A Golden Age of Gurus
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly.

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 you, I'm still like 16, 17. Two things that make people lack confidence in themselves, shame and rejection. Both of these experiences make us shrink. They make us feel like we're not- So 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 Kasey. I'm a functional nutritionist and I help menstruating women balance their hormones for easy and regular periods without restriction or extreme. 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 had so much fun- Supplements, skincare, 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 give 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's 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 trust in institutions wavers, we're looking to charismatic individuals to tell us how to live.

I became hugely taken with his thought and I was borderline kind of obsessed. Individuals who are often outside the mainstream, promising forbidden knowledge and alternative wisdom. She profiles productivity hackers, dating coaches, crypto bros, 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 cluelessness? I would actually say your question was gaslighting, Helen, because cluelessness, cluelessness, feigned ignorance, feigned ignorance on the part of white people is foundational to white supremacy. So I don't know. Feigned ignorance on the part of men... All of that's 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.

Am 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.

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Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. 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 bros, wellness influencers, you have diversity experts, you have heterodox intellectual heroes who imagine themselves to be uncovering

forbidden 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? Because 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? Oh, 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 normie 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 kind of compromised or sheeple or, you know, all these phrases that get used about, you know, the elites or even the matrix, you know, this kind of idea that

people are locked into these very old ways of thinking and they've been enlightened. You know, that's a phrase that comes up a lot, you know, this idea of kind 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 at an earlier point in your life being drawn in to one of these communities? Yeah.

Well, yeah, I've been on a search for meaning, I guess. I was raised Catholic and, you know, 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

essentially, which I thought was an interesting question. And so, you know, everybody has kind of lodestars in their life, whatever they might be. And for lots of Americans and lots of Brits too, traditional religion is on the wane. 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 this 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, 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 narcissist, you craves it, or you wouldn't write things down and put them on the internet. It's a tension. Okay, let's start where you start with the podcast, really.

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 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. 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, right?

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 guy has 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 someone who's deeply spiritual, but also a rationalist and a scientist and 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 mucus-less diets. He did primal scream therapy. There's a great anecdote, which didn't make it into the podcast, that Dan Kotke told us about the fact that there was a local Zen monastery. And one of the early Apple computers...

you know, Steve Jobs was delighted with it. And he turned up at this Zen monastery, was like, showed one of the monks, like, look at my amazing computer. And the guy's like, I don't believe in material possessions. Like, 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 minimalist aesthetic of Apple is very influenced by Zen and Eastern practices.

and also the idea that Apple became a cult, that 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 cooler, you were hipper, you weren't using the normie computer that 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. It's called the MacBook Air. Which, of course, is very funny now that Macs are completely ubiquitous and not a kind of hipster thing at all. But that was very much how they were sort of 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 allowed 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 did the people that you spoke to for the 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, you know, as he called it, put a dent in the universe. He thought that your life could impact others in this incredibly...

profound ways and being spiritual was part of that, which makes him more interesting than the kind of usual American arch capitalist, right? Who just exists to make money. There was a kind of spiritual project behind Apple. There wasn't one that was about kind of clarity and connection. And, you know, he saw it as profoundly democratizing process. The idea that, you know, when he, in the seventies, computers were out of reach of normal homeowners, right?

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, right, of like the black turtleneck and the jeans and these like round 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 appearances, 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-in-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 I'm exploring, is the idea of the kind of great man theory of history. You know, that 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 sort of, I have to say, maybe I shouldn't 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 I mean, you can't imagine Tesla or SpaceX happening without Elon or Apple happening without Steve Jobs. That's very true, but they might've happened in different ways.

you know, we might have a kind of convergent evolution where something, you know, you get to the same paths without the different people, which is actually one of the premises of Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, the section on tech there, and Steve Johnson's work on innovation, right? 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, you know, the ability to stream incredibly fast. You know, you need that before someone can invent YouTube.

And there's a very famous scientific paper from 1922 about concurrent discoveries. 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, right, that that is both a sort of social process, but that talented people are still incredibly important.

And, you know, we and post hoc, we will always attach stories to them about how they did it. But yeah, you're right. And Elon Musk is a very good example because he is the brand is I don't give a shit about

like you know um you know this is a power fantasy this is super cool and there are ways and this makes me very unpopular 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 know

You've got it. Well, I think 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 macho. Boring. 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 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, you know, that and that's my entirely non-cancel opinion about why the left should praise Elon Musk. They're going to come with me on that one. Okay, 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 spring 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. You know, 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, right? 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, right?

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 like 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. Okay.

Okay, 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, right, which coincides with the rise of sort 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 worship membership dropped below 50%, with just 47% of Americans reporting that they belong 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 Ibram 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, maybe not 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'm 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 fans and followers have maybe cycled through a few different things that they believe in. That's sort 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 Torero, the day gamer, the pickup artist. ♪

Happy Independence Day to all you bachelors, to all you cads, to all you nomads who are not tied down, who are not needy. This is Tom Torero. 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 day gamer. Valentine's Day, the day of the year which makes me feel nauseous. It's a day where we celebrate weak men, men who are groveling, men who are needy. Day game is a technique used by pickup 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 day gamer should be relentless. He should have a strategy to overcome any initial reluctance. And he, in his 20s, wanted to be a Greek Orthodox monk.

And then he eventually ends up as a pickup 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 they 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 documentary for the BBC, which was called The Church of Social Justice, that you can see white privilege or male privilege as being like original sin. You know, you are born already at a deficit that you kind of have to make up for. That is a 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, you know, 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 you're being cruel to. And I always felt like that about watching Twitter pylons was I remember saying at the time, like, oh, I now I understand how the Inquisition happened.

Because lots of people want to see people punished and feel good about it, right? There's the combination of sadism and righteousness. I had never actually seen it in the wild in that sort of Lord of the Flies sense before. But it helped me intuitively understand that very deep human impulse, I guess, to punish the outgroup or punish the scapegoat. There's an episode, I think it's called White Woman Tears. Yes.

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, you know, all that kind of religious demonstration of virtue through pain.

I was fascinated by Race to Dinner, and I have been since I first read about it. So it is two women, two Americans, and they, you know, for now £5,000, 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 a 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. And the premise being, of course, that you are racist. And even if you won't admit that you're racist, that's more proof that not only are you 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 book 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, here's how 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 5,000 pounds or $5,000 to be told that they were awful. You know, I just, it doesn't, there'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 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 rights movement, it should actually be basically the sort of mum of

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 I'd really like to see addressed, that's, you know, actually, we all know you haven't really, have you, ladies? You're all doing incredibly well and you should sort of stop complaining. So I love the gender aspect of that that ran underneath that. I found that fascinating. One of the things that surprised me in sort of the way that you covered the anti-racist movement is your...

I don't want to say sympathy for Ibram 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...

What intrigues me about Ibram X. Kendi is that for a guru, he seems pretty grounded.

That surprises me because, like many of the gurus we're 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 liked his thoughtfulness. And, you know, I encountered him in real life rather than on Twitter, where I know he's had some sparring matches with John McWhirter, for example. And, you know, that's a similar story you could tell about Jordan Peterson, right? The people who've encountered Peterson through his books see a very different version of him than people who've seen his tweets. But the thing I felt about Ibram 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 for anti-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 is

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 anti-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 someone like Ibram 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 Ibram 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 was a tendency to like

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, where 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?

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 him sound like a Republican who believes in Citizens United. And I'm just like... Great endorsement of Citizens United, yeah. Yeah.

The difficulty with it is, 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? Like, we all do it. Like, you know, I have criticisms of the liberal media and yet I'm employed by a liberal media institution, blah, blah, like I criticize the BBC. So, you know, none of us are living these morally pure, perfect lives where we just live in a hole of...

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-Racist Research. You know, I think there are people, I think, who are living in much more obviously like their big gold yacht. All right, 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 too little confidence in each other. What's the connection as 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 that people were living 50 years ago where they knew their bank manager...

or they knew their doctor, you know, you had a family doctor that delivered all your babies and knew you inside out. 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 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 him 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 brought on a board, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I think, you know, that polarisation 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 a different question to 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've almost moved back to a stage where brands are actually people-sized, I guess, right? You buy into a person, 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 an older generation, who's like yearning for the halcyon days of Walter Cronkite 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. Yeah.

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 or the way on tiktok the people duet 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 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 citizen journalism and often ends up being kind of like these multiplayer 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 out eventually killed himself was the person and they hunted him down. And True Crime Podcast, which is...

extremely amusing to me that some of the quote-unquote wokest 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 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 to spoil 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 thalidomide 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, saying that in a way it was an incredible story, but it ruined a generation of journalists because they were right about...

the medical establishment did lie to them you know they were wrong they said there's no problem here you know and and 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

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 red-pilled by that because they think, well, if you're getting this wrong, if you're reporting on this from an ideological rather than evidence-based perspective, what else are you covering up for 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 and i don't entirely blame the scientific establishment they had constantly updated information but you did go through that wobble on are masks useful are they not like do cloth mask and they didn't manage to find a narrative way of saying like here we're giving you the

we're giving you the best view we've got at the moment. And here's another one to, you know, and like, here's an update. And when I talk to people in Florida, you know, they all cite that Rachel Maddow clip where she's like, you know, the vaccine stopped transmission dead.

And that was the kind of received 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 out not to be true.

And let's not, you know, say that that's a process that happened in a vacuum, right? That was 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 living in this time where we've got all this information. But science and journalism are, you know, I think as you wrote in your famous resignation letter, 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 how we got it wrong. And actually today, here's how we've got it right. And so what people hear is you should trust us. We have the answers. And you're stupid.

You know, I felt that happened a lot during COVID. Oh, and 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 that we discovered that that was pointless.

I think that the whole world might be different or at least parts 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 sequence the genome. They very quickly develop vaccines that are safe and effective. And now 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 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 55 million people, take some kind of psychiatric drug, mostly antidepressants 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 wild naked man sex kung fu guru lots of stuff that I don't really understand I'm quite glad it does devotee of butthole sunning which you know in Canada really takes some grit to

to go out there and do that. But he was, you know, his journey towards being an anti-vaxxer was that kind of crunchy wellness journey. And it came out of two things that I could see. One was the feeling that kind of 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. You know, 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. Yeah.

And I also think there's a criticism of the American pharma and 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 it would 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, you know, the American health care system can often be, you know, if you're rich, it's the best health care system in the world. But, you know, it can often be profit driven in quite unpleasant ways. After the break, why so many gurus fall down the rabbit hole? Stay with us.

Okay, 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 that what political scientists call the Overton window, right? 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've fallen down the rabbit hole, right? It's 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 preys 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

of zero personal professional reward. You don't like being called a TERF online every single day, Helen? That's what makes me feel alive. But I think it's really important, you know, and the same thing with difficult subjects like 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 extremes would quite like to drive out the moderates, but that doesn't benefit the conversation. You know, 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, like some kind of memo has gone around. I read a piece in, 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 deadnaming 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 a kind of ancient Hebrew saying Jehovah out loud. You know, it's this 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 how 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 huge.

hugely people are going to get things wrong particularly in a multicultural society multi-faith society one that's becoming more socially liberal really fast and there has to be some ability to sort of 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

you know, these people are in charge, you know, and that's what feeds the 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 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 going to touch them. We're going to touch on these third rails. So you cover this subject in your series in an episode you titled Gazing into the Abyss.

And this is a 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 imagined themselves to be, intellectual renegades. Think Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, the Brothers Weinstein, Brett and Eric. They were 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. Right.

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 guardrails without an institution by holding themselves accountable, or at least this was the idea. Yeah.

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 have 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 have Sam Harris, who has 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, there's nothing there. Yeah.

And I also wrote, I quoted my friend Adam saying he is evolving, so excuse my Britishism here, he's evolving into a bellend 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, right? And it's sort of ironic that Eric Weinstein, I think, was the one who

coined the idea of audience capture, this analogue 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, you know, 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. You know, he's not a heterodox. I think he's a straightforward conservative and that's sort of fine. But it was annoying to me as somebody who sees himself still as being on the left, really, that the left created the intellectual dark web because it gave them so much to kick against, right?

and the more that people said, you know, these people are awful, you shouldn't listen to them, you shouldn't see them, you shouldn't, rather than rebutting them. The more power they got. Right, and I felt very strongly when I went into that Jordan Peterson interview, this is the one bit I do remember having a conversation with myself about, I will never say in that interview, I'm never going to say anything that you say is offensive. I'm going to say if I think it's wrong and I'm going to make the argument about why it's wrong. And I think that's the thing, is that there was the overused cudgel of offence and blasphemy rather than

As you say, you can say to Brett Weinstein, well, look, there's very good evidence that the vaccines are safe and effective and that ivermectin was a promising treatment at one point, but we now have a good meta-analysis review that says, sorry, no, it's not. And it's not a big pharma conspiracy because it's a generic drug that's very cheap, like...

you know this isn't like it would have been you know lots of things that were you know like basic steroids dexamethasone for example was in exactly the same position ivermectin was but that one turned out to work and so people prescribed that one like what's your mechanism where you why you think this was suppressed and that's the argument that you should be making right rather than you must not question the wisdom of the elders you have to partake in that scientific and journalistic process basically

But if we were to talk about like, why did it come apart so quickly? One answer to it is that it was never a phenomenon to begin with. And that me sort of framing it as a phenomenon was a mistake because actually they were just a

scattered group of vaguely connected people who had captured a very important segment, I would say, that maybe has even grown in size since then, certainly if you're counting Rogan. So maybe the answer to why did it fall apart was it was never a thing to begin with. There is a point to that. And I also think this is a part of my larger analysis of why cancellation

is a bad tactic in the sense of rather than criminal proceedings when someone's raised that standard about the idea of sort of unpersoning people for very minor offenses is what i mean is that actually what turned those people into a group is the same set of enemies

They all went through these experiences where they got kicked out of academia or whatever it might be, and they found solace in each other that they were all the outsiders. They all saw themselves as the outsiders, even though they then built themselves often enormous independent audiences. But that legacy, that underdog feeling, is something that has still carried through and is an incredibly potent part of

The gurus fear. So one of the things I did after I started the series, I discovered a podcast called Decoding the Gurus, which started out as a kind of criticism and dissection of the intellectual dark web. And they came up with all these, they have the so-called gurometer. And one of them is galaxy brainness. So the idea you have brilliant thoughts on every topic. Another one is grievance mongering, which is always that your thoughts have been, the reason you're not a mainstream success and on CNN every night is that there is some

force is holding you down. Conspiracy against you. Right. And I think there's a lot of that. There's overt performances of vulnerability. I think you've seen lots of them. So you will see that. So Lex Friedman gets dunked on for his reading list and he goes, I'm so sorry. I was only trying to bring love and joy to the world.

And then people rush in and say, oh, poor guy, how could you be mean to him? And like, you know, how many dunkings a day are there on Twitter? I regret the dunks, but they, you know, they are existent. And I've been in that position too of like slightly attention seeking through woe is me. But, you know, they indulge that everyone is against me. Therefore, you must support me. Therefore, you can never criticize me because you are then colluding with the big, powerful forces that are arrayed against me. And that

used as a way of evading criticism so I don't know I do think they were a group and that I think anti-woke was a thing and some of them were anti-woke from a left liberal position and some of them from a central position and some of them because they were opposed to the entire left but yeah I think you sort of you sort of made you made Fetch happen Barry is what happened you made IDW happen

The intellectual dark web sort of broke in the end among pretty typical political lines, right? There were the people, let's call them traditional liberals, who say, yeah, this wokeness thing is bad. Yeah, the institutional capture is bad. But the way through is bad.

to rebuild those institutions, not to fight fire with fire by suggesting we tear them down. This is certainly where the Sam Harris's fall. And then there are people who became much more radical and frankly felt like everything was coming apart and they sort of saw no other option other than a kind of nihilism. And I actually think that that is like a broad theme that runs through a lot of the anti-woke movement

intellectual group, if you can call it that, more broadly, which is those who sort of break ultimately traditional liberal and those who say, we need to understand that maybe the reason we got here is because of traditional liberalism not being muscular enough and it's time for something radically new. Yeah, I think there is a lot in that about the idea that what there was was essentially a revolt against left-wing groups

liberal authoritarianism, right? The imposition of certain norms and standards that were very political. And some people reacted to that with an assertion of the need for diversity of thought. And some of the people reacted to that with an assertion that what we needed was actually right-wing authoritarianism. And

And it's been a consistent sadness of mine that people who would talk a lot about freedom of speech then end up in situations where they're going to see Viktor Orban and hang out with him, you know, a right-wing authoritarian who is no friend of the LGBT community or migrants, you know, or ethnic diversity. And there was a sort of bizarre longing for a strongman among people who prided themselves on the idea of being kind of heterodox and sceptical. So, yeah, I think it's...

I don't, yeah, I guess I think, I do think of myself as liberal. I also do, because I'm British and European rather than American, think of myself much more in the,

as a social democrat rather than I think I'm not at all on the libertarian scale so yeah one of the things that's been interesting to me is about a kind of evolution about how I think about politics in different axes of economics authoritarianism versus liberalism and also social conservative versus social liberalism and those things have all kind of become unpicked from each other haven't they in the last 10 years you find people who've got mixtures of those that you would previously not have thought would sit together at all

One of the things that struck me when I was listening to the series is you make the case that gurus are by nature anti-establishment. And on first listen I was like, "Yeah, I think I agree with that."

But I wonder if that's always true, right? When I think about, let's say, the New York Times, right? And I think about a figure that looms very large there, like a Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's kind of like the guruification of the institution, or she has become sort of the guru at large of the paper. Or I think about Anthony Fauci, who literally said, when you criticize me, you're criticizing science because, quote, I represent science, right?

So I guess my question is, is it possible that institutions can become guru-ified? Or as Yuval Levin has talked about, how institutions maybe have become platforms for individual gurus. Right.

That's a very interesting way of thinking about it. I hadn't thought about that. And anti-establishmentarianism is another score on the garometer because you always have to have someone to kick against. I would say in the case of someone like Nicole Hannah-Jones that I think the way she sees herself is profoundly anti-establishment despite having, you know, the most mainstream job at the most mainstream liberal paper that there can be, right? And all of the most mainstream pedigreed awards from all of the most elite institutions. Yeah.

Yeah, but because she is an anti-racist and she's standing up to America's structural racism, she is anti-establishment, like to her, the establishment is racism and she is opposed to that.

And that's an equivalent to me of somebody like Russell Brandt who's got six million YouTube subscribers, you know, seeing himself as outside the establishment. I mean, you know, the Guardian newspaper, the independent newspaper, our left-wing newspapers here, even the Mirror, Tabloid, would kill for six million subscribers in their print editions, you know? He has got a reach comparable to any mainstream media organization. I think that one of the things that has happened is that institutions have kind of become vehicles for their gurus because...

because of the internet and because of the fact that people are now incentivized not to become, to use the Times example, a Timesman, right? You used to talk about going into the paper and being a Timesman for 50 years of your life. Now it's basically a giant megaphone for you to promote your own brand. And I don't know if there's any way out of that cycle. I think there probably is in the fact that I think that it's a play that sometimes...

only works once or only works at a particular time. So I'm thinking about the fact that I wrote a story for The Atlantic called The Guggenheim Scapegoat, which was about the complete meltdown of the New York Art Museum, the Guggenheim, over that summer of 2020. And there was a young black curator who got her first go at being guest curator on a show about Jean-Michel Basquiat. And her relationship with the museum completely spiralled out of control. She accused an older white female curator of racism,

The older white female curator was cleared by the investigation but was sacked anyway. And she was made a scapegoat for all this other stuff. And when that story came out, the younger curator had a very long and what seemed very cathartic rant about me and how I too was another avatar of institutional white supremacy and promised all these receipts that were going to come out that were going to debunk the claim, none of which had been so far forthcoming. But I don't know whether or not that...

precise thing will ever happen again at that institution. There's a kind of inoculation and I think that maybe, I think there may be things that we're seeing happening that are a product of a particular moment and kind of can't really happen. Once they've happened once, people know, they understand intellectually what's happening as it's happening and it can't happen again. That summer of 2020 was so particular in American journalism. Will it happen exactly the same way ever again? I'm just not sure that it will.

So Helen, what's the big guru pitfall? And yes, I am somewhat asking this question selfishly. How do you avoid becoming a guru?

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, right? 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, you know, having a hobby and

friends who don't care that you're famous on the internet. That's one way of kind 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 newsletter or a sub stack, right? Where you're not, you know, that you can write in this more tentative way and think and develop things

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 that's a very good way of describing it. People do end up having content brain where everything... And I'm, you know, being a journalist now for 15 plus years...

I struggle with the fact that something happens to me and my first, no matter whether 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 encouraging 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 are gurus the only ones that can make enough money to succeed? I mean, I hope that you will be the proof that that is true, that you can build these institutions. And, you know, 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 out to the hard right, but it does have a mix of political affiliations within the

within the group that people are responding to and I think the institutions allow you to do things that you can't do you know 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 uh really and renewal is the answer rather than starting every we're trying to reinvent the wheel with every generation

In your podcast, and 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, we're 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 criticised 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, who used to work for Channel 4 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 Jordan Peterson's videos. He saw him talking about Jung and Freud and, you know, meaning and life and these incredibly big questions. And he said,

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, a sort of, you know, eccentric academic. And he was completely bowled away by this and he founded his own YouTube channel, Rebel Wisdom, which was devoted to having these really big conversations about sort of semi-spiritual religious topics and meaning and what it means to be a man in the modern world and 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, you know, had become something very different. And this was around the time, if you remember, he tweeted the picture of the larger Sports Illustrated mural with, sorry, not beautiful, you know, which was, you know, bizarre. It was just me and...

Right, it was personally mean. It wasn't an ideological point, really. It was just this lady's fat. It was a classic kind of opinion dressed up as a sort of political critique. And the same thing with Elliot Page, which actually I think was more forgivable. I thought it was phrased in 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'd just become someone who's just like really unkind just doing unkind tweets and he'd 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 Jordan Peterson and that would make it you know they could kind of put this to him and it would make it okay and he never got to 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 crush? Like if you listen to every Sam Harris episode, is Sam Harris your guru? If you do yoga with Adrienne 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 like the way that you can tell if you're an alcoholic, right? You know, 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 uncover whether or not that is a healthy or unhealthy relationship. And are you, you know, 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 haranguing them about that? You know, all of those are the questions that you should be asking yourself. If you're watching...

whether it's yoga with adrienne as you say or productivity videos that's sort of fine isn't it but it's if you're like watching seven hours of productivity videos a day and then spending huge amounts of money buying bullet journals and 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 you know that's that's not something that's working for you

And, you know, I think it's the same thing as the kind of questions about whether or not you're in a cult, right? Which is what a lot of these things operate in a cultish way. You know, are these people cutting you off from your friends? Are they asking you for money for themselves that is beyond a kind of natural commercial transaction, but, you know, 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 Lindsley 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, etc. 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. No, screw that. Your mom sucks. You know, just go right to the throat and just

Because it's Twitter. Okay, 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 just 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.

where he's insinuating that all Marxists are pedophiles and 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...

Yeah.

Oh, I mean, I think that's a perfectly reasonable critique. And the title of the episode comes from a quote by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, 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, if you want to have a ruck 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, right?

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 paedophile alliance is like the big issue which you would right if you thought there was a kind of massive paedophile ring going to poise to take over America and 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 the kind of great questions of modern life? Because there's this great phrase, nut 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 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 harridan and like 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? Do I really need to put him on blast to 150,000 people? And so that's the bit I think 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 everyday life and you have to try and keep your sense of proportion. Helen, last question. Who is your guru?

I'm quite, I think if I have a guru, the closest thing I have to a religion is the science fiction and fantasy 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 grave 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 um but the uh you know through his characters one is granny weatherwax and one is samuel vimes and both of them are kind of authority figures who 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 mistakes and

And so if I had a guru, like he's written 30-odd novels, and the view of humanity that I find is 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, 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're interested in learning more about the gurus,

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