Decoding the Gurus - Curtis Yarvin: The Edgelord's Guide to Monarchy 40K

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

In this long-anticipated episode, Matt and Chris venture into the peculiar world of Curtis Yarvin—a reactionary blogger, tech entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed monarchist. Known to his early followers by the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug," Yarvin has become a prominent figure in the "dark enlightenment" and neo-reactionary circles. Some have even hailed him as an "intellectual powerhouse" of the modern far-right, with endorsements from influential figures like Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance.But what is Curtis really all about? In this episode, the decoders revisit the Triggernometry swamp to examine the political insights unearthed by the hard-nosed journalists Konstantin and Francis during their ferocious intellectual exchange with Yarvin.Prepare for thrilling revelations, including the historical figures and movements Yarvin has catalogued in his encyclopedic memory, his pick for the best Elizabethan monarch, and the surprising number of non-monarchs he believes are secretly running monarchical regimes. True to form, Yarvin’s rhetorical style is nothing if not meandering. So get ready for a whirlwind tour through his "mind palace," exploring topics like Soviet Russia, Elizabethan England, Shakespearean conspiracy theories, and a fantasy world of reactionary and techno-libertarian musings—not to mention the obligatory lab-leak narratives.Is Yarvin an edgy intellectual, a provocative contrarian, or just a verbose windbag with run-of-the-mill conspiratorial takes and a moody teenager's perspective on history? Matt and Chris tackle these questions, striving to decode Yarvin’s vision for society—and hoping, against all odds, that he might in the end just answer a single question.LinksTriggernometry: Curtis Yarvin- The Case Against DemocracyUnHerd: Curtis Yarvin: Welcome to the Dark EnlightenmentBehind the Bastards Part One: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. VanceBehind the Bastards Part Two: Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher Behind J.D. VanceThe Guardian: He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest clients the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, the co-host here, my assistant, junior partner, is Chris Kavanagh. G'day Chris, from Chattanooga. Chattanooga. Chattanooga to Tokyo. That's how we're doing it today.

International podcasting at its finest. Premium grid, the good stuff. Welcome. It's been a while. We haven't been in these decoding seats in a while. You know, that's, it's good to get back in the mix. Yeah, well, we've been we've been we've been taking it easy. We've been doing quizzes.

Yeah, the specials doing supplementary materials, which are more freeform. And this is the real thing. This is this is what the people want. This is our contribution to society. I think this is someone that we promised to do for years. So in that sense, it is what the people want. But I will say, Matt, I just need to mention on the back of the Christmas quizzes that I put the team selections to the vote on the patreon so I can report

back to you whose team from Guru Survivor was the winner and there was an overwhelming winner from the three teams. Do you need them recapped for you? Yeah, yeah, remind me of the teams. Okay. So we had Team Science Saboteurs. That was you. Sabine Hosenfelder. Andrew Huberman. And Nassim Taleb.

Okay. A bit of a science heavy, science critique heavy team nonetheless. Dream team. Dream team, that's how I think of them. Then we had Team Devious Love, Lex Friedman, Scott Adams, Jimmy Wheeler, and myself. A high risk, high reward selection there.

Yeah. Yeah. Scott Adams and Lex Friedman. You would only survive in that island if your team betrayed the rest of us before they betrayed each other. But interesting choices you made. That's fine. That's right. And then team spiritual evolution from Dan.

I do think that Brett Weinstein was a choice here purely because Dan wanted to cost Brett for a year. He's a brand aficionado, but he also had Dark Horse, Heli Izer, Yudekowski and Dr. K. Dr. K. That was a good spiritual warfare, intellectual warfare and evolutionary knowledge all in the one team. A potent package. A potent, well, I don't know. I think those are interesting choices. None of them seem like people that would survive in a desert island Chris, but eight that's just me

What do I know? I'm just just a co-host of a very successful podcast for gurus. That's right. Yep Matt 424 votes. Okay. This is a Significant sample size that we've got here and there is one team with a 73 percent got here and there is one team with a 73 percent selections rate or whatever i don't know percentage right so would you like to guess who that is who got 73 percent of the votes i'm sure it's my team it's got to be my team isn't it it is that's right yeah and no he's the best. Surely some of that. What a guy.

Some of that is going to be sympathy votes. Some of it. Because I scored. Now remind me, what score did I get in the first quiz? I think you got one. Did you get one right? Did I get one? I think I got one sympathy.

I think I may have gotten zero. But so that's fair. I think it's fair swings and roundabouts, right? I'm bad at quizzes, good at selecting teams of gurus to survive on desert islands. We all have our specialities, Chris. Yeah. Even if I take in the account, the sympathy vote, I can't account for that level. It's a landslide. Your team is... Yeah. But I wonder, Matt, I do wonder, were people picking the team that they liked the best rather than thinking about the scenario, right? That they need to survive on the island, but not the other people? Maybe. Maybe I'm just throwing out possibilities, right? It's just an alternative in every... You're like, hang on, Hang on. Don't try to Donald Trump this election result. This is you know, just just take the L

Was that the weave? Well, okay. Okay. I will say that and can I also mention my you know, we don't mention the patreon much here Right. I mean we do we do it at the end of every episode, but do we promote it? We just do the cutoff thing for the supplementary material. That's what we do. But I will say if you were on the Patreon, you would have got the Christmas special early. You would get the Decoding Academia if you're at the $5 an up tier. And Matt Nye, I don't want to get too many new Patreons, but I did upload an indulgent video of myself bouldering. So, you know, look, is that available to the public? No, it's only available to the people on Instagram,

like the 50 or so people who have known me since childhood, who are now inundated with my records of bouldering and our patrons. So if you wanted to see middle aged b bouldering action as somebody described it, oldering, that's on the Patreon. That's right. The wall is his ground people. Yeah, if you're not swayed by all those excellent reasons, you know, you'd also, if you were a patron, you would have listened to the Christmas special in its entirety and you would have understood what we were just talking about then. So massive advantages. Well, but that's obviously because I've done this, I have to release the Christmas one before this.

Don't worry, don't worry about it. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. That's all right. But I will also say that the other advantage, which we've never advertised, this is like a secret bonus advantage is that sometimes I have to commute and I'm bored, right? And you're over in America, you're asleep or my family are bothered to make times. So now there's a little function on Patreon that lets you like do a, an audio call with people. So that's how I've been passing the time on my commutes, answering questions and getting commentary and

feedback. That's where that Guru survivor islands scenario came from was discussing with people. So is that a selling point? Well, it's I can see it's very appealing. Everyone should take advantage of the fact that you just can't be at peace with yourself. Can't simply sit in silence for more than 10 minutes at a stretch and you desperately need to be engaging with other people to give you some sense of validation every minute of the day. So yeah, that's another big benefit.

That's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. It's mental stimulation, Matt, on the long and dreary road. I've consumed too much nonsense. I need on the long and dreary road. I've consumed too much nonsense. I need intellectual engagement. That is what I need, right? So you can't join the Patreon unless you're an intellectual. Yeah, that's right. If you think you can give that to Chris on his commute,

then join up. Otherwise, please don't. Yeah. And there's also like a flow of Patreon where it sends tons of notifications about that. So like that's a downtime as well. So anyway, anyway, we have a Patreon. That's where it sends tons of notifications about that. So like that's a downtime as well. So anyway, anyway, we have a Patreon. That's where it is.

That's where the advanced releases and all that kind of stuff goes. So that's our annual promotion of the Patreon. Right, that's it. It's done. Good, done. All right, we'll do another one next year. Good, well, this is gonna be the final decoding

for this year, 2024. Oh, you have little fear, Matt. You have little fear. You think we can't wedge in another one? Let's see. All right. Maybe it is. If you're listening to this, and it is the last one, Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year to you. And if there's another one before it, just recognize how productive we are. Okay. Right. That is impressive. Impressive productivity. Um, Matt doesn't think it can be done. I think it can. Let's see. how productive we are okay right that is impressive impressive productivity Matt doesn't think it can be done I think it can let's see let's see okay okay okay good good good good so we're doing Curtis Yavin Chris we're doing we are

this is an accordion episode Matt no faffing around okay heaven heaven for That's right. Heaven for Fend. Right. Who is this guy? What's his deal? He's a stupid reactionary blogger who used to go by the pen name Mentschus Moldbug. He is known for the dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary movement. They sometimes referred to as like the, you know, an intellectual powerhouse, a philosopher of that movement. And one of his claim to fame says that he invented the red pill terminology, like applied to right wing, seen through the matrix kind of crap.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we can thank him for that. Yeah. So what else? He hasn't written any books or anything, but apparently he's been quite influential. Right. Steve Bannon has talked about him. JD Vance has cited him as an influence.

He's had these blogs and things. So did he write a book? He didn't write a book. He had some tech thing. He had some tech thing, he had a tech company or tech product of some computer platform as a decentralized network of personal servers, the orbit computer price. Who hasn't got a startup at this point in time or two on their resume? Yeah, but it's not really that important because me and Feng is that he's a blogger who's influenced a bunch of the current crop of, you know, MAGA Republicans and neo-reactionaries before that.

But it was around before MAGA. He kind of was like a substacker before there was substack. You know, he wrote these really long, indulgent, very wordy and literary pieces outlining his views on various topics and his philosophy and political ideologies and whatnot. So he's sometimes presented as like the intellectual powerhouse of the neo-reactionary movement. He also is responsible for the cathedral. Do you remember that thing that the sense speakers used to always talk about, the blue cathedral? Oh, well, they used to talk about the blue church, and I saw that he was talking about the cathedral. So that's connected, right? That's where they picked that up from him, did they?

I'm pretty sure that's the genealogy there, but it's the same idea. And that if he is a neo-enlightenment against the, like his view is that left wing progressive values are a new orthodoxy, a new religion. So he is the neo-reactionary enlightenment movement, the dark enlightenment, because he's, very enlightenment movement, the dark enlightenment, because he's going to take us back to a kind of weird monarchy system. Yeah, we'll get into it. We'll get into it. And he was interviewed repeatedly on a bunch of different places, but it doesn't matter which interview that you look at, because it's essentially all the same stuff. The one that we are looking at is his interview on trigonometry with our friends Francis Foster and Constantine Kissin, intellectual power houses

of the center left map. They're well they're politically homeless those two so it stands to reason that they would have Kurdish Arvin on. They'll have anyone. They'll have anyone. Yeah, that's right. They're not afraid to talk to people. Okay. All right. Let's start with that one. Yeah, as you said, it's probably better to let good old Curtis speak for himself

and he can explain his ideas about monarchism and techno, anarcho, capitalism and stuff. I'm sure it'll all make sense. Yes. Okay. So here's him being introduced on Trigonometry. Our brilliant guest today has gone from an anonymous blogger to one of the intellectual godfathers of the so-called new right courtesy of and welcome to trigonometry. Thank you so much. And I'm enjoying being here and being in the UK. Well, it's great to have you on the show.

We'll get into whether new right is the right term. But before we do that, and all the rest of it, tell us who are you? How are you? Where you are? What's been the journey that brings you to be sitting here? Can I just mention as well, it's always the case, right? Where they're like, oh, you know, you're the intellectual godfather of the new right. But are you right? Is that even the right thing to say? Can we say that you're right? You know, they're just like, yes, yes, he's obviously right. Right. These. Yeah. But you know, it's, it's just that thing in the head of a dark space where they're always

so afraid about like somebody objecting to a label. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They don't really get into whether or not he's right or left wing in the end. But yeah, right wing, left wing. Let's find out.

Who cares? Really? He's an exciting guy with powerful ideas. Let's hear them. Yeah, let's hear what he, what is he? He was about to introduce himself. Introduce yourself, Curtis. I'm actually a retired computer programmer,

computer scientist, some people might even say although. And after 2000, I started working on a computer science research project and research is hard, you read a lot of books, and you know, to pass the time when your brain isn't on the computer science. And I started to sort of really through the reading of libertarians such as Mises and Rothbard and Rothbard's student Hans Hermann Hoppe, I don't know if you know the name. He wrote this book, Democracy, the God that Failed. And, you know, he was a libertarian,

but he's sort of bringing me, you know, bringing in this worldview from kind of before the democratic revolution and really opening you to the very difficult question of how our ancestors would see us. You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question. You know, we have this picture of our ancestors, but we've seldom reversed the question.

You know, we know what we think of Elizabeth I. What would Elizabeth I think of us? You know, we're sitting here right next to Westminster Abbey. You know, what would she think? What would she say if she could see Britain today? And our attitude toward the past, as I started to read the writers of the past, I got into him, a huge admirer of Thomas Carlyle,

who's now very unknown and very misunderstood. There you go, Chris, some references to some obscure books and slightly less obscure thinkers. Democracy, The God That Failedailed and Thomas Carlyle. Yeah, so he talks about a bunch of other sort of literary and historical things throughout this, but why don't we just let people know what he's referring to because he doesn't say much apart from,

oh, it invites us to think about what an ancient ruler like Elizabeth I would think about us, which isn't super helpful. So Democracy, the God that Failed, it's a book in which this guy, Hans Hermann Hopp critiques modern democratic systems. He says that democracy is flawed, that it's sort of inherently going to be corrupted and it's going to inevitably erode people's personal freedoms and undermines individual liberties. Thomas Carlyle, who a name that I know, but I have to admit, I needed to sort of check what his deal was. You know, he is more ambiguous, I guess, more of a, I don't know,

he's had to actually pigeonhole. You know, he wrote novels and sort of with some philosophical ideas in them I guess, but it's, they're sort of hard to describe. Like he wasn't a fan of democracy, he was something of a romantic I suppose, sort of had authoritarian leanings, like the romance of people like Bonaparte I suppose, and you know, didn't like the, you know, industrial, and didn't like the industrialization and all of this new technological developments in society. I think it's good that you described a bit of detail about that,

but I also don't think that you should assume from his dropping of references that it really matters because he picks and chooses what he wants to emphasize. And basically, if you imagine that most of the people he's citing, it's because he wants to pull out these ideas about regressive, anti-democratic stuff or racist elements in various parts as well that he likes from Thomas Carlisle.

That is the case. Right. So, yes, it's romanticism. Yes, he does know a bunch of relatively well-known and some more obscure figures and whatnot. But it's all in service of his waffly views about anti-democracy. So it's kind of like, you know, this is going to come up repeatedly. So I'll just say it now. Whenever you're in academia, you become very familiar with people dropping references to be performative. We've talked about it in various other gurus that

we've looked at. And that's absolutely what happens here. It's not that he doesn't know everyone that he's referencing, but it is hugely performative and it is in large part just to demonstrate what a wide, rare, and deeply philosophical thinker he is. And that's what you should take it to be, right? Like, so if you're like, oh, does he elaborate this? Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't, but it's all performative bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're not playing like the entire interview for people. We listen to it. So listeners don't have to.

So I just take a word for it, I guess. Like, he drops those names. He mentions them. Oh, no, you're going to hear loads of clips. You're going to hear loads of clips. You don't need to take our word for it, Matt. You remember how this works. They'll they'll hear him do it constantly. Well, you didn't let me finish.

I was going to say, like, they will, you will hear him drop more names. But take my word for it that he doesn't really describe in detail what these people said and why he's citing them in order to sort of build up some sort of argument. He does exactly what you said, which is he drops their names. And this is something completely different, which is what would Elizabeth the first think about our society today, which actually isn't related to the two names he just dropped very much, except in the most oblique sense.

So anyway, we can continue. Yeah. So the Elizabeth the first, was it the second? Which Elizabeth was it? The first Elizabeth, the first was it the second which Elizabeth was it the first Elizabeth the first Elizabeth the first reference was you know, I think this is supposed to be a clever thought experiment and there's an aspect to it, which is valid and reasonable Matt right that people often judge the past or Other countries and whatnot from a kind of provincial presentist perspective, right? They don't look at things the other way around

or they don't consider that, you know, society was fundamentally different, countries were different, all that kind of thing, right? There is an aspect of that that is true, but also it's a very simple point. It's a very simple point but he presents it as deeply profound and it's essentially historical and cultural relativism is what he's getting at here. So listen to this. And as I started to sort of read the past I started to get a sense of

kind of stepping outside you know whether it's the Overton window or Plato's cave or whatever, I started to get a sense of how the past would see the present. You know, we live in a time that considers us very, very superior to all of human history in a number of respects. And you know, when you look at our cell phones, our computers, you know, these things are sort of clearly superior, but are we as superior as human beings? Are our values and perspectives superior?

This seems to me to be a subject well worthy of debate. And especially what started to concern me is that there's a sort of almost a sort of provincialism to the present, because when you're in a very provincial society, you tend to be very centered on where you are, and you dismiss sort of the rest of the world as heathens, barbarians, you know, and, you know, you seldom in this sort of provincial context, you basically seldom sort of flip the script and say, what would they think of us? Yeah, I mean, so I guess one version of that is, like you said, that sort of relativism,

which is to invite people to say, hey, just look, just remember that we live at a particular point in time in a particular civilization, and not everyone who has lived thought the same way we do. And we might possibly not be 100% correct, although it feels like the way we think about things is clearly better than how Julius Caesar, Romans or Elizabethans or you name it, even religious Iranians say if you want to go to different geographic places instead of times, you know, other people see things differently, they might value different things we did. It's good to think about that perhaps. That seems fine as far as it goes, but yeah, like you said, there's the kind of relativism there which is just because, I don't know, Elizabeth I would have probably very

much disapproved of many things about modern culture. She certainly wouldn't have approved of atheism. That's for sure. Doesn't necessarily mean we're wrong. Does it? Oh, no. And, you know, this is echoing arguments that are well trodden in historical analysis, right, or in anthropology for that matter, about recognizing your own ethnocentric

and presentist projections and that kind of thing. And I think it's the presentation of these kinds of ideas that lands like an air of intellectual depth to what is going to follow, right? And let me just jump to why he wants to make this kind of thought experiment. Right. So at this point, he is talking about why he's not a Nazi. Okay. So he's not a Nazi. All right. But but let's consider, you know, why that is. that is. It seems wrong. It seems very strange. This obsession with race seems very odd and very unpleasant.

And we're taught, you know, at the same time in the US to believe we have these two concepts of equal protection of the law and protected classes. How do these things, you know, interact? You know, it's very Orwellian. But, you know, if I don't believe in this, what do I believe in? And the teacher says something, well, it's very simple. The opposite of this is being a Nazi. And at that point, your 15-year-old says, well, then I'm a Nazi.

And I'm using the British pronunciation, you know, just because I'm here in the UK. And that's a sort of like that antagonism where basically you're part of the kind of stereotyped, you're sort of when you do that and you know, I like to warn people against that choice because it's not that to be a Nazi is to be too radical actually, I think you must be much more radical than that, but it's like the sort of you know, you're inhabiting this caricatured opposition to the frame, whereas actually to be outside the frame is much bigger and much more interesting and the past is much more enormous. So he doesn't like identity politics or affirmative action. He describes those things as Orwellian,

which I think is up to the stretch. I mean, Orwellian generally refers to a kind of Stalinist, a kind of totalitarian total control, which might be taking it a bit far. But anyway, that's the anti-woke position. That's the dominant anti-woke position, though, right? Exactly. That is now their main talking point. I'm sure the trigonometry folks would agree that it is Orwellian, that things like affirmative action are preferred. And apart from that, his point is that, hey, you can not like that and not be a Nazi. There are other options available.

Well, yeah, but the way he freaks it is if the mainstream is telling you like it's affirmative action and it's DEI and all this that, you know, this is going to naturally incur the rebellion of people who want to think outside the box. And then when they, you say, you know, what if you don't believe in all that kind of things? Good. Then the only option is you're a Nazi. And then he's like, but if you become a Nazi, that is just playing into that predictable binary. And we need to go, we need to be more edgier than Nazis. There's a more interesting, more edgy take than being a Nazi, because everybody expects you to be a Nazi. So that's boring, right? And that's a very stupid. It's a stupid reason not to be a Nazi. It's also a stupid view about why people would be drawn towards Nazism.

It's perfectly possible to be annoyed with the excesses of social justice without becoming a Nazi. Right? Yeah. I'm sure there's many people listening who might have ambivalent feelings or even negative feelings about affirmative action or what's called identity politics without feeling any temptation to become a Nazi. So, yeah. So, and he says we need to be more radical than the Nazis, right, which is a worrying statement to make. Well, we all know what the exciting, edgy alternative is and it's, um,

monarchism, but, um, we'll get to that. Yeah. Maybe people are going to be surprised that that's what it is by them. And so the trigonometry people point the side. Let's talk about that. So you, I want to give you an opportunity to also clarify what you said, being more radical than a Nazi, What are you talking about? So, you know, I would say, for example, that, you know, to take Shakespeare seriously is much more radical than being a Nazi.

And so, you know, when you look at the world of Elizabeth I, it's a world that when we take it seriously, we can almost, we can barely understand. So for example, you know, it's a digression, but I happen to be like many very intellectual people. I happen to be an Oxfordian. I believe that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford. And so for example, to take the world of Elizabethan court poetry seriously and to take, there's a wonderful speech in Troilus and Cressida where

Ulysses sort of has this kind of defense of inequality and his defense of rank and his defense of like nobility. You'll not find an ounce of democratic sentiment in Shakespeare. Yeah. So following along there, it's, it's much more edgy and much more interesting not to be like a boring old reactionary neo-Nazi, but rather to take like Elizabeth and Moore's and Moret's and political thinking and like the drama of the period. Let's remember that Shakespeare is not so much

a political writer as a dramatist, writing plays for the entertainment of people. We should take that extremely seriously. This is the kind of, I suppose he's referring to Chris. What do you think? He's referring to the romance that's involved in Shakespearean plays, the sort of like the interest in character and drama and prestige social

status? What? No. Well, I mean, yes, but basically he's talking about the pandering to monarchy and divine rule and all that kind of anti-democratic set of things. Like basically taking the- What about the Tempest? What about the Tempest?

The Tempest involves a wizard? Or King Lear King Lear well I get but I guess you could take those kind of things right because you could say well But look King Lear was about the order being upset by these grasping Yeah, you could do a Jordan Peterson fine reading of Shakespeare develop a political philosophy around it I'm sure but you know what it reminds me of, Matt? You know the Mighty Boosh, the comedy series in the UK? Yeah, so they did this thing, episode they had, taking retro to its logical conclusion. They were, instead of doing like 80s retro or 70s, they were doing like Tudor music with

big liars and dressed like peasants from the medieval and retro to its logical conclusion. Calm down we have to be logical here okay if it's the past that's in maybe I should step up huh what if we were to look further back into the past than anyone has looked before before. This is taking political hysterism to its limits. Oh, conservatism. Yeah, like, you know, traditional values right back. But is he edgy enough? Has he considered going back to like caveman politics?

Like he can be out-edged, I think, by somebody going to prehistory. Or what about Egyptian politics? Maybe that's what we should have pharaohs, right? And then the other part, I mean, this is, it's actually beautiful to listen to because of the pretentiousness of it. It's like the worst parts of academia combined with the blowhards of the guru sphere. And he mentions, like many intellectuals, he believes in the Oxfordian theory of William Shakespeare, right, that he was the Earl of Oxford. And if you look that up, the first thing it says is, while historians and literary scholars

overwhelmingly reject alternative authorship candidates, including the Earl of Oxford, public interest in the Oxfordian theory continues. So this is the thing, he's often presenting it as, oh, I have this devious, delicious theory, which you probably haven't heard of it. But actually it's the bog standard conspiracies just dressed up.

So like that, there are alternative identity theories about who Shakespeare was. Yes, that's fairly common. It's like saying, you know, I believe we didn't land on the moon and I have very good reasons for it. Many intellectuals have entered that part, you know. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Well, there's going to be more of this.

There's going to be more of this name dropping and references to abstruse lines of thought. So let's, let's move on. Yes. So more though, to explain like why he's not for Hitler. He's more complex than that, Matt. Whereas, for example, Hitler is a demagogue, you know, he's a very, and, and if you look at, for example, the relationship between Hitler and the kind of the German

nationalists, great writers like Ernst Junger, who, you know, there's recently... I don't know, do you know Junger? There's recently been a Junger revival. Amazing, amazing writer. And these people look down upon Hitler as a sort of peasant. You know, and anti-Semitism, you know, in German society in 1900, you know, was a sort of peasant belief. You know, the idea that it could become a serious thing that would result in serious consequences for people was unthinkable to these German aristocrats. And so, for example, to these German aristocrats. And so for example, if I place myself in that time,

I'm sort of with, much more with a kind of Steffenberg, kind of the old German aristocratic, right, who eventually tried to blow up Hitler with a bomb and failed and Junger himself is almost caught up in these perches and killed. Yeah, yeah, so he's being relatively clear. He's not aligned with Hitler, but more with the old Prussian aristocracy. Much, much cooler frame of reference.

Yeah. Although again, like he often does this kind of thing, Matt, where he makes this claim, you know, these grand historical claims and just throws them in. And he says, you know, anti-Semitism was a kind of peasant belief, the aristocracy looked down on it. And yes, I know that the aristocracy might have looked down on Hitler, right? This upstart little demagogue. But the notion that German aristocrats didn't harbor anti-Semitism in the pre-World War II period. Oh, I think that's a questionable claim. I think that there would be plenty of historical sources which would speak that that might not exactly be as Roxola the historical fact as he claims there.

Yeah. And though the Prussian aristocracy may not have been populist in the same way Hitler was, they were most certainly authoritarian and militaristic. So it wasn't all peaches and cream, but he likes them because they're aristocrats, right? Yeah, that's it. It's like this stupid anti-elite elite or the outside elite. I can't remember how Barry Weiss recently framed Peter Thiel. They are billionaires and have influence over media and government contacts and all this, but they're the anti-elites, even though they're all hanging around

in elite circles and whatnot. They're the cool, like so old fashioned that it's, it's come full circle and it's cool again now. Yeah. Like the bell bottom jeans are due for a rerun, right? Okay. So just to round off this point, well, I mean, it's going to come back because this is essentially

it. This is the depth of his thought. That's it, right? We can pack up shop here because that is it. This is just what he's going to explain is like he likes anti-democratic monarchy things because he thinks they're better. And like he has various ways that he wants to make this sound deeper than it is. But that's it. That's it. And it's because it's edgy. It's more edgy than being an open Nazi. So here's some explaining why this is like actually a more intellectual edgy idea to be like pro Elizabethan than a neo-Nazi.

not woke, I'm post-woke, whatever, you know, what does that mean? You know, this word woke dates to 2012, as though we invented these ideas in 2012, which is absolute nonsense. They were being taught in American universities in the 70s. They were actually, you know, go back solidly to the 30s. And, you know, so to say that I'm not this, you know, once you say that not this means that, you're sort of making the mistake of saying Gentiles believe this. And to escape from that pattern and say, no, actually, you know, to say, I don't believe, for example, you know, to say, you know, the meaning of I don't believe in democracy, you know, that can be, have a huge number of meanings.

But to group, for example, Hitler and Elizabeth I, either of whom believed in democracy, I mean, I can't imagine that Queen Elizabeth would have let that little man in her presence for more than a few minutes. And, you know, and so sort of, it's so crucial to basically say, okay, I'm escaping from this dichotomy. And even to sort of view this dichotomy as kind of a single line and say, okay, well, I don't believe in woke. So but I'm not Hitler, but let's go, you know,

10% toward Hitler. I'm a moderate. I'm a moderate, you know, you know, as they say, the best way to fight, you know, radical racist terrorism is to support moderate racists. And, oh no, wait, they don't say that. And so there are all these other different fascinating, amazing directions to go to when you kind of let yourself out of the very narrow prison of the present and kind of into the past. Yeah, I mean, like we're doing him a lot of credit by actually checking the name drops, checking the references and seeing what he's referring to. But he's not, he's not spelling anything out except what you said, Chris, which is that he likes old fashioned, oldie

worldie aristocratic order. And it is correct, I suppose, in saying that it's not specifically Nazism. He is against democracy, liberal democracies. He likes the oldie-woldie stuff. He likes the stupid edgy edgelord stuff though. Like, let's go 10% towards Hitler and 90% Elizabethan monarchy, right? Or like the little, I want to support moderate racists to combat radical racist terrorism. Oh, ha ha ha. You know, it's all, it's tongue in cheek, but there's a point to it.

And like, hydro, hydro, right? But also that thing, Matt, about, you know, he's imagining how Elizabeth would react to Hitler and say, no, she would dismiss that little man. And it strikes me as like intellectual warhammer 40K neo-Nazi versus like, you know, like it is of that caliber. Really, it is like what faction do you like in this little intellectual playground you have of anti-democratic tyrants or figures from history.

Oh, I don't like the Sisters of Mercy. I prefer the Space Marines. I want to be a 40% orc and 60% this. And Kurdish Armin is exactly that kind of person. If he were not fantasizing about his anti-democratic regimes and influencing MAGA Republicans, he would be painting his Warhammer 40K and writing about the lore of the various factions that he supports and why it's important.

You know, the tyrants actually have an important message to send to the Space Marines or whatever. And you got it. So it's like this is your intellectual powerhouse. Is this preening poser? God damn. It's like, this is your intellectual powerhouse. Is this pre-Ninposer? God damn. It's just depressing. Yeah. When I heard that he was advocating for a kind of monarchy, a kind of aristocracy, and it was somehow connected to anarcho-techno-libertarianism as well, I thought,

I thought, well, this will be interesting. At the very least, we'll have some sort of interesting rationale for this point of view. But it never actually happens in this discussion on trigonometry. He just, he says that he's a fan of these things, and he does a lot of name dropping, but he doesn't really provide any arguments for that point of view. Like Chris, I mean, if you put me on the spot and said, Matt, trying to argue for the case that liberal democracy is fundamentally flawed and we should have a monarchy instead, right? I could, as an intellectual exercise, I could say, okay, modern

democracies involve politicians who need to be elected, so they're always going to be motivated to lie and be dishonest because that's the best way to get elected and they're always going to be motivated to lie and be dishonest because that's the best way to get elected and they're always going to be in need of campaign funds and so on in order to again get themselves elected, so they're going to be beholden to moneyed interests. And most people are going to become disengaged or whatever with democracy, are going to think about it very much and as a result, we're gonna end up with this rule. I think that we should have actually, I know it sounds crazy, but a hereditary monarchy.

Yes, there'll be like a fixed cost, like the UK suffers with their monarchy. But the flip side is that these are people who are guaranteed to be the heads of state, and they're not gonna be subject to these corrupting influences because their position is guaranteed. And they're going to be in a position.

It's a bit like having tenure at a university. They're going to be guaranteed to be able to put the interests of the country first. That's an example of an argument, of a justification for this edgy point of view that monarchy would be better. I just want to be clear that he never does that. He never explains any reasons for why he thinks this is better.

He just, he just cites a bunch of obscure stuff. It is writing, he does do this, but it falls apart if you dig into it, right? Like it's, it's very much all about the superficial presentation of that. It's very much all about the superficial presentation of them. So he is better at making specific arguments in writing, but they're extremely long winded and they rest on the same kind of cheeky historical and intellectual foundation. So I take that point. I kind of assumed that in his blog and stuff like that, he would have spelled things out more, but he had an hour and a half with the trigonometry.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. This is his chance to explain to people why he thinks monarchism is the best idea. And, you know, I gave you a potted version of one and it took what, 30 seconds? You know, he didn't do that. do that. No, he's very bad at that. And you get the impression that he's very used to being indulged, like Jordan Peterson, like so many of the gurus were going on these extended monologues or like illustrative stories. And I'll play some examples of that. But before that, Matt, just before we get out of this Holocaust point, you remember the guy, Marder Me made, the podcast historian guy that was doing the alternative history of World War II. So there's a part where he talks about conspiracy theories and World War II, right? And he wants to be clear that he's not denying the Holocaust and that that is a silly conspiracy theory. But listen to what he says

while making that point, right? Because he has to make it edgy. It would be too normie reactionary to deny the Holocaust. And so like my example of the, you know, the 15 year old, the brilliant 15 year old kid who becomes a Nazi, which I've seen millions and millions of cases of, okay, not millions, but very many. And it's sort of very sad because you get sort of trapped in that space. And especially you're sort of looking for what is the most taboo belief in the modern world. You wind up in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Well, you know, the Holocaust is one of the best attested facts, you know, in history. But if you're looking for the truth about World War II, actually, almost every other World War II conspiracy theory is true, except Holocaust denial. And so President Roosevelt had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor. Totally believe this, for example, I, you know, I don't want to go into details on this. But, you know, and so when we understand this sort of enemy, like if you look at kind of pop history, professional history, kind of studies of the Third Reich, you know, we understand it clearly as glass. We see Hitler almost perfectly. Understanding Stalin. Oh, you know, have you read there's a recent book, Stalin's War by Sean

McMeekin that came out, a lovely history, you know, kind's a recent book, Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin that came out, a lovely history, kind of a revisionist history or something, but impeccably academic of sort of Stalin's perspective in the war, kind of recompensulates the icebreaker hypothesis. Oh yeah. Okay, Chris, so he sounds a lot like this Marta May guy. Every other conspiracy theory that you've heard about World War II is correct. But what's his icebreaker hypothesis thing? That's like that Hitler had a ground strategy to, you know, like, use Stalinist Russia.

Like the non-aggression pact was actually like a plot to enable. It's like, you know, he was playing nine dimensional chess, right, but it is not a view that is accepted by the majority of historians, like because it is generally assumed that the non-aggression pact, although it was something that was gonna be abandoned when it was strategically convenient,

was temporarily useful, right, for the Soviets and the Nazis. So that's the strategy. But in the same way, he mentions, yeah, President Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor. That's totally, I won't go into the reasons, but no, sorry, again, no, it isn't actually a completely well, you know,

like this is actually the 150 IQ thing. No, that is a bog standard conspiracy theory to the extent that it was in a Michael Bay movie called Pearl Harbor. Right. But he presents it as, oh, yes, this is a, you know, the people that really understand the history knew that, you know, the Americans knew the attack was coming in. They allowed to happen so that they could get involved. But he presents it as if the really the proper understanding, you know,

it doesn't fall for the obvious conspiracies. It knows the deeper ones are real. And no, he just buys into conspiracy theories. The notion that like history is complex and some of the simplistic portrayals of World War II and World War I are wrong. That is the kernel of truth, which is true in like Marder Meade's presentation as well. But that is actually not that incredibly, you know, like that the cartoon Hollywood version of World War II. It actually was more complex. No shit, Sherlock.

But that doesn't mean Pearl Harbor actually they did know about that and they let the attack happen. No, all the evidence suggests that is not true. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So the implication with this kind of thing, apart from the fact everything you said is true, that, you know, no, not every conspiracy theory about World War II is true, except for the Holocaust, that it does play into that, I guess, ignorant point of view, where unless you accept the Hollywood ultra simplified version of it, that actually was a little bit complicated. Like maybe some intelligence official was suspecting that there might be

an attack on Pearl Harbor, maybe it wasn't taken seriously enough. Like those are the little grains of truth here. But that's not what the point is, that history is complicated. Rather, the point is, is that this narrative that you've been sold about World War II, in which the liberal democracies were the good guys and the fascist totalitarians were the bad guys, you've been totally misled and actually, you know, you're going to be red-pilled or black-pilled into some totally alternative view of history in which everything you thought you knew is wrong. I mean, that's kind of the implication that people like him and Marta made, I think, would

like people to come away with. Yeah, and like the things that are presented here is incredibly, you know, oh, this will blow your mind, right? Like one of the things that he points out was, you know, in the 1930s, communism was popular amongst like counter culture and revolutionary figures, right? Can you imagine that, Matt?

That like communism was something that intellectuals and was the kind of cool new ideology. So- George Bernard Shaw, oh my God, really? That nice old man? There's no longer a party. It's now this sort of movement that sweeps through society. But if you look at the connections between what

people who were communists in the 1930s, and everyone cool in the 1930s was communist, almost exclusively. And it was just an amazing group of people. I mean, they were brilliant. They were like, you know, when I try to explain 30s communism to people today, I'm like, you know, okay, maybe you went to gifted school,

maybe you're a little smart, you're watching, you know, a very intellectual podcast. Probably, you know, you've got a little bit up top. Imagine all the gifted kids in the world decided to form a party to take over the world. That was American communism, an amazing, amazing experience. And what this experience sort of, you know, devolves into is, you know, first of all, it becomes like progressivism

and people sort of forget where progressivism comes from. There's this sort of history of American anti-communism, which sort of takes on these kind of nationalist overtones and thinks of it as like this, you know, sort of infection stemming from Moscow. I'm like, how to get to Moscow? How to get to Moscow? You know, in, of course, because, of course,

in Russian intellectual history, you have the spectrum of easternizers versus westernizers. So you, on the one hand, you have Lenin, Nechev, Kropotkin, people like that. And on the other end you have Dostoevsky, Pobrinovsky. Do you know Pobrinovsky? Yeah, the more the name dropping and the let me blow your mind with these historical movements. I mean, like Chris, did you know about the Fabians? Have you heard about the Fabians? Yeah, well, I probably don't know them that well, but I know the basic idea of them. And there's modern people that have adopted that name.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, that was another one of these, you know, movements from pre-Bolshevik type communists from the 19th century. And, you know, it was a weird little movement, had some, you know, names you could name drop with that. H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, people like that. And you could point out that as well as having these sort of progressive and socialist type ideas. They also had some ideas that would have been deeply politically incorrect these days about colonialism and elitism and so on. You could waffle about that for a little bit and blow people's minds with this stuff,

but like who cares? Like why, he's not making any point with this apart from showing that he's aware of some relatively obscure historical narratives. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, you rears the point, Matt, about like his inability to answer questions directly or to, you know, just lay out his point of view in a coherent fashion. So I'm going to play, this is a kind of bunch of connected clips, but it starts here with one which highlights the trigonometry dynamic.

So here's Constantine noticing that it's been a while since Francis has said anything. It's really, he wants to ask a question. So listen to this. I know the dichotomy that you're talking about. I'm just aware that Francis hasn't asked a question so listen to this. I know the dichotomy they're talking about. I'm just aware that Francis hasn't asked a question about how it works. No, no, no. You can hear me. First of all, it's because I'm really enjoying you talk about it and I'm really enjoying the way that you analyse what has happened and it's through a very different lens. I guess my question to you, Curtis,

is you've identified the problems. Yes. So what is your vision? What is my vision? Poor Francis. He's so good though. He's doing his best. But my question to you, he's got it.

Anyway, this is- It wasn't a. Anyway, it wasn't a bad question. It wasn't a bad question. No, and actually France, Francis is my hero in this because he does ask some simple, but needful questions. Simple Jack. It's like simple Jack, but why is, why is monarchism better than democracy? You haven't explained that yet. And he's right.

Francis is right. And, um, I don't know, you'll probably play some excerpts of it. He proceeds to blather on without answering Francis's question at all. Don't spoil it, Matt. Don't spoil it. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he lays out his vision coherently. So he was asked, what's his vision? You've described the problem. What is the solution then? What is your vision? So my vision is essentially to see the present

as sort of continuous with the past. And my vision is to kind of, in a way, break out of kind of, not even, you know, as a progressive of the even, you know, as a progressive, the 20th century revolution, but really to ask questions about the 19th century revolution and the 18th century revolution. And so, you know, for example, one of my favorite writers

is, you know, the name Joseph de Maistre. So de Maistre is, he was trained as an Enlightenment man. He was trained basically in the school of Voltaire. And he basically sort of, you know, criticizes the French Revolution from his somewhat safe position as a minister in Savoy. And you know, to sort of find the French Revolution discussed in a book, you know book published in 1797 that could as well apply to the Russian Revolution to sort of, you know, even although so much of the 20th century

bloodthirstiness has vanished, which is, I think, absolutely wonderful. We're very peaceful people, and, you know, this is one of the reasons why I can imagine kind of very great political change happening in a peaceful way whereas most people see it as sort of violent. You know, imagine sort of, you know, the fall of the Soviet Union from the perspective of

a 1920s Bolshevik of like the era of like war communism. Ah, there you go. That's his vision, isn't it, so far? Well, that's the start. That's the start. Yeah. Let me tell you about Joseph de Nesta. Yeah. And also what about, you know, all the people in the heterodox sphere got so much mileage out of Kamala Harris having like waffly answers, looking to the future and not withholding the past or whatever. What about this? What the hell is this? Right? Like he's gearing

up the answer. But first we must consider, you know, the reaction of the Bolsheviks to you if they were looking at this reaction to and then 1797 was when it was published. Right. And you remember we covered the philosopher John Gray, who I feel gave Sam Harris something of a taste of his own medicine whenever he was asked to explain his arguments against atheism. And he went on a mind palace tour. He just kept doing that thing where he linked on to the next point. And it was a very indulgent like, and yes, of course he had a mistress who in the 15th century, you know, she wouldn't have been able to do that.

And that leads me to another point about a different Scottish philosopher. And he liked haggis on a Sunday night. That was of course, because you're like, you're losing the will to live, but this is, this is the start, right? So Francis asked a straightforward question. We've got, now, the beginnings of an answer. I'm obviously not going to play it all, because it continues on.

So this is like leaping forward in time to the next part of this. But believe me that this is all the same answer. And you'll see him say, OK, now getting back to my answer. And if you'd asked basically, you know, and this is why I'm sort of, you know, in a way of leading up to, you know, this answer is that most people imagine a kind of political change like this only coming, you know, at the expense of great violence. And if you'd asked, and I don't believe that's necessary or desirable, even possible, and if you'd asked basically

the Bolshevik of the 1920s to look at the events of 1989 to 1991, he would have been very confused because what he would have seen is this, basically the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by Basically, the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by a windbag and a drunk, that is Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Sometimes I think Yakovlev was, most of the ideas of Glasnost and Perestroika came from Yakovlev. These are not great individuals. These are not violent individuals. There's a crowd of a few thousand people in front of the Russian presidential palace,

you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this old Bolshevik would be like, well, where's the Soviet youth? Where's the Komsomol? You know, what is the Komsomol doing? How many people are in the Komsomol? And you'd be like, well, there's about a hundred thousand people in the Komsomol. And where are they? There you go. He's still working towards some kind of answer. And to remind everyone, the setup here is that he makes clear he's not a Nazi. He likes old-worldy stuff. I can't remember when he mentioned monarchism. It might have been after this or before this. He gets us, okay, so you don't like liberal democracy.

What are you proposing? And we have had this mind palace tour. Yeah, around Soviets and like what 1920s Bolshevik would think of the fall of the Soviet Union and you know Revolutions don't need to be violent and Okay. Okay. So let's see where this is leading up to right? This was you know, he's coming back. He's running to Francis's question and So, you know to answer your question very directly This is his question. And so, you know, to answer your question very directly, I'm a monarchist. I used to say I was a royalist to, you know, distinguish myself from the people here who

believe in costumes and so on. You know, what we have is this, in this country, what you have in this country is this kind of costume monarchy, you know, which is purely symbolic in nature. and you know, one of the questions I ask is very simply what would Elizabeth the first have thought of Elizabeth the second and you know and and that's a like Once you you put yourself in that framework, you know, the answer is obvious You know, but so when I say I'm a monarchist, I'm a believer in essentially absolute though accountable monarchy which strikes everyone as very

very strange. Right, so we finally got the answer. This was the point that he mentioned in being a monarchist. Great, I mean we finally have an answer. This is his vision, right? Yeah. We had the mind palace tour, we had Joseph Dymastro, we we had a little thought experiments about a Bolshevik thinking about revolutions that happened later on. We think about what Elizabeth the first would think of Elizabeth the second. And now he just tells us flatly, okay, he's in favor of like a real monarchy, like a real absolute monarch. Great. I'm happy we finally have an answer.

Well, we have a accountability. We have a accountability. Yeah, an account, an finally have an answer. We have accountability. We have accountability. Yeah, an accountable monarch. Yes, that's right. So, and this strikes people as very, very strange, Matt. It's so edgy. It's so out of people's fucking, you know, mental boxes that it blows their mind. Like, you can see him so excited and pleased with himself that he's found, you know, like, oh, this is so edgy that the Nazis are even confused what I am. And, oh, God, calm down, calm down, Curtis. You've just happened to have struck gold by telling edgy teenagers that they've got these

deep intellectual knowledge about, you know, the dark revolution and stuff. He's good at coining terms that are like satisfying for edgy teenagers who see themselves as, you know, the dark revolution and stuff. He's good at coining terms that are like satisfying for edgy teenagers who see themselves as, you know, the intellectual elite, the misunderstood people who are willing to look in the dark places, Matt, where normies fear to look. That's what he is very good at. But we have our champion, Francis Foster. He is the man of the people here, right? So he's got his answer, but this is not fully satisfying.

Like it took a while to get there, but Francis needs more elaboration on this point. So he asks for more detail. Who would be your idea of an effective absolute monarchy? Are we talking about something like Saudi Arabia? Are we talking about the UAE, the crown prince? You know, these are very foreign, you know, one of the difficulties is that you have to go to sort of very foreign countries to look for an equivalent at the sovereign level.

So, you know, if you're looking at 20th century political leaders who are essentially monarchs who I admire greatly, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who is in a way an Englishman, he's a sort of Englishman, is, because Singapore is the strange half Asian thing, you know, did an amazing job with that country. Deng Xiaoping, you know, is arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century if you look at kind of the transformation of

China under his leadership. He takes this absolute crap power that's created by Mao who was a nut an Absolute nut and then you know the power of Mao He's an absolute nut and like Stalin, you know, the power of Mao, he's an absolute nut. And like Stalin, you know, the revolution eats its own, he needs to destroy kind of all the people who brought him to power so that he can rule alone. And Mao is this, you know, crazed Chinese emperor. And somehow through the turmoil of Chinese politics, he's replaced by this intensely practical person, Deng Xiaoping, who sort of turns this deranged third world country into, you know, as I look around this room,

think about all the things in this room that were made in a monarchy. Right, Chris. So at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Lee Kuan Yew was elected. Yes, Singapore has a more authoritarian style of doing things. He certainly had some, Lee Kuan Yew had authoritarian tendencies, but he was elected. Right. He is not a hereditary monarch. Deng Xiaoping, of course, coming out of that party, centralized control of the CCP. Yes, he was effective in many ways.

And I agree with him that Nau was a lunatic, but these are not actually absolute monarchs. These are two random authoritarian-ish, at least, leaders. One of whom was elected and one of whom rose to power within a communist party framework. Yeah, and he's kind of just picking people. I guess this is his point, right? Because he's selecting countries that have had successful economic transformations. Right? Yeah, Singapore is economically very successful, right. And emerged from a colonial regime to, yeah, a kind of managed democracy of a way. And Deng Xiaoping opened up China in terms of allowing more market activities, right.

Basically making China highly capitalist, but with a communist repressive authoritarian government. So he likes them. He likes them as examples of this kind of rule that he's talking about, which is it produces success and it is very focused around an individual who wields a lot of power, like in a centralized way. But that's the thing which doesn't make sense for his argument, which is like, it's not controversial to say they were both very effective leaders, right? But it's not enough to say like he's proposing some sort of system, right? When you talk like you can't just pick people like I like Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar is the kind of leader that I want. So, you know, let's do it like the Romans did. The system that produced Julius Caesar also produced a bunch of other leaders that were nowhere near as good. Also the system that produced other Chinese leaders who he may well not like very much, right? Like you can't just pick individuals that you think are cool. Yeah. So what he wants to do is like pick the individuals that were successful and say those are the kind of things, but they weren't monarchs. They are not the head of monarchy systems, right? Like the leaders of these countries are not, nor are their children. So he's kind of, it's like stolen power in a way, like saying, well, these are obviously they're not perfect examples, but they're

kind of successful individuals. And you're like, right. Yeah. But they're not successful monarchies. Right. Yes. And no, if you're going to pre-use the communists on trigonometry, obviously there's a bit of an issue there, right?

Because they're anti-communists, Matt. That's part of their thing. So Francis is gonna bring up a point to consider here. But hang on a second, Curtis. So you're talking about innovation here. But what about the Uyghurs? What about the Uyghurs? What about?

What about the Uyghurs? And so, you know, when you look at, and this is one of the points about 20th century monarchies, essentially, is that when you look at 20th century monarchies, or as we like to say, dictatorships, and you're seeing essentially, you see all of these kind of atrocities.

And basically, one of the things that, you know, Lord Acton, a great Englishman, said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I used to believe that. I used to be a kind of a classical liberal, even a libertarian. And I started to realize at a certain point why you have these sort of new monarchies,

these fascisms in the 20th century, Hitler being the worst, probably the best of the 20th century, Hitler being the worst, probably the best of the 20th century fascist leaders is Salazar of Portugal. And Salazar is a very mild fascist, but he still has a secret police. He still has, and if you're even in Mussolini's Italy before know, Italy before the war, if you're, you know, an anti-fascist in Mussolini's Italy, you get like sent to an island, you know, and it's not Auschwitz, right?

And so, you know, the, the like sense of, you know, the reason, you know, when you say like, what about the Uyghurs, you know, for example, you're basically looking at a regime which is insecure at a certain level. Again, Matt, you get Curtis saying, Constantine, oh, yeah, you, you know, classical, I think you're a classical liberal and then Constantine saying, well, I've never actually, I don't think I've described myself as that, like just that complete unwillingness

to ever acknowledge that you have a very straightforward ideology or, you know, identifiable category that you belong to. So yes, he is exactly the kind of person that you can refer is a classical liberal, but you know, he doesn't want to be pigeonholed, Matt. You can't put him in your box. want the big pigeon holes, you can't put him in your box. No, he's uncategorizable. Yeah. And I know he goes on to say, well, what about the Americans in Afghanistan?

Yeah, I'm gonna play that. You can't just give it back. I know you're trying to avoid hearing that. But it's gonna come. But why, like he went on that big thing about, look, you know, in the 20th century, these kinds of new monarchies, which again, he's now defined fascism as like a new form of monarchyism. But then he's like, they did these kinds of atrocities. And you know, but some of them weren't so bad.

And he talks about Salazar and what, you know, like it's, it's this big rambly thing, right? And remember he's going to be talking about the Uighurs, right? And then he comes back to saying, well, so they're insecure at a certain level. So maybe this explains, but like, wait a minute. So is his argument that if you're a secure monarchy, that you don't engage in atrocities? Because they did. Like historically, there's plenty of examples of rather secure monarchs performing horrific

atrocities on conquered people. Right. So what even is the argument there? It is incredibly difficult to figure out what the argument is because he's, he supposedly is a fan of a benevolent monarchism, but then he cites a managed democracy and the Chinese communist party as examples of this, the periods at least in their history where he thought they did well. But so,

like what do they have in common apart from perhaps some degree of authoritarianism? That's the thing that he likes. It's just, you're basically guessing at what it is he's aiming for. No, wait, Matt, let's not be unfair. Now you tried to preempt it, but he's gonna pull it all together.

So the Wiggers, what about the Wiggers? Come on, we need to get back to them. What's the solution? Let's see what he has to say. And so it's sort of tempered by the kind of level of insecurity there. And that level of insecurity also, we're very fortunate to live in a relatively nonviolent age.

And so when you look, for example, at the Uyghurs, of course, they're a Central Asian people. And like many people around the turn of the century, a lot of Saudi money sort of went in. And they developed a terrorist movement there, which I think what really kicked that off was this, a bunch of Uyghurs went to, I forget what city, on a train station

and started massacring people with knives. And the response of the Chinese government is not, certainly it's not, I mean, this is of course post-Deng, it's not a response that, you know, sort of matches what I would do. At the same time, basically, there's another country which has a land border with China, which is Afghanistan. And, you know, and when you look at basically

the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, and you're like, okay, would I rather be a Uyghur in, you know, Xinjiang, or would I rather be, live in Afghanistan for 20 years of war and watch this being done the American way in which we spend $2 trillion and countless lives of ours and theirs to basically take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it to the Taliban. I'm not even going to respond to this Chris. It's just such a mess.

It's such a waffly, wonky, just like, it's just wandering all over the place with this argument. And you can hear like the amount of ums and ahs, right? You know, I know I am not someone gifted with the ability of speaking, you know, in a very Sam Harris kind of monologues without any verbal text, but Jesus Christ, he just sounds like he's waffling all over the point. And like, what was the point that the Uyghurs, well, he seemed to be suggesting that actually, you know, it's not the response that he would favor, but what were the Chinese authorities supposed to do? And then-

Yeah, so actually, Francis is the hero with this because he asks him a couple of direct simple questions, which he keeps papering over with Blather because he can't really answer them. He gets asked what he stands for, what he likes. He says, okay, it's a hereditary monarchy. Fantastic. He eventually says that. He didn't say it directly. Not directly. Eventually said that. He can't cite real examples of this. So he cites the Chinese communist party and Singapore, and then he needs to kind of defend, remember, he needs to defend the Chinese communist party because he cited it as a good example of good governance. And he has to then defend their human rights violations and suppression of minorities.

It's just like it's mental. But there's even this leap in that path where he's like, you know, bear in mind that China shares a land border with Afghanistan. And if you think about Afghanistan, that is like, you know, that is one of the weakest pivots I've heard for trying to get the water baptism was China shares a border with Afghanistan. And if we think about the invasion of Afghanistan, right? And you're like, hold on, that argument seems very tenuous where you're going to go there. And his then like the dichotomy is, so do you want to be a Uighur?

But then he gets confused. He's like, is he talking about Uighurs? It's like, he doesn't know their status would be in Afghanistan. So it's like, do you want to be in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Or do you want to be a Uighur in the CCP being kind of perfect? And you're like, what is this argument? This is such a tortured argument and it's not really dressing me. It's just filibustering.

Right. And to their credit, the trigonometry people at times during this interview are like, hold on, like, what are your, what is the actual argument here? Right. And then this case, it's Constantine that does that. So let's see if he can kind of bring it back right. When someone's like, but what are you saying here before we get onto Afghanistan and stuff?

Hold on. But that isn't the comparison we're talking about. We're talking about a Chinese style authoritarianism versus the system we have in the West, right? But the system we have in the West is a system for governing Western people. And so basically, when we say the reason these countries are neighbors, they're very similar cultures, and so when we're sort of comparing apples to apples, you know, actually, it's a very apples to apples comparison to look at the Western system of governing, you know, Afghanistan and the Chinese system of governing what is after all really a Chinese colony

of Xinjiang. I just don't want to get sidetracked into that. Let's stick with the West, right? Let's stick with the West. Let's stick with the West. And so, you know, let's sort of take this. You use the word authoritarian. And the word authoritarian is a very interesting word because when you get into kind of basic, you know, sort of again, pre-enlightenment political science, you're reading like Aristotle and so forth. You know, there really isn't anything in political science that Aristotle didn't understand.

And one of my basic beliefs or core beliefs, we sort of have this belief in limited government, for example, today. Every government is unlimited. Every sovereignty is absolute, sovereignty is conserved. And when you say there's a limited government, I just spoke, OK, in America, we have freedom of speech. In theory, that's a British tradition. I just spoke with someone this morning who

is being investigated by the police. He's facing 14 years in prison for satirical tweets. That's Western governance for Western people. That wouldn't be applicable for Eastern types, right? They need a very different type of governance because of course they're psychologically built differently. So yeah, I just noticed that reference to, you know, well, we're talking about governing Western people. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, full credit to Konstantin. He tries to get him to answer the question. He

says, hang on. And it's reasonable. You're saying China's the good guys here. We should emulate that. This is what we want. And you're comparing them to Afghanistan now they're gonna say well this the Taliban this is and this is apples to apples right the Afghanistan and China very very similar yeah he says that he says they're basically the same like there's a border right again well they've got a book that's right yeah and he and he says well it's actually a colony so that's why he's drawing the cup but like you have to remember his original point was the Chinese communist Deng Xiaoping system.

So he's nice trying to argue that that particular region of China is similar culturally to Afghanistan. But that argument- And this is why he says this because he doesn't want to compare the Chinese Communist Party to the liberal democracies like in the UK, because he knows that the trigonometry guys are going to go well, I like this better than that. Yes.

And then he's in a difficult spot here, I think. So he pivots to Aristotle. The authoritarianism. You can hear him giving up for a semantic sophistry style argument, right? Well, the definition of authoritarian, if you look at the root word, but like, yeah, so into this story about Aristotle. And then he jumps from there to, you know, freedom of speech. Of course, we have that in America and that is a British tradition. But these people that are being imprisoned for tweets or facing, you know, and it's like Jordan Peterson. It's all very loosely connected,

and it gives the impression of like this erudite, deeply cultured person who knows all these philosophers and world history and all these different regions and stuff. But it's so empty. There's very little there. He's just read some books. He can cite some names. He knows some geography and that's it.

But none of it actually hangs together. If you if you stop it and are like, hold on, what are you saying, Curtis? And you can see because he just immediately is like constantly jumping from topic to topic. Right. And it's so annoying. It is such a waste of time. I'm so sorry to everyone for having to subject you to this, but it has to be done. Yeah. And so again, trigonometry, the good guys, the good guys in this conversation,

they're trying to say, OK, well, like, let's hold on. So there's there's hypocrisies in the rest. But does that mean that monarchies are better? So listen to this. I just want to I understand what you're saying. And these are all good points that are covered on the show plenty. So the fact that Western governments are violating some of arguably the sacred principles of their own societies is a problem. And I agree with you. But I want to make a different... No, it's a different point. But we mustn't compare that to what we actually mean when we say the word authoritarianism. I think, yes, and I think there's actually... there's a very important point there. And, you know, the sort of the difference, you know, as I understand it, you describe yourself as a classical liberal. And so you see these kind of principles of...

I don't think I ever have, but it's not too far away from where I am. It's not too far away. And so from the perspective of most people who see this like woke authoritarianism or whatever, they kind of identify it as a somewhat new thing. Certainly, I remember kind of the freedom speech on the internet in the 1990s when you felt that anyone could say anything for any reason and no one cared.

And we've come to a very different place from that. And so understanding the causes of that and saying, are the causes of that deeper than this kind of, you know, superficial question of how do we get past wokeness, how do we roll the clock back to the 90s? And you know... You're not going to roll back the clock to 90s. And I think it's partly a technological issue, right?

What the internet did is it changed the way we communicate. And so the authoritarianism that you see now, it's a response to the fact that communication has become much more powerful than it ever has been. Well, it is, it is, it is. But we started, we were talking about World War II earlier and cancel culture in specific. And let me tell a couple of stories.

Oh God, no, please don't. So we've shifted from Afghanistan and China, some mention of Aristotle to woke authoritarianism, which is bad, though. He likes authoritarianism, but not work authoritarianism. Right. And now they're talking about, you can't turn back the clock to the 90s and technology. Well, he liked the 90s internet map because you could say whatever you wanted.

Right. And like that's the golden era. The matrix was right. That was the pinnacle of human civilization. But but we can't go back to that. Right. No, no, we can't. But like also famously, Matt, authoritarian regimes famously fans of free speech and open exchange of ideas. And like they would be they don't, you know, police the

internet any more strongly than Western democracies. Like, yeah, that is like it's so it's incoherent. It is incoherent. And it's it's not the at all. This is it's so annoying to listen to. And he says, let me tell you a couple of stories. Let me just point out, he's just been telling fucking stories. He's been telling stories about the Soviet era and the Uighurs in China and Aristotle.

And I'm just going to play a little bit of a story. So let's just say maybe a story is really relevant. So one of the things, and you basically, people who lose historical conflicts get written out of history very easily. And so you don't understand the age of what we call cancel culture. And so for example, just as, I'll give you two examples. One is a woman named Bella Dodd, completely forgotten by history. She was a member of the US Politburo of the CPUSA. She was a school teacher in New York's

communist school teacher in New York City, very like my grandmother, a little more successful in the party. She becomes a member of the Politburo. She's a member of the faction of Earl Browder, who is basically pushing the popular front line of unity between liberals and communists. They win the war, World War II ends, and there's a split between the liberals and communists, sort of like the Sino-Soviet split, in some ways, and sort of competing factions of progressivism. And as a result, Stalin, who controls the American Communist Party, purges its leadership.

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know if you're going to play more of this, Chris, but I hope you won't. Because he goes on to drop this bombshell that did you know that socialists in the United States, even back in the 1940s, were having schisms and canceling, in scare quotes, canceling each other because, you know, they were found lacking in some ideological doctrinal way. This will blow everyone's mind. At the beginning, he mentioned there, Chris, that history is written by the winners and we're in the age of cancel cultures. And what does any of this got to do with what they were just talking about? No, Matt, it's very relevant, right? And well, maybe like, he's getting too specific. He's getting lost in the details.

So he's gonna broaden it out. So just to sort of broaden this out a little bit. Oh yeah, well, that's why I always say to people, the late Soviet Union wasn't Stalinism, but it was exactly that. Exactly that. Which is why what's happening now. You would lose your job, you would,

you're just like Oh, my grandfather. Yeah, right So I always make this point to people in the West that This this isn't new and here's the parallel that you may want to think about when you're in this isn't new But let me tell a couple of other stories. So Browner. I read this somewhere and unfortunately, I Need a better his historical researcher dig this reference back up. But you know look, console culture was in Soviet Russia right like in it but it wasn't it's not always the same but there's parallels and but you know maybe if he tells a couple more stories,

a few more anecdotes from history. This will all connect together. Right? Spoiler alert, everyone. It does not. Yeah, I do feel some sympathy for Constantine and Francis, right? Because they're clearly like, okay, right, but let's try to answer, you know, some of the things that we're saying. Like just one question.

Let's try to answer just one thing. Yeah, I do answer a bit different than this. And you know, you heard him there, he mentioned that, you know, he's got a story, so let's just hear a little bit more, Matt. He's going to bring it together. He's going to bring it together. I always advise people to watch the film Reds, which is a very, you know, with Warren Beatty as John Reed, young John Reed, only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin.

And you basically see these people with these insanely modern attitudes. They live like people in San Francisco. Their love lives are like the love lives of people in San Francisco. These are completely modern people and they're a very small minority and they basically set out to take power. So here's a couple of examples that are sort of a little outside of the normal space of anti-wokeness.

So basically, this thing with the publishers is done. And this sort of kind of defines what it means to be mainstream media. What it means to be mainstream publishing is that you kind of went through this filtration, this coordination. It was a very different process in Nazi Germany, but this ideological coordination, which was centralized in Nazi Germany, except for the CPUSA, which is long gone, it was decentralized

in this country. Wokeness is decentralized, but it appears, it achieves the same purpose as, I'm going to butcher the German, Gleichschaltung, which is basically turning everything, the sort of turning everything Nazi that happened in the Third Reich. My favorite example of this is a wonderful writer, Victor Klemperer, do you know the name? He was a Jew who survived the Third Reich

because he was married to an Aryan and his wife was a linguist. So we wrote this wonderful book called Language of the Third Reich. Yes, exactly. Jesus Christ, right? You just want a such... I want someone to grab these guys and say, like, shut up, answer the question. No, you don't have, you don't have like eight minutes to give your waffly bullshit answer. Just answer the question directly without going in indulgent tangents.

Don't tell us about Victor, Victor Kleber. You're not allowed to talk about the movie Reds. You're not allowed to change the topic three or four times. Just answer the question. But this is the thing. We saw the same thing with Jordan Peterson where he gets asked a question and you go on this magical mystery tour,

segueing from semantic connection to semantic connection until I feel like everyone's just forgotten what the question was or what we were talking about at the beginning. But we're just left with the impression of an impressionist scatter gun feeling that this person knows things. Matt, even more in this case, this is 50 minutes into the episode, right?

They're approaching the end of the interview and they clearly haven a cut anywhere right in and like even just Outlining his basic ideas because he's been telling them stories for like 15 minutes, right? And you can hear the desperation and constant team He's right So he Watson as he's going on about this and like tries to say, okay Let's let's try to the that. So just listen to this. In Nazi Germany, you have Goebbels in his Ministry of Enlightenment,

and he's like, oh, you must be enlightened this way, that way, right? Just to translate your point into sort of simple language, what you're saying basically is it's decentralized. No one is sitting at the top going, everyone must have equity and diversity. No one's doing that, but everyone must have equity., everyone must have equity and diversity. No one's doing that. But everyone must have equity and diversity.

And so you have the same effect that Google's was trying to generate. But the mechanism is totally different. And it's a fascinating question of what this mechanism is. OK, cool. So we've got about 10 minutes left. Before we move on to Locals and have the conversation there, let's use the last 10 minutes in a little bit more succinct concrete way to talk about that mechanism.

Why is it that we're now obsessed with the German cat? Why is it that the same ideological positions are being pushed on everybody from corporations, the media, parliament down the road from here, the church, right? I mean, the NHS, everyone is ad hoc to a particular worldview and you can even believe that's a great worldview and it's exactly everyone needs equity and diversity and whatever. How does that happen? What is the mechanism? There is no more important question. Cool. Let's take ten minutes very specifically and talk about that. That is the most important question of the time. And the answer is because we're not a monarchy. And and and and and let me let me let me be

really, you know, specific and clear about that. So Constantine's beautiful, performative laughter, very annoying, but but also, I think it is sort of a genuine reaction, because like his answer is Well, you know all of this is because we're not a monarchy and he has obviously not done the grinds to justify that Conclusion at all. So it's just that it's just a statement like it's an exact same statement They made at the start that like he likes Monarchies, right?

And that's all there is to it. And it's even that premise that everything in society is absolutely lockstep. There's no political disagreements. There's no debate in British society, no different political movements. It's not like the conservatives had power for over a decade or anything like that.

As Constantine says, everyone is completely agreed on the ideology that we all have to follow. So how did that situation come about? Yeah, I feel like Constantine was grasping his straws there because he was feeling good. Because, like, thank God we've finally got a topic we can all get on board on, that there's a woke orthodoxy, it's being enforced by this kind of group think. you know, it's not being enforced, but in the Nazi style, but it's a terrible thing. We need to understand how that's happening. Okay, tell us why. Monarchy. Surprise. Like I feel that's a big laugh of custody, but I also feel like what else can he do? What can he do?

What can he do? And I feel so I was feeling so sorry for Francis with this because I just know you know the situation that Francis is in, right? Francis or Consen's? Francis. I'm feeling sorry for Francis now because Francis is tagging along. He's wanting to be a good Batman to Consen team. He's being told we're going to be talking to a very important thinker. He's very clever. He's going to be telling us Batman to consent to. He's being told we're going to be talking to a very important thinker. He's very clever.

He's going to be telling us some exciting, dangerous ideas about whatever. And he's trying to ask every man questions and the answers that he's getting must just baffle him even more. Like he must just be sitting there, utterly baffled by all of this, but assuming, I think, that it's all making sense, but in a way, this is over his head. And if I could speak to Francis right now, I'd tell him, mate, no, it's not going over your head.

There's nothing there. You're confused because it's meaningless, not because you're not sophisticated enough. You are right. Well, this is something that comes up in almost every interview with Curtis that I've seen. But people basically say, of course you're a genius. And like when he gives a winding answer, which doesn't seem to make sense, they're like, well, you know, yes, it's very interesting what you say.

And there's a lot to that. You know, maybe let's try to focus step by step. I mean, they always act like the emperor's new codes. We can't say, but this is fucking stupid, Curtis. This is stupid. Like you're just waffling nonsense. They can't see that because everyone's convinced he's the philosopher king of the new reactionaries. And the thing that gets me is they're all supposed to be about calling bullshit, you know, saying, oh, look, there's nothing actually here. All this orthodoxy, all these people are free to call out someone

when they're just waffling on Kamala Harris or anyone. They just get these platitudes. And here they have someone who for 50 minutes has run like rampant, just telling them stories about Russia and Bolsheviks and Afghanistan and how it's a border region. What would Elizabeth the first think about things? And they give it they give's a border region. What would Elizabeth I think about things? I know, and they give it a complete pass. Oh, what you're saying is tremendously interesting.

Very fascinating stuff. There's a lot to unpack there, but can you just walk us through the beginning? Cause we're only simple, we're just simple folk, right? We're not on your level. We've got 10 minutes left. Let's try to get just like two answers. Let's try to get the right answers.

We can do it. We can do it. And the spoiler, they can't. They can't. Even with that framing, that we're going to get answers. We're going to keep this simple on a single topic. Sorry, Curtis has other ideas. He's not letting you walk him to that path. So, well, let's see what he says. And when those professors and journalists and civil servants, like my parents, are basically told what to do by politicians, let's say the politicians can even fire them, that's horrifying. That leads us down the road to Hitler.

And so the principle of this sort of technocratic, meritocratic government is that the government should be ruled by experts. And these experts, the ideas of these experts exist in a marketplace of ideas, which is not the sort of democratic marketplace of ideas that gives us QAnon and, you know, weird anti-vaxxer internet stuff.

You know, that's a terrible marketplace of ideas. Everything that people say about it is true. But the marketplace of ideas among informed experts. And you're just like, how could this go wrong? And let me give you an example that sort of has nothing to do with wokeness, nothing to do with the German cat. Hold on, let me just work through what you're saying so that the logic is clear. Well, it's very easy to see how that goes wrong

because if the idea of democracy is essentially that you can get rid of the coach, right? If you don't like the coach, well, if the coach isn't actually in charge. Yes, if the coach actually isn't in charge, the wire's leading to the election. You can replace the coach, but the team is still gonna be run the way that it's run.

By the managers, the trainers. Right. And so, you know, what, you know, and this is really, this is very old thing. This is, you know, American progressivism, essentially, from the early part of the century. You know, going back in history, you have this sort of gilded age system in America, very like China, very corrupt, very effective. Right, Chris. So the mechanism and the problem with democracy is that you have this meritocratic expert deep state, I think, particularly Constantine was hinting at, which you can't change even by electing a different government. But they are beholden to the politicians. So I

don't know. I'm struggling to follow the logic there. Can you? Yeah. Well, you remember he was explaining like why monarchy and now he's getting into the details and they're keeping it very specific. But you can hear Constantine trying to provide simplified analogies before he jumps on to the next story about a random historical account. He's like, well, let's just break down where we've got so far. And the thing with Jarvin is what he wants, he has the monarchy thing, but he also has like this view about technocratic elites, right? Kind of like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in control of things. And that so he does have this, you know, worship towards a particular kind of expertise if you want, or at least like presented expertise. But his argument is that that has been corrupted

by, you know, the systems of workness and progressivism and whatnot. They've made that system not function right. And like, you know, putting restrictions on capitalists and this kind of thing, like all of it is not letting the great man of history properly run things. But so Jarvan is an elitist. You know, he wants a technocratic monarch go elite. You know, I think this is why what he's arguing for gets a bit messy because there are lots of contradictions like when you dig into it. Yeah, it's very confusing because sometimes these unelected technocratic elites are the good guys. Like I presume when they're like CEOs and in charge of corporations and stuff. And sometimes

these unelected elites are the bad guys. And he seems to have a problem with the fact that you know you can change the coach but it's not going to change that system so yeah it is a bit confusing I guess what it boils down to is just kind of that romantic attachment to this great man or woman in fairness Elizabeth the first he mentions of history and he just likes that kind of thing. These these these romantic, powerful figures who will who will do things and. Yeah, well, I have a clip that will help clarify the distinction and will also give our boy Francis another chance to shine with his, you know, kind of crazy wisdom that he injects.

So listen to this. The farther you go back in progressivism, the more I like these people. And they're just like, you know, this society should be ruled by the best people in it, and these people are manifestly not the best people, they are not the experts, they are not the spartist people. But who gets to judge who the best people are, Curtis? Well, at present, who gets to judge who the best people are, are these institutions. And so let me basically, you know, the meritocracy essentially now, it gets corrupted by, you know, all this race stuff or whatever.

But you know, let me give you an example of a problem that we're all familiar with and the effect in this. And that example is COVID. You all remember COVID? And... Unwillingly. You've probably had... Yeah, I'd rather not remember it example is COVID. You'll remember COVID. And you've probably had COVID. Yeah, I'd rather not remember it from the beginning. You probably had COVID.

And so I think it's fairly clearly established. It's not really a right-wing conspiracy theory. It's fairly clear that if it didn't happen, it could have happened. And here's how COVID happens. So first you have SARS-1, which basically jumps from a bat to a palm civet. It's very well established, very nasty disease.

And this, you know, SARS-1 is a problem. It almost escapes. It almost becomes COVID and it kills about 20% of the people that have it. It makes Delta COVID, which was a nasty disease, you know, look like the common cold. It's an important problem. The way science is funded Specifically science and you know, including for example virology Virology is not social science. It's very clearly scientific

it's a hard science and and in the and the principle of the second half of the 20th century the way that science has funded is sort of you know Consistent with this kind of government by experts principle, which and the thing about it all, it almost looks like it's no government at all. It's just like, no, there's no power here. It's just science. It's not power. It's just science.

So there, Matt, we have the pit and the waffle area, right? Like rolling, rolling around, he's not gotten into another example that he's going to use to explain things. It's COVID. And it's going to go more, right? You can already hear the beginnings of where this is going to go. And it's, it's very much a very predictable, you know, he says, well, it's not just a right-wing thing anymore, but he's about to outline like a lab like scenario and the corrupt virology establishment, like essentially, you know, Brett Weinstein plot. But so here he is saying that experts, like the true experts should be in power, but there are these corrupt systems, which are institutions, you know, that are getting in the way.

And like an example of a corrupt institution is, you know, science and the virologists, right? And so he's going to go on the big long tangent about COVID. But again, it's like, it's not actually proving anything unless you accept all these assumptions that he layers in. And as you'll see, yeah, he speaks very confidently about all the stuff about COVID. And if you actually have any reasonable grasp about the literature, he's providing the conspiratorial, lamblic thing, as if that's the cutting edge of science. And it isn't. Yeah, this little story and anecdote about COVID, which as you said, is going to be based public thing, as if that's the cutting edge of science. And it isn't.

Yeah, this little story and anecdote about COVID, which, as you said, is going to be based on conspiracy theories, is the rationale for his monarchical scheme, which he never really describes. Like, he dodged the question. Francis there wanted to ask, hey, who chooses the aristocrats in this alternative political system you're proposing? Which is a good question, which he dodges. He goes, well, I'll tell you who chooses them at the moment, you know, whatever, about you or someone who's choosing this for our own just presumably we need Elon Musk

and RFK Jr. to be sorting out stuff like COVID because they're not going to be corrupt. Anyway. Yeah, I know. I know. Well, let's continue down his road. So he's, he's outlined. He's not even on COVID yet. He's actually on SARS, right? That's what he was roughly doing about, but he's, he'll get there. He'll get there. Having like dropped out of my PhD program, but you know some people think of me as a computer scientist, the way science works is you get funding for things that are important and things that matter. And so within virology basically people realized that they could get quite a bit of grants by referring to this very real problem with bat coronaviruses and And they basically said, well, you know, this is a serious problem.

We deserve a number of pounds to study it. And so they're like, what if this happened again? What if a bat coronavirus emerged? Well, let's go and find all the bat coronaviruses. Let's go to all the bat caves. They literally did this. Let's bring the viruses back. But the problem is these viruses are bad viruses.

They don't naturally infect humans, but they can mutate to infect humans, but waiting for them to mutate is a very slow and random process. So what if we mutated them? And what if we trained them? What if we put a furin cleavage site in? What if we trained them to infect, you know, humanized mice? What if we did this in a Chinese laboratory with very poor biosafety conditions, you know, the Wuhan virus was not, that's an American virus because it's funded by American science. These people were literally funded to do this research by American grants. And so when you talk to the, you know, the virologists who did this, they're like, well, we need to predict the emergency. Well, what happens if you predict it?

What do you do? We predicted it, all right. Okay. All right. So there he goes. So it's as you said, Chris, his argument for why we need to get rid of democracy is because democracy basically boils down to apparently this rule by experts and the experts that have really screwed us over recently are the virologists because far from being the ones that actually did stuff like found

vaccines and things for COVID. No, no, no, they created it in a lab. They were so busy wondering whether or not they could, they didn't think about whether or not they should. So there you go. It's a conspiracy theorist. No, but it's even worse than that, right? Because like what he's describing there is like they realized that bad coronaviruses are actually a concern. And then, you know, they decided to make them more pathogenic, right? Then they took them to a lab with poorer safety record in order because they know. And they wanted to engineer them to make them more transmissible to humans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's basically the lab-like narrative. And he also presents it like

virologists, you know, find out the gain of function was this way where they could get lots of funding and all this kind of stuff. And again, it's such a cartoonish view of virology. The vast majority of virologists are not doing gain of function research. Like what that actually refers to as well, all depends on like a bunch of definitions, but it actually was small numbers of virologists that work in that particular area. And there was some controversy around it, around making viruses more infectious just because of safety issues. But the way he presents it is like the whole field is lined up without any consideration because they're all just self-interested, increasing their grant funding

and all those kinds of things. But actually there were debates and actually labs that do that kind of research take a lot of precautions in order to avoid these kinds of things. And all these accusations have been leveled at the Wuhan Virology Institute. And if you look into it, if you dig into beyond headlines, there is so much evidence that suggests the kind of scenario that he's presenting. While it sounds plausible, right, like just in terms of, you know, like John Stewart saying, oh, there's a virology Institute, you know, just nearby where they found the outbreak. But the actual details about the virus and about the records that we have from that lab, including things that they released years earlier and whatever, they don't line up with this story. It doesn't

work. But none of that really matters to him because he's just going by the kind of discourse narrative that is popular, you know, online. And he knows the words to drop in, but it's all based on just this conspiratorial narrative. And it doesn't reflect actual science. He's hinting at things that are real, like people being concerned about funding and orientating research that way. But his version of it is more like a Batman comic

than actually discussing the issues around like funding and grant securing priorities. Yeah. Well, I mean, putting aside the fact that the thing that he's referring to as evidence is totally untrue. I'm just excited to hear about how this purported poor behavior by virologists is going to be the fault of democracy and is going to be fixed by aristocrats. Is going to prove monarchy. Yeah. Okay.

Well, let's see. That's where he's supposed to be going. So here's the next leg of this argument. And yet this bad idea, which any fool on the street can see is a bad idea, basically succeeds in the marketplace of ideas that consists of professional virologists with IQs of 150 who've trained for many, many years to study this. And the question of why this bad idea succeeds in the marketplace of ideas is fundamental to the question of why bad ideas rule our society today and how we tend, you know, like, the difference

between gain-of-function research and the idea that colleges should discriminate it in missions by the skin color of the people applying to them, you know, they're both equally ridiculous ideas, right? And how do these ridiculous ideas succeed? And when we use words like authoritarianism, which is basically sort of an anti-monarchical word, we're basically looking at the sort of the pathologies of monarchies, which are systems very alien to the...and very opposed to the kind of oligarchy that runs our democratic societies today. And monarchies, you know, when they fail,

when they're bad in any system, democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy can be good or bad. Basic point of Aristotle. When bad monarchies distort the marketplace of ideas, it's overwhelmingly by repressing good ideas. And the way that we got here is very different from that. It's by a system that promotes bad ideas. Okay.

Has that helped? So the bad monarchies. So we're talking about, in Curtis's universe, are the virologists like bad monarchists? No, no, no, no, no, no. No. Come on, Matt, no, no, no. No. Okay. Come on, Matt, come on. Keep up.

Keep up. We're here. Put that 150 IQ to use. And I know that as well, the ever present reference to IQ that you find in this kind of content. But so he's positing there are three potential like government systems, like three broad categories, right? That he's concerned with democracy, monarchy and oligarchy, right?

Those are the three systems. Now he's saying monarchy's pathology is that it can repress good ideas, right? It can like, right. Imprison Galileo or something like that. Right. But oligarchy's issue is that it can promote bad ideas. Or that, like, because he'll go on to explain that he thinks our current system, like he doesn't think it's a democracy because he thinks democracy is only like direct democracy.

So he counts America, current America as an oligarchy. But he's not. The funny thing is he's not referring to like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. He's suggesting he's suggesting that's a bad system. But it's like because we have bad oligarchical people. he doesn't think is a pure democracy. It's kind of an oligarchy. Like you said, he thinks the oligarchs are like virologists or DEI officers in bureaucracies. Like as you say, he's not thinking of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and the other ultra-rich billionaires that are... No, he wants them. ...influencing politics. That's right. He wants them. He wants them to be like a new aristocracy inside a monarchy of some kind. Yeah. And he sees this monarchy of his is completely opposed to oligarchy. But what he means by oligarchy is rather more of like a technocratic, you know, bureaucratic state,

you know, a system where you have stuff like the reserve bank, you have x figuring stuff out. Again, famously, Monarchs noted for the lack of bureaucratic systems that were associated with them or like, you know, they were ruthlessly efficient decision makers. It's not like there's the famous courtly intrigues and palace backbiting and all this kind of thing. No, no, no, no. Just very efficient, all top-down. He's complaining about Hollywood versions of history, but it does feel like his dream monarch system is something that only exists in science fiction stories or very simplified versions of history where like what happened in Singapore is simply just to do one man. That's all. All those other systems, all the

parties and stuff that he was involved with, not really important. It was a single figure that did it all. Yeah, that's right. And as soon as that that exciting person, you know, disappeared, then it wasn't a monarchy anymore. It just became a boring old oligarchy, I suppose. What it assumes. Well, if you want to hear this fleshed out, this important, and just remember as well that this is the part where they're supposed to be getting concrete,

like focusing on a specific point, like a single thing for the last 10 minutes. But is he doing a good job of that? Well, let's hear a bit more. like a single thing for the last 10 minutes. But is he doing a good job of that? Well, let's hear a bit more. Moreover, it promotes bad ideas, not through a sort of conscious monarchical plan. There's no little council, the supreme elders of something

sitting in a little room saying, we're gonna fund this bad idea because we like bad ideas. That would be better in some ways because it would be easy to get rid of those people. But there's actually, there's no center. There's no little cabal. There's no dictatorship. There's sort of none of that. There's just a system that structurally rewards these bad ideas. And it structurally rewards these bad ideas, first of all, by separating authority from responsibility. And so, you know, someone like, you know,

Fauci, who's almost, you know, a little monarch within this oligarchical structure of process, you know, and who is really, you know, critical in, you know, sort of authorizing and continuing this gain-of-function research will never be held accountable. And so you have this kind of division, this, you know, when bad ideas are accountable, they are not, they're not favored in the evolutionary Darwinian

contest of ideas. So now an administrator like Fauci is like a little monarch, not an oligarch. But the issue- He's a monarch in an oligarchical system. Okay, gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. But the problem is they're not accountable. So I'm really like, I really wish we should get back to Francis's question because it really is important. Like, how do you pick these accountable monarchs in this system? Because just taking all these premises, accepting all these premises,

all of these assumptions, all the conspiracy theories accepting all of these premises, all of these assumptions, all the conspiracy theories, all of the cartoonish versions of reality there, accepting all of that, this very accountable head of state sounds a lot like, you know, an elected president or prime minister, no? Yeah. I mean, the other aspect of it is, Matt, that he's attracted to this great man of history narrative, right? That that was what he was referencing earlier in the talk, like these figures that are associated with that way of looking at history. And obviously his whole

monarchical system is based around that notion. But this reminds me that essentially, you know, the right wing conspiratorial, right? Well, here he is negating the notion of like a cabal of organized conspiracists, right? That's, that's kind of interesting that he, he argues that isn't there, but instead of that, he's like, it's Fauci. This little unaccountable monarch has taken over and is promoting gain of function research.'s like, it's Fauci. This little unaccountable monarch has taken over and is promoting gain of function research. And again, it just ignores that like the NIH, even just taking America, not even considering the whole structure of virology across the world, right? Which is an international discipline. But the right wing and the conspiracists have personified it in Fauci,

right? Just like they do with George Soros or with Klaus Schwab. But they actually aren't interested in the structure of grants or how they are determined and how they're allocated and the procedures through which they're assessed, which is not all individually by Fauci. No, it's not by Fauci. I mean, that's what's like. So characterizing him as a little mini monarch is ridiculous because he doesn't have the discretion to go against the rest of scientific advice and expert opinion. Like you might well try to claim that they're all governed by groupthink, or they're all governed by political correctness or something like that.

But it's really quite absurd to say he's like a little Napoleon. But I can't get around the fact that his whole thing is like he talks a lot about the problems with monarchies and them squashing good ideas and censorship and repression and all of that. And his solution to that is that, oh no, he likes accountable monarchs. So monarchs, Chris, famously very accountable to the people. That's what they're all about. Like Elizabeth the first, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck. These are all people that really they had to listen to the people that do really what the people wanted very much like your ideal elected

a democratic leader, right? Of course not. Like, there's like, what is this accountable monarch? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm still caught up though, though, Matt, and you know, like after complaining about how people have these cartoonish, you know, childish views about history, it's just so funny that they then go on to endorse it or Jarvin then goes on to endorse this kind of view. But as you say, not surprising.

And we're not really any closer yet to the answer to Francis's question, but we are learning about how the process shouldn't work. So there's one more bit just to finish off this tangent into virology. Okay. So maybe this will pull it all together Matt. Within virology, for example, gain of function research feels good because everyone's doing it. It's the way to get grants. And if you say no one should be doing this, you're basically selling saying your fellow virologist should not be funded. That's going to be hard. All right.

But the thing is, you know, when you basically extend that outside the circles of experts, essentially, you know, when these experts are promoting policies that strengthen power, that reward them, they're like, my field is important, my field matters, more must be done. And then you extend this to sort of the broader world Where does this sort of culture of? Victimology come from whether you're looking we talked about communism progressivism earlier And if you like it for example the Scottsboro boys case of you know, which is promoted by communists in the 1930s

You connect that to George Floyd. There's sort of this clear thread there and and, there's sort of this clear thread there. And there's, you know, providing people with a feeling of saying, I'm the defender of the victim. You know, I am the white knight. I am the Paladin. This is a complete waste of time. I'm so tired of hearing this mush. It's flipping between virologists and DEI. Scotsboro boys. Yeah. Yeah.

And he took a little jaunt to the 1930s again. It's just a short divergence there. But also his claim that, imagine if you were to stand up and say, gain of function research shouldn't be funded, you'll be hindered out of the discipline. That's right. Because everyone's doing it. Everyone's doing it. The whole like all like everyone's doing it. It's amazing that like, they're all doing it in the backyards and stuff. So yes,

again, there's the fact that he's just completely wrong about how prevalent gain of function research is. And then he is secondarily wrong as well, that nobody in the field would be brave enough to argue against it or criticize the value of it. Indeed, they were. We've read the articles. Like you said, it's a controversial topic. Very few people are doing it. It wasn't responsible for creating COVID virus. Like everything he says is wrong. And this is one of his very weak examples that explains why we should have a monarchy. Like it's absolutely 14 year old teenager stuff. It's a complete waste of time to listen to him.

It is. And like, so, you know, Constantine started this segment by saying, like, for this last bit, let's try to keep this focused, right? Let's take on one issue. And a couple of times, he's attempted to, like, summarize what he's saying. Is this what you mean? And you hear it again here. I think the effect of the George Floyd riots on, you know, the African-American

community in America is straightforwardly negative. There's very clear social science statistics, massive numbers of deaths from de-policing, right? But that doesn't have an accountability impact on the marketplace of ideas. What impacts the marketplace of ideas is... Well, to translate that, because, sorry, to translate what you're saying into simple language, the people who pushed that narrative didn't get the comeuppance they should have got. They were not delegitimized, discredited. They were not delegitimized, but they felt that positive feeling of feeling incredibly good about it.

Their hearts felt warm, they felt important, they felt like they mattered. felt warm, they felt important, they felt like they mattered. Yes. So a riot isn't accountable to the marketplace of ideas, Chris. Have I come up straight? Well, yeah, but I'm not... It's even like he's against the marketplace of ideas, isn't he? Because when he was... I can't keep track. Honestly... I can't keep track.

Honestly, I can't keep track. And these, by the way, these little phrases, like the marketplace of ideas, like they've just become such red flags. I've never heard these sequences of words being used in a sensible context. It's this free speech discourse nonsense. Anyway, so yes, we all all everyone in their cohort agrees you know everyone agrees that George Floyd right with bad and that's the fault of democracy because I don't know the experts weren't accountable to somebody like what's he saying I don't understand well Matt that's cuz you're not a high

IQ person so clearly not this is the last clip of him tying this all together. OK, so this will this will do it. Right. He's going to explain that he's going to put it all together. We've listened to him wander around across all these examples. But this is it. This is the point where he's going to explain democracy is the problem. Monarchy is the solution. Let's hear it. I'm not saying whether you know, it looks exactly like the kind of monoculture that's enforced through repressive means by an authoritarian government such as Nazi Germany. But the mechanism that basically creates that coordination of ideology is promotion rather than suppression. It's attraction rather than repulsion. And it's completely, it's inevitable in an oligarchical meritocratic structure of government. And

so when these oligarchies were established, you have these marketplaces of ideas. You know, professors had never been involved in government. The idea that professors should run the government in 1900 was as absurd as saying postmen should run the government. And because these marketplaces of ideas in academia were not corrupted by power, they were flat. And they were excellent. And people are like, OK, I have these corrupt politicians elected by democracy, terrible result.

We'll still use the name democracy, just as we still use the name monarchy, but politicians are awful, they're corrupt. What about these unbiased experts? But the thing is you give power to the experts and power corrupts them. And suddenly they become, they develop these conflicts of interest. They become sort of corrupted. And basically, when you give power to the marketplace of ideas, the marketplace of ideas corrupts itself and you get basically a world of absolutely terrible ideas. I think he's describing YouTube.

I think he's a bit mixed up. He wants to be talking about the universities, but if he was talking about social media, he might be onto something. but it's not power. It's just clicks. Matt, are the academics in power? No, like I... No, no, of course they're not.

None of it. Are we in power? Are we the ones who... No, no, we're not in power, Chris. Yeah, but like, because I think what he wants to argue is they're in power because ideas from academia have seeped into the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or some of the policies that they adopted, whatever. But like, in general, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is relatively small and, you know, has limited power. And even in the case, if you want to link it to social movements, Black Lives Matter or whatever, then connect it to the Marqueuse and all these,

the Frankfurt School and all this kind of connections. Who are the mainstream politicians that are promoting those are like now in the positions of power. Is it orientating the Supreme Court policy? Is it orientating the Biden administration? That's right. The Biden Harris platform, as most people know, very much avoided any of the edge Lord progressive stuff. They did their best running a very conventional platform. They did signal things from time to time, but like, you know, in this, the actual impact of those policies, like it's not like American I is a progressive wonderland of, uh, you know, socialized, it doesn't even have socialized healthcare. But in Curtis Yavans and Trigger Number Tree's worldview, the Harris

campaign was like a identity politics fixated DEI, like just corrupted by all these terrible ideas. Whereas, you know, they were running on a pretty conventional platform. And obviously they didn't win. They lost to MAGA. And it just blows my mind that when there's like, like all of the appointments to Trump, that many of them are billionaires. If they're not worth billions, they're worth hundreds of millions, many of them. Or they are influences right up there at the top of the food chain. Actually, people are queuing up, I saw, to donate money now to the Trump inauguration and things like that, because they know on which side their bread is buttered.

And when you have oligarchical things, like right there, but you look past that. I know. And you're looking for Anthony Fauci as your best example of an oligarchy and how it's contaminating democratic processes. It's just absolutely stupid. And that's the kind of stuff

where the trigonometry guys are nodding along with. Yeah, and even in that case, Matt, most of the people in the Trump administration, people like Jay Bhattacharya or Marty McCurry or whatever. The kind of ironic aspect of it is those people who Curtis Sharvin really rates, he likes Teal, he likes the COVID contrarians and all those kind of people, they were artificially amplified in relevance by these networks that aren't really based on merit. They're based on right wing politics and also falling in line with conspiratorial points

of view, saying nice things about RFK and all these kinds of things and being willing to bend the knee to Trump. So these are all completely irrelevant things to merit. They're not about merit. They're about your willingness to be a licks beetle and the extent to which you were promoted on right-wing media.

And then also linked into it is like these signifiers of prestige or means, right? Like you can be extremely wealthy and get influence in the Trump administration, or you can be like a Stanford professor who is saying the things that they want you to say about COVID and then you can be selected but in Curtis's like world those people are, you know, they're part of the good guys, right? Those are the free thinkers, the hundred needy IQ people, but they didn't rise up.

These are the men of destiny. Yeah. But they're like rising up by these artificial systems. And like quite clearly in the case of like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or whatever, it is approaching in the US oligarchical systems. Right. You have a lot of money. You supply it to support Trump and you will get all these kickbacks. And it's very openly treated in that way. The money for influence.

And I'm not saying there aren't aspects of that in just politics in general. But the thing is that he's not really interested in that. Right. Like Trump to him is an imperfect instantiation, you know, like baby steps, right on the way to an enlightened monarch who is accountable or whatever it is. So it's just all the standard anti- stuff. But with like all this blather, and this is this is it. This is the pinnacle of his argument, right? Where even if you buy it, it's very thin. And it's very just emotive and tenuous connections between topics.

I think the main thing that it does is just give people the impression of great intellectual depth, but there's nothing really there. No, and the things that he cites as supports for his arguments are just simply untrue. Like the meritocratic experts like Fauci being responsible for creating COVID. And this is an example of the great failure of meritocracy. I hope to God we've got to the other clips Chris, because I'm just so sick of hearing from this. Almost Matt, very almost. But I want to highlight one thing. So there's just two or three more. That's all you've got left. And the one thing is at the end of trigonometry things. So that's it. They've got to the end.

Like they said, I think they titled this episode, the keys for monarchy or whatever, but it's not really much of a key is outlined. There's a lot of stories told and a lot of things called monarchies, which are not actually monarchies. But at the end, trigonometry always does this thing where they ask their guests like, what's a question or a topic that we're not asking or we're not talking

about that we should be. Right. And it's the last question before they go into their behind the paywall thing. So people usually give a piffy, you know, like one line response or at most they kind of go on for a minute or two and then say, well, that's that's that, right? So let's just hear the start of what Curtis responded to that question. I won't play all of it, but this is just the start. Curtis, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I'm gonna go back to something that I said earlier

about technology. And I think the thing that we're not talking about when we talk about technology is, technology is destruction of labor demand and the way it makes absolutely ruthlessly acts to make human beings useless. And I think one of the reasons why the future needs a kind of state power, I used to be a libertarian, I love being a libertarian, I describe myself as a recovering libertarian, I'll always be a libertarian in a way.

And, you know, one of the things that has happened to these societies is that, you know, you have a society, go to the tower blocks, you know, 10 miles from here, you have these buildings full of absolutely useless people and they're just decaying in the most horrific way. And, you know, this is a very long train of history that starts with you know Goldsmith's deserted village. You know like all the labor demand for like the local blacksmith disappears. Okay so it's got these Luddite sympathies. Yeah technology makes people completely useless right. So like, we've had new technologies and it's true it

causes labor disruptions happening for hundreds of years but it certainly doesn't make labor obsolescent. The pattern that's been happening ever since the Industrial Revolution is that there are different kinds of jobs that are involved, almost always higher skilled jobs. So when we automated many aspects of farming and ploughing and digging with machines, then we ended up with a whole bunch of jobs in those fields and all the industries that support that stuff that are a much higher skill than the jobs that were replaced and higher paid. But you know, but this is like a standard populist thing. It's like hating on immigrants because they're taking our jobs

ignoring the increases of consumption and demand that immigration brings as well. And hating on technology for taking our jobs is just another extremely boring, popular stalking point. Well, he's going to waffle on about other stuff. So don't worry, Matt, but I'm not going to play it for you. You get to escape it. But I, it was just notable that like, even then, you know, the kind of wrap up question he feels bitten to start waffling on and start to give like illustrative stories of what he means and all this kind of wrap up question he feels bidden to start waffling on and start to give like

illustrative stories of what he means and all this kind of thing. Like he's, he's just somebody that is used to being indulged and loves the sound of the voice, right? That is, that is the impression that you get. And the last clips that I have, Matt, are not from the Trigonometry episode. It's from another appearance on Unheard. I've only got three of them. And the reason I want to play them is just to illustrate that you will hear from these, that what we talked about, it's not like we got him in a bad interview where he just happens to be, you know, a bit off and not explaining things very carefully.

The way that he's interacted with, the way he's treated as a genius and the way that he constructs his arguments is exactly the same across any of the content that you look at. And just to highlight the emperor's new clothing aspect of it, so you heard how the trigonometry people introduced him. Let's hear how the unheard host introduces him.

Tonight, no doubt you'll know our guest already, but I will introduce him anyway. Let's hear how the unheard host introduces him. pseudonym Menchus Moldbug. He is now author of the Grey Mirror Substack, which has a similarly oblique style, I would say. He is the godfather of the Red Pill movement, a kind of leading light in the New Right in the US, and infamously advocates for monarchy. He's not a royalist. Rather, he's a kind of equal opportunities supporter of absolute power, which

is something I'm sure we'll get into this evening. His name is, of course, Curtis Yavin. Join me in welcoming him to the On Her Club. Just totally indulged, isn't he? So exciting. Yeah. Oh, look, he's not for all those old fashioned monarchies. He's just for absolute power.

Sweet things away. How exciting, how edgy. Yeah, and Oblique, they mentioned Oblique twice there in the introduction, which I think is accurate. But there is kind of taken as a sign, it's a signifier of depth as opposed to pseudo-profundity, which I think is perhaps more accurate. Now, I'll just play one of his arguments from this, Matt, just one argument that he makes during this. Just one. So listen to this.

Nothing can so securely establish the happiness and tranquility of a country as the perfect combination of authority in the single person of the sovereign. The greatest subdivision in this respect often produces the greatest calamities. So I suppose that's an obvious place to start. Is the civic calamity or whatever you might call it that America is facing right now a fault of democracy? When you use the word democracy, of course, you're using a very, very loaded and complex word. And the meaning of that word in our modern world, it's like one of the simplest examples of what's going on here that I ever came up with, was simply

to examine the words democracy and politics and note that we use they mean the same thing but they have opposite emotional valences and so anything democratic is good anything political is bad if we were to democratize foreign policy that would be good but if we were to politicize it that would be bad so apparently we believe in democracy without politics, which is a rather strange thing to believe in if you think about it. You see any issues with the logic there?

I do see lots of issues there. Actually, he's got that, he's got the conspiratorial obsession with words, doesn't he? Like he reads a lot into the fact that politics has a negative connotation, but democracy has a positive connotation. Aha, what a contradiction. But obviously, Chris, when people use those words, when they say political, they are often referring to a kind

of politicized device. Yeah, they're referring to a kind of very like hyperpartisan, very ideological, like personal attacks, you know, rough stuff. And when we are referring to democracy, we're often referring to the principles and the sort of idealism of it. These are two aspects of the same phenomena. I don't think you need to read very much into the fact that they're in, phenomena, I don't think you need to read very much into the fact that they're in got somewhat different balances But yeah, he's just he's repeating the same old stuff, isn't he? He's got this he's got this hard on for autocratic like absolute rulers He's not so stupid as to think that like a hereditary monarchy like the UK

sort of still has is the go. And he sides Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping. He doesn't seem to care about a lot of the awful things that are done under absolute dictatorships over the last couple of hundred years, seems to think somehow magically, there'll be one that will just do good, will love the people, won't oppress them. And there'll be a mechanism, not democratic, by which really good ones will be selected from the great and the good somehow. But he doesn't explain how. And that's a very exciting and dangerous idea, so it gets to go on talk shows. Anyway, well, also that notion, Matt, that like you said, you know, politicize or to

make something political, it is usually used when there is an injection of partisanship into a particular issue, right? Like it is not the word politics in general, because like he's implying that democracy and politics are these two polls and people are kind of trying to exercise that there are politics involved with the mark. No, no, they aren't. Everybody understands that democratic systems involve parties and political debates and wrangling, right? Like all you've done is taken two words and then like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, let me give another example. Like when I talk about the law,

then you know, we feel positively about that we think about justice and stuff. But when I talk about legalistic, I think nitpicking, I think loyally kind of dodgy things, why do we have such a negative view of lawyers, but we have such a positive view of the law, Chris, think about that. Yeah. Well, I actually when you of the law, Chris. Think about that. Yeah. Well, I actually, when you said the law, I was thinking negative. But that just goes to show, Matt.

That shows something. It shows something, right? I mean, this is the thing. There's so little meat. And it all rests on accepting his interpretations and then going on these wild journeys. It's the same as Jordan on this semantic rocket ship. They love joyriding around it and nobody that they talk to or very few people pulls them over and says, no, nobody demands, just demands an answer

to the question. How will your just monarch be selected? How's that going to happen? Yeah, like, yeah, I would figure that out. Then you haven't got anything. Sorry. I mean, come on. Yeah. And last clip, Matt, I promised you only three. This is the last one, the last you'll hear of Curtis Sharvin today. And this is him talking about elections. and you'll also get to hear a little bit about the kind of technocracy that he does like. If you actually and I got retweeted by the Kamala Harris campaign for a Charlie Kirk clip in which I proposed this very dangerous idea that the winner of the election should actually take control of the government and And people are like, wow.

Controversial. This is really scary, because essentially, Americans have gotten really used to the idea that they're essentially electing Charles III. And in fact, one of the wonderful things about Joe Biden and the Biden administration is that electing this man who is palpably senile and actually incapable can barely function. People are like, how is this guy at the beach in Delaware all day and the government still functions?

Could Apple function with Tim Cook being at the beach all day? I don't know about that. But he was some sort of monarch. Who was some sort of monarch? Biden in that sense. No, no, Biden is really a ceremonial monarch. He's much more like Charles. They always mention Biden, but they'd never like in that when he's looking for an example there, like he's not going to cite Donald Trump's all the time that he spent golfing at Mar-a-Lago. That's never the example

that comes to mind, is it? No, no. Despite the fact that they're supposedly politically neutral, you know. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and you also heard Dermot that he doubts that Apple could function without Tim Cook. I think they'd get by. I think they'd be all right.

Like, I think, you know, I was surprised he didn't reach for Steve Jobs, but like is Tim Cook regarded as a linchpin for the Apple Corporation success? Like I think he's generally regarded as a relatively reasonable CEO by tech company standards. But he presents it like, you know, what would happen? What would happen if Tim Cook would happen? What would happen if Tim Cook would disappear? What would happen? Nothing would happen. Like, what about Microsoft, Chris? What about Microsoft? Like, Microsoft went

persisted very well, right? With a bunch of, frankly, pretty uninspiring CEO. Mediocre leaders. Yeah. Yeah. Because the world doesn't run like like according to the great man of history, romantic thing that he's got in his head. A lot of these rulers that he fetishizes from pre-modern times were pretty useless as well. Like he's just got a hero worship type thing going on. And this is like a substitute for actually having any coherent ideas about politics, but he thinks that's very interesting.

I do like the fact that, you know, the unheard people, a bit like the Trigonometry guys, they're, they're sometimes tripped up, you know, because typically monarchy is negative in their thing, right? They're calling people kings and whatnot. So the host is saying, no, Biden is kind of like, you know, a monarch, right? Wasn't he? But like in his system, monarchs are good. So he's like, well, he's kind of like a ceremonial monarch, right? Because he doesn't like ceremonial monarchs. And they're all a little bit, they're constantly bang off that that like but isn't that a

different system than monarchy or whatever yeah I feel like what's going on is like it's the same with trigonometry is that the people who's talking to mistaking being confused for being exposed to some deep and exciting ideas like it's just confusing because it doesn't make a lot of sense guys. It's not that special. Yeah, yeah, that is it. That is it. So do you have a big picture takeaway, Matt, on Mr. Jarvan? Will you be listening to more of his material recommending him?

Do you think he is a secular guru? My big picture of Curtis Jarvan is that he is a complete waste of time. He is a gadfly and his ideas are incoherent and he's not even interesting or poetic in the way he talks about them. He makes me think about Jordan Peterson with a kind of romantic nostalgia. He is absolutely stupid. nostalgia. He is absolutely stupid. Not only does he not even flesh out any of his ideas at all, he just monarchy something, something, something without explaining exactly what he's proposing. His reasons for why he's saying that this is a good approach based on like complete nonsense.

Like asking people to reflect on what Elizabeth the first would think about us. The implication being well if Elizabeth the first wasn't hugely approving then we're doing something wrong. It's like no that's not that doesn't follow. You know he blames democracy for the rise of Hitler. Untrue. Says all the conspiracy theories about World War II, except for the Holocaust are real. No, also untrue. Cites the synthetic origin of COVID actually created by these evil virologists who are just wanting power. Absolute poppycock. Actually, this construes the idea about Hitler and Stalin and all of these packs. Like you said, he is a shallow conspiracist, essentially. I mean, the only thing he's done is he's read reasonably widely. So therefore, he's able to pepper this

stuff with references to Thomas Carlisle and things from 1797 and so on, this heavy use of references and stuff to give it that pseudo intellectual veneer. And there's just absolutely nothing behind it. It is absolutely incoherent. I mean, if you're talking about edgy, non-democratic, authoritarian political systems, then you should at least be interesting. Like I was prepared to listen to him and thinking, okay, well, this will be spicy.

This will be spicy. This will be interesting. You know, we're going to get some edgy things here. My God. I mean, there is just there's just nothing there. Absolutely nothing there. And it's really quite embarrassing that people take him seriously. And if you're someone who listens to him and go wow, I really had my mind blown And I'm really looking at things in a different way then I'm sorry But you need to go back to school or get some help because there's something wrong with you

So that's that's that's where I'm at Chris Well see no, this is this is interesting because I think he's really insightful and has a lot of value to offer. No, no, I do not. He's a colossal windbag. And as I've mentioned throughout this episode, he actually is kind of the comic book guy from Simpsons. That's his archetype. And if he was on YouTube debating Warhammer factions or which Star Trek series is the best, right? Who's the best captain? That would be a good use of his talents, right? Because he could go on these indulgent, you know, mind palace wanderings, likening the new generation team to the Russian oligarchs in the 1930s. And actually, maybe they're more like the communists and all this kind of waffle. But actually, instead, he is someone who is taken seriously by people like Peter Thiel, by people like JD Vance,

and who is regarded as an intellectual figure with these very important ideas that speak to the modern moment. And that is absolutely damning of the modern moment and that entire movement. But I think when I'm listening to this, the thing I keep coming up against is that keep coming up against is that he is still doing that thing of telling people you are misunderstood and you find, you know, these restrictions and these kinds of things that are told to you, you know, the kind of Pink Floyd, you're not just another brick in the wall, right? We don't need no education. But then he, he kind of endorses, you know, you're right to have those feelings. And if you have those feelings, it's just an indication that you're a little bit smarter. You're a little bit more of a critical thinker. And that's why you can kind of

entertain these edgy ideas. Let me give you some edgy ideas. And then I think he looks and sounds like someone who is incredibly well read, who knows these obscure thinkers, knows the philosophers, knows these historical figures. Right. And that all of the things that are in the mainstream historians or academia, right. These people regard him as like pseudo profound because they see him as a threat to their authority. Right. Like he's such a renegade. That's why they're dismissive of him. And it's this like flattering presentation for people who feel a little bit, you know, outside or a little bit cold from whatever normie people are doing. But they're given the message that like just basically a satisfying message that you are a brave, intelligent person. And by listening and entertaining me, that reflects well on you. And it's an appealing message, I think for people that would feel a bit like socially alienated,

might have too much regard for their own intelligence and not that much critical thinking. So he's astounding for that kind of attitude. And I suspect that a lot of people just get like kind of orientated off into his world and Steve Seeler's world and whatnot, and consider themselves, you know, looking at these very ideas instead of recognizing that they're looking at the, you know, emperor in his finery when he's standing there naked. So yeah. Yeah. I think, I think you're right about the appeal. Um, like I often describe dismissively the audience of these kind of people as kind of these, you know, 16 year old boys, you know, the implication being there, these sort of naive, slightly grumpy, feel like societies, everything's against them,

they got a chip on their shoulder, all of that stuff, right? Arranging sea of emotions going on under the surface as well. And frustrations and the rest. And I don't need to be mean to that demographic. If you're a 16 year old boy, listen, I'm not having a go at you specifically, because the sad thing is a lot of people, men and women in their 40s and 50s, who find this stuff appealing too, but for the same reasons, right? It speaks to populism, it speaks to their frustrations, it speaks to their narcissism really,

at their conspiratorial leanings. You know, it's not you, there's something wrong with the world, you can see what's going on with it. And even when it's not explicitly conspiratorial, as we've heard, often it does lean on conspiratorial stuff a fair bit, that view of the world and that attraction to these sorts of things, and just, you know, not dealing with them critically, because they're just so darn appealing that everything they taught you at school is wrong. Actually, it's all corrupt and what we need is some sort of thing that's

going to fix it and make you, basically will legitimize and make you feel better about yourself. I think it appeals to the same psychological factors that steer people towards conspiracism. So yeah, not a good thing. Depressing, Matt. It's depressing. It's not that he's so evil or awful. It's just that he is just so insubstantial. He's just such a lightweight. There's just nothing there.

It is a shame that nobody seems to mind that it's so incoherent and he seems unable to even answer the most basic pressing questions about his fantastic new idea. Like he's had he's had decades thinking about this, this fantastic new idea of a kind of a monarchy, but not a hereditary one, one where you have, you know, absolute authority invested in the great and the good, some kind of philosopher king, but he can't answer the question of how this person who will don't worry, be very accountable somehow, doesn't answer the question of how this person who will, don't worry, be very accountable somehow, doesn't answer the question of how this person's going to be chosen, how they're going to be picked.

Whereas that's what politics has literally has always been about for 2000 years. That should be the first question on everyone's lips. And he doesn't answer it. And the question isn't even asked because he goes off and tells stories. But to be clear, Matt, he probably does answer it in one of his voluminous writings somewhere. But like the fact that you're pointing out is that he isn't able to articulate that when that should be like a very simple and straightforward thing. If you have further that. That should be point number one. Like he should have an elevator pitch for this thing by now is what I'm saying. He's had hours, I've listened to hours of him now, and there's no point telling me that

the answer to this obvious question number one is buried in one of his books somewhere. It's probably about seven different answers. They're probably all terrible, right? But it's not articulated upfront. But what bothers me even more is that the people that are interviewing him don't debonded from him. That should be the first thing that they I know. I know. Yeah, they let him go. Anyway, whatever. Well, yeah, so let's let's let him waffle on with more stories. Like on the

positive side, he's just going to be telling stories till the end of time to like people who are convinced that he's, he's saying very profound things, but the somewhat depressing side of it is that he actually is like influential in the, in the sense of, I'm not saying he's the puppet master behind things, but I think he basically does give some intellectual heft to people that have fairly nefarious ideas about like modern democracy and whatnot. But anyway, that is what it is.

So we'll draw things to an end there. And this week, we don't have a review of reviews. We're keeping things tight. I am going to read out a list of Patreon people. Okay. So just you, you listen to this list, Ma, and I will only ask you for one short comment at the end of the list. So we have Wendy Hylet, John Van Der Berg, Mark, Jordan, Marfolomeww Lars Lindertz Paul Hemerling William Dee

Eric Nietzsche Craig Helfrich Jonathan Generic Or Ben Klassen Alyssa Judson Fred Tamura take acts Tim knees Alexandra costa twisted sick veld Peter Jeremy Volneck Helgi a Benson Nile Davidson Alexandra Regin, Alec Thomas, Birch Frush, Beth Richardson, Lisa Matthews, Charlie Omert and Chris Wishy. So I'm afraid unfortunately that I don't have the specific tier list. But I think you're all honorary Galaxy Green Guru's for that reason.

And we thank you all for your support. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe, I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine.

Yeah. Thank you very much, one and all. Beautiful names. Any favorites? I love all of those names. I like the first one and the second last one. Yeah, that one, the third one was very good as well, but that's great. Well, Matt, you did well.

You lasted for this. You you have suffered and and bled for our listeners since. And now you you go to rest, but you will return again to listen to more. Maybe we'll do Curtis part two, but not for another 100 years. Not for another 100 years. No, no, no. All right, thanks, Chris. That was awful.

But we can tick him off for this. He's going to blow the doors off the grommeter. That's my final word. I think he's going to make Peter Tegel seem really smart. Anyway, bye. Bye. Oh, I hope you... Bye! Music