Curtis Yarvin Jr.

Postscript No. 13 | Steven Miller on living in Mencius Moldbug’s basement

THE NEW CRITIC
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POSTSCRIPT

“Sketch of Yarvin by his assistant, Stevie Miller,” Werner Zagrebbi

*In 2023, Stevie Miller, then 19, took a leave of absence from Carnegie Mellon University to work for the neo-reactionary, right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin and live in his Berkeley, California basement.

Stevie had been a fanatical reader of Yarvin’s blog Unqualified Reservations since middle school, and Yarvin had taken Stevie on as an amanuensis. But when Stevie worked for “Mencius Moldbug” (Yarvin’s internet pseudonym), Yarvin was not nearly so infamous as now. In the years since, Yarvin has been cited by Vice President J.D. Vance, and a Subreddit with over 12k followers, “YarvinConspiracy,” tracks his allegedly deleterious effect on the American right. The mainstream media has caught on too, sleuthing out links between conservative political factions and Yarvin’s extremist, exuberant internet writing. His densely-hyperlinked and referential prose, recondite intellectual heroes (Thomas Carlyle, James Froude, and John Adams, among others), and status as outsider-dissident-genius strike an alluring figure, an allure which he uses to recruit young people — especially young men — to the conservative movement. In June 2025, Ava Kofman wrote an excellent profile of Yarvin for The New Yorker (a portrait that Stevie told me forms a pretty accurate picture of Yarvin’s psychology):

“Near the open bar, I spoke to Stevie Miller, a sprightly sophomore at Carnegie Mellon who had been reading Yarvin since the seventh grade. (Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his ‘high-I.Q. style’ served as a ‘high-I.Q. magnet.’) Two years ago, Miller hung out with Yarvin at Vibecamp, a gathering for nerds and techies in rural Maryland. Yarvin, who left early, asked Miller to help him throw his own party in D.C., which came to be known as Vibekampf. Afterward, Miller became Yarvin’s first personal intern. ‘My parents, New York Jewish liberals who I love, were totally mystified,’ he said.”

So who is this precocious intern? When researching for this interview, I asked a D.C. friend, “Do you know Stevie Miller?”

“Everyone knows Stevie,” he replied.

Stevie Miller is the most gregarious, internet-addled, and social science-oriented gen z right-winger I know.

Now 21, Stevie, who hails from New York’s Upper East Side and the D.C. suburbs, is a fellow of Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures grant. Having returned to CMU after a brief stint at the University of Austin in 2025, he studies “Statistics & Machine Learning” in an honors program for “Quantitative Social Science Scholars.” He sometimes goes by the pseudonym Werner Zagrebbi, especially on Twitter, and he writes the Substack Right Rationalism.

Much of the social science-driven, right-wing world that Stevie belongs to was born from an interlinked sphere of blogs and forums (4chan, Slate Star Codex, MarginalRevolution, LessWrong, Unqualified Reservations, Overcoming Bias, and others) — following along through some of the hyperlinks in this interview should replicate the feeling of what it is like to be a young right-winger in the burgeoning internet blogosphere. For a broad overview of Yarvin, Stevie’s influences, and many others in the rationalist sphere, Rufus Knuppel’s p(doom) is a great starting place. (Stevie called it “one of the best things we’ve read on the intellectual and cultural history of the contemporary prediction markets boom.”) For the more minute references, I have provided footnotes and links.

Below, Stevie speaks about his time working for Yarvin, disappointment with various right-wing institutions like the University of Austin and the Hertog Foundation, failed attempts to land a job in the Trump administration, and much, much more.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*

*You can access the entirety of Postscript — this conversation in full, new weekly installments, and the complete archive of our gen z interview series — with a paid subscription. The $30 annual rate costs as much as a couple paperbacks or movie tickets. Our essays are always online and always free, but individual donors keep The New Critic, this flesh-and-blood gen z magazine, alive! Do consider a subscription.*

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ELAN The people I know who are most untethered from standard career expectations had a high drug intake in high school. You seem similarly untethered, but for you it seems to come via intellectual convictions. What is the origin of that in your personal history?

STEVIE It’s probably some sort of character flaw. Having too high openness will fuck you. Give me another decade, and I will make decisions and live in a less flighty way. Looking back, it was probably a good idea to work for Curtis Yarvin, but there was no way I should have known that at the time. Because remember, in 2023-24, he wasn’t famous. And going to UATX, that probably was just a bad idea, and I haven’t even written about it yet.¹

ELAN Well, I’ll be asking about it. Before I get into that, do you wish you did not read the internet at all? There’s a certain kind of person who has never heard of Substack and is not interested in the world of the internet.

STEVIE If you just took a data set of the Ivy League, of what percent has not heard of Substack, I would expect only a third or something has. That being said, I think it’s pretty clear at this point they’re going to catch on.

ELAN Sure. Do you wish you were the type of person who would be a latecomer to Substack?

STEVIE Yes. That’s a very good question. Seb Jensen responded to someone like this making the argument that online politics is worse than drugs, worse than video games, too. And to be honest, I don’t think that’s true. Just temperamentally, I don’t want to be applying to these fucking recruiting cycles. I see a lot of these people at Carnegie Mellon, and it sounds like this horrible, gray existence. I think I am doing something different and better. I think it’s more rewarding. And I think the best is yet to come of this.

I mean, who’s the president? I think if you’re going to write an intellectual history of Trump, you’re not going to look at tariffs and Sam Francis or something.² You’ll look at Yarvin and Steve Sailer and these people. And AI is obviously going to become, like, more than half of the economy. Whether that’s in one decade or three, I don’t know, but it’s all a part of this intellectual history. These things are going to get more status.

ELAN You’re clearly very good at meeting people and getting things done. Why do you not attend, say, Yale?

STEVIE I think just finding closure for that has been a pretty big force in my life. Dare I say, I even have a notes document about it? I have a lot of those. I titled one “Closure?” when I got access to that Columbia admissions data and just ran the numbers on what I should have done.

It’s really hard to reach your final form at 19. How would you get into a great college now? There are a lot of things you can exploit to do that, but it’s a very different world for us now. I knew the GMU people, but they were a lot less famous then.³ It wasn’t really social-climbey in high school to be into internet writing. This has been the step-change in the status economics of this sphere. That’s the central fact of the past three years — these people have become a much bigger deal, and people process that in different ways.

ELAN What drives your need for closure?

STEVIE Everyone wants to explain, “Why are people so right-wing these days? Could part of it be that they feel they were locked out of opportunities because of race?” That’s a thesis. Where would you see it in the data?

I tried a little bit of something else. Is there any evidence? I analyzed this NYU data from Cremieux. Is there any evidence that kids who say they’re in the Young Republicans group do worse than the Young Democrats? No. There’s no evidence. I think everyone should read Steve Teles’s stupendous article — he’s at Johns Hopkins Political Science these days — called “Beyond Academic Sectarianism.”

ELAN The National Affairs piece.

ELAN So, UATX. What’s the story there? You were there for a year and then came back?

STEVIE So I was there for one trimester, is actually what it was, and I’m not even sure if I remember how serious I was about staying. I probably always put a 60% subjective probability of coming back to Carnegie Mellon.

It was interesting seeing education reform up close. I should really write 40 pages on this and just get it out of my system. I think UATX is pretty bad actually. It definitely underperformed my expectations. What they’re trying to do is just emulate St. John’s.⁴ That’s the intellectual vision, though Joe Lonsdale has a different vision which is cringe in its own way.⁵ Those are the two factions. You could see in the very good Politico article —

ELAN So you liked that piece? That was one of my questions.

STEVIE Yeah, that article totally understands the problems. McKenna Conlin got forced out for giving them the “tea.” I should text her to see how she’s doing these days. She had an undergrad degree. She was there at 26 and was the token lib. I liked her. I was a fan.

Anyway, yeah, Lonsdale wants it to be Y Combinator university.⁶ Of course, we have Stanford already, so he’s trying to do something more radically in that direction. Mostly it’s just these St. John’s people who believe that if everyone reads Plato, they’ll do a lot better in life. But what they need is hardcore right-wing social science, Bryan Caplanism.⁷

None of these people understand what is really going on with American education. I had lunch with the president. I had lunch with all these people. They just don’t get it. They’re not in touch with the empirics. Why can’t their university be good? It’s because they don’t have good students. That’s what you need to make a good university. It’s the students.

ELAN But then they have this whole thing about SAT score, where if you get a 1400 you have automatic admission. What do you think of the current cutoff?

STEVIE Yes, yes. That’s what attracted me to the school. I watched that SAT video they posted on Twitter, or this guy Isaac Simpson made it. I know who he is. I was like, oh, yeah, that’s pretty based, I’ll write them an application. And they flew me out to Austin and gave me and a couple of the other tippy-top admitted students dinner with Peter Thiel. How could I not go for a semester? And they were offering to pay me a moderate amount of money that I could live with.

To attract others, fly people to Austin. The SAT floor was 1400, and now it’s 1440. You got to jack that up. You know, Seb Jensen, another very fine fellow, ran this great article on converting SAT scores to IQ. Perfect SAT scores are, on average, 136 IQ or something. These IQ numbers never get that high because of regression to the mean.

Anyway, they were giving $25k a year — this is living money, not PhD money. When I visited, I had lunch with this kid who was too “based ritual” and drank too much of their Kool-Aid. He’s definitely — you know, by University of Austin standards — a very fine fellow. He was telling me, you know, Stevie, we’re getting a 100k here from Alpha School to work on projects where we massively pad our hours.

40% of the class — 40% of University of Austin — the year before I came, was getting paid through the nose to do nothing. Nothing has come of it. It was called the Alpha Fellowship. McKenna Conlin used it to make skateboarding events or something. It was just stupendously lucrative. If I was getting $100k plus the $25k, holy fuck, I would be going to the University of Austin instead of Carnegie Mellon or Yale in a heartbeat. That’s what they should do. They should publicize it. Obviously, no one has heard of this. No one understands the actual economics of the University of Austin. They have tremendous opportunities, but no one knows about them.

What people know about is the cringe Plato advertising, where they said, you know, at Harvard, kids only work 25 hours a week. We work 50 hours a week. How do you interpret this from a Caplanian perspective?⁸ You’re wasting everyone’s time on nothing. For me, it’s Rossi’s Iron Law, an underrated concept. Charles Fain Lehman introduced me to it.⁹ But Gwern has a good article on it. The law is that the expected impact of a social policy is zero. You know what the expected impact of forcing everyone to read Plato is? Can you imagine?

ELAN Giving a lot of money to Allan Bloom’s estate.¹⁰

STEVIE You know, it’s ridiculous. They had us reading Closing of the American Mind, and it was just this stupendously silly work. Maybe, if Bloom was writing it again in this era, you would have access to Claude Code to see if any of the claims even make sense.

ELAN There’s something I noticed in your description of UATX — you seem to have an identification with McKenna Conlin. By your description, she seems the kind of person you would find at Brown or Vassar, schools where you have a significant demographic of alienated left-wingers. At UATX, that isn’t exactly the spirit.

STEVIE Yeah, you know, who cares about me, but I think for understanding my character, or Yarvin, or Richard Hanania, it goes back to Bryan Caplan, who taught that voters are not rational. He demolished the rational voter model in a book that he may well deserve a Nobel Prize for but that he almost certainly will not get. Well, what is left is to explain political participation? There isn’t a canonical GMU book on it, but I think the Elephant in the Brain gets close. People adopt the politics they do to fit in with their peers, unless you really want attention, and you really want to stick out, and you think you’re much better than all your peers — then you do the opposite. You do the thing that’s most different from your peers. You seek the antipode. You have to be self-aware about that shit. For a lot of people reading this, that’s what we’re doing here. So temperamentally, yes, I do like McKenna Conlin. I knew going to Austin would make me much less right-wing because I always find fault in these institutions. The closer you look, the worse they look — always, except maybe for rationalism.

ELAN Did you read the Marco Roth piece in the recent issue of The Point?

STEVIE No.

ELAN Well there’s a concept in it that I am curious about. Roth discusses a scene from an Upper West Side movie called Margaret. There’s a classroom discussion scene about King Lear where one student makes a comment simultaneously trying to impress the teacher with his brilliance but also to be recognized as above the teacher — to be both legitimated by the institution and recognized as beyond it. Does that mean anything to you?

STEVIE I mean, you made a good pitch for the piece. I’ll definitely take a look. I definitely identify with that. I think a lot of people who make it do. In the internet writing scene, that’s Tyler Cowen and the Red Scare girls, who care about mainstream status but also want to transcend it.

ELAN You’re back at Carnegie Mellon. How would you describe your experience there? Have you found like-minded Stevies?

STEVIE Basically, no. There are internet writers, you know — Arctotherium, for instance, these great people — who just work normal jobs. That’s kind of how I look at CMU. I’m just there because of circumstances basically outside my control. To be honest, I think it outperformed my expectations. The quantitative social science program is stupendous. I kind of knew, going into undergrad, that I wanted to have the Cremeiux data analysis skills with more institutional affiliations. Carnegie Mellon is a great place to do work, but things don’t fit together intellectually. Maybe I’d be doing much better at Columbia. We’ll see. I wrote a transfer application.

ELAN How many years of CMU do you have left?

STEVIE Three or four semesters, depending on classes.

ELAN Why have you not dropped out and just started working?

STEVIE Yeah, that’s a good question. There are all these Palantir fellowships of different kinds. They sing like sirens, but I think temperamentally I actually like education.

ELAN How did you first come across Curtis Yarvin?