I know I'm not someone gifted with the ability of speaking, you know, in a very Sam Harris kind of monologues without any verbal tics.
But Jesus Christ, he just sounds like he's waffling all over the point.
And, like, what was the point that the Uyghurs, well, he seemed to be suggesting that actually, you know, it's not the response that he would favor, but what were the Chinese authorities supposed to do?
So actually, Francis is the hero of this because he asks him a couple of direct, simple questions, which he keeps papering over with Blather because he can't really answer them.
He gets asked what he stands for, what he likes.
He says, okay, it's a hereditary monarchy.
Fantastic.
He eventually says that.
He didn't say it directly.
Not directly.
Eventually said that.
He can't cite real examples of this.
So he cites the Chinese Communist Party and Singapore.
And then he needs to kind of defend, remember, he needs to defend the Chinese Communist Party because he cited it as a good example of good governance.
And he has to then defend their human rights violations and suppression of minorities.
But there's even this leap in that path where he's like...
You know, bear in mind that China shares a land border with Afghanistan.
And if you think about Afghanistan, that is like, you know, that is one of the weakest pivots I've heard for like trying to get to whataboutism was, you know, China shares a border with Afghanistan.
And if we think about the invasion of Afghanistan, right?
And you're like, hold on.
Hold on, that argument seems very tenuous, where you're going to go there.
And he's then like, the dichotomy is, so do you want to be a Uyghur?
But then he gets confused.
He's like, is he talking about Uyghurs?
It's like, he doesn't know their status would be in Afghanistan.
So it's like, do you want to be in Afghanistan under the Taliban?
Or do you want to be a Uyghur in the CCP being kind of a person?
And you're like...
What is this argument?
This is such a tortured argument.
And it's not really addressing.
It's just filibustering, right?
And to their credit, the trigonometry people at times during this interview are like, hold on, what is the actual argument here, right?
And in this case, it's Constantine that does that.
So let's see if he can kind of bring it back, right?
When someone's like, wait, what are you saying here before we get on to Afghanistan and stuff?
Hold on, but that isn't the comparison we're talking about.
We're talking about a Chinese-style authoritarian system versus the system we have in the West, right?
But the system we have in the West is a system for governing Western people.
And so basically, when we say the reason these countries are neighbors, they're very similar cultures, and so when we're sort of comparing apples to apples...
You know, actually, it's a very apples-to-apples comparison to look at the Western system of governing, you know, Afghanistan and the Chinese system of governing what is, after all, really a Chinese colony of Xinjiang.
I just don't want to get sidetracked into that.
Let's stick with the West, right?
Let's stick with the West.
Let's stick with the West.
And so, you know, let's sort of take this.
You use the word authoritarian.
And the word authoritarian is a very interesting word because when you get into kind of basic, you know, sort of, again, pre-Enlightenment political science, you're reading like Aristotle and so forth.
You know, there really isn't anything in political science that Aristotle didn't understand.
And, you know, one of my, you know, basic beliefs or core beliefs, you know, we sort of have this belief in like limited government, for example, today.
Every government is unlimited.
Every, you know, every sovereignty is absolute.
Sovereignty is conserved.
And when you say, you know, there's, you know, a limited government, I just, you know, spoke, you know, okay, in America we have freedom of speech in theory.
That's a British tradition.
You know, I just spoke with someone this morning who is being investigated by the police.
He's facing 14 years in prison for satirical tweets.
That's Western governance for Western people.
That wouldn't be applicable for Eastern types, right?
They need a very different type of governance because, of course, they're psychologically built differently.
So, yeah, I just noticed that reference to, you know, well, we're talking about governing Western people.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, full credit to Konstantin.
He tries to get him to answer the question.
He says, hang on, and it's reasonable, you're saying China's The good guys here.
We should emulate that.
This is what we want.
And you're comparing them to Afghanistan.
The Taliban.
The Taliban.
And this is apples to apples, right?
Afghanistan and China, very, very similar.
Yeah, he says that.
He says they're basically the same.
There's a border, right?
Well, they've got a border.
That's all right.
Yeah, and he says, well, it's actually a colony.
So that's why he's drawing the...
But you have to remember, his original point was the Chinese...
Communist Deng Xiaoping system.
So he's now trying to argue that that particular region of China is similar culturally to Afghanistan.
But that argument...
And this is why he says this, because he doesn't want to compare the Chinese Communist Party to the liberal democracies like in the UK, because he knows that the trigonometry guys are going to go, well, I like this better than that.
Yes.
And then...
He's in a difficult spot here, I think.
So he pivots to Aristotle.
And authoritarianism.
You can hear him gearing up for a semantic sophistry-style argument, right?
Well, the definition of authoritarian, if you look at the root word, but like, yeah, so into this story about Aristotle.
And then he jumps from there to, you know, freedom of speech.
Of course, we have that in America, and that is a British tradition.
But these people that are being imprisoned for...
And it's like Jordan Peterson.
It's all very loosely connected.
And it gives the impression of this erudite, deeply cultured person who knows all these philosophers and world history and all these different regions and stuff.
But it's so empty.
There's very little there.
He's just read some books.
He can cite some names.
He knows some geography.
And that's it.
None of it actually hangs together if you stop it and they're like, hold on, what are you saying, Curtis?
And you can see because he just immediately is like constantly jumping from topic to topic, right?
And it's so annoying.
It is such a waste of time.
I'm so sorry to everyone for having to subject you to this, but it has to be done.
Yeah.
And so, again...
Trigonometry, the good guys, Matt, the good guys in this conversation, they're trying to say, okay, well, like, let's hold on.
So there's hypocrisies in the West, but does that mean that monarchies are better?
So listen to this.
I just want to, I understand what you're saying, and these are all good points that we've covered on the show plenty.
So the fact that Western governments are violating some of...
Arguably the sacred principles of their own societies is a problem, and I agree with you.
But I want to make a different, no, it's a different point.
But we mustn't compare that to what we actually mean when we say the word authoritarianism.
I think, yes, and I think there's actually, there's a very important point there.
And, you know, the sort of the difference, you know, as I understand it, you describe yourself as a classical liberal, and so you see these kind of principles.
I don't think I ever have, but it's not too far away from what I am.
It's not too far away.
And so...
From the perspective of most people who see this like woke authoritarianism or whatever, they kind of identify it as a somewhat new thing.
Certainly I remember kind of the freedom speech on the internet in the 1990s when you felt that anyone could say anything for any reason and no one cared.
And we've come to a very different place from that.
And so understanding the causes of that and saying, are the causes of that deeper?
Then this kind of superficial question of how do we get past wokeness?
How do we roll the clock back to the 90s?
You're not going to roll back the clock to the 90s, and I think it's partly a technological issue.
What the internet did is it changed the way we communicate.
And so the authoritarianism that you see now, it's a response to the fact that communication has become much more powerful than it ever has been.
Well, it is.
It is.
It is.
But, you know, we started, we were talking about, you know, World War II earlier and, you know, cancel culture in specific.
And let me tell a couple of stories.
Oh, God, no, please don't.
So we've shifted from Afghanistan and China, some mention of Aristotle, to...
Woke authoritarianism, which is bad, though.
He likes authoritarianism, but not woke authoritarianism, right?
And now they're talking about you can't turn back the clock to the 90s and technology.
Well, he liked the 90s internet, Matt, because you could say whatever you wanted, right?
And that's the golden era.
The Matrix was right.
That was the pinnacle of human civilization.
But we can't go back to that, right?
No, no, we can't.
But also...
Famously, Matt, authoritarian regimes, famously fans of free speech and open exchange of ideas.
And, like, they would be...
They don't, you know, police the internet any more strongly than Western democracies.
Like, yeah, that is...
Like, it's so...
It's incoherent.
It is incoherent.
And it's not the...
At all.
It's so annoying to listen to.
And he says, let me tell you a couple stories.
Let me just point out, Matt, he's just been telling fucking stories.
He's been telling stories about the Soviet era and the Uyghurs in China and Aristotle.
And I'm just going to play a little bit of his story.
So let's just say maybe his story is really relevant.
So, you know, one of the things, and you basically, you know, people who lose Historical conflicts get written out of history very easily.
And so you don't understand the age of what we call cancel culture.
And so, you know, for example, just as, you know, I'll give you two examples.
One is a woman named Bella Dodd, completely forgotten by history.
She was a member of the U.S. Politburo of the CPUSA.
She was a schoolteacher, New York's communist schoolteacher.
In New York City, very like my grandmother, a little more successful in the party.
She becomes a member of the Politburo.
She's a member of the faction of Earl Browder, who is basically pushing the popular front line of unity between liberals and communists.
You know, they win the war, World War II ends, and there's a split between the liberals and communists, sort of like the Sino-Soviet split, you know, in some ways.
And, you know, sort of competing factions of progressivism.
And as a result, Stalin, who controls the American Communist Party, purges its leadership.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know if you're going to play more of this, Chris, but I hope you won't because he goes on to drop this bombshell that did you know that socialists in the United States, even back in the 1940s, were having schisms and canceling, in scare quotes, canceling each other because,
you know, they were found lacking in some ideological doctrinal way.
This will blow everyone's mind.
At the beginning, he mentioned there, Chris, that history is written by the winners and we're in the age of cancel cultures.
What has any of this got to do with what they were just talking about?
No, Matt, it's very relevant.
Well, maybe he's getting too specific.
He's getting lost in the details, so he's going to broaden it out.
So just to sort of broaden this out a little bit.
Oh yeah, that's why I always say to people, the late Soviet Union wasn't Stalinism, but it was exactly that.
Exactly that.
Which is why what's happening now.
You would lose your job, you're just like, oh my god.
It happened to my grandfather.
Yeah.
So I always make this point to people in the West that this isn't new, and here's the parallel that you may want to think about when you're engaging.
This isn't new, but let me tell you a couple of other stories.
So, Browner, I read this somewhere, and unfortunately, I need a better historical researcher to dig this reference back up.
You know, look, cancel culture was in Soviet Russia, right?
But it's not always the same, but there's parallels.
But, you know, maybe if he tells a couple more stories, a few more anecdotes from history, this will all connect together, right?
Spoiler alert, everyone.
It does not.
But go on.
Yeah, I do feel some sympathy for Constantine and Francis, right?
Because they're clearly like, okay, right, but let's try to answer, you know, some of the things that we're saying.
Just one question.
Let's try to answer just one thing.
Yeah, I do answer particularly than this.
And, you know, you heard him there mention that, you know, he's got a story.
So let's just hear a little bit more, Matt.
He's going to bring it together.
I always advise people to watch the film Reds, which is a very, you know, with Warren Beatty as John Reed.
You know, John Reed, only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin.
And you basically see these people with these insanely modern attitudes.
They live like people in San Francisco.
Their love lives are like the love lives of people in San Francisco.
These are completely...
Modern people and they're a very small minority and they basically set out to take power.
So here's a couple of examples that are sort of a little outside of the normal space of like anti-wokeness.
So basically, you know, this thing with the publishers is done and this sort of kind of defines what it means to be like mainstream media.
What it means to be mainstream publishing is that you kind of went through this filtration, this coordination.
It was a very different process in Nazi Germany, but this ideological coordination, which was centralized in Nazi Germany, except for the CPUSA, which is long gone, it was decentralized in this country.
Wokeness is decentralized, but it achieves the same purpose as, I'm going to butcher the German, Gleichschaltung, which is basically turning everything, the sort of turning everything Nazi.
That, you know, happened in the Third Reich.
You know, my favorite example of this is a wonderful writer, Victor Klemperer.
Do you know the name?
He was a Jew who survived the Third Reich because he was married to an Aryan and his wife was a linguist.
So we wrote this wonderful book called Language of the Third Reich.
Yes, exactly.
Jesus Christ, right?
You just want, he's such, like, I want someone to grab these guys and say, like, shut up, answer the question.
No, you don't have, you don't have, like, eight minutes to give your waffly bullshit answer.
Just answer the question directly without going in indulgent tangents.
Don't tell us about Victor Klepperer.
You're not allowed to talk about the movie Reds.
You're not allowed to change the topic three or four times.
Just answer the question.
But this is the thing.
We saw the same thing with Jordan Peterson where he gets asked a question and you go on this magical mystery tour, you know, segwaying from semantic connection to semantic connection until I feel like everyone's just forgotten what the question was or what we were talking about at the beginning, but we're just left with the impression of an impressionist scattergun feeling that this person knows things.
Matt, even more in this case.
This is 50 minutes into the...
They're approaching the end of the interview, and they clearly haven't got anywhere, right?
Even just outlining his basic ideas, because he's been telling them stories for like 50 minutes, right?
And you can hear the desperation in Constantine at this point.
So he butts in as he's going on about this and tries to say, okay, let's try to deal with that.
So just listen to this.
You know, in Nazi Germany, you have Goebbels and his Ministry of Enlightenment, and he's like, oh, you must be enlightened this way, that way, right?
But just to translate your point into sort of simpler language, what you're saying basically is it's decentralized.
No one is sitting at the top going, everyone must have equity and diversity.
No one's doing that, but everyone must have equity and diversity.
And so you have the same effect that Goebbels was trying to generate, but the mechanism is totally different.
And it's a...
Fascinating question of what this mechanism is.
Okay, cool.
So we've got about 10 minutes left.
I want to, before we move on to locals and have the conversation there, let's use the last 10 minutes in a little bit more succinct, concrete way to talk about that mechanism.
Why is it that we're now obsessed with the German cat?
Why is it that the same ideological positions are being pushed on everybody from corporations, the media, parliament down the road from here, the church?
Right?
I mean, the NHS, everyone is ad hoc to a particular worldview.
And you can even believe that's a great worldview and it's exact.
Everyone needs equity and diversity and whatever.
How does that happen?
What is the mechanism?
There is no more important question.
Cool.
Let's take 10 minutes very specifically and talk about that.
That is the most important question of the time.
And the answer is because we're not a monarchy.
And let me be really, you know, specific and clear about that.
So, Constantine's painful performative laughter, very annoying, right?
But also, I think it is sort of a genuine reaction because, like, his answer is, well, you know, all of this is because we're not a monarchy.
And he has obviously not done the grinds.
To justify that conclusion at all.
So it's just a statement.
It's the exact same statement he made at the start, that he likes monarchies, right?
And that's all there is to it.
It's even that premise that everything in society is absolutely lockstep.
There's no political disagreements.
There's no debate in British society, no different political movements.
It's not like the Conservatives had power for over a decade or anything like that.
As Constantine says, everyone is completely agreed on the ideology that we all have to follow.
So how did that situation come about?
Yeah, I feel like Constantine was grasping at straws there because he was feeling good, because like, thank God, we've finally got a topic we can all get on board on, that there's a woke orthodoxy, it's being enforced by this kind of groupthink, you know, it's not being enforced in the Nazi style, but it's a terrible thing,
we need to understand how that's happening.
Okay, tell us why.
Monarchy!
Yeah, surprise!
Like, I feel that's a big laugh of custody, but I also feel like, what else can he do?
What can he do?
What can he do?
And I feel so, I was feeling so sorry for Francis with this, because I just know, you know the situation that Francis is in, right?
Francis or Constance?
Francis.
I'm feeling sorry for Francis now.
Because Francis is tagging along.
He's wanting to be a good Batman to Constantine.
He's been told, we're going to be talking to a very important thinker.
He's very clever.
He's going to be telling us some exciting, dangerous ideas, whatever.
And he's trying to ask every man questions.
And the answers that he's getting must just baffle him even more.
Like, he must just be sitting there, utterly baffled by all of this.
But assuming, I think, that it's all making sense, but in a way that's just over his head.
And if I could speak to Francis right now, I'd tell him, mate, no, it's not going over your head.
There's nothing there.
You're confused because it's meaningless, not because you're not sophisticated enough.
You are right.
Well, this is something that comes up in almost every interview with Curtis that I've seen.
People basically say, of course you're a genius.
And when he gives a winding answer, which doesn't seem to make sense, they're like, well, you know, yes.
It's very interesting what you're saying.
There's a lot to that.
You know, maybe let's try to focus step by step.
I mean, they always act like the Emperor's New Coast.
We can't say, but this is fucking stupid, Curtis.
This is stupid.
Like, you're just waffling nonsense.
They can't say that because everyone's convinced he's the philosopher king of the neo-reactionaries.
And the thing that gets me is they're all supposed to be about calling bullshit, you know, saying...
Oh, look, there's nothing actually here.
All this orthodoxy, all these people are free to call out someone when they're just waffling on Kamala Harris or anyone.
They just dip these platitudes.
And here they have someone who for 50 minutes has run...
It's like rampant.
Just telling them stories of like Russia and Bolsheviks and Afghanistan and how it's a border region.
What would Elizabeth I think about things?
And they give it a complete pass.
Oh, what you're saying is tremendously interesting.
Very fascinating stuff.
There's a lot to unpack there.
Can you just walk us through the beginning?
Because we're only simple.
We're just simple folk, right?
We're not on your level.
We've got 10 minutes left.
Let's try to get just like two answers.
Let's try to get the right answers.
We could do it.
We could do it.
And spoiler, they can't.
They can't.
Even with that framing, that we're going to get answers.
We're going to keep this simple on a single topic.
Sorry, Curtis has other ideas.
He's not letting you walk him to that path.
So, well, let's see what he says.
And when those professors and journalists and civil servants, like my parents, are basically told what to do by politicians, let's say the politicians can even fire them, you know, that's horrifying that leads us down the road to hit.
And so, you know, the principle of this sort of, you know, technocratic, meritocratic government is that the government should be ruled by experts.
And these experts, the ideas of these experts exist in a marketplace of ideas, which is not the sort of democratic marketplace of ideas that gives us QAnon and, you know, weird anti-vaxxer internet stuff.
You know, that's a terrible marketplace of ideas.
Everything that people say about it is true.
But the marketplace of ideas among informed experts.
And you're just like, how could this go wrong?
And let me give you an example that sort of has nothing to do with wokeness, nothing to do with the German cat.
Hold on, let me just work through what you're saying so that the logic is clear.
Well, it's very easy to see how that goes wrong.
Because if the idea of democracy is essentially that you can get rid of the coach, right?
If you don't like the coach.
Well, if the coach isn't actually in charge.
Yes.
If the coach actually isn't in charge, the wire is leading to the election.
You can replace the coach, but the team is still going to be run the way that it's run.
By the managers, the trainers.
Right.
And so, you know, what, you know, and this is really, this is a very old thing.
This is, you know, American progressivism, essentially.
From the early part of the century, you know, going back in history, you have this sort of Gilded Age system in America, very like China, very corrupt, very effective.
Right, Chris.
So the mechanism and the problem with democracy is that you have this meritocratic expert deep state, I think, particularly Constantine was hinting at, which you can't change even.
By electing a different government.
But they are beholden to the politicians.
So, I don't know.
I'm struggling to follow the logic there.
Yeah, well, you remember he was explaining, like, why monarchy?
And now he's getting into the details.
And they're keeping it very specific.
But you can hear Constantine trying to, like, provide...
Simplified analogies, like, before he jumps on to the next, you know, story about, like, a random historical account.
He's like, well, let's just break down where we've got so far.
And the thing with Yarvin is, like, what he wants, like, he has the monarchy thing, but he also has, like, this view about technocratic elites, right?
Kind of like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in control of things.
So he does have this...
You know, worship towards a particular kind of expertise, if you want, or at least like presented expertise.
But his argument is that that has been corrupted by, you know, the systems of wokeness and progressivism and whatnot.
They've made that system not function right.
And like, you know, putting restrictions.
On capitalists and this kind of thing, like all of it is not letting the great men of history properly run things.
But so Jarvin is an elitist.
You know, he wants a technocratic monarchical elite.
You know, I think this is why what he's arguing for gets a bit messy because there are lots of contradictions like when you dig into it.
Yeah, it's very confusing because sometimes these unelected technocratic elites are the good guys.
I presume when they're CEOs and in charge of corporations and stuff, and sometimes these unelected elites are the bad guys.
And he seems to have a problem with the fact that you can change the coach, but it's not going to change that system.
Yeah, it is a bit confusing.
I guess what it boils down to is just kind of that romantic attachment to this great man or woman, in fairness, Elizabeth I, you mentioned, of history, and he just likes that kind of thing, these romantic, powerful figures who will do things unfettered.
Well, I have a clip that will help clarify the distinction and will also give our boy Francis another chance to shine with his kind of crazy wisdom.
The farther you go back in progressivism, the more I like these people.
And they're just like...
You know, this society should be ruled by the best people in it, and these people are manifestly not the best people.
They are not the experts.
They are not the smartest people.
But who gets to judge who the best people are, Curtis?
Well, at present, who gets to judge who the best people are are these institutions.
And so let me basically, you know, the meritocracy, essentially, now it gets corrupted by, you know, all this race stuff or whatever.
But, you know, let me give you an example of a problem that we're all familiar with.
And the effect in this, and that example is COVID.
You'll remember COVID.
Unwillingly.
Yeah, I'd rather not remember it.
You probably had COVID.
And so I think it's fairly clearly established.
It's not really a right-wing conspiracy theory.
It's fairly clear that if it didn't happen, it could have happened.
And here's how COVID happens.
So first you have SARS-1, which basically jumps from a bat to a palm civet.
It's very well established, very nasty disease.
This, you know, SARS-1 is a problem.
It almost escapes.
It almost becomes COVID and it kills about 20% of the people that have it.
It makes Delta COVID, which was a nasty disease, you know, look like the common cold.
It's an important problem.
The way science is funded, specifically science and, you know, including, for example, virology.
Virology is not social science.
It's very clearly scientific.
It's a hard science.
And the principle of the second half of the 20th century, the way that science is funded is sort of, you know, consistent with this kind of government by experts principle.
And the thing about an oligarchy is it almost looks like it's no government at all.
It's just like, no, there's no power here.
It's just science.
It's not power.
It's just science.
So there, Matt, we have the pit in the...
Wafflarium, right?
Like rolling around.
He's now gotten into another example that he's going to use to explain things.
It's COVID.
And it's going to go more, right?
You can already hear the beginnings of where this is going to go.
And it's it's very much a very predictable, you know, he says, well, it's not just a right wing thing anymore, but he's about to outline like a lab leak scenario and the corrupt virology establishment, like essentially, you know, Brett Weinstein
plot. But so here he is saying that experts like the true experts should be involved.
And so, he's going to go on the big, long tangent.
About COVID.
But again, it's like, it's not actually proving anything unless you accept all these assumptions that he layers in.
And as you'll see, yeah, he speaks very confidently about all the stuff about COVID.
And if you actually have any reasonable grasp about the literature, he's providing the conspiratorial lab leak thing, as if that's the cutting edge of...
Of science.
And it isn't.
Yeah, this little story and anecdote about COVID, which, as you said, is going to be based on conspiracy theories, is the rationale for his monarchical scheme, which he never really describes.
Like, he dodged the question.
Francis there wanted to ask, hey, who chooses the aristocrats in this alternative political system you're proposing?
Which is a good question, which he dodges.
He goes, well, I'll tell you who chooses them at the moment.
You know, whatever, Fauci or someone is choosing this virologist.
Presumably, we need Elon Musk and RFK Jr. to be sorting out stuff like COVID because they're not going to be corrupt.
Anyway.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
Well, let's continue down his road.
So he's outlined.
He's not even on.
COVID yet.
He's actually on SARS, right?
That's what he was waffling on about.
But he'll get there.
He'll get there.
Having, like, dropped out of my PhD program, but, you know, some people think of me as a computer scientist.
The way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter.
And so within virology, basically, people realize that they could get quite a bit of grants by referring to this very real problem of bat coronaviruses.
And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem.
We deserve a number of pounds to study it.
And so they're like, what if this happened again?
What if a bat coronavirus emerged?
Well, let's go and find all the bat coronaviruses.
Let's go to all the bat caves.
They literally did this.
Let's bring the viruses back.
But the problem is these viruses are bat viruses.
They don't naturally infect humans, but they can mutate to infect humans.
But waiting for them to mutate is a very slow and random process.
So what if we mutated them?
And what if we trained them?
What if we put a furin cleavage site in?
What if we trained them to infect, you know, humanized mice?
What if we did this in a Chinese laboratory with very poor biosafety conditions?
You know, the Wuhan virus was not...
That's an American virus because it's funded by American science.
These people were literally funded to do this research by American grants.
And so...
When you talk to the virologists who did this, they're like, well, we need to predict the emergency.
Well, what happens if you predict it?
What do you do?
We predicted it all, right?
Okay.
All right.
So there he goes.
So as you said, Chris, his argument for why we need to get rid of democracy is because democracy basically boils down to, apparently, this rule by experts.
And the experts that have really screwed us over recently...
Other virologists, because far from being the ones that actually did stuff like found vaccines and things for COVID.
No, no, no.
They created it in a lab.
They were so busy wondering whether or not they could.
They didn't think about whether or not they should.
So there you go.
It's a conspiracy theory.
No, but it's even worse than that, right?
Because what he's describing there is they realized that bad coronaviruses are actually...
A concern.
And then, you know, they decided to make them more pathogenic, right?
And they took them to a lab with poor safety record in order because they know...
And they wanted to engineer them to make them more transmissible to humans.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's basically the lab-like narrative.
And he also presents it like...
Virologists, you know, found out the gain of function was this way where they could get lots of funding and all this kind of stuff.
And again, it's such a cartoonish view of virology.
The vast majority of virologists are not doing gain of function research.
Like what that actually refers to as well all depends on like a bunch of definitions, but it actually was small numbers of virologists that work in that particular area.
And there was...
Some controversy around it, right?
Around making viruses more infectious just because of safety issues.
But the way he presents it is like the whole field is lined up, you know, without any consideration because they're all just self-interested, you know, increasing their grant funding and all those kind of things.
But actually, there were debates and actually labs that do that kind of research.
Take a lot of precautions in order to avoid these kinds of things.
And all these accusations have been leveled at the Wuhan Virology Institute.
And if you look into it, if you dig into it beyond headlines, there is so much evidence that suggests the kind of scenario that he's presenting.
While it sounds...
Plausible, right?
Like just in terms of, you know, like Jon Stewart saying, oh, there's a virology institute, you know, just nearby where they found the outbreak.
But the actual details about the virus and about the records that we have from that lab, including things that they released years earlier, whatever, they don't line up with this story.
It doesn't work.
But none of that really matters to him because he's just going by the kind of discourse narrative that is popular.
You know, online.
And he knows the words to drop in, but it's all based on just this conspiratorial narrative.
And it doesn't reflect actual science.
He's hinting at things that are real, like people being concerned about funding and orientating research that way.
But his version of it is more like a Batman comic than actually discussing the issues around funding and grant skewering priorities.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, putting aside the fact that the thing that he's referring to as evidence is totally untrue, I'm just excited to hear about how this purported poor behaviour by virologists is going to be the fault of democracy and is going to be fixed by aristocrats.
And it's going to prove monarchy.
Yeah.
Okay, well, let's see.
That's where he's supposed to be going.
So here's the next leg of this argument.
And yet this bad idea, which, you know, any fool on the street can see as a bad idea.
Basically succeeds in the marketplace of ideas that, you know, consists of professional virologists with IQs of 150 who've trained for many, many years to study this.
And the question of why this bad idea succeeds in the marketplace of ideas is fundamental to the question of why bad ideas, you know, rule our society today and how we tend, you know, like the difference between gain-of-function research and the idea that Colleges should discriminate in missions by the skin color of the people applying to them.
They're both equally ridiculous ideas.
And how do these ridiculous ideas succeed?
And when we use words like authoritarianism, which is basically sort of an anti-monarchical word, we're basically looking at the pathologies of monarchies, which are systems...
very alien to the--and very opposed to the kind of oligarchy that runs our democratic societies today.
And monarchies, you know, when they fail, when they're bad, and any
system of government, democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy can be good or bad.
Basic point of Aristotle.
When bad monarchies distort the marketplace of ideas, it's overwhelmingly by repressing good ideas.
And the way that we got here.
It's very different from that.
It's by a system that promotes bad ideas.
Okay.
Has that helped?
So the bad monarchies.
So he's talking about, in Curtis's universe, are the virologists like bad monarchists?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No.
Okay.
Come on, Matt.
Come on.
Keep up.
Keep up.
Put that 150 IQ to use.
And I know as well the ever-present reference to IQ that you find in this kind of content.
So he's positing there are three potential government systems, three broad categories that he's concerned with.
Democracy, monarchy, and oligarchy.
Those are the three systems.
Now he's saying monarchy's pathology is that it can repress.
Good ideas, right?
It can imprison Galileo or something like that, right?
But oligarchy's issue is that it can promote bad ideas.
Because he'll go on to explain that he thinks our current system, like he doesn't think it's a democracy because he thinks democracy is only direct democracy.
So he counts America current.
America is an oligarchy.
The funny thing is, he's not referring to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
He's suggesting that's a bad system, but it's because we have bad oligarchical people.
That's the thing that confuses me.
The current system, which he doesn't think is a pure democracy, it's kind of an oligarchy.
Like you said, he thinks the oligarchs are like virologists or DEI officers in bureaucracies.
Yes.
As you say, he's not thinking of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and the other ultra-rich billionaires that are influencing politics.
That's right.
He wants them.
He wants them to be like a new aristocracy inside a monarchy of some kind.
Yeah, and he sees this monarchy of his is completely opposed to oligarchy.
But what he means by oligarchy is rather more like a technocratic.
You know, bureaucratic state, you know, a system where you have stuff like the Reserve Bank, you have ex-figuring stuff out.
Again, famously, monarchs noted for the lack of bureaucratic systems that were associated with them or like, you know, they were ruthlessly efficient decision makers.
It's not like there's famous courtly intrigues and palace backbiting and all this kind of thing.
No, no, no, no.
Like, just...
Very efficient, all top-down.
He's complaining about Hollywood versions of history, but it does feel like his dream monarch system is something that only exists in science fiction stories or very simplified versions of history,
where what happened in Singapore is simply just to one man.
That's all.
All those other systems, all the parties and stuff that he was involved with, not really important.
It was a single figure that did it all.
Yeah, that's right.
And as soon as that exciting person disappeared, then it wasn't a monarchy anymore.
It just became a boring old oligarchy, I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, if you want to hear this fleshed out, this important...
And just remember as well that this is the part where they're supposed to be getting concrete and focusing on a specific...
Moreover, it promotes bad ideas, not through a sort of conscious, monarchical plan.
There's no little council to supreme elders of something sitting in a little room saying, we're going to, you know, fund this bad idea because we like bad ideas.
That would be better in some ways because it would be easy to get rid of those people.
But there's actually, there's no center.
There's no little cabal.
There's no dictatorship.
There's sort of none of that.
There's just a system that structurally rewards these bad ideas.
And it structurally rewards these bad ideas, first of all, by separating authority from responsibility.
And so, you know, someone like Fauci, who's almost, you know, a little monarch within this oligarchical structure of process.
And who is really critical in authorizing and continuing this gain-of-function research will never be held accountable.
And so you have this kind of division.
When bad ideas are accountable, they are not favored in the evolutionary Darwinian contest of ideas.
So now an administrator like Fauci is like a little monarch, not an oligarch.
He's a monarch in an oligarchical system.
Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
But the problem is they're not accountable.
So I really wish to get back to Francis' question because it really is important.
How do you pick these accountable monarchs in this system?
Because just taking all these premises, accepting all these premises, all of these assumptions, all the conspiracy theories, all of the cartoonish versions of reality there.
Accepting all of that, this very accountable head of state sounds a lot like, you know, an elected president or prime minister, no?
Yeah.
I mean, the other aspect of it is, Matt, that he's attracted to this great man of history narrative, right?
That was what he was referencing earlier in the talk, like these figures that are associated with that way of looking at history and obviously his whole...
Monarchical system is based around that notion.
But this reminds me that essentially, you know, the right wing conspiratorial, right?
Where here he is negating the notion of like a cabal of organized conspiracists, right?
That's kind of interesting that he argues that isn't there.
But instead of that, he's like, it's Fauci.
This little unaccountable monarch has taken over and is promoting gain-of-function research.
And again, it just ignores that the NIH, even just taking America, not even considering the whole structure of virology across the world, which is an international discipline.
But the right-wing and the conspiracists have personified it in Fauci.
Just like they do with George Soros or with Klaus Schwab.
But they actually aren't interested in the structure of grants or how they are determined and how they're allocated and the procedures for which they're assessed, which is not all individually.
By Fauci?
No, it's not by Fauci.
I mean, that's right.
So characterizing him as a little mini monarch is ridiculous because he doesn't have the discretion to go against the rest of scientific advice and expert opinion.
Like you might well try to claim that they're all governed by groupthink or they're all governed by political correctness or something like that.
But it's really quite absurd to say he's like a little Napoleon.
But I can't get around the fact that his whole thing is, like, he talks a lot about the problems with monarchies and them, you know, squashing good ideas and censorship and repression and all of that.
And his solution to that is that, oh, no, no, he likes accountable monarchs.
So, you know, monarchs, Chris, famously very accountable to the people.
That's what they're all about.
Like Elizabeth I, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck.
These are all people that really, they had to listen to the people that do really what the people wanted, very much like your ideal elected democratic leader, right?
Of course not.
Like, what is this accountable monarch?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm still caught up, though, Matt, in the, you know, like after complaining about how people have these cartoonish, you know, childish views about history.
It's just so funny that they then go on to endorse it or Jarvan then goes on to endorse this kind of view.
But as you say, not surprising.
And we're not really any closer yet to the answer to Francis's question.
But we are learning about how the process shouldn't work.
So there's one more bit just to finish off this tangent into virology.
Okay, so maybe this will pull it all together, Matt.
Within virology, for example, gain-of-function research feels good because everyone's doing it.
It's the way to get grants.
And if you say no one should be doing this, you're basically saying your fellow virologists should not be funded.
That's going to be hard.
But the thing is, when you basically extend that outside the circles of experts, essentially...
You know, when these experts are promoting policies that strengthen power, that reward them, they're like, my field is important, my field matters, more must be done.
And then you extend this to sort of the broader world.
Where does this sort of culture of victimology come from?
Whether you're looking, we talked about communism, progressivism earlier, and if you look at, for example, the Scottsboro Boys case, you know, which was promoted by communists in the 1930s, you connect that to George Floyd.
There's sort of this clear thread there.
And there's, you know, providing people with the feeling of saying, I'm the defender of the victim.
You know, I am the white knight.
I am the paladin.
This is a complete waste of time.
I'm so tired of hearing this mush.
It's flipping between virologists and DEI stuff.
Scott's phone, boys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he took a little jaunt of the 1930s again.
Just a short divergence there.
But also his claim that, you know, imagine if you were to stand up and say gain-of-function research shouldn't be funded.
You would be hounded out of the discipline.
That's right, because everyone's doing it.
Everyone's doing it.
Everyone's doing it.
It's amazing.
They're all doing it in their backyards and stuff.
So yes, again, there's the fact that he's just completely wrong about how prevalent gain-of-function research is.
And then he is secondarily wrong as well that nobody in the field would be brave enough to argue against it or criticize the value of it.
Indeed.
They were?
We've read the articles.
Like you said, it's a controversial topic.
Very few people are doing it.
It wasn't responsible for creating COVID virus.
Like, everything he says is wrong.
And this is one of his very weak examples that explains why we should have a monarchy.
Like, it's absolutely 14-year-old teenager stuff.
It's a complete waste of time to listen to him.
It is.
And like, so, you know, Constantine started this segment by saying, Like, for this last bit, let's try to keep this focused, right?
Let's stick on one issue.
And a couple of times he's attempted to, like, summarize what he's saying.
Is this what you mean?
And you hear it again here.
I think the effect of the George Floyd riots on, you know, the African-American community in America is straightforwardly negative.
There's very clear social science statistics.
Massive numbers of deaths from de-policing, right?
But that doesn't have an accountability impact on the marketplace of ideas.
What impacts the marketplace of ideas is...
To translate what you're saying into simple language, the people who pushed that narrative didn't get the comeuppance they should have got.
They were not delegitimized, discredited.
They were not delegitimized, but they felt that.
Positive feelings of feeling incredibly good about it.
Their hearts felt warm.
They felt important.
They felt like they mattered.
So, a riot isn't accountable to the marketplace of ideas, Chris.
Have I...
Well, yeah, but I'm not...
It's even...
Like, he's against the marketplace.
Of ideas, isn't he?
Because when he was...
I can't keep track.
Honestly, I can't keep track.
And these, by the way, these little phrases, like the marketplace of ideas, like they've just become such red flags.
I've never heard these sequences of words being used in a sensible context.
It's this free speech discourse nonsense.
Anyway, so yes, we all, everyone in their cohort agrees, you know, everyone agrees that George Floyd riot, we're bad.
And that's the fault of democracy because, I don't know, the experts weren't accountable to somebody.
Like, what's he saying?
I don't understand.
Well, Matt, that's because you're not a high IQ person.
No, clearly not.
This is the last clip of him tying this all together.
Okay, so this will do it.
He's going to explain it.
He's going to put it all together.
We've listened to him wander around across all these examples.
This is it.
This is the point where he's going to explain, you know, democracy is the problem.
Monarchy is the solution.
Let's hear it.
I'm not saying whether, you know, it looks exactly like the kind of monoculture that's enforced through repressive means by an authoritarian government such as Nazi Germany.
But the mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather than suppression.
It's attraction rather than repulsion.
And it's completely, it's inevitable in an oligarchical, meritocratic structure of government.
And so when these oligarchies were established, you had these marketplaces of ideas.
You know, professors had never been involved in government.
The idea that professors should run the government in 1900 was as absurd as saying postmen should run the government.
And because these marketplaces of ideas in academia were not corrupted by power, they were flat.
And they were excellent.
And people are like, OK, I have these corrupt politicians elected by, you know, democracy.
Terrible result.
You know, we'll still use the name democracy, just as we still use the name monarchy.
But politicians are awful.
They're corrupt.
What about these unbiased, you know, experts?
But the thing is, you give power to the experts and power corrupts them.
And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest.
They become sort of corrupted.
And basically, when you give power to the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself, and you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas.
I think he's describing YouTube.
I think he's a bit mixed up.
He wants to be talking about the universities, but if he was talking about social media, he might be onto something.
But it's not power, it's just clicks.
Matt, are the academics in power?
No, of course they're not.
None of it.
Are we in power?
Are we the ones in control?
No, we're not in power, Chris.
I think what he wants to argue is they're in power because ideas from academia have seeped into the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or some of the policies that they adopt or whatever.
But in general, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is relatively small.
And, you know, has limited power.
And even in the case, if you want to link it to, like, social movements, right, Black Lives Matter or whatever, right, then connect it to the Marcuse and, you know, all these, the Frankfurt School and all this kind of connections, right?
Like, who are the mainstream politicians that are, like, promoting those and are, like, now in the positions of power?
Is it orientating the Supreme Court policy?
Is it orientating...
The Biden administration?
That's right.
The Biden-Harris platform, as most people know, very much avoided any of the edgelord progressive stuff.
They did their best running a very conventional platform.
They did signal things from time to time, but like, you know, in this, the actual impact of those policies, like it's not like American eye.
It's a progressive wonderland of, you know, socialized.
It doesn't even have socialized healthcare.
But in Curtis Yavin's and Trigonometry's worldview, the Harris campaign was like an identity politics fixated, DEI, like just corrupted by all these terrible ideas.
Whereas, you know, they were running on a pretty conventional platform.
And obviously they didn't win.
They lost to MAGA.
And it just blows my mind that when there's, like, all of the appointments to Trump, many of them are billionaires.
If they're not worth billions, they're worth hundreds of millions, many of them.
Or they are influencers right up there at the top of the food chain.
Actually, people are queuing up, I saw, to donate money now to the Trump inauguration and things like that because they know on which side their bread is buttered.
And when you have oligarchical things, like right there, but you look past that and you're looking for Anthony Fauci as your best example of an oligarchy and how it's contaminating democratic processes,
it's just absolutely stupid.
And that's the kind of stuff where the trigonometry guys are nodding along with, aren't they?
Yeah, and even in that case, Matt, like most of the people, you know, in the Trump administration, people like Jay Bhattacharya or Marty McCurry or whatever, like the kind of ironic aspect of it is those people who Curtis Irvin really rates,
you know, like he likes Teal, he likes the COVID contrarians and all those kind of people.
They were artificially amplified in relevance by these networks that aren't really based on merit.
They're based on, like, right-wing politics and also, you know, falling in line with conspiratorial points of view, saying nice things about RFK, right, and all these kind of things, and being willing to bend the knee to Trump.
These are all completely...
Irrelevant things to merit.
They're not about merit.
They're about your willingness to be a lickspittle and the extent to which you were promoted on right-wing media.
And then also linked into it is like these signifiers of prestige or means, right?
Like you can be extremely wealthy and get influence in the Trump administration, or you can be like a Stanford professor who is saying the things that they want.
You to say about COVID.
And then you can be selected.
But in Curtis's world, those people are, you know, they're part of the good guys, right?
Those are the free thinkers, the 180 IQ people.
But they didn't rise up.
These are the men of destiny.
Yeah.
But they're rising up by these artificial systems.
And quite clearly, in the case of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or whatever, it is.
Approaching in the US, oligarchical systems, right?
You have a lot of money, you supply it to support Trump, and you will get all these kickbacks.
And it's very openly treated in that way, the money for influence.
And I'm not saying there aren't aspects of that in just politics in general.
But the thing is that he's not really interested in that, right?
Trump to him is an imperfect instantiation, you know, like baby steps right on the way to an enlightened monarch who is accountable or whatever it is.
So it's just all the standard anti-woke stuff.
But with like all this blabber and this is this is it.
This is the pinnacle of his argument, right?
Where even if you buy it, it's very thin.
And it's very just emotive and tenuous connections between topics.
I think the main thing that it does is just give people the impression of great intellectual depth, but there's nothing really there.
And the things that he cites as...
The supports for his arguments are just simply untrue.
The meritocratic experts like Fauci being responsible for creating COVID, and this is an example of the great failure of meritocracy.
I hope to God we've got to get out of the clips, Chris, because I'm just so sick of hearing from this guy.
Almost, Matt.
Very almost.
But I want to highlight one thing.
There's just two or three more.
That's all you've got left.
One thing is at the end of Trigonometry's thing, so that's it, right?
They've got to the end.
Like they said, I think they titled this episode, you know, the case for monarchy or whatever, but there's not really much of a case outlined.
There are a lot of stories told and a lot of things called monarchies, which are not actually monarchies.
But at the end, Trigonometry always does this thing where they ask their guests, like, what's the question?
Or a topic that we, you know, that we're not asking or we're not talking about that we should be, right?
And it's the last question before they go into their behind the paywall thing.
So people usually give a piffy, you know, like one line response or at most they kind of go on for a minute or two and then say, well, that's that, right?
So let's just hear the start of what Curtis responded to that question.
I won't play all of it, but this is just the start.
Curtis, it's an absolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
I'm going to go back to something that I said earlier about technology.
And I think the thing that we're not talking about when we talk about technology is, you know, technology's destruction.
And I think one of the reasons why the future needs a kind of state power.
I used to be a libertarian.
I love being a libertarian.
I describe myself as a recovering libertarian.
I'll always be a libertarian in a way.
And, you know, one of the things that has happened to these societies is that...
You know, you have a society, go to the tower blocks, you know, 10 miles from here, you have these buildings full of absolutely useless people, and they're just decaying in the most horrific way.
And, you know, this is a very long train of history that starts with, you know, Goldsmith's deserted village, you know, like all the labor demand for like the local blacksmith disappears.
Okay, so it's got these Luddite sympathies.
Yeah, technology makes people completely...
Useless, right?
So, like Chris, we've had new technologies and it's true it causes labour disruptions happening for hundreds of years, but it certainly doesn't make labour obsolescent.
The pattern that's been happening ever since the Industrial Revolution is that there are different kinds of jobs that are involved, almost always higher skill jobs.
So when we automated many aspects of farming and ploughing and digging with machines, then we ended up with a whole bunch of jobs in those fields and all the industries that support that stuff that are a much higher skill than the jobs that were replaced and higher paid.
But this is like a standard populist thing.
It's like hating on immigrants because they're taking our jobs, ignoring...
The increases of consumption and demand that immigration brings as well.
And hating on technology for taking out jobs is just another extremely boring populist talking point.
Well, he's going to waffle on about other stuff, so don't worry, Matt.
But I'm not going to play it for you.
You get to escape it.
But it was just notable that even in the kind of wrap-up question.
He feels bitten to start waffling on and start to give illustrative stories of what he means and all this kind of thing.
He's just somebody that is used to being indulged and loves the sound of the voice.
That is the impression that you get.
And the last clips that I have, Matt, are not from...
The Trigonometry episode.
It's from another appearance on Unheard.
I've only got three of them.
And the reason I want to play them is just to illustrate that you will hear from these that what we talked about, it's not like we caught him in a bad interview where he just happens to be a bit off and not explaining things very carefully.
The way that he's interacted with, the way he's treated as a genius, and the way that he constructs his arguments is exactly the same across any of the content that you...
Look at and just to highlight the Emperor's new clothing aspect of it.
So you heard how the trigonometry people introduced him.
Let's hear how the unheard host introduces him.
Tonight, no doubt you'll know our guest already, but I will introduce him anyway.
He's a political theorist and, dare I say, provocateur.
He is the author of Unqualified Reservations, a kind of extraordinary oblique blog that he wrote under the pseudonym Mencher's Moldbug.
He is now author of the Grey Mirror Substack, which has...
A similarly oblique style, I would say.
He's the godfather of the red pill movement, a kind of leading light in the new right in the US, and infamously advocates for monarchy.
He's not a royalist.
Rather, he's a kind of equal opportunities supporter of absolute power, which is something I'm sure we'll get into this evening.
His name is, of course, Curtis Yarvin.
Join me in welcoming him to the Unheard Club.
Just totally indulged.
Isn't he?
So exciting.
Yeah.
Edgy.
Oh, look, he's not for all those old-fashioned monarchies.
He's just for absolute power, sweep things away.
How exciting, how edgy.
Yeah, and oblique.
They mentioned oblique twice there in the introduction, which I think is accurate.
But there is kind of taken as a sign.
It's a signifier of depth as opposed to pseudo profundity, which I think is perhaps more accurate.
Now, I'll just play one of his arguments for this, Matt.
Just one argument that he makes during this.
Just one.
Nothing can so securely establish the happiness and tranquility of a country as the perfect combination of authority in the single person of the sovereign.
The greatest subdivision in this respect often produces the greatest calamities.
So I suppose that's an obvious place to start.
Is the civic calamity, or whatever you might call it, that America is facing right now a fault of democracy?
When you use the word democracy, of course, you're using a very, very loaded and complex word.
And, you know, the meaning of that word in our modern world, it's like one of the simplest examples of kind of what's going on here that I ever came up with was simply to examine the words democracy and politics and note that...
We use, they mean the same thing, but they have opposite emotional valences.
And so anything democratic is good.
Anything political is bad.
If we were to democratize foreign policy, that would be good.
But if we were to politicize it, that would be bad.
So apparently we believe in democracy without politics, which is a rather strange thing to believe in if you think about it.
You see any issues with the logic there?
I do see lots of issues there.
Actually, he's got the conspiratorial obsession with words, doesn't he?
He reads a lot into the fact that politics has a negative connotation, but democracy has a positive connotation.
Aha, what a contradiction.
But obviously, Chris, when people use those words, when they say political, they are often referring to a kind of device.
Or politicised, yeah, they're referring to a kind of hyper-partisan, very ideological, like personal attacks, you know, rough stuff.
And when we're referring to democracy, we're often referring to the principles and the sort of idealism of it.
These are two aspects of the same phenomena.
I don't think you need to read very much into the fact that they're in somewhat different valences.
But, yeah, he's repeating the same old stuff, isn't he?
He's got this hard-on for autocratic, like, absolute rulers.
He's not so stupid as to think that, like, a hereditary monarchy like the UK sort of still has is the go.
And besides Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping, doesn't seem to care about...
A lot of the awful things that are done under absolute dictatorships over the last couple of hundred years seems to think somehow magically there'll be one that will just do good, will love the people, won't oppress them, and there'll be a mechanism,
not democratic, by which really good ones will be selected from the great and the good somehow.
But he doesn't explain how.
And that's a very exciting and dangerous idea, so he gets to go on talk shows.
Well, also that notion, Matt, that like you said, you know, politicize or to make something political, it is usually used when there is an injection of partisanship into a particular issue, right?
Like it is not the word politics in general, because like he's implying that democracy and politics are these two poles and people are...
Kind of trying to exercise that there are politics involved with democracy.
No, they aren't.
Everybody understands that democratic systems involve parties and political debates and wrangling.
All you've done is taken two words and then...
Yeah, I know.
Let me give you another example.
When I talk about the law, then we feel positively about that.
We think about justice and stuff.
But when I talk about legalistic, I think nitpicking.
I think loyally.
Kind of dodgy things.
Why do we have such a negative view of lawyers, but we have such a positive view of the law, Chris?
Think about that.
Yeah.
Well, I actually, when you said the law, I was thinking negative.
But that just goes to show, Mark.
That shows something.
It shows something, right?
I mean, this is the thing.
There's so little meat.
And it all rests on, like, accepting his...
Interpretations.
And then going on these, you know, wild journeys.
It's the same as Jordan, like on his, you know, semantic rocket ship.
They love joyriding around and nobody that they talk to or very few people pulls them over and says, no, nobody demands, just demands an answer to the question.
How will your just monarch be selected?
How's that going to happen?
Yeah.
Like if you haven't figured that out, then you haven't got anything.
Sorry.
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
And last clip, Matt, I promised you, only three.
This is the last one, the last you'll hear of Curtis Ervin today.
This is him talking about elections, and you'll also get to hear a little bit about the kind of technocracy that he does like.
If you actually, and I got retweeted by the Kamala Harris campaign for a Charlie Kirk clip in which I proposed this very dangerous idea that the winner of the election should actually take control of the government.
And people were like, wow.
Controversial.
This is really scary because essentially Americans have gotten really used to the idea that they're essentially electing Charles III.
And in fact, you know, one of the wonderful things about Joe Biden and the Biden administration is that electing this man who is palpably senile and actually incapable of can barely function.
People are like, how is this guy at the beach in Delaware, you know, all day and the government still functions?
You know, could Apple function with Tim Cook being at the beach all day?
But he was some sort of monarch.
Who was some sort of...
Biden, in that sense.
No, no.
Biden is really a ceremonial monarch.
He's much more like Charles.
They always mention Biden, but they never...
When he's looking for an example there, he's not going to cite Donald Trump's all the time that he spent golfing at Mar-a-Lago.
That's never the example that comes to mind, is it?
No, no.
Despite the fact that they're supposedly politically neutral, you know?
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, and you also heard, Dermot, that he doubts that Apple could function without Tim Cook.
I think they'd get by.
I think they'd be all right.
Like, I think, you know, I was surprised he didn't reach for Steve Jobs.
But, like, is Tim Cook regarded as a linchpin for the, you know, Apple Corporation success?
Like, I think he's generally regarded as a relatively reasonable.
CEO by tech company standards.
But he presents it like, you know, what would happen?
What would happen if Tim Cook would disappear?
What would happen?
Nothing would happen.
What about Microsoft, Chris?
What about Microsoft?
Like, Microsoft persisted very well, right, with a bunch of, frankly, pretty uninspiring CEOs.
Mediocre leaders, yeah.
Yeah, because the world doesn't run.
Like, according to the great man of history romantic thing that he's got in his head, a lot of these rulers that he fetishizes from pre-modern times were pretty useless as well.
Like, he's just got a hero worship type thing going on, and this is like a substitute for actually having any coherent ideas about politics.
But he thinks that's very interesting.
I do like the fact that, you know, the unheard people, a bit like the trigonometry guys, they're sometimes tripped up, you know, because typically monarchy is negative in their thing, right?
They're calling people kings and whatnot.
So the host is saying, oh, Biden is kind of like, you know, a monarch, right?
Wasn't he?
But like in his system, monarchs are good.
So he's like, well, he's kind of like a ceremonial.
Monarch, right?
Because he doesn't like Sarah O 'Neill monarchs.
And they're all a little bit, they constantly bang off that like, but isn't that a different system than monarchy or whatever?
Yeah.
I feel like what's going on is like, it's the same as trigonometry, is that the people he's talking to are mistaking being confused for being exposed to some deep and exciting ideas.
Like, it's just confusing because it doesn't make a lot of sense, guys.
It's not that special.
Yeah, that is it.
So, do you have a big picture takeaway, Matt, on Mr. Jarvan?
Will you be listening to more of his material, recommending him?
Do you think he is a secular guru?
My big picture of Curtis Jarvan is that he is a complete waste of time.
He is a gadfly and his ideas are incoherent and he's not even interesting or poetic in the way he talks about them.
He makes me think about Jordan Peterson with a kind of romantic nostalgia.
He is absolutely stupid.
Not only does he not even flesh out any of his ideas at all, he just, you know, monarchy, something, something, something.
Without explaining exactly what he's proposing.
His reasons for why he's saying that this is a good approach are based on, like, complete nonsense.
Like, asking people to reflect on what Elizabeth I would think about us.
The implication being, well, if Elizabeth I wasn't hugely approving...
Then we're doing something wrong.
It's like, no, that doesn't follow.
You know, he blames democracy for the rise of Hitler.
Untrue.
Says all the conspiracy theories about World War II, except for the Holocaust, are real.
No, also untrue.
Cites the synthetic origin of COVID actually created by these evil virologists who are just wanting power.
Absolute poppycock.
Actually, misconstrues the idea about Hitler and Stalin and all of these pacts.
Like you said, he is a shallow conspiracist, essentially.
I mean, the only thing he's done is he's read reasonably widely.
So, therefore, he's able to pepper this stuff with references to Thomas Carlyle and things from 1797 and so on.
This heavy use.
Of references and stuff to give it that pseudo-intellectual veneer.
And there's just absolutely nothing behind it.
It is absolutely incoherent.
I mean, if you're talking about edgy, non-democratic, authoritarian political systems, then you should at least be interesting.
Like, I was prepared to listen to him and thinking, okay, this will be spicy.
This will be spicy.
This will be interesting.
You know, we're going to get some edgy things here.
My God.
I mean, there is just...
There's just nothing there.
Absolutely nothing there.
And it's really quite embarrassing that people take him seriously.
And if you're someone who listens to him and go, wow, I really had my mind blown and I'm really looking at things in a different way, then I'm sorry, but you need to go back to school or get some help because there's something wrong with you.
So that's where I'm at, Chris.
Well, see, now this is interesting because I think he's really insightful and has a lot of value to offer.
No, no, I do not.
He's a colossal windbag.
And as I've mentioned throughout this episode, he actually is kind of the comic book guy from Simpsons.
That's his archetype.
And if he was on YouTube debating...
Warhammer factions or which Star Trek series is the best, right?
Who's the best captain?
That would be a good use of his talents, right?
Because he could go on these indulgent, you know, mind palace wanderings, likening the new generation team to the Russian oligarchs, you know, in the 1930s.
And actually, maybe they're more like the communists, right?
And all this kind of waffle.
But actually, instead...
He is someone who is taken seriously by people like Peter Thiel, by people like J.D. Vance, right?
And who is regarded as an intellectual figure with these very important ideas that speak to the modern moment.
And that is absolutely damning of the modern moment and that entire movement.
But I think when I'm listening to this, the thing I keep coming up against is that He is still doing that thing of telling people, you are misunderstood and you find,
you know, these restrictions and these kind of things that are told to you, you know, the kind of Pink Floyd.
You're not just another brick in the wall, right?
We don't need no education.
But then he kind of endorses, you know, you're right to have those feelings.
And if you have those feelings, it's just an indication that you're a little bit smarter.
You're a little bit more.
Of a critical thinker.
And that's why you can kind of entertain these edgy ideas.
Let me give you some edgy ideas.
And then I think he looks and sounds like someone who is incredibly well-read, who knows these obscure thinkers, knows these philosophers, knows these historical figures, right?
And that all of the things that are in the mainstream historians or academia, right?
These people regard him.
As like pseudo profound because they see him as a threat to their authority.
Right.
Like he's such a renegade.
That's why they're dismissive of him.
And it's this like flattering presentation for people who feel a little bit, you know, outside or a little bit cold from whatever normie people are doing.
But they're given the message that like just basically a satisfying message that you are a brave.
Intelligent person and by listening and entertaining me, that reflects well on you.
And it's an appealing message, I think, for people that would feel a bit like socially alienated, might have too much regard for their own intelligence and not that much critical thinking.
So he's astounding for that kind of attitude.
And I suspect that a lot of people just get like kind of orientated off into his world and Steve Seeler's world and whatnot and consider themselves, you know, looking at these very ideas instead of recognizing that they're looking at the,
you know, emperor in his finery when he's standing there naked.
So yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right about the appeal.
Like, I often describe dismissively the audience of these kind of people as kind of these, you know, 16 year old boys, you know, the implication being they're these sort of naive.
Slightly grumpy.
Feel like society's everything's against them.
They've got a chip on their shoulder.
All of that stuff, right?
A raging sea of emotions going on under the surface as well.
And frustrations and the rest.
And I don't mean to be mean to that demographic.
If you're a 16-year-old boy, let's do this.
I'm not having a go at you specifically.
Because the sad thing is, a lot of people, men and women, in their 40s and 50s, who find this stuff appealing too, but for the same reasons, right?
It speaks to populism.
It speaks to their frustrations.
It speaks to their...
Their narcissism, really, and their conspiratorial leanings.
You know, it's not you.
There's something wrong with the world.
You can see what's going on with it.
And even when it's not explicitly conspiratorial, as we've heard often, it does lean on conspiratorial stuff a fair bit.
That view of the world and that attraction to these sorts of things and just, you know...
Not dealing with them critically because they're just so darn appealing that everything they taught you at school is wrong.
Actually, it's all corrupt and what we need is some sort of thing that's going to fix it and basically will legitimize and make you feel better about yourself.
I think it appeals to the same psychological factors that steer people towards conspiracism.
So yeah, not a good thing.
Depressing, Matt.
It's depressing.
It's not that he's so evil or awful.
It's just that he's just so insubstantial.
He's just such a lightweight.
There's just nothing there.
And it is a shame that nobody seems to mind that it's so incoherent.
And he seems unable to even answer the most basic pressing questions about his fantastic new idea.
He's had decades.
Thinking about this fantastic new idea of a kind of a monarchy, but not a hereditary one.
One where you have absolute authority invested in the great and the good, some kind of philosopher king.
But he can't answer the question of how this person, who will, don't worry, be very accountable somehow, doesn't answer the question of how this person is going to be chosen, how they're going to be picked.
Whereas that's what politics is literally.
Has always been about for 2,000 years.
That should be the first question on everyone's lips.
And he doesn't answer it.
And the question isn't even asked because he goes off and tells stories.
But to be clear, Matt, he probably does answer it in one of his voluminous writings somewhere.
But the fact that you're pointing out is that he isn't able to articulate that when that should be a very simple and straightforward thing.
That should be point number one.
He should have an elevator pitch for this thing by now is what I'm saying, right?
He's had hours.
I've listened to hours of him now.
And there's no point telling me that the answer to this obvious question number one is buried in one of his books somewhere.
And it's probably about seven different answers.
They're probably all terrible, right?
But it's not articulated up front.
But what bothers me even more is that the people that are interviewing him don't demand it from him.
That should be the first thing that they...
I know, I know.
Yeah, they let him go.
Anyway, whatever.
Well, yeah, so let's let him waffle on with more stories.
On the positive side, he's just going to be telling stories till the end of time to people who are convinced that he's saying very profound things.
But the somewhat depressing side of it is that he actually...
Is, like, influential in the sense of, I'm not saying he's the puppet master behind things, but I think he basically does give some intellectual heft to people that have fairly nefarious ideas about, like, modern democracy and whatnot.
But anyway, that is what it is.
So we'll draw things to an end there.
And this week, we don't have a review of reviews.
We're keeping things tight.
I am going to read out a list of Patreon people, okay?
So just, you listen to this list, Matt, and I will only ask you for one short comment at the end of the list.
So we have Wendy Hylet, John
Jordan, Martholomew, Lars Linderts, Paul Hemmerling,
William D. Eric Nietzsche, Craig Helfrich, Jonathan Generic Generic, or Ben Klassen, Alyssa Judson, Fred Tamura, Tay Cax,
Tim Nees, Alexandra Costa, Twisted Sigveld, Peter, Jeremy Volmeck, So,
I'm afraid, unfortunately, that I don't have the specific tier list, but I think you're...
You're all honorary Galaxy Green gurus for that reason, and we thank you all for your support.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Thank you very much, one and all.
Beautiful names.
Any favorites?
I love all of those names.
I like the first one and the second last one.
Yeah, the third one was very good as well, but that's great.
Well, Matt, you did well.
You lasted for this.
You have suffered and bled for our listeners' sins.
And now you go to rest, but you will return again to listen to more.
Maybe we'll do Curtis Part 2, but not for another hundred years.
Not for another hundred years.
No, no, no.
All right.
Thanks, Chris.
That was awful.
But we can tick him off the list.
He's going to blow the doors off the Garometer.
That's my final word.
I think he's going to make Peter Taylor seem really smart.
