Interview with Curtis Yarvin
Curtis Yarvin is an American blogger also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug.
Right-Justified
Contents
Max Raskin: Where did your pen name — “Mencius Moldbug” — come from?
Curtis Yarvin: It came from two different handles that I was using in different places. I would very occasionally post on Reddit or Hacker News. Sometimes I would get banned and I would choose the name of a new classical figure, and I just happened to land on Mencius. And then I was doing some economics posting, and I posted something about gold, but I said mold instead of gold because I was talking about something with a hypothetical restricted supply. That caused me to choose, maybe at a later date, the handle Moldbug instead of Goldbug.
MR: Let me ask you about writing — just as a technical tool, what do you write on? Do you handwrite? Type?
CY: I generally write things in the blog editor itself. So when I write for Substack, I write in the Substack editor, which is really quite good and has a decent level of WYSIWYG.
MR: What’s WYSIWYG?
CY: What you see is what you get. So it’s the same in the editor as on the screen.
This is important because I’m going to give away one of my literary secrets here. People may start copying me. One of my secrets is that if you read my paragraphs, you’ll often notice that they’re abnormally well right-justified. They have nice clean lines on the right. Now there’s a lot of software in desktop publishing software that will do this for you by putting little spaces, but that looks unclean. But what’s even better, however, is if your words just naturally happen to line up nicely on the right. So how do you do that? It’s very simple. You basically write your paragraph. And then if it looks a little jagged on the right, you’re like, “Okay, how can I edit this to make it a little less jagged?” Normally, ideally, what you’re doing in order to do that is cut words.
MR: But you add them!
CY: So basically what you have is what Sigmund Freud would’ve called an anal-retentive way of tightening up your prose and editing as you go, simply because you’re just trying to make it fit cleanly on the right.
Typing vs. Writing
MR: Do you have an editor?
CY: No.
MR: Why not?
CY: I probably should.
MR: If I’m being totally honest, I just can’t get through a single thing on Unqualified Reservations.
CY: As I get older, sometimes copy mistakes appear in my work. I used to have very little of that. Definitely for the upcoming Gray Mirror (the book), I’ll have an editor. That’s the book I’ve been long promising and then my life got somewhat disrupted, and I basically restarted on a new draft because I have a slightly different approach. That will definitely be edited.
MR: Why do so many people in the neo-reactionary space have an aversion to editors? Why not just make things clear to your average reader?
CY: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of levels of editing. Right? First of all, you could ask Thomas Carlyle why he didn’t use editors to make the stuff clear.
MR: That’s what I would ask him, but he’s dead.
CY: You would ask him, and he would tell you that history does not depend on the average reader. That if you’re basically there to maximize your sales to the average reader, you’re basically writing to make money.
There are many, many benefits in not being clear to the average reader.
Is Marx clear to the average reader? I don’t think anybody ever understood Das Kapital. I don’t think it makes any sense at all. And yet, what are Marx’s revenues? What are his royalties? They’re immense, they’re enormous.
MR: I just mean — why not be clearer to the average reader of your blog?
CY: Most of my Unqualified Reservation stuff was basically posted as a first draft. I try to do a little better than that with my stuff now. Something that’s a book is a completely different thing.
I’m an internet poster. I’m a poster, not a writer. I can pretend to be a writer, but really what I am is a poster. A poster posts. He doesn’t compose something and put it through a process. He posts. It’s like the difference between blitz chess and regular chess.
MR: That’s like what Truman Capote said about On The Road. He said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
CY: Yeah, exactly. I don’t write, I type. And excuse me, can Truman Capote argue with Jack Kerouac’s sales? I don’t think so. It basically becomes, in a way, the difference between a live album and a studio album.
Jews for Mises
MR: Did people like Mises and Menger and Rothbard influence your polemics?
CY: I write much less like Mises and much more Hunter Thompson. I think, in fact, you could describe my style in some ways as Mises meets Hunter Thompson.
MR: When I was in high school, I had a shirt that said, “Jews for Mises.”
CY: I like that. I like that. I love the Mises Institute to death. It’s frozen in ideological time in a way.
Gen X-er
CY: Max, I got to ask. Raskin is a common name. Are you related to Marcus Raskin or Jef Raskin?
MR: I randomly ran into Marcus’ son, Jamie Raskin, who was campaigning at a Metro stop in Bethesda and we spoke about it, and we think we are probably related way back from Smolensk.
CY: Yeah, I believe that.
MR: What do you think was your most listened to band last year?
CY: It might well have been Broken Social Scene. It could’ve been New Order. There’s a lot of Gen X music still being made.
One band I have huge respect for is Shriek Back, which is this XTC spinoff band. But these guys are in their sixties and they’re still making amazing techno dance albums, amazing lyrics.
MR: You like that Gen X stuff?
CY: Yeah, I’m a total Gen X motherfucker.
So basically Skinny Puppy for a while. There’s a great Skinny Puppy spinoff album called Doubting Thomas, which is just Skinny Puppy with Nivek Ogre.
MR: Could you tell me what your most listened-to songs were last year?
CY: I don’t do songs. I do albums. I’m a Gen X-er. I’m sorry. We don’t do songs. We listen to albums.
MR: Do you do re-watch any TV shows?
CY: Yeah. With my various permutations in my family, I think I’ve watched The Sopranos four times and maybe The Wire two or three times.
The Wire is close to as good as The Sopranos.
MR: I hate The Wire, but I think The Sopranos is brilliant.
CY: With one exception: the sixth season of The Sopranos is not canon as far as I’m concerned.
It didn’t happen. They were phoning it in by that point.
MR: I don’t agree with you.
But The Wire is like David Foster Wallace — it’s tedious and smart and not pleasurable to watch.
CY: It could be edited down considerably. It tries to be clever at you, but there’s a good core there.
I think my son is old enough to watch The Shield. I need to re-watch The Shield.
Turbo America vs. Fall of Empire
MR: You must consume massive amounts of content.
CY: I read very fast and completely randomly, and I will follow links.
MR: Do you go on Twitter?
CY: I don’t have a Twitter account. I’ll sometimes basically surf Twitter, which is not a terribly good habit.
I read a lot of stuff on Archive.org. I have less times for reading than I used to, which sucks.
MR: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
CY: There’s really only one set of kinetic events going on in the world and that’s in the Ukraine. I like to follow the Ukraine War, so I’ll check that out on Twitter or something.
MR: What do you mean kinetic events?
CY: Kinetic. The future is determined by human action, right? In a sense, the importance of the conflict in the Ukraine is that it’s really a battle that could go either way, it still seems to me in many ways. The thing about war is that war is a kind of impersonal judgment. You can’t spin the output of a war. Somebody won, somebody lost.
MR: Oh, you mean kinetic as opposed to potential. There’s actually something happening.
CY: Yeah, there’s actually something happening.
CY: So the importance of this conflict is that in many ways it determines the difference between a Balaji Srinivasan “the American empire is falling” picture of the future and a Niccolo Soldo “turbo America” picture of the future. I think there’s some truth to a falling of empire and there’s also some truth to turbo America.
MR: I know Balaji, I don’t know the other guy.
CY: He’s on Twitter. He does interviews. You should go and read his interview with me because it’s going to have a very different tone than your interview with me.
MR: Why?
CY: Because it’s less Mises and more Hunter Thompson.
My ex even liked it, so there.
MR: Do you load up and have a bunch of links bookmarked?
CY: No, no. I have no organizational structure and I never did.
MR: Are you an organized person?
CY: Not terribly.
MR: Do you get a lot of emails every day?
CY: I get a lot of emails. I could be better at answering them all. I actually never get hostile emails, which is something very interesting. Please don’t read this and be an asshole, and make an exception to that.
But I don’t get a whole lot of hostile contact in general. Sometimes I’ll get a contact from a journalist who’s clearly up to no good, but they’re at least pretending. It’s actually by no means as disturbing as you might expect to open my email.
Let me pause this for a second. My doorbell just rang. I’ll be right back.
MR: They’re coming for you.
CY: They’re watching.
MR: They’re swatting you.
CY: [Returns] My son just ordered some food. It’s so easy taking care of kids when they can do their own Uber Eats orders.
Reddit Atheist
MR: Do you have a morning practice? Do you have any rituals?
CY: No, I’m completely free of rituals.
MR: Do you believe in God?
CY: No.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
CY: No, I believe in just physics. I’m a Redditor atheist, basically.
Just an unforgivably materialist and completely soulless person.
MR: Any meditation?
CY: I’ll do what are effectively meditation exercises to rest or go to sleep, but not to alert concentration, which is what a meditation is really supposed to do.
MR: Do you have difficulty falling asleep?
CY: Not great difficulty.
MR: When do you go to bed usually?
CY: I would say normal parent hours, like 10:30, 11:00 because I drive my daughter to school at 8:00 in the morning.
MR: Do you exercise?
CY: No, not really. I mean, I walk a lot, but that’s it…
MR: Do you have any phone apps that you would recommend that people might not have heard of?
CY: Definitely not.
MR: What about any life hacks or productivity hacks?
CY: No, I’m not a life hacking, productivity hacking kind of person.
Belief and Flossing
MR: Do you floss?
CY: Yes. Otherwise, I experience serious bone decay.
Moreover, everyone, especially people my age, should know that gum bacteria have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, at least plausibly. So when you don’t floss, just think of these little bugs just soaking their way up into your head.
MR: Who’s the first thinker that comes to your mind right now?
CY: Mises.
He didn’t wear his beard the way you do. Do you wear your facial hair that way for religious reasons or because you like it, or both?
MR: Both.
This is also during the omer and you’re not supposed to cut your hair.
CY: One of the things I always liked and admired about Orthodox Judaism — someone can ask “But how do you believe in all that?” And someone answers, “That’s not the point. The point is not to believe in it. The point is just you have to do it. It doesn’t matter.”
First of all, it doesn’t matter what you believe. And second of all, if you do it, you’re going to end up believing in it anyway. Is that accurate?
MR: When the Jews accepted the Torah, they say "we will do, and we will listen.” There’s a lot of importance placed on the order of those words.
It reminds me of this joke about Niels Bohr. His has his students over for dinner one night and they saw that he had a horseshoe over his door. And they were confused because he’s this big atheist and materialist. So they asked him what he was doing with the horseshoe…did he really believe in it?
He says, “No, no, I don’t believe in it. But the people who told me to do it, they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
CY: That’s very much the cousin of Pascal’s bet, of course.
I had a good Jewish experience recently up at Yale because a certain society whose name will go unmentioned was going to invite me to speak at Yale. And then they had some internal conflicts and decided I couldn’t be invited at all. Their founder, who is an absolute mensch, whose name I’m not going to mention, said, “Fine, let’s do it in my house.” So we did it at his house and it was an amazingly fun experience for everyone who was there.
Austrian Economics
MR: Would you call yourself an Austrian?
CY: I think of myself more as an Austro-mercantilist. I think that if you unite the visions of Mises and Friedrich List, I think you have a basically correct system.
List writes his National System of Political Economy in the 1840s, which I recommend certainly for any Austrian because he’s as good a writer as Mises and Rothbard, which is not a common thing.
I mean, the only real economics is literary economics. All this math just needs to be just flushed. Fine, great, you’re good at math — go make some money in the stock market. But stop trying to run monetary policy. It’s embarrassing. It’s a shanda.
Anyway, basically one of the great things about List’s book is that he’s constantly insisting that Adam Smith is right. And Adam Smith, who perhaps we can think of as the proto-Austrian, is basically doing Newtonian physics. He’s right, given the assumptions or the envelope within which he’s working.
If you assume that there is no such thing as a nation and that you’re basically solving problems in the interest of consumers everywhere, what List calls “cosmopolitical economy,” rather than political economy, that is, if you assume cosmopolis, you get Adam Smith’s view on free trade. But if you relax the assumption of cosmopolis and you basically say, “No, actually the world is divided into a number of essentially sovereign firms,” — even in a purely Austrian framework, you get completely different results.
MR: Mises calls that thymology and it’s a separate question from what he calls praxeology and economics.
CY: I don’t remember the thymology discussion because I basically already read all of Mises and Rothbard before I came to List. But tell me more about Mises’s interpretation of this question.
MR: So classical economics says all other things being equal…blah blah blah…free trade good because of comparative advantage and Ricardo…blah blah blah.
CY: Cosmopolis, yep. Right.
MR: But you can easily create a hypothetical — “What if you lived on an island nation and if you had free trade, a virus would enter the country and wipe everyone out?”
Obviously free trade not good in that case.
I don’t think this poses a problem for the Mises or classical economics worldview because they’re not saying free trade is apodictically good; they’re saying in certain situations it increases material output. But I think the whole thing about Austrian economics is how little it says about the world.
CY: Yeah, right. The thing is that Austrian economics, while apodictically correct, is easily used in directions where it is not apodictically correct.
MR: Correct. I think a perfect example of that is with the non-existence of inflation after the Financial Crisis of ’08. A lot of Austrians were saying the dollar’s going to hyperinflate because of all the quantitative easing. That didn’t happen. But all the old school Austrians said, “Well, we don’t actually have a view on this particular instance…”
CY: But people extrapolate, of course. It’s like folk Austrianism. Folk Austrianism tells you that the dollar is going to hyperinflate. But I think if you’re actually applying the tenets of it properly, the risk of hyperdeflation may be greater because, essentially, the deflation involves a gumming up or breakage of the machines that put spending power into the economy.
MR: So if someone asked you, are you an Austrian? Would you say yes or no?
CY: Well, I’m not a citizen of Austria, so no. I am an Austrian in spirit. I think I’m the right kind of Austrian, but I disagree with most other Austrians about issues like free trade and so forth.
Father Yarvin
MR: It seems like you place a pretty big value on being precise and thinking through things. Are you at all a team player where you’re like, “Basically, I’m a Republican?”
CY: No, I’ve never been a team player. Not only have I never wanted to be a team player, I’ve never even really wanted to be a team leader.
MR: Why not?
CY: It’s the wrong phenotype. It’s not me. It’s basically like the European division of society in which there are kings, priests, warriors, artisans, laborers, and merchants. Right? And I’m a priest. That’s just my role.
MR: Is it weird that this community has made you its leader?
CY: Well, I try to avoid any leading or contributing to any community. I don’t think there should be a community. I think communities are not bad, but poorly adapted to the modern world. The modern world is not a world of community. It’s a world of atomization.
MR: Yeah, it’s terrible.
CY: It’s terrible. And the thing is that it’s terrible, but you can’t put your head in the sand and make it go away. It’s terrible, but it is what it is. And you have to live in the world as it is and live up to its spirit.
So there are all these attempts to start a community or a political party or something. My God, it’s horrifying. Go ahead, just start your militia or whatever. Right? How’s it working out for you? Great.
MR: Are you a fan of Nick Szabo?
CY: It's funny. Nick and I were on each other's blogrolls. If you remember what a blogroll is, it's this ancient thing back when the internet didn't suck. Basically, social networking on the internet has been continuously declining for my entire post-pubescent life. It's been declining since the '80s.
MR: From Usenet down.
CY: From Usenet down. It's a vertiginous drop.
Any case, I'm arguing with Nick. I say something somewhat anti-revolutionary and he's like, "Your theory of politics is exactly the same as Charles I," which didn't really have maybe the desired intent because it caused me to say, "Well, what exactly is Charles I’s theory?”
Maybe he's part of my origin story.
Marx and Bronze Age Pervert
MR: Of the mainstream people, who do you like reading or watching?
CY: Does Houellebecq count?
MR: No.
CY: There's so little worth reading these days.
MR: Why do you still read?
CY: I hardly ever read a book currently published today. The only things that are worth reading are things basically that have a perspective outside what is produced today. That's very rare now. Have you read Bronze Age Mindset?
MR: I pretend to have read it.
CY: Many people did that with Marx. That's a really good sign — if you're a writer, that people pretend you have read your books.
Bronze Age Pervert has been very successful with that book. That's because the author just has so much gravitas that he can really put himself beyond the present and inspire a cult of being outside it. But I'll bet that's really hard to do and that takes a very impressive person to do.
I'm not honestly sure I'm as impressive of a person as Bronze Age Pervert. So one thing that I take care to do is basically I don't get involved in any community. Sure, I'll go to parties.
MR: Do you have friends who have no idea who you are?
CY: That’s not really possible. Alas…
Shirts and Shoes
MR: Do you care about clothing?
CY: Yes, I do. I don't care about clothing enough. I think that everyone should care about clothing more than they do. But yes, I do care about clothing.
MR: Where do you get your clothes from?
CY: Nordstrom Rack, wherever. It's more a question of having a few interesting pieces of clothing. I got this $200 Japanese t-shirt in Austin once because I needed a t-shirt. When I wear that with some very '70s shades, it makes me look like I walk straight out of The Doors.
MR: You wear sneakers?
CY: No, I don't wear sneakers. I wear either these Israeli walking shoes Naots, or I wear these Australian boots, R.M. Williams.
MR: Do you ever listen to comedy? I know you were on Tim Dillon.
CY: No, I never heard of Tim Dillon before I went on Tim Dillon. I don't listen to much comedy. I mean, everybody's a Dave Chappelle fan, right? It’s like you're talking about basketball, and somebody brings up Jordan. Yeah.
MR: You could still say that you like it.
CY: I love it…I mean, he's also a little past his prime maybe in some ways. But yeah, Dave Chappelle is a god. Right? But I think most comedy sucks. Most comedy is really honestly bad.
MR: Are you going to be in America your whole life, you think?
CY: Unless I have to flee to El Salvador, probably.
MR: Did you have any desire to live anywhere else in the world that you haven't yet lived?
CY: I grew up living in other places in the world.
MR: You're from Nicosia, right?
CY: I spent two years in Nicosia as a diplomat's brat. I failed to solve the separatist problem and so did my dad.
JustWrong
MR: Are you Satoshi Nakamoto?
CY: No.
MR: Do you use ChatGPT?
CY: No, I haven't used it, but I like what other people have done with it.
MR: Why won't you use it?
CY: I just don't really have any call to write boilerplate. It's wonderful that there's this boilerplate generator out there.
MR: What about the doomsday stuff from Eliezer Yudkowsky? I just assume that if you’re from LessWrong community, you’re probably wrong.
CY: I love that. You have this urge to switch sides in this whole Revenge of the Nerds drama. I respect that intuition. It's a very human intuition.