Jon Ronson recounts his 1990s infiltration of Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones, exposing elite rituals like the "Dole Care" effigy burn—later debunked as theatrical bonding. They critique social media’s role in amplifying outrage, from Justine Sacco’s viral shaming to Rachel Dolezal’s polarized backlash, arguing it silences nuance while extremist groups thrive on ideological certainty. Ronson’s deep dives into Al-Muhajirun and confirmed Bilderberg surveillance reveal real conspiracies like MKUltra and Artichoke, but also how capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior. Ultimately, the episode exposes how power structures—whether in secret societies or online mobs—distort truth, leaving dissenters trapped between paranoia and performative conformity. [Automatically generated summary]
Basically, we noticed something, which was that a lot of people on the fringes, Islamic fundamentalists and neo-Nazis and militia people, had this one thing in common, which was they were all conspiracy theorists.
They all believed in the evil power of Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove.
So I thought it'd be good to try and infiltrate those places.
But I didn't want to infiltrate Bohemian Grove alone, because frankly, I was scared.
So we met Alex Jones when he was rebuilding David Koresh's church at Waco, and he seemed kind of gung-ho.
Well, I think you're in the clear, because he gave many, many interviews where he talked about that.
That was a big...
It was kind of in the early days of the internet when you didn't get away with saying stupid shit like that, and you didn't have a bunch of people on Reddit that immediately could debunk you, or Twitter, or Facebook, where they just knew something that you didn't know, and like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Well, one of his big, like, piece of evidence at Bohemian Grove was where they transformed themselves into lizards was because of this woman called Kathy O'Brien who said that she was a kidnapped sex slave and that she would be, like, let loose into the gardens of the White House and George Bush Sr. would, like, hunt her.
And that was like his sex game.
And so she wrote this book about this called...
It was called something like The Crisis of Democracy.
It was called The Transformation of America.
And she said it was at Bohemian Grove.
She was a kidnapped sex slave at Bohemian Grove.
And, you know, that's where it all happened.
And Bohemian Grove was all based around this river and the Russian river and so on.
So that's where the Bohemian Grove rumours first started with Cathy O'Brien.
And so I thought like it can't be true that like George Bush and Henry Kissinger all go to this club and on the Saturday night they all put on robes and have a mock human sacrifice in front of a giant stone owl.
I thought that can't be true.
So I phoned up David Icke and I said, do you want to come with me?
And he's like, no!
And then I thought, well, remember that crazy, that guy we met at Waco, Alex Jones, maybe we should ask him.
So I called up Alex Jones and I said, do you fancy trying to get into Bohemian Grove?
And he was like, yeah!
I'm gonna get a camera, we'll get a hidden camera, we'll get in there, we'll get it right in their faces, those devil worshippers, and we'll confront them going about their globalists, devil worshipping evil.
So Alex's plan, and this is how we were going to get in.
We were going to rent a boat and, like, sail it along the river and then get out and then climb up the mountain and then get down the other side and then get in that way.
And I was thinking, this is an ill-conceived plan.
LAUGHTER And then we met this local lawyer called Rick, who was like this preppy lawyer who lived in the town, Monte Rio or Occidental.
And Rick had been in, he'd infiltrated Bohemian Grove just because like everybody in the town wants to know what's going on in Bohemian Grove.
So we met Rick to get some tips on how to break in.
And Alex told Rick his plan.
And Rick said, look, if you're going that way, you're going to get yourself killed.
And Alex wrote down, this was one of my favourite bits of the whole weekend, Alex wrote down on his notepad, going in that way, dash killed.
So Alex was like really torn because part of him, he admitted this to me afterwards, part of him was worried that like in The Wicker Man, me and Rick and all these other people that we met were all part of this kind of elaborate plan to lure Alex into the forest and like he would be the one sacrificing.
Well, that and Waco, you know, Waco first and then that.
I lost touch with him after that.
He liked me again, actually, after I wrote The Manistaric Goats.
Like, he didn't like me after I wrote my book, Them, which includes all the stuff about sneaking into Bohemian Grove, because he thought I was too much of a debunker of Bohemian Grove.
But then when I wrote The Manistaric Goats, he liked me again, because he felt that I was like...
It's kind of like a bit of a...
The Minnesota Ghost is kind of like a conspiracy book in a way.
Yeah, me and Rick the lawyer, this kind of preppy lawyer.
Oh, I'll tell you the funniest thing that I've missed out of this story was the night before we were going to infiltrate, Alex and Mike decided to practice being preppy.
And so they were walking up and down.
They were walking up and down like the corridor outside their motel room talking in a kind of effeminate way about microprocessors.
Like, you know, I just, nanotechnology is the future.
So we were wandering around, me and Rick, and we saw this giant, the giant owl of everybody's legend.
It's funny, I remember thinking it was stone, but then a few years later, somebody else infiltrated Bohemian Grove for some magazine and said it's not stone, it's like plaster of Paris or wood or something.
And there's a ringing of the bell and all these old men like drift down to this little pond and they all sit on like grass one side of the pond and Alex and Mike are there like a few rows behind us and there's the giant owl on the other side of the pond I remember actually this moment, which I thought was really weird, was this old man comes up to me.
I mean, this is like nearly 20 years ago, so I don't remember like all of the details, but this old man came up to me and said something like, like I was way younger than everybody else there.
And this guy says to me, is this your first time?
And I said, yeah.
I said, oh, you're going to love it.
Burn him!
Burn him!
And I did the sort of impression of what was about to happen in the pageant.
And there was this look of like real fucking intensity on this guy's face.
And at that moment, I thought to myself, like, there's Alex and Mike, like a few rows behind me, convinced that this is like evidence that the global elite are blood drinking Satanists.
And then there's all these men of wealth and power who are really fucking into it all themselves.
And they might be into it in a different way to the way Alex and Mike are into it, but they're fucking into it.
And I thought, I'm the only sane person in this entire fucking Redwood place.
Yeah, it was a weird way to spend your summer vacation.
I didn't see any famous people, but at one point we passed this display cabinet and there were the names of the guests in the display cabinet and I remember seeing Dick Cheney's name.
Well, since I guess since like the railroad came through San Francisco, like, like, you know, the turn of the 20th century, I think that's pretty much when it started, right?
Okay, what I heard, and as I say, it's been like 20 years since I've, you know, thought about this stuff too much, because once I put it in them, I kind of forgot about it.
But the story I heard was that when the railroad was coming through San Francisco, all the rich white Republicans, and unlike Bilderberg, this is a very Republican club.
Thought, you know, fuck, there goes the neighbourhood.
You know, we're going to lose our elite status.
We need to set up a private club for ourselves.
So they set up the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and then Bohemian Grove in, you know, a couple of hours north.
So then this ritual starts.
You see that a man wearing lederhosen appears in like a stage cut out of the giant redwood.
All these men in robes and hoods all descend in front of the giant owl.
There you go.
And they...
And they have this ritual where this papier-mâché effigy comes over on the pond in a gondola and they say to it, you know, we shall burn ye tonight, Dole Care.
And then the voice of Dole Care goes, ye shall not burn me!
And then they go, year after year, year after year, in this happy grove, we burn thee.
And then they lift it up and throw it in the fire and the effigy goes, ah!
And he said he was invited to, these were his words, he said he was invited to Jew the place up.
Like there weren't enough Jews there.
So...
And he said he thought it was kind of ridiculous.
But he agreed with my interpretation of it, which is basically that it's not evidence that the secret rulers of the world are actually Satanists who do actual human sacrifice, which is basically the way Alex was spinning it.
But it's this kind of weird, overblown pageant.
What I think is really interesting, and I think this is where Skull and Bones comes into it, is that there is this weird proclivity amongst the elites to create these ancient ceremonies for themselves.
And none of them are actually ancient.
They're all only, what, like 100 years old at the most.
I'd have to be under the influence of a lot of different things.
But the idea behind it, I guess, is that you get closer if you're all doing this ridiculous shit together that somehow or another through tradition or through A ritual that you bond?
You bond and maybe it gives you a kind of mandate to be in an elite.
I sometimes wonder whether, like at Skull and Bones 2, it's not just about bonding, but it's also about creating this kind of specialness for yourself.
It's like, if you go back to, like, the Aztecs and the Mayas, like, when they would make these human sacrifices, they would wear these crazy outfits and plumed headdresses, and it was all this, like...
But it's bizarre when people start wearing outfits and engaging in rituals.
You know, that's a weird aspect of human behavior that seems to be really prevalent.
It's like it's not like an isolated instance where there's only this you know like if you go to Africa and you see like or Asia or you know you see like these people that have those those Things that extend their neck those little bars those women put like god.
What are they doing?
Well, it's it's very isolated Yeah, it's only like one group of people that do it or the women that put the plates the Suri women that put the plates in their lips like what the fuck is that yeah, but doesn't catch on and Doesn't go anywhere else.
Bizarre ritual, but it's only isolated this one very specific area.
But rituals themselves, like really wacky dresses and weird things that people do, it's so common.
They said something along the lines of, despite John Ronson's objectionable trespassing, we appreciate the fact that he's putting a less sensationalist spin on what he saw than what Alex Jones did.
And so they appreciated the fact that I was being less hysterical about it than Alex.
And they said, you know, it's overblown...
It's an overblown pageant, but it couldn't be more innocent, or something along those lines.
Alex's spin was practically that, you know, it's possible that they were killing an actual baby.
I mean, Alex, I can't remember if Alex went that far, but he went a long way.
Oh, and at one point he said to me, yeah, we overheard these two old men when we were walking down the road.
I mean, it's true that me and Ikes were like separate during this, you know, but he said at one point we overheard these two old men going, yeah, we're going to get him elected.
And I thought, like, I don't know that Alex didn't hear that, but that's a bit fucking convenient.
I thought that's exactly the thing Alex would want to hear at Bohemian Grove.
I mean, one of the best pieces of work that Alex did was 9-1-1, The Road to Tyranny.
And in that, he exposed some stuff from news broadcasts that was really shocking about the use of agent provocateurs, which I always thought was utter horseshit.
And then it turns out, not only is it not horseshit, but its standard operational procedure has been proven with this Occupy Wall Street crowd.
They infiltrated the Occupy Wall Street group and did all kinds of crazy shit in the park.
We're trying to get people to join them and then arrest them.
And what the Asian provocateurs did during the WTO protest Is they had these peaceful protests and they would come in dressed up in like all black and they had military issue boots and they were smashing windows and breaking things and then they gave an excuse for the cops to come in and close down the protest.
They literally set up a no protest zone where people couldn't go to work with WTO badges.
They had a WTO badge with a line through it like saying no WTO. They were literally telling them they couldn't go to work with that on.
A fucking pin, which is completely against everything this country is supposed to stand for, right?
And so these people were, you know, these agent provocateurs...
We're working for the government, and they literally came in to try to break up a peaceful protest by turning it violent, and then they were all held up in this one house, and Alex documented it all, not with his own news footage and his own reporting spin, but basically just using actual news stories and different coverages by different local news stations and showed, like, what the fuck actually went on.
These people were all released.
These guys were all held up in a building somewhere, and they negotiated their release.
And, you know, at first I was really super skeptical, because I was like, that sounds like nonsense.
But then the more you peel away, the more you realize, well, this is something that they've always done.
It's like a standard...
Look, if you've got a bunch of people that are protesting and they're ruining your elite globalist fun, the best way to do it, if they're being peaceful, is to have people that pretend to be amongst them start smashing things.
Then you have an excuse to come in and arrest everybody.
And that's what they do.
So he had a really fascinating video on that, showing evidence of that being used before.
That there's a bunch of tactics that are in place.
It's not simply as innocent as that law enforcement is set up to enforce laws and to preserve peace.
It's not.
It's not.
They do a bunch of creepy shit.
And, you know, that's unfortunate, but that's...
When you start talking about conspiracy theory, well, that seems to be conspiracy fact.
It just seems to be something that's standard operational procedure when they can get away with it.
What I'm hoping is that with all this WikiLeaks shit and all this Edward Snowden stuff and all the new details that have been revealed about the NSA and...
And what we know now about security and the internet and the cloud, everything can be hacked.
Everything can be compromised.
I'm hoping that all goes away.
Because I'm hoping that it's just going to be way too transparent.
But, you know, I don't know.
But Alex Jones thinks what they're trying to do is get down to 500,000 people.
It's like it's been, they've known about it for fucking ever.
This idea that they're spraying clouds, like what the fuck?
Fuck, man.
They're controlling you with these clouds.
But when I did this sci-fi show, we talked about it.
And, you know, I brought in aviation specialists.
And I talked to different scientists.
And I talked to a bunch of different people about it.
And, you know, what we decided to print or we decided to show on the television show...
Unfortunately, you're dealing with 44 minutes of TV for an hour.
You've got a bunch of different commercials.
I think to really debunk something like that, you'd have to spend a long time with it and actually show people.
Like actually get a jet up in the air and film it and show how this plane is actually leaving these clouds because it's passing through haze.
Wouldn't be too hard to do if you had a really good budget, but we didn't have a really good budget.
And it wouldn't be that entertaining.
You know, we had to make it like short little snippets, which is like a real issue when you're dealing with any of those debunking shows, is that they also have to be entertaining and they also have to fit within a format where they have to break every five minutes or whatever it is for commercials.
What is it?
Seven minutes or something like that?
Whatever the fuck they do, you know, they're constantly having commercials.
So it's like you have to have these little tiny chunks of information and it's really just entertainment more than anything.
I mean, I don't know for certain, but I would say it's this idea...
You know, we love to...
This is a bit of a non-sequitur, but my most recent book is this book about public shaming called So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
And what I've noticed happens on Twitter is...
We will reduce somebody to a label, we'll reduce somebody to the worst tweet that they ever wrote, we'll demonize them and then we'll dehumanize them because we've just destroyed somebody and we don't want to feel bad about destroying them so we call them like a sociopath or something.
It's this whole like mental trick we play on ourselves, like, what's it called?
Cognitive dissonance.
This idea that we're good people, but we've just destroyed somebody.
So how do we make sense of that?
Or we just say whatever sociopath or something.
So it's all about, it's all about labelling and reducing and demonising and destroying people that we don't like.
Like, all you have to do is find a reason why you can unleash your fury on people.
And it's a free shot.
It's a free shot, because if John Ronson says something fucked up, there's a million people that could find out about that, and they don't know you at all, and so they have a free shot.
They've never met you, they're never gonna meet you, they live in another part of the planet, and they could just fucking fuck that guy, and they could just start typing a bunch of shit.
And there's this weird thing going on where everybody's kidded themselves into believing that, you know, you can lead a good ethical life, like I can lead a good ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a tweet or something can be a clue to our secret inner evil.
And I just wonder whether there's some kind of connection between...
It's about, you know, between that and about the rituals that you find in places like Bohemian Grove.
And maybe the connection is that it's all about tricking yourself into believing that you can do evil shit.
So like when you give yourself like a ritual at Skull and Bones or Bohemian Grove, that makes you feel, oh, I'm separate and different and better.
And that gives me a mandate to rule the world.
I can inflict this carnage on other people because I'm different to them and better than them.
And maybe on Twitter we do the same thing in our own little ways, which is like, oh, well, you know, we're better than that person because that person just misused their privilege or that person just showed their true inner evil.
It's all about setting yourself apart from people so that you can behave in ways that hurt other people and you don't have to feel bad about it.
Well, people have a tendency to pile on That's always been the case.
That's the reason why you see like when riots break out, that sort of exploits that type of pile-on behavior.
People will do things in large groups of chaotic Moments like a lot large groups of chaos rather that would they would never do with an individual you know as far as like assaulting people or I mean there's been instances where Gangs of people beat up and killed people and the people that were involved almost didn't feel responsible because they were one of many that stomp somebody or kick somebody or ran over somebody and The snowflake doesn't need to feel responsible for the avalanche.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a great way of putting it.
And I think diffusion of responsibility is a real issue with human beings when it comes to large numbers.
Anytime there's large numbers, they don't feel responsible for any repercussions of their actions.
If there was only two people in the world, and two people in the world somehow or another invented Twitter, and they were communicating with each other, and one guy said something questionable, and the other guy quoted him and said, John Ronson is a piece of shit.
Here is proof.
Fuck this guy.
Let's shame him.
What's this let's?
There's only you.
There's no one there.
But what they're trying to do is they're appealing to the bully instinct of people to just pile on.
And I'm torn, because sometimes I think publicly shaming people is a good thing.
Sure, if it's actual social justice, if it's actual right and wrongs.
But the problem is, I think these days we're in this really bad situation where people have decided to not differentiate between a serious transgression and an unserious transgression.
And they started out with this deficit by having a bunch of fucking shitty experiences when they were children.
They're shitty parents and bad time in school and maybe they've been picked on and maybe their job sucks or maybe they have unfulfilled sexual expectations, whatever the fuck it is.
Most people are going into any situation with a headwind or a tailwind, I guess it is, when someone's something behind you.
Tailwind, right?
Tailwind, right?
Headwind as you're trying.
There's push behind them.
It accelerates their reaction to anything, and they're almost looking for something that they can blame their bad feeling on.
They're almost looking for a target to unleash all their existential angst and frustration and life, all their unfulfilled expectations.
I thought it was one of the most important stories I ever did, because for 30 years I've been writing about abuses of power, like in the psychopath test, the abuses of power in the pharmaceutical industry or, you know, the worst excesses of psychiatry or psychopaths or whatever.
But whatever, the people abusing their power are over there.
And whenever I gave talks about that, everyone would love it.
People would love it.
And then I write this new story, this new book, where I say, you know what, the people abusing our power now, they're us.
It's like we've suddenly got all this new power on Twitter and social media and we're massively abusing it.
I've been talking about this for a while and I think that what's going on now with people and the internet and this newfound ability to communicate that we find ourselves in, this newfound situation we find ourselves in where anyone instantaneously can comment on virtually anything that happens in the world.
And if what you say resonates or offends, it can become a hot button and it just like gets all these ants just find the sugar and they just dive on it and they just swarm.
And it's almost like a mindless thing because I think that what we're experiencing is an adolescent stage of a new level of communication that human beings are experiencing.
I think that this new level of communication is starting off with the ability to just tweet at each other, and it's going to eventually go into some weird virtual reality place.
Anyway, Adam said to me one time that, you know, he thinks that the internet or definitely social media is going to be like one of those John Carpenter movies from the 80s where everybody's yelling at each other and everyone's like killing each other and eventually everyone flees to somewhere safer like the suburbs.
And you know, I noticed myself fleeing a bit from social media since my book came out.
A long time ago, like maybe 10 years ago or so, I would argue with people online all the time.
And then I realized what an enormous waste of time it is.
Also, I realized that I'm not picking the people that I communicate with, as opposed to the way you do it in real life.
And one of the things that I would do in real life is, I would avoid anybody that starts arguments and is shitty all the time.
People who are insulting and shitty, I wouldn't argue with them.
I would avoid them.
But on the internet, I would engage these people.
Like, I'll get you.
Yeah, you fucking loser.
But you realize after a while, this is a new thing, and I'm applying to it the sort of same strategy that I would apply to a heckler at a comedy club.
And you really can't.
This is a totally new thing and no one knows how to do it yet.
We don't have the benefit of hindsight to be able to step, you know, we're talking like 2000, you know, 2001. We didn't have the benefit of stepping back and saying, well, this has been going on for a long time and now we understand how to deal with people.
Back then, we didn't.
And I wasted a lot of time.
Had some fun, but wasted a lot of time.
And also, you get emotionally charged up and invested in these people that, in real life, you probably wouldn't want to hang out with them.
Social media public shamings are so fucking traumatizing to somebody on the receiving end of it.
Because there's nothing, you know, to be ejected from society, to be told you're not as good as everybody else, just get out, is like deeply traumatizing.
But then the people doing the shaming, they don't want to think that.
They don't want to think that they've just potentially done something intensely traumatising to another human being, like mangled up somebody's mental health.
So they just think, oh, I'm sure they're fine.
I'm sure they're fine.
That person we've destroyed, I'm sure they're fine.
You know, there's a guy who used to edit Gorka, who reviewed my book in one of the papers, who basically said, oh, John Watson's so sweet, you know, but it's fine.
You know, if you're a man being publicly shamed, it's fine.
It's no big deal.
They're just fine.
And then I was looking at this, I was thinking, fuck.
Oh, you know, I've gone around the world meeting these people.
They're not, they are not fucking fine.
It's like whether you want to carry on doing it or not, you have to accept they are not fine.
You know, people, well, a few weeks after that guy wrote that review, some guy in Israel who'd been falsely accused of being racist committed suicide.
You know, they're not fine.
It's like you can carry on doing it if you want, but it's a really severe fucking punishment.
Yeah, because we can only handle destroying one person a night.
In fact, I noticed with Justine Saka, one person that night tweeted, somebody HIV positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin colour protects her from AIDS. And you know how many people went after that person?
No one.
It's like we were too...
Everyone was too excited about destroying Justine to simultaneously destroy somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine.
Imagine the mindset of someone to think that the best way to respond to someone's inappropriate joke is to rape them and give them an incurable deadly disease.
First of all, she doesn't ever say anything that is indefensible, because she's very smart.
And also, I think, as a comic, everything that she says that's ridiculous...
If you want to debate her on like why or not I mean she plays the role of a dumb person saying ridiculous shit all the time like that's part of like a persona that she'll adopt and Abandoned on stage.
She'll adopt it and abandon it and you know going in that's what she's doing It's a part of being entertaining.
It's like you know Richard Pryor doing the dopey white guy voice.
Do I think he's really a dopey white guy now?
He's like hey my mom.
She's a great old gal and No, he's doing the fucking character of a dopey person that's easy to mock.
It's the same thing that Amy does.
She might not change her voice, but when she says ridiculous shit, she's clearly being a comic and doing it as an art form.
I mean, what I do like is the fact that there's a levelling of the playing field and social justice.
Obviously, that side of things I really like.
But the problem is that, you know, I think the problem...
I'll tell you what it is.
I went to college in London in the 80s.
And sometimes I feel with social media and with the social justice movement, it's like the worst fucker who used to hang around the student union now gets to decide everything.
And it's partly because of the 140-character Twitter thing.
So basically, in the student union in the 1980s, we all cared about social justice.
But it's like the most unforgiving, extreme fucker is now the one who's actually setting the agenda.
And not only setting the agenda on social media, but because the mainstream media is so enthralled to social media and doesn't want to get hurt, so it goes along with it, it's kind of creating an entire society of...
And colleges are where people first start exercising that muscle.
And it's the most rabid version of this issue today.
It's one of the reasons why a lot of comedians won't perform in colleges anymore.
Jerry Seinfeld just got a hard time from a bunch of people because he said that colleges are too politically correct.
And Chris Rock is saying the same thing.
And I stopped doing colleges a long fucking time ago for the very same reason.
Yeah.
Well, I did a college once, and this is a perfect example of it.
But this is a guy, this example is perfect because this is before the internet, and this was a guy that I actually talked to face-to-face.
Like, someone said, you know, like, I would do colleges and I'd fly into these towns.
And, you know, they're bored.
So, like, I tell my jokes and then sometimes I do like a Q&A with them, you know, just for fun, because it's a fun way to like, you let the kids get to ask questions and you get to fuck around and come up with things on the fly.
And some guy said, do you know any joke jokes or something along those lines, right?
And I said, I don't remember anyone.
I go, okay, I remember this one.
Two Jews walk into a bar.
They buy it.
Like, it's the end of the joke.
It's stupid.
It's terrible.
That joke, a guy came up to me after the show and said, that joke that you did about Jews is very offensive.
I said, what's offensive about it?
That Jews are successful at business?
What's offensive?
That I use the word Jew?
Two Jews walk into a bar?
That they went to a bar?
What part's offensive?
Are you just looking to be offended or are you actually offended?
And he was flabbergasted.
He didn't know what to say because he was a fucking 19-year-old kid and he thought he had his, he was an awkward, a socially awkward person and he thought, this is my opportunity to be right.
Yeah, and he just I'm offended like and there's all these kids supporting each other Yes, you do have the right to be offended and they're all fucking dumb as shit and they don't have any life experience and they really they don't have a nuanced view of the world yet and they're exercising this new muscle this new muscle of learning how to Call someone on their bullshit, man, on the patriarchy, on the cisgendered male heteronormative bullshit that you see every day.
And they're like finding this opportunity to express this rage.
And then eventually, hopefully they'll settle in and hopefully they'll sort of like, as time goes on, they have more experience.
They'll sort of realize how ridiculous they were, you know, when they were younger.
But it's like a natural inclination to, like, you know you fucked up, and you know you've done wrong things, so when you see it in other people, call it!
So this one kid that said this to me, I mean, that was the extent of our conversation.
I said, that's ridiculous.
I go, it's not offensive.
I go, I'm, first of all, I don't tell, I'm not racist, and if I told a racist joke, it'd have to be really good.
And he goes, we should never tell racist jokes.
I go, that's not true.
I go, if you make me laugh with a really funny racist joke, I'm thankful, because you made me laugh.
I don't think you think that everything you say is a fucking sworn statement, an affidavit that you're giving in court.
I assume that when you're doing the art of stand-up comedy, you're going to say things you don't really mean because they're funnier than what you really mean.
And that's part of the art form.
When you listen to a song, you know, Bob Marley didn't really shoot the sheriff, okay?
Probably didn't shoot anybody.
And it's like, it's part of the art.
It's making shit up.
And when you take that away, because people are going to be offended, well, then you remove almost every movie that's ever been made.
You remove almost every book that's ever been written.
You take away almost every stand-up comedian set, and you just get, you fucking nerf the shit out of the world.
And it's like, you know, so for 30 years I'm writing about abuses of power, and the first time I say we are the ones abusing our power, someone yells out, are you a racist?
That's just not a nuanced, objective, well thought out view of a human being.
What they're doing is looking for an opportunity to call you out on something.
Looking for an opportunity to shame you.
And that's what...
The problem I have with all this social justice warrior bullshit that's going on in the world is it's manufacturing a lot of hate.
And it's manifesting itself in a very angry way.
Where...
What should be people that are pro-gay rights, pro-transgender rights, pro-gay marriage, pro-peace, pro-choice, pro-love, pro-left-wing ideology, you know, those like do unto others as you have them do unto you.
This whole idea of like creating a more peaceful world and the way they're going to do it is by ruining everybody who doesn't agree with them and shitting all over them and insulting them.
And not distinguishing between what's actual social justice and what's a kind of cathartic alternative to social justice, like the destruction of Justine.
The destruction of Justine doesn't do any good for anybody.
I think some people are jumping off, but I think that what you said, the great thing about it is it gives a voice to people.
It's also the terrible thing about it.
But I think what this is, is, as I said before, is this like this adolescent stage of communication.
We're reaching this new level of interaction where we can interact with each other instantaneously.
And that's just never...
By the way, Tesla predicted this.
Tesla predicted smartphones 100 years ago.
And I tweeted this quote today that somebody sent my way.
Absolutely fascinating.
It was not just a quote.
It was a...
A piece that Tesla had written in, like, the 1920s.
Amazing.
Where he predicted smartphones.
Like, literally described a modern smartphone.
Scroll down, like, where his actual words.
Like, no, it's below that.
You can actually read it.
When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.
We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.
Not only this, but through television and telephony, like phones, we shall be able to hear one another as perfectly as though we were face-to-face despite intervening distances of thousands of miles and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will, do this, we shall be able to hear one another as perfectly as though we were Do his will?
To do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.
A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
And when you read that paragraph, you think to yourself, oh my god, you know, When we have that world for ourselves, what an amazing world it will be.
It will be a world of curiosity, it will be a world of understanding strangers, of nuance, of context.
And so we have the world, and we completely throw away curiosity, we throw away nuance, we throw away context, and what we have instead is condemnation.
Yeah, it is tongue in cheek because he sings, look at those mountains, look at those trees, look at that bum over there, man.
He's down on his knees.
You know, so what Randy Newman will do is that he will acknowledge his own privilege and then do a kind of grotesque, extreme version of it for comedy.
He does that in short, people who does it in Isle of LA.
And I think that's exactly what Justine Sacco was doing in that joke.
She was acknowledging her own privilege and then mocking it by doing kind of grotesque version of it.
And the only difference between Justine and Randy Newman was that Justine just wasn't any fucking good at it.
Although, you know, when the New York Times extracted my book and the fact-checker at the New York Times phoned up Justine and said to her, like, so before you got on the plane, were you surprised that, like, you didn't get any replies?
Because while she was like, you know, it all happened after she turned off her phone and fell asleep.
If you're, like, really into painkillers, I guess, but you'd have to, like, say that you're on pain.
So I think the thing about Xanax is you could say you have anxiety, and they'll give you medication.
I know a guy who went to a doctor to get a prescription because he was a social justice warrior and he said a bunch of incorrect things and people attacked him and so he had to go to the doctor.
He's freaked out.
He got a taste of his own medicine.
But that fucker, I saw him like six months later, still shitting on people online.
He didn't learn from the attack on him.
It's almost like they get addicted to this drama of shitting on people, of attacking people.
Even people who deserve it, I tend not to pile in on anymore.
I'll tell you where I think it all comes from.
In my book, for me anyway, in my book, The Psychopath Test, I'm really critical of labelling culture.
I'm critical of the fact that the DSM is 886 pages long and has a mental disorder for everything.
And most people, I think, agree with me that that's kind of, it's like easy to agree with me about that.
But then on social media, we do exactly the same thing.
We label people.
And yet, so the very same people who agree with me about the kind of, you know, what's wrong with labeling culture in the world, go home and do it themselves on social media.
You know, you can be the Dalai Lama or that label can be shit.
You could be Donald Trump, you know, and you're right now.
Donald Trump is an easy pile on.
Everybody will jump on him.
He said a bunch of racist things about Mexicans and a bunch of dumb shit during his speech announcing he's gonna be president He's an easy pile-on and he's also a guy that sort of embraces self-definition He embraces his label so much so that he puts his label on the top of a building Trump Towers.
This is the the Trump casino on the Trump this and like it's a part of the definition I think Any sort of definition like that, like officer, professor, doctor.
How about people that want...
Cosby was making people call him a doctor when he got an honorary doctorate.
Really?
I guess maybe secretly it was a big joke for him because he was drugging people, allegedly.
He admitted in a 2005 deposition that he obtained quaaludes, a sedative, with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with.
According to records obtained by the Associated Press on Monday.
The admission was contained in records that were unsealed after the AP went to court to compel their release.
Cosby's attorneys had repeatedly sought to keep the records sealed, arguing that they would be embarrassing.
This was a case that Cosby paid a woman off, and then because he had paid her off, part of the deal, part of the arrangement was that the records were to be sealed.
Well, 2005, I can't imagine the statute of limitations is...
Well, if that's 2005, that's when he admitted it, but when was the actual instance?
That's monster shit.
That's really...
That's dehumanizing shit.
I think...
That's a long conversation.
It's sort of semi-related, the definition of Bill Cosby, because Bill Cosby is a sort of iconic individual, and Bill Cosby is a celebrity, and because of that, he was worshipped and treated like a celebrity, and I think because of that worship, he sort of had an expectation of worship, and also, and this is Total armchair psychology from a dude who went to college for three years and barely paid attention.
But I think the expectation of that and the years and years of that, much like being a spoiled child, leads you to be a person who expects that from people and can even justify horrific behavior because you actually do think that you're better than someone, the same way royalty does, the same way people who Have grown up their life.
It's really one of the worst things that's happening in this country at the moment.
In the psychopath test I write about how these kids as young as one and two are getting labelled bipolar because everyone's so in love with the checklists that a kid goes to see a psychiatrist with a temper tantrum and so it scores high on the bipolar checklist.
So they're then given antipsychotic medication at the age of, like, literally one and two.
You know, that's how much labeling culture is out of control.
You know, as a journalist, the question I love asking most is, why?
You know, because that opens doors.
You know, why?
And then you have to go somewhere else.
But with labeling culture, including labeling culture on social media, it's like, it closes doors.
Well, if it was as simple as play, playthings, like just straight up mockery, I would expect that you would get some clever humor out of it, but it's hate.
There's a lot of anger and hate, and this whole public shaming thing sort of goes along with that.
I mean, there's some people that I follow that I don't agree with.
Unfortunately, I agree with their position on a lot of things, like gay marriage, like equality for all.
There's so many different things that I agree with, like, extreme left-wing people on, that it's really problematic, because when some of them adopt this sort of social warrior, public shaming stance, I'm so torn, because on one side, I want to go after them, but on another side, I agree with almost all of their positions.
On equality for women and equality for gay people.
I mean, there's so many of the positions that I have the exact same stance on.
But I don't have this stance on public shaming.
My stance is public humor.
You know, my stance whether Chris Christie says he's gonna lock up everyone who smokes marijuana, you know, because marijuana is so dangerous.
I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you have a fucking mirror in your house?
You're morbidly obese, and you're telling people that they can't have a substance that has never killed a single person ever.
Being overweight is one of the major causes of premature death in the United States of America.
Having a heart attack is one of the major causes.
And having a heart attack is almost directly related in most people to being overweight.
I mean, it's a huge issue.
And this fucking slob is on television telling people that he's going to stop marijuana because it's dangerous.
You know, he's stuffing hot dogs on his fat face.
Like, to me, a guy like that has to be mocked.
Because it's there, and that's my job.
Just like...
The fucking crocodile sees the wounded antelope and it gets too close to the waterhole, it can't help it.
It's gotta snap at it.
If I'm a comic and you say something stupid like that and you are just this blatantly obvious target, that is a dangerous person in my opinion.
Because he's a person who can dictate policy, he's a person who can make laws, and he's a person that literally can lock people up in jail.
Yeah, you're punching up and you're being funny and there's nothing, you know, I'd be a real dope if I was going to start being against things like that.
I guess, you know, what my book's against is the disproportionate punishment of people who don't deserve it.
I mean, it's also having a lack of There's a lack of perspective that comes with a lot of these pile-on bullying things like the, what's the woman's name again, Sako?
Black people get really angry because she's appropriating a disenfranchised segment of society that has already been stolen from by white people, you know?
Well, I felt it kind of was my story because for 30 years I've been writing about troubled people and I've come to conclusions about the way you should regard other people, other human beings, with sort of interest and curiosity and compassion, not cold, hard...
It's also saying that you're not allowed to have an opinion or it's not your story.
What you're trying to do is you're trying to silence anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Everyone that is a human being that witnesses a story, you witness some public thing that's taking place, you are absolutely allowed your opinion.
And if you're not going to allow people to speak up about things and have opinions about things, whether these opinions are informed or uninformed, that's all going to be sorted out in the wash.
But to say it's not your position to talk, well, then you're publicly silencing people.
But the Rachel Dolezal thing was, to me, it was a perfect example of how ludicrous human beings are, how ridiculous our society is, and how this woman is like, first of all, The NAACP was founded by white people.
It's something a lot of people don't know.
And black folks weren't even allowed to hold office until the 1970s.
Well, it was actually founded by New York City intellectuals, I believe.
I hope I'm not doing this wrong.
It was in response to all the lynchings.
And they were compassionate, intelligent, Progressive people that were trying to figure out a way past this horrible situation that the world had found himself in post-slavery, where there was all this resentment and there was lynchings and the chaos that is the South.
And, you know, I think we're still dealing with the repercussions and the reverberations of it right now.
With this Confederate flag debate that's going on all throughout America now.
It's like America's just sort of kind of waking up to the fact that, well, fuck, man.
A hundred or so years ago, you were allowed to own people.
And the people that wanted to be able to own people had a flag.
And these people put that flag on a car and drove it around on TV, and we didn't think about it.
Yeah, and it was the day that I turned up, and they were all standing around this giant cross that's lying on the ground, and they couldn't remember because they were all so rusty.
They couldn't remember whether to soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it.
And then they had this marquee in his garden, and they were all doing this kind of personality skills workshops, like all filling out these multiple choice, like which strengths and weaknesses most apply to you.
I always remember one of the strengths and weaknesses was mixes easily, which normally would be like a strength, but if you're the clan, it's going to be a weakness.
And then another one was warrior.
And one of the clansmen was like going, well, I don't consider being a warrior to be a weakness.
And then like the person doing the test was like, well, actually being a warrior can be a weakness.
So they were, this is the first story I ever did where I feel like I kind of twisted it around so that the people who would normally be the villains were the good guys.
And the people who'd normally be the good guys were the villains.
I always felt good about that.
So basically, they're a family of like, you know, they believe in Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg.
I tried to infiltrate Bilderberg one time, by the way, and got chased away by their henchmen.
I don't know if there's time to tell that story later.
So they moved to this cabin up in the woods on top of a mountain in Idaho, Ruby Creek, Idaho.
And Randy would hang out at the local Aryan Nations with the family.
That was his big undoing, was that he would take the family up to Aryan Nations, who were just, you know, fucking nuts, like violent skinhead nuts.
And Randy would take his family up there for like picnics and away days and so on.
So Aryan Nations, like pretty much every white supremacist, you know, group in America, was heavily infiltrated by undercover officers.
And they saw Randy and saw his family and could tell that Randy was less crazy than the other people there.
So they approached Randy and said, do you want to become an undercover informant?
And Randy said, no.
So then Randy thought that was that.
But then they sent a guy to ask Randy to saw off a shotgun.
So he said, okay, fine.
So he sawed off a shotgun slightly below the legal limit.
Like the guy pointed at him and said, no, saw it off there.
So he sawed it off there.
And then they said, aha, we've got you.
This was an undercover cop.
You've now committed a firearms offence.
You will go to jail unless you become an undercover informant for us.
And Randy, being a twat, said, no, fuck off.
And he kind of embarrassed the feds in front of his wife.
He said, look at those two guys over there.
Guess what they just asked me to do.
And so Randy was like an idiot.
And then he locked himself up in the cabin with his wife and kids and dog.
And so they surrounded the cabin, the ATF, and this went on for like a year.
They set up cameras in the trees and surrounded Randy's cabin.
And then one day, The ATF people got too close to the cabin and disturbed the dog.
And the dog starts barking and the dog chases the agents down the hill.
And Randy's little boy, who was like 12 years old or something, Sammy, chased the dog down the hill with a gun because Randy, like an idiot, had armed his kids.
And so they all run down to the bottom of the hill.
An agent jumps out and shoots the dog, kills the dog.
Sammy says, you killed my dog, you son of a bitch, and starts shooting wildly.
And the agent shoots Sammy in his arm and basically shoot his arm nearly off.
And Sammy yells, Dad, I'm coming home, Dad, and starts running up the hill.
And the ATF agent just shoots Sammy in the back as he's running up the hill, just in a sort of volley of gunfire.
So...
So Sammy's now dead.
This story doesn't get any better, I should tell you.
Sammy's now dead.
Randy gets Sammy's body, puts him in the shed.
And then the next day, oh, one of Randy's friends is there.
And there's a shootout.
And one of the agents, a guy called Bill Duggan, gets killed too.
So now you've got two dead people.
You've got a dead agent and you've got Sammy dead.
The jury's always been out as to whether the agent was killed by Randy's friend or by a friendly fire.
So anyway, the next day, Randy goes outside and an FBI sniper called Lon Horiuchi shoots Randy in the shoulder.
So Randy runs back in and Vicky, Randy's wife, is standing in the doorway holding her baby and a sniper shoots Vicky through the head and kills her.
And they pull Vicky's body into the cabin and a siege starts, like a 16-day siege or something.
And at the roadblock down at the bottom, that's kind of where the militia movement started.
Like all these local militia people all form at the bottom of the roadblock.
And for days, and then discover that Vicky's dead.
And I mean, I've seen some amateur footage.
And it's so sad.
And, and I've become really good friends with Rachel, who's Randy's younger daughter, who was in the cabin for all of that time.
And, and in the end, the government admitted responsibility and paid each of Randy's daughters a million dollars each and they killed Randy.
No, Randy's still alive.
Is he really?
Yeah, Randy now goes to gun shows where you can have your photograph taken with Randy Weaver for $5.
So one of the people who visited Randy's cabin, I visited Randy's cabin with Rachel, and another person who visited Randy's cabin was Timothy McVeigh shortly before blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
Yeah, I visited Elohim City, the place which you know about, right?
The place where, you know, I know I've got a kind of reputation for being a debunker of conspiracies, and the reputation is kind of warranted in most cases.
But I've got to say, of all the things I investigated when I was doing a lot of stuff about conspiracies, the one Where I thought this is a bit fucking fishy was Oklahoma City, yeah.
What's most certainly fishy is the efficacy of that bomb.
The bomb that they used, the fertilizer bomb that blew half that building apart.
When you talk to bomb experts, they go, that is like really, really unlikely.
They said that the amount of damage that a bomb like that that's made out of fertilizer can do is nothing in comparison to what that building was like.
And also that that building looked like it had been blown out.
Not that it had been blown in, but blown out.
Meaning that there was bombs planted inside the building.
And then there was all these news reports.
There was another one of Alex Jones's There was all these news reports that he played these clips of where they were talking about FBI agents removing bombs, unexploded bombs, from the building.
There were more than one bomb.
And then they had this, you know, this narrative that they blamed it on Timothy McVeigh.
Yeah, everyone, all of that crowd back then I knew about Bilderberg.
And I said, yeah, I've just been chased by the Bilderberg group, which I was.
In my book then, when I was trying to infiltrate secret societies, I went to Portugal with Jim Tucker.
He worked for this magazine called The Spotlight, which was run by this kind of white separatist group called the Liberty Lobby in Washington, D.C., Basically, everybody kept telling me about this group called the Bilderberg Group that no one had heard of back then.
Only real niche aficionados had heard of Bilderberg back then.
And much in the same way that I feel like I partly launched Alex Jones's career.
I also feel I partly gave the world Bilderberg, because I was the first mainstream writer to write about it.
Because everyone was saying, there's this group called the Bilderberg Group, and they secretly rule the world from inside a secret room.
And I said, if you ask big Jim Tucker, he'll tell you more.
So I phoned up Jim Tucker.
And he said, yeah, it's true.
They always meet once a year at a five-star hotel with golfing facilities.
That's where they rule the world.
And he said, you've caught me at a good time.
Honestly, it looked like something out of, like, Sam Spade.
He had an office with Venetian blinds and he wore a Trilby and he smoked like 80 a day.
He said that he had emphysema, which made him sound even more like someone out of Sam Spade.
Yeah, he only died recently, like a couple of years ago, and this was like 96. So Jim said, he said, yeah, I've discovered where they're going to meet.
Like my secret sauce has told me that they're meeting at the Caesar Park Hotel, a golfing resort in Sintra, Portugal, and I'm going to fly over there.
I apologize for my semi-American accent I'm doing here.
He said, I'm going to fly Did he use the term covert wickedness?
Like I'm by the pool, I'm going, he's standing behind the tree.
And she goes, well, look, just sit tight.
I'm sure it's going to go away.
So I went down to the beach.
Jim Tucker, throughout all of this, by the way, is loving it.
He's loving every fucking second of this.
It's his dream come true.
I'm sure, right?
I go down to the bridge, I'm petrified.
I want to, like, abandon the story, like, drive back to England from Portugal, because I'm afraid I'm going to get, like, stopped at immigration.
Are they connected?
Yes.
Yeah, pretty much.
You can get the ferry from Paris.
So I think it's like a two-day drive, but fuck it.
So then I had a cameraman with me, David Barker, because I was filming some of this for a documentary.
He convinced me to stick it out.
So I went to the beach and then I came back to the hotel.
And I swear to God, there's these two men in dark glasses sitting in the lobby of the hotel.
And as soon as I walk in, they both grab brochures and start reading them.
And I'm like...
So I go up to Jim Tucker and I say, there's these two men in the lobby reading brochures and they're only pretending to read brochures.
And Jim says, how do you know?
And I said, you can tell by their demeanour.
And then later when Jim wrote all of this up for his conspiracy website, he transcribed this conversation and he said, I said to Ronson, how can you tell?
And Ronson replied, you can tell them by their smell.
And I'm like, I didn't say smell, I said demeanour.
Yeah, well, much later on, like after all of this happened, I managed to interview three members of the Bilderberg Group, including the Secretary General, and including one of their founding fathers, who was this British politician, who's still alive, called Dennis Healey, who was a big Labour politician in the 1970s.
And he said, and I believe him, that Bilderberg was set up after the Second World War Because there was this big move against ideological politicians, like post-Hitler.
Like, we don't want any more Hitlers, so let's kind of create this sort of globalist, one world, new world order.
I mean, you know, the phrase new world order, I think, is true.
I think they were trying to create, like, a one world government where business would be more important than politics because business people are more trustworthy than ideological politicians.
I think that was their...
That was their thesis back then.
So it was kind of centrist, almost kind of liberal in a way.
But of course, what they didn't account for, or maybe did account for it and didn't give a shit, was that CEOs would be just as fucking evil and malicious and ideological in their own way as politicians.
Yeah, I said that actually to the Secretary-General of the Bilderberg Group when I interviewed him, Skycom Martin Taylor.
I said, you know, you get so many up-and-coming politicians who end up being like President or Prime Minister.
And he said, thank you.
Like he took that as a compliment.
Like, you know, we're good at starspotting the next...
And Dennis Healy said to me...
Starspotting.
Yeah, starspotting.
And Dennis Healy said to me, the idea is to get these rising politicians and introduce them to the heads of business and hopefully influence them to be more sensible and more globalist and less nationalist.
I think my book then was the first time Bilderberg, like, was ever discussed in kind of the mainstream world.
And then shortly after me, this journalist called Charlie Skelton came along, who's another sort of mainstream writer for The Guardian, and he goes every year to Bilderberg now, and partly as a result of him and partly as a result of me, suddenly Bilderberg is discussed in the mainstream world.
But when I went to Bilderberg, and now loads of people turn up to protest Bilderberg and so on, and they've even got a bit of a website now, I think, and they certainly admit existing now, and they didn't used to.
I'm very fascinated by the spectrum of human thinking and behavior, and that we're all kind of terrified of people that are on the far end, in one way or another.
We're terrified of extreme lefties, and we're terrified of extreme righties.
Was anything really revealing or unusual about that journey of trying to write that in your own mind?
One of the things I try to do When I watch ISIS videos or I watch radical fundamentalist Islamic guys talk, I try to imagine myself agreeing with them and being one of them and being happy to be one of them.
There's some appeal and some draw to being extremely confident about what you're saying, even if what you're saying is absolutely ridiculous, like stoning people for homosexuality.
Don't you think that people say things, a lot of the things they say, they say knowing that people are going to approve?
So they tailor these things in a way that, like, they lick their finger and put it up in the air and they catch the wind, like, ooh, the wind's going this way.
I'm going to say something that puts me on the moral high ground.
I was promoting some show I was doing or something I'd written, and I didn't know Robin Williams had died.
And so I tweeted, like, something about some show I was doing.
And I got, like, a kind of...
You know, 50 people immediately tweeting me basically saying, how dare you promote something when, you know, we're all so upset that Robin Williams has just died.
Because I hadn't noticed that Robin Williams...
And there's that kind of conformity again, the kind of RIP conformity.
Everybody has to do the RIP. And it's all good.
It's all coming from a good place.
It's all coming from a place that's teaching us how to care and teaching us how to level the playing field.
I would see people that dress like rebels, but they dress like the same rebels.
They're typically unique.
You see someone who's got, their hair's dyed pink and they don't give a fuck, but you don't give a fuck like everybody around you doesn't give a fuck.
You're wearing a uniform.
Whether you know it or not, you look like someone's going to Catholic school.
Like, you might think that you're some sort of a rebel, but the real rebels are indistinguishable from everyone else in the way they dress and the way they look, because they're just people.
You know, there are no real rebels.
Like, a real rebel is just someone who has their own opinion that may or may not go with the standard opinion that we're being supposed to, that we're supposed to absorb.
And it's, you know, the negative byproducts of all of this are big.
It makes people fearful.
It makes people shut the fuck up.
And also what it is, it declares war on human nature.
You know, this is the reason why I really wanted to write the public shaming book, because I felt like war had been declared on human nature.
Instead of trying to work out why people transgress, you know, in a sort of compassionate way, it just destroys people for transgressing.
And everybody transgresses.
Every human transgresses.
And when we so ferociously destroy other people for transgressing, we're shutting off really significant realities about humans, which is the fact that if we try to understand each other, it would make the world more compassionate and we would understand why people transgress more.
Yeah, I think that what we're talking about, too, is you're not talking about rallying against someone who's committing horrible atrocities, someone who's committing crimes against humanity, torturing people, murdering people.
You know, you're talking about differences of opinion.
There was a lot of conspiracy theories involving that one as well.
There was a lot of conspiracy theories that he was killed by the CIA in order to keep people out of there and justify our attacks on Islamic fundamentalists and that they had killed him because he was going to reveal information about...
All sorts of different shit.
And there was like a whole video dedicated to describing why these people were not Arabs and that their accent was wrong, their size was wrong.
They were built more like American military people.
And there's also stuff like Operation Northwoods, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff had signed that paper saying that they were going to try to fake attacks on American civilians.
They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay.
It proves that they were trying to- What's the difference between your book, sorry to interrupt you, but what's the difference between your book and the movie?
The book starts off with the kind of comedy of all of this crazy stuff they were trying out in the 70s and 80s, like trying to kill goats just by staring at them, trying to learn how to be invisible, which, by the way, after a while they adapted, they went from invisibility to trying to find a way of not being seen.
So I'm like, that's, you know, I said, like, camouflage.
He's a debunker and a skeptic and he and I were on the same page.
We're like, you know, we came up with some random shapes.
We're supposed to envision this area and then we went to the area and he was trying to find hits.
I'm like, man, I mean, you're talking like angles and like, fuck, anywhere you go that's man-made, you're gonna find angles that are similar to this.
And, you know, we picked out a few colors that were, you know, like super common.
You find those colors.
Yeah, you get some really lucky hits, but the thing about all the shit that we were wrong with and he's all about like it's just Don't think too much.
Just you know, let it come to you.
Let it come so you're supposed to scribble shit down and yeah, it's so mind-blowingly dumb and The Ed Dames guy was telling me that they had actually had found Osama.
I think it was Osama bin Laden.
He was saying Sorry if I can't remember correctly because it was all nonsense to me at the time and But they didn't go after him because they didn't want to win the war, because they didn't want the war to end.
Because the people had a vested interest in keeping the war going.
And that was sort of his idea behind why this remote viewing wasn't successful.
But he was citing all these different instances where remote viewing was successful.
I remember one time they were looking for Noriega, General Noriega, and the remote viewers were like called in to find Noriega.
And one of the remote viewers, it might have been Ed Dames actually, one of the remote viewers psychically divined that Angela Lansbury knew where Noriega was.
What I don't know is whether they actually ever asked Angela Lansbury or not.
What I discovered though, if it had just been remote viewing, I wouldn't have wanted to have written the Men's Day at Goats, because I found the remote viewing thing a bit boring.
But then what I discovered just through asking people was there was all this other shit going on.
Like they were trying to fast for a month, trying to burst clouds just by pointing at them, trying to kill goats just by staring at them.
And that stuff was so fun to me.
And then I discovered after like a year of like interviewing these guys, I discovered that like there was a line, I mean, a really crooked line, but a line nonetheless between some of these crazy endeavors in the 1970s and 80s.
And some of the kind of exotic interrogation techniques that were happening at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
So in the book, because some of the same people, like there was a colonel called John Alexander, who was involved in like exotic, you know, sound blasting and all the non-lethal weapons.
And he's a guy you should have on your show, actually.
He's an incredible guy.
So the Men's Day at Goats, the book sort of starts funny and gets dark, whereas the movie kind of stayed funny and kind of didn't go into the darkness in that way.
No, every so often, like a unit would get sick of it, like it was being run by the, I don't know, the DEA or, you know, the U.S. Army or military intelligence, and then they'd get sick of it.
I became friends with Eric Olson, whose father was Frank Olson, who's the guy who purportedly was given LSD by the CIA and then jumped out of a window in New York.
Well, do you know that Ted Kaczynski was a part of the Harvard studies on LSD? Oh, really?
Yeah, there was a German documentary called The Net that sort of highlighted this and it was all about his participation in the LSD studies and how it pushed him off the rails.
And, you know, I mean, I have a friend whose sister is out of her fucking mind.
She went on a couple of LSD trips and took way too much.
And to this day, it was like seven years ago.
To this day, she's all fucked up.
So it can happen, especially if you have, if you're mentally unstable to begin with and you get dosed and spiked, you know, it's totally possible.
I mean, people that have a slippery grip on reality, any really traumatic experience and any real, anything that's like super perturbing to your state of consciousness has the potential to set you off the rails in a way that you might not be able to recover from.
I mean, it is possible.
Yeah.
They did a lot of fucking experiments with LSD with people.
There was this thing called Artichoke where they were like experimenting in...
I believe this has all been verified.
They're experimenting in getting people hooked on heroin and then withdrawing the heroin and making them do cold turkey as a means of getting information out of them.
I mean, look, especially when you're dealing with the Cold War and this terrible thought that the Soviet Union was ready to drop bombs on your children any day of the week and that they're doing things like this and that, you know, the Nazis had been doing things like this.
And we know about all the experiments that the Japanese did and the rape of Nam King and the horrible things that the Nazis had done.
Didn't MKUltra start, or in the early days of MKUltra, some Americans were...
Some American soldiers were kidnapped by the Koreans?
And then they were seen on TV, like, saying, we renounce America, and...
They would try to work out like how the Koreans, and my memory is really sketchy on this, but then they try to work out like how the Koreans have managed to brainwash these three American servicemen so easily, and that was one of the reasons why they started MKUltra.
Well, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about Your work with extremists, because I always wonder, like, is it appealing?
Like, when you're...
I mean, obviously, you're not a white supremacist or an Islamic fundamentalist or anything, but when you're with them for a long period of time, when you're embedded, is there any...
Is there any, somehow or another, is there any pull towards, like, thinking, an inclination?
You know, never to their ideology, but what I did always like.
Throughout my writing career, the times I'm at my happiest, times where I think a story is really working, is when something shifts in me.
Like, I spend so much time with conspiracy theorists, and then suddenly I'm being chased by the Bilderberg group, and I go, fucking nuts!
And, like, I've become, like, paranoid.
And that's what I know, like, at the bottom of my brain.
I know that, like, what's happening to me is terrifying.
But the fact that I've gone through this really big change means it's going to be a really fucking good piece of writing.
LAUGHTER And that happened in them.
And it happened in the psychopath test too, actually, that I became completely drunk with my psychopath spotting powers.
Like I went on a course to learn how to spot psychopaths and I got so drunk with my psychopath spotting powers that I changed.
And my friends were saying to me, like, you've really changed.
Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for the Menisteric Goats, told me he was concerned about me because I was so convinced I could spot psychopaths everywhere.
The first half of my book, The Psychopath Test, sort of teaches people how to spot psychopaths.
And then the second half becomes like a cautionary tale to not get so fucking drunk with your powers that it turns you a little bit psychopathic.
But like nuances of language, you know, there's like a 20 point checklist where it all comes from.
Lack of empathy, lack of remorse.
I started meeting CEOs and doing the psychopath checklist on them to see if it's true that you're more likely to find psychopaths at the top of the tree than at the bottom.
And different psychiatrists and psychologists will use the terms like...
I mean, the upshot is that I don't think there's any real difference.
Some people will say there's a difference.
Because they'll bring their own sort of analyses to the situation.
But in general, you're talking about a kind of lack of empathy, a neurological lack of empathy, whether it's neurological or whether it's through childhood abuse.
That's another big matter of debate amongst those people.
But I'll give you a kind of classic example from the book.
I went to meet this Haitian dictator called Toto Constant in jail in upstate New York.
I'd met him a few times before, but I met him in jail.
And...
He kept on saying to me, I want people to like me.
Like, I really want people to like me.
He kept on saying that to me.
So finally I said to him, isn't that a weakness, like wanting people to like you?
Isn't that a weakness?
And he said, no, no, no, it's not a weakness.
Because if you can get people to like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do.
You know, that we see the world in terms of predators and prey and it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses and others.
You know, I think there really are psychopaths out there.
There are some people...
I think a lot of people...
The one thing I don't like about the sort of psychopath-spotting world is that they're not interested to a large extent in what turns somebody that way.
Because they're just really interested in the idea that there's just another species out there.
There's just this other species that aren't quite human.
They look human, but it's kind of like David Icke and the lizards, right?
There's people out there who've adopted human form, but they're not quite human.
But I'm really interested.
There's this other psychiatrist I met called James Gilligan, who basically says all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.
So these people were like so battered during their childhood, so humiliated, so abused, that they try and regain some self-esteem by committing violence onto other people.
Well, I think there's certainly some people that are like that, and there's some people that are violent just because they're angry at stupidity, or they're angry at aggression, or they just need some release in their life, and they're pent down with all sorts of stress, and they can't handle it, and they don't have an outlet.
You know, there's a lot of people that just, they're lacking an outlet, and I liken them to overflowing batteries, like a battery that, like, I think of a human body as, you Your human body is designed to exert a certain amount of effort, to put forth a certain amount of energy during the day.
And most people don't even remotely tap into their reserve of energy.
They sit down and their body just conforms to their office chair and they're there all day.
And at the end of the day, they sit in their car or they sit on the bus or the train and they make their way home, in which case they sit on the couch and they sit in front of the television.
And their body just is constantly storing up stress.
And it has this desire to exert energy and it's never met with what it needs.
It never has its needs fulfilled.
And so then you're in your car and you're in traffic and someone cuts you off and you're like, you fucking...
Piece of shit!
You have this unbelievably angry response because your battery is essentially found.
Instead of doing that to somebody in another car who can't hear you, if you then go home and you do it on social media, everybody hears you, including that person, and it can really damage someone.
And John Ronson on Twitter, J-O-N. Is there a J-O-H-N that's pretending to be you and writing a bunch of evil shit that you're going to get in trouble for?