Solidifies my opinion that BB is the best interviewer NPR will never hire.

Lots of podcast hosts seem to let Curtis speak incessantly and essentially waltz around intellectually for an hour or so. I was glad to see that BAB actually interrupted him with some new questions, clarifying questions, or just to express something in his own way. It made for a more enjoyable conversation. I mean, Curtis is obviously brilliant and extremely well read. He can speak intelligently about a whole host of things. But it's not always pleasant to listen to. tldr: good interview

What Curtis says around 26 minutes is so insightful. The connection between being empathetic towards someone and being their lord is profound.

*Are Your Leader's Motivations Good?* 0:30 Critique of Monarchy: Bad Monarchs 1:48 Try thinking about creating the CEO of Chipotle 3:47 Warmtime Dynamic Decision-Making Peace-Time Leadership: Keep Everything Stable War Time Leadership: Restore Stability [We needed this years ago and did not get it] 5:39 1900s Crazy Governments 7:00 Constrained To Sanity 8:09 Washington does crazy things daily, because the system makes them do so. 9:06 Does Government Have Too Many Problems to Tackle By Itself? 11:32 Citizen Genet, a Girondin French Ambassador to the USA *Good Intentions, Bad Results, Sad Reaction* 13:47 Arab Spring MORE BAD THAN "Democracy World Peace" 15:20 Charitable Damage (HEARTBREAKING) 25:00 Warped Empathy :( 19:15 *America's Soft Power* [Fueling The Will of Plebians] The Problem _[When a harmful person cannot recognize the harm they are causing]_ 27:00 Feeding = Lording, Giver and The Taker 28:20 Ownership Through (Warped) Emotional Support 33:33 Idealistic View of Freedom-Slavery Scale 39:13 Orders of Magnitude 40:42 America Must Be Aware of Global Issues 41:30 Homeland Security 42:55 Bizarre Science "Droplet Theory" [Now Disproven] 45:30 Experts Misusing Power 46:44 STOP CAUSING MORE PROBLEMS 48:04 Write your scholarly research! Bureaucrat, Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone Lesson: Sick People can act Evil and believe it is Good Evil People can perform Evil and argue it is Good

The fact the video opened with his "uhhhmmmmm" had me dying

“Freedom has become indistinguishable from destruction.” Yessssss.

Now THIS is something i didn't expect to see. First Vanity Fair now Benjamin Boyce? Moldbug's certainly been making the rounds lately

You DID get a word in :) You seemed much more prepared than the usual person that interviews Curtis. Thank you!

I love that moldbug uses a "normal" microphone like you'd use for a stage production and I can picture him clearly at a guitar center or best buy asking *specifically* for a "normal microphone" because he doesn't want to use some zoomer headset or fancy suspended condenser mic or goofy "gimmicky" looking USB snowball mic.

Always like Benjamin, glad to see him giving the deep right the attention they deserve. You should get Dave Greene (The Distributist) and Auron Macintyre on as well.

This was one of my favorite Moldbug interviews. He’s incredible based and insightful!

glad to see Benjamin has kept up his reading and thinking skills. Not many can follow along with uncle Yar

Probably the best contemporary interviewer in the world

Benjamin stepping up big time, thank you for this.

Great interview Ben! Was pleased to see Yarvin mention "Zen At War", which should be required reading for coastal hippie pop-buddhists.

I can’t wait. So awesome.

Curtis. I apologize for my assumptions and I enjoyed your talk with Benjamin. You fellas have done much for me this evening and collapse or not you have expressed empathy on a new level that has caused me to elevate my own empathy. This is a perfectly fine take on most things discussed and I wish I'd have found Curtis earlier. ✨️

Very good conversation. One of the best with Yarvin

WOAH. Never expected to see this match up. Love both of you. Thank you Benjamin and Curtis.

You coming at me. I'm an American citizen. I have been a kind, compassionate and messed up soul in a body since 1983. I am not proud of my 20 plus years of substance abuse but I am no longer ashamed of it. My abuse on myself came from a place of simply not being able to form a personality. All I knew was the creator I call God has been with me the whole time. I have finally escaped my abusers and now my life will begin. I will attend to all young people and older people that require assistance or love. I will not be identified as property ever unless it is in service of my creator or my karmic debt. My karmic debt is up to my God. Yarvin need not speak of the American people, we have shared no view with any elite. I am no pig, animal or anything beside a creation of the creator AMEN

Thank you for your work, gentlemen.

Ooo never expected this crossover! Looking forward to listening this on my next few runs! 😤😤😤

Bless you for digging instead of letting him monologue uninterrupted. This is the first interview I've seen besides David Gornoski that wasn't just a verbal version of his latest substack post.

Might be my favorite yarvin interview. Really great job, benjamin.

Really enjoyed this, such gentle but devastating critiques. I read somewhere (The 4th Turning, maybe) that America is a particularly linear society, always moving forward, with little introspection. A reading of all of history would help a lot.. thanks to you both.

Congratulations, Benjamin.. that's the best interview of Yarvin I've seen

Been a long time since I tuned in Benjamin, great to see you're expanding your guest list, very interesting choice.

With the LARPing, I like to refer to Curtis as "Lord Yarvin," not because I follow him with unquestioning fealty, but in a semi-mocking way, but also ya know, if that's his title, that doesn't make him *my* lord, what if *I'm* a lord, or I follow a different one? But if I notice that Lord Yarvin makes a move that I agree with, and I make the decision to take my little fief and act concurrently, as though he were a fellow lord from Game of Thrones and my house shall align with his house... There would probably come a point where the LARP turns real.

The black void as a backdrop gives your interviews a more unique vibe in my opinion but you do you Benjamin 💖

I have the same take RE Ukraine. Nina Jankowicz, of the new Department of Disinformation, most certainly spent time there teaching Ukrainians to lie to the West in a manner our masters knew would be most effective. I used to argue with my cousin, who I now know reads Yarvin. I argued against a proxy-Yarvin, I guess you could say, during the dark decade when I forsook social media for literature, though I just heard of Mr. Moldbug this week (what a coincidence! but there are no coincidences. #InASimulatedUniverseThereIsNoCoincidence). Another great convo. Thanks, Benjamin. 🤘

Definitely the best interview of Yarvin I've heard and I've listened to many. I will be checking out much more of Boyce's content both past and future.

Definitely the best one yet. What a gem this corner of KZfaq is… just heaps of knowledge in this video

I could listen to Curtis all day, he has so many interesting things to say.

A wise man and a good interviewer.

Thanks Curtis and Benjamin!

Great interview. The pace and relaxed vibe BB sets really works to minimize the amount of Uh UMMMs Yarvin usually has in dialogue.

Great Great Great interview! Moldbug is always a treat!

At 23:20 I wonder if Boyce understands how fundamentally brilliant this appraisal of the current moment is. I mean this in all sincerity, if he decided to just focus on the gist of this and describe it in just this way, he could have an intellectual banner to always hoist in the way that Rob Henderson talks about Luxury Beliefs, Yarvin talks about thr Cathedral, Wesley Yang talks about Successor Ideology, or Nassim Taleb talks about Skin in the Game. I don't know exactly how it would be branded, but something like Cosmopolitan Regime Change or similar would be close. 👍 Great job BB.

Another high production value interview by Yarvin.

Can't watch now but will def come back for this👀

Another great interview Benjamin. I'd not heard of Curtis until yesterday's glitchfest, but wanted to hear more of him. His takes may sound inhospitable, or ruthless, but they make a lot of practical sense. When he discusses the Arab Spring he perfectly captures my perspective at the time; which is possibly because I was studying for a PhD at the time. Now I feel naive and slightly embarrassed that I'd never questioned whether there was an alternative to just passively supporting it. Although I'd never even heard of Thomas Sowell back then, let alone Mises, and was entirely focused on art magazines of the 1910s and 20s.

very good collab, great guest choice boyce

Zizek describes the end of the Soviet regime as Very comedic.

I think you did a really good job on this interview. Your poking and prodding on certain subjects I think allowed the conversation to flow. I have heard Yarvin talk about irony as a source of political motion before but I was struck by the similarity with what Jonathan Pageau says about jesters pre-figuring the flip. It is funny to see how people from completely opposite backgrounds can come to a similar conclusion.

Awesome. Please catch up again!

GREAT listening!

Excellent interview Benjamin, well done 👍

thank you

I think it would be worth it to do a quick follow-up, keep in touch with Yarvin.

I've been taking a Benjamin break.....but I really had to watch this when I saw Moldbug was on the roster.

My biggest beef with yarvin is his constant invoking of chipotle... The worst of the burrito places

Yarvin’s take on the efficiency of hierarchies is compelling. His take on the problems of incentives in bureaucracies and how they fuck up things like virology and the war in Afghanistan are also on point and honestly refreshing. The abuse of power by the powerful is the central critique of placing power in the hands of a few. Its not overstated - its a historical phenomenon. He sidesteps it. His response and premise that the CEO of Chipotle is not going to poison the burritos, and therefore a CEO/King of Washington wont be bad is simplified and misleading. Poisoning customers would, for example, hurt the bottom line - which is a relatively straight forward goal for a corporation. The question is more like would a CEO of Chipotle abuse farm hands, and give one shit about sustainable farming that wont fuck up our food supply. That doesn’t mean modern CEO’s aren’t often relatively competent leaders in many ways. Governing requires complicated trade-offs. The desire for security and safety is reasonable but a powerful group that isn’t accountable to the people being policed leads to ever-increasing over-reach to neutralize undesirables and opposition. Those in power get paranoid and loony about “undesirables” and “opposition” and out-group ethnicities and can easily cause stupid amounts of harm. The incentives in democracy are fucked up but so are the incentives for a small group with nearly unlimited power - namely to stay in power at all cost. His critique of democracy is incisive and fresh but he’s not grappling with the problems of more centralized power. Without this sincere balancing of harms his pretense of objectivity is a form of propaganda. He’s selling a simple solution which is an incredibly appealing way out of the messy reality of life and society these days - but without sincerely dealing with the problems of non-democracies he’s selling snake oil. He also simultaneously dismisses the fucked up things that people in the civil rights movement reacted to, and also dismisses the underlying problem - the extent to which powerful, largely unaccountable people and groups abuse their powers - this is the phenomenon that US Founders were responding to with much of the constitution BTW. He supports this dismissal with thin, unsupported broad sweeping assertions like that MLK and the civil rights movement are to blame for problems in black neighborhoods after the 50s/60s. He conveniently ignores events like the tulsa riots and fire of black wall street (not by MLK) or how creations highway systems, (or even Central Park) dismantled thriving black neighborhoods. Im not even allergic to claims that civil rights movement played a part - maybe Affirmative Action extracted some of the most talented blacks from those neighborhoods etc… Still, his history is not trustworthy. All that said, he’s an interesting dude and he has changed aspects of how i think about the world.

0:00:00 "Ummmmmmmmm" oh yeah... I can feel that in my limbic system.

Yarvin is always a pleasure to listen to.

excellent . . thank you

The most fun and thought-provoking hour-and-52-minute interview I've ever sat through. Just incredibly cool.

Wow that was tremendous.

That intro is so smooth. Dang

I think Mr. Yarvin has great insight into a lot of problems, and not so great ideas about how to solve them. Kind of like Bernie Sanders.

Curtis is great

Alcohol Poisoning Challenge: take a shot every time Yarvin says "basically"

Molebug in the house! What a great conversation.

Self-made man, trustworthy - BB draws the most interesting guests. Keep shining your light, Benjamin!

guys imagine Benjamin managed to get BAP on next......

Keep Sharp moldbug. We'll need your perspective for a few more decades. I know you're in a spot. Get walking bud. Drink more water. Get more miles. Sleep well.

Bring the 🔥

“Nonsense is powerful and sense is not”

"Power is always prestigious" very good point. Very good discussion. I did not know about the starvation of Germans in Allied-occupied Germany post-WW2 either. Its a very good point that the sincere and romantic patriot would not press that red button to radically change America, not to save it and not if they saw it failing in front of their lying eyes. They love it as it is too much. It would take a clownish and ironic figure to take that leap.

like my 3rd listen. .. great interview :) still i have questions.

The sci fi book already exists it’s called The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Severian the Autarch.

I like a lot of his ideas but what he says here about irony really bothers me. I think our affinity for irony is flowing out of deep alienation and nihilism

The conflict is not between the science and power but between the science and the careers

Wow good guest

I’d like to hear Curtis talk about what the Apple III and a mandatory U2 album would be akin to on a national/political level.

Good calmversation! I'd love to listen to a conversation between you and Michael Malice at some point in the future

Just had a great idea for a website. You know how there's a website called TV Tropes, it lists all the tropes from movies, shows, etc. It's very addictive and actually interesting. Make one but with all these little bits, like "political formula". You'd get lots of visitors

At last...over the target 🎯 PS: Curt is the Monarch of Ironicstan... feels me?

Nice🤘🏻

I dunno how good a paradigm the CEO monarch is. See Noam Chomsky famous conversation with Andrew Marr, where he describes why Marr is where he is believing what he does; and how he's a symptom of the structure. CEOs are the same. If an individual CEO doesn't subordinate to the financialized superorganism, he's replaced by someone who does. Making these functionaries into monarchs doesn't sound like a recipe for auteur leadership but the opposite...

Wonder if the state will ever again be able to give ambitious people the conditions within which to grow. What is growth beyond the material? Spiritual. We already have the material (more or less) fixed.

Dr. Basically does it again

How does this only have 30k views

I believe I speak for everyone when I say:happy graduation. Lol. (Although, all the anarchist jokes aside, I don’t see Yarvin as particularly right wing or any sort of a radical, I mean, his parents worked for Biden’s campaign, and “Biden kissed his mom on the cheek” - why anyone would brag about that is beyond me, but why anyone would remember that is also beyond me…). The guy is interesting and every time I listen to him, I end up buying more books, but I don’t see him as someone I’d take advice from or idolize… I do, however consider him to be a great thinker, same as I do with Michael Malice, about whom I have almost the exact same opinion, BTW…

Moldbug is at his best when 1. Two/ three glasses of dago red 2. An air of insouciance.

do you plan to make podcasts from these episodes like the calmversations?

Not sure if Curtis is right about the Truckers being serious but not serious enough. I think the truckers themselves were very unserious but the media tried to turn them serious and the result was the perception of the middle area.

"How did you get this idea, what is the origins?" what a question

Nice thing about monarchy is the people know who is responsible.

Curtis Yarvin is a nut. My god!

We live in a crazy world where Moldbug is considered intellectual

It was a great conversation 👌

Reminds me of a politics of self-congratulation operative in US foreign management.

His take on Ukraine was eye opening

1:15 aha moment. amazing

great talk! thank you! I am triggered to the wort „basically“ now… sorry 😅

Great interaction of two fascinating minds, in a sort of harmony that musicians call counterpoint. Thanks guys. "In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, especially in the Baroque period." (wiki)

10/10

We must seize the means of Harvard

Speaking of irony as a political force, the Italian futurists come to mind; they led to history's least offensive fascism.

"If you have a regime that represents only part of a country, that's very bad"....looking at the state of America rn