Mike White On Transcending Identity
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike White is a writer, director, and actor. Among his many films, he wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck and wrote the screenplay for School of Rock. In television, he co-created and starred in Enlightened, and he’s the brilliant auteur of The White Lotus, currently in its third season. In reality TV, he competed on Survivor: David vs. Goliath and two seasons of The Amazing Race, alongside his gay evangelical father, Mel White, whom I knew well before I came to admire his son’s work.
For three clips of our convo — on the humanism of The White Lotus, Mike finding Buddhism, and his courageous gay dad — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: growing up in the boring suburbs of Pasadena; attending a private school of rich kids; his mom a teacher and homemaker; Mel the minister and ghostwriter for famous televangelists; the productive pain of adolescence; Mike studying postmodernists like Judith Butler at Wesleyan; Mel coming out of the closet right after his kids left college; Soul Force; Mike’s power of observation; his love of Camille Paglia; Sexual Personae; the subtle psychological warfare in White Lotus; how its characters aren’t didactic; how identity politics is bad for art; the golden age of reality TV; Mel joining Falwell’s church with his partner; the pressure to be the model gay; the gay characters of South Park; Mike’s nervous breakdown; the humor and lightness in Buddhism; meditation; Oakeshott and the ordeal of consciousness; Orwell and the clarity of nonfiction; Jennifer Coolidge and the evil gays; Parker Posey; Sam Rockwell’s autogynephilic role; bro-cest; the mysteries of desire; Freud; how iPhones kill imagination; Mike’s veganism; how class gets eclipsed in wokeness; and the redeemable qualities in all the White Lotus characters.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nick Denton on China’s inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there. Welcome to an extremely special episode of the dishcast. |
| 0:35.7 | First of all, thank you for subscribing all of you who have subscribed. |
| 0:38.7 | We keep going up. |
| 0:40.6 | Close to 200,000 people now we send this out to every week, which is pretty bloody |
| 0:45.1 | wonderful, and we're so grateful, and thank you very much for it. |
| 0:48.5 | And no ads, no sponsors, no foundations, no one to corrupt my otherwise devious and demented mind. |
| 0:57.4 | It's all, it's all sincere here, however, misguided. And coming up, to give you some sense of |
| 1:04.7 | what's coming up, Evan Wilson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins, |
| 1:10.1 | on faith and science. |
| 1:11.6 | Douglas Murray can have some words with him about Mahmoud Khalil, but also on Israel, Gaza, America, blah, blah, blah. |
| 1:20.5 | This week, the creator of the best TV show in America right now, but also a man of a long history and very interesting |
| 1:31.2 | parts of his life and career. His name is Mike White, the writer, director, actor as well, |
| 1:38.2 | a really good actor. Among his many films he wrote and starred in Chuck and Buck. He also wrote |
| 1:43.8 | the screenplay for The School of Rocky, |
| 1:46.5 | not contented with doing all these things. |
| 1:48.7 | He also was on reality TV with his dad and Survivor, |
| 1:53.9 | an incredible show, |
| 1:56.5 | and he created my favorite, Enlightened, with Laura Dern, and of course, created The White Lotus, |
| 2:06.5 | which is everybody's favorite topic of conversation. |
| 2:11.1 | He's done very few podcasts. |
| 2:12.5 | I am incredibly grateful for having him on here. |
| 2:14.4 | So, Mike, thank you so much for coming on the discast. |
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