brendan halpin

More Epstein emails have dropped, and after seeing my former boss, Danny Hillis, in one of the recent photo dumps, I went a-searchin’ for Danny’s name in the emails.

There are hundreds of pages of emails mentioning Danny Hillis, though, to be fair, every email appears like five times, as some are duplicated and then every reply in a chain appears as its own document. So it’s not really hundreds of emails.

But it is dozens. And what it details is nothing salacious—more what I would categorize as the banality of evil. Epstein would take a trip to Cambridge and see if Hillis was available, and they’d meet up. Or Epstein would be assembling a group of Harvard/MIT stars, and he’d make sure Hillis was there. Or Hillis would travel to New York and see Epstein there.

Again, I need to stress that there’s none of the chumminess or coded language in the Epstein/Hillis exchanges that you see in these emails from people who were obviously involved in the abuse that defined Epstein’s life. It’s friendly and professional. Actually a lot of it is actually logistical communications between their assistants. (Fun fact—they didn’t redact Hillis’ personal cell number from all the emails, so if you want to give him a call or send a text, that is totally something you can do, unless he’s changed his number!)

But, as I mentioned in my previous piece, the absence of criminal behavior on Hillis’ part doesn’t indicate a moral clean slate. He and Epstein saw each other a couple of times per year, as far as I can tell from the emails (confession—I didn’t look through all 200+ pages), between the years 2010 and 2018. He also did some consulting work for Epstein’s reputation-laundering philanthropic foundation. The files indicate that he signed an NDA, but my connections in the fundraising world tell me this isn’t necessarily unusual or sinister.

For those who want a lil’ timeline refresher, Epstein’s first conviction was in 2008. James Patterson’s book, which really brought the extent of Epstein’s evil to public prominence, came out in 2016. Epstein was arrested again in 2019.

So Danny Hillis knew that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile. And he chose to spend time with him anyway. For Danny Hillis, the systematic abuse of children was not a dealbreaker.

I reached out to Danny Hillis to ask him about this through emails at his Long Now Foundation and his company Applied Invention. I asked how he made sense of his association with a monster. I’m not surprised that he didn’t respond, but I can’t help speculating. So here goes.

First, you need to know that Danny Hillis is fantastically rich by the standards of normal people, but not at all rich by Epstein standards. I saw an estimate of Hillis’ net worth at $60 million. So he’s not one of the big money men that Epstein hung with.

Hillis is more of a professional smart person, only while most such people have cushy academic jobs that at least require them to like supervise grad students or publish papers, Hillis seems to have spent most of his time after Thinking Machines folded in 1996 doing something close to nothing, but different than the day before. His Wikipedia page is rife with mentions of stuff he invented that never really saw any practical application, with the exception of putting a data center in a shipping container, which, good for him, I guess.

His big legacy project as a public intellectual is to take a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos and put a really big clock in it. No, really. The clock is supposed to last ten thousand years. It’s got chimes programmed by Brian Eno.

Honestly I kind of respect the lack of hustle. Nice work if you can get it!

So, anyway, though Hillis moved in billionaire circles, he was never really one of them. His role, like those of Steven Pinker, Joi Ito, Noam Chomsky, and the other Harvard and MIT-affiliated people Epstein hung out with, was more akin to that of a trained monkey. Epstein threw them coins (or proximity to money and power), and they clapped and danced and did their little show, which was talking about Big Ideas. (But never the Big Idea that the great majority of the problems on planet earth are due to the hoarding of wealth. That’s just crazy talk!)

It’s actually a symbiotic relationship, because the evil, venal, ultimately petty money men get to feel like they aren’t just Scrooge McDuck cavorting in a swimming pool of money, but, rather, People Who Matter. People who are helping to shape the world’s future! People who talk to the smartest people in the world and sometimes give them money!

And the trained monkeys get the coins. I noted that Epstein seemed to have set up two meetings for Danny Hillis with Barclay’s president Jes Staley, so perhaps that alone explains Hillis’ willingess to spend time with a known pedophile.

But I have another theory about these people. I think Elon Musk kind of gave the game away when he said he considers us all to be NPCs. If you don’t play tabletop or video role playing games, you should know that NPC means non-player character. It’s like, the guy in the tavern who gives you information about where the goblins are hiding, or whatever. They look like people, (or gnomes or elves or whatever) but they fundamentally don’t matter except as far as they help move the players’ story along.

In other words, in billionaire circles, regular people don’t really count as human beings. This is why they’re able to treat masses of people with such casual cruelty—you wouldn’t do that to a person, but a broke guy in China making an iphone? That’s not a person. A single mom walking 15 miles a day in an Amazon warehouse and having to stand in a security line for an unpaid hour at the end of every work day? Well, that’s not a person. You? Me? We’re not people to them.

And so this is my theory about Danny Hillis—he found Epstein useful as a way to continue his professional smart guy grift, and the girls Epstein was abusing? Well, they weren’t the daughters of Danny Hillis or any of the people he spent time with. It’s not like Epstein was doing those things to people.

Maybe I’m wrong. If Danny Hillis is reading this, let me just say hi, fuck you, and please feel free to email me to explain why you spent eight years being friends with a monster.