#121 Curtis Yarvin: From Caesar to Satoshi: Why Political & Economic Systems Fail

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In Part 2 of our conversation, Curtis Yarvin dives deep into political decay, Austrian economics, and the origins of money and Bitcoin. We explore monarchy as the most honest system of rule, the flaws in free-market libertarianism, and the great economic debates between Mises, Keynes, and Friedrich List. Yarvin unpacks what the Austrians got right—and wrong—why personal net worth may be the real measure of inflation, and the ultimate question of Bitcoin versus gold.

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• Transcript

  Peter McCormack

  I mean, this essentially goes back to this. FDR, yeah, because you know what, like, after I what I was in, it was in Tucker's interview. You brought it up. So I went and read it actually, and now I posted on Facebook. And it was, it was warmly welcomed by my conservative friends, but this was it. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honesty. Facing conditions in our country today, values have shrunk into fantastic level. Taxes have risen. Our ability to pay the Fallen government of all kinds is faced by serious containment of income, blah, like he's a it's like he's rather than the bullshit we get from Keir Starmer or Kemi bad. He's just said that. And you have to, we have to have an honest conversation with the nation, an honest conversation.

  Curtis Yarvin

  And people love actually, like when you break through something false. You know, one of my formative esthetic moments, I had this weird experience, because my father was in the UN's Foreign Service, and so I was posted when he was posted when I was 10 and 11 to Nicosia Cyprus. And in Nicosia Cyprus, for some reason, rather than sending me to the International School for Americans, they sent me to the English school in Nicosia Cyprus. So I had this kind of Harry Potter experience, except I was also three years younger than everyone else, which was, like, really super weird. And it was a very weird way to be 10 and 11. But I, you know, I got a lot from it. I memorized some Shelley, you know, and so on and so forth. And it was the Harry Potter experience, right, but without the magic and with more Cypriots and the then I get back to America, and suddenly I'm a 12 year old sophomore in an American public high school, and I'm trying very hard to, like, acculturate myself to this very strange, you know, environment in many different ways. And one of the things I decide is I'm going to get a radio and I'm going to listen to top 40 radio, because that's what everyone in the class listens to. Everyone in my school listens to, and it's like 1985 and if you turn on top 40 radio, you know what you're getting is like, you know Bon

  Peter McCormack

  Jovi? Yeah. First album I ever bought was Bon Jovi. New Jersey No, it's Bon Jovi. I was telling myself, John with the funniest thing, when you brought up encyclopedia earlier, you smiled. So there was this thing that came on Twitter. It was a list of 20 things that, have you done? Have you used a rotary phone? Have you owned an encyclopedia? Haven't you owned a dictionary? Basically, I was 19 of the 20. You were, what, nine. But he was like, Dad, what's an encyclopedia? Amazing. And I was like, son, and then let me just, let me just tell you. But he also had what was a Walkman. And so I said to him again, son, it's a way of playing Bon Jovi, yeah, the first. And I remember, I got my first Walkman. I walked to town, my local town, and I bought Bon Jovi, New Jersey open with bad medicine? It was after slippery when we it was after slippery, yeah, it was the one after I'm few years older than you remember, yeah, you

  Curtis Yarvin

  know, and slippery when wet. Like, what was the track? You know, I'm a, I'm a cowboy, steel horse. Was that one slippery when wet? Yeah? Really, I think so. I'm a cowboy, you know, on a steel horse I ride,

  Peter McCormack

  yeah, you know, I'm Wanted Dead or Alive, right? You know, I want to, I think that's a different album. Maybe find that. Can we check that? Yeah, check that. I don't

  Curtis Yarvin

  check the facts here. Yeah, that might be the first factual error I've made here. Yeah, I suspect not slippery when wet. Yeah, let's get the track list.

  Peter McCormack

  Wanted Dead or Alive. You're correct? No, damn it.

  Curtis Yarvin

  Damn it, that one. And so anyway, so I'm listening to bon, you know, Bon Jovi and similar, like top 40 things. Yeah, I'm like a top 40, you know the concept, you know, it's 1985 right? I'm a cowboy on a steel horse I ride. And then, for whatever reason, for whatever it was, a contest or something, you know, this, this q, 107, or whatever they play, a Rolling Stone song they play, in fact, paint it black. And I'm just like, oh, you see, that's what rock and roll actually is. And from that day on, Bon Jovi was completely ruined for. Okay, right? And the thing is basically that effect of saying, like, Okay, now this is real. Like, you all have this kind of learned helplessness, where everybody has been saying, there's a red button. You keep stabbing at the red button, and it's like the closed door button on the elevator. But like, you know, what you need is a candidate who says, hey, you know this time. I mean, FDR didn't do this. He sort of did this kind of fraudulent thing. But actually, before the election, you've got to come out and say, Hey, Americans, Englishmen, if you're thinking of voting, here's something I want you to know, if you vote for me, I'm actually going to be the president. I'm actually going to be the president. So if you don't want me to actually be the president and actually be in charge of this huge, crazy, insane, beautiful and awful thing we call the US government, I think you should vote for my opponent. Well, so you know, because, actually, moreover, I would like to say to my opponent, actually, I think you should say the same thing. And I think if you win, you should really be the president.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, look, I've got two thoughts on that. Firstly, that requires Nigel Farage, one, to fully recognize the problem. Two, have the conviction to change it. And three, care more, care more about changing it than winning power. And

  Curtis Yarvin

  have the staff that knows how to back it up and turn it into something real, but that's not just a smile and a beer.

  Peter McCormack

  But does he care more about becoming Prime Minister or fixing the country? Because, and the truth is, it goes to my second thought is that what I've noticed in politics is really weird, right? I've considered running for office in the UK, and we again, we talked about this wandering through New York yesterday, and I said, Look, one of the reasons I think I might do I won't do too well because I'm not the smartest, but one of the reasons I think I would do well is I'm quite honest. But what I've noticed is that honest politicians do really fucking well.

  Curtis Yarvin

  They actually can. And this is the thing that most people don't see in Trump advance. They don't see that actually, the amazing thing about Trump and Vance, I have met Vance a few times. I've never met Trump. Here's the thing about Trump and Vance. They are the same person. On camera and off camera, they are absolutely the same person. Now let's think about who Keir Starmer is off camera. Does he even exist? Is even in the room, like, Who is this person? Who is he to his wife? What if we had a hidden camera on cure Starmer? What if we could look at every day of cure starmer's life? What is it with the Ukrainian rent place you keep setting fires like

  Peter McCormack

  Connor, all the politicians we've interviewed, who do you think is the same off camera, like, genuinely the same. Steve Baker, Steve Baker, yeah, who's Steve Baker, he was a conservative. He's the first person who brought up Bitcoin in the house, commons, yeah. Steve Baker, a little bit. I kind of think Liz truss is a little bit, a little

  Curtis Yarvin

  bit really worth cabbage and all head of cabbage, and I felt,

  Peter McCormack

  but neither of the labor guys, Josh Simmons, a bit more than Mike tap,

  Curtis Yarvin

  no. Can I recommend a labor rate for you? Yeah, interview, if they'll come. Lord Glassman, okay, you know Lord Glassman, Morris Glassman, the founder of blue labor do. Lord Glassman, I think you'll have an amazing time with Lord Glassman, I will tell you without any you know, Lord Glassman, friend of yours, yeah, he's the same person, Morris Glassman. He's a Jewish Lord. You might have to introduce me. I struggle to get labor people on, yeah, this is different. This is different. This is different. This is the true horseshoe, you know. And, like, there is a true horseshoe and Morris is, Morris is a true horseshoe man. And so, yeah, that does exist. With regards to Farage. I met him actually, like 10 years ago or so. I was at a dinner in Silicon Valley. I would say that, normally, I'm pretty black pilled. I would say that with Farage, there might be more than meets the eye.

  Peter McCormack

  Hey, listen, he's a he's the best option we have right now. There might be more than meets the eye, but, but what I want, my worry with reform is just, it's the hard decisions to make, and can you

  Curtis Yarvin

  make? Can you and can you basically take, you know, what is, what all of these populist, literal democratic, populist, quote, democratic, you know, meritocracy, what all these literal Democratic Parties have in common, and this is the huge problem of populism is that it is not enough just to be negative. You actually have to come together and create something new, and it has to be really new, and it has to be, I'm afraid to say this, like very big brain. And so, you know, the thing is that, how do you, basically, you know, how. Do you create a leadership that is like daring enough to say, we are going to revise 400 years of English constitutional history, and we are going to do it in the most nerdy way, literally, like last night or the night before last, to prepare for my, you know, debate with the great constitutional scholar. No, no irony meant there, you know, you know, you know, Jed rubinfeld, I was basically reading Blackstone from like, the mid, you know, 17th century. And I could probably, you probably don't want me to hear me talk for 20 minutes about Blackstone's theory of the king, but I could talk for 20 minutes about Blackstone's theory of the king. Yeah, right. That is very nerdy and very whatever. But the thing is, actually, like, you know, when you look at what populists want, they actually are in line, you know, they want this. They have this issue. They have that issue. They're right about this. They're wrong about this. They're against anti, you know, immigration and vaccination and all these other Asians, right, you know and like. But actually what they want is was well expressed by the great English poet Alexander Pope, when he said, For forms of government, let fools contest. Whatever governs best is best. And they have this Jeep and totally correct to the bone feeling that they're not being well governed, and in fact, they are being abused by their government. In fact, their government is constantly pissing down their neck and telling them it's raining. With an old you heard that expression before? That's an old Texas expression, don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining, right? You know? And as an Englishman, the number of times you feel the warm trickle on your neck. And told you know, this is just a balmy rain,

  Peter McCormack

  you know? Well, that's why, that's why I bring up bukele Because, yeah, because He's tremendously popular. Yeah, he's tremendously popular. He's done it through democratic means. We kind of changed the Constitution and got rid again, the

  Curtis Yarvin

  word democratic is playing, you false. I know, I know. You know, through populist games, crushed, you know, this sort of go over to the corrupt judges. Yeah, he crushed the meritocracy. Yeah, in El Salvador, the meritocracy in El Salvador was all sort of backed up by they're all, you know, sort of American stooges. Basically, there are Harvard stooges. Rather they're US Embassy stooges. And he told the US Embassy to go blow smoke up its butt, which is something, but he's currently, he's, don't say the US Embassy. Normally, you don't really get away with saying that. And like he was, just go ahead and blow smoke up your butt.

  Peter McCormack

  And we saw how they come after him, but he's kind of been like a CEO for the country. Oh, yeah, the big walk through, I

  Curtis Yarvin

  walk through, I will tell you in El Salvador story. So I've been in El Salvador twice, and it is true, when I was in El Salvador, I guess the first time I did get two intestinal infections in three days. That is probably because I swam in the ocean, which was brown, and you're a river mass, on the other hand. So you know, you go to El Salvador, you still don't want to drink the water. On the other hand, I did something insane in El Salvador. I tested the bouquets like theory, empirically in a crazy way, because totally accidentally, because I'd gone to a conference, and I brought my laptop, and I realized that I needed to get a ride share home. And to do that, I had to walk through the main square of Old San Salvador carrying a MacBook Pro under my arm. Did you keep it? I never felt unsafe at all. Okay? When I was in a similar situation in Sao Paulo, they were like, do not even take out your cell phone. Like, you know, in New York, I'm like, there are places in New York I would do that places. I would not London. Places that would do that, places I would not I felt completely safe in El Salvador, and here's how they'd look if humans vanished. the right way, because the future depends on it.

  Peter McCormack

  Well, so I got this tattoo here and in San Salvador, but I got it in a red zone. Had to go with three armed guards. Yeah. When did you get that? So that was about, I want to say, about four years ago. Yeah, so I was there interviewing bikayla. I went to

  Curtis Yarvin

  interview four years ago, yeah, like, because he, that's how early he got into big, yeah. And he had not accomplished his miracle yet.

  Peter McCormack

  No, so I went and interviewed him, but one of the we made a film there as well. And one of the most interesting conversation is quite ironic now being Yeah, with our studio in London, but I interviewed a person on the street, and they said I used to not be able to use my phone in public, yeah, because it'll just be snatched off me. Said I can walk down the street and use my phone now, whereas in London now you say, we don't use your phone in public, we've come full circle. And so I just think of him as I can see why leftists cannot stand it. They talk about the human rights abuses, and look, certainly there are some innocent people in jail, but he has changed a fundamental direction in that country by making tough, strong decisions, knowing that they're not perfect decisions by the kind

  Curtis Yarvin

  of that search for perfection is one of the most dangerous things, like you can't have, you know, there's this great, you know, British, you know, anonymous British tweeter named Druck McCormack of the UK esthetics, right? You know? And He came up with this great, you know, picture, which is basically, you know, may have some relationship to my big red button thing, you know. He's like, you know, there's a fix everything switch, you know, pull up on Twitter, go and search for the fix everything switch.

  Unknown Speaker

  I should use this resource more. This is I found out the fix everything,

  Curtis Yarvin

  yeah, but search on Twitter, search on X for fix everything. Switch. Unfortunately, it's an image, but no, go down. Go down. Yeah, they go there, yeah,

  Peter McCormack

  all right, fix everything. Easy, okay, so people listening, you can't press that switch. There is no switch. Actually, nobody wants to see any switch press in your switch Press in. Obsess maniac is simply not possible to press the switch. To be honest, it's quite frankly terrifying that you even think of press with a switch. Hey, buddy, just get fucked if you even think of pressing the switch, fuck you. You have this ridiculous fantasy where you can just press the switch. The middle ground is not switch pressing. It isn't easy. It's just pressing the switch. Yeah, if people say you shouldn't press the switch, then maybe don't. And then in the middle pressing, obsessed maniac. And then the middle is like a light switch. Fix everything

  Curtis Yarvin

  exactly. All right, should we? Should we break? I could use a break. I could use,

  Peter McCormack

  yeah, I do want to finish. I don't just stop. Another beer, quick,

  Unknown Speaker

  maybe some whiskey. We can go for hours. So, you know, Connor,

  Peter McCormack

  you got a question? Yeah, so my question was, it kind of sounds like you're asking for the return of a Caesar and his fellow philosophical friends who dictate.

  Curtis Yarvin

  I think essentially, you're in a situation where, if you know, to summarize the kind of previous conversation. Aristotle tells you that there are three forms or forces or kind of styles or ways of doing government. You can do it the monarchical way, the aristocratic way or the literal democratic way. And the problem with the literal democratic way is not even that the people are incompetent to govern. It's both better and worse than that. They are both incompetent and too weak to govern. If they were a king, they would be like an eight year old king. They their attention span is too weak, their capacity for you know, cooperation is too weak. You know, all of these things maybe can be improved, but you have to sit, you know, you know, sense squarely the fact that populism, the track record of populism in the last 75 years, is that it

  Peter McCormack

  always loses, but we want to mark as a radius, and

  Curtis Yarvin

  so and so. Your choice, in a way, because you don't have those other two forces, is you need to think really carefully and hard knowing that there's a wide range of distributions in the quality of a monarch that I think Caesar was fricking wonderful. I love Caesar. I love Augustus, Tiberius, you know, right? And so you basically want to design a system that will give you a Caesar, you know, an Augustus, but not a Tiberius or a Caligula. You can think of these exclusively in Roman terms. I have a, you know, historical conspiracy theory for which there is absolutely no evidence. And it's probably not true, but I love it nonetheless. So Edward Gibbon described the period from Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius or Trajan. I think in Mark Marcus Aurelius, I'm forgetting the order as the best government that humanity had ever experienced. You know, when you look into the lives of you notice that these emperors adopt each other. Okay, that's a very unusual historical pattern. Is this adoptive succession, where Marcus Aurelius is like nominally, the son of verus, who adopts him as a young and beautiful man. I'm like, I'm not saying but like, you know what? If actually the five good emperors are really the five gay emperors, you know what? If we get Commodus because Marcus Aurelius breaks the pattern and goes back to hereditary succession. You've seen glass. Gladiator. I've seen Gladiator. And so the thing is, actually, for me, I think the logical way to think about this problem knowing that, you know, for the moment, although you know, society can be monarchs can actually change society. For the moment, we don't have a suitable aristocracy that we can trust to govern. We don't have a suitable aristos, and we don't have a suitable demos. Therefore, as engineers, we're like, all right, you know, here are these other two designs that I really, really want it to work, but they're just not going to work. So, gosh, I guess we have to go with a form of government that humanity has used for like, 99.9% of its history, you know. And like, this is why I thought it was clever that the way yell, political union debate, which I lost, by the way, I lost 23 to six. I saw the resolution didn't pass, we'll be back. Yeah, back. We'll be back.

  Peter McCormack

  You know, you would have got less than 23 votes maybe five years ago.

  Curtis Yarvin

  Who wins his first election, right? You know, like, I would have been arrested, you know. And like, you know, the who wins his first election, right? And so, yeah, you know, to basically say, like, all right, you know, think about it as, like, you know, a chemist designing a pharmaceutical. Like, you know, a pharmaceutical is like, actually, most drugs are bad, right? You know, most molecules are something you don't want in your body, and you have to solve this problem. One of the things you're familiar with the concept of ozempic. Have you ever taken

  Peter McCormack

  ozempic? No, I'm tempted. I'm a little bit rotund. Yeah, it's

  Curtis Yarvin

  good shit. It's a hell. It's, as someone once said it's a hell of a drug, you know. And what's even better is bootleg Chinese rider, true tide. That's that one is not even released yet, amazing stuff. And, you know, I've looked like Xi Jinping, you know, you know. And I don't understand why he doesn't do this stuff, you know. And so, in any case, all you have is you have monarchy. And it's like this family of molecules which are very different from each other, which have a huge level of historical variance in how the monarch is chosen, the meaning of the monarch, the function of the monarch, etc, etc. The only thing you see is that if the monarchy is less than absolute, it rapidly disappears. Yes. And so, you know, there's something really Boolean there. It's like, achieving orbit, like, it is not good to build a rocket get that gets 99% of the way to orbit. Like, don't do that, right? You know, as Saint just said, you know, he who makes half a revolution, you know, you know, commit suicide, and that is basically also true of getting halfway to orbit. So you basically have to actually say, here is a family of molecules. And by the way, the original molecule for ozempic was developed from Gila monster venom. Okay, it was basically noticed that Gila monster Venom had this property, but it was actually the venom of a lizard. And so when I, you know, suggest that, you know, you go to, you know, a certain website and buy some cheap Chinese or red a true tide and inject yourself. I am not saying that you should go out in the desert and find Gila monsters to bite yourself with, right, you know. And like, actually, the fact that this molecule is, in the 20th century, very toxic, and by the way, that's an unusual situation for monarchy, because, you know, cume, the most rational of scholars in the Scottish Enlightenment, is like, yeah, basically, a well designed monarchy is obviously the best system of government. I'm like, you know, we've seen, you know, okay, there's Hitler, but also there's, like, even the terrible or there was this, like crazy, like Swedish monarch, like Eric the 14th, or something like that. Like, who was actually insane. More often you have very weak kings who are weak because they're just very young. And we see that's like the seven year old population. You just can't put the seven year old in charge of France. You just can't do it who's running Game of Thrones, you know? And it just like so that creates a problem where power, you know, gets dispersed, and that has often been very dangerous for kingdoms, in a way. I think the decay of the English monarchy starts with Elizabeth, just because she's wonderful, but she's also a girl, and she kind of lets her deep state run away with her a little bit, right? And then James the First comes in, and he's kind of this weak foreign king who doesn't have a local power base. And he starts gapping, as the Gen Zers say, he's constantly yapping about the divine right of kings, the divine right of kings, you know, he doesn't gap about the divine right of kings. Henry the frickin eighth. You know, that's because Henry, they did not need to do that shit, whereas James the First is like, I'm an absolute monarch. I'm an absolute monarch, right? You know, as soon as that starts to be compromised, as soon as he even has to insist on it, his dynasty is on the way to decapitation, right? So, but

  Peter McCormack

  this goes back to my point, where, if a monarch fails, it could very. Easily replace, but with democracy again, whereas

  Curtis Yarvin

  feels, there are a lot of failure modes, and they all suck, right? So it's like, basically, you're building a bridge, okay? A bridge is an inherently dangerous thing. A bridge is inherently something where you're really screwing around with the basic forces of nature. You're, in fact, defying those basic forces of nature. More than anything, what a bridge wants to do is fall down right. And the same is true of a monarchy. It's sort of a not a naturally stable form. It has to be very actively stabilized, the great sort of virtues and also the great vices of democracy and oligarchy. Oligarchy especially, has all these very strong, natural stabilizing forces, which leads to, just like, complete sclerosis and insanity, you know. But you know, at least there's, like, peace until it just everything falls apart, right? You know, and the like. But there's a lot of you know, the importance of an elite is tremendous. You don't, you can't get rid of your elite. You have to, like, basically, redo them to some extent. And that has to be, actually, very pleasant process for this elite. It should be a very pleasant process. But, you know, the for the, you know, in terms of engineering, yeah, you're doing this, like, very risky thing, like, you know, Jed compared it to, you know, a nuclear reactor. Like, he's like, Well, you know, you basically could power your system on coal, which, like, might burn a little funky, or you could build a nuclear reactor. Okay, what's the worst case scenario? Like, the worst case scenario is clearly a lot worse for your nuclear reactor. And that was a very effective argument, you know, by, you know, a very distinguished lawyer, right? So, you know, I'm like, Okay, there's that right on the other hand, basically, you know, you build a nuclear reactor, or you, like, freeze in the dark and you're eaten by wolves and, like, you're actually, you know, if you get another recurrence of, basically, the left regime. Now that the idea that there are like, two lefts, the nice left and the mean left, like the mutt left and the Jeff left has been, like, totally exposed and blown up. And they're obviously the same thing. You're just like, you know, it's a total mask off moment, in a way, like the response to this Charlie Kirk thing, yeah? Total mask off moment. And they're basically like, yeah, we're actually just one thing, right? You

  Peter McCormack

  know, yeah, because they were either dancing on his grave or just, like rationalizing

  Curtis Yarvin

  it same as their relationship to Stalin, literally, the same thing, historically, like, actually, they're, you know, they gave up Stalin and, you know, they went nuts for Castro, you know, they go nuts for yarafat, right? You know, there's this like attraction that's like, you know, the attraction of, you know, libs, you know, to Stalin, or, for that matter, to Luigi, is like, has this really suspicious resemblance to the way that lovelorn women send prison letters to murderers, right? You know, it's just like, wow, again and again. You're just choosing the ugliest possible thing. But

  Peter McCormack

  if you could, if you could, rather than poll them, if you could dive into their brains and see what they actually thought. How many of these libs wish Donald Trump hadn't turned his head at that moment?

  Curtis Yarvin

  Oh, sure, they, I mean, because they understand, in a way, they understand something that we don't, because they understand the basically fundamental and ultimate, you know, meaning of politics, and they are just about, you know, fundamentally, if you have parties A and B, and they're contending for power, and party a cares only about power, and party B cares about anything other than power, party A is going to win and party B is going to lose. That is just the way it works, like those are the rules. I don't make the rules.

  Peter McCormack

  How do we stop Commodus? Then? Because, which, by the way, I watched them watch gladiator again for the first time since I was a kid. See, here was, yeah, let me tell you this point. So I watched gladiator two, which was terrible. Writer one was also terrible. It was terrible. It was terrible. But seeing it as a, I don't know, 15 year old, and then seeing it again as an adult, after I've read meditations, discovered Bitcoin, spent a lot of time thinking about the fall of Rome. It goes from, it's you watch as a 15 year old. You just see, you just, you're just seeing gladiators fighting in the pit. You know this

  Curtis Yarvin

  this season. You don't worry the Germans. But it's a little bit more educational when you watch Arizona. Oh yeah. Oh shit. So the thing is, normally, when people ask this question, when I go to, like, Yale Law School and ask this question, like, basically, you know, there's a lot of good things that you can say about Yale Law students, but they're basically not nerds. There's like, three nerds in the audience. I can pick them up like you're a nerd, you're a nerd, right? You know, but for the most part, they're not nerds and so, but they're also very sharp, and so when they pin down this question, I have to, basically, like, work very hard to see not seem like a nerd. But with you, Peter, you know, I'm not ashamed and I'm not afraid. Great. We are nerds together. Let us be nerds. Let us join hands as nerds and the, the and so there's actually an answer to this question, and the answer to this question that is sort of well trodden and well worn. And I'm actually like, you know, I have, you know, been involved in way more many board of directors votes than I should have. So I have basically seen, you know, I spent, like, basically the last year in corporate governance war, right, you know, and fun. Have you done this? Yeah, of course, Hell Yeah, fuck yeah, right, you

  Peter McCormack

  know. Well, yeah, but I'm the guy,

  Curtis Yarvin

  literally, I, literally I, literally today, I, or rather, my forces, prevailed in an on chain election today, literally today. It was a very small difference, actually, like, huge respect to the people who lost that election. They're actually also wonderful. It's just sort of the wrong shape, you know, and

  Peter McCormack

  but I'm a chairman who can be removed by a board. And I'm also,

  Curtis Yarvin

  no, I'm only the my first startup plan, basically there was various kinds of corporate war involving the courts of Delaware, and the result was with my second co founder, I ended up in a situation where it's actually very workable situation where he's the CEO, I'm the CTO, but I control the board so he can fire me, but I also can fire him, you know. And every kind of co founder situation, if you want to sort of structure a co founder situation, you want this kind of Mexican standoff where it's basically clear that just either of you can blow up the world if you want, and you actually don't want to. And before you want to blow up the world, you should want to leave.

  Peter McCormack

  We should. We should probably talk about economics. Let's segue from there. Do you know what it's interesting is you, when you go out and look up your interviews, you've got some interviews you've done with, like crypto nerds, and then you've done your kind of, your Tucker Carlson ones, and during your like, Tucker and other ones, you very rarely bring up, very rarely cross the street. You do but when I do my interviews, very rare, unless I'm interviewing an actual Bitcoin nerd, it very rarely comes up. Like, I bring it up occasionally. So when I found out, like, oh, Curtis is also a Bitcoin nerd, that's kind of interesting, that's kind of interesting. So then it pushes me to like, in this world

  Curtis Yarvin

  therein, hangs a tale. Can I tell you a tale? Yeah, tell me. Tell you. Tell this is a tale that has not actually been I've said that I've done a lot of appearances, but this is a tale I referred to it briefly in a text message to you. But, yeah, this is a tale that has actually not been told before, so let me tell it. So I was basically, you know, where all this bullshit came from, is I was kind of doing two things at the same time. At the same time I was working on, basically, how do I rewrite all of government, and at the same time, I'm also working on, how do I rewrite all of computer science, because I feel that they have I am actually a drop out of the Berkeley PhD program in computer science. And I worked in, you know, I wrote the first I wrote a watt browser that was a pre iPhone cell phone browser that shipped about a billion units, of which about 10,000 were ever actually used. But, you know, that was, I was a. Whap, Oh, yeah. Oh, you remember whap, did you ever write WML,

  Peter McCormack

  no, I did, no, but I did start at my post University's Career did start out right in HTML,

  Curtis Yarvin

  yeah, but you'd hurt. You had heard of old of the attempt to have a parallel? Yes, I do. Well, that was I would. I did not organize, that I did not create, that I was butt upon, but it allowed me, you know, before the 2000 collapse, to sort of raise a reasonably sized little nest egg, not enough that I had, like, Fuck you money, and could just go to like, you know, go to shit, but like, actually enough to do. I was just like, well, I dropped out of grad school because I just couldn't stand the frickin bureaucracy. And I'm like, All right, I'm gonna go make some money in the private sector, and I'm gonna, like, fund myself to do an independent dissertation, right? And so I was like, All right, I'll do that, right? And, you know, because everything had gone to shit, but I still had some cash left, I should have sold the bubble, either way before I hit or way after I did. I'm a terrible investor, you know, and most of us are. I'm the worst and the and you'll see why and the terrible. And I apologize to everyone you know for my the terrible. This is my investing. But the although, you know, I made a lot of money on covid, actually, that was my best rate ever, like buying s and deep out of the money S and P puts in, like, January 2020, 20. That was a lot. Was like, that was money, right? You know, you know, in any case, you know, going back to sort of my early investigation, so it was like 2002 everything I worked on, it sort of gone to shit. Everything, clearly, was shit and deserved to go to shit, you know, in its own way. And WML, for instance, was shit, right, despite my best efforts. And I was like, All right, you know, clearly, sort of the way in which we're doing computer science is, you know, essentially, you know, if you look at your iPhone, your iPhone is actually basically a it is a mechanical copy of a structural copy of A mini computer the size of a fridge called a VAX that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation, you know, in 1975 or something like that. And it is running, basically running an operating system called Unix, which you might know of, which was, of course, which was the operating system for, you know, developed by these, you know, cool people at Bell Labs, amazing system for, you know, that was popularized, really, you know, by the deck machines, right? And so, for example, when you use your iPhone, here's something about your iPhone that you'll realize it tries very hard to pretend that there's only one level of memory. It tries very hard to pretend that all apps are on at the same time, but you'll notice that there's actually a difference there. And if you haven't used an app in a while, it's clearly like booting that app back up, right? So essentially, your iPhone has these two layers of storage because that's how hardware evolved. But hardware evolved that way, because basically, in 1975 you had, you know, one kind of memory, which was hard disk, memory on spinning cylinders that lasted forever, and another memory and was slow, and another kind of RAM that was cheap and fast. That dichotomy created the whole definition of what an operating system is. And, you know, I was like, I, you know, I'm like, one of these people who's, like, a heavy metal guitarist. I was like, I'm like, classically trained man. I trained at Juilliard, right? You know, I like, I very classically trained in system software. And the I was just like, you know, what, if this difference didn't exist, what would happen if we were actually designing the system from scratch? Well, you know, suppose we found an alien computing environment that fell off the back of an alien spaceship. Like, what would it look like? And, you know, because clearly, like, you know, maybe, for example, in normal computing, like, one is true and zero is false. But maybe the aliens would be like, zero is true and one is false, right? And so, and, but then, how would it be constructed? How would it be designed? And I became obsessed with this goal that was first uttered by, in a way, by this guy, Paul Graham, who's the, you know, leader of Y Combinator, of basically building a system with a minimum set of basic requirements, or the minimum, you know, structural like mathematical definition of. Of computers, like all computers would be running the same software, and that software would actually fit on a t shirt, okay? And everything that preceded that would be like the axioms of the system. Everything that proceeded from that would be like completely, you know, a deterministic pure function. And basically, you could define the whole computer for all time forever, as this function of its inputs turns into its output. So this was basically a fairly difficult goal. And I have these T shirts, you know, and, and, so this is a system called urbit, which, you know, yeah. So this is a system called Urban and so, basically, you know, it sort of took a while. It took like, several years, to say, Okay, what is the minimum set of equations here? What are the Maxwell's equations of software that define the t shirt and how, given that, you can define any, you know, programming environment in this, you know, you know, if you can bring up a knock spec, no, C, K,

  Unknown Speaker

  Maxwell equation is that the astrophysicist

  Curtis Yarvin

  Maxwell, yeah, so knock, yeah, you should be a specification. Should be there, yeah, wait, if you go back just urban specification, yeah, that's the definition of so I was like, All right, well, that's a little bit long. So I was like, All right, can we describe this system in literally 200 words? Like a put in a word count system, it's 200 words. This is all of software. I'm like, you know, all right, let's, let's reinvent this thing. And so I was like, All right, what's the minimum set of things you can do? And then on top of that, how do you define an actual programming language in these terms? That was another two or three years. That's also an area that I had some expertise in. Then you're like, Okay, once you have a programming language, well, here's the thing about language adoption, unless languages like, for example, C or JavaScript are adopted not because they're great languages, because but because the native language of the platform they run on. C is the native language of Unix. JavaScript is the native language of of the browser. Pull up another page, go to Twitter, look for the page of a guy named Guillermo Rauch.

  Unknown Speaker

  And search for Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo as in the Spanish name. You're

  Curtis Yarvin

  gonna have to spell that for much, G, U, I like Guillermo to a tour, yeah, exactly. G, U, I, E, Double L, yeah. E, double out. Doesn't matter. You'll fix it for it. Guillermo, yeah. Guillermo, Rauch, R, A, U, C, H. Guillermo, rock, there you go. Look for that and then look for that name and Curtis yarvin, react. Oh yeah, there you go. Click on that thread. No, just the thread, not the picture like, okay, that's hold scored up. Score up 2003 2003 Yeah, actually, well, I mean, that's 2000 I mean, it's issued, it's actually stuff that I did in the 90s. And basically, you know, there's this document online that's basically, like, here's this, like, fundamental. And Guillermo rock is the guy who, basically, he runs vercel He, I think he actually invented react, something like that. And so he's a reasonably prominent figure. And I just like, randomly posted this document that's online, which is basically like, oh yeah, I invented react, like, 10 years before anyone started using React. So if you look at Guillermo as review down there, scroll down, you know? And the special we read the one toward the bottom, reading for 2000 for 2000 This is a near perfect foreshadowing

  Peter McCormack

  of the subsequent tennis years of DOM update, updating. Hell do I mutations become very hard to reason about author and difficult, especially as project teams grow an event you don't know any What the fuck this is. All right. Scrolling

  Curtis Yarvin

  down, you'll get to the conclusion in 2005 gear, and we have said the same girl, ie, 15 years later, gear himself was saying something, yeah, the briefly, so over the and then he's like, but he missed this thing. We're later significantly back. This is the mistake that many predecessors of React made. TLDR, this paper

  Peter McCormack

  is really impressive. Civ, I say Curtis, anticipated 95% of React story by fucking so anticipated, really well articulated the pitfalls of its imperative competitors, the other 5% however, is the argument. What made react win? Yeah, you fucked up with that other 5% had the author not detoured into XML markup extensions to focus on the fact that FX would be used, whatever the fuck what's a TLD,

  Curtis Yarvin

  this paper would be an old timer. Could have been a contender. I could have been a condemned anyway. In any case, my point is that, you know, basically, I have, you know, reasonable claims to be a computer scientist. I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Yeah, right, and, so, essentially, you know, I have, like, the academic credentials. I dropped out of the right schools, I had the right job. So, you know, Brown, the brown CS program is undergraduate CS program is amazing. Like, you know, like, this is not, like, super implausible, and it's not super weird that I as a fucking weirdo would make, like, you know, $1.1 million and decide, all right, I'm going to spend that on spending the next 11 years reinventing all of computer science. So that's based or all of system software, which is my field of computer science, a lot of other, okay, we learn anything about AI. So in any case, I'm working on this urban thing. Yeah. And, you know, here is the basic problem in doing theoretical computer science, you'll be surprised that it's a problem I think many of your viewers share, you know, which is, how do you make money? And like, serious problem, right? And the thing is, okay, I'm reinventing computer science. I'm inventing a language, a programming language, okay, this is good. Okay, okay, I have to explain to my girlfriend, okay, this is how I'm gonna sell a programming language who's later my wife later the mother of my children. I'm gonna invent a program language and make money. It's insane, right? Completely insane thing. Because basically, the one thing you know about theoretical computer sciences, it doesn't fucking make money,

  Peter McCormack

  yeah, right? And open source, it really,

  Curtis Yarvin

  it's retarded, right? Imagine you're like, Oh, I'm gonna sell a programming language. You know, I think in the 80s, in the 80s, people sold programming languages like G basic, like Bill Gates, got to start selling programming languages. You know, you don't make money in computer science today, posting shit to GitHub is how you don't make money. Yeah, right. So I'm like, Okay, well, this is basically fuck because actually here your iPhone is basically a Vax. It is basically running this paradigm from 1975 it really calls for somebody to reinvent it completely from scratch. Nobody's gonna fucking do it, you know. And, you know, why the fuck not? You know, one time I was talking, was it like a random party in like, 2015 and I'm, like, talking to a guy, you know, some like, random Indian guy, cool guy, random party, right? And, like, what do you do? He's like, I'm a Google I'm like, Oh, what do you do Google? He's a product manager. Like, you know, something, something. He works on this, he works on that, Google Plus, I think he worked on Google Plus, you remember Google Plus, of course, right? You know, you've been there, right? You know, one of these wars, right? You know, and Google Plus, Google waves, buzz, wave was actually cool technology, and, you know, and wave was cool, right? And wave is really the potential, something that hasn't really been realized. And, but Buzz is restarted, right? Yeah. And, and the, and, you know, then he's like, you know, what do you do? I'm like, Well, I have the startup, you know. And he's like, you know, what is it called? I'm like, what is it? I'm like, well, it's in cold orbit. He's on. He's like, Oh, you're the urban guy. Yeah, I'm there. I'm the urban guy. And, you know, we get to talking a little bit, and he says something really remarkable to me, because, you know, at this point, our, like, total capitalization is, like, $3.1 million she's like, oh, yeah, we can never do anything that ambitious Google, like, without any sense of irony. And there was no irony in this comment at all. Like, you know, it was just like, oh, Google couldn't possibly do this, right, you know. But like, it would be even harder in academia, right, you know. And so, like, and it's for free software. Who's gonna I will pay for that, right? And so actually, you're looking really hard. You're looking really hard for an economic model. Hello and sorry. My wife just came in and the and you're looking really hard for an economic model. And you're like, how do you sell a programming language?

  Peter McCormack

  You can't. You can't because you taught it, because you want, like, widespread usage. You got open source.

  Curtis Yarvin

  No, it's actually, it's the most ridiculous possible idea, right? And so, actually, but here's the thing, is that actually the way you sell a programming language is you don't, because. Actually the way the programming language is adopted is because it is the native language of an operating system. And so actually, really you need to create an entire operating system, okay, which is even harder. How do you sell that? Okay? That's even more ridiculous, right? It's even more ridiculous. And then you're like, Wait a second. Do you know how IP addresses are allocated? No, you know, in an IP address, how many bits are in an IP address?

  Peter McCormack

  Come on. Man, I don't. Didn't do computers 32 okay, 32

  Curtis Yarvin

  that means there's 4 billion IP addresses, and they are allocated in this like they're by an organization called Arn, you know that, and they're allocated in blocks. And the principle, if you look into the question of like, you know, can you ask AI, how are a How are IP addresses allocated?

  Unknown Speaker

  Can we, can we get some AI on this

  Curtis Yarvin

  chat, GPT, this chat, GPS, how this how are AI? How are IP addresses allocated. All right, here we go.

  Peter McCormack

  Good question. Here's a breakdown IP addresses allocated in a hierarchical system.

  Curtis Yarvin

  Now, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, you know, all right, scroll down. Ask another question. You know, I have two questions. One is, what is the purpose of this design? Because it seems to me that the purpose of this design is to allocate IP addresses according to who needs them. I it. Wait for it. Excellent question you're thinking in exactly the right way. All right now, ask another question. You can type it while it does it. Con, yeah, ask another question, which is, you know, Doesn't this seem to match the economic model of Karl Marx? And you know, to each according to his need?

  Unknown Speaker

  Can say IP, allocation is communist.

  Curtis Yarvin

  You said it. I didn't. Everything ends up. Very sharp observation says, chat, GPT, everything ends up communist where it diverges. It isn't about abolishing ownership or profit entirely. All right. So, so, okay, so the lesson we learned from this is that, basically, imagine, of course, this is impossible. We are allocating IP addresses in there of a blockchain, and there's actually basically an NFT that says, Who owns an IP address. And you actually basically say, Oh, we're just going to basically fund the internet from basically selling. We're going to fund the development of the Internet by selling off all of this land in a speculative way such that, imagine the blockchain exists in like 1975 or something. You're basically going to say, obviously, every IPv four address is simply an NFT. And who are, whoever holds this NFT has that IP address and that's on chain, and that's their network address, and wow, wouldn't that be better than whatever this shit is? Yeah, and it would also, would also, it would also, it would also generate revenue. It would also be something that you could, in a sense, speculatively sell, because you could say, here is this new network that I'm creating called the Internet, which already exists at this point, I'm going to invent this network on which there are only 4 billion network addresses, and each of them is property that can be owned, bought and sold and basically traded on the market.

  Peter McCormack

  But you're gonna need a currency for that. Well, just saying,

  Curtis Yarvin

  just saying, so actually. Well, you know, you can, of course, buy or sell anything in dollars. You could have, you could have nfts and only stable coins and not have Bitcoin. This is true, not native to the internet. So, so this is, this is all true. This is all true. So basically, you know, when I realized basically that actually the way to make this whole economic structure viable, in a sense, was to say, actually, not only are you building a new, you know, meta sub language, 100 year fits on a t shirt thing, you're building a programming language that fits on top of that, and then you're building an operating system that runs on top of that. And in a way, Unix and the internet. Are kind of the same thing. And the internet is, sort of is just the network of Unix, right? And so when you're building an operating system, you're also building a network that is, of course, easily layered in an encrypted way over the internet. And so actually, if you said that network addresses on your new network, you know network, it connects things that are running the same operating system. You know, we're actually digital property in some sense, then you might be cooking with gas. And so, you know the idea that, basically, you're like, all right, you know, if you go all the way to having a system in which you know network addresses our digital property, in some sense, remember working on this in 2002 if network addresses our digital property in some sense, then not only and that property and the network pulls the operating system into existence, and the operating pulls the programming language into the existence, then you have a way to sell a programming language, right? And that is what many have sought. That is, you know, the Goldman ticket. This is a way to sell the programming language. And you're like, all right, you know, let's, let's try this. And because it's certainly a relatively unusual way to sell a programming language. And the same at the same time, actually, languages were the area that I was weakest in. I was very strong in browsers. I was very strong in operating systems, although a purely functional operating system like this is a very different kind of operating system, you know, very ready with operating systems, right? And so I'm like, All right, you know, I'm gonna, like, spend a couple of years doing this. I and then spent 11 years doing this, and my mother and my wife were like, You got to stop and raise money. And it was 2013 and so I was like, All right, and that's when I raised money, and it sort of became a thing. But I also had a final, you know, a complete you know orbit. Demo, if you pull up orbit 2013 demo, no, no, no, you are Yeah, there, yeah, that's that one. Yeah, just no voiceover, yeah, nobody can see it. We're just seeing code execute over, you know, it's a, you know, we're seeing code executed. Oh, here we go. It would totally pirated this burnino track. It's from Apollo. It's a full screen that you're in the garbage.

  Unknown Speaker

  We're an urban Virgil computer or ship.

  Peter McCormack

  The resolution kind of sucks. Yeah, it does. What's happening. Explain to people

  Curtis Yarvin

  what's happening. You've just basically entered, you know, the alternate world of Martian computing, and which shares only one thing with a software stack that we inherited from the 20th century, which is ASCII. Okay, it's clearly using ASCII. Otherwise, it might have just, you know, fallen off an alien spaceship, but it's entirely possible that the aliens invented ASCII first. They've been here for a long time, anyway. So this is me basically demoing the sort of stuff I've been working on for 11 years. It was very popular until people also learned that I also had this strange, you know, political science project, and so, you know, and then people are like, what the hell I was, you know, canceled from, you know, some functional programming conferences. It became this strange, controversial thing. The history of urban is interesting, but let's pause the history of urban a little bit and rewind, you know, some time, to my other interest, which is Austrian economics. Yes, there we go. Let's talk about Austrian economics for a second. Here we go. So, you know, I was basically as someone who had made a little bit of money in 2000 and experienced that bizarre bubble. You know, they say in Silicon Valley, there's two kinds of people who remember, 2000 people who don't, you know, at this point, we all have, you know, gray hair and stuff. I noticed that, you know, neither of us is nor a wedding, although we've chosen different directions and hair styling. Yeah, a couple years ago I had the same hair.

  Peter McCormack

  Do you think I should change to yours? Do you know what happens is, I grow it, and then he gets in and I cut it, and then I go back, I cycle

  Curtis Yarvin

  should go. You know, what would happen if I went to your hairstyle, your hair, but it's not gonna sue you. Yeah. Do you think

  Peter McCormack

  this suits me? Yeah, totally. To be honest, I prefer with the leather jacket as well.

  Curtis Yarvin

  The leather jacket is good, warm. It's early, it's early October. What I'm saying like the narrow Have you seen me in the narrow jacket? I. No, see, I have some tweed here, Yeah,

  Peter McCormack

  but see, I've seen, I've seen the professor look, and I've seen the punk rock look. And I think the what stuff you talk about, the punk rock look is better. But for certain audiences, they're gonna need the professor

  Curtis Yarvin

  certain. I'm not wearing my tweed because it was too warm. But, you know, I could, I could don the Tweed. Should I don

  Peter McCormack

  the Tweed? No, I prefer. I would like the leather jacket. I like the leather jacket here, but I can die, you know, you know what I'm talking

  Curtis Yarvin

  about, the tweed right here. We could go full tweed, but let's talk about Austrian economics and keep the costume the same because, you know, clips need to match. So, um, so essentially, remember our conversation earlier, where, you know, I sort of lost confidence in a way that the marketplace of ideas worked, yes, and losing confidence that the marketplace of ideas worked in a way meant losing confidence that it worked in all areas, and one of those areas being economics. And, you know, I sort of seemed to look at kind of modern macroeconomics, you know, actually, you know, my father in the State Department was in the economics cone. He was an economics officer and retired in the Senior Foreign Service from that and that sort of that gave me a basic interest. And then when I took a couple of college courses in the summer at Cornell when I was 14, and one of them was macroeconomics. And I'm just like, What even is this, right? And you know what it is to be, you know, first of all, to like, define what macroeconomics is as we understand it today, government economics. It is 20th century economics. Yeah, okay. And that limit. Tim poorly, no one before, like 1920 had heard of GDP. Yeah. Okay, that right there should make you ask some questions. Because, you know, first, basically, when we look at what Thomas Carlyle called the condition of England, question, do we really look at America and see that it's like economic activity has, like, the quality of technology and goods has certainly increased since 1925 but like, you know, anyone in 1925 who could just see like drone video of America's city streets would be like this nation has become a ruin, but with cool cars, right? You know, like absolutely in so many different ways, they would be viscerally appalled by the result, and to tell them we have some intellectual BS that, like, should convince them that, no, actually, we were doing better than ever, and we have the best government in history. And, like, you know, would like really not work on

  Peter McCormack

  them, but it's not like, it's not economics, it's propaganda. So, so the thing is

  Curtis Yarvin

  that essentially, what that tells you is not that you should spend a bunch of time questioning this economics, but that in, you know, in the same fashion that I sort of designed urban, I'm just like, basically, like, urban is not an evolution of Unix. Let's forget about Unix for a moment. Unix is great. It was great in its day. But let's like, let's start from scratch. And like, let's say, you know, sort of what is economics from scratch. And it was there that I found, you know, the great scholar who, really, you know, a lot of people associate the Austrian School with Hayek. Yeah. The fact is, Hayek was a student of Mises, yeah. And like, Hayek is second rate and all over the map, whereas Mises is, like a laser. You've read human action, yeah, of course, it's just, it's an amazing work. And you just like, you know, it's called literary economics by these mathematical imposters. And it's just like, you see this, and it's aprioristic, it's just like, it's just razor sharp logic, right? And you're just like, Yeah, this is the real economics and but

  Peter McCormack

  is it right? Like so, so my analysis, because I studied economics at school, we only studied Keynesian there was I didn't discover Austrian economics till I discovered Bitcoin, and then I realized it's basically two formal economics. There's free market economics, and then there's government

  Curtis Yarvin

  economics. Well, that is one way of saying it. But actually, I would say that if you think of what you call government economics as economics that's been infected in the same way that virology was infected, if you remember that metaphor, it's basically economics that's evolved to be sort of as powerful as possible, economics that justify government. So when I say free market economics, I'm not. I don't have any sort of religious belief in the free market, per se. There are many ways in which I disagree. I'm a mercantilist also, for instance, and that being an Austrian, I'm, like, completely an Austrian and completely a mercantilist. And I even see what Keynesian economics is trying to do. It's just doing it in a very silly way, yeah, and so, you know, but I would, you know, I would recommend that all Austrians read Friedrich list. You know, the great Austrian, the great, you know, sort of Neo mercantilist economics, who reinvents mercantilism in the age after Adam. Smith, I recommend list to everyone. He's an amazing writer. He's perfectly clear. There is not a single equation in the book and no equations at all. This is pure literary economics. And actually, to synthesize Mises in the list is like to form a kind of synthesis. That is, I think, the way that, you know, states should do economics basically, like the Chinese sort of understand list, but they don't understand Mises. Malay understands Mises, but he doesn't understand

  Peter McCormack

  list, which is why he just had, okay, so I don't know list. Help me understand list. A

  Curtis Yarvin

  list is the national system of political economy. So list, basically, was one of these lone geniuses. He dies in poverty later. His views become not only the basis of the late 19th century German mercantilist economic miracle, but also the Chinese and Japanese miracles in the 20th century, I was really surprised. About 10 years ago, my late wife and I went out to dinner with a Chinese couple, who both were they were like computer science grad students, but they were also party connected back home. And I started talking about trade. I had previously thought that the Chinese mercantilist miracle was kind of seat of the pants. Oh, it worked, you know? Oh, no, I mentioned Friedrich listing. He's like, you know, Friedrich list. Oh, everybody in China knows Friedrich list. And Friedrich list is basically saying, like, you have to treat the nation as a firm its balance of trade is its PNL, if it keeps losing money, something is wrong, right? And so in a way, Donald Trump, like, intuitively understands the things that Friedrich list understood when he talks about, like, balance of trade, like we're losing $300 billion to Canada a year or to Canada. And everyone was like, Donald Trump is an idiot and he doesn't understand

  Peter McCormack

  free trade. Hold on. Let me ask so you basically saying that, like the libertarian Austrians aren't baked in the reality of the state?

  Curtis Yarvin

  Exactly, yeah. And so in a way, if you understand the state as a firm, yeah, you can be both an Austrian and a mercantilist. You know, there's not a compromise between them. They're sort of two dimensions of the same thing, and the same way that, like Einstein and Newtonian physics are sort of both correct, in a way, there's a lot of Newtonian physics in libertarianism in general, and so, you know, having, you know, and this is something that I got this kind of synthesis, where I'm first, I'm such, some such a mysesian, and I start reading like Thomas Carlyle, and I'm like, This guy seems totally right, but Mises is totally right at the same time. But let's zero in a way, on the mysesian theory of money and banking, because one of the things that is really essential to the my season model of economics is that he's very against expanding the money supply. He's just like, any supply of money is adequate. You know, you have all of these justifications for inflation. And all of you know it's like, for example, the hedonic adjustments you see in GDP, you know, first of all, they kind of assume that the purpose of life is hedonism, which is kind of the point that Carlyle would make, you know, but they're also just like, you know, what you're really saying is, because technology got 3% better, I can skim off 3% on inflation, and you won't notice. Yeah, that's what they're saying. Yes, like, that's like, you know, it's like, you're just like, it's a scam. Read John Stuart Mill's the currency juggle. He understands this perfectly. You're just like, the ordinary person looks at this economics, looks at 20th century banking economics, and says, it's a scam. And what Mises understands is, Mises is trying to figure out the basis of this scam. And he identifies this in essentially maturity mismatched banking. And so he's basically like, you know, this idea that banking creates money is really based on the idea that having liabilities and assets which don't match each other is economically stable, and it's just bad accounting. Like, if you're a bank, you should balance your incoming payments with your outcoming payments. And if you want a 30 year, you know, to offer 30 year mortgages, you need people who are willing to buy 30 year CDs. Yeah, you know, that's called the flow of funds model, and it's sort of before magic, you know, 20 it's just normal accounting. It's cat. You know, banks should be subject to cash flow accounting rather than solvency accounting. I If you're familiar with the term hold to maturity, don't google that. You'll be very terrified. Yeah, I know. You know. I know. Oh, are you telling me that all American banks are insolvent? Are only held up from the Fed, of course.

  Unknown Speaker

  Like, how would they survive with the FDIC Oh,

  Curtis Yarvin

  and it's Oh, it's even worse than I mean, the thing is that, first of all, you know, now, even by the normal definition of solvency, they're insolvent. But even in the abnormal, even you know, and this is a new development, they. Are actually held up by the FDA. They're literally insolvent, and they have to come up with this category of hold to maturity. That was not usually a problem. Usually, historically, they are solvent in the sense that the net value of their assets exceeds the sum of their liabilities. But of course, if they all tried to sell the same assets at the same time, they would all disappear. Ultimately, it's kind of a SAM coin, if you remember

  Peter McCormack

  Sam bankman Fried. So would you say the FDIC was a mistake of FDR then? Or is necessary? No, it's

  Curtis Yarvin

  actually more complicated than that. So the problem is that, well before World War One, the world was on what was called the gold exchange standard. And it was already, you know, since the founding. This is kind of, you know, goes, this is a, you know, just an accounting error that goes back to the roots of English finance, and in some ways, created, because it tremendous, you know, created this tremendous capacity to borrow, this tremendous capacity and sort of covert capacity to borrow was a lot of what fueled the rise of England. It's now being basically spent on, like, you know, Draft Kings and weed, you know, and like, you know, the but the capacity to borrow is still there. This is an enormous covert borrowing machine. You know, is soft currency, once you allow in the old bank of Amsterdam system, basically gold balances had to be balanced by gold. Yeah, right. And you know it was gold. It was gold reserve standard. You know this, you know Austrian modern monetary stuff, right? It was a gold reserve standard. And moreover, if you're accounting for that generally, you might say, All right, you know, we have balances of 100% current gold, but we also have a number that says, you know, this is sometimes called the real bills doctrine. We also have a number that says, Okay, here's your balance of gold received in three months. Okay. On the other side of that balance has to be somebody who's going to deliver gold to you in three months. Yeah. So when you have a bank account currently that is actually defined in these terms, that is actually a zero term loan from you to the bank, it's maturity match that is constantly overlooked, right? So, you know, get getting aside this question of maturity mismatching, which you can sort of easily see allows the generation of spurious liabilities. Yeah, you basically are like, actually, no, any supply of money is, is adequate, and you end up with an interesting, and this is something I developed over time since then, the best measure of inflation is not this ridiculous, doctored CPI number. It is personal net worth. It is a statistic also collected by the Fed. It is simply assume that people don't care whether they have stocks or bonds or houses or whatever. They're just like, How much money do I have affects how much can I can I afford to buy? Yeah, personal net worth as a number is going up like this. Okay, that represents an increase in the balance sheet. Equity is a liability. Every time the stock market goes up, Americans get richer, and basically that's more ready. Some of some Americans get rich, no and fun, some Americans get richer. It's very unevenly distributed through nice socialist point. I appreciate the social

  Unknown Speaker

  Oh no, not being a socialist, I'd be the realist.

  Curtis Yarvin

  I know, I know. I just wanted to, like, stand under the table with that. But, you know, nice socialist point. But actually, the point is that this is stealth inflation. Yeah, that the right measure of inflation is, how much are people's portfolios, including dollars increasing. This is an increase in purchasing power inflation, as Milton Friedman has said, is always an everywhere monetary phenomenon. Yeah, right. So that's an interesting question, and that basically says, you know, there's a and this is where things start to get interesting. Do you know the term flickt is sac verte No, it's a magician term. It means flight to real value. Okay, yeah. And so when you had the great inflation of 1921

  Peter McCormack

  it's why everyone's buying gold and Bitcoin right now, people would buy,

  Curtis Yarvin

  yes, but we're gonna get into that in a little bit more detail. Okay, and in the flicktin Die sakverta, people would buy, like, furniture because they know that they're knew that their marks would be worthless tomorrow, because the supply of marks was rapidly increasing. Yeah. To me, fiat currency is government equity, yeah. And when we see, moreover, the government equity is m zero, but like, the value of all stocks in real estate is, like, if there was a term for this, it should be like, m8 Yeah, but it's actually z1 which is personal net worth, yeah, right. And when you see expanding personal net worth, you're like, wow, our houses are getting better and better. And while these blinds are like, nicer and nicer and like, oh my god, you know, I had termites, but the wood just healed itself. No, that's not the way houses actually work. And when you be. See price going up and the thing staying the same. You are seeing a monetary phenomenon, yeah, and you're seeing basically fundamental problems in calculation, which basically cause people to have various kinds of misincentives that, you know, it's causes all this malinvestment and basically causes us to, you know, suck and be China's bitch, right? So, okay, so you, if you basically are, like, you know, the expansion, and here's the thing about the expansion of the money supply is it makes $1 just a normal dollar, an M $0 something that is not a good way to store value, yeah, right. And that

  Peter McCormack

  leads you off the gold standard well.

  Curtis Yarvin

  So the thing is, basically, again, going back to the gold standard, the English were always on a gold exchange standard. And so they were like, basically, like, yeah, we can hold about, you know, a third of our assets in gold or a fourth, they would kind of wing it, and they would bullshit crisis. And eventually, World War One just calls all their blood and forces them off the gold standard and entirely, then they try to go back on the gold standard at the wrong exchange rate. This causes, you know, another financial crisis. The whole thing is, I've been a mess ever since. But you know, if you want to look at the true 19th century perspective on the gold standard, can you bring up an essay by John Stuart Mill? Bring it up in an old edition too, please, like you brought up the last thing called the currency juggle, by John Stuart Mill.

  Peter McCormack

  but let me ask so do you think the gold standard is was a good thing and they should have maintained, yes, but

  Curtis Yarvin

  the problem is that they deviate. They the gold exchange standard deviated so far from the gold standard that the only way to basically restore that balance was massive liquidation, and it was too much for the market to bear. They failed. They liquidated everything in the early 20s. But that's to come back the currency, juggle. The currency juggle. And it's an essay by John Stuart Mill.

  Peter McCormack

  Just help me out with my contradiction. There you go. Just help me with my contradiction quickly. Yeah.

  Curtis Yarvin

  So, so we talked Fine, fine, under a real original tech so we

  Peter McCormack

  talked about FDR, we talked about him essentially being a CEO, and we talked about him, yeah, if Congress doesn't give permission, we'll do the fuck anyway. But he also took CEOs off the gold standard because of

  Curtis Yarvin

  deflation. But the thing is that the gold standard of the time was a gold exchange standard, which was actually already deeply mixed with paper gold, right? And so you had the choice to basically do a site on site, colon, archive.org then you'll get an original looking thing. Site, colon, currency juggle. Anyway, you know, find that on archive.org We'll, we'll keep talking. So, anyway, yeah. So essentially, you know, things were all and you're starting to see this pattern, things were already hosed in the 17th century, right? And if you remember 400 years, yeah. And if you're basically like, things are hosed, wow. That is hard to believe. You're like, I thought we were on the road to utopia. I thought we were building socialism. You're telling me things are hosed. I'm hearing that for the first time, right? Things are hosed is a hard pill to swallow, and then once you've taken that pill, you need to swallow the next pill, which is still more brutal, which is things have been hosed since the 17th century, and that is true of the monetary system, that is true of various political and legal ideas. Just assume the worst case scenario about any field or any system of ideas is things have been hosed since the 17th century. And you know, you know, there's this famous fortune. Four chan tweet, which is, that's a four chan post, which is only one line. It is like one of the greatest lines ever uttered on four Chan and it just says, If only you knew how bad things really are. So if only you knew how bad things really are. I'm like, Yeah, stuff has been hosed since the 17th century.

  Peter McCormack

  That's the conversation I'm having with more my normal friends now, yeah, and so,

  Unknown Speaker

  oh, great. They have it on Marxist Internet Archive as well.

  Curtis Yarvin

  A wonderful site, very useful site, you know. And he's basically like, you know, the this is just the currency juggle is, yeah, porn, UA, dot x. Let's avoid that anyway. It's like, you know, you can find, you can find without going to archive.org and seeing 1830s page images, which the only way to read old books is read them with old page images. You're there. You need the time machine. Read the whole book. Do not read excerpts like you have to be. Remember that Sidney Fisher thing, where I was just, yeah, I went into the past, and I was just like, this is a different reality. I have to give these people their justice, you know? And it creates this amazing book, and which totally changed my mind about American history, basically, like, you know, 110 years after it was written, you know, and, like, a lot of great history in the early 20th century, actually, and, you know, so in any case, you're basically like, all right. Things have been hosed since the early 20th century. Number one, number two, basically, Mises rule is that, you know, any supply of money is adequate. Furthermore, if you look at the origins of, basically the idea of Austrian ideas of money, you're looking not at Mises, but at Carl Menger. If you could pull up Carl Menger on the origin of money, and he's, like, basically, like most people, Carl Menger with a C, you'll find it on, you know, it's fine. It'll work. And Mises Institute has a, you know, yeah, exactly, really excellent work. And he's basically skip the forward. Do not read modern Fords. Get that out of here.

  Unknown Speaker

  And he's just like,

  Curtis Yarvin

  you know, but that every economic unit in a nation should be ready to exchange his goods for little metal discs, apparently useless as such, or for document it's representing. The latter is a procedure so opposed to the ordinary course of things that we cannot well. Wonder if a distinguished thinker like Savigny, he was actually German, I believe, founds it downright mysterious. He's basically like, you know, okay, people look at Gold and think it's like worth something because it's gold, it's actually almost worthless. And all the other monetary metals that you know are noble metals, like gold, are worthless. Why does gold alone enjoy this premium? And the question he's asking there, you know, in not quite such terms, is like, why Bitcoin and not bitcoin cash?

  Unknown Speaker

  Because it's the least worthless. No, yeah,

  Curtis Yarvin

  well, we'll get to that actually. Like, I think there's a more interesting answer to that. Okay, the answer to why Bitcoin and not bitcoin cash is the same, and this answer is very complicated in the classical world, because the classical world has this weird bimetallic standard of gold and silver, and this bimetallic standard of gold and silver simply results from a patchwork of world nations, some of which have standardized on gold and some of which is standardized on silver. Asia basically runs on silver and the West basically runs on gold, which creates very interesting exchange structures that might or might not remind us of Bitcoin versus Ethereum.

  Peter McCormack

  Okay, so is it just like, is it just like network theory? Then wait, oh,

  Curtis Yarvin

  there's a deeper, there's a deeper rabbit hole. Okay, let us go deeper. Let us go deeper into the rabbit hole. Okay, okay, we are going deeper in the rabbit hole. And so I'm basically sort of investigating the question. And if you read so Menger through Mises develops something he calls the regression theorem. And the regression theorem is kind of interesting, because, of course, it's not a theorem, it's not mathematical. It's like a logical theorem. And when you know one observes the regression theorem. You know, one looks at the regression theorem and says, actually, ironically, Mises brother Richard von Mises was a, you know, very successful statistician. So it's not like mathematical talent did not run in that family. Furthermore, Mises himself was a serious, practical dude who ran the you know, economy of. He was Alan Greenspan of Austria for a couple years. So, like, you know, not an ivory tower, you know, theorist. He was a badass Jew, but very short King, right, you know. And you know, interestingly enough, his stepdaughter was also the great journalist Gita sereni, and the who wrote a great biography of Albert Speer. But getting back to Mises comes up with this regression theorem. And you look at the regression theorem through modernize, and you're like, Well, this is kind of game theory. You're kind of doing game theory, but game theory hasn't been invented yet, but you're kind of doing game theory. And so, in a way, essentially the game theory, because, you know, the magician theory of currency, choice is a is a spontaneous order. And the question Menger is asking earlier is like, why is this? These worthless discs of metal, overvalued, these are significantly complicated by the fact that gold, unlike Bitcoin, has inherent net worth. Bitcoin has no inherent net worth. Gold has inherent net worth, right? And but of course, the valuation of gold and the stocks of gold and the way that gold is traded bear no resemblance at all and have nothing to do with its inherent worth. Yeah, right. You know just sort of happens to coincide and silver has even more industrial uses. You probably have gold tipped, you know, audio cables, right? Unfortunately, that takes a very small amount of gold to gold investors. But gold is actually doing pretty well these days, I think. And it's one of these inflation assets. You're looking at the flute on the sack verta, you know, the flight to real value, right? You know, that's why the stock market keeps going up. It's not actually a sign of good health. It's a sign that actually things are host, sorry to admit that, right, but it's really true. Any my season will tell you that you're just increasing your liabilities. Are you increasing your tangible capital? No, you're spending your liabilities on wheat and DraftKings done, right? You know, and like you are cooked, right, you know. And you know, hey, you know, sorry to be blunt, right? I don't make the rules, no, right, you know. And so you're looking at, basically, you know, economics and even finance has become this kind of fallacious profession, in a way that accepts these strange assumptions and these strange rules, like, something is really wrong here, right? And it's something that actually the smartest people on Wall Street don't seem to entirely get, like, how wrong this is, you know, because they think everything is getting better and better and better, and it's just the fluid and de sac verte or, you know, it's just inflation economics, or is it just cope? There's cope, but there's also the flight to real value. And actually, you know, they say on Wall Street that pessimists, you know, look good, and optimists, you know, make money. And I've always been a pessimist, you know, and so in any case, working forward into this question of the origin of money, you know, I came up with basically, an unusual conclusion. And my conclusion that was that the origin of money could actually be related to financial markets today, and the Hungarian theory of the origin of money, and even the mysesian Theory of Money, relies a lot on something Mises calls the double coincidence of wants, because basically, The good becomes more desirable as a medium of exchange, if you know, both parties have it. And I'm like, you know, all right, that's interesting. But actually, the way that a medium of exchange creates demand for a good, you know, is sort of fundamentally frictional. If you imagine you're in a virtual world where anybody can trade anybody anything to, anything to instantly. You know, the double coincidence of wants vanished. But do you maybe still have a source of, you know, monetization energy. You know, could the monetization process happen at all without the double coincidence of wants. Let's assume the double coincidence of wants goes away, all right, and let's think about the monetization process in this imaginary virtual world where you can trade everything for anything else, then you get a different incentive that comes into play, rather than the double coincidence of wants. You basically say, if I'm comparing asset a for asset B as a store of value. How do I expect the exchange rate between A and B to evolve over time? Let me give you an example of this, you know. And this is an example that I used in some very early blog posts, actually. But we'll get to that is, you know, let's say you're in a society with no money, and so you sort of feel this pressure to invent money. You're a fisherman in Iceland. Your name is Sven, and your idea is you're going to go out in fishing season, which is September, and catch a bunch of fish, and you're basically just going to keep the fish. You. And what schven finds being kind of dumb is that fish don't keep. They don't keep and so therefore, you know your goal is not to eat the fish. Those fish are a store of value. You are going to exchange them for other goods later. They are a store of value. Do you remember a day so early in Bitcoin world where people kind of measured Bitcoin success by transaction volume, yeah, of course. And then they realized that was kind of wrong, yeah, I have a story about that. So in any case, you know, you have a you have a store of value. And you know, schven has no choice but to choose a store of value, because, you know, he consumes many things other than salmon. He has a need to store value from the present into the future. His question, therefore, at a very abstract, mycesian economic level, is, what should I use to store value? And fish is no good. Fish is no good. Okay, so his second idea is, all right, I'm going to store something that keeps I'm going to store axes, okay? And so at this point, we are looking at a question of what is called the Nash equilibrium, a concept which considerably postdates, you know, Mises. And we are looking and, you know, all right, if Sven wants to store money in axis, store value in axes. That's good. That's fine, that's okay. And, you know, access, hold their value. And access an ax, you know, an ax and a 2025 ax and a 2028 AX, as long as it's not rusting or something, keep it under good conditions, really holds its value, you know, can you say the dollar? I don't know, right? You know. And so Sven is like, let me store money in axis. And, you know, unbeknownst to him, you know, Eric and Heinz and Hans and all these other people, you know, he's basically testing out a Nash equilibrium. Everyone else makes the same choice. They're going to store money in axis. Here's what happens. There's a certain amount of elasticity in the production of axes. And so because there's a certain amount of elasticity in the production of axes, they don't disappear from the stores. Oh no, we have an efficient supply and demand market. The ax price skyrockets. Yeah. Axes go to the moon. They moon. And basically, Sven is like, holy cow, this was the best way to store value ever, because I bought these axes for 17, you know, marks 17 fish. And now, you know, I can sell my axes for 827 fish, you know, I win. Yo, yay me. Schven, right, you know. And so the AX price skyrockets. But sadly, the success is illusory, because when the AX rights skyrockets, the capital markets spring into action, and they're like we are hearing the Hayekian signal from the AX market. People love axes. People are using axes more than ever before. Schven needs 20 axes. I don't know why he needs 20 axes. Does he have 20 hands, 20 children? Has he, you know, imported, you know, 20 immigrants to do his work with axes. We don't know. All we know is, everyone loves axes. Everyone needs axes. Everyone is talking about axes. Let's get into the AX market. Let's invest in axes. There's an ax bubble, which becomes an ax craze. There's an ax mania. There's AX throwing. You might remember the AX throwing phrase, right? Everyone is super into axes. There's nothing, you know. What does Schwinn want to do? He wants to show off his axes. He doesn't want to just keep them there. He wants to take them to the AX throwing event. You know, they're beautiful axes, right? And, you know, they things keep going up and up and up until it's just like, wow, you know, there's a lot of axes on the market, and the AX dealers start to cut their price. And schven, if he's a smart Sven, is like, now it's the time to dump. And he dumps, and he gets out of the AX market and makes a profit. But what must go up come you know, must come down. And the result is that, you know, Finland is left with this enormous glut of axes. There are all these, you know, it's what Mises calls malinvestment.

  Peter McCormack

  It's almost like you're saying that we need a version of axes that cannot be produced in the market.

  Curtis Yarvin

  You might be saying that. You might be saying, Wow, any supply of money is adequate. And so if we basically look for something, we need a form of money that you cannot produce. Gold is pretty good, right? Gold is hardest to make, but it is actually possible to make in mine. And actually, gold mining has caused serious economic distortion. Spain has never recovered from its conquest through the New World. Go to Spain. Have you been to Spain? I've been spending many times, never recovered from its conquest of the new world. It has never recovered from this artificial expansion of its currency, because that created a world in which basically Spanish, you know, that created essentially Dutch disease. That created a world where Spain's, you know, had this enormous purchasing power. Power that is enjoyed by America today as a result imports, you know, out competed domestic manufacturer, and the whole structure of society collapsed.

  Peter McCormack

  But what you're saying is, right, Bitcoin is the first money that cannot be artificially created.

  Curtis Yarvin

  That's yeah, and so in any scenario, what you're saying, what you're saying is that when you basically have a fixed supply of money, as Mises says, actually two things. Number one, Mises imagines, when Mises pictures in Mises and Menger picture the origin of money, it's necessarily in very primitive conditions, yeah. And so they have this primitive idea of the double coincidence of wants. But as we see, actually maybe the same processes, you know, as Lyell, the geologist, said, you know, fuck these floods, right? Maybe the same processes that have operated in the past are operating in the present. And actually the incentive to choose a over b, as a as an as an asset of storage, in storing value. Don't think of this in terms of the thinking of a, you know, primitive Icelandic farmer. Think of it in terms of a hedge fund, right? And so actually, these processes of the origin of money are, or can be, or in a way, even should be, operating today in under basically present financial circumstances. And you're like, Whoa, okay, that's a disturbing realization, you know? So I started thinking about this really, very seriously around 2004 Okay, so, you know, how does this question you have this very interesting question of the origin of money. Fundamentally, the origin of money arises from a, basically, you know, if you have a perfect money, there's no need for any other money. If you have Bitcoin, there's no need for bitcoin cash, yeah, sorry, bitcoin cash, yeah, you know. But that's just how it be, right? You know. And, and, you know, this is what we call in computer science a standard. It's a very important, it's a path dependent, contingent outcome, right? Ethereum versus cereum Classic, sorry, Ethereum classic, actually, Vitalik proves that might makes right, you know. And, and, like, that's how it be right. And, and so, actually, the understanding of the sort of that is the same as the question of, like, Why gold and not platinum? Why is platinum priced as an industrial metal, rhodium, all these things with the qualities of gold is a platinum ring. Why is platinum priced as an industrial metal? Why does it stock structure look like, you know, an industrial metal. Gold is an industrial metal, but it is also a monetary metal. The interesting question is, basically Mises tells you straight out in his regression theorem, it can't start from zero. You see an inflation in the price and the stocks of whatever good is chosen by the free market as a money, but it can't start from zero. It has to start from people you know, can't be a worthless asset. Yeah, and I'm basically like, maybe it can be a worthless asset. Because maybe, basically, if people understand the theory, they will see that the theory predicts that a worthless asset, you know, can, in fact, become worth trillions of dollars as a result of, essentially, the RE standardization of money collective agreement, the restandartization of money is not going to happen and cannot, in any sense, happen in a in like if you have a perfect money out there's no there's no motor, the money is already perfect. Anything that anyone invests in, you know, even if it's like, it's just a bubble, it's a bubble that's going to pop, you know, whereas, basically, what my season Hungarian monetary theory is, says is, there's always at least one bubble that's not going to pop. It has to actually run to completion and become the new standard. And you have to get to a world where Nvidia is priced in Bitcoin and like that is basically full re monetization. That is something that is actually nowhere near happened yet, which you know for Bitcoin maximalist should be like, yeah, there's Actually at least another 10 to 20x to go. You but it's coming possibly. Possibly. And the thing is, actually, in a way, I had this long, I had a long time disagreement with Balaji, Srinivasan about that, and Balaji actually turned out to be right. Balaji is like, it's past. I'm like, the government could shut it down at any time. And I posted about this in like, 2013 I was like, the government could shut it down. Not 2013 even earlier than

  Peter McCormack

  that, yeah, but they had a chance. Then they had a chance. Yeah, they had a

  Curtis Yarvin

  child. No, they don't. They have no chance now. They don't, now they don't. Now they don't. Now they need it. And this is why I feel comfortable having this conversation, yeah, and actually, this is why I feel now, you know. And so essentially, you know, if you go back to urban, right, suddenly, you know, here's this question of, like, urban has like IPv four has a limited supply of addresses. These addresses develop value from activity on the network, but booting up a network is a very slow and difficult process. Et cetera, et cetera. The network effect is very difficult. We've made some progress. We're doing all right, but it's a slow and difficult problem. I recently came back to urban after actually five years of being away and, you know, enormous wars ensued and the but we've actually settled down into a beautiful piece. We're very happy. We're very happy. And I'm very happy, as the CEO of my new company, urban Tiger, which is actually also the name of the strip club in Birmingham, my birming or Birmingham, USA? No, you're Birmingham, yeah, you know. But you know, like, we'll go one day, we'll go one day, we'll go one day. Well, we have a better logo, but, you know, in any case, so you basically, as a combination of, sort of both studying Austrian economic theory and thinking seriously about the structure of a network, and in particular the economic structure of a network like you have network addresses, which basically, you know should have, there should be a market for them, and it shouldn't be a centralized system. It should be a decentralized system, right? And so it's actually fairly easy to anyone who knows anything about cryptography to say that, okay, you're going to treat network addresses in orbit as digital real estate. And you're basically going to say every address has a list of transactions associated with it, which is signed with a key, right? And then you're going to restrict that number of addresses to 32 bits. And then you're going to actually map those 32 bits into rather than having a naming system like the DNS, you turn the 32 bits into a base 256 alphabetic system, such as my name, sargnampac, right? That's my orbit name, and that's a 32 bit

  Peter McCormack

  number. So basically, you created scarcity, you created money, you created scarcity,

  Curtis Yarvin

  and you're just like, all right, actually, we have this structure that involves scarcity. So the scarcity needs some intrinsic value that I'm going to like create by making this operating system real. Had the operating system real become real. By 2013 it becomes somewhat real. But this was like 2005 right? So it was actually nowhere near real. And I was just like, actually, you know, you can create a virtual currency with a limited supply, no mining or anything in which, basically the currency is owned anonymously by cryptographic keys, and you have a registry which basically just registers cryptographic transactions. Essentially, I didn't invent Bitcoin. I invented Solana.

  Peter McCormack

  You get richer off that, yeah, what? You get richer off that?

  Curtis Yarvin

  Well, if I had actually invented Solana, but, you know, the, you know, arguably, yes, but you know, we'll see the fat lady has not yet Sung, but the, in any case, basically, I'm like, you know, what, if you actually, you know, defined a system like this, and which was just a cryptographic registry, forgetting the urban network address space. If you just abstracted this and you said, hey, there is a cryptographic registry of who owns what of a fixed thing. I even designed something that I was like, All right, this could basically deflate, essentially infinitely, until it's the monetary standard. I even designed something that really should have been used, which was by Bitcoin, which was a notation for deflating currency. So I'm like, you know, I will pay you know, to be, you know, 27 which is two times the 27th you know, bits, right? So, basically, essentially, I was just, like, actually, you could, like, I remember, like, being in a store in like 2005 and being like, you know, wow. Like, you know, if this existed, like, you know, in like 10 years, you could, you could buy a camel in Mauritania for bits, right? And. And and she was so close. So in a way, the thing I didn't invent was the blockchain. No, the thing I didn't invent was the blockchain. And so actually I came very close to, I basically, you know, Bitcoin is two interrelated, beautifully interrelated inventions, absolutely beautifully interrelated inventions. One is proof of work, the blockchain decentralized consensus. There's a lot of ways to do decentralized consensus. The blockchain is a particularly beautiful economic way to do that. The problem was well known in computer science has been as Byzantine agreement. A lot of Byzantine agreement solutions, or you could just fake it like nevermind, but the you can just fake it like nevermind, right? And so essentially, you know, I basically, I'm actually, really glad I didn't do this, because I was basically like, I was just like, you know, actually like, I could just launch what was essentially a centralized version of Bitcoin, having the other idea of Bitcoin, which is the idea that a worthless currency can go to infinity, that's the best bet. And that is, you know, I'm part. That is my part. So I'm partial to it. And I will furthermore tell you my theory. I'm not Satoshi, okay. I'm not really, really, not Satoshi. I had the motive, the opportunity and the propensity, but I'm not Satoshi. Okay. So sorry about that, but, um, you know, nonetheless, I was basically, actually came close to basically launching this deformed, crippled version of Bitcoin in 2005 and I chose not to do that. Instead, what I decided to do was file a document with the US Patent Office, which was a provisional patent explanation, you know, application, basically setting out the sort of the monetary theory of Bitcoin, and basically setting out this design for Solana and I, and you're the first to hear it. So you know, the thing is, it's sort of been interesting watching part of my theory, and you can find a post for me from that era talking about gold, because gold is, of course, another candidate for monetary standardization. None of this theory predicts the future. It doesn't predict that any of these things will succeed or fail, right? So basically, like, you know, this theory doesn't predict the future. But, you know, I spoke about this, you know, pretty clearly on my blog, you know, in 2000 2007 and 2008 and my current theory of the origins of Bitcoin is, regrettably, the common theory of Bitcoin, which is that somehow Nick Zabo was involved, because he backed edited some posts on his blog. I was already convinced that Nick Zabo was involved before I had lunch with him in 2015 and then I was like, wow, this guy really talks about the blockchain like something he invented, even though he drove up in a 1990s car. And I'm still more convinced that it was Nick Szabo, because I was writing about this monetary theory when Nick Szabo was on my blog. Role, interesting. So that is my theory of basically the origins and meaning of Bitcoin. It's interesting that people don't really. People dimly glimpse this theory in a way. They're starting to understand that this is actually a very simple game theory which is very clearly described in this document, which I'm like, All right, after 20 years, I'm going to release this. I ordered it from the patent office, and then they shut down the government. So of course, it's of no like patent validity whatsoever. It's purely a historical document, but I still, I still think it's a much clearer explanation of the value and meaning of Bitcoin, then you will find even among most Bitcoin maximalists, and it will be interesting to release it like the patent we saw earlier,

  Peter McCormack

  Curtis. I only got to like page two of my notes, and I prepared a lot.

  Curtis Yarvin

  All right, sorry, I know I hijacked you. I You for this pitch, really. This is our longest interview ever. You can you split it? Can you split it?

  Unknown Speaker

  We might have to. We might have

  Curtis Yarvin

  that's why economics is separate. But you're, you're fading. You have to close.

  Peter McCormack

  No, we've, the cameras are fading, but we should, we should do this again. I've got so many more questions. I loved it. Curtis. Have you ever done a four hour interview before?

  Curtis Yarvin

  Sure, sure. I've never discussed this origin of Bitcoin stuff before. You know, I was actually, honestly, basically, I was really worried that basically implicating me as like, at least the partial inventor of Bitcoin, would have serious adverse effects on Bitcoin. I worried about that for a long time, and then I was like, All right, I think Bitcoin can take it, you know, right?

  Peter McCormack

  We're gonna do this again, maybe in London, maybe here, maybe on the west coast. But Curtis, thank you, man. Fucking hell, this is amazing. Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. Was it premium content? It's unreal. Content, amazing, hopefully. JD, will watch it, and then I can get

  Curtis Yarvin

  him on. There you go. Thank you, everyone listening. JD, thank you so much, Peter, this was super fun. Thank you, Curtis, you.