Name: The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310
Uploaded: 2022-08-07T02:45:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310' from The Tim Dillon Show on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-07. Transcript available.

The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310

um and i think you're you're gonna be loud enough uh how's my hair perfect
i need a hair and makeup girl you don't have one you don't have one we can't
afford that uh-huh
i've heard that before we're doing we actually could but you know i mean when
you go over what
you pay i know i know it's too much i know i know and and you just get used
when you're really
bootstrapping yeah you get used to not wasting money that's the whole thing and
i i know so many
people who actually spend more money to feel more legitimate yeah oh yeah that's
called in the
startup industry that's called playing house um and it's everyone including us
does it with the
first money they get right um so and they go let me feel let's feel more
legitimate yeah because we're
spending the money exactly all right let's get this we're in we're in we're in
we're in we don't tell
you when we're in oh we don't we just go in excellent yeah so i can so i so i
can tell my
acid story i'd love to hear it all right let's hear it curtis jarvin is with us
google brilliant
that's a brilliant trick um and um all right so um you know uh tim wanted me to
uh humanize myself
a little bit yes it's good to be human um and so one of the best ways um you
know to humanize
yourself besides wearing an authentic shea shirt this is actually made in cuba
by the way it was
given to me by my friend sam frank who visited that country so i love that i
can't prove it but i
believe you it is absolutely true amazing you can inspect the label later but
um um anyway so um um
acid so i guess my acid story is from 1997 do you remember where were you in
1997 tim i was 12 but
also starting to do my first acid uh drop was 13. wow okay that's very early so
so i was i was um just
to set the stage um i was precocious in a number of things and um i actually
skipped three grades before
high school i grew up as a foreign service brat and when between when i was 10
and 11 um i was three
grades ahead in the english school nicosia cyprus which was a little british
public school where we
wore uniforms and had houses just like in harry potter i love them um and um um
should i look at
the camera no okay just okay um and um then my parents as diplomats do moved
back to washington
and i was sent to wild lake high school in columbia maryland um a distant suburb
of dc as a 12 year
old sophomore so um basically i've you know i've just so you were a 12 year old
a 12 year old
sophomore it's in a public school in maryland did the kids think that was cool
or did they hate you
well i think the thing is that would you know for when that's an excellent
question and i think that
basically you know um that was in my head i'm like which movie is exactly which
movie is it right and so
you know when you look back at that you you basically you know if you're in
that role kids and you
know i hope young people aren't watching this because we're about to talk about
drugs but um
the um worse and worse politics yeah yeah yeah that's just a segue right you
know um um you know
nobody really cares about acid but you know what we're getting to after that
that's the real trip
yeah it's not dmt either right right you know but um in any case um it really
depends on the
behavior of the kid and how he sort of behaves in the context of the people
around him um if he's just
like really sweet and funny it's one kind of movie but if he's a little
arrogant it's going to be the
other and which one were you it was the other okay so so yeah in any case um um
you know that
led me going to college i went to johns hopkins because that's where they had
um cty which now
since the summer will be known as the fire festival of nerd camps but we don't
get into that catastrophe
uh when you when you're a young uh person and you're going to learn and you get
like good test
scores they do like advanced you know you'll sit you'll do like algebra in like
a week and a half
by sitting and doing algebra all day for like six hours by yourself by your
self right so this is
this is like you know this is like intellectual like boot camp uh my daughter
was supposed to go
to it but it got canceled two days before the event this year thank you johns
hopkins anyway so i went
to johns hopkins as a freshman because it was there um you know no respect to
johns hopkins but um it
sucked so i transferred to brown so i graduated from brown in 92 and then i
went to grad school in
computer science at berkeley and i lasted for about a year and a half at berkeley
before i decided that
academia sucks even in computer science and it's a lot of results where um it
was just a bad run of
systems professors at berkeley too so anyway i was like i've got to drop out
and like seek my fortune
in the new multimedia boom the multimedia bubble of the early 90s which cd-roms
500 channels like you
know you experience this as retro but for me it was real right um and i lived
it right you know in any case
basically i got a job in that bubble and um and then i also basically got into
the early so the early
internet in its capacity which you talk about which is amazing because you talk
about it was
like decentralized it was a decentralized social network it actually worked it
had no central
government it was not censored it worked it was called usenet that's right um
and you know let me
you know we're gonna get you know i know everyone wants to get to the acid but
let's talk about usenet
for a second yeah please um so um um usenet was actually it was a decentralized
social network
that worked it was utterly amazing it was like if reddit was decentralized and
had an ontology which
means like an actual map of its content rather than like and it had like a
democratic governance
structure it was republic it was not a dictatorship like right um and it was
utterly amazing and here
was the problem with usenet basically we were on this thing nobody knew about
it i remember the first
time i read about the internet in the new york times it was like seeing your
cousin in the new york times
was 1988 and it was about a worm that was on the internet it was just like wow
the new york times
is writing about the internet right so usenet basically the reason that usenet
worked we all
thought was that because it was a decentralized social network and the future
of humanity that's
what we all just naturally assumed is that we were part knew we knew right we
didn't believe it we knew
it right it turned out that actually what made usenet special was it to get on
to usenet you had to be a
college student or work at a tech company interesting and so you didn't it was
it was um yes right it
wasn't everybody it wasn't everybody right it was basically you know it had it
had a quality filter
which was a human filter which was an elitist filter right you know it's like
if you go to burning
man have you been a burning man i haven't you haven't i haven't either yeah you
know someone i feel
like i want to go but i'm sober and i feel like is that you know i i've always
talked in this
on the show about like missing something in life and then not being able to go
back to it yeah like
being able to be like you know you know some very sick adults wanted to like
replicate summer camp
because they had never gone and you go this is you look at it and you go this
is it makes me feel
physically ill i don't know if being a sober guy at burning man is a good thing
or is it am i trying to
recapture something i i really i really you know i couldn't tell you um i'm a
widower my wife had
gone to burning man a couple of times i never have my and my fiancee is a
burner oh okay so basically
this gives me you know certain you know we'll get back we'll get back to the
acid trip i promise but
it's interesting to compare burning man as a community to usenet as a community
because both of
them have a sense that in certain senses they're superior to everything else in
the world right and
in certain senses they are superior to everything else in the world and other
senses like if you look
at for example the total fertility rate of burners you're going to find a very
low number right and
um and so you know or you know that sort of a community that exists by sort of
almost that reproduces
itself that lasts over time because burning man is not super young that sort of
reproduces itself by
intake rather than by fertility right there's something slightly imperfect
about that and both
communities have a barrier to entry and the barrier to entry so the barrier to
entry is what i was about
to talk about it's basically the barrier to entry you know that sort of creates
a filter you know i was
talking to you know i'm going to protect his name an intellectual uh you know
who knows the burning man
organizers well uh and i was asking him steve bannon i'm kidding yeah no steve
is that steve runs
steve runs never uh you know but yeah you know steve actually found uh you know
but um i'm sorry you
know but um the um um talking to the guy burning man yeah talking to the guy
burning man and i'm like why
does burning man have you know if you go to burning man to me from what i've
heard of burning man not
being a burner not wanting to embarrass myself but i think that what makes
burning man special is the
feeling that everyone at burning man has that anyone you meet there will be
like an old friend you
haven't met yet right and you know and that's an incredible feeling in a
community and that's an
attitude right that's an attitude that's a that's an ethos you know there's all
this public ethos
that sort of comes with you know the 12 principles of burning man one of which
is is radical inclusion
everyone is welcome is that similar would you say bohemian grove is the same
thing you know yes
bohemian grove has a much more explicit barrier to entry anyway i'm talking to
this guy you know very
very very intelligent interesting individual and i'm basically like what what
is it about burning man
that causes you know this feeling of togetherness right and you know he's like
well you know we don't
use money you know there's a number of principles of burning man you know and i'm
like you know well
basically my perspective is the reason that this is the case is that pretty
much everyone at burning
man is like pretty much everyone else is at burning man as a person moreover
what accomplishes this
is a principle that you might call radical exclusion which is that it really
sucks to get to burning
man it's really hard to be at burning man you're basically punishing yourself
you know this
playa is like hell right and you're punishing yourself to get there it's hard
to get a ticket
it's hard to find a camp it's basically it is as you say essentially the same
thing as bohemian grove
it has a slightly different community actually bohemian grove i was just
hearing someone who's uh
talking to someone who's i guess he's a guest at bohemian grove because his
father is a member
bohemian grove basically actually started out as literally bohemian originally
it was like an artsy
fartsy club very much like burning man and that served a similar you know kind
of community people
who would have found bohemians who would have found themselves very very
welcome and found like felt
really completely right at burning man um and so in both of these cases what's
creating the um the
feeling just this incredible social feeling of togetherness is like a policy an
effective policy
of radical exclusion right and when this policy breaks down as it did in the
internet in the
event that is known as eternal september um it's called eternal september
because every year in
september a bunch of clueless newbies a lot of internet slang like newbie was
invented on usenet
um a lot of clueless internet newbies who were freshmen would descend and then
aol that sent the
little disks in the mail or remember that aol basically gave all aol users
access to usenet which
was basically sort of you know as if you let you know the entire 25 million
population of lagos nigeria
into brooklyn 