Modern Wisdom - #570 - Helen Lewis - Investigating The World Of Modern Gurus

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Helen Lewis is a journalist at The Atlantic and an author Humanity has become much less religious and in the ruins of this fresh, listless world, bereft of traditional insight, a cadre of new gurus have risen to take the high priests' place of dispensing insights about how to live. Helen's new BBC Sounds documentary series delves into this world of secular gurus. Expect to learn why a Canadian man has started drinking his own urine, why Steve Jobs was much more than just a tech inventor, how much it costs to be accused of racism over dinner while being banned from crying, why so many people are turning away from mainstream media, Helen's post-mortem on the IDW, the mortal problem that productivity gurus are helping address and much more... Sponsors: Get a $250 discount on Sacred Hunting’s trips at https://www.sacredhunting.com/modernwisdom Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Listen to The New Gurus - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001g9sq/episodes/player Follow Helen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/helenlewis  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Helen Lewis. She's a journalist at the Atlantic and an author. Humanity has become much less religious, and in the ruins of this fresh, listless world bereft of traditional insight, a cadre of new gurus have risen to take the high priests place of dispensing insights about how to live. Helen's new BBC Sound documentary series delves into this world of secular gurus. Expect to learn why a Canadian man has started drinking his own urine,

why Steve Jobs was much more than just a tech inventor. How much it costs to be accused of racism over dinner while being banned from crying, why so many people are turning away from mainstream media, Helen's post-mortem on the intellectual dark web, the mortal problem that productivity gurus are helping address, and much more. As I mentioned earlier this week, there is no episode this Saturday. I figured that I would give you New Year's Eve off to enjoy yourself doing whatever it is you are doing. I also need to admit

that I messed up a little bit. I released a annual review template thing a year ago, which is the exact process I use to review the year that's just finished and plan my goals and stuff for the upcoming year. It is a combination of all of the best things that I've found from every big productivity writer on the internet and I just put it together for myself. And then I made a template that you guys could use, released it last year, and totally forgot to talk about it this year. So if you want to get a copy,

you can get it for free. It is chriswillx.com slash review. It will give you the best template that I've found for doing an end of your review for setting and planning goals for the upcoming year. It'll help you to reinforce habits. Remember good memories, all of that stuff. ChrisWillX.com slash review. And do not worry if you are deep into January and you still haven't done it yet. You have bags and bags of time to do this. It's not the sort of thing that needs to be completed before New Year's Eve or else it's useless. ChrisWillX.com slash review. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Helen Lewis, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. How did you get interested

in thinking about modern gurus? I wonder where the inspiration came from, but I think I've always been a journalist who's been interested in the weird parts of the internet. So I've spent a lot of time, I remember early in the 2000s when I just come out of being a teenager, I spent a lot of time in body modification communities. There was a site called BMEZ, which was run by a kind of crazy Canadian called Shannon Lara, and it was all full of either people having these really weird experimental tattoos and piercings, or actually in quite a lot of cases like hammering nails through their nuts. So from the very start, my interaction with the internet was a lot about being in the kind of weirder spaces. And I've always really enjoyed reporting on subcultures. So it does feel kind of slightly strange to me that I'm right at the end

of my 30s and I'm still doing like, let's explain the internet to people. You know, and I thought we might have got past that by now, but it is still a, it is still a viable job in journalism and a really fun and interesting job in journalism. Okay. And gurus are now their own subculture, many multiple subcultures on the internet in your opinion? Well, every sort of, I think, pretty much every interesting sphere on the internet has its own set of gurus. And there are lots that I didn't get to in the series.

You know, parenting is a really interesting one, right? I think when people are at moments of precarity or anxiousness, they want someone to tell them what to do or want someone to assure them that they've been through the same thing. And you know, more and more of our connections are moving online. My big analysis of the last 20 years is we used to have these geographic communities. You know, used to have to be friends with whoever lived in your town. And that's moved much more to most of our socializing and based around interest communities. And so what you have is that you might not know the people who live in your street, but you know all the other

furries or whatever it might be. I know that there are any furry gurus, I should just clarify that. I'm sure there are, but I don't personally know of them. But you know, parenting or wellness or productivity or whatever it might be, all the bits of your life, whether it's dating or working, money making, who do we look to for advice now? Actually, it's sometimes it's our friends, but just as often it's someone on the internet. I suppose as soon as you allow people to choose their own subculture, whatever it is that one person's going to get obsessed by and find interesting or compelling or whatever, there is inevitably going to be a person that is most effective at capturing the attention

of the people who like that stuff. And they are then going to have incentives that align to encourage them to give out advice. Sometimes those incentives could be financial, other times they could be genuinely altruistic. Here is a unique medical condition that very few people have dealt with and I have actually managed to find out a way that the medical system hasn't seen. And here is a potential solution for you and then people are going to hail them and everything in between from useful to useless. Yeah, I mean, childbirth and NCT groups, right? National childbirth groups are a really

interesting example of that in the real world, which is that people who have just had a baby or just about to have a baby want a huge amount of advice. And their friends aren't necessarily going through the same experience at the same time and sort of aren't that interested. So they seek out these chargers groups. However, if you ever have a friend who goes through that process, get ready for them to complain about the fact that there will be lots of, you know, people creeping into that hill be, for example, you know, very anti-bottle feeding, for example, or might have very odd opinions on childhood wax fiends. And yeah, as you say, there is always the problem of the kind of the kind of, it's like the sound of I won't want to be a member of any club that would have me kind of thing, right? Anybody who wants to be listened to by definition, you should

probably be quite suspicious of because those people, you know, like narcissists self-select very heavily. Where did the gurus come from then? Is it a natural emergence in your opinion or are the people seeing the opportunity to jump on the back of a bandwagon, how many of them are altruistic versus how many of them are pre-prepared looking at this as an opportunity to make a name for themselves? That's a really good question because actually one of the things that consistently comes up along across the series is the number of people who try and reinvent themselves across a number of different domains. So one of the people we talk about episode six is about something called Day Game, which

is a pickup artist technique where you chat up, you're smiling in the way that implies you've already had an interaction with this community. But for those who haven't, you know, you try and pick up women on the street and get them into bed very quickly. And one of the guys who was very big in this in the 2000s, early 2000s, term was a guy called Tom Tarrero. And it was interesting talking to people who had known him before he was Tom Tarrero when it was a guy called Tom Tarrero. And it was interesting talking to people who'd known him before he was Tom Tarrero when he was a guy called Tom Ralish.

He was an Oxford, he was a fairly nerdy percussion student. But he had been very much like a new atheist debate, bro. And then he'd completely fallen out of love with that and he'd become very religious. And he went and actually interviewed Richard Dawkins and felt that he'd really smacked Richard Dawkins down. And that made me laugh, because in the previous episode about the IDW, I'd spoken to James Lindsay. Now, James Lindsay is, I think let me get this the right way around. I think his middle name is

actually Stephen, but his pen name is James A. Lindsay because he started out as a new atheist writer in the American South, again, in the New Atheist wave. So that makes sense. And like the A and the S and next to each other on the keyboard. So this was his like Superman clock Kent, level of disguise about who he really was. But he started out as a new atheist. And now he's, you know, funded by Christian conservatives. And you know, you can see someone like Majid Noah as another member of the IDW right starts off in his book to hear an Islamist organization,

then be caught, you know, is now a kind of big anti-vaxxer. And I think some people, I call it like after the bacteria, I call them extrema files, you know, they're just very attracted to these big intellectual movements, whatever's the kind of zeitgeisty thing now, and being a kind of thought leader in it. And that's interesting to me, because I think most people probably have more fixed opinions and want to succeed in that sphere. Whereas there are some people who are who like the need comes first, the need to be validated, the need to be listened to, the need to be important comes first

and then they pour themselves into all the different bottles and see which one feels like the best fit. Did you consider looking at Brian Rose from London Real? I did not. Tell me about Brian Rose from London Real. I did not tell me about Brian Rose from London Real. You've missed a trick. So Brian Rose is, I would say, the most successful serial grifter on the internet. Or perhaps the most unsuccessful, given the fact that everybody knows it's a grift. Is that the fact that you're calling him a grifter in decades, but things have not gone well for Brian Rose of late? If there was a, he's had a sort of 50 year face plant basically just permanent every birthday, it's just some new gift and it's failed again.

He started off doing podcasting a long time ago, maybe 10 years ago basically. Him and his business partner were watching Joe Rogan, they really liked it, they decided to do their own thing. This only just recently came out, but he kind of screwed the business partner over, took the project for his own. He starts doing this business. He then gets introduced to Dan Pena, the trillion dollar man, who, as far as I can see, is of just a loud, angry, sweary grumpy old dude that wears suits and big ties.

It looks like something from Mad Men. He ran for the Mayor of London, he created his own independent freedom platform so he could broadcast live streams with David Ike during the middle of COVID. He is now doing decentralized finance, defy, like things, and is republishing podcasts that he recorded four or five or six years ago to make it look like the people who used to have on a coming back on so that they still think that he's relevant. It's impossible to unsubscribe from his email list. Anybody that's listening to this do not subscribe to his email list because that is like the

worst venereal disease that you can think of. It's just never getting off you. And like this, this is the Chris Williamson's GDPR complaint section of the podcast. Correct. That's very correct. Yeah. God, if I could, so if I knew how to submit to GDPR, Brian would be, I mean, I'm behind a very long list of people that have got grievances with him. My point being every single different opportunity that has has come up where there has been a chance for him to inject himself into something that looks opportunistic, there's always a financial incentive, there's always an in-group out-group tribalism thing going on, it's them versus us, they're trying to shut down free speech or they're trying to tell us what

to do, they're not for the people in politics, they're trying to control your money, each one of them has got the same cadence and rhythm and fundamental feel to it. And yet he just can, he, one of them fails. He got less votes in the London mayoral election than that guy that has the bin on his head. But was it? Count bin face. Count bin face. Yeah, like Binnie McBinface.

He got fewer votes than that guy. Got told off because he was going around London in a bus that had his face on the side of it. Livestreaming from the bus as he was going around. And then the police came over and said, you can't do this, it's fucking lockdown. He said, as you can see, the current mayor of London is trying to stop our campaign.

I'm like, Brian, you're not being victimized. You're just a prick. Like, that's what's going on. You're'm like, Brian, you're not being victimized. You're just a prick. Like, that's what's going on. You're honestly, I would like to say that to, I would say, I've approximately 4% of the internet need to be told you're not being victimized. You're just an asshole.

Like, I'm sorry. The people don't hate you because you've got hidden truths. People hate you because you're repellent. Yes. And I just think that people would be happier if that was something that was said more often. My point being, I can see what you mean. There are certain rhythms and trends that occur and people inject.

And that's not for me to say that every single person is as bad as Brian. Brian is about as 100% as you can get with regards to this. But some people feel compelled to put themselves into a movement and they're obsessive, dedicated individuals, and that shows up throughout their entire career of whatever it is that they do. Another good example would be Michael Sayler, who I encountered through crypto, you might have heard of, you know, he's now got laser eyes on Twitter and he's a crypto guru. And you go back a little bit into his history and he's best known for having lost six billion dollars in a single day during the dot com crash. And I had to go like, check, is that a typo? Do you mean six million?

And it was like, no, no, no, he was worth allegedly 10 billion. And they got by the end of the day, it's worth 3.9 billion. And I just think in my big list of people I would take financial advice for, I probably, all the people who haven't lost six billion dollars in a single day would be higher on the list than Michael sailor. But, but that's,. But that's no bar. That's one of the things I find really interesting about that space is there's almost a kind of idea that if you're flawed, it's more authentic. So you get these dating gurus who don't find love themselves. You get these productivity gurus who are working themselves into the ground. We don't want to hear necessarily from people who have got it all figured out. We find that kind of annoying. You wanna hear from somebody who's struggling like you are.

Mm. That's interesting. Based on my experience, I would say the people that seem to be the most flawless that are viewed by their audience. Now, as long as they're flawless, now that's fine. If they're flawed now, they're going to get called out because there is an incentive amongst the audience

for them to continually pick holes, right? Derek from More Plates More Dates, recently released this big documentary about the liver king. I had him on, he made it with my housemate, Zach. They're both out in Sacramento at the moment, recording blah, blah, blah. Derek did a training vlog with one of my friends. Derek knows more about hormones and TRT and supplements

and all of that stuff, then pretty much anybody else on the planet, right? Someone saw him doing a training vlog and decided to break down his training style and lambast him for the fact that he doesn't know how to train. Why? Because he is somebody that has sort of this pure, purest, white snow unfettered reputation when it comes to certain domains. And as soon as there's the opportunity for someone to pick a hole in it They've been able to do it because they've said that he doesn't know what he's doing when it comes to training my point being that When I think about the productivity world, right, which is a big part of my history and also there wasn't a single person on the episode You did on productivity that I haven't had on this podcast not a single person wasn so, but all of those people. That's because they're all very productive. They do a lot of podcasting.

They do, they put themselves out there. That's correct. But if you were to look at Ali Abdahl, Ali very rarely opens up about his own current vulnerabilities when it comes to productivity. Like, yeah, he'll have problems, but his problems will be significantly better dealt with than yours are because he's just a superior productivity guy.

I don't think people would have followed him, had he have had right now the issues. Someone that't think people would have followed him, had he have had right now the issues. Someone that's got a story, a backstory, in my opinion, people don't want to follow gurus that right now are struggling through things. They're likely idea of a narrative because it creates that I was where you are, you can be where I am, but I'm not convinced that it would be like, I'm watching you fail forward right now because why am I listening to you? Why wouldn't I just listen to someone who's more perfect, even if it's untruthful?

That's interesting. So I wonder with the liver king, you know, and this idea that, oh, I can get all these gains by just eating my raw organs. Oh no, actually, it was human growth hormone. Do you think that will affect his sales of his goat organ pills or his bull organ pills on every saying? Like, that's the thing. It ought to ought to my mind to be a huge blow to his credibility And I'm just not sure that it will one of the problems you have is he's so successful and has so much momentum at the moment and It was already primed the paleo movement and the ancestral health movement was already rattling along so How do you slow that down? Even if you were to chop his growth in half let's say that all of the damage that's been done

from, you know, Rogan, me, Zach, and Derek over the weekend, let's say that that chops his growth in half, he's still growing more than almost every other business on the planet. And now he's doing another podcast tour where he's apologizing for everything. He was on Andrew Schultz yesterday. They had to forbreeze the couch that I sat on yesterday to get rid

of the smell of the liver king so that I could sit down in a room that didn't honk like organ meats. That was... As I said, what does the liver king smell like? Does he smell the balls? Forbreeze as far as I'm aware, but they did have to get the air conditioner out to do that. Yeah, I don't think it's going to slow down.

But I mean, he's another guy. He's seen an opportunity to inject himself in. There's heavy financial opportunity here. Why not have the answers? His apology video is incredible because it was one of those bits. Remember that bit in Black Outlet goes forth when he's doing the summing up speech from Black Outlet's on trial. Sorry, you're probably too young to remember this. But it ends with like, he is guilty. And then he doesn't turn over. But it ends with like, he is guilty, and then he doesn't turn over the page, and then the other page is guilty only of caring too much.

And that was how I felt like his apology video was, right? It was like, I, yes, I am guilty only of caring too much about young men. I just wanted to be perfect for you, and that's why I had to dope myself. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. It was fantastic.

It was fantastic. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. It was fantastic. It Decker. That was his solution for it. So, okay, okay, what is the need that gurus are tapping into? Like, is there the individual or common trends in the need that gurus tap into? I think part of it is the desire for reassurance

that everything's gonna be okay. So the last episode is about looking into the future. And if you think about all the different roles we have in our culture about people's are looking into the future, it's everything from the super kind of scientific, like super forecasters through meteorologists, through trend forecasters in fashion, all the way out to tarot and fortune telling and astrology. And all of it's about the idea that you just want somebody to kind of listen to your problems and tell you, or be okay, or like give you some idea that, yeah, I think a lot of it is about a kind of idea of control.

And wanting to get some kind of a grip over a world that can feel very scary. And this is part of my thesis about it is that, you know, we're seeing a decline of people identifying as religious, huge decline in the UK in the last census. And, you know, you don't go to your priest for advice, like you probably would have done in 1850. So who do you go to?

So it's certainty in an uncertain world? Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. And I also think, you know, like the pick-up artist is really interesting because I think one of the reasons they flourish is because the feeling that that the idea of how you date somebody has changed, like what people want from a relationship or they expect from a relationship has really changed. And it's hard not to see quite a lot of that stuff as a backlash to feminism, right? The idea that what do women want in a relationship? Do they actually really want all this independence or is it in some ways making them unhappy?

That's the message that you get from a lot of those manosphere dating gurus. Yeah, I mean, that's an entire rabbit hole that I've spent an awful lot of this year thinking about, you know. How challenging is it for women who've only recently just been given parity in education and employment to find out that most of their relationship outcomes are negatively correlated with leaning into that education and employment? Women, as they earn more and become better educated, reduce the potential dating pool of men that they're going to fundamentally be attracted to, on average women want to date men that are better educated and better employed than they are.

So it's the tall girl problem, right? If you're a six foot two girl, you're stuck only dating professional athletes. Really, if you want to date a man that is taller than you on average, which is what women seem to want to do. And that's like, hard, that's harsh on the guys that feel like they're being left behind. It's harsh on this group of women who finally just about achieved independence and you're like, congratulations, like going, going finally be the person

that you wanted to be without the restrictions of whatever predisposition people were saying that you had to have. But now you're stuck sort of fighting for this group of turbochads at the top that are had to have, but now you're stuck sort of fighting for this group of turbochads at the top that are going to maybe a wealth of options doesn't encourage them to behave in an appropriate manner, right? So you have sort of heartbroken and wistful women, you have lonely and sort of forgotten men, and then you have these guys that I don't think it's

particularly good for them either, although it may be in the moment, it's probably not existentially for their soul in the long term. So yeah, that's a fascinating question. But when you do not have answers, you need to look to somebody that's got certainty. And one of the ways that I've been able to identify I think some of the more guru-esque figures, people who weaponize in-group and out-group dynamics, people who speak with absolute certainty

and very rarely use caveats. If you have somebody that has both of those things, that for me is a huge, huge red light. And that is Brian Rose from London Real. This is the way that the world is. It's them that are trying to shut us down. They are the ones that are trying to stop this. We are together in a movement. It's like, you don't care about us. You don't care about any us. You're trying to identify the most easy them that you can, because binding people together over the mutual hatred of an out group is significantly easier than binding them together over the mutual love of an in-group. Oh yeah, now I completely buy that, and actually our mutual friend Chris Cavanaugh

of Decoding the Guru is a whose podcast you went on as a writer reply. You know, he and Matt Brown have this very good Guruometer, which I only discovered after I'd pitched this series, I'm very glad about it because I really have the feel like I would have wholesomely ripped it off otherwise. But the idea of these kind of big pseudo-profowned ideas of the kind of conspiracy thinking, and of the kind of financial milking, in the team, that's the sign of a bad guru.

So I think you're right, what you said earlier on about the fact that some people are genuinely motivated because they want to help other people. There are good gurus, right? They're just as there are good priests, rabbis, imams, but those positions of authority carry innate dangers to them. And one of them is absolutely the idea that you have to create a kind of shared enemy. And the really interesting thing about that is to talk about the IDW. You know, I was thinking about this quite a lot because as you may have known, I've

had a few cancellation brushes myself. And it is a quite a powerful experience that makes you feel quite sympathetic to people who have been in the other situation. And I think if you're going to talk about anything that created the IDW, it was the idea that they'd all got a shared enemy in the quote-unquote's work. That was a more powerful, that you know,

uniting people with very, very disparate political opinions, but they could all agree that journalists from the New York Times and Slate and Vox were very annoying, and that's basically what banned them all together. What is your post-mortem on the IDW? I think it's a real shame because I do think it did identify some things that were important. I definitely do feel that American journalism in particular became very polarised and there wasn't a big middle. You know, one of the things I like about living in Britain and having the BBC, you know,

I go on question time and I have to sit next to Nigel Farage and the leftmost wing of the Labour Party and to complete other, you know, someone from the S&P, someone from Black and Green, whatever it might be, people, you have to be in the same space as having those conversations together. And that just doesn't happen in American journalism. You don't get somebody who's fox and somebody's MSNBC forced to share a space very often. So I like the fact that the IDW was pointing out the fact that actually there were lots of things, liberal institutions, liberal media institutions were missing, and they needed to be a bit more open-minded about that. That said, I do think

a lot of them were either straightforward conservatives who, therefore, didn't really, they weren't really heterodox, they were just conservatives. Someone like Ben Shapiro has a pretty consistent conservative outlook and there were some people in there who had some personality issues. As far as I say, that's a kind of saying, that some of their fighting and combative spirit actually kind of came from a kind of restlessness within them rather than they've been necessarily such an intellectual idea. One of the problems that you definitely have is when somebody gets a significant amount of clout for being good in one particular domain or having a

take which seems to be particularly accurate, it's very easy to get out over your skis and to then start commenting on stuff that you don't. I mean, this story from Douglas Murray, who is a really good friend of mine, and he said, someone asked him, somebody asked him something, something to do with COVID. This is a year ago, let's say. And Douglas said, I'm going to do something which is very rare in the modern world, which is not comment on something which I know nothing about. And you're like, there we are, like knowing or at least having the inclination that you have boundaries to your competence is something that is very important. And I think that you can end up in a situation where you start commenting on stuff that you shouldn't do.

Also, that being said, I would agree. I think that the IDW was a much-needed vector of splintering somehow, like it sort of injected itself, and sure enough, people made funny memes about it, and there's articles and all the rest of it, but it managed to inject itself and create a break point where people even now know what they mean by the intellectual dark web. Like you know the dynamic that you were referring to, and even if it's not something which had the legs to maintain its longevity longer term,

perhaps it was an important sort of like, break a switch or something that just kind of made people stumble over a little bit and go, actually, yeah, maybe we do need to be to see that there is a different way that things could be or something like that. It's funny you mentioned Douglas Murray because I have this weird, having been around in journalism there for so long, I have all these people's little hinterlands sticking my mind. So I remember being an undergraduate at Oxford when Douglas Murray is a couple years older than me. He was doing, I think, his PhD on Bozy, you know, Lodell for Douglas Oscar Wilde's lover

And I always sort of slightly wondered how did you go from doing a lovely Victorian Gay PhD into being like Douglas Murray of today. It's very exciting It's like in the same way that I remember when Miley and Opelus was a tech blogger at the telegraph And then you kind of watch his evolution to show all these other things. I'm not convinced that Douglas's trajectory and Milo's has been quite a bit extreme, I think. No, no one is at his extreme,

a church is Milo. I'm always kind of fascinated by, I think I've had a very boring and bland career, but just the fact that people just take these weird intellectual diversions is fascinating. That's the opportunity the internet gives you. Would you not say, so Douglas is the madness of crowds. A lot of that was about the collapse of grand narratives that people no longer had the existing institutions and understanding of

traditional wisdom that they would have relied on previously heavily coming in from religion. Is that not pretty much the same dynamic that you're describing here that it would be maybe more anthropological or ancestral wisdom, but he's talking about people don't know what to do, and in his view, they were turning to a church of social justice as a solution to their problems. Yeah, I do buy that as a thesis. I do think that there is a comfort and security in knowing who your tribe is and feeling that people have kind of got your back.

And you can either get that through explicitly religious settings or you can get it from social groups. So I haven't read Douglas's book but I understand people have found, I've found, I've found, I've found, so it's sold very well which I respect and that people have found lots of interesting stuff in it. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were parts of it I violently disagree with and parts of it which I would hardly agree with. Is it not given the fact that there is such a lack of faith in institutions, especially when it comes to kind of understanding the world around you at the moment?

What first off, where do you think that's come from? Like, why is it that there's such a lack of faith in them? I think a lot of is to do with the democratizing power of the internet. And that again, it's on those double-edged swords, right? It's not a completely bad thing that now anybody can set themselves up as a podcast. You know, what is the version of you 20 years ago? Can you have this career? Or do you have to go through a much more formal process of going and working on, like, a local paper

and then hoping that you'll get to go to Fleet Street because you've joined the right union? Right? It doesn't... There is a good side to that in the fact that it has allowed far more voices to be heard. But some percentage of those voices are unfortunately going to be bad voices. And I think that's the bit we haven't really got to is working out that the fact that gatekeeping is not completely dirty worked, but there was probably far too much gatekeeping in the media 20, 30 years ago. And we still haven't found the kind of right balance in that to my mind. So given the fact that there is a lack of appropriate faith, and I think it's well justified. I mean, if anybody wanted a nail in the coffin of faith in the institutions the last three years would have managed to do it with politicians and media types just putting their foot in

their mouth and face planting on it just permanently, rolling back previously stated absolutes and so on and so forth. Why not have people come through, someone needs to come through? The alternative is for people to just be bereft out at sea with no idea what to do. Is it better to have some advice that's hidden myths or is it better to have no advice at all? Right, but you've got to have a self-correcting mechanism and the great joy of science and

what the scientific revolution gave us was an idea that you were an engaged and a collective struggle towards the truth and you would get things wrong along the way but you would be part of a community of scientists who would review your work and they would pick you up when you went wrong. And the great Max Planck saying science advances one funeral at a time was a recognition of the fact that there was an unfortunate level of consensus that often meant that, you know, it was about people's personalities rather than how well they had interpreted stuff, but the idea was that science did still progress. And the same thing happens in an institution, you know, I work in the Atlantic and American magazine. And when I'm right at print piece for them, it goes through extensive fact checkers, you know, they will go back and ask me for sources, they will go, they will sometimes re-interview people to check that I've got things right.

There is a level of that. And in the same way, if I got something horribly wrong, there would be an open transparent process of corrections. And that's the ideal, right? Sometimes that doesn't work. The ideal is not that you never get anything wrong. The idea is you do everything you can to stop yourself getting things wrong.

And when you do get things wrong, you correct them when you're transparent about it. And that's what kind of annoys me, I guess, about some of the people who spend all their time slating the mainstream media. You know, I say this is a fully paid up MSM shell, but, you know, is that do they have similar levels of rigor and fact checking and then only up and fessing out when they get wrong, or do they just kind of go, oh, well, I well, I was right spiritually, or they would say that, wouldn't they? How is it the case if that's the sort of process that you go through at the Atlantic that

articles that come out in the Guardian and the New York Times managed to get published? I see almost on what seems to be a very regular basis, some insane titled thing, talking about how the calories on the back of a bar of chocolate and i'll the homophobic or whatever it is that the guardians putting out like it seems it seems to me that a lot of the takes that they go through don't have that degree of rigor so it doesn't seem like mainstream media is protected by the rules and procedures necessarily. That's funny you would pick two left-wing examples because I would actually say that's a bigger problem on the right, the problem of disinformation. I think if you, as I did recently, I came back from America, I spent some time in Florida

watching, you know, just the average evening viewing of Fox News, right? That is an incredibly narrative-driven product. And manages to create these whole ideas out of kind of whole cloth, which are really interesting, that people just kind of become fixated on this very narrow idea that everyone should be talking about. Without any kind of underlying idea, what the, I mean, I'm thinking of Hunter Biden's laptop. I'm also thinking of critical race there. I'm also thinking of the short lived crusade against ESG and pensions. But, you know, they are kind of narrative machines as much as their deliveries of facts.

So I don't think it's a unique problem on the left at all. And I think what you're probably identifying is opinion pieces, rather than straight news reporting. That's people having calories. Calories of homophobic is a bad opinion, not necessarily bad facts, is it? I mean, I'll tell you what's homophobic. I don't know, it's both, but yeah, I mean,

I think that what that shows is the echo chamber of whatever the algorithm likes to serve me is bringing up the most egregious transgressions that it sees from the left. That it'll pop up, lips of TikTok, and it'll pop up whatever else. But I imagine that there must be rights of TikTok as well. There must be an equivalent account for the transgressions that come from the other side

of the fence. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, there are media monitoring services, you know, as media matters and stuff like that. I can't think of anyone that does pick out random individuals. Like the thing that's, the thing is I have consumed lips of TikTok. I have laughed at mad Americans saying stupid things about gender. We all have, you know, it's okay, but I can't

think of a right wing version of that that does it where it picks out individual right wing people. I guess maybe actually in their heyday, things that the Daily Show and the Colbert Report did that. They used to go and interview some Trump supporters and they would set them up to make them look silly. And that was a kind of low-fi, low-churn version of what Lips of TikTok did. Now, and actually, probably we should be similarly uncomfortable about that. And I, again, probably laughed at all of that in the 2000s in a way that probably made me feel quite uncomfortable now that you're just picking individual, normy people and holding

them up as idiots to be kind of mocked by the crowd. In your opinion, then, is the mainstream media still putting out, on average, the best content? It's putting out better, more accurate content than individual creators? I mean, it depends what you're talking about, really. I follow an enormous number of substanks, and one of the reasons that I really like doing that is I wonder here from the world nerdy expert in a particular topic about, you know, my friend John Eligas got one of my,

he writes about transport policy and trains and just this, you know, in a level of detail you were simply not gonna get in the mainstream media because it's only interesting to a certain number of people. And that has been really positive because as a journalist, anywhere really, even if you're a specialist for sure, to some extent a generalist, you have to make yourself an expert on things very quickly.

I mean, I guess it speaks to a bit like what you do, right? You have to interfere in an enormous number of people and you have to make your, you have to master the subjects very quickly. And that's a tough thing to do. And it's a tough thing to get right and a bit know what the probing questions are to ask. So there is that problem. And I do think individual creators can sometimes do better at that stuff the really hardcore scrutiny But there is a huge problem and you definitely saw this with the IDW about who you know becoming essentially a version of regulatory capture

Been captured by your audience where they only want one type of content and also becoming too chummy with your subjects You know one of the things it's interesting to me is that you know Having done political journalism for so long is I'm quite critical of the lobby system, the press core in the US. You know, the idea is there's great journalists working there, but you're spending all day night with politicians, they or sources, you can't burn them or screw them over. And that means you can't do very, you know, you would weigh up whether or not it's worth burning a relationship for to do a story. And you have to be able to do that. You also have to have a paper that backs you,

and we'll deal with that, the relationship with the Trump White House or wherever it is being inflamed. And also, the advertisers aren't going to desert you. And I think that the thing is about an institution like journalism is only a really a collection of individuals. I can't take on Elon Musk. I can't stand up to Elon Musk and scrutinise his practices as me. What I can do is chip in my $20 a year towards a mainstream newspaper that can actually do that and can report and send writers to do it.

I think it's very fashionable to criticize the mainstream media. Rightly so, I've got my own many criticisms of it working within it. But there's an enormous amount of just shoe leather, very boring reporting. Who's the person who goes to the court case and sits through it all the way through? Who is the person who sits through the hours of Senate testimony and listens to all that stuff? There are lots of, the problem is that we complain about the high profile annoying journalists and the kind of bedrock of people who go and find things out day in and day out, we just actually don't talk about, we just all rely on them to have to kind of discover the facts on which the rest of us can all then have an argument.

Is it not the case that I'm on? Was that stirring? Well, you're not stirred by that, Chris. You're not, you're not now conceived actually the mainstream, the mainstream media might occasionally do some good. Well, it depends on whether you, what it is that you're reading and what you're exposed to, right? Because the stuff that most people will see will be the egregious examples.

It'll be the Taylor Lorenz crying for the 15th time about whatever it is that she's recently done. And I realized a little while ago that there's always been a dynamic where individual groups are categorized by the most extreme members that are within it. So previously it would have been that all Muslims are ISIS members, right? You know, that's like a pretty old trope, then it would be to do with anybody that's on the left is part of this sort of blue-haired SJW thing or anybody that's on the right is a bigoted homophobic racist blah, blah, blah.

I think that there's an equivalent dynamic going on within individuals. So you might have heard of something called the peak end rule. So peak end rule was found by Daniel Kahneman and what it suggests is that when you remember an event, you remember the most extreme or the most intense part and you also remember the end. So you remember the peak, you remember the end. This is why if you give someone a colonoscopy, you should just leave it in and out and not wiggle it

about about, yes. That's the story of it. That's the really stuck in my mind, yeah. I'm sure it did. And so what I've come to believe is that there is an equivalent rule for public figures in the world called the Peacate Rule. So people are remembered by their worst transgression and by their most recent transgression. Right. So when thinking about Jordan Peterson, if you're a critic of his, you will see him as a transphobe that didn't call students by their preferred pronouns and someone that criticizes sports illustrated girls on the internet. If you think about Hassan Piker,

you will think about a person who said America deserved 9.11 and someone who claims to be a socialist, but now lives in a $5 million mansion in wherever the fuck it is that he lives. You have their worst transgression and you have their most recent transgression. That's what people have seen as. That's how much of the public views, in my opinion,

big names that they see that exist like out there that create stuff. And after a while, people no longer actually are seen as people. People don't see the normal person, doesn't see Joe Rogan as a person. They see him as an amalgamation of ideas. He's like a representation of an ideology fused into human form. It just happens to be that the human was there before and has always gone through.

But that's why I think some of the dehumanizing language that gets used because it doesn't feel like you're criticizing a person. It feels like it's some, not like a deity, but like a symbol almost, that's what you're going for. And that's where I think the peak hate rule sort of ties in a little bit as well. That's really interesting.

I mean, I have a kind of weird perspective on this because I have one group of people on the internet who hate me for being, you know, a transphobia. And another group of people who hate me for being a kind of work careerist. And you're like, okay, but I can't judge this. You're, I think all of you should get together and fight it out, given that you've got

completely divergent things that you hate me for and come up to some sort of synthesis of resolution of this. But yeah, it's a fundamentally dehumanizing experience, but I also think that you've also cast people as the thing that you find easiest to argue against. So the Atlantic has a number of great rules that tell you when you join, one of which is something like don't be a dick. I mean, I think they phrase it slightly more than that, but it's like you don't care how good you're copy is, you still got to be pleasant to your co-workers, which again is something that I think more

people could benefit from being told. But the other one is you have to argue with the best version of your opponent's argument, because what you're talking about is a thing called nut picking, like cherry picking, but for the nuts. And it's really easy to do that and really lazy to do that in internet arguments, go and find someone saying something stupid and argue with them. And I have that experience sometimes when I write a piece and people don't argue with the, I mean, this is very basic stuff, but people don't argue with the piece that you've

actually written. They argue that the piece that they've been waiting for someone to write so that they can have a go at that piece and make themselves look good. So I wrote a piece about Elon Musk a couple of weeks ago, which I said, you know, a number of things about how I think he's very Riding twitching a very chaotic way and I can see why no one would want to live there But I was trying to explain his appeal and why if you look at any of his mad dragon tweets They've all got a hundred thousand likes on them. I was going like he is playing the heel He'd like, you know, he likes being the villain and his whole stick is do you want to have

Mark Zuckerberg pretending to care about healing the world or Sam Bankman freed, you know, saying, I've got to earn all this money because I need to give it away. Or do you just want to have me going, I'm rich, I'm Elon Musk, I do what I want, like Kathmand from South Park. And actually a lot of people find that much more honest, they assume that all rich people are awful and at least you're telling the truth about it. And people did not like that. And they were like, you know, do you like the taste of licking Elon's boot, you know, lackey? And I was like, I think this piece is really critical of him, but I'm just saying that people do like him and that is an observable fact in the

world. But they wanted to argue with the pro-Elon piece, right? So they just decided that that's the piece I'd written. And it's the great, tragedy of social media is that you become what people need you to be to make to be themselves, what they want to present to the world. We saw this the most easy example that I saw of what you're describing and also the P.K.T. rule was just before Sam Harris left Twitter, every single tweet that he put up

was replied to by hundreds of people with the same quote of, I wouldn't care if Hunter Biden had dead children in his basement, that laptop story still shouldn't have been like stopped or whatever it was that he said. And I'm like, well, like, I get it, but he wasn't tweeting about that. And bringing that up kind of just seems a little bit pointless. But for some people like that the most recent great transgression that he did so therefore that's how we're going to categorize that. You also looked at someone that drank their own urine.

Why? Did you look at them and why were they drinking? Oh right, why do they drink their own urine? Yeah, there was a conversation where I went, you know, I love the BBC but I do not love the BBC enough to drink my own urine. I'm just going to put that out there now. Don't ask me, I will not do that. I will do anything for love, but I will not do that. Is your own sweet Canadian guy who was a contestant

on Canadian Idol called Will Blunderfield? Lovely, just got off the phone with him, and I just thought, what a sweet young man. But drinks his own piss. And not just his own piss as it turns out, he's got, there's a whole video where he's like, and it's got a little bit of pre-come in it. And we had a long discussion about whether or not

it was just simply too unpleasant to be airing on radio for when people might be having the, you know, their breakfast. We decided we were going to keep it in anyway, because, you know, that's real life. But, yeah, that is, drinking your own urine is one of these strangely recurrent practices. So it's still used in traditional medicine in subsoil and africa and places like that, but it has been something that hippies have kind of done frequently.

And I just do not understand it. Like, I, if there is any signal that your body is giving to you in regards to urine, it's like, I want this out of me. This is, this is like, this is leaving the body now. Not like it needs to come back in. But it's something you find quite a lot. And you know, for him, it's part of it. She calls it Shavambu and it's part of his kind of wellness practice. But the interesting thing about talking to him was he had had an eye condition, Stravismus, where one of his eyes didn't quite track properly and had spent most of his childhood being medicalised. And then he came out as gay and was essentially gay bashed when he was holding his first boyfriend's hand and went to a psychiatrist or therapist to talk about it. childhood being medicalised. And then he came out as gay and was essentially gay-bashed when he was

holding his first boyfriend's hand and went to a psychiatrist or a therapist to talk about it. And instead of being given talking therapy, really was put on pills, was said you need to want some anti-depressant pills. And I understood from those two experiences why someone would get to the place where they are very skeptical of mainstream traditional medicine, why they don't want to be within what he calls the alopathic system. And so he's become more and more invested in anti-fac stuff. He's one of the people that those people who believe that if you don't eat certain things, then you don't need to wear sunscreen, which, you know, he lives in Vancouver, where it's pretty chilly most

of the time. So we may get away with it, but I think if you live in Australia, probably life threatening kind of a level of advice. But I wanted to try and do more than the standard anti-fac thing of saying, well, these people are just wrong, and kind of a level of advice. But I wanted to try and do more than the standard antifax thing of saying, well, these people are just wrong and kind of understand psychologically where someone, how someone would get to those opinions. You know what I mean? Because if you want to argue with antifax people or try and convince antifax people, then there are a couple of things you need to do. One of them is be open to the question of whether or not there are occasional vaccine injuries, which there are, right? They're just incredibly rare and much, much rarer than, you know, and it's much, much more dangerous to

get the illness, the old vaccinating again. So on just a rational risk calculation basis, you just go, I would rather take my chances with the measles vaccine than take my chances with measles, and that's where I come from on all of that. But I think that's probably, you know, I said that to him essentially. And I think that's an easier thing to say to people than I kind of know, no, no, we all believe in vaccines, a kind of mystical, reverential feeling, which I do have about vaccines. I think vaccines are one of the best things that humanity has ever done. But I can't expect everybody to share that feeling.

Whereas I can make a pragmatic argument based on the studies and what they show. When it comes to health and fitness, it seems like there are a lot of degrees of freedom, despite the fact that everybody cares about having good health and eating the right things. I had a dietician on not long ago, Gai-Kol Max Lugovier, and asked him, why is it that we understand the speed of light, and yet no one can agree on whether eating carbs is better or worse for you than other different types of macronutrients? It's important because there are so many degrees of freedom within exercise science and nutrition

science that you can fit the studies to show basically whatever it is that you want. You can get them to become whatever it is that you want to do. And I think that this rolls all the way through everything to do with health and fitness. Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to be in good condition. Everybody wants to live a long life. Sometimes you end up drinking your own piss.

Well, I mean, I'm not judging you, Chris, but it's not for me is what I'm saying. But yeah, I know what you mean. There is a established problem. It's actually one of the things that my friend Karen and Crady Peres wrote about in her book, Invisible Women, that one of the things that these studies will won't do often, they will often exclude women from them.

If you're looking at any kind of medical study, because I'll just say women's hormonal cycles are too crazy, they're just injecting all this stuff into the data, we don't want to, so you will find quite big drug studies that are only tested on men, because just adding in female hormones is considered to be too wacky. Never mind the idea that people have different hormonal profiles as they go through age, for example, and what might be an appropriate dose for a 20-something man and a 70-year-old

man might be very different. We just don't know about that internal body chemistry. But yeah, I know what you mean. You have to be a certain level of humility about things that are related to health because health advice does change and is fluid and he's always this is the best that we know right now, not the kind of final finished tablet of stone being handed down. Well, when you think about something which is even more arbitrary in terms of your life

well-being, I suppose productivity, like I say, a world that I used to come from, on that I spent a lot of time in, very good friends with Ali Abdahl, who you spent a good bit of time speaking to on the show. And yet, that is I would guess probably the largest personal development subsection on YouTube, and also probably in nonfiction, too. It'll be that in spirituality, I would guess, would probably be the two when it comes to books. And people are obsessive about that. People need a guru behind that because if I can fit more into my life, then it's kind of the same as me extending the amount of time that I'm alive. It's a denial of death.

Yeah, I really like the productivity gurus. They were my, they were the most wholesome bunch, shall we say. Like, I liked lots of people, but they were the ones I felt least guilty about liking, because they are just generally mostly very hardworking people who want to try and help other people achieve their goals. But even then, you say I did feel there was a certain downside to it, which is that lots of people feel that they're lacking something, you know, that they're always, I think Oliver Berkman put it about the idea that people feel like they wake up in the morning with a debt, you know, they're already behind and they spend the whole day kind of catching up.

And they never just think that what they've got is enough. They always feel that they're failing. And that was definitely something that spoke to me. I'm a terrible work colleague. I actually, I went to a therapist about four years ago. And my main thing that I wanted to talk about was like, how can I say no? Please teach me how to say no to work. Because I will always feel like, oh, they'll never ask me again. Or I should feel so flattered to be asked, or, you know, what if this opportunity doesn't come up again?

And you have to, you know, then you get the classic Warren Buffett advice, which is most people are very successful, say no to most things. And you think, Warren Buffett, how do you do it? Tell me, maybe I need to get Warren Buffett round to turn, then, you know, minor appearances on the BBC for me. Like, I just can't do it. I don't have the self-control of the stamina for it. I think Oliver's approach in 4,000 weeks is the best one that I found. It's like, like, you're not going to be able to do all of this stuff. Prepare in advance what you're going to suck at. Pick a small domain of things that you want to be good at and then just leave the rest. So if the productivity people were the ones that you enjoyed loving the most, who were the ones that you enjoyed loving the most, who were the

ones that you hated loving the most, was there someone that you found an affinity for and you felt guilty about it? Well, I say say, I felt very bad about the fact that I fundamentally disagree with Will on, you know, the merits of drinking your own piss, but I nonetheless got on with him. And I didn't, you know, it's a difficult line to walk when you're presenting someone with extreme views like that. I went and looked up the scientific literature and drinking your own urine, this might have kind of amused me. There's not really that much except that when it's used in traditional medicine, there is a worry

that you will pass on drug resistant bacteria from one person's urine to another. And he went very sweetly, oh, I wouldn't drink someone else's. Like, oh, no, that's the act of a madman, which was really funny because it just proves that everybody's got their own line for what they consider to be kooky, and some people's line is further out there than mine, but it's still there. So I did like them.

I found the pick-up artist really difficult to deal with because having written about feminism for so long, I know what those communities can be like and how deliberately cruel they can be to people that they feel are against them. I think one of the kind of most dangerous things in life is feeling that you can be horrible to other people because you've got to grievance and that justifies it if you see what I mean. What would the grievance of the manosphere be? Oh, that women have completely taken over, you know, that actually it's much harder to be

a man now, that women are withholding sex from men, that they hold all the cards in relationships, that they routinely make false rape accusations, you know, those kind of things that you see over and over. And my experience, you know, having lightly encountered those communities before is that they will just pick over the fact that they'll say, you know, well, of course, you know, like all the things they say about me, like, you know, I'm I haven't gotten any kids, so obviously I'm going to die alone. All you need to do is just do it really ugly or whatever it is. And probably when I was younger, that kind of bothered me more, I think maybe now I just don't care anymore, but there, you know, that they were a community that

seemed to absolutely delight in trashing anybody who crossed them. And I could see where it came from. I could see that it came from this feeling. It was about leveling the playing for the best settling of score, making redress. But I think that's always such an incredibly dangerous thing to kind of tell yourself, give yourself moral license that you know, I'm allowed to do this because I'm in the right. I don't have to obey in the normal rules because I'm my causes justified. That rarely leads to good places in my view. Yeah, I got a... Sometimes there'll be comments on the channel talking about how this person or this researcher or this analyst doesn't agree with the existing sacred cows that the Red Pill or the Manusphere or the whatever community agrees with.

And every single time that I see that it seems to me to be a pretty good sign. So I'm like the further that I continue to reinforce the fact that this is not a channel for people that want manosphere content. This is not a channel for people that want red pill content. This is not a channel for people that want to create them and us tribal adversarial relationships between men and women. Every single person that I speak to sees the fundamental relationship between men and women is one that is collaborative, not competitive, and that is so hard to find on the internet. Like, even when it comes from like L and Cosmopolitan,

how to sleep with him and not catch feels, how to get over, how to get your boyfriend back by sleeping with his best friend. These are articles, non-ironic articles that go out in commercial magazines, right? This isn't some fucking R-slash female dating strategy pink pill depths of the internet stuff. This is by it on a magazine shelf stuff.

Like that's really, really terror, like if you want to point a finger at toxic femininity, which sometimes is like, what where's the toxic femininity? It's like it's right fucking there. Like that's one of the instances. Mm. I mean, I think most toxic femininity is actually directed.

If you want to concede that that's a concept, I mean, I would, I'm pretty reluctant ever to say toxic think most toxic femininity is actually directed. If you want to concede that that's a concept, I mean, I would, I'm pretty reluctant ever to say toxic masculinity or toxic femininity because I think a lot of people just instantly switch off at that point. But I think if there is such a thing as toxic femininity, it's probably women directing it or the women largely. But I know what you mean, like having written a book about feminism, I thought a lot about how to make it a message

that a book, even a man could enjoy. But you know what I mean, like, and I had a male friend of mine read the draft and I talked it through with him and he kind of said in a couple of places, you know, but man, have you thought about it from our point of view? And, you know, there was a time in internet feminism where that would have been something that people would have scoffed at. You know, there was a kind of, do you remember the sort of drinking male tears era of internet feminism? No.

These very ostentatiously, like, someone got a hashtag trending once, it was like, kill all white men or something like that. And then they had to explain that, right. But then there was this whole people, and that's very offensive, and they went, no, no, no, it's actually, obviously it would be offensive to the other way around,

but it's okay, because it's a punchy satar on power relations, and you're like, oh God, are you all of you 12? Don't do that. But, you know, and I did have a, and the conclusion that I came, eventually came to in difficult women is that you have to have a kind of policy-based idea of feminism, right? Here are the things that we want, and like, you could agree with me or not. So if I say to you, you know, I think it's mad that the US doesn't have any federally mandated maternity leave. Women

have to cobble together bits of their holiday and unpaid time off. I'm not requiring you to agree with me that women are in some way better than men or like everyone has to have their unique generals, whatever it is. It's just a thing that you can agree with or not on a policy level. And that fundamentally to me is where feminism can go in a way that builds coalitions rather than being about some of those dry arguments about who's more of a twat than the other gender, right? Yes, well, I mean, that goes back to what I said before about men and women fundamentally being collaborative rather than competitive, because introspectual competition is way, way, way bigger than intersexual competition, right? Women compete with women, mostly, and men compete with men mostly.

And, cessually, that seems to be the case and it looks the same way now. On average, it's, have you seen the stats around most pro-life votes come from women rather than men? Yeah, I don't think that there's a massive percentage difference, but it makes sense to me that there are women who are very invested in the idea of themselves as mothers and having a maternal caring role and taking care of babies. And therefore, they see a proportion through that prism. They don't see it through the prism of personal independence and freedom and bodily autonomy. So, yeah, I know what you mean. It's really interesting when you do those kind of slice and dice. Like, you just, you get it a lot in arguments, everything's like sex work. Oh, we'll just listen to women, listen to sex work, listen to whatever the group is.

And actually, in the case of people who are working currently in the sex industry, they're going to, by definition, have one set of views on it, right? You're not going to find a lot of radical feminist abolitionists working in the sex industry for very good reasons. And so those appeals to identity can often be incredibly reductive, really, as if we don't live in a society, and only one group of people get to have opinions on the things that they do. You know, we've shown only asked billionaires about what tax rate rates billionaires would pay. Oh yeah, okay, that seems like a really good idea. I can imagine probably what that answer is going to be, thanks.

What did you learn from the crypto gurus, the crypto bros? What did you learn from the crypto gurus, the crypto bros? So one of the one I interviewed, I don't know if you know him, is Peter McCormack, who bought Rayal Bedford FC. Really interesting fun guy, great to get along with. He grew up in Bedford, which for American listeners is like, what's the, what's a kind of very boring American town? I'm not sure there is a... Anywhere in like India. What about Westchester?

Like it's out of London, but it's not super fun, but it's a really lovely place to live. But anyway, he made all this money through Krypton, his podcast, and then he bought Raeal Bedford FC. And he now has like a little non-league team that is sponsored by some of these crypto exchanges and gets fans from around the world.

And, you know, it's a really quite sweet and heartwarming story that he wanted to take his internet gains and put them back into an area that he felt needed more opportunities for young people. So I really liked him on that. The funny thing about Peter is that he thinks that almost all crypto is bullshit and full of scam artists He only believes in Bitcoin and I said to him this is Right, he's a Bitcoin Maxi and I said this is really funny to me because this is like how I feel as an atheist talking to people who believe in God You know this the famous rickie's you've raised quote about that you think 99% of gods are bullshit I just think one more is bullshit and that's how know, I feel a bit about crypto. I haven't ever seen the proposition beyond the fact that technology

is really interesting. I haven't really seen how you can create the value of the asset beyond more people buying into a limited resource. And so he was a really fun and challenging conversation because he was like, you can come back in 10 years time and you're going to admit that I'm right because places in the developing world that don't have access to mainstream financial mechanisms and it buys decentralized finance, they can skip that whole generation. And so, yeah, we have to meet up again in 10 years time and find out if my skepticism was was validated or not. One of the good litmus tests around crypto has been what happens in a bear market and what happens in a bull market.

If it was that everybody just cared about being able to give families in war-torn countries the opportunity to send money across the border without government interference, you should be still singing the prices of the technology when the price is 15,000 the same as it was when it was 60,000. Why aren't you? Why aren't everybody on the internet singing about how brilliant the new crypto toad pixel NFT is? What's because it's not worth as much? Almost everybody that's into crypto, you like it because you're able to make free money overnight. That's why you like it. That's fine. That's absolutely fine, but don't try and tell me that it's because you love the opportunity to repatriate

people in developing worlds from the tyranny of some government that wants to take the it's it's got nothing to do with that It's got nothing to do with that or else you would still be just as passionate when the market was shit as when the market was good And the market is currently shit and no one's talking about it except being critical Yeah, but again, I think it's a place where mainstream journalism came off a lot better than the individuals, right? Because that's a classic example of the fact you had people with a direct financial interest in the sector, being the ones who said, don't listen to the fard, you know, you just got to hoddle. And like, that's because their money directly depends on people doing those things, holding on for dear life and suppressing

their fear uncertainty and doubt. Whereas if you work on the financial times, you are much freer to go, I've taken a look at this crypto exchange and what's the great thing from the FTX thing where he had a tab on the spreadsheet that was said poorly hidden, fear to count. And it had $8 billion, like the $8 billion black hole was concealed within it. Right. That's the kind of thing that you need, you know, people on the outside who have no direct financial interest to turn and go, ah, I'm just going to stop you there. That, that looks bad. That feels bad to me. Bad. What, what, what was Guruy about the, the stuff that you looked at to do with crypto?

It seems like you just spoke to a guy that bought a football team. I don't know, is he proselytizing? Is he part of a pyramid scheme? Is what's he trying to do? Or are there other people to do with crypto that were trying to sell it? Yeah, so Peter is, he's an interesting one because he's a kind of sort of almost like a self-hating guru.

And he says, you know, come for the gain, stay for the revolution. Like he's invested in people getting into crypto because he believes in the power of the technology. But that's not where everybody is. You know, we spoke to Leia Heilpern, who's another British crypto guru. She's very, she's got, she's a very big libertarian. Yeah, actually, you're like this. She now lives most of the time in Miami because she thinks that British men are weak and effeminate. And I said, She is the girl who keeps defending Andrew Tate on Fox News.

Yes, yes. And I said, how can I admit it? Men in Miami, like Miami, home of the famous like incredibly camp muscle beach of men in tiny shorts, who like the company of other men, these are you are like, you know, this is what the paradigm of masculinity is to. And yeah, I don't think we really got very much further than that. But it was just very funny to me, because I think London is full of big hench lads.

And I don't know what we're talking about. Well, if you're area of expertise, not mine, Helen. She's just not going to the right places, basically, is what I think. And what did you learn from her? Well, she was really interesting because she's Jewish, and I did say to her, like, would you have Kenya on the podcasting now?

He's in his full-end simithy pomp and she's like, yeah, I would. And I was like, what about an actual neo-nazzi? And she's like, yeah, I would. And that to me is a kind of just a completely different fundamental approach to free speech that I have, which is, you know, there's sort of much more libertarian ideas. And that carries through into a lot of that crypto space is very libertarian.

They absolutely don't believe in government intervention. They don't, you know, they're very hostile to the whole idea of government. And it's really interesting talking to people like that because I'm a kind of normy social Democrat. I quite likely idea that when I phoned the fire brigade, the fire brigade turned up. That's fine by me. And so it was really challenging.

It's one of the things I really appreciate. But doing this job is talking to people who have ended up in very different political positions to me, who are clearly smart and like working out what it is that got them there and got me here. What about that struggle session, public humiliation bondage thing where white women were made to be shouted at around the table, but they couldn't cry? I don't think there's any actual bondage of what I think you may have just added that in in your own perspective. Artistic advice, whatever. Yeah, of what's not out.

Yeah, the series isn't out yet. I can imagine what I want. Right. Okay. Well, um, so race to dinner was founded by two women, uh, an Indian American woman called Syra Rau and a black American woman called Regina Jackson. And they for $5,000, um, a dinner will get a woman to invite all her white women friends. And then they will ask them who's racist and put up the hands of their racist. Well, no, then you get shouted at because you should have put your hand up because everyone's racist. It's a Kafka trap, it's Kafka dinner.

Yeah, but Sarah will put up her hands because she says, you know, as a personal color who's not black, she is institutionally anti-black and the way that the racial hierarchy works in the US is that everybody who isn't black thinks, well, it could be worse, I could be black. That's their premise. But the thing that it got me about this is just, and I think maybe part of this has been British as well. I just thought I wouldn't pay to someone to tell me, I wouldn't pay five grand for somebody to tell me that I'm racist.

I would pay five grand to tell me that I'm amazing, maybe. Is there a certificate? Do you get some sort of credential at the end of it? I'm wondering why you would pay $5,000 to have this. I mean, is the food particularly good? Is the service nice? No, you have to order a new bag. No, there is not a goody bag.

I'm job-a-end of it. Like, what's going on here. As far as I know, absolutely not. But OK, so here's the thing that I think is, there is a deep strain of masochism, I think, through a lot of women, particularly white, liberal, middle-class women. These are the same group of people

who buy women's magazines that tell you that you're fat and disgusting, and you need to diet. And the same people who look at the Daily Marl sidebar of shame about people who've got cancels and turkey necks and all the things that kind of horribly wrong with you. And I think a lot back to my formative experience, when I was a teenager, I used to read FHM, which kind of dates me because it hasn't existed for like two decades now,

because I found the men's magazines of the 90s were like, you're amazing. Like here's how to go out and score some chicks. Here's where we went to Vegas in a poker game and the guy who lost had to get breast implants, a real story, I remember from FHM. And the women's magazines were like, here are all the ways in which you're failing. Here's how to pluck your hair out of various bits of your body so you're not repellent anymore. And I thought, this is not for me.

I want fun and adrenaline and racing big cars around. And I think that tendency, that sort of self-legulating tendency, has carried on. And I did ask them. I said, you couldn't get eight men to sit down and listen to how they're all racist and then pay you. Like, I just don't believe that business model works with men. And that, to me, is completely fascinating.

That there is some kind of miss sort of yeah deep, masochistic streak in some kind of white middle-liberal class women where they want to be told but they're terrible and sort of luxuriating it. Did you draw a line between that and Robin DiAngelo's work? Yeah, so they're one of the things I said to them about you know what a great business model five grand to make white women cry, you know I've been trying to do that with my articles for years, but I've never got paid that much for it. They said, well, you know, that's a racist question. You should see how much Robin DeAngelo gets paid.

And it's true. She gets paid in an enormous amount of money. White presence. White presence. And and white fragility, there is a chapter called white women's tears, which is all about how, you know, that it is emotionally manipulative when white women are tears, which is all about how, you know, it is emotionally manipulative when white women are confronted with their racism, that they will burst into tears and then everyone will comfort them. And there's a whole slew of books called Things Like White Feminist

or Brat and Skin White Tears, you know, that are all about this premise that white women are the absolute worst. And the audience for that is white women. You know, that's what I just it's so one of these times where I just I just didn't have to agree without any of the sex. Right. I just I don't I don't fundamentally understand that mindset either. So I was trying to get into that that mindset too. What do you what do you what do you come to believe? Like what what you have written about women for a long time. You have been a woman for a long time. And you have now considered this new public flagellation, self-amiliation, humiliation thing with a five grand price tag. How does

this fit into the broader narrative of what you think it means to be a white middle class woman in the modern world. I think it's even more than that. I mean, I think about there's a brilliant piece of by all people of by Hillary Mantell and the London Review of Books, which is her review of, stay with me on this, her review of books about Medieval Saints, Medieval and Errexic Saints, and it's called Some Girls Want Out, and it's called some girls want out. And it's basically about the fact that all of these women looked at the kind of bargain about what it meant to be a woman in the world, and they went, no, I'm not doing it. I'm going to a nunnery and I'm starving myself, and I'm going to have these sort of trances that are caused by hunger

and see visions of Jesus. I want, I want out. And then when I was growing up, lots of girls used to do self-harm. You know, you had cutting scars or down your arms. And then I wrote a piece last year about white women, primarily in academia, who pretended to be women of color, like the sort of Rachel Dolezal kind of feel, which was always really interesting was that they were women who worked in like race studies and they decided they identified so strongly with the idea of doing minorities that they were women who worked in race studies and they decided they identified so strongly with the idea of doing minorities that they came to believe that they were minorities themselves in some way. And I talked to an expert in Munchausen's, Factitious Disorder, because I wondered if this

was a kind of social version of that. What is Factemant? Munchausen's, I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. So Munchausen's is where you keep reporting to the doctor with injuries that you have either dreamed up or inflicted on yourself. So, classic, you know, people sort of drink bleach and then talk about the stomach ulcers or whatever it is. And Munchersons by proxy is when you often usually take it to child, you know, you make them ill deliberately because people want that patient role, they want that attention, they want the sympathy, they get a feeling of validation from it. And I think that there was a feeling of validation from it. And I think that there was a kind of similar thing

happening on a social level with those academics that they wanted to be the minority. They wanted to speak with the authority and truth. And you look through it, happens through every major historical event. There are fake Holocaust survivors. There are fake, better-class survivors. There are fake 9-11 survivors. Some people are just innately drawn to that idea of spilling their guts and being a victim

in that sense. And I talked to an expert on Munchazzons and I said it was really notable to me that these are primarily women. And he said, well, I think, you know, often men when they're kind of troubled and sociopathic, they turn it outwards. They go out on the big binge drinking spray or they smash something up or they drive the car too fast or whatever it is they get into fights. And women turn it inwards and women become anorexic, women self-harm. I think you can see it related

to the way that teenage girls now often are reporting with gender dysphoria. They are turning that pain inwards on themselves. And I do think that's probably something that is either through socialization or biology, just a fundamental difference in the way that kind of those things manifest. And they want to go to these dinners as a, another form of that? Yeah, it is, but it is a bit like self-harm, isn't it? It's somebody to tell you that you're awful with the premise that then you, you purify yourself at the end, which is something that comes up a lot in discussions of anorexia, right? The people don't

want to eat food because it's sort of dirty and disgusting. Well, they don't want to have an adult body because it's dirty and disgusting. So there are, I think, the same ideas, a purity perhaps that persists through all of that. And I'm sure men do it too, right? Like, I'm sure that there are men who become? Like I'm sure that there are men who become and there are men who become and are said, well, there are men who do because they want to have a, you know, they have an idea that their body's disgusting. If it's not got like 7% body fat or whatever it might be. Yeah, I think that that was it seems like the liver King says that his sense of self esteem contributed to him wanting to be in this sort of condition that he's trained twice a day with these brain-busting workouts for many hours, seven days a week, for however many decades he's been doing it for, but precisely that reason.

It does seem like a phenomenon that women are more susceptible to than guys. I mean, self-harm rates, I think, are higher among girls than they are among boys. Yeah, suicide attempts are higher among women, but successful suicides. So, suicide attempts are higher among men, yeah. That's a really, really interesting statistic that I still haven't worked out what to do with that in my mind.

You know, when your famous conversation with Jordan Peterson, one of the things that he says back, however many percent of suicide's a man, and you go, well, yes, how do we fold into that conversation that women attempt it more. Like, what does it mean to say, like how many failed suicide attempts is worth a successful suicide attempt? Like if you try to kill yourself a hundred times, is that the same as one person that manages to do it once? How much of those can be written off as a cry for help? How much of that is just a literal lack of ability

to use lethal force. Like how many women would have done it had they have been able to do it? How many, like there's so many different filters and layers that you go through here. And I really don't know how to fold that in. I think about it more frequently than I probably realize that you've got those two stats that kind of. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's one of the things it doesn't know. And you can't draft it into any kind of sex war format because it's not like, I don't think there's anything that we could be doing differently in gender terms

that would make the men's rates come down. But you know what I mean? There's no way in which I think it's women's fault that men are killing themselves at that rate. It's not, the reasons for suicide are so difficult and complex and often usually like a whole welter of different factors that it resists being conscripted into any kind of simple narrative.

But I agree with you. I really wish that we had a better idea that we actually knew what the prescription was to lower male suicide rates. I just think that's the bit that no one seems to know. No one seems to know. It's not like one of those situations where I think about prisons policy a lot, right? that's the bit that no one seems to know. No one seems to know. It's not like one of those situations where, we know what the,

like I think about prisons policy a lot, right? We send far too many people to prison for minor offenses where, and that's mostly men, because most of people in prison are men, and that means that their lives are completely trash and they never managed to come back out of that spiral of graduating through bigger and bigger crimes and then they're institutionalized forever.

And the obvious solution to that is send fewer people to prisons and fewer men to prison for low level offenses, have more commune to punishments. And we know the reason that people don't do that is because a very strong right wing press will crucify any politician who does that. Anyone who commits a rape while out on Remand will let you know the politician who was responsible for that will get pilloried in the press. But there's not that, you. But there's not the thing that I know what's the lever to pull and who's stopping it being pulled in the case of male

suicide. And that's what makes it really, really difficult. It gets thrown at feminists a lot about what are you doing about male suicide? And the answer is, well, not very much, because no one, no one seems to know what the thing is that we need to be doing. Are you familiar with Cal's soap? Do you know him? He wrote a book called The Evolution of a Life Worth Living. No, I don't. So, the whole thing. I've got him coming on the show at the start of next year. So, once the episodes are passandated to you, I think he'd be really interested. And he conducted a study in which someone was given the option of dating two different types of person. One of them had a single previous suicide attempt and the other one currently

right now had cancer. On average, people wanted the person that had cancer. That's really interesting finding his theory behind it is that many almost all social reinforcement mechanisms are there to stop people from committing suicide, to stop them from taking their own life. He sees depression as not a precursor to, but a defensive mechanism against suicide. Most people that commit suicide aren't actually depressed. It doesn't seem. It seems that people, when you get depressed, it restricts the amount of movement and energy that you

expend. I haven't got into the book sufficiently deeply, so there may be areas of this that I'm butchering, because I remember it from a half-cut dinner three weeks ago when I first learned about him, but all of this is fascinating. And my point being that it is such a difficult idiosyncratic, individual problem to try and look at. Why is it that any one person arrives at the point where they decide to do that? I don't know.

Like, The bit that I do think we could probably do more about is about cultivating men's social relationships. Like I do think there is an established thing that men, particularly when they get married, if they're straight, they run all that kind of social life and their social relationships through their wife. You must know some of those guys who just have no idea

when anyone in their family's birthday is, don't arrange to see friends, they get buffeted around. And I'm pretty sure there's research that says that means that widow was struggle a lot more, actually, than widows,'t have a kind of social sort of safety support net by them. And it's one of the things I think again like the internet is a kind of bit of a problem with is that they also talk about the fact that women talk to each other and men talk side-by-side with each other, right? Like you go fishing or you go to the football or you go and do something

and then the conversation happens in those spaces. I think it's harder for men to phone up their mates and go like, can we just have a chat? You need a hand here, mate. Did you write Billy No Mates this year by Max Dickens? I didn't read that, but I heard about it. It sounded really interesting. Really worthwhile.

Or you could just listen to the podcast I did with them. Okay, that's it. Let's talk to that problem. He was really great. And he had a bunch of suggestions that I've seen come from Women as well as guys Nina power and Louise Perry both brought this solution up and then so did Max And it was the reintroduction of male only spaces as something which should be encouraged again because there was 50 years ago at the working men's clubs and the halls

of power that only men were allowed into was seen as a vaulted room in which the important decisions that would fix and choose the destiny for women's lives were being made. That needed to be broken open so that men were no longer the ones that were making the decisions on behalf of women. And what that's in their opinion ended up with is a removal of a lot of the male-only spaces that allowed men to bond in the way that they perhaps used to. And Max's research seems to show precisely what you said. And Man gets into a marriage and then transplants his entire friend group with that of his wife. And then now he's just,

it's like his wife's friends that are now his friends. But if they ever split up and ever increasing divorce rate to mean that they might, he's now left with no wife and no friends because all of the friends were her friends. They're friends with him because of her, but they're not friends with him. Yeah, I think that's true. That's interesting about male-any spaces. I agree with you. The problem is that, you know, when I think about that, I think about things like, you know, whether it's the judges all going to the Garrett club or whites of the private members club or equally well, the thing that happened, you know, within my lifetime, which is that the group of lawyers all go to the strip club

after work and those become ways in which men advance through the company and women are locked out of people with caring responsibilities can't kind of go and do those things. But there is a, my dad was a member of a working men's club, which he used to take me to put me in the saloon bar, give me two pounds, put in the quiz machine and tell me to like come, you know, just keep earning it back to keep maintaining my stuff. And while he was in the bar, bar bit. And I think that was something he got a great deal out of. And I think that was a fairly wholesome space. I very much doubt those people were being wildly misogynist in there. Or they were kind of scratching each other's backs in a kind of nepotistic work way. So I don't think I'd be against that. I mean, it would be very interesting

to know whether or not there'd be a huge backlash to that. I mean, there's a huge backlash to the idea of women-only spaces. So I don't know, men-only spaces would be seen as, well, to the idea that women kind of are gathering together in scene is sort of innately kind of transgressive now. And actually, my opinions on this slightly changed to the extent that I think probably, I think there should only be women-only spaces now really for safety. Like, I'm not sure I would want to join a women-only club. Is that not just because you don't want to be around that many women? They're not going to have as interesting, like, what's your issue with?

What's your problem? I went to an all-girl school, so, you know, that's... Second person put you off women for life. No, I did, but I did genuinely get to university and I was like, I'm going to be friends with men now, and I lived with male housemates, and I've always had loads of male friends ever since. But no, I might say most of my close friends are not sure if that's actually true, but like probably 50-50.

But I just think actually that it obviously upsets men horribly to be excluded from women spaces. And so you should have really clear provisions about why those spaces exist. And also that we're kind of, you know, in lots of ways, much more than we were in the past, much more equal. Why do you still need single sex spaces? But maybe, I don't know. The one thing I do, I interviewed Louise for the spark and the thing I really disagree with her on was this idea that women shouldn't get drunk in mixed sex spaces. I was like, I can't believe you're advocating the existence of Saudi Arabia. Like, I'm listening to this. This is really your solution.

And she said, look, it's not like that at all. It's normy advice. And I can see that that's true, actually. There are a lot of situations in which I wouldn't go out and get completely drunk, because I think it would be irresponsible. But it's something about it just still really, really wrinkles with me. The idea that we're going to have to accept that forever that men are so dangerous. I don't know. Maybe I'm still slightly utopian, I don't know. Yeah, well, I mean, David Buses' men behaving badly kind of showed me... I don't make a habit of hanging around with sexual aggressors and sexual offenders. So learning from David that it's a small minority of men committing the vast majority of offenses repeatedly. That

opened, just learning that fact opened my eyes. So, oh, just because I don't know any people that act like that doesn't mean that there can't be tons and tons of crimes like that. You don't need like one man to one crime. You can have one man to 100 crimes, right? That's a difficult one. I didn't speak to Louise about that with the mixed sex drinking spaces coming from her background that women that have been killed during rough sex caught thing.

I can't remember what it's called that she worked for. The rough sex defense, yeah, and we can't consent to this. Yeah, and I think that's true. That's the stuff that I do agree with Ron. She's just like, crying, crying, crying, but like, she's like, too per sex positivity stuff. It has been, you know, I was writing in difficult women about the idea that the sexual liberation of the 60s was basically like, you have to be up for it all the time.

And like, no, no, no, you can't say no because that means you're frigid. And there is a certain thing that now happens with things like children, I think too. That sounds like fricking. Yeah, if you don't want to get choked, that's because you're some uptight bitch. And it's like, it's really very dangerous thing to do. And as you say, there are a very small number of men who will choke a woman to death and then claim that that was totally consensual. And some of those cases are horrific. Some of those cases, people have got multiple other injuries, you know, had things shoved inside them. And you just think there probably has to be limits on what we assume people can consent to, which is very

paternalistic. I agree. Like again, coming from the sort of body modification sites of the 2000s, you know, there was a famous case of the bottom branding couple and all this sort of stuff about whether or not you could consent to SNN. And we've moved incredibly far on that actually in the British law in the last couple of decades. But I wonder if people are now some creeping unease is coming in about that maybe. What about Steve Jobs? What did you learn about him? What about Steve Jobs? I think from consensual SNM to Steve Jobs. It's a natural progression as far as I can see. Well, I was interested in him anyway because I've been writing this book about genius which has a lot of overlaps with gurus, who gets acclaimed as a genius and who actually changes the

world or often not necessarily, you know, it's a Venn diagram rather than a circle. And Steve Jobs was an incredibly good marketer, like he is of a type with people like Thomas Edison or Elon Musk, and that he created an aspiration and a lifestyle and products that went with it and that is a type of genius totally but it is also that he was a showman and I think that's incredible but the thing that kind of came up from us is that he was also deeply interested in Indian spirituality so at his funeral he gave everybody a copy of autobiography of a yogi by Yogananda and he went to India in the 70s and tried to find a guru of his own and was into primal-screen therapy and mucusless diets.

And we didn't get to put it in the show, but Dan Cocky was like employee number one for Apple, told us that at one point Steve went to the local Zen monastery with like a copy of the second-generation Mac. And was like, look, this is for you. And this Zen monk was like, I don't believe in possessions. What do you want from me here? And like, I don't believe in possessions. What do you want from me here?

And he just couldn't quite contemplate that anybody wouldn't want one of his shiny new computers. But you can definitely see that in the whole aesthetic of Apple, the clean lines of it. And you know, did you see Him as a guru as well? Well, we had this conversation with several people who knew him. And one of them said, he'd said, if I ever turn into a guru, kill me, but he kind of did, didn't he? Like, he did kind of preach a certain aesthetic and a lifestyle and have a kind of, people would refer to the cult

of Apple, you know, that they thought they were more than computers. They were a representative of you, this very cool San Francisco Bay hip- young tech guy, rather than a square Windows user. So he did in some respects make himself a guru. That doesn't mean that he was a bad guru or that he didn't achieve a lot. But yeah, I think he was a guru. When it comes to people who've had influence and changed the world and the intersection of those,

what's he thoughts on Jordan Peterson? Do you think that he has influenced the world? Do you think that he has influenced the world? Do you think that he's just had influence? What's your opinion on that? Well, I've heard from a lot of Jordan Peterson fans having interviewed him. And there are lots of particularly young men who really credit him for having given them a narrative about their lives that, you know, they could improve, like, self-improvement, right? That you do just, you tidy the bedroom, you put the, you know, you have the shower. And the kind of thing I find really sad about that is the fact that there was some people for whom this was really useful advice. And you're thinking, what has happened

in your life that, you know, have a shower every morning and try and have some self-respect, it's something that you needed to hear from, you know, not from your friends or family, but from someone outside that. But equally well, I'm really pleased that they got that. So my interactions, yeah, I had some very unpleasant, there are still people who are now, you know, vandalizing my Wikipedia page to this day because they're so angry about that interview. But there were also some people who really did take guidance from him. The thing I do think about him is that he was incredibly unsuited for internet fame, psychologically, and it's sort of sadly ironic that he, as a psychologist, kind of couldn't see that, because he got that thing where half the people were telling him he was the Messiah and he'd

save them and they're coming up to him and half the people were kind of like you said earlier treating him like the devil and he just wasn't able to tune out that noise and be himself and find himself somewhere in that bubble and I think it really really really got to him. Would you not say that it was more the stress of wife being ill, downstream from that like a lot of personal things? I mean layering on top of that the stress of wife being ill, downstream from that, like a lot of personal things. I mean, layering on top of that, the pressure of the public world, but he, as far as I'm aware, doesn't usually attribute it much to what's going on publicly. It was almost all what was going on privately. Do you not think that that's right? Well, he did say that recently that being in Twitter was like people sort of shamed him at you 24-7, which is, you know, pretty good experience of...

Somehow it's called it the most malignant form of telepathy where all that you ever hear are the shouting at you 24-7, which is, you know, pretty good experience. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The most malignant form of telepathy, all that you ever hear are the shittest of everybody else's thoughts. Yeah, that's probably, is that the same one when he later had this phrase that I absolutely loved in his podcast, which was, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're

we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, nice. Which is like, I always think you're like, wow, okay, I will never say those words in that order on a podcast. Well done Sam. But yeah, I know that's what he says, but he has come up with several different versions of the cider vinegar story and the, you know, the strange beef based diet story. But yeah, I don't know when goes through their partner being diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening cancer. And, you know, through his dependence on benzodiazepines, you know, those are things that I think would challenge even the kind of strongest

contribution. David Gogge and Jocka Willink would have an issue getting through that, let alone somebody who'd already been pretty stressed. And suffered from clinical depression, all of his life as far as he knew. So yeah, I have great personal sympathy with him, but I also think it's sort of ironic that somebody was a great guru of personal responsibility. Doesn't seem to be able to stop tweeting. Just tweeting constantly, day and night, now he's back on Twitter, and it's clearly not good for him, because he's just getting angry with random anonymous people online. And, you know, I do sort of, I absolutely understand, I have had my moments of arguing with random people online and I know what it's like when you, I think people use it as a form of self-harm

to some extent social media like that. You know that people are going to come back and say horrible things to you and you sort of do it anyway knowing that. Like I do think that is a kind of strange adult version of slicing up your arms with a razor blade. And it's a real shame that he can't stop himself really because there are, like, you know, I talked to David Fuller for this, for one of the episodes. And he really loved, you know, the Jungian perspectives. He really loved his attempt to synthesize all these interesting traditions of psychoanalysis and all the stuff he

would write about story, structure and stuff like that. There was obviously a lot of intellectual content that was not cultural or related in Jordan Peterson. And, you know, I'm not a person, the immersive fan, but that, to me, that was the best of him. And he's not doing that anymore, he's doing, he's, he's, he's, or at least his attention seems to be on the worst bits of his personality, the bits that I like the least, I guess. Well, I would certainly say, I would be a good avatar for one of those people,

not necessarily the clean up your room, I think I'd thankfully manage to do that. Your room looks delightful, I have to say. Yeah, so the advice has worked. Thank you. However, there was a good bit of stuff. I was the prototypical 28 year old guy, man-childing his way through a world

that gave him success that society said he should enjoy and yet hadn't found the fulfillment that he thought that he should do. And tell the truth. That was the first time that anybody had said that that that was something that I really, really should focus on. Not like, as an arbitrary, it's the honest and good thing to do, but like, this is actually something that you can aim for. And I'm like, wow, like, that's really...

That's very, very interesting. And then you see Sam writes the book, Lying, which is basically kind of the same thing, but from a more philosophical kind of pragmatic side. And then, X-ray monotope comes out from Jocker Willink,ink and you go, okay, like everybody's converging on the same thing. But Jordan was the whatever the gateway drug for me with that. But I also know what you mean when it comes to someone using like overusing Twitter and getting into a rhythm of being adversarial on there, any time that I ever end up getting tagged in a thread with Chris Kavanaugh, I know that checking Twitter for the next 24 hours

is pointless because my notifications, no matter even if I have a tweet that goes super viral, they're going to be dominated by his argument with this person who has an egg for a profile. Like that's, he will not let it go. If there's an argument that to be had, like Chris's Irish heritage will win out and he will continue to, like, there their resilient bunch. And um, yeah, I personally, I don't

understand it. I mean, I like Chris an awful lot. I think he's a great guy, but I don't have, I do not share his desire to correct people who are wrong on the internet. In fact, you may be even to see up there, I have the XKCD cartoon, which is like, you know, the one, which is the famous one of Come to Bed. I can't, someone is wrong on the internet. That was to me at a time in my life that I'm very happy to have left behind, I guess. It's a bit you-

It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you-

It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a bit you- It's a particular book or whatever that you're obsessed with or you start any pursuit or you there's a TV series or something and for a three month period at 5 p.m. every night you'll be late

making tea or late doing something because you start doing something else playing pickleball or fucking knitting or whatever it is that you end up doing and I think that you know the feedback mechanism and the dopamine hijack that you get from Twitter means that if that's what you've got yourself locked in on, it can really, really be compelling. And if there is always a battle to be had, it's a, it's a big temptation. So yeah, I mean, it'll be a little bit easier. Sugar, there isn't it. Don't you think about it exactly the same way that you think about bad food, which is that it is initially delicious. And it feels so good when you're eating, you know, when you're eating the McDonald's, you're like,

oh, the big mat, why don't I only eat big macs, this is amazing. And then you notice that you're immediately hungry again, and then you feel profoundly sad about your life choices. And, you know, and so I, you know, I do eat junk food, I eat junk food occasionally, but I know that I wouldn't want to eat a junk food only diet because I would feel like, you know, not even any moral qualms, I would just feel worse in myself. I would feel unnourished. And so much of my project in journalism over the last 10 years has been about trying to find to do the things that are genuinely, you know, not porridge exactly, but like a nice, like a nice poke bowl, like a nice, you know, healthy balanced diet. And part of that

is, I think podcasts are really good for that because podcasts you do end up having a conversation. You know, I'm sure some of your opinions on topics like gender in a slightly different place to mind, but we're just going to end up having, I'm going to listen to everything that you say and take it as part of you as a human, and then I'm going to kind of offer my kind of bits that I do and don't agree with. Rather than it turning into some kind of sort of Christian in the lines, dunking blood sport, where all my feminist fans come out and turn out and tell you that you're a huge misogynist and know your bro fans come out and tell me that I'm a kind of unfuckable harpy and we both have to

kind of go back off, back off people, back off. So we can actually have this conversation, right? Like that's just how it goes. Cultivating a reasonable audience is an incredibly difficult thing to do on the internet. It's like it's one of the hardest things to do. And I don't even know what the term would be disciplining the audience or guiding them towards it. It is like, it just feels like disciplining.

If I don't even mean it is like animal training. But the one very nice way. This is like animal training, but I want it really nice way. This is the sort of community that I want to have. I want it to be respectful. I want it to be thoughtful. I want it to be new ones. So I want it to be insightful. I want it to be patient.

I want it to be like all of these things. And yet, the stuff that compels people to comment and none of those insights. And then every so often, there'll be this really amazing comment that'll come up on the YouTube. And I'll be like, heart it and like, get it as high because there's certain things you can do to sort of push

it further up. And I'm like, look, this, this is the shrine of the type of discussion that I want to have. It's polite, it's disciplined, it's blah, blah, blah, but it's all of those things. And yet the internet is, you know, publicly open to anybody that has the biggest grievance and the most number of capital letters available on their keyboard. So yeah, I think it's very, very interesting.

Thinking about the secular gurus thing, I think it's very timely for you to release this at the moment, especially off the back of very bad wizards, conspiracy, decoding the gurus. Those are for better or worse, the insider baseball, rock stars, favorite bands. I think it's a guilty pleasure. Some of those, most podcasts that I know listen to one of those shows in one form or another because they kind of keep their finger on the pulse of what's happening and what's the other one, QAnon Anonymous and like other stuff like that. Everybody's got like some finger in one of those pies.

I think that the discussion about secular gurus is an interesting one and I think that it's probably pretty timely to to start talking about it. So I'm looking forward to coming out. Where should people go if they want to check out this series and can people outside of the UK listen to it? Yes, you can. So it's a BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sound project. So it comes out and two drops one on the 19th of December, the first four episodes and then the next we're after that. But it is also available wherever you find your podcasts. Awesome. And where should people go if they want to check out Mario stuff?

I mean, we go pretty much everywhere. I've been all over the place Chris, let me tell you. But the Atlantic is where it is my main writing home. They are currently in the middle of sending me to write a long piece about Florida, which is great. I love Florida. I'm in the tank for Florida. It's a great American state and I saw a manatee, I fired a gun. I did everything that you would want to do in Florida and yeah, and that's the kind of decadent journal lifestyle that I'm living at the moment. Fantastic. All right, Helen. Thank you. Thank you. Offends, get offends