Ed is such a unique guest. He's not trying to add in jokes or outrage, it's like he's just there to learn and ask questions because he's genuinely interested in learning more from Robert.
I found his curiosity really refreshing compared to some other guests who've been on in the past. He's engaged and interested in learning as much as we in the audience are.
I was fully ready to dislike Ed Helms on BTB...weirdly, as I like many of his roles, but I wholeheartedly agree he is a fantastic guest that's wholly engaged and knowledgable on many things tangentially related to the topic.
That's what all guests are brought it in to do, on this podcast - be curious. It's a podcast style wherein the guest represents the audience who are also listening to learn. Occasionally Robert brings in a guest who knows more about the subject than he does and lets them host, while he takes the audience role. Knowledge Fight is another podcast with the style but the "guest" role is the other regular host. Dan and Jordan from Knowledge fight come on BTB every now and then and, since they all worked together at the OG Cracked, those episodes are hysterical.
Ed was such a fantastic guest. I really loved how he wasn't shy about asking for clarifications. That definitely helped underline a few of the really important points.
The way he does it is excellent too, like he kinda respectfully calls Robert on his shit. Robert, thorough a researcher as he is, I find sometimes gets a bit loose with the speculating, and I like the way Ed’s questions are framed with a subtext of “this isn’t intended to be smarmy, I genuinely don’t know myself, but I feel it’s important we nail this down correctly.”
@@Joe-sg9ll Technically speaking these names we know them by are honorific titles. The zǐ part means "master" or "sage", so "Master Mèng" etc (you may also have heard of Lǎozǐ "the Old Master", the probably apocryphal author of the Dào Dé Jīng). His birth name is actually Mèng Kē, and similarly Confucius (Grandmaster Kǒng) was born Kǒng Qiū.
@@Joe-sg9ll "Zi" means teacher. Meng is surname--so Mengzi means Teacher Meng. Same with Kongzi. Chinese use last name first--so Confucius birth name was Kong Qiu, Qiu being his first name. As is in English, last name with honoree title (Professor Smith).
Soon as I saw that Yarvin looked like “We have Kylo Ren at home” it all made more sense. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s real easy to tell a comic book from a textbook.
This is the worst timeline. I remember reading the nutcase rants of moldbug from online tech forums 15 or so years ago and being glad he was a fringe weirdo. And now, thanks to a few rich weirdos & Trump, his ideas are a hairs whisker from being implemented. Stupidest timeline ever.
It goes beyond that, Curtis Yarvin is anti Enlightenment and Renaissance values. He believes in the divine right of kings - we would go back to the dark ages if he gets his way.
Most libertarians I meet want drugs or guns or whatever they don't want to be ruled by a monarch who can kill 100,000 people and then claim God said to do it, and get away with it. This is what used to happen 500 years ago we just forget. I hope I am not too obtuse with my comment, have a nice day
They're only just 'pivoting to video' as they say, they get hundreds of thousands on Spotify etc but they'll probably skyrocket once this hits enough people's feeds
Ed Helms is the only celebrity I've ever encountered out in the wild, and he was chill. I was like 13 years old, camping out at a bluegrass festival in Telluride, Colorado and he had (I guess) just finished hiking with his partner. I had filled up a canteen and I was walking back to camp with it when I walked past him on a footbridge and he pointed out to me that it was leaking. I was just kinda starstruck from having seen him in The Hangover and didn't verbally mention that I recognized him but I think he could tell lol. It was a pleasant interaction.
I once met Doug Stanhope when I worked at a hotel. He had just gotten back from partying at a sex club after his show. He brought back a woman with a shaved head, covered in tattoos and black leather. He had just gotten to the room and already looked like he was deep into a days-long hangover. He and I both went outside to smoke. Never said a word to each other. Just a mutual nod as he headed up to the room for the night. Long story short: It's cool meeting someone famous and they really are everything you hope they are, haha
I'm always surprised that people judge celebrities positively for just not spitting on them when they meet in public. One of my neighbors worked for a company that provided temporary nannies for rich celebrity clients (it paid more than working as a kindergarten teacher and she had $60k in student loans getting her master's degree in education she was trying to pay off) and her treatment in that position by these twats was BRUTAL. Even tho she was making 6 figures, the second she paid off her student loans she was gone.
In my personal experience as someone who graduated in 2018 bullying is less physical now, but most of it is either cyberbullying or trying to socially isolate people for being "weird"
Reminds me of how the filmmakers decided to revamp Peter Parker's bully Flash Thompson in _Homecoming_ versus the jock he was in prior depictions. They said Flash Thompson the jock just wouldn't really exist in a 2010s high school. Almost makes me nostalgic for being stuffed into lockers...
yeah, bullying in school for me was a lot more social ostracization, it was basically never physical. the tactics used were to make me seem like an other, to isolate me from the others and kinda sideline me into my own particular niche, which in turn got the group bullied in that sense (i always remember me and a friend being called lesbians as we walked the mile, partly because it shows how anything gay was seen as an insult, and partly bcus now im a gay trans man lol). i cant say how much my own experience matches others, particularly because im autistic and wasnt diagnosed until i was basically already out, so i know a lot of my treatment was based on my autistic traits, i was identified as an odd one out and without an identity that made the bullying more obvious. either way my interests and behaviors aligned with the friends i was able to make, but looking back, its likely those i clicked with were also neurodivergent in some way at the least, from my own experiences and from what ive heard from those in my age range, bullying was largely verbal and included a lot more targeted othering
The kids are NOT alright. My bestie from high school (class of 02) just found out her 19 year old daughter was having sex with her stepbrother since they were both 13 and then went on to use sex to get stuff bc the family has been so desperately poor for most of her life and it was the only thing she had. Now the daughter has BPD and is spiraling and my friend feels like she was a failure bc she had to work 3 jobs for the last 10 years and wasn't there to parent (she had the bad luck to marry just awful men, twice who never could be relied on to provide).
I remember running across a monarchism subreddit and just having to take a second. If there's one thing I can say about my extremely right-wing American upbringing, it's always that monarchism was portrayed as the dumbest thing in the world. Republicanism was the default, as it should be
Another of Curtis' early delusions is that the tech industry is efficient. I've been in big tech for over a decade and it is far leas efficient than many government agencies I've worked with.
Exactly, we all complain about the red taping and overly regulating on some things but not regulating on other. It munch better then big company greed and there backwards thinking. Look at the video game industry on that
@@maggmaster your country is chaos, not only for your people but your chaos spills out in to the world. Every time I get news from your country I hear about children killing each other at school and epidemics of obesity and drug abuse.
"Unions are a natural growth, and a natural oppositional force to exploitation." Ed Helms Honestly who tf knew that Ed Helms is so incredibly based. Thank you Ed Helms, thank you Robert
nah unions exist to favor some of the workforce at the expense of the lesser skilled and to support well paid union executives, or often the mafia as well
@@EliW95Had my best work environment working in Kroger's union. That pop machine in the break room was ice cold and price locked at a dollar. Dr. Pepper never tasted better like drinking out of a frosted mug.
For everyone loving the way Ed is curious and asking questions - you're going to love this podcast because that's what all guests are brought it in to do - be curious - and they pretty much all do it well. It's a podcast style wherein the guest represents the audience who are also listening to learn. Occasionally Robert brings in a guest who knows more about the subject than he does and lets them host, while he takes the audience role. Knowledge Fight is another podcast with the style but the "guest" role is the other regular host. Dan and Jordan from Knowledge fight come on BTB every now and then and, since they all worked together at the OG Cracked, those episodes are hysterical.
Yarvin got the idea of city states competing for citizens from the influential libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. It's always been a garbage idea because, given a choice, the first thing a state does when it becomes powerful enough is conquer its neighbours before they get powerful enough to conquer it. They don't compete for the hearts and minds of citizens if they can just obtain their loyalty by invading and subjugating them. If you need proof of this concept, please look to a resource known as 'human history'. Also, most of his followers are in favour of strict immigration controls. Where are people supposed to go if nowhere will take them? The whole idea of immigration controls is antithetical to the moral justification for his worldview. If you imagine an infinite number of free choices for migrants, then most will move somewhere that guarantees them the most freedom and the most happiness. Eventually that city state will become so big that it'll subsume all its competitors. I.e. true freedom is consensus politics... i.e. a democratic system with minimal inequality, and the exact opposite of what he assumes to be the most free outcome.
This man is a fool's fool. He is a perfect man to prop up if you want to undermine democracy and pretty much anything else worth preserving. Sorry for my multiple comments I just despise this guy
It is fascinating how we've already done the City State thing and had it catastrophically collapse. The actual collapse of the City-State (Polis) system happened in Greece way back when when the Achaemenid empire made a serious push into the region. But the Persians didn't do it. It was the major Greek cities with the development of "leagues", which, with central hegemons essentially made the individual city-state defunct. To prevent invasion or extortion by one league you needed to join another league or form your own, giving up your own autonomy. The ensuing violence from Athens, Thebes, and Sparta eating each other and what was left of the Free Polis would more or less open the door to Macedonia. But that's another story altogether.
When nozick talks about city states competing for citizens, he doesn't mean regular people, he means white men of wealth which of course his audience would be if not for all these "undeserving" minorities and women taking up spaces that according to their philosophy of racial hygiene belong to these antisocial downwardly mobile incel white dudes who grew up listening to PUA and Andrew Tate. It's ironic how much accumulating political power is just coming up with novel nonsense made to appeal to disaffected men. That seems to be the theme for the last 400 years.
So far in this video Comfy Couch's favourite philosopher - is a monarchist - wants to impose a Hindu caste system - grew up in the east coast elite - is a boomer computer nerd who can't cope with modern social media
As other commenters have noted, Mencius is the latinized name for Mengzi 孟子, the first great Confucian philosopher after Confucius himself. He technically didn't write the book that bears his name, his students probably did. It's essentially a record of his talks with rulers, ministers, intellectuals and students. It's clear Yarvin hasn't actually read him, because he would probably hate what he'd find, which is that Mengzi despised kings and their capricious ways. If Mengzi were alive today, he'd probably call Yarvin and those like him "petty people" 小人 and, more damningly, "village worthies" 鄉原. Mengzi says about them: "'If you would blame them, you find nothing to allege. If you would criticise them, you have nothing to criticize. They agree with the current customs. They consent with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, and they think themselves right, so that it is impossible to proceed with them to the principles of Yao and Shun [wise kings of old]. On this account they are called 'The thieves of virtue.'"
I remember reading about the Dark Enlightenment in 2018 and trying to tell people this was going to be a problem. I wish I'd been wrong. I'm really glad you're talking about it.
I remember, around the end of Clinton's terms, realizing the southern confederacy had turned into a fascist empire movement and was slowly taking over our government. No one listened then either.
So flavours of ayn rand, without the pretense? I saw a picture, and he looks loke a weird far right dude thinking crazy stuff. Why is he actually listened too and not mostly a lolcow :( There is a lolcow creator given he was asked to talk more about incest erotice, probably. He is funny weird if still a terrible person selling immortality rings, alex chu. I know because hannah reloaded uses him to go through how pathetic that people are and as entertainment of course, weirdos that are harmless to watch, and, he is a lolcow really, given how many comments ask him to talk about weird erotic fantasies. Anyways He remended me of that, how has he such influencal followers, like you would expect thiel who even couped elon, why :(
Eren Jaeger syndrome: insisting on the inevitability of what he already, deep down, wanted, as justification for his worst impulses. Complete with all the fascist overtones, but with none of the debate over the intentions of the author.
I never heard of that guy and I just checked out his blog. I think that guy is the definition of Dunning-Kruger Solipsism. It's all pseudo intellectual ramblings.
he’s not exactly hiding. yarvin was on the young turks and regularly expresses how he feels more comfortable speaking to cultural liberals, because he sees himself as being more similar to them than an average red state american.
Curtis Yarvin is indirectly responsible for a major reason I now hate libertarians: not treating his weirdo race science fans as ban on sight on libertarian message boards. I left and became a socialist and never looked back, but if I did I wouldn't be surprised if nothing has changed.
Libertarianism seems to be a stopover for a lot of people who are on their way out of or into something else. I had a layover there as well. It was not awesome.
They don't ban on sight because a lot of them are at the least sympathetic. Sooner or later right libertarians begin to realize their ideas aren't taken seriously by anyone and don't actually work in practice, and rather than backtrack and figure out where they went wrong they double down with "well then we should just MAKE everyone do things our way, guess we'll need a strong man"
@@jamesdurtka2709 People pretend that ideology is about advocating for particular structures of government first, when in reality it's firstly about advocating for social outcomes. If your preferred system trends towards infinite inequality, then that's what you really want. This is why you see "Big Government" Nazi flags flying alongside "States Rights" Confederate flags at far-right rallies. Those guys know it's all about the outcome of White supremacy.
Listening to the section about Curtis referring to his family as "Brahman" I'm reminded of a story I heard on NPR in which researchers looked into the online activity of people who committed atrocities. They found strong evidence that their intention wasn't to achieve a specific, tangible goal but rather to achieve a specific self-image (and presumably image in the minds of others). I tend to over-extrapolate that to lots of behavior I hear about (lots of it on this podcast). Maybe Yarvin isn't applying logic here; rather he's claiming a self-image he wants simply because he wants it and justifying it after the fact.
Precisely why these types always lean into biological racism as the foundation of their worldview. A Black, Brown or Asian person can never be the dominant class in their eyes not because of merit as they claim but because they don't allow for the creation of a dominant self image.
I think it has more to do with Hindus considering someone who is Brahman to be "enlightened." But Curtis is no more enlightened than the idjet working at 7-11. Which is where most academic philosophers end up--as they have no clue what philosophy even is, they just learned how to use big words to try and impress others.
@@MengzisDisciple it's because his family is DC insiders. He grew up in and around the political elite(Brahmin were the elite in hindu society) nice of you to show your bigotry though.
Modern republicans are basically monarchists now? They want Trump to be an emperor or king for life because they think democracy and freedom are too decadent and sinful.
The republican party and conservatives behind project 25 openly want Trump as an emperor for life because democracy and freedom are too decadent for them so basically monarchists?
The new camera angle on Robert is looking incredible, much more inviting and personable. We get those occasional camera glimpses and we can really see you speaking with your hands now. The editing is a lot more on point as well! Great job on this, y'all! Heck, now I wanna see Robert do some streaming or live coverage or whatever. Get some chat integration going, that kinda thing. Yes... yes.... Become a politics streamer, give in and join the fold!
So glad to hear more about Yarvin. I became aware of him and Thiel through a "Some More News" episode a few years ago, and wow. There is some scary shit going on in the background of the current right-wing now. I also remember checking out Yarvin's writing and wow...that is a dude who is very infatuated with his own ability to use big words. (See also Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.) I read his "A formalist manifesto" post and that was some extremely dumb shit. It's hard to believe anyone takes it seriously. He starts by acting as though he's inventing a new ideology with this tone like "I'm just so brilliant I can do this in my spare time." And then he outlines some very incorrect ideas about the political landscape, then goes on to his "formalism" system. He asserts the cause of violence is basically people not being clear on property rights and declares his brand new system is totally unlike anything, but it's only basically libertarianism but the state is also a private entity. It's so fucking dumb. He has pretty much no clue about anything. Very interesting to listen to your podcast outline how he arrived at his twisted nonsense.
I'm gonna need the world to stop making white dudes who think they're the next big thing because of an overestimation of skill and lack of self examination and it just turns out they're overall pretty average and very fascist.
Totally agree. A Jew sprouting Neo-Nazi eugenics BS should be the first clue he is an idjet. The second is using the title Mencius (not Mengzi), when Mengzi was an idealist and his counter-part Xunzi was the authoritarian wanna-be that Yarvin is.
@@bogdiworksV2 Too much fantasy reading as a child, mixed with a 1st year philosophy students reading of Taoism/Confucianism. Has a lot in common with George Lucas; which explains why both got it wrong. This is Huang-Di's "Legalism"--notice how Lucas' "sith" have pyramid temples and push the color black. The problem is Taoism does not push that "yin" has any sentience--in agreement with the Bible, where the "Void" was always there--even before creation.
Seems the heirs of successful people want to bake in their position into the structure of society without feeling the need to actually do anything useful/great themselves.
Monarchies here functioned a bit like family operations where every part of the family are stakeholders in keeping it all together. Not just the sovereign, the frontal face. Of course they can have internal feuds of procedures, which get complicated when half the houses are intermarried.
Good to see Ed Helms out again and doing well, appreciate this content and subject matter and for once with these types of pods it's not a 5 minute superficial video that could be gleaned from a single google search about a topic with clickbait titles, it's actual content.
"I was a nerd on Usenet in the 80s and didn't like that nerds in the 90s got to come be nerds and actually made Usenet actually cool and now I'm forever mad that younger people made me not cool anymore."
You believe what others say, outsourcing your thinking. Read his work, then comment. You’re accepting things that are so silly no one could believe them. Why do you?
As a person labelled "gifted", it's always such a staunch reminder of "what way I could have went down". I think I have to thank my socialist cultural background, so to speak, for steering away from alt-right, the moment the word "right" enter the picture. Edit: to put in context: I already knew, veeery well, who Rothbard and Hoppe are, what are their believes, I might or might not still have some of their books....
Exactly - Vance and Yarvin etc, think of themselves as geniuses, as super intellectual and super entitled… why???? Arrogant fuckers and haters, that’s all they are
FYI: the concept of "the Cathedral" comes from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond which is kind of a manifesto of open source development that's highly regarded in hacker culture. The "Cathedral" model stands for the traditional method of development (and organizing groups of programmers) while the "Bazaar" model stands for a sort of anarchism (or communism) kept in control by a benevolent dictator (the open source method).
It's important to note that the "benevolent dictator" is a dictator for exactly as long as they are benevolent - if there are significant disagreements about how a project is run, the dissidents can and do split off to try things their way instead. It's typically more like stewardship than dictatorship. This is possible because open source software can be copied and modified freely, so the cost to splinter is essentially zero, you just need to convince people that your version is worth switching to.
This is a different Cathedral, then. Yarvin's concept of the cathedral refers to a structure of thought/belief enforcement. The enforcement comes from making the throught/belief structue ubiquitous in large part and violence in few occasions. Media and academia is the cathedral in America and largely Western Civ. Other ears and civilazations have different cathedrals makeups.
@@douglascalder2600 Yarvin's Cathedral is clearly and extension of Raymond's hacker subculture philosophy to main stream culture, it uses the exact same arguments for why a flat non- hierarchic power structure governed by a dictator is more efficient than hierarchic structures with many levels like we have in our societies. It simply applies the philosophy of open source software development to society as a whole.
I though that as well, but TC&B is from 1997 and according to to this podcast, Yarvin's use is a few years earlier. And -- I had to double-check this -- Raymond's cathedral was more of a "too many cooks". You were supposed to think of how actual cathedrals were designed by one person. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't the one true way to design software.
I am just amazed. From the action of a few school bullies, creates Curtis Yarvin, Yarvin creates Thiel, Thiel creates Vance. Thiel money propping the chaos that is Trump. Trump and Vance candidates for US 1 and 2. That is one a hell of a butterfly effect.
I have new respect for Ed helms. It always surprises me when I find out that one of these guys has brains and a strong moral compass. It's a nice surprise and I will follow Mr helms with a little more interest. He's a funny guy.
Yarvin finding a social circle sure to a complete accident of the state of computers at the time and immediately extrapolating an entire worldview about the “natural” organization of society from that is so on the nose I can’t stand it
Oh Ed Helms is a Church Committee and the exposure of the crimes of Nixon nerd. 4:42 that’s why he’s on Behind the Bastards. Good for y’all. Glad to hear Helms has some to contribute to the conversation here via genuine interest. 🎉
And all of a sudden the illogical leaps the rightmost part of the GOP made for Trump - their perceived great man - makes a terrifying amount of sense now. 49:06
1:08:24 is this idea of society coming from the same intellectual tradition as libertarian floating city attempts. Vaguely recalling the BTB episode about those as I listen to this episode.
See also: Peter the great. Young monarch with WAY TOO much power and very little sense. Or desire to be a fair and/or just ruler. Cruelty for the fuck of it was just way too easy for him vs actually considering the implications of his actions as Czar. 1:15:38
Him skipping 2 grades after coming back from overseas makes it seem like the US school system is just trash. Skipping grades in elementary school is like...nothing. Skipping in high-school is a bit more impressive.
Also not mentioned is that kids don’t HAVE to skip grades. Parents can intervene and it’s often the smarter thing to do if a kid may not be mature enough to handle it.
@@prodigal_southernersuch a simplistic statement for such a massive concept as public education. "Beware of those who answer problems that require books and arguments with single sentences".
@@starsiegeRoks i get what you're saying, and sure, there's some more nuance, but my private school education basically did the same thing. it's just a difference in the kind of job, the kind of boss. none of us can live without working unless we're really, really lucky, so what greater purpose could it really serve?
I don't have the time stamp, and this is very pedantic, but the Palantir is not a ring. It's a seeing stone that's connected to the few other seeing stones left in Middle Earth, and the whole system was corrupted by Sauron, which in turn corrupted the wizard in charge of the Palantir and anyone else that used it. You still got the point across, but I watch too much "Um Actually" to let that claim slide
I feel like the people that follow this guy are people that were in the gifted and talented program in elementary school and never got over their superiority complex
The idea that somebody can just move to a different fiefdom/kingdom/dictatorship/whatever reminds me of people who espouse "states' rights" over human rights. You want an abortion/mixed race marriage/healthcare? Just go to a different state.
Discerning between autocracy and democracy by calling them privately and publicly owned is actually a pretty useful and surprisingly honest perspective, coming from a rightoid *unt.
Not going to be that guy, but I am glad Robert is somewhat cleaning himself more. Seriously cleaning yourself is good for mental health even if it a little bit.
Brah looks like Lizzie McGuire's dad. I've read Patchwork and as a political tract, it's incredibly silly...like some edgy teen who read Plato's The Republic and decided to write their own version, but only like, "Totally radical and eXtreme!"
36:30 Yarvin wasn't a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, he just wrote some textfiles or what was called 't-files' (source: Sifu Tweety Fish on bluesky, a cDc member)
It always enlightening to learn more about those who are actively trying to destroy our Democratic Republic. I've heard of Mr. Yarvin before but this deep dive is very eye opening.
11:11:40 I wasn't watching the vid at that moment and had to go back and figure out where that sound drop had come from, but it's just a really good, not-a-joke, honest-to-goodness British accent from Sophie.
Very good conversation here .. As someone who loves philosophy and mental exercise it brings I also feel that basic idea of it should never be understood a solution to society's problems; it's more like a mathematics way of exploring concepts by pushing them to a limit and see what's happening there. This should never be understood as our physical reality and most clever people know that.
Yep, ther is definitly value and it can push ideas to think through, like in case the trolley problem thats really more questioning what do people value and make that aware in a hypothesis. t gas value and are realy not bad tools to dissect arguments, but yeah its that exercises, not real. , through it might help in a moral compass?! Or not in that case.
I'm fascinated to listen to this one. I just found BTB a week or two ago after seeing The Apprentice in the theatre with a friend who was watching it twice in three days for a second view of the psychology.
Part badger has a very wind in the willows feel to it, also hacking used to mean doing computer stuff for fun, cracking was going where you did not belong, early computer wizards hated muggles stealing their words
holy shit. i've been following curtis for over a decade now (hate following, because i consider his ideological lean not just dangerous, but regressive as fuck) - i'm stokedddd
@@rblongfellow i consider it my duty as a person who wants to understand the widest breadth of what humanity is. Also, it reinforces my jovial misanthropic worldview :P - i mean, I listen to Knowledge Fight and Behind the Bastards as my most mainstream news sources LOL
@@rblongfellow i would agree totally- i think one reason the pendulum of ideology can swing back is that people don't engage with why/how their arguments are solid. They cannot defend their beliefs and they often are even worse at explaining why someone might believe otherwise. The moment someone opposing some ideas can do that with their side, they take in most anyone whos open to being captured. Idk
@@gregmurphy8059 couldn't agree more. People are reluctant to put their own beliefs/ideology to the test, but that is the only way to uncover if it holds water.
1:06:45 I'm pretty sure the use of "cathedral" as a metaphor for institutions who direct the way of thinking in a society is not something Yarvin thought of. I've heard of it in 90s during Balkan wars: establishing new institutions, system of thinking, rules and philosophy, as a "new cathedral". (I am not an expert - maybe it's much older than that)
I wondered if it was a reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," a philosophical thesis on software development by Eric S. Raymond (a prominent hacker-historian whose brain eventually turned to mush).
This made me realize that I’m probably in very small minority of your audience: I don’t watch The Office and I still haven’t gotten around to watching The Hangover.
@@dawntower3011 Fair enough. If that's not your style, then it's not for you. I think from an objective perspective, it is a well constructed show, but that doesn't mean everyone will or has to enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy a show, why waste your limited time on earth watching it
1:08:47 The host is incorrect on this, Yarvin endorses a board that has the power to hire and fire the state CEO, he refers to the system as an accountable monarchy.
Can you cover Anton Long and the o9a/Atomwaffen and Nick Land? They are even more shadowy, and also a big threat to this country. Probably more interesting too.
Land would be such a difficult figure to dissect. That episode would really be for the philosophy nerds. Many of these alt right weirdos claim to love Land, but I don’t really think they understand 95% of his original core philosophical formulations. They only know his most late stage, cooked, neo-reactionary shitpostings. For example, the eACC crowd cites him while presenting something antithetical to his position.
@@andrewtrust1021 yeah it would be kind of like the Lord Aspinall episode. First would talk about more reasonable things like his initial ideas on racial discrimination and class (surprisingly reasonable) then suddenly the second episode goes nuts. Maybe a third episode on the o9a continuing this.
“Mencius Moldbug” straight up sounds like a Harry Potter side character. SIDE NOTE: It is pronounced MEN-see-us. It’s the name European scholars gave to him because they Latinized his Chinese name.
Thanks for covering Curtis Yarvin. I didn't know who he was until I heard Anthony Scaramucci mention him and suggest that people start looking into him. Pretty shocking. Definitely something people need to be aware of. Monster indeed but absolutely fascinating to hear this guy's whole history and it's relevance to current politicians
A playthrough of Crusader Kings or even 5 minutes on the subreddit is a sufficient counter argument to monarchy. Even in an ideal situation where you start with Aragorn, you eventually need to deal with a Denethor or an inbred teenager, bereft of awareness of reality, who wants a horse to be the pope
I know it's easy to think about the constant wars of the absolute monarchs, but whenever they talk about a single great leader, my mind goes immediately to the ineptitude of Mao Zedong and _The Great Leap Forward,_ the catastrophic economic campaign that directly led to the death of millions of his own people by starvation.
@@monkeykingeater of course, but if there was any sense in the world, people like Mao and Stalin would have retired as heroes after winning their wars. Clearly they didn't also have the aptitude for administration
Mao falls probably into monarchs thou. ok kim yung il maybe moree claim, but , mao did pretty much get the one absolute leader by divinte right and, no different than a crazy king
Yeah ironically the authorian communist regimes show why abluslte monarch, especially the one with other of people will even worse today then were in 1700s and 1800s
@marocat4749 I agree with your instinct to lump then together. Autocracies tend to produce similarly bad results regardless of ideological windrow dressing.
I paused this video and watched a couple videos of Yarvin. He is clearly smarter than me but it seems like he spent to much time alone without someone challenging his ideas. Very scary that Vance is listening to him.
Seeing Ed Helm was genuinely shocking, which makes sense now I know he is hosting that Snafu season because the Snafu advert on ad breaks for BTB seemed suprisingly leftist/anti authoritarian.
Ed is such a unique guest. He's not trying to add in jokes or outrage, it's like he's just there to learn and ask questions because he's genuinely interested in learning more from Robert.
Honestly I was suspect at first but dude seems genuine
I found his curiosity really refreshing compared to some other guests who've been on in the past. He's engaged and interested in learning as much as we in the audience are.
Also, first time ever a guest calls Robert out on his awful pronunciation of non-English names
I was fully ready to dislike Ed Helms on BTB...weirdly, as I like many of his roles, but I wholeheartedly agree he is a fantastic guest that's wholly engaged and knowledgable on many things tangentially related to the topic.
That's what all guests are brought it in to do, on this podcast - be curious. It's a podcast style wherein the guest represents the audience who are also listening to learn. Occasionally Robert brings in a guest who knows more about the subject than he does and lets them host, while he takes the audience role. Knowledge Fight is another podcast with the style but the "guest" role is the other regular host. Dan and Jordan from Knowledge fight come on BTB every now and then and, since they all worked together at the OG Cracked, those episodes are hysterical.
Ed was such a fantastic guest. I really loved how he wasn't shy about asking for clarifications. That definitely helped underline a few of the really important points.
Agreed!!!! My new favorite guest, I hope they can get him again
The way he does it is excellent too, like he kinda respectfully calls Robert on his shit. Robert, thorough a researcher as he is, I find sometimes gets a bit loose with the speculating, and I like the way Ed’s questions are framed with a subtext of “this isn’t intended to be smarmy, I genuinely don’t know myself, but I feel it’s important we nail this down correctly.”
I was 0% ready for the Ed Helms jumpscare
No one ever is.
Same. Could not have predicted this
I got literally twice as excited when they introduce the guest, and I was already hyped for this!
Omg for real!!!
Totally caught me off guard as well.
Ed Helms is like one of the few non-TH-camr guests I immediately recognized, and I didn't realize he was this based!
changing my @ out of embarrassment
@@bloodbased don't talk about it, be about it champ
th-cam.com/video/eus516XOw1c/w-d-xo.htmlsi=016s-i5-KXKZWtpK
I know, he's always seems like a really chill, appreciative dude. He's very... un-Andy.
Biased?
The reason Mencius doesn't seem like a Chinese name is because it's a Latinized version of Mèngzǐ. Just like Confucius comes from Kǒng Fūzǐ.
I'm really impressed that Ed pulled that tidbit. He seems like a very smart dude.
what does Mengzi mean? or Kong fuzi for that matter
Those are their names in Chinese. Kong Fuzi, is just "Master Kong"
@@Joe-sg9ll Technically speaking these names we know them by are honorific titles. The zǐ part means "master" or "sage", so "Master Mèng" etc (you may also have heard of Lǎozǐ "the Old Master", the probably apocryphal author of the Dào Dé Jīng). His birth name is actually Mèng Kē, and similarly Confucius (Grandmaster Kǒng) was born Kǒng Qiū.
@@Joe-sg9ll "Zi" means teacher. Meng is surname--so Mengzi means Teacher Meng. Same with Kongzi. Chinese use last name first--so Confucius birth name was Kong Qiu, Qiu being his first name. As is in English, last name with honoree title (Professor Smith).
Ed asking for clarifications and being an active participant (questioning conclusions) is delightful. Having him as another host would be great.
Soon as I saw that Yarvin looked like “We have Kylo Ren at home” it all made more sense.
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s real easy to tell a comic book from a textbook.
I hate that phrase. The literal point of a book cover is for people to judge whether or not they want to read it.
Kylo was very clearly a man-baby neo-Nazi.
If people are reading PDF's they downloaded though, all they have is the title, right?
He looks like a broke ass, dime store Richard Thomas
This is the worst timeline. I remember reading the nutcase rants of moldbug from online tech forums 15 or so years ago and being glad he was a fringe weirdo. And now, thanks to a few rich weirdos & Trump, his ideas are a hairs whisker from being implemented. Stupidest timeline ever.
To paraphrase Quark’s brother Rom, “Libertarians don’t want to stop the exploitation - they want to become the exploiters!”
It goes beyond that, Curtis Yarvin is anti Enlightenment and Renaissance values. He believes in the divine right of kings - we would go back to the dark ages if he gets his way.
Most libertarians I meet want drugs or guns or whatever they don't want to be ruled by a monarch who can kill 100,000 people and then claim God said to do it, and get away with it. This is what used to happen 500 years ago we just forget. I hope I am not too obtuse with my comment, have a nice day
If you aren’t free to sell yourself into slavery, how can you ever truly be free?
Any day I can start with seeing a Deep Space Nine reference is a good day. Thank you for that
I think Robert would approve of this comment
How in fuck does this show not have a million subs??? This is by far one of the best podcasts available.
It's much more listened to on its own website and other areas I believe. YT makes up a very small section of viewers.
They're only just 'pivoting to video' as they say, they get hundreds of thousands on Spotify etc but they'll probably skyrocket once this hits enough people's feeds
I think most people listen to the podcast
It’s a podcast. It’s mostly listened to on the podcast platforms.
They’ve only very recently started also putting the episodes out here
We listen every day right here. Best so far, by leps & bounds!
Ed Helms is the only celebrity I've ever encountered out in the wild, and he was chill. I was like 13 years old, camping out at a bluegrass festival in Telluride, Colorado and he had (I guess) just finished hiking with his partner. I had filled up a canteen and I was walking back to camp with it when I walked past him on a footbridge and he pointed out to me that it was leaking. I was just kinda starstruck from having seen him in The Hangover and didn't verbally mention that I recognized him but I think he could tell lol. It was a pleasant interaction.
Gay ;)
@@NEDMKittenthe 1990s called, they want their homophobic "humor" back.
aww lol that's a cute memory
I once met Doug Stanhope when I worked at a hotel. He had just gotten back from partying at a sex club after his show. He brought back a woman with a shaved head, covered in tattoos and black leather. He had just gotten to the room and already looked like he was deep into a days-long hangover. He and I both went outside to smoke. Never said a word to each other. Just a mutual nod as he headed up to the room for the night.
Long story short: It's cool meeting someone famous and they really are everything you hope they are, haha
I'm always surprised that people judge celebrities positively for just not spitting on them when they meet in public. One of my neighbors worked for a company that provided temporary nannies for rich celebrity clients (it paid more than working as a kindergarten teacher and she had $60k in student loans getting her master's degree in education she was trying to pay off) and her treatment in that position by these twats was BRUTAL. Even tho she was making 6 figures, the second she paid off her student loans she was gone.
In my personal experience as someone who graduated in 2018 bullying is less physical now, but most of it is either cyberbullying or trying to socially isolate people for being "weird"
Reminds me of how the filmmakers decided to revamp Peter Parker's bully Flash Thompson in _Homecoming_ versus the jock he was in prior depictions. They said Flash Thompson the jock just wouldn't really exist in a 2010s high school. Almost makes me nostalgic for being stuffed into lockers...
@@coreyander286 Probably worse too as psycholofical aproaches can be insidious
yeah, bullying in school for me was a lot more social ostracization, it was basically never physical. the tactics used were to make me seem like an other, to isolate me from the others and kinda sideline me into my own particular niche, which in turn got the group bullied in that sense (i always remember me and a friend being called lesbians as we walked the mile, partly because it shows how anything gay was seen as an insult, and partly bcus now im a gay trans man lol). i cant say how much my own experience matches others, particularly because im autistic and wasnt diagnosed until i was basically already out, so i know a lot of my treatment was based on my autistic traits, i was identified as an odd one out and without an identity that made the bullying more obvious. either way my interests and behaviors aligned with the friends i was able to make, but looking back, its likely those i clicked with were also neurodivergent in some way
at the least, from my own experiences and from what ive heard from those in my age range, bullying was largely verbal and included a lot more targeted othering
The kids are NOT alright. My bestie from high school (class of 02) just found out her 19 year old daughter was having sex with her stepbrother since they were both 13 and then went on to use sex to get stuff bc the family has been so desperately poor for most of her life and it was the only thing she had. Now the daughter has BPD and is spiraling and my friend feels like she was a failure bc she had to work 3 jobs for the last 10 years and wasn't there to parent (she had the bad luck to marry just awful men, twice who never could be relied on to provide).
@@Backinblackbunny009your friend isn’t a failure but it sounds like she’s got some of her own issues she needs to work on
Seeing Ed Helms come to terms with the concept of monarchists is the most cathartic thing I've seen in a long time.
I remember running across a monarchism subreddit and just having to take a second. If there's one thing I can say about my extremely right-wing American upbringing, it's always that monarchism was portrayed as the dumbest thing in the world. Republicanism was the default, as it should be
th-cam.com/video/eus516XOw1c/w-d-xo.htmlsi=016s-i5-KXKZWtpK
@@andrewdunn8778until you realize republics are the same ilk as democracies and inevitably turn into tyrannies.
@@andrewdunn8778 Because it is. Both world wars were essentially wars of succession. Monarchy has been a cancer on Europe and the world.
Another of Curtis' early delusions is that the tech industry is efficient. I've been in big tech for over a decade and it is far leas efficient than many government agencies I've worked with.
Exactly, we all complain about the red taping and overly regulating on some things but not regulating on other. It munch better then big company greed and there backwards thinking. Look at the video game industry on that
Work for tech companies myself and can tell you this comment is spot on.
This is an absolutely insane thing to believe
Agile framework right? I’ve been in tech for 23 years and if you ran the country like a dev team we would be in chaos.
@@maggmaster your country is chaos, not only for your people but your chaos spills out in to the world. Every time I get news from your country I hear about children killing each other at school and epidemics of obesity and drug abuse.
Tonight is the night I realize there are Edge Lords who want to be actual lords, and I wish I could say I was surprised.
And then there's Traci Lords, who just edges everyone. 👀
I mean kaitlin bennet is a monatchist? Ther are a lot "american" trepublican being monarchists, somehow .
@@TroyConvers5000 "Nicely done."-Jimmy McNulty
The oligarchs are generally the same... Sociopaths.
@@TroyConvers5000 Underrated joke
“And sometimes it [ADHD] makes me really good for short bursts at cleaning my house” I felt that in my core
😅❤
"Unions are a natural growth, and a natural oppositional force to exploitation."
Ed Helms
Honestly who tf knew that Ed Helms is so incredibly based. Thank you Ed Helms, thank you Robert
Yeah, the Chicago Teachers Union is working so well for Chicago and its youth. So based! Moron.
nah unions exist to favor some of the workforce at the expense of the lesser skilled and to support well paid union executives, or often the mafia as well
@@EliW95corrupt unions might, but those unions should be regulated just like corrupt corporations
@@EliW95Had my best work environment working in Kroger's union. That pop machine in the break room was ice cold and price locked at a dollar. Dr. Pepper never tasted better like drinking out of a frosted mug.
Ed Helms just got way cooler
Sick episode as always! Thank you for your work yall
For everyone loving the way Ed is curious and asking questions - you're going to love this podcast because that's what all guests are brought it in to do - be curious - and they pretty much all do it well. It's a podcast style wherein the guest represents the audience who are also listening to learn. Occasionally Robert brings in a guest who knows more about the subject than he does and lets them host, while he takes the audience role. Knowledge Fight is another podcast with the style but the "guest" role is the other regular host. Dan and Jordan from Knowledge fight come on BTB every now and then and, since they all worked together at the OG Cracked, those episodes are hysterical.
I dunno, every episode I've heard so far was just "Robert Telling Some Dude How He Is Right About Everything." Ed is a refreshing change from that.
Yarvin got the idea of city states competing for citizens from the influential libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. It's always been a garbage idea because, given a choice, the first thing a state does when it becomes powerful enough is conquer its neighbours before they get powerful enough to conquer it. They don't compete for the hearts and minds of citizens if they can just obtain their loyalty by invading and subjugating them. If you need proof of this concept, please look to a resource known as 'human history'.
Also, most of his followers are in favour of strict immigration controls. Where are people supposed to go if nowhere will take them? The whole idea of immigration controls is antithetical to the moral justification for his worldview. If you imagine an infinite number of free choices for migrants, then most will move somewhere that guarantees them the most freedom and the most happiness. Eventually that city state will become so big that it'll subsume all its competitors. I.e. true freedom is consensus politics... i.e. a democratic system with minimal inequality, and the exact opposite of what he assumes to be the most free outcome.
This man is a fool's fool. He is a perfect man to prop up if you want to undermine democracy and pretty much anything else worth preserving. Sorry for my multiple comments I just despise this guy
It is fascinating how we've already done the City State thing and had it catastrophically collapse.
The actual collapse of the City-State (Polis) system happened in Greece way back when when the Achaemenid empire made a serious push into the region. But the Persians didn't do it. It was the major Greek cities with the development of "leagues", which, with central hegemons essentially made the individual city-state defunct. To prevent invasion or extortion by one league you needed to join another league or form your own, giving up your own autonomy. The ensuing violence from Athens, Thebes, and Sparta eating each other and what was left of the Free Polis would more or less open the door to Macedonia. But that's another story altogether.
When nozick talks about city states competing for citizens, he doesn't mean regular people, he means white men of wealth which of course his audience would be if not for all these "undeserving" minorities and women taking up spaces that according to their philosophy of racial hygiene belong to these antisocial downwardly mobile incel white dudes who grew up listening to PUA and Andrew Tate. It's ironic how much accumulating political power is just coming up with novel nonsense made to appeal to disaffected men. That seems to be the theme for the last 400 years.
"True freedom is people voting on how your rights will be violated" no, not really
@@highlander2705 oh yeah Greece actually tried democracy too and that failed, yet here we are, trying democracy again - so what’s your point?
So far in this video Comfy Couch's favourite philosopher
- is a monarchist
- wants to impose a Hindu caste system
- grew up in the east coast elite
- is a boomer computer nerd who can't cope with modern social media
Got to 51:20 were he completely failed to understand anything about history, so he's obviously got severe reading comprehension problems
@@williamchamberlain2263 1973 is prime Gen X not Boomer
Isn't everyone over the age of 35 a boomer? 😂
@@bogdiworksV2 lol sounds right people born in 1989 are boomers
Tread carefully. Some of Xers don't find any humor in that at all. I'm old, but I'm no fucking boomer.
As other commenters have noted, Mencius is the latinized name for Mengzi 孟子, the first great Confucian philosopher after Confucius himself. He technically didn't write the book that bears his name, his students probably did. It's essentially a record of his talks with rulers, ministers, intellectuals and students. It's clear Yarvin hasn't actually read him, because he would probably hate what he'd find, which is that Mengzi despised kings and their capricious ways. If Mengzi were alive today, he'd probably call Yarvin and those like him "petty people" 小人 and, more damningly, "village worthies" 鄉原. Mengzi says about them: "'If you would blame them, you find nothing to allege. If you would criticise them, you have nothing to criticize. They agree with the current customs. They consent with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, and they think themselves right, so that it is impossible to proceed with them to the principles of Yao and Shun [wise kings of old]. On this account they are called 'The thieves of virtue.'"
"VP candidate and hopefully future nobody...." Priceless
You’re going to be fine with a Vice President Vance
@@euphegeniaI'll feel pretty squirmy and slimy idk
Lol
I remember reading about the Dark Enlightenment in 2018 and trying to tell people this was going to be a problem. I wish I'd been wrong. I'm really glad you're talking about it.
Same.
I remember, around the end of Clinton's terms, realizing the southern confederacy had turned into a fascist empire movement and was slowly taking over our government. No one listened then either.
Same, or i think for me it was 2019.
Let me guess, you were told you were being paranoid and hysterical and that no American would subscribe to this?
@@MarkSiefert precisely
Dark Enlightenment basically translates to this :"why aren't people acknowledging that I'm the smartest one in the room?!?!?!"
So flavours of ayn rand, without the pretense? I saw a picture, and he looks loke a weird far right dude thinking crazy stuff. Why is he actually listened too and not mostly a lolcow :(
There is a lolcow creator given he was asked to talk more about incest erotice, probably. He is funny weird if still a terrible person selling immortality rings, alex chu. I know because hannah reloaded uses him to go through how pathetic that people are and as entertainment of course, weirdos that are harmless to watch, and, he is a lolcow really, given how many comments ask him to talk about weird erotic fantasies.
Anyways He remended me of that, how has he such influencal followers, like you would expect thiel who even couped elon, why :(
@@marocat4749 cuz people be petty and want to feel like "herobots"; it's just narcissism to cowardly to call itself narcissism
The Dork Enlightenment is main character syndrome made manifest.
Eren Jaeger syndrome: insisting on the inevitability of what he already, deep down, wanted, as justification for his worst impulses. Complete with all the fascist overtones, but with none of the debate over the intentions of the author.
But they aren’t the smartest people in the room, and if they are, they are definitely in the wrong room.
About time someone drags Curtis Yarvin from his musty basement into the light of day.
Chapo kinda did that but that was more of a sidenote.
I never heard of that guy and I just checked out his blog. I think that guy is the definition of Dunning-Kruger Solipsism. It's all pseudo intellectual ramblings.
he’s not exactly hiding. yarvin was on the young turks and regularly expresses how he feels more comfortable speaking to cultural liberals, because he sees himself as being more similar to them than an average red state american.
He seems to be popping into more people's radar lately. Almost for sure because of his connection to Vance.
@@RovieWade man, fuck tyt
Curtis Yarvin is indirectly responsible for a major reason I now hate libertarians: not treating his weirdo race science fans as ban on sight on libertarian message boards. I left and became a socialist and never looked back, but if I did I wouldn't be surprised if nothing has changed.
Libertarianism seems to be a stopover for a lot of people who are on their way out of or into something else.
I had a layover there as well. It was not awesome.
They don't ban on sight because a lot of them are at the least sympathetic. Sooner or later right libertarians begin to realize their ideas aren't taken seriously by anyone and don't actually work in practice, and rather than backtrack and figure out where they went wrong they double down with "well then we should just MAKE everyone do things our way, guess we'll need a strong man"
It has gotten worse, much worse.
@@jamesdurtka2709 People pretend that ideology is about advocating for particular structures of government first, when in reality it's firstly about advocating for social outcomes. If your preferred system trends towards infinite inequality, then that's what you really want.
This is why you see "Big Government" Nazi flags flying alongside "States Rights" Confederate flags at far-right rallies. Those guys know it's all about the outcome of White supremacy.
@@jamesdurtka2709so like at 1:10:00 …?
This puts so many things of the past decade into proper perspective, like as if I just found the missing piece of a much larger puzzle.
Listening to the section about Curtis referring to his family as "Brahman" I'm reminded of a story I heard on NPR in which researchers looked into the online activity of people who committed atrocities. They found strong evidence that their intention wasn't to achieve a specific, tangible goal but rather to achieve a specific self-image (and presumably image in the minds of others). I tend to over-extrapolate that to lots of behavior I hear about (lots of it on this podcast). Maybe Yarvin isn't applying logic here; rather he's claiming a self-image he wants simply because he wants it and justifying it after the fact.
@@nathankinsey5431 Brahmin, "Brahman" is Consciousness,Awareness,God, etc
"Brahmin" is the priest caste
Precisely why these types always lean into biological racism as the foundation of their worldview. A Black, Brown or Asian person can never be the dominant class in their eyes not because of merit as they claim but because they don't allow for the creation of a dominant self image.
I think it has more to do with Hindus considering someone who is Brahman to be "enlightened." But Curtis is no more enlightened than the idjet working at 7-11. Which is where most academic philosophers end up--as they have no clue what philosophy even is, they just learned how to use big words to try and impress others.
@@MengzisDisciple it's because his family is DC insiders. He grew up in and around the political elite(Brahmin were the elite in hindu society) nice of you to show your bigotry though.
Can you point me towards this article? I'll try to find it with the info you've already given in your comment for now
The irony of a REPUBLICAN taking his cues from someone who is pro-monarchy is 👌.
Vocabulary isn't Nance's strongest trait, but put him behind an eyeliner pencil and......😮
Is irony even the right word when it gets this on the nose...
not so ironic when you ignore party and go by ideology
conservative+monarchy? absolutely
Modern republicans are basically monarchists now? They want Trump to be an emperor or king for life because they think democracy and freedom are too decadent and sinful.
The republican party and conservatives behind project 25 openly want Trump as an emperor for life because democracy and freedom are too decadent for them so basically monarchists?
The new camera angle on Robert is looking incredible, much more inviting and personable. We get those occasional camera glimpses and we can really see you speaking with your hands now.
The editing is a lot more on point as well!
Great job on this, y'all!
Heck, now I wanna see Robert do some streaming or live coverage or whatever. Get some chat integration going, that kinda thing.
Yes... yes.... Become a politics streamer, give in and join the fold!
So glad to hear more about Yarvin. I became aware of him and Thiel through a "Some More News" episode a few years ago, and wow. There is some scary shit going on in the background of the current right-wing now. I also remember checking out Yarvin's writing and wow...that is a dude who is very infatuated with his own ability to use big words. (See also Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.) I read his "A formalist manifesto" post and that was some extremely dumb shit. It's hard to believe anyone takes it seriously. He starts by acting as though he's inventing a new ideology with this tone like "I'm just so brilliant I can do this in my spare time." And then he outlines some very incorrect ideas about the political landscape, then goes on to his "formalism" system. He asserts the cause of violence is basically people not being clear on property rights and declares his brand new system is totally unlike anything, but it's only basically libertarianism but the state is also a private entity. It's so fucking dumb. He has pretty much no clue about anything. Very interesting to listen to your podcast outline how he arrived at his twisted nonsense.
I'm gonna need the world to stop making white dudes who think they're the next big thing because of an overestimation of skill and lack of self examination and it just turns out they're overall pretty average and very fascist.
Totally agree. A Jew sprouting Neo-Nazi eugenics BS should be the first clue he is an idjet. The second is using the title Mencius (not Mengzi), when Mengzi was an idealist and his counter-part Xunzi was the authoritarian wanna-be that Yarvin is.
He sounds like an average thinker with dusions of grandeur and poor early socialisation.
@@bogdiworksV2 Too much fantasy reading as a child, mixed with a 1st year philosophy students reading of Taoism/Confucianism. Has a lot in common with George Lucas; which explains why both got it wrong. This is Huang-Di's "Legalism"--notice how Lucas' "sith" have pyramid temples and push the color black. The problem is Taoism does not push that "yin" has any sentience--in agreement with the Bible, where the "Void" was always there--even before creation.
Yep, birthers, Hitler etc rinse wash repeat a pavlovian power hungry nightmare of there on making & egos
Thanks for your enlightening discussion. It’s a treat to see Ed Helms jump in on this.
The point was to indoctrinate, not enlighten. They could've gotten Curtis on very easily, he does podcasts all the time.
I've been living in the back catalog and I gotta say guys I'm excited to be here today
Greetings from somebody else who's also in the backlogs and pops up for new episodes sometimes
Holy Smokes!!! BTB moving up in the world!!! Let's go
Seems the heirs of successful people want to bake in their position into the structure of society without feeling the need to actually do anything useful/great themselves.
Monarchies here functioned a bit like family operations where every part of the family are stakeholders in keeping it all together. Not just the sovereign, the frontal face. Of course they can have internal feuds of procedures, which get complicated when half the houses are intermarried.
Amen 👏👏💯
Good to see Ed Helms out again and doing well, appreciate this content and subject matter and for once with these types of pods it's not a 5 minute superficial video that could be gleaned from a single google search about a topic with clickbait titles, it's actual content.
"I was a nerd on Usenet in the 80s and didn't like that nerds in the 90s got to come be nerds and actually made Usenet actually cool and now I'm forever mad that younger people made me not cool anymore."
You believe what others say, outsourcing your thinking. Read his work, then comment. You’re accepting things that are so silly no one could believe them. Why do you?
As a person labelled "gifted", it's always such a staunch reminder of "what way I could have went down". I think I have to thank my socialist cultural background, so to speak, for steering away from alt-right, the moment the word "right" enter the picture.
Edit: to put in context: I already knew, veeery well, who Rothbard and Hoppe are, what are their believes, I might or might not still have some of their books....
Very intellectual of you
Glad you didn’t fall down the rabbit hole.
Bad luck despite being "gifted" is also a good deterant. Because you realize, it's got nothing to do with your "skills"
Curtis Yarvin is your favorite pseudointellectual's favorite pseudointellectual.
he's the MF DOOM of people who inexplicably smell like soup
Modern day Ayn Rand?
@@SgtKaneGunlock👏
Exactly - Vance and Yarvin etc, think of themselves as geniuses, as super intellectual and super entitled… why???? Arrogant fuckers and haters, that’s all they are
man Ed helms is an awesome guest! Thank you for doing the video feed on youtube.
FYI: the concept of "the Cathedral" comes from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond which is kind of a manifesto of open source development that's highly regarded in hacker culture. The "Cathedral" model stands for the traditional method of development (and organizing groups of programmers) while the "Bazaar" model stands for a sort of anarchism (or communism) kept in control by a benevolent dictator (the open source method).
It's important to note that the "benevolent dictator" is a dictator for exactly as long as they are benevolent - if there are significant disagreements about how a project is run, the dissidents can and do split off to try things their way instead. It's typically more like stewardship than dictatorship. This is possible because open source software can be copied and modified freely, so the cost to splinter is essentially zero, you just need to convince people that your version is worth switching to.
This is a different Cathedral, then. Yarvin's concept of the cathedral refers to a structure of thought/belief enforcement. The enforcement comes from making the throught/belief structue ubiquitous in large part and violence in few occasions. Media and academia is the cathedral in America and largely Western Civ. Other ears and civilazations have different cathedrals makeups.
@@douglascalder2600 Yarvin's Cathedral is clearly and extension of Raymond's hacker subculture philosophy to main stream culture, it uses the exact same arguments for why a flat non- hierarchic power structure governed by a dictator is more efficient than hierarchic structures with many levels like we have in our societies. It simply applies the philosophy of open source software development to society as a whole.
I though that as well, but TC&B is from 1997 and according to to this podcast, Yarvin's use is a few years earlier.
And -- I had to double-check this -- Raymond's cathedral was more of a "too many cooks". You were supposed to think of how actual cathedrals were designed by one person. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't the one true way to design software.
Photographic evidence that leather jackets do _not_ in fact make everyone look cool
Oh c'mon, Mr. Anarchist. If you didn't know who he was and his jacket was covered in crust punk patches, you wouldn't say that.
Frumpy looking guys trying to enhance their street cred with black leather, looks like a 90s IT dept. guy.
I am just amazed. From the action of a few school bullies, creates Curtis Yarvin, Yarvin creates Thiel, Thiel creates Vance. Thiel money propping the chaos that is Trump. Trump and Vance candidates for US 1 and 2.
That is one a hell of a butterfly effect.
its not just school bullies, its a personality disorder issue mostly.
@@Shonbon17I would certainly agree with that! Very disturbing.
I have new respect for Ed helms. It always surprises me when I find out that one of these guys has brains and a strong moral compass. It's a nice surprise and I will follow Mr helms with a little more interest. He's a funny guy.
I really doubt any major US news outlet would never publish the FBI files today
Yarvin finding a social circle sure to a complete accident of the state of computers at the time and immediately extrapolating an entire worldview about the “natural” organization of society from that is so on the nose I can’t stand it
Oh Ed Helms is a Church Committee and the exposure of the crimes of Nixon nerd. 4:42 that’s why he’s on Behind the Bastards. Good for y’all. Glad to hear Helms has some to contribute to the conversation here via genuine interest. 🎉
Esp grateful for Robert’s depth of knowledge re: the early days of the internet this episode.
And all of a sudden the illogical leaps the rightmost part of the GOP made for Trump - their perceived great man - makes a terrifying amount of sense now. 49:06
So this fellow wasn’t shitposting at all. He was signposting. 1:05:18
1:08:24 is this idea of society coming from the same intellectual tradition as libertarian floating city attempts. Vaguely recalling the BTB episode about those as I listen to this episode.
See also: Peter the great. Young monarch with WAY TOO much power and very little sense. Or desire to be a fair and/or just ruler. Cruelty for the fuck of it was just way too easy for him vs actually considering the implications of his actions as Czar. 1:15:38
Him skipping 2 grades after coming back from overseas makes it seem like the US school system is just trash. Skipping grades in elementary school is like...nothing. Skipping in high-school is a bit more impressive.
Also not mentioned is that kids don’t HAVE to skip grades. Parents can intervene and it’s often the smarter thing to do if a kid may not be mature enough to handle it.
It is trash, it's main function is to get kids used to following rules for their future bosses.
@@prodigal_southernersuch a simplistic statement for such a massive concept as public education.
"Beware of those who answer problems that require books and arguments with single sentences".
@@starsiegeRoks i get what you're saying, and sure, there's some more nuance, but my private school education basically did the same thing. it's just a difference in the kind of job, the kind of boss. none of us can live without working unless we're really, really lucky, so what greater purpose could it really serve?
@ndrew teaching critical thinking and a rounded view of the world.
I don't have the time stamp, and this is very pedantic, but the Palantir is not a ring. It's a seeing stone that's connected to the few other seeing stones left in Middle Earth, and the whole system was corrupted by Sauron, which in turn corrupted the wizard in charge of the Palantir and anyone else that used it. You still got the point across, but I watch too much "Um Actually" to let that claim slide
A Moldbug BtB? Let's gooooooo
I feel like the people that follow this guy are people that were in the gifted and talented program in elementary school and never got over their superiority complex
Remedial supposed adults to be sure
Ed Helms calling out Moldbug's crap in the first 15 mins is very funny 13:54
The idea that somebody can just move to a different fiefdom/kingdom/dictatorship/whatever reminds me of people who espouse "states' rights" over human rights. You want an abortion/mixed race marriage/healthcare? Just go to a different state.
Yeah and how they justify business owners treating their employees like shit. “You can just leave”
Who is granting you these rights?
Right, being a good coder makes you an expert on everything & qualified to rule. 😮
Love Ed Helms and love the podcast, greetings from Egypt 🇪🇬
Discerning between autocracy and democracy by calling them privately and publicly owned is actually a pretty useful and surprisingly honest perspective, coming from a rightoid *unt.
This might be the first time Robert's put some effort into his appearance since pre-pandemic.
Wow, yeah. He's wearing a shirt with buttons
Not going to be that guy, but I am glad Robert is somewhat cleaning himself more. Seriously cleaning yourself is good for mental health even if it a little bit.
Ed Helms appearing was just as surprising as when he appeared on Aunty Donna
Egg
Oh wow! I’ve listened to the pod for a long time but this is the first time I’ve seen your faces! You’re both great.
For more background on The Cathedral, read Eric S Raymond's (ESR) The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Thanks for this. I was trying to explain to some people who is and why his ideas are dangerous a few weeks ago. Now, I can just send them a link.
Seriously impressed by Helms
Ed, as always, was brilliant. What a lovely dude.
I don't know if we're supposed to feel seen and heard or insulted by the midnight content drop lol
Seen. Definitely seen.
Those are in fact the same thing
Yes.
Oh shit, Ed Helms. I met him once at the hotel I work at. Cool dude. Pretty chill.
Brah looks like Lizzie McGuire's dad. I've read Patchwork and as a political tract, it's incredibly silly...like some edgy teen who read Plato's The Republic and decided to write their own version, but only like, "Totally radical and eXtreme!"
36:30 Yarvin wasn't a member of Cult of the Dead Cow, he just wrote some textfiles or what was called 't-files' (source: Sifu Tweety Fish on bluesky, a cDc member)
It always enlightening to learn more about those who are actively trying to destroy our Democratic Republic. I've heard of Mr. Yarvin before but this deep dive is very eye opening.
Curtis Yarvin is basically Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of John Kennedy Toole's magnum opus "A Confederacy Of Dunces."
...On BATH SALTS.
So, with more exfoliated skin?
You beat me by 8 days. ❤
For the love of god, do one on Murray Rothbard. Dude was a nuclear power plant of bastard energy.
Why is it so hard for folks to recognise their own narcissism? Especially for folks who would be on the bottom of any natural hierarchy.
The antonym for neurotypical that you're looking for is "neurodivergent", Robert XD At least I think so. It's less cumbersome than aneurotypical.
11:11:40 I wasn't watching the vid at that moment and had to go back and figure out where that sound drop had come from, but it's just a really good, not-a-joke, honest-to-goodness British accent from Sophie.
Love your show! Ed Helms an alum from my high school in Atlanta, Westminster!
Very good conversation here .. As someone who loves philosophy and mental exercise it brings I also feel that basic idea of it should never be understood a solution to society's problems; it's more like a mathematics way of exploring concepts by pushing them to a limit and see what's happening there. This should never be understood as our physical reality and most clever people know that.
Yep, ther is definitly value and it can push ideas to think through, like in case the trolley problem thats really more questioning what do people value and make that aware in a hypothesis. t gas value and are realy not bad tools to dissect arguments, but yeah its that exercises, not real. , through it might help in a moral compass?! Or not in that case.
I'm fascinated to listen to this one. I just found BTB a week or two ago after seeing The Apprentice in the theatre with a friend who was watching it twice in three days for a second view of the psychology.
Part badger has a very wind in the willows feel to it, also hacking used to mean doing computer stuff for fun, cracking was going where you did not belong, early computer wizards hated muggles stealing their words
“The kind of academics that school rewards “. Is pretty circular kind of like saying the kind of athleticism that sports rewards.
holy shit. i've been following curtis for over a decade now (hate following, because i consider his ideological lean not just dangerous, but regressive as fuck) - i'm stokedddd
It's amazing how many of us read his stuff but are repulsed by it 😂 what kind of self harm is this?
@@rblongfellow i consider it my duty as a person who wants to understand the widest breadth of what humanity is. Also, it reinforces my jovial misanthropic worldview :P - i mean, I listen to Knowledge Fight and Behind the Bastards as my most mainstream news sources LOL
@@gregmurphy8059 there is something oddly fun about it. And it exercises the mind.
@@rblongfellow i would agree totally- i think one reason the pendulum of ideology can swing back is that people don't engage with why/how their arguments are solid. They cannot defend their beliefs and they often are even worse at explaining why someone might believe otherwise. The moment someone opposing some ideas can do that with their side, they take in most anyone whos open to being captured. Idk
@@gregmurphy8059 couldn't agree more. People are reluctant to put their own beliefs/ideology to the test, but that is the only way to uncover if it holds water.
I was kinda on the fence about the topic, but when I saw Ed Helms was the guest!!!!! Hit play!
1:06:45 I'm pretty sure the use of "cathedral" as a metaphor for institutions who direct the way of thinking in a society is not something Yarvin thought of. I've heard of it in 90s during Balkan wars: establishing new institutions, system of thinking, rules and philosophy, as a "new cathedral". (I am not an expert - maybe it's much older than that)
I wondered if it was a reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," a philosophical thesis on software development by Eric S. Raymond (a prominent hacker-historian whose brain eventually turned to mush).
This made me realize that I’m probably in very small minority of your audience: I don’t watch The Office and I still haven’t gotten around to watching The Hangover.
The Hangover isn't worth it, but the Office is
I only really know him from The Daily Show.
@@Dinglehoppers779 I’ve tried a few times, but I can’t get through how cringie Micheal Scott is.
@@dawntower3011 Fair enough. If that's not your style, then it's not for you. I think from an objective perspective, it is a well constructed show, but that doesn't mean everyone will or has to enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy a show, why waste your limited time on earth watching it
Same. 74;yo lawyer. Fascinating
1:08:47 The host is incorrect on this, Yarvin endorses a board that has the power to hire and fire the state CEO, he refers to the system as an accountable monarchy.
Terrible
Can you cover Anton Long and the o9a/Atomwaffen and Nick Land? They are even more shadowy, and also a big threat to this country. Probably more interesting too.
Land would be such a difficult figure to dissect. That episode would really be for the philosophy nerds. Many of these alt right weirdos claim to love Land, but I don’t really think they understand 95% of his original core philosophical formulations. They only know his most late stage, cooked, neo-reactionary shitpostings. For example, the eACC crowd cites him while presenting something antithetical to his position.
@@andrewtrust1021 yeah it would be kind of like the Lord Aspinall episode. First would talk about more reasonable things like his initial ideas on racial discrimination and class (surprisingly reasonable) then suddenly the second episode goes nuts. Maybe a third episode on the o9a continuing this.
“Mencius Moldbug” straight up sounds like a Harry Potter side character.
SIDE NOTE: It is pronounced MEN-see-us. It’s the name European scholars gave to him because they Latinized his Chinese name.
Thanks for covering Curtis Yarvin. I didn't know who he was until I heard Anthony Scaramucci mention him and suggest that people start looking into him. Pretty shocking. Definitely something people need to be aware of. Monster indeed but absolutely fascinating to hear this guy's whole history and it's relevance to current politicians
I've synopsis cliff notes read some, I got the understanding of the bs concepts & that was enough.
Ed Helms appearing made me jump.Such a cool guest get
I just moved to media. And have gone on an absolute deep dive into this stuff. It's so fucking interesting.
A playthrough of Crusader Kings or even 5 minutes on the subreddit is a sufficient counter argument to monarchy. Even in an ideal situation where you start with Aragorn, you eventually need to deal with a Denethor or an inbred teenager, bereft of awareness of reality, who wants a horse to be the pope
are we sure curtis yarvin isnt an adam driver character?
Or Markiplier's dad.
I think of him as Fascist Otacon.
Badger, Badger, Mushroom, Mushroom had a deeper significance than I thought.
Snaaaaake.
Yep. It tracks.
☝️
I used to chat on TalkCity back in the late nineties and early 2000s. Fun times!
Honestly, this sounds less like a monarchy and more like Nazism, especially with the DNA/IQ angle.
For this one the visual really helped because I had no idea who Ed Helms was by name.
I know it's easy to think about the constant wars of the absolute monarchs, but whenever they talk about a single great leader, my mind goes immediately to the ineptitude of Mao Zedong and _The Great Leap Forward,_ the catastrophic economic campaign that directly led to the death of millions of his own people by starvation.
Winning the Chinese Civil War was pretty ept
@@monkeykingeater of course, but if there was any sense in the world, people like Mao and Stalin would have retired as heroes after winning their wars. Clearly they didn't also have the aptitude for administration
Mao falls probably into monarchs thou. ok kim yung il maybe moree claim, but , mao did pretty much get the one absolute leader by divinte right and, no different than a crazy king
Yeah ironically the authorian communist regimes show why abluslte monarch, especially the one with other of people will even worse today then were in 1700s and 1800s
@marocat4749 I agree with your instinct to lump then together. Autocracies tend to produce similarly bad results regardless of ideological windrow dressing.
Ed helms was a surprisingly wonderful guest. Please have him back!
I paused this video and watched a couple videos of Yarvin. He is clearly smarter than me but it seems like he spent to much time alone without someone challenging his ideas. Very scary that Vance is listening to him.
This is required listening for anyone who is curious about the current political situation
Seeing Ed Helm was genuinely shocking, which makes sense now I know he is hosting that Snafu season because the Snafu advert on ad breaks for BTB seemed suprisingly leftist/anti authoritarian.
Listening to Curtis Yarvin's "ideas" is like pulling teeth. Or having teeth pulled.
If only he would actually cover Yarvin's ideas... strewth