EP.227 - HELEN LEWIS

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 are 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, eh?

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 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'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 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 influences 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.

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 in to 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.

This is an addendum that I am recording a couple of weeks after this episode was uploaded.

Just to say in response to some of the messages I've received since it went out, I've included a couple of links in the description to some more critical perspectives on the CAS review into different areas of healthcare for children and young people with gender identity issues.

that Helen Lewis talks about in this episode.

Thank you, back to the previously recorded introduction.

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 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.

Round old chat, let's have a round old chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Put on your conversation, hope that mind you're talking hats.

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 are 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 I it was one of those ones where you and I hadn't met before we hadn't really spoken and I'd 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

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 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?

I mean, this is bringing a, you've invited me to be whiny 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 then 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 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 had 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 everyone's remembered that she's terrible.

Yes, and you are made aware of it.

Sometimes it's thrust in front of you by people you know.

My mum used to like to send me bad reviews.

No!

Oh, no.

And 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.

And you're like, yeah.

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 Overton 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 always voice all this 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.

The vibe has definitely shifted on social media.

And ultimately, lots of the news organisations 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 traffics, they largely collapsed.

You know, they're kind of husks of what they were or have been sold off to other people.

So now, if someone does something outrageous on Twitter or gets a pylon, there's not the ancillary industry of picking it up and laundering.

It just sort of happens, and then everyone goes, oh, hmm, 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, X New Thing that 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 programme and write them.

And if you were trying to break in and you were young, you probably ended 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 going to 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 people of colour 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...

Twattish 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 kinds of wars, which is the argument that Catelyn Moran made about girls, which also got their 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 authentically about their own experiences, right?

We should have Man Like Mobine, we should have I May Destroy, we should have, you know, people writing authentically 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 creators still were white, as long as they put a black character in, we thank God we've done, you know, we've done our duty.

It's fine.

If people 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 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 Catelyn 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.

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'll 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 a very useful analogy because it is like alcohol in the sense that it doesn't happen to everybody.

So if it 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 way down.

That's how I see it anyway.

Yeah, I would concur.

Around 2020, then

was

when did JK send out her 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 wimped.

I can't remember what it is.

Wimpund, whatever, yeah, yeah.

Her point being, 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 sort of a veteran by that point.

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 favour 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 non-conformity.

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 butcher 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, you know, 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 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 it is.

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 you know, that this is the West poisoning itself, this is a dying civilization that has become decadent, and therefore, you know, 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 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 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, whatever it might be.

When's this?

2011?

It's 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 a 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 that 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 wrongin's and they may just sometimes lie to get things that they want and and that kind of all got swept aside in the in the rush to think well 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 really 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 maybe we have to have a sort of therapy session before we have our next conversation 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 the organiser phoned me and said, I've got years of trying to organise 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 going to like hannibal lecter i would have to sort of strapped to a gurney with a 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 yes all the villains of the transgender world the big transphobes yes and you are listed on their british author an anti-transgender activist which isn't true really i mean you're not i mean it's i said i write about it one piece in ten and fifteen i mean 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's a there is a fringe who 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, I you know, I my f 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 CASH report found that they didn't, that they were too experimental and there should have been much more research 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 Blockton Reported and they talk about the whole issue a lot on there when I say they that is Jesse Single and Katie Herzog Katie Herzog who are journalists who sort of got defenestrated in the US for not saying the right things about gender isn't that yeah Katie wrote a piece about detransitioners and now that's a very very small subset of people who transition we 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 exactly the issues that, you know, the CASH 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, 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 the 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 lost their jobs because of speaking up about this issue.

I don't know where all the 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 where I think that picture is now.

The ill feeling, I think, still remains.

But as you know, West Streeting, the Labour health spokesman, accepted the cash report.

The Greens in Scotland didn't accept the cash report, and that's one of the things that prompted Humzius to basically sort of bring down that government.

So, you know, everything has kind of moved on a step, I think.

And again, and that intent, I think, has taken some of the heat out out of it.

Because once the cues that are coming to people from people they trust, from their organisations that they trust, you know, political parties being one of them, saying the CAS report is a very sane piece of scientific research, not a kind of

protocols of the elders of Zion.

And remind us the thrust of the CAS report.

So, Hilary Cass, who was a top pediatrician, was asked to look into particularly the gender services supplied at the Gender Identity Development Service at the Taverstock Hospital in North London.

Now, that was the one hub for all youth gender services in England.

And there's a Sandy Ford Clinic up in Scotland.

But people were coming there from Wales, people come there from Ireland.

And they had this incredible upsurge in demand.

In the late 90s, 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, known as 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 were a boy, it blocked your testosterone.

And then, that would then give you this.

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 zero percent failure rate, or what happened is that once you were on that pathway, you never got off it.

It was a train that was only heading in one destination.

And that's what Hilary 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 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, you know, 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're really not sure if we were targeting the right people with that treatment.

And there was a sudden uptick of people seeking it, which 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 a 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 disfor it, 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 CAS 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 subtweet, 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 that is a good thing.

Like, you know, I don't, you know, what you absolutely don't want is some 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.

Man splaining, I believe it's known as.

Yes, thank you.

But you know what I mean?

I think there was an understandable reluctance on the part of kind of liberal men to get involved in it and they didn't have the time to understand the intricacies, the ins and outs of it.

And also because the kind of

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 both sidesma.

And so you just think, well, maybe I don't talk about everything.

Maybe this one isn't 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 for a story is to make the case for its importance.

And

you just can't expect other people to agree with you about everything.

I suppose there was a sense, perhaps,

among not just among men, but I don't know, people on the other side, or 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.

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 well no because 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, you know, I spoke to Natalie Wynne, Contra Points,

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 the details.

You know, 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 going to be enlightening for people as far as that conversation goes.

So

I didn't feel like I needed to weigh into it.

I didn't, and I also felt like I had some sympathy for someone like Natalie Wynne saying that it was a moral panic.

I have a huge amount of sympathy for Natalie Wynne,

who, you know, was great.

And she engaged with the J.K.

Rowling podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K.

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've transitioned male to female and you know, just feeling very much constant.

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.

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 kind of a contest for who gets, 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 a lot of people just think, well, I'll just, I'll, 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 can see a very, what 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 are treated to all intents and purposes as their 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 the thing about like atheists only believe in one fewer gods 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, hmm, maybe they do have a point about that?

I think toilets are the one.

And I, it 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 isn't 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

detransitioners, 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 consciousness and they don't realise it yet.

I think I would be very wary about

that as well.

But I don't know,

I'm sure I've got things wrong.

Did you watch Natalie Wynne's essay about the podcast about the witch trials of J.K.

Rowling?

I did.

I can't remember if I watched all of it.

I did obviously watch the bit where she talked about me, because as previously discussed, I am 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 was one of those ones where you think, are you, you're 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, you know, really sweeping draconian legislation saying, you know, you're going to be prosecuted for child abuse, right, if you let you, if you seek medical attention for this kind of stuff.

Which, whether or not you think the medical attention is helping,

you know, 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 Wynne is, you know,

a useful idiot for the patriarchy because she puts on a load of makeup and is conventionally feminine online.

d there's things just are 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 who are baddies and the left wing people are goodies and if you see a left wing person saying something that you disagree with, it's actually'cause they're a stooge for the right.

It's just very simple binary politics that you just and and kind of guilt by association, right?

Um

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 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, I want,

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, 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.

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.

Um, you know, in that video, Natalie is there 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 I, when I look at J.K.

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 sympathize with most of J.K.

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 J.K.

Rowling, all they feel is what I felt before I listened to that podcast, which is like, what's J.K.

Rowling ever done wrong?

She's nice, like she's a reasonable person.

And 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, 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

some of their interests will be different to those of biological females.

But the reason that the TERFs 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 not 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 that's the counterpoint.

And I'm in the same position as you.

I don't, I think, 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 know, 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 facing sort of lipstick and a bad wig.

And, and I just thought, again,

much the face that you made at me when I was meaning about Natalie Wynne's makeup was the face I made reading that, which was like,

you have so many good points.

Like, 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 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 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, it'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 Wegavi, which is exactly the same molecule, semaglutide, that is licensed for weight 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.

It is impressive, though, for someone like me, anytime 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.

The trouble is, yeah, but journalism is basically constantly taking an exam, right?

You just swat up and then you disgorge your knowledge and 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, you it makes you hungry, it drives you, it says something terrible's happening.

Oh my god, a family's 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.

I've been upset about that.

But it has made no difference to my weight at all.

Like, I'm fitter.

You know, I'd hope that I would live longer and less chance of, you know, shattering bones or whatever it might be in my 70s.

Yeah, so that's valuable.

But what I am not is supermodel rake thin.

And so suddenly this drug came along that doctors could prescribe to their patients who are living with overweight and obesity and it actually worked.

And they still to this day 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.

Looks like it has some very odd side effects.

It seems to increase people's impulse control.

People found they were doing 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 now, this may be an experience you've had.

Is that food noise?

No, but more like

Oh, sorry, I thought you meant actual literal noises coming from your stomach.

No,

I mean the biscuits in the cupboard whispering to you.

Got you, got you.

Yes, yes, calling to you.

Right, and you're just thinking, 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 could go.

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 on a very low dose and you titrate up.

And I think people are very differentially responsive to it.

So I think 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 The 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 had 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, 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, scaremongering, it's reasonable with an 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 a morbidly obese person in a gym and just everybody 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 the scotland you know in the whenever it was in prehistory their appetite cueing 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 revels but then that's maybe partly because of the howling void at the center of modern existence

And that's not going to go away with Ozempic.

I mean, a fair point.

One of the the things that was interesting, I read Johan 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 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.

You know, 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 Johan Hari was saying was that there 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 Ozempic.

And there was a kind of anhedonia that he felt because it was like, well, why aren't I feeling great?

Because look at me, I'm I'm 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 still me.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

And

you could have this kind of comforting delusion, oh, if only I, you know, moved to a nice house, if only I got thinner, if only I was this or that, then I'd be happy.

If any of those things actually happen to you and you're still you, you go, no, I'll never be happy because I'm me.

You gotta make peace for 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-1 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 Ozempic or something like that.

Yeah, I have anecdotally, I've heard about the kind of the kind of Ozempic kind of binge back.

And definitely, you have to think about it the same way you'd think about statins, which is it's your well, basically what happens is you take a Zempic 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,

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, 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 left, the criticism of Azempic, is we should fix the food environment.

And I don't know if you've read Chris Van Tulliken's 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 Leibniz and the poetry at work in there.

And that's quite an extraordinary piece of, 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 Zempic is really that when you're, you know, you're talking about all of those effects, when you're seriously overweight, the risks of what 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 a 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 Zempic.

And some of them had to apologise 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 live with it.

And I don't know what you would do in that situation if you did feel that a Zen Pit worked for you because

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.

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 going to 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, there's 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 was 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 at you.

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, oh, 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 a 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, they can 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 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 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 Ozempic.

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

the 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,

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 those are legitimate concerns.

The thing that struck me when I read those comments, and when I read about Zenpic normally, is how class-based they are.

There's a real kind of, it's the underclass

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 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's 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 on the way I can have free tortillas.

No, you should only eat sweet corn, and that's the sad takeaway from that.

Ah, shit.

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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

partridge that's got trapped underneath the chicken wire.

Come on mate, don't panic.

Just stay still.

Oh damn it.

This thing's covered in

Brambles.

It's ramble chat, not bramble chat, mate.

Oh whoa, take it easy.

There you go.

You're out.

Well done.

Yes, I 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.

Got a recommendation for you.

A music dock.

One of the best music docks I've seen in ages.

Stacks, Soullsville, USA.

Put together by an American director, Jamilo Wignot.

And it's four parts.

The story of the legendary Stacks 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 MGs who for a long time were the house band and played on Stacks 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

as 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 Stacks 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 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.

He nodded and said, Yeah, yeah, it's really good.

I didn't realize until I was watching the dock 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 Darren, 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 Salesville USA dock, especially of the Stacks Vault review tour of the UK in early 1967 with Otis Redding 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 stack 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 how the mood of anger and desperation in the black community in America at the time affected the artists and employees at Stacks.

So it's a very compelling, complicated story that also takes in dirty dealings in the music industry when Stacks 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.

Stacks, Soulsville, USA.

Google says you can stream it on Now TV or with SkyGo.

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 to Seamus Murphy Mitchell.

Thank you very much indeed, Seamus, for all your production support and editing work on this episode.

Thank you to to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast.

Thank you to everyone who helps me with my sponsors at ACAST.

Much appreciated.

But thanks most especially to you for coming back, for listening.

I really appreciate it.

Should we have a short formal embrace before we're run over by the tractor?

Good to see you.

Until next time, we share the same Aural space.

Go carefully.

I love you.

Bye.

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Just tell Squarespace what you want to do They'll suggest some templates that might be right for you Drag in pictures and text tabs and videos and next thing you know your website will be done.

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And when you have decided that you're ready to pay, type in the offer code Buxton.

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Because you'll save 10% if it's your first purchase of a website or domain.

Oh, 10%!

That's my favorite percent.

Thank you, Squarespace.