Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast | Ep. 717

Summary

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PBD Podcast Ep. 717: Who Is Curtis Yarvin?

Date: January 13, 2026
Host: Patrick Bet-David (PBD)
Guest: Curtis Yarvin

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Overview

In this provocative and wide-ranging discussion, Patrick Bet-David interviews Curtis Yarvin—sometimes described as a "neo-reactionary" thinker, software engineer, and influential underground political theorist often associated with Silicon Valley. The episode explores Yarvin's critiques of democracy, his controversial opinions about American political history, the realities of power, the lineage of leftist ideas in America, the COVID-19 debacle, and current events involving Iran and Venezuela.

Yarvin, known for challenging foundational assumptions about democracy and governance, explains his view that much of American political thought is rooted in longstanding myths or misunderstandings. The episode is densely packed with history, political philosophy, and sharp insights, and ventures into sensitive and controversial territory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Curtis Yarvin's Worldview and Controversies

• Introduction: Patrick Bet-David warns that Yarvin "will drive some people insane" with his views, while others may find him insightful. Quotes some of Yarvin’s infamous statements, e.g. "The United States should be run like a corporation" and "Democracy is not a solution. It is the problem."
• Origin of Ideas: Yarvin compares his intellectual journey to waking up in "The Truman Show," realizing that the narrative of American democracy and politics conceals deeper realities (02:04).
  • Quote: “You have these two words, politics and democracy … analytically these words mean the same thing.” (02:38)

2. Myth vs. Reality in American Government

• Yarvin suggests that what Americans call "democracy" is as symbolic as the UK's monarchy—a system where real power lies elsewhere, specifically in unelected bureaucracies (“the regime” or “deep state”). (06:33)
• Compares presidents’ power: FDR’s centralized, CEO-like control vs. modern presidents, whom he sees as figureheads, losing influence to bureaucracy post-1945.
  • Quote: “[FDR] could say, ‘We’re going to build…’ If you look at one of Trump’s cabinet meetings, it’s not like that. No, it’s really not like that.” (09:17)
• Asserts that the death of FDR initiated America’s transition to a bureaucratic regime, “the deep state,” difficult to dislodge.

3. Regime Change and Historical Comparison

• Yarvin argues true regime change (such as postwar Germany) is rare and deep, while shifts in US government since FDR have been mild—no inversion of the system itself (18:27).
• Draws analogies with denazification, suggesting the bureaucracy of the New Deal was never truly overthrown and continues as the real power center. (21:23)

4. Yarvin's Beliefs in Under 60 Seconds

• At 24:04: Yarvin defines his core assertion:
  • Quote: “We’re living inside this, you might say 250-year-old myth of American governance… I just don’t believe in our political system at all.”
• He sees the “success” of Anglo-American world as having very different causes than told in mainstream history.

5. Decoding Democracy, Meritocracy, Oligarchy, and Monarchy

• Discusses Aristotle’s three forms of government: rule by one (monarchy), few (oligarchy), or many (democracy). Yarvin contends that what passes for “democracy” in the US is actually rule by an expert oligarchy.
  • Quote: “Democracy today in the modern world means legitimate government. … Who would you have it guided by, some shoemaker?” (28:04)
• Compares the US presidency to Britain’s king: a dwindling, mostly ceremonial figurehead.

6. Monarchist Advocacy

• Patrick asks for Yarvin’s solution. Yarvin responds, “I’m a monarchist; I want to see monarchy.” (33:37)
• Yarvin laments both populist and meritocratic models, suggesting America is torn between two flawed systems.

7. The American Left’s Lineage

• Yarvin traces the origins of modern progressivism far back in American history, through his own family's communist past, through the New Left, Old Left, and beyond, arguing America was “always leftist.” (69:47)
• Traces Obama’s intellectual forebears to the New Left, Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, and back to 19th-century radicals.
  • “America is and always has been a leftist country. I know that’s very difficult for conservatives to accept. It is unfortunately true.” (68:47)
• Quote: “You cannot find any living conservative tradition in America with this kind of lineage.” (79:54)

8. Power, Bureaucracy, and Incentives

• Strong analogy between government and business: effective organizations run monarchically (like Apple under Jobs or Tesla under Musk), bureaucracies do not.
  • “Imagine if Apple had checks and balances ... There’s no way you could build an iPhone in this way.” (97:53)

9. COVID-19 and the Failure of Meritocracy

• Yarvin delivers a scathing analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, blaming the scientific bureaucracy for prioritizing career incentives (sensational ‘gain of function’ research) over public safety (123:24).
  • Gets emotional: “…just like an incredible fucking story… The true story of COVID was this is the way our country is governed.” (123:24)
• Argues conflict of interest between the stated goals (end viruses) and career incentives (discover/create new dangerous viruses and publish papers).
• Both populism and meritocracy see real flaws in each other; COVID response proves neither serves the public well.

10. Current Events: Iran, Venezuela, Foreign Policy

• Yarvin is skeptical about US-inspired regime change in Iran: “Unfortunately, the current thing in Iran is going to get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything.” (134:18)
• Advocates US withdrawal from empire (“isolationism”) and pragmatic, even “gunboat” foreign policy, e.g., in Venezuela. Praises Trump Administration’s approach for being “practical,” “not neoconservative.”
• On interventionism: wary of nation-building, skeptical of America’s capability to pull it off.
• Suggests the US encourage “buying off” dictators like Kim Jong Un rather than attempting revolutions.
• On monarchy vs. democracy: Monarchies are the historical default, more organizationally effective. Identifies China and Russia as modern monarchies (under Xi and Putin).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the myth of American governance:
  “We’re living inside this ... myth of American governance.” —Curtis Yarvin (24:04)

• On democracy and politics:
  “You ever seen the movie The Truman Show?... Truman just starts to notice these things about the world he lives in that just aren’t real.” —Curtis Yarvin (02:04)

• ‘Democracy’ as legitimacy theater:
  “Democracy today in the modern world means legitimate government. ... That is a claim of legitimacy. Nonetheless, anyone can look at [North Korea] for five seconds and say, no, this is actually a dynasty.” —Curtis Yarvin (27:00)

• Comparison of power:
  “If you can multiply anything by 100 and it’s still less than one, it’s got to be a very small number.” —Curtis Yarvin on presidential power changes (06:58)

• On the New Deal regime:
  “What FDR didn’t understand was... there’s no... Darwinian constraint on its performance... and the effectiveness... has just been getting worse and worse and worse for the last 80 years.” —Curtis Yarvin (14:25)

• On his monarchist position:
  “I want to see monarchy. ... I basically see that ... it’s a contest between oligarchy and democracy.” —Curtis Yarvin (33:37)

• On the lineage of American leftism:
  “America is and always has been a leftist country. ... Let me give you—here’s—since you have some nice research... Leftism is the real American tradition.” —Curtis Yarvin (68:47)

• On COVID-era science:
  “The true story of COVID was this is the way our country is governed. ... [Scientists] become, by doing normal things, mad scientists.” —Curtis Yarvin (124:05, 131:30)

• On Iran protests:
  “Unfortunately the current thing in Iran is going to get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything.” —Curtis Yarvin (134:18)

• On monarchy as default:
  “Why is monarchy almost the universal form ... found throughout history, even in cultures that have no connection with each other?” —Curtis Yarvin (94:22)

• Comic relief:
  PBD and Yarvin riff on the physical appearance of Media Matters’ David Brock and villain archetypes in cinema (93:09–93:44).

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Noteworthy Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction of Yarvin and his infamous positions (00:25–01:34)
• "Waking up in the Truman Show": How Yarvin started questioning democracy (01:36–02:38)
• FDR as 'CEO-president': The last powerful US presidency (06:33–11:09)
• Explaining 'regime change' and the denazification comparison (18:27–24:04)
• Curtis Yarvin's worldview in 60 seconds (24:04–25:05)
• Breakdown of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy in America (27:00–33:37)
• Tracing the lineage of American progressivism—from Obama to radical abolitionists to the Puritans (69:47–88:47)
• Why power structures in business work—and not in government (97:53–101:47)
• COVID-19 origins, ‘mad scientist incentives,’ and the bureaucratic state (123:24–131:30)
• Iran, Venezuela, and modern foreign policy (134:18–145:09)

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Tone & Style

The episode is intellectually intense, at times conspiratorial, unapologetically iconoclastic, and clearly shaped by both Yarvin’s provocative style and PBD’s direct, probing, opinionated hosting. There is humor (often dark), open skepticism, and a willingness to tackle taboo or fringe subjects. The tone is combative but respectful, with Patrick challenging Yarvin and repeatedly asking for practical solutions.

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Conclusion

For listeners seeking a deep dive into dissident politics, the mechanics of power, and revisionist history outside the mainstream Overton window, this episode delivers. Yarvin’s views are both challenging and controversial, but the conversation with PBD keeps them accessible and engaging.

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NOTE:
This summary preserves the original tone, highlights core insights, and provides a navigable structure for listeners new to Yarvin’s thought or who want to quickly find key arguments and memorable moments. Ads, intros, and off-topic banter are omitted for clarity and focus.

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Transcript

[Curtis Yarvin]

Did you ever think you were made again.

[Patrick Bet-David]

For me, Adam? What's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever saw. It's right here. You are a1of1.

[Curtis Yarvin]

My son's right about. I don't think I've ever said this before.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So we got, we got a special guest here. There's gonna be a group of you that are gonna be driven insane by what he has to say. But there's gonna. That are going to say. It's actually a good point. Like even right now with what's going on in the world, Venezuela, you know, just fell. Iran, with what they're going through, they went from a monarchy to whatever you want to call it with, you know, totalitarian regime under Khomeini. And then should they go to a constitutional monarchy? Should they go to a traditional democracy? What works, what doesn't work? My guess today. Here's what he said before. So brace for impact. We have a two hour conversation. But these are some of the things that he said that's driven people insane. Some races are more suited to slavery than others. That'll upset a lot of people. Okay. Democracy is not a solution. It is the problem. The United States should be run like a corporation. If Americans want change, they should stop voting. The democratic experiment has failed. Real power in America is held by an unelected regime. Equality is not a natural human condition. Order is more important than freedom. Curtis Yarvin, it's great to have you on.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here, Patrick.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So how did you come up with these ideas? How did this.

[Curtis Yarvin]

How did I come up with these ideas?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, my gosh, how did I come up with these ideas? As I was kind of a, you know, a little bit of a normie, libertarian kind of person. And I started reading a little bit and I started thinking a little bit. And after a little while, I'd had a little too much to think. And I think that the way you come up with these ideas is you're sort of in. You ever seen the movie the Truman Show?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of course.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You watch the Truman Show. It's really, really great movie. And Truman just starts to notice these things about the world he lives in that just aren't real, that can't possibly be real. The sky, the horizon is kind of stitched together, you know, I'll give you an example of one of these things that's very, very simple, which is that you have these two words, politics and democracy. And you might notice that analytically these words mean the same thing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Do they?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, you know, what is democracy without politics? It sounds like something that might have in North Korea. You know, actually north. You know, the full name of North Korea is the dprk. That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it's a monarchy. And so this is one of the things that we sort of see across history is that basically, regimes, well, they tend to lie. They tend to actually sort of conceal the most basic things about what they are. Let's go, for example, to the United Kingdom. It's not a kingdom. No one could possibly describe it objectively as a kingdom. It's true that it has a king, but the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous, okay? And everyone in the UK Recognizes that the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. It wasn't really true, let's say in 1725, that the king was running the government. That would be, I guess, George, the first. But people really believed it was the case then. And so you have these. You know what we. You know, when we call the US A democracy, you know, it's actually much more similar to calling the United Kingdom a kingdom than we might think. One of the ways that you can see this is, again, if you look at these words democracy and politics, you'll hear that they have opposite valences. So democracy, anything democratic is good. We're going to democratize U.S. foreign policy. I don't know what it means, but it has to be good. We're going to politicize U.S. foreign policy. Clearly bad. Like, we don't want this to be political. The word political has acquired a negative valence. We're gonna put politicians in charge of the government. Politicians. Nobody likes politicians. How should they be in charge of the government? And then you're just like, wait, but isn't having politicians in charge of the government what we mean when we say democracy? Moreover, when we look at actually the way that Washington, D.C. works, I actually grew up. My father was in the US Foreign Service in the State Department. So you grew up in the State Department. And they have very much this attitude of politics is this dirty thing that needs to be kept out of government whenever possible. It's like you're sort of clearly seeing, okay, we have to kind of pretend to be this. But if you actually look at the way that US Foreign policy changes when you have a presidential election, we'll get to Congress later. But until Donald Trump Until Donald Trump's really second term, actually, the influence of the election on foreign policy is pretty minimal. And the influence of the presidential election on domestic policy is almost zero, because domestic policy is run by Congress. And so we have these situations where everyone goes out in this election and they really think that they're like, they talk as if they were electing a king. They say, Donald Trump is in power. He's certainly not a negligible force in Washington. In fact, I'd say one way to look at the paradox of the Trump administration is to say, well, I think it's pretty unquestionable that the second Trump administration had maybe 10 times as much impact on Washington as the first.

[Patrick Bet-David]

There's no question it's not close. Second, it sounds like it's been three terms in a while.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It could be 12 months, it could be 10 times as much, could be 20 times as much. And if you look at. Well, wait a second, there's a punchline. So if you look at the. If you compare the first Trump administration to the Bush administration, again, you know, it's not as much of a difference, but it's 3x5x, you know, as much of an impact.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I mean, Trump to Bush.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Bush to Trump. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you remember the first Trump administration, it's like the liberals are like, the sky is falling every day.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Right. And now they're like, the sky is falling every day. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so are you saying him to Bush, he got three times more done, or Bush to Trump, Bush got three times.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, but Trump, even the first term, Trump had three times as much.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I agree.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So the thing is, what you're seeing from the perspective of the New York Times reader, you're just like, oh, my God, this politician, this, you know, carnival barker has this immense power over the government, which is the most important thing around, and we're all going to die. And it's like, well, even, you know, let's, let's acknowledge that these enormous increases in power are true. Okay? But power is something that you can measure on a zero to one scale. Zero is, you have no power, you don't matter. One is absolute power. So if you're looking at anything that's measurable on a zero to one scale. Does she love me? Does she love me not? One way to look at that is to say, all right, let me forget about where I am on this scale relatively, and figure out where I am on the scale. Absolutely. Because actually, when you're seeing those kinds of increases, you know, when you're seeing Increases by an order of magnitude, for example, what you see is that those kinds of increases are most available at the bottom of the absolute spectrum. So when you're going closer to zero, not closer to zero, closer to zero, not one. If you can multiply anything by 100 and it's still less than one, it's got to be a very small number. And so what people don't really realize about the post 1945American political system is that it goes from, of course, 1945, FDR dies. FDR is pretty close to one. He's pretty close to being, to really having absolute power over the, over the government, especially in wartime, but also before wartime, he's really running the government like a CEO. And if you look at like, you know, there's a diary I have of one of his cabinet secretaries and you look at FDR's cabinet meetings, they're like a CEO running a C suite meeting, okay? If you look at one of Trump's cabinet meetings, it's not like that. No, it's really not like that. Because actually the government, the way that Washington today works is when you're a CEO of a company, I actually am a CEO of a company. When you're the CEO of a company, one of the sort of worst terms of like you're not a good CEO is to say that you're reactive, okay? You're always reacting to things that happen. You're not making proactive decisions. You're not sort of steering. You're basically reacting to your inbound. Sure, company's doing really well and doesn't really need a CEO. Maybe it's fine to have a reactive CEO, okay? But FDR was a proactive CEO. He could say, oh, we're going to build. Look at like Route 1, for example, on the California coast. That's an FDR project. That's a New Deal, I believe. California Conservation Corps project. Imagine building Route 1 today. Completely unimaginably impossible. It would be much harder than building the high speed rail, right? And so what you're seeing is you're seeing the state, which is almost entirely based on bureaucratic process. And when you're working in a process based regime, everything is procedural, everything. You're almost as a civil servant, you're almost something like a judge in a way, because everything you're doing is following a process.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But FDR needed a crisis. Without that, he wouldn't have the power that he had. Right? I mean, take the crisis out, take the.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, yeah, the way that fdr, I mean, the way that FDR gains this power is very specific to the 1930s. And so, for example, one of the things you'll see in 1932 when FDR is running in the election, the Democratic Party is, of course, America's traditional conservative party at this time, and it's been basically taken over from the inside by radical progressives. The first example of this is Woodrow Wilson. FDR comes back again with the same thing, but he's still running as a Democrat. And so if you look at the 1932 political platform of Roosevelt, it's a traditional Democratic platform, which means small government, less spending, hard money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And on this platform, he gets the votes of the Solid south and the inner city Catholics, which basically drive him into office. Be that as it may, forgetting, I mean, America in 1932 is such a different country from today, night and day, more different from any country today on Earth. Right. But he managed to do that. He basically managed to create the new. He created the Washington that we have today. And so one of the things, if you step back and look at US history over the last 250 years, what you see is actually you're seeing transitions between forms of government. You know how the French talk about the First Republic, Second Republic, Third Republic. So in American history, we have three administrations that basically establish a regime. We have the Washington administration, which is actually run by Hamilton. We have the Lincoln administration, and we have the FDR's administration. These things happen about every 75 or 80 years. They basically involve consolidation of the power of the federal government under a single individual. They basically who is essentially a CEO of the government. This is what Hamilton and Washington were doing. This is what Lincoln was doing. This is what FDR is doing. Love them or hate them, you know, it's a neutral thing. They did plenty of good and bad things both. You know, that's sort of. That's what creates an administration. If you look at, you know, being a California person, if you look at the New Deal, again, I think they did plenty of things wrong. I think they made plenty of terrible choices. They were also run like a startup. And so if you're looking for, like a startup Washington, you know, basically look at, look at the New Deal. If you look, for example, at the Manhattan Project, you know, libertarians will basically be like, oh, well, the government can't do anything efficiently. Well, the Manhattan Project is, number one, a government project. Number two, it is probably the most successful engineering project in history. Number three, it has run almost exactly like a California startup, right? Down to the two co founders, right? You have the technical guy and the non technical guy. If you've seen Oppenheimer and number four, they're all communists, if you've seen Oppenheimer, of course. And so that's not. That combination of facts doesn't really fit into any kind of legendarium of the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the point you're making your point. You're making is the point running like a startup, Run it like a CEO. Run it like a guy who's running a Fortune 100 company. Let him make the decisions. Not a lot of executive orders. I don't need to get everyone's permission to do something.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So if you look at, you know, I'm sort of trying to set the historical stage a little bit for where we are. So if you look at, you know, again, FDR creates this sort of really, I mean, he literally conquers the world, right? You know, and he creates this kind of world conquering state. And people just looked at America at that time, whether they were Americans or foreigners, they're just like, this is a country, this is a government that could do anything. So FDR dies in 45, and in 44, he picks Harry Truman as his VP. Harry Truman is kind of a nobody. He's not even really a New Dealer. He, he's a man of sort of limited pretensions and limited abilities. And FDR replaces Henry Wallace, who was kind of a hardcore communist on his, his VP suite. With Truman knowing FDR knows, nobody else knows. Americans did not even know that FDR used a wheelchair. You're aware of that, right? Like that's the level of distance between reality and story. That was totally routine back then, right? And people just, people lived almost entirely in this comic book world. So. And you know, on all sides, that war was fought in a comic book world, you know, and World War I is even more sort of comic book. So you have basically a world where you have this very simplistic drama that's presented to a very unsophisticated by today's standards audience, right? So they just see this sort of propaganda experience of the war. They have no idea that FDR is dying. They have no idea of the difference between FDR and Truman. Actually what happens is that because Truman is a lightweight and he does not take over the job of fdr. He is not really in charge. This is what FDR intended. FDR is like, I've assembled this amazing collection of just amazing, talented, first rate people who can do anything. And I'm not going to have A successor. Instead, power is going to flow down into the regime, into the administration, into what we now call the deep state, and there's going to be no way to get it out. What FDR didn't understand, really, or maybe understood, but didn't care, who knows, was that a regime like that has no way simply because you have this administration that is almost impossible to get rid of. There's no sort of Darwinian constraint on its performance, especially if it's ruling the world and doesn't have to worry about Canada invading or something like that. And so the effectiveness of this organization has just been getting worse and worse and worse for the last 80 years.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Doesn't that validate that? You know, we can come back to that. But the part I want to go with you on FDR is would FDR have been FDR without a massive crisis? He used the crisis, right? Take the crisis out. He's not as historical figure as we would be talking about today.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You can't really separate the man from his time. FDR is a pretty enigmatic figure. It's very, very hard to know what was going on in his head because he has not. You know, this regime has never been defeated. And so when you look at a defeated regime, it's analyzed by its enemies. Its enemies have.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This is who? This regime. FDR regime.

[Curtis Yarvin]

FDR's regime has never been defeated. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

To find out, what do you mean by that? Like, no one's outdone him.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No one's done any, no one has done to him, for example. So again, let's, let's go back to the zero to one thing. If you're looking at a zero to one definition of regime change, okay, what's the most complete regime change that we've seen in our time? The fall of the Soviet Union, some people might say. But there's relatively. A lot of the elites sort of kept their positions, a lot of things like was actually a relatively incomplete regime change. You want to see complete regime change, go to Germany in 1945. That has the advantage of it being a regime change that was carried out by liberals. So it's sort of hard for people to question it. That's an absolutely complete regime change. And so, for example, the Allies come in and what are you going to do with the ss? Well, you might say, well, what's the problem with this Nazi regime? Real problem is the Holocaust. Big problem. What's the cause of the Holocaust? Anti Semitism in the ss. So we're going to stamp out antisemitism in the SS and all the SS lunchrooms anywhere in Germany, the new administration is going to put posters, pro Jew posters, and we're going to make it clear that the SS is a pro Semitic organization. Now, that's not what they did. That is not even close to what they did. Actually. The SS ceased to exist, and actually, having been a member of this previously prestigious and powerful organization, became something shameful. Love it or hate it, there were a lot of excesses in the Allied occupation of Germany, but you can't say it didn't work. And so when I say that basically nobody has overthrown the New Deal, that's essentially what I mean. Nixon and Reagan both make some attempts at various levels of government reorganization, as Trump has made various attempts. Really? You know, if you look at the number of federal employees, for example, through the 80s in the Reagan administration, you'll see it actually dips a little bit. And under Trump, it dips even more than that. It dips like 2, 10% or so. Okay, but still, if we're comparing that to denazification, you're still at 0.001% of that. So, for example, in 1945, they're like, all right, we're going to denazify Germany. Okay, what would that. You know, you can analogize that to dewokification or something. Okay, how are we going to denazify Germany? Well, we're going to basically take all the books that were published in Germany between 1933 and 1945, and if they are books that have any Nazi content, which, of course, imagine, you know, all the books that have progressive content, it's basically all of them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay, so what are we going to do? Except for make, except for maybe children's books and not even accepting children's books.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Have you been to them as well? Of course.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Have you been to a bookstore? Yoda or Barnes and Noble, you know, and you know how the Nazis burn books. You know, everyone's seen the picture of the Nazis burning books. This is a bunch of Nazi stormtroopers burning the library of the Institute for Sexual Research, which was the kind of key Weimar trans institution at a big, you know, big celebration, you know, throw gasoline on the books, whatever. It's very dramatic. Okay. The Allies in Germany in 1945 are very different from that. They're like, all right, it's going to be illegal to own any Nazi books, which are basically any books published in the last 12 years. And what are we going to do with these books? We're going to pulp them. They didn't burn Them, they just turned them into toilet paper. You can find these books in Germany today. Okay. I don't think it's illegal to possess them anymore. You're not going to find them randomly in a used bookstore. You can buy them in certain ways. Libraries have them and, you know, major libraries. And if you want to go and read these books, you will show that you have a legitimate academic need to read these books. Okay. Like, you'll need to present like academic credentials.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So imagine treating progressivism that way. Okay. I'm not saying that this is what needs to be done. This is. Every historical situation is different. You had the enormous power that was generated at that time by winning a war. Right. But when we use this kind of language that Donald Trump uses, he uses this very like crossing the Rubicon kind of language, like, we're going to change everything. This is a revolution. You know, you've got to basically check yourself and say, no, this is point 001 of a revolution. And when you have a real regime change in a country, everyone's life changes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, why don't we do this? Can you, can we do this just so the audience knows? Because some of the audience doesn't know who you are. Okay. They're kind of wondering, saying, who is this Curtis Yarvin guy? You're very well known in the Peter Thiel in the Elon Musk, in the tech bro billionaire Silicon Valley yourself. They know who you are. And you know, a lot of guys have said, you know, your ideas have been revolutionary, they follow it. We should consider what Curtis has to say. And then the likes of New York Times and others are going to say, this guy's crazy. He has no clue what he's talking about. And he's the secret mastermind behind Trump and all the ideas that's coming up, that's kind of how they're depicting who you are. If you could describe to the audience in less than 60 seconds, what do you believe in, what would that be?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Gosh, what do I believe in and what would that be? I would say what I believe is that in America, we're living inside this, you might say 250 year old myth of American governance. Every, every state, every nation, every polity has a political formula. It has a reason that it believes that its political system is right and just and true. And actually, if you're looking at Anglo American governance, you're really going back more like 400 years. And so I essentially believe that the things that we think we've learned in the Anglo American political tradition since essentially Elizabeth I are basically not true. I think that actually the reasons for the success of the Anglo American world are very different from the reasons that we think this success happened. And I actually just don't believe in our political system at all.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You don't believe in our political system?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't believe in it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so, you know, democracy, monarchy, right. The longest lasting democracy. When you look at the numbers on most articles, they'll say it's us 238 years. And you'll see a bunch of different countries in democracies.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Switzerland.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Switzerland, yeah, we've seen these. Right. And then if you go to monarchies, you'll see Japan at the top 2600 years. You'll see, you know, some real interesting. Sweden, you'll see Morocco, you'll see uk, you'll see Norway, I think some of these countries. Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But you have to distinguish actually, you know, not every democracy is a real democracy. Not every monarchy is a real monarchy. Perfect. One of the most important things, I think that, you know, if there's a single book that, that I'd recommend to sort of, for basically smart, curious people to sort of develop the skill of doing this kind of Truman show thing, of looking for. When does this word mean its opposite? There's a great book published by James Burnham in 1940. He's better known for the book the Managerial Revolution. But his best book is actually a book I found in a used bookstore very randomly. It's called the Machiavellians. And it's essentially a very brief, readable, well written summary of what's called the Italian school of political science, with writers from around 1900 in Italy. This is of course, well before Mussolini, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these writers were realists. They were profoundly realistic. And they insisted that the most important thing is to basically sort of abandon these symbolic statements and to see reality for what it really is. And so when you're decoding things like you have this word democracy. Democracy today in the modern world means legitimate government. When you claim to be democratic, you claim to be legitimate because we live in this sort of global democratic empire created by 1945 and even 1850, you might argue. And so this is why North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. They have to claim to be democratic because that is a claim of legitimacy. Nonetheless, anyone can look at it for five seconds and say, no, this is actually a dynasty. Right. The Kim family. Right. So when we look at, you know, our democracy, to sort of go back to the basics in the way or what we call a democracy. I would say that generally speaking there, you know, to paraphrase Aristotle, who knew everything about government, there are three forms of government. You have government of the one, the few and the many. So Aristotle called these monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. So if you use the word democracy in today's political language, you mean one of two things. If you're George Soros, for example, or someone from Soros World, when you use the word democracy, you mean what is sometimes called meritocracy, sometimes called civil society. You mean the power of prestigious institutions, the power of the experts. Democracy is by definition legitimate government, which means it's good government, which means it's government guided by it, guided by the best experts. Who would you have it guided by? You know, some shoemaker. You know, there's a, There's a famous cartoon in the New Yorker came out a couple of years ago where it's in the back of an airplane and the passengers are. There's a. Some passenger is stood up and is speaking and he's saying something like, you know, why should we let these arrogant pilots who think they know all about flying airplanes, you know, like flying. Fly the plane. You know, I. I demand to, you know, I demand a vote of the people to, to elect how to fly the plane, right? No one who saw this cartoon. There you go. No one who saw this cartoon thought that they were laughing at democracy. No one, you know, looks at this cartoon, opens their New Yorker and says, like, this is an anti democracy cartoon. It is plainly an anti democracy cartoon. It is plainly a cartoon about the absurdity of the literal word democracy. Because in fact, when you use the words like, you know, meritocracy and civil society and the rule and the rule of experts, the Aristotelian word is very, very plain. You're talking about an oligarchy. You're talking about an institutional oligarchy. If these institutions believed in God, you would call it a theocracy without a second look. It's a regime very similar to the, you know, in ancient Egypt, you know, 3,000 years ago, they had the rule of the priests of Amun, you know, same exact system, right? And the role that elections serve in the system is not too dissimilar to the role that the king of England serves in England, right? It's not quite that because, you know, Trump is like, Trump is a little like George III in some ways in that he's trying to revive the power of a kind of d institution so.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That, you know, the President, dying institution, the presidency.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because the presidency is very much going the way of. It's turning into President Camacho for mediocrity. It's very much going the way of the British monarchy in becoming almost entirely ceremonial. And so. And, and why do you say that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It'S losing its power?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Is it reality? Its power is its power. It's been losing its power for 80 years. It lost most of its power in 1945 when.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Due to Truman or due to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Due to. Due to the death of fdr and there was no way that anyone could have stepped into.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So. So you're a big supporter of what FDR did?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, actually, I think that FDR did some very bad things. But the. The like, on the other hand, got to say he conquered the world, right? You know, he could certainly build a railroad, you know, and. And so when you have a government that can't even build a railroad, like beggars can't be choosers, right? You're actually in a situation of pretty poor governance in this country. And a lot of the problem that we have is that because we feel that we have this perfect system of government, you know, there's something very schizophrenic in the way conservatives view the government because they view the system as perfect. But somehow the system has produced these horrible results. Like, how did that happen? Maybe we just have to put it back on the right. On the right course. You know, maybe just a little nudge and it'll snap back into actually working perfectly because it's a perfect system, after all. And in fact, if you look at the sort of, you know, let's go back to this thing of, like, democracy versus politics. So this idea that politics and politicians are bad is the idea that democracy is literal. Democracy is bad. Because there's another thing that we mean when we say democracy. We mean putting politicians in charge of the government, right? And we mean populism. And so what we have is basically the sort of the. The political landscape of the mind today is that populism and meritocracy are fighting over this magic word, democracy, which defines legitimacy. And everyone is like, well, this is democracy, you know. And, you know, the George Soros is of the world are just like, well, you know, obviously having the best people in charge is democracy. And the Donald Trumps of the world are like, no, actually, democracy is when elected politicians control the government. This is severely complicated in the American system by the fact. And this is something else that. So a lot of the things that I'm saying are things that are sort of quite obvious if you kind of think about them from a distance. But they are things that neither party is going to tell you, each for its own reasons.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What are you suggesting? What, what do you want to see?

[Curtis Yarvin]

What do I want to see? Well, that's a long, That's a long. You know, it's like, let me, let's start with the diagnosis a little bit first because understanding kind of how we got here, I want to, I'm a monarchist, I want to see monarchy. I basically see that, you know, in this kind of context between populism and meritocracy for this magic word, democracy, you know. And if we were to use Aristotle's categories in a scientific way, we would say it's a contest between oligarchy and democracy. And I think one of the things that you see if you look at the sort of the red versus blue conflict in America, and I think this is true about a lot of different kinds of conflict historically, is that whenever you see a conflict, the sort of, the interpretation of that conflict that should jump into your mind is that maybe each side is basically right about the other. And so you must know a couple that's always fighting, right? And you're like, well, the problem is he's kind of right about her, but she's also kind of right about him. Right? And I think that actually what animates most people in America politically today is not so much affection for their own model as fear and loathing of the other model. And so if you grew up like me, New Yorker reader, State Department, Ivy League kind of house. This is a house. My cultural background is definitely America's ruling elite. There's a lot of people more culturally elite than me. But for example, my father's parents were American communists. They were literal Jewish communists. They had cards. I don't know where the cards are, but they had, you know, card carrying communists. Did they carry the card? Did they keep it somewhere? All I know is from the 30s to the 70s, they had cards.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How did that not pass down to your dad?

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's a good question. I think that that's sort of the transition between the old left and the new left. You've probably heard the term red diaper baby. So, you know, you have the old left, which is kind of the Stalinist left. And that left kind of dies and runs out of gas in the 50s especially. Like there's a lot of, you know, a lot of that is dying in like 1956, for example, with, with, with Hungary. So, you know, the Communist Party USA is sort of the most excited, most exciting and most fun in the 1930s. In the 1930s it's. You saw Oppenheimer, right? Oppenheimer is made from the most liberal biography of Oppenheimer available. Actually, Oppenheimer himself probably was not only a communist. The head of the communist cell in the Berkeley Physics Department. What's clear and what the movie makes clear to you to its credit is that everybody else is a communist. In fact, Everybody in the 1930s who's cool is a communist. Dorothy Parker, Communist. Charlie Chaplin, communist. Everybody's a communist. It's normal. And do you know what the word they use to describe the word Communist in the 1930s means? Party member. This is also what it meant in the, in the Eastern Bloc.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You couldn't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's like calling yourself a Hell's angel just because you ride a motorcycle. No, you're not a Hell's angel unless you're a Hell's angel. Right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you have to be a true.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You have to be a true. Yeah, it's not just an expression of opinion, it's actually a status. And if you're kicked out of the party in the 1930s, you lose all your friends. If you're a Hollywood screenwriter, you lose your job. It's like a closed union shop, basically. Communism in the 1930s in America is like, what if all the kids at the gifted school tried to take over the world?

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's basically what benefits did they get from being a card carrying communist? Your grandparents.

[Curtis Yarvin]

My grandparents were. They moved up about four levels in the social hierarchy because they were basically, they were garment industry Jews. You know, they were, they were Yiddish speaking Jews. They were. These are shit tier Jews. Right? You know, they become communists and like all of their, you know, I'm just like, as a kid, I'm like, why is my grandmother's best friend a distributor of Italian films? Communist. Right. You know, and so, because she's a humble person, she makes boiled chicken. She's a schoolteacher in the New York City schools. Right. You know, but actually she has these tremendous intellectual pretensions. She had this tremendous intellectual energy and that led all of these people into the world of communism.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Did you spend a lot of time with your grandma, Grandpa?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Some. But you know what the funny thing is, they would actually, the only reason I knew that they were actual literal communists was through my parents. They would even as an adult and not even knowing that I was a blogger or anything, they were just, they were naturally completely secretive about it. And you know what word that was? Always used by these people to describe themselves and their supporters in general in the 1930s.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Aggressive, progressive. Yeah, right, Makes sense. So they hid behind that word.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, that word, it's little safer than communism.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. So the word progressive, basically you will find it used, for example, in the teens by Teddy Roosevelt and people like that. And Teddy Roosevelt is really more of an American fascist almost, in a way. He's certainly not a communist. But for about 100 years, the word progressive has meant communist. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, so mom and dad, Grandpa, just stay on that for a second. When you're hanging out with them, are they teaching you, Curtis, when you grow up, these are the things that matter. Here's what you got.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, I think that they lost most of their energy by the 1970s. I think most of. And that energy had become. Had fed into a more sort of diluted. It had become the new left and the new Left. You know, the principal difference between the new left and the old left is that the old left is centralized in the Communist Party usa. The new left is decentralized. The new left has no center. Nobody's in charge of it. And you're like, oh, well, you know, at least we're not Stalinist.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How did that happen?

[Curtis Yarvin]

It happened because it was increasingly difficult. Well, it happened first of all because of the Cold War, because Stalin actually, you know, it was Stalin's decision to get divorced after the war. Like the US did not want to get divorced. Stalin made it very clear during the war, American liberals and progressives had seen Russia as their kind of strong right arm that would help them control the world, basically. So you see, you know, there's all this amazing pro communist stuff during the 40s, films like Mission to Moscow and so forth, just insane Stalinist propaganda totally flooding the American Airways. 45. Stalin decides. No, actually, I'm not your little dog. Who knows how this would have played out if FDR hadn't died. Stalin's like, no, I'm actually a peer. And that creates a great split in the American left because the American left in 35, 36, had formed this, what was called the Popular Front, where liberals allied with color Communists or communists allied with liberals. Because it was always like, you know, the communists were sort of the more desirable party in that it was like the liberals were always trying to get with the Communists, basically. And the communists were like, oh, get away from me, liberal. Right. You'll. You'll see them do that now. And when that breaks, you get basically this breach in the American left where the majority of American liberals And I mainly include people who are not working for the Soviet Union, but sort of saw the Soviet Union as working for them, which was sort of the view at the top of the Roosevelt administration. Stalin decisively breaks that myth and causes these American liberals to realize, oh, we're not creating one progressive world government under the United Nations. We have two competing progressive world empires. These empires would still go after like the old British and French world. They would, you know, for example, in 56, the US and the USSR are aligned against Britain and France in the Suez crisis. Right. So there's still like, you know, this kind of deep ideological tie between the two. And that tie goes all the way from 1917 to 1989. So for example, in the 80s, there's.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This thing where 17 to 89.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. The whole life of the Soviet Union, it has very complicated, deep relationships with the American left. Probably too deep to go into here, but here's an example of this. So in, I think it was 84, this was revealed only after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 84, Teddy Kennedy sends his basically chief conciliary, John Tunney, secretly to Moscow to talk with and drop off about their strategy in the 84 election in which Teddy Kennedy didn't end up running. I think it was 84. Could have been 80. I think it was 84. So you have all of these, like, deep, deep, deep, deep. See, you know, you have all of these.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Former U.S. senate, California cold surrender. Teddy Kennedy is known for making confidential trips to Moscow in the 1880s. 1980s. A detailed top secret KGB memorandum published in 92 which revealed that Tunney served as a back channel to Soviet officials. 1980 visit. Ted Kennedy primarily, primarily challenged to challenge Carter. Tunney traveled to Moscow to devise a strategy to counter what Kennedy perceived as Carter's excessive anti Soviet stance. You got to be kidding me.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's right there on the screen. Right? You know, this is Wikipedia.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He stayed in politics 40 years and nothing happened to him.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah. So like the relationship between the US and the USSR is. It's not at all like the relationship between the US and Hitler. It's like the relationship between the Cold War is sort of like, imagine you're a parent, you have a teenager, I have a couple of teenagers. And sometimes teenagers turn out bad. You know, they get into heroin, they start stealing money from your purse. You know, they do awful, awful things. But it's not like a stranger broke into your house and stole money out of your wife's purse. You know, and so there's always this Kind of feeling of like a deep family tie there, which I think is something that they tried very hard to, you know, because there was this always this. Basically, for all of the 20th century, you had this idea that there were two lefts. You know how there's two lefts, you know, the communists and the liberals. And if you call a liberal a communist, you know, it's the worst thing in the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you look at basically the left now and you're just like, come on, don't. You're just yanking my chain. The idea that there's two lefts today, like, you're just yanking my chain. There is not two lefts. And, you know, this, of course, is first kind of recognized by the first. I mean, really, the first New Left president is Carter, but, you know, the first really acknowledged New Left president is Obama. And so again with Obama, you're probably familiar, being a conservative podcast, you're probably familiar with some of the, you know, interesting stories around the mysterious past of Mr. Barack Obama. And I think most of those stories.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are which one's most mysterious to you? I've heard many of them, but you're more well read on this topic.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So I think that generally speaking, I think just the important fact, I think his connection with Bill, for example, is completely real. I think that. But more generally, you can step back and say Barack Obama is a man of the New Left. He's a new leftist. When you use the word New Left, the dictionary definition should point to Barack Obama, right? And the connections between the New Left and the Old left, I think, are very interesting. First of all, you see this word progressive being basically continually used. It's not a coincidence, right? And it's like when people, when progressives today use the word progressive, I would say no more than 5% of them know that it is or ever was in any sense a euphemism for communist. They have no idea. They're like, you know, in New Mexico, one of the things that, you know, in the wild experience of Spanish colonization, a lot of Jews and conversos from Spain fled to the New World. So there are these populations of conversos in New Mexico, like Old Spanish, and they do strange things with candles and napkins, and they have no idea why. They don't know that they're Jews, right? And so in a way, that's kind of the state of the New Left. They actually don't know that they're communists. They don't understand that this is completely their heritage. And that when. And yet when you look at it, you see it all over the place.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The new left doesn't know they're communists.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They sort of do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And they sort of see Mamdani Obama.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They know they, they sort of, they. They see it from the inside in a way. And so they, they perceive themselves in sort of in opposition to liberals. And they'd basically be like, oh, no, we're not Stalinists. Like, Stalinists are like, you know, there's a lot of, if you know, the logical fallacy. No, true. No true Scotsman. You know, you basically get, you know, real communism has never been tried. You know, Stalin actually betrayed communism. You know, here's another fun story that your, your researchers can bring up easily. Do you know the name Stanley Levison?

[Patrick Bet-David]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So Stanley levison was, until 1956, I think he was not. It was not an official title, but he was basically the CFO of the Communist Party usa. He was kind of ran its financial operations. And in 56 or 55, really, he realizes that the writing is on the wall for being a minion of Stalin. It's like McCarthyism has happened. It's like, you know, it's just Hungary has happened. Like, it's just not. It's, it's not, it's not the vibe. It's not the thing. So Levison does this interesting thing where he just. He decides to rev a cause of the Communist party from the 1930s, and he finds a black minister with a somewhat dodgy PhD and creates a movement and an organization and writes all of his speeches and manages his whole organization. Absolutely. This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The preacher is Martin Luther King. And the funniest thing. Here's a fun thing that you can do with Wikipedia. If you go to Stanley Levison's page, you will see that it says that Stanley Levison was influential in creating the SCLC. Go to the SCLC's page. No mention, nothing. He's not on the page. He's not on the page.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so, like, this is instrumental in all the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization established by Dr. King and other Southern black preachers to further the cause of civil rights. He had initially been introduced.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Go to the SCLC page.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Go to the.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Search for Levison.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why not.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Man? You know, like, you've seen the Truman Show. You're like, why does that car come around every hour? You know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So, but what does this mean to a guy like you? How do you process this information? So did they use, did they use.

[Curtis Yarvin]

MLK to, it's, it's, no, it's just that it's like, you know, when you see an organization, you know, government and non government, you know, you can never be sure that it is what it says it is. And so, you know, basically for, you know, even now, like, it's like we accept all these sort of lies without question. We see a politician reading a speech and we're like, well, we didn't know. He, he, he didn't really write that speech. Maybe helped edit it a little bit, maybe he marked it up, but he's reading someone else's speech.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, you're saying I have a Dream was written by him?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, no, no, no. He didn't write his own speeches. This is common, this is well known history.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So I have a Dream speech wasn't written by Martin Luther King?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, he didn't write his own speeches. He might have written letter from a Birmingham Jail because he was actually in the Birmingham jail, but I'm not completely confident of that. If he wrote letter from a Birmingham jail, he was plagiarizing his own speechwriters.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, and he, Stanley was one of the speechwriters.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Go, go back, Rob, on the, on the previous, Go back one page on the, oh, right there. Martin Lord, I have a Dream speech. But it was collaborative effort on key contributions from his lawyer and speechwriters. Clarence B. Jones, businessman. Stanley Levison.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Businessman. Stanley.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, businessman. Not communists and other advisors who drafted, provided input.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think Jones is also a communist. You know, I mean, well, you know, I, I, we don't know the first.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I just want to read you one more thing because while you were speaking, I read this one part. Go back on the previous page. Go to the RFK side. It's like five sentences from the bottom. In 1963, following the revelation of Dr. King's circle, that Attorney General Bobby Ken R.F. kennedy and then John F. Kennedy had pressured Dr. King in person to break with Levinson and Jack Odell. But Levinson also communist. Yeah, but Levinson, Levinson continued to advise Dr. King privately until Dr. King's assassination in April of 68. And afterwards, Levinson continued to work with Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King. The poor people's campaign in D.C. that took place from May 12th.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Of course, he's actually the CEO, right. You know, and like he's actually the CEO, right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And MLK's communist ties to Levison.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but it was, you know, the thing is, if you pull back to the bigger picture, basically even the term civil rights so basically what you had was in the 30s with cases like, for example, the Scottsboro Boys, which were with George Floyd in the 1930s. You had this basically black nationalism and black liberation. Huge, huge cause of the Communist party in the 20s and 30s. If you look up the phrase self determination in the black belt, for example, that's a 1920s era communist slogan. And they actually imagined having black SSRs in like Alabama, like Soviet, so actually parts of the Soviet Union. And, and, and like, you know, because the Soviet Union was intended to be a world government, of course. Right. You know, and it wasn't Russian. It was started in Russia and you know, not really by Russians either. Right. And so you have all of these things that are basically, you know, 20th century stories, which when you look at them with a 21st century historical view and you're trying to find the reality rather than the narrative, you basically see that the reality is like very, very different from the narrative. It's like FDR being in a wheelchair. So what Levison was doing was simply basically taking a Communist Party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the civil rights movement. Right. So completely just no question of this history. It's like all the details are kind of readily acknowledged. If you look at like David Garrow's King biography, you know, it's all going to be in there. Right. You know, and you can actually tell the truth about it now. Maybe not quite in the way that I'm telling it, because I'm telling it in a way that makes it sensational, because I believe it actually is sensational. Right. And it's kind of amazing what happened here. It's kind of wild. And it's sort of like, of course, when we see these other regimes of the 20th century, we sort of expect them to be Orwellian. We expect people to not understand what's going on in their own country. But like, you know, the reality is like, what is America in the 1960s? It's basically three TV stations, ABC, CBS and NBC. Plus for the ruling class, NPR and PBS. And it is a very controlled, very tightly organized broadcast media environment. If you look at basically during both world wars, you'll see what we call and conservatives call the MSM is actually a government agency. So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information. OWI. O.W. is basically the mainstream media as a government agency. World War I, it's the Committee on Public Information, the CPI. Insane, wild propaganda. You ever take a look at like, you know, World War I propaganda and you're just like, this is propaganda for 11 year olds. Like, this is incredibly simplistic, incredibly crude. Like, why are we fighting in Germany? The Hun is going to come rape your sister with his spiked helmet. Right. You know, and it's like you look at the reality of the diplomatic, you know, machinations, you know, behind that, which is easily as complicated as anything going on in Washington today. And you're just like, actually this is for children. And, and so in a way, waking up from this kind of, this dream.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you though?

[Curtis Yarvin]

How do you wake up from the dream?

[Patrick Bet-David]

I mean, to the average person. No, I'm being serious with you because to the app. So you're telling me in 1917-89, a Teddy Kennedy who wants to run for office against Jimmy Carter has to send the guy. Okay. To Russia. Yeah. To meet with them and say he is more pro Soviet than Carter. For what? Hey, help him become a president.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sure.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why would you want to? So does that mean you needed Russia to get elected?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't know that you needed Russia to get elected, but it was like more like we're gonna kind of coordinate our efforts so that things sort of look good.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who cares though? Why do I need Russia? So if you come up election interference.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I mean, that's like, that's a different, that's a different world.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's truly Russian election interference.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's more that you still had a sense in the new left of the 80s. Consider for example, the nuclear freeze movement from back then. Remember that? You know, maybe you're about to see. Born in the 70s, like 78. Yeah, yeah, 73. So you know, if you remember sort of the peace movement of the 1980s, like actually Russia is quite deeply involved in that. They're still in the habit in the 80s of giving basically bunches of money to left wing movements all around the planet, certainly including the US Now. Yeah. Is this a sort of a little. A shadow of the way it used to be? It's a shadow of the way it used to be because, you know, before the Cold War, like just completely crazy stuff went on. You know, I'm. I mean, completely. But, but like you go, you know, all the way back to the past and you find like you go all the way back to 1917 and you find very deep ties between American progressive elements and the early ussr. Right. Again, completely. So, for example, if you. This was one of my little, little, little red pills. If you look at the Russian Civil War, for example, today's historians will tell you without blinking an eye, that the US sided with the White Russians, the anti communists, in the Russian Civil War. Technically, this is true. All the events on the ground were as such. In fact, however, the strategy certainly of Wilson is actually to prevent the British and the French from aiding the, the whites in some, some ways. He has to do this by actually, he actually sends troops. But the troops are not there to help defeat the Bolsheviks. They're actually there to sandbag any attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks. So they're sort of kept sort of too weak. It's like a Bay of Pigs type thing, in a way. And. And if you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin, you notice something very interesting about that, which is that there's a lot of vituperation coming from especially Lenin to Wilson. Wilson is always stretching out his hand to Lenin and Lenin is always slapping it away. And you're like, wow, these fanatical Russians just hate America, or something like that. Well, you know, point 7 of the 14 points is basically hands off the Bolsheviks. You know, Wilson is a revolutionary world leader. He's trying to revolutionize the world. He has this conflict. There's this sort of division in American socialism between Wilson and Debs. And basically Debs, the IWW leader, is the kind of candidate of all the cool kids. And all the cool kids really, really love the Russian revolution. Or if you've heard of, like John Reed, for example, you know, an excellent film about this period about early American Communism is a film called Reds. It was made in the 1980s. It has got Jack Nicholson in it. It has. Everyone is in it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Warren Beatty is in it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Warren Beatty is playing John Reed. And John Reed is the only American.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Produce and directed by Warren Beatty.

[Curtis Yarvin]

John Reed, who Warren Beatty is playing, is the only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin. Right? So you know, the level to which basically communism did not come out of Russia. Communism came. Came to Russia and the. And it came to Russia through people like John Reed. And you know what happens basically as soon as the Russian Revolution happens is it sort of breaks into these two sides. The kind of liberal Kerensky side and the radical Lenin side. And Lenin is sexy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who saw this and said, we can run with these ideas.

[Curtis Yarvin]

American progressives basically were like, so there's something called the Red Cross mission to Russia, which was basically the American Embassy to the Bolsheviks.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Rob, can you pull up Red Cross mission to Russia?

[Curtis Yarvin]

This was actually really the Wall street mission to Russia. And they were working quite closely. I mean, at the time, the business of. Yeah, this is kind of a Cover story. You know, at the time, the business of sponsoring revolutions abroad was very, very lucrative because this is kind of a 19th century thing. You kind of. This is a. The British perfected this. You like, sponsored the revolution and then you support the revolutionaries and the revolutionaries give you big, big, big, big contracts, right? And so all through the 20s, even when the US did not recognize Russia, and it was almost, I don't know the legalities, but it was quasi illegal to deal with Russia. Huge amounts of American investment as Russia is rushing into Russia. So you look, for example, at someone like Avril Harriman, one of the titans of the mid century diplomatic establishment. He's later U.S. ambassador to Russia and of course becomes a Cold War figure. Avril Harriman is the son of Edward Harriman, a huge railroad tycoon. You wouldn't expect him to be a Bolshevik. And yet Avril Harriman is given, I believe by Stalin, huge manganese concessions in Soviet Georgia in the 1920s. And so there's all of this actually, like really deep involvement there between the. If you search for manganese, it might be there.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Manganese.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Manganese, M A N g mang. But it might not.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Manganese conceptions.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, Stalin later takes it back from him. But like the, the. Yeah, you see, you just, you don't expect to see that, right? You know, Stalin later takes it back from him, but this didn't bother him too much. If you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lennon, you know what it's like.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, Wilson, Woodrowson, 1970, going back to Woodrow Wilson.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. If you rearrange, actually the name of your podcast from PBD to bpd, you know, there's a certain kind of relationship that you have with a person with borderline personality disorder, right. You know, and the BPD girl, right? Lennon is the BPD girl. Wilson is the like hopeless schlub who like, wants to date Lennon. And you know, Lennon will be like, lick my boot. You know, and Wilson will bend down and industriously lick Lennon's boot. And Lennon will be like, you didn't even lick the bottom part. That's the part that gets dirty. What the hell? You must hate me, right? You know, that was kind of the vibe.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So Lennon controlled Wilson?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, controlled. Lennon manipulated Wilson. It was more like basically, the BPD bitch isn't in charge of you. I'm sorry for using that word. Sure. She's not in charge of you. She just manages to manipulate you. And so Wilson, for example, is a major major influence in making sure the British and the French don't wipe out the USSR after World War I, which they have every inclination in every power to do. Right? And so the USSR in a way, starts its life as an American protectorate in a way that is really, really, really, really hidden from Americans then and even now. So like, actually this is a very, very deep and complicated relationship. It is funky, it is not at all simple. And the Cold War interpretation of it sort of simplifies it in a way. Even if you look at 1950s McCarthyist anti communists. Are they right? Yeah, they're right, but they're also wrong. They're right in a sense because they're right that, wow, we had this really relationship with the USSR that's like really strange. But they interpret this relationship as kind of. They interpret in this kind of nativist way. Like the thing about the Russians is that they're false foreign, they're very weird and foreign. You can see this in all the like Russian collusion stuff. They're like foreigners are, you know, contaminating our water supply or something, something, something. Or precious bodily fluids, you know. In fact, you know, there are certainly Americans who are pawns of the Soviet Union in this period, but the most influential liberal Americans are not, do not see themselves as working for the Soviet Union. They would have been utterly baffled by the idea that they, that they were working for the Soviet Union. They saw the Soviet Union as working for them. That is a completely, completely. That is also a heinous relationship considering the crimes of the Soviet Union, which are really at their worst in the 1930s when the Soviet Union is most popular in America. But that is a very different relationship. So, you know, for example, one. One of my historical theses that I'm pretty sure of, but that can't probably really be proved is I think FDR was completely knowledgeable about what Aldrigus was doing. Aldrichs was not a spy, he was not a traitor, he was a backchannel. And to basically someone like Alger Hiss in Washington in say, 1942, you know, would basically be like, look, we share all of our intelligence with the British, but not with the Russians, you know, but the Russians are actually a progressive power like us, whereas the British are stuck in the mud. Imperialists, you know, why shouldn't we be working more closely with the Soviets? And then the Soviets would basically do this BPD thing where, you know, so, for example, there's something called the Doolittle Raid in early in World War II where it's kind of America's 9 11. But in reverse, we can't really attack Japan at this point. We mount this stunt where we're going to basically fly American bombers off of carriers, land based bombers off of carriers on a one way trip to just drop some bombs on Tokyo somewhere, somehow just kill some Japanese and they're going to land in China. It was actually kind of a success in a way. But some of these aircraft, they don't land in China, they wind up in the Soviet Union, which at the same time is fighting the Axis at the same time with us. What happens to those pilots? They're imprisoned, they're interned because the USSR is like, well, we're neutral with respect to Japan. We can't. So actually, at the same time as the US is supplying Stalin with all of this stuff, Stalin is imprisoning Americans again. This is sort of characteristic of this kind of dysfunctional relationship where you treat her like a princess and she treats you like a slave. Right. You know, and so that sort of Wilson Lennon relationship is duplicated between FDR and Stalin.

[Patrick Bet-David]

How did Wilson get inspired by Lena? Like, what happened? What was a single event? Is there an event or not?

[Curtis Yarvin]

So American, American socialism and the American leftism is older than the ussr, you know. And so the idea that basically this is this kind of Russian planted seed in our society that like can be eliminated by sort of, you know, spraying some kind of pesticide that kills all foreigners or something is not really accurate, actually.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We inspired Russia.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Inspired us.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's right, that's right, that's right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And where does Rog. Leftist, progressive communist ideas come from? Is it. Does it go back down to a single individual?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, it's actually a very deep, you know, it's a very deep sort of cultural trope in American history. Let me give you, let me walk through here's, here's. Since you have some nice research on the screen, we can follow along with this. You know, here's. Leftism is the real American tradition. America is and always has been a leftist country. I know that this is very difficult for conservatives to accept. It is unfortunately true. So, for example, let's consider Barack Obama. We're going to trace Barack Obama's ideas or ideas and origins back. So who was Barack Obama's mentor? Well, that's a little bit disputed.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We've hit a couple names.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes. But you might think of Bill Ayers.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I think that's a very legitimate connection. They were certainly close, arguably before it was said that they were close.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, I would have thought about Frank Marshall Davis.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, that's his. That's his. Probably his dad, actually, who's also. I mean, they look like. If you basically take Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley Ann Dunham's face and morph them together, it looks like Barack Obama. This is another thing. If I. If, you know, let's go full birther for a moment. Can we go full birther? Obviously, he was not born in Kenya. That's ridiculous. That would have never happened at this time. What I believe happened was that basically Stanley Dunham's black Dunham is also a communist. His black communist pornographer friend knocks up his teenage daughter. And the response is. And this was kind of a normal thing for 1960, the response is, let's find an African exchange student who can pretend to be the real father. Because actually, my black communist pornographer friend knocked up my daughter is not acceptable in any way, shape or form in 1960.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is that what you're saying happened?

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's. I'm pretty sure what happened. And that explains, just like. It explains the complete lack of a relationship between Barack Obama Sr. And Stanley Ann Dunham. It explains Barack Obama's relationship with the guy he calls Pop. It explains, like, you know, a zillion things. And it's just. It's actually kind of banal. What's actually not banal is that I think they got communists working in the state government in Hawaii to kind of forge the documentation a little bit, which is why you had that whole foo for all with the birth certificate. Which, by the way, we still have not seen.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Which, by the way, I won't tell you some crazy story. My graphic designer in my company, I was in Woodland Hills, California. You know, Woodland Hills, California, you may know. Woodland Hills, die hard. Obama guy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Armenian guy, grew up in Venezuela, liberal family, so he's supporter of it. Remember the day the White House dropped the birth certificate on their website?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He calls me. He says, can you come into my office? I said, what's up? He says. He says, this is not a birth certificate. I said, what do you mean? He says, pat, let me show you. He gets on there. He says, this is all layered. Yeah. So he himself, Obama guy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They left the layers in the file. They left the layers in the file. Right. And the thing is, actually, Barack Obama is perfectly eligible to be president under this theory.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, he was born to two American parents, Stanley Ann Dunham and Frank Marshall Davis. He was born, absolutely no question, in America, probably in Seattle. And then they basically went through this ridiculous foo. Furraw to get a black exchange student to pretend to be his father instead.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It was a. What? It was a porn?

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was Frank Marshall Davis.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Frank Marshall Davis is Barack Obama's father?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Your opinion?

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's my opinion. That's my opinion.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who else has that position?

[Curtis Yarvin]

You'll see. It's out there on the Internet. It's. Well, dreams for my real father, I think, is the. There's a video on it. You know, it's. You know, it's funny because Obama was visiting. When he was president, he was visiting a genomics company in California that I knew the founder of, and I was like, get a glass. Get a drinking glass. Get a glass and we'll find this out. Because he doesn't look anything like Barack Obama Senior. Pull up a picture of Barack Obama senior.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Nothing.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Nothing like them. Nothing, nothing like them. Right? You know, and they're black. That's clearly nothing like them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and. And so, like, this is a. You know, nobody thought at the time, this boy is going to grow up to be president. People are just like, you know, the word bastard still had an impact then, and nobody wanted this kid to grow up with the real story of how this happened. And so they came up with this bullshit. Right. You know, and. And, like, that's a sort of. It's a thing like the Stanley Levison thing, where you're just like. You could call it a conspiracy theory, but it's actually a pretty banal thing to do at that time. It's actually pretty normal. It would be very weird now. Nobody would do anything like that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Let's go back to. So what is the original left?

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, okay, we're going back from Barack Obama. You go back to Bill Ayers. Now, Bill Ayers was the head of what organization?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Which one?

[Curtis Yarvin]

The Weather Underground, right? The Weatherman.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes. Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Right. So very glamorous. Very. You saw this. Maybe you saw the. The. The awful. That awful Paul Thomas Anderson film. One battle after another, you know? Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I got a lot of movies to watch.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You. You don't want to watch.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I got to watch. I definitely have to watch John Reed, the red movie with reds.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Absolutely. No, no, I. You know. Oh, my God, this movie is so. It's like this antifa glorification movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. It's like. I wrote a review of it for the Spectator that was like, this may be the worst movie ever.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Which one is this? The latest movie that just came out.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, you can't watch it for the first. It's all about Illegal immigration or something. Is that the one you're talking about?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, my God.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh. It's called one of his worst movies of all time. It is said he watch it Rob the other day. For the first three minutes, he shut it down.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It may be one of the worst movies of all time.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Really.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It is artistically bad, it is dramatically bad. It is esthetically bad. And it is morally.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's Sean Penn in it. It's got Benicio Del Toro.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah. No, the acting is amazing. I mean, with some exceptions, but no. So, all right, so you go back to the Weatherman. The Weathermen are glamorous. You hear about them. You know, you're like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. Like, you know is. Bernadine Dorn is hot, right? You know, they're like, these are princelings. These are, you know, so. And in fact, you know who Bill Ayers father was? Thomas Ayers. And he was the CEO of Consolidated Edison. Okay, so this is a rich kid. This is like a, you know, major league rich kid. But let's go back to the Weatherman. So the Weathermen are a splinter faction of a group called Students for a Democratic Society. Sds, which you've probably. Probably heard of. And let's go.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I've heard of Students for Democratic Society.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Now, SDS is actually the youth wing of an organization which we're going to get successively cooler names here. We're going to some. Are you ready for some cooler names? So the SDS is originally the youth wing of something called the League for Industrial Democracy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Nice.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Capitalism and Social League for Industrial Democracy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Great name.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Very cool name. Could be a band, you know, could be a band Lead for Industrial Democracy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Lid.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And. And it's basically changes its name from something called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which you'll see up there. And if you click on the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Now we're in 1905.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Now we're in 1905. No, Moscow.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Czar is still on his throne. Tsar is still on his throne. Now if you look at the founders of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, you'll see some names that you might recognize. Like Upton Sinclair or Jack London. You've probably heard of Jack London, right? You know, this is again, this is like really deep in the mainstream. This is not, you know, here. Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London. You've heard of all these people, right? These are significant Americans. And this is not coming from the kgb. Okay. So actually these are patrician. These are top tier Americans. Right? So if you One of the things I discovered while looking at this is that you can go even farther back with this because one of the founders of the ISS is a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Now, this is not a name you're going to know. Higginson is chiefly known as the guy who discovered Emily Dickinson. That's his chief claim to fame. It's worthy claim to fame. But he's also, when the ISS is founded, he's like the old guy in the room. You'll go to these young revolutionary things. I'm becoming the old guy in the room. All these kids. And my audience base is. Is heavily under 30. Right. So you'll. Because those are the radicals. Right. But there's always like an old guy in the room. So the old guy in the room, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, what's interesting is that he was part of an earlier era when he was young. He was part of an earlier era of American radicalism. He was in fact a financier of terrorism. He was, he was, he was actually one of the supporters of the leading American terrorist of the period. And he was a member of a group, I don't know if they called themselves this, but they became called that. Brace yourself for a serious comic book name. The Secret Six.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The Secret Six.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The Secret Six. All right, all right, all right. You know, you're like, is this a real thing? Is this a real thing?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who's the secret six?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Who are the secret six? 1859, they were the equivalent of like basically wealthy Saudis who funded Osama.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What?

[Curtis Yarvin]

John Brown. You've heard of John Brown?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of course, John Brown.

[Curtis Yarvin]

John Brown.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But not the other names that I'm looking at.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, but like, you know, let's see.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who looks like an evil guy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He was a psycho. He was a moly and total psycho. And so, you know, the. One of the names of the, of the leading antifa organizations is the John Brown Gun Club. So we're really dealing with something. You cannot find any living conservative tradition in America with this kind of lineage.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But if you go back, if I read that, go back to rob what you just said, it doesn't sound so. An evangelical Christian of a strong religious conviction, Brown was profoundly influenced by the Puritan fate of his upbringing. He believed that he was an instrument of God raised to strike the death blow to slavery in the US that doesn't sound like a bad person. A sacred obligation. Brown was leading the exponent of violence in the American abolitionist abolished movement, believing it was necessary to end slavery after decades of peaceful protection.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He was previously Known for what's called the Potawatomi Massacre, where he was in Kansas where a lot of this trouble was happening. And he just basically drags people out of their house with swords and murders the. Not that Harper's Ferry was exactly a success either. And so, you know, he's basically. If you look at the abolitionists in the run up to the Civil War, they look very, very modern. So if you're looking at the Republicans in the world of Abraham Lincoln, there are actually two very different sort of directions that come together in the Republican party. There are the abolitionists and the anti slavery men. And this sounds like you're describing the same thing, right? In fact it's totally different. This is why the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, comes so late in the war. And it has to be pretend to be a military measure because actually if you went into a bar in Richmond in 1861 and someone asked you to explain the war and you said this war is a holy crusade by the abolitionist north to abolish slavery in the south, they would clap you on the back and buy you another beer. If you said that in Chicago, they'd kick your ass. Right. So the anti slavery men. The first Republican presidential candidate is John C. Fremont, which a lot of you know, who also conquered California. So a lot of stuff is named for him. There's a town of Fremont near where I live. Fremont's slogan was free men, free soil Fremont. So if you were a free soiler.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In the world, free soil Fremont.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, very, very catchy. So what free soil meant was that basically slaves should not be allowed in the territories that were not incorporated as states. And you're like, well, you know, you're against slavery. We're all against slavery. You know, actually the free soil men had a very specific point. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like black people. They were actually. And the anti the abolitionist movement had many tropes of sort of a modern perspective on race. But the anti slavery men were hardcore racists. So for example, Oregon, you might not know this Oregon until I believe the 1970s. It was obviously a dead letter. Prohibited black people from entering the state of Oregon.

[Patrick Bet-David]

1970, just 50 some years ago.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, in the 1970s. I forget when it was actually taken out of the Constitution. Oregon was never like, you know, obviously never a Confederate state. There was never any Confederate Oregon.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, you're right. The banned black people from entering the state were part of history long before.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Related racist language in the state. I'm a little wrong on the dates Related racist language in the state, state constitution remained until 2002.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, and this is because of basically the anti slavery man heritage. The western Republicans were anti slavery. The chic people in Boston were abolitionists. And they managed to form this coalition which was the coalition of Lincoln. But if you look at the way Puritans and abolitionists thought, very, very, very similar to liberals today. Very similar kind of mindset, similar kind of messianic, you know, and they had all kinds of causes. You know, abolitionism was just one of them. Prohibition was another huge cause of these same people. Right. And so you kind of recognize when you learn to basically, you know, think about Harvard for a moment, in a way, Harvard has been the leading institution in American intellectual life for literally almost 400 years. It was founded in 1636. If you look at basically what are the ideas of Harvard at date D, you are going to find them running America at date D + 10 years D + 50 years D + 100 years. Right. And so Harvard was founded as a Puritan institution. Obviously it was a Puritan college for ministers. Actually, I learned this. I did a debate at Harvard about six months ago with a professor there. And for this I boned up on the history and I discovered that Harvard is actually somewhat implicated in the Salem witch craze.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What did they say when he brought that up?

[Curtis Yarvin]

They didn't know anything about it. She, she didn't know anything about it. But the, the. But, you know, so you have this sort of puritan religion of Harvard that basically you can watch sort of morph over time from like Puritanism into like pure hippieism. And it, like, there's never a break in that. There's never. No foreign army ever comes and takes over Harvard. Like it's always sort of this process of a kind of internal becoming really. And you can see how puritanism in the 17th century becomes purity, basically American progressive communism in the 20th and even 21st centuries. And so to understand history in this way, as a conservative, you're just like, wait a second. America for its entire life has been on the left side of the political spectrum. So for example, America is founded by these Puritan settlers. And the Puritans are of course Calvinists. And you can find actually, in a way, the first woke regime in history was actually the strange regime of Edward vii. No, the sixth, sixth or the seventh, maybe the sixth. I think the sixth, who is basically this boy king who comes after Henry VIII and before Bloody Mary. No, Edward vi. Sorry. And real brain fart. So basically you Know, Henry VIII has this, of course, religious revolution where he breaks with Rome for various personal and political reasons. But he's not quite part of the, like, extreme left wing, and I think you can really use this term at this time, kind of Protestant thing that's going on in Europe. But of course, he's influenced by this sort of whole Gutenberg revolution in thinking. And after he dies, his son, who is sickly and young, is basically tutored by these radical Protestants who basically create this kind of proto Puritan regime in England that lasts only for a few years because Edward VI dies young and is replaced by Mary Tudor, who tries to return the country to Catholicism. She also died somewhat prematurely. And then you have the Elizabethan world. Point is, you can connect basically in this sort of continuous ideological and cultural thread. You can go all the way back to 16th century England from Barack Obama. You can connect the abolitionists to the Puritans, you can connect the Puritans to the Tudors. And like, this is not, you know, this is actually just normal history. It's the way things work. Right. It's not particularly crazy. But the thing is, if you situate yourself properly in history in this way, you know, you sort of realize that, like, for example, if you're like a conservative, which you sort of find yourself trying to restore is like kind of previous generations of, you know, how many, many more people move from being liberal to conservative than the other direction and the people who will move in the other direction.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Every state plus, minus was more red. 20, 24. Every county, every state.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But I'm thinking more of like, of, of like. Yeah, there's that. But I'm thinking more of like intellectuals, like, you know, pundits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You'll see pundits who start off on the left and move over to the right in their lifetime. All over the place, all over history.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sure.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know. Yeah. Burke, for example, the, like, the idol of American conservatives. He's a Liberal in the 1770s. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But that does kind of make sense. You're being brainwashed by.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I know. And you're. And you're just like getting into, like, reality. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Life hasn't happened yet. You have.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Life hasn't happened yet. And then if you look at the people that move from conservative to liberal, they're really problematic people. They're people with like, serious biggest names.

[Patrick Bet-David]

By the way, David Brock. Who else?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Of Media Matters.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, Media Matters. He moved from the right to the left.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah. David Brock. David Brock got his start writing Hit pieces on Hillary Clinton.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But what is the profile of people that move from the right to the left?

[Curtis Yarvin]

They're psychopaths.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Really? Tell me why.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because they, they're, they're like. Because to go from left to right is a kind of waking up to reality, but actually the idea of, like, reversing that process and putting yourself to sleep and saying, you know, it's like, you know, you know what those people are like. They're like the guy in the Matrix who wants the juicy steak. You know, there's a lot of that basically in those people. They're like, how about I'll go with a nice juicy steak, right? I know it's not real, but elite it. And David Brock has had a, you know, pretty impressive career as a left wing hitman, right? You know, and before that, he had a reasonably impressive career as a right wing hitman, but he is actually like, you know, just a man completely.

[Patrick Bet-David]

First time I learned about Media Matters, we had an event, and at this event we're having Jordan Peterson, Kobe Bryant, Bean, George Bush. This is eight years ago, seven years ago.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. Seems like a different world, doesn't it?

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's a different world. And then both Bush's team and Kobe said, when we go to events, you're gonna get some hate coming your way. We're like, who's gonna say anything? Like, we're bringing Kobe because he's greatness, George because president. And then we're bringing Peterson for debate, and then Billy Beane. He's a baseball guy. I like him. Media Matters writes a hit piece on us, and then they reach out to me and they said, look, we just want you to know we're sorry that you're going through this. I'm like, are you guys good with it? Because I'm good with this. No, we're good with it. We ended up having the best event ever in 2018, 2019. So that's the first time I learn about how good they can be by going out there and do it. But that's interesting to say. When you go from right to left, I wonder how much of it is them being offended. I wonder how much of it is, you know, promised a job or a position that the other side didn't do it and say, I'm going to go to the other side. I wonder what the patterns are. Because it can't be values.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it's not in good faith. Whatever it is, it's not in good faith. It's a. It's just. It's a career move. It's a, like, you know, and it's a career move and it often comes out of like a kind of personality disorder, I think, you know, like David Brock's a weird guy, right? You know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can you pull him up? Can you pull up David Brock? You said he's a weird guy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He's a weird guy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And he went from a conservative writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton to go into the other side. Liberal Politico on Sunday has been one of times most influential operatives in the Democratic party. Led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. Brock began as a right wing investigative reporter from 1990s. He wrote the book Real Anita Hill and Trooper Gate Story. And aligning himself with the Democratic party, he switched with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. He founded Media Matters, a nonprofit organization to scrub progressive.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Pull up a picture. Pull up a picture. But he's a weird, he's a weird, weird looking guy. Yeah. Fizzy. I'm a strong believer in physio.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Is he married? Is he straight? Is he is.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's look at him. Let's, let's, let's.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I don't know what he looks like. Go to images. That's the look of somebody that would go from the right to the left.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You look like that. That's the look. You look like that. You look like a child molester, basically. And oh great, now I've made some enemies.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's like, look at those eyes, man. You know, it's like the, you know how, you know how those crazy women in England who like slept with a thousand guys in a day or whatever, they have these dead eyes?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And all like horrors and porn stars have like dead eyes. It's horrifying.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Like, he's got dead eyes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He's got dead eyes.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He looks like the guy from Lawless, the movie. I don't know if you've seen Lawless. It's a, that's a movie you got to watch. I'm making one movie recommendation because I got 28 movies I got to go watch after talking to you. But in Lawless, the evil guy, can you pull up Lawless villain? Put Lawless, movie villain. Lawless, movie villain. Go to images. He's got, you know that look, Zoom in, zoom into that look.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He just doesn't care.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, he's like, he could care less with the last hour we got together. I want to talk to you about a couple things, especially with the whole time that's going on right now. I'm curious to know what to say about this one. Monarchy, democracy. Let's just case study. I pulled it up and I kind of went up through a couple different things. When we looked at monarchies and, you know, democracy, the longest lasting democracy was US 238 NC, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, you know, Luxembourg, Belgium, couple of these guys. And then when you go up and pull up longest lasted monarchies, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, uk, Morocco. I kind of brought it up a little bit earlier. Why do monarchies outlast democracies?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, I would say the question is more why is monarchy almost the universal form of political organization found throughout history, even in cultures that have no connection with each other? So for example, when the conquistadors who are working for monarchy come to South America, they find the Aztecs, they find the Incas, they don't find any hippie tribes. Nobody's ever found any hippie tribes. And you know, the. Well, there's one interesting exception actually. But they basically find, you know, if you go back all the way to the chimpanzee, you will find that our ancestors for many, many millions of years have been living in small groups with individual leaders. Chimpanzees, you know, have kinks, they sometimes have a little triumvirate or whatever, but that's not really stable. They have, you know, chimp kings, actually. And being the chimp king is definitely the way to pass your jeans on as a chimpanzee. They make war. People were very surprised to find, you know, these things. And you know, everyone in the 1960s and 70s wanted to believe that we were descended from, you know, millions of years of hippies. And it was a big shock to found that even chimpanzees make war. And they make war in a very, very ugly way, right? So you have this sort of, this form which is really the universal form of human governance historically. But it's more than the universal form historically. It's also when you look at basically any effective organization, whether that's a company, whether it's a military, whether it's a movie. You've probably heard of the auteur theory of movies. You know, imagine a film directed by a committee. You're just like, you know, even in a restaurant you have a chef, right? And so this structure of basically, you know, the sort of the pyramid shaped command structure is something that recurs over and over again in human affairs. And if there was a way to build more effective organizations than a structure shaped like this, somebody would have found it. And so actually, if you want to get Anything done, you have a monarchy. And this is one of the reasons why essentially we see that structures other than monarchies. And of course, democracy is a very tricky word because just because it calls itself that doesn't mean it's that. But fundamentally what you're seeing, whether something is a democracy or an oligarchy, is you're seeing a lot of division of power. And you don't see that ever in a functional company, for example, because a company is not going to survive that. Imagine if Apple had checks and balances and maybe a Supreme Court that decided if its software wasn't buggy and the users of Apple products voted on the next feature. And maybe you had an Apple Congress of all the engineers or something, right? You know, there's no way you could build an iPhone in this way, right? There's also no way that, you know, the Department of Transportation could build a Tesla.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right?

[Curtis Yarvin]

These are just organizations that have much, much, much lower effectiveness structures. They're bureaucracies, they're bottom up systems, they're process oriented. Like the paperwork just multiplies infinitely until you really just can't build a railroad from SF to la. And you look at systems that are organized monarchically and you're just like, this is like not just twice as effective, this is 10 times as effective, this is 100 times as effective. And we happen to be competing with this country, China, which is very much a monarchy, which has this very interesting history where its monarchy was really founded by this. It's almost a worst case scenario. This psychopath Mao, he's really. Mao is just not a. He was a crazy dude, right? And one of the things that Mao did coming out of this revolutionary communist, you know, world that he was in, he did the same thing that Stalin did, which is that he killed everyone in the party who threatened him. And so he established this incredible level of like monarchy, you know, in China. Not of course a monarchy in name, but, you know, the rule of one person in China. He was a psycho. Millions of people, maybe tens of millions of people died. And then Mao dies. Mao dies and there's a struggle for power and he's created this incredible monarchy. And this monarchy is taken over by Deng Xiaoping. And Deng Xiaoping is actually capable, is actually like, you know, all of the leaders of China since Mao were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping had a horrible experience, like his sister was killed, right? You know, and so all of these guys, like, they're competent guys, they're done with any of this ma. And they just want to rule their country. And so Deng Xiaoping takes China as a monarchy, and his successors take China from this, like, backwater third world country. You know, one fact about China that most people don't know, like, if you go to China, you can't drink the water. Everything is crazy modern. You go to the subway, it's beautiful, it's gleaming, whatever. You can't drink the water because it still has the DNA of a third world country, because nobody expected to be able to drink the water in China, so nobody bothered fixing it. So actually, you can't drink the water, right? But everything else is just gleaming, whatever. You know, they're killing us. They're actually. They're destroying our country. They're literally killing us because they're beating us, right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

And China's beating us.

[Curtis Yarvin]

China's beating us. China's beating us. There's only a few technical areas where we still have a lead on China. China is beating us.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Like, in what areas? In what areas?

[Curtis Yarvin]

What? In this room was not made in China. I mean, literally, what in this room was not made in China, right? That screen was made in China. That screen was made in China. Everything was made in China. So I mean, like, basically, like, in terms of. And if you go from, you know, the train station in the metro in Shanghai to the metro New York, you will feel like you have just traveled to a third world country. You go from Dubai to jfk and you're like, you've traveled to a third world country, and then you go from JFK to, say, Sao Paulo, and you're like, oh, yeah, another step down, right? That's basically how bad it is. And there are a few technical areas. There's like, reusable rockets and deep ultraviolet lithography and. And, you know, a couple other things where the US is still ahead of China, but they are beating us. And they have put us in the same position that we were in with respect to the ussr, where everybody in the USSR could basically look at American gadgets, American stuff, and basically.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What do you call China, though? China. China wouldn't be. What would China be considered to you?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, it's a monarchy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What would Russia be considered to you?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Russia is also a monarchy now. These are monarchies where, you know, they haven't established, like, China. China is a monarchy, you know, the final monarchy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In your eyes, what is the rule of one? Rule of one. This is the whole Aristotle, one to many.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes. Literally the rule of one.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We are the third one under Aristotle's ideas.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Is that what you were? An oligarchy? We're an oligarchy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We're an oligarchy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We're an oligarchy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay?

[Curtis Yarvin]

And, and so if you, if you were an oligarchy that, you know, Trump would like us to be a democracy, but we're still an oligarchy. And you're reminded of that every time a judge overrules him. And the, the. But in China, China's a monarchy. It's not a hereditary monarchy. Now a lot of people in the, you know, it's a sort of, it's more like a theocracy. It's an institutional monarchy. And the rules for choosing the next leader are very strange and opaque. And we don't really know what happens when Xi Jinping dies. We don't really know what happens when Putin dies. Nobody has any idea what happens when Putin dies.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Isn't that a.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's a flaw.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's a flaw in the monarchy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's a flaw. That's a flaw. And so what you're seeing is basically because these monarchies have to pretend to be something else. You know, you'll have these like dictators and the dictator is like, you know, even in the Roman Empire, they never used the word king. They were just like, oh, I'm just the first citizen. You know, that's the origin of the word prince, the first citizen. Oh, you're the first citizen. No, you're the frickin king. Right. But they never use the Roman word rex, which means king in the Roman Empire. Imperator just means commander. So and they had. And this chaotic succession system basically broke down in the Roman Empire. So in the Roman Empire you have what's called, you know, first of all, Caesar and Augustus are absolutely great, their successors, so forth. And then you have this period of what's called the five good emperors from Marcus Aurelius is the last, and the first is Trajan, I think Trajan or Hadrian. You know, this is like a period over, of over 100 years where Edward Gibbon is like, this is the best government, you know, humanity has ever seen. And they adopted their successors. So it was a little more like the Chinese system in some ways. But when you have what's called in the 20th century a dictatorship, it's sort of a monarchy that's struggling to be born and often struggling to be born under very, very chaotic circumstances. So Napoleon, for example, does this. Napoleon is a leftist general in Reign of Terror era France and becomes his first. They're larping Rome, so he's like the first Consul and he's like, screw It, I'm going to make myself emperor and he makes himself emperor.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And he intended to pass on that role to his, to his family and he used his family a lot. But in the end, of course it didn't work out. You know, Hitler is kind of a shit tier Napoleon in some ways and he never had a family. Hitler was probably gay. I think Hitler's probably gay. It was probably gay. So look, same thing about Obama. If you see a guy who is a highly charismatic world leader and he is not surrounded by flocks of women at all times, what would you guess? Right? You know, you know about the Obama gay thing, I assume?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Ever seen, ever seen a video of Hitler doing a Hitler salute? He's like, he's. So your gaydar goes off, you just, you're looking at Hitler and you're like, that's Hitler. And like if you have any kind of gaydar at all and you're watching Hitler, you're like, that is a gay man.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow. You're saying Hitler is gay?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, yeah, but if you see the videos. Oh yeah, this is, there's a thesis, there's a very well written book by a German historian called the Hidden Hitler that makes this point like really, really strongly. Like he's hanging out in the men's hostel in Vienna which was a, you know. Yeah, that one, which is a, like a gay prostitution site. I don't think he wanted to be gay. He wasn't like a believer in like gay.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Recruited.

[Curtis Yarvin]

What?

[Patrick Bet-David]

He got recruited.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't know how he became gay, but you know, but I, I, I think he really wanted Eva Brown to really be his wife, but he was basically attracted to men. And you know, as to what's going.

[Patrick Bet-David]

On with you today, you're going to tell me gay. And you know, Hitler and Obama have the, are both gay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, I think so.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Both of them. That would be an interesting.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay, I think so. But you know, that's, they obviously are, you know, very different in many other ways. So you know, going back to the question.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Monarchy, democracy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Monarchy, oligarchy, Democracy.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And the thing is that everyone basically looks. And this is I think the crucial point here, you know, for Americans because they basically look at this oligarchy which is pretending to be a democracy and they're like, this is just a lie. And they can tell that this is a lie. They can say, hey, this is this other thing that's pretending to be this thing. You know, basically the way the deep state works is the deep State, you know, is the administrative state, the executive, you know, branch nominally. But the so called executive branch is actually run by Congress. It is run by the legislative branch. The legislative branch controls its budget down to very small micro budgeting levels. It controls its policy, and most of all, it controls its personnel. As you know, you can't fire these people. Imagine being the CEO, but you can't fire these. Imagine you're the CEO of this podcast, but you can't fire the people who work for you. What? Right. That makes no sense. Right. It's not actually an executive branch. We actually don't have an executive branch. We have a legislative branch. And moreover, the thing about this legislative branch is that it's controlled by Congress. Now, Congress ostensibly is democratically elected. We do have these elections. Almost nobody cares about congressional elections. The popularity rating of Congress, I think it might be over 30%. Now, this is very unusual.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the 27? I don't know what it is now, but I know when. As low as 27?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, no, it's been as low as Congress. It's been as low as 12. It gets us.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, you got to be kidding me.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What's the popularity of Congress right now, Rob?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I could be up in the 30s. That's very high.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I thought it was 27, but maybe it is 30s today. Approval rating of Congress, what is it? 14. 14.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Gallup. Oh, it's up to 17.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, right, you know, this is, and this is the organization.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So what was the highest. Go to the Highest point. Popularity. 2009.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's on the line. 1184. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a weird, you know, but like the thing is 17%, right? So here's, here's, here's how you keep the system from, you know, being an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It's really very easy. You basically run the whole executive branch procedurally according to what is called sort of laws that are passed by Congress, which are actually like micromanagement bills, as you know, thick as 10 phone books stacked on top of each other, which almost no congressman read. Then you have an electoral system where if you run for, if you're an incumbent running for the House of Representatives, your chance of being reelected is roughly 98%. Like in the Senate it's a little lower. It's more like 90%. However, if you get unelected, very sad. Whoever replaces you has no power at all because of the seniority system, which by the way, is found nowhere in the Constitution. And so if you manage to unelect. Like they. Unelected. Who did they unelect in? This guy, Dave Bratt. Unelected. A guy in Virginia a few years ago. You unelect one of these dinosaurs, like a Mitch Mountain McConnell or whatever. Good luck. His place is Eric Cantor. Yeah, Eric Cantor, One of the classic GOPE guys. His place is immediately taken by one of his fellows and you don't get his job because actually, the whole thing is run on the seniority system. And so actually, like, you know, one way to test whether a political system or a political power or political structure has become symbolic is to say, if we remove this structure, can the system work in the same way? So, for example, you know, if you remove Charles III from England, will daily life on the streets of England change at all? No, because he's not involved in government whatsoever. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, if you want the monarchy to have influence, you don't want a king that does not have influence. That's just a figurehead.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it's a fake figure.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You're not a fan of the figurehead?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I'm not a fan of the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because you think America is a figurehead.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think that actually democracy has entered the figurehead model. And so essentially, when you get.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So people would disagree with you on Trump, though, for Trump to be a figurehead, he's getting a lot of things done as A.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Again, 0.001%. Right. Remember what he's getting. Yeah, he's getting a lot of things done, but relative to his predecessors, he's getting a lot of things done, but on an absolute historical scale, still not really that much and the like. Again, if you're basically. If you're on that zero to one scale, the question you have to ask is, could this be multiplied by 10? Because if it could be multiplied by 10, it's less than 0.1. If it could be multiplied by 100, it's less than 0.01. And so if you basically see.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yes, you're going to keep going backwards. Sorry, you're going to keep going backwards. There is no progress.

[Curtis Yarvin]

What do you mean?

[Patrick Bet-David]

How do you make progress with that? If you have the system that you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Actually have to enter a completely. Yeah, you have to multiply. No, it doesn't have to be nasty. And that's. I think the most important thing is that actually you can get up to those higher levels of power without it being nasty. If you look at, for example, the fall of East Germany, almost complete change of power. It's not Quite Germany in 1945, it's pretty close. Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But somebody from the west got up and said, tear down that wall. So there was another, there was another force figure that was pushing you. So who can do that to America though?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, nobody's there. That's true, that's true, that's true. It's a different situation.

[Patrick Bet-David]

If I may, let me say this because I want to go to the Iran situation to see. Cause you know, you've commented on Iran as well. So I think about democracy, monarchy. Like when I'm processing and watching what you're saying in other interviews and then I'm saying, I'm asking questions. Okay, what is the benefit sell monarchy? Monarchy to me is 75 by birth, 25 by sword. So 25 by sword. And it says the last time somebody replaced the king by sword was 1689. Since then it's been pretty much by birth. Okay. Of the 75, that's by birth. There is no competition in a monarchy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But you're not including dictators in that sense.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I'm not putting dictators.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So if you look at, if you look at, say.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But if you let me make the points of where I'm going with this is the monarchy side. If it's by birth, there is no competition. It's the oldest son. It used to be 50% oldest son in the 1600s, then it went to 60%. Today it's about 80% is the oldest son that replaces the king. So 30 years in advance I know who's going to be my king. So it's not like I'm going to go run and campaign. And then it says monarchies make more long term decisions with debt than in America. On a democracy you may offer anything to get elected because it's a four year election cycle. But then at least in a democracy you have more freedom, more say in a monarchy you can be, you can get a good leader, good king and then all of a sudden the next guy comes up and holy shit, this guy's a, you know, dictator. Control doesn't want you to say anything. You lose your freedom of speech, you lose your freedom of innovation. He has, you have to listen to certain things. Maybe because he had a big fallen out with his father and he hates his father and my father's an evil man. I'm gonna do everything different than my father because he didn't respect me enough and didn't. We've seen these stories, right, that you go through.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh sure. So, so monarchies, monarchies have a lot of, have a lot of failure modes. Right. And Historical monarchies have a lot of different kinds of failure modes. You can have a king who's the oldest son. He's mentally retarded. Right. You know, Charles is gonna be a tough king. Charles ii. Charles II of Spain. Right.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, Charles II of Spain was a king and he was mentally retarded.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, he was like. There was too much inbreeding going on and the. Yeah. So, you know, when you have. When you have our Henry VI of England, you know, also, that guy's name is Charles. Yeah. Carlos.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not Carlita?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, that's Carlos. Carlos. And yeah, no, he was. He was. It was too much inbreeding. Wow.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, and working out too.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, look at him. Look at him. The face is just. Something's wrong with that guy. Right. So. So the thing is that. That, you know, historically, there's a lot of different systems of finding a single leader. Now, for me, actually, two things. One is that some of the problems that were caused by biological inheritance in the past don't exist anymore because it's actually with modern ivf, you know, Henry VIII doesn't have this problem of, I need to marry a woman to find someone who's going to give me a son and not succeed in that. You know, you can have a couple hundred. Right. The Ottomans did this thing where it wasn't the oldest son. Oh, no. Actually, it was all the sons of the last sultan. And he had a harem, so he had a lot of sons. And they basically fought it out to be, who's the next sultan?

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's not gonna work today.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And the others were strangled with the silken bowstring. Right. You know, that's not gonna work today. There's a lot of things that are sort of like, not gonna work today. What we have that works today, that's sort of. In a way, the inspiration is, you know, this feeling that basically as soon as you get into the private sector, suddenly just like, everything works like magic. You're just like, wow. You know, the California Department of Transportation could never build an electric car, but Elon Musk can build an electric car.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You're obviously. You're looking at monarchy there, right? And you're looking at the sort of superiority of a monarchical structural organization.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He is still held accountable by the government, though.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He is held accountable. So he's held accountable in two way, actually. He's held accountable by the government who's above him. And he's also held accountable by corporate governance, which is shareholders and a board of directors. Now, if you so. So There are sort of things you can learn from that at a sovereign level, but definitely at a sovereign level, you don't have a government over the government. Right? You're. You're really at the top.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's what I'm saying. So. So the question then the average person may ask is, what would Elon do if he knew he had zero regulatory guidelines to be dealing with today? What would Elon be doing today?

[Curtis Yarvin]

So I think that actually Elon would not be doing anything that super different from what he's doing. But this sort of bears, this sort of comes into one of the factors in the way Americans think about governance, where they're basically, you remember I said earlier that there's this kind of schizophrenia where Americans think they have an absolutely terrible government and the best system of government anywhere. So one of the things, when you're in any sort of terrible situation, one of the things that is often causing you to be trapped in a terrible situation is this little principle called the perfect is the enemy of the good. And you're basically like, here we're in this terrible situation. How do I get to a perfect situation? You've probably known many people in many ways who've been paralyzed and trapped many by the how do we get to the perfect situation?

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so those types of people don't make it in business.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, they don't. And you've got to be ready to make those compromises. And so when I look at sort of the way, at the position that we're in today, which is a very, very difficult position, because as I said earlier, I think meritocracy really accurately sees many flaws in populism. And I think populism sees many flaw, many flaws accurately in meritocracy. You know, it's like, basically, let's take, for example, Covid as an example of this. Now, you know, you might be familiar with the vast flow of dissenting Covid information out there. There are a vast quantity of memes. Some of these memes are true. Some of these memes are obviously false. Some of them, I can't really tell. It is just a giant polluted river of information. And you basically say from the perspective of someone of a blue stater who believes in meritocracy, you would basically say, wow, I'm going to put this sewer in charge of virology. It's like the cartoon of the guy who wants to fly the plane, right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

No, that cartoon is fascinating, by the way, that cartoon. Can you send that cartoon to me? Please continue.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so you look at this from the perspective of blue state America. And you're just like, oh, my God, really? We're going to have this highly detailed, technical, scientific thing, and it's going to be run by who has the best rumor in Facebook Moms. Like, no, this is ridiculous. This is an absurd way to run a railroad. And of course, they're completely right about that. And then populists will look at this and be like, all right, it sounds reasonable that we will have virologists run virology. But you know what happens if we have virologists run virology? They invent Covid. And in fact, if you look at basically the story of how Covid was invented, it looks like something that would be done by a mad scientist. Like an evil mad scientist would be like, oh, yes, we're going to go into the, you know, wow, there was this one pandemic, sars, one that looked really dangerous. So, wow, we could get some dangerous viruses here. I'm a mad scientist. I'm going to get some dangerous viruses. So we're going to go to all the bat cat Bat caves in southern China and Lao, and we're going to collect all the bat coronaviruses.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because she knew about it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, it was not actually. This is the crazy thing. This was actually just a normal process.

[Patrick Bet-David]

They didn't, like, Fauci knew about it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He knew about it in the sense of. Here. I think it's worth going longer into the interpretation of COVID Notice that one of the things that nobody talked about in the 2024 election was Covid. It was not a political issue at all. It's insane.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you think?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because it's too big to handle. We actually couldn't fit it on stage. Here's the reason why it was too big to handle. So, you know, you basically have all these Covid myths, these populous Covid myths going around. You know, is it because it's too.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Big to handle or because the left would have looked bad?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because both, it's the same thing. So not only would the left of. Look, Covid was an American Chernobyl. Covid was an American Chernobyl. Except it killed, like, you know, a thousand times as many people. Right. Because it was a Early Covid was a nasty virus. You did not want to get early Covid.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Oh, I got it. I was down for 21 days. Yeah, I lost £25.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it was brutal. It was brutal. As soon as Omicron came out, that should have been the end of it. Actually. There's. There's another conspiracy theory that Omicron was actually a vaccine. Because Omicron appears. Omicron is great. Saved my life when I got Omicron. I was like, oh my God, you got Omicron? I got Omicron.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Okay, what was the third one?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Delta was. Delta was. Delta was before Omicron. Delta was nasty. Omicron comes out and has two things about Omicron. One is that it's descended from a strain of virus that hasn't been seen in the wild for like six months to a year. Okay, where was it? It wasn't in the wild. It was in the lab. Secondly, it has signs of being adapted to rodents. Maybe it was hanging out in sewer rats. I don't know. Maybe it was hanging out in a frickin lab. Maybe it was actually. Someday we will find out that it was actually a good mad scientist who invented Omicron and saved us from this garbage. But to get back to the invention of COVID here's what happened. And I think this basically says a lot about the way our political system, the way this like, meritocracy works. So if you want to be a scientist, I'm, in a way, a scientist.

[Patrick Bet-David]

May I ask you why your eyes?

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's just, it's. It's like. It's so fucking dramatic. It's just like.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are you getting emotional? Truly?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. This has happened four times in the interview already.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Wow.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, because it's just like an incredible fucking story. Because let me tell you the true story of COVID okay? The true story of COVID was this is the way our country is governed. So you're a scientist. Okay. You probably know a lot of scientists. You know, I dropped out of a PhD program myself. How do you work as a scientist? You're a bureaucrat. You're writing grant proposals. Okay, what does your grant proposal say? This is important. The government should fund it. This is important. Here's what happened with COVID Stars. One happens. It's absolutely what it's purported to be. It's a bad virus that gets loose. You ever see the film Contagion? It's a Steven Soderbergh film.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Matt Damon. Is it Matt Damon?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think it's Matt Damon. You know, the technical advisor for Contagion was. Was one of the coronavirus crew. And the virus in Contagion actually is a bat coronavirus.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And so that movie was going viral the first week of COVID Second week of COVID March, April, whatever it was.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it was in. I watched it with my late wife when Covid started. And if you look at. SO sars, one happens, clearly a real problem. If you're a virologist, you go after real problems because real problems get you grants, right? The problem of bat coronaviruses mutating to become viruses that affect humans. A zoonosis. That's a real thing. Bam. Researchers converge on this like crazy, and they're like, you know. But what are we going to research exactly? Well, we're going to research the possibility that bat coronaviruses will mutate to infect humans. Of course, they're bad viruses. They don't naturally infect humans. But when we find one that comes close, ooh, it's a big surprise. How are they going to mutate? Well, mutations happen randomly in nature. How do we predict. That was one of the names of one of the study programs. How do we predict what mutations could happen in future to make SARS happen again? Well, we'll make them ourselves. You basically got this research program which is completely normal science. This was not a Chinese program. This was an American research program, mainly run out of the University of North Carolina by this guy Ralph Barrack. And the. Peter Daszak is the kind of the big grant coordinator for all this stuff, you know, still walking around free as a bird. And they basically have all of these bureaucratic incentives to act like mad scientists. They basically have. Because if you can take a bat coronavirus and mutated to become dangerous. That's a paper. The paper says bat coronaviruses are dangerous. Please give us more money. This treadmill is still going on, right? And in fact, the guy who replaced Fauci, I think his name is Eichelberger, as the head of American virology, Fauci has the remarkable distinction of being the guy who supervised this research, then covered it up and was in charge of the response to it. Truly insane episode. Truly insane.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And you literally pardoned. So you can't touch them.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think they could, but they're not. They're not. They're not. They're not going to try to prosecute this stuff.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you say that? Why?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because that's what I heard from people who were involved.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Because both sides.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because, no, because they just don't. That gets more into sort of what the mission of the Republican world in Washington sees itself as doing. They are basically. They're more like, what would be the point? And I'm like, I can tell you what the point is, but like, they're more like, what would be the point? But let me finish my story, because it's a great twist, please. So Fauci is out. He's out with the Trump administration. And certainly, I think most Americans do know or suspect that it was a lab leak. Either it was a lab leak or the world's most remarkable coincidence ever. I don't know if you've seen the Jon Stewart clip on Covid. Oh, my God. It's the best thing. John Stewart.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, of course. With Stephen Colbert. Oh, yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's the best thing.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You can't talk about.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's the best thing. It's the best thing Stewart ever did.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He was the first guy on the left who did that. And Colbert was uncomfortable.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah. He destroyed that. Right. You know, and like, you're just like, God, this guy's talented. Right? And, you know, the pangolin kissed the. Kiss the bat, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, so anyway, this guy's out, and Eichelberger is the new head of American virology. I think that's his name is Ian. And Eichelberger's claim to fame, he hadn't worked on back coronaviruses at all. His claim to fame, his mad scientist. You got to be in the head of the mad scientist. Imagine you're a mad scientist or you want to be a mad scientist. And is it Eichelbergers, the head of is the Fauci's replacement. If you want to be a. A mad scientist, you're in the shower, you're having mad scientist, you know, realizations, Right? And this mad scientist in the shower is like, I can recreate the 1918 flu. How are you going to recreate the 1918 flu? He's like, well, the 1918 flu spread all around the world, killed 20 million people. Whatever, whatever. And it infected Alaska. And in Alaska, they have permafrost. And I can go to Alaska and dig up a dead body from the permafrost that died in the 1918 pandemic, and I can resurrect the 1918 flu, and this will make me a famous scientist. And he did that. And now he's. Fortunately, I think we're immune to the 1918 flu, but. Or it didn't leak, but literally that's how he made his bones. I think it's J. Eichelberger or something like that. It's Fauci's replacement. If you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who is Fauci's replacement? I'm really curious about this guy now. I'm seeing Hugh. He's the head of Hawkin Kloss.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, that was Fauci's Aide Gene Marrazzo. No, those.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Jeffrey Taubenburger.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sorry, let you. Let you.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Jeffrey Tauben Burger.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, I knew I had it wrong.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Who gave him the job?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Who appointed a Trump is a Trump appointee. And if you. He was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu, and he published that genome, which means that anyone who can basically print DNA can have themselves a nice new Spanish flu. Right. And so when you basically ask to sort of pull back for a minute, why can't we get the mad scientists out of virology? Why do virologists insist on basically behaving as if their job was to invent dangerous viruses, as though they were mad scientists?

[Patrick Bet-David]

So you would categorize them as a mad scientist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, the thing is. No, actually he's a totally banal normal scientist. And what's crazy, what's really important about this regime of experts is the way in which sort of normal people become, by doing normal things, become mad scientists. Because what you're really looking at here with virology, and we'll relate this back to foreign policy in a moment, what you're really looking at here with gain of function research in virology is a conflict of interest. Because when you have a conflict of interest, you have the nominal interest of some person or organization and you have their actual interest. The nominal interest of virologists is to go to war against viruses, to kill all the viruses. If you're a virologist and like, you know, could snap your fingers and kill all the viruses, that would be optimal. Except, you know what? If you could do that, you wouldn't have a job anymore.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That makes sense. Right. And so what we got is this situation in which the nominal interest of virologists beating viruses is totally at cross purposes with the actual incentive on virologists, which is to make more and more dangerous viruses.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can we.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So the incentive basically is making them mad scientists. And that's sort of the problem, the structural problem.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I totally see that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And when populists look, you know, when populists look at Washington, they don't have this kind of intricate incentive based theory, but they're like, something is really wrong there, right? You know, and like when they look at the lab leak, they're just like, you know, it's like, I think what Peter Thiel once said about, you know, Trump, which was that he was sort of, you should take him seriously, but not literally, right? And that's sort of True of like populism in general. Populism sees this thing and it's like, let's take the cartoon with the airplane. Suppose you're in. Remember that airline that flew out over the Indian Ocean and disappeared? If you're an MH370. Yeah. You stand up and take control of the cockpit because that plane is going nowhere good. And when you see the way this sort of system of the rule of institutions and experts has developed, developed all of these conflicts of interest, you know. So let's go to foreign policy. For example. You're like expanding NATO to the east. Okay, what is expanding NATO to the east? It's gain of function, diplomacy. Actually, no one can point to a reason why expanding NATO to the east was a good idea. Many prominent experts warn against it. George Kennan is like, don't do this. William Burns, the CIA head, is like, don't do this. We tell the Russians we're not going to do this. We make them informal promises, we're not going to do this. Then we do it anyway. What the hell are they supposed to think? Right? You know, and it's like this compulsion, this sort of bureaucratic compulsion that can't be stopped that has no, you know, possible bearing on the security of Fort Lauderdale. You know, and it just like. And it's this, you know, this self licking ice cream cone and it's a toxic self licking ice cream cone. It like basically like, I mean is, you know, Covid kills 20 million people. How many people is Ukraine were killed? 500,000.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That was one of the things that I really wanted to know. I really. If there's one of the things that was in my top five that I wanted to know what happened was that because I think it would be a certain accountability for China as well with the recklessness. Even though you were saying Xi wasn't involved. But let's wrap up with this current event, Iran. What's going on there? Okay, what's going on there? What will happen? What should happen?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Wow. I think that unfortunately the current thing in Iran is going to get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything. I think that when a regime falls, protests don't bring about an end to a regime. When a regime falls, it's because it's lost confidence in itself and it no longer believes in in itself. And I don't think the ayatolls are at that point yet.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You don't think they are?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't think.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You think they will be this year, 2026? No. Or you're thinking it's a longer five.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's a very random, it's a very random thing. But it still feels to me like clearly the fanaticism of 1979 is not there anymore. Like, a lot of that energy is like, like the energy of Iran in the 80s is just demented, completely crazy. And by the way, if you don't know this, this is another thing where overthrowing the Shah was basically the dream of progressives everywhere for like.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Of course.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, of course Americans.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And Carter, Carter could have been involved. He didn't help him out. He promised he would. He didn't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh no. Carter orchestrated getting rid of him. I mean, you know, and like the, the, the, this is just like, like this is a, this is progressive diplomacy in the 70s.

[Patrick Bet-David]

So how do you process interventionist versus non interventionist? Is it 100%, never, don't intervene, or does it make sense at times? How do you process that?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I would say that, you know, the rules of like, statecraft and diplomacy have not changed at all in this world. You know, whatever we say they are is what they are. The problem is that basically, as Clint Eastwood put it, man's got to know his limitations. And you know, why we had Afghanistan, why we had Vietnam, is that we did not know our limitations. We did not understand how essentially bad we are at basically doing nation building, doing colonialism. Like, we sort of intentionally suck at it. These are very solvable problems, but like, we are not in a condition to solve these problems. One of the interesting things about the Venezuela intervention, I'm basically an isolationist. I think that the US should essentially abandon its empire. And, you know, but I have an open mind. And one of the things that was impressive about the Venezuela intervention was that it was actually reminiscent of kind of a pre missionary foreign policy. It was a very like, practically done thing. So first of all, perfectly executed. That's impressive. That's seriously impressive. You got to take your hat off to that. But also one of the interesting things was that you would have expected the Trump administration to put in Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, instead of working with the Rodriguez siblings, who are like the core of the old Venezuelan intelligence service. Okay? This is not neoconservatism. This is not like classic good neighbor policy liberalism. This is really gunboat diplomacy. And it's sort of wild to see this kind of Teddy Roosevelt diplomacy being carried out and apparently working in the present world. Because as far as I can tell, what the Trump administration intends to, to do with the current regime in Venezuela is basically just like, give it Carrots and sticks such that the people in charge of it can just get rich. And you're just like, yeah, you were the head of the Venezuelan intelligence agency. You are a very dirty person, you have done very bad things. You are going to get rich and your country is going to get fixed. Totally alien to American 20th century foreign policy. Like, you know, or they tried to buy Maduro out. You know what would be an amazing policy? Buy out Kim Jong Un. Basically be like, you know what your country is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You're holding it in this like incredibly backwater prison state. The 20th century thing is like, no, we have to prosecute him. Like Hitler. Okay, we didn't prosecute Hitler, but we should have prosecuted Hitler, right? You know, Nuremberg trials for Kim Jong Un, whatever. You know, he's guilty of like, you know, insane crimes. These North Korean gulags are every bit as bad as they say they are. Horrible, horrible monarchy. You buy him off and you free the country and he lives for the rest of his life in the south of France like a frickin prince. You know where Kim Jong Un was educated? Switzerland. He was educated in a private school in Switzerland. His iPhone is probably the same one as mine, right? You know, like, but he is terrified because he doesn't want to be Gaddafi. Right? And so you had this kind of, you know, this interventionist foreign policy where like the Arab Spring is like this, where it's like, we're gonna.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But would that be interventionist for North Korea? Would that be expansionist?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, the words, you know, you sort of, you shouldn't, you know, it would be normal in a way that the.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Sense, I'm not getting involved saying, let's get rid of them. Here's what. That's interventionist to me. It's like, listen, hey, we'll buy you for $88 billion.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, step away.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We'll take care of it from here. All right, sounds good. So we're expanding America. Like, you know, every, everything that we bought, we bought Florida, we bought.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, I'm not even, you know, like, I'm not even sure we'd, you know, make North Korea state or something, right? But the thing is actually maybe just give it to South Korea. Maybe say, hey, South Korea, you, we owe you all this money. Like, you know, know, let's figure out how to work this out, right? You know, I don't know. But like, that is a realist. That is a, you know, to me, realist. Foreign policy and isolationism have always been equivalents because that's Kind of the best you can do, right? Actually, the empire, you know, whatever you want to call it, our allies, our international community has been a real loss to this country. It has not been running at a profit. The idea of running a foreign policy as a at a profit, that's like imperialism. That's gunboat diplomacy. Like what we did in Venezuela was gunboat diplomacy. Right. The idea.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You're not supportive. What we did in Venezuela.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I know. I think that actually is very ambitious and interesting and I hope it works.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Out well to me to go in there with a Delta Force preparing for it since August. You go in, you take him, you leave. Wasn't expecting it. Everybody was shell shocked. No, you know, the way was done, quick operation. I mean, that's just insane to be able to get it done that way. Venezuelans are happy. Venezuelans here are happy. They're excited about what could happen next. Obviously controlling, leading. He joked the other day he posted something saying, the president of Venezuela. I don't know if you saw this or not. He posted something with the president, Venezuela. But this last tweet, Rob, if you go to that one that he just. This is an hour ago. Iranian patriots, keep protesting. Take over your institutions. Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I've canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the census killing.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's more of a neocon move, right? It's a neocon move because basically. And it's more reminiscent of kind of the American. It's more reminiscent of like the Arab Spring, you know, this is a sort of an Arab.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What should he do? You're saying, don't do anything. Sit on the sidelines.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's a difficult problem. I would say that. I think encouraging Iranians to do that is bad because I think that they are going to lose and a lot of people are going to get killed. And a lot of people already have been killed.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Do you think while he's saying this, you don't think he already has his next ten steps figured out? You don't think he. I don't know people in there.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't know.

[Patrick Bet-David]

What I'm saying is if you go this bold of an ask, you don't make an ask like this without already knowing it's about to be done. Don't you think that's a big risk for a president to ask the people to do that?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Trump is a mercurial man. He's a mysterious man. You know, the administration is actually pretty good at keeping secrets. I certainly don't know what is being planned there. Again, you know, if you'd asked me before the Venezuela operation, I would have said, don't do this. Right after it was done, I was like, you know what? When the facts change, I changed my mind. So, you know, if you, if, if. I think it would be certainly wonderful if the Trump administration and the people of Iran could pull this out in some way that worked. It's a very dangerous thing to do. I think the probability of failure is greater than the, the probability success.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Just so you know, I agree with you that the probability of failure is higher. But sometimes you got to take a gamble. And is this a gamble they're going to take? We're going to see.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, you're going to see what they're going to do.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah, I, I think, I think the people who are surrounded around Iran, who are.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And you have an Iranian Jewish background, right?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Not Jewish, Iranian Christian background. My mother and my father, they're Christian.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But the David. The David is David.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. Most people think that, but David. And Assyrians means Beta House of David and a mother's Bossian Armenian, so. But I've been around Christians, Muslims, Jews my entire life. I mean, you speak Farsi, do you? I speak fluent Farsi. I speak fluent Armenian, fluent Assyrian.

[Curtis Yarvin]

What do you think is going to happen in Iran?

[Patrick Bet-David]

I think that's the closest ever gone. I think if Biden doesn't become president in 2021, Iran would have fell in 2122. So I think those sanctions were really destroying Iran. And he just put on the sanctions. I don't know if you saw that two days ago. He said yesterday, Rob, if you have this, any, anybody that does business with Iran, I'm putting a 25% sanction on you. I don't know if you saw that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I saw that.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That was literally yesterday. So this has been the playbook for a minute, and I think it's. Is that the one? Yeah, right there. Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay 25% tariff on any and all business being done in the US the order is final and conclusive. Thank you for your attention. Right. You should, like.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I love. Thank you for your attention. It's so good. It's so good.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He wants to make sure you're paying attention. No, but, but to me, it's the closest it's been done. And if you look at what happened with Venezuela just a few weeks ago, to be able to pull that off and pull this off within a few.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Weeks.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I, I don't Know what award you give to this guy to. Haven't done that in 12, 12 months. How the hell do you do.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Call me again. Call, call me again. Call me again when he gets it done. I mean, I, you know, for sure, you know, you know, the, the, the. I mean, there's no question that the, I mean the Venezuelan regime I think is worse than the Iranian regime.

[Patrick Bet-David]

You think so?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think so.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Why do you say that?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Just, you know, Iran is not full of chaos and crime. And the thing is actually you must not follow closely. Not like the way they're hanging people.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And the way they're doing.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, but it's still a government, you know. Oh, now they're, they're going, they're going nuts.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, but the thing is that, you know there's, there's an old Arab saying which is the, the just the, the tyranny of the lion is better than the justice of the mouse. And in Venezuela, basically it's just like everyone steals independently. Everyone is a criminal. There's like whole criminal structures all the way up and down like you're. And in Iran at least you have a government, right? And you know, those who believe that anarchy is better than government, like they don't know their anarchy like in Venezuela is not just. Doesn't just have a shitty government with a shitty, you know, intelligence service, control, torture chamber or whatever. Yeah, it has that, you know, but it also has just like massive chaos and dysfunction of a sort that is not seen in Iran. And so yeah, it's still like it's.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Iran to me is a whole different story. Like the levels of crime, torture, what Iran is doing, the, the proxy wars and the amount of different military Houthis, Hamas, you know, Hezbollah, everything they're funding, they are chaotic.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They are now they're creators of chaos. But the thing is you can, you're still. I would rather walk down the street in Tehran, the Caracas.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Can we get him a one way flight? Just kind of send them there with a camera. Jake, you follow him with a camera. Just document it and see what happens and we send them to Brazil. Anyways. Curtis, this has been a blast. Really enjoy talking to you. For the people that are watching, you can actually manect them, you may agree. Or Disney like I don't know what he said. You can ask him any questions on Manect as well. But Curtis, I am looking forward to the next one after seeing what happens here.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But appreciate your time. This was fantastic man. Thank you. Take care, buddy. Bye bye bye bye.