July 6, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:24:30
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody knows. | ||
| All right, we're live. | ||
| John Ronson, how are you, fella? | ||
| Hey, how are you? | ||
| Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| No, I'm glad. | ||
| I can't tell you the number of people have said you should do Joe Rogan. | ||
| The number of people have said, oh, my God, Joe Rogan's talking about Bohemian Grove, or Joe Rogan's talking about psychopaths. | ||
| You have to come on. | ||
| Well, I'm friends with Alex Jones, and Alex Jones told me many, many, many years ago that they're burning effigies in Bohemian Grove. | ||
| They're worshipping Molech, the owl god. | ||
| Well, I went to Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, that's like going to Disneyland with Mickey Mouse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was kind of my idea. | ||
| I sometimes feel like the kind of Simon... | ||
| I mean, this isn't strictly speaking true, but I kind of sometimes feel a little bit like Alex Jones' Simon Cowell. | ||
| Because this is like way back in the mid to late 90s, when he was really famous in Austin, but kind of not that well-known outside. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I was working... | ||
| With this producer, John Sargent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was rebuilding David Koresh's church? | ||
| Yeah, that was the first time I met Alex Jones. | ||
| I went there with Randy Weaver. | ||
| I became friends with the Weaver family. | ||
| Who are the Weavers again? | ||
| They're Ruby Randy Ridge, you know, the family of white separatists. | ||
| So I got really friendly with Randy's daughter, Rachel, and then I went with Randy to Waco. | ||
| And Alex, there was this kind of crazy man in Waco. | ||
| And I was like, who the fuck is that? | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| This was about probably 98, maybe? | ||
| That's when I met him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I met him in 98. He was amazing. | |
| I mean, I could tell. | ||
| I drove through Austin with him. | ||
| He went to buy a new suit because he was giving a big talk at Waco. | ||
| And everybody in the clothing store was excited because Alex Jones had walked in. | ||
| So he was a big deal in the neighbourhood. | ||
| But then... | ||
| But then I wanted somebody to sneak into Bohemian Grove with. | ||
| And I asked David Icke first, I said, can we go into Bohemian Grove? | ||
| And he was like, no, that's where they transform themselves back into giant lizards. | ||
| Did he tell you that for real? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He really did. | ||
| Yeah, he said, that's where they transform themselves back into giant lizards. | ||
| He's kind of abandoned all that, hasn't he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He gets mad if you bring it up. | ||
| Does he? | ||
| Yeah, which you can't. | ||
| You can't get mad, man. | ||
| You made a lot of speeches saying that people transform into lizards. | ||
| You've got to own up to that shit. | ||
| God, I hope he said those exact words. | ||
| I mean, this is going back a long time. | ||
| He said words, he certainly strongly implied that he believed that it was at Bohemian Grove that they transformed themselves. | ||
| 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? | ||
| They transform into lizards. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here, dude. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 that was the video, he made a video about this, so you were involved in that? | ||
| Yeah, I was in this video. | ||
| Okay, now I remember you. | ||
| Okay, I remember you in that. | ||
| This was a long time ago. | ||
| Long time ago. | ||
| So we all went there. | ||
| We all went to Bohemian Grove. | ||
| It was me and my producer and my cameraman and then Alex and Alex's wife Violet and his friend Mike. | ||
| There was like six of us and we were like strange bedfellows. | ||
| Because I just thought, oh, this will be fun. | ||
| And Alex was like, you know, well, at one point I said to Alex, like, have you got like a contingency plan? | ||
| Like if we manage to get in and like you're, you know, you're uncovered, have you got a contingency plan? | ||
| And Alex said, yes. | ||
| And I said, what is it? | ||
| He said, I'll say to them, don't get any closer. | ||
| And I'm like, that's your contingency plan. | ||
| Don't get any, that's like a threat. | ||
| Alex is going, yep. | ||
| So, he was just going to scare them? | ||
| Yeah, he was going to yell. | ||
| Don't get any closer? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Don't get any closer. | ||
| That was Alex's plan. | ||
| I don't think he thinks that far ahead of shit. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| But they really did put on robes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they really do have like a bundle of sticks that's supposed to represent a human being. | ||
| And they carried it out there and light it on fire. | ||
| I saw it all with my own eyes. | ||
| But do they say that it represents a human being? | ||
| No. | ||
| What they say is that it represents dull care, like all the troubles in the world. | ||
| Like all these men of wealth and power have all these troubles in the world. | ||
| I've got to say it was weird. | ||
| White people problems. | ||
| Boy, that's real first world problems. | ||
| 1% are first world problems? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How funny is that to all the rich people? | ||
| Ruining the world is a pain in the ass for two weeks a year. | ||
| You guys have so much stress. | ||
| We need to burn a fake person. | ||
| To make you feel better. | ||
| God, you guys, it's so hard being a billionaire. | ||
| God, how do you do it? | ||
| How do you run the world? | ||
| Until it was weird, though. | ||
| So Alex's plan, and this is how we were going to get in. | ||
| We were going to rent a boat and, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER Fuck it, Alex. | |
| LAUGHTER So Rick said that what you need to do is like go to Eddie Bauer and get yourself some preppy clothes and just walk up the drive. | ||
| Just walk up the drive. | ||
| That's a smart move. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Alex was like really torn because part of him, he admitted this to me afterwards, part of him was worried that like in The Wicker Man, me and Rick and all these other people that we met were all part of this kind of elaborate plan to lure Alex into the forest and like he would be the one sacrificing. | ||
| Oh, Rich. | ||
| Yeah, it had crossed his mind. | ||
| So the upshot was that Alex and Mike decided to go in separately to me and Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So he didn't trust you that much? | ||
| No, he didn't trust me. | ||
| I mean, he didn't know me. | ||
| They didn't have Wikipedia back then. | ||
| He couldn't just Google you or anything, right? | ||
| He couldn't Google me. | ||
| Did he know of your work? | ||
| Did he know who you were? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I wasn't particularly well known back then. | ||
| I... I wasn't really well known at all. | ||
| Is it safe to say that Alex Jones helped launch you? | ||
| We kind of helped launch each other. | ||
| That night. | ||
| So you guys went in there, and Alex gave me this on VHS tape, by the way, back in 99 or whatever the hell you guys actually made a tape out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alex and I did this thing. | ||
| I did a special in Austin. | ||
| My first DVD I filmed in Austin, and Alex and I dressed up as the Bushes. | ||
| I was George Bush Jr., and he was senior, and we ran around the... | ||
| The state capital with these Bush masks on. | ||
| I've seen that video. | ||
| Did Alex have a big bullhorn saying that they were all Satanist globalists? | ||
| At one point in time, definitely, but I don't know if that made it into the video. | ||
| He actually sang a song. | ||
| There's actually a song. | ||
| I don't know if we've ever played this song. | ||
| It's so ridiculous. | ||
| Alex Jones wrote a song about the elite... | ||
| And it was on the video. | ||
| It was on the video. | ||
| And we're all, like, dancing around to Alex's Jones song in the... | ||
| This is so freaking stupid. | ||
| This is 99. Right. | ||
| 99 or maybe two. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does he say? | ||
| Put the headphones on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Put it back to the beginning so we can hear. | |
| Oh, that's me doing bong hits. | ||
| But we sure as hell don't. | ||
| Live, ladies and gentlemen, from the belly of the beast. | ||
| Crafting to the lies and disinformation. | ||
| No compromise. | ||
| One day closer to victory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Joe Rogan, baby! | |
| Oh shit, I broke the mask! | ||
| This is his song! | ||
| Moloch and Friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| So this is the same time, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I feel like I nurtured Alex's interest in Moloch by suggesting Bohemian Grove to his possible location. | ||
| I was wearing a Style Project t-shirt. | ||
| You remember Style Project? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Styleproject.com. | ||
|
unidentified
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With no compromise. | |
| Live from Austin, Texas. | ||
| Strap yourselves in. | ||
| So stupid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the belly of the beast. | |
| That's Alex Jones singing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Belly of the beast. | |
| He wrote it all too, by the way. | ||
| It had nothing to do with this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god, that was so stupid. | |
| 666 on Bush's head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, it was the only time I ever met Alex, though, that weekend in... | ||
| That's the only time you've ever met him? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| How much different is it than... | ||
| Should we keep going with this Bohemian group? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I feel there's more to say. | ||
| So Alex and Mike decided to go in via the undergrowth. | ||
| Like I saw them... | ||
| So they went in through the bushes? | ||
| They went through the bushes. | ||
| And there was a lot of poison ochre on there. | ||
| You guys just walked in. | ||
| Yeah, me and Rick the lawyer, this kind of preppy lawyer. | ||
| Oh, I'll tell you the funniest thing that I've missed out of this story was the night before we were going to infiltrate, Alex and Mike decided to practice being preppy. | ||
| And so they were walking up and down. | ||
| They 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. | ||
| No! | ||
| That's how they thought Preppy's talk! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh... | |
| So then they went in through the undergrowth, and me and Rick, the lawyer, went up the drive, actually with our producer, John Sargent. | ||
| And just as Rick said, you know, we gave the security guard a kind of I rule the world type wave, just preppy, and we were in. | ||
| Act like you know. | ||
| That's what Ice-T used to say. | ||
| When you used to rob things, Ice-T used to say, just act like you know. | ||
| Act like you know what you're doing. | ||
| So, yeah, we walked in and there was this bank. | ||
| My memory is, okay, there's this big bank of telephones. | ||
| This was like before cell phones. | ||
| Well, I guess there were cell phones, but... | ||
| Very few, right? | ||
| Yeah, very few. | ||
| There was a big bank of telephones. | ||
| And then there were all these camps. | ||
| It was like a giant redwood forest. | ||
| And then there were all these little camps everywhere. | ||
| And all the camps, sure enough, had weird, almost devil-y milieu. | ||
| I remember one of the camps was called Devil Eyes or something, and there was little red eyes poking out of the thing. | ||
| It was like a Halloween type shit. | ||
| And then some of the camps had grand pianos and hot tubs. | ||
| And there were all these old men, all of whom looked like Mr. Burns, sort of in little trucks going up and down. | ||
| Like golf carts? | ||
| Yeah, sort of... | ||
| More like posh pickup trucks, if I'm not rightly. | ||
| Like the kind of stuff you'd get at Universal Studio Tours or something. | ||
| And then we saw... | ||
| And there's all this owl stuff everywhere. | ||
| Now, the reason... | ||
| Some conspiracy theorists get really annoyed with what I'm about to say. | ||
| It's because everybody really loves the idea that they're worshipping Moloch, the giant devil owl. | ||
| But... | ||
| The reason why, as far as I could tell, there are all these owl sculptures everywhere is because it's an owl sanctuary. | ||
| There's little cabins with stuffed owls in there. | ||
| It's like an owl sanctuary. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| It's an owl sanctuary like they actually take care of owls? | ||
| Or like an owl preservation area. | ||
| This is a place where owls nest. | ||
| I'm no owl expert. | ||
| If you were worshipping an owl god, though, wouldn't that be a cool place to make your sanctuary where the owls actually nest? | ||
| Well, I guess so. | ||
| Unless... | ||
| You can't totally debunk it there, Mr. Ronson. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| Although, wouldn't... | ||
| Like, if you're worshipping a giant owl... | ||
| Wouldn't all the regular-sized owls be like false gods? | ||
| I mean, I'm busking this. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Or, you know, I don't know. | ||
| If you had like a great monkey god, and the monkeys lived around where the great monkey god lived, you'd feel like they worshipped the monkey god. | ||
| Yeah, like they were the minions. | ||
| Maybe the owls worshipped Moloch. | ||
| Okay, I'm with you on that. | ||
| Still, nonetheless. | ||
| Not the minions. | ||
| Despicable me, I can tell you have children. | ||
| 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 I'm sure they're right. | ||
| You guys were far away from it? | ||
| I remember us going like all the way up to it. | ||
| So is there a security guard like when you walk down? | ||
| There was one guy sitting in a little hut. | ||
| And he didn't ask anything? | ||
| Didn't ask anything. | ||
| He just said like enjoy your evening or something. | ||
| And where is Bohemian Grove again? | ||
| What state? | ||
| It's in Northern California. | ||
| It's next to this little town called Occidental. | ||
| There's like a no through road and then you go up the road. | ||
| Is that north of San Francisco? | ||
| Yeah, north of Napa. | ||
| North of Napa. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I remember seeing Alex and Mike. | ||
| And I was like, hey, it's Alex and Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| And then they walked past and they said, keep walking. | ||
| There's owls everywhere. | ||
| There's cameras in the trees. | ||
| There's owls everywhere? | ||
| Yeah, there's owls, Mike said. | ||
| There's owls everywhere. | ||
| Did they see owls? | ||
| I mean, are they talking about owl owls? | ||
| Well, I think at this point, Mike was convinced that every time they saw an owl, it was like, you know, it was Moloch related. | ||
| Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what were you thinking at this point? | ||
| You think, what the fuck have I got myself into? | ||
| Hanging out with these guys? | ||
| They're going to ruin my whole investigation? | ||
| Well, no, I mean, I was nervous because, you know... | ||
| The closer you can get to this microphone, the better, too, because we don't have our headsets on. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, I was nervous, but I sort of thought it was kind of fun. | ||
| I felt safe with Rick the lawyer. | ||
| I felt like nothing bad would happen to me because he looked so rich and preppy. | ||
| That's like every horror movie where things go bad. | ||
| You're hanging out with Rick the lawyer. | ||
| I thought I'd be fine with Rick the lawyer. | ||
| So then the bell rings, like gets to dusk. | ||
| And there's a ringing of the bell and all these old men like drift down to this little pond and they all sit on like grass one side of the pond and Alex and Mike are there like a few rows behind us and there's the giant owl on the other side of the pond 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. | ||
| What about Rick the Lawyer? | ||
| And Rick. | ||
| Me and Rick. | ||
| We're the only sane people. | ||
| I wonder if the tenants dropped off in that place once they invented Viagra. | ||
| You know, because like rich old dudes, they couldn't get it up. | ||
| There's not a lot to do. | ||
| You're bored. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| That's why he gets his extra hearts. | ||
| There's a photo of, I think it's Ronald Reagan at Bohemian Grove. | ||
| Yeah, with Nixon, right? | ||
| It might be with Nixon, yeah. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| Pull that up, Jamie, because it's a crazy photo. | ||
| So this has been like a weird spot where these guys have gone for decades. | ||
| Well, 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? | ||
| Who the fuck started this? | ||
| There he is. | ||
| There's Nixon. | ||
| There's Reagan. | ||
| Who started this thing? | ||
| And look at the big redwood behind them. | ||
| It's a majestic tree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, what I heard, and as I say, it's been like 20 years since I've, you know, thought about this stuff too much, because once I put it in them, 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. | ||
| And he's got like leaves all over his lederhosen. | ||
| It's like leaf-covered lederhosen. | ||
| And he starts singing this like song. | ||
| And the symphony's there. | ||
| Like the San Francisco Symphony. | ||
| Well, there's a video of it. | ||
| Pull a video of it. | ||
| Alex Jones at Bohemian Grove. | ||
| Because Alex... | ||
| Alex was a few rows behind us, and he was filming it all, like, with a camera that had toppled over 45 degrees in his bag. | ||
| And yeah, he filmed the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, he did it, like, on a sneak tip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did he film as early as, like, the pre-show Lederhosen... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an hour and a half long. | |
| I mean, if I know Alex, yeah. | ||
| If I know Alex, he filmed everything and put everything out. | ||
| See if you can find just some dude in a robe in front of a giant fucking owl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is what it looks like from here. | |
| Yeah, see how it's toppled over sideways? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go full screen, maybe we'll get a better look at it here. | ||
| I'm a few rows in front. | ||
| So then this happens. | ||
| 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! | ||
| It makes noises? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do they have like a speaker system or something? | ||
| Yes, he's the speakers. | ||
| And what you can't see in the video is that there's an orchestra to your left. | ||
| I mean, fuck knows where the guy in the leaf-covered lederhosen's gone at this juncture. | ||
| But he was like basically sitting on a giant redwood tree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's getting sodomized by Nixon and Dick Cheney. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Ronald Reagan's coaching them. | ||
| There's probably about a thousand people in that crowd the other side of the pond. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| When the fireworks go off, you get like a glimpse of how many people there are. | ||
| There's probably a thousand people. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, what are the requirements? | ||
| Like, how do you get in there? | ||
| You get invited. | ||
| I met Harry Shearer who got invited. | ||
| Harry Shearer from The Simpsons? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The voice guy? | ||
| He was the only person who'd been to Bohemian Grove who was willing to talk about it to me, like after we left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And he said he was invited to, these were his words, he said he was invited to Jew the place up. | ||
| Like there weren't enough Jews there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they're doing that for a reason, right? | ||
| They want to create this kind of Masonic, ritualistic milieu for themselves. | ||
| And I think there's a weird psychology going on there. | ||
| Because, I mean, you and me, we wouldn't... | ||
| Well, I mean, I wouldn't. | ||
| You wouldn't. | ||
| No, I wouldn't. | ||
| But I might. | ||
| I would have to be really fucked up to do it. | ||
| I'd have to be under the influence of a lot of different things. | ||
| But the idea behind it, I guess, is that you get closer if you're all doing this ridiculous shit together that somehow or another through tradition or through A ritual that you bond? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| You bond and maybe it gives you a kind of mandate to be in an elite. | ||
| I sometimes wonder whether, like at Skull and Bones 2, it's not just about bonding, but it's also about creating this kind of specialness for yourself. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That gives you a sort of, you know, doesn't make you feel so insecure about the idea that you're a global elitist who's ruling the world. | ||
| Wasn't that a thing about Skull and Bones as well? | ||
| They were saying that part of the ritual, they do like really humiliating shit to each other, and they film it so that they always have this. | ||
| Like the Scientologists. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Allegedly. | ||
| I've heard that, but I don't know if that's true, but I've heard that. | ||
| Well, young Jamie was saying that Tom Cruise might be leaving Scientology. | ||
| Is there any evidence to support this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'll look at Star Magazine. | ||
| Well, that's about as good as it gets, buddy. | ||
| That'll be good. | ||
| Going clear has a lot of power. | ||
| I think it could end the movement. | ||
| Well, it certainly did. | ||
| I mean, it exposed... | ||
| What it all deals with, I think, with this Bohemian Grove thing and... | ||
| Is this sort of cultish mindsets, these weird sort of mindsets where they engage in otherwise preposterous rituals that to the outside are like to us. | ||
| Like we're watching this owl god and a fucking bundle of sticks and burn thee! | ||
| This is so fucking stupid! | ||
| But to those people, it represents this thing they've all kind of agreed to do this goofy shit together. | ||
| And there's some weird power in that. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with that. | ||
| It's definitely there for a reason. | ||
| Well, it exists in so many different cultures. | ||
| That's the weirdest part about it. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Well, there's ritual in the ISIS cans too, right? | ||
| Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's bizarre when people start wearing outfits and engaging in rituals. | ||
| You know, that's a weird aspect of human behavior that seems to be really prevalent. | ||
| It's like it's not like an isolated instance where there's only this you know like if you go to Africa and you see like or Asia or you know you see like these people that have those those Things that extend their neck those little bars those women put like god. | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| Well, it's 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. | ||
| It's almost like every culture has them. | ||
| And the people involved... | ||
| By the way, when my book then came out, the Bohemian Club made a statement, I remember, about my book. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| 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. | ||
| They wrote that letter to Esquire magazine. | ||
| By the way, it could definitely be more innocent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, look... | |
| The Mickey Mouse Parade at Disneyland is also an overblown pageant. | ||
| That could not be more innocent. | ||
| That's literally as innocent as things get. | ||
| The Bohemian Grove could be way more innocent. | ||
| You're burning someone. | ||
| And you're saying, I burn thee, and then you have screams that play out over a loudspeaker. | ||
| That's not innocent. | ||
| That's wacky as fuck. | ||
| It's hard to just, just stating the facts, it would be really hard to soften that up. | ||
| Saying that you have an over-sensationalized version of it, that's not possible. | ||
| It's really sensational. | ||
| Although saying that... | ||
| I definitely had some truck. | ||
| This is why me and Alex fell out, because I felt what we saw was bizarre enough without having to put a spin on it. | ||
| What was Alex's spin? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, who knows what that conversation was about? | ||
| You take something out of context like that. | ||
| It could have been a total, complete joke. | ||
| Yeah, it could have been elected to, like, the local shrines. | ||
| It could have been anything. | ||
| It could have been the Boy Scouts. | ||
| I mean, who knows what the fuck they were talking about. | ||
| Alex is one of those jump-to-conclusions, confirmation-biased characters that oftentimes has some really fascinating information. | ||
| And there's much I admire about Alex. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| He's a friend. | ||
| He's a good friend. | ||
| He's an extraordinary broadcaster. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| He's crazy. | ||
| He's my friend. | ||
| I'll tell you right now. | ||
| He's out of his fucking mind. | ||
| But he's right a lot of the time. | ||
| I mean, one of the best pieces of work that Alex did was 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. | ||
| Someone did, somehow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, you know, at first I was really super skeptical, because I was like, that sounds like nonsense. | ||
| But then the more you peel away, the more you realize, well, this is something that they've always done. | ||
| It's like a standard... | ||
| Look, if you've got a bunch of people that are protesting and they're ruining your elite globalist fun, 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. | ||
| He's got this idea in his head. | ||
| They want to kill everyone with 500,000 people. | ||
| These really grandiose things he says like that. | ||
| Do you think he really believes them? | ||
| Or do you think he's trying to make something that's so huge that everyone's going to draw themselves towards him? | ||
| He's not a liar. | ||
| He might... | ||
| Go further with things than I would. | ||
| You know, he might not have rational conclusions. | ||
| He might approach things with confirmation bias. | ||
| But when you spend five hours a day on the fucking radio or whatever he does, just going over wacky theories and selling gold. | ||
| Gold and bonds and dried foods. | ||
| They got dried food. | ||
| Keep the dried food in your basement. | ||
| After a while, I think you lose your fucking mind. | ||
| If you work at a strip club, you get sick of hookers. | ||
| You get sick of working with strippers. | ||
| If you're selling drugs all day, the last thing you want to do is take drugs. | ||
| I think Alex is inundated with conspiracy. | ||
| He's overwhelmed. | ||
| He probably can't see the forest for the trees. | ||
| It's just all chaos to him. | ||
| Everybody's in on it. | ||
| The global elite, people are turning into reptiles, left and right, burning owls, babies, whatever they can. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to ask. | ||
| I love the guy, though. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| I love hanging out with him. | ||
| He's a lot of fun. | ||
| We got on better again, as I said, after The Men of Stay at Coats came out, because he really liked that book. | ||
| And then he had me on his show, and then all of his listeners said I was a shill for the New World Order. | ||
| I think I'm a shill, too, sometimes they say that. | ||
| Depends on what I say. | ||
| When I was talking about chemtrails, then they got really mad at me. | ||
| Joe Rogan's a shill! | ||
| I debunked chemtrails. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Didn't even debunk. | ||
| I just, fucking science. | ||
| I mean, it's like real simple science behind what happens when a jet engine passes through condensation in the atmosphere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's like it's been, they've known about it for fucking ever. | ||
| This idea that they're spraying clouds, like what the fuck? | ||
| 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. | ||
| See, I don't see myself as a debunker because I think... | ||
| Yeah, what I saw at Behavement Grove, for instance, was really, it was odd. | ||
| There was a kind of intensity there, which I believe is very different to what Alex felt was going on, but it was still odd. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's undeniably odd, right? | ||
| I mean, it is odd. | ||
| Yeah, and rituals exist for a reason. | ||
| What reason is that, though? | ||
| I mean, I don't know for certain, but I would say it's this idea... | ||
| You know, we love to... | ||
| This is a bit of a non-sequitur, but my most recent book is this book about public shaming called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's also about having an excuse to be a real asshole. | ||
| Real asshole. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, what you're really hot about. | ||
| What you really like, yeah. | ||
| And I just wonder whether there's some kind of connection between... | ||
| It's about, you know, between that and about the rituals that you find in places like Bohemian Grove. | ||
| And maybe the connection is that it's all about tricking yourself into believing that you can do evil shit. | ||
| So like when you give yourself like a ritual at Skull and Bones or Bohemian Grove, that makes you feel, oh, I'm separate and different and better. | ||
| And that gives me a mandate to rule the world. | ||
| I can inflict this carnage on other people because I'm different to them 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. | ||
| Maybe that's the connection. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very good point. | |
| So some nice liberal person who tells a joke that comes out badly is treated with a similar level of ferocity. | ||
| It's like a racist cop from the McKinney, Texas video. | ||
| Well, that's a very good way of putting it. | ||
| I think most people are not living life even. | ||
| They're going through life with a deficit. | ||
| And they started out with this deficit by having a bunch of fucking shitty experiences when they were children. | ||
| They're shitty parents and bad time in school and maybe they've been picked on and maybe their job sucks or maybe they have unfulfilled sexual expectations, whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| Most people are going into any situation with a headwind or a tailwind, I guess it is, when someone's something behind you. | ||
| Tailwind, right? | ||
| Tailwind, right? | ||
| Headwind as you're trying. | ||
| There's push behind them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All of it is on John Ronson's shitty tweet. | ||
| I wish you stopped using me as the kind of generic. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'll use someone else. | ||
| What should he tweet? | ||
| But I've experienced it before. | ||
| I've experienced it, but I found it adorable. | ||
| I would retweet people and stuff when they did it to me. | ||
| Well, I noticed because after my public shaming book came out, obviously, there was a lot of pushback and a lot of people went for me. | ||
| And I always really liked it. | ||
| When people went for me in a kind of ridiculous way, because then I could retweet that one and it would make me look good. | ||
| And it was one of my favourite ones was, all these people started going for me. | ||
| And one person wrote, and I just stayed completely silent. | ||
| And one person wrote, why isn't John Rodson applying to any of us? | ||
| And somebody else wrote, because John Rodson only applies to men. | ||
| And I'm like, fuck. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Yeah, I'm like, honestly, I'm part of some kind of... | ||
| Well, what were they upset at you for? | ||
| Well, okay, well, in that particular instance, it all started with Justine Sacco. | ||
| I wrote, there's a chapter in my book that defends Justine Sacco, who's the AIDS tweet woman, do you remember? | ||
| Right. | ||
| On the plane. | ||
| Listen, man, that lady is probably on Xanax and wine, and she said something that she thought was funny, that would be funny if she was your friend. | ||
| And would be funny if she... | ||
| If she was my friend and she sent that to me in a text message, I would fucking laugh. | ||
| You know, I'm going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. LOL, just kidding, I'm white. | ||
| Yeah, and then the worst thing, then she gets on the plane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's funny. | |
| Yeah, she gets on the plane, turns off her phone, and while she's asleep, is like just torn to shreds. | ||
| For 16 hours. | ||
| Yeah, hundreds of thousands of people. | ||
| And one of the most extraordinary things about it is that her inability to explain herself became part of the hilarity. | ||
| That was the tailwind. | ||
| Like, oh my God, we know something she doesn't. | ||
| One person tweeted, we're about to watch this Justine Sacco bitch get fired in real time before she even knows she's being fired. | ||
| And I just can't think of anything more unjust than that. | ||
| So I wrote this really passionate, you know, It was polemic defending her, I think, that, you know, we had gone crazy. | ||
| We'd lost our minds in this. | ||
| It was the most injudicial thing you could possibly think of. | ||
| And a lot of people, as you can imagine, kind of really objected to that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But it's because they have the green light to object. | ||
| I mean, it's not that you're not saying something reasonable. | ||
| I thought it was one of the most important stories I ever did, because 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. | ||
| And the pushback is ferocious. | ||
| Well, because the pushback is from the very people who enjoyed abusing this power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Unless people flee. | ||
| Flee? | ||
| Yeah, a couple of years ago, my friend Adam Curtis. | ||
| Flip phones, live in the desert. | ||
| Cut your own wood in the forest. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| My friend Adam Curtis said to me, who you'd love, by the way, if you don't know his stuff. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Oh, God, you'd love him. | ||
| He made The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self, these great BBC documentaries. | ||
| Oh, I've seen that. | ||
| I've seen The Century of the Self. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're probably not the nicest folks to be with. | ||
| Yeah, or maybe they are, and just the internet is turning us into, you know, these unempathetic, psychopathic figures. | ||
| I mean, you know, maybe if I met them in real life, they'd be sweet. | ||
| Well, you wouldn't know them, first of all, based on their tweets, because a tweet is one of the worst representations of you. | ||
| Yeah, it has to be kind of exciting. | ||
| Extreme. | ||
| 140 characters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, sometimes it can be poignant, sometimes it can be funny, but, like, to sum you up from... | ||
| First of all, to sum you up by your writing is difficult enough as it is when you're writing chapters and paragraphs without any back and forth. | ||
| It's hard, because I don't think we are just who we are as an individual. | ||
| I think we are who we are based on who we're interacting with and how that works out. | ||
| Like, that's who you really are. | ||
| That's one of the things that's so important about choosing your friends. | ||
| Because your friends aren't just someone you enjoy. | ||
| They kind of help define you. | ||
| And when you have a bunch of really good friends, and you communicate with them well, and you get a lot out of it, Change is who you are. | ||
| You become a better person. | ||
| You can become a better person in a really good relationship. | ||
| And you can become an awful person in a bad relationship. | ||
| You know, I've been in bad relationships before where I didn't like me. | ||
| I'm like, this person hates me. | ||
| I don't even like me anymore. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| And it's because we like to think of ourselves as completely autonomous. | ||
| But I don't think that's real. | ||
| I don't think there's anybody that's really autonomous. | ||
| I think we all need human beings, and we all cherish human interaction. | ||
| As much as you want privacy, you don't want it all the time. | ||
| I mean, if you had to choose between no privacy or no people, I would take no privacy every time. | ||
| I like people. | ||
| People are great. | ||
| You know, I don't want to be bothered all the time, and that's when people think the woods seem like a great idea. | ||
| I'm just going to go Unabomber and just fucking live in the woods. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you don't want to do that. | |
| Like, we literally are a superorganism. | ||
| We are not like one individual experiencing the universe solely on our own. | ||
| We're all constantly interacting with each other. | ||
| Yeah, which I think is part of the reason why... | ||
| Social media public shamings are so fucking traumatizing to somebody on the receiving end of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| Well, this mob mentality has existed throughout history. | ||
| I mean, when you go back to the punishing of the witches in Salem or, you know, what they do in Africa. | ||
| Have you ever seen these witchcraft accusation things in Africa where one person will... | ||
| Tell someone that someone's a witch and then everybody else in the tribe believes it and they're burning people alive. | ||
| These are really disturbing videos. | ||
| But it's like this pile on where I think part of what's going on is there's a real fear that that same thing could happen to them. | ||
| And so they lash out at that one person with real commitment so that they're inexorably a part of the group. | ||
| They're in that group. | ||
| Yes, they're safe for that day. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that person got a fucking... | ||
| Total free pass that night. | ||
| Imagine the mindset of someone to think that the best way to respond to someone's inappropriate joke is to rape them and give them an incurable deadly disease. | ||
| And they feel totally justified doing it. | ||
| And Justine was asleep on a fucking plane. | ||
| And everyone knew that, and that's why everyone loved it so much. | ||
| Well, didn't she write a bunch of other ridiculous tweets? | ||
| That was what she did. | ||
| She was trying to be funny. | ||
| Well, she wasn't a great tweeter. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there was a few. | ||
| The one was, I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night. | ||
| And then there was something about, you know, it's just stupid shit. | ||
| I bet she's fun to drink with. | ||
| Yeah, well, I had a couple of drinks. | ||
| She wasn't fun the first time because she was so fucking crushed. | ||
| I met her just a couple of weeks later. | ||
| I probably took years off of her life, right? | ||
| Jesus, poor Justin. | ||
| The second time was she okay? | ||
| Better the second time. | ||
| And it took her a year. | ||
| It was a year. | ||
| A year to recover. | ||
| Yeah, she was basically fucked and in the wilderness for a year. | ||
| You know, I noticed actually after my book came out, one of the pushbacks was like, well, you know, Justine Sack is fine now. | ||
| You know, she was only like unemployed and, you know, deeply traumatized for a year. | ||
| And I'm like, for one fucking joke that lands badly, a year, you know? | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that joke was representative of the hardest part... | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| This is what we fucking do. | ||
| And it's such a lie. | ||
| It's like we're all these fucking Miss Marples. | ||
| We're all these amateur sleuths on social media thinking that we can spot somebody's true inner evil through a little bit of phraseology. | ||
| That's what happened to Trevor Noah. | ||
| And it just happens over and over. | ||
| And it's happened to Amy Schumer. | ||
| And it just happens over and over and over again. | ||
| Yeah, but with Amy Schumer and Trevor Noah, though, they're stand-ups. | ||
| And especially Amy. | ||
| Amy doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| I bet she gives a bit more of a fuck than... | ||
| I just think everybody who's at the receiving end of that... | ||
| She does, but it gives her an up. | ||
| 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've heard her a few times on your podcast, by the way. | ||
| She hasn't done it in a little while, right? | ||
| She's got her show. | ||
| I haven't talked to her in forever. | ||
| She's busy as fuck. | ||
| She's got that movie coming out. | ||
| But she's very smart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's very smart. | ||
| So she would welcome any opportunity to defend anything like that. | ||
| She doesn't take herself like ridiculously seriously or anything like that. | ||
| She's a very smart girl. | ||
| But I think as a really... | ||
| Woman. | ||
| Wouldn't want her for calling me a boy. | ||
| I think there's like a serious change going on in the way that human beings act towards each other. | ||
| Do you like it? | ||
| No, I think it's really bad. | ||
| It's stressful. | ||
| Who would have thought... | ||
| The publicly shaming part. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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... | ||
| A surveillance society. | ||
| And colleges are where people first start exercising that muscle. | ||
| And it's the most rabid version of this issue today. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why a lot of comedians won't perform in colleges anymore. | ||
| Jerry Seinfeld just got a hard time from a bunch of people because he said that colleges are too politically correct. | ||
| And Chris Rock is saying the same thing. | ||
| And I stopped doing colleges a long fucking time ago for the very same reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I did a college once, and this is a perfect example of it. | ||
| But this is a guy, this example is perfect because this is before the internet, and this was a guy that I actually talked to face-to-face. | ||
| Like, someone said, you know, like, I would do colleges and I'd fly into these towns. | ||
| And, you know, they're bored. | ||
| So, like, I tell my jokes and then sometimes I do like a Q&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 everybody's boring. | ||
| And that's not the answer. | ||
| It's not the answer. | ||
| I think this is, I mean, this is all the reason why I'm so happy to have done the Justine Sacco story in my book. | ||
| Because, and I had so much pushback. | ||
| And each time I get pushback, I feel more and more happy that I did it. | ||
| Like, I remember I gave a talk in Norwich. | ||
| One of the first talks I gave was in Norwich, in England. | ||
| And somebody in the Q&A, somebody said to me, somebody called out, are you a racist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I was like, because I defended Justine. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And then... | ||
| But isn't that one person? | ||
| You're just dealing with really simple thinking. | ||
| That's just not a nuanced, objective, well thought out view of a human being. | ||
| What they're doing is looking for an opportunity to call you out on something. | ||
| Looking for an opportunity to 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because she wasn't even intending to be racist. | ||
| She was trying to make a liberal. | ||
| She was trying to be like Cart. | ||
| She was trying to be like Trey Parker and Matt Stone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This isn't someone who's going after a cop that shot a kid with a fake pistol or anything. | ||
| You know, this is... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And this is the real problem. | ||
| And the inability to distinguish between the serious transgression and the unserious transgression. | ||
| And what it's creating is a kind of surveillance society. | ||
| It's creating a kind of stasi where everybody's more fearful, everyone's scared to say things. | ||
| The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. | ||
| And now people are fleeing social media because they're realising that the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. | ||
| See, I don't think that's true. | ||
| I don't think they are fleeing. | ||
| I think they're jumping on droves. | ||
| I think some people are jumping off, but I think that what you said, the great thing about it is it gives a voice to people. | ||
| It's also the terrible thing about it. | ||
| But I think what this is, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Holy shit. | ||
| Fuck, that is unbelievable, right? | ||
| Fucking unbelievable. | ||
| And when you read that paragraph, you think to yourself, oh my god, you know, When we have that world for ourselves, what an amazing world it will be. | ||
| It will be a world of curiosity, it will be a world of understanding strangers, of nuance, of context. | ||
| And so we have the world, and we completely throw away curiosity, we throw away nuance, we throw away context, and what we have instead is condemnation. | ||
| Well, with dummies, but not with everybody. | ||
| Look, I'm way more informed now than I ever would have been if I had grown up in the 1960s. | ||
| Like, if I had grown up in the 1960s and I was a 47-year-old man in 1967, I wouldn't know jack shit. | ||
| I would be an ape. | ||
| I mean, that is true. | ||
| But I do fear, you know, I mean, I do fear that, you know, maybe there's two types of people in the world. | ||
| Those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. | ||
| And right now, the ideologues are winning on social media. | ||
| You know, I don't think they are. | ||
| I think, no, I just think they're making more noise. | ||
| And I think that it's really a matter of who those ideological people are surrounding themselves with. | ||
| I think they can be swayed into a more understanding nature. | ||
| And we can decide. | ||
| This is what somebody wrote about my book, which I really agreed with. | ||
| Somebody wrote, you know, we can decide who to listen to. | ||
| With Justine Sacco, the problem was that the bullies won. | ||
| Everyone was too scared to defend Justine. | ||
| Nobody defended Justine that night. | ||
| Except you, you brave bastard. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Yeah, well, a woman called Helen Lewis, who writes for The New Statesman, wrote a review of my public shaming book. | ||
| She said that she tried to defend Justine that night. | ||
| She wrote, I'm not sure the joke was intended to be racist. | ||
| And straight away, she got this fury of, well, you're just a privileged bitch too. | ||
| So she said to her, to her shame, she shut up. | ||
| And that's what happened that night. | ||
| Like, everybody shut up. | ||
| And it wasn't just on social media, like the mainstream media all got involved. | ||
| It was like, you know, and that became like the dominant narrative about Justine Sacco was that she was just kind of racist. | ||
| And anybody who tried to stick up for her just got screamed down. | ||
| Well, defending her, in defending her, I would say she's probably a little racist. | ||
| You can't really think like that, that it's okay to say that if you're not a little racist. | ||
| But in cracking that joke and saying something like that, which is unquestionably a racist joke, just kidding, I'm white, lol, right? | ||
| That's fucking racist. | ||
| Do you think that's racist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course it is. | |
| For me, it's like a bad Randy Newman song. | ||
| I mean, Randy Newman sang... | ||
| Short people. | ||
| Short people got no reason to live. | ||
| Like... | ||
| But he also said, I love LA. Is that tongue in cheek as well? | ||
| Yeah, it is tongue in cheek because he sings, look at those mountains, look at those trees, look at that bum over there, man. | ||
| He's down on his knees. | ||
| You know, so what Randy Newman will do is that he will acknowledge his own privilege and then do a kind of grotesque, extreme version of it for comedy. | ||
| He does that in short, people who does it in Isle of 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| I see your point. | ||
| It's hard to argue that it couldn't possibly offend people. | ||
| But the idea that she knew she was broadcasting it to all those people that were offended... | ||
| I think people just don't understand what the fuck is going on when they say things online. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And she said, I had 170 Twitter followers. | ||
| Nobody ever replied to anyone. | ||
| So she was using it like as a, she's like yelling into an empty room. | ||
| Yeah, no one ever replied to anyone for jokes. | ||
| She probably got unreasonably cocky because of that. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| And she got on a plane, and so she's probably on Xanax and drinking, which is what a lot of people do when they get on planes. | ||
| That's like a fucking, this lady was explaining to me that that's, she was like, she was bragging about it. | ||
| Like, give me a glass of wine on Xanax. | ||
| And I don't give a fuck about anything. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| And I was like, I wonder how many people take Xanax and get on planes? | ||
| And apparently, talking to people that take Xanax, it's super common. | ||
| They get anxiety, they're going to get on a long plane, and also sleeping pills. | ||
| People take a lot of sleeping pills when they get on planes. | ||
| Speaking of Xanax... | ||
| I was, it's when all of this was happening to me, like when the New York Times, you know, extract came out and it was just so noisy. | ||
| It was one of my noisiest stories ever. | ||
| And the book came out and it was incredibly noisy. | ||
| And I went to the studio to do this video, like talking about my book. | ||
| And the woman on before me was a doctor and she was doing a video about her book. | ||
| And she said, what's your book about? | ||
| And I said, public shaming. | ||
| She said, oh, did you read the piece in the New York Times about Justin Sacco? | ||
| And I said, I wrote it. | ||
| And she said, oh, wow, God, you must be so happy. | ||
| And I said, actually, I'm not happy. | ||
| And she said, why aren't you happy? | ||
| And I said, because there's so much noise. | ||
| And then she said, so what do you want? | ||
| And I said, Xanax. | ||
| And she just got out. | ||
| She got her pad and wrote me a prescription for like 60 Xanax, of which, by the way, I've had one and a half. | ||
| I don't abuse my Xanax, but I thought, fuck, it's easy to get medication. | ||
| It's very easy to get medication in the United States if you go to the right doctors, meaning go to any doctor. | ||
| But then I thought, fuck! | ||
| Did you take it? | ||
| I took like a half. | ||
| And what was it like? | ||
| That made me feel a bit... | ||
| I was no longer anxious. | ||
| But I felt groggy, and then I had to weigh up, what would I rather feel, groggy or anxious? | ||
| Welcome to America, that's our dilemma. | ||
| Groggy or anxious? | ||
| Groggy, anxious, caffeinated, or on Adderall. | ||
| But then I thought, God, like, when she said to me, what do you want? | ||
| Like, all I could think of to say was Xanax, but then did I miss, like, an amazing opportunity? | ||
| Like, I don't know anything. | ||
| I don't know anything, but, you know, were there, like, much, like, way better things than Xanax, I could have asked? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's weird. | ||
| I don't do it anymore. | ||
| I do not pile in on anybody anymore. | ||
| Even people who deserve it, I tend not to pile in on anymore. | ||
| I'll tell you where I think it all comes from. | ||
| In my book, for me anyway, in my book, The Psychopath Test, I'm really critical of 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. | ||
| I've been really toying with this very strange idea lately. | ||
| I had this conversation with my good friend Duncan Trussell, and we were talking about labels. | ||
| And self-definition and the sort of imprisonment of definition. | ||
| And I said, well, even words, like names for people. | ||
| Like, my name is Tom, you know, fuckhead, you know, whatever. | ||
| And as Tom, you know, you're a Whitmore. | ||
| And as a Whitmore, you know, you're supposed to stand for something in this world. | ||
| We're Ronsons! | ||
| Yeah, we're Ronsons, goddammit. | ||
| You're a Rogan. | ||
| Steffin' up, boy! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think these ideas of, like, having a name, like a label, like, you're Coca-Cola, you know, you're Jamie Vernon, you know, there's this... | ||
| I think having, instead of just being you, like, having names, even names themselves, like, you'd say, oh, well... | ||
| You know, what do you expect? | ||
| It's that fucking John Ronson guy. | ||
| You know, like all of a sudden you can be boxed in and defined. | ||
| You're not just a human being who is sort of like existing with these other human beings. | ||
| You're a labeled human being. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that label can be great. | ||
| You know, you can be the Dalai Lama or that label can be shit. | ||
| You could be Donald Trump, you know, and you're right now. | ||
| Donald Trump is an easy pile on. | ||
| Everybody will jump on him. | ||
| He said a bunch of racist things about Mexicans and a bunch of dumb shit during his speech announcing he's 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
New news right now that's came out. | |
| He admitted to it in 2005 in court. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll show you the little article. | |
| Oh, this just happened just now. | ||
| Oh, it just happened? | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| He admitted in a 2005 deposition that he obtained quaaludes, a sedative, with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with. | ||
| According to records obtained by the Associated Press on Monday. | ||
| The admission was contained in records that were unsealed after the AP went to court to compel their release. | ||
| Cosby's attorneys had repeatedly sought to keep the records sealed, arguing that they would be embarrassing. | ||
| This was a case that Cosby paid a woman off, and then because he had paid her off, part of the deal, part of the arrangement was that the records were to be sealed. | ||
| So they went to court and wow, he's fucked now. | ||
| Gave her like three and a half Benadryl or something. | ||
| That's another thing I was reading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God, what a monster. | |
| What's the statute of limitations and all of this stuff? | ||
| It's a very good question. | ||
| I think he can be... | ||
| Well, 2005, I can't imagine the statute of limitations is... | ||
| Well, if that's 2005, that's when he admitted it, but when was the actual instance? | ||
| That's monster shit. | ||
| That's really... | ||
| That's dehumanizing shit. | ||
| I think... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like Bohemian Grove. | ||
| I think it's related in a way to the idea of labeling. | ||
| Labeling and, you know, that's not a human being. | ||
| That's a police officer. | ||
| Officer Johnson, you know, you refer to the judge as your honor. | ||
| You know, you can't go, hey man, you know, I know you're reading off a book, but don't lock me in a fucking cage because I had a joint. | ||
| Order in the court! | ||
| You will refer to him as your honor. | ||
| You know, I mean like that all that stuff the fucking when they used to wear crazy wigs and outfits What are they doing there? | ||
| Well, they're separating themselves. | ||
| They're differentiating themselves and they're labeling though. | ||
| They're they're putting themselves in a very distinctive position and Labelling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Labels close doors. | ||
| Questions open doors. | ||
| Well, they certainly define in, like, a very concrete way. | ||
| This is what I felt, you know, I felt most out of step lately with the whole Rachel Dolezal thing. | ||
| Because when I heard that story, I just thought that is so mysterious and complicated and nuanced. | ||
| And, you know, maybe she's mentally ill or maybe she's not. | ||
| Whatever's going on here, this is like really fucking mysterious and interesting. | ||
| And I had like a thousand questions. | ||
| And so I went on Twitter expecting that that would be Twitter's response too. | ||
| They'd have like a thousand questions. | ||
| But no, people were either like ridiculing her or attacking her, like yelling blackface or whatever. | ||
| Oh, but there's plenty of people supporting her position as being transracial. | ||
| Those are my favorite. | ||
| Those people are adorable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I just thought, fucking hell, I can't... | ||
| You know what I thought? | ||
| I thought, I've been a journalist for 30 years and I'm sick... | ||
| I don't know where to go with this, but I thought I'm really sick of, like, damaged people being other people's playthings. | ||
| Either ideological playthings or playthings for mockery or whatever. | ||
| And obviously there's nothing wrong with comedy and satire and mockery. | ||
| I mean, that's fine. | ||
| But nonetheless... | ||
| So glad to say that. | ||
| But nonetheless, I'm just sort of sick of... | ||
| Cruelty. | ||
| Yeah, of making other human beings up playthings instead of, you know, for whatever reasons, instead of like curiosity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He can get people's freedom taken away. | ||
| Yeah, you're punching up and you're being funny and there's nothing, you know, I'd be 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. | ||
| Well, it's bullying. | ||
| Yeah, it's bullying. | ||
| Piling on. | ||
| I mean, it's also having a lack of There's a lack of perspective that comes with a lot of these pile-on bullying things like the, what's the woman's name again, Sako? | ||
| Justine, yeah. | ||
| The Rachel Dolezal thing, first of all, she handled herself very well on Matt Lauer. | ||
| Yeah, I should say, by the way, that me sort of saying all of that stuff on Twitter was right at the beginning before she'd said anything. | ||
| I was like, say, look, we don't know anything about this woman, you know. | ||
| We don't know anything. | ||
| Like, everyone's jumping to conclusions. | ||
| Nobody knows anything. | ||
| And I was just like, kind of screamed at for that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| She had some other issues, though, that were exposed as time went on. | ||
| And one of them is she's a plagiarist. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She plagiarized some art. | ||
| She was selling some art that she clearly plagiarized. | ||
| And she's just deceptive. | ||
| She lied about her background. | ||
| She said she was born in a teepee. | ||
| She's just not a truthful person. | ||
| And sometimes when people don't enjoy their life... | ||
| You know, I've met a lot of kids when I was young that, you know, came from really fucked up backgrounds. | ||
| And those are the ones that told, like, the really big lies. | ||
| And I think that a lot of those lies were because they didn't like their reality, you know? | ||
| And that's... | ||
| They didn't ask to be born. | ||
| And with people like that, you know, there's a mystery, right? | ||
| With people like that, you're like, so what happened? | ||
| Why do you feel that way? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Whereas with the Rachel Dollar Show, like, the minute this breaks on social media, everyone's just like, you know, fucking racist. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| There's no questions. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I had people tweeting me to say, you know, you're a white man. | ||
| This isn't your story. | ||
| That's hilarious, isn't it? | ||
| You're not allowed to have an opinion because you weren't born with the right amount of melanin in your skin. | ||
| So your mind is not working right. | ||
| Well, they said this is your story. | ||
| You can't comment on this because this isn't your story. | ||
| That's bullshit. | ||
| Well, I felt it kind of was my story because for 30 years I've been writing about troubled people and I've come to conclusions about the way you should regard other people, other human beings, with sort of interest and curiosity and compassion, not cold, hard... | ||
| Judgment. | ||
| So that's where I came from in that story. | ||
| It's also 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. | ||
| And you know, exactly what that is the opposite of, of course, is democracy. | ||
| I mean, I was reading people, I went off social media after all of that, because there was so much screaming. | ||
| And I was reading people basically saying, okay, let's goad John Ronson into saying something outrageous, and then we can get him. | ||
| Is that what they said? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why would they say that, though? | ||
| You know why they'd say that? | ||
| It's because the young have decided, for some mystifying reason, to create an incredibly stressful world for themselves. | ||
| I don't think they realize what they're doing. | ||
| But the Rachel Dolezal thing was, to me, it was a perfect example of how ludicrous human beings are, how ridiculous our society is, and how this woman is like, first of all, The NAACP was founded by white people. | ||
| It's something a lot of people don't know. | ||
| And black folks weren't even allowed to hold office until the 1970s. | ||
| Well, like the con club. | ||
| Yeah, in a lot of ways. | ||
| Well, it was actually founded by New York City intellectuals, I believe. | ||
| I hope I'm not doing this wrong. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And now we're thinking about it. | ||
| For the record, by the way, I was always disappointed when the Dukes of Hazzard was on TV. Because of the flag? | ||
| No, just because it wasn't as good as Wonder Woman. | ||
| But I realize this is a kind of tangent. | ||
| But what about Daisy Duke? | ||
| Well, Wonder Woman was pretty fucking hot too, right? | ||
| I spent a lot of time with the Ku Klux Klan, you know, for my book Them. | ||
| I discovered this politically correct faction of the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| Yes. | ||
| Run by a guy called Tom Robb, who decided that the Klan had a really bad image, and he was going to do something about it. | ||
| Was this recently? | ||
| No, this is like the mid-90s. | ||
| I read about it in my book Them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Is he back in the news? | ||
| No, there's another group, another faction of the Ku Klux Klan that was allowing black people, and they wanted to allow black people in. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Well, that is the kind of thing that Tom would have done. | ||
| In fact, Tom was accused by other white supremacists of kissing a black baby. | ||
| And he had to kind of deny it. | ||
| He had to issue a denial. | ||
| I didn't kiss no black baby. | ||
| Look at my lips. | ||
| I went to Tom's house and he directed. | ||
| So he banned. | ||
| I went for his big annual convention and he banned, like, the robes and the hoods. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| They were allowed to wear robes one day a year. | ||
| It's Christmas. | ||
| Yeah, and they were allowed to burn a cross one day a year. | ||
| Oh my God! | ||
| Yeah, and it was the day that I turned up, and they were all standing around this giant cross that's lying on the ground, and they couldn't remember because they were all so rusty. | ||
| They couldn't remember whether to soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| So they're all starting around. | ||
| And then Tom comes over and they go, Tom, do we soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it? | ||
| And Tom goes, you soak it and then raise it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How the hell are you going to soak it once it's raised? | |
| I know. | ||
| Then Tom looks at me as if to say, I'm so sorry that my members are such idiots. | ||
| Like Tom preferred me to the clown. | ||
| Oh my god, that's adorable! | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he thought it was warrior. | ||
| And it was worrier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, who says worrier? | ||
| Are you a worrier? | ||
| Like, no one really says that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The English. | |
| The English do? | ||
| Yeah, I, as an Englishman, I'm a worrier. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I could see someone saying, I'm a worrier, but I couldn't see it as a question, are you a worrier? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would think the question would be a little bit more straightforward, like, do you worry a lot? | ||
| I've got to say, in a kind of generic multiple choice question and answer thing, worrier would be like an odd one to have in there. | ||
| Are you a warrior? | ||
| Yes, sir, I am. | ||
| I'm a warrior for the white race. | ||
| Well, I'm not. | ||
| I would call myself a warrior. | ||
| Now, what is the reason why they burn the cross? | ||
| It's a cross. | ||
| They call it a cross lighting, not a cross burning. | ||
| It's a glass half full sort of a thing. | ||
| I think it goes back to the Scottish, I believe. | ||
| It's all to do with, like... | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| They told me. | ||
| You know what it's like being a journalist? | ||
| Like, you know everything for a short amount of time, and then you move on to the next story. | ||
| You write your story. | ||
| You fucking forget it all. | ||
| I've got a terrible memory anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've lost it. | |
| It's like being a podcaster, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We've talked about things, you know, we've done 667 episodes now. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Am I the 667? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who did you have for the 666? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You missed evil. | |
| Duncan Trussell. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| Actually, I don't know who he is. | ||
| He's pretty fake evil. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fake evil. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he could play evil. | ||
| One time I was on a road trip with the Klan from Harrison, Arkansas to St. Paul. | ||
| Long journey, like 17 hours. | ||
| I was in a car for 17 hours with the Klan. | ||
| And at one point Tom turned to me, the leader, and he said, can I ask you a question? | ||
| And I said, what? | ||
| And he said, do you think I'm weird? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was like, I think you're in a transitional phase between weird and not weird. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| So you were playing like psychological... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I was in the car with the clown. | ||
| But saying he's in a transitionary period, like, what did you mean by that? | ||
| Well, because he was trying to, you know, trying to do an image makeover, trying to be more politically correct. | ||
| It didn't really turn out. | ||
| Did he feel that black people are inferior to white people? | ||
| Did he really clearly feel that? | ||
| Well, he would probably call himself like a white separatist, but he wasn't, actually. | ||
| I mean, I've met white separatists like Randy Weaver, and they're far nicer people than Tom was. | ||
| Randy Weaver, who's the Ruby Ridge guy, right? | ||
| He's a white separatist. | ||
| I really got on well with the Weavers. | ||
| Got on really well with Rachel, his daughter. | ||
| And that story is a kind of a fucked up story, right? | ||
| Like he was, they had a house alone in the woods and they were killed by snipers, right? | ||
| Yeah, this is a really bad story. | ||
| So they were, this is the first story I ever did where I feel like I kind of twisted it around so that the people who would normally be the villains were the good guys. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was a playtime. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So they moved to this cabin up in the woods on top of a mountain in Idaho, Ruby Creek, Idaho. | ||
| And Randy would hang out at the local Aryan Nations with the family. | ||
| That was his big undoing, was that he would take the family up 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. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| For how much? | ||
| $5. | ||
| He sells himself quite short. | ||
| It's a bargain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Historical figure. | ||
| So one of the people who visited Randy's cabin, I visited Randy's cabin with Rachel, and another person who visited Randy's cabin was Timothy McVeigh shortly before blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. | ||
| Have you ever seen the conspiracy theories on that? | ||
| Yeah, I visited Elohim City, the place which you know about, right? | ||
| The place where, you know, I know I've got a kind of reputation for being a debunker of conspiracies, and the reputation is kind of warranted in most cases. | ||
| But I've got to say, of all the things I investigated when I was doing a lot of stuff about conspiracies, the one Where I thought this is a bit fucking fishy was Oklahoma City, yeah. | ||
| Oh, it's most certainly fishy. | ||
| What's most certainly fishy is the efficacy of that bomb. | ||
| The bomb that they used, the fertilizer bomb that blew half that building apart. | ||
| When you talk to bomb experts, they go, that is like really, really unlikely. | ||
| They said that the amount of damage that a bomb like that that's made out of fertilizer can do is nothing in comparison to what that 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. | ||
| And what was the other guy's name? | ||
| Terry Nichols. | ||
| Terry Nichols, yeah. | ||
| And that it was this fertilizer bomb. | ||
| And remember, there's like, there's all this... | ||
| They were looking for a guy from Iraq, and there was all this, like, different stuff that was going on in the news, like, right after it was over. | ||
| But then they had settled on the story that he had done it, and they had done it all with this fertilizer bomb. | ||
| But it's a weird one, because, I mean, I don't have an answer, and I don't even have a theory. | ||
| Like, who could have done it, or how it was done, or what would have been done. | ||
| Look, all we know is someone blew up that fucking building. | ||
| I mean, if it was just him... | ||
| And Terry Nichols. | ||
| It was just Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. | ||
| That to me is no more crazy than it was a bunch of other people that planted bombs inside the building. | ||
| It's all a heinous act of horror and murder. | ||
| Yeah, the weird thing that we discovered when I was doing the Oklahoma story was this place called Elohim City. | ||
| Have you heard of this place? | ||
| So I visited Elohim City. | ||
| This is like this kind of white separatist-stroke supremacist compound in the Arkansas-Oklahoma borders, in the Ozarks. | ||
| Spooky spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I turned up and they ordered the river dance for me. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd just been chased through Portugal by the Bilderberg Group, and I bonded with them over that. | ||
|
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I told them that I'd just been chased by Bilderberg. | |
| 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. | ||
|
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And he was still smoking? | |
| He died a couple of years ago, but he lasted a fuck of a lot longer than I'd have put money on. | ||
| I mean, I met him in March and I thought he'd be dead by May, but actually he lasted about another 10 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, he only died recently, like a couple of years ago, and this was like 96. So Jim said, he said, 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? | ||
| You might put an English spin on it there. | ||
| But he basically, I'm pretty sure he said he was going to climb up the drain folks. | ||
|
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Covert wickedness. | |
| That sounds like a white supremacist if I ever heard one. | ||
| That's how they talk. | ||
| So we flew there. | ||
| So me and Jim Tucker flew to Portugal and scouted around the Caesar Park Hotel. | ||
| And we decided that our cover story would be like, he'd be like a sales, we'd be salesmen. | ||
| But we didn't look anything like fucking salesmen. | ||
| I was like an early 30s, you know, skinny little Jewish guy and he was like this big southern gentleman. | ||
| So we looked like really fucking suspicious. | ||
| Like a gay couple? | ||
| Yeah, like gay couple. | ||
| I could have been like his toy boy. | ||
| We were like scouting, trying to talk to waitresses and stuff. | ||
| This was the day before the Bilderberg group was reportedly going to arrive at this hotel. | ||
| And then we left. | ||
| And I looked in my rearview mirror and there was a car following me. | ||
| And a chase ensued through the streets of... | ||
| I mean, I say a chase. | ||
| I was going 30 miles an hour, so was he. | ||
| But I kept thinking, fuck, if I speed up, he's going to speed up. | ||
| It's going to be like a fucking chase. | ||
| So it was very obvious it was his fault. | ||
| He wasn't trying to be sneaky. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I stopped the car and he stopped his car like behind me. | ||
| So I thought I've got to say something to him. | ||
| So I went over to the car and I knocked on the window. | ||
| And there's a guy in dark glasses in the car looking straight ahead. | ||
| And I'm knocking on the window and he refuses to look at me. | ||
| Obviously his orders were to follow but don't engage. | ||
| Like I'm suddenly in a world where I am being followed by somebody whose orders are to follow and not engage. | ||
| So I freak the fuck out. | ||
| So I get back in the car and I phone up. | ||
| First I phone up my wife and I say I'm being followed by the Bilderberg group. | ||
| I am fucking terrified. | ||
| And my wife goes, oh, you're loving it. | ||
|
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And I'm like, I'm not. | |
| And then I phoned up the British Embassy and I phoned up the British Embassy and I said, I'm being followed by the Bilderberg Group. | ||
| And then the woman from the British Embassy goes, and then she goes, go on. | ||
|
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And I'm like... | |
| I just heard you take a sharp breath. | ||
| And then she says, do they know you're here? | ||
| I mean, what are you doing here? | ||
| And I said, I'm essentially a humorous journalist out of my depth. | ||
| Can you foam what I also said to her to my shame? | ||
| I didn't put this in my book. | ||
| I wrote about all of this in my book then. | ||
| What I didn't say, what I didn't put in my book was that I also said to her, I said, I'm a humorous journalist out of my depth. | ||
| I'm a bit like Louis Theroux. | ||
| And she's like, oh, like she's heard of him and not me. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, but actually Louis often cites me as an inspiration. | ||
| I swear to God, this is like my last day on earth. | ||
| I'm about to be killed by the Bilderberg group. | ||
| And I'm telling the press officer for the British Embassy in Portugal that Louis actually speaks highly of me. | ||
| And so then she says, this is like the most startling thing that happened that day. | ||
| She said, well, the good news is if you know you're being followed, they're probably just trying to intimidate you. | ||
| And the dangerous ones would be those you don't know are following you. | ||
| And I'm thinking, first, how the fuck does the press officer at the British Embassy know this? | ||
| And B, what if these people are the dangerous ones? | ||
| And I just happen to be, like, naturally good at spotting them. | ||
| Like, I'm an anxious person. | ||
| I will spot. | ||
| Like, I suffer from anxiety. | ||
| Like, I will spot if somebody's following me. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So anyway, so then I go back to my hotel... | ||
| And the woman from the British Embassy phones me back and says that she's spoken to the Bilderberg group and they've said that nobody is following me. | ||
|
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Of course! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm like, he's behind the tree. | ||
| Like I'm by the pool, I'm going, he's standing behind the tree. | ||
| And she goes, well, look, just sit tight. | ||
| I'm sure it's 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. | ||
| LAUGHTER What does a Bilderberger smell like? | ||
| Yeah, like power. | ||
| And their henchmen smell like badly paid power. | ||
| Anyway, that was basically it. | ||
| But the next day... | ||
| We went back to the hotel and stood at the bottom and watched all of these people driving up the drive. | ||
| Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yeah, and they all really did turn up. | ||
| Vernon Jordan, who was Bill Clinton's man behind, you know, like Bill Clinton's man in the background. | ||
| Lots of people in the background. | ||
| Is there an official explanation for the Bilderberg Group? | ||
| Yeah, well, much later on, like after all of this happened, I managed to interview three members of the Bilderberg Group, including the Secretary General, and including one of their founding fathers, who 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. | ||
| If you buy that, John Ronson, I got a bridge to sell you in Portugal. | ||
| Well, I think that was where they came from. | ||
| But of course, what they didn't account for, or maybe did account for it and didn't give a shit, was that CEOs would be just as fucking evil and malicious and ideological in their own way as politicians. | ||
| And so that's why Bilderberg... | ||
| It became this kind of more nefarious thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think if there's ever going to be one antidote for power, it's information. | ||
| It's being able to expose all the dealings and secret organizations like the Bilderbergs or to a lesser extent the Bohemian Grove type folks. | ||
| I think the only thing that sort of mitigates that and diminishes that is everyone knowing about that. | ||
| More people know about the Bilderbergs now than ever before. | ||
| The Bilderberg group is like something that people will say it. | ||
| They don't really know a lot. | ||
| Like, I'll say it. | ||
| I don't know much about it. | ||
| I know that really important rich people meet and they discuss things and every single person who's ever been president has met them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or whore them out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's a network. | ||
| I mean, no question. | ||
| No question. | ||
| No, all these places exist for a reason. | ||
| I take a bit of credit. | ||
| I think my book then was the first time Bilderberg, like, was ever discussed in kind of 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. | ||
| They kind of have to, right? | ||
|
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Yeah, exactly. | |
| That's the information thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's partly to do with them and partly to do with Charlie Skelton. | ||
| Your book, Them. | ||
| You know, I'm very fascinated by extremists. | ||
| And I'm very fascinated by... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you see all of that happening on, you know, social media now, which I write about in the new book. | ||
| You know, you see this kind of joy in approval, mutual approval. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that's what I think is a problem with Twitter. | ||
| It's become like a sort of mutual approval machine that we surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do and we approve each other. | ||
| And that's such a great feeling. | ||
| If anybody gets in the way and says, I don't agree with what you're doing here, You feel ferociously angry about them and you scream them out. | ||
| Yeah, so I think this kind of mutual approval that goes on both on social media and also in extremist groups. | ||
| Don't you think that people say things, a lot of the things they say, they say knowing that people are going to approve? | ||
| So they tailor these things in a way that, like, they lick their finger and put it up in the air and they catch the wind, like, ooh, the wind's going this way. | ||
| I'm going to say something that puts me on the moral high ground. | ||
| I'm going to get a lot of retweets. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's kind of damaging. | ||
| I mean, like you said before, I come from a social justice world, so I believe in all the things that they believe in. | ||
| I believe in gay marriage. | ||
| I believe in all of those things. | ||
| But at the same time, I feel kind of uncomfortable when I feel like there's a kind of ferocious conformity going on. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| That you have to say it. | ||
| Like, every time somebody dies, you have to... | ||
| I remember when Robin Williams died. | ||
| Like, I was doing a bit of... | ||
| I was promoting some show I was doing or something I'd written, and I didn't know Robin Williams had died. | ||
| And so I tweeted, like, something about some show I was doing. | ||
| And I got, like, a kind of... | ||
| You know, 50 people immediately tweeting me basically saying, how dare you promote something when, 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. | ||
| But that's not, because how do they know that you didn't know? | ||
| Or how they know whether or not you knew. | ||
| Well, I explained that I didn't know. | ||
| But that's really common. | ||
| I mean, you can't be expected to be abreast of every single news story. | ||
| Especially something like a suicide. | ||
| Something that comes on. | ||
| It's not like something you have to pay attention to. | ||
| Like, you know, a military operation that we're all aware of. | ||
| No, this is a random celebrity decides to take his life. | ||
| How could you possibly... | ||
| Be forced to know about that. | ||
| And the problem is, you know, like on social media, we see ourselves as nonconformist. | ||
| But what this does is create a kind of fearful conformist world where you have to say what everybody else is saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're conforming to nonconformity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the idea of conforming to non-conformity is so ironic, though. | ||
| It's like the one thing that you are rallying against is the one thing that you don't even realize you are becoming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's, you know, the negative byproducts of all of this are big. | ||
| It makes people fearful. | ||
| It makes people shut the fuck up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, some people's transgressions are so serious, it deserves to overwhelm them, and they deserve to be defined by them. | ||
| And we're all like sort of in commiserating and we're all sort of in agreement. | ||
| We're all sort of bonding together on this, like, hey, like as humans, we're not going to tolerate this behavior because it's evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this is all a long way away from the question, which was about kind of hanging out with extremist groups and so on. | ||
| I mean, I discovered some things that I think people hadn't known at the time. | ||
| I mean, one was that they were all conspiracy theorists. | ||
| You know, that was what united the Ku Klux Klan with the Islamic fundamentalist group I hung out with called Al-Muhajirun. | ||
| I spent a year with this Islamic group called Al-Muhajirun. | ||
| You spent a year with them? | ||
| Yeah, I became like their... | ||
| They're chauffeur. | ||
| They said to me, Omar Bakri, the head of the group, said to me after a few months, like, I have let you into my life. | ||
| I've given you much. | ||
| I want something in return. | ||
| So I was like, what? | ||
| And he said, can you drive me to Officeworld? | ||
| LAUGHTER I need pencils. | ||
| Yeah, well, he needs to get his photocopying done, like crush the pirate state of Israel. | ||
| So I become like a chauffeur, start driving him everywhere. | ||
| And yeah, that was awkward. | ||
| Did you go home? | ||
| When you said you were with them for a year? | ||
| No, I went home. | ||
| He only lived like a couple of miles up the road from me. | ||
| So you would get up in the morning, bye honey, I'm gonna go hang out with the Islamic fundamentalists. | ||
| Gonna hang out with Omar, he needs to buy some collection boxes for Hamas, he needs to be driven to the Kashin Kari. | ||
| Now, that's a very scary organisation. | ||
| This was pre-9-11. | ||
| I mean, most of the stories I've told today are from my book Them, which was pre-9-11. | ||
| And so less scary. | ||
| Like, people thought they were ridiculous. | ||
| Like, not that much had happened at that stage. | ||
| While I was there with them for the year, though, I mean, you know, now so many, like, suicide bombers and so on. | ||
| And so many journalists get killed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that could have been you, easily, if you were dealing with a decade later. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Or even a couple of... | ||
| I mean, when was Daniel Pearl? | ||
| That was pretty early on. | ||
| Early stages of the Iraq War, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 2002 or 2003, maybe? | ||
| So I was only, what, four years earlier. | ||
| That was the first one, man. | ||
| That was the first one that had the video. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember watching that online against my own better judgment. | ||
| Has it haunted you ever since? | ||
| Oh, you can never get past that one. | ||
| What's crazy is that one had such an impact, and I've seen a few of them since then, and they didn't have nearly as much impact. | ||
| It's like slowly but surely you get numb to it in some horrible way. | ||
| I've never watched any of these videos, but I was in Brooklyn and the taxi driver told me that he watches like all of them. | ||
| And I said, I've never watched any of them. | ||
| And he said, well, I'll tell you the one you really shouldn't watch, Daniel Pearl. | ||
| I haven't watched any of them, so I don't know what he meant by that. | ||
| There was a lot of conspiracy theories involving that one as well. | ||
| There was a lot of conspiracy theories that 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, the conspiracy theories is a weird thing. | ||
| It's very imaginative. | ||
| Because there are conspiracies. | ||
| Oh, there are. | ||
| I mean, you know, I got chased away from Bilderberg. | ||
| I snuck into Bohemian Grove. | ||
| There are conspiracies. | ||
| And there's also stuff like Operation Northwoods, 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All in order to get us to a war with Cuba. | ||
| I mean, so it's not like it hasn't been proposed or it hasn't been even acted out like what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| I mean, there are real, real conspiracies that actually do happen. | ||
| Even in its own little way, my book, The Minister of Goats, kind of proves conspiracies. | ||
| It proves that they were trying to- What's the difference between your book, sorry to interrupt you, but what's the difference between your book and the movie? | ||
| Okay, in the book, I mean, I never actually went to Iraq. | ||
| The Ewan McGregor character that's kind of based on me goes to Iraq in the movie. | ||
| In real life, I just hung around like military bases in America. | ||
| So Fort Meade and Fort Bragg. | ||
| At the end of the movie, Ewan McGregor manages to walk through a wall, and I never managed to walk through... | ||
| So that didn't happen. | ||
| Well, the movie's kind of tongue-in-cheek. | ||
| Yeah, the book's more serious. | ||
| The book starts off with the kind of comedy of all of this crazy stuff they were trying out in the 70s and 80s, like trying to kill goats just by staring at them, trying to learn how to be invisible, which, by the way, after a while they adapted, they went from invisibility to trying to find a way of not being seen. | ||
| So I'm like, that's, you know, I said, like, camouflage. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm going to interview this guy who is a military guy that was working on their remote viewing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| I would have probably met this person. | ||
| I'm trying to remember his name. | ||
| I'll Google it. | ||
| Is it Ed Dames? | ||
| Yes, that's who it was. | ||
| Oh, Ed Dames. | ||
| Okay, I met Ed Dames. | ||
| He once psychically spied the Loch Ness Monster and determined that it was a dinosaur's ghost. | ||
| A dinosaur's ghost? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Is that what he really said? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He's a character boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was showing me pictures of his hot girlfriend. | ||
| Yeah, he was one of the main, Ed Dames, Joe McMonagle, like all of these real life stories. | ||
| Just hot. | ||
| Russian. | ||
| Way over his head. | ||
| Dude was batting way over his head, so maybe he remote viewed that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, if you're a psychic spy. | ||
| I tell you what though, being a black op military psychic spy isn't as glamorous as it sounds. | ||
| Very stressful. | ||
| Stressful, plus you're black ops, you've got no budget. | ||
| You're not allowed a coffee machine. | ||
| You have to bring your own coffee into work. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, a couple of the remote viewers told me how annoyed they were that because they were black op, they had to bring their own coffee into work. | ||
| Plus, what does it actually mean to be a psychic spy working for the US military? | ||
| What it actually means is that for 20 years, you go into some room at Fort Meade and try and be psychic. | ||
| It's kind of a shit job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I interviewed another guy. | ||
| I forget his name, but we actually tried it out. | ||
| And we tried to remote view things. | ||
| Did he get any luck? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was me and this guy, DJ Grothy, who's a skeptic. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He's the Randy guy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I was like, ooh. | ||
| Man, I don't know about all that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember one time they were looking for Noriega, General Noriega, and the remote viewers were like called in to find Noriega. | ||
| And one of the remote viewers, it might have been Ed Dames actually, one of the remote viewers psychically divined that Angela Lansbury knew where Noriega was. | ||
| Oh, that bitch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I don't know is whether they actually ever asked Angela Lansbury or not. | ||
| What I discovered though, if it had just been remote viewing, I wouldn't have wanted to have written 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. | ||
| How much money did they spend on that remote viewing thing? | ||
| That went on for a long time. | ||
| $20 million, I think. | ||
| $20 million. | ||
| Was there any one piece of evidence that they could point to that was like... | ||
| No, every so often, like a unit would get sick of it, like it was being run by the, I don't know, the DEA or, you know, the U.S. Army or military intelligence, and then they'd get sick of it. | ||
| Learn remote viewing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that Ed Dames? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not him. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, that's not a dance. | ||
| It's his website. | ||
| Yeah, he's an older gentleman than that. | ||
|
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It ended up back with the CIA in 1995. The CIA's greatest weapon has the power to change your life forever. | |
| Right. | ||
| Oh, so now you're using it, like, and look, they have a live support gal. | ||
| Look, she's pretty, too. | ||
| Need live support? | ||
| Call this pretty girl. | ||
| Why don't they have an angry black guy who could beat your ass? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Pretty white girl. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| It's like welcoming. | ||
| I'm smiling at you. | ||
| I have beautiful eyes. | ||
| Do you need live support? | ||
| Call me, sugar. | ||
| I'll show you how to find your dog. | ||
| Here's something interesting. | ||
| You know, the guy, the first guy who ran the remote viewers back in the very earliest days of remote viewing was a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. | ||
| And he was the same guy who ran MKUltra That is interesting. | ||
| Well, without a doubt, they've definitely experimented on people to try to find out whether or not they can control them. | ||
| Oh, no question. | ||
| There's this other operation called Artichoke. | ||
| I became friends with Eric Olson, whose father was Frank Olson, who's the guy who purportedly was given LSD by the CIA and then jumped out of a window in New York. | ||
| Killed himself. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he went fucking crazy and went off to teach at Berkeley, saved all his money from teaching and then went to live in the woods. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And Ken Kesey, too. | ||
|
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Didn't Ken Kesey get his LSD? I do not know if that's the case. | |
| I mean, he might have been. | ||
| But the Kaczynski thing is pretty well documented that he was a part of those studies. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| And there was worse shit than that. | ||
| There was this thing called Artichoke where they were like experimenting in... | ||
| I believe this has all been verified. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was like related to MKUltra. | ||
| I mean, yeah, you talked about some conspiracies being true. | ||
| MKUltra is a conspiracy that was true. | ||
| Yeah, there's plenty of those that are true. | ||
| I mean, look, especially when you're dealing with the Cold War and this terrible thought that the Soviet Union was ready to drop bombs on your children any day of the week and that they're doing things like this and that, you know, the Nazis had been doing things like this. | ||
| And we know about all the experiments that the Japanese did and the rape of Nam King and the horrible things that the Nazis had done. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| To the prisoners of war, I mean... | ||
| And weren't some American... | ||
| Didn't MKUltra start, or in the early days of MKUltra, some Americans were... | ||
| Some American soldiers were kidnapped by the Koreans? | ||
| And then they were seen on TV, like, saying, we renounce America, and... | ||
| They would try to work out like how the Koreans, and my memory is really sketchy on this, but then they try to work out like how the Koreans have managed to brainwash these three American servicemen so easily, and that was one of the reasons why they started MKUltra. | ||
| I might be getting confused. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about Your work with extremists, because I always wonder, like, is it appealing? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Is there an attraction to their ideology? | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do you look for? | ||
| Well, you know, nuances of language. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'll give you one example. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, I think that is true. | ||
| I think you're more likely to find psychopaths at the top of the tree than at the bottom because capitalism rewards psychopathic behaviour. | ||
| But isn't the definition, too, that a psychopath is someone that has power, whereas a sociopath is someone like... | ||
| There's some sort of a... | ||
| You know, the whole psychopath-sociopath thing, there's a lot of... | ||
| It's very blurry. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of debate out there as to... | ||
| And different psychiatrists and psychologists will use the terms 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So I said, so are you the sort of person who doesn't really feel like empathy? | ||
| And he said, no, no, empathy is a weakness. | ||
| So that's clearly telltale. | ||
| Well, I guess he figured, like, fuck it, I'm in jail. | ||
| Let's let the kid out of the bag. | ||
| I'm not getting out of here. | ||
| And also, sometimes they're like, like I said this to an old KGB spy I met one time, like I said, were you a bully at school? | ||
| And he said, yes, yes, yes, I was a bully. | ||
| He said he was English. | ||
| He said, I would get up from behind a tree, and my bag would have bricks in it, and I'd hit somebody over the head. | ||
|
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Jesus Christ. | |
| Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I said, he said, but I'd only get the bullies. | ||
| I'd only get the bullies. | ||
| So I said, and how did you feel about that? | ||
| And he said, I felt good. | ||
| And I said, and how do you feel now? | ||
| Like all these years later, looking back on it, how do you feel now? | ||
| And he said, I still feel good. | ||
| And I said, so you're not the sort of person who feels empathy. | ||
| And he said, you've really got to the nub of what kind of crank I am. | ||
| He said, when a dog dies, like one of my dogs dies, I feel incredibly upset and I cry. | ||
| But the human beings that I've hurt and killed don't feel anything. | ||
| So if you can get them being honest about their absence of empathy. | ||
| I don't want to hear that. | ||
| I do and I don't. | ||
| I do, but I don't want to know they're around, man. | ||
| There's something disturbing about someone who's just not willing to ever join the community. | ||
| You know, they live amongst you and they're just trying to manipulate... | ||
| Predators and prey. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All violence? | ||
| I don't like all. | ||
| I don't like statements that are so absolute. | ||
| It is a big statement, right? | ||
| But as a kind of humanist I like that because it's giving some humanity back to violent people. | ||
| It's saying, you know, it comes from a place of damage. | ||
| Whereas the psychopath spotters will basically say, no, no, they're like another species. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Honestly, I think there's truth in both camps. | ||
| Well, I think there's certainly some people that are like that, and there's some people that are violent just because they're angry at stupidity, or they're angry at aggression, or they just need some release in their life, and they're pent down with all sorts of stress, and they 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. | ||
| There's an opening. | ||
| It's like a hole in a water balloon. | ||
| The water just starts squirting out of it. | ||
| It can't help it. | ||
| It's so pent up with pressure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's certainly, you keep coming back to that. | ||
| It's only because it's mostly some books. | ||
| It's on your mind for a while. | ||
| Hey, do you mind if I go? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's a perfect way to end it. | ||
| This was a great conversation. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I'm so glad that we did this because, as I say, for years, people have like, oh my god, you've got to go on Joe Rogan. | ||
| Oh, I think we could have a hundred of these. | ||
| I mean, anytime you're back in town. | ||
| Hey, next time I'm back, we'll do it. | ||
| When are you back again? | ||
| Do you come around LA very often? | ||
| It might be soon, yeah. | ||
| My son's thinking about moving here, so if he does... | ||
| Oh, okay, great. | ||
| If he does, I'm not going to fucking leave. | ||
| I can't be in another city to my son. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, beautiful, man. | ||
| Well, definitely either way, one way or another, when you're back in town, let's do this again. | ||
| I really, really enjoyed it. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| And so your most recent book is So You've Been Publicly Shamed. | ||
| And I'm sure it's available everywhere, right? | ||
| Like Amazon and all that jazz. | ||
| I fucking hope so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bards and Noble, all that good stuff. | ||
| And John Ronson on Twitter, J-O-N. Is there a J-O-H-N that's pretending to be you and writing a bunch of evil shit that you're going to get in trouble for? | ||
| Actually, there is another John Ronson on Twitter that's pretending to be me. | ||
| I hope he's not shaming you. | ||
| We tried. | ||
| It's another story. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, John Ronson on Twitter. | ||
| John Ronson, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| That was a lot of fun. | ||
| Hey, thanks, Jamie. |
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