Beard New World

A short look inside the eggy egotism of Evgeny Lebedev's vanity podcast.

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Previously: School-branded holographic litter trays
'Britain's strictest teacher' and her school's ban on 'prayer rituals' are irresistible to newspaper columnists who want to do a little bit of Islamophobia as a treat.

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O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! 
O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

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Evgeny Lebedev has launched a podcast. Of course, he has. While he already owns two newspapers — The Independent and The Evening Standard — a truly tasteless modern art collection, and a pub with Gandalf, Lebedev couldn’t truly be the modern pseud he aches to be without a podcast. A man so thoroughly bamboozled by Elon Musk inevitably craves the opportunity to be the Siberian Joe Rogan, Russell Brand without the accusations, Stephen Bartlett with a less dubious claim to vast net worth.

Having spent years inserting himself into the pages of The Evening Standard — pictured curled around celebrities with all the hypnotic creepiness of Kaa in The Jungle Book or interviewing them like a sub-par Newsround press packer — Lebedev has now taken advantage of the newspaper’s brand to launch Brave New World. The podcast, seemingly named with no thought to the irony in Shakespeare’s first use of the phrase or the even heavier layer applied by Aldous Huxley in his novel, aims to pitch Lebedev as a ‘thinker’, albeit the kind of thinker who doesn’t get further than Malcolm Gladwell-influenced section of the airport bookshop.

Brave New World has wracked up three episodes so far with Lebedev talking to the physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté; “intellectual dark web” philosopher Sam Harris; and Dr David Sinclair, the anti-ageing researcher, who he sets loose on David Walliams in an attempt to reduce the comedian/’author’/irritant’s biological age. Each episode begins with a portentous monologue from the Lord of Siberia. He rumbles away sounding like a Russian-accented rock polisher, attempting to imbue his stereotypical rich guy obsessions — ‘health and wellness’, ‘free speech’ (for other rich guys like him), and talking ponderously with celebrities — with a sense of importance.

But Lebedev doesn’t do terribly well at preventing the thin veneer of intellectualism from cracking. When he compares Maté to Freud or expresses his admiration that the good doctor’s Instagram following outstrips even that of… Kate Moss, you’re reminded that money can’t buy taste or talent. Lebedev chooses his guests like he selects art; Walliams and Stephen Fry are human equivalents of the Fuck Face, the Chapman Brothers’ penis-nosed child statue that sits in his office — expensive but tacky signifiers of his wealth and relevance.

While he poses in the podcasts as a philosophical explorer, Lebedev lets the cracks in his eggshell ego show often. In his write-up of the Maté episode, he writes:

Media pile-ons are never pleasant (by no means a stranger to them myself), but for Maté it brought old trauma home to roost. 

There’s a lot going on in those parentheses: Lebedev, a pampered princeling given a newspaper group to play with while he was still in his twenties, has not suffered from “media pile-ons" but those other rather more endangered forms of press attention — scrutiny and accountability. His life peerage was gifted to him as a reward for the Evening Standard backing Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty and subsequent stint in Downing Street. He’s since used the Lords for nothing more than publicising celebrity interviews and creating one of Britain’s most wide-screen business cards (‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’ is pricey if you’re paying by the character). Where he sees pile-ons and Russophobia, others see cronyism and a howling moral vacuum.

Who is Lebedev’s podcast for? The only possible answer is… himself. Who else wants to hear him have a listless discussion with Stephen Fry about health regimes? Or the clumsy ‘banter’ between Lebedev and David Williams. When Dr David Sinclair reveals that Walliams has low testosterone, Lebedev chuckles, “It explains a lot.” Walliams laughs along through gritted teeth, audibly keen to keep his tame newspaper baron on side, perhaps as insurance should [redacted] resurface. Often, Lebedev’s audio sounds as though it was recorded at the bottom of the barrel being scraped.

The empty tears of Lord Lebedev

Lebedev is interesting only because of what he owns and what his KGB agent father did. He is a boring man who strains his every sinew and turns his every resource to persuading the rest of us that he’s fascinating. When he writes…

I have been a lucky student of these initiatives and explored their potential by making changes to my own life. I begin every day with Hof’s breathing exercises. Then I work out following an ice-cold plunge. I meditate, and have used psilocybin and ayahuasca and experienced the wonderment which they bring to the mind.

… he expects us to wonder at his uniqueness but the things he lists would come bundled in the box with Plutocrat Ken (“Look at his miniature ice bath! His teeny tiny bag of mushrooms! His ludicrously expensive little meditation hut (sold separately)!”) Lebedev picks up these fads and put them down again with the lazy ease of every dilettante in history; he’s just rich enough to grab people too and play with them like extremely detailed action figures.

In his article launching Brave New World (podcast), Lebedev quotes the novel from which he is so inelegantly taking inspiration:

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Bernard Marx put it thus: “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” I am lucky to have known such passion from a young age — and it is this passion that is behind The Standard’s new podcast, named after Huxley’s great book, and out tomorrow. I have long-held admiration for those eager to change the game. My guests on Brave New World are just that. Gabor Maté, who kicks things off, is transforming the way we tackle mental illness. Wim Hof, up later on, is an extreme athlete whose method of cold water immersion is providing relief for millions around the world.

Bernard Marx’s quote is from a scene in which he delivers a mournful and self-aggrandising monologue while Lenina, a self-described “pneumatic” lovely, who he’s been sleeping with looks on baffled. There’s an inadvertent irony in Lebedev, a man of privilege and status who still can’t shake off the overwhelming fug of absurdity that clings to him, relating so closely to Marx, a character who is only the focus of the novel until the more interesting John the Savage enters the frame.

Marx is an outsider within the elite who oscillates between bragging and whining, thinks of himself as a great rebel but is craven before his ‘superiors’, and shows little in the way of courage or creativity. Lebedev could be looking in a mirror, but he’s too distracted to realise, perhaps by all those celebrity big brains he’s interviewing, but more likely by his beard.

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