The Joe Rogan Experience - #668 - Jon Ronson

Episode Date: July 6, 2015

Jon Ronson is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose works include the best-selling The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest book So You've Been Publicly Shamed is available to purchase now on Amazon. http://www.jonronson.com/

Nobody knows. All right, we're live. John Ronson, how are you, fella? Hey, how are you? Thanks for doing this, man. Appreciate it. No, I'm glad. I can't tell you the number of people who said you should do Joe Rogan. The number of people who said, oh my God, Joe Rogan's talking about Bohemian Grove, or Joe Rogan's talking about psychopaths. You have to come on. Well, I'm friends with Alex Jones, and Alex Jones told me many, many, many years ago

that they're burning effigies in Bohemian Grove. They're worshipping Moloch, the owl god. Well, I went to Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones. Oh, that's like going to Disneyland with Mickey Mouse. Yeah, it was kind of my idea. I sometimes feel like the kind of Simon... I mean, this isn't strictly speaking true, but I kind of sometimes feel a little bit like Alex Jones' Simon Cowell. Because this is like way back in the mid to late 90s, when he was like really famous in Austin, but kind of not that

well known outside. And I was working with this producer, John Sargent, basically, we noticed something, which was that a lot of people on the fringes, that Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazis and militia people, all had this one thing in common, which is they were all conspiracy theorists. They all believed in the evil power of Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove. So I thought it'd be good to try and infiltrate those places. But I didn't want to infiltrate Bohemian Grove alone because, frankly, I was scared. So we met Alex Jones when he was rebuilding David

Koresh's church at Waco, and he seemed kind of gung-ho. He was rebuilding David Koresh's church? Yeah, that was the first time I met Alex Jones. I went there with Randy Weaver. I became friends with the Weaver family. Who are the Weavers again? They're Ruby Ridge, you know, the family of white separatists. And so I got really friendly with Randy's daughter, Rachel. And then I went with Randy to Waco. And I'll extend, there was this kind of crazy man at Waco.

And I was like, who the fuck is that? What year was this? This was about probably 98, maybe. That's when I met him. Yeah? Yeah, I met him in 98. Yeah. He was amazing.

I mean, I could tell, like, I drove through Austin with him. Like, he went to buy a new suit because he was like, you know, giving a big talk at Waco. And like, everybody in the clothing store was like excited because Alex Jones had walked in. So, he was like a big deal in the neighborhood. But then I wanted somebody to sneak into Bohemian Grove with. And I asked David Icke first. I said, can we go into Bohemian Grove? And he was like, no, that's where they transform themselves back into giant lizards.

Did he tell you that for real? Yeah. He really did. Yeah. He said that's where they transform themselves back into lizards. He's kind of abandoned all that, hasn't he? Yeah. He gets mad if you bring it up.

Does he? Yeah. Which you can't. You can't get mad, man Yeah, you get a lot of speeches Yeah saying that people transform into lizards. Yeah, you got to own up to that shit God, I hope he said those exact words. I mean, this is going back a long time He said words he certainly strongly implied that he believed that that it was a behemoth that they transformed I think you're in the clear because he gave many many interviews where he talked about that

That was a a big What was kind of in the early days of the internet when you can get away with saying stupid shit like that? And you didn't have a bunch of people on reddit that immediately could debunk your Twitter or Facebook Well, they just knew something that you didn't know and like what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, I transform in a lizard Well one of of his big piece of evidence that Bohemian Grove was where they transformed themselves into lizards was because of this woman called Kathy O'Brien, who said that she was a kidnapped sex slave and that she would be let loose into the gardens of the White House and George Bush Sr. would hunt her. that was like his sex game and so

she wrote this book about this called um it was called something like the crisis of democracy it was called the transformation of America and she said it was at Bohemian Grove she was a kidnapped sex slave at Bohemian Grove and you know that's where it all happened and and she was like and Bohemian Grove was all based around this um this this river and the russian river and and so and so that's where the behemoth grove rumors first started with with kathy o'brien that's hilarious yeah and um so i thought like it can't be true that like george bush and henry kissinger all go to this club and on the Saturday night they all put on robes and have a mock human sacrifice in front of a giant stone owl I thought

that can't be true so I phoned up David Icke and I said do you want to come do you want to come with me he's like no and then I thought well remember that crazy that you know a guy we met at Waco Alex Jones maybe we should ask him so I called up Alex Jones and I said, do you fancy trying to get into Bohemian Grove? And he was like, yeah, I'm going to get a camera. We'll get a hidden camera. We'll get in there. We'll get it right in their faces as devil worshipers. We'll confront them going about their globalist devil worshiping evil.

So that was the video. He made a video about this. So you were involved in that? Yeah, I was in this video. Okay, now I remember you. Okay. Yeah. I remember you in that.

This was a long time ago. Long time ago. So we all went there. We all went to Bohemian Grove. It was me and my producer and my cameraman and then Alex and Alex's wife, Violet, and his friend, Mike. There was like six of us. And we were like strange bedfellows because I just thought oh this will be fun and Alex and Alex was like you know well at one point

I said to Alex like have you got like a contingency plan like if we manage to get in and and like you're you know you're uncovered have you got a contingency plan and Alex said yes and I said what is it he said I'll say to them don't get any closer and I'm like that's your contingency plan don't get any gas like a threat I know this is going yep so his he was just gonna scare them yeah he's gonna get any closer that's it don't get any closer that was Alex's. I don't think he thinks that far ahead. No. That's a problem. But they really did put on robes.

Yeah. And they really do have like a bundle of sticks that's supposed to represent a human being. And they carried it out there and light it on fire. I saw it all with my own eyes. But do they say that it represents a human being? No. What they say is that it represents dull human being? No. What they say is that it represents dull care,

like all the troubles in the world. Like all these men of wealth and power have all these troubles in the world. I've got to say, it was weird.

White people problems. Boy, that's real first world problems. Yeah. 1% are first world problems. Yeah, exactly. We, you know. How funny is that though?

All the rich people. Ruling the world is a pain in the ass for two weeks a year. You guys have so much stress. We need to burn a fake person to make you feel better. God, you guys, it's so hard being a billionaire. God, how do you do it? How do you run the world? I'll tell you, it was weird though. So Alex's plan, and this is how we were going to get in.

We were going to rent a boat and sail it along the river and then get out and then climb up the mountain and then get down the other side and then get in that way. And I was thinking, this is an ill-conceived plan. And then we met this local lawyer called Rick, who was like this preppy lawyer who lived in the town, Monte Rio, or Occidental. And Rick had been in, he'd infiltrated Bohemian Grove, just because like everybody in

the town wants to know what's going on in Bohemian Grove. So we met Rick to get some tips on how to break in. And Alex told Rick his plan. And Rick said, look, if you go in that way, you're going to get yourself killed. And Alex wrote down, this was one of my favorite bits of the whole weekend, Alex wrote down on his notepad, going in that way, dash, killed. Fuck it, Alex. So Rick said, what you need to do is go to Eddie Bauer and get yourself some preppy clothes and just walk up the drive and just walk up the drive just walk up the drive that's a smart move yeah so alex was like really torn because part of him he

admitted this to me afterwards part of him was worried that like in the wicker man me and rick and all these other people that we'd met were all part of this kind of elaborate plan to lure Alex into the forest and like he would be the one to sacrifice Oh, that's so rich. Yeah, it had crossed his mind. So the upshot was that Alex and Mike decided to go in separately to me and Rick.

Oh, so he didn't trust you that much? No, he didn't trust me. They didn't have Wikipedia back then. He couldn't just Google you or anything, right? He couldn't Google me. Did he know of your work? Did he know who you were? Not really. I wasn't particularly well-known back then.

I wasn't really well-known at all. Is it safe to say that Alex Jones helped launch you? We kind of helped launch each other. That night. So you guys went in there, and Alex gave me this on VHS tape, by the way, back in 99 or whatever the so you guys went in there and alex gave me this on vhs tape by the way back in 99 or whatever the hell you got you guys actually made a tape out of it yeah well alex and i did this thing i did a special in austin um my first dvd i filmed in austin and alex and i dressed up

as the bushes i was george bush uh junior and he was senior and we ran around the state capital with like these Bush masks on. I've seen that video. Did Alex have a big bullhorn saying that they were all like Satanist globalists? At one point in time, definitely, but I don't know if that made it into the video, but he actually sang a song. There's actually a song. I don't know if we've ever played this song. It's so ridiculous. Alex Jones wrote a song about, like, the elite. And it was on the video. It was on the video. And we're all, like, dancing around to Alex's Jones song.

This is fucking stupid. This is 99. Right. 99 or maybe two. There it is fucking stupid. This is 99. Right. 99 or maybe two. There it is. Yeah. What does he say? Put the headphones on.

You hear what he's saying? I don't remember. Put it back to the beginning so we can hear it. Oh, that's me doing bonk hits. That's my son, George Bush. And we sure as hell don't. Live, ladies and gentlemen, from the belly of the beast. Oh, that's me doing bonkits. This is his song! Moloch and Friends.

Oh, my God. So this is the same time, right? Yeah. You know, I feel like I nurtured Alex's interest in Moloch by suggesting Bohemian Grove to him as a possible location. I was wearing a Style Project t-shirt. You remember Style Project? Right. Styleproject.com?

Project t-shirt. You remember Style Project? Right. Styleproject.com. So stupid. That's Alex Jones singing. He wrote it all, too, by the way. It had nothing to do with this. Right.

Oh, my God. That's so stupid six six six on bush's head so this is it was the only time i ever met alex so that that weekend in um that's the only time you've ever met that and waco you know waco first and then that i lost touch with him after that he he he recant he liked me again actually actually, after I wrote The Minister of Goats. Like, he didn't like me after I wrote my book Them, which includes all the stuff about sneaking into Bohemian Grove with him because he thought I was too much of a debunker of Bohemian Grove. But then when I wrote The Minister of Goats, he liked me again

because he felt that I was like... The Minister of Goats is kind of like a conspiracy book in a way. Right. Right. Yeah. So how much different is it than, should we keep going with this Bohemian Grove? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel there's more to say. So Alex and Mike decided to go in via the undergrowth.

Like I saw them. So they went in through the bushes? They went in through the bushes. And there was a lot of poison oak around there. I wouldn't be at all surprised if- You guys just walked in. Yeah. Me and Rick, the lawyer, this kind of preppy lawyer.

Oh, I'll tell you the funniest thing that I've missed out of this story was the night before we were going to infiltrate, Alex and Mike decided to practice being preppy. And so they were walking up and down, they're walking up and down like the corridor outside their motel room, talking in a kind of effeminate way about microprocessors. Like, you know, I just, nanotechnology is the future. No, that's how they thought preppies talked. Yeah. So, and then, so then they went in through the undergrowth, and me and Rick, the lawyer, went up the drive,

actually with our producer, John Sargent. And just as Rick said, you know, we gave the security guard a kind of I rule the world type wave. We were just preppy, and we were in. Act like you know. That's what Ice-T used to say. When they used to rob things, Ice-T used to say, just act like you know. Act like you know what you're doing.

Yeah, we walked in, and there was this bank my memories okay there's this big bank of telephones this was like before cell phones well i guess there were cell phones but very few right yeah very few there was a big bank of telephones and then there were all these camps it was like a giant redwood forest um and then there were all these little camps everywhere and all the camps sure enough had weird like almost devil-y kind of milieu like little red like i remember one of the camps was called like devil eyes or something and there was like little red eyes you know poking out of the thing it was like a halloween type right and then some of the camps had like grand pianos and hot tubs. And there were all these old men, all of whom looked like

you know, Mr. Burns. Sort of in little trucks going up and down. Like golf carts? Yeah, sort of more like posh pickup trucks, if I remember rightly. Like the kind of stuff you'd get like at Universal

Studio Tours or something. And then we saw pickup trucks okay rightly like the kind of stuff you'd get like like a universal studio tour or something and and then we saw and there's like all this owl stuff everywhere now the reason now this some conspiracy theorists get really annoyed with what i'm about to say um it's like because everybody really loves the idea that like they're worshiping moloch the giant devil owl but the reason why i saw as i could tell, there are all these owl sculptures everywhere is because it's an owl sanctuary. There's little cabins with stuffed owls in there. It's like an owl sanctuary.

But wait a minute. It's an owl sanctuary? They actually take care of owls? I think it's like an owl preservation area. This is a place where owls nest. I'm no owl expert. So this is a place where... Well, if you were worshipping an owl god, though,

wouldn't that be a cool place to make your sanctuary where the owls actually nest? Well, I guess so. Unless... You can't totally debunk it there, Mr. Ronson. Well, that's true. Although wouldn't... Like if you're worshipping a giant owl god,

wouldn't all the regular sized owls be like false gods i mean i'm i'm busking this maybe or you know i don't know if you had like a a great monkey god and the monkeys lived around where the great monkey god lived you'd feel like they worshiped them yeah like they were the owls worshipped moloch okay i'm with you on that. Still, nonetheless. The minions. The spookable minions. I can tell you have children.

So we were wondering about me and Rick, and we saw this giant, the giant owl. Right. Of everybody's legend. It's funny, I remember thinking it was stone, but then a few years later, somebody else infiltrated Bohemian Grove for some magazine and said it's not stone. It's like plaster of Paris or words or something. But I'm sure they're right.

You guys were far away from it. I remember going like all the way up to it. So is there a security guard? Like when you walk down? There was one guy sitting in a little hut. And he didn't ask you anything didn't ask anything you just like enjoy enjoy your evening or something and where is bohemian grog in what state uh it's in northern california it's it's next to this little town

called occidental there's like a no through road and then you go up the road uh is that north of san francisco yeah north of napa north of napa okay North of Napa, okay. And I remember seeing Alex and Mike. And I was like, hey, it's Alex and Mike, hey. And then they walked past and they said, keep walking. There's owls everywhere. There's cameras in the trees. There's owls everywhere?

Yeah, there's owls, Mike said, there's owls everywhere. Did they see owls? I mean, are they talking about owl owls? Well, I think at this point Mike was convinced that every time they saw an owl, it was like, you know, it was Moloch related oh jesus fucking christ yeah so so what were you thinking at this point you think what the fuck have i got myself into hanging out with these guys they're gonna ruin my whole investigation well no i mean i was nervous um because you know um the closer you can get to this microphone the better because we don't have our headsets okay sure so yeah i was kind of i was nervous um but i sort of thought it was kind of fun i felt safe with rick the lawyer

i felt like nothing bad would happen to me because he looked so rich and preppy and that's like every horror movie where things go bad you're hanging out with rick the lawyer yeah i thought i'd be fine with rick the lawyer yeah but so then the bell rings, like gets to dusk. And there's a ringing of the bell. And all these old men like drift down to this little pond. And they all sit on like grass one side of the pond. And Alex and Mike are there like a few rows behind us. And there's the giant owl on the other side of the pond um i remember

actually this moment which i thought was really weird was this old man comes up to me i mean like this is like nearly 20 years ago so i don't remember like all of the details but but this old man came up to me and said something like like i was way younger than everybody else there and this and this guy says to me, is this your first time? And I said, yeah. I said, oh, you're going to love it. Burn him, burn him. And I did this sort of impression of what was about to happen in the pageant.

And there was this look of real fucking intensity on this guy's face. And at that moment, I thought to myself, there's Alex and Mike, like a few rows behind me convinced that this is like evidence that the global elite are blood drinking satanists and then there's all these like men of wealth and power who are really fucking into it all themselves and they might

be into it in a different way to the way Alex and Mike are into it but they're fucking into it and I thought I'm the only sane person in this entire fucking Redwood post. What about Rick the lawyer? And Rick, me and Rick, we're the only sane person in this entire fucking Redwood. What about Rick the lawyer? And Rick, me and Rick. We're the only sane people. I wonder if the tenants dropped off in that place once they invented Viagra.

You know, because like rich old dudes, they couldn't get it up. It's not a lot to do. You get bored. Yeah, it was a weird way to spend your summer vacation. I didn't see any like famous people. But at one point, we passed this display cabinet. And there were the names of the guests on the in the display cabinet. And I remember seeing Dick Cheney's name. Oh, yeah, for sure. That's why he gets his extra hearts. Yeah. Have

you ever? There's a photo of I think it's Ronald Reagan at Bohemian Grove. Yeah, with Nixon, right? Yeah. Pull that up, Jamie, because it's a crazy photo. So this has been like a weird spot where these guys have gone for decades. Well, I guess since the railroad came through San Francisco

like the turn of the 20th century. I think that's pretty much when it started. Who the fuck started this thing? There he is. There's Nixon. There's Reagan. Who started this thing?

And look at the big redwood behind him. It's a majestic tree. Yeah. Okay, what I heard, and as I say, it's been like 20 years since I've, you know, thought about this stuff too much. Because once I put it in them them I kind of forgot about it but but but the story I heard was that when the railroad was coming through San Francisco all the rich white republicans and unlike Bilderberg this is a very republican club uh thought you know fuck there goes the neighborhood you know we're going to lose our elite status we need to set up a private club for ourselves so they set up the bohemian club

in san francisco and then bohemian grove in you know a couple of hours north uh so then this this ritual starts um this you see that a man wearing lederhosen appears in like a stage cut out of the giant redwood and he's got like leaves all over his lederhosen it's like leaf covered lederhosen and he starts singing this like song and and the symphony's there like the san francisco symphony well there's a video of it pull pull a video of alex jones at bohemian grove because alex alex was a few rows behind us and he was filming it all like with a camera that had toppled over 45 degrees in his bag. And yeah, he filmed the whole thing. Yeah, he did it like on a sneak tip.

Yeah. Did he film as early as like the pre-show lederhosen? I don't know. It's an hour and a half long. I mean, if I know Alex, yeah. If I know Alex He filmed everything See if you can find Some dude in a robe

In front of a giant fucking owl This is what it looks like from here Yeah see how it's toppled over sideways Yeah Go full screen maybe we'll get a better look at it I'm a few rows in front So then this happens All these men in robes and hoods

all descend um in front of the giant owl uh there you go and they uh and they have this ritual where this papi and masha effigy like comes over on the pond um in a gondola and they say to it you know we shall burn ye tonight uh dolcaire and then the the voice of Dolce goes ye shall not burn me and then they go year after year year after year in this happy grove we burn thee and then they lift it up and throw it in the

fire and the effigy goes ahhh it makes noises? yeah do they have like a speaker system or something? yes these are the speakers and what you can't see in the video is that there's an orchestra to your left makes noises? Yeah. Do they have like a speaker system or something? Yes, he's the speakers. And what you can't see in the video is that there's an orchestra to your left.

I mean, fuck knows where the guy in the leaf-covered lederhosen's gone at this juncture, but he was like basically sitting on a giant redwood tree. He's getting sodomized by Nixon and Dick Cheney. Yeah. Ronald Reagan's coaching him. There's probably about a thousand people in that crowd the other side of the pond.

Wow. When the fireworks go off, you get a glimpse of how many people there are. There's probably 1,000 people. Wow. What are the requirements? How do you get in there? You get invited. I met Harry Shearer, who got invited.

Harry Shearer from The Simpsons? Yes. The voice guy? He was the only person who'd been to Bohemian Grove who was willing to talk about it to me, like after we left. Wow. And he said he was invited to, these were his words, he said he was invited to Jew the place up. Like there weren't enough Jews there. That's hilarious.

And he said he thought it was kind of ridiculous. interpretation of it which is basically that it's not evidence that the secret rulers of the world are actually um satanists who do actual human sacrifice which is basically the way alex was was spinning it but it's this kind of weird overblown pageant um what what i think is really interesting and i think this is where skullull and Bones comes into it, is that there is this weird proclivity amongst the elites to create these ancient ceremonies for themselves. And none of them are actually ancient. They're all only, what, like 100 years old at the most. Right.

But they're doing that for a reason, right? They want to create this kind of Masonic, ritualistic milieu for themselves. And I think there's a weird psychology going on there. Because, I mean, you and me, we wouldn't. Well, I mean, I wouldn't. You wouldn't. No, I wouldn't. Yeah. But I might.

I would have to be really fucked up to do it. I'd have to be under the influence of a lot of different things. But the idea behind it, I guess, is that you get closer if you're all doing this ridiculous shit together that somehow or another through tradition or through ritual that you bond. You bond and maybe it gives you a kind of mandate to be in an elite. I sometimes wonder whether, like at Skull and Bones 2, it's not just about bonding, but it's also about creating this kind of specialness for yourself. Right, right, right. Yeah.

That gives you a sort of, you know, doesn't make you feel so insecure about the idea that you're a global elitist who's ruling the world. Wasn't that a thing about Skull and Bones as well? They were saying that part of the ritual, they do like really humiliating shit to each other and they film it so that they Always have this like the Scientologist. Yeah, maybe yeah, maybe yeah I've heard that but I but I but I don't know if that's true better

But I've heard that well young Jamie was saying that Tom Cruise might be leaving Scientology. Is there any evidence to support this? Star Star magazine does well, that's about as good as it gets buddy. I'll be good going clear has a lot of power I think it's only the movement. Well, it certainly did I mean it exposed well, what it all deals with I think with this this Bohemian Grove thing and is this sort of think with this this bohemian grove thing and is this sort of uh cultish mindsets these weird sort of mindsets where they engage in otherwise preposterous rituals that to the outside are like to us like we're watching this owl god and a fucking bundle of sticks and burn thee like this is so fucking stupid but to those people it represents this thing They've all kind of agreed to do this goofy shit together, and there's some weird power in that yeah

I agree with that. It's definitely there for a reason what exists in so many different cultures. That's the weirdest part about it It's like you go back to like the Aztecs and the Maya like they would when they would make these human sacrifices They would wear these crazy outfits and plumed headdresses. And it was all this, like in a time where it was- Well, this ritual in the ISIS comes too, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's bizarre when people start wearing outfits and engaging in rituals, you know, that's a weird aspect of human behavior that seems to be really prevalent It's like it's not like an isolated instance where there's only this you know Like if you go to Africa and you see like or Asia or you know you see like these people that have those those

Things that extend their neck those little bars those women put like God. What are they doing? Well? It's very isolated Yeah It's only like one group of people that do it or the women that put the plates the suri women that put the plates in their lips like what the fuck is that yeah but doesn't catch on doesn't go anywhere else like bizarre ritual but it's only isolate this one very specific area but rituals themselves like really wacky dresses and weird things that people do it's it's so common it's it's almost like every culture has them and the people involved um by the way when my book then came out the bohemian

club made a statement i remember about my book what they said they said something along the lines of despite john ronson's objectionable trespassing. We appreciate the fact that he's putting a less kind of sensationalist spin on what he saw than what Alex Jones did. And so they kind of appreciated the fact that I was being less hysterical about it than Alex. And they said, you know, it's an overblown pageant, but it couldn't be more innocent or something along those lines. They wrote that letter to Esquire magazine. By the way, it couldn't be more innocent, or something along those lines. They wrote that letter to Esquire magazine. By the way, it could definitely be more innocent.

I mean, look, the Mickey Mouse parade at Disneyland is also an overblown pageant. That could not be more innocent. That's really literally as innocent as things get. The Bohemian Grove could be way more innocent. You're burning someone. Like, and you're saying, I burn thee, and then you have screams that play out over a loudspeaker. That's not innocent.

That's wacky as fuck. Like, it's hard to just, just stating the facts, it would be really hard to soften that up. Yeah. You know, like, saying that you have an over-sensationalized version of it, like, that's not possible. sensationalized version of it like what that's not possible like it's really sensational although saying that i definitely had some chuck this is why me and alex fell out because i felt what we saw was bizarre enough without having to

put a a spin on it what was alex's spin a Alex's spin was practically that, you know, it's possible that they were killing an actual baby. I mean, Alex, I can't remember if Alex went that far, but he went a long way. Oh, and at one point he said, at one point he said to me, yeah, we overheard these two old men, like, when we were walking down the road.

I mean, it's true that me and Alex were, like, separate during this, you know, but he said at one point we overheard these two old men going, yeah, we're going to get him elected. And I thought, like, I don't know that Alex didn't hear that. But that's a bit fucking convenient. I thought that's exactly the thing Alex would want to hear at Bohemian Grove. Well, who knows what that conversation was about. You take something out of context like that.

It could have been a total complete joke. Yeah, it could have been elected to like the local shrines it could have been anything yeah even the boy scouts could i mean who knows what the fuck they were talking about yeah like alex is one of those jump to conclusions confirmation biased characters that oftentimes has some really fascinating information and as much i admire about alex i mean me too he's a friend he's a good friend he's a he's an extraordinary broadcaster he's crazy he's crazy he's my friend. He's a good friend. He's an extraordinary broadcaster. He's crazy. He's crazy.

He's my friend. I'll tell you right now, he's out of his fucking mind. But he's right a lot of the time. I mean, one of the best pieces of work that Alex did was 911, The Road to Tyranny. And in that, he exposed some stuff from news broadcasts that was really shocking about the use of agent provocateurs to which I always thought was utter horseshit. And then it turns out not only is it not horseshit, but it's standard operational procedure has been proven with this Occupy Wall Street crowd. They infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street group and did all kinds of crazy shit in the park.

We're trying to get people to join them and then arrest them. And what the Asian provocateurs did during the WTO protest is they would, um, they had these peaceful protests and they would come in dressed up and like all black and they had military issue boots and they were smashing windows and breaking things. And then they gave an excuse for the cops to come in and close down the protest. Well, they literally set up a no protest zone where people couldn't go to

work with WTO badges they had a WTO badge with us a line through it like saying no WTO they were literally telling them they couldn't go to work with that on this is a no protest like a fucking pin like which is completely against everything this country's supposed to stand for, right? And so these people were, you know, these agent provocateurs were working for the government, and they literally came in to try to break up a peaceful protest by turning it violent, and then they were all held up in this one house, and Alex documented it all, not with his own news footage and his own reporting spin

but basically just using actual news stories and different uh coverages by different local news stations and showed like what the fuck actually went on these people were all released these guys were all held up in a building somewhere and they negotiated their release someone did somehow okay and you know at first I was really super skeptical because I was like, that sounds like nonsense. But then the more you peel away, the more you realize, well, this is something that they've always done. It's like a standard.

Look, if you've got a bunch of people that are protesting and they're ruining your elite globalist fun, like the best way to do it if they're being peaceful is to have people that pretend to be amongst them start smashing things. Then you have an excuse to come in and arrest everybody. And that's what they do. So he had a really fascinating video on that

showing evidence of that being used before. That there's a bunch of tactics that are in place. It's not simply as innocent as that law enforcement is set up to enforce laws and to preserve peace. tactics are in place it's not simply as innocent as the law enforcement is set up to enforce laws and to preserve peace it's not it's not they they do do a bunch of creepy shit and you know that's that's unfortunate but that's when you start talking about conspiracy theory well that seems to be conspiracy fact you know it just seems to be something that's standard operational procedure when they can get

away with it. What I'm hoping is that with all this WikiLeaks shit and all this Edward Snowden stuff and all the new details that have been revealed about the NSA and what we know now about security and the internet and the cloud everything can be hacked. Everything can be

compromised. I'm hoping that all goes away. Because I'm hoping that it's just going to be way too transparent. Everything can be compromised. I'm hoping that all goes away because I'm hoping that it's just going to be way too transparent. But, you know, I don't know. But Alex Jones thinks what they're trying to do is get down to 500,000 people. He's got this idea in his head. They want to kill everyone with 500,000 people.

These really grandiose things he says like that, do you think he really believes them or do you think he's trying to make something that's so huge that everyone's gonna like draw themselves towards him um he's not a liar um he he might go further with things than i would you know he might not have rational conclusions he might uh approach things with confirmation bias but when you spend five hours a day on the fucking radio or whatever he does just going over wacky theories and selling gold gold and bonds and dried foods they got dried food keep the dried food in your basement you know it's after a while i think you lose your fucking mind

you know if you work at a strip club you get sick of hookers you get sick of working with strippers you know if you're selling drugs all day the last thing you want to do is take drugs i think alex is like inundated with conspiracy it's like he's overwhelmed you probably can't see the forest for the trees yeah it's just all chaos to him it's all everybody's in on it so It's all the global elite. People are turning into reptiles, left and right, burning owls, babies, whatever they can. I don't know, man. I don't, I mean, you'd have to ask. I love the guy,

though. He's a great guy. I love hanging out with him. He's a lot of fun. We had, we got on better again, as I said, after the Minister of Goats came out, because he really, he liked that book. And then he had me on his show, and then, like, all of his listeners said i was a shill for the new world order i think i'm a shill too sometimes they say that depends depends on what i say yeah when i was talking about chem trails then they got really mad at me right joe rogan's a shill i debunk chem trails okay

didn't even debunk. Just fucking science. I mean, there's like real simple science behind what happens when a jet engine passes through condensation in the atmosphere. Right. It's like it's been, they've known about it for fucking ever. This idea that they're spraying clouds. Like, what the fuck, man? And that they're controlling you with these clouds.

But when I did this uh sci-fi show we talked about it and you know i brought in aviation specialists and i talked to different scientists and i talked to a bunch of different people about it and you know what we decided to print was or we decided to show on the television show unfortunately you're dealing with 44 minutes of tv for an hour you know you got a bunch of different commercials so So you kind of, you don't spend, I think to really debunk something like that, you'd have to kind of like spend a long time with it and actually show people,

like actually get a jet up in the air and film it and show how this plane is actually leaving these clouds because it's passing through haze. Wouldn't be too hard to do if you had a really good budget, but we didn't have a really good budget, and it wouldn't be that entertaining. We had to make it short little snippets, which is a real issue when you're dealing with any of those debunking shows

is that they also have to be entertaining, and they also have to fit within a format where they have to break every five minutes or whatever it is for commercials. What is it? Seven minutes or something like that? Whatever the fuck they do. know they're constantly having commercials so it's like you have to have these little tiny chunks of information and it's really just entertainment yeah more than anything so you know i don't see myself as a debunker because i think um you know what i saw at behavior and grow for instance was was really it was odd there was a

kind of intensity there which which i believe is very different to what Alex felt was going on, but it was still odd. Yeah, well, it's undeniably odd, right? I mean, it is odd. Yeah, and rituals exist for a reason. What reason is that, though? I mean, I don't know for certain, but I would say it's this idea, you know, we love to, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, but my most recent book is this book about public shaming called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. We will reduce somebody to a label. We'll reduce somebody to the worst tweet that they ever wrote. We'll demonize them and then we'll dehumanize them because we've just destroyed somebody.

And we don't want to feel bad about destroying them. So we call them like a sociopath or something. It's this whole like mental trick we play on ourselves. Like what's it called? Cognitive dissonance. This idea that we're good people but we've just destroyed somebody. So how do we make sense of that? Or we just say we're a sociopath or something. So it's all about labeling and reducing

and demonizing and destroying people that we don't like. And it's also about having an excuse to be a real asshole. All you have to do is find a reason why you can unleash your fury on people. And it's a free shot. It's a free shot,

because if John Ronson says something fucked up, there is a million people that could find out about that, and they don't know you at all, and so they have a free shot. They've never met you. They're never going to meet you. They live in another part of the planet, and they could just fucking fuck that guy and they

could just start typing a bunch of shit and it's this weird thing going on where everybody's kitted themselves into believing that you know you can lead a good ethical life like i can lead a good ethical life but some bad phraseology in a tweet or something can be a clue to our secret inner evil. Yeah, what you're really all about. What you're really like, yeah. And I just wonder whether there's some kind of connection between, it's about, you know, between that and about the rituals that you find in places like Bohemian Grove.

And maybe the connection is that it's all about tricking yourself into believing that you can do evil shit. So like when you give yourself like a ritual at Skull and Bones or Bohemian Grove, that makes you feel, oh, I'm separate and different and better. And that gives me a mandate to rule the world. I can inflict this carnage on other people because I'm different to them. I'm better than them. And maybe on Twitter, we do the same thing in our own little ways,

which is like, oh, well, you know, we're better than that person because that person just misused their privilege or that person just, you know, showed their true inner evil. It's all about kind of, it's all about setting yourself apart from people so that you can behave in ways that hurt other people and you don't have to feel bad about it. Maybe that's the connection. Well, people have a tendency to pile on. It's always been the case. That's the reason why you see like when riots break out, that sort of exploits that type of pile on behavior. People will do things in large groups of chaotic moments,

like large groups of chaos rather, that they would never do with an individual. As far as like assaulting people or, I mean, there's been instances where gangs of people beat up and killed people and the people that were involved almost didn't feel responsible because they were one of many that stomped somebody or kicked somebody or ran over somebody the snowflake doesn't need to feel responsible for the avalanche yeah yeah exactly that's a great way of putting it and i think diffusion of responsibility is a real issue with human beings when it comes to large numbers and any times as large numbers they don't feel responsible for any repercussions or of their actions if there was only two people in the world

and two people in the world and two people in the world, somehow or another invented Twitter, and they were communicating with each other, and one guy said something questionable, and the other guy quoted him and said John Ronson is a piece of shit. Here is proof.

Fuck this guy. Let's shame him. What's this let's? There's only you. There's no one there. But what you're trying to do is they're appealing to the bully instinct of people to just pile on and i'm torn because sometimes i think publicly shaming people is a good thing like if it's actual social justice it's actual right and wrongs. But the problem is, I think these days we're in this really bad situation where people have decided to not differentiate between a serious transgression and an unserious transgression. Very good point. So some nice liberal person who tells a joke that comes out badly is treated with a similar level of ferocity. It's like a racist cop from the McKinney, Texas video.

Well, that's a very good way of putting it. I think most people are not living life even. They're going through life with a deficit. And they started out with this deficit by having a bunch of fucking shitty experiences when they were children. They're shitty parents and bad time in school and maybe they've been picked on and maybe their job sucks or maybe they have unfulfilled sexual expectations.

Whatever the fuck it is. Most people are going into any situation with a headwind or a tailwind, I guess it is, when someone's something behind you. Tailwind, right? Tailwind, right? Headwind as you're trying. There's push behind them. Tailwind, right? Headwind is your drive.

There's push behind them. They're like accelerates their reaction to anything. And they're almost looking for something that they can blame their bad feeling on. They're almost looking for a target to unleash all their existential angst and frustration and life. All their unfulfilled expectations. All of it is on John Ronson's shitty tweet. Yeah. You know?

I wish you stopped using me as like the kind of generic. I'm sorry. Every time you say it, I think, fuck, shit. Someone else. What shitty tweet? But I've experienced it before. I've experienced it, but I found it adorable. I would retweet people and stuff when they did it to me.

Well, I always liked it. I noticed because after my public shaming book came out, obviously, you know, there was a lot of pushback and a lot of people went for me. And I always really liked it when people went for me in a kind of ridiculous way because I could retweet that one and it would make me look good. And it was one of my favorite one was all these people started like going for me. And one person wrote, why? And I wasn't, I just stayed completely silent. And one person wrote, why isn't John Rodson applying to any of us? And somebody else wrote, because John Rodson only replies to men.

And I'm like, fuck. What does that mean? Yeah, honestly, I'm part of some kind of... Well, what were they upset at you for? Well, okay, well, in that particular instance, it all started with Justine Sacco. I wrote, there's a chapter in my book that def with Justine Sacco. I wrote, there's a chapter in my book that defends Justine Sacco, who's the AIDS tweet woman. Do you remember? Right.

On the plane. Listen, man, that lady is probably on Xanax and wine. And she said something that she thought was funny, that would be funny if she was your friend. I would be funny if she, well... If she was my friend, and she sent that to me in a text message i would fucking laugh yeah you know i'm going to africa hope i don't get get aids lol just kidding i'm white yeah and then the worst thing then she gets on the plane yeah she gets on the plane turns off her phone yes and while she's asleep is like just torn to shreds by like

16 hours yeah hundreds of thousands of people. And one of the most like extraordinary things about it is that her inability to explain herself became part of the hilarity. That was the tailwind. Like, oh my God, we know something she doesn't. One person tweeted, we're about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch

get fired in real time before she even knows she's being fired. And I just can't think of anything more unjust than that. So I wrote this really passionate, you know, polemic defending her, I think, that, you know, we had gone crazy, we'd lost our minds in this. It was the most injudicial thing you could possibly think of. And a lot of people, as you can imagine, kind of really objected to that. Of course. Yeah. So I think-

But it's because they have the green light to object. I mean, it's not that you're not saying something reasonable. I thought it was one of the most important stories I ever did, because like for 30 years I've been writing about abuses of power, like in the psychopath test, the abuses of power in the pharmaceutical industry or, you know, the worst excesses of psychiatry or psychopaths or whatever, but whatever, the people abusing their power over there. And whenever I like gave talks about that, I'd like everyone would love it, you know, people would love it. And then I write this new story, this new book, where I say, you know what, the people abusing our power now, they're us.

It's like, we've suddenly got all this new power on Twitter and social media, we're massively abusing it. And the pushback is ferocious. Well, because the pushback is from the very people who enjoyed abusing this power. Yeah, yeah. I've been talking about this for a while. And I think that what's going on now, with with people and the internet and this this newfound ability to communicate that we find ourselves in this newfound situation we find ourselves in, where anyone instantaneously can comment on virtually anything that happens in the world.

And if what you say resonates or offends, it can become a hot button, and it just gets all these ants just find the sugar, and they just dive on it, and they just swarm. And it's almost like a mindless thing, because I think that what we're experiencing is an adolescent stage of a new level of communication that human beings are experiencing yeah i think that this new level of communication is starting off with the ability to just tweet at each other and it's going to eventually go into some weird virtual reality place that's unless

people flee you know my friend a couple yeah a couple of years ago, my friend Adam Curtis. Flip phones, live in the desert, cut your own wood in the forest. Yeah, basically. My friend Adam Curtis said to me, who you'd love, by the way, if you don't know his stuff. No, I don't. Oh, God, you'd love him. He made The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self, these great BBC documentaries. Oh, I've seen that. I've seen The Century of the Self.

Yeah. Century of the Self, these great BBC documentaries. Oh, I've seen that. I've seen the Century of the Self. Yeah. Anyway, Adam said to me one time that, you know, he thinks that the internet or definitely social media is going to be like one of those John Carpenter movies from the 80s where everybody's yelling at each other and everyone's like killing each other and eventually everyone flees to somewhere safer like the suburbs. And, you know, I noticed myself fleeing a bit from social media

Yeah, I never I when a long time ago like maybe ten years ago or so I would argue with people online all the time and then I realized what an enormous waste of time it is Yeah Also, I realized that I'm not picking the people that I communicate with as opposed to the way you do it in real life The way and one of the things that I would do in real life is I would avoid anybody that starts arguments and is shitty all the time people were insulting and shitty I would argue I wouldn't argue with them I would avoid them but on the internet I would like engage these people you know like I'll get you yeah you fucking loser

you know but you realize after a while like oh this is a new thing and I'm applying to it like the sort of same strategy that I would apply to a heckler at a comedy club. And you really can't. This is a totally new thing, and no one knows how to do it yet. We don't have the benefit of hindsight to be able to step. You know, we're talking like 2000, you know, 2001. We didn't have the benefit of stepping back and saying, well, this has on for a long time and now we understand how to how to deal with people but the back then we didn't and

I wasted a lot of time had some fun But wasted a lot of time and also you you get emotionally charged up and invested in these people that In real life you probably wouldn't want to hang out with them. They're probably not the nicest folks to be with. Yeah, or maybe they are. And just the Internet is turning us into these unempathetic, psychopathic figures. I mean, maybe if you met them in real life, they'd be sweet. Well, you wouldn't know them, first of all, based on their tweets. Because a tweet is one of the worst representations of you.

Yeah. It has to be kind of extreme. 140 characters. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it can be poignant. Sometimes it can be funny. But like to sum you up from, first of all, to sum you up by your writing is difficult enough as it is when you're writing chapters and paragraphs without any back and forth.

It's hard because I don't think we are just who we are as an individual I think we we are we are who we are based on who we're interacting with and how that works out like that's who you really are you that's one of the things that's so important about choosing your friends because your friends aren't just someone you enjoy they kind of help define you and when you have a bunch of really good friends and you communicate with them well and you get a lot out of it, it changes who you are. You become a better person.

You can become a better person in a really good relationship. And you can become an awful person in a bad relationship. You know, I've been in bad relationships before where I didn't like me. I'm like, this person hates me. I don't even like me anymore.

Like, what the fuck is going on? And it's because we like to think of ourselves as completely autonomous, but I don't think that's real. I don't think there's anybody that's really autonomous. I think we all need human beings and we all, we all cherish human interaction. I mean, as much as you want privacy, you don't want it all the time. I mean, if you had to choose between no privacy or No people I would take no privacy every time I like people people are great You know I don't want to be bothered all the time, and that's when people think the woods seem like a great idea I'm just gonna go unabomber and just fucking live in the woods, but no You don't you don't want to do that like. We literally are a super organism.

We are not like one individual experiencing the universe solely on our own. We're all constantly interacting with each other. Yeah, which I think is part of the reason why social media public shamings are so fucking traumatizing to somebody on the receiving end of it. Oh, yeah, sure. Because there's nothing, you know, to be ejected from society, to be told you're not as good as everybody else, just get out, is, like, deeply traumatizing. But then the people doing the shaming, they don't want to think that. They don't want to think that they've just potentially done something intensely traumatizing to another human being,

like mangled up somebody's mental health. So they just think, oh, I'm sure they're fine. I'm sure they're fine. That person we just destroyed, I'm sure they're fine. You know, there's a guy who used to edit Gawker, who reviewed my book in one of the papers, who basically said, oh, John Ronson's so sweet, you know, but it's fine, you know, if you're a man being

publicly shamed, it's fine. It's no big deal. They're just fine. And then, and I was looking at this, I was thinking, fucking hell, you know, I've gone around the world meeting these people. They're not, they are not fucking fine. It's like, whether you want to carry on doing it or not, you have to accept they are not fine. You know, people, well, a few weeks after that guy wrote that review, some guy in Israel who'd been falsely accused of being racist, committed suicide. You know, they're not fine. It's like you can carry on doing it if you want. But it's a really severe fucking punishment. Well, this mob mentality has existed throughout history.

I mean, when you go back to the punishing of the witches in Salem or, you know, what they do in Africa. Have you ever seen these witchcraft accusation things in Africa where one person will tell someone that someone's a witch and then everybody else in the tribe believes it and they're burning people a lot. There's like really disturbing videos. But it's like this pile on where I think part of what's going on is there's a real fear that that same thing could happen to them. And so they lash out that one person like with real commitment so that they're inextricably a part of the group. They're in that group.

Yes, they're safe for that day. Because we can only handle destroying one person a night. I noticed with Justine Sacker, one person that night tweeted somebody HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin colour protects her from AIDS. And you know

how many people went after that person? No one. It's like we were too everyone was too excited about destroying Justine to simultaneously destroy somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. So that person got a fucking total free pass that night. Imagine the mindset of someone to think that the best way to respond to someone's inappropriate joke is to rape them and give them an incurable deadly disease. And Justine

And they feel totally justified doing it. And Justine was asleep on a fucking plane. And everyone knew that and that's why everyone loved it so much. Well didn't she write a bunch of other ridiculous tweets like she, that was what she did. She was trying to be funny. Well she was a great tweeter. Yeah I mean there was a few.

The one was I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night i don't know it was something about you know it's just stupid shit um i bet she's fun to drink with yeah well i had a couple of drinks so she wasn't fun the first time because she was so fucking crushed i met her just a couple of weeks later i probably took years off of her life oh jesus poor justin um the second time was she okay better the second time and it took her a year it was a year she was basically here to recover yeah she was basically fucked and in the wilderness for a year you know i noticed actually after my book came out one of the pushbacks was like um well you know justin sackers fine now you know she was only like unemployed and

you know deeply traumatized for a year and i like, for one fucking joke that lands badly a year, you know. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, that joke was representative of the hardest part. Yeah, exactly. This is what we fucking do. And it's such a lie. It's like we're all these fucking Miss Marples or these amateur sleuths on social media thinking that we can spot somebody's true

inner evil through a little bit of phraseology that's what happened to trevor noah and it just happens over and over and it's happened to amy schumer and it just happens over and over and over again yeah but with amy schumer and trevor noah though they're stand-ups and especially amy amy doesn't give a fuck like you can't bet she gives a bit more of a fuck than i i just think everybody who's at the receiving end of that it's she does but it gives her not first of all she doesn't ever say anything that is indefensible because she's very smart and also i think as a comic everything that she says that's ridiculous um if you want to debate her on like why or not, I mean, she plays the role of a dumb person saying ridiculous shit all the time.

Like that's part of like a persona that she'll adopt and abandoned on stage. She'll adopt it and abandon it. And you know, going in, that's what she's doing. It's a part of being entertaining. It's like, you know, Richard Pryor doing the dopey white guy voice. Do I think he's really a dopey white guy now? Who's like, hey, my mom, she's a great old gal. No, he's doing the fucking character

of a dopey person that's easy to mock. It's the same thing that Amy does. She might not change her voice, but when she says ridiculous shit, she's clearly being a comic and doing it as an art form right you know so she can defend a few times on your podcast by the way and and uh she hasn't done it in a little while right but she's been she's got her show i haven't talked to her in forever she's busy as

fuck she's got that movie coming out but uh she's very smart yeah she's very smart so she would welcome any opportunity to defend anything like that. She doesn't take herself Like ridiculously seriously or anything like that. She's a very smart girl But I think there's a really woman wouldn't want to call me a boy. I think There's like a serious change going on in the way that human beings act towards each other. Do you like it? No, I think it's really bad. It's stressful. Who would have thought?

The publicly shaming part. Yeah. I mean, what I do like is the fact that there's a leveling of the playing field and social justice. Obviously, that side of things I really like. But the problem is that, you know, I think the problem, I'll tell you what it is.

I went to college in London in the 80s. And sometimes I feel with social media and with the social justice movement, it's like the worst fucker who used to hang around the student union now gets to decide everything. And it's partly because of the 140 character Twitter thing. So basically, you know, in the student union in the 1980s, we all cared about social justice. But it's like the most unforgiving extreme fucker is now the one who's actually setting the agenda. And not only setting the agenda on social media, but because the mainstream media is so enthralled to social media and doesn't want to get hurt. So it goes along with it.

It's kind of creating an entire society of surveillance society. And colleges are where people first start exercising that muscle and it's the most rabid version of this issue today. It's one of the reasons why a lot of comedians won't perform in colleges anymore. Jerry Seinfeld just got a hard time from a bunch of people because he said that colleges are too politically correct and Chris Rock is saying the same thing. And I stopped doing colleges a long fucking time ago for the very same reason. Yeah.

Well, I did a college once, and this is a perfect example of it. But this is a guy, this example is perfect because this is before the internet. And this was a guy that I actually talked to face to face. Like someone said, you know, like I would do colleges and I'd fly into these towns and you know, they're bored. So like I tell my jokes and then sometimes I do like a Q and A with them, you know, just for fun. Cause it's a fun way to like, you let the kids get to ask questions and you get to fuck around and come up with things on the fly. And some, some guy said, do you know any joke jokes or something along those lines, right?

And I said, I don't remember anyone. I go, okay, I remember this one. Two Jews walk into a bar. They buy it. Like, it's the end of the joke. It's stupid. It's terrible. That joke, a guy came up to me after the show and said,

that joke that you did about Jews is very offensive. I said, what's offensive about it? That Jews are successful at business. What's offensive that I use the word Jew to Jews walk into a bar that they went to a bar. What part's offensive? Are you just looking to be offended or are you actually offended? And he was flabbergasted. He didn't know what to say because he was a fucking 19 year old kid. And he thought he had his, he was an awkward, a socially awkward person. And he thought this is my opportunity to be right

Yeah, and he just look I'm offended like and there's all these kids Supporting each other yes, you do have the right to be offended And they're all fucking dumb as shit, and they don't have any life experience And they really they don't have a nuanced view of the world yet, and they're Exercising this new muscle this new muscle of learning how to call someone on their bullshit man the patriarchy on the this this cisgendered male heteronormative bullshit that you see every day and they're they're like finding this this opportunity to express this rage and

then eventually hopefully they'll settle in and hopefully they'll sort of like as time goes on they have more experience they'll sort of like as time goes on, they have more experience. They'll sort of realize how ridiculous they were when they were younger. But it's like a natural inclination to like, you know, you fucked up and you know, you've done wrong things. So when you see it in other people, call it. So this one kid that said this to me, I mean, that was the extent of our conversation. I said, that's ridiculous. I go, it's not offensive.

I go, first of all, I don't tell, I'm not racist. And if I told a racist joke, it'd have to be really good, you know? And then, and he goes, we should never tell racist jokes. I go, that's not true. I go, if you make me laugh with a really funny racist joke, I'm thankful. Because you made me laugh. I don't think you think that everything you say is a fucking sworn statement, an affidavit that you're getting, giving in court.

I assume that when you're doing the art of standup comedy, you're going to say things you don't really mean because they're funnier than what you really mean. And that's part of the art form. Just like when you listen to a song, you know, Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff. Okay. Probably didn't shoot anybody. And it's like, it's, it's, it's part of the art. It's making shit up and when you take that away because people are going to be offended well

Then you remove almost every movie that's ever been made you remove almost every book that's ever been written You take away almost every stand-up comedian set and you just get you you fucking nerf the shit out of the world and everybody's boring Yeah, and that's not the answer it's not the answer i think this is i mean this is all the reason why i i'm so happy to have done the justin sacco story in my book because and i had so much pushback and each time i get pushback i feel more and more happy that i did it like i remember i gave a talk in norwich one of the first talks i gave was in norwich in England and in the Q&A somebody said to me, somebody called out

are you a racist? because I defended Justine so for 30 years I'm writing about abuses of power and the first time I say we are the ones abusing our power someone yells out are you a racist? and then it's got some trade of thought isn't that one person Someone yells out, are you a racist? And then, um, um,

ugh, that's a betrayed thought. But isn't that one person? You're just dealing with really simple thinking. That's just not a nuanced, objective, well-thought-out view of a human being. What they're doing is looking for an opportunity to call you out on something. looking for an opportunity to call you out on something. Yeah. Looking for an opportunity to shame you. And that's what

the problem I have with all this social justice warrior bullshit that's going on in the world is it's manufacturing a lot of hate. And it's manifesting itself in a very angry way. What should be people that are pro-gay rights, pro-transgender rights,

pro-gay marriage, pro-peace, pro-choice, pro-love, pro-left-wing ideology, you know, do unto others as you have them do unto you. This whole idea of creating a more peaceful world world and the way they're going to do it is by ruining everybody who doesn't agree with them and shitting all over them and insulting them yeah and not distinguishing between what's actual social justice and what's the kind of cathartic alternatives to social justice like the destruction of justin the destruction of justin doesn't do any good for anybody because she wasn't even intending to be racist she was trying to make a liberal she's trying to be like car she's trying to be like Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Right. This isn't someone who's going after a cop that shot a kid with a fake pistol or anything. You know, this is... Yeah, exactly. And this is the real problem. And the inability to distinguish between the serious transgression

and the unserious transgression. And what it's creating is a kind of surveillance society. It's creating a kind of stardust where everybody's more fearful. Everyone's scared to say things. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. And now people are fleeing social media because they're realizing that the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. See, I don't think that's true.

I don't think they are fleeing. I think they're jumping on droves. I think some people are jumping off. But I think that what you said, the great thing about it is it gives a voice to people. It's also the terrible thing about it. But I think what this is, as I said before, is this adolescent stage of communication. We're reaching this new level of interaction where we can interact with each other instantaneously.

And that's just never... By the way, Tesla predicted this. Tesla predicted smartphones a hundred years ago. And I tweeted this quote today that somebody sent my way. Absolutely fascinating. It was not just a quote. It was a

piece that Tesla had written in like the 1920s. Amazing. Where he predicted smartphones, like literally described a modern smartphone. Scroll down like where his actual words, like no,

no, it's out below that. You can actually read it. When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony, like phones,

we shall be able to hear one another as perfectly as though we were face-to-face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will, do this, do his will, be, oh, do his will, huh? To do his will be amazingly simple. Compared with our present telephone, a man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. Holy shit. Fuck, that is unbelievable, right?

Fucking unbelievable. And when you read that paragraph, you think to yourself, oh my God, you know, when we have that world for ourselves, what an amazing world it will be. It will be a world of curiosity. It will be a world of understanding strangers,

of nuance, of context. And so we have the world, and we completely throw away curiosity, we throw away nuance, we throw away context, and what we have instead is condemnation. Well, with dummies. But not with everybody. Look, I'm way more informed

now than I ever would have been if I had grown up in the 1960s. If I had grown up in the 1960s and I was a 47 year old man in 1967, I wouldn't know jack shit. I would be an ape. I mean, that is true. But I do fear, you know, I mean, I do fear that, you know, maybe there's two types of people in the world.

Those people who favor humans over ideology and those people who favor ideology over humans. And right now the ideologues are winning on social media. You know, I don't think they are. You really don't think so? No, I just think they're making more noise. And I think that it's really a matter of who those ideological people are surrounding themselves with. I think they can be swayed into a more understanding nature. And we can decide.

This is what somebody wrote about my book, which I really agreed with. Somebody wrote, you know, we can decide who to listen to. Yes. With Justine Sacco, the problem was that the bullies won. Like everyone was too scared to defend Justine. Nobody defended Justine that night. Except you, you brave bastard. Look at you.

Yeah. Well, a woman called Helen Lewis, who writes for the New Statesman, wrote a review of my public shaming book. She said that she tried to defend Justine that night. She wrote, I'm not sure the joke was intended to be racist and straight away yeah and straight away she got this fury of well you're just a privileged bitch too so she said to her to her shame she shut up and that's what happened that night like everybody shut up and it wasn't just on social media like the mainstream media all got involved it was like you know and and that became like the dominant narrative about

justin saka was that she was kind of racist and and anybody who tried to stick up for her just got got screamed down well um almost anybody defending her in defending her i would say she's probably a little racist she's which you can't really think like that that it's okay to say that if you're not a little racist but in cracking that joke and saying something like that which is uncertain unquestionably a racist joke just kidding i'm white lol right that's fucking racist you know do you think that's racist for me it's like a bad r Newman song. I mean, Randy Newman sang... Short People. Short People Got No Reason To Live.

Like... But he also said, I love L.A. Is that tongue-in-cheek as well? Yeah, it is tongue-in-cheek, because he sings, look at those mountains, look at those trees, look at that bum over there, man, he's down on his knees. You know, so what Randy Newman will do is that he will acknowledge his own privilege

and then do a kind of grotesque, extreme version of it for comedy. He does that in short people who does it in Isle of L.A. And I think that's exactly what Justine Sacco was doing in that joke. She was acknowledging her own privilege and then mocking it by doing kind of grotesque version of it. And the only difference between Justine and Randy Newman was that Justine just wasn't any fucking good at it. Right. That's a good point. I see your point. It's hard to argue that it couldn't possibly offend people. But the idea that she knew she was broadcasting it to all those people that were offended.

I think people just don't understand what the fuck is going on when they say things online. You know what? When the New York Times extracted my book and the fact check that the New York Times phoned up Justine and said to her, like, so before you got on the plane, were you surprised that like you didn't get any replies? Because while she was like, you know, all happened after she turned off her phone and fell asleep.

Right. And she said, I had 170 Twitter followers. Nobody ever replied. So she was using that like as a, she's like yelling into an empty room. Yeah. So she probably got unreason as a she's like yelling into an empty room. Yeah She probably got unreasonably cocky because of that exactly yeah, and she got on a plane And so she's probably on Xanax and drinking which is what a lot of people do when they get on planes That's like a fucking this lady was explaining to me that that's she was like like she was bragging about it Like give me a glass of wine or Xanax, and I don't give a fuck about anything.

It was hilarious. And I was like, I wonder how many people take Xanax and get on planes. And apparently, talking to people that take Xanax, it's super common. They get anxiety, they're going to get on a long plane. And also sleeping pills, people take a lot of sleeping pills when they get on planes. You know, speaking of Xanax, when all of this was happening to me like when the new york times you know extract came out and and it was just so noisy it's one of my noisiest stories ever and the book came out it was incredibly noisy and i went to the studio to do this video uh like talking about my book and the

woman on before me um was a doctor and she was doing a video about her book and she said what's your book about and I said public shaming she said oh did you read the piece in the New York Times about Justin Sacco and I said I wrote it and she said oh wow god you must be so happy and I said actually I'm not happy and she said why aren't you happy and I said because everyone's there's so much noise and then she said so what do you want and i said uh xanax and she just got up pardon wrote me a prescription for like 60 xanax of which by the way i've had one and a half uh i don't abuse my xanax but i thought fuck it's easy to get medication it's very easy to get medication in the united states if you go to the right doctors meaning go to any doctor yeah did you but then i thought did you take it i took like i took like a half and what was it like

that made me feel a bit i i was no longer anxious but i felt groggy and then i had to weigh up what would i rather feel groggy or anxious welcome to america that's our dilemma groggy anxious caffeinated or on adderall but then i thought god like when she said to me what do you want like all i could think of to say was xanax but then did i miss like an amazing opportunity like i don't know anything i don't know anything but you know were there like much like way better things than xanax i could have asked um if you're like really into painkillers i guess but you'd have to like say that you're on pain So I think the thing about Xanax is you could say you have anxiety and they'll give you a medication. Yeah, you know I know a guy who had to he went to a doctor to get prescription because

He was a social justice warrior and he said a bunch of incorrect things that people attacked him And so he had to go to the doctor So he's freaked out like he got a taste of his own medicine but that fucker i i saw him like six months later still shitting on people online like he didn't didn't learn from the attack on him like it's almost like they they get caught up in this they they get addicted to this drama of shitting on people of attacking people yeah it's weird you know what since i mean, I don't do it anymore. I do not pile in on anybody anymore, even people who deserve it.

I tend not to pile in on anymore. I'll tell you where I think it all comes from. In my book, for me anyway, in my book, The Psychopath Test, I'm really critical of like labeling culture. I'm really, I'm critical of like the fact that the DSM is 886 pages long and there's a mental disorder for everything.

And most people, I think, agree with me that that's kind of, it's like easy to agree with me about that. But then on social media, we do exactly the same thing. We label people. And yet, so the very same people who agree with me about the kind of, you know, what's wrong with labeling culture in the world, go home and do it themselves on social media. I've been really toying with this very strange idea lately. I had this conversation with my good friend Duncan Trussell, and we were talking about labels and self-definition and the sort of imprisonment of definition.

And I said, well, even words like names for people. Like, my name is Tom, you know, fuckhead, you know, whatever. And as Tom, you know, you're a Whitmore. And as a Whitmore, you know, you're supposed to stand for something in this world. We're Ronsons. Yeah, we're Ronsons, goddammit. You're a Rogan. Stefan up, boy.

Ronson's, goddammit, you're a Rogan. Stefan up, boy. I think these ideas of having a name, like a label, like you're Coca-Cola, you're Jamie Vernon. There's this, I think having, instead of just being you, having names, names themselves.

You'd say, oh, well, what do you expect? It's that fucking John Ronson guy. You know, like all of a sudden you can be boxed in and defined. You're not just a human being who is sort of like existing with these other human beings. You are a labeled human being. Yeah. And that label can be great. You know, you can be the Dalai Lama or that label can be shit.

You could be Donald Trump, you know, and you're right now. Donald Trump is an easy pile on. Everybody will jump on him. He said a bunch of racist things about Mexicans and a bunch of dumb shit during his speech announcing he's going to be president. He's an easy pile on. And he's also a guy that sort of embraces self-definition. He embraces his label so much so that he puts his label on the top of a building. Trump Towers.

This is the Trump Casino, the Trump this. And it's a part of the definition. I think any sort of definition like that, like officer, professor, doctor. How about people that want, like Cosby was making people call him a doctor when he got an honorary doctorate. I guess maybe secretly it was a big joke for him because he was drugging people, you know, allegedly.

New news right now that just came out. He admitted to 2005 in court. I'll show you the little article. Oh, this just happened just now. Oh, it just happened? Oh, my goodness. He admitted in a 2005 deposition that he obtained quaaludes,

a sedative with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with, according to records obtained by the Associated Press on Monday. The admission was contained in records that were unsealed after the AP went to court to compel their release. Cosby's attorneys had repeatedly sought to keep the records sealed, arguing that they would be embarrassing. This was a case that Cosby paid a woman off, and then because he had paid her off, part of the deal, part of the arrangement was that the records were to be sealed. So they went to court, and wow, he's fucked now. They gave her like three and a half Benadryl or something.

Another thing I was reading, this will be a good set. God, what a monster what's the statute of limitations and all of this stuff can't a very good question i think you can be well 2005 i can't imagine the statute of limitations is well if that's 2005 that's when he admitted it but when was the actual instance that's monster shit that's really that's dehumanizing shit i think we can go that's a long conversation it's sort of semi-related the definition of bill cosby because bill cosby is a sort of iconic individual and bill cosby as a celebrity and because of that he was worshipped

and treated like a celebrity and i think because of that, he sort of had an expectation of worship and also an – this is total armchair psychology from a dude who went that from people and can even justify horrific behavior because you actually do think that you're better than someone, the same way royalty does, the same way people who have grown up their life. Like Bohemian Grover can kind of reason for the rituals, maybe. I mean, I think it's related, in a way, to the idea of labeling. Labeling and, you know, just, well, you know, that's not a human being.

That's a police officer. Officer Johnson, you know, you refer to the judge as your honor. You know, you can't go, hey, man, you know, I know you're reading off a book, but don't lock me in a fucking cage because I had a joint. Order in the court. You will refer to him as your honor you know i mean like that that all that stuff the fucking when they used to wear crazy wigs and outfits what are they doing they're well they're separating themselves they're differentiating themselves and they're labeling though they're putting themselves in a very distinctive position labeling it's it's really one of the it's one of the worst

things that's happening in this country at the moment. In the psychopath test, I write about how these kids as young as one and two are getting labelled bipolar because everyone's so in love with the checklists that a kid goes to see a psychiatrist with a temper tantrum and so it scores high on the bipolar checklist. So they're then given antipsychotic medication at the age of literally one and two. That's how much labeling culture is out of control. As a journalist, the question I love asking most is why? Because that opens doors. Why? And then you have to go somewhere else. But with labeling culture, including labeling culture on social media, it closes doors. it closes doors, labels close doors, questions open doors. Well, they certainly define in like a very concrete way.

This is what I felt, you know, I felt most out of step lately with the whole Rachel Dolezal thing. Because when I heard that story, I just thought that is so mysterious and complicated and nuanced and you know maybe she's maybe she's mentally ill or maybe she's not whatever's going on here this is like really fucking mysterious and interesting and i had like a thousand questions and so i went on twitter expecting that that would be twitter's response too they'd have like a thousand questions right but no people were either like ridiculing her or attacking her like yelling blackface or whatever oh but there's plenty of people supporting her her position as being transracial those those are my favorite right those people are adorable right but i just thought

out i can't you know what i thought i thought I've been a journalist for 30 years and I'm sick. I don't know where to go with this, but I thought I'm really sick of like damaged people being other people's playthings, either ideological playthings or playthings for mockery or whatever. And obviously there's nothing wrong with comedy and satire and mockery. I mean, that's fine. But nonetheless. So glad you said that. But nonetheless, I'm just sort of sick of. Cruelty. Yeah, of making other human beings up play things.

Right. Instead of, you know, for whatever reasons, instead of like curiosity. Well, if it was as simple as play, play things like just straight up mockery, I would expect that you would get some clever humor out of it. But it's hate. There's a lot of anger and hate, and this whole public shaming thing sort of goes along with that. I mean, there's some people that I follow that I don't agree with. But unfortunately, I agree with their position on a lot of things like a marriage, like, you know, equality for all. Like, there's so many different things that I agree with, like extreme left wing people on that. It's really problematic because when some of them adopt this sort of social warrior, public shaming stance, I'm so torn because on one side I want to go after them.

But on another side, I agree so torn because on one side I want to go after them. But on another side, I agree with almost all of their positions on equality for women and equality for gay people. And I mean, there's so many of the positions that I have the exact same stance on, but I don't have this stance on public shaming. Where if I do, my stance is public humor. You know, my stance, whether Chris Christie says he's going to lock up everyone who smokes marijuana, you know, because marijuana is so dangerous. I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you have a fucking mirror in your house? You're morbidly obese, and you're telling people

that they can't have a substance that has never killed a single person ever. Being overweight is one of the major causes of premature death in the United States of America. Having a heart attack is one of the major causes. And having a heart attack is almost directly related in most people to being overweight. I mean, it's a huge issue. And this fucking slob is on television telling people that he's going to stop marijuana because it's dangerous. You know, he's stuffing hot dogs in his fat face like to me a guy like that has to be mocked because

it's it's there and that's my job just like the fucking crocodile sees the wounded antelope and it gets too close to the water hole it can't help it it's got to snap at it if i'm a comic and you say something stupid like that and you are just this blatantly obvious target, that is a dangerous person in my opinion. Because he's a person who could dictate policy, he's a person who can make laws, and he's a person that literally can lock people up in jail. He can get people's freedom taken away. Yeah, you're punching up and you're being funny and there's nothing, you know, I'd be real dope if I was going to start being against things like that. I guess, you know, what my book's against is the disproportionate

punishments of people who don't deserve it. Well, it's bullying. Piling on. I mean, it's also having a lack of, there's a lack of perspective that comes with a lot of these pile on bullying things like the, what's the woman's name again? Saco? Justine, yeah. The Rachel Dolezal thing. First of all, she handled herself very well on Matt Lauer. Yeah.

I should say, by the way, that me sort of saying all of that stuff on Twitter was right at the beginning before she'd said anything. I was like, say, look, we don't know anything about this woman. You know, we don't know anything. Like everyone's jumping to conclusions. Nobody knows anything. And I was was just like i screamed up for that and she had some other issues though that were exposed as time went on and one of them is she's a plagiarist oh yeah yeah she plagiarized some art and she was selling some art that she

clearly plagiarized and she's just deceptive she lied lied about her background. She said she was born in a teepee. She's just not a truthful person. And sometimes when people don't enjoy their life, I've met a lot of kids when I was young that came from really fucked up backgrounds, and those are the ones that told the really big lies. And I think that a lot of those lies were because they didn't like their reality.

They didn't ask to be born. People like that, you know, there's a mystery, right? With people like that, you're like, so what happened? Why do you feel that way? What's going on? Whereas with the actual dollar show, like the minute this breaks on social media, everyone's just like, you know, fucking racist. Shut the fuck up. There's no questions. questions well black people get really angry because she's appropriating uh a disenfranchised

segment of society that has already been stolen from from white by white people you know and i had people tweeting me to say you know you're a white man this isn't your story you don't have a right isn't it you don't have you're not allowed to have an opinion because you weren't born with the right amount of melanin in your skin. So your mind is not working right. Well, they said this is your story. You can't comment on this because this isn't your story. That's bullshit. Well, I felt it kind of was my story because for 30 years I've been writing about troubled people.

And I've come to conclusions about the way you should regard other people, other human beings, with sort of interest and curiosity and compassion, not cold, hard judgment. So that's where I came from in that story. It's also that saying that you're not allowed to have an opinion or it's not your story. That is what you're trying to do is you're trying to silence anybody that doesn't agree with you. Everyone that is a human being that witnesses a story, you witness some public thing that's taking place, you are absolutely allowed your opinion. And if you're not going to allow people to speak up about things and have opinions about things, whether these opinions are informed or uninformed, that's all going to be sorted out in the wash. But to say it's not your

position to talk, well, then you're publicly silencing people. And, you know, exactly what that is the opposite of, of course, is democracy. Yes. I mean, I was reading people. I went off social media after all of that because there was so much screaming. And I was reading people basically saying, OK, let's goad John Ronson into saying something outrageous and then we can get him. Is that what they said? Yeah.

Why would they say that, though? You know why they'd say that? It's because the young have decided for some mystifying reason to create an incredibly stressful world for themselves. I don't think they realize what they're doing. But the Rachel Dolezal thing was, to me, it was a perfect example of how ludicrous human beings are, how ridiculous our society is, and how this woman is like, first of all, the NAACP was founded by white people. It's something a lot of people don't know. And black folks weren't even allowed to hold office until the 1970s.

Well, at the con club. Yeah, in a lot of ways. Well, it was actually founded by New York City intellectuals, I believe. I hope I'm not doing this wrong. That they really, it was in response to all the lynchings. And, you know, they were like, they were just, they were compassionate, intelligent, progressive people that were trying to figure out a way past this horrible situation that the world

had found itself in post-slavery, where there was all this resentment and there was lynchings and the chaos that is the South. And, you know, I think we're still dealing with the repercussions and the reverberations of it right now with this Confederate flag debate that's going on all throughout america now it's like

america's just sort of kind of waking up to the fact that well fuck man a hundred or so years ago you were allowed to own people yeah you know and the people that wanted to be able to own people had a flag and these people put that flag on a car and drove it around on TV and we didn't think about it. Yeah. You know, and now we're thinking about it. For the record, by the way, I was always disappointed

when the Dukes of Hazzard was on TV. Because of the flag? No, just because it wasn't as good as Wonder Woman. But I realize this is a kind of tangent. But what about Daisy Duke? Well, Wonder Woman was pretty fucking hot too, right? I spent a lot of time with the Ku Klux Klan, you know, from my book Them. I discovered this politically correct faction of the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas.

What? Yes. Run by a guy called Tom Robb, who decided that the Klan had a really bad image. And he was going to do something about it. Was this recently? No, this is like the mid-90s. I wrote about it in my book, Them. Why?

Is he back in the news? No, there's another group, another faction of the Ku Klux Klan that was allowing black people and they wanted to allow black people in. Oh, really? Well, that is the kind of thing that Tom would have done. In fact, Tom was accused by other white supremacists of kissing a black baby and he had to kind of deny it. He had to issue a denial. I didn't kiss a black baby. And he had to kind of deny it. He had to issue a denial.

I didn't kiss no black baby. Look at my lips. I went to Tom's house and he directed. So he banned, I went for his big annual convention and he banned like the robes and the hoods. Whoa. They were allowed to wear robes one day a year. It's Christmas.

Yeah, and they were allowed to burn a cross one day a year. Oh my God. Yeah, and it was the day that I turned up and they were all standing around this giant cross that's lying on the ground and they couldn't remember because they were all so rusty. They couldn't remember whether to soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it. Oh, that's hilarious. So they're all standing around and then tom comes over and they go tom we can't do we soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it and tom goes you soak it and then raise it how the hell are you gonna like so

then tom looks at me as if to say i'm so sorry that my members are such idiots like tom preferred me to the clown oh my god that's adorable yeah and then he and then they had this marquee in his garden and and they were all doing this kind of personality skills workshops like like all filling out these multiple choice like which strengths and weaknesses most apply to you um i always remember like one of the strengths the weaknesses was mixes easily which normally would be like a strength, but if you're the clan, it's going to be a weakness. And then another one was warrior.

And one of the clansmen was like going, well, I don't consider being a warrior to be a weakness. And then the person doing the test was like, well, actually being a warrior can be a weakness. And he thought it was warrior and it was worrier oh god yeah well who says worrier are you a worrier like the english says that the english do yeah i as an englishman i'm a worrier oh i see yeah well i could see someone saying i'm a worrier but i couldn't see it as a question are you a worrier yeah i would think the question would be a little bit

more straightforward like do you worry a lot? I've got to say, in a kind of generic multiple choice question and answer thing, worrier would be like an odd one to have in there. Are you a worrier? Yes, sir, I am. I'm a worrier for the white race. Well, I'm not. I'm going to call myself a worrier.

Now, what is the reason why they burn the cross? It's a cross. They call it a cross lighting, not a cross burning. It's a glass half full sort of a thing. I think it goes back to the Scottish, I believe. It's all to do with like, I can't remember. They told me. You know what it's like being a journalist.

You know everything for a short amount of time, and then you move on to the next story. You write your story. You fucking forget it all. I've got a terrible memory anyway. It's like being a podcaster too. Right. We've talked about things, you know,

we've done 667 episodes now. Shit. Am I the 667? Yes. Who did you have for the 666? Duncan Trussell. Ah. But he's pretty fake evil.

Right. Fake evil. He's a great guy. Yeah. But he could play evil. One time I was, I went on a road trip with the clan from harrison arkansas to st paul long journey like 17 hours i was in a car for 17 hours with the

clan whoa and at one point tom turned to me the leader and he said can i ask you a question and I said what and he said do you think I'm weird wow yeah and I was like I think you're in a transitional phase between weird and not weird oh that's interesting so you were playing like psychological yeah well I was in the car with games with him but saying he's in a transitionary period like what did you mean by that well because he was trying to you know trying to do an image makeover, trying to be more politically correct. It didn't really turn out. Did he feel that black people were inferior to white people? Did he really clearly feel that? Well, he would probably call himself like a white separatist, but he wasn't

actually. I mean, I've met white separatists like Randy Weaver and they're far nicer people than Tom was. Randy Weaver, who's the Ruby Ridge guy, right? He's met white separatists like Randy Weaver and they're far they're far nicer people than Tom was Randy Weaver who's the Ruby Ridge guy right yeah white separatist I really got I got on well with the Weaver's gotten really well Rachel his daughter and that story is a kind of a fucked up story right like he was uh they had a house alone in the woods and they were killed by snipers right yeah this is a really bad story so they were this is the first story i ever did where i feel like i kind of twisted it around so that the people who would normally be the villains were the good guys yeah the people would normally be the good guys were the villains i always felt good about that so basically they were family of like you know

they believe in bohemian grove and bilderberg and i i went i tried to infiltrate bilderberg one time by the way and got chased away away by their henchmen. I don't know if there's time to tell that story later. There was plenty of time. Okay. So they moved to this cabin up in the woods on top of a mountain in Idaho, Ruby Creek, Idaho. And Randy would hang out at the local Aryan Nations with the family.

That was his big undoing, was that he would take the family up local Aryan Nations with the family. That was his big undoing, was that he would take the family up to Aryan Nations who were just, you know, fucking nuts. Like violent skinhead nuts. And Randy would take his family up there for like picnics and away days and so on. So Aryan

Nations, like pretty much every white supremacist group in America, was heavily infiltrated by undercover officers. And they saw Randy and saw his family and could tell that Randy was less crazy than the other people there. So they approached Randy and said, do you want to become an undercover informant? And Randy said no.

So then Randy thought that was that. But then they sent a guy to ask Randy to saw off a shotgun. So he said, OK, fine. So he sawed off a shotgun slightly below the legal limit. Like the guy pointed at him and said, no, saw it off there. So he sawed it off there. And then they said, aha, we've got you. This was an undercover cop.

You've now committed a firearms offence. You will go to jail unless you become an undercover informant for us. And Randy, being a twat, said, no, fuck off. And he kind of embarrassed the feds in front of his wife. He said, look at those two guys over there. Guess what they just asked me to do. And so Randy was like an idiot. And then he locked himself up in the cabin with his wife and

and kids and dog um and then and so they they surrounded the cabin the the atf and this went on for like a year they set up cameras in the trees and surrounded randy's cabin and then one day the um the the atf people got too close to the cabin and disturbed the dog. And the dog starts like barking and the dog chases the agents down the hill. And Randy's little boy, who was like 12 years old or something, Sammy, chased the dog down the hill with a gun because Randy, like an idiot, had armed his kids. And so they all run down to the bottom of the hill. An agent jumps out and shoots the dog, kills the dog. Sammy says, you killed my dog, you son of a bitch,

and starts shooting wildly. And the agent shoots Sammy in his arm and basically shoot his arm nearly off. And Sammy yells, dad, I'm coming home, dad, and starts running up the hill. And the ATF agent just shoots Sammy in the back as he's running up the hill just in a sort of volley of gunfire so so Sammy's now dead this story doesn't get any better I should tell you Sammy's now dead Randy gets Sammy's body puts him

in the shed and then the next day oh um one of randy's friends is there and there's a shootout and one of the agents a guy called bill duggan gets killed too so now you've got two dead people you've got a dead agent and you've got sammy dead um the jury's always been out as to whether the agent was killed by randy's friend or by friendly fire um so anyway, the next day, Randy goes outside and an FBI sniper called Lon Horiyuchi shoots Randy in the shoulder. So Randy runs back in and Vicky, Randy's wife,

is standing in the doorway holding her baby and a sniper shoots Vicky through the head and kills her. And they pull Vicky's body into the cabin and a siege starts, like a 16-day siege or something. And at the roadblock down at the bottom, that's kind of where the militia movement started.

Like all these local militia people all form at the bottom of the roadblock for days and then discover that Vicky's dead. I mean, I've seen some amateur footage and it's so sad. And I've become really good friends with Rachel, who's Randy's younger daughter, who was in the cabin for all of that time. And in the end, the government

admitted responsibility and paid each of Randy's daughters a million dollars each. And they killed Randy. No, Randy's still alive. Randy now goes to gun shows where you can have your photograph taken with Randy Weaver for five dollars. quarters a million dollars each. And they killed Randy. No, Randy's still alive. Is he really? Yeah, Randy now goes to gun shows where you can have your photograph taken with Randy Weaver for $5. Oh, my God. Yeah.

For how much? $5. He sells himself quite short. It's a bargain. Yeah. Historical figure. So one of the people who visited Randy's cabin, I visited Randy's cabin with Rachel,

and another person who visited Randy's cabin was Timothy McVeigh shortly before blowing up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Have you ever seen the conspiracy theories on that? About, yeah I visited Elohim City, the place which you know about right? The place where, you know, I know I've got a kind of reputation for being a debunker of conspiracies, and the reputation is kind of warranted in most cases. But I've got to say, of all the things I investigated when I was doing a lot of stuff about conspiracies, the one where I thought this is a bit fucking fishy was Oklahoma City. Yeah. Oh, it's most certainly fishy. What's most certainly fishy is the efficacy of that bomb.

The bomb that they used, the fertilizer bomb that blew half that building apart. When you talk to bomb experts, they go, that is like really, really unlikely. They said that the amount of damage that a bomb like that that's made out of fertilizer can do is nothing in comparison to what that a bomb like that that's made out of fertilizer can do is nothing in comparison to what that building was like and also that that building um looked like it had been blown out not it had been blown in but blown out meaning that there was bombs planted inside the building and then there was all these news reports there's another one of alex jones's uh stories there was all these news reports that he played one of alex jones's uh uh stories there was all these

news reports that he played these clips of where they were talking about fbi agents removing bombs unexploded bombs from the building and there were more than one bomb and then they had this you know this narrative that they blamed it on timothy mcveigh and what was the other guy's name uh terry nichols terry nichols yeah yeah. And that it was this fertilizer bomb. And remember, there was all this. They were looking for a guy from Iraq. And there was all this different stuff that was going on in the news right after it was over. But then they had settled on the story that he had done it.

And they had done it all with this fertilizer bomb. But it's a weird one because, I mean, I don't have an answer. And I don't have an answer, and I don't even have a theory, like who could have done it or how it was done or what would have been done. Look, all we know is someone blew up that fucking building. I mean, if it was just him and Terry Nichols, it was just Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, that to me is no more crazy than it was a bunch of other people

that planted bombs inside the building. It's all a heinous act of horror and murder. Yeah, the weird thing that we discovered when I was doing the Oklahoma story was this place called Elohim City. Have you heard of this place? So I visited Elohim City. city uh they all they all put this is like this kind of white separatist stroke supremacist compound in the arkansas oklahoma borders in the ozarks spooky spot yeah i turned up and they ordered the river dance for me oh jesus yeah i'd just been chased through portugal by the bilderberg group and i bonded with them over that. Like I told them that I'd just been chased

by Bilderberg. They knew about the Bilderbergs? Yeah, everyone, all of these, all of that crowd back then knew about Bilderberg. And I said, yeah, I've just been chased by the Bilderberg group, which I was. In my book then, when I was trying to infiltrate secret societies, I went to Portugal with Jim Tucker. He worked for this magazine called The Spotlight, which was run by this kind of white separatist group called the Liberty Lobby in Washington, D.C. Basically, everybody kept telling me about this group called the Bilderberg Group that no one had heard of back then. Only real niche aficionados had heard of Bilderberg back then. aficionados had heard of Bilderberg back then um and uh much in the same way that I kind of I feel like I partly launched Alex Jones's career I also feel I partly gave the world Bilderberg because I was the first like mainstream writer to write about it because everyone was

saying that there's this group called the Bilderberg group and they secretly rule the world from inside a secret room uh and I said if you ask big Jim Tucker, he'll tell you more. So I phoned up Jim Tucker. And he said, yeah, it's true. They always meet once a year at a five-star hotel with golfing facilities. That's where they rule the world. And he said, you've caught me at a good time. Honestly, he looked like something out of, like, Sam Spade. He had an office with Venetian blinds and he wore a trilby and he smoked like 80 a day.

He said that he had emphysema, which made him sound even more like someone out of Sunspeed. And he was still smoking? He died a couple of years ago, but he lasted a fuck of a lot longer than I'd have put money on. I mean, I met him in March and I thought he'd be dead by May, but actually he lasted about another 10 years. Wow.

Yeah, he only died recently, like a couple of years ago. And this was like 96. So Jim said, he said, said yeah I've discovered where they're gonna meet like my secret sauce has told me that they're meeting at the Caesar Park Hotel and golfing resorts in Cintra Portugal and I'm gonna fly over there I apologize for my semi-american accent I'm doing here he's I'm gonna fly over there and climb up the drain pipes and get in and confronting red-handed going about their covert wickedness so I I said, can I come?

And he said, okay, as long as you don't... Did he use the term covert wickedness? I might be slightly exaggerating. He might put an English spin on it there. But basically, I'm pretty sure he said he was going to climb up the door first. Covert wickedness. That sounds like a white supremacist if I ever heard one. That's how they talk. So we flew there.

So me and Jim Tucker flew to Portugal and scouted around the Caesar Park Hotel. And we decided that our cover story would be like, he'd be like a salesman. But we didn't look anything like a fucking salesman. I was like an early 30s, you know, skinny little Jewish guy. And he was like this big southern gentleman. So we looked like really fucking suspicious. Like a gay couple? Yeah fucking suspicious yeah like gay couple I could have been like his toy boy uh and like we were like scouting I like trying to talk to waitresses and stuff this was the day before the Bilderberg group was reportedly going to arrive at this hotel and then we left and we started I looked in my

rearview mirror and there was a car following me. And a chase ensued, like through the streets. I mean, I say a chase. I was going 30 miles an hour, so we'll see. But I kept thinking, fuck, if I speed up, he's going to speed up. It's going to be like a fucking chase. So it was very obvious it was following. He wasn't trying to be sneaky.

No. Well, I stopped the car and and he stopped his car, like, behind me. So I thought I've got to say something to him. So I went over to the car, and I, like, knocked on the window. And there's a guy in dark glasses in the car looking straight ahead. And I'm knocking on the window, and he refuses to look at me. Like, obviously, his orders were to follow but don't engage like i'm suddenly in a world where i am like being followed by somebody whose orders are to follow and not engage so i freak the fuck out so i get back in the car and i phone up first i phone up my wife

and i say i'm being followed by the builderberg group i am fucking terrified and my wife goes oh you're loving it and i'm like i'm not and then i phone up the british embassy and i phone up the british embassy and i said i'm being followed by the Bilderberg group um and then the woman for the British embassy goes and then she goes go on and I'm like I just heard you take a sharp breath and then she says what are you because do do they know you know do they know you're here I mean what are you what are you doing here and I said I am essentially a humorous journalist out of my depth. Can you foam what I also said to her to my shame?

I didn't put this in my book. I wrote about all of this in my book then. What I didn't say, what I didn't put in my book was that I also said to her, I said, I'm a humorous journalist out of my depth. I'm a bit like Louis Theroux. And she's like, oh, like she's heard of him and not me and I'm like yeah but actually Louis

often cites me as an inspiration I swear to god this is like my last day on earth I'm about to be killed by the Bilderberg group and I'm telling the press officer for the British Embassy in Portugal that Louis actually speaks highly of me.

And so then she says, this is like the most startling thing that happened that day. She said, well, the good news is if you know you're being followed, they're probably just trying to intimidate you, intimidate you. And the dangerous ones would be those you don't know are following you. And I'm thinking first, how the fuck does the press officer at the British Embassy know this? And hey, what if these people are the dangerous ones? And I just happen to be like naturally good at spotting them. Like I'm an anxious person. I will spot, like I suffer from anxiety. Like I will spot if somebody's following me. Right?

Right. Yeah. So anyway, so then I go back to my hotel and the woman for the British Embassy phones me back and says that she's spoken to the Bilderberg group and they've said that nobody is following me. Of course. Yeah. So I'm'm like he's behind the tree like i'm by the pool i'm going he's standing behind the tree and she goes well look just sit tight i'm sure it's gonna i'm sure it's gonna go away so i went down to the beach

jim tucker throughout all of this by the way he's loving it he's loving every fucking second of this it's his dream come true i'm sure yeah i go down to the bit i'm petrified i want to like abandon the story like drive back to england from portugal because i'm i'm afraid i'm going to get like stopped at immigration uh yeah you can pretty much you can get and get the ferry from from paris uh so uh it's like a two day drive but fuck it so then I had a cameraman with me, David Barker because I was filming some of this for a documentary he convinced me to like stick it out

so I went to the beach and then I came back to the hotel and I swear to god there's these two men in dark glasses sitting in the lobby of the hotel and as soon as I walk in they both grab brochures and start reading them. And I'm like, fuck. So I go up to Jim Tucker and I say, there's these two men in the lobby

and reading brochures and they're only pretending to read brochures. And Jim says, how do you know? And I said, you can tell by their demeanour. And then later when Jim wrote all of this up for his conspiracy website he like transcribed this conversation and he said i i said to ronson how could you tell and ronson replied you can tell them by their smell and i'm like i didn't say smell i said demeanor what is a what is a builder burger smell like yeah like power so and uh their hen Bilderberger smell like? Yeah, like power. And the Hedgeman smelled like badly paid power. So anyway, that was basically it. But the next day, we went back to the hotel and stood at the bottom and watched all of these people driving up the drive.

Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, all of these people. Yeah, and they all really did turn up. Vernon Jordan, who was Bill Clinton's man behind, you know, like Bill Clinton's man in the background. Lots of people in the background. Is there an official explanation for the Bilderberg Group? Yeah, well, much later on, like after all of this happened, I managed to interview three members of the Bilderberg Group, including the Secretary General and including one of their founding fathers, who is this British politician who's still alive called Second World War because there was this big move against ideological politicians like post-Hitler. Now, we don't want any more Hitlers. So let's kind of create this sort of globalist one world, new world order. I mean, you know, the phrase new world

order, I think is true. I think they were trying to create like a one world government where business would be more important than politics because business people are more trustworthy than ideological politicians. I think that was their thesis back then. So it was kind of centrist, almost kind of liberal in a way. If you buy that, John Ronson, I got a bridge to sell you in Portugal. Well, I think that was where they came from. But of course, what they didn't account for or maybe did account for it and didn't give a shit was that CEOs would be just as fucking evil and malicious and ideological in their own way as politicians.

And so that's why Bilderberg became this kind of more nefarious, presumably became a slightly more nefarious thing. Yeah, I think if there's ever going to be one antidote for power, it's information. It's being able to expose all the dealings and secret organizations like the Bilderbergs or to a lesser extent the Bohemian Grove type folks. Yeah. I think the only thing that sort of mitigates that and diminishes that is everyone knowing about that. And more people know about the Bilderbergs now than ever before. The Bilderberg group is like something that people will say it. They don't really know a lot. Like, I'll say it.

I don't know much about it. I know that really important rich people meet and they discuss things things and every single person who's ever been president has met them yeah i said that actually to the um secretary general of the builder book group when i interviewed him it's called martin taylor i said you know you get so many like up-and-coming politicians who end up being like president or prime minister and And he said, thank you. Like he took that as a compliment. Like, you know, we're good at star spotting the next. And Dennis Healy said to me, look, the idea is... Star spotting.

Yeah, star spotting. And Dennis Healy said to me, the idea is to get these rising politicians and introduce them to the heads of business and hopefully influence them to be more sensible and more globalist and less nationalist. Or whore them out. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a network. I mean, no question. No question. You know, all these

places exist for a reason. I take a bit of credit. I think my book then was the first time Bilderberg, like, was ever discussed in kind of mainstream, the mainstream world. And then shortly after me this journalist called Charlie Skelton came along who's another sort of mainstream writer for The Guardian and he goes every year to Bilderberg now and partly a result of him and partly a result

of me, suddenly Bilderberg is discussed in the mainstream world but when I went to Bilderberg and now like loads of people like turn up to protest Bilderberg and so on and they've even got a bit of a website now, I think. And they certainly admit existing now. And they didn't used to. They kind of have to, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's the information thing. Yeah. So it's partly to do with them and partly to do with Charlie Skelton. Your book, Them, you know, I'm very fascinated by extremists. And I'm very fascinated by the spectrum of human thinking and behavior and that we're all kind of terrified of people that are on the far end in one way or another.

We're terrified of extreme lefties and we're terrified of extreme righties you know did you when did you was anything like really revealing or unusual about that journey of trying to write that and in your own mind did you try to like one of things I try to do when I watch like Isis videos or I watch like radical fundamentalist Islamic guys talk I try to imagine myself agreeing with them and being one of them and being happy to be one of them. That like, you know, like there's some appeal and some draw to being extremely confident about what you're saying.

Even if what you're saying is absolutely ridiculous, like stoning people for homosexuality. And you see all of that happening on, media now, which I write about in the new book. You see this kind of joy in approval, mutual approval. Yes. And that's what I think is the problem with Twitter. It's become like a sort of mutual approval machine that we surround ourselves with people

who feel the same way we do and we approve each other. And that's such a great feeling. If anybody gets in the way and says, I don't agree with what you're doing here, you feel ferociously angry about them and you scream them out. And yeah, so I think this kind of mutual approval that goes on in both on social media and also in extremist groups. Don't you think that people say things, a lot of the things they say,

they say knowing that people are going to approve. So they tailor these things in a way that like they lick their finger and put it up in the air and they catch the wind like, ooh, the wind's going this way. I'm going to say something that puts me on the moral high ground. I'm going to get a lot of retweets. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's it's I think it's kind of damaging. I mean, you know, like you said before, you know, I come from a social justice world.

So I believe in all the things that they believe in right i believe in gay marriage i believe in all of those things but i at the same time i feel kind of uncomfortable when i feel like there's a kind of ferocious conformity going yes that you have to you have to say it like every time somebody dies you have to i remember when robin williams, you have to. I remember when Robin Williams died, like I was doing a bit of, I was promoting some show I was doing or something I'd written and I didn't know Robin Williams had died.

And so I tweeted like something about some show I was doing and I got like a kind of, you know, 50 people immediately tweeting me, basically saying, how dare you promote something when we're all so upset that Robin Williams has just died. Because I

hadn't noticed that Robin Williams... And there's that kind of conformity again, the kind of RIP conformity. Somebody does it, everybody has to do the RIP. And it's all good. It's all coming from a good place. It's all coming from a place that's teaching us how to care and teaching us how to level the playing field. But that's not because how do they know that you didn't know?

Or how do they know whether or not you knew? Well, I explained that I didn't know. But that's not, because how do they know that you didn't know? Or how do they know whether or not you knew? Well, I explained that I didn't know. But that's really common. I mean, you can't be expected to be abreast of every single news story, especially something like a suicide, something that comes on. It's not like something you have to pay attention to, like a military operation that we're all aware of. No, this is a random celebrity decides to take his life.

How could you possibly be forced to know about that? And the problem is, you know, like on social media, we see ourselves as nonconformist. But what this does is create a kind of a fearful conformist world where you have to say what everybody else is saying yeah we're conforming to non-conformity yeah it's like i would see people that were um you know um they dress like rebels but they dress like the same rebels they're typically unique you know like you know you see someone who's got you know their their hair's dyed pink and you know they don't give a fuck but you don't give a fuck and you know they don't give a fuck but

you don't give a fuck like everybody around you doesn't give a fuck like you're wearing a uniform yeah whether you know it or not you look like someone's going to catholic school like you might think that you're some sort of a rebel but the real rebels are indistinguishable from everyone else and the way they dress and the way they they look because they're just people you know where there are there are no real rebels like a real rebel is just someone who has their own opinion that may or may not go with the standard opinion that we're being supposed to uh that we're supposed to absorb yeah but the idea of uh conforming to non-conformity is so ironic though it's like the one thing that you are

rallying against is the one thing that you are rallying against is the one thing that you don't even realize you are becoming. Yeah. And it's, you know, the negative byproducts of all of this are big. It makes people fearful. It makes people shut the fuck up. Yeah. And also what it is, it declares war on human nature. You know, this is the reason why I really wanted to write the public shaming book, because I felt like war had been declared on human nature. Instead of trying to work out why people transgress, you know, in a sort of compassionate way, it just destroys people for transgressing. and everybody transgresses every human transgresses and when we so ferociously destroy other people for transgressing we're shutting off really

significant realities about humans which is the fact that if if we try to understand each other it would make the world more compassionate and we would understand why people transgress more. Yeah, I think that what we're talking about too is you're not talking about rallying against someone who's committing horrible atrocities. No. Someone's committing crimes against humanity, torturing people, murdering people. You know you're talking about differences of opinion.

Yeah, I mean some people's transgressions are so serious, it deserves to overwhelm them. And they deserve to be defined by them. And we're all like sort of in commiserating and we're all sort of in agreement. We're all sort of bonding together on this. Like, hey, like as humans, we're not going to tolerate this behavior because it's evil. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. humans, we're not going to tolerate this behavior because it's evil. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But this is all a long way away from the question which was about kind of hanging out with extremist groups and so on. I mean, I discovered some things that I think people hadn't known at the time. One was that they were all conspiracy theorists. You know, that was what united the Ku Klux Klan with the Islamic fundamentalist group I hung out with called Al-Muhajiroun. I spent a year with

this Islamic group called Al-Muhajiroun. I spent a year with this Islamic group called Al-Muhajiroun. You spent a year with them? Yeah, I became like their chauffeur. They said to me, Omar Bakri, the head of the group, said to me after a few months, like, I have let you into my life. I've given you much.

I want something in return. So I was like, what? And he said, can you drive me to Office World? I need pencils. Yeah, what do you need said, can you drive me to Office World? I need pencils. Yeah, well, he needs to get his photocopying done, like crush the pirate state of Israel. So I become like a chauffeur, start driving him everywhere. And yeah, that was awkward.

Did you go home when you said you were with him for a year? No, I went home. He only lived like a couple of miles up the road from me. So you would get up in the morning, bye, honey, I'm going to go hang out with the Islamic fundamentalists. I'm going to hang out with Omar. He needs to buy some collection boxes for Hamas. He needs to be driven to the Kashmiri. Now, that's a very scary organization.

This was pre-9-11. I mean, most of the stories I've told today are from my book, Them, which was pre-9-11. And so less scary like people thought they were ridiculous like not that much had happened at that stage while I was there with them for the year though I mean all you know now so many like suicide bombers and so on and so many journalists get killed yeah that's mean, that could have been you easily if you were dealing with a decade later. Yes. Or even a couple of, I mean, when was Daniel Pearl? That was pretty early on. Early stages of the Iraq war, right? 2002 or three. So I was only what, four years. That was the first one, man. That was the first one they had the video.

Yeah. I remember watching that online against my own better judgment. Has it haunted you ever since? Oh, you can never get past that one. And what's crazy is that one had such an impact. And I've seen a few of them since then. And they didn't have nearly as much impact. It's like slowly but surely you get numb to it. You know the first person, I've never watched any of these videos,

but I was in Brooklyn and the taxi driver told me that he watches like all of them. And I said, I've never watched any of them. And he said, well, I'll show you the one you really shouldn't watch, Daniel Pearl. Yeah, I haven't watched any of them. So I don't know what he meant by that. There was a lot of conspiracy theories involving that one as well there was a lot of conspiracy theories that there was uh that he was killed by the cia in order to uh keep people out of there and justify our attacks on islamic fundamentalists and that they had killed him because he was going to reveal information about all sorts of different shit and there was like a whole video dedicated to uh describing why

these people were not Arabs and that their accent was wrong, their size was wrong. They were built more like American military people. Right. I mean, conspiracy theories, it's a weird thing. It's very imaginative. Because there are conspiracies. Oh, there are.

I mean, you know, I got chased away from Bilderberg. I snuck into Bohemian Grove. There are conspiracies. And there's also stuff like Operation Northwoods I got chased away from Bilderberg. I snuck into Bohemian Grove. There are conspiracies. And there's also stuff like Operation Northwoods, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff had signed that paper saying that they were going to try to fake attacks on American civilians. They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, all in order to get us to a war with Cuba. I mean, so it's not like it hasn't been proposed or it hasn't been even acted out like what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. I mean, there are real, real conspiracies

that actually do happen. Even in its own little way, my book, The Minister of Goats, kind of proves conspiracies. It proves that they were trying to- What's the difference between your book? Sorry to interrupt you. What's the difference between your book and the movie?

Okay, in the book, I mean, I never actually went to Iraq. The E mcgregor character that's kind of based on me goes to iraq in the movie in real life i just hung around like military bases in america so um fort meade and fort bragg uh at the end of the movie ewan mcgregor manages to walk through a wall. And I never managed to walk through. So that didn't happen. Well, the movie's kind of tongue in cheek. Yeah, the book's more serious. The book starts off with the kind of comedy of all of this crazy stuff they were trying out in the 70s and 80s.

Like trying to kill goats just by staring at them. Trying to learn how to be invisible. Which, by the way, after a while they adapted. them, trying to learn how to be invisible, which by the way, after a while they adapted, they went from invisibility to trying to find a way of not being seen. So I'm like, that's, you know, I said like camouflage. No. I'm going to interview this guy who is a military guy that was working on their remote viewing.

Yeah. Who was it? I would have probably met this person. I'm trying to remember his name. I'll Google it. Is Ed Dames? Yes, that's who it was. Oh, Ed Dames. Okay, I met Ed Dames. He went psychically spied the Loch Ness Monster

and determined that it was a dinosaur's ghost. A dinosaur's ghost? Yeah. Is that what he really said? Yeah. He's a character boy. Yeah. He was showing me pictures of his hot girlfriend.

Yeah, he was one of the main. Ed Dames, Joe McMonagle, like all of these real life stories. Just hot, Russian, way over his head. Dude was batting way over his head. So maybe remote viewed that. Yeah. Well, you know, if you're a psychic spy. I tell you what, though, being a black ops military psychic spy isn't as glamorous as it sounds.

Very stressful. Stressful. Plus you've got your black ops, you've got no budget, you're not allowed a coffee machine, you have to bring your own coffee into work. Really? Yeah, a couple of the remote viewers told me

how annoyed they were that because they were black op, they had to bring their own coffee into work. Plus, what does it actually mean to be a psychic spy working for the US military? What it actually means is that for 20 years, you go into some room at Fort Meade and try and be psychic. It's kind of a shit job. Yeah. I interviewed another guy.

I forget his name, but we actually tried it out. And we tried to remote view things. Did he get any luck? No. It was me and this guy, DJ Grothy, who's a skeptic. The Randy guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's a debunker and a skeptic. And he and I were on the same page. We were like, you know, we came up with some random shapes. We were supposed to envision this area. And then we went to the area and he was trying to find hits. And I'm like, man, I mean,

you're talking like angles. And like, fuck, anywhere you go that's man-made, you gonna find angles that are similar to this and you know we picked out a few colors that were you know like super common you find those colors yeah you get some really lucky hits but the thing about all the shit that we were wrong with and he's all about like it's just don't think too much just you know Just, you know, let it come to you. Let it come to you. So you're supposed to scribble shit down. And it's so mind-blowingly dumb. And the Ed Dames guy was telling me that they had actually had found Osama. I think it was Osama bin Laden he was saying.

I'm sorry if I can't remember correctly because it was all nonsense to me at the time. But they didn't go after him because they didn't want to win the war. Because they didn't want the war to end. Because the people had a vested interest in keeping the war going. And that was sort of his idea behind why this remote viewing wasn't successful. But he was citing all these different instances where remote viewing was successful. And I was like, ooh, man, I don't know about all that. Yeah.

I remember one time they were looking for Noriega, General Noriega, and the remote viewers were like called in to find Noriega. And one of the remote viewers, it might have been Ed Dames, actually, one of the remote viewers psychically defined that Angela Lansbury knew where Noriega was. Oh, that bitch. Yeah. What I don't know is whether they actually ever asked Angela Lansbury or not. What I discovered though, if it had just been remote viewing I wouldn't have wanted to have written them in a stay at goat's because I found the remote

viewing thing a bit boring but then what I discovered just through asking people was there was all this other shit going on like they were trying to fast for a month trying to burst clouds just by pointing at them, trying to kill clouds just by pointing at them, try to kill goats just by staring at them.

And that stuff was so fun to me. And then I discovered, after like a year of interviewing these guys, I discovered that there was a line, I mean, a really crooked line, but a line nonetheless between some of these crazy endeavors in the 1970s and 80s and some of the kind of exotic interrogation techniques that were happening at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. So in the book, because some of the same people, like there was a colonel called John Alexander

who was involved in like exotic, you know, sound blasting and all the non-lethal weapons. And he's a guy you should have on your show, actually. He's an incredible guy. So the minister that goes to the book sort of starts funny and gets dark, whereas the movie kind of stayed funny and kind of didn't go into the darkness in that way. How much money did they spend on that remote viewing thing? That went on for a long time.

$20 million, I think. $20 million. Was there any one piece of evidence that they could point to that was like... No, every so often like a unit would get sick of it, like it was being run by the, I don't know, the DEA or, you know, the US Army or military intelligence, and then they'd get sick of it. Learn remote viewing. Right. Is that Ed Dames?

Okay. That's not him. No, that's not Ed Dames. It's his website. Yeah, that's not him no no that's not a dance it's his website yeah he's the older gentleman that it ended up back with the CIA in 1995 the CIA's greatest weapon as the power to change your life forever oh so now you're using it like and look they have a live support gal look she's pretty too need live support call us pretty girl why don't they have an angry black guy who could beat your ass nope pretty white girl isn't that funny it's like welcoming i'm

smiling at you i have beautiful eyes do you need live support call me sugar i'll show you how to find your dog here's something interesting you know the guy the first guy who ran the remote viewers back in the very earliest days of remote viewing was a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. And he was the same guy who ran MKUltra in the 50s. Like, so all the kind of poisoning people, spanking people's drinks with LSD, going off to Cuba to try and assassinate Castro by putting like a bomb in his cigar or poisoning his wetsuit. assassinate Castro by putting like a bomb in his cigar or poisoning his wetsuit. So all this really dark CIA shit that was happening in the 50s was run by this guy, Sidney Gottlieb. And he was the same guy who ran the remote viewers in the 70s. So that was kind of interesting. That is interesting. Well, without a doubt, they've definitely experimented on people to

try to find out whether or not they could control them. That's 100%. Oh, no question. There's this other operation called Artichoke. I became friends with Eric Olson, whose father was Frank Olson, who's the guy who purportedly was given LSD by the CIA and then jumped out of a window in New York and killed himself. Do you know that Ted Kaczynski was a part of the Harvard

studies on LSD? Oh, really? Yeah, there was a German documentary called The Net that sort of highlighted this. And it was all about his Participation in the LSD studies and how it pushed him off the rails, right? And then he went fucking crazy and went went off to teach at Berkeley Saved all his money from teaching and then went to live in the woods. Okay, and can Didn't can he see his LSD? I do. I do not know if that's the case I mean he might have been but the

Kaczynski thing is pretty well documented that he was a part of those studies. Right. And, you know, I mean, I have a friend whose sister is out of her fucking mind. She went on a couple LSD trips and took way too much. And to this day, that was like seven years ago, to this day she's all fucked up. So it can happen, especially if you have have if you're mentally unstable to begin with and you get dosed and spiked you know it's totally possible i mean people that have a slippery grip on reality any really traumatic experience and any real anything that's like super perturbing to your state of consciousness has the potential to

set you off the rails in a way that you might not be able to recover from. I mean, it is possible. Yeah. And they did a lot of fucking experiments with LSD with people. And there was worse shit than that. There was this thing called Artichoke where they were like experimenting in, I believe this has all been verified, This has all been verified. They're experimenting in getting people hooked on heroin and then withdrawing the heroin and making them do cold Turkey as a means of getting information out of them Wow. Yeah, and that was that related to MK ultra I mean, yeah, you talked about can some conspiracies being true MK. Ultra is a conspiracy. That was true. Yeah, there's plenty of those that are true

I mean look especially when you're dealing with the Cold War and this terrible thought that the Soviet Union was ready to drop bombs on your children any day of the week and that they're doing things like this

and that, you know, the Nazis had been doing things like this and we know about all the experiments that the Japanese did and the rape of Nam King and the horrible things

that the Nazis had done to the prisoners of war. I the horrible things that the Nazis had done to the prisoners of war. I mean... And weren't some American... Didn't MKUltra start or in the early days of MKUltra some Americans were... some American soldiers were kidnapped by

the Koreans and then they were seen on TV like saying we renounce America and they would try to work out like how the Koreans... and my memory is really sketchy on this, but then they try to work out like how the Koreans have managed to brainwash these three American servicemen so easily. And that was one of the reasons why they started MKUltra. I might be getting confused. Well, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about your work with extremists, because I always wonder, like, is it appealing you're I mean obviously you're not a white

Supremacist or an Islamic fundamentalist or anything, but when you're with them for a long period of time when you're embedded Is there any? Draw is there any Somehow or another is there any pull towards like thinking and inclination? Is there an attraction to their ideology? You know, never to their ideology, but what I did always like, like throughout my writing career, the times I'm at my happiest, times when I think a story is really working is when something shifts in me. Like I spend so much time with conspiracy theorists

and then suddenly i'm being chased by the builder group and i go fucking nuts and like i've become like paranoid and that's what i know like at the bottom of my brain i know that like what's happening to me is terrifying but the fact that i've gone through this really big change means it's going to be a really fucking good piece of writing and that happened in them and it happened in the psychopath test too actually that I became completely drunk with my psychopath spotting powers like I went on a course to learn how to spot psychopaths and I got so drunk with my psychopath spotting powers that I changed and like my friends were saying to me like you've really changed Peter Straughan who wrote the screenplay for the minister at goats told me he was concerned about me because i was so convinced i could spot psychopaths everywhere what do you look for um well you know nuances of language um the first half of my book the

psychopath test sort of teaches people how to spot psychopaths and then the second half becomes like a cautionary tale to not get so fucking drunk with your powers that it turns you a little bit psychopathic. But like nuances of language, you know, there's like a 20 point checklist where it all comes from. Lack of empathy, lack of remorse. I started meeting like CEOs and doing the psychopath checklist on them to see if it's true that you're more likely to find psychopaths at the top of the tree than the bottom. I'll give you one example. Is that true? Yeah, I think that is true.

I think you're more likely to find psychopaths at the top of the tree than at the bottom because capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior. Isn't the definition, too, that a psychopath is someone that has power whereas a sociopath is someone like... There's some sort of a... You know, the whole psychopath-sociopath thing, there's a lot of... It's very blurry. Yeah, there's a lot of debate out there as to, and different psychiatrists and psychologists will use the terms.

I mean, the upshot is that I don't think there's any real difference. Some people will say there's a difference because they'll bring their own sort of analyses to the situation. But in general, you're talking about a kind of a lack of empathy, a neurological lack of empathy, whether it's neurological or whether it's through childhood abuse. That's another big matter of debate amongst those people. But I'll give you a kind of classic example from the book. I went to meet this Haitian dictator called Toto Constant in jail in upstate New York. I'd met him a few times before,

but I met him in jail. And he kept on saying to me, I want people to like me, like I really want people to like me. He kept on saying that to me. So finally, I said to him, isn't that a weakness, like wanting people to like you? Isn't that a weakness? And he said, no, no, no, it's not a weakness because if you can get people to like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do. Whoa. Yeah. So I said, so are you the sort of person

who doesn't really feel like empathy? And he said, no, no, empathy is a weakness. So that's a, well, that's clearly telltale. But I've... I've, um, Well, I guess he figured like, fuck it, I'm in jail. Let's let the kid out of the bag. I'm not getting out of here. And also, sometimes they're like, like I said this to an old KGB spy I met one time. Like I said, were you a bully at school? And he said, yes, yes, yes, I was a bully. He said he was English.

He said, I would like get up from behind a tree. from behind a tree and my bag would have bricks in it and I'd hit somebody over the head with a brick. Jesus Christ. Yeah. He said, but I'd only get the bullies. I'd only get the bullies. So I said, and how did you feel about that? And he said, I felt good.

And I said, and how do you feel now? Like all these years later, looking back on it, how do you feel now? And he said, I still feel good. And I said, so you're not the sort of person who feels empathy. And he said, I still feel good. And I said, so you're not the sort of person who feels empathy. And he said, you've really got to the nub of what kind of crank I am. He said, when a dog dies, like one of my dogs dies, I feel incredibly upset and I cry.

But the human beings that I've hurt and killed, don't feel anything. Whoa. Yeah. So if you can get them being honest about their absence of empathy. I don't want to hear that. I mean, I do and I don't. I mean, I do, but I don't want to know they're around, man. Yeah.

There's something disturbing about someone who's just not willing to ever join the community. You know, they live amongst you and they're just trying to yeah see the world in terms of predators and prey and it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses yeah this you know I think there really are psychopaths out there there was some people yeah that's I think a lot of people that the one thing I don't like about the sort of psychopath spot in world is that they they're not interested to a large extent in what turned somebody that way. Because they're just really interested in the idea that there's just another species out there.

There's just this other species that aren't quite human. They look human, but it's kind of like David Icke and the lizards, right? There's people out there who've adopted human form, but they're not quite human. But I'm really interested. There's this other psychiatrist I met called James Gilligan who basically says all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. So these people were like so battered during their childhood, so humiliated, so abused that they try and regain some self-esteem by committing violence onto other people. All violence?

I don't like statements that are so absolute. It is a big statement, right? But as a kind of humanist, I like that because it's giving some humanity back to violent people. It's saying, you know, it comes from a place of damage. Whereas the psychopath spotters will basically say, no, no, they're just like another species. Okay, yeah. You know what?

Honestly, I think there's truth in both camps. Well, I think there's certainly some people that are like that and there's some people that are violent just because they're angry at stupidity or they're angry at aggression or they just need some release in their life and they're pent down with all sorts of stress and they they can't handle it, and they don't have an outlet. There's a lot of people that just – they're lacking an outlet. And I liken them to overflowing batteries, like a battery that – I think of a human body as – your human body is designed to exert a certain amount of effort, to put forth a certain amount of energy during the day. And most people don't even remotely tap into their reserve of energy.

They sit down and their body, you know, just conforms to their office chair and they're there all day. And at the end of the day, they sit in their car or they sit on the bus or the train and they make their way home. In which case they sit on the couch and they sit in front of the television. And their body just is constantly storing up stress. And it has this desire to exert energy and it's never met with what it needs. It never has its needs fulfilled. And so then you're in your car and you're in traffic and someone cuts you off and you're like, you fucking piece of shit. You have this unbelievably angry response because your battery is essentially found.

There's an opening. You know, it's like a hole in a water balloon. Water just starts squirting out of it. It can't help it. It's like so bent up with or pent up with pressure. And if you instead of doing that to somebody in another car who can't hear you, if you can go home and you do it on social media, everybody hears you, including that person, and it can really damage someone.

Yeah, well, certainly you keep coming back to that. It's only because it's one of the most recent books. It's on your mind for a while. Hey, do you mind if I go? No. That's a perfect way to end it. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I'm so glad that we did this because, as I say, for years people have like, oh, my God, you've got to go on Joe Rogan.

Oh, I think we could have a hundred of these. I mean, anytime you're back in town. Hey, next time I'm back, we'll do it. When are you back again? Do you come around L.A. very often? It might be soon, yeah. My son's thinking about moving here. So if he does.

Oh, okay, great. If he does, I'm not going to fucking leave. I can't be in another city to my son. I hear you. Yeah. Okay, well, beautiful, man he does, I'm not going to fucking leave. I can't be in another city to my son. I hear you. Yeah. Okay, well, beautiful, man. Well, definitely either way, one way or another,

when you're back in town, let's do this again. I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. And so your most recent book is So You've Been Publicly Shamed. And I'm sure it's available everywhere, right?

Like Amazon and all that jazz. I fucking hope so. Barnes & Noble. Took me long enough to write. All that good stuff. And John Ronson on Twitter, J-O-N. Is there a J-O-H-N that's pretending to be you? Writing a bunch of evil shit that you're going to get in trouble for?

Actually, there is another John Ronson on Twitter. It's pretending to be me. I hope he's not shaming you. We tried. It's another story. Is it really? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, John Ronson on Twitter. Ah, you're fine. John Ronson, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, brother. I really appreciate it.? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So yeah, John, John, John, John, John, John, John, John,

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