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 KissingerVernon 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