Interview with Helen Lewis on culture wars and religion, that Jordan Peterson interview, and gurus generally
Today Chris and Matt are visited by Helen Lewis, a journalist, editor, and writer with what could very fairly be described as a rather distinguished career in those fields. Helen has previously worked at the New Statesman and is currently with The Atlantic. She has also served as a Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University and also on the steering committee for the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University. Her books include Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Helen's work covers a broad array of topics including politics, feminist issues, and contemporary/online culture. She is also known for a particular long-form interview which became a 'viral moment' when she sat down for a challenging discussion with one, Jordan B. Peterson.Most recently Helen has produced "The Church of Social Justice" for BBC4, which asks whether political movements might be taking the place of traditional religions in Britain. A question which never generates any controversy whatsoever. She is also working on an upcoming project that looks at internet gurus and the ecosystems they spawn. So, we were glad to take the opportunity to catch up and talk about the intersections with our rather idiosyncratic collection of interests.Join us as we try to decipher whether everything is a religion, if social justice requires a pope, and how exactly can we resolve ALL of those thorny culture war debates. We might not ultimately reach any satisfying answers but Helen does offer her one rule for life at the end of the interview!Also featured on this episode: our most defensive response to a review to date, and a segment on the dangers of JAQing off!LinksThe Church of Social Justice (BBC4)How Social Justice became a New Religion (The Atlantic)Helen's Book: Difficult Women- A History of Feminism in 11 FightsHelen's interview with Jordan Peterson for British CQJoe Rogan's Recent Vote Republican ClipChris' appearance on Embrace The Void discussing definitions of religion
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
Yes, that's right.
Sense-making is the game and Decoding the Gurus is the name.
But your name, Chris, is Chris.
My name is Matt.
Keep going.
I may have lost the thread there a little bit.
But it was a good idea anyway.
Throw in a metaphor.
Throw in a metaphor and we'll rescue it.
We are deep in the sense making muck.
We're excavating tunnels.
We're digging through metaphorical soil to reach the famed Fabergé eggs that lie.
The deep ore of sense, a deep seam of sense is there.
Just imagine us like two hairy dwarfs with our gleaming pickaxes chopping through the sense-speaking metaphors to try and get at the nuggets of wisdom that lie buried deep, deep down several metaphorical levers deep.
That's what we're doing.
We've been doing it for a while and we'll continue to do so.
That's right.
Just have to be careful we don't dig too deep because you know what happened to the dwarves in Lord of the Rings?
That's right.
There's monsters down there.
Yeah, in the sense-making minds.
Think of the implications of this metaphor if we map it out, if we follow it all the way through.
Yeah, but what about the elves, man?
What about the elves?
Oh, that's our nuller day.
That's our nuller day.
But we are not here today to talk about the sense-makers because we have yet to finish our work.
It's hard work.
But it's honest work.
But it's honest work, and by God, we'll get there.
So while you're waiting there on the edge of the mine for the lift to come up with the rocks of sense, we thought we would toss you some scraps.
That's a terrible way to say we're going to do an interview with someone in the meantime.
It's not the scraps.
What happened instead, Matt, was while we were digging through the sense-making layers, we hit upon a diamond.
A diamond in the rough.
A crystalline structure that emerged and we have excavated and we've took this up.
The show you, in the meantime, say, just hold on, look at this shiny object in the meantime.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what it is.
And who are we talking to, Chris?
The shiny object is the journalist Helen Lewis, previously a journalist that the New Statesman wrote for various things.
I listened to her on the New Statesman podcast, talk about British politics in a very interesting way.
And she now works at the Atlantic, but recently had some...
Articles and BBC documentaries come out about the topic of religion and whether there are aspects of religion and social justice movements.
And predictably, that was met with great enthusiasm online.
Twitter was uncharacteristically gentle.
Yeah, they were just like, oh, interesting.
That's a nice idea, yeah.
It's good.
Fruit for thought.
Yeah, there was a bit of a couple of them.
But we're not going to spoil it because we talked to Helen about that and religion is supposedly my area of academic expertise.
So, you know, there might be interesting points to discuss there.
So, that's what's coming up in the interview.
But before we get there, Matt, I've got a grievance-mongering segment for you.
You want to air a grievance?
Go ahead.
I want to air a grievance.
You know this thing, Matt, of course, like everything, it happens on Twitter, but it also happens in other places.
It happens via emails and so on.
And it's where you get a question where somebody presents it, you know, like, oh, dear sir, pray tell, I came across this story about...
The Hunter Biden laptop.
And I know nothing.
I know nothing about it.
But I'm purely curious if there is some legitimacy to some of the things that I may have heard on the grapevine.
And, you know, you respond and say, oh, well, of course, there does seem to be validity to some parts of it.
But that was never really in dispute.
I mean, there were pictures and everybody knows Hunter Biden's a fuck up.
So the question is really whether the allegations would relate.
Joe Biden.
That's why they're of any relevance.
And there, there seems to be little.
But the response is, oh, oh, sir, thank you for the answer.
But, you know, I have seen in my travels this article on The Daily Wire, and it mentions this.
I know The Daily Wire isn't reliable, but also The Daily Mail has covered this aspect.
And if you look at this one article which appeared in, it goes on, right?
It continues on and on.
And as it goes on, it becomes clear the person has a very strong opinion.
You know, they are not just working their way through it.
They've got like a whole thesis on the thing.
And I hate that.
I hate that for, oh, please explain to me, good sir.
I am but a humble traveler, weary from my sojourn in the discourse trenches.
Yeah.
Somebody needs to tell these people that we are aware.
Everybody knows what they're doing.
It has a name.
Just asking questions.
Jacking off.
J-A-Q.
We're onto them.
It doesn't work.
It just annoys people.
What's the difference between that and sea-lining, though?
What's sea-lining?
I forget.
Well, sea-lining is that you barge into a conversation and kind of demand that people explain in detail about whatever you want them to talk about.
I've heard people argue that the sea lion cartoon isn't great because, like, if you just change some of the details, the sea lion is actually quite reasonable, right?
Like, if somebody makes a racist comment offhand and then they're like, oh, excuse me, like, could you just explain more?
And you're like, no, no, you know, go away, I don't want to talk about that.
I think that's the difference.
Just asking questions is the thing where you have a very clear conclusion that you already Believe, but you present it in this full, naive way of, oh, I just have questions that I would like to answer.
Joe Rogan is the kind of king of just asking questions approach, right?
But the thing is, Matt, you said, you know, we all know what you're up to.
But there's so many that don't.
There's so many people that are like, Joe Rogan has an open mind.
He's just a curious person.
He doesn't have an ideology.
He's got no, you know, lean one way or the other.
He just asks questions.
That's all he does.
So, I didn't know this, but you told me that some terrible person on the Reddit said that I was wrong in saying that Joe Rogan was right-wing.
I was very, very wrong about that.
You know, the tone that you said terrible person there, Matt, as well, is like, I know, I know you were being sarcastic, but I'm just warning you that I actually think...
You know, I've experienced this online.
People don't hear the tone.
So they're like, oh, Matt just called someone terrible.
Just to say he had a twinkle in his eye when he said it.
That's all.
But yes, somebody has been taking you to task for saying that.
That Joe Rogan is a right-wing partisan.
How could you say that, Matt?
On what basis?
They mentioned a couple of times, you've only listened to six hours.
On what basis?
Which is not true because we've done other episodes with Joe Rogan since then.
There's a clip there in front of me from 17 hours ago on our Reddit.
We just say Joe Rogan is telling people to vote Republican.
He must be that very special kind of left-winger.
Tells people to vote Republican, I guess.
Yeah.
Why would I be confused?
You know, so easy to get confused.
I'm just a simple man.
It is.
It's very hard.
I mean, it's very difficult to spot Joe Rogan's skew.
You know, when we did the episode on him, the clips, you could, 50-50.
50-50.
Is he going to defend Biden?
Is he going to defend Trump?
It was just not clear.
And which way he leans, it's all unclear.
I mean, he spoke to Bernie Sanders.
He spoke to Bernie Sanders and he said in the primary that he might prefer Bernie Sanders.
So, you know, people have got them all wrong, Matt.
They've just got them all wrong.
Oh, Matt.
I hear that.
Just log off, Chris.
Log off.
Well, they're all over the place, Matt.
You meet these people.
You meet them walking around in the street like P-Zombies as well.
But yeah, so just asking questions as such.
An effective technique.
And even though people make fun of it, there's memes floating around.
It's now got its own little moniker and everything.
It still works.
It still works.
This is like Matt Tybee, Glenn Greenwald's kind of thing as well.
They're not saying Alex Jones is right.
They're just asking questions about the way he's treated in the mainstream media.
Ho-hum.
Ho-hum.
So, from that diabolical behaviour to an altogether more entertaining and less diabolical behaviour, let's go speak to our guest for this week.
Let's do it.
Would you join me, Matt, in the parlour?
Let's proceed into it, yes.
Right this way.
Okay, so, Matt, with us now kindly is...
Helen Lewis, staff writer for The Atlantic, and previously with New Statesman, where I think I first came across you, Helen, and has recently released a short documentary, video documentary,
The Church of Social Justice on BBC Video 4, and a connected article in The Atlantic, which looks at...
Well, our social justice has some features which make it parallel with religion, but we'll get into that.
So, first of all, Helen, thank you for waking up early and agreeing to talk to us.
Thank you very much.
If you can hear the bad noises, that's just me chugging my morning cup of tea, the first of my many morning cups of tea.
Apologies.
Well, if there's deep intakes of breath, that's Matt smoking his vape.
Pen or whatever they're called.
So that's not Helen.
She's not taking the vibe.
So that background noise is my, if you hear it.
Yeah, that's me.
That's me.
So, yeah, Helen, just to say as well that the documentary you made was relevant to my interests in particular because I do research on religion and also things which are not religion but have rituals.
In them.
That's the other thing that I'm interested in, visual psychology.
So this seemed up my alley.
I used to listen to you on the New Statesman podcast with Stephen Bush back in the day and enjoyed that.
So this is a pleasure.
It's like the podcast world coming to life.
You're actually a real person.
Yeah, the podcast has come to you.
I'm sorry, I didn't bring Stephen.
We would have had to then talk about the Labour Party and no one wants that.
No, no.
We might get into that later.
But the other thing that people might know you for probably This is probably not a nice thing to say.
You do have books and stuff that you've written, but...
I do have an almost 20-year career as a journalist, but you're going to say I also sat opposite a quite grumpy Jordan Peterson in 2018 for GQ.
Yes, that too was me.
I am, unfortunately.
Yes, I think that's going to haunt your career.
But yes, you did think the reason that it's so well known, because he's been interviewed by...
Hundreds of people, thousands of people probably at this stage, but your interview was a long form one and it was one of the few that was critical, but actually I think overall quite well received and well regarded and regarded as a challenging interview for him.
Where he was kind of pushed on stuff in a way that he normally isn't.
Yeah, I think it was a kind of Rorschach plot, which we can kind of talk about in regards to all of this stuff.
But basically, everybody I knew thought it was amazing.
I totally kippered him like he looked like a loon.
And then everybody in the YouTube comments thinks he totally kippered me.
I look like a sort of woke idiot, which is quite funny because it's just people watching exactly the same interview.
And as you say, incredibly long, about 90 minutes.
I mean, GQ only sprung the video bit of me quite late, so the cameraman who did the stills photography also had to record it, which is why there were only two shots.
There's a shot of him and there's a two-shot of the two of us.
It's not one of me, too.
And he kept having to pause every half hour to put a new memory card in.
We'd literally filled it with big insights into life.
And then at the end, I remember the cameraman going, and I was quite exhausted.
I think John Peace must have been quite exhausted.
And the cameraman went, well, I don't know who's going to want to watch that.
That's typically what happens when we record an episode.
Every time we finish an episode of our podcast, we're like, fuck, that was long, this very niche topic.
But amazingly, people listen to...
Well, the answer was like something I meant to like about 55 million people so far.
It overtook the Cathy Newman.
I'm working on something, which maybe we'll get to later, also in your subject area about gurus, so I went and revisited it.
And some of the criticisms of me are just genuinely very funny.
There's one that criticises me for inhaling and exhaling.
It's like, you can see he's got her on the run.
She's inhaling and exhaling.
Well, that is a telltale sign.
That's one of the things we point out.
Like, look at the breathing on the gurus.
They're all breathing.
I'm sorry to dwell on this.
Yeah, I found your performance in that interview to be very enjoyable.
It was very cathartic to me to hear a bunch of points put to him.
And I think I remember you saying online at the time that the reaction you got from his community was actually more positive than you were.
Anticipating.
Like, overall, I'm sure you got your fair amount of strange comments, but I saw as well the reaction seemed to be kind of like that they respected a bit that you were able to go hard.
I mean, tell me what you think about this, but I think there was a sort of bifurcation at some point in the intellectual dark web community between the people who genuinely were kind of heterodox liberals and the people who were either outright conservatives or actually in cults of personality.
And so at that time, when I went into the r slash Jordan Peterson forum, there were some people going, oh, not to go.
But also there were quite a lot of people who genuinely appreciated that I had done what they had always wanted someone to do, which was take him and his ideas seriously.
Send over, you know, a mainstream media interviewer to do a long-form interview with him.
And, you know, I think, I don't know whether or not maybe the American tradition of interviewing is much more deferential.
I don't think by the...
I mean, I grew up watching Jeremy Paxman.
I don't think I was...
I mean, I could have been a lot meaner.
Like, the interviewers I grew up watching were really seriously...
Like, Jeremy Paxman's famously asked him, I've had the same question 12 times in a row.
And it was, did you threaten to overrule?
Which is this question that makes no sense to anyone now.
In fact, one of my main criticisms of those IDW podcasts is that they are just people who agree with each other, agreeing with each other for hours on end.
And I don't know why anyone wants to watch that, but I'm the one who's wrong because people really do.
Yeah, this is something we constantly complain about.
And because our podcast for...
It kind of requires, not that anybody's making it to us, but except us, but that we listen to like four hours with Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein speaking to a chiller.
And it's hard to imagine more positive reinforcement back padding.
You would imagine that people would get bored and just like want to say something insulting just to mix things up every so of them.
They don't seem to get tired of it, and it's the next week it's another person and they could do the whole thing again.
To be honest with you, I think we should be grateful, right?
Because sometimes it does elicit completely bonkers answers.
I've just watched some clips of that Lex Friedman interview with Peterson just last week, and had I been sitting there and he started saying some of this stuff that I just don't understand it on a basic word level, I would have compelled to interject and go, "What?"
What?
Matter is what matters.
That's not how physics works.
There are physicists who've looked into this.
Maybe go to the guys at CERN and ask them.
They're the experts.
But then maybe that sort of first-year philosophy lecture, stoned ramblings.
If you interrupt that, you can't let light in on magic.
That wouldn't happen if people were giving a challenging interview, I think.
Yeah, things have certainly devolved in terms of the discourse.
You wouldn't see, I think, virtually any of these gurus agree to talk to someone like yourself, Helen, these days.
They talk to each other, and they clap each other on the back, and they run a victory lap.
But on that point you mentioned about the bification, I mean, that's also something we've noticed.
In fact, we have an article in Process, an academic one, where that turned out to be our theme.
You know, we looked at how the gurus...
And the heterodox fear and the anti-wokes fear generally, how it handled these events of COVID and now Ukraine.
And there was an apparent bification where you had figures like Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehman, or Sam Harris, who, you know, whatever their faults and whatever you might disagree with them about, took a reasonably rational,
principled position on those things.
And then you had Probably the majority of them that spiral to one degree or another to this conspiratorial MAGA chud.
So I think that is real.
That has happened.
James Lindsay is the classic example of this.
So I first encountered him making another Radio 4 documentary called The Roots of Woke Culture, which looked at that so-called squared hoax.
And so this is somebody who comes to prominence by saying people just agree with stuff because it confirms their biases and that allows them to suspend their rational disbelief.
And I check in a couple of years later and this is somebody who's...
Fallen for the libs of TikTok hoax about, I think it's the one about how some students were furries and were asking for kitty litter in their classrooms.
And it's like, it was kind of the most perfect illustration of an internet fable of you have become what you, you know, you gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into you and you basically become the mirror image of the people you were criticizing at the start, just from too much internet, simply too much internet.
There's no short of irony.
I mean, this is the man that wrote How to...
Have impossible conversations and it was nothing but the worst kind of Twitter troll.
But you've got to look at the anti-woke sphere is really interesting because I write articles that could sometimes be classified in that domain, right?
I have written about.
So what I think is sort of some very kind of corporate religious aspects where it's about kind of just like everybody, you know, going to a diversity training where a lot of white rich people sit around meditating on their sins for a bit and then go back to doing their job that has got no social awareness whatsoever.
So I do fall into that sphere.
And I think there's a real, there's a really interesting tension there between the fact, I think it is very hard to be overtly, whatever you want to call it, anti-woke in academia, in publishing, you know, in the arts, like in theatre.
It is really not hard to be anti-woke on Twitter and on Substack.
And there is this kind of borrowed martyrdom that drives so much of that, which is like, I'm saying things are really hard to say.
And you're like...
For you, they're not.
For other people, they really would be.
Like, if you were the director of an artistic director of a theatre company, sub-state theatre company, this would be a mental thing for you to say and expect to keep your job.
But on sub-state, I think you're going to be fine, actually.
There's a general disregard for the fact that there's a very big ecosystem that has a voracious appetite.
for stuff critical of critical race theory or social justice things and of course that's going to exist and you can even say well if the some of the excesses weren't so much there that there wouldn't be the opportunity for people to lap up the the kind of backlash or but I find it kind of frustrating that often people don't grapple with the fact that like Dave Rubin is hugely Successful.
And so if you say, oh, you can't, you cannot argue for anti-woke positions or positions critical of social justice, you definitely can.
And you can definitely get lots of attention.
But it's much harder if you wanted to be, like you say, a guardian writer and take that position or, you know, write for...
I don't know, maybe a BBC journalist as well might, although the BBC has been putting out content which is more critical than is standard in American mainstream things.
Or to stand up at a university faculty meeting and say, hey, I think these land acknowledgements are a bit trite and silly and we shouldn't do them.
I mean, they're not going to fire you on the spot, but, you know, it's not something one would say.
Yeah.
I think that's a genuinely brave stand to take, particularly within an organisation to some extent captured.
And I think one of the things I think is really interesting about this ideology is that it refuses to acknowledge it's an ideology.
It's just being kind.
It's just being in favour of equity.
And you are never allowed to go, but does it actually achieve the stated principles that you are?
Because that's taken as questioning the principles, right?
You know, I've got a lot of time for many of the tenets.
Intersectionality, I think, is a really interesting legal theory.
But the kind of specific application of it in land acknowledgements, I just feel like Bob Geldof at the end of Live Aid being like, just give us your fucking money.
Like, if you care that much, just, you know, just pay people.
Like, just pay more tax, whatever it might be.
Just do something that actually costs you something.
None of this costs you anything apart from words.
Yeah.
And I think that the...
The slight flip side is I noticed this whenever somebody sent me recently.
There was a resignation letter from a tenured guy.
I think he was in anthropology, which is why a whole bunch of people DM'd me and was like, look at this.
And I was reading what is now sort of a kind of template for I was a tenured professor and I had things going for me and then wokeness came to the university.
But then there's also this...
Part that often creeps in, where people start to, like, he was really big up in the University of Austin, or is it the University of Texas?
Austin, Texas, yeah, yeah.
The Barry Weiss.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, and the whole bunch of, like, other, like, the kind of James Lindsay-ish stuff, and you're like, okay, well...
What you're describing is suddenly becoming slightly more skewed towards that you've got annoyed by something in academia, which is definitely there, a kind of pressure and a conformity.
But you're uncritically accepting, on the flip side, the heterodox position as fighting against that.
They're siding like Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.
And I feel like if you're feeling aggrieved with academia and the left...
That it often lends people towards credulously accepting whatever, you know, somebody writes for Colette or something like that.
And it shouldn't because you don't have to throw in your lap of Peter Boghossian in order to be critical of land acknowledgments.
But at the same time, I would say that if you think the spectrum of American intellectual life runs from, you know, standard academic to Peter Boghossian, there's a whole lot more right wing on the edge of that.
That, to me, is what's interesting about that.
I don't know whether or not some people live in genuine, real-life bubbles, where the idea of a Trump supporter is a kind of...
I know James Lindsay...
You know, went in for Trump because he was from Antioch.
But you know what I mean?
Like the concept of a genuine, principled, pro-life Catholic conservative is just a type of person that they don't encounter in their everyday life.
But that's why I do think the Jonathan Haidt thesis about the kind of self-sorting of, you know, it is not good that the police now attracts people with an authoritarian disposition rather than the random people who happen to live in that town and it just recruited from that town.
That's bad.
And the same thing is bad if academia only attracts people with a certain set of political views.
You do want a range of weirdos in any profession.
Which is why I love the BBC, right?
Because the BBC sits somebody, like in American terms, somebody from MSNBC and somebody from Fox, and they have to go on Question Time together and have an argument.
And I looked at the study of American media, and instead of a spread from left to right, there's a poll and a poll and a big hole in the middle.
And that's just, that's terrible.
Because as soon as you then say something that is slightly critical of your own side, it's giving sucker to the enemy.
And you can't do intellectual work like that.
Yeah.
And I think that there are, in academia, especially in American stuff, you know, there are Christian colleges and they're in a minority.
But there definitely is right-wing academics.
But within specific fields, you know, you'll never hear from them.
But I...
One thing that I've noticed, and you probably have noticed it yourself, Helen, with like Jordan Peterson, is a lot of the first wave of critiques of Jordan felt a little bit to me, like what you're pointing out about, you know, like Boghossian,
kind of casting him as this far-right figure.
And he seemed to be more a conservatively inclined, but still kind of academic-type person.
But over time...
And now, you know, he's a pundit for the Daily Wire reeling at people to go to church and, you know, we'll see who cancels who.
And with Boghossian, you know, he has not gone as far as Lindsay, but he was doing a tour around Hungary recently for Orban's government.
Jordan Peterson also went over to see Orban.
Douglas Murray has been over to see Orban.
And you're kind of like all this talk about, you know, totalitarianism and...
And how people are not okay with the far right.
But they don't seem to see much of an issue with things like Hungary, which, you know, even just on the thing of, like, journalistic freedom, there's big concerns there.
But because they're kind of anti-woke, anti-social justice, it's like, well, that's fine.
So it's just that there seems to be a pull towards the, like, more partisan right in that sphere.
I'm going to be very cruel and say, you know, one of the things that the New Statesman published, my former employer in the 1930s, was H.G. Wells went over to interview Stalin.
And there's a great quote that was like, Mr. Stalin, it seems you're somewhat to the left of me.
And like, no shit.
But I just think there is a thing in people who become writers and commentators that they really like applause.
And then more than anything else, they like to be made to feel important.
And if the literal leader of a country is inviting you over and fating you and saying, my God.
Your ideas are here to save Western civilization.
It takes a pretty cynical, shriveled, you know, cow like me to be like, yeah, but no, thank you.
And nonetheless.
Right.
I just think that was the old tradition of journalism was that you instinctively, you know, like, I think that I was like, you know, you should be like, you should treat politicians like a dog treats a lamppost.
Politicians do one thing and journalists do another.
But these guys, because they live on the borderline of cultural critics or philosophers, are very susceptible to the idea that they might be invited somewhere to deliver their ideas.
I don't have any particularly interesting ideas.
I go out and look at things and write them down for other people, right?
And I just think that's the difference between a journalist and...
A commentator, and hopefully that slightly inoculates you from thinking, "Oh, I'd love to go to Hungary.
I hear it's lovely this time of year, and they'll put a little banquet on for me in the stateroom and I can pose with him."
And oh, right, so he's also rolling back protections for LGBT people and, you know, talking about how he wants to have a white Hungary.
Oh, well, I mean, we've all got our little exotic opinions.
Or the other thing, which is that you somehow think you can talk them round.
Or the kind of...
The Hitler thing, which is why he was always very nice to me.
I studied the Mitford sisters and Diana Moseley is very fascinating on this.
He was always so polite and just cannot reconcile the idea that somebody who could have very good manners and be nice to you and nonetheless have terrible political positions.
And I think for people who were otherwise incredibly smart, it's really interesting to watch that happen.
Yeah, you've really hit upon those two major themes in this grocery, which is one, they have this amazing faith in personal relationships and one-on-one conversations to sort things out and prioritize that over anything else.
And it doesn't take being fated by a problematic European leader to turn their heads because unlike...
An old-fashioned journalist, they don't have a day job.
They don't have a salary.
They are essentially entrepreneurs.
And many of them are quite explicit about approaching their channels, the number of hits they're getting, and the number of likes and retweets, and the various types of monetization that occurs.
Some of them are quite explicit about treating like a business.
But even if those that are not...
Consciously aware of it.
The gamification of journalism is amazing.
It actually takes a conscious effort to not pay attention to those metrics and to just do what you think is a good thing to do without taking that into account.
Yeah, I think that's true.
What's the bit that bakes my muffin, mostly because it involves people shouting at me, is the fact that people think that that model, the entrepreneur model, is more honest.
Oh, look at you, you lying mainstream media journalist.
And you're like, but I take a good middle class salary to do this.
What I don't do is rely on milking you directly for money in order for me to travel on life's planes and whatever it is.
And I don't know if it's uniquely American.
It feels quite American to think that the latter being the overt kind of shyster, the kind of like roll up, roll up, have a look at my intellectual words.
There's something, you know, it's the Trumpian quality, right?
There's something more honest to that.
Yeah, and I think the fact that whatever you think of institutions, they can be suffocating and enforced orthodoxies, but they also can apply quality control and pushback.
And, you know, I find that a lot of the Substack and independent people, that they do very much over time become pretty caricatured versions of themselves, whereas when they were In the media organization,
although they were probably unhappy and bullied, they also were kind of forced not to indulge the worst instincts.
And it's, yeah, that's an unfortunate thing.
And I guess all of this probably orbits around the general thesis of your article, the article and documentary, The Church of Social Justice.
I could attempt to do it, but maybe it's better if I force you to do it.
So if you were describing the general thesis there, Helen, in a nutshell, what's the big idea?
Well, a couple of years ago, I wrote a history of feminism called Difficult Women.
And one of the interviews I did with it was with a think tank called Theos, which is a Christian think tank.
And Elizabeth there said to me, and this is the way she phrased it, I hope you don't find this offensive, but do you think feminism replaced religion?
Because I was raised...
My dad's a Catholic deacon.
And I said, first of all, it's really interesting that you think that I would find that offensive.
That's an assumption that's going worth interrogating.
But I said, no, I do.
I think I really do buy that, actually.
I was big into New Atheism in the 2000s when that was the thing, because it felt like countercultural and a rebellion against my youth.
But New Atheism was prey to cults of personality.
Definitely.
And I find now, looking back at it, the kind of idea that I think it was Michael Shermer said that atheists should rename themselves 'Brights'.
It sort of makes me want to pop out an eyeball and cringing.
Because it's just the idea that we've evolved.
We're the people who've evolved past these silly superstitions.
And so I kind of wanted to look at that thesis and look at whether or not social justice movements do replace religion for some people.
And I talked to Elizabeth again, who says she talks, for example, from very burnt-out environmentalists.
And she says to them, "Have you not thought of the old praying?
Give it a whirl, see how you like it."
And I wanted to explore the thesis because I know that people have written previously about social justice as A religion in a bad sense, in the superstitious sense or in the kind of culty, ritualistic aspects.
But to me also, there's a very good side to religion, which I see in my parents, which is that it has given them a ready-made community.
It's given them a life that is about something bigger than yourself and a sort of sense of meaning and purpose beyond yourself.
And I think that's when the best of social justice movements, when you see, you know, the civil rights marches and people getting beaten up in order to get civil rights for black people in the US, you need to have some kind of ethic or ethos behind that, some kind of community.
And maybe you need to have some rituals that go along with that, the bond, the group all together.
So, yeah, so I think there was a lot of assumption that I was coming at it from the point of view of like social justice is like religion and that's bad.
But it wasn't aiming to do that.
It was aiming to take a much more holistic view of it.
Yeah, so it's fair to say that the reaction to it online that I saw was kind of polarized.
You had people that were like, yes, we've been saying this and I can see parallels.
And then you also had the reaction amongst people that were kind of like, this is just, you know, James Lindsay has been saying this for five years and this is just a tired take, right?
Everything I don't like is a...
Is a religion.
And because my academic work is focused on religion, and even in the annoying field of study of religions, there's endless debates about Whether the term religion is a useful concept or not,
and what categorizes a religion.
I've even written a freaking paper.
So it never ends.
Like that topic is just a perennial one that comes up.
And I think people are sensitive to, like you say, that when almost all, on all occasions, when somebody says X is like a religion, what they mean is like X is like a fundamentalist cult.
With all the worst aspects of religion, dogmatic certainty, very strong in-group, out-group, moral condemnation of non-believers.
That's usually the parallels that people are drawing on.
What they're not typically saying is what you just outlined, which is, you know, it offers community and the meaning system or value system that people take a kind of solace in or that they might find philosophically.
Deep and according with the values.
So, yeah, there's an interesting assumption that the comparisons to religion are fundamentally negative.
And I think part of that is, like you say, because lots of the people that write that, they are making a negative comparison.
So it's kind of the go-to assumption.
I think there are some really negative assumptions.
I think when you designate certain things not just as...
You know, a sort of blasphemy and kind of can't be interrogated.
They're just axiomatically bad.
I think, you know, that is something that I feel is present in social justice politics that does remind me of, you know, Catholicism.
I think there are good criticisms, you mentioned one of them there, is that basically what kind of religion are we talking about?
Are we actually talking about American evangelicals?
Are we talking about fundamentalism?
Are we talking about Western religion?
I think all of those things are kind of true.
And I think in the documentary it's more obvious that I'm talking about my background as a kind of English Catholic.
But yeah, the big surprise of the documentary is that religious people, by and large, really liked it.
Which is really funny.
Because they probably have some big thoughts about the people at their church who annoy them in particular ways and then can see that behaviour in other contexts and kind of recognise it.
The people who didn't like it were the people who think that they're above religion and they've given it up and feel that they are being criticised here for having You know, I think one of the things that's difficult about that, it's very hard to find words to describe that ideology,
but it is a left-wing ideology that is not materialist.
It's not economic.
It's not anti-imperialist.
It is socially liberal in a very particular way.
And one of the problems with it is that it doesn't believe it's an ideology and therefore kind of any criticism it shudders away from because it's sort of been named and described.
And whereas its adherence would say, you know, this is just about treating everyone equally.
This is just about kindness and niceness.
I mean, on one hand, I can see the pushback, which is that everything is a little bit like a religion.
But then, you know, I think of Amanda Montel, who we interviewed, who wrote a book about cultishness and emphasis on the ness, right?
Just to say, look, it's about looking in everyday life and seeing what qualities might have some of the features of cults.
And it's not saying that it's a full-blown...
We're going to drink Kool-Aid in the morning sort of thing.
And I have to say, I mean, my family background is also Catholic, and long before I ever heard of Twitter, I had noticed, I think, that there was, I think, for many people who essentially lost their religion sometime in the 70s or the 80s, but grew up with a strong Catholic cultural background,
and the Catholic Church itself.
You know, there are different types of Catholic Church, different from Rome out here, where there's always been a strong social justice mission, a strong track record of doing things in the community and schools and social work and things like that.
And I have to admit, I did have the thought long before anyone else wrote about it that I felt that...
You were the first one.
I felt that people...
It was quite an easy shift to kind of drop the metaphysical aspects, but the moral aspects, like it dovetailed quite nicely, actually, with the sort of the attitudes to sex, you know, and so on, which was, as well as the moral prescriptions,
modern sort of social justice fame, it did occur to me that it fit quite nicely.
It gave a sense of meaning.
It gave like a mission in the world, like what we need to do in order to make the world a better place.
And it gave a sense of identity in terms of it defined what it was to be a good person and a worthwhile person.
Do you think, though, there's something that I think people really struggle with, which is the idea that there are some practices which are useless and, you know, have no utility, but we should all do nonetheless just in order to signal our kind of collectivism or our allegiance to a particular group?
That's something that I really struggle with, right?
The idea that there are bits of religion that actually...
I don't believe whatever, but actually maybe it's a good thing for everybody to do.
Maybe it's a good thing, you know, so one of my mentions, we've talked about either land acknowledgements or pronoun announcements.
And now I don't think that pronoun announcements do their stated goal, which is to make transgender people feel welcome.
Actually, if you talked, like ContraPoints, the YouTuber said, when people do that, I feel actually it's because they've noticed there's a trans person there and they're all doing it to prove how great and like right on and cool they are about it.
So it makes me feel more visible.
Also in 99% of circumstances it's really obvious from people's names and personal appearance what pronouns you should use for them.
No one would ever know that you were a she /they unless you told them, right?
So all of this stuff is an architecture that exists.
So why are you doing it?
And then there is a case for doing it that says we want to show that if anybody did change their pronouns we would be okay with it.
We don't think it has any other function.
It just signals our belief, like our allegiance to this particular belief system, or indeed the belief system that actually you can overnight change your sex or your gender identity.
And that's why we do it.
And then people could take it or leave it on that basis, argue with it on that basis.
And that for me is the fundamental disjunction that I was kind of getting at here, is the fact that religious practices Maybe in utile, you know, they don't have a utility, but there may be a reason to do them anyway.
And I think people on the left kind of slightly struggle with that idea.
Because I study ritual psychology and when you do that, you end up starting to notice like how much of life is ritualized and not just in Japan.
Here it's quite evident, especially when you're a foreigner, right?
Or you're a foreigner anywhere, you notice the ritualized aspects of life.
But when you look at your own country and you're kind of For your job, for us to think about rituals, you start to realize, you know, how much of life is ritualized and how much they matter outside of a religious context.
Even, you know, there's kind of grand event things like the...
Inauguration events, right?
Like when Obama said the Pledge of Allegiance one word or whatever wrong, it needed to be re-said the next day, right?
Why?
Because nobody actually thinks, well, if he didn't say that, some spiritual force will come down and make him not the president.
But getting the rituals right matters.
And you can see that when the Republicans recently...
Played around with.
We're not going to engage in the handover of power in the proper, artistic way.
It causes a big problem.
So I'm less reluctant about acknowledging that outside of the religious arena, we all have these things that we do and things that we say and kind of conventions that we follow that are not logical.
They're culturally inherited or there to signal things.
But I...
I think you're right, Helen, that part of it is because there's the discourse around virtue signaling.
That, oh, you're just saying that in order to get social credit.
And that definitely is going on.
But it's also sometimes...
Presented as discrediting of anything that you would just like, you know, oh, you put the Ukraine flag.
That's just virtue signaling.
Like, why don't you go volunteer in Ukraine?
And you're like, well, you know, there's a large spectrum and maybe just signaling that you're supporting a country that's currently being invaded.
It's a small gesture, but, you know, there's no harm to it.
And I think that the point about the people on the...
Left being reluctant to see things that they're doing as being that, as like signaling a group commitment.
I think that also comes up because there is then a kind of implicit judgment that it's...
It's not about what the people are saying about.
It's kind of like a shallow self-centered thing more.
That's a kind of like implicit part it feels like with that.
But it needn't be because we all do things every day to signal we are part of certain groups or agree to certain things.
So yeah, I think the implicit judgment and maybe the fact that Jordan Peterson and various other people are the ones that usually emphasize.
That has made people resistant to that.
Yeah, I mean, I remember when I went to Japan a couple of years ago, how lovely I found it when I got on the Shinkansen and the guard came through the doors in his white gloves and then turned around and bowed to the carriage.
And I thought, well, actually, you know what that says to me?
That says to me, I respect the train.
I respect the people on the train.
And this is a much nicer train than British trains, so clearly.
Like respecting the train is the way to go if you want train travel in your country to be much nicer.
And I don't, so I don't, you know, you might think that's, people like, oh, it's a quaint, but actually it serves a really useful social function of signaling.
This is a public space in which we act in a particularly respectful way that is really useful.
And yeah, I agree with you about the thing about virtue signaling that is good is I think one of the things that social media is particularly prone to pluralistic ignorance.
And some of the subjects I write about, you know, you really get that.
You find out that basically everybody agrees with you but they just either think they're too scared to say so or more likely they think they're quite lonely.
And actually, by putting the Ukraine flag in your bio, whatever it is, it's like putting the lawn sign out with your candidate's name on it.
You are letting people know that it's okay to have that opinion.
There are people around them who have that opinion too.
That's not a bad thing.
Yeah, the red rose.
That seems they've gone away.
I never figured out what that was for, Chris.
This isn't just being a boomer, but what was that for?
This is embarrassing, Matt.
Fuck you.
I also...
I can't remember.
I did look it up.
Was it not socialism?
Was it not the red rose?
Like in Britain, it was the Labour symbol is the red rose.
So that was some of it, right?
Was it not a left-wing thing?
No, it is.
It is definitely a left-wing thing, but I couldn't remember.
I looked it up.
This is a bit like old people trying to understand the internet, isn't it?
I have another question.
What about the teardrop?
Is that just an Australian thing?
Like a teardrop, like a drop, a water drop.
I thought that was what you got in prison after you'd killed a guy.
That sounds like an environmental thing, does it not?
I think it's socialist to some degree, maybe.
Okay.
The gender-critical feminist for a while had the checkerboard flag, which I never really got.
I think that might have been, oh, there are only two sexes, like this is black and white.
But there was a kind of strain of person whose name was something like, you know, goody, gender-free, checkerboard flag, hashtag I stand with JK Rowling.
It was a kind of type.
So Helen, obviously you have been in the trenches with the trans debates and gender critical fun that happens every day online.
But that in particular, it's impossible to talk about the concept of whether religious aspects or whatever apply and not...
Touch on that, because it seems to me that in kind of line with what Matt said about, you know, the possibility of drawing parallels to religion in ways that kind of self-serve, I can see that people could argue, you know, that trans...
Trans women are women, right?
You could argue that's a terminating cliche, this thing that, you know, cults use, which is like a simple mantra that shuts down discussion, and if you disagree with it, you're outside the kind of moral universe, right?
But on the other hand, there is the way to perceive that, that, you know, all effective human rights movements have employed slogans that simply state about the rights.
And then, on the gender critical side, I've seen this reluctance for people to kind of acknowledge that identity exists.
Like, some people say, I don't have an identity, mainly because they want to say that gender is not a coherent concept.
But they go, like, quite far down that road to basically deny the existence of identity as a meaningful concept.
And so it feels like there's a lot in that discourse.
On both sides, that ends up hovering around these very strong denunciations of things as completely incoherent and spiritual mumbo jumbo.
And yeah, I don't know that I've posed a great question there, but I'm curious how you feel about all that.
Why are people so angry on the internet?
It's a very good question, Chris.
Let's solve that one right here.
Solve that out!
I think, again, I think that's a debate that really...
You know, it is, I think, the first real social justice movement that has developed at exactly the same time as Twitter.
And all the other ones, really, feminism, civil rights, whatever it might be, have benefited from having had a lot of their intellectual groundwork done before the advent of social media.
Because as you say, one of the problems is that actually you don't know what people mean by that.
Now, by trans women or women, do you mean that there are people who are biologically male who want to live as women, be treated as women, you know, to almost all extents in society, you know, be women?
Which basically, apart from a few kind of very staunchly conservative right-wing social conservatives, actually is a bargain that pretty much everybody accepts.
But you don't know whether or not that's the proposition or is the proposition that they are literally identical to somebody who was born biologically female, has lived as a biological female, and should be considered by virtue of an inner essence exactly the same.
And that's a much tougher thing.
Some people do believe that.
But I think it's certainly...
I don't think you have to believe that in order to treat transgender people with decency.
And therefore, in the same way that I think it falls into the level of spiritual belief, in the sense that I don't have to believe that Muhammad's going to heaven on a winged horse to treat Muslims with respect.
I don't have to believe in body, you know, the post literally becomes the body and blood of Christ not to practice anti-Catholic discrimination.
And so that's where I think that that problem comes.
The other problem, frankly, having talked about it, is because a lot of the people raising...
Concerns in the early days were feminist and therefore were more likely to be women, particularly older women.
A lot of people, men, didn't take it seriously.
The high squeaky voices just didn't penetrate.
So one of my favourite things, he won't mind me saying this because he's a friend and I like him, a guy called Tom Chivers.
He wrote for Buzzfeed, wrote for The Telegraph, The Independent, wrote a brilliant piece about Laverne Cox saying, you know, is she a woman?
Well, not really, but, you know, no one's claiming that biological sex doesn't exist, but it's just polite to call Laverne Cox she.
And the piece is now in his archive with an amazing little update at the top, which just says, update, I have since discovered that some people don't think biological sex exists.
And that was so my experience of the early 2010s, is that you would go, okay, so I think we can all find some reasonable accommodations here, but actually there are some bits of this ideology that are making very, very provocative claims that have huge implications.
And people would go, no, that's not happening.
That's not happening.
And I think some of the radicalisation that you've seen is, in the same way that I have great sympathy with some of the followers of the gurus that you talk about, right, is from a feeling of being unheard and from a feeling of being excluded.
Dismissed and demonised and looked down on.
And I do think there are bits of the gender critical feminist movement now that are unpleasant and actually border into transphobia.
And a part of that is about a level of exclusion from mainstream discourse and into silos where there are a couple of people who are sort of pretty cult leader-ish actually.
And I think that's what happens when you don't have a properly functioning public debate about something.
Actually, I know people say like we should just exclude people from the public square and never address it, but the reaction to my social justice article was actually a really good example of this.
So, an American professor did like, oh, this is a fresh take.
And someone described this as being the example of the yawn.
I don't know if you heard this idea before, which you get where people go, oh, we've all had this discussion.
And the point is, yes, you and your extremely online friends have all had this discussion and we'll sort out what you think.
But people like my mum and dad haven't, and they have a vote too.
And I think that is something that really resonates in lots of the communities that I look at, where people feel that there is an elite who think this is all very boring and settled, but never want to explain their working to them.
And I think that is the conditions in which polarisation and conspiracism can flourish.
There's a thought, Helen, one issue that seems to complicate things quite significantly and to be doing it in a...
The most dramatic way currently in America is that while you have the, especially in the UK, you know, UK is referred to as turf island, right?
In liberal American circles, yes.
In liberal American circles, yes.
And so I think the debates in the UK that there generally is more Attention paid to presenting the kind of gender critical perspective, right?
You had Nolan's documentary recently on the BBC, and you do have people presenting that side of the argument.
And of course, in the right-wing media, you have a lot of space for that.
But on the American right, it's pretty clear that the American right does have a very, like...
You know, the position that you were describing, the kind of staunch, conservative, very bigoted perspective on trans people.
That clearly exists and still has cultural force.
An example that springs to mind is Colin Wright, the former biologist, now pundit of sorts about gender ideology.
The original position that I saw him coming from, Was very much the acknowledgement that there's biological sex and there's sex differences and that these shouldn't be lost in the discussion over like gender and trans debates.
But if you look at him now, he's on Tucker quite often.
He's courting Elon Musk with these little, you know, his mug diagram of the left has moved completely crazily and now I'm on the right.
Not indicating that the right might have moved in any way over the past, like, 20 years.
So it feels like some of the people, when they're flagging warning signs about the gender critical movement and its closeness to right-wing conservatives, that they do get proven right on occasion,
you know, on James Lindsay and Groomer discourse and that.
And I wonder about, like, threading That needle.
Yeah, but that's a basic lack of respect for feminism, right?
James Lindsay is not a feminist.
And I think there is a...
No, I mean, I don't think he would expect me to say that either, right?
That he just doesn't see it.
So there is, I think, has been a concerted effort to say there is only one critique of this, and it is the right-wing conservative, like, it's just not natural, won't someone think of the children?
And I think people, particularly online, pick the opponent they want to fight.
You know, they fight with...
You know, like a straw man version of their opponents or actually more the kind of identity category, the person that they feel most comfortable arguing with.
So they say, well, obviously, you know, it's only dried up old Karens that think this.
And so that's it.
Well, of course, we can instantly dismiss it.
I'm really wary of talking about this because I know that a repeated theme is that...
Guru's a miserable and grievance monger and talk about how hard they've had it.
But I'm going to say it anyway because I no longer care.
Which is that I think you talk about the space in Britain to talk about it.
That is the result of a lot of people.
A lot of, you know, people throwing themselves onto the barbed wire so that other people could clamber across, right?
I, you know, I am on the glad list of bigots next to Rush Limbaugh.
It just makes me laugh.
I don't think we've got a lot else in common, if I'm honest.
Well, I mean, obviously, he's dead, so that's not going to stop him converging his interests with mine.
But I think there was, and I feel consistently angry, of like, I am 99% on the same side.
You know, coming from the left.
But no, there has to be a purity politics here where people are excluded.
And that documentary reference was about Stonewall, which is the biggest LGBT organisation in Europe.
And for years they had an explicit policy of no debate.
We don't debate this.
While at the same time calling for huge policy changes in public law and policy.
So you can't reconcile, you can't expect to tell people there's a new reality, but also they're not, you're going to entertain no discussion.
And that, to my mind, poisoned that whole subject for years.
And yeah, you're right.
I think there are people, Kelly Jane Keene, Mitchell, Posey Parker is another example of someone who's gone on Tucker.
I mean, not entirely, I would say, situate her within the mainstream feminist movement either.
She's always seemed very much to be her own woman.
So there are people who have spotted a kind of market opportunity there, or this is a single issue cause for them, who have, I think, therefore been more You know, more easily seduced by eventually shading and shading and you wake up and you're Ron DeSantis in a wig.
And I don't think that's necessarily happened to the same extent in the UK because it was so much – organisations like a women's place were so much grounded in the trade union movement, for example.
There were, again, these institutions that kind of act as a check on people.
But I also feel a great deal of sympathy.
I've been very lucky.
The New Statesman was always great to me.
The Atlantic has always been great to me.
And I've got BBC work.
But, you know, I have been cancelled from several literary festivals because one person has complained they don't want to be on the bill with me.
I have, you know, I've got my voice removed from a computer game.
Most amazing.
Morally judged by the computer games industry.
It's just very funny to me.
I'm sorry, your murder simulator is woke now and I can't be allowed on it.
But, you know, and actually at every point during that journey, the place I could have found a really sympathetic audience was by going to a right-wing audience and saying, look at these crazy leftists.
They don't even want to hear the slightest critique of their position.
And, you know, I didn't have to do that because I was lucky in the places that I worked, but lots of other people...
Someone like Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, the only place she could get a hearing, Julie Bindle, the only place she could get a hearing for years was in the right-wing press.
So that's one of the reasons I'm very strong on the fact that you have to have a level of self-regulation.
And frankly, really, do we look at the right in America and think, God, they've really got it right by not allowing any criticism?
No.
The American right would be a lot healthier if people were allowed to go, I understand that you like some of Trump's policies, but I think he might be...
Quite a chaotic and bad leader who does, you know, some things, some are calling crimes.
You know, the American right could do with, frankly, a hell of a lot more self-criticism.
Yeah, it was interesting, the shift towards MAGA and Trumpism and the way that the more principled wing of the Republican Party just got booted.
Yeah, eaten.
Is it Liz Cheney was the latest in line with that?
But, you know, even in your article in The Atlantic about social justice and religion, you have a section there talking about MAGA, talking about QAnon, and the ways in which it's perhaps the most, the strongest, tight-laced identity straitjacket.
That one could wear.
And yet, talking about the way that right-wing or left-wing outlets pick up the story, I did notice that Fox News picked up your story.
Look, look, look at this proof.
Workness and social justice is the religion.
I noticed they didn't quote those bits where you were talking about MAGA and QAnon.
Yes, it's funny that, isn't it?
Also, it's slightly odd for their audience, who I imagine are quite religious, that they would say, look, it is like a religion and that's a bad thing.
Are your audience not quite heavenly Christian?
But you're right, like, QAnon is an incredibly good example of something that I think strays way beyond the stuff I was writing about into, you know, it literally has a prophet and these sort of divine revelations, and which is sort of, in fact, in a way, I know this weird thing to say out loud,
I sometimes wonder if social justice would be better if it did have a pope, because then they could say things.
That's a hard thing.
Yeah, that's good.
That'll be the title of the episode, Helen!
Social justice needs a Pope.
And I am willing to serve if called.
Alert the social justice cardinals, put the white smoke out of the chimney.
No, but in a way, because one of the things that's very difficult in writing about it is its diffuseness.
And what we talked about earlier, you know, the idea that actually some people have got...
Quantifying the level of lunary is always really hard when you're writing about stuff online, right?
Is this a belief that lots of people hold or is it a belief that a few very loud people hold?
And proportionality is one of the hardest challenges for modern journalism because you can find 15 people on Twitter who will believe anything, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, I love...
One of my favourite pastimes in life is looking at the Daily Mail website when they do, you know, fans outraged by Rihanna's low-cut dress on ITV and, like...
You look at the screen grabs they've got of Twitter and the words in bold are "Rihanna, dress, outrage" and that's it.
Of course you can find five people going "Harry, look at this hooah" on television, whereas actually everyone else thought it was a perfectly reasonable dress and didn't bat an eyelid.
That idea of proportionality was what made me hesitate in commenting on your thesis about social justice and religion because I can cite examples.
You know, there was recently a thing on Twitter where a historian had written what very much appears to be a pretty normal and inoffensive It's the American Historical Association president who criticized the 1619 project,
didn't he?
And then he wrote about presentism in history, the idea that people are much more now studying things through the lens of today and recent history.
I read that article and I thought, well, I'm not sure I agree with all this.
And yet it had the pro forma.
Kind of apology, which is I need to stop and I need to listen.
I apologize for the harm that caused and I'm going to reflect on do better, etc.
Which very much has those religious confessional aspects.
But the reason one hesitates to cite these kinds of things is that, yes, there are examples and there are even better ones.
You can find some video of some social justice people, white...
Activists, you know, washing the feet of black people to absolve their sins.
A wonderful example that supports your thesis.
And yet, it's very hard to say whether there's an example that proves anything, isn't there?
And it's hard to comment.
Well, what's interesting about that is, so that's an explicit echo of what happens in the Catholic Church, and maybe Anglican churches too, about Maundy Thursday, right?
So, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples in the Last Supper.
Was it before the Last Supper?
But anyway, it was fairly well established.
Jewish ritual of cleanliness.
And so now my dad has done this.
I mean, I've watched him wash other men's feet, which is not something you can often say about your father.
So what I think happened there is interesting is people want to perform a ritual that says humility.
And what do they reach for?
They reach for what they grew up with.
They reach for religion.
And like, I know it's not quantitative research, but it's qualitative, right?
It's still interesting.
That we are, even those of us who are secular atheists, still are so soaked in a culture of a particular type of religion that that's what we reach for.
That's the frame through which we understand the world.
And I think that is worth kind of acknowledging.
There is a point though here, Matt, that's worth mentioning because I saw there's a person on Twitter, Keiko, did an investigatory thread on that.
And it turned out that the people doing that...
We're these kind of televangelist pastors that make money, so they're explicitly religious as well.
But part of the issue there is, if you're talking about any phenomenon in America that's popular, the vast majority of Americans are religious.
So you will have social justice advocates who are religious, you will have conservatives who are religious, if it's an American phenomenon.
There will be a large percentage of the people who are religious and for whom, you know, religion matters, maybe in a way that is less common in the UK or in Western Europe or Australia, for that matter.
And, you know, you talked to Helen earlier about how, and in the documentary as well, you know, you were talking to somebody who saw their social justice as part of their religious belief.
And there definitely seems to be Within religious communities, some people that explicitly take that framing and say, you know, this is just the kind of outreach of the religious mission that we feel.
This is kind of it being embodied in the same way the civil rights was connected with the black Christian communities in America.
And then you also have the conservative right.
In America, like we've covered some of the guru people who regard that as parasiting into the religion and completely changing the fundamental mission and it has to be opposed.
And both of those people are within the Christian community in America and they've got a very different vision about what is part of their religion, what is a foreign religion and, you know, what shouldn't be.
So it definitely is an issue that it seems You have to discuss if you want to do justice to the discourse that is ongoing around the topic.
My mum is very funny on this because she brought me up by pointing out repeatedly that Jesus is basically a communist, right?
He says, leave your father and mother and follow me.
These were initterent guys who basically had only the clothes that they stood up in and they went around begging for food.
They were not owning a yacht and a small business in Pensacola.
It's a very interesting...
Mutation about what true Christianity is.
But I think you're right.
There is a kind of idea about who gets to claim it and what it actually has to involve.
But it's weirdly so divorced from any kind of religious authority now, I think, in a way.
Yeah.
Yeah, because the current Pope is, I know I was going to say the current Pope is woke.
There's another title.
Hey, intellect, there he is.
But the current Pope is a Jesuit and that has been, you know, that is a Catholic tradition that is explicitly about poverty and, you know, and therefore he has enacted several reforms in the Vatican that have been quite annoying to the people who see the Vatican as a place for sort of cushy dinners and nice robes, which is,
you know, again, is an equally strong part of the Catholic tradition.
It's hard to talk about religion or even Christianity because it's just so diverse and heterogeneous, isn't it?
Like, what's happening in the Midwest in the United States and some Protestant churches is vastly different from what's happening in Brisbane near where I live.
But I think the thing that all the religions have in common, even Eastern religions, is, you know, is a focus on the self, right?
The soul and your conduct and self-reflection and trying to purify yourself or make yourself better in some way, shape or form.
And that's an interesting lens.
Everyone wants to make themselves better.
I'd like to get more exercise and eat less crappy food and drink less alcohol.
But I don't personally use a philosophical framework to help me with those things.
Maybe I should.
I think what you're arguing maybe, Helen, is that it's very understandable, it's a very human thing to have those needs and desires and having some kind of identity and some kind of meaning structure is important.
Rituals and things do serve a purpose in daily life, whether it's a conductor on a train or the president, as you said, Chris, reading out the words in the correct form.
But if you look at serious social justice issues, right, let's take...
Let's just take two that spring to mind.
Climate change and, in my part of the world, the situation of Indigenous people, their socio-economic, education levels, health, etc.
Those are two, where I'm sitting, super important issues.
Probably my own behaviour, my own conduct, is going to contribute relatively little to those things.
Those are big, systematic...
Policy-type things, which has very little to do with whether or not I'm a good person.
And maybe there's a disconnect there.
Actually, though, I think James Lovelock's Gaia thesis about the earth as a kind of giant superorganism, I think there is something, maybe not religious, but mystical about that.
I think it's awe-inspiring, right?
I think it's sublime in the way that romantic poets would have called something sublime.
It's just sort of huge to contemplate.
And I do think there is...
You know, so much of when you look through that tradition of science writing that goes from, you know, Carl Sagan through to Brian Cox, it's about wonder about the natural world.
Like, aren't we, isn't it amazing to have this pale blue dot in the middle of nothing?
And I do think that is evoking some kind of transcendence, which is really useful for climate change activism, right?
The idea that you are part of something that is much bigger than yourself, I think is quite motivating in the idea of the idea that you're a steward of the earth for future generations, you know, your children, their grandchildren.
Whatever it might be.
So I think that that's a cause I think that explicitly has benefited from Like, a certain spirituality to its discourse.
Chris and I have kind of reflected that.
Like, you know, we're like science, rationalist, evidence guys, right?
Terrible.
Like, the worst kind of people.
You know, we put Carl Sagan up on a pedestal.
I had a Carl Sagan reading it.
I had the Pale Blue Dot at my wedding.
Actually, I should say my first wedding, something that John Peterson fans will be appreciative of.
But, yeah, I think it's a really beautiful, beautiful piece of literature.
It actually is the closest I come to a kind of religious feeling of like, wow, I was really lucky to be born and to have lived my life
Well, that's what I was going to say.
On the theme of worldviews being a religion, if we're honest with each other, we don't like to think of ourselves as religious, but when we think about what motivates us to decode gurus and do these recordings and editing and all that stuff, it's like this sense of offense and transgression that someone like Jordan Peterson or these other people are aping The scientific,
rational, academic approach, which we've invested a lot in personally.
And they're sullying it.
And it hurts us.
We've self-reflected.
We all spend that much time talking about.
But I think it definitely plays a part, like an emotional investment to the ideals of...
You know, like science and academic rigor.
And when you see people who are good at aping that style, but completely lacking in the substance or that they're promoting anti-vax stuff or they're promoting hard right political views with it.
It does you like there's the one hand of, OK, so look, here's Jordan Peterson doing stupid religious apologetics dressed up as psychology.
But there's also the feeling of like, yeah, that it's It's a wolf and sheep's clothing affair.
You shouldn't be doing that.
I totally get that, because actually, and if I'm really honest with myself, one of the things that drew me to feminism was the idea that I wasn't just simply not being taken seriously, that people were dismissing me because of my high squeaky voice.
And I read that first Peterson book and went into that interview thinking, there are people who will just look at the two of us and know instantly which one of us has authority, which one of us is smarter.
Maybe we can only ever settle this with an IQ test, but I don't know who is smarter than me and Jordan Pisa.
I don't really believe in the concept of one particular type of intelligence, to be honest with you.
It has very little relationship to people's success in life.
But it was just the fact that people will look at that and go, "Oh, the stupid girl, silly girl," which was great.
I mean, I was in my mid-30s, so I was very excited.
People were so like, "Thank you.
I moisturize."
But he had transgressed against him.
I've just got to say that Jordan Peterson's recent videos have...
I think you're ahead on points.
I think I remember saying in the interview, actually, you seem to cry a lot more than I do.
But that was...
I don't mean to be rude because I think he's genuinely not well.
I watched those last interviews and I thought, and I have said this in public, so I'll say it again, which is that if people around him really truly loved him, the last thing they would give him is a Daily Wire column and access to...
Making videos.
He's had an enormous, overwhelming amount of criticism.
Having had 100s of that, I know how incredibly upsetting it can be.
And, you know, he's clearly not in a place to deal with it.
But I do think that that is in itself a problem, right, is that he keeps putting himself out there and therefore, you know, he's making statements in the public square.
We have to be allowed to have opinions on them.
You can't take them off.
Yeah, just because other people criticize him or just because of his fragility, apparent fragility, doesn't mean that he hasn't got the ability to cause harm, like loosely defined, or say things that are untrue that other people are allowed to contest.
That's a very difficult bit of internet dynamics to navigate, I find, and ethically.
I think, Helen, the point...
Do you ever feel bad, though?
Oh, we do.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we do.
We get accused of being mean.
Can you imagine?
All the time.
You are.
I mean...
Own it.
So rude.
That's the real oppression, is being accused of being rude.
But we are mean, but we thought about it, I think.
You know, these people, it's alright, because the people that we're criticising are extremely influential, and there are hundreds of thousands of people who are nodding their heads and going, this is absolutely fantastic stuff, we need more of this.
And it may well be that they're on the spectrum, say, or they could be subject to emotional things, or they could be feeling poorly because they're eating only meat for months and months and months.
For example.
Before I just take random examples.
But yeah, I mean, you can't really let that stop you because, you know, there's this concept of like civility porn that you're sure you know about.
Imagine for a moment that I don't know what that is.
You can't expect that people automatically know civility porn.
It's a niche concept.
You're too online.
I managed to be both a boomer and too online.
I don't know how I do that.
So is it like porn, but the first scene, instead of fixing the dishwasher, it's just people going, what a great argument.
Thank you for your intellectual engagement today.
Yes, would you like to go to the bedroom?
No, no, no, it's not that at all.
No, no, thank you.
It's people fetishizing this idea of never doing an ad hominem, always practicing extreme charity with the other person's point of view.
You know, it's kind of like trying to be so anti-tribal, being above all of this and engaging in...
We were talking about signalling and stuff before.
There's a thing, I believe, online where people definitely do signal this as a virtue.
I'm doing a bad job, Chris.
I can talk to Alex Jones.
There's no problem.
I could sit down and have a nice dinner with Alex Jones.
And it's like, well, is that actually good, though?
But what would you talk about?
That's the thing I also think about.
Ultimate boss, Jeff Goldberg, did once an interview with Alex Jones, and there's a line in it where he says, "It was exhausting because he is nuts."
I met Alex Jones once on the BBC Sunday politics show, he came on to talk about conspiracy theories, and he was perfectly nice in the green room, had a massive entourage.
And then the instant he got on set, it was like he switched on and he's suddenly thundering on and on and on and on and on.
And it was much like that famous clip of James Lindsay on Dr. Phil.
It was like someone pressed on on the tape recorder and it was just like a fire hose of information.
But I really struggle with this.
So again, Peterson and the diet and the many autoimmune conditions and all of this personal story.
I think is interesting because it speaks to his credibility as the arch-rationalist.
And I don't like saying to somebody, "I don't believe that you were awake for 11 days because that's physically impossible," or however long it was it is.
20 plus.
Right.
You would be in the medical literature if that was actually true.
So there's obviously something you were having short naps or whatever it might be, like something that this is a story that has some...
You know slight caveats but it's being presented as a revelation and to me that does speak to the credibility of I've read 200 scientific papers and whatever it is because if you are somebody who is presenting themselves in a particular way doesn't have a great deal of self-perception that speaks to your intellectual but it feels really mean to go I this is this all smells a bit fishy doesn't it?
I think people regard some things like that like off But I think completely what you said, Helmut, like the fact that Jordan Peterson's daughter only eats a specific type of specifically aged meat now.
She's changed off ruminant meat to this.
She's back on the specific meat.
His wife, as he explained to the Lex Friedman, can only eat lamb.
That's all.
And Jordan Peterson is only eating beef.
Now, even if there was a genetic connection between his and his daughter's diet, which seems questionable, but okay.
His wife is not genetically related, one hopes.
And so there does seem to be, you know, a signal there that there's an approach to reasoning.
You're dancing around this, but let me just say, this sounds like the kind of thing that somebody with Munchausen would say.
He may not, but I have multiple autoimmune disorders that are unknown to medical science and can't be resolved.
Might either be a tragic truth or it might be the kind of thing that somebody has a mythology that they have created for themselves.
And it may be fundamentally based around the fact that actually all of this comes down to his dependency on benzodiazepines, but that has to be put aside because that's for weak people.
Like that's one of the things I feel very sad about with that is that I think he could have used that genuine moment of terrible suffering to talk to other people in that situation.
You know, in the way that I was just reading a great subset by a guy who was a recovering addict who was just very, you know, or Freddie DeBoer I think writes very well about being bipolar and having had a complete...
Sort of, I think, almost psychotic break and how he's had to like rebuild his life on medication.
That is the kind of, as a guru, as a learning experience, you could say to your audience, God, I went through this thing.
And you know what?
We have this way that we talk about drug addicts in society and it's cruel and it's wrong.
And actually, I'm here to tell you it can happen to anybody.
You can be flying high as you like.
But no, that's not the way it went.
And I think that was just, again, that sort of speaks to my irritation about the choices on the path that he has taken.
Yeah, and the drug dependence in the Lex episode was completely recast as like an outcome of the autoimmune thing.
So it became not about like a feeling.
Yeah, whereas the previous iteration was about his wife's terrible diagnosis, which again, these are both very good explanations, but they're sort of not the same explanation.
So there's a feeling of a sort of story being edited in real time.
You know, and I just think that, again, that speaks to the fact that he's had a really genuinely horrible time.
The suffering is real, right?
This is how I always feel when I write about functional disorders or psychological psychosomatic disorders.
The suffering is real.
Maybe people are not so self-aware about what the cause of that suffering is.
Well, I look forward to putting this one on the internet.
I'm also cognizant of using up your coffee, but there was two things that I wanted to...
And one was just like an admission that, you know, earlier when you raised the point about feminist perspectives being overlooked in these kinds of discourses, when you did the debate with Jordan Peterson and brought up the point about women taking the names of husbands,
right?
And how this is an obvious example of an imbalance in favour of men.
And one, that was a great example in that moment.
It was a very concise, you know, understandable thing that everybody gets.
But the The other thing was, for me as well, that was an example that, you know, would not have come to my mind and it seemed that he didn't have a good answer for why that doesn't count as an example,
you know, of like a kind of privilege, automatic privilege that men have or, you know, the more significant one that women didn't have the vote until a century or so ago.
But the thing is, Chris, who gave them the vote?
Men.
The real hair race.
Well, that's the point I was getting to.
Did you consider it?
And I also think, like, you know, on the debates around gender things, that I think it's fair to say that both Matt and I are more comfortable talking about a James Lindsay or a Colin Wright than we are the feminist perspective,
either because we are just trying to...
Avoid hassle of that or because it's easier for us, right?
It's much easier to be critical of somebody like Colin Wright than it would be for like a feminist writer who's in the gender critical position, I think.
For us, yeah, just I haven't, you know, intentionally did that.
But I just noticed when I give the examples earlier, the people I reached for were like James Lindsay and Colin Wright, which is, you know.
What you highlighted and the other people that I think of in those discourse, I mean, I think it's like Jesse Singel and Kitty Herzog and stuff as well, but it's more Jesse that seems the name that would spring to mind if I was going to make a point about that.
Wow.
Well, we've all learned a lot this morning, haven't we?
Yes.
But I think that's very true and I don't deprecate it.
I think what you're doing is...
Yeah, I think there is a known thing that particularly men on Twitter retweet other men more, like there is actually just research on that.
And I do think it's really easy.
I've been looking into gurus for this new series and the ones I do think of immediately are men.
Men are often like top of, like they're the top example, like they're the guy for the thing.
I think women find it harder to achieve those positions.
But I always think it's a real...
Shame, because feminism is actually, and I think maybe this is one of the things that has inoculated me from going what we'll refer to as the full James Lindsay, which is that feminism is both at the same time a really fascinating intellectual tradition, a way of approaching history, and also has a body of knowledge within it that I find just really,
you know, I'm not a mum, so I don't really know a lot about motherhood, but feminist writing on motherhood and social position is just really kind of fascinating.
And I always feel really sad for people who don't read that, because it's, You know, it's not all sort of sappy kind of self-help, like read the rights of women.
It's beautiful and really intellectually interesting.
But yeah, I think there is a problem with that.
And I do think when I see those debates about gender online, I think people genuinely, sometimes men don't understand the way that women craft their lives.
And this is not all women in all situations, but just that you know that if something happened to you, you'd be...
You'd be blamed, right?
Actually, men are far more likely to be attacked in the street.
Street violence is generally a male or male crime, but no one will ever say to you if you're walking home from the pub a bit pissed, oh, well, like, why were you out anyway?
Why were you even doing that?
And that's something that I just sort of think I've lived with throughout my life and the same thing of being on alert when, you know, like someone asked me to come and appear at the Edinburgh Festival a while ago and I was trying to work out where they were staying and they were like, oh, you could stay with me.
And instantly I'm like, oh, should I though?
Am I going to get myself into a situation that I'm going to have to either talk myself out of or go along with?
And I just think that I would wish that there was more awareness of the fact that women do have to construct their lives in a certain way because of the control system that is male violence.
And I think that would help people understand that these aren't kind of hysterical women.
If you've been raped by a man...
You are probably going to be quite edgy around people you perceive to be men for quite some time afterwards.
It's a natural trauma response.
And that is a valid feeling.
There are other valid feelings in the debate that have to be balanced against it, but you are entitled to that feeling as a victim of that crime.
And that kind of annoys me when it's all happening in the kind of...
Intellectual debater sphere, I guess.
Actually, women's very boring mundane everyday experiences of male violence just don't kind of, they're just sort of boring.
I think actually there's a lot of the problem with feminism is that much like my article, it's not a fresh take.
Oh, come on.
Mary Wollstonecraft was writing about this in 1792.
Get some new vibes.
And also I think the problem is also I think men feel very much on edge when you start talking about it.
Like having talked about feminism for a lot of time, I think men are...
I think what you're thinking about criticising female gurus is really interesting.
And it's not unreasonable because I'm sure people will be like, "Oh, look at these sexist debate bros."
Just being super dismissive.
And it's a card you can play as a woman on the internet, right?
You're just dismissing me because I'm a woman.
Whereas actually sometimes even women have bad opinions.
No, no, no.
But I do think, I wanted to ask you this actually about the gender split of gurus because I'm definitely finding it.
There's more men.
Are men just more willing to go like, do you know who's got some amazing wisdom to share with the world?
Me, a dude.
Look, I mean, we've got a theory.
We have been very much aware of that and we've sought out.
And we'll be glad when we see, when we have a woman we can cover, great, you know, it gets a bit of balance.
Just like we're looking for more right-wing gurus, you know, because we don't want it to be...
The other way, left-wing.
Sorry, left-wing gurus.
Yes, the other way.
I look forward to your podcast episode on the cult of...
Have you done Zizek?
No, Slavo Zizek.
Oh, he's on our list.
I can't understand what he's saying.
We've got a problem with him.
Wow.
I think my theory about this, the psychological take, is that there are some psychological sex differences, and one of the bigger ones is risk aversion and risk-taking.
So men do a lot more risky things, often status-seeking risky things, and it could be anything from having more...
But young men specifically, right?
Yes, young men.
But how does that work for the boomer guru?
That's a good question, actually.
Or have you already taken your risks at that point and you've become a person who takes risks?
Maybe they've gotten into a groove.
My theory is not perfect.
It's more of a thought bubble, I guess.
But there does seem to be a willingness to that risky proposition and that narcissism.
That is required.
That ridiculous degree of steamroller self-belief in the face of being shown again and again that you're wrong, that your opinions are stupid.
But having that ridiculous degree of self-confidence that you're just going to barrel through and double and triple down.
And maybe it's more in how the audience are perceiving these guys rather than just their own thing.
But it's seen, it's both they feel willing to do that and they're perceived it works better maybe for men somehow.
I totally, I really do buy that.
I think, I'm sure, you know, I don't know whether there's any gender difference in narcissism as a personality trait, but I think perhaps it expresses itself differently, like, and that's socially conditioned, right?
The way that there was, we just, my colleague Olga Kazan's old article about women being funny, you know, and both men and women said they wanted a partner with a sense of humour, and it turned out when they further questioned it, that what it meant was women wanted someone to make them laugh, and men wanted someone to laugh at their jokes.
That's pretty much what I want.
Isn't it what we all want, really?
But I think that's really true.
But I also think there's a...
You look at it from the other end of the telescope, which is...
And female politicians really struggle with this, about women claiming authority.
And do we just think they're bitches?
I don't want to be told what to do.
There's a certain, like, you want my real mum kind of vibe to it.
And I think that's the thing.
I try to work out, what does a female Jordan Peterson look like?
Yeah.
And would any men follow that person?
I just don't see it at all.
And I think the same is true for women, right?
Women like listening to male authority too.
I think that's...
Yeah, although the audiences for these guys...
Predominantly, guys.
You know, women are not known in the fan club, but it is male-dominated.
The other thing that occurred to us is that where there's a split is maybe more in the health and well-being space.
So, complementary and alternative medicines and spiritual wellness and all that stuff, definitely that's where women make a much better showing.
So, it's a different vibe.
You could still be a guru, but it's more the Earth Mother type.
The conspiracy sphere definitely has a lot more, like even if you look at Jordan Peterson and Michaela Peterson, she's active in the health and wellness sphere, right?
Relationship advice.
Whereas like the men active in that tend to be pick up artist types, Andrew Tate, right?
They've got a very distinct vibe to them.
So I think that like if you're looking In conspirituality kind of circles or health and wellness circles, you get a lot more female guru types.
And the closest example I think that we've covered to like a Jordan Peterson on the female side is Brené Brown, which many people suggested explicitly for that kind of reason.
She was closer to that mould.
Actually, Matt and I found it a bit grating, in part because of, like, not just because of the...
The high-pitched voice, right, Chris?
Her high, squeaky voice.
No, not just because of that.
No, like, it felt like there was a specific brand of American self-help which grates on, like, British and Australian and Irish.
Sensibilities, right?
The kind of, let's talk about who you are for hours.
And it's the most fascinating subject.
You know, what makes you tick that feels really self-indulgent?
And I don't think that is just her particular style.
I think that's just a...
A thing in American self-help movements, which at least Northern Irish people are not so comfortable with.
Oh, no, I felt like that by a lot of the gurus.
I think that, you know, and I think when I'm making this BBC series, it's going to be really interesting to try and find British versions who are often kind of knock off American versions, because everything about that sphere is so...
Religious, but also individualistic, but also capitalist.
It's a very American blend of characteristics.
But I think you're right.
The wellness space does seem to be more open to women, but also heavily gendered.
And it's like ladies' gurus for ladies, blokes' gurus for blokes.
Oh, yes.
You know, which I think is kind of an interesting split.
But when I think about the intellectual dark web, most of the women in that were anti-feminists, right?
Or like...
Critical of Claire Lehman, you know, which I think is interesting.
Did you watch the brilliant TV series Mrs America, which is about Phyllis Schlafly with Cate Blanchett?
Really interesting.
And this is true.
she turns up to the kind of to go and meet um senate committee to talk about her pet subject which is missile defense and then she says oh but of course and then and they make her take the notes and then she says oh but of course i think the equal rights act is silly like women just you know compliments to men and suddenly they're
all like oh hello hang on a minute
Margaret Thatcher.
Margaret Thatcher.
And so you end up with a lot of very smart women becoming their thing.
So a question that I think dovetails with a whole bunch of the things that we've been talking about is that, you know, not just in religion, but in politics and also the intellectual dark web and in the guru sphere we look at, there's a lot of it which is like,
sure, it's tied to an ideology, but it takes to form a lot of a kind of personality.
Cult that, you know, people follow the leaders and become heavily morally invested in them.
And I know that you have talked about, or at least I heard on The New Statesman quite often, the kind of personality cult that formed around Jeremy Corbyn.
And I'm somewhat inclined to see that as, you know, recency bias makes me think of like...
Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn and so on.
All of these recent figures.
But actually, Obama had a pretty strong personality cult, which I was brought into when he first emerged as well.
And I kind of wonder on that, one, how much that is what people are picking up on when they're seeing parallels with religion.
Because when you see communists...
You have the personality cults in communist states, and people get that there's something religious about that, even though, you know, it's tied to a political ideology.
And I'm loading this in with like 20 questions, I realize, but I'm kind of suggesting maybe one issue is that politics and the culture war and all of those things, that they can have These metaphysical significance and this personality cult feature and that actually that's not exclusive to religion and never has been throughout history.
So that might be part of the objection is like people have always taken politics.
Some people have taken like communism as their pure ideology and it does function like a religion.
So is that a new feature of modern society or is that just like That's just the way we're built.
I think the nature of fandom has changed because of social media, and you can build fandoms much more easily.
Whether or not they can then accomplish anything is a kind of different question.
But yeah, this is a very good example of not prejudging your interviewees, in the same way that Elizabeth Oldfield assumed I would find this comparison offensive.
I asked Victoria Turner, who's in the documentary, who edited an anthology called Young, Woken, Christian, and I said, do you feel that kind of...
There was a kind of semi-religious aspect to the Corbyn mania.
Because when I went to his first rally, one of his first rallies in Islington, it was like a revivalist meeting.
And the Labour anthem is the red flag, which everybody sings, which has a tune that sounds a bit like a Christmas tree.
But it's very stirring words about the people's flag is purest, deepest red.
And she said, and she went, oh, yes, of course.
Like to me and to my friends, he was a secular saint.
And I think you have to understand that level of investment in him as a person to understand what then happens, which is then, but he's a good person.
He's only trying to do good things.
How could you criticize him?
And I definitely think that is something you see with the gurus that you talk about, right?
But this is for some of them at least.
But he's a good person.
He's trying to help.
How could you criticize?
What kind of, you know, meany-mouthed cynic does that?
And it's a really important...
Again, it's the function of, I think, journalists to be the one that kind of goes, I know everyone's really into this, but I'm sorry, I've got a few questions.
But it's very hard.
Is it new?
Well, my other project that I'm working on is I'm coming to the end of a book on genius.
And so Difficult Women was a history of feminism that basically argued...
That lots of the pioneers of feminism were difficult in whatever way that was.
They might have been monomaniacal.
The Pankhursts were pretty impossible to get along with, alienated everybody, including one of the Pankhurst daughters, left her own organization.
It's totally single-minded, used violence, were willing to kill people in the pursuit of this aim.
Lots of them have been like that.
And the kind of underlying thesis of that book was, are those the kind of people you need in order for political change to happen?
Do you need people who are unreasonable?
You know, this George Bernard Shaw quote as my epigraph is about all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
And then the new book about genius kind of could in some ways be titled Difficult Men because it's about the people who have the mythology around themselves of genius, which is not an objective quality, are the ones who often have big lives and sort of turn themselves into icons in this particular way.
And all of it, I think, kind of goes back to, you know, Thomas Carlyle wrote The Great Man Theory of History, right, which from the start people were criticising.
But it's like the most zombie thing of all human nature, right?
People keep sticking stakes in it and going, like you talking about academic stuff, people go, well, actually, we should talk about feminisms.
Actually, we should talk about religions.
Like, you know, can we even talk about...
And people keep trying to bring all this nuance and stuff to it.
But then at the end of the day, what actually people want to do is see one life.
As an archetype of a particular thing, attribute a huge amount of agency to one person who becomes a symbol of something.
And so I do think that that is a pure human impulse in the same way that I think a certain religious impulse is.
Sorry, that went very Lindsay there, didn't it?
I just unloaded a lot of things that I've just...
in a kind of pure machine gun at you.
There's a strong connection there with one of the...
Our diagnosis with why gurus are influential and why people are taken for a ride about something like vaccines by someone like Brett Weinstein.
The correct way to approach these things is difficult.
It is absolutely difficult.
What you need to do is you need to have a trust network.
You have to not invest all of your trust in a single individual, just like an academic doesn't invest all of their trust in a single research paper that's published.
And you need to apportion your trust appropriately and moderate it depending on the topic and the source.
If it's someone that's got...
The proper background and so on.
And when you actually think that through, that task of trusting the right people to the right amount about the right things, that's a tremendously difficult job that takes a lot of effort.
And it's an awful lot easier and feels a lot more secure if you can just find just one person whom you can go to.
Right.
Gurus are a kind of living heuristic, aren't they?
Right?
You just go, this all seems very complicated.
Him.
He's like me.
And that definitely happens in politics too.
And one of the questions I always ask to predict that is, you know, it shares my values.
Because you go, this is somebody who understands people like me, is like me.
Pin my rosette, like, and then I've delegated all my thinking.
And I totally understand that impulse.
I remember thinking about an issue like commercial surrogacy.
And I thought, do you know what?
This is a very complicated issue.
But all of the feminists I respect are all on one side of this.
So I'm going to assume until I look into it properly.
That's probably where I'm going to land on it.
And if you didn't have any of those thinking shortcuts in your life, you'd be wandering around going, what is a spoon?
How do I open my door?
Who am I?
There's nothing wrong with heuristics.
Heuristics are essential.
I think, Helen, an overlap that probably dovetails with your interest as well is the personality.
Indicators that people take from gurus.
They say, that person was nice.
He's a good man or a good woman.
They're just trying their best.
And that the politicians explicitly cultivate that kind of reaction to themselves.
And once you've bought into that level, it becomes that...
That's often the heuristic that people go by, well, are they doing good?
Because if they're trying to go to, they're probably doing good.
And if they appear to be people who value science, then, you know, they're unlikely to be promoting pseudoscience.
And as, like, history, politics, the world shows, that's a terrible heuristic because the most charismatic and the most people who are best at appearing...
in a particularly appealing way are often the most awful humans who do terrible things and it's probably certainly true that if you're in a room with them and you sit down and have dinner that you can have a very engaging conversation with Jordan Peterson or whoever it may be but that shouldn't be the thing that you use to judge their political program or their ideological output but it is and it's a very human thing that that's what we So,
yeah, I guess we're kind of saying that we're screwed.
We are screwed.
I remember going to a dinner with Alex Salmond and it was an extraordinary...
He gave a lecture and it was an extraordinary...
This is the lead now of ALBA, the one of the independence part, former leader of the Scottish National Party and former First Minister of Scotland.
And he pretty much just...
Raconteurred for two hours straight over dinner.
And it was very fun.
It was very gossipy.
It was incredibly charismatic.
And that's the kind of thing that people will say about Bill Clinton as well.
Like these people are very successful politicians, are often extreme extroverts to the extent that they almost don't know who they are when there's no one else there.
But is that the kind of personality type that also can, you know, read a spreadsheet?
Well, no, there are no reasons why those two things should be connected at all.
And I think that is a large part of why we get the wrong leaders is that Entertainment and dry technocracy are two very different skills.
Yeah.
I mean, we're fighting this so much when it comes to science communication that I'll stick with the COVID example.
But, you know, we know the researchers who are genuine authorities on this, that the people you should just ask and delegate your trust to.
So if you're like me and you don't want to read the primary literature on bloody vaccines or something.
But they're not necessarily charismatic.
They don't devote much energy or effort to charming people and playing the part.
And there are other people who specialize in the role.
And I always think of the West Wing.
And I always think how the president in the West Wing is just so much more presidential than any real president.
Because it just goes to show that if you invest your effort into acting the thing, you can do a lot better than the real thing, typically.
Zelensky.
I mean, he's doing very well now.
Yeah, but he's obviously given thought to what is the persona of a war president.
And this is what I mean.
People would say that's very pejorative, as if I'm calling him shallow and superficial.
I'm not.
One of the things that he's done exceptionally well is go, what would an inspiring military leader in 2022 rather than 1945 look like?
It would look like a guy in a T-shirt who's relatable and funny.
Because we can now accommodate that alongside seriousness.
Winston Churchill wasn't throwing in a few knob gags at the end of his stirring broadcasts in the Second World War.
But you can do that now.
And I think, yeah, we do underrate that as a skill.
But yeah, in the same Corbyn election, I interviewed Yvette Cooper.
Hard work, let me tell you.
And I remember the headline we put on the piece, which was discipline over dazzle.
Let's be honest, we're sort of code word for, yeah, all right, you know.
But I remember talking to Emily Thornberry, who is another Labour politician, who's very smart and very self-aware about this stuff.
And I said, why don't you talk about how tentative you are?
You know, why don't you go on question time and say, look, we just don't know yet.
And she said...
It doesn't work.
People don't want to hear it.
People will tear you apart.
That's not how politics works.
And I think that's what you're talking about with the COVID scientists.
The best COVID scientists are probably quite, well, it's a 70% chance, or it's a very small study, but this is really hopeful.
And actually, is science communication just confidently going, wear a mask two weeks later, don't wear a mask?
And, you know, whatever it might, or probably the other way around.
Yeah.
Certainty.
Certainty being confused with authority is kind of another human problem, I think.
And if they do do that, the medical authorities and stuff get criticized because the point is that they didn't say, "Well, we think on average you'd be better off."
Doing this.
But if they did communicate like that, you know, there's kind of debates about it, like whether people would respond well to it.
But I think there is some idealistic takes about that.
Yeah, everybody just wants to have the exact probabilities communicated and no.
Well, Helen, thanks so much for coming to talk to us.
We've covered a lot of territory.
It's so much fun.
I don't think we've really solved any of the questions that we looked at, but it was pretty interesting nonetheless.
So you failed, Helen.
This was your guru audition, and now you're out of contention.
Do you have any simple, snappy slogans you want to...
Twelve rules, for example, that you might want to tell us.
Even six rules will do.
I actually have one rule for life, which is that anything you like is probably bad for you.
Checks out.
That's suitably refined.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm going to go away and meditate on that.
Yeah.
And I, Helen, I am very tempted to just...
Keep you and make you regale with stories about previous elections.
But we shouldn't do that because we took up all your mourning.
You can do that on your own time, Chris.
If you've got burning questions you've always wanted to know about Andy Burnham, we can address them in private and not share them with the group.
I can go back to my New Statesman archives and relive the glories of the 2015 election.
I don't need to know these things, Chris.
No one else needs to hear about it.
But Helen, so there's the BBC documentary that people can go listen to, and there's the article on The Atlantic that we'll put in the show notes.
If people want to go on Twitter and hear people be exasperated on Ailer Direction, they can go and do that any day of the week.
But what about the terminal interview question that's always there?
What's next for Helen Lewis?
My merch line is obviously coming out soon.
A range of scented candles and lobster type-ins.
With that logo.
Oh, the logo.
Yeah, so I'm just finishing up a book, actually, which is, as I said, on Genius.
So that will be out hopefully 2024.
And this is why what brought me here was my worry.
I'm working on a BBC series about gurus.
Opposition research.
This is our first meeting, obviously.
I imagine it'll be our...
Our last meeting, because you'll have to do some sort of furious denunciation about how I've got it all terribly wrong in about three months' time.
So, yeah, that will hopefully be coming out at the end.
I think what we're going to do, I think, is very complimentary.
I deliberately stayed away from your podcast because I didn't want to rip you off, but I now know a lot more about...
When I decided to come on, I thought I'd listen, so I listened to maybe like two hours about Brett Weinstein.
I'm sorry.
No, I feel very...
Up to date with all him and everything that he's been up to.
And that's nice.
It's nice to have a friend, even if they don't know it.
But yeah, I think what we're going to do is look at maybe it from the other end of some of the people who are followers and what they get out of it.
So that would be really interesting and trace the kind of evolution.
But I think you're right.
It's a kind of fascinating modern phenomenon.
I don't know.
Tell me what you think about this.
I think we are living in a golden age of gurus.
I think there were just...
They're everywhere.
They're like, you know, they're like hedgehogs.
No, not hedgehogs.
Other things.
Hedgehogs pick up leaves.
They're like grey squirrels, right?
There used to be experts who were red squirrels and now there are gurus who are grey squirrels and they've just done incredibly well in the urban environment eating out of bins and whatever it might be.
I love this analogy.
But you know what I mean?
Like there are a lot of gurus who I think are really fascinating who are like six, seven thousand followers, like the micro guru, and they don't attract a lot of attention.
But it's almost a stage where like, you know, anybody who's had any experience happen to them can then pivot to turning that into being a guru on that experience.
And that I just think is something that because of communication technology, you couldn't have done 20 years ago.
So yeah, for fans of you, hopefully there will be fans of me also talking about gurus.
I'm sure they will.
And the one thing that struck me about that, Helen, is we've looked at a little bit the Guru ecosystems, like the Discord servers that get set up and the Patreon communities.
And, you know, this is very much just like Web 2.0 stuff, but...
In particular, those technologies are very good at generating these extremely intense fan communities that previously would have been associated with pop stars.
And then also, we've seen it create minor gurus, like people that come out of that ecosystem and are like uberfans and then spin off into their own little mini ecosystems of gurus.
And Lex Friedman...
Started that way as a fan of Joe Rogan.
And there's other examples, so it's like an area that I think is really underexplored.
They're basically like gremlin talent, so we're fucked, unfortunately.
Do you know what?
I didn't get to ask you my one question, but that means I'm going to withhold it so that you have to invite me on at some future time, which is, what is sense-making?
Tune in.
Tune in.
If you want to know the answer to this, everybody, tune in to our next episode.
It's going to be amazing.
You did well, Helen.
That's good.
It's been very enjoyable and I appreciate you indulging us early in the morning.
And our lawyers will be in touch about the guru thing when it comes out.
But, you know, we'll cover that bridge when it comes up.
Right, good.
Obviously, the BBC, as you know, notorious for its enormous fees, so you'll be looking at a cut in the low six figures, I would have thought.
All right, well, thanks very much again, Helen, and yeah, stay safe on the Twittersphere.
Enjoy your time.
Thank you.
Bye.
Okay, so I've just closed the parlour door, and we're back in the...
The boardroom.
The boardroom.
I was going to say the anteroom.
The anteroom of the boardroom.
The anteroom of the boardroom.
The really important stuff happens.
That's right.
We're lighting up cigars, having a cognac, and it's time to get down to the really serious business of review of reviews.
Is it?
Oh, you're going to jump there?
I was just going to say Helen left us with a bombshell.
You know, she finished on a mega question.
What is sense making?
Just drop that atomic bomb and leave the room.
And just leave it.
That's right.
And we didn't set it up.
We didn't set it up.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's coming.
It's coming.
We can't address that.
She asked the $6 million question, Matt.
The question that's on everyone's lips these days.
What is sense making?
What is sense making?
It's coming.
It's coming.
You'll have more sense than you know what to do with very shortly.
Yes, you will.
But as you said, Matt, we have things to do before we get out of here.
And one of them is to review the reviews that we receive.
And, you know, this time I've got an interesting little set of reviews because I've got a critique of you.
What?
I've got a critique of me.
Oh, okay.
All right.
That's fair.
That's fair.
Did good.
Your critique landed us with a one-star review, Matt.
And a review that is titled Trash?
And it is from Tom.
And it says, the Aussie one called RoboCop trash.
Avoid.
That's the review, Matt.
Hey, hey.
Did I call it trash?
I don't remember saying that.
You did call it trash!
You bashed an It Is Classic and as a result we got a one-star review.
I hope you're happy with yourself.
Look, you know what?
I'm actually, I'm gonna make up for it because I've already started doing this.
I've started watching the original Predator with Arnie in it, which...
You know, Predator.
What do you mean you've started watching?
It's like an hour and a half long.
Well, I got sick of it and it went away, but I'm planning to return to it.
Okay.
No, I don't mind a bit of 80s schlock.
Yeah, look, I'm going to get back into it.
You retract the comments about Rubber.
That's what you're saying.
I do retract it.
So if they could resubmit that review.
Review of five stars.
It's not trash maps.
They should have given it at least two and a half because I said it was great.
They probably didn't get that far.
As soon as they heard me say that, they just slammed down their iPhone.
Okay.
So that was your negative review.
Now, I have a three out of five negative review.
And I say negative.
Because I think the tone of mine is probably more intricately harsher than your RoboCop one.
But let's dig into it.
This is a meaty one, Matt.
So the title is Meh.
Intrigue delves into hypocrisy.
I think they probably meant to say descends.
But I'm not editorializing the review.
It's not your review, Chris.
It's the review.
Just read it.
And this is by Ginger Sisyphus, by the way.
So, this project started out really interesting and well done.
Correct.
Chris and Matt provided insightful commentary on the Weinstein's delusions with a solid foundation in the subject matter of academia and conspiracy cult thinking.
Correct.
Good so far.
The problem is...
Waiting for the swerve.
The problem is that, brackets mostly, Chris and, to a lesser degree, Matt, have slowly let people goad them into the same guru habits exhibited by those whom they criticize.
Okay.
Which ones?
Which ones?
Failure to stay in one's lane is a big guru problem.
That Chris loves to exhibit himself.
It's all well and good to point out that Brett Weinstein isn't an expert epidemiologist when criticizing him for his COVID takes, but somehow Chris, a cultural anthropologist, is fit to opine on inter alia, the nature of consciousness, various international conflicts,
and the state of American private schools in LA.
Not only that, but he does it with the smug condescension.
Condescension.
Made famous by gurus like Ben Shapiro and Eric Weinstein.
From where did he get all that knowledge?
Stay in your lane, mate.
You're not nearly as god-brained as you positioned yourself.
And that's precisely the problem with the IDW.
Go back to what you're good at.
So there's some harsh truths for...
I will say that it's kind of directed at both of us.
I felt that Venom was kind of aimed quite squarely at me in those comments.
Yeah, I felt so too.
Thank you, Chris.
I feel like you've leapt on that hand grenade for us both and you've taken the full blast of it.
Okay, well, how do you respond?
So what do I think about that?
Well, well.
So I think there's several key issues lacking in this critique.
So first of all, let me get started.
Point one of 10. So first thing is that this is a minor point.
It's just a point that I want to make.
It may speak to the level of research that is involved here.
I'm not a cultural anthropologist.
I'm a cognitive anthropologist.
And neither am I a social.
Anthropologist, which would be closer.
But cultural anthropologist, nay.
So get your anthropologist smackdown correct.
That's one thing.
So how well is he listening, Matt?
All right.
All right.
But that doesn't detract from his main...
That doesn't disturb me.
That doesn't detract from his criticism.
No, no.
A cognitive anthropologist isn't qualified to have independent opinions about Ukraine.
Or are they, Chris?
Or are they?
Yes, what he's gotten wrong here is that our argument is the whole construct of the galaxy brain dimension.
The issue there is not having opinions on different things.
It's perfectly fine to have opinions on different things and stuff that is outside of your area of expertise.
The important thing is when having said opinions to make it clear whether you're speaking out of your And now, in the case of the nature of consciousness, I think it's been flagged up clearly enough to everyone that we are not experts in that.
I'd go further and say we have very little idea what we are talking about, but I agree with you.
I think we made that pretty clear.
Abundantly clear.
And if not, let me make it clear now.
If you want to have a philosophically robust discussion about the nature of consciousness, go see some cognitive science and philosophers.
Go read a book by Chalmers or something.
Yeah, actually, Daniel Dennett, I think, is closer to correct on these things.
But, you know, anyway, you've got plenty of options.
On the topic of international conflict opinion, the international conflicts I've opined on tend to be things like Russia and Ukraine.
I'm sorry, but I don't think you need a degree in international geopolitics to understand that there is a country being invaded by a larger aggressor.
There's lots of...
Geopolitical dimensions and regional factors that I don't understand.
Very few people commenting on the issue understands.
But being opposed to invasions by aggressive neighbors is not something that requires a whole heap of expertise.
And it's perfectly fine for people to have that opinion or various other opinions on International politics.
You're allowed to have opinions.
What would be wrong is if you presented that as like, oh, my opinion on the Ukraine is based on decades of in-depth research on the region.
Like, no, I don't know anything more than your average person who's read since the conflict started about that area.
I suppose the other thing that's worth mentioning is that, I mean, when we talk about things like that seriously, it's because One of our gurus has got strong opinions about it, right?
Like most recently was with, what's his name?
Oh, Robert Wright.
Robert Wright.
So Robert Wright's opinion is a minority opinion.
He's not the only one who has it, but it is a slight outlier one, which is essentially putting a much larger share of the blame on NATO than, say, the consensus, shall we say, opinion.
In order to talk to him about these views, you sort of have to talk about it.
Like, we don't have a unique opinion about that.
We're not broadcasting sort of hot takes and outlier opinions on our show.
Really, we're sort of representing what is pretty much the consensus opinion.
The consensus opinion might be wrong, but, you know, it is...
Yeah, well, that...
That was another point that I want to make.
If you're arguing for a position which reflects the general consensus of experts in an area or the majority opinion, that's not a unique take to you.
It would be like having the opinion that global warming is a problem.
Yeah.
Well, an apt example is a lot of our critiques on the Eric and Brett.
Weinstein and people like that, these anti-vaxxers and so on, you know, our analysis is based on the presumption that they're essentially wrong, that the vaccines work, that the COVID virus was a serious problem, that ivermectin doesn't work.
That informs our analysis, and that's because we have taken the time to get our heads around what is the consensus opinion among experts on those things, and we represent it.
That's necessary.
Deal with their views, like in the total abstract, without any priors or assumptions about how the world works.
Yeah, and the other thing that was mentioned was the state of American private schools in LA.
But there, again, I feel like there's a category area because I think that's a reference to me pointing out that Sam Harris...
Made a switch from talking about all schools in America to what's been taught in elite private schools in Manhattan or somewhere like that.
But that's obviously true.
That doesn't require me to have specialist knowledge about the schools.
The point is, Sam's claim switched from a very dramatic, wide-reaching claim about all schools in America to a subset of schools in a specific region, elite schools.
Which is a different claim.
That's the point.
And when it comes to what's being taught in schools in America, once again, we're very clear that we don't know the extent to which height or various other cultural war figures are misrepresenting or exaggerating things in American schools.
But I do know people that teach.
In America, and the reports are different, including people that are sympathetic to kind of IDW takes.
They basically do argue that a lot of it is hyperbolic.
So, you know, maybe not in some cases and maybe so in others.
But yeah, again, I don't know how things are in universities across America.
I think most of the culture warrior people...
Also don't, because they're typically talking about very specific universities whenever they make their points.
Now look, if we started going on in this podcast about how it's absolutely clear to anyone with a brain that Elon Musk's Attempts to make self-landing rockets and build a Mars base or whatever is part of a secret plan to get Peter Thiel and some other cronies up there so they can have a harem of sex slaves and found some genetically pure Mars colony.
Pretty likely.
Sounds good.
Sounds good so far.
If we were setting out claims like that with absolute assurance and claiming that we knew better about how to understand about all the nefarious stuff that what this guy is up to, and you cannot find any of that amongst any consensus orthodox media,
then yes, send us the one-star reviews because we deserve it.
But you won't find us doing that, hopefully.
No, no.
So, look, I actually think it's kind of a useful review because I think it's important to stick out that the criticism is not about people having opinions on different topics outside of their area of expertise.
It's that you delineate that they are opinions, they're personal opinions.
Yeah, and that, you know, if you're advocating a very minority position, you flag it.
As such, and don't endorse conspiracism.
In terms of the smug condescension, that's purely a mistake.
As we all know, norvenary sarcasm.
No, no.
Norvenary sarcasm.
That's what it is.
You've made a schoolboy error.
I'm happy to take that one on board.
I will say, yes, we should own that.
We should own being smug, condescending, sons of bitches.
Well, I do think you're very smug and condescending.
That's true, man.
I do.
Yeah, a little bit.
You know, tone is tone.
One man's biting sarcasm is another man's snarky, like, I don't know, snarky shit talk.
Yeah.
I can't think of a way to put it, but yeah.
So that's it.
That's it.
It's just that it should be clear when we are speaking within Our realm of expertise and when we were offering opinions which are based on our reading of evidence or critical analysis of somebody's point of view.
I think we do generally flag that up and we also do credit people when they do that in their content.
Yeah, and that's what the gurus don't do.
I mean, even if I'm talking on a topic that is in my realm of expertise, something to do with addiction, I can tell you what my professional opinion is.
And I can tell you what the consensus one is, and I can tell you the ways in which they might be similar or different.
You know, so I think that's the thing that the gurus don't do.
Like, a normal expert, a normal academic, it's quite clear what they're an expert in.
And even when they're talking about those things, they don't claim that they're this special case where just forget about what all those other idiots think.
Just, you know, I know, I'm 100% sure this is absolutely true.
Yeah, and then when we're talking about consciousness, we know we know what we're talking about.
We know that.
Hopefully it's clear.
We just meet puppets.
Yeah.
We can do Noella.
Yeah.
P-zombies.
Look, you know, you might read this as defensiveness, but again, you're just being mistaken.
You're just trying to be clear.
You're trying to clarify.
Just clarifying for Ginger Sisyphus's sake, you know, need to help him out here.
But in any case, I generally, we do like the negative and positive feedback.
Of course, you know, five stars and write the negative thing is fine.
You can do that.
But in any case, I appreciate the feedback and other people's opinions are available.
Many people find us incredibly galaxy-brient and hoisted by our own petard.
So it may be.
All our opinions are available.
I just can't believe we got a one-star review just because I said I didn't like Robocop.
That's harsh.
Come on.
I can believe it, Matt.
I think he did the right thing there.
Really?
You're an uncultured swine, but that's wrong.
Yes.
So now, Patreons, Matt.
Patreons.
We've got a...
Patreon.
And we put stuff there.
We put things like we have the Coding Academia series where we discuss research papers and look at them critically, usually related to guru-esque things or conspiracy theories.
And we also have monthly livestream hangouts there where we talk to the Galaxy Brain Guru tier and answer questions.
And...
The episodes, the interviews, we put them out slightly earlier there.
Usually the raw, unedited versions, we kind of check them up with videos.
So if people want to see our faces or they want to hear all the ums and ahs which are not there, which are carefully exercised from the final recording.
You can join up on the Patreon and find us there.
But you don't have to.
You don't have to.
No, that's right.
And if you want to be at that top tier, the $10 tier or whatever it is, you can join those live streams and have a chat with us.
The last live stream, we had it at a sort of a time zone that didn't suit Europe or the United States.
They're relatively small crowds.
So, you know, you can get up there and you can tell us what you think of RoboCop.
You could have delivered your review in person.
Yeah, you could deliver your review in person.
Pay me $10 and they get up there and crush my opinions about RoboCop.
Yeah, that's it.
So, yeah, you can find out what we really think about the occurs on those live streams.
But, yeah, so that's there.
And we like to shout out the people who...
Are kind enough to support us on Patreon.
And I have a couple of people to shout out, unless you have any objections to that, Matt?
No, please proceed.
Speak now or forever hold your tongue.
Okay, well, so for conspiracy hypothesizers, this week we have Mopi Dick, Hola Gatito, George Weiner, Hey,
right.
those are some good handles.
Good handles.
Yeah.
Good.
All unique in their own way.
Thank you all.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Okay, and next, Matt, we have revolutionary thinkers, the higher tier, the ones that get access to the academic knowledge.
These are people who want to expand their minds.
Yeah, the ones that want to reach a slightly higher level.
So there we have Odbjorn Nordland.
We have...
Don't say anything, Pat.
Don't say anything.
There's Ebuwa, Ben Makin, Adam G, Ayman Singh, and River Pebbles.
Congratulations, Chris.
I think you managed to offend three distinct continents and one subcontinent.
There.
Well done.
How would you say that first one?
Let me just...
You have to give me the...
Show me it written.
You can't say it to me because then your terrible pronunciation will infect mine.
Okay, that's tricky.
Odbjorn Nordland.
Fuck you.
I think you did.
That's it.
Anyway, thank you, Odbjorn.
It's a good name.
It's a good name.
It's our limitation.
Don't say our.
Your.
Yes, it is a good name.
I like the cross through the O. That's just charming.
At least it makes me think of Vikings.
Vikings.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you.
And lastly, Matt, the Galaxy Brain Gurus.
This is the top tier.
The North Stars in the guru sky.
The pricing on the guru cake.
Correct.
And there we have Potato Wire, we have Jason Truck, Shane Gronholz, Janet Uter, and Justin Kitchen.
Good, good.
That's our Galaxy Brain Gurus.
Galaxy Brain Gurus.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, the best.
The best.
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard.
