Mike White On Transcending Identity

Mike White is a writer, director, and actor. Among his many films, he wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck and wrote the screenplay for School of Rock. In television, he co-created and starred in Enlightened, and he’s the genius auteur of The White Lotus, currently in its third season. In reality TV, he competed on Survivor: David vs. Goliath and two seasons of The Amazing Race, alongside his gay evangelical father, Mel White, whom I knew well before I came to admire his son’s work.

For three clips of our convo — on the humanism of The White Lotus, Mike finding Buddhism, and his courageous gay dad — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in the boring suburbs of Pasadena; attending a private school of rich kids; his mom a teacher and homemaker; Mel the minister and ghostwriter for famous televangelists; the productive pain of adolescence; Mike studying postmodernists like Judith Butler at Wesleyan; Mel coming out of the closet right after his kids left college; Soul Force; Mike’s power of observation; his love of Camille Paglia; Sexual Personae; the subtle psychological warfare in White Lotus; how its characters aren’t didactic; how identity politics is bad for art; the golden age of reality TV; Mel joining Falwell’s church with his partner; the pressure to be the model gay; the gay characters of South Park; Mike’s nervous breakdown; the humor and lightness in Buddhism; meditation; Oakeshott and the ordeal of consciousness; Orwell and the clarity of nonfiction; Jennifer Coolidge and the evil gays; Parker Posey; Sam Rockwell’s autogynephilic role; bro-cest; the mysteries of desire; Freud; how iPhones kill imagination; Mike’s veganism; how class gets eclipsed in wokeness; and the redeemable qualities in all the White Lotus characters.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nick Denton on China’s inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod on DOGE and public servants:

Thank you for inviting Michael Lewis on the show last week; it was so much fun. The thing I loved most was your both absolutely genuine belly laughs at each other’s jokes, memories, and insights. Humor saves, and I appreciate it.

Another listener writes:

I loved your discussion with Michael Lewis, and two things stood out to me. First, the discussion of where to find the 2025 Ross Perot. The easy answer is Donald Trump. The GOP of 2012 is dead and gone and has been hijacked by Trump. If a 2028 version of Mitt Romney were to run for president, he would need to mount a third-party run and wouldn’t stand a chance in the modern GOP.

Second, you voiced concern over federal employees having blocked Trump in his first term. I don’t believe any of them blocked Trump (or had the power to). Instead, it was laws and — as you pointed out in the episode — empirical truth. As we’re seeing in the second Trump administration, he’s ignoring both the law and empirical truth, and I don’t know what the public wants civil servants to do with a chief executive not constrained by either of these factors.

Here’s a dissent:

Of course there are great government employees who are doing amazing things and selflessly helping the country. But the country is also running the highest-ever federal deficit outside of wartime (or Covid), at nearly 7% of GDP last year while at full employment, which is completely insane. Ignoring this, in favor of emphasizing that a dozen of the 3,000,000 federal employees are really great and undervalued, is certainly one editorial choice!

Both you and Michael complained about how DOGE is recklessly damaging the government, and he used his cherry-picked examples of great things that a handful of government employees are doing, implicitly giving the impression that this is the type of thing that government spending mostly goes to. This is as nonsensical as the opposite claims that all government programs are as useless as the gender queer cultural USAID programs.

What most people want solved is how we get the federal budget back to reasonable levels while retaining the core competencies, such as the ones that Michael highlights. The trillion dollar question is how we do that. That is the question that you should have asked former bond trader Michael Lewis, who surely understands that ongoing federal budget deficits of 6%+ are a one-way road to financial and economic crisis. And you should have asked if he has any ideas on how to solve these problems. Instead it was just bitching and complaining about how Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I think I made the point in the podcast that because Musk is only able to tackle 14 percent of federal spending, there will be minimal impact on the debt (especially when extending the 2017 tax cuts). The only way to cut the debt is to tackle Medicare and Social Security.

Another points to a news item published this week:

I’m a big fan of yours (and a paid subscriber for many years), but you really need to issue a correction on the podcast from this week. You let Michael say, “Elon Musk has no experience running large institutions, and the only one that he has run [X] has dropped 60% in value.” This is demonstrably not true: “Elon Musk’s X regains $44 billion valuation in major comeback.”

It’s a little unfair to accuse Michael of not knowing something when we taped before this news came out. But I’m happy to include the info.

Another looks to the lesser known villain of federal workers:

I am partway through your excellent episode with Michael Lewis — basically right at the part where you discuss Russell Vought. I think Vought is in some ways the most contemptible of the characters that Trump has handed the government over to.

Vought, from his position as OMB head, is leading the charge to destroy basic biomedical research in this country — yet, he is personally one of the biggest beneficiaries of that research. He has a daughter with cystic fibrosis — a deadly, life-altering, and life-shortening disease that until very recently was untreatable. Within the past decade, building on NIH-led scientific research, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has developed three miracle drugs for treating CF. With the benefit of these drugs, many people with CF can live something much closer to a normal life. The impact these drugs have had on CF are roughly analogous to the impact that the development of antiretrovirals had on HIV/AIDS — just a complete game-changer.

Vought’s daughter has had her life changed for the better by the miracle that is Trikafta (one of the three Vertex drugs), and yet he is devoted to destroying the system that, for all its many flaws, saved his daughter’s life. Contemptible.

Zeal warps the mind. Next up, “from a fed”:

This is odd, but I’m writing to thank you for having Michael Lewis on to talk about DOGE and federal employees without having listened to the show. And I may not ever listen. Not because I don’t want to hear what he has to say, but because the way I am handling being in the center of this strange and horrible storm engulfing federal employees is to let most of it sail on by.

I did cancel my subscription to The Free Press after Nellie Bowles decided it was fun to mock the feds who spoke up about the extremely weird, unprofessional, and anonymous emails from “HR” (that’s not a thing — government employee personnel actions are handled through each agency) telling us to quit. But so far that’s been about the extent of my engagement with any of it. I don’t have the energy to explain all the nuance and detail about how federal employment works — nuance and detail that is mostly not showing up anywhere in the media or Substack. (Though Jeff Maurer had a good column about the childish DOGE emails.)

Sure, there are idiots and assholes who don’t deserve their jobs in government, just like everywhere else. But to have an entire section of the American population actually jeering at people who are upset over losing their jobs ... wow. Would Americans do that to any other group? And what other instances are there of a group of employees whose employers are leading the jeering and derision?

So. Thanks again. Maybe I’ll listen in a few months after I’m either fired or this stuff has settled down.

One more listener on that episode:

What a pleasure it was to listen to your conversation with Michael Lewis. He’s delightful! A couple of quick points:

The dull process point is that I sent you a snippy email last month complaining that your interview tics often interfere with exactly what I’m interested in. This conversation with Lewis didn’t do that; you let him finish his stories for the most part, and then your questions and responses augmented the conversation rather than derailing it. The form, and not just the substance, of this episode was a joy to listen to.

The more substantive point is that you discussed Michael Kinsley and reminded me that I would love for you to go in depth sometime about that man. I absolutely adored his writing in the '80s and '90s, and it sounds like he was a creative and life-affirming editor. Would you sometime flesh out an encomium to Kinsley? (I’m guessing that his Parkinsons takes a pod conversation off the table.) If I were wealthy, I’d commission an anthology filled with stories from you and other writers about Kinsley. My fear is that it will only be his (far in the future, I hope) death that would trigger it. How much better would it be to celebrate him while he’s alive?

Kinsley is the GOAT. I put out feelers for a pod but worry it may be pushing it. Thanks for encouraging me to re-engage. Here’s another guest rec:

I recall a while back that you were telling us that Van Jones was going to be a guest on the Dishcast. Did that ever come to be? I seem to have missed if it it did happen. Also, what are your thoughts on have Pete Buttigieg on the show? Please!

Van agreed to come on the pod, but his PR team canceled it. I’d happily have Pete on. I’ve tended to avoid politicians because they are inevitably constrained in the kind of frank, free-wheeling conversations a podcast does best.

Next up, readers continue to debate the free speech of Mahmoud Khalil. One writes:

Your dissenter points out that it might not be a good idea to visit Slovenia and protest their government. I don’t know much about Slovenia; maybe he’s right. But this is America, and we should be big enough that we can handle a tourist coming here just to protest against us, or say anything else that would be covered under the First Amendment. Can’t we handle that? Let’s show the other countries how it’s done.

Here’s Thomas More — my confirmation saint — showing how it’s done:

Another writes:

The case of Mahmoud Khalil is even worse than you say: the Trump administration happily welcomed the Tate brothers — two anti-Semitic, light Holocaust deniers — back to the United States. From the Times of Israel: