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- [00:00]
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- [00:58]
Tim Miller
Hey guys, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark. I'm here with Will Sommer, author of the False Flag newsletter. You can get over@thebullwork.com and I wanted to pull him in because I just read this, I don't know, 50,000 word New Yorker profile on a guy named Curtis Yarvin. For people who don't know Curtis, Will's going to explain that to us. But the short of it is he's, if you want to call it a philosopher. He's the Internet philosopher to the tech oligarchs that want to overthrow our democracy and replace it with a techno fascism or possibly like a benevolent monarchy, depending on the day. And so this person is unfortunately extremely influential. We have to know about him. J.D. vance reads about him, Peter Thiel reads him, Marc Andreessen reads them. Donald Trump doesn't read, but everybody else in the circle does read them. So Will Sommer, that's. That was my short summary. Why not? For the uninitiated, why don't you give people a little bit more on Curtis Jarvis?
- [01:55]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, that summed up pretty well. I mean, this is a guy who started out as a blogger under the name Mencius Moldbug. So that kind of is kind of like scurrying out from the dark web. And basically he has a lot of, you know, kind of pretentious sounding ideas, but they boil down to that America should be run as sort of a techno dictatorship by Silicon Valley. And that anyone, you know, that they don't like, that rich people don't like, should be taken care of in, you know, a presumably violent way. And so as you can imagine, these people love him because he just says, you know, people like Peter Thiel should be the king of America. And so as a result, he's, he's become this, this sort of beloved figure all the way up to J.D. vance saying, you know, he has great ideas about perjuring the federal bureaucracy, stuff like that.
- [02:40]
Tim Miller
And just to put like an additional minor point in it, like on why we should give this the time of day, because, God, reading this article, it's really enough to send you into the depths of despair, honestly, that we could be doing a national suicide because of this idiot's blog. He's not an idiot. This, this person who needed to be hugged as a child and who needed more friends in high school's blog, maybe he's got, he's, he's intellectually smart, but very, very strange. But, but in addition to being influential with these other influential people at this administration, he also, he didn't coin the term red pilling, which is from the Matrix, but I guess he kind of popularized it. It's a very popular term, a less popular term, but one that you see around this idea. There's the cathedral. It's kind of this like, you know, woke liberal establishment or whatever that needs to be attacked. He has a following among like young, nerdy, high iq, high aspiring boys mostly, but to a degree that's pretty alarming. Kind of like a little bit of maybe a Jordan Peterson overlap, maybe upmarket Jordan Peterson, potentially. So I don't know. Those are a couple of reasons. Anything else on why this, this asshole's relevant and why people should stick around for the funny anecdotes from the story we're about to take.
- [04:02]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, he, he clearly sees himself, I mean, he as sort of this like corrupter figure almost where he takes people who are on the track to be in the sort of liberal elite. JD Vance is kind of the model example here in that this was someone who was going to Yale, all this stuff. And then this idea that these ideas, even if not Yarvin himself, kind of turned him towards the right. And so in this way, Yarvin, see, he describes himself as a dark elf giving like forbidden mushrooms to corrupt other elves. And that's sort of the mill you were in.
- [04:34]
Tim Miller
Yeah, and I do think that, you know, look, I mean, he fully believes a lot of his bullshit, right? And it kind of doesn't matter which, what elements he does and doesn't believe. But I do think that like, what is relevant is he does like that Idea that he sees himself as kind of a provocateur or somebody, like implants these ideas into people's head in a way that makes them think. Right. Like he plays on the vanities of smart people who like, want to think one, like want to be contrarian, like don't want, they don't want to have the same view that every Barack Obama supporting technocrat had. Right. And so he like drops these little ideas in about, you know, how, you know, wouldn't society be better if it was more homogenous or you know, like wouldn't look at how successful Singapore and Abu Dhabi is. Maybe the whole world should just be little mini Singapore's and Abu Dhabi. He just throw. Throws out random stuff like that, hoping to get people who are in influence, I guess, hoping to radicalize them, hoping to kind of tickle their little brain cells and be like, oh, that's a more interesting opinion than just thinking that we should help bolster the social safety net and be kind to people.
- [05:42]
Will Sommer
And it's a very flattering view to say to someone you kind of see the world in a way no one else does. Or in the case of these people who already have power and money to say, I think the world should be run by people exactly like you.
- [05:56]
Tim Miller
Yeah. All right, so to his origin story a little bit. He's a child prodigy who I guess gets put into high school and sophomore year of high school at age 12 and graduates college at 18. That works out for some people. But just kind of as one man's opinion, if you have a child that's a super prodigy, I try to keep him a little closer to the peers. Like the ones that are that much of an outlier do end up having some socialization issues in my experience. Small sample size, but the ones I know have some socialization issues. And it does feel like a lot of the themes as you get through this story, I kind of call back on that, like this is a very smart young person who wanted to get a pat on the head from older people that he was around that are like, oh, you're so smart, give him credit for things. And he's always trying to kind of earn that like, respect and that he is doing that. But like with the masters of the universe now and, and that, and that there is kind of a deep insecurity that he's, that he's still trying to compensate for. What do you think about that? Pop psychology?
- [07:04]
Will Sommer
I mean, I think that's right. I mean, certainly the way the article presents it is that it really kind of all goes all the way back to this kind of weird upbringing this guy had. It suggested his dad was very tyrannical, that he sort of became kind of went off into his own world. And that in a way, like his embrace of all of these off the wall ideas is sort of a way of like getting back at people or saying, you know, it's my genius they can't handle. Not my. Perhaps off putting personal behavior at one point, you know, in terms of, like, sucking up to powerful people. He goes to visit this kind of much more courtly, far right French writer in the article who owns a castle, Camus, and he says, yeah, so he says, how much you paid for this thing? The guy's like. And then he writes an article saying, I was just visited by a weird creep from America.
- [07:50]
Tim Miller
I loved that anecdote. He cried a couple times. And the person he goes to meet, Camus, no relation to Albert, was also a noxious creature in his own right and was, I guess, the person that was the popularizer of this kind of notion of this great replacement that was happening in Europe and now in America, where, you know, folks from the third World were coming to a country and they're going to replace the, you know, historical, you know, white population. So, so Yarvin goes to, like, on a pilgrimage to meet this older man. And then apparently, in addition to annoying him by asking about how much things cost, also just like, talked the whole time and like, gave him his opinion on random people throughout history. Started being like Napoleon III and, you know, like, naming, like, Rand leader, landing people through history and ranting. And the guy, I couldn't get a word in edgewise. And again and again the article paints it as, like, this guy trying so hard to, like, earn the approval of this elder racist, you know, that like, he. He actually turns him off.
- [09:01]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, it suggests that he's, you know, getting basically drunk and he's saying, you know, weeping and saying, I don't want my kids to die in mass graves for being white. And this French guy's like, what?
- [09:12]
Tim Miller
A lot of weeping. He cries three separate times during the article. Also a lot of racist comments. I don't think this should be surprising to anybody, but he had a documentarian following him around in addition to the New Yorker reporter. So it's definitely a person that wants attention. So it seems like a lot of times the New Yorker reporter and the documentarians were in the same place together. The documentarian was expressing some frustration that he gives the same long soliloquies about the random, like, things that he cares about over and over again, so it becomes useless film. And also, he says racist stuff so much that he's worried that that is not going to allow it to sell. At one point, Yarvin pulled out his iPhone to demonstrate that he'd hacked the chatbot Claude to get it to call him by the N word. Also, one of the ex girlfriends, I guess, that is interviewed talks about that was a big complaint of hers that he would say the N word a lot. So, I mean, again, this probably shouldn't be surprising. He also says one of his ideas for blacks in America is that church blacks should be put in charge of ghetto blacks.
- [10:16]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, and yeah, and this is. These are obviously so many strange anecdotes about a very weird guy. And then you have to keep in mind, I mean, this is a guy who's coming to dc, Palling around with kind of the leaders of the MAGA movement and who's been praised by our vice president, among other things.
- [10:32]
Tim Miller
Yeah, the vice president meets him in the story like they're the inauguration party. And JD comes up to him and the story puts it, he amiably greets him, you reactionary fascist. And kind of, they have a big laugh about how they call this guy reactionary fascist. And so, again, extremely alarming. The vice president is reading this guy who loves saying the N word, has very retrograde views, to say the least, about what to do with the black folks in America. I want to go through a couple other things. In his blog, he joked about converting San Francisco's underclasses into biodiesel to power the city's buses. He suggested putting them into solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual reality interface, because it's crucial to find a humane alternative to genocide, an outcome that achieves the same result as mass murder without any of the moral stigma. You can potentially do that through an AI. Yeah. I mean, again, it's not that I don't. It's not that it's wrong in its face for the vice president to read provocative bloggers and, you know, to get a wide variety of views. I fucking read this, asshole. The concerning part to me is like, that. It's not that he just reads them, it's that their pals, like, he considers him a friend. Marc Andreessen, another a big advisor to Trump, calls him his friend when they talk about him.
- [11:57]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, I think it's concerning that someone with these kind of crazy ideas would get this close to power and obviously be influencing it. I mean, he's you know, you mentioned the biodiesel thing. I mean, he's weeping at one point about how America treats the homeless and he says there has to be a better way, like melting them down for fuel. I was like, I don't think that's a better way. I mean, he's very into this monarchy idea that we would be, you know, all ruled by like basically like sort of a Saddam Hussein type figure. And he says, well, you know, we'd be treated really well because we'd be the K slaves essentially. And it says, oh, geez, you know, I, I don't think that's such a great plan.
- [12:32]
Tim Miller
He also compliments China and Russia as having preferable systems. He wants Russia to take over Europe and, and thinks that the Chinese system is as good. He's never been to China. The reporter pushes him a couple times on like, well, you're supposed to be a free speech guy. And he's like, well, you know, in China, you know, there's not really threats to free speech as long as you only get canceled. Yeah, as long as you're not organizing against the leader, the chairman again. I guess we could go through more. If this has intrigued people at all, read the article. If it's repulsed you and you don't want to know anymore, God bless you. Move on to the next YouTube video that we have. But I guess to me we've made this point but just to drive it home. The notion that this clearly emotionally unstable person who's randomly weeping at times during interviews, like talking about race science, like has deeply racist views, has like insane proposals for what society should look like, has like very deep knowledge about random history stuff and some computer science, but like inch deep rationales for what he wants to do. Like when you follow up with them on what the, what the Saddam Hussein like, government would look like. He doesn't, he doesn't have any, like, he can't follow up basic questions. The idea that this person could so have inspired the people that are extremely influential in tech and in the future of the country with AI extremely influential in the Trump administration, young up and coming people like that, this man could be the one that is their philosopher king makes me want to just jump out the window. I don't know about you. I guess that's my final point.
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Will Sommer
I mean, I think it's very malevolent and it's also really shallow. And before we go, can we just drill down on the helmet anecdote?
- [14:21]
Tim Miller
Oh please.
- [14:22]
Will Sommer
So at one point, I mean, this isn't really like a sinister. But people basically just describe him because he's like a 16, 17 year old in college. He's very weird. And people remembered him in college just insisting on wearing a bike helmet to class. And so he was keeping this bike helmet on. And when the reporter says at one asks one of his classmates, do you know Curtis Yarvin? The guy says, oh, you mean Helmethead.
- [14:46]
Tim Miller
And again, I think that's what, like, that's where we are. It's like Helmet Head is influencing the top reaches of our, of our government and, and Helmet Heads acolytes are trying to overthrow our democracy. Like, because, you know, the other kids at Berkeley thought he was strange. It seems like it's really some pretty bleak stuff. But that's what you come here for, bleak material. Go subscribe to Will Summers newsletter. He's got some doozies coming out this week. I heard a little. I heard a little briefing this morning about what he has in store. So make sure you're checking that out and subscribe to the feed here. And I read very long New Yorker articles about horrible people, so you don't have to. We'll see you soon.