An interview with Werner Zagrebbi

If the Intelligence Quotient has no fans, I am dead

1. What do you believe can be accomplished by the rising zoomer elite now that Trump is in office?

Hello Empire’s Intern!¹ This is Werner Zagrebbi. For those who don’t know, my main resume item is having lived/worked for Curtis Yarvin all of last year. This year I’ve returned to university, but I’m trying to stay active. If anyone is wondering, I insisted on this viatext interview format. You see, there is something super gay and cringe about podcasting—I recently dropped an article about this. What I’m trying to replicate is Niccolo Soldo’s brilliant work.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is much of a rising Zoomer elite. Zoomer representation, as Zoomer leader Seb Jensen can attest, isn’t all that great. DOGE, rather famously hired a bunch of cool zoomers like Luke Farritor, but it’s a pretty lean operation. I do hope they make a better measure of inflation that stops the government from continuing to massively overpay social security—though I’m not sure that’s really in their purview.

It isn’t easy to work for Trump. I’m doing a program at my university that gives me a stipend, housing and course credit for an internship in D.C. (that’s where I’m writing from). I got something pretty cool, but I didn’t get into the admin. It’s not for lack of trying. There was a not that implausible counterfactual for the Trump administration that involved like everyone on right-wing Twitter getting a job.

Imagine it: an open application on “civilservice.gov”, and if you had a 1550+ on the SAT and prior membership in YAF, you get an entry-level job. Every sane, seriously right-wing civil servant (all ≈30 of them) is in the running for cabinet/ambassadorships. That’s the depressing part. We on the online right know that enough good people exist. There just isn’t a mechanism to find them, and this administration will, as a result, not live up to its potential. This is what Project 2025 should have been. Maybe next time ;)

Now, Empire’s Intern, I’ll take your question a little more literally than you probably meant it. What should the great Zoomer figures of the online right get up to? Well: I hope Maxwell Tabbarok is involved/cited in changing science policy. How about he makes an American ARIA!

Cremieux has already made a real contribution. People don’t realize just how pivotal his support for Jim O’Neill was. He deserves 15%+ of the credit for getting him hired. Leopold Aschenbrenner is probably too busy becoming a billionaire, but maybe he could take some time off to run an alignment Manhattan Project (yeah, I’m into that—like it’s so fun to think about all this triumphant political shit I forget we’re all going to die). Nemets should destroy Canada. And Baron Trump should have fun at NYU.

2. What was working with Yarvin like? He seems to give the impression of a talkative eccentric intellectual. Would you say that’s a correct assessment?

Yarvin is affable. And I think it’s easy to overestimate how eccentric he is. Hanania has a quote “Independent writing is probably not for the psychologically normal”—public intellectual work does tend to select for a pretty unusual type. Given this occupation and generally how smart and creative Yarvin is (his IQ is public at 165), it is pretty notable he’s not weirder.

That’s not to say there aren’t aspects of Yarvin’s personality I don’t understand well, ut he’d rank in the bottom 50% for mental illness. None of his quirkiness affects, say, his ability to show up to meetings on time. I think this relative normality is a big part of what made Yarvin’s career tremendously successful.

I enjoyed working for Yarvin very much. There are a lot of reasons I’d recommend it. I remember the year before I went to work for Yarvin (this was the summer before my freshman year), I talked to Hanania when he did a meetup in my city, and he offered me a job for the summer—or at least talked about the possibility of one (I shouldn’t exaggerate). I ended up doing other stuff. I think the decisive factor was that, unlike Yarvin, Hanania couldn’t offer to just let me live with him! Yarvin has a big basement. It’s often worth getting the extra space—many positive-sum trades can be made using real estate. What’s more, working for Yarvin is cool! Speaking of Hanania:

Compared to like any other of the other big names of the modern internet world of ideas, Curtis has the vibes of a cool, prestigious person to work for. Hearing of it instantly inspires questions like “Might he know Peter Thiel or JD Vance?”

Scott may have a wider audience, but working for him would not have the same status implications.

2. The selection mechanism you proposed. Seems like just IQ+rightism -is this all you think is important/can be measured to select admin members?

I do think that would be pretty workable! That would probably get you 60% of the upside of vetting people at all.

If the Intelligence Quotient has no fans, I am dead. That being said—and my good friend Morton SAT girl likes to point this out: for most people reading this, what’s scarce tends to be executive function and sanity. Nailing this is a big part of how Chris Rufo and Curtis got where they are.

With IQ there is a negative selection thing with primarily identifying with rightism–it means you aren't primarily identifying with physics or music composition or whatever. The high IQ rightist is often the “high IQ guy who would have been a physicist if he wasn’t hobbled by other shit.” On the margin, try to signal/hone executive function.

2a. How important do you think IQ is for selecting political leaders and theorists? The IQ test is something very few people care to defend. Adverse selection, no doubt, is at play. Hyping up IQ is a close cousin of hyping up one’s self for having a high IQ, which is naturally more common among those who don’t have more concrete things to hype themselves up for (it’s especially common among literal children, who not only don’t have many accomplishments but tend to have an incomplete understanding of what’s cringe). But I’ll do it.

It exists for a reason. If you (and of course not necessarily, you, Empires Intern—anyone) can come up with a better predictor of, say, educational attainment, income, health, and the other good outcomes of modern life, psychologists will—with some time for diffusion—start using that to measure old Spearman’s g. The Stanford Binet has been empirically shown to correlate with the things we’d expect intelligence to correlate with better than everything else (with some caveats, of course). This has been the part of psychology most resilient to the Replication Crisis.

If you gave me, say, a sample of undergrads and asked me to pick out who’s cut out to be a political theorist, I suspect their IQs would be the most useful variable by which to rank them. Still, the real world is quite different.

The storied “marketplace of ideas” selects most of our political theorists, and elections our leaders. On the margin, I think both of these institutions would do better to reward IQ more, but they still reward IQ a lot.

I take Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ron Unz more seriously knowing their super-high IQ scores, and I think others should take this into account, too. There are of course counterexamples. Richard Hanania, I think, comes to mind as someone who overperforms his IQ. Hanania is quite intelligent, probably in the 135-145 range. And yet, there are some aspects of the internet writing thing in which he’s the best in the world.

I’ll leave you with something that’s—on the margin at least—imo even better for selecting political leaders and theorists: an intellectual’s track record at predicting future events.

Of course, this is not essential for *all* kinds of intellectuals or even all kinds of political theorists. But, for pundits, I find this a very underrated trait. We, after all, are listening to their perceptions of reality. Not to get all Poperian, but if they aren’t making testable predictions, they may just be saying bs—and if their testable prediction suck, then they are definitely just saying bs.

So how do my hocas do?

Hanania has made a public killing² at the betting markets, as has Scott Alexander, on a smaller scale.

Curtis Yarvin, who most wouldn’t think of as a Tetlockian fox, still managed to do well enough betting on a single event (that Covid would be bad) to pay for a big part of his lovely home.

It would be cope to say I follow these fellows because of their track record of accurate assessment, but it certainly gives me greater confidence that they understand things about the world most do not

2b. Is there any reason you think Hanania outperforms his IQ?

It would be hard for him not to, he performs so well. I very strongly fanboy.. after all, Hanania’s not only great: He *feels* great to support because the act of liking Hanania alienates retar—people, including many of my friends. It’s like caring more about pronouns than genocide. Yeah ok maybe Gregory Mankiw or something has done more for elevating good ideas, but he just doesn’t jive with my System 1 morality in the same way.

On Twitter, like everything that Hanania posts is optimized to be maximally triggering. So when you fanboy Hanania, you get to show off how discerning, high decoupling and high IQ you are for recognizing his inaccessible genius. (Side note: yeah, I frequently post a tatterdamalion PDF of an old IQ test³ I took. But like 25% of the rest of my online presence is probably more subtle kinds of IQ signaling arising from the same impulse. This is what it means to be a true Hansonian. You must be self-aware about this shit. Otherwise what’s the g-d damn point.)

But to more seriously answer the question: One of Hanania’s first accolades was from Bryan Caplan (radi Allahu anu), who said “For me, what’s most impressive about Hanania is the absence of Social Desirability Bias. He describes the world as it is, and offers advice to improve upon the ugly world in which we find ourselves.” And I think this is still true.

Hanania is low-key the true apotheosis of the Rationalist tradition—and not just because of the Nietzschean Liberalism thing. Rationalism has always essentially been about methods, not conclusions. And Hanania is uniquely into this truth seeking. But if Scott Alexander’s stated ethos is “charity over absurdity,” Hanania’s might as well be “scrutiny over absurdity.” Scott tries to interpret arguments in their most reasonable form (the “steelman” impulse… I remember some fan calling him a prophet of sanity for this reason). Hanania is different. He emphasizes not only the standard Rationalist steelman shit, but also the… “steelwoman(?)” (it’s not the strawman)—the worst and most uncomfortable implications of a perspective and argument. More than Scott does.

Hanania called Rationalism “The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.” Hanania’s at his best on the “cost” side of the intellectual cost-benefit analysis. And he’s simply the best.

This no-holds-barred scrutiny bears exotic intellectual fruit. Consistently, like once a month at least, you’ll get an amazing take from Hanania you’re just not going to get anywhere else. He’s off the charts for intellectual “wins-above-replacement.”

This is basically GMU spirit: Arbitraging the truth-seeking quotidian on LessWrong to say novel and important things in more prestigious parts of the world of ideas. When they expect you to just play status games, you call their bluff and come at them with the real truth they never even thought to consider looking for.

But unlike Hanson and Caplan, Hanania has found a way to sell his ideas as a very competitive entertainment product.

3. What exactly do you find gay about the video-podcast format?

I recently published an article that touched on this. Basically, I agree with Scott Alexander.

4. Seems like you’re worried about AI apocalypse. How did you come to the conclusion that it’s likely?

In my youth, I took part in Philip Tetlock’s Hybrid Forecasting Persuasion Tournament—this is how I got the superforecaster title I brag about so much on Twitter, and which real prediction markets buffs may realize makes me kind of a pseud. But I think they’re on the right track about like 2% extinction risk from that in the next 75 years.

Even if you don’t buy the Yudkowsky stuff, it will be a very different world when everyone has a handy advisor who knows how to blow up a city. Cowen talks about this: Now it costs many, many millions to procure/produce a nuclear weapon. What does the world look like when it’s only like 1 million dollars? What’s the equilibrium there?

And not just nukes, of course. Countless other things. The models seem prodigious at folding proteins…

4b. Did you ever read Tetlock book on the subject and if so is that how he describes it how super forecasting actually works in practice?

I read Superforecasting a while back, and I liked it, but I don’t have that much to say on it at this point.

5. Seems like Niccolo Soldo has been a great inspiration to you. What do you like about his work? I don’t have much to say on Soldo I don’t actually read him that much—I used to read those weekly posts but it's not that favorable of a matchup. I'll say I met him in person and feel like he'd be a lot of fun to hang out with.

6. Your first Substack article was about your signaling theory of wokism. Although I believe that it’s purpose in practice, I don’t believe that’s the ultimate cause. Are you aware of the Mutation Theory of Leftism and if so, do you believe it’s wrong or incompatible with your theory?

I’d direct your audience to Seb Jensen on that. In brief: “yes,” and “yes.”

6b: do you have time for the long answer or would you still prefer to defer to Seb on that?

Yeah Seb’s the guy.

7. Are there any obscure books that have influenced you?

Curtis’s reading list, famously, takes up a lot of space intellectually. Through him, we all found otherwise obscure stuff like Michels and Pareto (or at least James Burnham’s reading of them), Fustel de Coulanges (Andressen and others talk about him now), Thomas Carlyle of course, Human Smoke, Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Mind of Napoleon, and—dare I say—Bronze Age Mindset. Those influenced me.

But I read mostly normal stuff (ie, not obscure) and a lot of blogs. If blogs count: J. Sanilac’s is probably the most underrated and was very influential on me. He wrote some awesome fiction Memoirs of an Evil Vizier, though I can hardly claim that part of his work was influential (I was like that before).

Hanania’s Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is probably the best answer I’ve got. A fucking incredible book. Everything a modern book on politics should be. And no one read it because Hanania published it with an academic publisher and it cost $200 to get a print copy. To quote my own article:

Following the traditional formula of the George Mason School, The Elephant in the Brain [one of GMU economist Robin Hanson’s books] takes a well-established mainstream concept—in this case Robert Trivers-style self-deception—and takes it to its radical but patently correct conclusions.” It’s that GMU spirit again: Using mainstream methods, and mainstream data, and yet—with LessWrong-style truth seeking—reaching decidedly unmainstream conclusions.

Hanania’s Illusion of Grand Strategy exemplifies this: Following the traditional formula of the George Mason School, Illusion of Grand Strategy takes a well-established mainstream concept—in this case Public Choice Theory—and takes it to its radical but patently correct conclusions. Hanania critiques the whole field of International Relations. The “schools” of the IR each, in their own way, seek to explain why the US acts the way it does: Liberal internationalists contending that foreign policy reflects American values, and Neo-Realists that it protects American hegemony. Instead, Hanania argues that much of what is understood as strategic foreign policy is actually post-hoc justification for the aggregate outcome of competing bureaucratic and group interests—ie how intelligent people understand how all the other aspects of government policy is made; calling into question the justification for IR as a field separate from PoliSci at all. It’s a great book.

8. Do you have any additional advice for rightist zoomers?

When Peter Thiel was at Stanford, everyone knows that he started the Stanford Review. But people forget that he got money for this from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—an org started by one William Frank Buckley. This still exists, and they still give those right-wing student newspapers grants.

To strive in this greater right-wing internet nexus (and a lot of the rest of the world) is to learn to live in spiraling networks of mentors and mentees, minnows organizing themselves around whales like Thiel, the Red Scare girls, and Cowen. I’ve spent some time here, and I have lived well enough. Of course, I’ve missed a lot of opportunities, but—in the spirit of Patrick Collison and Nabeel Qureshi—here are some of the things I’ve found helpful:

1. Send more cold emails—this is probably the best advice I can give you. Most people should be sending 10x more. Aspire not to have a single living hero you haven’t met.

2. Have a general idea of what is going on where (SF—Yarvin + most Twitter people, NYC—Sovereign House, DC—GMU), and try to spend as much time as you can in all those places. Agglomeration effects are no joke.

3. Go to more conferences and parties. At least at good colleges, there’s usually a lot of money available for undergrads to go to conferences. Use this enthusiastically. If any of you reading this are ever in New York and want to get into Sovereign House, DM me on Twitter.

4. Going to right wing parties is very synergistic with reading blogs and being into Twitter discourse. If you regularly read a lot of blogs, you’ll have a lot to talk about with the people who write those blogs. In fact, you’ll find that the only people you’ll have anything to say to at these parties are the “microcelebrities”—the successful bloggers and big Twitter accounts—so you’ll naturally talk to them.

5. Don’t worry about bothering microcelebrities. They aren’t actually famous. And even people at Sovereign House have read them much less than you think.

6. Avoid “networking.” Make friends with people you actually like. It’s especially rewarding to have same-age friends you grow alongside: Theo Jaffee, who I’ve known since the first grade, is a strong example of that for me.

7. Still, it’s not a sin to be strategic about mentorships: To pat myself on the back Curtis has gotten ≈3x as famous as he was when I first went to work for him.

8. And if you do “network,” it’s classier to do it on behalf of others. Typically, you know someone who could benefit from a meeting or job more than you can. Repay such favors.

9. Again, Hanania called rationalism “The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.” I’d encourage a lot of you guys to apply this lens to the “normal”/cathedral institutions. Ofc they suck in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean they would suck for *you*. Don’t not try to go to Harvard just because you understand how evil they are. It’s far worse for Harvard if you’re there! Be the only kid at Harvard willing to talk on Fox News or testify in front of Congress about how much they suck—it’s a good niche.

10. On basically the same note: Have a realistic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream media. Reflect carefully on Scott Alexander’s “The Media Very Rarely Lies” and Hanania’s “The Media is Honest and Good.”

11. Take every opportunity to make public appearances.

12. Make a Manifold account and use it to practice your epistemic habits.

13. Apply for an Emergent Ventures Grant. Tyler Cowen personally interviews everyone, and if you’re younger than 21 and understand his perspective, you can generally get an “Early Career Support” grant of ≈5k. If you’re under 21 or not, though, look through the list of winners to get a feel for the kinds of things they fund, and consider what you could try that’s like that.

14. In preparation for applying, sign up for emails from Tyler Cowen’s blog (perhaps the most influential in the world) so you know what’s on his mind.

15. Getting a grant is just the first step. Once you have the grant, you’re part of the network. EV will fly you to their yearly conferences, and you’ll be added to the group chat. Make a good impression on Tyler Cowen. He can write you letters of recommendation.

16. Strongly consider transferring colleges—you very probably aren’t considering it strongly enough. Our generation was excluded from the finest institutions of higher education by overt, illegal bias. There is now some indication things have changed for the better. Cornel and Columbia tend to have relatively high transfer acceptance rates. And Columbia, in particular, is a really promising place for a right wing kid because of its law school1, proximity to Sovereign House, and program General Studies.

17. Take gap years. Many forget you can do this strategically to get extra cycles for transfer applications!

18. Try to take classes with professors you actually like, and take them to lunch. Being right wing in the American educational system has downsides, of course, but there are also some upsides. You’ve probably noticed that it’s extremely rare for young Americans to be authentically interested in and engaged with ideas. Every year in college application essays, millions ape this to lesser and greater degrees. We don’t have to ape. Right wing teenagers actually have read books by professors from Chicago and Harvard, and truly have ambitions to study things at Yale you can’t study elsewhere. You can use this to your advantage.

19. Generally, you won’t get graded down by professors for being right wing at American universities. They’ll usually be happy that someone actually cares.

20. Do summer programs like Hudson Institute’s and Hertog’s. Just look at Nick Whitaker’s LinkedIn and try to emulate that.

21. If you’re more into labor markets, consider dropping out of college or even high school. Apply for a Thiel Fellowship—this is an IRL place where online clout is useful. You always have to be looking for situations like that.

22. Build online clout—and at this point Twitter is the only social networking that really matters for the Western right. In most situations, it’s best—as much as possible—to leave open the possibility of writing under your real name.

23. Remember that there are kinds of status (broadly construed) that are illegible in most contexts but are nonetheless extremely valuable. Like remember the Time 100 most influential people in AI list? Obviously, Dwarkesh Patel should be on there, as should Leopold Aschenbrenner and regrettably even Beff Jezos. But they’d never be on the list, even though they’re—in the truest possible sense of the world—extremely influential. Still, generally endeavor to find ways to translate less illegible status into more legible status.

24. Write an article for Stripe’s Works In Progress magazine or Palantir’s The Republic. This is excellent because of the synergy: not only is it a very honest signal you have expertise on some important issue, but it can also temper your scattered knowledge and ambition into real expertise!

25. Or if you’re not into that sort of thing, at least win a Passage Prize.

26. Try playing quizbowl. Steve Sailer was one of the best players of all time, and I, Curtis Yarvin, Crimieux, Pericles Abassi, Nemets, Greg Cochrane and surely others I’m not aware of all played the game; the overrepresentation is immense. At least 5/30 of the most influential voices on Right Wing Twitter played the game!

27. Strongly consider going to law school. This is the only cranny of American education where it is helpful to be right wing, and admission generally comes down to a highly g-loaded test. Last year, I spent like a week hanging out at Yale Law Fed Soc—I think this place is our Neorxnawang.

28. If you’re thinking of doing this, try publishing a law review article while you’re in undergrad.

29. If you’re female, read J. Sanilac and follow his advice dogmatically. It wouldn’t be unjustified to make an Anki.

30. If you’re male, don’t obsess over PUA shit. Just increase you standards for hygiene and wardrobe, and try to increase your status. This generally will solve your women problem. But even if it doesn’t, at least you got higher status!

31. Memorize some poems.

32. If you can have an impact on someone, give as much advice as you have to. Drag them out of the hole. It’s worth it.

33. Be right wing. There is something special about what we are doing. It’s the most interesting, the most fun, the most underrated, and perhaps the most rewarding place in a generally gray contemporary world. And almost all of the promise remains in the future.

1. I go by many names (Jacob)

2. I think he’s written more about it other places.

3. ;)