← The Interview
The Interview
Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
00:52:15
The once-fringe writer has long argued for an American monarchy. His ideas have found an audience in the incoming administration and Silicon Valley.
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- [00:00]
Podcast Sponsor
This podcast is supported by Goldman Sachs.
- [00:06]
Curtis Yarvin
Investing in Sports a four part series from exchanges. The Goldman Sachs Podcast informed perspectives on the ever evolving business of sports and the expanding investment ecosystem with leaders at the forefront of the industry. For the sharpest analysis on franchise ownership, media rights, the growing women's sports market and more. Investing in sports from Goldman Sachs exchanges. Listen now.
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David Marchese
From the New York Times. This is the interview. I'm David Marchese. For a long time Curtis Yarvin, a 51 year old computer engineer, had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme that institutions like the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he's called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator. To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what sympathetic ears might hear as a helpful serving of historical references, but which others hear as a distorting mix of gross oversimplification, cherry picking, personal interpretation presented as fact and just plain inaccuracy. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President elect J.D. vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so called wokeism.
- [01:43]
Curtis Yarvin
You know, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things.
- [01:49]
David Marchese
Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an American Caesar might be installed into power.
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Curtis Yarvin
I mean, you're essentially advocating for someone to, you know, age old, move right, which is gain power lawfully through an election, through legal means and then exercise it unlawfully.
- [02:05]
David Marchese
And Yarvin has also found fans in the powerful and increasingly political ranks of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen. The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin, who's also a good friend of mine, and the way he describes the American system we are living under FDR's personal monarchy. I've been aware of Yarvin's work for years and was mostly interested in it as a prime example of growing anti democratic sentiment in particular corners of the Internet. Until recently, those ideas felt too fringe to really take seriously. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can't be so easily dismissed anymore. Here's my conversation with Curtis Yarvin. To my understanding, one of your central arguments is that America needs to, I think the way you've put it in the past to sort of get over our dictator phobia that, that American democracy is a sham beyond fixing and having sort of a monarch style leader, or call it a CEO or call it a dictator. That's the way to go. So why is democracy so bad? And why would having a dictator solve the problem?
- [03:29]
Curtis Yarvin
Let me answer that in, I think, a way that will be relatively accessible to readers of the New York Times. You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I do a speech sometimes where I'll just read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural address in which FDR essentially says to the American people, hey, Congress, give me absolute power or I'll take it anyway. So did FDR absolutely actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there's a great piece that I've sent to, you know, some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition.
- [04:13]
David Marchese
Can you.
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Curtis Yarvin
Who? I mean, the. There's all sorts of people milling around.
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David Marchese
Name one.
- [04:20]
Curtis Yarvin
Name one. Wow. Name one. Well, I definitely know Marc Andreessen. And so I sent this piece to Mark Andreessen. And it's an excerpt from the diary of Harold ickes, who is FDR's secretary of the Interior. And it's a little diary entry describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in this cabinet meeting is that Francis Perkins, who's the Secretary of Labor, comes in to this meeting and is like, here I have a list of the projects that we're going to do. FDR personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, this is crap. This is crap. Aren't you doing like humiliates Francis Perkins in the Oval Office or wherever they're having their cabinet meeting. And then at the end of the thing, it's like everybody agrees that the bill will be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just a picture of FDR acting like a CEO. And so the question of, was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean? I don't know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes, Democrats, Republicans, and everyone except for a few right wing Republicans, basically revere fdr. And FDR ran the New Deal like a startup.
- [05:42]
David Marchese
So as I understand it, the point you're trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past in American history, and therefore it's not something to be afraid of. Now.
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Curtis Yarvin
Is that, yeah, what we see what we see in the sort of the course of, you know, to kind of look at the objective reality of power in the US since the revolution. You know, you'll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation, and you're just like, name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation. And they can't unless they're a professional historian. Next you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what you'll see is that basically what is established looks a lot like a startup. It looks so much like a startup that this guy, Alexander Hamilton, who is recognizably a startup, broke, is running the whole government. He's basically the Larry Page of this republic. He's nominally the secretary.
- [06:49]
David Marchese
I feel like I'm asking you, what did you have for breakfast? And you're saying, well, you know, at the dawn of man, when cereals were.
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Curtis Yarvin
Doing a Putin cultivated, I'm doing a Putin. I'll speed this up and then answer.
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David Marchese
The question, what's so bad about democracy?
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Curtis Yarvin
So to make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and FDR dictators, this sort of opprobrious word, what they were was basically national CEOs, and they were running the government like a company from the top down.
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David Marchese
So why is democracy so bad?
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Curtis Yarvin
So it's not even that democracy is bad, it's just that it's very weak. And the fact that it's very weak is basically easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of basically, is democracy good or bad? Is, I think, a secondary question to, is it what we actually have? When you say to a New York Times reader, democracy is bad, they're a little bit shocked. But when you say to them politics is bad or even populism is bad, they're like, of course these are horrible things. And so the thing is, when you basically want to be anti, say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government. And then you'll be like, yes, of course. Actually, policy and law should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors and so forth. Then you'll realize that what you're actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
- [08:34]
David Marchese
You know, your ideas are ones that have been pointed to by people in real positions of power in the Republican Party. I think it's probably overstated the extent to which you and JD Vance are friends but he has definitely overstated. He has mentioned you by name publicly and referred to de wokeification ideas that sort of are very similar to yours. You know, you've been on Michael Anton's podcast, and Michael Anton has been tapped by Trump to be high up in the State Department, talking with him about how to install an American Caesar. Peter Thiel, a major Republican donor, said, you know, you're an interesting thinker. And so let's say people in actual positions of power said to you, curtis, we're going to do the Curtis Yarvin thing. What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy?
- [09:35]
Curtis Yarvin
My honest answer would have to be, it's not exactly time for that yet. Because what I see happening in D.C. right now, you know, nobody should be watching this, panicking, you know, thinking I'm about to be installed as America's secret dictator. I don't think I'm even going to the inauguration. The.
- [09:54]
David Marchese
Were you invited?
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Curtis Yarvin
No, no, no. Why? Why? Like, I'm an outsider, man. You know, like, I'm an intellectual. And the actual ways in which my ideas get into circulation is actually mostly through the staffers and the kind of younger people who basically kind of, you know, swim in this very online kind of soup. And I think that's fine. I think that what's happening now in D.C. to sort of distinguish my much more radical ideas from what's happening now, I would say that what's happening now is there's definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which sort of governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you go to Washington and say to anyone who's, like, professionally involved in the business of Washington, that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House at all. And they'll basically be like, yeah, of course the executive branch works for Congress. And so you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald Trump. And, you know, maybe the world's most capable CEO is right.
- [11:05]
David Marchese
Your point is he can't. The way the system's set up, he can't actually get that much to it.
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Curtis Yarvin
He can't actually do that much to it. And he can block things, he can disrupt it, he can create chaos and turbulence or whatever, but he can't really change what it is. Now, he had a great.
- [11:20]
David Marchese
Do you think you're maybe overstating the inefficacy of a president you could point to. Well, you know, the repeal of Roe is something that's directly attributable to Donald Trump being president. You could point some. One could argue that the COVID response was attributable to.
- [11:40]
Curtis Yarvin
I think the COVID response is a better example. Certainly many things about COVID were different because Donald Trump was president. Here, I'll tell you a funny story. At the risk of bringing my children into the media in 2016, my son's daughter, he's now 14, he was 6 then. And my children were going to a Shishi progressive Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco. And so.
- [12:09]
David Marchese
So you send your kids to a Shishi. Sorry, I'm laughing. You send your kids to a Shishi.
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Curtis Yarvin
Progressive school at the time manner of.
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David Marchese
Rubber hits the road.
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Curtis Yarvin
Indeed. And you can't isolate children from the world. Right. You know, and so at the time, my late wife and I did not. We just adopted the simple expedient of not talking about politics in front of the children.
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David Marchese
Smart.
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Curtis Yarvin
Recommend everyone. But of course, everyone's talking about it at school, right? And my son comes home and he has this very concrete question. He's like, pop, when Donald Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we gonna be able to go to the beach? And I'm like, wow, you really took him literally. Like everybody else is taking him literally, but you really took him literally. And I was like, if you see anything in the real world around you over the next four years, that changes as a result of this election. I'll be surprised.
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David Marchese
In one of your recent blog posts, or I guess it's a newsletter, not a blog at this point, you referred to J.D. vance as, I think, as a normie. What do you mean?
- [13:18]
Curtis Yarvin
I would say that the thing that I admire about Vance and the thing that's really remarkable about him as a leader is that I think that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. You know, his ability to connect with, like, flyover Americans in the world that he came from is, of course, very, very great. But the other thing that's neat about him is that he went to Yale and Yale Law School, in fact. And so he can connect at a. He speaks. He's a fluent speaker of the language of the New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And basically, one of the things that I believe really strongly, you know, that I haven't touched on when I talk about monarchy is I think that it's utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy is that you have to be the president of all Americans. And I think this is something that basically the new administration could do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and basically saying, hey, you know, you want to make this country a better place. Like, I feel like you've been misinformed in some ways. You're not a bad person. This is like 10 to 20% of Americans. This is a lot of people are like the NPR class. They are not bad people. Evil people who want to like. But the thing is, they're human beings. We're all human beings. And like, human beings can support bad regimes.
- [14:47]
David Marchese
The question was, why did you call J.D. vance a normie?
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Curtis Yarvin
Because he contains within him norminess, but he's also an intellectual and he contains within him intellectual.
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David Marchese
What you just said about, you know, the administration could do a better job of reaching out to progressives and we're all human beings, as you well know. It's a pretty different stance than the stance you often take in your writing. Right. You're laughing because, you know it's true. Where, you know, you talk about things like de wokeification, people who work, those things are places like the New York Times should all lose our jobs. We should. You know, you have an idea for a program called Rage, Retire all government employees. You know, you have ideas which I hope are satirical about, you know, how to handle non productive members of society that involve basically locking them in a room forever. So why is your tone, has your thinking shifted?
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Curtis Yarvin
No.
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David Marchese
Is the rhetorical tone different in a sense like this?
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Curtis Yarvin
You're looking for different. My thinking has definitely not shifted. And you're finding different emphases. Let me. You know, it's like when I talk about Rage, for example, you know, both my parents worked for the federal government. They were career, you know, federal employees on the nose.
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David Marchese
From a Freudian perspective, it is.
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Curtis Yarvin
But the thing is, basically when you look at the way, when you look at those, the way to treat those institutions, I'm just like, treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so because these people, having had power, have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. And winning means these are your people now. And so the thing is, when you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can't be this sort of anti aristocratic thing of like, we're gonna like bayonet all the professors and like, you know, throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that like you were a normal person serving a regime that did this like really weird and crazy stuff.
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David Marchese
But how invested do you think J.D. vance is in Democracy.
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Curtis Yarvin
It depends what you mean by democracy. I mean, I think that the problem is basically when people equate democracy with good government. When you use that word, you're using a very tricky word. I would say that what someone like. I'm on very safe ground, despite not knowing him well at all, that someone like J.D. vance believes essentially in the common good and, you know, the idea that government should serve the common good. And I think that people like J.D. and people in the sort of the broader intellectual scene around him, which is very varied intellectual scene, would all agree on that principle. Now, if that principle. I don't know what you mean by democracy in this context. What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it's bad. And if it's for the common good, it's good.
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David Marchese
I think what you just described might be something that Peter Thiel would agree with. And there was, I think a progressive.
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Curtis Yarvin
Could agree with it.
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David Marchese
And there was reporting that I saw. I think it was 2017 reporting done by Buzzfeed where they published some emails, I think between you and the right wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as fully enlightened. What would fully enlightened have meant in that?
- [18:29]
Curtis Yarvin
Enlightened in that context? Well, what fully enlightened for me generally means fully disenchanted. When I look at basically what the kinds of people that I know, not really that well in Silicon Valley think, I'm basically like, you know, have people like this been exposed to my ideas? Yes. Do they agree that America should be a monarchy? I doubt it, but I have no idea. But what they agree on is not a belief, but a disbelief. So I think that when a person who lives their life within the kind of sort of progressive bubble, liberal bubble, use whatever term you like of the current year looks at the right, or even the new right or whatever, you know, you want to call it. I think what's hardest to see is that what's really shared is not a positive belief, but an absence of belief. Basically, we don't worship these same gods. We do not sort of see, you know, the New York Times and Harvard as like divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that sort of always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think that the way the US Government works, you know, really works well or seems to be perfect in any respect.
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David Marchese
And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened?
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Curtis Yarvin
Yes.
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David Marchese
Okay.
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Curtis Yarvin
It's a disenchantment from, like, believing in these old systems. And the right thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, oh, we need to go do things Curtis's way, and is basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say, you know, like, we just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle's political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle's physics. What if that isn't?
- [20:27]
David Marchese
So you're basically saying there's a historical and political recency bias that people are susceptible to. Exactly. But I think the thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strong man figure would be better for people's lives. Can you answer that question?
- [20:45]
Curtis Yarvin
Number one, I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people's lives. And I think that, you know, the best answer when I ask people to answer that question, I sort of ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that, you know, these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. Okay. And then you're looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy, and it has a little thing on it that says, designed in California and made in China.
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David Marchese
This is an example you use a lot where you say, and if Apple ran California, wouldn't that be much better run?
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Curtis Yarvin
Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine. I'm sorry, I'm here in this building and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than any other source in the world. And how is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth generation, hereditary, absolute monarchy. And so we've basically taken. We've taken in some ways. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, even the Pre World War I progressives, you go back to a book like Drift in Mastery. Very.
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David Marchese
I find the depth of background information to be obfuscating rather than illuminating.
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Curtis Yarvin
But how can I change that? How can I make.
- [22:17]
David Marchese
By answering the questions more directly and succinctly, I think would be the simple. Would be the simple reply.
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Curtis Yarvin
And I'll try.
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David Marchese
But. But the thing I'd like to say just. Just to tie this back a little bit to something we spoke about a minute ago is, you know, there is this idea that the incoming Trump administration is interested in the idea of a more powerful executive office. Are there things that you, if you saw them, would be hints that the Trump administration is taking the right steps as, as you might see it, towards actually enacting that reality and becoming a strong executive, a more monarchical executive office.
- [22:53]
Curtis Yarvin
I would say that the incoming Trump administration, you know, with, with all due respect, and there's a lot of great people there and people who are working extremely hard, unfortunately, I would say that they're essentially finding themselves in a position where they're trying to untangle the Gordian knot. Meaning what? Meaning that they're basically trying to. Let's take just NASA in specific. So for example, if you Compare NASA to SpaceX, that's a fine example of actually all of the principles that I've been describing because NASA was once as efficient as SpaceX. So if you basically say, okay, at a very abstract level, forget the rest of the government, Elon, go and fix NASA. The goal of NASA is to give us cool space shit. We feel like we're not getting enough cool space shit. You have $25 billion a year, go and do cool space shit. I think you would get a lot more cool space shit under that principle. But one of the basic principles of kind of the California startup way of thinking is just to realize it's way easier to create a new NASA than it is to fix the old NASA. And that principle extends sort of around the government.
- [24:05]
David Marchese
You know, your ideas, and I guess has been called like sort of a neo reactionary cast of mind, are seemingly increasingly popular in the Silicon Valley world. Don't you think there's some level on which that world is responding to your ideas because you're just telling them what they want to hear? If more people like me were in charge, things would be better. It's an ideologically useful set of arguments for them to latch onto.
- [24:34]
Curtis Yarvin
The funny thing is, I think that's almost the opposite of the truth. It's like, let me give you a very simple illustration of this. Someone I have actually never met, believe it or not, who is Elon Musk now? Elon tweeted the other day, he was like, the proper structure of government on Mars should be not just a democracy, but a direct democracy. Let me sort of examine the thinking behind Musk saying this because I find it sort of extremely odd in a sense because one of the things about monarchy that's been known for quite some time and again, even in very, very anti monarchical regimes and periods, an exception is made for this is that a ship Always has a captain, an airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety critical environment.
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David Marchese
You should have someone in charge.
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Curtis Yarvin
You should have someone in charge. But the thing is, you look at basically a Mars colony and you're just like, really? Are the citizens of the Mars colony going to vote on how to replenish the oxygen supply or whatever? No, of course not. The Mars colony that Yulan establishes will be a subsidiary of SpaceX and it will have someone in charge and it will have a command hierarchy just like SpaceX does. And so I'm like, Elon, when you say that this should be a democracy, what are the people voting on? And so there's this world of actually real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every day and actually applying that world, applying that thinking to like, you know, being like, oh, this is, you know, this thinking is directly contradictory in a sense to the ideals that I was taught in this society. That's a really difficult cognitive dissonance problem. Even if you're Elon Musk, when I.
- [26:25]
David Marchese
Hear you talk about the need for a monarch, and we'll just use that term encompassing CEOs or dictators, I'll just say monarch is good.
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Curtis Yarvin
It's a neutral term.
- [26:36]
David Marchese
It would be an understatement to say that sort of humanity's record with monarchs is mixed at best. Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius seems like it went pretty well under Nero. Not so much. Spain's Charles III is a monarch you point to a lot. You know your favorite monarch, Louis xiv, who, you know, he's like, starting wars like they're going out of business. So those are all sort of before the age of democracy. And then the monarchs in the age.
- [27:07]
Curtis Yarvin
Of democracy are just terrible, terrible.
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David Marchese
I can't believe I'm saying a phrase like this. If you put Hitler aside and only look at Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, IDI Amin, we're looking at people responsible for the deaths of something like 75 to 100 million people. So given that historical precedent, do we really want to try dictatorship?
- [27:30]
Curtis Yarvin
Your question is the most important question of all. Because basically understanding like, why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad is really like essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it's important to note that we don't see for the rest of European and like world history, human history as a whole is a mixed bag. The history of the age of democracy in the last 250 years is also a mixed bag.
- [27:59]
David Marchese
But we don't see in human history what if you didn't finish the Holocaust.
- [28:03]
Curtis Yarvin
You know, you can pull the camera way back and basically say, wow. You know, in Europe, since basically the establishment of European civilization from like a thousand AD to, you know, 1750 AD, we didn't have this kind of chaos and violence. And then you can't separate Hitler and Stalin from the sort of global democratic revolution that they're a part of.
- [28:29]
David Marchese
But one thing I noticed when I was going through your stuff is that you make these historical claims, like the one you just made about sort of no genocide in Europe between 1000 AD and the Holocaust, essentially. And then I poke around and thought, huh, is that true? And then you think, well, well, you have this. There was Tamerlane, he killed. There was.
- [28:49]
Curtis Yarvin
Tamerlane was not in. I meant Europe, though.
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David Marchese
Like, well, it's okay on the edges of Europe and that's sort of like a goalpost shift there. But then. Or you think, well, there were the French wars of religion. They killed millions of people, including the massacre of the Huguenots. So I often find when you just scratch a little at some of the historical.
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Curtis Yarvin
There was no massacre of Huguenots. I think you're confusing it with a sack of bezier and the massacre of the Alpigensians.
- [29:16]
David Marchese
So they got massacred, not the Huguenots.
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Curtis Yarvin
Yeah, but the thing is, when people look at the Holocaust, they saw like a new species of deviltry that had not really existed in the world in that way before. You know, when you see a city sacked in the Middle Ages, you see just like wild, undisciplined troops, like, raging around. You don't see like lines of people marched to their deaths.
- [29:40]
David Marchese
My skepticism comes from what I feel like is a pretty strong cherry picking of historical incidents to support your arguments. And then I look and you're like, oh. The incidents that you're pointing to are either not necessarily factually settled, or there's a different way of looking at them. But I actually want to, just because some of the historical references are now actually making my head hurt. I just want to ask a couple very concrete questions about some of the stuff you've written about race, for example, which seems pretty provocative to say the least. I'll read you some examples. This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program. To me, the trouble with white nationalism is that it's racist, not that it's strategically unsophisticated. There's two more. There's two more. It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone's Life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves. Come on, the third one. The third one. If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck.
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Curtis Yarvin
So that was. So let's go through each of those.
- [31:01]
David Marchese
And this is a guy who's saying, we'll live through, achieve harmony.
- [31:07]
Curtis Yarvin
Let's go through each of those examples. And so when you look for example at Mandela, the reason I said that most people don't know this, there was a little contretemps when Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken off the terrorist list.
- [31:23]
David Marchese
I mean, maybe the more relevant point is that Nelson Mandela was in jail for opposing a viciously racist apartheid regime.
- [31:30]
Curtis Yarvin
But the viciously racist apartheid regime, basically they had him on the terrorist list. So if you. Look, let's get to the other two.
- [31:39]
David Marchese
But again, your quote was, if you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik but adore Nelson Mandela, I'd prefer to condemn them both.
- [31:47]
Curtis Yarvin
And the thing is basically when you look at the impact, what does this.
- [31:51]
David Marchese
Have to do with equating Anders Breivik, who shot people on some because the bizarre, deluded mission to rid Norway of Islam with Nelson Mandela because they're both.
- [32:02]
Curtis Yarvin
Terrorists and because they basically both violated the rules of war in the same way and they both basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the time, this valorization.
- [32:14]
David Marchese
So Gandhi then is your model Martin Luther King non violent?
- [32:19]
Curtis Yarvin
More complicated than that. But I could say things about either. But let's move on to one of your other examples. So I think the best way to basically grapple with that period directly.
- [32:32]
David Marchese
Which period are we talking about now?
- [32:33]
Curtis Yarvin
1860S. Okay, okay, let's talk about Africa.
- [32:35]
David Marchese
We're talking about the Civil War, African.
- [32:36]
Curtis Yarvin
Americans in the 1860s. Okay. The thing that you can do that any times reader can do, just go to your Google bar and Google slave narratives. Just go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the times. And so the thing is that basically the treatment of the freed slaves after the war is like extremely. There was a recent historian who published a thing and I think this is. I would dispute this. This number is too high. But his estimate was that something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically die in between like 1865 and 1870.
- [33:12]
David Marchese
Yeah, well, again, I can't speak to the veracity of it.
- [33:15]
Curtis Yarvin
That's your. Anyway, anyway, the thing is basically like.
- [33:18]
David Marchese
You know, but you're saying there are historical examples in slave narratives where the freed Slaves themselves expressed regret at having freedom. But this to me is another prime example of how you selectively read history. Because if you read other slave narratives where they talk about the horrible brutality of it, so what?
- [33:38]
Curtis Yarvin
And I see this.
- [33:38]
David Marchese
How does that justify.
- [33:39]
Curtis Yarvin
And I see this in the conversation.
- [33:41]
David Marchese
Anyone's life more pleasant, difficult to argue that anyone that is including freed slaves.
- [33:47]
Curtis Yarvin
Anyone is anyone. Is anyone.
- [33:49]
David Marchese
Children were no longer sold out from underwent.
- [33:51]
Curtis Yarvin
When I said anyone. Okay, first of all, when I said anyone, I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.
- [33:59]
David Marchese
But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era of.
- [34:04]
Curtis Yarvin
The era of 1865-1875 was? Absolutely. And the war itself wasn't good either. But if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the south, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted.
- [34:27]
David Marchese
But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards to make people free.
- [34:33]
Curtis Yarvin
I can't believe I'm arguing Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war. And so the thing is, when you look at basically the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, you're basically just like, it just visited this huge amount of destruction on all sorts of people, black and white. I'm just like, all of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time. And what I'm fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way the people respond to Breivik, I'm like, basically you're responding in this kind of cartoonish way to something that terrorism, which is, you know, what is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? You know, that's a really important question in 20th century history. To say that I'm gonna have a strong opinion about this stuff without having an answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong.
- [35:27]
David Marchese
Now maybe you think I haven't been red pilled or whatever, or I'm not thinking through these issues enough. But I feel like to me, you call it cartoonish, I call it very morally clear. I can, I can say something like, you know, I think slavery was bad, I'm glad there are no longer enslaved people. And then to hear you then say, well, you have to look at it from this other perspective. You know, this is a one dimensional view of history. I think, well, that's a no. I think it's pretty cut and dry. It just is very fascinating to me that your ideas, which strike me as pretty extreme. You know, they were fringe ideas to me that apparently are no longer on the fringe. And that's. I don't know. What do you think that says about conservatism today?
- [36:11]
Curtis Yarvin
I think that American conservatism is in the long and very, very difficult grieving process of realizing that it has always been a fraud. And I think one of the especially dangers in American conservatism is that there's so much grift in it and so much of it consumes so much energy and so much attention and produces so little. You are still a factor of a hundred from being able to give the people who are voting for you and donating to you anything like what they imagine they're going to get from you.
- [36:46]
David Marchese
And when you say it's a fraud, I take that to mean insofar as its conservatism is just the Washington Generals.
- [36:55]
Curtis Yarvin
Are never going to win the game. It just doesn't have the power to give anything that it promises.
- [37:06]
David Marchese
After the break, I call Curtis back to ask more about the incoming administration.
- [37:11]
Curtis Yarvin
I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think that that's Trump of limited him as a leader in various ways.
- [37:38]
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- [39:26]
David Marchese
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me again. I appreciate it.
- [39:29]
Curtis Yarvin
Thank you. Thank you. Let's have some more fun.
- [39:33]
David Marchese
You know, you do so often draw on the history of the pre Democratic era, which is a historical period sort of exactly coterminous with, for example, women being treated as second class citizens and, and sort of the status of, of women in that time period which, you know, you sort of valorize, is not something I've really seen come up in, in your writings. But do you feel like your arguments take enough into account the way that monarchies and dictatorships historically tend not to be great for big swathes of demographics?
- [40:12]
Curtis Yarvin
So, okay, so let's look at enfranchisement in specific. So when I look at the status of woman in say a Jane Austen novel, which is well before enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of okay. The woman in Jane Austen's book seems to be fine now who are desperate.
- [40:29]
David Marchese
To land a husband because they have no access to income without them.
- [40:32]
Curtis Yarvin
Well, have you ever seen anything like that in the 21st century? I mean, the whole class in Jane Austen's world is the class of like UBI earning aristocrats. Right? You know, but are you, are you.
- [40:43]
David Marchese
Not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does.
- [40:54]
Curtis Yarvin
It's very hard. So first of all, when we say liberty, for example, so you, you did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. So free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. And so the assumption that you're making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
- [41:25]
David Marchese
Do you think it's better that women got the vote?
- [41:28]
Curtis Yarvin
First of all, I don't believe in actually voting at all. So it's a little.
- [41:33]
David Marchese
Do you vote?
- [41:34]
Curtis Yarvin
No. I believe that voting is providing this sort of almost kind of pornographic stimulus. It sort of becomes more like supporting your football team or something. It basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. But the thing is, what does this power mean to you is really the most important question. And I think that what it means to most people today is that it provides a source of meaning for them, it makes them feel relevant, it makes them feel like they matter in a sense. And I think that there's something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that sort of goes up against the very, very important question of we need a government that is actually good and that actually works and we don't have one.
- [42:22]
David Marchese
So the solution that you propose basically has to do with, like we've said multiple times now, installing. You call it a monarch, you call it a CEO figure. And the result of investing an individual with the power of a CEO would be hopefully a more efficient, more responsive, more effective government. Why do you seem to have such faith in the ability of CEOs? I mean, most startups fail. We can all point to CEOs who are effective, CEOs who have been ineffective. And it seems to me unlikely that, putting that aside, that a CEO or dictator is much more likely to think of estate citizens as economic units rather than living, breathing human beings who, you know, have, want to flourish in their lives, who deserve, you know, the dignity of a secure retirement or meaningful leisure time. So why are you so confident that a CEO would be the kind of leader who could bring about better lives for people? It just seems like such a simplistic way of thinking.
- [43:25]
Curtis Yarvin
It's not a simplistic way of thinking. And having worked inside the kind of salt mines where CEOs do their CEOing business, and having been a CEO myself, I think I have a better sense of it, maybe, unfortunately than most people. Last time we spoke, I used the example of imagine if your MacBook had to be made by the California Department of Computing or if your electric car had to be made by the U.S. department of Transportation. The thing is, the things that make companies succeed or fail, I will say.
- [44:02]
David Marchese
Apple and Tesla, by the way though, have both benefited greatly from government help in various forms.
- [44:08]
Curtis Yarvin
Well, they live in a governed society. And so the thing is, basically when libertarians talk about Apple and Tesla, they're saying, okay, here are the benefits of freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of true in a sense, but the benefit of freedom is that they, these organizations have used freedom to establish monarchies which are, you know, completely top down command units.
- [44:33]
David Marchese
Yeah, but again, we've gotten, we've gotten away from the central question a little bit, which is, let me.
- [44:38]
Curtis Yarvin
That's the question.
- [44:39]
David Marchese
Why are you so confident that.
- [44:41]
Curtis Yarvin
That's the question, that's the question of efficiency. And so when I basically look at Systems run by CEOs. I'm just like, basically. I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad, but the overall quality, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk. The median performance is so much better. But you asked something that I think is a more important and more interesting question, which is, you know, you're like, okay, America needs a CEO who will be economically efficient. The CEO who will be economically efficient will think of human beings as pure economic units and will do things like, wow.
- [45:33]
David Marchese
Well, no, just the idea that a company has goals that are not necessarily the same goals as how. What a government might have insofar as providing for its citizens.
- [45:43]
Curtis Yarvin
Perfect, perfect question. The thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as making a profit or just selling more stuff, but that's not actually really the goal of a company. The real goal of a company is to maximize the worth of its assets, to make the stock price go up. Basically, one of the ways to unify the worldview of, say, Charles the First and Elon Musk is to realize that when Charles the First is thinking about his people, he is both thinking of them as economic assets and as human assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive. And in order to see his country thrive, he wants people to be, of course, he wants them to be producing as much wool or whatever England exports as possible. Right. But the sense of him being kind of the pater patriae, kind of the father of the country and sort of feeling about the people in his society, not exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but sort of like the way a parent should feel about his children, that sense of, like having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a CEO is not to rake in the bucks, but to make my operation flourish.
- [47:09]
David Marchese
Earlier you had said that you believe that regardless of what his goals are or what he says, Trump isn't likely to actually get anything transformative accomplished just because of the entrenched government bureaucracy that. That exists. But. But sort of putting that aside, what is your opinion of Trump generally?
- [47:34]
Curtis Yarvin
I think that Trump. You know, the funny thing is I talked about FDR earlier in the. Earlier in our conversation, and I think actually a lot of people might, in different directions, might not appreciate this comparison, but I think that in a lot of ways, Trump is very reminiscent of fdr because what FDR had was this tremendous charisma and self confidence combined with a tremendous sort of ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between Trump and FDR that has really held Trump back is of course that FDR is from one of America's first families. He's a hereditary aristocrat, and Trump is not really from America's social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think it's hurt him in his ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his family. I think that that sort of limited him as a leader in various ways. And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It's almost like he actually feels like he knows what he's. That's, I think something that's very helpful because insecurity and fragility is just, it's his Achilles heel.
- [49:19]
David Marchese
What's your Achilles heel?
- [49:21]
Curtis Yarvin
What's my Achilles heel? I think I also have self confidence issues. I sort of rarely. I won't bet fully on my own convictions.
- [49:30]
David Marchese
Are there ways in which you think your insecurity manifests itself in your political thinking?
- [49:37]
Curtis Yarvin
That's a good question. I think that if you look at, especially my older work, I think I had this kind of joint consciousness that, okay, I feel like I'm onto something here. But I also like the idea that people would be in 2025 taking this stuff as seriously as they are now. When I was writing in 2007, 2008, I mean, I was completely ser. I am completely serious. But it sort of led to like, you know, I think a certain level of like, you know, it's like when you, when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever, I'm basically like, yeah, you know, the sentiments behind that I can explain and articulate and they were serious sentiments. And they're, they're serious now. What I've. Would I have expressed it that way? Would I have like trolled? I'm always trying to get less trollish. Like, you know, over time you'll see that I've definitely gotten less trolly. On the other hand, you know, if you read my recent blog posts, I can't really resist trolling Elon Musk, which might Be part of the reason why I've never met Elon Musk.
- [50:53]
David Marchese
Do you think your trolling instinct has maybe gotten out of hand?
- [50:59]
Curtis Yarvin
No, it definitely hasn't gotten. It hasn't gone far. I mean. No, I mean the trolling. Like, what I realize when I look back is that actually.
- [51:10]
David Marchese
Do you think your trolling has now become a political program?
- [51:14]
Curtis Yarvin
The instinct to revise things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct. It's very much. It's a serious and important thing that I think the world needs.
- [51:31]
David Marchese
I gotta say, there are a lot of things to do with your ideas that we just didn't get to. But the thing that I still find myself deeply unconvinced about is why blowing up democracy, rather than trying to make it better, would somehow lead to better lives for the people who are struggling the most.
- [51:53]
Curtis Yarvin
Well, you know, I can lead a horse to water. Of course, the. I think that as you start to. As the sort of walls fall away and you start to explore ideas that are sort of outside the very narrow bubble of the present that we live in, because there's no. I think it's impossible to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which intelligent, thoughtful people like you sort of consider has grown sharply narrow in the 20th century. And if there's really one thing that I kind of want to do the most, say with this conversation is to kind of make people feel like they can basically step outside of the very small box that they grew up in and they can say, not everything outside that box is perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible. I'm not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti Semite or even a misogynist, whatever that means. I'm asking them to sort of acknowledge that there are cases in which our judgment of the past is completely right. And yet there are also ways in which the whole past would very unanimously point to things that we're doing and say, that's crazy. I can't believe you're doing that.
- [53:24]
David Marchese
That's Curtis Yarvin. He writes on Substack. His newsletter is called Gray Mirror and he has a new book called Gray Mirror Fascicle one Disturbance. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme with help from Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Annabel Bacon. Mixing by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew and Seth Kelly is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman. Matty Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to the Interview. Wherever you get your podcasts to read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com theinterview and you can email us anytime@the interviewytimes.com I'm David Marchese and this is the Interview from the New York Times.
- [54:28]
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David Marchese
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