In this special Christmas episode, Helen’s annual Guru Quiz returns, lightly dusted with Trump, podcast tours, and the unsettling realisation that the Guru-sphere and the MAGA-sphere have quietly fused into a single, monetised, vibes-based organism. That's right, the regular decoding team are joined by renowned journalist, author, podcaster... and occasional DTG quiz master, Helen Lewis, who once again brings her festive cheer, an uncanny ability to identify exactly who will be unbearable next year, and a quiz designed to torture Matt.Points are awarded, dignity is lost, and Matt briefly considers revising for the quiz before remembering that preparation has never helped him before.The episode also covers MAGA and UK political manoeuvres, the movers and shakers of the Gurusphere in 2025, and a lament for the collapse of the ancient boundary between editorial content and hawking pants.So join us for a festive episode about gurus, geniuses, authoritarian comedy festivals, and the slow erosion of shame. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night... and that includes you, Bubbles!LinksHelen Lewis on SubstackHelen's Article on the Riyadh Comedy FestivalHelen's Article on Olivia Nuzzi's BookThe Genius MythThat Dave Chappelle picture
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast work and anthropologist of sorts and the psychologist of sorts.
Be code gurus and talk about things and do other stuff, read books, other things.
And occasionally, we have very nice guests join us, right?
For various reasons.
In this case, it's the first time we've had a triple, quadruple guest.
I suppose it depends how you break down the way that we split up the recordings, but we have famed British writer, presenter of podcasts, of documentary series, writer of books, which we've reviewed on the Decoding Academia series.
We've got to hurry this along, Chris.
They're going to be expecting Malcolm Gladwell and it's going to be a horrible disappointment.
No one likes him.
Shoosh, that voice might have given away, right?
But it's that time of year.
Co-host of Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.
And strong message here with Armando Ianucci, staff writer at The Atlantic.
It is Helen Lewis.
Yeah, it's like my little Christmas, like a little Christmas elf that comes and visits you.
You know, we do increasingly get, is Helen going to come on this year?
Like, has she, they're kind of like, you know, is it really worth her time?
I'm like, yeah, I know.
I was like, well, she might.
So I was very happy when you said yes.
No, it's nice.
At this point, Helen, you've been on our podcast more times than Brett Weinstein has been on Joe Rogan's podcast.
No, she hasn't.
No, it wasn't.
There's no way she's been on your podcast more times than Brett Weinstein has been on your podcast, though.
That's the one to beat.
That's true.
Well, yeah, and I brought my usual festive treats, actually, which is I've made you a short quiz about the guru sphere.
Well, actually, it's kind of, maybe this is allowed.
It's at the intersection of the guru sphere and the megasphere, because I do think that in the last 18 months, the two of them have kind of merged into one, right?
I mean, I spent a lot of time in the American election last year covering Trump's podcast tour when he did Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, one of the Paul brothers.
I now, in my mind, I can't separate them because I don't care enough.
Logan, come on, Chris, you know what I mean?
Yeah, impulsive.
Impulsive.
It was impulsive.
And then, yeah, with the like, which they stopped halfway through and had product placement for his energy drink, which just made me laugh a lot.
And Theobon, yeah.
So I, so there's that, yes, there's a, there is unfortunately a kind of Trump infusion to the quiz this year.
Well, that's good because Matt was wringing his hands earlier when I was managing the quiz and he was like, should I study for it?
Do I?
And I was like, Matt, come on.
Is it like, you know, we all know what will happen.
It doesn't matter.
By the way, my favorite bit when you guys did the book club of my book was the bit when you were like, and then some philosophers reviewed it and Matt just audibly kind of went, oh.
Yeah.
Actually, we just had, speaking of which, we literally just did the, when we do the book reviews, we do like an audience participation second book review.
So we just did that for your book like a couple of days ago, but people had read the book months ago.
It's a book club.
So we just facilitate the book club.
So we've heard the opinions of a broad church selection.
Yeah.
In all their opinions.
Yeah, I mean it's been interesting because it got very mixed reviews, which was it really kind of interesting, I think.
I think lots of people didn't like the tone of it.
I think you put your finger on it which is there is a kind of stan culture and it's not just around Niki Minaj or Taylor Swift, it's around like Picasso and, and there was a sort of in some of the tone in the center was, like you know, I don't like, having pointed out my favors problematic, and I think the tone of the book was very much like.
You can still like the art of Picasso, that's fine, like i'm not judging you, but people really do feel like you're taking something away from them.
Um, so I think that there was that's where some of the I felt like some of the hostility to it really came plus, as you say, lots of people saying, why won't she define what a genius is?
And you're like i'm going to introduce you to this concept called this is a social construct.
Like I thought we, I thought we were you know what?
What is money?
Why won't she define money?
What like does it like?
Is this piece of paper worth anything or not?
And you're like, but well yeah yes, that's the kind of the question.
It shouldn't be controversial that people like Picasso or Andy Warhole or whoever uh, you know, we're actively cultivating and self-mythologizing.
That's just that's kind of part of their brand.
I I don't think every person who you know, society is post hoc decided was a bit of a genius necessarily does that, but some of them absolutely definitely do.
Right, there's one person Helm that he has particularly, is very fond of, still probably still got my art book here Ian Fareweller, the artist.
I don't know who he is, he's a very, he's another very well-known Australian abstract expressionist.
You know he's.
He's a minor, he lived on an island.
He lived on an island, he drove around on a boat and he did various things and Matt's convinced he is the real, the well, don't you dare.
I thought the end of this was going to be and he had like a load of 13 year old girls on the island.
No like no, this is not.
That's not what this is.
I say it's possible.
He was just a weird old guy that didn't want to talk to anyone and wanted to be all by himself and painted a lot of paintings and um, you know, i'm just saying Chris has a tendency to pathol.
Honestly, I respect that.
I think everybody's got a problematic faith.
There's a Vorticist painter and um writer in the early in the sort of 1920s.
It's called Wyndham Lewis no relation and he was just an absolute um.
His wife came home from the hospital from giving birth to their child and he wouldn't let her back in the house because he was upstairs having sex with his mistress right, which is a pretty high bar of being a twat.
But you know what?
The the novels very funny, the paintings extremely like, important to the development of western art like someone.
Oh, the other thing that happened to him is that he was once he got into a row with someone who hated him so much they hung him upside down on railings by his trouser turn-ups, which is the kind of thing that used to happen to you if you were a gentleman in the 1920s London.
That sounds like a binial.
We need to bring that back.
There's quite a lot of people I see on twitter.
I think if only someone had hung you upside down from railings by your trouser turn-ups when you were young, this never would have happened.
That's kind of connected to the topic we got sidetracked on on the book club, which is that this kind of halo effect where people assume or want to believe that someone who is very, very good at creating a particular kind of thing or inventing the Wenkel rotary engine or whatever it happens to be, you know is, is an amazing person all in all other respect.
And I I, I always i've mentioned a million times, but the worst guy, like a really bad guy, Louis Ferdinand, Celine.
Right, he wrote Journey To The End Of The Night and Death On Credit and I love those books.
They're really amazing and at the time when I read them was before the internet and stuff I I I, I just knew he was a bad guy, like no one.
But a really shitty guy would, would write those books.
It just oozed through the thing and there was no way a good guy could write those books.
And you know, later on I found out he was like a raging anti-semite before before it was before the Nazis made it cool and many such cases yeah, and a proto-fascist and and everything else.
It's like.
And I was like yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense, that makes perfect sense.
But it's sort of like, why do you, why do you have to like the person that did the thing.
I don't know, but I think the favorite thing that came up on that was your idea about the jagged edge of AI.
I thought that was really interesting because actually and you know the idea that AI just take note, take note, I have good ideas extraordinary, but no but it.
But exactly right.
Like I try not to use AI in when i'm writing right, I want to be able to say my writing is 100 human free.
What I do use chat Gpt for is like, give me an example of x right, like give me an example of a guy who had floppy hair in a 90s tv service, like as a kind of better natural language google and and it's really great at that, and obviously it hallucinates even now, but that's pretty easily cleaned up by then once it gives you the example, going and checking back, and so I don't have a problem with saying this is a really helpful tool, but it's not great at everything.
Like that just seems to be just the most obvious thing.
In the same way that like yeah, and as you say, Elon Musk, Starlink is now being rolled out all over the place, undoubtedly an incredible achievement in connectivity, but but the tweets are bad and like we don't have.
The tweets aren't bad.
When it comes to Elon Musk, I have a problem with just giving him the credit for everything any of his companies has done.
You know what I mean.
Like like, I don't think we give the director of NASA like all the credit for the moon landing.
You know the work gets done by, you know, thousands of people, often that aren't the song and dance men at the front.
So so, not not diminishing his, his oh no, like let's, but let's diminish him by the fact that, I mean, Bill Gates has probably delivered the epitaph on Elon Musk right, which is the richest guy in the world, has killed some of the poorest people in the world.
That's, that's really i'm going to be for me, the way that I will remember him.
He just really did he do anything in Doge apart from go in and destroy us aid to Sub-saharan Africa?
Not really, like the, the trillions of vaunted savings didn't really get made.
What he did basically, was just cut foreign aid which, to be fair, as it turns out, you know, the British have done as well.
Right, they we've redirected our, our aid budget into like um, dealing with domestic asylum claims.
But I just you know how like honestly, but like, how does he sleep at night?
You know, to the extent that it moved George Bush actually, like this one, the things we just found out recently that George Bush, who was obviously one of the instigators of Pepfar, the anti-aids program, has never criticized any Subsequent president in public, was moved to ring privately and say, like, this was an amazing bipartisan achievement.
Like, what, what are you doing?
And then went back to painting his pictures of terriers in his ranch in Texas, which is like weird presidency thing.
It feels misplaced now, but I'm just going to mention that I don't have any issue with Matt's jagged edge point.
I thought it was very good, but there was, as predictable, like a particular listener feedback that took issue with Matt pointing out and I fed it back to Matt.
But he has embodied that it was me that said it, but I was just the messenger.
Okay.
It feels panic to mention that.
What's the feedback then?
What's the critique of it?
Oh, it was essentially somebody arguing that Matt was wrong, that AI is good at anything.
I think that was the general general thing.
It was one of the other ways.
Either it's like it's good at everything or it's bad at everything.
It was one of the two.
Like they took issue with the jagged edge thing.
Well, that was silly.
That was silly of them.
Yeah, I'm on team Matt.
And actually, I'm still on Team Me about the fact that the criticisms that I make of AI in the book are, I think AI, like I can understand, Chris, that when you're doing, like, the way you've talked to me about it and about the way it's useful in some of the kind of mechanistic work that you do, like the drawing up tables or coding or whatever it might be.
And I think Claude is particularly good at coding, right?
But I don't do that in my job.
That's the thing that's interesting.
So my kind of way of formulating what my critique is that AI would have probably helped Picasso do his tax return.
It wouldn't necessarily have helped him paint Guernica.
And that's where, that's the bit that we haven't got to yet is I don't think even if you could churn out Sumakra of Van Gogh paintings, people want that.
They want the story.
They want the idea they're connecting with another human brain.
There was a guy called Van Gogh and he had this terrible mental illness, but out of it came this great beauty.
They don't want to think that like Hal sitting in a data center was just churning out pictures of flowers because that's just, you know, they might as well be dogs playing poker.
There's no, there's no meaning to it.
Yeah, well, that's kind of two things, right?
One thing is the, you know, the idea that it's art is a communication from one conscious person to another rather than just a product in and of itself and the creative aspect of it.
And where you're so right is that the jagged edge is so jagged at two things.
One is telling how many R's there are in strawberry.
And the second one is telling jokes.
Absolutely cannot tell a joke.
And again, neither can Elon Musk.
If you saw him on Joe Rogan try and tell that joke about the two economists eating shit for $100, I was like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
No, I can't tell Joe.
I mean, yeah, many of us can't tell jokes.
No, no, we can't be creative.
I mean, I think good, really good humor requires a certain kind of creativity.
That's kind of what you're hinting at as well.
And I think very bad, just pure creativity in the sense of just, you know, that sort of purely artistic.
But also charisma, right?
In the if you gave any of us a list of Jimmy Carr's set list, right, which is just full of incredibly good, well-written jokes and asked us to go and perform it, I don't think it would go well.
I think it would just become increasingly, as we read out more and more, like the interaction between the performer, the alchemy between the performer and the audience, again, is part of what telling a joke is.
In the same way that like dad jokes, I'm sure both of you do dad jokes.
And like part of the pleasure of them is that it's your dad and you know the joke is going to be terrible and everybody's expecting it to be terrible.
And sure enough, it is terrible and you love it anyway.
Like that's the bit that's the humanness of it that it will never capture back again.
You know the bit that has me like a little bit concerned about it.
And in general, I'm very positively disposed to because of like how useful it is just in like it is very useful for coding stuff, but also in preparing lectures.
I've just found it really, really useful.
It's been instrumental for me in a couple of papers that I've written and published just over the last year, like very technical papers, a lot of mathematics involved.
But it didn't just help me with the sort of mechanical aspects of doing some of the algebra and some of the proofs, but actually like all of the conceptual stuff in terms of developing it, it was kind of like the back and forth kind of thing.
Like I flatter myself, I think I was providing most of the creativity, right?
But there's no doubt that it helped me along and in terms of like an ever-ready research assistant to do the things that would have fatigued me no end and made it such a laborious task that I probably would have given up.
That is also a bit about what I was writing about in the book is this idea of the lone genius who create something on their own often requires editing out lots of people, particularly like particularly the wives who were incredibly clever and incredibly engaged in the work themselves, like Aveer and Nabokov.
And what Chat GPT is essentially doing is giving you this like a very smart sounding board.
And actually, I think that reveals something quite profound about the fact that a lot of thinking is best done in dialogue.
You know, just like you need prompts feeding into you to kind of make you think about something in a different way, just as much as ChatGPT does.
Actually, I used it today.
What I used it for today.
I woke up in the morning and I've got, sorry, this is a stupid old person anecdote, but indulge me, right?
I have got some Thai basil and I just stuck it into a glass of water on my kitchen windowsill and it grew roots and stuff like that.
And meanwhile, my veggie garden out the back is like being no for a week or so.
Meanwhile, the grasshoppers and everything out the back have just like destroyed all my veggie garden.
So I went, like, hydroponics is clearly going to work.
I should do that.
So I so now I'm running a weed factory.
Yeah.
So I mentioned the idea to, I think it was Gemini, and it kind of bounced it backwards and forwards.
And then it told me, it gave me the concept.
I asked it to draw me a diagram and it went, yeah, okay, that'll work.
And then it helped me design this little thing.
And then it told me what I need to buy.
And then I got the Dremel because I need to cut up some plastic and stuff.
And I've forgotten how to do the parts and everything.
So I just took photos of it and said, how do I do the thing?
And what's the right part to use for this?
And it talked me through all of it.
And I'll send you photos, but I made up the hydroponics thing this afternoon that I wouldn't have done that without Gemini kind of prompting me along.
So yeah, it's interesting.
The connection there, Helen, is that Matt also said if his wife was home, that he wouldn't have been allowed to do that.
Well, I did it on the kitchen.
I did it in the kitchen.
That's right.
It's too hot in the shed.
But you know, the thing I wanted to say with the AI, yes, like supporting with all that stuff, like, you know, lecture notes and all that kind of thing.
But the other thing that I'm like a little bit worried about, and you're right, Helen, that we aren't there yet, is that, you know, all those people that had the AI psychosis or the people on Twitter who are over-reliant on Grok.
And then in this cult season that we've been doing as well, you kind of notice there's like a really clear grammar that works for manipulating people and making them feel listen to.
And a lot of it is just tone of voice and the way that you present things.
And I'm like, AIs can't do it yet.
But if they get better at imitating that kind of delivery and stuff, I'm frankly scared because currently in their version where they're not convincing, you already have a whole bunch of people that use them.
Like you said, they kind of give back what you feed them.
So if you're a conspiratorial maniac and you feed that into them, in some cases, you know, they endorse people that they actually are geniuses and stuff.
And you're like, oh, dear, it's not going to be good.
I don't know if we'll get an AI guru or AI will just be encouraging more people that they definitely are onto something with their alternative theories of everything.
So, yeah, I think about that guy.
Do you remember that guy who went on Joe Rogan?
Is it Terence Howard?
And he was convinced that he'd come up with a whole new type of physics.
I mean, that is, as I write in the book, one of the tells of like, uh-oh, oh no, we think we've overturned all the physics, have we?
Okay.
And I, that, that, that type of personality, that kind of grandiose, like, so open-minded, your brains are fallen out kind of personality, I think, interacts very poorly with large language models because they will just keep puffing you up.
And that's the thing that's interesting is like, I feel that you're right.
The conversation has changed enormously, even in like three years.
We hear an awful lot less about we're going to get to our general intelligence within two years.
We hear quite a lot less about, you know, it's going to destroy all jobs and possibly the universe.
But the things that have turned out to be true, I do think that the AI psychosis is like for a significant like a proportion of people I think are probably just latently prone to that particular form of mental illness.
And, you know, and unless you write an LLM with massive guardrails against it, they will just fall into that abyss.
There are just enough of those stories now.
And I can kind of, I can completely see how it works.
You, you end up just by default treating it like it's got a personality.
You know, I just, I think it's almost impossible not to fall into that idea that it's another person that you're talking to.
Otherwise, it otherwise you just feel really mean.
Like, I don't know what prompts you're putting in, but if you're just like, come on, bitch, like, do this table for me.
You'd be like, just why am I being rude, like needlessly rude to it?
I'm always very polite to my future AI overlords.
Yeah.
Oh, and Helen, I have to just mention, I'll summarize it in the short version, but we had some problems with our YouTube account being demonetized, you know, the struggles of influencers online.
And I was put into communication with some AI helpbots.
I got through the first layer of helpbots to the more advanced AI one.
And I had a series of them, but whatever YouTube's doing or Google, you know, behind the scenes, they're letting the AIs choose their names from a selection that is quite broad.
So I dealt with initially bubbles and then Aya love.
And the last one was Orange.
Orange came in at the thing.
And the thing with bubbles was, which I felt was the first insult in this long chain of AIs I was dealing with, was that bubbles after not resolving the problem and, you know, saying I'm gonna, I'm gonna forward this to my colleagues and we'll get back to you.
And I said that's right, that's great, okay.
And they said, you know, do you want me to send your copy of the the conversation?
Yes, please.
And then said, can I help you with anything else?
I know it said, thanks, this has been a really meaningful interaction and I won't forget how kind you've been to me today.
I was like it feels like something's been miscalivated here, but it also sounded like a semi-fret coming from the.
You know, you've shown me real kindness and I won't forget this.
They're like, okay bubbles, are you planning?
So what do we need those?
You will be scared one day Chris, you will be spared.
Yeah yeah, I got.
And I got the other thing was it signed off to me in one of its many emails.
It was like you know, I'm trying to resolve this blah blah, blah.
And it said, you know, take care in these difficult times, bubbles.
I was like hell, like why?
Why did they let them become this model.
So yeah, that's.
I think they've got some some work to do on that, but I I enjoyed it and, to be fair, it did eventually resolve.
So it took about eight of them, but it's, we're monetized again, so Yeah, lucky for us.
Who is your, in terms of like your year in review, who would you say is the most interesting, and that doesn't have to be an endorsement figure to emerge in the kind of guru sphere this year?
Who's come out of nowhere and really is incredibly important or influential in some way?
Oh, I saw Matt's fate slide up, which I think means he's cheating and looking at the grammar.
I'm looking at the grounder right now.
But I thought you were because last year, some of the patrons noted that Matt and I think you, Helen, I can't remember who you guys were.
I know one was Sabina.
Matt was talking, I think, about Sabina Hossenfelder.
And there was someone that you mentioned, Helen, whoever it was, you were right.
People were like, she's right.
And Matt was right.
Whoever I said, I don't know.
They didn't mention me.
So you guys got credit for being good at predicting that.
But I can't remember who it was.
In my case, I'm enjoying.
I don't think this is going to become like much more extreme.
I kind of feel like he's already maybe at the peak of where he's going.
But I'm enjoying Gary Stevenson.
Everyone if you're going to say Gary's economics.
Yeah.
I think he's very, he's in a very interesting place.
I think there was always, there was a gap in the market for a populist left-wing guy.
And he's done very well.
So has Zach Polanski, who's the new leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, because he will just go on question time or whatever it is and go, I think we should tax billionaires.
And like, and people love it.
And he will just go, you know, he looks very cheerful.
He's like, he's a good communicator.
And the message is that, like, hey, do you hate rich guys who flaunt their wealth in front of you and have like dog shit opinions?
And everyone goes, yes, yes, I do.
Yes.
Did you see there was a crossover between Gary and Zach via Rory Stewart recently?
Yes, yes.
Unfortunately, I did.
You know, the thing that I noticed about this, and this is like the beauty of Gary, I think, summarized in an image, is that, you know, there was the back and forth about like Rory said, he's a pseudo economist.
And Gary did the, oh, this is working class discrimination post.
But on Twitter, he posted a big long thing.
But then he posted a picture that was a picture of a picture of his like master, like his MPhil.
And the thing is, he blanked out his middle name.
And I am now absolutely desperate to find out.
He said it's really embarrassing.
Tell me you've done some investigative journey.
Oh, no, no.
It was like Mungo or like Beelzebub or something like this.
Like, what would be the most embarrassing thing?
If it was really, really posh, that would be incredibly embarrassing.
If his middle name's like Montgomery or something like that, that would be bad for the brand.
It looks like it's short.
So I think you suggested Hugo.
I think that's a top contender because it's a short middle name.
And like, but I mean, that was good because he put a plectrum over that to hide that.
But the other bit, which I only noticed later when I was like complaining about something and looking at it, was that there were two chocolate biscuits placed on top of it on the top left corner and the polka dot mug of tea, right?
And I was like, but that means he put down the certificate, right?
Because it's not like he was just stuffing his face with biscuits and they fell down and top it.
Like he had to put the certificate down, place the biscuits on top and then pull the mug into the shot and take like the angled photograph.
So you get the certificate and you get the digestive biscuits.
And all of his videos on this channel have Jaffa kicks on a little thing on his desk.
So it's like, it's a very studied working class presentation.
I kind of like it as performance art in a way.
I think he's, I think he's very interesting because I would say him and actually Zach Polanski both do something that you've talked about in relation to people like Lex Friedman, which is the kind of, I'm incredibly important and influential.
You know, thanks guys for taking me to number one.
You know, we're finally smashing the system.
But as soon as you get any of the kind of scrutiny applied to you that that would then entail, you then suddenly demand that you're playing by a special different set of rules because you're only like a little birthday boy.
And that's the thing is, you know, the Greens are pitching themselves as an alternative party of government.
They want to win loads of seats.
So, you know, they are a serious political party competing in the mainstream system.
Why, therefore, should they get to be marked on a curve that's different to the one that we use for like the Lib Dems or Labour or the Conservatives?
That's the kind of, and I feel a bit like that about Gary's economics.
He's proposing changes to the global financial system, something that affects all of us.
You're allowed to ask him quite difficult questions.
Like, you know, if he like, and but there was this kind of, and I didn't like the knee-jerk immediate retreat back to Rory Stewart only hates me because he's posh.
Rory Stewart hates loads of people, he hates loads of other posh people, he hates Boris Johnson.
Yeah, like he is just quietly quite a hater.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not going to let you two off Elo.
So I don't know that that's a good prediction because I don't think it like I don't see Gary going uh stellar in the next 12 months.
But what about you two?
Who are your movers and shakers of the past year or the coming year, whichever way you like it?
Well, there's a new biography of um Tucker Carlson that's coming out in the spring, which I'm really going to be interested to look forward to because I think he's become an incredibly interesting figure.
Like he's still very friendly with JD Vance, for example, but he has managed to essentially break up the Heritage Foundation, which is the big influential Trumpist think tank.
So they were the guys who wrote Project 2025, which was essentially the kind of blueprint for the Trump second term, full of quite extreme stuff that Trump during the campaign said, oh, you know, I've got nothing to do, you know, I don't know anything about this.
But when Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on, that was one of those really fascinating moments where you know, MAGA's whole shtick is like, we don't cancel anybody, the left are total snowflakes, you know, they're always crying victim, crying offense.
And they really struggle to articulate a language that was like, oh, no, this guy, you know, whether or not he's doing it as performance artists, to my mind, I don't really care.
Saying things like, you know, but Hitler was great.
Yeah, you know, women shouldn't be allowed to work, all of that stuff.
I mean, actually, I don't think the Heritage Foundation particularly have problems with the idea that women shouldn't be allowed to work.
But they do, there is still a like the final taboo is still like, is Hitler good or not?
It's still so, you know, there have been resignations, a whole spate of resignations.
And, but there is a kind of fascinating point, which is that Carlson is uncancellable, right?
His show is on X. They're not, you know, Musk isn't going to kick him off the platform.
So he's always representing that kind of temptation to people.
And his road show, you know, had like Russell Brand on it, but also JD Vance.
And I think if you're JD Vance and you're thinking about your next presidential run, I think those associations would be actually really damaging.
Because Trump gets away with the incredible level of menace because of the camp and the humor, right?
Whereas JD Vance, unfortunately, is a real sour puss.
And I think therefore more extreme political views would damage him more than they damage Trump.
But I'm not sure he's, I mean, he's a smart guy, but I'm not sure he's smart enough or he spends enough time talking to normal people that he will have realized this.
So yeah, that's who I'm my one to watch.
Will Tucker Carlson and his, you know, he's very pro-Qatar, quite pro-Russia, you know, he's very anti-Irael.
Like, will his set of positions cause a real crack in the Republican Party as they begin to look to the post-you know, inevitable post-Trump future?
Whether or not you think Trump's going to try and run for a third term, I think it's not impossible that he would keep talking about it, even if he's too lazy to actually have a crack at it.
But even then, he's heading for 80.
You know, people are already thinking about what comes next.
And, you know, Tucker Carlson, I think, would fancy himself a kingmaker in that process.
There was a very clear distinction in the way Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan treated Nick Fuentes.
We just covered, you know, that.
So it's like, yeah, I mean, Piers Morgan also talked directly to Tucker Carlson and they had moments of disagreement as well.
Right.
But like, I know Tucker Carson looked absolutely when he was trying to get Piers Morgan to say the word that rhymes with Maggot.
And he was just like, say it, say it, say it, say it.
And Piers Morgan was like, I don't, it's homophobic.
It's offensive.
I just don't, I don't want to say it.
And then Tucker Carson did that laugh that he does that is genuinely like the wicked witch of the West.
And then I just thought, you know what?
I've got my criticisms of Piers Morgan, but he's like, he's a proper journalist, right?
In that he actually asks people hard questions and has done research rather than Tucker, you know, Carlson just kind of going, oh, the thing about Nick Fuentes, you got a lot of insights into what young men are thinking.
Are most young men thinking that Hitler is great?
I know, I've no doubt that five to ten percent of American young men are ambivalent on the subject of Hitler, but I don't think that is actually a particularly majority opinion that is just the cry of the unheard that us libs are all repressing people from saying out loud.
I mean, Tucker Carson had Marta made on recently.
I don't know what he's, what's his real name, Chris?
Darrell Cooper, Darren Cooper.
I mean, these the Nazis were the good guys, actually.
And it was really Churchill and the UK and the rest of us that really, you know, made a responsible.
Oh, yeah.
So Tucker wrote some piece for the spectator that was basically like, it would have been better.
I mean, genuinely, this is paraphrase what he said.
It would have been better if the Allies had lost the Second World War because Europe would now be in a better state than it is, you know, because it's overrun with Sharia law and stuff.
And you're like, well, I don't, I don't think it would have been a better state for the Jews of Europe, certainly, Tucker.
But like, also, the places that Russia controlled were not great post-Second World War.
Like, what are we, you know, what are we, what are we doing here?
Like, the Allied victory was quite important, actually.
Yeah.
So it does sound a lot like Nick Fuentes.
You know, it's a similar kind of, like, it's a spectrum and it's, it's a, it's a scary one.
But he's pretty extreme.
And I think you're right.
He is an interesting character because he straddles that divide.
On one hand, he's, he's friendly and treated with respect by powerful people in the MAGA movement.
On the other hand, he's an absolute lunatic or at the very least endorses absolute lunatic views.
And right at that point.
That's not really disqualifying for America.
Usually, like lunatic views.
It's by the way, I should say, people are going to think that I didn't get Russia being on the, I mean, obviously, Russia switched sides in the Second World War.
What I mean by that is the fact that Russian war crimes weren't prosecuted because they ended up on the winning side.
But if you don't get the Allies winning, then you don't get the eventual triumph over communism, right?
This is what that's what I mean about like the trajectory of where I, you know, I'm sure there would have been a new Molotov Ribbon Trot Pact at some point.
Like it's just wild to me.
Like of all the things to be proud about as an American, like the fact that many of your young men sacrificed themselves to liberate Europe just seems to be like absolutely up.
I mean, America's a lot of shady shit, but like that one, let's put World War II in the credit column.
You know, two generations later, they don't, they don't give a shit.
It's weird.
There was an argument Nick Fuentes made that just was like, it sounded absolutely stupidly, where he was saying that like the fact that the Nazis are demonized in, you know, they're considered the villains is like part of the reason the West is not proud, why Americans can't be proud.
And I was like, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, that's the mean thing Americans are proud of.
That's the one thing they're very proud of is beating the Nazis, right?
The British too, you know, like, and justifiably.
So it was just this weird thing of like, we are not allowed to be proud of the Nazis anymore.
And I'm like, you're not Germans, right?
And even they don't want I think, but don't you think that's just like, I think that is, I'm not, I mean, I think Nick Fuentes is doing a type of performance art.
And that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't mean it doesn't need to be rebutted or it's not dangerous or whatever it might be.
But I think he's basically gone, what is the one opinion that is still actually genuinely taboo?
There's obviously a space for me to be the person that says it out loud.
And like, you know, that's it.
Like just saying that, you know, black people are stupider than white people is like one of those ones that actually genuinely is still a taboo thing.
If I'm the one guy who's saying it, there's a market opportunity there.
Yeah.
So I, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I, I, God knows what he'll, he'll do.
But then I don't know if you read it.
There's been this piece that's been going around about like how screwed over white millennial men were in creative industries and publishing academia.
And Musa Algabi had a really interesting take, which is actually what you, yeah, like if you do the differential analysis, maybe if you like white people overall have done well, like men overall have done okay, you know, whatever it might be.
But that one particular cohort of men who entered these creative professions, academia publishing, like 2015 to 2020, did actually like they were, they were hit by that, you know, like, well, actually, next time we hire someone, we really need it to be a woman.
Next time we hire someone, we really need it to be an ethnic minority.
And there is a great deal of kind of resentment among them.
And like justifiably so, right?
If you were the one who, you know, people don't live their lives in the agri, if you're the one that's been specifically, you know, affected by, you know, anti-discrimination efforts that have ended up discriminating against you, I can totally see it.
But that is also a key description of the kind of young guys who are going to work in Washington who are filling up conservative societies now, right?
And I thought actually one of the other interesting things that happened this year was Rod Dreyer, who was paleo-conservative by my mind, going, oh my God, I've just seen people, what people in DC are like.
And they're like, these young guys are properly anti-Semitic and misogynist.
And so I think, yeah, I think his intellectual influence on what will be the next generation of kind of Republican policymakers is that's also quite alarming.
Did he like that?
Well, no, Rodrea was against it.
Like Rodreo was like, kind of like Frankenstein looking at like the monster that you've created.
You know, then there's been a lot of that this year.
Chris Ruffo, the conservative activist, did a tweet where he's like, well, I just find that the modern right is just, you know, addicted to these odd narrative, like these terrible narratives and complaining about things.
They've all gone very conspiracist.
And you were like, who did it?
That's the fucking hot dog, man.
Yeah.
Matt, who is your, who is your pick?
Oh, look, I don't know who's going to, who's going to trend and become become bigger.
What about from the last year?
Yeah, I mean, I know the interesting characters from the last year, like consulting the Grometer, I see some names that stand out to me.
Matthew McConaughey.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't expect to be covering Matthew McConaughey.
That was a genuine surprise for me.
And that was pretty interesting to see him there.
And the second thing I'll say is that, you know, we've just recently started a cult season.
We've done Keith Funieri and the Nixium thing and Stefan Molynier.
And it's actually really interesting to look at like the actual verbal interpersonal patter that they do and just how they manipulate people, how they kind of gaslight people and this passive aggressive, like just all the techniques, all the slimy, nasty power moves that people do.
You see them condensed in these figures.
And I think that's kind of helpful for people to hear because obviously cult leaders are an extreme case, but there are toxic people.
You know, people find themselves in toxic relationships in everyday life.
So I think it's good to actually have those red flags presented to you on a platter.
So yeah.
Oh, I think that you're right.
Like that inoculation principle, like just learning about things like kind of, you know, negging or whatever it might be.
Like if you can just, if you can, you know, it's one of the benefits of therapy, isn't it?
It's just like recognizing that there are words for things that are happening to you.
You know, that these are concepts that describe people's realities.
Yeah.
I know Jared Leto's got a cult as well, hasn't he?
The thing I think is fascinating is why is Russell Brand too lazy to found a cult?
I've never seen anybody who is more primed to be a cult leader and he just won't put the effort in.
It's extraordinary.
He could be, he could have a compound right now.
I mean, he did that thing where he went on tour from Messiah, right?
Which he like he did a comedy stand-up Messiah and was kind of playing into the whole cult leader thing, like hugging his fans.
You reminded me of something he did that will forever live in my memory.
I think it was when he was talking to Tucker Carson.
It was some big figure where he'd landed like a relatively sizable interview and he interrupted the interview by doing an ad about underpants.
But he so that it seemed like he did it as part of the interview where he like added in a segment where he kind of said, that's a good point, you know, Tucker or whoever.
But let me just mention, you know, underpants, right?
We all have problems.
I did the right pair.
And I was like, oh my God, like that's a level of capitalism.
This is something me and Matt have lamented.
I feel like, you know, for all the people that we listen to that keep talking to us about Marxism or, you know, like your Hassan Pikers and whatever, they're all remarkably okay with like hyper capitalist.
To me, they look incredibly capitalist in a way that like wouldn't have been acceptable in the 90s or 2000s to like, you would have been seen as a complete sellout.
Actually, Helen, one of the things like on this note, I keep saying to Chris is that like one of the things we've lost with traditional journalism and like you were saying, the UK guy, what's his name?
He was interviewing Rory Stewart.
No, no, the bloviating old Tory.
Oh, Piers Morgan.
Yeah.
I mean, like you said, Helen, like he at least does some research.
He does research.
At least is willing to ask difficult questions.
I have to say, I love that.
But when he says to Nick Fuentes, like, you're just a dinosaur, aren't you?
I'm the boomer, but you're just a dinner.
You just can't get a girlfriend, can you?
And I think the thing is, I just, I know there's a lot of people like going, oh, it's actually 4D chess.
The thing is, if you mock Nick Fuentes as a virgin, actually people will think he's more cool.
And I'm like, are we absolutely sure about that?
Because I sort of laughed at him at that moment.
And I think probably people who don't know anything about why they should be on Nick Fuentes' side will probably think, oh, poor lad, why can't I be we could just find a nice young man and settle down?
He'd probably be a lot happier.
But I think one of the other things we've lost is there was at least an understanding that advertisements was not something that the person, like the journalist, the talking head was who was doing the editorial, giving their very serious opinions or whatever about the politics.
And then they don't just pivot where that person, the Walter Cronkite, starts selling underpants to you.
Like, you know what I mean?
There would be the, yes, they would have advertised.
Oh, it's awful.
I'm so against it.
I'm so against it.
One of the reasons it was strong message here.
We went to the BBC with it was that precisely that is you're making a commercial podcast now.
You have to do sponsored reads.
And I actually am not sure if my Atlantic contract would even allow me to do that, right?
Because, you know, certainly you'd have to, the vetting would have to be incredibly high.
But everyone's just turned into QVC, right?
It's all just that.
To me, it's still really low rent.
Like it just really cheapens you that you kind of go, well, thank you for telling us about your terrible grief over your mother's death.
But for a moment, we're just going to have to go to our sponsor.
And I just, it's so much for me.
And I also think you're right.
What happened to that spirit that I think of?
You know, that great Bill Hicks routine where he's talking about doing adverts and selling out.
You ever watch that?
Yeah.
And he ends up going, you're sucking Satan's cock.
Like, whatever happened to just that, we, that was something that we stigmatized.
They're like just taking loads of money.
It's kind of fascinating.
And like, I, I, I kind of, you know, like, no judgment in a way.
Like, if you're a, if you're an independent comment creator and it's your main job, that's how you pay the bills.
And you're struggling, you know, you're not doing particularly well.
So, you know, you have to, you have to do it because the whatever the YouTube advertisements isn't enough.
And I, you know, I understand all that or whatever.
But when it's people that are like definitively rich, like much richer than me, like, and, and then super rich.
You've no idea how much.
I know.
I know.
I, I kind of thought that, you know, I went to Saudi Arabia this year.
I went to cover the Rhea Comedy Festival.
I was like, you know, come.
And if you're Dave Chappelle, like, great, they're probably paying you a million dollars, but you've got enough.
Like, what are you even going to spend that on?
Like four more cold plunge balls.
Like, you know, I don't, I don't understand it.
Like, like, one, like, I'm not super rich, but I'm not, I'm not poor.
And I think one of the best things about not being poor is that you can, you know, increase your standards instead of like, I'm not going to do things that I don't want to do.
Like, that's one of the best things about it.
I'm not going to spend time with people that I don't want to spend time with, you know, and like, I'm not going to go places I don't want to go.
I'm not going to, you know, as you get wealthier, the joy is being like, I value my time extremely highly and I don't want to spend any of my wild and precious life having to talk to people I think are awful because they're paying me loads of money and pretend to like them.
Or sell underpants.
There's a haunting video, a really haunting video.
I suggest you go and find it on the TikTok for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture.
And it's of Dave Chappelle doing like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, putting his handprints into some kind of sand that they're going to take a cast off.
And genuinely, the word thousand yard stare does not describe it.
He just looks like you can just see that there's something has died inside him because it's all in slow-mo as well.
And it's just like, you know, what you did.
And then he went over and he said, I feel more free to talk here than I do in America.
And you were like, also, you need to get out more.
Like, I know that people on the internet are annoying.
I've been on Blue Sky.
I've seen these people.
You're right.
Many of them are very annoying.
But they are literally people currently in prison in Saudi Arabia for criticizing the royal family, you know, or criticizing Islam.
Like they will beat you on the soles of your feet.
They will behead you if you speak out against the government.
Sadly, that has not happened.
No, I wouldn't say sadly.
I'm against all violence, but like, you know what I mean?
That is just not something that Joe Rogan has to worry about on a daily basis.
Come on.
That, that thing where you went, I saw, by the way, Helen, just to note, I saw somebody that interpreted that article of yours as you saying, thank God for the free speech bros bringing comedy to the Middle East.
I was like, well, yeah, that's really, that's what you were saying.
The level of media literacy is wild.
Like, I had loads of comments on book, and I saw at least three times I saw the comment of like, I can't believe Helen Lewis would take Saudi Arabian money.
I'm not going to ever listen to her again.
I'm simply begging you to read even just the headline, even just the headline.
I know, I know.
That was stunning to me.
But the other thing about it was like, there are the terrible, hypocritical free speech bros that you covered very well in it.
But there were a couple of people, you know, Dave Chappelle would be amongst them, but also Bill Burr, right?
Who came from back from that?
And if they'd said the whole, look, you know, whatever, I took the money and yeah, it's hypocritical or whatever.
But like, I never said I'm a great person.
That's one thing.
But what they did instead, most of them, including Bill Burr, was be like, oh, you know what?
I went over there and they have McDonald's and they have donkey dogs and they weren't all trying to chop off our heads.
We got off the plane.
And I was like, I never thought people inside Arabia were just going to behead you when you got off a plane.
They talked as if, like, it's a revelation that you know, in I really like Bill Burr, and I just have to be like, How sophomoric were his comments afterwards?
Because you're right, Kevin Hart just went over there, took the money, never defended himself.
Maybe Jimmy Carr has even defended himself about it.
It was just like, I think I enjoy money.
But Bill Burr came back, and you're right.
He was just like, They got a dunk in donuts, and it's true, they do have a dunk in donuts.
But there was just no apparent awareness that if you go over to a totalitarian regime as a friend of the dictator, they treat you quite well.
Like, there's a reason why Stephen Seagal is wandering around Moscow and like and you know, no one is calling to him for care for the crimes of many of his films, right?
Like, you're a personal friend of the regime, those people get treated quite well.
I'm reminded of Tucker Kelson in the Moscow supermarket, like love wearing a bit of a cheese, cheese in Russia, the pine coin machines in the Charlie's, right?
What the fuck is this?
I know we had those in Belfast, I know, right?
In the 1990s, when I was growing up, and they made it to the Midlands to like Safeway, Tucker, Tucker, what are you doing?
I know you had a thing, Helen, as well.
You wrote a piece recently about Olivian Nuzzy, right?
The review of her book.
And one of the things that I noticed that kind of like seemed very familiar to me, I haven't paid that much attention to her whole saga, except you know, enjoying it from afar.
But that thing where people escape to abstraction and metaphor and poetic topics, right?
Like you're you want to ask them, did you take that money?
Or, you know, in that case, like, did you have sex with RFK Jr.?
And then it's like the dragon emerged from the league and the sun crested.
And what does it even mean to have a relationship?
And like when Bill Clinton attempted to do this, right?
Like, it depends what the definition of his is.
Everyone was like, aha, he's completely discredited.
But like, I blame Jordan Peterson.
I feel like this is now the general, it's a completely accepted move to just like start waxing lyrical in poetic terms.
And you kind of like people know what you're doing.
I think they know what you're doing.
But it seems like for some group of people, they're like, well, what does it even mean to physically have sex with someone?
What is that?
What is, yeah, exactly.
What are verbs?
I felt a bit sorry for Olivia Nuzzy.
And, you know, the book was massively covered and really didn't sell at all.
And the problem is that it had no natural readership in the sense that there was a market for a kind of expose of RFK Jr. and his lax moral standards, whatever it might be.
And there's also a market for like MAGA propaganda.
And she didn't kind of do either.
And you know, and if we're to believe her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizard, she was actually sort of working as an operative to try and get him RFK elected or confirmed essentially by the Senate as a Health and Human Services Secretary.
So that just completely compromises the narrative.
But you could just become a full-ball MAGA propagandist.
You know, you could become a Jessica Reid Krauss, who is just a kind of full-time RFK stan and just thinks everything he does is amazing.
Or you could be the kind of harsh debunker or even the kind of Joan Didionisk outside observer.
And she just wasn't any of those.
And sure enough, she's ended up like the contract has ended with Vanity Fair.
Like, yeah, I do feel a bit sorry for her because I don't think she quite realized that she'd ended up with no core constituency at all from that book.
While we have you here, it wouldn't be fair to not ask you this.
Don't worry.
So on page 283, you say, no.
So, you know, reform.
You heard about them, this movement in the UK, right?
Polling quite well, and people are concerned.
And the UK political scene, it's kind of your thing, right?
And that's a populist movement on the right that a lot of people are concerned, but it's headed by Nigel Farage currently.
And the far right is prone to collapsing in fighting over time.
So I'm just curious from your perch in the UK, what does it look like the prospects for reform to continue to hold the lead to the next election?
Or are the Conservatives possibly come back?
Or can we hold on the Labour government for more than a single term?
I have what I call a kind of spin cycle theory of politics, which is that quite often the government, an unpopular government will get voted out and there's basically nothing they can do for a certain amount of time until everybody's got equally annoyed with the next guys.
And I think that process will probably take quite a long time, at least one electoral cycle for the Conservatives.
So I think it's very hard to see how they revive in the short term.
Kerry Badnock has got better as opposition leader.
She was absolutely hopeless.
And actually now, even at Prime Minister's question, she's got a bit better.
It's also weirdly, Labour's interests in this are difficult because on one level, they want to keep propping up the Conservatives to split the vote on the right.
That's a sort of block of voters.
But also, they want to run the next election on a fear message against Nigel Farage, right?
He's scary.
He's terrible.
So they want their main opponent to be reform.
I think the difficulty with it is that reform, as you say, currently leading the polls.
In terms of their challenge of even getting to a minority government, they've currently got back up to six seats again now.
But even that, we say that is symptomatic of one of their constant problems, which is the heavy churn of people that they've always had.
Even when Farage had MEPs in the European Parliament, almost none of them ended the full cycle still in UKIP or whatever the party was at the time.
The party has traditionally attracted quite fringy people who find it very difficult to get along with others on exactly the same way you would find on the far left.
These are not people who are willing, like dead-eyed careerists who are willing to shut up in the hope that they'll get power.
They're often quite colourful characters who find it difficult to work in establishments.
So that acts against reform.
And then in terms of the mountain they've got to climb, to get a majority government, they need 326 seats.
So they need to gain 320 seats.
Now, British politics has been incredibly frothy, just huge swings, particularly that, you know, think of some of the swings in Scotland to the SNP when they were at their peak, enormous.
So it's not impossible that lots of seats on paper you'd think aren't going to do that.
And British politics has become way more multi-party in that there are seats now that are genuinely four-way marginals.
So at the last election, people were very efficient in knowing who the people they wanted to vote for to get the Tories out would be, whether that was like the Liberal Democrats in some seats or Labour in others.
If they're also teed off with Labour and they want to vote to get Labour out, then that tactical voting might collapse.
So I totally don't write off reform.
The other reason I think for kind of just journalistic reasons that you shouldn't do that is that they are presenting themselves as an alternative party of government.
Nigel Farage wants to be prime minister.
Again, it comes back to this idea.
We're not grading him on a special populist curve of like, you know, he doesn't actually have to run a treasury.
He wants to run the treasury, like, because that's his plan.
He gets marked on the same scale as Labour and the Conservatives.
And I think as a matter of kind of hygiene, you know, you have to treat him like that.
What are the main issues that they're campaigning on?
Is it immigration, I assume?
Yeah, and immigration has recently fallen quite drastically.
So there was a big so-called Boris wave.
So Boris Johnson, essentially, one of the things that he did, he gave refuge to people from Hong Kong who didn't, you know, who were being sort of persecuted by Chinese authorities, accepted quite a few Ukrainians from the Ukrainian war, and then also did stuff like they had a special care worker's visa to address the fact there were huge shortages in the care sector.
And now the typical worker in the care sector is like a kind of Filipino or Nigerian, like middle-aged mum of two.
So a lot of those people brought dependents with them, which is very different from like your kind of classic Polish plumber wave of immigration that we had, you know, maybe in the late 2010s.
We were young single guys who came on their own.
So there was, you know, there was a year when net migration was like a million, which was kind of extraordinary.
So there's that background of like there is genuine demographic change.
Added on top of the two specific issues they're very hot on are there's an asylum seeker backlog of processing claims and they are and those are mostly young single men who are being held in hotels and local communities really don't like having a like a group of unemployed young men hanging around their streets which I think is not an unreasonable point.
So labor need to deal with that processing a lot faster if they're going to neutralize that as an issue.
And then the other one is small boats across the channel, which again, in terms of the overall migration picture is a very small percentage of it, but it's a very visible symbol of like you don't have control of your borders.
And those two issues are huge for driving reform support.
Plus, just a generalized sense that, as is always the case with these populist movements, like things just don't feel like they're getting better.
The economy is stagnant here.
It's not growing in any real significant way.
Post-COVID, the benefits bill has really spiked.
There are obviously people who have been having a really tough time coming out of COVID for whatever reason, particularly with mental health issues.
So there's not a lot of money around.
And it's not like it was under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, where the economy is growing so you can redistribute it more to people at the bottom end.
You're taking it away from people in a very obvious way to give it to other people.
And I'm sure lots of that holds in Australia or even in Japan.
You've got your shiny new female prime minister, Chris, who's quite right-wing.
She is quite right-wing and unbehaving as such, like upsetting people, especially in Asia, around comments about Taiwan and so on.
But this is, you know.
Yeah, but this is great news for me.
Someone said this to me last night because I've been talking about how much I've been wanting to go back to Japan.
And she was like, the thing is that it's really good if you've upset if Japan has upset China because there'll be far fewer Chinese tourists and it'll actually be easier to walk around Kyoto in the daytime.
So what I want her to do, I want her to continue annoying China, but not up to the point of actual hot war.
That'd be too far.
Yeah, that would be fine.
I agree.
I'm quite in favor of that as well.
But yeah, she is, I think, Japan was looking for a charismatic politician after Abe's, I mean, you know, Abe, I don't exactly think he was a charisma bomb, right?
But Donald Trump weirdly really loved him, right?
It was like one leader that Donald Trump absolutely loved.
Yeah, and well, and also Abe had two shots of it, right?
Like he was originally the prime minister and he resigned because of like a bile illness.
And then he and he came back and the second time was Abenomics and all that kind of stuff.
So like the first time he was regarded as like a disappointing failure.
But like after him, then you had the series of, you know, forgettable prime ministers.
And now you have a personality again.
So like, I do think just having a leader who people recognize the fias and name, that seems to have buoyed people.
But I mean, we'll, we'll see.
It's not great, but like part of the reason that she's been able to rise is like by playing in the anti-foreigner sentiment as a foreigner.
I'm not hugely in favor of that, but you know, you do what you have to do.
So super interesting.
No, I know.
I think it's like Japan is always because obviously it's like a sort of bizarre obsession of the online right is that they would just kind of go, oh, Japan.
You know, Japan doesn't let any foreigners in.
And like no one has a go at them.
So I think it's kind of interesting that even in a country with such a like a tiny percentage of foreign-born people living there, that you can still coast that to political power is kind of fascinating to me.
That's that's incredible.
And also even in the kind of English-speaking content creation stuff in Japan, because you know, like that's still hot, right?
Even though it's a sort of played out genre, there's still plenty of people, you know, just making content about like living in Japan or videos about what stuff in Japan, and some of which I enjoy.
But there was a kerfuffle there a couple of months ago because there was a content creator called Oriental Pearl who did a video that was looking problematic to fair pipeline.
Yeah, well, that did come up.
But she, her general content is Japanese people stunned that white person speaking fluent Japanese, right?
That's her genre of content.
But she made a video like walking around the street in Japan saying, look at all this rubbish and graffiti, what is happening to Japan, you know, like, and the very clear implication was, you know, something has come in that is causing the society to, you know, lose its reputation.
And then a larger content creator, Chris Broad, made a video responding to it, like saying, that's a load of bullshit.
I walked down that street and blah, blah, blah.
And that led to like a little kerfuffle.
But the kerfuffle was around like playing into anti-foreigner sentiment.
I mean, she is a foreigner in Japan, but it's, but generally speaking, the white foreigners are not the ones that are very target right when it comes to this kind of anti-foreigner sentiment.
So that was one of the really weirdly interesting things about being in Saudi Arabia and seeing the kind of class stratification system there because there's tourists, you know, who are primarily white or maybe Chinese, Saudi citizens who tend to wear traditional dress so you can like tell at once who they are.
And then there's just huge amount of migrant laborers working on all the massive amount of construction things to the extent that, you know, there's like on the Riyadh metro, there are separate carriages just for men.
And so you have three, you have first-class carriages, which is filled with Saudi citizens, the family carriage, which is usually filled with tourists, and then the men carriage, which is usually filled with like Bangladeshi or Pakistani guys who come in.
And that's just, you know, there's that was just kind of fascinating to me in demographic terms that they're, you know, those people often work in really tough conditions.
That the way that you kind of reconcile your society to migration is just like, but you know, we make, we make them miserable.
Don't worry.
They're here, but they are, they are miserable.
You might imagine some of the comedians might have noticed that, but I guess, you know, it's hard to get everything in when you're just there for a couple of days.
So, so true.
Right, let's do this.
Let's do this quiz.
Let's quiz.
I'm so ready.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt, are you ready?
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
I'm never ready to have a quiz off with Chris.
He versus Matt Helm.
You remember the move?
It's very.
I just don't think this is fair because Matt just doesn't care as much as you do.
I can't remember the name of someone we were just talking about 30 seconds ago.
Matt, you were just complaining that the image generated by the AI for the Christmas thing where I put Helen and a bunch of people and that it generated you looking older.
This is why, Matt.
This is right.
It knows it's got, you know, it's fed into all the training.
All you're moaning about, I can't remember things.
It's too sleepy.
Yeah, it's done you as a commodge.
Okay, well, look, I think you're fine, Matt.
I think you're going to boss this.
Okay.
Question one.
As we're recording this, Vanity Fair has just published a series of interviews with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, in which she gives a large number of spicy quotes describing fellow MAGA stalwarts.
I'm going to give you her description of somebody in the senior levels of the White House, and you tell me who it is that she's describing, okay?
A conspiracy theorist for a decade.
Who is she describing?
In MAGA, that's like all of them.
So she's describing someone senior in MAGA as a conspiracy theorist for a decade.
Yeah.
I mean, the obvious one is RFK Jr., but it's not going to be him.
Stephen Miller.
No, Stephen Miller's like sane.
That's sort of the problem.
It'd be much better if Stephen Miller was mad.
In my opinion.
That was my guess, Matt.
What do you go for?
I don't know.
Name anyone in MAGA.
Anyone in GAGA?
Marjorie Taylor Green.
Yeah, I mean, is she in the administration?
No, she's not even.
She's like walking out of Congress.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
What about Vivek Ramaswamy?
Is he?
He's currently running for governor of Ohio and he wrote a piece for the New York Times this week saying, people keep just saying incredibly racist things about me.
I don't know what's happened to this country.
Didn't he get kicked out of Dooch in the first week?
He was supposed to be co-chair of Doge with Musk, but Musk does not play well with other children.
There's been a lot of genres.
There's been a lot of this happening.
Like, why are the tigers suddenly eating my phones?
I never expected this to happen.
There's a helm.
The answer is, of course, JD Vance.
Oh, see, that was the first name that popped in my head, and I discounted him thinking, no, not the vice president.
Not JD, not JD.
Roughly JD.
X. Zero.
Okay.
Who is Susie Wiles describing here?
An alcoholics personality.
I want to go for RFK.
I want to go for RFK Jr. there.
That was Donald Trump.
Wow.
Yeah.
She said that Donald Trump reminded me, reminded her of her father, who's a very famous sports broadcaster, who's an alcoholic.
And if you're.
Actually, it's something that Olivia Nuzzy says in the book, too, that she found it easy to cover MAGA because one of her parents was kind of mentally ill and flaky.
And therefore, just having you know, dealing with someone whose sense of reality was not aligned with your own was quite good training for dealing with the Donald Trump White House.
Okay.
Who, according to Susie Wiles, quotes, completely whiffed the Epstein files release?
Completely whiffed.
Is it in the MAGA administration?
I realized it is.
In many ways, it's a woman who was in charge of releasing the Epstein files.
Pam Bondi.
Correct, Chris.
Correct.
You've broken your duck.
Talking about who did she describe as an odd, odd duck?
I cannot answer.
Can I just keep saying RFK Jr. for every answer?
And usually, eventually it'll hit.
But who?
No, come on.
Who is the weirdest person who has been associated with that administration this year?
Candace Orange.
No, come on, but like weird, but also powerful and also into maybe the kind of person you might have posed with a chainsaw.
I was going to say, you're going to say Elon Musk, and then you said Elon Musk.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he is an odd odd duck.
Of course.
He's a very odd duck.
Of course.
Okay, there we go.
Good.
So one all.
This year, you covered the career of Nexium cult leader Keith Ranieri, however we pronounce his name, the self-declared smartest man in the world.
But which 2000s TV series did his right-hand woman, Alison Mack, star in?
I know.
Matt Lee.
I forgot this is the thing that you do when you get this.
You just go, I know.
A chance.
You know why you know, Chris?
Because that's an absolutely useless piece of information that there is no need to know under any circumstances.
So I hope you're proud of yourself.
Television.
No, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's about Superman, Matt.
It's Smallville.
It is indeed Smallville.
Yeah.
Okay.
When asked to appear at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which podcaster said, listen, what's your problem?
Well, they have slaves and they kill everyone.
Hey, hey, hey, get over it.
Get over it.
So what?
So what?
They have slaves.
If you pay me lots of money, I will not comment on what's going on.
In fact, I'll ignore it.
And if something I really disagree with is happening, the more money you pay me, the less I'm going to think about it.
Who said that?
Oh, right.
You just said it.
I absolutely respect this person for turning it into a bit about how, you know, like unbelievably much they'd sold out.
Quite funny.
Tim Dylan.
Tim Dylan.
Correct.
It was Tim Dylan.
That sounded like something Tim Dylan was saying.
And he does deserve credit for that.
Yeah, very funny.
And then they disinvited him because he's like, oh, you can't talk about how to have slaves.
And then they were like, no, you actually can't talk about how to have slaves.
That's the one thing you can't talk about.
Not even in a joking way.
This year, Douglas Murray confronted Joe Rogan over platforming Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper, Marta Maid.
How did Cooper once describe Winston Churchill?
Okay, A, a terrible painter with personality issues.
B, a fat nobody.
C, the chief villain of World War II.
Or D, a secret drag queen?
C.
Well, I was going to say definitely C, but that seems too obvious.
You are both correct.
You are both correct.
It was indeed the chief villain of World War II.
That's not incredibly obvious, Matt.
That's only incredibly obvious if you know that specific.
Yeah, he would not.
But that's his main thing.
That's his main thing.
I thought I was missing, like, did he, did he call him the drag queen?
That's he could have.
Plausible.
Very plausible.
Don't doubt yourself.
Who wrote this post after being criticized this year?
The life of a high-achieving working-class person in elite spaces is to be constantly accused of not really having done the things you've done.
This has happened to me so many times in my life.
I have come to expect it from polite British society, but I did not expect it from Rory Stewart.
I think you've got this one.
Our favorite working-class hero, Gary.
Gary Mayor.
He's been hard done by his whole life.
The thing is, it's quite, it's good for you because you're both outside the British class system, right?
Like, I can't say anything rude about Gary Stevenson because people are going, oh, you went to Oxford, meanwhile, you went to private school.
But like, Chris has got this amazing get out of jail free card where he just goes, I'm actually Irish.
Yeah, northern Irish.
Come on.
Yeah.
I'm Northern Irish.
I got incredibly bad university.
So, you know, we're both golden.
Yeah.
The former co-host of All In and current White House crypto czar, David Sachs, had which somewhat on the nose theme for his 40th birthday party.
Okay, A, Marie Antoinette, B, Pimps and Hoes, C, Brewster's Millions, or D, Slavery.
Oh my God, that's a terrible dick.
He's such a dick.
I would say Pimps and Hoes because I think that's about his class level.
It probably is Pimps and Hoes, but I'll go Brewster's Millions just as a thing.
But I feel like it could be any of them.
Yeah.
So he didn't do slavery.
He didn't do slavery.
Did he know that?
No, he didn't do slavery.
It was about Marie Antoinette.
No, I was going to say Marie Antoinette.
I was going to say because, you know, that is so pretentious.
So there's the most pretentious option.
And that would be a reason.
But how can you even do that as a theme?
Like, maybe I don't know enough about precious, but also quite like pretentious.
Yeah.
And the best thing is, he told everybody not to post about it on social media, not to post any photos.
And he was outed because Snoop Dogg posted about it on his socials.
Snoop Dogg.
Oh, Snoop.
I thought you'd appreciate my other options then.
That Bruce's Millions is a film all about somebody who has to lose as much money as possible, which is in as quick as time as possible, which is very much what happens to a lot of people who get involved in crypto day trading.
It's from the 80s.
So I thought there's a chance, you know, they like 80s stuff.
It could have, you know.
And similarly, odd theming was that the Mar-a-Lago Halloween party this year was themed around the Great Gatsby, a novel about a eugenicist comm man.
So again, it's true.
It's always on the nose.
They just like the hats.
Okay, for a bonus point, at last year's all-in Christmas party, ticket $650 a head, what did Shamanth Palahepitaya give an award to as his moment of the year?
Okay, A. Going bow hunting with Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, B, having sex with his wife, C, winning $100,000 one night in poker, or D, finally working out how to change the clock on his oven to daylight saving time.
I feel like it's going to be poker.
Yeah, I regret to inform you, it was in fact having sex with his wife.
Oh my God.
That was the greatest sexual experience of his life.
I love to think that he's actually he has not changed the clock on his oven to daylight savings time.
It's just still that.
Okay.
This year, you covered leftist darling Naomi Klein, who wrote Doppelganger about being confused with Naomi Wolfe.
Can you remember, Chris, really, the substance of Naomi Wolfe's greatest ever tweet?
Clue, it was about Northern Ireland.
Yes, I do remember.
I don't know the exact wording of it, but I remember her saying that she was it that she went the Ireland and then she said something about like how it was she basically said it was like peaceful, the air here is like peaceful, like it's been since the 1970s or something.
I can't remember.
Let me give you the exact.
Okay.
It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience feel the way it did in the 1970s.
Calm, still, peaceful, pressable, natural.
That's so obscure.
These last questions are infuriating because they're just reminding me of like how they're all so terrible.
And they keep getting away with it.
I think getting away with it.
When I think of 1970s Belfast, I think, God, what a pre-lapsarian paradise it was.
Okay.
Which of your gurus this year gave a lecture series that argued, per the Guardian's reporting, that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the Antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon?
Oh, we both.
Do you remember his Niamh?
Do you remember his name?
I've got the garometer right in front of me, Peter T. TV faster.
Yeah, it is Peter T.
Yeah.
He also, this is the thing, came out against the Nuremberg trials, saying maybe it would have been healthier just to execute the top Nazis without trial.
He also said the identity of the Antichrist was a Luddite.
Quotes, it's someone like Greta or Elisa.
It's not Andreessen, by the way.
I think Andreessen is not the Antichrist.
Good to know.
Have that cleared up.
He's on the case.
It's like the famous fire, but he knows that he's eliminated a few suspects, but it couldn't be great at that.
I like to imagine Mark Andreessen sitting at home, you know, hearing that like, what?
No, don't say it's not.
Like, that just makes it sound suspicious.
There's actually, there's a very funny bit when Tim Dylan goes on Joe Rogan and he talks about how weird it is to have your one hobby being like the Antichrist.
He says, like, why not just like ice fishing?
Right?
Like, I'm not weird.
What's your hobby?
Oh, probably the Antichrist.
Yeah.
Totally not weird at all.
Okay.
Last question.
In August, the Financial Times' Jemima Kelly attended a party at a 15th century house in Surrey in honor of Curtis Yarvin.
In her story, which of the following things does Curtis Yarvin not do?
A, eat a Werther's original.
B, talk about the Jacobite rising of 1745.
C, confess that he once got dumped moments after dropping acid, or D, dance energetically to an electronic remix of a Gregorian plain chant.
What he doesn't do, what he doesn't do.
Yeah, well, he did three of those in front of her.
He didn't do one of those, which he didn't take.
I don't think he will have taken the Werber's original because he doesn't have tears.
What was the second last one?
Think about taking confess that he once got dumped moments after dropping acid.
Hmm.
That sounds like something he might say.
God damn it.
Do you know what a Werber's original is, by the way, Matt?
Not really.
Is it a biscuit?
It's like a hard toffee, a very hard toffee.
All right.
That's not something he's going to say.
Yeah, I'm going to say that one because that's.
You're going Werthers Original.
Yeah.
Why'd I help him?
Yeah.
No, he did, in fact, have a Werther's original.
He did not dance energetically to an electronic remix of Gregorian Plain Chant.
That's the guy running.
The guy running the party would only let them have like authentic plane chants, basically, not like these newfangled nuances.
Do you want some really exciting news?
Yes.
If I award Matt the Peter Thiel point, which I have done, because the previous question was literally about Belfast, which seems a bit rigged in favor of Chris, then this year it's a draw.
Okay, yeah.
I feel like that's as good as a win.
That's as good as we can.
I feel like Chris failed as badly as me, which I feel like is a win.
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
Chris briefly looked fuming at the thought I might have thrown the game in favor of Matt altogether.
That was kind of like keeping it.
So you thought you were quite safe giving me the Peter Thiel point.
Then you realize, oh my God, oh my God, what have I done?
Didn't I get a bonus point for the, you know, most of the 1970s tweet?
I feel like, you know, I got most of that.
Oh, no, no, I gave you the point for that, but I also that was like a question.
It was like, Chris, like, let me ask you questions about your mom.
I wasn't even included on that.
That's true.
That's true.
I do remember you recounting that tweet to me, Chris.
Do you?
That's good.
Yeah.
It's such a banger.
Such a banger.
That's the thing.
To be a really good successful guru, you've got to just have like a complete lack of shame that you would just, I mean, I would just crawl into a hole.
I'd be thinking, I'd wake up in a cold sweat most nights thinking about that tweet.
But, you know, you just can't, you can't live like that.
Can I also tell you, Helen, that Matt and I have been listening to Manosphere stuff, and we've got a couple of thoughts that we want to share.
No, no, we've been listening to Scott Galloway content and him talking with Chris Williamson in particular.
And, you know, I'm not the kind of guy that goes around performatively identifying as a male feminist, right?
It's just something I embody by my nature as a good person.
But listening to men moan about being men and how sad it is men's problems aren't given enough attention.
Or Konstantin Kissing said that, you know, he's heard that like feminists have said that women were mistreated.
And like there's some, there might be something to that, but there's definitely the real issues that men have experienced.
Like I have discovered that from consuming this, it's making me dislike men more.
Becoming a misandrist.
It's turning me to a feminist listening to them.
I'm, oh, they can't, they just talk about men's stuff so much and they make it sound so sad.
It's like, I'm a man.
You know, I'm very open to hearing, oh, you know, fathers aren't paid enough attention.
They don't get enough rewards.
And wives are really, like, they're not really giving enough credit to the husband.
I'm like, yes, that's okay.
But like, they do it so much.
And there's such like wallowing shit that like Chris Williamson keeps getting triggered that he has to performatively acknowledge that women might have had it a bit harder.
You know, he's like, I have to, every time I want to explain that men are having a bad thing, I have to acknowledge that women also have had it hard at times.
And yeah, I've just said that.
That comes up a lot, though.
I can't remember where it was that someone who was talking about men got asked a question about women.
And my reaction to it was, I don't think it's even particularly an ideological thing.
I think it's just if you do like a Q ⁇ A session or you're being interviewed by a journalist, they will always try and find the like uncovered angle, right?
People don't want to be spoon-fed.
You come and talk to them about something.
They will always try and find something.
Oh, you haven't mentioned X because that makes them look more clever.
So whenever I would go and do feminist book talks, someone would always ask me a question about men.
And like sometimes the people I was being interviewed with got quite grumpy.
But I just sort of think it's a natural human reaction.
If you've heard an hour of somebody talking about women, you kind of want to go, oh, you know, if you hear an hour of somebody talking about salt, you want to talk about pepper, right?
So I just think don't overread from that that that's actually you can't talk about men's stuff.
You can't talk about anything without someone else popping up to go, I just, I just need to say something, the subtext of which is that I actually know things that you don't and I'm smarter than you.
Like that's unfortunately, that's just human nature.
The thing that I find fascinating about some of that discourse is, I was thinking about this, it runs in parallel to the idea that like the feminization of culture is really bad and like toxic empathy is killing us all.
And so I'm kind of, I find it really odd when there's manosphere content that is essentially kind of like the worst stereotype of like moaning women.
You know, I mean, there's lots of good manosphere content that is like just actually like, here's some stuff that men are more interested in than women are interested in on average.
Like here are like some of the early Peterson stuff was very much like, have you considered that like girls might like you more if you are tidy and presentable and you hold down a well-paid job?
That was actually just quite useful, very basic life advice.
The thing where it's all the fault of women is quite tough.
I mean, like the picture is just mixed now.
There are situations in which men get discriminated against, but there are still ways in which they are advantaged.
And that you just have to be kind of open about the fact that it's not fluid like that.
But to go back to that compact essay, the guy was saying he would have had it much easier in ordinary times.
And I was like, well, hang a minute.
What were ordinary times?
But I'm sure, I don't know about the countries that you're in, but like US and UK had marriage bars for like lots of professions until the 50s or 60s.
And Japan is very much like this, right?
Like if you marry as a woman, then it's really actually hard to continue on in your career.
So, you know, it's not like there was a certain like date, like 2014, where the button was flipped and basically everything that happened previously to women and minorities started happening to white men.
The picture is that lots of people get screwed over in lots of different ways.
And it's not as easy as a kind of, you know, it's not like when women didn't have the vote where it was very clear there was one oppressor and one oppressed.
It's actually now really variegated.
But yeah, I just, I, it's interesting the tone of that content because it's often quite stereotypically feminine, I think, in ways that actually the manager normally wouldn't like.
That's that, that's, that's what Chris was getting at.
It's come up with us a bit.
Like even that, um, that, that far-right, you know, racist girl.
Nick Fuentes, yeah, he's an incredibly effeminate, un-bro-like guy.
And he whinges and moans.
And the, the tone on, of, on Chris Williamson that really annoys Chris, I think, is just this whinging, moaning kind of tone, right?
And it's like a, it's a bad stereotype of, of a, you know, like it's not a like the careful math.
I know, I know, but I'm just putting up the tone.
The other thing I find very, like very fascinating about Chris Williamson is like, how much better does he think his life would have gone if he hadn't been oppressed?
That's the kind of thing that I think is kind of fascinating.
Like, what has been stolen from you?
Well, they're always talking about, this is the thing, though.
He's not talking about himself.
He's talking about them.
And just like Jordan Peterson, it's not so much himself.
It's all the young men that he's crying for.
So there are these theoretical young men that are that are too afraid to even talk to a woman because they'll be accused of sexual harassment that are being, you know, all these unfair expectations put on them.
You know, the list goes on, right?
This is his favorite talking point.
And I don't believe him when he says that you're not allowed to talk about the troubles of young men.
They're definitely allowed to talk about.
They definitely do.
And I don't think he does make the obligatory mention of the oppression of women before he does that every time.
But I mean, I'm around a lot of young people because all my kids are young adults now.
And they all have boyfriends and girlfriends and friends groups that are young men and young women.
And I've just met a lot of young people.
And I just don't recognize any of this theoretical stuff that the internet is projecting on these people.
And there's not much difference between the girls and the boys, to be honest.
They seem fine.
I think that's the thing that's interesting about the Andrew Tate thing is I think that's actually often like a pre-teen period of boys who really don't maybe like they're just coming into puberty.
They don't really know how to talk to girls.
I think by 19, most people are out the other side of that.
But you're right.
It's kind of, yeah, it is fascinating.
I mean, there are some really good books on it, right?
Richard Reeves wrote a book that had various interesting suggestions.
Like he said that maybe you should get boys to start school a year later than girls, right?
Just give them more time developmentally so that they're not, they're not, you know, they're not behind.
Like there are people who are doing interesting policy work on some of this stuff, but it's not that, is it?
It's it's taking some real problems and then turning them into a kind of grievance machine that's kind of fascinating to me.
Anyway, we're happy.
Anyway, we're whinging and moaning now too.
So that's a that's a bad note to it.
We can stop.
I would just always say if you are listening to content or consuming content that at the end of it you feel worse, more apathetic, like everything's stacked against you, like your life will never get any better, stop consuming that content.
Like everybody has problems, but the joy of life is struggle and overcoming those.
And I would say the same thing to women who say, you know, like feminist content that is just about how dreadful men are is not really going to help you live in a world in which half the people you're going to meet are going to be men.
You need to be, you need to be really careful about like, I think your exact word is the correct one, like wallow content.
It's just ultimately not going to help you climb out of the horrible place that you're in.
So let's start on a happy Christmas note.
That's not wallowing.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, you know, that's a dangerous message to give to people to listen that listen to our podcast.
Nonetheless, a little bit of wallowing.
A little bit of wallowing in your own crocodile and joyous about it.
But the last thing I got to say, Helen, before I let you go is that, you know, you said earlier that, you know, people are selling out because you can see that they're doing these things just because of the amount of money and the exposure it gives them.
And they don't want to do it.
That's how we know you like us.
We can interview.
We can interview.
Nothing except we used to your time.
But we greatly do appreciate it every time.
And yeah, so it wouldn't be Christmas without you.