In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Alex Jones tells the story of how he went to Bohemian Grove, and why he thinks it's a place where people transform themselves into lizards. And why it's one of the most dangerous places he's ever been. Plus, a new book about the disappearance of a woman who claims to have been kidnapped at the same place as the Grove. And a new conspiracy theory about a sex slave who says she was kidnapped by George W. Bush Sr. and turned into a slave at the gardens of the White House. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song was written and performed by Micah Vellian and our ad music was made by Mark Phillips. We were mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Our editor was Matthew Boll and our editor was Patrick Muldowney. Special thanks to Rachel Goodman. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers, for sponsoring this episode. And thanks to John Ronson for the use of his music stylings and for the background music, and for his editing and mixing skills, and thanks to our mixing and mastering of the sound design, which was done by Mark's mixing, mastering, and mixing, and mastering, of course, by Alex's excellent editing and mastering skills, which were all provided by his excellent mixing skills. . Thank you Jon Ronson, for the production of this episode and editing, and our thanks to the excellent editing, our excellent sound effects, and the excellent mixing and mixing. and mastering and mastering. , and thanks also to our lighting, and all of our amazing sound design and editing by our excellent equipment, and and our amazing engineering, and sound effects and our excellent mixing, which are all by our amazing mastering, which is by our wonderful sound engineer, and thank you for all of your support throughout the editing, thanks to all of the help from our excellent mastering and editing and our wonderful editors, and we hope you enjoy it all, and your support and all your feedback, again and thanks you can see us again, thank you so much for all your support, we really really appreciate it. we really appreciate you, and really appreciate all of you, really really really much more than we can see you, we appreciate you. thank you, you're amazing. -Jon Ronson - Thank you, Jon Ronson, for being here.
00:00:56.000Basically, 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.
00:01:09.000They all believed in the evil power of Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove.
00:01:14.000So I thought it'd be good to try and infiltrate those places.
00:01:17.000But I didn't want to infiltrate Bohemian Grove alone, because frankly, I was scared.
00:01:22.000So we met Alex Jones when he was rebuilding David Koresh's church at Waco, and he seemed kind of gung-ho.
00:01:31.000He was rebuilding David Koresh's church?
00:01:33.000Yeah, that was the first time I met Alex Jones.
00:03:06.000It 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?
00:03:23.000Well, 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,
00:04:15.000And 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.
00:04:51.000I'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.
00:04:59.000So that was the video, he made a video about this, so you were involved in that?
00:07:00.000So Alex's plan, and this is how we were going to get in.
00:07:03.000We 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.
00:07:12.000And I was thinking, this is an ill-conceived plan.
00:07:16.000LAUGHTER And then we met this local lawyer called Rick, who was like this preppy lawyer who lived in the town, Monte Rio or Occidental.
00:07:26.000And 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.
00:07:33.000So we met Rick to get some tips on how to break in.
00:07:39.000And Rick said, look, if you're going that way, you're going to get yourself killed.
00:07:42.000And 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.
00:08:09.000So 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.
00:09:01.000So 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.
00:11:44.000He liked me again, actually, after I wrote The Manistaric Goats.
00:11:48.000Like, 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.
00:11:56.000But then when I wrote The Manistaric Goats, he liked me again, because he felt that I was like...
00:12:26.000Yeah, me and Rick the lawyer, this kind of preppy lawyer.
00:12:31.000Oh, 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.
00:15:34.000If 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.
00:15:48.000Despicable me, I can tell you have children.
00:15:52.000So we were wandering around, me and Rick, and we saw this giant, the giant owl of everybody's legend.
00:16:02.000It'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.
00:17:30.000I felt like nothing bad would happen to me because he looked so rich and preppy.
00:17:35.000That's like every horror movie where things go bad.
00:17:37.000You're hanging out with Rick the lawyer.
00:17:39.000I thought I'd be fine with Rick the lawyer.
00:17:43.000So then the bell rings, like gets to dusk.
00:17:47.000And 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,
00:18:09.000which I thought was really weird, was this old man comes up to me.
00:18:12.000I 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.
00:18:22.000And this guy says to me, is this your first time?
00:18:29.000And I did the sort of impression of what was about to happen in the pageant.
00:18:34.000And there was this look of like real fucking intensity on this guy's face.
00:18:38.000And 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.
00:18:49.000And then there's all these men of wealth and power who are really fucking into it all themselves.
00:18:55.000And they might be into it in a different way to the way Alex and Mike are into it, but they're fucking into it.
00:18:59.000And I thought, I'm the only sane person in this entire fucking Redwood place.
00:19:17.000Yeah, it was a weird way to spend your summer vacation.
00:19:21.000I 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.
00:19:47.000Pull that up, Jamie, because it's a crazy photo.
00:19:50.000So this has been like a weird spot where these guys have gone for decades.
00:19:56.000Well, 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?
00:20:14.000Okay, 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.
00:20:22.000But 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.
00:20:36.000Thought, you know, fuck, there goes the neighbourhood.
00:20:38.000You know, we're going to lose our elite status.
00:20:40.000We need to set up a private club for ourselves.
00:20:43.000So they set up the Bohemian Club in San Francisco and then Bohemian Grove in, you know, a couple of hours north.
00:23:35.000And he said he thought it was kind of ridiculous.
00:23:38.000But 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.
00:23:53.000But it's this kind of weird, overblown pageant.
00:24:00.000What 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.
00:24:13.000And none of them are actually ancient.
00:24:15.000They're all only, what, like 100 years old at the most.
00:24:34.000I would have to be really fucked up to do it.
00:24:36.000I'd have to be under the influence of a lot of different things.
00:24:39.000But 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?
00:24:54.000You bond and maybe it gives you a kind of mandate to be in an elite.
00:24:58.000I 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.
00:25:11.000That 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.
00:25:21.000Wasn't that a thing about Skull and Bones as well?
00:25:24.000They 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.
00:25:57.000What it all deals with, I think, with this Bohemian Grove thing and...
00:26:03.000Is 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.
00:26:15.000Like we're watching this owl god and a fucking bundle of sticks and burn thee!
00:26:39.000It'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...
00:26:50.000Well, there's ritual in the ISIS cans too, right?
00:26:54.000But it's bizarre when people start wearing outfits and engaging in rituals.
00:27:00.000You know, that's a weird aspect of human behavior that seems to be really prevalent.
00:27:05.000It'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.
00:27:20.000Well, 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.
00:27:33.000Bizarre ritual, but it's only isolated this one very specific area.
00:27:37.000But rituals themselves, like really wacky dresses and weird things that people do, it's so common.
00:27:44.000It's almost like every culture has them.
00:27:56.000They 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.
00:28:11.000And so they appreciated the fact that I was being less hysterical about it than Alex.
00:28:15.000And they said, you know, it's overblown...
00:28:19.000It's an overblown pageant, but it couldn't be more innocent, or something along those lines.
00:28:24.000They wrote that letter to Esquire magazine.
00:28:26.000By the way, it could definitely be more innocent.
00:29:22.000Alex's spin was practically that, you know, it's possible that they were killing an actual baby.
00:29:28.000I mean, Alex, I can't remember if Alex went that far, but he went a long way.
00:29:32.000Oh, and at one point he said to me, yeah, we overheard these two old men when we were walking down the road.
00:29:39.000I 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.
00:29:47.000And I thought, like, I don't know that Alex didn't hear that, but that's a bit fucking convenient.
00:29:52.000I thought that's exactly the thing Alex would want to hear at Bohemian Grove.
00:29:56.000Well, who knows what that conversation was about?
00:29:59.000You take something out of context like that.
00:30:00.000It could have been a total, complete joke.
00:30:02.000Yeah, it could have been elected to, like, the local shrines.
00:30:31.000I mean, one of the best pieces of work that Alex did was 9-1-1, The Road to Tyranny.
00:30:37.000And 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.
00:31:09.000Is 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.
00:31:25.000They literally set up a no protest zone where people couldn't go to work with WTO badges.
00:31:30.000They 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.
00:31:38.000A fucking pin, which is completely against everything this country is supposed to stand for, right?
00:31:45.000And so these people were, you know, these agent provocateurs...
00:31:51.000We'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,
00:32:37.000Look, 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.
00:32:49.000Then you have an excuse to come in and arrest everybody.
00:33:11.000And, you know, that's unfortunate, but that's...
00:33:16.000When you start talking about conspiracy theory, well, that seems to be conspiracy fact.
00:33:21.000It just seems to be something that's standard operational procedure when they can get away with it.
00:33:26.000What 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...
00:33:36.000And what we know now about security and the internet and the cloud, everything can be hacked.
00:36:09.000And I talked to a bunch of different people about it.
00:36:12.000And, you know, what we decided to print or we decided to show on the television show...
00:36:19.000Unfortunately, you're dealing with 44 minutes of TV for an hour.
00:36:23.000You've got a bunch of different commercials.
00:36:25.000I think to really debunk something like that, you'd have to spend a long time with it and actually show people.
00:36:35.000Like 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.
00:36:43.000Wouldn't be too hard to do if you had a really good budget, but we didn't have a really good budget.
00:36:49.000You 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.
00:37:46.000This 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.
00:37:54.000And what I've noticed happens on Twitter is...
00:37:59.000We 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.
00:38:16.000It's this whole like mental trick we play on ourselves, like, what's it called?
00:38:50.000It'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.
00:38:58.000They'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.
00:39:08.000And 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.
00:39:27.000And I just wonder whether there's some kind of connection between...
00:39:32.000It's about, you know, between that and about the rituals that you find in places like Bohemian Grove.
00:39:39.000And maybe the connection is that it's all about tricking yourself into believing that you can do evil shit.
00:39:45.000So 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.
00:39:53.000And that gives me a mandate to rule the world.
00:39:55.000I can inflict this carnage on other people because I'm different to them and better than them.
00:40:00.000And 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.
00:40:11.000It'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.
00:40:24.000Well, people have a tendency to pile on That's always been the case.
00:40:30.000That's the reason why you see like when riots break out, that sort of exploits that type of pile-on behavior.
00:40:39.000People 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.
00:41:11.000And I think diffusion of responsibility is a real issue with human beings when it comes to large numbers.
00:41:16.000Anytime there's large numbers, they don't feel responsible for any repercussions of their actions.
00:41:22.000If 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.
00:41:46.000But what they're trying to do is they're appealing to the bully instinct of people to just pile on.
00:41:51.000And I'm torn, because sometimes I think publicly shaming people is a good thing.
00:41:58.000Sure, if it's actual social justice, if it's actual right and wrongs.
00:42:04.000But 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.
00:42:16.000So some nice liberal person who tells a joke that comes out badly is treated with a similar level of ferocity.
00:42:23.000It's like a racist cop from the McKinney, Texas video.
00:42:26.000Well, that's a very good way of putting it.
00:42:28.000I think most people are not living life even.
00:42:32.000They're going through life with a deficit.
00:42:34.000And they started out with this deficit by having a bunch of fucking shitty experiences when they were children.
00:42:39.000They'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.
00:42:50.000Most people are going into any situation with a headwind or a tailwind, I guess it is, when someone's something behind you.
00:44:33.000Listen, 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.
00:45:45.000But it's because they have the green light to object.
00:45:48.000I mean, it's not that you're not saying something reasonable.
00:45:50.000I 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.
00:46:06.000But whatever, the people abusing their power are over there.
00:46:09.000And whenever I gave talks about that, everyone would love it.
00:46:33.000I'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.
00:46:51.000And 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.
00:47:00.000And 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.
00:47:09.000I 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.
00:47:45.000Anyway, 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.
00:48:01.000And you know, I noticed myself fleeing a bit from social media since my book came out.
00:48:08.000A long time ago, like maybe 10 years ago or so, I would argue with people online all the time.
00:48:14.000And then I realized what an enormous waste of time it is.
00:48:17.000Also, I realized that I'm not picking the people that I communicate with, as opposed to the way you do it in real life.
00:48:23.000And 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.
00:48:29.000People who are insulting and shitty, I wouldn't argue with them.
00:48:39.000But 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.
00:48:50.000This is a totally new thing and no one knows how to do it yet.
00:48:55.000We 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.
00:49:13.000Had some fun, but wasted a lot of time.
00:49:16.000And 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.
00:49:24.000They're probably not the nicest folks to be with.
00:49:26.000Yeah, or maybe they are, and just the internet is turning us into, you know, these unempathetic, psychopathic figures.
00:49:33.000I mean, you know, maybe if I met them in real life, they'd be sweet.
00:49:35.000Well, you wouldn't know them, first of all, based on their tweets, because a tweet is one of the worst representations of you.
00:49:47.000I mean, sometimes it can be poignant, sometimes it can be funny, but, like, to sum you up from...
00:49:53.000First 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.
00:50:00.000It's hard, because I don't think we are just who we are as an individual.
00:50:04.000I think we are who we are based on who we're interacting with and how that works out.
00:51:21.000Like, we literally are a superorganism.
00:51:25.000We are not like one individual experiencing the universe solely on our own.
00:51:31.000We're all constantly interacting with each other.
00:51:34.000Yeah, which I think is part of the reason why...
00:51:37.000Social media public shamings are so fucking traumatizing to somebody on the receiving end of it.
00:51:43.000Because 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.
00:51:54.000But then the people doing the shaming, they don't want to think that.
00:51:57.000They don't want to think that they've just I'm sure they're fine.
00:52:15.000Who 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.
00:52:25.000You know, if you're a man being publicly shamed, it's fine.
00:52:31.000And then I was looking at this, I was thinking, fuck.
00:52:33.000Oh, you know, I've gone around the world meeting these people.
00:52:36.000They're not, they are not fucking fine.
00:52:38.000It's like whether you want to carry on doing it or not, you have to accept they are not fine.
00:52:43.000You 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.
00:53:45.000Yeah, because we can only handle destroying one person a night.
00:53:48.000In 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?
00:54:13.000Imagine 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.
00:54:27.000And they feel totally justified doing it.
00:54:30.000And Justine was asleep on a fucking plane.
00:54:33.000And everyone knew that, and that's why everyone loved it so much.
00:54:37.000Well, didn't she write a bunch of other ridiculous tweets?
00:56:10.000First of all, she doesn't ever say anything that is indefensible, because she's very smart.
00:56:15.000And also, I think, as a comic, everything that she says that's ridiculous...
00:56:21.000If 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.
00:56:34.000She'll adopt it and abandon it and you know going in that's what she's doing It's a part of being entertaining.
00:56:41.000It's like you know Richard Pryor doing the dopey white guy voice.
00:56:46.000Do I think he's really a dopey white guy now?
00:58:02.000I went to college in London in the 80s.
00:58:04.000And 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.
00:58:16.000And it's partly because of the 140-character Twitter thing.
00:58:20.000So basically, in the student union in the 1980s, we all cared about social justice.
00:58:25.000But it's like the most unforgiving, extreme fucker is now the one who's actually setting the agenda.
00:58:32.000And 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...
00:59:28.000So, 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.
00:59:40.000And some guy said, do you know any joke jokes or something along those lines, right?
01:00:16.000He 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.
01:00:25.000Yeah, 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,
01:00:47.000man, on the patriarchy, on the cisgendered male heteronormative bullshit that you see every day.
01:00:55.000And they're like finding this opportunity to express this rage.
01:00:59.000And then eventually, hopefully they'll settle in and hopefully they'll sort of like, as time goes on, they have more experience.
01:01:06.000They'll sort of realize how ridiculous they were, you know, when they were younger.
01:01:10.000But 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!
01:01:18.000So this one kid that said this to me, I mean, that was the extent of our conversation.
01:01:33.000I go, if you make me laugh with a really funny racist joke, I'm thankful, because you made me laugh.
01:01:39.000I don't think you think that everything you say is a fucking sworn statement, an affidavit that you're giving in court.
01:01:45.000I 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.
01:02:52.000And I was like, because I defended Justine.
01:02:53.000And 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?
01:03:42.000What 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.
01:04:00.000This 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.
01:04:10.000And not distinguishing between what's actual social justice and what's a kind of cathartic alternative to social justice, like the destruction of Justine.
01:04:17.000The destruction of Justine doesn't do any good for anybody.
01:06:23.000Intervening distances of thousands of miles and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will, do this, do his will, be, oh, do his will, huh?
01:06:35.000To do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.
01:06:41.000A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
01:06:47.000And 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.
01:06:55.000It will be a world of curiosity, it will be a world of understanding strangers, of nuance, of context.
01:07:01.000And 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.
01:07:10.000Well, with dummies, but not with everybody.
01:07:14.000Look, I'm way more informed now than I ever would have been if I had grown up in the 1960s.
01:07:19.000Like, if I had grown up in the 1960s and I was a 47-year-old man in 1967, I wouldn't know jack shit.
01:10:06.000It's hard to argue that it couldn't possibly offend people.
01:10:10.000But the idea that she knew she was broadcasting it to all those people that were offended...
01:10:16.000I think people just don't understand what the fuck is going on when they say things online.
01:10:20.000Although, 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?
01:10:31.000Because while she was like, you know, it all happened after she turned off her phone and fell asleep.
01:12:54.000I don't know anything, but, you know, were there, like, much, like, way better things than Xanax, I could have asked?
01:13:00.000If you're, like, really into painkillers, I guess, but you'd have to, like, say that you're on pain.
01:13:04.000So I think the thing about Xanax is you could say you have anxiety, and they'll give you medication.
01:13:10.000I 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.
01:15:03.000I 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...
01:15:13.000I think having, instead of just being you, like, having names, even names themselves, like, you'd say, oh, well...
01:15:48.000He 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.
01:16:04.000This 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.
01:16:41.000He 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.
01:16:47.000According to records obtained by the Associated Press on Monday.
01:16:50.000The admission was contained in records that were unsealed after the AP went to court to compel their release.
01:16:56.000Cosby's attorneys had repeatedly sought to keep the records sealed, arguing that they would be embarrassing.
01:17:01.000This 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.
01:17:15.000So they went to court and wow, he's fucked now.
01:17:18.000Gave her like three and a half Benadryl or something.
01:17:48.000It'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,
01:18:04.000and also, and this is Total armchair psychology from a dude who went to college for three years and barely paid attention.
01:18:12.000But 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,
01:18:30.000the same way royalty does, the same way people who Have grown up their life.
01:19:14.000They're differentiating themselves and they're labeling though.
01:19:16.000They're they're putting themselves in a very distinctive position and Labelling.
01:19:20.000It's really one of the worst things that's happening in this country at the moment.
01:19:25.000In 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.
01:19:42.000So they're then given antipsychotic medication at the age of, like, literally one and two.
01:19:46.000You know, that's how much labeling culture is out of control.
01:19:49.000You know, as a journalist, the question I love asking most is, why?
01:21:32.000Yeah, of making other human beings up playthings instead of, you know, for whatever reasons, instead of like curiosity.
01:21:39.000Well, 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.
01:21:49.000There's a lot of anger and hate, and this whole public shaming thing sort of goes along with that.
01:21:55.000I mean, there's some people that I follow that I don't agree with.
01:22:00.000Unfortunately, I agree with their position on a lot of things, like gay marriage, like equality for all.
01:22:08.000There'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,
01:22:25.000but on another side, I agree with almost all of their positions.
01:22:29.000On equality for women and equality for gay people.
01:22:33.000I mean, there's so many of the positions that I have the exact same stance on.
01:22:37.000But I don't have this stance on public shaming.
01:22:45.000You know, my stance whether Chris Christie says he's gonna lock up everyone who smokes marijuana, you know, because marijuana is so dangerous.
01:22:52.000I'm like, Jesus Christ, do you have a fucking mirror in your house?
01:22:55.000You're morbidly obese, and you're telling people that they can't have a substance that has never killed a single person ever.
01:23:03.000Being overweight is one of the major causes of premature death in the United States of America.
01:23:09.000Having a heart attack is one of the major causes.
01:23:12.000And having a heart attack is almost directly related in most people to being overweight.
01:23:40.000If 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.
01:23:48.000Because 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.
01:23:54.000He can get people's freedom taken away.
01:23:57.000Yeah, 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.
01:24:06.000I guess, you know, what my book's against is the disproportionate punishment of people who don't deserve it.
01:24:14.000I 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?
01:25:40.000Black people get really angry because she's appropriating a disenfranchised segment of society that has already been stolen from by white people, you know?
01:25:51.000And I had people tweeting me to say, you know, you're a white man.
01:26:11.000Well, 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...
01:26:26.000So that's where I came from in that story.
01:26:28.000It's also saying that you're not allowed to have an opinion or it's not your story.
01:26:35.000What you're trying to do is you're trying to silence anybody that doesn't agree with you.
01:26:40.000Everyone that is a human being that witnesses a story, you witness some public thing that's taking place, you are absolutely allowed your opinion.
01:26:51.000And 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.
01:27:01.000But to say it's not your position to talk, well, then you're publicly silencing people.
01:27:07.000And you know, exactly what that is the opposite of, of course, is democracy.
01:27:11.000I mean, I was reading people, I went off social media after all of that, because there was so much screaming.
01:27:16.000And I was reading people basically saying, okay, let's goad John Ronson into saying something outrageous, and then we can get him.
01:27:29.000It's because the young have decided, for some mystifying reason, to create an incredibly stressful world for themselves.
01:27:37.000I don't think they realize what they're doing.
01:27:40.000But 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.
01:27:57.000It's something a lot of people don't know.
01:27:59.000And black folks weren't even allowed to hold office until the 1970s.
01:28:14.000It was in response to all the lynchings.
01:28:18.000And 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,
01:28:33.000where there was all this resentment and there was lynchings and the chaos that is the South.
01:28:39.000And, you know, I think we're still dealing with the repercussions and the reverberations of it right now.
01:28:44.000With this Confederate flag debate that's going on all throughout America now.
01:28:48.000It's like America's just sort of kind of waking up to the fact that, well, fuck, man.
01:28:53.000A hundred or so years ago, you were allowed to own people.
01:28:56.000And the people that wanted to be able to own people had a flag.
01:29:02.000And these people put that flag on a car and drove it around on TV, and we didn't think about it.
01:30:26.000Yeah, 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.
01:30:36.000They couldn't remember whether to soak it and then raise it or raise it and then soak it.
01:31:07.000And 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.
01:31:20.000I 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.
01:34:23.000So 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.
01:34:31.000And the people who'd normally be the good guys were the villains.
01:36:22.000And then he locked himself up in the cabin with his wife and kids and dog.
01:36:29.000And so they surrounded the cabin, the ATF, and this went on for like a year.
01:36:35.000They set up cameras in the trees and surrounded Randy's cabin.
01:36:39.000And then one day, The ATF people got too close to the cabin and disturbed the dog.
01:36:46.000And the dog starts barking and the dog chases the agents down the hill.
01:36:51.000And 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.
01:37:03.000And so they all run down to the bottom of the hill.
01:37:06.000An agent jumps out and shoots the dog, kills the dog.
01:37:09.000Sammy says, you killed my dog, you son of a bitch, and starts shooting wildly.
01:37:14.000And the agent shoots Sammy in his arm and basically shoot his arm nearly off.
01:37:19.000And Sammy yells, Dad, I'm coming home, Dad, and starts running up the hill.
01:37:23.000And the ATF agent just shoots Sammy in the back as he's running up the hill, just in a sort of volley of gunfire.
01:37:51.000You've got a dead agent and you've got Sammy dead.
01:37:55.000The jury's always been out as to whether the agent was killed by Randy's friend or by a friendly fire.
01:38:02.000So anyway, the next day, Randy goes outside and an FBI sniper called Lon Horiuchi shoots Randy in the shoulder.
01:38:12.000So 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.
01:38:22.000And they pull Vicky's body into the cabin and a siege starts, like a 16-day siege or something.
01:38:31.000And at the roadblock down at the bottom, that's kind of where the militia movement started.
01:38:37.000Like all these local militia people all form at the bottom of the roadblock.
01:38:42.000And for days, and then discover that Vicky's dead.
01:38:45.000And I mean, I've seen some amateur footage.
01:38:49.000And, 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.
01:38:55.000And, and in the end, the government admitted responsibility and paid each of Randy's daughters a million dollars each and they killed Randy.
01:39:17.000So 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.
01:39:31.000Have you ever seen the conspiracy theories on that?
01:39:35.000Yeah, I visited Elohim City, the place which you know about, right?
01:39:39.000The 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.
01:39:50.000But 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.
01:40:05.000What's most certainly fishy is the efficacy of that bomb.
01:40:09.000The bomb that they used, the fertilizer bomb that blew half that building apart.
01:40:13.000When you talk to bomb experts, they go, that is like really, really unlikely.
01:40:18.000They 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.
01:40:27.000And also that that building looked like it had been blown out.
01:40:33.000Not that it had been blown in, but blown out.
01:40:36.000Meaning that there was bombs planted inside the building.
01:40:39.000And then there was all these news reports.
01:40:41.000There 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.
01:41:07.000And remember, there's like, there's all this...
01:41:08.000They 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.
01:41:15.000But then they had settled on the story that he had done it, and they had done it all with this fertilizer bomb.
01:41:20.000But it's a weird one, because, I mean, I don't have an answer, and I don't even have a theory.
01:41:26.000Like, who could have done it, or how it was done, or what would have been done.
01:41:31.000Look, all we know is someone blew up that fucking building.
01:42:17.000I'd just been chased through Portugal by the Bilderberg Group, and I bonded with them over that.
01:42:24.000I told them that I'd just been chased by Bilderberg.
01:42:28.000Yeah, everyone, all of that crowd back then I knew about Bilderberg.
01:42:33.000And I said, yeah, I've just been chased by the Bilderberg group, which I was.
01:42:39.000In my book then, when I was trying to infiltrate secret societies, I went to Portugal with Jim Tucker.
01:42:45.000He 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.
01:42:58.000Only real niche aficionados had heard of Bilderberg back then.
01:43:04.000And much in the same way that I feel like I partly launched Alex Jones's career.
01:43:10.000I also feel I partly gave the world Bilderberg, because I was the first mainstream writer to write about it.
01:43:16.000Because everyone was saying, there's this group called the Bilderberg Group, and they secretly rule the world from inside a secret room.
01:43:21.000And I said, if you ask big Jim Tucker, he'll tell you more.
01:43:58.000Yeah, 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.
01:44:05.000Like 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.
01:44:13.000I apologize for my semi-American accent I'm doing here.
01:44:16.000He said, I'm going to fly Did he use the term covert wickedness?
01:44:30.000You might put an English spin on it there.
01:44:33.000But he basically, I'm pretty sure he said he was going to climb up the drain folks.
01:48:31.000So anyway, so then I go back to my hotel...
01:48:36.000And 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.
01:49:05.000I go down to the bridge, I'm petrified.
01:49:07.000I 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.
01:49:59.000And I said, you can tell by their demeanour.
01:50:01.000And 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?
01:50:10.000And Ronson replied, you can tell them by their smell.
01:50:14.000And I'm like, I didn't say smell, I said demeanour.
01:50:16.000LAUGHTER What does a Bilderberger smell like?
01:50:56.000Is there an official explanation for the Bilderberg Group?
01:50:59.000Yeah, 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.
01:51:18.000And 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.
01:51:29.000Like, we don't want any more Hitlers, so let's kind of create this sort of globalist, one world, new world order.
01:51:36.000I mean, you know, the phrase new world order, I think, is true.
01:51:39.000I 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.
01:51:55.000So it was kind of centrist, almost kind of liberal in a way.
01:52:00.000If you buy that, John Ronson, I got a bridge to sell you in Portugal.
01:52:04.000Well, I think that was where they came from.
01:52:06.000But 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.
01:52:21.000It became this kind of more nefarious thing.
01:52:25.000Yeah, I think if there's ever going to be one antidote for power, it's information.
01:52:32.000It's being able to expose all the dealings and secret organizations like the Bilderbergs or to a lesser extent the Bohemian Grove type folks.
01:52:43.000I think the only thing that sort of mitigates that and diminishes that is everyone knowing about that.
01:52:50.000More people know about the Bilderbergs now than ever before.
01:52:54.000The Bilderberg group is like something that people will say it.
01:53:33.000And 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.
01:53:55.000I think my book then was the first time Bilderberg, like, was ever discussed in kind of the mainstream world.
01:54:04.000And 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.
01:54:19.000But 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.
01:54:46.000I'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.
01:54:55.000We're terrified of extreme lefties, and we're terrified of extreme righties.
01:55:01.000Was anything really revealing or unusual about that journey of trying to write that in your own mind?
01:55:12.000One 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.
01:55:29.000There'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.
01:55:41.000And you see all of that happening on, you know, social media now, which I write about in the new book.
01:55:46.000You know, you see this kind of joy in approval, mutual approval.
01:55:52.000I mean, that's what I think is a problem with Twitter.
01:55:53.000It'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.
01:56:01.000If 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.
01:56:10.000Yeah, so I think this kind of mutual approval that goes on both on social media and also in extremist groups.
01:56:16.000Don't you think that people say things, a lot of the things they say, they say knowing that people are going to approve?
01:56:22.000So 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.
01:56:29.000I'm going to say something that puts me on the moral high ground.
01:57:20.000You 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.
01:57:27.000Because I hadn't noticed that Robin Williams...
01:57:29.000And there's that kind of conformity again, the kind of RIP conformity.
01:57:32.000Everybody has to do the RIP. And it's all good.
01:58:38.000You 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.
01:58:48.000Whether you know it or not, you look like someone's going to Catholic school.
01:58:51.000Like, 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.
01:59:06.000Like, 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.
01:59:38.000And also what it is, it declares war on human nature.
01:59:43.000You 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.
01:59:52.000Instead of trying to work out why people transgress, you know, in a sort of compassionate way, it just destroys people for transgressing.
02:00:07.000And 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.
02:00:26.000Yeah, 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.
02:00:39.000You know, you're talking about differences of opinion.
02:00:43.000Yeah, I mean, some people's transgressions are so serious, it deserves to overwhelm them, and they deserve to be defined by them.
02:00:51.000And we're all like sort of in commiserating and we're all sort of in agreement.
02:00:56.000We'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.
02:03:09.000What'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.
02:03:17.000It's like slowly but surely you get numb to it in some horrible way.
02:03:20.000I'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.
02:03:29.000And I said, I've never watched any of them.
02:03:31.000And he said, well, I'll tell you the one you really shouldn't watch, Daniel Pearl.
02:03:35.000I haven't watched any of them, so I don't know what he meant by that.
02:03:38.000There was a lot of conspiracy theories involving that one as well.
02:03:41.000There 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...
02:03:58.000And 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.
02:04:08.000They were built more like American military people.
02:04:24.000And 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.
02:04:35.000They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay.
02:04:39.000All in order to get us to a war with Cuba.
02:04:41.000I 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.
02:04:48.000I mean, there are real, real conspiracies that actually do happen.
02:04:51.000Even in its own little way, my book, The Minister of Goats, kind of proves conspiracies.
02:04:56.000It 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?
02:05:03.000Okay, in the book, I mean, I never actually went to Iraq.
02:05:07.000The Ewan McGregor character that's kind of based on me goes to Iraq in the movie.
02:05:12.000In real life, I just hung around like military bases in America.
02:05:30.000The 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.
02:05:50.000So I'm like, that's, you know, I said, like, camouflage.
02:06:51.000Yeah, 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.
02:07:00.000Plus, what does it actually mean to be a psychic spy working for the US military?
02:07:04.000What it actually means is that for 20 years, you go into some room at Fort Meade and try and be psychic.
02:07:29.000He's a debunker and a skeptic and he and I were on the same page.
02:07:34.000We're like, you know, we came up with some random shapes.
02:07:37.000We're supposed to envision this area and then we went to the area and he was trying to find hits.
02:07:41.000I'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.
02:07:49.000And, you know, we picked out a few colors that were, you know, like super common.
02:07:55.000Yeah, 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.
02:08:03.000Let 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.
02:08:16.000He 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.
02:08:25.000Because the people had a vested interest in keeping the war going.
02:08:28.000And that was sort of his idea behind why this remote viewing wasn't successful.
02:08:33.000But he was citing all these different instances where remote viewing was successful.
02:08:41.000I remember one time they were looking for Noriega, General Noriega, and the remote viewers were like called in to find Noriega.
02:08:49.000And 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.
02:09:00.000What I don't know is whether they actually ever asked Angela Lansbury or not.
02:09:05.000What 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.
02:09:14.000But then what I discovered just through asking people was there was all this other shit going on, like they were trying to...
02:09:48.000So 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.
02:09:59.000And he's a guy you should have on your show, actually.
02:10:04.000So 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.
02:10:14.000How much money did they spend on that remote viewing thing?
02:10:21.000Was there any one piece of evidence that they could point to that was like...
02:10:26.000No, 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.
02:11:19.000You 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.
02:11:28.000And he was the same guy who ran MKUltra That is interesting.
02:11:55.000Well, without a doubt, they've definitely experimented on people to try to find out whether or not they can control them.
02:12:02.000There's this other operation called Artichoke.
02:12:04.000I 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.
02:12:15.000Well, do you know that Ted Kaczynski was a part of the Harvard studies on LSD? Oh, really?
02:12:19.000Yeah, 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.
02:13:02.000So 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.
02:13:11.000I 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.
02:13:41.000They'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.
02:13:54.000I mean, yeah, you talked about some conspiracies being true.
02:13:57.000MKUltra is a conspiracy that was true.
02:13:58.000Yeah, there's plenty of those that are true.
02:14:00.000I 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.
02:14:17.000And 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.
02:14:28.000Didn't MKUltra start, or in the early days of MKUltra, some Americans were...
02:14:34.000Some American soldiers were kidnapped by the Koreans?
02:14:39.000And then they were seen on TV, like, saying, we renounce America, and...
02:14:43.000They 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.
02:15:05.000I 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...
02:15:17.000Is there any, somehow or another, is there any pull towards, like, thinking, an inclination?
02:15:24.000Is there an attraction to their ideology?
02:15:28.000You know, never to their ideology, but what I did always like.
02:15:34.000Throughout 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.
02:15:43.000Like, I spend so much time with conspiracy theorists, and then suddenly I'm being chased by the Bilderberg group, and I go, fucking nuts!
02:16:04.000And it happened in the psychopath test too, actually, that I became completely drunk with my psychopath spotting powers.
02:16:11.000Like I went on a course to learn how to spot psychopaths and I got so drunk with my psychopath spotting powers that I changed.
02:16:18.000And my friends were saying to me, like, you've really changed.
02:16:21.000Peter 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.
02:16:34.000The first half of my book, The Psychopath Test, sort of teaches people how to spot psychopaths.
02:16:38.000And 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.
02:16:45.000But like nuances of language, you know, there's like a 20 point checklist where it all comes from.
02:16:54.000I 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.
02:17:08.000I think you're more likely to find psychopaths at the top of the tree than at the bottom because capitalism rewards psychopathic behaviour.
02:17:17.000But isn't the definition, too, that a psychopath is someone that has power, whereas a sociopath is someone like...
02:17:28.000Yeah, there's a lot of debate out there as to...
02:17:30.000And different psychiatrists and psychologists will use the terms like...
02:17:34.000I mean, the upshot is that I don't think there's any real difference.
02:17:37.000Some people will say there's a difference.
02:17:41.000Because they'll bring their own sort of analyses to the situation.
02:17:44.000But 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.
02:17:52.000That's another big matter of debate amongst those people.
02:17:55.000But I'll give you a kind of classic example from the book.
02:17:58.000I went to meet this Haitian dictator called Toto Constant in jail in upstate New York.
02:18:05.000I'd met him a few times before, but I met him in jail.
02:20:17.000The 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.
02:20:26.000Because they're just really interested in the idea that there's just another species out there.
02:20:30.000There's just this other species that aren't quite human.
02:20:33.000They look human, but it's kind of like David Icke and the lizards, right?
02:20:36.000There's people out there who've adopted human form, but they're not quite human.
02:20:43.000There's this other psychiatrist I met called James Gilligan, who basically says all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.
02:20:52.000So 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.
02:21:30.000Honestly, I think there's truth in both camps.
02:21:32.000Well, 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.
02:21:48.000You 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.
02:22:04.000And most people don't even remotely tap into their reserve of energy.
02:22:09.000They sit down and their body just conforms to their office chair and they're there all day.
02:22:15.000And 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.
02:22:23.000And their body just is constantly storing up stress.
02:22:26.000And it has this desire to exert energy and it's never met with what it needs.
02:22:57.000Instead 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.
02:23:07.000Yeah, well, there's certainly, you keep coming back to that.
02:23:11.000It's only because it's mostly some books.
02:24:05.000And 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?
02:24:12.000Actually, there is another John Ronson on Twitter that's pretending to be me.