S1M0NE • Member Bonus
April 30, 2026
Our April member bonus—and Thinking Machines series closer—digs into S1M0NE, Niccol’s 2002 satirical sci-fi about a director who builds a digital actress no one can let go of.
Pete Wright is a podcaster, author, and co-founder of TruStory FM. He's been behind a microphone for over thirty years and has logged thousands of episodes across three dozen shows covering film, ADHD, creative process, and the craft of storytelling. He spent fifteen years teaching graduate students and has consulted on brand communications for organizations ranging from global brands to one-person shops. His debut science fiction novella, Lattice, was published in 2026. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Pete has hosted as well as been a panelist on a number of episodes.
This page features episodes on which he has been a host.
See episodes where Pete has been a panelist right here.
Our April member bonus—and Thinking Machines series closer—digs into S1M0NE, Niccol’s 2002 satirical sci-fi about a director who builds a digital actress no one can let go of.
This week, Pete and Tommy make the case that modern medicine — mental and physical — is quietly performing miracles on us whether we asked for it or not. Turns out the hardest part isn’t the surgery. It’s trusting a stranger enough to let them rearrange your insides.
This week, Nick Fury — director of SHIELD, the world’s most powerful intelligence organization — attempts to covertly warn Captain America of a massive conspiracy by turning off the lights, displaying a phone with the words “EARS EVERYWHERE” in approximately 96-point font, and then speaking out loud, twice, using his own name, six feet from the agents who are actively monitoring him. It is, to put it charitably, a choice.
What if the threat is already inside? Tommy curates a triple feature about invaders that don’t need to knock — they’re already in the town, in the body, in the mind. Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation (2018), Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), and Tarsem’s The Cell (2000) — three films, three decades, three very different ideas about what gets in, and what it costs to get it out.
Your plans don’t fall apart because you’re broken. They fall apart because you’re planning like you don’t have ADHD. Pete and Nikki kick off a three-part planning series with a clear-eyed look at why every system you’ve tried has come up short, and why that is not a character flaw.
We close out Thinking Machines with Brian and Charles—a Welsh inventor, a washing machine robot, and a father-son story that splits us right down the middle.
Tommy found a therapist’s framework that explains exactly why housewarming gifts cause full-scale panic attacks, and it involves childhood, ransoms, and the specific misery of watching someone open what you bought them. Pete spent seventeen years avoiding dentists after a bad one did unnecessary work on his childhood teeth, and the statistics on why dentists do what they do are both infuriating and, ultimately, pretty hopeful.
Nick Fury attempts to go off the grid in Washington, DC, which is like trying to disappear at your own birthday party. Meanwhile, someone very dangerous is standing in the middle of the street, and he is in absolutely no hurry.
Mandy is broadcasting from Greece, where thousands of years of myth-making about heroes, gods, and monsters have made her absolutely certain the gang needs to figure out which god they worship, which hero they’d follow into a burning building, and why the shark in Jaws is the most terrifying monster in cinema precisely because it does not care about you at all.
Most fitness advice is written for people who can hold a plan in their heads and feel rewarded by incremental progress. That’s not ADHD. This week, Pete and Srdjan make the case that the gym might be the most powerful cognitive intervention for ADHD that doesn’t require a prescription — and explain exactly why the standard playbook keeps failing the people who need it most.