Transcript
Curtis Yarvin (0:00)
You're already starting to see this phenomenon where the stock market booms and like people's employment is disappearing and all these things go like demand for humans, like literally like lawyers, accountants, lawyers. I'm not like my lawyers, you know, they're on their way out. So you see this like massive demand destruction. You see a relatively small number of people getting extremely filthy rich by being on the producing side of this. You know what is really wrong, you know, is a concept that actually should not exist and makes no sense. I'll give you two words, passive investing. Actually, I have no alpha. I'm not adding any information to this information market. But there is something else called beta, right? And what is beta? Beta is the government printing money. If you have a hard money financial system, you will not have beta. Both foreign trade and migration is actually a little taste of the future. Because when you're importing basically slave labor, you're treating them like optimist robots. There's a third approach, which is the default approach, which is just everything turns into the third world. We've turned America and Europe into basically Argentina with nukes. You're in a situation where suddenly America is a third world country. Your children will be like digging rare earths out of a hill with their bare hands, like Congolese min.
Peter McCormack (1:28)
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Curtis Yarvin (1:53)
Pleasure. It's always good to be here, even though it's cold and nasty in this city, but always is. Well, at least the Thames hasn't frozen.
Peter McCormack (2:01)
So not yet, but it may freeze. The country may freeze over at some point. Politically anyway. Look, we're in very strange times. As you know. The debt, global debt, sovereign debt, is at all times high. It's a wall of debt that we worry can't be paid off. And that's happened at a time where I think we're right in an AI acceleration phase, which is changing a lot of jobs, a lot of industries. There's a lot of fear with that. It feels like governments are even more behind the curve than ever and companies are leading the charge. Is this the moment where we realize democracy just does not work?
Curtis Yarvin (2:44)
Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. And also there's a lot of ruin in a financial system. Let me say something provocative about finance, though, which is actually a truism that you will learn in any kind of accounting school, which is that liabilities consist of actually two things. They consist of debt and they consist of equity. And so when you say basically the debt can't be paid off, this is of course true, in a sense, but really, when the stock market goes up, that's also red ink. And understanding that when the stock market goes up, that's also red ink because it's also a liability. It's also essentially, I mean, it's, it's, it's inflation. Right? You're literally increasing the quantity of dollar or pound denominated assets. And it is the quantity of financial assets denominated in pounds or dollars or pounds and dollars that define spending power. And so actually, what you're seeing when the stock market goes up, you don't think of that as being like the government printing money and giving it to rich people. But in fact, in ways that are clearer than you can, it is the government printing money and giving it to rich people. It's actually the real graph to watch is not the graph of debt. If you go, or at least for America, it's. I think it's one of the Z1 statistics. It's simply personal net worth. And personal net worth is spending power in dollars. And when personal, when net worth does not, when the increase in this curve, which goes steadily up despite our assets not particularly being worth much more, except in the case of maybe an AI factory, when that curve goes upward and to the right. There's two possibilities. There's one, oh, that number will basically be the same as the inflation number, which is, of course, the consumer is price inflation, as opposed to, you know, the. Which is downstream, obviously, of monetary inflation. But when you're inflating total personal net worth, and that is not driving inflation, it's because you're basically giving all the money to the rich people. So it kind of like sucks in either perspective. On the other hand, it's been sucky for quite some time. And I can tell you, like, this AI really works, you know, and I use it professionally, like, not in my writing, of course, but, you know, it's not that this, it's that. Right.
