Links from the discussion:

The Deep Left take

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood

John Carreyrou in 2015 breaking the story

My ChatGPT query about federal prison rules

Billy Evans on the All-In podcast

Wired on “Theranos 2.0”

Podcast on The Curse with Rob Henderson

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Below is a cleaned-up version of the transcript.

Coming to the Elizabeth Holmes Story

Richard Hanania: Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m here today with Zoe Bernard. We’re going to talk about the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything, which is in theaters right now. Zoe, can you introduce yourself to the audience before we begin?

Zoe Bernard: I’m a journalist, mostly covering tech, culture, and the world of business. I’m currently working on a book about prediction markets that should hopefully come out next year. And I have a lot of thoughts on the movie.

Richard: Awesome. You’ve written for Vanity Fair, right?

Zoe: I’ve written for Vanity Fair in the past, and also for The Information, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Business Insider.

Richard: Got it. It looks like you came into this having read a lot about Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: I was a reporter when John Carreyrou initially broke the story, and it was the coolest story on the tech beat at the time. I avidly consumed everything he was writing. I read Bad Blood when it came out, and I watched The Dropout only fairly recently, maybe a couple of months ago. So I came into this with a ton of cultural baggage and an understanding of the reporting background of what had happened at Theranos.

Richard: I’d read some stories about Elizabeth Holmes, probably eight years ago, but I didn’t remember much or follow it closely. I knew the basic outline: She wanted to be like Steve Jobs; it was all fake; she had Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and these other people on her board. I knew the sexy details, but I never got into the evidence of what she did or how strong the case was.

Zoe: You knew about the voice? The fake voice?

Richard: I remember that, too. I watched the movie yesterday in the theater. Then today, in preparation for this conversation, I read a bunch of old New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporting and made it through most of Carreyrou’s book.

Zoe: Oh my God, you read fast.

Richard: I skimmed it. I skipped the parts about where an employee majored in computer science and went to Stanford. I don’t need to know that. I tried to get as much of it as possible. And I talked to ChatGPT, of course, to ask about some of the details. I sent you a comparison I had it make between Elizabeth Holmes’s exaggerations and lies and Elon Musk’s. That was interesting. I love that you can just have it spit out a report for yourself.

Did the Movie Make Elizabeth Holmes Seem Innocent?

Richard: Here’s my impression of the movie, and then you can tell me yours. I watched it and thought, There’s a chance Elizabeth Holmes was innocent. From the film alone, I mean.

Zoe: Wait, really? Whoa. That’s wild.

Richard: Yes, just from the film. And a spoiler warning to the audience: There’s a sense in which there are no spoilers because we know she goes to jail, but there are spoilers in how the story plays out. If you want to experience the movie without knowing any of that, consider yourself warned.

By the end, you’re led to think about this guy Billy Evans—her partner, although I found out they’re not legally married.

Zoe: Are you convinced by that? I wasn’t convinced.

Richard: No, I’m not convinced anymore. I’m talking about what I thought when I had no context beyond the movie. She seems—people use the word autistic too easily these days, but she seems almost like that. There’s the big scene where Nathan shows her Abbott and Costello, and he asks why it’s funny. She says, “I don’t know.” It’s very strange.

I sent you a screenshot from Carreyrou’s book about something similar: Somebody made a parody advertisement or poster, she didn’t get the joke, and she basically locked down the company. That seems consistent with the film’s portrayal.

I knew she had this old boyfriend, Sunny, and now she has Billy. One interpretation you could take away, just from watching the film, is that she’s a woman who’s socially unaware, gets taken in by men who aren’t good for her, and is manipulated by them. Maybe that happened with Billy, and maybe it happened with Sunny when she was running Theranos.

But then I read all day, and the evidence is much stronger that she was on top of everything. She created an entire culture of denying reality. She had this reality-distortion field. You can compare her with Musk or Jobs: These people can be bullshitters, but they actually built great products. Theranos got as far as Walgreens, where its testing services were offered before they were pulled. And the technology just didn’t work as promised. The company had about a decade to get it right.

At some point, you have to deliver. Maybe if she’d managed it by 2012, everything would have been forgiven. But she didn’t. She was lying the whole time. So I think she was guilty. That’s my way of saying the film was good to her: It fooled me into thinking that maybe she was innocent. What was your impression?

Zoe: That’s interesting, because I’ve seen that take online a lot: People whose only entry point into Elizabeth Holmes is this movie walk away thinking maybe she’s innocent. I knew so much about her already that I didn’t experience it that way.

One of the central questions the film asks is: Did she knowingly lie, or did she believe her own lies? My assumption walking in was that, of course, she believed her own lies. I think most founders have to believe what they’re selling. She’s obviously the hero in her own story, and she had to justify what she was doing again and again. But it’s fascinating that you were able to walk out thinking maybe she was innocent.

Richard: Everyone knows there’s a spectrum of how much entrepreneurs get away with, how much they bullshit. Just watching the film, I didn’t know where she fell on that spectrum. I sent you that Deep Left article, which we’ll probably talk about. The author seemed to have the impression that entrepreneurs all bullshit, and from the article I wasn’t sure he’d read much beyond what was in the movie. I thought maybe Elizabeth Holmes was within the normal range.

But she’s not. She wasn’t just exaggerating that a product would be ready in a year. She told bald-faced lies. She claimed the devices were being used in Iraq or Afghanistan, carried around in Humvees by our troops. It’s presented as this patriotic product. There were fake reports with pharmaceutical-company logos, making it look as though those companies had verified Theranos’s techniques. These were things made up out of thin air.

She’s obviously guilty. Whatever the exact legal standard is—knowledge, reckless indifference to the truth, whatever—she has to meet it. But you said you had a contrarian take on the movie.

Was It All Fake?

Zoe: My contrarian take is that everyone seems obsessed with this movie, and I thought it was fine. I didn’t totally love it. That surprised me because I love Nathan Fielder and have watched just about everything he’s done.

Richard: Did you see The Curse?

Zoe: Oh my God, I loved The Curse. I thought it was excellent. Brilliant.

Richard: It was great. I did a podcast on it. It was one of my favorite shows, although—no spoilers—I didn’t like the ending. We won’t get into that here.

Zoe: The ending was weird. But I also loved The Rehearsal. So to be fair, my expectations couldn’t have been higher. I thought I was about to see the best movie I’d ever seen.

One of my biggest issues involves the scene where Elizabeth says to Nathan, almost offhandedly, “I’m not benefiting economically from this project whatsoever.” He makes a little face, and then roughly an hour of the movie is devoted to investigating whether she knew that Billy had asked to be compensated. That small question stands in for the larger question about her time at Theranos: Did she know Sunny was doing all these things on her behalf?

My problem was: Why didn’t Nathan just ask her when she was sitting right there? I actually think he did ask her and didn’t include it. The only time we hear her answer to some degree is when he’s effectively writing lines for Amanda Seyfried to read.

Richard: Those lines were supposed to be based on his notes. He didn’t have transcripts, but they were supposedly based on his notes—unless he’s lying.

Zoe: In theory. I’ve seen people online suggest he just wrote the dialogue, and I’ve come around to thinking he made it up.

Richard: I have no idea. He’s the director; it’s his movie. I’d like to hope people don’t do that. As for why he didn’t confront Elizabeth in the moment, it didn’t strike me as so strange. They were filming only days before she had to report to prison. Suppose Nathan suspects Billy is manipulating her. If he starts a fight about money, Billy might say, “What the hell? Why did you mention that to her?” Then Nathan gets kicked out of the house, loses the scene where she goes to prison, and they stop talking to him. His movie is screwed. Billy had already leveraged the production to secure a cut of the money. Nathan may just have been careful.

Zoe: But Nathan confronted them in so many uncomfortable ways! There’s the Abbott and Costello video, and the moment when Billy says he can’t understand why Elizabeth would be into him, and Nathan asks, “Isn’t your family rich?” He’s willing to bring up very awkward things. It seemed like he’d ask about the money in that same offhand way. Maybe he wouldn’t, though.

Richard: I liked the film. Three hours is a long time to sit in a theater these days, but it kept my attention. I liked the buildup. In the beginning, Billy seems like the victim and Elizabeth the manipulator. Nathan implies she might be with him for his money. Over time, that switches around.

I was invested in whether she knew about the money because it really does tell you something. It’s strange, though. At one point she goes upstairs and leaves the men alone to talk. They say the baby is crying, and then they go upstairs. Was that contrived? She didn’t know the baby would cry, presumably.

What held my attention was that Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. You spend three hours with her, and I still can’t arrive at a definitive conclusion about her character. I can make a case that she’s a complete manipulator, in on everything, telling Nathan that she didn’t know about the money when she actually did. But I can also construct a story in which she’s a sucker for Sunny and Billy. Not an airhead—she must have a high IQ—but socially unaware, susceptible to men who are ambitious and find a use for her. I can believe almost anything between those extremes.

Zoe: Totally. She is fascinating. This is the first time we’ve really seen her so close up—maybe almost too close up. I was amazed by how hypnotic I found her. I’ve always thought she looked a little strange, but by the end of the film I found her extremely beautiful. I don’t know what happened. I’ve met some odd but very successful and powerful people, and her draw reminded me of what those people possess. She’s instantly magnetic.

Richard: She gets better-looking over time. That’s what happens with charismatic people: The way you perceive them changes. At first I thought Amanda Seyfried was too beautiful to play Elizabeth Holmes. I also only just realized she’s the actress from Mean Girls.

Zoe: Yes!

Richard: By the end, though, I thought the two of them had sort of converged.

The Deep Left Interpretation

Zoe: They did. Speaking of Amanda Seyfried, you sent me that Substack piece where she’s almost the villain and Billy Evans is the person we’re supposed to aspire to be more like. Was that the general take?

Richard: That’s Deep Left Analysis. People who read my blog often know who he is. He has an interesting take. And I think he’s right about the filmmakers’ intentions: We’re supposed to dislike Billy. By the end it seemed almost personal, as if Nathan had a financial motive, because he kept pressing Billy to give up the money.

Zoe: But that’s an interesting question. If Elizabeth and Billy get a cut of the film, it changes the whole way you perceive it. When it was revealed halfway through that they might have a financial stake, I thought, Wow, maybe they don’t care what the movie says about them as long as it’s a massive success.

Richard: I agree. That’s why documentarians generally don’t pay their subjects. But once that was established, I thought it was strange for Nathan to keep badgering Billy to give up his share. By that point the movie was nearly over, so why was that so important to him? And then at the end, Billy gives the money back. That made him look like an idiot. He’s already been cast as the villain, and now a line at the end says he gave up the money. He just looks weak and villainous at the same time. It doesn’t help him.

The Deep Left take is basically that these people are doers. Think about Elon Musk, the most extreme version of this. He does amazing things. From what I hear, Tesla now actually has self-driving cars. You can buy a Tesla, and you’re officially supposed to pay attention to the road, but you don’t have to. That’s one of the coolest technologies ever. I’ve taken a Waymo, and I hope to buy a self-driving car someday.

Then you look at Musk’s posts on Twitter, and he can seem like the dumbest person alive. If Twitter were all you knew about him, you’d think he had the IQ of a rodent. I don’t think he’s just pretending to be stupid. I think he’s probably genuinely stupid when it comes to politics. He exaggerates and lies about his own businesses, too.

In the Deep Left interpretation, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans are versions of this entrepreneurial type. They aren’t as competent as Musk, so they fail. Nathan Fielder, meanwhile, is a guy who whines about them. And Seyfried’s role is more about gossip and stirring the pot.

Zoe: The criticism of Amanda was that she’s a little fake. Behind Elizabeth’s back she’s saying how much she dislikes her, and then to her face she’s saying, “You’re so amazing; you have a beautiful family.” That’s fair.

Richard: Exactly. What’s her intention in being involved? It seems like she’s in it for the gossip. Maybe that’s unfair; Nathan approached her, and she got an opportunity to appear in this movie. But why is she there? She played Elizabeth Holmes, yet it’s not as though she has unique insight into her. It was funny and enjoyable watching the reenactments, though.

The problem with the overall Deep Left take is that Holmes and Evans weren’t especially competent. Reading Carreyrou’s book and other reporting, Elizabeth doesn’t seem to have known much about biology. It’s not as though she was a scientific genius with a bold idea that almost worked. She seems to have been completely out of her depth and somehow coasted along for a decade, scamming people. A little bit of scam mixed with competence might get you somewhere. But if you’re just a scammer, there’s nothing to celebrate.

Zoe: And the big issue is that they had tests out in Walgreens. They were using these tests on the American public. You can lie about your SaaS product, but if you’re testing a healthcare product on actual people, that’s a huge liability.

Richard: Right. I read the original Wall Street Journal piece, and I wondered whether someone could make a pro–Elizabeth Holmes case. I doubt it, but I’d like to know how often the tests worked versus didn’t work. With any product, there’s a tradeoff. Maybe something is cheap and convenient, though not very good. You have that in healthcare, too. Not every test is the highest-end test. Maybe a test that’s merely good enough could be useful at a lower price.

Zoe: It’s healthcare, though. If they’d openly said, “This test is so much cheaper, but it’s only 15 or 20 percent accurate,” or whatever the actual figure was, then at least consumers would know.

Richard: They certainly presented it as far more accurate than some rough-and-ready alternative. And you have to put that in the context of the company trying to bully people and silence criticism. It’s not as though one regulator came along and made trouble for an otherwise honest company. Almost everyone working there seems to have developed suspicions about what they were doing at some point.

I came out of the movie loving the possibility of a revisionist pro–Elizabeth Holmes take. I love that sort of thing. But I don’t think there’s actually a good case to make. I’d be surprised if someone managed it.

Zoe: I definitely didn’t leave the theater thinking she was innocent. But it offered a fascinating possible insight into her relationship with Sunny. Maybe he really was controlling. At the end of the day, was she the puppeteer, or was he the mastermind? Does she just find herself in these roles? I think she’s pretty kooky.

A Two-Person Cult

Richard: Once might be chance. Twice is a pattern. She seems to have a type. Did you end up disliking Billy? Did you find him sympathetic at all?

Zoe: No. I didn’t like Billy. Did you?

Richard: Nathan actually stands up for him at the end. Amanda Seyfried is much more negative, and Nathan says it’s a love story. Billy does seem to genuinely love her and care about his kids. He talks about not having sex for 900 days. I love these awkward moments because Nathan doesn’t let them pass as quick jokes; he keeps probing.

Billy seems to care about his family. He has a company now, and I read a Wired piece about it. As far as we know, serious people are involved, and it’s not just Theranos all over again. We shouldn’t assume that it is.

But let me ask you this: Were you surprised when you found out he was a Charlie Kirk fan?

Zoe: Not at all. Were you?

Richard: Not really. I didn’t expect it to come up in the movie, but when it did, it made sense.

Zoe: It made so much sense. The day I saw the movie, I was talking to someone who knows Billy, who said he sees him all the time in Austin and Billy always shows up with his gun. According to this person, nobody really likes him. I didn’t find him likable from the beginning. He seemed like an oddball. But I do think Elizabeth and Billy have some kind of love.

Richard: I don’t even know if it’s weird love. It just looks like love. Everyone’s relationship seems strange if you examine it closely. Given how weird Elizabeth is, the relationship with Billy and the kids might be the least weird aspect of her life.

Zoe: When they talk about it, though, it’s too much. She wants to build “monuments of love.” They say they never argue and get along all the time. He has an AI version of her hanging out in the kitchen. It’s strange.

Richard: That AI thing was weird. That’s something a Charlie Kirk fan would do.

Zoe: Their relationship felt like high-school first love, something not entirely grounded in reality, even though their reality is very real and he’s visiting her in prison.

Richard: Maybe that’s what love is.

Zoe: It’s definitely a form of love. The best analysis I read on Twitter called them a “two-person cult.” That’s what it feels like.

Richard: That’s very good. She draws people in, and the most cult-like relationship might be the one she has with her lover. And they have kids. Will this be some multigenerational cult? I don’t know.

Zoe: I wonder what will happen to those children. Imagine being a child who’s featured so prominently in this documentary, and then having Elizabeth Holmes as your mother.

Richard: It’s not just the kids. Her parents believe in her, too. When did you learn her dad had worked for Enron?

Zoe: I watched The Dropout recently, and it comes up there. What did you make of her parents and their relationship with her?

Richard: We don’t see much of the mother, but we see the father. He seemed like a nice, normal guy, acting the way a normal person might if his daughter were in that situation. He didn’t seem crazy. He even said this was different from Enron because she’s innocent. At least he isn’t a conspiracy theorist about every criminal conviction.

He seemed willing to talk to Nathan, whereas Billy would rush in and try to control the conversation or stop them talking. I find it difficult to say much bad about the father.

Zoe: The parents looked very nervous when Billy and Elizabeth were talking about starting a new company. They looked stressed out, and for good reason.

The Swimming Scenes

Richard: What did you make of the swimming scene?

Zoe: I couldn’t recognize the man. Could you see who it was?

Richard: I was pretty sure it was Nathan. I couldn’t positively identify the woman, but it had to be Elizabeth, right?

Zoe: That’s funny because I recognized Elizabeth, not Nathan. I’ve read that different viewers can’t tell who it is. I think there were two versions of the scene. Wasn’t there one where Nathan swims with Amanda Seyfried, impersonating Elizabeth?

Richard: Maybe. I don’t know.

Zoe: I think it comes up twice. The interpretation I’ve seen is that this is a moment when Nathan and Elizabeth connect. He might be suggesting that he develops some kind of feeling for her—not necessarily romantic—that affects how he edits the movie.

Richard: I thought he might be falling for her. There’s the long, almost electric hug. He’s also trying to drive a wedge between her and Billy, so the movie starts to look a little like a love triangle. I half expected Nathan and Elizabeth to hook up at the end. I wondered if that’s where it was going.

The swimming scene itself is strange because they never explain it. Earlier she offers to go into the water with him, and he says he’s scared of cold water. Then suddenly they’re swimming together, and we never learn how it happened. Something feels missing. They’re telling us something in that scene, but I’m not sure what.

Zoe: Maybe that’s because the point is simply their genuine connection. They’re laughing and having fun. Nathan has a moment when he sees beyond the possibly sociopathic person he’s been investigating and actually connects with her. I initially thought the man was Billy, but now that you say it, it must have been Nathan.

Richard: Who else could it be? I could tell it wasn’t Billy. Nathan looked different because his hair was wet and combed over, but it looked like him. And Billy was in better shape.

Zoe: I believe you. One other thing: I kept reading that there was an insane twist in the middle. What do you think the twist was?

Richard: Maybe the money revelation. It didn’t feel like one enormous twist to me. It felt like a gradual buildup toward making Billy the villain.

Scam Culture

Richard: The gun thing was interesting. It suggests a very paranoid mentality. Billy’s almost a prototype of a certain type: He likes Charlie Kirk, he’s on Twitter all day, he’s got what I’d call right-wing Twitter brain. We should talk about the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account because I’ve had some experiences with it. In a small way, I’m a character in this movie.

There’s also the AI version of Elizabeth. I don’t know why, but there’s something psychologically interesting about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk fans. They seem especially drawn to this kind of thing. I can’t imagine a liberal making an AI version of his partner and putting it in the kitchen. It all seems to fit together.

Elizabeth herself doesn’t come across as particularly political. She wears a cross; I don’t know how important religion is to her.

Zoe: I was curious about her politics. I’ve followed the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account a little for a while, and whoever was tweeting seemed very right-wing and heavily MAGA. I figured she was trying to get a pardon. I had heard her husband might be running the account, but I wasn’t sure. Now we know.

Richard: And I’ve interacted with that account a few times. I dunked on it for something and got a snarky comeback from “Elizabeth Holmes.” Before the movie, I didn’t even know if the account was really hers. These days anyone can buy a blue check. I remember criticizing it for being a very right-wing, MAGA-seeming account. Now we know it’s Billy using her account to tweet.

Zoe: When the teaser trailer came out, everyone on Twitter lost their minds over it. Then the Elizabeth Holmes account tweeted something genuinely supportive of the film. That shocked me because in the teaser she looks pretty crazy. At the time I wondered why she’d endorse a portrayal like that. Then you learn it’s Billy. As I watched, I thought: He’s endorsing it because he has a financial stake.

Richard: I don’t think it’s only the movie money. They’re trying to build a company. Hype matters. If the movie gets people’s attention, and even some viewers become sympathetic, maybe that helps raise money. They have an interest in the film’s success even without a direct cut. Billy has his company, and according to the Wired article Elizabeth isn’t legally involved in it.

I think he sees Elizabeth’s fame and the fascination surrounding her as something he can parlay into a new business. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her. But it explains the billboards and his association with that inventors group. He’s willing to go along with this bizarre publicity effort because it gets attention.

Zoe: I remember seeing those inventors billboards around L.A. and thinking, I’m not looking into that.

Richard: His attitude seems to be: Milk it, get as much publicity as possible, and hopefully turn that into a successful company. He’s hustling off Elizabeth Holmes being in prison.

Zoe: I had the same thought, and then I started wondering whether she was actually a mark for him. Did he see her notoriety as an opportunity? In America, being a scammer can almost be a good thing in terms of publicity. Think of the woman in New York—Anna something.

Richard: I remember her. Wasn’t she German, or pretending to be German?

Zoe: Yes, she’s German. She’s parlayed being a scam artist, going to Rikers, and serving time into a celebrity career.

Richard: Fame opens doors. When you go to a party or reach out to somebody, it helps if they’ve heard of you. People are interested in someone notable, whether for good reasons or bad. Otherwise you’re just one face among a million.

Martin Shkreli is another example.

Zoe: Exactly. I think I read that he might be going back to jail.

Richard: And these people all seem to gravitate toward MAGA. It’s a culture of being loud, getting attention, and not being ashamed.

Zoe: And of acting as if rules don’t matter.

Richard: They don’t care about corruption. They care whether you’re funny. That’s Trump, right? There’s the Andrew Tate example, although I think he finally went too far, even for some MAGA supporters. A lot of them went silent about him. The Trump administration ultimately cooperated with an extradition-related process, or something along those lines. It took a lot of bad press for them to turn on him, but there is a limit.

Then look at George Santos. He’s still on Twitter; I don’t know what he’s doing now, but he’s around. He got a pardon, and he’s certainly not living in shame. We have this decline of shame.

Should Elizabeth Holmes Be in Prison?

Zoe: For sure. Let me ask you something. After watching the movie and digging into her case, did you feel her prison sentence was unfair or too long?

Richard: I’m pretty tough on crime. If you defraud people out of something like $400 million, eleven years in prison sounds about right to me. I could go either way, but I don’t find it outrageous.

Zoe: I feel similarly. But when she was sentenced, I remember being shocked. So often you read about people committing financial crimes or defrauding investors and nothing really happens to them. When something actually happened to her, it surprised me.

Richard: I think the legal system often goes hard on people who become famous for their crimes. Take the Diddy case. He had serious sex-trafficking charges, but the jury wouldn’t convict him on those. He was convicted on prostitution-related offenses, which ordinarily, especially for a first conviction, might not produce a huge prison term. I forget his exact sentence. My impression was that the judge came down especially hard because he’s Diddy and people believed he got away with something more serious.

I have similar doubts about the punishment in some other famous cases, including Ghislaine Maxwell’s. Fame is usually good for you, but when prosecutors and judges become convinced you’ve done something terrible, it can really work against you.

Zoe: Look at Sam Bankman-Fried. I can’t remember his exact sentence, but it was a long time. He’s not coming out soon.

Richard: It was multiple decades. I do think we should sometimes consider the benefit a person could bring to society. Some people are lifelong criminals with thirty or forty arrests, and you don’t expect them to contribute much if released. SBF had talent. Elizabeth Holmes, maybe—I don’t know whether she had much talent beyond scamming. But I think we should consider the possibility of a person’s future social contribution.

Zoe: If Elizabeth Holmes got out of jail tomorrow, do you think she’d go right back to building Theranos 2.0 and lying to people?

Richard: She’d have trouble securing investors. But if she could convince people a second time, that would itself demonstrate a skill.

Zoe: I think she could do it. If she tried, I think she could raise money.

Richard: You’re probably right. There are a lot of rich people, and you don’t have to convince all of them—just some. Who knows? Maybe the second time she’d actually build something. The tragedy is that, if she had been more competent, or had someone genuinely competent running things alongside her, the story could have been different. Imagine if her partner had been somebody like Steve Jobs, somebody who could actually manage a business.

It seems she never had that. Her reality-distortion field worked on herself. Anyone who told her things she didn’t want to hear became disloyal or a traitor. It’s hard to build a successful company that way.

I think Musk is more capable of keeping two parts of his brain separate. One part is rational and deals with the technology, and the other part bullshits. You can’t confuse the two. Holmes seemed like an extreme case of combining them. That may be why she could fool people for so long, but it was also her downfall.

Is that fixable? Could you imagine a universe where Elizabeth Holmes builds a great company? Maybe, with the right circumstances.

Zoe: Maybe some software. Maybe the next Facebook.

Richard: Maybe. I have no doubt she could raise some money.

Zoe: Fundraising and selling people on a product or a vision are major parts of being a CEO. But one of her fundamental flaws is that she surrounded herself with yes-men.

The Elizabeth Holmes Utility Function

Richard: Absolutely. And that’s her fault. Let me ask you about motivation. Do you believe her when she says she doesn’t care about money? In the opening of Carreyrou’s book, he says he’d heard from people who knew her that she wanted to be a billionaire from the time she was a little kid. Do you think she’s financially motivated? What do you think motivates her?

Zoe: I think she’s motivated by power. From the stories about her childhood, her family placed a high value on making the world a better place. I think she wanted to be regarded as someone doing good. And in her mind, she was. She was bringing people a healthcare product that would save them money, be more accurate, and revolutionize the industry. But she couldn’t execute because she didn’t have the scientific knowledge.

Richard: When I think about her utility function, I don’t think she wants money in the sense of private jets and lavish vacations to islands in the Pacific. She points out that she never cashed out her shares. It doesn’t seem like she wanted to live that kind of lifestyle. Money seems more like a status symbol to her. I don’t know if I’d call it power, exactly, but she wanted the status of being a female billionaire.

She probably sees herself as someone who cares about science and people’s health and wants to revolutionize medicine. She liked comparing the little Theranos device to the iPhone: this beautiful, elegant thing. But someone genuinely obsessed with creating the device would know a lot about biology. They’d be a nerd who dives into a subject and becomes very knowledgeable about it.

That doesn’t seem to be who she was. The driving force was ambition and status rather than fascination with the science. Musk seems to be the kind of nerd who sits around thinking deeply about rockets. Elizabeth Holmes strikes me as far more superficial in what she actually wants and thinks about.

Zoe: Totally. It feels as if she was distracted by status and media attention early on. It was almost as though she thought, I don’t actually care about building the company; my job as CEO is to sell the vision. Meanwhile she wasn’t paying attention to what was happening with the product.

Richard: All sizzle and no steak—is that the expression?

Zoe: I think people do say that. That’s a perfect description of Elizabeth.

Why Are the Close-Ups So Uncomfortable?

Richard: What did you think of the extreme close-ups? I was watching on a big movie screen, and it’s almost uncomfortable how closely you see the faces. You can see every hair on Nathan Fielder’s face. It’s not flattering. At one point you can see Elizabeth Holmes’s teeth and even what looks like staining between them. I notice the same thing when I look too closely at my own teeth. It’s not even food stuck there, more like a discoloration from something I’ve eaten.

Zoe: I didn’t notice that, but I believe you. The shots were way too close for comfort.

Richard: Is this just Nathan trying to make us uncomfortable for three hours?

Zoe: You should reach out to Elizabeth and say, “Hey, I have the same problem.”

Seriously, at first I didn’t like the close-ups. I thought they were too stylized and annoying. As the film went on, I started liking them. Later I thought: Maybe the point is that you’re looking so closely at someone’s face that you think you ought to understand them. But there’s total opacity. You still can’t see what’s going on inside.

You can look at somebody right in front of you, hear them tell you something to your face, and still not understand their intentions or know anything definitive about them.

Richard: You’re saying that effect is magnified when you get so close?

Zoe: Yes. That’s my interpretation of why he might have chosen to film it this way. You have unusually intimate access to Elizabeth Holmes—almost too close for comfort—but she’s this confusing, mercurial character. You can see what she’s eaten between her teeth, and you still can’t understand her.

Richard: I wonder if there’s another part to it. When you blow up a face on a huge screen, you can literally see the face better. We’re always reading facial expressions: smiles, frowns, eye movements. If you magnify all that a hundred times, are you better at figuring out what someone is thinking?

We evolved to notice very subtle things in people’s faces, but we didn’t evolve to see faces quite this large. Maybe magnification misleads us. Or maybe it’s like using a microscope, and you do see more. I’d love to see research on this. Are you better at reading emotions or detecting lies from a giant image of a face than from looking at somebody normally? That’s a fascinating question.

Zoe: My instinct is that you’d be better at telling if somebody is lying from farther away, because you can see their posture and their hands. You lose all that information when the frame is this tight.

Richard: Fine, for the study you could blow up the head while keeping the rest of the body visible, too. I agree you lose something when you crop a shot. But all else equal, what happens when you look at a much bigger face? Maybe there are things you’re better at reading and other things you’re worse at reading.

Zoe: If she made a dramatic gesture every time she said, “I’ve never told a lie,” maybe we’d have the key to that scene.

Richard: Exactly. Anyway, the close-ups are captivating because we’re not accustomed to looking at people that closely. Maybe the director doesn’t entirely know what the effect is. But it’s part of the same experience: You’re supposed to feel uncomfortable. They stare at each other, Nathan presses on awkward lines of conversation, the camera gets extremely intimate, and the music is spooky. It all works together.

Billy in the Shower

Zoe: We haven’t gotten to the most important part of the movie: Billy naked in the shower.

Richard: I was going to bring that up. But first, do you remember how The Curse was obsessed with Nathan’s character’s penis?

Zoe: Yes. The size of it was a big part of the show. It was quite small.

Richard: There’s a scene where his wife apparently tells her parents about it. I think that’s what happened; I could be wrong. When I did a podcast about The Curse with Rob Henderson, Rob said it was a very small penis. I told him I don’t look at many men’s penises, so I don’t know what’s small or big. Did you think Nathan’s was small?

Zoe: Are you asking me for my professional assessment? My first impression of the one hanging there in the shower was that it was a pretty good size.

Richard: No, I’m talking about Nathan in The Curse. We’ll get to Billy.

Zoe: Oh! Nathan’s was small. I remember that. I think I even rewound it to get a better look. It was a while ago, but the small size was definitely part of the show.

Richard: That’s interesting. He makes a show where his character has a small penis, then shows the audience his penis. Billy’s, on the other hand, looked like a good size to me, though again I don’t have much basis for comparison. But why is Billy just standing there in the shower? What does that add to the movie?

Zoe: Exactly! And how did they get that shot? There’s a moment when Billy gets out of the shower and walks past Nathan, and they exchange this strange look. Was there a conversation where Billy agreed to let the crew film him showering?

Richard: You’d think there would have to be limits in the contract. You can’t just film everything someone does in the bathroom and use it, surely. Maybe Billy was an idiot and signed away the right to everything, and they used a few seconds of him naked.

Then there’s Nathan almost leering at him. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it took me back to The Curse. Is he jealous? Is he sizing Billy up? It connects to the idea of a love triangle. Nathan might have developed feelings for Elizabeth and be trying to bring Billy down. And here he’s checking out Billy’s manhood in the shower.

I liked Deep Left’s interpretation: Billy is this brutish man of action, very physically imposing, while Nathan is the smaller, sarcastic, thoughtful, neurotic guy. The shot exaggerates that dichotomy.

Zoe: Throughout the movie I kept asking myself whether there was sexual tension between Nathan and Elizabeth. I thought I was picking up on something, but I couldn’t be sure. Toward the end it’s funny because Elizabeth is absent from the screen, but Nathan sends her a letter and mentions he’s been through a breakup. That seemed like a peculiar personal detail to share with the subject of your documentary, someone you haven’t spoken with in a while.

Then, based on Nathan’s account of their meeting, they spend time talking about his breakup, and Elizabeth comforts him.

Richard: There’s also the reenacted scene where she tells Nathan he would be great at having kids. That seems to strike him as especially flattering. Maybe that’s just what she does: She gets into people’s minds.

Do you think you’d be charmed by her?

Zoe: I’m not entirely certain I wouldn’t be susceptible. What about you?

Richard: I don’t think she’s the type who charms me.

Zoe: I don’t think she could sell me something, but I’d find her fascinating and want to ask a ton of questions.

Richard: I think anybody would. The people who really win me over tend to be more outgoing and unpredictable. Intense eye contact isn’t the way to win my heart. But she’s interesting.

Zoe: Intense eye contact is how she flirts.

The Eggs: Control, Care, or Creative Editing?

Richard: What about the scene where Billy takes over beating the eggs? What did you make of that?

Zoe: I was confused. I saw the movie with my fiancé, and I leaned over and asked why Billy took the eggs away from her. My fiancé said, “She’s not whisking them fast enough.” Apparently there’s a technique to it. He didn’t think it was a big deal.

But the film builds it up as though Billy is so controlling that Elizabeth can’t even mix eggs without his supervision.

Richard: I also thought it was meant as a metaphor for their relationship. But the way she froze when he took the whisk was strange. I thought her hands shook for a moment, and I think the camera focused on them.

At first I wondered whether this would turn into one of two stories. Either she was frightened of Billy, and he was about to show us how controlling he could be; or she was having some sort of nervous breakdown, unable to function, and he was stepping in gently to help her.

Neither interpretation was really confirmed. She never seemed afraid of him, but she also didn’t seem like a woman who was falling apart. Given that she was about to go to prison for eleven years, she seemed surprisingly together. So the scene remains this strange, ambiguous little moment.

Zoe: There were so many moments like that. They’re tiny, seemingly innocuous things that you can analyze in completely different ways. I thought Billy looked weird in that scene, but I also wondered whether the editing made it look worse than it was.

Think of Elizabeth stumbling over the difference between what the Theranos device can do and what it is capable of doing. It’s presented almost like a semantic question, and you can get lost interpreting one word in several ways. You could show that egg-whisking scene to a theater full of people and hear completely different accounts of what it tells you about their relationship. Does it really have the significance we’re assigning to it?

Richard: That’s why I thought the film made her sympathetic. The “can” versus “capable” scene seemed designed to suggest that in her own mind she’s telling the truth. Maybe her problem is that she’s extremely literal. Just like with Abbott and Costello: What if people think she’s lying, but she’s actually interpreting language differently?

But after reading the evidence, I don’t think that can be the whole story. She may just be nuts. I think she probably believes every aspect of her own story, though.

Zoe: I agree. I honestly think that’s right.

Autism and Ambition

Richard: There’s an image of autistic people as being extremely concerned with truth, or obsessed with getting to the bottom of a question. Some develop an intense interest in understanding or making something. Elizabeth strikes me as someone who takes that kind of intense, almost autistic focus and applies it to her own ambitions.

It’s a horrifying combination. It has the outward appearance of somebody striving for truth or doing something great and beautiful. But in reality, what are we looking at? A woman with her Charlie Kirk–fan boyfriend, AI holograms of themselves, efforts to raise money, and attempts to hobnob with famous people. There seems to be nothing beyond that.

Zoe: It’s almost like what you see is what you get with the two of them.

Richard: Right. They’re so superficial that it becomes mysterious. You wonder what’s beneath the surface, and maybe there isn’t anything.

Zoe: That’s true. You can overanalyze it. Do you think Nathan was actually manipulated and beguiled by Elizabeth, or was that an act he was playing?

Richard: I think Nathan Fielder knows what he’s doing. They weren’t together very long. The production followed her for roughly a month before prison, and he only moved in for part of that time. Then he didn’t see her for years before picking the project back up. I don’t think he was sitting awake every night pining for Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: I agree. I think he was playing a character. That’s why the whole love-affair suggestion felt a little ridiculous to me.

Richard: But to his credit, he didn’t say he was in love with her. He left breadcrumbs for viewers to interpret, including the swimming scene. If he’d announced, “I’m so in love with her; I have to see her,” it would have been ridiculous. Maybe he struck the right balance and created just enough tension.

I wish he’d made a move. That would have been a great climax, whether she rejected him or not. Either way, we’d learn something.

Zoe: That would have been better than the swimming scene. It did sometimes feel as though she was flirting with him. Was she?

Richard: I don’t know. She’s charming everybody. I imagine she spoke to George Shultz and Henry Kissinger in the same way. Maybe you call that flirting, maybe not. She’s trying to win people over. Nothing she did was especially sexual. She wasn’t drawing attention to her body or asking Nathan how her shirt looked. There wasn’t that kind of thing.

Zoe: I suppose. It’s her way of looking at him that stood out. You can see how somebody might be beguiled by that.

Richard: That’s her thing. She stares at everybody. We did see her breastfeed once, which was interesting. But I’d have liked to see her interact with more women in the film, to know if she behaved any differently.

Zoe: We barely see her mother, and when her mother shows up, she’s almost completely silent. It makes you wonder whether that was a role model for her.

Richard: I don’t know. That may be reading too much into the mother. We really don’t know much about her.

Theranos Whistleblowers and the Evidence Against Holmes

Richard: Anything else worth discussing about the film?

Zoe: Have you seen Tyler Shultz’s commentary? He was one of the Theranos whistleblowers. I saw some of his tweets and a video interview. He said that when Elizabeth pulled out the device in the movie, it wasn’t even the device Theranos actually used. Apparently he was almost screaming in the theater. If that’s right, she was still lying in the documentary itself.

Richard: What was the difference between the device in the film and what they used?

Zoe: From what I understand, the one she showed was a much more sophisticated device, a tiny thing. The machines they actually used were bigger. I remember from The Dropout that they used Siemens machines, not just their own technology. In some cases they were effectively taking somebody else’s machine and putting Theranos branding on it.

Richard: I read the book today, so this is fresh in my mind. It was a combination. There were a few things the company could do with its own equipment and other things it did with modified or repurposed machines from other companies.

Zoe: Right. But the Theranos machines I remember were bulky. The little one she shows in the film seems like something you could hold in your hand.

Richard: What other reactions have there been from people who knew her or were involved in the story?

Zoe: John Carreyrou wrote an op-ed, I think in The New York Times, analyzing the movie in light of his reporting. He talks about how Elizabeth and Sunny had this legal team threatening him and chasing down sources.

Richard: Yes, that’s in the book.

Zoe: So it’s hard not to think she had something to hide. She was going after the reporter and the whistleblowers.

Richard: Maybe I’m being too naive. When I put Carreyrou’s reporting together with the movie and everything else, I start thinking she must be a psychopath.

Zoe: I think that she can be psychopathic in her behavior and still have a story in her mind that justifies it. A lot of entrepreneurs see themselves almost as martyrs. They believe they’re bringing a new idea into the world, and everyone is challenging them. Elizabeth thought she was disrupting a multibillion-dollar industry. She could have convinced herself that Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics were behind the criticism and had sent this reporter after her.

Richard: This is what’s fun about Elizabeth Holmes: My mind keeps going back and forth. For all I know, Sunny could have been behind the lawyers and the threats. I haven’t seen anything that definitely rules that out. Maybe there is still a sliver of a case for her.

Zoe: In theory, he could have been.

Richard: I’m not saying there’s a good legal defense. I mean a defense against the harshest moral judgment of her. There’s always a thread you can pull on that doesn’t quite fit the prosecution’s portrait. There’s her failure to understand Abbott and Costello. There’s the story in Carreyrou’s book about her missing a joke. Those are two different sources, and together they suggest a person who is intensely literal.

You could imagine she’s like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There: She just exists, other people project meaning onto her, she becomes strangely charming, and powerful men attach themselves to her. I don’t think that’s a crazy interpretation.

But I don’t think that’s where the preponderance of the evidence points. On balance, the evidence supports a harsh judgment of Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: There’s another weird moment I remember. Amanda Seyfried is at Billy’s house, Elizabeth calls from prison, and Billy casually says, “Amanda’s here.” Amanda asks Elizabeth whether she knew she’d be there. Elizabeth gives this bizarre answer—something like, “I think I knew I knew.” She won’t straightforwardly acknowledge whether Billy told her. Why not just say, “Yes, he said you were coming over”?

Richard: I remember that, and Amanda comments on it later. But the exact words matter. If Elizabeth said, “I think I knew,” that’s not so strange. I could say that if someone had probably told me about a visit, but I couldn’t remember. “I think I knew I knew,” on the other hand, is a very unnatural phrase.

Zoe: It was something strange along those lines. I’d have to watch again. There’s also the question of why that phone call could be included in the documentary when others couldn’t.

Richard: You’re right. She was already in prison when that call happened.

The All-In Interview and Recording Prison Calls

Zoe: Speaking of prison calls, did you see Billy’s interview at the All-In conference? I saw it in a review, and it’s fun to watch in retrospect.

Richard: I knew he appeared at All-In, but I haven’t seen it. I personally can’t stand the All-In guys. The way they talk, think, and act makes me understand why some people hate billionaires. I become a socialist when I watch them. But tell me about this interview.

Zoe: It was the least obnoxious of the four hosts doing the interview—the less-famous David. Not David Sacks, the other one. [Editor’s note: the speaker appears to mean David Friedberg.]

Billy’s on stage, and Elizabeth calls his phone. He must talk to her constantly, and surely she knows he’s attending this conference. The interviewer asks whether they can put her on speakerphone, which would be a great moment for the audience. But Billy refuses. He says she could end up in solitary confinement, or a higher-security prison, if the call gets recorded or broadcast.

Then Billy talks to her as though she doesn’t know where he is. “Hey, how are you? I’m at this conference.” It feels artificial. Why wouldn’t she know he was going to be onstage?

Richard: Let’s check whether his claim about prison rules is true.

Zoe: I’ve interviewed people in jail before, though not necessarily in federal prison, and I didn’t encounter anything like that. I also heard about someone planning to interview Sam Bankman-Fried for a Substack. It seems possible to interview inmates. And hadn’t an earlier Elizabeth Holmes call already been recorded for the film?

Richard: There’s a distinction between interviewing an inmate, the prison’s own routine recording of phone calls, and recording or broadcasting a call for the media without permission. I looked it up: Billy may be exaggerating how automatic the consequences would be, but there is a real basis for concern. Federal prisons regulate media interviews and outside recording or broadcast of inmate communications, and violations can result in disciplinary action. There’s no general rule that a recorded call automatically means solitary confinement or a transfer to a higher-security prison. But I can understand why they wouldn’t want to take a risk.

Zoe: Fair. Still, it feels over the top that saying hello to a conference audience would lead to something so severe. And if interviews can be arranged, why didn’t Nathan interview Elizabeth regularly while she was in prison?

Richard: That’s what the final part of the movie is about: Nathan trying to get a prison visit. He had to arrange it through calls and communications, and Billy was getting in the way. He barely managed to secure that one meeting. Elizabeth seemed dependent on Billy, or at least unwilling to communicate directly with Nathan without him.

Zoe: He could have kept trying. It also seems strange that she might not be able to watch a movie about herself. Don’t prisoners have access to media?

Richard: It probably depends on the prison and the available access. I don’t know for sure whether she’ll get to see it.

Final Verdict on the Movie and Holmes’ Future

Richard: Anyway, I liked the movie and would recommend it. It kept my attention for the entire running time.

Zoe: I would recommend it too, even though I wasn’t as enthusiastic.

Richard: How much longer does Elizabeth have? She was sentenced in 2022, right? Or was it 2023?

Zoe: She’s got a long time. She was sentenced about three years ago, and the sentence was eleven years, so maybe eight more years in theory.

Richard: I read something about her moving to a lower-security or halfway-house arrangement at some point. Her conditions could change, though I don’t know exactly how that works. We’ll see what becomes of Billy’s company and the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account in the meantime.

Zoe: I feel like when she finally gets out of prison, she’s going to have a huge publicity blitz.

Richard: It’ll be interesting to watch. All right, Zoe, this was fun. Thanks for doing it.

Zoe: This was so fun. Thanks for having me. Have a good one.

Richard: Absolutely.

I’m fascinated by what the author ended up doing to Shatov. He had the worst outcome of any major character. But from his politics and background, Shatov appears to be a stand-in for Dostoevsky. So Dostoevsky has himself get cucked and killed, and then his wife and stepson also die. What’s going on here?

We discuss Stavrogin’s suicide as him reenacting the death of Matryosha, the one act he never forgave himself for.

Of all the characters, Stepan is the only one with a true redemption arc. He’s LARPing his whole life, but in the end does take a stand for his principles against the young radicals and their supporters among the mob.

On the topic of politics, I explain how I believe that, while Dostoevsky was correct in his critique of the leftists and nihilists, in the end the Russian Empire was brought down by the stupidity and incompetence of the reactionaries. Slavophile ideas ensured that Russia entered World War I on the side of Serbia, Tsar Nicholas II refused to reform and kept his country in a state of backwardness, and the bizarre tale of Rasputin shows what can go wrong when your elites are not grounded in Enlightenment values.

One of Dostoevsky’s greatest strengths is as a savage critic of his former political allies on the nihilistic left. His blind spot seems to have been his steadfast support of royal absolutism, yet in this novel at least, he takes several opportunities to mock monarchists and reactionaries.

Links

Reviews of Part I, and Part 2

John Psmith book review

Rob’s review of Demons, Part 1 and Part 2

My review of Crime and Punishment

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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We contrast Nikolai and Pytor. Nikolai is a natural alpha, and seems to not care about or need politics. For Pyotr, it is a source of his identity. There’s a broader lesson here in how ideology tends to factor more prominently in the psyches of those who are less good looking and likable.

Rob brought my attention to the censored chapter, which wasn’t in the version of the book that I had. As you’ll see, the chapter is actually quite vital for understanding some of the most important themes of the book, and I’m glad Rob brought it to my attention.

I just read Crime and Punishment too. It had much more of an effect on me than Demons, so look forward to a written review.

Links

Our review of Part I

John Psmith book review

Rob’s review of Demons, part I and part 2

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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The book is conveniently divided into three parts, and so we are doing a three-part podcast series on it. The other two parts will be released over the next few weeks.

We decided to begin Demons after I came across this review by John Psmith. I stopped reading the review midway through, as it made me want to go to the original source and I didn’t want any spoilers. I’ve now gone back and read it.

According to the Word document that I use to keep track of which books I’ve read, I’ve finished two other works by Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground. I was probably in college at the time, and I only vaguely remember Notes from the Underground being about some lowlife who makes up high-sounding philosophical justifications for his crimes, but that’s it. The Brothers Karamazov is completely gone from my mind. I tried to jog my memory by looking over the plot but just about nothing rang a bell. I now know there were three brothers, and their surname was Karamazov, and that’s the extent of it. I have a vague recollection of a drunk father rambling and pouring out a drink for his son. Maybe it’s time to go back to these books.

Anyway, regarding this convo, Rob and I recorded this after we got through Part I, so there will only be spoilers up to that point. If you like, you can read along with us. We do screen share throughout the conversation, so if you watch the video you can see us going back to passages that made an impression. Topics covered include:

• Dostoevsky’s influence and reputation

• Nikolai as a charismatic figure

• Themes of liberalism, radicalism, and hypocrisy

• Cultural insights into Russian society, politics, and ideas of honor, and how they differ from our own culture

• The historical context of 19th-century Russia nihilism and its impact on society

I will say that the book holds up extremely well. The radicals and the more moderate liberals, and the psychological dynamics between those two groups, are clearly recognizable in twenty-first century America.

See also Rob’s review of Demons, part I and part 2.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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Substack has a new screen share feature, which we tried out. I wanted us to play parts of the movie and react to it, but Amazon prevents you from being able to do that. We do use screen share though to read and react to reviews of the film by Ross Douthat and Steve Sailer. The Sailer one in particular cracks us up. I had forgotten how charming his old man racism can be. He at one point goes on a rant about the history of superstitious savagery in Haiti, which he attempts to connect to director Ryan Coogler’s alleged ethno-narcissism. See also the Scott Greer review, which I bring up.

Unfortunately, while screen share looked good during the stream, it cuts off part of the screen in the video. Hopefully Substack is able to fix this. Nonetheless, we read from the articles out loud, so you can follow along.

Overall, this is a fun movie that is hard to take too seriously. I was expecting something a bit more sophisticated given how much critics loved the film, but it’s mostly a crowd-pleaser. The storyline is simple, the characters aren’t too deep, the bad guys are as cliché as they can possibly be (literally the Klan!), and one finds demographic sops to nearly every racial group, with the exception of Hispanics. The messaging is somewhat basic, though there is a hint of subversion in the fact that the zombies talk like woke libs.

We spend some time on the director’s bizarre fixation on cunnilingus. I count four or five different times it comes up. This leads to a discussion of the way movies and TV shows portray oral sex as received by women versus men.

Rob and I also debate what makes the movie appealing. Partly, as Douthat and Sailer both point out, people want to talk about a blockbuster film that isn’t some kind of sequel, remake, or spinoff. Additionally, we find black masculinity appealing, and here you get an unadulterated version in its natural environment. If such a premise sounds fun to you, you might enjoy Sinners. Even if not, you should probably watch it anyway since it’s nice to be part of a conversation involving a movie that is not about Marvel superheroes or part of some other long-existing IP universe.

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I add that the interviews have another value here, in that Gilligan tells us explicitly that the show is not about Covid or AI. In some ways, the point about AI makes it worse, because it takes away one plausible method for the virus to have ended up with its bizarre and seemingly contradictory characteristics. We discuss the idea of Vince Gilligan interviews serving as the Word of God in understanding this universe.

I note how incurious Carol appears to be about why animals are not part of the joining, or even why she is one of only a handful of people on earth immune from the effects of the virus. Major red flags.

Chris reminds me here that I wasn’t demanding enough as a viewer. We’re getting answers about how exactly the joining works, and the rules governing the Others’ behavior. What we don’t have any hints of are the whys. There is no indication that we’ll ever get them either. Why are the Others like this? Is there a deeper logic of the origins of the rules? Does it have something to do with human nature, or does the virus not care about the specifics of the species it infects? Is there an evolutionary theory that can explain how we got here? The show creators want us to speculate on these things, but they haven’t given us anything to go on.

Chris and I clarify that we’re not saying it’s a bad show. But there are a lot of opportunities to go deeper here, and we might just not get them. If things continue like this in Season 2, I’ll be disappointed but may be able to more fully enjoy the show without expecting it to be any different.

For those who get to the end, you’ll see us preview the forthcoming Game of Thrones spinoff and talk about why shows take longer to make these days.

For previous discussions on Pluribus, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, see below. All episodes are conversations between me and Chris, unless noted otherwise.

“Should You Become a Pod Person?” Pluribus, S1:E1-3, with Rob Henderson

“The Kim Wexler Theory,” Pluribus, S1:E1-6

“The Righteous Mestizo,” Pluribus, S1, with Rob Henderson

The Breaking Bad Universe

Nietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and Saul

“The Conscientious Objector to Therapy Culture,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S1-S2

“A Love Story?”, Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4

“The Whitewashing of Walter White,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S4-S5

Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and Execution

Better Call Saul: S6E8, Point and Shoot

Better Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and Games

Better Call Saul: S6E10, Nippy

Better Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking Bad

Better Call Saul: S6E12, Waterworks

Better Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc Andreessen

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via email or alerts through your settings.

In this discussion, Rob brings up a good point, which relates to how Manousos and Carol approach their shared situation in ways that reflect sex stereotypes. I bring up Manousos as the “Righteous Mestizo” prototype, a figure we also saw in the Breaking Bad universe. I mention the hints of religiosity in his character, and the way that this undergirds his stubbornness and morally upright behavior. Perhaps this ties in to Vince Gilligan’s conservatism, and also his contempt for AI.

Throughout the conversation, we refer to two Gilligan interviews, one in Variety and the other in Esquire.

For previous discussions on Pluribus, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, see below. All episodes are conversations between me and Chris, unless noted otherwise.

“Should You Become a Pod Person?” Pluribus, S1:E1-3, with Rob Henderson

“The Kim Wexler Theory,” Pluribus, S1:E1-6

The Breaking Bad Universe

Nietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and Saul

“The Conscientious Objector to Therapy Culture,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S1-S2

“A Love Story?”, Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4

“The Whitewashing of Walter White,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S4-S5

Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and Execution

Better Call Saul: S6E8, Point and Shoot

Better Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and Games

Better Call Saul: S6E10, Nippy

Better Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking Bad

Better Call Saul: S6E12, Waterworks

Better Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc Andreessen

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via email or alerts through your settings.

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He raises some good questions about the direction of the show. Chris says that thus far, it is mostly a character study of Carol, and he has no reason to care about her yet. I say fair enough, but the reason that most of us began watching the show is the involvement of Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn. We compare Pluribus to Breaking Bad, which was plot-driven at first, and Better Call Saul, in which we were going in with a character that we already knew and loved.

This led me to think through my own theory: perhaps Carol Sturka is Kimberly Wexler. I asked ChatGPT about this, and things went in a very weird direction. I haven’t seen any reason so far why this is impossible.

Chris and I discuss the question of whether the hive mind is its own creation, or the result of what you get when you amalgamate all of the world’s humans. Is there a way to see the hive mind’s code of ethics as a sort of least common denominator human morality? The ethical system has some inconsistencies, and there are still open questions like why they can kiss others without their permission to fundamentally change them but they can’t violate their individual rights in other ways. The ethical system seems to be a mix of the most extreme forms of libertarianism and paternalism. And why do they care about Carol so much anyway? All of these questions hopefully have satisfying answers.

We also talk about the possible AI angle. Is this hive mind the result of something that evolved naturally, or, as I suspect, a technological creation that started to spread across the universe? The latter is seeming a lot more likely. The idea that this is misaligned AI would explain the oddities of their ethical system.

Chris lays down his marker and says that Pluribus is going to invert the process that unfolded in Gilligan’s previous two shows. Instead of a character going bad, here they’re going to become better. By the end, we’ll see peace, love, harmony, and an understanding that we all need each other. That would be kind of lame though, and I have too much faith in Vince Gilligan to think he’ll take us in that direction.

Still, this makes sense in light of some of the lessons of the previous two shows, which teach that most people in American society are good. Chris and I debate whether we are supposed to share in Carol’s contempt for her fans, or react more negatively to her sneering at them. I was sure it was the former, but on further reflection maybe this is wrong. Just as most lawyers are ethical, finance isn’t about screwing people over, and most Americans try to live their best lives and follow the rules, perhaps the truly enlightened view is that we should let the romance novel readers have their fun.

For previous discussions on Pluribus, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, see below. All episodes are conversations between me and Chris, unless noted otherwise.

“Should You Become a Pod Person?” Pluribus, S1:E1-3, with Rob Henderson

The Breaking Bad Universe

Nietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and Saul

“The Conscientious Objector to Therapy Culture,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S1-S2

“A Love Story?”, Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4

“The Whitewashing of Walter White,” Rewatching Breaking Bad, S4-S5

Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and Execution

Better Call Saul: S6E8, Point and Shoot

Better Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and Games

Better Call Saul: S6E10, Nippy

Better Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking Bad

Better Call Saul: S6E12, Waterworks

Better Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc Andreessen

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via email or alerts through your settings.

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I absolutely loved this film. Daniel Plainview was one of those characters who become incorporated into my psyche for a substantial period of time, like Don Draper or Tony Soprano. I open by discussing how Plainview’s relationship with his son affected how I interacted with my own for a few days. I find myself still returning to his competent benevolence whenever the kids become too annoying.

We talk about the themes relating to capitalism, progress, and religious fundamentalism in backward communities. The movie was genuinely pro-capitalist in ways I didn’t expect. The man of action gets ahead by building, based on his own intelligence, competence, and drive. And I’ve rarely seen such a satisfying ending.

Late in the conversation, we circle back to other PTA films, with Tyler giving me his theory for the general worldview of the entire body of his work.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via email or alerts through your settings.

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I started watching because I trust Gilligan based on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul both being among my favorite shows. The fact that he brings Rhea Seehorn along as the lead actress added to the appeal.

If you haven’t watched it yet, you can go ahead and start now since we’ll be following along with the series (spoilers below). One cool thing Gilligan does is that he spends a lot of time showing people getting deeply into some technical or scientific topic or engaging in a form of craftsmanship. We see a great deal of lawyering in Better Call Saul, and engineering and chemistry in Breaking Bad. Recall Walter White’s experiences fixing the boiler and cooking meth, or Gus talking wine. We observe glimmers of this here when the scientists find signs of alien life, and when Carol and Helen are walking through the ice hotel and the bellhop is explaining the experience. Rob informs me that this is something the kids call “competence porn,” a phrase that we both hate but nonetheless seems to capture the phenomenon.

Gilligan has identified as conservative, or at least more conservative than most people in Hollywood. I discuss with Rob the beauty of casting a Mauritanian as the lecherous guy who uses his newfound power to ride on Air Force One and have sex with as many women as possible. This is a country with a blend of French, Arab, and black African culture. In other words, this is like the sexual predator singularity (I can say it, I’m an Arab). Moreover, the Asians and Native Americans want to just accept the new world, the black guy wants to be king and have a lot of sex, and the upper class American white woman is the only one looking around and saying this is not ok! Perhaps she needed to be a lesbian, as that’s the only way a show can otherwise be this politically incorrect. The other benefit of making her one is that she stands out as a prototypical suburban Karen. Rob points out that even her name sounds like Karen.

I also see hints of a parable that is pro-capitalist, or at least somehow about capitalism. When Carol finds Sprouts empty, she calls the aliens and tells them that she’s always been independent and wants to do her own shopping. But to get her “independence” she needs an army of drones to bring the food and stock the shelves. Isn’t this what capitalism is? People mindlessly doing repetitive tasks for our pleasure and benefit? We just don’t appreciate it and think that we created everything we have. Then at the end of episode 3, we get Carol’s shock upon realizing they would provide her with an atom bomb if she wanted one. Is this showing us where capitalism goes off the rails, when it gives us substances and products that are clearly harmful?

Rob brings up AI as a theme, which I didn’t consider much before, but it makes perfect sense. Here is this thing that has access to all of the world’s knowledge, is much smarter than you, but also has blind spots and is dumb in a lot of ways.

We spend a lot of time going over potential paradoxes regarding the rules of how the pod people behave and interact with the autonomous humans remaining. What if they get contradictory commands? Do they feel pain and pleasure experienced by other pod people? Why can they not coerce the remaining humans into doing stuff while their entire project is about coercion in the end? Where do animals fit into all this? There’s a lot in this universe that is yet to be explored.

On the surface, we’re supposed to be on Carol’s side. But part of me wonders whether there’s a pro-alien reading of the show. Maybe they really are all-knowing and we should just listen to them. When Zosia serenely tells Carol, in her drugged up and miserable state, that we would all save a person drowning without thinking twice, doesn’t the point land? After all, Zosia is happy and Carol is spiraling! You might say she was in this condition because of the aliens, but the flashback to the hotel and initial episode tell us she wasn’t all that happy before.

Rhea Seehorn is perfectly cast here. As a dry-humored cynic, she seems more Wexler than Wexler. Maybe this is another reason she had to be a lesbian. I feel that if a woman like Carol wasn’t a lesbian, her male partner would need to be a complete non-entity.

The show is generally funny, though the snapback humor is a bit cringe. I think Seehorn provides the best possible version of it nonetheless.

Gilligan has not disappointed, and I’m eager to see where this goes next.

If you are interested, check out previous discussions I’ve had on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. All conversations are with Chris Nicholson, except for the two that involved Marc Andreessen. Pretty amazing to think that at this point I have done dozens of hours of video and audio on the worlds that Vince Gilligan has created. My audience for the TV reviews isn’t huge, but it is very passionate.

The Breaking Bad Universe

Rewatching Breaking Bad, S1 and S2

Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4

Rewatching Breaking Bad, S4-S5

Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and Execution

Better Call Saul: S6E8, Point and Shoot

Better Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and Games

Better Call Saul: S6E10, Nippy

Better Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking Bad

Better Call Saul: S6E12, Waterworks

Nietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and Saul

Better Call Saul finale with Chris and Andreessen

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We debate the message of the film. I came away believing that it was very anti-porn, while Tyler sees it more as about Hollywood in general, and with an uplifting message in the end. My view is quite darker. We discuss the B characters, and what their stories are trying to tell us.

We’ll be doing There Will Be Blood next, so stay tuned for that.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via emails or alerts.

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I enjoyed Lockjaw as an amalgamation of rightoid characters. He’s in the military, and also a Nazi, and an incel. I point out that another way that this movie is not woke is that its bad guys are literal white supremacists. There’s none of this idea that the real enemy is unconscious bias or disparities or whatever. It’s a liberal fantasy through and through. You get sex and violence, but also an enemy that makes you feel morally pure.

I argue that a move away from the neurotic version of woke – here I’m thinking of a room full of masked DSA members talking about their anxiety – was inevitable. How would you even make an entertaining movie glamorizing these people? A liberalism that is about sex, violence, and killing Nazis is broadly appealing. It would center left-wing economic ideas, which are popular across the political spectrum including among Trump supporters, and also lets one protect the innocent and fight adversaries who are both evil and pathetic, like Lockjaw. We talk about the prospects of immigration being the issue that unites various factions of the left, given that it is the one place where conservatives actually do use violence against people of color.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use. You can also decide whether you want to receive either podcast via emails or alerts.

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Yet we can’t help but wonder… is there a Straussian understanding of the film, or perhaps the source novel? Frankly, Hitler comes across as really cool. He’s smart, talented, and charming. He learns about the world, takes initiative, and accomplishes his goals. Hitler gives fatherly advice. He has progressive views on women, and appears unbothered by all the homosexuality and gender bending he must observe in Berlin. Germans who oppose immigration are allowed to speak their piece. At the same time, the movie tries to give the impression that Hitler is actually talking to leaders of the NPD, with one of them asking that the cameras be turned off so he could express loyalty to the Führer.

As I found out from my research, this was a scripted part of the movie, but it was intended to give the impression that it was real. I mention how people will always take the surface level interpretation of a piece of art, so it is not difficult to send a hidden message. This is what has always made me skeptical of Straussian readings of books, as people will miss the point unless you make it very clear for them, and that goes even for sophisticated observers, who are unlikely to put that much effort into understanding any particular work.

Nonetheless, it’s fun to speculate. Scott Greer actually read the novel, and I asked him whether there was a way to read it from a pro-Hitler perspective. He replied yes, and the film actually made Hitler look even worse than the book. I await the Highly Respected episode on this.

Rob and I discuss German remembrance culture, and whether the same film could be made today. We also mention the eerie way in which a lot of people’s faces are blurred, which I’m guessing is the result of Germany having really weird privacy laws. I take this as an indication that there is something deeply wrong with their culture.

Near the end, we discuss the chapter on propaganda in Mein Kampf, and how Hitler would do as an influencer today.

Note: If you don’t want the TV and film reviews, go to your settings in Substack and uncheck the H&H podcast. Also, if you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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I think this film perfectly encapsulates the post-MeToo era. Sure, there’s still a sexual assault storyline, etc. But it seems that after the crazy 2010s and early 2020s, men and women are back to being honest about what they want. Women want height and money, men youth and beauty. The film acknowledges this reality, and although it is judgmental about it – particularly towards the middle aged men who want to date younger, less so the woman who wants a guy with money – there’s an acknowledgment that this is human nature, so what are you going to do? Around 2020, cultural leftism felt like if it couldn’t change human nature, it could simply bully everyone indefinitely. With the decline in the power of the MSM, the rise of the bro podcast sphere, Elon’s purchase of X, the quick money that can be made via OnlyFans, and newer forms of social media, trying to repress our instincts has become a hopeless battle. The future is a more fragmented culture, which means that human nature will reign supreme given that no faction can exercise enough hegemony to realistically shape us into something else.

Lily and I discuss the importance of height in this film and dating culture more generally. When I was a kid, we would talk about women desiring a man who is “tall, dark, and handsome.” Dark of course didn’t mean black or Indian, but more like a tanned white guy. But there was less of this idea that things were hopeless if you were short. Either we’ve become more realistic, or women feel freer to indulge in this preference.

Lily explains why she thinks people should in fact be more rational about picking partners according to tangible criteria. I’m inclined to agree. Whatever the discourse around dating is right now and whatever it is encouraging people to do, it’s clearly not working. The default script people go through their lives with makes the difference, and we’ve flipped from one of being married and having children, to one that says focus on your career and a family would be nice to have if you find the perfect person in the right moment and it doesn’t interfere with your other goals in life. When we discuss people being picky, this I think is what we’re getting at. People think they should have jobs no matter what, so they’ll settle for a “good enough” career instead of remaining unemployed. They at one point treated family formation the same way, but don’t anymore.

Note: If you don’t want the TV and film reviews, go to your settings in Substack and uncheck the H&H podcast. Also, if you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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I knew we were supposed to feel sorry for Ani, but I saw her as a gold digger. Rob and I debate whether she was “really” in love with Ivan. He convinces me that she fell in love in the way someone like her would. The fact that she liked him for his money did not make the relationship any less real. This made sense. I guess the thing I struggle with is that Ivan just sucks so much as a person, so it’s hard for me to sympathize with a woman caring about him.

Speaking of which, Russians come off poorly here. We discuss the role of Russians in pop culture, and whether the movie could have worked if the rich family were American instead. I thought the father was the worst character of all, but Rob and Tyler convinced me that there was another way to interpret his behavior. Rather than being cold and aloof, chiming in only to laugh at Ani, he was taking a backseat to his wife, and enjoyed seeing her taken down a peg.

One of the more interesting debates we have is over how the audience is supposed to feel about Igor. He came into Ani’s life as a thug there to restrain her. If he could be redeemed by a few nice gestures, it indicates a more forgiving attitude towards male misbehavior than we saw at the height of the MeToo era.

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In the 2017 remake of Twin Peaks on Showtime (spoilers beginning here), Dale Cooper returns in a catatonic form. This Zombie Cooper really likes coffee and cherry pie. Whenever we arrived at a moment where his old self comes out after he has seen coffee or cherry pie, I would feel this sense of anticipation and enjoy the predictable punchline. Man likes coffee is not funny to me. But a character I’ve grown to know and love returning after a quarter century in a different form – and liking coffee – is a thought that brings me overwhelming joy.

“The past is a foreign country.” With the invention of TV and movies, we can visually and audibly experience the kinds of situations and jokes people once found funny, what they feared, how they expected the sexes to relate to one another, and more. Even if previous eras put less emphasis on realism in art, we at least learn what was expected from individuals in terms of ideals, prototypes, and norms. Becoming familiar with characters living in one culture and watching what they are like in another, through the passage of time, can be a surreal experience.

Of course, all of us who were alive in 1990 and are still here today have had to adjust to new social realities, but in real life the shift is so gradual that its shock is diluted throughout countless small experiences reminding us that the past is always incrementally slipping away. Only through fiction can we fully experience getting to know characters living in one generation and then suddenly seeing what they are like in the next. The fact that this premise is so interesting is why you’ll often see novels, shows, and movies about an individual waking up from a coma, or in a variation of that theme, people living in a foreign country and then coming back, which is the premise of the King of the Hill remake.

This is part of the appeal of the Twin Peaks story. Tyler Tone originally convinced me to get into this universe, and he now joins me to discuss the series, with a particular focus on The Return.

We spend time on the aesthetic shift between the original and the remake. As argued by Jonathan Foltz, the story is much more thematically and geographically sprawling than the original, reflecting what has happened to American culture since the early 1990s.

The first series offered an idealized vision of small-town America – albeit with a dark underbelly – while the 2017 series feels haunted by economic decay, addiction, and disconnection. We reflect on how Twin Peaks originally brought tens of millions together on network television, while The Return premiered on a premium TV channel and streaming service with orders of magnitude fewer viewers.

The conversation begins with a discussion of the subplots and character arcs, before getting into larger questions about the series. We reflect on how The Return withholds the Cooper fans expect, offering instead Zombie Cooper as Dougie Jones and the evil Mr. C. I take the fact that we don’t get the Cooper we remember until late in the show as a sign that he’s too good for the culture we’ve created. As viewers have come to expect anti-heroes, an unblemished classic hero is difficult to imagine. I talk about how pro wrestling changed over the 1990s, reflecting the larger cultural shift, and the move away from clear cut good guys and bad guys. There is something similar going on with the original Sheriff Truman, who is omnipresent throughout conversations and via his brother and namesake, while never actually showing up.

At some point, we also discuss how the original “Bob” really doesn’t work in 2017. I guess in 1990, a plausible symbol of evil was a guy who looks like a janitor in a denim outfit? Such a figure is laughable today. Maybe Bob takes whatever form represents evil in a particular cultural context. If so, it’s interesting to think how out of place the original character looks from our vantage point.

I was hit hard by the storyline with Bobby and Shelly. David Lynch first led us on to believe that they were still together. Then in the middle of what looks like a family discussion, the young criminal comes out and takes Shelly away. Bobby is defeated. The entirety of Shelly’s past is seen in a different light. She wasn’t a victim of Leo; he was the kind of man she sought out, with her daughter falling into the same patterns.

The seeming revelation that something similar happened between Ed and Nora at first compounded the original despair, but their relationship then moves in the opposite direction. Tyler and I speculate on why the two love stories end up differently.

We discuss David Lynch’s politics. Tyler informs me that he voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. I note that the clearest tell that he was a rightoid is that he didn’t cast many nonwhites in the series, except for Asian females. See in particular the scene where the tiny girl is put on the ground and crawls on the floor. Relatedly, there’s the fact that the Twin Peaks universe caters to the male gaze as a more general matter. This appears to be the role of Tammy, who serves as the sidekick to Lynch himself. As mentioned in my review of that film with Rob, I’ve always thought that the point of Mulholland Drive was to put two beautiful actresses in sex scenes together.

We spend some time on the Dr. Jacoby storyline. To me, it’s interesting that the two people who we see enjoying his show are Nadine and Jerry. All three of these individuals are B characters throughout the series. Are those the ones who get into paranoid right-wing politics? Tyler questions whether Dr. Amp is actually right-coded, but I think I convince him by pointing to the shovel scam and the Americana iconography. It is true there are some more left-wing critiques in his rants, and this shows Lynch being ahead of his time, given the MAGA-MAHA convergence we have witnessed.

Ben Horne makes occasional appearances to show us how men have changed. Before, he had sex with his subordinates. Now he doesn’t. Not because he’s afraid of being cancelled, but because that’s not what we expect from older men in positions of power anymore. He’s kind of dead inside, compared to the energetic and jovial character he was a quarter-century ago, so this really doesn’t seem like a celebration of the feminization of the world.

And then there’s Audrey. I was in shock watching her first appearance. You can see the same facial expressions, patterns of speech, tics and eccentricities. But what was cute or could even make a man fall in love with a woman in her twenties – the frivolity, indecisiveness, arbitrary and fierce passions – is unsettling in one who is deep into middle age. Only the mole remains unblemished as a commemoration of the past. Shelly in contrast is still beautiful, and it seems like Lynch made Audrey look particularly bad to drive the point home. People talk about her storyline, and much of The Return, as an assault on the concept of nostalgia, but here the lessons are heightened as we’re reminded of one of the cruelest facts of human existence: women age.

After exhausting some of the main subplots – I don’t think we could’ve gotten to all of them, even with much more time – we move on to larger themes. The show, we agree, is less about solving mysteries than about resisting the very idea of resolution. Tyler emphasizes that he doesn’t particularly like the idea of worrying about plot details, but rather seeks to experience the director’s larger vision. He mentions the four and a half hour YouTube video that seeks to explain the series, which I’m just starting to get through.

I ask about the significance of the episode centered around the detonation of the atom bomb. Tyler argues that we shouldn’t think about this as a scientific explanation of the main plot, but rather see nuclear weapons as a symbol of man becoming alienated from his nature and losing control. We talk about nuclear weapons as the symbol of man-made danger versus AI, with me arguing that the latter is much more depressing as the crowning achievement that might destroy us.

Nuclear weapons are cool. They’re just machines that are doing more of the thing that machines do, that is rearranging matter. AI cuts to the core of who we are, and while there will be a lot of great applications going forward, it is also drowning the world in slop. Fine, slop is not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I don’t know, I find slop worse. This is the technological version of hating pronouns more than genocide, even though I’ve become so polarized against MAGA liars that I can’t even hate pronouns all that much anymore. And of course, if you listen to Eliezer, AI is much more dangerous than nuclear weapons anyway.

We close the conversation by discussing the final episodes, particularly Cooper’s surreal re-entry into an altered timeline. Does he really believe he can save Laura Palmer? Was the lesson that he was being too hubristic, or something else? Tyler presents a popular theory that the ending was, despite all appearances, a happy one. I like having that out there as a possibility.

Regardless, if there’s one rule of watching Twin Peaks, it is to remember that the point is not narrative closure. The show is a reflection, telling us who we are and what we’ve become. I don’t think the reality of our modern culture is as dark as Lynch believed it was. But we can’t lie to ourselves and say we haven’t lost something. And we cannot find redemption in nostalgia in a world where rapid societal changes are constantly making a mockery of what we have loved.

• Tim assuming that his family would be permanently poor

• Tim acting like a lost doofus unable to handle any pressure throughout the show

• Belinda getting a $5 million transfer into her bank account that quickly, without anyone worrying that it would come to the attention of authorities

• Rick assaulting Jim Hollinger at his house, and then returning to his resort not expecting anything to happen

Still, most of the storylines wrapped up quite nicely. I like that Rick ended up giving Chelsea validation in the short time they had left together. I did not foresee Hollinger actually being Rick’s father, but it made sense. We all thought Gaitok was headed towards a bad ending, but he did get the girl. This may have involved a sacrifice of his principles, but still, Mook under normal circumstances was well out of his league. If you’re going to sell out, that’s exactly what you do it for. I didn’t expect the friendship of the three women to last, but I liked how they came together at the end.

The scene I found most profound on the show was Victoria’s brief speech on the nature of wealth. Modern people, particularly the rich, have this conflicted relationship with their standard of living and place in the world. After Piper told her parents that she realized she didn’t want to live in a developing world monastery for a year, Victoria explained that it would be indecent for them not to make the most of their fortunate circumstances.

We’re lucky, it’s true. Nobody in the history of the world has lived better than we have. Even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t, it’s offensive. It’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream that one day they could live like we do.

The right has this tendency to LARP and imagine things were better in the past, while liberals know history has been miserable but are often consumed by guilt. Lately, we’ve seen a kind of rightoid Maoism that celebrates poverty and thinks it’s good for the soul. None of this is healthy. The idea that enjoying your life is the way to honor the story of human progress is a message that is both intellectually compelling and quite moving. Victoria’s wisdom was a pleasant surprise, showing that she was much different than we had been led to believe.

Previous discussions of The White Lotus

Me and Rob on Season 1

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7

Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2

Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 3 & 4

Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 5 & 6

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We start out by discussing the latest in the Ratliff family incest dynamics. Sophie called it last month. She was right and I was wrong. We spend quite a lot of time on the extent to which Lochy manipulated his brother into what happened, and how intentional he has been in the process. I wonder whether Rob’s interpretation of his character is consistent with other things we know about him.

We then go on to talk about the relationship between Jackie, Kate, and Laurie. The show does an excellent job of presenting the kind of situation where a person cares very deeply about something but feels the need to keep repeating “I don’t care,” which is a giveaway that they do. I note that continuously telling someone to go get laid is a way of belittling them while pretending to be on their side.

Talk of the Valentin situation leads to a fascinating conversation about asymmetric aging. Older men who want to have fun can go off to a place like Thailand and simply buy what they want, while it doesn’t work like that for their female counterparts. A man can be “used” for his money or material possessions and not care. But women need to be desired, and that becomes much more difficult as they get older.

We of course discuss the great autogynephilia speech, which you can watch here. It was one of the most compelling soliloquies I’ve ever seen on television. In preparation for this conversation, Rob and I did our first serious reading on the issue, which was chapter 9 of J Michael Bailey’s book on the topic. Relying on his work, we talk about why autogynephilic men lie to themselves and others about their condition. I note how Frank had a completely novel explanation for his desires, one that he had wrapped up in Buddhist philosophy, which contrasts with the more scientific sounding justifications for transgenderism normally given in the West.

Rather than saying he naturally has the brain of a woman, when Frank takes the female role, he maintains his voracious sexual appetite. So he ended up telling himself a story that was consistent with a Buddhist outlook that stressed deep questions regarding the nature of the self, rather than the precepts of gender theory. By avoiding the adoption of a politically correct ideology, Frank found it easier to justify completely indulging in his appetites before becoming religious.

Links to previous discussions of The White Lotus

Me and Rob on Season 1

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7

Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2

Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 3 & 4

Articles mentioned in the discussion

Andrew Sullivan interviews Mike White

New Yorker profile of Mike White

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Links to previous discussions of The White Lotus

Me and Rob Henderson on Season 1

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6

Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7

Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2

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In previous seasons, I’ve been discussing the show with Rob Henderson. He is traveling this week, but we plan to talk about future episodes together going forward. For now, let me know what you think of Sophie.

We debate incest dynamics within the Ratliff family, the concept of the “Chadcel,” how the show handles the topic of phone addiction, the need for men to be at least somewhat dangerous, what exactly is going on with Rick, and more.

Links to previous discussions

Me and Rob Henderson on The White Lotus, Season 1

Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 1-4

Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6

Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episode 7