I saw this movie, Evil Does Not Exist, at the Toronto International Film Festival, and I was really

blown away by it, and in the year or so since then, it's only been rising in my estimation.

And I suggested this movie for the podcast for a couple of reasons. First of all, we just

watched a movie about James Carville, and I thought it was important to swing far in the other direction.

Let's get a little beauty. Let's move away from the streets of Washington, D.C. and into rural

Japan for a little bit. And secondly, this movie captures a little bit of what I'm feeling

lately about freedom, democracy, capitalism, and just the way things are.

Very happy that we watched it. I think it, you know, it rhymed with how I was feeling as well,

not just because having spent the past few hours thinking about James Carville, I really did want

to experience some beauty again. But because, you know, I think it falls into a category,

well, there's a few categories it falls into and a few things it's channeling that I think I've found

very appealing since my early 20s, at least. This is a film that is in some ways about sort of the

ineluctible march of modernity and civilization and the corrosion of human

relationships of the ecosystem broadly defined or various kinds of ecosystems that goes along with

that. This is a film that I think conveys really beautifully and I think this is where a lot of the

subtlety comes in. The experience of living in a sort of thick community, an experience that I think only a very

small number of human beings really still have.

I mean, it used to be many ways the default human experience, regardless of, you know,

what period in history a person lived or what part of the world they lived in.

You know, this is the modern version, you know, what the villagers in this film, the lives they live.

This is the modern version in many ways of how probably the majority of people have lived throughout the history of our species.

So relatively small communities, you know, fairly rural, kind of tight-knit,

...