Investigating The World Of Modern Gurus - Helen Lewis

1. 0:00 – 0:24

   Intro

   1. HLHelen Lewis0:00

      ... is her own sweet Canadian guy, who w- was a contestant on Canadian Idol, called Will Blunderfield. Just got off the phone with him, and I just thought, "What a sweet young man." But drinks his own piss. And not just his own piss, as it turns out. There's a whole video where he's like, "And it's got a little bit of pre-cum in it." And we had a long discussion about whether or not that was just simply too unpleasant (laughs) phrase to be airing on Radio 4, when people might be having th- their breakfast. We decided we were gonna keep it in.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:23

      How

2. 0:24 – 6:13

   Helen’s Interest in Weird Internet Sub-cultures

   1. CWChris Williamson0:24

      did you get interested in thinking about modern gurus?

   2. HLHelen Lewis0:30

      I wonder where the inspiration kinda came from, but I, I think I've always been a journalist who's been interested in the weirder parts of the internet. So I've spent a lot of time... I remember early in the 2000s, um, when I'd just come out of being a teenager, I spent a lot of time in body modification communities. There was a site called BM Ezine, which was, um, run by a kind of crazy Canadian called Shannon Larratt, and it was all full of either people having these really weird experimental tattoos and piercings or actually, in quite a lot of cases, like hammering nails through their nuts. Um, so from the very start, my interaction with the internet was a lot about being in the kind of weirder spaces, and I've always really enjoyed reporting on subcultures. So, it does feel kind of slightly strange to me that I'm right at the end of my 30s and I'm still doing, like, "Let's explain the internet to people." Um, you know, and I thought we might have got past that by now. But it is still a, it is still a viable job in journalism, and a really fun and interesting job in journalism.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:18

      Okay. And gurus are now their own subculture, m- many multiple subcultures on the internet, in your opinion?

   4. HLHelen Lewis1:25

      Well, every sort of, I think, pretty much every interesting sphere on the internet has its own set of gurus. And there are lots that I didn't get to in the series. You know, parenting is a really interesting one, right? I think when people are at moments of precarity or anxiousness, they want someone to tell them what to do, or want someone to assure them that they've been through the same thing. Um, and, you know, more and more of our connections are moving online. My big analysis of the last 20 years is we used to have these geographic communities, you know? Used to have to be friends with whoever lived in your town. And that's moved much more to most of our socializing based around interest communities. And so what you have is that you might not know the people who live in your street, but you know all the other furries or whatever it might be. And not that there are any furry gurus, I should just clarify that. I mean, sure there are, but I don't personally know of them. But, you know, parenting or wellness or productivity or whatever it might be, all the bits of your life, whether it's dating or working, money-making, who do we look to for advice now? Actually, sometimes it's our friends, but just as often it's someone on the internet.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:22

      I suppose as soon as you allow people to choose their own subculture, whatever it is that one person's going to get obsessed by and find interesting or compelling or whatever, there is inevitably going to be a person that is most effective at capturing the attention of the people who like that stuff, and they are then going to have incentives that align to encourage them to give out advice. Sometimes those incentives could be financial. Other times, they could be genuinely altruistic. Here is a unique medical condition that very few people have dealt with, and I have actually managed to find out a way that the medical system hasn't seen, and here, here is a potential solution for you, and then people are gonna hail them, and everything in between, from useful to useless.

   6. HLHelen Lewis3:05

      Yeah, I mean, childbirth and NCT groups, right? National Childbirth Groups are a really interesting example of that in the real world, which is that people who have just had a baby or just about to have a baby want a huge amount of advice, and their friends aren't necessarily going through the same experience at the same time and sort of aren't that interested, so they seek out these childbirth groups. However, if you ever have a friend who goes through that process, get ready for them to complain about the fact that there will be lots of, you know, people creeping into that who'll be, for example, you know, very anti-bottle feeding, for example, or might have very odd opinions on childhood vaccines. And yeah, as you say, there is always the problem of the kind of, the kind of... It's like the sound of, "I won't, don't wanna be a member of any club that would have me," kind of thing, right? Anybody who wants to be listened to, by definition, you should probably be quite suspicious of, um, because those people, you know, like narcissists, self-select very heavily.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:51

      Hmm. Where did the gurus come from, then? Is it a natural emergence in your opinion, or are people seeing the opportunity to jump on the back of a bandwagon? How many of them are altruistic versus how many of them are, um, pre-prepared, looking at this as an opportunity to give, make a name for themselves?

   8. HLHelen Lewis4:09

      That's a really good question, 'cause actually one of the things that consistently comes up along, across the series is the number of people who try and reinvent themselves across a number of different domains. So one of the people we talk about, episode six, is about something called day game, which is a pickup artist technique where you chat up w- You're smiling in a way that implies you've already had an interaction with this community. But for those who haven't, um, you know, you try and pick up women on, on the street and get them into bed very quickly. And one of the guys who was very big in this in the 2000s, late 2000s, early 2007, was a guy called Tom Terrero. And it was interesting talking to people who'd known him before he was Tom Terrero, when he was a guy called Tom Relish. He was at Oxford. He was a fairly nerdy percussion student, but he had been very much like a new atheist debate bro. Um, and he then, he'd completely fallen out of love with that and he'd become very religious, and he went and actually interviewed Richard Dawkins and felt that he'd really smacked Richard Dawkins down. And that made me laugh because in the previous episode about the IDW, I'd spoken to James Lindsay. Now, James Lindsay is... Let me get this the right way around. I think his middle name is actually Steven, but his pen name is James A. Lindsay because he started out as a new atheist writer in the American South, again, in the new atheist wave. Does that make sense? And like the A and the S are next to each other on the keyboard, so this was his like Superman Clark Kent level of disguise about who he really was. But he started out as a new atheist, and now he's, you know, funded by Christian conservatives. And, you know, you can see someone like Maajid Nawaz, another member of the IDW, right? Starts off in Hizb ut-Tahrir, uh, an Islamist organization, then become, you know, is now a kind of big anti-vaxxer. And I think some people, I call it a bit like after the bacteria, I call them extremophiles. You know, they're just very atta- attracted to these big intellectual movements, whatever's the kind of zeitgeisty thing now, and being a kind of thought leader in it. And that's interesting to me because I think most people probably have more fixed opinions and want to succeed in that sphere, whereas there are some people who, uh, who, like the need comes first, the need to be validated, the need to be listened to, the need to be important comes first, and then they pour themselves into all the different bottles and see which one feels like the best fit.

3. 6:13 – 11:06

   The Fascinating Case Study of Brian Rose

   1. HLHelen Lewis6:13

   2. CWChris Williamson6:13

      Did you consider looking at Brian Rose from London Real?

   3. HLHelen Lewis6:16

      I did not. Tell me about Brian Rose from-

   4. CWChris Williamson6:18

      You've missed-

   5. HLHelen Lewis6:18

      ... London Real.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:19

      ... you've missed a trick. So, Brian Rose is, I would say, the most successful serial grifter on the internet, um, or perhaps the most unsuccessful, given the fact that everybody knows it's a grift.

   7. HLHelen Lewis6:31

      (laughs) I was gonna say, the fact that you're calling him a grifter indicates that things have not gone well for Brian Rose of late.

   8. CWChris Williamson6:35

      If there was a... He's had a, sort of, 50-year face plant, basically just permanent... Every birthday, it's just some new grift and it's failed again. Um, he started off doing podcasting a long time ago, maybe 10 years ago, basically (clears throat) . Him and his business partner were watching, uh, Joe Rogan. They really liked it. They decided to do their own thing. Um, this only just recently came out, but he kind of screwed the business partner over, took the project for his own (clears throat) . He starts doing this business. He then gets introduced to Dan Pena, the Trillion Dollar Man, who, as far as I can see, is a, just a loud, angry, sweary, grumpy old dude that wears suits and big ties that look like something from Mad Men (sniffs) . He ran for the Mayor of London. He created his own independent freedom platform so he could broadcast live streams with David Icke during the middle of COVID. He, uh, is now doing decentralized finance, DeFi-like things, and is-

   9. HLHelen Lewis7:38

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson7:38

       ... republishing podcasts that he recorded four, or five, or six years ago to make it look like the people who used to have on are coming back on, so that they still think that he's relevant. It's impossible to unsubscribe from his email list. Anybody that's listening to this, do not subscribe to his email list because th- that is like the worst venereal disease that you can think of. It's just never getting off you. And-

   11. HLHelen Lewis8:01

       I, I like this... This is the Chris Williamson's GDPR complaint section of the podcast. Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson8:05

       Correct. That's very correct. Yeah. I... God, if I could s- if I knew how to submit to GDPR, Brian would be... I mean, I'm behind a very long list of people that have got grievances with him. My point being, every single different opportunity that has come up where there has been a chance for him to inject himself into something that looks opportunistic, um, there's always a financial incentive. There's always an in-group, out-group tribalism thing going on. It's them versus us. They're trying to shut down free speech, or they're trying to tell us what to do. They're not for the people in politics. They're trying to control your money. Each one of them has got the same, like, cadence and rhythm and fundamental feel to it, and yet he just c- he... One of them fails. He got less votes in the London mayoral election than that guy that has the bin on his head. What is he called?

   13. HLHelen Lewis8:55

       Count Binface.

   14. CWChris Williamson8:55

       Count Binface, yeah. B- like, Binnie McBInface. He got fewer votes than that guy. Um, got told off because he was going around London in a bus, had his face on the side of it, live streaming from the bus as he was going around. And then the police came over and said, "You can't do this. It's fucking lockdown." He said, "As you can see, the current Mayor of London is trying to stop our campaign." I'm like, "Brian, you're not being victimized. You're just a prick. Like, that's what's going on."

   15. HLHelen Lewis9:20

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson9:21

       Um.

   17. HLHelen Lewis9:21

       Honestly, though, though I would like to say that too. I would say approximately 4% of the internet-

   18. CWChris Williamson9:26

       Yeah.

   19. HLHelen Lewis9:26

       ... need to be told you're not being victimized. You're just an asshole.

   20. CWChris Williamson9:29

       Yeah.

   21. HLHelen Lewis9:29

       Like, I'm sorry. The, the... People don't hate you because you've got hidden truths. People hate you because you're repellent.

   22. CWChris Williamson9:33

       Yes, yeah.

   23. HLHelen Lewis9:33

       And I just think p- people would be happier if, if that was something that was said more often.

   24. CWChris Williamson9:37

       My point being, I can see what you mean. There are certain, um, uh, rhythms and, and, and trends that occur and, and people inject. And that's not for me to say that, you know, every single person is as bad as Brian. Like, Brian is about as-

   25. HLHelen Lewis9:50

       No, not at all.

   26. CWChris Williamson9:50

       ... hundredth percentile as you can get with regards to this. But some people feel compelled to put themselves into a movement and they're obsessive, dedicated individuals and that shows up throughout their entire career of whatever it is that they do.

   27. HLHelen Lewis10:06

       Another good example would be Michael Saylor, who I encountered through crypto, you might have heard of. You know, he's now got laser eyes on Twitter and he's a, he's a crypto guru. And you go back a little bit into his history, and he's best known for having lost $6 billion in a single day during the dot-com crash. Six... Um, and, and I had to go, like, check, "Is that a typo? Do you mean six million?" And it was like, "No, no, no. He was worth allegedly 10 billion." And he got... By the end of the day, he's worth 3.9 billion. And I just think in my big list of people I would take financial advice for, I'd probably... All the people who haven't lost $6 billion in a single day would be higher on the list than Michael Sailor. But, but that's, but that's no bar. Like, that's one of the things I find really interesting about that space, is, there's almost a kind of idea that if you're flawed, it's more authentic, you know? So you get these dating gurus who don't find love themselves, you get these productivity gurus who are working themselves into the ground. And, and, like, we don't want to hear necessarily from people who have got it all figured out. We find that kind of annoying. You wanna hear from somebody who's struggling, like you are.

   28. CWChris Williamson11:00

       Hmm. That's interesting. Um, based on my experience,

4. 11:06 – 15:00

   Should a Guru Be Flawless or Struggling?

   1. CWChris Williamson11:06

      I would say the people that seem to be the most flawless, that are viewed by their audience now, as long as they're flawless now, that's fine. If they're flawed now, they're going to get called out because there is an incentive amongst the audience for them to continually pick holes, right? Derek from More Plates More Dates recently released this big documentary about the Liver King. I had him on. He made it with my housemate, Zack. They're both out in Sacramento at the moment recording blah, blah, blah. Derek did a training vlog with one of my friends. Derek knows more about hormones and TRT and supplements and all of that stuff than pretty much anybody else on the planet, right? Someone saw him doing a training vlog and decided to break down his training style and lambasted him for the fact that he doesn't know how to train. Why? Because he is somebody that has sort of this purer, purest, white snow, unfettered, uh, reputation when it comes to certain domains. And as soon as there's the opportunity for someone to pick a hole in it, they've been able to do it because they've said that he doesn't know what he's doing when it comes to training. My point being that when I think about the productivity world, right, which is a, a big...... part of my history, and also, there wasn't a single person on the episode you did on productivity that I haven't had on this podcast. Not a single person-

   2. HLHelen Lewis12:16

      Nice.

   3. CWChris Williamson12:16

      ... wasn't... So, but all of those people-

   4. HLHelen Lewis12:18

      Just 'cause they're all very productive. They do a lot of podcasts. They do-

   5. CWChris Williamson12:20

      That's correct.

   6. HLHelen Lewis12:20

      They put themselves out there. (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson12:21

      That's correct. But for you to look at Ali Abdaal, Ali very rarely opens up about his own current vulnerabilities when it comes to productivity. Like yeah, he'll have problems, but his problems will be significantly better dealt with than yours are, because he's just a, like a, a superior productivity guy. Um, I don't think people would've followed him had he have had, right now, the issues, someone that's got a story, a backstory. In my opinion, people don't want to follow gurus that right now are struggling through things. They like the idea of a narrative because it creates the, "I was where you are. You can be where I am." Um, but I'm not convinced that it would be like, "I'm watching you fail forward right now," because why am I listening to you? Why wouldn't I just listen to someone who's more perfect, even if it's untruthful?

   8. HLHelen Lewis13:03

      That's interesting, 'cause so I wonder with the Liver King, you know, and this idea that, oh, I can get all these gains by just eating my raw organs. Oh, no, actually, it was human growth hormone. Do you think that will affect his sales of his goat organ pills or his bull organ pills, or whatever he's selling? Like, that's the thing. It ought to my mind to be a huge blow to his credibility, and I'm just not sure that it will.

   9. CWChris Williamson13:23

      One of the problems you have is he's so successful and has so much momentum at the moment, and it was already primed. The paleo movement and the ancestral health movement was already rattling along. So, how do you slow that down? I, I... Even if you were to chop his growth in half, let's say that all of the damage that's been done from, you know, Rogan, me, Zach, and Derek over the weekend, let's say that that chops his growth in half, he's still growing more than almost every other business on the planet. And now he's doing another podcast tour where he's apologizing for everything. He was on Andrew Schulz yesterday. They had to Febreze the couch that I sat on yesterday to get rid of the smell of the Liver King so that I could sit down in a room that didn't honk like organ meats. That was-

   10. HLHelen Lewis14:07

       Well, I was gonna say, what do, what does the Liver King smell like? Does he smell of bull's testicles?

   11. CWChris Williamson14:09

       Well, Febreze as far... It's Febreze as far as I'm aware.

   12. HLHelen Lewis14:12

       (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson14:12

       But, um, they did have to f- uh, get the air conditioner out to, to do that. Yeah, I, I don't think it's gonna slow down. Um, but I mean, he's, he's a- another guy. He's seen an opportunity to inject himself in. There's heavy financial opportunity here. Why not have the answers?

   14. HLHelen Lewis14:27

       His apology video was incredible because it was one of those bits... Remember that bit in, um, Blackadder Goes Forth when they... Uh, he's doing the summing-up speech when Blackadder's on trial? Sorry, you're probably too young to remember this.

   15. CWChris Williamson14:36

       No, no, no. I remember.

   16. HLHelen Lewis14:36

       But it, it ends with like, "He is guilty." And then he doesn't turn over the page, and then the other page is, "Guilty only of caring too much."

   17. CWChris Williamson14:44

       (laughs)

   18. HLHelen Lewis14:44

       And that was how I felt like his apology video was, right? It was like, "I, uh... Yes, I am guilty only of caring too much about young men. I just wanted to be perfect for you, and that's why I had to dope myself." It was-

   19. CWChris Williamson14:54

       Wants to prevent male suicide-

   20. HLHelen Lewis14:55

       It was, it was classic-

   21. CWChris Williamson14:56

       ... takes Winstrol and Deca. That was his solution for it. And so...

5. 15:00 – 24:56

   What Human Needs are Gurus Tapping Into?

   1. CWChris Williamson15:00

      O- okay. What is the need that gurus are tapping into? Like is there a, uh... Are there individual or, or common trends in the need that gurus tap into?

   2. HLHelen Lewis15:11

      I think part of it is the desire for reassurance that everything's gonna be okay. So, the last episode is about looking into the future, and if you think about all the different roles we have in the, um, in our culture about people that look into the future, it's everything from the super kind of scientific, like super forecasters, through meteorologists, through trend forecasters in fashion, all the way out to tarot and fortune-telling and astrology. And all of it's about the idea that you just want somebody to kind of listen to your problems and tell you it'll be okay, or like give you some idea of control, um, and wanting to get some kind of a grip over a world that can feel very scary. And this is part of my thesis about it is that, you know, w- we're seeing a decline of people identifying as religious, huge decline in the UK in the last census. Um, and, you know, you don't go to your priest for advice like you probably would've done in 1850. So, who do you go to?

   3. CWChris Williamson15:59

      So, it's certainty in an uncertain world?

   4. HLHelen Lewis16:03

      Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. And I also think, you know, like the pickup artists are really interesting 'cause I think one of the reasons they flourish is because the feeling that that... the idea of how you date somebody has changed, like what people want from a relationship, what they expect from a relationship has really changed. And it's hard not to see quite a lot of that stuff as a backlash to feminism, right? The idea that what do women want in a relationship? Do they actually really want all this independence, or is it in some ways making them unhappy? That's the message that you get from a lot of those manosphere dating gurus.

   5. CWChris Williamson16:29

      Yeah. I mean, that's an entire rabbit hole that I've spent an awful lot of this year thinking about, you know? Um...

   6. HLHelen Lewis16:35

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson16:38

      How challenging is it for women who've only recently just been given parity in education and employment to find out that most of their relationship outcomes are negatively correlated with leaning into that education and employment? Women, as they earn more and become better educated, reduce the potential dating pool of men that they're going to fundamentally be attracted to. On average, women want to date men that are better educated and better employed than they are. So, it's the tall girl problem, right? If you're a six-foot-two girl, you're stuck only dating professional athletes, really, if you want to date a man that is taller than you on average, which is what women seem to want to do. And that's like hard. That's harsh on the guys that feel like they're being left behind. It's harsh on this group of women who finally just about achieved independence and you're like, congratulations. Like go and, go and finally be the person that you wanted to be without the restrictions of whatever predisposition people were saying that you had to have. But now, you're stuck sort of fighting for this group of turbo chads at the top that are going to maybe, um... A wealth of options doesn't encourage them to behave in an appropriate manner, right? So, you have sort of heartbroken and wistful women. You have lonely and sort of forgotten men, and then you have... These guys at the top, I don't think it's particularly good for them either. Although it may be in the moment, it's probably not existentially for their soul in the long term. Um, so yeah, that, that's a, that's a, a fascinating question, but when you do not have answers, you need to look to somebody that's got certainty. And one of the ways that I've been able to identify, I think some of the more guru-esque figures are people who-... weaponize in-group and out-group dynamics-

   8. HLHelen Lewis18:13

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson18:14

      ... people who speak with absolute certainty and very rarely use caveats. If you have somebody that has both of those things, that for me is a huge, huge red light, and that is Brian Rose from London Real. "This is the way that the world is. It's them that are trying to shut us down. They are the ones that are trying to stop this. We are together in a movement." It's like, you don't care about us. You don't care about any us. You're trying to identify the most easy them that you can, because binding people together over the mutual hatred of an out-group is significantly easier than binding them together over the mutual love of an in-group.

   10. HLHelen Lewis18:43

       Oh yeah, no, I completely buy that, and actually, w- our mutual friend, Chris Kavanagh of, um, Decoding the Gurus, whose podcast you went on as a right of reply, you know, he and Matt Brown have this very good guru-o-meter, which I only discovered after I'd pitched this series, which I'm very glad about, because I really u- feel like I would've wholesomely ripped it off otherwise. But the idea of these kind of big, pseudo-profound ideas, of the kind of conspiracy thinking, li- and of the kind of financial milking, you know, to me that's a sign of a bad guru. So I think you're right, what you said earlier on about the fact that some people are genuinely motivated because they want to help other people. There are good gurus, right? Just as there are good priests, rabbis, imams. But those positions of authority carry innate dangers to them, and one of them is absolutely the idea that you have to create a kind of shared enemy. And the really interesting thing about that is, to talk about the IDW, you know, I- I was thinking about this quite a lot, because as you may have known, I've had a few cancellation brushes myself. And it does... it is a quite a powerful experience that makes you feel quite sympathetic to people who've been in the other situation. And I think if you're gonna talk about anything that created the IDW, it was the idea that they'd all got a shared enemy in the quote-unquote woke. That was a more powerful thing, you know, uniting people with very, very disparate political opinions, but they could all agree that journalists from the New York Times and Slate and Vox were very annoying, and that's basically what bound them all together.

   11. CWChris Williamson20:04

       What is your post-mortem on the IDW?

   12. HLHelen Lewis20:09

       I think it's a real shame, because I do think it did identify some things that were important. Like, I definitely do feel that American journalism in particular became very polarized, and there wasn't a big middle. You know, one of the things I like about living in Britain and having the BBC, you know, I go on Question Time, and I have to sit next to Nigel Farage and the left-most wing of the Labor Party, and two complete other r- you know, someone from the SNP, someone from Plaid Cymru, whatever it might be. People... you have to be in the same spaces having those conversations together, and that just doesn't happen in American journalism. You don't get somebody who's Fox and somebody who's em- MSNBC forced to share a space very often. Um, so I like the fact that the IDW was pointing out the fact that actually there were lots of things that liberal institutions, liberal media institutions were missing, and they needed to be a bit more open-minded about that. That said, I do think a lot of them were either straightforward conservatives who therefore didn't really... they weren't really heterodox, they were just conservative. Someone like Ben Shapiro has a pretty consistent conservative outlook, and there were some people in there who had some personality issues (laughs) . Should I say that? Is that, is that a kind way of saying it? But, you know, that some of their, their fighting and combative spirit actually kind of came from a kind of restlessness within them, rather than the- maybe necessarily being such an intellectual idea.

   13. CWChris Williamson21:23

       One of the problems that you definitely have is when somebody gets a significant amount of clout for being good in one particular domain or having a take which seems to be particularly accurate, it's very easy to get out over your skis and to then start commenting on stuff that you don't. I mean, this story from Douglas Murray, who is a, a really good friend of mine, and he said (laughs) someone asked him... Somebody asked him something, something, something to do with COVID. Uh, this is a year ago, let's say, and, uh, (laughs) Douglas, Douglas said, "I'm going to do something which is very rare in the modern world, which is not comment on something which I know nothing about." And you're like, there we are. Like, knowing or at least having the inclination that you have boundaries to your competence is something that is very important, and I think that you can end up in a situation where you, you start commenting on stuff that you shouldn't do. Also, that being said, I would agree. I think that the IDW was a much needed, uh, like vector of splintering somehow. Like, it sort of injected itself, and sure enough, people made funny memes about it, and there's like articles and all the rest of it. But it managed to inject itself and, and create a breakpoint where people even now know what they mean by the intellectual dark web. Like, you know the dynamic that you are referring to, and even if it's not something which had the legs to maintain its longevity longer term, perhaps it was an important sort of, uh, like breaker switch or something that just kind of made people stumble over a little bit and go, "Actually, yeah, maybe we do need to be... to see that there is a different way that things could be," or something like that.

   14. HLHelen Lewis23:04

       Mm-hmm. It's funny you mentioned Douglas Murray because I have this weird... Having been around in journalism now for so long, I have, I've... All these people's little hinterlands stick in my mind. So I remember being an undergraduate at Oxford when... And Douglas Murray's a couple years older than me. He was doing, I think his PhD on Bosie, you know, Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, and I always sort of slightly wondered, how did you go from doing a lovely Victorian gay PhD into being like Douglas Murray of today? It's very exciting to me. It's like in the same way that I remember when Milo Yiannopoulos was a tech blogger at The Telegraph, and then you kind of watch his evolution through all these other things.

   15. CWChris Williamson23:37

       I don't think... I, I, I'm not s- I'm not convinced that Douglas's trajectory and Milo's has been quite as extreme.

   16. HLHelen Lewis23:41

       (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson23:41

       I think that-

   18. HLHelen Lewis23:42

       No, no one has had as an extreme c- uh, trajectory as Milo. I just... I'm always kind of fascinated by w-... I, you know, I think I've had a very boring and bland career, but just the fact that people just take these weird intellectual diversions is, is fascinating to me. Like, that's the opportunities the internet gives you.

   19. CWChris Williamson23:54

       Would you not say... So Douglas's The Madness of Crowds, a lot of that was about the collapse of grand narratives, that people no longer had the existing institutions and understanding of traditional wisdom that they would have relied on previously, heavily coming in from religion. Is that not pretty much the same dynamic that you're describing here? That it's... it would be maybe more anthropological or ancestral wisdom, but he's talking about people don't know what to do, and in-... his view, they were turning to a church of social justice as a solution to their problems.

   20. HLHelen Lewis24:24

       Yeah, I do buy that as a, as a thesis. I do think that there is a comfort and security in knowing who your tribe is, and, and feeling that people have kind of got your back. Um, and you can either get that through explicitly religious settings or you can get it from social groups. So, um, I haven't read Douglas's, uh, book, but I understand people have, have found... have sun-... so it s- sold very well, which I respect, and that people have found lots of interesting stuff in it. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were parts of it I violently disagree with, and parts of it which I heartily agree with.

6. 24:56 – 34:10

   Our Current Lack of Faith in Institutions

   1. CWChris Williamson24:56

      Is it not... Given the fact that there is such a lack of faith in institutions, especially when it comes to kind of understanding the world around you at the moment... Uh, well, first off, where, where do you think that's come from? Like, why is it that there's such a, a lack of, of faith in them?

   2. HLHelen Lewis25:09

      I think a lot of it is to do with the democratizing power of the internet. And that, again, it's one of those double-edged swords, right? It's not a completely bad thing that now anybody can set themselves up as a podcast. You know, what is the version of you 20 years ago? Can you have this career or do you have to go through a much more formal process of going and working on like a local paper and then hoping that you'll get to go to Fleet Street 'cause you've joined the right union, right? It doesn't... There is a good side to that, in the fact that it has allowed far more voices to be heard. But some percentage of those voices are unfortunately going to be bad voices. And I think that's the bit we haven't really got to, is working out the, the fact that gatekeeping is not a completely dirty w- word. But there was probably far too much gatekeeping in the media 20, 30 years ago, and we, we still haven't found the kind of right balance in that, to my mind.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:54

      So given the fact that there is a lack of appropriate faith... And I think it's well justified. I mean, if, if anybody wanted a nail in the coffin of faith in the institutions, the last three years would have managed to do it, with politicians and media types just putting their foot in their mouth and face-planting on it just permanently, rolling back previously stated absolutes and so on and so forth. Why not have people come through? Someone needs to come through. The alternative is for people to just be bereft out at sea with no idea what to do. Is it better to have some advice that's hit and miss or is it better to have no advice at all?

   4. HLHelen Lewis26:35

      Right, but you've got to have a self-correcting mechanism. And the great joy of science and what the scientific revolution gave us was an idea that you were en- engaged in a collective struggle towards the truth, and you would get things wrong along the way, but that you would be part of a community of scientists who would review your work and, you know, they would pick you up when you went wrong. And the great Max Planck saying, you know, "Science advances one funeral at a time," was a recognition of the fact that there was an unfortunate level of consensus that often meant that, you know, it was about people's personalities rather than how well they had interpreted stuff. But the idea was that science did still progress. And the same thing happens in an institution. You know, I work in The Atlantic and America Magazine, and when I write a print piece for them, it goes through extensive fact-checkers. You know, they will go back and ask me for sources. They will go... You know, they will sometimes re-interview people to check that I've got things right. You know, there is a, a level of that. And in the same way, if I'd got something horribly wrong, there would be an open, transparent process of corrections. And that's the ideal, right? Sometimes that doesn't work. The ideal is not that you never get anything wrong. The idea is you do everything you can to stop yourself getting things wrong, and when you do get things wrong, you correct them and you're transparent about it. And that's what kind of annoys me, I guess, about some of the people who spend all their time slating the mainstream media. You know, I say this as a fully paid-up MSM shill, but, you know, th- is that do they have similar levels of rigor and fact-checking and then owning up and fessing up to when they get it wrong? Or do they just kind of go, "Oh, well, I... n- n- I was, I was right spiritually"? Or they would say that, wouldn't they?

   5. CWChris Williamson27:59

      How is it the case, if that's the sort of process that you go through at The Atlantic, that articles that come out in The Guardian and The New York Times manage to get published? I see almost on what seems to be a very regular basis some insane titled thing talking about how the calories on the back of a bar of chocolate are now homophobic or whatever it is that The Guardian's putting out. Like it, it seems, it seems to me that a lot of the takes that they go through don't have that degree of rigor. So it doesn't seem like mainstream media is protected by the, uh, rules and procedures necessarily.

   6. HLHelen Lewis28:36

      That's funny you would pick two left-wing en- examples because I would actually say that's a bigger problem on the right, the problem of disinformation. I think if you, um... As I did recently, I w- came back from America, I spent some time in Florida watching, you know, just the average e- evening viewing of Fox News, right? That is a- an incredibly narrative-driven, um, product and manages to create these whole ideas out of kind of whole cloth, which are really interesting, that people just kind of become fixated on this very narrow idea that everyone should be talking about without any kind of underlying idea what, what the actual... I mean, I'm sort-... I'm thinking of Hunter Biden's laptop, I'm also thinking of critical race theory, I'm also thinking of the m- short-lived crusade against ESG and pensions. But, you know, they are kind of narrative machines as much as they're deliveries of fact. So I don't think it's a unique problem on the left at all, and I think what you're probably identifying is opinion pieces rather than straight news reporting. That's people having-

   7. CWChris Williamson29:29

      Oh, yeah, they're probably-

   8. HLHelen Lewis29:29

      ... calories are, calories are homophobic is a, is a bad opinion, not necessarily bad facts, is it? I mean-

   9. CWChris Williamson29:34

      Well, it's both.

   10. HLHelen Lewis29:34

       ... are calories homophobic? It's probably-

   11. CWChris Williamson29:35

       I, I don't know, it's both. But yeah, I mean, I, I think that what that shows is the echo chamber of whatever the algorithm likes to serve me is bringing up the most egregious transgressions that it sees from the left, that it'll, it'll pop up Libs Of TikTok and it'll pop up whatever else. Um, but I imagine that there must be a, like, Rights Of TikTok as well. There must be an equivalent account for the transgressions that come from the other side of the fence.

   12. HLHelen Lewis30:06

       Yeah, that's interesting. I d-... I mean, there are media monitoring services. You know, there's Media Matters and stuff like that. I can't think of anyone that does... picks out random individuals. Like the thing that's... The thing is I have consumed Libs Of TikTok, I have laughed at s- at mad Americans, um, saying stupid things about gender. We all have. Uh, you know, it's okay. But I, I can't think of a right-wing v-... a version of that that does it where it picks out individual...... right-wing people. I guess, maybe actually, in their heyday, things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report did that. They used to go and interview some Trump supporters, and they would set them up to make them look silly. And that was a kind of lo-fi, low-churn version of what libs of TikTok did now. And actually, probably we should be similarly uncomfortable about that. And I, again, probably laughed at all of that in the 2000s in a way that'd probably make me feel quite uncomfortable now, that you're just picking individual normie people and holding them up as, as, as idiots to be kind of mocked by the crowd.

   13. CWChris Williamson30:58

       In your opinion then, is the mainstream media still putting out, on average, the best content? It's putting out m- better, more accurate content than individual creators?

   14. HLHelen Lewis31:09

       I mean, it depends what you're talking about really. I follow an enormous number of Substacks, and one of the reasons that I really like doing that is I want to hear from the world nerdy expert in a particular topic about a s- you know... My friend, Jon Elledge, has got one where he writes about transport policy and trains. And just this le- you know, in a level of detail you were simply not gonna get in the, in the mainstream media, because it's only interesting to a certain number of people. And that has been really positive because, as a journalist anywhere really, even if you're a specialist, of course, you are to some extent a generalist, you have to make yourself an expert on things very quickly. I mean, I guess it speaks to a bit like what you do, right? You, you have to interview an enormous number of people, and you have to make your... You have to master the subjects very quickly, and that's a tough thing to do, and it's a tough thing to get right and b- know what the probing questions are to ask. So, there is that problem, and I do think individual creators can sometimes do better at that stuff, the really hardcore scrutiny. But there is a huge problem, and you definitely saw this with the IDW, about who, you know, becoming... Essentially a version of regulatory capture, being captured by your audience, where they only want one type of content, and also becoming too chummy with your subjects. You know, one of the things that's interesting to me is that, you know, having done political journalism for so long, is I'm quite critical of the lobby system, the press corps in the U- US. You know, the idea is there's great journalists working there, but you're spending all day and night with politicians. They're your sources. You can't burn them or screw them over. And that means you can't do very... You know, you would weigh up whether or not it's worth burning a relationship for to do a story. And it... And, and you have to... In order to be able to do that, you also have to have a paper that backs you, um, and will deal with that, you know, the, the relationship with the Trump White House or wherever it is being in flames, and also, you know, the advertisers aren't gonna desert you. And I think that, you know, the thing is about i- an institution like journalism is, it's only really a collection of individuals, right? I can't take on Elon Musk. I can't stand up to Elon Musk and scrutinize his practices as me. What I can do is chip in my $20 a year towards a, a mainstream newspaper that can actually do that and can report and send writers to do it. And I think, you know, it's very fashionable to criticize the mainstream media, and rightly so. I've got my own many criticisms about working within it. But there's an enormous amount of just shoe leather, very boring reporting. You know, who's the person who goes to the court case and sits through it all the way through? You know, who is the person who sits through the hours of Senate testimony and listens to all that stuff? You know, there are lots of j-... The problem is that we, we complain about the high-profile annoying journalists, and the kind of bedrock of people who go and find things out day in and day out, we just actually don't talk about. We just all rely on them to have... to kind of discover the facts on which the rest of us can all then have an argument.

   15. CWChris Williamson33:45

       Is it not the case at the moment-

   16. HLHelen Lewis33:46

       Was that stirring? Were you not stirred by that, Chris? Are you not-

   17. CWChris Williamson33:48

       I-

   18. HLHelen Lewis33:48

       You know, do you not now concede that actually the ma- the mainstream media, the hated mainstream media might occasionally do some good?

   19. CWChris Williamson33:54

       Well, it depends on whether you, uh... What it is that you're reading and what you're exposed to, right? Because the stuff that most people will see will be the egregious examples. It'll be the Taylor Lorenz crying for the 15th time about whatever it is that she's recently done. And

7. 34:10 – 39:42

   Public Figures Are Remembered By Their Transgressions

   1. CWChris Williamson34:10

      I realized a little while ago that there's always been a dynamic where individual groups are categorized by the most extreme members that are within it, right? So previously, it would have been that, um, all Muslims are ISIS members, right? You know, that- that's, like, v- a pretty old trope. Then it would be, um, to do with everybody that's on the left is part of this sort of blue-haired SJW thing, or anybody that's on the right is a bigoted, homophobic racist, blah, blah, blah. I think that there's an equivalent dynamic going on within individuals. So, you might have heard of something called the peak-end rule. So Peak-End Rule was found by Daniel Kahneman, and what it suggests is that-

   2. HLHelen Lewis34:51

      Oh. Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson34:52

      ... when you m- remember an event, you remember the most extreme or the most intense part, and you also remember the end. So you remember the peak, and you remember the end. And you did this with-

   4. HLHelen Lewis34:59

      This is why if you give someone a colonoscopy, you should just leave it in at the end-

   5. CWChris Williamson35:02

      Extend it out. Correct.

   6. HLHelen Lewis35:02

      ... and not wiggle it about a bit. Yes. That's-

   7. CWChris Williamson35:03

      Correct. That was the study they did.

   8. HLHelen Lewis35:04

      That's the bit that really stuck in my mind, yeah, funny enough.

   9. CWChris Williamson35:06

      I'm sure it did. And so, what I've come to believe is that there is an equivalent rule for public figures in the world called the peak-hate rule. So, people are remembered by their worst transgression and by their most recent transgression. Right? So, uh, when thinking about Jordan Peterson, if you're a critic of his, you will see him as a transphobe that didn't call students by their preferred pronouns and someone that criticizes Sports Illustrated girls on the internet. If you think about Hasan Piker, you will think about a person who said America deserved 9/11 and someone who claims to be a socialist but now lives in a five-million-dollar mansion in wherever the fuck it is that he lives. Right? You have their worst transgression, and you have their most recent transgression. That's what people are seen as. That's how much of the public views, in my opinion, big names that they see that exist, like, out there, that create stuff. And after a while, people no longer actually are seen as people. Like people don't see... The normal person doesn't see Joe Rogan as a person. They see him as an amalgamation of ideas. He's like a representation of an ideology fused into human form. It just happens to be that the human was there before and has always gone through. But that's why I think some of the dehumanizing language that gets used, because it doesn't feel like you're criticizing a person. It feels like it's some... Not like a deity, but like a, like a symbol almost, that that's what you're going for, and that's where I think the peak-hate rule, uh, sort of ties in a little bit as well.

   10. HLHelen Lewis36:34

       That's really interesting. I mean, I have a kind of weird perspective on this, because I have one group of people on the internet who hate me for being, um, you know, a, a, a transphobe, and then another group of people who hate me for being a kind of woke careerist. And you're like, okay, but I can't, I can't judge this. You, you'll, you... I think all of you should get together and fight it out, given that you've got completely divergent things that you hate me for, and come up to some sort of synthesis or resolution of this. But yeah, it's a, it's a fundamentally dehumanizing experience. But I also think that you, you also cast people as the thing that you find easiest to argue against. Um, so The Atlantic has a number of great rules that they tell you when you join, one of which is something like, "Don't be a dick." I mean, it's... I think they phrase it slightly more than that, but it's like, we don't care how good your copy is, you still got to be pleasant to your coworkers, which again, is something that I think m- more people could benefit from being told. But the other one is you have to ve- argue with the best version of your opponent's argument. 'Cause what you're talking then about is a, is a, a thing called nut picking, like cherry-picking, but for, for the nuts. And it's really easy to do that, and really lazy to do that in internet arguments. Go and find someone saying something stupid and argue with them. And I have that experience sometimes when I write a piece and people don't argue with the... I mean, this is f- very basic stuff, but people don't argue with the piece that you've actually written, they argue that the piece that they've been waiting for someone to write so that they can have a go at that piece and make themselves look good. So I wrote a piece about Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago in which I said, you know, a number of things about how I think he's very... running Twitter in a very chaotic way, and I can see why no one would want to live there. But I was trying to explain his appeal and why, if you look at any of his mad dragon tweets, they've all got 100,000 likes on them. I was going like, "He is playing the heel." He li- you know, he likes being the, the villain, and his whole shtick is, do you want to have Mark Zuckerberg pretending to care about healing the world, or Sam Bankman-Fried, you know, saying, "I've got to earn all this money because I need to give it away," or do you just want to have me going, "I'm rich. I'm Elon Musk. I do what I want," like Cartman from South Park. And actually, a lot of people find that much more honest. They assume that all rich people are awful, and at least you're telling the truth about it. And people did not like that. They were like, "Do you like the taste of licking Elon's boot, you know, lackey?" And I was like, "This piece is really critical of him, but I'm just saying that people do like him and that is an observable fact in the world." But they wanted to argue with the pro-Elon piece, right? So they just decided that that's the piece that I'd written. And the great tragedy of social media is that you become what people need you to be to make thems- to, to be themselves, what they want to present to the world.

   11. CWChris Williamson39:02

       We saw this, the most easy example that I saw of what you're describing and also the peak hate rule was just before Sam Harris left Twitter. Every single tweet that he put up was replied to by hundreds of people with the same quote of, "I wouldn't care if Hunter Biden had dead children in his basement. That laptop story still shouldn't have been, like, stopped," or whatever it was that, that he said. And I'm like, "Well, like, I get it, but he wasn't tweeting about that." And bringing that up kind of just seems a little bit pointless. But for some people, like, that's the most recent great transgression that he did, so therefore, that's how we're going to categorize that. Um,

8. 39:42 – 46:53

   Helen’s Study of a Urine Drinker

   1. CWChris Williamson39:42

      you also looked at someone that drank their own urine. Why... did you look at them and why were they drinking their own urine?

   2. HLHelen Lewis39:49

      Oh, right, why did I drink their own urine? Yeah, there was a co- it was a conversation where I went, "You know, I love the BBC, but I do not love the BBC enough to drink my own urine." I'm just gonna put that out there now. Don't ask me. I will not do... I will do anything for love, but I will not do that. Um, he's a very sweet Canadian guy who w- was a contestant on Canadian Idol called, um, Will Blunderfield. Lovely. Just got off the phone with him and I just thought, "What a sweet young man," but drinks his own piss, and not just his own piss, as it turns out. He's g- there's a whole video where he's like, "And it's got a little bit of pre-cum in it." And we had a long discussion about whether or not it was just simply too unpleasant a phrase to be airing on Radio 4 when people might be having their, you know, their breakfast. Um, we decided we were going to keep it in anyway because, you know, that's, that's real life. But, um, yeah, there's... that is... Drinking your own urine is one of these strangely recurrent practices, so it's still used in traditional medicine in sub-Saharan Africa and places like that, but it has been something that hippies have kind of done frequently, and I just do not understand it. Like I... if there is any signal that your body is giving to you in regards to urine, it's like, "I want this out of me. This is, this is like, this is leaving the body now." Not like it needs to come back in. But it's something you find quite a lot. And you know, for him it's part of it's... she calls it shi-bam-bo and it's part of his kind of wellness practice. But the interesting thing about talking to him was, he had had an eye condition, strabismus, where one of his eyes didn't quite track properly and had spent most of his childhood being medicalized. And then he came out as gay and was essentially gay-bashed when he was holding his first boyfriend's hand and went to a psychiatrist or a therapist to talk about it, and instead of being given talking therapy, really was put on pills and was said, "Do you want some anti-depressant pills?" And I understood from those two experiences why someone would get to the place where they are very skeptical of mainstream traditional medicine, why they don't want to be within what he calls the allopathic system. And so he's become more and more invested in anti-vax stuff. He's one of the people, those people who believe that if you don't eat certain things, then you don't need to wear sunscreen. Um, which, you know, he lives in Vancouver where it's pretty chilly most of the time, so he may get away with it. But I think if you live in Australia, probably life-threatening kind of level of advice. But I wanted to try and do more than the standard anti-vax thing of saying, "Well, these people are just wrong," and kind of understand psychologically where someone... how someone would get to those opinions.

   3. CWChris Williamson42:05

      Hmm. It seems-

   4. HLHelen Lewis42:08

      You know what I mean? Because if you want to argue with anti-vax people or try and convince anti-vax people, then there are a couple of things you need to do and one of them is be open to the question of whether or not there are occasional vaccine injuries, which there are, right? They're just incredibly rare and much, much rarer than, you know... And, and it's much, much more dangerous to get the illness that you're vaccinating against. So on just a rational risk calculation basis, you just go, "I would rather take my chances with the measles vaccine than take my chances with measles."... and that's, that's where I come from and all of that. But, and I think that's probably a... You know, I said that to him essentially, and I think that's an easier thing to say to people than a kind of, "No, no, we all believe in vaccines," a kind of mystical, reverential feeling, which I do have about vaccines. I think vaccines are one of the best things that humanity's ever done. But I can't expect everybody to share that feeling, whereas I can make a pragmatic argument based on the, on the studies and what they show.

   5. CWChris Williamson42:58

      When it comes to health and fitness, it seems like there are a lot of degrees of freedom, despite the fact that everybody cares about having good health and h- eating the right things. I had a dietician on not long ago, a guy called Max Lugavere, and asked him, "Why is it that we understand the speed of light and yet no one can agree on whether eating carbs is better or worse for you than other different types of macronutrients?" And he's like, "Well, it's because there are so many degrees of freedom within exercise science and nutrition science that you can fit these studies to show basically whatever it is that you want. You can get them to, to become whatever it is that you want to do." And I think that this rolls all the way through everything to do with health and fitness. Everybody wants to be healthy, everybody wants to be in good condition, everybody wants to live a long life. Sometimes you end up drinking your own piss.

   6. HLHelen Lewis43:46

      (laughs) Well, I mean, I'm not judging you, Chris, but I, it's not for me is what I'm saying.

   7. CWChris Williamson43:50

      Mm-hmm.

   8. HLHelen Lewis43:50

      But yeah, I know what you mean, and there is a, a established problem. It's actually one of the things that my friend Caroline Criado-Perez wrote about in her book, Invisible Women, that one of the things that these studies w- won't do often, they will often exclude women from them, if you're looking at any kind of medical study, 'cause they'll just say, "Women's hormonal cycles are too crazy. They're just injecting all this stuff into the data. We don't want to do it." So you will find quite big drug studies that are only tested on, on men, because just adding in female hormones is, is just considered to be, like, too wacky. Nevermind the idea that people have different hormonal profiles as they go through age, for example, and like what might be an appropriate dose for a 20-something man and a 70-year-old man might be very different. We just don't know about that internal body chemistry. But yeah, I know what you mean. You have, there has to be a certain level of humility about things that are related to health, because health advice does change and is fluid and is always, "This is the best that we know right now," not the kind of final finished tablet of stone being handed down.

   9. CWChris Williamson44:43

      But when you think about something which is even more arbitrary in terms of your, uh, life wellbeing, I suppose, productivity, like I say, a world that I used to come from, one that I spent a lot of time in, very good friends with Ali Abdaal, who you've spent a good bit of time speaking to on the show. And yet, that is, I would guess probably the largest personal development subsection on YouTube and also probably in non-fiction, too. It'll be that and spirituality, I would guess, would probably be the two when it comes to books. Uh, and people are obsessive about that. People need a guru behind that, because if I can fit more into my life, then it's kind of the same as me extending the amount of time that I'm alive. It's a denial of death.

   10. HLHelen Lewis45:27

       Yeah, I really liked the productivity gurus. They were my, um... They were the most wholesome bunch, shall we say. Like I liked lots of people, but they were the ones I felt least, you know, l- least guilty about liking, 'cause th- they are just generally mostly very hardworking people who want to try and help other people achieve their goals. But even then, uh, like you say, I did feel there was a certain downside to it, which is that lots of people feel that they're lacking something, you know? That they're always... I think Oliver Burkeman put it about, the idea that people feel like they wake up in the morning with a debt, you know? They're already behind, and they spend the whole day kind of catching up, and they never just think that what they've got is enough. They always feel that they're failing. And that was definitely something that spoke to me. I'm a terrible workaholic. I actually, I went to a therapist about four years ago and my main thing that I wanted to talk about was like, "How can I say no? Please teach me how to say no to work." Um, because I will always feel like, "Oh, they'll never ask me again," or, "Oh, I should feel so flattered to be asked," or, you know, "What if this opportunity doesn't come up again?" And you have to, you know... Then you get the kind of classic Warren Buffett advice, which is that most people who are very successful say no to most things. And you think, "Warren Buffett, how do you do it? Tell me." Maybe I need to get Warren Buffett round to turn down, you know, minor appearances on the BBC for me. Like, I just can't do it. I, I don't have the self-control or the stamina for it. Um...

   11. CWChris Williamson46:39

       I think Oliver's approach in 40,000 Weeks is the best one that I've found. It's like, "Look, you're not going to be able to do all of this stuff. Prepare in advance what you're going to suck at. Pick a small domain of things that you want to be good at and then just leave the rest." So if, if the productivity

9. 46:53 – 54:10

   The Worst Sub-cultures on the Internet

   1. CWChris Williamson46:53

      people were the ones that you enjoyed loving the most, who were the ones that you hated loving the most? Was there someone that you found an affinity for and you felt guilty about it?

   2. HLHelen Lewis47:04

      When I ousnd say I say I felt, I felt very bad about the fact that I fundamentally disagree with Will on, you know, the merits of drinking your own piss, but I nonetheless got on with him and I didn't... You know, it's a difficult line to walk when you're presenting someone with extreme views like that. I went and looked up the scientific literature on drinking your own urine. This mo- kind of amused me. There's not really that much, except that when it's used in traditional medicine there is a worry that you will pass on drug-resistant bacteria from one person's urine to another. And he went very sweetly, "Oh, I wouldn't drink someone else's." Like, oh no, that's, that's the act of a madman. Um, which was really funny, 'cause it just proves that everybody's got their own line for what they consider to be kooky. And some people's line is further out there than mine, but it's, you know, it's still there. So I did like them. Um, I found The Pick Up Artist really difficult to deal with because having written about feminism for so long, I have, you know... I know what those communities can be like, um, and how deliberately cruel they can be to people that they feel are against them. I think one of the kind of most dangerous things in life is feeling that you can be h- horrible to other people because you've got a grievance and that justifies it, if you see what I mean? So, you know, I'm very-

   3. CWChris Williamson48:12

      What would the grievance of the manosphere be?

   4. HLHelen Lewis48:15

      Oh, that, that women have completely taken over... You know, that actually it's much harder to be a man now. Um, that women are withholding sex from men, that they hold all the cards in relationships, that they routinely make false rape accusations. You know, those kind of things that you see over and over. And my experience of, you know, having lightly encountered those communities before is that they will just pick over the fact that they'll say, you know, "Well, of course," you know, like all the things they say about me, like I, you know... I, I haven't got any kids so obviously I'm gonna die alone. Um, or, you know, just that you're really ugly or whatever it is. And probably when I was younger that kind of bothered me more. I think maybe now I just don't care anymore. But-... there, you know, the, they were a community that seemed to absolutely delight in trashing anybody who crossed them. And I could see where it came from. I could see that it came from this feeling it was a, about leveling the playing field, about settling a score, re- making redress. But I think that's always such an incredibly dangerous thing to kind of tell yourself, give yourself moral license that, you know, "I'm allowed to do this because I'm in the right. I don't have to obey the normal rules because I'm, my cause is justified." That rarely leads to good places in my view.

   5. CWChris Williamson49:18

      Mm. Yeah, I got a... Sometimes there'll be comments on the channel talking about, um, how this person or this researcher or this analyst doesn't agree with the existing sacred cows that the red pill or the manosphere or the whatever community agrees with. And every single time that I see that, it seems to me to be a pretty good sign, because I'm like, the further that I continue to reinforce the fact that this is not a channel for people that want manosphere content.

   6. HLHelen Lewis49:49

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson49:49

      This is not a channel for people that want red pill content. This is not a channel for people that want to create them-and-us tribal, adversarial relationships between men and women. Every single person that I speak to sees the fundamental relationship between men and women as one that is collaborative, not competitive. And that is so hard to find on the internet. Like, even, even when it comes from, uh, like, Elle and Cosmopolitan, uh, how to sleep with him and not catch feels. You know, how to get over, how to get your boyfriend, uh, like, back by sleeping with his best friend. Like these are articles, non-ironic articles that go out in commercial magazines, right? This isn't some fucking r/female-dating-strategy pink pill depths of the internet stuff. This is buy-it-on-a-magazine-shelf stuff. Like that's really, really terri-... Like, if you want to point a finger at toxic femininity, which sometimes is like, "What, where's, where's the toxic femininity?" It's like, it's right fucking there. Like that's one of the instances.

   8. HLHelen Lewis50:50

      I mean, I think most toxic femininity is actually directed... If you want to concede that that's a, a concept. I mean, I, I would, I'm pretty reluctant to ever to say toxic masculinity or toxic femininity, because I think a lot of people just instantly switch off at that point.

   9. CWChris Williamson51:02

      Right.

   10. HLHelen Lewis51:02

       But I think if there is such a thing as toxic femininity, it's probably women directing it at other women, um, largely. But I know what you mean. Like having written a book about feminism, I thought a lot about how to make it a message that a, a book even a man could enjoy. But you know what I mean. Like I, and I had a, a, a male friend of mine read the draft, and I talked it through with him, and he kind of said in a couple of places, you know, like, "Well, have you thought about it from our point of view?" And, you know, there was a time in internet feminism where that would have been something that people would have scoffed at. You know, there was a kind of... Do you remember the sort of drinking male tears era of internet feminism?

   11. CWChris Williamson51:34

       No.

   12. HLHelen Lewis51:35

       It is very ostentatiously like, someone got a hashtag trending once, it was like, kill all white men or something like that.

   13. CWChris Williamson51:41

       Fantastic.

   14. HLHelen Lewis51:41

       And then they had to explain that... Right. But then there was this whole, people went, "That's very offensive." And they went, "No, no, no, it's actually, obviously it would be offensive the other way around, but it's okay because it's, uh, a punchy satire on power relations." And you're like, "Oh God, are you all of you 12? Don't do that." But, you know, and, and I did have a... And the conclusion that I came, eventually came to in Difficult Women is that you have to have a kind of policy-based idea of feminism, right? Here are the things that we want, and like you could agree with me or not. So if I say to you like, you know, "I think it's mad that, uh, the US doesn't have any federally mandated maternity leave. Women have to cobble together bits of their holiday and unpaid time off," I'm not requiring you to agree with me that women are in some way better than men, or like everyone has to have their unique gender roles, whatever it is. It's just a thing that you can agree with or not on a policy level. And that fundamentally to me is where feminism can go in a way that builds coalitions rather than being about some of those dry arguments about who's more of a twat than the other gender, right?

   15. CWChris Williamson52:39

       Yes. Well, I mean the, that goes back to what I said before about men and women fundamentally being collaborative rather than competitive, because intrasexual competition is way, way, way bigger than intersexual competition, right? Women compete with women mostly, and men compete with men mostly. Ancestrally that seems to be the case, and it looks the same way now. On average it's... Uh, uh, have you seen the stats around, uh, most pro-life votes come from women rather than men?

   16. HLHelen Lewis53:09

       Yeah, I don't think that there's a massive percentage difference. But it makes sense to me that there are women who are very invested in the idea of themselves as mothers and, um, and having a maternal caring role and taking care of babies. And, and therefore they see abortion through that prism. They don't see it through the prism of personal independence and freedom and bodily autonomy. So yeah, I know what you mean. It's really interesting when you do those kind of slice and dice, like you just... You get it a lot in, um, arguments over things like sex work. "Oh, well, just listen to, listen to women, listen to sex workers, listen to whatever the group is." And actually in the case of people who are working currently in the sex industry, they're going to, by definition, have one set of views on it, right? You're not gonna find a lot of radical feminist abolitionists working in the sex industry for very good reasons. And so those appeals to identity can often be incredibly, um, reductive, really, as if we don't live in a society and only one group of people get to have opinions on the things that they do. You know, we shouldn't... Only ask billionaires about what tax rate, rates billionaires would pay. Oh yeah, okay, that seems like a really good idea. I can imagine probably what that answer is gonna be, thanks.

10. 54:10 – 1:00:20

    What Helen Learned from Crypto Gurus

    1. HLHelen Lewis54:10

    2. CWChris Williamson54:10

       What did you learn from the crypto gurus, the crypto bros?

    3. HLHelen Lewis54:17

       Um, so one of them I interviewed, I don't know if you know him, he's Peter McCormack who bought Real Bedford FC. Really interesting, fun guy. Great to get along with. He grew up in Bedford, um, which for American listeners is like-What's, what's a kind of very boring American town? I not, just not sure there is a... Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson54:36

       Anywhere in like, anywhere in like Indianapolis or Wis- West Con-

    5. HLHelen Lewis54:39

       West Chester? What about West Chester?

    6. CWChris Williamson54:40

       Fine, we'll go for that.

    7. HLHelen Lewis54:40

       Like, it's outside London, but it's not super, um, fun. But it's a really lovely place to live. But anyway, he, um, he made all this money through crypto and his podcast, and then he bought Real Bedford FC. Um, and he now has a, like a non, little non-league team that is sponsored by some of these crypto exchanges and gets fans from around the world. And you know, uh, it's a really quite uh, sweet and heartwarming story that he wanted to take his internet gains and put them back into an area that he felt needed more opportunities for young people. So I really liked him on that. The funny thing about Peter is that he thinks that almost all crypto is bullshit and full of scam artists. He only believes in Bitcoin. And I said to him, "This is really funny, this is-"

    8. CWChris Williamson55:19

       He's called a maxi, cut my maxi, maxis.

    9. HLHelen Lewis55:20

       Right, he's a Bitcoin, he's a Bitcoin maxi.

    10. CWChris Williamson55:22

        Yeah.

    11. HLHelen Lewis55:22

        And I said, "This is really funny to me because this is like how I feel as an atheist talking to people who believe in God." You know this f- the famous Ricky Gervais quote about that, "You think 99% of Gods are bullshit. I just think one more is bullshit." And that's how, you know, I, I feel a bit about crypto. I, I haven't ever seen the proposition beyond the fact that technology's really interesting. Um, I haven't really seen how you can create as- you know, the value of the asset beyond more people buying into a limited resource. And so he was a rightly fun and challenging conversation 'cause he was like, "You're gonna come back in 10 years time and you're gonna admit that I'm right." Because places in the developing world that don't have access to mainstream financial mechanisms and it, by decentralized finance, they can skip that whole generation. And so yeah, we have to meet up again in 10 years time and find out if my skepticism was, was validated or not.

    12. CWChris Williamson56:09

        One of the goods, litmus tests around crypto has been what happens in a bear market and what happens in a bull market. If it was that everybody just cared about being able to give families in war-torn countries the opportunity to send money across the border without government interference, you should be still singing the praises of the technology when the price is 15,000, the same as it was when it was 60,000. Why aren't you? Why aren't everybody on the internet singing about how brilliant the new crypto toad pixel NFT is? Well, it's because it's not worth as much. Like almost everybody that's into crypto, you like it because you're, you're able to make free money overnight. That's why you like it. That, that's fine, that's absolutely fine. But don't try and tell me that it's because you love the opportunity to repatriate people in developing worlds from the tyranny of some government that wants to take the... It's, it's got nothing to do with that. It's got nothing to do with that. Or else you would still be just as passionate when the market was shit as when the market was good, and the market is currently shit and no one's talking about it except being critical.

    13. HLHelen Lewis57:13

        Uh, yeah, but it a- again I think it's a place where mainstream journalism came off a lot better than the individuals, right? Because that's a classic example of the fact you had people with a f- direct financial interest in the sector being the ones who said, "Don't listen to the FUD, you know, you just gotta hodl." And like that's because their money directly depends on people doing those, those things, holding on for dear life and suppressing their fear, uncertainty, and doubt, you know. Uh, and whereas if you work on the Financial Times, you are much freer to go, "Hmm, I've taken a look at this crypto exchange and uh," You know. What was the great thing from the, um, the FTX thing where he had a, a, a tab on the spreadsheet that said poorly hidden fiat account and it had $8 billion dol- like the $8 billion black hole was, was concealed within it. Right? That's the kind of thing that you need, you know, people on the outside who have no direct financial interest to, to then go, "Ah, I'm just gonna stop you there. That, that looks bad. That feels bad to me. Bad."

    14. CWChris Williamson58:06

        What, what, what was guru-y about the, the stuff that you looked at to do with crypto? It seems like you just spoke to a guy that bought a, a football team. I don't know, is he proselytizing? Is he try- is he part of a pyramid scheme? Is, what's he trying to do? Are, are, were there other people to do with crypto that were trying to sell it?

    15. HLHelen Lewis58:26

        Yeah, so Peter, Peter is a, uh, he's an interesting one because he's a kind of sort of almost like a self-hating guru in that he says, you know, "Come for the gains, stay for the revolution." Like he, he's invested in people getting into crypto because he believes in the power of the technology. Um, but that's not where everybody is. You know, we spoke to uh, Laya Heilpern, who's another British crypto guru. She's very big, she got, she's a very big libertarian. She, actually you'll like this. She now lives most of the time in Miami because she thinks that British men are weak and effeminate. And I said-

    16. CWChris Williamson58:55

        She is the girl who keeps defending Andrew Tate on Fox News.

    17. HLHelen Lewis58:59

        Yes, yeah. So, and I said, "Hang on a minute, men in Miami, like Miami home of the famous like incredibly camp Muscle Beach of men in tiny shorts who like the company of other men. These are your like, you know, this is what the paradigm of masculinity is too." And you know, I don't think we really got very m- much further than that. But it was just very funny to me 'cause I think London is full of big hench lads. Um, and I don't know what, what, but she's da-

    18. CWChris Williamson59:19

        That's your area of expertise, not mine, Helen.

    19. HLHelen Lewis59:22

        (laughs) She's just not going to the right places basically, is what I think.

    20. CWChris Williamson59:25

        And what did you learn from her?

    21. HLHelen Lewis59:27

        Yeah. Well, she was really interesting because um, she's Jewish and, and I did say to her like, "Would you have Kanye on the podcast?" And now he's in his full antisemitic pomp. And she said, "Yeah, I would." And I was like, "What about an actual neo-Nazi?" And she said, "Yeah, I would." And that to me is a kind of just a completely different fundamental approach to free speech than I have, which you know, there's sort of much more libertarian ideas, and that carries through into a lot of that crypto space is very libertarian. They absolutely don't believe in government intervention. They don't, you know, they're very hostile to the whole idea of, of government. And it's really interesting talking to people like that because I'm a kind of normie social democrat, you know? I think that's k- I quite like the idea that when I phone the fire brigade, the fire brigade turn up. Like that's fine by me. Um, and so it's always really challenging. It's one of the things I really appreciate about doing this job is talking to people who have ended up in very different political positions to me but who are clearly smart and like working out what it is that got them there and got me here.

11. 1:00:20 – 1:20:42

    Paying to be Called Racist Over Dinner

    1. HLHelen Lewis1:00:20

    2. CWChris Williamson1:00:21

       What about that struggle session public humiliation bondage thing where white women were made to be shouted at around a table but they couldn't cry?

    3. HLHelen Lewis1:00:30

       (laughs) I don't think there's any actual bondage involved. I think you may have just added that in, in your own-

    4. CWChris Williamson1:00:34

       Artistic license, whatever.

    5. HLHelen Lewis1:00:35

       ... personal view. Yeah, of what's going on.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:00:36

       It's not out yet. The series isn't out yet. I can imagine what I want.

    7. HLHelen Lewis1:00:38

       Right. (laughs) Okay. Well, um, so Race To Dinner was founded by two women, uh, an Indian American woman called Syra Rao and a Black American woman called Regina Jackson. And they, for $5,000, um, a dinner will get a woman to invite all her white women friends, and then they will ask them who's racist and put up their hands if they're racist. Um, and this-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:00:59

       What if you don't put your hand up?

    9. HLHelen Lewis1:01:00

       Well, no, then you get shouted at because you should've put your hand up because everyone's racist.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:01:03

        It's a Kafka trap. It's Kafka Dinner.

    11. HLHelen Lewis1:01:06

        Yeah. Um, but, but Syra will put up her hands because she says, you know, as a, as a person of color who's not Black, she is institutionally anti-Black. And the way that the racial hierarchy works in the US is that everybody who isn't Black thinks, "Well, it could be worse, I could be Black." That's their, their premise. But the thing that got me about this is just... And I think maybe part of this is being British as well. I just thought, "I wouldn't pay to someone to tell me that. (laughs) I wouldn't pay five grand for somebody to tell me that I'm racist." I would pay five grand to tell me that I'm amazing, maybe. But-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:01:33

        Is there a certificate? Do you get some sort of-

    13. HLHelen Lewis1:01:37

        I don't-

    14. CWChris Williamson1:01:37

        ... credential at the end of it? I'm wondering why you would pay $5,000 to have this. I mean, is the food particularly good? Is the service nice?

    15. HLHelen Lewis1:01:47

        No, you have to order your own food.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:01:48

        Is there a goodie bag?

    17. HLHelen Lewis1:01:51

        (laughs) No, there is not a... No, there is not a goodie bag. Um-

    18. CWChris Williamson1:01:53

        Handjob at the end of it? I, like, what's going on here?

    19. HLHelen Lewis1:01:56

        Abs- As far as I know, absolutely not. Um, but... Okay, so here's the thing that I think is... There is a deep strain of masochism, I think, through a lot of w- women, particularly white liberal middle-class women. You know, these are the same group of people who buy women's magazines that tell you that you're fat and disgusting and you need to diet, um, and the same people who look at the Daily Mail sidebar of shame about, you know, people who've got cankles and turkey necks and all the things that are kind of horribly wrong with you, you know. And I think a lot back to my formative experience. When I was a teenager, I used to read FHM, which kind of dates me because it hasn't ex- existed for, like, two decades now. Because I found the men's magazines of the '90s were like, "You're amazing." Like, "Here's how to go out and score some chicks." Like, "Here's the... where we went to Vegas in a poker game, and," like, you know, "the guy who lost had to get breast implants," a real story I remember from FHM. And the women's magazines were like, "Here are all the ways in which you're failing." Like, "Here's how to pluck your hair out of various bits of your body so you're not repellent anymore." And I thought, "I don't... This is not for me." Like, "I want, I want fun and adrenaline and racing big cars around." Um, and I think that, that tendency, that sort of self-flagellating tendency has carried on. And I did ask them, I was like, "You couldn't get eight men to sit down and listen to how they're all racist and pa- and, and then pay you. Like, I just don't believe that, that business model works with men." And that, that to me was completely fascinating that there is some kind of mis- sort of, yeah, deep masochistic streak in some kind of white middle liberal-class women where they want to be told that they're terrible and sort of luxuriate in it.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:03:25

        Did you draw a line between that and Robin DiAngelo's work?

    21. HLHelen Lewis1:03:28

        Yeah. So they... One of the things I said to them about, you know, "What a great business model, five grand to make white women cry." You know, "I've been trying to do that with my articles for years, but I've never got paid that much for it." Um, th- they said, "Well, you should... You know, that's a racist question. You should see how much Robin di Angelo gets paid." And it's true. She gets paid an enormous amount of money.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:03:46

        White privilege.

    23. HLHelen Lewis1:03:46

        Um, and, and in White Fragility, there is a chapter called White Women's Tears, which is all about how, you know, that it is emotionally manipulative when white women are confronted with their racism, that they will burst into tears and that everyone will comfort them. Um, and there's this whole slew of books called things like White Feminist or, um, Brown Skin, White Tears, you know, that, that are all about this premise that white women are the absolute worst. And the audience for that is white women. You know, that's what... And I just... Uh, it's one of those times where I just think I just-

    24. CWChris Williamson1:04:18

        It's Fifty Shades of Grey without any of the sex.

    25. HLHelen Lewis1:04:20

        Right. I just, I don't under- I don't fundamentally understand that mindset either. So I was trying to get into that, that mindset too-

    26. CWChris Williamson1:04:27

        And what, what have you-

    27. HLHelen Lewis1:04:27

        ... about the kind of purification rituals of it.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:04:29

        Yeah. What have you come to believe? Like what, what's... You have written about women for a long time. You have been a woman for a long time.

    29. HLHelen Lewis1:04:37

        True.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:04:37

        And you have now considered this new public flagellation, self-humiliation, humiliation thing with a five-grand price tag. How does this fit into the broader narrative of what you think it means to be a white middle-class woman in the modern world?

Episode duration: 1:34:47