Seasons greetings from Decoding the Gurus!Time to grab a hot chocolate, cosy up to the fire, and wrack your brain to see how much attention you've been paying to all those gurus... that's right it is time for the annual Guru quiz!Luckily for us, the esteemed journalist and author, Helen Lewis, is back as a combined special guest and quiz master. Prepare for stunning revelations, scintillating dystopic erotic fiction, and more nootropic stimulation than you can shake a stick at.So who will triumph this year Chris or Matt? And how will Helen fare when the tables are turned? Join us, find out, and have a happy Christmas/non-denominational Winter holiday season!And don't worry, there might be just a little bit more DTG goodness to come before the end of 2023...
Hello and welcome to a very special Christmas episode of Decoding the Gurus.
I am Professor Matthew Brown this Christmas.
He is Associate Professor Christopher Kavanagh this Christmas.
And with us is Ms. Helen Lewis this Christmas.
Welcome Helen.
Hello Christopher.
I'm not any kind of professor.
So Chris, for once you can feel smug and superior.
Oh, that's right.
Not even an assistant professor, eh, Helen?
A girl can dream, a girl can dream, eh?
Now my chance to lord over someone else.
Yeah, you know, Matt got told off by one of our listeners for doing that, constantly putting me down, talking down.
But they actually said you did well by not mentioning it last time, so you got your positive stroke.
I've sworn it off.
I won't be mentioning titles anymore, but it's Christmas, so anything goes.
Okay, so there you go, Helen.
No titles.
Forget it.
We're all equal here.
This is now a leftist podcast.
Welcome to the revolution.
Long overdue.
Helen, for people who might not know, last year you had a series on the new gurus on the BBC Video Science, right?
BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, yeah.
It's still on BBC Sounds.
I don't know why anyone would know the difference, but to the BBC it's very important that those are two distinct things.
It is.
It's very important.
And I was basically correct in what I said.
So that's the important thing.
And you also work at The Atlantic, a publication of Note, and The Private Eye, which is also a publication of Note.
Matt, do you know The Private Eye?
Is that to The Atlantic as associate professor is to professor?
What's the relationship there?
It's a British satirical magazine, which is basically print only.
And I do their podcast.
So I now finally am on a podcast as nature intended, which is nice.
Chris, you forgot to mention the most important thing that happened to me this year, which is that I made a bonus episode of The New Gurus featuring the insights of...
That's right.
Chris Williamson.
No.
Yes.
To be fair, Chris Williamson, but also on Christopher Kavanagh.
I was there.
That's right.
Was that my first appearance on the BBC?
Maybe.
No, I think I was on the BBC complaining about something at one point.
So there you go, Helen.
My second appearance, but probably the only one that anybody actually heard.
So, yeah, I enjoyed that.
I got to talk about...
Gigachads and Sigma males and various embarrassing phrases that probably I wouldn't want my parents to hear me utter.
Yeah, but that was fun.
Someone finally explained Gigachance to the Radio 4 audience.
And I think we talked about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as well.
I went off and did a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class to find out what all the tech bros say in it.
And it's quite aggressive cardio.
I can see what they like about it.
But to be honest with you, being mashed into some sweaty man's ball sack in the morning was not my idea of fun.
So probably not going to go back to that one again.
Yeah, that's, you know, horses for courses.
I can't remember if I mentioned on the podcast or not.
It's probably not the thing that you want to start to mention in public.
But I was training with one heavyset guy.
It was actually in judo.
In UCL's judo center.
That's the setting.
I know you know London.
So that was in there.
And there was a relatively heavyset elder.
Not like a really old man, but, you know, just...
You beat up an extremely old man.
You beat up Gandalf, essentially.
That's what I'm envisioning.
Fat Gandalf, okay.
Well, what fat...
He wasn't...
He was more like bald Professor Gandalf.
That's the way I would put it.
And we were doing Neuaza, grappling on the ground, right?
In a kind of Brazilian jiu-jitsu-esque fashion.
And he had his judo gi kind of flapping around, as happens when you're tussling.
We're both sweaty and he was above me and the sweat like glistened down I think to like his chest or connection to the belly and I seen that and it was just above my face and then it dropped off and I felt like the salt fire across my taste receptors before I could avoid it and that was In a way,
that was a deeply dysphoric moment, and it wasn't even, you know, a technique.
Not an official technique.
Well, Chris, it could have been Wes.
It could have been the bullsack.
Yeah, that's right.
It could have been.
I mean, there have been around plenty of bullsacks in prison in Jiu-Jitsu, but I'm not sure which is worth it.
I'm not sure, Helen, if this is the way that I...
Imagine the podcast beginning, but it probably is fairly standard for your last appearance too.
Welcome to the intellectual salon that is decoding the gurus.
Yeah, why do we not get invited to the intellectual dark web dinners?
This is the question with this kind of scintillating feedback.
But my private eye is an institution in the UK.
It's like a little...
I'm channeling Constantine Kissin.
I recently heard him.
Going off on how the feeling Private Eye had to target him in order to try and increase their relevance.
Oh, yes.
Yes, that's a Private Eye.
That rings a bell.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I've heard of Private Eye.
I just thought it was a men's magazine, something like that.
Well, no, no, I don't.
It has little, like, pictures with...
Funny captions on them.
That's what I remember.
Cartoons.
That's cartoons, Chris, as we call them.
No, it was photos.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Like caption covers.
Yeah, there'll be a photo of the Prime Minister saying something amusing.
That's what they do on the front cover.
Yeah.
They got into quite a bit of trouble recently because they did quite a spicy cover about Israel-Gaza, saying that perhaps, you know, Israel was going to go a bit over the top in its response and everybody kind of piled in.
And then I think now we're kind of several weeks on is kind of...
Tapping their feet and sort of pretending that they never got that upset about it because, in fact, Israel did go in pretty two-footed to the extent that, you know, President Biden, noted dove, President Biden thinks it's all a bit much.
But yeah, so I work at the Atlantic, which upsets one set of people, and then Private Eye, which upsets another set of people.
So I've been really maximizing the level of offense that I've been able to deliver this year.
That's right.
But have you been active enough in the podcast space?
That's the question, Helen.
Like, you know, you have to always...
Work the angles.
You've not got any new podcast.
Well, you're on a podcast, in fact.
You are on page 92. I do my time.
94. Yeah, I do my time in the year.
I did them a quiz that was all about British stuff.
So I've got my eye in this year about the quiz.
So your quiz will probably be the best quiz because I've had so much practice.
Oh, yeah.
And so many, many people, many listeners were asking.
Is Helen coming?
She was just there.
Someone, some callous listener responded.
She was just there to spruik her own show because it was about guru fame.
She wouldn't lower herself to return for her second year.
How wrong they were.
Yeah.
They see they've got it all wrong.
They just...
Bad judges of character, the people online.
But we are thankful that you lowered yourself to return and to...
Take up your mantle as Quizmaster.
I kind of suspect it's partly because you enjoy being a Quizmaster, like you'll go on any podcast if you're a Quizmaster.
If there's a quiz on offer, you're there.
Is that how it is?
Wow.
It's way harsh, Ty.
Yeah, that's a bit broadly true.
No, it's really fun.
I have to say, this one of all of the quizzes that I've ever made, probably...
Made me feel the most ill.
Well, you'll see.
You'll see what I had to wade through in order to deliver piping hot content to your listeners.
What I did to myself.
Oh, you know what I will do, Helen?
But I'll do it for the magic of podcast editing.
So you'll just have to, like, replay it in the image in your mind.
Because it was, you know, we do little updates on what the gurus have been doing.
And there was...
A uberguru who felt the need to target you specifically recently on a conversation.
Jordan Peterson discussed you with Chris Williamson.
And for the listeners at home, he said...
The interviews that have done me the most good in the long run were the two interviews that were most hostile.
One by...
Channels 4. Griffin.
Kathy.
Kathy Newman.
Kathy Griffin.
And Kathy, Kathy at least had a sense of humor.
Another one by Helen Lewis, who had no sense of humor at all and doesn't seem to have learned anything at all in the interim.
But I think that, I think that one has 80 million views now, twice as many as the Kathy Newman interview.
Like it just keeps racking up views.
And it was because Helen Lewis, she has like...
50 tricks or 100 tricks.
Cathy had like four.
You know, and they were pretty blunt.
And she had a sense of humor about them.
But Helen Lewis, she was just all tricks and lots of them and smart.
You know, and it's quite something to talk to someone who's quite smart and quite educated, but all tricks.
He said that Helen was humorless.
I had no sense of humor, which ironically I find extremely amusing.
So, I don't know, checkmate Jordan Peterson on that one.
He's had a lively year.
He just gave an interview to The Telegraph, which is a right-wing British paper, saying that Labour will probably get elected in Britain next year and it will turn the country into, quote, Venezuela.
Which is really funny because in any other...
Well, it's not really a mean thing to say.
In any other situation, be like, mate, did you go to sleep in 2017 and only just woke up?
But sort of, I think that is genuinely what happened in that that was the...
Conservative attack line on Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
You'll have a leftist economy, we'll have hyperinflation, it'll be like Venezuela.
But since then, the leader of the Labour Party has changed to now being somebody who is...
I think Keir Starmer is seen as being a kind of stealth Blairite.
I know someone who refers to him as the Manchurian Blairite.
He's been a sleeper agent for centrist dads.
And Labour is just in a completely different place to where it was.
But someone who has not updated the notebook on this is Jordan Peterson.
I begin to think he hasn't been paying that much granular attention to British politics.
I'm shocked.
I'm shocked.
How dare you, Helen?
The most weird thing about it as well, not that I follow these people too closely, is that Michaela has had a secret baby.
Have you seen this?
I did.
I did notice that.
The secret baby that appeared on Twitter.
Right, but she kept a pregnancy secret.
Oh yeah, that part.
Yeah.
And then announced it eight months.
And then, of course, I completely forgot that her new husband is called Jordan.
So she was like, it was lovely to have Jordan with me in the delivery room.
And I was like, oh, a bit much.
Well, it's still unclear.
It's not entirely certain that that would refer to her husband, given their odd relationship.
But yeah, so that's right.
She replaced the guy who had like a demon.
Inside him called Victor or Igor, right?
Wasn't the demon?
Sorry, his name might have been Victor and the demon was called Igor, but...
This just feels like anti-Russian propaganda, Chris.
Yeah, but that's true.
That's what she said about...
She wrote this kind of love poem on Instagram to her previous partner and not afterwards, like during the time when she was with him.
And she said, "He's a master of the blade.
He's like a stealth assassin.
He has a demon inside him called Igor and he's possessed by a demon called Igor."
But possessed by a demon in a good way.
Yeah, that wasn't clear.
I think it was supposed to make him seem, you know, mysterious.
But, like, I guess that's a line that works on some people.
Like, I'm possessed.
Hello, you know, you look great.
You can tell that.
Yeah, I wouldn't put it on your Hinge profile.
I'd probably lead with, like, six foot one.
You know, great sense of humour.
Loves to travel.
Possessed by demon.
Cold ego.
Yeah.
Dude with the blade.
It's something that James Lindsay would say in a very animated fashion when, like, getting flustered.
Well, there is another of your gurus with whom I had an encounter.
I went up and said hello to James Lindsay because he was on Decoding the Gurus in which he expressed his desire to have Anthony Fauci hanged at The Hague for war crimes, unspecified.
And I went over and said hello to him and he was very nice and very pleasant.
Anyway, then I wrote in my piece that he seemed very chipper for a man who believed that America was wracked by civil war and civilisation was falling, which he found overly sarcastic, so he called me a hag.
Oh, well, that's...
It's fair, isn't it, Matt?
That's what you're thinking.
It's only fair.
I am cracking on a bit.
I've got my differences with James, but you know.
Did I slip into a coma?
Because I thought Helen said that James Lindsay appeared on our podcast this year.
When he appeared on the...
On my podcast.
Oh, your podcast.
Ah, the new gurus.
Okay, that's right.
The knockoff.
The new better gurus.
Yes, thank you, Chris.
Yeah, so I said hello to him and I also said hello to another coding guru's favorite, Brett Weinstein, who I have to say I couldn't resist because I'm a human troll.
But I think it's okay to be a troll if you actually have the balls to do it in real life.
Which was that he...
I don't entirely blame Chris for this, Matt.
Sent me the fact that Brett and Heather had discussed me and Barry Weiss talking about him on his podcast.
And I had said it's a shame, you know, lots of people who go through cancellations, you know, they find that a really psychologically wounding experience, but you can end up, like Brett Weinstein, into a completely conspiratorial space.
And Yasha Monk also used him as the kind of flagship example of a kind of descent into...
I can't remember.
It was very funny.
I think he said just like women nattering away or something.
It was girl talk.
Yeah, I know.
Me and Barry Weiss doing a little bit of girl talk, just, you know, talking on nails, slagging people off.
Anyway, so I said, I went up to him and said, Oh, hi, Brett.
It's really nice to meet you.
I'm Helen Lewis.
You know, the one who was having some girl talk with Barry Weiss.
And he genuinely looked at me like I had just, I'd pissed on his chips.
It was, it was just completely rabbit in the headlights.
Just like had no comeback, which was a really interesting insight.
But in case of both of them, that James was lovely to me.
Brett was obviously petrified by me, but there was very much like, Big man in tweets, not so hard man in the streets cases.
That's shocking.
It's very surprising to hear that.
It's funny, isn't it?
But you often find people who are very conflict diverse in real life and then suddenly on the internet allows them sort of kind of cost free to unleash this side of themselves that they can't.
And there was a theorist by Alice Marwick about the idea that actually online abuse was about the fact that we've made it less.
You know, it was less acceptable now to be overtly racist and misogynist in everyday life.
So suddenly the provision of social media allowed people just to kind of splurge out all the stuff that they, you know, it was a kind of facet of driving out of this unacceptable speech from the public sphere.
That was what drove it to flourish on Twitter.
And I think that's probably my insights from meeting some gurus this year suggest that people who love giving it all the chat on their own podcast in their own safe space actually probably don't want to do a public debate.
I mean, I know this is...
You know, you've said this many, many times, but it was a very stark illustration of the fact that people find it much harder to be rude to people in real and everyday life.
It's why moving stuff online has been catastrophic in many ways.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just like cars, right?
You're in a car.
People beep the horn.
They yell by their fists.
But if you actually confront them face-to-face, then they...
I like this idea that you're getting out there with your tire hammer going, "Get to my face!"
Well, I didn't, but I've told Chris this story.
My brother, who's my hero in some ways, he's like me, except he's a little bit smaller.
And gay.
And gay.
And there's this young guy in a great big truck behind him, being a very aggressive driver.
And he's driving his little town car and he just stopped it in the middle of the road and walked back to him and knocked on the window to have a chat about this.
And the guy was like James Lindsay or Brett Weinstein.
Most people don't want to actually...
I'll say as well, Matt, that I feel people would imagine...
That I will be meek and retiring in real life.
And actually, actually, I would point them that I am actually usually smiley and nice and friendly.
It's just that people online mystique sarcasm for anger and fury and like in a much, you know, a much stronger way.
Shall we probe the sort of psychological weirdness of essentially you, Scrappy Doo, moving to the most notoriously polite and repressed society in the world?
What's that about, Chris?
Well, look, I managed to find the only...
John Campbell fan in Tokyo who showed up to my talk to start a debate with me about John Campbell.
So I can't get away from them.
You know, I travel all the way over here and they still hunt me down.
But you're probably genuinely the most argumentative man in the whole of Japan.
That must feel quite good.
He was very deft.
He was very competent in handling that heckler.
But, you know, Helen, the thing is, with most people, the tragedy is that we're completely different people.
Online and in person.
But with Chris, his tragedy is that he's exactly the same.
There's a tragedy.
It is unfortunate.
I know what I am.
I know what I am.
But yeah, so enough banter.
That's the allotted banter.
It's finished, Matt.
The timer has went off.
We're not allowed to exceed the quotient.
And Helen, you have a job.
I do.
To do.
So we had a...
Decoding the Guru's Quiz last year.
And this will be the second year.
It's not a tradition.
I've kept it nice and tight this year so we don't have to have the roundabout Irish literature because I felt like maybe that was not what the people wanted.
But are you ready?
I'm going to keep a score.
There are 12 questions.
Would you like to play this together?
No.
Or separately?
Competition.
And no, Matt, not again.
We're not doing it again.
Like, oh, let's say it at the same time.
No, it's a competition.
Me versus you.
Mano a mano.
Okay.
I don't like this.
I think it's fine.
You'll be fine, Matt.
I think it's fine.
Okay.
Let me lure you in with a nice easy one.
What has 75 ingredients in a single scoop?
Oh, I know.
Is it?
Oh, I forgot you say this every time.
Is it this nootropic drink that Chris has?
Can you have a scoop of that drink?
Does that even make sense?
How many ingredients has it got, Chris?
Well, that does...
I can see in front of me, so that would be cheating.
I will tell you that that drink does not have 75 ingredients, Matt.
That will help you.
But one ingredient, and that's caffeine, and another ingredient that is presumably food coloring, and that's basically it, as far as I can see.
Cognizant and a big guy.
Yeah, I know the answer.
75 ingredients.
Really?
Okay.
All right.
You go first, Matt.
Do you know the famous thing about Red Bull, by the way, which I'm sure Chris Williamson's nootropic drink has also learned from, which is that they deliberately, from an advertising marketing perspective, made it taste disgusting.
Because if they'd made it taste sweet, people would be like, oh, this is just like a fizzy drink.
If they made it taste horrible, they could market it as like a performance drink.
Who would drink this for fun?
You only drink this because you're so hard.
The fact that you like the taste of that nootropic drink is further proof that there's something very wrong with you.
It's got a very metallic tongue to it.
I will say that.
But I like that.
I'm like, yeah.
So, is there a buzzer?
Can I buzz?
Tell me the answer.
AG1.
AG1.
Athletic Greens.
Ah, Athletic Greens.
It is, in fact, Athletic Greens.
Do you know why it's AG1?
Is there an AG2 on the horizon?
Or is it...
I don't know why it's age one.
I know it's athletic greens, but I don't know what the one is there for.
Hmm.
Strange.
Look into that.
Okay, number two.
Which one of these is not a real Elon Musk tweet?
A. Have you ever eaten your own earwax?
Surprisingly bitter.
B. 10,000 bottles of burnt hair sold.
C. At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne.
Or D. Nuke Mars.
Oh, God.
I like doing these ones because you're like, oh, my God, three of these are real.
You're going with Nuke Mars.
You think Nuke Mars is fake?
Yeah.
I think Nuke Mars.
I'll pick the porcelain throne.
I regret to inform you are both wrong.
Those are both real Elon Musk tweets.
The fake one is, have you ever eaten your own earwax?
Surprisingly bitter.
Which is a riff on Dumbledore and Harry Potter.
I don't know where that came from in my brain, but it did.
The burnt hair one is a reference to the fact that at some point he was talking about selling a perfume that smelled horrible and it was about burnt hair.
I have to say, I completely wiped that one from my brain.
Okay, number three.
In September, Trigonometry guest and Manosphere influencer Pearl Davis tweeted, The best women are married before 25. Everyone else is left over.
Don't shoot the messenger.
How old was she at the time?
29. Matt?
Any advance on that, Matt?
24. What would be the funniest age for her to be?
Yeah, 26. Okay, I'm going to say that Chris, you already went with 29 and Matt just said 26, so Matt gets the point.
Oh my god.
Thank you.
She said that when she was 26. God damn it.
That's not favouritism, Chris.
That's just fair.
It is fair.
You need all the help.
Like a golf handicap, it's fine.
You are slightly less online and therefore, you know, that's a good thing for you.
It does.
Okay. Which of the following things did Sam Bankman-Fried not say when testifying in his fraud trial?
A, that he aimed to get down to only 60,000 emails in his inbox every day.
B, that he didn't cut his hair because he was busy and lazy.
C, that his one regret was not appearing on Lex Friedman's podcast.
Or D, that he knew basically nothing about crypto before starting FTX.
Which one did he not say?
Yeah, three of those are real.
One of those are fake.
Oh, no, I think he said the last one, so he didn't say...
Lex.
I said the Lex one is fake.
I'll say the one about the cutting hair.
A bit busy and lazy.
Chris, you are correct.
See?
He didn't say that his one regret was not appearing on Alex Friedman's podcast, but, you know, he probably still could from prison, so that didn't...
I just like the fact that other people have inbox zero and he had inbox 60,000.
What even was all that stuff?
Mostly spam.
I was going to say, the man did not have junk filters and that's not to his credit.
Number five, what caused severe eye burn this year at an NFT festival?
Severe eye burn?
Sounds like something out of House of Usher.
Eyeburn.
So it's got to be a bright light source of some kind.
Well, good, Matt.
You're sciencing this.
You're like the fucking...
Keep going, keep going.
The wheels are turning.
I'm reasoning it from first principles, and I appreciate that.
I'm going to say a laser show then, like some...
Fucking laser show.
Sorry, where was this festival?
Where was this conference?
That's a good point.
Let me just see the magical podcast and find out.
What's it going to change?
Well, I was going to say the Las Vegas.
Oh, the big ball.
The big ball.
The sphere.
It was the Bored Ape Yacht Club Festival in Hong Kong that took place in November.
Well, it's got to be lasers of some kind.
Stealing my answer, old man, but okay.
We're both saying lasers.
Some kind of lasers.
I'm not going to give you that because it's not quite right because they decided it would be super awesome if they had UV lights.
And what's better than a normal strength UV light that you would put in your home, for example, a black light, but an industrial strength UV light used for basically cleaning hospital-grade equipment.
And so they installed incredibly strong UV lights that basically...
Burned people's eyeballs.
One of the attendees reported that it felt like microwaving your eyes.
Didn't Donald Trump suggest doing that?
To get rid of COVID?
Swallow light or put light all over you?
Maybe that's...
They were just...
They were just ahead of their time.
Hygiene, yeah.
And someone pointed out that the bald ape signal is actually supposed to be a monkey with laser beams coming out of its eyes.
And they were like, oh, I didn't realise actually that laser beams go into your eyes.
But yeah, UV and laser are not the same type of light.
That's true.
And people will write in if they say that they are.
Yes, they will.
Save your emails.
We're not getting the point, OK?
OK.
Number six.
What did Joe Rogan do with Elon Musk at a safe distance in a warehouse this year?
I know.
Let's give Matt's old brain a chance to get those cogs wearing.
What do you think he did in a warehouse with Elon Musk?
What would those two rascals get up to?
Well, it's from a safe distance, so they couldn't have been wrestling.
Oh, look at this science rain.
Yes, Joe Rogan did it while Elon Musk was at a safe distance.
Watching him.
A flying kick?
A push-ups?
He probably did those as well, just off camera.
He shot a bow and arrow at the Cybertruck.
He did shoot a bow and arrow at the Cybertruck.
I can't remember whose tweet it was, but they were like, this is really good because I have always worried about being attacked by Mongolian horse archers on the school run.
Or Joe Rogan, just popping out of the line to try and spear you and cook you before his cold plunge.
That could happen if you're in Texas.
I have been enjoying the videos of the people extremely weak-looking, kicking the Cybertruck with their loafers ineffectually.
If you kick a car like that, a normal car, do they...
Like, are people denting cars via kicks usually?
Is that something that normally happens with just like a normal truck?
I guess if it's a supercar and it's carbon fibre, then actually it's really easy to dent it, right?
Because it's just so light that it comes across.
But yeah, I don't think if you've got basically a normal family car, then just a light...
Also, when is this going to come up?
As you say, all of these people live in Texas and they drive for the food truck to their factory and back again.
They don't have to at any point...
It's gone to sustained assault from a panzer division.
Like, it's just not coming up, is it?
To be fair, it is America where there is the possibility of just, like, random people opening fire on you.
So maybe it's more of a priority in that neck of the woods.
The other thing that's really fascinating is the British car series Top Gear once did a whole series where they took a Toyota Hilux truck and they tried to destroy it in as many ways as possible, which eventually culminated in them putting it on the top roof of a building that was scheduled for demolition and then blowing up the building and then dragging it out of the wreckage, at which point were there just like a little bit of oil and a kind of bit of...
It still started.
And it was a kind of classic example.
I don't know whether or not it's apocryphal of like, you know, the way that the AK-47 has become the weapon of choice for jihadists because it's basically, it hasn't got very many moving parts and you can buy, you know, replacements for it and fix it really quick.
And the same thing with the apocryphal story, I think, about the Americans made this biro that worked in space and the Russians took a pencil.
But there is a kind of aspect to that of the Cybertruck, right, which is just quite old.
Get an old banger and, you know, one of those old cars that's just like a workhorse car and it will probably do most of the things you want.
And if you need bulletproof glass, then probably have a think about your life choices and what you did to get here.
But then you wouldn't be cool and edgy.
Like literally edgy in the case of the Cybertruck.
Like that's, it's edge embodied.
I was going to say, you want your car and your truck to...
To bend, to dent if you kick it.
Because if it doesn't, then it means it's got ridiculously thick steel and that is a waste of weight.
They pop right back out.
This is good.
Anyway, you want a Toyota.
Basically, you want a Toyota.
You want an AK-47 and you want a Toyota.
And a Toyota.
That's right.
These are the tools for the 21st century terrorist or man of our town.
I've got a Honda.
I've got a Honda.
That's very nice.
They're okay.
I'm sorry, Chris, but as soon as you start that, I start hearing the rest of baby got back in my head.
I got a Honda.
My baby's got a Honda.
It's got a very Japanese name.
It's called the Honda Freed.
Like freed.
I was freed.
From your Honda?
Well, my Honda freed me from the shackles of walking.
So, yeah, there you go.
Anyway, that's my car for anybody who wants to look it up.
That's very good.
I'm sure people can go and do their own research on that one.
Number seven.
Which of your gurus, or people you've covered on the podcast at least, told Swagger, the magazine for entrepreneurs, I don't consider myself a journalist.
I get information the way most people get their information, whether it's from Twitter or Instagram or YouTube.
I tell people what I think.
I try to talk to the camera in a way that is like talking to a friend.
There's so many of them that could be.
Which of them is most likely to talk to Swagger, the magazine for entrepreneurs?
Elon Musk.
Again, Elon Musk?
That would be a lot of Elon Musk, though.
Matt, I'm going to give you a clue and say it's someone else I did also see lurking around the edges of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, along with Conceptual James and Brett.
Fucking know who it is.
American, lives in Florida.
Weird.
No, I don't know who it is.
You decided he wasn't actually that much of a guru who is just annoying.
Oh, I know who it is.
His name rhymes with Maeve Boobin.
His first name is Dave.
Now I know.
Now I know, but now it's embarrassing to tell you.
Say it, Matt.
Say it!
Maeve Boobin.
All right.
Well, then, the point goes to Matt.
Yeah, thank you.
I was thinking there was Constantine.
Until you...
Yeah, I was going to go Constantine because that's the sound.
But Constantine, like he's not, is he being interviewed by Swagger yet?
Not yet.
Give it time.
But then I guess that is the model, isn't it, right?
But I like the revelation of like, oh, I just hear things and then I just sort of pass them on without passing them through any kind of filtration system at all.
I was like, oh, you just said it out loud.
How kind of you.
I know I'm interrupting the quiz, Helen, but you know Logan Paul has a podcast called Impulsive.
So this is not...
Hang a minute.
This is one of the two brothers, Jake and Logan Paul, who are both influencers slash now mixed martial artists boxers.
Yes.
Remind me which one of them it is.
So Logan Paul...
He's the boxer one.
No, he is the...
Oh, well, they're both boxers now, but Logan Paul is a WWE guy, but he's the one that went to the Japanese forest and looked at the dead suicide person.
That's him.
So the older brother, but he has a podcast called Impulsive and they had a co-host on it called George Janko, who was like the third wheel on that podcast.
And he was kind of, you know, the one that was beat up.
In joking terms.
And he was Christian.
This was the kind of thing that kept me in front of him for being religious and being in the Jordan Peterson or this kind of stuff.
And he said nice things about Andrew Tate.
And he has just recently, a week ago, interviewed Andrew Tate for his YouTube channel.
And it's got, you know, whatever, like 7 million views or whatever.
And I listened, I saw him just, I was watching the intro to it and he was saying.
He was talking to his wife, who he brought on the podcast and was like, you know, you had all these preconceptions about Andrew Thier and then I told you to do your own research and, you know, you find out that all this stuff about him being a misogynist and all, it was just wrong.
You know, you just got to do your own research and you find out that it's all nonsense, like none of the accusations.
And you're like, this is not true.
Like, that's the opposite.
But he was just, you know, saying, you got to be responsible, got to do your own research and you'll find out that...
You know, it's all lies, what they say about Andrew Tate.
You're like, no, that's not true.
It's not right.
The weird thing about that is that Andrew Tate, God bless him in some respects, he will just flat out say, I'm a misogynist.
I just don't think women are that good.
They should stay in the kitchen, right?
It's not like this kind of dance of the seven veils where it's like, who can even say, no, you're being really uncharitable to him?
Like, he's pretty open about it.
I know.
That's what makes it quite impressive.
And actually, that guy, the George Janko guy, he was like the sympathetic guy getting beat up by the mean, evil, Logan Paul, and he's just a little religious dolt.
And then, no, he's like a gullible manosphere dickhead.
So there you go.
But it's actually a huge insult to Andrew Tate, right?
In the same way that sometimes people will say things like that about Jordan Peterson, and they'll say, well, he doesn't really use Christian imagery or whatever.
And you're like...
I can't believe that I've actually listened to the things that he has said from his own mouth and you haven't.
It's very weird, isn't it?
Yeah, this is the trouble with people.
They don't listen to what the gurus are saying.
They should be paying attention to the more.
We're often saying that.
It's true.
Perhaps they could consume them through the intermediary medium of some sort of podcast about the whole sphere.
Apparently there is a way.
Right, right.
Number eight.
Sort of on a similar theme.
Who said this here?
If you're into flat earth and you feel very good about it, that you believe that the earth is flat, the idea you should censor that is ridiculous.
If it makes you feel good and you're becoming the best version of yourself, I think you should be getting as much flat earth as possible.
Sounds like something Dave Rubin would say, but it's not him.
And we've already had me of Buben.
So who would say that, Matt?
Who would be pro flat earth?
The kind of person probably who would say it would love.
Lex Friedman.
Lex Friedman.
You said the magic word.
Matt would have done that too.
I could see the glint of recognition in Matt's eyes, but he was just less...
Of course it would be Lex Friedman.
Of course it would.
You're becoming the best version of yourself.
Obviously a version of yourself that can't fly to Australia, because how would you reach it?
But nonetheless, you should be heard.
Yeah, he said that to Andrew Huberman, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to go and look up and see whether Andrew Huberman went.
Are you on glue?
No, he didn't.
The answer is...
But I suspect he didn't.
No, he didn't.
He did not, Mr. Huberman.
Okay, continuing the theme.
Number nine.
I've numbered these wrong.
Oh, well, never mind.
No one will ever know.
Who said, journalists annoy the hell out of me, so I understand from Putin's perspective that journalism, journalists, can be seen as the enemy of the state?
Annoy the hell out of me.
Okay, but I'm going to give Matt a first go at this.
Well, it sounds like Jordan Peterson.
He gets annoyed by you.
You're a journalist, Helen.
It's true, but think about the loving Putin aspect of it.
Wait, I say Konstantin, but he famously hates Putin.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not Konstantin.
So Chris, I'm afraid I'm benching you.
You're incorrectly interrupted, so I'm going to deduct five points from you.
Yes.
Oh no!
It's really happening.
We're not doing well.
We're not doing well this year.
Matt, would you like to take a guess?
Who is perhaps softer on Putin and understands his hatred of journalists more than the average American podcaster?
See, it's not Jordan Peterson, even though that fits with him.
He's sympathetic.
I hear someone else is sympathetic.
It may be someone who's been in an answer previously again.
Well, Lex is sympathetic.
He's sympathetic to everybody.
Correct, Matt.
That is good.
Point of order.
The scores so far are Matt is on four points and Chris on minus one.
Wow.
Point of order.
Pay attention, Chris.
You might learn a couple of things.
I'll try.
But I do just want to say that Konstantin, even though he's famously a little bit lukewarm towards Putin, he did come out saying, you know, Ukraine needs to give it up now.
They've been...
They've done enough.
And then he was profiled by various sources that cover Putin apologists pointing out that he's actually not that good on Russia and he's repeated a whole bunch of things that they have essentially pushed.
So I'm just saying, I wasn't completely off base.
That's all I wanted to say.
In a very real way, the fact that you could even think that it was Konstantin says a lot.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's stunning.
It's stunning.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for that, Cope.
Okay, this is the one where I feel like I really earned my corn because I read Elisa Yudkowsky's multi-page forum style, like interactive, also written by other people, erotic fiction called Project Lawful.
And I, it's possible, may never recover.
So which of these is not a real passage from Elisa Yudkowsky's erotic fiction Project Lawful?
Okay?
Not real.
Okay.
I'm going to say that these are all quite long because the man loves a comma.
Okay, here we go.
Well, personally, were I given the run of the art duke of Sir Mim's summer villa, I would go look at all the bedrooms before I decided which one I was claiming and probably take his own personal bedroom unless he's decorated it grotesquely like with the skulls of his enemies.
But if you're terribly eager to go to bed, we could just ask the staff what their plan was and I'm sure they'll have a skull-free, very lovely bedroom.
A. Okay.
B. My ambition before I ended up here was to fairly make a billion labour hours and then marry about two dozen women and have about 144 kids.
That was B. C. Calistria, god of women who want to leave their husbands, get abortions and get revenge.
Why this doesn't also apply symmetrically to men who want to leave their wives is one of the things he didn't have time to ask Carissa.
That was C. D. Kelton felt a pulse within him again, deeper this time, like the first time he beheld the beauty of the void space.
Shafara always had this effect on him, dammit, and his pressure suit was too tight to contain any excitement.
That was D. So, Archduke of Sermium's summer villa bedrooms, one.
144 kids, two.
Unequal sex differences of leaving husbands and wives, C. Or the beauty of the void space, D. That's amazing.
I'm going to go with one, and I'm just amazed that he wrote three of those.
Whether I'm right or wrong.
I think B is the fake.
Okay, so you think, Matt, you're going for the Archduke of Sermium's summer villa bedrooms.
That's the one with the skulls, right?
That's the one with the skulls.
That sounds like something you would make up.
Isn't it?
There's only one that is not real.
Yes, you're picking the fake one.
And you're going, Chris, with the billion labour hours and having 144 kids.
Yeah.
You are both wrong.
Those are both real sentences from Project Lawful.
Which one did you make?
Which one did you make up?
The fake one is Kelton felt the pulse within him again deeper this time, like the first time he beheld the beauty of the void space.
And I was like, as I was writing it, I was like, do you know what?
I think I've got a future in this.
This is quite good.
That's the one that made me want to read it.
I'm going to write extremely horny Reddit-based fiction.
That's my pivot for the new year.
The skull one is real.
The skull one is real, that.
He wrote that.
Also, the one that's obviously real is the bit about like, oh, I see, so it's okay for women to get abortions, but not men.
Yeah, that's obviously.
And you were like, oh, I can hear that.
It's obviously.
Who said this year Say what you want about Hamas supporters At least they know what a woman is
Oh
Constantine hasn't been the answer for anything yet, but...
Who would say something so stupid?
Tucker Carlson, Russell Brand, Elon Musk.
The problem is, Helen, there's so many.
Many of them would say that.
Gad sad.
Gad sad.
That sounds like a gad sad kind of joke.
Yeah.
Matt, are you going to be led astray by the other children or are you going to come to your own answer?
Oh, well, I do like the sound of Gatsad.
Now Chris says it.
No, I'm going to go for Jordan Peterson because that answer's got to be right sooner or later.
It was Constantine Kizzen.
No!
That is a very Constantine thing to say.
Of course it is.
But like bad comedians, there's so many.
Is it a Gadsad joke?
Is it a Constantine?
Is it a Francis?
No, it's not Francis.
No funny voice.
It's never Francis.
See, Matt's the nasty one.
There, Helen picked it up.
Just saying.
That's alright.
I'm the Francis in this conversation, just trying to keep up.
To be fair to Constance Kissing, I was at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and his speech got the best reception because he had put some jokes in it and everyone else was talking about birth rates or accepting Jesus into your heart.
I would say he had definitely the most upbeat of all the speeches.
So credit to him on that one.
Number 12. Which of these is not a real product shilled by Andrew Huberman?
Okay.
Are you ready?
A. Hongcat and Fidogia supplements to synergistically uplift energy levels.
B. Rugged enemas use royal flush for 15% off.
C. LMNT, which I realise now is lemon tea, tagline stay salty.
Or D. Maui Nui venison, the healthiest red meat on the planet.
Wow.
See, I've...
Three of those are real.
I have browsed his product offerings, and I've come across, like, dozens of them, and I've not come across any of those.
Like, how many of them are out there?
What is he endorsing?
The enema one feels on the nose?
Yeah, I was going to say enema.
I thought of it before him.
I didn't say it, but I was going to say enema.
But I also know, I've listened to lots of podcasts, Matt, and enemas and, like...
Fitted boxer briefs and the stuff like man-skipping balls are things that podcasters often advertise.
Really?
Yeah.
Because I actually went for that because I thought that's not a practical thing to market.
No, people really like enema.
No, wait.
They don't like enema.
They like bidets.
They like bidets.
It's not the show.
It's not the show I'm thinking.
I was thinking of a bidet.
Yeah, it's not.
He didn't market enemas.
No way.
Look at you just laughing about the fact you're living in a country that's got toilets with little built-in enema sprays.
But have you watched the mad Russell Brand interview with Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, where he throws away from this very serious discussion with Ron DeSantis, he obviously wants to be president of the United States, to advertise a type of underwear that keeps your balls essentially dry.
And it is like the sort of most peak guru moment of like the fact that the kind of the sheer indignity of the fact that this entire industry runs on like the kind of adverts you got at the back of a newspaper that everyone pretended didn't exist and weren't your business line.
Now it's like the thing that you're like you're open about.
Look at me.
Look what I'm shilling.
I'm shilling ball underwear.
To Ron DeSantis to talk about wokeness.
There's two products that I hear promoted on podcast from people who are not, you know, like their podcast image is not like, Sex fiend and they're the manscape like make your your testicular region shorn and the other one is blue too a viagra pill that will that will apparently have the effects of viagra but it's very jarring to hear you know like a kind of dad style podcaster be like Do you need help
in the bedroom?
And you're like, hey, what?
You shouldn't be shilling these.
So yeah, we might have to do that.
We might need to do that.
You know, I'm just warning you.
That's funny because I'm pretty sure I read that halitosis as a concept was sort of invented by the advertising industry.
I mean, in the era before toothbrushes, to some extent, everybody had pretty bad breath.
But the concept that there was a condition called halitosis that one could have and then you could solve it with...
I don't know, presumably this was the 1920s, presumably smoking was supposed to make it better, or but mints.
And I sort of think that's a bit the same about men waxing their balls.
I just think if you're a straight man and you're having sex with women, they are...
They just aren't.
They just don't care.
And it's a sort of heroic attempt to create a whole new category of thing that is just probably not, it's going to founder on the rocks of women being really having very low standards.
Do you remember the, whatchamacallit, the Mitchell and Webb thing where they had the execs talking about toothbrushes and they were saying like, we'll put a thing on the back of the toothbrush.
And we'll tell them that they need to brush their tongue.
And they said, nobody will brush their tongue.
Like, it's not...
And they say, they will if we tell them that we won't brush their tongue.
They'll brush their tongue, goddammit.
And they said, brushing your tongue makes you wretch.
And they said, it doesn't matter.
So, you know, that...
Yeah, that stands to reason.
But we're going with enema.
It's our final answer.
Millionaire style.
You are correct.
It is enemas.
Although I don't know, I don't think I really should be the person to tell you this, but it is possible to do enemas at home.
There's a very interesting, I'm trying to remember which astronaut it is, but one of the things that they had to do before qualifying for NASA's space programme was have a colonoscopy.
And I think it's one called Tom something.
I think he's called Tom Jones, but that was also the Welsh singer, so it seems unlikely.
And he talks about the fact that he basically did about three at-home enema kits because he wanted to be sure that he aced his colonoscopy.
I'm not really sure is quite how it works, but just a little bit of edutainment for you there, Matt and Chris.
That's good to know.
Yeah, well, Huberman's find one product that they can expand into.
So there we go.
We've helped him out if he listens to this.
That's true.
Okay, last question.
Number 13, as it turns out.
Which of the following insults did James Lindsay not use against Jonathan Paggio this year in an argument over the Enlightenment?
Okay.
A. Icon wanker B. Con artist C. Artsy fartsy philosophical amateur or D. Fucking clown We must have said fucking clown.
That's definitely James.
Nailed on.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Oh, artsy fartsy.
What was the first one?
Icon Wanker.
Icon Wanker.
He's not British.
He's not British.
Does he know what a wanker is?
I mean, he is a wanker.
You may have tipped your hand.
Wait, wait, what have I done?
And give Matt the secret key.
Okay, final answer from both of you.
Icon wanker, con artist, artsy-fartsy philosophical amateur, or fucking clown?
Icon wanker.
Yeah, I've got to go for the wanker because...
Yeah.
Yeah.
Arms linked, Chris.
You are both correct.
Chris is entirely right.
It is an overly British insult, which I picked entirely because there was once a comedy series called The Inbetweeners, which was about kids at a school, and one of them started taking a briefcase to school, and all the other kids would shout, briefcase wanker, at him.
And I just thought the idea of following Jonathan Paget around the internet going, I can't wanker.
I can't wanker.
This is the key.
This is the magic key for winning at your quizzes, Helen.
Forget about the subject.
Because it's impossible to know all this bullshit about all of these people.
What you do is you think about Helen, and you think about Helen constructing this thing, and you think, what would Helen do making it artificial?
But you couldn't do that with the Eliezer.
The Eliezer one.
It troubles you, doesn't it, Chris?
You're going to go and read Project Lawful now and be like...
Did he really not say that?
I'm going to have to read the whole thing just to fact check that.
Does that mean I lost Helen?
Did I lose this year?
I was going to say...
Would you like the final scores?
Yeah.
Which is that you both scored six points.
However, because of Chris's minus five penalty for interruption, Matt is the winner.
Oh, no.
Well, look, you know, there's no I in team, right?
We're a team.
You're not going to set us up to compete, cause division, cause contention.
It's true.
It's a team, but you're just the best member of the team.
The senior member of the team.
Can I show you what I have prepared?
Like, because...
Let me show you.
I don't know if it's going to work.
This will be...
In a way, it'll be enjoyable for you.
So let me see if it works.
Let me see.
Nothing's happening.
"Ah, yeah!"
So, unfortunately, I couldn't use that.
So the people who are listening couldn't see, but there was a laser show which I went off on my video screen.
So, Chris, actually, I know about this, right?
This thing where gestures in Zoom generate those effects.
And I know because my colleague...
It somehow became activated for him, and he didn't even know what would set it off.
But just every now and again, he'd go, oh, no, endless things would happen.
You can say, thank you, Helen.
Oh, my God.
Okay, that one does it.
It's not going to work for you.
It only works for me because it's a Mac thing.
So, like, I think I can do this.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You can't see it because my background's blurred, but yeah.
And it makes you explode, apparently.
Yeah.
Well, that's lovely, Chris.
Thank you, Chris.
You said you prepared something special, and I didn't realise it was emojis, essentially.
I do have one other thing, although I do realise this might slightly kick up your morning, but I'll try to do it quickly, Helen.
So, in a reversal, is that reversal, isn't that a game Americans play with cards?
The Reverso Uno, something like that.
I've played the Reverso card.
I've twisted the table.
Now I'm the quiz master.
Look at me, Helen.
Look at me.
I'm the quiz master now.
Matt, I'm going to need your help here.
Yeah.
Because no one is as online as Chris, and you have to spend a lot of time with him, so you have the better insight into his psychology on this one.
So we're going to have to work out.
What would Chris find?
No, no, no, no.
I will help you, yes.
This is not a quiz about...
Matt will help you.
I think he should.
But this is a quiz specifically...
To test your journalist bona fides, because it's all about the gurus you covered, what they've been up to since you've covered them.
Have you just discarded them like wet drags in the rain?
Somebody might be throwing wet drags away in the rain.
You don't know, Helen.
This is all about people you've covered on your new gurus series.
So who is the responsible?
Person covering Gurus.
Is it you?
Is it us?
We'll find out with these themed questions.
So let's see how you do in this new Gurus quiz.
Okay, I'm ready.
All right.
So there's basically one for each of your episodes.
So there's...
Well, there's eight questions, okay?
I'm going to lose a quiz about myself.
This is going to be worse than your T-Shock horror last year.
Right, okay, I'm ready.
I also skipped the one about the guy who died because I felt in bad taste to create a kind of humorous question about what he's been up to.
So, yes, setting that aside.
First of all, in a letter to a friend from 1973, Steve Jobs wrote, Tim, I've read your letter many times.
I do not know what to say.
Many mornings have come and gone.
People have came and went.
I have loved and I have cried many times.
But how did he finish this paragraph?
Four options.
Okay.
But in, not option one.
But in my depths, the truth whispers.
Can you hear it too?
Option two.
Yet.
Beneath the waves, the core remains untouched.
Do you see it?
Option three.
Somehow, though, beneath it all, it doesn't change.
Do you understand?
Option four.
Still, beneath the ebb and flow of life, the essence persists.
Can you feel its presence?
Now, one of them he finished that letter with.
Which one was it?
I was really hoping that one of them would be like, P.S. I've invented the apple too and I think it's a banger.
But no such bone was being thrown to me.
This is before he went on his pilgrimage to India, if that helps you.
I don't know what you think, Matt, but I'm tempted to go with the ebb and flow of life.
But that might just be recency bias because they all sounded vaguely like mystic woobollocks.
I've just latched on to the last one.
You have in my depths, beneath the waves.
Somehow, beneath it all, and the ebb and flow.
I like In My Depths.
I did like In My Depths.
That was good, too.
What's your final answer?
I can't help you, Helen.
They all sound equally...
Do you know what?
I'm going for A, In My Depths.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
Somehow, though, beneath it all, it doesn't change.
Do you understand?
No, I don't.
Yes, that's, sadly, but, you know, that's just the first one.
There's many chances to come back from this, and Steve Jobs was particularly an odd fellow, and to be fair, you did an interview on the episode he just came up.
So, here's another one.
I can, however, let me ask you one.
What was Steve Jobs' last words, according to the Walter Isaacson biography of him?
My God, it's full of stars.
Almost.
It was supposed to be, oh, wow, oh, wow.
Okay.
Okay, that's pretty good words to go on.
It's just kind of good.
Yeah, like quite, if you're going to, if that's your whole vibe, that you're kind of like merging with the universal consciousness, that's quite a funky set.
Just, you know, bear in mind for the...
Your distant future.
That's quite a banger set of last words, rather than...
What's the famous one that's always misattributed to Oscar Wilde, which is like, either that wallpaper goes or I do.
Yeah, yeah.
I like the one...
Here's that English admiral.
He was expressing his love for his...
What'd they say?
The famous...
Nelson, Nelson.
His mistress or his dog?
No, no, his shipmate, his captain, his second-in-command captain, you know, in that very...
Oh, is that the one that's always disputed whether or not it's Kiss Me Hardy or Kismet Hardy?
Is that the one?
Yeah, no, no, he went on for quite a bit about his strong affections for him.
But, you know, that was how I spoke in those days.
But his very last words were something very weird.
It was something...
I think the blood was not getting to the head, so...
I mean, a lot of last words must be quite...
It must be quite trippy because people are either ebbing away on very, very strong drugs.
So there must be a lot more like kind of, you know, the pigeons are coming!
Do recall Brett Weinstein's inventive evolutionary theory that, you know...
Something that occurs, especially when people are being hung.
No, we're not.
No, thank you, Chris.
Post-mortem ejaculation.
It's adaptive, okay?
I'm sorry.
It's science.
Don't blame the messenger.
Maybe other men, but not Nelson, Chris.
Not Nelson.
Okay, well, from that rude comment, we'll turn to someone you know well, Helen.
A man who drinks his own urine from time to time.
Will Blunderfield.
Lovely Will Blunderfield, yeah.
A nice man, some odd habits.
But what has he been saying?
So which of the following is not a post that he made in the following month on Facebook?
So three of these are real.
One is false.
Which one is one?
If you're naming your fitness brand Spartan or Warrior, but hitting the gym fully clothed, you might be a poser.
Spartans worked out naked.
Just saying, hashtag real warriors, hashtag gym poser.
Option one.
Okay.
That's real.
I'm sure that's real.
Well, he does like, I mean, he notoriously does butthole signing in Vancouver.
He's quite, his whole shtick is a wild naked man.
So that's not an implausible.
And also very true about the Greeks, you know, frankly.
That's not going to help you.
Next one.
40 dudes sign up for full moon yoga, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Helps with the flexibility.
Shocks the passerbys.
Hashtag mooning meditation.
Hashtag bear asanas.
That's number two.
Bear asanas.
That's quite good.
Yeah.
Good pun.
Option three.
I wear a kilt because it lets my balls breathe.
Option three.
No, that's just something that you've written.
What's D?
Option four.
The Matrix wants you to feel gay.
Panic.
Oh, sorry.
The Matrix wants you to feel gay panic to lower your procreative propensities.
Yes, I believe that one because he has quite a tortured relationship with his sexuality and now defines himself as sort of beyond labels.
So I'm going to go...
I actually have never seen a picture of him wearing a kilt, so I'm going kilt, Chris.
Yep, go free.
I think that's your Celtic nature just creeping out there.
You would be wrong.
The false one was the one with the pun, the bare ass in us.
That was me.
That's right.
I'm genuinely impressed because I did not know that you had an intricate enough knowledge of yoga positions in order to be able to craft a solid buttock-based yoga pun, and I apologize to you for that.
Well, ChatGPT may have helped out with that pun, but anyway, we'll continue on with that.
You wrote your quiz!
I did not.
ChatGPT cannot be coerced into being rude unless you try very hard.
But I did seek its help for some pun, I have to say.
So credit to you, ChatGPT.
It deserves the credit for that pun.
Ali Abdel, productivity hacker person man, recently provided...
Yeah, former doctor.
Oh yes, doctor.
Nice guy on your show, actually.
Recently provided a nine-step sleep routine on Twitter.
Which of the following...
Oh, sorry.
No, sorry.
I have reordered this.
So here are the first seven steps.
Get your R's in.
Build a sleep rhythm.
Start with sunlight.
Morning exercise.
Caffeine control.
Catch the evening sun.
Set dark mode.
That's steps one to seven.
Okay?
You're almost there.
Now, steps seven or step seven, eight.
No, steps eight and nine.
The last two steps.
Three options.
I'm sorry, I would like to say, I retract me being nice about your puns when it turns out you can't count to nine.
Look, there's a lot of numbers in this thing that I've written down.
There are three options, and these are the two to finish that list.
Yeah, that's it.
So, expect the spike, keep your cool.
That's pair number one.
Next one, dim the lights, evening reflection.
Next one, tech timeout, sleep cycle.
So, which one is it?
Read me A again.
Expect the spike.
Keep your cool.
That one sounds plausible, because having a cool bedroom is definitely much better for you, right?
Like, it's much better to have a nice big duvet or blanket on, but in an essentially cool room.
So I don't know what I expect the spike would be, though.
Maybe that's the bit where you...
Get into bed and then suddenly you spend an hour scrolling TikTok and you should expect that and not find yourself watching pool tea videos at 11pm.
It's when the new tonic kicks in.
I hope he's paying you.
I really do.
Otherwise this is just embarrassing.
You are like Huberman shilling.
The healthiest red meat on the planet.
Yeah, I would say he's not paying me, but he can pay me with more of these drinks.
That's the only way.
Are you now addicted to Chris Williamson's nootropic drink?
I am.
I am.
I'm 100% addicted.
I've replaced one addiction with that, and I'm going to run out.
I think it's been part of his long-term strategy, but yeah.
But let's forget about my addictions.
Let's focus on the steps.
What is it?
What's your answer?
Matt, do you have thoughts?
My hunch is that one.
I quite like the second one.
It was boring, but so were the rest of the steps.
Chris, what was the second option?
Dim the lights, evening reflection.
Yeah.
See, that's plausible.
So who are you going to go with, Helen?
Your intuitions are old man mad.
Well, I'm going to stick with mine, and then Matt can stick with his, and then he can win this quiz as well, which will be the crowning achievement of Matt's year, surely.
Unfortunately not, because you were right to dump the old man.
You are correct.
Expect this fight, keep your cool.
Although Dim the Lights evening reflection was created by me, Matt, which is why you liked it.
So there we go.
That's just why we're podcast friends.
I have to say, if there's anyone that I would look to for sleep advice, it is, of course, you.
Yes, that's right.
Tech time on sleep cycle.
I did spend a long time on this.
Coming up with possible alternatives, but yeah.
You've got no right to talk about, Chris.
Chris, sleeping.
Your sleep cycle is to sleep two hours underneath your desk at three o 'clock in the afternoon.
And that's it.
Oh, okay, okay.
He doesn't need to sleep.
He's beyond sleep now.
Now that he's got...
What's it called?
It's called something like...
Look, you're making me shill it.
You're making me shill it.
Yeah, what's this drink called again, Chris?
Remind us.
New tonic.
Productivity drink available.
12 bucks, but yeah.
So, Helen was right.
Helen got that right.
One point for you.
Now, the next one.
We're now doing diversity, aren't we?
So this is good.
I look forward to you getting it.
I can remember the order of episodes.
So yeah, this was diversity gurus, this one.
Yeah, this one was a bit tricky.
When Regina Jackson and Sarah Rao were dropped by their theatre agent at CAA for their comments over the conflict in Gaza, how did Sarah Rao describe it?
Rao.
Rao.
Sarah Rao.
Rao.
Row.
Describe it.
That's a hard one to say.
Option one.
This is McCarthyism on steroids and ethnic cleansing.
We are disgusted, but not shocked.
Option two.
The desire to be perfect and to avoid conflict at all costs are characteristics of white supremacy culture, which we will not abide.
Hashtag no silence.
Option three.
They will not silence us.
We, black, indigenous, and brown folks are not each other's enemy, regardless of what they say.
Hashtag stand together.
Option four.
CAA have shown their true colors, adding you to the list of fascist American media organizations.
Hashtag free Palestine.
The first one doesn't have a hashtag.
Is that right, Chris?
Oh, no, sorry.
It should have a hashtag.
It should have hashtag Free Palestine.
Sorry, I missed that.
Yes.
Interesting, Matt.
Interesting that he missed the hashtag out of that one.
Yeah.
I like the first one, nonetheless.
I know that I don't have a good track record of being your brain's trust talent, but just for what it's worth.
I like the first one, too, and I quite like the second one because there is a lot of chat about white supremacy.
And I know that Sarah Roud did do a tweet.
Afterwards, which was amazing, about the fact that how terrible it was that Taylor Swift hadn't weighed in on the conflict because she could, quote, end it with one Instagram post, which just poses the question, what would the Instagram post say?
What would that involve?
I tell you what, let's do the spread betting again.
I'm going to go B if you're going to go A, Matt.
I'm going to go white supremacy culture is about conflict avoidance.
Oh, Matt, one point for you.
Helen, zero.
And I will mention, though, that your sense was not wrong.
That is a real tweet from Sarah.
It's just not about this particular topic.
So that's why you recognize that.
That was cunning of you.
A real tweet from another time.
No respect for the...
Lore of the quiz.
You're now both equal on one point.
It's heating up.
Wait, this isn't a competition.
I'm Helen's advisor.
If she doesn't choose to take my advice, doesn't listen to her elders, I can't do anything about that.
Okay, well, that was good.
Now, number five.
Matt, you should get this one.
The Sensemakers famously had a session that was aimed at Making Sense of Sensemaking, featuring Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jimmy Whelan, Jordan Hall.
Which of the following?
Is not a title from the Rebel Wisdom channel.
Okay?
So there is one of these, which is not real.
Which one is it?
And here are your options.
In Search of the Third Attractor with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
If we don't fix sensemaking, we won't survive with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
War on Sensemaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
Wait, that's real, Helen.
That's real.
Sense-making and society, a critical dialogue with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
Hmm.
One more.
There's one more I'm going to add.
Oh, why?
Better sense-making with Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Fervaki and Sarah Ness.
Does anyone at any point ever ask Daniel Schmachtenberger, what is sense-making, though?
Can you just sum it up in a tweet?
Bless him.
Four of those.
How much time have you got, Helen?
You could ask him that if you've got four or five hours to spare.
He's running too many paradigms for me.
Which one do you think it is?
My advice to you, not my guest, but my advice to you for your guest is for sense-making in society.
A critical dialogue.
It's very funny that this is sort of allied with a movement that complains about postmodernism all the time because this is like the titles of things I had to read as an undergraduate, you know.
The next level.
The next level.
You cannot overstate how...
I mean, the thing about the sense makers is you have to understand just how seriously they take themselves.
That's the thing.
Oh, no, I love that about them.
It's actually genuine.
This is what I mean.
The nice thing about covering is very unselfconscious people.
And, you know, sometimes that can lead to incredible creativity.
And sometimes it leads to just people making endless YouTube videos about the war on sense making.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like people with Warhammer 40,000 or model train sets.
You really, really get into it.
Never talk about a dialogue between sense-making society because they're moving on.
They're creating new societies.
They're thinking about the far distant future.
Trust me, it's got to be three.
That's the one.
Four.
You make a very compelling case.
Chris, I'm going to go with that one.
That was correct.
And well worked out, Matt.
You're very clever.
Very clever.
See, you science it.
You science it.
Would you have got this one?
It's like Sherlock Holmes.
You eliminate the improbable.
Don't get cocky.
Don't get cocky now.
But there was, I did have an alternative that I came up with, but I didn't use it, which was navigating information overload, the future of sensemaking.
Would that one have, would you have got that?
No, that would have rung my bells too.
I know them too well.
I'm in their heads.
I'm living there.
Really incredible that that's the one bit of gurudom that you've just...
Yeah, you're done.
You're a fucking whisperer.
You've got 78 paradigms spinning around.
I just like the funny stuff where people have really bitchy arguments on the internet and have slap fights, but you're there and they're going, like, tell me more about the phenomenological instability of chronological time.
Yeah, I love it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I generally do appreciate them.
Kind of for the reason you said that, Helen.
Because, like, the other ones, like, especially the political...
Like, you know, they're boring, you know, they hate this and they're angry about that.
Whereas the sense makers are just pure, like they are the pure essence of gurueness, untainted by the mere trappings of reality, society or politics.
And you have to respect that.
Well, three.
We're on the final three.
They're coming up, Helm.
We're not going to keep you forever.
But there are three left.
And this question, you might notice it's a little bit of the Cozy Ngurus question disguised as a question for you.
But, Matt, maybe you can help out.
When Peter McCormick was discussing Bitcoin with Eric Weinstein, to what...
Did Eric not compare aspects of Bitcoin too?
So he compared Bitcoin to a number of things.
One of these, he didn't compare Bitcoin to.
So option one, the concept of bidda or innovation in Islam.
Option two, an enormous revolver from a Russian mobster in Snatch.
Option three, Hamas.
For example, that they do social services in Gaza, but also fire rockets.
Option four, a water wiggle.
A water wiggle.
A water wiggle?
A water wiggle, yes.
A water wiggle.
It's like a little thing that you hold that moves around.
Are you not familiar with the water wiggle thing?
I genuinely thought this was one of those times where Chris is saying a word that I completely know and his accent means that I'm going, "Oh, water wiggle."
And he says, "Yes, everyone knows it."
And you find that he's actually sort of trying to say like, you know...
Well, I didn't know about it.
I didn't know about it until Eric Weinstein.
He famously wiggled a water wiggle with Joe Rogan.
Am I right, Chris?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
He did use a water wiggle in an interview with Joe Rogan.
You are correct.
So it is something that he has done before.
What is it?
I feel like I'm going mad.
What does it do?
What is it for?
It's like a toy, like kind of slippery thing that moves around.
It's a bit like, you know, the balloon arm man, but like in water tube format.
He was using it to explain his theory of physics.
Yes, he was in that instance.
Yes, he was.
He must have brought it with him, actually.
I just realized, like, he didn't have that on him.
He brought a prop with him to Joe Rogan.
So did he bring it two times?
So this is relevant context for you, Helen.
You've got to ask yourself.
Yeah, but don't you think that maybe that's the thing that Chris has added in as the rogue extra thing?
Because it is a thing that Eric owns and has gestured to before, but he's...
Cunningly moved it across to this paradigm.
Precisely.
You're on the right track.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too.
Maybe I think you both are fine.
Maybe I knew that you would think that.
Maybe he's using the water wiggle every interview.
We don't know.
What do you think about the US presidential election?
He's like, well, very much like the water wiggle.
Well, unfortunately, you are both correct.
But in my favour, I thought that my...
He had such a bad memory that he wouldn't recall.
He would just have a vague memory that Eric was holding the water wiggle and be like, oh yeah, didn't he compare something to a water wiggle?
Which he did, but he remembered Joe Rogan was there.
This is very funny because I did a quiz for Blocked and Reported and Katie Herzog has been smoking a lot less weed this year.
And let me tell you, it's really like a dramatic uptick in her scores.
So Matt, clearly whatever nootropics you've been on this year have had a similarly great effect on you.
Nootropics is coffee and whiskey.
It's good.
It's all the body needs, apparently.
It's really helped.
Yep.
All the core elements and nutrients that the body demands.
Okay.
Well, here you are.
Second last.
Which podcast inspired this reaction in Peter Turchin?
And this is Peter Turchin now.
I almost never listened to podcasts.
But for this one, I registered with Spotify and listened through the whole thing.
Three fucking hours.
Unbelievably good.
I mean, the thing is that in a way that sounds like a massive diss of Joe Rogan, but it's also, it could be a massive diss of Decoding the Gurus.
Well, yeah, so sadly I should have put Decoding the Gurus as one option, but I didn't.
But I do realise I couldn't.
I like this podcast, but it was, if anything, a bit too long.
Yeah.
So option one, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson debating the concept of truth.
Option two, Joe Rogan and Brett Weinstein discussing COVID and vaccines.
Well, joke's on you because that one surely came in only three hours.
That's possibly true.
Option four.
Constantine Kissin and Jordan Peterson discuss Western privilege and the counter-woke revolution.
Now, which one did Peter Turchin find unbelievably good?
My only rationale about this, Matt, is the fact that he said he registered for Spotify, whereas Rogan is obviously Spotify original and quite hard to...
I don't know, it's like YouTube clips and stuff like that, but would you have to register for Spotify to listen to any of the rest of them?
Maybe to get the full Sam Harris, I guess.
That's a good point.
Yeah, no, I think with Sam Harris, you need to subscribe to his specific app.
I don't think it's a Spotify thing, so I think you're right.
That's what leans me towards Joe Rogan.
Yeah, I would have gone for Lex.
I was going to advise going for Lex, but given what you've said, I mean, it has to be the Joe Rogan.
Or maybe Peter Perturgeon, who I had...
Dinner with us as part of his publicity tour.
He's quite good fun.
But I can imagine him being slightly boomerish in the fact that he'd never used a podcast before.
And this was for him his first ever podcast app.
And he doesn't understand the existence of Overcast or whatever it might be.
So, unfortunately, having narrowed it down, I've now un-narrowed it down again.
So let's go with Lex.
If the heart says Lex, then let's go Lex.
The gut says Lex.
That's the kind of drivel that people would find life-changing and important.
Final answer?
Yeah.
No, you were incorrect because unfortunately...
He was talking about Joe Rogan and Brett Weinstein, and you smartly worked out the thing which I was like, oh, for fuck's sake, that's Spotify.
But then you were too smart, and you wrote to yourself.
Yeah, we overthought it.
You know, that's what we did.
We overthought it, Helen.
Wow, I dodged the bullet, but disappointing from Peter Turchin.
I did respond to that tweet, but there we are.
Did he care at all?
No, I mean, I'm sure he cared, but he didn't respond to my pointing out that that was not a very insightful episode.
But there you go.
Can't trust academics about vaccines.
Who knew?
Yeah, well, I think the thing is that the book, his book End Times is very interesting and talks about these cycles of history and has lots of interesting, provocative stuff in it about empires kind of essentially collapsing from within.
And, you know, but there is some slightly odd stuff about feeding stuff into a big computer.
Which when people start talking about it, you know, in those kind of terms, as if the big computer is going to solve everything, you kind of, it's sort of a slight red flag.
And then there's a bit where...
He's quite nice about Tucker Carlson, which is also another slight rhetoric.
I mean, of all your gurus or people that you've covered tangentially this year, Tucker Carlson has had one of the worst dissents, right?
In that the Dominion lawsuit saw him get kicked out of Fox and he's now reduced to interviewing people who think they've seen UFOs and the guy who claims he slept with Barack Obama in 1999 or whatever it was.
Like, not been a banner year for old Tucker.
So, yeah, there we go.
The last question.
You're both collectively on free.
We're on like one point.
No, you're free.
You're both on free.
Water wiggle helped.
I'm an advisor.
I'm a conciliary.
You're an advisor, but you sometimes advise badly.
So this last question...
No, but you were the MVP.
You were the MVP on the water wiggle, which I still don't entirely believe exists, but I'm willing to concede probably does.
Well, I'm going...
This last one, were you to go different ways, there's two points in it, so somebody could race ahead, okay?
Chris Williamson.
Who did feature on Helen's podcast, has developed a new tonic drink.
To be fair to Chris, they do all sound quite nice.
As you were reading them out, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, it sounds lovely.
Yeah.
I'd drink something with only three of those in it.
And yet two of them are not real.
Well, unless you're seeing brand development for the nootropic drinks, and they will be seeing the special, like, Chris Kavanagh-approved new flavours.
All right.
I think a good strategy here is to pick the ones that sound the least sexy.
So lemon zest is a bit...
Lemon zest rush is a bit basic bitch, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
What about Orange Sunrise?
I also thought Orange Sunrise was dull.
Yeah, that's a bit of the 1970s, isn't it?
Yeah, I think we choose those two.
Read us the remaining three, Chris.
Wild Citrus, Tropical Ice, and Pineapple Paradise.
Yeah, I think, so the second one.
Tropical Ice?
Tropical Ice, that's definitely in it.
It's not really a flavour though, is it?
Ice.
It doesn't have to be.
Tropical ice.
It's all just made up words.
It doesn't matter.
In fact, I'm going to defect.
I'm going to say tropical ice is one that is made up, just so that we can have an interesting split, opening up the possibility that might triumph again.
So I'm going to go with...
I'll stick with lemon zest rush, but I'm also going to go tropical ice.
Okay.
All right.
Final answers?
Yep.
Lock them in.
Lock them in.
This is for the championship of New Gurus 2023.
By any chance, do I win a palette of Chris Williamson's nootropic drink if I come first in this?
I'm sure I can arrange that.
Williamson, if you're listening, hint hint.
That's it.
So, well, you were both correct that Lemon Zest Rush is a basic bitch, and that was invented by me.
Or ChatGPT.
Let's be honest.
ChatGPT.
Come on, Chris.
Me, ChatGPT.
There's no difference anymore, Helen.
We are one.
But the other one, unfortunately, you both lost.
You were both wrong.
Orange Sunrise.
Is indeed.
In fact, I have one right here.
That's not orange.
This is Orange Sunrise.
Mustard Yellow.
Orange Sunrise, it is.
And Tropical Ice is indeed, it's kind of Smirnoff Ice flavour.
That's what you can imagine.
But that's the best drink in the world.
I miss Smirnoff Ice so much.
Wow, I'm going to love Chris Williamson's new Tropic drink brand.
That's right.
So Pineapple Paradise, that was Chachibiti slash Chris Kavanaugh invention.
I prompted it, okay?
It didn't make it up on its own.
There you go.
So that means, in the end, you're both joint champions.
You both win.
Everybody wins a prize.
We all win a creative of new tonic, new tropic drink.
There we go.
I imagine that would go very well over Christmas with my turkey and stuffing and the delicious taste of, I don't know which one's the real one, Orange Sunrise.
I'm probably going to be jonesing when I'm down at my family's, my wife's family's place in Kansai.
Like, where's the productivity juice?
So, yeah, I'll have to plan that out in advance.
Helen, you did reasonably well at the quiz, and that was very satisfying for me.
It did take a long time to research that, so I have great appreciation for the effort that you put in.
Me to research that.
It took a long time for me to enter things into ChatGPT.
I only use ChatGPT for assistance.
It's only an assistance.
But it did help.
I will say that.
Thank you to ChatGPT, too.
Thank you to New Tonic for the sponsor of this episode.
And yes, that was it.
So Helen and Matt are joint New Gurus champions.
Matt is, unfortunately, he defunded me and is the decoding champion for this year.
So you can teach an old dog new tricks.
And it was a totally fair competition, Chris.
The better man won.
What can I say?
Helen was very impartial, I thought, very fair in adjudicating it.
But, you know, bad luck next time.
Who knows?
Maybe 24 will be the year of Kavanaugh.
Shoot ticket PJ to James Lindsay.
Bitch!
Whore!
Start doing it.
It was a snitch up.
Yeah, next time I see old puncher in a face.
Sorry, please don't attack me.
That's just the nootropics talking, guys.
That's not it.
Side effects include swearing at women.
It's possibly true.
Possibly true.
Well, will you come back next year with a...
We haven't put you off.
We're locking you in now before you get even bigger, Helen.
You have to agree so that any controversies that we bring or you bring...
We're locked into this relationship.
It must continue.
I will only come if any of your gurus do anything ridiculous in the course of the next year.
So we'll just have to see.
We'll have to see if that happens.
We can sign off on that.
We can sign off on that.
Yeah, that is true.
And lest we all forget, I did not make up.
The line about wearing kilts to let your balls breathe.
That was someone else, not me, despite the aspersions cast upon my character.
I just wanted to make that clear before we finish.
So important, important note to end on.
Matt, have you or Helen, both of you, have you got any New Year's resolutions?
We're a little bit early, but not that far.
What are you going to do in 2024?
I might finally get off Twitter because I looked at Blue Sky and threads and it's all people complaining about Twitter.
And I thought, yeah, maybe it's time to gracefully let social media sail off on the Viking longboat aflame into the sunset.
It's just, it's lost its joy, hasn't it?
Ah, you're a TikTok Twitch streamer, I see.
I was thinking about a joke from Red Dwarf where there's like a toaster that's obsessed with making toast things.
In fact, No one around here wants any toast.
Not now.
Not ever.
No toast.
How about a muffin?
Or muffins.
We don't like muffins around here.
We want no muffins, no toast, no tea cakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes, and no hot cross buns, and definitely no smeg and flapjacks.
Ah, so you're a waffle man.
You see what he's like?
He winds me up, man.
So, anyway.
It's a very, very specific British reference.
No, I always appreciate a Red Dwarf reference, but I went on TikTok and it was just too good, so I came back off it again.
Yeah.
I was just spending a lot of time watching people.
Although I do obviously now misunderstanding what young people are talking about and the words they use like riz and drip.
Oh, riz.
Cringe.
Cringe drip.
That's what that guy dropped into your master in the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
That was Riz.
That wasn't Riz.
That was anti-Riz.
Matt, what about you?
What's your resolution for decoding the gurus in 2024?
What are you going to achieve?
I feel certain that there's lots of new single malt whiskeys out there that I haven't tried yet.
I'd like to really Really just dig in, put my mind to it, and try as many as I can.
I like that.
I'm going to finally publish that second paper that we've mentioned for two years in a row that we'll finish.
We'll get that, Matt.
We'll publish that paper on gurus.
We'll be there.
We'll still be first.
We'll still be first.
That's right.
There's not like a crowd falling over themselves to beat us to it for some reason.
No.
You know, if you'd asked us a year ago, we could have said something about writing a book.
Oh, yeah.
But we've given up on that.
We know it's not going to happen.
Well, maybe at some point in the future.
We'll see.
As someone who has never been writing a book for approximately three billion years, I heartily endorse the idea of not.
Although my book, as I said, does quote one Matthew Brown and Christopher Kavanagh in it on Galileo Syndrome.
So, you know, that will have it flying off the shelves.
Helen, that thing that you should ask, and in the case with you, it's actually of interest.
Do you have any exciting projects coming up that we should know about?
Any knock-off Decoding the Guru?
Any more spinoffs of Decoding the Guru?
My next Radio 4 series is going to be about the group chat.
And various versions of it, you know, Telegram, WhatsApp, and what that's done to politics, Telegram, Discord.
Yeah, I'm hoping to go back to the days of ICM and MSN Messenger.
Yeah, right?
Remember that?
Great times.
And yeah, and it's hopefully going to be called, slightly narcissistically, Helen Lewis has left the chat.
Oh, that's great.
That's a good note for me to finish on by, in many ways, now leaving the chat.
Yeah, wow.
So this is the history of the group chat?
Is this a history of it?
It'll have a bit of history in it because it's the BBC and they really love that.
And also because the history of the kind of chat slightly mirrors my own experience on the internet.
You know, I remember being young and being on, yeah, no, ICQ, not ICM.
ICQ and then, yeah, you know, the kind of, do you remember, kids today just do not know what ASL means, you know, and that was like a great staple of my teenage years, age, sex, location.
Now, obviously, I realise that every single person asking that was a 57-year-old man in his basement.
But, you know, that was the kind of time that we lived in.
So, yeah, and I think WhatsApp for me has become the social network that I use most of.
And it's probably healthier.
So I think there's a really interesting story to be told there about...
The way that social media had a kind of brief crest and then everybody remembered that it's mental to say things in public all of the time, constantly to an audience you don't really understand who's in it.
And it might be to your six friends or it might be to everyone in the world and you'll be on Fox News Chiron the next day.
And everybody's now in the process of retreating back from those public social networks.
Yeah.
people are ending up in Facebook groups rather than just saying everything to their entire friend group.
But certainly, you know, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp has become a huge feature of parliamentary inquiries here in Britain.
It's a huge feature of the COVID inquiry because all of the government, basically the ministers were just WhatsAppping each other.
And in this very colloquial way that implied they didn't think they were being overheard.
So now everybody has learned to switch on disappearing messages.
So this will never happen again.
One brief moment, you're getting an unvarnished insight into what very quick policymaking and decision-making was like on the group chat and the dynamics that encourages, right?
So I found some academic research about the fact that you will not be surprised to know that in most group chats, particularly like parents' group chats, one or two people just absolutely dominate it.
And then there are probably like side group chats where some of the people go, oh my God, she's off on one again.
But the group dynamics are fascinating and not that much studied because it's not like Twitter mobbing, which happens right out in public where everyone can see it.
These are things that are happening in little containers
I do have to mention that somebody in this chat might have been on a Zoom call sending cheeky messages about the meeting that they were in and not...
Realizing until afterwards that all of the messages are retained by the host of the chat.
So, somebody, somebody, Helen.
Some boomer who doesn't understand how this technology works.
Well, I think it sounds bad, like, retreating to silos, but it's obviously probably a healthier thing, right, for a more natural human.
Yeah, that's how human societies have functioned.
And, you know, there's lots of really interesting discussion about the move to cities during the Industrial Revolution and how that both spurred innovation but also kind of caused cholera.
So I think having these very big groups that are way beyond anything that our brains were designed for has obviously had some pretty mind-bending effects.
And you can see why people would want to kind of retreat from that.
Well, I'm all for it.
I'm going to retreat to...
A small community or a silo as soon as I can find one that will have me.
Chris, I know, has got his little groups.
You've got your group chats and things.
I hear about them secondhand.
No one's invited me to them.
That's all right.
I need to have some space, Matt.
You know, the other thing is, one, this is just making me interested to hear your series.
We'll probably have to torment you to come on and speak at length about it.
Like, fuck, what the hell was I going to say?
It was really insightful and incredibly important.
You were just carried away by the thought that you were simply too cool from that?
And then you were like, yes, I am.
It's true.
And then you couldn't think about anything else.
Oh, I got it.
Look, it came back.
I was briefly stunned by how cool I was, but I recovered from that.
And I was just thinking that, you know, patrons, the little walled gardens that people make on locals or sub stacks.
Much the same way, there's a very low hurdle, right?
Sometimes it's only one dollar or something like that, but people feel more free to express things when there's like a little bit of a barrier, right?
And that kind of stuff.
So it speaks to what you're talking about, that people are constructing their own little ecosystems within.
Yeah, and not to go back to one of your gurus, but Nicholas Nassim Tamalev's concept of skin in the game is kind of interesting here, right?
Like, so why have trade unions, labor unions for Americans been more effective at driving workplace change than the kind of identity-based movements that you've seen on social media?
Part of it is because...
Do you have a coherent community of people in a workplace?
And also because you have to pay your dues.
You have to literally say, well, I think it's worth $30 a month for me to be part of this campaigning organisation and I have a real stake in it.
I want it to succeed rather than these much more loose affiliations.
And I think you're right.
I have lots of friends with whom I only really communicate with through WhatsApp because we live in different parts of the country or whatever it might be and we see each other once a year.
So I think that's interesting because it's a type of social media that I feel quite positive about.
Much more so than I feel about public social media.
But it comes with many of the same downsides of people who can't read tone, for example, or people accidentally posting in the wrong chat group.
Or, you know, we're going to talk about Slack and the way that that led to some of those kind of work.
You know, that it adds an element to workplace dynamics that actually some people find is really burdensome.
The idea that you have to go and perform in Slack as well as just turning up and doing your job and what things are being rewarded.
Yeah, well, I'll be delighted to talk about this more at length when I've done all the research for it.
If we were Tao Lin, we'd be saying, well, I guess this is all because we're all becoming autistic and the world is autism and that's why we're all retreating to these little spaces.
And on his feet, Tao Lin, the Red Scare.
Yeah, from Rescat.
But I think there's something about that, right, which is a very interesting thing, which we've ended up with these forms of communication that strip out all of speech, emphatic communication.
And this is the thing you were talking about in your Garometer episode about this, about the fact that if people hear you speaking, maybe they think that you're quite sarcastic, but they see your tweets, they think you're a monster.
That's true.
And it's just because Northern Ireland sarcasm doesn't really carry across in tweets.
Helen said it, not me.
Okay, I didn't mention Northern Ireland sarcasm, but it's true.
Right, but text-based communication is really hard for a lot of people who can't necessarily read nuance, and it does require a certain level of emotional intelligence.
Yeah, Chris.
I'm fine.
No, I read it.
All the people don't read mine.
Oh, right.
That's right.
It's the children who are wrong.
Yeah.
But there is also a thing that's happening at the same time, which, and I don't know how I'm going to phrase this, because as I said, I'm still working on this book about genius.
But our valorization of the tech genius has become wrapped up with a certain kind of emotional unintelligence.
And whether that's autism or diagnosably so, or whether or not that's just a normal variation in personality.
But there's a famous tweet about...
One of the guys who worked at OpenAI saying all the people at OpenAI who can make eye contact only joined in the last six months.
I'm like, that's where the business has gone wrong.
So there's this idea that if you are good at coding, you should also...
This is the sort of stereotype you have to live up to.
And it comes back to the Sam Bankman free trial.
You know, that quote I had about the way that he didn't brush his hair was a deliberate strategy to look like the guy who is so busy thinking about how he's going to revolutionize the banking system that he can't, you know...
Wear a normal suit.
So it's very interesting those two things have happened at the same time.
Yeah, but I mean, I get how they're aping the look because the look is associated with the good things.
But it's still true.
Like on a university campus, the only people wearing suits are freaking idiots.
The guy shuffling around with sandals and socks.
He's the clever one.
Or woman.
A woman wouldn't wear sandals and socks, but to be honest, you know what I'm saying.
I can actually think that's probably one of those things that is now so unfashionable that young people wear it just to show off how attractive they are.
Like, I can still be attractive even in sandals and socks.
Yeah, so you may be inadvertently right there that young women are wearing.
The sandals and the socks, I mean, I haven't been known to wear sandals and socks.
It's like a stag's antlers, you know, if you can.
The peacock's tail.
They're not just for show.
You've used the wrong analogy.
No, it's right.
When Matt gets into fights with other professors, he can kick them because his sandals and socks are less fashionable than theirs.
Why sandals and socks are functional too?
They breathe?
They breathe, they allow air circulation.
But they keep warm.
Yeah.
But it's your peacock's tail, is what you're saying.
It's your social signaling of like, I've got to an agent status where I no longer have to care about your petty dictates of wear closed-toed shoes with socks.
It's your bread ass.
Nice.
What a lovely name to end on, Chris.
Yeah, that's good.
And thank you so much, Helen, for all your time for the quiz and for enduring the lengthy recording time, as always.
So it's a pleasure and we'll follow you again soon enough.
