Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - On Shame with author, Jon Ronson

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

In 2015, bestselling author and podcaster, Jon Ronson, published 'You've Been Publicly Shamed', a book exploring how social media changed the way we shame people publicly, while fostering a culture of 'casual cruelty' in which we were all too happy to participate. In this episode, Emma sits down with Jon to discuss how this phenomenon of public shaming has evolved in the 8 years that have passed since the publication of the book, and what Jon makes of our present day public discourse. Invariably, the conversation veers down fascinating rabbit holes as Jon explains how he continues to repeatedly churn out bestsellers, what inspires him to embark on a new investigation and the art of writing non-fiction like fiction. It is truly one of our favourite podcast episodes to date. This episode was sponsored by The Knude Society, aka the female-led sexual pleasure company on a mission to help you enjoy your body, in whatever way feels right for you.  The Knude society has designed two vibrators, as well as a water-based lube, that can help you do exactly that.  Get 15% off when you shop with the Knude society using the code SEXTALKS15.  If you want to join the Sex Talks crew, sign up to Emma-Louise’s substack ‘Swipe Right’ here. And if you'd like to join an upcoming live podcast recording grab your ticket here.

Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more honest, open and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics. Topics like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role of technology is playing in changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuanced and a lot more curiosity. So each week I'll be joined by new guest, whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine, and do, well, just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans about all the stuff we're typically not meant to talk about.

If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my substack, be the link in the show notes, or come to a sex talks live at the London edition hotel. Before we get started, I also want to tell you about this week's podcast sponsor, The Nude Society, aka with female-led sexual pleasure company on a mission to help you enjoy your body in whatever way it feels right for you. Now you know I'm a big advocate for self-pleasure because I really believe there is nothing more empowering

than getting to know your own body. What feels good for you, what you like, and of course what you don't. The New Society has designed two vibrators as well as a water-based lobe that can help you do exactly that. I recently tried their Lenin vibrator, which bends in half so it can stimulate you both internally and externally at the same time.

You love a bit of multitasking, don't we? Suffice to say, I really like this vibrator and think you will too. Get 15% off when you shop with the News Society using the code Sex Talks 15. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. Right, so I'm so excited about this episode. I'm joined by the wonderful John Ronson,

who's a non-fiction author, documentary maker and screenwriter. His books, including them, Adventures with Extremists, the men who stare at goats, It's a psychopath test, lost at sea, so you've been probably shamed. They've all been international bestsellers. While the audible original audio series, which I've been loving, the butterfly effect, went straight to number one, the US and the UK. And the last days of August was released in January 2019

and also became a number one bestselling non-fiction audiobook. John recently wrote and presented Things Fell Apart with a new podcast series for the BBC, which explores the culture wars, and it's totally fascinating. I've been immersed in it in the past couple days. So welcome to the Sex Talks podcast, John. Hey, how are you doing? Really well. And you're speaking to me from New York? Yes, I am in Greenwich Village, where I come to write and just be quiet and on my own. Excellent. So we hear any construction work behind. We know it, so it's a very New York background. Yeah, they're building right the other side of this wall. So I think it's quite likely that suddenly there'll be, incredibly annoying drilling.

Excellent. Always the way of New York. I miss it a lot, so it just takes me back. I'm so pleased to have you on the podcast day. I reached out to you because we've promised sex talks as we delve into lots of taboo topics, specifically around sex, gender, and shame is a topic that comes up

at pretty much every single sex talks event. Only, I think the last event, we had sex therapist Kate Moyle say that shame is the number one emotion associated typically with sex. So it's some topic that comes up all the time. Over the summer, I was reading your book, you've been publicly shamed,

which was written in 20, or came out in 2015. And a topic that I'm already fascinated with, it just totally engrossed me. And I was reading it for the second time, but I think it kind of hit me afresh with this new sex talks shame lens through which I was now reading it. So I really wanted to invite you on

to really delve a little bit deeper into this topic of shame and really, I guess, see where things are at with this topic eight years on from the publication of the book. So I'm going to thrust us back quite a few years and begin by asking what initially made you so interested in this topic of public shaming? Well, honestly, it was to do with moving to New York. I moved to New York and the first year was kind of rough. We moved with all the privileges that

you could possibly have and still it was rough. I found myself, you know, isolating and being homesick and missing my friends and missing London. And I'd go on Twitter and I'd see people being publicly shamed. This was the very earliest days of public shaming before the phrase council cultured had even been invented. This was so early that like everyone was for it, like except for the person being shamed. It was so new and exciting that we had this power. And I found myself, because I was having a rough time in New York,

and I noticed that some of the people being piled in on what were also in New York. And I would like look at them and I think, well, here's someone else unhappy in New York. And I found myself just empathizing with the shames more than the shamers. So, you know, like Kennedy said about the moon landing, sometimes you do things because they're hard. I think I know what he meant because I moved to New York. It was hard. And from that hard experience, I started seeing things in a new way.

So I think that was the very, you know, that was the kernel of it. And I know you've said previously that you always tend to go through a bit of a change in the process of your work, whatever story you're delving into, whoever you're interviewing. And that's kind of really key to the empathy that undergirds the type of journalism that you do. You just kind of stay curious and open to have your mind change in the process of your work. What, I mean, your perspective on public outrage shifted during the writing of this book. Can you talk to us a little bit about that shift? And at what point during your research slash writing, that shift occurred? Right. Well, yeah, at the beginning, I was a keen shamer.

Good to know. I'm talking about the very earliest days here of Twitter, like 2009, 2010. I remember there was this heavily pregnant woman who wanted to. to leave LA Fitness and they wouldn't let her. So we, you know, we made it happen. And, you know, within an hour, LA Fitness obviously didn't know what hit them. Within an hour, they were, you know, begging her to leave. Like, here's your money back.

Because they didn't realize what we did, that power had shifted. And that would happen from time to time. And then something changed. And I think what changed was that we fell in love with our shaming power too much. And instead of getting corporations that had committed actual transgressions or powerful people who were exploiting people,

we started getting like anyone who misspoke, like somebody with 100 Twitter followers who just misspoke, we'd get them. And when I was writing my book, The Psychopath Test, I was becoming more aware of what complicated, you know, the best way to look at another human being is there's a complicated mix of clever and stupid, ethical and cruel, empathetic and unfriendly. You know, we're a mess.

Everyone knows that, except for, you know, a tiny number of people who are just malevolent because they have a personality disorder that makes them that way or whatever. Most of us aren't like that. Most of us are a mess. And what I began to notice on social media was that we weren't seeing our fellow humans that way. We were creating this stage. for constant artificial high drama. Everybody was either, you know, a terrible villain

or the most fantastic hero. And it just wasn't true. And so I started to feel like I've got to say, I've got to do something about this because the way that this, you know, hitherto lovely thing, Twitter was devolving, was entirely at odds with how I felt that human should regard each other. So that's why I wanted to write the book.

And you went in with, I want to say, quite an optimistic view of what the impact of the book could be. So I've heard you say, boy, you thought it could kind of, in a way, the lightning rod to us kind of awaken us to how awful the cesspit of much of online had become and kind of almost shame us in to stop public shaming. But it wasn't quite, you didn't quite get the initial reaction at least. People weren't shamed out of their actions immediately. No, no, the opposite happened. And like I assumed the people reading the book would be, you know, I was writing it for Seamus. I thought everybody would just see it the way I do.

All I need to do is point it out. I remember before the book came out, my American publisher sent me a box of cookies with a card that said, you know, fasten your seatbelt, it's going to be a rocky year. And I like, you know, frowned and emailed him back and said, what do you mean? And he said, some people are going to hate the book. And I thought. No one's going to hate the book. How could they?

I'm right. And sure enough, a lot of people hated the book. And the book wasn't read by the shame as the book was read by the shamed. So, you know, I started noticing that, yeah, I'd get more and more emails from shamed people. I'm sure. And so you add it on a little bit at the end, I think, in a new, I've got a newer version of it, in which you address a lot of the backlash and the shame that you got for the book in the immediate aftermath.

And I was really shocked to read that because I think maybe I read it also quite optimistically at first being like, God, yes. Yeah, it was horror. There was a horrible pushback. A pool at surprise winning critics started slagging the book off in a way that made, on Twitter,

in a way that made me think that she hadn't read it. So I apologetically de-end her, and I said, I can't up thinking that you actually haven't read the book. And this was after she was slagging it off. And she said, oh, I was meaning to. So, you know, for a short period of time, it was fashionable to slate the book.

The reason being that people would say that public shaming was one of the few weapons of the dispossessed. And so if I am criticising public shaming, then I'm criticising the dispossessed. But, you know, that's not what was my intention. And also not what the book was. Also, you know, really, it's something that makes me so happy about that book and about all of my work in general is that it tends to be liked by everyone across the, you know, I mean, there's people who don't like it and me and my work, but the people who do like it are really across the spectrum and a lot of people in the centre and a lot of people like me who are, who are, you know, left-leaning liberals, I suppose. And I also think, God, that's a rare, that's very rare. And I think it's because I'm not ideological.

I'm all about, you know, humans and kind of, you know, empathy and the complexity of humanity. And that's something that seems to unite people across the spectrum. Well, I think also just the way that you write, you do, you bring the reader along with you on your, like, on your, like, curiosity journey. So at no point do you feel like your. being spoken down to or being kind of proselytized to instead. Or manipulated. No, exactly. Instead. And I think that's what really, for me, I read it.

I almost about two days of the summer because I was so gripped. Because I felt like I was in your brain as your view on shame was evolving and you were meeting all these new people and you're really being carried along by their story. And I think I suppose it's also very confronting people. You note in the book, the powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far off places. But now the powerful, crazy, cruel people were us because they're kind of the hate mob online. I think that is quite confronting.

And you realize reading that how I think we all play a participatory role. And actually the dehumanization that exists online of people who become the targets of these kind of mass hate mobs online. And I think when you begin to see yourself or of any involvement you've had in any sort of online Twitter thing, it's confronting, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of shocking to me. You know, in the psychopath test, I was going to say targets, but targets isn't the right word because I'm never targeting people. But, you know, the people I was curious about learning more about

who were behaving in baffling and cruel ways were big corporations or, you know, the more shadowy side of the pharmaceutical industry or psychopaths, psychopaths in positions of power in them, It was all about these secret cabals, like the Bilderberg group and Bohemian Grove that were full of really powerful people. The people abusing their power, in the minister at Goats, it was the military. The people abusing their power in my previous work had been these far away powerful people. And suddenly power shifted in a way that was obviously positive in many ways because a rebalancing of power always has a lot of positive qualities, of course. But also the abuse of power was.

was us. It was us. And yeah, it made me feel a little dispirited, I suppose, about our capacity for casual cruelty and the tricks we play on ourselves. We destroy someone, turns out that they hadn't done it. This happens all the time. I could give you 100 examples. And we never self-reflect. We just move on with our date until we, and it's partly because of just a thrill of, you know, when there isn't somebody to shame, it's like a day treading water or picking fingernails. It's such an intoxicating thing that we play these cognitive tricks on ourselves to get away with, you know, cruelty. John, we're eight years on now from the publication of that book and still enthralled to social media. I feel like the pace of technological change is even faster now.

How do you think the world of online shaming has evolved? and changed in this time. One thing I've noticed that I found surprising and bad. So there's a chapter, and so you've been publicly shamed about Max Mosley, who he's the son of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader. But Max had a much more useful life than his father. He was involved in car safety, a little bit like Ralph Nader, in Formula One.

A lot of people liked Max Mosley. Anyway, one day, somebody said to him, have you seen the front of the news of the world? And he said, no. So we went to the newsstand. And there was a picture of Max in bondage gear, grainy photo, a son of fascist leader, has sick Nazi orgy. And somebody had been secretly recording him having an S&M session at some, a consensual S&M session at some club somewhere. And Max looked at this. And I don't think of me.

I think, you know, immediately he felt bad, like, oh my God, everybody's seen this. My reputation is ruined. But after a little while, he had a really strange, well, he thought, firstly he thought, everybody knows when it comes to sex, people think and say and do strange things, and only an idiot or somebody tricking themselves would pretend that that's not the case about sex. So all of his, you know, Germanic stuff in the orgy, He said, yeah, it's weird, but sex is weird.

And secondly, the orgy may have been German-themed, but there was no Nazism. So he refused to be ashamed, and in fact, he sued the news of the world for... Successfully, yeah, the news of the world, the poor news of the world had to go through every frame of the video pointing out Nazism. So, like they'd say, here's Mr. Moe. having a cup of tea, anything Nazi there? I'd have to go, no. Oh, my gosh. So, Max, anyway, what he said to me was,

and this is the answer to your question, I think. He said, if the, if the shame, I can't remember whether he said at all. I thought, anyway, the thought arose for Max's story, that if a shamee refuses to be ashamed, then the whole thing crumbles. shaming only works if the person will feel ashamed. And he said, I'm refusing to feel ashamed.

He said to me, I don't know if it's because, you know, people sometimes say that maybe I'm a sociopath or something. I don't know whether I'm a sociopath or not, but I can tell you that I'm not feeling ashamed. And because I'm not feeling ashamed, it's all crumbling. And there's another moment, you know, there's nothing they can do. There's nothing ashamedists can do.

And there's another moment in the book where I say, if our shameworthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. So a pop science writer in an ivory tower is much more likely to be deeply shamed for malfeasance and their work than somebody who's just very open about everything. And that's been the big change, I think. I think people refusing to be ashamed

and well, that's the main difference is, you know, Trump would come along and he would just refuse to be ashamed and all sorts of people. Democrats too, Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, was found wearing, you know, they found photographs of him wearing blackface when he was at medical school in his mid-20s and everyone was calling for him to resign. And he was like, no, I refuse to resign. and I refuse to feel ashamed by this.

And everyone was like, oh, all right. And it's partly, I think, the fault of the shame is that we overused our weapon. And it's a little bit like a bug becoming a super bug in hospital, like impervious to treatment. And some people are saying, this is wonderful, you know, like, this is, but it's not wonderful because when we do bad things, we ought to feel bad about this. I'm not advocating for shame-free power.

paradise. We need to feel ashamed if we do bad things. So I think that's been the biggest change. It came from Trump and now everybody's taking a leaf out of Trump's book and now everybody's like Max Mosley, which is good if you haven't done anything wrong and you're like, but it's not good if you have. I thought about this a lot actually in preparing this interview because I obviously thought a lot about Trump and I wondered whether it's also to do with this kind of post-truth culture that he also really initiated in that truth has become kind of quite relative and we're so used to hearing now that like my truth, my experience is this

and that somehow being as though we're all kind of living in our own sphere of truth that we can have our own sphere of truth that is completely separate to someone else's sphere of truth and in a way I wonder if that in itself kind of elides shame because it's like well you may think this is wrong but in my truth, it's not. And so I almost think they're kind of quite combined. And I wonder if that's something that's also been teased out in the work you've done since.

Well, I think that's a great point. And when I agree with a lot, I always really cringe when somebody says, my truth or your truth. Because, you know, there's, you know, for a long time, people have been sort of saying postmodernism can be dangerous. And I think that's an example of it. Personally speaking, I really,

aim as much as I can for evidence-based factual truth and that's been described to me as your truth but it you know but it's it's not my truth it's the closest I can get to the truth and if you flatten what truth means so magical thinking can become truth or ideology you know ideological led, you know, thinking can become truth. If you take away what truth actually means, you've got a world of chaos. And that is the world that we're living in. And it's a very worrying world.

Yeah, I think about that a lot. In fact, pretty much all of season two of things fell apart looks at this. Oh, excellent. Looks at truth. And it wasn't what we intended, but it's what it became. came. And yeah, and my last show, I made a show for the audible called The Deputante, which is very much about that, too, about the search for evidence. In a way, the last days of August was about that, in that, because I think true crime podcasting also falls victim of this,

that's a little bit like being a conspiracy theorist, being a true crime podcaster. So, yeah, I've noticed... Because people set out with a very specific idea of the story that they want to tell, and then they selectively choose the facts that accompany that quite conveniently. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because quite often the truth is kind of boring. So I'd say in this, in the last few stories that I've done, what I'm trying to do is remind people, and I do it in things fell apart, I did it in the debutant, I try to remind people that, you know, the truth may sometimes be a little more boring, but there's a huge importance

and sanctity in reaching for that. I suppose it's also connected with the, I mean, the tension economy that we live in now where everyone's vying for a little snippet of everyone else's attention at all times and there's kind of this like almost like race to the bottom to try and get that little bit of like 50 minutes of fame on social media,

but I think that also does really encourage the replacement of truth as being a priority with just sensationalism. and click-baity sort of culture. And I think that's also, and then also a way, the way that affects shame, though, I think is quite interesting because I think in a way we've,

the news cycle and the kind of constant stream of content now coming out online on social media, it's so fast pace, there's almost kind of not really enough time to like sit too long on a specific story or person's shame. I mean, just I was thinking like Lizzo the other day, publicly shame,

but for having apparently treated her whole team terribly. front line, you know, headlines everywhere, all over social media. Within days, I don't think a single person remembered the story because we moved on. Yeah, I completely forgot about it until he just reminded me. Honestly, so. I mean, I think there might also have been a settlement that happened behind scenes and hence why the headlines stopped for that. But I wonder also, I mean, Twitter is obviously so much the forefront of the stories of shame

that you explore in the book. and I guess because we've never really had a social media platform at the scale that Twitter facilitated that sort of cross-cultural conversation and the story around Justin Sacco was particularly notable in that and suddenly you had like the world watching on Twitter as this woman was on her airplane waiting for her to land and find out that she was a number one hate symbol

because of a tweet that she'd sent out. In light of Elon Musk having been taken on Twitter, we know it's dropped by when users have dropped by back. over 10% now and it looks like it's beginning, you know, for better and for worse, on a bit of a decline. Do you think that also completely changes the landscape in which public discourse takes place and specifically sort of public shaming? I mean, it would be interesting to see if everybody moves over to blue sky, will it quickly become... The same thing. Yeah. I mean, it won't, blue sky will never become Elon Musk's Twitter, but it could easily become the previous

Twitter, which was bad, you know, which had its faults in different ways. Elon Musk managed to swoop in and take over in the nefarious way that he did in part because of the mistakes that, you know, people on our side of the fence were making previously. I would say that Elon Musk Twitter is way, way, way worse than the pre-Elon Twitter. But that wasn't great either. So, you know, it's possible that, you know, we'll start, everyone will start afresh on blue sky, but it will then, you know, quickly devolve into being, you know, sanctimonious and the way that it was before Ilombas took over and so on.

It's just a mess. I think the main problem is that ideology, really going back to what you said about your, our truth, ideology has become, maybe we're living in a not ideological enough world in the 90s. I mean, just look at all the stuff that's coming out ever since the Russell Brand revelations about, you know, this world that we all sleepwalked through in the early 2000s with. loaded, and everybody thought, okay, this is a bit distasteful. But looking back at it now, it's like, whoa. It's shocking.

You can't believe that we watched that and laughed at any point. Absolutely. So you could certainly argue that the, you know, that the sort of rise of ideology in that wake was for good reason, because this, you know, amoral world that we all lived in the 90s of the early 2000s was, you know, got pretty, what's the word? Dispo, dystopia, dystopic. Yeah, very dystopic very quickly. But, you know, like a pendulum swinging, now people are way too much in love with ideology,

over-evidence-based journalism. And so whoever's in charge of Twitter or any of the social media platforms, you know, this evidence-free ideology seems, to be, you know, consuming it and poisoning the waters, whether it's coming from the left or the right. And, you know, the night of Justine Saka, when she was on a plane, one of the things that I found most shocking, really felt like the world shifted that night when she was on the plane. And one of the things I found most shocking was the very, very few people, including Helen Lewis, actually, from the Atlantic, who like popped their head up from behind the parapet

and said, can we not just wait for her plane to land to find out what she meant by that joke? They were taught to shreds, and so they all went silent. And what was happening, when people were saying, can we just wait for her plane to land? What people were saying, really, was, can we just wait for evidence? Can we just be a little bit patient and wait for evidence? And patience and a call for evidence were considered weak that night. It was weakness. We know what she's like.

We don't need to wait for evidence. We know what she's like. So that's a perfect example of ideology trumping evidence and the chaos that ensues as a result. I suppose that's my way of saying, you know, I don't know if anything's going to change it. While ideology is more important to people than evidence, we're not going to have a better world.

You close the book by saying that one of the kind of often of this shaming culture is that the safest option, a bit like you've just said that with regards to people like Helen Lewis, is to just say bland things, to say nothing of great substance from an online perspective. And I wonder, with this benefit of hindsight, eight years on, do you think our public discourse has become more bland and perhaps more homogenised in that people are like kind of play it safe

by perhaps just saying what they think it's safe to say or like, you know, taking on a specific identity online, molding to the influencer style on Instagram or something. Do you think that has happened as a result of the public shaming? I'd say that's definitely happening, but also the opposite is happening to an extent. Like the night of Justine Sacco, everyone was too scared to say anything to support her.

And that has changed a little bit. I think, you know, partly to an extent because of, you know, my book and straight after my book came out, Monica Lewinsky. Actually, Monica Lewinsky's TED Talk was slightly before my book, but it was in the same month. And there suddenly were people coming out like me and Monica saying, oh, there's dangers here. And the discourse began to change. And now I would say if somebody is being ambiguously shamed, there's much more of a back and forward pro and ante than there was before. So that's, in many ways, positive. It's also negative because people just become so entrenched in their ideology.

You see this with the gender wars. Everyone's so entrenched in, you know, whichever side of it that they're on. Then it's just constant shouting and nothing, nothing coming from that. So, again, positive and negative, I suppose. Time for a quick ad break to remind you of this week's podcast sponsor, the New Society, aka the female-led sexual pleasure company, on a mission to help you enjoy your body in whatever way feels right for you.

Self-pleasure is key to getting to know your body better and the New Society have designed two vibrators as well as a water-based lobe that can help you do exactly that. The Lenin Vibrator, which is the one I recently tried out, bends in half so you can use it to stimulate yourself both internally and externally. Excellent if you're looking to explore that G-spot. I love this vibrator and think you will too. Get 15% off when you shop with the News Society

using the code Sex Talks 15. I've included a link in the show. Okay, back to the show. I suppose also it's just easier than ever to exist in your echo chamber. Even just in terms of what social media platform you live on, what kind of means of communication you decide to be the ones you focus on. It's just so much easier than ever to get up to be in that kind of stratified online space, I suppose. Yeah, and people, people, that's, it's so negative.

Because if you've done something wrong that you should feel bad about, And then you find yourself in an echo chamber of people who are cheering you on, like flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Yeah. And you're not going to, you're not going to learn. We're not just speaking and learning. And that thing you say about the importance of curiosity. And when contempt and judgment replaces curiosity for how we interact with other people

and how we perceive difference, I think we're in a really terrible position because we're then just, we are just kind of shouting across the aisle. We're not actually communicating and learning and seeking to understand. Yeah, and history, the recent history has shown that those things don't work. You know, de-platforming people kind of doesn't work. Trying to yell people into agreeing with you doesn't work. The only thing that really works is curiosity, a willingness to listen to other people, a willingness to learn.

If you fill your head with cold, angry judgment, there's no room for those things. There's no room for curiosity. Like I understand the arguments about de-platforming and so on, but I just don't think they work. No. I don't think they work. I mean, just look at the de-platformed.

I mean, they're finding their spaces and they're getting more and more angry. Shame. Somebody pointed this out to me the other day. You know, being shamed has a massive impact on your psychological. psychologically huge. Naomi Wolfe seemed to tumble down the rabbit hole just when she had been shamed for something. I can think of lots and lots of people who become radicalized. You know, you lose them down the rabbit hole in the immediate aftermath of them being shamed for something.

So that's another, that's another example of why shaming has a lot of negative consequences, it's because it tends to just make people double down. Well, I suppose it's just that ostracizing people from the community and then they find there's almost a kind of extremism gets bred in that space of the like kind of the space beyond acceptable society. And if we just kind of throw people out and kind of disown them and then expect everything to be fine. Yeah, I should say yes.

I even noticed that way back in like 2012, 2013 when I was writing the book. Some kid would go on Twitter, say, something that comes out wrong, you know, not some horrible person, just somebody makes a mistake. The left would like cast them out and who would be waiting with open arms the right, Milo Yianopoulos, you know, Mike Cernovich, people like that would say, come to us, we'll accept you, we'll have you. And so you see all of these left-wing people, liberals or centrist, lurching to the right because the right are the ones who were accepting them. And so their beliefs then get, you know, coarser and they become angrier and crazier

because it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's, it's, making them feel welcome. I do think it's often. I mean, you know, card carrying lefty, but I think the left, we shoot ourselves in the foot by being too puritanical sometimes and I've used. I, I agree. I am also a card carrying lefty and I feel the same way. I remember somebody saying to me, I don't know if this is true, and it's slightly contentious, but someone. said when the right shame you, it's horrific, but it's quite short-lived. But when the left shame you, they'll go on and on about it for like years. Let's zoom out. Actually, I really want to ask about the inception of the ideas for your other bits of works. You've written across such

a broad genre of topics and managed to find the most fascinating stories, as I say, just across the board, crossing so many different genres. And I'm really curious to know what tends to be the genesis of the ideas that then prompt a new project view. I was just listening to an interview did about discussing the genesis of the butterfly effect. And it was one look in amongst a receptionist that precipitated that. So I wonder, maybe we could zoom in on that one as a kind of example. Right. That is a good example, because that was about self-delusion and hypocrisy and cruelty. But the person who was being self-deluded, hypocritical and cruel,

she seemed like kind of a nice guy. So I'll tell you the story very quickly. It was when I was writing saying, you've been publicly shamed. And somebody said to me on Twitter, Connor Habib, a former porn star who's now a writer living in Dublin, messaged me and said, you're writing a book about shame?

Have you ever thought about doing anything about shame and pornography? There's all these porn sets, which are all about people working out their own feelings of shame in porn scenarios. So I did. He introduced me to a dominatrix called Princess Donna. And I went to her shoot, Public Disgrace, it was called. Oh, I've read about this.

Yeah. It was in a bar. It was very late at night. And I was on New York time, and this was in L.A. And anyway, a woman gets, you know, porn star called Jody Taylor. She gets pulled into the bar and somebody has sex with her and everybody in the bar is supposed to like jeer and, you know, so on. And it's her working out the thing that she would find most shameful if it happened in real life

and it de-shames it by, you know, doing it in a sort of safe porn environment. What was quite sweet was that, you know, they'd got all these, you know, to be, to pretend to be the surprised people in the bar. And they were like, you know, shout out abusive things. You know, shout out, shout things out. And nobody could think of anything. This one guy in a, you know, in a beanie hat, shouted out, put ice on her tooth. That was the only to think of to be like a few.

Anyway, it was an exhausting night. I can totally imagine. You've got to lie. one a m and i was so tired and so and i'm i was thinking to myself you know please ejaculate so i can go to bed and go to sleep and i thought god or not way i'm like probably thousands of women before me please ejaculate so this could i can go to sleep anyway familiar thought yeah it's funny there is an episode of public disgrace out there where There's me, there's me all tweedy and owl-like taking notes in the corner,

which is bound to, like, unless you've got a very odd taste, that's going to ruin some people's erotic ambience. I got up thinking, nobody wants to tweedy, owl-like journalist in the corner of their porn film. You never know. People's kinks are wide-ranging. Anyway, so then, so I was going to meet. Princess Donna, I think the next day or whatever. And I was in my room. This was at the Chateau Marmont. And the receptionist phoned up and said, you know, your guest is here. So I went downstairs and everybody in the lobby was dressed exactly like I'm dressed in her, you know, muted James

purse t-shirts and hoodies and so on, except for Princess Donna, who was dressed. Who was just like a, you know, great, mad peacock, you know, in a very tight dress and, you know, very colourful, very, you know, high heels and so on. And I looked over at the, I was walking, I walked towards her and I glanced over at the receptionist. And he was looking at her and the look on his face was, was contempt. He was looking at her with contempt. And I remember thinking, I bet she would, I bet, you know, you'd be fine with her on your laptop, but not in your vicinity. So it was the hypocrisy of that that made me think, I don't really know anything about porn people in their lives and their concerns. I just don't know anything about them. And I always

want to solve mysteries too. So that moment had had it all, really. It had mystery. It had this sort of combination between something happening on the fringe and something happening in mainstream society. That seems to be in my work quite. lot too, that I go to the edge of society, but being on the edge of society is a really interesting way to stand with them and look back at mainstream society. So it's never, you know, the bad version of what people like me and Louis Theroux and John Safran and various other people do, the bad version of it is, is going to the fringes of society to mock people. Like I never do that. I want to go to the finches of society and I'd be curious and

understand them and try and see our world through their eyes, maybe we'll learn something new. So all of that was in that moment. And in that one moment, so something as small as that one moment, seeing that kind of that flicker of that glance of that receptionist and his disdain, is that then quite typical in terms you'll have that one moment in this kind of fringe society situation, as you just described, that then precipitates kind of you fall down a research rabbit hole that then becomes the book, the project. and how much research are you then doing that doesn't become that?

How many rabbit holes do you fall down that maybe don't end up being the best-seller book that we read? Sadly, a lot, because I think other things have to happen. So something like that look is enough to put me down the rabbit hole. But then I think a few things have to happen once you're down the rabbit hole. You need to be surprised. There needs to be mystery. You need to think, oh, you know, I didn't expect that. And also, you need to find stories that kind of connect with each other.

other. So in my book then, for instance, my first book, I spent a year with a militant Islamist, Oma Bakri Muhammad, and he was a conspiracy theorist. He said there was a shadowy cabal secretly ruling the world from inside a secret room. And then later on, I was with the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas. And they were conspiracy theorists, too. They said the same thing about a secret room. This was back in the 90s when people weren't really thinking about the relationship between political extremism and conspiracy theories. But here was a connection between these two stories. I didn't think would be connected. So that was the wind behind myself writing them.

I thought, okay, here's something that these two stories have in common. Maybe I should hook up with conspiracy theorists and we'll find the secret room and then when we get in, we'll confront the Illuminati going about their covert wickedness. And then I thought, well, I don't know what's going to happen if I'd go off of that journey, for that journey, but whatever happens is bound to be interesting. So that's another good place to

be. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's bound to be interesting. And at the point, do you, when you're beginning the book, when you're beginning the podcast series, do you have a thesis in terms of what you think you will be setting out to explore? Or are you, the way the book, so for example, you've been publicly shamed, the way it reads, you really are going on this journey with you. You are following your points of curiosity. And I wonder how much that is actually, you are genuinely uncovering things as you go along versus you do set out with a bit of a thesis to begin with that then kind of unfurred in myriad ways. Well, if I do set out with a thesis, you've got to hold it lightly. Like you've got to be very willing to end up thinking the opposite to that thesis.

So one example is with the psychopath test. At the beginning of that book, I want to be, you know, a keen psychopath hunter. So I want to learn how to hunt psychopaths and then journey into the corridors of power trying to, you know, use my new psychopath spotting skills to spot psychopaths in boardrooms and so on. And the first half of the book is that. But then slowly I start to think, you know, actually, you know, becoming a psychopath spotter is turning me a little bit psychopathic and my desire to just reduce people to diagnose it, you know, to a checklist of symptoms. that's kind of psychopathic too. So then the book sort of mutates into being a sort of critique of like when does,

when do mental health labels stop being helpful? Can, you know, be like Nietzsche with the abyss, you know, kind of looking at psychopaths turn you a little bit psychopathic and so on. So if I ever do have a sort of thesis at the beginning, I particularly like it if I completely like it, if I completely threw away the thesis and come up with the opposite thesis halfway through

because then you're on an arc, you're on a journey. That's what you want from a novel, so you should want it from a non-fiction book too. I really love that because I think that for anyone, there's lots of writers and budding authors I know who come to sex talks and who listen to this, I think there can be a pressure to feel like your ideas need to be bound up and you have all the insight,

all the knowledge before you set out on writing something or exploring a topic that you have to have all the answers. And I think that is evidence sometimes in quite a few books I've been reading recently where I feel like actually you haven't necessarily given yourself the freedom to really explore. You've been kind of almost straightjacketed by your own kind of idea on the topic. And I do think when you can actually give yourself permission to be curious, what comes out is so much more, is so much richer. I couldn't agree more. It's a bad habit. of non-fiction writers to do that, maybe there's a little bit of fear that we want to be seen to be authoritative. But actually, you know, not being authoritative, being a bit stupid, being

an unreliable narrator, changing your mind. Those are likable things. I was just going to say, also it gives you cliffhangers. Like if you're, you know, it gives you cliffhangers, it gives you big changes, all the things that you want from a story. In the way you've just described that, it feels, and I guess this is the way your books read, that you approach nonfiction as if it were fiction in a way, those devices like the unreliable narrator, which are such brilliant devices that I think are so powerful

that keep fiction so, that keep you so hooked to a great story when it's fiction, that I think get lost so often in nonfiction. It don't need to be. And I think often because of the pressure on people to be the expert. I always thought it kind of dispersing if, you know, when I pick up a non-fiction book, and in the first chapter, they say, this is what I'm going to tell you in this book. And you wouldn't, you wouldn't do that. When you think, shut it? I'm done. Now I know. I didn't need to read it. You gave me the

quickest book in the first chapter. Exactly. Imagine reading a novel when it says, okay, in this novel, this twist is going to happen, and then that's going to happen. It's like, no, let it unfold. Completely. It's a weird, for some reason, journalists, I don't know if we've, if we're trained this way or whatever, but we, you know, we care more about the information than we do about the way we tell the story. And I think there's nothing wrong. You know, I grew up with Tom Wolf's new journalism and Haddress Thompson and, you know, Joe Esther House, all of these like great, Joan Didion, these people who would play with nonfiction, Lynn Barber, you know, the great profile writer. These are people who play with the form a little bit and, you know, they

know what to leave unsaid. Leaving things unsaid is one of the most important parts of writing. And so I grew up loving that kind of stuff. You know, Kurt Vonnegut wrote nonfiction where he does all of that. So yeah, that's why I do it because I was so wildly in awe of the people who I loved growing up who did it. And we are coming towards the end of the episode. So I am going to wrap us up. But I've just got one final question. I know you've described. You describe yourself, I think, in jest, but it's now been forever more emotionalized on Wikipedia as the style of journalism being Le Nouvelle egotiste style journalism, which I heard you say that at an interview and promptly Googled it. And I love now, it has a Wikipedia page,

kind of very earnestly saying this is a style of journalist, I think describes it as it is a grouping of documentary filmmakers who make films where they see them, where they themselves are featured. This is against the grain of more traditional documentary film, which mainly of your voyeuristic observation. So you've created a genre of journalism. I think it was, if I remember rightly, it was sight and sound, which is such a fancy, fancy, you know, magazine.

And they wanted me to write something about Nick Broomfield, I think it was. And, yeah, I thought, well, I'm writing for sitem sound. So I might as well come up with a French sounding genre. So, yeah, so I called us Les Neuvel Egotis. And, yeah, caught on. But I wonder how much then, And just to wrap us up, how much you feel your style of journalism and that Nouvelle-Egotis style journalism has changed and evolved

over the course of your very illustrious career? I'm definitely more, I've noticed that I'm moving more and more like inwards to mainstream society. You know, the psychopath test was much more about our world than many sthetic goats was. And so you've been publicly shamed as even more about our world. than so you've been publicly shamed was. Sorry, then the psychopath test was. So, yeah, so I'm moving more and more into the cruelties

and the absurdities of everyday life as opposed to some strange place all the way over there. I think that's been the biggest change. I think Louis has probably gone through a similar journey too. That's Louis through the other documentary maker, who's also the New Valley Doty. And why is that shift happen? Why are you more interested in those stories?

Definitely feels... Speaking personally, I remember I was always, like, wildly impressed. I used to know Nick Hombie pretty well. We lived in Iceland, you know, I both lived in Islington, and I'd say my arsenal sometimes. And I'd read his novels, and I was one novel, this is like such a weird thing to get really hooked on. but there's a particular novel that Nick Cornby wrote where the Great Day Newmont, the big final scene, was in the basement of a Starbucks.

And he pointed out, I don't know if it's the same now, but definitely in the early days of Starbucks. Nobody ever went into the basement. They had all the seating of the basement, and nobody ever went in there. Like, people who sat on the ground floor, but the basements of the Starbucks were always, like, really empty. I don't know why that was when it was the case.

Anyway, he created this, you know, incredibly powerful, but very human and small scene in the basement of a Starbucks on Upper Street. And I just remember reading that and just being wildly impressed and thinking, you know, I go off to, you know, Ku Klux Klan compound or, you know, these, you know, jihad training camp. And yeah, I sort of humanise what I see there, but I've still got the ease of going to somewhere that's immediately interesting and exciting. and maybe what Nick Cornby's doing in the basement at Starbucks is better in a way

because he's taking something so ordinary and making it so riveting. And I don't know whether that was the reason why I started to move more and more in, but it was definitely something that was on my mind a lot. Like I want to be able to write really well about us, not about them. I guess it's also seeing the magic in those really, small moments and those kind of non-descript, those non-events. Even I mean, just thinking of that, that I keep, I have that and kind of bust my mind. Just you seeing that flicker of disdain of that receptionist. It's such a small human moment that's not a big event. It's not a big

thing, but it's so telling. And it's so leads you down to such a fascinating rabbit hole. I agree. It might be a better art. Like I'm not saying that I don't, and in fact, I'm doing some writing now on a new book where I do go to a pretty extraordinary place and meet a pretty extraordinary person. So it's not like, you know, something that's not like our world at all. So I'm not saying that I don't do it anymore. And there are good things to find to be found in these very mysterious sort of tiger, yeah, Tiger King type places. But yeah, there's something particularly mature, I think, about, about making the ordinary extraordinary as opposed to what I do quite a lot,

which is make the extraordinary quite ordinary. Well, what a wonderful note to end on. John, thank you so much. This has been totally fascinating. And I mean, I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since we put it in the diary. I've just to say, I absolutely love your work. And I think the way you approach storytelling is just unparalleled.

So really thank you. And we can now come and learn from you in one of your workshops. Yeah, I'm coming over. How can we write like you? Okay, well, first, I could I say that? I thought I was a great interview and I thought all your questions were like really good and I really enjoyed talking to you.

Oh, thank you, sir. That means a lot. Well, and I mean it. And second, yeah, I'm doing five writing workshops in November. Excellent. A lot of the stuff we talked about is the kind of stuff that I'm going to be talking about in those writing workshops, how you find stories,

you know, when you know you've got a story. So anyway, London, Edinburgh. Dublin, Bristol and Manchester. They're all middle of November. If you go into any of my social media, there's like a link in my bio. I'll put a link in the show notes as well, actually. Oh, thank you.

Anyone to come with me, I will be booking into one, so you can come along with me. Oh, excellent. And yeah, London's sold out already. The others aren't. And yeah, please come. You will, absolutely. Well, thank you so much your time.

I really appreciate it. And yes, everyone, go and just consume all the fantastic stuff you've got out there. As I said, the BBC series I've been listening to, which is your latest piece of work, has been riveting, so I can definitely recommend that the starters. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me,

your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the Eventbrate link in the show notes, as we have a lot of exciting live events coming up. In the meantime, don't forget to submit whatever ag-down question you'd like us to tackle on a future podcast episode via

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