Curtis Yarvin
speaker
700 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 14 Jan
Curtis Yarvin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And so when I basically look at systems run by CEOs, I'm just like, basically, I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad, but the overall quality, you know, just pick one at random and... And put him or her in charge of Washington. And I think you'd get something much, much better than what's there. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk.
The like median performance is so much better. But you asked something that I think is a more important and more interesting question, which is. You know, you're like, OK, America needs a CEO who will be economically efficient. The CEO who will be economically efficient will think of human beings as pure economic units and will do things like.
Perfect, perfect question. The thing is, normally we think of the goal of a company as making a profit or just selling more stuff, but that's not actually really the goal of a company. The real goal of a company is to maximize the worth of its assets to make the stock price go up.
basically like one of the ways to kind of unify the worldview of, say, Charles I and Elon Musk is to realize that when Charles I is thinking about his people, he is both thinking of them as economic assets and as human assets. He basically wants to see his country thrive and
And in order to see his country thrive, he wants people to be, of course, he wants them to be producing as much wool or whatever England exports as possible. But the sense of him being kind of the pater patriae, kind of the father of the country, and sort of feeling about...
the people in his society, not exactly the way a parent should feel about his children, but sort of like the way a parent should feel about his children, that sense of like having a reciprocal obligation. So my goal as a CEO is not to rake in the bucks, but to make my operation flourish.
I think that Trump, you know, the funny thing is I talked about FDR earlier in the earlier in our conversation. And I think actually, you know, a lot of people might in different directions might not appreciate this comparison. But I think that in a lot of ways, Trump is very reminiscent of FDR.
Because what FDR had was this tremendous charisma and self-confidence combined with a tremendous sort of ability to be the center of the room, be the leader, cut through the BS, and make things happen. I think one of the main differences between Trump and FDR that has really held Trump back is, of course, that FDR is from one of America's first families. He's a hereditary aristocrat.
And Trump is not really from America's social upper class. And I think the fact that Trump is not really from America's social upper class has hurt him a lot in terms of his confidence. I think it's hurt him in his ability to delegate to and trust people who are not part of his family. I think that that sort of limited him as a leader in various ways.
And one of the encouraging things that I do see is I do see him executing with somewhat more confidence this time around. It's almost like he actually feels like he knows what he's doing. That's, I think, something that's very helpful because, you know, insecurity and fragility is just, you know, it's his Achilles heel.
What's my Achilles heel? I think I also have self-confidence issues. I sort of rarely, I won't bet fully on my own convictions often.
That's a good question. I think that if you look at especially my older work, I think I had this kind of joint consciousness that, okay, I feel like I'm onto something here. But I also like the idea that people would be in 2025 taking this stuff as seriously as as they are now when I was writing in 2007, 2008. I mean, I was completely serious. I am completely serious.
But it sort of led to like, you know, I think a certain level of like, you know, it's like when you hit me with the most outrageous quotes that you could find from my writing in 2008 or whatever, I'm basically like, yeah, the sentiments behind that I can explain and articulate and they were serious sentiments and they're serious now. Would I have expressed it that way? Would I have trolled?
I'm always trying to get less trollish. Like, you know, over time, you'll see that I've definitely gotten less trolly. On the other hand, you know, if you read my recent blog posts, I can't really resist trolling Elon Musk, which might be part of the reason why I've never met Elon Musk.
No, it definitely hasn't gotten, it hasn't gone far. I mean, no, I mean the, the, the trolling, like what I realized when I look back is that actually.
The instinct to revise things from the bottom up is very much not a trollish instinct. It's a serious and important thing that I think the world needs now.
Well, you know, I can lead a horse to water, of course. I think that as the sort of walls fall away and you start to explore ideas that are sort of outside the very narrow bubble of the present that we live in, because there's no...
I think it's impossible to deny that the variety of ideas in the space which intelligent, thoughtful people like you sort of consider has grown sharply narrower in the 20th century. And if there's really one thing that I kind of want to do the most, say, with this conversation, is to kind of make people feel like they can basically step outside of the very small box that they grew up in.
And they can say, not everything outside that box is perfect. Many things outside that box are absolutely horrible. I'm not asking anyone to become a Nazi or an anti-Semite or even a misogynist, whatever that means. I'm asking them to sort of acknowledge that there are cases in which our judgment of the past is completely right.
And yet there are also ways in which the whole past would very unanimously point to things that we're doing and say, that's crazy, I can't believe you're doing that.
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