Reflections on Yarvin, Why the Right is Stuck, and Startups as Dictatorships w/ Samo Burja

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today we're releasing a conversation from Turpentine's podcast, Live Players, with Samo Burja. In light of Curtis Yarvin's recent New York Times interview, Samo does a deep dive on Yarvin's ideas and how to apply them to the present moment. Please enjoy the episode.

Samo, so there was an interesting Twitter conversation we were having that I wanted to bring up in this conversation. There was a, you know, Curtis Yarvin has been in the news lately. He did an interview with New York Times. Who could have imagined that? A sign of the vibe shift, if there ever is one. It seems like there's a set of institutions that's really trying to understand what is Curtis's influence on the tech right or on the right more broadly. And then Dorkesh, who's a brilliant interviewer and a mutual friend, had this tweet saying, hey, Curtis really misses the point when he makes this comparison between Apple and the government. And he says Apple can succeed by having a CEO because there's a market that rewards the best CEOs and punishes the worst CEOs. And as a result, we get the winners, the losers fall. And there isn't any huge sort of risk of that. Whereas in government, you don't have this sort of selection mechanism by which the best people can become CEO. And, and the risks of having a bad CEO, a bad leader like a Chavez or Mao or whatever are catastrophic. And thus the analogies from the market to the government don't, don't really hold. And then you had an interesting response. So let's, let's get it together.

My response specifically was because he credited the functionality of private companies to an evolutionary process where that is simply not the case. There is no natural selection that is being run on corporations. Natural selection requires heritable variants with differential survival. So unless you fulfill that criteria, uh, if there is no reproduction, there is no natural selection. And corporations do not reproduce. And when they do reproduce, when they make spinoffs, these are completely new companies that often don't have much or any of the DNA of the previous organization other than perhaps staff and the overlap of staff. But if we're talking about that, then that's an argument for cloning employees. It's sort of not an argument for corporations transferring their bylaws and best practices and there being some sort of mechanistic approach to their functionality. I mean, even Apple is actually a great example. I think it is a functional institution, but a dead player. And a functional institution can persist for a long time after the founder has sort of departed. It can persist, it can be profitable, but it will be unable to adapt to circumstances. Would I be surprised if Apple today was outcompeted by a Chinese firm? Not at all. I think they will be blindsided by future innovation, either coming from the United States or coming from without. And, you know, would the Apple of Steve Jobs have been blindsided? Almost certainly not. So first, I want to dispose of this idea that the market automatically Basically, the profit discipline is what could result in a company, first off, becoming functional, and secondly, acquiring a live player at its helm. You know, a committee, be it a legislative body or be it a not a for-profit board, will necessarily have to act through consensus. By acting through consensus, they're almost certainly going to only go for picks that seem Obvious or a good idea. No board would have voted if they could help it to give, say, twitter.com to Elon Musk. It had to be something of a hostile takeover. It seems an action with a lot of risk, but a lot of downside. Now, I specifically wrote like a long rebuttal of the institutional evolution thesis because I think it's a common misconception. Now, this doesn't mean that market discipline isn't Or that creative destruction, or AKA disruption, isn't important. Employees, machines, real estate are misallocated between functioning firms and non-functioning firms. And if you create a new company that is better at, say, making electric vehicles, society is vastly better off if the electric vehicles making robots are in a Gigafactory and reassigned to the Gigafactory rather than if they're still at General Motors being utilized in a suboptimal way. So straightforwardly, market discipline rewards functionality. There's just insufficient mechanism for it to create functionality. And we could go deeper into, let's say, like the core of the work issues argument. And I feel like the core of it. And by the way, when people respond to an argument and they say, oh, but there are other arguments against, say, I don't know, Curtis Yarwin's position. Well, I can only respond to the arguments that are explicitly written. It's necessarily beyond the scope to say arguments that aren't there. But let's look at the argument that is there. There's this idea that there is unbounded downside In government. I sort of don't believe that at all. I mean, even in the most catastrophic cases, for example, in the Chinese government after Mao, there was a recognition that the policies were disastrous. And in fact, Mao was removed from power before he died multiple times. So he was accountable. In a sense, to at least the other members of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, this is not always the case. Stalin obviously secured his position to such an extreme degree that it was sort of impossible to go with a different leader until, until his death. But, you know, I think that, for example, for China and the Soviet Union, I think the disaster might have been the bad policy, not even the bad leadership. I wonder if someone else were running the same system Stalin was running, would there have been a Ukrainian famine? I think probably so. So in that case, I would put the blame on sort of the fundamental faults related to Bolshevism and the fundamentally incorrect theory of Marxism. And I would actually say that that is probably responsible for more of the problems. And merely, you know, applying groupthink, that doesn't actually solve those problems. If there was a committee in charge of revolutionary Russia or revolutionary China, and we eliminated there being a single leader and instead there's a plurality of them, and everything the committee believes is crazy, the effects would be just as bad. And in fact, we have a historic case study, like, you know, the French Revolution had the Directorate. Which was this sort of revolutionary council or the Committee on Public Safety in France, right? So I think the attempt to just— the assumption that we're just picking— the assumption that basically it kind of doesn't matter what the ideas are of the relevant people running a country. I think that's the assumption I would challenge. So I would say that Actually, the 20th century shows that there are a few ideologies that were just radically incorrect about the nature of the world. They would have been radically disastrous if implemented by a single individual, aka a dictator or a president, or that, but they would have been, and in fact were, just as disastrous when implemented by a committee or a bureaucracy. So does government in fact have greater downside Compared to a private company? In a lot of ways, yes, obviously it has a monopoly on violence. So you can have disastrous wars can be started. The rights of citizens can be trampled. But then also the stakes, the economic stakes are higher. If Apple fails, well, that's just Apple. If the U.S. economy fails, well, then Apple fails anyway. It fails by default. So let's put it this way. The upside of a well-run government is vastly higher also than the upside of well-run Apple.

Yeah. I, yeah, I was also confused by that part of the argument because it seemed to imply that to some extent, if Apple were a committee or, you know, had collective decision-making, it would be safer or something, or there would be less risk when that, that's not the case. Holacracy is a Terrible track.

The riskiest thing is never changing, right?

Exactly.

As the world changes. Exactly.

And, and I think applying it to government.

Yeah, I think, I mean, the same could happen to governments, right?

Yeah.

If the U.S. government remains a static dinosaur, China will outcompete the United States, free market or not, because they know how to use markets. They make smartphones and they make cars and they make AI. And you know what, maybe The US government should be competent too.

Yeah. And I think that's what they're really saying is not that it's less risky to have a committee-led decision-making process. No one wants direct democracy. I think what they're actually saying is a gridlocked government is less riskier than a government that is, you know, making lots of decisions in case you have the wrong person making those decisions. But I would say, I would just echo your point, maybe short-term, but long-term, Especially in a world where the most powerful player sets the agenda, there's no way that the most powerful player is going to be a dead player, so to speak. No way it's going to be a sclerotic bureaucratic entity that can't make decisions because there is going to be a Steve Jobs-led level leader country. Yeah, a country that is going to— it's almost like the innovator's dilemma, but applied to countries. Like, uh, innovation says, you know, big companies can't innovate because they're too busy sort of, you know, protecting their existing resources or focused on, on what they already have. They don't want to disrupt themselves, but, you know, they'll lose to some upstart that is, you know, has a great, you know, live player leading them. And similarly on a, on a country level. So, so I'm not sure what they're advocating for there.

I mean, I think implicitly what they're saying is that all is well. that the United States is not currently in any big problems. So we can kick the can down the road of these fundamental government problems. But I think the other problem here is that there's not just the catastrophic risk of being radically outcompeted. It's the fact that every single government bureaucracy decays from the moment of its founding over time, right? A bureaucracy works the best When you set it up first, because it's like an automated script performing a function. The only thing that changes over time is a greater amount of graft, a greater amount of overstaffing, a greater amount of incompetence, unless a live player like actively resets it. And there's a political reason to expend sort of political energies needed to actively reset it. And I think that happens very infrequently in politics. So it's not just that. Oh, we can just keep things as they are and the government will stay equally incompetent. I think the result will be every single year the government will work a little bit worse. So eventually it hits the tipping point where no amount of private sector innovation can escape omnidirectional taxation, omnidirectional inflation, and like omnidirectional regulation. It's sort of, you know, I think we have to start thinking in a very different way where, you know, normally people talk about Elon Musk having revolutionized the electric car industry and revolutionized space because he's in the United States. But let's consider maybe he did it despite being in the United States, despite having to deal with the government. Now, to be clear, China doesn't have The kind of society that could accept an Elon Musk, but you know, they have their own Jack Ma's and so on, and they can harness them, right? Or this, uh, quant, uh, that leads the recent DeepSeek company. But DeepSeek, for those who've not been following AI news, is this, uh, model that people are disputing for how much it was trained, but no one is disputing that it was trained to a level equivalent to Western models at a vastly lower price point, which suggests mathematical innovation, or at least very efficient code. Compared to how Western companies train these foundational models for the chatbots. So I would say that at the very least, we have to wonder, well, where are all the other Elon Musks if our system is so excellent at it? Why is all the industrial innovation coming out of China right now? And I don't want it to. I do think China is a less free society than the United States, but I think that there's a sort of conflation of like freedom and gridlock, where I think a gridlocked government is actually the enemy of freedom pretty directly because it functions as a bitocracy and it can't help but function as a bitocracy when dealing with its own citizens. So I actually think that the petty tyranny of the bureaucrat also becomes much worse in a gridlocked government than in an agentic government. Imagine a garden. Is overgrown with weeds. In a way, the most toxic weeds, the ones that grow the fastest, that consume the most light, uh, that cause the other plants to fail, those weeds will overgrow your garden. I think that's kind of happening with the U.S. government and U.S. society. And currently we can be a little hopeful that possibly there's some gardening happening and possibly some of the weeds. are going to be plucked off the trees before they kill them, right? Before the vines smother the trees. And, you know, if you want to look at examples, like we don't have to be very theoretical. Let's put it this way. Europe has even more gridlocked governments. And these governments have succeeded in squashing their economies and growth in their economies. Is that really the direction we want to go in? Because remember, it'll be a little worse every single year. Until we course correct. So I really think that there's this, there's this assumption that government is infinitely fragile. And I think the truth of it is more that government is very intermittently functional. It's very hard to set up a functional government. If you set it up, you're kind of set for a century or so, or 50 years or so, but eventually someone has to reset it. Look, I guarantee you the government of Singapore will not be very competent in 50 years. Because it'll have been 70 years since a live player ran it, right? Currently it still works super well. It's like Apple in the first few years after you have a handoff from Steve Jobs, you know, you have your winning product. You're still collecting the benefits. In Singapore's case, the benefits of giving everyone air conditioning, of having clean streets, of having rule of law. All of these things are set up and running. But they're not really self-sustaining. And eventually the civil service in Singapore will come to decay and will come to be like an overgrown weed garden. It'll just take decades for that to happen.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere. From self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming. Fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. So you're saving a pile of money, Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com/turpentine. That's oracle.com/turpentine. Most of you probably know how much the Turpentine team loves Notion, the sponsor of today's episode. We use it every day for editorial planning, transcript markups, project managing, knowledge sharing, and it's where I drop random 3 AM ideas that turn into episodes. Now it has the power of AI built right inside of Notion and woven across our entire workspace. It's been a total game changer for our productivity and focus. We just used it the other day to architect the content schedule for next month across our network. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. The fully integrated Notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. Try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/upstreampod. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com/upstreampod, to try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. That's notion.com/upstreampod.

The other part of this is that democracy, you know, means sort of different things, right? So Curtis likes to say that he wants to return back to democracy under FDR or democracy under Lincoln or under, under Washington, where the executive had more authority. And so it's not just this clear It's kind of like where on the spectrum of sort of capability versus gridlock do you want to be?

I mean, I also think that, you know, if we, if we look at Curtis's ideas, and I think you, you've written also very interesting and high quality reply to Dwarkesh when you note that the United States has had these periodic reboots of government, which, you know, are completely compatible with the constitutional order as it exists. It's just a question of, is there agency behind it, right? And I think that all else equal, I think the presidency is well suited to agentic live individuals choosing to shape things like foreign policy, choosing to deal with bureaucracy, right? This does not mean that, say, a congressional committee couldn't do something very good. But then we have to ask ourselves, how many live players Can be elected in Congress, right? How many are there? So I think that there's definitely a world where it could be Congress that is keeping the bureaucracy accountable. But in a very real sense, that's not where we are politically. In a very real sense, Congress is less democratic than the presidency. It's much harder to unseat enough people. or turn over enough people in Congress for there to be a real change in the cultures that goes back to what it perhaps was in the 19th century, which was this sort of almost debating society of some of America's best minds discussing what the laws should be and discussing what the civil servants should do. In a way, as much as, you know, the king or queen of England devolved their power to Parliament, which then devolved it to the civil service, I wonder whether Congress today is enjoying all the benefits and prestige of being in power, but has long devolved power to unnamed agencies. And then there's an open question. Okay, having set the budget, having delegated so much of law to mere administrative decision-making, right? And the laws that are passed being written by lobbyists and NGOs and so on. You know, I don't know. Does Congress even have a democratic mandate? So I'm not even sure it has a democratic mandate. Maybe it is the heart of oligarchy and the presidency is actually one of the remaining vestiges of democracy where it works the way it's supposed to. So in this sense, again, if by democracy we mean the people have an agenda and they hire people to enact that agenda, clearly the presidency, be left under the Biden administration or right under the Trump administration, It's a more responsive instrument than Congress. So I don't even think the voters are wrong to only focus on the national election rather than the local election. The local elections, let's say local democracy has already been defeated by bureaucracy. National democracy, we're currently running a test as to whether democracy can even on this level overpower bureaucracy. And I think we'll see over the next 4 years. what the results of this test are.

Yeah, I, I think, you know, there are a lot of different ways to read Curtis, and Curtis has lots of ideas which I, I, I don't endorse. You know, you want— you know, it's like almost kind of where on the Curtis train do you want to step off? You know, if you go all the way on the Curtis train, you know, he advocates for sort of, you know, government being a joint stock corporation with, with a board, kind of mimicking— and he actually wants to mimic the market mechanism on a country level. He has this idea called Patchwork, which is kind of like the original network state concept where there would be these competing, you know, countries and states and people, you know, could—

Sketches a very anarcho-capitalist vision, right? And in, in some ways I could see it being desirable. Like, I certainly am in favor of small, like efficient states. Like there's an argument that it's easier to run a Singapore than it is to run a China or to run the United States. So maybe, I don't know, maybe New York should be a city state and you should be free to enter and leave New York as long as you abide by its laws. But yeah, he, he proposes and sketches many different concepts to many years of writing. Like he's a well-known essayist and polemicist. And I think the polemicist angle shouldn't be underrated here where, you know, I, I think there's some element of hyperbole also in his writing.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. And he enjoys provoking and I, I, I think being a gadfly that provokes people, that almost like enrages them, right? Like, I think there's something useful there. And that's part of the reason his ideas have been influential. It's not because people agree with them, all of them, but because once presented, they have us talking about this topic at all. Noam Chomsky was not talking directly about Donald Trump, for example. or Joe Biden. He was talking about Curtis Yarwin. And that is also the function of a gadfly, of the, of the Socrates, of a hyperbole, the provocation. You set a conversation, you open a conversation that people must address. If, you know, you're silent, this conversation might not happen at all. But saying something provocative often has the function of forcing a conversation. It's sort of like, I'm almost tempted to call philosophers and thinkers like this as the equivalent of a building inspection. You know, the inspector shows up and time to check if your establishment is up to the fire code, right? Do you or do you not have arguments for how things are run right now? Here's a challenge. There's no evading it. You must respond. And I think currently, you know, the provocations still stand. There are some responses. But the responses seem less persuasive than they should be for us to continue running things the way we've run things for what, 40 years or so? Like, you know, and the world has changed so much in 40 years, but even the stuff that used to be done super well is not done super well. Like if I were to pick an element of the U.S. government that I truly admire for its efficiency and its, you know, functionality. You know, I'd say DARPA, but people don't even know how DARPA works, right? If you ask congressmen what makes DARPA work, I'm not sure they could give you a coherent answer. So even the congressmen, if they want to replicate it, create more bodies like DARPA, which is also an interesting question. Well, maybe, you know, DARPA is exactly correctly funded. Maybe it couldn't spend 5 or 10 times as much money super well. Or maybe there should not be 5 or 6 competing DARPA. Maybe those get on each other's toes. And et cetera, et cetera. Like, but even if you wanted to multiply that sort of success, there's been very little investigation and focus on doing so. And I think it's because in the United States, the discussion for the longest time was only focused on big versus small government. And so people, they tend to favor a welfare state, a sort of social democratic approach. They always defend a type of government spending. And, you know, people who want a small minarchist state, you know, they don't see a route to full anarcho-capitalism with, you know, the corporation of New York sleekly run like Apple is or, or, or whatever, or SpaceX, even a better example. So they just oppose any sort of growth of government functionality. And I think this discourse has trapped everyone in sort of a false dichotomy. Where the core point that I think Curtis's writing does make, and I've read something like half of his writing, that I strongly agree with is the idea of a small and efficient government where the functions that the government sets out to do, it does very well. I don't think there's anyone who'd even argue that it would not be possible for the Pentagon to spend, let's say, 50% than what it spends currently, and there would be It would be possible to do that in such a way that there would be no reduction in U.S. military power. Anyone who's seen the procurement process, the kind of stuff we're spending, what kind of technologies the Pentagon invests in, they can tell that this thing could work more efficiently. And I think you have to go all the way to anarcho-capitalism, right? Like, minarchism isn't enough for someone to say national defense should be fully privatized. Like, I think, I think because of that, at the very least, we should make the Pentagon efficient. But if you imagine like Republican senators and congressmen, congresspeople trying to make the Pentagon efficient, or generals trying to make the Pentagon efficient, I mean, in a way, the more successful they would be at that task, the less money they'd be paid at retirement. In a way, the retirement budget is the corruption. Inherent in the contractor choices, and that's why Boeing—that's not very well known for keeping airplanes in the sky—is still load-bearing part of U.S. defense rather than say companies with a more recent proven track record. And of course, you know, if Boeing fixes its ability to produce commercial aircraft, I'll have more faith that they are keeping up with all of the. Many developments in aerospace. I've yet to see the Boeing drone and I've yet to see Boeing lobby the U.S. government that you should buy our drones rather than buy our 20th century jet fighters.

Yeah, that's, that's well said. A question you kind of phrased earlier, which is like someone is voted, you know, presumably for a set of policies or a set of agendas that they aim to enact. What should their ability to enact that agenda? Basically. And I think what I, what I want us to, to do is to be honest with the trade-offs that we're taking. If we, if we say that they shouldn't be allowed to, to enact, and it's not have this fairy tale, oh, you know, this committee just makes better decisions. It's really, are we having decisions or are we not having decisions? And it seems like we've not had decisions for quite some time. And, you know, there are pros and cons of that, but it, I would argue, and it seems you argue as well, this is not long-term sustainable relative to another power who does have the ability to make decisions. Now, the contrast to that is the last 5 years, you know, China's decisions around COVID and others seem to have really set them back.

I mean, they really did, but then did our decisions on COVID not set us back? It's a question of who suffered more damage and it's not a very obvious one. To figure out. I mean, China has made mistakes. There's no denying that. But I think a lot of these were like, in a way, high agency mistakes. The lockdowns that they imposed in China, right? That was a fresh exertion of their bureaucracy. But we had lockdowns imposed anyway. So I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure that the Western world was saved from a dumb COVID policy, actually. I think we had an equally dumb COVID policy, right? And perhaps like, if we were to give an example of an actually disastrous Chinese policy, I think it would have to be the one-child policy, which was set up and left running for 50 years. It was only a few years ago, maybe early 2012, 2013, 2014, when China formally abandoned So that was an example of a catastrophic policy that was left running by an authoritarian government that circumvented, you know, a lot of private rights as well, where they just pushed pressure on individuals to not have children. It moderated over the years, right? But the deep problem there perhaps was that a policy was left running way past its expiration date. So I think if you have high agency government and if power can be relatively peacefully transferred to the live players versus having to be stuck in dead player organizations, I think even mistakes can be corrected for much more quickly. If I were to, you know, propose that there was a government that did COVID policy well, I would actually highlight Sweden. And perhaps Sweden has a more functional bureaucratic system than the Western world and China. Because their policy was sort of like, well, old people should stay home. Young people can go to work and young people can go to the beach and young people can have fun and that will actually be okay. And when we look at the statistics, not that many people died in Sweden and the economic damage was less than what we saw in the Western world. And it was less than what was seen in China. I suspected that the Question of disastrous policy. I mean, again, I think the underlying question here is how much, how high is the opportunity cost that we are paying for dysfunctioning government? And I think maybe the Dwarkesh position is that actually we're not paying that high a cost because government can't be that good anyway. And the economy is growing still. And we should just not upset the boat and just be happy with like 2% economic growth or whatever it is, whatever the real number is. And eventually this will result in a very advanced society, in a society that's not scarce. And along the way, there'll be moral failings, but there won't be new moral disasters, right? So for example, you know, the, uh, you're not going to have a curtailment of the rights of the citizens and shipping them off to a gulag or something. But, you know, I'm not sure. I feel like the cost of inefficient government's pretty high. I think, for example, I think we have old people, hundreds of millions of them, who are having their brains melt because Alzheimer's research funding has been completely divorced from actual progress on Alzheimer's, including completely fabricated data. And this is money spent on this. That doesn't— it's not that the money is wasted. It's that the money is spent on fraudulent research. This actively slows down scientific progress. And that's just Alzheimer's, right? What if we think about aging itself? What if we think of the diet, the health of the people, right? What if we think of other policies that are happening and creeping in the Western world, right? In Canada, The most budget efficient way to deal with a sick person is to tell them to kill themselves. You know, I'm joking a little bit, but I'm talking about medically assisted dying, which because of bureaucratic incentives every single year, like 3 or 4% more people than the previous year are fast tracked to it because on a simple budget, budgetary spreadsheet, it's clearly the cheapest treatment option by far. So I think you could easily imagine a world where actually even a bureaucratic government commits heinous atrocities. There's just no one to be held accountable. And, you know, if I look at the streets of San Francisco where I live, and I look at people rotting in the streets, literally having, you know, their legs decompose and suffering horrible drug addiction, I just don't know. I feel like that's an— that is a— atrocity without decision makers. And I think if we add to this, and let's say the Canadian assisted suicide program and the poisoning of the epistemic well of science, I think the opportunity cost we're paying for bad government is very, very high. There's no reason. Okay. The reason we can't live in the future is not because any, no technologies, there's no technology even missing. Right? When people see a clean Japanese city or a clean Chinese city with cheap healthcare and smartphones, they say, oh, they're living in the future. The difference between San Francisco and Tokyo isn't in the quality of the smartphones. It's in the quality of the whole experience of living there. And I think that difference will for always elude us until we have efficient government. And then the cost to human lives, such as the enabling of crime, bad health outcomes, people dying that didn't need to die. I think those will keep, keep playing a role. So I actually think that the cost of inefficient government is astronomical. And so I'm willing to risk it a little bit because we're actually harming a lot of people every single year. with bad policies and bad choices.

Yeah. The, in many ways, Joe Biden was the perfect metaphor for sort of the asleep at the wheel, you know, headless, sleepy Joe. Yeah. Headless government of just, you know, unaccountable bureaucrats who are neither, you know, voted nor sort of are accountable to neither a, you know, a voter base nor a market. Right. You didn't, you don't vote for these 3-letter agencies. You don't vote for these policies. You don't vote for, for, for the, you know, you don't have a say whether these people get to keep their jobs or not. There's no accountability. No one gets fired when Afghanistan happens or something like this. And, and the president can't even fire them either, or a lot of them at least. And I do want to zoom out to briefly just, because I feel like Curtis Yarvin is a, is a misunderstood figure. And I want to just claim that he's had a lot of influence on some other thinkers who are a bit less provocative, although they're provocative in their own way, but a bit more clear. You know, I mentioned the network state idea that Balaji has. I think that was influenced by and built upon Curtis's ideas. We saw, you know, Marc Andreessen has mentioned James Burnham a lot and kind of this idea of managerialism of sort of, we don't have more organizations are oligarchies than we would like to admit, even companies themselves. CEOs feel trapped by their employee base and their investors. And you see Vivek Ramaswamy advocating for ending the sort of administrative state or deep state or giving more power to the authority. I think these are sort of directly taken from Curtis's ideas. I know Thiel is inspired by Curtis. I think Curtis is a lot better, in my opinion, in his analysis of the problems than in his proposed solutions sometimes, which sometimes can be a bit fanciful. But I think, you know, one thing, I think one thing he really inspired is this shift from libertarian to right wing. I think he identified that, you know, there's a lot of Silicon Valley libertarians and took that.

In a way, perhaps he was the first tech right writer.

Exactly. I think, I think there were a lot of libertarians and he basically went to libertarians and said, hey, You're kind of just losing. Like if you're, if you have your hands behind your back and someone's punching you, you're just losing. And so, you know, you don't want to lose, right? It's not fun to lose. And so you need to be willing to seize power. You need to be willing to stand up for yourself. And these ideas of sort of marketplace of ideas or classical liberalism, these are elegant ideas, but in some ways they lose to liberal ideas because they're not playing, but they're, they're, you know, they're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

And even when these ideas were first ascendant, they were advanced by agentic and thoughtful individuals wielding unelected power. I mean, it's, let's be real, the Constitutional Congress and America's founding fathers, they didn't really ask themselves like, you know, but should we be reforming government? I mean, they did to some extent, but what I'm saying is that they, they were not afraid to gamble over what today would be seen as a trivial tax. And I think maybe they were right and we were wrong, right? Like you look at the, what was the tea tax? It was like 3% or something.

Yeah. I don't know the exact number.

Yeah. What's the activation energy for them to demand better government and what's our activation energy? And, you know, they gambled and the upside has been immense. I mean, the upside has arguably been the most successful country in the history of the world. I feel like we should play that roulette a few more times.

Yeah, 100%. That, that, that, that makes sense.

We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Every time I hop on the 101 freeway in SF, I look up at the various tech billboards and think, Damn, turpentine should definitely be up there, and I bet I'm not alone. In a world of endless scrolling and ad blockers, sometimes the most powerful way to reach people is in the real world. That's where AdQuick comes in. The easiest way to book out-of-home ads like billboards, vehicle wraps, and airport displays, the same way you would order an Uber. Started by Instacart alums, AdQuick was born from their own personal struggles to book and measure ad success. AdQuick's audience targeting, campaign management, and analytics bring the precision and efficiency of digital to the real world. Ready to get your brand the attention it deserves? Visit adquick.com today to start reaching your customers in the real world. Again, that's adquick.com. Hey everyone, Erik here. In this environment, founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams. Especially when it comes to engineering. That's why Sean Lanahan started Squad, a specialized global talent firm for top engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org. Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day. Their engineers work in your time zone, follow your processes, and use your tools. Squad has frontend engineers excelling in TypeScript, React, and Next.js ready to onboard to your team today. For backend, Squad engineers are experts at Node.js, Python, Java, and a range of other languages and frameworks. While it may cost more than the freelancer on Upwork billing you for 40 hours but working only 2, Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost, without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit. Squad takes care of sourcing, legal compliance, and local HR for global talent. Increase your velocity without amping up burn.

Visit I think another one of his contributions, at least in my understanding of the world, is you kind of see, you know, it's typical to see sort of the Democrats and the Republicans as, oh, these are 2 parties that believe very different things. And there's just a ping pong, a pendulum shift between one and the other. And reading him, I think I had a better appreciation that in some ways or many ways, A conservative is really often a liberal on a lag. Like, if you look at many people who make up the Republican Party today, many of them used to be former Democrats. And in some ways, it's like, you know, Republicanism is just a Democrat who stopped moving with the left as the left kept moving. And so that you see that there is this kind of pattern and trend towards more leftism. It's almost like the left versus the less left. And so that kind of changed, changed how I view, view things a little, a little bit as well.

I mean, it's, it's, it's the case that the agreement of the 2 political parties on issues such as foreign policy was very deep, right? And that was very apparent, especially in the early 2000s, but somehow it wasn't something that was brought into discourse much. And I think Curtis was one of the first writers that point out that like deep level of ideological agreement. Like, for example, we'll see what happens in the courts, but recently the Trump administration basically undid a bunch of specific interpretations of how hiring should happen in the federal government that prioritized affirmative action and equated affirmative action with civil rights, basically, and proposed that there should be merit. And the question is, well, all these like libertarian and conservative Republicans, if they could have just issued an executive order at any time to do this, why didn't they? And I think the answer is they actually agreed with the Democrats. Maybe their voters didn't, but I think in their heart of hearts, they thought that, no, you must have some affirmative action because it's such a racist government. They will be impossible to fairly evaluate people based on merit. Now, if they said that to their voters, they would lose. But I think this distinction between what are the most fundamental assumptions, it's like, if you're like, oh, the woke left has gone bananas. I like, you have to check your clock. When did the woke left go bananas, sir? They go bananas 2016, 2012, 1988, 1888. I think you're completely correct. You have to. Actually check what someone's views are if you want an alternative to the default course. Because it's not even like the Democratic Party is advancing all left ideas. No, it's a very specific vision of the future of the country set in the middle 20th century. And you know what? In the middle of the 20th century, it kind of worked, right? FDR, Eisenhower, these are all recognizably the predecessors to modern America. But it feels like this direction, this ideological, political ideal direction is stale. Like there's a very real sense in which, you know, China has a different left-wing direction than the U.S. And then, and maybe in some ways for a little bit, they were actually more capitalist. Like, you know, I'm going to say, I don't know, the idea of a special economic zone where you let a region develop for 90 years and you exempt it from regulation. That doesn't sound like a very left-wing idea to me. And that sounds like something the U.S. sure could use. China did that. So let's put it this way. The core ideological direction of the United States and the thesis that it is exploring probably needs a correction. And I think that Curtis was correct in pointing out that there was an ideology that united the mainstream left and the mainstream right. I think people, until someone like him pointed this out, they didn't know this. It's now become almost a common wisdom. But I remember 2010, '11, '12, when I first read these ideas, these were like very out there, very interesting ideas. People would like talk to each other in harsh tones. Oh, have you heard of this writer, Mintzis Molbach? Have you read him? Right? It's almost like, oh, don't tell anyone, but yeah, I read, I read him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. That's, that's underground intellectual influence. And now that he is a public intellectual of the American mainstream, I'm hoping that the quality of the discourse among public intellectuals is only going to improve from now on. And, you know, then we can pick something as maybe the new ideological project of America. And, you know, it doesn't even have to be a hard right agenda, not at all. One of the things I do agree with Curtis where he wrote it is like whoever you know, wants to govern the American people has to be the president of all Americans, right? It has to be the leader of all Americans. And I'm like, yeah, actually, you know, there's some valid folkways in blue state America. I like Whole Foods. Okay. I like Greek. I like my food organic. And, you know, that's not a mistake. That's, that's just something I just endorse. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Thank goodness. I, I'm actually happy conservatives are now shopping more for organic food and like, you know, natural raw stuff. It used to be just granola hippies, right? Crunchy, crunchy people that did this. And I think the health benefits are self-explanatory. So, you know, it's like there are different ways to live on a continent and America is a continent. Has different cities, different climates. And yeah, yeah, whatever the broad ideological direction is, it'll have to be acceptable to everyone. And I think that's true even if America weren't a democracy, right? Even in a place like China, I guarantee you if economic growth stops, the social contract will stop and the Communist Party will bleed all of its legitimacy and be overthrown. That doesn't mean it'll be overthrown by something better, but it means that in every society around the world, in, in a weird minimal sense, this is a minimal definition. And it is a cherry-picked definition, but it is a valid one. In a minimal sense, every government in the world is democratic because it is simply impossible to run a government when 51% of the population disagrees. It's just a question of like, how strongly do you disagree with the government and how sensitive is the government to disagreement, right? But in a very real sense, it takes millions of workers even to make, you know, a totalitarian nightmare country like North Korea work? Like millions of people have to go to work and look at themselves in the mirror and decide that they're okay with this. But if you run the numbers, it's 51%. Doesn't mean it's a good equilibria, but, you know, so, so in that very real sense that I, I think that the more you can harness the broad interests of everyone in society, the more powerful and functional your society will be. And the less it will wage war on itself and with each other. So there is, there is this sense where I do think that there was some powerful political wisdom in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. I'm not necessarily talking about the anthropology, but there was this correct intuition that actually the energies of the nation currently, you know, oppressed by these weird feudal structures, misdirected, suppressed, et cetera, uh, these could be harnessed. And of course, the systems that tried to harness them, some of them were good, some of them were bad. Uh, these became the dominant and powerful political systems of first the 19th century and then the 20th century. So let's put it this way. There's a reason democracy won. It just doesn't mean that democracy is the end of cultural or political evolution. And whatever happens next, will actually recuperate, reuse, and refactor the strengths of both liberalism, which is not democracy itself, right? You can have liberalism implemented through legal systems, et cetera, and democracy, right? Whatever happens next must incorporate this. So I think the answer is like, we're hopefully going to go forward to new undreamt of heights of good government and you know, respect for individual rights and actual economic prosperity and government efficiency. Yeah, I don't think we have yet reached the end of history. How could we? I mean, Francis Fukuyama did not, he, when he wrote the book, he didn't know that TikTok could exist, right? He didn't know social media could exist. He didn't factor in AI. So how could political evolution cease? If technological evolution has not. Yeah.

He himself is having conniptions right now over trying to understand the Trump, you know, Trump, Trump in 2025 and how his thesis, you know, played out.

But also, also like, let me again emphasize, so far I've seen nothing undemocratic. I mean, look, he was elected. It's a second term. No one has gone to jail. There's no political prisoners that have been freshly made. So for now, I don't even see anything fundamentally illiberal culturally. Sure, it's not left-wing, it's culturally right-wing, but I see no, no curtailment of any, any essential part of the American constitutional order. Actually, in some ways, weirdly, more adherence to some you know, some unused parts of the Constitution, let's say.

Yeah. Gearing towards closing here, is there anything else you'd like to, like to say about Curtis Yarvin's influence or sort of, you know, legacies, so to speak, or, or anything else just on the topic that we've, we've discussed?

I think people are far too afraid to read people, to read authors they disagree with. I think it's a flaw of our intellectual culture that we assume that reading someone or appreciating their writing means you must agree with them. It's the mark of an educated mind to be willing to consider, uh, an idea without automatically accepting it. And I think given that we live in one of the most propagandized eras in human history, we all need writers like Curtis Yarwin. We need people, individuals, who pursuing their thoughts and their views of the world. poke us, force us to go to the equivalent of ideological gym where we get stronger. Because this way we'll be less sort of taken in by whatever trends occur in the mass internet, right? The memetic sewers where constantly new crazy ideas are developing, constantly new mind viruses are replicating. Uh, I think we need more people like him. So I would say, I hope that Curtis is the first in a new crop of American intellectuals, truly self-made intellectuals, grassroots intellectuals, people who have been autodidacts or thought outside the box, not people who have been appointed by the legacy institutions like universities or the press or, you know, partisan think tanks. This includes right-wing partisan think tanks. They're awful. They have awful intellectual taste. I can't say how, how badly the epistemic commons of the United States has been managed. So in a way, writers like Curtis are showing the promise of the digital republic of letters, right? We were promised in the 1990s that there would be a revolution in cyberspace, that people could anonymously share their ideas, write long essays. Curtis tried doing it, you know, like it's, it's not quite as advanced as Ender's Game where like the best shitposter is elected president, but it feels like we went a little bit there and we got some intellectual productivity out of the internet, the free internet. So let's hope it lasts.

Yeah, it is crazy how sort of controversial he was. He was even canceled.

Yeah. He's not anymore, actually. Like in reality, he is not, but he was, right? People got like, I bet people got fired for reading him in big tech. And look at them, you know, look at them now. They're all sitting at the inauguration front row. I mean, all the top execs, at least like that's a change.

Yeah, it is. It is pretty incredible. And it's, you know, he's changed his tone a little bit. He's less provocative than he used to be, but his ideas haven't changed a ton. It just seems like the real world has perhaps proven him correct a little bit.

I mean, let's put it this way, you know, I think, I think love him or hate him, Noam Chomsky was also more controversial when he first got started to later on, even though his ideas of the world didn't change at all either. Sometimes it is people assume you are 100% wrong, and then it takes a few decades or years for people to decide you're 30% or 40% right. And, you know, I wouldn't say that Chomsky is 40% right. I just think that, you know, society thought he was 40% right or 50% right. And that's why he was accorded the status and the prestige he had.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So I think, I think Curtis is rising to that status right now where people are like, oh, he's 50% right. Or like, oh, he, he has great critiques. I don't agree with his conclusions. So of course remedies, but I agree with his critiques. What you said earlier, uh, that's not unique. I've heard that from, from dozens of, dozens of people. And, and people aren't afraid to say that anymore. I mean, even Dwarkesh might have said similar things about him. I don't recall.

Well, maybe in a future episode we'll, uh, we'll have a similar skirmish on the internet about, around Bronze Age Pervert or some other non, uh, non-writer.

I look for— I look forward to it. I look forward to the, to the debate.

Well, Asamoah, a great conversation as always. Until next time. Till next time.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co, and let's partner together.