Transcript

Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717

From PBD Podcast · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 2 h 28 min · 25,975 words · 369 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717", an episode of PBD Podcast published January 13, 2026 (2 h 28 min, about 25,975 words). It mentions 24 people, works and ideas, including Democracy, Curtis Yarin, American Governance, Monarchy, Stanley Levison.

What this episode is about

Curtis Yarvin presents provocative ideas on governance, arguing that traditional democratic systems have failed and advocating for alternative political structures, such as a corporate-style government. He discusses his controversial viewpoints on race, freedom, and order, claiming that equality is not a natural state and that real power is concentrated in an unelected ruling class, sparking debate on what forms of government would be most effective in addressing current global crises.

Key takeaways

  • Democracy's just a stylish coat; underneath, it's all about the power suits of unelected elites.
  • Venezuelan chaos and Iran's turmoil challenge our assumptions about democracy's supremacy—are we asking the right questions?
  • If politics is dirty, who’s cleaning house? Elections may just be convenient charades in the corporate state.
  • Order vs. freedom: the age-old debate where many prefer a comforting cage to chaos—even if gilded.
  • Remember, in North Korea, democracy is in the name. Labels can disguise tyranny better than a tailored suit.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 15:00: Democracy, Monarchy, Curtis Yarin, American Governance
  2. – 30:00: Democracy, Monarchy, The Machiavellians, American Governance
  3. – 45:00: Democracy, Monarchy, Curtis Yarin, Oppenheimer
  4. – 1:00:00: Martin Luther King, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Civil Rights Movement, The Truman Show
  5. – 1:15:00: Reds, Socialism
  6. – 1:30:00: Socialism, Democracy
  7. – 1:45:00: Monarchy, Democracy
  8. – 2:00:00: Monarchy, Democracy
  9. – 2:28:11: Monarchy

Notable quotes from "Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717"

  • Some races are more suited to slavery than others. That'll upset a lot of people. Okay? Democracy is not a solution. It is the problem. The United States should be run like a corporation.
    about Democracy · at
  • The influence of the presidential election on domestic policy is almost zero because domestic policy is run by Congress. and so, we have these situations where everyone goes out in this election and they really think that they're like they.
    about American Governance · at
  • Creates an administration. If you look at, being a California person, if you look at the New Deal, again, I think they did plenty of things wrong. I think they made plenty of…
    about The New Deal · at
  • Just This is a country. This is a government that could do anything. So FDR dies in 45 and in 44 he picks Harry Truman as his VP. Harry Truman is kind of a nobody. He's not…
    about Harry Truman · at
  • Like you'll you'll need to present like academic credentials. So imagine treating progressivism that way.
    about Progressivism · at
  • Is a real monarchy. one of the most important things I think that you know if there's a single book that I'd recommend to sort of you know for basically smart curious people to sort of you know develop the skill of doing this kind of.
    about The Machiavellians · at
  • Little bit first because understanding kind of how we got here. I want to I'm a monarchist. I want to see monarchy.
    about Curtis Yarin · at
  • Organization. Absolutely. This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. the preacher is Martin Luther King. And the funniest thing, here's a fun…
    about Martin Luther King · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Curtis Yarin — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions · first at
    Guest advancing an anti-democratic, pro-monarchy critique of modern American governance, arguing real power sits in an unelected bureaucratic regime created after FDR.
  • Stanley Levison — Person · Referenced operative / connective tissue · 11 mentions
    Presented as a former Communist Party USA financial officer who helped create/influence SCLC and advised MLK; used to argue civil-rights institutions were 'laundered' communist initiatives.
    Stanley Leverson… basically the CFO of the Communist Party USA.
  • Martin Luther King — Person · Contested historical figure in argument · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a leader whose organization/speeches are claimed to have been heavily shaped by Stanley Levison and Communist Party networks.
  • Harry Truman — Person · Historical hinge figure · 1 mention · first at
    Portrayed as a lightweight successor chosen by FDR to prevent a strong successor and allow power to flow into the administrative/deep state.
  • James Burnham — Person · Referenced expert / recommended author · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as author of a recommended framework for political realism and decoding euphemistic regime language; his 1940 book is highlighted.
    Truman show thing of looking for you know when does this word mean its opposite when was there's a great book published by James Bham in 1940 he's better known for the book the…
  • Humeni — Person · Referenced leader (Iran example) · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the figure associated with Iran’s post-monarchy totalitarian regime in the host’s framing (spelled 'Humeni' in transcript).
    Went from a monarchy to whatever you want to call it with the, totalitarian regime under Humeni.

Books & papers

  • The Machiavellians — Book · Recommended book · 2 mentions · first at
    Recommended as the key text for learning to decode political euphemisms and distinguish nominal from real regime types.
  • The Italian School of Political Science — Book · Referenced intellectual tradition · 1 mention · first at
    Presented as the realist tradition summarized by Burnham, emphasizing stripping away symbolic claims to see how power actually works.
    And it's a essentially a very brief readable well-ritten summary of what's called the Italian school of political science with writers from around 1900 in Italy. This is of course well before Mousolini etc. And these writers.
  • The Managerial Revolution — Book · Referenced book (secondary) · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned to situate Burnham’s notoriety, while asserting The Machiavellians is his 'best book'.
    Opposite when was there's a great book published by James Bham in 1940 he's better known for the book the managerial revolution but his best book is actually a book I found in a used bookstore very randomly. It's called the Mchavelians.

Companies & orgs

  • The Southern Christian Leadership Conference — Company · Key organization in contested claim · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as the civil-rights organization allegedly shaped/created by Stanley Levison; used to argue hidden organizational control behind public narratives.
    Speeches and manages his whole organization. Absolutely. This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. the preacher is Martin Luther King. And the…
  • The Office of War Information — Company · Referenced propaganda institution · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as evidence that WWII mainstream media functioned as a government agency, supporting the claim of tightly controlled narrative environments.
    Is actually a government agency. So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information, OWI. OWI is basically the mainstream media as a government agency.
  • The Committee on Public Information — Company · Referenced propaganda institution · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as WWI propaganda apparatus to argue mass media narratives were simplistic and centrally managed.
    World War I, it's the Committee on Public Information, the CPI. Insane, wild propaganda. You ever take a look at World War I propaganda, and you're just This is propaganda for 11 year olds. this.

Concepts & topics

  • Democracy — Concept · Core topic · 25 mentions · first at
    Central object of critique: framed as a legitimizing euphemism masking oligarchy/monarchy-like realities; contrasted with 'politics' and used to interpret regimes like DPRK and the US.
  • American Governance — Concept · Core topic · 2 mentions · first at
    Yarvin argues Americans live inside a 'myth' of governance; claims real power is bureaucratic and elections have limited impact, especially post-1945.
  • Monarchy — Concept · Proposed alternative system · 24 mentions · first at
    Yarvin explicitly endorses monarchy as a preferred form of government, contrasting it with democracy/oligarchy and using UK/DPRK as examples of misleading labels.
    And then should they go to a constitutional monarchy? Should they go to a traditional democracy? What works?
  • The New Deal — Concept · Core historical example · 2 mentions · first at
    Presented as a 'startup-like' governance model enabling large projects; also described as the regime that has never been overthrown and still structures Washington.
  • Progressivism — Concept · Core topic / semantic claim · 1 mention · first at
    Argued to function historically as a euphemism for communism; used to connect 1930s Communist Party culture to modern 'progressive' politics.
  • Civil Rights Movement — Concept · Core topic (revisionist framing) · 1 mention · first at
    Characterized as a rebranded continuation of earlier Communist Party initiatives; tied to SCLC/MLK and propaganda/media environment claims.
    Was simply basically taking a communist party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the civil rights movement. Right?
  • Socialism — Concept · Background ideology category · 4 mentions · first at
    Appears in discussion of American left lineage (Intercollegiate Socialist Society; League for Industrial Democracy) and as a precursor context to communism/progressivism.
    He's trying to revolutionize the world. he has this conflict. There's a sort of division in American socialism between Wilson and Debs. And basically, Deb's the IWW leader is…
  • The Democratic People's Republic of Korea — Concept · Illustrative example (euphemism/legitimacy) · 2 mentions · first at
    Used to show how 'democratic' labeling functions as legitimacy-claiming euphemism despite dynastic monarchy-like reality.
    Korea. actually North, the full name of North Korea is [snorts] the de the DPRK. That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Places & events

  • Iran — Place · Current-events reference · 2 mentions
    Used to illustrate regime transition questions (monarchy to totalitarian regime) and to tee up debate about constitutional monarchy vs democracy.
    Iran… They went from a monarchy to… totalitarian regime…

Media & podcasts

  • The Truman Show — Media · Metaphor / framing device · 2 mentions · first at
    Used as an analogy for noticing seams in political narratives and euphemistic language (democracy/politics; kingdom/UK; DPRK).
    To think and I think that you know the way you come up with these ideas is you're sort of in you ever seen the movie The Truman Show?
  • Oppenheimer — Media · Illustrative example · 2 mentions · first at
    Referenced to support claims about the Manhattan Project being run like a startup and about communist affiliations among participants in the 1930s/40s milieu.
    Right? You have the technical guy and the nontechnical guy if you've seen Oppenheimer. And number four, they're all communists if you've seen Oppenheimer, of course.
  • Reds — Media · Recommended/illustrative media · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a film depicting early American communism and John Reed; used to argue communist ideas flowed from US elites to Russia.
    Warren Batty is playing John Reed and John Reed is the only American produced and directed by Warren Betty.

Full transcript with timestamps

Did you ever think Adam? What's your point? The future looks bright. My handshake is better than anything I ever signed right here.

You are a one of one. My son's right. I don't think I said this before. Okay, so we got we got a special guest here. There's going to be a group of you that are going to be driven insane by what he has to say. But there's going to be many of you that are going to say it's actually a good point. Like even right now with what's going on in the world, Venezuela, you know, just fell. Iran with what they're going through. They went from a monarchy to whatever you want to call it with the, you know, uh uh um totalitarian regime under Humeni.

And then should they go to a constitutional monarchy? Should they go to a traditional democracy? What works? What doesn't work? My guest today, here's what he said before. So, brace for impact. We're going to have a two-hour conversation, but these are some of the things that he said that's driven people insane. Some races are more suited to slavery than others. That'll upset a lot of people. Okay? Democracy is not a solution. It is the problem. The United States should be run like a corporation. If Americans want change, they should stop voting. The democratic experiment has failed. Real power in America is held by an unelected regime. Equality is not a natural human condition. Order is more important than freedom. Curtis Yarin, it's great to have you on.

Thanks so much. Pleasure to be here, Patrick. So, how did you come up with these ideas? How did this

How did I come up with these ideas? Uh, you know, my gosh. Uh, how did I come up with these ideas? is I was kind of a, you know, a little bit of a normie libertarian kind of person and I started reading a little bit and I started thinking a little bit and uh after a little while I'd had a little too much to think and um I think that you know the way you come up with these ideas is you're sort of in you ever seen the movie The Truman Show?

Of course. You watch The Truman Show. It's it's really really great movie. And you know, Truman, you know, just starts to notice these things uh about the world he lives in that just aren't um that aren't real, that can't possibly be real. You know, the sky, the horizon is kind of stitched together. You know, I'll give you an example of one of these things that's very, very simple, which is that you have these two words, politics and democracy. Mhm.

And you might notice that analytically these words mean the same thing. Um do they?

Well, uh you know what is democracy without politics? It sounds like something they might have in North Korea. You know, actually North, you know, the full name of North Korea is [snorts] the de the DPRK. That's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That is three euphemisms for democracy, one place name, and it's a monarchy. And so, you know, what this is one of the things that we sort of see across history is that basically regimes um well, they tend to lie. They tend to actually sort of, you know, conceal the most basic things um about what they are. Let's go, for example, to the United Kingdom. It's not a kingdom.

No one could possibly describe it objectively as a kingdom. It's true that it has a king, but the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. Okay? And everyone in the UK recognizes that the idea that the king is running the government is preposterous. Um, it wasn't really true, let's say, in 1725, that the king was running the government. That would be, I guess, George, but people really believed it was the case then. And so you have these, you know, what we, you know, we when we call the US a democracy.

You know, it's actually much more similar to calling the United Kingdom a kingdom than we might think. One of the ways that you can see this is again if you look at these words democracy and politics, you'll hear that um they have opposite veances. So democracy, anything democratic is good. You know, we're going to democratize US foreign policy. I don't know what it means, but it has to be good. We're going to politicize US foreign policy. Clearly bad. Like, we don't want this to be political. The word political has acquired a negative veilance. You know, we're going to put politicians in charge of the government.

Politicians, nobody likes politicians. How should they be in charge of the government? And then you're just like, wait, but isn't having politicians in charge of the government what we mean when we say democracy? Um, moreover, when we look at actually the way that Washington DC works, I actually grew up, um, my father was in the US foreign service in the state department.

So, you grew up in the state department and they have very much this attitude of like politics is this like dirty thing that needs to be kept out of government whenever possible, right? It's like you're sort of clearly seeing, okay, we have to kind of pretend to be this, but if you actually look at the way that US foreign policy changes when you have a presidential election, we'll get to Congress later, but you know, until Donald Trump until Donald Trump's really second term, actually the influence of the election on foreign policy is pretty minimal. and the influence of the presidential election on domestic policy is almost zero because domestic policy is run by Congress. Um, and so, you know, we have these situations where everyone goes out in this election and they really think that they're like they they talk as if they were electing a king. They say Donald Trump is in power.

uh he's certainly not a negligible, you know, force in Washington. In fact, I'd say, you know, one way to look at the sort of the paradox of the Trump administration is to say, well, I think it's pretty unquestionable that the second Trump administration had maybe 10 times as much impact on Washington as the first.

There's no question. It's not even close. Second, it sounds like it's been three terms in Washington.

It could be 12 months. could be 10 times as much, could be 20 times as much. And if you look at Well, wait a second, there's a punch line. So, if you look at the if you compare the first Trump administration to the Bush administration,

again, you know, it's not as much of a difference, but it's 3x, 5x, you know, as much of an impact. I mean,

Trump to Bush, Bush to Trump. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you remember the first Trump administration, it's like the liberals are like, "The sky is falling every day." Sure. Right. And now they're like, "The sky is falling every day." Right. And

are you saying him to Bush, he got three times more done or Bush to Trump, Bush got three times?

No. But Trump, even the first term, Trump had three times as much impact as Bush. So the thing is what you're seeing from the perspective of the New York Times reader, you're just like, "Oh my god, this politician, this, you know, carnival barker has this immense power over the government, which is the most important thing around, and we're all going to die." And it's like well even you know let's let's acknowledge that these enormous increases in power are true. Okay but you know power is is something that you can measure on a 0ero to one scale. Zero is you have no power you don't matter. One is absolute power.

So if you're looking at anything that's measurable on a 0ero to one scale you know does she love me? Does she love me not? You know, one way to look at that is to say, all right, let me forget about where I am on the scale relatively and figure out where I am on the scale absolutely because actually when you're seeing those kinds of increases, you know, when you're seeing increases by an order of magnitude, for example, what you see is that those kinds of increases are most available at the bottom of the absolute absolute spectrum. So when you're going

meaning closer to zero, not close to closer to zero, not to one. If you can multiply anything by 100 and it's still less than one, it's got to be a very small number. And [snorts] so what people don't really realize about the post 1945 American political system is that it goes from, of course, 1945 FDR dies. FDR is pretty close to one. He's pretty close to being to really having absolute power over the over the government, especially in wartime, but also before wartime, he's really running the government like a CEO. And if you look at like, you know, there's a diary I have uh of one of his uh cabinet secretaries. And you look at FDR's cabinet meetings, they're like a CEO running a seauite meeting. Okay? If you look at one of Trump's cabinet meetings, it's it's not like that. No, it's really not like that because actually the government, the way that Washington today works is when you're a CEO of a

company, I actually am a CEO of a company. When you're the CEO of a company, one of the um sort of worst terms of like you're not a good CEO is to say that you're reactive.

Okay? You're always reacting to things that happen. You're not making proactive decisions. You're not sort of steering. You're basically reacting to your inbound.

Sure. Company's doing really well and doesn't really need a CEO. Maybe it's fine to have a reactive CEO. Okay. But FDR was a proactive CEO. You know, he could say, "Oh, we're going to build, you know, look at like Route One, for example, on the California coast. That's an FDR project. That's a New Deal, I believe, California Conservation Corps project. Imagine building Route One today. completely unimaginably impossible. It would be much harder than building the high-speed rail, right? And so what you're seeing is you're seeing this state which is almost entirely based on bureaucratic process.

And when you're working in a process-based regime, everything is procedural. everything. You're you're almost as a civil servant, you're almost something like a judge in a way because everything you're doing is following a process.

But FDR needed a crisis. Without that, he wouldn't had the power that he had, right?

Uh I mean, take take the crisis out. Take the Well, yeah. The way that FDR I mean, the way that FDR gains this power is very specific to the 1930s. And so, for example, one of the things you'll see in um in 1932 when FDR is running in the election, the Democratic Party is of course America's traditional conservative party at this time. Um and it's been basically taken over from the inside by radical progressives. The first example of this is Woodro Wilson. Um FTR comes back again with the same thing, but he's still running as a Democrat. And so if you look at the 1932 political platform of Roosevelt, it's a traditional democratic platform which means small government, less spending, hard money, etc., etc., etc. And on this platform, he gets the votes of, you know, the solid south and the inner city Catholics, which basically drive him, you know, into office. Be that as it may, forgetting, I mean, America in 1932

is such a different country from today. night and day more different from any country today on earth, right? Um

but you know he managed to do that. He basically managed to create the new he created the Washington that we have today. And so you know one of the things if you if you step back and look at US history over the last 250 years what you see is actually you're seeing transitions between forms of government. You know how the French talk about the first republic, second republic, third republic. So in American history, we have three administrations that basically establish a regime. We have the Washington administration which is actually run by Hamilton. We have the Lincoln administration and we have the the FDR's administration. Um these things happen about every 75 or 80 years. They basically involve consolidation of the power of the federal government under a single individual. They basically who was essentially a CEO of the government.

This is what Hamilton and Washington were doing. This is what Lincoln was doing. This is what FDR is doing. Love them or hate them. You know, it's a neutral thing. They did plenty of good and bad things both. Um, you know, that's sort of that's what creates uh an administration. If you look at, you know, being a California person, if you look at the New Deal, again, I think they did plenty of things wrong. I think they made plenty of terrible choices. They were also run like a startup. And so if you're looking for like a startup Washington, you know, basically look at look at the New Deal.

If you look, for example, at the Manhattan project, you know, libertarians will basically be like, oh well, the government can't do anything efficiently. Well, the Manhattan project is number one a government project. Number two, it is probably the most successful engineering project in history. Number three, it is run almost exactly like a California startup, right? Down to the two co-founders, right? You have the technical guy and the nontechnical guy if you've seen Oppenheimer. And number four, they're all communists if you've seen Oppenheimer, of course.

Right. And and and so, you know, that's not that combination of facts doesn't really fit into any kind of legendarium of the American.

What's the point you're making? Your point you're making is run it like a startup. Run it like a CEO. Run it like a guy who's running a Fortune 100 company. Let him make the decisions. Not a lot of executive orders. I don't need to get everyone's permission to do something is.

So if you look at, you know, I'm I'm sort of trying to set the historical stage a little bit for where we are. So if you look at, you know, again, FDR creates this sort of really, I mean, he literally conquers the world, right? you know, and he creates this kind of world conquering state and people just looked at America at that time, whether they were Americans or foreigners, they're just like, "This is a country. This is a government that could do anything." So FDR dies in 45 and in 44 he picks Harry Truman as his VP. Harry Truman is kind of a nobody. He's not even really a New Dealer. He's a man of sort of limited pretensions and limited abilities.

And FDR replaces Henry Wallace, who was kind of a hardcore communist on his uh his VP suite with Truman knowing FDR knows. Nobody else knows. Americans did not even know that FDR used a wheelchair. You're you're aware of that, right? Like that's the level of like distance between reality and story that was totally routine back then,

right? And people just people lived almost entirely in this comic book world. So and you know on all sides that war was fought in a comic book world. Um you know and World War I is even more sort of comic book. So you have basically a world where you have this very simplistic drama that's presented to a very unsophisticated by today's standards audience. Right? So they just see this sort of propaganda experience of the war. They have no idea that FDR is dying. They have no idea of the difference between FDR and Truman.

Actually what happens is that because Truman is a lightweight and he does not take over the job of FDR. He is not really in charge. This is what FDR intended. FDR is like I've assembled this amazing collection of just amazing talented first rate people who can do anything and I'm not going to have a successor. Instead, power is going to flow down into the regime into the administration into what we now call the deep state and there's going to be no way no way to get it out. What FDR didn't um understand really or maybe understood but didn't care, who knows, was that a regime like that has no way simply because you have this administration that is almost impossible to get rid of.

There's no sort of Darwinian constraint on its performance, especially if it's ruling the world and doesn't have to worry about Canada invading or something like that. And so the effectiveness of this organization has just been getting worse and worse and worse for the last 80 years.

Doesn't that validate that you know the the cons? Well, we can we can come back to that. But the part I want to go with you on FDR is would FDR have been FDR without a massive crisis? He used the crisis, right? Take the crisis out. He's not as

historical figure as we would be talking about today. You can't really separate the man from his time. FDR is a pretty enigmatic figure. It's very, very hard to know what was going on in his head because he has not, you know, this regime has never been defeated. And so when you look at a defeated regime, it's analyzed by its enemies. Its enemies have

this is who this regime um FDR FDR regime FDR's regime has never been defeated. Right?

You'll find out. What do you mean by that? Like no one's outdone him. No one's done any

no one has done to him for example. So again let's let's go back to the 0ero to1 thing. If you're looking at a 0ero to one definition of regime change okay what's the most complete regime change that we've seen in our time the fall of the Soviet Union some people might say but there was relatively a lot of the elites sort of kept their positions a lot of things like was actually a relatively incomplete regime change. If you want to see complete regime change, go to Germany in 1945. That has the advantage of it being a regime change that was carried out by liberals. So it's sort of hard people hard for people to question it. That's an absolutely complete regime change. And so, you know, for example, you know, the allies come in and what are you going to do with the SS? Well, you might say, uh, well, you know, what's the problem with this Nazi regime? real problem is the Holocaust. You know, big problem. What's

the cause of the Holocaust? Anti-semitism in the SS. So, we're going to stamp out anti-semitism in the SS and all in all the SS lunchrooms anywhere in Germany. Uh the new administration is going to put posters, pro-Jew posters, and we're going to make make it clear that the SS is a pro-Semitic organization. Now, that's not what they did. That is not even close to what they did. Actually, the SS ceased to exist. and actually having been a member of this previously prestigious and powerful organization became something shameful, right? And um you know, love it or hate it, uh there were a lot of excesses in the Allied occupation of Germany. Um but uh you can't say it didn't work. And so when I say that basically nobody has overthrown the New Deal, that's essentially what I mean. Nixon and Reagan both make some attempts at various levels of government reorganization as Trump has made various

attempts. Um really, you know, if you look at the number of federal employees, for example, through the 80s in the Reagan administration, you'll see it actually dips a little bit. And under Trump, it dips even more than that. It dips like 10% or so. Okay? But still, if we're comparing that to denazification, you're still at 0.001% of that. So, for example, in 1945, they're like, "All right, we're going to denazify Germany." Okay, what would that you know, you can analogize that to dewification or something? Okay, how are we going to denazify Germany? Well, we're going to basically take all the books that were published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 and if they are books that have any Nazi content, which of course imagine you know all the books that have progressive content.

It's basically all of them. Sure. Okay. So, what are we going to do except for except for maybe children's books and not even accepting children's books. Have you been to Have you been to a bookstore? you go to a Barnes & Noble, you know, and um you know how the Nazis burn books, you know, everyone's seen the picture of the Nazis burning books. This is a bunch of um Nazi stormtroopers burning the library of the Institute for Sexual Research, which was the kind of key VHimar trans institution. They had a big, you know, big celebration, you know, throw gasoline on the books, whatever. It's very dramatic. Okay. The Allies in Germany in 1945 are very different from that. They're like, "All right, it's going to be illegal to own any Nazi books, which are basically any books published in the last 12 years, and what are we going to do with these books? We're going to pulp them." They didn't burn them. They just turned them

into toilet paper. You can find these books in Germany today. Okay? I don't think it's illegal to possess them anymore. You're not going to find them randomly in a used bookstore. You can buy them in certain ways. Libraries have them, and you know, major libraries. And if you want to go and read these books, you will show that you have a legitimate academic need to read these books. Okay? Like you'll you'll need to present like academic credentials. So imagine treating progressivism that way.

Okay? I'm not saying that this is what needs to be done. This is every historical situation is different. You had the enormous power that was generated at that time by winning a war. Right? But when we use, you know, this kind of language that Donald Trump uses, you know, he's uses this very like crossing the Rubicon kind of language like we're going to change everything. This is a revolution. You know, you've got to basically check yourself and say, "No, this is 0001 of a revolution." And when you have a real regime change in a country, everyone's life changes.

Yeah. Why don't we do this? Can Can we do this just so the audience knows because some of the audience doesn't know who you are, okay? They're kind of wondering saying, "Who is this Curtis Yarvin guy?" Uh, you're very well known in the Peter Theel, in the Elon Musk, in the tech bro billionaire Silicon Valley yourself. They know who you are. And you know, a lot of guys have said, you know, your ideas have been revolutionary. They follow it. We should consider what Curtis has to say. And then the likes of New York Times and others are going to say, "This guy's crazy. He has no clue what he's talking about and he's the secret mastermind behind Trump and all the ideas that's coming up." That's kind of how they're depicting who you are. If if you could describe to the audience in less than 60 seconds, what do you believe in? What would that be? Gosh, what do I believe in and what would that be? Um, I would say what I believe is

that in America, we're living inside this, you might say, 250 year old myth of American governance. Every every state, every nation, every polity has a political formula. It has a reason that it believes that its political system is right and just and true. And actually, if you're looking at Anglo-American governance, you're really going back more like 400 years. And so, I essentially believe that the things that we think we've learned in the Anglo-American political tradition since essentially Elizabeth I are basically not true. I think that actually the reasons for the success of the Anglo-American world are very different from the reasons that we think this success happened. And I actually just don't believe in our political system at all.

You don't believe in our political system. I don't believe in it. Okay. So, you know, democracy monarchy, right? The longest lasting democracy when you look at the numbers, you know, on most articles they'll say it's us 238 years. And you'll see a bunch of different countries uh in democracies.

Switzerland, Switzerland. Yeah, we've seen these, right? And then if you go to monarchies, you'll see Japan at the top 2600 years. You'll see, you know, uh uh some real interesting Sweden, you'll see Morocco, you'll see uh uh UK, you'll see Norway, I think some of these countries.

Sure. But you have to distinguish actually, you know, not every democracy is a real democracy. Not every monarchy is a real monarchy. one of the the most important things I think that you know if there's a single book that I'd recommend uh to sort of you know for basically smart curious people to sort of you know develop the skill of doing this kind of Truman show thing of looking for you know when does this word mean its opposite when was uh there's a great book published by James Bham in 1940 he's better known for the book the managerial revolution but his best book is actually a book I found in a used bookstore very randomly. It's called the Mchavelians and it's a um essentially a very brief readable well-ritten summary of what's called the Italian school of political science uh with writers from around 1900 in Italy. This is of course well before Mousolini etc etc etc. And these writers

were realists. They were profoundly realistic. And they insisted that the most important thing is to basically sort of abandon these symbolic statements and to see reality for what it really is. And so when you're decoding things like you have this word democracy, democracy today in the modern world means legitimate government. That's again when you claim to be democratic, you claim to be legitimate because we live in this sort of global democratic empire created by 1945 and even 1815, you might argue. And so this is why North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

They have to claim to be democratic because that is a claim of legitimacy. Nonetheless, anyone could look at it for five seconds and say, "No, this is actually a dynasty, right? the Kim family, right? So when we look at, you know, our democracy to sort of go back to the basics in the way or what we call a democracy, I would say that generally speaking there um you know to paraphrase Aristotle who knew everything about government there are three forms of government. You have government of the one, the few and the many. So Aristotle called these monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. So if you use the word democracy in today's political language, you mean one of two things. If you're George Soros, for example, or someone from Soros world, when you use the word democracy, um you mean what is sometimes called meritocracy, sometimes called civil society. Um you mean the power of prestigious institutions

uh you know the power of the experts you know democracy is by definition legitimate government which means it's good government which means it's government guided guided guided by the best experts who would you have it guided by you know some shoemaker you know there's a there's a famous cartoon in the New Yorker came out a couple of years ago where it's in the back of an airplane and the passengers are there's a some passenger stood up and is speaking and um he's saying something like um you know uh why should we let these arrogant pilots who think they know all about flying airplanes you know like fly the plane you know I I demand to you know I demand a vote of the people to uh to elect how to fly the plane right no one who saw this cartoon there you go uh No one who saw this cartoon thought that they were laughing at democracy.

No one, you know, looks at this cartoon, opens their New Yorker and says like, "This is an anti-democracy cartoon." It is plainly an anti-democracy cartoon. It is plainly a cartoon about the absurdity of the literal word democracy. Because in fact when you use the words like you know meritocracy and civil society and the rule and the rule of experts the aristoilian word is very very plain. You're talking about an oligarchy. You're talking about an institutional oligarchy. If these institutions believed in God you would call it a theocracy without a second look. Um it's a regime very similar to the you know in ancient Egypt you know 3,000 years ago they had the rule of the priests of Amun you know same exact system right and the role that elections serve in the system is not too dissimilar to the role that the king of England serves in in England right it's not quite that because you know Trump is like Trump is a little

like George III in some ways and that he's trying to revive I have the power of a kind of dying institution. Um so that you know the president

dying institution the presidency because the presidency is very much going the way of it's turning into president Kamacho from mediocracy. It's very much going the way of the British monarchy and becoming almost entirely ceremonial. And so and and

why do you say that? Uh it's losing its power. Is it reality? Its power is its power. It's been losing its power for 80 years. It lost most of its power in 1945 when FDR died

due to Truman or due to due to the death of FDR and there was no way that anyone could have stepped into.

So So you're a big supporter of what FDR did? No, actually I think that FDR did some very bad things. But the the like on the other hand got to say he conquered the world, right? you know, he could certainly build a railroad, you know, and and so when you have a government that can't even build a railroad, like beggars can't be choosers, right? You're actually in a situation of pretty poor governance in this country. And a lot of the problem that we have is that because we feel that we have this perfect system of government. You know, there's something very schizophrenic in the way conservatives view the government because they view the system as perfect, but somehow the system has produced these horrible results. Like, how did that happen? Maybe we just have to put it back on the right on the right course. You know, maybe just a little nudge and it'll snap back into actually working perfectly because it's a perfect

system after all. uh and in fact if you look at the sort of you know let's go back to this thing of like democracy versus politics. So this idea that politics and politicians are bad is the idea that democracy is literal democracy is bad because there's another thing that we mean when we say democracy we mean putting politicians in charge of the government, right? And we mean populism. And so what we have is basically the the sort of the the political landscape of the mind today is that populism and meritocracy are fighting over this magic word democracy which defines legitimacy.

And everyone is like, well, this is democracy, you know, and you know, the George Soroses of the world are just like, well, you know, obviously having the best people in charge is democracy. And the Donald Trump's of the world are like, no, actually democracy is when elected politicians control the government. This is severely complicated in the American system by the fact and this is something else that so a lot of the things that I'm saying are things that are sort of quite obvious if you kind of think about them from a distance but they are things that neither party is going to tell you each for its own reasons.

What are you suggesting? What what what do you want to see? What do I want to see? Uh well that's a long that's a long you know it's like let me let's start with the diagnosis a little bit first because understanding kind of how we got here. I want to I'm a monarchist. I want to see monarchy. I basically see that um

you know in this kind of context between populism and meritocracy for this magic word democracy you know and if we were to use Aristotle's categories in a scientific way we would say it's a contest between oligarchy and democracy and I think one of the things that you see if you look at the sort of the red versus blue conflict in America and I think this is true about a lot of different kinds of conflict historically is that whenever you see a conflict, the sort of the interpretation of that conflict that should jump into your mind is that maybe each side is basically right about the other. And so you must know, you know, a couple that's always fighting, right? And you're like, well, you know, the problem is he's kind of right about her, but she's also kind of right about him,

right? And I think that actually what animates most people in America politically today is not so much affection for their own model as fear and loathing of the other model. And so if you grew up, you know, like me, you know, New Yorker reader, State Department, Ivy League kind of house, this is a house. This is my my cultural background is definitely America's ruling elite. Uh there's a lot of people more culturally elite than me. Um but for example, my father's parents were American communists. They were literal Jewish communists. They had cards. I don't know where the cards are, but they had, you know, card carrying communists.

Did they carry the card? Did they keep it somewhere? All I know is from the 30s to the 70s, they had cards.

How did that not pass down to your dad? Um that's a good question. I think that that's sort of a the transition between the old left and the new left. You've probably heard the term red diaper baby. So, you know, you have the old left, which is kind of the Stalinist left, and that left kind of dies and runs out of gas in the 50s, especially like there's a lot of, you know, a lot of that is dying in like 1956, for example, with with with Hungary. So, you know, the Communist Party USA is sort of the most excited, most exciting, and most fun in the 1930s. In the 1930s, it's you saw Oppenheimer, right? Oppenheimer is um made from the most liberal biography of Oppenheimer available. Actually, Oppenheimer himself probably was not only a communist but actually the head of the communist cell in the the Berkeley physics department. What's clear and what the movie makes clear to you to its credit is that everybody else

is a communist. In fact, everybody in the 1930s who's cool is a communist. Dorothy Parker communist. Charlie Chaplan communist. Everybody's a communist. It's normal. And um do you know what the word they used to describe the word communist in the 1930s means party member. This is also what it meant in the in the Eastern block. You couldn't It's like calling yourself a hell's angel just cuz you ride a motorcycle. No, you're not a Hell's Angel unless you're a Hell's Angel, right? So,

you have to be a true You have to be a true Yeah. It's not just an expression of opinion. It's actually a status. And if you're kicked out of the party in the 1930s, you lose all your friends. If you're a Hollywood screenwriter, you lose your job. It's like a closed union shop. Basically, communism in the 1930s in America is like, what if all the kids at the gifted school tried to take over the world? That's basically

what benefits did they get from being the card carrying communist? Your grandparents?

Uh, my my grandparents uh were they moved up about four levels in the social hierarchy because they were basically um they were garment industry Jews, you know, they were they were Yiddish speaking Jews. they were these are tier Jews, right? You know, they become communists and like all of their, you know, I'm just like as a kid, I'm like, why is my grandmother's best friend a distributor of Italian films? Communist, right? You know, and so because she's a humble person, she's makes boiled chicken, she's a school teacher in the New York City schools, right? You know, but actually she has these tremendous intellectual pretensions. She had this tremendous intellectual energy and that led all of these people into the world of communism.

Did you spend a lot of time with your grandma? Um or grandpa some. But you know what the funny thing is? They would actually the only reason I knew that they were actual literal communists was through my parents. They would even as an adult and not even knowing that I was a blogger or anything, they were just they were naturally completely secretive about it. And do you know what word that that was always used by these people to describe themselves and their supporters in general in the 1930s?

Progressive. Progressive. Yeah. Right. Makes sense. So they hid behind that word.

They Well, that word it's a little safer than communism. Yeah. So the word progressive um basically you will find it used for example in the teens by Teddy Roosevelt and people like that. And Teddy Roosevelt is really more of an American fascist almost in a way. Uh he's certainly not a communist, but for about a hundred years, the word progressive has meant communist. Right.

Okay. So So mom and dad, grandpa, just just stay on that for a second. When you're hanging out with them, are they teaching you Curtis, when you grow up, these are the things that matter? Here's what you got.

Well, I think that they lost most of their energy by the 1970s. I think most of that energy had become had fed into a more sort of diluted uh it had become the new left. And the new left, you know, the the the principal difference between the new left and the old left is that the old left is centralized in the Communist Party USA. The new left is decentralized. The new left has no center. Nobody's in charge of it. And you're like, "Oh, well, you know, at least we're not Stalinist."

How did that happen? Um, it happened because it was increasingly difficult. Well, it happened first of all because of the Cold War. Because Stalin actually, you know, it was Stalin's decision to get divorced after the war. Like the US did not want to get divorced. Stalin made it very clear during the war, American liberals and progressives had seen Russia as their kind of strong right arm that would help them control the world basically. So you see, you know, uh there's all this amazing pro-communist stuff during the 40s, films like Mission to Moscow and so forth. just insane Stalinist propaganda totally flooding the American airways. 45 Stalin decides, "No, actually I I'm not your little dog.

Um, who knows how this would have played out if FDR hadn't died." Stalin's like, "No, I'm actually a peer." And that creates a great split in the American left because the American left in uh 3536 had formed this what was called the popular front where liberals allied with communists um or communists allied with liberals because it was always like you know the communists were sort of the more desirable party in that. It was like the liberals were always trying to get with the communists basically and the communists were like, "Oh, get away from me, liberal." Right? You you'll see them do that now. And when that breaks, you get basically this breach in the American left where the majority of American liberals and I mainly include people who were not working for the Soviet Union but sort of saw the Soviet Union as working for them. Um, which was sort of the view at the top of the Roosevelt administration.

Stalin decisively breaks that myth and causes these American liberals to realize, oh, we're not creating one progressive world government under the United Nations. We have two competing progressive world empires. These empires would still go after like the old British and French world. They would, you know, for example, in 56, the US and the USSR are aligned against Britain and France in the SE crisis, right? So there's still like you know this kind of deep ideological tie between the two and that tie goes all the way from 1917 to 1989. So for example in the 80s there's there's this thing where

17 to89 yeah the whole life of the Soviet Union it has very complicated deep relationships with the American left. Probably too deep to go into here but for you know here's an example of this. So in I think it was 84, this was revealed only after the fall of the Soviet Union. In ' 84, Teddy Kennedy sends his basically chief consiliary John Tunny secretly to Moscow to talk with Androp off about the um their strategy in the 84 election when Teddy Kennedy didn't end up running. I think it was 84. Could have been 80. I think it was 84. So you have all of these like deep deep deep see you know you have all these

former US California close friend Ted Kennedy is known for making confidential trips to Moscow in the 1880s

1980s a detailed top secret KGB memoranda published in '92 which revealed that Tunny served as a back channel to Soviet officials 1980 visit Ted Kennedy primarily primarily challenged to challenge Carter Tunny traveled to Moscow to devise a strategy to counter what Kennedy perceived as Carter's excessive antis-siet stance. You got to be kidding me.

It's right there on the screen, right? You know, and this is a Wikipedia. He stayed he stayed in politics 40 years and nothing happened to him.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so like the relationship between the US and the USSR is it's not at all like the relationship between the US and Hitler. It's not it's like the relationship between the you the cold war is sort of like imagine you're a parent you have a teenager I have I have a couple of teenagers and sometimes teenagers turn out bad you know they get into heroin they start stealing money from your purse you know they do awful awful things but it's not like a stranger broke into your house and stole money out of your wife's purse you know and so there's always this kind of feeling of like a deep family tie there which I think is uh something that they tried very hard to you know Because there was this always this basically for all of the 20th century, you had this idea that there were two lefts.

Mhm. You know how there's two lefts, you know, the communists and the liberals, and if you call a liberal a communist, you know, it's the worst thing in the world, etc., etc., etc. And you look at basically the left now and you're just like,

come on, don't you're just yanking my chain. The idea that there's two lefts today, like you're just yanking my chain. There is not two lefts. And you know this of course is first kind of recognized by the first I mean really the first new left president is Carter but you know the first really acknowledged new left president is Obama and so again with Obama you're probably familiar being a you know conservative podcaster you're probably familiar with some of the you know the interesting stories around the mysterious past of uh Mr. Barack Obama. Um, and I think most of those stories are uh,

which one's most mysterious to you? So, I've heard many of them, but um, you're more well read on this topic. So,

I think that generally speaking, I think just the important fact at I think his connection with bay errors, for example, is completely real. Um, I think that but more generally, you can step back and say Barack Obama is a man of the new left. He's a new leftist. He's just When you use the word new left, the dictionary definition should point to Barack Obama, right? And the connections between the new left and the old left, I think, are very interesting. First of all, you see this word progressive, you know, being basically continually used.

It's not a coincidence, right? And it's like when people when when progressives today use the word progressive, I would say no more than 5% of them know that it is is or ever was in any sense a euphemism for communist. They have no idea. They're like, you know, in New Mexico, one of the things that um you know, in the wild experience of Spanish colonization, a lot of Jews and conversos from Spain fled to the new world. So there are these populations of of conversos in uh New Mexico, like old Spanish, not you know, and they do strange things with candles and napkins, and they have no idea why. They don't know that they're Jews, right? And so in a way, that's kind of the state of the new left. They actually don't know that they're communists. They don't understand that this is completely their heritage. And that when and yet when you look at it, you see it all over the place.

The new left doesn't know they're communists. They sort of do and they see Mamani Obama

they know they they sort of they they see it from the inside in a way and so they they perceive themselves in sort of in opposition to liberals and they'd basically be like oh no we're not Stalinists like Stalinists are like st you know there's a lot of if you know the logical fallacy no true no true Scotsman you know you basically get you know real communism has never been tried you know Stalin actually betrayed communism you know here's another fun story that your uh your researchers can bring up um easily. Do you know the name Stanley Leverson?

No. So Stanley Leon was um until 1956 uh I think he was not it was not an official title but he was basically the CFO of the Communist Party USA. Um he was kind of ran its financial operations. And in 56 uh or 55 really he realizes that the writing is on the wall for being a minion of Stalin. It's like McCarthyism has happened. It's like you know it's just Hungary has happened. Like it's just not it's it's not it's not the vibe. It's not the thing. So Leison does this interesting thing where he he decides to revive a cause of the Communist Party from the 1930s and he finds a black minister with a somewhat dodgy uh PhD and creates a movement and an organization and writes all of his speeches and manages his whole organization. Absolutely. This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Uh the preacher is Martin Luther King. And the funniest thing, here's a fun thing that

you can do with Wikipedia. If [snorts] you go to, you know, Stanley Leverson's page, you will see that it says that Stanley Leon was influential in creating the SCLC. Go to the SCC's page.

No mention, nothing. He's not on the page. He's not on the page. Um and and and so like this is

was instrumental in all the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization established by Dr. King and other southern black preachers to further the cause of civil rights. He had initially been introduced.

Go to the SCLC page. Go to the SC uh search for Leon. Why not, man? You know, like you've seen the Truman Show. You're like, "Why does that car come around every every hour, you know?"

So, but what what does this mean to a to a to a [snorts] guy like you? How do you process this information? So did they use did they use MLK to

it's it's no it's just that it's like [sighs] you know when you see an organization you know government and non-government you know you can never be sure that it is what it says it is. And so, you know, basically for um you know, even now, like it's like we accept all these sort of lies without question. We see a politician reading a speech and we're like, well, we didn't know he he he didn't really write that speech. Maybe he helped edit it a little bit. Maybe he marked it up, but he's reading someone else's speech. You know,

you're saying I have a dream was written by him. No, no, no. He didn't write his own speeches. This is common. This is wellknown history. So I have a dream speech wasn't written by Martin Luther King.

No, he didn't write his own speeches. He might have written a letter from a Birmingham jail because he was actually in the Birmingham jail, but I'm not, you know, completely confident of that. If he wrote letter from a Birmingham jail, he was plagiarizing his own speech writers. Um, you know,

and he Stanley was one of the speech writers. Yes. Go back Rob Crop on the on the previous uh go back one page on the Oh, right there. Martin Lord I have a dream speech but it was collaborative effort when key contributions from his lawyer and speech writers Clarence B. Jones businessman Stanley Leonson

businessman Stanley Leon businessman not communist and other advisers who drafted provided input Jones is also a communist you know I mean is also a communist

but well you know I I don't know the first I just want to read you one more thing because while you were speaking I read this one part go back on the previous page go to the RFK site it's like five sentences from the bottom uh in 1963 following the revelation of Dr. King's circle that attorney general Bobby Kenn RF Kennedy and then John F. Kennedy had pressured Dr. King in person to break with Levenson and Jack Odell but Leist

also communist. Yeah. But Levenson Leon continued to advise Dr. King privately until Dr. King's assassination in April of 68. And afterwards Levenson continued to work with Dr. King's wife, Kretta Scott King, the poor people's campaign in DC that took place from May 12 to

Of course, he's actually the CEO, right? You know, and and like he's actually the CEO, right? And

MLK's communist ties to Leon. Yeah. And but it was, you know, the thing is if you pull back to the bigger picture, basically even the term civil rights. So basically what you had was in the 30s with cases like for example the Scottsboro boys which were was George Floyd in the 1930s you know you had this um basically black nationalism and black liberation huge huge cause of the um communist party in the 20s and 30s. If you look up the phrase uh self-determination in the black belt, for example, that's a 1920s era communist slogan. And they actually imagined having black SSRs in like Alabama, like Soviet actually parts of the Soviet Union. Um and and and like you know, because the Soviet Union was intended to be a world government, of course, right? You know, and it wasn't Russian. It was started in Russia. um and um you know and not really by Russians either, right? And so you have all of these things that are

basically, you know, 20th century stories which when you look at them with a 21st century historical view and you're trying to find the reality rather than the narrative, you basically see that the reality is like very very different from the narrative. It's like FDR being in a wheelchair. So what Leon was doing was simply basically taking um a communist party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the civil rights movement. Right? So completely just no question of this history. It's like all the details are kind of readily acknowledged. If you look at like David Garrow's King biography, you know, it's all going to be in there, right? you know, and you can actually tell the truth about it. Now, maybe not quite in the way that I'm telling it because I'm telling it in a way that makes it sensational because I believe it actually is sensational, right? And and

it's kind of amazing what happened here. It's it's kind of wild and it's sort of like, of course, when we see these other regimes of the 20th century, we sort of expect them to be Oruroian. expect people to not understand what's going on in their own country. But like, you know, the reality is like what is America in the 1960s? It's basically three TV stations, ABC, CBS, and NBC plus uh for the ruling class NPR uh and PBS. And it is a very controlled, very tightly organized broadcast media environment. If you look at basically during both world wars, you'll see what we call and conservatives called MSM. uh is actually a government agency. So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information, OWI. OWI is basically the mainstream media as a government agency.

Uh World War I, it's the uh Committee on Public Information, the CPI. Insane, wild propaganda. You ever take a look at like, you know, World War I propaganda, and you're just like, "This is propaganda for 11 year olds." Like, this is incredibly simplistic, incredibly crude. like why are we fighting in Germany? The Hun is going to come rape your sister with his spiked helmet, right? You know, and it's like you look at the reality of the diplomatic, you know, machinations, you know, behind that which is easily as complicated as anything going on in Washington today and you're just like actually this is for children and and so in a way waking up from this kind of this dream to

how do you though? How do you wake up from the dream? I mean, look, to the average person, No, I'm being serious with you because to the a So, you're telling me in 1917 to '89, a Teddy Kennedy who wants to run for office against Jimmy Carter has to send a guy, okay, to Russia.

Yeah. To meet with them and say he is more pro pro-s Soviet than Carter for what? Hey, help him become a president.

What? What? Why would you want to Who? So, so does that mean you needed Russia to get elected?

I don't know that you needed Russia to get elected, but it was like more like we're going to kind of coordinate our efforts so that things sort of look good on all

who cares though. Why do I need Russia? So, if you're talking about election interference, I mean, that's like

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a different that's a different world. That's truly Russian election interference.

More that it's more that you still had a sense in the new left of the 80s. Consider, for example, the nuclear freeze movement from back then. remember that? You know, maybe you're about the born in the 70s, like 78. Yeah.

Yeah. 73. So, you know, if you remember sort of the peace movement of the 1980s, like actually Russia is quite deeply involved in that. They're still in the habit uh in the 80s of giving basically bunches of money to left-wing movements all around the planet, certainly including the US. Now, yeah. Is this a sort of a a little a shadow of the way it used to be? It's a shadow of the way it used to be because uh you know before the cold war like just completely crazy stuff went on. uh you know I'm I mean completely but but like you go you know all the way back to the past and you find like you go all the way back to 1917 and you find very deep ties between American progressive elements and the early USSR right again completely. So, for example, if you, this was one of my little little little red pills. Um, if you, um, look at the Russian Civil War, for example, um, today's historians will tell you without

blinking an eye that the US sided with the white Russians, the anti-communists in the Russian civil war. Technically, this is true. All the events on the ground were as such. In fact, however, the strategy certainly of Wilson is actually to prevent the British and the French from aiding the whites. In some some ways, he has to do this by actually he actually sends troops, but the troops are not there to help defeat the Boleviks. They're actually there to sandbag any attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks. So, they're sort of kept sort of too weak. It's like a Bay of Pigs type thing in a way. Um and um and if you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin, you notice something very interesting about that, which is that there's a lot of vituporation coming from especially Lenin to Wilson.

Wilson is always stretching out his hand to Lenin and Lenin is always slapping it away and you're like, "Wow, these fanatical Russians just hate America or something like that." Well, you know, seven of the 14 points is basically hands off the Bolsheviks. you know, Wilson is a revolutionary world leader. Um, he's trying to revolutionize the world. Uh, he has this conflict. There's a sort of division in American socialism between Wilson and Debs. And basically, Deb's um, the IWW leader is the kind of candidate of all the cool kids. And all the cool kids really really love the Russian Revolution. If you've you've heard of like John Reed for example, you know, an excellent film about this period about early American communism is a film called Reds. It was made in the 1980s. Um it has got Jack Nicholson in it. It has everyone is in it. Um and

Warren Betty is in it. Warren Batty is playing John Reed and John Reed is the only American

produced and directed by Warren Betty. John Reid who Warren Batty is playing Yeah. is the only American buried in the wall of the Kremlin.

Right. So you know the level to which basically communism did not come out of Russia. Communism came to Russia and the uh and it came to Russia through people like John Reed. Um, and you know what happens basically as soon as the Russian revolution happens is it sort of breaks into these two sides. The kind of liberal Kinsky side and the radical Lenin side and Lenin is sexy.

Who saw this and said we can run with these ideas? uh American progressives basically were like so there's something called the Red Cross mission to Russia which was basically the American embassy to the Bolsheviks and

can you pull up Red Cross mission to Russia? Uh this was actually really the Wall Street mission to Russia. Um and they were working quite quite closely. I mean at the time the business of um um yeah this is kind of a cover story. Um, you know, at the time the business of sponsoring revolutions abroad was very, very lucrative because this is kind of a 19th century thing. You kind of, this is a the British perfected this. You like sponsor the revolution and then you support the revolutionaries and the revolutionaries give you big big big big contracts, right? And so all through the 20s even when the US did not recognize Russia and it was almost I don't know the legalities but it was quai illegal to deal with Russia huge amounts of American investment as Russia is rushing into Russia. So you look for example at someone like Avil Haramman, one of the titans of the midcentury diplomatic establishment. He's later um

US ambassador to Russia and of course becomes a cold war figure. Aval Haramman is the son of Edward Haramman, a huge um railroad tycoon. You wouldn't expect him to be a bolevik. And yet Aval Haramman is given, I believe, by Stalin huge manganese concessions in Soviet Georgia in the 1920s. Um, and so there's all of this actually like really deep involvement there between the um, if you search for manganesees, it might be there.

Manganese. Manganesees. MG. MG. Um, but it might not. Manganese concessions. Yeah.

192. Stalin later takes it back from him. Um, but like the the um, yeah, you see, you just you don't expect to see that, right? you know, uh, Stalin later takes it back from him, but this this didn't bother him too much. If you look at the relationship between Wilson and Lenin, you know what it's like, you know, um,

Wilson. Woodson 197 going back to Woodro Wilson going all the way back to Woodro Wilson. Um, if you rearrange actually the name of your podcast from PBD to BPD, um, you know, there's a certain kind of relationship that you have with a person with borderline personality disorder, right? you know, and the the BPD girl, right? Lennon is the BPD girl. Wilson is the like hopeless schlub who like wants to date Lennin. And you know, Lennon will be like, "Lick my boot." You know, and Wilson will bend down and industriously lick it lick lick Lennon's boot. And Lennon will be like, "You didn't even rip lick the bottom part.

That's the part that gets dirty. What the hell? You must hate me." Right? You know, that was kind of the vibe.

So Lennon controlled Wilson. No, controlled. Lenin manipulated Wilson. It was more like basically the BPD isn't in charge of you. I'm sorry for using that word. Sure. Uh she's not in charge of you. She's just manages to manipulate you. And so Wilson, for example, is a major major influence in making sure the British and the French don't wipe out the USSR after World War I, which they have every inclination and every power to do, right? And so the USSR in a way starts its life as an American protectorate in a way that is really really really really hidden from Americans then and even now.

So like actually this is a very very deep and complicated relationship. It is funky. It is not at all simple and the cold war interpretation of it sort of simplifies it in a way. Even if you look at 1950s McCarthyist anti-communists, are they right? Yeah, they're right, but they're also wrong. They're right in a sense

because they're right that wow, we had this really relationship with the USSR that's like really strange. But they interpret this relationship as kind of they interpret in this kind of nivist way. Like the thing about the Russians is that they're foreign. They're weird and foreign. You can see this in all the like Russian collusion stuff. They're like foreigners are, you know, contaminating our water supply or something something something our precious bodily fluids. Uh, you know, in fact, you know, there are certainly Americans who are pawns of the Soviet Union in this period, but the most influential liberal Americans are not do not see themselves as working for the Soviet Union. they would have been utterly baffled by the idea that they were working for the Soviet Union. They saw the Soviet Union as working for them.

That is a completely completely that is also a heinous relationship considering the crimes of the Soviet Union which are really at their worst in the 1930s when the Soviet Union is most popular in America. Um but that is a very different relationship. So, you know, for example, one one of my uh historical thesis that I'm pretty sure of, but that can't probably really be proved I think FDR was completely knowledgeable about what Alrahis was doing. Aldrais was not a spy. He was not a traitor. He was a back channel. And you know to basically someone like Alger in Washington in say 1942 you know would basically be like look we share all of our intelligence with the British but not with the Russians you know but the Russians are actually a progressive power like us whereas the British are stuck in the mode imperialists you know why shouldn't we be working more closely with the Soviets and then the Soviets would basically do

this BPD thing where you know so For example, there's something called the Dittle raid in um early in World War um two where it's kind of America's 9/11 but in reverse. We kind of we can't really attack Japan at this point. We mount this stunt where we're going to basically fly American bombers off of carriers, land-based bombers off of carriers on a one-way trip to just drop some bombs on Tokyo somewhere somehow, just kill some Japanese, and they're going to land in China. And it was actually kind of a success in a way, but some of these aircraft, they don't land in China. They they wind up in the Soviet Union, which at the same time is fighting, you know, the Axis at the same time with us. Uh what happens to those uh pilots? they're imprisoned. They're interned because uh you know the USSR is like well we're neutral with respect to Japan you know we can't you know so actually like at the same time as the US

is like supplying Stalin with all of this stuff Stalin is imprisoning Americans right again this is sort of c you know like characteristic of this kind of this kind of dysfunctional relationship where you treat her like a princess and she treats you like a slave right you know And and so that sort of Wilson Lennin relationship is duplicated between FDR and Stalin.

How did Wilson get inspired by Lena? Like what hap what was a single event? Is there an event? So American American socialism and the American leftism is older than the USSR, you know, and so the idea that basically this is this kind of Russianplanted seed in our society that like can be eliminated by sort of, you know, spraying some kind of pesticide that kills all foreigners or something is not really accurate. Actually,

we inspired Russia more than they inspired us. That's right. That's right. That's right. And where does R OG leftist progressive communist ideas come from? Is it does it go back down to a single individual?

No. No. It's actually a very deep, you know, it's a very deep sort of cultural trope in American history. Let me give you let me walk through here's here's uh since you have some nice research on the screen uh we can follow along with this. Um you know here's leftism is the real American tradition. America is and always has been a leftist country. I know that this is very difficult for conservatives to accept. Uh it is unfortunately true. So for example, let's consider Barack Obama. We're going to trace Barack Obama's

uh sort of or ideas and origins back. So uh who was Barack Obama's uh mentor? Well, that's a little bit disputed.

We've hit a couple names. Yes. But you might think of Bill Ess. Sure. Um, and I think that's a very legitimate connection. They were certainly uh close uh arguably before it was said that they were close. Uh, you know,

I would have thought about Frank Marshall Davis. That's Yeah, that's his that that's his his probably his his dad actually who's also I mean they look like if you if you basically take Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley N. Dunham's face and morph them together, it looks like Barack Obama. This is another thing. if I if you know let's let's go full birther for a moment. Can we go full birther?

Obviously he was not born in Kenya. That's ridiculous. That would have never happened at this time. What I believe happened was that basically um

um um Stanley Dunham's uh black Dunham is also a communist. His black communist pornographer friend knocks up his teenage daughter. And the responses and this was kind of a normal thing for 1960. The response is, "Let's find an African exchange student who can pretend to be the real father because actually my black communist pornographer friend knocked up my daughter is not acceptable

in any way, shape, or form in 1960." Um, you know, I had Is that what you're saying happened?

That's I'm pretty sure what happened. Um, and and that explains just like it explains the complete lack of a relationship between Barack Obama senior and Stanley Nunham. It explains Barack Obama's relationship with the guy he calls pop. It explains like, you know, a zillion things and it's just it's actually kind of benal. What's actually not benal is that I think they got um communists working in the state government in Hawaii to kind of forge the the the documentation a little bit, which is why you had that whole foo with the birth certificate, which by the way, we still have not seen,

which by the way, I want to tell you some a crazy story. Yeah. Uh, my graphic designer in my company, I was in, uh, Woodland Hills, California. You know, Woodland Hills, California. You may know Woodland Hills.

Diehard Obama guy. Yeah. Armenian guy, grew up in Venezuela. Liberal family. So, he's supporter of it. Remember the day the White House dropped the birth certificate on their website?

Mhm. I do. I do. He calls me. He says, "Can you come into my office?" I said, "What's up?" shot.

He says this is not He says this is not a birth certificate. I said what do you mean? He says Pat, let me show you. He gets on there. He says this is all layered.

Yeah. So he himself Obama guy they left the layers in the file. They left the layers in the file. Right. And and the thing is actually Barack Obama is perfectly eligible to be president under this theory. Right. You know he was born to two American parents Stanley N. Dunham and Frank Marshall Davis. He was born absolutely no question in America, probably in Seattle. Uh, and then they basically went through this ridiculous foofer to get a black exchange student to pretend to be his father.

Instead, it was a what? It was a porn. It was Frank Marshall Davis. Frank Marshall Davis is Barack Obama's father.

Yeah. Your opinion? That's my opinion. That's my opinion. Who else has that position?

Uh, you'll see I It's out there on the internet. It's well dreams for my real father I think is the there's a video on it. Um you know it's I you know it's funny because Obama was visiting um when he was president he was visiting um a genomics company in California that I knew the founder of and I was like get a glass get a drinking glass. Get a glass and we'll find this out because he doesn't look anything like Barack Obama senior. pull up a picture of Barack Obama senior.

Nothing nothing like him. Nothing nothing like him, right? You know, and they're black. That's clearly nothing like him, right? You know, and and so like this is a you know, nobody thought at the time this boy is going to grow up to be president. People are just like, you know, the word bastard still had an impact then and nobody wanted this kid to grow up with the real story of how this happened and so they came up with this right? You know, and and like that's a sort of it's a thing like the Stanley Leon thing where you're just like you could call it a conspiracy theory, but it's actually a pretty benal thing to do at that time. It's actually pretty normal. It would be very weird now. Nobody would do anything like that.

Let's go back to So what did the original left? So okay, we're going back from Barack Obama. You go back to Bill Ays now. Bill Ays was the head of what organization?

Which one? The Weather Underground, right? The Weathermen, right? Yes. Right. So um very glamorous, very You saw this maybe you saw the the uh the awful u that awful Paul Thomas Anderson film. One battle after another, you know. Yeah. Don't

I got a lot of movies to watch. You You don't want to watch. I got to watch I definitely have to watch John Reed the Red movie with

Reds. Absolutely. No, no. I you know um Oh my god, this movie is so It's like this Antifa glorification movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. Uh it's like I wrote a review of it for the spectator that was like this may be the worst movie ever made.

Which one is this? The latest movie that just came out. Oh, you can watch it for the first It's all about illegal immigration or something. Is that the one you were talking about?

Oh my god. Oh, it's called one of his worst movies of all time. It is. said he watch it, Rob, the other day for the first three minutes he shut it down.

It may be one of the worst movies of all time. Really? It is artistically bad. It is dramatically bad. It is aesthetically bad. Uh and it is morally very bad.

Sean Penn in it. It's got Benio Del Toro. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, the acting the acting is amazing. I mean, uh with some exceptions, but uh No. So, all right. So, you go back to the Weathermen. The weathermen are glamorous. you hear about them, you know, you're like Bill Ays and Bernardine Dorne, like you know, he's Bernardine Dorne is hot, right? You know, they're like they're these are princlings. These are, you know, um so um and in fact, you know who Bill Ays's father was?

Thomas Ays and he was the uh CEO of Consolidated Edison. Okay, so this is a rich kid. This is like a, you know, major league rich kid. But let's go back to the Weathermen. So the Weathermen are a splinter faction of uh a group called Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, which you've probably heard of. Um and um let's go.

I've heard of Students for a Democratic Society. Now SDS is actually the youth wing of an organization which we're going to get successively cooler names here. Some are you ready for some cooler names? So the SDS is originally the youth wing of something called the League for Industrial Democracy.

Nice. Capitalism and Socialism. League for Industrial Democracy. Great name. Very cool name. Could be a ban, you know. Could be a ban. League for Industrial Democracy.

LID. Um and uh and it's basically changes its name from something called the Intercolgate Socialist Society. Uh which you'll see up there. And if you click on the intercolgate socialist society,

now we're in 1905. So now we're in 1905. No Moscow. Zara is still on his throne. Zara is still on his throne. Now if you look at the founders of the Intercolgate Socialist Society, you'll see some names that um you might recognize like Upton Sinclair

or Jack London. You've probably heard of Jack London, right? You know, this is again this is like really deep in the mainstream. This is not you know here Upton Sinclair Walter Litman Clarence Darrow Jack London you've heard of all these people right these are significant Americans and this is not coming from the KGB okay so um actually um you know these are patrician these are these are top tier Americans right so if you one of the things I discovered while looking at this is that you can go even farther back with this because one of the founders of the ISS is a guy named Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Now, this is not a name you're going to know. Um Higginson is chiefly known as the guy who discovered um um Emily Dickinson. That's his chief claim to fame. It's worthy claim to fame. But he's also when the ISS is founded, he's like the old guy in the room. You know, you'll go to these young revolutionary things. I'm I'm becoming the old guy in the room, right? You all these kids, right? you know, and like, you know, my my my audience base is heavily under 30, right? So, you'll um because those are those are the radicals, right? Always.

So, but there's always like an old guy in the room. So, the old guy in the room, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, what's interesting is that he was part of an earlier era when he was young. He was part of an earlier era of American radicalism. He was in fact a financeier of terrorism. He was

he was he was actually one of the supporters of the leading American terrorist of the period and he was a member of a group I don't know if they called themselves this but they became called that. Brace yourself for a serious comic book name. The Secret Six.

The Secret Six. The Secret Six. All right. All right. All right. You know, you're like, is this a real thing? Is this a real thing?

Who is the Secret Six? Who are the Secret Six? 1859. They were the equivalent of like basically wealthy Saudis who funded Osama.

What? John Brown. You've heard of John Brown. Of course, John Brown. John Brown, but not the other names that I'm looking at.

Yeah, but like you know, um, let's see. Who are the He looks like an evil guy. Look, he was a psycho. He was a complete and total psycho. And so you know what the one of the names of the of the leading antifa organizations is the John Brown J gun club. So we're really dealing with something you cannot find any living conservative tradition in America with this kind of lineage.

But if you go back if I read that go back to Rob what you just said it doesn't sound so an evangelical Christian of a strong religious conviction. Brown was profoundly influenced by the Pitan fate of his upbringing. He believed that he was an instrument of God raised to strike the death blow to slavery in the US. That doesn't sound like a bad person. A sacred obligation. Brown was leading the exponent of violence in the American abolish uh abolishist abolished uh movement believing it was necessary to end slavery after decades of peace.

previously known for what's called the Podawatami massacre where he was in Kansas where a lot of this trouble was happening and he just basically uh you know like drags people out of their house with swords and murders them. Um not that Harper's Ferry was exactly a success either. And so you know he's basically if you look at the abolitionists in the runup to the Civil War they look very very modern. So, if you're looking at the Republicans in the world of Abraham Lincoln, uh there are actually two very different um sort of directions that come together in the Republican party. There are the abolitionists and the anti-slavery men.

And this sounds like you're describing the same thing, right? In fact, it's totally different. This is why the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, comes so late in the war and it has to be pretend to be a military measure because actually if you went into a bar in um Richmond in 1861 and someone asked you to explain the war and you said, "This war is a holy crusade by the abolitionist North to abolish slavery in the South," they would clap you on the back and buy you another beer. If you said that in Chicago, they'd kick your ass. Right. So the anti-slavery men, the first Republican presidential candidate is John C. Fremont, which a lot of, you know, who also conquered California, so a lot of stuff is named for him. There's a town of Fremont near where I live.

Fremont's slogan was free men, free soil, Fremont. So if you were a free soiler in the world,

free man, free soil, Fremont. Yes. Very, very catchy. So what free soil meant was that basically um slaves should not be allowed in the territories that were not incorporated as states. And you were like, well, you know, you're against slavery. We're all against slavery. You're right. You know, actually the free soil men had a very specific point. They didn't like slavery because they didn't like black people. They were actually and the anti- the abolitionist movement had many tropes of sort of a modern perspective on race, but the anti-slavery men were hardcore racists. So, for example, Oregon, you might not know this, um Oregon until I believe the 1970s, it was obviously a dead letter, prohibited black people from entering the state of Oregon.

1970, just 50ome years ago. Yeah. Yeah. in the 197 I I I I forget when it was actually taken out of the Constitution. Oregon was never like, you know, obviously never a Confederate state. There was never any Confederate Oregon. Um the

Yeah, you're right. Um um the uh ban black people from entering the state were part of the history long before

related racist language in the state. I'm a little wrong on the dates. Related racist language in the state constitution remained until 2002. Right.

So, and this is because of basically the anti-slavery man heritage. The western Republicans were anti-slavery. The chic people in Boston were abolitionists and they managed to form this coalition which was the coalition of Lincoln. But if you look at the way Puritans and abolitionists thought, very very very similar to liberals today, very similar kind of mindset, similar kind of messianic, you know, and they had all kinds of causes, you know, uh abolitionism was just one of them. Prohibition was another huge cause of these same people, right? And so you kind of recognize when you learn to basically, you know, think about Harvard for a moment. In a way, Harvard has been the leading institution in American intellectual life for literally almost 400 years. It was founded in 1636. If you look at basically what are the ideas of Harvard at date D, you are going to find them running America at date D plus

10 years, D plus 50 years, D plus 100 years, right? And so Harvard was founded as a Puritan institution. Obviously it was at Burton College for for ministers. Um actually I learned this I did a debate at uh

Harvard about six months ago uh with a professor there and uh for this I boned up on the history and I discovered that Harvard is actually somewhat implicated in the Salem witch craze.

What did they say when he brought that up? Um they didn't know anything about it. has she uh she didn't know anything about it but uh the the um but you know so you have this sort of Puritan religion of Harvard that basically you can watch sort of morph over time from like Puritanism into like pure hippieism and it like there's never a break in that there's never no foreign army ever comes and takes over Harvard like it's always sort of this process of a kind of internal becoming really. And you can see how Puritanism in the 17th century becomes basically American progressive communism in the 20th and even 21st centuries. And so to understand history in this way as a conservative, you're just like, wait a second, America for its entire life has been on the left side of the political spectrum.

So for example, America is founded by these Puritan settlers and the Puritans are of course Calvinists. And you can find actually in a way the the first woke regime in history was actually the strange regime of Edward the 7th. The se No, the sixth. Sixth or the seventh? Maybe the sixth. Um I think the sixth. um who is basically this boy king who comes after Henry VIII and before um Bloody Mary um no Edward V 6 sorry uh and um real brain fart. So basically, you know, Henry VIII has this of course religious revolution where he breaks with Rome for various personal and political reasons. Um, but he's not quite part of the like extreme left-wing and I think you can really use this term at this time kind of protestant thing that's going on in Europe. But of course he's influenced by this sort of whole Gutenberg revolution in thinking. And after he dies, um, his son who is sickly and young is basically tutored by these

radical Protestants who basically create this kind of protouritan regime in England that lasts only for a few years because Edward V 6 dies young and is replaced by Mary Tudtor who tries to return the country to Catholicism. She also died somewhat prematurely and then you have the Elizabethan world. Point is you can connect basically in this sort of continuous ideological and cultural thread. You can go all the way back to 16th century England from Barack Obama. You can connect the abolitionists to the Puritans. You can connect the Puritans to the tutors. Um and and like this is not, you know, this is actually just normal history. It's the way things work, right? It's not particularly crazy. But the thing is if you situate yourself properly in history in this way, you know, you sort of realize that like for example, if you're like a conservative, which you sort of find yourself trying to restore is like kind

of previous generations of you know how many many more people move from being liberal to conservative than the other direction. and the people who will move in the other direction.

Every state plus minus was more red 2024. Every county, every state, but I'm thinking more of like of of like yeah, there's that, but I'm thinking more of like intellectuals like, you know, pundits, etc., etc., etc. You'll see pundits who start off on the left and move over to the right in their lifetime all over the place, all over history. Sure. you know, yeah,

Burke, for example, the like the idol of American conservatives, he's a liberal in the 1770s, right? Um,

but that does kind of make sense to you're being brainwashed by and you're just like getting into like reality.

Yeah. Life hasn't happened yet. You have life hasn't happened yet. And then if you look at the people that move from conservative to liberal, they're really problematic people. They're people with like serious

Who are the biggest names by the way that Brock, who else? Of Media Matters. Oh, of Media Matters. He moved from the right to the left.

Oh yeah. David Brock David Brock got his start writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton.

But what what is the profile of people that move from the right to the left? They're psychopaths.

Really? Tell me why. Because they they're they're like [sighs] because to go from left to right is a kind of waking up to reality. But actually the idea of like reversing that process and putting yourself to sleep and saying, you know, it's like, you know, you know what those people are like? They're like the guy in the Matrix who wants the juicy steak. You know, there's a lot of that basically in those people. They're like, I'll go with a nice juicy steak, right? I know it's not real, but I'll eat it. And David Brock has had a, you know, pretty impressive career as a left-wing hitman, right? you know, and before that he had a reasonably impressive career as a right-wing hitman, but he's actually like, you know, just a man completely.

First time I learned about media matters, we had an event and at this event we're having uh Jordan Peterson, Kobe Bryant, Billy Bean, George Bush. This is eight years ago, seven years ago.

Yeah. Sounds like a different world, doesn't it? It's a different world. And then uh the the both uh Bush's team and Kobe said, "When we go to events, you're going to get some hate coming your We're like, who's going to say anything? Like, we're bringing Kobe because he's greatness and we're bring, you know, George because president, and then we're bringing Peterson for debate, and then Billy Bean, he's a baseball guy. I like him. Media Matters writes a hit piece on us and then they reach out to me and they say, "Look, we just want you to know we're sorry that you're going through this." I'm like, "Are you guys good with it?" Because I'm good with this. No, we're good with it. We ended up having the best event ever in 2018, 2019. So that's the first time I learn about how good they can be by going out there and do it. But that's interesting to say when you go from right to left. I wonder

how much of it is them being offended. I wonder how much of it is, you know, promised a job or a position that the other side didn't do and say, "I'm going to go to the other side."

I wonder what the patterns are because it can't be values. It Yeah, it's not in good faith. Whatever it is, it's not in good faith. It's a It's just It's a career move. It's a like, you know, and it's a career move and it often comes out of like a kind of personality disorder, I think. You know, like David Brock is a weird guy,

right? You know, can you pull him up? Can you pull up David Brock? You said he's a weird guy.

He's a weird guy. And he went from a conservative writing hit pieces on Hillary Clinton.

Yeah. To going to the other side. Liberal political has been times most influential operatives in the Democratic party which led to Paulo Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. Brock began his career a right-wing investigative reporter from 1990s. He wrote the book real Anita Hill and the uh uh trooper gate story and aligning himself with the Democratic Party. He switched

with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. He found a media matters a nonprofit organization progressive.

Pull up a picture. Pull up a He's a weird He's a weird weird looking guy. Yeah. Phys I'm a strong believer in physomy.

Is he Is he married? Is he straight? Is he I think he's gay. He is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, let's look at him. Let's let's let's I don't know what he looks like. Go to images.

That's the look of somebody that would go from the right to the left. You look like that.

That's the look. You look like that. You look like a child molester, basically.

And Oh, great. Now I've made some enemies. Um but but yeah, you know, it's it's it's uh like look at those eyes, man. You know, it's like the um you know how you know how they those

crazy women in England who like slept with a thousand guys in a day or whatever, they have these dead eyes.

Yes. And all like horrors and porn stars have like dead eyes. It's horrifying. Like

he's got dead eyes. He's got dead eyes. Look at He looks like the guy from Lawless, the movie. I don't know if you've seen Lawless. It's a That's a movie you got to watch. I'm making one movie recommendation to return because I got 28 movies I got to go watch after talking to you.

But in Lawless, the evil guy. Can you pull up lawless villain? Put lawless movie villain. Uh uh lawless movie villain. Uh go to images. He's got, you know, that look. Zoom in. Zoom into that look. He just doesn't care. Yeah. He's like he could care less.

With with the last hour we got together, I want to I want to talk to you about a couple things, especially with the whole time that's going on right now. I'm curious to know what to say about this one.

Monarchy democracy. Let's just case study. I I pulled it up and I kind of went up through a couple different things when we looked at monarchies and you know democracy the longest lasting democracy was US 238 and you see Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, you you know uh Luxembourg, Belgium, couple of these guys. And then when you go up and pull up longest lasting monarchies, Japan Norway Denmark Sweden UK Morocco, I kind of brought it up a little bit earlier. Why do monarchies outlast democracies? Well, either I I would say the question is more why is monarchy almost the universal form of political organization found throughout history even in cultures that have no connection with each other. So for example when the concistadors who are working for a monarchy come to South America they find the Aztecs they find the Incas. They don't find any hippie tribes. Nobody's ever found any hippie tribes. And um you know the uh

well there's one interesting exception actually. Um but um they basically find you know if you go back all the way to the chimpanzee you will find that our ancestors for many many millions of years have been living in small groups with individual leaders. Chimpanzees you know have kings. They sometimes have a little triumvirate or whatever, but that's not really stable. They have, you know, chimp kings actually and being the chimp king is definitely the way to pass your genes on as a chimpanzeee. They make war. People were very surprised to find, you know, these things. And, you know, everyone in the 1960s and 70s wanted to believe that we were descended from, you know, millions of years of hippies. And it was a big shock to find that even chimpanzees make war. And they make war in a very, very ugly way. Right? So you have this sort of this form which is really the universal form of human

governance historically but it's more than the universal form historically. It's also when you look at basically any effective organization whether that's a company whether it's a military whether it's a movie you've probably heard of the aur theory of movies you know imagine a film directed by a committee you're just like you know um even in a restaurant you have a chef right and so this structure of basically you know the sort of the pyramid-shaped command structure is something that recurs over and over again in human affairs. And if there was a way to build more effective organizations than a structure shaped like this, somebody would have found it. And so actually if you want to get anything done, you have a monarchy. And this is one of the reasons why you know essentially we see that uh structures other than monarchies and of course democracy is a very tricky word because just because it calls itself that

doesn't mean it's that. But fundamentally you know what you're seeing whether something is a democracy or an oligarchy is you're seeing a lot of division of power. And you don't see that ever in a functional company, for example, because a company is not going to survive that. Imagine if Apple had checks and balances and uh maybe a Supreme Court that decided if it software wasn't buggy and uh the uh users of Apple products voted on the next uh feature and maybe you had an Apple Congress of uh all the engineers or something, right? You know, there's no way you could build an iPhone in this way, right? There's also no way that, you know, the Department of Transportation could build a Tesla, right? These are just organizations that have much much much lower effectiveness structures. They're bureaucracies. They're bottom-up systems. They're processoriented.

It's, you know, like the paperwork just multiplies infinitely until you really just can't build a railroad from SF to LA. And, you know, you just, you look at systems that are organized monarchically and you're just like this is like not just twice as effective, this is 10 times as effective, this is a hundred times as effective. And we happen to be competing with this country China which is very much a monarchy which has this very interesting history where its monarchy was really founded by this uh it's almost a worst case scenario. this psychopath Mao, he's really Mao is just not a he was a crazy dude, right? And one of the things that Mao did coming out of this revolutionary communist, you know, world that he was in, he did the same thing that Stalin did, which is that he killed everyone in the party who threatened him. And so he established this incredible level of like monarchy, you know, in China. Not of course a

monarchy in name, but you know, the rule of one person in China. He was a psycho. Millions of people, maybe tens of millions of people died and then Ma dies. Mao dies and there's a struggle for power and he's created this incredible monarchy and this monarchy is taken over by Deng Xiaoping and Deng Xiaoing is actually capable is actually like you know all of the leaders of China since Mao were persecuted in the culture of revolution. Xunping had a horrible experience like his sister was killed, right? You know, and so all of these guys like they're competent guys.

They're done with any of this mouse and they just want to rule their country. And so Deng Xiaoping takes China as a monarchy and his successors take China from this like backwater thirdw world country. Do you know one fact about China that most people don't know? Like if you go to China, you can't drink the water. Everything is crazy modern. You go to the subway, it's beautiful, it's gleaming, whatever. You can't drink the drink the water because it still has the DNA of a third world country because nobody expected to be able to drink the water in China. So, nobody bothered fixing it. So, actually, you can't drink the water, right? But everything else is just gleaming whatever, you know, they're killing us.

They're actually they're destroying our country. They're literally killing us because they're beating us, right? And so,

China's beating us. China's beating us. China's beating us. There's only a few technical areas where we still have a lead on China. China is beating us like a

what areas? In what areas? What in this room was not made in China? I mean literally what in this room was not made in China, right? That screen is made in China. That screen was made in China. Everything was made in China. So I mean like basically like in terms of and if you go from you know the train station in the metro in Shanghai to the metro in New York, you will feel like you have just traveled to a third world country. You go from Dubai to JFK and you're like you've traveled to a third world country and then you go from JFK to say Sa Paulo and you're like oh yeah another step down right that's basically how bad it is and there are a few technical areas there's like reusable rockets and deep ultraviolet lithography and um you know couple other things where the US is still ahead in of China, but they are beating us and they have put us in the same position that we were in with respect to the USSR where everybody in

the USSR could basically look at American gadgets, American stuff and and basically

what what do you call China though? China China wouldn't be what would China be considered to you?

Oh, it's a monarchy. What would Russia be considered to you? Russia is also a monarchy. Now these are monarchies where you know they haven't established like China China is a monarchy you know

define a monarchy and you're right what is the rule of one rule of one what one this is the whole Aristotle one to many yes literally the rule of one

we are the third one under Aristotle's ideas is that what you're saying we're an oligarchy we're an oligarchy

we're an oligarchy we're an oligarchy um and and so if you if you were an oligarchy that you know Trump would like us to be a democracy but we're still an oligarchy uh and you're reminded of that every time a judge overrules them and the the but in China, China's a monarchy. It's not a hereditary monarchy. Um now a lot of people in the you know it's a sort of it's more like a theocracy. It's an institutional monarchy and the rules for choosing the next leader are very strange and opaque and we don't really know what happens when Xihinping dies.

We don't really know what happens when Putin dies. Nobody has any idea what happens when dies. Isn't that Isn't that a

That's a flaw. That's a flaw in the monarch. That's a flaw. That's a flaw. And so what you're seeing is basically because these monarchies have to pretend to be something else. You know, you'll have these like dictators and the dictator is like, you know, even in the Roman Empire, they never used the word king. They were just like, "Oh, I'm just the first citizen." You know, um that's the origin of the word prince. It's the the first citizen. Oh, you're the first citizen. No, you're the freaking king. Right. Um but they never used the the Roman word rex which means king in the Roman Empire. Um imperator just means commander.

So and and they had and this chaotic succession system basically broke down in the Roman Empire. So in the Roman Empire you have um what's called you know first of all Caesar and Augustus are absolutely great uh their successors so forth and then you have this period of what's called the five good emperors from uh Marcus Aurelius is the last and the first is uh Trajan I think Trejan or Hrien um you know this is like a period over of over a hundred years where Edward Gibbon is like this is the best government you know humanity has ever seen right then they adopted their successors. So, it was a little more like the Chinese system in some ways.

Um, but when you have what what's called in the 20th century a dictatorship, it's sort of a monarchy that's struggling to be born and often struggling to be born under very very chaotic circumstances. So, Napoleon, for example, does this. Napoleon is a leftist general in you know, reign of terror era France and becomes his first they're laring Rome. So he's like the first console and he's like screw it, I'm going to make myself emperor and he makes himself emperor, right? And he intended to pass on that role to his uh to his family and he used his family a lot. Um but in the end, of course, it didn't work out. Um you know, um Hitler is kind of a tier Napoleon in some ways. Um and he never had a family. Hitler was probably gay, I think. Um

Hitler's probably gay. Hitler's probably gay. Um, so look, same thing about Obama. If you see a guy who is a highly charismatic world leader and he is not surrounded by flocks of women at all times, what's what would you guess, right? You know, um, you know about the Obama gay thing, I assume.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Ever seen Ever seen a video of of Hitler doing a Hitler salute? He's like He's so your gayar goes off. You just you're looking at Hitler and you're like that's Hitler and like if you have any kind of gaydar at all and you're watching Hitler, you're like that is a gay man.

Wow. You're saying Hitler is gay. Well, yeah. But if you see the videos Oh, yeah. This is there's a thesis. There's a very well-ritten book by a German historian called The Hidden Hitler that makes this point like really really strongly. like he's hanging out in the men's hostel in Vienna which was a you know um um yeah that one um which is a like a gay prostitution site. I don't think he wanted to be gay. He wasn't like a believer in like gay ideology

recruited what he got recruited. I don't know how he became gay but uh you know but I I I think he really wanted Eva Brown to really be his wife but he was basically attracted to men. Um and um you know as to what's going on said today you're going to tell me gay and you know Hitler and Obama have the are both gay.

Yeah I I think so both of them that would be an interesting okay so I think so but uh you know that's uh they obviously are you know very different in many other ways. So, so you know going going back to the question

monarchy democracy mon monarchy oligarchy democracy and the thing is that everyone basically looks and and this is I think the crucial point here you know for Americans because they basically look at this oligarchy which is pretending to be a democracy and they're like this is just a lie and they can tell that this is a lie they can say hey this is this other thing that's pretending to be this thing you Basically the way the deep state works is the deep state you know is the administrative state the executive you know uh branch nominally but the so-called executive branch is actually run by Congress is run by the legislative branch the legislative branch controls its budget down to very small micro budgeting levels it controls its policy and most of all it controls its personnel as you know you can't fire these people like imagine being the CEO but you can't fire these imagine you're you're the CEO of this podcast, but you

can't fire the people who work for you. What? Right? That makes no sense. Right? It's not actually an executive branch. We actually don't have an executive branch. We have a legislative branch. And moreover, the thing about this legislative branch is that it's controlled by Congress. Now, Congress ostensibly is democratically elected. We do have these elections. Uh almost nobody cares about congressional elections. the popularity rating of Congress. I think it might be over 30% now. This is very unusual. Uh what's the

27? I don't know what it is now, but I know when as low as 27. Oh, no. It's been as low as Congress.

It's been as low as 12. It gets as Oh, you got to be kidding me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

What's the popularity of Congress right now Rob? I could be up in the 30s. That's very high. That's

I thought it was 27, but maybe it is 30s today. Uh approval rating of Congress, what is it?

14. Gallup. Oh, it's up to seven. Wow. So, right, you know. Wow. This is and and this is the organ. So,

what was the highest? Go to the highest point popularity 2000 uh 2000 that's on that's on the line 11

84. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird, you know, but like the thing is 17%, right? So here's here's here's how you keep the system from, you know, being an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It's really very easy. You basically run the whole executive branch procedurally according to what is called sort of laws that are passed by Congress, which are actually like micromanagement bills as, you know, thick as 10 phone books stacked on stacked on top of each other, which almost no congressman read. Um, then you have an electoral system where if you run for if you're an incumbent running for the House of Representatives, your chance of being reelected is roughly 98%.

It's like, you know, in the Senate, it's a little lower. It's more like 90%. However, if you get unelected, very sad, uh, whoever replaces you has no power at all because of the seniority system, which by the way is found nowhere in the Constitution. And so if you manage to unelect, like they unelected, who did they unelect in um this guy Dave Brat unelected uh a guy in Virginia a few years ago. Um you know, you unelect one of these dinosaurs like a Mitch McConnell or whatever. Good luck.

His place is Eric Hanter. Yeah. Eric Caner, one of the classic GOP guys. his place is immediately taken by one of his fellows and you don't get his job because actually the whole thing is run on the seniority system. And so actually like you know one way to test whether a political system or a political power or political structure has become symbolic is to say if we remove this structure can the system work in the same way. So, for example, you know, if you remove Charles III from England, will daily life on the streets of England change at all? No. Because he's not involved in government whatsoever. Right. Uh, you know, if you

But you want the monarchy to have influence. You don't want a king that does not have influence. That's just a figurehead.

Yeah. It's a fake. You're not a fan of the figurehead model. I'm not a fan of the figurehead

because you think America is a figurehead. you you're I think that actually democracy has entered the figurehead model and so essentially when you get so

people would disagree with you on Trump though for Trump to be a figurehead he's getting a lot of things done as a

again 0.001% 01%. Right? Remember what he's getting? Yeah, he's getting a lot of things done, but relative to his predecessors, he's getting a lot of things done, but on an absolute historical scale, still not really that much. Um, and the the like again, if you're basically if you're on that 0ero to one scale, the question you have to ask is could this be multiplied by 10? Because if it could be multiplied by 10, it's less than 0.1. If it could be multiplied by 100, it's less than 0.01. And so if you basically see Yes.

So you're going to keep going backwards. Sorry. You're going to keep going backwards. There is no progress.

What do you mean? How do you make progress with that? If you have the system that

you actually have to enter a completely Yeah. You have to multiply nasty. You have to No, it doesn't have to be nasty. And that's I think the most important thing is that actually you can get up to those higher levels of power without it being nasty. If you look at for example the fall of East Germany almost complete change of power. It's not quite Germany in 1945. It's pretty close.

Yeah. But somebody from the west got up and said tear down that wall. So there was another

there was another figure that was pushing you. So who can do that to America though?

Yeah. Nobody's there. That's true. That's true. That's true. It's a different situation.

If I may, let me let me say this because I want to go to the Iran situation to see because you know

you you you you've commented on Iran as well. So yeah. So I think about democracy monarchy in the like when I'm processing and watching what you're saying in other interviews and then I'm saying I'm asking questions.

Okay. What is the benefit? Sell monarchy. Monarchy to me is 75% by birth, 25% by sword. So 25% by sword. And it says the last time somebody replaced the king by sword was 1689. Since then, it's been pretty much by birth. Okay. Of the 75% that's by birth. There is no competition in the monarch.

But you're not including dictators in that set. I'm not putting dictators. And so if you look at if you look at say

but if you let me make the point. So where I'm going with this is the the the monarchy side if it's by birth there is no competition. It's the oldest son. It used to be 50% oldest son in the 1600s. Then it went to 60%. And today it's about 80% is the oldest son that replaces the king. So 30 years in advance I know who's going to be my king. So it's not like I'm going to go run and campaign. And then it says monarchies make more long-term decisions with debt than in America. On a democracy you may offer anything to get elected because it's a four-year election cycle. But then at least in a democracy you have more freedom, more say in a monarchy. You can be you can get a good leader, good king, and then all of a sudden the next guy comes up and holy this guy's a you know dictator control doesn't want you to say anything. You lose your freedom of speech. You lose your freedom of innovation. He has you have to listen to

certain things. Maybe maybe because he had a big falling out with his father and he hates his father and my father's an evil man. I'm going to do everything different than my father because he didn't respect me enough and didn't we've seen these stories, right, that you go through.

Oh, sure. So, so monarchies monarchies have a lot of have a lot of failure modes, right? And historical monarchies have a lot of different kinds of failure modes. You can have a king who's the oldest son. He's mentally

right? You know, Charles be a tough king Charles II of Spain, right? You know, um

Charles II of Spain was a king and he was mentally Yeah. He was like there was too much inbreeding going on. Um and um the uh Yeah. So, you know, when you have when you have or Henry V 6 of England, you know, also uh um

that guy's name is Charles. Yeah. Carlos, not Carlita. No, no, that's Carlos. Carlos.

Looks like a car. And yeah, no, he was he was it was too much inbreeding. Uh, you know, and

it's not working out too well for you. Look at him. Look at him. The face is just something's wrong with that guy, right? So, so the thing is that that you know historically there's a lot of different systems of finding a single leader. Now, for me actually two things. One is that some of the problems that were caused by biological inheritance in the past don't exist anymore because it's actually with modern IVF. You know, Henry VIII doesn't have this problem of I need to marry eight women to find someone who's going to give me a son and not succeed in that. You know, you can have a couple hundred, right? Uh the Ottomans did this thing where it wasn't the oldest son.

Oh, no. Actually, uh it was all the sons of the of the last Sultan and he had a herum. So, he had a lot of sons and they basically fought it out to be who's the next Sultan.

That's not going to work today. and the the others were strangled with the silk and bow string, right? You know, that's not going to work today. There's a lot of things that are sort of like not going to work today. What we have that works today that's sort of, you know, in a way

the inspiration is, you know, this feeling that basically as soon as you get into the private sector, suddenly just like everything works like magic. You're just like, wow. You know, the California Department of Transportation could never build an electric car, but Elon Musk can build an electric car. Okay, you're obviously you're looking at monarchy there, right? And you're looking at the sort of superiority of a monarchical structural organization.

He is still held accountable by the government though. He is held account. So he's held accountable in two ways actually. He's held accountable by the government who's above him and he's also held accountable by corporate governance which is shareholders and a board of directors. Now if you so so there are sort of things you can learn from that at a sovereign level but definitely at a sovereign level you don't have a government over the government right you're you're really at the top

that's what I'm saying so so the question then the average person may ask is what would Elon do if he knew he had zero regulatory guidelines to be dealing with today what would Elon be doing today

so I think that actually Elon would not be doing anything that super different from what he's doing. But this sort of bears, you know, this sort of comes kind of comes into one of the factors in the way Americans think about governance where they're basically you remember I said earlier that there's this kind of schizophrenia where Americans think they have an absolutely terrible government and the best system of government anywhere. Mh.

So, one of the things when you're in any sort of terrible situation, one of the things that is often causing you to be trapped in a terrible situation is this little principle called the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And you're basically like here, we're in this terrible situation. How do I get to a perfect situation? You've probably known many people in many ways who've been paralyzed and trapped many by the how do we get to the perfect situation? And so,

those types of people don't make it in business. No, they don't. and and and and the the you you've got to be ready to make those compromises. And so when I look at sort of the way at the position that we're in today, which is a very very difficult position because as I said earlier, I think meritocracy really accurately sees many flaws in populism and I think populism sees many flaw many flaws accurately in meritocracy. You know, it's like basically let's take for example COVID as an example of this. Now, you know, you might be familiar with the vast uh flow of dissenting COVID information out there. There is a vast quantity of memes. Some of these memes are true. Some of these memes are obviously false. Some of them I can't really tell. It is just a giant polluted river of information. And you basically say from the perspective of someone who of a blue stator who believes in meritocracy, you would basically say,

"Wow, I'm going to put this sewer in charge of viology." Like it's like the, you know, the cartoon of the guy who wants to fly the plane, right? No,

that cartoon is fascinating. By the way, that cartoon, can you send that cartoon to me? Please continue. and and and and so you know, you look at this from the perspective of like Blue State America and you're just like, "Oh my god, like you're really we're going to have this highly detailed technical scientific thing and it's going to be run by who has the best rumor in Facebook moms." Like, no, this is ridiculous. This is an absurd way to run a railroad. And of course, they're completely right about that. And then populists will look at this and be like, "Uh, all right. Uh it sounds reasonable that we will have viologists run viology. But you know what happens if we have viologists run vyology? They invent COVID. And in fact, if you look at basically the story of how COVID was invented, uh it looks like something that would be done by a mad scientist.

Like an evil mad scientist would be like, "Oh yes, we're going to go into the, you know, wow, there was this one pandemic SARS one that looked really dangerous. So wow, we could get some dangerous viruses here. I'm a mad scientist. I'm going to get some dangerous viruses. So, we're going to go to all the bat ca bat caves in southern China and Lao and we're going to collect all the bat corona viruses.

You think she knew about it? No. No, it was not. Actually, this is the crazy thing. This was actually just a normal process. They didn't like

You think Fouchy knew about it? He knew about it in the sense of here. Let me let me expl I I think it's worth going longer into the you know interpretation of COVID. notice that one of the things that nobody talked about in the 2024 election was

co it was not a political issue at all. It's insane. What what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what wh what why why do you think

because it's too big to handle we actually couldn't fit it on stage and like and here's the reason why it was too big to handle. So you know you basically have all these co myths these populist co myths going around you know

is it because it's too big to handle or because the left would have looked bad because

both it's the same thing. So, not only would the left of CO was an American Chernobyl. CO was an American Chernobyl, except it killed like, you know, uh, a thousand times as many people, right? Because it was a Yeah, early CO was a nasty virus. You did not want to get early CO.

Oh, I got it. It I was down for 21 days. Yeah, I lost 25 pounds. Yeah, it was brutal. It was brutal. As soon as Omron came out, that should have been the end of it. Actually there's a there's another conspiracy theory that omccron was actually a vaccine because omccron appears. Omrron is great. Saved my life. When I got omocrron I was like oh my god you got

I got omocrron. Okay. What was the third one? Del uh delta was n delta was before omccrron. Delta was nasty. Omron comes out and has two things about omccron. One is that it's descended from a strain of virus that hasn't been seen in the wild for like six months to a year. Okay, where was it? It wasn't in the wild. It was in the lab. Secondly, it has signs of being adapted to rodents. Maybe it was hanging out in sewer rats. I don't know. Maybe it was hanging out in a freaking lab. Maybe it was actually someday we will find out that it was actually a good mad scientist who invented omccron and saved us from this garbage.

But to get back to the invention of COVID, here's what happened. And I think this basically says a lot about the way our political system, the way this like meritocracy works. So if you want to be a scientist, I'm in a way a scientist. Uh

may I ask you why uh your eyes it's just it's it's like it's so dramatic. It's just like

Are you getting emotional? Truly, this has happened four times in the interview already.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. because it's just like an incredible story because let me tell you the true story of CO. Okay, the true story of CO was this is the way our country is governed. So you're a scientist, okay? You probably know a lot of scientists. You know, I dropped out of a PhD program myself. How do you work as a scientist? You're a bureaucrat. You're writing grant proposals. Okay, what does your grant proposal say? This is important. The government should fund it. This is important. Here's what happened with co stars one happens.

It's absolutely what it's purported to be. It's a bad virus that gets loose. You ever see the film contagion? It's a Stevenberg film.

Matt Damon. Is it is it Matt Damon? I think it's Mam. Matt Damon. Uh you know the technical advisor for contagion was one of the coronavirus crew and the virus in contagion actually is a bad corona virus. And so

that movie was going viral the the first week of CO, second week of CO, March, April, whatever it was.

Yeah. Yeah. It was in I I watched it with my late wife when uh when CO started. Um and um if you if you look at um so SARS one happens clearly a real problem. If you're a viologist, you go after real problems because real problems get you grants, right? the problem of of bat corona viruses mutating to become viruses that affect humans. A zoonosis, that's a real thing. Bam. Researchers converge on this like crazy and they're like, you know, but what are we going to research exactly? Well, we're going to research the possibility that bat corona viruses will mutate to infect humans. Of course, they're bad viruses. They don't naturally infect humans, but when we find one that comes close, oo, it's a big surprise. And how are they going to mutate? Well, you know, mutations happen randomly in nature. You know, how do we predict? That was one of the names of one of the study programs.

How do we predict what mutations could happen in future to make SARS happen again? Well, we'll make them ourselves. And so, you basically got this research program which completely normal science. This was not a Chinese program. This was an American research program mainly run out of the University of North Carolina uh by this guy Ralph Bareric and the um Peter Dazzac is the kind of the big grant coordinator for all this stuff. Um you know still walking around free as a bird. Um and they basically have all of these bureaucratic incentives to act like mad scientists. They basically have because if you can take a bad corona virus and mutate it and become dangerous. That's a paper. The paper says bad corona viruses are dangerous.

Please give us more money. This treadmill is still going on. Right. And in fact, the guy who replaced Fouchy, I think his name is Eichelberger, um, as the head of American vyology, Fouchy has the remarkable distinction of being the guy who supervised this research, then covered it up and was in charge of the response to it. Truly insane episode.

Truly insane. you pardon so you can't touch them. I think they could, but they're not they're not going to they're not they're not going to try to prosecute this stuff.

Why do you say that? Why? Uh because that's what I heard from people who were involved. Um and

why though? Because both because No, because they just don't. That gets more into sort of what the mission of the Republican world in Washington sees itself as doing. They are basically they're more like what would be the point and I'm like I can tell you what the point is but like they're more like what would be the point but let me finish my story because there's a great twist please.

So Fouchy is out you know he's out with the Trump administration and certainly I think most Americans do know or suspect that it was a lab leak. Either it was a lab leak or the world's most remarkable coincidence ever. I I don't know if you've seen the John Stewart clip on COVID. Oh my god it's the best thing John Stewart ever did. Of course, with Steven Coar. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's the best thing. It's the best thing.

We can't talk about it. It's the best. This is the best thing Steuart ever. He was the first guy on the left who did that. And Coar was uncomfortable.

Yeah. Yeah. He and he just he destroyed that, right? You know, and like you're just like, "God, this guy's talented, right?" And

you know, the panglin kiss the kiss the bat, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever, right? you know. So anyway, this guy's out and Eichelberger is the new head of American viology. Uh I think that's his name is in and um Eikberger's claim to fame. He hadn't worked on back corona viruses at all. His claim to fame, his mad scientist, you got to be in the head of the mad scientist. Imagine you're a mad scientist or you want to be a mad scientist. Um and um he's the is it Eckleberger is the head of is the Fouchi's replacement. Um if you want to be a um a mad scientist uh you're in the shower, you're having mad scientist re, you know, realizations, right? And this mad scientist in the shower is like, I can recreate the 1918 flu.

How are you going to recreate the 1918 flu? He's like, "Well, the 1918 flu spread all around the world, killed 20 million people, whatever, whatever, and it infected Alaska, and in Alaska, they have perafrost. And I can go to Alaska and dig up a dead body from the perafrost that died in the 1918 pandemic, and I can resurrect the 1918 flu, and this will make me a famous scientist." And he did that. And now he's fortunately I think we're immune to the 1918 flu but uh or it didn't leak. But literally that's how he made his bones as a biologist.

Who? Uh I think it's Jay Eichelberger or something like that. It's Fouch's replacement if you uh

who is Fouch's replacement. I'm really curious about this guy now. I'm seeing Hugh

He's the head of Hen Claus. No, no, that was Fouch's aid. Jean Marazzo. No, those are all um Jeffrey Tabinberger. Sorry. Ladies

Jeffrey Talbenburgger. Yeah, there you go. I know I had it wrong. Who gave him the job? Who appointed him?

Trump. He's a Trump appointee. And if you uh um he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. and he published that genome which means that anyone who can basically print DNA can have themselves a nice new Spanish flu right and so when you basically ask to sort of pull back for a minute why can't we get the mad scientists out of viology why do viologists insist on basically behaving as if their job was to invent dangerous viruses as though they were mad scientists

so you would categorize him as a mad scientist well the thing is no actually he's a totally benign normal scientist and and and what's crazy what's really important about this regime of experts is the way in which sort of normal people become by doing normal things become mad scientists because what you're really looking at here with viology and we'll relate this back to foreign policy in a moment. What you're really looking at here with with gain of function research in viology is a conflict of interest. Because when you have a conflict of interest, you have the nominal interest of some person or organization and you have their actual interest. The nominal interest of viologists is to go to war against viruses to kill all the viruses. Right? If you're a viologist and like you know could snap your fingers and kill all the viruses that would be optimal except you know what if you could do that

you wouldn't have a job anymore. Mhm. Yeah. Um that makes sense because that makes sense, right? And so what we got is this situation in which the nominal interest of viologists beating viruses is totally at cross purposes with the actual incentive on viologists which is to make more and more dangerous viruses.

Can we So the incentive basically is making them mad scientists. And that's sort of the the structural problem.

I totally see that. And when populists look, you know, when populists look at Washington, they don't have this kind of intricate incentivebased theory, but they're like something is really wrong there,

right? You know, and like when they look at the lab leak, they're just like, you know, it's like, well, I think what Peter Teal once said about, you know, Trump, which was that he was um sort of um you should take him seriously but not literally, right? And and that's sort of true of like populism in general. populism sees this thing and it's like you know let's take the cartoon with the airplane like suppose you're in remember that airline that flew out over the um you know Indian Ocean and disappeared you know if you're an MH370 yeah you stand up and take control of the cockpit

because that that plane is going nowhere good right and when you see the way this sort of system of the rule of institutions and experts has developed all of these conflicts of interest you know so let's go to foreign policy, for example, you're like expanding NATO to the east. Okay, what is expanding NATO to the east? It's gain of function diplomacy. Actually, no one can point to a reason why expanding NATO to the east was a good idea. Many prominent experts warned against it. George Kennan is like, "Don't do this." William Burns, the CIA head, is like, "Don't do this." We tell the Russians, "We're not going to do this." We make them informal promises that we're not going to do this. then we do it anyway. What the hell are they supposed to think? Right? You know, and it's like this compulsion, this sort of bureaucratic compulsion that can't be stopped, that has no, you know, possible bearing on the security of Fort

Lauderdale, you know, and it just like and it's this, you know, this self-licking ice cream cone, and it's a toxic self-licking ice cream cone. it like basically like I mean is you know COVID kills 20 million people how many people is the Ukraine war killed 500,000

that was one of the things that I really wanted to know I really if there's one of the things that was in my top five that I wanted to know what happened was that because

I think it would be a certain accountability for China as well with the recklessness even though you were saying she wasn't involved but let's wrap up with this current event Iran what's going on there okay

what's going on um what will happen what should happen oh wow uh I I think that unfortunately the current thing in Iran is going to get a lot of protesters killed and not accomplish anything. I think that when a regime falls, uh protests don't bring about an end to a regime. When a regime falls, it's because it's lost confidence in itself and it no longer believes in itself. And I don't think the Ayatollas are at that point yet.

You don't think they are? You think they will be this year, 2026? No. or you're thinking it's a longer it's a very random it's a very random thing but it still feels to me like clearly the fanaticism of 1979 is not there anymore like a lot of that energy is like like the energy of Iran in the 80s is just demented completely crazy and by the way if you don't know this this is another thing where overthrowing the sha was basically the dream of progressives everywhere for like

of course yeah most Americans don't Carter could have been involved. He didn't help him out. He promised he would. He didn't.

Oh, no. Carter orchestrated getting rid of him. I mean, you know, and like the the the this is just like a like this is a this is progressive diplomacy in the 70s.

So, how do you process interventionist versus non-interventionist? So, is it a 100% never don't intervene or does it make sense at times? How do you process that? I would say that um you know the rules of like statecraftraft and diplomacy have not changed at all in this world. You know whatever we say they are is what they are. The problem is that basically as Clint Eastwood would put it man's got to know his limitations. And you know why we had Afghanistan why we had Vietnam is that we did not know our limitations. We do not understand how essentially bad we are at basically doing nation building, doing colonialism. Like we sort of intentionally suck at it. These are very solvable problems, but like we are not in a condition to solve these problems.

One of the interesting things about the Venezuela intervention, I'm basically an isolationist. I think that the US should essentially abandon its empire. Um, and you know, but uh I have an open mind. And one of the things that was impressive about the Venezuela intervention was that it was actually reminiscent of kind of a pre- missionary foreign policy. It's a very like practically done thing. So first of all, perfectly executed.

That's that's impressive. That's seriously impressive. You got to take your head off to that. But also, one of the interesting things was that, you know, you would have expected the Trump administration to put in Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, instead of working with the Rodriguez siblings, who are like the core of the old Venezuelan intelligence service. Okay, this is not neoconservatism. This is not like classic good neighbor policy liberalism. This is really gunboat diplomacy. And it's sort of wild to see this kind of Teddy Roosevelt diplomacy being carried out and apparently working in the present world because as far as I can tell what Trump what the Trump administration intends to do with um the current regime in Venezuela is basically just like give it carrots and sticks such that you know the people in charge of it can just get rich you know and you're just like yeah like you were the head of the Venezuelan

intelligence agency. You are a very dirty person. You've done very bad things. You are going to get rich and your country is going to get fixed. Totally alien to American 20th century foreign policy. Like, you know, or they tried to buy Maduro out. You know what would be an amazing policy? Buy out Kim Jong-un.

Basically be like, you know what? Your country is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You're holding it in this like incredibly backwater prison state. The 20th century thing is like, "No, we have to prosecute him like Hitler." Okay, we didn't prosecute Hitler, but we should have prosecuted Hitler, right? You know, Nuremberg trials for Kim Jong-un, whatever. You know, he's guilty of like, you know, insane crimes. These North Korean gulogs are every bit as bad as they say are. Horrible, horrible monarchy. You buy him off and you free the country and he lives for the rest of his life in the south of France like a freaking prince. You know where Kim Jong-un was educated? Switzerland. He was educated in a private school in Switzerland. His iPhone is probably the same one as mine, right? You know, like, but he is terrified because he doesn't want to be Gaddafi, right? And so you had this kind of, you

know, this interventionist foreign policy where like the Arab Spring is like this where it's like we're going to

Well, would that be interventionist for South North Korea? Would that be expansionist? Well, the words, you know, you sort of you shouldn't, you know, it would be normal in a way that

the reason I'm saying that is like I'm not getting involved saying let's get rid of them. Here's what that's interventionist to me. It's like listen, hey, we'll buy you for $88 billion. Step away. We'll take care of it from here. All right, sounds good. So, we're expanding America like you know, every everything that we bought. We bought Florida. bot.

Yeah, I'm not even like I'm not even sure we'd uh you know make North Korea a state or something, right? But the thing is actually maybe just give it to South Korea. Maybe say hey South Korea you we owe you all this money like you know let's figure out how to work this out, right? You know I don't know. Um but like that is a realist that is a you know to me realist foreign policy and isolationism have always been equivalent because that's kind of the best you can do right actually the empire you know whatever you want to call it our allies our international community has been a real loss to this country it has not been running at a profit the idea a of running a foreign policy as as a at a profit. That's like imperialism. That's gunboat diplomacy. Like what we did in Venezuela was gunboat diplomacy, right?

The idea you're not supportive what we did in Venezuela. I know. I think that actually is very ambitious and interesting and I hope it works out well

to me to go in there with a Delta force preparing for it since August. You go in, you take him, you leave. Wasn't expecting it. Everybody was shell shocked. No, you know, the way it was done, quick operation. I mean, that's just insane to be able to get it done that way. Venezuelans are happy. Uh, uh, Venezuelans here are happy. They're excited about what could happen next. Now, obviously controlling, leading, he joked the other, he posted something saying the president of Venezuela, I don't know if you saw this or not. He posted something with the president Venezuela, but this last tweet, Rob, if you go to that one, he just, this is an hour ago, Iranian patriots, keep protesting. Take over your institutions.

save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I've canled all meetings with Iranian officials.

That's more that's more of a neocon move, right? It's a neocon move because basically and and it's more reminiscent of kind of the American it's more reminiscent of like the Arab Spring. You know, this is a sort of an Arab

What should he do? You're saying don't do anything. Sit on the sidelines. It's a difficult problem. I would say that I think encouraging Iranians to do that um is bad because I think that they are going to lose and a lot of people are going to get killed and a lot of people already have been killed.

Do you think while he's saying this you don't think he already has his next 10 steps figured out? You don't think he already has people in there?

I don't know. What I'm saying is if you go this bold of an ask, you don't make an ask like this without already knowing it's about to be done. Don't you think

that's a big risk for a president to ask the people to Trump is a Trump is a murial man. He's a mysterious man. You know the administration is actually pretty good at keeping secrets. I certainly don't know what is being planned there. Um again I you know if you'd asked me before the Venezuela operation I would have said don't do this right after it was done I was like you know what uh when the facts change I changed my mind. So, you know, if you if if I think it would be certainly wonderful if the Trump administration and the people of Iran could pull this out in some way that worked. It's a very dangerous thing to do. I think the probability of failure is greater than the the probability of success.

Just so you know, I agree with you that the probability of failure is higher, but sometimes you got to take a gamble. And is this a gamble they're going to take? We're going to see.

We're going to see what they're going to do. Yeah. I think I think the people who are surrounded I around Iran who are

and you have an Iranian Jewish background right not Jewish Iranian Christian background my mother and my father they're Christian

the David bet David is bet David yeah most people think that bed David and Assyrians means beta house of David and a mother's boian Armenian uh so but I've been around Christians Muslims Jews my entire life I mean this

you speak far do you I speak fluent Farscy I speak fluent Armenian fluent Assyrian What do you think is going to happen in Iran?

Um, I think this the closest it's ever gone. I think if Biden doesn't uh uh become president in 2021, Iran would have fell in 21-22.

So, I think those sanctions were really destroying Iran. And he just put on the sanctions. I don't know if you saw that two days ago.

Yeah. He said yesterday, Rob, if you have this, any uh anybody that does business with Iran, I'm putting a 25% sanction on you. I don't know if you saw that.

I saw that. That was literally yesterday. So, this has been the playbook for a minute. And I think uh it's it's uh is that the one? Yeah, right there. Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay 25% tariff on any and all business being done in the US. The order is final and conclusive. Thank you for your attention. Right. You should like

I love Thank you for your attention in this matter. It's so good. It's so good. It's

He wants to make sure you're paying attention. No, but but to me u it's the closest it's been done and if you look at what happened with Venezuela just a few weeks ago to be able to pull that off and pull this off within a few weeks. I I don't know what award you give to this guy to be to haven't done that in 12 12 months. How the hell do you do this?

Call me again. Call Call me again. Call me again when he gets it done. I mean, you know, for sure, you know, the the the um I mean, there's no question that the I mean, the Venezuelan regime, I think, is worse than the Iranian regime.

You think so? I think so. Why do you say that? Justa, you know, Iran is not full of chaos and crime. And the thing is, actually,

you must not follow it closely. Not like not the way they're hanging people and the way they're doing.

Yes, but it's still the government, you know. Oh, now they're they're going they're going nuts, right? You know, but the thing is that, you know, there's there's an old Arab saying which is the um the just the the tyranny of the lion is better than the justice of the mouse. And in Venezuela, basically, it's just like everyone steals independently. Everyone is a criminal. there's like whole criminal structures all the way up and down like you're and in Iran at least you have a government right and you know those who believe that anarchy is better than government like they don't know their anarchy like in Venezuela is not just doesn't just have a shitty government with a shitty you know intelligence service control torture chamber whatever yeah it has that you know but it also has just like massive chaos and dysfunction of a sort report that is not seen in Iran. And so, yeah, it's still like it's

Iran to me is a whole different story. Like the levels of crime, torture, what Iran is doing, the the proxy wars and the amount of different military Houthies Hamas

you know, Hezbollah, everything they're funding, they are chaotic. They are they are creators of chaos. But the thing is, you can you're still I would rather walk down the street in Tyran than Caracus. Can we can we get him a one-way flight route to just kind of send him there with a camera? Jake, you follow him with a camera just to document it and see what happens. And we send him to Brazil.

Anyways, Curtis, this has been a blast. Really enjoy talking to you. Uh, for the people that are watching, you can actually you may agree or you're like, I don't know what he said. You can ask him any questions on Manact as well. But Curtis, I am looking forward to the next one after seeing what happens here. Yeah. But appreciate your time. This was fantastic, man. Thank you. Absolutely. Take care everybody. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717"?

Patrick Bet-David (Host), Curtis Yarvin (Guest).

What is "Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717" about?

Curtis Yarvin presents provocative ideas on governance, arguing that traditional democratic systems have failed and advocating for alternative political structures, such as a corporate-style government. He discusses his controversial viewpoints on race, freedom, and order, claiming that equality is not a natural state and that real power is concentrated in an unelected ruling class, sparking…

What is mentioned in this PBD Podcast episode?

24 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Democracy, Curtis Yarin, American Governance, Monarchy, Stanley Levison, The New Deal. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Who Is Curtis Yarvin? | PBD Podcast 717"?

The episode runs 2 h 28 min; the transcript is about 25,975 words in 369 timestamped sections.

More from PBD Podcast

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.