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1:50

Also produced a late night discussion programme

1:52

hosted by John called For the

1:55

Love Of in which he and his

1:57

guests explored topics that were

1:59

then considered Fringe, ghosts,

2:02

cryptozoology and

2:05

conspiracies about the moon

2:07

landings and the death of Princess Diana to

2:09

name a couple. And for a

2:11

while, John became one

2:14

of those people in the media who

2:16

reported from the fringes of culture, spending

2:18

time with people who held beliefs most

2:21

of us would consider esoteric and

2:23

his approach was often quirky.

2:28

In the mid 2000s, his Radio 4

2:30

show John Ronson On featured

2:33

serious stories alongside funny observations

2:35

about the weirdness of everyday

2:37

life. I loved it. That

2:40

was the first sort of John Ronson expedition

2:42

that I really got with because to be

2:44

honest with you, I wasn't

2:48

that fussed about conspiracy theories. I thought,

2:50

well, they're crazy. You always

2:52

seem quite cold towards me back then. Now

2:55

I know why. No, that's not true. By

2:59

the way, my favorite episode for The Love Of was

3:01

about time travel. Somebody

3:03

bought along a time machine, but he refused

3:05

to plug it in. And

3:08

everyone else around the time was

3:10

going, please. Why? Because

3:14

it used too many trees or something. Yeah,

3:16

I think it would be too powerful, too

3:18

amazing. And we're going. Okay. How

3:21

do you think my intro is going? I like it very

3:23

much. Here we go. This

3:25

is a very selective, personalized overview of your

3:28

career. But as the internet

3:30

became a central part of

3:32

modern life for all of us

3:34

and conspiracies, subcultures, and once marginal

3:36

beliefs spread and began to take

3:38

hold in the mainstream, John's

3:40

focus gradually shifted from the margins

3:43

to the world all around us.

3:45

In 2011, he looked at the way

3:48

mental health is dealt with in the

3:50

psychopath test. And in 2015, his book

3:52

So You've Been Publicly Shamed came out

3:54

just as social media was transitioning from

3:57

being a fun, supportive place to meet

3:59

people. Click on some fun links to

4:02

being a place where saying the wrong

4:04

thing could get you excommunicated by your

4:06

tribe in minutes. The first

4:08

series of Things Fell Apart came out in 2021. The

4:11

second one has just aired as we speak

4:13

this year in 2024. And

4:17

both series feature extraordinary stories that often

4:19

have surprising roots decades ago and explore

4:21

how we got to the point where

4:23

we are so prepared to think the

4:25

worst of each other. And

4:28

I'm here to chat about mainly

4:30

series two with John and very

4:32

excited to be here. Adam

4:39

thank you for that lovely introduction. My other

4:42

memory from back in the 90s

4:44

was I was around at

4:47

Joe Cordes's house and

4:49

I think you were there when

4:51

my wife telephoned and

4:53

told me that she was pregnant. I

4:55

do remember that. Yes, I was with

4:57

you and Joe and I think Louis

4:59

Theroux. And I think even Edgar Wright.

5:02

Wow. It was a big set of 90s. What

5:05

I don't remember is whether I came back in and

5:07

said guess what I've just been told or whether I

5:09

kept it to myself. That I can't remember. I have

5:11

a memory. I have a sort of recollection that you

5:14

might have told us. Yeah, when

5:16

people started having kids. Yeah, I think

5:18

I was earlier than the rest of

5:21

you. Yeah. How did having a child

5:23

change your outlook on the world? Well,

5:29

you know, we went to Legoland a lot. I

5:32

was dividing my time

5:34

between Gee had training camps

5:36

and I was writing the Menistate Goats at

5:38

the time and hanging out with Nazis and

5:41

stuff. And then I went back to London

5:43

and go to the little 30 morning show

5:45

at Lorddale House and Highgate where people would

5:47

do like balloon animals and shit. So

5:50

yeah, it was a strangely

5:52

fractured life. Do you

5:54

think that it made you more gloomy

5:56

or more upbeat about the world? Oh,

5:59

um. more

6:01

gloomy because

6:04

you're really confronted by the difficulties of life

6:06

when you have a kid. I mean, you

6:08

know, lots of it is very adorable too

6:11

and myself and I continue

6:14

to have a fantastically good relationship. But

6:17

you stop being, you know, carefree, you

6:19

start having to deal with responsibilities and

6:22

raising kids, you know, is hard and

6:25

it does make you more tense

6:28

about life's hardnesses maybe. I don't

6:30

know, was that a terrible answer?

6:33

No, I mean, I think it's totally relatable.

6:35

I found it really difficult. I was shocked

6:37

by how gloomy I felt when my

6:40

kids were young. Sometimes I look back and I think,

6:42

God, that's a bit of a waste of time

6:44

when they're so sweet and young and

6:47

everything. But it is quite a weird

6:49

experience to have young kids and to

6:51

still be out in the world trying

6:53

to forge a career or whatever and

6:55

yeah, yeah. Things

7:08

fell apart. Series two, I think

7:11

I might even prefer it to series one.

7:13

Is that okay to say? Yeah, I appreciate

7:15

that. I loved the

7:17

first series, but this

7:20

one, the fact that it was about

7:22

the experience of these stories that impacted

7:24

us in lockdown really

7:27

took me back to the madness of that

7:29

time in a way that was cathartic because

7:32

I hated that time. From a personal

7:34

point of view, my mother died around

7:37

then about a

7:40

week after George Floyd

7:42

was killed. I'm not saying the two are

7:44

related, but you know, that

7:46

to give you an idea of the

7:48

general feverish atmosphere around that time.

7:50

So she died at the end of May of 2020. Yeah,

7:54

exactly. So it really threw me,

7:56

like there was a personal

7:58

grief as well as kind of wider

8:01

social grief that was

8:04

all-consuming. And this show

8:06

kind of resolved a lot of the confusion of

8:08

feelings I had around that time. For me it

8:11

was a weird situation because in 2019, for the

8:13

first time in my life, like all I do

8:15

is work seven days a week, but

8:17

for the first time in my life around 2019 it got

8:21

too much for me. I was making a show called The Last

8:23

Days of August and it

8:25

was a really dark and difficult

8:27

show and the whole thing, the

8:29

production, everything about it was difficult and it just toppled

8:32

into me the whole thing. And then

8:35

when the pandemic happened for the very first time

8:37

in my life it coincided with

8:39

me needing a break, like I needed to get

8:41

my energy back and so on. I

8:44

felt very sorry for the people who weren't in that

8:46

same kind of headspace, but then after a while it

8:48

started to seep in. I'd be running through the country

8:50

lanes upstate where I live and letting

8:52

out little alarmed shrieks. And

8:55

then... What kind of yelps are we looking

8:57

at here? All manner of yelps. Could be

8:59

words. Oh! Yeah, things like that. And

9:02

actually then what happened was the BBC came along

9:04

and said, do you want to make a

9:07

show about the Cultural Wars, which tallied

9:09

with a lot of things I'd been thinking about anyway,

9:11

and so I made things

9:13

fell apart from the laundry room

9:15

of my house. So they came to you

9:17

with that idea? Yeah, the BBC said, do

9:19

you want to do something about the Cultural

9:22

Wars? And I was kind of obsessed with

9:24

a mutual friend of ours. Oh yeah, okay.

9:26

And his kind of

9:29

collapse. Yeah. A mutual friend of ours

9:31

is a comedy writer who, a brilliant

9:34

comedy writer, but he got too embroiled in

9:36

the Cultural Wars. And

9:38

it completely took over his life to any

9:40

extent that he lost all of his work

9:42

and his family. And I was watching this

9:45

happening and just really trying

9:47

to figure out what were the mechanics of this.

9:49

Because it wasn't just him, this was something all

9:51

over the place. People were toppling. And so when

9:53

the BBC came to me with that idea, I

9:56

probably wouldn't have agreed to do it if I wasn't already

9:58

kind of obsessed with it. that aspect of it.

10:01

Like, what is it about the cultural wars

10:03

that are causing people to really, you

10:05

know, plummet down rabbit holes that they then

10:07

can't escape from? Well, mentioning

10:10

our mutual friend, at

10:12

the time, I remember he was saying to me,

10:14

I'd love to come on the podcast and chat

10:17

with you about this issue that he was so

10:19

embroiled in. But I

10:21

couldn't see a way for it to

10:23

be productive, for it to be useful.

10:25

I thought this conversation is totally zero,

10:27

Sam. There's no enlightenment and

10:29

understanding coming out of it that I

10:31

can see. Didn't you have

10:33

the same worry about the culture wars

10:35

as a subject for making a series

10:38

about? Well, okay.

10:40

So the first thing I do when I'm

10:42

embarking on a project is I think, what's

10:44

the best version of this? What would be

10:46

the perfect version of this? And what's the

10:48

worst version of this? And so

10:50

when you think of the perfect version, that's

10:52

something to aspire towards. And when you think

10:54

of the worst version, that's something to avoid.

10:57

So I didn't want to feel the

10:59

culture wars. On

11:01

a personal level, I'm conflict averse.

11:03

I don't want to be conflicty.

11:07

I didn't want experts. That's another

11:09

pitfall. No experts. So all

11:11

of those pitfalls were then leading me to

11:13

the perfect version of the show. And the

11:15

perfect version of the show is human stories

11:17

about people who are caught up. Stories

11:20

that don't make anything worse, but offer

11:22

some kind of enlightenment. And

11:24

then I thought, well, and this doesn't

11:27

happen in season two, but in season one, it happens. I thought,

11:29

well, if I go back into the past and

11:31

tell these origin stories, you know,

11:34

when you go to a party, you go to a

11:36

party late and everybody at the party is screaming at

11:38

each other. And it's impossible to figure out like how

11:40

that started. I've heard you use this analogy before. And

11:42

I want to know what that party was. I've never

11:44

been to one of those parties where I turn up

11:47

and everyone's just you mean like screaming in anger. Yeah,

11:49

something's gone wrong at the party. Party was that where

11:51

you turned up and everyone was having a row. I

11:55

think I've got a memory of some

11:57

kind of student party where people are

11:59

taking too much. speed and I think

12:01

that had something to do with it. And they were saying, I

12:03

hate you more. The

12:06

left wing is the best wing. No, the

12:08

right is the easily best wing. That

12:11

kind of argument. It's more a general idea of

12:13

maybe this is because I just hate parties. But

12:15

when I think of parties, I think of everybody

12:17

just yelling at each other. What do you think?

12:19

You're tracing the roots of whatever conflict you've stumbled

12:22

in upon. Yeah, and I thought it'd be nice

12:24

to go back. I've been

12:26

interested in ripple effects stories for a

12:28

long time now. That

12:30

moment of a pebble being thrown in the

12:32

water. And if you can

12:35

go back to that tiny little moment where

12:37

it all started, I thought it would offer

12:39

humanity and clarity. I

12:42

don't know, connect people. I think

12:44

people would be more interested in human stories than issues.

12:47

Yeah, very much so. And so how

12:50

did that govern the way you conducted

12:52

the interviews, for example, just to leap

12:55

ahead to that? Like, were there rules

12:57

that you set yourself? Have you learned

13:00

over the years to avoid saying certain

13:02

things or to make sure you say

13:04

other things? You know, my interviewing

13:06

is all wrapped up in the fact that

13:08

I'm pretty socially awkward. And there's always the

13:10

chance I'm going to say something really stupid.

13:13

So a lot of my interviewing technique is to try

13:15

to avoid blurting out something that

13:18

will upset people. But really,

13:20

what it is, it's curiosity. So

13:22

my producer and I get so passionate

13:24

about the stories that we do and things fell

13:26

apart. By the time

13:29

I'm interviewing somebody, I'm extremely curious.

13:31

And I kind of can't wait to hear what they have to say. And

13:35

when it goes well, that's the best

13:37

part of it. People are swept along

13:39

by my enthusiastic curiosity.

13:42

And also, yeah, sort of tear down

13:44

the barricades of the formality of an

13:46

interview. Yeah. You talked to

13:49

Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator

13:51

in one of the episodes

13:53

about the great reset. Monday

13:57

morning, the phrase, the great reset,

13:59

trended. with nearly 80,000 tweets with

14:01

most of the posts coming from

14:04

familiar far-right internet

14:06

personality. I wonder

14:09

if that's us. And

14:11

that was quite good because he's another

14:14

one of these American conservatives who are

14:16

quite affable, quite reasonable in

14:19

a lot of ways, and

14:21

yet you know that

14:23

they have said all kinds of really unhelpful

14:25

stuff in the past and

14:27

fed a load of

14:29

misunderstanding by being totally black

14:31

and white about an issue or exaggerating

14:34

or just being bombastic. He

14:37

went into a slight kind of shtick about

14:39

Ida Orkin and her essay, You'll

14:41

Know Nothing and You'll Be Happy,

14:43

and he starts doing like impersonations

14:45

of Klaus Schwab, sounding like a

14:48

Nazi. I don't want to call

14:50

them Nazis, although Klaus Schwab is

14:52

like a cartoon of a

14:54

James Bond bad guy. He's a little

14:56

white kitty cat in his lap away

14:58

from being a movie villain. But

15:00

he had a little touching moment when he was

15:02

talking to you when he wanted to clarify on

15:04

a personal level that he wasn't being mean about

15:06

this woman you were talking about, Ida Alkin? Is

15:09

that how you plan to say that? Yeah, Ida

15:11

Orkin. Orkin. But hang on just a second,

15:13

John. I hope you never got the impression that I was condemning

15:15

her. I'm condemning the

15:17

fact that there are so many people

15:19

latching on going, yes, that's a great

15:22

idea. We should be

15:24

able to have philosophical discussion. I

15:26

should be able to argue

15:28

both sides of this. I thought

15:30

that was a really fascinating moment.

15:33

So I said something human about Ida Orkin,

15:35

about, you know, I'd met her and I

15:38

really liked her and I think she's been

15:40

misunderstood. And he immediately changed because

15:42

I told you to think that I'm, said,

15:44

you know, yeah, the humanity, the sort of

15:46

reality of him came out just then, I

15:48

thought. Yeah. I mean, the World

15:50

Economic Forum didn't do itself any favors. No. A,

15:53

calling it the Great Reset, which if

15:55

you're a conspiracy theorist is a terrifying

15:58

thing to call your big idea. idea.

16:00

What would a better brand

16:02

for that idea

16:04

have been? Something like? A gentle

16:06

change. Yes. A sexy

16:08

new start. A fresh start. A

16:12

small and modest proposal. The idea

16:14

was, here is a total

16:17

disruption of the normal flow of

16:20

society. Let's use it to

16:22

do some good, to phase out

16:24

some bad habits we've got into, to introduce

16:26

some good new ones. And

16:28

that was the idea behind it. They

16:31

weren't good at communicating that. Possibly because

16:33

they all lived in chalets

16:35

on top of the Alps

16:37

and literally above everyone. Yeah.

16:40

That's the thing. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Again,

16:43

speaking of interviews, how about the

16:45

interview you did with Mickey Willis in episode

16:48

eight? Because that was one of

16:50

those ones where you actually got

16:52

to the point where you

16:54

were saying things that he was not prepared to

16:56

believe. Damn it. That's not true. I don't think

16:59

that the vaccines killed millions during COVID. Oh, really?

17:04

No. OK. He

17:07

just flat out disagreed with you

17:09

about the efficacy of the vaccine.

17:11

And then there was a sort of

17:14

uncomfortable pause. So in that moment in

17:17

the unedited conversation, did you try

17:19

and present him with facts

17:21

and figures to support your case or did you

17:23

just move beyond it? I

17:25

moved beyond it because I think it's

17:28

not my job. It's funny. Yesterday,

17:30

I was listening to an interview

17:32

between a left wing podcast

17:35

and a far right wing podcast.

17:37

And the whole interview was the

17:39

left wing podcast challenging the sort

17:42

of troll like things that the right

17:44

wing podcast says. And I was listening

17:47

to the thinking, I'm not getting anything

17:49

from this. And so you have to

17:51

approach people on a

17:54

human level, not on an ideological level. Like if

17:56

I was challenging some of Mickey's crazy ideas, it

17:58

would have been a very difficult just become

18:00

a sort of I'm a representative of

18:02

righteous society saying irrational truth. They're saying

18:05

something big and trolly and nothing's going

18:07

to change. The reason why I really

18:09

wanted to do Mickey Willis was because

18:12

of his fascination

18:15

with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Towards

18:17

the end of the show we were trying to figure out what the final

18:19

episode should be and I had a

18:22

little brainwave about the series

18:24

pretty much starts with this with

18:26

Mickey Willis's interview with Judy Mykowitz, the

18:28

star of the documentary Pandemic. You

18:30

hear Mickey Willis's voice briefly but we don't

18:32

linger on it. So wouldn't it

18:34

be sort of fun to go back at the end

18:37

to the man who interviewed Judy Mykowitz? So I listened

18:39

to a whole load of podcast

18:41

interviews that Mickey Willis did. And

18:43

in one I was stopped walking through New York

18:45

City and he

18:47

starts talking about Joseph Campbell's hero's journey

18:49

and I rewounded and listened to it

18:52

three or four times and I just

18:54

thought this is extraordinary because

18:56

you've got this guy in the 1950s,

18:59

Joseph Campbell, who has this idea, you

19:01

know, just has an insight into narrative structure. He

19:04

notices that from cave drawings to the

19:06

present day there's a particular narrative that's

19:09

particularly popular and it's the idea of

19:11

the hero's journey. The reluctant heroes taken

19:13

out of their everyday life, taken

19:16

into a new world. They have to

19:18

fight dragons, they have to

19:20

meet mentors who've helped them on

19:22

their way. There's threshold guardians who've stopped

19:24

them from going further and then

19:26

at the end there's the great big

19:29

battle of the dragon and the dragon nearly

19:31

kills the hero but then the hero prevails.

19:34

And I realized that Mickey Willis is thinking

19:36

of this as a lifestyle idea, as a

19:38

self-help idea, not what it's supposed to be,

19:40

which is just a way of understanding narrative.

19:43

At the foundation of the hero's journey

19:45

is a reluctant hero,

19:47

an everyday person who suddenly receives

19:50

a call to adventure. So

19:53

it's that kind of a story that

19:55

then sends this person, usually obsessively, into

19:57

a new world. So now they have

19:59

to go. and suddenly become an

20:01

investigator and find courage that they never

20:03

thought they had. There's tricksters, there's people

20:06

that try to trick them, there are

20:08

people called threshold guardians that try

20:10

to stop them from advancing forward

20:13

too far, and then

20:15

there are mentors they receive lessons from.

20:18

And so they become the hero of their

20:20

own life. He's making this his real life,

20:23

and I thought that was extraordinary because

20:25

it really encapsulates everything in the series.

20:27

Because what is the hero's journey? It's

20:30

heroes and monsters, it's, you know, valiant

20:33

fighters versus dragons. And

20:36

that's what everybody who's deeply involved in

20:38

the cultural war thinks that the world

20:40

is. But it isn't what the

20:42

world is, the world is a bunch of people just

20:44

trying to make sense of things. Stumbling

20:47

around with an unsatisfactory

20:49

ending, looming in the

20:51

distance, and making compromises along

20:53

the way, and

20:55

doing their best, and making mistakes,

20:57

and trying to learn somewhat. But

21:00

yes, it's the opposite of a film. That's why

21:02

you have films, to kind of impose

21:05

some sort of order, get some kind

21:07

of satisfying sense out of the chaos

21:09

of real life. And that's the

21:12

hero's journey as a template for that, isn't it? And

21:15

I really understand wanting to sit in a

21:17

room and make a satisfying

21:20

narrative to sort of control

21:22

and harness the horrors of the world. I mean,

21:24

that's what I spend my life doing. But

21:27

you want to do that with nuance

21:29

and an understanding of the vagaries and

21:31

the grey areas of the human condition,

21:33

as opposed to thinking that

21:35

everybody's either a hero or a dragon. That's what we

21:37

do on Twitter. That's why Twitter became such a nightmare.

21:41

Because we saw the world in terms of

21:43

heroes and villains on Twitter. Was there ever

21:45

a time when nuance thrived that you can

21:47

remember? Were you ever aware, like, this

21:49

is a great time for nuance, the late 1980s or the

21:52

early 90s, maybe? I

21:56

wouldn't say the 90s. They weren't very nuanced

21:58

time. sleepwalking

22:01

through comedians making

22:03

jokes about sexually assaulting

22:05

people and no one like noticed.

22:07

Yeah but I guess in my

22:09

mind if there was any

22:12

nuance it came from the idea

22:14

that maybe a lot of the big questions had

22:17

been settled that we were all on the same

22:19

page about certain issues that are now

22:21

feeding the culture wars. You

22:23

shouldn't be racist to people, you shouldn't

22:26

be sexist, you should treat people fairly

22:28

and kindly. That seemed to be the

22:30

kind of prevailing assumption certainly among my

22:32

group of friends and

22:34

most of which I kind of hoover'd

22:36

up from culture from movies and TV

22:38

shows those values were in

22:41

most of what I was exposed

22:43

to growing up. True but

22:45

I would also say pushback.

22:47

Okay I'll push back and

22:49

that was a very white

22:51

time. Yeah yeah. So you

22:53

could care about racism you

22:57

know you go to a

22:59

big media organization and everyone is

23:01

white and quite a

23:03

lot of male too so yeah maybe

23:05

we were getting more enlightened but the world

23:08

wasn't changing. Yes well do you think then

23:10

I mean certainly it was in my case

23:12

but do you think that the whole affection

23:16

for nuance is a sort of expression

23:18

of privilege and elitism in some ways?

23:21

I mean possibly I understand

23:24

that one pushback against things fell apart

23:26

would be you know people care a

23:28

loss about culture war

23:30

issues so who am

23:32

I to be the old

23:35

man on the battlefield telling everybody to calm

23:37

down? So I do get that

23:39

criticism but I suppose my answer to that criticism

23:41

is there are reasons for culture wars and

23:43

many culture wars have made the world

23:46

better. It was only a few

23:48

years ago with that terrible Oscar so white

23:50

photograph of all the Oscar winners and there

23:52

was like I think everybody except for one

23:54

person was white and you know there

23:56

was a huge need for

23:58

cultural change. for more

24:01

diversity and so on and for

24:03

predatory men to be held to

24:05

account and so on. There's

24:07

all sorts of wrongs that needed to be righted.

24:10

But that doesn't mean that you can't take a

24:12

sort of nuanced critical look at the cultural wars

24:15

because there's so much other stuff in

24:17

that world too. So I suppose what

24:19

I'm focusing in on is the deleterious,

24:22

disproportionately dysfunctional nature of the cultural wars

24:25

because yeah, I think it would be

24:27

privileged and elitist to scold

24:30

people for caring about things. Yeah,

24:32

but I wonder if maybe in 20 years time

24:34

or further than that society

24:37

might have improved in certain fundamental ways and

24:39

people will look back and say well those

24:42

paroxysms of the

24:45

culture wars were a necessary part of

24:48

us getting to a better place and yeah, there

24:50

may have been some casualties along

24:52

the way. Possibly, I

24:54

don't know, I think people will look back

24:56

on this period and they'll

24:58

look at this sort of frenzy of public

25:00

shaming on twitter and think

25:02

what were people thinking? This was crazy, you know. And

25:05

I think that's over now by the way. I

25:08

think public shaming by the left on twitter is

25:10

over. Why? Because you think everyone's got the memo

25:12

that that's not cool? I think people

25:14

will look back on the period between like maybe 2012, 2013

25:16

and maybe

25:20

last year or the year before as

25:22

this crazy time when a generation came up and

25:25

gave themselves a set of rules that

25:27

were impossible to live by. That if

25:29

you say this your career is over.

25:31

If you accidentally misspeak, it's over for

25:34

you forever. This was a

25:36

rough set of rules that people gave

25:38

each other. Anyway,

25:41

what I'm about to say isn't an original thought. I

25:43

was actually listening to a podcast by

25:45

Katie Herzog and she was interviewing

25:47

Andy Mills, a very brilliant radio

25:49

producer. One of the creators

25:51

of The Daily, the New York Times podcast. It took

25:54

us a long story short. It came out that

25:57

about 10 years earlier when he was working

25:59

for Radiolab He did

26:01

something very stupid and

26:03

he was out with a bunch of

26:05

co-workers and they were all

26:07

getting drunk and one

26:09

of them insulted him, called him

26:12

a pipster and he poured

26:14

a drink over her head. And

26:17

at the time there was punishment

26:20

and he was deeply energetic and so on. Then

26:23

it went away and then 10 years later when

26:25

he's riding very high with the daily and so

26:27

on it came out again that this had happened

26:29

and he was truly cancelled.

26:32

Lost his job. Yeah. Didn't

26:34

get hired anywhere else. He, in this

26:37

interview with Katie Herzog, made the point,

26:40

Elon Musk taking over Twitter is

26:42

mostly terrible. But maybe

26:44

one unexpectedly positive thing that's

26:47

come out of it is that the left,

26:49

they've sort of left Twitter now and gone

26:51

to blue sky and threads and so on.

26:54

And I think that's sort of frenzy,

26:56

that snowball. You say something slightly stupid

26:58

and the next minute you're

27:01

the main player on Twitter and

27:03

you've lost your job. I

27:05

don't think it has that power anymore. So

27:08

I think that kind of left

27:10

wing bullying is over but

27:12

what's taken its place is

27:15

right wing bullying. The

27:18

un-woke versus the woke. Friends took a course

27:20

in going to Russia to interview Putin as

27:22

a friend and ally. So

27:26

what's happening now I think is that

27:28

while quote unquote woke culture is actually

27:30

losing its power, the

27:32

anti-woke right are more obsessed with

27:35

it than ever. So

27:37

they're now battling what they perceive

27:39

to be an enemy that actually doesn't really have

27:41

all that much power anymore. And they're

27:43

going more and more hardened, going more and more

27:45

to the right, getting more

27:47

and more extreme people on their podcasts

27:49

because they're the ones that get the

27:51

most listens. So

27:54

that's where the new dysfunction

27:56

feels to me. What

27:58

is it then that animates

28:00

most of these culture war

28:03

battles. What is being threatened that

28:06

makes people get so upset? I

28:09

guess it's the old progressiveness

28:11

versus conservation. We

28:14

like the world as it used to be versus

28:16

people who know we need to fix the wrongs

28:18

of the world. Yeah.

28:21

Certainly both sides are guilty of

28:23

behaving in ways that in the

28:25

old and pre-social media times you

28:28

would associate with the kind of

28:31

mainstream media, for want of a better phrase.

28:34

What the internet did, as far as

28:36

I can tell, is enable every individual

28:38

to be their own kind of media

28:41

node or brand or

28:43

hub or whatever you want to call it, to

28:45

operate in that same way, to suddenly acquire

28:48

a grasp of what newspapers and

28:50

TV companies had always known, which

28:53

was that certain things cut through

28:55

and other things don't. The thing

28:57

that cuts through mainly is

29:00

a kind of exaggeration,

29:02

for want of a better

29:04

word, sensationalism, exaggeration, clickbait

29:07

really, and operating

29:10

on that basis, which now

29:12

is totally rampant. If you go

29:14

on YouTube, everything is

29:16

clickbait. Even stuff that's being generated

29:18

by quite thoughtful commentators,

29:20

if you actually watch the videos, they'll

29:23

be sat there having a nuanced

29:26

conversation with someone. But

29:29

as far as the thumbnail is concerned, it's like,

29:32

here are the reasons why the world's ending next

29:34

week, or here's why so-and-so

29:36

is a terrible person, or this

29:39

person destroys that person.

29:42

Yeah. I think there's a lot of

29:44

empty pretense in those

29:46

corners, people pretending to hate

29:49

things that they don't really hate. I think

29:51

we need to discredit the

29:54

practice of exaggeration, of

29:56

totally bad faith exaggeration.

30:00

Screening out the actual facts of misrepresenting

30:02

facts and taking them out of context

30:04

willfully doing so just to please your

30:07

but what a YouTube What a YouTube?

30:10

Star would say to that in reply

30:12

is when I put out nuanced conversations

30:14

I get 12,000 views and when I

30:16

get the most extreme person on my

30:19

show I get hundreds of thousands of

30:21

years Yeah, so that says us market

30:23

forces But I agree with

30:25

you I think you're absolutely right that individuals have

30:27

learned what major organizations have always known And

30:31

I think it's a shame like, you know,

30:33

the whole point about social media was to

30:35

make was to do things better But to

30:37

make justice better or make communication better it

30:41

was a place of curiosity in the early days an

30:43

empathy people would have windows into

30:45

other people's lives and We'd

30:48

be curious about it. Oh my god,

30:50

I can see into this person's home

30:52

now And I'm so interested and then

30:54

that curdled very quickly and became all

30:57

about judgment instead But I think though

30:59

as far as the bad faith

31:01

practices and the meanness and the exaggeration

31:04

That is rampant on both sides It's

31:08

short-term that strategy if

31:11

you think back to the things that

31:13

really make an impact long-term on the

31:15

culture The things that

31:17

we really value in the

31:19

arts or whatever it might be They're

31:21

not driven by those things so much that

31:23

stuff tends to fade the stuff that really

31:26

makes an impact is generally the stuff That

31:28

is heartfelt. Yeah. Yeah

31:30

somewhat hopeful that has something

31:33

Encouraging to say about us

31:35

as human beings. Mmm, you

31:37

know, yeah I agree most

31:39

people want everything to be

31:41

kind and heartfelt and not

31:44

extreme and tolerant and yeah I

31:55

Guess the reason I really love this

31:57

series and why I like so much

31:59

of your work is

32:01

that what you are interested in more

32:04

than politics it seems to me is

32:06

just reminding us of a

32:09

capacity for being kind,

32:12

for universal values. I've

32:15

said a bit to humans. Yeah,

32:17

yeah. I've said this before

32:19

but the fact is I had a rough

32:21

time with it at Cardiff High School and

32:24

I think that's very good training for a journalist

32:26

to be forced to the edge of the playground

32:28

not being aligned to any group, not being able

32:30

to be aligned to any group because nobody wants

32:32

to. Journalists have to

32:34

be unaligned and have to be evidence-based and

32:37

have to understand that humans

32:40

are a mess. Good people

32:42

do stupid things and vice versa and we're

32:44

just trying to blunder our way through life

32:47

as best as possible. There's

32:50

a lovely bit in the third episode,

32:52

Tonight's the Night comrades, which

32:54

is mainly about the family

32:56

being surrounded by local

32:59

folk who think that they

33:01

are... Antifa.

33:03

Antifa, yeah. And they just

33:05

want to... I can't think

33:07

of the Sons of Twilight and that's where Twilight

33:09

was filmed. But

33:12

you paint an absolutely terrifying picture.

33:14

At this time they start hearing in

33:17

the distance chainsaws. The

33:21

chainsaws decided it. It would,

33:23

they realised, be prudent to

33:25

leave forks. And so

33:27

they packed up and headed back towards the

33:29

bridge. And

33:34

when they come up to the bridge they

33:36

find that those chainsaws that have been heard

33:38

in the distance had actually been someone cutting

33:41

down five alder trees. To

33:43

block their path as a barricade, yes.

33:45

And there's some reason they were being kept

33:47

there in this isolated campground by themselves in

33:49

the middle of the forest while

33:52

locals zoom by on ATVs and

33:54

someone's shooting gunshots in the background.

33:56

By the end of the episode though, the

33:59

ringleader of of the armed anti-antifa

34:04

gang. Apologizes. Apologizes. Yeah.

34:06

You know what? I

34:08

totally messed up. I jumped the gun. I

34:11

knee-jerk this. I mean, it's sort of bittersweet

34:13

because he ends up getting canceled. Yes. By

34:16

the local townspeople who boycott his business.

34:18

He goes out of business. Yeah. So

34:20

their forgiveness might have gone a

34:23

little further. Yeah. I'm glad you noticed that

34:25

because, yeah, that was a little slightly bitter

34:27

moment at the end of the show. But

34:29

his apology, though, in the moment was

34:31

very moving. I mean, his capacity

34:34

to actually say, I'm sorry. Yeah.

34:36

We went way too far. Yeah.

34:38

And I really hope that these people can

34:41

forgive us. Wish they didn't. I

34:44

guess some of them did. But

34:46

that's one of those moments where you do think,

34:48

like, come on. One journalist, I think, was Helen

34:50

Lewis, says, when the right go after you, and

34:54

look, I'm about to give a big,

34:56

poor generalization, which I'm sure isn't true

34:58

in many situations. I love big, broad

35:00

generalizations. She said, when the

35:02

right go after you, when it's really horrible,

35:05

and it didn't last that long. Whereas

35:08

when the left go after you, they

35:10

never, like elephants, they never forget. It

35:12

could last years. And

35:16

that's made a difference. But anyway, I

35:18

thought there was some hopefulness in the

35:20

fact that fundamentally,

35:22

people are, in those

35:24

situations, they're often motivated by fear. And

35:28

the fear might look incredibly

35:30

aggressive and self-assured. But

35:32

at the core of it, there's usually worry

35:34

and doubt. Yeah. And that

35:37

guy was genuinely worried that Antifa was

35:40

going to leave the sissies and come

35:42

to his small town and take over.

35:45

He fell for fake news. Oh,

35:47

man. But no, it was good.

35:49

It was such a dose of perspective and

35:51

sanity after the residual

35:55

feelings of that mad time, 2020.

35:58

In 1919. as the Spanish

36:01

flu caused through a world still

36:03

broken by the Great War. Yeats

36:05

wrote his poem, The Second Coming.

36:09

Things fall apart, the centre cannot

36:11

hold. The best lack

36:13

all conviction, while the worst

36:16

are false, as passionate intensity.

36:21

A hundred years later, and we

36:23

were hit by our own pandemic,

36:26

forcing us into lockdown. I

36:29

heard you talking about the WB

36:31

Yeats poem. Where the title

36:33

comes from? The Second Coming. Things

36:36

fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere

36:38

anarchy is loosed upon the

36:41

world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed,

36:43

and everywhere the ceremony of innocence

36:45

is drowned. The best lack all

36:47

conviction, while the worst are full

36:49

of passionate intensity. Which I

36:51

don't love, that last line I don't love.

36:53

Because there he is saying, you know, the

36:55

centre cannot hold, let's all connect. And then

36:58

you just insult everyone. The

37:01

best lack all conviction, the worst is

37:03

like, God, you know, you want the

37:05

centre to hold, don't insult everyone.

37:08

Better last line would

37:10

have been, the best are

37:12

doing their best, while

37:14

the worst aren't that bad. Aren't

37:17

that bad. While some of the

37:19

worst are full of

37:21

misplaced, passionate intensity, which is

37:23

laudable in itself, but

37:26

really needs to be considered in

37:28

a more nuanced way in certain

37:30

contexts. You're right, I'll

37:32

just email WB Yeats with those changes and

37:34

we'll try and get that actioned. Apparently he

37:36

was quite grumpy, so he may not, the

37:39

email you get back from him may not

37:41

be. He may not be a good reply,

37:43

is he? Where

37:48

to Be a Woman is the podcast celebrating

37:50

the best of women's wellbeing. I'm

37:52

Sophia Smith Gala. And I'm Saachi Paul. And

37:55

we're on a quest to find out where

37:57

in the world women are living their best

37:59

lives. We're hearing from some incredible

38:01

women about what their countries are getting

38:03

right. And picking the best bits for

38:05

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38:10

Let's be a woman from the BBC

38:13

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