THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.227 - HELEN LEWIS

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Adam talks with British journalist, author and presenter, Helen Lewis about culture wars and weight loss drugs.This conversation was recorded face-to-face on 8th May, 2024Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSBEAT - Eating disorder charity. Beat’s helpline is available 365 days a year on 0808 801 0677NATIONAL CENTRE FOR EATING DISORDERS - NCFED offers information, resources and counselling for those suffering from eating disorders, as well as their support networks. Visit their website or call 0845 838 2040HELEN LEWIS SUBSTACK - THE BLUESTOCKINGHELEN LEWIS: GREAT WIVES - 2024 (BBC SOUNDS)HELEN LEWIS HAS LEFT THE CHAT - 2024 (BBC SOUNDS)From WhatsApp leaks to group chat nightmares, how instant messaging changed the world.THE NEW GURUS - 2023 (BBC SOUNDS)Helen Lewis meets the new gurus promising us enlightenment in the digital worldCONTRAPOINTS - THE WITCH TRAILS OF JK ROWLING - 2023 (YOUTUBE)YouTuber Natalie Wynn explains why she regretted taking part in The Witch Trials Of JK Rowling podcastTHE WITCH TRIALS OF JK ROWLING PODCAST - 2023 (THE FREE PRESS WEBSITE)YOU CAN'T SAY THAT 1 - 2024 (REFLECTOR WEBSITE)A year after 'The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling', the producers of that podcast consider where things stand around the issues in their series.YOU CAN'T SAY THAT 2 - 2024 (REFLECTOR WEBSITE)Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) is one of the contributors to this second part and puts across her criticisms of the 'Witchtrials' podcast series.WHEN CHILDREN SAY THEY'RE TRANS by Jesse Singal - 2018 (THE ATLANTIC)STAX: SOULSVILLE USA - 2024 (YOUTUBE) 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? It's Adam Buxton here. Sorry to tell you that it's just me today.

My best dog friend Rosie is at home, happily curled up on the floor while her human mum does important legal work. Of course I could have pretended Rosie was here with me but I would feel bad deceiving you. The thing is she just absolutely doesn't want to come out at the moment because of these bird-scarers. It wasn't the gunshots so much, she doesn't like the gunshots but they are quite infrequent but what's been happening for the last few weeks is that they've had these gas-powered noise

guns on the fields around here because I suppose they've just put down seeds or something for the new crop. I don't know about farming, I don't know if you've noticed. So I suppose the idea is to stop the birds from just munching all the seeds that they've just put down. And it's a drag because the shots are irregular. I think it's once every half hour or something like that. So you never quite know when it's gonna happen. And Rosie, as soon as she's out of the house

and we're on the track, she's worried. And the other day I said, come on Rosie, we're gonna get over this. Fine, there's nothing to worry about. And it was late in the day, I thought maybe they've turned the guns off now, because I think they turn them off in the evenings. I carried her part of the way and then I set her down, but she was still pretty reluctant. But I said, come on, let's go, it it'll be fine and as soon as we got up to where the gun was it went off and she was really upset and I felt terrible that I'd let her down and all her worst fears had come true. For a dog that sound is incredibly loud and unpleasant.

We're still friends but she certainly doesn't want to come out for a walk with me at the moment, or anyone else for that matter. Anyway look, let me tell you about episode number 227, which features a rambling conversation with British writer, journalist, presenter and returning podcast guest Helen Lewis. Here's a few Helen facts for you. Born in 1983, Helen 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. In 2019 she became a staff writer at the American Lifestyle magazine and multi-platform publisher

The Atlantic, where her work is characterized by a willingness to tackle controversial subjects and challenge prevailing narratives. In recent years Helen has written and presented several excellent series on Radio 4 that include The New Gurus about uber-influencers of the digital world like Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow. I'd also recommend her series Helen Lewis has left the chat which featured strange, funny and shocking stories from the world of private messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack. Her new series is called Great Wives in which she meets the life partners of history's most famous geniuses. Although

I don't believe she has yet spoken to my wife. You can listen to all those series on BBC Sounds. In addition to all that and frequent appearances on Have I Got News for You and co-hosting duties on the Private Eye podcast, Helen also writes a weekly newsletter available via the Substack platform. It's called The Blue Stocking, a reference to an 18th century term for women involved in literary, academic or intellectual pursuits, back when such activities were considered unconventional and inappropriate for women. In the blue stocking, Helen shares stories from around the internet that often touch on her main areas of interest, history, psychology, feminism and media criticism, and she says, often I can't

help myself writing about the culture wars. Helen has written several pieces about weight loss drugs especially ozempic and in our conversation recorded face-to-face in London back in early May this year 2024 we talked about the pros and cons and implications of these kinds of drugs. It was really interesting to hear Helen talk about her own relationship with food over the years, and a lot of what she said certainly resonated with me, although I think I'm still rather in denial about my own occasionally dysfunctional eating habits and body image issues, which have never been too extreme extreme but they certainly do

bother me from time to time like a lot of people in the modern world I suspect. We talk about all that in the second half of our conversation but we began by giving into the gravitational pull of the culture wars in particular the issue of gender politics. As I say to Helen, it is not a conversational topic I would normally weigh in on, partly because it has become so bitter and toxic, but as Helen explains, for some people that kind of attitude is not good enough. I thought we had a very interesting talk about all of this, but listening back there were several moments that I wished I had expressed myself better.

I say at one point that I wish people could be more respectful when discussing these kinds of issues. But I do understand that some people would feel that it's offensive of me even to talk about being respectful or nice, given the complexity of the subject matter and the stakes for people directly affected. Still, I really do believe that how difficult subjects are talked about is important. Ironically, I'm just not sure I said that very well. I'm very aware that this is a subject that's full-time for many people involved and it's not

one that I'm confident discussing, but because I like Helen and I think she's amazingly smart and thoughtful I thought we could at least try to have a conversation that touched on all of this and didn't just make things worse. I hope that's what we did. But I began by asking Helen if she thought the climate of the culture wars had changed significantly since we first met on zoom in 2020 just thought the climate of the culture wars had changed significantly since we first met on Zoom in 2020, just after the publication of her book Difficult Women, a History of Feminism in Eleven Fights, which examined the struggles and contradictions within the feminist movement. Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now with Helen Lewis. Here we go. you're talking at. Yes, yes, yes. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la I think that things have got better and we are very reluctant to acknowledge when things

have got better but I think they have. Better in what way? I think that some of the cancellation stuff has eased off definitely. I think that there is a broader range of views and now kind of acceptable that mechanism has restored itself for people being able to air legitimate concerns reasonably and it doesn't feel so unbelievably tense as it did say in 2020. I think the vibe has shifted. So can you paint a picture of what the vibe was like? Because I remember obviously the general feeling of anxiety that there was. But you know,

I tend to feel that quite a lot anyway. I listened back to the conversation you and I had towards the end of the summer in 2020. And I was in a bad place anyway, because my mum had died. So I had that extra layer, like many people did, of just a personal bit of grieving to add to the general sense of like, what the fuck is going on? And I really felt pretty mad.

I remember the day that I spoke to you, it was one of those ones where you and I hadn't met before, we hadn't really spoken. And I got in touch because I read your book, Difficult Women. And listening back to it, actually, it was really quite fun. It was a good talk. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Yeah. And I enjoyed listening back to it. I wasn't quite as whiny as I remember being, but there was quite a bit of me sort of apologizing to you in one way or another for not being

cleverer. You know what I mean? It was just me saying, Oh, I know, you know, I don't really know my mind and I, how do you get into all these rows and not get upset? Helen, how do you do it? Aren't you upset about people saying nasty things about you on the internet and all basically projecting on you all the anxieties that I had myself but how would you now characterize the tone of a lot of stuff that was going on then here but I went through a period I guess maybe 2017, 2018 to quite recently where I couldn't really enjoy anything nice that happened to me because it always felt like somebody would come in and try and take it away and that happened you know when I joined the Atlantic in 2019 I had to warn them I was like you know there might be some people saying some very rude stuff about me and sure enough there was a Jezebel article saying you know Atlantic adds to its transphobia problem and a quite unflattering picture of me on Channel 4 News. And you know, the ambition with those

kind of pieces was that you would kind of you take someone down, you know, that you'd make the Atlantic rescind their offer to hire me because I would be just too disgusting or you would provoke a staff revolt that would make it really hard. And I just that happened and that's happened to so many of my friends, that you have this constant sense of everything being tainted because there were people who would seize on any moment when you were kind of in the news to go I hope that one's remembered that she's terrible Yes, and yeah, and you are made aware of it

Sometimes it's thrust in front of you by people, you know, my mom used to like to send me bad reviews She thought they were quite good. You know, they were sort of three star reviews. So she'd think like, I think she thought, well, it's nice that people are talking about you. And you obviously read the one sentence in it that was like, it's not as good as his previous work. Yeah.

But now, I mean, you're active on social media, you're sort of engaged in that way as part of your job. So you're seeing all this stuff, right? Yeah, but I think it's different since Elon Musk took over Twitter It has become a bad place in many ways the Overtoun window of what's acceptable on there has shifted in ways that were very helpful To me, you know people could be banned for misgendering for example And whatever you think about that, I would voice all it's rude and I try not to do it But it doesn't seem to me to be equivalent to hate speech, which was how it was kind of presented mmm, the vibe is Stephanie shifted on on social media and I try not to do it, but it doesn't seem to me to be equivalent to hate speech, which was how it was kind of presented.

The vibe has definitely shifted on social media and ultimately lots of the news organizations that only existed to write up social media controversies, Buzzfeed, Huffpost, Jezebel, Vox has pivoted away from them, you know, that kind of ecosystem, which relied on social media traffic, they largely collapsed, you know, they're kind of husks of what they were have been sold off to other people. So now if someone does something outrageous on Twitter or gets a pile on, there's not the ancillary industry of picking it up and laundering it just sort of happens and then everyone goes, Oh, bit spicy and moves on.

And that 2010s I think was just, you have to just see it as a product of economics, right? You could just get, if you were a young writer, why girls is racist? Why the League of Gentlemen is homophobic? Why, you know, ex-new thing that everyone, my mad men is white supremacy. You know, these were very easy articles to get commissioned. They were easy articles to write in the sense you only had to watch a TV program write them. And if you were trying to break in and you were young were Young you probably end up writing a lot of them, but they meant that a lot of cultural criticism Got reduced to just saying that everything was problematic and that made I think for an atmosphere I think that if you talk to lots of creative people they will say to you that it just felt Extremely tense that if you just put a foot wrong without even knowing what that was gonna be in advance

You didn't know where the electric fence was but you knew that if you touched it, you might be electrocuted. And again, I just think that's loosened a lot in really helpful ways. I mean, I guess the argument for all those pieces would be that it was part of an effort to encourage people to think harder about the kind of material they were putting out and the kind of biases and prejudices that were at work there that maybe needed closer scrutiny that hadn't really been thought about properly before. And so yeah, that's happened to a degree, I suppose. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld would tell you it's happened too much.

And I was looking at the interview that he gave the other day to David Remnick at the New Yorker that you linked to on your sub stack. And that was fun. I enjoyed reading that. He's quite a strange figure, Jerry Seinfeld. Don't you reckon? I mean, I've seen a clip of him on YouTube angrily responding to someone saying, why weren't there more clip of him on YouTube angrily responding to someone saying, why weren't there more people of color on Seinfeld and stuff? Or maybe it was on comedians in cars getting coffee.

And he didn't like that suggestion. I mean, it is a kind of a twatish question in a way, because it just sort of reduces everything to totting up actual numbers. No, this is funny, but this is the exact argument I think in Britain kicked off those kind of wars, which is the argument that Katlyn Moran made about girls, which also got the criticism that it was far too white. And she said, well, you know, I don't think you should kind of put someone in, you know, as a character that the writer doesn't feel they can write authentically just for the sake of representation. And then she fatally said, it's not that people look at ABBA and say, why

isn't one of you black? Which just completely, I mean, it's hard now to recreate for you 10 years later, the level of vitriol and intensity there was about that, which was, you know, at worst, a point that was clumsily expressed, right? It just certainly wasn't her going, also, I've been thinking about it. And the KKK did make a lot of very good points. And I think we should all. Yeah, right. But I agree with you. I've always sort of wondered with this kind of stuff is that you should have more creators writing authentic about their own experiences, right? We should have man like Moby. And we should have I may destroy you. We should have, you know, people writing authentic about the black British experience from within those communities, rather

than just saying to like the idea that you could perpetuate a system where all the creative still white as long as they put a black character and we thank God we've done. Yeah we've done our duty it's fine if we want to write a comedy that's set in a kind of you know Jewish boarding school in the 1950s and it's a very narrow world that's fine it just shouldn't be that every every comedy is inexplicably set in a Jewish boarding school in the 1950s. Yeah, yeah. And then people online thinking the absolute worst of each other. I suppose that's the thing that came across to me most was, you know, a lot of these arguments are arguments that need to be had in one way or another. But it just always seemed to be like people ascribing the very worst motives to everybody, a bit like your Katlyn Moran story, sort of people rather than saying, oh, maybe you could have put that in a slightly different way, just people going, you fucking racist. Right.

And my colleague Derek Thompson wrote a brilliant piece a while ago called Social Media is Attention Alcohol. And I think it's a really useful frame for looking at it. I mean, you know, I don't drink a massive amount. Sometimes I like it, but I could, you know, I could say I could stop anytime I want. That sounds like I'm an alcoholic. No, what I mean is I have one drink and I actually don't feel the need for a second drink. And that to most people is kind of how social media works.

You know, they might have an Instagram account. They look at it every so often. It's nice. They've scrolled a bit of TikTok. For some people, social media is like alcohol and they cannot quit it. They think about it all the time. They feel bad when they haven't been on it for a while so they think if I do another tweet or whatever it be I'll make it better and those people often gravitate towards social

justice causes because it's a way that people can't question your unhealthy relationship right and I think it's I think it's a very useful analogy because it is like alcohol in the sense that it doesn't happen to everybody so if it doesn't hasn't happened to anyone that you've known it's quite hard to understand that but if you've seen somebody who's addicted In that really dysfunctional way You kind of have to wait for them to hit rock bottom because they will not listen to you on the on the way down That's how I see it. Anyway, yeah, I I would concur around 2020 then Was when did JK send out her explosive tweets? That would have been I think that was 2021 but certainly around that so JK Rowling tweeted

something about people who menstruate an article about people who menstruate and she said there used to be a word for those people woman wumpud I can't remember what it is. Wimpund whatever yeah yeah her point like, let's not erase the whole concept of womanhood and biological sex. Q great fun, productive conversation that rolls on thereafter. And had you already been drawn into that vortex at that point? Oh, I was I was a veteran.. I think the first thing I wrote about transgender issues was maybe 2014, 2015 and I approached it in the way that I imagine probably you

did which was thinking you know I prided myself on having been on the right side of the kind of gay marriage debate and having grown up very kind of liberal and been through that and then assuming it was a kind of an extension of that and therefore that I would be in favor of it, that it was a kind of straightforward civil rights movement. To some extent, I think that is still true. We are still very intolerant of gender nonconformity. You know, there are lots of places in both in here and in America and around the world

where if you look a certain way that people think is, you know, you're a butch woman or an effeminate man, you could quite easily be beaten up. We are still quite intolerant of that. And we still have, you know, all these ideas about what a real man should do and what a real woman should be like. And there's straightforward rhetoric

from Republicans in America that say, let's get rid of this now. Let's stop this whole hysteria. Let's stop people's access to anything that will help them transition. Let's get rid of it. The concept doesn't exist. It shouldn't be entertained.

It's not doing anyone any good. Let's stop it. I mean, it is as black and white as that. Oh yeah, absolutely like that. It is basically like that this is kind of degeneracy. Yeah. And that's the rhetoric you get from Vladimir Putin as well, Victor Orban in Hungary, that this is the West poisoning itself, this is a dying civilization that has become decadent and therefore men aren't really men anymore and women don't know their place anymore. So that's the backdrop to it so that's how I came to writing about it and then there was a Women in Equality Select Committee in 2015 headed by Maria Miller. She was done for

expenses fiddling and decided she needed a kind of second act in her political career so she decided she would use the first Women in Equality Select Committee hearing to do an investigation into transgender equality and the problem was there was no money for the NHS, right, we're in the middle of austerity there. So what actually one of the big problems is incredibly long NHS waiting lists, and just over demand for mental health services in the same way you see for ADHD or anxiety, wherever it might be. When's this 2011? 2015.

Oh, 2015. Yeah. And so there was a sort of simple answer about what would make people's lives better which was just actually you know giving them prompt access to the NHS but that wasn't very popular or very you know possible answer so that's when you got the idea of self-id coming through and the problem with that was they didn't hear from feminist groups they didn't hear any of the you know they heard from someone who worked in a prison who said well this could be a problem because the one thing you say about sex offenders is they're wrong ends. And they may just sometimes lie to get things that they want.

And that kind of all got swept aside in the in the rush to think, oh, hang on a minute, this is the next this is the next civil rights crusade. So that's when I started writing about it. So by the time that JK Rowling had done her tweet, I was sort of, I felt like I'd said everything that I kind of wanted to say on the subject. And had you got a lot of pushback from it? Adam, come on, come now. No, it was actually it was really fine. It was amazing. No, I mean, it was a horrible period. Again, this is, I know, we have to have a therapy session before we have our next conversation, so we can both get our whining out of the way. But I got so we can both get our whining out of the way. But I got chucked out of a literary festival in Belfast because someone complained and then organized a phone me and said, I've got years of trying to organize stuff

between Catholics and Protestants. I thought we were really good at getting people with different views to talk to each other, but this one's defeated me. You know, I got chucked out of professional opportunities all over the shop. I did a women's hour to talk about how toxic it was and the Stonewall representative

wouldn't be in the room with me. As if I was this dangerous, if I was gonna like Hannibal Lecter, I would have to be sort of strapped to a gurney with a mask over my face. And specifically they were objecting, because I saw that you're on, you've made the transgender map.

This is a website that sort of lays out all the villains of the transgender world, the big transphobes. Yes. And you are listed on there, British author and anti-transgender activist, which isn't true really. I mean, you're not. I mean, I write about it one piece in 10 and 15.

But also you're not trying to get rid of transgender people in the way that some more fundamentalist gender critical activists are. Yeah, I mean there is a fringe you want to repeal the original gender recognition act from 2004 which says people can change their legal sex. That's not where I am at all, I just think that sometimes your biological sex probably will still trump your legal gender. But for most intents and purposes, you know, my position is fundamentally liberal. People should do what they want to the extent that it doesn't impinge on anyone else. I

only get interested in it when it impinges on someone else, which is rape shelters, prisons, you know, really, and sports. And then the kind of medical question around children and that very specific thing about whether or not puberty blockers had enough evidence to be used, which the CAS report found that they didn't, that they were too experimental and they should have been much more researched on them earlier. But yes, anyway, go on. Well, only, you know, to mention that you're on there, obviously. And I mean, I know that I've heard you chatting on Blocked and Reported, and they talk about the whole issue a lot on there.

When I say they, that is Jesse Single and Katie Herzog, who are journalists who sort of got defenestrated in the US for not saying the right things about gender, is that right? Katie wrote a piece about detransitioners and now that's a very, very small subset of people who transition. Well, I say that, we don't actually really know. The research on them is really poor. I think a lot more people, rather than saying, I've made a terrible mistake,

a lot more people see their journey as one of kind of evolution. They might no longer take hormones, for example, but we don't really know how to describe that. Katie wrote a very empathetic piece about that, particularly coming from her perspective as a lesbian, who saw that lots of people who'd previously seen themselves as lesbians were now identifying as non-binary or trans men and seeing that shift. Jesse wrote a cover story for The Atlantic in 2018

called, you know, When Your Child Says They're Trans, which was about exactly the issues that, you know, the cast report looked at. And he, you know, if you go back and read that piece now, it's just 6,000 words, he talks to people involved in the field, he talks to very happily transitioned people who say that it's the best thing that ever happened to them. He talks to people who regret their transition. He talks to clinicians working in the field. But that was presented as a kind of exterminationist piece of rhetoric. And so both of them were basically drummed out of the American mainstream media. In a way, again, things have got better. You know, the New York Times has run some really good in-depth proper reporting that looks at the issue

in a really nuanced way. The Atlantic's always been very supportive of me writing stuff, but the kind of things that New York Times is writing now were not things they would have published in 2019. And so, you know, I think some of the energy of that movement comes around the fact that people felt really

silenced unfairly And I think a lot of you know, I personally know two people who've lost their jobs because of speaking up about this issue I don't know where all that anger goes now You know There are a lot of women who feel very burned and particularly very burned with men that they thought respected them that they now think Actually, did you respect me because you didn't listen to me when I said something was really important to me. So that's, that's, that's where I think that picture is now the ill feeling I

think still remains, but as you know, West Street and the Labour health spokesman's accepted the Cass report. The Greens in Scotland didn't accept the Cass report. And that's one of the things that prompted Humza Yousaf to basically sort of bring down that government. So, you know, everything has kind of moved on a step, I think. And that, again, and that in turn, I think has taken some of the heat out of it, because once the cues that are coming to people from people they trust, from their organizations

they trust, you know, political parties being one of them, saying the Cass report is a very sane piece of scientific research, not a kind of, you know, protocols of the elders of Zion. And remind us the thrust of the Cass report. So Hillary Cass, who was a top pediatrician, was asked to look into particularly the gender services supplied at the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Hospital in North London. Now that was the one hub for all youth gender services

in England, and there's a Sandyford Clinic up in Scotland. But people were coming there from Wales, people were coming there from Ireland, and they had this incredible upsurge in demand. In the late nineties, they were seeing maybe 50 kids a year and then suddenly by the 2010s that was in the thousands and they brought in this experimental protocol developed by Dutch scientists and there was the Dutch protocol,

which was the idea that you would give people hormone blockers. It blocked the effects of hormones, their natal sex hormones. So if you're a boy, it blocked your testosterone. And then that would then give you the idea was time to think and consider your options. And then if you wanted to, you could go on to cross sex hormones, you could transition or if you didn't want to, you could carry on with your puberty. As it happened, there were a couple of problems, which is that almost nobody didn't carry on to cross sex hormones, right? So either those clinicians were incredibly effective at identifying every single child who, you know, who needed them and they had a 0% failure rate. Or what happened is that once you

were on that pathway, you never got off it was a train that was only heading in one destination. And that's what Hillary Cass found. She said, you know, the thing is, we now have good research that says that going through puberty is one of the things that resolves gender dysphoria. So it might be that puberty might be the mechanism by which you feel terribly estranged from your body. And then suddenly you think, oh, no, hang on a minute. I feel like this because, you know, I want to have short hair and I fancy girls, but that's okay. I'm a lesbian and I can live in this body and have a happy life without needing to have medical treatment. But if you don't ever go through puberty you never find that out. So it was done with the absolute best of intentions that it was thought well this is brilliant we can make people's lives much easier. But the problem was that we were really not sure if we were targeting the right

people with that treatment and there was a sudden uptick of people seeking it which you might be just that stigma is reduced or it might be social cues are coming around. This is, you know, saying it's fashionable is OTT, but certainly you might say we have a symptom pool, right? This is how historians of medicine think about it. You have symptoms that happen over time, all the time, and people put attacks, different diagnosis to them over time. So what was hysteria in the 19th century? We wouldn't call that anymore because it seems to be really stigmatizing. And so what might have happened is that you had lots of people who were genuinely distressed and they thought, oh, I know what's wrong with me. It's gender dysphoria. It's about my

gender. Whereas it might have been a much bigger, wider picture. Anyway, so that's, that's the background to the Cass report. She did a report that said all of those things really and said, we really don't have the evidence to know this works. We need to be really cautious about what we do. But, you know, it was not a kind of like, let's ban all this and burn it with fire and nobody should ever transition again. It was not where it was at all. When you said before about some men not really listening to the concerns of people like yourself. It wasn't a live action sub tweet, Adam.

It wasn't, I promise. But I'm interested to know what you thought was going on in their heads. I think, and I find this completely reasonable, I think they thought this isn't a hill worth dying on. And I think two things about that. One, I think there is a reluctance of men to get involved in things they see as being about feminism, and is a good thing. Like, you know, I don't, you know, what you absolutely don't want is some, you know, man put in charge of struggling feminist movement, right? Someone going in and going, every so often this would happen, by the way, a man would go and go, isn't this all very

simple? I think we should fix it like this. And I sort of, I felt a bit bad for them, but not that bad actually. Mansplaining, I believe it's known as. Yes, thank you. But you know what I mean, I think there was an understanding of reluctance on the part of kind of liberal men to get involved with it, and they didn't have the time to understand the intricacies, the ins and outs of it. And also because the kind of, I think the smear campaign, because in some cases it was true, but the sense that some people were saying things that were horrible and unsupportable. You know, there were people definitely on the gender critical side saying really unkind, mocking, cruel things. And then as soon as you enter this debate as a new entrant, you suddenly go, is that okay? Is it okay to go look at this man in the dress? Is that okay?

And feeling that they didn't want to just step into it because it was too, you know, too inflammatory. I mean, it's how I feel about Israel-Gaza at the moment, right? I have a, my basic assumption is I don't think that war is achieving its aims and I think it's coming at a grotesque cost of human lives. But, do I really want to wade into that online and have people say to me, oh, so you don't care about the people who died on October 7th? Yeah. Oh, but you don't care about the Nakba? Oh, but you don't care about what happened in 56 BC? Don't want to hear your both-sidism. Right. And you say you just think, well, maybe I don't talk about

everything. Maybe this one is when I sit out. And that's why I fall in a different place to some of the other people, which is that you can't make other people care about things that you care about. The job of the activist or the journalist writing a book story is to make the case for its importance. And you can't make you just can't expect other people to agree with you about everything. I suppose there was a sense perhaps, not just among men, but I don't know people on the other side on the more sort of pro trans side, that this was looking parts of it were looking a lot like a moral panic and that certain things had been exaggerated no one was suggesting that it was acceptable for women to be attacked in women only spaces by. Men intentionally identifying as women just so they could gain access to those spaces to be predatory i don't think anyone thought that that was something not worth worrying about. I don't think anyone thought that that was something not worth worrying about. But they did think perhaps that the frequency of those incidents had been exaggerated or, you know, it was like, well, obviously, that's bad. But how often is it really happening? How big a problem

are we talking about here? If this is one of the main things that someone like JK Rowling is talking about, you know, is that a worse threat than so many other things that are going on in the world? Do you wish that you'd waded into it? Do you think that would have been better? Well, no, because I didn't feel I had anything valuable to say. I just thought, what the fuck do I know?

I can imagine what it's like to be a trans person in 2024. I bet it's really difficult and I bet it's exhausting and I bet you feel totally besieged and beleaguered. And I spoke to Natalie Wynn, ContraPoints, and she said as much and I sympathized, but I haven't read all those books that J.K. Rowling has read. I don't know all those books that JK Rowling has read.

I don't know all the details. I have an opinion, sort of a kind of wishy-washy sympathy with the idea that you should be cautious when it comes to kids. And I'm a father, and I know that you worry about every single thing that your child is going through, and you always want to err on the side of Caution where possible so I have sympathy for that way of looking at things

But yeah, I don't have anything that I feel is gonna be enlightening for people as far as that conversation goes So I didn't I didn't feel like I needed to weigh into it I didn't and and I also felt like I had some sympathy for someone like Natalie Wynn saying that it was a moral panic. I have a huge amount of sympathy for Natalie Wynn, who, you know, was great, and she engaged with the JK Rowling podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

She went on, and I think she made a really good case. And I think what you're talking about, the idea of being kind of hyper-visible, I think that's really tough. You know, I know people who transitioned, male to female, and you know, just feeling very much constantly, you just never know you are just a target, a big moving target walking down the street late at night, you don't know if some beery group of lads are going to come and start shouting harassing you all of those kind of things. Those kind of things also happen to women too. That's the other thing. Yeah. And lots of women's experience of the world is being hyper. But no one's saying that's not a, you know, no one's saying, so what? You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, that is a bad thing and that needs to be dealt with as well. I didn't feel like anyone was saying one thing was worse than another. I think it sort of did get into a contest because I think that's the way things work online. It's a kind of contest for who gets, there's only a limited amount of sympathy and so who gets it. And I think you could apply the same to Israel Palestine right is that as soon as you express sympathy for one side people assume you don't have sympathy for the other side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so some a lot of people just think

well I'll just I'll I'll skip that one. But yeah, I mean, so my reason for talking about it was always the idea that I thought you you know I, I, I can see a very, one, I think is a moderate policy compromise, right? Which is that people transition, they live their lives, they are unbothered, unharassed in the streets, not discriminated against at work, all of those things. And except in a few exceptional circumstances, you know, they were treated to all intents and purposes as the gender that they identify with. But there are some small places where we need to make accommodations. And some of those, you know, some of that's actually already happening in practice. You know, people are installing single cubicle loos, for example, or you have now, the prison service has been

trying for example, dedicated wings, you know, there are creative solutions to some of these issues. And I could see that there was a kind of moderate compromise that I thought would work out a lot better than the current situation for everybody, and that if people like me didn't speak up and say those things, the debate was going to be left entirely to extremists on both sides. And I, you know, it's like, you know, the thing about, like, atheists only believe in one fewer god than everybody else, than religious people, right? I think that's sort of how I feel about this issue.

This is one issue that I've decided to wade into, but I do not see myself as somebody who gets their cricket bat out and just storms into any issue that's roiling across the internet. Most of the time, I think I don't have anything to add here. This is not one for me. Right, right. Were there any criticisms that you got that made you think twice that you did think like, maybe they do have a point about that. I think I think toilets are the one that and I was one of those things where people told me what I thought so much that I forgot what I actually thought and what I'd actually written down. And I don't think you can really have any kind of, you know, how would you police single sex toilets realistically, right, that we have a convention around them. But beyond that, there is simply no way of enforcing them beyond kind of vigilante

justice that would end up really badly for everybody. So I think that's an issue that often gets raised too high in the mix. I also think with, with D-transitioners, it's important to remember that from what we know, most people are happy with their transition. Going around and telling people that they're wrong and they've been harmed and they just it's false conscious they don't realize it yet. I think I would be very wary about that as well. But I don't know, I'm sure I've got I'm sure I can't remember if I watched all of it. I did obviously watch the bit which talked about me because as previously discussed, I'm a narcissist.

She lumped you in with other what she describes as TERFs, saying that they are the real handmaidens, the useful idiots who put a concerned female face on the patriarchal violence against trans people that will ultimately be enacted by right wing men. So I think her thesis then she quotes Andrea Dworkin quite a lot is saying that there's a certain kind of woman that is distracted by the patriarchy that is sent off worrying about other people when they should be worrying about the violence coming at them from the people, the men in their own house. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those ones where you think, are you absolutely sure you're familiar with my work? But I think that the useful idiot charge is a really interesting one because that's definitely what is impeding the conversation in

America. It is very hard to make the kind of moderate left-wing feminist arguments that I think have now gained a huge amount of ground here because it's happening against the background of this terrible legislation, really sweeping draconian legislation saying you're going to be prosecuted for child abuse if you seek medical attention for this kind of stuff. which whether or not you think the medical attention is helping, these parents are not all mad people. They are responding to the distressed child in front of them in the way that they think best. So I do find that legislation really punitive. I don't

think I am a useful idiot for the right-wing patriarchy, any more than I think that Natalie Wynn is, you know, useful for the patriarchy because she puts on a lot of makeup and is conventionally feminine online. It's this thing's just a lot more complicated than that. And I also really object to the idea that actually things are really simple. And there's the right wing people are baddies and the left wing people are goodies. And if you see a left wing person saying something you disagree with, it's actually because they're a stooge for the right. It's just very simple binary

politics that you just and then kind of guilt by association, right? Did you when you said that thing about Natalie just now wearing makeup? Was that kind of a bitchy thing to say? Totally a bitchy thing to say, but she's a massive bitch. So surely it's all in the game, yo, in the words of Omar. Yeah, but you but I that makes me uncomfortable. I always want- You want your guests to do better.

No, no, no. I guess what I mean is that I don't want people to stoop. You know what I mean? I want them- I've let myself down. I've let the school down. No, that's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying, Helen. Maybe saying. No, that's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying, Helen. Maybe, I mean, maybe that is what I'm saying.

No, I guess what I'm saying is that I am so obsessed with the idea of the tone of the conversation, right? I think that the way people speak about things is almost as important as what's actually being said. I think it's part of what is being said. Yeah. Would you agree with that? It makes me slightly uncomfortable because I think that niceness tends to preserve the status quo. But let's not say nice. It's not just nice because that's such a pejorative way. It's like sort of saying, oh, let's not cause any trouble.

That's not exactly what I mean. I mean like a sort of level of respect, I suppose, which is different from just being nice. Yeah, I think that's fair enough. In that video, Natalie is then making a joke about somebody being physically assaulted. And that's why I think I'm slightly spicier with her than I would be otherwise, because I think, well, you know, if you dish it out,

you've got to be able to take it, Natalie. Yeah, okay, okay. Because when I look at JK Rowling's tweets sometimes, I do just think like, this isn't helping. When so many people, like the vast majority of people I know, would sympathise with most of JK Rowling's views, people who haven't dug into the whole issue, particularly who haven't, for example, listened to that podcast, the witch trials of JK Rowling, all they feel is what I felt before I listened to that podcast, which is like, what's JK Rowling ever done wrong? She's nice, like she's a

reasonable person. And then, then when you dig into the things that have been said by people she allies herself with the way they have expressed certain opinions, you do just think, well, that is not very helpful. And when you're coming out and when you're expressing yourself for someone, you know, clearly she cares about words, she cares about language. It's a big part of what she's arguing about.

She knows the power that words have. So when she makes a point of ridiculing the Scottish hate crime bill by just calling people men who want to be called women, regardless of whether you agree with those people or not, regardless of the views that those trans people have, they want to be called women and it's not any skin off her nose to call them women, or at least not to come out and call them men in a way that is such a kind of bit of playground abuse, you know, it's such a taunt. I mean, I take your point.

I don't use that language. I think probably where I've ended up is the Chimamanda position, which is trans women are trans women. You know, they want to live as women, be seen as women, but they have a unique history that means that, you know, some of their interests will be different to those of biological females. But the reason that the Turfs say trans women are men is because they think that's how normal people understand what's going on. You know, they think they're using plain language in

order to obfuscate what's happening and that those of us who are a bit more kind of dainty about it are playing kind of middle-class language games. That's the counterpoint. And I'm in the same position as you. I don't, I think it's hard to pick through everyone that everyone has ever spoken to and say, well, that person once liked to tweet by someone. And you can go down endless speculation,

but there is an account that I saw J.K. Rowling interacting with that is somebody that is a kind of cruel parody of a trans woman, right? Basically some, an obviously male face in sort of lipstick and a bad wig. And I just thought, again, much the face that you made of me when I was mean about Natalie Wynn's makeup was the face I made reading that, which was like, you have so many good points. Guys, guys. You know what I mean though? Yeah I do know what you mean because I do feel like that but I but

It's narcissism too though isn't it? It comes back to you because I think I've burned a lot of political capital defending JK Rowling and saying what I think what most of what she said is really reasonable so actually it's embarrassing to me when something like that happens and that's again I think a dynamic that we don't talk about enough right that if That if you, if someone gets cancelled and you go in and defend them, and they subsequently go barking mad, you look, you know, you look really stupid. But when that happens, it's a bit like, you know, when you campaign for the innocence of somebody on death row, you've got to be really, really sure they didn't do it,

because if they come out and do another murder, that's bad. You've ruined everything for everyone then. Now one of the big stories this year, 2024, has been the widespread uptake of Ozempic. What is Ozempic, Helen? Ozempic is one of a class of drugs known as GLP-1 agonists, which act on appetite and glucose regulation in the body. So Ozempic is the form of it that was developed for diabetics. There is now also Wegevi, which is exactly the same molecule, semaglutide, that is licensed

for weight loss. And now a whole load of other ones, Mount Jaro and various other ones. But the thing that's really interesting about them is... Can I just say, I really... The way you just can say all that stuff. You do anything in Newsreader voice and it ultimately sounds just 15 times more uh... It is impressive though, for someone like me, any time I come across anyone who can

string a whole sentence together with complicated facts that they've remembered, I'm just like whoa, how'd you do that? Anyway, sorry, I derailed you. But journalism is basically constantly taking an exam, right? You just swat up and then you disgorge your knowledge. You don't really deeply understand anything. I shouldn't have said that. That's basically nuked my entire career. Anyway, the weight loss drugs are really interesting because for a long time we have known that obesity is a metabolic disorder, right? It's among other things, it's a

disorder of dysregulation. You can't trust your appetite. That's how I think about it now. And so getting people to lose weight was really, really tough because your body fights it. You know, it makes you hungry, it drives you, it says something terrible is happening, oh my God, a famine is happening and makes you hungrier as you try and lose weight. So all the people who just said, it's actually very simple, just eat less and exercise more, hanging is too good for them. Because two things happen. One, it is really not that easy to run a calorie deficit and be hungry all the time. Most people can't do that in their lives. And then exercising more also very ineffective for weight loss. I currently go to the gym three

times a week. Three times a week, it's not godly. And you know, I can now lift extremely large weights that I previously couldn't. Still can't do a pull-up, but I've been upset about that. But it has made no difference to my weight at all. Like I'm fitter, I'd hope that I would live longer and less chance of shattering bones or whatever it might be in my 70s. Yeah, so that's valuable. But what I'm not is supermodel rake thin. And so suddenly this drug came along that doctors could prescribe to their patients

who were living with overweight and obesity and it actually worked. And they instilled this, they don't actually quite understand the biochemistry of it. They thought it acted on the gut. It looks like it acts on the brain. It looks like it has some very odd side effects. It seems to increase people's impulse control. People found they were doing a lot much less kind of compulsive shopping or gambling. People seem to report that they want to drink less when they're on it. And the number one thing that you talk to people is that they say their food noise has reduced. And this may be an experience you've had. Is that food noise? No, but more like, heck, Tommy, eat me. Oh, sorry, I thought you meant actual literal noises coming from your stomach.

No, I mean, I mean the biscuits in the cupboard whispering to you. Got you, got you. Yes, yes. Calling to you. Right, and you're just like, I'm just a biscuit, just a biscuit sitting here, but if I ate the biscuit it wouldn't be there for me to think about anymore. I am a chocolate bunny who lives in your wife's desk. I've been here since Easter. I can't believe you didn't find me until now. Is that a real thing that happened? Yep. Three of them I found, big ones.

So I think the thing that's fascinating about it is that it's still very experimental. I think the dosing regimes can be off. So the idea is you go on a very low dose and you titrate up. And I think people are very differentially responsive to it. So I think with some of the symptoms that people are having, and they do report, you know,

nausea and diarrhea quite a lot, are people ramping up the dose too aggressively. And you know, the other thing that's happened is that people really need, when they're on it, to lift weights and eat protein, right? You need to eat like a kind of protein bro, just simply because you are actually effectively losing weight, which is very hard to do, by restricting your calories. It makes you want to eat less. People lose 15-20% of the weight they're losing is from muscle. And I wrote this piece of Atlantic about the social side of it, because I was fascinated by the fact that diets until now have not worked, right? They just haven't.

For most people, you know, it's very, very hard. Once you've got to a BMI of over 30, really, it's almost nobody manages the transformation required. And so all of these social dynamics have built up, you know, what happens if you're the friend who's always been the thin friend and suddenly you're not the thin friend anymore? You know, people always talked about how people would have fat bridesmaids at one point to make themselves look better. But those dynamics do exist in families and in relationships, or in couples I was really interested in, right? If you're a couple and you have a takeaway together

and you pig out and that's what you do, right? If you're a couple and you have a takeaway together and you pig out and that's what you do, and one of you is suddenly just picking at a tiny bit of rice and not wanting to drink anymore. And I talked to people who are in that situation, so you know, we don't do stuff together anymore because I'm not really interested in eating. Came up quite a lot.

And there's lots of kind of, I don't think it's scare-mongering, it's reasonable in the experimental drug to talk about potential side effects. So yeah, so I spoke to lots of people who said, yeah, there are some side effects, but you don't understand. I've got my life back. And actually now I can go to the gym because I've got to the stage where I've lost enough weight that I feel like I can be out in public. You know, who wants to be morbidly obese person in a gym and just talking about being hyper visible?

Everybody's staring at you and judging you. But the thing I think that talking to all those people really taught me is that it's not that naturally thin people have willpower. It's that they don't need it. They don't want to eat the biscuit. If all of us lived in a world in which we could trust our appetite that would just cue you when you actually needed to eat something, we'd all be a lot thinner. But the combination of abundant food and ultra processed food that is delicious and slips down really easily has overwhelmed millennia of evolution in

which, you know, my ancestors who were in Scotland, you know, in the, whenever it was in prehistory, their appetite, queuing them to always eat slightly too much was probably really good and why they survived. For me, in Lewisham in 2024, it results in me going to the petrol station and buying a huge bag of Rebels. But then that's maybe partly because of the howling void at the centre of modern existence. And that's not going to go away with Ozempic. I mean, a fair, fair point. One of the things that was interesting, I read Johann Hari's extract, he's written a book about it. Yeah, I read that in the Times. Yeah. And he talked about the fact that he had been using food as a kind of

crutch and actually taking that away made it really difficult. And you have, there have been reports of people who have reported feeling suicidal on it which i can imagine right in the same way that quitting drinking is really hard if you have been using something emotionally to prop you up. And you don't do the emotional work necessary to not need that anymore you just take away the stimulus it probably is really really bleak yeah i guess the i think what you're having hurry was saying was that they were for him for someone like him his attitude to food was evidence of various unresolved issues. That remained unresolved even when he started losing weight on a zempik and there was a kind of an hedonia that he felt. because it was like, well, why aren't I feeling great? Because look at me, I've lost weight, I feel better, I look better, or I feel as if I do, and why don't I feel super chipper and energetic and positive?

And a friend of his said, well, I think it's because you still have those unresolved issues, they're still working away there. And you've got to go and talk to your therapist. And he said, all right, well, I'll sit with the feelings and I'll do the work. And I mean, I must say, I could relate to that. I sort of thought, yeah, I bet you I would feel something like that. Because what happens is you become suddenly if someone gives you everything you've ever wanted

and says, you're amazing. And you think I feel brilliant. And then you go, I don't feel brilliant. I'm, I'm still me. Yeah. Oh, no. And that you know, you could you could have this kind of comforting delusion. Oh, if only I, you know, moved to a nice house, if only if I got thin, or if only I was this or that, then I'd be happy. If any of those things actually happened to you, and you're still you, you go, no, I'll never be happy because I'm me. Got to make peace with yourself, man. God. Yeah. And then two thirds of people somewhere, I read, who lost weight found that it came back when they stopped taking ozempic. And sometimes it comes back even more ferociously because your body has become accustomed to the artificial glp one inhibitor if that's what it is. and it no longer produces as much of that as it would have done before. You started taking a Zempic or something like that.

Yeah, I have anecdotally, I've heard about the kind of the kind of Zempic kind of binge back. And definitely you have to think about it the same way you think about statins, which is it's your basically what happens is you take a Zempik and it can, as you say, slows your gastric movement and it keeps you fuller for longer after meals. And as soon as you stop taking it, though, it doesn't do those things anymore. So your body is then at that point queuing you to eat like you were eating before at a level that clearly had made you overweight. And so I think that's unavoidable. You know, you have to be very clear-eyed about what it is. Of course that leads to, I think, particularly people on the left to be suspicious about it because they think, oh, it's Big Pharma hooking you on something forever. And that is true, but you could, as I say, you could say exactly the same for high blood pressure medication, right? If you

go on high blood pressure medication in your 40s or 50s, it's not like at 70 you get to go, well, that's good, but now I really fancy actually, you know, having very tight arteries and then the other thing that people on the on the left the criticism of Azempic is we should fix the food environment and I don't know if you've read Chris van Tullekens book on ultra processed food it's really really good and I found it very convincing about the fact that The unhealthiness of our food environment is just not giving people a fighting chance. I strongly

believe that if I only ate food that was actually food, I probably wouldn't put on weight. But we've managed to package particularly sugar into forms that are so exquisitely delicious that I don't, I mean the hobnob apart from anything else is like a Formula One car of food, isn't it? It's a very good piece of work. I talked to Tim Key about the Choco Leibniz and the poetry at work in there and that's that's quite an extraordinary piece of but but all of them I mean. The Pringle. Just anything from the corner shop I can't really think of too many things there that are not working very well.

But the trouble with the Zempik is really that when you're, you know, you're talking about all of those effects, when you're seriously overweight, the risks of that are also really high. And then all of this feels very much in opposition to the other conversation that's going on about loving yourself whatever shape you are. And that also being a facet of a feminist discussion, right? I think some of those people were lying, though. That's the really sad thing, is that you saw quite a few fat influencers, and that's the word they would use about themselves, who actually did go on a Zempik. And they had to, some of them had to, had to apologize and say they were only going on it for their diabetes, right? But I think that some of the fat positivity movement came out of the feeling that nothing was ever going to work

and we needed to find a way for people to to live with it. And I don't know what you would do in that situation if you did feel that a zemp it worked for you because you're you kind of imagine finally getting to a place where you feel happy with yourself and then being offered the chance to be thin again. Mm-hmm. I think that's very tough. I mean, if someone said to me, do you want to be too stone thinner for the rest of your life? Yes.

Also, is it gonna take the fun out of eating? Because, you know, eating is like a very central, sociable thing, even if you have a complicated, not especially healthy relationship with food. It's not all hating yourself. You know, there are times when you can have some biscuits and it's pretty great. And it's just great. God, I don't know if that's it.

I say that it probably is the case for me now. And it's one of the reasons I decided that, you know, it is a kind of which way Western man thing, right? When you hit 40, where you have to decide, are you going to become an unbearable fitness person or are you just going to accept your inevitable decline and I just thought unbearable fitness person signed me up and that has made me feel better about eating because I do think you know I kind of need to eat now like I need my protein but I would say that all the way through my teens and 20s I don't know if I enjoyed eating at all because it always came with that sense of shame, like, why are you

eating? Why do you need this? Why are you so weak? And I think lots of people's relationship with food is like that. And I think particularly when you are overweight, visibly so, and you know that you're being shamed and people are looking... And people I talk to would talk about how hard it is to eat in a restaurant when you're fat because people are looking at you like, disgusting. And then that takes away from your enjoyment of food too. So I can see, yeah, on a physical level, those molecules might be changing relationship with food, but lots of people's relationship with food is a guilty pleasure. And sometimes the weight between the guilt and the pleasure, you know, is very much depends on your circumstances. Yeah, I mean, that does sound to me like something that needs to change as far as the way people think about it all, like those people

staring at the fat people in the restaurant, making fuck off the comments underneath the Johan Hari article were quite instructive as far as what the average person thinks and a lot of prejudices are laid bare there this is just like a handful in just a tiny section of the comments lazy obese people who eat fish and chips drink coke and don't exercise buy a pair of running shoes please just eat well and exercise daily that's all you need to do anything else is a cop-out just eat less and have some self-control all All drugs have side effects. I suppose that's another thing. That's a legitimate anxiety though isn't it as far as Ozempic goes is this is a time bomb and what are we going to be looking at in 10 years time for a generation of people

who manage their weight with Ozempic? Yeah for example there's a really big question about whether or not what's the upper age for prescribing a Zempik? When you're 50 or 60 or 70, it's very bad for you to be carrying extra weight, but also very bad for you to be losing muscle because you don't want to have a fall. You know, it's the age, when you get to the age in your 70s, when you don't just fall over, you have a fall. You really want to have not lost a significant amount of muscle at that point. That stuff. And you know, there is a fundamental problem, which is why are we paying food companies to produce stuff that isn't really food that we then eat, and then we're paying again to fix ourselves so that we don't want to eat that stuff, right? I mean, you know, food regulation is a very

difficult area, but I am so grateful, because I visit America a lot for my job, to live in the European food environment, not the American food environment. Oh yeah. Just this, there's just this sheer size of the portions and the difficulty in bits of, you know, like flyover state America of finding fresh fruit and vegetables, just what food is available to you in your immediate environment. You know, I just, it's like a terrible game that is rigged against people. It is actually more bizarre in that, you know, the abnormal people in

that situation, the people who are thin. So I think, I think those are legitimate concerns. The thing that struck me when I read those comments and when I read about Zempik normally is how class-based they are. There's a real kind of, it's the underclass who are, you know, who can't control themselves, like these very old stereotypes about people. But also the other thing that turns out is that just so much of the dietary advice we've had over the last 50 years has been complete bollocks. And it's been kind of cruel to hold people accountable for when they've been trying to, you know, the fact that we were told that fat was the problem, and then it switched

to now really people think sugar is the problem. The fact that new research has come out saying you're counting calories is really difficult because you don't absorb calories in the same way. So the classic example is like the same amount of sweet corn and a tortilla, right? You could have the same amount of calories in both and you eat both, you're going to be able to take more calories from the tortilla. It's much more easily digestible. So if you're counting calories at a headline rate that's actually also

really, really hard. And so all of this stuff has happened where people have been very confidently told a huge amount of conflicting advice. So wait, I can have three tortillas? No, you should only eat sweetcorn and that's the sad take away from that. Ah shit. Wait. Continue. Wait, continue. Hey welcome back Podcats. That was Helen Lewis there.

I'm very grateful indeed to Helen for making the time to come and talk to me. I've put a few links in the description to one or two things that we spoke about. I've also put a couple of links. Oh mate, what is that? Oh that's a cartridge that's got trapped underneath the chicken wire come on mate don't panic just stay still brambles it's ramble chat not bramble chat mate there you go you're out well done yes was saying, I've put links in the description to the National Center for Eating Disorders and to the Eating Disorder charity, BEAT, who have a 24-7 helpline that you could try if you or a loved one is struggling with

any kind of eating disorder. How are you doing anyway, Podcats? I hope you're alright out there. I've been alright, thanks very much. I've got a recommendation for you. A music doc. One of the best music docs I've seen in ages. Stacks. Soulsville, USA.

Put together by an American director, Jamila Wignott, and its four parts, the story of the legendary Stax record label that started in Memphis in the late 1950s and produced some of the best American music of the 60s and early 70s by artists like Booker T and the M.G.' MGs who for a long time were the house band and played on Stax Records by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, the Staple Singers and others and Booker T and the MGs, which stands for Memphis Group. There's the bird gun. Anyway, yes, Booker T and the MGs, who in some ways symbolized the ethos of Stacks. They were an integrated band, two white, two black members, at a time when racial segregation was still

the norm in America, especially in southern states like Memphis. And Booker T and the MGs, like a lot of Stax music were unbelievably exciting and raw compared to a lot of what was around musically at the time. I wrote in my book Ramble Book about being in the car with my son when he was 14 and back then he was in full Kevin the teenager mode but I had this moment of connection with him when we started talking about music one day on the school run and I played him Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs which he'd never heard before and it was an amazing moment because

it's an amazing piece of music and I got to see his face. Well I couldn't watch his face while he was listening to it because it would be too cheesy and he didn't like me but I sort of sneaked a look after a few seconds of green onions and he was smiling and he nodded and said yeah yeah it's really good. I didn't realize until I was watching the doc and I googled it that Green Onions was released in August 1962 when the charts, especially in the UK, were dominated by very different music. A lot of smooth crooners. Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Neil Sadaka, Frank Ifield. I remember you! I like a bit of Frank Ifield. Anyway,

suddenly you get... The Beatles hadn't even released their first single yet. Love Me Do came out two months after Green Onions, and tremendous as it was. Love Me Do doesn't have quite the same punch as Green Onions. They went on to do some good stuff, sure. The Beatles, there's a good bit in the documentary about Otis Redding having been inspired by Sergeant Pepper and just wanting to do something on the same level of ambitiousness as Sergeant Pepper anyway. There's also some incredibly exciting footage of Booker T and the MGs in the first episode

of the Salisville USA doc, especially of the Stacks Vault review tour of the UK in early 1967 with Otis Reading and Sam and Dave and the Marquis and all of them look extraordinary they're on top form but Booker T and the MGs, Booker T Jones on the organ, Al Jackson Jr. on drums, Donald Duck Dunn puffing on a pipe on bass, and Steve Cropper with his slick back hair and smart shirt on guitar. They just all look magnificent and they seem to be enjoying themselves as much as the crowd is. Amazing joyful shots of the British audience. They look like they can't quite believe what they're seeing. And then Otis Redding turns up and sings Try A Little

Tenderness with Booker T and the MGs and he's on a low stage just a few feet away from the crowd and... oh my god it's magical! Anyway the Stacks story is not all integrationist utopia and the documentary takes you through the tragedy of the plane crash that killed Otis Redding and most of his backing band. And then just four months later in April 1968 there's the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis and the documentary shows you have a mood of anger and desperation in the black community in America at the time affected the artists and employees at Stax.

So it's a very compelling complicated story that also takes in dirty dealings in the music industry when Stax was effectively screwed over by the competition and you see how they fought back and how important artists like the staple singers, Gene Knight and the Dramatics and especially Isaac Hayes were in keeping the label afloat until it eventually folded in 1976. Stax,

Soulsville, USA. Google says you can stream it on NowTV or with Sky Go I'm not sponsored by either of them currently by the way that's where it says you can look at them though I'm sure there's other ways I put a link to the trailer in the description right now I'm going to get back see Rosie get this edited try and do a bit more book work thank you you to Seamus Murphy Mitchell. Thank you very much indeed Seamus for all your production support and editing work on this episode. Thank you to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast. Thank you to everyone who helps me with my sponsors at A-Cast, much

appreciated. But thanks most especially to you for coming back for listening I really appreciate it so we have a short formal embrace before I run over by the tractor good to see you until next time we share the same out old space go carefully I love you BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE END Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe. I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide

I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I can't stop the tide I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass.

I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass.

I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to be a little bit of a pain in the ass. Thanks for watching!