THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.129 - HELEN LEWIS

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Adam talks with British journalist Helen Lewis about her book Difficult Women, A History of Feminism In 11 Fights, her encounter with Canadian clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson who Helen interviewed for GQ magazine in 2018, the downside of keeping up to date with current affairs and much else.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional editing. Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIO BOOK AT AUDIBLE) (2020)PRE-ORDER SIGNED HARDBACK COPIES OF RAMBLE BOOK AT WATERSTONES (2020)DIFFICULT WOMEN by HELEN LEWIS (GUARDIAN REVIEW by RACHEL COOKE, 2020)THE ERIN PIZZEY SECTION FROM DIFFICULT WOMEN (THE ATLANTIC, 2020)MY EXPERIENCE OF INTERVIEWING JORDAN PETERSON by HELEN LEWIS (GQ , 2018)HELEN LEWIS INTERVIEWS JORDAN PETERSON FOR GQ (YOUTUBE, 2018)HELEN LEWIS ARTICLES FOR THE ATLANTICARTICLE ABOUT THE UNDOING PROJECT (THE NEW YORKER, 2016)THE POWER OF BAD (HOW THE NEGATIVITY EFFECT RULES US AND HOW WE CAN RULE IT) by JOHN TIERNEY AND ROY F BAUMEISTER (SYNOPSIS ON PENGUIN WEBSITE, 2019)LOVE IS BLIND (NETFLIX TRAILER ON YOUTUBE, 2020) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a farm track in Norfolk, East Anglia, UK.

It is late July 2020, rather an overcast evening, although I have just rounded a corner and I'm now looking at a wide open field. The sun is going down and because there are still many clouds in the sky of different kinds, the cirrus, the nimbus. It's shaping up to be a very good sunset. That's one of the advantages of the overcast day out here in Norfolk. It very often turns into quite a pretty evening. This is a good intro, isn't it? Come on. Country chat. Up ahead is my dog friend, Rosie Buxton. She is, what is she doing? She's sniffing away at the hedgerows. She has a paw raised and her nose is twitching. She is ready to mete out country justice to any creature who steps out of line. Earlier today she had some harsh words with a couple of rabbits

who refuse to wear face masks in their warren. You might not be worried about getting ill, but it's all the other rabbits in the warren that you've got to think about. Rabbits told her to piss off and mind her own business and she didn't like that. Anyway, look, welcome to podcast number 129, which features a rambling conversation with British journalist and author Helen Lewis. Here's a few selected Helen facts for you. Helen, currently aged 36, read English at Oxford University and got her postgraduate diploma in journalism at London City University. Helen was made assistant editor at the New Statesman

magazine in 2010, becoming deputy editor a couple of years later. She was, for a long while, the co-host, along with Stephen Bush, of the New Statesman podcast. In 2019, she became a staff writer at American lifestyle magazine and multi-platform publisher, The Atlantic. It's one of my favorite lifestyle magazines slash multi-platform publishers. Our conversation was recorded remotely in May of this year, 2020, and we talked about, amongst other things, how Helen deals with the criticism and occasional abuse which comes her way from time to time online, especially when she writes about controversial topics or encounters divisive figures like, for example, Canadian clinical psychologist

and author Jordan Peterson, who Helen interviewed for GQ magazine in 2018. We talked about that encounter and it gave me an opportunity to mention my Paul Weller story again, which I haven't done for at least a few weeks, so that was good. We also talked about the downside of keeping up to date with current affairs, but we began our conversation by talking about Helen's book, Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in Eleven Fights, that I read earlier this year, and I enjoyed it very much. That was the reason that I got in touch with Helen.

It was after reading that. I really recommend it. I'll put a link in the description of this podcast. Oh, and in case there's anyone listening who doesn't get the reference, the People's Front of Judea were a political organization in Monty Python's life of Brian, who were in fierce conflict with the Judean People's Front. Okay, back at the end for a tiny bit more waffle, but right now, with Helen Lewis, here we go. So how are you doing anyway, Helen? It's very nice to meet you. Where are you? Obligatory remote lockdown podcast question.

I am in South London in Lewisham, which I moved to a couple of years ago and made a very rare good life decision because I'm next to a massive park. So that is my entire life. It's me, this front bedroom and the park. That's where I live now. And is it a nice park? I mean, it's fine. It's got a little river. That's where I live now. And is it a nice park? I mean, it's fine. It's got a little river. It's got a skate park, which is actually, which being this being South London,

isn't even filled with youths. It's filled with middle-aged men, which really cheers me up. Okay, so I was saying to you just before we started recording that I kind of came to your work via your book. The book is Difficult Women, History of Feminism in 11 Fights.

And I read about it in The Guardian. I think maybe they extracted a section or little bits. And I was very interested by it. The article was called Fighting the Tyranny of Niceness, Why We Need Difficult Women. And the subheadinging was today's thumbs up, thumbs down approach to feminism is boring and reductive. It's time to embrace complexity. And I thought, yes, I love to embrace complexity. But I read on and then I bought the book and really enjoyed it. I loved it. I mean, how would you describe it? And how would you describe it? Apart from anything else, it's a kind of mad idea, really. I was trying to work out a way to write a book about feminism because it's something that I've written about for years now. And I thought, how the hell do you compress, you know, 250 years of history into a 350 page book? But the fundamentally interesting thing about feminism, right, is that it's got shit done. I mean, as a social movement, 150 years ago, women couldn't go to university.

You know, 100 years ago, just over, they couldn't vote. Only 50 years ago, they weren't paid the same. You know, all of this stuff has been done by people. And that was what was really interesting to me, is kind of going, at a time, particularly, I started writing it in 2017, when I felt pretty dispirited with politics and its ability to make positive change. I thought, why don't I spend some time reading about some women who got some shit done? Yeah. And so there's 11 chapters in there.

And most of those chapters focus on a particular personality that was instrumental in the feminist movement. But all of those, well, almost all of those personalities are kind of, what's the word that you would pick? Nightmares. Nightmares is probably quite a good one. Well, they're complex. those personalities are kind of what's the word that you would pick nightmares nightmares it's probably quite a good one complex and they are they're not just straightforwardly heroic lily white you know geniuses brave wonderful women they like all of us have aspects to their lives and their personalities that would be described as problematic, I suppose.

One of the things that got me interested that was quoted in the article I read was your reference to the children's book, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. How would you describe that book for people who are not familiar with it? I mean, I feel bad because it is a children's book. It's a great children's book. I bought it for my daughter. She loves it. Well, so it has all these great stories of quote unquote inspirational women who said, you know, they were empowered women who didn't need rescuing. And the one that just made me hoot was Coco Chanel. And it said, you know, she learned how to sew from the nuns in the convent

and a rich friend lent her some money and she set up her own atelier and she made it through the Second World War and she changed fashion forever. And you go, that is one way of telling the story of Coco Chanel. Another way would be to say that it was the 1930s. She borrowed money from a friend who was Jewish. She then dobbed him in basically under the Aryan laws that forbade Jews from owning businesses, seized control of the company. She got through the Second World War by being probably a Nazi spy, certainly a kind of collaborator. And the clothes are lovely. I mean, the woman had great, great taste. The logos are terrific. The bags. I love the bags. Where would rappers be without her? But she certainly didn't need rescuing. You know, when the chips were down, she slept with a Nazi officer in order to make sure that she was safe. Is that an inspirational story I'd want to tell my daughter? You know, if things go really bad, have you considered sleeping with a Nazi officer?

I've already had that conversation with my 11 year old. look at, you know, I mean, that's fair enough. It's a children's book. You probably don't need to have that conversation with your 11 year old. But I sort of saw that approach kind of creeping into, you know, this sort of industry of sort of celebrating empowered women. And it's not really how politics works, right? Politics or even being a human being. I mean, countless similar books must have been written for children about male heroes of one kind or another, and their lives have been oversimplified in all sorts of ways. So it's not as if it's just books about inspirational women that have done it. But it is an interesting thought. And also, it used to drive me a bit crazy that for a while we had fridge magnets of many of those women in the Rebel Girls book.

fridge magnets of many of those women in the Rebel Girls book. And I don't know, there was just something about them being reduced to sort of smiley, cartoony fridge magnets that got under my skin a little bit. And I just like smiley fridge magnet Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo. Yeah. So Frida Kahlo in a terrible accident, you know, loses huge amounts of feeling. All of her paintings haunted by the idea about not being able to have children and spent her whole career. There's a brilliant article people dig up every so often where it says, Mrs. Diego Rivera, she paints too.

And that was the context in which she was working. She was Mrs. Diego Rivera. And yeah, and to see that kind of reduced to, oh, wouldn't I like to, like, it's International Book Day, so I'm going to paint a monobrow onto my child always feel slightly disrespectful to her legacy really yeah now there's so many as i said before i think all the women and the case studies that you focus on in your book were names that were more or less new to me with a few exceptions i've heard of marie stopes and people like that. But Erin Pizzi, you know, I knew about the charity Refuge. I don't know if she founded it, but her work in the 70s setting up the first women's refuge in the UK led to the foundation of that charity.

But I found her story fascinating. And she's kind of a good poster person, I suppose, for the type of women you're talking about in the book, who have done undeniably a lot for creating a world where women are treated equally. But also, you know, now in her later life, she's been weirdly co-opted by people who are perhaps not so focused on that aim. Can you talk to me a little bit about her and her story? You went and talked to her though, right? I did. She lives in Twickenham. She's in her 80s now. I really wanted to talk to her because I was vaguely aware this, to me, the headline was, the woman who founded the first domestic violence refuge in the UK is now a men's rights activist, you know, who says that feminism destroyed the nuclear family and the only thing that a child needs is two parents under one roof. And I thought,

wow, that's an intellectual journey. Okay, I'm in, I'm interested. And it's true. Yeah, she set up refuge in 1971. They kind of had the first building that was given to them by the council in Chiswick. And they kind of essentially squatted it really. But from the start, she had this quite, it's's the trouble is I do feel some sympathy with her view which is not something that's a particularly popular thing to say which is that she wanted to be more interested in the way that relationships are dysfunctional on both sides and it's a really difficult thing to edge towards because you know women are dying and some men are dying but it's a 10 to 1 in terms of women killing men versus men killing

women so anything that sounds like victim blaming is really difficult to edge around and I want to be really careful about that but you know she was seeing women who kept going back to the perpetrator which is something that everybody across the whole sector has struggled to understand for 50 years now since the refuge movement started you know and now a model of coercive control has been developed right where you get into this situation it's the only crime really where somebody alternates between saying that they love you and beating you up and that level of kind of kind of basically kind of holding someone in your power is a lot better understood than it was in the 70s so you can kind of see where she ended up parting ways with the

feminist movement but yeah she's gone so completely across the aisle. I think it's absolutely fascinating. But it was partly that political thing about who's responsible for domestic violence. And it was partly a personal thing, which you see again and again in feminism, which is that she saw herself as a kind of ordinary housewife. And she thought that the feminist movement was full of, you know, Maoists and Stalinists and, and you know these university educated blue stockings who didn't know anything about the real world who were all kind of political ideologues and i thought i feel that pull too you know when you see people marching around social media with these incredibly fringe things that they're trying to say the kind of centerpiece of feminism the impulse is always

just to go to your loons, like back off. Like, can we just do some boring stuff about childcare and then we'll kind of get to these more abstract stuff that you want to get to. But yeah, I just find her intriguing. And she's not anywhere on the Refuge's Our Story page. She's kind of been written out of the official record. But she kind of belongs there to me.

Yeah. You know, I felt sympathy with her for, as far as I could tell, getting frustrated with that whole people's front of Judea, Judean people's front infighting bullshit that you see on the fringes of so many important movements, you know. And you just think, wait, you're supposed to be all on the same side, aren't you? And I thought, yeah, I could easily see how you would get fed up with that and isolate yourself. But was she sort of cast out what was the thing that ensured that she got

removed from the official story then there's a complicated story about the angry brigade and planning to bomb Bieber the clothes shop which kind of all got mangled I want to get it very much right because Andrew Marr had to do a libel payout to her for getting the story wrong in his history of Britain. So I'm very keen to get it right. The question is whether or not she informed the police about people who she knew that she thought were plotting to bomb Bieber. That's her side of it.

And why were they going to bomb Bieber? Well, I presume it was part of the capitalist hegemony. I'm shamefully ill-informed about the angry brigade, actually. But, you know, she felt the far left had kind of infiltrated feminism and that very much wasn't where she was politically. And that they were, you know, they were one in Bruskin College, Oxford in the 1970s. So she may actually have had a chance to, which, you know, many of us have wanted to, to literally storm out of a movement rather than doing a flouncy tweet. Yeah. No, I think she's, I mean, she's a fascinating character because you just can't deny all the good she did and how much she cared about these people, you know, and apparently continues to do so and there's videos of her chatting away on youtube and i mean i didn't watch too many of them but though i

watched a couple and the most as you say yeah i suppose the most controversial things she says well she's quite stridently pro men's rights in a way that certainly isn't fashionable. And she's sort of conservative when it comes to the family unit. But she's not saying like it has to be a man and a woman. She's just talking basically what it comes down to for her is it needs to be a loving environment to raise a child. It doesn't matter if you're two women or two men or whatever. But that's the other thing that fascinated me having read her memoir. She's such an unreliable narrator. And I think this happens a lot in feminism as well, because it's concerned with kind of private stuff.

She wrote this Daily Mail article saying the only thing that the child needs is two loving parents under one roof. As soon as she got involved in the refuge, her husband gets kicked out to the basement and then out completely. She starts having all kinds of kids staying over. Her daughter gets pregnant at 14. She's living this actually kind of chaotic, bohemian life, whilst at the same time suggesting, actually, the thing is,

the nuclear family has been terribly belied by these feminists. Whereas you get all these feminists who've got radical political views and are very boringly heterosexually married in these kind of quite tedious ways. Well, that's quite common, though, surely, isn't it? Like, you feel as if you've learned your own lessons in your life, and then you want to tell other people how they should live theirs. You don't want to make the same mistakes I did. Yeah, I think that's probably true. But I just think there's so much hypocrisy around. I mean, the last couple of days have been interesting, because there's been a big kind of discussion about children and like what it's like to have children at home during coronavirus.

Now, I don't have kids, so I kind of approach this from an outsider's perspective. But this sort of, you know, I thought you loved having children. Like, why did you have children if you didn't want to spend any time with them? All of that kind of stuff I find really fascinating because most people didn't have children expecting that they would become full time stay at homeat-home parents and hold down a full-time job as well but anything to do with kids I think is just pushes a judgment button in people they just can't resist feeling that they should be able to tell other people how to parent their children yeah I know and it's always a total disaster area it's like the worst as soon as you start judging people about how they're bringing up their children. It's like, OK, I've got every right now to punch you right in the face. But I said to you before we started recording that I came to you through your book.

And then knowing that I was going to speak to you, I started looking you up online. I mean, I knew who you were and I'd read bits and pieces of yours before. I mean, I knew who you were and I'd read bits and pieces of yours before, but then I started looking at some of the things you've done and some of the spats you've been involved with over the years. I mean, just reading about some of them made me want to go to bed and lie down and close the curtains for a long time. Do you have a thick skin yourself or do these things get to you? I mean, there's a bit of the book where you talk about some of the spats that you got into towards the beginning

of the so-called fourth wave of feminism and the kind of annexing of who was a proper feminist and who wasn't. And this was around the time that Catlin Moran's book came out and was a sensation and then actually did a great job of raising the profile of the cause of feminism in all sorts of ways. But then it caused a kind of gold rush of people writing about it and getting books published about it and talking about it and then people accusing each other of not being proper feminists and and you got caught up in that to a certain degree that's a very kind way of putting it i definitely got caught up in it way too much and that was partly about my personal circumstances so i was assistant editor at the new

statesman which is a left-wing weekly magazine and i got my deputy editor when i was Whenever it was, you know, so I had a lot of kind of commissioning power and there was a lot of interest in feminism off the back of that Catlin Moran book. So it was, as you say, it was a gold rush and that becomes a really difficult environment because people are desperate for credit. They're desperate for the money, you know, and they don't want to see it all going to a particular type of person who's already, you know got a lot of those things so it became really vicious really quickly and I was not as mature I'd like to think that now my the grandeur and wisdom of age I'd be much more mature about it but I'm not sure I would in that situation again because it's very hard not to defend yourself when you feel like you're being misinterpreted right that's the thing I found

when I interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2018 that you know the video's been watched like 10 million to defend yourself when you feel like you're being misinterpreted, right? That's the thing I found. When I interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2018, that, you know, the video has been watched like 10 million times and the comments underneath are atrocious. I've never seen anything like that. But to the extent that, you know, like people just calling me ugly, people calling me, you know, a non-player character, people saying that, you know, my husband's a cuck, all of this stuff. And actually most of the time I've just found that really, really very funny. The stuff that's really hurtful is when people misread you, like when you get twisted, because every impulse in you wants to go, no, I'm a good person. No, no, if I just explain myself one more time, you'll understand that I'm a good person. And that's the criticism that I think is most difficult to deal with. And that's

why I think, you know, you talk about the people's front of Judea. It's why I think left-wing politics is particularly vicious for this, because somewhere running underneath it is a contest about who's a good person and the idea that there are good people and bad people. And therefore you have to prove yourself to be on the side of the righteous. And that's what so much of it comes down to. You just think it's tribal and it's sort of religious really rather than political. Yeah. I mean, I relate down to you just think it's tribal and it's sort of religious really rather than political yeah i mean i relate to what you just said so much and the other thing though for me as a person who struggles with a certain amount of self-loathing and anxiety in that department sometimes the criticism hurts because you feel that maybe it's accurate and that maybe there are things that you need to change about yourself or in your darkest moments, maybe you can't change them and maybe you are just a fucking shit bag.

Did you ever feel like that? Yes. Yes. And I think it's probably quite common in the kind of people who get into those situations. I remember when I was at the New States when I did a I used to do theme weeks and I did one about mental health and I said I put open call actors I always put out to all of our writers saying do any of you have anything you'd like to say about your mental health it was like the deluge is everybody came to tell me about their mental health problems and I think writers generally aren't particularly well adjusted as a

type of person right you know and I think there's something more than that too which is I think when I've really had bad times on Twitter I've gone looking for people being horrible about me oh man as a sort of form of self-harm and I think I've definitely seen other people do that too because what you do then is you can use it as the stick to flagellate yourself yes I have failed yes no one likes me all of that stuff but also you then kind of get into a sort of martyrdom kind of complex into a sort of martyrdom kind of complex about it and I think it's one of the big dangers about why too much social media rots your brain is that you want to show off your wounds and you want them to be acknowledged and I think it's a really dangerous impulse I had a I try not to respond to it now but I had

an incident before Christmas where someone else, a professional journalist in the UK, did a tweet about a piece that I'd written and said, the thing is, everybody that she worked with hates her. It's this open secret in journalism. She's, you know, she's a charlatan and everyone who worked with her hates her. And I thought, well, come on, actually, you know, the line has been crossed here. This is a bit much. Is this year 10? I think not. And I tweeted about it. And I sort and I tweeted about it and I I sort of regret tweeting about it now because there was an instant backwash of huge amounts of sympathy for me and huge amounts of aggro for the guy who said it and I actually looked I could see on my Amazon page that pre-orders for my book went up and what happened there was that some

people had obviously felt so bad for me and the hatred that i was attracted that they'd kind of gone to pity by my book and i thought i remember once when i talked asked a friend about before interviewing jordan peterson actually he said you know it's interesting to talk about evolution because he's evolving into a bellend before our eyes the selection pressure being attention right which i thought was a good and cruel thing to to say but i sort of thought actually the selection pressure of the martyrdom high is really really something to watch out for on on social media and i don't think it's good and i think you know people everybody gets all this kind of grief and then for some people getting the grief becomes a they want to you know they want the pain acknowledged that's a dynamic dynamic that's hard to kick, I would have thought.

Mm-hmm. And I suppose some people would say like, oh, well, if you don't like it, then don't write all your articles prodding at this or that subject that I don't agree with. And no, you always think you know best and blah, blah, blah. best and blah blah blah i mean a good example of you putting yourself in harm's way would be deciding to interview jordan peterson which i wanted to ask you about and do you mind me asking you about this i don't want to go too deep into it because i don't want to open reopen any wounds or antagonize any i do find it quite hard to listen to his voice now. Just actually, Jenny, I think I might be triggered by Jordan Peterson, but go on. There's no such thing as the patriarchy. What are you talking about?

Jordan Peterson. So for people that don't know, he is a Canadian clinical psychologist, social commentator and author. and author. And he, I suppose, first entered the spotlight in 2016, commenting on a Canadian piece of legislation that was trying to bring into law the idea that hate crimes should include a failure to respect gender identity and expression. And he was taking issue with the idea that it should be a matter of law what pronouns you should use for certain people. And he was saying, you know, this is getting ridiculous. And where does it end and what possible repercussions could there be further down the road if you start policing speech in this way? So a kind of interesting debate, I suppose, just blew up and became instantly toxic and made him a kind of hero for a lot of people who are characterized as alt-right. Not exclusively, but certainly there were lots of those people who were listening to what he was saying and suddenly held him up as a champion. And then he kind of leaned into all that.

Although when you were talking to him, he very strongly denied that that was the case and refused to acknowledge that a lot of those alt-righty types are among his followers online. So that's where he appeared on the radar. And then the next thing that I was aware of was when he went on Channel 4 News and was interviewed by Kathy Newman, because he's written various books. Yeah, his two books are very different. Twelve Rules for Life is, you know, kind of self-help book. And I don't mean that in a disparaging way. It started off as a quarrel list of ways to be a better person. His first book, Maps of Meaning,

is a sort of Joseph Campbell kind of hero's journey mixed in with some Jungian analysis that's got weird, like, diagrams of dragons. It starts off quite early with a description of him as a young psychology student going to a maximum security prison wearing a cape and knee-high leather boots and then being left alone with a load of murderers and feeling really like that he was going to a maximum security prison, wearing a cape and knee-high leather boots, and then being left alone with a load of murderers and feeling really like that he was going to get murdered

until this little guy ends up saying, like, it's all right, Jordan, I'll look after you. And he later finds out that this guy had been a gangland boss who had made two policemen dig their own graves and then shot them. The reason I remember that anecdote is that we talked a bit about this in our conversation. He's someone who's very fascinated by masculinity and particularly about masculinity and violence

and I talked to him a bit about fascism and about the idea that you know do you feel the pull of that kind of strongman ideology and he said yes I do you know I'm really aware of it in myself that you know that idea that order is masculine which is this Jungian archetype but yeah he was he was a fascinating interviewee. Yeah, I mean, it is a fascinating conversation. But as you say, beneath it are just screeds of, I would say, crazy comments from people who are just wanting to see it as a straightforward boxing match with a winner and a loser. And the pro the pro petersons obviously think you are the loser and that he owned you and it's not a balanced chat that's going on underneath the video the weird thing about that is that a theater came to me a bit about six months a year afterwards and said

they were interested in dramatizing it right along the Along the lines of, I mean, a very budget version of Frost Nixon. Yeah. I should clarify. I said the interesting thing about that to me is that the way that that play, then film is structured, is that there's a winner, right? And the idea is that even Nixon goes, you got me, right?

And the world goes, oh, you got him. And that doesn't happen now. And that to me was the big takeaway from the Peterson interviews. I got loads of emails from people saying, oh my God, you know, he came across as that Hannibal Lecter, you absolutely destroyed him. And then you look at the video and there are millions of comments saying, oh my God, he absolutely is destroyed. Are these feminists are terrible at arguing. And it to me was the perfect parable about that decline of any kind of gatekeeper or referee or, you know, shared sense of reality that the Internet has brought us.

Now, if Frost Nixon happens now, a load of people think that Nixon won because they're Nixon supporters. Yeah. I mean, all the titles of so many YouTube videos are, you know, watch so-and-so owning so-and-so and so-and-so destroys so-and-so. And actually, it's nothing like that. It's just some conversation that's been taped at a university somewhere. And there's a mild disagreement, maybe. But were you not nervous about just stepping into that arena at all? And did you think like, well, what purpose is this really going to serve when it will be boiled down to just oh he

owned her uh she destroyed him whatever i was nervous and i was nervous for practical reasons i mean i spent the week beforehand putting two-factor authentication on all my email and social media accounts right because if you expose yourself to that level of internet attention some of the attention will be bad so So, you know, that was quite concerning. But the reason that I agreed to do it is I'd originally written a column about him a couple of months previously, in which I'd said he was a cargo cult intellectual, right? He had all the forms and appearance of, you know, you must know about cargo cults. Is that a phrase that I don't know? Let's say for the sake of argument that I don't.

Is that a phrase that I don't know? Let's say for the sake of argument that I don't. So it was this idea that in these, I think, Pacific islands, American planes arrived with relief stuff and that dropped out. And the island has had a lively sort of mythology around it about the idea that if you just waved bamboo poles, that were the kind of things that look like air traffic control, then maybe the kind of, you know, plenitude would rain down again from the skies. There's also some tiny island i think somewhere that worships prince philip as a god but let's not go into that now but the idea of cargo cult intellectuals is someone who has all the appearance of being incredibly intellectual but the substance just isn't really there which was my criticism of him

that the book is you know says things that are pretty straightforward but for the audience it's written in it gets garlanded with kind of Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn and these kind of bits of evolutionary biology about lobsters quite famously that are kind of there to give it a sort of spurious sort of sciencey kind of vibe and a friend of mine said look you've been really over heart I think he's got some really interesting things to say I think you're being sneering and feminist and condescending. And I said, okay. This is a male friend of yours. Yes, a very brave male friend of mine. So when GQ said, do you want to interview him? I thought, okay, I'm going to do it. Then I'm going to go and I'm going to take him seriously. And I'm also going to confront the idea that

people have, you know, that kind of Ben Shapiro facts don't care about your feelings. The idea that progressive activism is all just based on, you know, how we would wish the world to be. And actually, the cruel truths of human nature are that men are just aggressive, and that's the way it's always going to be. And therefore, they'll end up being CEOs, because that's the natural extension of being a hunter-gatherer. gatherer and see whether or not on equal terms you know we can have a conversation that is an interesting intellectual exchange whether i can learn anything from him and you know whether or not my you know i'm secure enough in the things that i think and believe and argue that i can stand up to someone who is everyone agrees an incredibly good public speaker yeah an incredibly forceful arguer i mean he really is impressive at talking there's no doubt about that but he has a weirdly i suppose the thing about him for me when i've watched his stuff is that after being impressed by how confident he is i mean for someone like me who is often diffident and doesn't really know his mind about a lot of things and ties himself up in knots in all sorts of ways, to be confronted

by a person like that, who is confident in every conceivable way is very impressive. Then after a while, especially when he starts talking about, you know, he's someone that has got himself in all sorts of trouble. And following his comments about the C-16 amendment in Canada, you know, he was just in the maelstrom of this debate about trans rights. And was he being transphobic, et cetera? And so he's come out of that on the other side, just with an exaggerated sensitivity to that whole world and to the idea of woke culture. And it's now completely demonized in his mind.

And so he goes on the offensive about it and rants about it and sees it as an exaggerated threat, I think, to such a degree that he comes off quite cranky a lot of the time. But now he seems to have hardened. And when he was talking to you, I mean, he said, I heard him saying that you came in with quite an antagonistic demeanor anyway. So he felt that you were on the offensive. He knew that you didn't think much of him anyway. Maybe he read the piece you wrote about the cargo cult. So he was already on the defensive. I don't think he had. I don't think he knew who I was because he said he asked me what my surname was when we started doing it. And my reading of it is different.

I mean, I take this as me being biased. Obviously, I don't think that having been a journalist for 10 years, I've obviously tried to not cultivate like, come on, fuck it. Let's do this interview then. That's not my general. I'danour. But I think it was probably more, my mother-in-law actually said, when I said that I was an honorary fellow at Oxford that term, it actually changed. And I wonder whether or not actually he had thought I was a standard issue social justice warrior, and I was going to come out with a load of social constructionist stuff and therefore went in very hard and fast and then sort of felt slightly overextended and overexposed and then kind of

pulled back that was more my reading of it but yeah someone sent me the Joe Rogan bit where he said I had a negative animus and it was just it sort of made me I know I shouldn't say it sort of made me laugh a bit it was like the sort of she projected sort of mean girl vibes at me and it threw me off my game. I know it's weird, a lot of those people, you know, you so often find out with people who seem very confident, aggressively confident even, that actually they're sort of sentimental and sensitive in an unexpected way. But he just seemed unnecessarily aggressive with you and so unsmiling. That was the thing that came across was that it was just so combative from the off. I would have been frightened of him if I'd been sat in front of him. I would have not been able to string a sentence together. You would have been hearing the fear in my voice. Did you feel

like that when you were sat there? I mean, yeah. And I don't mean to imply that I think he would have done this, but I did genuinely have a moment where I thought, he's not going to punch me. I've got a videographer here, like that's going to be fine. But he was obviously incredibly unhappy and tense. And we had this situation they they decided quite last minute to film it so they had just a standard video recorder you know like a a camera in which there were only half hour memory slots so we had to every three twice we had to put a new memory slot in which has created a whole hilarious range of internet conspiracy about like why does he get cut off at 48 minutes in what's because to put a new memory card in the slot. But I just think you're right about the certainty.

And I find the certainty fascinating because I also think of myself as a slightly unsure, kind of cautious, anxious kind of person. But I think weirdly that makes you more resilient, right? Because you're not so invested in stuff that you become horribly vulnerable if you feel that it's being attacked or debunked. If you're incredibly attached to your convictions, then you've opened up a huge point of vulnerability on yourself. But I do think the problem is that, you know, fame particularly calcifies people into, you know, into caricatures of themselves. And the pronouns bill is a really interesting example, right?

Because he does appear to have overstated what was in that bill but there was a situation only a couple of years ago here where a case came to court where a woman had been punched by a trans woman and refused to use her preferred pronouns and the judge said well that's not very kind is it and you sort of thought I don't I agree it's not a particularly kind thing to do however you're punching someone in the face, also not kind. And I do think that there would be an issue if you were convicted of a hate crime, for example, because you called your rapist he, I would find that really, really an uncomfortable thing to do. So, you know, somewhere under all the layers of the kind of aggro, there was a point that he was making about

the fact that society is a kind of negotiation between different people. But the internet doesn't reward that and modern publishing culture doesn't reward that it rewards very simple truths bluntly stated and aggressively defended right yeah exactly but to such a dispiriting degree so that all these you know so many of the arguments that are going on are between people who when it comes down to, are just wanting people to be treated properly with respect and kindness. You know, on both sides, they claim that that's their motivation. But the conversations are not moving towards that goal, I don't think. And as you say, instead, it's all just boiled down to who won and who lost. And, oh, man, I was really impressed that you'd done it.

But also, I was thinking, like, why did you agree for them to film it? Because that would be the bit that would turn it into a disaster area as far as I was concerned. Like, if you were interviewing him for an article and you write up the article in as fair a way as you can, that's one thing. the article in as fair a way as you can that's one thing but then to have it filmed and put on youtube then it gets away from you to such a degree and you just become a hostage to all these people who will monster you afterwards you know and do you feel as if that can be avoided or does that get to you i mean i don't think it can be avoided and it it does get to me but i think it's fairer to him isn't it um i think the idea is that you know if by being incredibly transparent about the interview process right it's all there i think

it's now one of the things i have a problem about with doing journalism now is trying to find people to write about who are kind of untilled soil i know that sounds like a really weird thing to say people who are unselfconscious which is what you kind of want to write about who are kind of untilled soil. I know that sounds like a really weird thing to say, people who are unselfconscious, which is what you kind of want to write about, right? You want to write about people who are living and doing stuff. And so much of modern journalism is interviewing people who have got layers and layers of this carapace of self-awareness and, you know, knowing what their reputation is, thinking about how they're going to be presented. And if you do write up the interview yourself, you've got a huge amount of control about, you know, how you present it. Obviously, you can make yourself the heroic narrator of that story.

And it might not be true. But I think the reason I went along with it, although, again, I was quite nervous about it, not least because I thought, you know, the one, the favourite, the thing that amused me the most actually was that um I'm very pale and loads and loads of the internet comments were like bitch needs to get some sun and then about four months afterwards I got diagnosed with quite a severe vitamin d deficiency and it turned out that bitch did in fact need to get some sun

so I'd like to thank them for their thoughtfulness in that regard. How did you leave things then at the end of the interview? Was it frosty or was he okay and polite? No, he's incredibly, incredibly polite and, you know, was like, you know, have you got everything that you need? And he'd had to do a photo shoot beforehand for the pictures for it and was then off to whatever the, you know, we were in Baltimore. He was then off on the next, you know, stop nine billion of his, you know, were in baltimore he was then off on the next what you know stopped nine billion of his you know world tour i'd seen him two three days earlier talking in long island to like a thousand people and now obviously since he's been in a medical coma for pill addiction right so who

knows whether or not at the time he was already experiencing some of those symptoms you know it much i would partly tempted to kind of get involved in the dunk contest i just think you know i don't i don't think he's a bad person and i think he said some very unhelpful you know his whole line about enforced monogamy about perhaps being a good idea was something with which i hugely disagree and i think it's a hugely dangerous concept to even begin to edge towards but you know you know, he's all the more interesting because I don't know exactly how I feel about him. Yeah. What would you have asked him if it had been you interviewing him? What would you want to know from him?

I thought about it. How the hell would I have? I mean, I wouldn't have gone in there in the first place, I think. And even though I like having these conversations, I'm interested in all this stuff. I like talking to people like you and reading your books and things like that. You know, I was never on the debate team at school or anything like that. I find it hard to know my own mind, let alone argue a good case. So I would be completely pulverized by someone like Jordan Peterson.

He would hold me up as everything that was wrong with modern manhood, probably. He would probably say that I'm just a terrible, spineless, hand-wringing lackey of the left, possibly. I don't know. So I would treat it with caution. But on the other hand, I suppose I would appeal to his humanity. I suppose I would make myself vulnerable. I'm trying to think because I, you know, I really try and avoid confrontation whenever possible. I would much rather just get along with people. And that's either an admirable impulse or you could characterize it as a cowardly one. I don't know. But confrontation of any kind makes me upset.

You know, I had a thing once where I interviewed Paul Weller, who was on Radio 2. And I thought it would be funny to say to him, has anyone ever said to you, Paul Weller, Weller, Weller? Oh, tell me more. Tell me more. I thought that was funny. It's a good line. Come on. Well, that's funny.

It's a good line. Come on. Paul Weller. And I was thinking about it on the way to Radio 2 and chuckling away to myself and thinking, I'm pretty sure Paul Weller is going to find that quite funny and want to be my friend. Anyway, Paul Weller didn't find that funny. He thought it was the most awful thing. He thought it was just absolutely a shit thing to say and embarrassing and made it very clear on air and looked at me with his little angry mod eyes. And it was I was absolutely awful because I didn't want to antagonize him.

You know, I think he's great. Anyway, all the Paul Weller guys on Twitter afterwards, which I'd only just joined at the time, I think. Maybe I wasn't even on Twitter then. I can't remember. Somehow I was reading. Oh, it was on the message. You didn't go to the Paul Weller forum, did you? That was a mistake.

I didn't go to the forum, but they were all on the Radio 2 message board and they were apoplectic. They were just like, you stupid fucking arsehole. You should be killed for doing that stupid joke. I mean, they were so angry. Just the idea that I, I guess they found it disrespectful to Paul. And boy, oh boy, I just thought, God, it wasn't, I wasn't trying to be mean.

It was just a stupid joke. And it really rattled me at the time. But now I think I might lean into that a little bit more, especially with someone like Jordan Peterson, because at the end of the day, like, what do I care really what he thinks of me and what his followers think of me? I mean, I would care.

I wouldn't like to be exposed to their contempt, but I do find him an interesting person. You know, he's clearly an extremely intelligent guy, and he is interested in a lot of interesting things. So, yeah, I just, I suppose I would just try and, this is a very long, rambly answer to your question. No, I like it as an answer because I have the opposite problem with interviewees, which is that several of my previous interviewees I'm now friends with, which I think is equally bad in the opposite direction, because you kind of think you shouldn't be using it as a sort of very high class kind of friend dating service,

your journalism career. Who would I like to be friends with? And I think going in, you know, the best interviewers are the ones who go in not caring how the other person thinks and actually having no need for them afterwards, right, in any way. And that's that kind of clinical level of hygiene i think is something that journalism really needs and often is kind of slightly missing you know i mean the sense that i find a lot of criticism is very kind of cozy because either it's about showing off about your incredibly rarefied tastes or it's about being in the kind of club and wanting to be kind of friends with the people who are doing interesting things and the ideal kind of critic is a sort of you you know, sociopathic hermit, basically,

with a really good prose style. But I probably would have made a joke to Paul Weller. And I hate those situations too, because you're treated by the person's fans like you're some kind of clammy idiot who is sort of beneath them. And you're like, well, presumably Paul Weller was there to promote Paul Weller and the idea of Paul Weller, the career of Paulul weller the music of paul weller right he hadn't just turned up at the goodness of his heart as a sort of charity donation to your show yeah and when there are those interactions between celebrities and journalists you sort of think

everyone is there to do a job right yeah but that's what i think when you when you talk about wanting journalists to be completely independent to an almost kind of psychopathic degree, like to be unfussed by maybe trampling over the feelings of their subject. I agree with you to a degree. Like, yes, they should be balanced. And that is certainly preferable to just blowing smoke up their ass. should be balanced in it that is certainly preferable to just blowing smoke up their ass but at the same time i don't know i think you've got to treat people the way you would if you were meeting them in a friendly environment don't you unless you're going to meet some fascist dictator or someone like that yeah i've never interviewed a fascist dictator, sadly. But I mean, even then, like some people,

some people come away from having interviewed pretty problematic people with a grudging respect for them, I suppose, don't they? Because this is the thing is like, with very few exceptions, hmm, is this a good thing to say? Definitely say it. No, but with very few exceptions, like very few people, I would say, are totally 100 percent evil.

Wouldn't you think like most people started out OK? I mean, this is a profound philosophical conversation that I'm not equipped to have. It's like whether you believe in true evil or whether people are just made evil by circumstance and bad luck. I don't know. I'd like to think that people are mainly good and that they go wrong. But I quite subscribe to that Simon Baron Cohen thesis about evil being about an empathy deficit. So that in itself is quite useful in those terms. You're probably not going to ever do a really good interview with someone who's evil because they just don't have, you know,

they're not interested in other people's minds and they don't really see other people as fully formed human beings. But I agree with you. There is a problem when you do interviews that there is a kind of expected things that you have to cover. And there is a certain tendency of people who want an interview with anyone vaguely controversial, just to be a

harangue about how terrible they are. I interviewed Tony Blair a couple of years ago. And I knew that there was a way in which I was going to ask him about Iraq, because I wanted to ask him about the contrasting responses to that and, you know, our failed intervention in Libya. But he's a really interesting guy. He's got lots of, you know, huge amount of foreign policy experience, loads of interesting things to say, very relevant experience. And nonetheless, there were people who basically wanted me to go, Tony Blair is a war criminal. Let me tell you over the concept of another 2,000 words

about how terrible a war criminal Tony Blair is. And you kind of go, even if you think that's true, isn't it more interesting to ask how that all of the Iraq war unfolded? Like, how did that happen? If, like you say, unless you think that everybody in there went, I want to make lots, you know, I want to, I want to be in charge of a huge foreign policy disaster. It's always been my ambition and my dream. Then presumably something went wrong. And asking about that and trying to interrogate that is much more interesting than straightforward condemnation. Yes. Although in a way that article was sort of already written for you,

because the way to write it surely would have been to, yeah, maybe sound that note of ambiguity and say, well, actually, here's a three-dimensional person with very interesting aspects to his life and career. But then last paragraph would be, so it makes it all the more strange that he turned into a fucking war criminal. The end. Yeah, but it also got to me because I've just, weirdly, I've been reading this Michael Lewis book about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky,

you know, the psychologists. Yeah, I love that book. And it's such an unexpectedly beautiful book, isn't it, about the way they kind know, the psychologists. Yeah, I love that book. And it's such an unexpectedly beautiful book, isn't it? About the way they kind of get pulled apart. Yeah, the undoing project. But about the idea that we don't, we, you know, we have these mental models of regret, and we don't regret the things that we just didn't do. And I think that's so interesting, if you're in politics, you'll never get attacked for not doing stuff, because people assume it happened without you in any way. Whereas anything you do, you get criticised for. It's a terrible bind that

actually probably makes something fundamental about human psychology makes politics worse, because, you know, anything you don't do, you don't get blamed for by and large. Although I suppose you could say that the current Conservative government is now in the process of being blamed for not doing things earlier in the Covid crisis. Yeah, that's true. May 2020, where it feels as if the tide of public opinion is very much turning against the conservative government. And there's a lot of anger about why the death rate in the UK was so high, second only to the US. And I talked to a doctor towards the beginning, like a week before the lockdown began. And he was someone who had worked with the WHO. And he was saying, look, I'm no fan of Boris Johnson and his government, but there are

a lot of intelligent experts giving them pretty sound advice. I don't know what that person would say now if I spoke to him, but I suspect he would say, well, that was true then and it's true now. They did what they thought was best. And the conflict now is like, well, to what extent was it motivated by their desire to just keep the economy on the rails, right? Right. But the trouble with all of that is we're nowhere near the end point of which you would say. Yeah, that's the thing, it's too early. Now it's done and we can look back on it. I mean, this is always the problem when you cover elections is that you try and work out, map out the possible futures.

And you can see a situation in which there's a vaccine developed by the end of the year, say, and you know, our death rate is much higher than everyone else's and we look absolutely terrible. You can see another situation in which there's no vaccine and actually everybody has to learn to live with it for years and years and years and Britain gets back to normal faster than other people because we've ended up having something close to the now discredited idea of herd immunity and that's then rehabilitated by history having been at the time condemned as this like you know essentially which we're sort of murdering people because we want it to burn through the population and I just don't know why at this point you would particularly as a non you know statistician non-epidemiologist, start essaying very confident opinions about how we've dealt with the pandemic when we're still dealing with the pandemic.

Yes, I'm sort of, it's one of the many reasons I'm glad I'm not currently on Twitter. Were you a big, did you like physical contact in the olden days? Did you like it when people hugged you and things like that no no i didn't and you know the ultimate middle class dilemma of one kiss on the cheek or two kisses on the cheek yeah that i would say that probably used up about one percent of my brain constantly being on high alert whether or not i was going to hand out the you know the incorrect number and end up sort of lunging at someone and that is gone now presuming no one is ever going to touch anyone else again it's that that that's quite exciting to me so what are you going to be doing namaste bowing and yeah that's definitely not going to lead to a huge cultural appropriation

around the internet i don't well done good show you solved that one is namaste no good no it's you're culturally appropriating it from buddhism aren't you do they mind well the thing is i went to nepal uh yeah was it um 2018 and everybody was saying namaste it was really really weird to see it divorced from the usual place where i see people saying namaste the yoga studio and remembering that there is actually it's just like it's like saying hello i just love the idea that people probably in nepal are kind of going around to each other going hello yeah exactly what a strange thing to say to each other and then saying british people would be very hurt by that you know exactly there's some furious tweets about this so you're off twitter but to what extent are you following the news and are you someone that feels they just have to be across

current affairs and things like that or can you disengage for periods of time i don't think i've ever had a happier moment than when i realized that i didn't have to go to labor party conference this year that was a true moment there's the one upside of the pandemic yeah no when i um so i moved from the new statesman to the atlantic year, and I thought I'm moving to a purely writing role. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to slightly recalibrate because the trouble with covering Westminster is just a lot happens. someone there's always a new bill there's always a debate there's always a knife edge vote and then you just step back and you think what actually happened like what is different today than yesterday in any material sense and i think it's one of the things i really worry about about political journalism is it is this kind of weird sort of versailles where everybody's kind of cooped up together and they think everything they're doing is enormously important and you kind of cooped up together. And they think everything they're doing is enormously important. And you kind of go, you know, the peasants can't buy bread outside. Are you guys

entirely sure that you're clocking this? And therefore, I did take the opportunity to slightly disengage from being interested in following the minutiae of Westminster politics. Because as you say, the really interesting thing is, these big subjects, they change over years, people kind of go, oh, I'm going to write a book about populism. Well, that was a very interesting book to write in 1932. It's a very interesting book to write now. You know, these fundamental big drivers of politics are kind of, to some extent, always with you and more interesting ultimately than the micro froth about the latest Brexit vote. Yeah. Do you have any friends that just don't read the news no no i probably should shouldn't i that would be a normal thing i don't know i mean i don't i don't know anyone like that

because i suppose most people would see cutting yourself off from what's going on in the world to that degree as irresponsible and evidence that you don't care but i don't think that's the case i think like every every now and again you'll get a news story about someone like i don't care. But I don't think that's the case. I think like every now and again, you'll get a news story about someone like, I don't read the news anymore. And everyone's like, oh, that's weird. And I'm much happier. And that's the story is always, I no longer watch TV news or read newspapers. And I've never been so happy. And people are like, well, yeah, but you're irresponsible. You're no longer taking part in society and you're part of the problem. But then the people that I've read about say, well, no, I mean, I still vote when it's time to vote. I'll read the manifestos of the parties and you can't insulate yourself totally from what's going on in the world.

You know, you're still involved in conversations with other people, but you're not seeking it out and you're not addicted to it and you're not reading about it all the time or watching it on the news all the time. because, you know, journalism and news journalism maybe was once supposed to be neutral, but for a long time it hasn't been. And it uses all those tricks, especially TV news, to appeal to your emotions. And you come out of it shredded a lot of the time. The trouble is people will say quite regularly, you know, I wish that the media covered more positive stories.

It'd be nice. Why is everything so negative? And you kind of go, I'm going to introduce you to my friend the analytics chart which shows you that people don't read those stories right right right i interviewed a guy called ro bowmeister last year he wrote a book called the negative uh yeah the negativity effect and it's the problem is as humans we're drawn to look at the bad side because actually probably you think in evolutionary terms it's quite good to be alert for the you know the tiger that was going to eat you so people are always

going to kind of seek that out but I agree with you the thing that's interesting to me is about the idea that reading a lot of news has come to stand in for doing politics and something we had we had an article on the Atlantic a couple of months ago that was talked it was called the perils of political hobbyism and it had two contrasting people. One was like a college graduate who read a lot of news and tweeted a lot about stuff and signed a lot of petitions. And the other was, you know, a kind of person in a normal occupation, like a nurse or something like that, who was a local community organiser, maybe helped out the local soup kitchen. And it said, which of these two people is doing more politics, more effective politics? politics and actually is that synthetic form of politics that's I'm really

interested I'm angry about everything that's happening I'm very against all the bad things that are happening is that level of engagement actually a substitute for doing small but unrewarded things in your community that ultimately would probably be better and I think that's really true I think that for more educated people have sort of lured themselves in the idea that just knowing a lot about stuff and feeling a lot of emotions about news is somehow, well, it's lazier, isn't it?

So than going and just volunteering at a food bank. Because also it kind of makes you feel better. It makes you feel like you're engaged in this great existential struggle. Yeah, that's what, it's hobbyism. It's a very self-indulgent form of politics. feel like you're engaged in this great existential struggle yeah that's what it's hobbyism it's it's it's a very self-indulgent form of politics what do you helen what do you do when you want to break from it or when you just want to cheer yourself up what kind of things do you go to to sort of

lift your spirits and to like have a massive chill pill i watch sas who dares wins that's a great program oh yeah love that what's that one i what uh channel four i believe did you watch that um oh god what's it called love is blind the netflix series where they made people date each other in pods where they couldn't see each other and then this being america it ended with them either deciding to marry each other or not no i, I didn't see that. Oh, love to see it. It was so unbelievably unethical, but also just absolutely fascinating. Love is blind. Love is blind. And then the other thing I do, which is extremely nerdy, is I read history. Because I think reading history always makes you feel better about

the present, right? Because you just see people have lived through it before it's you know it's all kind of happened before and it will all be kind of dust sometime I'm currently trying to write something else about the 1970s so I'm reading more follow-up stuff from the book and just reading about the parliament in the 1970s just cheers me up so much it's so so mental I'm just reading about barbara castle's memoir it's got about a story about her long-running campaign to um get a lady's loo within walking distance of the chamber and she finally gets one and they call it barbara's castle and now i have only one ambition in life which is at some point to get like a punning because the name is lewis so it can already work i can have helen's loo at some point somewhere prominent like a punning because the name is Lewis. So it can already work. I can have Helen's Lou at some point somewhere prominent.

Like where do I want my commemorative Memorial Lou to be? That's all I'm trying to decide now. Then all the Jordan Peterson fans can go there and take a dump in it. It's very moving. It's what I would have wanted. You realize that's how we're going to end this podcast wait this is an advert for Squarespace every time I visit your website

I see success yes success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch,

And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Helen Lewis there, and I'm very grateful indeed to Helen for making the time to talk to me. Helen Lewis there, and I'm very grateful indeed to Helen for making the time to talk to me. I really recommend her book, Difficult Women, History of Feminism in 11 Fights. There's a link in the description of the podcast. It's very well written, very engaging, each chapter focusing on a

different important struggle in the history of feminism. And Helen is currently working on her second book, which she describes as essentially a socialist theory of genius, which actually is quite a good description for my book as well. Speaking of my book, I sent out the first physical copies, hardback copies, which I was sent by HarperCollins, my publishers, a week or two back. And I have started sending them out to friends and family. The book is not actually available until early September. But yeah, I thought I'd send a few advanced copies to first of all, the people who are actually mentioned in the book so i sent one to joe called balls cornish and he took a picture of it and the inscription on the inside cover and posted it on his instagram page unfortunately neither he or i noticed that i'd actually left

out a word in the inscription. It said something like, Dear Joe, thanks for being part of this book. It would have been very dreary without you or something. Except I missed out the word been. It would have very dreary without you. And so he posted a picture of the inscription on his Instagram page, which I didn't know he was going to do. And I guess he didn't notice that I'd missed out the word either.

So it doesn't look that good. This guy can't even get the inscription on a book right. What's the rest of it going to be like? Anyway, I'm going to send him another copy with the same inscription. And I'll include a bean this time. And maybe the beanless copy might be auctioned as a curiosity for, well, I would imagine, a lot of money. This week I'm going to send out a few more copies to members of my family, my brother and sister, my auntie, Auntie Jessica. She gets mentioned in there. I don't know what she's going to make of me calling my... My grandfather was a batman, which is like a personal servant for a lieutenant colonel. Kind of, I keep imagining Baldrick, although I'm not sure that he was exactly like Baldrick.

Eh, maybe. Anyway, instead of calling him a batman, I call him the lieutenant colonel's war bitch in the book. I'm not 100% sure if Jessica's going to find that amusing. Well, see, I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that you can pre-order copies of the book by following the link in the description of this podcast.

All right. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support on this episode. Thanks, Seamus. Much appreciated, as ever. And thank you, too, to Matt Lamont. Cheers, Matt. Great job editing this conversation. And thanks as well to Helen Green. She does the artwork for this podcast. And I just noticed the other day that I, I mean,

I've mentioned her many times, but I don't give her a regular thank you, which I really should do. So I apologise, Helen, for not doing that on a regular basis. You know how grateful I am to you for your fantastic artwork. There's a link to her site in the description of the podcast. She's just magnificent. She's also illustrated my book, Ramble Book, and done another great job on that. Knocking it out of the park. Helen Green, thank you. And thank you very much for downloading this podcast, listening right to the end. You're great, open-minded, cool, fun, interesting, G-S-O-H. And, well, I mean, I think we both know that I love you. Bye! Thank you. Bye. Thank you.