#150 - Curtis Yarvin - Can Democracy Survive AI and Debt?

Summary

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Podcast Summary

The Peter McCormack Show, Episode #150

Guest: Curtis Yarvin
Title: Can Democracy Survive AI and Debt?
Date: February 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the intersecting crises and transformations wrought by accelerating artificial intelligence (AI), mounting sovereign debt, and the shifting legitimacy of Western democratic systems. Curtis Yarvin, an influential political philosopher and technologist, joins host Peter McCormack for an unfiltered, free-ranging discussion on the fate of democracy, “third worldization,” economic collapse, technological disruption, and the politics of authenticity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Economic Crisis: Asset Bubbles, Beta, and the Demise of Middle-Class Stability

• Market Booms, Joblessness, and ‘Demand Destruction’:
  • As AI accelerates, traditional jobs (lawyers, accountants, creative fields) are destroyed while financial assets soar, concentrating wealth among a shrinking elite.
    • “You're already starting to see this phenomenon where the stock market booms and like people's employment is disappearing … demand for humans … is vanishing.” (Curtis Yarvin, 00:00, 39:45)
• ‘Passive Investing’ and Beta as Money Printing:
  • Yarvin criticizes the notion of “passive investing,” arguing that index fund gains are fiat-driven “beta,” i.e., beneficiaries of government money printing, not productive economic growth.
    • “What is beta? Beta is the government printing money. If you have a hard money financial system, you will not have beta.” (Curtis Yarvin, 00:54, 44:15)
• Illusion of Prosperity via Asset Inflation:
  • Rising asset prices are not real wealth gains for most, but “siphoning to the rich”; measuring “personal net worth” is a better indicator of inflation than CPI.
    • “When the stock market goes up, that’s also red ink… It’s also a liability.” (04:00)
    • “Inflation is an increase in purchasing power, and that's your purchasing power … suitcase full of bills or mutual fund or house.” (Curtis Yarvin, 08:25)

2. AI, Labor, and the New “Resource Curse”

• AI as the New Industrial Revolution—and Crisis:
  • AI’s acceleration threatens to eliminate entire professional classes rapidly, exacerbating inequality and societal instability.
    • “We can deliver a lot more software much faster… But actually, if you're a graphic designer, you're fucked. If you're a translator, you're fucked.” (34:44)
• The ‘Dutch Disease’ and ‘Resource Curse’ via Technology:
  • Yarvin extrapolates from resource-rich economies: as AI concentrates productive capacity, most citizens lose economic value and political influence, leading nations to become “the third world with nukes.”
    • “The resource curse is when a country strikes oil and everything in the country gets worse… It becomes easier to buy things overseas… You get this destruction of labor demand.” (Curtis Yarvin, 38:50)
    • "Your children will be digging rare earths out of a hill with bare hands, like Congolese miners..." (Curtis Yarvin, 00:54, 27:34)

3. The West’s Fate: “Third Worldization,” Social Unraveling, and Elites’ Short-sightedness

• Three Futures for the West (53:22):
  • Socialist Path: More redistribution, entrenched welfare, continued decline.
  • Nationalist Path: Tighter controls, closed borders, attempt to revive national labor markets.
  • Default (Third Worldization): Persistent decline, massive inequality, and “Argentina with nukes.”
  • "There's a third approach, which is just everything turns into the third world... America is a third world country [with] the rich living very well..." (Curtis Yarvin, 53:22)
• Parallel to Developing World Oligarchies:
  • “If you want to overvalue your currency, you destroy your industries. If you undervalue, you destroy living standards but build up industry.” (12:00)
• Political Fragility and Rise of Alternatives:
  • Rapidly shifting party alignments, loss of establishment legitimacy, and demand for authentic, non-performative politics (15:53, 17:54)
    • “There is a demand for sincerity now; there's a demand for both sincerity and irony, actually.” (Curtis Yarvin, 18:07)

4. The Democratic Crisis: Authenticity, Populism, and the Limits of Reform

• The Sincerity/Authenticity Shift and the Social Media Era:
  • “On camera, this character appears… off camera, more measured, more real. But now the public wants the on/off-camera divide removed.” (16:24)
• The Role of ‘Red Pills’ and Overton Window Breaking:
  • The electorate is rapidly becoming open to ideas—remigration, mass deportations, radical reform—previously dismissed as taboo (59:46-63:21)
    • “The act of breaking through that veil creates this effect where it’s kind of—once you’ve seen something that is real, you’ll never go back to the fake thing again.” (Curtis Yarvin, 101:11)
• Limits and Tragedy of Reform Parties:
  • Many new anti-establishment parties simply tweak surface issues (e.g., beer taxes), offering minimal real change and replicating establishment patterns.
    • “The thing that's going to save pubs is getting rid of business rates and ... minimum wage. It's just so beyond that.” (Curtis Yarvin, 79:23)

5. The Coming Crisis: Function and Failure of Welfare, UBI, and Work Ethic

• Uselessness of UBI/Universal Welfare:
  • If human labor is fundamentally purposeless, UBI is just “child-level existence.”
    • “It’s a massive dehumanization of the human race... If you want a pair of shoes, you have to craft the shoes. That’s artificial labor demand.” (Curtis Yarvin, 84:37, 89:16)
• Need for ‘Game Design’ of Society:
  • Radical proposal: treat productive work as a societal game—impose artificial rules to create meaning, ban cheap/automated labor to restore dignity to manual and creative work.
    • “Your society has to be a little bit of a video game with video game-like rules.” (Curtis Yarvin, 91:15)

6. Lessons from History & International Politics

• Borrowings from Cromwell, Trump, and Revolution:
  • True transformation requires a sense of duty, willingness for sweeping regime change, and leadership authenticity.
    • “Big things are easier than small things… When you’re winning, you need to keep them on the run. That means swooping in and scooping them up.” (Curtis Yarvin, 118:54)
• Contemporary Lessons: Rubio vs. Vance in Foreign Policy
  • Symbolic/performative nationalism (“Western Civilization”) enables establishment capture; real change requires breaking with these dynamics, not reinforcing them.
    • "As soon as you see your enemies clapping for something you did, you should be very, very afraid because maybe they know something you don't." (Curtis Yarvin, 123:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Asset Inflation:
  • “When the stock market goes up, that's also red ink. It's also a liability.” (Curtis Yarvin, 04:00)
• On the Resource Curse Parallel:
  • “Technology and the resource curse: a country strikes oil and everything gets worse. AI is the same—it shrinks real demand for labor.” (Curtis Yarvin, 38:50)
• On Democracy’s Limits in AI Age:
  • “If these systems worked well, they wouldn't constantly need technological advances to bail us out. We should be able to have Edwardian London with Edwardian technology.” (Curtis Yarvin, 05:20)
• On Social Decay:
  • “We've turned America and Europe into Argentina with nukes.” (Curtis Yarvin, 00:54, 27:34)
• On Authenticity in Politics:
  • “There is a demand for sincerity now… The 21st century sincerity always has to have this slight quality of irony.” (18:07)
• On Reforms:
  • “That's full out comedy … rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” (Curtis Yarvin on beer tax proposals, 79:05)
• On Leadership Duty:
  • “Power is a burden. And the thing is, when you don't see it as a burden… you evade your duty.” (Curtis Yarvin, 62:54)
• On 'Breaking the Veil':
  • “Once you've seen something that is real, you'll never go back to the fake thing again.” (101:11)
• On AI’s Labor Challenge:
  • “What do you do with all the Uber drivers? … Both foreign trade and migration is already a little taste of the future robot economy.” (Curtis Yarvin, 48:48)
• On ‘Beta’ and Risk:
  • “Beta is the government printing money… If you have a hard money financial system, you will not have beta.” (Curtis Yarvin, 44:15)
• On the Future of the West:
  • “The third world is full of socialist ideology, but it doesn't really live in a—like William Morris—there's no equality in the third world. It's the opposite of equality.” (Curtis Yarvin, 54:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00, 39:45: Beginning debate on economic disruption from AI; "demand destruction", asset booms, rise of the rich.
• 02:44: Debt, equity, and the illusion of prosperity.
• 12:00: Currency valuation, China’s strategy, and deindustrialization.
• 16:24 – 19:11: Changing political environment; sincerity and irony in modern media.
• 27:34: China's hypothetical shift to gold and consequences for the West.
• 38:50: The resource curse, Dutch disease, and labor market collapse by technology.
• 44:15: 'Passive investing', 'beta', and money printing.
• 53:22: Fork in the road—socialism, nationalism, or “third worldization.”
• 62:54 – 63:21: The psychological requirements of authentic leadership and duty.
• 79:05: The comedy and tragedy of superficial reform (beer tax discussion).
• 84:37 – 93:07: Video game society: banning automation, restoring crafts, artificial labor demand.
• 101:11 – 105:30: The authenticity effect; “Once you’ve seen something real, you’ll never go back."
• 123:52 – 130:48: Rubio vs. Vance; lessons on symbolism, kayfabe, and policy “frame-breaking”.

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Tone & Language

The conversation is irreverent, darkly humorous, and intellectually provocative, combining philosophy, economic theory, and trenchant social commentary. Yarvin's style draws on historical analogies, game theory, literature, and technological insight—frequently employing irony and hyperbole but never straying into pure cynicism.

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Key Takeaways

• The convergence of accelerating AI and unsustainable fiscal systems threatens to turn Western democracies into "third world countries with nukes."
• Asset inflation and ‘passive investing’ are symptoms of a hollowed-out, predatory financial system that destroys labor demand and concentrates wealth.
• AI will soon eliminate millions of jobs, producing a restless surplus population and forcing societies to either embrace radical reforms or descend into oligarchic, third-world-like structures.
• Political authenticity and sincerity (with self-aware irony) are now the highest political currency, as voters tire of establishment “kayfabe."
• True transformation will require breaking from incrementalism and embracing large-scale, purpose-driven regime change—rooted in leadership that treats power as duty, not as status.
• Without intentional, even “artificial” creation of meaningful work (“video game society”), UBI and welfare solutions risk producing purposeless, infantilized societies.

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The episode is essential listening for anyone interested in the intersection of technology, political economy, and the fate of democratic governance in the 21st century.

Transcript

[Curtis Yarvin]

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]

This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Ayran. The AI cloud for the next big thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iren.com to learn more, which is Irene.com. curtis, good to see you here in London.

[Curtis Yarvin]

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]

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]

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.

[Peter McCormack]

I learned that early on.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Let's delve in. Let's delve into this. Right. You know, quietly. Right. You know, it's. But, but, you know, one of the, you know, Another sort of grim doomer thought about the state of our financial and political systems is you're like, if these systems worked well, they wouldn't constantly need technological advances to bail us out. We should be able to have as nice a place as Edwardian London with Edwardian technology. And in fact, if our technology in the last hundred years had not improved, but our systems of government and finance had gone in the same direction they have gone, things would be absolutely terrible.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, you know, with technology and innovations, things should get cheaper, faster and better. And if you're wealthy, they probably have.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, they have definitely gotten cheaper, faster and better. But to equate those are hedonic changes, and to equate those with financial changes is really sort of strange and wrong. So if you look at the way CPI is calculated, for example, by the Labor Department, this is sort of one of the triumphs of 21st century statistics. And when you're basically doing statistics and you see two groups of numbers that are different and you're like, I'm going to average these groups of numbers and report them as a single thing. You're really in a very strange place. And when you look at basically CPI metrics as a basket of products in the U.S. first of all, they're all sort of rated hedonically. So what you're actually, you see this K shaped curve, and the top of the K is basically things that are human services, like medical bills or college costs or whatever. And those just go straight up at like 8 or 9 or 10% a year. Obamacare has done insane things with this. And then you have the figure for the cost of a car. Now the cost of a car has not decreased, but the cars have more horsepower, they have better airbags. And so according to the way we measure these things, this is deflation. What you're actually saying is that basically when technology improves, the the government should be able to steal that dividend from you. And that's what you're doing by measuring, by mixing these numbers together. You're basically saying, well, we expanded. We diluted the financial system by 10% a year. So we basically. It's like if you expanded the equity of a company and you took 10% off, well, you have the same number of shares. They didn't take any shares from you. Yeah, there's 1.1 million now rather than 1 million shares. But we didn't take anything from you. Right, right. You know, and it's like, furthermore, the stock price went up, so you actually made money. And it's like, no, actually that doesn't change the fact that you're skimming, right? And it's sort of the same when you basically say, well, we have this expanding financial universe, right? And the expansion. And it doesn't, you know, when real estate values go up, it doesn't mean your house got better. That is clearly a monetary phenomenon. And then you say, well, but technology got better, so we stole a bunch of money from you, but your car got faster. That is 20th century macroeconomics. We stole a bunch of money from you, but your car got faster. Also, we inflated the financial system. So as long as you want to gamble with your savings, you can put them in an index fund and they will earn more money than interest, because that's how inflation works. If it was just interest, then. Right. And so it's this whole insane system of robbing Peter to pay Paul through the monetary system, in all of the financial system, in all of these really strange ways, right? And even measuring what this system is doing is hard. Like probably most economists would be like personal net worth. That's a weird way to measure inflation. I'm like, inflation is an increase in purchasing power, and that's your purchasing power. And it doesn't really matter if your purchasing power is in a suitcase full of bills or, you know, mutual fund. Right? You know, or a house, right? It's still your purchasing power.

[Peter McCormack]

Right?

[Curtis Yarvin]

And so the whole economy depends on that number going up. And if the number starts to be flat, there's a huge gap. Like when you basically stop borrowing and stop inflating. And again, when you sort of think of borrowing and inflating asset prices is fundamentally the same thing in the way that debt and equity are fundamentally the same thing. They're both liabilities. And when you also see government debt, which is really just a form of equity, you're just like, wow, this is just this giant money losing system. And this giant money losing system can continue because the value of these polities is so great.

[Peter McCormack]

But it's okay if you're in the club, though.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's okay if you're in the club because you're actually in the money gaining part. It's really very much third world economics. And it's absolutely the thing that has destroyed all of these industries, right? And sovereign, you know, even the sort of. The sovereign powers of what remains of English sovereignty have allowed it to like de. Industrialize by. I mean, it's just a simple national choice. If you want to overvalue your currency, people have more nice stuff to spend and you destroy your industries. You want to go in the other direction, right. Then people have less nice stuff and you build huge quantities of industries. This is why China undervalues its currency. For China Inc. Undervaluing their currency is like cutting your prices. Right. It's just like a discount store that is basically, you know, your goods from China Inc. Cost less if you basically pull the currency down. That's why they have currency controls, that's why they manipulate the currency. That's why there's not a free market in the yuan. Right. And so you're actually like, I mean it just the whole system of saying, oh, our GDP is going up because people have more stuff. Oh, now your cars are going to be made in China, that's fine. Right? Because we can print more money and China is willing to basically accept like it's very much worth it to them to send consumer goods here, you know, in exchange for pieces of green paper.

[Peter McCormack]

But eventually this will collapse. You know, it's like, or it's arguably collapsing slowly around.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think that there's too much like when I, when I hear people saying that, my worry is that there's something, there's something optimistic in the human heart and that leads to something called just world fallacy. And so actually in a way it's like, yeah, I think God would definitely want it to collapse. I think when you look at the system on the other hand, you know, let's not be too quick to know what God wants. Maybe God wants it to continue in order to punish us.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Maybe we deserve it. Right. You know, and, but there are certain

[Peter McCormack]

signals that stand out for me. So the, the fast changing political environment, say here in the UK we used to have two lead parties and occasionally, occasionally a coalition. They're both existential risk of not even existence parties. We have brand new parties that are becoming legitimate very quickly. A fast paced growth of the Greens.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Strange pieces of ice are breaking in strange ways because you have this like, you know. Yes. So the sort of, the things that are in kind of tension with the 21st century, we have a political system or at least an electoral system because it's of course relationship to the actual government is increasingly attenuated. But we have an electoral system which is very much based on 20th century broadcast media. And so you have this thing where it's basically like, you know, having been in the UK for, you know, 21 hours or whatever, I've already heard many discussions between supporters of England's two great parties, of course, the left wing party of reform and the right wing party of Restore. Right. You know, like this, this is, this is the Overton Window which I inhabit when I come here. Right. You know, and, and, and, you know, you were doubtless adept enough in this situation that you personally could make the reform case against restore and the restore case against reform, whichever these, these forces that you believe in. But, you know, reform is this sort of, it's a kind of transitional thing in a way, because it's kind of, it's daring to sort of stir the surface of the sort of broadcast media political game. Of course, Farage has been playing that game with various levels of success for quite, quite some time. He's quite a kinny operator in that game. He's quite a good player. But it's a game in which, like, absolute sincerity is not exactly the currency of the realm. It's a game where basically people in that world expect, you know, a lot of theatrical. They don't expect, they don't even know it exists. It's sort of like if you go far, you know, farther back in the past, the reality and the audience become increasingly attenuated. So, of course, most Americans, and probably most Brits did not know at the time that Franklin Roosevelt used a wheelchair. I didn't know that he was able to conceal that from the public. Right. And very aggressively, yes, people knew he was a polio survivor, but he always stood in front of the cameras. So this difference between on camera world and off camera world really quite considerable at that time. And, you know, FDR using a wheelchair in terms of like, historical importance is very much the least of it.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and you see that gap sort of narrowing in a way. It's like one of the things that people don't, I think, remark on often enough about Trump and Vance as politicians is they are absolutely the same person off camera as on camera. Right. And moreover, they don't seem. I've never met Trump, but they don't seem terribly masked in that context either. And I would say I did meet Farage once a long time ago. He's charming on camera, he's charming off

[Peter McCormack]

camera, but he's very different off camera. That's one of the things I notice. I think on camera he's Farage, and off camera he's Nigel and he's a lot more measured, considerate. Slower speaking, it's almost like Nigel is more measured.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Peter McCormack]

He has a great understanding of history, incentives. And then when he's on camera, this character appears.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Whereas Rupert Lowe.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Is the same on camera and off camera.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I mean I, when I met, when I met, you know, Nigel, like 10 years ago or so, I was, I was impressed by him. I was like, you know, expected this glad handing chap with a beard. Not someone who could talk intelligently about not only Enoch Powell, but even Pierre Pujad. Right. You know, it's like imagine an American politician who knows who Pierre Pujad is. I mentioned this because Pujadism was sort of French 1950s populism basically. And so, yeah, he's an Oxbridge graduate. He's not just having the piss, but his like in the market for like absolute sincerity that is created by the world of social media. He's really at a disadvantage relative to low because I've never seen Low off camera. You probably have.

[Peter McCormack]

He was here a few days ago

[Curtis Yarvin]

and I would imagine he is the same person as off camera as on camera.

[Peter McCormack]

Same person on camera, off camera and how he tweets, he is just. Yeah, he's, he's the real deal. What you see is what you get. And there, I think there is a demand for sincerity now there's a demand

[Curtis Yarvin]

for both sincerity and irony actually, because the sincerity has to be. There can't be. It's not a kind of unself aware sincerity. The, the 21st century sincerity always has to have this slightly. There's nothing without a slight quality of irony. There's nothing that's sort of not aware of itself in that way. Like the heavy. If you go and watch like propaganda from 100 years ago or political propaganda from 100 years ago, many things will strike you. But one of the two things will strike you is that the intellectual level is much lower and there is no irony. None.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And, and that only starts creeping into politics in like the late 20th century, really. And now of course, we live in one of the most ironic ages in, in history. Right. You know, probably there's a lot of like Late Roman Empire vibes kind of in that also very ironic, very, very materialistic period.

[Peter McCormack]

But it also feels like a period of great civilizational shift we're going through, I sense it in that we're going through one of the technical, the big revolutions, which is a, which is going to change a lot of things. We do have this debt bubble does exist, depending on how you define it. And there is a big geopolitical shift that's happening now and all these forces that happen at the same time. And what it feels like to me is that the old democratic system that we've been running certainly for the last maybe 100 years now doesn't work because we're able to see it for what it is, see its mistakes and just reject it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, let's, let's, let's talk about the financial side first in a way, because really when you're looking at this huge paper bubble, just saying paper to include both debt and equity, you're basically seeing something that, you know, when a. Can I use the word shitcoin on this?

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, you can, yeah. You can use way worse than that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

When a shitcoin basically is like constantly expanding, it's like fully diluted value by my. By minting new coins, you're basically like, well, actually the proper way to account for this is fractional accounting. Like what percentage of the hold do I hold? And it seems that that is going down constantly due to your, you know, basically rug pull minting activities.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

When you have a whole economy that is doing this, it basically creates a pressure for exits. It creates what Von Mises called the flight to real value. And then the problem with the flight to real value is you're like, oh, well, tulips have real value. So we're going to bid up the tulips and then tulips cannot sustain overvaluation because they're freaking plants, man. And anyone can mint tulips, right? Although actually, you know, the, the thing about the tulips that most people don't understand about the tulip bubble is that one of the reasons there was a tulip bubble is that the exotic tulip bulbs did not breed true because they were not just genetic, they were like. There was also like a something that infected the tulip that made it like variegated in various ways. And so there was like real like rarity in like a Semper Augustus tulip or whatever. But, you know, still ultimately did not work. And so you have this kind of coordination problem of like finding the exit and like, what is the exit? And so, for example, like the, you know, crypto aside, certainly I remember, you know, I had like, I had a, I was, I had pre IPO shares and like a dot com company in like 2000, right? Not a whole lot. And I remember having. It's one of these moments where you have like a thought which is like the right thought and then you dismiss it immediately from your mind. And my right thought was, I should move all of this money as far from tech as possible. And then I was like, well, what if. What's farthest from tech that's possible, you know, I don't know. Gold, right? And I look at gold. And gold is in what I believe in the UK you call the brown bottom, where the Gordon Brown sold off the nation's gold reserve for like $250 an ounce.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Does it hurt? Does it hurt? When I say these things, I mean,

[Peter McCormack]

it doesn't hurt me personally, but I think it hurts the country.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, it does, it does. It was a sad move, right? And for all I know, the golden Fort Knox is still there. Right? And so you're basically saying like when you're sort of looking for an exit, it's what game theorists call a coordination problem, because you basically don't want to go into something that's going to be like overvalued. Like the tulip bulbs where you can't overvalue this. And then people are like, wow, we could grow tulips too, right? And you have to sort of pick the same thing as other people. And when you go into gold, like the gold market is a weird place, man. There's like gold derivatives up the wazoo and like, you know, as somebody naked short gold out there, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. What is the BIS doing? You're familiar with the bis, right? You know, there's like weird ancient hundred year old skullduggery. It's not even post World War II skullduggery, it's post World War I skullduggery. That's like the BIS, right? So the thing is that you're going when that exit route of basically saying, well, all this thing is diluting because that's what you're doing. When you expand the paper, you're, you're, you're diluting right now maybe you're creating new value with your AI factories or whatever that matches the dilution in some places, maybe not, right? So you're like, what is the thing that can't be diluted? And then you're like, all right, gold and, or maybe bitcoin. And there are basically two rather somewhat medium term arguments against each of these. The argument against bitcoin is no one is quite sure what to do with the quantum problem because it is starting to look. Although I'm very skeptical of scientists of all kinds basically, but they, they seem to think that they're actually making progress on quantum computing. You know, now this is a problem that you must have been, yeah, but it's solvable. It's solvable, it's solvable, it's solvable. And so, you know, that's basically, you know, somebody will steal Satoshi's keys, which are all unshielded, basically. And whatever, whatever. And then the case against gold, you'll love this is scalable chrysopia. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

[Peter McCormack]

Somebody published a paper, is this synthetically creating gold?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Synthetically creating gold, which people have long known is like theoretically possible, but yeah, you get six atoms. Well, somebody published this design for basically a fusion tokamak wrapped in a bath of mercury. And as the neutrons filter out from the fusion tokamak, it gets in to the mercury and they're like, this could maybe be profitable. Now these are calculations made by scientists, so it's probably an order of magnitude off, but they're like, we can make this profitable for $5,000 an ounce, which is precisely the price of gold at the moment.

[Peter McCormack]

They've done it for diamonds now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, now diamonds, that's atomic structure and this is actual transmutation. Right? But you know, the point is that there are a lot of. When you're basically playing this game of looking for an exit, you have a gant from the dilution, from the debt bubble, from the paper bubble, you have this fundamental problem of game theory which is that like everyone else is also looking for the exit. And like therefore when you're predicting what these exits will do, you have to basically make this reflexive calculation where you're like, what are other people going to do? So for example, in the gold market, basically you have these giant players in which are central banks which could buy a lot of gold because the percentage of the reserves in gold is fairly small. So if you look at basically Chinese gold holding, one of the reasons why the gold market has gone a little crazy over the last year is that it looks like this, right? It's a hockey stick in terms of basically Chinese gold reserve because the Chinese are like, why do we have these green pieces of paper? Like we don't even like these people, right? You know, they're sitting and licking the dead presidents, right? So they're like, who is Andrew Jackson?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, Andrew Jackson. Oh, right. You know, what are you going to do with your green paper? Right? So, so, so what you're seeing there, here's an example of the way those things could converge. Now I'm not making policy for the have no pretty case for the Chinese Communist Party. But the thing is, if the Chinese Communist Party was to say, well we're this export oriented nation and we're doing that to like impoverish our people, but like what we really need is to keep our people Employed, because, you know, otherwise they get rioting, they get rowdy.

[Peter McCormack]

We have to shoot them.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We have to shoot them, right? And actually, you know, reports from China are now like, China is also having problems just because I think of the efficiency of technology. They're having problems with their full employment. They have, like, weird financial structures, but they have a trade surplus, which is, a trade surplus for a country is like running a profit for a firm. If you're profitable, like, you could be a mess, but you're still profitable. So let's say China tomorrow is like, all right, we. Every time we get a dollar in surplus trade, we're going to put it into gold. We are going to basically be remorselessly buying a trillion and a half dollars, which is, I think roughly China's trade 2 trillion or so trade surplus. We're going to be buying $1 trillion of gold every year. You certainly, you can imagine what would happen if they were buying a trillion dollars of bitcoin every year, right? And even more than that, they could say, well, this gold actually belongs to the Chinese people and we are going to basically go back on the gold standard for China because we have, we have basically done busting out the planet. Because what China has been doing is like a Sopranos bust out of the planet. All right? We're done busting out the planet. We've turned, you know, America and Europe into basically Argentina with nukes, right? You know, the last titans of like, ASML or whatever will finally fall and the Chinese will just be better at everything. You know, they're even. They're landing rockets on their tails now. They're chasing Space X or chasing Tesla, like, etcetera, etc, etcetera. This is a remorseless 9 9, 6, if you've heard the term competitor. So they're like, all right, we're done with this. All right? Now, hey, rest of the world, like Argentina with nukes, right? You want anything from us? I don't know. You must have some gold somewhere. Hey, Americans, you got some gold somewhere? Why don't you burn through Fort Knox maintaining your standard of living for the next five years? And when you're done with that, maybe you can think of something else. I don't know, you know, you can mine. You could write, you know, and you're, you're in a situation where suddenly America is a third world country, right? And has basically nothing to offer China in much the same way that the Congo has nothing to offer China except from, like, raw materials. So your children will be like, digging rare earths out of A hill with their bare hands, like Congo. These miners or something, right? Meanwhile, the Chinese people basically having reaped the rewards of becoming the world's leading industrial country, now suddenly all their money has turned into gold, their purchasing power. They've basically replaced foreign purchasing power for running their big economy with domestic purchasing power. They've lost their export market because they basically let their currency float back up, in fact. And they sort of did the bitcoin thing in my hypothetical thing with gold so that, like, everybody in China is like, crypto rich but in gold, right? And they're like, you know, spending like crazy and the factories are buzzing and like, here in the west, we're like, you know, does anyone have an egg? You know, an egg can be at a real luxury in certain situations, right? You know, and so that's a situation of sort of crushing dominance in a way, for China. Now, it is true that our frontier AI models are six months ahead of theirs or open source models or something. Maybe seven or eight months even. That's not a huge amount of time. And the possibility that these things will plateau is very much there. And one of the effects of people are like, oh, this is an economic transformation that will, you know, bring only good things to the world. I'm like, well, you know, you could imagine it being kind of on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Like, you know, like, nobody in my company, like OpenAI, has already prohibited their developers from coding. People don't code there anymore. And I'm basically in the process of doing the same thing at my company, right? And so I'm just like, no, this is ridiculous. Like, you can't do this by hand anymore, right? And so it is an Industrial revolution like effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, one of the things that the Industrial Revolution did was destroy an enormous number of livelihoods, like, very, very early. I don't know if you know the James Goldsmith poem, the Deserted Village.

[Peter McCormack]

No, I don't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Classic late 18th century poem about the beginnings of the Industrial revolution in England. And he's just like, this is just completely hollowed out the countryside. What the hell, right? There used to be a village blacksmith, and now everything is made in Sheffield. Nothing is made in Sheffield. But now it used to be, right? You know, they, you know, there's still a Sheffield Wednesday. I don't know why there's a Sheffield Wednesday. I'm an American. I can't understand why there's a Sheffield Wednesday. None of our sports teams is named for the days of the week, but, you know, we won't go there. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

And they're pretty much bankrupt.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, there you go.

[Peter McCormack]

There you go.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Right. And yeah, you know, my son is a, is a Premier League fan and it's interesting to see the difference in the Premier League demographic, you know, on the stands, in the streets, on the field.

[Peter McCormack]

But Sheffield Wednesday have minus points.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Wait, what?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, they have minus points.

[Curtis Yarvin]

How is that possible?

[Peter McCormack]

Kurt, can you have a look up Sheffield Wednesday's points for me? So they. Because we have penalties for if you go bankrupt or if you have financial issues or. So there's different penalties of them are they take away points off you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Right.

[Peter McCormack]

And so I think they start. I don't know if they started the season or early on, maybe minus 12 points. And so they. I think they're still on. Are they still on minus points? Minus 10. They're minus 10.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And how many divisions down can they go? Can they go to like semi pro?

[Peter McCormack]

No, they will only drop one. So they'll drop down into the league one next year, but they're on minus points, so.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Got it.

[Peter McCormack]

But yeah, look, it's.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's League one, then the championship, then the Premier. Right? Am I wrong?

[Peter McCormack]

So this AI thing I was thinking about this morning, I was watching an interview with Elon Musk and he was talking about the office and office space jobs are just going to go. Task screen based jobs are going to go because we essentially replace manual jobs with screen jobs and people sat there doing tasks in front of screens. But you can give AI control to your screen, it can do it better than you, faster than you, 24 hours a day for like 20 bucks.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There's two, there's two sort of courses where that goes in. And one of them, the optimistic one, which I'm sure Elon will give you, is the Jevons Paradox one where you're like, well, it became much cheaper to create this stuff, so we need much more of it. And I'm like, you know, just taking my own company as an example, I'm just like, wow, we can deliver a lot more software much faster. That's true. And we don't need to fire anyone. We don't need to fire anyone because everyone we have is capable of being an architect as well as an engineer. And now they're only architects. There are no more engineers. There are only architects. And if you can't architect, you're done. Right? You're John Henry competing with a locomotive. Now, are we still going to need architects? Certainly we still need them now, definitely I need to hold Claude's hand because I'm Doing something interesting, which it hasn't really seen before. So I have to hold his hand. It's still like I'm solving like problems that would have been like week long divagations in the development phase and they just like disappear in two hours, right? And then I'm like, all right, so maybe we'll have much more software. But you know what also AI is good at also still improving at this really is graphic design. Is graphic design getting in, you know, exhibit the Jevons paradox. Are we going to get much more graphic design? Because graphic design gets much easier? No, the product managers are just going to tell AI to do it. Actually, if you're a graphic designer, you're fucked. Right. If you're a translator, you're fucked. Right. And so there's basically large classes of, you know, we, you know, in the English language at least we use professional words to designate who we are. You know, I'm an African American, but I'm also a graphic designer. I'm actually neither. But like the, you know, although, you know, I can do a decent design and I can actually speak some pretty good Ebonics, but we won't do that here. But I'm neither of these things. But many people are like, I'm a graphic designer. Sorry, happened to the cobblers first. And actually so what you're seeing with AI is you're seeing something that's. I think I have seen other people making this, you know, comparison. It's kind of obvious, but it's not enough talked about, which is the relationship between technology and the resource curse. If you know, the resource curse, I don't explain. It's the economic phenomenon where a country strikes oil and everything in the country gets worse. Even though like Venezuela, for example, is the worst country in, you know, just structurally in South America, even though it's the only one with really substantial amounts of oil. This is not a coincidence. This is seen all over the globe. The problem is that essentially, and the mediating factor is something called Dutch disease. What Dutch disease means is that you have this source of money and that makes basically anything like you have this pile of money. It becomes easier to basically buy things overseas than buy with the pile of money than to make them yourself. Do they make handbags in Saudi Arabia? I don't think so. Right. You know, and so you basically get this like destruction because the whole GDP of the country can be produced by like six guys, right? And so you get this destruction of labor demand. And the result is that very large numbers of people are forced to Essentially turn to the political means of survival rather than the economic means, which means they actually. There is nothing that they can do that is helpful enough to their fellow human beings that those fellow human beings will feed them. And so they actually need to use their political power to get money. And that basically is what turns you into Venezuela. And so in a world where you're already starting to see this, like, people train to be software engineers. Well, you could be an architect. Right. The thing is, the best way to be an architect is to have written a lot of code for 10 years and nobody's writing any code anymore. So maybe we'll just. The architects will just get, you know, gray hair and we'll teach people how to. I mean, you, you know, people are software managers who don't know how to code. Right. You know, and so. Right. And all these things go like, demand for humans. Like literally, like lawyers, accountants, lawyers. I'm not like, my lawyer is, you know, they're on their way out. Right. You know, and like, the, the like, mine specifically, I'm going to like, you know, take Claude to my family court case. Right. You know, and 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 do see a lot of some like, sort of conventional labor going into building data centers and so forth. But you're already starting to see this phenomenon where the stock market booms and people's employment is disappearing. And there are just many, many, many professions. There are some pieces of inefficiency in the market where you have a bullshit job for basically regulatory reasons or other things. Those bullshit jobs, because they're held up by power, are going to stay, but they're going to become even more sort of obviously unnecessary. And whether that those brittle structures can be broken is unclear. But in terms of actually needing people, I mean, this is one of the things we found in Covid that was so crazy About COVID in 2020 was once before the Fed got involved, it was we were going to have cannibalism in the streets. And once the Fed got involved, they're just like, no problem, everyone. Nobody has to work. We don't actually need to work in this country. The only people we need to work are like, the food delivery guys. You know, they can wear masks and bring us food and the rest of us will just print money.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And they just printed money and the stock market, which are going like, go like. Right. You know, and so that kind of lasts forever.

[Peter McCormack]

You can do it temporarily.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The thing is that just world fallacy always plays a factor there. And so when your intuition is that that can't last forever, it's important to separate that intuition from actual mechanisms in a way. And so, for example, one of the. When you talk about people exiting the financial system, you basically see a situation where people stop saving in the currency because. Or in the standard currency because saving in a different currency, despite the lack of actual financial markets in this currency will do better. And so that's especially true in the sort of the rush to an exit. This is the kind of traditional collapse structure of, you know, paper money. You basically get in, like the Soviet Union, for example, which really abused, you know, their paper money. You develop like this concept of hard currency versus soft currency. And in like 20th century, really mismanaged economic third world or communist countries, hard currency meant the dollar or gold, right? And which were sort of considered of equivalent hardness being. Because they were of comparable hardness, right? And so you have to, when you imagine basically sort of whole economies fleeing to basically a parallel financial system, that's somewhat ahead of where we are, where you basically say, and there are all these kind of structural restrictions to it. Like it used to be very hard to buy Bitcoin. You had to go to Mount Gox, right? You know, you should have gone to Mount Gox. But, you know, some did and some didn't. And then, you know, later on you had to use Coinbase. And now it's like these things are getting closer and closer to just being, you know, calling your bank and saying, I'd like to basically have my savings account in Bitcoin or in gold, rather zcash, you know, rather than, rather than pounds or, you know, there's no technical reason why, for example, a bank in the UK can't offer dollar savings account, right? All these currencies kind of locked together, so it doesn't really matter that much. But they could. In Argentina for a while, they were offering, before the Coralito, they were offering dollar accounts to Argentinians which were not, however, backed by actual dollars.

[Peter McCormack]

They didn't switch.

[Curtis Yarvin]

They learned some lessons there. And I think in Argentina they have like something ridiculous, like as many paper dollars as there are in the United States or something, some insanity like that, right? So you have sort of ways that essentially frictional effects keep people in this system. And then of course, they have to be in the system to gamble on. OpenAI. In fact, one of the craziest things about our financial system and to people who are serious economists or financial People and really believe that there's basically like nothing wrong here. I'm basically like, well, 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, right? You're just like, 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, right? What is beta? Beta is the government printing money. If you have a hard money financial system, you will not have beta. Right?

[Peter McCormack]

Buy an index fund.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, right, right. And so you're sort of forced to like, you know, you're forced to take on risk that you don't want, right? Because actually it should be if, you know, if you're like, I want money in 30 years, like in a financial system that is like sane and stable, you're like, I want to move my spending power from now to 30 years from now. So I need to find somebody who wants a mortgage, who wants to move the spending power in the other direction that will create an interest rate. And really, what if I just know I want to take this money out in 2056, I should buy a CD maturing in 2056 and that will be the best value. And that CD, let alone leaving your fricking checking account, that CD will be utterly massacred by an index fund. Right? And that's why we force you to gamble, right? And it's a crazy system, right? It is actually a completely crazy thing. The only people that should be in an information market, which is a prediction market, are two kinds of people. People who have alpha and people who think they have alpha, right? And what a financial, what a financial market should be is a zero sum game. It's like polymarkets. These are some game. It's people who have alpha taking money from people who think they have alpha. It's like professional poker. You have, you know, the fish, right? You know, and the fish are what you eat, right? You know, it's like if you're an advantage player and you're in a room full of advantage players, it's like basically it's like you're in a singles garb bar, but it's all, It's a sausage fest, you know, Right. They don't want to play each other.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

And you know, even if you've lost half of those jobs, that's millions of jobs lost with nothing to go to instead. And then if that happens then, well, they have to sell their houses. So we're going to have a deflationary moment in the housing market. Are we going to have to go to UBI like this is something that feels 12 to 18 months out. The Microsoft AI CEO said this is 12 to 18 months out. Claude is replacing industries SaaS products are. They're basically if you've got shares in a SaaS product, you're at high risk at the moment. What is this, what you want to happen and what is going to happen? And it's like where is your head at with that?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, you know, the like what I feel in sort of the proper design of a polity for the 21st century. To me maximizing GDP and maximizing Hidona. Because when you're maximizing GDP, you're maximizing hedonism essentially that's what GDP is measuring. It's like, how much fun did the economy produce?

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I think that in order to operate a functional society in the 21st century, that view of economics needs to change to a view in which you're like, no, the real goal of economic management is matching a labor supply with labor demand is basically making sure that every normal, healthy human being in the system is demanded. What do you do with all the Uber drivers? 12 to 18 months? You know, so many things of that kind. Right. And you see, in a way, 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, basically. You don't have a social connection to your optimist robot and you don't have a social connection to your Uber driver. You know, Mohammed from Oman. Right. You just don't. Right. And one of them is very human being. One of them is not. But like actually the distance on the social graph from you to Muhammad from Oman probably runs through some like Gulf Prince or something. And it's like 30 steps long. Right. And when you have basically a labor class that is not socially connected to the labor demanding class, that's already a robot economy, that's already a slave economy, basically. Somebody on Twitter came up with something really nice about the whole immigration system that I really loved. Maybe it's not comprehensible on this side of the Atlantic, but the point me, he's like, you know what this immigration phenomenon is, is what you're seeing is Americans have become half abolitionist and half slaveholder. They're abolitionists because they have the moral theories of abolitionists, but actually the labor structure of their economy is very reminiscent of the Confederacy. And you know what you will see when with these immigration crackdowns is, well, he'll limit, you know, limousine liberals in Santa Monica being like, Anna Maria can't take care of my children today. Right. Because Anna Maria didn't get emancipated. Exactly. But like, something like that, she got deported and the result is the same. Anna Maria is not there. And you, you know, you're going to have to go to your law job. Oh wait, that doesn't exist anyway, so why don't you take care of the kids? Right? You know, and like, and that's, that's what you're seeing. I think we're seeing sort of the same thing of like, actually this system, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a lot of different ways, is kind of Surviving on these kind of frictional structures. And then when the friction evaporates, it's just gone. Right. And what do these people do? I don't know. Nobody's starving in America. There's soup kitchens, you know something, there's Snap cards, ebt. You can sell the house, you know, you can live on that for a while. Yeah, it's actually, it's kind of grim. And moreover, you have this situation where, you know, at the same time as these countries import huge numbers of military aged men to do menial labor, they have large numbers of people in the country who are not even capable of doing menial labor because they're just like tower block chavs, you know, and like actually work is entirely beyond them. Work is not beyond Mohammed from Oman, you know, and like, and so you have, you know, this huge problem of people who don't know how to work are not interested in work. They're certainly not interested in working with their hands. Oh my God. Right. And you know, you're sort of confronting AI is leading you to confront this problem of, you know, matching these things. And even before AI, you'd already been screwing it up for 30 years.

[Peter McCormack]

So we are forking the road where for most of these nations, they've got really two options. One is to head to a much more socialist path to try and win votes and secure power. And the other option is a much more disciplined nationalist approach.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, yeah, I mean, the, the, the like. No, I mean there's a third approach which is the default approach, which is just everything turns into the third world. Because the third world is exactly like this. You have a number of small. In a third world country, I don't know how much time you spend in the third world country, but in any third, in any third world country that doesn't say Papua New guinea, there are like very, very rich people who live very, very well. Although it is very expensive to live well as a rich person, typically in the, in the third world. But labor is very cheap, but other things are not.

[Peter McCormack]

But this is the socialist path. To me, the Third World, well, it's kind of the same.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The third world is full of socialist ideology, but it doesn't really live in a, like William Morris, you know, like there's no equality in the third world. It's the opposite of equality. If you go to Angola, for example, one of the places where real estate is the most expensive in the world is Angola. It's the part of Luanda that is actually like where some amounts of civilization has survived and where if you're working in the oil industry, which is needless to say, not run by Angolan. Angolans. That's where you live. And you're like basically extracting this enormous amount of oil from Angola and enriching a small group of corrupt bureaucrats. And then there's a lot of money left over and you use that money to fly in $200 hamburgers.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you think the UK is heading towards that third world version?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Of course, it's already there in so many different ways.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and like, you know, come on, you can't. I guess you don't have like the shanty towns really here or anything quite like that.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but you know, you have the early birth of them when tent cities that didn't used to appear. And now you'll drive through London, you'll look down the street and there's 40 tents. I mean, it's the start.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's a start. It's the start. It's not, you know, and so, and so what you're going to see, the way that's. Here's how that's going to continue. So one of the things you're seeing politically as this old kind of mind management system breaks up and people, all the cordon sanitaires fall down and people get red pilled in various ways. You might think that people getting red pilled in various ways is something that would really put a stop to this craziness of population replacement. Oh no, actually is quite very much the reverse. Because there's something, you know, anyone who's like totally lost faith in the left in a way. It's like they have many complaints with the left, but it sort of all boils down to you basically recognize that this is not a vegetarian thing, this is a predator. Right. And so this is a predator. And so when a predator such as a lion is hunting, there are basically two phases of the pursuit. There's the stock and the charge. And the stock is like, well, nobody really knows what's going on here. Let's take the demographic replacement in the U.S. it's from the 1965 Immigration act and politicians swore up and down that this was not what it was. Basically, since that act, basically it's brought like 100 million people from the third world into the US, right? Something like that. Solid, solid numbers like that. But in order to sort of do that, you know, you couldn't have this giant boat lift where, you know, some gigantic version of the Empire Windrush brought 100 million people at the same time. It's more a case of like, you know, slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy fish, right? You know, where you're kind of tickling it and you're like, oh yeah, oh yeah. Our friends from, you know, we're open where hearts are welcoming, right? You know, like all of this like, you know, stuff that's just of course, unbelievably sinister because it's sort of trading on people's goodwill and people's good wishes. It's like this con. But the thing is, when people, when enough people see the con and all these systems are incentive based, they're not based on planning. That's left is not run by some cabal. It's incentives that drive things. What you're seeing, especially in what used to be called the white dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, especially as you're seeing, they're starting to speed run. They're starting to come out of their crouch and basically just be like, yeah, actually we're, I mean, in the 21st century, I think they've increased the population of Canada by like 35%. Right. And so even that is small. Even that is small. The Spanish government was just like, we're going to legalize 500,000. Oh, but that's just an estimate. That's just an estimate of how many people that plan will suck in. It probably will be more like over a million. Right? And so, you know, and those people are Schengen. They can go anywhere in Europe and you will see them do that and the like. And, and so what you could see in the US if basically the next time Democrats win the presidency, people are going to be like mass immigration. Like, no, we've not seen mass immigration. We have no idea what mass immigration is. Mass Immigration is not 2 million people entering the US a year. Mass immigration starts, I would call it mass until it was like 10 a year. And like mass immigration is really the 10 to 50 to 100 million a year.

[Peter McCormack]

But that's what could spark civil war. No, no, I don't know, I'm seeing it here.

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, because people have no balls. People have no balls. And actually like, you know, they will not resist. They will not resist. All of you know, the thought that they will get their muskets and put on their tri cornered hats or whatever. You know, when you go back and you go back into the period when people actually did this, you're just like, these people are completely alien to us. Never happen. It won't happen at all. What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa, which is they will Just acknowledge that they've lost all of their power forever. And then they will sit quietly in their houses and build more and more barbed wire and electric fences until finally they are exterminated in one big pogrom. That's the future. That's what will happen to your children. And so, literally, unless your money will be a fair protection, as it is in South Africa. But the.

[Peter McCormack]

But the reaction here, Curtis, is that we're seeing the rise of ethno nationalism and debates around remigration, which was something people wouldn't even have discussed a decade ago. Deportations. Sounds like something the Nazis might do. Or it sounds like it's racist. And look, sure, the left are calling it racist, but it now could be a vote winner. It could be an election winner.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It could be an election winner. And the thing is that. But winning elections is really just the start. And as we have seen over and over again, winning elections is really just the start. And one of the things that. Going back to the Farage versus Slow question, the new Overton Window, right, You're basically like, there are people that will tell you, as we have already discussed, that Farage is not real. Nigel is real. And Nigel is actually a very deep and cagey thinker. And.

[Peter McCormack]

But who wants to. Who wants to be Prime Minister? Nigel or Farage?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, well, you know, that's what Dominic found with. With Boris. You know, basically, Dom wanted to, like, you know, he wasn't. I mean, I don't know, he's a little wonky, whatever, but he wanted to actually do things with the UK government. And they get into number 10, and he realizes that Boris, for all his, you know, legendary brain power, just wants to, like, sit in number 10 and look good like any other occupant of number 10, basically, for really quite some time. And, you know, his goal is just to stay on the horse, you know, which is one of the great metaphors from Carlisle from 170 years ago. Right. And. And he's not riding the horse in any direction. In any direction. The horse will go in whatever direction goes. He just wants to stay on the horse. And in Carlisle's metaphor, the horse is following its own footsteps in a circle. Right. And. And whereas. So maybe Farage, Maybe Nigel wants to rule. It's hard to know. But like Rupert, Rupert wants to rule.

[Peter McCormack]

So.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Actually.

[Peter McCormack]

So I'm going to disagree with you. So, firstly, I'm going to say I think Nigel, I think Farage build a lot of political capital by being Farage.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes. And I think, does he want to spend It. On being Nigel.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't think he does. I think. I think he thinks he cannot win as Nigel, and I think that's going to be potentially his mistake to be seen. There's a lot that Rube has to do. I think the great thing about Rupert is he doesn't want to be Prime Minister. He feels he has a duty.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes.

[Peter McCormack]

He's like that. Who's the Greek Kinesia? I can't remember his name.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Cincinnatus. That's Roman, not Greek. Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

By the way, I'm stealing that. That was Connor Thomas and told me that. But I think he feels a duty to do it, which is why he doesn't change character. I think he would go in, he would do it for a shorter time as possible and leave. He has. He has no want for anything. He wants to be on his farm.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. But the thing is, so, first of all, that, like, the sense of duty, like, sensing that there's, like that power is a duty rather than a privilege or rather than a source of status. It's something that, like, you know, it's a burden. It's a burden. Right. And the thing is, when you don't see it as a burden, I have a lot of good things to say about Trump, but ultimately, I don't think that Trump sees power as a burden.

[Peter McCormack]

No.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And that's why, in a way, it's sort of in a perverse way. That's why he doesn't really want more of it. He doesn't understand, like, the people who want power, I mean, the libs actually, really, they really do. It's a compulsion. It's a craving, but in their minds, it's a duty. You know, it's like, basically, you know, in the mind of a heroin addict, it must feel sort of like God needs you to get heroin, like, now. Right. You know, and so the libs feel this duty. You know, everyone who grew up watching the fucking West Wing or whatever, they feel this duty. Right. And we kind of don't. We don't feel like to say, you know, the furthest thing from Elon Musk's mind is it is my duty to get more power. That's, in fact, what everyone is accusing him of thinking, him and all the other dissonant billionaires. And when somebody accuses you of something which is not true, your immediate impulse is, of course, to deny it. And that locks you into that denial pretty hard. And so actually, you have this strange situation where these people are accused of having this power craving, which actually they should have in the form of like, come on, this is like your. I'm sorry, Eli, your duty is Earth, not Mars, right? Much better planet. Much better planet. And like, you sort of see, like, that they kind of. Their sort of. Their will is to evade that duty. And so, for example, when Trump won the election, if he had recognized sort of governing as a duty, he would have realized that, like, dicking around with executive orders is not a thing with a lot of legs. And he actually needs to take control of Congress, which is hard, but possible with his razor slim majorities. And so if his basically was like. If he was, if I can coin a word, power maxing with two X's, right? He would have basically been like, all right, how do I use my little foothold in the White House to actually get to the point where FDR was at, where I could write legislation in the White House. But he does not have a burning need to write legislation in the White House. He has a burning need to look good on camera and be the leader of the free world, right? And so his enemies have a burning need for power. He doesn't have a burning need for power. What the hell is going to happen? Right? And so, you know, and when that need comes from, I mean, the relationship in the minds of, you know, what Abraham Lincoln called the. The family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle, the relationship between ambition and, like, a sense of duty, say, for example, in the mind of someone like Napoleon is complicated. Right? But did Napoleon feel that his duty was to rule France? He absolutely did. You know, I was reading a little bit about Low, and I was struck by the fact that Lowe's personal hero is also my personal guru's personal hero. And that's, of course, Cromwell, right?

[Peter McCormack]

Happy to cut the head of a king.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, actually, of course, there's two Cromwells, and we could.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, we could. Am I. Have I got the wrong one?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, you have the right one. Yeah, okay, you have the right one, but you have the right one. Although I don't know that that was entirely Cromwell's decision, because I don't think he was completely in control of the whole situation at that point.

[Peter McCormack]

He gets the credit.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He gets the credit. Right. And. And. And, you know, then there was the one who dealt with the monasteries, which also has, I think, resonance in our day. And. And the. The, you know, I mean, in a way, like, really, you know, I was sort of thinking about this for something that I'm writing recently, and I'm like, the question, in a way is how far Back you sort of have to go to revise history. How far back do you have to go to go sort of delineate a period whose echoes are still present today? And I think the number is about 500 years. And that basically takes you to the point when Henry VIII is like, no, I'm going to do my own thing. I'm not just going to continue the system of Henry vii. And the real OG in English history and ultimately world history, because England took over the world, is Henry vii. He's just a massive. He's like founder energy up the wazoo guy barely even has a legitimate claim to the throne. He's like, Welsh. He's Welsh, right? You know, and, you know, somehow he. He pulls this off and founds this very, you know, creates the modern English nation state in a way by sort of reassembling England from the, you know, the wars of the Roses and then, you know. But he's a skin flint. He's like, basically manages money very, very tightly. And then Henry VIII is. He likes to spend money, Does Henry. He likes to spend money. And so basically, there's. Basically, the thing about Henry VII is that there isn't really any news. Like, nothing really happens. It's like, not a drama. It's like, you know, he reigns from, like, 1485 to, like, 1512 or something like that. No drama. Imagine, like, 27 years or whatever it is of English politics with no drama, right? Nothing happens during the reign of Henry vii. Certainly not in the way that it happens with the rest of the Tudors, right? And so you have basically, like, the idea of Cromwell specifically is like. And this is what is so inspiring about Cromwell for Carlisle is Cromwell is just like, look, I'm here, I'm going to deal with the realities. Like, there's a lot of bullshit. We got rid of the old fusty old monarchist bullshit, but now we have this, like, weird psycho puritan, independent, fifth monarchy, men, diggers, levelers bullshit, all right? Because, you know, this is. Modernity is really happening at that point, right? You know, it's really kicked off and you have people who just could be, you know, left as a Glastonbury, like tomorrow, right? You know, who are running around in the 17th century and Cromwell is just like, I just have to run the English state and make it, like, extremely badass. And I think there are many elements of the Cromwellian state that survive the Restoration and that are basically core to England today.

[Peter McCormack]

And do you think that we're essentially in this very similar position now? And it's Perhaps if it only rhymes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But the thing about, you know, it's like when you talk about civil war, for example, coming out of these things, I think that there's, you know, most people who talk about civil war in that sense, at least. At least in some way, LARPing. They're projecting a vanished world into the present. And one of the things that we really learned from the Trump administration, from the second Trump administration, is you must be familiar with the line, like, you know, we can just do things. Yeah, right. And, you know, I think somewhere subconsciously in Washington, people really of a governing class persuasion really thought that if you did something like abolishing usaid, which is one of the most oldest, most revered, most prestigious organizations in the federal government, I think without thinking it consciously, they really thought that if something like that was done, like, the blacks of Anacostia would rise up, you know, And I'm just like, no, no, the blacks of Anacostia will not rise up. No. Foreign service officers will not be, you know, forming barricades and tearing them cobblestones, streets of Georgetown. No, that's not how it works. And that also, you see that Also, that tremendous LARPing in the fall of the Soviet system, because the Soviet system sort of comes out of this revolutionary Bolshevik tradition where it's just like, you have to be hard and kill the enemies of the workers and peasants, and you're a revolutionary. And as soon as it starts to fall, these people who have lived in this LARP where they're revolutionaries realize that they're not actually revolutionaries at all. And you would expect them to fight. When the Soviet Union falls, it has, like, 500,000 trained KGB special forces, right? These people are actually literally trained to kill. What do they do? They do nothing because they're not a bunch of killers, right? And you're in the Stasi. The day before the Stasi falls, you're a major in the Stasi in East Germany. It's like being a New York Times reporter. Everybody wants to know you. Everybody wants to be your friend. You're just like a big swinging death. You've seen the way these guys walk, you know, like, people with power just have this, like, aura, right, of, like, people have been sucking up to them for, like, so long, and you meet, like, a big. A big wig, like, major media reporter, like, and they have this vibe of, like, just every cell in their body knows they're an important person, right? And that's what it must have been like to be a major in the Stasi. You're Basically just like, you know, everybody, you know is like, can you help with this? You know, can I?

[Peter McCormack]

Right, right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And you can. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. Right? Day after it falls, you're like, all right, I'm a major in the Stasi. This is a revolutionary organization that goes back to Rosa Luxembourg and Carl Liebknecht. And, you know, if the imperialists ever come in, you know, we'll fight them in the cafes. We'll be building bombs. We'll be like, you know, what would Carl and Rosa do day after? It's just like, you go to work, building's locked, card key doesn't work, try to log in, password not recognized. You're just like, oh, I guess I need to go start building bombs. No, go start building bombs. Because you're not a cafe revolutionary. And it's 1931, and actually you realize, oh, wait, that was a LARP. I better hope they pay me my pension. And then when they do pay you your pension, and I think they. German government is still paying pensions to Stasi, you know, veterans. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

[Peter McCormack]

What?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah. Because they. Because when you win, you take ownership of those people. They're your people now. You own the whole thing. And you're just like, yeah, all right. You work for the system. Everybody worked for the system, whatever, right. I think they actually cut the STASIA had a very generous pay package, and they. They cut it to some extent.

[Peter McCormack]

But what does it all mean for now?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Like, what it means for now is that basically if Rupert Lowe comes in and is just like, you know, it's like the end of Inception. You saw Inception, you're just like, suddenly everything is just, like, falling down and treats Whitehall like this dozy. And it's just like. Because here's another thing that we learned from the Trump administration, and we learned that largely from these kids at doge. And these kids at DOGE were operating really without. They were not operating in a highly AI enabled way. But what they realize is that actually taking control of these things simply through their IT systems is actually, like, really extremely possible. And so what you do if you're really like, you know, dedicated to absolute change, is you just like, all right, it's here in England, it's easy. There's nothing, no English constitutional tradition more sacred than the. The powers of the absolute powers of Parliament.

[Peter McCormack]

And if you win a parliamentary majority.

[Curtis Yarvin]

If you win a parliamentary majority, absolutely. Somebody. I was talking to this line, and somebody was like, well, they might use the King. I'm like, wow, you Know, well, this, it's. I mean, that thing in Spain, they couldn't pass it through the legislature, so they're doing it as a royal decree. And they have this poor playboy prince, son of the completely useless Juan Carlos the Second, who's like, even more corrupt and useless. And basically what it means to him to be king is he has been taught that the modern way of being a king is that you sign whatever is put in front of you. You know, and so I could see it, actually, because those reserve powers still exist under law. I don't think that they have, like, the strength to do that. But the idea that, you know, Rupert Lowe is like, all right, we're dissolving the Foreign Office. Why do we need a Foreign Office? You know, if we have something to say to the French, we'll just zoom, you know, and like, I don't really think that the workers and peasants of England are going to rise up if that happens. And I also do not see the mandarins of the Foreign Office taking to violence. And I'm like, actually. And the effect, once you're doing big things, like, actually the sort of the tragedy of the Trump administration is with things like usaid, you started to see pieces of that fall of East Germany psychology where just like morale just collapses. You know, once you've taken down the Stasi, the rest of the East German government is not going to offer any resistance whatsoever. And in the modern AI enabled world, you're like, all right, how are you going to do this? Wow. This government does all this stuff in all these ways. You're like, all right, we're going to identify all the real service points that people need to rely on. We're not going to have any chaos or whatever. Your import license or whatever will go through. We will identify all the real service points of this government. We will instantly cut everything else. So it's like basically the direct service points, 5 to 10% of staff. Then for that, you keep operating those things as is for the moment. But what you're really going to do is you're going to image the servers and operate it with a completely different team that has and is run in a completely different way that has full access to those files and every email they ever sent. And you can basically just like reboot that organization full functionally with a completely different set of people and much fewer people at that. Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

So. Well, like Elon Musk did with X, like, that's right, that's right, that's right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He took it from like 3,000 engineers to like 30. Right. You know, is some shit broken? Yeah, some shit is broken, but not, not much. Right. You know, and so you're basically. And even that was an iterative process there. It was a process of attrition. He didn't just say, oh, I'm bringing my 30 guys in here, we're going to image the servers and everybody else go home. Right. It sort of worked out that way in the end. But he also did not have these tools at that time in order to do that. And so when you're, you know, the thing is when you're really there to rule and you come in and you're in charge, you're basically just like, why would I keep using these organizations?

[Peter McCormack]

But this is kind of the tragedy then of reform, because their original appeal was they weren't the establishment. Like they were anti establishment. And they've morphed into the establishment. Yes, they've. They're talking about, you know, repealing some laws and they're talking about, well, weren't that. Wait, wait.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I mean, the thing that I heard was just like, I mean, it's so huge that I can barely wrap my head around it. I think Farage was talking about a. Even as high as a, a 10 cut in the beer tax.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, 5 PO.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I'm just like. And I'm like, wow, that is like levels of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is just like, yeah, that's full out comedy. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

You know, save any pubs? Like, look, the thing that's going to save pubs is getting rid of business rates and get rid of a minimum wage.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And it's just so beyond that even. I mean. Yeah, you know, like the whole fabric of, you know, there's this book, you must know the writer Kingsley Amos.

[Peter McCormack]

Oh, I know the name. I don't know him as a writer.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He's the father of Martin Amos, who is perhaps somewhat better known these days, but a great mid century writer. And he wrote this book that is one of his later books which is really very little known. It's called Russian Hide and Seek. And it takes place in an England that has been conquered by Soviet Russia like 40 years ago or so previously. And there's a new generation of apparatchiks who are actually like Anglophiles and they're like, we're going to restore English culture, we're going to restore England. We're going to have like maypoles and like, you know, and, and you know, not to, you know, spoil anyone's experience of this lovely book, but basically you know, they're kind of trying to resuscitate a corpse now, are there? You're like, all right, let's bring the pubs back. Are there pubs in England? Yes, there are. Are there cobblers in England? Yes, there are. You don't get all of your shoes from Vietnam, but I think to sort of, in a way, bring the level of the revolution that is needed home, in a sense, what you're basically seeing, especially with AI, but in retrospect, also with the Industrial Revolution, in a way, is that the power that man is acquiring over the physical world starts to resemble, in some ways, the power that a game designer has over the virtual world. And one of the things we see about the virtual worlds that game designers create is that there are always monsters in them. There's always difficulty. You always have to grind, you have to whatever. And that is exactly because the job of the game designer is to create labor demand. The laborer is the player, right? And the player not only has to. I mean, you know, this is why the gamers have the term grinding. The player not only has to, you know, grind. Right. You know, but really the goal is to have the grinding be fun. Like, actually, so what you're trying to do in your, like, cornucopia, Aaron Bastani, fully, you know, fully automated, you know, luxury communism world is you're basically. You've created a video game that sucks because basically there is no difficulty, there is no danger. There is. You've created Wally World, right? You know, that old Pixar film.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, you've created. Have you played socialist Monopoly?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No. What is that?

[Peter McCormack]

I've got it like Monopoly, socialism. I bought a copy of it and I played with my kids. It never ends. The game never ends. You can't win the game because if you get anywhere, it redistributes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. But the thing is actually a world where you do not need. So in a way, what you're saying when you basically take the only. What the game designer can do is change the rules of the world to make the game harder in a way that works. So he's like, this virtual world is boring without monsters. So we're going to have monsters, right? Minecraft didn't used to have monsters. And then they were like, no, we need mobs. Right? And so you create monsters, you create danger. You create. All right, well, danger in real life, different thing maybe could see it, right? Why do people do extreme sports? Right. War is the ultimate extreme sport. There's that form of danger. You change the rules of the world and you say, all right, war is part of humanity. Humans without violence are not humans. They're sheep. They're some other life form, right? Actually, men need war to live. The problem isn't war. The problem is artillery. The problem isn't war. The problem is everything that makes war really shitty. Okay, we're gonna have war, but we're gonna have rules of war. And the rules of war are gonna be like, no explosives, no electricity, no chemicals. You got to go full homer. Or you could basically say, well, the world in which basically your shoes are created by a printer or by slave labor in Vietnam doesn't really change anything. The thing is, you get shoes without work. So actually, a world in which you get shoes without work doesn't really work because actually, people need to do something. And one thing that actually, you can take anyone with an IQ of 90 and you can make them a very good shoemaker. You can take someone with an IQ of 90 and make them an artisan who can do things that would just blow either of us away.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, this is the ready player one problem. Yes, the ready player one problem in that I would love to walk on stage and play guitar for Metallica at Wembley Stadium.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

But I haven't been and played the club circuit where 20 people turn up. I haven't sat on the bus with five other stinky guys going and trying to sell two T shirts so I can afford the next concert. I haven't earned it when I walk out on stage. It's not authentic.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You have to. Yeah, and you haven't earned your shoes. And you haven't, like, you know. So basically, man needs, you know, this, this, you know, Neruda line. Struggle, iron and volcanoes. Right? And so you have this force that on the one hand is an impoverishing force. And then it has sort of. People are like, oh, well, we'll give you ubi, which you can spend on your shoes that are no longer made in Vietnam, but are now made in the UK by robots. Right? And you're still. You're living like a child, you know, and it's this sort of massive dehumanization of the human race. And the alternative is to say, no, actually, the world. Now that we have all this productive power, we need to actually design a world like a video game and crafting in video games. You want a pair of shoes, you have to craft the shoes. That's artificial labor demand. You can't just click a button and clone 100,000 of the shoes. There's no shortage of bits to do that. But Actually, if you did that, it would kill crafting, right? And so you basically realize that in a way, in the kind of world that you have to create here, it's like everything is fake, right? You know, in order to like ban machine made shoes, shoes from Vietnam, you have to have, it's not a libertarian thing, you gotta have to guy, you know, got a guy at the port who looks in the container, is like, I knew it, shoes, you know, and treats it like cocaine, right? Because you know, those shoes will actually destroy the lives of like good American artisans who have to make shoes by good British artisans who have to make shoes by hand from all British materials. And so that is a complete restructuring of the way we live.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Otherwise.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And that authentic real world has to be one with rules that prevent it from becoming purposelessness. And so it's like if you look at like Luddites, the sort of the way you think in terms of Luddites is like let's ban the new technology, let's ban AI, let's ban genome sequencers, something, something, something actually to fix the economy. It's the old technology that you have to ban. It's the first things that were killed by the industrial revolution. And you're just like what are like 10 million people, you know, going to do? And you're just like well actually they could make shirts. And like if there was no way to make a shirt by machine, then you know, you, yeah, sure, your shirts cost $200.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, but like, you know that productivity is coming out of the cornucopia of AI and the person who made the shirt actually enjoyed making the shirt. And it's a nice frickin shirt. Right. You know, it's sort of the Etsy ification of the economy essentially.

[Peter McCormack]

But this is one of the arguments for the kind of like the world where we move to much more AI and automation is that actually there will be another economy built. An authentic economy built on people who desire things that are created by humans.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. But the problem is that there's not enough of that. And the thing is people don't sure, you know what really is the difference between your Gucci bag and your knockoff Gucci bag? Well, you know, your real Gucci bag was created by Italians and your knockoff Gucci bag was created by Chinese. And you feel much personally closer to Italians than Chinese. But the thing looks the same, it's the same supple leather, you know, and so, you know, actually if you're trying to do this in a libertarian way, it doesn't work.

[Peter McCormack]

You can't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. But if you're trying to do it in a non libertarian way and you're basically doing full on William Morris guild socialism, actually it can. And so. Yeah, and so you're actually, you're back in. And this was sort of a dream in a way of the Arts and crafts movement in the late 19th century. They were a little early on that, but they basically, I mean this is also Carlylean because This is like Ruskin, who was a Carlislean. They sort of recognized that, you know, the dignity of fulfilling work is essentially work that challenges you to your limits is actually that is the thing that we desire, should desire most. And not luxury or fentanyl or coke whores or whatever. No, we should want to be cobblers. You know, there's this great, you know, you must know the actor Cecil Day Lewis, right?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. He, he stopped making films to go and be a cobbler.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. I'm like, if it's good enough for Cecil Day Lewis, you know, like not only an actor but also an aristocrat. He apprenticed to an Italian cobbler for a couple of years. Right. You know, and it's like actually like. And I'm sure those were very high end shows shoes and I'm sure like probably they were, you know, they're not cheap. Right. But the thing is you can construct your society has to be a little bit of a video game with video game like rules. Like we're going to treat this container full of shoes from Vietnam like it was cocaine. Right. And that is not a libertarian thing. It's just not a libertarian thing. And expecting it to happen spontaneously on its own in a libertarian way is no, you're going to get the third world. And like. And so in a way, when you look at this sort of Carlislean, Cromwellian kind of picture of a, you know, I mean the Cromwell's government really took total responsibility, as did the royal governments before it took total response. There was nothing libertarian about either Cromwell or the Tudors. Right. And but kind of accepting that responsibility to rule is, you know, it's a huge thing. It's like you actually have to have that really, that cincinnatus spirit. And like one of the things that, like when you just talk about low. You know, you said something earlier that was very very, I thought, very, very insightful because you basically said that the problem is that Faraj is making a mistake because basically he's a boomer and because he's a boomer, he thinks only Faraj can get elected and Nigel cannot get elected.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. I haven't voted in three elections. I would have voted for Nigel. I can't vote for Faraj because I know and I'm exactly, I'm at a disadvantage because I know both of them.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

And I would tell Nigel, like, what are you doing?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, it's because you not actually what sells.

[Peter McCormack]

And in a world where you can see behind the veil, you know, it's all bullshit. You know, every politician Pretty much is

[Curtis Yarvin]

fucking break the fourth wall, dude, today.

[Peter McCormack]

Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer, Prime Minister. Listen to this. This is fucking how retarded our government is today. Our Prime Minister tweeted out this. Yeah, where is it? The choices this labor government have made means inflation has fallen today to its lowest rate in a year. Lower food and petrol prices are helping ease the pressure on household budgets. And I, like, I retweeted him, I said, it's a strange world where you're having to teach basic economics to our Prime Minister. Anyway, Kier, inflation fallen doesn't mean lower prices, it just means prices are rising a lower rate. This is what, this is the level of incompetence we're dealing with.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

I mean, and so I just. I just cannot buy into that. I just want somebody to come in and be straight up honest and. And he's being straight up honest ruble and. And the weird thing is people like it more. There are, as a. There's a group of people ready for it, a group around. There's the people who aren't still believe society has to say, no, you're a racist for thinking that. And it's funny, my friend sent me a meme yesterday. But the basic point is, like, they're calling Rupert Lower a racist. He would happily sit at a dinner table with Modi Bukele, Milei Trump, like, people from all different countries of racist. And they would get on like the best of friends.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I mean, well, as we say in America, I don't know if you say this here, but, you know, if you're a racist, it doesn't matter what race your friends are, they just all have to be racists.

[Peter McCormack]

But they're really nationalist conscious.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, of course. You know, and the thing is, it's like, you know, that transitional phase, you know, it's like my friend Jeremy Carl had a rough time in his Senate hearing, you know, the other day, because he has this sort of problem of basically fitting. He has to basically complain about race communism without calling it race communism or violating any of the taboos of race communism. That's really pretty hard. And like, the. It's just like. And if you watch the way that sort of Farage, not Nigel, but Farage sort of will basically be attacked on these points and, you know, very skillfully evade them.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and you admire the skill with which he evades them, you know, but for fundamentally, as did Jeremy Carl the other day, when you're evading, people might find that you Seem evasive and like, and, and, And Low just simply doesn't do this and, or at least not that. I, you know, I'm just observing, like the, the sort of. The latest things, you know, Low doesn't do this and.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, I'll give you example. Do you know. Do you know Matt Good, who Matt Goodwin is?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. So I like Matt. He's been here a couple of times, hung out with him.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Highly principled. But he's now running for a seat in Gore. Gore. Was it Gorton and Denton or something? Wherever. It's somewhere in Manchester. There's a complete personality shift that he's had to go through to fit into the party. And it's so obvious, I can see it. And like, I get why he's had to do it because he has to now go win a seat which has, you know, a large percentage of Muslims in that area. He has to pretend who isn't.

[Curtis Yarvin]

But at the same time, it's like seeing your friend transform into a lizard.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. The guy got a girlfriend and now, like, he doesn't want to come to the football because he's going shopping or he's like, doing the gardening. It's like. But then you go to Rupert's Twitter, like, I'll give you a couple examples.

[Curtis Yarvin]

What time do you have, by the way?

[Peter McCormack]

We're at 2. We got a Malahama. So a Restore Britain government would hold a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty. I mean, that's. I don't agree with it. I don't want the state killing people. But he's there. What else has he got here? Restore Britain would abolish the obr. I mean, it's so obviously has to happen that all their predictions are fucking wrong. I mean, if you just go through like, here's my mass deportations book. He's just like, he's gone. Do you know what I want to go? Zero fucks.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Like, here's zero fucks. Here's my zero fucks party. And you know what I really like about them is that they are. I think they've recognized there's two votes in the next election. There's establishment and anti establishment and they have to stay in that. And I like the fact they've talked about, we don't want any other failed MPs. I mean, the Reform are just a bunch of architects, a failure. They just want to get experts a bit like your thesis. He's the CEO. He needs to build his board.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You need Actually, well, I'm Parliament. Parliament shouldn't even be the board. Parliament should be a rubber stamp. And the thing is, actually the effect of bringing in people who are not politicians is that they're trivial to whip. And the. Because they're not. I don't have political careers. They're just part of this thing. Right. They're just party members. And, you know, being an MP is like a sort of dignity that they're given. They're not like actual, like players. And the thing is, basically the effect of bringing all these players from the Tory party, which is now sort of reconstituted itself, you know, under the, you know, the smile of Farage, you know, is it's only a matter of time. Is he going to take Kemi? What would happen if Kemi applied?

[Peter McCormack]

Fuck. But even generic today, like, I'm in politics for people like my dad in some fake ass video and I'm like, no, you're not. You're in politics for yourself. You were going to become the leader of the Conservative Party. You didn't get it. You know, they're not going to win. You're looking at reform. Think reform might win. I'm kind of like the largest name now. And if, you know, there's a problem in Nigel, I become the de facto leader, that's my fastest route to be Prime Minister. It's the fucking bullshit in me.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, you know, and it's like the FDR in the wheelchair thing, it's like a certain level of, like, puffery is kind of standard and acceptable, you know, and it's like the people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 when he was going about lying and saying, I believe that, you know, marriage is between a man and a woman. Right. You know, and the, you know, which is especially interesting considering his own, you know, questionable sexuality. At least I have questions, you know, and, and, you know, the, the.

[Peter McCormack]

We don't go in there.

[Curtis Yarvin]

We're not going. We're not going there. Right, yeah, yeah, we could actually, we could fill up the next half hour with questions. Right? But, but the thing is, you know, his voters were like, oh, yeah, you know, he's lying. You know, he's lying for a good cause. Like, that's cool, you know, and like, you know, that, that sort of acceptance of. Again, this is very, very Carlislean. I really implore you to read the Latter Day pamphlets, which is the, the great Carlyle work, you know, because he's just like, people just accept that there's just all this bullshit and this like, hugely important thing of government, you know, he's just like, there are. People are like, oh, that's a sham. Oh, he doesn't really believe that. You know, people watch that video and nobody really watching that, nobody who cares enough to watch a Robert Jenrick video is like so simple that they actually believe that what he's saying. Oh, no, they're like, oh, that's the right tone for him to be striking. They sort of review it in this kind of meta sense. It's like, oh, yeah, that's a. That's some good bullshit. That's some tasty bullshit. You know, that's bullshit from the bullshit region of France.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, go shake some people's hands, you know.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Right, right, right. And. And it's just like acting actually the sort of. The act of breaking through that veil creates this effect where it's kind of. Once you've seen something that is real, you'll never go back to the fake thing again. And I'll give you two great examples of this. One is from recent history. There was a nationalist politician in Serbia by the name of Slobodan Losevication.

[Peter McCormack]

I remember. You remember, I went to Yugoslavia for the, the war.

[Curtis Yarvin]

On what side?

[Peter McCormack]

I know I went there when I was five years old.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh.

[Peter McCormack]

Like, we drove. We have Yugoslavian friends and they invited us to go and stay. And we drove from England to Yugoslavia. It took two days. And we had a car full of like radios and TVs because they couldn't get them in the country.

[Curtis Yarvin]

This was the 80s?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. This was 1983. We went to.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And how old were you in 83?

[Peter McCormack]

I was five. We went to Belgrade and then we went to what is Croatia now and the beach. And it was a weird experience. I don't remember a lot of it, but I remember that's probably the, the most memories I have from being five.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, Slobo was a. Slobo was a mid level or, you know, communist bureaucrat and things started breaking up. And he basically goes down to Kosovo, which is this like, historic territory where there have been sort of demographic swamped by Albanians. And he says to the Serbs and Serbian, of course, he's like, he has this sort of great classic line of populist politics. He's like, no one will dare to beat you anymore. Right. That is the essence of populist politics. Like, basically you are being beaten, you're being abused, and like you're, you know, the first problem that you have to solve here is your battered wife situation syndrome. Right. And like you have battered wife syndrome up the wazoo. You have Stockholm syndrome. You actually love your abuser. You're doing all of it, okay? And so, you know, first of all, you. You have this mindset. You're like, I need to fix my husband. I need to fix my husband. No, you don't usually leave your husband. No, you don't. Right? And so the vibe of like, you need to leave your fucking husband, right, Is like, you know, just that people can even process that is like something where, well, you know, it's politics. You're not leaving your husband just to be an I list. You're leaving your husband for someone you just met. Right? You know, and so when that guy has that level of authenticity where he just like, you know, awakens, like something electric deep within your body that you thought was going to sleep forever, like, no one will dare to beat you anymore. Yeah. You know, you're gonna take. You can sort of transform, you know, apathy into reality. It's like that contrast between nobody sees the fake thing until, like, the real thing is next to it. You know, it's like something that happened to me was I had this weird experience where I lived in Cyprus as a kid, and not only was I in Cyprus, I was going to the English school in Cyprus, which is a sort of faux British public school.

[Peter McCormack]

Is that in Lanaka?

[Curtis Yarvin]

In. No, Nixea, the capital. And. And you know, to add weirdness to that, I was basically skipped three grades ahead, okay. Because I added two grades when I went there because they did things by admission test. And I'm like, all right, sure, this

[Peter McCormack]

doesn't surprise me, right?

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and so that was a weird, you know, cultural experience. But what was even weirder was when I got back to the United States and had to be a 12 year old sophomore in an American public high school. That was very disorienting. I don't think I've ever really recovered from that. But the, the. In any case, although I have had sex but the. Since. Right? But. So I'm sort of trying to. Trying to, you know, accommodate myself. And I'm like, all right, well, I need to listen to the same music that these kids listen to. So I got like a little boombox and I started listening to like 80s top 40 radio. You must know, 80s, tough. Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi.

[Peter McCormack]

In Excess.

[Curtis Yarvin]

In Excess is a little. Has a little edge. But like, Bon Jovi is like my first.

[Peter McCormack]

The first album I ever bought was

[Curtis Yarvin]

bon Jovi, N.J. that was after Slippery When Wet, I think.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It starts with Bad Medicine. I got a. I got a cassette player and I walked to town and I bought. Yeah, I went to the cassette and I bought that. I did have Europe's the Final Countdown as a single.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, wow.

[Peter McCormack]

That was the first song. My dad bought me that because I love.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I'm just thinking, you know, Bon Jovi's, you know, I'm a cowboy On a steel horse I ride I'm wanted. That's a bit better Alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, that's the sort of thing that I'm listening to, right. And, you know, it's not. Bon Jovi's still around. It's not entirely without merit or whatever. And then for whatever reason, there's some kind of contest in Q107, the station plays a Rolling Stone song. Okay. And I'm like, okay, right. You know, and the problem that basically, UK politics in our, you know, little pool of it is that basically, like, you know, you can't escape the impression that Farage is Bon Jovi and Rupert is the Stones. Right. You know, and, like, what's even worse. What's even worse is that Nigel is also the Stones. And, like, Nigel might be more the Stones than Rupert in a way, but, like, actually, like, Nigel doesn't come out to play.

[Peter McCormack]

No. See, is it maybe. Oh, fuck.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Maybe.

[Peter McCormack]

Maybe Nigel was in a Stones covers band. Yeah. Fuck. You just blow my mind there. Did you know why I was chatting to. You know, I won't reveal his name just in case, but, like, somebody you would know. I'll tell you afterwards. And, like, he was talking to me about my podcast, and he was, like, saying, dude, you need to put on a suit. At the moment, you look like a, like, tattooed football yob trying to have intelligent conversations. He was like, put on a suit. And I was like, faint this. I was like, I've started to wear a shirt. He's like, yeah, but your tattoos on your hands are a problem. You might need gloves. I'm like, I'm not wearing gloves. Like, fuck that. But he was saying, look, this is. This is what? Like, this is how America sees the uk. He sees you in suits. He sees America sees you as, like, discipline, English man. Like, like, tidy hair, tidy beard. Discipline and getting shit done. And I think that's what it is. It's like, Rupert isn't sloppy.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, well, he was a serious businessman, right?

[Peter McCormack]

You run a football club.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. And the thing about a football club is, like, you're basically, you know,

[Peter McCormack]

you can't Win on the long term as a chairman, and you have tens of thousands of people calling you a wanker. Yeah, it's a fucking. It's a tough game.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yes. You're dealing. You have the difficulty of being a business. You actually need to win. Winning is extremely hard. And then you have tens of thousands of people calling you a wanker.

[Peter McCormack]

And you know what?

[Curtis Yarvin]

How did he get into that? How was he.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't know, actually, I've never. But we've spoken about it because I own a much smaller club and, like, I have three people calling me a wanker. Like he has tens of thousands. But it's. It's. In some ways it's like the comments on YouTube, right? If you have a thing like this, you read the comments. They either break you or make you. And sometimes they break you before you make you. And then you just get stoic about it. So, yeah, well, okay, yeah, all right. I'm fat. All right. Like, I. I ask a question wrong, I'm a dumb. Whatever. But you learn to not give a fuck. And I actually think being a football club chairman prepares you for criticism.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, because you knit.

[Peter McCormack]

Because the thing is, a football club chairman, when the club's doing well, no one cares about you. But when it's failing, it's all your fault. And so, like, you kind of forged in steel being a football club chairman. So, look, I don't think there's anyone that could say anything where he goes. I think he goes, I don't care. Fuck off. Call me racist.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And it's actually very attractive because what is unattractive is, you know, there's a. An Islamic philosopher. Oh, Osama bin Laden. Sorry, it's a bit. I do it all the time. And he has this great line where he's like, when people see a weak horse and a strong horse, by nature, they like the strong horse and actually, like, they. They despise the weak horse. And the thing is, when you basically, you know, someone accuses you of being a racist and you get all sort of, you know, like, like. And I mean, there's no way the admin would have let him do this. But I think, for example, Jeremy, Carl, in that hearing, if he'd gone in with the mindset of, like, I'm gonna humiliate these senators and rub them, rub their noses in the, like, you know, shitty race that is like, all around, you know, the U.S. do you know the latest race news from the U.S. this is. This blows my mind. Harvard. So remember, they had this lawsuit where they're like, basically, like, Harvard is racist and it's getting federal money. How is, how is this allowed? And because they are American conservatives and they are basically in various ways, and they found the people suing were. They found that the best way, although this was probably not the issue closest to their hearts, they found that the best way to appeal to maybe the judge in this was to talk about how Harvard was mean to Asians. And it's true. Harvard discriminated against Asians, like, even more heavily than it discriminated against whites because they had no character or something like that. You know, I mean, we could talk about that, but we won't. In any case, that was the wrap. And really what they. They're like, Asians are not going to be donors. Asians are like, you know, and I'm sure they're being very practical about these things. I'm sure it's not coming from deep seated racial prejudice. I'm sure it's coming from just like Machiavellian data examination. In any case, they get sued and it is undeniable that basically being an Asian makes it much harder to get into Harvard and being black makes it much easier. And so we now have the data on what their response is. They're like, all right, we'll stop discriminating against Asians. Well, now just discriminate against white people. Like, fuck you. Right. You know, and so basically when you sort of come in with this kind of aggressive, like, I'm coming into a press conference, my team has just lost the, like, you know, they've been relegated or whatever, and, you know, and I'm just gonna be like, all right, you know, let's talk about why we get relegated and you go on the attack. Who you're attacking, I don't know.

[Peter McCormack]

Right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and it's just much more sympathetic than, like, running away. And so when you put yourself in a position where, like, Farage has to put himself in, where he's like, like, you know, swearing up and down that, you know, you know, anyone can be an Englishman and, you know, etc, etc. Etc. It's not as compelling, but it's not compelling. Yeah, but, but, but the thing is, it is compelling when you compare it to, you know, Keir Starmer. It is compelling when you compare it to Kemi Badenok.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, but it depends where voters are at. Because I said, he said something to me recently. They said the thing about politics is, like, there's what people say and what they think, and what matters at the ballot box is. Ballot box is what they think. And there are too many people who can't say what they think because of social consequences or just aren't brave enough to say what they think. And somebody like Rupert Lowe is just smashing through the Overton window and he's enabling people to say things.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, Jim Ratcliffe, that's some of the best thing that Trump has done.

[Peter McCormack]

Even I don't know if you saw Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Yeah, what he said. And look, I think his choice of words was actually poor. It, like, it damaged the point because he then had to go on the defense and apologize. But, like, again, he's opening like he's smashing through the Overton window. Like, people are breaking cover and saying, I think this immigration experiment has failed. I think this diversity experiment has failed. I think multiculturalism has failed. And, like, the problem is, like, the battered housewife syndrome. And it's like, come on, can we just. Can we have some nuance here? This good immigration and bad immigration. Can we just. Can we just have that conversation? Yeah, it's like you have to have that conversation.

[Curtis Yarvin]

What does it actually mean to be British? Right. You know, and. And is it a legal status? Is it a. Like, you know, and. And like, that's a, you know, resolving these questions or. In a way, it's like, you know, when you think about regime change, really, I think that Farage is under the opinion that wherever he wants to go, he can go there slowly without risking his neck too much. And I think that's also a strategic mistake. I don't think the right can move slowly, basically, and the slower. It's just the left is incremental, the right is not. And I'm not saying that every step has to be made in one, but fundamentally, it's entropy versus extropy. The left is entropic, so things can just decay. But if you're building something, you need to build. Right? So I think that the idea in the mind of the sort of Farages of their world is you have this kind of incremental subversion of the system, which they think is possible. It's an aging system. It's much more subvertible than it used to be. But I still basically don't think of that as possible. If you have someone more like Rupert Lowe. My suspicion is the way Rupert Lowe sees it, I think he's sort of thinking in terms of something less like 100% regime change and more like 40% regime change. The thing is, if you. If you're thinking of like 1%, 2% regime change, that's going to slide back down and before you know it, it's 0.1% and 0.01%. Once you're up at like 30, 40, you know, you're just like, why can't I do it all?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and like the, the. And that's when you get like really Cromwellian, basically.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. My hot take on this is that actually I don't, I, I've considered reform, still a left wing party. And I think the reason I have is because I think we've forgotten what a proper right wing conservative party looks like. And all I think they're going to do is they're going to come in, they're going to tweak some things. We're still going to have a massive welfare state.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You'll still have a beer tax. It's just 5 pence lower.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, 5 pence lower. And we want people to work, not work from home. But I still think we'll just have a very large state. The debt will increase and all they're going to do is change who they point things at. But it's still the same.

[Curtis Yarvin]

It's Boolean. It's basically. And it's like even with Trump's achievements, if you compare the second Trump administration to the first Trump administration at the Bush administration, these are monumental achievements. Like, he's reversed the flow of migration, he's sealed the borders, whatever, whatever, whatever. They're all things that could be reversed in three days by the next administration. Right. You know, and, and like you have not actually, if you're once you abandon the illusion that you can basically just do a good government without actually really rethinking once you basically realize that actually it is your duty to get as much power as possible. And you know, in exactly the sense of duty that you described, a 40% regime change is very unstable because you basically are like, okay, have we defeated the other 60% or have we not defeated them? They will feel very defeated. And so like either you're just like, no, actually 100% is right. Let's just, you know, swoop in and scoop them all up while they're feeling defeated. That is clearly the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do is just to be like, well, it's, we want, it's over, boys. You know, you know, let's let them, you know, that lets them kind of regroup and restrengthen. And so, you know, when you're winning, you need to basically keep them on the run entirely. And that means, you know, it's like, you know, what's on the other end of, like, you know, the beer tax. Right. You know, okay, that's. That's. That's really thinking small in a way that is. I'm sure it's an issue that touches Englishmen's hearts deeply, but it's like, you know, to an American, it's like one of the, you know, you sort of look at American politics and you're just like, oh, my God, they're spending this much time on something completely. Right. You know, you know, what's on the other end of that scale? You're like, I don't know, restore the empire. You know, at least, you know, maybe clean up South Africa. You know, you could really try to suck most of the technical talent out of the US you could do a really strong reverse brain drain. Your legal system is probably completely fucked. So you need a recodification of the laws.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, we need to start writing that now.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Ready? Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. And so the thing is, it's like the lesson that I don't think Nigel understands, that you clearly see in even the spasmodic and halting efforts of the early Trump administration, is that big things are actually easier than small things. Because if you. It's like a grasping the nettle kind of thing. If you're, like, tentative about it and evasive and, like, you'll seem weak. And basically the situation Nigel is in is that he basically has had a monopoly for quite some time on being an alternative to this system. And that monopoly position has allowed him to sort of play the middle in a way and work really hard at being marginally acceptable to the system and getting huge wins, which turned out to not be wins at all, like Brexit. And he's sort of been a player in this field, and now it's actually, you know, somebody's coming much harder than him, and it's sort of not someone who, you know, it's like people compare, you know, Rupert Lowe, for example, to Nick Griffin. Is he. Nick Griffin still alive? Is he still.

[Peter McCormack]

He's the BMP guy. I think so. I don't know. But, like, he's not Nick Griffin.

[Curtis Yarvin]

He's not Nick Griffin. For one thing, he doesn't have a glass eye. But, you know, but in other ways also, he is not Nick Griffin. Right? You know, and like. And that feeling of, you know, substance there is, like, very well communicated. And people are like, somebody in the Twitter was like, well, you know, we should pictures of Rupert Lowe to, you know, Englishman. And 90% of them had no idea you know, who he was. And I'm like, all right, well, once 90% of an Englishman have seen him, you know, how much more popular do you think he's gonna be? Yeah, right. You know,

[Peter McCormack]

well, look, the Twitter test is interesting because, like, oh, it's only Twitter people who know him and. But he has. His. His posts are the most viral of any politician in government. And they're like, oh, well, this is Elon Musk boosting. It's like, no, this is his genuine popularity in the online audience, and that's going to spread out. Whether he can get, you know, build enough of a big ten, I don't know. But, like, there is demand for it.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And certainly his staffers are, like, seem like very serious people, too.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And. And the. The, like, they're, you know, I mean, you know, the English young. Right. Is in many ways more impressive than the American young. Right. You know, which I might have said to you before, but, like, it's very, very true. And it's more.

[Peter McCormack]

It's. There's this. How do I put it? Like, when you compare, say, a Charlie Downs with Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes is like an entertainer.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah.

[Peter McCormack]

Charlie Downs is just mission driven.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. There's actually, There's. There's a living tradition of statesmanship there, whereas actually for Americans, for. At least from my perspective, it's much more like resurrecting a dead tradition. And that was. That's sort of what makes me a neoreactionary, not a reactionary. I'm not, like, directly connected to this historical tradition. I just, like, you know, it's like Michelangelo, you know, and the people who did the Renaissance basically observed that, like, Renaissance, that the art of antiquity was actually just much better than anything that they could do themselves. And they're like, we are just going to learn from the past. But there isn't, like, a continuous stream of teachers that, you know, connects Proxitellas to Michelangelo or anything. It's, like, entirely died out. And here it is not quite entirely died out. And this is the thing that I notice. I'm going to Austria and then Germany next. And this is the thing that I notice in Europe, and it's different in every European country, is that old traditions have not entirely died out and. Whereas there's no old right in America.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, it's like a little brother, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's like a little brother.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah. And so actually being in the role of actually the little brother, which was the role of America for the whole 19th century, of course, you know, is like. It's actually, it's fitting, I think, in a way. It's like. Actually, you're just like, no, this is a. This is a really impressive bunch of young people, and they should have a country to run.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. But there's also another interesting comparison. I watched Marco Rubio's speech the other day, and I thought it was very good. I thought it was very good. But that is almost like the son coming to tell the dad, like, no, Marsha together.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, no, no, I thought it was. Let's talk about Rubio's speech.

[Peter McCormack]

You want to have. We've got five, ten minutes here.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's my perspective. In a way. It's that basically, I'm not a fan. And let me tell you that sort of the reason why the difference between the Rubio speech and the Vance speech a year ago, which might seem like very similar speeches, were actually quite different. And the result of the Vance speech in the audience was people basically felt like their mother had just died. And with Rubio, they stood up and clapped. Okay, why? What is the difference there? And basically, as soon as you see your enemies clapping for something that you did, you should be very, very afraid because maybe they know something you don't. What actually was done there is basically, in a way, it's a victory for the neocon wing rather than the isolation, isolationist wing of the administration, to the extent that there is even an isolationist wing. And here's why they clapped. What Rubio accomplished there was very similar to the amazing transformation that the American empire, which had just spent the last four to six years, depending on your timing, in 1945, fighting for a progressive world empire called the United nations, in which Stalin would be our strong right hand. And then they realized that this was not going to happen and that Stalin actually did not want to be their little buddy and which they had thought for the whole war. And they never saw him as a peer. And then he's like, yeah, you. You know, and they're like, oh, we thought we were playing him, but we actually were getting played. Right. And that made them very pissed at Stalin, and that allowed them to come home and present themselves to the American people as staunch anti Communists. And these were actually the people that had been like, you know, the strongest allies of Stalin, like, five years before. Right. And not even allies of Stalin that had been using Stalin, you know, for purposes of world domination, basically. And when they realized that they could basically retool this whole anti Hitler machine into an anti Stalin machine, when they realized that they could basically do this incredible Orwellian switch where we were now fighting our biggest ally, or sort of semi fighting our biggest ally in this strange way that made no sense at all. You know, they were just like, all right, our thing lives. And basically, what the reason why the people in Munich clapped at that speech is, they were like, rubio comes in and he's like, you know, Vance comes in and he basically undermines the institutions. And he's like, do we even need this? I don't know. Do you need it? Nobody needs it, right? And, you know, he made these people feel not needed. He undermined. Rubio comes in and he's like, I challenge you to stand up for Western civilization, you know, and like, you know, etc. Etc. And they're all like, western civilization. And wait, wait, wait, wait. And you. What they realize is that they can come home and basically be like, we're for Western civilization. We're standing up against Communism. You know, and then they just quickly do. They're like, well, the real Western civilization is diversity.

[Peter McCormack]

You know, See, my read was like, they all got so embarrassed with Vance. Like, they was like, I can't believe he said this. Everyone was like, yeah, but he was right.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And then Rubio comes in, and the first thing he does in his speech is he basically celebrates the founding miracle of this whole world. He's basically like, I'm not going to call you quislings. I'm not going to say, I'm going to call you allies. I'm not going to. I mean, the amount of real undermining that could be done just by saying, hey, guys, the EU is just the Western version of the Warsaw Pact, right? I mean, you just. You could rip. I mean, what Vance did was incredibly gentle. You. They would be crying, they would be vomiting, right? You know, like, they would, like, see their lives flash before their eyes because they would realize that they were about to suffer the fate of Ceausescu, right? You know, and, like, essentially what he's saying to them is, you're not going to get Ceausescu'd, we're not going to pull the rug, and we are going to participate in this same Reagan type game where basically, we are going to support the shitlib leaders of Europe and of Canada and of Australia and New Zealand. We are going to support them by opposing them and letting them feel like, oh, I'm the real nationalist. I'm standing up for Europe in the face of this. You know, we disagree about Western civilization. You know, we think Western civilization means Diversity and homosexuality. And we're going to stand by the, that right. You know, and all around, you know, it's. Trump managed a 40 point swing in the Canadian election. Do you know this? Like the, the, the Liberals were about to be wiped out. Trump comes in, he's like, we're going to have a trade war with, you know, like Canada or whatever. Now the conservatives in Canada are not, they're not great. Right. You know, but like, still, like basically you're sort of scoring an own goal because what you're doing there is you're basically saying you're participating in the kayfabe, you're not breaking the frame. So essentially when Reagan comes out as anti communist, basically all of Europe being like all euro communists or whatever, basically they're like, this is great for our narrative. We get to play against Reagan. We get to explain to our core support base of European shitlib aristocrats that we are here protecting you from Reagan. And when Trump comes out with his Greenland thing, it's like, same thing. It's like basically, oh, we'll protect you from the big bag Americans. We're standing up for you. It's funny because you have these two kinds of nationalism in Europe. You have, for example, the nationalism of the Scottish National Party and the nationalism of the British National Party or the English Defense League or wow, these are two very different kinds of nationalism that appear superficially to be the same thing. Catalan nationalism versus Spanish nationalism. Like, wow, these things are actually opposites. And so what you're doing when you basically the Greenland thing is straightforward conversion of foreign policy into domestic propaganda. He's like, I am standing up to this. You know, I'm here for America's interests. We're going to get Greenland. We need Greenland for the rare earths. Mining under ice is fucking possible.

[Peter McCormack]

Right?

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and, and, and you know, Greenland is a, an icy desert full of welfare Indians. Right. You know, basically. And anything, any bases that you needed, the Danes would give you. So you're basically just like picking a fight with these shitlib Europeans in a way that actually they love. I think he also swung the Danish election this way. And so actually, like, you know, when, for example, state proposes to like fund the ifda, you know, let's say Trump comes out and funds Restore uk, Is that good for Restore uk? Fuck no, right? Fuck no. Right. And the thing is that basically, unfortunately, unfortunately, the reality of American politics is American voters cannot possibly understand that. And because American voters cannot possibly understand that you actually do you win votes in America by doing something that is counterproductive for your overall ideological goals. Right. And you're sort of, you're winning. Yes, you're sort of winning in a way, but you're winning in this kind of sugar high way where you know, everybody's going to forget about Greenland by next week. Right. But you've like permanently damaged your public diplomacy efforts in Europe with this retardation. And I think the tragedy there is that I really do think that foreign policy has to be used as domestic policy. But there's this just like grand move that you can pull where you basically tell all of Europe Vance times 20, and you're just like, you know, Germany love you, Germany, but do I care what kind of government you have? No, I don't actually. We don't care at all. You could be communist, you could be Nazi, you could be some kind of hippie thing. We don't care. We could. And, and you know, and by the way, hey, Germany, like not only are we closing our bases because we don't need them, they're to protect you or something from Putin. Not, not a big deal, whatever. We're closing our bases. And actually, we're actually also withdrawing all our diplomats from Berlin because all they were doing was implementing interfering in your domestic politics, which we don't care about anymore. And if we have something to say to you, well, we'll email. But if it's complicated, we might have to, you know, and you know, and that would be like, that is the exact opposite of funding the if day. And that would be the afgh's basically wet dream. Right. And moreover, if you do that, and if you do that to all of Europe now, not all of Europe may sort of take this opportunity, but like, you're creating all kinds of interesting possibilities and those possibilities will eventually reflect back into American politics. For example, if the as happened with Gorbachev, if the French are just like, you know what, we're kind of done with this shitlib thing and we're gonna make France France again. And Americans see that and they're like, wow, they could just do that. I mean, already in a way, even Bukele in like the shittiest little country, he's had a huge impact on Latin American politics and he's had some impact on North American politics. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

And even Hungary and Poland here.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Yeah, right. But the thing is actually, if you're even hungry and Poland here to some extent, because they haven't even. Even though the, the shitlibs took back Poland, they still have not quite yet managed to fill it with Angolans, you know, and so here are these countries that you can go to that don't have this problem. And what does it cost on Ryanair? 39 pounds?

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, something like that.

[Curtis Yarvin]

You know, and like, you can see this alternate world where, you know, like, it just. It's not a thing. Right. And so the more of that you see, what really happened in the fall of the Soviet Union was that Gorbachev, not with any plan to let. He let the. Basically the satellite. The allies. He let the allies fall first, right? You know, and the allies fall first. And basically you have this whole narrative of, like, international socialist brotherhood, right? And it's like, oh, wait, it wasn't socialist brotherhood at all, actually. It was just a stupid Little Empire from 1945. Right. And it looks like acting. Actually, they don't really like socialism very much in Czechoslovakia, you know, and. And that would be. That's something that you can do that actually is like. It's a slower circuit. But the level of effect that it has on domestic politics is Titanic because you basically, so much of international politics is like, legitimization. Like, you know, in the 60s, basically, you know, the libs would be like, oh, we have to do this thing, this, like, civil rights thing, because otherwise the new countries of Africa will outvote us in the UN General Assembly. And people, like, swallowed this. They believed it, like, unconditionally, right? Yes, the UN General Assembly. Very important. We can't lose votes in the UN General Assembly. You know, in the early 70s or late 60s, I think there was a Supreme. Arthur Goldberg, who was a Supreme Court justice appointed by Lyndon Johnson. He actually steps down from the Supreme Court to a more important position of ambassador to the United Nations. You're just like, wow, you can't even imagine that world, right? And just like, watching that dream fall apart, like, you know, I would think it would be wonderful if Trump just. Just like, hey, you know what? You know, people talk about Turtle Island. You know, let's talk about Turtle Bay, because that's some really nice real estate. So if you want to have a United nations, hey, rest of the world, go ahead and do that, but we're just not going to do this anymore. And actually that feeling of you're gaining support by showing strength, and you're showing strength by just shoving over these moribund institutions, which used to be pillars of the narrative and now just would fall over without a trace. I mean, you know, and have to

[Peter McCormack]

get in the car. And I'm going to re. Watch both now, both Vance and, oh, yeah, yeah. Marco Rubio. Because I like.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I was like, yeah, because he's saying it's brilliant. You'll see people. I mean, Internet Nazis love Rubio's speech. And you're just like, actually, no. Like you don't see what he's doing here.

[Peter McCormack]

Right. I'm going to watch both again. I'm conscious of your time. You got to go to the next thing. We could have done another three hours. When are you back next?

[Curtis Yarvin]

It was good.

[Peter McCormack]

Am I going to see you in Vegas in.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Oh, wait, Vegas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's. Can we record in Vegas?

[Peter McCormack]

Of course we can record in Vegas.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Do they have studios there?

[Peter McCormack]

We'll just find a studio. Of course we'll find a studio. Curtis, thank you.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right, great.

[Peter McCormack]

See you soon.

[Curtis Yarvin]

See you soon.