Honestly with Bari Weiss: A Golden Age of Gurus

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 brad stall, 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.

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 Casey.

I'm a functional nutritionist, and I help menstruating women balance their hormones for

easy and regular periods without restriction or restrictions.

Hey 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 with that video.

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 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 is called The New Gurus.

It's 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 at, 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 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.

Am I at risk of becoming a guru?

How do you build new things that are a 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 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 profits 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 hang out in a piercing studio and then I

hang 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 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 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 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 load stars 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.

They have that kind of a level of profound influence on people.

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, but the idea that you want approval is, 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.

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.

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 this 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 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, you know, Steve Jobs was delighted with it.

And he turned up at this Zen monastery and 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.

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, you know, 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 know, you weren't using the normal computer that

everyone else was using.

And 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, he has he called it put a dent in

the universe.

He thought that your life could impact others in these 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 that wasn't one that was about kind

of clarity and connection, and, you know, he saw it as a profoundly democratizing process.

The idea that, you know, 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 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 as 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, 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 sort of, I have to say, maybe I should be embarrassed about this.

I sort of believe the great man 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 have 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.

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, right, that that is both a

sort of social process, but the talented people are still incredibly important.

And that, 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, like,

you know, 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 to, well, 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 boring, but no, I eat a plant-based

diet and I have much better erections and my muscles are great is a way to get men to

eat carrots.

Exactly, exactly.

And like for the good of the planet that we should all be eating less meat and burning

less fossil fuels.

So making stuff that you would, people you 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 guru 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, 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, 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 D'Angelo 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.

One of the things that's very interesting to me is the lots of people you talk to who

are our 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 Terreiro, the daygamer, the pickup artist.

The 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 Terreiro, 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 weak men, men who are groveling, men who are needy.

Daygamer 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 daygamer 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 slightly coercive techniques.

And I keep thinking, do you like sex or not?

Where do you stand on that issue?

But the thing that was interesting, of course, 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 hold forth and be special.

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 documentary, 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 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 to 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 are you're

being cruel to.

And I always felt like that about watching Twitter pylons, because I remember saying,

I'm 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?

The combination of sadism and righteousness, I had never actually seen it in the wild.

And that's the 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, 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, two Americans, and they, you know, for now 5,000 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.

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 you're 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 D'Angelo'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, which

were like, has had to lose weight to not be repulsive.

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 or $5,000 to be told

that they were awful.

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, 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.

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 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 had a few 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 find 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 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 Ibram X. Kendi is that for a guru, he seems pretty grounded.

That surprises me because like many of the gurus were covering in this series, for every

time.

Yeah.

And I'm very clear about the fact he's a fellow Atlantic writer.

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.

I know he's had some sparring matches with John McQuirter, 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 obviously 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 the

idea of, 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 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 give him a pass simply because of aesthetics, really.

And 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 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, a great endorsement of Citizens United.

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.

I criticize the BBC.

So none of us are living these morally pure, perfect lives where we just live in a whole.

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 he has been involved in fundraising for the Boston

Center for Anti-Racist Research.

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.

If I buy something from Amazon and it doesn't work, I 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 had a family doctor that delivered all your babies and knew you

inside out.

We're living in some ways much more free, but also much more depersonalized these days

and I can see that leads to a loss of trust.

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, 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, 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 a little

local town and he would meet the editor of the local newspaper.

He might have been a Republican, 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 them on everything, but here are

some good things and some bad things.

They want bang, bang, bang.

He's evil.

He's the devil.

He's brawn aboard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I think 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.

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 almost move back to a stage where brands are actually people sized, I guess.

You buy into a person.

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

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 look at the source material that he was talking about.

I'm really interested, I guess, in the connection between the democratisation of information

and the rise of distrust because the very thing that has allowed us to 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 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, 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 had turned out eventually had killed

himself was the person and they hunted him down.

And True Crime Podcast, which is a kind of, extremely amusing to me, that some of the

quote-unquote's wokeest 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 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 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 you saying that in a way it was an 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 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

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,

and I don't entirely blame the scientific establishment, they had constantly updated information,

but you did throw through that wobble on our masks, useful, are they not, like, do cloth

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, and here's an update.

And when I talked to people in Florida, you know, they all cite that Rachel Maddow collect

where she's like, you know, the vaccine stopped transmission dead.

And that was the kind of receptive 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 the 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 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 and 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 arrived at it, you just hopefully get closer and closer to it.

And we haven't quite got to the, 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.

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 are 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.

Where we, we, 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 will be 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, 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 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 interviewed a very sweet guy, a Canadian musician, wild

naked man, sex kung fu guru, lots of stuff that I don't really understand, quite that.

It does devote a butthole something, which, you know, in Canada really takes some grit

to go out there and do that.

But he was, you know, 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 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.

And I also think there is a criticism of 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 I actually would like to stuff you full of as few pills

as possible, because, you know, 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 healthcare system can often be, you know, if you're rich,

it's the best healthcare 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 the, 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 their

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 prays on my mind, and it's one of the reasons that I do the journalism

that I do, and particularly when it regards to gender, even though it's a zero personal

professional reward.

You don't like being called a turf online every single day, Alex?

That's what keeps me feel alive, but I think it's really important 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 the extremes are 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, like some kind of memo

has gone around.

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 someone changes their name and instantly you can never ever refer

to their previous name, and to do so is like the same as it would be to an ancient Hebrew

saying Jehovah outlawed.

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 sort of an assumption baked into some of that journalism that there's a handbook

that gets updated and everyone is aware of the handbook.

And I think it causes people enormous tension.

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.

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, multi-faith 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 ignore 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.

There's a group of taboo breaking, or at least they imagine themselves to be intellectual

renegades.

I 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.

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.

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 was 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, it's not, there's nothing there.

And I also wrote, I quoted my friend Adam saying he is evolving, 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 the attention, right?

And it's sort of 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 I, you know, I was, 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, that's sort of fine.

But it was, 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.

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, well, 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, 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 phase of

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, all

they saw themselves as the outsiders, even though they then built themselves often enormous

independent audiences.

But that legacy, that underdog feeling is something that hasn't still carried through

and is an incredibly potent part of the guru sphere.

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 Gerometer, 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 forces

holding you there.

It's 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 existing.

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 uses 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 post 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 to rebuild those institutions, not to fight fire with fire by suggesting we

tear them down.

This is certainly where the Sam Harris 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

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, socially 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 with an assertion that we needed was actually right wing authoritarianism.

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 Victor 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 skeptical.

So yeah, I think it's a shame.

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 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 conservatives versus socialism.

And those things have all kind of become unpicked from each other, haven't they, in the last

10 years?

I mean, we'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 guru-ification 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.

So I guess my question is, is it possible that institutions can become guru-ified?

Or as Yvonne Levin has talked about, how institutions maybe have become platforms for

individual gurus?

That's a very interesting way of thinking about it.

I hadn't thought about that.

And anti-establishmentarianism is another score on the grometer, 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 the most mainstream job at

the most mainstream liberal paper that there can be, right?

And all of the most mainstream pedigree awards from all of the most elite institutions.

Yeah.

But because she is an anti-racist, and she is standing up to America's structural racism,

she is anti-estab...

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, seeing himself as outside the establishment.

I mean, the Guardian newspaper, the independent newspaper, our left-wing newspaper's here,

even the Mirror tabloid, would kill for six million subscribers in their print editions.

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 of the internet, and because of the fact that people are now incentivized

not to become, to use the times example, a timesman, right?

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 a first go at being guest curator on a show

about Jean-Michel Basquiat and her relationship with the museum completely spiraled out of

control.

She accused an older white female curator of racism.

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 seemed very cathartic

rant about me and how I too was another avatar of institutional white supremacy and promised

all these receipts that we're going to come out that we're going to debunk the claim when

none of which have 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 someone 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.

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 in 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.

It'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 are 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 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 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 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 seem 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 them talking about Jung and Freud and meaning

and life and these incredibly big questions, and goes to Canada to interview him.

He said, 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 Kathy Newman interview.

And he was, as David describes, an 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 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, he tweeted the picture of the larger sports illustrator tomorrow, and

was sorry, not beautiful, which was bizarre.

It was just mean.

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 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, that he could kind of put this to him, and it would

make it okay.

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 crush?

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, 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 understand 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, you know, 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, like, watching seven hours of productivity videos a day and then

what we're 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 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 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.

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 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 Space 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 that, 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.

Campus controversies, a really good example, right?

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 paedophile ring going to poise to take over

America and you had kids, I can imagine you'd 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 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 an argument

with that person, you know, 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 in 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 them 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 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, can you get counsel

from beyond the gate?

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 have you got this basic opinion on Brexit?

But 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 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 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 they're, you know, I like that a lot.

Find your gurus and 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

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.