Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20150503

I went to these things in central portugal. And i went there was a conspiracy theorist from this town who has now departed and we tried to infiltrate the builder bird mating and obviously lots of conspiracy theorists from all different stripes of the illuminati so we scouted around the hotel and then left and then got chased by men in dark glasses. I should tell you i wasnt sure it existed. I just went there because i thought this is what conspiracy theorists believe. It was never in the Mainstream Media. I thought this was just a fantasy so i went there and i thought maybe something is happening but im sure its not important. So we scouted around the hotel with jim tucker trying to forge contacts with waitresses and Chamber Maids which was really unsuccessful and then we left and i noticed a dark green was following us. When i say chase i was going 30 miles an hour and so was he. If i had gone faster he would have gone faster so driving to portugal i am panicking. Obviously ive never been chased by the shadowy henchmen of the secret police. Never. I have been yelled at by neonazis on a number of occasions so i kind of know whats going on there. Never been chased by men in dark glasses of the Shadowy Organization that i didnt noticed it before. This was new. So i stopped the car and he stopped his car and then i went up to his window. It was a man of dark glasses and i knocked on the window to try and explain myself and he would not look at me. He just looked straight ahead so then i got back in the car and carried on driving and then he carried on in went the other way. So the first thing i did was phoned up my wife and i said this is really bad. I am being chased by the Bilderberg Group and im really upset and i dont know what to do and im really out of my depth. And im not even sure whether i will ever see you again. My wife said oh you are loving it. And then i phoned up the British Embassy and i said im being followed by a dark green lancia belonging to the Bilderberg Group and the woman from the British Embassy went, go on. And i said im sorry but im here to take a short breath. She said what are you doing here here . I said im essentially a humorous journalist. Do you think you might phone the builder bird group and i lowered my voice and i said im here with a conspiracy theorist called and provocateur and that might be the problem. So then she said and of everything that happened that day she said the good news is that you know you are being followed they are probably just trying to intimidate you and the dangerous ones because you dont know are following you. So i thought that was comfort because one of these people are pretentious ones and are actually good at starting them. So we got back to our hotel and this is this event may god to the movie of a shoot horses dont they so we got back to the hotel and the woman from the British Embassy telephoned and said i have spoken to the builder bird office at the hotel and nobody is following you and how can they call up someone who doesnt exist . So i said hes behind the tree and he was. There was the man behind the tree staring at us. So for the next month i would say, dont know exactly when it starts when the chase starts because i imagined myself being chased for weeks afterwards. But at some point it starts and i wasnt being chased anymore. Host so the bilderbergs do exist . Where did they get the name . Guest from the first hotel where they met in 1954. They interviewed me like Bilderberg Group and nobody wrote back. I should say the next day we went back to the hotel and stayed and watched these limousines going up the drive. David rockefeller, Henry Kissinger Vernon Jordan heinz and you know stuff was going on. So eventually i managed to speak to two really important bilderbergs. One was Dennis Healey who was one of the founding members and he explained what bilderberg meant to him which was that this was started in the world war and it was through hitler and they believe that giving power to business who believe in who dont have ideology, they just believe in money was a safer thing to do than to have power in the hands of these ideological politicians. So the idea was it was just globalism. We will be globalist. We will invite upandcoming politicians with has a business can have private conversations and try and promote the idea of globalism to upandcoming parties. Host jon ronson did you enjoy your time with jim tucker . Guest yeah read at the time it was terrifying of course but now im older and this is true of a lot of my adventures. I also snuck into the meme grove the weird rightwing version of bilderberg where they have rituals where effigies are thrown into fire he bellies of giant stone owls and i snuck into one of those. I think in all of these adventures at the time you want to do nothing less than the stuff. A lot of adrenaline type person. But looking back these are the great days. These adventures are a think a great days. Host who is omar bakri and how did you become this show for . Guest Omar Bakri Mohammed was an Islamic Militant living in london announced in 1995 that he wouldnt rest until he saw flags flying on down the street. I realized he looked a couple of blocks away from me in north london. Back in those days if u. S. Me why i was doing the story in my midtwenties why did i want to do the story my answer would always be to say it might be funny. Things have changed but that then i thought it might be funny so i thought it might be funny to sneak into a bilderberg building and to hang out with omar bakri for a while to watch them establish the islamic state. He was calling himself bin ladens man in Great Britain. And so we call them up a really successful movie director and said can we spend a year with you and he said okay. So we went to his house and on the first day the first thing we did was watch the lion king. Thats the only way he can relax. He said they call me the lion. They call me the great warrior, the great five top and he needed to get collection books so he we went to the local wholesale warehouse and the only collection boxes they had in stock were these giant novelty plastic cocacola bottles. So i said isnt it funny that you are collecting money to overthrow the west and these palpable symbols of western corruption. He was like yeah and didnt want to engage in the dialogue. And then we spent a few months with him on and off chauffeuring him to the cash and carry and chauffeured him to office world where he got his islam future of Britain Special price promise that if you find a copy cheaper we will give you double the difference or something. Then the one time i was with omar at office world and he was getting some leaflets that said crush the pilot state of israel and a couple of feet up there was a hasidic jew getting copies of a bar mitzvah. Omar is looking and getting sideways glances. Omar came to me and said its a hasidic moment. Then he said you know i have let you into my life. I would like something in return and i said what and he said you know can you drive me to this meeting up in birmingham . So i drove him to what was basically like not a secret paris meeting but basically radical list meeting and they wouldnt let us in. Omar got in trouble for bringing us along so we had to wait in the parking lot while omar we said yes please. So we were in the car talking to each other while omar was doing god knows what in the spooky house in birmingham. Then the omar out of me as a jihad Training Camp. He said i have been with omar for a year and never discussed my religion but he said he suddenly said look at me with the infidel. They have these jihad trainees. Look at me with the infidel jon two is a and they all went and i said paid than an atheist. Actually i am an atheist so it was a stupid thing to say at the time. And then they grounded me and asked me what it was like to be a jew and they had never met a jew and they were treating me like a rare fish. And then this was all in 1996 1997 and i remember at the time i met someone from the board of deputies at the Antidefamation League and he said britain and i think you meant me as well as britain has not woken up to what islamic terrorism actually means and im thinking and then four years later and ever since 2001 omars people have been implicated in acts of terrorism. One of omars people on a number of occasions where a suicide bomber has blown themselves up and had his number stored in its mobile phone. This happened on a number of occasions. One of the drivers were those jihad Training Camp was ended up blowing himself up somewhere and omar now is in prison in beirut. So a few people have said were you naive that this was happening and you were making a comic story and this was like a burgeoning thing. If you are in the middle of it you presented it as a comic story. And i guess my answer is nothing happen. All the comedy and the absurdity happened and we were there. I mean we were there by lock in a way but we were there for that so i think its a valuable record of the world being about to change with nobody knowing it was about two. Host was your time with randy weaver and his family for the same reason . Guest no. Of all the stories in my book then, that was the one story that i took a completely different attitude. It was a terrible human tragedy and what i love about that story is that the first time i ever really told the story where the people who most people would represent as the ones come over as humanistic and flawed. Randy weaver is certainly flawed and im sure feels partly responsible for what happened to his family. Im sure he does but nonetheless, it was a really interesting story for me as a journalist where the Weaver Family were the kind of you know, were the kind of heart of the story and everything that entails. I had never written a story where the people and most people would think of them as the villains were the people who i was feeling great sympathy and empathy for but i should explain what the story is because i think a lot of people have forgotten it. Family of white separatist conspiracy theorist believing in bilderberg and all of this stuff, the world order goes to the top of a mountain in idaho because they say if you cant live on top of the mountain in idaho where can you live . The big error was they would go to the nearby aryan nation the White Supremacy place and randy insists that he was never a white supremacist, but there was a kind of oval vin diagram up with the weavers believed in what the White Supremacists believe that he never considered himself as a hardliner. Anyway so he would go there on picnics and the kids were young, nine, 10 years old including the girl that i got to know very well and liked hugely, rachel weaver one of the daughters. Anyway like a lot of White Supremacy hangout this was infiltrated by the federal government. By the way can i take a slight detour for a second . When i was writing the story i went to aryan nation foolishly thinking if i sat around with the weavers they would be fine so i drove past the sign that said jews turnback noaa kind of drove. I was surrounded at the skinheads 10 young men. Aryan nation was about to be closed down so they had nothing to lose in these men started surrounding me and started yelling at me what is your genealogy . And i said my genealogy . And i said i am church of england. One of these guys made a joke to kind of relieved the situation that church of england, they are the ones that make you give away all your money and it was a joke and everyone kind of relax. I have often wondered whether that one might have been an undercover agent protecting me at that moment. So anyway randy would go with his wife and his kids to the summer camp and so on and undercover agents randy baer. He presumably thought he is somebody we could work with slightly crazy person who spends with crazy people. He asked if i was an informant and he said no and quite a grandstanding we like a big no. So then they sent somebody to entrapment. They said do you have a gun and randy said yes. They said would they said what he saw the gun they are and they saw the way. It was below the legal limit to the legal limits so they said you have sold as a legal weapon. You will go to prison unless you come and work for us and randy said no. Randy dug his heels and, put his family in the cabin stayed there for a long time. I think a year, year and a half. You will never take me off this land. Stupid business and the agents were like watching and one day one of the agents atf got too close to the cabin and the dogs started barking and the dogs started chasing the agents and randys little boy sammy who was 12 years old looks much younger like nine chased the agents down the hill. The agents hit in the bush, came out and said i have shot the dog and killed the dog and then sammy said you shot my dog you son of a. And fired. He didnt hit anybody but fired and then the agents opened up and shot his arm almost off and sammy yelled and ran up the hill and the hill and age and shot him in the back and killed him. One of the agents got shot and killed at the same time and maybe it was a family friend maybe it was friendly fire we dont know. Then the next day pedro drug sammys body into the shed in the next day randy came out and they shot randy, the fbi and then they shot vicki weaver in the head as she was holding her baby in the doorway and in a siege institute for until finally the family came out. And a family was awarded 1 million each in compensation. So that was a story i guess the whole thing about them really is to talk about that kind of Pressure Cooker of craziness. You know the conspiracy theorist were getting crazier and so were our responses towards them just going upandup and up. And then host randy weaver is still alive. What is he doing . Guest the last i heard randi he was selling his book at gun shows and have your photograph taken with randy weaver for 5 or something. Randy, hope you wont mind me saying this in public randy is very grandstanding. He said something terrible to me at one point about the agent who had been killed when sammy was killed. He said hes not worth more than my dog to me. In private i really got the sense that randys shoulders a terrible burden and knows that he was part of this escalation of hostilities and that sammy and vicki would still be alive if he hadnt acted the way he did. Host jon ronson we will talk about some of the other people you write about in some of your other books but how do you get to know these people . Why do they say yes to you . Guest increasingly passion and empathy. I have been writing books now for 15 maybe 20 years and the older i get the more i see my fellow human beings including the ones demonized by society for whatever reason as fully grounded complicated and pathetic human beings, a mix of of and there are exceptions of course. There are people whose transgressions are so serious it overwhelms them but most people you meet randys daughter rachel the loveliest person. Randy, complicated person read i have spent time with diagnosed psychopath in secure units and found many positive traits. With my new book so youve been publicly shamed its about these people being weighed. People we have decided are of no merit because of some they have no merit and you know human qualities. So theyre empathy and passion. I only tell stories that i passionately want to tell so i can go to people and say look and i think the passion, i think they can feel it. Host somebody talked about your new book is featured in your new book so youve been publicly shamed. Lets watch a little bit of video here and come back. And there are no parameters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation and the growth of the internet as jack at that price. For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation and our cultural soil both on and offline. Gossip web sites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic and shame. Its led to desensitization and a permissive environment on line which lends itself to trolling invasion of privacy and cyberbullying. Host jon ronson. Esco its true we rely on social media read i sometimes feel that we are like unpaid shaming interns for google and twitter like they are making good money off of peoples shaming since we are getting nothing. In fact we are getting worse than nothing. We are contributing to a frightened, cold conservative conformist society. Yeah you know i was talking about the weavers and i was talking about people being demonized in my earlier books. Power shifted and now right now at this moment the people who have the most power on social media are people who convey much of my world and i think we are finding it really hard to distinguish and differentiate between serious transgressions and done serious transgressions and somebody who makes a joke that comes out badly suddenly that person is being torn apart their lives in cataclysm because of the foolish and erroneous belief that some badly worded joke is a clue to that persons inherent evil. You know its labeling culture again which i write about in the psychopath test and in them and also in so youve been publicly shamed. To want to define somebody by their outburst aspect. I do it in the Mainstream Media as well and they do it because its fun and because it makes us feel good. Its like a kind of cathartic alternative to real progress. As somebody wrote about my book and we do it exist as human beings we love nothing more than to declare the people insane and we do it to make ourselves feel good and he do it because on social media we surround ourselves with people that feel the same way we do so it becomes as mutual approval machine. I filmed burt filmmaker called a mutual grooming so people like Monica Lewinsky or Justine Sacco in my book have data passed around in this approval machine because when we destroy somebody like justin sacco everybody approves of us and this is a dopamine rush and we can show that we are good and empathetic people but nr for russias desire to be empathetic people theyd flame burned really hot and we commit these on empathetic acts like we did to justine. Host is there some in this . Guest i think theres a kind of drone strike operator that we can just press the button and continue happily with our day and we dont need to think about the village we have just smashed up. And the snowflake doesnt need to feel responsible for the avalanche. I think most of all you think its the earnest desire to do good. That is where it is coming from because we do good. Constantly good things happen. Social justice is making enormous and roads. Its working. We have power. Its a color missed in a column. We can punish the newspaper and i say we, sometimes it is me and sometimes its other people but it works as power. The black lives matter protests, that works to an extent and there is power there but we fall in love with that so much that a day without a shaming feels like a day shedding water or picking fingernails and suddenly theres this huge amount of collateral damage. I wanted to write a book about the collateral damage. These people that we now have demonized. Host heres a picture of Justine Sacco arriving at the cape town airport. He to his Justine Sacco . Guest justine, i really love justine in my story because one of the first things, this book has been written about a lot much more than any of my other books and one of the editorial is said jon ronson is right to write a book about mob mentality on social media but why did he have to make Justine Sacco a sympathetic character . When i read that i dug my heels and all the more because you know dont tell me that i can write about that wronged person but im not allowed to write about this wronged person because its a package that comes with her read someone has wronged and they are wronged. So justine was a pr woman in new york city ricci had 170 twitter followers. On avatar she is good looking she is blonde ricci evidently has funded parties in new york. There are a lot of people out there who immediately so anyway she would to be jokes to her 170 twitter followers and one of them, the worst joke you ever made and never will make. She was on her way from new york cape town and she tweeted going to africa. I hope i dont get aids. Just kidding, im quite. Host we are going to show that tweet on the air right now. Guest sheet chuckled to herself. She wandered around heathrow sporadically checking twitter. Got no replies and felt that sad feeling that we feel when the internet does not congratulate us. When the New York Times ran an extract from my book the fact checker bugger up and said are you surprised you got no replies . She said i have 170 twitter followers and i got no replies. No one ever talks about it on the internet. So she got on the plane switched off her phone woke up 11 hours later in cape town, turned on her phone and there was a text from somebody she hadnt spoken to since high school that said i am so sorry to see what is happening to you right now. She looked at it baffled and texted her best friend, you need to call me right away. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on twitter. Another reason why i said she was wrong to us because she didnt intend i mean like everybody else i lay in bed not to tweak my overtime and the tweet went around the world. Everybody from gawker to donald trump, everybody was like oh you know this woman is a terrible human being. And she was asleep on the plane and oblivious to her destruction. That became part of the hilarity that she didnt know because her employer said this is an outrageous tweet. So then it was like oh man i cant wait for Justine Sacco the land. We are about to watch this Justine Sacco get fired in real time before she even though shes been fired. And trolls hoping that she would be raped by someone who is hivpositive and we will find out of her skin color protects her from aids. Everybody was so excited to be tearing apart Justine Sacco that nobody could handle the complexity of tearing apart someone who is inappropriately tearing apart justine. Thats how simpleminded our social media shaming czar. You know this cathartic alternative to social justice. And the other reason why i say she was wronged if she had not intended my first thought was wow this is exciting. To watch this person get destroyed and 30 seconds later i thought im not sure that was intended to be a racist week. They say tradition of people doing this type of humor are not flaunting privilege but mocking her pledge by making extreme versions. Sure people have no reason to live southpaw colbert. Maybe i thought as i lay in bed maybe Justine Saccos crowd was not as good at it. Maybe thats why her life is changing forever. And when i did meet justine a couple of weeks later she was just broken, just crushed, traumatized. I asked her to explain the joke and she said we live in america in a bubble when it comes to whats going on in the third world. Somebody reviewed my book actually helen lewis working for the new statesman and she wrote in her review that like me she was on twitter that night and she tweeted im not sure that joke was intended to be racist. She said straightaway she got this flurry, you are a privileged too and she showed up up. As journalists and as human beings we are supposed to stand up to the police and stand up to injustice that people were just too afraid to stand up to injustice with Justine Sacco and that made me all the more all the more certain i had to do it. Did she want to talk to you in this book . Guest not at first. I was asking people to relive these deeply wounding haunting traumatizing moments in their lives. Justine agreed to talk to me. She finally agreed to meet me three weeks after it happened but the deal we had was i could take the conversation that would defer judgment as to whether so than a couple of months went by where i was like and she decided she wanted one time to give one interview to show people how insane it was that the punishment was so wildly disproportionate to the plan. So then i met her again and both interviews were on the record. As the book was coming closer and closer to publication he started to regret talking to me and if it was like if i could turn back the clock i wouldnt talk to you. She was really nervous. Its still painful to be told because this isnt trolls. There were some trolls but it was nice people. Hundreds of thousands of nice good people told justine that she was worthless and she had to get out. That was a deeply traumatizing thing. So anyway the New York Times extract came out and she emailed me and said i am so glad that you told my story. She felt such a relief that i told the story the way it should be told. Host what is she doing now wax just go she has a new job in public relations. This is after a year crashed in the wilderness. She has got a new job in public relations. She is dating again. She couldnt date for a while because you type in Justine Sacco what you get you get racist woman. But she is dating again and she is fine now im happy. A lot of people said to her after the book came out i cant believe what we did. Actually nobody said we cant believe that we did to you. Actually they said i cant believe that those people did to you and then i got backlash. First it was like oh you are compassionate kind to do a story like this and suddenly there was a backlash against me. One comment said what racist is jon ronson going to produce a tape on for next . And i mention these extreme ones and i will get to the more ludicrous ones. I realize im slightly highest. The other one i remember i didnt reply to any of them. Actually i wrote one thing when the New York Times extract came out. I wrote by the way this isnt a standalone article. Its an extract of my book and i saw a bunch of people tweeted oh, now jon ronson says its an extract from a book. What does that mean quext it was the noise and extract. So was the only thing and nobody replied. I didnt reply to anybody and then somebody tweeted, why isnt jon ronson replying to any of this and someone wrote because jon ronson only replies the man. So then i remembered something in the book. He says i have to remember im just a blank canvas for people to put their ideologies in and in that moment i realized i was a blank canvas for people to put ideologies onto and i also realized something today realize maybe there are two types of people in the world. They are the people who value humans over ideologies and theres a type of people who value ideologies of the type of people. Maybe thats too simplistic but if there are those two types of people in the world im the first out. Host you are watching booktv on cspan2, 48 hours of nonfiction books about airs every weekend and this is our in depth program. Once a month we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work in this month it is bestselling author jon ronson. Jon ronson first wrote a book in 1995. Its called clubbed class. We will ask him about that in just a minute. Them the bestseller came out in 2001 the men who stare at goats came out in 2004 at doorstep became a movie. The psychopath test the journey to combat this in 2011 is being made into a movie. Lost at sea the jon ronson mysteries 2012, frank the true story that inspired the movie and this year his most recent book is so youve been publicly shamed. What is clubbed class . You make a face every time. The producer told me you made a noise when he asked you about that. You made a face again. Just go if i could shout in my attic. In the early 90s i made a tv series for the bbc called the ronson mission. I was in my early 20s and completely unprepared to make a tv series. Also i hated everything about it it. The cameras hadnt been invented so it turned out with these giant cameras. I was a journalist and i was you know suddenly i was an actor. It was very uncomfortable. The series was a terrible flop and i was kind of in the wilderness in my early 20s and only offer of work i was given was to write a book. There is this book called clubbed class and the idea was, and at such a Young Persons thing feeling biased in my youth. The idea was to blank my way around they world in this fivestar way so i tried to get myself on free trips on the qe2 and i went to zimbabwe and im a big game hunts the most exciting thing that happened was i ended up in a miniwar in south africa africa. It was one i dont know people remember this when the awp nazi group was just around the type timed of election and mandela was just about to be elected. Sun city that the casino were killed and i was there so i was stranded in sun city with this war so was kind of exciting. In the absence of having my own voice i was just trying to be p. J. Orourke ordered british version of those people and victor lewis smith. So i was just being them and that is why im embarrassed about the book. Wasnt my voice. I first found my voice when i was writing them. Was that we want to put the numbers up because in depth is a calling program. You would like to have a conversation jon ronson 202 7488200 and the east and central timezone 7488201. For those of you in mountain and pacific and further out in hawaii as well and booktv at cspan. Org is our email address. If you cant get her on the phone lines you can send it to be at booktv and finally you can make a comment on our facebook age facebook. Com facebook. Com cspan. He will be with us for another two hours and 15 minutes. Mr. Ronson was a psychopath . Is their definition . Guest according to robert hare who is the master of the man who invented the checklist to checklist of 20 trades. I could probably name all 20. Lack of empathy, lack of remorse remorse, grandiose selfworth glibness, superficial charm, impulsivity irresponsibility cunning and manipulative. The main one is lack of empathy because its an illogical absence of empathy according to harry. Theres evidence of up person i met doing so youve been publicly shamed who has a different it makes them indifferent to other human beings where there should be empathy is kind of twisted forest growth. Grandiose selfworth and so on. The reason why i stumbled on this story i wanted to write a book about psychopath because of a totally different story i was doing for my bbc about this woman. This only just started. I dont believe i said i havent got time. I made a story about this woman and this is how it started. This isnt in the book by the way. She was internet dating and she met a guy a very gallant man, so gallant that he would hold the door open for her, buy her flowers walk on the roadside of the sidewalk which i didnt even know was like a thing. How did you know that was a gallant thing . I went out on so bad on gallantry open the door for somebody way too early and they have to break into an embarrassed run. So anyway he was very gallant and they fell in love. She was about to marry him and she said he realized i dont know anything about this guy am about to mary said she looks him up on companies house. You can find out stuff about people so she discovered he had this other house that she didnt know about. She drove to it and it was this mansion near the sea near edinburgh and so she confronted him and he went into another room and hes on the phone and he came back and he said okay i can tell you. He is american and he said i worked for the cia and that house you stumble upon is our safe house. You know okay and showed various documentation to prove it and so on. So for the next seven years she was married to him and he would go off to janine and she would get messages from the cia saying hes fine, hes in the hospital but hes fine. After seven years of the she got a call one day saying are you mrs. Jordan and the woman said yes. She said im the other mrs. Jordan. It turned out he wasnt working for the cia. He was a bigamist and the house was his other wives and families. He was a bigamist and a pedophile and fraudster. So i came across her story because i wanted to know about the victims. So i said to her her producer work with can you find me some victims and she found mary. But i was talking to mary about this and i said you must have been incredibly upset. She said no hes a psychopath. So just the wildebeest being upset when its being chased by the lien. I thought wow ive never thought of the world that way before. Then i talk to a psychologist called mark stout who wrote this book called the sociopath next door and she said yeah not only do they exist but way more than you think and this was the kicker for me they ruled the world. I said are you telling me theres this particular mental disorder that is so powerful that its like remolded society and she said yes. Capitalism rewards psychopathic character traits. You are much more likely to have a psychopath at the top of the tree at the head of your business then you are then i remember saying to her this is a huge plot. If you think about this, this is a huge thought and she said yes its a huge thought. So then that thought stuck with me. This was all the preamble and none of this is in the psychopath test. Then i started talking to this psychologist who spent time a psychopath and i think he told me about robert hare. And then i started reading the dsm because im interested in labeling. It used to be a pamphlet back in the 50s. A little pamphlet and now its bigger than the biggest bookshelf over there, 186 currently list. The dsmiv lists 74 disorders and they have added a few. As burgers and a bunch of others. So i thought this is extraordinary. I was looking to the dsm at a friends house and suddenly i found all these things that i qualified as like generalized anxiety disorder which was a given. Parent child relational problems. I thought yup. Arithmetic learning disorder. I was like, yes. Nightmare disorder which is capitalized if you have dreams of being perceived as declared as a failure which is basically all of my dreams. So im thinking wow, yes. And then i thought okay, either i much crazier than i thought i am or maybe its not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder without a professional or maybe the psychiatric repression has a strange desire to label essentially norman normal human that they behavior is a disorder. I did notice though that psychopathy wasnt in the dsm. Psychopaths arent in there. But what is in their his antisocial personality disorder. So thats sort of vague and i wondered why. Then i forgot about it. So then i thought i shouldnt worry at all about this going on. Thats the purpose, okay. So then i thought i would call out to meet some critics of psychiatry. It would be sort of fun and theres a great piece in harpers about labeling culture by the dsm. So i ended up having lunch with a scientologist to have a crack team of psychiatry disorders. I had lunch with one of the heads who you can imagine how nervous i was at this lunch because there are so many stories about strongarm tactics. The in fact a friend of mine louis thoroux has been making a documentary about scientologist and everyone on twitter was like why am i not more interested in seeing louis talking about scientologist so i was really nervous. I got along quite well with randy. There was no pressure and i said to him prove it. Prove to me your view that psychiatry is like a wicked science that cant be trusted and he said i can prove it to you. I said how and he said i can introduce you to tony. So i said who is tony . Said tony is that broadmoor which is broadmoor hospital and the old desert known as the ride more asylum for the criminally insane. I said what to Tony Duquette and he said hardly anything. He beat somebody up with something but thats not the point. The point is that he faked madness to get out of a prison sentence and now he is stuck at broadmoor and nobody will believe he is saying. Do you want us to try to get you into broadmoor to meet tony so i said yes please. So brian did something that scientologists are really really good at which is circumvents bureaucracy and got me into broadmoor. So we turned out it ride more and i have to say i was a scholar instead of a journalist which i thought was slightly ridiculous. So we turned up at broadmoor and the guy at the desk said that he got a phone a cake with a hacksaw inside and making jokes and oh my god im telling you more than is in the book. We were put into this waiting area between the security fences with this woman and i said who are you . She said both of my sons are here. Later on i saw her. It was so sad. She was dressed up like a sunday lunch. It was sunday lunchtime and she was dressed in her best clothing because she had two boys locked up at broadmoor. She said im only allowed to see them one at a time. This is so sad. So anyway we got taken into the place where you get to meet the patient which is called the wellness center. Brian said to me, you know tony is the only person in the entire dsp d. To have permission to meet people in the wellness center. So i said what does the spd stand for and he said dangerous and severe personality disorder. So i said this is the most dangerous people. Then the patient started arriving and they were all quite overweight and wearing sweatpants. They kind of looked like they had given up and i remember brian whispered to me they are medicated which to brian is a scientologist is the worst thing thing. Then brian said oh here is tony. The guy is walking towards me and he was wearing a suit pinstriped suit and he had his arm outstretched. It was evidently the outfit of someone who wanted to convince me that he was very sane. He sat down and afterwards i said to brian, you know you gave me the best story. Thank you. This is the best story. I sat down and i said is it true that you fake your way in here and he said yup i beat somebody up when i was 17 and my cellmate said to me you are looking at 5 to seven years in prison. What you need to do is faked madness. Tell them you are mad and you will get sent to some cushy hospital. You will have your own playstation and nurses who bring a pizza. I said how did you do at . Said well i asked to see the psychiatrist and i had just seen a film called crash in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So i said i get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. I told the psychiatrist that i wanted to watch women as they died because it would make me feel more normal. I said where did you get that from . Said the biography of ted bundy that they have at the prison library. Anyway it turns out i faked madness too well. They didnt send me to a cushy hospital but they sent me to broadmoor and the minute i got here i said there has been a terrible misunderstanding. I said how long have you been here for . Said i had just gone to prison i would have gotten five to seven years. I have been at reidemar for 12 years. He said its much harder to convince people that you are saying that than it is to convince somebody you are crazy. He had to stay away from the other patients. He had a strangler on one side of him and a rapist on the other side so we stayed in his room a lot. He said he saw as medical nurse and they wrote so they didnt want serial killers. One way he tried to convince them that he was saying us to talk about normal things like football. He said that is what you would do, right . And i said yes. He said there was an article in new scientist about how they were training bumblebees to sniff out explosives so i said to the psychiatrist, i said to the nurse did you know that they are trading training bumblebees to sniff out explosives . In the medical nose notes believes bs can sniff out explosives. He said how do you sit in the same why . Have you crossed her legs in the same way that the more you are selfconscious so anyway i left broadmoor and he seemed completely normal to me. The and then one of them said, you could contact robert half. So i did. I remember the conversation. So i did. And i would write courseware he taught, how to use a checklist responsibly. And so i did. At one point in time he said to me coming in no what upsets me so much is the fact that there is a huge story here in this sort of turned corporate psychopatha. No one was interested by it. I kind of popularized the idea of people thinking about corporate psychopath he. He said this is the biggest story in the world. Likewise the injustice. So i did. I went to Bernie Madoff than i said can i come interview you in prison and he didnt write that. And then i took the psychopath test indicated more than you let is. I said i believe you may have a very special rain that makes it feel less interested. Can i come in to see you . He said come on over. Host and al dunlap is the gentleman for a while. If youve read the psychopath test journey through the madness industry come you can find out what happened to tony in the end. We are going to go to phone calls. Robert is influential. All over the world have accepted his attention that psychopaths are incurable and everyone should concentrate their energy instead of learning how to route them out using his pcl checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. Is that indicative that the industry part . Also, yeah. About halfway through the book i become a joke with my psychopath studying powers. I start thinking about all of the people in the past of interest to me to determine in a Television Documentary bad reviews. And i am blind to it. I went through the checklist within and when he said no too many shortterm relationships he said no to juvenile delinquency. My guess is to west point. I remember thinking that its okay. And it online may i am so drunk with my psychopath powers. The second half of the book is kind of the more tyrannical side and somehow children as young as two and three are getting labeled as bipolar because they go higher in the bipolar checklist. Rebecca four years old died because her parents gave her cyanotic psychotic medication. Unbelievable. That is what they mean. None of this is to impute robert hare who has spent a lifetime developing object is, which is a serious thing. People come to my course and says that think a real burden. People come to my course and pick their fingernails and then go back because they score higher on the checklist. What happened to me was i became a cautionary tale to not see what they do in the first half of the book. I think what this book, you know, this book is about the gray area between under one extreme to scientologists. Host what is the threat amongst all of your books . Guest i think its about power and power becomes absurd and people inside bubble with power commit but all of that from a position of humanism and empathy. It is all kindness and compassion. So it is tried to humanize these inhuman situation. We are not the people in the bubble. We like to destroy and not feel bad about it. And so my job is to both humanize her and asked. You know, to explore this last between power and humanity in a way that doesnt repeat mistakes. Host tear from america. We will begin with christopher in nashville, tennessee. You are on with jon ronson. Caller hi, thank you for taking my call. I was calling because your story at the beginning obviously seems like youre talking about people in power. I was wondering what your thoughts were on the documentary has been a lot of talk here in america about the monotony and hollywood and some stories that few. What do you think im not in my second part of the question my second order of discussion is you talk about people with power. I was just recently reading about the ussr collapsed and the oligarchs that cavemen and most of them were jewish people. I noticed a lot of jewish, not so much practicing of their religion, but part of their identity taking control in the major media outlet and major government forms. I was wondering your statement on those two issues. Guest well funny enough i was talking about this yesterday, having a conversation he was on one of the protest in new york. I was talking to somebody after the protests. We were talking about the raster tiles. Heres the problem. Theres a lot of power in the world. They happen to be one of the jewish. This is this is sometimes a euphemism quite quickly into antisemitism. Because throughout history people have considered the illuminati back through the elders of zion. If you read the first, it is ridiculous. It is supposed to be like the secret minute of a secret jewish meeting and they think they are merciless engines come agreed. We will not rest until weve established our International Super government. Can you honestly imagine. Still, people believe this. So i am always saying how other and secret group success. If you want to know how many are actually jewish. Almost none. The comedian said the reason he was invited was to trim 11 the place that. There were so few steps to better with almost embarrassing. It gets to the codeword. Host in one of your books i forget which one maybe them, you go to hollywood. Guest gap, i ago with tony kaye. Host [inaudible] guest yeah, they were trying to wrestle the film from him because he wouldnt believe it. And so, he invited a rabbi and he brought a rabbi a Catholic Priest and a tibetan monk and he took them all within todays meeting. It was kind of embarrassing because they rabbi didnt actually believe the ideas. It didnt work at all. I do talk about code words. The Antidefamation League, dave go a little bit total eclipse. That last call some people do use code words. But also in this kind of crazy. Did new yorkers, i think theyve got an overly generous dictionary of code words. But there are codeword speared host matthew is lansing michigan. Thanks for holding. Uri with jon ronson. Caller hi i was wondering what mr. Ronsons opinion was why so many horrible people make so many despicable comments on the internet and yet people like Justine Sacco are punished horribly for what they said. Guest thank you so much for that comment. It is so ridiculous. It happened the other day with this woman mckinlay, is that her name . The espn woman. Her car is impounded, so she goes to get her car out and launches into this kind of horrible tirade like im better looking than you. Host kind of an entitlement tirade. Just go these days motion where the offense is the misuse privilege and entitlement, which is much harder to get upset about. The problem is the word privilege is being bandied around. The word privilege is now being used. Chastain, even if she had 150 twitter followers. Its pretty much the same case. Yes. Ive got better at keeping you. Ive got better hair than you. And it was all filmed of course what happened is terrible i will credit your. So we punish people with exactly the same transgression. So that is my ironic in itself. They said this is sent suggested. What they did to Justine Sacco was a cathartic alternative to social justice. It makes you feel like you or rosa parks, but youre not. Tearing apart a woman on a plane as she slept is not courageous. However, the six cops who were arrested yesterday or the day before yesterday, the guy who filmed put it online and save big on for social media. This is what we should be doing. Now the powers that are hand. We know how to differentiate between a serious transgression and a nonserious transgression. Right now doing proper good work. We are also creating a Surveillance Society routinely. One of the people in my talk, but one basically sad its fine. This is somebody you know getting eaten up and relax as bad. This is a bad. Doesnt hurt at all. Ive worked with people being destroyed on social media for transgressions. Sometimes nothing. It mangles peoples Mental Health. I met people suffering from depression suicidal thoughts waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who you are. You know, poster manic stress disorder agony. But when you are the object of the shaming those feelings are shameless. Something happened to me a couple of weeks ago for a line from the galley of my boat was taken out and publish. Somebody tweaked it out of context and made it look worse than it was. The next thing i said coming in now, it goes to show what an impact on the Mental Health and social media and somebody tweaked it me stop whining. If you are the object of a shaming, any feelings that you have are laughable. That is why wanted to write a book, which human eyes. People say its like watching a horror movie. Your heart is pounding. You feel that it feels like to be at the end of a social media shame. You feel that dreadful dread. And they also say such a great page but that is what i wanted to do with this book is make people feel that. I think it is much harder. Host it even, brooklyn. Good afternoon. Uri with jon ronson. Caller mr. Ronson said i think you are one of the most decent people in public life today in writing. I have a question about the mideast and the emotional pull to take extreme positions. I would just love to hear whatever you have to say. I will hang up now. Thank you. Guest i have wanted to do in israel palestine story for a long time. I did do a story a few years ago about astroturf, about how government will pretend to be kind of social media. Ive never been to gaza or the west bank. What i would say if i want them to feel like im a good person because ive got no strings. Im not a polemicist. I am a tree and 11 who feels no kinship to israel. Ive often thought maybe i should do that story. Host were you raised in the faith . Guest yes, raised orthodox in the synagogue. Cardiff yeah. My greatgrandfather was on his way to new york and ran out of money. You are a sun ray thin and even though they went to the reform synagogue, i have to go to the orthodox one where everybody hit themselves. And every things in hebrew. I discovered that i could have basically done mine in english. It takes years of hebrew school. Then i have to go three times a week like other kids at the orthodox synagogue. I think the fact that the man who performed my bar mitzvah was murdered a couple of years later by neighbors. Which is kind of a confluence. I would smuggle into the synagogue to show them what it was like a mayor. It felt kind of weird. But then now is 13 14 i started going to the reform synagogue. I remember one time we played this game and it was like capture the flag. And the guy said you were the israelis. Then they went to the reform synagogue is like summer camp in winter camp. Hanging out with girls. So ive never had the chance. I never believed a word of it either. I didnt believe a word of it. But love to continue to love jewish people. Host is you ever get to know Christopher Hitchens before he died . Guest no, never did. Host needed nelly tweet and allow shamus to command on search results. Guest okay, heres the thing no. Somebody said to me when i was writing this book, you know, google has a formal toby eagle but it has anything happened whether its good or bad. I worked with some economists which was made tonight adjusting saccos shaming because november 2013 she was googled 40 times. On december 2013 googled 1,220,000 times. So we were out using mathematics with several million dollars. The most was half a million and i think 120,000. Host youve got it in your book so youve been publicly shamed, the psychopath test. I look toward a moment ago but couldnt find my mark. We will go to barbara in seattle. Caller hi, i want to ask a question. Do you think that the cia and the u. S. Government is more site go or lifecycle event had a date . I have been to move next door to a person and he would not kill any women with children. Certainly that was the story that is why you would feel the way that i did incredibly unsympathetic. While she stood on mind in the doorway and we know this kind of stuff happens a lot. In my book, i suppose it looks how inside the bubble people convince themselves of these extreme interrogation techniques more psycho than ted dundee ted bundy presumably different. The reason i stopped and slow down of course that this thing goes back, the psychopathy is so powerful that it remotes institution to become more psychopathic. I go back and forward on it if you want to know my honest feeling about it. I go back and forth on it. I think that theres certainly some truth to it. They feel less rewarded in business politics and so on can review a sense of selfworth, lack of remorse and so on. They may be its a bit of labeling to play both the cia. That also feels kind of good. Its because i swing back and forth on that. Host make use in scottsdale arizona. Caller wow, this is just wonderful. He is a prophet. I think that he does that work on this area as a science. We need to bring all of their scientists who were that it is organizational. There is the one group dynamic. You are putting your hand on it. You know how much they are suffering from . G know how many families in the east of turkey and israel and middle east are suffering from the mothers with the psychopath tendencies for the power connected themselves to the power to survive. You are just fresh air. But you need to talk about more remedies. Come up with the mindfulness training. I decided later in my age after shaking hands and putting. Seeds in their and all the good things that bring awareness. Host already. We are going to leave it there and give it to mr. Ronson. Just go to one thing was mindfulness. The next time i am in need im going to go for mindfulness because people swear by it. Host what is mindfulness guest you know maybe the caller can answer this. It is this new thing that is sweeping the therapy world. It doesnt involve medication. Everyone says its amazing. Youve got a trimindfulness. Maybe a mindfulness therapist can give it very brief explanation of exactly what it is. Host will land, miami. Go ahead with your question or comment. Caller hello im so happy to be on your program. Like the previous caller said, a breath of fresh air. My question would be somebody was in dealing with the emotional, quote unquote, issues for a long time and right now struggling with girl grande done who has been labeled undiagnosed and is struggling right now to find a way now have to navigate his journey with the help of parents who are wellmeaning and grand parents who love him but our laws because we have been does mr. Acted in so many areas to the Justice System. Host can i ask if this is guest adhd initially, but i dont pullback to any standard because no one has ever confirmed for giving me a reason to believe it is true. It may well be but i suspect theres so many of the things involved in coming to a conclusion on what people are and why they came to be who they are. Host what age is the grandchild . Caller 18. Guest i am sorry for the troubles youve been going through. I mean, there is undoubtedly an epidemic of labeling and diagnoses going on. Host you rate first about how they come up with these diagnoses, who comes up with them and often the loudest person in the room. Guest it is extraordinary. The reason why it went from being that they thought because his mother was very unhappy nobody helped. And then she died and growth of this hate trade. So when he became a psychiatrist and took over the ds said he decided to basically emphatic a psychiatry and replace it with something more scientific. I think it was inspired by psychologists like robert hare. But can you identify for sort of mystical reasons. So he hired a room and for years years it was like a typewriter of that account adhd. Within a proposed or mental disorders that you said no to. He said a typical child syndrome. The problem when i asked a man proposing that the same characteristics were. The other one was masochistic personality disorder and it was women who stayed in abusive relationships. Ive gotten attacked by the feminists, with selfdefeating personalities. Im a terrible liberal. I only see both sides. I do believe that there is some disorders were a label is only good thing. Hes got caves. You got ocd. You know, there are kids everywhere right now to think of themselves my god i can throw this at you. This makes me a terrible person. I could yell out something racist. I must be terrible. And they get haunted by this. They go and see a psychiatrist eventually and a psychiatrist says everybody has these thoughts. This does not make you a bet person. It pops into your head and then they pop out again. And then a lot of people are cured by that realization. Thats okay. Its normal. Here are the ways you can help. You know, in my new book so youve been publicly shamed, the psychopath test, talked about social media in the early days. Paper words nervously on social media and other people would tweet back zero oh my god, im exactly the same. I loved that. It was incredible. Basilica garden of eden. People said they had a voice. We would have someone who would publish like a racist newspaper, but also to have this kind of terrible. There is even a phrase back bad. Facebook is worry to entry and lied to your friends and tell the truth to strangers. Then they laugh at our faces because people got so drunk with wanting to do good cow with wanting to be a good social justice person. Instead of people openly and unselfconsciously admitting their secrets, suddenly people were being defined and destroyed by the secret. I felt so compelled to write so youve been publicly shamed, the psychopath test because to see us wonderful thing into a whole surveillance culture was just heartbreaking. Host bestseller not their jon ronson is our guest on in depth this month and booktv. We often ask guests to come on. Seriously jon ronson told us. Host 202 is the area code if you want to talk with three. His most recent book is so youve been publicly shamed, the psychopath test. 7488201 for those of you in the mountain in pacific. Next month, Lauren Wright will be our guest out of chicago printers row lets fast. In chicago we will be talking here. He has a document bearing on the issue. Were you happy with the misery . Did you have any say so . Guest i didnt have any say so. In fact i wrote a screenplay about a year ago in england and we rewatched it for the first time because it had been so long. Its got a few problems in the last half, a little bit complicated and long winded. Other than that, great. George clooney was lovely and very charming. One of the famous people whose very considerate to everyone whos around 10. And yes, i liked it. Host where did you find general stumble by them . Did you make of that name . Guest no when it came out it was like my firstever. On channel four here is another. Make more. I was like i dont know what to do. My producer said take the money. Im sure this is going well. I think its a good danger when youve got to just be more. Indeed we had no idea what we are doing. They try to do the skull and bones story at yale. A man in my 30s going off. Then we tried to do the story about how they possibly grave rocked. So they got nowhere. My producer at the time jumped out in what had happened is the book i just come out and do this on cuddling the fact that the cia and it wouldve serious book and of course in this stuff came out in the mid90s right up until the mid90s i said weve got to do something. So we ended up with this guy in las vegas and be employed and he was a skeptic. And i was panicking awake enough. The few times in your life you just ask one question and it happened at this meeting. I just said to him you know when you start assessing did you notice anything else going on . He said there was this Major General who thought that he could [inaudible] another who was like a lieutenant colonel. I said weve got to find this story. We uncovered the whole saga which is a sickly or big breakthrough in hawaii. I met this guy who is kind of who George Clooney is based on in the movie. He said he was part of the secret to great unit. I said what was bubble wand. Level one was observation. So i said what was level two . A fork in the road you go left right. So i said what was level three . I said that is quite a leap from level two. He said that first, but after a while we adopt it to trying to find a way. He sent level for could stop the hearts of the coat. And i said he got damaged in the process. I said was that go fighting back . He said is what was known as a sympathetic interest. One time we had a room. Goat number 60, goat number 70. So i went back to london and i came into the party. And then this is how the movie starts that he thought because the human body is made up mostly of space in the wall is made mostly of athens. That means he would get up from behind his desk. The head of Army Intelligence would last into the hall. He said one time the colleague with domestic abuse. So i think for me the moment when i thought this could be a book was the realization by glad we can make other people. I said its almost like a kind of soap opera about this struggle and the people involved in these things back in the 70s were also involved in Guantanamo Bay and abu ghraib. And so its kind of a more serious explanation about these tiny country and how these ideas mutated. Host and in fact you either fact, use their quotes were interviewed lindsay england, saying what happened at abu ghraib was holding the prisoner on a leash with a military intelligence. Guest i wonder what they think now, but at the time that is what they were saying. And its by themselves. They were told to do this stuff. And its like publicly shamed, by the way. I remember one of the nonlethal people said to me the holy grail of interrogation at guantanamo and abu ghraib is lets imagine late at night walking down the corridor and it jumps out in front of you when you scream and then you realize its your wife. Thats two parts working. He said the cuckoo of fact if he interrogated holding onto that moment before you realize its your wife. And you hold onto that moment. Just blah, blah, blah all of that. Youve accomplished the effect. As thinking about the cuckoo effect when i was writing hundreds of thousands of people were tweaking i cant wait. Everybody in this bar has just landed yet. Cant look away. Maybe millions of people. I thought oh my god twitter discovered. Host odds in oklahoma. You are on with author jon ronson. Caller yeah, good to have access here. Listening to u. N. Tv the other day i found a lot of what youre talking about with social media to be quite interesting. I struggle about. I am in my 50s. I struggle a lot with social media, the value of it. I think it is a jaded situation that kind of bears that saul on the society, the collect of society at the same time. I want to run something by you. I do a lot of writing about false paradigms of power that are propped up and held up and continued to extinction writing about this. I describe our society as it presently exists and i like to give feedback from you on this here on the phone. I dont have my tv on. So what i am seeing is a society that is essentially like a fear why did in his loaded onto and its unloaded onto constantly. But its never emptied out so it never has the potential to steal and it never arrives anywhere in it never remains anywhere. So the culture is in question constantly in this creates a great deal of anxiety, which you speak of quite eloquently. I so enjoyed the details with which you examine things going on here. I also want to say this. Host we are going to have to get an answer from our guest. If you are going to listen to the phone, i will leave you on while you are listening. Guest some of the faces again, when you talked about the fear wagon and we know that politics in the Mainstream Media trade that has happened throughout history you know, the trade with tear and make money off of terror. The way of social media is fear outrage. So now the somebody transgresses, we determined that somebody is outside of our acceptable norms, our social circle, our mutual approval. We are out there. Of course it is much more conservative world. I was giving a talk in london quite recently. Somebody came up to me and he said pretty much every child is damaged because of some event happened on social media. Everybody is getting defined. You talk about people peddling fear the war on terror, the cave in bin ladens hightech caves and over and over again and fight the spreading of fear for business or political ends. The fact is outrage on social media. All about humanizing people, all about labeling. It is all about pretending that its a clue to their inherent evil. Erroneous understanding about how it works and how you are a mix of wisdom. So yes, what we know on social media is the opportunity to do something new. In the distance we are trying to batter. So passionate and outspoken but that kind of quite frightening and its like its like if you are not as radical as we are as ideological as we are then you are part of the problem and that feels to me a bit like that. Host paula tweets in, your genius is worn from curiosity and goes on to ask what does mr. Ronson see as the biggest ideological differences between them . Guest i have been there for three nows three years now so i should have good answers for that. I think one slightly negative that i have noticed since so youve been publicly shamed came out even though ingrained in the American Culture is the idea of redemption and Second Chances, we are all flawed and we all make steaks i think some American People the american Justice System and also some americans dont really feel that way. They dont really feel people should have Second Chances and there is a kind of draconianism and justice amongst some americans that personally i wish wasnt there. I want to live in a world where transgressions are not wired to human context. I want to live in a world where people get Second Chances. So that is one difference i have noticed. But to set out with something more positive i love it here and i feel like its becoming my home. I think america is very cando and if its unforgiving about transgressions, its very open to giving people a chance. Very open to first chances and quite close to Second Chances. If i wanted to do a comedy club i would go to meetings. If i want to do a comedy club in brooklyn im doing one within a month which i am doing and thats something that feels very american. Host jeffrey in fort lauderdale, good afternoon to you. Caller good afternoon. Jon, its a real treat having you on the show. I love dear ted talk on the psychopath test and in particular when you mentioned the gray areas and thats where you and im a health professional. Ive been in the field for 30 years and i would like to make a brief comment and then just listen to what if anything you have to say to that. The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the socalled bible, i am a critic of the dsm because it lacks scientific validity. Now i think you and i would agree, there is Mental Illness but that diagnoses in the dsm are not object if medical conditions like diabetes or Heart Disease which are diagnosable through objective tests. They are basically symptoms and behaviors that are observed by a clinician and they amount to myths that are based on socially norms that you spoke of. And the problem and heres the end of my comment, the problem is labeling people based on these myths these labels include clinicians from addressing the gray areas that you spoke so eloquently of in your ted talk. Host lets leave it there. Guest no can i ask host im so sorry i hung up on him. Guest no i wonder if you could phone back. I dont know if its possible. Host jeffrey if you are hearing that when you try to phone back. What was your question . Guest my question was going to be, this is a question for there are 400 or so mental disorders in the dsm. Does he feel that way about everyone every one of them or does he think some checklists and some disorders in the dsm have validity. Thats a genuine question. I come from a world of gray areas that demand thinking some of the disorders in the dsm are baffling and ridiculous but then others they seem okay so i believe your question is good. Host at the call stack and we will get them back on the line so you can ask another question. Samantha and el paso thanks for holding. Your onthejob ronson. Caller hi. Im excited to talk to you. I love your work and thanks to cspan for great programs like this. I was just wondering how long from the idea to do something when it strikes you to completion does it take with research on everything to complete a project and you just work on one at a time or do you have several Different Things going on at once . And is it take a while between projects because it seems like you are so into whatever you are working on, whatever book or topic. Does it take a while afterwards to kind of get that out of your system or how does that process work . Guest thank you. The answer to every questioner question or is its loan. It takes me forever to come up with the subject and it takes me forever to write it and then id i whittle and whittle and whittle it down because for some reason not to go into overtime and show adhd im really nervous about boring people so if i find a superfluous word in a sentence i will strike it out. Which is why in my books can take three years of constant success of work yet you can read them in a day and a half for that reason. And then you get obsessed forever. The psychopath test, talked about that book. It took me two and a half years to write and i talked about it nonstop for two years. I was really yearning for a day having giving a talk on stage and i was bored. I always become bored with the topic so i can get it out of my system and write something new. So really that took me forever. It takes me forever because, and i dont have another book yet. Luckily i have a movie with a great south korean so im making a movie with him at the moment. Host what is the topic . Guest i am forbidden from saying. Im for bed and from answering that question but its good. Host what about the fact that the psychopath test is being made into a movie . Guest no yeah. I actually poured some chai tea over myself a few minutes ago but yes kristin coal who is a Brilliant Writer is writing the screenplay. Theres everything from meet the parents to incredible political dramas like game change. Scarlett johansson is set to star in it but beyond that host what role . Guest no i have no idea. What ive said over the years from the men who stare at goats and this if you are the provider of the source material stay the hell out the the screenwriter does not want you leaning over their shoulder and nor should he do that. Its the relay race that you have given the battle over in tuesday the hell out. As far as i know, had dinner with kristin at christmas and i havent spoken since then. I deliberately just i just let them get on with it. I know its going to be fictionalized in the same way the men who stare at goats was in the same way that frank was. I obviously dont like narratives in my book what i do offers great dialogue, great moments and comedy different way of seeing the world and the great screenwriter canthat together in a great narrative. Host we have jeffrey back of the line from fort lauderdale. Jeffrey, jon ronson had a question for you. Guest no did you hear the question . Host go ahead and repeat it. Caller you stated for the viewers. Guess what you were saying you were a Mental Health professional and you were very skeptical of the dsm disorders. My question is as a gray area liberal my view has always been some disorders in the dsm clearly are absurd and ridiculous but others we assume have got it right. That the checklist is the scientific way of identifying that particular Mental Illness and mental disorder. My question to you was you are suspicious of the dsm in its entirety and you think that one is okay and that one is not and so on . Caller its an excellent question and i appreciate you amen general and your work to strike a balance. My short answer is yes and no. Yes, i think all of the diagnoses in the dsm lacks scientific validity. Why . Because they lack object of criteria because there is no objective test that can act really make the diagnosis. However, no i dont discount all the diagnoses and agree with you because there is such a thing as severe Mental Illness such as psychosis and mood disorders. However, and we need some basis to diagnose and the dsm is the only game in town. The National Institute of Mental Health however is doing the right thing the research to actually identify the brain anomalies associated with mental disorder. One last point, jon. There are some disorders that are so ridiculous such as adjustment disorder or oppositional defiant disorder which basically is childhood. Guess what can i tell you this story . I know a little girl who was diagnosed with ocd and didnt get over the ocd after her run of behavioral therapy so that cognitive behavioral therapist that diagnosed the girl is having oppositional defiant disorder. Caller okay because i thought you said ocd. And i was going to direct you and say i was referring to odd. Guest this little girl got an ocd diagnosis but when cbt didnt get her throat with the requisite period the therapist gave her an additional diagnosis of odd. Caller i think you and i are basically on the same page but i would just close by saying the dsm is the only game in town for doing diagnoses but none of the diagnoses are valid and the National Institute of Mental Health is into the long gain to actually identify the objective brain anomalies that correspond to mental disorders. This is the best show on tv right now to have you. Its such a pleasure and that ted talk was so inspiring and so well done i really appreciate it. Host jeffrey this time we are going to hang up and not call you back. Guest jeffrey thats really good. You know they got rid of childhood bipolar disorder because little kids were being diagnosed as bipolar at the age of two and three because they had temper tantrums. In the dsm five they made an effort to move away from that but they came up with a new disorder called disruptive moods dysregulation disorder which you know what it sounds like. Its a teenager or a child having big mood swings. Host tim on our Facebook Page and by the way the can get through on the phone lines and want to make a comment you can try our social media dresses and we will flash those up on the screen. Tim posts on public shaming on social media whatever happened to the development of what used to be called tilting a thick skin to other peoples comments . When i was young i was taught to ignore stupid ending comments. Understand the public nature of social media. It makes it more serious that people react too strongly to what others say on social media dont feed the trolls. Guess now i understand that. The problem is when somebody is at the end of like a big someone like justin sacco of whole bunch of things happen. Firstly you get fired because there are Many Companies that are like whoa Abbado Deridder this person is going to be us next. So you get fired so you lose your livelihood. Worse than that i would say and i can say this because i have met people in the situation. A lovely woman comes to washington d. C. Works with adults with learning difficulties so she is bringing them on a tour to d. C. Like the things i did yesterday going to see the Lincoln Memorial and you know the Washington Monument and in arlington and the tomb of the unknown soldier. So wednesday, great employee, a lovely young woman has this kind of running joke with her friends where they do the opposite of society. So they smoke in front of the nonsmoking sign or loiter in front of a no loitering sign and posted on facebook. Anyway arlington you see a sign that says keep off the grass. No we dont want to get in trouble and you see another sign that says silence and respect. So the inspiration strikes. Lindsey poses in front of the sign. Host we are showing the picture right now. Guest thats the joke about the sign. Posted on facebook. A couple of military friends say thats kind of offensive and its ridiculous. Forget about it. And then lindsey said to her french and we take it down . Jamie her sister such we take it down and lindsey says no let them think about for a day. A month later they were in a restaurant and its gone viral and gone all over the place. What lindsey did that night was go home. Theres this completely unequipped young woman suddenly being told by tens of thousands of people that she is a monster. Everything from outrageous trolls we are going to rape you and murder you on social media and over the telephone. They got ahold of her home number. Concerned, nice people which in a way is like worse. We are disappointed in you. You are a bad person. You disrespect the military and so on. Lindsey was up all night reading every single comment about her. She was far from her job fired from her job so for months she would read every comment and those comments mangled her Mental Health, depression, insomnia anxiety basically didnt leave home for a year and a half. What brought her back, i wrote two or three times. I said i want to tell you a story about my book and finally i convinced her to talk to me. Now everybody is being incredibly nice. Until it has happened to you on a kind of scale is impossible to know what it feels like. Its terrible. It can ruin peoples Mental Health. To be cast out as a social creature, to be cast out as horrific and what cures it is to be brought back in with compassion and kindness in that kind of thing. Host the weather in white plains new york. Hi. Caller hi, how are you . Thank you jon for your chronicling of the social media situation. I have a question i would like to take you back to justine i believe because to me that is kind of like the essence of some of what i am hearing about all of the wonderful things he said in these personality types whether they have been diagnosed or not. Here is my thought. Why is it that most of what you have mentioned coming off of this twitter shaming that was done to her, it seems to me comes up as an approach from a human communication perspective. It only involves ranting and raving. Its kind of like what i call uppercase inyourface global slaps that in my way of thinking shut the other person down. Thats number one. Its very unlikely that justine is going to respond to a barrage. I realized that twitter has a minimum number of things you can say, but why is it that you think most of, and that this is not the case, please help me out here why is it that is the way it went rather than as i think many people were trained to think about is a more reasoned question kind of normal verbal words that would facilitate a sense that both sides are being heard. In other words the shaming thing as opposed to i would say okay justine and i know you cant do this on twitter. Justine, lets talk about what you thought you were saying and whether or not you have stepped back to realize the thought. Host we are going to leave it there. Jon ronson. Guest what you just described there is democracy. People listen to each other they may disagree and argue and they listen. That is how communication should be what what happens on social media is the opposite of democracy. You surround yourself with people and tech utopians call social media type of democracy. What is greater is organizing, Greater Organization and organizing protests and so on. But its not democratic because what happens is you surround yourself with people who feel the same way you do. Thats how social media set how social media set up and when things are going well thats great. I tell a joke and people tell me how great i am and its great. Also you find people who have a similar point of view. But then what happens is you were locked up in this bubble this echo chamber this approval machine and you dont want to hear i said this earlier in the program but i will repeat it. A woman called helen lewis a review of my book she wrote on the night of justine sea shaming i dont think justine intended to be racist. Whole lot of people said to her you are just a privileged woman too. So it was like get out of our network. That screening somebody out is not democratic. To destabilize that mutual approval is bad for you people dont like it. People dont want to hear injustice. You hear what the person has to say and in court u. K. Were at the person has to say. Justine sea was such an important moment i think in the development of this new media partly because she was asleep on the plane and oblivious to her destruction and that became part of the joy of it. Part of the joy of it was where about to watch this justine sea who got fired in realtime before she even though shes getting fired. Another point of my book, i write about a disgraced pop science author called jill meyer who committed some journalistic things and lost his job rightly but at this moment happened later when i was spending time on the book where he was given an opportunity to publicly apologize for what he did at the foundation called the knight foundation. Host as the knight ridder. Guest e. He sent his speech and i didnt know what to make of it because it seemed like a jonah lehrer and narrows space. So jonah turns up at the foundation. What they didnt know was they had erected a giant screen twitter feed right next to jonahs had with another monitor monitor. So while jonah was trying to apologize he could read what people were tweeting in real time. Realtime responses to his quest for forgiveness and another chance. As hes trying to apologize the tweets were coming up in huge letters were jon the layer ordering us. Jonah lehrer it is just a sociopath. Theres that word again. We want to destroy somebody that we dont want to feel bad about it so we demonize with the word like sociopath. Jonah lehrer has not proven he is capable of shame and his barrage as he is trying to apologize. Imagine if that were an actual court in the murderer standing in the dark trying to explain their circumstances and the jury is yelling out bored, sociopath. If we were watching a courtroom drama at the cinema and that scene happened we wouldnt think that was good. Yet, you give us power. You put the power in our hands and thats how we abuse it. Even though the courtroom drama gets gives the power become the hanging judges and the people people being rival that whippings and why . The reason why is because we are and i include myself in this, we are social justice. We want to attack people but while jonah lehrer was desperate to try to apologize in front of that screen after being disgraced and ruined for 10 months, that was a privilege. We felt we were punching up but actually we were kicking someone when they were down. Host politicians legitimate targets represented aaron shock shock. They did his office like downton abbey. Host when i was writing so youve been publicly shamed i felt most comfortable writing about ordinary people who are being disproportionately punished from a time of transgression. I thought i had to draw that line because it would be ridiculous if suddenly i was saying im against you now criticizing any kind of transgression. Im not against satire. Im not against journalism. Im not against curiosity. Im not against holding powerful people to account. This book isnt against any of those things. What this book is against is our new widespread forest fire or quiddity to run people, ordinary people. Host the next call for jon ronson comes from david in portland there again. Portland oregon. Hi david. Caller hi. I was just wondering what your favorite performing artists are and particularly [inaudible] host why do why do you ask that question, dave it . Caller im just curious. Im always a little curious about people. I get a feeling. [inaudible] host good music to you is . Caller music with some sort of soul and depth to it. Thats a tough question. Host thank you. Guest thank you. I listen to a lot of anguish funk. Every day i listen to the full. Its so great so criminally unknown in this country. I listen to the full. I have started working with the scottish band Ben Sebastian that that i made a silent comedy with Matthew Perry and the scroll for that. I listen to them a lot. I once made a documentary and i said then it that every thought i have ever had has already been been i do think its my thought process. So him very much. Host what about this gentleman showing on the screen now, frank sidebar. If you listen to him . Guest i was a player in the late 80s. When i move to london i became, i became the entertainer of my local college. One day the phone ring and this voice said our keyboard player cant make it so we have to cancel. Unless you know any keyboard players. So i said, i play keyboard and they said you are in. But i dont know any beer songs. He said can you play c, f and chi and locally those were the three note that i could play. I said yes. He said while you are in. So i joined the band for three years and it was amazing. He was the avantgarde comedy. He wore these fake cats but they never took off and nothing makes a young man feel more alive than cruising up the motorway next to a man wearing a big fake hat. So i would look in the off. I wonder why he had the hat on. Sometimes in the band he kept the hat on so we would play these venues with five other people, 750 people. One time we played wembley supporting this Boy Band Group that was the one direction at the time. This was 50000 people. This was his biggest audience ever by 49,500 people but he chose to do a series of terrible versions with his hat on. I got batted off stage after that 10 minutes. One gig we played was at jbs nightclub in the west midlands. It was probably known as dudleys for people on cspan. There were probably 20 people in the audience and halfway through the show the audience split up into two teams. Some people got out of football and play the game. We got off stage and he took up his hat and underneath his real name is chris. He said that the show we ever played. And then he fired us all for tax reasons. 15 years past and i was in the park with my son joel and my phone ring in this voice said hello. And i said frank . And he said oh yes. I said how are you . He said im fine. I said put kirson. So chris came on the line. Hello jon. He said he was going to come back and could i rejoined the band. I had seen the blues brothers. He said no i want you to write something about her time in the band. I wrote this little piece in the guardian and it really came out emotional. Then he came out with a midlife crisis. That moment where i got up on stage iv the first time and being in this crazy band with this guy. It was very emotional and after i broke the peace my friend who wrote the screenplay for the men who stare at goats and the screenplay for an amazing hillary mentals book which is on pbs at the moment. A wonderful series. Anyway he said to me i have always wanted to write a fake music bio, like what would happen if Captain Beefheart was alive in the 1950s. But your idea is better. I said i have no idea what you are talking about. I said a man with a big fake hat trait thats not my idea. It actually happened and this is what happened. So me and started writing a screenplay about a fictional job joining a fictional band about a man that wears a big fake hat. He would never take off his hat. Andy got married so i imagined a mix of the real frank and Captain Beefheart and Daniel Johnston who is this incredibly talented bipolar singersongwriter. An early question about musicians i admire. One of the things i admire more than anything is the documentary called the devil in johnson which i recommend to all of your listeners. And so we imagined a mix of all these people and completely out of the blue Michael Fassbender said he wanted to do subboard. Are you aware that he wears was a big fake hat the entire movie and he never takes it off and he said he was aware. He got married and it was a great thing. Unfortunately chris passed away while we were writing the screenplay and never got to see the movie. You know i have been telling stories because my book so youve been publicly shamed about bad things happening from social media. Heres something good that happened. Chris died and the day after his death it was announced in the local paper that he would be buried in a poor persons grave. We came back in time 200 years. But it turned out there was such a thing. So i set out once a week and said over a thousand people sent and 23pound 23000 pounds which was enough to exhume him and rebury him a half a dozen times. Host rivered emails and rivered emails and its hysterical that Brian Williams is being set up for what the press has been doing for a very long time. Guest exaggeration. The reason why i am reluctant is because until the Brian Williams scandal i had never heard of Brian Williams so the reason i weighed in on it was i dont quite understand what Brian Williams means means in the american landscape. Was he really respected go to news commentator who or was he more of a showman . That is the reason why i tend not to weigh in on the Brian Williams thing because i dont quite understand what the name Brian Williams brings with it. Host marcus from portland oregon, hi marcus. Caller thanks very much for taking my calls. Jon, really and join the conversation. I was amused at the beginning venue looked questioningly as that you could go on. Guest no this is the marathon dance contest of the interview. At the end of the interview im going to start sobbing and they will take me outside and kill me. I apologize. Carry on. Caller i didnt want to give too much more on the social media bit but still im brought back to it. I miss skimmer of your books and it seems to me that in the last decade or so the book by nicolas carr is people know a lot about a lot of Different Things beginning with in depth which is why elect a show and i was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that in terms of really getting indepth into a topic and then as a followup can you just mentioned what you do to recharge after you have gone indepth a lot of Different Things besides holding your sobbing guest my sobbing corpse. Thank you. The one i lose myself in a story story, and a very real way to when we were on our way to toronto for the premiere of the men who stare at goats, on the plane i said to i know how to spot psychopaths. They rule the world and i know exactly how to spot them and i now have this power. Looked at me like i had gone insane. He was like dont be ridiculous. And i love moments like that when i congenitally turn from one human being to another human being and people listening hours ago i was being chased by the Bilderberg Group and i became really paranoid and started imagining myself in chase. This agony is not pleasant and thinking this is such a mess all these contradicting thoughts are swirling around my head. Like the dsm with a psychopath test. Am i for the dsm, and mike and the dsm . Is a good good, as good, as it back . Assigned colors are crazy but maybe they arent crazy about this aspect of things and does that make me crazy . All these thoughts swirling around. Its painful and agony. You know when i was writing the men who stare at goats there was a quote. When i was writing the men who stare at goats you know i may not be able to remember it. It was a quote by a u. S. Supreme court judge. I would not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity but i would give my life to simplicity on the other side of complexity. That is what i try and do in my books. You lose yourself in all of this stuff and you examine it from every possible including the craziest aspects. And you drown in it all. And then you come out at the end with something simple yet all the complexities and they are the fun page to read. So i cant say its fun to write but that is what i mean. How do i recover . Honestly i take half a day off and then i start to feel guilty and start working again. Host jon ronson do you read a lot of the reviews, the critiques of your books . Are you focused on that . Guest no no, i tend to skim and if i see a word like delightful or superb, i think okay good and i stop reading. And if i skim and i see a word like equivalencies im like wow. I have a vague idea of the interview. I did give a role to myself once about if you read a good review like a great rave, how happy are you . You are happy for about three seconds and then youre miserable again. If you read a bad review how unhappy are you . You are massively unhappy for ages. Years ago ive made myself a rule. Im going to be exactly as unhappy about it criticism as i am happy about no criticism. That worked for ages and there have been a couple of backlashes against the book which i should say by the way i dont think are fair. One or two people have said i dont understand i dont write about why women get it worse than men when in fact its entirely about why women get it worse than men and shaming us. I think it would just annoy me because there is misrepresentation. Im not reading anything at all. Host Doug Isenberg in massachusetts. Doug you are on with author jon ronson. Caller hello. You produced a video called escaping control which didnt go down too well among members of the Jewish Community or some of them at least. Can you talk about that and if you had a chance to goliath . [inaudible] guest russ what is escaping control . Just go escaping control is a web series i did about control of the internet. But i dont think its true that thing about the Jewish Community. I did one episode where he went to israel and looked at how certain zionist cant even remember. It was an episode that wasnt that great but it didnt really get any controversy as far as i can remember. Nobody really watched it. There were a couple of episodes in the series that were good and we are really watched. Including i hooked up with patrice wilson. He is an l. A. Producer and if you like a rich mother with a teenage daughter he writes a song unrecorded video. So you tell what your likes and dislikes are and patrice a few thousand dollars were recorded video for you. One of the songs went crazy viral. I have not heard it after that. Rebecca blacks friday he wrote this song about friday. I cant remember so i wrote to patrice and i said can you do one for me . What are your likes and dislikes and i talk about this and they said well on tuesday evenings i sometimes get to go to the cinema by myself. And its nice. Its a couple of hours to myself going to the movies by myself and that is probably my favorite thing. So he came back with this song that went im getting older. My life is over. Its not that bad. So that one went super viral. I honestly dont remember what i did in israel and i dont remember getting any criticism for it read. Host your level of fame in Great Britain as opposed to here, you walk down the street in Great Britain without being recognized over there . Guest i get recognized that i remembered a big star wants it to make you have got it perfect. You have enough fame to make your ego feel good but not so much like, you can do anything that you want to if i do a tour in britain in london or glasgow or manchester i can imagine about 1000 people will show up. I dont get that recognized. Host do you fill it book store on your book tour . Guest e but smaller. We did a show in San Francisco and about 600 people came. And then stores in nashville where 100 or 150 people came. That was nice, to be able to go to santa cruz and fill it with 150 people is amazing. Host frank from lava city kansas. Guest no i wow. In our movie frank, frank comes from lots kansas. Host i am caller i am interested in the economics of all this. One thing like justine sea got fired because shes an economic liability to her employer. Dsmiii is useful because it allows psychologists and psychologists to bill for their services. What i am most interested in is the economics of very Destructive Industries and i have fought personally against the private prison industry which you want or charlie have some in Great Britain and also fight against the fracking industry and ive been very successful in both fights. Both of them are driven to this incredible recklessness by the money that drives them. And here in kansas we have experienced in my home seven or eight earthquakes a day because of the way fracking chemicals are injected deep underground. Private prisons, the companies have scammed scanned the localities to build economic prisons and bondholders to build these things and to make operating than they have to invent a reason for literally tens of thousands to be held in prison. Host frank can you bring this to a conclusion . Guest no it is really close to my heart. If Eric Schlosser warned about to put out a book about the american prison system i would love to write a book about that. Host his last book was commandandcontrol. Guess though thats right. It has always stopped me from doing it because its an incredibly interesting topic. Host depict. Host depicted a topic for your next book . Guest not yet. I would have done the prison system if he hadnt done it before me. In the so youve been publicly shamed i focus in on childhood bipolar disorder because its so baffling and its so unbelievable. In so youve been publicly shamed i write about both senses of the word. Host cynthia a few minutes left in our program with jon ronson. Colorado springs, colorado. Caller hi jon. In the interest of full disclosure when the movie came out i was in that and i agree with your about the film and since we are talking about wonderful topics and you have given me two more books i have to go out and get write a book the books and the movie pick up the while the more colorful aspect through remote viewing and i wanted to know could you actually get into any of the actual data because there was so much value to a lot of the work that they did and they are still doing teaching people how to do this. Didnt want to leave people with the impression that the only part of remote viewing is the funny while part or something to be shamed you might think. Guess though right. Thank you for that question. You know you have obviously read this the men who stare at goats book and i did sit in on some remote viewing sessions in calabrese and i met skip atwater so i met a lot of the big remote viewing luminaries. In the end i didnt do much about that. The main reason i didnt was because jim had written his book remote viewers and i did want to to, didnt want to tread on his turf. Cerelli the men who stare at goats theres only one chapter about remote viewing. Most of it is about this other stuff. The stuff that hadnt come out at all and its true that i wrote a skeptical comic. A skeptical comic about all of this stuff. I wouldnt say its fair to say shaming. It was more enlightened comic. Host that is the last time we have been given the guest an idea of whats coming next. Who is in this picture cracks. Guest no a magazine asked me. Host is this you . Guest e its me. You might mistake it for yentl. I was deeply ashamed. Basically what happened was i was asked by a magazine, you know there is a tradition in journalism and black like me a white man that would stain their skin dark and live in segregated louisiana in the 1960s. And then i remember after 9 11 somebody said to me what you stay in your skin and go live in a Muslim Community . You want me to spy on muslims . I was like no. I wouldnt do that. And a very persuasive editor said to me okay we have got one. Like black like me but it will be so interesting. We want to make you a woman and then you can live like a woman. I will get a prosthetics artist who can make you look exactly like a woman and you can walk like a woman. I will give it a try. They spent ages making me a prosthetic head and i slipped it on. I basically look like a woman with a gigantic head. I said forget about the prosthetics because there will make me look exactly like a woman. Here is a padded and will make you walk like a woman and here is a wig. And then dress me up and test photographs were taken. I walked up to the editor in the office and they went you look so much like a woman. And i was like why do you think i look like a woman. He looked just like a woman, go go. Theres a scene in goodfellas go get the and shes looking back. If walking into the outside world looking nothing like a woman and my heart is pounding. Humiliation factors so largely in the life of a journalist. The professional of people. I can do this. I cant do it and i stopped. And she was very disappointed that i just couldnt do it. I dont think anyone has seen the photographs so when i was writing so youve been publicly shamed i started to look at my own fear and shame and i realize that photograph of me as a woman would have been utterly horrific if it would have gone now. That is why in an attempt to eradicate shame for my life i included that by doing the book. Host to fall post on our Facebook Page at what point did the documentary about you called Stanley Kubricks boxes a guy would like you to share about his films and the making of that documentary. Guess that the first documentary ever made in 1995 was called Hotel Auschwitz and it was about the concentration camp raid shortly after came out i got a telephone call from this posh found the man who said my employer would like a copy of your documentary. I said to a sure employer and he said im not at liberty to tell you. I said oh go on and he said okay okay. Its good to break so that was easy. So i sent the tape and waited and nothing happened. As i said cooper died and a few months after he died this man phoned again and said do you want to come up to the house and everybody knew he lived in this mysterious house between north of london and it had become the stuff of legend. There were rumors when kubrick was alive in this crazy house so i went up to this house, huge huge house that was full of boxes boxes everywhere. It looked like the Internal Revenue service had taken over this house a few years ago. It was huge but there was no occupants. It was utilitarian, boxes and filing cabinets and so on. So i said what is in the boxes and they said everything. So stanley never threw anything away. I went back home and i said to my wife these boxes and she said you have to ask them if you can go through the boxes. So i asked them and they said okay. I spent years maybe a couple of times a month. This is extracted in my collection lost at sea and Stanley Kubricks ox is. My favorite actually theres a few favorites. On my first day i saw this locks that said sniper had scary so i opened it up and it was a severed head of a sniper. Im holding the head by a tear just then kubrick what passed and i said i found they had. She says that ryan oneil said and i said now is the head of the sniper and she was shocked. I said i know and that was it. But my favorite one was i found all these photographs behind the house photographs of london. Thousands of doorways, mortuaries, costume shops. They were almost all taken by kubricks nephew meant well. I went to go see men well and he had 30,000 photographs over year. I said was it a good year and he said it was a great year. He said the best moment, so this is my favorite moment, he said kubrick wanted to take photographs of this long street in london. Its a long street and he said come he didnt want the buildings tilting back. Every day he would go and take a photograph come down and move the ladder for weeks and weeks. Kubrick would call up and say are you nearly there . You must be nearly finished. They get the photos developed tape them altogether into this perfect panorama of big hole commercial world takes it back to kubricks house on this long corridor. A kubrick comes out of his room and looks at it and goes im sure its going there. He could have just gone there. Host the last word with jon ronson on in depth. Thank you