Curtis Yarvin
Appearances
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And, you know, the idea that government should serve the common good. And I think that people like J.D. and people in the sort of the broader intellectual scene around him, which is very varied intellectual scene, would all agree on that principle. Now, if that principle, I don't know what you mean by democracy in this context.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it's bad. And if it's for the common good, it's good.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What would fully enlightened for me generally means fully disenchanted. When I look at basically what the kinds of people that I know not really that well in Silicon Valley think, I'm basically like, you know, have people like this been exposed to my ideas? Yes. Do they agree that America should be a monarchy? I doubt it, but I have no idea.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But what they agree on is not a belief, but a disbelief. So I think that when a person who lives their life within the kind of, you know, sort of progressive bubble, liberal bubble, use whatever term you like, of, you know, the current year, looks at
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
the right or even the new right or whatever, you know, you want to call it, I think what's hardest to see is that what's really shared is not a positive belief, but an absence of belief. Basically, we don't worship these same gods.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
We do not sort of see, you know, the New York Times and Harvard as like divinely inspired in any sense, or we do not see their procedures as ones that sort of always lead to to truth and wisdom. We do not think that the way the U.S. government works, you know, really works well or seems to be perfect in any respect.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Yes. Okay. It's a disenchantment from, like, believing in these old systems. And the right thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, oh, we need to go do things Curtis's way, and is basically...
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say, you know, like, we just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle's political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle's physics. What if that isn't so?
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Exactly.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Can you answer that question? Number one, I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people's lives. And I think that, you know, the best answer when I ask people to answer that question, I sort of ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Because these things that, you know, these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. Okay. And then you're looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. And it has a little thing on it that says designed in California and made in China.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it. I'm sorry, I'm here in this building and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than any other source in the world. And how is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth generation hereditary absolute monarchy.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And so we've basically taken, you know, we've taken in some ways, like, and this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, even like the pre-World War I progressives, you know, you go back to, you know, a book like, you know, Drift and Mastery, you know, are very— How can I change that?
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Fine, I'll try.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I would say that the incoming Trump administration, you know, with all due respect, and there's a lot of great people there and people who are working extremely hard, Unfortunately, I would say that they're essentially finding themselves in a position where they're trying to untangle the Gordian knot. Meaning what? Meaning that they're basically trying to, let's take just NASA in specific.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So, for example, if you compare NASA to SpaceX, you know, that's a fine example of actually all of the principles that I've been describing because NASA was once as efficient as SpaceX ever. So if you basically say, okay, at a very abstract level, forget the rest of the government. Elon, go and fix NASA. The goal of NASA is to give us cool space shit.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
We feel like we're not getting enough cool space shit. You have $25 billion a year. Go and do cool space shit. I think you would get a lot more cool space shit under that principle. But one of the basic principles of kind of the California startup way of thinking is just to realize it's way easier to create a new NASA than it is to fix the old NASA.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And that principle extends sort of around the government.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The funny thing is, I think that's almost the opposite of the truth. It's like, let me give you a very simple illustration of this. Someone I have actually never met, believe it or not, who is Elon Musk. Now, Elon tweeted the other day, he was like, the proper structure of government on Mars should be not just a democracy, but a direct democracy.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Let me sort of examine the thinking behind Musk saying this, because I find it sort of extremely odd in a sense. Like, because one of the things about monarchy that's been known for quite some time, and again, even in very, very anti-monarchical ways, regimes and periods and exception is made for this, is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Basically, in any very safety-critical environment... You should have someone in charge. You should have someone in charge. But the thing is, you look at basically a Mars colony, And you're just like, really, are the like the citizens of the Mars colony going to vote on like how to like replenish the oxygen supply or whatever? Like, no, of course not.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The Mars colony that Elon establishes will be a subsidiary of SpaceX and it will have someone in charge and it will have a command hierarchy just like SpaceX does. And so I'm like, Elon, when you say that this should be a democracy, what are the people voting on? And so there's this world of actually real governance that someone like Elon Musk lives in every day.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And actually applying that world, applying that thinking to like, you know, being like, oh, this is, you know, this thinking is directly contradictory, you know, in a sense, to the ideals that I was taught in this society, that's a really difficult cognitive dissonance problem, even if you're Elon Musk.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Monarch is good. It's a neutral term.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And then the monarchs in the age of democracy are just terrible.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Your question is the most important question of all, because basically understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is really essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it's important to note that we don't see for the rest of European and world history, human history as a whole is a mixed bag.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The history of the age of democracy in the last 250 years is also a mixed bag.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
A holocaust. You know, you can pull the camera way back and basically say, wow, you know, in Europe, since basically the establishment of European civilization from like 1000 AD to, you know, 1750 AD, we didn't have this kind of chaos and violence. And then you can't separate Hitler and Stalin from the sort of global democratic revolution that they're a part of.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
He killed, there was a... Tamerlane was not in Europe. I meant Europe, though.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So I often find, why don't you just scratch a little at some of the historical... There was no massacre of Huguenots. I think you're confusing it with the Sack of Béziers and the massacre of the Alpagentians. So they got massacred, not the Huguenots. Yeah.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But the thing is, when people look at the Holocaust, they saw like a new species of deviltry that had not really existed in the world in that way before. You know, when you see a city sacked in the Middle Ages, you see just like wild, undisciplined troops like raging around. You don't see like lines of people march to their deaths.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Let me answer that in, I think, a way that will be relatively accessible to readers of The New York Times. You've probably heard of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I do a speech sometimes where I'll just read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural address, in which FDR essentially says to the American people, hey, Congress, give me absolute power or I'll take it anyway.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
There's two more. There's two more.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Let's go. Let's go. Harmony. Let's go. Let's go through each of those examples. And so when you look, for example, at Mandela, the reason I said that most people don't know this. There was a little Contra Thompson when Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken off the terrorist list.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
He was in the viciously racist apartheid regime. Basically, they had him on the terrorist list. So if you look at— Let's get to the other two.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Because they're both terrorists and because they basically both violated the rules of war in the same way. And they both basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the time. This valorization. So Gandhi then is your model.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It's more complicated than that, but I could say things about either. But let's move on to one of your other examples. So I think the best way to basically grapple with that period directly. Which period are we talking about now? 1860s. Okay, yeah. Okay, let's talk about African Americans in the 1860s.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Okay, the thing that you can do that any Times reader can do, just go to your Google Bar and Google slave narratives. Just go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the time. And so the thing is that basically the treatment of—
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
of the freed slaves after the war is like extremely, there was a recent historian who published a thing, and I think this is, I would dispute this, this number is too high, but his estimate was that something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically die in between like 1865 and 1870.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Their children were no longer sold out from under them. When I said anyone, okay, first of all, when I said anyone, I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely, and the war itself wasn't good either. But if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war. And so the thing is, when you look at basically, you know, the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, you're basically just like, it just visited this huge amount of destruction. On all sorts of people, black and white. I'm just like, all of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So did FDR actually take that level of power? Yeah, he did. And so there's a great piece that I've sent to some of the people that I know that are involved in the transition. Who? I mean, there's all sorts of people milling around. Name one. Name one. Wow. Name one. Well, I definitely know Mark Andreessen, and so I sent this piece to Mark Andreessen.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And what I'm fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way, you know, the people respond, you know, to Breivik. I'm like, basically, you're responding in this kind of cartoonish way. to something that terrorism, which is, you know, what is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? You know, that's a really important question in 20th century history.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
To say that I'm going to have a strong opinion about this stuff without having an answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I think that American conservatism is in the long and very, very difficult grieving process of realizing that it has always been a fraud. And I think one of the especially dangers in American conservatism is that there's so much grift in it and so much of it consumes so much energy and so much attention and produces so little.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
You are still a factor of 100 from being able to give the people who are voting for you and donating to you anything like what they imagine they're going to get from you.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It just doesn't have the power to give anything that it promises.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think that that's sort of limited him as a leader in various ways.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Thank you. Thank you. Let's have some more fun.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
So when I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of okay. The woman in Jane Austen's book seems to be fine.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Have you ever seen anything like that in the 21st century? I mean, the whole class in Jane Austen's world is the class of, like, UBI-earning aristocrats, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It's very hard. So first of all, when we say when we say liberty, for example, so you you did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. So free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. And so the assumption that you're making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And it's an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who's FDR's Secretary of the Interior. And it's a little diary entry describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. And what happens in this cabinet meeting is that Francis Perkins, who's the Secretary of Labor, comes in to this meeting and is like, here, I have a list of the projects that we're going to do. FDR personally takes this list and
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
First of all, I don't believe in actually voting at all. So it's a little... Do you vote? No. I believe that voting is providing this sort of almost kind of pornographic stimulus. It sort of becomes more like supporting your football team or something. It basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But the thing is, what does this power mean to you is really the most important question. And I think that what it means to most people today is that it provides a sort of meaning for them. It makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter in a sense. And I think that
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
There's there's something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that sort of goes up against the very, very important question of we need a government that is actually good and that actually works and we don't have one.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It's not a simplistic way of thinking and having worked inside the kind of salt mines where CEOs do their CEOing business and having been a CEO myself, I think I have a better sense of it maybe unfortunately than most people. Last time we spoke, I used the example of imagine if your MacBook had to be made by the California Department of Computing or if your electric car had to be made by the U.S.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Department of Transportation.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Well, they live in a governed society. And so the thing is, basically, when libertarians talk about Apple and Tesla, they're saying, okay, here are the benefits of freedom, etc., etc., etc. That's sort of true in a sense, but the benefit of freedom is that these organizations have used freedom to establish monarchies, which are completely top-down command units.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And so when I basically look at systems run by CEOs, I'm just like, basically, I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad, but the overall quality, you know, just pick one at random and... And put him or her in charge of Washington. And I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The like median performance is so much better. But you asked something that I think is a more important and more interesting question, which is. You know, you're like, OK, America needs a CEO who will be economically efficient. The CEO who will be economically efficient will think of human beings as pure economic units and will do things like.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Perfect, perfect question. The thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as making a profit or just selling more stuff, but that's not actually really the goal of a company. The real goal of a company is to maximize the worth of its assets to make the stock price go up.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
basically like one of the ways to kind of unify the worldview of, say, Charles I and Elon Musk is to realize that when Charles I is thinking about his people, he is both thinking of them as economic assets and as human assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive and
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And in order to see his country thrive, he wants people to be, of course, he wants them to be producing as much wool or whatever England exports as possible. But the sense of him being kind of the pater patriae, kind of the father of the country, and sort of feeling about...
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
looks at the projects in New York and is like, this is crap, this is crap, I don't know what you're doing. Like, humiliates Francis Perkins in the Oval Office or wherever they're having their cabinet meeting. And then at the end of the thing, it's like everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is just a picture of FDR acting like a CEO.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
the people in his society, not exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but sort of like the way a parent should feel about his children, that sense of like having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a CEO is not to rake in the bucks, but to make my operation flourish.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I think that Trump, you know, the funny thing is I talked about FDR earlier in the earlier in our conversation. And I think actually, you know, a lot of people might in different directions might not appreciate this comparison. But I think that in a lot of ways, Trump is very reminiscent of FDR.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Because what FDR had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous sort of ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS, and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between Trump and FDR that has really held Trump back is, of course, that FDR is from one of America's first families. He's a hereditary aristocrat.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And Trump is not really from America's social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think it's hurt him in his ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his family. I think that that sort of limited him as a leader in various ways.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It's almost like he actually feels like he knows what he's doing. That's, I think, something that's very helpful because, you know, insecurity and fragility is just, you know, it's his Achilles heel.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
What's my Achilles heel? I think I also have self-confidence issues. I sort of rarely, I won't bet fully on my own convictions often.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
That's a good question. I think that if you look at especially my older work, I think I had this kind of joint consciousness that, okay, I feel like I'm onto something here. But I also like the idea that people would be in 2025 taking this stuff as seriously as as they are now when I was writing in 2007, 2008. I mean, I was completely serious. I am completely serious.
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And so, you know, the question of was FDR a dictator? What does it mean to be a dictator? What does this pejorative word mean? I don't know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes, Democrats, Republicans and everyone, you know, except for a few right wing Republicans, basically revere FDR and FDR ran the New Deal like a startup.
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But it sort of led to like, you know, I think a certain level of like, you know, it's like when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever, I'm basically like, yeah, the sentiments behind that I can explain and articulate and they were serious sentiments and they're serious now. Would I have expressed it that way? Would I have trolled?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I'm always trying to get less trollish. Like, you know, over time, you'll see that I've definitely gotten less trolly. On the other hand, you know, if you read my recent blog posts, I can't really resist trolling Elon Musk, which might be part of the reason why I've never met Elon Musk.
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No, it definitely hasn't gotten, it hasn't gone far. I mean, no, I mean the, the, the trolling, like what I realized when I look back is that actually.
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The instinct to revise things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct. It's a serious and important thing that I think the world needs now.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Well, you know, I can lead a horse to water, of course. I think that as the sort of walls fall away and you start to explore ideas that are sort of outside the very narrow bubble of the present that we live in, because there's no...
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I think it's impossible to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which intelligent, thoughtful people like you sort of consider has grown sharply narrower in the 20th century. And if there's really one thing that I kind of want to do the most, say, with this conversation, is to kind of make people feel like they can basically step outside of the very small box that they grew up in.
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And they can say, not everything outside that box is perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible. I'm not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti-Semite or even a misogynist, whatever that means. I'm asking them to sort of acknowledge that there are cases in which our judgment of the past is completely right.
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And yet there are also ways in which the whole past would very unanimously point to things that we're doing and say, that's crazy, I can't believe you're doing that.
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Yeah, what we see in the sort of the course of, you know, to kind of look at the objective reality of power in the U.S. since the revolution, you know, you'll talk to people about the Articles of Confederation, and you're just like, name one thing that happened in America under the Articles of Confederation, and they can't, unless they're a professional historian.
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Next, you have the first constitutional period under George Washington. If you look at the administration of Washington, what you'll see is that basically what is established looks a lot like a startup. It looks so much like a startup that this guy, Alexander Hamilton, who is recognizably a startup bro, is running the whole government. He's basically the Larry Page of this republic.
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He's nominally the secretary.
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Cereals were first cultivated. I'm doing a Putin. I'll speed this up.
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So to make a long story short, whether you want to call Washington, Lincoln and FDR dictators, this sort of, you know, appropriate word, what they were was basically national CEOs. And they were running the government like a company from the top down.
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So it's not even that democracy is bad. It's just that it's very weak. And the fact that it's very weak is basically easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of basically is democracy good or bad is, I think, a secondary question to is it what we actually have?
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
When you say to a New York Times reader, democracy is bad, they're a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, politics is bad, or even populism is bad, they're like, of course, these are horrible things.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And so the thing is, when you basically want to be anti, you know, say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government. And then you'll be like, yes, of course. Like, actually, you know, policy and law should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors and so forth.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Then you'll realize that what you're actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
My honest answer would have to be it's not exactly time for that yet. Because what I see happening in D.C. right now, you know, nobody should be watching this panicking, you know, thinking I'm about to be installed as America's secret dictator. I don't think I'm even going to the inauguration. The... Were you invited? No, no, no. Like, I'm an outsider, man. You know, like, I'm an intellectual.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And the actual ways in which my ideas get into circulation is actually mostly through the staffers and the kind of younger people who basically kind of, you know, swim in this very online kind of soup. And I think that's fine. I think that what's happening now in D.C., to sort of distinguish my much more radical ideas from what's happening now,
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I would say that what's happening now is there's definitely an attempt to revive the White House as an executive organization which sort of governs the executive branch. And the difficulty with that is if you go to Washington and say to anyone who's like professionally involved in the business of Washington that Washington would work just fine or even better if there was no White House at all.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And they'll basically be like, yeah, of course. The executive branch works for Congress. And so you have these poor voters out there who elected, as they think, a revolution. They elected Donald Trump and, you know, maybe the world's most capable CEO.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
He can't actually do that much to it. And he can block things. He can disrupt it. He can create chaos and turbulence or whatever. But he can't really change what it is.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I think the COVID response is a better example. Certainly many things about COVID were different because Donald Trump was president. Here, I'll tell you a funny story. At the risk of bringing my children into the media, you know, in 2016, my son... Who's how old? He's now 14. He was six then. And my children were going to a she-she progressive Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
At that time, mannered immersion. The rubber hits the road. Indeed. And you can't isolate children from the world, right? And so at the time, my late wife and I did not. We just adopted the simple expedient of not talking about politics in front of the children, which I recommend to everyone. Smart move. But of course, everyone's talking about it at school, right?
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And my son comes home and he has this very concrete question. He's like, Pop, when Donald Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we going to be able to go to the beach? And I'm like, wow, you really took him literally. Like, everybody else is taking him literally, but you really took him literally.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And I was like, you know, if you see anything in the real world around you over the next four years that changes as a result of this election, I'll be surprised.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
I would say that the thing that I admire about Vance and the thing that's really remarkable about him as a leader is that I think that he contains within him all kinds of Americans. You know, his ability to connect with like flyover Americans in the world that he came from is, of course, very, very great.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But the other thing that's neat about him is that he went to Yale and Yale Law School, in fact. And so he can connect at a he speaks. He is a fluent speaker of the language of The New York Times, which you cannot say about Donald Trump.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And basically, one of the things that I believe really strongly, you know, that I haven't touched on when I talk about monarchy is I think that it's utterly essential for anything like an American monarchy is that you have to be the president of all Americans.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And I think this is something that basically the new administration could do a much better job of reaching out to progressive Americans and not demonizing them and basically saying, hey, you know, you want to make this country a better place? Like, I feel like you've been misinformed in some ways. You're not a bad person. This is like 10 to 20 percent of Americans.
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'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
This is a lot of people are like the NPR class. They are not bad people, evil people who want to like. But the thing is, They're human beings. We're all human beings. And like human beings can support bad regimes.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
But he's also an intellectual and he contains within him intellectual.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Is your rhetorical tone different in a setting like this? You're looking for different, my thinking is definitely not shifted and you're finding different emphases. Let me, you know, it's like when I talk about rage, for example, you know, both my parents worked for the federal government. They were career, you know, federal employees.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It is, it is. But the thing is, basically, when you look at the way, when you look at those, the way to treat those institutions, I'm just like treat it like a company that goes out of business, but sort of more so because these people having had power have to actually be treated even more delicately and with even more respect. And winning means these are your people now.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
And so the thing is, when you understand the perspective of the new regime with respect to the American aristocracy, their perspective has can't be this sort of anti aristocratic thing of like, we're going to like bayonet all the professors and like, you know, throw them in ditches or whatever.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
Their perspective has to be that, like, you were a normal person serving a regime that did this, like, really weird and crazy stuff.
The Daily
'The Interview': Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
It depends what you mean by democracy. I mean, I think that the problem is basically when people equate democracy with good government, when you use that word, you're using a very tricky word. I would say that what someone like I'm on very safe ground, despite not knowing him well at all, that someone like J.D. Vance believes essentially in the common good.