Does Democracy Still Control Power? w/ Curtis Yarvin (Transcript)

They didn’t take any shares from you. There are 1.1 million now rather than 1 million shares. But we didn’t take anything from you. Furthermore, the stock price went up, so you actually made money.” And it’s like, no, actually that doesn’t change the fact that you’re skimming, right?

And it’s the same when you basically say, “Well, we have this expanding financial universe.” When real estate values go up, it doesn’t mean your house got better. That is clearly a monetary phenomenon. And then you say, “Well, but technology got better, so we stole a bunch of money from you, but your car got faster.” That is 20th century macroeconomics, right? “We stole a bunch of money from you, but your car got faster.”

Also, we inflated the financial system. So as long as you want to gamble with your savings, you can put them in an index fund and they will earn more money than interest, because that’s how inflation works.

And so it’s this whole insane system of robbing Peter to pay Paul through the monetary system, in all of the financial system, in all of these really strange ways. Even measuring what this system is doing is hard. Like, probably most economists would say personal net worth is a weird way to measure inflation. But inflation is an increase in purchasing power, and that’s your purchasing power. And it doesn’t really matter if your purchasing power is in a suitcase full of bills or a mutual fund or a house — it’s still your purchasing power.

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

PETER MCCORMACK: But it’s okay if you’re in the club though.

Third World Economics and Deindustrialisation

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s okay if you’re in the club because you’re actually in the money-gaining part. It’s really very much third world economics. And it’s absolutely the thing that has destroyed all of these industries.

Even the sovereign powers of what remains of English sovereignty have allowed it to deindustrialize. It’s just a simple national choice. If you want to overvalue your currency, people have more nice stuff to spend and you destroy your industries. If you want to go in the other direction, then people have less nice stuff and you build huge quantities of industries. This is why China undervalues its currency.

For China Inc., undervaluing their currency is like cutting your prices, right? It’s just like a discount store. Your goods from China Inc. cost less if you basically pull the currency down. That’s why they have currency controls, that’s why they manipulate the currency, that’s why there’s not a free market in the yuan.

And so you’re actually like — the whole system of saying, “Oh, our GDP is going up because people have more stuff, oh, now your cars are going to be made in China, that’s fine” — because we can print more money and China is willing to accept it. It’s very much worth it to them to send consumer goods here in exchange for pieces of green paper.

PETER MCCORMACK: But eventually this will collapse. It’s arguably collapsing slowly around us.

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

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

CURTIS YARVIN: Maybe we deserve it.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

The Fracturing Political Landscape

CURTIS YARVIN: And there are certain—

PETER MCCORMACK: —signals that stand out for me. So the fast-changing political environment — say here in the UK, we used to have two lead parties and occasionally a coalition. They’re both at existential risk now of not even existing as parties. We have brand new parties that are becoming legitimate very quickly, a fast-paced growth of the Greens.

CURTIS YARVIN: Strange pieces of ice are breaking in strange ways. You have this political system — or at least an electoral system, because its relationship to the actual government is increasingly attenuated — but we have an electoral system which is very much based on 20th century broadcast media.

Having been in the UK for about 21 hours or whatever, I’ve already heard many discussions between supporters of England’s two great parties — of course, the left-wing party of Reform and the right-wing party of Restore. This is the Overton Window which I inhabit when I come here. And you were doubtless adept enough in this situation that you personally could make the Reform case against Restore and the Restore case against Reform, whichever of these forces you believe in.

But Reform is a kind of transitional thing, in a way, because it’s daring to stir the surface of the broadcast media political game. Of course, Farage has been playing that game with various levels of success for quite some time. He’s quite a canny operator in that game, quite a good player. But it’s a game in which absolute sincerity is not exactly the currency of the realm. It’s a game where people in that world expect a lot of theatre.

It’s sort of like if you go farther back in the past, the reality and the audience become increasingly attenuated. Most Americans and probably most Brits did not know at the time that Franklin Roosevelt used a wheelchair.

PETER MCCORMACK: I didn’t know that. He was—

CURTIS YARVIN: He was able to conceal that from the public, yes, very aggressively. People knew he was a polio survivor, but he always stood in front of the cameras. So this difference between the on-camera world and the off-camera world was really quite considerable at that time. And FDR using a wheelchair, in terms of historical importance, is very much the least of it.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

On-Camera vs. Off-Camera Politicians

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

PETER MCCORMACK: —camera, but he’s very different off camera. That’s one of the things I notice. I think on camera he’s Farage, and off camera he’s Nigel, and he’s a lot more measured, considerate, slower speaking.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yes, Nigel is more measured. Yes, yes, yes.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Whereas Rupert Lowe.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is the same on camera and off camera.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I met Nigel, like 10 years ago or so, I was impressed by him. I was like, expected this glad handing chap with a beard. Not someone who could talk intelligently about not only Enoch Powell, but even Pierre Poujade. You know, it’s like imagine an American politician who knows who Pierre Poujade is. I mention this because Poujadism was sort of French 1950s populism, basically.

And so, yeah, he’s an Oxbridge graduate, he’s not just having the piss. But in the market for absolute sincerity that is created by the world of social media, he’s really at a disadvantage relative to Lowe, because I’ve never seen Lowe off camera. You probably have.

PETER MCCORMACK: He was here a few days ago.

CURTIS YARVIN: And I would imagine he is the same person off camera as on camera.

PETER MCCORMACK: The same person on camera, off camera. And how he tweets, he is just — yeah, he’s the real deal. What you see is what you get. And I think there is a demand for sincerity now.

CURTIS YARVIN: There’s a demand for both sincerity and irony, actually, because the sincerity has to be — it’s not a kind of unself-aware sincerity. The 21st century sincerity always has to have this slight — mostly there’s nothing without a slight quality of irony. Like, there’s nothing that’s not aware of itself in that way.

If you go and watch propaganda from a hundred years ago, or political propaganda from 100 years ago, many things will strike you. But one of the things will strike you is that the intellectual level is much lower and there is no irony. None. And that only starts creeping into politics in like the late 20th century, really. And now, of course, we live in one of the most ironic ages in history. Probably there’s a lot of Late Roman Empire vibes in that — also a very ironic, very materialistic period.

The Collapse of the Old Democratic System

PETER MCCORMACK: But it also feels like a period of great civilizational shift we’re going through. I sense it in that we’re going through one of the big technical revolutions, which is going to change a lot of things. We do have this debt bubble, depending on how you define it. And there is a big geopolitical shift that’s happening now, and all these forces happening at the same time.

And what it feels like to me is that the old democratic system that we’ve been running, certainly for the last maybe 100 years — now doesn’t work, because we’re able to see it for what it is, see its mistakes, and just reject it.

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, let’s talk about the financial side first, in a way, because really, when you’re looking at this huge paper bubble — just saying “paper” to include both debt and equity — you’re basically seeing something that, you know, when a — can I use the word “shitcoin” on the show?

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

CURTIS YARVIN: When a shitcoin is basically constantly expanding its fully diluted value by minting new coins, the proper way to account for this is fractional accounting. Like, what percentage of the whole do I hold? And it seems that that is going down constantly due to basically rug pull minting activities.

When you have a whole economy that is doing this, it basically creates a pressure for exits. It creates what Von Mises called the “flight to real value.” And then the problem with the flight to real value is you’re like, “Oh, well, tulips have real value. So we’re going to bid up the tulips.” And then tulips cannot sustain overvaluation because they’re freaking plants, man, and anyone can mint tulips.

Although, the thing about the tulips that most people don’t understand about the tulip bubble is that one of the reasons there was a tulip bubble is that the exotic tulip bulbs did not breed true — because they were not just genetic, there was also something that infected the tulip that made it variegated in various ways. And so there was real rarity in, like, a Semper Augustus tulip or whatever. But still, ultimately, it did not work.

And so you have this kind of coordination problem of finding the exit — like, what is the exit? I remember, I had pre-IPO shares in a dot-com company in like 2000. Not a whole lot. And I remember having one of these moments where you have a thought which is the right thought, and then you dismiss it immediately from your mind. And my right thought was, “I should move all of this money as far from tech as possible.” And then I was like, “Well, what’s farthest from tech that’s possible? I don’t know. Gold.”

And I look at gold, and gold is in what I believe in the UK you call the “Brown Bottom,” where Gordon Brown sold off the nation’s gold reserve for like $250 an ounce. Does it hurt when I say these things?

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, it doesn’t hurt me personally, but I think it hurts the country.

The Problem of Finding an Exit From Paper Assets

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, it does. It was a sad move. And for all I know, the gold in Fort Knox is still there. So you’re basically saying, when you’re looking for an exit, it’s what game theorists call a coordination problem. Because you basically don’t want to go into something that’s going to be overvalued — like the tulip bulbs — where you can’t overvalue this. And then people are like, “Wow, we could grow tulips too.”

And you have to sort of pick the same thing as other people. And when you go into gold, the gold market is a weird place, man. There’s gold derivatives up the wazoo, and somebody is naked short gold out there — I don’t know, maybe, maybe not. What is the BIS doing? You’re familiar with the BIS? There’s like weird ancient hundred-year-old skullduggery — not even post-World War II skullduggery, it’s post-World War I skullduggery. That’s the BIS.

So the thing is, when that exit route of basically saying “all this thing is diluting” — because that’s what you’re doing when you expand the paper, you’re diluting — right now, maybe you’re creating new value with your AI factories or whatever that matches the dilution in some places. Maybe you’re not. So you’re like, “What is the thing that can’t be diluted?” And then you’re like, “All right, gold, or maybe Bitcoin.”

And there are basically two somewhat medium-term arguments against each of these. The argument against Bitcoin is no one is quite sure what to do with the quantum problem, because it is starting to look — although I’m very skeptical of scientists of all kinds — they seem to think that they’re actually making progress on quantum computing.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but it’s solvable.

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s solvable, it’s solvable, it’s solvable. Somebody will steal Satoshi’s keys, which are all unshielded basically, and whatever. And then the case against gold — you’ll love this — is scalable chrysopoeia. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. Somebody published a paper on synthetically creating gold, which people have long known is theoretically possible. Somebody published this design for basically a fusion tokamak wrapped in a bath of mercury. And as the neutrons filter out from the fusion tokamak into the mercury, they’re like, “This could maybe be profitable.” Now, these are calculations made by scientists, so it’s probably an order of magnitude off, but they’re like, “We can make this profitable for $5,000 an ounce,” which is precisely the price of gold at the moment.

PETER MCCORMACK: And they’ve done it for diamonds now.

The Gold Standard, China’s Rise, and the AI Revolution

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, now diamonds, that’s atomic structure and this is actual transmutation, right? But the point is that there are a lot of. When you’re basically playing this game of looking for an exit, you have a G from the dilution, from the debt bubble, from the paper bubble. You have this fundamental problem of game theory, which is that everyone else is also looking for the exit. And therefore when you’re predicting what these exits will do, you have to basically make this reflexive calculation where you’re like, what are other people going to do?

So, for example, in the gold market, basically you have these giant players which are central banks which could buy a lot of gold because the percentage of the reserves in gold is fairly small. So if you look at basically Chinese gold holding, one of the reasons why the gold market has gone a little crazy over the last year is that it looks like this, right? It’s a hockey stick in terms of basically Chinese gold reserve. Because the Chinese are like, “Why do we have these green pieces of paper? We don’t even like these people, right?” You know, they’re sitting and looking at the dead presidents, right? So they’re like, “Who is Andrew Jackson? What are you going to do with your green paper, right?”

So what you’re seeing there, here’s an example of the way those things could converge. Now, I’m not making policy for the Chinese Communist Party. But the thing is, if the Chinese Communist Party was to say, “Well, we’re this export oriented nation and we’re doing that to impoverish our people. But what we really need is to keep our people employed because otherwise they get rioting, they get rowdy, we have to shoot them, right?”

And actually reports from China are now like, China is also having problems just because of the efficiency of technology. They’re having problems with their full employment. They have weird financial structures, but they have a trade surplus, which is, a trade surplus for a country is like running a profit for a firm. If you’re profitable, you could be a mess, but you’re still profitable.

So let’s say China tomorrow is like, “All right, every time we get a dollar in surplus trade, we’re going to put it into gold. We are going to basically be remorselessly buying a trillion and a half dollars” — which is I think roughly China’s trade, 2 trillion or so trade surplus — “we’re going to be buying $1 trillion of gold every year.” You certainly can imagine what would happen if they were buying a trillion dollars of bitcoin every year, right?

And even more than that, they could say, “Well, this gold actually belongs to the Chinese people and we are going to basically go back on the gold standard for China because we have basically done busting out the planet.” Because what China has been doing is like a Sopranos bust out of the planet. All right? We’re done busting out the planet. We’ve turned America and Europe into basically Argentina with nukes, right? You know, the last titans of like ASML or whatever will finally fall and the Chinese will just be better at everything. You know, they’re even landing rockets on their tails now. They’re chasing SpaceX, chasing Tesla, etcetera. This is a remorseless 996 — if you’ve heard the term — competitor.

So they’re like, “All right, we’re done with this. Now, hey, rest of the world — like Argentina with nukes — you want anything from us? You must have some gold somewhere. Hey, Americans, you got some gold somewhere? Why don’t you burn through Fort Knox maintaining your standard of living for the next five years? And when you’re done with that, maybe you can think of something else.”

You know, you’re in a situation where suddenly America is a third world country and has basically nothing to offer China, in much the same way that the Congo has nothing to offer China except raw materials. So your children will be like digging rare earths out of a hill with their bare hands, like miners or something, right?

Meanwhile, the Chinese people, having basically reaped the rewards of becoming the world’s leading industrial country, now have suddenly all their money turned into gold, their purchasing power. They’ve basically replaced foreign purchasing power for running their big economy with domestic purchasing power. They’ve lost their export market because they basically let their currency float back up. And they sort of did the bitcoin thing in my hypothetical with gold, so that everybody in China is like crypto rich but in gold, right? And they’re spending like crazy and the factories are buzzing, and here in the west, we’re like, “Does anyone have an egg?” An egg can be a real luxury in certain situations, right.

And so that’s a situation of sort of crushing dominance in a way for China. Now, it is true that our frontier AI models are six months ahead of theirs, or open source models or something. Maybe seven or eight months even. That’s not a huge amount of time. And the possibility that these things will plateau is very much there.

One of the effects — people are like, “Oh, this is an economic transformation that will bring only good things to the world.” I’m like, “Well, you could imagine it being kind of on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.” Nobody in my company — like OpenAI has already prohibited their developers from coding. People don’t code there anymore. And I’m basically in the process of doing the same thing at my company, right? And so I’m just like, “No, this is ridiculous. You can’t do this by hand anymore.”

And so it is an Industrial Revolution-like effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, one of the things that the Industrial Revolution did was destroy an enormous number of livelihoods, very, very early. I don’t know if you know the Oliver Goldsmith poem, “The Deserted Village.”

PETER MCCORMACK: No, I don’t.

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

PETER MCCORMACK: And they’re pretty much bankrupt.

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh, there you go. Right? And yeah, my son is a Premier League fan. And it’s interesting to see the difference in the Premier League demographic, you know, on the stands, in the streets, on the field.

PETER MCCORMACK: But Sheffield Wednesday have minus points.

CURTIS YARVIN: Wait, what?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, they have minus points.

CURTIS YARVIN: How is that possible?

PETER MCCORMACK: Because we have penalties for if you go bankrupt or if you have financial issues. So there’s different penalties. Some of them — they take away points off you. And so I think they started the season maybe minus 12 points. And so I think they’re still on — are they still on minus points? They’re minus 10.

CURTIS YARVIN: And how many divisions down can they go? Can they go to like semi-pro?

PETER MCCORMACK: No, they’ll only drop one. So they’ll drop down into League 1 next year. But they’re on minus points, so.

CURTIS YARVIN: Got it.

PETER MCCORMACK: But yeah, look, it’s.

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s League One, then the Championship, then the Premier League, right? Am I wrong?

AI and the Future of Work

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

AI, Labor Displacement, and the Resource Curse

CURTIS YARVIN: There’s two sort of courses where that goes in. And one of them, the optimistic one, which I’m sure Elon will give you, is the Jevons Paradox one where you’re like, well, it became much cheaper to create this stuff, so we need much more of it.

And I’m like, just taking my own company as an example. I’m just like, wow, we can deliver a lot more software much faster. That’s true. And we don’t need to fire anyone. We don’t need to fire anyone because everyone we have is capable of being an architect as well as an engineer. And now they’re only architects. There are no more engineers. They’re only architects. And if you can’t architect, you’re done, right? You’re John Henry competing with a locomotive now.

Are we still going to need architects? Certainly we still need them now. Like, definitely. I need to hold Claude’s hand, because I’m doing something interesting which it hasn’t really seen before. So I have to hold his hand, right? It’s still like, I’m solving problems that would have been week-long divagations in the development phase. And they just disappear in two hours, right?

And then I’m like, all right, so maybe we’ll have much more software. But you know what? What AI is also good at, and still improving at, is graphic design. Is graphic design going to exhibit the Jevons Paradox? Are we going to get much more graphic design because graphic design gets much easier? No, the product managers are just going to tell AI to do it. Actually, if you’re a graphic designer, you’re fed. If you’re a translator, you’re fed.

And so there are basically large classes of — in the English language at least — we use professional words to designate who we are. Many people are like, “I’m a graphic designer.” Sorry, it happened to the cobblers first.

And actually, what you’re seeing with AI is something that I think I have seen other people making this comparison. It’s kind of obvious, but it’s not enough talked about, which is the relationship between technology and the resource curse. If you know the resource curse, I don’t need to explain. It’s the economic phenomenon where a country strikes oil and everything in the country gets worse. Venezuela, for example, is the worst country structurally in South America, even though it’s the only one with really substantial amounts of oil. This is not a coincidence. This is seen all over the globe.

The problem is essentially — and the mediating factor is something called Dutch disease. What Dutch disease means is that you have this source of money, and that makes it easier to basically buy things overseas with that pile of money than to make them yourself. Do they make handbags in Saudi Arabia? I don’t think so. And so you basically get this destruction because the whole GDP of the country can be produced by like six guys. And so you get this destruction of labor demand.

The result is that very large numbers of people are forced to essentially turn to the political means of survival rather than the economic means, which means there is nothing that they can do that is helpful enough to their fellow human beings that those fellow human beings will feed them. And so they actually need to use their political power to get money. And that basically is what turns you into Venezuela.

And so in a world where you’re already starting to see this — people train to be software engineers. Well, you could be an architect. But the thing is, the best way to be an architect is to have written a lot of code for 10 years, and nobody’s writing any code anymore. So maybe the architects will just get gray hair and we’ll teach people how to — I mean, software managers who don’t know how to code, right?

And all these things go like demand for humans — literally, lawyers, accountants. My lawyers, they’re on their way out. Mine specifically — I’m going to take Claude to my family court case. And so you see this massive demand destruction. You see a relatively small number of people getting extremely filthy rich by being on the producing side of this. You do see a lot of conventional labor going into building data centers and so forth. But you’re already starting to see this phenomenon where the stock market booms and people’s employment is disappearing.

There are just many, many professions. There are some pieces of inefficiency in the market where you have a bullshit job for basically regulatory reasons or other things. Those bullshit jobs, because they’re held up by power, are going to stay — but they’re going to become even more obviously unnecessary. Whether those brittle structures can be broken is unclear.

But in terms of actually needing people — this is one of the things we found in COVID that was so crazy about COVID in 2020. Before the Fed got involved, it was going to have cannibalism in the streets. And once the Fed got involved, they’re just like, “It’s no problem, everyone. Nobody has to work. We don’t actually need to work in this country.” The only people we need to work are the food delivery guys. They can wear masks and bring us food, and the rest of us will just print money.

And they just printed money and the stock market, which should have gone down, went up. And so that can’t last forever.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

CURTIS YARVIN: And they just printed money and the stock market, which should go down, went right up. And so that can’t last forever.

PETER MCCORMACK: You can do it temporarily.

Hard Money, Soft Currency, and the Collapse of Paper Money

CURTIS YARVIN: The thing is that the just world fallacy always plays a factor there. And when your intuition is that that can’t last forever, it’s important to separate that intuition from actual mechanisms.

For example, when you talk about people exiting the financial system, you basically see a situation where people stop saving in the currency — or in the standard currency — because saving in a different currency, despite the lack of actual financial markets in that currency, will do better. And so that’s especially true in the sort of rush to an exit.

This is the kind of traditional collapse structure of paper money. In the Soviet Union, for example, which really abused their paper money, you developed this concept of hard currency versus soft currency. In 20th century, really mismanaged economic third world or communist countries, hard currency meant the dollar or gold, which were considered of equivalent hardness because they were of comparable hardness.

And so when you imagine whole economies fleeing to basically a parallel financial system — that’s somewhat ahead of where we are — there are all these structural restrictions to it. Like, it used to be very hard to buy Bitcoin. You had to go to Mt. Gox, right? And then later on you had to use Coinbase. And now these things are getting closer and closer to just calling your bank and saying, “I’d like to basically have my savings account in Bitcoin or in gold, or in Zcash, rather than pounds.”

There’s no technical reason why, for example, a bank in the UK can’t offer dollar savings accounts. All these currencies are kind of locked together, so it doesn’t really matter that much. But they could. In Argentina, for a while before the Corralito, they were offering dollar accounts to Argentinians — which were not, however, backed by actual dollars.

PETER MCCORMACK: They didn’t switch.

CURTIS YARVIN: They learned some lessons there. And I think in Argentina they have something ridiculous like as many paper dollars as there are in the United States, some insanity like that.

So you have ways that essentially frictional effects keep people in the system. And then of course, they have to be in the system to gamble on OpenAI.

In fact, one of the craziest things about our financial system — and to people who are serious economists or financial people and really believe that there’s basically nothing wrong here — I’m basically like, well, you know what is really wrong? A concept that actually should not exist and makes no sense. I’ll give you two words: passive investing.

You’re just like, “Actually I have no alpha. I’m not adding any information to this information market.” But there is something else called beta. And what is beta? Beta is the government printing money. If you have a hard money financial system, you will not have beta.

PETER MCCORMACK: Buy an index fund.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, right. And so you’re forced to take on risk that you don’t want. Because actually, if you’re like, “I want money in 30 years” — in a financial system that is sane and stable — you’re like, “I want to move my spending power from now to 30 years from now.” So I need to find somebody who wants a mortgage, wants to move the spending power in the other direction, and that will create an interest rate.

And really, if I just know I want to take this money out in 2056, I should buy a CD maturing in 2056, and that will be the best value. And that CD — let alone leaving your checking account — that CD will be utterly massacred by an index fund. And that’s why we force you to gamble. It’s a completely crazy system.

The only people that should be in an information market, which is a prediction market, are two kinds of people: people who have alpha, and people who think they have alpha. And what a financial market should be is a zero-sum game. It’s like Polymarket’s zero-sum game. It’s people who have alpha taking money from people who think they have alpha. It’s like professional poker — you have the fish, and the fish are what you eat. If you’re an advantage player and you’re in a room full of advantage players, it’s like you’re in a singles bar but it’s a sausage fest. They don’t want to play each other.

The Pace of AI Disruption and the Jobs Crisis

PETER MCCORMACK: So your view on AI — I think you’re right. And I think the pace of change is what’s going to frighten people. The pace of change of six-figure salaries just being wiped out and not returning. I don’t know — it could be a couple with three kids, and he’s a lawyer on $150,000 and she’s a marketing exec on $120,000. They live a nice middle-class lifestyle, and suddenly in 12 months neither has a job and there’s no job to go to.

And how we shift based on that — we looked it up the other day — 17.7% of all jobs in the UK are basically in accounting, law, creative, or HR industries. And even if you’ve lost half of those jobs, that’s millions of jobs lost with nothing to go to instead. And then if that happens, they have to sell their houses. So we’re going to have a deflationary moment in the housing market. Are we going to have to go to UBI?

This is something that feels 12 to 18 months out. The Microsoft AI CEO said this is 12 to 18 months out. Claude is replacing industries. SaaS products — basically if you’ve got shares of a SaaS product, you’re at high risk at the moment. What is this? What you want to happen versus what is going to happen — where is your head at with that?

GDP, Hedonism, and the Design of a 21st Century Polity

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, what I feel in the proper design of a polity for the 21st century — to me, maximizing GDP and maximizing well-being are different things. Because when you’re maximizing GDP, you’re maximizing hedonism essentially. That’s what GDP is measuring. It’s like, how much fun did the economy produce?

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

The Robot Economy and Immigration

CURTIS YARVIN: I think that in order to operate a functional society in the 21st century, that view of economics needs to change to a view in which you’re like, no, the real goal of economic management is matching a labor supply with labor demand — basically making sure that every normal healthy human being in the system is demanded. What do you do with all the Uber drivers 12 to 18 months? So many things of that kind.

And you see, in a way, both foreign trade and migration is actually a little taste of the future. Because when you’re importing basically slave labor, you’re treating them like optimist robots. You don’t have a social connection to your optimist robot, and you don’t have a social connection to your Uber driver — Muhammad from Oman. You just don’t. And one of them is a very human being. One of them is not. But the distance on the social graph from you to Muhammad from Oman probably runs through some Gulf Prince or something, and it’s like 30 steps long.

And when you have basically a labor class that is not socially connected to the labor demanding class, that’s already a robot economy, that’s already a slave economy, basically.

Somebody on Twitter came up with something really nice about the whole immigration system that I really loved. He said, “What this immigration phenomenon is, is what you’re seeing is Americans have become half abolitionist and half slaveholder.” They’re abolitionists because they have the moral theories of abolitionists. But actually the labor structure of their economy is very reminiscent of the Confederacy.

And what you will see with these immigration crackdowns is limousine liberals in Santa Monica being like, “Anna Maria can’t take care of my children today.” Because Anna Maria didn’t get emancipated exactly, but something like that — she got deported. And the result is the same. Anna Maria is not there. And you’re going to have to go to your law job. Oh wait, that doesn’t exist anyway, so why don’t you take care of the kids?

And that’s what you’re seeing. I think we’re seeing the same thing — this system, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in a lot of different ways, is kind of surviving on these frictional structures. And then when the friction evaporates, it’s just gone. And what do these people do? I don’t know. Nobody’s starving in America. There’s soup kitchens, SNAP cards, EBT, you can sell the house, you can live on that for a while. It’s kind of grim.

Moreover, you have this situation where, at the same time as these countries import huge numbers of military aged men to do menial labor, they have large numbers of people in the country who are not even capable of doing menial labor because they’re just like tower block chavs. And actually, work is entirely beyond them. Work is not beyond Muhammad from Oman. And so you have this huge problem of people who don’t know how to work, are not interested in work, and are certainly not interested in working with their hands.

AI is leading you to confront this problem of matching these things. And even before AI, you’d already been screwing it up for 30 years.

A Fork in the Road

PETER MCCORMACK: So we are at a fork in the road where, for most of these nations, they’ve got really two options. One is to head to a much more socialist path to try and win votes and secure power, and the other option is a much more disciplined, nationalist approach.

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, there’s a third approach, which is the default approach, which is just everything turns into the Third World. Because the Third World is exactly like this. In any third world country — and I don’t know how much time you spend in a third world country — there are very, very rich people who live very, very well. Although it is very expensive to live well as a rich person in the Third World, labor is very cheap, but other things are not.

PETER MCCORMACK: But this is the socialist path. To me, the Third World — well, it’s kind of the same.

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

PETER MCCORMACK: But do you think the UK is heading towards that third world version?

CURTIS YARVIN: Of course. It’s already there in so many different ways.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

CURTIS YARVIN: You can’t — I guess you don’t have shanty towns really here, or anything quite like that.

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

The Predator and the Charge

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s the start. It’s the start. And here’s how that’s going to continue. One of the things you’re seeing politically, as this old mind management system breaks up and people get red pilled in various ways — you might think that people getting red pilled is something that would really put a stop to this craziness of population replacement. But actually, it’s quite very much the reverse.

Anyone who’s totally lost faith in the left, in a way — they have many complaints with the left, but it all boils down to recognizing that this is not a vegetarian thing. This is a predator. And when a predator such as a lion is hunting, there are basically two phases of the pursuit: the stalk and the charge.

The stalk is like, well, nobody really knows what’s going on here. Take the demographic replacement in the US — it’s from the 1965 Immigration Act, and politicians swore up and down that this was not what it was. Basically since that act, it’s brought like 100 million people from the Third World into the US. Something like solid, solid numbers like that.

But in order to do that, you couldn’t have this giant boat lift where some gigantic version of the Empire Windrush brought 100 million people at the same time. It’s more a case of slowly, slowly, catchy, catchy fish — where you’re kind of tickling it and saying, “Oh yeah, our hearts are welcoming, we’re open.” All of this stuff that is, of course, unbelievably sinister, because it’s trading on people’s goodwill and good wishes. It’s like a con.

But when enough people see the con — and all these systems are incentive based, they’re not based on planning, the left is not run by some cabal, it’s incentives that drive things — what you’re seeing, especially in what used to be called the white dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zealand especially, is they’re starting to speed run. They’re starting to come out of their crouch and basically just be like, “Yeah, actually we’re—”

In the 21st century, I think they’ve increased the population of Canada by like 35%. And even that is small. The Spanish government was just like, “We’re going to legalize 500,000.” But that’s just an estimate of how many people that plan will suck in — it will probably be more like over a million. And those people are Schengen. They can go anywhere in Europe, and you will see them do that.

And what you could see in the US — if basically the next time Democrats win the presidency — people are going to be like, “Mass immigration? No, we’ve not seen mass immigration. We have no idea what mass immigration is.” Mass immigration is not 2 million people entering the US a year. I wouldn’t call it mass until it was like 10 million a year. And mass immigration is really the 10 to 15, 50 to 100 million a year.

PETER MCCORMACK: But that’s what could spark civil war.

CURTIS YARVIN: No, no.

PETER MCCORMACK: I don’t know. I’m seeing it here.

CURTIS YARVIN: No, because people have no balls. They will not resist. All of the thought that they will get their muskets and put on their tricornered hats or whatever — when you go back into the period when people actually did this, you’re just like, f*, these people are completely alien to us. It will never happen. It won’t happen at all.

What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa, which is that they will just acknowledge that they’ve lost all of their power forever, and then they will sit quietly in their houses and build more and more barbed wire and electric fences until finally they are exterminated in one big pogrom. That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children. Unless your money will — money will be a fair protection, as it is in South Africa.

The Rise of Ethno-Nationalism

PETER MCCORMACK: But the reaction here, Curtis, is that we’re seeing the rise of ethno-nationalism and debates around re-migration, which was something people wouldn’t even have discussed a decade ago. Deportations sounds like something the Nazis might do, or it sounds racist. And sure, the left are calling it racist, but it now could be a vote winner, it could be an election winner.

CURTIS YARVIN: It could be an election winner. But winning elections is really just the start. And as we have seen over and over again, winning elections is really just the start.

Going back to the Farage versus Slow question — the Overton window — you’re basically like, there are people that will tell you, as we have already discussed, that Farage is not real, Nigel is real. And Nigel is actually a very deep and cagey thinker.

PETER MCCORMACK: But who wants to be Prime Minister? Nigel or Farage?

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, that’s what Dominic found with Boris. Basically, Dom wanted to actually do things with the UK government. They get into Number 10 and he realizes that Boris, for all his legendary brain power, just wants to sit in Number 10 and look good — like any other occupant of Number 10, for really quite some time. His goal is just to stay on the horse, which is one of the great metaphors from Carlyle from 170 years ago. He’s not riding the horse in any direction. The horse will go in whatever direction it goes. He just wants to stay on the horse. And in Carlyle’s metaphor, the horse is following its own footsteps in a circle.

So maybe Farage, maybe Nigel wants to rule. It’s hard to know. But Rupert wants to rule.

PETER MCCORMACK: So actually, I’m going to disagree with you. I think Nigel — I think Farage builds a lot of political capital by being Farage.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yes.

PETER MCCORMACK: And I think—

CURTIS YARVIN: Does he want to spend it on being Nigel?

PETER MCCORMACK: I don’t think he does. I think he thinks he cannot win as Nigel, and I think that’s going to be potentially his mistake. There’s a lot that Rupert has to do. I think the great thing about Rupert is he doesn’t want to be Prime Minister. He feels he has a duty. He’s like that — who’s the Greek? Kinesia. I can’t remember his name.

CURTIS YARVIN: Cincinnatus. Roman. Not Greek.

Power, Duty, and the Nature of Political Ambition

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

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, but the thing is, the sense of duty — sensing that power is a duty rather than a privilege, or rather than a source of status — it’s a burden. It’s a burden, right?

And the thing is, when you don’t see it as a burden, I have a lot of good things to say about Trump, but ultimately, I don’t think that Trump sees power as a burden. And that’s why, in a perverse way, that’s why he doesn’t really want more of it. He doesn’t understand the people who want power.

The libs, actually, really do. It’s a compulsion. It’s a craving, but in their minds, it’s a duty. It’s like, basically, in the mind of a heroin addict, it must feel sort of like God needs you to get heroin, like, now, right? And so the libs feel this duty. Everyone who grew up watching the f*ing West Wing or whatever, they feel this duty. And we kind of don’t.

The furthest thing from Elon Musk’s mind is, “It is my duty to get more power.” That’s, in fact, what everyone is accusing him of thinking — him and all the other dissident billionaires. And when somebody accuses you of something which is not true, your immediate impulse is, of course, to deny it. And that locks you into that denial pretty hard.

And so actually, you have this strange situation where these people are accused of having this power craving, which actually they should have — in the form of, like, come on, Elon, your duty is Earth, not Mars, right? Much better planet. Much better planet. And you sort of see that their will is to evade that duty.

So, for example, when Trump won the election, if he had recognized governing as a duty, he would have realized that dicking around with executive orders is not a thing with a lot of legs. He actually needs to take control of Congress, which is hard, but possible with his razor slim majorities. If he was — if I can coin a word — power-maxing with two X’s, right? He would have basically been like, “All right, how do I use my little foothold in the White House to actually get to the point where FDR was at, where I could write legislation in the White House?”

But he does not have a burning need to write legislation in the White House. He has a burning need to look good on camera and be the leader of the free world. His enemies have a burning need for power. He doesn’t. What the hell is going to happen?

And when that need comes from — I mean, the relationship in the minds of what Abraham Lincoln called “the family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle” — the relationship between ambition and a sense of duty, say, for example, in the mind of someone like Napoleon, is complicated. But did Napoleon feel that his duty was to rule France? He absolutely did.

I was reading a little bit about Lowe, and I was struck by the fact that Lowe’s personal hero is also my personal hero. And that’s, of course, Cromwell, right?

The Cromwell Parallel

PETER MCCORMACK: Happy to cut the head of a king.

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, actually, of course, there are two Cromwells, and we could —

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, we could. Have I got the wrong one?

CURTIS YARVIN: No, you have the right one.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

CURTIS YARVIN: You have the right one. Although I don’t know that that was entirely Cromwell’s decision, because I don’t think he was completely in control of the whole situation at that point.

PETER MCCORMACK: He gets the credit.

CURTIS YARVIN: He gets the credit. Right. And then there was the one who dealt with the monasteries, which also has, I think, resonance in our day.

I was thinking about this for something that I’m writing recently, and the question, in a way, is how far back you have to go to revise history. How far back do you have to go to delineate a period whose echoes are still present today? And I think the number is about 500 years. That basically takes you to the point when Henry VIII is like, “No, I’m going to do my own thing.”

The real OG in English history — and ultimately world history, because England took over the world — is Henry VII. He’s just a massive founder-energy figure. The guy barely even has a legitimate claim to the throne. He’s Welsh, right. And somehow he pulls this off and creates the modern English nation state by reassembling England from the Wars of the Roses.

But he’s a skinflint. He manages money very, very tightly. And then Henry VIII likes to spend money. And the thing about Henry VII is that there isn’t really any news. Nothing really happens. He reigns from, like, 1485 to 1512 or something like that. No drama. Imagine 27 years or whatever it is of English politics with no drama. Nothing happens during the reign of Henry VII — certainly not in the way that it happens with the rest of the Tudors.

And so the idea of Cromwell specifically — and this is what is so inspiring about Cromwell for Carlyle — is that Cromwell is just like, “Look, I’m here. I’m going to deal with the realities. There’s a lot of bullshit. We got rid of the old, fusty, monarchist bullshit, but now we have this weird, psycho Puritan, Independent, Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers, Levellers bullshit.”

Because modernity is really happening at that point. It’s really kicked off, and you have people who could just be leftists in Glastonbury tomorrow, running around in the 17th century. And Cromwell is just like, “I just have to run the English state and make it extremely badass.” And I think there are many elements of the Cromwellian state that survive the Restoration and that are basically core to England today.

History Rhyming: Civil War, LARPing, and the Collapse of Power

PETER MCCORMACK: And do you think that we’re essentially in a very similar position now? And it’s perhaps, if only, history rhymes?

CURTIS YARVIN: But the thing about, when you talk about civil war, for example, coming out of these things — most people who talk about civil war in that sense are at least in some way LARPing. They’re projecting a vanished world into the present.

One of the things that we really learned from the second Trump administration is, you must be familiar with the line: “We can just do things.” And I think somewhere subconsciously in Washington, people of the governing class persuasion really thought that if you did something like abolishing USAID — one of the oldest, most revered, most prestigious organizations in the federal government — they really thought, without thinking it consciously, that if something like that was done, the blacks of Anacostia would rise up. And I’m just like, no. No, the blacks of Anacostia will not rise up. Foreign service officers will not be forming barricades and tearing up cobblestones in the streets of Georgetown. That’s not how it works.

You also see that tremendous LARPing in the fall of the Soviet system. Because the Soviet system comes out of this revolutionary Bolshevik tradition where it’s just like, “You have to be hard and kill the enemies of the workers and peasants, and you’re a revolutionary.” And as soon as it starts to fall, these people who have lived in this LARP where they’re revolutionaries realize that they’re not actually revolutionaries at all.

When the Soviet Union falls, it has, like, 500,000 trained KGB special forces. These people are literally trained to kill. What do they do? They do nothing. Because they’re not a bunch of killers.

And if you’re in the Stasi — the day before the Stasi falls, you’re a major in the Stasi in East Germany. It’s like being a New York Times reporter. Everybody wants to know you. Everybody wants to be your friend. You’re just a big swinging presence. People with power just have this aura — people have been sucking up to them for so long. You meet a bigwig major media reporter and they have this vibe where every cell in their body knows they’re an important person. And that’s what it must have been like to be a major in the Stasi. Everybody knows you. “Can you help with this? Can I?” Right. And sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.

Day after it falls, you’re like, “All right, I’m a major in the Stasi. This is a revolutionary organization that goes back to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. And if the imperialists ever come in, we’ll fight them in the cafes. We’ll be building bombs.” Day after? You go to work. Building’s locked. Card key doesn’t work. Try to log in — password not recognized. You’re just like, “Oh, I guess I need to go start building bombs.” No. You don’t go start building bombs. Because you’re not a cafe revolutionary and it’s not 1931. You realize, “Oh, wait. That was a LARP. I better hope they pay me my pension.”

And then when they do pay you your pension — and I think the German government is still paying pensions to Stasi veterans —

PETER MCCORMACK: What?

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh, yeah. Because when you win, you take ownership of those people. They’re your people now. You own the whole thing. And you’re just like, “Yeah, all right, you worked for the system. Everybody worked for the system, whatever.” I think they actually cut the Stasi’s very generous pay package to some extent.

Taking Control: DOGE, Whitehall, and Parliamentary Power

PETER MCCORMACK: But what does it all mean for now?

CURTIS YARVIN: What it means for now is that basically, if Rupert Lowe comes in — it’s like the end of Inception, suddenly everything is just falling down — and treats Whitehall like the Stasi.

Because here’s another thing that we learned from the Trump administration, largely from the kids at DOGE. These kids at DOGE were not operating in a highly AI-enabled way. But what they realized is that actually taking control of these things simply through their IT systems is really extremely possible.

And so what you do, if you’re really dedicated to absolute change, is — all right, it’s here in England. It’s easy. There’s nothing, no English constitutional tradition more sacred than the absolute powers of Parliament.

PETER MCCORMACK: And if you win a parliamentary majority —

The Tragedy of Reform and the Problem of Authentic Labor

CURTIS YARVIN: If you win a parliamentary majority, absolutely. Somebody. I was talking to this line, and somebody was like, “Well, they might use the king.” I’m like, wow. That thing in Spain, they couldn’t pass it through the legislature, so they’re doing it as a royal decree. And they have this poor playboy prince, son of the completely useless Juan Carlos II, who’s like, even more corrupt and useless. And basically, what it means to him to be king is he has been taught that the modern way of being a king is that you sign whatever is put in front of you.

So I could see it, actually, because those reserve powers still exist under law. I don’t think that they have the strength to do that. But the idea that Rupert Lowe is like, “All right, we’re dissolving the Foreign Office. Why do we need a Foreign Office? If we have something to say to the French, we’ll just Zoom.” I don’t really think that the workers and peasants of England are going to rise up if that happens. And I also do not see the mandarins of the Foreign Office taking to violence.

And the effect, once you’re doing big things — actually, the tragedy of the Trump administration is with things like USAID, you started to see pieces of that fall of East Germany psychology where morale just collapses. Once you’ve taken down the Stasi, the rest of the East German government is not going to offer any resistance whatsoever.

And in the modern AI-enabled world, you’re like, “All right, how are you going to do this?” This government does all this stuff in all these ways. You’re like, “All right, we’re going to identify all the real service points that people need to rely on. We’re not going to have any chaos or whatever. Your import license or whatever will go through.” We will identify all the real service points of this government. We will instantly cut everything else. So it’s basically like the direct service points, 5 to 10% of staff. Then for that, you keep operating those things as is for the moment.

But what you’re really going to do is you’re going to image the servers and operate it with a completely different team that has full access to those files and every email they ever sent. And you can basically just reboot that organization functionally with a completely different set of people and much fewer people at that.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. Well, like Elon Musk did with X.

CURTIS YARVIN: That’s right. He took it from like 3,000 engineers to like 30. Is some sht broken? Yeah, some sht is broken, but not much. And even that was an iterative process. It was a process of attrition. He didn’t just say, “Oh, I’m bringing my 30 guys in here, we’re going to image the servers and everybody else go home.” It sort of worked out that way in the end, but he also did not have these tools at that time in order to do that. And so when you’re really there to rule and you come in and you’re in charge, you’re basically just like, “Why would I keep using these organizations?”

PETER MCCORMACK: This is kind of the tragedy then of reform, because their original appeal was they weren’t the establishment — they were anti-establishment — and they’ve morphed into the establishment. They’re talking about repealing some laws and they’re talking about, well, weren’t that—

Reform’s Deck Chair Rearrangement

CURTIS YARVIN: Wait, wait. The thing that I heard was just so huge that I can barely wrap my head around it. I think Farage was talking about even as high as a 10% cut in the beer tax.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, 5p.

CURTIS YARVIN: And I’m just like — that is like levels of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That is just full-out comedy.

PETER MCCORMACK: You know, save any pubs. Look, the thing that’s going to save pubs is getting rid of business rates and getting rid of a minimum—

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s just so beyond that even. You know, there’s this book — you must know the writer Kingsley Amis.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, I know the name. I don’t know him as a writer.

CURTIS YARVIN: He’s the father of Martin Amis, who is perhaps somewhat better known these days, but a great mid-century writer. He wrote this book that is one of his later books, which is really very little known. It’s called Russian Hide and Seek. And it takes place in an England that has been conquered by Soviet Russia like 40 years ago or so previously. And there’s a new generation of apparatchiks who are actually like Anglophiles and they’re like, “We’re going to restore English culture, we’re going to restore England, we’re going to have maypoles,” and so on.

Not to spoil anyone’s experience of this lovely book, but basically they’re kind of trying to resuscitate a corpse. Are there pubs in England? Yes, there are. Are there cobblers in England? Yes, there are. You don’t get all of your shoes from Vietnam.

The Game Designer Analogy: Labor, Meaning, and AI

But I think to sort of bring the level of the revolution that is needed home — in a sense, what you’re basically seeing, especially with AI but in retrospect also with the Industrial Revolution in a way, is that the power that man is acquiring over the physical world starts to resemble in some ways the power that a game designer has over the virtual world.

And one of the things we see about the virtual worlds that game designers create is that there are always monsters in them. There’s always difficulty. You always have to grind. And that is exactly because the job of the game designer is to create labor demand. The laborer is the player. And the player not only has to grind — this is why gamers have the term “grinding” — but really the goal is to have the grinding be fun.

So what you’re trying to do in your cornucopia, Aaron Bastani, fully automated luxury communism world is you’ve created a video game that sucks because there is no difficulty, there is no danger. You’ve created Wall-E World — that old Pixar film.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, you’ve created — have you played Socialist Monopoly?

CURTIS YARVIN: No. What is that?

PETER MCCORMACK: So I’ve got it — Monopoly Socialism. I bought a copy of it and I played it with my kids. It never ends. The game never ends. You can’t win the game because if you get anywhere, it redistributes.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, but the thing is, in a world where you do not need — what the game designer can do is change the rules of the world to make the game harder in a way that works. So he’s like, “This virtual world is boring without monsters. So we’re going to have monsters.” Minecraft didn’t used to have monsters. And then they were like, “No, we need mobs.” And so you create monsters, you create danger.

Danger in real life — different thing, but maybe you could see it. Why do people do extreme sports? War is the ultimate extreme sport. There’s that form of danger. You change the rules of the world and you say, “All right, war is part of humanity. Humans without violence are not humans. They’re sheep. They’re some other life form.” Actually, men need war to live. The problem isn’t war. The problem is artillery. The problem isn’t war. The problem is everything that makes war really sh*tty. We’re going to have war, but we’re going to have rules of war. And the rules of war are going to be like, no explosives, no electricity, no chemicals. You’ve got to go full Homer.

Or you could basically say, well, the world in which your shoes are created by a printer or by slave labor in Vietnam doesn’t really change anything. The thing is, you get shoes without work. So actually, a world in which you get shoes without work doesn’t really work, because people need to do something. And one thing is, you can take anyone with an IQ of 90 and you can make them a very good shoemaker. You can take someone with an IQ of 90 and make them an artisan who can do things that would just blow either of us away.

Authenticity, Effort, and the Ready Player One Problem

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, this is the Ready Player One problem. I would love to walk on stage and play guitar for Metallica at Wembley Stadium.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: You have to.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

CURTIS YARVIN: And you haven’t earned your shoes. You know, this Neruda line — “struggle, iron and volcanoes.” And so you have this force that on the one hand is an impoverishing force. And then people are like, “Oh, well, we’ll give you UBI,” which you can spend on your shoes that are no longer made in Vietnam but are now made in the UK by robots. And you’re still living like a child. It’s this sort of massive dehumanization of the human race.

And the alternative is to say, no, actually, now that we have all this productive power, we need to actually design a world like a video game. And crafting in video games — if you want a pair of shoes, you have to craft the shoes. That’s artificial labor demand. You can’t just click a button and clone 100,000 of the shoes. There’s no shortage of bits to do that. But actually if you did that, it would kill crafting.

And so you basically realize that in a way, in the kind of world that you have to create here, it’s like everything is fake. In order to ban machine-made shoes from Vietnam, you have to have a guy at the port who looks in the container and is like, “I knew it. Shoes.” And treats it like cocaine. Because those shoes will actually destroy the lives of good British artisans who have to make shoes by hand from all British materials.

PETER MCCORMACK: So—

CURTIS YARVIN: So that is a complete restructuring of the way we live.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s almost like the reverse Ready Player One. We have to construct an authentic real world for people to live in and have purpose.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Otherwise—

The Etsy-ification of the Economy

CURTIS YARVIN: And that authentic real world has to be one with rules that prevent it from becoming purposelessness. And so it’s like, if you look at Luddites, the sort of the way you think in terms of Luddites is like, let’s ban the new technology, let’s ban AI, let’s ban genome sequencers. Something, something, something actually to fix the economy. It’s the old technology that you have to ban. It’s the first things that were killed by the industrial revolution. And you’re just like, what are like 10 million people going to do? And you’re just like, well actually they could make shirts. And like if there was no way to make a shirt by machine, then you know, your shirts cost $200. Yeah, you know, but like, that productivity is coming out of the cornucopia of AI and the person who made the shirt actually enjoyed making the shirt. And it’s a nice frickin shirt. It’s sort of the Etsy-ification of the economy essentially.

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

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

PETER MCCORMACK: You can’t.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, but if you’re trying to do it in a non-libertarian way and you’re basically doing full on William Morris guild socialism, actually it can. And so, yeah, you’re actually back in. And this was sort of a dream in a way of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th century. They were a little early on that, but they basically — I mean this is also Carlylean because this is like Ruskin, who was a Carlylean. They sort of recognized that the dignity of fulfilling work is essentially work that challenges you to your limits. That is actually the thing that we desire, should desire most. And not luxury or fentanyl or coke whores or whatever. No, we should want to be cobblers.

You know, there’s this great — you must know the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, he stopped making films to go and be a cobbler.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, I’m like, if it’s good enough for Daniel Day-Lewis — not only an actor, but also an aristocrat. He apprenticed to an Italian cobbler for a couple of years. Right. And it’s like, actually — and I’m sure those were very high end shoes, and I’m sure they were not cheap. Right.

But the thing is, you can construct — your society has to be a little bit of a video game with video game-like rules. Like, we’re going to treat this container full of shoes from Vietnam like it was cocaine. Right. And that is not a libertarian thing. It’s just not a libertarian thing. And expecting it to happen spontaneously on its own in a libertarian way — no, you’re going to get the third world.

And so in a way, when you look at the sort of Carlylean Cromwellian kind of picture — I mean, Cromwell’s government really took total responsibility, as did the royal governments before it. There was nothing libertarian about either Cromwell or the Tudors. Right. But kind of accepting that responsibility to rule is a huge thing. It’s like you actually have to have that really, that Cincinnatus spirit.

Farage vs. Nigel

And one of the things — like, when you just talk about Low — you said something earlier that was very, very insightful, because you basically said that the problem is that Farage is making a mistake because basically he’s a boomer, and because he’s a boomer, he thinks only Farage can get elected and Nigel cannot get elected.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. I haven’t voted in three elections. I would have voted for Nigel. I can’t vote for Farage because I know —

CURTIS YARVIN: Exactly.

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m at a disadvantage because I know both of them.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: No, it’s because it’s not actually what sells.

PETER MCCORMACK: And in a world where you can see behind the veil, you know, it’s all bullshit. You know, every politician pretty much is —

CURTIS YARVIN: F* — break the fourth wall, dude.

Keir Starmer and Basic Economics

PETER MCCORMACK: Today. Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister. Listen to this. This is how retarded our government is today. Our Prime Minister tweeted out this — yeah, where is it? — “The choices this Labour government have made means inflation has fallen today to its lowest rate in a year. Lower food and petrol prices are helping ease the pressure on household budgets.” And I retweeted them, I said, “It’s a strange world where you’re having to teach basic economics to our Prime Minister.” Anyway. Inflation falling doesn’t mean lower prices, it just means prices are rising at a lower rate. But this is the level of incompetence we’re dealing with.

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh, yeah.

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

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

PETER MCCORMACK: But they’re really nationalist.

The Problem of Political Evasion

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, of course, of course, of course. You know, and the thing is, it’s like that transitional phase — my friend Jeremy Carl had a rough time in his Senate hearing the other day, because he has this sort of problem of basically fitting. He has to basically complain about race communism without calling it race communism or violating any of the taboos of race communism. That’s really pretty hard.

And if you watch the way that Farage — not Nigel, but Farage — will basically be attacked on these points and very skillfully evade them, you admire the skill with which he evades them. But fundamentally, as did Jeremy Carl the other day, when you’re evading, people might find that you seem evasive. And Low just simply doesn’t do this — or at least not that. I’m just observing the latest things. Low doesn’t do this.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I’ll give you an example. Do you know who Matt Goodwin is?

CURTIS YARVIN: Yes.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. So I like Matt. He’s been here a couple of times, hung out with him.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Highly principled. But he’s now running for a seat in Gorton and Denton, or somewhere — it’s somewhere in Manchester. There’s a complete personality shift that he’s had to go through to fit into the party. And it’s so obvious, I can see it. And I get why he’s had to do it, because he has to now go and win a seat which has a large percentage of Muslims in that area. He has to pretend who he isn’t.

CURTIS YARVIN: But at the same time, it’s like seeing your friend transform into a lizard.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s — the guy got a girlfriend and now he doesn’t want to come to the football because he’s going shopping or he’s doing the gardening. It’s like — but then you go to Rupert’s Twitter, like, I’ll give you a couple of examples.

CURTIS YARVIN: What time do you have, by the way?

PETER MCCORMACK: We’re at 2. We got another half hour.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

Rupert Low and the Zero Fucks Party

PETER MCCORMACK: So, “A Restore Britain government would hold a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty.” I mean, that’s — I don’t agree with it. I don’t want the state killing people. But he’s there. What else has he got here? “Restore Britain would abolish the OBR.” I mean, it so obviously has to happen — all their predictions are f*ing wrong. I mean, if you just go through — yeah, here’s my deportations book. He’s just like — he’s gone. You know what I want? Zero fucks. Yeah, zero fucks. Here’s my zero fucks party.

And you know what I really like about them is that they’ve recognized there are two votes in the next election — establishment and anti-establishment — and they have to stay in that lane. And I like the fact they’ve talked about, “We don’t want any other failed MPs.” I mean, Reform are just a bunch of architects of failure. They just want to get experts — like your thesis. He’s the CEO. He needs to build his board.

CURTIS YARVIN: You need actually — well, Parliament shouldn’t even be the board. Parliament should be a rubber stamp. And the thing is, actually the effect of bringing in people who are not politicians is that they’re trivial to whip, because they don’t have political careers. They’re just part of this thing, right? They’re just party members. And being an MP is like a sort of dignity that they’re given. They’re not like actual players.

And the thing is, basically the effect of bringing all these players from the Tory party — which has now sort of reconstituted itself under the smile of Farage — is, it’s only a matter of time. Is he going to take Kemi? What would happen if Kemi applied?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, even Kemi today — like, “I’m in politics for people like my dad” — some fake-ass video, and I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in politics for yourself. Like, you were going to become the leader of the Conservative Party. You didn’t get it. You know they’re not going to win. You’re looking at Reform, think Reform might win. I’m kind of like the largest name now. And if there’s a problem with Nigel, I become the de facto leader. That’s my fastest route to be Prime Minister. Stop f*ing bullshitting me.

The Acceptable Level of Puffery

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, it’s like the FDR in the wheelchair thing. It’s like a certain next level of puffery is kind of standard and acceptable. And it’s like the people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 when he was going about lying and saying, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.” Right. Which is especially interesting considering his own questionable sexuality — at least I have questions.

PETER MCCORMACK: We’re not going there.

CURTIS YARVIN: We’re not going there. Right, yeah, yeah, we could actually fill up the next half hour with questions.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

CURTIS YARVIN: But the thing is, his voters were like, “Oh yeah, he’s lying. He’s lying for a good cause. That’s cool.” And that sort of acceptance — again, this is very, very Carlylean, and I really implore you to read the Latter-Day Pamphlets, which is the great Carlyle work — because he’s just like, people just accept that there’s all this, in this hugely important thing of government — he’s just like, people are like, “Oh, that’s a sham. Oh, he doesn’t really believe that.”

You know, people watch that video and nobody watching it — nobody who cares enough to watch a Robert Jenrick video — is so simple that they actually believe what he’s saying. No, they’re like, “Oh, that’s the right tone for him to be striking.” They sort of review it in this kind of meta sense. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s some good, tasty bullshit. That’s from the bullshit region of France.”

PETER MCCORMACK: Go shake some people’s hands.

The Milosevic Moment and the Power of Authenticity

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

PETER MCCORMACK: I remember. You remember, I went to Yugoslavia for the war.

CURTIS YARVIN: On what side?

PETER MCCORMACK: I know I went there when I was five years old.

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, this was the 80s.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, this was 1983. We went to — and how old?

CURTIS YARVIN: 83.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: Well, Slobo was a mid-level communist bureaucrat, and things started breaking up. And he basically goes down to Kosovo, which is this historic territory where they’ve been sort of demographically swamped by Albanians. And he says to the Serbs — in Serbian, of course — he has this sort of great, classic line of populist politics. He’s like, “No one will dare to beat you anymore.”

Right. That is the essence of populist politics. Like, basically you are being beaten, you are being abused. And the first problem that you have to solve here is your battered wife syndrome. You have battered wife syndrome up the wazoo. You have Stockholm syndrome. You actually love your abuser. You’re doing all of it.

And so you have this mindset. You’re like, “I need to fix my husband.” No, you don’t — you usually leave your husband. And so the vibe of like, you need to leave your husband — that people can even process that is like something where, well, you know, it’s politics. You’re not leaving your husband just to be alone. You’re leaving your husband for someone you just met.

And so when that guy has that level of authenticity where he just awakens something electric deep within your body that you thought was going to sleep forever — “No one will dare to beat you anymore” — you can sort of transform apathy into reality. It’s like that contrast between nobody sees the fake thing until the real thing is next to it.

Growing Up Between Worlds

Something that happened to me — I had this weird experience where I lived in Cyprus as a kid. And not only was I in Cyprus, I was going to the English school in Cyprus, which is a sort of faux British public school.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is that in Larnaka?

CURTIS YARVIN: In Nicosia, the capital. And to add weirdness to that, I was basically skipped three grades ahead because I added two grades when I went there because they did things by admission tests. I’m like, “All right, sure, this doesn’t surprise me.” And so that was a weird cultural experience.

But what was even weirder was when I got back to the United States and had to be a 12-year-old sophomore in an American public high school. That was very disorienting. I don’t think I’ve ever really recovered from that.

In any case, I’m sort of trying to accommodate myself. And I’m like, “All right, well, I need to listen to the same music that these kids listen to.” So I got a little boombox and I started listening to 80s top 40 radio. You must know 80s — Cyndi Lauper, Bon Jovi, INXS. INXS has a little edge. But Bon Jovi is like my —

PETER MCCORMACK: The first album I ever bought was Bon Jovi, New Jersey. That was after —

CURTIS YARVIN: Slippery When Wet, I think.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It starts with “Bad Medicine.” I got a cassette player and I walked to town and I bought — yeah, I went to the cassette and I bought that. I did have Europe’s “The Final Countdown” as a single.

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh, wow. That was —

PETER MCCORMACK: That was the first song. My dad bought me that because I loved it.

CURTIS YARVIN: And I’m just thinking, Bon Jovi’s — “I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride, I’m wanted —”

PETER MCCORMACK: That’s a bit later.

CURTIS YARVIN: Alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that’s the sort of thing that I’m listening to. And it’s not entirely without merit or whatever. And then for whatever reason, there’s some kind of contest on Q107, the station plays a Rolling Stones song, and I’m like, “Okay, right.”

Farage, Lowe, and the Stones vs. Bon Jovi Problem

And the problem with UK politics in our little pool of it is that basically you can’t escape the impression that Farage is Bon Jovi and Rupert is the Stones. And what’s even worse is that Nigel is also the Stones. And Nigel might be more the Stones than Rupert in a way, but Nigel doesn’t come out to play.

PETER MCCORMACK: No. See, is it maybe — oh, f*.

CURTIS YARVIN: Maybe.

PETER MCCORMACK: Maybe Nigel was in a Stones cover band.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, f*.

PETER MCCORMACK: You just blow my mind there. Did you know — I was chatting to — I won’t reveal his name just in case, but somebody you would know. I’ll tell you afterwards. And he was talking to me about my podcast and he was saying, “Dude, you need to put on a suit. At the moment, you look like a tattooed football job trying to have intelligent conversations. Put on a suit.”

And I was like — I’ve started to wear a shirt. He’s like, “Yeah, but your tattoos on your hands are a problem. You might need gloves.” I’m like, I’m not wearing gloves. But he was saying, look, this is how America sees the UK. America sees you in suits. America sees you as, like, disciplined Englishmen — tidy hair, tidy beard, disciplined, gets things done.

And I think that’s what it is. It’s like, Rupert isn’t sloppy.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, well, he was a serious businessman.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. At a football club.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah. And the thing about a football club is, like, you’re basically —

PETER MCCORMACK: You can’t win on the long term as a chairman, and you have tens of thousands of people calling you a wanker. Yeah, it’s a tough —

CURTIS YARVIN: You have the difficulty of being a business. You actually need to win. Winning is extremely hard. And then you have tens of thousands of people calling you a wanker. How did he get into that?

PETER MCCORMACK: You know what? I don’t know, actually. But we’ve spoken about it because I own a much smaller club and I have three people calling me a wanker. He has tens of thousands.

But it’s, in some ways, like the comments on YouTube, right? If you have a thing like this, you read the comments — they either break you or make you. And sometimes they break you before they make you. And then you just get stoic about it. Yeah, all right, I’m fat. All right, I asked a question wrong, I’m dumb. Whatever. But you learn to not give a f*. And I actually think being a football club chairman prepares you for criticism, because when the club’s doing well, no one cares about you. But when it’s failing, it’s all your fault. And so you’re kind of forged in steel being a football club chairman.

So look, I don’t think there’s anyone that could say anything where he goes — I think he goes, “I don’t care. F* off. Call me a racist.”

The Strong Horse and the Weak Horse

CURTIS YARVIN: And it’s actually very attractive, because what is unattractive — there’s an Islamic philosopher. Oh, Osama bin Laden. Sorry. It’s a bit — I do it all the time. And he has this great line where he’s like, “When people see a weak horse and a strong horse, by nature, they like the strong horse” — and actually they despise the weak horse.

And the thing is, when someone accuses you of being a racist and you get all sort of — I mean, there’s no way the admin would have let him do this. But I think, for example, Jeremy Carl, in that hearing, if he’d gone in with the mindset of, “I’m going to humiliate these senators and rub their noses in the shitty race bullshit that is all around the U.S.” —

Do you know the latest race news from the U.S.? This blows my mind. Harvard. So remember they had this lawsuit where they’re like, basically, Harvard is racist and it’s getting federal money — how is this allowed? And because they are American conservatives, and they are basically p*ies in various ways, they found that the best way — although this was probably not the issue closest to their hearts — they found that the best way to appeal to maybe the judge in this was to talk about how Harvard was mean to Asians.

And it’s true. Harvard discriminated against Asians even more heavily than it discriminated against whites, because they had “no character” or something like that. In any case, that was the argument. And it is undeniable that basically being Asian makes it much harder to get into Harvard, and being black makes it much easier.

And so we now have the data on what their response is. They’re like, “All right, we’ll stop discriminating against Asians. We’ll just discriminate against white people.” F* you. Right.

And so when you sort of come in with this kind of aggressive posture — like, I’m coming into a press conference, my team has just been relegated, and I’m just going to go on the attack — it’s just much more sympathetic than running away.

And so when you put yourself in a position where Farage has to put himself in, where he’s swearing up and down that anyone can be an Englishman, etc., etc. — it’s not as compelling. But the thing is, it is compelling when you compare it to Keir Starmer. It is compelling when you compare it to Kemi Badenoch.

The Overton Window and What People Really Think

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. But it depends where voters are at. Because somebody said something to me recently — they said, “The thing about politics is, there’s what people say and what they think, and what matters at the ballot box is what they think.” And there are too many people who can’t say what they think because of social consequences, or just aren’t brave enough to say what they think. And somebody like Rupert Lowe is just smashing through the Overton Window and enabling people to say things.

CURTIS YARVIN: So Jim Ratcliffe — that’s some of the best things that Trump has done.

PETER MCCORMACK: Even — I don’t know if you saw Sir Jim Ratcliffe. Yeah, what he said. And look, I think his choice of words was actually poor. It damaged the point because he then had to go on the defense and apologize. But again, he’s opening — he’s smashing through the Overton Window. People are breaking cover and saying, “I think this immigration experiment has failed. I think this diversity experiment has failed. I think multiculturalism has failed.” And the problem is like the battered housewife syndrome.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: And it’s like, come on, can we just — can we have some nuance here? There is good immigration and bad immigration. Can we just have that conversation?

The Right Must Move Fast: On Farage, Lowe, and Regime Change

CURTIS YARVIN: It’s like you have to have all the other question. What does it actually mean to be British? And is it a legal status? Resolving these questions — or in a way, when you think about regime change, really, I think that Farage is under the opinion that wherever he wants to go, he can go there slowly without risking his neck too much. And I think that’s also a strategic mistake.

I don’t think the right can move slowly, basically, and the slower — it’s just the left is incremental, the right is not. And I’m not saying that every step has to be made in one, but fundamentally it’s entropy versus extropy. The left is entropic, so things can just decay. But if you’re building something, you need to build.

So I think that the idea in the mind of the sort of Farages of their world is, you know, you have this kind of incremental subversion of the system which they think is possible. It’s an aging system, it’s much more subvertible than it used to be. But I still basically don’t think of that as possible.

If you have someone more like Rupert Lowe, my suspicion is the way Rupert Lowe sees it — I think he’s sort of thinking in terms of something less like 100% regime change and more like 40% regime change. The thing is, if you’re thinking of like 1%, 2% regime change, that’s going to slide back down and before you know it, it’s 0.1% and 0.01%. Once you’re up at like 30, 40, you’re just like, why can’t I do it all? And that’s when you get like, really Cromwellian, basically.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. My hot take on this is that I consider Reform still a left wing party. And I think the reason I have is because I think we’ve forgotten what a proper right wing conservative party looks like. And all I think they’re going to do is they’re going to come in, they’re going to tweak some things. We’re still going to have a massive welfare state.

CURTIS YARVIN: You’ll still have a beer tax. It’s just 5 pence lower.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, 5 pence lower. And we want people to work — no work from home — but I still think we’ll just have a very large state. The debt will increase and all they’re going to do is like, change who they point things at.

CURTIS YARVIN: But yeah, it’s bullion. It’s basically — and it’s like, even with Trump’s achievements, if you compare the second Trump administration to the first Trump administration, to the Bush administration, these are monumental achievements. Like, he’s reversed the flow of migration, he’s sealed the borders, whatever, whatever, whatever. They’re all things that could be reversed in three days by the next administration.

And once you abandon the illusion that you can basically just do good government without actually really rethinking, once you basically realize that actually it is your duty to get as much power as possible — a 40% regime change is very unstable because you’re basically like, okay, have we defeated the other 60% or have we not defeated them? They will feel very defeated. So either you’re just like, no, actually 100% is right, let’s just swoop in and scoop them all up while they’re feeling defeated — that is clearly the right thing to do.

The wrong thing to do is just to be like, “Well, we won, it’s over, boys,” because that lets them regroup and restrengthen. When you’re winning, you need to basically keep them on the run entirely.

And that means — what’s on the other end of the beer tax? That’s really thinking small in a way. I’m sure it’s an issue that touches Englishmen’s hearts deeply, but to an American, you look at American politics and you’re just like, oh my God, they’re spending this much time on something completely — what’s on the other end of that scale? Restore the empire. Maybe clean up South Africa. You could really try to suck most of the technical talent out of the US — a really strong reverse brain drain. Your legal system is probably completely broken, so you need a recodification of the laws.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, we need to start writing that now.

CURTIS YARVIN: Indeed. Indeed. Yeah, indeed.

And the lesson that I don’t think Nigel understands — that you clearly see in even the spasmodic and halting efforts of the early Trump administration — is that big things are actually easier than small things. It’s like a grasping the nettle kind of thing. If you’re tentative about it and evasive, you’ll seem weak.

Basically, the situation Nigel is in is that he’s had a monopoly for quite some time on being an alternative to this system. And that monopoly position has allowed him to play the middle in a way, and work really hard at being marginally acceptable to the system and getting huge wins, which turned out to not be wins at all — like Brexit. He’s sort of been a player in this field, and now somebody’s coming much harder than him.

People compare Rupert Lowe, for example, to Nick Griffin. Is Nick Griffin still alive? Is he still —

PETER MCCORMACK: He’s the BNP guy. I think so. I don’t know. But like, he’s not Nick Griffin.

CURTIS YARVIN: He’s not Nick Griffin. For one thing, he doesn’t have a glass eye, but in other ways also, he is not Nick Griffin. And that feeling of substance there is very well communicated. Somebody on Twitter was like, “Well, we showed pictures of Rupert Lowe to Englishmen, and 90% of them had no idea who he was.” And I’m like, all right, well, once 90% of Englishmen have seen him, how much more popular do you think he’s going to be?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, look, the Twitter test is interesting because — oh, it’s only Twitter people who know him. But his posts are the most viral of any politician in government. And they’re like, “Oh, well, this is Elon Musk boosting it.” It’s like, no, this is his genuine popularity in the online audience and that’s going to spread out. Whether he can build enough of a big tent, I don’t know. But there is demand for it.

CURTIS YARVIN: And certainly his staffers seem like very serious people, too.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

CURTIS YARVIN: And the English young right is in many ways more impressive than the American young right, which I might have said to you before. But it’s very, very true.

PETER MCCORMACK: And it’s more — there’s this — how do I put it? Like, when you compare, say, a Charlie Downs with Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes is like an entertainer. Charlie Downs is just mission driven.

A Living Tradition: The English Right vs. the American Right

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah. There’s actually a living tradition of statesmanship there, whereas for Americans, at least from my perspective, it’s much more like resurrecting a dead tradition. And that’s sort of what makes me a neoreactionary, not a reactionary. I’m not directly connected to this historical tradition. It’s like Michelangelo and the people who did the Renaissance — they basically observed that the art of antiquity was actually just much better than anything that they could do themselves. And they’re like, “We are just going to learn from the past.” But there isn’t a continuous stream of teachers that connects Praxiteles to Michelangelo or anything. It’s entirely died out.

And here it is not quite entirely died out. This is the thing that I notice — I’m going to Austria and then Germany next — and it’s different in every European country, but old traditions have not entirely died out. Whereas there’s no old right in America.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. It’s like a little brother, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, it’s like a little brother.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah. And being in the role of the little brother, which was the role of America for the whole 19th century, of course — it’s fitting, I think, in a way. You’re just like, no, this is a really impressive bunch of young people and they should have a country to run.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. But there’s also another interesting comparison. I watched Marco Rubio’s speech the other day, and I thought it was very good. But that is almost like the son coming to tell the dad, “We stood together.”

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, no, I thought it was — let’s talk about Rubio’s speech.

PETER MCCORMACK: You want to find —

CURTIS YARVIN: Do I have you go —

PETER MCCORMACK: We got five, ten minutes.

Rubio vs. Vance: The Neocon Reboot

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So here’s my perspective. I’m not a fan. And let me tell you the reason why — the difference between the Rubio speech and the Vance speech a year ago, which might seem like very similar speeches, were actually quite different.

The result of the Vance speech in the audience was people basically felt like their mother had just died. And with Rubio, they stood up and clapped. Okay, why? What is the difference there?

Basically, as soon as you see your enemies clapping for something that you did, you should be very, very afraid, because maybe they know something you don’t. What actually was done there is basically a victory for the neocon wing rather than the isolationist wing of the administration, to the extent that there is even an isolationist wing. And here’s why they clapped.

What Rubio accomplished there was very similar to the amazing transformation that the American empire pulled off — which had just spent the last four to six years, depending on your timing, fighting for a progressive world empire called the United Nations, in which Stalin would be their strong right hand. And then they realized that this was not going to happen, and that Stalin actually did not want to be their little buddy, which they had thought for the whole war. They never saw him as a peer. And then he’s like, “Yeah, f* you.” And they’re like, “Oh, we thought we were playing him, but we actually were getting played.” And that made them very pissed at Stalin, and that allowed them to come home and present themselves to the American people as staunch anti-Communists.

And these were actually the people that had been the strongest allies of Stalin, like five years before — not even allies of Stalin, but people who had been using Stalin for purposes of world domination, basically. And when they realized that they could retool this whole anti-Hitler machine into an anti-Stalin machine, when they realized that they could do this incredible Orwellian switch where they were now fighting their biggest ally in this strange way that made no sense at all — they were just like, “All right, our thing lives.”

And basically, the reason why the people in Munich clapped at that speech is — Vance comes in and he basically undermines institutions. He’s like, “Do we even need this? I don’t know. Do you need it? Nobody needs it.” And he made these people feel not needed. He undermined them.

Rubio comes in and he’s like, “I challenge you to stand up for Western civilization,” et cetera, et cetera. And they’re all like, “Western civilization!” And what they realize is that they can come home and basically be like, “We’re for Western civilization. We’re standing up against Communism.” And then they just quickly do — they’re like, “Well, the real Western civilization is diversity.”

PETER MCCORMACK: See, my read was like, they all got so embarrassed with Vance. Like, they were like, “I can’t believe he said this.” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, but he was right.”

The Kayfabe of Foreign Policy and the Fall of Institutions

CURTIS YARVIN: Rubio comes in and the first thing he does in his speech is he basically celebrates the founding miracle of this whole world. He’s basically like, “I’m not going to call you quislings. I’m not going to say, I’m going to call you allies.”

I mean, the amount of real undermining that could be done just by saying, “Hey, guys, the EU is just the Western version of the Warsaw Pact.” You could rip. I mean, what Vance did was incredibly gentle. They would be crying, they would be vomiting. They would see their lives flash before their eyes because they would realize that they were about to suffer the fate of Ceaușescu.

Essentially what he’s saying to them is, “You’re not going to get Ceaușescu’d, we’re not going to pull the rug, and we are going to participate in this same Reagan-type game where basically we are going to support the shitlib leaders of Europe and of Canada and of Australia and New Zealand.” We are going to support them by opposing them and letting them feel like, “Oh, I’m the real nationalist. I’m standing up for Europe in the face of this. We disagree about Western civilization. We think Western civilization means diversity and homosexuality, and we’re going to stand by that.”

Trump managed a 40-point swing in the Canadian election. Do you know this? The Liberals were about to be wiped out. Trump comes in, he’s like, “We’re going to have a trade war with Canada.” Now, the conservatives in Canada are not great, but basically you’re scoring an own goal because what you’re doing there is you’re participating in the kayfabe. You’re not breaking the frame.

So essentially when Reagan comes out as anti-communist, basically all of Europe — all the euro-communists or whatever — they’re like, “This is great for our narrative. We get to play against Reagan. We get to explain to our core support base of European shitlib aristocrats that we are here protecting you from Reagan.” And when Trump comes out with his Greenland thing, it’s the same thing. “We’ll protect you from the big bad Americans. We’re standing up for you.”

It’s funny because you have these two kinds of nationalism in Europe. You have the nationalism of the Scottish National Party and the nationalism of the British National Party or the English Defense League. These are two very different kinds of nationalism that appear superficially to be the same thing. Catalan nationalism versus Spanish nationalism — these things are actually like opposites.

So what you’re doing with the Greenland thing is straightforward conversion of foreign policy into domestic propaganda. “I am standing up for America’s interests. We’re going to get Greenland. We need Greenland for the rare earths.” Mining under ice is f*ing possible. And Greenland is an icy desert full of welfare Indians. Any bases that you needed, the Danes would give you. So you’re basically just picking a fight with these shitlib Europeans in a way that they actually love.

I think he also swung the Danish election this way. And when, for example, State proposes to fund the IfD — let’s say Trump comes out and funds Restore UK — is that good for Restore UK? No. F* no.

The reality of American politics is that American voters cannot possibly understand that. Because American voters cannot possibly understand that, you actually win votes in America by doing something that is counterproductive for your overall ideological goals. You’re winning in this kind of sugar-high way where everybody’s going to forget about Greenland by next week, but you’ve permanently damaged your public diplomacy efforts in Europe with this retardation.

The Grand Move: Withdrawing from European Entanglement

I think the tragedy there is that foreign policy has to be used as domestic policy. But there’s this grand move that you can pull where you basically tell all of Europe — Vance times 20 — and you’re just like, “Germany, love you, Germany, but do I care what kind of government you have? No, I don’t actually. We don’t care at all. You could be communist, you could be Nazi, you could be some kind of hippie thing. We don’t care.”

“And by the way, hey, Germany — not only are we closing our bases because we don’t need them, they’re to protect you or something from Putin. Not a big deal, whatever. We’re closing our bases. And actually, we’re also withdrawing all our diplomats from Berlin because all they were doing was interfering in your domestic politics, which we don’t care about anymore. And if we have something to say to you, well, we’ll email. But if it’s complicated, we might have to Zoom.”

That is the exact opposite of funding the IfD. And that would be the IfD’s basic wet dream. Moreover, if you do that to all of Europe, not all of Europe may take this opportunity, but you’re creating all kinds of interesting possibilities, and those possibilities will eventually reflect back into American politics.

For example, as happened with Gorbachev — if the French are just like, “You know what, we’re kind of done with this shitlib thing and we’re going to make France France again” — Americans see that and they’re like, “Wow, they could just do that.” Already, even Bukele in the shittiest little country has had a huge impact on Latin American politics and some impact on North American politics.

PETER MCCORMACK: And even Hungary and Poland here.

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, right. But the thing is, even Hungary and Poland here to some extent, because even though the shitlibs took back Poland, they still have not quite yet managed to fill it with Angolans. So here are these countries that you can go to that don’t have this problem. And what does it cost on Ryanair? £39. You can see this alternate world where it’s just not a thing.

The Soviet Parallel: How Legitimacy Collapses

What really happened in the fall of the Soviet Union was that Gorbachev — not with any plan — let the satellite allies fall first. And basically you have this whole narrative of international socialist brotherhood, and it’s like, “Oh wait, it wasn’t socialist brotherhood at all, actually. It was just a stupid little empire from 1945.” And it turns out they don’t really like socialism very much in Czechoslovakia.

That’s something you can do that is a slower circuit, but the level of effect it has on domestic politics is titanic. So much of international politics is about legitimization. In the 60s, the libs would be like, “Oh, we have to do this civil rights thing because otherwise the new countries of Africa will outvote us in the UN General Assembly.” And people swallowed this unconditionally. “Yes, the UN General Assembly. Very important. We can’t lose votes in the UN General Assembly.”

In the early 70s or late 60s, there was Arthur Goldberg, who was a Supreme Court justice appointed by Lyndon Johnson. He actually steps down from the Supreme Court to the more important position of ambassador to the United Nations. You just can’t even imagine that world.

And just watching that dream fall apart — I would think it would be wonderful if Trump just said, “Hey, people talk about Turtle Island, let’s talk about Turtle Bay, because that’s some really nice real estate. If you want to have a United Nations, hey, rest of the world, go ahead and do that. But we’re just not going to do this anymore.”

And that feeling of gaining support by showing strength — showing strength by just shoving over these moribund institutions, which used to be pillars of the narrative and now would just fall over without a trace.

Closing: Vegas and Signing Off

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m going to rewatch both now — both Vance and Marco Rubio. Because I, like—

CURTIS YARVIN: Yeah, because he’s saying it’s brilliant. You’ll see people — Internet Nazis love Rubio’s speech. And you’re just like, actually, no, you don’t see what he’s doing here.

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

CURTIS YARVIN: It was good.

PETER MCCORMACK: Am I going to see you in Vegas?

CURTIS YARVIN: Oh, wait — Vegas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we record in Vegas?

PETER MCCORMACK: Of course we can record in Vegas.

CURTIS YARVIN: Do they have studios there?

PETER MCCORMACK: We’ll just find a studio. Of course we’ll find a studio. Curtis, thank you.

CURTIS YARVIN: All right, great. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

PETER MCCORMACK: See you soon.

CURTIS YARVIN: See you soon.

Related Posts

• President Trump Remarks on US, Israel Attacking Iran (Transcript)
• President Trump on Economy, Energy in Corpus Christi, TX (Transcript) 
• Bulwark Podcast: w/ Susan Glasser on Trump’s State of the Union address (Transcript)
• Douglas Macgregor: US-Iran Diplomacy Fail (Transcript)
• The Truth About Trump’s State of the Union w/ Sen. Bernie Sanders (Transcript)