#121 - Curtis Yarvin PT.2 - From Caesar to Satoshi: Why Political & Economic Systems Fail

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Peter McCormack Show

Episode #121 — Curtis Yarvin PT.2: From Caesar to Satoshi: Why Political & Economic Systems Fail
Date: October 20, 2025
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug)

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Episode Overview

This wide-ranging, intellectually dense episode continues Peter McCormack's deep-dive with controversial thinker Curtis Yarvin. "From Caesar to Satoshi" traverses the collapse and failures of political and economic systems, Curtis’s original theories on the origins of money (and Bitcoin), why populist movements usually fail, the pitfalls of democracy, and the history of economic thought. Yarvin recounts his firsthand experience as a computer scientist and lays out the connections between digital property, network effects, and the inevitability of monetary transformation—a journey from Ancient Rome all the way to blockchain.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. "Things Have Been Hosed Since the 17th Century"

• Yarvin opens with a thesis: systems—political, economic, legal—have been fundamentally broken since the 17th century.

  "Things are hosed is a hard pill to swallow. And then... things have been hosed since the 17th century." (Curtis, 00:00)

• This isn't a recent malaise, but a problem with the very shape of modern governance and economics.

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2. On Authentic Political Leadership

• Peter references FDR's candid honesty in contrast with today’s politicians.
• Yarvin describes the longing for authenticity in leadership:

  "People love actually, like when you break through something false..." (02:08)

• Honest politicians succeed:

  "What I've noticed is that honest politicians do really fucking well." (Peter, 07:05)

• Yarvin praises Trump and J.D. Vance for being the same on- and off-camera, unlike other politicians:

  "They are the same person on camera and off camera." (Curtis, 07:31)

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3. Why Populism and "Literal Democracy" Usually Fail

• Populist/“literal democratic” movements lack the organizational heft to make lasting, substantive changes.
• Curtis makes a distinction between being reactive (negative) and creating—populism is too often about what it hates, not what it will build:

  "It is not enough just to be negative. You actually have to come together and create something new. And it has to be really new... very big brained." (Curtis, 10:00)

• Reference to Alexander Pope:

  “For forms of government, let fools contest, whatever governs best is best.” (11:19)

• Populism’s track record is poor because “the people” as such are too weak to govern themselves for long:

  "They are both incompetent and too weak to govern. If they were a king, they would be like an eight year old king." (Curtis, 18:47)

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4. On Caesarism, Aristocracy, and the Design of Government

• Yarvin explores classical forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy):
  • Democracy is unstable and too easily manipulated.
  • Aristocracy no longer functions as a check.
  • Monarchy, for most of history, was "normal" and when designed well, is optimal—but it's risky.
• The challenge: how to build a modern Caesar without risking a Caligula:

  "You want to design a system that will give you a Caesar, you know, an Augustus but not a Tiberius or a Caligula." (Curtis, 19:47)

• Absolute monarchy is "Boolean" (all or nothing); you can’t go halfway to revolution:

  "The only thing you see is that if the monarchy is less than absolute, it rapidly disappears." (Curtis, 24:52)

• "Oligarchy... has all these very strong natural stabilizing forces which leads to just... insanity. But at least there's peace until just everything falls apart." (Curtis, 26:17)

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5. Case Study: Bukele in El Salvador

• Transformation via "CEO-style" leadership: Bukele compared to a national CEO, making hard choices, personal risk, cleaning up corruption.

  "He crushed the meritocracy in El Salvador... and he told the U.S. embassy to go blow smoke up its butt..." (Curtis, 12:46)

• Discussion of how effective government requires tough, sometimes imperfect, practical choices—not false pursuit of "perfection":

  "That search for perfection is one of the most dangerous things. Like you can't have..." (Curtis, 16:57)

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6. "Fix Everything Switch" and Political Engineering

• Satirical "Fix Everything" light switch meme discussed; ridiculing the fantasy that systemic problems are solved by flipping a simple switch or “principled” gesture.

  "You have this ridiculous fantasy where you can just press the switch... The middle ground is not switch pressing." (Peter and Curtis, 17:49-18:24)

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7. Curtis Yarvin's Technical Journey and Economic Insight

• Urbit: Yarvin’s history of trying to rewrite both computer science and government.
  • He details his early work on Urbit—an operating system/network with digital property at its core.
  • The proprietary value of digital addresses, native protocols, and scarcity anticipating NFT/blockchain concepts.
• Failed attempts to monetize a programming language led him to architectural insights shared with Bitcoin:

  "The way you sell a programming language is you don't. Because actually the way the programming language is adopted is because it is the native language of an operating system." (Curtis, 50:21)

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8. Austrian Economics, the Origin of Money, & Bitcoin

• Roots tracing back to his doubts about modern economics and enlightenment by the Austrian school (esp. Mises).

  "Modern macroeconomics... I'm just like, what even is this?" (Curtis, 62:13)

• The “regression theorem,” why money must start from some value, and how that relates to Bitcoin.
• Story of the Icelandic fisherman using fish, then axes, as "stores of value"—and why only non-producible assets like gold/Bitcoin can serve as true money:

  "Sven has no choice but to choose a store of value... his second idea is, all right, I'm going to store something that keeps. I'm going to store axes... Axes go to the moon... but what must go up come, must come down." (Curtis, 91:27-94:39) "We need a form of money that you cannot produce." (Peter, 94:54) "Gold is pretty good... but Bitcoin is the first money that cannot be artificially created." (Curtis, 95:00-95:45)

• Menger’s “On the Origin of Money” and the bimetallic standard (gold/silver)—how network effects create a unique dominant currency.

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9. Why Bitcoin, Not Bitcoin Cash? Why Gold, Not Platinum?

• Once a standard takes hold, network effects enshrine it for practical and social reasons, not “inherent worth.”

  "If you have a perfect money, there's no need for any other money... that's what we call in computer science a standard." (Curtis, 95:45)

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10. On Being "Almost Satoshi"—Personal Prehistory of Bitcoin

• Yarvin relates how, in the early 2000s, his technical discoveries in digital scarcity anticipated cryptocurrencies:
  • He essentially invented the economic layer of digital-scarcity property, even designing what would become familiar as NFTs/Solana.

  "If you just abstracted this and you said, hey, there is a cryptographic registry of who owns what... I even designed something that really should have been used, which was by Bitcoin..." (Curtis, 104:35)

  • He lacked only the insight of the blockchain and proof of work.

  "I'm not Satoshi. Okay? I'm really, really, really, really not Satoshi. I had the motive, the opportunity, and the propensity, but I'm not Satoshi." (Curtis, 105:58)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On political systems:

  "Just assume the worst case scenario about any field or any system of ideas is things have been hosed since the 17th century." (Curtis, 00:14)

• On the yearning for realness:

  "They are the same person on camera and off camera. Now let's think about who Keir Starmer is off camera. Does he even exist?" (Curtis, 07:31)

• On switches, quick fixes, and political delusion:

  "You have this ridiculous fantasy where you can just press the switch. It's simply not possible to press the switch. To be honest, it's quite frankly terrifying that you even think of pressing the switch." (Peter/Curtis, 17:49-18:09)

• On populism and power:

  "If you have parties A and B and they're contending for power, and party A cares only about power and party B cares about anything other than power, party A is going to win and party B is going to lose." (Curtis, 29:20)

• On the economics of modernity:

  "Things were already hosed in the 17th century... if only you knew how bad things really are." (Curtis, 79:43/80:53, referencing the 4chan meme)

• On Bitcoin's core theoretical insight:

  "Maybe, basically, if people understand the theory, they will see that the theory predicts that a worthless asset can in fact become worth trillions of dollars as a result of essentially the restandardization of money." (Curtis, 95:45)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening thesis – "Things are hosed": 00:00
• Honest leaders and authenticity: 02:08—08:23
• Failure modes of populism and democracy: 10:00—18:47
• Case study on Bukele: 12:29—16:57
• "Fix Everything switch" meme: 17:49—18:24
• Three forms of government, why monarchy?: 18:47—26:17
• Technical journey, Urbit backstory: 34:40—50:21
• Austrian economics, money, Mises/Gold: 59:41—70:11
• Inflation and malinvestment, "Sven and the axes": 91:27—95:45
• Bitcoin as perfect, non-producible money: 95:45—99:56
• Personal prehistory of digital scarcity: 103:36—105:58
• On "almost being Satoshi": 105:58—108:18

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Overall Tone & Style

This is a marathon, freewheeling discussion. Curtis's tone is provocative, darkly witty, and unfiltered—mixing acerbic institutional critique, learned historical references, inside jokes, and deep technical analogies. Peter matches his candor, grounding abstract theory in contemporary realities and Bitcoin.

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Useful for Listeners Who Missed the Episode

• Understand Curtis Yarvin's core thesis: Modern systems have been broken for centuries. We shouldn’t be surprised at the failures around us; the rot is deep.
• Practical analogies (e.g., "Sven and the axes" or "Fix Everything switch") demystify high-concept economic/game theory through colorful stories.
• Historic sweep: Connects Roman emperors, the English Constitution, and the gold standard to cryptography, digital property, and Bitcoin.
• Personal narratives: Yarvin's own nearly-Satoshi moment, the birth of Urbit, and the direct influences shaping modern cryptocurrencies.

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If you crave big ideas on political and economic failure, the story of digital money, or want to hear one of Bitcoin’s intellectual godfathers think out loud, this deep, candid exchange is essential listening.

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Transcript

[Curtis Yarvin]

Things are hosed. Wow, that is hard to believe. You're like, I thought we were on the road to utopia. I thought we were building socialism. You're telling me things are hosed. I'm hearing that for the first time. Right? Things are hosed is a hard pill to swallow. And then once you've taken that pill, you need to swallow the next pill, which is still more brutal, which is things have been hosed since the 17th century. And that is true of the monetary system, that is true of various political and legal ideas. Just assume the worst case scenario about any field or any system of ideas is things have been hosed since the 17th century.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Because you know what? Like, after I was it in, it was in Tucker's interview. You brought it up. So I went and read it, actually, and then I posted on Facebook and it was, it was warmly welcomed by my conservative friends. But this was it. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honesty facing conditions in our country today. Values have shrunken to fantastic level. Tactics have risen. Our ability to pay the fallen government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income. Blah, blah. Like it's a. It's like he's. Rather than the bullshit we get from Keir Starmer or Kemi Baden, he's just there. And we have to have an honest conversation with the niche.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We have to have an honest conversation. And people love actually, like when you break through something false, you know, one of my formative aesthetic moments, I had this weird experience because my father was in the UN Foreign service and so I was posted when he was posted when I was 10 and 11 to Nicosia, Cyprus. And in Nicosia, Cyprus, for some reason, rather than Sending me to the International School for Americans. They sent me to the English school in Nicosia, Cyprus. So I had this kind of Harry Potter experience, except I was also three years younger than everyone else, which was like really super weird. And it was a very weird way to be 10 and 11, but I got a lot from it. I memorized some Shelley and so on and so forth. And it was the Harry Potter experience, but without the magic and with more Cypriots. And then I get back to America and Suddenly I'm a 12 year old sophomore in an American public high school. And I'm trying very hard to acculturate myself to this very strange environment in many different ways. And one of the things I decide is I'm going to get a radio and I'm going to listen to top 40 radio, because that's what everyone in the class listens to, everyone in my school listens to. And it's like 1985. And if you turn on top 40 radio, you know what you're getting is like, you know, Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi.

[Peter McCormack]

First album I ever bought was Bon Jovi, New Jersey.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Was it Slippery One way?

[Peter McCormack]

No, it's Bon Jovi, New. I was telling myself with the funniest thing. When you brought up encyclopedia earlier, you smiling. So there was this thing that came on Twitter. It was a list of 20 things that have you done? Have you used a rotary phone? Have you owned an encyclopedia? Haven't you owned a dictionary? Basically, I was 19. Of the 20, you were what, nine? But he was like, dad, what's an encyclopedia?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Amazing.

[Peter McCormack]

And I was like, so.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And then, let me just.

[Peter McCormack]

Let me just tell you. But he also had what as a Walkman? And so I said to him again.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Son, it's a way of playing Bon Jovi.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. And I remember I got my first Walkman. I walked to town, my local town, and I bought Bon Jovi, New Jersey open with Bad Medicine. It was after Slippery when we went.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was after Slippery.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, it was the one after. I'm a few years older than you remember.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. You know, and Slippery when Wet. Like, what was the track? You know, I'm a. I'm a cowboy. Like a steel horse I ride.

[Peter McCormack]

Was that on Slippery when Wet?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it was Slippery when wet. Really? I think so. I'm a cowboy, you know. On a steel horse I ride.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, I'm one in Dead or alive. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

You know, you know, I want to. I think that's a different album. Maybe find that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Can we check that?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, check that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I Check the facts here. Yeah, that might be the first factual error I've made here, but I suspect not. Slippery when wet.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, let's get the track list. Wanted, Dead or alive. You're correct. No, damn it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Damn it. I aced that one. And so anyway, so I'm listening to Bon, you know, Bon Jovi and similar, like top 40 things on, like a top 40, you know, the concept top 40, you know, it's 1985, right? I'm a cow cowboy On a steel horse I ride. And then for whatever reason, for whatever it was a contest or something, you know, this Q107 or whatever, they play a Rolling Stone song. They play, in fact, paint it Black. And I'm just like, oh, you see, that's what rock and roll actually is. And from that day on, Bon Jovi was completely ruined for me, right? And the thing is basically that effect of saying, like, okay, now this is real. Like, you all have this kind of learned helplessness where everybody has been saying, there's a red button. And you keep stabbing at the red button. And it's like the closed door button on the elevator. But like, you know, what you need is a candidate who says, hey, you know, this time, I mean, FDR didn't do this. He sort of did this kind of fraudulent thing. But actually, before the election, you've got to come out and say, hey, Americans, Englishmen, if you're thinking of voting, here's something I want you to know. If you vote for me, I'm actually going to be the president. I'm actually going to be the president. So if you don't want me to actually be the president and actually be in charge of this huge, crazy, insane, beautiful and awful thing we call the US Government, I think you should vote for my opponent. Well, so, you know, because actually, moreover, I would like to say to my opponent, actually, I think you should say the same thing. And I think if you win, you should really be the president.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, look, I've got two thoughts on that. Firstly, that requires Nigel Farage. One, to fully recognize the problem. Two, have the conviction to change it, and three, care more about changing it than winning power.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And have the staff that knows how to back it up and turn it into something real that is not just a smile and a beer.

[Peter McCormack]

But does he care more about becoming prime minister or fixing the country? Because. And the truth is that goes to my second thought. Is that what I've noticed in politics, it's really weird, right? I've considered running for office in the UK and again, we talked about this wandering through New York yesterday, and I said, look, one of the reasons I think I might do. I won't do too well because I'm not the smartest. But one of the reasons I think I would do well is I'm quite honest. But what I've noticed is that honest politicians do really fucking well.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They actually can. And this is the thing that most people don't see in Trump and Vance. They don't see that. Actually, the amazing thing about Trump and Vance, I have met Vance a few times. I've never met Trump. Here's the thing about Trump and Vance. They are the same person on camera and off camera. They are absolutely the same person. Now let's think about who Keir Starmer is off camera. Does he even exist? Is he even in the room? Like, who is this person? Who is he to his wife? What if we had a hidden camera on Cure Starmer? What if we could look at every day of Cure Starmer's life? What is it with the Ukrainian rent boys who keeps setting fires like Conor?

[Peter McCormack]

Of all the politicians we've interviewed, who do you think is the same off camera? Like genuinely the same? Steve Baker. Steve Baker, yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Who's Steve Baker?

[Peter McCormack]

He was a conservative. He's the first person who brought up bitcoin in the House of Commons. Yeah, yeah. Steve Baker. A little bit. I kind of think Liz Truss is a little bit.

[Curtis Yarvin]

A little bit really Head of cabbage and all. Head of cabbage and all.

[Peter McCormack]

I fell for it. But. But neither of the labor guys. Josh Simmons a bit more than Mike Tapp. No. Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Can I recommend a Labor right for you to interview, if they'll come. Lord Glassman.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know Lord Glassman, Maurice Glassman, the founder of Blue Labor. Do. Lord Glassman. I think you'll have an amazing time with Lord Glassman. I will tell you without any, you know, Lord Glassman friend of yours? Yeah, he's the same person. Maurice Glassman. He's a Jewish lord.

[Peter McCormack]

You have to introduce me. I struggle to get labor people on.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, this is different.

[Peter McCormack]

This is different.

[Curtis Yarvin]

This is different. This is the true horseshoe, you know, and like, there is a true horseshoe and Morris is a true horseshoe man. And so, yeah, that does exist. With regards to Farage, I met him actually, like 10 years ago or so. He was at a dinner in Silicon Valley. I would say that normally I'm pretty black pilled. I would say that with Farage there might be more than me, the eye.

[Peter McCormack]

Hey, listen, he's the best option we have right now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There Might be more than meets the eye.

[Peter McCormack]

But, but, but what I want, my, my worry with reform is just, it's the, the, they're hard decisions to make. And can you make, and you, and.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And can you basically take, you know, what is what all of these populist, literal Democratic, populist, quote democratic, you know, meritocracy. What all these literal Democratic parties have in common, and this is the huge problem of populism, is that it is not enough just to be negative. You actually have to come together and create something new. And it has to be really new. And it has to be, I'm afraid to say this, like very big brained. And so, you know, the thing is that how do you basically, how do you create a leadership that is daring enough to say, we are going to revise 400 years of English constitutional history and we are going to do it in the most nerdy way. Literally last night, the night before last, to prepare for my debate with the great constitutional scholar, no irony mint there, you know, Jed Rubenfeld. I was basically reading Blackstone from like the mid, you know, 17th century. And I could probably, you probably don't want me to hear me talk for 20 minutes about Blackstone's theory of the king, but I could talk for 20 minutes about Blackstone's theory of the king.

[Peter McCormack]

Right?

[Curtis Yarvin]

That is very nerdy and very whatever. But the thing is actually like, you know, when you look at what populists want, they actually are in line. They want this, they have this issue, they have that issue. They're right about this, they're wrong about this. They're against immigration and vaccination and all these other Asians. But actually what they want was well expressed by the great English poet Alexander Pope when he said, for forms of government, let fools contest, whatever governs best is best. And they have this deep and totally correct to the bone feeling that they're not being well governed and in fact they are being abused by their government. In fact, their government is constantly pissing down their neck and telling them it's raining with an old town. Have you heard that expression before? That's an old Texas expression. Don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining. Right. You know, and as an Englishman, the number of times you feel the worm trickle on your neck and told, you know, this is just a balmy rain, you know, well, that's why, that's why I bring up Bukele, because he's tremendously popular.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, he's tremendously popular. He's done it through Democratic means, but kind of changed the constitution and got rid.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Again, the word democratic is playing you falsely.

[Peter McCormack]

I know, I know.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He's done it through populist means. Basically crushed, you know, the sort of.

[Peter McCormack]

Got rid of the corrupt judges.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, he crushed the meritocracy in El Salvador. The meritocracy in El Salvador was all sort of backed up by. They're all, you know, sort of American stooges, basically, or Harvard stooges, rather. They're U.S. embassy stooges. And he told the U.S. embassy to go blow smoke up its butt, which is something.

[Peter McCormack]

But he's.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You don't say to the US Embassy normally, you don't really get away with saying that. And like he was just go ahead and blow smoke up your butt.

[Peter McCormack]

And we saw how they come after him. But he's kind of been like a CEO for the country.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh yeah, the. The beast I walk through. I will tell you an El Salvador story. So I've been in El Salvador twice and it is true, when I was in El Salvador, I guess the first time I did get two intestinal infections in three days. That is probably because I swam in the ocean, which was brown. And you're a river mess. On the other hand, so you know, you go to El Salvador, you still don't want to drink the water. On the other hand, I did something insane in El Salvador. I tested Bukele's theory empirically in a crazy way because totally accidentally, because I'd gone to a conference and I brought my laptop and I realized that I needed to get a ride share home. And to do that, I had to walk through the main square of Old San Salvador carrying a MacBook Pro under my arm.

[Peter McCormack]

Did you keep it?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I never felt unsafe at all. When I was in a similar situation in Sao Paulo, they were like, do not even take out your cell phone. Like, you know, in New York I'm like, there are places in New York I would do that, places I would not. London places I would do that, places I would not. I felt completely safe in El Salvador.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

When did you get that?

[Peter McCormack]

So that was about, I want to say about four years ago.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

So I was there interviewing Bekele to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Interview four years ago?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, because that's how early he got into bitcoin. And he had not accomplished his miracle yet.

[Peter McCormack]

No. So I went and interviewed him. But one of the. We made a film there as well. And the most interesting conversation is quite ironic now being with our studio in London, but I interviewed a person on the street and they said I used to not be able to use my phone in public because it'll just be snatched off me. He said I can walk down the street and use my phone now. Whereas in London now you, you say people don't use your phone in public. We've come full circle. And so I just think of him as. I can see why leftists cannot stand in. They talk about the human rights abuses and look, certainly there are some innocent people in jail, but he has Changed a fundamental direction of that country by making tough, strong decisions, knowing that they're not perfect decisions by the kind of left.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And that search for perfection is one of the most dangerous things. Like you can't have. You know, there's this great, you know, British, you know, anonymous British tweeter named Druk McCunley. Do you know Druck but Cunley of the UK aesthetics? Right. You know, and he came up with this great, you know, picture which is basically, you know, may have some relationship to my big red button thing. You know, he's like, you know, there's a fix everything switch. You know, pull up on Twitter, go and search for the fix everything switch. I should use this resource more. This is. Yeah, I found on the fix everything. Yeah, but search on Twitter, search on X for a fix everything switch. Unfortunately, it's an image. But no, go down, go down. Yeah, there you go. There you go.

[Peter McCormack]

All right. Fix everything. Easy. Okay. So people listening. You can't press that switch. There is no switch. Actually, nobody wants to see any switch pressing. You are switch pressing Obsess Maniac is simply not possible to press the switch. To be honest, it's quite frankly terrifying that you even think of pressing the switch. Hey, buddy, just get fucked if you even think of pressing the switch.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Fuck you.

[Peter McCormack]

You have this ridiculous fantasy where you can just press the switch. The middle ground is not switch pressing. It isn't easy. It's just pressing the switch. Yeah. If people say you shouldn't press the switch, then maybe don't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And you're in the middle pressing obsessed maniac.

[Peter McCormack]

And in the middle is like a light switch. Fix everything, please.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, exactly. Exactly. All right. Should we. Should we break? I could use a break.

[Peter McCormack]

I could use. Yeah, but I do want to finish. I don't want to just stop.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, no, no. We can.

[Peter McCormack]

Another beer, quick.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Maybe some whiskey. We can go for hours, you know.

[Peter McCormack]

Right. Connor, you got a question?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

So my. My question was it kind of sounds like you're asking for the return of a Caesar and his fellow philosophical friends who dictate.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think essentially you're in a situation where if you, you know, to summarize the kind of previous conversation Aristotle tells you that there are three forms or forces or kind of styles or ways of doing government. You can do it the monarchical way, the aristocratic way, or the literal democratic way. And the problem with the literal democratic way is not even that the people are incompetent to govern. It's both better and worse than that. They are both incompetent and too weak to govern. If they were a king, they would be like an eight year old king. Their attention span is too weak, their capacity for cooperation is too weak. All of these things maybe can be improved. But you have to sense squarely the fact that populism, the track record of populism in the last 75 years is that it always loses.

[Peter McCormack]

We want a mark as a radius.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so your choice in a way, because you don't have those other two forces, is you need to think really carefully and hard knowing that there's a wide range of distributions in the quality of a monarch that I think Caesar was fricking wonderful. I love Caesar, I love Augustus Tiberius. And so you basically want to design a system that will give you a Caesar, you know, an Augustus Benotta Tiberius or a Caligula. You can think of these exclusively in Roman terms. I have a historical conspiracy theory for which there is absolutely no evidence and it's probably not true, but I love it nonetheless. So Edward Gibbon described the period from Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius or Trajan, I think in Marcus Aurelius, I'm forgetting the order as the best government that humanity had ever experienced. You know, when you look into the lives of, you notice that these emperors adopt each other. Okay, That's a very unusual historical pattern is this adoptive succession where Marcus Aurelius is like nominally the son of Varus, who adopts him as a young and beautiful man. I'm like, I'm not saying, but like, you know, what if actually the five good emperors are really the five gay emperors, you know, and what if we get Commodus because Marcus Aurelius breaks the pattern and goes back to hereditary succession? You've seen Gladiator, I've seen Gladiator. Not a good thing. Right. And so the thing is actually for me, I think the logical way to think about this problem knowing that for the moment, although society can be monarchs can actually change society for the moment we don't have a suitable aristocracy that we can trust to govern. We don't have a suitable Aristotle, we don't have a suitable demos. Therefore as engineers we're like, all right, here are these other two designs that I really, really, really wanted to work, but they're just not going to work. So gosh, I guess we have to go with a form of government that humanity has used for like 99.9% of its history.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And like this is why I thought it was clever that the way yell political union debate, which I lost by the way. I lost 23 to 16.

[Peter McCormack]

I saw the resolution didn't pass.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We'll be back. We'll be back. We'll be back.

[Peter McCormack]

You know, you would have got less than 23 votes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Who wins five years ago, who wins his first election? Right? You know, like. Like, I would have been arrested, you know, And. And like, you know, the. The. Who wins his first election, Right? And so, yeah, you know, to basically say, like, all right, you know, think about it as like, you know, a chemist designing a pharmaceutical. Like, you know, a pharmaceutical is like. Actually, most drugs are bad, right? You know, most molecules are something you don't want in your body. And you have to solve this problem. One of the things you're familiar with the concept of Ozempic. Have you ever taken Ozempic?

[Peter McCormack]

No. I'm tempted. I'm a little bit rotund.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, try it. Try it. It's good shit. It's a hell. It's. As someone once said, it's a hell of a drug, you know, and what's even better is bootleg Chinese Reddit, Retro Tide, that's. That one is not even released yet. Amazing stuff. And, you know, I look like Xi Jinping, you know? You know, and I don't understand why he doesn't do this stuff, you know, and so in any case, all you have is you have monarchy. And it's like this family of molecules which are very, very different from each other, which have a huge level of historical variance in how the monarch is chosen, the meaning of the monarch, the function of the monarch, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The only thing you see is that if the monarchy is less than absolute, it rapidly disappears. Yes. And so there's something really Boolean there. It's like achieving orbit. It is not good to build a rocket that gets 99% of the way to orbit. Like, don't do that, right? As Sanjus said, he who makes half a revolution commits suicide. And that is basically also true of getting halfway to orbit. So you basically have to actually say, here is a family of molecules. And by the way, the original molecule for Ozempic was developed from Gila monster venom. Okay? It was basically noticed that Gila monster venom had this property, but it was actually the venom of a lizard. And so when I suggest that you go to a certain website and buy some cheap Chinese eridatrutide and inject yourself, I'm not saying that you should go out in the desert and find Gila monsters to bite yourself with, right? And actually, the fact that this Molecule is in the 20th century, very toxic. And by the way, that's an unusual situation for monarchy because Hume, the most rational of scholars in the Scottish Enlightenment is like, yeah, basically a well designed monarchy is obviously the best system of government. I'm like, we've seen, okay, there's Hitler, but also there's even the terrible, or there was this crazy Swedish monarch like Eric the 14th or something like that who was actually insane. More often you have very weak kings who are weak because they're just very, very young. And we see that's like the seven year old population. You just can't put the seven year old in charge of France. You just can't do it.

[Peter McCormack]

If he was the one in Game.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Of Thrones, you know, and it just like. So that creates a problem where power, you know, gets dispersed. And that has often been very dangerous for kingdoms. In a way. I think the decay of the English monarchy starts with Elizabeth, just because she's wonderful, but she's also a girl and she kind of lets her deep state run away with her a little bit, right? And then James the First comes in and he's kind of this weak foreign king who doesn't have a local power base and he starts gapping, as the genseers say. He's constantly yapping about the divine right of kings. The divine right of kings. You know who doesn't yap about the divine right of kings? Henry the freaking eighth. You know, that's because Henry VIII did not need to do that shit. Whereas James I is like, I'm an absolute monarch. I'm an absolute monarch, right? You know, as soon as that starts to be compromised, as soon as he even has to insist on it, his dynasty is on the way to decapitation, right?

[Peter McCormack]

So but this goes back to my point where if a monarch fails, it could very easily be replaced. But with democracy, again, if it fails.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There are a lot of failure modes and they all suck, right? So it's like basically you're building a bridge, okay? A bridge is an inherently dangerous thing. A bridge is inherently something where you're really screwing around with the basic forces of nature. You are in fact defying those basic forces of nature. More than anything, what a bridge wants to do is fall down, right? And the same is true of a monarchy. It's sort of not a naturally stable form. It has to be very actively stabilized. The great sort of virtues and also the great vices of democracy and oligarchy, Oligarchy especially has all these very strong natural stabilizing forces which leads to just like complete sclerosis and insanity. But at least there's peace until just everything falls apart. But there's a lot of the importance of an elite is tremendous. You can't get rid of your elite. You have to basically redo them to some extent. And that has to be actually a very pleasant process for this elite. It should be a very pleasant process. But, you know, in terms of engineering, yeah, you're doing this, like, very risky thing. Like, you know, Jed compared it to, you know, a nuclear reactor. Like, he's like, well, you know, you basically could power your system on coal, which, like, you know, might burn a little funky, or you could build a nuclear reactor. Okay, what's the worst case scenario? Like, the worst case scenario is clearly a lot worse for your nuclear reactor. And that was a very effective argument by a very distinguished lawyer. Right? So I'm like, okay, there's that. On the other hand, basically you build a nuclear reactor or you freeze in the darker and you're eaten by wolves. And if you get another recurrence of basically the left regime, now that the idea that there are two lefts, the nice left and the mean left, like the mutt left and the Jeff left has been like, totally exposed and blown up. And they're obviously the same thing. You're just like, you know, it's a total mask off moment in a way. Like the response to this Charlie Kirk thing. Yeah, total mask off moment. And they're basically like, yeah, we're actually just one thing, right? You know.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, yeah, because they were either dancing on his grave or just like rationalizing it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Same as their relationship to Stalin. Literally the same thing historically, like, actually they're, you know, they gave up Stalin and, you know, they went nuts for Castro, they go nuts for Yasser Arafat. Right. You know, there's this like, attraction that's like, you know, the attraction of, you know, libs, you know, to Stalin or for that matter to Luigi is like, has this really suspicious resemblance to the way that lovelorn women send prison letters to murderers. Right. You know, it's just like, wow, again and again, you're just choosing the ugliest possible thing.

[Peter McCormack]

But if you could, rather than poll them, if you could dive into their brains and see what they actually thought. How many of these libs wish Donald Trump hadn't turned his head at that moment?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, sure. I mean, because they understand, in a way, they understand something that we don't because they understand the basically fundamental and ultimate meaning of politics. And they are just about fundamentally, if you have parties A and B and they're contending for power. And party A cares only about power and party B cares about anything other than power. Party A is going to win and party B is going to lose. That is just the way it works. Those are the rules. I don't make the rules.

[Peter McCormack]

How do we stop Commodus then? Because. Which, by the way, I watched Gladiator again for the first time since I was a kid.

[Curtis Yarvin]

See here was.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, let me tell you this point. So I watched Gladiator 2, which was terrible.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Gladiator 1 was also terrible.

[Peter McCormack]

It was terrible. It was terrible. But seeing it as a, I don't know, 15 year old, and then seeing it again as an adult after I've read Meditations, discovered Bitcoin, I spent a lot of time thinking about the fall of Rome. It goes from. It's. You watch as a 15 year old and you just see, you just, you're just seeing gladiators fighting in the pit.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, this, this season, sorry, the Germans.

[Peter McCormack]

But it's a little bit more educational when you watch them.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, shit. So the thing is, normally when people ask this question, when I go to like Yale Law School and I ask this question, like, basically, you know, there's a lot of good things that you can say about Yale Law students, but they're basically not nerds. There's like three nerds in the audience. I can pick them up like, you're a nerd, you're a nerd, you're a nerd. Right. You know, but for the most part, they're not nerds. And so, but they're also very sharp. And so when they pin down this question, I have to basically like, work very hard to seem, not seem like a nerd. But with you, Peter, you know, I'm not ashamed and I'm not afraid. We are nerds together. Let us be nerds. Let us join hands as nerds. And so there's actually an answer to this question and the answer to this question that is sort of well trodden and well worn. And I'm actually like, you know, I have, I have, you know, been involved in way more many board of directors votes than I should have. So I have basically seen, you know, I spent like basically the last year in corporate governance war. Right. You know, and have you done this?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, of course.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Hell yeah. Fuck yeah. Right?

[Peter McCormack]

You know, well, yeah, but I, I'm.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The guy who, I literally, I literally, I literally today I, or rather my forces prevailed in an on chain election. Today, literally today, today. It was a very small difference actually, like huge respect to the people who lost that election. They're actually also wonderful. It's just sort of the wrong shape, you know.

[Peter McCormack]

But I'm a chairman who can be removed by a board and I'm also, no, I'm only the chairman.

[Curtis Yarvin]

In my first startup plan, basically there was various kinds of corporate war involving the courts of Delaware and the result was with my second co founder, I ended up in a situation, it's actually very workable situation where he's the CEO, I'm the cto, but I control the board. So he can fire me, but I also can fire him and every kind of co founder situation. If you want to sort of structure a co founder situation, you want this kind of Mexican standoff where it's basically clear that just either of you can blow up the world if you want and you actually don't want to. And before you want to blow up the world, you should want to leave.

[Peter McCormack]

This show is sponsored by Gemini. We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money and that is by stacking bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about bitcoin. You can go and research this, you can go and read the books, but the truth is it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it's secured my family's future and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me it's with Gemini. They're a fully licensed, full reserve exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com which is G E M I N I dot com. We should probably talk about economics.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Let's segue from there.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you know what is interesting is when you go out and look up your interviews, you've got some interviews you've done with like cryptonards and then you've done your kind of Tucker Carlson ones and during your like Tucker and other ones, you very, very rarely Bring up.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Very rarely cross the street.

[Peter McCormack]

You do, but. But when I do my interviews, very rare, unless I'm interviewing an actual bitcoin nerd, it very rarely comes up like I bring it up occasionally. So when I found out like, oh, Curtis is also a bitcoin nerd, that's kind of interesting. That's kind of interesting. So then it pushes me to like.

[Curtis Yarvin]

In this world, therein hangs a tale. Can I tell you a tale?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, tell me a tale.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Tell me a tale. This is a tale that has not actually been. I've said that I've done a lot of appearances, but this is a tale. I referred to it briefly in a text message to you, but this is a tale that has actually not been told before. So let me tell it. So I was basically where all this bullshit came from is I was kind of doing two things at the same time. At the same time I was working on basically how do I rewrite all of government. And at the same time I'm also working on how do I rewrite all of computer science. Because I feel that they. I am actually a dropout of the Berkeley PhD program in computer science and I worked in. You know, I wrote the first. I wrote a WAP browser that was a pre iPhone cell phone browser that shipped about a billion units of which about 10,000 were ever actually used. But you know, that was. I remember wap. Oh yeah, oh, you remember wap. Did you ever write wml?

[Peter McCormack]

No, I did, no. But. But I did start out my. My post university career. Did start out writing HTML.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, but you'd hurt. You had heard of old. Of the attempt to have a parallel.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes, I do.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, that was. I would. I did not organize that. I did not create that. I was. But upon. But it allowed me, you know, before the 2000 collapse to sort of raise a reasonably sized little nest egg. Not enough that I had like, fuck you money and could just go to like, you know, go to shit, but like actually enough to do. I was just like, well, I dropped out of grad school because I just couldn't stand the fricking bureaucracy. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to go make some money in the private sector and I'm going to like fund myself to do an independent dissertation, right? And so I was like, all right, I'll do that. Right? And you know, because everything had gone to shit, but I still had some cash left. I should have sold the bubble. Either way before I head or way after I did. I'm a terrible Investor, you know, and.

[Peter McCormack]

Most of us are.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I'm the worst. And the. And you'll see why. And the. The terrible. And I apologize to everyone, you know, for. For my. The terribleness of my investing. But the. Although, you know, I made a lot of money on Covid, actually, and that was my best trade ever. Like, buying S and deep out of the money. S and P puts in, like, January 20, 2020. That was a. That was, like. That was money, right? You know, and, you know, in any case, you know, going back to sort of my early investigation, so it's like 2002. Everything I worked on had sort of gone to shit. Everything clearly was shit and deserved to go to shit, you know, in its own way. And wml, for instance, was. Was shit, right? Despite my best efforts. And I was like, all right, clearly, sort of the way in which we're doing computer science is essentially. If you look at your iPhone, your iPhone is actually basically a mechanical copy of or a structural copy of a mini computer the size of a fridge called a vax that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation, you know, in 1975 or something like that. And it is running, basically running an operating system called Unix, which you might know of, which was, of course, which was the operating system for, you know, developed by these, you know, cool people at Bell Labs. Amazing, amazing system for, you know, that was popularized really, you know, by the DEC machines, right? And so, for example, when you use your iPhone, here's something about your iPhone that you'll realize. It tries very hard to pretend that there's only one level of memory. It tries very hard to pretend that all apps are on at the same time. But you'll notice that there's actually a difference there. And if you haven't used an app in a while, it's clearly like, booting that app back up, right? So essentially, your iPhone has these two layers of storage because that's how hardware evolved. But hardware evolved that way because basically in 1975, you had one kind of memory, which was hard disk memory on spinning cylinders that lasted forever, and another memory and was slow, and another kind of RAM that was cheap and fast. That dichotomy created the whole definition of what an operating system is. And I was like, I'm like one of these people who's like, a heavy metal guitarist. I was like, I'm like, classic trained man. I trained at Juilliard, right? You know, like, I'm very classically trained in system software. And I was just like, you know, what if this difference didn't exist. What would happen if we were actually designing the system from scratch? Well, you know, suppose we found an alien computing environment that fell off the back of an alien spaceship. Like, what would it look like? Because clearly, maybe, for example, in normal computing, one is true and zero is false. But maybe the aliens would be like, zero is true and one is false. Right, but then how would it be constructed? How would it be designed? And I became obsessed with this goal that was first uttered by, in a way, by this guy, Paul Graham, who's the leader of Y Combinator, of basically building a system with a minimum set of basic requirements or the minimum structural, mathematical definition of computers. All computers would be running the same software, and the software would actually fit on a T shirt. Okay? And everything that proceeded that would be like the axioms of the system. Everything that proceeded from that would be like completely a deterministic pure function. And basically you could define the whole computer for all time, forever, as this function of its inputs turns into its outputs. So this was basically a fairly difficult goal. And I have these T shirts. So this is a system called urbit, which you may have heard of. So this is a system called urbit. And so basically it sort of took a while. It took several years to say, okay, what is the minimum set of equations here? What are the Maxwell's equations of software that define the T shirt? And how, given that you can define any programming environment in this, if you can bring up a knock knock spec. No, C K.

[Peter McCormack]

Maxwell equation.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Is that the astrophysicist Maxwell? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So noc. Yeah, yeah, you should be a specification. Should be there. Yeah. Wait, wait, if you go back, just URBIT specification. Yeah, that's the definition of. So I was like, all right, well, that's a little bit long. So I was like, all right, can we describe this system in literally 200 words? Like, I put it in a word count system. It's 200 words. This is all of software. I'm like, all right, let's reinvent this thing. So I was like, all right, what's the minimum set of things you can do? And then on top of that, how do you define an actual programming language in these terms? That was another two or three years. That's also an area that I had some expertise in. Then you're like, okay, once you have a programming language. Well, here's the thing about language adoption. Linux languages, like, for example, C or JavaScript are adopted not because they're great languages, but because they're the native language of the platform. They run On C is the native language of Unix. JavaScript is the native language of the browser. Pull up another page, go to Twitter, look for the page of a guy named Guillermo Rauc and search for Guillermo Rauc. Guillermo, as in the Spanish name.

[Peter McCormack]

You're gonna have to spell that for myself.

[Curtis Yarvin]

G, U. I like Guillermo.

[Peter McCormack]

To Toro.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Peter McCormack]

G U, Y, E double L. Yeah, yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

E double L. Doesn't matter. You'll fix it for it.

[Peter McCormack]

Guillermo.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, Guillermo Rauch. R A, U, C H. There you go. Look for that and then look for that name and Curtis Yarvin. React. Yeah, there you go. Click on that thread. No, just the thread, not the picture. Like.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, that's hold scored up, score up. That's 2003.

[Curtis Yarvin]

2003. Yeah, actually. Well, I mean, that's 2000. I mean, it's issued. It's actually stuff that I did in the 90s. And basically, you know, there's this document online that's basically like, here's this like fundamental. And Guillermo Rauch is the guy who basically he runs Vercel. I think he actually invented Reaction, something like that. And so he's a reasonably prominent figure. And I just like randomly posted this document that's online, which is basically like, oh, Yeah, I invented React like 10 years before anyone started using React. So if you look at Guillermo's review down there, scroll con, scroll down, you know, and the.

[Peter McCormack]

Which one should we read?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Read the one toward the bottom. Reading for 2000. For 2000. This is a near perfect foreshadowing of.

[Peter McCormack]

The subsequent tennis years of DOM updating. Is he going to say it's eight in hell? DOM mutations become very hard to reason about Author and difficult, especially as project teams grow an event you don't. I've got no idea what the fuck this is.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right, keep scrolling down. You'll get to the conclusion. In 2005, Guillermo, him, I. E. 15 years later, Guillermo himself was saying the same thing.

[Peter McCormack]

Briefly. So over.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And then he's like, but he missed this thing. We're later significantly back. This is the mistake that many predecessors of React made. TLDR, this paper is really impressive.

[Peter McCormack]

I say Curtis anticipated 95% of React story by fucking. Also anticipated and really well articulated the pitfalls of its imperative competitors. The other 5%, however, is the argument made.

[Curtis Yarvin]

React win.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, you fucked up with that other 5%. Had the author not detoured into XML markup extensions and focus on the fact that FX would be used as well. Whatever the fuck. What's the tld?

[Curtis Yarvin]

This paper would be an old timer could have been a contender. I could have been a contender. Anyway, in any case, my point is that basically I have reasonable claims to be a computer scientist.

[Peter McCormack]

I think that's fair.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think that's fair. And so essentially I have the academic credentials. I dropped out of the right schools, I had the right jobs. The Brown CS program is undergraduate CS program is amazing. Like, you know, like this is not like super implausible and it's not super weird that I, as a fucking weirdo would make like, you know, $1.1 million and decide, all right, I'm going to spend that on spending the next 11 years reinventing all of computer science. So that's based or all of system software, which is my field of computer science. There's a lot of other.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, we can.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't know anything about AI, so in any case, I'm working on this URBIT thing.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And you know, here is the basic problem. And doing theoretical computer science, you'll be surprised that it's a problem I think many of your viewers share, which is how do you make money? Serious problem, right? And the thing is, okay, I'm reinventing computer science. I'm inventing a language, a programming language. Okay, okay, this is good. Okay, I have to explain to my girlfriend, okay, this is how I'm going to sell a programming language. Later, my wife, later, the mother of my children, I'm gonna invent a programming language and make money. It's insane, right? Completely insane thing. Because basically the one thing you know about theoretical computer science is it doesn't fucking make money. Yeah, right. And open source, it really, it's right. Imagine you're like, oh, I'm gonna sell a programming language. You know, I think in the 80s, in the 80s, people sold programming languages like Gbasic, like Bill Gates gotta start selling programming languages. You know, you don't make money in computer science today. Posting shit to GitHub is how you don't make money, right? So I'm like, okay, well this is basically fucked because actually here your iPhone is basically a vax. It is basically running this paradigm from 1975. It really calls for somebody to reinvent it completely from scratch. Nobody's going to fucking do it, you know, and you know, why the fuck not? You know, one time I was talking, was it like a random party in like 2015? And I'm like talking to a guy, you know, some like random Indian guy, cool guy, random party, right? And like, what do you do? He's like, I'm a Google I'm like, oh, what do you do at Google? He's a product manager. Like, you know, something, something, something. He works on this, he works on that. Google plus, I think he worked on Google. Google. You remember Google, of course, right? You know, you've been there, right? You know, you've fought in these wars, right? You know, and Google plus, Google. Waves. Buzz. Buzz. Wave was actually cool technology, you know, and Wave was cool, right? And Wave is really the potential. Something that hasn't really been realized. And. But Buzz is right, you know, and. And the. And, you know, then he's like, you know, what do you do? I'm like, well, I have the startup, you know, he's like, you know, what is it called? I'm like, what is it? I'm like, well, it's this thing called Urbit. He's like, he's like, oh, you're the urban guy. I'm like, yeah, I'm the urban guy. And, you know, we get to talking a little bit and he says something really remarkable to me because, you know, at this point, our, like, total capitalization is like $3.1 million. He's like, oh, yeah, we can never do anything that ambitious at Google, like, without any sense of irony. And there was no irony that's coming at all, Right. You know, it was just like, oh, Google couldn't possibly do this. Right? You know, but, like, it would be even harder in academia, right? You know, and so, like. And it's for free software. Who's going to. I will pay for that. Right? And so actually, you're looking really hard. You're looking really hard for an economic model. Hello. Hi. And. Sorry, my wife just came in and the. And you're looking really hard for an economic model. And you're like, how do you sell a programming language?

[Peter McCormack]

You can't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You can't.

[Peter McCormack]

Because. Because you want, like, widespread usage.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You gotta.

[Peter McCormack]

Open source.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's. It's actually. It's the most ridiculous possible idea, right? And so actually, but here's the thing, is that actually the way you sell a programming language is you don't. Because actually, the way the programming language is adopted is because it is the native language of an operating system. And so actually, really, you need to create an entire operating system. Okay. Which is even harder. How do you solve that? Okay, that's even more ridiculous, right? It's even more ridiculous. And then you're like, wait a second, do you know how IP addresses are allocated?

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know what an IP address is? How many bits are in an IP address.

[Peter McCormack]

Come on, man. I didn't do computer stuff.

[Curtis Yarvin]

32, 32, 32. That means there's 4 billion IP addresses. And they are allocated in this, like they are by an organization called arin. You know that. And they are allocated in blocks. And the principle, if you look into the question of, like, you know, can you ask AI, how are IP addresses allocated? Can we. Can we get some AI on this chatGPT? This chat GPT? How this. How are AI, how are IP addresses allocated.

[Peter McCormack]

All right, here we go. Good question. Here's a breakdown. IP addresses allocated in a hierarchical system, managed globally by.

[Curtis Yarvin]

A few times. Now scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. You know, all right, scroll down and ask another question. You know, I have two questions. One is, what is the purpose of this design? Because it seems to me that the purpose of this design is to allocate IP addresses according to who needs them. Wait for it.

[Peter McCormack]

Excellent question.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You're thinking in exactly the right way. All right, now ask another question.

[Peter McCormack]

You can type it while he does it. Colm.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah? Ask another question, which is, doesn't this seem to match the economic model of Karl Marx? And, you know, to each according to his need.

[Peter McCormack]

IP allocation is communist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You said it, I didn't.

[Peter McCormack]

Everything ends up.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's a very sharp observation, says chatgpt.

[Peter McCormack]

Everything ends up communist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Where it diverges, it isn't about abolishing ownership or profit entirely. All right, so the lesson we learned from this is that basically imagine, of course, this is impossible. We are allocating IP addresses in the era of a blockchain, and there's actually basically an NFT that says, who owns an IP address? And you actually basically say, oh, we're just going to basically fund the Internet from basically selling. We're going to fund the development of the Internet by selling off all of this land in a speculative way such that, imagine the blockchain exists in 1975 or something. You're basically going to say, obviously, every IPv4 address is simply an NFT. And whoever holds this NFT has that IP address and that's on chain and that's their network address. And, wow, wouldn't that be better than whatever this shit is? And it would also. It would also. It would also generate revenue, and it would also be something that you could, in a sense, speculatively sell. Because you could say, here is this new network that I'm creating called the Internet, which already exists at this point. I'm going to invent this network on which There are only 4 billion network addresses and each of them is property that can be owned, bought and sold, and basically traded on the market.

[Peter McCormack]

But you're gonna need a currency for that. Well, just saying.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Just saying. So actually, well, you know, you can of course, buy or sell anything in dollars. You could have NFTs and only stablecoins and not have Bitcoin. This is true. Okay?

[Peter McCormack]

It's not native to the Internet.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So this is all true. This is all true. So basically when I realized, basically that actually the way to make this whole economic structure viable, in a sense, was to say, actually, not only are you building a new meta sub language, hundred year fits on a T shirt thing, you're building a programming language that fits on top of that, and then you're building an operating system that runs on top of that. And in a way, Unix and the Internet are kind of the same thing. The Internet is sort of just the network of Unix, right? And so when you're building an operating system, you're also building a network that is, of course, easily layered in an encrypted way over the Internet. And so actually, if you said that network addresses on your new network, a network, it connects things that are running the same operating system, we're actually digital property in some sense, then you might be cooking with gas. And so the idea that basically you're like, all right, if you go all the way to having a system in which network addresses are digital property in some sense, remember working on this in 2002, if network addresses are digital property in some sense, then not only and the network pulls the operating system into existence and the operating pulls the programming language into the existence, then you have a way to sell a programming language. That is what many have sought. That is the golden ticket. This is a way to sell the programming language. And you're like, all right, let's try this. Because it's certainly a relatively unusual way to sell a programming language. And at the same time, actually, languages were the area that I was weakest in. I was very strong in browsers, I was very strong in operating systems. Although a purely functional operating system like this is a very different kind of operating system, you know, very ready with operating systems, right? And so I'm like, all right, you know, I'm going to, like, spend a couple of years doing this and then spent 11 years doing this. And my mother and my wife were like, you got to stop and raise money. And it was 2013, and so I was like, all right. And that's when I raised money and it sort of became a thing. But I also Had a final, you know, a complete, you know, URBIT demo. If you pull up. Urbit 2013 demo. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, there, that's. That. That one. Just no voiceover.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, nobody can see it. We're just seeing code.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Voiceover, you know, it's a. You know.

[Peter McCormack]

We'Re seeing code executed. Oh, here we go.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It would totally pirated, this Brandino track. It's from Apollo. It's welcome to full screen that. Full screen that. Get rid of the garbage.

[Peter McCormack]

We're an urban virtual computer or ship.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The resolution kind of sucks.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm sorry. Yeah, it does. What's happening? Explain to people what's happening.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You've just basically entered, you know, the alternate world of Martian computing and which shares only one thing with a software stack that we inherited from the 20th century, which is ASCII. It's clearly using ASCII, otherwise it might have fallen off an alien spaceship. But it's entirely possible that the aliens invented ASCII first. They've been here for a long time. Anyway, so this is me basically demoing the sort of stuff I've been working on for 11 years. It was very popular until people also learned that I also had this strange political science project. And then people are like, what the hell? I was canceled from some functional programming conferences. It became this strange, controversial thing. The history of Urbit is interesting, but let's pause the history of Urbit a little bit and rewind sometime to my other interest, which is Austrian economics.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes, There we go.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay, let's talk about Austrian economics for a second.

[Peter McCormack]

Here we go.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, you know, I was basically as someone who had made a little bit of money in 2000 and experienced that bizarre bubble. You know, they say in Silicon Valley, there's two kinds of people. People who remember 2,000 people who don't, you know, at this point, we all have, you know, gray hair and stuff. I noticed that, you know, neither of us is Nora wedding, although we've chosen different directions in hairstyling.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. A couple of years ago, I had the same hair.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Do you think I should change to yours?

[Peter McCormack]

Do you know? What happens is I grow it and then he gets it, and then I cut it and then I go back.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think I should go. You know what would happen if I went to your. Your hairstyle.

[Peter McCormack]

Your hairstyle, but it's not gonna suit you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. Do you think this suits me?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, totally. To be honest, I. I prefer with the leather jacket as well.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The leather jacket is good, but it's still too warm. It's Early. It's early October. How do you like the narrow. Have you seen me in the narrow jacket? No, see, I have some tweed here.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but see, I've seen. I've seen the professor look and I've seen the punk rock look. And I think the what stuff. You talk about the punk rock look is better. But for certain audiences, they're gonna need the professor look.

[Curtis Yarvin]

For certain, I'm not wearing my tweed because it was too warm. But, you know, I could. I could don the tweed. Should I don the tweed?

[Peter McCormack]

No, I prefer. I would like the leather jacket. I like the punk.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I don't have the leather jacket here, but I can dom.

[Peter McCormack]

You know.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know what I'm talking about the tweed right here. We could go full tweet, but let's talk about Austrian economics and keep the costume the same because, you know, clips need to match. So essentially, remember our conversation earlier where I sort of lost confidence in a way that the marketplace of ideas worked.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And losing confidence that the marketplace of ideas worked in a way meant losing confidence that it worked in all areas. And one of those areas being economics. And I sort of seem to look at kind of modern macroeconomics, actually. My father in the State Department was in the economics cone. He was an economics officer and retired in the senior foreign service from that. And that gave me a basic interest. And then when I took a couple of college courses in the summer at Cornell when I was 14, and one of them was macroeconomics, and I'm just like, what even is this? Right. And you know, what it is to be, you know, first of all to like, define what macroeconomics is as we understand it today.

[Peter McCormack]

Government, economics.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It is 20th century economics. Yeah. Okay. And that limit, temporally, no one before, like 1920 had heard of GDP.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Okay. That right there should make you ask some questions, because, you know, first, basically, when we look at what Thomas Carlyle called the condition of England question, do we really look at America and see that it's like economic activity has. The quality of technology and goods has certainly increased since 1925. But anyone in 1925 who could just see drone video of America's city streets would be like, this nation has become a ruin, but with cool cars. And. Absolutely. In so many different ways, they would be viscerally appalled by the result. And to tell them we have some intellectual BS that should convince them that, no, actually we were doing better than ever and we have the best government in history and would really not work on them.

[Peter McCormack]

But it's not economics. It's propaganda.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So the thing is that essentially what that tells you is not that you should spend a bunch of time quite questioning this economics, but that in the same fashion that I sort of designed urbit, I'm just like, basically like URBIT is not an evolution of Unix. Let's forget about UNIX for a moment. UNIX is great, it was great in its day. But let's start from scratch and let's say sort of what is economics from scratch? And it was there that I found the great scholar who really, a lot of people associate the Austrian school with Hayek. Yeah, the fact is, Hayek was a student of Mises and like, Hayek is second rate and all over the map, whereas Mises is like a laser. You've read Human Action, of course, it's just, it's an amazing, amazing work. And you just like, you know, it's called literary economics by these mathematical imposters. And it's just like, you see this and it's, it's a prioristic, it's just like, it's just razor sharp logic. Right. And you're just like, yeah, this is the real economics and is it right?

[Peter McCormack]

Like so, so, so my analysis, because I studied economics at school, we only studied Keynesian. There was, I didn't discover Austrian economics until I discovered Bitcoin. And then I realized there's basically two form of economics. There's free market economics and then there's government economics.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, that is one way of saying it. But actually I would say that if you think of what you call government economics as economics that's been infected in the same way that virology was infected, if you remember that metaphor, it's basically economics that's evolved to be sort of as powerful as possible economics that justify government. So when I say free market economics, I'm not, I don't have any sort of religious belief in the free market per se. There are many ways in which I disagree. I'm a mercantilist also, for instance. And that being an Austrian, I'm like completely an Austrian and completely a mercantilist. And I even see what Keynesian economics is trying to do. It's just doing it in a very silly way.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so, you know, but I would, you know, I would recommend that all Austrians read Friedrich List, you know, the great Austrian, the great, you know, sort of neo mercantilist economics who reinvents mercantilism in the age after Adam Smith. I recommend Liszt to everyone. He's an amazing writer. He's perfectly clear. There was Not a single equation in the book and no equations at all. This is pure literary economics. And actually to synthesize Mises and Liszt is like to form a kind of synthesis that is, I think, the way that, you know, states should do economics. Basically. Like the Chinese sort of understand Lisp, but they don't understand Mises. Milei understands Mises, but he doesn't understand Liszt, which is why he just had to bail out.

[Peter McCormack]

So I don't know Liszt. Help me understand Liszt.

[Curtis Yarvin]

A list is the national system of political economy. So Liszt basically was one of these lone geniuses. He dies in poverty later. His views become not only the basis of the late 19th century German mercantilist economic miracle, but also the Chinese and Japanese miracles in the 20th century. I was really surprised. About 10 years ago, my late wife and I went out to dinner with a Chinese couple who both were. They were like computer science grad students, but they were also a party connected back home. And I started talking about trade. I had previously thought that the Chinese mercantilist miracle was kind of seat of the pants. Oh, you work, you know. Oh, no. I mentioned Friedrich List. He's like, you know, Friedrich List? Everybody in China knows Friedrich List. And Friedrich List is basically saying, like, you have to treat the nation as a firm. Its balance of trade is its pnl. If it keeps losing money, something is wrong. Right. And so, in a way, Donald Trump, like, intuitively understands the things that Friedrich List understood when he talks about, like balance of trade. Like, we're losing $300 billion to Canada a year to Canada. And everyone was like, Donald Trump is an idiot and he doesn't understand free trade.

[Peter McCormack]

Hold on, let me ask. So are you basically saying that, like, the libertarian Austrians aren't baked in the reality of the state exists?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. And so, in a way, if you understand the state as a firm, you can be both an Austrian and a mercantile. There's not a compromise between them. They're sort of two dimensions of the same thing. In the same way that Einstein and Newtonian physics are sort of both correct in a way, There's a lot of Newtonian physics in libertarianism in general. And so having. And this is something that I got this kind of synthesis where I'm first, I'm such a Misesian, and I start reading like Thomas Cross Carlisle, and I'm like, this guy seems totally right, but Mises is totally right at the same time. But let's zero in, in a way on the M theory of money in banking. Because one of the things that is really essential to the Mian model of economics is that he's very against expanding the money supply. He's just like any supply of money is adequate. You have all of these justifications for inflation and all of it's like, for example, the hedonic adjustments you see in gdp. First of all, they kind of assume that the purpose of life is hedonism, which is kind of the point that Carlyle would make. But they're also just like, what you're really saying is because technology got 3% better, I can skim off 3% on inflation and you won't notice. That's what they're saying. Yes, that's like, it's like, you're just like, it's a scam, It's a scam. Read John Stuart Mills, the Currency Juggle. He understands this perfectly. You're just like the ordinary person looks at this economics, looks at 20th century banking economics, and says it's a scam. And what Mises understands is Mises is trying to figure out the basis of this scam. And he identifies this in essentially maturity mismatched banking. And so he's basically like this idea that banking creates money is really based on the idea that having liabilities and assets which don't match each other is economically stable. And it's just bad accounting. If you're a bank, you should balance your incoming payments with your outcoming payments. And if you want a 30 year, to offer 30 year mortgages, you need people who are willing to buy 30 year CDs. That's called the flow of funds model. And it's sort of before magic 20. It's just normal accounting. It's cat. You know, banks should be subject to cash flow accounting rather than solvency accounting. If you're familiar with the term hold to maturity, don't Google that, you'll be very terrified.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I know.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, I know. Oh, are you telling me that all American banks are insolvent, are only held up by guarantees from the Fed?

[Peter McCormack]

Of course. Like, how would they survive without the fdic?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, and it's. Oh, it's even worse than that. I mean, the thing is that first of all, you know, now even by the normal definition of solvency, they're insolvent. But even in the abnormal, even, you know, and this is a new development, they are actually held up by the fda. They're literally insolvent and they have to come up with this category of hold to maturity that was not usually a problem. Usually historically they are solvent in the sense that the net Value of their assets exceeds the sum of their liabilities. But of course, if they all tried to sell the same assets at the same time, they would all disappear. Ultimately, it's kind of a SAM coin, if you remember. Sam Bankman, Friedman Free.

[Peter McCormack]

But would you say the FDIC was a mistake of FDR then or it was necessary at the time?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, it's actually more complicated than that. So the problem is that, that well before World War I, the world was on what was called the gold exchange standard. And it was already since the founding. This is kind of, this is just an accounting error that goes back to the roots of English finance. And in some ways because it created this tremendous capacity to borrow. This tremendous capacity and sort of COVID capacity to borrow was a lot of what fueled the rise of England. It's now being basically spent on like draftkings and weed. But the capacity to borrow is still there. This is an enormous covert borrowing machine. Is soft currency. Once you allow in the old bank of Amsterdam system, basically gold balances had to be balanced by gold, right? And it was gold reserve standard. This Austrian modern monetary stuff, it was a gold reserve standard. And moreover, if you're accounting for that, generally you might say, all right, we have balances of 100% current gold. But we also have a number that says, this is sometimes called the real bills doctrine. We also have a number that says, okay, here's your balance of gold received in three months, okay? On the other side of that balance has to be somebody who's going to deliver gold to you in three months. So when you have a bank account currently that is actually defined in these terms, that is actually a zero term loan from you to the bank. It's maturity matching that is constantly over, right? So getting aside this question of maturity mismatching, which you can sort of easily see, allows the generation of spurious liabilities. You basically are like, actually no, any supply of money is adequate. And you end up with an interesting. And this is something I developed over time since then. The best measure of inflation is not this ridiculous doctored CPI number. It is personal net worth. It is a statistic also collected by the Fed. It is simply assume that people don't care whether they have stocks or bonds or houses or whatever. They're just like, how much money do I have affects how much can I afford to buy? Personal net worth as a number is going up like this, okay? That represents an increase in the balance sheet. Equity is a liability. Every time the stock market goes up, Americans get richer. And basically that's more Reading Some Americans get rich. No. And Some Americans get Richer. It's very unevenly distributed. That's true. Nice socialist point. I appreciate the socialist point.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, no, I'm not being a socialist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sorry, sorry.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm being a realist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I know, I know. I just wanted to stab you under the table with that. But nice socialist point. But actually the point is that this is stealth inflation. That the right measure of inflation is how much are people's portfolio portfolios, including dollars, increasing. This is an increase in purchasing power. Inflation, as Milton Friedman has said, is always an everywhere. A monetary phenomenon. Right. So that's an interesting question. And that basically says, you know, there's a. And this is where things start to get interesting. Do you know the term Fluchten die Sackvirte?

[Peter McCormack]

No, I don't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's a musician term. It means flight to real value.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. And so when you had the great inflation of 1921, it's why everyone's buying.

[Peter McCormack]

Gold and Bitcoin right now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

People would buy. Yes, but we're going to get into that in a little bit more detail. And in the Flockton die Sackvirt, people would buy like furniture because they know that they knew that their marks would be worthless tomorrow because the supply of marks was rapidly increasing. To me, fiat currency is government equity. And when we see, moreover, the government equity is M0, but like the value of all stocks in real estate is like, if there was a term for this, it should be like M8.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But it's actually Z1, which is personal net worth. Yeah, right. And when you see expanding personal net worth, you're like, wow, our houses are getting better and better. And while these blinds are like nicer and nicer and like, oh my God, you know, I had termites, but the wood just healed itself. No, that's not the way houses actually work. And when you basically see price going up and the thing staying the same, you are seeing a monetary phenomenon and you are seeing basically fundamental problems in calculation which basically cause people to have various kinds of misincentives that causes all this malinvestment and basically causes us to suck and be China's bitch. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So if you basically are like, the expansion. And here's the thing about the expansion of the money supply is it makes a dollar, just a normal dollar, an M0 dollar, something that is not a good way to store value. Yeah, right. And that leads you off the gold standard. Well, so the thing is basically again, going back to the gold standard, the English were always on a gold exchange standard. And so they were like, basically like, yeah, we can hold about a third of our assets in gold or a fourth. They would kind of wing it and they would push this crisis. And eventually World War I just calls all their bluffs and forces them off the gold standard entirely. Then they try to go back on the gold standard at the wrong exchange rate. This causes another financial crisis. The whole thing has been a mess ever since. But if you want to look at the true 19th century perspective on the gold standard, can you bring up an essay by John Stuart Mill? Bring it up in an old edition too, please. Like you brought up the last thing called the Currency Juggle by John Stuart Mill.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, but the problem is that they deviate. They, they, they. The gold exchange standard deviated so far from the gold standard that the only way to basically restore that balance was massive liquidation. And it was too much for the market to bear. They liquidated everything in the early 20s.

[Peter McCormack]

But that's to come back.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The Currency Juggle. Juggle. The Currency Juggle. And it's an essay by John Stuart Mill.

[Peter McCormack]

Just help me out with my contradiction.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There you go.

[Peter McCormack]

Just help me with my contradiction quickly.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, Find a real original text.

[Peter McCormack]

We talked about fdr. We talked about him essentially being a CEO, and we talked about him. Yeah, if Congress doesn't give permission, we'll do it the fuck anyway. But he also took the US off the gold standard because of deflation.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But the thing is that the gold standard of the time was a gold exchange standard, which was actually already deeply mixed with paper gold.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so you had the choice to basically do a site archive.org then you'll get an original looking thing. Site colon currency juggle. Anyway, you know, find that on arXiv.org we'll keep talking. So anyway, yeah, so essentially, you know, things were all. And you're starting to see this pattern. Things were already hosed in the 17th century.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And if you remember, 400 years. Yeah. And if you're basically like, things are hosed. Wow, that is hard to believe. You're like, I thought we were on the road to utopia. I thought we were building socialism. You're telling me things are hosed. I'm hearing that for the first time. Right. Things are hosed is a hard pill to swallow. And then once you've taken that pill, you need to swallow the next pill, which is still more brutal, which is things have been hosed since the 17th century. And that is true of the monetary system, that is true of various political and legal ideas. Just assume the worst case scenario about any field or any system of ideas is things have been hosed since the 17th century. And there's this famous 4chan tweet, which is a 4chan post, which is only one line. It is one of the greatest lines ever uttered on 4chan. And it just says, if only you knew how bad things really are. So if only you knew how bad things really are. I'm like, yeah, stuff has been hosed since the 17th century.

[Peter McCormack]

I feel like that's a conversation I'm having with more my normally friends now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. Oh, great, they have it on Marxist Internet archive as well. Let's put a. Pull it up.

[Peter McCormack]

I didn't know that was a Miles.

[Curtis Yarvin]

A wonderful site, very useful site. And he's basically like, this is just the currency juggle is. Yeah, Pornua X. Let's avoid that. Anyway, it's like you can find without going to archive.org and seeing 1830s page images, which the only way to read old books is read them with old page images. You're there. You need the time machine. Read the whole book. Do not read excerpts. You have to be. Remember that Sidney Fisher thing where I was just. I went into the past and I was just like, this is a different reality. I have to give these people their justice. And he creates this amazing book.

[Peter McCormack]

Which.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Totally changed my mind about American history. Basically, like 110 years after it was written. And a lot of great History in the early 20th century, actually. So in any case, you're basically like, all right, things have been hosed since the early 20th century, number one. Number two, basically, Mises rule is that any supply of money is adequate. Furthermore, if you look at the origins of basically the idea of Austrian ideas of money, you're looking not at Mises, but at Carl Menger. Yeah, if you could pull up Carl Menger on the origin of money, and he's like, basically like most people. Carl Menger with a C. He'll find it con. You know, it's fine. It'll work. And Mises Institute has a. You know. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Really excellent, excellent work. And he's basically skipped the forward. Do not read modern forwards. Get that out of here. And he's just like. But that every economic unit in a nation should be ready to exchange his goods for little metal disks, apparently useless as such, or for documents. Representing the latter is a procedure so opposed to the ordinary course of things that we cannot. Well, wonder if a distinguished thinker like Saverny, who's actually German, I believe, founds it downright mysterious. He's basically like, okay, people look at gold and think it's worth something because it's gold. It's actually almost worthless. And all the other monetary metals that are noble metals like gold are worthless. Why does gold alone enjoy this premium? And the question he's asking there in not quite such terms as, like, why Bitcoin and not Bitcoin cash?

[Peter McCormack]

Because it's the least worthless?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No. Well, we'll get to that. Actually, I think there's a more interesting answer to that. The answer to why Bitcoin and not Bitcoin cash is the same. And this answer is very complicated in the classical world, because the classical world has this weird bimetallic standard of gold and silver. And this bimetallic standard of gold and silver simply results from a patchwork of world nations, some of which have standardized on gold and some of which is standardized on silver. Asia basically runs on silver, and the west basically runs on gold, which creates very interesting exchange structures that might or might not remind us of Bitcoin versus Ethereum.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, so is it just like network theory, then?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Wait. Oh, there's a deeper. There's a deeper rabbit hole. Let us go deeper. Let us go deeper into the rabbit hole. Okay, okay, we are going deeper in the rabbit hole. And so I'm basically sort of investigating the question. And if you read. So Menger, through Mises. Mises develops something he calls the regression theorem. And the regression theorem is kind of interesting because of course it's not a theorem, it's not mathematical, it's like a logical theorem. And when one observes the regression theorem, one looks at the regression theorem and says actually ironically, Mises brother Richard von Mises was a very successful statistician. So it's not like mathematical talent did not run in that family. Furthermore, Mises himself was a serious practical dude who ran the economy of all. He was the Alan Greenspan of Austria for a couple years. So not an ivory tower theorist. He was a badass Jew, but very short king. And interestingly enough, his stepdaughter was also the great journalist Gita Sereni, who wrote a great biography of Albert Speer. But getting back to Mises, Mises comes up with this regression theorem. And you look at the regression theorem through modernize and you're like, well this is kind of game theory. You're kind of doing game theory, but game theory hasn't been invented yet, but you're kind of doing game theory. And so in a way, essentially the game theory, because the Magesian theory of currency choice is a spontaneous order. And the question Menger is asking earlier is like, why is these worthless disks of metal overvalued? These are significantly complicated by the fact that gold, unlike Bitcoin, has inherent net worth. Bitcoin has no inherent net worth. Gold has inherent net worth. Right. And, but of course the valuation of gold and the stocks of gold and the way that gold is traded bear no resemblance at all and have nothing to do with its inherent worth. Yeah, right. You know, it just sort of happens to coincide. And silver has even more industrial uses. You probably have gold tipped audio cables. Unfortunately that takes a very small amount of gold to gold investors. But gold is actually doing pretty well these days, I think. And it's one of these inflation assets. You're looking at the fluke die Sackvirte, the flight to real value. Right. That's why the stock market keeps going up. It's not actually a sign of good health, it's a sign that actually things are host. Sorry to admit that, but it's really true. Any miceysian will tell you that you're just increasing your liabilities, are you increasing your tangible capital? No, you're spending your liabilities on wheat and draftkings done. Right. You know, and like you are cooked. Right? You know, and you know, hey, you know, sorry to be blunt, right. I don't make the rules. Right. You know, and so you're looking at basically, you know, economics and even Finance has become this kind of fallacious profession in a way that accepts these strange assumptions and these strange rules, like something is really, really wrong here. Right? And it's something that actually the smartest people on Wall street don't seem to entirely get. Like, how wrong this is because they think everything is getting better and better and better. And it's just the Flukhandi Sackvrte. It's just inflation economics.

[Peter McCormack]

Or is it just cope?

[Curtis Yarvin]

There's cope, but there's also the flight to real value. And actually, they say on Wall street that pessimists look good and optimists make money. And I've always been a pessimist. In any case, working forward into this question of the origin of money, I came up with basically an unusual conclusion. And my conclusion was that the origin of money could actually be related to financial markets today. The Bungarian theory of the origin of money and even the Misesian theory of money relies a lot on. On something Mises calls the double coincidence of wants. Because basically, the good becomes more desirable as a medium of exchange if both parties have it. And I'm like, all right, that's interesting, but actually, the way that a medium of exchange creates demand for a good is sort of fundamentally frictional. If you imagine you're in a virtual world where anybody can trade anything to anything to instantly the double coincidence of once vanished. But do you maybe still have a source of monetization energy? Could the monetization process happen at all without the double coincidence of once? Let's assume the double coincidence of once goes away, and let's think about the monetization process in this imaginary virtual world where you can trade everything for anything else, then you get a different incentive that comes into play rather than the double coincidence of wants. You basically say, if I'm comparing asset A for asset B as a store of value, how do I expect the exchange rate between A and B to evolve over time? Let me give you an example of this, and this is an example that I used in some very early blog posts, actually. But we'll get to that is, let's say you're in a society with no money, and so you sort of feel this pressure to invent money. You're a fisherman in Iceland. Your name is Sven, and your idea is you're going to go out in fishing season, which is September, and catch a bunch of fish, and you're basically just going to keep the fish. And what Sven finds being kind of dumb is that fish don't keep. They don't keep and so therefore, your goal is not to eat the fish. Those fish are a store of value. You are going to exchange them for other goods later. They are a store of value. Do you remember a day so early in Bitcoin world where people kind of measured Bitcoin's success by transaction volume?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, of course.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And then they realized that that was kind of wrong. I have a story about that. So in any case, you have a store of value, and Sven has no choice but to choose a store of value. Because he consumes many things other than salmon. He has a need to store value from the present into the future. His question, therefore, at a very abstract misesian economic level, is, what should I use to store a value?

[Peter McCormack]

Fish is no good.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Fish is no good. Okay. So his second idea is, all right, I'm going to store something that keeps. I'm going to store axes, okay? And so at this point, we are looking at a question of what is called a Nash equilibrium, a concept which considerably postdates, you know, Mises. And we are looking and, you know, all right, if Sven wants to store money in axes, store value in axis, that's good. That's fine. That's okay. And axes, holder value, an axis, an axe, a 2025 axe and a 2028 axe. As long as it's not rusting or something, keep it under good conditions, really holds its value. Can you say the dollar? I don't know. And so Sven is like, let me store money in axis. And unbeknownst to him, Eric and Heinz and Hans and all these other people, you know, he's basically testing out a Nash equilibrium. Everyone else makes the same choice. They're going to store money in axes. Here's what happens. There's a certain amount of elasticity in the production of axes. And so because there's a certain amount of elasticity in production of axes. Axes. They don't disappear from the stores. Oh, no. We have an efficient supply and demand market. The axe price skyrockets. Axes go to the moon. They moon. And basically Sven is like, holy cow. This was the best way to store value ever. Because I bought these axes for 17 marks. 17 fish. And now I could sell my axes for 827 fish. I win. Yay. Mi schwen. Right? And so the axe price skyrockets. But sadly, sadly, the success is illusory because when the axe price skyrockets, the capital markets spring into action and they're like, we are hearing the Hayekian signal from the axe market. People love axes. People are using axes More than ever before, Sven needs 20 axes. I don't know why he needs 20 axes. Does he have 20 hands, 20 children? Has he imported 20 immigrants to do his work with axes? We don't know. All we know is everyone loves axes. Everyone needs axes. Everyone is talking about axes. Let's get into the axe market. Let's invest in axes. There's an axe bubble, which becomes an axe craze. There's an axe mania. There's axe throwing. You might remember the axe throwing craze, right? Everyone is super into axes. There's nothing more, you know. What does Sven want to do? He wants to show off his axes. He doesn't want to just keep them there. He wants to take them to the axe throwing event. You know, they're beautiful axes, right? And, you know, things keep going up and up and up until it's just like, wow, you know, there's a lot of axes on the market. And the ax dealers start to cut their price. And Sven, if he's a smart Sven, is like, now is the time to dump. And he dumps and he gets out of the axe market and makes a profit. But what must go up come, you know, must come down. And the result is that, you know, Svenland is left with this enormous glut of axe. There are all these. It's what Mises calls malinvestment.

[Peter McCormack]

It's almost like you're saying that we need a version of axes that cannot be produced in response to the market.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You might be saying that. You might be saying, wow, any supply of money is adequate. And so if we basically look for.

[Peter McCormack]

Something, we need a form of money that you cannot produce.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Gold is pretty good, right? Gold is pretty good.

[Peter McCormack]

That's the hardest to make, but it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Is actually possible to make and mine. And actually, gold mining has caused serious economic distortion. Distortion. Spain has never recovered from its conquest of the New World. Go to Spain. Have you been to Spain?

[Peter McCormack]

I have been to Spain anytime.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It has never recovered from its conquest of the New World. It has never recovered from this artificial expansion of its currency because that created a world in which basically Spanish. That created essentially Dutch disease. That created a world where Spain's had this enormous purchasing power that is enjoyed by America today. As a result, imports, you know, outcompeted domestic manufacture and the whole structure of society collapsed.

[Peter McCormack]

But what you're saying is Bitcoin is the first money that cannot be artificially created.

[Curtis Yarvin]

That's, you know. And so in any scenario, what you're saying. What you're saying is that when you basically have a fixed supply of money, as Mises says. Actually, two things. Number one, Mises imagines when Mises pictures, in Mises and Menger picture the origin of money, it's necessarily in very primitive conditions. And so they have this primitive idea of the double coincidence of wants. But as we see, actually maybe the same processes, as Lyell the geologist said, fuck these floods, maybe the same processes that have operated in the past are operating in the present. And actually the incentive to choose A over B as an asset of storage in storing value. Don't think of this in terms of the thinking of a primitive Icelandic farmer. Think of it in terms of a hedge fund. Actually, these processes of the origin of money are or can be, or in a way even should be operating today under basically present financial circumstances. And you're like, whoa, okay, that's a disturbing realization. So I started thinking about this really very seriously around and around 2004. So how does this question, you have this very interesting question of the origin of money. Fundamentally, the origin of money arises from basically, if you have a perfect money, there's no need for any other money. If you have Bitcoin, there's no need for Bitcoin cash. Yeah, sorry, Bitcoin cash. Yeah, you know, but that's just how it'd be, right? You know, and you know, this is what we call in computer science a standard. It's a very important. It's a path dependent contingent outcome, right? Ethereum versus Ethereum Classic. Sorry, Ethereum Classic. Actually, Vitalik proves that might makes right, you know, and like that's how it be, right? And so actually the understanding of the sort of that is the same as the question of why gold and not platinum? Why is platinum priced as an industrial metal? Rhodium, all these things with the qualities of gold, this is a platinum ring. Why is platinum priced as an industrial metal? Why does its stock structure look like an industrial metal? Gold is an industrial metal, but it is also a monetary metal. The interesting question is basically Mises tells you straight out in his regression theorem, it can't start from zero. You see an inflation in the price and the stocks of whatever good is chosen by the free market as money. But it can't start from zero, it has to start from people. It can't be a worthless asset. I'm basically like, maybe it can be a worthless asset, because maybe, basically, if people understand the theory, they will see that the theory predicts that a worthless asset can in fact become worth trillions of dollars as a result of essentially the restandardization of money, collective agreement, the restandardization of money is not going to happen and cannot in any sense happen in a. Like if you have a perfect money out there, there's no motor, the money is already perfect. Anything that anyone invests in, even if it's like it's just a bubble, it's a bubble that's going to pop. Whereas basically what Misean Mangarian monetary theory says is there's always at least one bubble that's not going to pop. It has to actually run to completion and become the new standard and you have to get to a world where Nvidia is priced in Bitcoin and like that is basically full remonetization. That is something that is actually nowhere near happened yet. Which you know, for bitcoin maximalists should be like, yeah, there's actually at least another 10 to 20x to go.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

Possibly, possibly. And the thing is actually in a way I had a long time disagreement with Balaji Sreenivasan about that and Balaji actually turned out to be right. Balaji is like, like it's past. I'm like, the government can shut it down at any time. And I posted about this in like 2013. I was like the government could shut it down and not 2013, even earlier than that.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but they had a chance.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Then they had a chance.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, they had a chance.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Now they don't. No they don't. Now they don't. Now they don't. Now they don't. Now they need it and this is why I feel comfortable having this conversation. And actually this is why I feel comfortable now, you know. And so essentially, if you go back to Urbit, suddenly here's this question of Urbit, like IPv4, has a limited supply of addresses. These addresses develop value from activity on the network. But booting up a network is a very slow and difficult process, et cetera, et cetera. The network effect is very difficult. We've made some progress, we're doing all right, but it's a slow and difficult problem. I recently came back to Urban after actually five years of being away and, you know, enormous wars ensued and the. But we've actually settled down into a beautiful piece. We're very happy, we're very happy. And I'm very happy as the CEO of my new company, Urban Tiger, which is actually also the name of the strip club in Birmingham.

[Peter McCormack]

My Birmingham or Birmingham usa.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, you're Birmingham. Yeah, you know, but, you know, like.

[Peter McCormack]

We'Ll go one day, we'll go one.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Day, we'll go one day. But we have a better logo. But in any case, so you basically, as a combination of both studying Austrian economic theory and thinking seriously about the structure of a network, and in particular the economic structure of a network, you have network addresses which basically, you know, should have. There should be a market for them and it shouldn't be a centralized system, it should be a decentralized system, right? And so it's actually fairly easy to anyone who knows anything about cryptography to say that, okay, you're going to treat network addresses in URBIT as digital real estate. And you're basically going to say every address has a list of transactions associated with it which is signed with a key. And then you're going to restrict that number of addresses to 32 bits, and then you're going to actually map those 32 bits into. Rather than having a naming system like the DNS, you turn the 32 bits into a base 256 alphabetic system, such as my name, Sargnam Pav, right? That's my Urbit name and that's a 32 bit number.

[Peter McCormack]

So basically you created scarcity. You created much.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You created scarcity. And you're just like, all right, actually we have this structure that involves scarcity. So the scarcity needs some intrinsic value that I'm going to create by making this operating system real. Had the operating system real become real by 2013, it become somewhat real. But this was like 2005, right? So it was actually nowhere near real. And I was just like, actually you can create a virtual currency with a limited supply, no mining or anything, in which basically the currency is owned anonymously by cryptographic keys, and you have a registry which basically just registers cryptographic transactions. Essentially. I didn't invent Bitcoin. I invented Solana.

[Peter McCormack]

You get richer off that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. What?

[Peter McCormack]

You get richer off that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, if I had actually invented Solana, but arguably, yes, but we'll see. The fat lady has not yet sung. But in any case, basically, I'm like, you know what? If you actually defined a system like this, which was just a cryptographic registry, forgetting the urban network address space. If you just abstracted this and you said, hey, there is a cryptographic registry of who owns what, of a fixed thing. I even designed something that I was like, all right, this could basically deflate essentially infinitely until it's the monetary standard. I even designed something that really should have been used, which was by Bitcoin, which was a notation for deflating currency. So I'm like, I will pay you to be 27, which is two times the 27th bits. So basically, essentially, I was just like, actually, you could. I remember being in a store in 2005 and being like, wow, if this existed in 10 years, you could buy a camel in Mauritania for bits.

[Peter McCormack]

It was so close.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So in a way, the thing I didn't invent was the blockchain. No, the thing I didn't invent was the blockchain. And so actually, I came very close to. I Basically, bitcoin is two interrelated, beautifully interrelated inventions. Absolutely beautifully interrelated inventions. One is proof of work, the blockchain. Decentralized consensus. There's a lot of ways to do decentralized consensus. The blockchain is a particularly beautiful economic way to do that. The problem was well known in computer science, has been his Byzantine agreement. There are a lot of Byzantine agreement solutions. Or you could just fake it, like, nevermind. But you could just fake it, like, nevermind, Right? And so essentially I basically, I'm actually really glad I didn't do this because I was basically like. I was just like, you know, actually, like, I could just launch what was essentially a centralized version of Bitcoin. Having the other idea of bitcoin, which is the idea that a worthless currency can go to infinity, that's the best bet. And that is, you know, that is my part. So I'm partial to it. And I will furthermore tell you my theory. I'm not satoshi. Okay? Okay. I'm really, really, really, really not satoshi. I had the motive, the opportunity, and the propensity, but I'm not Satoshi. Okay? So sorry about that. But nonetheless, I was basically. Actually came close to basically launching this deformed, crippled version of Bitcoin in 2005, and I chose not to do that. Instead, what I decided to do was file a document with the U.S. patent Office, which was a provisional patent application, basically setting out the sort of the monetary theory of bitcoin and basically setting out this design for Solana. And you're the first to hear it. So the thing is, it's sort of been interesting watching part of my theory, and you can find a post for me from that era talking about gold, because gold is, of course, another candidate for monetary standardization. None of this theory predicts the future. It doesn't predict that any of these things will succeed or fail.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So basically, this theory doesn't predict the future. But I spoke about this pretty clearly on my blog in 2007 and 2008. And my current theory of the origins of bitcoin is regrettably, the common theory of bitcoin, which is that somehow Nick Szabo was involved because he backdated some. Some posts on his blog. I was already convinced that Nick Szabo was involved before I had lunch with him in 2015. And then I was like, wow, this guy really talks about the blockchain like something he invented, even though he drove up in a 1990s car. And I'm still more convinced that it was Nick Szabo because I was writing about this monetary theory when Nick Szabo was on my blog roll.

[Peter McCormack]

Interesting.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So that is my theory of basically the origins and meaning of bitcoin. It's interesting that people don't really. People dimly glimpse this theory in a way. They're starting to understand that this is actually a very, very simple game theory, which is very clearly described in this document, which I'm like, All right, after 20 years, I'm going to release this. I ordered it from the patent office, and then they shut down the government. Of course, it's of no patent validity whatsoever. It's purely a historical document. But I still think it's a. I still think it's a much clearer explanation of the value and meaning of bitcoin than you will find even among most bitcoin maximalists. And it will be interesting to release it like the patent we saw earlier.

[Peter McCormack]

Curtis, I only got to page two of my notes, and I prepared a lot.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right. Sorry I hijacked you. I hijacked you. For this pitch. Really?

[Peter McCormack]

This is our longest interview ever.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Can you split it? Can you split it into two?

[Peter McCormack]

We might have to. We might have to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think that's good. That's why the economics is separate. But you're fading. Have to close.

[Peter McCormack]

No, the cameras are fading.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But we should.

[Peter McCormack]

We should do this again. I've got so many more questions. I love it. Have you ever done a four hour interview before?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Sure, sure, sure. But I've never discussed this origin of bitcoin stuff before. You know, I was actually, honestly, basically, I was really worried that basically implicating me as, like, at least the partial inventor of bitcoin would have serious adverse effects on bitcoin.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I worried about that for a long time. And then I was like, all right, I think bitcoin can take it, you know.

[Peter McCormack]

Right, we're going to do this again. Maybe in London, maybe here, maybe on the West Coast. But, Curtis, thank you, man. Fucking hell. This is amazing.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Thank you.

[Peter McCormack]

Thank you, everyone for listening.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Was it premium content?

[Peter McCormack]

It's unreal content.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Amazing.

[Peter McCormack]

Hopefully JD will watch it and then I can get him on.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There you go. Thank you, everyone listening. Jd, thank you so much. Peter, this was super fun.

[Peter McCormack]

Thank you, Curtis.