Anonymous Group Chats Are the Only Real Free Speech | Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Yarvin (0:00)

We're basically using the increasing intelligence of A.I.s, basically to make them less retarded, to make them more under control, to make them more predictable.

When you think about A.I.s kind of acting autonomously, I sort of would dispute this kind of context, that that's in any way a real thing. Intelligence implies a will, or implies a sort of an anima or a spirit that will seek power. These things don't seek anything. The smarter they get, the easier they are to control, the less insane they are, and the better they are as tools.

SPEAKER_2 (0:42)

We are back. We are live with Curtis Yarvin, who is the creator of Urbit, which is a decentralized personal server platform, many other things. There's many ways to describe it. And the founder of Tlon Corporation, which has built Urbit into a real product. We're going to talk about the product today.

And then there's this other reason that you're known for that I'm forgetting.

Curtis Yarvin (1:03)

Oh, yeah, yeah. I write some stuff on the internet sometimes.

SPEAKER_2 (1:06)

Yeah, he's a poet, a poet and a writer. Curtis, welcome.

Curtis Yarvin (1:09)

Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_2 (1:13)

So tell us about what Urbit is building right now.

Curtis Yarvin (1:16)

Tell us about what Urbit is building right now. Well, there's a short term and a long term. Let me talk about the short term first. You know, the Urbit is this thing that I started really 25 years ago, when I realized that the system software platforms we inherited from the 20th century kind of suck. And we've been wrestling with that for some time. And the problem, of course, with boiling the ocean and building something new is you're great, great, you have a new thing. Everybody should use your new thing. What did they do first?

And the problem of what did they do first, you know, sort of hasn't been adequately solved. I started working on Urbit in 2002 I worked on it for about 11 years in my basement. Turned it into a startup called Tlan. As you mentioned earlier, I was there from 2013 to 2018, left and came back with a new Urbit startup, Urban Tiger in 2024 And so this is our first Urban Tiger release. Urbit is a decentralized system. Nobody controls it.

But the product is very, very simple. The product is a secure, strongly anonymous conversations because we're basically in a world where, you know, it's like when people use Signal, for example, is a great product, but sort of the threat model of Signal is like the NSA is listening to my conversations. The real threat model...

SPEAKER_3 (2:51)

I thought they were encrypted.

Curtis Yarvin (2:52)

They are encrypted. Signal is very well encrypted. But the thing is, I don't know that the NSA really cares about your conversations. The real risk is getting doxxed.

And having basically a doxx-proof platform for secure, sensitive discussions is something that we don't really have yet. And so I was like, let's build that. And that product is Urbit Lodges, which is now live. You can go to urbit.house right now and make your own launch. And the idea is very simple. There's a lot of spaces in this world for conversation, but you don't have freedom of speech when you can be held to account for what you say. And so having a platform where no one knows who you are and that's cryptographically secure is becoming more and more important.

SPEAKER_2 (3:47)

So how is it more secure from a doxing standpoint than an anonymous Twitter account or a Signal?

Curtis Yarvin (3:54)

So an anonymous Twitter account, of course, Twitter has your phone number, Twitter has all of your identity, Twitter has everything.

In Signal, what happens is because the platform wasn't really designed to handle identity all that well, what you have on Signal is either you use a real name on Signal and you're in a screenshot and everyone assumes that's you because it's you, or you use initials on Signal, which you see some people do, and the number of people I've invited to the wrong group chat because of that is fairly considerable. Or you use kind of a dumb nickname and your dumb nickname is gonna half-docs you because you probably used that somewhere else. And it's just not really designed for, I want something where a screenshot is a journalist, nothing.

SPEAKER_2 (4:43)

Right. How did you come up with the naming scheme for like Urbit Usernames? It's like four syllables, they work well together.

You're Saurag Namtive?

Curtis Yarvin (4:53)

I'm Saurag Namtive. And the way, basically what you're looking for there is you want what's essentially a random name that's easy to say and remember that doesn't mean anything. And so your name is actually an Ethereum NFT token, which you get directly from the blockchain when you sign up. And it has a pretty little picture associated with it.