Decoding the Gurus - Gurus Christmas Special with Helen Lewis

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Join us for this special festive episode in which we initiate the fledgling Gurologist (and occasional journalist and author) Helen Lewis into the deeper and more esoteric levels of Gurology. Helen may have produced an excellent new multi-part series on the New Gurus for the BBC but just how many nut or shark-based anecdotes can you fit into a 30-minute episode? And is the BBC really ready for truly hardcore sensemaking?In any case, we indulge our new padawan with an extended discussion about the new series (it's actually very, very good!) and what she has learned on her travels. Along the way we compare notes, discuss the ethics of covering narcissists and harmful gurus, and uncover Helen's personal role in creating one prominent modern guru.But that's not all! Befitting the season, Helen comes bearing a gift... or is it a test? Unveiling her inner Quizmaster persona she attempts to humble the masters with an End of Year Guru quiz. Can Matt & Chris survive? Who between them is the true Gurologist (& who conversely is winning at life)? Join us and find out!P.S. The Elon Decoding episode is on its way very soon!LinksThe New Gurus SeriesHelen's recent appearance on Embrace the VoidHelen's Atlantic Article on Ron DeSantis' electoral strategyRussell Brand's infamous interview with Jeremey PaxmanRussell Brand's interview with Ed MilibandLaurie Penny's piece on Milo & friends

Welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and try to understand what they're talking about i'm not going to introduce you like you're going to introduce us what am i here for wow that i was so captivated by that that i I was just expecting that to continue on. It was like listening to a BBC series as I woke up. But you didn't do the end, so I'll have to finish it off. He's Chris Kavanagh, an anthropologist. I'm Matthew Brown, psychologist.

And with us, our guest on a very special Christmas special episode is Helen Lewis. Thank you for doing the introduction, Helen. I know. I am available for Barty's, Mar Mitzvah's, other podcast introductions. Just call my agent. So this was the agreed triad for you doing this series on gurus. Therefore, we stamp our approval in the series for the BBC. Yeah, that's a reasonable triad.

It's good. I was genuinely really worried when we pitched it and we got it commissioned and then i did some googling and i was like oh dear these are going to be crazy internet people who are going to be really angry and it's going to be a whole big deal and then it turned out you were the rarest of beasts which was nice internet people who thought such a thing existed and you were very nice about it oh oh no no no this has all been a setup a fiend where now it's the like this is our christmas special of sorts so this is the airing of grievances segment helen boy do we have a lot of grievances for a viewer series helen you you wandered onto our turf we'd stake this out we have various patents covering all of the gurus and ideas no no um i've only heard the scent marked all over this place

all of the gurus just weed all around brett weinstein no one's no one's coming near that he's mine now that's right um no but congratulations congratulations, Helen, on The New Gurus, this series you've created for Radio 4 for the BBC. You know, you're catering to the normie audience, which is great. You know, it's good that that sector has been taken care of. But I think Chris mentioned that you deliberately avoided consuming too much of our content or even any, so as not to be influenced or prejudiced by us and maybe came to similar conclusions? How would you describe that? Yeah, I think that's very true.

I cracked eventually and I was on a road trip in Florida at the beginning of November and then I was having some very long drives. So I did then. That was the time really to dig into some of those Dark Horse episodes. So that's when I really caught up on my solid Decoding the Guru's time. But I really wanted to know whether or not, yeah, we would converge in the same places after I first spoke to you. And I think we kind of did.

I think the one that I really saw was the anti-establishment because kind of doing it for the BBC and approaching people from the BBC, some of those communities are just so hostile. Like the pickup artist community, for example, just absolutely think anything that the bbc is going to do is going to be a stitch up they're going to be horrible and i kept getting sort of slightly shame-faced emails from people who were kind of wanted to talk but also knew that this was a kind of there was a huge taboo in their community against doing it so that was one of the

things that came across really really strongly what else did i like you guys already picked up on yeah the conspiracist thinking is absolutely there in lots of those um and the money aspect of it like one of the things that um tara isabella burton who wrote this book called strange rights new religions for godless world talked to me about the supplement business and the fact that if you look at gwyneth paltrow's goop supplements and you look at alex jones's insta hard and all this kind of crazy stuff they're all relying on the same complementary medicine that isn't really medicine supplements just one is branded for anxious middle-aged women in california and one is branded for like slightly overweight middle-aged men who think they're rambo in the midwest but they but the money that's where the money is the money is in supplements and the money is in crypto

because that's unregulated in the same way so yeah i got a chance to dig in a bit more to some of that stuff i think narcissism came up would you agree that is uh yeah the good prompt mark they're very subtle but the interesting thing for me about the series and i've heard most of it although now everybody can because the half of it is out but you have done this strange thing, Helen, and didn't really know it was possible, where you take a topic and you fit lots of information into a short, condensed format of under 30 minutes. There's relatively limited amounts of waffle or personal information and then you

stick to the topic and you deal with the bitcoin people and the pickup artists and the kind of health and wellness space in each and i i realize that i'm describing like a traditional episodic program but i i'm just genuinely quite impressed because like one of the things with these people that that are gurus is they speak so much and they're all over the place but if you want to get the full appreciation of what they're like you must place. But if you want to get the full appreciation of what they're like, you must have so much content because you did interviews and stuff with them

that you could fill episodes of Decoding the Guru for several months with. So I'm curious about that. Like, is it at the end, are you happy with what comes out or are you kind of very upset that all of your great work is left on the cutting room floor? Yeah, you have to machine gun quite a lot of darlings.

There's a whole story about Peter McCormack, who's a Bitcoin guru, going to see President Bekele of El Salvador, taking a load of back pain medication, which made him really high. And he ended up nearly vomiting on the rug in front of him. And I was very attached to this story. I find it hilarious. But it just had nothing to do with the subject at hand and so it had to be ruthlessly cut out but a half hour an hour podcast the script for that including interviews is about 5 000 words so i just want you to reflect really on the number of words that

you've spoken on this podcast in the last year like it's several versions of war and peace over and over again um but yeah that's one of the things and genuinely a problem when we were doing episode five which is the intellectual dark web which is out on boxing day um to the extent that both the sound mixer and the editor actually had problems cutting jordan peterson because his sentences don't end they just don't end and we're just like try and find a representative clip that's not you know because you can't misrepresent him you've got to kind of give a fair and it's just like that bit we'll just arbitrarily chop it here and here and just some some bit about something about young right that'll do it was really it was a big challenge that one

so we were interviewed recently on a podcast about cults and people that were previously in cults and they were talking to us about why so many of the people in the guru space appear to be male appear to be real they they generally are male and matt re re presented his theory of um you know men being risk-taking sensation seekers because he's obsessed with gambling and he knows that this applies but you previously suggested the last time we had you on that there's a there's an issue there because that applies more to younger men than older men but lots of the gurus are older so uh we were asked in the interview what the solution to that was and nilor was good we't remember. So Mark kindly told them to like,

uh, listen to what Helen said in that interview. But, um, I'm inviting you since you're here and Mark and I consult with you to help them upgrade this theory. There's another gender difference. What is it?

Well, I, I mean, this is a very, you may, this is hardcore feminist theory. So Matt, so you're entitled to question the evidentiary basis of it.

But this is the idea of male entitlement is the idea that we, like Cordelia Fine's book is very good on this. The fact that, you know, parents pay more attention to male babies, male kids in school talk more, they interrupt more, they get more attention from the teachers. they get more attention from the teachers so there is a kind of and i think i'm convinced relatively by the evidence of it a kind of consistent drum beat in boys lives that you're someone who's worthy of attention or someone who should be listened to you can put yourself first whereas all like you know the i spent my childhood being told you know it's not ladylike you know sit properly do this don't don't take up too much space and there's that brilliant chimamanda negozia dice space that you know girls are told to shrink themselves and and like put other people first and i think there's

a kind of with the gurus is kind of tapping the wine glass everybody listen to me thing that is quite it is quite something that we don't normally encourage women to do now as ever there are some percentage of women that are like me massively found fond of the sound of their own voices and they've become this terrible debilitating uh female condition but like i just think that's you find more men who are and also the other thing i think in the gurus that you cover they have to have a certain inability to read feedback that people are a bit bored right there's a kind of like of emotional intelligence that your audience's eyes have slightly glazed over and you're nonetheless plowing onto the next

10 minutes of this anecdote regardless and i yeah i wonder if that's a more male trait too but this is i mean this is very you know stereotypical i guess yeah yeah yeah no no you'd be very proud of me because i did actually mention that in that interview chris i did mention i literally said it's the patriarchy i literally said that you did i did because that's the summary of what helen just described yes yeah because like iled, like during that interview, I Googled like Indian gurus, the traditional gurus, and Google gives you a nice great big list with all the photographs and, yeah, they're all guys, right? And you've got to expect society's got to have something to do with that, right?

For the same reason that most politicians are men, right? So it's the old nature nurture well and i also think if you accept the thesis which our commissioning editor was really interested that we explore that to some extent the kind of internet gurus have replaced traditional religion then you are swapping one male authority figure for another the other couple of dynamics i think are really important is i think there are a lot of guys out there looking for a kind of father figure and actually david fuller who you guys know I asked him this question in regard to Peterson. And he said, well, look, it's interesting.

I don't know if that's true, but I don't think it's a bizarre or offensive question, essentially, was what he said. Because that's Peterson's appeal to lots of people is stern but empathetic. Or at least it was before he went into his full madness of King George Pomp these days. But he was explicitly a kind of stern dad to the internet. And then the other thing is, I think to some extent, and this is getting very stereotypical, podcasts in some respect become for men like friends. Sorry if this sounds really offensive.

I don't mean it to be. But the parasocialness of it, I think for people who don't have such huge social networks themselves in real life can actually be really appealing. I feel attacked. Look, Alan, just to be clear, Matt and I are not friends. This is purely a business relationship,

purely intellectual. Matt is an intellectual sock for my entertainment. There's no passion or a genuine friendship there but but that no no i mean i mean i mean that's good thank you for clearing that up but i mean for the audience right in the sense we talked a lot in the last couple of years about the kind of crisis of male loneliness about the fact that decline of male only you know the fact that pubs and bars

used to be very male spaces they're now mixed family spaces there aren't that many you know and actually also they have this line about whether or not it's like women talk to each other and men talk alongside each other right like often a lot of men find it more comfortable to like go fishing together go to the cricket together go to the football together and they don't have to be like now is our big deep chat about our feelings and i wonder if podcasts kind of give you that like you listen to joe rogan and it's like here are the bros all kind of hanging out together and like i'm a bro too yeah i think careful careful it's a trap i know oh look there's so much stuff feeding into it and there's a couple of things that's tricky first of all like any sort of evidence of like psychological empirical data on this isn't very helpful in figuring out who's going to be a guru because

they're almost by definition exceptional people and the the kind of data you gather on risky status seeking behaviors or narcissism whatever is on normal or relatively normal populations so it can help you understand about the audience perhaps but not so much about those edge tale scenarios i i think though that dark triad, the narcissism and that egocentric kind of thing is maybe a sex difference that persists. Is the dark triad girl Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy? No, what is it? Oh, I always forget. I think that's it, isn't it?

Has the quiz started or is this just like... Yeah, I know. It's about academic specialism. No, because they always said that they found that in internet trolls as well. It's funny if you think that the psychology of the guru and the internet troll is... In one way, one is just a much more successful internet troll, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you look at the replies to Brett Weinstein or Jordan Peterson, you know, there's a lot of women there

who are on board. Are there? Yeah. I was browsing through them today. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe anti-vax is a bit of a special situation, but at least when I sort of browse it it feels it feels pretty pretty gender Jordan Peterson went anti-vax quite hard today today

yeah yeah he was always a little bit anti-vax so if you remember they went to um Serbia during the pandemic I think it's one of the former Yugoslav countries because they didn't want to be in the like all the US lockdowns the Canadian lockdowns were so incredibly straight. And you were like, like, sir, you've recently had double pneumonia. Like, this is really an illness you should not catch. Like, I'll probably be fine. You actually might die if you catch this. But it was, so there were early signs

that he was going that way. There were, and I think like, this might be a reverse influence case from Michaela is more inclined towards that, or it was initially. But there was an interesting case, actually, where we decoded the discussion between Jordan Peterson and Brett, which was one of his first post-illness extended interviews. And Brett, because he's Brett, at several points brought up the vaccines and COVID.

And Jordan repeatedly kind of had to take that well I don't know about that and I'm not really in a place to speak because I you know I've just been knocked out and I haven't had the time to look into things he he doesn't have that concern anymore but I mean I remember matt you and i at the time saying isn't it nice to see someone being like thrown the ball and asked the like rum of it and saying look i'm not i'm not in a position to comment on vaccines and that kind of stuff and yeah when i when i saw jordan's you know jumping on the anti-vax thing and there was a sense of rightness to it like he could tell that he was comfortable and the jigsaw puzzles fitted into place with this satisfying click and one of the standard psychological perspectives on what people

have particular opinions is they they have opinions that fit in with a broader worldview and and his opinion about vaccines didn't fit in with his general anti-establishment worldview. And you could feel that it just, you felt him sort of clicking into place. The same with climate change, really, right? Like he just has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change for basically the same reasons because it would kind of just make him an outlier. The one thing I did think making that into intellectual dark web episode actually is my respect for sam harris has increased because he does seem to be able to

stand up to his friends and say i know you all think this but i actually don't and and like i say i agree with you entirely jordan peterson's radicalization to me it looks not like an intellectual journey but like peer pressure and sam harris has to some extent managed to resist that often at great personal cost of all the rest of them being mean boys to him basically and like laughing at him which is one of the you know hardest things to resist if you get like a load of high status people or just openly mocking you very few people will be able to resist that it would be good if somebody had encouraged sam harris to uh take that kind of stance earlier and and meet that point it would have been

good but you know we can't live in that world needless to say Chris you had the last laugh oh that interview yes that did come off in that interview but it is very nice to see well I think it's ironic

in a way like Sam Harris's willingness to disappoint people and just that bullheaded, single-minded way that he's got. The very thing that made him so irritating for you to interview. Who said he was irritating? You said that. I didn't say that. Anyway, I think that's helped him resist that peer pressure and stuff.

Right, and I feel the same about Barry Weiss as well, right? Formerly of the New York Times, who left the New York Times, founded what was formerly Common Sense, now the Free Press. And she did the Twitter file, so she took the Elon bargain, the Faustian Elon bargain, but then immediately went and did some actual reporting, looked into some other stuff, and then said, I'm really concerned that we've exchanged one overlord's whims for another overlord's whims,

at which point Elon had a little cry because it turned out he didn't want independent journalism at all. He wanted somebody to be his instrument. And I think unfollowed her, which is, I mean, for a 50-something man, just an aspirational level of pettiness, which I have to respect. But yeah, I respected that she did that, that she went, I'm a journalist, give me some files. some files great it's really interesting and maybe i'll agree to your conditions because this story's so good but that doesn't mean you own me and i think any journalist worth their salt would have immediately gone i'm going to do something now that's rude about elon musk just to show that i can i don't i'm not bought and sold like that it was nice it was nice to see that and some people have indicated that tyvee talked a bit about it on this podcast i haven't listened to see that. And some people have indicated that Tyvee talked a bit about

it on his podcast. I haven't listened to confirm that. But in that case, with the Twitter files, we should talk about Musk as a potential guru. But on Barry Weiss,

this is a pet peeve, but I think it does relate to, especially the IDW side of the guru sphere, because it's something that Matt and I have talked also in some of the American self-help people that we've covered. There's a breathless way that they present information. And you see it in extreme form in Brett Weinstein, where everything is the collapse of civilization and the woke are going to take over, or James Lindsay, for that matter. Barry is not that. But when consuming her content,

I definitely get the same sense, and I did with the Twitter files that like, wait for this ground shaking, earth moving information, which will blow your mind about everything that happened. And then fundamentally, with the Twitter files and whatnot, it is an interesting story. It's nice to see moderation discussions and like peek behind the Slack window. That is exactly what I would have anticipated was happening at Twitter and in line with what was publicly known. So it just, that's the bit, yeah.

The trouble with that is, the intent point to that, I would say, think about the Snowden or the Julian Assange revelations and think about, oh, the CIA does some spying. Pretty heady stuff. Like you have to not be too kind of like yawning about that stuff. And also the fact that the Guardian and the New York Times puffed that stuff, like it was kind of earth shaking, right? And our relations with our allies will never be the same again. And guess what? It turns out that everyone went, oh yeah, okay. So the CIA are bugging our phones. Oh, right. Well, yeah, fair enough. We probably thought that was true. So I kind of, from a journalist point of view, I'm going to defend sensationalism because

you always want people to read your stories. But I will concede that it created a massive problem, right? Which is that Mary Weiss and Matt Tybee came out and said, this is the most earth shattering thing. Life will never be the same again. And everyone else was quite bored by it because it was quite technical. And now the right wingers fear is obviously kind of going yeah going oh well this is it this is more the liberal media trying to cover stuff up why isn't this on why isn't the most important story in the

world on the front page of the new york times which is again also how i feel about hunter biden's laptop right it's really interesting if you go and talk to u.s normie republicans and say what was on hunter biden's laptop and actually very often they can't tell you they just know it was bad. It was something about corruption, something about porn and that's it. But, but it's become totemic and the fact that people won't cover it has become totemic as well. This is probably like slightly tangential to Guru stuff, but you

know, it's our show, we can do that. I do have this question about like one thing that Matt and I've noticed when it comes to like the discourse around the lab leak and it applies to the Twitter files and applies to the Hunter Biden laptop as well that a large part of the debate just becomes the shifting narrative like you said with the Hunter Biden stuff what's actually on the on the laptop, it isn't really this earth-shaking revelation. The best thing that people have been able to focus on is some reference to the big man in an email, a potential meeting set up, some deal that might have potentially involved Biden in an email. It is not the greatest

like Watergate level conspiracy. And the same thing with the lab leak that when people talk about it, they have this memory of it where if you mention it, you were completely kicked off social media and you weren't allowed to discuss it in polite company or people would spit out their tea and scream that you're racist but none of it's not true first of all it's not true because i had to deal with the lab like people every day on twitter nobody was banning them it seems that like a lot of what the guru is doing a lot of what the online discourse and the twitter files is no exception is around the perception as opposed to the content.

Like, what do the Twitter files mean? Does this mean that everyone was vindicated when they were talking about shadow banning and stuff? And it does feel a lot like the details get lost in the vibe for either people wanting to endorse it or say that it's nothing and that that's predetermined. And I definitely have a bias towards it being lesser and you know you mentioned snowden and the i can't remember the

other one the julian passage oh the paradise papers yes yeah yeah yeah so like i i agree that like with the paradise papers and stuff like that I kind of was like yeah rich people have tax gives oh Shaki but I did think it is good to have them documented and with Snowden even though we know like the CIA and stuff is spying like the extent

of the spying was I think sort of surprising that they were doing such a huge net and then the problem was they had too much data to even look at so I I realize I'm waffling around but the point I'm trying to make like is when you're you're a journalist and you have to address these kind of topics do you find that is what you end up having to deal with a lot of it like being vibe based on people's perceptions as opposed to like the actual details of stories and and like related to barry

is it a problem that she seems to be playing into those kind of vibe based things that's my my kind of issue yeah i think that's the thing when you're a sole trader rather than part of an institution then you know and i think david fuller says this pretty explicitly right all the incentives are you know he said i could have grown my channel by just platforming anti-woke people you have to make a conscious economically wounding decision to yourself over and over and over again to do good responsible journalism and that's um i think that's really tough i mean i had a conversation with the bbc because i said like I just want you to be fully aware in advance that the people I'm going to be covering

are very likely to complain about this series because to them all the incentives align with doing it, right? Like, I've been terribly introduced by the mainstream media for their audience is an incredibly appealing narrative. I would doubt that, you know, we're going to make this as legally and ethically sound as we can, that they will have grounds for an official or even a legal complaint. But nonetheless, there are lots of people for whom making a huge fuss on social media is nothing but upside for them. And you have to be aware of that

when you're doing journalism in this environment. And I also get kind of slightly annoyed. You know, the Elon fanboys are a really good example about this, the sheer level of credulousness that if, so the example about the stalker, the story about the stalker, right, and how the jet was putting his kid in danger is a really good example. When the Washington Post goes and does this, involving Bellingcat, right, and Bellingcat taking time off Ukraine war to look into this, geolocates where his car was. And it's, you know, it's a day after his plane last flew and several miles away. So he's just made that up as far as we can see that the jet had anything to do with that incident but people who will spend all their time saying the mainstream media are lying to you seem to be completely unaware of the idea that elon musk too it's possible may lie to you yeah yeah

that like inconsistency of charity is i mean it's a feature of humans in general, but with the musk, it's impressive in some cases. And that concept of four-dimensional and nine-dimensional, how many dimensions you want chess, seems to be very, very useful because when somebody does something that looks stupid or it seems counterproductive, there's always this escape hatch that maybe they're doing something really clever

and it's so clever that you have to just... It looks stupid because we are just not on their level. So Musk did a poll very recently when we were recording about whether he should be the CEO and various people were having online corneries about that because it ended up that he was voted quite unanimously. No, that he shouldn't be in the poll. But I then saw people saying,

oh, this was actually a poll to catch the bots who would vote against him and stuff like that. And yeah, it seems you know cope the cope is strong but yeah but the one thing i thought about um musk is that i it's really interesting to me that i think he is very trumpy and i know we went through a phase of comparing everything to trump but like in both case the thing is the same right the offer is that everyone is lying to you or everyone like no one knows what they're doing and at least i'm honest about it so all politicians lie or like you know i'm just if you were rich wouldn't you be a chaos dragon like this

this is what freedom really is and to me i and i might i'd be really interested in your take on this because i felt like that a lot with the gurus we covered in the series that what the shape they finally took was essentially arbitrary and i sometimes feel this about like terrorism and jihadis too right like you have a combination of a personality type and the prevailing ideology of society and that dictates rather than anything else i don't is that maybe that's just massively simplistic but like i look at um so james lindsey obviously started off as a new atheist writer you know in the in the sand is now kind of in bed with the kind of christian conservatives or um tom torero who's the pickup artist i deal with in episode six started off first of all he wanted to be an orthodox monk um oh he also had a

kind of dawkins phase and then he got very into religion and then he wanted to be an orthodox monk and then he became pickup artist and he wanted to sleep with as many women as possible and like these on the surface of it like do you want to be celibate or not like make up your mind and but actually what he was always doing was always looking for that position where he would get to talk like he would get to be a priest essentially and it'd be either a priest of a religion or it'd be a priest of pickup artistry and i just found that very i found that very compelling yeah yeah we've we spoke about this before and it's the idea of looking at things through a psychological lens rather than an ideological or a political one where the specific, the specific story that they're telling isn't as important as the fact that they

are the person up there who's telling the story and enthralling everyone. And I don't think it's wrong to make those parallels between Musk and Trump and the rest of our gurus. I read a book when I was a teenager. It was something called something like Mozart and the rest of our gurus, I read a book when I was a teenager. It was something called something like Mozart and the Enlightenment. It had this funny thing and it basically said, you can basically understand everything as this conflict between romanticism and classicism. The romantic figure, these people that break all of the boundaries and they have this charisma about them, there's an appeal to that and it's contrasted against a kind of a bureaucracy

and these checks and balances and systems and rules and all of that stuff. It feels to me that the appeal of someone like Musk or Trump or all of those other figures, or even the good old-fashioned fascists like Hitler or Mussolini, is that they are this personal figure that sweeps away all of the corruption. And you can trust them because you feel like you know them. You have a parasocial relationship with them. And that to me feels like the difference. People are more accepting of Musk making these arbitrary kind of decisions than they are

of these shadowy executives or committees or things happening behind closed doors it kind of plays into the conspiratorial thing as well but but for a like a classical liberal type person it's like you like committees you like rules and regulations and things what kind of absolute pervert likes committees surely no such thing there's a there's a guru that is like springing to my mind that's a really good example of this and i i loved as well helen the episode that you did covering the pickup artist especially the triad monk to pickup artist pipeline and on undiscovered i've learned previously but matt you will enjoy it if you hear it as well especially because you had an interview with the woman that he was married to and so there was like this personal window into it but um the person i'm

thinking about is is similarly has a weird collection of views in some respect stephan molyneux and i came across him actually i think before his trump tone when he'd been profiled in some Channel 4 documentaries about online cults. And he had some appearances on Rogan, the second of which went very bad when Rogan played some videos of him acting in a very misogynistic and culty way. But Stephen Molyneux, for people who don't know,

is like a Canadian YouTuber who previously claimed to have the biggest philosophy channel in the world. He's not a philosopher, but that is how he self-styled himself. And his network was called Free Domain Radio because it was like a kind of libertarian. So he started out as like an anti-spanking capitalist. Yeah, not adult anti-spanking. Although I think he was against that too. But he viewed it that way.

I like spanking your kids. Oh, right. I can't comment on this stance with consulting adults but he was very concerned with spanking children and you know as we as we all are like that he felt that that that corporal punishment led people into this like you know destroyed their life and he was he was early on a kind of manosphere figure and and so it was basically mullers completely destroying the lives of people and even if it was men who did the punishment he did this famous spiel saying it's because women are rewarding the assholes they are the

ones that are fucking the species right like so sorry helen but you know ultimately it is always women's fault yeah yeah it's good to have that cleared up but he went from anarcho-capitalist to from like anti-spanking online psychology cult to anarcho-capitalist libertarian to strong MAGA trump apologist and then his current thing is i believe ethno-nationalist bound from all platforms. So that's quite the journey. And it's one that takes place in the space of just seven or eight years. It's like a lifetime of ideology. in some figures who are very popular like Christopher Hitchens or even like this figure doesn't have exactly a political stance but like Mark Kermode for example the popular film critic

were in is he white supremacist now no no he's not he's not come out as a anti-spanker. Yeah. He was like some variety of insane Marxist in his university years. So Trotskyist, I think that's what he was. An old trot, as he said. But Christopher Hitchens went for a whole gamut of ideologies. So is that

something that we think is you know, like for gurus the ideology is somewhat disposable or is that a subset of gurus like i know you've been covering ron desantis and he seems like somebody that's rather ideologically malleable or opportunistic um might be the way to phrase it but yeah i mean he's always been um incredibly conservative but then he for as long as he's only 44 now so for as long as he's been in the republican party you know the tea party had been in the ascendant and it was very obvious where the kind of energy of that party went he was

when he was in congress he was part of the freedom he was a founding member of the freedom caucus whose unofficial nickname for themselves because they wanted to get stuff done but they were also incredibly conservative was the reasonable nut job caucus which I think is just like, good, because other people, they're unreasonable nut jobs. We're the reasonable nut jobs. But, you know, so he had- They called themselves that? Yeah, that was an unofficial nickname for themselves,

which is good at a level of self-awareness. But he's not a guru figure. And like, it's interesting, it's actually going to present a challenge to political reporters, I think, coming into next year, that he's very uncharismatic. He's actually kind of boring. I went to watch one of his rallies and I was a bit, I was like, oh no, this is bad because people will just zone out of this. And he's actually

saying things that are quite extraordinary and particularly cruel, but it's not got the fireworks of Trump, right? Trump came attended with all this hoopla of like, hey, I'm going to be evil. Watch me be evil, everyone. I'm i'm so evil and actually somebody's just bureaucratically evil is is much harder to get people to pay attention to um but what he's done because he's an incredibly smart guy is he has now recruited i would say unreasonable nut job wingmen basically right he now has outsourced all of that so he's now got his new his own version of the cdc with lots of these dissident scientists on and your friend of mine, Brett Weinstein. And so he's got people to do that kind of level of heavy lifting for him to say the kind of, oh, you know, maybe all of this is, you know, maybe Anthony Fauci should be put in prison. That sort of stuff. And it's been very useful for him because what it's allowed him to do is outflank Trump from the right.

And he's also made a very smart calculation that the donors and the party elites are ready to move on from Trump. And actually, for all that there are lots of people in the base who love the crazy, there are lots of people in the base too, who want all the delicious lib owning, but don't want the fear that it will cross the line and the dog whistle will become a whistle and it will embarrass them. It will be vulgar. You know, there are lots of people in that base who are, you know, they've been married for 50 years. They have a very very strong face they would love to have a trump but without the pussy grabbing essentially and ronda santos is married to a very beautiful former tv anchor he's got three adorable looking children his wife went through breast cancer last year and he supported her

through that so he's got like he gives you he's got a wholesome story, but he will put people on the Supreme Court who make Genghis Khan look like a hand-wringing liberal and pass very draconian laws, which is what they want. And above everything else, if there's one thing that he has done, he has tax cuts for businesses, which he's done very effectively in Florida. So he's offering the Republican Party an incredible bargain, and it demands to be seen what the percentage of people is who love the crazy. This is what I've been trying to work out for the last couple of months who wants the tax cuts and who wants the drama and which of those sides is going to win i'm curious helen that

picture that you're painting and you've done you have various articles about ron de santos that we'll we'll put in the show notes because i think they're very interesting about you know his kind of personality and that but if you have ron desantis in the way that you described as like you know quite strategic thinker but not a bombastic delivery guy even if he tries to put that on in occasion and we're seeing somebody like elon musk who from me and matt consuming his content for the decoding episode is similar like in the way that he delivers thing it's quite boring and like relatively sane whenever he's talking it's you know it's not even ted talk level the pitch usually it's more energy than that yeah so the the interesting thing for me is

that implies that like if you look at musk's twitter behavior you would think he's this mental bombastic guru type but he's not personality wise he but he can play that online and it sounds like ron desantis can outsource the craziness to James Lindsay and Brett Weinstein and these kind of people. So does that mean that we are approaching a point where you can just outsource your, like, you can just get the crazy people or play the character online,

but you yourself can be quite calculating and rather boring in your delivery and still get the benefit is that what's going to happen that's that's what the republican primary of next year will demonstrate and the other thing it will demonstrate is just the importance of that right-wing media ecosphere which i guess we also talk about in this really casual way but it is just incredibly asymmetric you know and i think one of the things that musk is really wrestling with now is the idea that that people might say things that he doesn't agree with right this is fascinating all this rhetoric about kind of safe spaces on the right and actually the one thing that lots of people on the right really cannot

handle is the idea of a not safe space um i'm i'm kind of consistently fascinated and ronda sanchez but you know he's been on it's not t Tucker Carlson, although he did a long sit down with Tucker Carlson, which he'd went into his backstory. And it was one of those absolutely classic backstories where this is a guy who went to Yale Law and one of the other Ivy Leagues, I think Harvard undergrad. And he said, the day I first arrived, I was in jean shorts because I'm from Florida and they all looked down on me. And it was that classic right-wing populist trope of, I went among the elites and I discovered they were all snooty and disdainful. And he's played that very carefully.

Like he's very much downplayed his elite credentials in a much more successful way than the previous generations, pre-Trump generations of Republicans were able to. But that is also where you have to be now to win a Republican primary. You have to be not just, you know, you have to be overtly anti-intellectual, basically. So what do you think? I mean, that's part of a broader thing with the right and the left kind of switching places in a way. The left traditionally has been the party, the workers' party, the party of the working class and against the elites and whatever. More and more, of course, it's the party that academics like me

or journalists like you tend to vote for, and the right has pivoted towards going for that populism. So is that all just part of this broader shift? You must have thought about that a fair bit. What does all that mean? I've got a very normie analysis on this, which is exactly what you're right, that we moved in from the 20th century model of class based and economic based voting to now a method of values based voting. And it's relatively true across America. I'm not sure whether or not it's so true across. And that's not always the case. But graduates vote far more for left-wing parties now, for example. It's one of the biggest predictors. I think the single biggest predictor of voting remain in the EU referendum was having a degree. So it's switched. And I think a lot of that is about the decline of manufacturing jobs.

A lot of that is about where the kind of growth in the economy has come over the last 20 years. And, of course, the other big split as well is just age, which is kind of fascinating. Basically, the conservative base in this country is people in their 50s and above. It's just that there's a lot of them and they all vote and they're very evenly distributed throughout the country, whereas younger people are heavily concentrated in the cities. So there has been this enormous political realignment and it does it has had enormous effects on on politics but the thing that i think i do cling to you know the what's the matter with kansas thesis which is that the right in the us effectively welded on guns initially an abortion onto an economic platform um in order to keep getting people voting against their own economic interests um yeah and that's

like it feels very simplistic and i don't mean it in a rude way, but it has been incredible. Like, someone like Ron DeSantis is essentially, if you look at actually what he's interested in in policy terms, it's tax cuts for businesses. And consistently all the way through what, you know, the Republican hierarchy put up with Trump because he put tax cuts in place. Absolutely nothing else matters. So you have to kind of, to some extent, look at all that stuff as kafabe. The trouble is that it's kafabi that affects people's actual lives and this is why we come back to this discussion chris you know but the same thing about you know do they really mean it um when people do this you know do these people really believe what they're saying and i just kind of constantly think

i don't care and i don't mind because it's it doesn't matter ultimately but the other thing that's interesting is what you were saying about the kind of personality thing, is it does suggest what the remedy is for these gurus, right, which has to be structural rather than personal, because those people are always going to exist. And what you have to do is create a society in which they don't flourish. That's the only thing that we would do that would mean that you know a proto weinstein doesn't doesn't no one listens to him he's just you know sitting at home ranting quietly to himself about ivermectin so on that very topic helen and you've fallen neatly into the the jaws of of our our trap because you you personally are somewhat responsible for encouraging a present day guru somebody who was once still is to some extent like associated with the left and certainly was at that time but now has a right-wing populist streak and i'm right i'm speaking of course of one russell brand who during your time at new statesman edited the a special issue right around about the time when he was opining on politics he

is often opining in politics now but at that time it was on the back of the interview with jeremy paxman the bbc political reporter wasn't that off the back of that i with Jeremy Paxman, the BBC political reporter. Wasn't that off the back of that? No, I mean, don't say this to anyone who worked at the New Statesman at the time because we set him up with that interview to promote the issue. And then it was the only thing that anyone remembers.

But it's fine because actually that's now all quite embarrassing. And the fact that people don't think I had anything to do with it is probably better. You did that. You're even more responsible than I give you credit. So you are part of the reason that he was talking to Jeremy Paxman and told everyone like, why vote? What difference does it make?

They're all a bunch of idiots anyway. So do we at least have some thanks to give to you for encouraging russell brown to become more political and to tell more people about his opinion or can you not claim responsibility for no ironically of all the things that i have actually been cancelled for i've never been cancelled the one thing i think i sort of deserve it for because it was 2013 and he was writing a football column for the guardian and he was still doing kind of stand up and stuff like that. Like he was in that space, but not known.

He hadn't written the book revolution yet, or I didn't, maybe he'd written my bookie work. Sorry. It makes me upset to say that. Isn't it a two part? There's a sequel, my wookiee book.

Oh God. Yeah. Can I just, I think I might have said this before, but I have to interject that one of my enduring memories of my student time in London was, I didn't go to your fancy elite media parties very often, but one of my friends became sort of involved in media and had a house party and there were various people there and in the middle of the night at what was a very unenjoyable party

somebody had like a microphone set up like a kind of karaoke thing and they were reading from my bookie work they were just like like doing a reading in the way that you would read warm piece or i don't know what people read in those kind of things so i i had my bookie week seared into my i didn't enjoy that at the time and i would not enjoy it now that is a powerful like don't take drugs kids message or you may end up reading out my bookie work to people at a party um and we went i wouldn't normally tell this story but it has now been um 10 years and he's completely crackers now so i'm going to we went to meet him at the savoy for the setup meeting and he told me this

story about how there was a universal animal consciousness and the way you could tell this was that cows had learned in germany to walk over cattle grids with their little hooves just on the bits and I was like, oh great, cows cleverer than you think, those cows what will they think of next? and the thing is, that all around the world, cows have now learned to walk over cattle grids

and there was a bit of my brain that was going this is, I mean this is bad news, this is like our only defence against the cow rampage has finally been taken away from us shit we're in trouble now they're on to us and and of course i came away and i was like is that true and of course it's not true but it was it was it was so compelling the way he was it was like he was there like this huge gothic spider very thin covered in chains and incredibly kind of compelling. Just an incredibly charismatic man

who would just hold people's hands. He was very touchy. But yeah, we did this edition and the content was kooky. I blanked most of it out of my mind, but there was definitely David Lynch on Transcendental Meditation. There was a piece by Alec Baldwin on whether or not JFK had been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. there was definitely david lynch on transcendental meditation there was a piece by alec baldwin on

whether or not jfk had been shot by uh lee harvey oswald yeah we don't we don't we don't look back on that one with um with joy but there was also a piece about this piece about not voting about the need for revolution and shepherd fairy of the obama hope poster did the front cover which was a revolution of consciousness and the whole theme of the thing was revolution and then we set him up to that interview jeremy paxman in which he said don't don't vote and it was incredibly popular i then commissioned robert webb to write a piece the next week which was like no actually do vote and i think in fact the last line of the thing is so russell go away and read some fucking orwell um and it turned into a kind of a good like kind of slang match between the two of them. So I did slightly atone for it.

But the thing is, this is the bit I really regret, is that it was all kind of slightly fun and games happening in this land of like, well, maybe we could just ask questions. Isn't it great to have open minds? And I just think, I wrote a piece about kind of the sort of groiper memes before the 2016 election, you know, the kind of dank memes and people thinking it was fun to flirt with Nazi imagery and stuff like that. And and there was just in those first years of the

2010s an immense level of complacency that this was the final finished form like what the end of history had happened i remember reading a column in the ft by janan ganesh who is their kind of big flanner correspondent saying that the problem with politics is just so boring there's no you know it's like apathy no one cares anymore like it's all just but and in a way that just seems to me like the kind of that was the death knell of that era of politics the kind of everything's great like what could possibly go wrong here and then it from 2015-16 onwards it really it really did the boring classicist kind of you know guys in gray suits the hollow men you know running the show when there's too much of them it creates space for people like russell brand and everyone

feels like they want a breath of fresh air and things like the bookie walk or transcendental consciousness with cows start sounding interesting because you're just so bored with the people in suits i don't know like aust Like Australia is a bit like that at the moment. Like in many ways, our politics is so much healthier than places like the United States, partly because we have compulsory voting and we don't have a mainstream party that's gone mental. But as a result, they are extremely centrist and it's very hard to discriminate them. And in many ways, that's a good thing.

I think probably mostly it's a good thing. But you can see that when they get too close together that they create space at the edges for for just all kinds of weirdness yeah there is a like a coda for the russell brand thing which you know his ultimate coda is where he is now which you know is not a good place and not good impact on the world he was i believe he was just talking with somebody about the Twitter files. Matt Tybee. Yeah, he's interviewed Matt Tybee. And he also occupies a really interesting space, right? Because he's got that whole bit to himself, which is basically the left-wing anti-vax,

sort of Chomsky-Pilger kind of questioning of Western imperialism. Because so much of that stuff in the u.s is dominated by the right there's actually the fact that he's not actually into groomer discourse he's not he's pretty anti-capitalist you know he is occupying a great niche like respect to respect to the lad he's found him he's found a market opening yeah yeah yeah left-wing crunchy populism is yeah it's a it's a market segment. Who would have thought? But I do remember before, and he definitely wouldn't do this now, but after

he went on that kind of grand tour about the absolute meaninglessness of voting and how all political parties are fundamentally the same, he then had a sit-down interview with the charisma vacuum that is Ed Miliband.

And Ed Miliband, he like put, you know, the kind of very basic questions, like the kind of stuff that, you know, politicians get asked when they go to a primary school. What have you done for us lately? Or this kind of thing. And Ed Miliband provided fairly good stock answers. He's a smart guy not particularly charismatic but you know very thoughtful person and his answers were good and he kind of pointed out yeah look you know it does matter because here's what conservatives have

done and here's what labor governments have done so actually lots of the things that you care about are relevant and and then Brussels response was kind of like oh i see i see well i guess it is important then that we vote and maybe you should all go out and vote for uh libra and but he he did this interview like i think three days before the election or like at some point where it was going to have very little impact and there was there was talk about whether his anti-vote thing would have swung the vote right but it turned out not to have much of an impact at all you're talking about the famous owen jones headline which is like russell bram back said milliband and the tories should be worried and it turns out the tories were not sadly worried at all by that and in fact they quite sadly they won an unexpected overall majority

which then meant that they couldn't horse straight away the idea of a Brexit referendum with a pact with the Lib Dems. So yeah, in a way, if Russell Brand had done that three weeks earlier, Brexit might not have happened. It's one of the many alternate theories of life. There is a thing that you mentioned, Helen, about people, especially in the early 2010s or before Trump, the alt-right and stuff, it wasn't that people were just treating it all as, oh, this is just funny. People are pretending to be Nazis online.

But it was more like the New York Times and stuff got criticized for kind of trying to profile Nazis, right? They're just like us, right? They just don't like Jews or people from different ethnic backgrounds living in their country. But there was this little genre of, and left-wing journalists did it too, Laurie Penny did a notable one on Milo, were palling around with quite reprehensible figures and saying, well, of course their ideology is terrible, but they're a lot of

fun, was the kind of common takeaway. And now that looks somewhat irresponsible, but I'm curious. I don't think this, but I'm going to devil's advocate it anyway. So your Guru series, you cover a lot of people, the crypto people and and whatnot so is there any concern on your part that you might cover people who take a dark turn like your coverage of them is relatively moderate and then in the coming year they they end up like going down some dark paths no i think that's a completely reasonable concern and laurie you know who used to i used to edit her um or them sorry at the new statesman you know i took an enormous amount of heat for that that piece i think it's called the boys on the bus and it was

like oh yeah and the thing is that milo is just really great fun and things i'm sure milo was really great fun it's just that the kind of missing piece of analysis i guess was and that's how he takes you in to then sell you on whatever mad ideology he's currently pressing and so the good thing about doing the series for the BBC is that they were very clear like and this was you know this is hard stuff to do so episode two I say of Will who is our main subject of the episode whose guy drinks his own urine um and his anti-vax I really like him who doesn't but leading to my favorite bit when he was like i was like but what about

drinking other people's urine he's like obviously not no i wouldn't recommend doing that this is like good okay good we found the line but um but i you know and i wanted to make clear that i both that i really liked him he's a really nice guy and also that i understand the story like he had strabismus so he has an eye problem which he said we spent a lot of childhood and interacting in various unpleasant ways with the medical system then Then he got gay bashed when he was walking out with his first boyfriend. And instead of getting therapy, he was just, you know, the American medical system often in pills, or the Canadian medical system often in pills. And so like, what I wanted to do was kind of say, it's not right to be anti-vax. Like,

here are the facts. Here's how many people a year measles killed before the measles vaccine in 1968 or whenever but i understand the psychological journey that got him to this place and that to me is the bit that's that's hard and because it's the bbc you have to you have to be okay with saying to people like i'm not going to uncritically launder everything that you say um and like i'm sure when the crypto episode comes out that that will be an issue too right because i'm just pretty crypto skeptic and in my interviews with people i was very crypto skeptic and they're allowed to push back you know it's the bbc line is you have to have due impartiality so we have to represent the full range of viewpoints but the thing that we have

to do because of its being a state funded broadcaster is make very clear when people are outside the mainstream. And that's quite a tough thing to sell interviewees on and get people to kind of agree to sign up to that isn't just going to be... I mean, we've had this conversation before. You know, the number of people who actually genuinely want to come on and do a critical interview with somebody is actually quite low. And they don't have to. They can just hang out completely in their lovely, warm bubble of joy.

So credit to them for coming on and talking to me really but yeah you are free to have a go at me for um if people it turns out all across britain tomorrow like over christmas they're chugging their own piss and that's me i did that i'm sorry yeah that's uh i'm just keeping a tally um so that you know this ammunition can be used when we need to take you down. And given where Russell Brand has ended up, this seems likely, but you kind of already answered this, but given that you covered a whole bunch of people,

and it is clear from the interviews that there are individuals that you got on well with interpersonally, right? And like you say, that's not everything, because some monsters are probably interpersonally very entertaining people like matt for example but the um are there when you're like looking at the gurus that you've seen that across the series are there ones that you would single out that you like like you know that you don't think what they're doing is particularly harmful and you can compare that if you want with like people that fundamentally terrified you and you're worried for the future by their rise um but yeah that because like we we do we do cover gurus including some of the people that that we think are harmful to the discourse,

like Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein, for example, are people that we think do a lot of bad stuff and promote bad thinking. They're also entertaining in a way that lots of lesser gurus are not. So there's aspects like that, but yeah. joe rogan is the classic exemplar of that right like uh and and i remember having a weird defense of joe rogan during the whole anti-vax thing which is the fact that if you watch american tv they are advertising all kinds of insane experimental medicine and then they have to list the side effects at the end and it's all like you know it'll affect shatner's bassoon and give you you know crunkles or whatever

and it's just the lack of regulation and the fact that you are allowed to do direct to consumer advertising it comes up in one of my special interests which is child gender medicine I think to most people in Europe the idea that a surgeon can directly advertise mastectomies to teenagers is just mind-blowing like this is just not in my, in my world. And so, but the American system of kind of individualist consumerism is just in a very different place. And so while I didn't think Joe Rogan was right to do that, I can also see how it looked like hypocrisy given the overall picture of medical regulation in America. And he does an incredibly good job, I think, of being an average guy who's just kind of

interesting and interested in people. And watching him discuss the liver king, I just found it really, really enjoyable and really likable, just laughing at this comically hench guy who's clearly had ab implants being like, look at this, look at this, look at this. He did have a kind of quite appealing emperor's new clothes, like boy in that story, quality to him. But yeah, I love the productivity hackers. they were all absolute poppets i thought um but it's all but that world is quite dark again it kind of comes back to the structures right what is what is the lessons and the message that people have got that they think that they need to do 15 side hustles and they need to you know be boxing out their day in half uh hour points It's all of a piece of that kind of

Amazon warehouse approach to work where you must be monitored and controlled all the time and your output must be kind of consistent in this very machine-like way. So even the ones that I really liked, I had reservations about. But, you know, I felt sorry for some people as well. And to return to one of our frequent subjects, James Lindsay, he told me in the interview that he was glad that Twitter had suspended him. Now, this may have been cope at the time, but he sounded really genuine about the fact he was like, I was looking for an exit from Twitter and I'm actually kind of glad. Like not exactly said it in these terms, but like I've got my life back. And of course what happens a couple of months

later, he's unsuspended and he's tweeting away dozens of times a day. And it's just like, to me, looks like very compulsive behavior that isn't actually he's probably aware that it's not making him happy and and it made me feel more it did change my opinion to him because it did make me feel like you're not entirely in control of this i do feel sorry for you actually that you you would have been it would have been better for you had elon taking your twitter away not giving you more of your delicious attention crack yeah i can't remember matt did you hear the episode with james lindsey in it no i didn't get to that one yeah no because helen puts to him that he like it's a the tone of the interview is is interesting because you're you're

not being aggressive with him which i also think is a good idea because he would have responded like in the dr phil and the rear clip and nobody needs to hear that but because you were being more friendly to him when you put the point to him about feuding with the holocaust memorial and what that's the auschwitz museum yeah never argue with the auschwitz museum on twitter that's a rule. Yeah, he seemed unusually, uncharacteristically to be slightly apologetic about it. Like, well, I wasn't really feuding. I was just taking issue with one of the,

and we'll see if they actually do that. But he did seem to recognize how that looks to normal people. If you're going home to your parents and being like yeah so I'm currently in a feud with the Holocaust memorial site but you know don't listen to

the naysayers about that so that was interesting to me you know getting the more human response and like if you look at Jordan Peterson's Twitter behavior since he's brought back like that's not good for him he's like tweeting every couple of minutes about like different headlines that he's he's just come across like it it does look like a bunch of them have issues with compulsive behavior including Elon so yeah I did feel again I said to say about

feeling sorry for James Lindsay to some extent he did also say that he's like persona non grata on the right as well which was really interesting to me because that's not my perception of it at all but i just think what often happens with those people who spiral out online is that they alienate more and more people and they become and it's really being ostracized is really horrible and without a kind of group of normie friends online or like a normie job like one of the people I interviewed who came off I think a lot better is Ibram Kendi another one a person that you've decoded and one of the things he said is like I'm an academic and that's his primary identity is like I'm an academic I fundraise for my Boston Center for anti-racist research now I think he's got some pretty kooky ideas I think the idea of a department of anti-racism

just sounds impossibly unworkable and the idea of no neutrality everything is racist and racist is just you know is impossible in practice but his primary identity is not reply guy and this is just like this whole series is a big lesson about like touching grass essentially that it will help you when and he has been through you know lots of the kind of more spirally people kind of talk about the dunking they've been through and it's true like i do think people mocked james lindsey in a very cruel way i mean i may have been one of them uh from time to time but like he did you know he did experience a huge amount of mockery and but at the same time ibram x kendy's you know getting death threats you know being being put as public enemy number one on the

tucker carlson show in america is really you know, a good thing for your health. But the fact that he could go away to a whole group of people who are his people and have a completely different life, I think was incredibly healthy for him. Like, it's the only thing that makes me feel better about the whole thing is that some of the bad gurus, obviously are incredibly rich and successful and they get a huge amount of affirmation. But I just am i'm clinging to the fact that i hope it doesn't make them happy and i don't know if that's do you think that's true matt do you think any of the people that you've covered who are a bit who are in the bad side are actually whole and enjoy and they can just watch a sunset with their you know beloved family and enjoy it do you think they feel that kind of those kind of

emotions yes and no because um like first of all we completely came to the same point of view as yourself with regard to imbra and x kendi both about his some of his policy suggestions are quite extreme and i think quite silly but in the way he comes across he's very much as an academic so it's interesting that that he made a big point about that and not guru like at all and i think that identity is really helpful for keeping you grounded and i i suspect that for you or for a journalist in general you know you you have an identity with that which which is important and would probably stop you getting sucked into various attention feedback cycles oh sorry what's your big intake of breath was that am i off track no i i i was like i would but much i would

love to say that i don't think that's actually true of me in my 20s i definitely went through a phase in and i write about this in difficult women in the book where i made my life much worse by rowing with people on twitter and getting into fights and picking fights and i i think i used it as a form of essentially kind of self-harm like if you want to just have a load of people telling you you're shit and then you can go everyone hates me i'm so and like you know it's almost a kind of munchausen's kind of version of it right where you put yourself into the kind of victim role but yeah with age comes great wisdom matt luckily um now i can't be asked yeah that's right being just weary helps an awful lot my i i know people like my brother and chris perhaps too, they enjoy conflict on some level and they're energized by it.

But, you know, Chris and I have said to each other that, you know, in the very small way with this podcast and the very tiny little bit of attention you do get, you know, like you kind of see how you get an insight into the various ways in which people go wrong. And a lot of people that do similar things seem to be quite extreme and seem to be like haters or being whatever. And it is helpful for us to remind ourselves that we have a day job and this is just this thing and it doesn't matter. I think once you start really feeling like this really matters, I think once you start really feeling like this really matters, like this argument you're having with the Holocaust memorial is something that you've got to with him and they would often emphasize that point and it's of course true that everyone contains

multitudes and the the persona that a public figure of any kind inhabits um yeah that's it sounds like a platitude doesn't it but it's obviously not the totality of them no and and and that's the same thing i think with peterson too the way that david fuller talks about going to meet him in i think 2017 um and sort of talking about this sort of bumbling eccentric professor and that's the thing is that you can kind of see it's a bit like the kind of arnold rimmer ace rimmer thing you can see the path that he took where he was just sorry that was a very nerdy 90s sci-fi reference um we love that the geriatric millennials out there but um but like the you can see the version where he's just like the kooky old guy who wears sort of funny waistcoats and

has some slightly odd ideas about evolution or whatever it is but it's essentially like a beloved teacher and i feel really really sad he could have been that person and he's he's he chose a different path with all the same characteristics, right. And, and just chose different bits of his personality to emphasize and, and lean into it. I think that is the real tragedy of Jordan Peterson. Yeah. I'm not going to let you both away with the subtle nagging of my online Twitter. This is actually an intervention, Chris. This is. We've actually all been leading up to this. There is a constant reprieve from people

that, oh, I like Chris on the podcast, but it's just because they can't hear the tone on Twitter. That's the difference. And I probably would get on from Matt Spriller. Chris, I get DMs from people

who listen to the podcast and have been, in their minds, abused by you on Twitter. And then they DM me. That's amazing. Like, Matt, control your wife. Yeah. I can't stop him.

I can't stop him. So I have sympathy for those people so inclined to argue with people online, whatever it is like to be one of them. But that aspect of having a degree, one of, what's the word, healthy self-disregard, knowing that you are not the next Galileo,

genuinely, I'm very well aware of that. And Matt and I are quite content to be middle-briar academics. Eric Weinstein referred to me as a middle-briar academic at one point, and I was like, well, that's fine. That's a fairly accurate description. But he took it as an insult right because i'm not in the genius class from his perspective and that that does seem to be something that like is inoculating to a certain extent like if if you have that tendency to to be willing to entertain critiques and to see yourself as like you know when you're getting very up on your high horse and something that you're also slightly comical and i i think oh i definitely feel like that about america like the other thing that obviously happens is that the gurus do tend to

be american and i do think there is just a cultural difference of britain i think particularly has got tall poppy syndrome where it's like oh hark at you you know who do you think you are and we just anybody who kind of puts themselves forward you know oh she's no better than she ought to be. Like there's a whole cultural discourse about basically people just sort of loving themselves that we just don't like. So you get these absurd interviews with celebrities where they have to pretend to be like other people,

even though they're sitting in a big pile of gold, like smorg. And I just think America is far more okay with I'm here, I'm great, I'm rich. Did I mention, like, it's very interesting like i think dave chapelle is an incredibly good comedian but the comedy is always based around like i'm really rich and i just it doesn't i saw him in britain a couple of months ago it doesn't quite work as well in britain because you're like well don't don't go on about it dave i mean come on

it's just they need to make a deal out of it yeah yeah there's a because in the series, people are touchy about certain kinds of subjects, right? Like you can see it in like Robert Wright recently spoke to Brett Weinstein and it was a fairly contentious interview because he was just calling him on a very specific issue. But like the direct questioning was not appreciated. James Lindsay cut off David Fuller whenever he suggested that he would put his impossible

conversations into practice on an episode and speak to a critic that he'd been mean to online. So in general, the gurus tend to regard criticism as bad faith motivated and coming from a negative space. And I know that even the people that we regard as like, or we talked about Kendi. So if you bring up topics that are uncomfortable, like, for example, the fees that they are paid for talks,

which can be quite substantial, and which seem counter to the argument about capitalism being this terrible system that we must I know that there is the little cartoon in my head of oh interesting you criticize capitalism yet you participate in it but but there is the fact that like there's degrees right and if your speaking fee is like in the five figure category I think you're you're you're doing capitalism right and so in that case like you talk to candy and you raise the issue about the fees paid and in the episode it goes by quickly right kind of like his answer to me was a very very textbook deflection of the issue and is that something like that we just have to accept that like the

gurus won't accept criticism and that even in the case where they don't display all of the toxic characteristics that they basically can very easily present any harsh criticism as you're trying to get them like why are you trying to take me down or my enemies take me down with this point of view? It's a very winding question, but try to find that. No, but it speaks to one of the things that is definitely one of the biggest changes that I've seen in the 20 years that I've been in journalism, which is people are so much more media literate now. They're so much more narrative literate than they were in 2000s, just an exposure to a huge amount more.

They just have so many more preconceptions about what you're going to ask. I always talk about the idea that when I want to do profiles, what I would love to do is find someone who's essentially an untilled field. And I've done a couple of profiles like that. I profiled a guy who was an explosives expert who was in his 80s, who liked to blow things up in his quarry. And he was great because he just didn't have any filter whatsoever. He was like, I'm an explosive. Do you want to go and blow stuff up? And yes, I did. But most of the time you're talking to people who are very either media trained in the case of professional politicians and things like that,

or people who are very aware that they think you're going to come away with a particular story. And that's a real challenge. You have to find a way as a journalist of asking those questions in a way that doesn't just trigger boring, instant defensiveness. So with James Lindsay,

I just was very open about the fact i was like look james you know people are going to say you're arguing with the auschwitz museum that is the actions of a crazy person and like but tell me you know you must have had a reason for doing it so help me understand what it is like what did you think you were getting from that rather than being like answer the question and actually the kind of interrogative kind of paxman style interview is doesn't really kind of work anymore because as you say you just run straight into people's media train walls but you know kendy i said to him you know you talk in the book about racism and capitalism being the conjoined twins and how does that square we're taking 20 grand from a merchant bank and he said look you know corporations are people uh and i you know i

think if i can reach someone in the corporation and i think we had a continuing discussion it didn't kind of really go much further than that so we put a representative sample of that conversation in the in the thing people have got to hear that conversation and make up their own mind about it like even if you think that's a deflection it's a useful thing to hear but it is an increasing problem i think i'm having as somebody who sits on the kind of, I think I described myself to Aaron Rabinowitz as woke skeptic, you know, that people are so full of this howling criticism of the right that they just think they just go into lockdown mode and you mustn't criticize the left at all. The same thing happens on the other side, that because people are really aware of the attack

line used against them, and that of the attack line used against them, and that's the attack line used against Kendi, right? You're a hypocrite. You say you're against capitalism and yet you're wearing shoes, checkmate. But you have to, and sometimes the best way to do it is to acknowledge the elephant in the room and just say, you know, I'm going to, like, I want to hear your answer on this. What is your answer on this? And like frame it actually in a more collusive way of saying, you must have heard this criticism, right? Because what people want absolutely is certainty. I'm going to have to put this in because we have to give you the chance to respond to this. Here

it is. And then they know you're not trying to hoodwink them. It's not a gotcha. You're not trying to get them. You are trying to get them on record with their response to this very common criticism. And that's a job I don't think I would have had to do in journalism quite the same way a decade ago but people are really aware of what the potential outcomes might be so actually the best thing usually is just to say this is what i'm going to put in the program like tell me this is your chance to tell me what you think yeah and that famously went very well for you recently when you asked someone for a comment on an article that you had had written about the art industry so right but but that's again that's about fairness and like having worked for an american magazine now for a couple of years i really appreciate their

madly rigorous fact-checking process uh which is an incredibly awkward experience like i have this thing i was thinking if i ever go and lecture journalism students again stop me if i told you this before but i think every journalism student should get into a lift and face the wrong way and face all the people who are already in the lift and just stare them down because that is the best training you can possibly have for journalism is overcoming social conformity and the unwritten codes that we will have and feeling really really awkward and embarrassed and doing it anyway. And that's what you have to do with the BBC. You have to ask people the challenge questions. That's what they're called. That's what you're doing if you're Atlantic fact-checking. You have to say, I'm going to shade you like this, this, and this, and then you have your chance to respond.

And people don't want to do it, not because necessarily they're biased, but just because it's really uncomfortable to say, I think you're a charlatan. I'm going to say you're a charlatan. What do you say to that? Like, who wants to do it? What kind of sociopath wants to do that? Don't answer that. I can see you looking at Clint in your eye.

Yeah, well, not me, that's for sure. Yeah, you know, we've had a few chats with gurus who have exercised their right to reply and i've come away from them thinking exactly the same thought that i'm not the kind of psychopath that could could easily do that like it's not a natural human thing i know i should be challenging them i should be and i i kind of try a little bit but um i'm i'm like a i'm like a limp fish i don't know it's it's so it's just doesn't come naturally uh yeah well there's uh i i'm more comfortable with it to some extent but maybe not as as much as you alan but the there's two related questions i haven't i suppose the more relevant for what we're talking about is

so long-form podcasts are a thing I don't know you know people have indulgent unedited conversations with people that they like about specific topics um and you, we have mixed feelings about it. But I'm curious when it comes to, like, the example which currently is center of my mind is Lex Friedman is planning to interview a host of controversial people. He already has famously interviewed Kanye West. And he is planning to interview Andrew Tate and you know Ben Shapiro various political firebrands now the thing I'm curious about from a journalist's point of view where you have done long-form interviews with like Jordan Peterson and how do you feel about that format. Is it just indulgent or does it give the opportunity to see things that, you know, a more traditional journalist interview

because there is the anticipation that you're going to challenge them on various points of controversy? Like how much do you think love is important in an interview? That's the question. Are you increasing love with your interviews? What do you think?

I actually, one of the little clips we've got in the thing we call the built top is, oh no, maybe it's in the IDW. It is that kind of, this podcast is seven hours. For some, that's too long. For some, that's too short. For others, it's just right. And it's just like, I think it's one of those really interesting examples that to the Radio 4 mainstream bbc audience they'll be like seven hours on a podcast

of course that's too long but you know that's that to a lot of people it is it turns out too short i think it's um i think a lot of this story has to do with podcasts actually and i do say at one point during the series you know yes everybody in this series has a podcast because they do a couple of things and they just for first out they really enable the parasocial relationships right you get them so much more of a sense of somebody when you're both hearing their voice and their intonation and their accent their affect and all that stuff and also the bits of your life that inevitably creep in when you're just you know like your love of nuts for example the kind of stuff that just you just

learn along the way um so i don't think necessarily the current age of gurus could happen without podcasts, and neither could it happen in the sense that the charisma is often conveyed interpersonally. You want to see them being charismatic at people, or indeed at the listener. And also just the sheer amount of time that you're spending with these people. If you listen to all of Lex's content, most people don't spend, if they've got a job and a family, they don't spend that much time with their friends. You could have had people that are your best man at your wedding and you wouldn't spend as much time with them as you spend with Lex Friedman telling you about whatever it is that he's got to tell you about. And so I think all of those things are actually changed in the

last 10 years and they probably do account for a large amount of the picture that we're looking at now. But I don't mind a long-form interview. The thing is, I object to in the case of Andrew Tate, and we talked about Andrew Tate and whether or not to cover him in the series, I don't think he is interesting or insightful enough to merit that long an interview, right? I think if you interview Ben Shapiro and he tells you about setting up the Daily Wire, what it's like to work in the conservative ecosystem, how he's built this incredible brand, what it's like being a Jewish person in that space when so many people are anti-semites and a huge amount of death threats

like there's lots of things i would really like to peer i don't know whether i've been sure it would be honest about those things but he is a smart and interesting guy who's done things that i don't agree with but i think there's a lot there andrew tate is as i think you've said many times before a kind of you know grifting misogynist with a fake university who, you know, it stands in front of these supercars. You don't know if he's just hired them for the day, like how much of the financials are actually even true. It's impossible to know any of that stuff. And he doesn't really have any great insight into the world beyond bitches need a smack. And like, I just don't know what you're going to get over seven hours of that like it's not like you know at least peterson's views on gender which by the way i think

are often quite loopy like you know are based on having read some stuff and thought about some stuff and some bad readings of evolutionary psychology that you could then unpack but i just don't see what's i mean if he does it it'll be fascinating because i think lex freeman is just gonna like get about 45 minutes in and then be like right so bitches eh what what do they need oh oh okay great but like what what what content is he gonna is he gonna fill in that time yeah it's a bit like i mean he's so much more toxic so it feels unfair to make this comparison but it's like paris hilton like you know just famous for being famous i don't know what i'd ask her either um but yeah like you said even with these gurus that are terribly terribly wrong at least at least they're interesting

in some ways they've got something to talk about yeah so yeah lex but i you know maybe he's got a massive maybe we're all being very rude and he's got an enormous intellectual hinterland and he's going to be like well actually i feel this is all grounded in hegelianism and we're all going to go oh oh i see thank you andrew great great thoughts but it does tell us like i think about lex's editorial decisions because i feel like am i being unfair but it seems to me like he wants to interview whoever is famous at the moment whoever's well you know he follows two people on twitter have you seen this this is one of my favorite things in the world he follows two people on twitter vladimir selensky obviously from ukraine and and like the russian official government account it's just like all right so those are your two interview targets then are you

like you're doing the classic bad journalism thing of like sucking up to the person who you want to get access to but it's just like but also i like the way that you've just taken both sides there maybe you are the person to broker the peace agreement we've all been hoping for in 2023 it's just it's just like who thinks he is who's who's spicy like your your kind of decision about who to interview should go beyond who's spicy and actually i did have this conversation in the podcast with leah heilpern who's a crypto guru she's jewish herself i was like would you interview kanye west now and she's like yeah absolutely and i was like but he's just in his full-blown bipolar manic phase antisemitism like what is and i said this to lex on twitter like what is there left to get out of him he's going to come on and say he loves hitler like you just that's it that's what he does

now and i said what about richard spencer and she's like yeah i'd interview a neo-nazi and i'm just like but what but why and i just it's just a fundamentally just a clash of ideologies where she just wants to talk to someone because they're interesting and spicy and i just it's just a fundamentally just a clash of ideologies where she just wants to talk to someone because they're interesting and spicy and i just apart from the ethics of it i'm just not sure what i know what neo-nazis think there are quite a lot of history books that really outline a lot of that ideology you know like go away and read you know a few books but we can read lex's favorite book about the rise and fall of the third right like it's like oh but you know say what you want about the nazis at least they wrote stuff down about what they

they didn't hide it like we're all very aware of it um so i just i don't understand that kind of content brain i guess yeah that's the the content brain is a good term for it and i i i think the equations that people are making about things getting attention or that like just finding out more about what people want to say. There's this notion that if you spend a lot of time with somebody and you talk to them, you'll break through their shell, right? But in some cases, first of all, there aren't very deep layers. The anti-Semitism is fundamentally part of the person's character.

That's the stuff that they're interested in. Nick Fuentes, maybe if you spend a week with him, you'll find out that he also likes ice cream and he has quite a penchant for cooking Thai curry or whatever. But I don't care because the thing I care about with Nick Fuentes is that he's an anti-Semitic neo-fascist. That's why I don't like him and that's why he's a concerning figure. And it does feel this elevation of like getting to the real person behind the hateful ideology it's it's not invaluable louis theroux did it very does it

very well people who profile terrible people do it no i think that louis theroux neo-nazi program i think it was a complete bust and i love you know louis through uh you know i just think you know his his savel programs were brilliant his you know his Paul Daniels like people who were kind of cult figures he did really well and his stuff inside prisons incredibly good like places that you just are kind of weird but you want to go to but his neo-Nazi program failed for two reasons to me one was as you say that sometimes the shell is literally all there is and you don't penetrate behind the shell to like the cuddly guy who just you know his mother smacked him once and that's why he became an ethnic nationalist and the second thing is that they turned it back on him and they turned him into a spectacle and started live

streaming him walking around and like that's very uncomfortable you know the one i mean with you mean the the recent one with baked alaska and yeah i was thinking i was thinking of the previous one where he was standing in the garage and the people started asking him if he was Jewish. Oh, with Eugene Terblanche, that one. Yeah. Yeah. Like the kind of classic, classic Louis.

But the more recent one, I agree there was an element that at least they were trying to use him for content as well. And like that seemed a harder thing to navigate. But in any case, I still think he did it in a much more responsible way. And I'm willing to challenge people and make uncomfortableness than is normal with the more Lex Friedman side of the pool

when it comes to indulgent interviews so yeah it's i i guess we're probably there isn't that much where we disagree that like you you should include some pushback if you want to interview neo-nazis it's a very controversial position to stake out um but well no i think you guys are talking about something a bit more general and robert wright who we've got a lot of time for actually has like formalized this concept and he calls it cognitive empathy you have to practice cognitive empathy and understand you know where these distasteful characters who might be your opponents might be doing that things that you think are bad understand where they're coming from and understand what motivates them. And he believes that Western policy with respect to Ukraine and Putin

is failing at practising that standpoint taking. And, yeah, I don't know. I think it's probably an interesting question. But for me, I think he's wrong. I think in many ways it just doesn't really matter in a way. I understand that Vladimir Putin looks at the world differently. I understand that he sees the West as degenerate, that he sees himself as... sure my perceptions are not perfectly accurate, but I get a sense. But ultimately, you know, these people that think very differently from ourselves, they're going to do the things they're going to do, that they've taken the public positions or concrete actions that they've taken. And in the end, it doesn't really matter if they like ice cream or if, you know, they've got issues with their mother or something. That's not really the point, is it?

I know what you mean. And I always felt this about Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, who every time there was any kind of conflict would call for a peaceful resolution and you had to be like but other sometimes you can only have a peaceful resolution if both sides want a peaceful resolution if what vladimir putin wants is to take large bits of ukrainian territory and you don't want him to do that there is no compromise position like he's either going to have to win or lose and i think that's that is the drawback to that model is that if we it was just kind of also the next model if only we could all talk it out we could all come to a reasonable compromise and some people are unreasonable and what they want is impossible and it's a refusal to contemplate the fact that at that point you have to do things

that are morally murky you know like a like a stage of war for example right you'd obviously be great if we could all just sit down and talk it out but sometimes you can't some differences are irreconcilable and you know i know it does it always sounds good to practice universal love and to practice universal understanding and empathy these are all very nice sounding words but we're we're against it that's the guru's point i'm gonna say it's a great way to end this section of the podcast as Matt comes out against the concept of love. I'm against it. I'm broadly anti. Helen, I have a final gotcha question planned for you before you getcha us. And I was wondering, because you have on occasion been the main character on Twitter and also in the media in general. And you have famously been cancelled from such important things as the computer game Naughty Dogs we're making. So because of that experience and that specific one, that's the one that I know really created.

created um does that make you feel sympathy to a greater extent when people a lot of the gurus are railing against how they're treated in the mainstream and how they're presented right and they're very strong on the cancellation thing and of course i'm not saying you endorse all of the things that jordan peterson talks cancellation. But when you've gone through like public criticism and cancellation campaigns, personally, does it increase like the sympathy for their narrative? Like in a way that like say me and Matt would not have sympathy for it? Yeah, I think it's definitely a bias that i should um acknowledge because that's feeling of being ostracized and the feeling of everybody just not even listening to what you're saying because they already know you're a bad person and the feeling that you um people that you like and you think you would get on with have already heard

this caricature version of you that's sort of stalking around it totally independent of you and therefore would be reluctant to speak to you and the fact that professional opportunities are closed to you that people the sort of sense of i said this to james zinzi actually we didn't we didn't go into the program but i understand what it is feel like to walk around with a kind of miasma around you um this kind of feeling that there's something you might corrupt people just by touching them it's a really horrible feeling and it does give me an enormous amount of sympathy i what in my case i hope it has turned me down is i feel like a bit like a reformed alcoholic in the sense that i feel like you know don't do what i what i want to always say in those situations is don't lean into it and this is the advice i always give to people who

have been cancelled is like this is a thing that happened to you it's not who you are and becoming professionally cancelled as some people do because it is quite lucrative and also out of a sense of wanting revenge and wanting the idea that one day eventually you'll triumph and everybody will admit that you were right all along there is no justice in the world that won't happen you will burn yourself up in that quest for vengeance that that is the kind of useful bit I can contribute but that said you know and I know this is your academic speciality, Chris, like the bonding effect of going through that is extraordinary. Like, you know, people like Jessie Singleton, Katie Herzog, I know that I get on with them well, because partly we've been all through the same trial by fire. And they also, I know I can trust them and they know they can trust

me in some way, because again, we're all aligned. We've got the same set of enemies, really. Like, that's a very powerful factor in kind of making you feel instantly a connection with people and feel that you can trust them. So yeah, I definitely have a huge amount of sympathy. And I also think it's one of those things where you should reflect on your luck, that I was very lucky that I had lots of people around me. One of my very good friends is Caroline Criado Perez, who went through a particularly horrible experience getting incredibly badly trolled to the extent that she had people were jailed over the threats that they were sending her. And having seen her go through that and come out the other side of it and it not define her forever has been a very powerful experience. So that is my message to the

cancelled. It's horrible to be cancelled, but you're just someone who once got cancelled. You're not professional cancellyyz this is this is good advice and yeah and and when you get cancelled chris i hope you remember this yeah making notes well fortunately matt and i are just really purely about love and expanding it for our podcast so we don't create enemies we we bring them into our embrace and parasocial hug so we don't need to worry about that helen and plus we're also correct on all issues so that that's unlikely to come up these these things you have to factor in but um well look literally i do and could continue to talk to you about gurus endlessly but the are you ready to be quizz but are you ready to be quizzed?

I was going to promote your series and a little blurb before I what kind of professionals are you? I was saying the series it's very good people can find it on BBC Radio 4 half of it is out and the other half is

coming after Christmas if you like this podcast, you will definitely like Helen's series. Imagine our podcast, but much, much shorter with professional production values.

It's basically all the back bits gone and just condensed into a good kernel of 30 minutes yeah yeah it's it genuinely is extremely good and um nothing about nuts though you won't hear about helen's nothing but you did hear you say that you would enjoy kick in response to somebody saying that you might cry there we go a little insight into the woman behind the journalist. Yeah.

So, yeah, great series. Thank you for coming on and talking to us again. And hopefully you stick around in this neck of the woods even after the series is done. Gurus, I mean, not this podcast. You don't have to stay. Forever. Prison forever in Zenkazen. You're just visiting.

You're just visiting the guru. Like, we live here. You're going to be off writing about Ukraine or AIDS or COVID or something. You know, I know how you journalists are. I know. You just adopted the darkness. You won't want it. All right. Well, Chris, you were sounding like you were wrapping up and finishing the show. No won't want it. All right.

Well, Chris, you were sounding like you were wrapping up and finishing the show, but we're coming to the end. No, I was just saying this. Yeah, we have the most important part because the other thing that people don't know about Helen is that she's a Riddler-esque figure. She's a quiz master of extraordinary talents. Like, imagine your best pub quiz person.

They multiply it by 1000 and you're not even approaching the skill at which Helen has a constructing quizzes and she kindly offered given all the stuff that she's done with gurus to make a little quiz for me and Matt about gurus a kind of Christmassy guru quiz. That's fair, Helen. I haven't picked you up. That's how you describe yourself. I mean, you've set up expectations, but it would be nice. It's basically like a year in review, actually several years in review,

of listening to this podcast and to each other, actually. So we'll see whether or not you've been doing that. Oh, shit. Are you ready? Okay. Well, before we start start i have a point of order um okay can i can i have a drink you can't you can't this is a drinking quiz this is a drinking quiz like i know it's mid morning where you are helen hold on hold on even better yeah there we go fantastic lovely christmas you can see very festive see that it's Christmas. I know it's probably like 10 o'clock in the morning where you are.

No, I'm not having whiskey. I've got to do a full day's work. Just think of this as kombucha. Oh, look, a Christmas hat. Wow. Okay, so for audio listeners, there's a Christmas hat which has emerged. So this is very Christmassy themed. Could not be more Christmassy.

Okay, ready for the gurus round. Okay. So ready. What are the rules of of this i'm gonna ask you questions and chris is gonna know them instantly because he's a freak and you're gonna be like well how do you know that chris until we get to the last round where you're gonna surge back in like a late overtaking stage and it's gonna be very it's gonna bring love and peace and reconciliation all right and your listeners can play along. We don't have buzzers or anything, so shall we just raise our hands if we know the answer? Honestly, just say it and argue amongst yourselves.

Play cooperatively, I think, is probably the nicest way to do this. That's true. It's not a competition, Chris. We're a team. We do everything together. Okay, number one. Who was sorry not beautiful? Oh, I know. Okay, number one. Who was sorry, not beautiful? Oh, I know.

Oh, I know. It's ever good first, right? It's cooperative. Discuss amongst yourselves. It's a larger lady. It's a larger lady. It was a larger lady. It was Jordan Peterson who said this, right?

No? Right, but he is obviously obviously beautiful so who was he talking about he was talking about sports illustrated model woman right well i confidently predicted here was that you were going to get to sports illustrated model and then you weren't going to know her name and i was going to be able to call you both sexist for just treating all sports illustrating novels if they were just one giant woman but they're not she's got a name chris it does have this chris i'm not gonna i'm just gonna be a cop because that will go even worse so yes you have successfully stumped us that we don't know it's you mean you you can have half a point for that it's you mean you um okay question two do i get half a point as well i knew the same stuff that chris did yes yes you both get the same half point i've got my time as half and me that is

this is this could go very badly okay number two the sense maker jamie wheel wanted to write his phd thesis on a new concept of time was it called a polychronic quantum epistemology b first person phenomenological chronology c externalized anthropomorphic patinicity or d fucking crazy time balls that's really hard i know the answer fuck you chris how can you know the answer to that that's insane you go first you go first um i'll choose the last one fucking crazy time balls i'm gonna choose that one the answer is a it's a isn't it It is polychronic quantum epistemology, yes. Polychronic quantum. I mean, again, this is one of the quizzes where if you win,

you also lose. A fun bit of trivia, since I won't know any of this trivia, but I have my own trivia, so it doesn't really matter. I was actually approached by something of a crank. He wanted to do a PhD on the the same topic literally the same topic like like a new conceptualization of time and he i he came in and he came and we had a couple of meetings and he was talking to me he had all these documents and bits of paper and i couldn't understand what he was talking about but it was just this whole like all of our understandings

of time were all wrong and his phd was going to be on a whole new version of time so it was basically jamie well but uh by the way helen that amazing thing there is that you said what that was polychronic something or other but it's the sense makers have just this amazing ability to say things that your mind cannot to say things that your mind cannot retain it it just slips off so like i can recognize it but i can never say what that term i know i might as well have gone like yeah polychronic quantum epistemology which makes sense when you break it down right the science of knowing about i don't know polychronic means i guess many times but they happen at a quantum level i don't know i guess they're probably if there are supposed to be little dimensions folded up at a quantum level. I don't know. I guess they're probably, if there are supposed to be little dimensions folded up at the quantum level,

then maybe they have got their own time schemes. I don't know. Tell us your distractors, because I thought your distractors were very good. They were very plausible. What were they? You didn't realize it would tip this. This is going to happen every question.

First person phenomenological chronology. See, that was good that's a that's a good that's a good phd title i could plausibly do a phd in that um externalized anthropomorphic patonicity beautiful yeah that's very that's very sense making do you know how i did this let's pull back the curtain on the magic is that i went through your interview and i just noted down all the words that were longer than 11 letters and i was like match them together wow that's it that's incredible i'm pretty sure that's what they do they just grab these words and they match what's long okay stop distracting helen sorry question number three mark carey m jackson alessandra antonello and jacked in rushing are the authors of a paper which had a profound effect on one of your gurus. It was called What Gender and Science? Oh, Chris,

you already look so confident. Matt, why don't you have a go first? It was called What Gender and Science? What's the question again? Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jacqueline Rushing are the authors of a paper which had a profound effect on one of your gurus. It was called What Gender and Science? You are going to kick yourself when I tell you. Okay. So is the question which guru? No, no. What's the missing word? Sorry, what? Okay. Yeah, it was called What Gender and Science.

No, that wasn't like a Jamie Wheal title. Like, here's my paper on what gender and science. No. Sorry, sorry. A blank gender and science. Blank gender and science. I'm going to go with race. Race, gender and science.

Silly, silly math. Silly math. It is years. Gender, sexuality. It is yours. It is, of course, the other great IDW session, Feminist Glaciology. Well done, Chris. Okay. Oh, that was the Feminist Glaciology paper.

You're kidding. Of course it was. God. I can't believe you don't have that pinned up above your bed is one of the greatest triumphs of science um okay number four the subject of many IDW gurus obsession this year once received an email that said 10 held by h for the big guy who was the big guy oh well that's okay I get to go first right because I have a handicap yeah because i can

also see from chris's smug face on video that he knows the answer that's the tell here i want to play poker with you so much i could take so much money off you are you still keeping score chris are you still keeping score yeah yeah okay so i have a handicap i get to go first um so that's that was hunter b about Joe Biden? Joe Biden's answer? Yeah, I'm going to assume that, Chris, you knew that was Joe Biden because you referenced it earlier. So I thought, oh, shit, he knows that one.

I did, but I let him get it. It doesn't matter that you know it. I answered it first. Number five, which guru wrote this trenchant and hilarious satire? Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist

is to suffocate to stop breathing. The logic holds up. Is this a multiple choice one or we do something different? That's got to be the most heavy-handed satire I've ever heard. So that's Gad's sad level. That's what I was going to say as well.

Sure, sure. I was. Is it Gad's sad? It is, of course, Gad's sad. It is the Gadfather. You just couldn't let me have it. You couldn't let me have it, could you, Chris? You had it so fine. I was confident enough, but that's amazing. Oh, God.

I mean, it was the heavy-handedness that gave it away. That's how I knew. Yeah, it was the way I just relentlessly kept pounding the dead horse until. In case you were missing the point, just again and again. Okay. Number six, who was the first ever guest on the Dark Horse podcast? Oh, I know. You are insufferable.

Your family at Christmas must hate you. The fact that you know Chris doesn't reflect well on you. You think it does. No. I also understand why my own family are annoyed because I am this person at our family quizzes where I'm like, I know the answer to this one. Please, Scott, please. Okay, so I'll just have a guess.

First guess on the Dark Horse podcast. It wasn't Heller. Was it Eric? It was not Eric. Chris? It was Andy Ngo. It was Andy Ner. Was it Eric? It was not Eric. Chris? It was Andy Ngo. It was Andy Ngo. That's disturbing.

He is a bastard. He is a bastard. You're right, Matt. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, again, I would say another hollow triumph for Chris there. Give me this. No, I have. Number seven. I would say another hollow triumph for Chris there. Give me this from my house.

Number seven. Which of your gurus was once married to a Christian gospel singer then known as Catherine Elizabeth Hudson? I'm available to provide clues on this one because I think it is quite hard and probably you're not going to get it. Well, Chris is looking stumped, so it must be hard. It is hard. She was hot and cold about him, but then she escaped like a firework.

She kissed a guru and she liked it. Oh, I know. Oh. What's his name? The English guy we were just talking about before. Russell Brand. Is it Russell Brand? It was Russell Brand. Of course. It's Katy Perry's original name. There we go. talking about before. Russell Brand. Is it Russell Brand? It was Russell Brand.

That is Katy Perry's original name. There we go. Okay, I get the point. You get the point. Okay, all right. I'm working from a handicap, Chris. That's right. We established that.

So, yes, okay. Both a procedural one and a mental one. Next question. Okay, eight. Whose book quoted a student describing their classes as a ancestral mode for which I was primed but didn't even know existed? Sorry, which student? Sorry, sorry, which person? Whose book quoted one of their own students describing their classes, their university

classes, as an ancestral mode for which I was primed but didn't even know existed. Ancestral mode. Gee, that could be Jordan Peterson. It could be Brett and Heather's book because they talk about ancestry and all that nonsense. Chris, do you know the answer, by the way? You seem confident. You have a confident expression on your face. Of course you know the answer by the way you seem you seem confident you have a confident expression on your face of course i know the answer i know the answer i'm just purely poker-faced in it so you may have a chance to steal um go on which one are you gonna go you're

gonna go pity you're gonna go uh brett and heather I think I've got to go Jordan. I'm going to go for Jordan. What an error. That's a bad miss. You're kidding. It is a Hansa Kipler's guide to the 21st century. So close, Matt. So close.

You could always taste it. It felt too obvious. I thought it felt like a trick question. That is the kind of thing that I would do. Yeah. I remember that specific quote. Okay, number nine. About which potential interviewee did Lex Friedman once claim that most journalists would, quote, push back because they're trying to signal to fellow journalists and to people back home that this, me, the journalist is on the right side?

Whereas he, Lex, would, quote, empathise with them to understand the, quote, full arc of history. Which potential interview did he say that about? I'm going to go for Vladimir Putin. I enjoy that level of confidence. It's a good level of confidence. Chris, are you similarly confident? I'm just, like, stuck with Kanye West,

but you said potential interview. No, it is not not someone he has interviewed, no, not so far. You can't choose Vladimir Putin, by the way. You've got to choose something else because I already... Is that the rule? Well, I think you're probably right, but I'll say Hitler. And you would be right to say Hitler.

Oh, no. Oh, no. Potential interview guest. oh no yeah you got it you got it potential interview you did it he was dead you could you could have been

wrong together Matt that's what you could have had and instead you tricked him you forced him into being right okay

number 10 which guru wrote I try to be very thoughtful about how and when I cry I try to cry quietly so that I don't take up more space. And if people rush to comfort me, I do not accept the comfort. Oh, this is an easy one. I know this one.

Go on then. Robin DiAngelo. Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. You see, it's a woman. I couldn't. I thought I could hear this sort of vague chirruping, like. See, Chris is going on actual memories, whereas I'm going on vibes.

And I think that strategy, you know, it's a dark horse. I was thinking Gordon. No, no. I thought I would trick you with that. No, he loves people comforting him. He does accept the comfort. Well done, Matt. I put a point trick you with that. No, he loves people comforting him. He does accept the comfort. Well done, Matt. I've got a point for you. Okay, number 11. In making sense of sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger was running 70 to 90 paradigms at once. But who were the poor fools who were only running one? Who are the poor fools who are only running one? GMA.

GMA idiots. GMA idiots? It's a much more weirdly specific answer than that. Weirdly specific. Have I finally defeated you both? This is a poised in trial. I'm so excited. Come on. A very specific thing that annoys sense makers.

See, in my reconstructed memory, he just said most people are running just one or two paradigms. I'm afraid it was the Quakers. What? Quakers. Quakers. Why the Quakers? They're just running in silence, not hurting anybody,

but only running one paradigm at once okay that's good yes okay number 12 i am according to wikipedia an occult concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people what am i benign agrigor it was disturbing on a number of levels but yes you are right did you know that yeah i was gonna say egregore you were just overcome with excitement how often in your daily life do you get to say egregore it's just not enough um It's true. Number 13. Which of these is not a real title of a Dark Horse episode?

A, becoming allergic to truth. B, keeping sane, Brett speaks with Neil Oliver. C, the wrong side of history. Or D, staying self-aware with Constantine Kizin. I have no idea. No idea whatsoever. what is your wild stab in the dark go on um wrong side of history okay the constantin kissin you are of course correct although i didn't really realize until i read through the whole list of dark horse episodes how many of them are sort of incredible cell phones it's just it's keeping sane brett

speaks with neil oliver it's just absolutely unimprudent yeah good really the wrong side like literally yeah if you take them if you just take them they apply to brett they're they're kind of like quite insightful. I like becoming allergic to truth. I like that one. Okay, number 14. Whose return appearance on the Joe Rogan show did Devin Gordon describe in The Atlantic as a walrus with a persecution complex or a talking pile of gravel? That sounds like Eric Weinstein.

I'm just going on vibes. Okay, Matt says Eric. Vibes, good vibes. einstein uh i'm just going on vibes nice okay matt says eric what did give me that description again helen you have a jeremy corbin mug carry on sorry this is how my family attempt to troll me is with them people have a right to be angry mugs um a walrus with a persecution complex or a talking pile of gravel that does sound like eric though but just saying oh no he doesn't have a gravel gravel voice like that's gonna be and he's not that oh i'm gonna time you out in 10 seconds chris we haven't got all day this isn't a sense making episode we haven't got all day okay i i don't know i i'll say graham hancock but it's

not graham hancock you're gonna be very upset because it was of course alex jones oh of course it was of course so i'm like so much genuinely upsetting okay in lex friedman's daily morning routine with whom does he say he is in an open relationship? Hitler. Hitler. Just keeping things casual, you know, both of them are dating other people. They're going to see if it gets serious. Okay. I'm sensing that you don't really have this one.

And the answer is... No, don't. Because, like, I do. It's there somewhere in my memory. I remember it being ridiculous. I can't remember what he said, but it might be... It's something technological.

It's like his computer or Twitter or something like that. I can't remember, but I'll say Twitter, but it's not Twitter. What you're trying to do is remember the specific ridiculous thing from Lex Friedman's morning routine where there are rich pickings.

The answer is, of course, his electric guitar because he also plays acoustic. Not Hitler, Matt. He's not in an open relationship. You see, I think one of the things that's led me to do so well in life is the fact that I make no space in my brain for little factoids like that. If I heard it, it went right in one ear and right out the other. And thank God for that.

That's a beautiful question. Thank God for that. Both of those have been good. Very good. Okay. Number 16. Don't worry we are approaching the the end you will you will be able to leave at some point and go back your lives 16 i'm enjoying that i can call my which guru once organized a competition to write the rudest possible poem about turkish leader erdogan for which his own entry was resep eran is the Turkul, never tire of rim jobs from his circle, yet his chiefest delight, now caliph is in sight,

are the felchings he gets from Frau Merkel. I mean, that's just a bad poem. But one of the people that you've covered wrote that monstrosity of a poem. Who was it? That's unbelievable. The fact that somebody would know anything about any of the things that you just mentioned that's the thing that's puzzling me the gurus don't know that kind of stuff it makes me want to say gadzad again because he's the only person that would go to that much effort

no no no no no you've already that's a question about gadzad so i'm using my meta skills i'm gonna go for that too. Right, you're piggybacking on Chris's answer. Yes. And what's happened is much like the playground, you shouldn't have been swayed by peer pressure, Matt, because it is the wrong answer. It is, of course, Douglas Murray.

Oh. That was the only one that I was thinking. I was thinking Europeans. I was thinking only a European would care about any of this stuff. So I was thinking there's like three. Douglas Murray criticizing Erdogan is somewhat surprising to me, though, in any case. Yeah.

It was a competition run by the Spectator magazine. For a bonus point, who won that contest? Christopher Hitchens. petition run by the spectator magazine um for a bonus point who won that contest christopher hitchens from beyond the grave chris well i don't know anything i don't know how long are the ones been ever behind it could have been 15 years ago or something so can i ask a little hint question was it the guru, another one of our gurus who won it, or just a rando? It was, no, not a rando. I think that's a cruel description of the person. It is not a guru.

It is someone British and someone who this year had a quite spectacular fall from grace. The guy from Top Gear. I don't know if he's had a fall from grace. Jeremy Clarkson. Yeah, Jeremy Clarkson. Again, no. It was Boris Johnson.

It would be him. Of course it would be him. There was a young fellow from Ankara who was a terrific wankerer till he sowed his wild oats with the help of a goat, but he didn't even stop to thank her. Which I don't think he wrote himself, to be fair, but then that is kind of in keeping with the career of Boris Johnson. Douglas was better. He should have won. be fair but then that is kind of in keeping with the career of boris johnson that's not this was

better he should have won douglas where he was wrong in the great rude poetry competition okay number 18 this is good okay this is good the quiz when you like i want to write a quiz where if you get it right you feel bad but if you get it wrong you feel worse that's the ideal quiz to me how's the scores going chris how the points the points? Are we neck and neck? I'm not going to spoil it, Matt. We'll find out at the end. There's a chance. I'm saying there's a chance.

There's a chance. There's always a chance. You're going to make it out, but it's fine. 18. Eric Weinstein shares his middle name with a character from Friends. What is it? Ross. I don't know any of the names a character from Friends. What is it? Ross. I don't know any of the names of people from Friends. What?

Oh, poor Matt. I actually never watched a single episode of Friends. Wow. Yeah. Okay, well, that's... They exist. You bet you're really ruining that decision now, 20 years old, Matt, aren't you?

That's right. Reaping what I sow. All right. It is Ross, right? It is. It is Ross. I was really hoping you'd say Gunther, but it is, of course, Eric Ross Weinstein. Okay.

Number 19. Multiple choice. Which of these is not a real product sold on the Goop website? A, the Viva La Vulva Vibrator. B, the DTF dietary supplement, C, the This Smells Like My Bollocks candle, or D, the Madam Ovary menopause pills? Oh, my God.

The last two are strong contenters, aren't they? They're so implausible. Yet one of them must be actually sold on the website. Mm-hmm. This Smells Like My Bollocks candle? that's my answer terry because because it's meal it's like that's right that's right yeah that is actually available on uh jeremy clarkson's farm shop website the rest are from from goop yeah that's good that's good to end with a solid point.

Okay, number 20. To what does Sam Harris definitely not belong? That tribe. That's not a real question. You just want me to say that. You just want me to say that. Good of you to finally admit it, Chris. That's very good.

Okay. Do you want to give us the questions now before the Matt-centric bonus round? Okay. Yes. So, Mike, you questions now before the math-centric bonus round? Okay. Yes. So, Mike, you would have answered that yes as well, right? Sure. Absolutely. Right.

So, the scores, eight maths are easy to count up, not so many. So, Mike, you have six and a half points I have solid showing so if you handicap me I have ten and a half if you don't do that unfair action I have thirteen and a half

out of twenty so I've just either score is available I've kept the record just right just for completeness okay here are the um so i i said to matt like what are what subjects do you think you plausibly might have more knowledge on than your knowledge of like weird internet beef and you picked matt literature and ire Ireland in an attempt to troll Chris, which I approve of, partly. This is how we find out.

No, no. No, I just said I know. I bet I know more about Ireland than Chris knows about Australia. But this is a quiz about Ireland. No, but you've listened to podcasts about Irish history and stuff. I haven't done that. So you probably, I know that podcast, mate. You give it to me and there's like 20 episodes

on like that Irish agreement in 1918 and blah, blah, blah. I tell you this, I better know more about Irish literature than you do. But anyway. Well, you can teach your questions. Let's put that proposition to the test, Matt, that unwarranted confidence may or may not pay off I'm going to give you two points

per question for this because then you can catch up so these are worth two okay this is awful like it's bad I feel like I'm being set up for a big fall here because like I explained I wasn't good at facts or names or dates but also concepts

I'm not good at any of these things. Stop your pretty excuses because I am certain that I will not beat you in the literature area. So just have confidence. Have confidence. I'm just worried. It's trivia. I hate trivia.

Anyway, go on um yeah okay okay so question one estragon and vladimir are here who is missing well i know that's from samuel beckett's um waiting for goddo but oh yeah goddo i guess yes yes yes Oh, I don't know. Godot. Oh, yeah. Godot, I guess. Yes. Yes. All right. That was me. That was me, Matt.

You got it after. I think that was very much an assist from Matt, and then you tapped it into the goal. I think you should both have the point. All right. I'll give you a one, Matt, and I'll give me a two, because obviously it's Godot. Obviously.

Okay. number two. Who took over as Taoiseach of Ireland on December 17th? Sorry, as what of Ireland? Taoiseach, Prime Minister of Ireland. Oh, I don't know what a Taoiseach is. No, I don't know the answer to that one. The best thing is the fact that actually Chris, that we've discovered has been pretending to be Irish now

in a successful ruse that's lasted many years. He's not going to know this one either. He's actually a citizen of the UK, I think, technically. I mean... This is much more embarrassing for me than it is for you. I have no idea who that is there's a new one that uh who is it helen it's leo varadkar again oh yeah that's true yeah i i didn't know that but matt also didn't know it just not that he also didn't know it. Just note that. He also didn't know it.

Right, but he's not. I mean, do you know who the current Prime Minister of Australia is? I think that... Do you know, Matt? His initials are A.A., I believe. Just to give you a clue. Aldous Albee. It's Anthony Albanese.

Do you know the Prime Minister of'm not sure yet hold on is this true yeah yeah i mean the name in his defense they change him really really frequently like the last the last tie shot i know is bernie ahern that's how that's that's how little attention I paid to that. Chris, they're all just like middle-aged fat guys in white shirts and ties. You've mentioned them to me, Matt. You've said his name. Oh, my God. Alan, this is terrible. So zero to both of us, and let's say nothing more.

Yeah, let's never mention that again. Okay, number three. Dimitri, Ivan and alexi are brothers what is their surname karamazov what okay um i i got close i got close but that's like the person trying to blag it in a yeah no that was right karamazov yeah this is this is like a this is like an idw question format yeah they all love dostoevsky they love dostoevsky dostoevsky in the bible these are the two things they love any two books you need to read okay uh

which irish writers middle names were augustine aloysius oh augustine come on it would be very embarrassing for you not to get this obvious but Augustine Aloysius. Oh, Augustine Aloysius. Come on, it would be very embarrassing were you not to get this obvious question. I mean, no one actually knows this, so this is basically spin the wheel of famous Irish writers of the 20th century. I'm going to go for James Joyce, just because he's famous.

Chris, who are you going for? Alleged Irishman, Chris Kavanagh. Who are you going for? Just tell us any. Just tell us any. Any famous Irish writer, Chris. Seamus Heaney, he was a poet, but I'm sure he wrote short stories or something at some point.

So maybe him? I'm afraid the points go to matt it was in fact james joyce there you go it was a shot in the dark but you know it hit the target okay final one which i actually think unfortunately this is a chris century question i think you'll get this and that won't it's an unfair one to end on but whose cookbook was nearly called the peas process i know i had tears in my eyes i mean it's called calling this irish literature is i will admit a bit of a stretch yeah no i'm gonna pass on this one chris it's jerry adams it is j Jerry Adams' improbable cookbook. Oh, I knew that

Jerry Adams wrote a cookbook. Yeah, he had this, yeah. There was a Bush that handed it to him in the advertisement from it and stuff. So contemporary Irish politics, that's where I'm at. What was that movie with Jerry? I mean, it didn't have them in it, but it portrayed Jerry Adams

talking to the Protestant guy, you know, the negotiations. Wait, not Mike McGinnis. That's the opposite. No, no. It's the opposite of a Protestant. No, you know, the Protestant firebrand. Ian Paisley. Ian Paisley.

Paisley, yeah. So there was a movie, a drama based on dialogues between Paisley and that guy. It was a BBC drama, I think, rather than the movie, wasn't it? Or am I getting that wrong? Yeah, I think it was a BBC. I do know the movie you're talking about. I feel like it was a movie.

Anyway, it was good, I thought. It was also, and we end on a very Christmassy note because, of course, one of my favourite tweets ever is Gerry Adams complaining about not being able to get his Christmas lights on and someone replying, surely you know someone who can fit a timer so happy christmas uh happy christmas i do i do have to do the you know the important thing of just tallying the scores so just just it's all just for fun chris it's just for fun it's christmas

it's just for fun it's just a. It's just for luck, Chris. You don't need to tell me the scores. Nobody cares. Well, look, Matt, the important thing is, let's take my score with a handicap, you know, make it fair. And then, you know, you're not that far behind. That's the important thing. The important thing is Matt finishes with 11.5 out of some number. And I finish on 15.5,

which is higher, substantially higher. And that's the most important thing. That was great, Helen. You are the Quidditch Blaster, genuinely. So people should pay you significant amounts of money for that. Other people, not us. Right.

He's having a car accident. Yeah. Well, the better man won, Chris. I want you to hold the knowledge of your victory. I do think you're right, Matt. I think the real victory is having listened to Lex Friedman's morning routine and then let it slide. Like the Elven poetry in Lord of the Rings. Your eyes just slide over it don't retain any of that information the real victory is

living is living well helen and um and i feel like uh you know um we can't score that chris but yeah and i i i do also thank you helen for limiting the amount of embarrassing contemporary Irish knowledge questions that you included for us. That was worried. If you continued along that vein of questioning, I may have had technical difficulties and dropped the call. So, yeah, but that's good. That's good. So, look, we learned things. We found out things about gurus.

And we have established that although your series is very good, it should be best considered a supplement to long-form podcasts by middle-aged men. That's really the message that we want to take away at the end. It was very big of you to come on, Helen, to concede that. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. It's true.

Just, you know, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Like that's how I feel about my podcast series. No, it's very nice. And I do want to say a genuine thank you to both of you for having been very generous about it because it was a worry to me that I was trampling all over your terrain. But it turns out that actually there are many gurus in the sea and enough for everybody to point at and go,

oh, that's a bit weird. What's he doing? What's that man doing on the internet? Exactly. We don't need to have any fishing controls or disputes like England had with Norway or whatever about the cod. You know, I mean, and I think you should come back and be a regular guest because I think, you know, I mean, and I think you should come back and be a regular guest because I think, you know,

that role would be a fitting, you know, end to your arc. Career arc. Thanks, Matt. It's like my retirement gig. We'd love that. I would love to come back. Very the only slight possibility that I would have to subject myself to more of this content.

And I just can't listen, even at two times speed. I don't know how you do it, Chris. I just, why can't people write things down like the old days? That was better in my view. One thing that you should know is Helen's condition for supplying me

the crack cocaine of podcasts, which, you know, I consumed like a vampire bat, is she would supply the episodes for the series early for me to consume if I listened at times one speed that was the that was the deal and uh that's that's tough but I did do that I did do that so yeah look at that that was a trade-off I know but we had genuinely like we have we employed a composer to make original music for the series we got a very good sound designer who occasionally had to be reined in from putting slightly too many sound effects in but was a just a brilliant brilliant guy and then i was like chris you are not listening to this it's like so chipmunk speed i would say

it's an insult it's an insult to everyone involved in this you can do it to joe rogan i don't care about that that's fine but do it to the beat to the bbc chris there's a thing that like all of the themes for all of the podcasts for me are at times two speed right like so anytime i hear them at normal it's it just sounds really wrong like everything has moved slowly and I've never heard most of the theme tunes for podcasts at normal speed. So that is, that's a thing. So there, one day an anecdote to finish high off brand.

But thank you very much for coming on, Helen. We will definitely have you back when we can think of a reason to trap you. But everybody should go listen to the series and thank you very much for the quiz. Thank you. we will definitely have you back when we can think of a reason to trap you but um everybody should go listen to the series and thank you very much for the quiz thank you where where can people find you uh probably here as it turns out like yeah here um no the atlantic uh obviously have

a stuff writer there i have a sub stack because that's the law now uh and yeah and wherever you find your podcasts i believe is what they say yeah you have a podcast again that's right welcome welcome to the podcast ecosystem all right so Matt I'm sure I'll talk to you soon enough so I'll push this button Matt okay thanks Helen bye Thank you.