Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Helen Lewis on culture wars and religion, that Jordan Peterson interview, and gurus generally

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

Today Chris and Matt are visited by Helen Lewis, a journalist, editor, and writer with what could very fairly be described as a rather distinguished career in those fields. Helen has previously worked at the New Statesman and is currently with The Atlantic. She has also served as a Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University and also on the steering committee for the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University. Her books include Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Helen's work covers a broad array of topics including politics, feminist issues, and contemporary/online culture. She is also known for a particular long-form interview which became a 'viral moment' when she sat down for a challenging discussion with one, Jordan B. Peterson.Most recently Helen has produced "The Church of Social Justice" for BBC4, which asks whether political movements might be taking the place of traditional religions in Britain. A question which never generates any controversy whatsoever. She is also working on an upcoming project that looks at internet gurus and the ecosystems they spawn. So, we were glad to take the opportunity to catch up and talk about the intersections with our rather idiosyncratic collection of interests.Join us as we try to decipher whether everything is a religion, if social justice requires a pope, and how exactly can we resolve ALL of those thorny culture war debates. We might not ultimately reach any satisfying answers but Helen does offer her one rule for life at the end of the interview!Also featured on this episode: our most defensive response to a review to date, and a segment on the dangers of JAQing off!LinksThe Church of Social Justice (BBC4)How Social Justice became a New Religion (The Atlantic)Helen's Book: Difficult Women- A History of Feminism in 11 FightsHelen's interview with Jordan Peterson for British CQJoe Rogan's Recent Vote Republican ClipChris' appearance on Embrace The Void discussing definitions of religion

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, and we try to understand what they're talking about. Yes, that's right. Sense-making is the game, and Decoding the Gurus is the name. But your name, Chris, is Chris. My name is Matt.

Keep going. I may have lost the thread there a little bit, but it was a good idea anyway. Throw in a metaphor. Throw in a metaphor and we'll ask you. We are deep in the sense making muck. We're excavating tunnels. We're digging through metaphorical soil to to reach the famed

fabergé eggs that lie the deep ore of sense a deep seam of sense um is there just imagine us like two hairy dwarfs with our gleaming pickaxes chopping through the sans-speaking metaphors to try and get at the nuggets of wisdom that lie buried deep deep down several metaphorical levers deep that's what we're doing we've been doing it for a while and we'll continue to do so that's right just have to be careful we don't dig too deep because you know what happened to the dwarves in Lord of the Rings? That's right. There's monsters down there. Yeah. In the sense-making minds.

Think of the implications of this metaphor if we map it out, if we follow it all the way through. Yeah. But what about the elves, man? What about the elves? What about the elves? Oh, that's another day. That's another day. But we are not here today to talk about the Sensemakers because we have yet to finish our work. It's hard work. But it's honest work. It's hard work, but it's honest work.

And by God, we'll get there. So while you're waiting there on the edge of the mine for the lift to the mine for the lift to come up with the rocks and we thought we would toss you some scraps

from our That's a terrible That's a terrible way to say we're going to do an interview in the meantime. It's not the scraps. And what happened in Steadmatt was while we were digging through the sense making layers, we hit upon a diamond.

A diamond in the rough. A crystalline structure that emerged and we have excavated and we've took this up to show you in the meantime say just just hold on look at this shiny object in the meantime yeah that's right um that's what it is and who are we talking to chris what's the shiny object is the journalist helen lewis previously a journalist that the new statesman wrote for various things. I listened to her on the New Statesman podcast talk about British politics in a very interesting way. And she now works at the Atlantic, but recently had some articles and BBC documentaries come out about the topic of religion and whether there are aspects of religion and social justice movements and predictably that was met with great enthusiasm

twitter was uncharacteristically gentle yeah they were just like oh interesting that's a nice idea yeah it's good great for thought yeah there was a bit of a couple but we're not going to spoil it because we talked to helen about that And religion is supposedly my area of academic expertise. So, you know, there might be interesting points to discuss there. So that's what's coming up in the interview. But before we get there, Matt, I've got a grievance mongering segment for you. You want to air a grievance? Go ahead. I want to air a grievance. Youering segment for you you want to air a grievance go ahead i want to air a grievance you know this thing matt of course like like everything it happens on twitter right but it

also happens in other places it happens via emails and so on and it's where you get a question where somebody presents it you know like oh like, oh, dear sir, pray tell, I came across this story about the Hunter Biden laptop and I know nothing. I know nothing about it, but I'm purely curious if there is some legitimacy to some of the things that I may have heard on the grapevine. And, you know, you respond and say, and say oh well of course the there does seem to be validity to some parts of it but that was never really in dispute i mean there were pictures and everybody knows hunter biden's a fuck up so the question is really whether the allegations would relate to joe biden that's why they're of any relevance and And there, there seems to be little. But the response is, oh, oh, sir, thank you for the answer.

But, you know, I have seen in my travels this article on the Daily Wire, and it mentions this, I know the Daily Wire isn't reliable, but also the Daily Mail has covered this aspect. And if you look at this one article which appeared in, it goes on, right? And it continues on and on. And as it goes on, it becomes clear. The person has a very strong opinion. You know, they are not just working their way through it. They've got like a whole thesis on the thing. And I hate that. I hate that. Oh, please explain to explain to me good sir i am but a humble traveler weary from my sojourn in the discourse trenches yeah somebody needs to tell these people that we are aware everybody knows what they're doing it has a name just asking questions

jacking off j-a-q and We're onto them. It doesn't work. It just annoys people. What's the difference between that and sea lioning, though? What's sea lioning, I forget. Sea lioning is that you barge into a conversation and kind of demand that people explain in detail about whatever you want them to talk about. I've heard people argue that the sea lion cartoon isn't great because like, if you just change some of the details, the sea lion is actually quite reasonable,

right? Like if somebody makes a racist comment offhand and then they're like, Oh, excuse me, like, could you just explain more? And you're like, no, no, go away. I don't want to talk about that i think that's the difference i just asking questions is the thing where you have a very clear conclusion that you already believe but you present it in this full naive way of oh i just i just have questions that i i would like to answer joe Rogan is the kind of king of just asking questions approach, right? But the thing is, you said, you know, we all know what you're up to.

But there's so many that don't. There's so many people that are like, Joe Rogan has an open mind. He's just a curious person. He doesn't have an ideology. He's got no, you know, lean one way or the other. He just asks questions. That's all he does. Sorry, I didn't know this, but you told me that some terrible person

on the Reddit said that I was wrong in saying that Joe Rogan was right-wing. I was very, very wrong about that. You know, the tone that you said terrible person there, Matt, as well, is like, I know know i know you were being sarcastic but i'm just just warning you that i actually think that you know i've experienced this online people don't hear the tone all right so they're like oh matt just called someone terrible so just to say he had a twinkle in his eye when he said it that's all but yes somebody has been taking you to task for saying that that Joe Rogan is a right-wing partisan how could you say that Matt on what basis

they mentioned a couple times you've only listened to six hours on what basis which is not true because we've done other episodes with Joe Rogan since then so there's a clip there in front of me from 17 hours ago on our Reddit. We just say Joe Rogan's telling people to vote Republican. He must be that very special kind of left winger that tells people to vote Republican, I guess. Yeah. Why would I be confused? You know, so easy to get confused. I'm just a simple man. It is. It's very hard. I mean, it's very difficult to spot joe rogan skew you know when we did the episode on him the clips you could 50 50 50 50

is he gonna defend biden is he gonna defend trump it was just not clear and which way he leans it's all it's all unclear he i mean he spoke to bernie sanders he spoke to Bernie Sanders. He spoke to Bernie Sanders and he said in the primary that he might prefer Bernie Sanders. So, you know, people have got him all wrong, Matt. They've just got him all wrong. I hate it.

Just lug off, Chris. Lug off. Well, they're all over the place, Matt. You meet these people. You meet them walking around in the street like P-Zombies as well but yeah so just just asking questions is such an effective technique and even though people

make fun of it, there's memes floating around, it's now got its own little moniker and everything it still works it still works, this is like Matt Tybee Glenn Greenwald's kind of thing as well. They're not saying Alex Jones is right. They're just asking questions about the way he's treated in the mainstream media.

Ho hum. Well, ho hum, ho hum. So from that diabolical behavior to an altogether more entertaining and less diabolical behavior, let's go speak to our guest for this week. Let's do it. Would you join me, Matt, in the parlor? Let's proceed into it. Yes.

Right this way. Okay. this way okay so matt with us now kindly is helen lewis staff writer for the atlantic and previously with new statesman where i think i first came across you helm and has recently released a short documentary video documentary the church of social justice Social Justice on BBC Video 4 and the Connected article in The Atlantic, which looks at whether social justice has some features which make it parallel with religion. But we'll get into that. So first of all, Helen, thank you for waking up early and agreeing to talk to us. Thank you very much.

If you can hear bad noises, that's just me chugging my morning cup of tea, the first of my many morning cups of tea. Apologies. Well, if there's deep intakes of breath, that's Matt smoking his Vip pen or whatever they're called. So that's not Helen. She's not taking the Vip. So that background noise is Matt, if you hear it. Yeah, that's me helen she's she's not taking the episode that that background noise is my if you hear it yeah that's me that's me so yeah helen just to say as well that the documentary you made was relevant to my interest in particular because i do research on religion and also things which

are not religion but have rituals in them. That's the other thing that I'm interested in, ritual psychology. So this seemed up my alley. And I used to listen to you on the New Statesman podcast with Stephen Bush back in the day and enjoyed that. So this is a pleasure. It's like the podcast world coming to life. You're actually a real person. Yeah, the podcast has come to you.'m i'm sorry i didn't bring steven um but then we would have we would

have to then talk about the labor party and no one wants that no no but we might we might get into that later but the other thing that people might know you for probably this is this is probably not a nice thing to say you you do have books and stuff that you've you've written but you're I do have an almost 20 year career as a journalist but you're going to say I also sat opposite a quite grumpy Jordan Peterson in 2018 for GQ yeah so yes that was unfortunately yes I think that's going to haunt your career but but yes you did I think the reason that it's um so well known because he's been interviewed by hundreds of people thousands of people probably at this stage but your interview

was a long form one and it was one of the few that was critical but actually i think like overall quite well received and well regarded and regarded as like a challenging interview for him where he was kind of pushed on stuff in a way that he normally isn't. Yeah I think it was a kind of Rorschach plot which we can kind of talk about in regards to all of this stuff but basically everybody I knew thought it was amazing I totally kippered him like he looked like a loon and then everybody in the YouTube comments thinks he totally kippered me I look like a sort of woke idiot which is quite funny because it's just people watching exactly the same interview and as you say incredibly long about 90 minutes i mean cheeky

only sprung the video bit on it about of it me quite late so the cameraman who did the stills photography also had to record it which is why there were only two shots there's not a shot there's a shot of him and there's a two shot of the two of us. It's not one of me too. And he kept having to pause every half hour to put a new memory card in. We'd literally filled it with big insights into life. And then at the end, I remember the cameraman going, and I was quite exhausted. I think John Peasy must have been quite exhausted. And the cameraman went, well, I don't know who's going to want to watch that.

That's typically what happens when we've recorded the episode every time we finish an episode of our podcast we're like that was long this very niche topic but amazingly people listen to well the answer was like something i meant like about 55 million people so far um yeah it overtook the kathy newman i'm working on something which maybe gets you later also in your subject area about gurus so i went and revisited it and some of the christisms um yeah it overtook the kathy newman i'm working on something which maybe we'll get to later also in your subject area about gurus so i went and revisited it and some of the criticisms of me are just genuinely very funny there's one that criticizes me for inhaling and exhaling so you can see he's got her on the run she's inhaling and exhaling

well that is a telltale sign that's that's one of the things we point out like look at the breathing on the gurus they're all breathing i'm sorry to dwell on this at the start but yeah i found your performance in that interview to be very enjoyable it was very cathartic to me to hear a bunch of points put to him and i i think i remember you saying online at the time that the reaction you got from his community was actually more positive than you were anticipating like the overall I'm sure you got your fair amount of strange comments but they I saw as well the reaction seemed to be kind of like that they respected a bit that you were able to go hard i mean tell me what you think about this but i think there was a sort of bifurcation at some

point in the intellectual dark web community between the people who genuinely were kind of heterodox liberals and the people who were either outright conservatives or actually in in cults of personality and so at that time when I went into the r slash Jordan Peterson forum, there were some people going, oh, not to go. But also there were quite a lot of people who genuinely appreciated that I had done what they had always wanted someone to do, which was take him and his ideas seriously, send over, you know, a mainstream media interviewer to do a long form interview with him. And, you know, I think, I don't know whether or not, or maybe the American tradition of interviewing is much more deferential. I don't think by

the, I mean, I grew up watching Jeremy Paxman. I don't think I was, I mean, I could have been a lot meaner. The interviews I grew up watching were really seriously, like Jeremy Paxman once famously asked me, I have the same question 12 times in a row. And it was, did you threaten to overrule? Which is this question that makes no sense to anyone now. But it wasn't, it's my main, in fact, one of my main criticisms of those IDW podcasts is that they are just people who agree with each other, agreeing with each other for hours on end.

And I just, I don't know why anyone wants to watch that, but I'm the one who's wrong because people really do. Yeah, this is something we constantly complain about. And because our podcast kind of requires, not that anybody's making it to us, but except us, but that we listen to like four hours with Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein speaking to each other. And it's hard to imagine more positive reinforcement back padding. You would imagine that people would get bored and just like, want to say something insulting, just to mix things up every so often, but they don't seem to get tired of it.

And it's, it's the next week, it's another person that they could do the whole thing again. To be honest with you, I think we should be grateful, right? Because sometimes it does elicit completely bonkers answers. I've just watched some clips of that Lex Friedman interview with Peterson just last week. And had I been sitting there and he started saying some of this stuff that I just don't understand it on a basic word level, I would have been compelled to interject and go, what? And actually, matter is what matters. No, that's not how physics works. There are physicists who've looked into this.

Like maybe go to the guys at CERN and ask them. They're the experts. You know, it just, it was, it was so, but then maybe, you know, that sort of first year philosophy lecture stoned ramblings. If you interrupt that, you can't let light in or magic. That just, that wouldn't happen if people were giving a challenging interview, I think. Yeah. Things have certainly devolved in terms of the discourse.

You wouldn't see, I think, virtually any of these gurus agree to talk to someone like yourself, Helen, these days. They talk to each other and they clap each other on the back and they run a victory lap. But on that point you mentioned about the bifurcation, I mean, that's also something we've noticed. And in fact, we have an article in Process, an academic one, where that turned out to be our theme. You know, we looked at how the gurus and the heterodox feared and the anti-work sphere generally, how it handled these events of COVID and now Ukraine. And there was an apparent bifurcation where you had figures like Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehman, or Sam Harris, who, you know, whatever their faults and whatever you

might disagree with them about, took a reasonably rational principled position on those things. And then you had probably the majority of them that spiral to one degree or another to this conspiratorial MAGA chud land. So I think that is real. That has happened. James Lindsay is the classic example of this. So I first encountered him making another Radio 4 documentary called The Roots of Woke Culture, which looked at that so-called squared hoax and so this is somebody who comes to prominence by saying people just agree with stuff because it confirms their biases and that allows them to suspend their rational disbelief and i check in a couple of years later and this is somebody who's fallen for the libs of tiktok hoax about i think it's the one about

how some students were furries and were asking for kitty litter in their classrooms and it's like it was a kind of the most perfect illustration of an internet fable of you have become what you, you know, you gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed into you and you basically become the mirror image of the people you were criticising at the start, just from too much internet, simply too much internet. There's no short of irony.

I mean, this is the man that wrote How to Have Impossible Conversations and it was nothing but the worst kind of Twitter troll. But you've got to look at the anti-woke sphere is really interesting because I write articles that could sometimes be classified in that domain, right? I have written about, so what I think is sort of some very kind of corporate religious aspects where it's about kind of just like everybody, you know, going to a diversity training where a lot of white rich people sit around meditating on their sins for a bit and then go back to doing their job that has got no social awareness whatsoever. So I do fall into that sphere. And I think there's a real, there's a really interesting tension there between the

fact, I think it is very hard to be overtly, whatever you want to call it, anti-woke in academia, in publishing, you know, in the in the arts like in theatre it is really not hard to be anti-woke on twitter and on substack and there is this kind of borrowed martyrdom that drives so much of that which is like i'm saying things are really hard to say and you're like for you they're not for other people they really would be like if you were the director of the artistic director of a theatre company sub-state theatre company this would be a mental thing for you to say and expect to keep your job but on sub-state i think you're going to be fine actually there's a general disregard for the fact that there's a very big ecosystem

that has a voracious appetite for stuff critical of critical race theory or social justice things and of course that's going to exist. And you can even say, well, if some of the excesses weren't so much there, that there wouldn't be the opportunity for people to lap up the kind of backlash. But I find it kind of frustrating that often people don't grapple with the fact that, like, Dave Rubin is hugely successful and so if you say oh you can't you you cannot argue for for anti-woke positions or positions critical of social justice you definitely can and you can definitely get lots of attention but it it's much harder if you wanted

to be like you say a guardian writer and take that position or, you know, write for, I don't know, maybe a BBC journalist as well might, although the BBC has been putting out content which is more critical than is standard in American mainstream things. Or to stand up at a university faculty meeting and say, hey, I think these land acknowledgements are a bit trite and silly and we shouldn't do them. I mean, they're not going to fire you on the spot, but it's not something one would say. Yeah. No, I think that's a genuinely brave stand to take, particularly within an organisation to some extent captured. And I think one of the things I think is really

interesting about this ideology is that it refuses to acknowledge it's an ideology. It's just being kind. It's just being in favor of equity. And you are never allowed to go. But does it actually achieve the stated principles that you want? Because that's taken as questioning the principles. Right. You know, I've got a lot of time for many of the ten intersectionality, I think, is a really interesting legal theory. But the kind of specific application of it in land acknowledgements, I just feel like Bob Geldof at the end of Live Aid being like, just give us your fucking money. Like if you care that much, just, you know, just pay people, just pay more tax, whatever it might be, just do something that actually costs you something.

None of this costs you anything apart from words. Yeah. And I think that the slight flip side is I noticed this whenever somebody sent me recently, there was a resignation letter from a tenured guy. I think he was in anthropology, which is why a whole bunch of people DMed me and was like, look at this. And I was reading what is now sort of a kind of template for i was a tenured professor professor and i had you know things going for me and then wokeness came to the university but then there's also this part that often creeps in where people start to like he was really big up in the university of austin or as a university of texas austin texas yeah yeah yeah right yeah and and the whole bunch of like other like the kind of james lindsey-ish

stuff and you're like okay well what you're describing is suddenly becoming slightly more skewed towards that you've got annoyed by something in academia, which is definitely there, a kind of pressure and conformity, but you're uncritically accepting, on the flip side, the heterodox position as fighting against that. They're siding like Peter Bergossianames lindsey and i feel like if you're feeling aggrieved with academia and the left that it often lends people towards credulously accepting whatever you know somebody writes for a quillette or something like that and and it shouldn't because you don't have to throw in your lap of peter bergosian in order to be critical of land throw in your lap of peter virgosian in order to be critical of land acknowledgements so but it's at the same time i would say that if you think the spectrum of american intellectual life runs from

you know standard academic to peter virgosian there's a whole lot more right wing on the edge of that like that's that's to me is what's interesting about that is that i just think you know i don't know whether or not some people live in genuine real life bubbles where they just, the sort of idea of a Trump supporter is a kind of, I know James Lindsay, you know, went into Trump because he was from Antioch. But, you know what I mean, like the concept of a genuine principled pro-life Catholic conservative is just a type of person that they don't encounter in their everyday life. It's, I think, but that's where I do think the Jonathan Haidt thesis about the kind of self-sorting of, you know, but that's where I do think the Jonathan Haidt thesis is about the kind of self-sorting of, you know, it is not good that the police now attract people with an authoritarian disposition rather than the random people who happen to live in that town and it just recruited from that town.

That's bad. And the same thing is bad if academia only attracts people with a certain set of political views. You do want like a range of weirdos in any profession. Yeah. Which is why I love the BBC, right? Because the BBC sits somebody, I mean, like in American terms, you know, somebody from MSNBC and somebody from Fox, and they have to go on question time together and have an argument. And there's, I looked at the, you know, the study of American media, and instead of a spread from left and right, there's a pole and a pole and a big hole in the middle. And that's just, that's terrible. Because as soon as you then say

something that is slightly critical of your own side it's giving sucker to the enemy and you can't you can't do intellectual work like that yeah and i i think that there are in academia especially in american stuff you know there are christian colleges and they're in a minority but there definitely is right-wing academics, but within specific fields, you know, you'll never hear from them. But one thing that I've noticed, and you probably have noticed it yourself, Helen, with like Jordan Peterson, is a lot of the first wave of critiques of Jordan felt a little bit to me like what you're pointing out about, you know, like Boghossian, kind of casting him as this far-right figure. And he seemed to be more a

conservatively inclined, but still kind of academic type person. But over time, and now, you know, he's a pundit for the Daily Wire, reeling at people to go to church and, you know, we'll see who cancels who. And with Boghossian, you know, he has not gone as far as Lindsay, but he was doing a tour around Hungary recently for Orban's government. Jordan Peterson also went over to see Orban. Douglas Murray has been over to see Orban. And you're kind of like all this talk about, you know, totalitarianism and how people are not okay with the far right, but they don't seem to see much of an issue with things like Hungary,

which, you know, even just on the thing of like journalistic freedom, there's big concerns there. But because they're kind of anti-woke, anti-social justice, it's like, well, that's fine. So it's just that there seems to be a pull towards a more partisan right in that sphere. I'm going to be very cruel and say, you know, one of the things that the New Statesman published, my former employer in the 1930s, was H.G. Wells went over to interview Stalin. And there's a great quote, it was like, Mr. stalin it seems you're somewhat to the left of me and like no shit but i just think there is a thing in people who become writers and commentators that they really like applause and they more than

anything else they like to be made to feel important and if the literal leader of a country is inviting you over and fainting you and saying, my God, your ideas are here to save Western civilization. It takes a pretty cynical, shriveled, you know, cow like me to be like, yeah, but no, thank you. And nonetheless, right? I just think that was the old tradition of journalism was that you instinctively, you know, like, I think the line was like, you know, you should be like,

you should treat politicians like a dog treats a lamppost. And that to me is the kind of, that's, you you know politicians have what do one thing and journalists do another but these guys because they live on the borderline of kind of cultural critics or philosophers are very susceptible to the idea that they might be invited somewhere to deliver their ideas i don't have any particularly interesting ideas i mean i go out and look at things and write them down for other people right and i just think that's the difference between a journalist and a commentator. And hopefully that slightly inoculates you from thinking, oh, I'd love to go to Hungary. I hear it's lovely this time of year.

And they'll put a little banquet on for me in the state room and I can pose with him. And oh, right, so he's also rolling back protection to LGBT people and talking about how he wants to have a white Hungary. Oh, well, I mean, we've all got our people, but I think opinions or the other thing, which is that you can you somehow think you can talk them round. Oh, well, like he or he or the kind of the Hitler thing, which is what he was always very nice to me. You know, I mean, I studied in the Mitford sisters

and Diana Mosley is very fascinating on the subject. He was always so polite and just cannot reconcile the idea that somebody who could have very good manners and be nice to you and nonetheless have terrible political positions. And I think for people who are otherwise incredibly smart, it's really interesting to watch that happen. Yeah, you've really hit upon those two major themes in this grocery, which is one, they have this amazing faith in personal relationships and one-on-one conversations to sort things out and prioritize that over anything else. It doesn't take being faded by a problematic European leader to turn their heads because unlike an old-fashioned journalist, they don't have a day job. They don't have a salary.

an old-fashioned journalist, they don't have a day job. They don't have a salary. They are essentially entrepreneurs. And many of them are quite explicit about approaching their channels, the number of hits they're getting, and the number of likes and retweets and the various types of monetization that occurs. Some of them are quite explicit about treating like a business. But even if those that are not consciously aware of it, the gamification of journalism is amazing. Like it actually takes a conscious effort to not pay attention to those metrics and to just do what you think is a good thing to do without taking that into account. Yeah, I think that's true. What's the bit that bakes my muffin, mostly because it involves people shouting at me, is the fact that people think that that model, the model is more honest oh look at you you lying mainstream media journalist and you're like but you know i take a good middle class salary to do this what i don't do is rely on you like

milking you directly for money in order for me to like to travel on nice planes and whatever it is and it's i don't know if it's uniquely american it feels quite american to think that the latter being the overt kind of shyster the kind of of like roll up, roll up, have a look at my intellectual rights. There's something, you know, it's the Trumpian quality, right? They like that there's something more honest to that. Yeah. And I think the fact that whatever you think of institutions, they can be suffocating and enforced orthodoxies, but they also can apply quality control and pushback.

And you know, I, I find that a lot of the, Substack and independent people that they, they do very much over time become pretty caricatured versions of themselves. Whereas when they were in the media organization, although they were probably unhappy and bullied, they also were kind of forced not to indulge the worst instincts. And it's, yeah, that's an unfortunate thing. And I guess all of this probably orbits around the general thesis of your article, the article and documentary, the Church of Social Justice. So I could attempt to do it, but maybe it's better if I force you to do it. So if you were describing the general thesis there, Helen, in a nutshell, what's the

big idea? Well, a couple of years years ago I wrote a history of feminism called Difficult Women and one of the interviews I did with it was with a think tank called Theos which is a Christian think tank and Elizabeth there said to me and this is the way she phrased it, I hope you don't find this offensive but do you think feminism replaced religion because I was raised Catholic, my dad's a Catholic deacon and I said first of all it's really interesting that you think that I would find that offensive that That's an assumption that's going worth interrogating. But I said, no, I do. I think I really do buy that actually. I was big into new atheism in the 2000s when that was the thing because it felt like countercultural and a rebellion against my youth. But new atheism

was prey to kind of cults of personality. Definitely. And I find looking back at it, the kind of idea that I think it was Michael Shermer said that atheists should rename themselves brights. It sort of makes me want to pop out an eyeball and cringing, because it's just the ideas we've evolved. We're the people who've evolved past these silly superstitions. And so I kind of wanted to look at that thesis and look at whether or not social justice movements do replace religion for some people. And I talked to Elizabeth again who says she talks to example for from very burnt out environmentalists who just she and she says to them you know do you have

you not thought of the old praying you know give it give it a whirl see how you like it. But and I wanted to explore the thesis because I know that people have written previously about social justice as a religion in a bad sense and in the superstitious sense or in the kind of culty ritualistic aspects. But to me also, there's a very good side to religion, which I see in my parents, which is that it has given them a ready-made community.

It's given them a life that is about something bigger than yourself and a sort of sense of meaning and purpose beyond yourself. And I think that's when the best of social justice movements, when you see the civil rights marches and people getting beaten up in order to get civil rights for black people in the US, you need to have some kind of ethical ethos behind that, some kind of community. And maybe you need to have some rituals that go along with that, the bond, the group all together. So yeah, so I think there was a lot of assumption that I was coming at it from the point of view of like, social justice

is like religion and that's bad. But it wasn't aiming to do that. It was aiming to take a much more holistic view of it. Yeah. So it's fair to say that the reaction to it online that I saw was kind of polarized. You had people that were like, yes, we've been saying this and I can see parallels. And then you also had the reaction amongst people that were kind of like, this is just, you know, James Lindsay has been saying this for five years and this is just a tired take, right? Everything I don't like is a is a religion and i because my my academic work is focused on religion and even in the annoying field of

study of religions there's endless debates about whether the term religion is a useful concept or not and what categorizes a religion. I've even written a freaking paper. So it never ends. Like that topic is just a perennial one that comes up. And I think people are sensitive to, like you say, that when almost all, on all occasions, when somebody says X is like a religion, what they mean is like, X is like a fundamentalist cult with all the worst aspects of religion, dogmatic certainty, very strong in-group, out-group, moral condemnation of non-believers. That's usually the parallels that people are drawing. And what they're not typically saying is what you just outlined, which is, you know, it offers community and the meaning system or value system that people take a kind of solace in or that they might find philosophically deep and according with the values.

So, yeah, there's an interesting assumption that the comparisons to religion are fundamentally negative. And I think part of that is, like you say, because lots of the people that write that, they are making a negative comparison. So it's kind of the go-to assumption. I think there are some really negative assumptions. When you designate certain things not just as blasphemy and can't be interrogated, they're just axiomatically bad. I think that is something that I feel

is present in social justice politics that does remind me of Catholicism. I think there are good criticisms, you mentioned one of them there, is that basically what kind of religion are we talking about? Are we actually talking about American evangelicals? Are we talking about fundamentalism? Are we talking about Western religion? I think all of those things are kind of true. And I think in the documentary, it's more obvious that I'm talking about my background as a kind of English Catholic. But yeah, the big surprise of the documentary is that religious people by and large really liked it, which is really funny because they probably have some big thoughts about the people at their church who annoy them in particular ways and then can see that behaviour in other contexts and kind of recognise it. The

people who didn't like it were the people who think that they're above religion and they've given it up and feel that they are being criticised here for having... I think one of the things that's difficult about that, it's very hard to find words to describe that ideology, but it is a left-wing ideology that is not materialist. It's not economic. It's not anti-imperialist. It is socially liberal in a very particular way. And one of the problems with it is that it doesn't believe it's an ideology and therefore kind of any criticism it shudders away from because it's sort of been named and described. And whereas its adherents would say, you know, this is just about treating everyone equally. This is just about kindness and niceness. I mean, on one hand, I can see the pushback,

which is that like everything is a little bit like a religion. But then, you know, I think of Amanda Montell, who we interviewed, who wrote a book about cultishness and emphasis on the nests, right? Just to say, look, it's about looking in everyday life and seeing what qualities might have some of the features of cults. And it's not saying that it's a full-blown, we're going to drink Kool-Aid in the morning sort of thing. And I have to say, I mean, my family background is also Catholic and long before I ever heard of Twitter, I had noticed, I think, that there was, I think, for many people who essentially lost their religion sometime in the 70s or the 80s, but grew up with a strong Catholic cultural background. And the Catholic

Church itself, you know, there are different types of Catholic Church, different from Rome out here, where there's always been a strong social justice mission, a strong track record of doing things in the community and schools and social work and things like that. And I have to admit, I did have the thought long before anyone else wrote about it, that I felt that- You were the first one. I felt that people, it was quite an easy shift to kind of drop the metaphysical aspects, but the moral aspects, like it dovetailed

quite nicely actually with the sort of the attitudes to sex you know and and and someone which was um as well as the the moral prescriptions modern sort of social justice fame it it did occur to me that it fit quite nicely it it gave a sense of meaning. It gave like a mission in the world, like what we need to do in order to make the world a better place. And it gave a sense of identity in terms of it defined what it was to be a good person and a worthwhile person. Do you think, though, there's something that I think people really struggle with, which is the idea that there are some practices which are useless

and have no utility, but we should all do nonetheless, just in order to signal our kind of collectivism or our allegiance to a particular group. That's something that I really struggle with, right? The idea that there are bits of religion that actually, I don't believe whatever, but actually maybe it's a good thing for everybody to do. Like maybe it's a good thing. You know, so one of my mentions, we've talked about either land acknowledgements or pronoun announcements. And now I don't think that pronoun announcements do their stated goal, which is to make transgender people feel welcome.

Actually, if you talk to that, ContraPoints, the YouTuber said, when people do that, I feel actually it's because they've noticed there's a trans person there and they're all doing it to prove how great and like right on and cool that they are about it. So, it makes me feel more visible. Also in 99% of circumstances, it's really obvious from people's names and personal appearance what pronouns you should use for them. No one would ever know that you were a she slash they unless you told them, right? So, all of this stuff is an architecture that exists. So, why are you doing it? And then there is a case for doing it that says we want to show that if anybody did change

their pronouns, we would be okay with it. We don't think it has any other function. It just signals our allegiance to this particular belief system or indeed the belief system that actually you can overnight change your sex or your gender identity. And that's why we do it. And then people could take it or leave it on that basis, argue with it on that basis. And that for me is the fundamental disjunction that I was kind of getting at here, is the fact that religious practices may be inutile.

You know, they don't have a utility, but there may be a reason to do them anyway. And I think people on the left kind of slightly struggle with that idea. Because I study ritual psychology, and when you do that, you end up starting to notice like how much of life is ritualized and not just in japan there here it's quite evident especially when you're a foreigner right you or a foreigner anywhere you notice the ritualized aspects of life but when you look at your own country and you're kind of for your job forced to think about rituals you start to realize you know how much of life is ritualized

and how much they matter outside of a religious context. Even, you know, there's kind of grand event things like the inauguration events, right? Like when Obama said the Pledge of Allegiance, one word or whatever wrong, it needed to be reset the next day, right? Why? Because nobody actually thinks, well, if he didn't say that, some spiritual force will come down and make him not the president. But getting the rituals right matters. And you can see that when the Republicans recently played around with, we're not going to engage in the handover of power in the proper, which is the way it causes a big problem. So I'm less reluctant about acknowledging that outside of the religious arena,

we all have these things that we do and things that we say and kind of conventions that we follow that are not logical. They're culturally inherited or they're to signal things. But I think you're right, Helen, that part of it is because there's the discourse around virtue signaling that, oh, you're just

saying that in order to get social credit. And that definitely is going on. But it's also sometimes presented as discrediting of anything that you would just like, you know, oh, you put the Ukraine flag, that's just virtue signaling, like, why don't you go volunteer in Ukraine? And you're like, well, you know, there's a large spectrum and maybe just signaling that you're supporting a country that's currently being invaded. It's a small gesture, but you know, It's a small gesture, but, you know, there's no harm to it. And I it's not about what the people are saying about it. It's kind of like a shallow self-centered thing more. That's a kind of like implicit part, it feels like, with that.

But it needn't be because we all do things every day to signal we are part of certain groups or agree to certain things. So yeah, I think the implicit judgment and maybe the fact that Jordan Peterson and various other people are the ones that usually emphasize that has made people resistant to that. Yeah. I mean, I remember when I went to Japan a couple of years ago, how lovely I found it when I got on the Shinkansen and the guard came through the doors through the doors in his like white gloves and then turned around and bowed

to the carriage. And I thought, well, actually, you know what that says to me? That says to me, I like, I respect the train. I respect the people on the train. And this is a much nicer train than British trains. So, clearly, like respecting the train is the way to go if you want train travel in your country to be much nicer. And I don't, so I don't, you know, you might think that's people like, well, it's a quaint, but actually it serves a really useful social function of signaling. This is a public space in which we act in a particularly respectful way that is really useful. And yeah, I agree with you about the thing about virtue signaling that is good is I think

one of the things that social media is particularly prone to pluralistic ignorance. And some of the subjects I write about, you know, you really get that. You find out that basically everybody agrees with you, but they just either think they're too scared to say so, or more likely they think they're quite lonely. And actually by putting the Ukraine flag in your bio, whatever it is, it's like putting the lawn sign out with your candidate's name on it. You are letting people know that it's okay to have that opinion. There are people around them who have that opinion too. That's not a bad thing. Yeah, the red rose.

That seems they've gone away. I never figured out what that was for, Chris. This isn't being a boomer, but what was that for? This is embarrassing, Matt. Fuck you. I also, I can't remember. I did look it up. Was it not socialism?

Was it not the red rose? Like in Britain, it was the labor symbol is the red rose. So that was some of it, right? Was it not a left-wing thing? No, it is. It is definitely a left-wing thing, but I couldn't remember. I looked it up. This is a bit like old people trying to understand the internet, isn't it?

Like all of us. I have another question. What about the teardrop? Is that just an Australian thing? Like a teardrop, like a drop, a water drop, an emoji. Helen? I thought that was what you got in prison after you'd killed a guy. That sounds like an environmental thing, does it not?

I think it's socialist to some degree, maybe. Okay. The gender critical feminists for a while had the checkerboard flag which i never really got i think that might have been oh there are only two sexes like this is black and white but um there was a kind of strain of person whose name was something like you know goody gender free checkerboard flag hashtag i sandwich ak rolling um was a kind of type uh of person on Twitter. And so, Helen, obviously, you have been in the trenches with the trans debates and gender critical fun that happens every day online. But that in particular, like it's impossible to talk about the concept of whether religious

aspects or whatever apply and not touch on that. Because it seems to me that in kind of line with what Matt said about, you know, the possibility of drawing parallels to religion in ways that kind of self-serve, I can see that people could argue, you know, that trans women are women, right? Could argue that's a foretelling cliche, this thing that, you know, cults use, which is like a simple mantra that shuts down discussion. And if you disagree with it, you're outside the kind of moral universe, right? But on the other hand, there is the way to perceive that, that, you know, all effective human rights movements have employed slogans that simply state about the rights.

that simply state about the rights. And then on the gender critical side, I've seen this reluctance for people to kind of acknowledge that identity exists. Like some people say, I don't have an identity, mainly because they want to say that gender is not a coherent concept, but they go like quite far down that road to basically deny the existence of

identity as a meaningful concept. And so it feels like there's a lot in that discourse on both sides that ends up hovering around these very strong denunciations of things as completely incoherent and spiritual mumbo jumbo. And yeah, I don't know that I've posed a great question there, but I'm curious how you feel about all that. Why are people so angry on the internet? It's a very good question, Chris. Let's solve that one right here. Solve that one. Solve that.

I think, again, I think that's a debate that really, you know, it is, I think, the first real social justice movement that has developed at exactly the same time as Twitter and all the other ones, really, feminism, civil rights, whatever it might be, have benefited from having had a lot of their intellectual groundwork done before the advent of social media. actually you don't know what people mean by that. Now, by trans women or women, do you mean that there are people who are biologically male who want to live as women, be treated as women, you know, to almost all extents in society, you know, be women? Which basically, apart from a few kind of very staunchly conservative right-wing, you know, social conservatives, actually is a bargain that pretty much everybody accepts. But you don't know whether or not that's the

proposition or is the proposition that they are literally identical to somebody who was born biologically female, has lived as a biological female and should be considered by virtue of an inner essence exactly the same. And that's a much tougher thing. Some people do believe that, but I think it's certainly, I don't think you have to believe that in order to treat transgender people with decency. And therefore, in the same way that I think it falls into the level of spiritual belief in the sense that I don't have to believe that Mohammed's going to heaven on a winged horse to treat Muslims with respect. I don't have to believe in body, you know, the post literally becomes the body and blood of Christ

not to practice anti-Catholic discrimination. And so, that's where I think that that problem comes. The other problem, frankly, having talked about it is because a lot of the people raising concerns in the early days were feminists and therefore were more likely to be women, particularly older women. A lot of people, men, didn't take it seriously. They just didn't. The high squeaky voices just didn't penetrate. So one of my favorite things, you won't mind me saying this because he's a friend and I like him, a guy called Tom Chivers, who wrote for Buzzfeed, wrote for Telegraph, The Independent, wrote a brilliant piece about Laverne Cox saying, you know, is she a woman? Well, not really, but you know, no one's claiming that biological sex doesn't exist, but it's just polite to call Laverne Cox she. And the piece is now in his archive with an

amazing little update at the top, which just says just says update i have since discovered that some people don't think biological sex exists and like that was so my experience of the early 2010s is that you would go okay so i think we can all find some reasonable accommodations here but actually there are some bits of this ideology that are making very very provocative claims that have huge implications and people would go no that's not happening that's not happening um and i think some of the radicalization that you've seen is in the same way that I have great sympathy with some of the followers of the gurus that you talk about, right, is from a feeling of being unheard and from a feeling of being excluded and dismissed and demonized and looked down on. And I do think there are bits of the gender critical feminist movement now that are unpleasant and actually border into

transphobia. And a part of that is about a level of exclusion from mainstream discourse and into silos where there are a couple of people who are sort of pretty cult leader-ish actually and I think that's what happens when you don't have a properly functioning public debate about something actually I know people say like we should just exclude people from the public square and never address it but the reaction to my social justice article was actually a really good example of this so um an american professor did like oh this is a fresh take and someone described this as um as being the example of the yawn i don't know if you heard this idea before which you get where people go oh we've

all had this discussion and the point is yes you and your extremely online friends have all had this discussion and we'll sort out what you think. But people like my mum and dad haven't, and they have a vote too. And I think that is something that, you know, really resonates in lots of the communities that I look at where people feel that there is an elite who think this is all very boring and settled but never want to explain their working to them. And I think that is the conditions in which polarisation and conspiracism can flourish. There's a thought, Helen, one issue that seems to complicate things quite significantly

and to be doing it in a dramatic way currently in America is that while you have the, especially in the UK, you know, UK is referred to as turf island right in liberal american circles yes in liberal american circles yes and so i think the debates in the uk that there generally is more attention paid to presenting the kind of gender critical perspective right you had nolan's documentary recently on the BBC and you do have people presenting that side of the argument. And of course, in the right-wing media, you have a lot of space for that.

But on the American right, it's pretty clear that the American right does have a very like, you know, the position that you were describing the kind of staunch conservative like very bigoted perspective on trans people like that that clearly exists and still has cultural force and you know i'm an example that springs to mind is Colin Wright, the former biologist, now pundit of sorts about gender ideology. The original position that I saw him coming from was very much the acknowledgement that there's biological sex and there's sex differences and that these shouldn't be lost in the discussion over gender and trans debates. But if you look at him now, he's on Tucker quite often. He's courting Elon Musk with these little, you know, his mug diagram of

the left has moved completely crazily, and now I'm on the right. Not indicating that the right might have moved in any way over the past, like, 20 years. So it feels like some of the people, when they're flagging warning signs about the gender-critical movement and its closeness to right-wing conservatives, that they do get proven right on occasion, you know, in James Lindsay and groomer discourse and that and i i wonder about like threading that needle yeah and that but that's a that's a basic lack of respect for feminism right james lindsey is not a feminist and i think there is a no i mean i don't and i

don't think he would he would expect me to to say that either right that he just doesn't see it so there is i think has been a concerted effort to say there is only one critique of this and it is the right-wing conservative like it's just not natural won't someone think of the children and and and i think people particularly online pick the opponent they want to fight you know they fight with uh you know the like a straw man version of their opponents or actually more the kind of identity category the person that they feel most comfortable arguing with so they say well obviously you know it's only dried up old karens that think this and so that's it well of course we can instantly dismiss it i'm really worried talking about this because i know that a repeated theme is that um gurus are miserable and grievance monger and talk about

how hard they've had it but i'm going to say it anyway because uh i i no longer care which is that i think you talk about the space in Britain to talk about it. That is the result of a lot of people, a lot of, you know, people throwing themselves onto the barbed wire so that other people could clamber across, right? I, you know, I am on the glad list of bigots next to Rush Limbaugh. It's just like, makes me laugh. I don't think we've got a lot else in common, if I'm honest. Well, I mean, he's dead, so that's not going to stop him converging his interest with mine. But I think there was, and I feel consistently angry of like, I am 99% on the same side, you know, coming from the left. But no, there has to be a purity

politics here where people are excluded. And that documentary reference was about Stonewall, which is the biggest LGBT organization in Europe. And for years, they had an explicit policy of no debate. We don't debate this. While at the same time, calling for huge policy changes in public law and policy. So, you can't expect to tell people there's a new reality, but also you're going to entertain no discussion. And that, to my mind, poisoned that whole subject for years. And yeah, you're right. I think there are people, Kelly Jane Keane, Minchell, Posey Parker is another example of someone who's gone on Tucker.

I mean, not entirely, I would say, situate her within the mainstream feminist movement either. She's always seemed very much to be her own woman. So there are people who have spotted a kind of market opportunity there or this is a single issue cause for them who have, I think, therefore been more easily seduced by eventually shading and shading and you wake up and you're Ron DeSantis in a wig. And I don't think that's necessarily happened to the same extent in the UK because it was so much – the organization like A Women's Place was so much grounded in the trade union movement, for example. There were, again, these institutions that kind of act as a check on people.

But I also feel a great deal of sympathy. I've been very lucky. The New States was always great to me. The Atlantic has always been great to me and I've got BBC work. But I have been counseled from several literary festivals because one person has complained they don't want to be on the bill with me. I have got my voice removed from a computer game. The most amazing, morally judged by the computer games industry. It's just

very funny to me. I'm sorry, your murder simulator is woke now and I can't be allowed on it. But, but, you know, and actually at every point during that journey, the place I could have found a really sympathetic audience was by going to a right wing audience and saying, look at these crazy leftists. They don't even want to hear the slightest critique of their position. And, you know, I didn't have to do that because I was lucky in the places that I worked, but lots of other people weren't. Someone like Kathleen Stock at Sussex University, the only place you could get a hearing, Julie Bindle, the only place you could get a hearing for years was in the right-wing press. So, that's one of the reasons I'm very strong on the fact

that, you know, you have to have a level of self-regulation and frankly, is the, really do we look at the right in America and think, God, they've really got it right by not allowing any criticism? No, the American right would be a lot healthier if people were allowed to go, I understand that you like some of Trump's policies, but I think he might be quite a chaotic and bad leader who does, you know, some things, some are calling crimes. You know, the American right could do with, frankly, a hell of a lot more self-criticism. Yeah, it was interesting, the shift towards MAGA and Trumpism and the way that the more

principled wing of the Republican Party just got booted. Yeah, eaten. Is it Liz Cheney was the latest in line with that? But even in your article in The Atlantic about social justice and religion, you have a section there talking about MAGA, talking about QAnon and the ways in which it's perhaps the most, the strongest tight-laced identity straitjacket that one could wear. And yet, talking about the way that right-wing or left-wing outlets pick up the story, I did notice that Fox News picked up your story. Look, look,

look at this proof. Workness and social justice is the religion. I noticed they didn't quote those bits where you're talking about MAGA and QAnon. Yes, it's funny that, isn't it? Also, it's slightly odd for their audience, who I imagine are quite religious religious that they would say, look, it is like a religion and that's a bad thing. And you're like, are your audience not quite heavenly Christian? This seems, yeah, but you're right. Like QAnon is an incredibly good example of something that I think strays way beyond the stuff I was writing about into, you know, it literally has a prophet and these sort of divine revelations and which is sort of, in fact, in a way i know this weird thing to say i sometimes wonder if social justice would be better if it did have

a pope because then they could say things that'll be the title of the episode social justice needs a pope and i am willing to serve if called alert the social justice cardinals put the white smoke out of the chimney um no but in a way because one of the things that's very difficult is in writing about it is its diffuseness and what we talked about earlier you know the idea that actually some people have got quantifying the level of lunary is always really hard when you're writing about stuff online right is this a belief that lots of people hold or is it a belief that a few very loud people hold

and proportionality is one of the hardest challenges for modern journalism because you can find 15 people on twitter who will believe anything right yeah um and you know i i love one of my favorite past times in life is looking at the daily mail website when they do you know fans outraged by rihanna's low-cut dress on ITV. And, like, you look at the screen grabs they've got off Twitter and the words in bold are Rihanna dress outrage. And, like, they've just gone, yeah, and that's it. Of course, you can find five people going, Harry, look at this, ooh, we're on television.

Whereas, actually, everyone else thought it was a perfectly reasonable dress and, you know, and didn't bat an eyelid. That idea of proportionality was what made me hesitate in commenting on your thesis about social justice and religion because I can cite examples. There was recently a thing on Twitter where a historian had written what very much appears to be a pretty normal and inoffensive article and was the latest in...

Oh, this is the American Historical Association president who wrote about... He criticised the 1619 Project, didn the american historical association president who wrote about um he criticized the 1619 project didn't he and then he wrote about presentism in history the idea that people are much more now studying things through the lens of today and recent history yeah yeah i read that article and i thought well i'm not sure i agree with all this but you know didn't seem didn't seem yeah and yet it had the pro forma kind of apology, which is I need to stop and I need to listen. I apologize for the harm that caused and I'm going to reflect on do better, etc. Which very much has those, you know, those religious confessional aspects.

But, you know, the reason one hesitates to cite these kinds of things is that, yes, there are examples and there are even better ones. You can find some video of some social justice people, white activists, you know, washing the feet of black people to absolve their sins. A wonderful example that supports your thesis. And yet, it's very hard to say whether there's an example that proves anything, isn't there? And it's so, it's hard to comment. comment well what's interesting about that is so that's an explicit echo what happens in the catholic church and maybe anglican churches too about maundy thursday right so that jesus um washed the feet of his disciples and uh the last supper was it before the last supper but anyway it was a fairly well established jewish ritual of

cleanliness and so now my dad has done this i mean i guess i've washed him i've watched him wash other men's feet which is not something you can often say about uh your father um but like so what i think happened there is interesting is people want to perform a ritual that says humility um and and what do they reach for they reach for what they grew up with they reach for religion and like i know it's not quantitative research but it's qualitative right it's still interesting that we are even those of us who are secular atheists still are so soaked in a culture of of a particular type of religion that that's what we reach for that's the frames through which we understand the world and i think that is worth kind of acknowledging there is a point

though here matt that's worth mentioning because i saw there's a person on Twitter, Keiko, did an investigatory thread on that. And it turned out that the people doing that were these kind of televangelist pastors that make money. So they're explicitly religious as well. like they're explicitly religious as well. But part of the issue there is like, if you're talking about any phenomenon in America that's popular, the vast majority of Americans are religious. So like you will have social justice advocates

who are religious, you have conservatives that are religious. Like if it's an American phenomenon, there will be a large percentage of the people who are religious and for whom, you know, religion matters, maybe in a way that is less common in the UK or in Western Europe or Australia, for that matter. And, you know, you talked, Helen, earlier about how, and in the documentary as well,

you know, you were talking to somebody who saw their social justice as part of their religious belief. And there definitely seems to be within religious communities, some people that explicitly take that framing and say, you know, this is just the kind of outreach of the religious mission that we feel. This is kind of it being embodied in the same way the civil rights was connected with the black Christian communities in America. And then you also have the conservative right in America, like we've covered some of the guru people who regard that as parasiting into the religion and completely changing the fundamental mission and it has to be opposed. And both of those people are within the Christian community in America

and they've got a very different vision about what is part of their religion, what is a foreign religion and, you know, what shouldn't be. So it definitely is an issue that it seems you have to discuss if you want to do justice to the discourse that is ongoing around the topic my mom is very funny on this because she brought me up by being pointing out repeatedly that jesus is basically a communist right he says you leave your father and mother and follow me um these were an ignorant guys who basically had only the clothes that they stood up in and they went around begging for food they were not like owning a yacht and a small business in pensacola

like it's a very interesting mutation about what like what true christianity is but i think you're right there is a kind of idea about who gets to claim it and what it actually has to involve um that is so weirdly so divorced from any kind of religious authority now i think in a way yeah yeah yeah because the current pope is I know I was going to say the current Pope is woke. There's another title for the- Hey, intellect, there he is. But the current Pope is a Jesuit and that is a Catholic tradition that is explicitly about poverty and therefore he has enacted several reforms in the Vatican that have been quite

annoying to the people who see the Vatican as a place for sort of cushy dinners and nice robes, which is, again, is an equally strong part of the Catholic tradition. It's hard to talk about religion or even Christianity because it's just so diverse and heterogeneous, isn't it? Like what's happening in the Midwest, the United States and some Protestant churches vastly different from what's happening in Brisbane near where I live. which is vastly different from what's happening in Brisbane, near where I live. But I think the thing that all the religions have in common, even Eastern religions, is a focus on the self, right? The soul and your conduct and self-reflection and trying to purify yourself or make yourself better in some way, shape or form. And that's an interesting lens.

Like everyone wants to make themselves better. I'd like to get more exercise and eat less crappy food and drink less alcohol, but I don't personally use a philosophical framework to help me with those things. Maybe I should, but I think what you're arguing maybe, Helen, is that it's very understandable.

It's a very human thing to have those needs and desires and having some kind of identity and some kind of meaning structure is important. Rituals and things do serve a purpose in daily life, whether it's a conductor on a train or the president, as you said, Chris, reading out the words in the correct form. But if you look at serious social justice issues, right, let's just take two that spring to mind. Climate change and in my part of the world, the situation of Indigenous people, their socioeconomic, education levels, health,

et cetera. Those are two, where I'm sitting, super important issues. Probably my own behaviour, my own conduct is going to contribute relatively little to those things like those are big systematic policy type things which has very little to do with whether or not i'm a good person and maybe there's a disconnect there actually though when i think you know james lovelock's gaiathesis about the earth is a kind of giant super organism i think is i think there is something no you're not religious but mystical about that i think it's awe inspiring, right? I think it's sublime in the way that romantic poets would have called something sublime. It's just sort of huge to contemplate. And I do think there is, you know, so much of

when you look through that tradition of science writing that goes from, you know, Carl Sagan through to Brian Cox, it's about wonder about the natural world. Like, aren't we, isn't it amazing to have this pale blue dot in the middle of nothing. And I do think that is evoking some kind of transcendence and which is really useful for climate change activism, right? The idea that you are part of something that is much bigger than yourself, I think is quite motivating in the idea of the idea that you're a steward of the earth for future generations, you know, your children, their grandchildren, whatever it might be. So I think that that's a cause I think that explicitly has benefited

from like a certain spirituality to its discourse. Chris and I have kind of reflected that. Like, you know, we're like science rationalist evidence guys, right? Terrible. Like the worst kind of people. You know, we put Carl Sagan up on a pedestal that's i had i had a carl sagan reading it i had the pale blue dot at my my wedding i should say my first wedding something that um john pearson fans will be appreciative of but yeah i think it's a really

beautiful beautiful piece of literature it actually is the closest that i come to something to a kind of religious feeling of like wow i was really lucky to be born and like to have lived my life in this world that's amazing well that's what i was going to say like on the theme of worldviews being a religion if we're honest with each other we don't like to think of ourselves as religious but when we think about what motivates us to to code gurus and do these recordings and editing and all that stuff it's like this sense of offense and transgression that someone like Jordan Peterson or these other people are aping the scientific, rational, academic approach,

which we've invested a lot in personally, and they're sullying it. And it hurts us at a certain level. We've self-reflective. This is that. We all spend that much time talking about, but I think it definitely plays a part like an emotional investment to the ideals of, you know, like science and academic rigor. And when you see people who are good at aping that style, but completely lacking in the substance or

that they're promoting anti-vax stuff or they're promoting hard right political views with it. It does you like there's the one hand of okay, so look, here's Jordan Peterson doing stupid religious apologetics dressed up as psychology. But there's also the feeling of like yeah that it's it's a wolf in sheep's clothing affair you shouldn't be doing that i totally get that because actually one of the and if i'm really honest with myself one of the things that drew me to feminism was the idea that i wasn't just simply not being taken seriously that people were dismissing me because like of my high squeaky voice and i and i read that peterson first peterson book and went into that interview thinking there are people who will just look at the two of us and know instantly which one

of us has authority which one of us is smarter uh and like i'm not going to get maybe we can only ever settle this with an iq test but like i i don't know who is smarter i mean john peace i don't really believe in the concept of one you know particular type of intelligence to be honest with you it has very little relationship to people's success in in life but you know it was just the fact that people will look at that and go oh the stupid girl silly girl which was great i mean i was in my mid-30s so i was very excited people were still like thank you i moisturize but like he had transgressed against i just got to say that jordan peterson's recent videos have um i think you're ahead on points yeah i did i mean i think i remember saying in the interview

actually you seem to cry a lot more than i do but that was like and you know i don't mean to be rude because i think he's genuinely not well right i watched those last interviews and i thought and i have said this in public so you know i'll say it again which is that if people around him really truly loved him the last thing they would give him is a daily wire column and access to making videos he is somebody who is not he's had an enormous overwhelming amount of criticism having had 100s of that i know how incredibly upsetting it can be and you know he's clearly not in a place to deal with it but i do think that that is in itself a problem right is that he keeps putting himself out there and therefore you know he is making statements in the public square we have to be allowed to have opinions on them you can't take them off you know just because other people criticize him or just because of you know his his fragility

apparent fragility doesn't mean that he hasn't got the ability to cause harm like loosely defined or like say things that are untrue that other people are allowed to contest that's a very difficult bit of internet dynamics to to navigate i find like an ethic ethically i think helen the point do you ever do you ever feel bad though do you ever do i need to feel bad yeah yeah yeah we do we get we get accused of being mean can you imagine all the time i mean i mean own it oh so rude that's the real oppression is being accused of being rude. nodding their heads and going, this is absolutely fantastic stuff. We need more of this. And it may well be that they're on the spectrum, say, or they could be subject to emotional things, or they could be feeling poorly because they're eating only meat for months and months and months. But, you know, for example, before we just take random examples, but yeah, I mean, you can't really let that stop

you because, you know, there's this concept of like civility porn that you're sure you've know about imagine for a moment that i don't know what that is you can't expect that people automatically know civility porn it's a niche concept you're too online i managed to be both a boomer and too online i don't know how i do that um so is it like porn but the first scene instead of like fixing the dishwasher it's just people going what a great argument thank you for your intellectual engagement today yes would you like to go to the bedroom no no no it's not that at all it's no no it's people um the fetishizing this this idea of never doing an ad hominem or always practicing extreme charity with the other person's point

of view. You know, it's kind of like trying to be so anti-tribal, being above all of this and engaging in this purely good faith way. And really, you know, we're talking about signaling and stuff before. Like there's a thing I believe online where people definitely do signal this as a virtue, you know, to be, I'm doing a bad a bad job Chris I can talk to Alex Jones there's no problem I could sit down and have a nice dinner with Alex Jones and it's like well is that actually good though but what why but what what would you do do you talk about like that's the thing I also think about it's like

I just don't think I'd have it my um ultimate boss Jeff Golbo the editor of the Ant antique did once an interview with alex jane he said and there's a line in it where it says it was exhausting because he is nuts and that's so like i just think you just be i i met alex james once on the bbc sunday politics show he came on to talk about conspiracy theories and he was perfectly nice in the green room had like a massive entourage and then the instant he got on set it was like he switched on and he's suddenly thundering on and on and on and on and on. And it was like, much like that famous clip of James Lindsay on Dr. Phil, it was like someone pressed on on the tape recorder and it was just like a fire hose of information. But I really struggle with this.

So, again, Peterson and the diet and the many autoimmune conditions and all of this personal story I think is interesting because it speaks to his credibility as the arch rationalist. And I don't like saying to somebody, I don't believe that you were awake for 11 days because that's physically impossible, or however long it was. It is 20 plus. Right. You would be in the medical literature if that was actually true so there's obviously something you were having short naps or you know whatever it might be like something that this is a this

is a story that has some you know slight caveats but it's being presented as a revelation and to me that does speak to the credibility of i've read 200 scientific papers and whatever it is because if you are somebody who is presenting themselves in a particular way doesn't have a great deal of self-perception that speaks to your intellectual, but it feels really mean to go, I, I, this is, this all smells a bit fishy. Doesn't it? There's a, I think people regard some things like that, like off limit, but I, I think completely what you said, Helen, that that the fact that Jordan Peterson's daughter only eats a specific type of

specifically aged meat now. She's changed off ruminant meat to this. She's back on the specific meat. His wife, as he explained on the Lex Friedman, can only eat lamb. That's all. And Jordan Peterson is only eating beef now. Even if there was a genetic connection between his and his daughter's diet, which seems questionable, but OK, his wife is not genetically related, one hopes. And so there does seem to be, you know, a signal there that there is an approach to reasoning. You're dancing around this, but let me just say, these sounds like the kind of thing

that somebody with Munchausen's would say. He may not, he may not, but this is, I have multiple autoimmune disorders that are unknown to medical science and can't be resolved. Might either be a tragic truth or it might be the kind of thing that somebody has a mythology that they have created for themselves,

about themselves. And it may be fundamentally based around the fact that actually all this comes down to his um dependency on benzodiazepines but that's you know that has to be put aside because that's for weak people like that's one of the things i feel very sad about with that is that i think he could have used that genuine moment of terrible suffering to talk to other people in that situation you know in the way that i was just reading a great subset by a guy who was a recovering addict, who is just very, you know, or Freddie de Boer, I think writes very well about being bipolar and having had a complete sort of, I think, almost psychotic break and how he's had to like rebuild his life on medication.

That is the kind of, as a guru, as a learning experience, you could say to your audience, God, I went through this thing. And you know what? We have this way that we talk about drug addicts in society and it's cruel and it's wrong and actually i'm here to tell you it can happen to anybody you can be flying high as you like and but no that's not that's not the way it went and i think that was just again that sort of speaks to what my irritation about the the choices on the path that he has taken yeah and that the the drug dependence in the Lex episode was completely recast as like an outcome of the autoimmune thing. So it became not about like a feeling.

Yeah, whereas the previous iteration was about his wife's terrible diagnosis, which again, these are both very good explanations, but they're sort of not the same explanation. So there's a feeling of a sort of story being edited in real time. And I just think that again, that speaks to the fact that he's had a really genuinely horrible time. The suffering is real, right? This is how I always feel when I write about functional disorders or psychological psychosomatic disorders. The suffering is real. Maybe people are not so self-aware about what the cause of that suffering is. Well, let's look forward to putting this one on the internet. I'm also cognizant of using up your coffee, but there was two things that I wanted to

cover. And one was just like an admission that, you know, earlier when you raised the point about feminist perspectives being overlooked in these kinds of discourses, when you did the debate with Jordan Peterson and brought up the point about women taking the names of husbands, right? And how this is an obvious example of a, like an imbalance in favor of men. And one that was a great example in that moment, there was a very concise, you know, understandable thing that everybody gets. But the other thing was, thing that everybody gets. But the, the other thing was, for me as well, that was an example that, you know, would not have come to my mind and a, it seemed that he didn't have a good answer

for why that, that doesn't count as an example, you know, of like a kind of privilege, automatic privilege that men have, or the more significant one, that women didn't have the vote until a century or so ago. But the thing is, Chris, who gave them the vote? Men. The real heroes. Well, that's the point I was getting to. Did you consider it? No. And I also think, like, you know, on the debates around gender things, that I think it's fair to say that both Matt and I are more comfortable talking about a James Lindsay or a Colin Wright than we are the feminist perspective. of that or because it's it's easier for us right it's much easier to be critical of somebody like colin wright than it would be for uh like a feminist writer who's in the gender critical

position i think for us uh yeah just i haven't you know intentionally did that but i just noticed when i give the examples earlier the people i reached for were like james lindsey and colin wright which is you know what you highlighted and the other people that i think of in those discourse i mean i think it's like jesse single and kitty herzog and and stuff as well but it it's more jesse that seems the name that would spring to mind if i was going to make a point about that wow well we've all learned a lot this morning haven't we um yeah no i think that but i think that's very true and like i and i don't deprecate it i think what you're doing is yeah i think that there is a an unknown thing that particularly men on twitter retweet other men more like there's

actually just research on that and i do think it's really easy i've been looking into gurus for this new series and the ones i do think of immediately are men men are often like top of like they're the top example yeah like they're the guy for the thing. I think women find it harder to achieve those positions. But I always think it's a real shame because feminism is actually, and I think maybe this is one of the things that has inoculated me from going what we'll refer to as the full James Lindsay, which is that feminism is both at the same time a really fascinating intellectual tradition, a way of approaching history history and also has a body of knowledge within it that I find just really – I'm not a mum so I don't know anything about motherhood – but feminist writing

on motherhood and social position is just really kind of fascinating. And I always feel really sad for people who don't read that because it's not all sort of sappy kind of self-help. Like, read the rights of women. It's kind of beautiful and really intellectually interesting. But yeah, I think there is a problem with that. And I do think when I see those debates about gender online, I think people genuinely sometimes men don't understand the way that women craft their lives. And this is not all women in all situations, but just that you know that if something happened to you you'd be be blamed right actually men are far more likely to be attacked in the street street violence is generally a male or male crime but no one will ever say to you if

you're walking home from the pub a bit pissed oh well like why were you out anyway why were you even doing that and and and that's something that i just sort of think i've you know lived with throughout my life and the same thing of being on alert when, you know, like someone asked me to come and appear at the Edinburgh Festival a while ago. And like, and I was trying to work out where they were staying. They were like, oh, you could stay with me. And instantly I'm like, oh, should I though? Like, am I going to get myself into a situation I'm going to have to like either talk myself out of or go along with it and I just think that I would wish that there was more awareness of the fact that women do have to construct their lives

in a certain way because of the control system that is male violence and I think that would help people understand that these aren't kind of hysterical women if you've been raped by a man you are probably going to be quite edgy around people you perceive to be men for quite some time afterwards which it's a natural trauma response and that is a valid feeling there are other valid feelings in the debate that have to be balanced against it but you are entitled to that feeling as a victim of that crime um and that kind of annoys me when it's all happening in the kind of intellectual debater sphere i guess that actually women's very boring mundane everyday experiences of male violence

just don't kind of, they're just sort of boring. I think actually that's a lot of the problem with feminism is that much like my article, it's not a fresh take. Like, oh, come on, Mary Wollstonecraft was writing about this in 1792. Like, oh, yeah, get some new vibes. And also, I think the problem is that also, I think men feel very much on edge when you start talking about it. Like having talked about feminism for a lot of time, I think men are, I think the problem is that also I think men feel very much on edge when you start talking about it. Like having talked about feminism for a lot of time, I think men are, I think what you're

thinking about criticizing female gurus is really interesting about, and it's not unreasonable because I'm sure people will be like, oh, look at these sexist like debate bros, just like being, you know, being super dismissive. And it's a card you can play as a woman on the internet, right? You can be like, you're just dismissing me because I'm a woman. Whereas actually sometimes even women have bad opinions because that might be just no no no no don't be yeah i i but i do think i i wanted to ask you this actually about the gender split of gurus because i'm definitely finding it there's more men do our men more

just more willing to go like do you know who's got some amazing wisdom to share with the world? Me, a dude. Look, I mean, we've got a theory. We have been very much aware of that and we've sought out and we'll be glad when we see, when we have a woman we can cover. Great, you know, it gets a bit of balance. Just like we're looking for more right-wing gurus, you know, because we don't want it to be the other way, left-wing. Sorry, left-wing gurus. Yes, the other way. I look forward to your podcast episode on the cult of, have you done Zizek? No, Slavoj Zizek. He's on our list.

I can't understand what he's saying. We've got a problem with him. Wow. I think my theory about this, the psychological take, is that there are some psychological sex differences. And one of the bigger ones is risk aversion and risk taking. So men do a lot more risky things, often status seeking risky things. And it could be, you know, anything from having more cut. But young men specifically, right?

Yes, young men. To hustle strength. But how does that work for the boomer guru? That's a good question. Or have you already like taken your risks at that point and got into a you know you've become a personality who person who takes maybe they've gotten into a groove my theory is not perfect it's more of a it's more of a thought bubble i guess but i mean there does seem to be a willingness to that risky proposition oh and that narcissism that

that is required that ridiculous degree of steamroller self-belief in the face of being shown again and again that you're wrong, that your opinions are stupid. But having that ridiculous degree of self-confidence that you're just going to barrel through and double and triple down. And maybe it's more in how the audience are perceiving these guys rather than just their own thing. But it's both they feel willing to do that and they're perceived it works better maybe for men somehow i i totally i really do buy that i think i'm sure you know i don't know there's any gender

difference in narcissism as a personality trait but i think perhaps it expresses itself differently like and that's socially conditioned right with the way that there was we just have my colleague olga kazan's old article about why like women being funny you know and both men and women said they wanted to a partner with a sense of humor and it turned out when they further questioned it that what it meant was women wanted someone to make them laugh and men wanted someone to laugh at their jokes that's pretty much what i want isn't it what we all want, really? But I think that's really true. But I also think there's a, you look at it from the other end of the telescope, which is, and female politicians really struggle with this, about women claiming authority.

And do we just think they're bitches? I don't want to be told what to do. There's a certain, like, you want my real mum kind of vibe to it. And I think that's the thing. I'm trying to work work out what does a female Jordan Peterson look like? And would any men follow that person? I just don't see it at all. And I think the same is true for women, right? Women like listening to male authority too. I think that's true. Yeah. Although the audiences for these guys are predominantly guys, you know, women are not unknown in the fan club but it is male

dominated the other thing that occurred to us is that where there's a split is maybe more in the health and well-being space so complementary alternative medicines and spiritual wellness and all that stuff definitely that's where women make a much better showing so it's a different vibe it's it's you could still be a guru um but it's more the earth mother type the cons conspirituality sphere definitely has a lot more like even even if you look at jordan peterson and michaela peterson she's active in the health and wellness sphere right relationship advice whereas like the men active in that tend to be pickup artist types, Andrew Tate, right?

They've got a very distinct vibe to them. So I think that like, if you're looking in conspirituality kind of circles or health and wellness circles, you get a lot more female guru types. And the closest example, I think that we've covered to like a Jordan Peterson on the female side is Brene Brown, which many people suggested explicitly for

that kind of reason. But she was closer to that mold. Actually, like matt and i found it a bit grating in part because of like not not just because of the like american high squeaky voice yeah not just because of that no but like it felt like there was a specific brand of american self-help, which grates on like British and Australian and Irish sensibilities, right? The kind of, let's talk about who you are for hours. And it's the most fascinating subject, you know, what makes you tick that feels really self-indulgent. And I don't think that is just her particular style. I think that's just a thing in American self-help movements, which at least Northern Irish people are not so comfortable with. Oh, no, I felt like that by a lot of the gurus.

I think that, you know, and I think when I'm making this BBC series, it's going to be really interesting to try and find British versions who are often kind of knock-off American versions, because everything about that sphere is so religious, also individualistic but also capitalist like it's a very american blend of characteristics but i think you're right the wellness space does seem to be more open to women but also heavily gendered and it's like ladies gurus for ladies blokes gurus for blokes oh yes um you know like i which i think is kind of an interesting split but when i think about the intellectual dark web most of the women in that were anti-feminists right or like critical like critical of claire layman you know um which i think is interesting

if you watch the brilliant tv series mrs america which is about phyllis schlafly with um kate blanchett and it really interesting she and this is true. She turns up to go and meet Senate committee to talk about her pet subject, which is missile defense. And then she says, oh, but of course, and then they make her take the notes. And then she says, oh, but of course, I think the equal rights act is silly. Like women just, you know, are compliments to men. And suddenly they're all like, oh, hello, hang on a minute. And I think it's again, it's sort of like- Margaret Thatcher. Right. Growing towards the audience. And there is a huge audience.

In the same way there is an audience for black intellectual to say, actually, you know, anti-racism is overdone. There's a huge audience for woman to say feminism is overrated. And so you end up with a lot of very smart women that becoming their thing. So it held a question that I think dovetails with a whole bunch of the things that we've been talking about is that you know not just in religion but in in politics and also the

intellectual dark web and and in the guru sphere we look at there's a lot of it which is like sure it's tied to an ideology but it takes to form a lot of a kind of personality cult that, you know, people follow the leaders and become heavily morally invested in them. And I know that you have talked about, or at least I heard on the New Statesman quite often, the kind of personality cult that formed around Jeremy Corbyn. cult that formed around Jeremy Corbyn. And I'm somewhat inclined to see that as, you know, recency bias makes me think of like Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn and so on, like all of these recent figures. But actually, like Obama had a pretty strong personality cult, which I was was brought into when he when he first emerged as well and i i kind of wonder on that one how much that is what people are picking up on when they're seeing parallels with religion because like you know when you see communist history you have the personality cults in in communist states and people get that there's something religious about that,

even though it's tied to a political ideology. And I'm loading this in with like 20 questions, I realize. But I'm kind of suggesting maybe one issue is that politics and the culture war and all of those things, that they can have these metaphysical significance and this personality cult feature. And that actually, that's not exclusive to religion and never has been throughout history.

So that might be part of the objection, is like people have always taken politics, some people have taken like communism as their pure ideology and it does function like a religion so is that a new feature of modern society or is that just like that's just the way we're built i think the nature of fandom has changed because of social media uh and you can build fandoms much more easily. Whether or not they can then accomplish anything is a kind of different question.

But yeah, this is a very good example of not prejudging your interviewees, right, in the same way that Elizabeth Oldfield sort of assumed I would find this comparison offensive. I asked Victoria Turner, who's in the documentary, who edited a anthology called Young, Woke and Christian, and I said, do you feel that there was a kind of semi-religious aspect to the corbin mania because when i went to his first rally in uh one of his first rallies in islington it was like a revivalist meeting and you know and

the labor anthem is the red flag which everybody sings which has a tune that sounds a bit like a christmas tree but it's very stirring words about the you know people's flag is purest you know deepest red um and and and said, and she went, oh yes, of course. Like to me and to my friends, he was a secular saint. And I think you have to understand that level of investment in him as a person to understand what then happens, which is then, but he's a good person. He's only trying to do good things. How could you criticize him? And I definitely think that is something you see with the gurus that you talk about, right? But this is for some of them at least, but he's a good person, he's trying to help. How could you criticize? What kind of meany mouthed cynic does that?

And it's a really important kind of, again, it's the function of, I think, journalists to be the one that kind of goes, I know everyone's really into this, but I'm sorry, I've got a few questions. to be the one that kind of goes, I know everyone's really into this, but I'm sorry, I've got a few questions. But it's very hard. Is it new? I just, well, so my other project that I'm working on is I'm coming to the end of a book on genius. And so Difficult Women was a history of feminism that basically argued that lots of the pioneers of feminism were difficult in whatever way that was. They might have been monomaniacal. They might have been, you know, the Pankhursts were pretty impossible to get along with, alienated everybody, including one of the Pankhurst daughters

left her own organisation. It's totally single-minded, used violence, you know, were willing to kill people in the pursuit of this aim. You know, lots of them have been like that. And the kind of underlying thesis of that book was, are those the kind of people you need in order for political change to happen?

Do you need people who are unreasonable? You know, there's a George Bernard Shaw quote that is my epigraph is about all progress depends on the unreasonable man. And then the new book about genius kind of could in some ways be titled Difficult Men, because it's about the people who have the mythology around themselves of genius, which is not an objective quality, are the ones who often have big lives and sort of turn themselves into icons in this particular way and all of it i think kind of goes back to you know thomas carlisle wrote the great man theory of history right which from the start people were criticizing but it's like the most zombie thing of all human nature right people keep sticking stakes in it and going like

you're talking about academic stuff people go well actually we should talk about feminisms actually we should talk about religions like you know actually, we should talk about feminisms. Actually, we should talk about religions. Like, you know, can we even talk about that? And people keep trying to bring all this nuance and stuff to it. But then at the end of the day, what actually people want to do is see one life as an archetype of a particular thing, attribute a huge amount of agency to one person who becomes a symbol of something. And so I do think that that is a pure human impulse in the same way that I think certain religious impulses. Sorry, that went very Lindsay there, didn't it? I just unloaded a lot of things that I've just, like, in a kind of pure machine gun at you. our diagnoses with why gurus are influential and why people are taken for a ride about something like vaccines by someone like Brett Weinstein. And that is that the correct way to approach

these things is difficult. It is absolutely difficult. What you need to do is you need to have like a trust network. You have to not invest all of your trust in a single individual, just like an academic doesn't invest all of their trust in a single research paper that's published. And you need to apportion your trust appropriately and moderate it depending on the topic and the source, if it's someone that's got a proper background in and so on. And when you actually think that through, that task of trusting the right people to the right amount about the right things, that's a tremendously difficult job that takes a lot of effort. And it's an awful lot easier and feels a lot more secure if you can just find just one person whom you can go to. Right. Gurus are a kind of living heuristic,

aren't they? You just go, this all seems very complicated. Him, he's like me. And that definitely happens in politics too. One of the questions I always ask to predict that is, you know, shares my values. Because you go, this is somebody who understands people like me, is like me, pin my rosette, and then I've delegated all my thinking. And I totally understand that impulse. I remember thinking about an issue like commercial surrogacy and I thought, do you know what, this is a very complicated issue, but all of the feminists I respect are all on one side of this. So I'm going to assume until I look into it properly, that's probably where I'm going to land on it. And like, if you didn't have any of those thinking shortcuts in your life, you'd be wandering around going,

what is a spoon? How do I open my door? Who am I? Yeah, that's right. There's nothing wrong with heuristics. You know, heuristics are essential. I think, Helen, an overlap that probably dovetails with your interest as well is like, you know, the personality indicators that people take from like gurus. They say that person was nice. He's a good man or a good woman, right? They're just trying their best, and that the politicians explicitly cultivate that kind of reaction to themselves. And once you've bought into that level, it becomes that that's often the heuristic that people go by,

well, are they doing good? Because if they're trying to do good, they're probably doing good. go by, well, are they doing good? Because if they're trying to do good, they're probably doing good. And if they appear to be people who value science, then they're unlikely to be promoting pseudoscience. And as history, politics, the world shows, that's a terrible heuristic because the most charismatic and the most people who are best at appearing in a particularly appealing way

are often the most awful humans who do terrible things. And it's probably certainly true that if you're in a room with them and you sit down and have dinner, that you can have a very engaging conversation with Jordan Peterson or whoever it may be. But that shouldn't be the thing that you use to judge their political program or their ideological output, but it is, and it's a very human thing that that's what we use. So yeah, I guess we're kind of saying that we are screwed. We are screwed. I remember going to a dinner with Alex Salmond, and it was an extraordinary, he gave a lecture, and it was an extraordinary, this is the leader now of ALBA, the one of the independents, but former leader of the Scottish National Party and former First Minister of Scotland.

And he pretty much just raconteured for two hours straight over dinner. And it was very fun. It was very gossipy. It was incredibly charismatic. And that's the kind of thing that people will say about Bill Clinton as well. Like these people are very successful politicians, are often extreme extroverts to the extent

that they almost don't know who they are when there's no one else there. But is that the kind of personality type that also can, you know, read a spreadsheet? Well, no, there are no reasons why those two things should be connected at all. And I think that is a large part of the answer of why we get the wrong leaders is that entertainment and dry technocracy are two very different skills. Yeah. I mean, we're finding this so much when it comes to science communication that I'll stick with the COVID example, but you know, we know the researchers who are genuine authorities on this, that the people you should just ask and delegate your

trust to. So if you're like me and you don't want to read the primary literature on bloody vaccines or something, but they're not necessarily necessarily charismatic they don't devote much energy or effort to charming people and playing the part and there are other people who who specialize in in the role and i always think of the west wing and i always think how the president the west wing is just so much more presidential than any real president and because it just goes to show that if you invest your effort into acting the thing you can do a lot better than any real president. And because it just goes to show that if you invest your effort into acting the thing, you can do a lot better than the real thing, typically. Zelensky.

I mean, he's doing very well tonight. Yeah, but he looks, he's obviously given thought to what is the persona of a war president. And this is what I mean. People would say that's very pejorative, as if I'm calling him shallow and superficial. I'm not. One of the things that he's done exceptionally well is go, what would an inspiring military leader in 2022 rather than 1945 look like? It would look like a guy in a T-shirt who's relatable and funny because we can now accommodate that alongside seriousness in a way you couldn't if you're like Winston Churchill wasn't throwing in a few knob gags at the end of his stirring broadcasts in the Second World War. But you can do that now. And I think, yeah, we do underrate that as a

skill. But yeah, and the same Corbyn election, I interviewed Yvette Cooper. And I remember we'd try... Hard work, let me tell you. And I remember the headline we put on the piece, which was discipline over dazzle, which, let's be honest, was sort of code word for, yeah, all right, you know. But I remember talking to Emily Thornberry, who is another Labour politician, who's very smart, very self-aware about this stuff. And I said, why don't you talk about how tentative you are? You know, why don't you go on question time and say that we just don't know yet? And she said, it doesn't work. People don't want to hear it. It just, people will tear you apart. That's not how politics works. And I think that's what you're talking about with the COVID scientists. The best COVID scientists are probably quite, well, it's a 70% chance or like, it's a very small study, but like, this is

really hopeful. And actually is science communication just confidently going, wear a mask two weeks later, don't wear a mask and you know, whatever it might, mask two weeks later don't wear a mask and you know whatever it might all probably the other way around um yeah certainty like certainty being confused with authority is a is a kind of another human problem i think and and that if they do do that the you know the medical authorities and stuff get then criticized because the the point is that they didn't they didn't say you know well we think on average you'd be better off doing this but if they did communicate like that you know there's kind of debates about it like whether people would respond well to it but i i think there is some idealistic takes about that that yeah everybody just wants to have the exact probabilities communicated and know.

Well, Helen, thanks so much for coming to talk to us. We've covered a lot of territories. It's so much fun. I don't think we've really solved any of the questions that we looked at, but it was pretty interesting nonetheless. So you field, Helen. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. This was your guru audition and now you're out of contention.

Do you have any simple snappy slogans you want to- 12 rules, for example, that you might want to tell us. Even six rules will do. I actually have one rule for life, which is that anything you like is probably bad for you. Checks out, checks out. Checks out, that's suitably defined. Yeah, thank you thank you that's i thought i thought i'm gonna go and go away and meditate on that yeah and i helen i am very

tempted to just keep you and make you uh regale with stories about previous elections but we shouldn't do that because we took up all your morning but um so you can do that you can do that on your own time chris i will if you want if you've got burning questions you've always wanted to know about andy burnham we can address them in private and not share them with the group i can go back to my new statesman archives and relive the glories of that i don't need to know these things no one else needs to hear about it but helen so there's the bbc documentary that people can go listen to. And there's the article on The Atlantic that we'll put in the show notes.

If people want to go on Twitter and hear people be exasperated on Aylor direction, they can go and do that any day of the week. But what about the terminal interview question that's always there? What's next for Helen Lewis? My merch line is obviously coming out soon. A range of scented candles and lobster tie pins. With that logo. Oh, the logo. Yeah, so I'm just finishing up a book, actually,

which is, as I said, on genius. So that will be out hopefully 2024. And this is why what brought me here was my worry. I'm working on a BBC series about gurus. So opposition research. This is our first meeting. Obviously I imagine it'll be our last meeting because you'll have to do some sort of furious denunciation about how I've got it all terribly wrong in about three months time.

So yeah, that'll hopefully be coming at the end. I think what we're going to do, I think it's very complimentary. I deliberately stayed away from your podcast because I didn't want to rip you off but i have now i now know a lot more about uh when when i decided to come on i thought i'd listen so i listened to maybe like two hours about brett weinstein i'm sorry no i feel i feel very up to date with all him and everything that he's been up to and that's nice it's nice to have a friend even if they don't know it but yeah i think what we're going to do is look at maybe it from the other end of some of the people who are followers and what they get out of it so um that would be really interesting and trace the kind of evolution

but i think you're right it's a it's a kind of fascinating modern phenomenon i think i don't tell me what you think about this i think we are living in a golden age of gurus i think they were just they're everywhere they're like you know they're like hedgehogs no not hedgehogs other things like hedgehogs pick up their pickup leaves so they're like they're like them they're like gray squirrels right they are just there used to be experts who were red squirrels and now there are gurus who are gray squirrels and they've just done incredibly well in the urban environment eating out of bins and whatever it might be um but you know what i mean like there are a lot of gurus who i think are really fascinating who are at like six seven thousand followers like the micro guru and they don't attract a lot of attention but it's there it's

almost a stage where like you know anybody who's had any experience happen to them can then pivot to turning that into being a guru on that experience and that i just think is something that because of communication technology you couldn't have done 20 years ago. So yeah, for fans of you, hopefully, there will be fans of me also talking about gurus. I'm sure they will. And the one thing that struck me about that, Helen is we've looked at a little bit the guru ecosystems, like the Discord servers that get set up and the Patreon communities.

And, you know, this is very much just like web 2.0 stuff. But in particular, those technologies are very good at generating these like extremely intense fan communities that previously would have been associated with pop stars. And then also we've seen it create minor gurus, like people that come out of that ecosystem and are like Uber fans and then spin off into their own little mini ecosystems of gurus. And Lex Friedman started that way as a fan of Joe Rogan. And there's other examples. So it's like an area that I think is really underexplored. They're basically like gremlins, Helen. So we're fucked, unfortunately.

Do you know what? I didn't get to ask you my one question, but that means I'm going to withhold it so that you have to invite me on at some future time, which is, what is sense-making? But let's leave it there. That's teasing. Tune in. Tune in. If you want to know the answer to this, everybody, What is sense-making? But let's leave it there. Tune in.

Tune in. If you want to know the answer to this, everybody, tune in to our next episode. It's going to be amazing. You did well, Helen. That's good. It's been very enjoyable and I appreciate you indulging us early in the morning. And our lawyers will be in touch about the guru thing when it comes out but you

know we'll cover that bridge when it comes up right good obviously the bbc as you know notorious for its enormous fees so you'll be looking at a class of in the low six figures i would have thought all right well uh thanks very much again helen and yeah, stay safe on the Twittersphere. Enjoy your time. Thank you. Bye. Okay, so I've just closed the parlor door and we're back in the boardroom.

The boardroom. I was going to say the anteroom. We're actually, okay, this is where the- The anteroom of the boardroom. The anteroom of the boardroom where the really important stuff happens. That's actually, okay, this is where the ante room of the boardroom. The ante room of the boardroom where the really important stuff happens. That's right.

That's right. We're lighting up cigars, having a cognac and it's time to get down to the really serious business of review of reviews.

Is it? Oh, oh, you're going to jump there? I was just going to say Helen left us with a bombshell. You know,

she finished on a mega question. What is sense making? Just drop that atomic bomb and leave the room. Just leave it. That's right. And we didn't set it up. We didn't set it up.

So it's. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it's coming. It's coming. We can't address that. She asked a $6 million question, Matt.

The question that's on everyone's lips these days what is sense making just what is sensation coming it's coming it's coming you'll have more sense than you know what to do with very shortly uh yes you will but as you said matt we have things to do before we get out of here and one of them is to review the reviews that we receive and you know this time i've got an interesting little set of reviews because i've got a critique of you what i've got a critique of me oh okay all right that's fair that's fair did good your critique landed us with a one-star review, Matt. And a review that is titled Trash? And it is from Tom. And it says, the Aussie one called RoboCop trash.

Avoid. That's the review, Matt. Hey, hey. Did i call it trash i don't remember saying that you did call trash you bashed an it is classic and as a result we got a one-star review i hope you're happy with yourself like i like you know what i'm actually i'm gonna make up for it because i've already started doing this i've started watching the original Predator with Arnie in it, which, you know, Predator. What do you mean you've started watching? It's like an hour and a half long.

Well, I got sick of it and it went away, but I'm planning to return to it. Okay. No, I don't mind a bit of 80s schlock. Yeah, look, I'm going to get back into it. You retract the comments about robot i do retract it so if they could resubmit that review review of five stars it's not trash math no they should have given at least two and a half because i said it was great they probably didn't get that far as soon as i heard me say that they're just like

they slammed down their iphone um okay so so that was your negative review now i have a three out of five negative review and i say negative because because i think if the tone of mine is probably more intricately harsher than than your robocop one one. But let's dig into it. This is a meaty one, Matt. So the title is, Meh, Intrigue Delves Into Hypocrisy. I think they probably meant to say Descends. But I'm not editorializing the review. It's not your review, Chris.

It's their review. Just read it. And this is by Ginger Sisyphus, by the way. So, this project started out really interesting and well done. Correct. Chris and Matt provided insightful commentary on the Weinstein's delusions with a solid foundation in the subject matter of academia and conspiracy cult thinking.

Correct. Correct. Good so far. The problem is... Waiting for the swerve. The problem is that brackets mostly Chris and to a lesser degree Matt have slowly let people goad them into the same guru habits exhibited by those whom they criticize. Okay. Which ones? Which ones?

Failure to stay in one's lane is a big guru problem that Chris loves to exhibit himself. It's all well and good to point out that Brett Weinstein isn't an expert epidemiologist when criticizing him for his COVID takes, but somehow Chris, a cultural anthropologist, is fit to opine on inter alia, the nature of consciousness, various international conflicts, and the state of American private schools in LA. Not only that, but he does it with the smug condescension

made famous by gurus like Ben shapiro and eric weinstein from where did he get all that knowledge stay in your lane mate you're not nearly as god-brained as you position yourself and that's precisely the problem with the idw go back to what you're good at. So there's some harsh truths for us to chew on. And I will say, you know, it's kind of directed at both of us. And I felt the venom was kind of aimed quite squarely at me in those comments. Yeah, I felt so too. I mean, thank you, Chris. I feel like you've you've

you know you've leapt on that hand grenade for us both and you've taken the full blast of it okay well how well how did how do you respond so so what do i think about that well well so i think there's several key issues lacking in this critique so So first of all, let me get started. Point one of 10. So first thing is that this is a minor point. It's just a point that I want to make. It may speak to the level of research that is involved here. I'm not a cultural anthropologist. I'm a cognitive anthropologist. And neither am I a social anthropologist, which would be closer. But cultural anthropologist, nay. So get your anthropologist smackdown correct.

That's one thing. So how well is he listening, Matt? All right. All right. But that doesn't detract from his main... That doesn't distract me. That doesn't distract from his criticism. No, no.

A cognitive anthropologist isn't qualified to have independent opinions about Ukraine. Or are they, Chris? Or are they? Yes, what he's gotten wrong here is that our argument is the whole construct of the galaxy brain dimension. The issue there is not having opinions on different things. It's perfectly fine to have opinions on different things and stuff that is outside of your area of expertise. The important thing is when having said opinions to make it clear whether you're speaking out of

your expertise. And now in the case of the nature of consciousness i think it's been flagged up clearly enough to everyone but we are not experts in that i'm not even we have you know i don't go further i'd go further and say we have very very little idea what we are talking about but i agree with you that I think we made that pretty clear. Abundantly clear. And if not, let me make it clear now. If you want to have a philosophically robust discussion about the nature of consciousness,

go see some cognitive science and philosophers. Go read a book by Chalmers or something. Yeah, actually, Daniel Dennett, I think it's truer to correct on these things. But, you know, anyway, you've got plenty of options. Yeah. So that's it.

And on the topic of international conflict opinion, like the international conflicts I've opined on tend to be things like Russia and Ukraine. And like there, I'm sorry, but I don't think you need a degree in international geopolitics to understand that there is a country being invaded by a larger aggressor, right? There's lots of geopolitical dimensions and regional factors that I don't understand. Very few people commenting on the issue understands. But being opposed to invasions by aggressive neighbors is not

something that requires a whole heap of expertise. And it's perfectly fine for people to have that opinion or various other opinions on international politics. You're allowed to have opinions. What would be wrong is if you presented that as like, oh, my opinion on the Ukraine is based on decades of in-depth research on the region like no i don't know anything more than your average person who's read since the conflict started about that area i suppose the other thing that's worth mentioning is that i mean when we talk about things like that seriously it's because one of our gurus has got strong opinions about it right like most recently was with what's his name it's named oh robert right so so robert wright's opinion is a minority opinion he's not the only one who has it but it is a slight outlier one which is essentially putting a much larger share of the blame on NATO than, say, the consensus, shall we say, opinion.

So in order to talk to him about these views, you sort of have to talk about it. We don't have a unique opinion about that. We're not broadcasting sort of hot takes and outlier opinions on our show. Really, we're sort of representing what is pretty much the consensus opinion the consensus opinion might be wrong but you know it is it yeah well that yeah i that was another point that i want to make like if you're arguing for a position which reflects the general consensus of experts in an area or the majority opinion like that's not a unique take to you it would be like having the opinion that global warming is a problem yeah well like a very like an apt example is

like a lot of our critiques on the eric and brett weinstein and people like that these anti-vaxxers and so on you you know, our analysis is based on the presumption that they're essentially wrong, that the vaccines work, that the COVID virus was a serious problem, that ivermectin doesn't work. That informs our analysis and that's because we have taken the time to get our heads around what is the consensus opinion among experts on those things and we represent it that's that's necessary like you can't just deal with their views like in the total abstract without any priors or assumptions about how the world works yeah and and the other thing that was mentioned was the state of American private schools in LA. But there again, like this is a, I feel like there's a category area because I think that's a reference to me pointing out that Sam Harris made a switch from talking about all schools in America to like what's being taught in elite private schools in Manhattan or somewhere like that.

But that's obviously true. That doesn't require me to have specialist knowledge about the schools. The point is, Sam's claim switched from a very dramatic, wide-reaching claim about all schools in America to a subset of schools in a specific region, elite schools, which is a different claim. That's the point. And when it comes to what's being taught in schools in America, once again, we're very clear that we don't know the extent to which height or various other culture war figures are misrepresenting or exaggerating things in American schools. But I do know people that teach in America, and the reports are different,

like, including people that are sympathetic to kind of IDW takes, they basically do argue that a lot of it is hyperbolic. So, you know, maybe not in some cases and maybe so in others. But yeah, again, I don't know how things are in universities across America. I think most of the culture warrior people also don't because they're typically talking about very specific universities whenever they make their points. But now look, if we started going on in this podcast about how it's absolutely clear to anyone with a brain that Elon Musk's attempts to make self-landing rockets and build a Mars base or whatever is part of a secret plan to get Peter Thiel and some other cronies up there so they can have a harem of sex slaves and found some genetically pure Mars colony.

Pretty likely. Sounds good. Sounds good so far. Like if we were setting out claims like that with absolute assurance and claiming that we knew better about how to understand about all the nefarious stuff that what this guy is up to and you cannot find any of that amongst any consensus orthodox media then yes send us the one star reviews because we deserve it but you won't find us doing that hopefully well no no so look i actually think it's kind of useful review because i think

it's important to stick out that the criticism is is not about people having opinions on different topics outside of their of expertise it's that you delineate that they are opinions their personal opinions yeah and that you you know if you're advocating a very minority position you flag it as such and don't endorse conspiracism in terms of the smug condescension that's purely a mistake as we all know northernerish sarcasm no no northernerish sarcasm that's what it is you've made a schoolboy error i'm happy to take that one on board i will say yes we should own that we should own being smug condescending tons of bitches well i do think you're very smug and condescending that's true man i do yeah yeah yeah a little bit you

know tone is tone one man's biting sarcasm is another man's snarky like i don't know snarky shit talk yeah i can't think of a way to put it but um yeah so that's it that's it it's just that i it should be clear when we are speaking within our realm of expertise and when we were offering opinions which are based on like our reading of evidence or critical analysis of somebody's point of view i think we do generally flag that up and we also do credit people when they do that in their content yeah and that's what the gurus don't do i mean even if i'm talking on a topic that is in my realm of expertise, something to do with addiction, I can tell you what my professional opinion is and I can tell you what the consensus one is

and I can tell you the ways in which they might be similar or different. So I think that's the thing that the gurus don't do. Like a normal expert, a normal academic, it's quite clear what they're an expert in and even when they're talking about those things they don't claim that they're this special case where just forget about what all those other idiots think just you know i know i'm 100 sure this is absolutely true um yeah and then when you talk we're talking about consciousness we know we know what we're talking about we know that hopefully it's clear um're talking about. We know that. Hopefully it's clear.

We just meet puppets. Yeah. We can do Noella. Yeah. P-Zombie. So, look, you know, you might read this as defensiveness, but again, you're just re-mystic. We're just trying to be clear.

We're trying to clarify. Just clarifying for Ginger Sisyphus' sick, you know, need the help him out here. But in any case, I generally, we do like the negative and positive feedback. Of course, you know, five stars and write the negative thing is fine. You can do that. But in any case, I appreciate the feedback and other people's opinions are available. Maybe many people find us incredibly galaxy-brained

and hoisted by our own petard. So it may be. All our opinions are available. I just can't believe we got a one-star review just because I said I didn't like Robocop. That's harsh. Come on. I can believe it, Matt.

I think he did the right thing there. Really? You're an uncultured swine but that's okay yes so so now patrons matt patrons we've got a patron and we put stuff there we put things like we have the coding academia series where we discuss research papers and and look at them critically, usually related to guru-esque things or conspiracy theories. And we also have monthly live stream hangouts there where we talk to the Galaxy Brain Guru tier and answer questions. And the episodes, the interviews, And the episodes, the interviews, we put them out slightly earlier there.

Usually the raw, unedited versions, we kind of check them up with videos. So if people want to see, you know, our faces, or they want to hear all the ums and ahs, which are not there, which are carefully exercised from the final recording, you can join up on the Patreon and find us there. But you don't have to. You don't have to. No, that's right.

And if you want to be at that top tier, the $10 tier or whatever it is, you can join those live streams and have a chat with us. The last live stream, we had it at a sort of a time zone that didn't suit Europe or the United States and the relatively small crowd. So, you know, you can get up there and you can tell us what you think of Robocop.

You could deliver your review in person. Yeah, you could deliver your review in person. Pay me $10 and then get up there and crush my opinions about Robocop. Yeah, that's it. So, yeah, you can find out what we really think about the girls on those live streams.

But yeah, so that's there. And we like to shout out the people who are kind enough to support us on Patreon. And I have a couple of people to shout out, unless you have any objections to that, Matt.

No, please proceed. Speak now or forever hold your tongue. Okay, well, so for conspiracy hypothesizers, this week we have Mopi Dick, Hola Gatito, George Weiner, Paul Reedy, Catherine, Dylan Osborne, The Real Deal, Professor Feinstein,

Jim G, Sue Simmons, Ryan Chandler, and Cassidy Kide. Hey, those are some good handles. Good handles. Yeah. Good. All unique in their own way. Thank you all. Every great idea starts with a minority of one.

We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay, and next, Matt, we have revolutionary thinkers, the higher higher tier the ones that get access to the academic knowledge um these people who want to expand their minds yeah the ones that want to you know reach a slightly higher level so there we have odd bjorn nordland we have don't say anything bad don't say anything, Matt. Don't say anything. There's Ebua, Ben Macon, Adam G, Aiman Singh, and River Pebbles. Congratulations, Chris. I think you managed to offend three distinct continents and one subcontinent there.

Well done. How would you say that first one? You have to show me it written you can't say it to me because then your terrible pronunciation will infect mine okay that's tricky um odd beyond nordland fuck. I think you did. That's it. Anyway, thank you, Oddbjorn. It's a good name. It's a good name.

It's our levitation. I'm just laughing at our inability to pronounce it. Don't say our. Your. Yes, it is a good name. I like the cross through the O. That's just charming. It makes me think of Vikings.ings vikings yeah that's right and lastly matt the galaxy brain gurus this is the top tier the north stars in the guru

icing on the guru cake correct and there we have potato wire we have jason truck truck, Shane Gronholz, Janet Uter, and Justin Kitchen. Good, good. That's our Galaxy Brain Gurus. Galaxy Brain Gurus. Yeah, it is. Yeah, the best, the best. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.

And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am. Yeah. I don't trust people at all. Well, that's that, Matt. So thanks to everyone

who does that. We appreciate you all. And next time we'll be back for the sense-making payload. It will finally be delivered. It's coming up. I see it coming out of the mine shaft as we speak.

We're halfway there. It's been epic. Promises to be good. Alright, look forward to that guys. Thank you and take care. Good night. That's right. Note the disc. Accord the gin. Consider the nth dimensional cube yes and

have a very good evening one and all yep yep go frolic an infinite possibility space bye Thank you.