Join us for this special festive episode in which we initiate the fledgling Gurologist (and occasional journalist and author) Helen Lewis into the deeper and more esoteric levels of Gurology. Helen may have produced an excellent new multi-part series on the New Gurus for the BBC but just how many nut or shark-based anecdotes can you fit into a 30-minute episode? And is the BBC really ready for truly hardcore sensemaking?In any case, we indulge our new padawan with an extended discussion about the new series (it's actually very, very good!) and what she has learned on her travels. Along the way we compare notes, discuss the ethics of covering narcissists and harmful gurus, and uncover Helen's personal role in creating one prominent modern guru.But that's not all! Befitting the season, Helen comes bearing a gift... or is it a test? Unveiling her inner Quizmaster persona she attempts to humble the masters with an End of Year Guru quiz. Can Matt & Chris survive? Who between them is the true Gurologist (& who conversely is winning at life)? Join us and find out!P.S. The Elon Decoding episode is on its way very soon!LinksThe New Gurus SeriesHelen's recent appearance on Embrace the VoidHelen's Atlantic Article on Ron DeSantis' electoral strategyRussell Brand's infamous interview with Jeremey PaxmanRussell Brand's interview with Ed MilibandLaurie Penny's piece on Milo & friends
Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm not going to introduce you.
You've got to introduce us.
What am I here for?
Wow, that was...
I was so captivated by that that I was just expecting it to continue on.
It was like listening to a BBC series that I woke up.
But you didn't do the end, so I'll have to finish it off.
He's Chris Kavanagh.
An anthropologist.
I'm Matthew Brown, psychologist.
And with us, our guest on a very special Christmas special episode is Helen Lewis.
Thank you for doing the introduction, Helen.
I know.
I am available for Barty's, Mar Mitzvah's, other podcast introductions.
Just call my agent.
So this was the agreed triad for you doing this series on gurus.
Therefore, we stand for our approval in the series for the BBC.
Yeah, that's a reasonable triad.
It's good.
I was genuinely really worried when we pitched it and we got it commissioned.
And then I did some Googling and I was like, oh dear, these are going to be crazy internet people who are going to be really angry and it's going to be a whole big deal.
And then it turned out you were the rarest of beasts, which was nice internet people who thought such a thing existed and you were very nice about it.
Oh, no, no, no.
This has all been a setup, a fiend where now...
This is our Christmas special of sorts, so this is the airing of grievances segment, Helen.
Boy, do we have a lot of grievances for a viewer series.
Helen, you wandered onto our turf.
We'd stake this out.
We have various patents covering all of the gurus and ideas.
Sent marked all over this place.
I love the gurus.
Just weed all around Brett Weinstein.
No one's coming near that.
He's mine now.
That's right.
No, but congratulations, Helen, on The New Gurus, this series you've created for Radio 4 for the BBC.
You know, you're catering to the Normie audience, which is great.
You know, it's good that that sector has been taken care of.
But I think Chris mentioned that you deliberately avoided...
Consuming too much of our content, or even any, so as not to be influenced or prejudiced by us and maybe came to similar conclusions.
How would you describe that?
Yeah, I think that's very true.
I cracked eventually and I was on a road trip in Florida at the beginning of November and then I was having some very long drives.
So I did then.
That was the time really to dig into some of those dark horse episodes.
So that's when I really caught up on my solid Decoding the Guru's time.
But I really wanted to know whether or not, yeah, we would converge in the same places after I first spoke to you.
And I think we kind of did.
I think the one that I really...
What I saw was the anti-establishment, because kind of doing it for the BBC and approaching people from the BBC, some of those communities are just so hostile.
Like the pick-up artist community, for example, just absolutely think anything that the BBC is going to do is going to be a stitch-up.
They're going to be horrible.
And I kept getting sort of slightly shame-faced emails from people who kind of wanted to talk, but also knew that there was a huge taboo in their community against doing it.
So that was one of the things that came across really, really strongly.
What else did I...
You guys have already picked up on.
Yeah, the conspiracist thinking is absolutely there in lots of those.
And the money aspect of it.
One of the things that Tara Isabella Burton, who wrote this book called Strange Rights, New Religions for Godless World, talked to me about the supplement business.
And the fact that if you look at Gwyneth Paltrow's goop supplements and you look at Alex Jones's InstaHard and all this kind of crazy stuff, they're all relying on the same complementary medicine that isn't really medicine.
Supplements, one is branded for anxious middle-aged women in California and one is branded for like...
Slightly overweight middle-aged men who think they're Rambo in the Midwest.
But that's where the money is.
The money is in supplements.
And the money is in crypto because that's unregulated in the same way.
So, yeah, I got a chance to dig in a bit more to some of that stuff.
I think narcissism came up.
Would you agree?
Good prompt, Matt.
Good prompt.
Very subtle.
The interesting thing for me about the series, and I've heard, Most of it.
Although now everybody can because half of it is out.
But you have done this strange thing, Helen, and didn't really know it was possible where you take a topic and you fit lots of information into a short, condensed format of under 30 minutes.
There's relatively limited amounts of waffle or personal information.
And then you...
Stick to the topic and you deal with the Bitcoin people and the pickup artists and the kind of health and wellness space in each.
And I realize that I'm describing like a traditional episodic program, but I'm just genuinely quite impressed because like one of the things with these people that are gurus is They speak so much,
and they're all over the place, but if you want to get the full appreciation of what they're like, you must have so much content, because you did interviews and stuff with them, that you could fill episodes of Decoding the Guru for several months with.
So I'm curious about that.
At the end, are you happy with what comes out, or are you kind of very upset that all of your great work is...
Left on the cutting room floor.
Yeah, you have to machine gun quite a lot of darlings.
There's a whole story about Peter McCormack, who's a Bitcoin guru, going to see President Bekele of El Salvador, taking a load of back pain medication, which made him really high, and he ended up nearly vomiting on the rug in front of him.
And I was very attached to this story.
I find it hilarious, but it just had nothing to do with the subject at hand, and so it had to be ruthlessly cut out.
But a half-hour podcast, the script for that, including interviews, is about 5,000 words.
So I just want you to reflect, really, on the number of words that you've spoken on this podcast in the last year.
Like, it's several versions of War and Peace over and over again.
But yeah, that's one of the things, and genuinely a problem.
When we were doing episode five, which is the intellectual dark web, which is out on Boxing Day, to the extent that both the sound mixer and the editor actually had problems cutting Jordan Peterson.
Because his sentences don't end.
They just don't end.
And we're just like, try and find a representative clip that's not, you know, because you can't misrepresent him.
You've got to kind of give a fair.
And it's just like, that bit.
We'll just arbitrarily chop it here and here.
And just some bit about, something about Jung.
Right, that'll do.
It was really, it was a big challenge, that one.
So we were interviewed recently on a podcast about cults and people that were previously in cults.
And they were talking to us about why So many of the people in the guru space appear to be male.
They generally are male.
And Matt re-presented his theory of men being risk-taking, sensation-seekers, because he's obsessed with gambling and he knows that this applies.
But you previously suggested, the last time we had you on, that there's an issue there because...
That applies more to younger men than older men, but lots of the gurus are older.
So we were asked in the interview what the solution to that was, and neither of us could remember.
We couldn't remember.
So Matt kindly told them to listen to what Helen Lewis said in that interview.
But I'm inviting you since you're here, and Matt can now consult with you to help him upgrade this theory.
There's another gender difference.
What is it?
Well, I mean, this is a very, you may, this is hardcore feminist theory, so Matt, so you're entitled to question the evidentiary basis of it.
But the idea of male entitlement is the idea that, like Cordelia Fine's book is very good on this, the fact that, you know, parents pay more attention to male babies.
Male kids in school talk more, they interrupt more, they get more attention from the teachers.
So there is a kind of, and I think I'm convinced relatively by the evidence of it, a kind of consistent drumbeat.
In boys' lives that you're someone who's worthy of attention or someone who should be listened to, you can put yourself first.
Whereas all that, you know, I spent my childhood being told, you know, it's not ladylike, you know, sit properly, do this.
Don't take up too much space.
And there's that brilliant Chimamanda Ngozi Adiché piece that, you know, girls are told to shrink themselves and like put other people first.
And I think there's a kind of, with the gurus, it's kind of tapping the wine glass, everybody listen to me thing.
That is quite...
It is quite something that we don't normally encourage women to do.
Now, as ever, there are some percentage of women that are, like me, massively fond of the sound of their own voices and they overcome this terrible, debilitating female condition.
But I just think that you find more men who are...
And also the other thing I think in the gurus that you cover, they have to have a certain inability to read feedback that people are a bit bored, right?
There's a kind of like of emotional intelligence that your audience's eyes have slightly glazed over and you're nonetheless plowing onto the next 10 minutes of this anecdote regardless.
And yeah, I wonder if that's a more male trait too.
But this is, I mean, this is very, you know, stereotypical, I guess.
Yeah.
No, no, you'd be very proud of me because I did actually mention that in that interview, Chris.
I did mention, I literally said, it's the patriarchy.
I literally said that.
That's the summary of what Helen just described.
Yeah, because I Googled, during that interview, I Googled Indian gurus, the traditional gurus.
And Google gives you a nice, great big list with all the photographs.
And yeah, they're all guys, right?
And you've got to expect society's got to have something to do with that, right?
For the same reason that most politicians are men, right?
So, it's the old nature and nurture.
Well, and I also think if you accept the thesis, which our commissioning editor was really interested that we explore, that to some extent, the kind of internet gurus have replaced traditional religion, then you are swapping one male authority figure for another.
The other couple of dynamics I think are really important is I think there are a lot of guys out there looking for a kind of father figure.
And actually, David Fuller, who you guys know, I asked him this question in regard to Peterson, and he said, well, look, it's interesting.
I don't know if that's true, but I don't think it's...
A bizarre or offensive question, essentially, was what he said.
Because that's Peterson's appeal to lots of people.
He's stern but empathetic.
Or at least it was before he went into his full madness of King George pomp these days.
But he was explicitly a kind of stern dad to the internet.
And then the other thing is, I think to some extent, and this is getting very stereotypical, that podcasts in some respect become for men like friends.
Sorry if this sounds really offensive.
I don't mean it to be.
But like the parasocialness of it, I think for people who don't have such huge social networks themselves in real life can actually be really appealing.
I feel attacked.
Look, Alan, just to be clear, Matt and I are not friends.
This is purely a business relationship, purely intellectual.
Matt is an intellectual sock.
For my entertainment.
There's no passion for our genuine friendship there.
No, I mean, that's good.
Thank you for clearing that up.
But I mean for the audience, right?
In the sense, we talked a lot in the last couple of years about the kind of crisis of male loneliness, about the fact that decline of male only, you know, the fact that pubs and bars used to be very male spaces, they're now mixed family spaces.
There aren't that many, you know, and actually also they have this line about whether or not it's like women talk to each other and men talk alongside each other, right?
Like often a lot of men find it more comfortable to like go fishing together, go to the cricket together, go to the football together, and they don't have to be like, now is our big deep chat about our feelings.
And I wonder if podcasts kind of give you that.
Like, you listen to Joe Rogan and it's like, here are the bros all kind of hanging out together.
And, like, I'm a bro too.
Yeah, I think...
Careful, it's a trap.
I know.
Oh, look, there's so much stuff feeding into it.
And there's a couple of things that's tricky.
First of all, like, any sort of evidence of, like, psychological, empirical data on this isn't very helpful in figuring out who's going to be a guru because they're almost by definition exceptional people.
The kind of data you gather on risky status-seeking behaviours or narcissism, whatever, is on normal or relatively normal populations.
So it can help you understand about the audience, perhaps, but not so much about those edge-tail scenarios.
I think, though, that dark triad, the narcissism and that egocentric kind of...
Is maybe a sex difference that persists?
Is the dark triangle Machiavellianism narcissism and psychopathy?
No, what is it?
I always forget.
I think that's it, isn't it?
Has the quiz started, or is this just like...
Yeah, I know.
It's about academic specialism.
No, because they always said that they found that in internet trolls as well.
It's funny if you think that the psychology of the guru and the internet troll is...
In one way, one is just a much more successful internet troll, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if you look at the replies to Brett Weinstein or Jordan Peterson, there's a lot of women there who are...
Who are on board.
Are they?
Yeah, I was browsing through them today.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe anti-vax is a bit of a special situation, but at least when I sort of browse, it feels pretty gender neutral.
Jordan Peterson went anti-vax quite hard today.
Today.
Yeah.
He was always a little bit anti-vaxxer.
If you remember, they went to Serbia during the pandemic, I think it was one of the former Yugoslav countries, because they didn't want to be in all the US lockdowns, the Canadian lockdowns were so incredibly strict.
And you were like, sir, you've recently had double pneumonia.
This is really an illness you should not catch.
I'll probably be fine.
You actually might die if you catch this.
So there were only signs that he was going that way.
There were, and I think...
This might be a reverse influence case from Michaela is more inclined towards that, or was initially.
But there was an interesting case actually where we decoded the discussion between Jordan Peterson and Brett, which was one of his first post-illness extended interviews.
And Brett, because he's Brett, at several points brought up the vaccines and COVID.
And Jordan repeatedly...
Kind of had to take that, well, I don't know about that and I'm not really in a place to speak because I've just been knocked out and I haven't had the time to look into things.
He doesn't have that concern anymore.
But I remember, Matt, you and I at the time saying, isn't it nice to see someone being thrown the ball and ask the rum of it and saying, look, I'm not.
I'm not in a position to comment on vaccines and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, that's what's so different from now.
When I saw Jordan's jumping on the anti-vax thing, there was a sense of rightness to it.
You could tell that he was comfortable.
The jigsaw puzzles fitted into place with this satisfying click.
And one of the standard...
Psychological perspectives on why people have particular opinions is that they have opinions that fit in with a broader worldview.
And his opinion about vaccines didn't fit in with his general anti-establishment worldview.
And you could feel that it...
It just, you felt him sort of clicking into place.
The same with climate change, really, right?
Like, he just has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change for basically the same reasons, because it would kind of just make him an outlier.
The one thing I did think making that intellectual dark web episode, actually, is my respect for Sam Harris has increased, because he does seem to be able to stand up to his friends and say, I know you all think this, but I actually don't.
And like I say, I agree with you entirely.
Jordan Peterson's radicalization, to me, looks not like an intellectual journey, but like peer pressure.
And Sam Harris has, to some extent, managed to resist that, often at great personal cost of all the rest of them being mean boys to him, basically, and laughing at him, which is one of the hardest things to resist.
If you get a load of high-status people all just openly mocking you, very few people will be able to resist that.
It would be good if somebody had encouraged Sam Harris to take that kind of stance earlier and made that point to him.
It would have been good, but, you know, we can't live in that world.
Needless to say, Chris, you had the last laugh.
Oh, that interview.
Yes, that did come up in that interview, but it is very nice to see.
Well, I think it's ironic in a way, like, Sam Harris's willingness to disappoint people and just that bullheaded, single-minded...
The very thing that made him so irritating for you to interview.
Who said he was irritating?
You said that.
They didn't say that.
Anyway, I think that's helped him resist that peer pressure and stuff.
Right, and I feel the same about Barry Weiss as well, right?
Formerly of the New York Times, who left the New York Times, founded what was formerly Common Sense, now the Free Press.
And she did the Twitter file, so she took the Elon bargain, the Faustian Elon bargain, but then immediately went and did some actual reporting.
Looked into some other stuff and then said, I'm really concerned that we've exchanged one overlord's whims for another overlord's whims, at which point Elon had a little cry because it turned out he didn't want independent journalism at all.
He wanted somebody to be his instrument and I think unfollowed her, which is, I mean, for a 50-something man, just an aspirational level of pettiness, which I have to respect.
But yeah, I respected that she did that, that she went, I'm a journalist.
Like, give me some files.
Great.
It's really interesting.
And maybe I'll agree to your conditions because this story is so good.
But that doesn't mean you own me.
And I think any journalist worth their salt would have immediately gone, I'm going to do something now that's rude about Elon Musk just to show that I can.
I'm not bought and sold like that.
It was nice.
It was nice to see that.
And some people have indicated that Tyvee talked a bit about it on his podcast.
I haven't listened to confirm that.
But in that case, with the Twitter files, we should talk about Musk as a potential guru.
But on Barry Weiss, this is a pet peeve.
But I think it does relate to, especially the IDW side of the guru sphere.
Because it's something that Matt and I have talked also in some of the American self-help people that we've covered.
Breathless way that they present information and you see it in extreme form in Brett Weinstein where everything is the collapse of civilization and the woke are going to take over or James Lindsay for that matter.
Barry is not that but when consuming her content I definitely get the same sense and I did with the Twitter files that like wait for this ground shaking Earth-moving information which will blow your mind about everything that happened.
And then fundamentally with the Twitter files and whatnot, it is an interesting story.
It's nice to see moderation discussions and peek behind the Slack window.
But it's exactly what I would have anticipated was happening at Twitter and in line with what was publicly known.
So it just, that's the bit, yeah.
The trouble with that is, the intent point to that, I would say, think about the Snowden or the Julian Assange revelations and think about, oh, the CIA does some spying.
Pretty heady stuff.
You have to not be too, kind of, like, yawny about that stuff.
And also the fact that The Guardian and The New York Times puffed that stuff like it was kind of earth-shaking, right?
And, oh, our relations with our allies will never be the same again.
And guess what?
It turns out that everyone went, oh, yeah, okay, so the CIA are bugging our phones.
Oh, right, well, yeah, fair enough.
We probably thought that was true.
So I kind of, from a journalist's point of view, I'm going to defend sensationalism because you always want people to read your stories.
But I will concede that it created a massive problem, right, which is that...
Mary Weiss and Matt Tybee came out and said, this is the most earth-shattering thing.
Life will never be the same again.
And everyone else was quite bored by it because it was quite technical.
And now the right-wing sphere is obviously kind of going, yeah, going, oh, well, this is it.
This is more the liberal media trying to cover stuff up.
Why isn't this the most important story in the world on the front page of the New York Times?
Which is, again, also how I feel about Hunter Biden's laptop, right?
It's really interesting if you go and talk to US normie Republicans and say, what was on Hunter Biden's laptop?
And actually, very often, they can't tell you.
They just know it was bad.
It was something about corruption, something about porn, and that's it.
But it's become totemic, and the fact that people won't cover it has become totemic as well.
This is probably slightly tangential to Guru stuff, but it's our show.
We can do that.
I do have this question about one thing that Matt and I have noticed when it comes to the discourse around the lab leak, and it applies to the Twitter files and applies to the Hunter Biden laptop as well, that a large part of the debate,
Just becomes the shifting narrative.
Like you said, with the Hunter Biden stuff, what's actually on the laptop?
It isn't really this earth-shaking revelation.
The best thing that people have been able to focus on is some reference to the big man in an email, a potential meeting set up, some deal that might have potentially involved.
Biden, in an email.
This is it.
It is not the greatest Watergate-level conspiracy.
And the same thing with the lab leak, that when people talk about it, they have this memory of it where if you mention it, you were completely kicked off social media and you weren't allowed to discuss it in polite company or people would spit out their tea and scream that you're a racist.
But it's not true.
First of all, it's not true because I had to deal with the lab leak people.
Every day on Twitter, nobody was banning them.
It seems that like a lot of what the gurus do and a lot of what the online discourse and the Twitter files is no exception is around the perception as opposed to the content.
Like, what do the Twitter files mean?
Does this mean that everyone was vindicated when they were talking about shadow banning and stuff?
And it does feel a lot like the details get lost in the vibe for either people wanting to...
Endorse it or say that it's nothing and that that's predetermined.
I definitely have a bias towards it being lesser.
You mentioned Snowden and the...
I can't remember the other one.
Julian Assange.
Oh, the Paradise Papers, yes.
Yeah, so I agree that with the Paradise Papers and stuff like that, I kind of was like, yeah, rich people have tax cubes.
Oh, Shaki.
But I did think...
It is good to have them documented.
And with Snowden, even though we know the CIA and stuff is spying, the extent of the spying was, I think, sort of surprising that they were doing such a huge net.
And then the problem was they had too much data to even look at.
So I realize I'm waffling around, but the point I'm trying to make is when you're a journalist, And you have to address these kind of topics.
Do you find that is what you end up having to deal with?
A lot of it being vibe-based on people's perceptions, as opposed to the actual details of stories.
And to relate it to Barry, is it a problem that she seems to be playing into those kind of vibe-based things?
That's my kind of issue.
Yeah, I think that's the thing.
When you're a sole trader rather than part of an institution, then...
You know, and I think David Fuller says this pretty explicitly, right?
All the incentives are, you know, he said I could have grown my channel by just platforming anti-woke people.
You have to make a conscious, economically wounding decision to yourself over and over and over again to do good, responsible journalism.
And that's, I think that's really tough.
I mean, I had a conversation with the BBC because I said, like, I just want you to be fully aware in advance that the people I'm going to be covering...
Are very likely to complain about this series because to them all the incentives align with doing it, right?
Like, I've been terribly introduced by the mainstream media.
It's for their audiences an incredibly appealing narrative.
I would doubt that, you know, we're going to make this as legally and ethically sound as we can, that they will have grounds for an official law or even a legal complaint.
But nonetheless, there are lots of people for whom making a huge fuss on social media is nothing but upside for them.
And you have to be aware of that when you're doing journalism in this environment.
And I also get kind of slightly annoyed.
You know, the Elon fanboy is a really good example about this.
The sheer level of credulousness.
So the example about the stalker, the story about the stalker, right, and how the jet was putting his kid in danger is a really good example.
When the Washington Post goes and does this, involving Bellingcat, right, and Bellingcat taking time off the Ukraine war to look into this, geolocates where his car was, and it's a day after his plane last flew and several miles away.
So he's just...
Made that up as far as we can see, that the jet had anything to do with that incident.
But people who will spend all their time saying the mainstream media are lying to you seem to be completely unaware of the idea that Elon Musk too, it's possible, may lie to you.
Yeah, yeah.
That inconsistency of charity is, I mean, it's a feature of humans in general, but with Musk, it's impressive in some cases.
And that concept of like...
You know, four-dimensional or nine-dimensional, how many dimensions you want.
Chess seems to be very, very useful because when somebody does something that looks stupid or it seems counterproductive, there's always this escape hatch that maybe they're doing something really clever, and it's so clever that you have to just...
It looks stupid because we are just not on their level.
So, like, Musk did a poll very recently when we were recording.
About whether he should be the CEO.
And various people were having online coronaries because it ended up that he was voted quite unanimously.
No, that he shouldn't be in the poll.
But I then saw people saying, oh, this was actually a poll to catch the bots who would vote against them and stuff like that.
And yeah, it seems, you know, the cope is strong.
Yeah.
But the one thing I felt about Musk is that it's really interesting to me that I think he is very Trumpy.
And I know we went through a phase of comparing everything to Trump, but like in both cases, the thing is the same, right?
The offer is that everyone is lying to you or everyone, like no one knows what they're doing.
And at least I'm honest about it.
So all politicians lie or like, you know, I'm just, if you were rich, wouldn't you be a chaos dragon like this?
This is what freedom really is.
And to me, and Matt, I'd be really interested in your take on this because I felt like that a lot with the gurus we covered in the series.
The shape they finally took was essentially arbitrary.
And I sometimes feel this about like...
Terrorism and jihadis too, right?
You have a combination of a personality type and the prevailing ideology of society and that dictates rather than anything else.
Maybe that's just massively simplistic.
So James Lindsay obviously started off as a new atheist writer and is now in bed with Christian conservatives.
Or Tom Torreira, who's the pickup artist I deal with in episode six, started off, first of all, he wanted to be an orthodox monk.
Oh, he also had a kind of Dawkins phase and then he got very into religion and then he wanted to be an orthodox monk and then he became a pick-up artist and he wanted to sleep with as many women as possible.
On the surface of it, do you want to be celibate or not?
Make up your mind.
But actually what he was always doing was always looking for that position where he would get to be a priest essentially and it would be either a priest of a religion or it would be a priest of pick-up artistry and I just found that very compelling.
Yeah, yeah.
We've spoken about this before and it's the idea of looking at things through a psychological lens rather than an ideological or a political one where the specific platform, the specific story that they're telling isn't as important as the fact that they are the person up there who's telling the story and enthralling everyone.
And I don't think it's wrong to make those parallels between Musk and Trump and the rest of our gurus.
I've read a book like...
When I was like a teenager, it was something called something like Mozart and the Enlightenment.
And it had this funny thing and it basically said, you can basically understand everything as like this conflict between romanticism and classicism.
The romantic figure.
These people that break all of the boundaries and they have this charisma about them.
There's an appeal to that, and it's contrasted against a kind of a bureaucracy and these checks and balances and systems and rules and all of that stuff.
It feels to me that the appeal of someone like Musk or Trump or all of those other figures, or even the good old-fashioned fascists like Hitler and Mussolini, is that they are this personal...
Figure that sweeps away all of the corruption and you can trust them because you feel like you know them.
You have a parasocial relationship with them.
And that, to me, feels like the difference.
People are more accepting of Musk making these arbitrary kind of decisions than they are of these shadowy executives or committees or things happening behind closed doors.
It kind of plays into the conspiratorial thing as well.
But for a classical liberal type person...
It's like, you like committees.
You like rules and regulations.
What kind of absolute pervert likes committees?
Surely no such person.
There's a guru that is like springing to my mind that's a really good example of this.
And I loved as well, Helen, the episode that you did covering the pickup artist, especially the...
Trad monk to pick up artist pipeline and undiscovered I've learned previously.
But Matt, you will enjoy it if you hear it as well.
Especially because you had an interview with the woman that he was married to.
So there was like this personal window into it.
But the person I'm thinking about is similarly has a weird collection of views in some respect.
Stefan Molyneux.
And I came across him.
Actually, I think before his Trump turn, when he'd been profiled in some Channel 4 documentaries about online cults, and he had some appearances on Rogan, the second of which went very bad when Rogan played some videos of him acting in a very misogynistic and culty way.
But Stephen Molyneux, for people who don't know, is like a Canadian YouTuber who previously claimed to have the biggest philosophy channel.
In the world.
He's not a philosopher, but that is how he self-styled himself.
And his network was called Free Domain Radio because it was like a kind of libertarian.
So he started out as like an anti-spanking.
I was not expecting a start.
Yeah, not adult anti-spanking, although I think he was against that too.
I like spanking your kids!
I can't comment on this stance with consenting adults, but he was very concerned with spanking children, as we all are.
He felt that that corporal punishment led people into this, destroyed their life.
And he was early on a kind of manosphere.
And so it was basically Muller's completely destroying the lives of people.
And even if it was men who did the punishment, he did this famous spiel saying, it's because women are rewarding the assholes.
They are the ones that are fucking the species, right?
Like, so, sorry, Helen, but, you know, ultimately...
It is always women's fault.
Yeah, it's good to have that cleared up.
But he went from anarcho-capitalist, from, like, anti-spanking online psychology cult to...
An anarcho-capitalist libertarian to strong MAGA Trump apologist.
And then his current thing is, I believe, ethno-nationalist banned from all platforms.
So that's quite the journey.
And it's one that takes place in the space of just seven or eight years.
It's like a lifetime of ideology.
And you do see in some figures who are very popular.
Like Christopher Hitchens.
Or even, like, this figure doesn't have exactly a political stance, but like Mark Kermode, for example, the popular film critic, where in...
Is he a white supremacist now?
No.
No, he's not come out as an anti-spanker yet.
He was like a...
Some variety of insane Marxists in his university years.
So Trott's case, I think that's what he was.
An old Trott, as he said.
But Christopher Hitchens went for a whole gamut of ideologies.
So is that something that we think is, you know, like for gurus, the ideology is somewhat disposable?
Or is that a subset of gurus?
Like I know you've been covering Ron DeSantis, and he seems like somebody that's...
Roller, ideologically malleable or opportunistic might be the way to freeze it, but yeah.
I mean, he's always been incredibly conservative, but then he, for as long as he's only 44 now, so for as long as he's been in the Republican Party, you know, the Tea Party had been in the ascendant, and it was very obvious where the kind of energy of that party went.
He was, when he was in Congress, he was part of the Freedom, he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, whose unofficial nickname for themselves, because they wanted to get stuff done, but they were also incredibly conservative, was the Reasonable Nut Job Caucus.
Which I think is just like, good, because other people, they're unreasonable nutjobs.
We're the reasonable nutjobs.
They called themselves that?
Yeah, that was an unofficial nickname for themselves, which is good at a level of self-awareness.
But he's not a guru figure, and it's interesting, it's actually going to present a challenge to political reporters, I think, coming into next year, that he's very uncharismatic.
He's actually kind of boring.
I went to watch one of his rallies, and I was a bit...
I was like, oh no, this is bad because people will just zone out of this.
And he's actually saying things that are quite extraordinary and particularly cruel, but it's not got the fireworks of Trump, right?
Trump came attended with all this hoopla of like, hey, I'm going to be evil.
Watch me be evil, everyone.
I'm so evil.
And actually somebody who's just bureaucratically evil is much harder to get people to pay attention to.
But what he's done, because he's an incredibly smart guy, is he has now recruited...
I would say unreasonable nutjob wingmen, basically, right?
He now has outsourced all of that.
So he's now got his own version of the CDC with lots of these dissident scientists on and your friend of mine, Brett Weinstein.
And so he's got people to do that kind of level of heavy lifting for him to say the kind of, ooh, you know, maybe...
All of this is that, you know, maybe Anthony Fauci should be put in prison, right?
That sort of stuff.
And it's been very useful for him because what it's allowed him to do is outflank Trump from the right.
And he has also made a very smart calculation that the donors and the party elites are ready to move on from Trump.
And actually, for all that there are, lots of people in the base who love the crazy.
There are lots of people in the base, too, who want all the delicious lib owning, but don't want the fear that it will cross the line and the dog whistle will become a whistle and it will embarrass them.
It will be vulgar.
You know, there are lots of people in that base who are, you know, they've been married for 50 years.
They have a very strong face.
They would love to have a Trump, but without the pussy grabbing, essentially.
And Ron DeSantis is married to a very beautiful former TV anchor.
He's got three adorable looking children.
His wife went through breast cancer last year and he supported her through that.
So he's got like, he gives you, he's got a wholesome story.
But he will put people on the Supreme Court, he'll make Genghis Khan look like a hand-wringing liberal, and pass very draconian laws, which is what they want.
And above everything else, if there's one thing that he has done, he has tax cuts for businesses, which he's done very effectively in Florida.
So he's offering the Republican Party an incredible bargain, and it depends to be seen what the percentage of people is who love the crazy.
This is what I've been trying to work out for the last couple of months.
Who wants the tax cuts and who wants the drama?
And which of those sides is going to win?
The picture that you're painting, and you have various articles about Ron DeSantis that we'll put in the show notes because I think they're very interesting about his kind of personality and that.
But if you have Ron DeSantis in the way that you described as a quite strategic thinker, but not a bombastic delivery guy, even if he tries to put that on on occasion, and...
We're seeing somebody like Elon Musk, who, from me and Matt consuming his content for the decoding episode, is similar.
Like, in the way that he delivers things, it's quite boring and, like, relatively sane whenever he's talking.
It's, you know, it's not even TED Talk level, the pitch, usually.
It's more low energy than Matt.
Yeah, so the interesting thing for me is that implies that, like, If you look at Musk's Twitter behavior, you would think he's this mental bombastic guru type, but he's not personality-wise.
But he can play that online.
And it sounds like Ron DeSantis can outsource the craziness to James Lindsay and Brett Weinstein and these kind of people.
So does that mean that we are approaching a point where you can just outsource your life?
You can just get the crazy.
Or play the character online, but you yourself can be quite calculating and rather boring in your delivery and still get the benefit.
Is that what's going to happen?
That's what the Republican primary of next year will demonstrate.
And the other thing it will demonstrate is just the importance of that right-wing media ecosphere, which I guess we all sort of talk about in this really casual way, but it is just incredibly asymmetric.
And I think one of the things that Musk is really wrestling with now is the idea that...
That people might say things that he doesn't agree with, right?
It's sort of fascinating.
All this rhetoric about kind of safe spaces on the right and actually the one thing that lots of people on the right really cannot handle is the idea of a not safe space.
I'm kind of consistently fascinated.
And Ron DeSantis, you know, he's been on, it's not Tucker Carlson, although he did a long sit down with Tucker Carlson, which he went into his backstory and it was one of those absolutely classic backstories where this is a guy who went to Yale Law.
And one of the other Ivy Leaves, I think Harvard undergrad.
And he said, you know, the day I first arrived, I was in jean shorts because I'm from Florida and they all looked down on me.
And, you know, it was that classic right wing populist trope of I went among the elites and I discovered they were all snooty and disdainful.
And he's played that very carefully.
Like he's very much downplayed his elite credentials in a much more successful way than...
The previous generations, pre-Trump generations of Republicans were able to.
But that is also where you have to be now to win a Republican primary.
You have to be not just, you know, you have to be overtly anti-intellectual, basically.
So what do you think?
I mean, that's part of a broader thing with the right and the left kind of switching places in a way.
The left traditionally has been the party, the workers' party, the party of the working class and against the elites and whatever.
More and more, of course, it's the party that academics like me or journalists like you tend to vote for, and the right is pivoted towards going for that populism.
So is that all just part of this broader shift?
You must have thought about that a fair bit.
What does all that mean?
I've got a very normy analysis on this, which is exactly what you're right, that we moved from the 20th century model of class-based and economic-based voting to now values-based.
Voting.
And it's relatively true across America.
I'm not sure whether or not it's so true across Australia.
You can tell me.
It's true.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, that you get the cities are very, in American terms, blue, right?
And then it's the surrounding counties.
And that's not always the case.
But, you know, graduates vote far more for left-wing parties now, for example.
It's one of the biggest predictors.
I think the single...
Biggest predictor of voting remain in the EU referendum was having a degree.
So it's switched.
And I think a lot of that is about the decline of manufacturing jobs.
A lot of that is about where the kind of growth in the economy has come over the last 20 years.
And of course the other big split as well is just age, which is kind of fascinating.
Basically, the conservative base in this country is people in their 50s and above.
It's just that there's a lot of them and they all vote.
And they're very evenly distributed throughout the country, whereas younger people are heavily concentrated in the cities.
So there has been this enormous political realignment and it has had enormous effects on...
On politics.
But the thing that I think, I do cling to, you know, the what's the matter with Kansas thesis, which is that the right in the US effectively welded on guns initially and abortion onto an economic platform in order to keep getting people voting against their own economic interests.
And that's, like, it feels very simplistic, and I don't mean it in a rude way, but it has been incredible.
Someone like Ron DeSantis is essentially, if you look at actually what he's interested in in policy terms, it's tax cuts for businesses.
And consistently all the way through what...
You know, the Republican hierarchy put up with Trump because he put tax cuts in place.
Absolutely nothing else matters.
So you have to kind of, to some extent, look at all that stuff as cafebi.
The trouble is that it's cafebi that affects people's actual lives.
And this is why we come back to this discussion, Chris, you know, but the same thing about, you know, do they really mean it when people do this?
You know, do these people really believe what they're saying?
And I just kind of constantly think I don't care and I don't mind because it doesn't matter ultimately.
But the other thing...
That's interesting, Matt, is what you were saying about the kind of personality thing, is it does suggest what the remedy is for these gurus, right, which has to be structural rather than personal, because those people are always going to exist.
And what you have to do is create a society in which they don't flourish.
That's the only thing that we can do.
What are the things that we would do that would mean that, you know, a proto-Weinstein, no one listens to him.
He's just, you know, sitting at home ranting quietly to himself about ivermectin.
So on that very topic, Helen, you've fallen neatly into the jaws of our trap because you, you personally, are somewhat responsible for encouraging a present-day guru.
Somebody who was once, still is to some extent, like associated with the left, certainly was at that time, but now...
Has a right-wing populist streak in him, right?
I'm speaking, of course, of one Russell Brand, who, during your time at New Statesman, edited a special issue, right?
Around about the time when he was opining on politics.
He is often opining in politics now, but at that time, it was on the back of the interview with Jeremy Paxman.
BBC political reporter.
Wasn't that off the back of that?
I mean, don't say this to anyone who worked at the New Statesman at the time because we set him up with that interview to promote the issue and then it was the only thing that anyone remembers.
But it's fine because actually that's now all quite embarrassing and the fact that people don't think I had anything to do with it is probably better.
You're even more responsible than I give you credit.
So you are...
Part of the reason that he was talking to Jeremy Paxman and told everyone, like, why vote?
What difference does it make?
They're all a bunch of idiots anyway.
So do we at least have some thanks to give to you for encouraging Russell Brand to become more political and to tell more people about his opinion?
Can you not claim responsibility for that?
No.
Well, ironically, of all the things that I have actually been cancelled for, I've never been cancelled for the one thing I think I sort of deserve it for, because it was 2013, and he was writing a football column for The Guardian, and he was still doing kind of stand-up and stuff like that.
Like, he was in that space, but not known.
He hadn't written the book Revolution yet, or I didn't.
Maybe he'd written My Booky Wook.
Sorry, that makes me upset.
Makes me upset to say that out loud.
Isn't it a two-part?
There's a sequel, my Wookiee book?
Oh, God.
Can I just...
I think I might have said this before, but I have to interject that one of my enduring memories of my student time in London was I didn't go to your fancy elite media parties very often, but one of my friends became sort of involved in media and had a house party.
And there were various people there.
And in the middle of the night, at what was a very unenjoyable party, somebody had like a microphone set up, like a kind of karaoke thing, and they were reading from my bookie work.
They were just like doing a reading in the way that you would read, or I don't know what people read in those kind of things.
So I had my bookie week seared.
I didn't enjoy that at the time and I would not enjoy it, no.
That is a powerful "don't take drugs kids" message or you may end up reading out my bookie work to people at a party.
I wouldn't normally tell this story but it has now been 10 years and he's completely crackers now so I'm going to.
We went to meet him at the Savoy for the setup meeting and he told me this story about how There was a universal animal consciousness.
And the way you could tell this was that cows had learnt in Germany to walk over cattle grids with their little hooves, like just on the bits.
And I was like, oh, great.
Cows.
Clever than you think, eh?
Those cows.
What will they think of next?
And he went, and the thing is that all around the world, cows have now learned to walk over cattle grids.
And there was a bit of my brain that was going, this is, I mean, this is bad news.
This is like our only defence against the cow rampage has finally been taken away from us.
Shit, we're in trouble now.
They're on to us.
And of course I came away and I was like, is that true?
And of course it's not true.
But it was so compelling the way he was there.
He was there like this huge gothic spider, very thin, covered in chains.
And incredibly kind of compelling.
Just an incredibly charismatic man who would just hold people's hands.
He was very touchy.
We did this edition and the content was kooky.
I blanked most of it out of my mind, but there was definitely David Lynch on Transcendental Meditation.
There was a piece by Alec Baldwin on whether or not JFK had been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.
We don't look back on that one with joy.
But there was also this piece about not voting and about the need for revolution.
And Shepard Fairey of the Obama Hope poster did the front cover, which was a revolution of consciousness.
And the whole theme of the thing was revolution.
And then we set him up to do that interview with Jeremy Paxman, in which he said, don't vote.
And it was incredibly popular.
I then commissioned Robert Webb to write a piece the next week, which was like, no, actually do vote.
And I think, in fact, the last line of the thing is, So Russell, go away and read some fucking Orwell.
And it turned into a good slang match between the two of them.
So I did slightly attend for it.
But the thing is, this is the bit I really regret, is that it was all kind of slightly fun and games happening in this land of like, maybe we could just ask questions.
Isn't it great to have open minds?
And I just think, I wrote a piece about kind of the sort of...
Groyper memes before the 2016 election, you know, the kind of dank memes and people thinking it was fun to flirt with Nazi imagery and stuff like that.
And there was just, in those first years of the 2010s, an immense level of complacency that this was the final finished form, like what the end of history had happened.
I remember reading a column in the FT by Janan Ganesh, who is their kind of big flaneur correspondent, saying that the problem with politics is it's just so boring.
There's no, you know, it's like apathy.
No one cares anymore.
Like, it's all just, and in a way, that just seems to me like the kind of, that was the death knell of that era of politics, the kind of, everything's great.
Like, what could possibly go wrong here?
And then from 2015, 16 onwards, it really did.
The boring classicist kind of, you know, guys in grey suits, the hollow men.
Running the show, when there's too much of them, it creates space for people like Russell Brand.
And everyone feels like they want a breath of fresh air and things like the bookie walk or transcendental consciousness with cows start sounding interesting because you're just so bored with the people.
I don't know.
Australia is a bit like that at the moment.
In many ways, our politics is so much healthier than places like the United States, partly because we have compulsory voting and we don't have a mainstream party that's gone mental.
As a result, they are extremely centrist, and it's very hard to discriminate them.
And in many ways, that's a good thing.
I think probably mostly it's a good thing.
But you can see that when they get too close together, that they create space at the edges for just all kinds of weirdness.
There is like a coda for the Russell Brand thing, which, you know, his ultimate coda is where he is now, which, you know, is not a good place and not a good impact on the world.
I believe he was just talking with somebody about the Twitter files.
Matt Tybee.
Yeah, he's interviewed Matt Tybee.
And he also occupies a really interesting space, right?
Because he's got that whole bit to himself, which is basically the left wing.
Anti-vax, sort of Chomsky-Pilger kind of questioning of Western imperialism.
Because so much of that stuff in the US is dominated by the right, the fact that he's not actually into groomer discourse, he's pretty anti-capitalist.
He is occupying a great niche, respect to the lad.
He's found a market opening.
Yeah, left-wing, crunchy populism.
It's a market segment.
Who would have thought?
But I do remember before, and he definitely wouldn't do this now, but after he went on that kind of grand tour about the absolute meaninglessness of voting and how all political parties are fundamentally the same, he then had a sit-down interview with the charisma vacuum that is Ed Miliband.
And Ed Miliband, he put the kind of very basic questions, the kind of stuff that, you know, Politicians get asked when they go to a primary school.
What have you done for us lately?
This kind of thing.
And Ed Miliband provided fairly good stock answers.
He's a smart guy, not particularly charismatic, but, you know, very thoughtful person.
And his answers were good.
And he kind of pointed out, yeah, look, you know, it does matter because here's what conservatives have done and here's what labor governments have done.
So actually, lots of the things that you care about are relevant.
And then Brussels' response was kind of like, oh, I see.
I see.
Well, I guess it is important then that we vote.
And maybe you should all go out and vote for Leobar.
But he did this interview, I think, three days before the election or at some point where it was going to have very little impact.
And there was talk about whether his anti-vote thing would...
It swung the vote, right?
But it turned out not to have much of an impact at all.
You're talking about the famous Owen Jones headline, which is like, Russell Brand back said Miliband and the Tories should be worried.
And it turns out the Tories were not, sadly, worried at all by that.
And in fact, quite sadly, they won an unexpected overall majority, which then meant that they couldn't horse trade away the idea of a Brexit referendum with a pact with the Lib Dems.
So, yeah, in a way, if Russell Brand had done that three weeks earlier...
Brexit might not have happened.
It's one of the many alternate theories of life.
There is a thing that you mentioned, Helen, about people, especially in the early 2010s or before Trump, the alt-right and stuff.
It wasn't that people were just treating it all as, oh, this is just funny.
People are pretending to be Nazis online.
But it was more like the New York Times and stuff got criticized for kind of trying to...
Profiled Nazis, right?
They're just like us.
They just don't like Jews or people from different ethnic backgrounds living in their country.
But there was this little genre of, and left-wing journalists did it too, Laurie Penny did a notable one on Milo, were palling around with quite reprehensible figures and saying,
well, of course their ideology is terrible, but they're a lot of fun.
Was the kind of common takeaway?
And now that looks somewhat irresponsible.
But I'm curious.
I don't think this, but I'm going to devil's advocate it anyway.
So you're a guru series.
You cover a lot of people, the crypto people and whatnot.
So is there any concern on your part that you might cover people who take a dark turn, that your coverage of them is relatively...
Moderate.
And then in the coming year, they end up going down some dark paths.
No, I think that's a completely reasonable concern.
And Laurie, I used to edit her, or them, sorry, at the New Statesman, I took an enormous amount of heat for that piece.
I think it was called The Boys on the Bus.
And it was like, oh yeah, the thing is that Milo is just really great fun.
And I'm sure Milo was really great fun.
It's just that the kind of missing piece of analysis, I guess, was...
And that's how he takes you in to then sell you on whatever mad ideology he's currently pressing.
And so the good thing about doing the series for the BBC is that they were very clear.
And this was, you know, this is hard stuff to do.
So episode two, I say, of Will, who is our main subject of the episode, who's a guy who drinks his own urine and is anti-vax.
I really like him.
Who doesn't?
But leading to my favourite bit when he was like, I was like, but what about drinking other people's urine?
He was like, well, obviously not.
No, I wouldn't recommend doing that.
And I was like, good.
Okay, good.
We found the line.
But, you know, and I wanted to make clear that I, both of them, I really liked him.
He's a really nice guy.
And also that I understand the story.
Like, he had strabismus, so he has an eye problem, which he spent a lot of childhood interacting in various unpleasant ways with the medical system.
Then he got gaybashed when he was walking out with his first boyfriend.
And instead of getting therapy, he was just, you know, the American medical system often in pills, or the Canadian medical system often in pills.
And so, like, what I wanted to do was kind of say, it's not right.
To be anti-vax.
Like here are the facts.
Here's how many people a year measles killed before the measles vaccine in 1968 or whenever.
But I understand the psychological journey that got him to this place.
And that to me is the bit that's hard.
And because it's the BBC, you have to be okay with saying to people, like, I'm not going to uncritically launder everything that you say.
And I'm sure when the crypto episode comes out that that will be an issue too, right?
Because I'm just...
Pretty cryptoskeptic.
And in my interviews with people, I was very cryptoskeptic.
And they're allowed to push back.
You know, the BBC line is you have to have due impartiality.
So we have to represent the full range of viewpoints.
But the thing that we have to do because of it's being a state-funded broadcaster is make very clear when people are outside the mainstream.
And that's quite a tough thing to...
Sell interviewees on and get people to kind of agree to sign up to that isn't just going to be...
I mean, we've had this conversation before.
You know, the number of people who actually genuinely want to come on and do a critical interview with somebody is actually quite low.
And they don't have to.
They can just hang out completely in their lovely, warm bubble of joy.
So credit to them for coming on and talking to me, really.
But yeah, you are free to have a go at me.
If people, it turns out, all across...
Britain, tomorrow, like over Christmas, are chugging their own piss.
And that's me.
I did that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I'm just keeping a tally so that, you know, this ammunition can be used when we need to take you down.
And given where Russell Brand has ended up, this seems likely.
But you kind of already answered this.
But given that you covered a whole bunch of people, and it is clear from the interviews that there are individuals that you got on with.
Interpersonally, right?
And like you say, that's not everything because some monsters are probably interpersonally very entertaining people, like Matt, for example.
But when you're looking at the gurus that you've seen across the series, are there ones that you would single out that you like, that you don't think what they're doing is particularly harmful?
And you can compare that, if you want, with people that are fundamentally terrified you and you're worried for the future by their rise.
Because we do cover gurus, including some of the people that we think are harmful to the discourse, like Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein, for example, are people that we think do a lot of bad stuff and promote bad thinking.
They're also entertaining in a way that lots of...
Lesser gurus are not.
So, you know, there's aspects like that.
But Joe Rogan is the classic exemplar of that, right?
And I remember having a weird defense of Joe Rogan during the whole anti-vax thing, which is the fact that if you watch American TV...
They are advertising all kinds of insane experimental medicine and then they have to list the side effects at the end and it's all like, you know, it'll affect Shatner's Bassoon and give you, you know, crunkles or whatever.
And it's just the lack of regulation and the fact that you are allowed to do direct-to-consumer advertising.
It comes up in one of my special interests, which is child gender medicine.
I think to most people in Europe, the idea that a surgeon can directly advertise mastectomies to teenagers is just mind-blowing.
Like, this is just not in my...
In my world.
But the American system of individualist consumerism is just in a very different place.
And so, while I don't think Joe Rogan was right to do that, I can also see how it looked like hypocrisy given the overall picture of medical regulation in America.
And he does an incredibly good job, I think, of being...
An average guy who's just kind of interesting and interested in people.
Watching him discuss the Liver King, I just found it really, really enjoyable and really likeable, just laughing at this comically hench guy who's clearly had ab implants, being like, "Look at this!
Look at this!
Look at this!"
He did have a kind of quite appealing Emperor's New Clothes, like boy in that story, quality to him.
But yeah, I love the productivity hackers.
They were all absolute poppets, I thought.
But that world is quite dark.
Again, it kind of comes back to the structures, right?
What is the lessons and the message that people have got that they think that they need to do 15 side hustles and they need to be boxing out their day in half?
It's all a piece of that kind of Amazon warehouse approach to work where you must be monitored and controlled all the time and your output must be consistent in this very machine-like way.
Even the ones that I really liked, I had reservations about.
I felt sorry for some people as well.
To return to one of our frequent subjects, James Lindsay, he told me in the interview that he was glad that Twitter had suspended him.
Cope at the time, but he sounded really genuine about the fact he was like, I was looking for an exit from Twitter and I'm actually kind of glad.
Like, not exactly said it in these terms, but like, I've got my life back.
And of course, what happens a couple of months later, he's unsuspended and he's tweeting away dozens of times a day.
And it's just like, to me, looks like very compulsive behavior that isn't actually, he's probably aware that it's not making him happy.
And it made me feel more, it did change my opinion to him because it did make me feel like...
You're not entirely in control of this.
I do feel sorry for you, actually.
It would have been better for you had Elon taking your Twitter away, not giving you more of your delicious attention crack.
Yeah, I can't remember, Matt.
Did you hear the episode with James Lindsay in it?
No, I didn't get to that one.
Because Helen puts to him that he...
The tone of the interview is interesting because you're...
You're not being aggressive with him, which I also think is a good idea because he would have responded like in the Dr. Phil review clip and nobody needs to hear that.
But because you were being more friendly to him, when you put the point to him about feuding with the Holocaust Memorial and what that seems like.
The Auschwitz Museum, yeah.
Never argue with the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter.
That's a brawl for life.
Yeah, he seemed...
Unusually, uncharacteristically, to be slightly apologetic about it.
Like, well, I wasn't really feuding.
There was a ticking issue with one of the...
And we'll see if they actually do that.
But he did seem to recognize how that looks to normal people.
If you're going home to your parents and being like...
Yeah, so I'm currently in a feud with the Holocaust Memorial site, but don't listen to the naysayers about that.
So that was interesting to me, getting a more human response.
And if you look at Jordan Peterson's Twitter behavior since he's brought back, that's not good for him.
He's tweeting every couple of minutes about different headlines that he's just come across.
It does look like a bunch of them.
Have issues with compulsive behavior, including Elon.
Yeah, I did feel, again, I say about feeling sorry for James Lindsay to some extent.
He did also say that he's like persona non grata on the right as well, which was really interesting to me because that's not my perception of it at all.
I just think what often happens with those people who spiral out online is that they alienate more and more people and they become, and it's really, being ostracized is really horrible.
And without a kind of group of normie friends online or like a normie job, like one of the people I interviewed who came off, I think a lot better is Ibram Kendi, another person that you've decoded.
And one of the things he said is like, I'm an academic and that's his primary identity.
It's like, I'm an academic.
I fundraise for my Boston Center for Anti-Racist Research.
Now, I think he's got some pretty kooky ideas.
I think the idea of a department of anti-racism just sounds impossibly unworkable.
And the idea of no neutrality, everything is racist, anti-racist, is just, you know, is impossible in practice.
But his primary identity is not reply guy.
And this is just, like, this whole series is a big lesson about, like, touching grass, essentially, that it will help you when...
And he has been through, you know, lots of the kind of more spirally people kind of talk about the dunking they've been through.
And it's true.
Like, I do think people mocked...
James Lindsay in a very cruel way.
I mean, I may have been one of them from time to time, but he did experience a huge amount of mockery.
But at the same time, Ibram X. Kendi is getting death threats.
Being public enemy number one on the Tucker Carlson show in America is really not...
You know, a good thing for your health.
But the fact that he could go away to a whole group of people who are his people and have a completely different life I think was incredibly healthy for him.
It's the only thing that makes me feel better about the whole thing is that some of the bad gurus obviously are incredibly rich and successful and they get a huge amount of affirmation.
But I'm clinging to the fact that I hope it doesn't make them happy.
Do you think that's true, Matt?
Do you think any of the people that you've covered who are in the bad side are actually...
And they can just watch a sunset with their beloved family and enjoy it.
Do you think they feel those kind of emotions?
Yes and no.
Because first of all, we completely came to the same point of view as yourself with regard to Imbra and X. Kendi.
Some of his policy suggestions are quite extreme and I think quite silly.
But the way he comes across, he's very much as an academic.
So it's interesting that he made a...
Big point about that.
And not guru-like at all.
And I think that identity is really helpful for keeping you grounded.
And I suspect that for you, or for a journalist in general, you have an identity with that, which is important and would probably stop you getting sucked into various attention feedback cycles.
Sorry, you can take a breath.
Am I off track?
No, I would love to say that.
I don't think that's actually true of me in my 20s.
I definitely went through a phase, and I write about this in Difficult Women in the book, where I made my life much worse by rowing with people on Twitter and getting into fights and picking fights.
And I think I used it as a form of essentially kind of self-harm.
Like if you want to just have a load of people telling you you're shit, and then you can go, everyone hates me.
And like, you know, it's almost a kind of Munchausen's kind of version of it, right?
Where you put yourself into the kind of victim role.
But yeah, with age comes great wisdom, Matt, luckily.
Now I can't be asked.
Yeah, that's right.
Being just weary helps an awful lot.
I know people like my brother and Chris Batch, too.
They enjoy conflict on some level and they're energized by it.
But Chris and I have said to each other that in the very small way with this podcast and the very tiny little bit of attention you do get...
You get an insight into the various ways in which people go wrong.
And a lot of people that do similar things seem to be quite extreme and seem to be like haters or being whatever.
And it is helpful for us to remind ourselves that we...
We have a day job.
This is just this thing.
And it doesn't matter.
I think once you start really feeling like this really matters, like this argument you're having with the Holocaust Memorial is something that you've got to be in boots and all, then that's the path for the dark side, as Yedda says.
But it doesn't surprise me that James and Z can be a very nice person interpersonally.
We're friendly with people who are or were very good friends with him and they would often emphasize that point.
And it's of course true that everyone contains multitudes and the persona that a public figure of any kind inhabits.
Yeah, it sounds like a platitude, doesn't it?
But it's obviously not the totality of them.
And that's the same thing, I think, with Peterson too, the way that David Fuller talks about going to meet him in, I think, 2017, and sort of talking about this sort of bumbling, eccentric professor.
And that's the thing is that you can kind of see, it's a bit like the kind of Arnold Rimmer, Ace Rimmer thing.
You can see the path that he took where he was just, sorry, that was a very nerdy 90s sci-fi reference.
We love that show.
The geriatric millennials out there.
You can see the version where he's just like the kooky old guy who wears sort of funny waistcoats and has some slightly odd ideas about evolution or whatever it is, but is essentially like a beloved teacher.
And I feel really, really sad.
He could have been that person and he chose a different path with all the same characteristics, right?
And just chose different bits of his personality to emphasize and lean into.
I think that is the real tragedy of Jordan Peterson.
Yeah.
I'm not going to let you both...
Away with the subtle nagging of my online Twitter feed.
This is actually an intervention, Chris.
We've actually all been leaning up to this.
There is a constant refrain from people that, oh, I like Chris on the podcast.
But it's just because they can't hear the tone on Twitter.
That's the difference.
And I probably would get on from Matt Spurler.
Chris, I get DMs from people.
I get DMs from people who listen to the podcast and have been, in their minds, abused by you on Twitter.
And then they DM me.
That's amazing, mate.
Control your wife.
I can't stop them.
I can't stop them.
So I have sympathy for those people so inclined to argue with people online, whatever it is like to be one of them.
But that aspect of having like A degree, one of, what's the word?
Like, healthy self-disregard.
Like, knowing that you are not the next Galileo, right?
Genuinely, I'm very well aware of that.
And Matt and I are quite content to be middle-brow academics.
Eric Weinstein referred to me as a middle-brow.
Academic at one point.
And I was like, well, it's fine.
That's a fairly accurate description.
But he took it as an insult because I'm not in the genius class from his perspective.
And that does seem to be something that is inoculating to a certain extent.
If you have that tendency to be willing to entertain critiques and to see yourself as like...
You know, when you're getting very up on your high horse on something, that you're also slightly comical.
And I think...
Oh, I definitely feel like that about America.
Like, the other thing that obviously happens is that the gurus do tend to be American.
And I do think there is just a cultural difference of...
Britain, I think, particularly has got tall poppy syndrome, where it's like, oh, hark at you, you know, who do you think you are?
And we just, anybody who kind of puts themselves forward, you know, oh, she's no better than she ought to be.
Like, there's a whole cultural discourse about basically people just sort of loving themselves that we just don't like.
So you get these absurd interviews with celebrities where they have to pretend to be like other people, even though they're sitting in a big pile of gold.
And I just think America is far more okay with I'm here, I'm great, I'm rich.
I think Dave Chappelle is an incredibly good comedian, but the comedy is always based around I'm really rich.
I saw him in Britain a couple of months ago.
It doesn't quite work as well in Britain because you're like, well, don't go on about it, Dave.
I mean, come on.
They need to make a big deal out of it.
In the series, people are Touchy about certain kind of subjects, right?
Like you can see it in like Robert Wright recently spoke to Brett Weinstein and it was a fairly contentious interview because he was just calling him on a very specific issue.
But like the direct questioning was not appreciated.
James Lindsay cut off David Fuller whenever he suggested that he would put his impossible conversations into practice on an episode and speak to a critic that he'd been mean to online.
So, like, in general, the gurus tend to regard criticism as bad faith motivated and coming from a negative space.
And I know that even the people that we regard as like, or, you know, we talked about Kendi.
So, if you bring up topics that are uncomfortable, like, for example, the fees that they are paid for talks, which can be quite substantial and which seem counter to the argument about...
Capitalism being this terrible system that we must have.
I know that there is the little cartoon in my head of, oh, interesting, you criticize capitalism, yet you participate in it.
But there is the fact that there's degrees, right?
And if your speaking fee is in the five-figure category, I think you're doing capitalism right.
And so in that case, you talk to Kendi and...
You raised the issue about the fees paid.
And in the episode, it goes by quickly, right?
Kind of like his answer to me was a very, very textbook deflection of the issue.
And is that something that we just have to accept, that the gurus won't accept criticism, and that even in the case where they don't display all of the toxic characteristics, that they basically...
Can very easily present any harsh criticism as you're trying to get them.
Like, why are you trying to take me down or my enemies take me down with this point of view?
It's a very winding question, but try to find that.
No, but it speaks to one of the things that is definitely one of the biggest changes that I've seen in the 20 years that I've been in journalism, which is...
People are so much more media literate now.
They're so much more narrative literate than they were in the 2000s.
Just an exposure to a huge amount more.
They just have so many more preconceptions about what you're going to ask.
I always talk about the idea that when I want to do profiles, what I would love to do is find someone who's essentially an untilled field.
And I've done a couple of profiles like that.
I profiled a guy who was an explosives expert who was in his 80s who liked to blow things up in his quarry.
And he was great because he just didn't have any filter whatsoever.
He was like, I'm an explosive.
Do you want to go and blow stuff up?
And yes, I did.
But most of the time, you're in...
Talking to people who are very either media trained in the case of professional politicians and things like that, or people who are very aware that they think you're going to come away with a particular story.
And that's a real challenge.
You have to find a way as a journalist of asking those questions in a way that doesn't just trigger boring, instant defensiveness.
So with James Lindsay, you know, I just was very open about the fact, I was like, look, James.
People are going to say, you're arguing with the Auschwitz Museum.
That is the actions of a crazy person.
But you must have had a reason for doing it, so help me understand what it is.
What did you think you were getting from that?
Rather than being like, answer the question!
And actually, the interrogative, Paxman-style interview doesn't really work anymore because, as you say, you just run straight into people's media-trained walls.
But Kendi, I said to him, you talk in the book about...
Racism and capitalism being the conjoined twins.
And how does that square with taking 20 grand from a merchant bank?
And he said, look, corporations are people.
And I think if I can reach someone in the corporation.
I think we had a continuing discussion.
It didn't really go much further than that.
So we put a representative sample of that conversation in the thing.
People have got to hear that conversation and make up their own mind about it.
Even if you think that's a deflection, it's a useful thing to hear.
But it is an increasing problem.
I think I'm having as somebody who sits on the kind of, I think I describe myself to Aaron Rabinowitz as woke skeptic, you know, that people are so full of this howling criticism of the right that they just think they just go into lockdown mode and you mustn't criticize the left at all.
And the same thing happens on the other.
That because people are really aware of the attack line used against them, and that's the attack line used against Kendi, right?
You're a hypocrite.
You say you're against capitalism and yet you're wearing shoes.
Checkmate.
But you have to, and sometimes the best way to do it is to acknowledge the elephant in the room and just say, you know, I want to hear your answer on this.
What is your answer on this?
And frame it actually in a more collusive way of saying, you must have heard this criticism, right?
Because what you...
What people want absolutely is certainty.
I'm going to have to put this in because we have to give you the chance to respond to this.
Here it is.
And then they know you're not trying to hoodwink them.
It's not a gotcha.
You're not trying to get them.
You are trying to get them on record with their response to this very common criticism.
And that's a job I don't think I would have had to do in journalism quite the same way a decade ago.
But people are really aware of what the potential outcomes might be.
So actually, the best thing usually is just to say, this is what I'm going to put in the program.
Like, tell me.
This is your chance to tell me what you think.
And that famously went very well for you recently when you asked someone for a comment on an article that you had written about the art industry.
Right, but again, that's about fairness.
And having worked for the American Magazine now for a couple of years, I really appreciate their madly rigorous fact-checking process.
It's an incredibly awkward experience.
Like I have this thing, I was thinking if I ever go and lecture journalism students again, stop me if I told you this before, but I think every journalism student should get into a lift and face the wrong way and face all the people who were already in the lift and just stare them down.
Because that is the best training you can possibly have for journalism is overcoming social conformity and the unwritten codes that we will have and feeling really, really awkward and embarrassed and doing it anyway.
And that's what you have to do with the BBC.
You have to ask people to challenge questions.
That's what they're called.
You know, that's what you're doing if you're Atlantic fact-checking.
You have to say, I'm going to shade you, like this, this, and this.
And then you have your chance to respond.
And people don't want to do it, not because necessarily they're biased, but just because it's really uncomfortable to say, I think you're a charlatan.
I'm going to say you're a charlatan.
What do you say to that?
Like, who wants to do it?
What kind of sociopath wants to do that?
Don't answer that.
I can see you looking with a glimpse in your eye.
Well, not me, that's for sure.
We've had a few chats with gurus who have exercised their right to reply, and I've come away from them thinking exactly the same thought, that I'm not the kind of psychopath that could...
I could easily do that.
It's not a natural human thing.
I know I should be challenging them.
I should be.
And I kind of try a little bit, but I'm like a limp fish.
I don't know.
It just doesn't come naturally.
I'm more comfortable with it to some extent, but maybe not as much as you, Helen.
But there's two related questions I have.
The more relevant for what we're talking about is, so long-form podcasts are a thing.
I don't know, you know, people have indulgent, unedited conversations with people that they like about specific topics.
And, you know, we have mixed feelings about it.
But I'm curious when it comes to, like, the example which currently is center of my mind is Lex Friedman.
He's planning to interview a host of controversial people.
He already has famously interviewed Kanye West, and he is planning to interview Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro, various political firebrands.
Now, the thing I'm curious about, from a journalist's point of view, where you have done long-form interviews with Jordan Peterson, how do you feel about that format?
Or does it give the opportunity to see things like a more traditional journalist interview because there is the anticipation that you're going to challenge them on various points of controversy?
Like, how much do you think love is important in an interview?
That's the question.
Are you increasing love with your interviews?
What do you think?
I actually, one of the little clips we've got in the thing we call the Built Top is, oh no, maybe it's in the IDW, it is that kind of, this podcast is seven hours.
For some, that's too long.
For some, that's too short.
For others, it's just right.
And it's just like, I think it's one of those really interesting examples that to the Radio 4 mainstream BBC audience, they'll be like, seven hours on a podcast?
Of course that's too long.
But, you know, to a lot of people it is, it turns out, too short.
I think it's...
I think a lot of the story has to do with podcasts, actually.
And I do say at one point during the series, yes, everybody in this series has a podcast.
Because they do a couple of things, and they just...
For a start, they really enable the parasocial relationships, right?
You get so much more of a sense of somebody when you're both hearing their voice and their intonation and their accent and their affect and all of that stuff, and also the bits of your life that inevitably creep in when you're just, you know, like your love of nuts, for example, the kind of stuff that you just learn along the way.
So I don't think necessarily the current age of gurus could happen without podcasts, and neither could it happen in the sense that...
The charisma is often conveyed interpersonally.
You want to see them being charismatic at people or indeed at the listener.
And also just the sheer amount of time that you're spending with these people.
You know, some of these, if you listen to all of Lex's content, most people don't spend, if they've got a job and a family, they don't spend that much time with their friends.
You know, you could have had people like your best man at your wedding and you wouldn't spend as much time with them as you spent with Lex Friedman telling you about whatever it is that he's got to tell you about.
And so I think all of those things are actually...
Change in the last 10 years and they probably do account for a large amount of the picture that we're looking at now.
But I don't mind a long-form interview.
The thing is, I object to in the case of Andrew Tate, and we talked about Andrew Tate and whether or not to cover him in the series.
I don't think he is interesting or insightful enough to merit that long an interview, right?
I think if you interview Ben Shapiro and he tells you about setting up The Daily Wire, what it's like to work in the conservative ecosystem, how he's built this incredible brand, what it's like being a Jewish person in that space when so many people are anti-Semites and a huge amount of death threats.
There's lots of things I would really like to hear.
I don't know whether or not Ben Shapiro would be honest about those things, but he is a smart and interesting guy who's done things that I don't agree with, but I think there's a lot there.
Andrew Tate is, as I think you've said many times before, a kind of grifting misogynist with a fake university who stands in front of these supercars.
You don't know if he's just hired them for the day.
How much of the financials are actually even true?
It's impossible to know any of that stuff.
And he doesn't really have any great insight into the world beyond bitches need a smack.
And I just don't know what you're going to get over seven hours of that.
It's not like...
You know, at least Peterson's views on gender, which, by the way, I think are often quite loopy, are based on having read some stuff and thought about some stuff and some bad readings of evolutionary psychology that you could then unpack.
But I just don't see what's...
I mean, if he does it, it'll be fascinating because I think Lex Freeman is just going to get about 45 minutes in and then be like, right, so bitches, eh?
What do they need?
Oh, okay, great.
But what content is he going to fill in that time?
Yeah, it's a bit like, I mean, he's so much more toxic, so it feels unfair to make this comparison.
But it's like Paris Hilton, just famous for being famous.
I don't know what I'd ask her either.
But yeah, like you said, even with these gurus that are terribly, terribly wrong, at least they're interesting in some ways.
They've got something to talk about.
Yeah, Lex, but I...
Maybe he's got a massive...
Maybe we're all being very rude and he's got an enormous intellectual hinterland and he's going to be like, well, actually, I feel this is all grounded in Hegelianism and we're all going to go, oh, oh, I see.
Thank you, Andrew.
Great thoughts.
But it does tell us, I think, about Lex's editorial decisions because I feel like, am I being unfair?
But it seems to me like he wants to interview whoever is famous at the moment.
Well, you know, he follows two people on Twitter.
Have you seen this?
This is one of my favourite things in the world.
He follows two people on Twitter, Vladimir Zelensky, obviously from Ukraine, and the Russian official government account.
It's just like, alright, so those are your two interview targets then, are you?
You're doing the classic bad journalism thing of sucking up to the person who you want to get access to.
But also, I like the way that you've just taken both sides there.
Maybe you are the person to broker the peace agreement we've all been hoping for in 2023.
It's just...
He certainly thinks he is.
Who's spicy?
Your kind of decision about who to interview should go beyond who's spicy.
And actually, I did have this conversation in the podcast with Lea Heilpern, who's a crypto guru.
She's Jewish herself.
I was like, would you interview Kanye West now?
And she said, yeah, absolutely.
And I was like, but he's just in this full-blown, bipolar, manic phase.
And I said this to Lex on Twitter, what is there left to get out of him?
He's going to come on and say he loves Hitler.
That's what he does now.
And I said, what about Richard Spencer?
And she's like, yeah, I'd interview a neo-Nazi.
And I'm just like, but why?
And it's just fundamentally a clash of ideologies where she just wants to talk to someone because they're interesting and spicy.
And I just, apart from the ethics of it, I'm just not sure what...
I know what neo-Nazis think.
There are quite a lot of history books that really outline a lot of that ideology.
You know, like, go away and read, you know, a few books.
We can read Lex's favorite book about the Boys of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Like, it's like, say what you want about the Nazis.
At least they wrote stuff down about what they wanted.
They didn't hide it.
Like, we're all very aware of it.
So I just, I don't understand that kind of content brain, I guess.
Yeah, the content brain is a good term for it.
I think the equations that people are making about things getting attention or that just finding out more about what people want to say.
There's this notion that if you spend a lot of time with somebody and you talk to them, you'll break through their shell, right?
But in some cases, first of all, there aren't...
Very deep layers.
Like, the antisemitism is fundamentally part of the person's character.
Like, that's the stuff that they're interested in.
Like, Nick Fuentes, maybe if you spend a week with him, you'll find out that he also likes ice cream.
And he, you know, has quite a penchant for cooking Thai curry or whatever.
But I don't care.
Because the thing I care about with Nick Fuentes is that he's an antisemitic.
Neo-fascist, right?
That's why I don't like him.
And that's why he's a concerning figure.
And it does really this elevation of getting to the real person behind the hateful ideology.
It's not invaluable.
Louis Farouk does it very well.
People who profile terrible people do it.
No, I think that Louis Theroux neo-Nazi programme, I think it was a complete bust.
And I love Louis Theroux.
I just think his Savile programmes were brilliant.
His Paul Daniels.
People who were kind of cult figures, he did really well.
And his stuff inside prisons, incredibly good.
Places that are kind of weird, but you want to go to.
But his neo-Nazi programme...
It failed for two reasons to me.
One was, as you say, that sometimes the shell is literally all there is and you don't penetrate behind the shell to the cuddly guy who just, you know, his mother smacked him once and that's why he became an ethnic nationalist.
And the second thing is that they turned it back on him and they turned him into a spectacle and started live streaming him walking around.
And that's very uncomfortable.
You know the one I mean with Quentin?
You mean the recent one with Baked Alaska.
Baked Alaska, yeah.
I was thinking of the previous one where he was standing in the garage and the people started asking him if he was Jewish.
Oh, with Eugene Terreblanche, that one.
Yeah.
Yeah, like the kind of classic Louis.
But the more recent one, I agree, there was an element that at least they were trying to use him for content as well.
That seemed a harder thing to navigate.
But in any case, I still think he did it in a much more responsible way.
And I'm willing to challenge people and make uncomfortableness than is normal with the more Lex Friedman side of the pool when it comes to indulgent interviews.
So yeah, I guess we're probably...
There isn't that much where we disagree that you should include some pushback if you want to interview neo-Nazis.
It's a very controversial position to stake out.
Well, no, I think you guys are talking about something a bit more general.
And Robert Wright, who we've got a lot of time for, actually has formalized this concept and he calls it cognitive empathy.
You have to practice cognitive empathy and understand where...
These distasteful characters who might be your opponents and might be doing things that you think are bad, understand where they're coming from and understand what motivates them.
He believes that Western policy with respect to Ukraine and Putin is failing at practicing that standpoint taking.
I think it's probably an interesting question, but for me, I just...
I think he's wrong.
I think in many ways it just doesn't really matter in a way.
I understand that Vladimir Putin looks at the world differently.
I understand that he sees the West as degenerate, that he sees himself as...
I'm sure my perceptions are not perfectly accurate, but I get a sense.
But ultimately, these people that think very differently from ourselves, they're going to do the things they're going to do, that they've taken the public positions or concrete actions that they've taken.
And in the end, it doesn't really matter if they like ice cream or if they've got issues with their mother or something.
That's not really the point, is it?
I know what you mean.
And I always felt this about Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, who every time there was any kind of conflict would call for a peaceful resolution.
And you had to be like, but sometimes you can only have a peaceful resolution if both sides want a peaceful resolution.
If what Vladimir Putin wants is to take large bits of Ukrainian territory and you don't want him to do that, there is no compromise position.
He's either going to have to win or lose.
And I think that's...
That is the drawback to that model, which is also the next model.
If only we could all talk it out, we could all come to a reasonable compromise.
Some people are unreasonable and what they want is impossible.
It's a refusal to contemplate the fact that at that point you have to do things that are morally murky, like a stage of war, for example.
It would obviously be great if we could all just sit down and talk it out, but sometimes you can't.
Some differences are irreconcilable.
And, you know, I know it does.
It always sounds good to practice universal love and to practice universal understanding and empathy.
These are all very nice sounding words, but we're against it.
That's the Guru's podcast.
I was going to say, it's a great way to end this section of the podcast is Matt comes out against the concept of love.
I'm against it.
I'm broadly anti.
Helen, I have a final gotcha question planned for you before you get to us.
And I was wondering.
Because you have, on occasion, been the main character on Twitter and also in the media in general.
And you have famously been cancelled from such important things as the computer game Naughty Dogs were making.
So because of that experience and that specific one, that's the one that I know really created.
Does that make you feel To a greater extent, when people, a lot of the gurus are reeling against how they're treated in the mainstream and how they're presented, right?
And they're very strong on the cancellation thing.
And of course, I'm not saying you endorse all of the things that Jordan Peterson talks about cancellation.
But when you've gone through public criticism and cancellation campaigns, personally, does it increase?
There's sympathy for their narrative in a way that, say, me and Matt would not have sympathy for it.
Yeah, I think it's definitely a bias that I should acknowledge because...
That feeling of being ostracized and the feeling of everybody just not even listening to what you're saying because they already know you're a bad person.
And the feeling that people that you like and you think you would get on with have already heard this caricature version of you that's sort of stalking around, totally independent of you, and therefore would be reluctant to speak to you.
And the fact that professional opportunities are closed to you.
I said this to James Lindsay, actually.
It didn't go into the program, but I understand what it is to feel like to walk around with a kind of miasma around you.
This kind of feeling that there's something you might corrupt people just by touching them.
It's a really horrible feeling.
And it does give me an enormous amount of sympathy.
In my case, I hope it has turned me down, is I feel a bit like a reformed alcoholic in the sense that I feel like, you know, don't...
What I want to always say in those situations is don't lean into it.
And this is the advice I always give to people who have been cancelled.
It's like, this is a thing that happened to you.
It's not who you are.
And becoming professionally cancelled, as some people do, because it is quite lucrative and also out of a sense of wanting revenge and wanting the idea that one day eventually you'll triumph and everybody will admit that you were right all along.
There is no justice in the world.
That won't happen.
You will burn yourself up in that quest for vengeance.
That is the kind of useful bit I can contribute.
That said, and I know this is your academic specialty, Chris, the bonding effect of going through that is extraordinary.
People like Jessie Singel and Katie Herzog, I know that I get on with them well because partly we've been all through the same trial by fire.
I know I can trust them and they know they can trust me in some way because, again, we're all aligned.
We've got the same set of enemies, really.
That's a very powerful factor in making you feel instantly a connection with people and feel that you can trust them.
I definitely have a huge amount of sympathy.
And I also think it's one of those things where you should sort of think and reflect on your luck, that I was very lucky that I had lots of people around me.
You know, one of my very good friends is Caroline Criado Perez, who went through a particularly horrible experience getting incredibly badly trolled to the extent that people were jailed over the threats that they were sending her.
And having seen her go through that and come out the other side of it and it not define her forever has been a very powerful experience.
That's my message to the cancelled.
It's horrible to be cancelled, but you're just someone who once got cancelled.
You're not professional cancelling X, Y, Z. This is good advice.
For when you get cancelled, Chris.
I hope you remember this.
I'm making notes.
Well, fortunately, Matt and I are just really purely about love and expanding it for our podcast.
So we don't create enemies.
We bring them into our...
Embrace and parasocial hug.
So we don't need to worry about that, Helen.
And plus, we are also correct on all issues.
So that's unlikely to come up.
These things you have to factor in.
But, well, look, literally, I do and could continue to talk to you about gurus endlessly.
Are you ready to be quizzed?
Are you ready to be quizzed?
I was going to promote your series.
What kind of professionals are you?
The series, it's very good.
People can find it on BBC Radio 4. Half of it is out and the other half is coming after Christmas.
If you like this podcast, you will definitely like Helen's series.
Imagine our podcast, but much, much shorter with professional production values.
It's basically all the bad bits gone and just condensed into a good kernel of 30 minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It genuinely is extremely good.
Nothing about nuts, though.
You won't hear about Helen's.
No.
Nothing.
But you did hear you say that you would enjoy cake in response to somebody saying that you might cry over...
There we go.
A little insight into the woman behind the journalist.
Yeah.
So yeah, great series.
Thank you for coming on and talking to us again.
And hopefully you stick around in this neck of the woods even after the series is done.
Gurus, I mean.
Not this podcast.
You don't have to stay.
Forever.
Prison forever in Zencast.
You're just visiting.
You're just visiting the guru world.
Like, we live here.
You're going to be off writing about Ukraine or AIDS or COVID or something.
You know, I know how you journalists are.
I know.
You just adopted the darkness.
You won't want it.
All right.
Well, Chris, you were sounding like you were wrapping up and finishing the show, but we're coming...
No, I was just thinking this.
Yeah, we have the most important part because the other thing that people don't know about Helen is that she's a Riddler-esque figure.
She's a quiz master of extraordinary talents.
Like, imagine your best pub quiz person.
They multiply it by 1,000 and you're not even approaching the skill at which Helen has constructing quizzes.
And she kindly offered...
Given all the stuff that she's done with gurus, to make a little quiz for me and Matt about gurus.
A kind of Christmassy guru quiz.
That's fair, Helen.
I haven't picked you up.
That's how you describe yourself.
I mean, you've set up expectations, but I thought it would be nice.
It's basically like a year in review, actually several years in review, of listening to this podcast.
And to each other, actually.
So we'll see whether or not you've been doing that.
Oh, shit.
Are you ready?
Okay.
Well, before we start, I have a point of order.
Okay.
Can I have a drink?
You can.
You can.
This is a drinking quiz.
This is a drinking quiz.
Like, I know it's mid-morning where you are, Helen.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Even better.
Yeah, there we go.
Oh, fantastic.
Lovely.
It's Christmas.
You can see that it's Christmas.
Very festive.
I know it's probably like 10 o 'clock in the morning where you are.
No, I'm not.
I'm not having whiskey.
I've got to do a full day's work.
Just think of this as kombucha.
Oh, look, a Christmas hat.
Wow.
Okay, so for audio listeners, there's a Christmas hat which has emerged.
So this is very Christmassy themed.
It could not be more Christmassy.
Okay, ready for the gurus round.
Okay.
So, ready.
What are the rules of...
I'm going to ask you questions and Chris is going to know them instantly because he's a freak.
And you're going to be like, well, how do you know that, Chris?
Until we get to the last round, Matt, where you're going to surge back in a late overtaking stage and it's going to bring love and peace and reconciliation.
And your listeners can play along.
We don't have buzzers or anything, so should we just raise our hands if we know the answer?
Honestly, just say, and argue amongst yourselves.
Play cooperatively, I think, is probably the nicest way to do this.
That's true.
It's not a competition, Chris.
We're a team.
We do everything together.
Okay, number one.
Who was, sorry, not beautiful?
Oh, I know.
Oh, I know.
It's...
It never goes first, right?
It's cooperative.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
It's a larger lady.
It's a larger lady.
It was a larger lady.
It was Jordan Peterson who said this, right?
No?
Right, but he is obviously beautiful.
So who was he talking about?
He was talking about Sports Illustrated model.
Woman.
Right.
What I confidently predicted here was that you were going to get to Sports Illustrated model, and then you weren't going to know her name, and I was going to be able to call you both sexist for just treating all Sports Illustrated models as if they were just one giant woman, but they're not.
She's got a name, Chris.
She does have a name.
You shouldn't have this, Chris.
I'm not going to...
I'm just going to be a couple of years, because that will go even worse.
So, yes, you have successfully stumped us that we don't know.
It's you, me, new.
You can have half a point for that.
It's you, me, new.
Okay, question two.
Do I get half a point as well?
I knew the same stuff that Chris did.
Yes, yes, you both get the same half point.
I've got my donors half and me donors half.
I'm keeping it separate.
This could go very badly.
Okay, number two.
The sense maker Jamie Wheel wanted to write his PhD thesis on a new concept of time.
Was it called:
A. Polychronic quantum epistemology B. First-person phenomenological chronology C. Externalised anthropomorphic patonicity or D. Fucking
time balls.
That's really hard.
I know the answer.
Fuck you, Chris.
How can you know the answer to that?
That's insane.
You go first, Matt.
You go first.
I'll choose the last one.
Fucking crazy time balls.
I'm going to choose that one.
The answer is A. It's A, isn't it?
It is polychronic quantum epistemology, yes.
I mean, again, this is one of the quizzes where if you win, you also lose.
A fun bit of trivia, since I won't know any of this trivia, but I have my own trivia, so it doesn't really matter.
I was actually approached by something of a crank.
He wanted to do a PhD on the same topic, literally the same topic, like a new conceptualization of time.
And he came in and we had a couple of meetings and he was talking to me.
He had all these documents and bits of paper and I couldn't understand what he was talking about.
But it was just this whole, like all of our understandings of time were all wrong and his PhD was going to be on a whole new version of time.
So it was basically Jamie Well.
By the way, Helen, that amazing thing there is that you said what that...
Polychronic something or other.
But the sound speakers have just this amazing ability to say things that your mind cannot retain it.
It just slips off.
So I can recognize it, but I can never say what that term is.
Polychronic quantum epistemology, which makes sense when you break it down, right?
The science of knowing about...
I don't know what polychronic means.
I guess many times, but they happen at a quantum level.
I don't know.
I guess they're probably...
If there are supposed to be little dimensions folded up at the quantum level, then maybe they have got their own time schemes.
I don't know.
Tell us your distractors, because I thought your distractors were very good.
They were very plausible.
What were they?
You didn't realise it would tip this.
First person phenomenological chronology.
See, that's a good PhD title.
I could plausibly do a PhD in that.
Externalised anthropomorphic patonicity.
Beautiful.
Yeah, that's very sense-making.
Do you know how I did this?
To pull back the curtain on the magic is that I went through your interview and I just noted down all the words that were longer than 11 letters and I was like, match them together.
Wow!
That's incredible.
I'm pretty sure that's what they do.
They just grab these words and they match them together.
What's long?
Okay, Matt, stop distracting Helen.
Sorry.
Question number three.
Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandra Antonello and Jacqueline Rushing are the authors of a paper which had a profound effect on one of your gurus.
It was called What Gender and Science?
Oh, Chris, you already look so confident.
Matt, why don't you have a go first?
It was called What Gender and Science?
What's the question again?
Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandra Antonello and Jacqueline Rushing are the authors of a paper which had a profound effect on one of your gurus.
It was called What Gender and Science?
You are going to kick yourself when I tell you.
Okay.
So is the question which guru?
No, no.
What's the missing word?
Sorry, what?
Okay.
Yeah, it was called What Gender and Science?
No, that wasn't like a Jamie Wheel title.
Like, here's my paper on what gender and science.
No.
Sorry, sorry.
A blank gender and science.
Blank gender and science.
I'm going to go with race.
Race, gender, and science.
Silly, silly math.
Silly math.
Glaciers.
Gender.
Sexuality.
Glaciers.
The other great IDW session, feminist glaciology.
Well done, Chris.
Okay.
Oh, that was the feminist glaciology paper.
You're kidding.
Of course I was.
Oh, God.
Fuck.
I can't believe you don't have that pinned up above your bed as one of the greatest triumphs of science.
Okay, number four.
The subject of many IDW gurus' obsession this year once received an email that said, 10 held by H for the big guy.
Who was the big guy?
Oh, well, that's okay.
I get to go first, right?
Because I have a handicap.
Yeah, because I can also see from Chris's smug face on video that he knows the answer.
That's the tell here.
I want to play poker with you so much, I could take so much money off you.
Are you still keeping score, Chris?
Are you still keeping score?
I've got the score.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so I have a handicap.
I get to go first.
So that was Hunter Biden about Joe Biden?
Joe Biden's answer?
Yeah, I'm going to assume that Chris, you knew that was Joe Biden, because you referenced it earlier, so I thought, oh shit, he knows that one.
I did, but I'll let him get it.
It doesn't matter that you know it.
I answered it first.
Number five, which guru wrote this trenchant and hilarious satire?
Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing.
By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first homo sapiens, and so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate, to stop breathing.
The logic holds up.
It's true logic.
Is this a multiple choice?
One or two?
That's got to be the most heavy-handed satire I've ever heard.
So that's Gad's sad level.
That's Gad's sad.
That's what I was going to say as well.
Sure, sure, sure.
I was, I was.
Is it Gad's sad?
It is, of course, Gad's sad.
It is the Gadfather.
You just couldn't let me have it.
You couldn't let me have it.
You're so fine.
I'm confident enough, but that's amazing.
Oh, God.
I mean, it was the heavy-handedness that gave it away.
That's how I knew.
Yeah, it was the way I just relentlessly kept pounding the dead horse.
In case you were missing the point, just again and again.
Okay.
Number six, who was the first ever guest on the Dark Horse podcast?
Oh, I know.
You are insufferable.
Your family at Christmas just hate you.
The fact that you know Chris doesn't reflect well on you.
You think it does.
I also understand why my own family are annoyed because I am this person at our family quizzes where I'm like, I know the answer to this one.
Please Scott, please.
Okay, so I'll just have a guess.
First guess on the Dark Horse podcast.
It wasn't Heller.
Was it Eric?
It was not Eric.
Chris?
It was Andy Ngo.
It was Andy Ngo.
Bastard.
Disturbing.
He is a bastard.
He is a bastard.
You're right, Matt.
Yeah, again, another, I would say, another hollow triumph for Chris there.
Give me this from my house.
Yeah.
Number seven.
Which of your gurus was once married to a Christian gospel singer then known as Catherine Elizabeth Hudson?
I'm available to provide clues on this one because I think it is quite hard and probably you're not going to get it.
Well, Chris is looking stumped so it must be hard.
It is hard.
She was hot and cold about him but then she escaped like a firework.
She kissed a guru and she liked it.
Oh, I know.
Oh.
What's his name?
The English guy we were just talking about before.
Russell Brandt.
Is it Russell Brandt?
It was Russell Brandt.
That is Katy Perry's original name.
There we go.
Okay, I get the point.
Okay, all right.
I'm working from a handicap, Chris.
That's right, we established that.
So, yes, okay.
Both the procedural one and the mental one.
Next question.
Okay, eight.
Whose book quoted a student describing their classes as an ancestral mode for which I was primed but didn't even know existed?
Sorry, which student?
Sorry, which person?
Whose book quoted one of their own students describing their classes, their university classes, as an ancestral mode for which I was primed but didn't even know existed?
Ancestral mode.
Gee, that could be Jordan Peterson.
It could be Brett and Heather's book, because they talk about ancestry and all that nonsense.
Chris, do you know the answer, by the way?
You seem confident.
You have a confident expression on your face.
Of course I know the answer.
Of course I know the answer.
I'm just purely poker-facing it, so you may have a chance to steal.
Go on, which one are you going to go?
You're going to go Pity or you're going to go Brett and Heather?
I think I've got to go Jordan.
I'm going to go for Jordan.
What an error.
That's a bad mistake.
You're kidding.
It is a hunter's guide to the 21st century.
So close, Matt.
So close.
You could always taste it.
It felt too obvious.
I thought it felt like a trick question.
That's the kind of thing that one would do.
Yeah, I remember that specific quote.
So, yeah.
Okay, number nine.
About which potential interviewee did Lex Friedman once claim that most journalists would, quote, push back because they're trying to signal to fellow journalists and to people back home that this, me, the journalist, is on the right side?
Whereas he, Lex, would, quote, empathize with them to understand the, quote, full arc of history.
Which potential interviewee did he say that about?
I'm going to go for Vladimir Putin.
I enjoy that level of confidence.
It's a good level of confidence.
Chris, are you similarly confident?
I'm just stuck with Kanye West, but you said potential interviewing.
No, it is not someone he has interviewed.
No, not so far.
You can't choose Vladimir Putin, by the way.
You've got to choose something else.
Is that the rule?
Well, I think you're probably right, but I'll say Hitler.
And you would be wrong to say Hitler.
Oh no!
You could have been wrong together, Matt.
That's what you could have had.
And instead you tricked him and you forced him into being right.
Okay.
Number 10, which guru wrote, I try to be very thoughtful about how and when I cry.
I try to cry quietly so that I don't take up more space.
And if people rush to comfort me, I do not accept the comfort.
Oh, this is an easy one.
I know this one.
Go on then.
Robin DiAngelo.
Oh, I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
You see?
It's a woman, Helen.
I couldn't.
All I could do is this sort of vague chirruping.
See, Chris is going on actual memories, whereas I'm going on vibes.
And I think that strategy, you know, it's a dark horse.
I was thinking Gordon.
I was thinking Gordon.
I thought I would trick you with that.
No, he loves people comforting him.
He does accept the comfort.
Well done, Matt.
I've got a point for you.
Okay, number 11. Make a note, Chris.
Make a note.
I've got it.
I've got it.
In making sense of sense-making, Daniel Schmachtenberger was running 70 to 90 paradigms at once.
But who were the poor fools who were only running one?
DMA.
DMA, idiots.
DMA, idiots.
It's a much more weirdly specific answer than that.
Weirdly specific.
Have I finally defeated you both?
This is a poised in triumph.
I'm so excited.
A very specific thing that annoys sandspeakers.
See, in my reconstructed memory, he just said most people are running just one or two paradigms.
I'm afraid it was the Quakers.
What?
Quakers?
Quakers.
They're just around in silence, not hurting anybody, but only running one paradigm at once.
Okay, that's good.
Yes.
Okay, number 12. I am, according to Wikipedia, an occult concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.
What am I?
Egregore.
It was disturbing on a number of levels, but yes, you are.
You are right.
Did you know that?
Yeah, I was going to say Egregore.
Were you?
No.
Okay.
I could have waited.
You were just overcome with excitement.
How often in your daily life do you get to say egregore?
It's just not enough.
It's true.
Number 13. Which of these is not a real title of a Dark Horse episode?
A. Becoming allergic to truth.
B. Keeping sane Brett Speaks with Neil Oliver.
C. The wrong side of history.
Or D, staying self-aware with Konstantin Kizin?
What?
I have no idea.
No idea whatsoever.
What is your wild stab in the dark?
Go on.
Wrong side of history.
Okay.
The Constantine Kissen one.
You are, of course, correct.
Although I didn't really realise until I read through the whole list of Dark Horse episodes how many of them are sort of incredible cell phones.
Keeping sane, Brett speaks with Neil Oliver.
It's just absolutely unebraneable.
Yeah, good.
The wrong side of history is literally true.
If you just take the apply to Brett, they're kind of quite insightful.
I like becoming allergic to truth.
I like that one.
Okay, number 14. Whose return appearance on the Joe Rogan show did Devin Gordon describe in The Atlantic as a walrus with a persecution complex or a talking pile of gravel?
That sounds like Eric Weinstein.
I'm just going on vibes.
Okay, Matt says Eric.
Wait, what?
Did you read that description again, Helen?
You have a Jeremy Corbyn mug.
Carry on.
Sorry, this is how my family attempt to troll me is with people who have a right to be angry mugs.
A walrus with a persecution complex or a talking pile of gravel.
That does sound like Eric, though, but just saying.
No, he doesn't have a gravel voice.
Like, that's going to be...
And he's not that...
I'm going to time you out in 10 seconds, Chris.
We haven't got all day.
This isn't a sense-making episode.
We haven't got all day.
Okay, I don't know.
I'll say Graham Hancock, but it's not Graham Hancock.
You're going to be very upset because it was, of course, Alex Jones.
Of course it was.
Genuinely upsetting.
Okay, in Lex Friedman's daily morning routine, with whom does he say he is in an open relationship?
you.
Hitler? Hitler?
Hitler?
Just keeping things casual, you know?
Both of them are dating other people.
They're going to see if it gets serious.
Just, you know.
Okay, I'm sensing that you don't really have this one.
And the answer is...
No, don't.
Because, like, I do.
It's there somewhere in my memory.
I remember it being ridiculous.
I can't remember what he said, but it might be...
It's something technological.
It's like a computer or Twitter or something like that.
Or...
I can't remember.
I'll say Twitter, but it's not Twitter.
What you're trying to do is remember the specific ridiculous thing from Lex Friedman's morning routine where there are rich pickings.
The answer is, of course, his electric guitar, because he also plays acoustic.
Hitler, Matt.
He's not in the open relationship with Hitler.
You see, I think one of the things that's led me to do so well in life is the fact that I make no space in my brain for little factoids like that.
If I heard it, it went right in one ear and right out the other.
And thank God for that.
That's a beautiful question.
Thank God for that.
Number 16. Don't worry, we are approaching the end.
You will be able to leave at some point and go about your lives.
16. I'm enjoying that.
I can call my...
Which guru once organised a competition to write the rudest possible poem about Turkish leader Erdogan, for which his own entry was, Recep Erdogan is the Turkle, never tire of rim jobs from his circle, yet his chiefest delight, now Khalifa's insight, are the felchings he gets from Frau Merkel.
I mean, it's just a bad poem.
But one of the people that you've covered wrote that monstrosity of a poem.
Who was it?
That's unbelievable.
The fact that somebody would know anything about any of the things that you just mentioned, that's the thing that's puzzling me.
The gurus don't know that kind of stuff.
It makes me want to say Gadzad again because he's the only person that would go to that much effort.
No, no, no, no, no.
You've already asked a question about Gadsad, so I'm using my meta skills.
Nassim Taleb.
No, Nassim Taleb.
I'm going to go for that too.
You're piggybacking on Chris's answer.
And what's happened is, much like the playground, you shouldn't have been swayed by peer pressure, Matt, because it is the wrong answer.
It is, of course, Douglas Murray.
That was the only one that I was thinking.
I was thinking Europeans.
I was thinking only a European would.
Care about any of this stuff.
I was thinking there's like three.
Murray criticizing Erdogan is somewhat surprising to me though, but in any case, yeah.
It was a competition run by the Spectator magazine.
For a bonus point, who won that contest?
Christopher Hitchens?
From beyond the grave, Chris?
Well, I don't know when he did it.
I don't know how long Erdogan's been around.
It could have been 15 years ago or something.
Can I ask a little hint question?
Was it the guru, another one of our gurus who won it, or just a rando?
No, not a rando.
I think that's a cruel description of the person.
It is not a guru.
It is someone British and someone who this year had a quite spectacular fall from grace.
The guy from Top Gear.
I don't know if he's had a...
Jeremy Clarkson.
Yeah, Jeremy Clarkson.
Again, no.
It was Boris Johnson.
It would be him.
Of course it would be him.
There was a young fellow from Ankara who was a terrific wankerer till he sowed his wild oats with the help of a goat, but he didn't even stop to thank her.
Which I don't think he wrote himself, to be fair, but then that is kind of in keeping with the career of Boris Johnson.
Douglas' was better.
He should have won.
Douglas Worry was wrong in the great, rude poetry competition.
Okay, number 18. This is good.
I want to write a quiz where if you get it right, you feel bad, but if you get it wrong, you feel worse.
That's the ideal quiz to me.
How's the scores going, Chris?
How are the points?
It's like Nick and Nick?
I'm not going to spoil it, Matt.
We'll find out at the end.
There's a chance.
I'm saying there's a chance.
There's a chance.
There's a chance.
There's always a chance.
You're going to make it out, but it's fine.
18. Eric Weinstein shares his middle name with a character from Friends.
What is it?
Ross.
I don't know any of the names of people from Friends.
What?
Oh, poor Matt.
I actually never watched a single episode of Friends.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay, well, that's...
You bet you're really ruining that decision now, 20 years old, aren't you?
That's right.
Reaping what I sow.
All right.
It is Ross, right?
It is.
It is.
It is Ross.
I was really hoping you'd say Gunther, but it is, of course, Eric Ross Weinstein.
Okay.
Number 19. Multiple choice.
Which of these is not a real product sold on the Goop website?
A. The Viva La Vulva vibrator.
B, the DTF dietary supplement.
C, the This Smells Like My Bollocks candle.
Or D, the Madam Ovary menopause pills.
Oh my god, the last two are strong contentors, aren't they?
They're so implausible.
Yet one of them must be actually sold on the website.
Mm-hmm.
This Smells Like My Bolls candle.
That's my answer, Terry.
Because...
Because it's Mio.
It's like Mio.
That's right.
Yeah, that is actually available on Jeremy Clarkson's farm shop website.
The rest of them are from Goop.
That's good.
That's good to end with a solid point.
Okay, number 20. To what does Sam Harris definitely not belong?
That tribe.
That's not a real question.
You just wanted me to say that.
You just wanted me to say that.
Good of you to finally admit it, Chris.
That's very good.
Okay.
Do you want to give us the questions now before the math-centric bonus round?
Okay.
Yes.
So, Matt, you would have answered that yes as well, right?
Sure.
Absolutely.
Right.
So, the scores...
Eight maths are easy to count up.
Not so many.
So, Matt, you have 6.5 points.
I have...
Solid showing.
So, if you handicap me, I have 10.5.
If you don't do that unfair action, I have 13.5 out of 20. So, I've just...
Either score is available.
I've kept the record.
Just for completeness.
Okay, so I said to Matt, like, what subjects do you think you plausibly might have more knowledge on than your knowledge of, like, weird internet beef?
And you picked, Matt, literature and Ireland in an attempt to troll Chris, which I approve of, partly.
No, no, I just said I know, I bet I know more about Ireland than Chris knows about Australia.
But this is a quiz about Ireland.
No, but you've listened to podcasts about Irish history and stuff.
I haven't done that.
So you probably...
I know that podcast, mate.
You give it to me.
And there's like 20 episodes on that Irish agreement in 1918 and blah, blah, blah.
I'll tell you this.
I better know more about Irish literature than you do.
Let's put that proposition to the test, Matt.
That unwarranted confidence may or may not pay off.
I'm going to give you two points per question for this because then you can catch up.
So these are worth two.
This is awful.
I feel like I'm being set up for a big fall here.
I explained I wasn't good at facts or names or dates, but also concepts.
I'm not good at any of these things.
Stop your pretty excuses because I am certain that I will not beat you in the literature area.
So just have confidence.
Have confidence.
I'm just worried.
It's trivia.
I hate trivia.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, okay.
Okay, so question one.
Estragon and Vladimir are here.
Who is missing?
Well, I know that's from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but...
Godot!
Oh yeah, Godot, I guess.
Yes, yes.
That was me!
That was me, Matt!
You got it after!
I think that was very much an assist from Matt, and then you tapped it into the goal.
I think you should both have the point.
All right.
I'll give you a one, Matt, and I'll give me a two, because obviously it's Goddard.
Okay, number two.
Who took over as Taoiseach of Ireland on December 17th?
Sorry, as what is Ireland?
Taoiseach, Prime Minister of Ireland.
Oh, I don't know what a Taoiseach is.
No, I don't know the answer to that one.
The best thing is the fact that actually Chris, we've discovered, has been pretending to be Irish now and a successful ruse that has lasted many years is not going to know this one either.
He's actually a citizen of the UK, I think, technically.
I mean...
This is much more embarrassing for me than it is for you, but I have no idea who that is.
There's a new one?
Who is it, Helen?
It's Leo Varadkar again.
Oh, yeah.
That's true.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
But Matt also didn't know it.
Just note that.
He also didn't know it.
Right, but he's not.
I mean, do you know who the current Prime Minister of Australia is?
I think that...
Do you know Matt?
His initials are AA, I believe.
Just to give you a clue.
Aldous Albi.
It's Anthony Albanese.
You don't know the Prime Minister?
Hold on.
Is this true?
Yeah.
I mean, the name.
In his defense, they change him really, really frequently.
The last Taisha I know is Bernie Ahern.
That's how little attention I pay to that.
They're all just middle-aged.
Fat guys in white shirts and ties.
Oh my god.
Helen, this is terrible.
So zero to both of us and let's say nothing more.
Yeah, let's never mention that again.
Okay, number three.
Dimitri, Ivan and Alexei are brothers.
What is their surname?
Karamazov.
Karamazov.
What?
I get close.
I get close, but that's like the person trying to blag it.
Yeah, no, Matt was right.
Karamazov.
Yeah, this is like an IDW question format.
They all love Dostoevsky.
They love Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky in the Bible.
These are the two things they love.
This is the only two books you need to read.
Okay.
Which Irish writer's middle names were Augustine Aloysius?
Come on, it would be very embarrassing for you not to get this obvious question.
I mean, no one actually knows this, so this is basically spin the wheel of famous Irish writers of the 20th century.
I'm going to go for James Joyce, just because he's famous.
Chris, who are you going for?
Alleged Irishman Chris Kavanagh, who are you going for?
Just tell us any famous Irish writer, Chris.
That isn't Simulac.
Rod is dying.
Shamus Hini, he was a poet, but I'm sure he wrote short stories or something at some point.
So maybe him?
I'm afraid the points go to Matt.
It was in fact James Joyce.
There you go.
It was a shot in the dark, but you know.
It hit the target.
Okay, final one, which I actually think, unfortunately, this is a Chris-centric question.
I think you'll get this, and that won't.
It's an unfair one to end on.
But whose cookbook was nearly called The Peas Process?
I know.
I fear to know this.
I mean, calling this Irish literature is, I will admit, a bit of a stretch.
Yeah, no, I'm going to pass on this one.
Chris?
It's Jerry Adams.
It is Jerry Adams' improbable cookbook.
Oh, I knew that Jerry Adams wrote a cookbook.
Yeah, he had this, yeah.
There was a bush that handed it to him in the advertisement from it and stuff.
So contemporary Irish politics, that's where I'm at.
What was that movie with Jerry?
I mean, it didn't have them in it, but it portrayed Jerry Adams talking to the Protestant guy, you know, the negotiations.
Not Martin McGuinness, that's the opposite.
No, you know, the Protestant fryer brand.
Ian Paisley.
Ian Paisley.
Yeah, so there was a movie, a drama based on dialogues between Paisley and that guy.
It was a BBC drama, I think, rather than the movie, wasn't it?
Or am I getting that wrong?
Yeah, I think it was a BBC drama.
I do know the movie you're talking about.
I feel like it was a movie.
Anyway, it was good, I thought.
And we end on a very Christmassy note because, of course, one of my favourite tweets ever is Gerry Adams complaining about not being able to get his Christmas lights on and someone replying, surely you know someone who can fit a timer.
So, happy Christmas!
Happy Christmas.
I do have to do the important thing of just tallying the scores.
It's all just for fun, Chris.
It's just for fun.
It's Christmas.
It's just for luck, Chris.
You don't need to tally the scores.
Nobody cares.
Well, look, Matt, the important thing is, let's take my score with a half, make it fair, and then, you know, you're not that far behind.
That's the important thing.
The important thing is, Matt finishes with 11.5.
Out of some number.
And I finish on 15.5, which is higher, substantially higher.
And that's the most important thing.
That was great, Helen.
You are the Quid Blaster, genuinely.
So people should pay you significant amounts of money for that.
Other people, not us.
Well, the better man won, Chris.
I want you to hold the knowledge of your victory.
I think you're right, Matt.
I think the real victory is having listened to Lex Friedman's morning routine and then let it slide, like the elven poetry in Lord of the Rings.
Your eyes just slide over it.
Don't retain any of that information.
The real victory is living well, Helen.
And I feel like, you know, we can't score that, Chris, but...
Yeah, and I do also thank you, Helen, for limiting the amount of embarrassing contemporary Irish knowledge questions that you included because that was worried.
If you continued along that vein of questioning, I may have had technical difficulties to interrupt the call.
So, yeah, but that's good.
That's good.
So, look, we learned things.
We find out things about gurus and we have established that although your series is very good, it should be best considered a supplement to long-form podcasts by middle-aged men.
That's really the message that we want to take away at the end.
It was very big of you to come on, Helen, to concede that.
Thank you.
True.
Just, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Like, that's how I feel about my podcast series.
No, it's very nice.
And I do want to say a genuine thank you to both of you for having been very generous about it because it was a worry to me that I was trampling all over your terrain.
But it turns out that actually there are many gurus in the sea and enough for everybody to point at and go, oh, that's a bit weird.
What's he doing?
What's that man doing on the internet?
Exactly.
We don't need to have any fishing controls or disputes like...
England had with Norway or whatever about the cod.
You know, I mean, and I think you should come back and be a regular guest because I think, you know, that role would be a fitting, you know, end to your arc, your career arc.
Thanks, Matt.
It's like my retirement gig.
We'd love to have you.
I would love to come back.
Bury the only slight possibility that I would have to subject myself to more of...
More of this content.
And I just can't listen even at two times speed.
I don't know how you do it, Chris.
Why can't people write things down like the old days?
That was better in my view.
One thing that you should know is Helen's condition for supplying me the crack cocaine of podcasts, which, you know, I consume like a vampire bat, is she would supply the episodes for the series early for me to consume if I listened at times one.
Speed.
That was the deal.
And that's tough.
But I did do that.
I did do that.
So, yeah, look at that.
That was a trade-off.
I know, but we had genuinely, we employed a composer to make original music for the series.
We got a very good sound designer.
Occasionally he had to be reined in from putting slightly too many sound effects in, but was just a brilliant, brilliant guy.
And then I was like, Chris, you are not listening to this.
So chipmunk speed.
It's an insult.
It's an insult to everyone involved in this.
You can do it to Joe Rogan.
I don't care about that.
That's fine.
But do it to the BBC, Chris.
There's a thing that all of the themes for all of the podcasts for me are...
At times two speed, right?
So anytime I hear them at normal, it just sounds really wrong.
Like everything has moved slowly.
And I've never heard most of the theme tunes for podcasts at normal speed.
So that's the thing.
So there, one dean anecdote to finish.
High off brand.
But thank you very much for coming on, Helen.
We will definitely have you back when we can think of a reason to.
Trap you.
But everybody should go listen to the series.
And thank you very much for the quiz.
Thank you.
Where can people find you?
Probably here, as it turns out.
The Atlantic, I obviously have a stuff writer there.
I have a sub stack because that's the law now.
And wherever you find your podcasts, I believe is what they say.
