Erling Haaland, crypto billionaires, and the foxes incident

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30business needs in one place, saving you time, headaches, and serious money. Stop paying for missing pieces. Go to odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com to learn more. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. Matt, you are back. Have you missed your very uncomfortable chair? Haven't missed the chair. I've missed all of you, though. Rachel, my friend Rachel said she had a very nice time with you last week.

1:09Good, we loved it. We were chatting all about solo-maxing, hetero-pessimism, and femicels, trad wives. I'm glad she was there to replace it, because I don't know what any of those words mean. It was very like women have a podcast vibe, and everyone can go back and listen to it. That was last week's episode. This week, though, we have got your new doc. My new documentary, which you can see on BBC iPlayer. Yeah, which is all about the tech billionaire takeover. So I spent a year hanging out with tech billionaires to find out what they envision for the future of our society. Spoiler, lots of crypto.

1:40Lots of crypto. And also we're going to talk about ADHD, the rise in ADHD diagnoses and people seeking diagnosis and misinformation about ADHD online. Yeah, exactly. Which kind of connects back to when we were talking about medical misinformation a couple of weeks ago and is about misinformation around mental health on social media and the impact that that can have. but but but before we get to your doc let's talk about one of your favorite people it's not just in bieber it is erling holland erling brout holland he is a footballer for anyone who isn't into football there has never been an athlete more made for social media than erling holland his look his gait his ability he's he's norwegian and he does these snapchats like really jokey content i mean there's this video of him like going shopping for like a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and he's like yeah kind of like shopping everything he does is funny somehow and he's such an incredible talent and he's like almost single-handedly like driving norway to the semi-finals potentially well we should say oh yeah we're recording this before the england norway game so so this could actually be a very triggering topic trigger warning we're talking about erling holland um the reason we're talking about in those because we've discussed the pos vibes of world cup social media content.

2:54But there's a darker side, isn't there, as predicted? Yeah, there is a darker side. And particularly around Holland being claimed as, well, basically as an Agartha. If you don't know what that is, you need to listen to our episode on Agartha. For anyone who's forgotten, it's the whole white monster energy drink, neo-Nazi symbolism under an iceberg thing. If you don't know what that is, then you really need to go back. That's elucidated nothing. But the idea is that a lot of racist and kind of eugenicist people online are talking about Holland as a kind of Aryan phenotype. And there's a lot being spoken about the matchup between England and Norway as a matchup between his traditional kind of Aryan Norwegian phenotype.

3:35And for example, Anthony Gordon, who people jokingly refer to as someone you could imagine at the Battle of Agincourt, because he kind of looks like a medieval English person. Yeah, they're both blonde, white. Exactly. Anthony Gordon is from the UK place for England. And yeah, and the kind of underlying sentiment here is that race has now being thrown at this World Cup in a big way by lots of people on social media. And there's a lot of discussion over, like, is the English team English? And it feels like that discourse happens every time. But I think the thing I've noticed quite distinctly this World Cup is that often some of this stuff will start as what seems to be a joke.

4:09And I guess, you know, lots of the Agarthen content that you've told me about is stuff that seems like on the surface of it, like a bit funny or a bit absurd, but actually has much more sinister undertones. And it's kind of the same with this, right? Like there are obviously people who are just joking about Harland and saying like he seems a bit like a caveman. Or there are people joking about Anthony Gordon, you know, comparing him to Princess Diana and then also comparing him. Oh, he does look a bit like Wester. Oh, that's a whole thing. I can't believe you've missed that trove of memes. I'm well in that side of X.

4:36But yeah, and then there are people who either co-opt that humour and or kind of use the humour to soft launch their racist, implicitly racist ideas. Yeah, this idea of like who gets to represent certain countries, which I guess the World Cup at its core is kind of about nationality. And you can see how then the conversation gets subverted in that way. Exactly. And the word phenotype is now surging on social media in reference to people like Holland. That term has risen a lot. It's kind of a code word for eugenics often in recent times. and also this idea amongst some racist accounts that like the left must be so pissed off that the best footballer in the world right now is a kind of white Viking from Norway but it's like guys one of the best footballers in the world is a black woke Frenchman I start to learn how to cook What's the Mbappe special?

5:23For example nothing Some of the stuff about Haaland is less sinister Are you having a... Most of it is Most of it is, yeah Are you having a Brout summer? I hadn't heard that We're not sure whether England will be having a Brat Summer after. Whether it is or isn't a Brat Summer will be defined by the events one week prior to this podcast being released. Obviously, that is referring to the Brat Summer phenomena of two years ago, which was Charlie XCX's album coming out and everyone saying it was Brat Summer. Now people are taking Harlan's double-barrelled name on his shirt and saying that they're having a Brat Summer.

5:58And there's loads of younger Norwegian fans, particularly younger Norwegian women, who are like posting TikToks in t-shirts saying Brout Summer. So maybe we love Brout Summer or maybe we hate it. That remains to be seen.

6:17So Matt, tell me about this new doc. Essentially, crypto billionaires try and take over everything. That's, yeah, that's pretty much it. So the doc is called The Tech Billionaire Takeover. and it's essentially trying to answer the question of what is the future that our kind of tech billionaire overlords are envisioning for all of us because they are increasingly kind of taking control of and influencing our society if you look at the the news in in this country in the uk right now is all about um nigel farage receiving a five million pound gift from a crypto billionaire in the US. The crypto industry is the biggest lobby in the country.

7:00So in the last election cycle, they contributed more than the fossil fuel industry. I've been hanging out with a couple of tech billionaires, a lot of tech millionaires over the past kind of almost two years now. What's their vibe first? Like if you're going to summarize, because I think a lot of people will have preconceived ideas about what that kind of person would be like to hang out with. I think one thing I've noticed about billionaires is they tend to, because they're so often surrounded by people who either work for them or are trying to get their money or who are somehow not genuine or are there to support them.

7:31Like they kind of often saw me as like one of the few genuine, like, yeah, like a friend, something they could actually open up to. Because I'm a journalist, I'm not trying to get any money from them. I'm not working for them. So they kind of opened up quite a lot to me. And, you know, a lot of these tech billionaires, they're just they care more about sci fi and video games. And that's the kind of stuff that we talked about a lot. But one thing that also is true about tech billionaires is they do believe genuinely in many cases that their technology and their brains have the power to completely rewrite how our society is run.

8:05A lot of them are, you know, cozying up to the Trump administration now, but they see Trump and his office and the government itself as something kind of ephemeral and fleeting. And they are the ones with the real power and the genius to kind of run the world. And they really do believe that. And increasingly, the way that they envision our world and our society to be run is through cryptocurrency and the underlying technology of cryptocurrency, which is the blockchain. So who are the standout characters, people that you met? Because it feels like there's a kind of cast, like there's these names I've recognized and I've seen pop up, but I don't actually know huge amounts about.

8:41So a lot of people have seen in the news that the Trump family has made billions through their crypto ventures. Well, their primary crypto venture is a company called World Liberty Financial, which sells a what's called a stable coin, which is a cryptocurrency that's theoretically always worth the same thing as one dollar called the USD1. They've profited billions from that. Now, the initial lead investor in Worldly We Financial is a Chinese crypto billionaire called Justin Sun. And he is the main character of the film. I don't understand why this doesn't get more coverage, why more people aren't talking about this.

9:16Because Justin Sun himself, he's someone who's been accused of financial fraud, of market manipulation. his cryptocurrency platform, Tron, which is a blockchain, which we can explain more about later, was accused of being the blockchain on which the majority of illicit crypto transactions happened. It's where mafia organizations, where Hamas, Hezbollah, allegedly kind of laundered their money and stored their money. Justin Sun denies those allegations and actually has now settled out of that SEC lawsuit with the US government and also claims that Tron, his platform, is kind of leading the way in combating illicit transactions.

9:55And they've seen a huge decline because of that. But I've hung out with him in Hong Kong, in Manhattan, when he rang the NASDAQ bell to celebrate his company becoming publicly listed on the most prestigious tech stock exchange, the NASDAQ. He basically is known for outlandish stunts, right? Like if you've heard of Justin Sun, you've probably heard him as the guy who bought the banana duct tape to a wall. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So that was like an art piece, which was a banana duct tape to a wall called Comedian and he bought it for$6.2 million and then ate it. That's the kind of stuff he does. It's kind of like being a sort of incredibly rich troll.

10:32Yeah, exactly. He also spent$28 million going to space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin flight. And he called me right afterwards to tell me about the experience, you know, and I think he's probably aware that when he does these stunts, the value of his crypto holdings go up because his profile goes up. And this is the thing about crypto and the internet and social media is so much of crypto, arguably all of crypto, is just garnering attention around a cryptocurrency or product through social media, through stunts. A huge portion of Twitter is now just people, just accounts that exist solely to pump particular cryptocurrency products by attaching them to news stories, events, viral stories, trolling, whatever.

11:15Why do you think that he let you spend so much time with him? Well, partially because he's always been keen for attention, I think, is what you can see from the fact that he ate the$6.3 million banana. Partially also because he is keen to talk about his vision for the future of society. I mean, he explains to me that he believes that the technology that underwrites cryptocurrency, the blockchain, which is essentially a kind of decentralized, encrypted, automatic way to use software to implement transactions on cryptocurrency, that same technology could also be used to run society itself, voting, governance, the allocation of budget.

11:56I think in the future, eventually, the US general election, presidential election, will run up blockchain too, because it's just better. I believe in the technology rather than government force. So I think that's the whole, I think, new technology-based libertarian is all about. Blockchain and internet technology we have today is empowered individuals rather than organizations. I think that's very important. That's also why I believe the government will be useless because of technology involvement. Not only does he think this could be an act in our society as it is today, that he's actually been elected the prime minister of a small micronation called Liberland that uses blockchain technology to run its entire governance.

12:47Where is the Liberland? It's on a kind of contested bit of land on the Danube River between Serbia and Croatia, which I also went to. What was it like? Well, it wasn't much right now. It was kind of like a muddy spit of land, really, with like a couple of like tree houses and tents. And it has the backing of Justin Sun and 30 other billionaires as well, right? because this is one of many kind of micro nations that all run the blockchain. There's one called Prospera in Honduras. Peter Thiel has his Seasteading Institute. Another one is Draper Nation, which was created by Tim Draper. He's a kind of a billionaire tech investor.

13:25And, you know, I interview him in the film as well. I go to Draper University, which is his kind of like, it's half university, half dragon's den. It basically trains people how to be tech startup founders. And so they're competing for investment from Draper's investment fund. And also, like, if you ever wanted to understand the culture of Silicon Valley and the psychology of the people who try and become tech startups. I mean, look, all I'll say is this. They're told that they are superheroes. And in the graduation ceremony, they have to put on a cape and, like, jump into, like, a ball pit, basically, as though they are superheroes.

13:59And I did this as well, by the way. In the film. But yeah, they think that they're superheroes and that they can save society and the government is just outdated. It's inefficient. I think one of the concerns that critics have about this is essentially these tech bros are turning themselves into sort of like mini governments, right? I mean, we're talking about like these micro nations and this idea that you can basically just sort of set up your own little mini kind of country and then run everything as you'd like. And you have a huge amount of power and influence because you're incredibly rich.

14:32Exactly. And that's written into the code, the constitution of these countries. The more tokens, the more... But they're not elected, right? Like they're just... Well, they're elected on the blockchain, but you get more votes if you have more tokens on the blockchain. So it's actually about money. Yeah, the victory you are, the more votes you have. I mean, I guess in some ways, most elections are about money and the ability to campaign. But ultimately, in a democracy, that's very different from in these micronations. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that these people being chosen to run these micronations obviously doesn't really impact the very, very small number of people who inhabit those micronations necessarily, but it does affect how the rest of the world works.

15:10So what a lot of these tech billionaires believe is that nations and nation states are going to be replaced with something that they call network states, where it's like an online community where the law is computer code, essentially. There is no central government. And these countries, these states will compete for citizens in the way a company competes for customers. So like you could switch from one country to another, just like you could switch gym memberships. And Liberland is an example of one of these, right? Now, in theory, it could be democratic if each person got one vote, right? In order for that to work on the blockchain, people would have to figure out how to have your identity exist on the blockchain, which some people are working out.

15:53But until that happens, the way you get votes is by purchasing tokens, which means the richer you are, the more votes you have. And what do we know about the origins of these ideas? Where have they come from? So a lot of these ideas can be traced back to a guy called Curtis Yarvin, who wrote under the online moniker Mencius Moldbug. And he's basically like he's been called the founder of the dark enlightenment. So he's a kind of near reactionary thinker who his views are notoriously confusing. I met him in California and it was very hard to get a word in edgewise, but he sort of believes that basically democracy has failed and it doesn't work.

16:31And I think one of the reasons for that is that like people want less immigration, but immigration remains high, according to him. And therefore, it should be replaced with something more akin to a kind of corporate monarchy. And essentially, like we should have tech CEO kings running these kind of network state like corporate countries. where you are, rather than a citizen, you're kind of a shareholder in a corporation. People can very easily see that there's a very simple analogy between a company and a state. When we look at any functional structure that involves more than a few people, we always see that it is organized as a monarchy.

17:11We always see a pyramid-shaped org chart. A company has a CEO, an army has a general, a film has a director. This is just nothing other than monarchism. So the patchwork system is an idea that's orthogonal to that. It's the idea that the greatest human flourishing has been seen historically in periods with large numbers of small states. When you look at a corporation in a way, it's a kind of virtual state. It's like a state at a lower level. It pretends to be a state, but Microsoft can't really attack Oracle by sending troops of thugs to Oracle's headquarters to go beat up the engineers. Right.

17:46Although they probably should. And, you know, this all sounds absolutely insane, but this is someone who's won the praise of people like Peter Thiel, like J.D. Vance, the vice president. So a lot of the most powerful people in the world are actually looking to these thinkers and these ideas for how society will run in the future, no matter how crazy they sound. And Curtis Yarvin is someone I've heard of because he is a bit of a favorite, really, with right wing YouTubers. I mean, he's the kind of person that just sort of pops up everywhere. Yeah. He's slightly inescapable if you're consuming that kind of content.

18:16This week on Rufo and Lomas, we're talking to the dissident, right, intellectual Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name. You're going to have to pronounce the first word for me. Minchus Moldbug. There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. Curtis Yarvin is with us. Google him. That's a brilliant trick. We got a special guest here. Curtis Yarvin, it's great to have you on. Curtis Yarvin, a genuinely interesting person. We're honored to have him with us today. Thank you for that lovely intro, Tucker. I'm pleased to be here. Oh, no. No, this is one of those conversations where - Does that sound too fake?

18:47Was that too fake? He's all over social media. He kind of looks like Johnny Ramone. He has like a leather jacket, like long black hair and a very idiosyncratic way of speaking. But he genuinely believes that like we should have a hereditary monarchy, you know, held accountable by a kind of corporate board. What you're talking about really reminds me of, like when you mentioned the tech bro kings, essentially, really reminds me of how some of the Scandinavian countries, so Denmark and Finland, actually appointed ambassadors to the social media companies. And they treat the social media companies like governments.

19:23And so they deal with them as though they're kind of like a nation state in and of themselves. Because essentially they are as powerful, if not more powerful than a lot of governments. And to some extent, that just fits into this realm that you're describing, where tech bros become so powerful and influential that they actually... They actually are kings. Yeah. They are literal kings. Or queens. Or queens, yeah. I imagine there's a threat leans towards kings. And the blockchain technology will also allow this world supposedly to come about because you can use blockchain like a kind of computer code version of law to ensure that the hereditary monarchy is stable and that the government acts in the interests of the people.

20:06and if not i mean he was saying all sorts of things like the corporate board that runs the country could like shut down all guns everywhere using something he referred to as a crypto dingus that like uses encryption to like shut it's like a kind of you know the nuclear football like it would be like that but for every gun in society so basically what you realize is like all this stuff comes from like the sci-fi like it sounds like gaming adult brains yeah yeah essentially like adolescent brains in like rich older men who now kind of run our world. Essentially quite a few of these tech billionaires who seem to be setting themselves up in opposition to current political systems, governments who they feel kind of don't work anymore, don't represent the average person, are outdated, are behind, whatever, are actually either connected to those political systems and actually kind of welcomed into them and or are at war with them, but in such a way that they're still kind of like very sort of intermingled with certain bits of the political world.

21:05And therefore it feels, again, a bit hypocritical because, you know, what they're proposing is ultimately a load of faceless millionaires or billionaires also being in charge of stuff. And it seems to be more about them just wanting to have the power rather than it being about making sure that governments, quote unquote, are held accountable. Exactly. It like it dresses itself up as this kind of tech libertarianism that takes the power back from the government and gives it to the people but really what it does is it ends up giving it to the people who control the technology and that just so happens to be them

21:45matt i've had several messages from people getting in touch about how lots of content relating to adhd or other neurodivergent conditions have been popping up on their social media feed So much so that they kind of feel like, oh, wait a sec. Like, am I experiencing this? Have I got ADHD? Have I got autism? Lots of kind of pseudo psychology. I think that's the issue, the kind of pseudo bit. Exactly. And it's really interesting to try and parse this out from the genuine rise in ADHD diagnoses versus, you know, how much of this is just people who think they might have ADHD because they've seen something on social media.

22:20The NHS monitoring data shows that the number of people waiting for an ADHD assessment rose from 21 ,000 in April 2019 to around 270 ,000 by December 2025. So it's a huge rise. And that's kind of the reason we're talking about it, because there is a lot of content about this. And it can be quite tricky, actually, to figure out what's true and helpful and what's misleading. Here's how to tell if a girl has ADHD in under one minute. These signs are going to be weirdly specific and probably creep you out a little bit. This is what it's like inside the mind of someone with inattentive ADHD like me.

22:576 signs that you may be suffering from ADHD, also known as a deficit of attention, hyperactivity. And 10 signs to recognize that you have ADHD. The last one is the most problematic. I'm 27, I just got prescribed ADHD medication, so I want to talk about some of the symptoms that made me realize I need to see a psychiatrist. There's been a fair bit of research done into this in recent months and years. There was this study that came out last year about how there are 28 billion views on the hashtag ADHD. So we're talking about like a huge section of content. And you can see how easily misinformation and inaccuracies can be baked into that, which is something that quite a few experts, clinicians have warned about.

23:36I'm sure there are people booking in for ADHD assessments who very much have it. There also could be a lot of people who don't have it but have convinced themselves they have. Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting topic because on the whole, increased awareness around mental health issues is a good thing. For example, the rise is in ADHD diagnoses and people seeking a diagnosis. But the population prevalence of ADHD has been constant. Around 5 % of children, 3 % or 4 % of young people and adults in this country have had ADHD. But the number of people who are actually getting diagnosed with it is because of the administrative awareness, people who are actually getting the help.

24:14Who are essentially questioning whether it happened. Yeah, it has increased. But obviously that jump from 21 ,000 to 270 ,000 is huge. So clearly, you know, a lot of social media self-diagnosis is going on. And that comes from a lot of these creators are basically saying things like, if you don't clean your room and like if you do your homework late, then like you have ADHD. And you actually do have ADHD, don't you? Yeah, so I do have ADHD. I got an official diagnosis of ADHD. and to be fair I do think that like social media played a role in that actually because it happened when I was writing my last book and it was just so difficult like I've always had things right like I wrote my dissertation in like basically one 24-hour period and this is like a history dissertation at uni that's like zero to complete in 24 hours it's not like you're enjoying your life more because you're not working you're more distracted or you're more stressed out because you're not working and you just don't have the executive function to actually like do what you know needs to be done which is like sit down and actually do the thing and it's also affected my life and like lots of other ways too like there was the have I ever told you about like um the the foxes incident no I mean I don't know if how much I would definitely remember if something called the foxes incident like I discussed I think this is ADHD I came home from holiday and like foxes had been living inside my house basically and like i remember my girlfriend's reaction we walked through the door i was like no wait just don't come in don't come in and she was like what matt what the first thing i noticed there was like ai fruit yeah basically she is so i walked through the door and the first thing i noticed is like slightly colder than normal and my doc martens are like scattered across the floor i'm like that's weird i pick one up i tip it over and like a bunch of basically piss comes out and i'm like what is going i look into the living room and it is just a nightmare scenario.

26:05There's like fox shit like everywhere. They were like sleeping in our bed. Like even to this day, my girlfriend's like, I can't imagine them shrieking in the bed. And they went into the pantry. The one thing they decided to eat was my like hot chocolate powder, which they could have just eaten there on the floor. But they took it over to the white sofa, the most expensive out of my own. And they ate it there. And then they discovered that chocolate is poisonous to foxes. So they like threw up and diarrhea'd the chocolate all over my white sofa. So it was bad for them and for me. And like, I'm seeing all of this and I'm like, oh my God, she's going to, and she was pregnant, by the way.