All right, it’s about time I start sending these again. I read/watch a lot of things but haven’t been good about sharing them. So, a quick dive into several recent things I’ve been enjoying…

Can the Left Win Back the Podcast Bros?

The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz wrote a great article about Hasan Piker—the leftist Twitch streamer sometimes called “the Joe Rogan of the left.” It’s a sharp, funny, and sobering look at why so many young men have been drifting rightward in recent years—and what it might take to bring them back.

Marantz, who also wrote Antisocial, a definitive book on the alt-right’s rise online, explores how the podcast bros has perfected the audio “hang” which effectively functions as a recruitment tool. Figures like Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, and Theo Von offer a vibe more than an ideology—making their shows feel like the only place where masculinity, humor, and freedom are still on the menu. And the left? Mostly absent from that space—until Hasan Piker.

Piker is a rare counterpoint: buff, funny, deeply online, and proudly socialist. From his L.A. streaming mansion, he games, reacts, and riffs to an audience of millions. Marantz examines whether he’s an exception—or the beginning of a new kind of leftist media personality who can speak bro, but still talk labor rights.

If you’ve been wondering why your cousin in college listens to Jordan Peterson or why so many “reasonable” dudes end up in YouTube rabbit holes—this piece is essential reading.

👉 Read “The Battle for the Bros” in The New Yorker

Inside the Quiet Power Behind Bryan Johnson

The New York Times investigative reporter Kristen Grind just published a major investigation into Bryan Johnson—the anti-aging tech entrepreneur best known for spending millions a year trying not to die. According to her reporting, Johnson has repeatedly used far-reaching confidentiality agreements with employees, business partners, romantic partners, and even friends—some threatening six-figure penalties if violated. These NDAs often barred people from saying anything negative about him, including comments that could make him look bad long after the relationship ended.

I actually wrote about Johnson last month for Men’s Health from inside his “Don’t Die” Summit in downtown LA. This stuff was out of the purview of my story, but I had seen that Vanity Fair had done a story focused on his ex-fiancé, who claimed that he broke up with her when while she was battling stage 3 breast cancer after allegedly saying he would take care of her financially.

Johnson denies being in the wrong and has been actively discrediting his ex by forensically picking apart videos she's shared that detail their relationship. If there was one thing I felt after interviewing Johnson for that story, it's that he handles everything in his life with a ferocious intensity. Even when he's having fun, he's doing it seriously. So it's not a far stretch of the imagination to see his zealousness going a little to far.

On the other hand, one of the claims made in the New York Times story is that he asked people to sign contracts that force them to opt into a kind of workplace environment where he might be say…talking about his erections or dressed in very little clothing. And this is where, when placed in the formal context of a New York Times story, Johnson looks really weird. However, if you understand Johnson's media empire, this is par for the course. He does naked photo shoots and posts about nighttime erections, as a matter of course. And, yeah, it’s fucking weird, but that doesn’t mean it’s a hostile workplace. Clearly, Johnson’s methods are overzealous, but he’s not wrong to preemptively defend himself. That said, employees should not have to surrender the rights that protect them. I don't know. What do you think?

👉 Read “The Billionaire’s Secret Contracts” in The New York Times

Peter Thiel’s Chaos Capitalism

For the better part of a year, I’ve been trying to get a handle on Peter Thiel—the libertarian transhumanist billionaire who co-founded PayPal, was Facebook’s first outside investor, and has quietly become one of the most influential figures in right-wing politics. And I have to say that Jules Evans’s write-up on the libertarian transhumanist billionaire is one of the best I’ve come across—sprawling, incisive, and strangely intimate in its grasp of Thiel’s contradictions. He sketches the contours of what may be “Peak Thiel”: a moment when Thiel’s fingerprints are all over the American power structure, from tech and Trumpworld to the Pentagon and a rising Christian Right.

The piece lays out Thiel’s transformation from Stanford libertarian wunderkind to techno-oligarch to ideological kingmaker, stitching together threads that span the PayPal Mafia, his Girardian fascination with scapegoats (Yay mimetics!), and a messianic belief in technological salvation. The piece ends on a chilling but crucial note—pointing to a new alliance between Silicon Valley, the Christian Right, and the defense state, with Thiel, Vance, and Musk at its center. It’s less QAnon fever dream and more like a Bond villain origin story, if the villain were media-shy, obsessed with Tolkien, and willing to bankroll the end of liberal democracy. A must-read.

👉 Read “Peter Thiel is betting on the apocalypse” in

Mickey17 and the Melancholy of Being Cloned

Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is a strange, slippery film—and also a pretty fun time. Set in a future where the most disposable humans are literally labeled “Expendables,” it follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a man who signs up to be repeatedly cloned and sacrificed for the sake of space colonization. Each time one version dies, another wakes up. But when two versions of Mickey are accidentally alive at the same time, things get complicated.

The film reminded me a lot of Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, which is told from the perspective of a present-day comedian and his distant-future clone—both characters wrestling with identity, continuity, and loneliness across time. Like Houellebecq’s novel, Mickey 17 plays with the existential tension between the original self and the copy, and what it means to be a person when your death is just a reset button away.

Pattinson delivers a spectacular dual performance, physically and emotionally distinguishing between the original Mickey—naive, hopeful, kind of a doormat—and the hardened, defiant version that emerges later. You never lose track of who’s who, which is no small feat given the film’s shifting tone and genre-blurring. One minute it’s a slapstick sci-fi workplace comedy, the next it’s a grim existential drama, then suddenly there’s a philosophical standoff with alien life. That tonal volatility may leave some viewers disoriented, but it also feels like classic Bong: committed to world-building while undercutting it at every turn.

Mark Ruffalo plays a deeply unsettling colonial governor, a kind of Trump-Musk hybrid, who sees the new planet as his personal startup-slash-empire. The film flirts with satire in its depiction of power, class, and the idea that some lives are built to be sacrificed for progress. And while its narrative momentum sometimes gets lost in the genre swirl, there’s enough weirdness and vision here to hold your attention—and just enough heart to make you care about a man whose job is to die over and over again.

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