The Interview - Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

The once-fringe writer has long argued for an American monarchy. His ideas have found an audience in the incoming administration and Silicon Valley.

From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese. For a long time, Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer, had been writing online about political theory in relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme, that institutions like the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he's called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator. To support his arguments, Yarvin relies on what sympathetic ears might hear as a helpful serving of historical references, but which others hear as a distorting mix of gross oversimplification,

cherry picking, personal interpretation presented as fact, and just plain inaccuracy. But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to his notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism. — You know, there's this guy Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. — Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an American Caesar might be installed into power. — You know, I mean, you're essentially advocating for someone to, you know, an age old move, right, which is gain power lawfully through an election, through legal means, and then exercise it unlawfully. And Yarvin has also found fans in the powerful and increasingly political ranks

of Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen. The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarvin. He's also a good friend of mine. And he the way he describes the American system, we are living under FDR's personal monarchy. I've been aware of Jarvin's work for years and was mostly interested in it as a prime example of growing anti-democratic sentiment

in particular corners of the internet. Until recently, those ideas felt too fringe to really take seriously. But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can't be so easily dismissed anymore. Here's my conversation with Curtis Yarvin. To my understanding,

one of your central arguments is that America needs to, I think the way you've put it in the past, is sort of get over our dictator phobia that American democracy is a sham, beyond fixing, and having sort of a monarch-style leader, call it a CEO or call it a dictator, that's the way to go. So why is democracy so bad and why would having a dictator solve the problem? Let me answer that in I think a way that will be relatively accessible

to readers of the New York Times. You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I do a speech sometimes where I'll just read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural address in which FDR essentially says to the American people, hey, Congress, give me absolute power or I'll take it anyway. So did FDR absolutely actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there's a great piece that I've sent to, you know, some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition. I mean, the, there's all sorts of people milling around. Name one. Name one, wow.

Name one, well, I definitely know Mark Andreessen and so I sent this piece to Mark Andreessen. And it's an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is FDR's secretary of the interior. And it's a little diary entry describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in this cabinet meeting is that Francis Perkins, who's the Secretary

of Labor, comes in to this meeting and is like, here I have a list of the projects that we're going to do. FDR personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, this is crap, this is crap, aren't you doing? Like humiliates Francis Perkins in the Oval Office or wherever they're having their cabinet meeting. And then at the end of the thing, it's like everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just a picture of FDR acting like a CEO. And so, you know, the question of was FDR a dictator?

What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean? I don't know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes, Democrats, Republicans, and everyone, you know, except for a few right-wing Republicans, basically revere FDR. And FDR ran the new deal like a startup. So as I understand it, the point you're trying to make is that we have had something like a dictator in the past in American history and therefore it's not something to be afraid

of now? Is that right? Yeah, what we see in the course of, you know, to kind of look at the objective reality of power in the US since the revolution, you know, you'll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation and you're just like, name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation and they can't, unless they're a professional historian. Next, you have the first constitutional period with under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what you'll see is that basically what is established looks a lot like a startup. It looks so much like a startup that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who is recognizably a startup bro, is running the whole government. He's basically the Larry Page of this Republic. He's nominally the secretary.

I feel like I'm asking you, what did you have for breakfast? And you're saying, well you know the dawn of man when the cereals were first cultivated. I'm doing a Putin. I'll speed this up. And then answer the question, what's so bad about democracy? So to make a long story short, whether you wanna call Washington, Lincoln, and FDR dictators, this sort of, you know, a probrious word, what they were was basically national CEOs.

And they were running the government like a company from the top down. So why is democracy so bad? So it's not even that democracy is bad, it's just that it's very weak. And the fact that it's very weak is basically easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist

despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of basically is democracy good or bad is I think a secondary question to is it what we actually have. When you say to a New York Times reader democracy is bad, they're a little bit shocked. But when you say to them politics is bad or even populism is bad, they're like little bit shocked. But when you say to them, politics is bad, or even populism is bad, they're like, of course, these are horrible things. And so, the thing is, when you basically want to be anti, you know, say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is

not a good system of government. And then you'll be like, yes, of course. Like, actually, you know, policy and law should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors and so forth. Then you'll realize that what you're actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy. You know, your ideas are ones that have been pointed to by people in real positions of power in the Republican Party. I think it's probably overstated the extent to which you and JD Vance are friends, but

he has mentioned you by name publicly and referred to de-wokefication ideas that are very similar to yours. You've been on Michael Anton's podcast, and Michael Anton has been tapped by Trump to be high up in the State Department talking with him about how to install an American Caesar. Peter Thiel, a major Republican donor, said you're an interesting thinker. Let's say people in actual positions of power said to you, Curtis, we're going

to do the Curtis Yardman thing. What are the steps that they would take to change American democracy into something like a monarchy? My honest answer would have to be it's not exactly time for that yet. Because what I see happening in DC right now, nobody should be watching this panicking, thinking I'm about to be installed as America's secret dictator.

I don't think I'm even going to the inauguration. Were you invited? No. I'm an outsider, man. I'm an intellectual and the actual ways in which my ideas get into circulation is actually mostly through the staffers and the younger people who basically swim in this very online soup. I think that's fine.

I think that what's happening now in DC to distinguish my much more radical ideas that what's happening now in D.C. to sort of distinguish my much more radical ideas from what's happening now, I would say that what's happening now is there's definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which sort of governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you go to Washington and say to anyone who's like professionally involved in the business of Washington That Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House at all and they'll basically be like yeah Of course the executive branch works for Congress and so you have these poor voters out there who elected as they think a revolution, they

elected Donald Trump and maybe the world's most capable CEO is in there. Right. Your point is he can't, the way the system is set up, he can't actually get that much done. He can't actually do that much to it. And he can block things, he can disrupt it, he can create chaos and turbulence or whatever, but he can't really change what it is. Do you think you're maybe overstating the inefficacy of a president? You could point to the repeal of Roe is something that's directly attributable to Donald Trump

being president. Yes, it is. You could point, one could argue that the COVID response was attributable to Donald Trump being president. Yes, and I think the COVID response was attributable to Donald Trump being president. I think the COVID response is a better example. Certainly many things about COVID were different because Donald Trump was president. Here, I'll tell you a funny story. Sure.

At the risk of bringing my children into the media, in 2016, my son and daughter- Who's how old? In 2016, my son and daughter, he's now 14, he was six then. And my children were going to a Shishi progressive manner and immersion school in San Francisco. And so- You sent your kids to a Shishi, sorry, I'm laughing. You sent your kids to a Shishi progressive school. At that time, manner and immersion.

And indeed, and you can't isolate children from the world. And so at the time, my late wife and I did not, we just adopted the simple expedient of not talking about politics in front of the children. Smart move. Recommend everyone. But of course, everyone's talking better at school. And my son comes home and he has this very concrete question.

He's like, pop, when Donald Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we going to be able to go to the beach? And I'm like, wow, you really took him literally. Like everybody else is taking him literally, but you really took him literally. And I was like, you know, if you see anything in the real world around you over the next four years that changes as a result of this election, I'll be surprised. In one of your recent blog posts, or I guess it's a newsletter, not a blog at this point,

you referred to JD Vance as, I think, as a normie. What do you mean? I would say that the thing that I admire about Vance and the thing that's really remarkable about him as a leader is that I think that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. His ability to connect with flyover Americans in the world that he came from is of course very very great. But the other thing that's neat about him is that he went to Yale and in Yale Law School in fact and so he can connect at a he speaks he's a fluent speaker of the language of the New York Times which you cannot say about Donald Trump. And basically one of the things that I believe really strongly, you know,

that I haven't touched on when I talk about monarchy is I think that it's utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy is that you have to be the president of all Americans. And I think this is something that basically the new administration could do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and basically saying, hey, you know, you want to make this country a better place, like, I feel like you've been misinformed in some ways, you're not a bad person, this is like 10 to 20 percent of Americans, this is a lot of people are like the NPR class, They're not bad people, evil people who want to like,

but the thing is they're human beings, we're all human beings and like human beings can support bad regimes. The question was, why did you call JD Vance a normie? Because he contains within him norminess, but he's also an intellectual and he contains within him intellectualness. What you just said about the administration could do

a better job of reaching out to progressives. We're all human beings. As you well know, it's a pretty different stance than the stance you often take in your writing. Where you, you're laughing because you know it's true. Where, you know, you talk about things like de-wokefication, people who work at places like the New York Times

should all lose our jobs, we should, you have an idea for a program called Rage, retire all government employees, you have ideas which I hope are satirical about how to handle non-productive members of society that involve basically locking them in a room forever. So why is your tone, has your thinking shifted? No, no, no, no.

Is there a tortuous tone difference in a setting like this? You're looking for different, my thinking is definitely not shifted and you're finding different emphases. Let me, you know, it's like when I talk about rage, for example, you know, both my parents worked for the federal government.

They were career, you know, federal employees. Basically- It's a little on the nose from a Freudian perspective, but yeah, go on. It is, it is, it is. But the thing is, basically, when you look at the way, when you look at those, the way to treat those institutions, I'm just like, treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so because these people having had power have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect.

Winning means these are your people now. And so the thing is when you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective can't be this sort of anti-aristocratic thing of like, we're going to like bayonet all the professors and like, you know, throw them in ditches or whatever. Their perspective has to be that like, you were a normal person serving a regime that did this like, really weird and crazy stuff. How invested do you think JD Vance is in democracy? It depends what you mean by democracy. I mean, I think that the problem is basically when people equate democracy with good government,

when you use that word, you're using a very tricky word. I would say that what someone like, I'm on very safe ground despite not knowing him well at all, that someone like JD Vance believes essentially in the common good. And the idea that government should serve the common good, and I think that people like JD and people in the sort of the broader intellectual scene around him, which is very varied intellectual scene, would all agree on that principle. Now, if that principle,

I don't know what you mean by democracy in this context. What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it's bad. And if it's for the common good, it's good. I think what you just described might be something that Peter Thiel would agree with. And there was a- I think a progressive could agree with it.

And there was a reporting that I saw, I think it was 2017, reporting done by BuzzFeed where they published some emails, I think between you and the right wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, where you talked about watching the 2016 election with Peter Thiel and referred to him as a fully enlightened. What would fully enlightened have meant in that context? What fully enlightened for me generally means fully disenchanted. When I look at basically what

the kinds of people that I know not really that well in Silicon Valley think, I'm basically like, you know, have people like this been exposed to my ideas? Yes. Do they agree that America should be a monarchy? I doubt it, but I have no idea. But what they agree on is not a belief, but a disbelief. So I think that when a person who lives their life

within the kind of, you know, sort of progressive bubble, liberal bubble, use whatever term you like, of, you know, the current year, looks at the right or even the new right or whatever, you know you want to call it, I think what's hardest to see is that what's really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief. Basically we don't worship these same gods. We do not sort of see the New York Times and Harvard as like divinely inspired in any sense,

or we do not see their procedures as ones that sort of always lead to truth and wisdom. We do not think that the way the US government works, you know, really works well, or seems to be perfect in any respect. And this absence of belief is what you call enlightened. Yes. It's a disenchantment from believing in these old systems.

And the right thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, oh, we need to go do things Curtis's way, and is basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say, we just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle's political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle's physics. What if that isn't so? You're basically saying there's a historical and political recency bias that people are

susceptible to. Exactly. But I think the thing that you have not quite isolated yet is why having a strong man figure would be better for people's lives. Can you answer that question? Yes. Number one, I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people's lives.

And I think that the best answer when I ask people to answer that question, I sort of ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that you know these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. Okay and then you're looking around yourself and you see for example a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple which is is a monarchy, and it has a little thing on it that says, designed in California and made in China. Right.

This is an example you use a lot where you say, if Apple ran California, wouldn't that be much better? Right. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I'm sorry, I'm here in this building and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than any other source in the world

and how is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth generation hereditary absolute monarchy. And so we've basically taken, you know, we've taken in some ways like, and this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the vision of the early progressives, by the way, the early progressives, even like the pre-World War I progressives, you know, you go back to, you know, a book like, you know, Drift and Mastery, you know, are very

I find the depth of background information to be obfuscating rather than illuminating. But how can I change that? How can I make that by answering the questions more directly and succinctly I think Would be the simple would be the simple reply and I'll try but but the thing I'd like to say just just to tie this Back a little bit to something we spoke about a minute ago is you know There is this idea that the incoming Trump administration is Interested in the idea of a more powerful Executive office are there things that you if you them, would be hints that the Trump administration

is taking the right steps, as you might see it, towards actually enacting that reality and becoming a stronger executive, a more monarchical executive office? I would say that the incoming Trump administration, you know, with all due respect, and there's a lot of great people there and people who are working extremely hard. Unfortunately, I would say that they're essentially finding themselves in a position where they're trying to untangle the Gordian knot. Meaning what? Meaning that they're basically trying to, let's take just NASA in specific.

So for example, if you compare NASA to SpaceX, you know, that's a fine example of actually all of the principles that I've been describing because NASA was once as efficient as SpaceX. So if you basically say, okay, at a very abstract level, forget the rest of the government, Elon, go and fix NASA. The goal of NASA is to give us cool space shit. We feel like we're not getting enough cool space shit.

You have $25 billion a year, go and do cool space shit. I think you would get a lot more cool space shit under that principle. But one of the basic principles of kind of the California startup way of thinking is just to realize it's way easier to create a new NASA than it is to fix the old NASA. And that principle extends sort of around the government.

You know, your ideas and I guess has been called like sort of a neo-reactionary cast of mind are seemingly increasingly popular in the Silicon Valley world. Don't you think there's some level on which that world is responding to your ideas because you're just telling them what they want to hear? If more people like me were in charge, things would be better. It's an ideologically useful set of arguments

for them to latch onto. The funny thing is, I think that's almost the opposite of the truth. It's like, let me give you a very simple illustration of this. Someone I have actually never met, believe it or not, who is Elon Musk. Now, Elon tweeted the other day, he was like, the proper structure of government on Mars should be not just a democracy, but a direct democracy.

Let me sort of examine the thinking behind Musk saying this because I find it sort of extremely odd in a sense. Like, because one of the things about monarchy that's been known for quite some time, and again, we've been in very, very anti-monarchical regimes and periods, an exception is made for this, is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment,

resume- You should have someone in charge. You should have someone in charge. But the thing is, you look at basically a Mars colony, and you're just like, really? Are the citizens of the Mars colony going to vote on how to replenish the oxygen supply or whatever? No, of course not. The Mars colony that Elon establishes will be a subsidiary of SpaceX and it will have someone in charge and it will have a command hierarchy just like SpaceX does.

And so I'm like, Elon, when you say that this should be a democracy, what are the people voting on? And so there's this world of actually real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every day and actually applying that world, applying that thinking to like, you know, being like, oh, this is, you know, this thinking is directly contradictory in a sense to the ideals that I was taught in this society, that's a really difficult cognitive dissonance problem, even if you're Elon Musk.

When I hear you talk about the need for a monarch, and we'll just use that term, encompassing CEOs or dictators, I'll just say monarch. Monarch is good, it's a neutral term. It would be an understatement to say that sort of humanity's record with monarchs is mixed at best. Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius seems like it went pretty well. Under Nero, not so much. Spain's Charles III is a monarch you point to a lot, you know? He's sort of your favorite monarch. Louis XIV, you know, he's like starting wars

like they're going out of business. So those are all sort of before the age of democracy. And then if you look at more- And then the monarchs in the age of democracy are just terrible. Terrible. I can't believe I'm saying a phrase like this. If you put Hitler aside and only look at Mao, Stalin,

Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin. We're looking at people responsible for the deaths of something like 75 to 100 million people. So given that historical precedent, do we really wanna try dictatorship? Your question is the most important question of all, because basically understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, why Stalin was so bad

is really like essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it's important to note that we don't see for the rest of European and like world history, human history as a whole is a mixed bag. The history of the age of democracy in the last 250 years is also a mixed bag. But we don't see in human history what? You didn't finish the whole. A Holocaust.

You can pull the camera way back and basically say, wow, in Europe since basically the establishment of European civilization from like 1000 AD to 1750 AD, we didn't have this kind of chaos and violence. And then you can't separate Hitler and Stalin from the sort of global democratic revolution that they're a part of. But one thing I noticed when I was going through your stuff is that, you know, you make these historical claims like the one you just made about sort of no genocide in Europe between

1000 AD and the Holocaust essentially. And then I poke around and think, huh, is that true? And then you think, well, there was Tamerlane. He killed, there was a. Tamerlane was not a, I mean Europe though. Well, it's okay on the edges of Europe. And that's sort of like a goalpost shift there. But then, or you think, well,

there were the French wars of religion, they killed millions of people, including the massacre of the Huguenots. So I often find, why don't you just scratch a little at some of the historical- There was no massacre of Huguenots. I think you're confusing it with the Sack of Beziers and the massacre of the Alpagentians. So they got massacred, not the Huguenots? Yeah. But the thing is, when people look at the Holocaust they saw like a new species of devil tree that had not really

Existed in the world in that way before you know when you see a city stacked in the Middle Ages You see just like wild and disciplined troops like raging around you don't see like lines of people marched to their deaths like raging around, you don't see like lines of people marched to their deaths. My skepticism comes from what I feel like is a pretty strong cherry picking of historical incidents to support your arguments. And then I look and you're like, oh, there's the incidents that you're pointing to are either not necessarily factually settled or there's a different way of looking at them. But I actually want to, just because some of the historical references are now actually making my head hurt, I just want to ask a couple very concrete questions about some of the stuff you've written about race, for example, which seems pretty provocative to say the least.

I'll read you some examples. This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program. To me the trouble with white nationalism is that it's racist, not that it's strategically unsophisticated. There's two more. There's two more.

It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone's life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves. Come on. Let's go. The third one, the third one. If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you'd like to fuck. So that was so, so, so, oh, let's go, let's go,

let's go through each. And this is a guy who's saying, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's go, let's go through each of those examples. And so when you look, for example, at Mandela, the reason I said that most people don't know this, there was a little Contra comps when Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken off the terrorist list. I mean maybe the more relevant point is that Nelson Mandela was in jail for

opposing a viciously racist apartheid regime. The viciously racist apartheid regime basically they had him on the terrorist list. So if you look at... Let's get to the other two. But again, your quote was, if you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela- I prefer to condemn them both. And the thing is basically when you look at the impact, you see- What does this have to do with equating Anders Breivik, who shot people on some bizarre deluded mission to rid Norway of Islam with Nelson Mandela.

Because they're both terrorists. And because they basically both violated the rules of war in the same way. And they both basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the time. This valorization of- So Gandhi then is your model. Martin Luther King, non-violent.

More complicated than that, but I could say things about either. But let's move on to one of your other examples. So I think the best way to basically grapple with that period directly. Which period are we talking about now? 1860s. Okay, yeah.

Let's talk about Africa. We're talking about the Civil War. African Americans in the 1860s. The thing that you can do that any Times reader can do, just go to your Google bar and Google slave narratives. Just go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the time. And so the thing is that basically the treatment

of the freed slaves after the war is like extremely, there was a recent historian who published a thing, and I think this is, I would dispute this, this number is like extremely, there was a recent historian who published a thing and I think this is, I would dispute this, this number is too high, but his estimate was that something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically die in between like 1865 and 1870. Yeah, well, again, I can't speak to the veracity of that.

That's too high, anyway, anyway, the thing is basically like, you know. But you're saying there are a horse historical examples in slave narrative where the freed slaves themselves expressed Regret at having they just but this to me is another prime example of how you selectively read history because if you read other slave narratives where they talk about the Horrible brutality of it. So what? How does that justify- I say this in the conversation. Make anyone's life more pleasant.

Difficult to argue that anyone, that the civil war made anyone's life more pleasant, including freed slaves. Anyone is, anyone is, anyone is- Your children were no longer sold out from under them. When I said anyone, okay, first of all, when I said anyone, I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.

But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era of revolution? The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely, and the war itself wasn't good either, but if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely a turn to deer between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted. But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards to make people

free. I can't believe I'm arguing this. Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war. And so the thing is, when you look at basically the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, you're basically just like, it just visited this huge amount of destruction on all sorts of people, black and white. I'm just like, all of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time. And what I'm fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way the people respond to Pryvec, I'm like basically you're responding in this kind of cartoonish way to something

that terrorism, which is what is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? That's a really important question in 20th century history. To say that I'm going to have a strong opinion about this stuff without having the answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong. Now, maybe you think I haven't been red-pilled or whatever, or I'm not thinking through these issues enough, but I feel like to me, you call it cartoonish, I call it very morally clear. I can say something like, you know, I think slavery was bad

I'm glad there are no longer enslaved people and then to hear you then say well You have to look at it from this other perspective, you know, you're this is a one-dimensional view of history I think well, that's a no. I think it's pretty cut and dry It just is very fascinating to me that your ideas which strike me as pretty extreme, you know, they were fringe ideas to me that your ideas, which strike me as pretty extreme, you know, there were fringe ideas to me that apparently are no longer on the fringe. And that's, I don't know, what do you think that says about conservatism today? I think that American conservatism is in the long and very, very difficult grieving process

of realizing that it has always been a fraud. And I think one of the especially dangers in American conservatism is that there's so much grift in it and so much of it consumes so much energy and so much attention and produces so little. You are still a factor of a hundred from being able to give the people who are voting for you and donating to you anything like what they imagine they're going to get from you.

And when you say it's a fraud, I take that to mean in so far as its conservatism is just... The Washington generals are never going to win the game. It just doesn't have the power to give anything that it promises. After the break, I call Curtis back to ask more about the incoming administration. I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think that that's sort of limited him as a leader in various ways. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me again. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you. Let's have some more fun. You know, you do so often draw on the history of the pre-democratic era, which is a historical period sort of exactly coterminous with, for example, women being treated as second-class citizens. And sort of the status of women in that time period, which you sort of valorize, is not something I've really seen come up in your writings.

But do you feel like your arguments take enough into account the way that monarchies and dictatorships historically tend not to be great for big swathes of demographics? So, okay, so let's look at, you know, enfranchisement in specific. So when I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of okay. The woman in Jane Austen's book seems to be fine. Now, who are desperate to land a husband because they have no access to income without them? Well, have you ever seen anything like that in the 21st century?

I mean, the whole class in Jane Austen's world is the class of like, UBI earning aristocrats, right? You know? But are you not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? It's very hard. So first of all, when we say liberty, for example, so you did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. So free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power.

And so the assumption that you're making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves. Do you think it's better that women got the vote? First of all, I don't believe in actually voting at all. So it's a little- Do you vote?

No. I believe that voting is providing this almost pornographic stimulus. It becomes more like supporting your football team or something. It basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. But the thing is, what does this power mean to you is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it provides a meaning for them. It makes them feel relevant.

It makes them feel like they matter in a sense. And I think that there's something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the very, very important question of, we need a government that is actually good and that actually works and we don't have one. So the solution that you propose is it has to do with, like we've said multiple times now,

installing, you call it a monarchy, you call it a CEO figure, and the result of investing an individual with the power of a CEO would be hopefully a more efficient, more responsive, more effective government. Why do you seem to have such faith in the ability of CEOs? I mean, most startups fail. We can all point to CEOs who are effective, CEOs who have been ineffective, and it seems to me unlikely that, putting that aside, that a CEO been ineffective. And it seems to me unlikely that putting that aside,

that a CEO or dictator is much more likely to think of estate citizens as economic units rather than living, breathing human beings who have, want to flourish in their lives, who deserve the dignity of a secure retirement or meaningful leisure time. So why are you so confident that a CEO would be the kind of leader who could bring about

better lives for people? It just seems like such a simplistic way of thinking. It's not a simplistic way of thinking. And having worked inside the kind of salt mines where CEOs do their CEOing business, and having been a CEO myself, I think I have a better sense of it maybe, unfortunately, than most people.

Last time we spoke, I used the example of, imagine if your MacBook had to be made by the California Department of Computing, or if your electric car had to be made by the US Department of Transportation. The things that make companies succeed or fail. I will say Apple and Tesla, by the way, though, have both benefited greatly from government help in various forms.

Well, they live in a governed society. So the thing is basically when libertarians talk about Apple and Tesla, they're saying, okay, here are the benefits of freedom, etc., etc., etc. That's sort of true in a sense, but the benefit of freedom is that these organizations have used freedom to establish monarchies, which are, you know, completely top-down command units. Yeah, but again, we've gotten away from the central question a little bit, which was,

why are you so confident that CEOs are... That's the question of efficiency. And so when I basically look at systems run by CEOs, I'm just like, basically, I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good. Some of them are bad, but the overall quality, you know, just pick one at random and put him or her in charge of Washington. And I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk. The like median performance is so much better, but you asked something that I

think is a more important and more interesting question, which is, you know, you're like, okay, America needs a CEO who will be economically efficient. The CEO who will be economically efficient will think of human beings as pure economic units and will do things like, wow. Well, no, just the idea that a company has goals that are not necessarily the same goals

as what a government might have insofar as providing for its citizens. Perfect, perfect question. The thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as making a profit or just selling more stuff, but that's not actually really the goal of a company. The real goal of a company is to maximize the worth of its assets to make the stock price go up. Basically, one of the ways to kind of unify the worldview of say Charles I and Elon Musk is to realize that when Charles I is thinking about his people, he is both thinking of them as economic assets and as human assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive. And in order to see his country

thrive, he wants people to be, of course, he wants them to be producing as much wool or whatever England exports as possible, right? But the sense of him being kind of, you know, the pater patriae, kind of the father of the country and sort of feeling about the people in his society, not exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but sort of like the way a parent should feel about his children. That sense of like having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a CEO is not to rake in the bucks, but to make my operation flourish. Aaron Ross Powell Earlier you had said that you believe that regardless of what his goals are or what he says, But regardless of what his goals are or what he says, Trump isn't likely to actually get anything transformative accomplished just because of the entrenched government bureaucracy

that exists. But sort of putting that aside, what know, the funny thing is I talked about FDR earlier in the earlier in our conversation. And I think actually, you know, a lot of people might in different directions might not appreciate this comparison. But I think that in a lot of ways, Trump is very reminiscent of FDR because what FDR had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous sort of ability to like be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS, and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between Trump and FDR that has really held Trump back is,

of course, that FDR is from one of America's first families. He's a hereditary aristocrat, and Trump is not really from America's social upper class. I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think it's hurt him in his ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his family.

I think that that's sort of limited him as a leader in various ways. And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It's almost like he actually feels like he knows what he's doing. That's, I think, something that's very helpful because, you know, insecurity and fragility is just, you know, it's his Achilles heel. What's your Achilles heel? What's my Achilles heel?

I think I also have self-confidence issues. I sort of rarely, I won't bet fully on my own convictions. Are there ways in which you think your insecurity manifests itself in your political thinking? That's a good question. I think that if you look at especially my older work, I think I had this kind of joint consciousness that, okay, I feel like I'm on to something here, but I also like the idea that people would be in 2025, taking this stuff as seriously as they are now.

When I was writing in 2007, 2008, I mean, I was completely serious, I am completely serious. But it led to I think a certain level of like, it's like when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever, I'm basically like, yeah, you know, the sentiments behind that I can explain and articulate and they were serious sentiments and they're serious now.

Would I have expressed it that way? Would I have like trolled? I'm always trying to get less trollish. Like, you know, over time you'll see that I've definitely gotten less trolley. On the other hand, you know, if you read my recent blog posts, I can't really resist, uh, trolling Elon Musk, which might be part of the reason why I've never met Elon Musk. Do you, do you think your think your trolling instinct has maybe gotten out of hand? No, it definitely hasn't gotten, it hasn't gone far.

I mean, no, I mean, the trolling, like what I realized when I look back is that actually- Do you think your trolling has now become a political program? The instinct to revise things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct. It's a very serious and important thing that I think the world needs. You know, I got to say there are a lot of things to do with your ideas that we just didn't get to. But the thing that I still find myself deeply unconvinced about is why blowing up

democracy rather than trying to make it better would somehow lead to better lives for the people who are struggling the most. Well, you know, I can lead a horse to water, of course. I think that as you start to, as the sort of walls fall away and you start to explore ideas that are sort of outside the very narrow bubble of the present that we live in, because there's no, I think it's impossible to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which intelligent, thoughtful people like you sort of consider has grown sharply narrower in the 20th century. And if there's really one thing that I kind of want to do the most, say, with this

conversation is to kind of make people feel like they can basically step outside of the very small box that they grew up in. And they can say, not everything outside that box is perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible. I'm not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti-Semite or even a misogynist, whatever that means. I'm asking them to sort of acknowledge that there are cases in which our judgment of the past is completely right. And yet there are also ways in which the whole past would very unanimously point to things that we're doing and say, that's crazy, I can't believe you're doing that. — That's Curtis Yarvin. He writes on Substack. His newsletter is called Gray Mirror.

And he has a new book called Gray Mirror, Facialal One, Disturbance. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orm with help from Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Annabel Bacon, mixing by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Matthew and Seth Kelly is our senior producer.

Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Maddie Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash The Interview, and you can email us anytime at theinterviewatnytimes.com. I'm David Marchese,

and this is the interview from The New York Times.