Investigating The World Of Modern Gurus - Helen Lewis - #570

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Helen Lewis. She's a journalist at The Atlantic and an author. Humanity has become much less religious, and in the ruins of this fresh, listless world bereft of traditional insight, a cadre of new gurus have arisen to take the high priest's place of dispensing insights about how to live. Helen's new BBC Sounds documentary series delves into this world of secular gurus. Expect to learn why a Canadian man has started drinking his own urine, why Steve Jobs was much more than just a tech inventor, how much it costs to be accused of racism over dinner while being banned from crying, why so many people are turning away from mainstream media, Helen's post-mortem on the intellectual dark web, the mortal problem that productivity gurus are helping address, and much more. As I mentioned earlier this week, there is no episode this Saturday. I figured that I would give you New Year's Eve off to enjoy yourself doing whatever it is you are doing. I also need to admit that I messed up a little bit. I released an annual review template thing a year ago, which is the exact process I use to review the year that's just finished and plan my goals and stuff for the upcoming year. It is a combination of all of the best things that I've found from every big productivity writer on the internet. I just put it together for myself and then I made a template that you guys could use, released it last year and totally forgot to talk about it this year. So if you want to get a copy, you can get it for free. It is chriswillx.com/review.
It will give you the best template that I've found for doing an end of year review, for setting and planning goals for the upcoming year. It'll help you to reinforce habits, remember good memories, all of that stuff, chriswillx.com/review. And do not worry if you are deep into January and you still haven't done it yet. You have bags and bags of time to do this. It's not the sort of thing that needs to be completed before New Year's Eve or else it's useless. chriswillx.com/review. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Helen Lewis.
Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.

**Helen Lewis** (2:27)
Thank you for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
How did you get interested in thinking about modern gurus?

**Helen Lewis** (2:35)
I wonder where the inspiration kind of came from, but I think I've always been a journalist who's been interested in the weirder parts of the internet. So I've spent a lot of time, I remember early in the 2000s, when I just come out of being a teenager, I spent a lot of time in body modification communities. There was a site called BMEzine, which was run by a kind of crazy Canadian called Shannon Lara and it was all full of either people having these really weird experimental tattoos and piercings or actually in quite a lot of cases, that hammering nails through their nuts. So from the very start, my interaction with the internet was a lot about being in the kind of weirder spaces and I've always really enjoyed reporting on subcultures. So it does feel kind of slightly strange to me that I'm right at the end of my 30s and I'm still doing like, let's explain the internet to people. And I thought we might have got past that by now, but it is still a viable job in journalism and a really fun and interesting job in journalism.

**Chris Williamson** (3:23)
Okay, and gurus are now their own subculture, many multiple subcultures on the internet in your opinion?

**Helen Lewis** (3:30)
Well, every sort of, I think, pretty much every interesting sphere on the internet has its own set of gurus. And there are lots that I didn't get to in the series. Parenting is a really interesting one, right? I think when people are at moments of precarity or anxiousness, they want someone to tell them what to do or want someone to assure them that they've been through the same thing. And more and more of our connections are moving online. And my big analysis of the last 20 years is we used to have these geographic communities. You used to have to be friends with whoever lived in your town. And that's moved much more to most of our socializing based around interest communities. And so what you have is that you might not know the people who live in your street, but you know all the other furries or whatever it might be. I don't know if there are any furry gurus. I should just clarify. I'm sure there are, but I don't personally know of them. But parenting or wellness or productivity or whatever it might be, all the bits of your life, whether it's dating or working, money making, who do we look to for advice now? Actually, sometimes it's our friends, but just as often it's someone on the internet.