The H&H Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob and I finally conclude our discussion of Dostoevsky’s Demons. (spoilers below)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. LinksReviews of Part I, and Part 2John Psmith book reviewRob’s review of Demons, Part 1 and Part 2My review of Crime and PunishmentNote: 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson is back to discuss Part II of Demons. In this conversation, we focus on how “on the nose” the novel seems when you think of it as predicting the future course of events in Russia. Dostoevsky told us that many of his fellow countrymen were demons who just wanted to destroy. The twentieth century seemed to prove that beyond doubt. I bring up some of the strange paradoxes of Dostoevsky’s Russian nationalism, as he appears to have contempt for his fellow citizens at the same time he puts so much emotional stock in the abstract notion of their peoplehood. 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.LinksOur review of Part IJohn Psmith book reviewRob’s review of Demons, part I and part 2Note: 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joins me to discuss Part I of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872).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 societyI 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joins me to discuss Sinners, which critics and viewers are both raving about.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.

Chris Nicholson joins me to talk about Season 1 of Pluribus. This is a completely different conversation than the one I just had with Rob. Chris keeps pointing out, and I agree with him, that the show is probably not going to go that deep philosophically or in terms of the origins of the virus. He mentions his “oh no” moment when Vince Gilligan noted to the interviewer he was talking to that the drones were happy. Are we just getting the most basic thought experiment from intro to philosophy? Is the virus storyline simply unnecessary?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 HendersonThe Breaking Bad UniverseNietzschean 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-S5Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc AndreessenNote: 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comI’ve done two previous podcasts on Pluribus: one with Rob Henderson, and one with Chris Nicholson. I didn’t want to choose between them for discussing the end of the season, so I decided to do an episode with each. I’m releasing Rob today, and Chris will be later this week. As you will see, these are vastly different conversations, and I think many will enjoy the contrast. 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:E1-6The Breaking Bad UniverseNietzschean 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-S5Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc AndreessenNote: 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comChris Nicholson returns after almost two years to discuss Pluribus, up to episode six.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 HendersonThe Breaking Bad UniverseNietzschean 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-S5Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc AndreessenNote: 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comTyler Tone joins me to discuss There Will Be Blood (2007), as part of my Paul Thomas Anderson series, which has thus far included One Battle After Another (2025) and Boogie Nights (1997).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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me to discuss the first three episodes of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, which is now on Apple TV.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 UniverseRewatching Breaking Bad, S1 and S2Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4Rewatching Breaking Bad, S4-S5Better Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksNietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and SaulBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Andreessen

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comFresh off watching One Battle After Another, I did a livestream review of Boogie Nights with Tyler Tone as part of a series on Paul Thomas Anderson films. We begin with a discussion about the movie playing to nostalgia. This was a film made in 1997 set in the 1970s and 1980s. It is impossible to imagine us today having the same feelings looking back at the aughts. I wonder whether this is similar to economic growth in that the low hanging fruit has been picked, and you can only do things like sexual liberation and break down taboos once. Culture thus becomes stuck soon after society achieves a long enough streak of peace and prosperity. 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comLily Zuckerman joins me again to discuss the new Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another. The movie consciously goes out of its way to separate itself from circa-2020 era wokeness. Lily calls it representative of Chapo Trap House liberalism.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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joins me to talk about Look Who’s Back (2015) (watch on YouTube), a German film with the premise that Hitler returns to life and becomes a successful entertainer. We talk about the over-the-top antifascist messaging of the movie, as on the surface we see Germans indulging their racism, and (spoiler) at the end a Hitler voiceover as we’re shown the activities of modern day rightists.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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comLily Zuckerman is a student at UATX. She suggested we watch Materialists (2025), in which a high-end matchmaker named Lucy Mason (Dakota Jackson) goes around setting people up while also being involved in a love triangle of her own. 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comAnora (2024) was hailed by critics as a movie about the empowering nature of sex work (spoilers below and in the episode). Rob Henderson and Tyler Tone join me to discuss. We just don’t see it. This seems to be one of those films where there’s a politically correct interpretation that is divorced from the actual content of the movie. That conclusion seems inevitable from the last scene, in which Ani has sex with Igor and then breaks down. I was afraid there would be a cheesy heartwarming ending where she doesn’t have sex with him but wants him to take her out on a date. That’s how a rom-com would’ve finished. But this was much darker. 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.

Twin Peaks originally ran for two seasons on ABC from 1990 to 1991. A running joke on the show was that FBI agent Dale Cooper, the protagonist, really liked coffee and cherry pie. He was always complimenting establishments on their coffee and cherry pie, while recommending them to other people. To an audience in the early 1990s, this must have been very funny. But the humor of a guy really liking coffee was lost on me watching in 2025.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me to talk about the last two episodes of Season 3 of The White Lotus. Overall, I found the ending mostly satisfying. But the plot holes. There were so many! Among them (spoilers below):* 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 happenStill, 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 LotusMe and Rob on Season 1Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 3 & 4Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 5 & 6

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joins me to discuss The White Lotus, Season 3, up to episode six. There are spoilers in this conversation, as well as the rest of these show notes.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 LotusMe and Rob on Season 1Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2Me on Rob on Season 3, Episodes 3 & 4Articles mentioned in the discussionAndrew Sullivan interviews Mike WhiteNew Yorker profile of Mike White

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me this week to talk about the first four episodes of Season 3 of The White Lotus. We start off by discussing the Ratliff family and whether the incest dynamics are actually there or that was kind of a head fake at the beginning of the season. Other topics addressed are whether Mook is too perfect, the relatively positive portrayal of age gap relationships, toxic female relationships, the horrors of aging, and much more. The conversation goes down a dark path as we wonder if Season 3 might be paying homage to The Shield, a show that you can watch me, Rob Henderson, and Marc Andreessen talk about here. Links to previous discussions of The White LotusMe and Rob Henderson on Season 1Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 1-4Me and Rob on Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6Me and Rob on Season 2, Episode 7Me and Sophie on Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2

I’m joined by my new friend “PhiloSophie” (Substack, X) to discuss the first two episodes of Season 3 of The White Lotus.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 discussionsMe and Rob Henderson on The White Lotus, Season 1Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 1-4Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 5 & 6Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episode 7 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

David Lynch recently passed away, so Rob and I decided to honor the legendary director by watching two of his movies, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2008), and discussing them.We liked the first film, and debated various interpretations of it, including the standard one and other possible theories. I’m motivated to have a contrarian take here, perhaps because of the overwhelming beauty I found in the reality we were initially introduced to.While Mulholland Drive gave us much to work with, we both absolutely hated Inland Empire. In my view, it’s fine to have surrealist or absurdist elements, but if it gets to the point that the whole thing is a disjointed mess it’s hard to stay interested or care what happens. A character could have died or turned into a rhinoceros at any point after the first hour and I wouldn’t have been moved or surprised, because nothing actually matters once you figure out what the director is trying to do. You need reality to be bounded in some way if you hope to be entertained by or learn from a work of art. We refer to ChatGPT throughout, which performed quite impressively, generating arguments for novel interpretations for the films and clearing up some of the confusion we had about the plots and sequences of events. At the end we decide we’ll give the series Twin Peaks a chance, so look out for that. By the way, the other day I asked people to subscribe to my new YouTube channel, where I posted the conversation with Brian Chau. As it turns out though, I already have a YouTube channel with nearly a thousand subscribers. I just forgot it existed. So ignore the link I posted yesterday and go here if you want to watch my free videos on YouTube. But I prefer you see them here. If people have other interpretations of the films or thoughts on the conversation here, feel free to leave them in the comments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joined me last night on a live stream to discuss the question that has roiled right-wing twitter: should American men work at Panda Express? For background, see Rob’s coverage here. See also friend of the Substack Scott Greer, whose article we reference. Rob is amused by the Greerhead Pledge, which you can learn about from my conversation with Scott. We go into the status-money tradeoff in jobs, the reasonableness of people’s expectations, how much these anonymous rightists reflect attitudes in the rest of society, their similarities with woke, and more. We also discuss whether working at Panda Express will actually limit what kind of partner you can hope to attract. I explain why one of the beauties of immigration is that it allows you to go outside of the status hierarchy of your own society when looking for a wife. I’m big into following your dreams. Listeners shouldn’t get the impression from this conversation that I’m for income-maxing above all else. That’s not what I did, and if you truly have a passion or talent for something, go for it. What I’m objecting to here is the idea that you should tell people who are only slightly above average it is fine for them to look down on normal, everyday jobs. That’s not good either for society or encouraging people to live happy and productive lives.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joined me on a livestream today to talk about The Penguin, the miniseries that ended last night. See here for our discussion of episodes 1-4, and point eight here on the racial demographics of crime in Gotham. I talk about my theory of the general message of the miniseries, which is that leftist revolutionaries are truly evil people who manipulate resentments for their own gain. I also argue that the rivalry between Oz and Sofia is the 2016 Democratic primary all over again. On one side, you have an establishment figure who suffers due to sexism, and on the other a fat folksy guy who represents a multiracial class-based revolution. One claim to victimhood is treated as clearly more legitimate than the other.There’s a strange glitch in the recording where when I listen to it with my AirPods it’s choppy, but mostly fine when I play through my MacBook speakers. I’m not sure how it sounds on other devices or whether this is even a problem for everyone. This is the hazard of doing this through livestream rather than a normal recording.To get notifications for future livestreams, download the Substack app.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comLast night I had an AMA with Rob Henderson. The way I’m going to do these from now on is that the livestream is open to everyone in the moment, but only paid subscribers can listen to the whole thing. To join us for future episodes, you need to have the Substack app downloaded on your phone or tablet. Announcements are on X and Notes, and you get a notification when it starts on the app. I don’t want to email everybody because I think it creates too much spam in people’s inboxes. I’m planning to have a discussion with Alex Nowrasteh this Friday at 5ET, so join us for that if you can. Rob and I begin by discussing a recent video of Jordan Peterson that has been making the rounds. See my criticism here and Rob’s defense. We also field questions on the upcoming election, women in politics, how and why we block on X, the few smart conservative institutions that are out there, and more.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob Henderson joins me to talk about the first four episodes of The Penguin miniseries on HBO. We discuss how it reminds us of and pays homage to other shows. To me, it seemed like HBO was trying to recreate the magic of Tony Soprano and using the DC Comics universe as a hook. We go over the similarities and differences between the two characters, both manipulative fat guys who get offended when you question their sincerity.Rob and I also discuss Sofia Falcone, and the feminist plotline throughout her story. Cristin Milioti looks perfect for the role and plays it extremely well. Our conversation also covers race and gender dynamics in the show. I call it very 1990s in its themes and how it addresses, or more commonly ignores, identity issues. Whites are the default, whether as criminals or those in positions of power and influence, stereotypes don’t exist, and blacks mostly serve as sidekicks. Overall, we both rate The Penguin as watchable but nowhere near the Pantheon of the great antihero shows.Note that the Substack app doesn’t show the option for seeing the transcript. However, it is available if you access this page through a browser.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comSome months ago, I had a tweet that went viral on what it means for a woman to say “I’m not going to sleep with you.” I followed this up with an article about the video, and Rob later responded to both.Rob and I decided we needed to talk about this. It turned out to be a fascinating discussion, and one that provides a great deal of useful advice to young men. Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation is when we get into how the sexual marketplace is in a way the last vestige of our prehistoric world of scarcity. As an individual living in a first world country, you can usually work and acquire food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare in straightforward ways. The one need you can’t fill just by paying for it, at least not easily and without legal risk, is sex. And, as I tell Rob, I think most frustration that we think of as sexual is actually a deeper frustration towards the feeling of being unwanted and rejected. This is why even the best sexbots are not going to make incels happy. Whether women will sleep with a man is the most honest form of feedback he’s going to get in life on his overall worth, and this is something we are deeply uncomfortable with. That is not to say that the sexual marketplace is in overall less brutal towards women. In many ways, they have it much worse, in part due to the always lurking threat of violence. It’s interesting that as soft as society has become and despite the degree to which things like paternalistic regulations and the welfare state try to smooth out the rough edges of life, the sexual marketplace remains the one important area where a kind of red in tooth and claw approach dominates. I also enjoyed talking to Rob about the ways in which society does not give people a script anymore regarding how to form relationships, and why this makes doing so difficult. This can be seen in a recent video of a young woman talking about how she has achieved career success and health but has no one to spend her life with. Not only are young people not instructed on how to form relationships, but even the idea of bettering yourself socially is seen as sort of weird. On many topics society tries to tell you how to think or behave, and people can either reject that advice or seek out other forms of information. When it comes to dating, there’s not even an “establishment” perspective on how men should meet women to rebel against. Other topics covered include:* Whether men are afraid to aggressively pursue women these days, and whether they should be* The generation gap in how people responded to the original video* How the online right exhibits resentment and bitterness towards women, and the way that they mirror many feminist critiques of men* Dating apps, and whether you can still approach women publicly* Why developing social skills and being comfortable in social situations is crucial for success* The importance of college and living in an urban environment to facilitate social interactions* What we think about the idea that men should focus on making money in their 20s and wait for their “sexual peak” that supposedly comes later.* How taking care of one's appearance, grooming, and hygiene can make oneself more attractive.* The importance of having a positive attitude and the need to avoid toxic people and communities.See also my article “Black Guy Hitting on Girls,” my interview with Jazmen Jafar and Farha Khalidi, and Rob on making conversation. I believe that there is a dearth of good information out there for men these days on how to attract women, and that this is probably the most important part of your life to get right. I highly recommend everyone listen to this podcast, but especially young men who would like to do better with the opposite sex.

A reader offered to pay Rob and I to review two movies: Zulu (1964), and They Live (1988), and here we take him up on it. Apparently, both of these films have cult followings among far-right types.I happened to like Zulu. I’ve always enjoyed reading military history, and seeing how a siege works in practice, or at least a portrayal of it, is always a satisfying experience. The film was based on the Battle of Rorke's Drift, which was fought in 1879 as part of the Anglo-Zulu war. There, around 150 British and colonial soldiers held off 3,000-4,000 Africans.The British soldiers are portrayed quite romantically, and there is little in the way of politics. You simply appreciate the heroism for its own sake, which is inherently conservative. Rob and I nonetheless have a bit of a disagreement about how justified we should see the right-wing affection for this movie.They Live, in contrast, we agree has a standard leftist message. The lesson is that white people, capitalism, and western civilization are bad, and the multiracial poor are heroes. Rob and I talk about why antisemites seem to like the film. I argue it’s because their worldview is fundamentally not that different from that of leftists, in that there’s a rich elite conspiring to hold everyone down. So they see a movie with a conventional anti-white narrative, and decide it’s actually antisemitic, even though there isn’t a hint of anyone being Jewish anywhere in the film and the director explicitly disavows any such interpretation. We touch on topics like the move towards more grittiness in art and culture, how attitudes have changed regarding how women should respond to sexual assault, how leftists have reacted to different Republican presidents, why you never hear about people “selling out” today, and much more. Referencing our review of Blackboard Jungle, we once again go back to the idea that modern anti-racism has been there in art since at least the 1950s. If there are prominent counterexamples of works that have actually been “racist” in a way that term would be understood by a normal American, rather than someone who is a committed leftist, please let us know and we may check them out.Since we’re getting paid for this review, we’re making it available for free. If other readers want to pay for us to watch and discuss any other movies or TV shows, reach out through Substack DMs and we’ll be open to your suggestions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me to talk about the film Civil War. We both have already posted (spoiler-filled) reviews. I really didn’t like it, while he gives the movie a kind of lukewarm endorsement. The greatest weakness is clearly its lack of explanation of how the US got to the point where Americans were killing each other. The movie doesn’t simply ignore the question. It goes out of its way to be unrealistic by putting California and Texas on the same side. The film is also notable for the lack of texture with which it presents American society, or whatever America is supposed to be in this alternate universe. For a sample of the conversation the film has motivated, see reviews by Tyler Cowen, Michelle Goldberg, and Ross Douthat, all of which we touch on here. We discuss different ways in which the movie is politically correct, including the lack of sexual violence. This appears to be an aspect of reality that contemporary audiences are particularly unable to handle. This ties in to larger issues about what kinds of stereotypes this film either reinforces or tries to refute.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comThe Sydney Sweeney saga continues. Rob joins me on the podcast to talk about her new film Immaculate, which I reviewed on X here. The conversation begins by Rob informing me that he thinks Sydney Sweeney is mid, and this leads to a heated debate about her appeal, which involves ranking various actresses and models over the years. We come to the conclusion that it’s a combination of her natural breasts, low class physiognomy, and nasally bored girl voice. The conversation then moves on to the film itself, its message, particularly on abortion, and Hollywood double standards when it comes to how it portrays different religions. We get sidetracked into me discussing some of my thoughts on the merits of Catholicism versus Protestantism. In the end, we didn’t find anything too deep or fascinating about the film, but it was a good 89 minutes of mindless entertainment. Listen to the audio here, or watch the video below.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me to talk about The Curse, Season 1.Warning: spoilers in the show notes and also in the discussion. I highly recommend watching first, because it’s very good. The first nine episodes were some of the most compelling TV I’ve ever seen. I tend not to like the premise of white liberals being hypocrites. It takes aim at an easy target and is too overtly political for my taste. But this show I think puts politics in its proper place. Asher and Whitney Siegel are human beings first, virtue signallers second, which is far more common than the opposite. Their main emotional investment is in their own financial situation and personal relationships.Emma Stone as Whitney shines in her role. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The way she uses humor to deflect tension, establish connections, and try to but not really succeed at eliminating status imbalances is captivating. She’s the most compelling version of the liberal white woman. There’s a kind of fakery that takes itself so seriously that it becomes authentic, even romantic. Rob thinks she’s a completely unsympathetic character, while I see more nuance. We observe her through the eyes of her adoring husband, who turns out to be a literal cuck. We discuss the meaning of this. I argue that Asher having a tiny penis is central to the whole story, while Rob seems to take pity on the poor man and see it all as a bit much. We also talk about my idea of there being two kinds of white liberals: those who get into Native Americans, including Hispanics, and those who get into blacks. Leftists tend to gravitate to the minority group that is most similar to them in personality. The ones who are more extroverted, risk acceptant, and into showy displays of submission like blacks better. More sensitive and subtle souls take the other path. Part of this reflects how each minority group approaches identity politics. Black Americans are more likely to lean into their role as designated victims, while Natives are sort of puzzled by the whole thing. White liberals looking to play a savior role or indulge in racial masochism pick up on these differences and choose accordingly. I was looking forward to the final episode, but ended up truly heartbroken by it. You don’t introduce arbitrary magic into a story that was so internally consistent up to that point. I remember the sinking feeling I got the exact moment I knew they ruined the show. A world that had been absurd because it stayed brutally true to the human condition suddenly became absurd due to a supernatural element. What a betrayal of the audience.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comIn previous discussions on rewatching Breaking Bad, I’ve often talked about how our minds play tricks on us. Going over the final two seasons, I was shocked by how much I had whitewashed Walter White’s character. I remember him being a somewhat complex figure near the end, when in reality he was a kind of cartoon villain. I was most amazed to realize that I had misremembered how he killed Mike. I thought it was an accident! The fact that I got something so basic wrong indicates either that I was twisting reality in my mind at the time or I’ve done so over the last decade, probably influenced by the blaze of glory through which he went out.Of course, the way Walt finally gets his revenge on the Nazis seemed ridiculous at the time, and it’s even more ridiculous in retrospect, given we were expecting that outcome and not experiencing the surprise and overwhelming awe one feels when seeing it for the first time. We also reflect on the famous jailhouse murders. I present to Chris my theory of how the Nazis seem to show a remarkable number of virtues in a way that other criminals don’t. His interpretation of the series holds that individuals are often brought down by their fatal flaws. For Hank in particular, it might have been his toxic masculinity. But for the Nazis it was actually their compassion and sense of honor that did it! What were the writers trying to tell us?Perhaps the most interesting part of our discussion is when Chris convinces me that Walt went back in the end to rescue Jesse from the Nazis. I actually hadn’t considered this, either during the original watch or this time around.I realize that this is now the twelfth conversation I’ve released on Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. See below for the previous discussions, which are listed in chronological order, just above the video and transcript. There’s been a lot to explore in this universe, and I hope others have enjoyed this journey with us. I’m open to suggestions regarding what to watch next. The Breaking Bad UniverseBetter Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesNietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and SaulBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc AndreessenRewatching Breaking Bad, S1 and S2Rewatching Breaking Bad, S3- S4E4The transcript below is AI generated, and has not been checked for accuracy. I’ve added my own transcript because the Substack version doesn’t differentiate between speakers, which makes it seem useless to me. I hope they fix this, because it would be nicer to have actually usable transcripts integrated into another tab. But if you want to use the Substack version for whatever reason, you can.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me on the podcast to talk about what it takes to become a writer, “public intellectual,” or however one wants to describe what we do. This conversation can serve as a guide for those who might try to follow a similar path. But even if you’re not going to be writing for a living, I think there’s still a lot you can get out of our talk, as it served as an opportunity for us to take a step back and reflect on our previous work — and really our lives — up to this point. When we got to the topic of each of our writing processes, I came to realize that we have deep differences regarding how we get motivated, and our approach to life more generally. Rob says don’t romanticize the process, while my philosophy is that romanticizing everything is the key to joy and meaning. Writing is something he occasionally has to force himself to do, while I hate taking breaks and vacations, and wish family life didn’t pull me away from working even more. Rob of course is the psychologically normal one here, and which of us you decide to take advice from is going to depend on how exactly your mind works. Ironically, in the midst of our discussion about how we get ideas, I realized that I needed to at some point write an article on my romanticize everything philosophy. This is something I have thought about before but it’s been a while since I’ve reflected on it. Other topics we cover include:* How we describe our jobs to other people* What it was like having one foot out the door of academia* How we both sort of stumbled into our current positions* The odds of actually making money at this* How to build an audience* The ways in which we use X* Internet fame as a way for single young men to find girlfriends* Avoiding audience capture* Why we were both lucky to start our newsletters around the time that we did, rather than a few years later* Dealing with book publishers and the prestige media* Why journalists, academics, and independent writers all tend to share similar characteristics* The ways in which various writers like Razib Khan, Scott Alexander, Freddie deBoer, and others have been able to make it on their own, and how their different backgrounds have contributed to their successThis ended up being one of the most inspiring conversations I’ve had in a while. It was fascinating to hear Rob’s story and invigorating to reflect on my own, and I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude when considering just how much serendipity was needed for both of us to end up where we are.Below, you can watch the video of our discussion or read the transcript, lightly edited for clarity.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comRob joins me to talk about our experiences growing up poor, or poorish, with a focus on what race relations were like. For some context, I’m 38 and spent my childhood in one of the less nice suburbs of Chicago, while he’s 34 and was raised in rural California. Both of us mostly hung out around people who didn’t end up going to college and had prole habits, ideas, and interests. My family had some money but like many immigrants they didn’t spend it on moving to a nice school district, so I grew up with the lower-class American experience. We discuss racial tensions in our schools, whether kids we grew up with were just uncomfortable with gay people or actively hated them, dating across color lines, and much more.Over the years I’ve come to realize that everybody is in something of a bubble. When I was growing up among the proles, I had a lot of misconceptions about what those at different socioeconomic levels were like, and more educated Americans are just as clueless about those at the middle or bottom. Rob and I came of age at about the same time, in communities that were majority white and non-college educated. Nonetheless, there was a lot more anti-blackness and anti-gayness where I lived, while these attitudes appear to have been less prevalent in Red Bluff. Maybe this is a California thing, as regional differences seem to matter a lot. Our divergent experiences reflect only a slight portion of the variation that exists across the United States, as neither of us has spent time in say Appalachia or the Deep South. We tell stories about the gay kid that Rob knew who was once the only one with the courage to say the “n word,” the Muslim girl at my school who one day took off her hijab and caused the boys to lose their minds, the Christian Arab girl whose family swore to kill her if she ever slept with a boy, and Rob’s only experience with the trans movement. The first of these causes us to reflect on the 1990s and 2000s as the era of a more masculine liberalism, which joyously mocked those who felt harmed by words, whether incantations to Satan or racial slurs. Near the end, we get to wiggers versus cowboys, and how Trump has shifted the ways in which the people we grew up with see the political world. This conversation motivated me to look into what happened to the town I grew up in. It went from 1% black and 5% Hispanic in 2000, to now about 7% black and 22% Hispanic. Over 5% of households speak Arabic at home, and another 15% Spanish. I was recently back and saw signs and billboards in Arabic for the first time, and a sushi restaurant, which would’ve been a very strange sight when I was a kid. There’s something truly beautiful about demographic transitions, where those willing to reproduce and take the necessary steps to better their lives by crossing a border inherit the earth. Life is about movement. Whenever you find yourself on the opposite side of the youth, you must reconsider. Those who mourn certain aspects of the past can’t push a rewind button, but must use contemporary ideas, technologies, and institutions to try and build something new. You can watch the video or read the transcript below. Note that the transcript is AI generated and has not been checked for accuracy.

Chris joins me to go over Breaking Bad, Season 3, and the first few episodes of Season 4. I had gotten to Episode 4 of Season 4, while he had only gotten to Episode 2 of that season, so there was some confusion on this point, for which we apologize. You can listen here or on your podcast app, or watch the video below. There are spoilers in the episode and the rest of these notes. Once again, I’m blown away by how little I remembered from originally watching the show. Often, it’s the emotional coloring of a storyline that stays with me, while plot details are completely lost. But those details are very important for understanding a story, shedding light on the personalities and motivations of the characters. So I remembered Walter falling out with Gus, because I can still feel how miserable his life became under constant surveillance, but not how that happened. Hank’s injury was something that had completely dropped from my mind. I had remembered him as the guy at the beginning of the series and at the end, but forgot all of the development in between. The character who is really making an impression on me on this rewatch is Marie. She had always been something of a joke in my mind, but here you see that she is actually quite sympathetic, particularly in how she takes care of Hank after his injury and doesn’t get discouraged regardless of how bad he treats her. On the main storyline, I’m taken aback by how much Jesse really screws Walt. There were a few times when Walt was in a position to simply continue making money and being on good terms with Gus, but Jesse ruins things with his emotional instability, drug addiction, and irrational pride. We discuss why Walter continues saving him, and come to the conclusion that he just cared about Jesse, making Breaking Bad in its essence a true love story. On this point, see Mike’s Half Measures speech.One thing we thought was interesting was that Gail Betteker may have been the only character in the entire Breaking Bad universe to ever express a political ideology. We discuss the significance of this, and the role he played in Walt’s larger story.Here’s the video of our discussion. For previous conversations on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, see the links below. All the discussions are between me and Chris, except where Marc Andreessen joins us, as noted. They are listed in chronological order.The Breaking Bad UniverseBetter Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesNietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and SaulBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc AndreessenRewatching Breaking Bad, S1 and S2 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob joins me to talk about the last season of The Leftovers. For previous discussions, see here and here.We’ve changed the name of our show to The H&H Podcast. I had come to dislike the previous “dissident” kind of theme, which doesn’t really reflect the way I see the world anymore, nor is it much related to what the show actually is. We have basically been over most of the topics discussed in this episode (spoilers in the rest of the description). The show seemed like it was on the road to not offering us closure, and we didn’t get any. I think it could’ve ended after Season 2 and nothing would have been lost. The major question at the end of Season 3 is whether Nora is telling the truth, and we debate the two sides of the issue. Rob convinces me that she was lying, which makes the whole thing even sadder.The conversation naturally branches off into other topics, including whether this is a smart show or for dumb people, what that actually means, how women sexually assaulting men is portrayed in fiction versus the opposite, whether the inability of people to move on in the show is realistic, and much more. At the end we foreshadow a future discussion we hope to have on the new Napoleon movie. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob joins me for a discussion of The Leftovers, up to the end of Season 3, Episode 3. If you’re following along, there will be spoilers based on how far we have gone, as there will be in the rest of these show notes. See here for Season 1. We both think Season 2 was quite compelling, but the show has really declined as time has gone on. There’s a tension in that this is clearly a world where the supernatural exists, but a recurring theme is that people keep trying to find patterns in random events. Which is it? It seems to be a world of miracles but without larger purpose. We also again go into this show being a kind of throwback to an earlier era. Things that seem to mostly not exist in this universe include Hispanics, gay people, Asians who aren’t girls in some black guy’s sex cult, political partisanship, non-Christian religions, geopolitical competition, and racial politics, or even racism. My main complaint is that there hasn’t been much progression towards some kind of explanation regarding the central mystery of the show, nor many of the small ones for that matter. Rob agrees, but seems much less bothered by this. He informs me that there are only five episodes left, so we’ll see if we get to any sort of satisfying conclusion. It’s hard to see it, but I may be surprised. The show started out with a lot of promise and provoked some interesting questions, but now it’s repetitive, stagnant, and in a sense pointless. My interest in checking out the last few episodes is largely based on a belief that there’s no way it can go on like this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson joins me to discuss Season 1 of The Leftovers, an HBO series that ran for three seasons between 2014-2017. Our conversation revolves around two main themes. First, whether this is a Christian show, or maybe as Christian a show as you can expect from HBO. We discuss subtle pro-life propaganda, and how it portrays family life. Second, we connect the plot of The Leftovers to what happened in the aftermath of covid-19. Like in the pandemic, in this show a substantial part of the population is no longer with us, and we talk about the similarities and differences between this fictional universe and actual events. It’s an interesting question what would happen if 2% of the population just vanished. I frankly don’t know how society would behave. It seems plausible to me that we’d see something like what happens in this show, where people have a day of remembrance for their missing “heroes” and otherwise go on with their lives. Or I could imagine mass panic and political and social instability. This is what makes the show interesting. Other topics include:* The portrayal of small town America* Racial tropes used in the construction of the Holy Wayne character* The Lolita storyline, and how it has disappeared from popular culture* Age gaps between men and women, the lack of them here, and how much better Kevin Garvey looks than his wifeExpect a future podcast to go through Season 3, Episode 3, and then another to finish off the series. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Chris Nicholson joins me to talk about Breaking Bad, Seasons 1 and 2, which we both recently rewatched for the first time in over a decade.The entire experience helped demonstrate to us the fallibility of memory. It’s not like this was a forgettable series. Breaking Bad was among the most memorable shows that either of us had ever seen. Yet after a decade, while we remembered major developments like certain death scenes and the ultimate fates of the main characters, many strings that tie together various aspects of the plot had been lost to both of us.Fair warning: the conversation includes spoilers about Season 1 and Season 2. We also didn’t go out of our way to avoid spoilers for later seasons of Breaking Bad or the entirety of Better Call Saul, although, as it turned out, we didn’t reveal many of them. If you haven’t seen Saul yet, you can listen to this conversation and rest pretty easy knowing that there aren’t any major spoilers. Even if you’ve only seen Season 1 and Season 2 of Breaking Bad but not Seasons 3-5, I don’t think there are many points in the discussion where we explicitly mention what happened in later episodes, so you may be able to enjoy this podcast without having the rest of the series ruined. What struck me most about Season 1 is how we can understand Walt as a conscientious objector to therapy culture. I had forgotten his initial decision not to proceed with cancer treatment. He wanted to simply die and be done with it, and his greatest fears involved being pitied or taken care of by others. And, in light of all that subsequently happened, could it not be argued that he was correct all along? Think about all the lives that could’ve been saved if they had left the man alone!In my view, Walt shows himself to be something of a misanthrope, at least if we understand his character from a more feminine perspective. He only seems truly happy when focusing on some technical or scientific issue — installing a new water tank, cooking meth, building a new battery from scratch, etc. It’s in these moments alone that he’s able to bond with other people, either over a shared interest or by being able to explain to them some aspect of how the world works. An extreme version of the object-focused male mind, in contrast to people-focused female traits. Throughout the series we see the recurring themes of childlike wonder and the love of science that are commonly associated in our culture with figures like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, but without the liberal preaching. Chris brings up the hostility of fans towards Skyler, and he’s correct it doesn’t make sense from the perspective of Christian morality. But from another view, she’s doing her best to impose her female instincts onto him: try to live as long as possible, don’t worry about being a burden on others or depending on their charity, don’t cook meth if it’s against the law. This can easily be seen as a story of toxic masculinity. The protagonist would rather burn the world down than sacrifice his pride. That’s what our heads say, but the fan reaction to Skyler and sympathy for Walt show that the heart feels differently. At first glance, it’s Hank who represents toxic masculinity, but scratch beneath the surface and, as Ross Douthat pointed out, he’s the hero of the show. It’s the same thing that we see in Better Call Saul, where the more likable characters aren’t necessarily the most morally upstanding. Chris pointed out some things that I hadn’t noticed about Hank, namely how he went out of his way to keep the peace by clamping down on the perception that he was unmanning Walt. In this context, we discuss all the intricacies of the scene where Walt forces his son to keep drinking by the pool. Another part of our conversation focuses on the relationship between Walt and Jesse. Chris presents the theory that Walt keeps his protege around because he likes teaching him, and they have a kind of father-son relationship. I think that’s right, and we reflect on the younger man’s fundamental decency. I tend more towards the view that this is something of an abusive relationship, in that Jesse keeps wanting to get out of the game while Walt drags him back in.One thing that became clearer to me on the rewatch was how it could be plausible that Walt would go from being this passive high school teacher to a drug kingpin practically overnight. I recall a flashback to the Gray Matter days, where he seems like a different man. Instead of Walt being a square his whole life and then suddenly transforming into Heisenberg, it might be that his previous experiences with Gretchen and Elliot crushed him, and getting cancer simply brought out the more risk acceptant and masculine traits that had been suppressed by years of disappointment. Other topics touched on include whether Walt resents his son, the romance between Jesse and Jane, Jane’s father as another one of those stand-ins for decent normies everywhere, and the extent to which the Saul Goodman we see in the show is recognizable from the end of Better Call Saul. The conversation goes to almost two hours, so we cover a lot of ground. From now on, we’ll be doing one episode for each of the final three seasons. For previous conversations on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, see the links below. All the discussions are between me and Chris, except where Marc Andreessen joins us, as noted. They are listed in chronological order.The Breaking Bad UniverseBetter Call Saul: S6E7, Plan and ExecutionBetter Call Saul: S6E8, Point and ShootBetter Call Saul: S6E9, Fun and GamesNietzschean or Christian? Marc Andreessen on Breaking Bad and SaulBetter Call Saul: S6E10, NippyBetter Call Saul: S6E11, Breaking BadBetter Call Saul: S6E12, WaterworksBetter Call Saul finale with Chris and Marc Andreessen This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

I first heard of the movie Blackboard Jungle while reading Derek Thompson’s Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. The film is most remembered today for opening with the song Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets, which set off the rock and roll revolution and everything that came after it. Blackboard Jungle is a story mostly told through the perspective of an inner-city teacher named Richard Dadier, and serves as a way to showcase what at the time was considered urban dysfunction among teenage boys. Here’s how Thompson describes the significance of the film and its opening track.“The breakout success of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had everything to do with its placement at the beginning of the film Blackboard Jungle,” said Jim Dawson, author of Rock Around the Clock: The Record That Started the Rock Revolution. The reaction to Blackboard Jungle was something like hysteria — not just among teenagers, but also among their parents and politicians. Kids danced in the aisles of movie theaters and blasted the song from their cars. On May 17 1955, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Princeton University dorms held a competition to play the song as loudly as possible from their rooms. Around midnight, the students emptied into the quads, set fires to trashcans, and chanted up and down the streets. Meanwhile, several major American cities censored the film. The mayor of Memphis forbade teenagers to see it, while Atlanta tried to ban the movie after an alderman’s wife said it threatened the “peace, health, morals, and good order of this city.”Just as l’affaire Caillebotte consecrated impressionism through scandal in the 1890s, Blackboard Jungle’s notoriety promoted its opening track, unleashing the rock-and-roll genre. On July 2, 1955, three months after Blackboard Jungle debuted, “Rock Around the Clock” became the top-selling single in the country and the first song called “rock ’n’ roll” to reach number one on the Billboard charts, ultimately selling more physical copies than any song by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Madonna, or Michael Jackson.One of the laws of chaos is that a microscopic change in the present trajectory can lead to wildly different future outcomes; the Brazilian butterfly shakes her wings, and a Pacific typhoon forms off the coast of Indonesia. The most popular melodies of 1954 and 1955 were dulcet waltzes next to the high-tempo hits of the later 1950s. Billboard’s number one songs before and after “Rock Around the Clock” were the schmaltzy “Unchained Melody” and the minstrel ballad “Yellow Rose of Texas,” which sounds like it could have been written in the 1850s.Could what’s implied here possibly be true? That one song placed at the start of one film changed everything about music and ultimately led to a seismic shift in American culture, with implications for everything from education and crime to family formation? The possibility boggles the mind, but I can’t totally dismiss the idea. One thing I knew for sure after reading the passage above was that I needed to see this movie.After tackling some deep questions about the causes of historical events and how contingent they might be, Rob and I focus on how race and gender issues are portrayed in the movie. On race, the film seems practically modern. Some themes and tropes that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1990s or 2000s include: the middle-class professional being horrified at being accused of racism; the black kid having a good heart while only the white kid can be portrayed as pure evil; and the way that racial differences are downplayed in a social context. This last point is particularly striking, as a group of lower-class white boys has no racial consciousness at all, and for all practical purposes the young men treat their black and Hispanic classmates like they do anyone else. When it comes to relations between the sexes, however, one sees the 1950s as a completely different universe. It is considered completely normal for the main female character to care primarily about her looks and keeping her husband happy. Overall, we see a great deal of stagnation in American culture on race, alongside radical changes in how men and women relate to one another. While the movie’s portrayal of male-female relations lines up with popular propaganda about the 1950s, I found myself shocked at the difference between how that decade is commonly described and what was shown in this film. Surely, movies don’t perfectly reflect reality, but the fact that this particular representation of race relations was plausible to an audience of that time is surely worth noting. This experience has made both of us to want to watch other old films in order to have a more direct understanding of the cultures of past eras. Very little can be simply taken for granted.Listen here or watch on YouTube. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

I’ve posted a two part review of Barbie on Twitter, and a review of Oppenheimer. As I explain in the Oppenheimer review, it feels wrong to pair them, given the transcendent importance of that film and the silliness of its “rival.”That being said, Rob and I have been thinking about both, and we’re here to entertain you, so we’re discussing them together. My Oppenheimer review nonetheless makes it clear that if you’re going to see one film, it should be that one. Here’s an excerpt.I was not excited learning that Oppenheimer was going to be three hours long. No matter what the subject, that’s a long time to be sitting in the theater. I also wondered how Christopher Nolan could do the subject justice on the big screen. The scale and importance of World War II boggles the mind. A nearly endless list of larger than life figures. In the realm of politics, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Mussolini. Clashes of great ideologies. At the same time, you had some of the most influential figures in the history of physics working together as part of the war effort on a weapon that would change geopolitics forever. Despite all this, Nolan meets the challenge. Brilliant use of light, sound, explosions, as cut-in scenes, both to literally simulate the effect of the atomic bomb and as metaphors to reflect Oppenheimer’s tortured psychology. The film needs to be seen on the big screen to get the full experience. The characters are deep and compelling. There were many ways that the discussions about scientific concepts could’ve gone wrong, either too technical to show off the producer’s brilliance or too dumbed down to the point where it’s annoying. The script struck the right balance. The film remains exciting throughout the three hours. Given the brilliance of the end result, it was only fitting that WWII and the atomic bomb received a treatment that was long enough to feel commensurate with the importance of the subject.As for messaging, the commentary I’ve seen assumes that Nolan is trying to make Oppenheimer into a sympathetic character, a victim of McCarthyism, and give the message that communist espionage was no big deal. I have no idea what film these people saw. As the viewer finds out, Soviet espionage was real, and all of those who worried about spying in the Manhattan Project were obviously correct! From the perspective of the omniscient viewer, we know that Oppenheimer was not a spy (although in real life who knows), but he’s constantly showing bad judgment, by sleeping with women who are either his friends’ wives or communists, and giving up his infant son to his communist friends because he and his wife were sick of the baby’s crying. The hero of the film is midcentury American society. The system works. It makes use of Oppenheimer's talents to win WWII, and then discards him, after a fair hearing, when he becomes an annoying primadonna after the war, as he seeks policy influence that his ego and awful judgment make him clearly unqualified for. The film makes you think it's going in the direction of a standard Hollywood sob story about McCarthyism. But those deciding on Oppenheimer's security clearance actually use good investigative procedures to get to the truth, and know that he's a loyal American. They tell him that, but also that he can't be trusted because he has awful judgment. And how can anyone think they're wrong?..I was tempted to talk a bit about Barbie, but it feels silly to spend too much time on it, just because they happened to be released on the same day. History will always remember WWII and the creation of the atom bomb, as it will Chris Nolan for giving us Oppenheimer.Do read the whole review. It’s up to over 200K views as of this writing, although that’s behind my review of Barbie, at over 500K, reflecting the relative success of each film at the box office.Upon reviewing Barbie, some rando academic responded that I was just doing the conservative thing of trying to find something to be mad at. My response was au contraire, I actually wanted to distinguish myself from conservative influencers who tend to have more predictable cultural takes. Before seeing the movie, people had shared with me this thumbnail, which struck me as ridiculous.A few years ago, someone made a movie about Blue State elites hunting Red Staters, and right wingers got it cancelled based on the theory that it was attacking them, when they were actually supposed to be the good guys. So conservatives are often not the most sophisticated art critics. It’s also worth mentioning that this movie was heavily promoted and became a cultural phenomenon even before its release, and I liked the idea of moving back towards a country where blockbuster films serve as Schelling Points for the larger culture. Barbie being good would’ve let me both differentiate myself from less sophisticated conservatives, and also appreciate a work of art that could represent a healthy trend, away from endless remakes of movies and back towards widely successful original storytelling. But intellectual honesty compels me to tell the truth. Ben Shapiro was right. This movie was awful, both in terms of politics and of character and plot development. The trailer, which had given me hope, turned out to be a bait and switch on the audience. Shapiro’s review is in parts goofy, like when he complains about masturbation jokes, but most of his critiques are completely correct.But that doesn’t mean we should despair at the kind of unsophisticated drivel that achieves commercial success in modern America. Men can still do great things, and Nolan’s body of work is one of the clearest examples we have of that. There are inspiring stories out there for those inclined to look.Listen here or watch on YouTube. Links:* Hanania review of Oppenheimer* Hanania review of Barbie, Part I and Part II* Helen Andrews’ strange interpretation of Barbie* Ben Shapiro review* American Prometheus* Michelle Goldberg on the meaning of Barbie and Taylor Swift, and my reaction to Goldberg* Michael Tracey on the Barbie marketing campaign This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson joins me to discuss Season 1 of Yellowstone. I had only heard about the show when I saw a controversy blow up on Twitter where Matt Walsh was attacking boomers for liking it while denouncing the series as woke propaganda.Rob uses a phrase that I love to describe the series: “profoundly unsophisticated.” Every character tells you exactly what they’re thinking or what they’re planning at each moment. You get wild coincidences and strange chance encounters that add shootouts, horse chases, and action scenes to the show without having much basis in the plot. The politics are just as unsophisticated as the plot and character development, being based in a primitive kind of NIMBY fundamentalism and anti-rich animus, with a progressive but not exactly woke worldview on social issues.All of that being said, Rob and I are going to keep watching. As smart guys, we like sophisticated shows, but it can also be fun to turn your brain off for an hour and enjoy shootouts and the Montana landscape. And, I suspect, deep down, we feel joy at the thought of continuing to snigger at boomers and what they consider sophisticated entertainment as we imagine observing a show like this through their eyes. Ok, maybe not Rob, but that’s definitely what’s going to keep me watching. We laughed a lot during this one. I think you’ll enjoy it, even if you haven’t seen the show. Listen here or watch on YouTube. Note that on YouTube, the Narrative Control podcasts are no longer on the CSPI channel. You can keep up with new episodes at the Richard Hanania channel, which has everything connected to this newsletter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob joins me to wrap up Succession (spoilers below).We both sort of predicted Tom’s triumph, as did many other people. The ultimate lapdog ends up with the company, his marriage, and a pregnant wife. I bring up how Tom’s career and personal life remind me of the male cuttlefish that disguises itself as a female, and therefore non-threatening, in order to find mating opportunities. There’s an equivalent in humans among beta males, and in this case the strategy worked for Tom. While I had been expecting a feminist ending, we actually got the opposite. Shiv has lived her life in the shadow of one man, and went and married a guy who she thought she could walk all over, but he now has the upper hand in the relationship. I say that this is in part because she’s now pregnant, but Rob argues that it’s actually Tom who may be trapped by the baby. There’s a lot here about gender dynamics and how pregnancy influences the balance of power between the sexes. I was so glad to see that we finally got an answer on Kendall’s kids. As you may remember from previous discussions, this has been a constant obsession of mine, and the truth came out in the most satisfying way possible. Rob and I wonder the extent to which the Roy children were the authors of their own misery. People like to blame parents for how kids turn out, due to a bias toward blank slatism, but in the end Logan was right that they weren’t serious people, and one can’t just assume he made them that way. My suspicion is that he would’ve liked to find a suitable heir, but he simply didn’t have one. Rob puts forth the possibility that perhaps, as Bryan Cox said, Logan’s problem was that he loved his kids too much.We close by discussing Succession’s legacy and how it compares to other classic shows. To me, it’s really hard to do something this timely this well, and I suspect people will be watching this show generations from now for insights into our crazy political era — everything from violence in the streets, to disputed elections, right-wing populism, and what social media and the 24-hour news cycle have done to our brains.You can listen to the show here, or watch on YouTube.LinksRob’s Substack essay on the finaleMe and Rob on Succession: S1-S3, S4:E1, S4: Ep 2-4, and S4: Ep 5-9On cuttlefishInterview with Bryan Cox This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob joins me to talk about Succession, through the penultimate episode of the series.There are spoilers below, and throughout our conversation.We discuss Ross Douthat’s recent piece on the series, and where I agree and disagree with him. We almost have inverse views on the lessons of the show, where Douthat says public opinion has been written out of it, while I think that the trend has been for mass sentiment and larger forces to intrude more on the personal struggles of the Roy family. Perhaps the point is that elites are in control as long as they’re strong and competent, like Logan clearly was, but not when they’re weak and divided, as are his children?In the end, I think Shiv taking over makes the most sense. She was always brushed aside by her father due to his sexism, and it would be appropriate for the show to end with the triumph of the girlboss, while she’s pregnant and with the entirety of her womanhood on display, no less. Rob and I also discuss the possibility of Tom ending up running the empire with Shiv as the power behind the throne. We’re both fascinated by the Jeryd Mencken character. Rob and I agree that a guy like that couldn’t be a plausible presidential candidate in real life. We spend a lot of time talking about what branch of the “dissident right” he represents. Is he supposed to be a Catholic traditionalist, a Nietzschean, a white nationalist, or some combination thereof? This leads me to talk about my idea of there being deep and overlooked contradictions within the American far right. Speaking of Nietzsche, we both loved Kendall’s speech, which was an unapologetic defense of the man of action. While the two big eulogies were framed as giving “both sides” regarding the life of Logan, they can be seen as giving both sides of a debate that goes to fundamental questions of our political divide. How should we understand the past? Do we dwell on its flaws, and those of individuals and institutions that build great things, or do we celebrate what humanity has been able to accomplish despite the costs?Listen here, or watch us on YouTube. LinksMe and Rob on Succession: S1-S3, S4:E1, and S4: Ep 2-4Marc Andreessen on the Breaking Bad universe, the end of Better Call Saul (with Chris Nicholson), and The Shield (with Rob)Douthat on SuccessionMe on The Biomechanics of Trumpism This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

****NOTE: SPOILERS BELOW****Rob Henderson joins me once again to talk about Succession, S4: Ep 2-4.Of course, our conversation revolves around the shocking death of Logan. I really appreciated how the episode gave us a realistic perspective on what happens when someone dies. It’s not always dramatic, or foreshadowed all that much. We usually don’t get to see the moment they grab their chest and keel over or hear their final words. Rather, we learn about the event from people who happened to be around the individual the moment they passed away. Others end up unsure of what really happened or what tricks of memory might have distorted their perceptions. Succession could have given us a glimpse into what Logan’s final moments actually looked and sounded like, as most shows do in a situation like this. But we are not owed it. So much of the event is wrapped in mystery. Was he really fishing his phone out of the toilet when it happened? What was his mood like just before he died? Did he listen to Roman’s final voicemail? And of course, did he want Kendall to be his successor, or not? We’ll probably never know the answer to most of these questions, and I’m fine with that.Another big piece of news is Shiv’s pregnancy. Rob and I do the math and calculate whether Tom is likely to be the father. According to this, it probably works out. We speculate on how interesting it would be if Shiv went and got knocked up by another guy immediately after they broke up, given how badly Tom wanted to have kids. Shiv seemed like she was never taken seriously as Logan’s successor, and Rob and I wonder if her fate is to remain in the shadows of her brothers or eventually find a way to triumph, pregnant and all. I previously predicted that politics might start intruding more on the universe of the main characters, given that we were told in S4:Ep 1 that the election was weeks away. The last episode supports this view, as Republican presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken arrives at Logan’s old apartment to pay his respects. Will the passing of Logan, an icon of American life, be seen as the watershed that ushered in a new, more dangerous era? Rob and I note how overwhelmingly white the decisionmakers are in this show. I know they get away with it in part because the main characters are supposed to be conservatives and therefore bad people, but still, it’s quite striking and an unusual artistic choice. A bunch of white people in a room making big decisions is still a very normal thing in real life, but not on TV. I find that artificial diversity is often a distraction, as I imagine producers always navigating their way through a minefield or trying to make an ideological point. Here, you can simply sit back and enjoy the characters and situations for what they are. I don’t necessarily want artificial homogeneity in art either, but artificial diversity is the norm and it unquestionably subtracts from most shows and movies. Succession should be given credit for accurately representing what an elite conservative institution actually looks like.Then again, what is up with Kendall’s daughter? How is she so much darker than her parents and why am I apparently the only person in the world who has noticed this? Please share your thoughts. The best Rob and I can come up with is that the show will end with Stewie having cucked everyone. This is our White Lotus conversation all over again. For context surrounding our discussion about whether one’s sexual perversions can be separated from a person’s regular life, see here and here. We close by reflecting on why we dislike Kendall, while perhaps having a bit more sympathy for Roman.Listen to the episode here, or watch on YouTube.Links:Me and Rob on the first three seasons of SuccessionMe and Rob on Season 4, Episode 1Michelle Goldberg on Succession (New York Times) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob joins me to discuss Succession, Season 4: Episode 1.Click here for our previous conversation about the first three seasons of the show. One thing I like about the show is how it straddles differences in class, aesthetics, and politics. The producers are really walking a tightrope, and it’s very easy to make a show like this too preachy and on-the-nose, or what the kids call “cringe.” The series fails in a few places, but overall it does a good job of navigating what are clearly some very treacherous waters. Topics we discuss include* Greg as the “everyman” and the corruption of his character* How business leaders interact with more ideological actors, and the masses* Conservative and liberal differences, following up on our previous conversation* Logan Roy’s synthesis of nostalgia politics and Nietzsche* Whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to watch the showI explain my prediction that, by the end of the series, reality will intrude upon the Roy family and ATN in ways that it hadn’t before. Up until now, it has been mainly a show about characters, with social commentary thrown in, but the latter will become more prominent as the series reaches its end. Another possibility is that we get a complete victory for Logan, in a result that would bring joy to Marc Andreessen’s heart. Listen here, or watch the video on YouTube.LinksMe and Rob on Succession, Seasons 1-3Marc Andreessen on the role of the Nietzschean superman in art, in discussions of The Shield, the Breaking Bad universe, Better Call Saul, and DeadwoodRichard Hanania, “Why is Everything Liberal?” and “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV”Sophie Gilbert, “The Real Succession Endgame” (The Atlantic) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson and Marc Andreessen join me to discuss the Deadwood: The Movie (2019), along with our thoughts about the series more generally. We converge on the idea that the main protagonists of the show, that is, Swearengen, Bullock, and Hearst, represent three eras of civilization, with each of the first two leading to the next one. Marc sees the Hearst character, who apparently has little in common with his real-life namesake, as the hero of this universe. My view leans more towards the idea that he should be the hero, but the show and the movie reflect the liberalism of their respective eras.Hear why Marc calls Deadwood “the closest thing we have to modern Shakespeare.” Also, what he learned about the Gilded Age from taking a walk around Stanford campus.By contrasting the politics of the movie and the show, we get a time capsule of the priorities of liberalism in the mid-2000s relative to a decade later. I present my theory about each of the Cars movies similarly being representative of a particular era in art and entertainment. It’s truly fascinating how the hivemind works, with individual artists and producers fully believing that they’re making original work while they all rely on the same motifs and moral themes of their contemporaries. Rob points out that just by watching the Deadwood series or the movie, you could guess the time around which each was made. Another theme of our discussion is how Deadwood presents a less romantic version of reality than what we are used to seeing. Echoing one of my previous conversations with Rob, Marc is particularly struck by the use of mud. I point out that the real life story of Swearengen’s Gem Theater was much more brutal to the women than how things were portrayed. Moreover, characters still had their teeth, and besides the mud getting at the bottom of their clothes, they often looked otherwise impeccable. That being said, some of the medical scenes in the series were absolutely brutal, and if it’s true that we can only take so much reality, then Deadwood pushes us to near our limit. Before this conversation, I did a good bit of reading on the real life characters behind the show, and I discuss what I found throughout the discussion. See the links for more information. Note that throughout this conversation we refer to the movie as having come out in 2018. It was actually 2019. We regret the error. Listen to the podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.LinksMe on the Cars moviesJerry L. Bryant and Barbara Fifer, Deadwood’s Al Swearingen (sic): Manifest Evil in the Gem TheaterMatthew Bernstein, George Hearst: Silver King of the Gilded AgeRon Soodatler, “Who Was the Real George Hearst?”Legends of America, “Al Swearengen & the Notorious Gem Theater”David K. Whitlock, “HBO’s Deadwood — The Facts and the Fiction.”Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 1 through Season 2, Episode 2Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 2Me and Rob on Deadwood, Season 3 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson joins me to talk about Season 3 of Deadwood. Rob and I decided to not do any research on the real life story of Deadwood or the making of the series until we finished all three seasons and the movie. So here we debate whether the Season 3 finale was meant to be the end, or there were loose threads that were meant to be picked up in Season 4. I bring up the question of whether we should care about the survival of the town of Deadwood from the outside looking in. Objectively speaking, it’s a place that is controlled by criminal elements, filled with drunk men who brawl with and shoot at each other, and where family life barely exists. Nonetheless, the viewer does care about the survival of Deadwood against outside forces, for fundamentally conservative reasons. We sympathize with the residents because we’ve come to know them. Once again, the theme of the show this season reflects mid-2000s liberalism. Degrees of racism or sexism aren’t what separate the good characters from the bad ones. Rather, the message is that too much concentrated capital is the enemy, reflecting normie Hollywood values of the time.The series does an excellent job of showing complex, flawed individuals. Unlike most period pieces we might see today, the characters are unapologetically products of their time, and their shortcoming are taken on their own terms, not used to lecture the modern viewer. The fact that Deadwood ended after just three seasons makes me already look back on the show like I would a friend who was taken before his time.Listen here or watch the video on YouTube.LinksMe and Rob on Deadwood, Season 1 and Season 2: E1 & E2 and Season 2 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob is back to talk about Deadwood, this time through the end of Season 2.We discuss Al’s development, comparing it to that of Tolliver. We also spend a strange amount of time on whether white actors can still say the N-Word, a debate that we do not settle here.Rob and I also discuss the show evolving from one about personalities to a political thriller. One thing we both love about Deadwood is how it avoids sugarcoating life in an earlier era. Rob mentions that the women get their dresses dirty while walking about, something I hadn’t noticed before. The scenes of illness, death, and even Al pissing in his chamberpot serve as reminders of the hard realities of existence before modern amenities. We talk about ways that the show might even go further, and what we are looking forward to seeing in the final season and movie.See our previous conversation here. Listen to our latest discussion here, or watch it on YouTube. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob Henderson joins me to talk about Deadwood. Our conversation covers all of Season 1, and Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2.I enjoyed discussing what makes Al Swearengen an anti-hero and whether he or Bullock is the main character of the show. The golden age of TV was really the golden age of anti-heroes, each show centering around a charismatic figure, and both Rob and I agree that Deadwood is among the best from the era that we’ve seen. Having recently read Henrich and interviewed him on the CSPI podcast, I’ve been conceiving of the Old West, despite its reputation for chaos and dysfunction, as demonstrating how deeply embedded WEIRD morality was in nineteenth century America. Here were communities coming together and forming under what were basically anarchic conditions, often threatened by Indians. Nonetheless, out of nothing, and with no laws to rely on, Americans of the Old West built houses, communities, churches, saloons, and much else of what we consider hallmarks of a modern society. They created rudimentary political institutions that were relatively well-functioning and non-exploitative, before being incorporated into the US. This isn’t something that should be taken for granted. Rob points out something I’d missed, which is that thus far the pimps in the show are arguably monogamous, or monogam-ish. I push back a little bit on the point, but if Rob is right, it fits into WEIRD morality, although maybe we’re reading too much into this, even if it’s true. One of the things that makes this show unique is its willingness to portray its main characters committing violence against women. Even anti-heroes like Tony Soprano and Don Draper tend not to do that. But Deadwood doesn’t flinch from showing what relations between the sexes were like in the distant past. Other topics we discuss include:* How the show addresses race, and why racist characters always tend to be the dumb ones.* The show’s portrayal of euthanasia, and how it backs up what I said in my article on people’s moral intuitions regarding when to end human suffering. * Mancur Olson’s idea of the Stationary Bandit and how it explains the behavior of characters in the show.* The attitude taken towards religion and its relationship with science as a Bush-era relic.You can listen here or watch the video on YouTube. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

This Christmas Eve, I’m giving my readers the gift of a very special podcast. Marc Andreessen and Rob Henderson join me to talk about The Shield, which ran on FX from 2002 to 2008. We debate whether we are supposed to root for the Strike Team or not, with Rob saying no, and Marc and me strongly disagreeing. Building on our discussions on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Marc gives his Nietzschean interpretation of the show. To me, this was the most right-wing show I’ve ever seen. The lesson is basically that white cops who actually care about what happens on the streets are the only thing maintaining order, which they are able to do as long as they are not stopped by affirmative action, criminal defense lawyers, or the weakness and inertia of government. While the Strike Team does bad things, their actions are, for most of the series at least, directed towards protecting the innocent and ultimately the greater good. Sam Bankman-Fried would approve.Marc discusses the show in the context of the history of policing in Los Angeles, and posits that places go through cycles in which crime increases, and there is then a demand for someone to keep order. I point out that some civil liberties that many Americans think are a deep part of our heritage were actually invented by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, including criminals having the right to a court-appointed attorney and being read their Miranda rights. I see The Shield as critiquing the pro-criminal jurisprudence of the Warren Court, and making clear its practical consequences. A lesson seems to be that the reason crime hasn’t been even worse is that certain cops are willing to disobey the letter and spirit of the law, at great personal risk, for the sake of protecting their community.People have said the show is based on the Ramparts scandal. Having read the New Yorker piece that Marc suggests, I think that there’s no more than a superficial resemblance. Nonetheless, the article is worth reading, as it shows the interconnectedness between crime, the civil rights machines, and affirmative action in policing. The most corrupt cops were tied to gang bangers, and when one of them was killed by a fellow police officer in what is widely acknowledged to have been a justified shooting, the association of black officers demanded “an official police funeral with full honors, a ceremony reserved for policemen killed in the line of duty.” Civil rights law demanded more black cops, quotas were set, and when those hired turned out to be corrupt, that fact became the basis for civil rights lawsuits filed on behalf of criminals! There’s no part of the criminal justice system that isn’t touched by the cancer of identity politics. Part of our discussion centers around Mara. I found her arc particularly touching. We of course talk about the ending, which hit me harder than any show I can remember watching. As we all acknowledge, the Strike Team is far from morally blameless. But I still think that, as tragic as their story was or how many mistakes they made, they lived by a code, and were ultimately the defenders of a divided and ungrateful community. Listen here or watch our conversation on YouTube.LinksMe and Marc Andreessen discuss Better Call Saul and Breaking BadMe, Marc Andreessen, and Chris Nicholson on the series finale of Better Call SaulRandall Sullivan, Labyrinth: Corruption & Vice in the L.A.P.D.Peter Boyer, “Bad Cops.” (The New Yorker, May 13, 2001)LAPD Blues (Frontline Documentary)James Elroy, LA Confidential.James Elroy, White Jazz.Tim Golden, “The Cienfuegos Affair: Inside the Case that Upended the Drug War in Mexico.” (The New York Times, December 8, 2022)Rob Henderson, “Good Cop and Bad Cop Left for the Day. I’m a Different Kind of Cop.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe

Rob is back to talk about the last episode of Season 2 of The White Lotus. We agree that one of the main lessons of the series has been a general pessimism towards monogamy. The question of whether healthy and fulfilling marriages are even possible is still an open question, perhaps to be taken up in Season 3. Near the end, we agree that Cameron and Daphne are the most complex and interesting characters of this season. I analogize their personalities to that of Trump, in how they often combine extreme honesty and dishonesty in the same statement. Listen to the discussion here or watch on YouTube.LinksMe and Rob Henderson on The White Lotus, Season 1Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 1-4Me and Rob on The White Lotus, Season 2, Episodes 5-6 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.richardhanania.com/subscribe