What I Watched: Back to Netflix Edition

It’s been a while since I binge-watched Netflix to the extent of recent weeks, but I’ve been working on some larger knitting projects and I find that I enjoy having shows running in the background while I knit. I prefer documentaries and comedy specials for that, because I listen to them without necessarily having to watch them. I’ve lost track of the number of specials I’ve seen, but they included:

– Ali Wong, Hard Knock Wide: as raunchy, or possibly more so, than her first special. I really enjoyed the show, but I think I liked Baby Cobra more – probably because I had no frame of reference for it, while Hard Knock Wife consequently had a high standard to live up to.

– John Mulaney, Kid Gorgeous: he’s not a “must watch” comic for me but this was pretty good.

– Amy Schumer, The Leather Special: kinda meh, to be honest. I felt like I was watching “Amy Schumer, Celebrity” rather than “Amy Schumer, Comic” which was kinda intriguing, but also kinda not as funny.

– Trevor Noah, Afraid of the Dark: I’m a sucker for anyone who can do a bunch of accents, so I liked this a lot. The bit at the end about Russian accents had me in tears. Full disclosure: I am one quarter Russian (hey, it counts), but I can’t do accents to save my life, and especially not a good Russian accent; I am now very sad about that.

Moving on, I watched a bunch of what I call “non-fiction TV”. Better known as “documentaries”. Can you tell that I had been on a reading kick until recently? Anyway, Dirty Money is excellent, you guys. It’s a docu-series that focuses on various financial and business scandals. I especially enjoyed the episodes on Valeant, payday lending, and Donald Trump.

I don’t often feel very strong negative emotions towards people, but I loathed Scott Tucker and his wife as soon as they started speaking. Their complete disregard for the suffering they caused to millions of people, combined with self-pity over Scott’s federal indictment and the loss of their ill-begotten gains, made me sick to my stomach. These people are poster children for what is wrong with capitalism, and I say that as a leaning-to-the-fiscal-conservative-side person.

Equally enraging was the Valeant story, which tested the limits of my conservative tendencies in a similar way. I understand how the pharma business operates, and the fact that a profit needs to be made to provide an incentive to spend money on potentially life-saving R&D. But to gouge exorbitant profits from a “captive market” (people dependent on your drugs to stay alive) without using any portion of that money towards advancing the public good? I simply cannot accept that as a justifiable business model – ethically, morally, whatever. It’s just despicable, and the people involved in that business who only see/care about the bottom line are equally despicable.

So it was interesting to follow up that episode of Dirty Money with Betting on Zero, a documentary about Herbalife. For those of you who don’t know, Herbalife is a multi-level marketing (MLM) company … also known as a pyramid scheme. Now, I consider MLMs to be as scummy as payday lending, so imagine my surprise when I saw a familiar face in an unexpected position.

(Don’t @ me if you’re involved with an MLM; I have no interest in debating this with you. #sorrynotsorry)

Let me back up. One of the biggest investors behind Valeant was the Pershing Square investment fund run by Bill Ackman. Ackman is some kind of Wall Street wunderkid, according to the Vanity Fair articles I binge-read after watching Dirty Money. He went out of his way to support Valeant and its CEO, even after information about its shady practices came to light. Valeant, by the way, has not dropped the prices on its drugs in the aftermath of the resulting public outcry; it is continuing to charge as much as $300,000 for a year’s supply of a life-saving drug that used to cost as little as a $1 a pill or something. Its stock price is in the toilet, however; were it not for the exorbitant prices it continues to charge, it would be bankrupt. Pershing Square lost a ton of money on its Valeant investment before finally selling its stake – which is a little bit of justice, I suppose.

Anyway, the same Bill Ackman shows up in Betting on Zero … because of his crusade against Herbalife. That’s right, Ackman became convinced (not without good reason, I might add) that Herbalife was an unethical pyramid scheme and decided to short their stock – in other words, to bet on the fact that their stock price would go to zero once the truth about their business practices was known and (Ackman believed) the government would take action against Herbalife. The documentary is based around the story of this “short” – which Ackman ended up losing. Even after an FDA investigation which concluded that Herbalife “was not not a pyramid scheme”, the company is chugging along, and expanding into new markets. It had to pay out some kind of settlement per the FDA ruling, but the amount was peanuts. (The documentary doesn’t cover this, but it’s worth digging into if you’re interested. I also recommend John Oliver’s segment on MLMs, which touches on it.)

What was amusing to me was Ackman’s self-positioning as an activist investor – i.e. someone who was pursuing this investment position (the short) almost as an ethical choice. A bit rich, I thought – excuse the pun – considering his stance on Valeant. I guess we all have our blind spots … or something.

So that was it for me, for now; if you have other documentary recc’s, send them my way because I have a lot more knitting on my hands. And tell me what you’ve been reading and watching lately.