ROUGH TRANSCRIPT: Helen Lewis
We talk to Helen Lewis, staff writer of The Atlantic and BBC correspondent, about the decline of religion, the rise of gurus, and the trouble with genius.
The following is a rough transcript of our conversation with Helen Lewis.
Please note that this is a full, rough, unedited transcript. If you’d like us to polish and edit these transcripts, please consider supporting Uncertain Things as a paid subscriber!
Adaam: Hey, Vanessa.
Vanessa: Hi, Adaam. Oh my God. I sounded like a game show host. Throw the wheel Adaam. We'll, what will you get?
Adaam: Apparently that's what we are slowly melding into. So we have today on our game show uncertain things, Helen Lewis. But before, we actually have a cool announcement.
Vanessa: Mm-hmm, we have our first ever live virtual spectacular event.
Adaam: Well, spectacular remains to be seen. A spec,
Vanessa: a spectacle can be good or bad. Adaam, it could end in flames. Fair enough. And it would be on brand.
Adaam: It would be in brand . We are having a, a small intimate discussion with Neil Ferguson and Martin Gorie. Audience favorites.
Vanessa: Yes. We talked to Neil about his book Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe last
Adaam: year.
Yes. And to Gurri about his book, revolt of the Public. Mm-hmm. , which we have, I think since anointed the uncertain things Bible. Right.
Vanessa: Both authors think about our society's impending collapse. How we got here in a very nuanced, uh, thoughtful
Adaam: way and different way. Yes. And that's why I mentioned both of them in my newsletter after the, uh, Peter Turchin episode.
Mm-hmm. . And I was trying to weave the thread between. Turchin Fu uh, Ferguson and Gurri.
Vanessa: That was a very good newsletter, by the way. I liked that one.
Adaam: Uh, thank you. Cancel Vultures. You mentioned as you were editing it, that well actually what, why, why don't we bring them for a panel, uh, to actually talk about it.
And then you even went further and said, we should do it live. And I was like, I, my head exploded from the, uh, uh, anticipatory headache of making it happen. Yeah. But, but here we are.
Vanessa: Well, the fun thing was that we emailed them independently and said, what would you think about having a conversation with the other?
And they both independently said, oh, I really like and admire that person. I would love to have a chat with them. So that was, that was great because they were on board from basically the beginning, which is wonder.
Adaam: So if you wanna join, we are capping it at 35 attendees. We want to let people participate in the discussion somewhat and be able to ask questions.
If you want to attend, it's free. It is free,
Vanessa: which is great. However, if you are a paid uncertain thing subscriber, i e paid on the uncertain dot subst act.com, you get access first. So for the next week, only uncertain subscribers who pay get access to the event. So as we said, it's only 35 spots, so that gives you a good shot of definitely getting a spot if you're paid subscriber.
If you're not, then on February 15th we will open it up to everybody. Um, and then you just have to be fast and just get your spot before it goes away. Okay,
Adaam: next is our interview, uh, Helen. Yes. Do you wanna set it up?
Vanessa: Sure. Helen Lewis, uh, staff writer for the Atlantic Radio journalist. She did this excellent new program for BBC four called The New Gurus, where each episode looks at a different aspect of guru dom from wellness to crypto to doomsayers, uh, and how they have so captivated the 21st century audience.
So it's an excellent deep dive. So we invited her on to talk about that, especially because, It seems like gurus have such a pull over our lives because of the decline of religion. And Helen has talked a lot about that, written a lot about that. She did a great series called The Church of Social Justice, which also thought about the different ways that kind of leftist ideology is replacing religion.
So it's something that we've been thinking about a lot and we're really excited to, to chat with, with Helen about as well. And just
Adaam: generally the idea of, uh, charismatic personality, filling the void. For people and the, the potential dark paths that it can take you down. Cult content and scammer content is one of my weird guilty pleasures.
Mm-hmm. Um, I don't know why, I mean, I can, I can explain it. I think I just find the psychology fascinating. The relationship between the manipulated and the manipulator. Right. And the way that they affect each other. The perverted symbiosis intrigues me.
Vanessa: Right. My favorite part of the interview actually, is we, we got into the difference between a guru and a genius. The way they're similar and different. And it's interesting because Helen's literally writing a book called The Selfish Genius. So she had a lot to say on this front, and it, it let us call back to our conversation with Eli Lake about, you know, the ways that we re relate to artists. Um, so that for me was actually the most compelling part.
We have some conversations coming up in the future about art and production and the content economy, and I think we'll pick up on some of those threads in our future conversations as well.
Adaam: So, with that, as a reminder, if you want to become a paid member, we are, uh, at uncertain.subs.com. Also, you can sign up without being a paid member and just support us and mm-hmm.
leave some comments or enjoy our newsletter. Mm-hmm. , if you so choose and share us with your friends and enemies. As always, five stars on Apple if generosity fills your heart. And with that,
Vanessa: Helen Lewis.
And shall I drive into the first question, or would you like to take it away? Go, go. You're
Adaam: ready for it?
Vanessa: Okay. I'm on fire. I had a coffee, I had a coffee right before this. I'm like, caffeinated. Apologies Owen. Um, okay,
Adaam: so, and hooked up on all the Jordan Peterson content that you've
Vanessa: consumed. I was the only one in the world, Helen, who just only recently watched that interview. , I watched it. Congratulations. Like yesterday.
So it's fresh on my mind. I'm sure it's, you know, far distant memory for you now, but
Adaam: I'll add that this, I believe is the first piece of Jordan Peterson content that Vanessa has consumed in general
Vanessa: ever. Yeah, it was, it was my first introduction. .
Helen: I can't, I dunno how I feel about that. I mean, I guess good to have a long form introduction, but I think, you know, I caught him at a particular time in his life, so it may not be the most balanced introduction to his work,
Vanessa: I guess.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and Aam has since keyed me in that he's had a bit of a trajectory since that interview as well. So, but that's something I think we'll get into in this conversation is the, the, uh, the, the cycles of enchantment and disenchantment with gurus. Uh, but. But I'm jumping ahead because I think the, before we get into gurus, we wanted to talk to you a little bit about why the world is so ripe for them at the moment.
Uh, and we, we've kind of described it as this, the voidness, I guess, of the current, uh, moment. It's something we've been thinking about a lot. We actually pitched a series very similar to the new gurus, uh, to an outlet that didn't get picked up. But we've been thinking about it a lot and we've been seeing many disparate threads about this kind of sense of lack.
Um, so we wanted to ask you first, like what, when you were thinking about starting this series, what were the threads that you were seeing and picking up on that made you think, yes, there's, this is, there's something here that I wanna do a show about.
Helen: One of them was the decline of, um, established religion.
And that's something that you see in census, uh, statistics both in the US and the uk. You know, even since the nineties actually, like the decline in church going. Um, something I think is a huge factor in this, again, in the US particularly, is polarization and the lack of a kind of middle ground in the media, right?
You know, the fact that people are in often their bubbles and echo chambers. Then there's also the technology and economics of it, you know, the kind of creation of platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, you know, now also all the pa you know, rumble, um, all of these, um, platforms for people with various levels of kind of censorship or not.
And then there's the money aspect of it where particularly, I mean, wellness supplements have always been big business. Um, but crypto in particular, you know, that has been a huge economic engine behind lots of internet content over the last couple of years. So it was a confluence of all of those factors.
And then add to that, the fact that, you know, I think we, there is a human desire always to listen to kind of incredibly entertaining, charismatic people. And given the technology that we now have, it's never been easier to find and build an audience.
Adaam: So you diagnose why this is happening as mainly the loss of religion as a center for meaning derivation as well as the, uh, you know, and.
As well as the technology that makes it easier for people to discover new
Helen: priests? Well, I think it's, yeah. I think the, the thing that we, I never think we have grappled with in the last 20 years, actually really during my adult lifetime, is the switch from most people's primary way of relating to other people being moved from geography basis to an interest basis.
Right. Um, and I saw this when I was young, you know, when I was in my teens, I became a member of a site called BM Eine, which was body modification, Eine, and it was a big subcultural site at the time, and it had a very early sort of pro, kind of MySpace esque social network associated with it. And that was people from, you know, Oklahoma, I knew people in and, and Vancouver and they were all interested in body modification.
And I, you know, simply if I had been born even five years earlier, that wouldn't have been the people that I spent hours every night with during my adolescence. It simply wouldn't have been possible. So that has been, I think, an enormous switch within our lifetimes in how we relate to other people. Right.
So if I understand
Adaam: right, so your point is, When it was more about proximity, you would absorb the parts of your community that you had in common and then had to also accept and tolerate those areas in which you, uh, had differences like your politics, for instance. But when technology enables you to build communities diffusely and your, you find yourself connecting around niche interests like cryptocurrency, for instance, with people around the world, suddenly that becomes your core community.
And as a result, you attach a lot of significance to this topic. It becomes. Essential to your identity, and you discover suddenly that you are a lot less tolerant to people outside of that or who have differing opinions about this thing that in the past would've just been one of the many things that define you, but now is at the heart of who you are as a social
Helen: creature.
That's one of the things that I think can happen. And that's some of the, um, stuff that's covered in, uh, the coddling of the American Mind, you know, by Jonathan Hay and Greg Koff. The idea being that usually you, you know, you had to recruit the police from just whoever lived in your town or whoever lived in that district, and that meant that there were maybe a kind of greater variety of people.
The same thing with sort of small time academics. You know, when you have these much bigger markets, you get these sort of self sortings. And I think a similar thing is true of like, you know, if you were.
If somebody, if you were a furry in 1950, you know, I mean, I'm sure there were people who liked the thought of themselves as animals, um, throughout history, but like the chance of you meeting somebody else like that and finding out about that person, were very small.
And if you're a furry in 2023, I've got absolutely great news for you. You know, I mean, it is much easier to build interest-based communities, but you, you're right, they can become, um, because you're not doing what Terry Patrick referred to as the kind of brownie in motion of society, right? You are, you are self excluding lots of people.
There is a potential to end up becoming quite hung up on the ingroup and the outgroup in a way that, you know, might once been the way that the English traditionally always hated the French, right? But now it might very well be heterodox podcasters and their war on the woke and the, you know, and those battle lines being drawn in different places.
And what's the leap
Vanessa: then or connection between. A world in which we find community in these subcultures of the internet towards seeking aru. Like is there something about interacting with people in a non-physical embodied way that leaves us more open to capture or something like what's, what is this connection like in your mind?
Helen: Well, there's, there's an effect on the guru and the effect on the audience. And so
there is a concept that we discuss in the series called the idea of the Parasocial relationship, which is this relationship between one person and their, you know, and their audience, and the way that their audience feels. This incredibly strong connection with somebody. You know, your podcast listers might be listening to hours of you talking a week, and that's a very intimate connection to have, you know, hearing someone's voice, hearing the little bits of your life that slip into it. And what happens is people end up having these very deep, intense bonds with people they've never, never met.
And then it happens something in the other direction too, which is that if you publish anything on the internet, whether it be Twitter, YouTube, even a podcast, you cannot avoid hearing about the feedback. And that makes internet gus very susceptible to audience capture and not just audience capture as in giving your audience exactly what they want, but also a process of ramification.
Because if there are 90 people making diet content, The algorithm might very well lead people to extreme diet content. And the way to prosper in that space is to me not just kind of, Hey, have you thought about eating some vegetables? But to be like, have you only thought about eating vegetables? Have you thought about being a high raw vegan?
Have you thought about doing this purge? You know, the way that you have to constantly create content but also differentiate yourself. So what we saw again and again with people who had attained internet fame and internet guru status is that there was a pull constantly. Towards making them become more outrageous, more extreme, simply because that was what is being rewarded, both in terms of eyeballs and then very, very obviously in terms of revenue.
Because if you're a YouTube creator, if you get demonetized, you know, that's your income gone for the, for the month. Whereas if you do something that's great, you might earn 20,000 pounds off a video. And so you are very, very alive and sensitive to what the market wants from you. Um, and you know, the, the great thing about bundled journalism, the journalism that I came up with is that a traditional daily newspaper had some bits that were quite, you know, were lost leaders.
Like foreign reporting is incredibly expensive and very poorly read. Whereas sports coverage very well read, horoscopes, you know, racing tips, all of these kind of things, and you bundled it all together and the internet has unbundled that so people can only have and do the bits that are really sexy and, and revenue generating.
And that's been a, again, that's just a huge change to that kind of media, e economic ecosystem that we have really.
Vanessa: I kind of wanna spend a little bit more time on this idea of the decline of religion as well, because it's something that Adamo and I have been thinking a lot about in terms of living in the absence of religion and how it, it, it leaves us more ripe for these types of internet relationships.
Um, and something we've
Adaam: been thinking of. Not that the unbundling of news and the current state of our industry is not something that we regularly, uh, talk
Vanessa: about. Oh, no, of course. Yeah. And we'll, we'll probably get back to that too. But, but I, I do think there's something about it, it religion, and I think you bring this up a lot in your, uh, church of Social Justice program, right?
It's not just that religion provides some sort of medium for spiritual. Conversation or thinking about inner life or meaning or purpose. The community aspect of it is very fundamental, right? The com maybe the structures of community as well, the routine of it. Um, and I was actually curious cuz I, I know that from that program that you said you grew up raised in the Catholic religion, AAM grew up in Israel in a non-religious household, but in Jerusalem where you, you can't escape religion.
So religion is ever present and I grew up without religion at all from parents who rejected religion. But I think at least, and I'll speak for Adam and I back cuz I can't speak for you Helen, but I mean we still felt this kind of lack, this lack of meaning, structure, moral compass that we felt like we had to figure out how to fill.
And I'm curious from your perspective, like I assume, do you think there's a difference between people who were raised with religion and a structure and then lost it versus people who never had that structure at all? Or are we just all striving for the same thing even if we don't have the kind of touchpoints of what religion gave us earlier?
Helen: I think there's probably a bit of both in the sense that I think if you grew up with religion, um, that you maybe are still attached to the rituals of it, of your childhood, and they'll either give you a sense of kind of peace or stillness or, you know, they're just nostalgic. But I think there's also something that's fairly universal.
One of the interesting conversations I've had this week actually was with, um, a Satanist who is a, an atheist, but says therefore involved in a religion that is all about social justice. And I said, Hey, that's really interesting. How did you come to that? And he said, well, I was brought up in a very heavily Christian family and, you know, I wanted, I knew that I wanted that spiritual connection, that spirituality, but I'm not aist, I don't believe in God.
So I, I went looking basically for a vehicle for that. And that this is how you, apparently this is what leads you to, to satanism. And I found that was really interesting because actually the, one of the reactions to the piece was people being quite offended by the comparison between social justice and religion.
So it's interesting to talk to somebody who said, you know, I kind of went out shopping essentially, I need religion in my life. And I think that the established religions are. Bad, and I don't really believe in God. So, you know, I wanted to find myself a replacement for that. So I found that all kind, really honest and self-aware, reflection, and I think that's probably true for a lot of us.
The impulse for me making that documentary in the first place was someone saying to me, you know, do you think feminism has replaced religion for you? Um, in a way that implied that she thought, I would find this an incredibly offensive question. And I didn't actually, I found that very thought provoking one, because I think, you know, there is a sense of kind of higher purpose about some of those social justice movements. That means not only have you got community, but also that you're striving together to make the world a better place. Um, you know, and, and you know, and then there's all that much more stuff when we talk about, you know, the kind of rituals and taboo and religious concepts like, you know, I do think white and male privilege do kind of echo original sin in the sense that they're an idea of something that you're, you're born with and then you have to kind of strive to overcome. And it just might be that, you know, We've had religion for thousands of years and these things are kind of built very deep into us. And, and also because particularly in America, you know, it's a very religious culture, whether you are personally religious or not, that these are the frames that you're gonna end up analyzing stuff through and, and thinking, you know, you are going to think, oh, this is just like church. Oh, you know, even the words we use for things like evangelizing, you know, they're all coming from a particular set of traditions and experiences.
Adaam: I wanna spend a second on what you mean by religion, because I think for a lot of people, even when they make this comparison of, uh, social justice as religiosity, they think of religion in the context of 2000 odds, new atheism, that of religion as fundamentalism, right?
Religion is hidebound the source of inquisition and small mindedness and intellectual intolerance. Whereas as you find it thought-provoking, it's because you are seeing it at something more. So I want you to let you define. What is it that you found interesting in religion insofar as its absence is generating this universal yearning for in the current search for higher purpose?
Helen: Yeah, I mean, you know, let me just be clear that this is a question that perplexes anthropologists and sociologists, you know, they never cut the argument about like, what is a religion? And then the classically, you know, should we talk about religions and are we talking too much about Abrahamic faiths?
And, you know, all of that stuff. It is a really lively site of academic debate, so I'm not gonna pretend to have a definitive answer on what a religion is, but I think, oh, let me be
Adaam: clear. This is a question that we have engaged with from our earliest days of the podcast. Our first two interviews were with historian Tom Holland and sociologist Persico, and between the two of them, I think we've spent five to six hours pondering about this question.
So I, I'm definitely not turning to you to seek the definitive answer , but I'm interested in, in how you approach it, you know, as you are, as you're trying to make these comparisons in your personal life and in your
Helen: journalism. Sure. And I think there is a case for saying something is religious in the sense of not just ideological, but implying something sort of slightly, some spiritual, some idea sort of being saved.
That's a kind of really interesting concept. And also the rituals, you know, and to, and sort of, uh, ritual and cleanliness and taboos I think are also a big part of religion. You know, and I think when I talk about, and to be clear, I'm not, I'm not only being positive about this, I agree with you. People do when they make that kind of snap comparison of social justice, like religion, you know, um, like in John MCs woke, racism, he's very clear that he's talking about sort of, he means it's fundamentalist and it means you shouldn't even just talk to these people because they're irrational.
I guess that's the word that people hear is, is supernatural and irrational. And I, to some extent, I do mean that in that I think that political, that these are more than political systems have created sort of unsayable taboos, right? That to me are quite religious in the sense that there are forms of words that you're simply not supposed to use.
And we're all supposed to understand that those are appalling and they may be very. You know, one of the examples I, I've been thinking about that I'm, I'm really interested. Is the idea of dead naming, which is the idea of using, you know, a transgender person's previous name. Now, 20 years ago, no one thought that was a problem, right?
They didn't think that there was a, you know, there was someone was called one thing and then they were called something else. And that was, that was kind of perfectly reasonable and you wouldn't need to hide that. Now in progressive circles, there is an enormous taboo on that, and it has been created incredibly quickly, and it is enforced and referenced as if it would be incredibly obvious.
Now, it's very interesting to me because I personally, in my own life know at least a couple of trans people who have absolutely no hangup about their previous name at all. They don't subscribe to the feeling that it's a kind of magic word that up that upsets them, whereas other people clearly do feel incredibly strongly about that.
But that to me has a slightly religious echo, right? That there is a sort of power in the word, in the name. Um, and yeah, it's something that you find in the, the i the discussion of Yahweh, right? Like the idea about whether or not some names are simply Unsayable. Um, and that to me is really interesting because I think in a way, for those of us who are on the outside, it's a maybe.
Helps you understand how strongly people feel about some tenets of social justice, right? If they feel them as strongly as anybody felt about, about religious incantation or words or scripture.
Vanessa: It's just interesting. I, I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago, but by the history chicks, and they were talking about, uh, the history of Pocahontas.
And Pocahontas had multiple names. Uh, she had her given birth name, which in, according to her tribe, uh, the idea is that only your closest inner circle knows that name. And it is, it's something that you don't share with the broader world because it's kind of something sacred that you hold for just your inner circle.
Pocahontas was like her public facing name. Um, and then when she, uh, converted to Christianity, she took on the name Rebecca. Um, The, the reason that, uh, we kind of know that she, for forsook, I guess her tribe, because they never came to rescue her when she was kidnapped, is that she had told them her original name.
And so it was like a signifier to her tribe that, uh, in like I have told them this, this sacred name and it no longer, it no longer defines who I am. I am now Rebecca. And I just found that a very interesting use of. Using name to identify where you are in the context of, of how you wanna present yourself.
Um, and it just, it just reminded me of that when you were talking about dead naming. Yeah. No, but
Helen: names are entirely about power. Who gets to name what is, uh, is an entirely about power. So there's a very brilliant Brian Friel play about Ireland in the 19th century called translations in which the English turn up and they decide that they're going to rename, you know, not only are they driving out the Irish language, but they're also going to rename all the towns and make you use the English name for them.
And it's a kind of classic example of, of colonialism, you know, the way that, that Welsh was driven out from Welsh schools in the 19th century. And you know, in, in Japan, you can buy a better name after your death, right? Your, your family can buy you a, a better name. So we do have these, you know, all the fact that traditionally through history, women have been expected to take their husband's name on marriage and you become part of his family.
So this is what I mean, I think it's really interesting. You know, that you can talk about ritual and ritual still has such a place in a, in a modern world that can seem so secular on its surface. And yet lots of these things that you prod, you know, do seem to gesture like you say, like Dr. Pocahontas to these much deeper concepts underneath.
Go back
Adaam: to the Tempest Shakespeare's, the Tempest Caliban is rebelling against his own name, being forced upon him by his
Helen: oppressor. And you're right. And the beginning of, um, sorry. And the end of the Crucible as well. Right. So John Proctor's great lament at the end of the Cru, but is, give me my name. I must have my name.
You know, you can take everything else but have my, have my name. So you're right, it does make for some incredibly powerful art. Right? That's
Adaam: the, also the X in Malcolm X indicating that he has no authentic origin anymore. Uh, he had been de vaccinated and cannot return to his ancestral origins, nor can he tolerate the colonial.
Europeanized lie that has been forced on him.
Naming is inextricably linked to power struggles going back as far as cultures have been interacting and superimposing themselves on each other. First thing that David does when he conquers Jerusalem in the Old Testament is renaming it. Naming is self-assertion. It's power, it's ownership. So it's a fascinating topic, but it can also go frustratingly far insofar as language goes, beyond being a dialogue about power and ownership into something more mystical. The word as cosmic terror, that can fall upon the speaker. There's a history of that in Judaism, as you've mentioned, because in Judaism, the world was created by speech, and therefore languages revered.
But I also see it as a very American thing. And maybe that's because the puritans in shaping the d n A of the US have relied heavily on scripture, especially the Old Testament and Jewish mysticism, or maybe not. But the result is that
we have a culture that quakes at the idea of uttering certain words, whether they're, uh, slurs or four letter words, or, uh, the N word. So I wonder if you, if you agree that the, the reason that the US seems to be more language obsessed has something to do with the, the unique way in which religious revivalism took shape here compared to Europe.
Helen: I think I would definitely agree with the, um, proposition that America is a more religious culture, but I also think it's about the kind of idea of the American language Internet, right?
So we are all living on the English language internet, but it's actually really the American language. Internet America is six times bigger in population size, um, than Britain. Um, so we're all living in the kind of shadow. And that means, you know, the same, the problem in the Academy France has about the fact that France is not generating enough new words, and so people are saying low weekend instead, or whatever. It's, um, is the, is the same issue, is that America is so big and so culturally powerful that it is the one that is generating all the new vocabulary. It's the, the accent in which these conversations are being had. So I, I think I would probably attribute it most of that.
Vanessa: It's also interesting though in, in the US though, because I think these new words emerge and, but different even within the US different pockets. Cottoning onto the definition before others. And so you have these like con, constant ov lags and o and then overlaps of what the word even means. Like I'm thinking fake news. For example, I remember having a conversation with a taxi cab driver. It was the first time I'd heard the term, and he was like, what do you think about this fake news? And I was like, oh. And I took it at a very literal definition. I was like, well, there's definitely a problem with fact checking in journalism and like this is an issue. But I didn't realize that there was a whole, not only a whole definition that I was missing, but a whole culture that had emerged around it. And so I feel like even within, even within America, there's so many pockets that the, the language is, it's hard to keep hold of What even is the accent? Where is it coming from? Where, where is it going and and are we all capturing? Yeah,
Helen: I think it's one of. A big challenge for journalism. One of the reasons I wanted to do the new GU is for the B bbc, you know, is that is a addressing a big mainstream audience who don't know maybe what some of these subcultures are like. Whereas, you know, I think for people who are very online capped up, they can, this can all seem incredibly obvious to them. But, you know, I've got friends who are re you know, well educated men and women about time, but they dunno what like a simp is. You know, that's just not a word that's gonna have any, any resonance to them, um, or whatever it might be like.
So this is what I think you're right. And I also think, you know, there's a kind of enormous flourishing online, but everything can be very hetic. And I felt like that myself. Like I consider myself to be extremely online. But even when we came into the crypto episode, I had some vague headline thoughts about crypto.
I vaguely knew what the blockchain was. You know, I knew. The kind of headline stuff. Uh, but, but I was surprised just how massive an industry was. And then it, and then it began to feel a bit like I was in a kind of arctic sea and I could see all these little bits of ice, but I had absolutely no idea how, how big the icebergs were under the surface.
And I think that's probably almost everybody. No one is no, I mean, are very, but it's very hard to be across everything online. You would have to be like, kind of near, you'd have to be plugged into the machine. Uh, it'd be extraordinary.
Adaam: You know, you made me think about the difficulty in navigating as for people to navigate the real world, meeting new people versus trying to figure out where they stand online on contentious issues, having to call their words carefully to avoid stumbling on language traps that that might make them lose their heads.
And while we. Are completely aware of it happening online. We can already see it being projected into the real world with people sometimes not even fully capable of evaluating what the consequences of getting into those conversations would be with real people, which you would presume would be easier when you can read social cues and, uh, have the benefit of face-to-face interaction.
But you never know because now you are afraid that you might be stumbling into a, a psychopath who might be recording you or just waiting in, in the, uh, corner of the room to, uh, tweet about you and I .
So I have a friend who's younger, um, uh, a recent college graduate who has some public profile. And, um, I remember once we got into a conversation about Joe Rogan, and it felt like he had to, uh, litmus test the room first and throw a few platitudes about, you know, Joe Rogan. He's kind of crazy, right? But then something in his tone or in the gaps implied that he's actually trying to push back against it a little bit or to, to open up certain conversations that he thinks, but he didn't have that conversation. He's be able to be discussed, but he's just not sure if people are comfortable with it.
So he is using j Rogan as a, as a feeler to gauge where everyone else in the room was before he could start open talking openly. And I think that when you start relying on these touchstone topics to, to test first whether you should speak freely, we've crossed some sort of line, a very bad line. You think that?
N face-to-face interaction, you should be free of these concerns. If a conversation starts that people are uncomfortable with, they should be able to say, uh, maybe let's switch the topic. Maybe that's not the, the right space for this, but because
online you have so much stored energy just waiting to be erupted by somebody waiting accidentally into the wrong neighborhood, it ends up translating to the real world with, especially with people with public profile like my friend. Then just remain constantly on alert about what they can or can't say. So I guess I think that normal language, human language is also currently in crisis because of this importation of American internet language to real life and around the world. Well,
Helen: you say that, but I've got a slightly more positive view, which is the fact that there are, like, at some point it does seem to be like every man has been allocated a podcast, uh, that there are just a huge number of these podcasts that go on for hours and hours and hours and hours.
And they are the place, I think where you see the people having those difficult kind conversations.
Joe Rogan is a really good example, right? Because I think he, uh, he and JK Rowling are two great exemplars of this. Like, oh, everyone knows they're problematic and you have to go. These are two of the most popular people in the whole world. So clearly quite a lot of people actually disagree with you because otherwise Spotify wouldn't have paid however many million dollars it was for the show and it wouldn't be the top first rated. People like Joe Rogan, you are if you actually, if you think there's something wrong with Joe Rogan, you are the minority and you have to make your case. But there is this assumption that, oh no, everyone knows that. And no, I was thinking about this. And the same thing is true of of, of JK Rolling, right? The last book went straight into the top of the bestseller. She's got like five of the top bestselling, um, you know, children's books ever published, and people are still queuing up for the shops and all that kind of stuff. And yet you would, you know, if you spent too much time on Twitter, you would think, oh no, we all know that no one, you know, that we've all
Adaam: by way, I, I wanna push back on this because I think that the Joe Rogan type podcasting of which I guess largely speaking, we are part of, has grown in a self-selecting way as part of this subculture responding to this speech crisis that we're talking about, right? The medium has become associated with being able to have long form conversations, um, about, and I'm not gonna use the word heterodox, because it is taboo in this podcast. matters that, that are otherwise caused for anxiety. , this is the space for that. It's a space that evolved in part to answer the need.
Um, but that doesn't mean that the initial fears outside of this space have been resolved. The people who go on podcasts to have these conversations have already decided to take on the, the risks involved. But what about all the others who have it? For many people who want to be part of these conversations but are afraid of the consequences, maybe cuz they have a semi-public profile, they can just decide to not go on podcasts in order to avoid those risks.
But what do they do when they're in public or when they're, um, in, in, in, in a group and they're just not sure Who might be the secret sociopath in the corner of the room waiting with their fingers, itching on their phone to burn somebody?
Helen: Oh yeah. I mean, I, I, I think that's, True. I think being, having any kind of public profile does inevitably make you slightly more cautious about, you know, um, who you trust, which is kinda a really horrible thing.
Actually. It's one of the things that I like these in the real world, right? But, but I, but also on, I mean, I don't really see any distinction between the real world and online. I'm afraid, like they, who blurred into one another for me,
Adaam: right? But that's the point, right? Things have merged or at least blurred between internet world and real world to the point where sure, all, uh, people have been endowed with a podcast, but it is essentially a carve out for the people who want to take those risks.
And it sort of defines your community in a very specific way to which many people might not choose to opt in because they have, uh, different risk tolerance or, uh, just wanna live their lives. And in the meantime, the real world follows Twitter's image, which is a dark image.
Helen: I think it less so than it did.
I think that really peaked during like 2021. Um, and I think, you know, I wrote a piece about kind of whatever you wanna call it, woke capitalism, I imagine. Is that a band word as well? I feel like it's, it's a band word for me. I try and put it in very heavy quote marks capitalism, but like, no. Yes. Also capitalism.
I'm just kidding. Um, . But like the, the council culture, another probably B word, but um, was just actually mostly c. Covering right? Actually, what the most, the engine of capital of cancel culture was. Three people complain and a company decides it would rather not have the bad publicity and Jettisons view.
You know, and the same thing happened. There were a series of really unfair instance where people got, you know, my, um, colleague Asha Munro about a poor guy who was accused by someone else of making an okay sign, which was then taken to be a white supremacist sign. And, and, and this blew up and he got fired and he, there's the quote from him was really moving cuz it was just like, I don't know what I could have done differently.
Like, how could I protect myself from this? This is like being struck by lightning. You know? You just could not predict it and it could happen to anyone at any time. And that was really chilling. But I think that to some extent there has now been a pushback and companies now get barracks from the other side because there's such a big anti-cancer culture movement that to some extent the knee jerk reaction, you know, has now not become the pa course of least resistance.
It's, I mean, I'm not saying it's cured. I still think there's a lot of that kind of very corporate panic that goes on. Um, But you know, it's again, like you look at Netflix, you know, what is the, what is the most watch special? It's, it's Ricky Cha Bass, it's David Chappelle, it's Jimmy Car. When you ask actual audiences what they want, what they want is the stuff that they've been told that they can't have.
You know, it's like a first lesson of parenting is you must never, you know, tell your children that sweets are amazing, but you can't have them because they're just gonna want them more and, and I think that's been, you know, that's something I think is, we're currently going through a sort of cycle of working that out in the culture about the fact that people are rebelling as soon as they've been told they can't have something, they kind of want it more.
Adaam: But the thing of it was revealing about this, I mean, discovering that corporate America had no spine. Surprised no one, I think, right? Well,
Helen: I think it did actually. I think it did. I think it's a pro I. Well, uh, no, not exactly. I think you're right in that sense, but I think that progressive activists got a bit carried away with the sense that finally they had got a weapon that they could use against big business that they had never had before.
Right, right. That's the bit
Adaam: where and ironically achieved through
Helen: capitalism. Yeah. Right. And they could now wield capitalism a kind of against itself by, by basically shaming companies into doing stuff. And so in some cases that was probably, you know, a good thing, like some people rejecting sponsorship from fossil fuel companies or whatever it might have been.
But it, it, it was this, I was, what I was mean is
it was strange to see the left take this cu up so enthusiastically, you know, and, and kind of. I remember, again, I think it was Wesley Yang's piece pointed out that, um, you know,
who are the first people that normally get attacked by when you have fire at will, which is the case along in many American states.
It's, it's u it's union busting legislation, right? It's stop people unionizing in the workplace. Why would leftists cheer, making it easy to fire, easier to fire people? That has been something that has been a campaign of organized labor throughout the 20th century. It's about making it harder to fire people because it puts more power into employees.
So that, that's a bit, I meant, I, the strangeness of the fact that the left decided this was a, a brilliant tool to use is, is still slightly weird
Adaam: to me. Oh yeah, no, that's a great point. Um, I would just say that what surprised me, and I guess also didn't fully surprise me because I have a cynical view of humankind, but somehow I keep being surprised is how far people that.
You'd think are well adjusted or you thought were well adjusted, would go in these acts of, uh, performative abuse and it's not even performative cause it has real world consequences. And thinking about people that I know, people that I, uh, considered friends or, or at least sane, respectable people, how much pleasure they derive in this public cruelty in the seeking out and dragging out of fellow humans.
Sometimes strangers and sometimes people familiar to them. And at some point you just wonder if the psychopathy really is the purpose of it all. And the ideology is a Dexter like excuse for sadistic. Self gratification.
Helen: Okay, but that kind of takes you back to religion, right?
There's a brilliant book by Terry Patrick called Small Gods in, which is set in a theocracy in which it turns out that only one person actually still believes in the religion, and yet it has this huge apparatus including Inquisition. And you know, I, it's all, you might, you might say that about communism too, right? How many people really are committed to this ideology versus how many people are working it to get to their advantage? And I felt a bit the same about that, which is that how many people really believe what they were saying versus how many people had found the perfect tool to do the things they wanted to anyway.
But the thing is, it's interesting, particularly when you look at it in the American context, is you have to some extent see it as kind of twin reactive polarization, because the similar dynamic did happen on the right over Trump.
Anne Aba, my colleague at the Atlantic, wrote brilliant book called Twilight of Democracy, and she starts in like 1990s where it's, you know, in Eastern Europe and everything is so, you know, exciting. The idea that the Berlin War's fallen. You know, you're having all this liberation, all the communisms fallen. And she's all these people that she's with at this party celebrating the end of communism. You know, she's charts their journey now and some of them are now in authoritarian parties in Poland. You know, they support Victor Orban and authoritarian in Hungary. They supported Donald Trump in authoritarian in America. And, and she kind of goes, what, what went wrong? Like, where did all these people who were, you know, I thought were on my side, I thought were liberals. It turned out that the problem wasn't authoritarianism, it was left wing authoritarianism. They were excluded from, and it turns out right wing authoritarianism was completely fine by them. So I think when you talk about that disillusionment, I definitely understand what you are, what you mean. But I, I guess I won't, I'm just not disillusioned with those people cuz I didn't think they were my tribe beforehand.
Right. I, I always consider myself to be someone on the left. So I think that there are probably people on the other side of politics who, for whom, who have had the, you know, exact inverse, you know, mirror image journey over the last five years. It is, has been a time where some people have become intensely polarized.
Adaam: Before letting you go Vanessa, I just wanna clarify that for me, it was never about people on my quote unquote tribe acting in ways that shocked me, in part because I have such a knee jerk adverse reaction to the idea of being associated with a tribe. So for me the shock was really seeing people on, on either tribe exhibiting inexhaustible, desire for cruelty, this depths of sadism that I just couldn't imagine.
Vanessa: Yeah. We'll, well maybe we'll come back to this somewhere if we get to the intellectual dark web, cuz there's a similar interesting trajectories that have happened there. But, um, but no, I wanna get back to gurus and, uh, one of the things that Adam and I were thinking about as we were thinking about.
Asking you about the gurus even covered and, and how they operate in the 21st century is, um, the question of
what's the difference between a guru and a genius? And we recently had a conversation with Eli Lake about Kanye West. And Eli's stance is that he considers Kanye West a musical genius. And no matter what Kanye says in terms of politics, anti-Semitism, he is still going to keep listening to the music because he considers it a work of genius. He considers it a great contribution to the culture. Um, and he thinks that you can divorce me. Oh,
Adaam: listener. If you could only see Helen's expression right now, .
Helen: No, it's, um, I think I, I actually, I actually agree with that. Um, if you can see behind me, um, I've got all these books. Cause the book that I'm currently writing is on Genius, right?
So I've got very strong opinions on genius. Right? Um, and I think there is a case for saying that KA is incredibly musically talented. I remember the, when the college dropout came out and just thinking, this is. Like just brilliant, right? And, um, I listened to it in enormous amount of time, and I don't have a problem still.
It's not like I've gone and burned all my records because he's now saying I love Hitler. I mean, I probably wouldn't listen to an album that was like that because it would just be, you wouldn't wanna play that in your car. People would, would think you were bizarre. But you know what I mean? Like, I, I think there is a, you know,
nobody's is perfect and one of the big conversations is like, what's the statute of limitations? You know, the fact that Paul Gogan was sleeping with underage teenage girls in Tahiti. Um, you know, Picasso got adopted, a girl from an orphanage did pornographic drawings and then sent her back again. She was 13. There is, you know, you go back through this and, and like every, almost all great art and achievement has got some smelly bit in the kind of foundation of it. So you, you ha you cannot take a hygienic approach to achievement and art. It's simply impossible.
That said, I also think that genius is not an objective quality and that actually mostly what it is, is a story. And it is often a story though of double Edgeness. And Kenny's a very good example, right? Is he a better musician than. Taylor Swift, I would say, no. I know this is gonna be like one of these things people are gonna write in about, but actually he's regarded as more of a genius because we have this romantic idea of the geniuses having, uh, extracting a human cost on you that it drives you mad. That was the idea behind the romantic poets behind, you know, uh, you know, around the time of sort of Byron, Byron being very Byron, classic example. Byron is like the Kanye West of, of his century. And the idea being that there is a price to be paid for exceptional achievement. And so I would say actually in the case of the Damon of
Adaam: inspiration sitting on your shoulder,
Helen: right, that, that ca that it bolsters the myth of the genius of Kanye. The fact that he's going out there and doing these completely outrageous things, doing this completely outrageous lifestyle. We want our exceptional achievers to be weird in some way. Um, and so that is a perpetual problem that will, that will never resolve ourselves. Cause we don't want boring icons,
Vanessa: right? But there's something about their, their production of art, which I think is fundamentally different from the way we think about. Gurus because you, you and I can have a relationship with the art that we can separate from the, from the artist, right? Like something profoundly moving or transformational can, can be the result from someone deeply problematic or with terrible political views. And I think that's where Eli's getting outwards. You, you don't, you don't have to take the politics with the art when you're talking about a guru. They are not selling a, a, a, they may be selling an artistic product, something product.
Helen: They're not selling something that's external to them. They're by and large selling themselves. And a personality,
Vanessa: holistic perspective, a holistic lifestyle that, that actually ends up in influencing your politics, your morals. Like there's, there's, uh, but
Helen: also they embody it, right? They, the claim, which some of the geniuses made someone like Picasso is a good example of somebody who embodied his art. You know, the idea was very passionate Latin, you know, he was uncontrollable, it was masculine, all that sort of stuff. But yes, the, specifically in the case of the, the, the gurus, you know, and often many of them overclaim their outside achievements outside of the, the gurus where many of them are just like, I'm looking, I'm thinking in the intellectual space, are actually kind of mid-level academics and there are many, many min, very good and mid-level academics, right? But there is a difference between them and the kind of ones who are selling themselves as, as kind intellectual guides through the right. There is a kind of certain. Spiritual leader. That was the thing that I really, when I kept thinking about who, who we're focusing on it, was spiritual leaders.
Um, and I would say that, you know, not every genius, lots of geniuses, the, their mythology of genius is embroidered by being a recluse. You know, like Emily Dickinson. It's all about the fact that she locked herself away and no one saw her. The modern day equivalent of Emily Dickinson would obviously not be on YouTube pumping out eight hours of content a week. Um,
Vanessa: I dunno, Bo Burnham had that whole inside, uh, documentary that did very well.
Helen: I guess that's true now you can write your poems with lots of MD dashes in them from Yeah. And then just read them out online. But you know what I mean, like that they like the person is the product with a guru. Right. In a way that you can't, it's not the, I mean, that, that is different from a genius. A genius can make things that are external to them, but, you know, they geniuses actually often they don't have, they don't write great books. They don't, you know, they don't create great art. Actually, the product is their YouTube videos or their podcasts. Things that are essentially kind of ephemeral is what I'm saying. Like what will remain of Jordan Peterson in in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years? Not a great deal. More than more than remain of us mere mortals. I would suggest.
Adaam: It makes me sad when I think, I don't know if it applies to Peterson, but so many of these people, I wonder if just this profound opportunity cost for these talents that could have been utilized differently, were those people not swept up in the game of becoming petty pundits? Are we losing out on creative works that could have been of deeper consequence and longevity?
We used to lose artists to reckless drug abuse and over elaborate masturbation techniques, and now we lose them to. Twitter commentary and, you know, it goes to this thing that I keep coming back to, uh, which is really more a feeling than a provable claim.
Uh, but it seems that there hasn't been great intellectual innovation in the past decade. Um, and maybe even longer. There's a lot of mind stagnation that maybe it's imagined and, uh, and maybe it's really the result of oversaturation, but it feels like ideas don't have the, the time they need to really develop.
And as a result, our conversations and our perceptions of ourselves. Stay at this shallow, repetitive, angry level and fail to capture the deeper changes that we are undergoing.
So the gurus that we talked about, and even some of the more rigorous studies and explorations of our, uh, uh, uh, moment, seem to be all using the same vocabulary, talking about the same things with just ever so slightly different points of view. And with the rate of political and technological convulsions, you'd think there'd be more to say that, you know, would shatter my current perception of things and realign it. And, but I, I, there hasn't been much, I mean, I can think of Martin Gorie maybe, but, but
Helen: what else? Yeah, I know. I think there's something into that.
But one of the problems is there's nothing wrong with being a popularizer. Like to some extent, that's my job, right? Is to go away and read academic papers and talk to people, and then kind of think about it and, and present it in a, in a mainstream friendly way. So I don't, oh, hey, wait. Vanessa
Adaam: and I are journalists.
We take the works of others and, um, crunch them into something more shallow and digestible. I'm very proud of my, uh, profession, uh, and glad to do that. But you do need the people working on a different time scale, you know, immersing themselves in the deeper questions. We as journalists need the thoughts of others to be, uh, deeper and richer so that we can regurgitate, ruin, and mischaracterize it
But at the moment, what do we have? Uh, we have anti-racism on the left, and we have this. Common good Catholic, integral Realism, um, on the rights, and these are both very, very shallow movements, intellectual movements. And then that's what we have as building blocks for our adversarial, uh, media world.
Helen: But that does bring us to intellectual dark work quite well, cuz episode five of the series is David Fuller, who worked for a mainstream news organization.
He worked for Channel four News and he expressed pretty much what you are expressing there, which was that in your day-to-day work as a journalist, you aren't asking, you know, what fills the hole that God once had or whatever it might be. These kind of very deep and meaningful questions. And that's why he was initially captivated by Jordan Peterson's work to the extent of leaving his job in channel for news and setting up a YouTube channel.
And he went through a kind of, again, I think something that probably you are familiar with, which is then a slight level of disillusionment that he had been promised that these people would be thinking incredibly deep thoughts. And then it really seemed that actually what they were doing was going on each other's podcasts and moaning about the people who'd been mean to them on the internet.
And they're like, look, I've, I've done that. I think we've all done that. I'm not, you know, I'm not saying it, but, but it, you are right, it did because. There was no engine for reflection. And the idea that, you know, I, I interviewed,
I remember interviewing Brian Green, the theoretical physicist, right? He's a string theorist. I felt for about five minutes that I understood string theory after speaking to him. It was very exciting, gone there. But he said to me, and I said to him about being a public intellectual, and he said, well, look, you know, I see myself as someone who I go away in the trenches for four years doing research, and then I come out and I tell everybody what I've done. And you know, what three or four years is about the amount of time of thinking and writing that you need to come out with a book that has got a substantive statement. You cannot be producing one YouTube video a week and be like having incredibly deep thoughts. The, the content economy is just now completely weighs against the level of reflection you need to have to do proper intellectual.
Vanessa: Yeah. And there is no funding for it. This is the frustrating thing, like who's the person that's going to go and fund you to do, uh, four years of, I don't know, investigative journalism. Like there's no, the institutions are, are less and fewer and far between that are willing to invest in that kind of content making because the returns are just, are just, and
Helen: you're right.
And, and in the cold economic terms, it's entirely the, the correct decision. So you end up with like great nonprofit organizations doing that kind of work and, um, and philanthropic ventures. But yeah, as a kind of capitalist enterprise, it's, it's not one that is self-sustaining.
Adaam: And it's true for publishers too, because I, I mean, I don't know what deals you were able to strike, but from my familiarity with the publishing industry at at, at the current world of nonfiction, expects the author to produce a new work, a new book every year to a year and a half.
In order to turn a profit. And that's, that's just not realistic for, in, in, in terms of a timescale to really work out, uh, valuable, meaningful perspective. Not to mention strong pros, um, with some exceptions. Um, but the result really is the non-fiction market being flooded with these middling to garbage columns that have been artificially stretched over 500 pages.
Helen: I, my absolute pet hate the books and the smart thinking section, and you pick it up and you're like, this font's very big. These margins are very big. And you think this 5,000 words of content has been artificially padded to be $9 99 worth of sales, right? Again, it's just the fact that there, we have a model that like, that's what a book is and that's what a book costs and whether or not you've written a whole book's worth of, but yes, to say that I, I I've done okay with my books in, in British terms, at least.
My first one is only. It doesn't have an American publisher cuz it's, it's a British history of feminism. So, but you know, if I couldn't have lived on that money on the time that it took me to write it, it was a, it was a side hustle and it was something that I wanted to do because I really wanted to spend the time with that material and think about it.
But yeah, it's not a, you couldn't live in London on the amount of money that I earned from that book.
Vanessa: It makes me think if, if. If genius is gonna go extinct, basically, and we're only going to get gurus from now on because there was a time when, when, you know, artists could go, I don't know, be a Bohemian and go off and they, or they had a patron or stuff and they could work on their art.
And nowadays, I, if the business models are all around consistent, consistent output, that is antithetical to the kind of art that we considered capital A art. And I wonder if it's just going, we're just gonna get gurus now because of the incentives. It's just gonna be, um, here's a thing I'm creating. Here's my lifestyle, here's the sandwich I had, whatever, here's my political opinion and we're just gonna sh keep on this shift and never actually have the or, or at least it's gonna be such a rare thing to have art
Helen: to do. I'm gonna make you feel better about everything Vanessa, by saying Rembrandt one of the greatest portrait painters in history. Didn't like painting portraits. He loved painting mythological subjects, like loads of people chasing a deer. That ant was actually Diana goddess of the hunt. He painted the portraits because that's what Dutch middle class, upper middle class merchant society would pay him a load of money for. So in that case, the cold commercial incentives accidentally gave us may perhaps one of the, the greatest portrait painters ever lit.
So a note of cautious optimism there added to which, the fact is that I do wonder whether or not one of the periods I'm three cheers for capitalism. But there have always been, you know, patrons throughout history, you know, Shakespeare was writing for a commercial audience, right. At the time that Shakespeare was writing poetry was the elevated art form and drama was the thing that you wrote for people who were also fighting a bear in the pit.
Right? Right. And it's just very, we're just very lucky that he was a, a genius and that he managed to turn that commercial art form into something sublime. So I'm not as downbeat as you are, but I also think there is a case for saying, there's a paper that came up very recently saying innovation has slowed.
And one of the ideas might be that we picked a lot of low hanging fruit, particularly at the end, the end of the 19th century. And we're now in an era of very high specialization where you just have to get through a lot of knowledge before you can then advance a field. But you know, we have made some incredible, like mRNA vaccines are an incredible advance. The way that AI has come on in the last year is an incredible advance. Um, electric cars, you know, things like this, there are still very exciting things happening. It's just that there's so much stuff happening all the time that it can kind of be harder to spot, I guess. Well,
Adaam: in that sense, our advancements in the field of AI are probably gonna make the whole genius question moot.
Vanessa: Well. That's
Helen: a whole, that's another thing, but I'm not sure about that though because it's fundamentally, I imitative, right? Even though it's called generative ai. I think that's the problem is that it's trained on this huge corpus of stuff. What it isn't is truly creative and that's the bit that we still don't have any explanation for. You know, what is creativity?
Adaam: An argument that I keep hearing from people whose livelihoods are gonna be directly impacted by some of these new generative ais is that it might actually end up being good for the top percentile genius class, however you define it. While devastating for the creative class where most of the creative class, because it's going to shatter jobs from the, the medium to low skill levels, while still requiring somebody at these, um, higher generative levels to, uh, feed the database, but also to. Call out the output from the ai so you are actually gonna have, uh, a much stricter pyramid.
Helen: Well, that one does make sense, right? If you think about the early days of animation and, and Disney and the fact that each had frame had to be hand drawn and then, then we moved to computer animation and that hasn't stopped people making movies, it hasn't stopped people saying that Pixar, you know, is a genius company.
Maybe you do just move the creativity like up one level of technical ability. But yeah, I think I agree with you cuz there I think there is a thing that we should feel very sympathetic to. People who are being disrupted. Even when the disruption might be exciting, it's, I would be, if I were currently an illustrator, I would feel quite, quite tense right now that my job was gonna be eaten and that, you know, I mean I always feel it's about journalism, right?
Like you know, you sort of feel like you, which was the kind of bows that they find in England and then they suddenly invented the much better bow and then like all the guys who'd spent their entire energy careers training to fire a, you know, long bow cause suddenly extinct. And that will happen I'm sure many times a century,
Adaam: right?
And maybe the premium four originality will go up.
Vanessa: I know, I was gonna ask earlier,
do you think the myth of genius is a hindrance to innovation or a help to innovation?
Helen: I think it's both. And primarily probably a help in the sense that it gives us stories to tell and it also gives people who are kind of worker bees, um, A, a story to tell themselves about why they're letting themselves be exploited.
Hmm. And that probably sounds incredibly cyclical. Yeah. But you know what I mean? Like if you're a feeling that you're engaged in some ground project that you are working for Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or whoever it might be, and then like, they're kind of great mind probably is what helps you think that you're gonna work that 14 hour day.
You know? And that's one of the things that I really struggle with in this book is the idea about geniuses, kind of exploitation of resources and like being a parasite to some extent. It probably is a help, but probably in a way that is quite un wholesome to confront. Actually,
Vanessa: that's actually something I think about a lot because I've, I've come from kind of more corporate gigs than I've done more communications consulting to make money.
And it's something I do feel implicated in it. I'm essentially creating a narrative around a company to sell a grand vision. And every day you're confronted. Is this, is this vision actually in line with what we're doing on a day-to-day basis? Are we moving towards it or am I just selling a, a pretty picture and then duping, am I helping and duping the world?
It's something I've had to think about a lot actually.
Adaam: It's funny that we need to, uh, have this ideal of ocular innovation in embodied in, in a single person in order to really develop trust and um, and ultimately
Helen: to submit. But it makes total sense if you think about strong men in politics because you know, there's an immense appeal to strong men in politics, and you can see it in the idea that.
ideas, you know, could decisions being made in a kind of bureaucracy that are incredibly unfair. You don't know who to hate. Whereas if you know that there's one person making the decisions, then like, that's it. And it might be unjust, but then, you know, there might be, you might be able to work your way up into the favor of that one person.
Like it's, I think it's appealing for the same reason that conspiracy theories are appealing, right? Which is that deposits that someone is in control and therefore you might be able in some way to, you know, infiltrate it or topple it or whatever. It's, rather than the idea that the world is a kind of screaming ball of chaos, hurtling around the sun, which I think is kinda quite hard to comprehend and like feel sane about.
Adaam: It's not just the utilitarian aspect that, uh, it gives you a person to, uh, topple or confront, but it just makes it comprehensible.
Helen: Hmm. It's human sized. I talk a lot about the idea about making things human sized and the stories that tend to go viral, or like, if you want to try and bring down a company, if you're doing investigative journalism into their malpractice, you have to find the detail that makes it human sized.
I remember I was judging a journalism ward a couple of years ago about this mad scam involving fishing quotas and the fact they selling people were selling off their fishing quota to other people. But there was this one fact in it that was something like, you know, a fifth of Scotland's fishing quota is technically allocated to this one wooden boat.
And like, and then the company was obviously then selling off it's right for other people. And it was just this thing that I was like, you could get a picture of the boat. You could see the boat. This is obviously due because the, it tells the whole story of this incredibly complicated financial instrument just in this one picture of the rickety boat.
And that's always what I'm looking for when I do investigations or try and tell really complicated stories. What's the one image that kind of brings it down to a size that you can kind of, you can comprehend. It's one of the reasons that like sex scandals are. Damaging always were right Because everybody can understand what it is to cheat on your HU husband or wife or to fancy your brother's wife or whatever it might be.
Like. Those are very human sized fallibilities, right? Whereas very complicated financial frauds with no, you know, like the subprime mortgage crash, right? It's the great thing that Michael Lewis did in writing his book about that was he came up with a frame about, here are all these weirdos who were the only ones who therefore didn't follow the herd.
And that's a human sized story of like, oh, if you're an outsider, then maybe you'd see things that other people don't see and then you can then talk about credit default swaps and a load of other stuff that would make your eyes cross if you had to try and listen to it dry.
Adaam: And this goes to the whole mechanical allure of gurus, cuz the people who are drawn to them originally show up for the ideas.
Something intrigued them, fascinated them, captured them. But then they stay for the charisma of the person, which in turn, Affects the guru themselves because either captured by audience or incentives are now focused on maintaining this parasocial connection with their audience, often at the expense of the original ideas.
And then back to the audience who now see the grew themselves rather than the ideas as the embodiment of whatever it was that was absent in their lives before.
Helen: You definitely see it in the, um, have you ever, have you seen, do you know if I say the liver, Is that a name that makes sense to you? I've heard you
Vanessa: talk about the Liver King, but I actually didn't know who he was.
except that he's king. Not weird. Apparently I . He's what? He smells weird. I think I heard
Helen: in one of your podcasts Oh yes, . Oh yes. No, Chris Williamson had to sit on a couch after Germany. So, um, but he's a huge jacked guy and his whole thing is like pri he's hello primal. So it's all about teaching men to get in touch with her, like in a caveman.
And um, you know, and then he sells a whole range of supplements. So like, this is raw goats, whatever it might be. But, but when he got caught out for taking steroids, , and it was like, oh, so it's not the raw goat, it's thes. That's why you're so ripped. His entire, you know, you think this would be incredibly destructive to his mythology.
Right. His whole mythology, which is like, Hmm, I am angry and naked in the wilderness. No, it's not. I'm actually taking fistfuls of artificially created chemicals. Instead, what he managed to do was he did this amazing, about the most amazing apology since the mad one where Harvey Weinstein said he had to, um, pay people off cuz he'd wanted to fight the NRA or something.
Completely bons apology that obviously didn't work, but his deliver Kings Apology was all about the fact that he just cared so much about male suicide rates. Wow. But that's why he had to jupe people. He was like, I've been trapped in this lifestyle, you know, preaching this stuff. And I just felt such a responsibility to people.
Oh wow. And you see this all the time in sort of guru style apologies, right. Where it's like a pivot. I had to do this thing I, I just had, look I guilty Yes. Of caring too much. And that's how the Liver King's apology went. And it worked incredibly well. Cuz you're right, he had done exactly what you said, which is he embodied his brand and he had to find a way to pivot to how he.
Lying to his fans was also in some ways, embodying his brand and like, you know, it, it may very well have worked for
Vanessa: him. Right. Have you ever been heartbroken by a guru, Helen? Have you ever had someone that you be had became disenchanted with, that you had once held to high esteem?
Helen: No, I don't think that has happened.
And I think being a journalist is a really useful training for this, which is that I basically mistrust everybody. Um, , you know, like that's got great journalistic saying, which is like, even if your mother tells you she loves you, fact check it. Oh, I sort of feel like that about everything . Um, you get a second source.
Um, so I don't think there is a, a situation like that in
Adaam: preparation. I was telling Vanessa that this is the answer. I'm, I, I, I expect, I guess because there's a personality type that is drawn to journalism or rather, uh, this is this type of personality type that would interpret journalism as a skeptical, if not adversarial and antagonistic job.
A job that would disavow any kind of lionizing of an idea or a person. And maybe I'm just projecting, but I think this atic personality type is the one that's always a little more wary of the crowds than of ostracism.
Vanessa: Um, I cognizant that we have like about around 15 minutes le left that I have quickfire, like
Helen: let's do the quickfire round.
Well,
Vanessa: I'm curious cause I I mean we have like, we can either do quickfire round, we can do, I can tell you the buckets that I, we haven't gotten to and you can tell us which one you're more interested in talking about. Um,
Helen: well, you can pick, I don't mind. So whatever you are most interested in talking about.
Okay.
Vanessa: Well we did, we did mention the Jordan Peterson interview up at the top and I did wanna ask you not just about that interview, but about interviewing in general. Um hmm. Because I think you have an, a very interesting approach to interviewing that you're, from what I can tell from, from what I've been re reading and listening to, You are very good at adapting the interview style to the person that you're talking to.
Um, and we can, we can talk about that with, with Jordan Peterson, but also just in general, I think,
Helen: um, well I didn't do that very successfully, I have to say. Oh, you think, but yes. Oh, I
Vanessa: dunno. I dunno. I mean, like, we can get into it, but, um, I mean, for me it feels like you're, you're cognizant before you're either, or maybe it's a bit of both.
You're either cognizant before about like, what would be the rhetorical techniques to use with this person to kind of have a more effective interview. Or maybe in the moment you're intuitively mirroring a bit about how to engage. And I'm curious, first of all about how you kind of approach interviewing.
And second of all, if in our kind of current political climate, you're more aware of the stakes of being confrontational versus conciliatory in
Helen: your. Oh, definitely because you get, uh, you know, pelted, whatever you do, right? If you interview people who have unsympathetic or political opinions or extremists, some people don't think you should interview them at all.
Like I'm talking about anti-vaxxers, for example. And there will always be armchair generals who think they could have done it much better, uh, and will put pick faults with your performance. But I like interviewing because it's a kind of genuine interaction with another consciousness that happens in real time.
Like it's a performance, but it's also a kind of dance. Um, and you have to try and think about your arc of the interview. But what's your immediate next question gonna be? How are you reacting to the question? Listening to? And also the things that what builds rapport with the interviewee, like what do you actually have in common is a really good thing to ask yourself before you interview somebody.
So when I interviewed James Lindsay, for example, somebody who people think is quite extreme, I knew that we have both been. Experience of being kind of counsel and who, who is James Lindsay for the people like me. So he's a intellectual, dark web adjacent guy who was part of the grievance studies hoax, where they, through sort of people sort of exiled from academia as they would put it, um, submitted academic journals to, you know, in on social justice subjects with the aim of proving the academic journals were kind of, you know, ideologically captured.
And he's been through a trajectory which we cover in the program, episode five, which, you know, he , this is the phrase that I think encapsulates you, spent too much time on the internet, ended up on Twitter, arguing with the Auschwitz Memorial. Just I think that, you know, says log off and I put this to him and, and like, the thing is that he is always and has since
Adaam: refocused his energies on calling people groomers online.
Helen: Yes, he's very big into groomer discourse. But like, the thing that's interesting about James is we obviously have both been through this experience of, of kind of cancellation, whatever you wanna call it, and like knowing what it's like to feel ostracized and have a kind of meas around. I think that's how I put it to him, but also, You know, I think you have, your interviews aren't stupid.
And so James knows that I've come from the bbc, that I'm gonna make some criticisms of him, that I'm probably gonna say he's quite extreme in his views. And so the best thing to do to, to my mind in those situations is to be really honest and just to say, look, people are gonna say this is really nuts.
Why? Why did you do it? You must have had a reason for doing it. That I don't understand. Like, what is that reason? Because fundamentally that is the question you're there to answer. And I don't think Gotcha questions really work. Um, and you shouldn't try and do them really, because people are very wise for them and savvy and it's a performative thing.
The most interesting thing always is to try and understand why somebody thinks completely differently to you, rather than trapping them into looking stupid, which is a kind of momentary sugar rush. But no one's really learned anything or, or moved their advanced, their understanding of the issue at all.
Vanessa: Mm-hmm. . And you feel like you weren't able to. To take that approach with Jordan Peterson. Like, what, what, what are you talking more
Helen: than just from my very first question where I said something like, you know, why are so many people buying what you're selling? He just took massive, massive offense as if I was accusing him of being a grifter, which wasn't what I meant at all. Really. Like, to me that was a question about why are you so popular? Like, what is it about you that's connected with the current moment, which is in some ways an incredibly softball question. Like, you know, why are you so beloved? Isn't the way of phrasing that. Right. But it was something about the way that I had phrased it that just obviously was like a little bit of grit in his eye and he, he was quite, um, you know, quite hard going from that point onwards. Mm-hmm. ,
Vanessa: do you thrive on that kind of. A bit more confrontational debate type discourse because AAM is Israeli. He loves that stuff. He like will
Helen: leave. I've got an Israeli friend who is extremely argumentative. Yes. Terrifying.
Vanessa: And it's like, it's like a, it's like an amping up experience. Whereas I'm, I have a, I have the opposite. I have a, oh God, it's happening. We're getting into this. Oh no. Um, where are, where are you on that, uh, spectrum and, and how did it influence your approach to that particular interview?
Helen: By very, a weird coincidence. I was discussing this with a friend earlier today. Specifically my appetite for confrontation because I've got a, a very odd thing going on, which is that I have a, I think an unusually high appetite for confrontation, particularly for a woman or like tolerance for it.
Like a, you know, that I, I cannot, I just, if there's a button that you shouldn't press cuz it'll get you in trouble. I'm just like, but I wanna press the button though. I just wanna press, oh, I press the button . And so I kind of can't stop myself, which is obviously intention with my desire for a quiet life, but also now is in tension with the fact that I. Pretty battered by the last couple of years, particularly, you know, online. Um, and so I do have a slight kind of, you know, tense feeling about getting into arguments because I worry that someone's gonna kind of come after me and try and ruin my life because of them. Right. I think that's the thing that's interesting.
Like, it is interesting you evoke Israeli culture, right? Like the idea is you'll get together over dinner, like you're all friends, but you have a proper dingdong fully, you know, great rag, but at the end of it, you're still friends, right? And that's the bit that I think I no longer feel like is, is true.
And maybe that's good, right? Because actually there are some subjects on which you shouldn't all be friends about. So, you know, these, these things have genuine real world stakes. But yeah, I don't enjoy arguing as much as I, I used to just because I think I've got a kind of trauma response to it basically.
Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Vanessa: Yeah. Um, one thing that I did wanna ask you about that, that interview in particular is, so , one of the things that really struck me is that you asked him a, a question that, um, or rather
he asked you a question, which was something along the lines of, how do you prove that our society is patriarchal?
And I was so mind blown by that moment because like, for me, it's just so, to me, self-evident that I had never actually taken the time to qu to query. How do, how does one prove that patriarchy exists? I'm curious, you've had four years to fall on this question. Um, if you've, if you've wanted to, but, uh, do you have a different answer now?
Like, how do you even, go ahead, go, go and answer a question like that?
Helen: I can't remember what my answer was, but I do think it's, it's actually really not a bad question to ask. Right? Right. And you should, something that you should be able to answer. In fact, I wrote a whole book about feminism, right? Called Difficult Women, um, in which I go back to things like angles, the origins of the family, like there are, there is really good intellectual work about the fact that current society is structured around the exploitation of female reproductive.
See, this is you, I'm getting a bit technical in my language, but you know what I mean? Like, it's not a very easy reproduction. But basically the Handmades Tale is a really good example of it, right? Like women as a resource. And the fact is that, you know, through traditional societies, if you're Genghis Calm, what you want is lots of women to pay you lots of babies, and then you can control your territory.
So women are a resource to be controlled and exploited. And you see that with, you know, the. Rape and impregnation is a weapon of war, right? The idea that you can wipe out an opposing religion by, you know, by forced impregnation. So it, it does all come down to that, essentially to female biology. Um, and, and the fact that for men, for all their enormous upper body strength and, you know, all this sort of kinda stuff cannot have babies on their own.
The kind of great fundamental paradox of, of the strength of masculinity is that there is also this kinda absence or lack at the heart of it. So that's, you know, but then I went into the question about saying why do, well, why, why do women take their husband's names then? Um, because there's a very obvious answer that was, you know, the, the, you had male line succession, you know, Kings went through the male line only in France.
You know, only, you know, only inherit through the male line. Only men can be leaders. All of this sort of stuff. And, you know, almost all religions, you know, only men are allowed to be, the only men can be Pope . You know, like, it's just, it just, it was one of those things where it was kind of mind blowing that you were like,
The thing is that he read it, I think is like there are no men who have any problems. That's what you're saying. And it's just not true. Is it like that that's, you know, so you can cite the fact that men make up the majority of the prison population. Men are the majority of people who are killed in violent confrontations by other men. You know, all of those things are true. Um, you know, men make up the majority of, of street homeless people, for example, like that. Like there are really big problems that men are facing and saying that the world is patriarchal is not the same as saying it's amazing to be a man. It's like it's winning the golden ticket of life. But I think there's the one of those things where it's like, actually you wanna kind of re really clear in your definitions and maybe people are talking at cross purposes and in that conversation,
Adaam: right.
It's worth remembering that the culture against which Jordan Peterson rose was basically Buzzfeed feminism too. Great phrase. Yeah. You know, the, this intellectual movement that saw men spreading as the worst manifestation of the patriarch.
Helen: But the thing about that was that, again, you can say this is a bit like cancer culture, right? That style of internet feminism, which I agree with you now in retrospect, looks unbearably. T twee was driven by the demands of the market. Did people wanna read articles about the, you know, four strip of women in refugee camps? No, they did not. Did they wanna read articles about how men were really annoying because they used your toothbrush and put it back again, like, yes. Yes, they did. And so like that was for a while. It was what it seemed like feminism was. It was a, that was a commercial creation, essentially. Right? That kind of I know what you mean. That kind of, I'm drinking male tears outta a mug trollish kind of thing. Or the kind of moaning, basically a lot of articles that could have been like, the problem here is my boyfriend and his annoying habits rather than actually a problem being the patriarchy. It was like, the patriarchy isn't leaving the Lucy up. Is it though, it's like specifically the man that you live with, . Uh, well,
Vanessa: I find that like, so
one of the things that I think is tricky in having conversations across, uh, party lines is when you invoke words like the patriarchy, it can, it can actually arrest the conversation, right? Like, just, just signaling that there are underlying power structures can kind of, kind of be like a, like put on the brakes. Like now we're gonna have to, like, there's a, there's like a closing off even, even if, if it's true. Right? Even if we can acknowledge that there's a historical paradigm that continues to influence today.
Um, So I don't, yeah, there's
Helen: lots of words that I don't use for precisely that reason cuz they 10 people out. I don't use toxic masculinity because it makes off the people go, oh, , you know, I don't, and I suddenly don't use toxic femininity. And again, I probably, like, I I, in the book I explain my theory of patriarchy is now like being much like a kind of ruined house that's been patched up right before women had the vote, you know, or were able to earn equal pay or you know, any of those kind of things. It was much more obvious patriarch was written into the very structures of our laws. Now it's a much more kind of fluid social force. It's maybe not so ing obvious go to Saudi Arabia. It's pretty damn obvious. Right. And that's where we were. Uh, you know, there's a great line about Margaret Atwood has about the Hammer's tale, which is like, everything that's in this book has happened to some woman at some time. Um, so you know that everywhere is in a different stage of its journey away from patriarchy, maybe in some cases in a journey back towards patriarchy because, you know, progress isn't always linear.
But yeah, I agree with you. Like I would avoid using. Woke because people find it pejorative. Again, heterodox, you know what I mean? If, if, if you are, if people, if there is things that people just feel are overused or cliched, then you wanna avoid them as a writer. And also just, you know, I'm always looking for kind of neutral language. Um, when you are, you know, it's very hard now that everything is politicized. Right. Do you refer to elective double mastectomies for children or do you refer to top surgery and like, which one are you pick of those has now signaled which side of the argument you're on? You know, do you say pregnant women or do you say pregnant people? You've already signaled a kind of political position and that's quite a cruel and, you know, counterproductive thing to have done to language, I think. Right. To, to take away any possibility of neutral terms.
Vanessa: You said earlier that uh, the reason why you started the, uh, church of Social Justice series was because someone had asked you if feminism had kind of replaced religion in your mind.
Um, was there a time period where feminism essentially was your religion? Or, or what, what was your relationship like with feminism then versus now?
Helen: I think it was as much my religion as religion ever was in that I wasn't ever particularly devout. Okay. And I wouldn't say I'm particularly devout feminist either.
and I've never been an activist either. Right. And I'm very clear about that. And like Kate Katie Herzer, blockchain reported, I remember her saying a while ago, she wouldn't describe herself as a feminist because she thinks there's a journalist you shouldn't describe herself as a member of any social movement.
And that really gave me pause for thought. And I think she has a really good point. It's a bit late for me now, but she has a very good point. Right. Which is probably a more accurate thing would be to say that I'm a historian of feminism. Um, or, you know, a journalist who focuses on feminism is an issue because feminism has got lots of, you know, it's got strands that are pro-sex work, it's got strands that are anti, you know, um, exploitation through prostitution, whatever you wanna say.
So it's, it's not a kind of easy label and it doesn't necessarily imply particularly, Obvious set of beliefs. You know, you can be any kind of number of different flavors. So I think that's always been the consistent problem, is I don't like to kind of, I'm not a joiner in, and I think that's a kind of, that's the kind of classic journalist thing.
That's how you know you're a journalist, right? If everyone else is having fun and you are kind of looking at them going, what are these humans doing and why? Why are they doing it? You know, like, how many times can you honestly in your life say you've been completely lost in the moment without any little bit of you going, well, that's interesting, isn't it?
I feel, I feel this emotion we call joy. Um, and that's the kind of great solace of being a writer and that you've always got a way to kind of distance yourself from a process, weird or uncomfortable things that happening to you. But it means that you're not, you somehow haven't got access to the unselfconscious ecstasy that some other people seem to feel, you know, whether it's through religion or through the righteousness of their dunks on.
Vanessa: Uh, yeah. I won't get, I won't get into this cause it's a whole minefield of conversation, but I mean, one of the things, uh, we had been thinking about when we pitched that series that was kind of new guru adjacent, uh, was the world of psychedelics and how that's a whole way that people feel like they can access new realms of consciousness that maybe they can't in everyday life.
And that, that, I won't get into it now, but that's something
Helen: we've been thinking about. No, but that makes a lot of sense. If you're a kinda an uptight person who would never fall on the floor and speak in tongues, then you take Myas and, oh look, you fall on the floor and you start speaking in tongues. It must be a, again, I guess again, a great relief in the burden of self-consciousness, which the internet does so much to foster in us, right?
That you're seeing all of your life as kind of pre-con. Like you look at a sunset and you don't think, what a lovely sunset. You think this is gonna look great on Instagram. You know, the way that it is has sort of ruined Yeah. Life in that, in that respect. Yeah. That's why I
Vanessa: got off Instagram and into podcasts.
Um, Helen, thank you so much for, for joining us. It's such a great conversation. Any, any final thoughts, words, wisdom, anything you wanna
Helen: shill? Yeah, I was gonna say, let me do my comprehensive shilling. Um, the new gurus by b bbc ra, um, radio sounds is available wherever you find your podcasts. Uh, you can find me at the Atlantic.
That's where I do my main writing. I also have a, because that's the law, which is Helen Lewis ck.com. Um, and I am, I'm so far 20 days clean on Twitter.
Vanessa: Wow. Congratulations. How's it? So, are you shaking? What's, how's it
Helen: going? Mm, no, I'm in, I'm in the sun, the upland phase now, where I've been through like three things that I was really incredibly annoyed by.
And I've resisted the temptation. I'm feeling strong. Okay. I'm feeling good.
Vanessa: Do you have like a pet that is getting the, uh, the aggression, like, ah, ?
Helen: No, I'm not screaming at a cat. Good. Don't worry. Uh, or my husband, um, no. What am I doing? Uh, I'm having long, healthy walks and I'm reading. Let me blow your mind Books.
Vanessa: Yeah, that this is a struggle for me. AAM actually reads like a book a week and I have read a book in about four years. It's
Adaam: terrible. Oh, oh yeah. I will say that the social media cleanse is probably the best thing that the pandemic has brought on me. Um, the discovery that there is, there really is a life outside.
Helen: So I'll end you on that note of, of like, it is great to touch grass. People aren't lying to you. Thank you, Helen. Thank you very much.
Adaam: Thank you for listening to Uncertain Things. We're at uncertain.dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. Share us with your friends and enemies and give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts if you are feeling in the mood.
Until next time, stay sane.