A Golden Age of Gurus

I'm Barry Weiss and this is honestly. (upbeat music) Over the last decade or so, the internet has devolved into a playground for influencers selling and showing off literally everything. - So this is where I get addicted to lip filler. I start wanting to look like a Bradstall mind-jump, still like 1670. - Two things that make people a lot confidence in themselves, shame and rejection. Both of these experiences make us shrink. They make us feel-- - Well, these are the things about women's health and women's hormones that we should know, but actually nobody teaches us. What's up? I'm Casey. I'm a functional nutritionist and I help menstruating women balance their hormones for easy and regular periods without restriction or restriction. - Hi sisters, James Charles here and welcome back to my YouTube channel. I hope you guys are all having an amazing week so far. I am very excited for today's YouTube video. Last year, I opened up a $500 makeup mystery box and how to sew much stuff. - Supplements, skin care, goji berry diets, menstrual cycle coaching, whatever that is. Ball tanning. I'm particularly obsessed with this woman who shoves her face into different bread products and then puts the videos up on Instagram. My guest today says, "These people aren't just superficial TikTok or Facebook stars, telling you how to properly contour your face so you look like a Kardashian or giving you advice on what new diet to follow." She argues that the internet has actually become a kind of digital revival tent and that that tent is full of gurus. In fact, she argues we're living in a golden age of gurus. - I'm Helen Lewis, a staff writer for The Atlantic and I think we're living through a golden age of gurus. - Atlantic writer Helen Lewis' latest podcast for the BBC, it's called The New Gurus, is an exploration of what it means to be a guru in the 21st century. - Everywhere you look online, people are giving and taking advice. Advice that they claim will transform your life. - The gurus will always say, "I have the secret wisdom they don't want you to hear." It makes it extra attractive, right? - As our trusted institutions waivers, we're looking to charismatic individuals to tell us how to live. - I became hugely taken with his thought and I was poor, the line kind of obsessed. - Individuals who are often outside the mainstream promising forbidden knowledge and alternative wisdom. - She profiles productivity hackers, dating coaches, crypto-brows, wellness influencers, diversity experts and heterodox intellectual heroes, all of whom are making a living, captivating millions of people with their unconventional ideas. - Okay, how can I find a way that makes me feel the most juicy and excited to be alive? And for me, it's like drinking my piss once a day makes me feel good. - I mean, to be perfectly blunt, a civil war and a world war seem pretty inevitable to me. - Tell me what are the kind of things I'm likely to be getting wrong out of cleanlessness. - I would actually say your question was gas lighting, Helen, because, cluelessness, cluelessness, fained ignorance, fained ignorance on the part of white people is foundational white supremacy. So I don't know, fained ignorance on the part of me. All of that is insanely fun to listen to. But the thing that I find so interesting and deeply relevant about Helen's series is that it helps explain why these figures are so appealing right now. What it is about our moment that is so ripe for people to believe in this stuff. She also exposes the limits of individual experts and the need for institutions. And this is something no surprise that I think about a lot. And I at risk of becoming a guru. How do you build new things that are response to decayed institutions while avoiding guru pitfalls like becoming a caricature of yourself or giving your audience exactly what they want to hear? So today, a conversation with Helen Lewis about who these new gurus are, about why they're saturating our social media feeds and inboxes, and about what, if anything, she's learned about fighting our worst instincts that the internet makes oh so easy to indulge. Stay with us. Helen Lewis, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. So Helen, you've got this new podcast on the BBC and it profiles everyone from a guy who drinks his own urine to a woman who believes that civil war is coming because she's reading it in the stars. And then a lot of people in between those two people, you have productivity hackers, you have dating coaches, you have crypto-brows, wellness influencers, you have diversity experts, you have heterodox intellectual heroes who imagine themselves to be uncovering for bit in truths. And what all of these people have in common at least according to you is that they're all gurus. These online prophets are telling us how to eat, how to think, how to get rich, how to find love, how to manage our time. These are the new gurus. And in fact, you believe that we're living in a kind of golden age of gurus. So just to start off, what is a guru? 'Cause I think of that word and I think Swami or guy in a yoga loincloth. What is it according to you? Well, that's not, I mean, that is the original meaning. In Sanskrit, it means "dispeller of darkness," "bringer of light." So the idea was you were a spiritual teacher, and a one-to-one teacher. You had these great revelations and you would pass them on to the person, and you would give them their own personal yoga to follow in life, which was that set them on their life's path. And the modern version of that is people on the internet who set you on their life's path. So I was looking at all of these different areas. And as you say, they're quite disparate, but the one thing they have in common is that they're not just somebody offering you tips, like top tips about diet. There's a kind of ethos and a philosophy and a kind of quasi-religion behind all of them. What got you interested in this as a subject? I love weird communities on the internet, and I always have done. I was involved in body modification communities in my teens, which I know now I look like an extremely normy elder millennial, but I hung out in a piercing studio, and then I hung out in online spaces where people were sort of putting nails through bits of themselves and stuff like that. And so that gave me an insight into communities that are deliberately alternative. They pride themselves on being alternative. And that's what you see in both positive and negative ways with lots of the gurus, right? They aren't mainstream and they don't want to be mainstream. They regard the mainstream often as compromised or sheep-all, or all these phrases that get used about the elites or even the matrix. This kind of idea that people are locked into these very old ways of thinking. And they've been enlightened. That's a phrase that comes up a lot. This idea of a spiritual awakening and enlightenment. So you're not drawn to them necessarily because you want to dispel them, or because you're deeply suspicious of them, but maybe in part because you might have imagined an earlier point in your life being drawn into one of these communities. Well, yeah, I've been on a search for meaning, I guess. I was raised Catholic, and I've done a bit of work about feminism since then, and someone did ask me whether or not they thought my childhood religion had been replaced by kind of politics, essentially, which I thought was an interesting question. And so everybody has kind of loadstars in their life, whatever they might be. And lots of Americans and lots of Brits too, traditional religion is on the way. And people are going less frequently to church, synagogue, whatever it might be. And so these guys are in some ways taking the place of your local priest or vicar or rabbi, telling you how to live. You know, they have that kind of a level of profound influence on people. I mean, my sort of intellectual lineage is from feminism and also from New Atheism, I was very big into that in the 2000s, as so many of us were. And being a journalist, I mean, I know you feel it's quite strongly. It's like the idea that I actually, I sort of don't want to belong. I think that's kind of compromising. I think, you know, not to say journalists should be complete sociopaths, but I think you can't. Although many are. Yes. Right. You don't have to be a sociopath to work here, but it helps. But, you know, but the idea that you want approval is poison to a journalist, really, right? You have to be somebody who actively rejects praise, to some extent. Whilst also, obviously, being a massive nalcistic craves it, or you wouldn't write things down and put them on the internet, it's attention. Okay, let's start where you start with the podcast. So where exactly did all these gurus come from? That's what this episode is all about. I have a theory because I think there's one man more than any other who's responsible, a man who's sought enlightenment, a man who is himself a guru to many devoted followers, and a man who built the technology on which our modern gurus rely. Steve Jobs, the man behind the iPhone and the Mac. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And this is a revolution of the first order to really bring the real internet to your phone. How exactly do we get this? You make the case, and I think this is so interesting and surprising in your first episode, that the birth of the new age of gurus begins with Steve Jobs of all people. Tell us that story. Well, I think that the age of new gurus is about a coalescence of technology, economics, and ideology. And Steve Jobs marks the beginning of that. So he was a kind of second generation hippie. He was around in the '70s wanting to travel to India and get his own personal guru. And he meant that in the original sense of finding one guy. So he goes to India and turns up at this ashram. And because they don't have the internet, they don't have Google Maps. They don't have a website for the ashram. The guys died the previous year, and he never finds his guru. But he met Larry Brilliant, who I really wanted to include in the series, because he's both somebody's deeply spiritual, but also a rationalist and a scientist who was involved in the campaign. to eradicate smallpox. So this isn't an anti-religious series. You know, lots of people marry religion and a commitment to truth and facts. But what happened with Steve Jobs is that he was always on this quest. He did mucusless diets. He did primal scream therapy. There's a great anecdote, which didn't make it into the podcast that Dan Cocky told us about the fact that there was a local Zen monastery. And one of the early Apple computers, Steve Jobs was delighted with it. And he turned up at this Zen monastery. It was like, showed one of the monks, like, look at my amazing computer. And the guys, I don't believe in material possessions. I am not going to be an Apple customer for the very good reason that I'm a Zen monk. And actually, what then happens is that the minimlist ascetic of Apple is very influenced by Zen and Eastern practices. And also the idea that Apple became a cult. The people used to call it the cult of Apple. That owning an Apple and a Mac somehow made you better than a PC user. You were cool, you were hippo. You weren't using the normie computer there. Everyone else was using. As you know, Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet. The MacBook and the MacBook Pro. These are the standards in the industry by which competitive products are judged. Well, today we're introducing a third kind of notebook to call the MacBook Air. [APPLAUSE] Which is very funny now that Max is completely ubiquitous and not to kind of hipster thing at all. But that was very much how they were marketed and sold. And then you get to the end of the story. And what happens is that at his funeral, Steve Jobs gave everybody out a book. And the book that he gave them was autobiography of a yogi by Yogananda. And Yogananda had followed a similar path to him, which is that he had looked for spiritual enlightenment in India, become a guru, and then had moved to America where he found very fertile terrain, and had got a radio show. This new technology that led him to spread his message. And so there's an echo there between him and what Steve Jobs did inventing the smartphone, on which I now spend fully seven hours of my day, every day, and completely changing the way that we connect with the world and with other people. And you wouldn't have that world of gurus without the intimate connection that we have with our screens. So in other words, there are kind of two things going on with jobs. One is that he empowered these emerging gurus through the technology he developed, like the iPhone. And the other thing is that he became a guru himself, even though as you cite in your show, that was the last thing he claimed he wanted, right? He infamously said, "Kill me if I become a guru." So what are the people that you spoke to for this series who knew Jobs well, make of that, and the way it all shook out? I think they felt that he was always on a kind of quest for enlightenment. And that they also saw that he had this mission to, has he called it, "Put a dent in the universe." He thought that your life could impact others in those incredibly profound ways, and being spiritual as part of that, which makes him more interesting than the kind of usual American arch capitalist, right, who just exist to make money. There was a kind of spiritual project behind Apple, another one that was about kind of clarity and connection. And he saw it as profoundly democratizing process. The idea that when he, in the '70s, computers were out of reach of normal homeowners. And so bringing that level of power to the people was as he saw it, this kind of great democratic project. And that's what we're still reckoning with now, particularly with social media, right? Is that traditional gatekeeping has been broken down. You no longer have to own a printing press in order to get your message out. And that's brought enormous benefits. But it has also brought enormous challenges too. And we are really at the beginning of learning how to adjust our brains to deal with this incredibly information heavy world that we're living in. Steve Jobs is, I think, the first CEO I remember that had a signature look. It was the combo rate of the black turtle neck and the jeans and these brown glasses. And it gave you this distinct sense that this guy isn't just, as you put an arch capitalist, a CEO, he is a brand. More than that, he is Apple. He embodies it. And of course, beyond his appearance is his reputation for sort of like ruthlessness and a ruthless commitment to excellence. And to me, he's sort of looking back on it. One of the first examples of how a brand and its guru and chief get conflated, which now applies to so many CEOs, especially in tech today, Zuckerberg and Facebook, of course, Amazon and Bezos, but more than any other, I would say, Elon Musk and SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter. So when do you cross over? When does a brand become a guru? When does a guru become a brand? And what dangers do you see in the way that the two have become ever more conflated? That's a really interesting question to me, because my other project at the moment is I'm writing a book on genius. And the basic premise of that among lots of other things that I'm exploring is the idea of the kind of great man theory of history. The history depends on these great men coming along, which is a Victorian idea. And what happens, of course, is that every generation someone comes along and debunks it, and you have generations of historians going, well, I think social forces are actually quite important. And every generation, instead, we go back to looking at charismatic individuals and ascribing big changes to them. I have to say, maybe I should be embarrassed about this. I sort of believe the great men theory of history. And then I read SPQR, Mary Beard's book, and I'm like, no, it's the revolutionaries from the bottom. But you can't imagine Tesla or SpaceX happening without Elon or Apple happening without Steve Jobs. That's very true, but they might have happened in different ways. We might have a kind of convergent evolution where you get to the same paths without the different people, which is actually one of the premises of Malcolm Global's book, "Outliers the Section on Tech," there, and Steve Johnson's work on innovation, that you have what's called the adjacent possible. So things become all the conditions slot into place for something to happen. And for YouTube, it's like the ability to stream incredibly fast. You need that before someone can invent YouTube. And there's a very famous scientific paper from 1922 about concurrent discoveries. Lots of-- like, three people discovered the existence of oxygen in the same year, for example, because all the conditions were there. And it's a very hard thing to hold in your brain at once, that that is both the social process, but that talented people are still incredibly important. And we-- and host hoc, we will always attach stories to them about how they did it. But yeah, you're right. Elon Musk is a very good example, because he is-- the brand is, I don't give a shit. You know, this is a power fantasy. This is super cool. And there are ways-- and this makes me very impopular on the left to say that, in some ways, what Elon Musk has done has been very good for environmentalism, right with Tesla, because there was an argument for electric cars, which was like burning fossil fuels is killing the planet. Sorry, eat your greens. You've got to-- you've got it well. But I think-- and Arnold Schwarzenegger, weirdly is the other person who is very good at this, right? He has rebranded electric vehicles and a plant-based diet. We don't say vegetarian anymore, because that sounds-- As much a hortic. But no, I eat a plant-based diet, and I have much better erections, and my muscles are great. It's a way to get men to eat carrots, it turns out. Exactly. And you like for the good of the planet that we should all be eating less meat and burning less fossil fuels. So making stuff that people need to do cool is a good-- that, and that's my entirely non-cancel opinion why the left should praise Elon Musk. They're going to come with me on that one. OK, so in the show, you talk about how we're living through a golden age of gurus. But it strikes me that there's a lot of other times in history that we could also characterize that way. I'm thinking, of course, of the '60s and the '70s, especially in this country. So why is this a golden age of gurus? And why is it particularly happening right now? I think there are a couple of different things. One is the age of anxiety. And you know, I think gurus bring up where people are really feeling that social norms are in flux, knowledge is in flux, and they need to be told what to do. They need some guidance. And so lots of-- you know, the manosphere, these sort of men's rights activists, is a very potent source of gurus. And you can see that as a reaction to successive waves of feminism, the way that more women have come into the workforce. What does it mean to be a man today, if it doesn't mean to be a breadwinner? It doesn't mean to be a patriarch. You know, so they're feeling that kind of anxiety. So I think that's definitely part of it. And then the second thing is the technological aspect. There was a kind of hard ceiling on the number of people who could have a show on the nightly news in America in the 1960s. And there is no hard limit now on the number of people who can have a YouTube channel. And so you get these top level gurus that we might all have heard of people at Russell Brand. But you also get people who've got a couple of thousand subscribers and are making a reasonable income on that. So it has fleshed out the ability to make money all the way down the chain. So let's get into some of the other aspects that have given rise to these specific types of gurus. And I think a huge part of it, which you touched on before, is the decline in religion, which coincides with the rise of social justice experts, maybe in place of where the pastor or the priest or the rabbi used to be. Last year, for the first time in American history, studies showed that House of Warship membership dropped below 50% with just 47% of Americans reporting that they belonged to a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. Now for context, that number was 70% in 1999. Do you see the rise of the online guru as a kind of substitute for organized religion? Are people attracted to Abraham Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or-- and there's many other people from your series we could name-- because they're trying to fill what Durkheim called the God-shaped hole in their hearts? Yeah, I maybe don't even a God-shaped hole, but I would say a worship-shaped hole. What's interesting to me, because I find it very hard to understand and access, is a desire to really believe in someone and worship them and hold them up and make a hero of them. And I guess maybe it's my cold rotten heart from too many years in journalism, but I very reluctant to believe in people, because then they have the possibility of disappointing you. And one of the things that's very interesting to me is lots of people you talk to who are of fans and followers have maybe cycled through a few different things that they believe in. That's-- of interesting to me, but what they're looking for, you know, they're always kind of searching for something, looking for something. And the odd thing about that, that I didn't expect going into it, is that a lot of the gurus are like that too. People are gurus of multiple things. In episode six, we talk about Tom Tarrero, the daygamer, the pick-up artist. Happy Independence Day to all you bachelors, to all you cats, to all you nomads who are not tied down, who are not needy. This is Tom Tarrero, not his birth name, but we'll get to that later. In the world of online relationship advice, he was once a well-known name. Around 2010, he set himself up as a dating guru on YouTube. Specifically, he was a daygamer. Valentine's Day, the day of the year, which makes me feel nauseous. It's a day where we celebrate weekmen, men who are groveling, men who are needy. Daygamer is a technique used by pick-up artists. It means you talk to a woman during the day, on the street, and you try to get her number, get a date, get her to have sex with you. A daygamer should be relentless. He should have a strategy to overcome any initial reluctance. For a while. And he, in his 20s, wanted to be a Greek Orthodox monk, and then he eventually ends up as a pick-up artist. So he goes from wanting to be celibate, to teaching young men how to sleep with as many women as possible with these sort of slightly coercive techniques. And you're kind of like. I mean, I keep thinking, like, do you like sex or not? Like, where do you stand on that issue? But the thing that was interesting, of course, that both of them, was that both of them gave him the same kind of role in life, that people would listen to him. He would be an authority figure. He would get to kind of hold forth and be special. And like, one of the things I always think about the internet is it has confronted us with the vastness of how many other people there are in the world, how unspecial we are. And so lots of the kind of weird refluvia that you see in the way that people categorize their identity is a reassertion of their specialness and uniqueness and the need to put labels on themselves to say, "No, I'm not one of the herd. I'm me. I'm a whole individual person." One of the things that I've been really interested in over the past few years, both personally and also just as a phenomenon, is the way that social justice has come to stand in as a kind of religion for many people. I'm wondering what you make of that idea. Yeah, well, that's the funny thing, isn't it? Is that you can think of. You know, and I said this in my previous document for the BBC, which is called the Church of Social Justice, that you can see white privilege or male privilege as being like original sin. You are born already at a deficit that you kind of have to make up for. That is of kind of inherently Christian idea that you need to have this sort of washed away. And indulgences is a very good way of looking at it because that in the medieval church you were able to pay some money to the Pope to then do bad things. And that's an idea that is obviously incredibly appealing to humans. As is the idea that in any ideology you get, whether it might be communism or social justice or a religion, that it licenses you to do cruel things because they're good for the people who are you being cruel to. And I always felt like that about watching Twitter pylons was I remember saying it was. Oh, I now understand how the inquisition happened because lots of people want to see people punished and feel good about it, right? The combination of sadism and righteousness, I had never actually seen it in the wild and that's at a Lord of the Flies sense before. But it helped me intuitively understand that very deep human impulse, I guess, to punish the out group, or punish the scapegoat. There's an episode, I think it's called White Woman Tears, where you talk about a phenomenon that I think a lot of people will be shocked to hear about, which is this idea that you pay to go to a dinner in which you're called racist, explain to people what happens at these dinners. And I wonder if the impulse for people to go to them is sort of similar as the Catholics who would sort of pay gold coins to get themselves out of purgatory. Or people who'd ostentatiously like flagellate themselves in the streets and all that kind of religious demonstration of virtue through pain. I was fascinated by racism and I have been since I first read about it. So it is two women to Americans and they, you know, for now, five thousand pounds, you organize a dinner, you have it catered and then you are put through a kind of struggle session, essentially, where they say anyone who's racist, raise your hand. I raise my hand because I'm institutionally anti-black. And all the white ladies look at Regina like, oh my God, you're working with an evil anti-black woman to which Regina always says, and black people know it. We know that every person, every immigrant who comes to this country is made to believe that they are better than black people. You know, I, and the premise being, of course, that you are a racist and even if you won't admit the racist, that's more proof that not only you are racist, but you're also in denial about it, which is even worse. And the episode is called "White Women's Tears", which is a chapter title from Robin DiAngelo's but "White Fragility", because it struck me that this was a particularly female thing. And I connected it with the women's magazines that I read growing up as a teenager, right, which were like, has had to lose weight to not be repulsive. You know, here's how to get rid of all your body hair so that men won't hate you. The idea that the kind of condition of femaleness is sort of shame and guilt. And I just did not think that you could get eight men to pay five thousand pounds or five thousand dollars to be told that they were awful. You know, it doesn't, it's a sort of masochism to it that I think is quite gendered. And I didn't connect it to this, but I could have done the entire, if you remember, the great Karen discourse of 2020. - I do. - Which was, basically, people had discovered that they could say things that were, seemed like sort of basically old-fashioned misogyny, but if you put the word "white" in front of them, it was magically now an incredibly incisive social critique. And that's deeply bound up in it too. The idea that women have to apologise constantly that they're in the wrong, and they shouldn't claim authority, and they shouldn't take up space. You know, the fact that the women's movement is basically constantly asked to put all the other movements first. It should actually be a racial justice movement. It should actually be a trans-arrowed movement. It should actually be basically the sort of mum of the world going around and picking up everyone else's socks off the floor. And if you say, "Well, actually, women have got some problems that I'd really like to see addressed." That's, actually, we all know you haven't really had a few ladies. You're all doing incredibly well, and you should sort of stop complaining. So I love the gender aspect to that, that ran underneath that. I find that fascinating. One of the things that surprised me in sort of the way that you covered the anti-racist movement is your. That, I don't want to say sympathy for you, Brum Kendi, but you seem to have a sort of respect for him that maybe even surprised you. One of the things I'm trying to explore in this series is why some people connect with audiences, really big audiences. People have said a lot of things, but I think two things that has been consistent has been the clarity of my work. And then secondly, the vulnerability, you know, of my books, particularly the last two. I think most people don't like being lectured to, but I also think people want to be better. What intrigues me about Ibrahimek's Kendi is that for a guru, he seems pretty grounded. That surprises me because like many of the gurus were covering in this series. Yeah, and I'm very clear about the fact he's a fellow Atlantic writer, so maybe that affects my sympathy for him. But I also. I like his thoughtfulness. And you know, I encountered him in real life rather than on Twitter. I know he's had some sparring matches with John McWerter, for example. And you know, that's the similar story you could tell about Jordan Peterson, right? The people who've encountered Peterson through his books or see a very different version than the people who've seen his tweets. But the thing I felt about Ibrahim Kendi and reading the books as well was that there was a kind of stillness and quietness and an attempt to be thoughtful about things. And I do profoundly disagree with some of his ideas. The idea of a department, frantic racism, is not only I think sort of wrong, but I can't. The idea of it. I've just come back from spending quite a bit of time in Florida, but the idea that you could make it happen in America, you know, you can't even put in a sort of vaccine mandate. So you're never going to be able to get institutional funding for frantic racist department. But you know, he's a public intellectual. He's supposed to be thinking. I guess I wonder though if there's a potential pitfall where. where someone like Ibrahim Kendi can kind of get softer treatment or get a little bit of a pass, because his aesthetics are better, because he's more buttoned up, because he's more sober sounding, because he's more intellectual sounding, as opposed to the women of race to dinner, who frankly sound like, just absolutely insane, hysterical people. Whereas Ibrahim Kendi's ideas are actually much. have much more traction and are much more impactful on the culture than theirs are. And I wonder if there's a tendency to give him a pass, simply because of aesthetics, really. And when he's. There's a moment in the podcast that I was like, "Oh, shit, I wish Helen Lewis dug in on this. We're you're pressing him. You're an anti-capitalist. You claim that racism and capitalism are kind of conjoined twins, or however he phrases it. And yet you're going and giving speeches to corporations for $20,000 or more." How anti-capitalist are you if you're taking $20,000 to speak to a merchant bank? How do you deal with that question? And he says. I deal with it largely because I understand that corporations are made up of people. I know we like to imagine corporations as these fixed entities, but they're not. They're made up of people, and they're made up of policies. Corporations are people, which makes them sound like a Republican who believes in citizens united. And I'm just like. Great endorsement of citizens united, yeah. The difficulty with it is, you know that famous cartoon on the internet that's like, "I see you have some criticisms of society, yet you participate in society. Curious." I love that. Right, we all do it. I have criticisms of the liberal media, and yet I'm employed by a liberal media institution blah blah blah, like I criticize the BBC. So, you know, none of us are living these morally pure, perfect lives where we live. we just live in a whole, like don't, you know, only eat vegetables that we've grown ourselves. So I think you have to take that into account. But the other thing is the fact that, you know, he has been involved in fundraising for the Boston Center for Anti-Races Research, you know, I think there are people I think who are living in much more obviously like their big gold yacht. Well, let's go back to why this is the golden age of gurus. I think another, so it's high anxiety, high uncertainty, loss of religion. I think also a tremendous loss of trust. People seem to have lost trust in absolutely everything. According to recent Gallup polling, 7% of Americans say they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the media. Pew research shows that public trust in government is near historic lows, with just two in 10 Americans say that they trust government to do what's right. And even in terms of interpersonal trust, 80% of Americans think we have two little confidence in each other. What's the connection is you see it between living in a time of high social distrust and the rise of gurus? Well, I think that there is an idea that you want things to go back to being human sized again, and that the world is happening. You know, if I buy something from Amazon and it doesn't work, I sort of shout into the void. The lives of people living 50 years ago where they knew their bank manager, well, they knew their doctor. You know, you had a family doctor that delivered all your babies and knew you inside it. You know, we're living these much more, you know, in some ways much more free, but also much more depersonalized these days. And I can see that leads to a loss of trust. And you know, I've shared a lot of your criticisms about the American media and its polarization. And the fact that there is a big hole in the middle where people should be talking to each other. And instead, you've got a very left media, you know, significantly to the left of the general population and then another one significantly to the right of the general population. So you do have a lot of people who are sitting there thinking, you know, where is the media that reflects me? And Barack Obama talked about this very well when he was interviewed by my boss, Jeff Goldberg, about the idea that when he was in his first campaign in 2008, he used to go to like a little local town. And he would meet the editor of the local newspaper. He might have been a Republican, right? But he was in a little bow tie and he would get a fair hearing from him. And that's been replaced. That's been replaced by talk radio stations that are incredibly partisan. That's been replaced by Fox, which has a very strong right-wing agenda. And those people do not want to hear a kind of, well, we don't agree with them on everything, but like, here are some good things and some bad things. They want bang, bang, bang. He's evil. He's the devil. He's born a board, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I think, you know, that polarization is also a big part of it, but it's also a desire to get things back to the size of a village again. You know, can I trust the New York Times? Is there a different question? Can I trust this guy on the internet who seems to be quite nice and quite approachable and normal? And I see a lot of his personality. That's the other thing, right? Is that we almost move back to a stage where brands are actually people-sized, I guess. Right? I wonder how this connects, though, to the age of personal technology that we're living through and the fact that there's a lot of people, especially the older generation who's like yearning for the Halcyon days of Walter Cronk, when everyone trusted him. And of course, the difference then and now is we couldn't fact-check him. We couldn't go on Twitter and like look at the source material that he was talking about. I'm really interested, I guess, in the connection between the democratization of information and the rise of distrust, because the very thing that has allowed us to sort of do our own research and get our own facts on the one hand has been an incredible thing. And on the other hand, it's made us see flaws of the gatekeepers, you know, and the kind of information that they have suppressed or kept out or twisted ever so slightly for their own political biases. I do think there is something particular about the internet and social media that makes you the protagonist of whatever story is happening. And what's the stuff that does really well on Twitter? It's like tell me your age without telling me your age and you get to say something about yourself, right? Or like, you know, here are the three movies that remind me of myself for the way I'm tick-tock the people duets stuff. And it's just like anything where you can get people to basically put themselves into the story so they're the protagonist of it becomes incredibly important. And that is what happens with the most successful of the gurus, I think, is that they say that, you know, there is a crusade that they're on and people need to join them. And you definitely see the rise of what I think of as kind of, you know, citizen journalism and often ends up being kind of like these multi-player role-playing games. I remember this happening first time I noticed it was with the Boston Marathon bombing, where a Reddit community were convinced that this guy who turned that eventually killed himself was the person and they hunted him down. And True Crime Podcasts, which is a kind of extremely amusing to me that some of the quote-unquote's "woke as people in media make true crime podcasts," right? Which are often turned into slightly unpleasant, raking over, of, you know, often young white women's lives in order to kind of, you know, work out who's the killer and you get to be involved in it because you're playing the police detective in this. It's like a video game. And, you know, that tendency I find quite interesting too, but it's anything that can put you at the heart of the story. Not just boil the series for people who haven't listened yet, but talk to me about the epic levels of distrust in society and how that winds up to a man drinking his own urine. Yeah, it's not the most obvious thing, but it's difficult, isn't it? I remember once having a conversation with a really great editor here in England about the Thalidomides scandal, which if you know there was a drug that was prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness, that ended up causing birth defects. And what happened with that was that the Sunday Times under Harold Evans broke open that story. And I remember him, the editor, I was talking to you saying that in a way it was incredible story, but it ruined a generation of journalists because they were right. The medical establishment did lie to them, you know, they were wrong. They said there's no problem here, you know, and after that was broken, they'd struggled ever to believe in it. Again, and one of the journalists who was involved in that Christopher Booker then became a very prominent climate change denier. And it was because he could no longer believe what he was being told by any establishment. And I think that's a similar thing that once you lose trust in one thing it's gone forever. And it's one of the reasons that I talk and write a bit about gender and when it comes to things like child transition, for example, because I find it very hard when I read stories that are, I think, sort of ideologically rather than science led in the mainstream liberal press, then, you know, I've known that other people have been essentially kind of read piled by that because they think, well, if you're getting this wrong, if you're reporting on this from an ideological rather than an evidence-based perspective, what else are you covering up from me? For other people, it was maybe the Iraq war. For others, it was cloth masks or the idea, yeah, I mean, there was everyone has their own moment, but it's so true that once you sort of spot the initial lie, what's to prevent you from sort of falling down the rabbit hole and thinking that the entire thing is a palace of lies? And I think COVID has been incredibly radicalizing to lots of people for that reason because, when I don't entirely blame the scientific establishment, they had constantly updated information, but you did through that wobble on our masks, useful, are they not like do-class masks? And they didn't manage to find a narrative way of saying, like, we're giving you the best view we've got at the moment and here's another one, you know, in like, here's an update. And when I talked to people in Florida, you know, they all cite that Rachel Maddo, where she's like, you know, the vaccine stopped transmission dead. And that was the kind of receptive, received a wisdom, particularly through the Delta variant. It's not true of Omicron and subsequent variants. So, and that's fine, the science has caught up to that, right? But that in their mind was this kind of debunking moment where they had been told they had to get the vaccine for this reason that then turned that not to be true. And let's not, you know, say that that's a process that happened in a vacuum, right? That was a, something that was narrative built through the right wing media, very much so as part of a general, you can't trust Anthony Fauci, an attempt to turn him into a hate figure for political reasons. But, you know, we are, we are living in this time when we've got all this information, but science and journalism are, you know, I think as you wrote in your famous resignation that, you know, they are a constant search for the truth. You never arrive at it. You just hopefully get closer and closer to it. And we haven't quite got to the humility bit where we say, oh, here's where we got it wrong. And actually, today, here's how we've got it right. And so what people here is, you should trust us. We have the answers. And you're stupid. You know, I felt that happened a lot during COVID. Oh, you're stupid if you don't trust the science. Without actually a real attempt to explain what the science was and how provisional it was, because it was felt that people were too stupid to understand it. And I understand it's really difficult in public health. You have to give people very clear and simple messages, but we were telling people in Britain to hand wash way beyond the time what we discovered that that was pointless. I think that the whole world might be different, or at least part of it, if the people who had said things that then turned out to be false simply said, we got it wrong, or we said it based on the science we had at the time. And now we're revising our opinion. And that moment just like never seemed to happen. I'm also not sure whether or not I don't know whether or not that would have worked. Do you think it would have made a difference? No, because I think it would have been gleefully seized on as if everything was wrong. And actually, I think the real story of COVID and science is an incredibly good one. Right? People very quickly sequenced the genome. They very quickly developed vaccines that are safe and effective. And millions of people have had them. Millions of deaths have been avoided that would otherwise have happened. You know, if that pandemic had happened even 20 years ago, it would have been incredibly disruptive. So there's, you know, I'm giving science an incredibly like a day-minus. And I think if they had ever admitted they were wrong, it would have been like, you got everything wrong. The statistics about the level of unhappiness among people in the West is pretty astonishing considering we have just about every material comfort compared to other people in the world. In a recent study, 82% of Gen Z respondents said that they were regularly feeling so sad that nothing could cheer them up. 95% reported that poor mental health interfered with their daily life and activity. And one in six Americans, this is probably 55 million people take some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly anti-depressants like SSRIs. How does that connect to the rise in gurus? - Well, I think it's got an enormous way that it plays into anti-vax rhetoric, for example. So episode two is about wellness. And I interview a very sweet guy, a Canadian musician, Wildnaked man, sex kung fu guru, lots of stuff that I don't really understand. I'm quite glad it does devotee butthole something, which in Canada really takes some grit to go out there and do that. But his journey towards being an anti-vaxer was that kind of crunchy wellness journey. And it came out of two things that I could see. One was the feeling that food was full of additives and poisoning you. And there are things in American food that you are not allowed to put in food in Europe, frankly. Food regulation is quite poor. And then the other thing was that he had been gay-bashed and instead of being offered therapy to deal with the anxiety that he felt as a result, he was offered psychiatric drugs. And I also think there is a criticism with the American farmer and the American medicine that is profit-driven rather than patient-focused. And there are all kinds of problems with the National Health Service, right? But at least it doesn't have that for-profit motive in trying to stuff you full of as many pills as it can sell you. Because actually, we'd like to stuff you full of as few pills as possible because they're being funded out of taxation. So it was interesting to me that the route to his anti-vax came from two complaints that I think are fundamentally valid, which is that American food is often full of very strange additives that you don't really know what they are. And that the American health care system can often be-- if you're rich, it's the best health care system in the world. But it can often be profit-driven in quite unpleasant ways. After the break, why is so many gurus fall down the rabbit hole? Stay with us. OK, so we've touched on religious decline, high social distrust, lack of happiness. I have one more theory that I want to throw out about why even some very reasonable seemingly rational people I know are turning to gurus these days. And that is what political scientists call the overtin window, the bounds for normal conversation, socially acceptable conversation, have become so narrowed and limited. And one of the consequences, I think, of people not being able to say things-- normal observations, not talking about bigoted things, normal things, without fear of being socially ostracized, having reputational harm or even being fired from their job, is that what they do instead is turn to these dark corners of the internet, where they can finally be their full selves and speak freely. And sometimes what happens in those dark corners of the internet is they find out that they're perfectly reasonable observations that have been labeled a conspiracy theory or labeled as some kind of phobia or bigotry was actually kind of true or at least had a nugget of truth. And then suddenly, they fall in down the rabbit hole. The phenomenon we were talking about before, you find out that the mainstream media has lied about the drug you were talking about before, that actually did cause deformities in babies of women that were pregnant. What else did the establishment lie about? So you can go very quickly from thinking that Fauci told a noble lie, which he admitted to doing, to thinking that Bill Gates is actually implanting microchips on behalf of the globalist elite. So first, I want to ask you if you agree with this theory. And secondly, and I think that this is a really important question, how do we stop people from tumbling down that rabbit hole once they've uncovered a lie? It's something that prays on my mind. And it's one of the reasons that I do, the journalism that I do, and particularly in regards to gender, even though it's a zero personal professional reward. You don't like being called a turf online every single day, how it? That's what makes me feel alive. But I think it's really important, and the same thing with difficult subjects, whether it's immigration or whether it's Israel or whatever it is, if people in the moderate, sensible, broad mainstream are not having those conversations, the only people having them are the people at the extremes. And actually, the people at the extremes would quite like to drive out the moderates, but that doesn't benefit the conversation. And I think gender is a very, really good example of the way that the norms have changed incredibly whiplash fast. And everyone is assumed to have been issued some kind of update. I like some kind of memo has gone around. I read a piece, and I think it was the verge today about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. And it said he had to have explained to him what was wrong with dead naming people. And I thought, yeah, him and about 90% of the population, actually, or any human from 2007, the idea that you couldn't, that someone changes their name, and instantly, you can never ever refer to their previous name, and do so is, you know, like the same as, you know, it would be to kind of ancient Hebrew saying, Jehovahite like, you know, it's just kind of blasphemy. It's an instant offence. Is something that actually, if that's what you believe, you are probably going to have to explain that to a lot of people, because it is a new thing. But there is, in a sort of an assumption baked into some of that journalism, that like, there's a handbook that gets updated, and everyone is aware of the handbook. And I think it causes people enormous tension. You know, I get consistently people telling me, "Hey, incredibly brave, I am to talk about stuff." It shouldn't be that way, right? It shouldn't be that people have no idea what the landmines are, because most people are good and tolerant and kind, and don't want to deliberately upset people. You know, and that was one of the things that the social justice movement was so terrible about, right? That idea of intention doesn't matter. Intent doesn't matter, that was the mantra. And intent matters hugely. People are going to get things wrong, particularly in a multicultural society, multiphathed society, one that's becoming more socially liberal really fast. And there has to be some ability for them to go, "Oh, I had absolutely no idea, I'm so sorry. Thank you for letting me know." Rather than getting screamed at, which is probably more likely to send them the other way and send them directly into, well, you can't say anything anymore. You know, these people are in charge, you know. And that's what feeds that idea of people feeling it's totalitarian, right? That someone somewhere has been issuing orders, and they don't know who they are. It's not an elected politician, it's someone someone they picked, but someone's in charge of what you can say, and they may or may not tell you in advance, and you can just walk onto that grenade without ever having meant to or known about it. It's a lethal way to run a society. Well, that brings us to one of my favorite subjects, Helen, the intellectual dark web. And the boom in intellectual gurus, who have sort of stepped into that opportunity, right, who have said, "Look at the way the legacy media or mainstream institutions ignored these subjects. We're gonna touch them. We're gonna touch on these third rails." So you cover this subject in your series, and in episode you titled "Gazing Into the Abyss." And this is subject I happen to know a little bit about. In May 2018, I wrote a story for The New York Times about the so-called intellectual dark web. This was a group of taboo breaking, or at least they imagine themselves to be intellectual retrogates. Thank Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, the brother's Weinstein, Brett and Eric, they're mostly men, there were a few women mentioned in the piece who were, and I think to many people still are, providing an important intellectual alternative to many mainstream institutions. Now, when I wrote about it at the time, one of the things I found sort of hopeful about the intellectual dark web or the IDW was that it seemed to me at least an attempt to supersede the influencer model, right? It was a group of people who saw that the influencer model was everywhere, or the guru model, as you call it, and it had its own dangers and pitfalls, and that maybe we could find a way to have a kind of confederation, like institutional guard rails without an institution by holding themselves accountable, or at least this was the idea. And here we are, a little more than four years after I wrote that story. We have Brett Weinstein appearing on stage with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talking about how the COVID vaccine is dangerous, believing that different things were suppressed by Big Pharma. You have Dave Rubin, who was mentioned in the story, who became a trumper. You've Ben Shapiro, who's gotten tangled up with Candace Owens, who is now employed by the Daily Wire, and is very close to Kanye. And you've Sam Harris, who is officially turned in his intellectual dark web card. What did you think about that group four years ago? And why do you think that it unraveled the way that it did? That's such a dangerous question to ask, because I will come up with some incredibly self-flattering version of it, where it's like the thing is Barry, I always saw the danger. And I don't know if I did. I wrote a very unflattering piece about Jordan Peterson before I interviewed him, so that would have been mid-2018, which is about the time you wrote that piece, in which I called him a cargo cult intellectual. I said he's somebody who sounds like he's got really deep things to say, but actually when you listen to it, it's not there's nothing there. And I also wrote, I quoted my friend Adam, saying he is evolving-- so excuse my Britishism here-- he's evolving into a belland before our eyes, the selection pressure being attention. And I think that was something that definitely you saw after the intellectual dark web was named and formed was that they grew towards attention. And it's ironic that Eric Weinstein, I think, was the one who coined the idea of audience capture, this analog of regulatory capture. The idea that you become famous and you end up becoming the caricature that your enemies saw and becoming the kind of fighter that your fans wanted you to be. So there was a really interesting that happened with them. I think it's a very interesting example of fame and the distorting power of fame to turn you into a cartoon version of whatever you originally started off as. But it's a tough piece from the start, wasn't it? Because you had this heterodox group, and then you did also have a kind of straightforward conservative group, and you were open from the start that those were Ben Shapiro just is a conservative. 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Well, I do think it's important to have a centering about what your life's purpose actually is. You know, I always think about the fact that James Baldwin, one of the great writers of the 20th century, essentially becoming a public intellectual, sort of stopped him continuing to intellectually advance. When you're in broadcast mode, actually, have you got the time to do the deep introspection and thinking that you have? So whether or not it's having a hobby and friends who don't care that you're famous on the internet, that's one way of keeping yourself sane. And then the other way is by going away to private spaces and doing your thinking. And maybe that's even doing your thinking on a newsletcher or a sub-stack where you're not. You know, that you can write in this more tentative way and think and develop. But I think, you know, the constant being on broadcast mode, having to pump out content, content, content, is what slowly kind of. I mean, they call it content brain. And it's a very good way of describing it. People do end up having content brain, where everything. And I mean, being a journalist now for 15 plus years, I struggle with the fact that something happens to me in my first. No matter what, it's a brilliant thing or a terrible thing. My first thought is always, "Oh, I could write about that, that's interesting." And it's maybe not a great impulse to encourage in yourself. But yeah, I think that's the thing. So giving yourself the space and time to think and be tentative and have those interesting discussions in a place where you don't have to be declarative is really important. Do you think in our golden age of gurus, there's room for the building of new institutions or gurus the only ones that can make enough money to succeed? I mean, I hope that you'll be the proof that that is true, that you can build these institutions. And I work for the Atlantic, which is having a really great boom time at the moment. It is offering a mix of things. It's not going to the hard right, but it does have a mix of political affiliations within the group that people are responding to. And I think the institutions allow you to do things that you can't do independently. There is still a role for them. So not all of them are creaking. And maybe the nature of institutions is to always creak and always need renewal. And that's the kind of lesson of all of this, is that stagnation is the problem, really. And renewal is the answer, rather than starting, we're trying to reinvent the wheel with every generation. In your podcast tonight, I was really interested in this part. You talk about the parasocial relationships that people can develop with their gurus from afar. I think it came up in the really moving story, actually, of the guy who sort of fell in love with Jordan Peterson and then fell out of love with Jordan Peterson. David worried he had developed a parasocial relationship with his guru. Even though they'd only met twice, David felt that he knew Peterson. Do you see him as a sort of father figure? Is that part of your relationship with him? I've asked myself this question. I think one of the things that Jordan Peterson says were not necessarily transparent to ourselves. He was seen as a father figure by so many people. It's definitely possible. This idea of parasocial relationships, feeling as though we're personal friends with people whose content we consume online, is key to understanding the new world of gurus. It explains why someone like Jordan Peterson has such ardent fans ready to avenge any slight against their idol. David knew that if he criticized Peterson, he would lose some of his own audience, people who would see it as a betrayal. But he did it anyway. Yeah, in episode five, we covered David Fuller. He used to work for Channel Four News. So he's got another story that's very similar to yours in the sense of having worked for the mainstream media, feeling that it was very not asking the big questions, not asking the right questions. He watched John Peterson's videos. He saw him talking about young and Freud, and meaning and life, and these incredibly big questions. And goes to Canada to interview him. And he said it was, you know, people go across the world for a sports game, and this was my super bowl like going to interview Jordan Peterson. And he caught him just before the Cathy Newman interview. And when he was, as David describes, as sort of, you know, eccentric academic, and he was completely bold away by this. And he founded his own YouTube channel, Rebel Wisdom, which was devoted to having these really big conversations about semi-spiritual religious topics and meaning, and what it means to be a man in the modern world, all this sort of stuff. But he felt compelled about six to eight months ago to write a piece saying that he thought that Jordan Peterson had become something very different. And this was around the time, if you remember, of the-- he tweeted the picture of the larger sports illustrator, Marla, who was sorry, not beautiful, you know, which was, you know, bizarre. Like, it was just me, and-- Right, it was personally me. It wasn't an ideological point, really. It was just this lady's fat. It was a classic kind of opinion dressed up as sort of political critique. And the same thing with Elliot Page, which actually, I think, was more forgivable. I thought it was phrasing an unkind way, but I felt that the point was there that if you do feel that experimental medicine is being done on people, then you would probably want to speak out about it. But again, it was just this sense that he just becomes someone who's sort of just really unkind, just doing unkind tweets and need kind of fell out of love with him. And that was a very tough process, I think, for him to go through, because it was kind of humbling to admit that he'd put his faith in someone who'd let him down. And I think he always hoped that he could have a kind of conversation with John Peterson, and that would make it-- you know, they could kind of put this to him, and it would make it OK. And he never got to have that conversation. How do you know, though, Helen, if you're just admiring someone who's worthy of admiration or falling into a parasocial relationship or a guru crash? Like, if you listen to every Sam Harris episode, Sam Harris or Guru, if you do yoga with Adrian on YouTube every morning, are you a follower of hers? Like, what are the qualities that sort of make it cross the line? I think you have to apply similar tests to the way that you can tell if you're an alcoholic, right? So the classic signs of, like, do you drink alone? Do you drink in the morning? Do you lie to people about your drinking? Ask yourself the questions that would help you undercover whether or not there is a healthier, unhealthy relationship. And do you feel that anybody who doesn't think the same thing as you is somehow morally inferior? Do you spend a lot of time harranging them about that? All of those are the questions that you should be asking yourself. If you're watching-- whether it's yoga with Adrian, as you say, or productivity videos, that's sort of fine, isn't it? But it's if you're watching seven hours of productivity videos a day and then, but with spending huge amounts of money buying bullet journals and then you're never writing your great novel, you might have to just accept that you don't actually want to write a great novel enough to actually sit down and write the great novel. And actually, that's not something that's working for you. And I think it's the same thing as the kind of questions about whether or not you're in a cult, which is a lot of these things operate in a cultish way. Are these people cutting you off from your friends? Are they asking you for money for themselves that is beyond a natural commercial transaction? But it strays into grifting. And all of that stuff is worth asking yourself. One of the characters you interview for the show is a guy called James Lindsay, who became famous in 2018 for submitting these bogus papers to academic journals based on absurd fake research topics like rape culture in dog parks and the intellectual penis. It was a very funny episode that were then approved by these academic journals and thus exposed how ridiculous and farcical academia had become. But that was four years ago. James Lindsay did not stop there. He eventually wound up in a place of what you call a classic case of internet poisoning. I actually joined Twitter in like 2012. I was abnormally patient, abnormally willing to engage in dialogue. And what I was doing was destroying myself mentally and emotionally with the level of frustration, the trolling, et cetera. And so self-defensively just being dismissive and rude is a strategy. It was, oh, well, let's have a dialogue. I would love to have a debate. Now screw that. Your mom sucks. Just go right to the throat and just because it's Twitter. OK, but that ends up with you arguing with the Auschwitz Museum. Well, I didn't quite argue with them. I just called them out for what they said. And then people said it was an argument. You compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, which is just something I would not recommend anybody do. It's pouring a big can of gasoline all over that particular argument. Well, I seriously hope that I was wrong about that. But we'll see what happens. I still stand by what I said. Well, he's insinuating that all Marxist are pedophiles in comparing COVID vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, talking a lot about the great reset, that kind of thing. So you say that what happened to Lindsay in the show is a kind of occupational hazard of modern gurus. But I wonder if it's bigger than that. I wonder if it's also an occupational hazard for anyone on the internet, which is almost everyone in the world. And I guess I wonder if that's unique to being a guru, because before this, I didn't really think of Lindsay as a guru, although I see the case for him being one. Or if it's just about all of us, actually, and the way that we sort of have to learn to resist fighting our worst instincts, that the internet makes it so easy to indulge. Oh, I mean, I think that's a perfectly reasonable critique. And the title of the episode comes from a quote by Nietzsche in "The Spakes are a Thustra," which is, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it in the process. He does not become a monster himself. For if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." And then what that makes me think about is the fact, and I've been guilty of this, you can always, but if you want to have a rock on Twitter, you can always find an annoying representative of the other side who will give you a fight, right? And that's what I mean about gazing into the abyss. Actually, one of the hardest things in modern journalism is the idea of proportion. Like campus controversies, a really good example, right? Like, what's happening at elite colleges in the US? Interesting. But you have to ask yourself, how much weight do you give it compared to something like, intergenerational poverty or lead pollution or all of these other subjects that actually probably have a lot more Effect on the day-to-day lives of Americans and what I felt with James Lindsay was that he had become consumed by these couple of issues and Genuinely thought that the Marxist pedophile alliance is like the big issue which you would right if you thought there was a kind of massive Pedophile ring gonna boys to take over American you had kids I can imagine you feel pretty like that was a bad thing you were against that happening But how big a problem is this and how much of my brain should I devote to it? Are they kind of great questions of of modern life because this is great phrase not picking right which is a version of cherry picking But you find the nuttiest examples and so I could go online and I could find an Anime communist saying the most you know like we should abolish the nuclear family And like I could go online and have have an argument with that person, you know that somebody on that bit every day of the week Or someone you know the same thing that used to happen when I wrote a lot about feminism I could find a frothing misogynist to quote tweet saying that I'm ugly and a haradun And let hang them out to dry in front of all my followers and farm that for attention and Those people are there, but you have to say how much important is you know son of bulldog 420 with four followers on Twitter Does it do I really need to put them on blast to 150,000 people and so that's the bit I think is is gazing into the abyss right you can always find someone who is wrong on the internet And you can always find people who are wrong in every day life and you have to try and keep your sense of proportion Helen last question Who is your guru I'm I think if I have a guru The closest thing I have to a religion is the science fiction fancy author Terry Pratchett And he is safely dead and has been for several years now So he can't is can you get counsel from beyond the guy? You know what I mean? He's not going to come out and do a dumb tweet basically that means I have to go Oh, I hate you now why are you having like why have you got this basic opinion on Brexit? But the You know through his characters one is granny weather wax and one is Samuel Vimes and both of them are kind of authority figures You have a very kind of rigid moral code, but are also incredibly forgiving of the fallibilities of human life And like I sort of think you find that characteristic in a really good Vicar or rabbi does that make sense like somebody who is living a pretty moral life But is also pretty forgiving about the fact that we're all human and we all make mistake And so if I had a guru like he's written 30 old novels and the view of humanity that I find the sort of like People are kind of funny aren't they like most of them are quite well-meaning But they're quite petty and vicious and jealous and we're all like that and no you know I like that a lot Find your gurus in yeah dead authors rather than living youtubers is my final parting advice to you Helen Lewis. Thank you so much for talking to me today and thanks for this fantastic podcast series It's called the new gurus Thank you for having me Thank you to Helen Lewis for coming on the show today You can listen to her series which I really loved listening to the new gurus wherever you get your podcasts If you like this conversation if it provoked you if it challenged you If it made you rethink the parasocial relationship you have with the gurus in your life I know that it made me do that Share this with your friends and family share it with people in your community and use it to have a conversation of your own And if you want to support honestly, there's only one way to do that It's by subscribing to the free press at vfp thefp.com See you next week You