#Podcasting Market 2023

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

In her unmissable 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein paints a picture of a "mirror world" of right wing and conspiratorial beliefs that are warped, false reflections of real crises:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.

Klein is at pains to point out that other political thinkers have described this phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, leftists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Socialism – the idea that working people are preyed upon by capital – is reflected in the warped mirror as "working people are preyed upon by international Jewish bankers."

The mirror world is a critical concept, because it shows that far right and conspiratorial beliefs are often uneasy neighbors with real, serious political movements. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, in other words:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

Once you understand the mirror world, you start to realize that many right wing conspiracists could have been directed into productive movements, if only they'd understood that their problems were with systems, not sinister individuals (this is why Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"):

https://mamot.fr/@Lazarou@mastodon.social/113943287435897828

This also explains why the "tropes" of right wing conspiratorialism sometimes echo left wing, radical thought. I once had a (genuinely unhinged) dialog with a self-described German "progressive" who told me that criticizing the finance industry as parasitic on the real economy was "structurally antisemitic." Nonsense like this is why Klein's "mirror world" is so important: unless you understand the mirror world, you can end up believing that "progressive" just means "defending anything the right hates."

Historian Erik Baker is the author of a new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which has some very interesting things to say about the mirror world:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674293601

In a recent edition of the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, the hosts interviewed Baker about the book, and the conversation turned to the subject of pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-the-entrepreneurial-ethic/

MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").

The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).

Rank-and-file members of the Amway cult lived in dire poverty, convinced that their financial predicament was their own fault for not faithfully following the "sure-fire" Amway method for building a business. Andrea Pitzer's gripping memoir of growing up in an Amway household offers a glimpse of the human cost of the cult:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZxYkntna5M_rYEv4707Zqqs

Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.

Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.

At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.

Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."

Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:

Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:

“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-organizing-activism-friends-family-conversation-presidential-election

The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.

The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.

In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.

The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.

Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.

Hearing Baker's interview and reading Pitzer's memoir last week made it all click together for me. Not just that MLMs destroy social bonds, but that within every person who gets sucked into an MLM, there's a community organizer who could be building the bonds that MLMs destroy.

[atwhughesversion]

Canucksblur’s “most Canuckian experience” bracket — Round 1, Poll 6

welcome back! the winner of Poll 5 was “THAT Rangers game — outshot them, still lost, injuries, and Miller ENG.” Poll 6 is here, with additional context below as always if you’d like it:

the context:

based on the way this management group has operated heading into the end of january each season, you’d think they had a different trade deadline than the rest of the league. on january 30, 2023, the canucks traded bo horvat (their CAPTAIN) to the new york islanders, in return for a nice package. they’d already made it clear that they would be taking offers for him rather than re-signing him but like…our captain. anyways, then we move on to january 31, 2024, when the canucks were the ones to put together a package to land elias lindholm (one of the best pending UFAs available for trade last season) — a package that saw andrei kuzmenko head to calgary. and 2025? oh boy. january 31, 2025, jt miller (the guy the picked over horvat, who as we’ve just seen was the beginning of this cycle of january trades, btw) was traded to the rangers, after weeks of basically wondering when it was gonna happen. he was almost traded a couple weeks earlier, but that one fell through. do you think the canucks know that there are other days to make trades besides jan 30/31???

riftgate. oh, riftgate. this is the nickname given to the supposed “rift” between jt miller and elias pettersson that wreaked havoc on the canucks this season. their rocky relationship wasn’t a secret prior to this year, but at the beginning of this season something seemingly happened to cause it to blow up (petey’s words, not mine). we don’t know the details and that’s fine, but ultimately it led to miller getting traded. because having two elite top 6 centres signed long-term whose natural talents play off of each other perfectly, and actually getting to keep them both, would just be too easy. however, before that trade happened? when i say the canucks were the main characters of the league, i mean it. you couldn’t go to any podcast or NHL panel without someone bringing it up. the vancouver market alone had enough riftgate coverage to last a lifetime, but then you had elliotte friedman joining in on the gossip every other day. HNIC? riftgate. 32 thoughts? riftgate. former NHL executive does an interview anywhere? riftgate. biz, from spittin’ chiclets, is the one who started the whole thing. hell, bo horvat — he’s rly popping up left and right today — did an interview about it. as in, new york islander bo horvat. having in-house drama is one thing but when it is the national discussion point of the entire league for months? that’s just the canucks for you, i suppose.

[side note: i feel like my contexts are getting longer and longer lmao. i went into this series making an effort to keep them short, so people wouldn’t see a wall of text and scroll on, but apparently my inherent need to talk and talk is winning out, for which i’m sorry 😭]

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

I think the launch of Meghan’s show was her last big moment of media attention unless there’s a divorce. There was quite a bit of media interest in the show because there was still a lot of curiosity about what Meghan might be capable of. The podcast was a fail, but maybe she just isn’t a podcaster. Well now the show has come out and all the papers said it sucked. I doubt the US media will comment much on her product launch or her second season. Her new podcast sounds incredibly boring and any Royal stories she has are ancient. The haters give her some relevancy, but M&H were barely a blip on the pop culture radar 2023-2024 despite them popping up and random events and fake tours. She got mocked for doing a bunch of dorky and pretentious things in the show, but that’s just not going to stay interesting in a world where the Kardashian’s, real housewives and 90 day fiancé exist. I think her move to Lemonada is a much more realistic picture of her cultural relevancy. She has an audience and can make headlines thanks to the title, but she just doesn’t have mass appeal. She is widely disliked, but she just doesn’t play a great villain either.

I think As Ever has potential when the products are actually available. Of course, that depends on the marketing and how Meghan promotes them. Photos that look like she smeared the lens with Vaseline, trends from 2012, and Harry taking pictures of the sun will not do the job.

[theaudientvoid]

A few days ago, there was a thread on my dash to the effect of "why isn't the stock market completely fucked, as opposed to only sort of fucked" in relation to recent developments regarding tariffs. The consensus answer was that markets generally seem to think that Trump will back down and this will all blow over.

It's interesting. Paul Krugman recently had a guest on his podcast who made the case that we actually came very close to a full on financial crisis after tariffmageddon.

As a refresher of the timeline, Trump announced very high tariffs, much higher than the markets had been expecting, on April 2, to take effect a few days later. The stock market immediately crashed, but Trump insisted that he would stay the course. Then, a few days later, the tariffs took effect, the bond market crashed, and the Trump almost immediately announced a 90 day pause on some of the tariffs (but an increase on others). Both stock and bond markets have rebounded somewhat since then, but are still down from their highs in February.

The bond market crashing has two effects. First, the sale price of US Treasury bonds falls, and additionally the interest rates that the government has to pay on those bonds goes up. Traditionally, US Treasury bonds are seen as just about the safest financial asset available. This is because the US government its two and a half centuries of existence, has never defaulted on its debt. Because of this, the USG pays very low interest rates on its debt. If the interest rates that the government is required to pay go up, then that has major implications for the governments budget going forward.

However, more germane to the point currently being discussed, a lot of very big banks currently have a lot of their assets in treasury bonds. This is due to regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis requiring them to keep a large portion of their asset sheets in "safe" assets, which in practice means treasuries. If these assets were suddenly fall in value, then that would negatively impact their viability as financial institutions.

You make recall the failure of Silicon Valley Bank a few years ago. That was directly caused by fluctuations in the bond market. Now, Silicon Valley Bank had almost all of its assets in treasury bonds, and thus was unusually exposed to interest rate risk. But the crash in the bond market in early April was a lot bigger than in 2023.

[13thdoctorposts]

At some point 13 fans needs to actually put the numbers to paper on the era's audience numbers, because my recollection is that they're perfectly on par and at times even better than Capaldi's and several of the latest specials. I'm tired of haters whining about 'everyone hated it' when they mean misogynists targeted it and boycotted it from the very instance of a rumour that 13 would be a woman.

Peter Nolan from Blogtor Who did a post on the numbers after the airing of Power of the Doctor, in one section of the post he compares the Whittaker and Capaldi eras…

“It’s remarkable then, that the Whittaker era of Doctor Who is overall on course not only to retain the audience it was given, but actually very slightly grow it. The average Thirteenth Doctor was watched by 4.67m viewers, up 0.12m (2.6%) on the 4.55m average of the Twelfth Doctor. It’s median viewing figure of 4.21m, meanwhile, is 0.34m (7.4%) lower than Capaldi’s, representing the boost Whittaker’s average is given by the large audiences for her first series. But overall, we haven’t seen Doctor Who just do a respectable job all things considered. Rather, it actually got ratings that would be good a decade ago.”

You can check out the whole article here https://www.blogtorwho.com/doctor-who-power-of-the-doctor-viewing-figures/?amp=1

As you can see the Whittier era did quite well especially when considering it had to fight to get through the Pandemic, which people seem to like to act like isn’t a big deal with their revisionist history of how difficult that time actually was. Not only were millions dying and getting sick, people were losing their jobs and lock downs were keeping people at home and a number of parents learnt how hard it was to home school your child even with a teacher on zoom, some while also having to work full time at home. This isn’t to mention the ridiculous amount of restrictions on how they could make the show and keep everyone safe. Sadly they also just didn’t have budget, it was why they needed Disney to come in. In the Who Corner to Corner podcast Chibs talks about how he wanted to do a new years special after Flux but was told there was no budget and he couldn’t do it but he wanted there to be a new year special so he ask if he used monster from the cupboard (a couple daleks they had sitting there) a warehouse and only 2 guest stars could he do it and they still told him they didn’t think so but he told them they were doing it and then we got Eve of the Daleks, one of my fav episodes of the run.

This goes to show the show was struggling to afford to make episodes it had no real money for marketing. If series 12 and Flux got the marketing series 11 did of course we would have seen even bigger numbers but Chibs stated in his Radio Free Skaro podcast from Gally One in 2023 that the only marketing budget they had after series 11 was marketing that could be done on the BBC that’s extremely limiting. They also didn’t have a brand manager unlike all previous eras. If you can afford a brand manager you’re not going to choose to not have one and having one probably would have also help quite a bit.

It’s not 2008 anymore, even Tennent couldn’t pull his 2008 numbers and that was with the big Disney budget to make the show and market the show, and they had a year to market the show and the most well known Doctor, so considering that vs what Chibs had to work with the Whittaker era is a solid era of Doctor Who. It just came at a time when the Budget was struggling, and the TV landscape was changing along with a campaign to try and destroy it before it began simply because they chose a Woman to be the Doctor, as demonstrated by the fact the BBC had to release a press statement backing Whittakers casting and the change to a Female Doctor. And that did have a snow ball effect of people picking everything apart to an insane level they do not do with any of the episodes from the male Doctors episodes a lot of which could be seen as far more problematic.

All this to say could the numbers had been better? Yes, if they had budget to market the show the way it needs to be marketed in a landscape with a million competing shows on far more streaming services than there were regular channels back in the day. But did the show do well with the limited resources it had. Also Yes.

[missingpolinseason]

Shondaland and Netflix ignored a petition signed by over 75K people and said the deleted Polin scenes don't exist. Recently, What a Barb! podcast had acess to scripts and find out a deleted scene and that the dream scene was bigger and included the quote "It has only ever been us" said by Colin. This are the ones we know, plus the reshot scenes we can see because of Luke's wig - including the market scene that was shown as a pic in tudum 2023 and later reshot.

Polin is the ONLY Bridgerton couple to not have a flashback. The Bridgerton couple with less screentime in their own season.

Please, like, share, repost, reblog this post with the hashtag #RestoreThePolinScenes. Feel free to download the pic and post in other social medias too. And let's continue to fight for this beautful stolen polin moments.

[zot3-flopped]

What’s even crazier to me about the uproar over MH’s recent statements is that to me at least, they had nothing to do with Taylor. He made a remark that he would not write about “every casual romantic liaison he had in the past year” during an almost three hour, theory-heavy podcast episode that touched on his current approach to music. And everyone took that to be a dig at Taylor, that he is continuing to “demean, manipulate, humiliate her” as if he didn’t casually date two other women that same year…? (Charlotte Dalessio and Meredith Mickelson). Do swifties not realize that their Queen herself was in three relationships in the year of 2023 as well? But when he talks about his partners, it could only be Taylor right? Nobody has a life outside of her? They also claimed his comments on the way music is currently marketed or created in trope-like scenarios in a capitalistic manner was directed at her. Which, doesn’t it say something that even swifties hear that and immediately think of Taylor? But also ignores that these criticisms have been a central theme of his work his whole life. Doesn’t matter whether we or they like the guy or not. Their ability to make everything about her (and have it all accepted as fact after they have meltdowns on Twitter and tabloids pick it up and report on it) never ceases to amaze me but also doesn’t do her any favors. This is why many fellow artists cannot stand her. Is she worth getting involved with for all this?

Perhaps 'casual romantic liaison' IS how Matty sees his 30 day relationship with Taylor? It makes a lot more sense than acting like they were soulmates.

Taylor has a 15-year history of taking very short relationships far too seriously, and the fandom falls into line every time and acts like she is writing about a failed marriage.

[itsmyfandomandilikeit]

What we actually know about the renewal of Star Trek: Prodigy

Ok so there's been some speculation going around that Prodigy is or is not being renewed. The fact is that there has been zero news on the topic, official or otherwise, and anyone claiming to know differently is wrong or lying.

That being said, there are some things we do know:

1. Netflix is of course notorious for canceling things. I am an Inside Job fan. I know. However, they almost never leave things ambiguous. They aren't shy. When things are canceled, they make a clear public statement saying that it's canceled. Usually within two weeks of airing.

2. All of the clear public statements we've gotten from Netflix and the Prodigy crew have been consistent: Netflix will decide when they get more data. Recently, Aaron Waltke said on a podcast that they will review the viewing numbers from the first six months after season 2 was released, which occurred on July 1. This lines up with Netflix's data release schedule, which collates viewing data from the first and second halves of the year.

3. They are also waiting on a few other things. Namely, Netflix still commissions Paramount to create seasons of Prodigy. The sale of things like DVDs, Blu-Rays, digital downloads, and those new ship models that are coming out this December, affect the price of a season of Prodigy. Merchandise sales and licensing pay for a portion of it, and Netflix has to cover the rest of the cost. I'm sure the new theme park ride affects this as well. The cost to commission a season of Prodigy is determined by a number that is very much, at the moment, in a state of flux because of the upcoming physical media and merchandise releases, which could do well or not.

4. It was announced that the Hagemans have been added to a LEGO Ninjago project, and there has been some speculation that they will be unable to work on Prodigy because of this. This is irrelevant. The Hagemans have stated repeatedly that they typically work on 2 or 3 projects at once. To my knowledge, Aaron Waltke was working on Transformers One during the production of Prodigy season 2. This is just normal. They're getting work because their work has done well.

5. Prodigy costs the least of any Star Trek project to produce, but it is also the only Star Trek project that Netflix has access to. If, say, Section 31 does extremely well, Netflix can't get any portion of that success except for through Prodigy. Netflix also knows that very few new users are actually signing up for Paramount+, and indeed many users are leaving the platform, so Prodigy remains a good investment for Netflix. No matter how well this season of Lower Decks does, Netflix can't buy it because it's not for sale.

6. Data from 2023 indicated that Prodigy outperformed all of the rest of Star Trek on Netflix (admittedly, the US is not counted in this). What's especially notable about this is that it was only available for one week in 2023. In the first half of 2024, Prodigy continued to do well on the Netflix platform, despite it effectively only playing reruns during that time. Netflix will not release numbers for the second half of 2024 until next year.

7. Prodigy has the budget and appeal of a children's show, but it also has an avid adult audience. Many adults are watching it just because it's Star Trek or because they want to keep up with the overall story. Anyone who wants to maintain Star Trek completion must watch Prodigy, which is only available through Netflix.

8. Marketing is typically the lion's share of the cost of any media, but no marketing was done for Prodigy. It relied on word of mouth and the Star Trek brand. This affects how expensive it is to Netflix.

9. Finally this is not about the show itself but I just don't think that the story is over because plotlines in Star Trek never really end. Watching TAS is like the Leo Dicaprio pointing meme of seeing how Discovery was designed from a ton of these episodes. Every detail of the older shows is spun into entire plotlines in NuTrek. Whether or not Prodigy is renewed, these characters and species have been added to the canon and more than likely it will never let them go. If there isn't a new season, there will be video games, books, comic books, theme park attractions, stupid hats (that I'll buy), sunglasses, t-shirts, board games, markers, branded blankets, posters, and anything else you can think of. I kinda don't know how I feel about this but it is what I think. No matter how many seasons of Prodigy there actually will be, I'm sure the characters and settings will be brought back thirty years from now for better or worse.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How an obscure advisory board lets utilities steal $50b/year from ratepayers

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC on WEDNESDAY (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE on THURSDAY (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Two figures to ponder.

First: if your local power company is privately owned, you've seen energy rate hikes at 49% above inflation over the last three years.

Second: if your local power company is publicly owned, you've seen energy rates go up at 44% below inflation over the same period.

Power is that much-theorized economic marvel: a "natural monopoly." Once someone has gone to the trouble of bringing a power wire to your house, it's almost impossible to convince anyone else to invest in bringing a competing wire to your electrical service mast. For this reason, most people in the world get their energy from a publicly owned utility, and the rates reflect social priorities as well as cost-recovery. For example, basic power to run lights and a refrigerator might be steeply discounted, while energy-gobbling McMansions pay a substantial premium for the extra power to heat and cool their ostentatious lawyer-foyers and "great rooms."

But in America, we believe in the miracle of the market, even where no market could possibly exist because of natural monopolies. That's why about 70% of Americans get their power from shareholder-owned companies, whose managers' prime directive is extracting profit, not serving their communities. To check this impulse, these private utilities are overseen by various flavors of public bodies, usually called Public Utility Commissions (PUCs).

For 40 years, PUCs have limited private utilities to a "rate of return" based on a "just and reasonable profit." They always gamed this to make it higher than was fair, but in recent years, the "experts" who advise PUCs on rate-setting have been boiled down to a tiny number of economists, who have discovered that the true "just and reasonable profit" is much higher than it's ever been considered.

Mark Ellis worked for one of those profit-hiking "experts," but he's turned whistleblower. On paper, Ellis looks like the enemy: former chief economist at Sempra Energy, an ex-Exxonmobile analyst, a retired McKinsey Consultant, and a Socal Edison engineer. But Ellis couldn't stomach the corruption, and he went public, publishing a report for the American Economic Liberties Project called "Rate of Return Equals Cost of Capital" that lays out the con in stark detail:

https://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250102-aelp-ror-v5.pdf

I first encountered Ellis last week when he was interviewed on Matt Stoller and David Dayen's excellent Organized Money podcast, where he memorably referred to these utilities as "pocket-picking machines":

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-pocket-picking-machine

Dayen followed this up with a great summary in The American Prospect (where he is editor-in-chief):

https://prospect.org/environment/2025-02-21-secret-society-raising-your-electricity-bills/

At the center of the scam is a professional association called the Society of Utility and Regulatory Financial Analysts (SURFA). The experts in SURFA are dominated by just four consulting companies, who provide 90% of the testimony for rate-setting exercises. Just two people account for half of that input.

In order to calculate the "just and reasonable profit," these experts make use of economic models. Even in normal economics, these models are the source of infinite mischief and suffering, built on assumptions that legitimize the most abusive conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

But even by the low standards of normal economic models, the utility models are really bad. They rely on unique "risk premium" and "expected earnings" calculations that no one else in finance will touch. As Dayen explains, these models are "perfectly circular."

This might be a bit confusing, but only because it's one of those scams that you assume you must have misunderstood because it's so, well, scammy. In the "expected earnings" analysis, the "just and reasonable profit" a utility is allowed to build into its rates is defined as "the amount of money it would like to make." In other words, if a utility projects future revenues of $10 billion over the next ten years, that is its "expected earnings." "Expected earnings" are treated as equivalent to "just and reasonable profits." So under this model, whatever number the utility puts in its financial projections is the number that it's allowed to take out of the pockets of ratepayers.

This is just as bad as it sounds. In 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said that it "defied financial logic." No duh – even SURFA's own training manual says it "does not square well with economic theory."

In the world of regulated utilities, this kind of mathing isn't supposed to be possible. The PUC and its "consumer advocates" are supposed to listen to these outlandish tales and laugh the utility out of the room.

But it's SURFA that trains the consumer advocates who work for the PUCs, the large energy customers, and community groups. These people – who are supposed to act as the adversaries of the companies that pay SURFA members to justify rate-hikes – are indoctrinated by SURFA to treat its absurd models as accepted economic gospel. SURFA has co-opted its opposition, transformed it into a botnet that parrots its own talking-points.

Because of this, the private power companies that serve 70% of US households made an extra $50b last year, about $300 per household. What's more, because the excess profits available to companies that simply bamboozle their regulators are so massive, they swamp all the other tools regulators use to attempt to improve the energy system. No incentive offered for conservation or efficiency can touch the gigantic sums energy companies can make by ripping off ratepayers, so nearly all the incentive programs approved by PUCs have been dead on arrival.

What's more, utilities are allowed to fold the cost of hiring the experts who get them rate hikes onto the ratepayers. In other words, if a utility hires a $10,000,000 expert who successfully argues for a $1,000,000,000 rate-increase, they get to recoup the ten mil they spent securing the right to rip you off for a billion dollars on top of that cool bill.

We often talk about regulatory capture in the abstract, but this is as concrete as it can be. Ellis's report makes a raft of highly specific, technical regulatory changes that states or cities could impose on their PUCs. These are shovel-ready ideas: if you find yourself contemplating a sky-high power bill, maybe you could call your state rep and read them aloud.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/24/surfa/#mark-ellis

[jclovely]

📯📯📯 2025 YEAR OF DECISION 📯📯📯

MANY THINGS FORECASTED AND TOLD BUT THE CHOICE IS YOURS, BELIEVE LIES AND DECEPTIONS OR THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL ???

Here is a summary:

. The Rapture of the Body of Christ ie. all born again believers past and present.

. Lies and deceptions through AI, project Blue Beam, aliens in the skies, creation of Black Swan event such as the drones leaving poisonous substances in the air which many US and UK people have seen and fell sick to.

. Transgenderism and continuation of transhumanism agendas under Elon Musk, and all Luceferian global elites under WHO, UN, WEF, CDC, NHS, NIH and more creating the NWO.

. FALSE Ecumenism or Omnism bringing many faiths together creating ONE WORLD RELIGION.

https://rumble.com/v63gvok-exploring-the-abrahamic-family-house-a-temple-to-world-religion.html

. Terrorist attacks continuing domestically and internationally as we have seen lately in NYC, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Germany.

. Tower of Babel 2.0 returning trying to destroy the work of the Lord and destroy humanity.

. Hatred of Jews and Christians continuing as well as antisemitism and hypocrisy towards Israel defending itself since Oct. 7th 2023.

. CBDC and creation of digital currency.

. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ALREADY FORECASTED IN 1997 BY DR. ANDY HINES AND JOSEPH COATES. THEY WROTE ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT WAS THERE ALREADY AND THEY IMPROVED IT.

. Markets crashes around the world.

. World War 3 starting in the Middle East.

. 7 years Tribulation coming after the Body of Christ is Raptured and the revelation on the antichrist bringing FALSE peace.

. Club of Rome division of the 10 regions, now Trudeau gone, Canada, Greenland, Panama fair game for Trump and Musk to get these countries and their rich natural resources.

. And more sinister outcomes as mentioned in the Book of Revelation by the Apostle John.

IT WILL NOT HAPPEN ALL IN 2025 BUT IT IS WHAT IS SURELY TO COME IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS.

THERE IS NO FEAR FOR THOSE THAT BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS CHRIST. HE IS OUR HOPE.

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR SAVIOUR, HE IS READY TO GIVE YOU THE GIFT OF SALVATION RIGHT NOW:

A - Admit you are a sinner.

B - Believe in Jesus Christ, that He died for your sins and He resurrected and returning soon.

C - Call on His Name, confess that He is your Saviour now and forever.

As you come to Him, the Holy Spirit will seal you and will direct you to His Holy Word and reveal Himself to you and to all TRUTH.

God bless you all.

RECEIVE THE FREE GIFT OF SALVATION THAT THE LORD JESUS CHRIST READY TO GIVE YOU.

BUT HERE IS THE GOOD NEWS YOU CAN BE SAVED FROM ALL THIS AND BE TAKEN AWAY WITH HIM.

ONLY ONE SOLUTION SALVATION THROUGH THE LORD JESUS CHRIST WHAT HE WARNED US 2000 YEARS AGO HAPPENING NOW. REPENT, WE ARE ALL SINNERS, ACCEPT HIS FINISHED WORK AT THE CROSS AND BE SAVED FROM THIS WORLD GOING TO DESTRUCTION.

LET HIM DIRECT YOUR PATHS AND PROTECT YOU FROM WHAT IS COMING. HE IS THE TRUTH.

Thank-you to @godslove, @hiswordsarekisses, @heartsings77, and many others for all the gifs and memes.

Amen.

📯👑📯

🇮🇱👑🙏

🙏💖🌺🦋🕎✝️👑🇮🇱🕊📯

[thoughtroomba02]

TS Film Thoughts Masterpost

As promised.

Let's start things off -

Breaking News - Headlines about the film

Dec 9 2022 - her film contract makes headlines

From what I can find, this is the first that anyone knows she is producing a film. There are no details released other than it's a script she wrote and she will be directing the film.

The next we hear is Dec 7, 2023 from the Tennessean --

It's been crickets, essentially. There are no public details I can find about the film anywhere including cast list, release date, content, ETC.

Interestingly, two days ago -- though uncertain of validity of source -

I don't have access to puck so cannot confirm what the article says; but this was recent! So; in theory, she finishes her Eras tour and moves directly in to film.

More on how Disney+ ties in our next section...

Who is Searchlight Pictures?

Created April 29, 1994 - formerly known as Fox Searchlight/under 20th/21st Century Fox

Biggest success: Slumdog Millionaire 187 Academy Ward Nominations with 46 wins; 5 Best Picture since 2009 117 Golden Globe Nominations; 51 wins 66 Screen Actors Guild Award Nominations; 55 wins 137 Independent Spirit Awards, 54 Wins

Other Notable Films: 12 Years A Slave; Black Swan; Napoleon Dynamite;

20th century fox, prior to the creation of Searchlight, was prominent in the specialty and independent films market in the 1990s; it carried this interest into Searchlight, at least initially.

In 2012, it was incorporated into Murdoch's 21st Century Fox. Barf.

On Dec 14, 2017 Disney put their first bid out on 21st Century Fox/Fox Searchlight. On March 19, 2019 the companies merged and Disney acquired Fox Searchlight; Fox News notoriously split independently. Disney dropped the name Fox; so now we have just Searchlight Pictures. There is also a Searchlight Pictures TV and shorts production, which for the sake of time I will not get into.

For Funsies, here is a short film (Jun 18 2019, after Disney acquired) produced by them called....LAVENDER. About a gay man who has a relationship with a married gay couple. Can't make it up.

Anyway, since merging with Disney especially, the company seems to be LGBTQ friendly.

And yes, Joe Alwyn has worked with Searchlight, with tweets I found dating back to 2018 with Searchlight UK. Make of that what you would like, I have no real objective commentary on the matter.

Taylor as a Director

She also directed the Long Pond Studio Sessions and Miss Americana.

Most of her directorial work has been since the Lover debut. Most of which is very queer coded/sapphic.. and again, make of that what you will.

Appearances/Pap Walks, ETC

Since her split from JA, we have seen her with multiple friends in the film industry. Among these: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Selena Gomez, Keleigh Teller, Miles Teller, Sophie Turner, Emma Stone...

And dare I say.... Travis Kelce, who seems to want to break his way into the entertainment industry?

(aside from this headline; his failed dating show, his podcast, his multiple PR deals like with ZenWater... etc. I rest my case).

We also know there has been some B roll footage taken at the Chiefs Games.

Additionally, the media coverage of this relationship has been an absolute f*cking circus; with constant headlines of the two and their "engagement" / relationship dynamics. On Taylor's end, we have had constant references to Bejeweled (where she Ghosts); including Keleigh Teller giving her the opal ring.

The Speculation

Yall, this is my opinion - you can agree, disagree, etc; but I have no insider information. Just thoughts.

She makes her film directorial debut with Searchlight - recently acquired by Disney, who is pro-LGBTQ; and is clearly in deep with business deals with them, as seen on Taylor Nation and her Eras Tour Film.

We have rumors of her beginning her film production at the end of the ERAS tour, along with knowledge of her currently with B roll footage from chiefs games. We have multiple highly papp'ed appearances with her + TK; but also with multiple film stars, including Blake Lively (still not over that photo), Sophie Turner (I do think there's altruism here tbh on TS's end), and Keleigh. If you believe Keleigh is her stand in invisible bride.... Holy shit. Between the opal ring shutdown of the media circus as well as her and TS literally taking a page out of TSHOEH and dressing in character...

My ultimate suspicion is that she's using actual experiences of her current life-highly papp'ed - to tell her story. And that Keleigh is her stand in muse in this film.

I also think the @spade-riddles we've been getting about a final act ending, etc, pertain to her film. I don't have evidence aside from speculation.

I rest my case. Enjoy this post and make of it what you will.

[mariacallous]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s warning about mitochondria slipped in between the anti-vaccine junk science and the excoriation of pharmaceutical drugs as “the No. 3 killer in our country.” He was speaking in 2023 to Joe Rogan, elaborating on the dangers of Wi-Fi—which no high-quality scientific evidence has shown to harm anyone’s health—and arguing that it causes disease by somehow opening the blood-brain barrier, and by degrading victims’ mitochondria.

The mention of mitochondria—the tiny structures that generate energy within our cells—was brief. Two years later, mitochondrial health is poised to become a pillar of the MAHA movement, already showing up in marketing for supplements and on podcasts across the “manosphere.” Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s newest nominee for surgeon general, has singled out the organelle as the main casualty of the modern American health crisis. According to Means (who has an M.D. but no active medical license), most of America’s chronic ailments can be traced to mitochondrial dysfunction. Should she be confirmed to the post of surgeon general, the American public can expect to hear a lot more about mitochondria.

Among scientists, interest and investment in mitochondria have risen notably in the past five years, Kay Macleod, a University of Chicago researcher who studies mitochondria’s role in cancer, told me. Mitochondria, after all, perform a variety of crucial functions in the human body. Beyond powering cells, they can affect gene expression, help certain enzymes function, and modulate cell death, Macleod said.

When mitochondria are defective, people do indeed suffer. Vamsi Mootha, a mitochondrial biologist based at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, told me that rare genetic defects (appearing in about one in 4,300 people) can cause the organelles to malfunction, leading to muscle weakness, heart abnormalities, cognitive disability, and liver and kidney problems. Evidence also suggests that defects in mitochondria directly contribute to symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and could be both a cause and an effect of type 2 diabetes. Other conditions’ links to mitochondria are blurrier. Researchers see aberrant mitochondria in postmortem biopsies of patients with illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and fatty-liver disease, Mootha said; whether those damaged mitochondria cause or result from such conditions is not yet clear.

But according to Good Energy, the book Means published last year with a top MAHA adviser—her brother, Calley—mitochondrial dysfunction is a veritable plague upon the United States, responsible for both serious illness and everyday malaise. In their view, modern Western diets and lifestyles wreck countless Americans’ metabolic health: Every time you drink unfiltered water or a soda, or feel the stress of mounting phone notifications, you hurt your mitochondria, they say, triggering an immune response that in turn triggers inflammation. (Damaged mitochondria really can cause inflammation, Macleod said.) This chain of events, the Meanses claim, can be blamed for virtually every common chronic health condition: migraines, depression, infertility, heart disease, obesity, cancer, and more. (Casey Means did not respond to requests for comment; reached by email, Calley did not respond to my questions about mitochondria, but noted, “There is significant scientific evidence that healthy food, exercise and sleep have a significant impact on reversing chronic disease.”)

Good Energy follows a typical wellness playbook: using a mixture of valid and dubious research to pin a slew of common health problems on one overlooked element of health—and advertising a cure. Among the culprits for our mitochondrial ravaging, according to the Meanses, are poor sleep, medications, ultraprocessed foods, seed oils, too many calories, and too few vitamins, as well as chronically staying in comfortable ambient temperatures. The Means siblings therefore recommend eschewing refined sugar in favor of leafy greens, avoiding nicotine and alcohol, frequenting saunas and cold plunges, getting seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, and cleansing your life of environmental toxins. Some studies indeed suggest that mitochondrial function is linked with sleep and temperature, but they’ve all been conducted on cell cultures, organoids, or mice. According to Macleod, evidence suggests that diet, too, is likely important. But only one lifestyle intervention—exercise—has been definitively shown to improve mitochondrial health in humans.

The Meanses are riding a wave of interest in mitochondrial health in the wellness world. Earlier this year, the longevity influencer Bryan Johnson and the ivermectin enthusiast Mel Gibson both endorsed the dye methylene blue for its power to improve mitochondrial respiration; Kennedy was filmed slipping something that looks a lot like methylene blue into his drink. (Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment; the FDA has approved methylene blue, but only as a treatment for the blood disease methemoglobinemia.) AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens, formulates its drinkable vitamins for mitochondrial health. Even one laser-light skin treatment promises to “recharge failing mitochondria.” The enzyme CoQ10 is popular right now as a supplement for mitochondrial function, as is NAD, a molecule involved in mitochondria’s production of energy. NAD IV drips are especially beloved by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Kendall Jenner, and the Biebers. These supplements are generally thought to be safe, and some preliminary research shows that NAD supplementation could help patients with Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases, and that CoQ10 could benefit people with mitochondrial disorders. Patients whose symptoms are clearly caused or made worse by deficiencies in a specific vitamin, such as thiamine, can benefit from supplementing those vitamins, Mootha said. But little research explores how these supplements might affect healthy adults.

In Good Energy, as well as on her website and in podcast appearances, Casey Means promotes a number of supplements for mitochondrial health. She also recommends that people wear continuous glucose monitors—available from her company, Levels Health, for $184 a month—to help prevent overwhelming their mitochondria with too much glucose. (According to Macleod, glucose levels are only “a very indirect measure” of mitochondrial activity.) As with so many problems that wellness influencers harp on, the supposed solution to this one involves buying products from those exact same people.

At best, all of this attention to mitochondria could lead Americans to healthier habits. Much of the advice in Good Energy echoes health recommendations we’ve all heard for decades; getting regular exercise and plenty of fiber is good guidance, regardless of anyone’s reasons for doing so. Switching out unhealthy habits for healthy ones will likely even improve your mitochondrial health, Jaya Ganesh, a mitochondrial-disease expert at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. After all, “if you consistently beat your body up with unhealthy habits, everything is going to fall sick,” Ganesh said.

But the mitochondrial approach to wellness carries risks, too. For patients with genetically caused mitochondrial disease, lifestyle changes might marginally improve some symptoms, Ganesh said, but attempting to cure such conditions with supplements and a healthy diet alone could be dangerous. Means also calls out medications—including antibiotics, chemotherapy, antiretrovirals, statins, and high-blood-pressure drugs—for interfering with mitochondria. Macleod told me that statins really do affect mitochondria, as do some antibiotics. (The latter makes sense: Mitochondria are thought to have evolved from bacteria more than a billion years ago.) That’s no reason, though, to avoid any of these medications if a doctor has determined that you need them.

And yet, a whole chapter of Good Energy is dedicated to the idea that readers should mistrust the motives of their doctors, who the authors say profit by keeping Americans sick. The book is less critical of the ways the wellness industry preys on people’s fears. Zooming in on mitochondria might offer a reassuringly specific and seemingly scientific explanation of the many real ills of the U.S. population, but ultimately, Means and MAHA are only helping obscure the big picture.

[justforbooks]

Eddie Jordan

Flamboyant Formula One team boss who was also an entrepreneur and skilled deal-maker

Viewers of Netflix’s Drive to Survive have become accustomed to the modern Formula One world of enormous hi-tech teams supported by armies of corporate sponsors and marketing, media and PR specialists. Eddie Jordan, who has died aged 76 of prostate cancer, represented a previous era of buccaneering individualists who made their own luck and built their teams in their own image.

“We were johnny-come-latelies, noisy, brash, having a good time, giving the establishment two fingers,” Jordan told MotorSport magazine. “So we got lots of attention, lots of value for our sponsors, and a huge fanbase.”

Jordan Grand Prix draped Page 3 models over their cars and were the rock’n’rollers in the F1 paddock, not least because Jordan could frequently be seen flailing away behind his drumkit in his band Eddie’s Pitstop Boogie Boys (who often played at Silverstone after the British Grand Prix) or subsequently Eddie & the Robbers. He was good friends with rock stars including George Harrison, Genesis’s Mike Rutherford, Chris Rea and John Lydon, and when Led Zeppelin staged their one-off reunion at London’s O2 Arena in 2007, Eddie was there.

But he was also a brilliant entrepreneur and deal-maker. He gave Michael Schumacher his first Formula One drive, and his efforts also ensured that Jordan came fifth in the World Championship in their debut year of 1991, a remarkable achievement for a fledgling independent team. During his team’s lifespan from 1991 to 2005, he employed numerous top drivers including Eddie Irvine, Rubens Barrichello, the 1996 world champion Damon Hill, Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Jean Alesi.

In 1998, Hill brought the team their first win at the Belgian Grand Prix, and Frentzen added two more the following year, helping Jordan to reach third place in the World Championship, their best performance. In 2003 Giancarlo Fisichella won the team’s final victory at Interlagos in Brazil.

Jordan was a close friend of F1’s eminence grise Bernie Ecclestone, and shared something of his deal-making instinct. In 1995 he made a small fortune by selling Irvine’s contract to Ferrari. He explained: “Irvine would come to me for free and I’d give him a three-year contract, and build him up, and build him up, and then sell him to Ferrari. He’d get 13 or 14 million and Ferrari would pay me five.” A major sponsorship deal with Benson & Hedges for the 1996 season prompted Jordan’s cars to turn yellow.

In 1998, Jordan sold half his shares to the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, then bought them back at a substantial profit. On Ecclestone’s recommendation, he sold Jordan Grand Prix to the billionaire Alex Schnaider for a reported $60m, and in 2006 the team became Midland F1 (and would subsequently become Spyker and Force India before its latest iteration as Aston Martin).

He pulled off another entrepreneurial coup in 2024, when acting as manager for Adrian Newey, arguably the greatest car designer in F1 history. He negotiated Newey’s transfer from Red Bull to Aston Martin, based at Jordan’s original Silverstone site, for a rumoured salary of £30m.

After selling his team, he had a media career as an F1 pundit, for BBC Sport’s Grand Prix programme from 2009, then for Channel 4’s F1 coverage from 2016. He presented Top Gear in 2016-18, and in 2023 he and David Coulthard launched their podcast, Formula for Success.

Eddie was born in Dublin, the son of Paddy and Eileen Jordan. His father was an accountant for the Electricity Supply Board, and his mother a housewife. He also had an elder sister, Helen. “My mother was the boss and head of the family, and I think I took a lot from her,” Eddie told the Sunday Telegraph. “We had that strong mother-and-youngest-son bond. I was driven.”

He attended Synge Street Christian Brothers school, displaying early entrepreneurial flair by dealing conkers, marbles and school textbooks, and at one point considered becoming a priest (his father’s twin sister was a senior nun with the Irish Sisters of Charity). He briefly considered dentistry but then got a job in the Bank of Ireland. In 1970, a banking strike prompted him to move to Jersey to earn money, where he not only trained in accountancy but tried go-karting, and became infatuated with it.

Back in Ireland, he pursued his karting hobby and was successful enough to win the Irish Kart Championship in 1971. He then moved up to Formula Ford (partly sponsored by a Dublin carpet shop), although he suffered a temporary setback when he broke both legs in a crash at the Mallory Park circuit in Leicestershire in 1975. He bounced back in Formula Atlantic, and won the Irish Formula Atlantic title in 1978.

He then moved to England and, now married to Marie McCarthy (a former basketball player for Ireland), tried his luck in Formula Three, but with little success. He decided to switch from driver to team owner, and formed Eddie Jordan Racing (EJR) in 1979.

The team enjoyed a standout season in F3 in 1983, when their driver Martin Brundle came a close second to the gifted Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna. “We so nearly won the championship because we psyched Senna, and he started to make mistakes,” Jordan said.

In 1987 Johnny Herbert won the British F3 title with EJR, then in 1989 EJR’s new signing, the French driver Alesi, won the F3000 title. Herbert had now entered F1 with the Benetton team, and Alesi followed suit with Tyrrell (assisted by Jordan’s sponsorship contacts with the Camel cigarette brand).

This inspired Jordan to make the leap to F1 himself. He assembled a team including the designer Gary Anderson, and attracted sponsorship from Marlboro, 7UP and the Irish government.

He signed up the drivers Andrea de Cesaris and Bertrand Gachot, who racked up some solid results before Gachot was involved in a bizarre road-rage incident at Hyde Park Corner in London in which he sprayed a taxi driver with CS gas. This earned Gachot a prison sentence, and as replacement Jordan signed Schumacher for his F1 debut.

Schumacher only drove once for Jordan, at Spa in Belgium, but his performance was so sensational that he was scooped up by the Benetton team, even though Jordan apparently had a watertight contract with him. The episode highlighted the machiavellian politics lurking behind the glamorous facade of F1.

Jordan had numerous interests outside motor racing, building up a substantial property portfolio as well as being a shareholder in Celtic FC and co-owner of the London Irish Rugby Club. He had investments in gaming and entertainment businesses, and launched his own V-10 vodka and the energy drink EJ-10. He also owned several luxury yachts.

He was a patron of the child cancer charity CLIC Sargent and the youth charity the Amber Foundation. In 2012 he was appointed an honorary OBE for his services to charity and motor racing. His autobiography, An Independent Man, was published in 2007.

On Jordan’s death, Ecclestone commented: “Eddie was a special guy. Tell me which team principal today is like him. You can’t give me one because there isn’t one. They don’t make them like that now. We will never replace him in Formula One.”

He is survived by Marie and their children, Zoe, Miki, Zak and Kyle.

🔔 Edmund Patrick Jordan, motor racing entrepreneur, driver, businessman and broadcaster, born 30 March 1948; died 20 March 2025

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Vanity Fair's Wild About Harry Mea culpa for launching MeGain Markle & publishing her propaganda

"Inside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Big Business Ambitions, 5 Years After Their Royal Exit | Vanity Fair"

FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE

Inside Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Big Business Ambitions, 5 Years After Their Royal Exit

Ensconced in their cozy Montecito mansion, the Sussexes are living the American dream. By all accounts, the love is real. But their foray into moguldom has not always been a smooth ride.

BY ANNA PEELE

JANUARY 17, 2025

The house proved it: The Duke and Duchess of Sussex could have it all. Their Montecito home offered all the fresh promises of a 21st-century California mansion and the cloistering of a gated neighborhood from which they could emerge on their own terms. In the house’s 13 fireplaces, described as “mostly centuries old examples brought over from France,” there was even some European history, stripped of any potentially uncomfortable context.

At $14.65 million for more than 18,000 square feet, half the current median price per square foot in Montecito, Rockbridge was a steal. The oligarch owner’s romantic relationship had deteriorated to the point where he was compelled to offload far below market value, according to a source with knowledge, and the property seemed just right for the duke and duchess, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. It was the perfect launchpad for Archewell, their nonprofit and entertainment studio—an approximation of a part noblesse oblige, part aspiring independently wealthy mogul model, one that Elizabeth, Charles, and William rejected by fiat during the January 2020 “Sandringham Summit.”

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex during the Royal Salute Polo Challenge, to benefit Sentebale, at the USPA National Polo Center in Wellington, Florida, on Friday April 12, 2024.PA IMAGES/ALAMY.

This January marks five years since that failed parley. Leaving the royal family has brought tests for the couple—legal, financial, reputational, personal, and practical. Going from divinely chosen (or at least chosen by someone else who was divinely chosen) members of a 1,200-year-old institution to start-up founders in exile is a tough adjustment. But there has also been opportunity. Over many months, Vanity Fair spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and lived alongside the couple to understand the impact they’ve had on their new coastal California community, the challenges of enacting the ambitions of two first-time CEOs, and how their experience with the monarchy foreshadowed some of their current difficulties. (Harry and Meghan declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Harry still works closely with the charities he founded: the Invictus Games Foundation and Sentebale, an organization focusing on “mental fitness” and the impact of poverty and HIV/AIDS in southern African countries. “He has real gravitas when he speaks about his work in Africa,” says someone inside the couple’s circle. And he is free from “Willy,” as well as the future king’s supposed dominion over that continent, as Harry confessed in his 2023 memoir, Spare. “Africa was his thing,” Harry said. Archewell also encompasses Meghan’s efforts to empower and educate young women, like the 40x40 initiative, where for her 40th birthday she asked 40 well-known friends, such as Melissa McCarthy and then first lady of Canada Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, to each spend 40 minutes on Zoom mentoring a woman returning to the workplace in the wake of the pandemic. On March 14 of last year, the fourth anniversary of their flight to California, Meghan rejoined Instagram to announce American Riviera Orchard, a home goods and sundries line. The Sussexes have announced Meghan’s second podcast, though not the title or premise of it. Archewell Productions also recently produced two high-profile Netflix series—a docuseries called Polo, which premiered December 10 and features the world of Harry’s buddy Nacho Figueras, and the reality show With Love, Meghan. The latter is a hospitality endeavor that, according to the Netflix promotional language, “reimagines the genre of lifestyle programming, blending practical how-to’s and candid conversation with friends, new and old.” Three days before her show’s scheduled premiere date of January 15, Meghan announced that the series would be pushed to March 4 “as we focus on the needs of those impacted by the wildfires in my home state of California.” The couple has been volunteering amid the crisis in Los Angeles and donating to people displaced by the fires, as well as taking in friends who had to evacuate their own homes.

“They have this naivete and their hopefulness about what’s possible in terms of storytelling and good works and all those things,” says producer Jane Marie, who collaborated with the couple while they developed audio projects at Archewell and later produced a podcast with Michelle Obama. “I wish I had that kind of optimism.”

Optimism abounded as the couple embarked on their Spotify deal in 2020, both for them and for those who were coming in to help do the work. “I thought that I had the role of a lifetime,” says a person who worked in media projects, who was a “fan” going in and eager to make the type of life-changing content Harry and Meghan seemed to want to create. “I thought I was gonna be besties with Meghan and Harry and we were gonna, like, run around the world saving people.”

Interest in the couple was unslakable. But it remained to be seen whether they were actually interesting, beyond Harry’s uniquely difficult upbringing and Meghan’s years of defending herself from shoddy treatment and racism, whether in the British press or from members of her husband’s family. As one former Spotify employee put it, “The thing you’re escaping is the reason you’re compelling.”

Those stories would be meted out in different media: breathless reports of a $20 million Penguin Random House contract (Spare) and $100 million partnership with Netflix (Harry & Meghan). (According to a representative for Netflix, “We don’t disclose our financial deals with talent, but I can confirm to you on the record that the $100M figure is not correct.”) On the August 2022 cover of The Cut Meghan did to promote her first—and only—Spotify podcast, Archetypes, she said, “I’m, like, so excited to talk,” and “It’s like I’m finding—not finding my voice. I’ve had my voice for a long time, but being able to use it.” When repeatedly asked by the interviewer what she wanted to say with her newly free voice, Meghan demurred. “I have a lot to say until I don’t. Do you like that? Sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song,” she said, noting, “I’ve never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking. I can talk about my whole experience and make a choice not to.” (One of the people who spoke with VF for this story says they signed a nondisclosure agreement to be employed by Harry and Meghan.) A person who worked closely with the couple and “loves them” says, “I have no idea what [Harry’s] interests are beyond polo. No clue what his inner life is like.”

The development process was challenging. The former Spotify employee says, “They had this idea to do a podcast because they knew celebrities did them,” a category differentiated between celebrities who get a lot of money to begin podcasting, like Harry and Meghan, and celebrities who get large deals after proving themselves to be capable podcasters, like Smartless’s Will Arnett, Sean Hayes, and Jason Bateman. The former Spotify employee says Harry and Meghan “didn’t do what celebrities do on podcasts, which is turn on the mic and talk. They wanted a big theme that would explain the world, but they had no ideas.” Someone who worked closely with them on audio projects disputes this version, lamenting that because of Meghan and Harry’s insistence on silence from employees and their own reticence, the public doesn’t know about good projects that had to be abandoned for practical reasons. “It feels like the only story is ‘They didn’t satisfy their contract,’” she says. “It’s not like work wasn’t being done.”

As time passed—it would be nearly two years between the couple’s deal being signed and the premiere of Archetypes—Spotify began applying pressure to produce something (anything!) that people might listen to.

People involved with production say the couple did trial runs on some big ideas, like a This American Life–style show where Harry and Meghan took turns hosting and talking to interesting civilian guests. As Bloomberg reported, Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. The concept wasn’t just that the men shared challenging early lives; it was that their experiences made them into sociopaths, or so Harry envisioned, one person familiar with the ideation process says. (The person who worked in media confirms there was a “sociopath podcast.”) The person who worked closely with the couple on audio projects recalls Harry saying, “I have very bad childhood trauma. Obviously. My mother was essentially murdered. What is it about me that didn’t make me one of these bad guys?” To implore a season’s worth of world-famous sociopaths to talk about how they developed sociopathy would be what is referred to in access journalism as “a booking challenge.”

As time passed—it would be nearly two years between the couple’s deal signing and the premiere of Archetypes—Spotify began applying pressure to produce something (anything!) that people might listen to. The former Spotify employee says Harry came to the Los Angeles office once and asked for a cup of cocoa. There was none in the office, so employees scrambled to obtain some. An idea was pitched to Harry—what if he reviewed a hot chocolate every week while chatting with a different friend?—which he and his team considered and rejected. Another concept was that Harry would “fix” something every week, ranging from a flat tire to global warming. “He wanted to do a podcast about disabled people who compete in the Invictus Games,” the former Spotify employee says. “But there’s no crossover between the audience who would listen to that and people who want to hear about Harry’s life.” (Harry and Meghan did produce a 2023 Netflix docuseries called Heart of Invictus, which significantly underperformed Harry & Meghan.)

The former Spotify employee says it was challenging to engage Harry, and a person who interviewed for a job with the couple says, “I just felt like he kind of didn’t want to be there doing that at this time.... My expectation was ‘charming receiving line.’ And it was clear he wasn’t that person. At least that day.” And at least in the context of a hiring manager: A person who worked on an event during Harry’s book tour says he has the “greatest manners I’ve ever seen. Hands down. Like I can’t believe his knees are as supple as they are. He was getting up and down anytime somebody walked into a room.... He was unfailingly kind and friendly to everyone.”

During the interview, the potential employee says, Harry’s attitude was either “Well, why should I do this?” or “Why are we doing this?” The interviewee says they wondered, “Didn’t Spotify pay you a lot of money to do this?” The person inside the couple’s circle says, “He looks like the kind of guy who would, frankly, happily work for charities for the rest of his life and would be very happy if Meghan made all the money and he didn’t need to.”

On his self-titled podcast, Bill Simmons described his own experience working with the Sussexes at Spotify. “The Fucking Grifters. That’s the podcast we should have launched with them,” Simmons said. “I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try and help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories.… Fuck them. The grifters.”

Harry and Meghan became increasingly nervous about how their content would impact them. Marie says, “I can say that they had really great ideas for shows, interesting pitches, interesting guests. But them as the deliverers or either of them as the hosts of these more kind of edgy ideas would have been like…they would have had to move again. I think it’s a combination of self-censorship for good reason and the corporate powers that be that run podcasting that don’t know what that is [to create valuable shows]. In combination, those things make it really hard to make good stuff.” The person who worked in media projects imitates the thought process behind any decision about the couple’s projects: “Well, he has a million things that he has to protect, and he has the book, and they have the documentary, and they don’t want to make the queen upset, and their public image.…”

That source says the idea for Archetypes came from another employee—not Meghan—though the employee didn’t own any of the intellectual property. Archetypes began production in January 2021. Though the former Spotify employee says the initial expectation was that Archewell would handle production for the series, the process took so long that Spotify’s studio Gimlet was called in. A source familiar with the production of Archetypes says this required additional cost to and resources from Spotify, though a current Spotify employee refutes that the extra support was a burden. (Virtually the entire Gimlet team would be laid off in the year following Archetypes’s release, but employees blame mismanagement at Spotify rather than any individual project.)

The former Spotify source says, “Archetypes was complicated as a podcast concept. You had to explain what the archetype was, then why the woman embodied it, but also how it wasn’t true about her. Every episode was like, ‘This is my friend who has been called that archetype but is not that archetype.’” These archetypes—actually stereotypes—included diva (Mariah Carey) and bimbo (Paris Hilton and Iliza Shlesinger). As for those “friends,” there was an expectation that Meghan would be able to use her personal Rolodex to book the show, the way hosts like Simmons and the Pod Save America guys do. The person who worked in media projects says the assumption was, “Meghan’s gonna be on the phone with the pope tomorrow.” The former Spotify employee says in addition to Taylor Swift, they heard rumors that Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion were asked to come on the show and declined. (Other people who worked on the podcast also say they heard those names mentioned, though a source close to the situation says Megan Thee Stallion’s team knew nothing about any request.)

According to the source in media projects, Meghan would agree to provocative ideas and then walk them back. In one episode, she wanted to actually say the word bitch because, as the source remembers Meghan saying, “You hear it all the time.” It ended up with Meghan calling it “the B-word.” An episode titled “Slut,” intended to center on how trans women’s sexuality is used against them, was retitled “Human, Being” by Meghan and had to be completely reimagined late in production. “Every episode got more and more watered down and further away from actual conversation,” the source says. “It felt like very Women’s and Gender Studies 101 taught in 2003.” (Though the Spotify contract has widely been reported as worth $20 million, two sources told VF such deals are generally not paid out in lump sums; in other words, the couple would not likely have received the full amount without meeting benchmarks beyond making one 12-episode season of a podcast. Spotify does not comment on deal terms.)

The issues extended into the actual workplace. Terry Wood, an executive vice president at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions, was brought in to be what Meghan would later call her “right hand” when Archetypes won a People’s Choice Award in 2022. The source familiar with the production of Archetypes describes Wood’s anger, saying that she yelled at Spotify staffers when Meghan changed her mind about episodes. (Wood did not respond to VF’s request for comment.)

The source who worked in media projects says Meghan’s own relationships with employees tended to follow a familiar pattern. She would be warm and effusive at the beginning, engendering an atmosphere of professional camaraderie. When something went poorly, often due to Meghan and Harry’s own demands—such as a teaser for Archetypes being released five months before the show premiered and before there was any tape to promote—Meghan would become cold and withholding toward the person she perceived to be responsible. The source says it was “really, really, really awful. Very painful. Because she’s constantly playing checkers—I’m not even going to say chess—but she’s just very aware of where everybody is on her board. And when you are not in, you are to be thrown to the wolves at any given moment.” In practice, they say, that manifested as “undermining. It’s talking behind your back. It’s gnawing at your sense of self. Really, like, Mean Girls teenager.” Marie had a different experience with Meghan: “She’s just a lovely, genuine person,” she said.

The person who worked in media projects read stories in the tabloids about Meghan “bullying” palace aides and couldn’t imagine such behavior actually happened. After working with her, though, this person realized, “Oh, any given Tuesday this happened.” While it beggars belief that Meghan actually shouted at a palace aide, as has been reported, a person who interacted with her professionally says, “You can be yelled at even if somebody doesn’t raise their voice. [It’s] funny that people don’t differentiate between the energy of being yelled at and literally somebody screaming at you.”

Two sources say a colleague with ties to Archetypes took a leave of absence after working on three episodes, then left Gimlet altogether. Several others described taking extended breaks from work to escape scrutiny, exiting their job, or undergoing long-term therapy after working with Meghan. The person who interacted professionally with her says, “I think if Meghan acknowledged her own shortcomings or personal contributions to situations rather than staying trapped in a victim narrative, her perception might be better.” They added, with the soggy laugh of a plebe rendering judgment on the Duchess of Sussex, “But who am I to criticize Meghan Markle? She’s doing great.”

It’s hard to imagine how someone who seems so earnestly intent on being kind and engaging in world-improving (if also brand-building) activities could wind up engaging in revanchism with people so below her in status. A partial answer might be found in an episode of Archetypes in which Meghan interviews Mindy Kaling, who assumed Meghan was popular as a child. While attending Immaculate Heart Catholic school in Los Angeles, Meghan tells Kaling, “I never had anyone to sit with at lunch. I was always a little bit of a loner and really shy and didn’t know where I fit in. And, and so I just became, I was like, okay, well, then I’ll become the president of the multicultural club and the president of sophomore class and the president of this and French club. And by doing that, I had meetings at lunchtime. So I didn’t have to worry about who I would sit with or what I would do because I was always so busy.” (It brings to mind Swift’s “Mastermind” lyrics: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”)

In other words, Meghan was a good person trying to do good things in spite of—and at times because of—unkind people. The person familiar with the production of Archetypes says at least one employee who had a terrible experience got a handwritten thank-you note and gift from Meghan. Is it any surprise that a sense of victimhood and righteousness could continue to exist in a person who had been treated so horribly by the press and her husband’s family? (Not to mention those little B-words at Immaculate Heart.) That people whom Meghan may have perceived as enemies or interlopers—members of the loathsome media, or insiders at the palace, or people who actually knew how to make a podcast, or her pitiable father and half sister selling her secrets and history to tabloids for cash—might have seemed more powerful than her in some way, despite her immense fame and wealth and privilege? And then whatever happened to them, well…they shouldn’t have gotten between Meghan and her good work. As Harry knows, trauma can warp your perspective.

Spare, Harry’s best-selling and beautifully written (by J.R. Moehringer) memoir, chronicles the prince’s lonely former life with MRI-level self-examination—if not always top-tier self-awareness. Harry recounts an anti-poaching trip to Namibia in which he insisted on sleeping outdoors despite his team telling him, “We just saw proof that there are lions out here, boss.” Harry claims everyone with him—including a bodyguard, local police, a ranger, and Namibian soldiers who were all there to protect him—went to bed in their tents or trucks rather than staying up to ensure he wasn’t eaten by lions in the night. The book also discusses in great detail Harry’s issues with his family, opening on his reunion with now King Charles and Prince William, who in addition to “beloved brother” Harry describes as his “arch nemesis,” possessing a “familiar scowl” and “alarming baldness.” It doesn’t get more flattering for Willy in the ensuing pages.

At an event in 2023, someone privately asked Harry if he’d heard from his family. He said he hadn’t. This person asked Harry if he thought he was going to, and he said he hoped so. “That’s sort of what made me so sad,” the source says. “His hope seemed very genuine. And I was just kind of like, ‘Oh, no.’ ” The source believed Harry hadn’t absorbed the gravity of what it would mean to sell millions of copies of a tell-all book about a famously insular and circumspect family in the middle of a years-long public relations crisis. “The power of the written word, and the power of the narrative…” this person went on. “I don’t know if that’s something he understood while he was doing it.”

In addition to painting Dorian Gray–style personal portraits of family members, in Spare, Harry accuses the offices of his brother, father, and Camilla of briefing the press against Harry to distract from or trade away negative stories about themselves. Harry sued the publisher of the Daily Mail for libel for publishing an article in 2022 that said Harry tried to conceal his efforts to obtain taxpayer-funded security, but the prince ultimately dropped the case, and a judge ordered Harry to pay the Mail’s publisher nearly 50,000 pounds in legal fees.

Harry is currently involved in two other lawsuits that further alienate him from his home country and its tabloid media. He is moving forward with an invasion of privacy case against Sun publisher News Group Newspapers, which follows a settlement from Mirror Group Newspapers for a phone-hacking charge. But more isolating is the suit regarding state police protection for him and his family when they are in Britain, which Harry, Meghan, and their older child, Archie, were stripped of when they left the UK in 2020. There are clear dangers to the family’s safety—a person who worked closely with them says strangers take Lyfts to their house, and in 2023 the couple was involved in what a spokesperson called a “near catastrophic car chase” with paparazzi. (There were no injuries, collisions, or charges filed.) The person who interacted with Harry in 2023 also described a “very scary paparazzi situation” after employees at the hotel where Harry was staying allegedly tipped off photographers to his presence. Nevertheless, the High Court in London twice struck down the UK lawsuit. Harry is appealing.

According to someone familiar with Harry and Meghan, the legal case was at least part of the reason Harry didn’t attend the June wedding of his longtime friend Hugh Grosvenor, ​​Duke of Westminster. The source says if he’d come back for the event, it could have imperiled his claim that he needs government-funded protection. “‘Well, you were here in May and you were absolutely fine attending a wedding,’” the source says, imagining the response in court. “So I’m sure a lot of the decisions about time in the UK are also being made based on how it looks for the case.”

Of course, there’s also Willy. The source says that after invitations went out, Harry and Grosvenor had a conversation. (Vanity Fair has also reported that Harry may not have formally been invited.) The source says they discussed Harry’s discomfort at the thought of being re-mired in the familial claustrophobia of Windsor turf. “It suddenly becomes all about the brothers, and did they look at each other, and how close were they stood?” the source says. Which is exactly what happened at Charles’s 2023 coronation and their uncle Lord Robert Fellowes’s funeral in August.

You can imagine the Zapruder-footage-level scrutiny by the press. The source says they miss Harry, or at least the person they pretended he was in their papers. “I think with a lot of the reporters they like the version of Harry that they helped create,” they say, describing how they would reminisce about when Harry would come over and pal around with them. “Yes, but he also, when you left, would make fun of you all behind your backs and hated you guys.”

“They are so hot for each other,” according to a person who worked closely with the couple. “Like, you know how you meet those couples where you’re like, the way they’re looking at each other, I should probably not be here right now?”

But who is the real Harry, now that he’s been released from the zoo in which he was raised? By one telling, the person who interacted professionally with Meghan says he’s socially marooned beyond his nuclear family. “She was up-front about the fact that Harry hadn’t made many friends yet,” the source says of Meghan’s assessment of her husband. The person who worked in media projects with the couple also has a guess. “I think Harry doesn’t know what he wants because he grew up in a fishbowl, and so he doesn’t know what real life really is,” they say. “I think he probably wants to be left alone and be able to go kiss babies every once in a while but not have to worry about money. I don’t think he wants to be famous the way Meghan wants to be famous.”

Harry and Meghan are, in the estimation of everyone Vanity Fair spoke with, deeply in love. “They are so hot for each other,” the person who worked closely with them said. “Like, you know how you meet those couples where you’re like, the way they’re looking at each other, I should probably not be here right now?” When Harry is solo, the person inside the couple’s circle says, “he’s very personable, he’s very at ease with people, quite like Diana... he just has this way of, like, making people feel very comfortable.” When he’s in public with Meghan, “there is a circus,” the source says. “He’s so protective of her because people are so nasty to her.... It’s a whole different experience.”

Harry has explicitly drawn parallels between his wife and his late mother. “My deepest fear is history repeating itself,” Harry wrote in a 2019 statement about Meghan’s treatment by the press. “I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditised to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces.”

While Harry is vigilant about Meghan’s safety, the person who worked closely with them says Meghan’s role in their dynamic is caregiver and facilitator; she’s the one who makes things happen. “Pre-Meghan,” says the person familiar with the couple, “Harry would just pop in [to the palace press office], ask a few questions, and leave, like he was a little bored but also very keen.” It’s almost impossible to imagine today’s Harry willingly engaging with the media in search of purpose. The source who worked with Harry and Meghan says, “I can picture him meeting Meghan and being just a deep breath of, like, ‘I’ve been so exhausted, and you make everything so easy.’... I don’t want to be like, oh, it’s an Oedipus thing or whatever, but it kind of feels like she’s reparenting him in a way.”

It’s easy to imagine a folie à deux emerging from the singular blend of circumstances: a need to believe in each other and the primacy of their relationship in the face of shared trauma and the real obstacles they encountered as they idealistically endeavored to break the wheel, while occasionally breaking the spirits of those tasked with executing their shared vision. “You don’t” tell them no, the person who worked in the couple’s media projects said. “I left because I couldn’t live with myself anymore.”

This intracouple permission to stray from other people’s realities may have led to some of the points of contention that people bring up when questioning Meghan’s fidelity to emotional truth above literal truth: her assertions that she neither googled Prince Harry nor looked up the etiquette for meeting the Queen of England and didn’t know she was supposed to curtsy until the ride over.

“Meghan is the type of woman who would check a menu out online before going to a restaurant to pick what she was going to eat,” says Tom Fitzgerald, a fashion and cultural commentator who, with his husband, Lorenzo Marquez, comprise the brand Tom and Lorenzo. (A resident of Montecito who ate lunch in the same restaurant as Meghan said the server told her Meghan had called ahead to ask about the privacy of the seating arrangement.) “So the idea that she didn’t know she was supposed to curtsy for the queen, I just didn’t find it particularly believable, because [based on] everything she ever told us about herself, I cannot imagine that she went into meeting the royal family completely cold, with no research whatsoever.” Fitzgerald also points to Meghan’s repeated claims that she was forced to wear neutrals during her time in the palace in order to avoid upstaging or competing with Queen Elizabeth and other senior members of the family, noting that Meghan’s wardrobe is now primarily composed of that palate.

A royals reporter believes that Meghan assumed her husband’s vision rather than researching the job of being a royal, and the reporter has a more positive view of the folie. “Oh, that’s such a good idea for a successful marriage,” the reporter says. “It’s a terrible idea for a job, but...if you’re joining this big network of people, you’ve got to see this through your husband’s eyes, be your husband’s advocate in it. And it’s no wonder this relationship works, even if the family business part of it fell apart.”

It’s a charming (if Freudian) dynamic—a husband and wife who organize each other’s lives and well-being, who flirt and hold hands and want the world to be a better place, even to the exclusion of evidence that suggests their well-meaning way of disrupting institutions is not always the best approach. That instinct to do things as Harry and Meghan believed they should be done, rather than how they are typically accomplished, was exacerbated during their time as senior working royals. It led to conflict with Harry’s family and palace staff, the reporter says, because Harry “doesn’t understand himself. He doesn’t understand a monarchy. His family didn’t do a very good job of inculcating him into the family legend partially because he didn’t care; partially because he was just kind of abandoned at the age of eight.”

However, the couple’s regal charisma while effortlessly changing the world has been showcased to great effect on their most successful reimagining of monarchy x Markle: Harry and Meghan’s common royal tours, to Nigeria in May and Colombia in August. “Invictus Games for sure is a very clear product, a brand, an organization that Harry spent a decade building, which is why in many ways I think the Nigerian tour worked,” says Elaine Lui, the celebrity commentator behind Lainey Gossip. “When they appear together in non-Invictus circumstances, that’s when people are like, I’m not really clear what they’re representing here.” That’s contrasted with an actual royal tour, when individuals are acting on behalf of the sovereignty and its various causes; or, as Lui points to, an independent actor like Angelina Jolie, who went to places like Afghanistan and Ukraine with the backing of the United Nations Refugee Agency. (In September, Harry appeared in front of a small group at the United Nations in New York to highlight issues in Lesotho, one of the countries where his charity Sentebale focuses its efforts.) Lui says, “She could leverage the history and the reputation of a very established philanthropic organization to say, ‘Hey, I’m lending my celebrity to this cause and in raising this awareness, we can actually attach the effect or the results to the UNHCR.’ ” With the gauzier parts of Meghan and Harry’s tours—what Harry called the “reasons to meet the people at the heart of our work”—Lui says the question is how are they helping anyone, and how is Archewell distinguishing itself from any other foundation? After raising more than $13 million in 2021, according to public disclosure forms, the charity grossed $2 million in 2022. The nonprofit has not yet shared its 2023 or 2024 revenue. “Yes, it has them as spokespeople,” Lui says. “But they haven’t had yet—because it’s still quite new—a track record of being able to make philanthropic achievements independent of the palace.”

How complete that independence is is another point that rankles people about Meghan and Harry. If you still use a title and descend upon commonwealth or developing countries and let little girls curtsy to you, as one did to Meghan in Colombia, it doesn’t seem like you’ve totally left the monarchy behind. It also doesn’t give you a lot of room to critique it.

The Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan litigates in painstaking detail Harry’s and Meghan’s mental health declines as she was bullied at the very least in sight of, and by many accounts at the behest of, an imperialist establishment. Yet this doesn’t seem to sour them to the idea of participating in a hereditary bloodline. In the doc, Harry says that during their last week as working senior royals, the couple, ruing the circumstances of their exit, kept telling each other, “We would have carried on doing this for the rest of our lives.” When Charles ascended the throne after Elizabeth’s death, the couple’s children became Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. Some people familiar with the production of Archetypes and Harry’s book tour said they were instructed to address the couple as sir or ma’am, though the request was dropped in one instance after the person pushed back. (Other people say they were encouraged by Harry and Meghan to call them by their first names.) “I think ultimately it’s cachet and sets them apart as different and special,” the source familiar with the couple says. “In the US, success, money, fame, all of that stuff exists out here. But a blood title, it’s few and far between.” (Many members of Meghan’s current inner circle—which includes Kaling; Figueras’s wife, socialite Delfina Blaquier; Tracy Robbins, the fashion designer and wife of Paramount Global co-CEO Brian Robbins; and parenting influencer and activist Kelly McKee Zajfen—are basically living by the rules of “American aristocracy,” according to Lui. They “stay behind the scenes…wield their power quietly…[and] look down on people who are very public, too thirsty.” On the other hand, all of the aforementioned are slated to appear on With Love, Meghan.)

A Black studies scholar who is also an African American woman noted the way racism is discussed in Harry & Meghan: as the one-off actions of Princess Michael of Kent wearing a blackamoor brooch to a brunch where Meghan was present, or the distant colonialism that still furnishes the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster and the jewels in the family’s tiaras, or Harry saying that the royal family merely had “unconscious bias.” “It’s a very common discursive move,” the scholar says. “Locating racism in individual bad actors or locating it in the past.... Queen Elizabeth becomes a kindly grandmother. She’s in the back of a car [or] her carriage, under a blanket. There’s that story, which is really kind of sweet that Meghan tells in the documentary, but [it] can’t connect that with the larger ideology of England—and thereby Queen Elizabeth—being like, ‘We are the natural rulers of the world.’ And that includes the segregation of people of color.” The cultural critic says this framing makes it so Meghan and Harry “can tell the story of being victims of the system, but it’s all about them being disenfranchised from whiteness and white privilege.”

The couple repeatedly expressed frustration in Harry & Meghan that Meghan wasn’t tapped as an asset for upholding the crown’s international interests in an era when Prince William was tasked with expressing “profound sorrow” for the “appalling atrocity of slavery” during a tour to Jamaica. As historian David Olusoga says in the docuseries, “Part of what makes the inability of the palace to defend Meghan an even bigger disaster is that the center of the argument for the monarchy in this country is the commonwealth. The commonwealth is 2.5 billion, mainly Black and brown people. Here was a woman who looked like most of the people in the commonwealth.” Harry speaks shortly after and says the palace and its denizens “have already missed an enormous opportunity with my wife and how far that would go globally.” The source familiar with the couple says it’s important to note that Harry isn’t an anti-monarchist. “He just didn’t like the way things were run within the institution,” he says. “His issues are about people and behaviors, not tradition.”

The source, who is also a person of color, defends Meghan’s right to want a piece of the empire for herself. “If I was in the same position and I was treated the way I was by the institution, it wouldn’t stop me from still feeling that that title is mine and deserved,” they say. “If anything, it would feel like you’re giving in to the pressure to exclude you in the first place. So actually it would probably make me want it even more. Damn well I’m going to slap it on my kids’ names too.”

Natalie Portman, Jeff Bridges, John Carradine, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Jonathan Winters, Gwyneth Paltrow, Adam Levine, Jimmy Connors, T.C. Boyle, Leonardo DiCaprio, Neil Young and Daryl Hannah, Michael Keaton, and of course Oprah are among the many celebrities who have peacefully coexisted with other locals in Montecito, an unincorporated part of Santa Barbara County. When a Montecitan’s labradoodle ran up to a child and licked their ice cream, the kid’s father—Kardashian affiliate Scott Disick—ran up to the pet owner with concern; not because he was upset that the cone was ruined but to reassure the person that the ice cream was vegan and wouldn’t upset the dog’s stomach. Katy Perry has, per usual, had some legal real estate issues, and Ellen DeGeneres has become unpopular for her immaculate, usually off-market flips that have supposedly driven house prices up. “I think everyone, including the A-list celebs, would prefer that it’s not on the map like it is,” the Montecitan says. It’s a place where no one would ever “bother” a famous person beyond saying hello at the coffee shop, as they would to anyone else. One resident says Montecito’s defining characteristics are “quiet” and “neighborliness.”

The prince and “the starlet,” as the Montecitan calls her, have become local villains, according to several people who spoke with VF. They attribute the increase in housing prices to them as much as DeGeneres and point to out-of-towners coming in, driving too fast, and taking up all the street parking by local trails like the one Meghan was photographed hiking on while Harry was in the UK for Charles’s coronation. You can’t just walk into Lucky’s for dinner anymore. While the Montecitan says neither he nor his friends have ever met the couple (two others mentioned Harry biking in town), they popped up in the video for DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s vow renewal, and the Montecitan saw photos of Harry playing polo at a nearby field, which will also be featured in Harry’s Netflix docuseries. Meghan’s Netflix project was filmed at a house near theirs.

American Riviera Orchard—which on Instagram has a logo styled with a royal-looking crest and written in Meghan’s perfect calligraphy and is known internally as ARO—is located in Montecito. Though an 1898 book published by the Southern Pacific Company rail line states, “The Montecito is known as the American Riviera,” today that honor is understood to belong to Santa Barbara; no one Vanity Fair spoke with had ever heard Montecito referred to by the name. “It’s such a kind of hucksterism,” one resident says. “It’s just finding every way she can to monetize something.” And in doing so, bringing more attention to the place where the Sussexes say they want to be left alone. “I still think they’re the most entitled, disingenuous people on the planet,” the Montecitan says. “They moved away from England to get away from the scrutiny of the press, and all they do is try and get in the press in the United States.” Lui says the most common criticism she hears about Meghan (though she notes it’s true of Harry as well) is “you can’t cherry-pick the good parts and leave out the bad parts” of fame. However, she points out, “all celebrities do this. ‘Don’t take photos of me. Oh, but here, let me step out, conveniently, and get papped. Only give me good reviews of my movie or my album. And if you don’t like my music, I’m gonna post on Instagram that you’re so shitty as a reviewer.’ ”

Whether American Riviera Orchard will be well-received—or received at all, at least in name—remains to be seen. On August 31, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the trademark application: “Registration is refused because the applied-for mark is primarily geographically descriptive,” the response read. In other words, you can’t claim a place. (Tell that to Queen Victoria.) The same day, according to the New York Post, the office reportedly received a complaint from storied pear purveyor Harry & David regarding the similarity in name to its Royal Riviera line. As far as the substance of the brand, Lui says Meghan’s first lifestyle effort, The Tig, was popular in Lui’s circle in Toronto while Meghan was filming Suits there. However: “American Riviera Orchard to me is giving 2014. It’s not giving 2024,” she says. “Fame arrests you at the moment it arrives. And I wonder if that is your health-and-wellness-lifestyle version of that, where she had to suspend The Tig and quit it the moment that she became Harry’s girlfriend, then fiancée, and then his wife. American Riviera Orchard is maybe picking up from where The Tig left off.”

The source familiar with the couple says, “I think there’s one thing that no one could take away from Meghan is how hard she works, how much effort goes into everything that she does. Ultimately that’s all she needs. And I think that’s why American Riviera Orchard probably will be a massive success. Even if in two years’ time it doesn’t exist anymore and she’s on to the next, it will have that moment. There’ll be no way that you can say that it wasn’t successful.”

A few years ago a rumor began circulating around the book world about another prospective project for Meghan. This story, which a person with knowledge confirms the broad details of, was that Meghan’s team had a conversation with a publishing house to gauge interest in the idea for a potential book. The concept, for which there was no written or formal proposal, was post-divorce. Not a general book on life after marital dissolution, or one about Meghan’s past experience. (She was married to producer Trevor Engelson from 2011 to 2014.) This book—this notion of a book, really—might center on a post-Harry divorce. Not that there was actually one in the works! Just…if this a priori divorce ever came to be, would this publisher theoretically be interested in a book that took place in its aftermath? Another source with knowledge says, “If that’s true to any degree, she would have been approached and not vice versa.” No offer was ever made, and no manuscript was produced. After all: There was no divorce.

The source familiar with the couple says Meghan’s metabolism for campaigns that she can move on from—Archetypes, the ephemeral 40x40 mentorship program, the forthcoming lifestyle line and show, the wisp of a possible book about a divorce that might never happen—are part of why she’s better suited to celebrity outside the palace. “The royals don’t work like that,” the source says. “How many years has Kate been talking about early childhood development, like 11 now, 12? We still haven’t really seen anything.” (Princess Catherine launched Shaping Up, a campaign focused on “increasing public understanding of the crucial importance of the first five years of a child’s life.”)

In that time, Meghan has gone from star of a syndicated cable series to paradigm-changing princess to her husband’s conduit out of royal life to the founder of a hybrid charity–Hollywood start-up. She has earned as much faith in her own force of will as a sovereign might have from believing that they were anointed by God to lead.

As for what she’ll do with that power, look at what it means for her to make the world a better place, which she and Harry genuinely seem to want to do. Jameela Jamil, Chrissy Teigen, and Omid Scobie, the author of Finding Freedom (about Harry and Meghan’s time in and departure from royal life) and Endgame (about the ensuing years within the Windsor dynasty), have all publicly discussed Meghan unexpectedly reaching out during difficult times in their lives and offering solace, even though they weren’t close. Lui sees it as something Meghan took from her royal years, just as Harry has taken his impeccable manners and the ability to patronize the fuck out of a charity. “That’s what they do,” Lui says. “They bless you with their royalness, and that’s the gift. It’s not like Princess Diana was ever best friends with all the people that she visited in the hospital.”

“I think that they don’t know what ‘change the world’ means,” says the person who worked in media projects. “They want to be people who are looked at as people who want to change the world.” Maybe that’s why Meghan has continued—on Nick News, in The Tig, on panels, on Archetypes, in Colombia in August—to bring up the story of writing a letter to Procter & Gamble about a sexist soap ad, taking credit for them changing the spot so that it no longer suggested women should be the ones doing dishes. Procter & Gamble declined many requests from VF to confirm that Meghan was the impetus for the switch, and in 2021 the company partnered with Archewell with the goal of “elevat[ing] the voices of adolescent girls to ensure their point of view and lived experience is heard at the tables where decisions are made.” Whether or not Meghan’s letter is what prompted the change, the fact that more than 30 years later she continues to speak up about having spoken up suggests it’s the kind of mission she aspires to. Marie, who has worked with many celebrities, says of the Sussexes’ aspirations, “I think it’s actually better than where most people start out.”

To point out the modesty of that world-bettering feels like contributing to the essential problem of Harry and Meghan: No matter what they do, they just can’t win. (If, I guess, you don’t count the overwhelming portion of their beautiful lives that exists outside of Daily Mail headlines and blog comment sections.)

If Harry’s burden is the soft oppression of no expectations, Meghan’s might be the opposite: the betrayal of not living up to an unachievable ideal. “I think the whole world was waiting for her to be that person, and then she never jumped,” the source who worked in media says. “Diana walked amongst land mines. Meghan couldn’t even say the word slut.”

Anna Peele is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her culture writing looks seriously at subjects that are sometimes considered frivolous. Anna spent the first eight years of her career as an editor at men’s magazines, where she wrote a widely read Esquire cover story of Miles Teller

© 2025 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.

[hexpositive]

Hex Positive, Ep. 038 - Creating Your Personal Grimoire

Since magic and writing first existed together, there have been books of magic. Grimoires and other mystical tomes dot the historical record, from illuminated manuscripts to beloved props of modern pop culture. For the modern witch, a grimoire is as much a personal reference guide as it is a self-written textbook of the craft. This month, we’ll discuss how to build your own grimoire, with tips for staying organized, suggested topics, and a journaling exercise to get you started!

Partial Transcript

Additional Resources:

Wikipedia Article - Grimoire

Wikipedia Article - Book of Shadows

Wikipedia Article - Key of Solomon

Wikipedia Article - Pseudepigrapha

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Cited Podcast: Historical Blindness, Ep. 116 - The Key to the Secrets of King Solomon (May 02, 2023)

Visit Here Comes The Witch on tumblr for more grimoire inspo!

Harvest Witch Market

Sunday, Sept 17 2023, 12pm-6pm Diversity Richmond, 1407 Sherwood Ave, Richmond VA Hosted by River City Witch Markets

⁠Hex Positive is now on YouTube⁠!

Check my ⁠Wordpress⁠ for full show notes, as well as show notes for past episodes and information on upcoming events. You can find me as @BreeNicGarran on TikTok, Instagram, and Wordpress, or as @breelandwalker on tumblr. For more information on how to support the show and get access to early releases and extra content, visit my ⁠Patreon⁠.

Visit the ⁠Willow Wings Witch Shop⁠ to purchase my books and homemade accoutrements for your craft!

Proud member of the ⁠Nerd and Tie Podcast Network⁠.

MUSIC CREDITS

“Spellbound” & “Miri’s Magic Dance” Ad - "Danse Macabre - Violin Hook" and “Feelin’ Good” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[r-o-s-e-f-i-r-e]

hello……cleaning out my drafts just in case of you know what. here’s a crazy slice of nothing from december 2023

it’s not like eddie is the kind of puritanical self-hating assimilated gay who’s never encountered drag before. the only podcast he listens to regularly is trixie and katya’s. he watched pink flamingos at probably too young an age and it certainly stirred some kind of psychosexual awakening any therapist would have a field day with. hell, he knows his way around a fucking glue stick: gandalf big naturals hadn’t made an appearance on the scene in about a year, since the band took over the majority of his attention, but there’s still a tiktok up with 800k views of him grinding on gareth, dressed as gollum in a pair of lacy pink panties and the ring and nothing else.

to whit: eddie knows drag queens.

however: he can shamefully admit his knowledge of drag kings to be, unfortunately, rather sparse. just like some of the poorly shaded in eyeliner mustaches arrayed before him now, eddie thinks mournfully.

it was just that! in chrissy’s own words: the lesbians were at home. the handful of dyke nights across the city were few and far between and often poorly attended. the queers, chrissy said, wanted to play card games and make pasta from scratch using eggs they’d gotten at the farmers market and then go to bed at 9pm. this was simply factual and true! there was a serious lack of presence in the overall queer community, from what eddie had witnessed. or maybe eddie had just been more focused on blowing the first guy he could entice into the bathroom whenever he went out. whatever. the point was!

eddie could admit: he had never actually been to a drag king show before.

“it’s the recital,” chrissy had said, holding the flyer up to her face so that only her giant blue pleading eyes were visible. “i think — we’re all amateurs. duh. it’s not going to be, like, a professional drag brunch or anything. but i think it’ll be really cute and fun and will you come???”

“uh, DUH,” eddie had said, because he would swim in shark-infested waters for chrissy, let alone go to a tiny boardgame bar on a sunday night at the very reasonable hour of 7pm to watch her continue to break free of the shackles of compulsory femininity imposed upon her by her mother since birth. take that, laura! eddie thought, thrilled, when chrissy debuted her drag king persona in their living room the week before — a swaggering caricature of a james dean daydream, leather jacket, white tank top, dress pants, her hair slicked back. eddie had been expecting at first perhaps an inverse of her high school persona, shoulder pads and a jock strap. but no! taylor swift girlies will somehow continue to surprise you.

anyway. he’s got a dirty shirley with extra cherries and a prime seat in the second row with gareth and jeff posted up next to him. there’s a pretty good crowd, for a sunday night — chrissy had batted at his arm and squealed when she saw how many people had showed up, how all the seats had already been filled, many a septum-pierced tattooed blue-haired boygenius lover resigned to standing room only.

“there’s only seven of us, so it’s not going to be too late a night,” chrissy had said. “and then some alums will do a little performance! and then maybe steve, if we’re lucky!”

“steve?” eddie had said.

“okay, children,” the hottest person eddie has ever seen in his life drawls into the microphone, as the lights in the bar flicker pointedly. “please collect your drinks, tip our bartenders generously (a cheer from the all-goth bar staff) and make yo ur way to your seats, we’re going to kick things off in just a minute.”

eddie is lucky he’s already sitting down, because he processes exactly none of that. instead he stares at the queen’s bubblegum pink lips and big hazel eyes under a shimmering smear of teal eyeshadow and chews his paper straw into a pulp. the queen was made up in a perfect 80s pastiche — big teased out wig, an asymmetrical off the shoulder sweater, a big chunky belt, a tiny miniskirt over a pair of fishnets, slouchy little boots. the look she’s giving the audience is disapproving. arms crossed. a disdainful pop of gum wouldn’t be out of place. she has the longest legs eddie’s actually ever seen and eddie wants to kneel at her feet.