The Dropout (Movie/Show Review #11)

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It’s a good show that takes its time in places, though it feels somewhat rushed toward the end. Still, it is well produced and competently made.

The Story of The Dropout

The series tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes fooling the world—and herself—into believing she was the female version of Steve Jobs. Everyone went along with it: investors, the media, politicians. They desperately wanted to believe in the feminist narrative that women can do it all.

The show doesn’t explore this in great depth; it even repeatedly frames Holmes’ downfall as an inversion of the true reality. At one point, a character says something along the lines of: “When she finally fails, it will be the biggest blow to all the good female entrepreneurs out there.” The underlying message seems to be that the patriarchy is still out there, waiting to tear women down.

What the show never really addresses is that Holmes only rose to fame because she was a woman.

The supposedly patriarchal Western world wanted a female CEO superstar. Politicians helped. Investors helped. The media helped. Everyone played a role in turning every lie she told into an accepted truth—until it inevitably collapsed and reality exposed the fraud.

Ironically, it was mostly men—the so-called patriarchy—who made Holmes famous. The role of politics is only briefly touched upon, but figures like Henry Kissinger were on Theranos’ board of directors very early on, providing political connections and access to funding. The media is portrayed as the force that ultimately unmasked Holmes and revealed the truth, yet it was the same media that aggressively promoted her and Theranos in the early days as a young female genius. She fit the feminist rhetoric perfectly and satisfied the desire for a female icon in the tech CEO space.

The Story of Theranos

In the end, Theranos was the story of a woman and an Indian man scamming Western elites by exploiting leftist virtue signaling. The company was marketed as a force for good—helping the poor and the sick, fighting evil capitalist corporations at the top of the industry with revolutionary innovation, all while claiming to make the world a better place.

Add a female CEO to win over feminists. Add an Indian man behind the scenes who actually ran things, and you get the multicultural angle as well.

It was a socialist-leftist wet dream. Theranos received endless benefit of the doubt until the scam became impossible to ignore.

It is said that investors lost more than $900 million. One can’t help but wonder how much taxpayer money was also poured into this black hole.

Conclusion

The Dropout is a good watch—one that is likely to make your blood boil. It doesn’t cover all the factors involved, particularly the political networks that enabled Theranos’ rise, but it succeeds as an interesting character study: of a woman who eventually believed her own lies, and of a liberal bubble caught in the web she and her Indian handler spun.

Writing Less Will Be a Marker of Human Writing Soon

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AI can already churn out 1,000 words about a single topic. Ask it to write about writing, and within seconds it produces an article that would normally take an experienced human writer with knowledge about the theory of writing an hour.

This development will flood the internet with long-form blog posts produced at scale. Quantity will no longer be a signal of effort, skill, or insight in the era of AI.

To distinguish yourself from AI-generated content, writing less may be the better strategy.

  • Start with a clear idea.
  • Collect your thoughts around it.
  • Freely write your article about these thoughts.
  • Then compress it all into as few words as possible.

Focus on the density of meaning rather than word count. In an era where AI can generate endless text, clarity and minimalism may become the strongest signals of human authorship.

A Lesson from Wake Up Dead Man

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I watched the third installment of the Knives Out franchise yesterday—and I liked it. It’s a good movie, and even one of the better films of the year. It’s obvious that everyone involved had a lot of fun making it, and that Rian Johnson is a smart writer.

Yes, he messed up Star Wars—but only because Kathleen Kennedy allowed him to. Johnson’s filmography proves time and again that he can write clever, original stories. Wake Up Dead Man is a great example of his ability to deliver smart, well-constructed plotlines.

That said, the one thing that almost made me give up on the movie was the first act. It’s simply too long. More than half an hour passes before we get the first murder victim. After that, the movie really picks up steam and keeps you on the edge of your seat. At times, it’s downright brilliant—just like the first two Knives Out films. But I can imagine some viewers dropping out during the first act because it drags a bit.

The best way to get people interested in your story is to start with a bang. Throw the audience straight into the action—just like Tom Cruise does in every Mission: Impossible movie.

Of course, you need to develop the plot and characters at some point, or you won’t have a story at all. But first, you have to capture the audience’s attention before they’re willing to invest in your character and plot development.

As great as Wake Up Dead Man is, I would have started with the murder and then used flashbacks to convey the plot and character development that’s crammed into the first act.

Still, I liked the movie—a lot—and I highly recommend watching it.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (Books to Read #9)

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Another milestone from the master. George Orwell understood the true nature of socialist virtue-signalers like no one else. 1984 dissected their rhetorical games, while Animal Farm exposed the moral games played by statists to coerce people into compliance.

It’s a short read, giving it the feel of a fairy tale not only in style but also in scope. I remember reading it for the first time in a single sitting, finishing it within a couple of hours. When I turned the last page, it felt as though the world suddenly made sense.

If you’ve grown up in the West and have only been exposed to public education and mainstream media, this book is an eye-opener to how the real world works.

It’s absolutely genius in the way it breaks down a complex concept like mass manipulation into a simple parable: All animals are equal… but some animals are more equal than others. There may be no better sentence to describe the mind-bending games played on us daily by the system under the veil of tolerance, multiculturalism, and liberalism—and Orwell wrote it almost 100 years ago. It makes you wonder: for how long have these games been played on humanity?

If you haven’t read it yet, you can read Animal Farm for free here.

Or at least watch one of the free film versions available: