Blocked and Reported · Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Episode 297: Throuple Trouble (with Helen Lewis)

February 28, 2026·1 hr 22 min·5 clips

Helen Lewis frames the BAFTAs slur as two competing rights with no magical third option.

Helen Lewis gets the spare chair. Katie sets up the visit with a custody joke, Pacific Northwest distance angst, and the practical snag of not getting to England soon. Jesse is elsewhere in San Francisco, backseat driving a Waymo, which gives the episode a looser guest-room feel. Helen slides from travel chat into the odd machinery of British political feuds. Rupert Lowe becomes the main case. Helen describes him as a former Reform figure, now outside Nigel Farage's party, trying to build another party with a very familiar name. Elon Musk stays in the background. The story turns on Musk boosting Lowe, Farage pushing back on Tommy Robinson, and right-wing factional drama getting pulled into platform politics. The media complaint gets skewered without much strain. Lowe, as Helen describes it, wants journalists to cover his claims while keeping them out of the sessions where those claims are made. Katie checks the American angle. What surprises her is that allegations making noise on her timeline do not seem to show up the same way in her searches. Helen keeps it brisk. She treats the whole thing less like a grand ideological puzzle and more like a study in ego, access, and attention. The episode still sounds like the show. There is banter before business, self-aware guest worship, and enough meta-podcast framing that the detours feel built in. The title's throuple trouble arrives near the end. By then, the conversation has drifted into a comic worry about novelty, domestic logistics, bed size, and how many partners one household can handle. Katie owns her basicness plainly. The joke lands because the episode has already set up a rhythm where personal taste, politics, and online absurdity keep cutting across each other. Helen fits the room. She can go long on British political context, then let one strange detail do the work.

As heard by us

Katie Herzog and Helen Lewis turn a messy British right-wing feud and throuple chatter into brisk, skeptical media criticism.

Blocked and Reported brings Katie Herzog and Helen Lewis together for a loose, skeptical tour through online politics, media suspicion, and the culture-war weirdness around Episode 297's throuple theme.

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Why you'd press play

For a loose guest chat that settles into a detailed look at the Rupert Lowe, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk fallout.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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