Good morning, and happy Friday. I was joined on Wednesday by economic sociology professor Brooke Harrington, author of Capital Without Borders and Offshore: Stealth Wealth & The New Colonialism.
Below is a corrected transcript of the discussion, edited for clarity:
Greg Olear (GO)
Brooke Harrington, welcome back to PREVAIL. How are you?
Brooke Harrington (BH)
I’m fine, thanks for having me on the show again.
GO
It’s always nice to see you and catch up and get your take on things that are going on. Cause it’s been about, I think, six weeks since last time you were here—and stuff has happened in six weeks. A lot of things have happened in six weeks of vast global importance. Like I think the Academy Awards, for example, just to name one thing. Yeah. I can’t even remember who won. No, but seriously, we’re at war now. Or excursion, I suppose we’ve declared excursion.
BH
Operation, special military operation--which is a term you might have recalled hearing somewhere in the last three years or so.
GO
Yeah, it sounds better in the original Russian, I think. I think it flows more off the tongue, you know.
But we were talking before we hit record about this idea of an economy of secrets, is how you put it—this idea that there’s a truth that’s out there that everybody knows and yet no one can talk about. Like, you know, “The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club”—that kind of thing. And of course, the biggest exemplar of this is Epstein and all the Epstein stuff. And there’s other examples, too. But what made you think about this as a as a kind of topic? Was it Epstein? Was it Trump? Was it both of them? What’s on your mind about it?
BH
Well, for almost 20 years, I’ve been studying the secretive system called the offshore financial system, where it often goes by the misnomer of “tax havens.” And the reason that’s a misnomer is that the biggest users of the system come from countries that don’t impose taxes at all.
And what those users, especially from the Arab peninsula, for example, are doing with offshore accounts in the Bahamas or Singapore or Mauritius is, they’re buying secrecy—not always for nefarious purposes. Maybe they’re gay and they come from a country where they’re not allowed to have a same-sex spouse, but they want to leave an inheritance to that person. Well, you’ve got to get your money offshore to do that, if the laws of your country don’t permit it.
But there are lot of nefarious reasons, as we’ve seen in the Panama and Paradise and Pandora Papers that unfurled between 2016 and 2021. In fact, Friday, this Friday the 3rd, will be the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers. I wonder if anyone will mark it in the media.
GO
We will, because this is going to run on Friday. So we’ll make sure to announce that. Ten years. This has been going on a long time.
BH
That is an economy of secrets. What’s being bought and sold out there is secrecy for various purposes by various people in various flavors. Secrecy from whom is a major axis of differentiation among different offshore financial centers. They don’t all compete head to head with each other.
As I’ve been writing a paper about secrecy recently—an academic journal article—I’ve been thinking about how many things are open secrets, and how our government, our democracy, which is supposed to be transparent, is riddled with open secrets—somewhat along the lines of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the emperor who had no clothes because everyone had to, in that society, in the story, had to be roped in to the conspiracy of silence around the fact that the emperor was naked. And in addition, everyone had to be pressed into service to give fawning, flattering remarks about the non-existent clothes.
Just think about all the things that are unfolding right now, shaping our lives as Americans and as citizens of the world that are open secrets that are subject to conspiracies of silence. Like, where’s Jake Tapper, the self-appointed expert on presidential cognitive incompetency? Like, hello? I’m waiting, Jake, you know? Bring it to us.
GO
Ha!
BH
Okay, so the open secret is Donald Trump is completely out of his mind and has been for some time, but you’re not allowed to talk about that.
Another open secret is that the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania was a put-up job. Like, I don’t even know that much about guns, but I know that a bullet that’s a couple inches long doesn’t graze your ear and leave that ear completely unblemished. But we’re not allowed to talk about the fake assassination attempt, where the Secret Service detail allowed their charge—the person whose life they’re supposed to protect, even at the cost of their own—they allowed him to stand up, head unprotected, and pose with his tiny little feral fist in the air for several seconds. Come on! Like, again, I’m no national security expert, but that smells to high heaven. We’re not allowed to talk about the conspiracy of silence surrounding that.
We’re not allowed to talk about like the extremely and increasingly obvious indebtedness Trump has to Russia, which he is paying off in spades by lifting sanctions on their oil and pumping billions of dollars into the Russian economy so that they can continue to prosecute their insane war against Ukraine.
We’re not allowed to talk about how the whole Iran war thing was just a chest-beating exercise that is going to get people killed—that has gotten people killed: all those poor school girls in Iran, God knows how many other Iranians are going to die, and American service members. Thank God the Europeans are hoisting a collective middle finger to this whole enterprise.
But we do know that Putin himself is making bank off of it. And like, why? So he can reveal the locations of American service members to the Iranians? Like, who exactly is Trump working for now? We’re not allowed to talk about it.
GO
Don’t get me started on that one. I’ve been talking about that for a long time—2018, I had Dirty Rubles come out and, you know, nothing has changed in the meantime between that. The Trump people really did meet with the Russians during the campaign. Paul Manafort really was working with an FSB officer who specialized in election fuckery. Really did give him data. All this stuff happened.
BH
As soon as they started screwing with Hillary Clinton as a candidate in 2016, I recognized the stamp of what they had done to Yanukovitch’s, was it Yanukovitch? There was a woman who ran against him, Yulia Tymoshenko. I think they actually did lock her up.
GO
Yeah, they did, they did. It didn’t end well.
BH
Manafort comes along, and he basically tries to run the Ukrainian smear campaign against a female opponent to keep an autocrat in power. I’m not a Ukraine expert. I don’t really follow that part of the world or speak a Slavic language. I just read the newspapers, and I was like, “Hey, this is pinging some pattern recognition on my part. and look, it’s the same people involved.”
GO
Yeah, same people, same thing.
Drug use is another one. That’s another thing that we’re not allowed to talk about with Trump. I remember I was on a radio show years ago—and I’ve had Noel Casler on my show, and I interviewed him pretty early on, where he talked about Trump’s drug use. And Noel was there, you know—he was on the set of The Apprentice, or rather Celebrity Apprentice—and has been saying this for years and years, and has never been sued for some reason—possibly because he’s telling the truth.
And it was right around the time where Trump had showed up to speak, his pupils were like dilated, and there was literally white shit flying out of his nose as he appeared slurred and out of his fucking mind. And I mentioned this on the radio show.
And I was on with somebody who was a regular kind of CNN MSNBC person. And she recoiled from that like it was an electric shock. Clearly she had been told by the lawyers, “Do not talk about this,” for whatever reason.
But there’s been reports after this, during the Biden Administration, where they went back and looked at all the drug use that went on in the White House during the Trump years, the first Trump term, where they had all these, you know, doctors quote unquote, so-called, prescribing all these medicines. There was just there was just a lot of drug use going on.
BH
And it wasn’t like extra strength Tylenol; it was, like, fentanyl.
GO
Yeah. And the other, it wasn’t Adderall, but it was Adderall adjacent. It was like a lower grade Adderall, like a Sanka version of Adderall or something, but it still had the same sort of effect. And nobody talked about that at all.
I mean, on The West Wing back in the day, when the president on The West Wing was hiding his MS, that subplot went over like two and a half seasons—him hiding the diagnosis. Trump’s medical thing? They went in and stole his file and roughed up the doctor. That was out of the news in two hours—and we haven’t talked about it since.
So yeah, we could probably go back and forth with the omertà stuff. Anything involving Melania, there’s another one.
BH
Yeah.
GO
What was Melania doing between 1994 and 1996? Good luck trying to find that out.
BH
She knew Epstein before Trump did. I mean, didn’t Epstein introduce the two of them?
GO
Paolo Zampolli introduced the two of them, but he’s another—I mean, he’s such a standup guy that he got ICE to deport his ex-girlfriend who he had a child with. That’s how nice of a guy he is.
BH
Was that Karoline Leavitt’s brother-in-law, sister-in-law, or was that a different case?
GO
No, different—different person, different person. She was a model. I think from somewhere in Latin America—Brazil. And that is the thing that happened. And this is someone who Melania has been close to for a long, long time, stayed in his apartment when she first moved to the city.
But, yeah, there’s so much open secret stuff that we’re not allowed to talk about. And of course Epstein is the big one. You know, I can’t remember—I’ve been trying to think about this, like when I first heard of Jeffrey Epstein. Do you remember when you first heard of him? Did you encounter his name when you were doing research for your books or was he still pretty obscure?
BH
Never, never, which is really interesting because he presented himself as an offshore wealth manager. He presented himself to people like Leon Black and Les Wexner as a wealth advisor who could help them design tax avoidance strategies, and so forth. And of course he bought himself an island in the Caribbean, right in the blast zone, the headquarters of international offshore finance.
GO
Yes.
BH
And then he tried to buy off the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands to look the other way when it came to his various crimes—mostly sex crimes. But his profile is that of an offshore wealth manager, with the exception of the fact that he had relatively little education. That doesn’t mean that he’s not a smart guy. There are plenty of people who only have high school educations or less who are very smart, but you can tell from his emails—he had trouble with basic English in a way that does not lend credibility to him being a math teacher at Dalton on the basis of his merits. Which makes one wonder what the hell he was up to there.
There is the theory that he was just running a giant kompromat operation. What I hope I live long enough to find out is, did someone like Putin come along and tap Jeffrey Epstein and say, “Hey, you—you’re good at cozying up to rich guys and being their pimp. How about you film some of that and I’ll pay you for the materials?” Or was Epstein really a freelancer who sort of after the fact found ways to connect to Russian or Israeli or whatever intelligence?
GO
I mean, he’s known Ehud Barak for a long time. Barak is always described as the former prime minister of Israel. But before he was prime minister, he was the head of the Israeli military intelligence unit during the 80s—the time of the Iran-Contra and the Al-Yamamah arms deal between Saudi and Britain, which Doug Leese was instrumental in handling. And that’s at a time when Epstein worked for Doug Leese. And that’s a very small world.
BH
Mm-hmm.
GO
So he’s known Barak in that capacity for a long time. And he’s also was good friends with the guy, I forget his name, Vitaly something, who was the head of the FSB during kind of the transition period from KGB to FSB—to the point where he was looping them in on all these things. So Epstein was right in the center of all of these intelligence services. You know, in addition to, if you go through the emails, there’s all the various sheiks and emirs and all these Middle Easterners that go by, you know, MbZ-style abbreviations so we Westerners can tell them apart. But he seemed to have been heavily involved in all of that stuff. So I don’t know.
Yeah, I don’t think he had any ideology at all. I think he was just kind of out for himself. And I think he got off on that, on the thrill of being on the inside—the power trip or whatever. That’s my theory anyway.
BH
Well, you know, it’s what that goes to show, from a sociological point of view. What I see when you talk about this is, it’s an economy of secrets, because the currency of those relationships—like how does a guy with a high school education become buddy-buddies with the former prime minister of Israel, former head of Israeli intelligence? Like, that is not a common occurrence.
So they must have things of value for one another. And as far as anyone knows, Epstein was from a modest middle-class family in Coney Island. Money probably wasn’t the thing he had to offer Ehud Barak. But the world of an intelligence officer is a world in which secrets are the coin of the realm. And of course, what was Putin himself? An intelligence officer.
All of us are involved in alternative economies with alternative currencies. And you, as someone who deals in coins. Anyone who has a frequent flyer account or who collects points on their credit card that they can use to offset their balance when they pay every month. Those are alternative currencies that exist all around us.
Most of us get paid in the U.S. dollar in America, but we’re also running accounts in alternative currencies. And for some of us, some elites, and also some people who aren’t elite, but just have other forms of capital, like the models whose beauty led them into the ambit of people like Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak. They have what sociologists call bodily capital. They’re just so good looking or they’re so athletically talented that rich people want to have them around, the way kings once had court jesters for their entertainment.
But all those forms of capital, including the money, get exchanged for secrets. And then there’s also an exchange rate by which those secrets can be cashed in for money. And you can see this in Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He hands off secrets—like, “Yeah, we finally convinced Gordon Brown to resign.” So Epstein knew that at least eight hours before the rest of the world. And in return, what Mandelson can say to Epstein is, “Help me get a one-day-a-week job where I can earn like a cool million or two, but I only have to show up like on Mondays, and then I’m free the rest of the week.” And apparently Epstein did exactly that.
GO
Well, you know, it’s good work if you can get it, I guess
But at least the British are investigating this stuff. At least there’s some attempt in Europe to dig into this guy. Cause I feel like—I don’t know. I mean, you know, obviously some of the papers are writing articles here and there. Every once in a while that New York Times will have something about Leon Black or whatever. But I feel like 85 percent of any of those Epstein articles are stuff that I knew a long time ago. And they’re just kind of repurposing it. I don’t know if it’s slowly getting the people who haven’t been following the story up on it or what the whole purpose of it is.
It’s interesting about—what was it? Bodily currency?
BH
Bodily capital.
GO
Bodily capital, yeah. I mean, you have art. Like if you notice all these MAGAs, they’re just artless people, and a lot of the influencers so called are just failed actors, failed comedians, failed musicians. They want to be cool so bad. Donald Trump wants to be cool. At the end of the day, he wants all of Manhattan society to love him and to be welcomed with open arms by the real elite people. And he’ll never, ever, ever have that happen. Like, it’s never going to happen. Sometimes the psychology is just on, you know, brazen glaring display, you know.
BH
Yeah, I mean, there’s all this interesting research in sociology that’s been going on for more than a century, and now even in neuroscience and economics, that says that the reason people want money is not for money’s sake. Beyond a certain subsistence level, the money itself doesn’t make you happier. That’s not to discount the value of money. I mean, it’s nice to able to pay your bills and live comfortably.
But what people really want from the money is status. Ultimately what makes you happy is a sense of being esteemed and respected by the people whose esteem and respect you want—which is not everyone. In sociology, we say we all have reference groups, meaning people whose good opinion we care about. And some of those we don’t get to choose. Like, we’re born into families, and those families become our reference group. And we don’t really get to choose our families, but we can go no contact with them if we don’t want to be subject to their judgments.
But a lot of our adult life and even our adolescent life is spent choosing other reference groups. We want to be like influencers on social media or we want to be like the cool kids at school. And so we do things, we dress in certain ways, we do our hair in certain ways, we say certain words in order to attract the positive attention and respect of the people we want it from. And clearly for Donald Trump, that’s Manhattan society. But he has the demeanor of, like, a Rodney Dangerfield. No disrespect to the great Rodney.
GO
No respect at all.
BH
Exactly. Like, every time I see Trump in his baggy, ill-fitting suits and his stupid little ties, making these kind of Borscht Belt-style cracks at the podium, I’m like, “You can’t even do a good Rodney Dangerfield impression, my man.” But he so clearly wants to. He’s such a creature of the 70s and 80s. It’s written all over him.
GO
That’s also true. The whole, he’s lost in the past and dragging us all into the past. Even “Bomb Iran” is such a 1980s thing. Nobody cares about this anymore. It’s just not a thing.
Now, I want to get back to something that you said when you were on the show in December. We were talking about A.I., and you said that, you know, A.I. is eventually going to crash because this is a product that nobody wants that they keep trying to foist upon us with their Gemini and their Co-pilot and all this other crap. (I don’t know what Claude is, but I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what any of stuff means.) And you said that what will happen is there will be a crash and then all of these libertarian rich assholes will go to the government and be like, “Help me daddy, please, we can’t lose the money, please bail us out.”
BH
Or they will threaten—they’ll say, “We’ll bring down the world economy if you don’t.” Because that’s what they’ve started to do. That’s what happened with Silicon Valley Bank. They didn’t come pleading; they came threatening.
GO
Hmm. I did not know that.
What’s happening now—among the many other things in Iran—is that because of this Strait of Hormuz business and the war…I did not know anything about helium and its magical properties two weeks ago, but now we all know, we’re all experts in helium. And Qatar produces something like 40 percent of the helium in the world. And you need helium to make microchips.
And now all these AI fuckers, who spent all of this time and money propping up Trump, are going to get screwed by him and his impulsive idiotic decision to do this. Because you can’t build these ridiculous AI data farms, whatever they’re called, without lots of microchips. And we’re not gonna be able to make microchips because we’re not gonna have enough helium. So how do you feel about your prediction? That’s my question.
BH
Well, think Trump’s invasion of Iran may have hastened along this crash in the sense that if you can’t build the data centers, then you can’t have the revolution. But you couldn’t really have the revolution anyways—but it might have taken longer to find that out had there been more resources, more natural resources to build the data centers.
I have to believe that with the way that Trump has made energy prices skyrocket, the fact that data centers are also making people’s energy costs skyrocket is also going to hasten the demise of this AI revolution. Because there’s a point at which people just can’t pay anymore. And that’s when you get this sort of French Revolution, fuck it, I’ve got nothing to lose. It’s pitchforks and torches in the streets now.
GO
I read this study from Penn Wharton about—I don’t like to be one of these “let’s talk about the national debt” people, because, I mean, ultimately we can just print more money to pay the debt. That will cause its own hyperinflation collapse, but technically we’re not ever going to fully have that as a problem because everything is denominated in U.S. dollars. But once the debt service gets to be something like 200 percent of GDP, that’s when it becomes completely unsustainable. They predicted— and this study is a couple of years old now already—it’s going to be between 2040 and 45, I think, when this is going to happen.
Now this war has escalated all of the economic unrest. I mean, he’s burned through our supply of Tomahawk missiles like he’s some drunk freshman smoking a pack of cigarettes outside a bar at 2 a.m. And it’s going to take 18 months, two years to replenish that, at enormous expense. And all of this money that’s going to go to fight the war is money that we don’t have yet, because of the tax cuts and everything else. So I feel like all of this stuff is hastening and accelerating to the point where we’re going to have a major—potentially, yes, a French Revolution style event. Because economically, whenever the income inequality gets to be that much, there’s always some sort of revolution, historically. How worried should we be about all this, you think?
BH
You know, when you’re talking about the depletion of the missiles and the other military matérial, what I was thinking is, if I were an enemy of the U.S., I would think this is a fantastic time to attack the United States. Because they’ve rendered themselves defenseless—or a lot less well-defended than they used to be. They’ve got a total incompetent Fox News host who’s hated by enlisted people running the military. It’s an omnishambles. What a fantastic time to attack the Great Satan.
One of the reasons I’m not so keen on coming back to the U.S. is because I think that if Iran really wants to escalate, just activate some cells in the US and go to town. Because, like, what are we going to do? We burned through our military resources. Our government is total chaos. The Mad King only cares about his giant ballroom.
GO
Yeah.
BH
What a fantastic time for our enemies to get their revenge for…God knows how many countries are salivating at the prospect right now.
GO
What you haven’t accounted for is that we have the great Markwayne, Whateverhisnameis in charge of our national defense now. And that 25-year-old kid with the one raised eyebrow and the sneer in charge of counterterrorism.1 So I assure you bruh, we’re in very good hands here, in the U S..
But seriously—these data centers that Iran threatened to…who knows what they’re really going to do, but they’re threatening to hit, you know, the big companies: to hit Palantir, to hit Apple, to hit Google and Amazon.
BH
What do you think they mean by that? How can they hit them from Iran? Do you mean like send people to US and blow them up?
GO
I don’t know.
There’s just drones. All they need is—it’s not like any of those places have any defense around it. Like, one drone could probably take out the whole system. I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like an impossible thing to do, especially when, you know, like we said, we’re burning through all of our defenses. I can’t imagine the morale of the military is very high right now.
And we have a president who would welcome some kind of terrorist attack because he’s going to use it to try to convince us to call off the elections, like his buddy Netanyahu. He’s going to want the same kind of treatment. “We’re under attack. We’re at war. We can’t change horses in midstream during the war. It’s not what we do,” even though—I wasn’t alive then, but I seem to recall there was an election in 1864. Pretty sure there was. Pretty sure Lincoln won re-election that year.
But yeah, it’s just this whole thing is—I don’t know. Up until the attack in Iran, I thought, at least in the back of my head, all right, everything that he’s done so far, while obviously horrifying and awful and people have suffered and died and you can’t get any of that back, it’s all ultimately reversible, right? An FDR-style Congress could come in and boom, revert back, put in guardrails so this doesn’t happen again.
But after the Iran bombing, I don’t know. I think that that broadened a variable that’s so far beyond our control, that it’s just too impossible to predict. And I don’t know how we get any of that back. I mean, we can’t do the turn-the-page thing, right? Even if we change the laws and Mamdani is the president in four years somehow, people around thew rold aren’t going to trust the U.S. again, unless all of these people are arrested, indicted, and punished for what they’ve done.
BH
And even then. You know, we could have Nuremberg-style trials, put these people away, and, like, the prisons will be overflowing with these clowns. And the justice system will be overwhelmed for years. It’ll take, I don’t know, a generation, if we have any hope of regaining the trust of allies.
GO
Yeah, I don’t know. Exile—as you know, we’ve talked about this. Exile is a lovely option. Little St. James is right there. Just put them all in Little St. James. They can go fishing. We’ll give them some fishing rods, and that’ll be the end.
BH
Lord of the Flies or Survivor style.
GO
Yeah. What’s the one where you’re—what is it, Naked and Alone? Is that what it’s called? I can’t remember what I don’t watch. Do you watch these shows? I don’t watch any of these shows.
BH
I don’t. I don’t. I just know of their existence. Sometimes I find it hard to believe they exist. I remember maybe 10 or 12 years ago, I flipped on the television. I was living in Denmark, but they were showing American television there. And one of the show titles, which I thought was a joke, was Too Ugly to Date. And the premise of the show was that they found people who were unattractive. And then subjected them to ritual humiliation for the entertainment of viewers. And I’m like, “This is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen. What is wrong with people?” Like, that had to be greenlit by multiple layers of executives and creatives and stuff. I guess that’s how we get a country that elects Trump twice.
GO
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not far from, you know, Ouch! My Balls!, which is the name of the show in Idiocracy that everybody watches, which is just people getting kicked in the balls. In fact, that’s probably more entertaining in actuality than any of these. Like, I would shudder to watch that Too Ugly to Date show. It would make me feel bad, like for everyone involved.
What’s it like being in Europe now? Because I’ve been there, but I’ve only been there in short bursts. And you’ve been there now for a sustained length of time. Has the attitude towards Americans changed? Are people still kind of sympathetic or are they pissed off? What are you seeing?
BH
I have not found personally the hatred and aggression that some people describe. I lived in Europe for 12 years between 2006 and 2018. And I did get a lot of anti-American aggression during that time, but that was the Bush and Obama administrations mostly. And that was just, you know, historic resentments like, “America doesn’t produce anything but Levi’s and Coca-Cola, you losers.” Or people in Denmark throwing beer in my face because I asked a question in English. That’s just nationalism more than anything.
But, I’ve just been at a conference in Paris. I’m staying long term in Italy. And I can speak the local languages, but people can tell from my accent and often from the way I look that I’m not one of them, that I’m American. And they usually ask. But I’ve still encountered curiosity and friendliness and openness, just like the old days, mostly. So in my experience, nothing has changed. But there is this general sense of, like, “Shit, the world is in a bad place.” And in Italy, I do see anti-Trump graffiti, which is reflected in national policy. Like, Sicily just denied American military jets the right to refuel on the island—which, good for them.
GO
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Meloni been pretty staunch about sticking up for Italy and Europe in general against Trump, I have observed—even though obviously she has her own issues. But at least on that front, Italy seems to be, you know, in pretty good hands.
I know you’ve got to go in a little while. So there’s one more thing I want to talk about and just get your thoughts on. You’ve talked about this in your books, it comes up in the study of offshores, and LB with The World Beneath and the mob: These systems, these dark money systems require laws and stability to function. They’re parasitic in that sense. You can’t have just a mob economy without having a regular economy to prop it up and make sure that the banks work and that there’s barristers that can help you sue for libel in Britain, that the SWIFT codes happen and the money transfers, all of that stuff. You know what I’m talking about.
But there is a point, I think, at which the dark stuff so subsumes the lightness that the entire system breaks down. And doesn’t everybody suffer? Something like crypto—like, these Winklevoss twins own all this crypto. If the entire U.S. economy collapses, is crypto really going to be a hedge against that? Or is it also going to collapse because it’s tied to the economy? By the way, everyone’s selling this crypto and they can’t get rid of the crypto fast enough, these crypto people, right now, from what I’ve seen.
But I feel like it’s almost like the same thing with the debt, the 200 percent. There’s a point at which it becomes not sustainable. Are you seeing that? Are we getting closer to that point? Do you think or are you still confident that we’ll be okay as far as that goes?
BH
I was just reading something about how, like with the alternative Super Bowl halftime show that Kid Rock was doing, there’s this prevalence of people on the right wing— including the libertarians, who I classify as right wing—who’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to create alternative realities for themselves. Like Bari Weiss creating an alternative university, Kellyanne Conway talking about alternative facts. And apparently Trump himself, the entire White House, is like an alternative reality where Trump’s aides only show him sizzle reels of things blowing up in Iran, and they don’t actually tell him how things are going.
And Mar-a-Lago is this wonderful world where you can pretend that America’s number one and America’s getting greater, et cetera. But eventually, delusions run into reality. And crypto is a delusion. It’s the indoor cat delusion of, “You’re not the boss of me. I go my own way. I’m an independent cat. I’m a lord of the jungle.” But like open the door and say, “OK, cat, there’s the jungle. Knock yourself out.” And all of a sudden the delusion meets reality, and it’s unsustainable.
So I think the delusions of autonomy that crypto tries to represent will be punctured by the loss of U.S. dominance in the world economy, as more and more countries start selling off their treasury bonds and divesting of U.S. debt as the dollar becomes less important to the world economy. It won’t happen overnight. It’s hard to untangle 75, 80 years of international systems, but it seems to be happening finally—delusions of dominance and hegemony and the individual delusions that are promoted by AI.
Like, you can have a relationship—you can have a marriage—with a chatbot that flatters you and lies to you.
GO
Sign me up!
BH
That delusion gets punctured when the chatbot is telling you how to kill yourself—saying, you know, “That’s a really good idea. You should definitely think about shutting yourself in the garage and turning on the ignition of your car and just taking a bunch of deep breaths. It’ll all be better if you’re not here.” That’s when reality intrudes—as it inevitably does. It’s just a shame that we’re all shackled to these delusional, malevolent, malicious people.
GO
I mean, we are. And the AI people seem like the worst of the bunch too, right? Like this, what’s his name, Sam Altman looks…I mean, how is he a real person? He just seems like the obvious bad guy from any lame sci-fi movie from the 1980s. And this Alex Karp dude with his stupid hair and these guys…Elon Musk doesn’t even know how to wear a T-shirt properly. These guys can’t comb their hair. Like what, why are we allowing them to have so much power?
And it’s also, I think, gotten to the point where we’re going to have to seize their wealth. It’s not just about, “You did something wrong.” I think it’s—even calling it taxation at this point is probably too…the economics of it demand redistribution on some level, because I feel like they’ve stolen all this money from us and we need to just take it back.
BH
They have. And they’ve stolen the life’s work of people like me. And then had the nerve to come whining to the government saying, “But if you don’t let us steal, we can’t make any money.” It’s like, how is that going to work if I come to my local police department and say, “Well, I can’t pay the mortgage if you won’t let me rob banks. So come on, be a friend.”
GO
Ha ha ha.
Yeah. I mean, that is probably a compelling argument for Trump, though. I mean, that’s one he could probably get behind.
Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. Why do people need to have billions in the three digits?
BH
It strikes me that what’s really motivating these guys, like you point out—that Karp and Musk, and I would add Thiel and JD Vance—they’re all, as you said about many of the people surrounding Trump, they’re failures. A lot of them, by their own standards, are failures as men, specifically. They’re insecure about how they look.
They’re motivated by self-hatred, but they’re making it everyone else’s problem. Like, it’s almost like the joke about how men will burn the world down to avoid going to therapy? But literally, they’re doing it. They’re doing the meme.
And think about someone like Kristi Noem, right? After all the years of having to suffer through right-wingers going, “What is a woman?”—you know, yammering on about other people’s alleged sexual perversions, here’s Kristi Noem probably leaking the pictures of her husband dressed up in fake breasts and being all kinky and stuff, and saying, “You should pity me. And by the way, that’s why I had my little fuck palace with Corey Lewandowski paid for by you and other taxpayers. Feel sorry for me.”
All these people just seem to have deep, deep self-hatreds that they’re not willing to look at. And so they externalize them. Like Stephen Miller. I don’t know what his glitch is, but he does not have the look of a happy man. Like, have you ever seen Stephen Miller look happy?
GO
There was a photo of him separating parents from children where he was beaming, pretty much.
No, I haven’t. He’s a horrible person.
BH
He’s a festering boil of self-hatred. And even in those images and videos of him when he was a teenager, he looked that way. And taking sadistic pleasure in talking about harming immigrants, whatever insecurity he has about being a legit American because he comes from immigrant ancestors, he’s just taken his insides and put them on the outside. And now, the whole world has to suffer. Millions of people have to suffer.
It sounds incredibly simplistic. And this is one of the many areas in which I’m not a specialist. I’m not a psychologist. But all of these hateful, hateful people who are destroying the world seem to be on the run from their self-hatred. And that’s why they’re creating these delusional worlds. “I’m a big independent man. Like look at AI. I’m intelligent.”
And, you know, Alex Karp goes around telling on himself. He purports to create artificial intelligence, and then tells the story of how as a PhD student, he was rejected by one of the great intellectual towering figures of the 20th and 21st century, Jürgen Habermas, who just died. Karp could have kept that information to himself, but he has this confession compulsion, I guess is what Freud would have called it. And he takes it upon himself, Alex Karp, to write an article that he probably thinks makes him look cool, but is actually a confession that the towering intellectual figure of the 20th and 21st century didn’t think he was that smart and rejected him as a PhD student.
So what does Alex Karp do? He doesn’t muster any humility and decide to rethink his approach to things. No, no, no. He decides he’s going to conquer and dominate intelligence. He’s going to monopolize it and put it in a bottle and sell it back to us by stealing the work of actually intelligent people. That’s his revenge for his rejection. Will he ever admit that? No. But, you know, if you read what he says, if you read what he writes, he says it in sort of an encoded way with an amazing lack of self-awareness. All of these people seem to have no hope.
GO
Well, they’re encouraged to have no self-awareness or no introspection or no empathy by no less a no less a towering intellectual than Mark Andreessen.
BH
Right, right. If you want to externalize all of your self-hatred, it is crucially important that you never introspect, that you never look inside, because what you’re going to find is ugly. So you just take all that ugliness and you put it out there, and you make it corporate policy, or you make it public policy, and you make it other people’s problem.
And that is my answer to your question of why do they need a couple zeros behind their billions. Because the relentless chase of those billions is also a distraction from their self-hatred, and it allows them to buy these delusional worlds and force them on the rest of us, so that we all have to live with their self-hatred and delusion. It makes it more real for them.
GO
That’s a great way to explain it. Yeah. At the end of the day, these are people who named a company after an object from Lord of the Rings and are unaware that they are Sauron. So that’s who we’re dealing with. It’s just dummies.
Okay, so I know you’ve got to go. Thanks as always for coming on and tell people where they can find you because you’re on Blue Sky. I see you all the time tweeting there and it’s always good to see what you’ve got to say about stuff that’s happening, tell everybody where they can find you.
BH
I have a website, brookeharrington.com. And I post on Bluesky at EBHarrington.
GO
Well, thank you so much for joining me today—and enjoy the last couple months that you have before you have to come back to the United States.
BH
To come back to the cesspit of delusion and dysfunction run by a bunch of self-hating people.
GO
Yeah. Or as Trump would call it, Queens.
TONIGHT: FOUR YEARS
This week is the four-year anniversary of The Five 8. Please join us for a special episode:
Thomas Fulgate, said kid, is actually 23.
