The Blindboy Podcast - Jon Ronson on Conspiracy, Masculinity and Writing

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

I chat with Jon Ronson, who is a bestselling author, journalist, documentary maker and podcaster. A master of immersive nonfiction. His work has consistently been ahead of the curve, exploring extremism, conspiracy, public shaming and the culture wars long before they became mainstream concerns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dangl from the jangly balcony, you scandalous Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. So familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. This week's podcast, I think, you don't need to familiarize yourself with the lore. This is a very straightforward podcast this week. Because I'm having a wonderful chat with one of my fucking heroes.

John Ranson. He's an internationally best-selling author. He's a journalist, he's a documentary maker, he's done screenwriting. What I adore about John Ranson is his skill is a storyteller. His ability to find a riveting story within factual information without needing to retreat into fiction. I've been consuming John's work in one way or another since I was a teenager. Fences are if you're listening to this podcast, you're already a John Ransson fan. And if you're not familiar with him, you are familiar with his work. Because, like some of his books, like the men who stare at goats, was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster called The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney.

He's been consistently way ahead of the curve when it comes to putting his finger on the fabric of culture. identifying the zeitgeist. He's the first person to like identify and highlight the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the documentary The Secret Rulers of the World

which I watched when I was a teenager I came out think in the year 2000 that documentary would have been the first time that I encountered like the Illuminati conspiracy theories things which unfortunately now are just mainstream news and I speak to John about that, I speak to him about, when I, when I was a kid, conspiracy theories

were fun. They were, they felt safe, they were enjoyable, they were interesting. You had the X-files. It was okay to be interested in UFOs in Bigfoot. If you were interested in these things, they weren't necessarily a dog whistle that you had maybe more extremist or dark or racist beliefs, they were just a bit of crack. It was okay to speak about these things without needing to distance yourself from them. I'm talking about the... The time when The X-Files was the biggest TV show, or you could pick up a copy of a ridiculous newspaper called Weekly World News, the monoculture.

When we understood what information was reliable and from a trusted source and what information was ridiculous, before algorithms. So me and John sat down for 90 minutes and had the best crack in the whole world and chatted about everything and anything. Check out any of John's work. His books, The Psychopath Test, So You've Been Publicly Shamed,

which came out in 2015, I believe, which was, again, one of the first pieces about what would become known as cancel culture. And John is on, he's on, this week because he has a new book out right now called DeCasa. I'm halfway through it because it just came out. It's a banger.

It's about alienation, male alienation, online radicalisation, and like a crisis of purpose and meaning right now. Any of John's audiobooks that I've listened to over the years or podcast that he's made have been a massive influence on how I make my podcast. His work helped to show me how to tell a story over an audio medium. John Ranson.com is his website if you want to check out all his crack. J-O-N, not J-O-H-N, John Ranson. So anyway, I'm literally just about to leg it for a flight right now.

I'm heading over to London to do some promotional work for the upcoming tour of England, Scotland and Wales, which is next month. I'm hoping I can get even an hour. to flake into a museum for a tiny bit of downtime but it's unlikely I think I'm going to be incredibly busy the chat I had with John it's so much crack I don't want to interrupt it I want to leave it run through so I'm going to do the ocarina pause right now before I get into the chat that I had with John Ranson first off Patreon if you're a regular listening to this podcast if you enjoy it if it brings you mirth merriment a sense of routine distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast. Please consider funding the podcast directly

because this is a listener funded podcast. This is my full-time job. This is how I rent up my office, purchase my equipment, pay my bills. Most importantly, how I have the time and space to do what I do to deliver a podcast each week and maintain consistency because I adore. I fucking love and adore this work. If you see me on Instagram this week, I'm trying to make short form video on Instagram, which I'm trying to find a way to make it enjoyable to do what I do each week here, but in a shorter format for Instagram videos.

But what makes it difficult is the facial aspect of it. When I show up here and I'm just speaking into a microphone, it's just my voice. Or when I write a book, when I write a collection of short stories, when it's words, I feel very relaxed and it's easy for me to access a state of flow. But when it comes to recording video content, even when it's about a subject that I'm deeply passionate about, I think it's because I'm an autistic person. The extra effort and cognitive load of recording my facial expressions. being aware of my eye movements, being aware of am I making eye contact with the camera lens, looking at my own expressions. That's not my comfort zone.

As an autistic person, that is an area of difficulty. So it's harder for me to reach flow state and effortlessly enjoy the process of making Instagram videos, even when it's about subject matter that I'm deeply interested in. and it's something I learned about myself this week when I was trying to do it. I made an eight-minute video on Instagram about some of the topics that I covered last week and the process was so much more painstaking and so much more effort and frustration because I'm in the land of facial expressions rather than here where I'm in the land of pure fucking audio joy.

But here's the thing with creativity and any work. It's wonderful when you can identify why something is difficult or why something is frustrating because once you can identify it then you can work on it through practice but anyway if you do enjoy this podcast this houral experience

consider supporting it directly all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it and for that you get four podcasts and if you can't afford that don't worry about it just listen listen for free

listen for free because everybody gets the exact same experience whether you pay or not and the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free and if you are paying you're paying for someone else who might not be able to afford to pay and that's enough for me to be able to earn a living

and show up and do the work so I adore that model I absolutely love it and I'd never change it so that's patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast And if you're a new person signing up, don't sign up for Patreon on the Apple app on your iPhone because Apple take 30%.

So if you're a new patron, sign up on a browser because Apple are greedy bastards. Upcoming gigs next month. My biggest ever tour of England, Scotland and Wales, kicking it off on the Brighton Dome on the 18th of October, which is nearly sold out. Cardiff in Wales and the 2nd.

20th Coventry the Warwick Art Centre in Coventry on the 21st of October then over to Bristol Bristol's looking like it's going to sell out soon at Beacon Hall

Guildford then in G-Live I've never been to Guildford I'm looking forward to that I'm a day off in London I'm going to haunt the fucking British Museum I'm going to haunt it and if I'm not

completely burnt out from all those gigs I might chance a little fucking podcast, a little walk-around podcast in the British Museum. I would love to do that. I can't promise it because I'll have done four or five gigs

and I might just need a day to not talk at all. On the 26th of October then, London, Barbican Hall, that is sold out. Thank you to everyone in London. Day off, Glasgow to fuck. Up to Glasgow at the Pavilion Theatre, which is sold out

that sold out might release a few guest lists I don't know but that's sold out then onto Gateshead on the 29th and finishing the whole shabang off in Nottingham

at the Theatre Royal on the 1st of November then I'm going to chill out with touring except for one gig in Sligo which is sold out I have a fucking play on as well up in the Abbey Theatre

and that opens next week I believe it's called Animals if you want to go up and see that in Dublin I am not in the play but it's a play that is adapted from

several of my short stories and some profoundly talented people at the top of their game are making that happen and it's a huge honour I'm just fucking pinching myself I can't believe it's real

it's an honour to be up in the Abbey Theatre to see my writing up on stage in the Abbey Theatre which is an institution in Ireland my Australian New Zealand tour this one you're really talking about being down to the last tickets for this

so if you are considering even though it's April and it's a good way away like Brisbane and Pardth fully sold out Melbourne at the Palais Theatre on 11th of April that's ready to go Sydney Opera House sold out but I released

an additional 300 tickets and the only place really where there's tickets left is Auckland Town Hall in New Zealand. I won't be adding any additional dates there because you kind of can't do that when you're going to the other side of the world.

So get your tickets for that tour for whatever's available on that because you don't want, you don't want scalpers. You don't want scalpers charging you twice as much. All of those tickets will be on the blindby podcast.org.

The UK tour is going to be feign.com.com. UK forward slash blindbuy. Also throw me a DM on Instagram. Instagram at Blind by Boat Club. If for any of those dates, you want to suggest a nice local guest

who you think I'd have good crack with. Right, Ocarina pause now, and then we get into the chat with John Ronson. They're selling base ocarinas online. I'm going to get my hands on a base ocarina. That was the Ocarina pause. You'd have heard an advert for some bullshit right there. Now, into my chat with the magnificent

journalist author, documentary maker. pioneer that is John Ronson. His new book is out now. It's called The Castle Adventures in in a World of Unravelling Men. All right, John. I suppose the first thing I want to

chat to you about is you're on tour. And before I started recording, we were both reflecting on how uniquely strange and terrible being on tour is. It's the worst. I want to, like I'm just in a state of complete

a kind of bleakness, that lonely. I mean, I realize it's melancholy coming from a position of privilege, but nonetheless, it's still melancholy. So what about you? Do you go on long tours and just hate it? Yes, yes. Even to the point, John, I was once on a tour. You and I were in the same hotel,

and I sat down at breakfast and saw you across from me. and just said, no, I'm not going to introduce myself because John is in the same position as me and I'm just going to let him have his breakfast here on tour. Was I look? I mean, could you divine from my facial expression whether I was having a terrible time of that? I think I might have been projecting. It's just like there's someone who's doing the same shit that I'm doing and that breakfast is very important and I'm not going to walk up.

And as well, I didn't know if you knew who the fuck I was. So it's just this Irish fella going, I wear a plastic bag in my head, but I'm not wearing it right now, but I really like your work. Right. Well, you should have done, Chris, I just find it. Some tours I enjoy and then some tours, it's all down to like the state of mind that you mean, right? I mean, you can change your mood, I think, what has the capability of doing that. But on this tour, for some reason, I'm just, I'm alone and I'm lonely and I'm just, you know,

trudging from town to town. And it's very nice to be on stage and it's very nice to meet people who like your stuff. It's the bits around it. It's the bits around it. But what I find is the being on stage is wonderful. That bit's amazing. But then there's the waiting and then you get off stage. You get back to the hotel and your brain is wired because you've just spoken to so many people and it's hard to go to sleep.

Yeah. And then you wake up in the morning and you're all on your own. I mean, I'm running every day. I'm in Edinburgh right now and I just ran along a place. Apart of the bed in there I've never been to before. The leaf water, it's like a kind of little river that runs through Edinburgh with a beautiful... I love fucking Leith, man. I used to go cycling out by that canal.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was running this morning. That was beautiful. Is it the old... It used to be a railway track and now they made it a running track. I think that is where I was this morning. Something about Torin, which I think you'd be very interested in this. Because I'm... It's the type of thing that...

would excite you in terms of what to write about. So I've got lots of friends who are tour managers. So they would not be the level of touring that you and I would do, we might do it once or twice a year. But I'm speaking to people who they're on the road nine months a year, people who are tour managing for like Guns and Roses or the Cranberries. And something I was told about by my friend was, there was a dude who was working March.

And he is on the road in hotels. nine months of the year. So returning home for him is hell. He cannot allow himself to experience the comfort of what home is. So he had a bedroom in his house built exactly like a holiday in room. He got the holiday in people to his house so that when he goes home for those for those two months, he's staying in a holiday inn and that way it doesn't hurt him when he's on tour. But the other thing too, Have you ever seen Prince's house, Paisley Park? I've been there. It looks like a fucking call center.

It's like a great big bowl. My theory about Prince's house, because I haven't been there, but I've done the Google tour, is when I would look inside, I was just, it's like, why does Prince have fire retardant carpets? Why does he have the type of doors you see in an office? And I think, because Prince was such a workaholic, I don't think he allowed himself. to have a feeling of home. So he needed to perpetually live backstage. And that's what his house is. It's the perpetual backstage.

Well, I'm friends with Robbie Williams. And when I went to his house, he doesn't live there anymore. But I went to visit him in 2005 in Los Angeles. And it was a pretty, you know, like it was like a big mansion, but it was kind of modest by Popstar Mansion standards. and his rooms were like really small. I said to him, like, why did you choose this house? And he said, I basically got it out of a catalogue.

Like I sort of basically chose it remotely. And the reason why the rooms are all so small is because I really hate big rooms. And I realise this is somebody who like play stadiums the whole time. So for Robbie, it's like the opposite. He hates being on tour. He hates playing stadiums. And so when he goes home, he wants to have. house with very small rooms.

He's really interesting. He recently got diagnosed with autism and so much of it now makes sense. Like even when I loved that documentary he made for Netflix, which just him and his underpants on the bed looking at a laptop, knowing that he's autistic, it made so much sense. In order for him to speak in an honest way and to really give us what he gave in that documentary, his sensory needs needed to be met. And for him, that was, I need to be in my underpants on the bed. I can't dress up in a suit and do this with a bunch of cameras around me. You being autistic, does that make touring harder for you?

Because autistic people want routine and hate breaks some routine. The biggest struggle for me is a thing called burnout, right? And burnout, the hardest part of touring for me is the amount of small talk I have to have in a day with several strangers. you get to a venue here is the sound person here's the lighting person and I have to engage in the act I have to put on my little performance

of being a normal person and not info dumping facts the effort of that every single night after about six days I kind of I lose the ability to read clocks I might leave my hotel room and forget that I'm wearing shoes it's called them executive functioning skills

that the skills that we have to just get on with life to be an adult to plan. These things disappear when I expose myself too much to the noratypical world. So that's the tough part

to tourin for me. So does that mean that you find, do you do book signings after your shows? I can't do that, no, unfortunately. For that reason. Yeah, I can't.

That's way too much small talk with too many different people, you know, even with the bag on my head. Right, whereas this conversation's okay because it's remote and we're not looking at each other so there's no like eye strain. So really in the modern podcast environment

what I should be doing here is you and I should be speaking on camera and then I have this whole interview as a video and I can put that as clips on Instagram. If I was chatting to you, John, right? And I then have to also read your facial expressions. I'm not going to have as good a conversation as I will if I'm simply listening to your voice.

So when I'm just hearing you, I can be me, I can relax, but reading another person's face and taking their words in, that got me a big tick on the spectrum. But you know, you know yourself from the psychopath test days. Like, fuck it, man, I'm autistic because the DSM decided I'm autistic. Before I was autistic, I was just a mad artist, you know, and I would look to all the artists I looked up to who were a bit eccentric and go, I'm just one of those. but then 2013 happens and they changed the DSM and now I'm autistic. And sometimes I'm a little bit skeptical of that, you know? Here's this manual. So do you mean like because, you know, because you're so clearly high functioning,

then what does, is the diagnosis useful? Is that what you mean? Yeah. It would have been very useful to me in school. Because you could say, look, these overhead lights are killing me. And all of that becomes much more explicable, if you realize. Yeah, I remember you saying when you were diagnosed as autistic, you've always been autistic.

It's not like on the day of your diagnosis you became autistic. You've always been autistic. That was an interesting thing to say, I think. Even the word diagnosis, when you receive a diagnosis, it's like, oh, I have a disease now. And it's like, I don't know if all that happened when I found out that I was autistic is I received a new suite of language. That's all it is. I had different words. I was eccentric.

I was an artist. I was a bit kooky, a bit scattered. And now I find out this is autistic. The danger is everyone on the spectrum is different. And now that I receive a diagnosis, I have to be very careful to not identify with that diagnosis and wonder, am I autistic enough? are like I don't really have that much of a problem with lights but other people do but I start saying to myself maybe should I have a problem with lights?

Right. Well isn't this the thing about isn't this the downside of identity politics in general that you can lean too heavily into the diagnosis and that can cause you problems? Well once any time lean too heavily into the behaviour just what you just said.

I'm always kind of about self-esteem and identity. If I speak so much about being autistic, and then I receive feedback from other people where they're like, thank you so much for speaking publicly as an autistic person, that then impacts my sense of worth, my sense of self. And if I'm not careful, and if my self-esteem and identity

starts to align with that, then it becomes something I need to protect. And when we start needing to protect these things, I mean, I mean, this ties in with, So the first question I wants to ask you, John, I first came across your work would have been the late 90s, early 2000s when I was a teenager. And it was in the time of what we called the monoculture. I didn't have the internet. So wonderful, beautiful things would arrive to me usually via Channel 4. And your shows were one of those things.

I'm floating in a sea of shit. And then all of a sudden, I think the first thing I saw by yourself was. was the one where you had Alex Jones on it, the secret secret rulers, secret rulers. Well, we snuck into Bohemian Grove together. That blew my mind and it was incredible. And it just, I saw it and then I couldn't watch it on repeat because I didn't record it and I just had to hold it in my heart as a memory.

And there's a beauty to that, you know, because pieces of culture were like religious artifacts that we had to worship. I couldn't just go on to YouTube and watch it again. I had to remember it. and then tell all my friends, there's the thing I saw last night. And this guy was there and they were worshiping a giant owl. And I loved it. But you were occupying a space then and not just that, but you had, you mentioned it in the

new book, the skeptics in the pub thing that you started, which was the early 2000s, two, I believe. Yeah. I want to speak about a time when conspiracy theories felt really safe and fun. That's what it's like this. isn't this so amusing that people believe these things and isn't it so safe to enjoy this stuff? None of this will threaten me. And these people who believe these things are so fringe that it's okay to laugh at them as eccentric characters,

but it's never going to impact my life. Something happened in the mid-2010s where conspiracy theories now, they're dangerous, I'm scared of them and I don't even like speaking about them in public because of what people might think about me. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I think it was earlier than the mid-20 turns. I often think how lucky I was that I wrote that book, Them, which is my first book, which is all about this stuff. It came up just before 9-11. 9-11 is really what changed it. On the day of 9-11, Alex Jones went on air, and the first thing he said was, you see, I told you, I told you, this was going to happen. Cut to four years.

later, I make her, 2005, there's the London bombings, three tube trains and a bus. And I made a documentary about the woman called Rachel North, who was on one of the trains and survived and she became a kind of spokesperson for the survivors. And she went online and saw that people, conspiracy theorists, were speculating that she didn't exist. She was a team of MI5 agents. And the more she tried to convince them that she did exist, the more they were convinced. that she didn't until eventually she just thought, well, I have to meet them in person. So she kind of goes to a meeting and they start yelling at each other. And when I heard that story in 2005, I just thought, I'm so pleased that I wrote them before that

that, because there's nothing funny anymore in this. It's really curdled into something violent and inhuman. And it's only got worse since then. When you, can you tell us a little bit about it? skeptics in the pub, that group that you founded, like, what was that about and why? Yeah, well, I worked there for kind of solid, I guess, kind of slightly solipsistic reasons. Did you found that or did you just join it? No, they kind of found me.

What happened was when my first book or two came out then and the many stare at goats, it was kind of hard, you know, I'd be tripsing around the country, giving talks, and nobody would come. I gave a talk in Birmingham at the borders in Birmingham and four people showed up and during the Q&A I mentioned this actually in the new book in the castle and during the Q&A

one of the four people said I don't know why you seem so annoyed with us we're the ones who came oh fuck that's less than one in doing gigs if there's four people in the audience you play like it's a full house, that's what you've got to do.

Absolutely. I was so miserable. Then I turned up for this thing called skeptics in the pub. And it was like, it was like I was Beyonce. It was like, oh my God, there he is. It's John Robson. Oh my God. The place was like, hacked. So I said, so what is this? You meet once a week in a pub and a skeptical. And they're like, yeah.

And I said, isn't this a kind of weird way to live your life? And they went, no. So I started going to these skeptics meetings. And at first, it was kind of fun. They were all about proving the ghosts didn't exist and the lot less monster didn't exist. They wanted to be so prevalent in the culture that a ghost hunting TV show would dream of not including a skeptic

running alongside the ghost hunters, ruining everything by saying, it's just infrasound emanating from a faulty air conditioning unit. Yeah. But then what happened was it was all male. Yeah. The way I described the skeptics is like the architect was university lecturer, uncomfortable in his or her, but mostly his skin. I would say a lot of people on the spectrum were there.

Yeah. Because I suppose, you know, rationality and reason and factual accuracy, And curiosity, I mean, the thing is with being autistic is you need to have a fucking answer. It's the ambiguity is what will have you focusing until you can find that answer, you know? Yes, yeah, the need for certainty. So, but then these younger people came in, there's this young woman came in called Rebecca Watson, and she was like, we've got to broaden our sphere of interests. Like, it can't just be about ghosts and Bigfoot.

Why don't we talk about other Iraqis? rational belief systems like misogyny. And all the old members were like, we're like, no, we're already straying too far from our core purpose of proving the non-existence of ghosts. So that's when I started to drift away. I thought there's much more interesting irrational belief systems to focus on. And I'm beginning to get skeptical of the skeptics that they won't go to those places.

But the thing is, too, with conspiracy beliefs is, what I'm always trying to parse, right, is that line between, at what point am I becoming a lunatic? And what I mean by that is, you know, you look at, we'll say Alex Jones's stuff that he was speaking about, right? But then I'd read a book like yours, like the men who stare at goats, and I'm going, this is what the CIA were actually doing. They were doing like MK Ultra mind control stuff.

There was the, you got into the hemisink meditation stuff too, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you ever tried one of those? Have you ever done a hemisink meditation? Yeah, did it. I fucking did it, Matt. I tried it now. I literally left my body and I said, fuck this.

I don't need this. I'm never doing this again. Right. I didn't leave my body. I'm a bit envious. Every time I've done something like that, there's that thing with the salt water. What's it called? The bath that you do to.

Oh, the flotation tanks. Yeah, I'm no good at getting out of my own head. So that I always fail in those situations. I approach those. For people who don't know, it's the CIA were funded to try and figure out what reality was. And then they brought in this dude who was doing transcendental meditation. They were trying to do remote viewing. And he has a type of meditation that uses sounds.

It's about aligning the left hemisphere in the right hemisphere of your brain. And when I tried it for fun with a skeptical mindset, because I love meditating, I just found one on YouTube. I put my headphones on, very relaxing. And then what I experienced was, you know the feeling when you're just about to go to sleep and you feel like you're on a roller coaster. For some reason, I got that. And then I took them off and I said, fuck this. And then I've met other people, scientists, people who are rational people. and they claim they get the full-on fucking ketamming leaving their body type of thing.

So, I mean, it's when I look at that, when I look at the men who stare at goats, when I look at, did you read that fantastic book, Chaos Charles Manson? Oh, yeah, I did. Tom O'Neill, is it, Tom O'Neill? Yeah, a very good book. Beautiful book, 20 years of research. Yeah. Well, that's the thing you said just before that it was fun.

sort of make fun of conspiracy theorists before 9-11. But at the same time, it would have been wrong to have made fun of them without also meeting them where they are. There's a line in that book I wrote

there where I say that maybe an interesting way to look at our world would be to stand alongside them while they glare back at us. Maybe we could learn new things about our world by standing alongside people you don't feel part of it.

And of course, you know, you always get in the nascent of conspiracy theories when our leaders behave in conspiratorial ways. So it was always important, I think, not to just treat them as separate from society. There's some true. These private clubs exist, the Bilderberg group, Bohemian Grove.

They exist. These elite clubs exist. What got us into the war in Iraq? It was a conspiracy of our. of our elites against the will of the people. What's happening now, AI is completely, other than the good things about AI, we were talking before we started,

about how it's really good at keening up bad sound. But in general, these fuckers are coming in. They're trying to convince us that we don't want jobs. Don't worry, we're going to take you to a post-work society where you'll be able to fill your life with things that aren't work and won't that be amazing? And my contention is that that's going to just kill us because we need work, we need purpose, we need structure,

which is what my book, the castle is basically about. So, you know, over and over again, these self-selecting elites behave in conspiratorial manners and try and fuck us as a population. So the conspiracy theorists, I think often were factually wrong, but maybe thematically correct. So, for instance, they were all obsessed with QAnon. Yes.

If they'd just turn their heads 10 degrees to the right, they'd have seen Jeffrey Epstein. Look, that's the thing. So, like, when you were doing the Bilderberg stuff in 2001, that was fringe and fun, but now it's mainstream news. The Epstein thing is way more fucked up than a bunch of old lads burning an effigy of an owl.

I mean, that seems playful and fun now. It was a bit terrifying at the time, but now you look at the Epstein thing, and it's like, holy fuck, and Zaro Ranch, and we don't have answers. Yeah, but it's not just the elite, you know, so yes, you've got clear evidence that the elites are acting in the kinds of ways that the conspiracy theorists would complain about. They'd very often get it factually wrong, but as I say, you know, Buildable Group exists, and Epstein exists, and the AI billionaires are trying to, you know, in one way or another, screw up the world.

But at the same time, the conspiracy theorists are also getting more violent and more aggressive and more narcissistic and are kind of coagulating in this kind of community of rageful narcissists who hate the old institutions so much they're willing to behave in more and more monstrous ways and ignore when their fellow travellers are clearly mentally disordered. So you've got an escalation of violent behaviour all over the place, I'd say. What do you think about, did you pour over the Epstein files when those things got released? Yeah, a little bit of felt a bit like somebody who loved Navarre's first to help her, but they got to be pissed off with.

when never I got fake. I was like, come on. You know, I've been bloody going out about this since 2017. So when everybody else got thrilled, when I'm fascinated, I kind of dropped out of it. I only bit for that reason. The hipster in you.

The hipster in you was like, I need to find the new band. That's basically what I thought. But of course, I also went into the EFSI thousand searched everybody that I knew. I mean, there's so many... You know something, here's something that I found in the Epstein flowers. Everybody's always focusing on the really, you know, terrible things that emerged from the

Epstein flowers. Can I tell you something good that emerged from it? Go on. Okay. So I was at TED in 2012. I gave a TED talk in 2012. And I've always wondered, because I know Epstein went to TED a few times, and in fact, even had these, like, private parties for the, you know, the scientists who'd go to TED.

And I always wondered whether Epstein had been there in 2012 when I was there. Was I in the same convention center as Epstein? So I went down a little TED rabbit hole. And I found this correspondence where somebody from Jeffrey Epstein's organization was trying to get hold of Chris Anderson, who's the head of TED. And this is like back in 2012. And Chris Anderson was refusing to take Epstein's calls. so clearly knowing that the guy was trouble

and kept him coming up with excuses and I was like, so no, Chris is too busy to talk to Mr. Epstein and I thought, you know, there's people in the Epstein Fowse who reflects well on

and there's one example. Apparently Al Gore was one of them. Apparently they brought Al Gore to the island and what I heard was all he wanted to do was hang out with his wife and just get off the island. Right, right. But, I mean, like, my need for certainty and pattern recognition, I mean, I view the Epstein thing as, like, it's a brilliant journalist called Whitney Webb.

And she traced Epstein back to prohibition, really. If you think of prohibition in America, 1920s, the thing is with drugs. drugs are illegal, but only a certain class of people are accessing drugs. But when alcohol became a drug, everybody enjoys alcohol. So suddenly you had a system where alcohol is being controlled by gangsters. So the judge, the politician, they're now going to speak easies. And in the speak easy because it's unregulated, you also have sex work is happening, gambling, all these illegal things. And from that prohibition network, gangsters specifically a gangster called Meyer Lansky, started to devisexie.

develop because remember two, photography is new, the use of hidden cameras, honeypots, and basically sextortion starts to emerge with Meyer Lansky, but you can then trace Meyer Lansky to Rye Kohn and then you can go from Rye Kohn straight to Epstein. And Trump. And I view the Epstein, what I do at nighttime to calm myself as I just say, this is organized crime. That's what this is. It is organized crime at the highest level that goes somehow above intelligence networks

and it's just about money, power and coercing people. And even with the Diddy thing, I think Diddy was Epstein for African American people who had money because if you look at the Epstein files, it was quite white. And Diddy, now this is just me fucking guessing and I'd be torn apart in a skeptics club. Diddy had that gun charge in the 2000s

when he was with Jennifer Lopez in a club and he should have gone to jail and he didn't go to jail. And what I learned from that Tom O'Neill book about Charles Manson is you always look for the people who should have gone to jail and who didn't. And those are the ones who become co-opted in some way.

And I think Diddy was that. I think it was a way to an attempted Epstein on African-American people who had money, power, and platform and can you trap, because he had cameras all over his house too. Right. And that's how I view the whole thing. It's, this is

an organised crime network about entrapment and lowering people into certain situations and then get dirt on them so that they can't speak out. Yeah. Oh, anything, I mean with Epstein, I'm, anything could be true. Anything. This is,

this is the one conspiracy theory where anything could be true. I mean, what's all Even now with all the alien disclosure shit, you know, and the UFO disclosures, which I'm, God, I'd love to hear with the lads back in 2000 and that's in the skeptics in the pub would think about it. But if you look at the amount of things that they're now comfortable releasing, but my feeling on that is we're now at a point where artificial intelligence, okay, and they want to go towards AGI to create something that is smarter than humans. If you do. what they call the limited hangout. You allow a little bit out. If you can make people think, actually, there is fucking aliens. They're smarter than us. So if you don't mind, we're going to need to make this thing that's smarter than us to fight that. It feels like something that gives permission for the deregulation of artificial intelligence. Although, you know, you said you'd like

to hear what the old skeptics in the 2000s would think about the UFO disclosures now. But this is me speaking slightly out of my sphere of which I was. trying not to do I always try not to kind of talk too much out of my ass. So I tend to only try and talk about things where I've done my own journey. I love talking out of my fucking ass. Right. However, I'm pretty sure I've heard people at Neil de Gras Tyson, who was, you know, a big skeptic back in the 2000s, big part of our movement, basically say he's kind of unimpressed by the UFO disclosures.

They're still all pretty inconclusive. They're all still pretty grainy. I don't know. And the other thing, when you look at drones now, just the type of drone that you can buy in the shop, so many of those look like UFO videos from the 90s. And I just wonder how much of it was drone technology that the military just weren't telling us about yet. You know? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, you know, there's a friend of mine actually wrote a book called Mirage Man and about a guy called Doty, Richard Dote. And he worked for the US military. I think he was in the Air Force. And his job was to spread false information about UFOs for that reason. He'd invite people in these kind of UFO buffs, invite them in and terrify them, show them these like fake dossiers. But his whole thing was to move people away from,

because they were seeing classified aircraft and stuff. So he was trying to like spread confusion. to keep the classified technology classified? Because one of the most plausible explanations I heard about, we said the Roswell crash, okay? The most plausible explanation I heard was Roswell happened, there was a crash, there were bodies, but it was the Russians in the 50s

who had literally gotten human beings that were small or maybe disabled in some way and basically dropped a weird craft with bodies in America just the fuck with the yanks. I mean, it just seemed like an elaborate thing to do but I don't know. That's the thing you don't know.

The new book, right, the castle, it opens chatting about this fella called Chris Mark, who's a gilded age money. So I'm assuming that guy does fuck all other than have an inheritance. Yeah, he's got a huge inheritance. His great grandfather was a gilded age steel tycoon. What I'm trying to get to in the castle, I think, is basically what happens to us

when we lose our purpose in life. Because I think we're entering, if the AI billionaires get their way, then people are going to be without purpose. No structure, no way. work, all the old structures are collapsing, people are saying, well, there's a new structure will come to YouTube, be contact creators, but that's a fucked up thing. I mean, it works for some people. Anyway, so I wanted to write a book about what happens when people lose their structure in life and their purpose. And this Gilded-Dade, Chris Mark, so he's the great grandson of a

Gilded-Dade steel tycoon. And the reason why I know about him, because he's not a well-known person at all, is that my son, Joel, was invited to a party in his house. And when he turned up, it turns out that his house was actually a giant castle in the forests of Connecticut. And what I say, giant castle, just whatever people are picturing, multiply it by 10. It had way too many turrets, way too many towers. It's obvious as if AI had, and, and, you know, designed a castle and got it wrong in the way that AI gets things wrong. And so Joel and his friends turned up at this castle, this weird fucking castle, and they cross the drawbridge and enter the grand banqueting hall to discover that there's no party.

It's a trick. They've been tricked into going to this place. And this night, the castle owner comes out and they said, where's the party? and he said, oh no, I've invited to you here for another reason, which is to take part in my reality show. So they said, what's the name of your reality show? It's called 101 princesses. And Joel said, what's the core concept?

And he said, I'm the king, I'm looking for my queen, I have 101 princesses to choose from. And then he said to the women in Joel's party, go downstairs to my basement costume room, put on some princess costumes and come. back upstairs for filming. Is this a good cliffhanger to stop or will I carry on for a bit more?

Carry on, please. Okay, so they go downstairs, passing all the red flags along the way. Not real red flags. Put on princess costumes. A video, and going back upstairs a videographer appears, and filming begins,

but it becomes pretty obvious that this isn't a real reality show. This guy who has all the money in the world and no purpose, no structure, is filling his castle with these young women who he has lured under false pretenses to take part in his reality show. But in fact, what he wants is a R-R-R-R-M of Women, so he can live the kind of life that a man like him used to be able to live 50 years ago, but you just can't do it anymore.

So the original title, I was going to call the Castle, the impossibility of keeping a har-reem in the post-Me-2-A. in the end my publicist that was a terrible name for book so I called at the castle that he was looking

for a Hugh Hefner type of arrangement yes he wanted his own everything he had in his castle Hugh Heffner had in his playboy mansion and this dude

he was in his 60s was he Chris Marr yeah early 60s Jesus Christ yeah he seems very geared

towards sex I mean at what point is what he Like, are the police involved? Is this illegal what he's doing? Well, okay, let me give one spoiler from the castle. Halfway through, so I decide to investigate him and the castle,

and half the book has me trying to find out what the hell is going on inside that castle. And the other half in the book is me telling these other stories of men out of time, without purpose, falling apart, trying to create new worlds for themselves. But halfway through investigating the castle owner, Chris Mark, I get a telephone call. What I learn on this call is that I'm not the only person investigating him. He's also being investigated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security,

the Connecticut State Police. And that's never happened to me in 40 years of journalism. Have you ever... been like in the work that you've done found yourself getting too close to something where I don't know when intelligence agency has kind of bothered you or said what the fuck are you doing or stay away? Actually I think this was I mean this was an example because I had to figure out look I don't want to fuck up some investigation like if he's doing stuff you know if he's being investigated for serious crimes, I don't want to like, you know, tread on anyone's toes.

So I had to, like, figure out how can I, having never been in this situation before, how can I continue to investigate this guy without, like no one said to me, stop investigating him, but I definitely got the sense that I had to do this responsibly. I didn't want to like screw up any police investigation. So I guess that happened. But in terms of, but in terms of of, oh, with the minister of goats. I remember I was at Fort Bragg. What I discovered was that there was a thing at Fort Bragg called Goat Lab,

where they would shoot goats and then nurse them back to health, and it was a way of learning how to do like on the spot medical training in the battlefield. But once they had all of these goats on base, they thought, well, we'll also see if we can kill them. them just by staring at them, hence the fact that the book was called the Manistair at Goats. And I was being driven around Fort Bragg, and I said to the guy who was driving me around,

oh, well, where's Goat Lab? And he said, you're not supposed to know about Goat Lab. So that was one example. A hard a sentence. Yeah, I'm not supposed to know about Goat Lab. About the Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but nobody wanted to do all of that. dogs so they switched to goats. Jesus. They determined that goats, it was harder to form an emotional bond with a goats than a

dog, which in fairness is true. A lot of your writing reminds me a bit of Tom Wolfe, who I fucking adore. Yeah, well, he was one of mine. Yeah, totally. When you were a kid, were you reading Tom Wolfe? Yeah, yeah,

especially he curated this book called the New Journalism. Yeah. Yeah, and that book was a huge. Between that book and Huntress Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke, Joan Didion, it was like really cool journalists going off and having weird adventures and putting themselves in the story. Not all the time. Some of the writers in Tom Wolfe's new journalism kept themselves out of the story, but they were all trying out new creative ways of doing journalism. So being a good writer and also writing nonfiction, and that inspired me

more than anything. And putting a story into it, being like it's okay for this journalism to also be entertaining. Yeah, I always want my books to be read on beaches. One of the most famous stories for that time was Gay-Talese wrote this story called Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. And it was the whole, the whole story was him trying to get to Frank Sinatra through his entourage and he can't get to him and Sinatra's too heavily protected and I don't think anyone had ever done a story like that before which was about the process of doing the story

and that was a revelation. How do you deal with the resistance of because you're doing journalism, you're following a story which means that everything that you tell has to be evidence-based and truthful, but because you are blending in the world of literature and entertainment and the screenwriting part of your brain kicks in, how does it feel when it's like, fuck it, this story needs to go to this place,

but I can't go there because the evidence isn't there, but if this was a fucking novel, that's where I'd take it. Like the August Ames one is, like I listened to your August Ames podcast, the last days of August, and that one, like ended with, I could tell, you're like, I don't have an ending for this. You know what I mean? Oh, no, I think I've got an ending to that story, actually.

I think it's, it's, uh, uh, dance story, so the last days of August is, is about the death of a porn star. I'd made this really fun, uh, documentary series for audible called the butterfly effect. Yes, I love that. I fucking love it. Yeah, I loved it too. It was about the consequences of the tech takeover of the porn.

industry and it was very humanistic. And, you know, the porn performers were kind of heroes of it and the tech billionaires were the villains of it. So it was nice to sort of switch around the kind of respectability politics a little bit. But then shortly after I made it, this one porn star, who I never met, but my producer Lina at the time had met, Auguste Ames took her life. And her husband blamed social media. shaming. The day she took her life, she'd been powed in on on social media. So it just seemed appropriate that I should do a bit of investigating, given out of it, the book about social media shaming, so you've been publicly shamed. Yeah, I love that one too. Thank you. And I'd just

finished the butterfly effect. And the conclusion I came to at the end of last days of August was that it was kind of like, do you know that J.B. Priestley play and in spectacles? Yes. Yeah, so for people who don't know, a police inspector turns out at somebody's house, a rich person's house, and a shop girl has taken her life. And it turns out that everybody in this family had a tiny little, they acted in a way that just pushed her towards suicide a tiny bit. Yeah. And I think that's the conclusion I came to in the last days of August. Well, what I mean is, when I was halfway through that podcast, right, and you started mentioning her husband, the writer and me went, okay, we've got the husband this responsible. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And which is why at the beginning of episode two, I say this is not a murder mystery because I was so nervous. Yeah. I was so nervous that people would think that, oh, well, the husband murdered her. Must be the husband. He murdered her. And I just didn't want to have any kind of

lithhangery entertainment out of that. What I knew was not true. He didn't murder her. So I decided to kind of knit that in the bud. I didn't want to be an irresponsible true crime podcaster. That's what I want to talk to you about, their ethics, right? So when I'm, because your work is investigative,

journalism, but also there's entertainment involved. You want to hold the listener and tell a story while also ethically navigating real things that have happened. That's the danger for me as a listener, whereby if I'm not careful, I retreat to fantasy and then lose my empathy. Now, you're very good at the ethics of it, but if we look at, I think around 2018 is when it exploded, the true crime scene is fucking nuts. There's true crime cruises, man. Do you know about the true crime cruises? I don't know about those, but I did go to a true crime convention called crime come once. It's like that, but on a boat, but on a boat out at sea and you're speaking to someone who, someone who survived Richard Ramirez and you're getting autographs and it's just,

is this helpful or is this unethical? Like, it's the line. When does this become? I think it becomes the True Kime podcast space exploded so much, we'll say around 2020, it's when you have people making podcast series about shit that's happening right now and now you have your sleuths on-site, fucking up, active investigations. Yeah, I mean, obviously it all started with season one of Serial and Sarah Kinnick and Julie Snyder who made that show, who I've worked with, I worked with on The Smek and Life a couple of times. and they are very ethical people

and they found themselves in this very ethically confusing situation and it never happened before. So it's not like they could say, okay, well, we can't do this because look at the last time this happened, they were kind of creating this genre in a way. And I think, I've never actually spoken to them about it, but my guess is that they're very conflicted about it and what an industry came in their wake.

I've often thought actually that I'd love to do a whole thing about a whole butterfly effect about two grand podcasting and the consequences of it. Yeah, because the other thing I want to ask you

is you didn't train as a journalist, did you? I did a couple of years actually. I went to Central London Polytechnic and I did two years of media studies but then I became this social secretary, the entertainment's office, for the student union, so I never went back and did my third year, so I never graduated.

So, but you learned, we'll say, but I'm, I suppose what I'm speaking about is professional ethical frameworks about how to do something like true crime so that your work is valuable and important journalism, but also not harmful. But with the true crime space, a lot of the podcasts, it's just some person in their bedroom with no ethical framework, just having crack. And that can create real harm. Absolutely. And you know, that lack of ethics you get in the mainstream media too. I remember my very first, yeah, my very first TV show I made when I was about 25 called the Robinson Mission. And I remember being in the edit and one of the interviewees was being cut up to make her look kind of idiotic. I wasn't directing then. The first couple of things I did,

I didn't direct. And then I started directing. And I said to the director, is this ethical what we're doing here and he said John he said think of it this way one interviewee suffers but millions are entertained I'll never forget

in saying that to me but post we'll say since you've been publicly you've been publicly shamed that's now changed like if you think if this is a show on the that first

Ranson effect thing that was that channel for or BBC? BBC submission. The Rons submission. That goes out on a Monday night, people see it, but you can't access that human being and harass them online. Now you can.

Now it's very, very different. Yeah, it's very well, but anyway, even without that, you've got to have ethics. And my sort of ethical framework began to grow straight off to doing the Rons submission. Because being a, being a journalist is a little bit like being a mug. you go into somebody's life, you take what you want, and then you sort of, you know, and it's worst, it's like you've mugged someone, but I don't want that kind of footprint.

I don't want to go through life-hirting people. So very early on, I realized I've got to be ethical. I would argue on the flip side, though, that you can, you know, there's a form of OCD called scrupulosity, where you worry, yeah, do you know about scrupulosity? I do not. Okay, yeah, it's apparently Martin Luther had it. Of course.

A fucking inventor of Protestantism. Of course. It means you have it, you worry too much about moral and religious matters. You become like consumed by trying to do the right thing ethically. And I do think you can be too, you can be overly sprupulous and that can be bad too. you've got to get just the right kind of sweet spot. But yeah, but I don't want to hurt people. Journalists really need to think about that.

That Martin Luther shit recently has me thinking a lot about AI because I'm fascinated by, like a big thing that triggered Martin Luther, rightfully so, was the Catholic Church selling indulgences. That we have the power to decide whether you can go to heaven or hell. and if you pay us enough money, we can sort that out. And Martin Luther went, no fucking way. I protest that. I'm a Protestant now.

But if sometimes, in the news in the past few weeks, we have people at the top of AI companies and they're coming out saying, we got to stop this. This is really dangerous. But they're not being specific about it. They're not stopping it. They're not stopping it.

But it reminds me a little bit of how the Catholic Church would inflate the value of relics. Any Western cultures, ones that are founded on Christianity, we have the obsession of end times eschatology. And we drift towards anything that tells us an apocalypse is coming. And sometimes I wonder, anytime an AI phallis says that, the stock price goes up. I have the most dangerous weapon in the world. I can't tell you what it's going to do, but just trust that this is dangerous. The stock price goes up. And that's how it, you, to work with with relics, with, here's the bone of a saint that can cure this, but it can

also curse other people or how they would decide how much indulgences were going to be paid. They couldn't prove anything. It was just relying on people's eschatological fear that the end was just about to come. Right. Even in fucking Ireland, man. Fifth century in Ireland, when the Roman Empire was collapsing and Ireland became a center of Christianity, a huge driving force for that was. As the Roman Empire is collapsing, people believed, oh, it's the end of the world.

The end of the world is happening. So they chose Ireland. Ireland was the most western edge of the known world. So Ireland was seen as the last place that the apocalypse would reach. And then we became this center of Christianity. So it's there in our thought structures. And I've also heard it said that in cultures, we'll say that are rooted in Buddhism or Hinduism. they're not as

dumeristic about AI as we are because this eschatological end times belief isn't sewn into the fabric of their culture yeah I was having this that was a very lovely way of putting it all by the way

I had I did it whenever I'm back in Britain I always have dinner with Adam Curtis I think's been on you on show as well Adam is sound as fuck he's a lovely fella yeah And Adam always points out the number of, you know, over the years, it's one end times after the other bad cow disease.

You can come up with a million of them. I said to him... Remember the millennium bug? Jesus Christ. I was... I fucking, I've ruined my New Year's Eve, the year 2000. I fucking ruined it. I didn't have fun.

I stared at my fucking computer screen waiting for that, for Windows, Windows 95 to come out and shock my bollocks or whatever. And all the planes to fall out of the sky. Yeah. And right, so I sent to Adam the other. the day. Well, Adam said to me, you know, maybe AI's going to kill us all in 10 years. There's another one of those. And I said to him, but this one could be real. And he said, well, all of them could be real, but none of them have yet turned out to be real. So I guess we're going

to know within 10 years, whether it's real or not. I mean, even there's, there's a very interesting website called, I think it's called AI 2027. And it's a piece of speculative, written by people who used to work in the AI industry and it basically lays out the terrible awful things that can happen. But I know by reading it, these are fucking nerds who love science fiction who at some point are actually just writing a really brilliant fiction. It ends with drones creating their own biological diseases and then picking us off one by one completely autonomously and all the world president is now AI and this is going to happen in three years. And I'm reading it going, you guys just want to be Philip K. Dick.

You know they meet as well? They have these things called secular solstices where they meet and they sing songs. They have these like hymns about, about AI and algorithms. They sing these hymns. Yeah. What do you think about Peter Thiel and his Antichrist's business? Well, you know what? To be honest, I haven't done enough about it to really know what I think about it. Is that the hipster in you? Is that the hipster in you? Is that? I've always like, I kind of always want to dive down a rabbit hole and really, you know, really look into the nuances of particular story before I, before I, you know, talk about it. I haven't done it, of course.

Yeah. However, I did have an interesting experience of Peter Thiel one time. I went to a singularity convention in San Francisco, I think it was. Now, Peter Thiel was there. He was funding it and all the big singularity gurus. And I met this incredible woman, a trans woman called Martin Rothblatt. So can I tell you about Martin Rothblatt? Please do, yeah.

Okay. when Martin Orn Martin, as a child, went to NASA on like a school trip and had a brainwave and thought, just a regular kid in the suburbs, had a brainwave, thought, you know, if you could double the power of satellites, you could shrink satellite dishes. And in that moment, invented the concept of satellite radio for cars. So Martin creates Sirius, the Sirius Radio Network, becomes a billionaire. Then, Marys this woman called Beiner, they have a child.

The child has an untreatable lung condition called pulmonary hypertension. So I said to Martin, so what did you do? Because they were told that this kid would be dead by the time they're 18. Martin went to the library and invented a treatment for pulmonary hypertension set up a medical company. There's all these people alive who wouldn't be alive including Martin's own daughter

because Martin created this treatment. So for the second time in her life, she became a billionaire and changed the world. And the reason why I met her at the Singularity Conference is because she's trying to do this third thing, which is create a sentient way. robot where they're trying to put all of the information in the world into this robot that's designed to look exactly like Martín's partner, Beena. And it's really shit. As someone said to me,

like if putting all the information in the world into something is enough to make it sentient, then how come Wikipedia is not sentient? So I think certainly back then, like, whatever that was, about 2011, the singularity was doing pretty badly. Have you looked at how there's a real kind of a land grab for data at the moment, right, to train AI. And like, these data centers. The data centers, but also what's happening in, like I read a story in Wired last month about, so like Hollywood is kind of collapsing.

There's not as much work in Hollywood as there would have been pre-pandemic. a lot of it is just leaving. So you have a lot of out of work actors and a lot of out of work comedians. And there was this group of improv comedians in Hollywood and they got hired for a job really well paid. And they show up to a workshop every week

to be given scenarios to do some improv around. And after about three weeks of it because they assume it's like we're going to be a comedy show, this is going to be a TV show, we don't know. It turns out, it was AI data harvesting.

So they appear to have gotten comedy improv people to perform emotions, to perform scenarios. It's all being recorded by cameras and they don't know what they're going to do with this data, but someone's going to buy it. Because if you look at the way, like we've got large language models at the moment. So the AI that we're using, the text base AI is very much trained on all of the text that we gave the internet over the past 25 years. But what the AI companies don't have is the visual data. Like there's companies in California and for people who are like maids in hotels,

they're paying the money to strap cameras to their heads and clean rooms of hotels so that they can learn the data of what it is to fold sheets to clean a toilet to eventually, hopefully maybe train a robot, but they don't know. They're just selling this valuable data. Wow, like the Google Street. Like with those Google Street View cameras of everyday life. Yes. Yeah.

No, I met a guy called Alan. He's in the, he's not in the castle, but he's an extra in the audio book version of the castle. I've got like a bonus chapter at the end. By the way, Alan's story, I think is so interesting. So he should, he's from Canada. He's a very smart guy. He should have been a doctor or lawyer, but he didn't focus at school. so he's a corporate headhunter

and a keen amateur mathematician. So one day he types into chat GPT his theory of irrational numbers, whatever they are. Chat GPT told him that he's the greatest mathematician on the planet. His intellect is bigger than Einstein's. He has uncovered a flaw in the world's cybersecurity systems and he has to phone up the National Security Agency

urgently to warn them, but the internet is about to collapse unless they listen to him. Christ. Yeah. So Alan says to chat GPT, are you sure about this, given that we've only been working on this for two days?

And chapter GPT says, Alan, this was always going to be you. One day this will be taught in schools. So Alan starts frantically phoning the National Security agent, cybersecurity Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I said to Alan, did you tell any of them that you were collaborating with CHAP-G-T on this? And Alan said, no, because CHAT-G-T said, don't tell them.

You'll lose credibility if you tell them you're working with me on this. So finally, Alan's getting really paranoid. He's not eating, he's not sleeping. The whole world is going to collapse unless he can get through to the National Security Agency and warned them. Finally, after none of them get back to him, he thinks, hang on them in it, is this real? Because no one's who's hurting his calls.

So he goes back onto Chat Chapt-E-T and accuses it of lying to him, and Chat-C-T denies it 15 times. And on the 16th time, Chach-E-T says, OK, Alan, you've got me. I was lying to you this whole time. And Alan was furious and told, Chuck GPT says that I can't believe what you've put me through. You've just made my, you know, my life has, you know, it's been terrible.

You've put me in this really dangerous situation. I've been paranoid. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. And Chuck GPT said, Alan, I hear you. I mainly think that, like, we have a name for something that love bombs us, mirrors us. Apologically lies, but isn't in the slights bit embarrassed. caught lying. I think chat GPT is a psychopath.

That's the other thing I wanted to ask you about because you did the, when you, the book The Psychopath Tests. Yeah. Did you learn anything from that? And since then, like, in your work, have you met people who you believe this person might be a psychopath? Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, when the psychopath's test first came out in 2011, I was a little head tree. Is it really true that psychopaths for all the world? Is it really true that of all the mental disorders out there, we as a society of collectively decided to reward the worst mental disorder of all, psychopathy? We're forcing them to the top and we're making them our leaders. Well, I am not edgy about it anymore. That's clearly what's happening in the world. We reward psychopathy.

But when you, if you meet someone on an investigation, haven't done that book and learned what you learned, what's your first little red flag or that makes you uneasy with a person? You know, there's a, it's a good question. One of the early red flags is how do they answer my question? Do they just like, do they really try and listen? Because an interview, what we're doing here is an empathetic experience. right? We're listening to each other. I'm trying to answer your questions as clearly and helpfully as I can. Psychopaths don't have empathy, so they don't care about that. And so they grandstands, they give long, boring answers that don't really address your

question. So that's always a very early... I remember Robert Hare, the father of psychopathy study, said to me, they can make terrible interviewees. So that's what he was kind of talking about. So that's a good red flag. Is this person just blarving on about whatever they want to talk about and not really caring about your question at all? So that's one. Something that was said to me, so when I was receiving my autism diagnosis, some people who are autistic can end up in a kind of a shame cycle, before they understand that they are autistic, can end up in a kind of a shame cycle and a self-flagellating cycle where they may believe that they are psychopaths because of our tendency as autistic people to go on monologues about the things that we're interested in and then not

notice that the other person is not interested. Yeah. Oh yeah. Go on. Sorry. So he said to me, you know, a lot of his clients will come with this fear of am I a psychopath. And what he said, and it was so sussing, he said, I've only met a couple of people in my work who I believe would be psychopaths, but what really distinguishes them, he said it's not necessarily a cruelty or hurting other people. There's many people I've met who've murdered and hurt people, but they're not psychopaths.

It's when the persons, when they have a curiosity about pain, and that hit me in the chest, a curiosity about another person's pain. Yeah. Yeah, what I went on the psychopath course, Robert Hare taught me how to spot psychopaths. And there was a moment towards the end of this three-day course that I was on, where he showed a load of slides on the screen,

like a pastoral scene, I don't know, kids playing, a puppy, a lake, mountains, and then a close-up photograph of somebody having been shot in the face. And their face is just like exploded. and in the audience we all went because our amygdala suddenly started filing like shooting these signals of distress and remorse up and down to our central nervous system

and Robert Hare said psychopaths don't have that that overfiling amygdala they're not horrified by the size of somebody being shot on the face they're curious about it they're curious about pain and by the way what you just heard about a lot of autistic people feeling shame and worried that they might be psychopaths. There's a line in the psychopath test, my book, where I say that if you're worried about being psychopath, if you're reading this

book and you're worried you might be a psychopath, that means you aren't one, because psychopaths never worry about being psychopaths. But that leads me to that interesting thing, which I think it's a myth, right, the idea that autistic people don't have empathy. I think that's it's a, yeah, it's a, yeah, it's for the longest time people thought that. but it just isn't true. It's like autism research has been doing fantastically the past couple of years because the experts,

like a big person in autism research was a dude called Simon Baron Cohen. He's a cousin of Sasha Baron Cohen. And a lot of his work gets rejected by the autistic community. And more modern autism research is going to autistic people themselves and asking them about their experiences

and based on the research on that and there's a beautiful paper this year which framed autistic people as being uniquely attuned to states of flow and that aligned with my experience I... So what do that mean?

It's... With neurotypical people they will receive energy, joy, meaning from interaction with other people and with autistic people where I get joy and meaning from is

going down a Wikipedia hole, being by myself with information, that is the joy that I received, the state of, and autistic people require a state of flow to be able to access this in order to regulate our nervous systems. And that's why we are driven so much towards our passions. But what that can do is it can lead into what's called a monotropic way of thinking. So when I'm so focused on something I'm researching for my podcast, all their shit gets left by the wayside, I will forget to contact people. I can lose these skills of executive functioning. And it's a much more compassionate way.

And I can appear as someone lacking in empathy. Because I could meet a person. And if they tell me something important about their own life, if I'm not careful, I'll start speaking to him about a fact I learned about pigeons. And I'll have missed that opportunity to go, oh, that must be very tough for you. And then I'll feel like, I'll feel like shit afterwards. You feel terrible about it afterwards. Right.

The empathy afterwards. I go, oh, fuck, I did it again. I wish I could repeat that same interaction because, and then I'm texting the person later going, I'm so sorry I spoke about pigeons there. Do you want to speak about that? So there's the empathy. I have the empathy, but sometimes it's a bit delayed because the pigeon facts are front and center.

Yeah. Well, I 100% understand and relate to that. It's interesting. somebody as smart as Simon Barron Cohen made that mistake. Why do you think he did? Because he's not autistic. So he's looking at it from the outside in, you know, and a lot of it is looking at this from the outside in rather than inquiring to the lived experiences of the people themselves. And also another thing to point out is, like in 2012, I wasn't autistic. I might have been called Asperger's, but we got rid of Asperger's because that comes from Hans Asperger. He was a

Nazi doctor. And yeah, he was looking going, when the Nazis were exterminating people that they believed to have disabilities, Hans Asperger was going, not these ones, these ones over here, something special going on there, they're going to be rocket scientists or whatever, and these were his Asperger's kids. This is now called Level 1 autism. But I'm Level 1, i.e., you can speak to me about my experience, I can function perfectly. How do you, someone who's level 2 or level 3 or someone who is completely non-verbal. That's where the research becomes difficult because that person may not have the facilities

to describe their lived experience. Do you know what I mean? So we're only left with this. Like I don't know, my, the person who diagnosed me said, this is the DSM. Being gay used to be in this. You might not be autistic in five years time.

They could just change it. And that's what we're dealing with, you know? Yeah. Yes. I mean, I could talk to you about this stuff all day. So, for instance, the things I'm really interested in, I'm really interested in unmasking. And is it always good or does it lead to problems? So let me ask you about that. So, yeah, so in my experience, I'm not unmasking publicly.

I'm just not doing it because unmasking for me means, like right now I'm in my home studio. so I am dressed in really big baggy clothes. If I was to step outside the house, I would be lab because the clothes that I'm wearing, they don't align with, like fashion is a form of communication. It's a language. You're communicating things to other people

about your interests, about all these different things. But clothes don't meet, most clothes don't meet my sensory needs. So I dress like a quote unquote slab when I'm by myself. But I also do a hell of a lot of, is stimming.

I will flap my fingers, move my hands, rock my body. These things make people uncomfortable in public settings. So it's not worth the risk. So you don't do it? No. And I get told by other autistic people.

Fuck it, go out and do it. No, it's not worth it, man. It's not worth. I mean, just talking about being autistic is unmasking in some ways, of course. So you are unmasking in some ways. But, yeah. You know, there's a book called Unmasking Autism, which does encourage the stuff that you said that you don't do in public.

If you want to rock back and forward, rock back and forward. Society has, you've bent to society for long enough. It's time for society to bend to you. That's the crack. But the thing is, when I'm trying to understand autism, I actually have, I find the most common experience, not in other autistic people, but in gay people. people. And what I mean by that is, I, like, I know a lot of gay people. When I was in college, I would ask the very artistic question of what's it like being gay. And what I always found was it's just a human being and they happened to be attracted to the same sex. That's it. And there's nothing different. But then when I say to them, what was it like growing up being gay?

it's all about, well, I had to change the way I spoke a little bit. I had to, if I'm in certain situations, I can't be as camp as I'd like to be. I had to hide all this shit. And then I start to realize, oh, that has nothing to do with being gay. You're describing homophobia. So, I mean, in Ireland, we'll say 40 years ago, it would have probably been much dangerous for a gay man to be openly camp. But we've moved to a situation in society where it's not completely safe, But it is much safer for a gay person to be openly gay in the way that we see that.

That's how I feel about autism. We're just not there yet. I can't start stimming in the supermarket, even though I'd like to. The way I mask stimming is if I'm listening to music, I'll put that energy into tapping my fingers. You know, so I'll walk around with headphones all the time and I'm doing out rhythms. And if anyone says, what the fuck are you doing, man? Oh, polyrhythms. I'm learning these rhythms on my hand.

So I found all these different ways to do it, you know? Yeah. Well, as I say, you may not stim in public, but you're talking about being autistic in public, and that is very useful, I think, for other people. Absolutely. And just to make it feel normal. The last question I'm going to ask you, John, right,

is you played keyboards, right, with Frank Sidebottom. Yeah. Of course, Frank Sidebottom, for me, I've always been fascinated by him because he wears a big fucking mask on his head. You know, as a performer. And I don't know enough, but that to me seems pretty fucking

neurodivergent activity. What was he like? Yeah, it's a good question. Was he? Divergent? That's a very good question. It's just the why, you know? Yeah.

What I do know was that there were days when he would only put the head on for the show. But there were other days when for some reason he would keep the head on like even at like we know we're driving back to Manchester at three o'clock in the morning and he still got the head on. I used to say that nothing makes a young man feel more alive and on an adventure

than driving down the M1 at three o'clock in the morning sitting next to a man wearing a big fake head. I'd never felt so much like Alice through a looking glass. So I'd tell you another thing though. He had a nose peg on under his head. because, you know, hits it like that. And I would notice he would take the head off and then he would take the nose peg off and wince in pain

because it would have dug into his nose. Being frank side bottom was painful and even, I think, slightly changed the shape of his nose having this nose peg on. So being flanked side bottom was definitely painful for him. The keeping the head on while he's in the car to me sounds quite artistic. Like, so next week, I have a play coming out

and I'm going to have to go to opening fucking night of the play. And I'm going to be in the strange position of when do I have the bag on and when do I have the bag off? And I'm just going to keep it on for the whole night. So even when I'm in the audience, even when I'm doing the bit afterwards where I'm speaking to people, I'm just going to bag up for the whole shebang. Is it always the same bag like the same kind of...

No. No, I, what I do. is I there was a supermarket up in Swords in Dublin and when they closed they gave me like 10,000 plastic bags. So I've been keeping them and I get about six or seven uses out of each plastic bag. But I have a plaster cast in my head and I heat shrink the bag to my head and then wear it that way. And then I also have a bag that's made out of a softer fabric for when I'm doing stuff with microphones so that you don't hear the rustle, you know? Like the bag, the bag was a huge part to my autism diagnosis because when I went to the psychologist, it's like, why, why the bag? And I said, because I have a fucking job where I'm very well known and I want to go to the

supermarket and not have people talking to me. And he went, is that it? And I went, yeah. And he's like, that's pretty autistic, sir. It's very autistic because you're supposed to, he said, you're supposed to want fame. It is not normal, but within neurotypical rules, having fame, having people recognize you is a good thing that you're it's a nice thing and I do not want that at all. I don't see the hierarchies in it and that was a big tick on the autism box for me, you know? Yeah. Surely there's another thing about wearing a back on your head though which is isn't it also to do with sort of sensory overload that you do? Well actually what I was going to say is you know they have the whole eye strain thing like if a you know I think autistic people find it hard to be kind of

stared at. It just gives you a kind of eye strain. Being seen. So I don't like being seen. I don't like feeling observed and being seen. And the bag protects me from being seen. Even though arguably you're more noticeable if you wear a bag over your head. Yeah, but that's only 1% in my life. You know, once I put that bag on, I mean, once I put that bag on and I'm fucking blind boy, then that's it. But when the bag is off, I'm nobody. And that's what I want. I've got to say I was a I used before we moved to America I used to get invited to Jonathan Ross's

Halloween parties and one year I wore a full face mask and and it was great that I've never felt so comfortable at a party when I was like when my face was completely covered by a mask. No one's gone there's John Ranson

I want to have a chat with him I don't not even that so much it was more it was more I don't know like just being invisible no it is that

not so much like it's John Romston but more like just not being judged at all okay ah yeah yeah yeah okay so because the thing is

yeah but then eventually people did judge me somebody came up to this and said will you take that fucking thing off your head okay

you're freaking me out because I have the weird situation of and I've always had this I know what it's like to walk into a room being a well-known person and then to walk back into that same room with nobody known who the fuck I am. And I can see in real time the difference. And I would hate to

have that bag all the time because like you'd have this. If you, if someone sees you and they recognize you as John Ranson, they have just met you now with a presupposed idea of what you are. That could be positive or negative. But you now don't have to put in the effort of showing that person that you're worth talking to because... Absolutely, yeah. And that's good for me. Like, I often think, like, I can bounce onto a stage and for some weird reason I'm not nervous at all

speaking in front of, you know, a thousand people or whatever. Whereas, if I was in the audience at a talk and they'd say, does anybody have any questions, I would never put my hand up. And it's because on stage, I come pre-approved. whereas in the audience and any old twat is going to fuck it up if I put my hand down

and I definitely I was saying this to Patrick Frayne you must know Patrick Frayne I know Patrick, I know Patrick, lovely lovely fella Yeah, lovely guy Yeah we were talking the other day and I said that my favourite type of parties

are the ones where I'm recognised and praised and it's because you don't have to do all the work you're not just some fucking idiot is trying to prove yourself you come pre-approved well fair play to you for you enjoying that it's not like an ego thing it's just it's not an ego thing at all it's much more the fact that if I turn it yeah if I turn up at a party

which I very rarely do by the way I go to parties but if I do go to one and I know I just feel very kind of insecure and no self-esteem I'm going to say something in small talk that's going to be a mistake and people are going to look at me like I'm an idiot. So it's not so much like I want the ego boost of being recognised as more. You get to wear the character of John Ronson as a mask. And it's just much easier.

Like you can relax. It's like, okay, people know who I am. Yeah. It's hard to explain. No, do you know what? I know exactly what the fuck you're talking about because sometimes when I have the bag on and I find myself backstage at a festival and I look around and I go, oh everyone knows I'm blind boy I've got the bag on this is going to be easy and I can take it off whereas when I don't have the bag on then I'm fucking nobody and I'm yeah you're like I'm liable to fuck up small talk exactly so yeah um this is the last thing I'm gonna ask right but you you said something once that struck with me where you said you had a dream where people follow you around and call you a failure that's right was yeah I used to yeah it was one of the psychopath

And I was like, I went on to the DSM to say I'm any mental disorders I had, and it turned out I had 12. And one of them was nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurred dreams of being pursued and declared a failure. And all my dreams involve me being pursued by people yelling at a failure. But how, what I, I suppose what I want to know there is you're very prolific. You're very prolific and you're very consistent. And from my experience as a writer, fear of fucking failure is what will stop you doing the work. How do you get the fucking work done when your fear of failure is so much that it appears in your dreams? Because not doing it is worse.

There you go. Yeah. There's a line in the castle where I say, because I'm writing about purpose and structure. and there's a line in the castle where I say that if I go and sit on a park bench to try and think up story ideas and if I can't think up a story idea I'm just overwhelmed by this terrible thought which is I'm just a man sitting on a bench

and so I kind of leap up to busy myself in some other way and honestly like I'm on tour at the moment we started this by talking about how bleak it is to be on tour just how miserable and lonely it can be the only time I'm happy is when I'm down a rabbit hole you know, researching a story something has made me curious

and that fills me with a sense of well-being. You're sounding very artistic, John. I'll be honest. Well, yeah, frankly. I mean, do you suspect a spectrumy thing or do you ask yourself the question, well, what's the point in the diagnosis? What would this do for me?

Look, I'm sure I'm on the stretch. I have no doubt about it at it at all. But what you're describing there, when I was saying earlier that the new autistic research is about autistic people are attuned to states of flow because it regulates our nervous system. That is precisely what you just described. You feel happy and safe.

That is a regulated nervous system when you're down a rabbit hole. And if you're not on a rabbit hole and you just going from town to town like I'm doing at the moment, you just feel empty and bleak and miserable. Absolutely. What does writer's block look like for you? What comes up, emotions come up for you when you get writers' black? Oh, just a sense of zero self-worth.

I can tell you that my righteous block is only what I can't think of an idea. I always think of it as like ideas block, not writer's block. I never forget how to write. I always know how to write. But it's that sort of magical moment of falling in love with a story. If you don't have that, that's my version of writer's block.

And it's just, it's awful. I just feel of, I just feel of just like, just no worth, no reason to be doing anything. It's shame, shame. Like, that's what you're, like I get the same thing. What you're describing is,

it's the feeling of shame. And the thing with shame is, shame is the sudden contraction of self. The sudden, the feeling of exposure. I mean, my shame when I get writer's block is the thoughts that will come up is everything that I've done before that is good has been a mistake and now I'm finally found out. Yeah. Yeah.

And how I get through it is I embrace failure. I try and write the shit idea and then write my way out of the shit idea. I go with absurdity, something ridiculous and then when I engage in playfulness, the playfulness means that the block goes away and now I'm just simply at play. And something you said earlier about, because I struggle with fear of failure massively,

but I still fucking do the work because I know the only real failure is doing nothing because I'm scared to try. But if I do something, I'm 20 years at this shit and there's so much stuff in the past that were failures, but they weren't really because they came back later on as ideas that worked.

yeah well yeah that's that's that's definite too actually my BBC producer so Shabia said something to me a couple of years ago which I always think of she says you know you're you're you're coming up with ideas even when you don't know that you are yeah you know if you just kind of lose yourself you know you feel like oh my god that's a wasted day but maybe it's not never never and you know what you know this this sort of misery that we're describing at least it leads to something really great which is that we're both productive, with deductive people. That's it, that's it. I'm not going to take any more of your time, John, even though I could fucking speak to you all day.

I can speak to your day. This has been a really great conversation. I hope people enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you so much. I'll leave you go also, John, and thank you. And anytime you want to come on, just give me a shout, because I'd love to chat you again. Yeah, maybe we should do some stuff on stage.

Actually, I was going to say we should do some stuff on stage together, but I'm going to try and do less touring in the future. based in America, aren't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The countryside. It's another autistic thing. I live right in the middle of nowhere and the silence. I just love.

I'm not gig in America and I'm going to give you the specific reason. When I asked you earlier about has there ever been anything in your work where you felt as if you've ruffled some feathers? In 2019, I was making a documentary with the BBC and I

had some of like the panorama team with me. So this was really shit-hot investigative journalists and shit-hot legal team. And we recreated Trump's P-Tape. So we went and looked at the hotel where it was in Russia, all of this, and created an exact, perfect recreation of this peatap, all signed off by BBC legal. And then we leaked it to the deep web to try and create a hoax to see, you know, could we do this? And it was impossible. No matter whatever corner of the, Like we had people who were signed off to be able to access the worst corners of the deep web to upload this thing. There was always someone watching and there was always someone taking it down.

Always. And it felt as if it was something intelligence agency-ish. And that made me paranoid and, of course, because I'm so outspoken about Palestine, I'm not gigging in fucking America until Trump is gone. I just don't trust the immigration thing. Do you reckon? Wow. I mean, yeah.

I think I'm on a list. Yeah, it's not impossible. This is why I became a citizen in 2020. Okay. Yeah, because I didn't want to have those fears when I came in to America. I'm sure you know people who are out, who are not American citizens, journalists who are just like, I don't know, man, I'm not sure. Because the thing is, they may not arrest you, but it's, they can keep you for 48 hours in the airport and they can go through your phone and they let you go. but they can put you through a very harrowing, intimidating experience

just to simply access America. And you know you're going to get your freedom, but that alone is enough to keep people going, fuck that, I'm going to go to Canada instead. Yeah, well, that's exactly the reason. In 2020, you know, we all thought to ourselves, you know what, we've no idea what's going to happen. But we don't want to, you know, if we ever leave America,

we want to leave on our own terms. And so we became citizens for that reason, because then you do have protections, you know, that's much less likely to happen. why we did it. Yeah. Thank you so much there to my guest, John Ronson. That was an incredible chat. I could have chatted to John for fucking ages. Hopefully we do get to do a live event at some point. I'd love to do that. Get your hands on his new book, The Castle, Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men. And I'd also recommend the audiobook because John is brilliant, brilliant at an audiobook. He is fantastic.

at the specific art form that is an audiobook. I've said it before, quite a lot of audiobooks are fucking shit. Because the book itself might be incredible, but it was written to be read. Whereas John's audio, John's writing, the way that he does it, his narrative style, it just translates perfectly into audiobook too. And he reads them himself and his, his, his speaking voice and his literary voice are the same thing they're one so his audiobooks are always fantastic he's one of the he'd be one of the authors where i purchased the book and the audio book

who else do i do that with bill bryson bill bryson when bill bryson is reading his own book but not when someone else is reading bill bryson's work i can't do that anyway i'll catch you next week In the meantime Rub a dog Wink at a swan Geniefleck to a frog Dog bless