Back once again with the dark art of Gurometry, we turn our sights to the bad boy of Silicon Valley—the mulleted maestro, the edgy eejit, Curtis Yarvin. A legend in his own mind, but how does he rank on the Gurosity scale? Join us as we dissect his essence across 11 factors, from his revolutionarily mundane and incoherent ideas to his dazzling absence of charisma. Tune in as we feed this 'dark enlightenment' thinker into the Gurometer and reveal his true colours.The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (34 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusCurtis Yarvin: Gurometer00:00 Introduction to Gurometry02:27 Curtis Yarvin: The Man, The Myth, The Eejit04:43 Galaxy Brainlessness05:48 Cultishness08:32 Anti-Establishmentarianism09:55 Grievance Mongering12:43 Self-Aggrandizement and Narcissism13:30 Cassandra Complex16:21 Revolutionary Theories17:59 Pseudo-Profound Bullshit19:43 Conspiracy Theories Galore23:55 Moral Grandstanding25:50 Gurometer Scores and Analysis27:56 Bonus Point Attribution34:03 Final Thoughts on Curtis Yarvin
Welcome to Decoding the Guru's Gurometer Edition, where we apply the science, the art of gurometry to a figure that we have recently covered in depth on the podcast,
done a deep decoding of.
But here, we're trying to quantify our observations, and we do that by assigning them values of 1 to 5 on 11 different criteria.
But before we do that, I must introduce that I am Chris Kavner.
I'm an anthropologist of sorts in Japan.
None of that matters.
What matters is the man across from me who is a senior psychologist, highly respected in his field.
He's an Australian.
He's in America.
He's Matthew Brown.
There he is.
Welcome, Matthew.
I'm in the nation's capital, Chris.
Washington, D.C. You were invited up.
You have your jacket.
You're ready to advise.
There was some confusion at the security gates to the White House.
They didn't seem to have my name on the list.
It was uncomfortable, a bit embarrassing.
There was some kind of...
I was like, that's all right.
I had a nice day anyway, wandering about.
I went to some excellent exhibitions in Smithsonian and things like that.
Yeah, nice town.
The people are friendlier, I've got to say.
Down south.
A bit more laid back.
A little bit more relaxed.
In a Waffle House.
I've been to Washington, D.C. I know.
I know how that goes.
But, Matt, we're not here for your cultural observations.
This is a precise ship, right?
We do science or art.
Yeah, you can't waffle about America here.
We are here for a very specific purpose.
We've got to take a guru that we've recently covered and we've got to quantify their generosity.
According to the ancient art of geometry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We will.
And that man is Curtis Yavin.
You know, Chris, I did some more subsequent looking into Curtis Yavin after our episode.
I mean, ideally, I'd do my research before the episode, I guess.
That's okay.
I did a fair bit afterwards.
And I'll just say, and I learned a fair bit more about his ideas and views on various things.
What a change, my relatively searing evaluation of the guy.
My God, what a load of nonsense.
And while I was watching this crap, Chris, the most perfect metaphor occurred to me.
I wish I'd used it on the show, which was that we talked about how he's got this melange of ideas, very Jordan Peterson style.
He doesn't really answer questions.
He just gives you a story, and then there's an anecdote, and then there's a hypothetical.
And none of this...
Is hanging together.
It's like somebody has thrown a bunch of jigsaw pieces onto the table.
None of them are fitting together.
That was my initial metaphor.
I think the best metaphor is if on closer inspection you realize that those puzzle pieces are actually the kinds of prizes you get in breakfast cereal boxes or the gacha that are sitting behind you.
That would make it even a better metaphor.
None of it hangs together.
It's not logically coherent.
And then when you actually look at the little facts and things that are presented, you realize that they're laughable.
Anyway, let's move on.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think that's right.
I was wondering where you were going to go with that analogy.
Like, when you look closer, they're little pieces of crap.
Tiny little turds sitting there on the table.
That is also possible.
But yes, he's also known as Menchus Moldbug.
So he used to go by that nom de guerre before he de-anonymized.
So there we have him.
He is the dark enlightenment, a neo-reactionary master.
He is Kurdish Yorvan.
If you want to hear our detailed thoughts on him, please view the full decoding episode, which is audio only.
You have to look up a podcast to hear that.
But today, Matt, let's put him into the garometer.
And we, by tradition, start with galaxy brainness.
Tendency to voice confident opinions about a constellation of ideas.
There is no topic that is out of their ballywick, as we like to say.
Where would you put Curtis on galaxy brainness?
One to five.
I'd give him either a four or a five.
Maybe I could give him a little bit less of the maximum.
But what do you think?
I mean, he roams around.
It's history and political stuff and art and philosophy and science.
It's everything, isn't it?
Yeah.
He roams around.
I'm going to give him a five.
I'm going to give him a five.
Yeah.
Is there any topic that you can imagine him being asked about and saying, I don't know much about that?
Like, no.
There's nothing that he cannot put his intellect to.
So what do we have next, Mark?
What is the next factor?
We've got cultishness.
The sort of grooming your audience and sort of the subtle ways of enacting control in various ways.
It could be through flattery even.
It doesn't have to be sort of negatively balanced.
But it's a thing, cultishness.
Other people have talked about it.
What do you think, Chris?
Would you say that he's a cultish figure?
Does he do the things a cult leader does to any extent?
Yeah, I think he does.
And he strongly encourages in-group and out-group dynamics.
But also, the major way that I see him do it is by these kind of compliments that he delivers about how the people that are following along...
They're hierarchy people, Matt.
They're the kind of people that don't, you know, look for simple solutions.
They're the people willing to think about things, be a bit more edgy than others.
So, like, a lot of his stuff...
Has this, like, flattering undertone to the audience that, like, if you're keeping up, if you're appreciating how radical his ideas are, that you're, like, one of the high intellect people.
If you see him as, you know, a kind of bog standard reactionary figure, that's the kind of take that somebody that doesn't really appreciate the profundity of his ideas have.
Now, maybe because of his character, he's, like, not as good.
At cultivating the parasocial attachments as some of the other people in this space, that's the part that I think is true, that he is a little bit introverted and geeky, right?
Too much to get the same level of obsessive fan as some of the other figures that we've covered.
He's not a Jordan Peterson person, right?
He's not very charismatic and...
In person.
But yeah, so I would say he's high on this, but he's not particularly gifted in some aspects of it.
So I'd give him four.
Yeah, I agree with that.
He definitely is the flattery thing.
And I think it's probably just because he is like his audience.
They're like teenage boys with a chip on their shoulder.
Yeah.
But I can't think of many other ways in which he's obviously manipulative.
It could just be that I didn't see his tricks, didn't see enough of his spiel to notice the tricks.
So I think I'll give him a three.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm in for it.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, even though he definitely doesn't deserve it.
Right.
Chris.
The next factor is anti-establishmentarianism.
This is not just being critical of the establishment.
It is, in fact...
Taking a contrarian, anti-establishment stance on every issue.
The institutions, the establishment, they're all lying all of the time.
None of them can be trusted.
What they taught you at school, it's just a thin veneer over the deep nature of reality.
Yeah, he does this in spirits.
He does this incredibly.
He's just a five on this, without a doubt.
This is his whole shtick and why he's appealing to those immature...
Men, mainly, who think they're a lot smarter than they are.
Anyway, do we need to talk about that more, Chris?
Are we happy with our fives?
No, I mean, the only other thing I would say is that he likes to present fairly bog-standard contrarianism and conspiratorial reasoning as if it's deliciously devious and a little bit out there for people to consider, but it's very conventional.
Within those spaces, the kind of things that he believes.
He just likes to add flavor to it.
But yeah, so there's that.
But that's just me commenting on him being a dickhead.
Yeah, not nearly as dark and dangerous as he would like to think he is.
Okay, so the next one, Chris, is grievance mongering.
Litigating tales of woe.
I remember we ended up arguing about this.
We ended up with identifying three sub-facets of this.
There was the grievance.
Oh, if you have enemies.
Yeah, you've got enemies, personal enemies, the sort of person that's seeing lots of enemies.
Having a personal tale of grievance.
In your life, you've been held back, whatever.
But also inculcating a sense of grievance as part of your appeal, part of your shtick.
So, what do you think about this one, Chris?
Yeah, I don't know enough about him to know if he has the list of enemies.
I suspect that he would from his personality, but I didn't hear that in the content that we covered.
And he did give the presentation that he saw through whatever everybody else was taking for standard.
People like him might be dismissed by...
No, but that kind of is captured by the anti-establishmentarianism.
But he definitely inculcates a feeling of grievance in his audience that they're being lied to and that they're not being given proper options or this kind of thing.
So yeah, I suspect he's higher in this than I will give him because I'm going to give him three.
But that...
That's partly based on just the content that we've looked at and that while I suspect he does that, I didn't see him do it in the things that I've looked at.
Yeah, like in what I saw of him, he's always had this incredibly smug and kind of relaxed attitude.
He's not like Jordan Peterson whipping himself up into a frenzy of anger.
I've always seen him pretty laid back.
But I think the stuff that he's...
Whatever you want to call it, the narrative that he is pushing is one in which everything is not as it seems.
It's all a bit of a trick.
All of these structures in that society are sort of run by corrupt people that are wanting to hold you down.
So it's the same.
He shares a lot in common.
I think it would be a mistake to think of him as principally a conspiracy theorist.
But it's interesting.
I think a lot of the appeal...
To his cheek, has a lot of the same elements of why people find conspiracy theories appealing.
I mean, he does endorse some conspiracy theories.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
So look, I'll give him a three, just because he dinged that one aspect of it, but not so much the other two.
So you're in accord.
I am in accord.
Now, the next one is self-aggrandizement and narcissism.
And that's five.
There's some people that we cover where it's just like, what is there to say?
That's another of his primary characteristics is how self-satisfied and how much he regards himself as a huge IQ individual.
It's incredibly funny just given how trivial.
I know.
And silly his ideas are.
Anyway, but yeah, let's not keep it above the belt.
We don't need to resort to a person.
I didn't say it.
No, I'm talking to myself.
It's me.
But yes, I think he's just incredibly vain.
So five for self-aggrandizement.
Chris, the next one is Cassandra Complex, where you're warning of the impending doom.
You're the one that can see what's going on, and this is part of your appeal to people.
Yeah, there's an emergency.
There's a call to action.
Has Curtis Yavin got that going on?
Whenever this category comes up, I always remember that we had it as a category and then Jordan Peterson was like, I'm like a Cassandra.
That's making it too easy.
And in his case, he was like, but Cassandra was doomed not to be listened to, but actually people listen to me.
Millions of people listen to me.
So he's like, Cassandra, without any of the...
The issues that she had to deal with.
Like Cassandra, but better.
Yeah, and I feel Curtis Jarvan is a little bit like that.
So again, he is heated.
He is rated highly by J.D. Vance, by Peter Thiel, by folks that are influential within the neo-reactionary right wing.
So he doesn't suffer from the curse of Cassandra to not be heated, but he definitely views himself.
As like a visionary ahead of the curve, spotting where things are going and that kind of thing.
So I still would say he's not at the tippy top.
He's not at the Michael O 'Fallon level of that.
So I'm going to give him four.
But he's definitely up there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
He always seems so complacent.
He's describing all these conspiracies and these alternative histories.
Quite ridiculous political views and this whole different alternative understanding of history and philosophy and politics.
But he seems pretty laid back about it, you know?
Well, that is true.
He isn't like, yeah, again, he's not like panicking about it.
He seems to be quite confident that basically his philosophy will win out.
But even then, at times it's like he seems to not really care if it doesn't.
When society is destroyed, he just likes to know that he understands these things better than other people.
So yeah, there is that bit.
I'm going to knock him down to 3.5 because of that.
Yeah, because he's almost like the perfect armchair commentator.
You know what I mean?
He's got an opinion on everything.
He knows exactly what is the right thing to do, having a monarchy.
And things like that.
But doesn't, isn't really fussed about, you know, making it happen.
So I'm going to give them, but you know, I mean, I'll give it to you just because most of the stuff is probably that's pretty radical, you know, is that the thing that's pretty radical changed in our situation.
Next is revolutionary theory.
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