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Helen Dale won the Miles Franklin Award
for her first novel The
Hand that Signed the Paper
and Read Law at Oxford and Edinburgh.
Her most recent novel
Kingdom of the Wicked has been shortlisted
for the Prometheus Prize
for science fiction.
She writes for a number of
outlets, including The Spectator,
The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette.
She lives in London and is on Twitter.
I'm with Helen Dale.
Hi.
- [Helen] Hello, Bridget, how are you?
- [Bridget] I'm great.
Thank you for coming to my little studio,
and all the way across the pond.
- [Helen] All the way from Blighty?
- [Bridget] That's a flight.
- [Helen] It is.
Over here, it is.
I didn't realize that it was
eight hours time difference
at this time of year.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] From London.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And I arrived,
and I'm in San Francisco,
'cause I've been here
for nearly two weeks now,
and I was so jet lagged.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Helen] I literally
didn't know what day it was.
It was just unbelievable.
- [Bridget] I was a
disaster going to London.
I mean, it was same thing.
It took me two days to
really fully recover.
- [Helen] Well, I'm not
hugely looking forward
to the Friday/Saturday
flight back to London.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah, because
it's a 12-hour flight,
and then the jet lag is just.
- [Helen] Unbelievable.
- [Bridget] Yeah, it really is.
So tell us about you.
Who are you?
Who are you?
- [Helen] I'll be much less
known to American readers
than I am to British
and Australian readers.
Broadly speaking, in the
UK, I'm known as a columnist
and commentator who also writes novels.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] In Australia,
I'm known as a novelist
who also writes columns and commentary.
- [Bridget] Okay.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] And there's a very simple
historical reason for that.
One of my novels won the
Miles Franklin Award,
which is the Australian equivalent
of the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize.
- [Bridget] Wow!
- [Helen] And it was a novel,
and I had never written
any journalism before
the book was published.
I'd had a few short
stories published, fiction,
but never, ever any
commentary or journalism.
- [Bridget] Wow!
- [Helen] And that is
the sort of leading
Australian literary award.
So when I subsequently wrote,
started to write journalism
for different outlets,
I was always, in the mind
of an Australian who reads,
I am a novelist first,
"oh, but she also writes
for The Australian."
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] That kind of thing.
In Britain, that's completely different,
because I started to write
for The Spectator in the UK,
which is the oldest magazine
in continuous publication
in the English-speaking world.
You're now starting to write
for The Spectator as well,
and you're sort of part of
that board of Spectator family.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] Albeit a long way down the line,
you and I work for Andrew Neil,
who's probably the best
journalist in Britain.
He's the chairman of The Spectator,
and he also does lots of shows
on the BBC, the state broadcaster.
And so, I wrote some
columns for The Spectator,
and people liked them.
And then I started writing columns
for other outlets as well, also British.
So Standpoint and The Telegraph,
which gets called the Torygraph,
'cause it's considered
a conservative paper.
But I do also write for Quillette.
- [Bridget] Of course.
- [Helen] Claire Lehmann's paper.
- [Bridget] She's Australian.
- [Helen] She's Australian,
but that is so international in focus.
- [Bridget] So you seem to have stumbled
into the more political commentary.
Did you set out to be a writer?
Was that what you always wanted to do?
- [Helen] No, I didn't
set out to be a writer.
I fell into literature by accident.
My plan, when I was at
school, was to be a lawyer,
and it was really quite simple.
I went to the guidance officer,
I'm sure you have them in
American schools as well.
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] And I had
predicted results at A level,
and they were very good.
He just sort of looked at me and said,
"Well, I suppose you'll
have to do medicine then,
"with those marks," and I said,
"Well, my family's already got a doctor."
(Bridget laughs)
So I suspect that my father
would put his foot down
on the idea of another doctor.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Bridget] Too many doctors?
- [Helen] Too many
doctors in the household.
- [Bridget] Need to diversify?
- [Helen] And we talked for a little bit,
and I finished up
saying, "And in any case,
"what do you call
someone with straight A's
"who can't stand the sight of blood?"
A lawyer.
(both laughing)
And the other option was an engineer,
and I thought about engineering as well.
It would have been civil engineering,
but in the end, I finished
up being a lawyer.
- [Bridget] So let's back up.
Where were you born?
- [Helen] Well, I'm from
Australia originally.
- [Bridget] I grew up watching,
my mom was obsessed with The Thorn Birds.
- [Helen] Oh, dear Lord.
(Bridget laughs)
You know that wasn't
even filmed in Australia?
- [Bridget] I believe it,
but this was my impression
of Australia growing up,
and I was obsessed with this movie.
My mom was for some reason.
It's extremely melodramatic.
- [Helen] The novel is
by Colleen McCullough,
who, she's dead now, who
was an Australian writer.
But the film itself
finished up actually being,
they had to borrow the kangaroos in it
from a zoo or something.
- [Bridget] Where did they film it?
- [Helen] It's filmed
somewhere in the United States
with a similar landscape.
- [Bridget] Oh!
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] That's my understanding, anyway.
- [Bridget] Yeah, that's really funny.
- [Helen] But the novel is very good.
She's a good writer.
- [Bridget] And the
movie was just so tragic.
My friends all make fun of me.
They're like, "Why were you
watching that as a child?"
(Bridget laughs)
It's a very melodramatic film,
and it was like, four
movies, or three movies.
- [Helen] Yes, there were telemovies.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
My mom was so obsessed with it,
and so we all ended up watching it.
But my idea of Australia
was just that everything's
trying to kill you at all times.
- [Helen] Well, that is probably,
in certain parts of the
country, that's actually true.
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] I mean,
we have quite spectacular
numbers of bities.
The running joke is the Indian cobra
is the 15th most poisonous
snake in the world.
The other 14 are in Australia.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Bridget] How long were you there?
- [Helen] Off and on.
I've sort of divided my life
roughly equally between
the UK and Australia.
So, and I'm 46 years old
now, so half of that.
- [Bridget] Wow, you look amazing.
- [Helen] Just call it
half of that, basically.
- [Bridget] Okay.
So, you left in your 20s?
So you properly grew up in Australia, wow.
- [Helen] Apart from being
back and forth to the UK
at various times from the
age of about three or four,
back and forth quite regularly,
often for long periods, four
to six months at a time.
- [Bridget] Just for family?
- [Helen] Family, yes.
- [Bridget] Okay, cool.
- [Helen] Because my parents are British,
so I'm one of these dual nationals.
- [Bridget] Oh, you're so lucky.
- [Helen] Who can't, I'm not
allowed to run for Parliament.
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] Because in Australia,
I'm disqualified under Section 44
of the constitution because
I'm a dual national.
I have allegiance to a foreign power.
Two of them, actually,
the United Kingdom and
the Republic of Ireland.
- [Bridget] You know what's interesting,
is I've always wanted
to do a standup routine
about how funny that must have been
when the criminals were
being sent to Australia
from the shit weather
of London and England,
and then they get there, and
they're like, "Come on down!"
Were the writing letters
home like, "Rob the banks!"
"It's amazing here!
(Bridget laughs)
"The beaches are gorgeous!"
- [Helen] Well, the thing
is, though, for the first,
you're asking me to do
Australian history here.
For the first 50 years or
so after the Brits turned up
and planted the Union
Jack, the colony struggled,
and at least initially, there was a period
where it looked like they
were going to starve,
and it was only that they
got supply ships from the UK
to turn up in what was then Sydney Harbor.
- [Bridget] Uh-huh.
- [Helen] And they could feed themselves,
because they didn't understand,
initially, how to grow crops in Australia,
which sounds extraordinary
now when you consider
it's one of the most agriculturally,
probably the most agriculturally
productive country
in the world, but at least initially,
people did not know what they
were doing, it's that simple.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And they really struggled.
- [Bridget] What's
interesting too is that,
I was reading when I was in Australia
about a lot of the
history and just how many
of the prisoners ended up
having to build Australia.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] They needed people
to help build the houses,
and so they got down
there to be prisoners,
and then they ended up being free men
and kind of working to
help keep the society going
that they were trying to build.
- [Helen] They became what was known
as "ticket of leave" men,
where they were given,
they weren't formally free,
but they were given a ticket of leave,
which gave them freedom
in the colony, basically.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And it was
effectively like being freed,
because you had to make
your own way, basically,
and you could be paid wages.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And do all the
normal things that people did.
- [Bridget] I love Aussies.
Everybody who listens to my podcast
knows that Aussie men in
particular are my kryptonite,
and when I was traveling around the world,
at any time there were Aussies around,
which, there always are,
because they travel so much,
that the girls who would be around
or my friends would be like,
"Oh, there goes Bridget,
found her Aussie men."
But they kind of became, in many ways,
the Americans of the
international traveling world
because of the mine boom.
So all of these bogans or
whatever suddenly had money,
and they were traveling,
and they were just making
asses of themselves
everywhere they went in the world.
(Bridget laughs)
And I was like, "I'm so
glad that Australians
"are the new Americans
in terms of just having
"that horrible reputation
internationally."
- [Helen] Yes, because
it was, for a long time,
Australians had a good
traveling reputation,
but the effect of that,
and you may as well,
it's best to be truthful about it.
The effect of it was
because of the class constraints
on international travel.
So the people who were
traveling were people
who were overwhelmingly
middle and upper middle class,
and it's worth using the
British class divisions
rather than the American ones.
Many of the people that Americans
will describe themselves
as middle class, and an
Australian or a British person
will look at most of the Americans
who describe themselves as middle class
and say, "No, you're working class."
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] Middle class or upper
middle class particularly,
and particularly in the UK,
means someone who has gone to university
and has a professional,
managerial, or civil service role.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] It doesn't mean someone
who just happens to have earned
a decent amount of money.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] And so what
you were seeing globally,
before air travel really, really took off,
and before people had so much money,
was you were seeing what a
thin crust of both British
and Australian society
in international travel.
- [Bridget] Right, traveling, mmhmm.
- [Helen] And certainly, Europeans,
and it happened in the
opposite direction, too.
People in the UK had
gone and lived in France
and Italy and Spain and
often bought property there,
and it was that middle
and upper middle class.
So they were very amenable.
That would learn the local language.
Often they'd turn up, it's
very common for people
educated people in Britain
to speak good French,
and they would turn
up, and they were fine.
And then you had this
mass movement of people
who just wanted to dance in
nightclubs and would drink
in ways that French and Italians
and Spanish people don't,
the great British drinking habit
of drinking on an empty
stomach, basically.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And so, all the
Italians and the French,
who actually, per head of
population, drink more alcohol
than the Brits, but because
it's always with food,
you don't see the public drunkenness.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] So then they would
be looking down their noses
at British people outside
an inevitably very fake
Irish or British pub that had been built
just to cater for the tourists,
throwing up everywhere,
because they're drinking all this alcohol
on an empty stomach, which is not the way
people in France and Italy
and Spain drink alcohol.
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] So yes, the bad British tourist
and the bad Australian tourist.
- [Bridget] They got out.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] They escaped.
- [Bridget] They escaped.
- [Helen] They got off the reservation.
- [Bridget] That's really interesting,
because even in America,
if somebody was a plumber
or an electrician,
and they made, for instance,
in America, six figures,
they would be considered middle class.
They wouldn't be considered that.
They'd still be considered working class.
- [Helen] Working class.
'Cause class very much
in the UK and Europe,
and to a lesser extent in Australia,
but still to a degree, because
Australia was a colony,
social class is much more
about cultural capital,
and particularly in Britain and Europe.
It's the education that
you have, not the income.
Now, obviously, there is correlation
between education and
income, but it's not perfect,
which means, of course, a lot of people
who superficially have money, I mean,
and they get called all sorts
of rude things in Britain.
They get called "Mondeo man,"
which is after a type vehicle,
"Essex man" and "Essex boy,"
"Essex girl" and all
of this kind of thing.
There was a TV show called
TOWIE, The Only Way Is Essex,
which is just an entire look
down your nose, but very funny,
piss take of the cultural
phenomenon of people
who basically don't have very
much culture having money.
- [Bridget] Oh, okay.
- [Helen] And the show is called TOWIE.
You'll see on UK Twitter
#towie, The Only Way Is Essex.
- [Bridget] Oh, that's hilarious.
Oh, you know what, now
that I think about it,
when I was in London visiting my friend,
she's Italian, but she's
been in London for 20 years,
which is interesting with
all of the Brexit stuff.
She was obsessed with that show actually,
now that you mention it.
Is it a reality show?
- [Helen] It's quasi-reality.
- [Bridget] Quasi-reality.
- [Helen] Quasi scripted.
It's a bit scripted and a bit reality.
- [Bridget] All reality is scripted.
- [Helen] It's a mixture, yeah.
- [Bridget] Yeah, interesting.
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] Yes, I was saying
to you when you sat down,
so where did you go to uni?
- [Helen] Well, I did my
classics degree in Australia
at the University of Queensland,
and then I did my law qualifications,
my English law was at Oxford,
and my Scots law was at Edinburgh.
- [Bridget] Oh, wow, that's really cool.
And then, did you go practice law?
- [Helen] Yes, yes.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] Yes, I've
practiced in various places,
most recently in Australia,
until the middle of 2016.
- [Bridget] Okay, and are you
not practicing it anymore?
- [Helen] I haven't done
any legal consulting
since April this year.
I was doing a bit of consulting,
but I'm at the point now where
I have so much writing to do
that I can't really do anything else,
and I've also even had to
say I can't do some writing.
- [Bridget] Writing, I know that feeling.
- [Helen] Because it
will not be good quality
if I just try to write
it quickly, basically.
- [Bridget] What kind of
law were you practicing?
- [Helen] Well, I started out
in life at the criminal bar,
so dealing with people who've
been charged with crimes.
- [Bridget] Uh-huh, criminals.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] Well, not necessarily.
- [Bridget] Or, allegedly.
- [Helen] Allegedly.
That's very important,
presumption of innocence.
And then I went to corporate and finance
and practiced in that for a while,
and then the last stint,
the last couple of years,
was I was technically classified
in the government category,
because I was working for a politician
in Australia, a senator.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] So that puts you in sort of,
you're considered, even
though my politician boss
was not at all in the government,
he was what's known as a cross-bencher,
which is a senator not from
one of the major parties,
but I was categorized by the law society
as a government solicitor.
- [Bridget] So what kind of
law do you do in that case?
- [Helen] Well, in that case,
you provide legal advice
to your politician, and
you draft model bills.
- [Bridget] Oh, that's cool.
- [Helen] Yeah, which was actually
a lot of fun and very interesting.
- [Bridget] That must
have been fascinating.
- [Helen] Because one of the
model bills that I drafted
was actually a marriage equality bill,
because it was before marriage
equality had been passed
in Australia, and some
of it actually eventually
found itself into the
legislation that was enacted.
- [Bridget] Oh, that's really cool.
- [Helen] So that was quite a
good thing to be involved in.
- [Bridget] Oh, that's amazing.
And now, isn't marriage
equality kind of how you found
your way in the midst of the culture wars?
- [Helen] No, no.
- [Bridget] No.
- [Helen] My culture wars.
- [Bridget] How did you end up in the mix?
- [Helen] In the middle
of the culture wars?
- [Bridget] In the middle
of all of this nonsense?
- [Helen] Well, mine is much older.
The culture wars have been
going on for quite a long time.
(Bridget laughs)
So mine goes back to 1995 in Australia,
with my first novel, The
Hand that Signed the Paper,
which won the Miles Franklin Award,
and also caused an enormous controversy.
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] And my run-in,
and this might shock a
few of the Americans.
It depends on where
your listeners are based
or what their politics are.
But my run-in was with what in Britain
is just called "the Jewish lobby."
So I was accused of writing a racist,
antisemitic book and so on and so forth.
- [Bridget] Was that your novel?
- [Helen] Yeah.
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] Yes, my first novel.
And it really, really got quite full-on.
And it was my first encounter with people
who would accuse you of something,
so I was accused of being, variously,
a racist or an antisemite,
or they would always bleed
these two in together,
and I have a sense that they're
actually slightly different.
But that might be just a personal view.
And it was my first encounter
with accusing someone
of what I considered to
be a fairly serious slur
and expecting them to
prove that they weren't.
- [Bridget] Right, it's
that Kafka trap, right?
- [Helen] Yes, you have
to prove a negative,
and in law, proving a
negative is very difficult.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] To prove that you're
not some appalling thing,
which is why you have the
presumption of innocence.
You burden the state with the proof
rather than the accused,
because it's really awful
and very difficult to prove
that you didn't do something.
It's like that sort of
classic trap question,
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] That kind of thing.
It's a sort of entrapping question.
So, there was no internet then.
I did all my research for my first book
in what was then a university library,
and the debate as such as conducted
in the pages of the newspapers
and on television and so on and so forth.
It was pre-social media in
every sense of the word,
but all of the characteristics
that you associate
with the contemporary
culture wars were manifest.
I was not supposed to be representing
people who were not of
my ethnic background.
I wasn't supposed to be writing novels
about somebody else's history.
All of these claims were directed at me.
- [Bridget] This is such the weird part
of the world we live in.
- [Helen] And the people were entitled.
That was something that
became very clear to me.
People who had dreadful histories,
histories of oppression or
terrible historical experiences,
were entitled to manage
how those experiences or
narratives were portrayed,
which, of course, just about
writes off half of fiction.
That's the terrible danger with this.
So all of those things
were directed at me.
- [Bridget] What year was this?
- [Helen] 1995.
- [Bridget] Wow!
- [Helen] Yes, this was a long time ago.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] I won the Miles Franklin Award
for my first novel in 1995.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And I was 22.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] So it certainly
blew things up a bit.
- [Bridget] That must
have been so upsetting.
- [Helen] Well, initially,
it wasn't that upsetting,
because, of course, pre-social media,
you can't really cancel a novelist,
if all you're doing is talking
about that novelist's book.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] So the effect
of everybody banging on
about my novel was to cause
it to sell by the truckload.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] So my initial response was
"This is personally unpleasant,
and what is being said to me
"is personally unpleasant,
and it's also not true,
"but I can't complain
about the royalty checks."
It's important to keep
that uppermost in mind,
because the royalty checks were very good.
Where it started to become cancel culture
in the modern sense
was that I didn't want
to be a full-time writer.
I started to write another
novel, and it wasn't very good.
In Kingdom of the Wicked,
which is my second novel,
book one of Kingdom of the Wicked,
in the essay in the back of that,
I explain how the reason
there was a 13-year hiatus
is basically because I
started to write another novel
under pressure because the first one
had been a massive bestseller,
and I got 40,000 words in,
and I was basically writing it
under the pump to satisfy the
requirements of publishers,
because they think you're
gonna write another one,
another massive bestseller.
And it was 40,000 words of crap.
I'm sorry, I knew it was crap,
and I actually, I mean, I know
when I've written rubbish,
and I actually put it in, you know,
does your local council do
bin collections off the curb?
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] I actually put
the whole lot in a box
and weighed it down with a brick
and put it out with sort
of some dead furniture
and some various other items
for the local council
to pick up off the curb.
It was just dreadful.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Bridget] You're like that band
that became hugely famous
from your first album
and then everybody's dying
for a sophomore outing,
and then they give you one 13 years later.
(both laughing)
- [Helen] So, I tried to make
a career leaving that alone,
and I was grateful for
the money in the bank
and the ability to buy a house
and all of that kind of thing.
That was good, that was a good thing.
But I wanted a normal day job,
and that was when I started
to run into cancel culture.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] I'll just tell
one cancel culture story
rather than a whole heap of them,
because it'll bore your listeners.
- [Bridget] I'm sure there's many of them.
- [Helen] But for example,
I applied for what is known as a pupillage
or an associateship with
a supreme court judge,
and I had a first in
law, and I was considered
to be very clever, and
so on, and so forth,
and had all of these things going for me.
And before I applied for the position
with one of the superior
appellate court judges,
I'd been applying for
jobs at various law firms,
and I had a first, and
a first in the British
and Australian system
really means something.
They're very rare.
Most people, the whole idea
of people getting all A's
is just foreign to the
British and Australian
university system, particularly
the good universities.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] It's not the
way the system works.
I mean, Americans, I tutored
at Oxford for a year,
and Americans would, and
they were from Stanford
on an exchange program,
would turn up and get a 65 for a paper,
which is a B, a solid B,
it's a good B, at Oxford,
and would be crying and
would have to be told
by their Oxford tutors, including me,
that actually, no, that's a good grade.
Most Americans start off
on about 55, which is a C.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] Not very good.
So grade inflation certainly
hadn't happened then,
and hasn't really happened now.
And I couldn't get work.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] And I was
thinking, this is ridiculous.
So I did a controlled experiment,
and I sent CVs off to
three or four law firms
with my name changed, but all my results,
and the Miles Franklin Award left off,
and I sent CVs out with my actual name
with the Miles Franklin Award,
which is a significant achievement,
one most people would think
you should stick that on
your CV to various law firms.
I got interviews with all the ones
with the disguised name
and no Miles Franklin.
- [Bridget] How did they know?
- [Helen] Well, the thing is that the ones
where I disguised, they didn't know.
All they had was an academic
transcript to go on.
- [Bridget] Right, but how
did the ones with your name?
It wasn't like they
could Google your name.
- [Helen] No, but the thing
is, I was so well-known,
I had become a national
figure as a result,
a huge national figure.
- [Bridget] Whoa.
- [Helen] As in, on the
front page of the newspaper
day after day after day,
all the national broadcasts in Australia.
- [Bridget] In Australia?
Okay, yeah.
- [Helen] Just in Australia.
Not in the UK, just in Australia.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] I was a little bit in the UK,
but it was all print coverage.
I don't think there was
anything on the BBC,
or if there was, I never
heard about it at the time.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
And it's not that big, yeah.
- [Helen] So I had become a
national figure in Australia,
a huge national figure.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] Cartooned in the paper,
easily identifiable if I
walked down the street.
People would either say
something rude to me
or want an autograph.
- [Bridget] That's so
hard when you're young.
- [Helen] So I got those two extremes.
So, what I did then, when
I applied for my pupillage,
I think you call them clerkships here
with Supreme Court judges.
- [Bridget] Yes, yes.
- [Helen] When I applied for
my pupillage, my clerkship,
I left off the Miles Franklin Award
and used the disguised name,
and I got a telephone call.
It was just when mobiles were
starting to become a thing,
and I had to pull the
car over and answer it.
And it was a supreme court judge,
'cause they offer it themselves.
They don't get their secretary to do it.
They do it themselves.
And you don't string along
a supreme court judge.
So I accepted the job
literally sitting there
by the side of the road
so I wasn't breaking the
law with a phone in my hand.
And then he said to me, he said, "Helen,
"why don't you put the Miles
Franklin Award on your CV?"
And so, he'd seen through
the subterfuge, basically.
- [Bridget] Yes.
- [Helen] And I said, "Because I find
"that I get discriminated
against if I do."
And his response to that was,
"More bloody fool then,
because you're hired."
- [Bridget] Ahh.
- [Helen] So it then became clear to me
that this cancel culture thing,
which, it was not called that then.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Helen] But the idea of
making someone's life difficult
in terms of employment prospects
once they've been involved
in a cultural controversy of this type
was happening to me in the
late 90s and early aughts.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And it continued.
It persisted to the point
where the politician I
worked for for two years,
between 2014 and 2016,
was being sent abuse,
because it was reported that
a Miles Franklin Award winner
was working for this Australian senator.
So it became a news story.
He was getting daily abuse.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] On who he'd hired
as his senior advisor,
and there were times when he
was getting more abuse about me
than abuse for his own
political positions,
some of which were quite controversial,
not only marriage
equality, he was very pro,
but he wanted to liberalize
some aspects of Australia's gun laws,
which, of course, is just
anathema in Australia.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] It immediately
puts you in a tiny
political minority, if you
want to change the gun laws.
Most Australians are very
pro-John Howard's gun laws.
- [Bridget] Okay, interesting.
- [Helen] Very pro-gun control.
To be a politician in Australia
who wants to change any aspect of it,
and my boss, his name
was David Leyonhjelm,
didn't actually want to change that much.
He just wanted to get rid
of the long arms registry, basically.
He thought it was a
silly impost on farmers,
to be forced to have to register
for every single type of
firearm that they owned,
instead of just proving
that they were a fit and
proper person to own a firearm.
David just thought that
once you'd made that point,
then if you needed a
different kind of shotgun,
or if you needed a different
kind of hunting rifle,
you shouldn't have to go through
the same rigamarole again.
That's all he wanted to change.
- [Bridget] And did they have
to pay for it too every time?
- [Helen] Oh, yes, you
have to pay every time.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah.
- [Helen] The entire thing was a.
- [Bridget] Racket.
- [Helen] I went through the process
of being a licensed
gun owner in Australia,
and I've never been a pistol
shooter or anything like that.
I've only ever wanted a longarm.
So I only had to do it once,
'cause I just wanted to
be able to shoot on a farm
and that kind of thing to
get rid of feral pests.
So it was not an impost for
me, but if you were a person
who wanted a shotgun, then
wanted a hunting rifle,
which is very different from a shotgun,
and then wanted a pistol,
you had to go through
three separate systems.
- [Bridget] Wow, wow.
- [Helen] And pay the New
South Wales police each time.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm, mmhmm.
- [Helen] And then you had
to have a gun safe storage,
mandated safe storage in your house,
that they would come around and inspect
before you got your license.
- [Bridget] Wow, wow.
- [Helen] So that was what
David wanted to change.
He didn't have a problem
with the storage issue,
but he just wanted, people should not
have to go through this stupid exercise
every single time they get a
different category of firearm.
They have to pay the police
a huge amount of money
and have Plod, as he gets called
in Australia or in the UK,
have PC Plod turning up to your house
and kicking your gun safe
to make sure the storage is adequate.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] That was all
he wanted to change,
and the calumnies
that rained down on his
head for wanting to do that!
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And yet, there were times
he was getting more abuse
about having me working for him
than he was over his comments on gun laws.
- [Bridget] Wow, wow.
That's so crazy.
- [Helen] It goes, it persists,
and where I think the
modern stuff is worse
is that the stuff that happened to me,
a happy side effect of
people trying to cancel me
was my books selling by the truckload.
- [Bridget] Now your book
won't even get published, yeah.
- [Helen] Whereas now, exactly, exactly.
You have your finger right on it,
whereas now, like that last.
- [Bridget] The YA.
This happens to the YA
authors all the time.
- [Helen] Young adult.
Her name, Amelie Wen Zhao,
who got a three-book deal canceled
and had to hand back a
half million buck advance.
- [Bridget] I know.
- [Helen] I mean, goodness.
If you'd have given me a half,
I mean, and I got a pretty
hefty amount of money
out of my first book.
If you'd have asked me to,
after you'd given me
half a million dollars,
in that much time, I'd have
gone and bought a house with it.
- [Bridget] I think she
wrote the book, too.
- [Helen] Yeah.
- [Bridget] It wasn't like
she didn't write the book.
She actually did the
work and wrote the book.
- [Helen] That is my understanding,
and it's not just her.
There's been half a dozen of them.
- [Bridget] Oh yeah, definitely.
- [Helen] But that's the one I remember,
because for her, it was a three-book deal.
It wasn't just one individual publication.
- [Bridget] It raises
an interesting point.
Someone asked me recently,
because I found myself in
the interesting position
of helping people in the
midst of being canceled.
So I'll have celebrities
call me when, for instance,
they say something, and then
there might be a YouTuber
who makes a video about them,
or maybe they said something,
they tweeted something,
and then now it's starting to go viral,
and they don't know what to do,
and if you don't understand cancel culture
or critical theory, which
most people in PR don't,
because why would they,
and if you haven't experienced the mob
or know people who know the
mob, who have been canceled,
you don't really know what to do.
These people can't get
advice from their PR people.
They have no concept.
And somebody recently asked me,
"I thought all press was good press."
And I'm like, "That's not true anymore."
- [Helen] No, that's the big shift of it.
I could sit there, and as
personally unpleasant as it was
to be called for everything,
and I was called for everything,
and to have people writing
vicious articles about me
in the paper and saying
rude things about me
on telly and all of that kind of thing,
all it did was cause more books to sell.
- [Bridget] It was good press.
It was bad press, but it
was still ultimately press.
- [Helen] I think I had
someone at my publisher
run the "there's no such thing
as bad publicity" line at me
at some point, and I was
sitting there thinking,
"you haven't been called
a racist 10 times today.
(Helen laughs)
"I have."
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] So it was the same issues,
calling people racist or antisemites,
and then other things caught on with that.
It became, then there was sexism.
- [Bridget] And who were the people
that were calling you this?
- [Helen] Oh, it was all sort of,
just your classic sort of
peak lobby organizations.
There was the Australia Israel
Jewish Affairs Commission went after me.
There were pro-Zionist
columnists in the paper.
A chap called Gerard Henderson, who,
I finished up writing in
the same paper as he did,
and he still just would sound
off at me quite regularly.
He did when I was working
for Senator Leyonhjelm,
which was quite recently.
So they were all the standard
peak lobbying organizations,
and I don't have a problem
with slapping on an ethnic
or sexual minority "lobby."
I actually think it's quite
important to call them lobbies,
so Jewish lobby, trans lobby,
African-American lobby.
Call them lobbies.
Don't dignify them with the name activist.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Environmental lobby,
Greta Thunberg's lot,
Extinction Rebellion.
Call them all lobbyists,
because lobbyists attract,
lobbying organizations,
and I get to say this
'cause I worked for a politician,
attract a certain sort of individual,
and almost without exception,
those individuals are
not attractive people,
and they are deeply,
deeply unrepresentative
of the people on whose behalf
they purport to do their lobbying.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And over and
over and over again,
because my personal run-in
was with the Jewish lobby,
over and over and over again,
I would have regular Jews, ordinary Jews,
you might go into a deli or something
and get some bagels and lox or whatever,
and I would be recognized.
They'd go, "Oh, please
don't mistake them for us."
- [Bridget] Ahh.
- [Helen] So you get that
cancel culture phenomenon
of people from the minority,
who are supposedly being
represented by these lobbyists,
not being represented by them at all,
and then you have them,
ordinary members of the public,
going, "No, no, no, no,
no, I don't agree with."
- [Bridget] "They don't speak for us."
- [Helen] "They don't speak for me.
"I don't agree with
trans lobbyist X, Y, Z,
"or Jewish lobbyist X, Y, Z,
"or African-American lobbyist X, Y, Z,"
or even in other areas, I mean,
because my senator I worked
for was a farmer originally
and was a large animal veterinarian,
he got a lot of lobbying
from rural organizations,
from peak farming bodies,
renewable energy bodies,
mining industry, so on and so forth,
and with relatively few exceptions,
I noticed the same phenomenon
amongst the corporate lobbyists
or the agricultural lobbyists
or the mining lobby,
that they attracted an awful lot of people
who were not very nice,
who did not behave well.
- [Bridget] I wonder why that is.
- [Helen] And then you
would meet an individual
who might have wind farms on his property
or a whole heap of photovoltaic cells
or might be next door to
where there was going to be
a new open-cut mine or
something like that.
So you would get someone
who was purportedly
being represented by these
different lobby groups,
who was not at all like
that and was horrified
at what was being said or
done in his or her name.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And this happened
over and over and over
and over again while I was
working for a politician.
Because Canberra is a specific,
it's a created capital, and
you go there for sitting weeks,
I then had the opportunity
to talk to other staffers
who were working for other
politicians on "the Hill."
We have it too, the same phenomenon.
And it didn't matter
whether they were Labor,
Coalition, which are the
center-right, a miner party.
So, my boss was a Liberal Democrat,
which doesn't mean the
same as it does here.
It means a classical liberal in Australia.
- [Bridget] Right, right, right.
- [Helen] Whether they
were One Nation Party,
which are the sort of
right-wind national populists.
Didn't matter who those
staffers worked for.
Everyone told you the same story.
The lobbyists are mad,
and they're awful people,
and if you cross one
of them, they will try
to get you fired, which
was exactly what happened,
and not just to me.
Everyone had similar stories.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] And it doesn't matter
whether it's an ethnic
lobby, an industry lobby,
an agricultural lobby;
the behavior is the same.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] They're just awful
people who do awful things,
(Bridget laughs)
who think it's completely
fine that when a politician
or a staffer or a writer
or a journalist or whatever
doesn't play ball with them,
that the appropriate response.
- [Bridget] Is to destroy them.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] Is to, well, to get them sacked.
To get them sacked from their job.
And destroying is a happy
side benefit to that.
- [Bridget] It's interesting.
That's just so interesting,
because I had a great guest on,
Coach T, and he said,
he's just a really interesting black man,
works with men who are
young men avoiding prison
or out of prison or in between,
and he came and was talking
about a lot of his experiences,
but he said, "You know,
if you're serving me
"and I didn't ask you to serve
me, you're serving yourself."
He's like, "I didn't
ask you to speak for me.
"I didn't ask you to help me.
"So if you're out there
purporting to help me,
"and nobody asked you to help them,
"you're really just being self-serving."
It was such an insightful and interesting,
it is an interesting personality type,
I wonder, that it's that difference
between being selfish and self-seeking,
where you're doing good deeds.
- [Helen] The expression
that is used in the UK
and Australia, I don't know
whether you have it in the US,
to describe this kind
of political behavior,
lobbying behavior, is "do-gooding."
- [Bridget] Okay, yeah.
- [Helen] Being a "do-gooder."
and I don't know whether
it made the news over here,
but it certainly did in
Britain, all of the controversy
where it turned out the
Oxfam aid workers in Haiti.
- [Bridget] Okay, yeah.
- [Helen] were sexually
exploiting huge numbers of people.
- [Bridget] Yeah, yeah.
- [Helen] And the behavior
was absolutely egregious,
the kind of thing that,
if it happened at your local
high street law firm or bank,
or even in a government department,
half the people involved would be in jail.
- [Bridget] Right.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] So it was like it had attracted
these sort of aid organizations,
and it wasn't just Oxfam.
There were a large
number of them involved,
and the controversy is still
boiling away in the UK,
had just attracted all of these people
who were just morally feral.
- [Bridget] Right.
(both laughing)
So interesting.
- [Helen] That "do-gooding" thing.
- [Bridget] What is that?
What do you think that is?
- [Helen] I'm a lawyer,
not a psychiatrist.
Ask Jordan Peterson.
He might know.
- [Bridget] I loved that piece
you wrote about, actually,
Jordan Peterson and Amy's self help books.
I thought it was really
insightful, about the normals.
- [Helen] The "normies."
- [Bridget] The "normies."
- [Helen] That's Angela
Nagle's expression.
She's an Irish writer.
She calls them "the normies,"
and she wrote a book
called Kill All Normies.
- [Bridget] What's that?
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] The quotation in
the article from Angela Nagle
is actually from that
book, Kill All Normies,
and she just goes into these subcultures
where people have finished up,
where they've just not learned how to live
as normal human beings
and basic functioning.
And so they finish up in a situation
where they have to get it out of a book.
And I just hadn't realized
the extent of this.
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] Until I was commissioned.
- [Bridget] To write the piece?
- [Helen] To write that piece.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Helen] A piece that was on
two very popular works of self-help,
Amy Alkon's Unf*ckology, I think
you're supposed to call it.
- [Bridget] Yes, I have
it right here somewhere.
- [Helen] And Jordan
Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
And as I said in the piece,
I had read one other
self-help book in my life.
- [Bridget] Right, How to Win Friends.
- [Helen] Dale Carnegie,
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
I mean, this is partly
snobbishness, I think,
snobbery of a certain kind of person,
or a certain sort of social class,
who went to a certain sort of university
and reads a certain sort of thing.
So I acknowledge that.
And so I read these two
books, and I just thought,
I mean, Jordan's got a
marvelous sense of narrative
and a gift for storytelling,
and Amy's incredibly funny.
- [Bridget] Yeah, she's hilarious.
- [Helen] You know, incredibly funny.
And I had just read both of them, though,
and I thoroughly appreciated
Peterson's storytelling
ability and Amy's humor,
but neither book told me
anything I didn't already know.
- [Bridget] Right.
Make your bed!
Like, didn't you learn
this when you were 10?
- [Helen] Yes, exactly!
Then I had this sort of
somewhat awkward conversation
with Michael Mosbacher,
who was my editor at
Standpoint at the time.
I rang him up and I said,
"I'm not quite sure how I'm
going to write this piece.
"You've commissioned a two
and a half thousand-word piece
"off of me on this, and
I just don't quite know
"how I'm going to work it,
"because I've not read
very much self-help,
"and everything in here is
just extraordinarily obvious."
- [Bridget] Yeah, but it's not.
- [Helen] And he said,
"Write about that, then."
And so that's what I did.
And it was then and in the
process of doing the research
for that piece, I read
the Angela Nagle book
Kill All Normies, which
I strongly recommend.
She's done a documentary.
I think it was for Irish,
one of the Irish TV channels,
but you can get it on YouTube very easily.
And she goes through
sort of where these different
subcultures come from.
So she talks about Reddit,
and she talks about the "chans,"
and she talks about Tumblr.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] And which ones
finished up more right-wing,
and which ones finished up more left-wing.
There's a degree of
overlap between her book
and Michael Malice's book The New Right.
- [Bridget] Yep, I have
that right here too.
- [Helen] If you read Kill All Normies
next to The New Right,
the New Right gives you sort
of the more American picture.
Kill All Normies gives you
the British and Irish angle.
- [Bridget] Interesting,
I'll have to read that, okay.
- [Helen] But there's an overlap,
a strong overlap between
the two, and they both talk
about internet subcultures
and those kind of things,
and they do it very well.
And it was only when I read her book
I came to an appreciation
that we finished up
in a situation with a very
large number of people who,
it's a commonwealth expression,
I don't know that you have it in the US,
who don't have any "brought-upsy."
- [Bridget] Oh.
We don't have that here.
- [Helen] Don't have that one.
"Well, they just don't
have any brought-upsy."
It's not that they're bad people,
and it's not that they're stupid people
or anything like that, but literally,
they've gone through
life and never been told
that picking your nose in front
of a client is a bad idea.
wearing odd socks to a job
interview is a bad idea.
If you're a man, you
need to wear deodorant
and a suit and a tie to work,
and if you're a lady, you
also need to wear deodorant
and can't wear a plunging neckline,
and you need to wear a skirt
or neat trousers to work.
Just sort of very, very basic things
about comporting yourself
at the most trivial level.
I mean, Peterson's advice,
Amy Alkon's is a slightly
more sophisticated audience,
I thought, but Peterson's
advice is really at the level
of "No, no, no, the big knife
is for your main course,
"and the smaller one is for the starter."
It really is almost at that level.
So that was that sense,
and so I wrote about that,
'cause it was the only way I
could get imaginative entry
to the world of people who
desperately need Jordan Peterson
and Amy Alkon in order
to make sense of life.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
That's so, I don't know, it's sad to me.
I had that same feeling
that you kind of expressed
at the beginning, of just it
being somewhat disheartening.
A lot of that stuff,
it's a framework just
for where I am mentally.
So you wake up, you make your bed,
and it just is like, I did something!
(Bridget laughs)
There's just that almost reward system
of just being a functioning human.
And I've been, I mean, I'm in recovery,
and I've been in bad,
dark times in my life,
and that's something that I don't do
when I'm in those places.
So I know how much those
tiny little things,
the brought-upsy's can go
away when psychologically,
you are depressed or anxious
or addicted to drugs.
- [Helen] Or whatever, yes.
- [Bridget] Yeah, those
are, to me, the symptoms.
- [Helen] You lose the ability
to take care of yourself.
- [Bridget] Yeah, yeah.
- [Helen] And you can't
help, you can't take care
of anybody else unless you
first take care of yourself.
- [Bridget] Right.
What is that Gandhi quote,
"A drowning man can't save others"?
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] Or, as I say to
all my friends who are mothers,
"put the mask on first."
- [Helen] There's a
reason why the airlines
give that advice.
- [Bridget] Yeah, I know.
- [Helen] You can't help
anyone when you're dead.
- [Bridget] Exactly.
(Bridget laughs)
Or when you're passed out, yeah.
- [Helen] Or when you're passed out.
It's really very simple.
- [Bridget] I'd like to take a quick break
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So, where do you think,
circling back to cancel culture,
because it's so in the
zeitgeist right now,
what are your thoughts
on where it is and where,
do you think it will burn out?
Is it a movement that
you see gaining speed,
or do you see it?
- [Helen] At the moment,
it is gaining speed,
because the difference is that,
when people tried to cancel me initially,
all it did was made me more money,
and literally paid my mortgage.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] How to pay a
house off really quickly
is if everybody complains about you
and turns your book into a bestseller.
So that's fine.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] But I was
also, yes, I was young.
I was 22.
That's fine, I acknowledge that.
I was also a Miles Franklin Award winner,
the equivalent of a
Booker or Pulitzer winner.
I was a proper public figure
who'd just won the country's
most famous literary award.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Okay?
A small country, but a
small, literate country
with a lot of people in it who
buy books, as I discovered.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Many of the people,
and this is where I do think
that this is both different
and out of control.
Many of the people being canceled now
are not at all famous.
- [Bridget] No!
- [Helen] That Jon Ronson book
So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
- [Bridget] I have that here too.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] About, you know,
a lady who sent one tweet
and had like, 120 followers
on Twitter or something.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah, that
was the famous Justine Sacco.
- [Helen] Justin Sacco.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
She comes up all the time on this podcast.
- [Helen] Or the silly girl who just took
a silly, rude photo, and
she wasn't even on Twitter.
It was on Facebook,
and somehow, Facebook's sharing algorithm,
it was on her private, personal page,
and the sharing algorithm
somehow broke, and it meant
that she got utterly
humiliated, that kind of thing.
And this is very, very common now.
We had a situation in Britain where a chap
who was an Asda greeter,
so Asda's like the British
equivalent of Walmart.
He was a greeter, like
you have Walmart greeters.
- [Bridget] Yeah, yeah.
- [Helen] And he was fired for sharing
a Billy Connelly routine
that mocked Islam.
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] One difference is
that a few times in Australia,
or quite a few times, and to
a lesser extent in the UK,
but certainly quite a lot in Australia,
is countries that have
relatively powerful trade unions,
it can be much, much
harder to cancel someone,
and I've actually got a piece coming out
in the magazine that I'm
commissioning editor for,
which is, the first issue's
being launched this month.
- [Bridget] You're gonna talk about that.
- [Helen] Yeah, Smith Magazine.
I've actually got a piece on Israel Folau,
the rugby player who's another
classic cancel culture story.
But I go through some
of these other attempts
to cancel people in
Australia that have failed.
- [Bridget] Oh, interesting.
- [Helen] And the reason they have failed
is because Australia has
unfair dismissal legislation
that's known as the Fair Work Act
which actually makes it quite
difficult to sack someone
for their political opinions
or their religious beliefs.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
I thought that was the case in America,
but I'm beginning.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] You've got
this entire culture here
of contracts at will,
that they don't even exist
in Australia or the UK.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] You have zero
hours contracts in the UK,
and they can penalize a young employee
by just not giving them any more hours,
and I'm sure that happens,
but it's actually quite
difficult to sack people.
And in America traditionally, you've said,
well, we have contracts at
will, which do have benefits.
- [Bridget] Right, like I
can quit whenever I want to.
- [Helen] You can quit whenever you want,
and also, they keep unemployment down.
Because there's no cost
to sacking someone,
they can go and get a job
somewhere else relatively easily.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] As soon as there's
a cost to sacking people,
employers supposedly become
more reluctant to hire,
and that's one of the issues in France
with the very inflexible labor market.
But the benefit of having a
somewhat inflexible labor market
is that you can't just fire people
for saying something that
a mob disagrees with,
and Australia is a good example of that.
And it's across the political spectrum.
The lefties went after
a university academic
called Professor Peter Ridd,
who questioned climate change,
and the National Tertiary
Education Union, trade union,
defended him, and he won,
and he's just had an enormous
payout from the university.
So that was an example of the lefties
going after a right-winger, but an example
of right-wingers going after
a leftie was a journalist
for a media company, said very
rude thing about the ANZACS,
and he did it on ANZAC Day,
which is the Australia equivalent
of Veterans Day or Memorial Day.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] What's the one in America
that you have a public
holiday for, bank holiday?
- [Bridget] Memorial Day.
- [Helen] It's Memorial Day?
Okay, ANZAC Day is the Aussie
equivalent of Memorial Day.
So saying rude things about
the troops, basically.
- [Bridget] Okay, okay.
- [Helen] And he did it on Twitter.
He tweeted a whole bunch of rude things
about the Australian
New Zealand Army Corps,
and it's probably our
most solemn national day.
It's a bank holiday and so on.
And he was fired, and his union
backed him to bring a claim
under the unfair dismissal
legislation that Australia has,
the Fair Work Act.
And he won a very large settlement.
- [Bridget] Oh, wow.
- [Helen] And there've been cases
where people have been reinstated.
There have been cases where
people have got a lot of money,
and that is because Australia
still has relatively powerful unions.
So this is a complicated
issue for classical liberals
who have traditionally
valued freedom of association
and hiring and firing and
employers not being penalized
for speech about employees
and so on and so forth.
The countries where you finish
up having more speech rights,
more ability to participate
in public debate,
turn out to be the countries
that have a strong heritage
of trade union, participation
in trade union rights,
because the right to organize,
to be a labor organizer,
was originally won by
trade unionists in Britain,
because what was happening
was coal mine owners
would sack a miner who had
joined and was publicly agitating
and had joined the Labor Party.
And so these original rights,
those employee rights,
that you were allowed to
disagree with your employer
politically and he or
she couldn't sack you
for your politics, those
rights were originally won
by the trade union movement.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] In countries like the UK,
France, Australia, Italy,
Spain, so on and so forth.
And you can kind of, to a
degree, get around the problem
of rigid labor markets
causing high unemployment
amongst the low skilled by
doing what Australia does
with its immigration policy.
It is almost impossible
to get into Australia
if you don't have any skills.
- [Bridget] Yeah, I know.
- [Helen] And the
country has set itself up
so that even when it takes refugees,
you notice it's reached its
hand out for Venezuelans
and said, "Oh, Donald Trump,
"you don't want those Venezuelans?
Well, Australia will
have those Venezuelans,"
'cause they're all
middle-class and educated.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm.
- [Helen] "The Vietnamese boat people?
"Oh, we'll have those too."
That's exactly what
Australia did in the 70s.
You had educated middle
class fleeing from communism,
but the country at the same time
had made it enormously
difficult for Muslim refugees
and Sri Lankan Tamil
refugees to get into it,
because they're not only
refugees, but they're low skill.
- [Bridget] Oh.
- [Helen] So you've got
this very deliberate policy
of protecting an
electorally crucial stratum
of the working class from
labor market competition.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] So the rigid labor market,
Australia doesn't really
pay the penalty that, say,
France does for having
a rigid labor market
by making deliberate policy choice.
It's a country of high immigration,
but as Boris Johnson is
always talking about,
a country of points-based immigration.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
That's so fascinating.
- [Helen] So it's a very, very different
approach to immigration.
- [Bridget] Than anywhere.
- [Helen] Well, Canada
is quite similar as well.
Canada's a little less
rigid than Australia.
Australia is really rigid on those rules.
- [Bridget] Oh yeah, mmhmm.
- [Helen] People who turn
up and who are unwanted,
even refugees, mandatory detention,
mandatory detention, and it was introduced
by Paul Keating, a labor prime minister.
- [Bridget] Wow.
- [Helen] Left-leaning, quite
a left-leaning prime minister.
- [Bridget] Wow.
Interesting.
- [Helen] So this is just a
different policy approach.
- [Bridget] It is harder
to get to Australia too.
- [Helen] Well, it's surrounded
by cold, shark-infested waters.
- [Bridget] Yeah, you're
not walking there.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] No, no.
So you've got this, it's
harder to cancel people
in places where it's
harder to fire people.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Which is a
conundrum that people,
I have always considered
myself a classical liberal,
a conundrum that people
on my side of politics
have to confront honestly,
and a lot of us aren't.
Conservatives in Britain,
some of them are getting it,
in the sense that the most
valuable thing about speech
is not what people say, but
the fact that people can speak.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And you need
speech for civil society.
So if that means taking
away some employer rights
in order to improve the quality
of debate in civil society,
then you will get some conservatives,
in both Australia and the UK, saying that,
okay, that's a reasonable trade-off.
- [Bridget] That's so interesting.
- [Helen] It's just a very,
very different conception,
because the value of speech
to a Burkean conservative
is not that someone gets
to go to a pride parade
or someone gets to go to an all-male club
and bang on about how great it is
to be in a men's club or whatever.
That is not the value of speech
to a Burkean conservative.
To a Burkean conservative, the
most valuable part of speech
is to go into the public square
and engage in civil society
and not be penalized unduly.
- [Bridget] Right.
I think I've found that this
is what has happened to me,
is that I took my free speech for granted,
never contemplated what
it really looked like,
and then this whole
thing with Shane Gillis,
the Saturday Night Live guy
who was hired and then fired.
- [Helen] Yeah, I've only
just seen a tiny bit of that,
but yes, we've had all sorts
of problems in Britain.
- [Bridget] Of course.
- [Helen] With comedians as well.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm, and it's
interesting that they're going,
particularly I was seeing this on Twitter.
I find it fascinating they're
going after comedians,
because I feel like you have more control.
If you can control comedy,
you can control speech,
because they're so
representative of free speech.
And someone said to me, fairly, they said,
"Oh, so you're gonna defend this guy?
"You're gonna defend him,
"and therefore, you're
defending his racism."
But in order to defend free speech,
I'm not defending racism,
but I do have to defend
someone's ability to say something racist.
- [Helen] Yeah, the issue
is not what is said.
The issue is the capacity to speak.
And people are losing sight of that.
- [Bridget] Every time I
push back against that,
I just get called a racist.
And so, then in order to even defend it,
it's exactly what you're talking about,
that kind of Kafka trap where
someone calls you a racist,
you defend yourself, and the
act of defending yourself
is proof that you are racist.
- [Helen] You finish up in this situation,
and I'm going to quote an
Australian legal academic.
He's a professor at the
University of Newcastle,
which is just north of Sydney.
And his name is Russell Blackford,
Professor Russell Blackford,
and he's a jurisprudential scholar,
which is a philosopher of law.
So a very practical kind
of applied philosophy.
He wrote a very fine book
called Tyranny of Opinion,
which is a scholarly
study of cancel culture,
which I strongly recommend to you.
- [Bridget] Oh wow, I have to read this.
- [Helen] Strongly recommend.
It's quite scholarly.
- [Bridget] That's all right.
- [Helen] But it's very clearly written.
He writes beautifully.
- [Bridget] I mean, I'm about
to go study constitutional law
at this point because I'm
so fascinated by it, so.
- [Helen] And he's Australian,
and the virtue of Russell Blackford's book
is that before he became an academic,
he was a specialist industrial barrister
who dealt with the Fair Work Act.
- [Bridget] Oh, interesting.
- [Helen] And Australia's
union-inspired legislation.
So he's very knowledgeable in that area,
and one of the things he talks
about is when you're accused
of one of these things,
of racism or antisemitism
or transphobia or
whatever it is this week,
is never apologize, and never explain.
So if you try to justify yourself and say,
"I'm not a racist," or "I'm not
a this" or "I'm not a that,"
and you try to prove it
under one of the traditional
ways of trying to prove it,
which was "I have black friends"
or "I have Jewish friends" or transgender.
- [Bridget] Oh gosh, yeah, no.
- [Helen] You can't do that anymore.
It's been taken from you.
- [Bridget] It's stupid anyway.
They use that to just
prove that you're racist.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] So Professor Blackford's advice
is very much along the lines
of don't apologize to mobs,
because it's like rolling
over on your back.
- [Bridget] I always say this, yeah.
- [Helen] And showing your stomach,
and don't try to justify yourself.
Maybe the great Australian
response to people who say,
"Oh, Bridget, you're a
racist" is, "in your dreams."
- [Bridget] Yeah, yep.
- [Helen] I mean, something like that,
because you'll get nowhere.
- [Bridget] Now it's pointless.
- [Helen] And it just makes it worse.
- [Bridget] It does, it does.
I mean, I ran into this on Twitter.
I said something,
and I can see how it
would have been perceived,
and I hadn't had coffee, and
I'm very much able to look
at my own role in whatever
situation I find myself in,
but in this instance, James
Lindsay reached out to me
from Helen's friend and
the grievance studies,
and he is just a master
in understanding critical theory as well,
and he said, "Nothing you
say will make this better.
"It will only make it worse.
"Log out."
And it was the best advice
anyone ever gave me.
He was like, "You cannot
defend yourself against this,
"and in fact, it will only make it worse."
So just log out and let it blow over,
and 72 hours later, it did.
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] But I'm in
a different position.
I'm not working for a corporation.
The stories I'm hearing from people
are, you know, I always
say moms in mommy groups
being shamed out of their mommy group,
and like you said, they're not famous.
So, people are saying,
they use these comedians
like Dave Chappelle or Bill
Burr as examples of people.
They're like, cancel culture isn't real.
I always hear this.
And I say just because
people who have enough fame,
audience, and money to weather
an attempt to be canceled
doesn't mean that it's,
A, not setting an example
for all of the people who
don't have that power,
and B, that cancel culture
isn't real on these
little micro levels like you're
seeing with Justine Sacco
or a woman who I was reading about online.
I went down this rabbit hole.
She had a farmer's market
booth, and they were trying
to get her farmer's
market booth taken away.
- [Helen] Oh, I read an
article in a British paper
about knitting groups
being infected by it.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah, knitting
is a big one right now.
It's a big one.
That's a big hotbed of cancellations.
- [Helen] Well, the issue
is when they talk about,
"well, cancel culture isn't real"
because someone like Dave
Chappelle could rise above it,
and to a large degree,
I mean, I wasn't famous
before my first book came
out in Australia, obviously.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Helen] But I had every
advantage that money could buy
and quite a bit that money couldn't,
given the way social class works
in British colonies and in Britain.
It is very, very difficult
to cancel someone
with a law degree from
the University of Oxford.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] And this is going
to sound very British,
and I will explain it after I've said it,
but it's a conversation I've
had with a number of people
in the UK, 'cause I'm self-employed also.
I'm in a position
where I can take on legal
consulting if I want to.
I'm in the position where
I can take on writing work
or I can knock it back, or I can say,
"If you want me to
write something quickly,
"you have to pay me more,"
all of those kind of things.
I'm in that very fortunate position now.
But you cannot have a situation,
and this is an Edmund Burke
civil society argument,
you cannot have a situation
where the only people
with freedom of speech
are upper middle class Shire
Tories who can't be sacked.
- [Bridget] Right, exactly.
- [Helen] I mean, when I
say "upper middle class
"Shire Tory," I mean, I tick every box.
I live in the home counties, the Shires.
- [Bridget] Right.
(Bridget laughs)
The Shires.
- [Helen] Which is the
prosperous areas around London.
I went to Oxford.
I own my house, and it's unmortgaged.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] That kind of thing.
You cannot have a situation
where people like me,
or people like you,
are the only ones who've
got freedom of speech,
because once again, we're getting away
from the situation of
what people are saying,
and we're talking about
the fact of speech itself.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And we're
saying that little people,
that Justine Sacco or Professor
Peter Ridd in Australia
who had the litigation,
who was not at all famous,
just a university academic.
I mean, people that think,
"Oh, he's a full professor
of physics and meteorology,"
or whatever it was,
might say that that
means you're, it doesn't.
Seriously, no one knew who he was
until the litigation blew up.
But all of these people,
the people in moms groups
and this kind of thing,
if you say that they don't get to speak,
then speech and democracy
and civil society, is lunacy.
- [Bridget] Well, this is what
I hate about cancel culture.
- [Helen] It means that
a certain sort of class
of commentariat gets to speak.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And everybody else
has to bite their tongue.
- [Bridget] Right, and
this is what's happening.
- [Helen] And that the
point is those people vote.
- [Bridget] Right, they
speak with their vote.
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] And they did in 2016.
I think Brexit is a good example.
- [Helen] And this is the
danger of shutting people up,
is one of the reasons why
we have the secret ballot,
one of the reasons why it
was developed independently
in two civilizations,
first in ancient Rome,
and then it was developed
again in Australia,
which was why it was called
the Australian ballot,
and then exported all over the world.
But it was developed
in both those civilizations
for the same reason,
so that people could not be
intimidated over their views,
so that they could pass
their ballot in secret.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] And so their views
could not be bought and sold,
because one of the things that
happened with open ballots,
and there are descriptions
of this in Britain
before they adopted the Australian system,
of the people who wanted to be elected
just going into all the pubs
and just buying everybody rounds of pints,
"Oh, vote for me, vote for me,"
because you had to go in
and declare your vote,
put your hand up and
declare who you voted for,
whereas the Australian system;
in the Roman system, it
was a piece of pottery.
The Australian system was
to vote on a piece of paper
in a booth so no one could see,
and then drop it in the box.
- [Bridget] Right, that was like recently,
Andrew Yang, right before the debates,
he was saying he was going to give
every 10 families in America
$100,000 or something,
or 120,000, $1,000 a month, basically,
and got the cash for one
family and was alerted
that that's highly illegal
and you can't do that.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] You can't just go be like,
"Here's $100,000, please vote for me."
- [Helen] Yeah, no, you're not
allowed to do that anymore.
- [Bridget] I was like,
"God, how are you even
running for president,
"not knowing that, but okay."
It's been, you know, fascinating,
because the people who often
say cancel culture isn't real,
and I was saying this on
Twitter the other day.
I said, "Congratulations
to everyone who told me
"cancel culture doesn't exist
"for getting Shane Gillis fired,"
because these are the
people who are telling me,
but then the argument
that they have is that,
"Well, name one person
"who has been canceled
that hasn't deserved it."
I can name five people
that are friends of mine
who have had their lives destroyed,
gone through a depression, can't work.
My friend said if he hadn't been,
I've had friends on this
podcast who had talked about it,
and it's devastating,
and they're not famous
enough to weather it.
My one friend had to leave LA.
- [Helen] I mean, I'm a lawyer,
so lawyers like to argue from principles.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Unless someone
is sacked from their job
because they did something at work
that materially affected
their ability to do their job,
then you shouldn't be sacking people,
because employment is not about
what people's private views are.
Employment is about whether
you can or can't do your job.
- [Bridget] But even publicly.
I mean, so Shane was on
podcasts and was saying
that people were, he was
using the word "chink."
They were racist jokes.
He was on a podcast
with a bunch of people,
and then he got hired for SNL.
- [Helen] Which is a big
break over here, isn't it?
- [Bridget] Huge deal.
I mean, a dream come true for a comedian,
or anyone in our space, and
then it was properly taken away
by the end of the weekend.
- [Helen] So he didn't even
do a pre-record for them.
- [Bridget] No, no.
He never even got a chance
to do his first episode.
They announced that he was hired.
I love how they always say,
and I was joking about this
on my little YouTube show that I have now,
about the headline is always
"racist remarks surface."
I'm like, these didn't surface.
You went digging for them.
You looked for them,
and you published them,
with the intention of
getting this person fired.
- [Helen] Yes.
- [Bridget] So they "surface," in quotes,
and everybody was outraged,
and then the Asian community
was rightfully upset,
because they say, "If this was the N word,
"he probably never would have been hired.
"Why is it okay to still make
these jokes about Asians?"
It was a whole argument,
but I always say, when
comedians kind of step in it,
and again, this is where it gets,
it's such a tough needle for me to thread
because I'm not a lawyer
and I don't always know
how to argue these things,
I always say, you know,
"I defend any comedian's
right to be hyperbolic."
I don't defend the
content of your hyperbole.
- [Helen] You can't have a
situation where a comedian,
and I'm paraphrasing Andrew Doyle here,
who's a personal friend of mine.
- [Bridget] I love Andrew.
He's been here.
He's been on the podcast.
- [Helen] He's the creator
of Titania McGrath.
- [Bridget] Yeah, brilliant.
- [Helen] You can't have a
situation where every joke lands.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Because that
joke has not been written.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] The situation for a comedian is,
you try to be as funny for
as many people as possible.
Now, I have never done standup,
but there is a strong expectation
that Spectator columnists are amusing,
and I do try to be amusing in my columns.
And most of the time, the gags that I put
in a Speccy column, they
land, and the kind of people
who read the Spectator, read my columns,
they find them funny, and they laugh,
and they write a nice letter to the editor
and say, "Helen Dale was
very funny this week,"
words to that effect, that kind of thing.
But I know from the
contents of my social media
or from what is sent to
the magazine's editor
that not all of those jokes
land with all of those people.
I have had people complain about,
for example, putting a
swear word in an article.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] That wasn't blotted out.
You know, the editor left it spelled out,
because the Spectator
is coded conservative,
and there are still some
social conservatives
in Britain and Australia who read it.
So they don't like the
idea of a woman swearing.
That's their particular
cultural tradition.
They probably don't like
a man doing it either,
but they tolerate it more
than a woman doing it.
- [Bridget] In America, I always get,
when I do conservative media,
"Can we get her to stop saying oh God?"
You know, I can swear,
but I can't say "oh God."
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] You can't blaspheme,
because they're religious.
We don't have the religious issue.
It's more just the swearing issue.
So I've had people complain about that,
'cause I swore in a joke.
I've had people just not
find those gags funny.
Now, this is in print.
I have had proper comedians say to me,
"You're very funny in print,
have you tried standup?"
And I have always run a mile.
And I said, "No, you
don't seem to appreciate
"that with the columns, I
get to think about the gags."
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] And try them out on a few people
to see if people think they're funny.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] Poor bloody standup
doesn't have that opportunity.
- [Bridget] No, no.
- [Helen] That's the thing.
You're literally just throwing
your soul out there to see.
- [Bridget] Chris Rock said
that it's the only artistic medium
where you get better by failing publicly.
You can go learn a song in
a bedroom on your guitar.
You can privately mess up a million times.
But the only way you
know when a joke is good
is if you mess it up many
times before you get it.
- [Helen] And so the
difficulty that you comedians
are being, with this safe comedy,
is that all their jokes have to appeal,
they have to be all things to all men.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm, mmhmm.
- [Helen] And no one can do that.
That's not possible.
(Bridget groans)
- [Bridget] It's also just so boring.
- [Helen] And, I mean, bloke
in Britain who was canceled
for Sargon of Akkad, the YouTuber.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah, he
got kicked off Patreon.
- [Helen] Yeah, over gags.
And he does tell some racist
jokes, and his response was,
"I'm sorry, a lot of
racist jokes are funny,
(Bridget laughs)
"and I'm not going to stop telling them.
"And if you have a problem with that,
"then you don't watch my YouTube.
"Just don't bother."
- [Bridget] It's so fascinating too,
because it's such an elitist mentality.
I'm like, have you worked in a restaurant,
or on a farm or around men?
I have worked in so many blue collar jobs
and worked on weed farms
and places where people
are just sitting around talking for hours.
It's all racist jokes,
of all different races
mixing together and making
jokes about each other.
It feels very elitist to say,
"You can't make these jokes."
- [Helen] And the other
difficulty you've got
with telling people that
you can't make jokes
based on stereotypes,
which racist jokes are,
but sexist jokes are in both directions
like all the adverts now that
are based on incompetent dads,
which I know annoys a lot of
blokes who aren't incompetent.
- [Bridget] Right, right.
- [Helen] But the reason
stereotypes exist,
and there's actually
an enormous amount of
empirical research on this,
the reason stereotypes exist
is because they are true.
- [Bridget] Well, I always say this.
They don't exist in a void.
- [Helen] That includes
the funny ones like men
dressing their toddler in
green and orange clothes
because they don't see color, that joke,
but also, women solving their problems by,
instead of going and talking to the boss,
bitching with all their
girlfriends on Slack.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] That sort of joke
works, and those are kind of,
I think they're fairly benign,
despite the fact that the
advertising council in the UK
has waded into the sexist jokes.
- [Bridget] Right, right, I saw that.
- [Helen] And so on and so forth.
But it also means that
a lot of the other jokes
that people tell, they work.
They land because they've
got a grain of truth in them,
or more than a grain of truth.
I mean, if you watch that
very, very fine short
Steven Pinker video on
crime rates and race.
- [Bridget] I haven't seen it.
- [Helen] It's, I mean, well,
the African-American crime rate
is about eight times higher
than the European-American one, basically.
As Pinker points out,
you can find this figure
on the Department of Justice website.
It's not hard to find.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm, mmhmm.
- [Helen] So people could
make jokes about that.
People could make jokes
about Jews being involved in finance.
I mean, Goldman Sachs, what name is that?
The jokes write themselves,
and if you tell people
that they're not allowed to be
funny about things like this,
then they probably won't be funny,
but the thing that humor
was meant to relieve
will be taken away from them,
and I actually think you make
prejudice and bigotry worse
by taking away that pressure relief valve.
- [Bridget] I agree.
- [Helen] I mean, part of being a grown-up
is accepting that people
get to score one off you.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Helen] You've had this
happen, I've had it happen.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] I've had it
happen on national telly.
I had Sargon, when I've been
on his show, score one off me.
It absolutely landed, an absolute beauty,
and I had to laugh at it.
I mean, part of being an adult
is that people are allowed
to score one off you.
- [Bridget] And the follow-up,
the corollary to that,
is no one has ever proven
any link between the media
that people consume and
their subsequent behavior.
- [Bridget] Interesting.
- [Helen] So all these attempts to prove
that violent video games
cause school shootings,
all these attempts to
prove that porn causes.
- [Bridget] Dysfunction.
- [Helen] People to commit sex offenses.
If anything the effect is
in the opposite direction.
When effect sizes have been
found, they're very small,
but when they have been found,
they're in the opposite direction.
So basically, porn and violent video games
are actual substitutes
for sex offenses and.
- [Bridget] Violence.
- [Helen] And violence.
So this idea that a whole bunch of people
sitting around and saying, "An Englishman,
"and Irishman, and a
Scotsman walked into a bar,"
and then proceed to tell a
bunch of jokes about them,
is going to lead to a resurgence
in the Northern Ireland trouble, say.
That's the British context.
I mean, there will be American ones.
It's just nonsense.
There is not a shred of evidence for that.
It's like all of these
implicit association tests
and implicit bias tests.
They don't replicate.
This is part of the replication crisis,
in entire academic disciplines,
people thinking that
they've found something,
and then it disappears in a puff of magic.
- [Bridget] Right, when you
even try and hold it up.
- [Helen] 'Cause it's not there.
It's about as real as
the genie in the bottle.
- [Bridget] Right, it's so interesting.
So, I ask the same two questions
at the end of all of my
podcasts of my guests.
What is your biggest vice
or defect of character
that you have to, you can
interpret this however you want.
It can be something you're working on now
or something in the arc of your life
you've had to work against.
(Helen sighs)
- [Helen] Just casually?
Laziness.
I can be a really lazy person.
(Bridget laughs)
Laziness in the sense of, if I don't have
an obvious reason to get
out of bed, I just won't.
(Bridget laughs)
And I have to be really disciplined,
and I don't file stuff late
and that kind of thing.
I'm really determined not to do that.
But I have to remind myself,
"No, you need to sit down and
start working on this now,
"or otherwise, you'll be filing late,
"and if you file late,
that's embarrassing."
But yet, I can be really lazy.
- [Bridget] I understand that.
- [Helen] It was the phrase
"getting out of your own way,"
because I remember my
mother actually saying to me
a couple of times when I was a kid,
"Helen, will you just
get out of your own way?"
(Bridget laughs)
Which suggests that.
- [Bridget] This is persistent?
- [Helen] This is a persistent problem.
Get out of your own way.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
And what's your biggest asset?
- [Helen] I absolutely will not back down.
- [Bridget] Mm, that's that lawyer in you.
- [Helen] Yep, I just won't.
I mean, I'll always be very courteous
and try to be polite
and have decent manners
and behave appropriately, and all of that.
The stuff I was writing about
in the Jordan Peterson/Amy Alkon piece,
that once I've got a piece of
information about something
or something that I
think is worth exploring,
I am like a dog with a bone,
and I just will not let go.
And I've had the thing
a few times in my life
where people say, "Helen, drop it."
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] "Just drop it, let it go."
(Bridget laughs)
It's unhealthy.
- [Bridget] It's interesting.
So many of the people
that I've interviewed
kind of in this space
seem to have that same,
it's like a pathological need
to understand or be understood,
or not be misunderstood.
It's interesting to me.
It does seem to be part of
the personality type required
to be kind of in this weird,
I feel like my podcast has
become the Island of Misfit Toys,
where it's like, all of these people
who are kind of in this weird
gray area in the culture wars,
not necessarily here nor there.
Tell us about your upcoming endeavor,
or whatever is what's launching today.
- [Helen] Yeah, it's Smith Magazine,
which is, the editor-in-chief
is Jamie White,
who used to work for the
Institute of Economic Affairs,
famously Margaret Thatcher's
favorite think tank.
- [Bridget] Oh, wow.
- [Helen] The IEA.
I'm the commissioning editor,
and it's called Smith for
Adam Smith, obviously.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] The fact that
blacksmiths make things,
and that Smith is the commonest surname
in the English language.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] And it's a month
printed/online magazine.
It will be launching in the US as well.
It's meant to fly above the news.
- [Bridget] Right.
- [Helen] We are the
opposite of hot takes.
We are the anti-hot takes.
- [Bridget] Right.
It's the evergreen takes.
- [Helen] Yeah, the people
who Jamie and I have hired
for the magazine are across
the political spectrum.
- [Bridget] That's cool.
- [Helen] I mean, this is
very, very deliberately.
- [Bridget] No real editorial
line one way or another.
- [Helen] We do have a
very strong expectation
that people can write well, so
in the magazine prospectives
that I've got in front of
me here, we want people
who communicate complex
ideas with clarity and wit,
and the wit tradition is
characteristic of The Spectator,
and there are people brought across
like myself from The Spectator.
But there's also an
ex-Economist guy there as well
who was originally at The
Economist, the science editor.
But right across the spectrum.
So Jamie is associated
with classical liberalism
or even libertarianism.
Sarah Churchwell,
professor for the Public
Understanding of the Humanities
at the School of Advanced
Studies, University of London,
is associated with the
political left and has written
a lot about the history
of the United States,
written about The Great
Gatsby, Marilyn Monroe.
Matt Ridley used to be science
editor of The Economist.
Jonathan Wolff, author of a
book called Why Read Marx Today.
- [Bridget] Oh, gosh.
(Bridget laughs)
- [Helen] So he's very much on the left.
Steven Landsburg, centrist economist,
professor of economics at
the University of Rochester.
Me, I've always been in the
sort of classical liberal
end wing of the Tory party in the UK.
I have Burkean elements, and
that's why I'm very conflicted
at the moment over the
association principle,
which is a classical liberal one
for employers and employees,
but also the speech principle,
which I have to acknowledge
is being protected in those countries
that have significant
trade union traditions.
So at the moment, Edmund
Burke and John Stewart Mill
are having a knock-down,
drag-out punch-up in my head.
- [Bridget] In your head, interesting.
- [Helen] In my head,
because they're the two
sort of main wings of
British conservatism.
Burkeanism is much more
about organic order
and civil society.
- [Bridget] Mmhmm.
- [Helen] That through
languages of politics matrix,
a conservative is talking about a contrast
between civilization and barbarism.
A classical liberal is
talking about a contrast
between freedom and coercion,
and the problem is, sometimes
those two traditions,
even though they've been on
the same side for a long time,
they fight, and like oil
and water, they fight.
- [Bridget] Right, interesting.
God, I could talk to you for
like five hours about this too.
- [Helen] Yeah, since we
were talking about her,
our Agony Aunt columnist for
Smith Magazine is Amy Alkon.
- [Bridget] Oh, yay!
A very, very good friend.
- [Helen] So but yes,
we've got David Friedman,
the economist and physicist.
- [Bridget] Oh, wow.
- [Helen] Writing as well.
- [Bridget] Great.
And where can we find you,
and what is the name of your book,
in case anybody wants to buy it?
- [Helen] Oh, well, you can
get them all off of Amazon.
The Hand that Signed the
Paper, you can get off Amazon.
You can get book one and book two there.
It's a series, but there's
not going to be another one.
There's only two books.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] Kingdom of the Wicked,
book one is Rules, and book two is Order,
and it's set in a Roman empire
that's had an industrial revolution.
So it's speculative fiction.
- [Bridget] Cool.
- [Helen] Whereas my first novel,
The Hand that Signed the
Paper, is historical fiction.
- [Bridget] Is that the
one you won the award for?
Okay.
- [Helen] Yeah, the
Kingdom of the Wicked Books
were shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize,
which is for science
fiction, but I didn't win.
I just got shortlist,
whereas the other one.
- [Bridget] Won.
- [Helen] Both shortlisted
and won the Miles Franklin.
- [Bridget] Wow, very, very accomplished.
And where can we find you online?
- [Helen] I'm @_helendale.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] All one word, but
remember the underscore first,
or otherwise, you'll finish up
tagging a graphic designer in Yorkshire.
- [Bridget] Okay.
- [Helen] Who has the same name.
So @_helendale, and that's my on Twitter.
I mean, I'm on Facebook,
but it's mainly a personal
page with pictures of cats.
- [Bridget] No, we'll find you on Twitter.
- [Helen] And I have a
YouTube channel as well,
but it's quite small,
and I just occasionally
put things up there.
- [Bridget] Okay, and what's that?
- [Helen] That's just helendale
as well, I'm easy to find.
- [Bridget] Okay, awesome,
thank you so much for coming.
Did you have anything
else you wanted to, okay.
- [Helen] No, that's all fine.
- [Bridget] Thank you so much.
- [Helen] No problem.
- [Bridget] It's time
for the Weekly Check-In
with Bridget and Cousin Maggie.
♪ Christmastime is here again ♪
(Bridget laughs)
- [Maggie] Bridget's on a cleanse.
(Maggie laughs)
- [Bridget] Ayurvedic.
I'm trying to heal my gut.
- [Maggie] Yep, start fresh.
Start fresh for the new year.
- [Bridget] I had to
got to a shot of chemo,
and my insides have
been torn up ever since.
- [Maggie] She doesn't have
cancer, don't let her fool you.
- [Bridget] I don't have cancer.
- [Maggie] Don't everyone
jump on board and by like,
"Oh my God."
- [Bridget] I heard Bridget has cancer.
But that stuff is poison,
and it does tear you up on the inside.
(Maggie laughs)
(Bridget groans)
- [Maggie] She's just an empty skin suit.
- [Bridget] I feel that way, actually.
- [Maggie] It's been a rough
month or six weeks for you.
- [Bridget] Yeah, it's been,
I just wanna start feeling normal again,
but I'm not quite there yet.
- [Maggie] Well, hopefully,
this will help reset.
- [Bridget] Are you
ready for the holidays?
- [Maggie] I am, I fly out tomorrow.
- [Bridget] Did you do your shopping,
or do you do it at home?
- [Maggie] I do it online, mostly.
- [Bridget] Oh, you just
have it all shipped there?
- [Maggie] Yeah, I started
today actually doing shopping.
My family's super easy.
We all just send each other lists,
including links, and are just like,
"here, I'm getting this person this,
"I'm getting this person that."
- [Bridget] Oh, wow.
- [Maggie] We are not
precious about gifts.
- [Bridget] I have too much family.
- [Maggie] You do.
- [Bridget] I don't get anyone presents.
- [Maggie] Yeah, you do.
- [Bridget] We just don't do presents.
There are too many of us.
- [Maggie] Well, you
guys don't do Christmas
in a central location, either.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Maggie] I go home,
and my family's there.
We all come to one place and whatnot.
- [Bridget] That's true.
I do do presents for my family here.
You can't show up empty-handed.
- [Maggie] No, at Christmas.
- [Bridget] You can't be the cheapskate
who shows empty-handed.
- [Maggie] Yep.
So, yeah, I've gotta do
some more ordering of stuff,
finish that, but usually,
it's a pretty easy process.
- [Bridget] Hi, Hope.
- [Maggie] Hi, Hope.
She's still wearing her
cone, poor little thing.
- [Bridget] Poor baby, you and I.
We've had a rough patch.
- [Maggie] Hopefully that will
come off tomorrow too, right?
- [Bridget] Hope and I
have been quite a pair.
Just two little, we're on the bench.
- [Maggie] But you're both on the mend.
- [Bridget] Yeah, hopefully.
Hopefully.
- [Maggie] Yep.
- [Bridget] It's been a good year though.
- [Maggie] All in all, yes.
We made a list of everything that we did
at our Team Phetasy Christmas
or holiday celebration dinner.
- [Bridget] That was fun.
- [Maggie] That was fun.
- [Bridget] We ate a lot.
Maybe that's why my insides get torn up.
(both laughing)
Never again.
- [Maggie] That was good.
- [Bridget] Maggie's like,
why are you doing a cleanse
before the holidays?
- [Maggie] Yeah, cleanses happen
after the holidays usually.
- [Bridget] No, not this one.
- [Maggie] I just wanna
get a jump on the new year.
- [Bridget] I do.
- [Maggie] Get back to being normal.
- [Bridget] I swear, I have
had a headache for two days.
- [Maggie] That sucks.
- [Bridget] But I think it's sugar.
- [Maggie] Uh-huh, it's the sugar detox.
- [Bridget] I feel like
I went through this
with the Whole30.
- [Maggie] You did, you had
a headache for like a week.
- [Bridget] Yeah, sugar
is real, sugar addiction.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- [Bridget] The detox is real.
- [Maggie] The sugar
detox is real for sure.
- [Bridget] I eat a lot
of sugar, apparently.
- [Maggie] So do I.
It's not good.
- [Bridget] Now not
even Ritual can save me
from my sugar consumption.
(both laughing)
- [Maggie] At least
you know you're getting
some healthy nutrients in your body.
(Maggie laughs)
- [Bridget] No one send me candy anymore.
- [Maggie] I know.
You can never mention that you like.
- [Bridget] It's like sending
a heroin addict crack.
- [Maggie] Heroin.
(both laughing)
- [Bridget] Heroin.
- [Maggie] You can never mention
candy you like ever again.
- [Bridget] No, I really
like smoothies and cleanses.
- [Maggie] Kale and pressed juices.
- [Bridget] Send me Pressed Juicery.
(Maggie laughs)
Send me overpriced juices.
- [Maggie] You're like,
"Send me gym subscriptions.
(Bridget laughs)
"and Barre classes."
- [Bridget] Send me gift certificates
to Pressed Juicery, please.
- [Maggie] Hope-a-dope, oh my goodness.
- [Bridget] No, I'm a bone broth cleanse,
which is the most LA
thing you'll ever hear.
- [Maggie] Oh, boy!
That is something right there.
- [Bridget] It's delicious.
Well, that way you don't actually,
remember when we did the master cleanse?
- [Maggie] Yes, I do, clearly.
- [Bridget] I thought about doing it,
and I was like, "Eh, I'm
pretty weak right now."
- [Maggie] You're not really
getting the nutrients you need
with the master cleanse.
- [Bridget] No, but this one, you do.
You get all the nutrients.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- [Bridget] You get bone broth and juices,
or milks, or something.
- [Maggie] The master cleanse,
during the days of soup and toast.
We were so broke,
we decided to go on the
master cleanse for two weeks.
- [Bridget] For those who
don't know, the master cleanse
is just an unhealthy combination
of lemon juice, water.
- [Maggie] Maple syrup.
- [Bridget] Maple syrup.
- [Maggie] And cayenne pepper.
- [Bridget] Yep.
- [Maggie] And you just
drink this elixir all day.
It's actually delicious.
- [Bridget] It's not bad.
- [Maggie] But you have
to drink it all day.
- [Bridget] To keep your blood sugar up.
- [Maggie] To keep your blood sugar up.
Otherwise, you just like.
(both laughing)
- [Bridget] Starve.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- [Bridget] If you let your
blood sugar crash suddenly,
you're starving.
- [Maggie] And then you drink
a laxative tea at night.
- [Bridget] Oh, yeah.
- [Maggie] And then you have
to cleanse with the salt water
in the morning in order
to flush out your system.
We did this for two weeks.
We did not eat food.
- [Bridget] But did we do
the cleanse every morning,
or was that just the first week?
- [Maggie] No, we did it
every single morning of every single day.
- [Bridget] I blocked it out of my memory.
The saltwater flush was quite something.
(both laughing)
You couldn't be working a real job.
- [Maggie] No.
- [Bridget] Let's just say that.
Which neither one of us were.
- [Maggie] No, we weren't.
I don't know how people
function when they do it too,
because we literally
could not, we were like,
we'll get so much writing
down or so much work done.
You can't think.
There's no food going to your brain.
- [Bridget] There's no calories.
- [Maggie] So you literally
are just sitting there staring into space.
I think we just like, sunbathed,
(both laughing)
and did nothing for two weeks.
- [Bridget] And did nothing.
The cleanse takes your life.
- [Maggie] And we went
to the farmer's market
and got an entire huge box full of lemons.
- [Bridget] And used them all.
- [Maggie] And used them all.
- [Bridget] Yeah, I was
considering doing that,
just 'cause I felt so
empty and good afterwards.
I did feel good.
- [Maggie] You purge a lot.
You get a lot of nasty
crap out of your system,
that's for sure.
- [Bridget] This is too
much holiday information.
(Maggie laughs)
Yeah, it's a very deep purge.
But I don't know how scientific it is.
- [Maggie] I don't know either.
We like, read a book, and
we're like, sign us up!
(both laughing)
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Maggie] It's something
you can do in your 20s
with no problem, when
you're like, "I'm healthy!"
- [Bridget] It's good to know though
that you really only need
water, lemon, and sugar
to survive for like, two weeks.
- [Maggie] It's true.
I mean, we literally did not
eat, and that was so weird too,
is the days stretch endlessly before you
when they're not framed around meals.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Maggie] We had this
whole different perspective
on human life and existence.
- [Bridget] Yeah, you're
like, outside of the wheel.
- [Maggie] When you're not eating,
because everything revolves around food.
- [Bridget] So like, let's get a drink,
let's get a coffee, let's get lunch.
- [Maggie] Grab some maps, let's do this.
(Bridget groans)
- [Bridget] Everything.
- [Maggie] And we went to that movie,
that Step Up 2 on Valentine's Day.
- [Bridget] And all
the freaking teenagers.
We snuck into it.
- [Maggie] Yeah, somehow we managed
to just walk right into this movie.
- [Bridget] Like we were teens.
- [Maggie] 'Cause we were so broke.
thank God we didn't have to pay.
(Maggie laughs)
And then there were like,
teenagers passing around
cupcakes and candy in the movie,
just like, handing them out to everyone.
- [Bridget] I'm like, why did we think
that sitting in a room
that smells like popcorn
would be a good idea, a
week into this cleanse?
- [Maggie] But it was so fun.
That movie was so fun.
It was such a party atmosphere.
- [Bridget] I think we
were just delirious.
- [Maggie] No, it was
a really funny movie.
It was like, surprisingly funny.
- [Bridget] No, it was fun.
The funniest part was how
she took a train at the end.
- [Maggie] No, no, that was Step Up 3.
(Maggie laughs)
- [Bridget] I'm confusing my Step Ups.
- [Maggie] Don't worry, I
know them all very well.
- [Bridget] I loved the dancing.
- [Maggie] The dancing.
We're just here for the dancing.
- [Bridget] Yeah, that was funny.
So I was thinking about doing that,
and then thank God my people around me
were like, you've been weak,
and probably not a great idea.
- [Maggie] Yeah, you need nutrients.
Like, actual nutrients.
- [Bridget] So this one is, and it feels
like it revolves around
meals a little bit more,
'cause you still have three
times a day or eating,
not eating, drinking, and
it's like 1,000 calories.
It's not no calories
like the master cleanse.
(both laughing)
- [Maggie] How long
are you planning to go?
- [Bridget] It's only four days,
but my stomach already feels better,
even if my head is pounding.
- [Maggie] Uh-huh.
- [Bridget] Because my
stomach's just been so off
since all of the stuff,
so I feel like it just
needed, it needed a break.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- [Bridget] I think it's
good every once in a while
to give your digestive
system some time off.
- [Maggie] Probably.
- [Bridget] And I guess
bone broth heals, again,
I don't know how much
science is involved in this.
I've read a couple things.
But it heals your stomach
and your gastrointestinal
lining and stuff.
- [Maggie] Bone broth
sounds much more nutritious
than lemon juice and maple syrup.
- [Bridget] Well, I remember
our good friend Sarah,
my best friend,
she was talking about bone
broth way back in the day,
because her great-grandmother
from Sweden or something
used to make it all the time,
and I trust those ladies.
- [Maggie] Yep.
- [Bridget] I trust the old world.
- [Maggie] The folklore.
- [Bridget] Yeah.
- [Maggie] Wisdom.
Folk remedies.
- [Bridget] It's not folklore.
- [Maggie] No, the folk remedies,
that's what I was going for.
- [Bridget] Yeah, I trust
the Midwestern peoples
(both laughing)
and their remedies.
But yeah, she used to make
homemade bone broth all the time.
My friend's like, "You know
you could probably do this
"for like, a third of the cost."
When you look at the ingredients,
it's like, boil some bones and some herbs.
- [Maggie] Yeah, but that sounds
like a giant pain in
the ass, boiling bones.
- [Bridget] I will always
pay for convenience.
(both laughing)
- [Maggie] Won't we all!
Better make use of the convenience
while we can before the apocalypse comes.
- [Bridget] I know.
I'm excited for it.
I know we can survive it.
(Maggie laughs)
- [Maggie] On lemon juice and maple syrup.
- [Bridget] On lemon
juice and maple syrup.
I should stockpile maple syrup
and begin stockpiling water.
Haha.
- [Maggie] Haha!
- [Bridget] And now I
just need to stockpile,
and we have citrus trees all over.
- [Maggie] I can't wait to start shooting
out water cooler show.
- [Bridget] It's gonna be amazing.
- [Maggie] It's gonna be super fun.
Hope's giving me that look.
- [Bridget] It's time, we're
talking about the apocalypse,
and Hope is here.
- [Maggie] Yep.
- [Bridget] She has a
natural sense of timing
for when people are
like, "okay, wrap it up."
- [Maggie] It's time to stop talking now.
- [Bridget] She's done.
- [Maggie] Well, this is our last podcast
until the new year, so
happy holidays to all.
Have a safe and happy holiday celebration.
- [Bridget] Thanks for
listening to us in 2019.
- [Maggie] Yeah.
- [Bridget] It's been a
challenging year for many of us,
and hopefully, if you're
going through some rough times
or you're lonely, you
know you're not alone.
You can listen to Walk-Ins Welcome.
We're right here with you.
I'm gonna be around over the holidays,
just doing my little thing.
So, take care of yourselves.
- [Maggie] Good things in the new year.
- [Bridget] Get ready for 2020,
'cause it's gonna be a shit show.
(Maggie laughs)
(Bridget laughs)
I'd like to thank this
week's sponsor, Ritual.
Ritual is the obsessively
researched vitamin for women.
Better health doesn't happen overnight,
and right now, Ritual
is offering my listeners
10% off during your first three months.
Visit ritual.com/walkin to
start your ritual today.
That's 10% off during
your first three months
at ritual.com/walkin.
Tune in next week for
another riveting episode
that will change your life,
help you get out of your own way,
and solve all the world's problems.
I wanna thank Ricochet,
our composer Jared Elias,
my co-producer and cousin Maggie,
and all of you out there listening.
This has been Walk-Ins
Welcome with Bridget Phetasy.
I'm Bridget Phetasy, and you're welcome.
(dreamy world music)
(Bridget laughs)
That's the dumbest line.
(both laughing)
