Jon Ronson on Conspiracy, Masculinity and Writing

I chat with Jon Ronson, who is a bestselling author, journalist, documentary maker and podcaster. A master of immersive nonfiction. His work has consistently been ahead of the curve, exploring extremism, conspiracy, public shaming and the culture wars long before they became mainstream concerns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:20Speaker 01

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• 1:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dangle from the jangly balcony, you scandalous Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. This week's podcast, I think, you don't need to familiarise yourself with the lore. This is a very straightforward podcast this week, because I'm having a wonderful chat with one of my fucking heroes, Jon Ronson. He's an internationally bestselling author. He's a journalist, he's a documentary maker, he's done screenwriting. What I adore about Jon Ronson is his, his skill as a storyteller, his ability to find

• 2:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  a riveting story within factual information without needing to retreat into fiction. I've been consuming Jon's work in one way or another since I was a teenager. Chances are, if you're listening to this podcast, you're already a Jon Ronson fan. And if you're not familiar with him, you are familiar with his work, because like some of his books, like The Men Who Stare at Goats, was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster called The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney. He's been consistently way ahead of the curve when it comes to putting his finger on the

• 3:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  fabric of culture, identifying the zeitgeist. He's the first person to like identify and highlight the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the documentary, The Secret Rollers of the World, which I watched when I was a teenager. It came out, I think in the year 2000. That documentary would have been the first time that I encountered like the Illuminati conspiracy theories, things which unfortunately now are just mainstream knows. And I speak to Jon about that, I speak to him about, when I, when I was a kid, conspiracy theories were fun. They were, they felt safe, they were enjoyable, they were interesting.

• 3:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  You had the X-Files, it was okay to be interested in UFOs, in Bigfoot. If you were interested in these things, they weren't necessarily a dog whistle that you had maybe more extremist or darker racist beliefs, they were just a bit of crack. It was okay to speak about these things without needing to distance yourself from them. I'm talking about the, the time when the X-Files was the biggest TV show, or you could pick up a copy of a ridiculous newspaper called Weekly World News, the monoculture, when we understood what information was reliable and from a trusted source, and what information

• 4:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  was ridiculous, before algorithms. So me and Jon sat down for 90 minutes and had the best crack in the whole world and chatted about everything and anything. Check out any of Jon's work, his books, The Psychopath Test, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which came out in 2015, I believe, which was, again, one of the first pieces about what would become known as cancel culture. And Jon is on, he's on this week because he has a new book out right now called The Casa. I'm halfway through it because it just came out. It's a banger.

• 5:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's about alienation, male alienation, online radicalisation, and like a crisis of purpose and meaning right now. Any of Jon's audiobooks that I've listened to over the years, or podcasts that he's made, have been a massive influence on how I make my podcast. His work helped to show me how to tell a story over an audio medium. Jonransohn.com is his website if you want to check out all his crack. J-O-N, not J-O-H-N, Jon Ronson. So anyway, I'm literally just about to leg it for a flight right now.

• 5:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm heading over to London to do some promotional work for the upcoming tour of England, Scotland and Wales, which is next month. I'm hoping I can get even an hour to flake into a museum for a tiny bit of downtime, but it's unlikely. I think I'm gonna be incredibly busy. The chat I had with Jon, it's so much crack, I don't want to interrupt it, I want to leave it run through. So I'm gonna do the Ocarina pause right now before I get into the chat that I had with Jon Ronson. First off Patreon, if you're a regular listener to this podcast, if you enjoy it, if it brings you mirth, merriment, a sense of routine, distraction, whatever has you listening to

• 6:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  this podcast, please consider funding the podcast directly, because this is a listener-funded podcast. This is my full-time job. This is how I rent up my office, purchase my equipment, pay my bills, most importantly, how I have the time and space to do what I do, to deliver a podcast each week and maintain consistency, because I adore, I fucking love and adore this work. If you see me on Instagram this week, I'm trying to, I'm trying to make short form video on Instagram, which I'm trying to find a way to make it enjoyable, to do what I do each

• 7:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  week here, but in a shorter format for Instagram videos. But what makes it difficult is the facial aspect of it. When I show up here and I'm just speaking into a microphone, it's just my voice, or when I write a book, when I write a collection of short stories, when it's words, I feel very relaxed and it's easy for me to access a state of flow. But when it comes to recording video content, even when it's about a subject that I'm deeply passionate about, I think it's because I'm an autistic person, the extra effort and cognitive

• 7:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  load of recording my facial expressions, being aware of my eye movements, being aware of, am I making eye contact with the camera lens, looking at my own expressions? That's not my comfort zone as an autistic person, that is an area of difficulty. So it's harder for me to, to reach flow states and effortlessly enjoy the process of making Instagram videos, even when it's about subject matter that I'm deeply interested in. And it's something I, I learned about myself this week when I was trying to do it. I made a, an eight-minute video on Instagram about some of the topics that I covered last

• 8:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  week, and the process was so much more painstaking and so much more effort and frustration because I'm in the land of facial expressions, rather than here, where I'm in the land of pure fucking audio joy. But here's the thing with creativity and any work, it's wonderful when you can identify why something is difficult or why something is frustrating, because once you can identify it, then you can work on it through practice. But anyway, if you do enjoy this podcast, this aural experience, consider supporting it directly. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And for that, you get four podcasts.

• 9:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it, just listen, listen for free, listen for free, because everybody gets the exact same experience, whether you pay or not. And the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. And if you are paying, you're paying for the, you're paying for someone else who might not be able to afford to pay. And that's enough for me to be able to earn a living and show up and do the work. So I adore that model. I absolutely love it and I'd never change it. So that's patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. And if you're a new person signing up, don't sign up for Patreon and the Apple app on your iPhone, because Apple take 30%.

• 9:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if you're a new patron, sign up on a browser, because Apple are greedy bastards. Upcoming gigs next month, my biggest ever tour of England, Scotland and Wales, kicking it off on the Brighton Dome on the 18th of October, which is nearly sold out. Cardiff in Wales on the 20th, Coventry, the Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry on the 21st of October, then over to Bristol. Bristol's looking like it's gonna sell out soon at Beacon Hall. Guildford then, in G Live. I've never been to Guildford, I'm looking forward to that.

• 10:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have a day off in London, I'm gonna haunt the fucking British Museum, gonna haunt it. And if I'm not completely burnt out from all those gigs, I might chance a little fucking podcast, a little walk-around podcast in the British Museum. I would love to do that. I can't promise it because I'll have done four or five gigs and I might just need a day to not talk at all. On the 26th of October then, London, Barbican Hall, that is sold out. Thank you to everyone in London. Day off Glasgow to Falk. Up to Glasgow at the Pavilion Theatre, which is sold out.

• 11:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  That sold out might release a few guest lists, I don't know, but that's sold out. Then on to Gateshead on the 29th and finishing the whole shebang off in Nottingham at the Theatre Royal on the 1st of November. Then I'm gonna chill out with touring, except for one gig in Sligo, which is sold out. I have a fucking play on as well up in the Abbey Theatre and that opens next week, I believe. It's called Animals, if you wanna go up and see that in Dublin. I am not in the play, but it's a play that is adapted from several of my short stories and some profoundly talented people at the top of their game are making that happen. And it's a, it's a huge honour.

• 12:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, I, I, I'm just fucking pinching myself. I can't believe it's real. It's an honour to be up in the Abbey Theatre, to see my writing up on stage in the Abbey Theatre, which is an institution in Ireland. My Australian New Zealand tour, this one, you're really talking about being down to the last tickets for this, so if you are considering, even though it's April and it's a good way away, like Brisbane in part, fully sold out, Melbourne at the Palais Theatre on 11th of April, that's ready to go. Sydney Opera House sold out, but I released an additional three or 300 tickets. And the only place really where there's tickets left is Auckland Town Hall in New Zealand.

• 12:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, I won't be adding any additional dates there because you kinda can't do that when you're going to the other side of the world. So get your tickets for that tour, for whatever's available on that, because you don't want, you don't want scalpers, you don't want scalpers charging you twice as much. All of those tickets will be on the blindbypodcast.ie. The UK tour is gonna be fain.co.uk forward slash blindby. Also throw me a DM on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club if for any of those dates you wanna suggest a nice local guest who you think I'd have a good crack with. Right, Ocarina pause now and then we get into the chat with John Ronson.

• 13:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're selling base Ocarinas online. I'm gonna get my hands on a base Ocarina.

• 13:42Speaker 03

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• 14:27Speaker 03

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• 14:55Speaker 00

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• 17:12Speaker 00

  Some days, getting the work done isn't the problem. Staying locked in is. AlphaBrain is on its daily nootropic formula for cognitive support. Designed to support memory, focus, attention and mental clarity. Its formula with science-driven ingredients include theanine and huperzine A to support focus and memory and it's caffeine free. So when you're deep in the work, AlphaBrain helps support enhanced productivity and tune out distractions. Get focused on what matters. Shop AlphaBrain now at O N N I T dot com.

• 17:44Speaker 03

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• 18:28Speaker 03

  No sleep study required. Prescribed online, shipped to your door. Excite OSA at springsleep.com/sleep20. Code sleep 20 for 20% off. Excite OSA is an FDA cleared prescription only device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. Not for everyone. Individual results vary. Risks and benefits at springsleep.com.

• 19:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the Ocarina pause you'd have heard in advert for some bullshit right there. Now into my chat with the magnificent journalist, author, documentary maker, pioneer, that is John Ranson. His new book is out now. It's called The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. All right, John, um, I suppose the first thing I wanna chat to you about is, is you're, you're on tour and before I started recording, we were both reflecting on how uniquely strange and terrible being on tour is.

• 19:43Speaker 06

  It's, it's the worst, but I wanna, like, I'm just in a state of complete, a kind of bleakness, like lonely. I mean, I, I realise it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, melancholy coming from a position of privilege, but nonetheless, it's still melancholy. So, so what about you? Do you, do you go on long tours and just hate it?

• 20:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes, yes, even to the point, John, I was once on a tour. You and I were in the same hotel and I sat down at breakfast and saw you across from me and just said, no, I'm not gonna introduce myself because John is in the same position as me and I'm just gonna let him have his breakfast here on tour.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  Was I looking, I mean, could, could you, could you divine from my facial expression whether I was having a terrible time with that?

• 20:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I think I might've been projecting. It, it, it's just like, there's someone who's doing the same shit that I'm doing and that breakfast is very important and I'm gonna, I'm not gonna walk up and as well, I didn't know if you knew who the fuck I was. So it's just this Irish fella going, I wear a plastic bag on my head, but I'm not wearing it right now, but I really like your work.

• 20:52Speaker 06

  Right. Well, you should have done, Chris. I, I just find it, some tours I enjoy and then some tours, it's, it's all down to like the state of mind that you mean, right? I mean, you can, you can change your mood, I think, what, what has the capability of doing that. But on this tour, for some reason, I'm just, I'm alone and I'm lonely and I'm just, you know, trudging from town to town. It's very nice to be on stage and it's very nice to meet people who like your stuff.

• 21:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the bits around it. It's the bits around it, but what I find is the... Being on stage is wonderful. That bit's amazing, but then there's the waiting and then you get off stage, you get back to the hotel and your brain is wired because you've just spoken to so many people and it's hard to go to sleep.

• 21:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, and then you wake up in the morning and you're all on your own. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm running every day. I'm in Edinburgh right now and I just ran along a part of Edinburgh I've never been to before, the, the Leith Water. It's like a kind of little river that runs through Edinburgh with a beautiful.

• 21:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love fucking Leith, man. I used to go cycling out by that canal.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's exactly why I was running this morning and that was beautiful.

• 21:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it the old, it used to be a railway track and now they made it a, a running track?

• 22:03Speaker 06

  I think that is where I was this morning.

• 22:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Something about touring, which I think you'd be very interested in this, cause I'm, I'm, I'm, it's the type of thing that would excite you in terms of what to write about. So I've got lots of friends who are tour managers. So they would not be, the level of touring that you and I would do, we might do it once or twice a year, but I'm speaking to people who they're on the road nine months a year, people who are tour managing for like Guns N' Roses or The Cranberries. And something I was told about by my friend was, there was a dude who was working March and he is on the road in hotels nine months of the year.

• 22:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  So returning home for him is hell. He cannot allow himself to experience the comfort of what home is. So he had a bedroom in his house built exactly like a Holiday Inn room.

• 23:02Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 23:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  He got the Holiday Inn people to his house so that when he goes home for those, for those two months, he's staying in a Holiday Inn and that way it doesn't hurt him when he's on tour. And, but the other thing too, have you ever seen Prince's house, Paisley Park?

• 23:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've been there.

• 23:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  It looks like a fucking call centre.

• 23:21Speaker 06

  It's like a great big ball.

• 23:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  My theory about Prince's house, cause I haven't been there, but I've done the Google tour, is when, when I would look inside, I was just, it's like, why, why does Prince have fire retardant carpets? Why does he have the type of doors you see in an office? And I think because Prince was such a workaholic, I don't think he allowed himself to have a feeling of home. So he needed to perpetually live backstage. And that's what his house is. It's the perpetual backstage.

• 23:54Speaker 06

  Well, I'm, I'm friends with Robbie Williams and when I went to his house, he doesn't live there anymore, but I went to visit him in like 2005 in Los Angeles. And it was a pretty, you know, like, it was like a big mansion, but it was kind of modest by pop star mansion standards. And, and his rooms were like really small. And I said to him, like, why, why did you choose this house? And he said, I basically, I got it out of a catalogue. Like I sort of basically chose it remotely. And the reason why my, why the rooms are all so small is because I really hate big rooms. And I realised this is somebody

• 24:35Speaker 06

  who like plays stadiums the whole time. So for Robbie, it's like the opposite. He, he hates being on tour. He hates playing stadiums. And so when he goes home, he wants a house with very small rooms.

• 24:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's re- interesting. He, he recently got diagnosed with autism and so much of it now makes sense. Like even when, I loved that documentary he made for Netflix where it's just him in his underpants on the bed, looking at a laptop. Knowing that he's autistic, it made so much sense. In order for him to speak in an honest way and to really give us what he gave in that documentary, his sensory needs needed to be met. And for him, that was, I need to be in my underpants on the bed. I can't dress up in a suit and do this with a bunch of cameras around me.

• 25:17Speaker 06

  You being autistic, does that make touring harder for you? Because autistic people want routine and hate breaks and routine.

• 25:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  The biggest struggle for me is a thing called burnout, right? And burnout, the hardest part of touring for me is the amount of small talk I have to have in a day with several strangers. You get to a venue, here is the sound person, here's the lighting person, and I have to engage in the act. I have to put on my little performance of being a normal person and not info dumping facts. The effort of that every single night, after about six days, I kind of, I lose the ability to read clocks. I might leave my hotel room and forget that I'm wearing shoes. It's called executive functioning skills, that the skills that

• 26:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  we have to just get on with life, to be an adult, to plan, these things disappear when I expose myself too much to nor, the neurotypical world. So that's the tough part to touring for me.

• 26:22Speaker 06

  So, so does that mean that you find, like, do you do book signings after your shows?

• 26:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can't do that, no, unfortunately.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  For that reason?

• 26:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I can't. That's way too much small talk with too many different people, you know, even with the bag on my head.

• 26:36Speaker 06

  Right. Whereas this conversation's okay because it's remote and we're not looking at each other. So there's no like eye strain.

• 26:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm. So really, in the modern podcast environment, what I should be doing here is you and I should be speaking on camera. And then I have this whole interview as a video and I can put that as clips on Instagram. If I was chatting to you, John, right, and I then have to also read your facial expressions, I'm not going to have as good a conversation as I will if I'm simply listening to your voice. So when I'm just hearing you, I can be me, I can relax. But reading another person's face and taking their words in, that, that got me a big tick on the spectrum. But you know, you know yourself from the, the psychopath

• 27:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  test days. Like, fuck it, man. I'm autistic because the DSM decided I'm autistic. Before I was autistic, I was just a mad artist, you know? And I would look to all the artists I looked up to who were a bit eccentric and go, I'm just one of those. But then 2013 happens and they changed the DSM and now I'm autistic. And sometimes I'm a little bit sceptical of that, you know? It's, here's this manual and.

• 27:50Speaker 06

  So you mean, right, so you mean like, because, you know, because you're so clearly high functioning, then what does, is the diagnosis useful? Is that, is that what you mean?

• 28:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. It would have been very useful to me in school because.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  Because you could say like, these, these overhead lights are killing me and, and all of that becomes much more explicable if you realise. Yeah. I remember you saying when you were diagnosed as autistic, you've, you've, you've always been autistic. It's not like on the day of your diagnosis, you became autistic. You've always been autistic. That, that was an interesting thing to say, I think.

• 28:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even the word diagnosis, it's, when you, when you, when you receive a diagnosis, it's like, oh, I have a disease now. And it's like, I don't know if, all that happened when I found out that I was autistic is I received a new suite of language. That's all it is. I had different words. I was eccentric. I was an artist. I was a bit kooky, a bit scattered. And now I find out this is autistic. The danger is everyone on the spectrum is different. And now that I receive a diagnosis, I have to be very careful to not identify with that diagnosis and wonder, am I autistic enough? Or, like, I don't really have that much of a problem with lights, but other people do. But I, I, I start saying to myself, maybe should I have a problem with lights?

• 29:15Speaker 06

  Right. Well, isn't this the thing about, isn't this the downside of, of identity politics in, in general, that you can lean too heavily into the diagnosis and that can cause you problems?

• 29:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, once, any time.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  Lean too heavily into the behaviour, like just what you just said.

• 29:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm always conscious about self-esteem and identity. If I speak so much about being autistic and then I receive feedback from other people where they're like, thank you so much for speaking publicly as an autistic person. That then impacts my sense of worth, my sense of self. And if I'm not careful and if my self-esteem and identity starts to align with that, then it becomes something I need to protect. And when we start needing to protect these things, I mean, I mean, this ties in with.

• 30:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  So the first question I wanted to ask you, John, I first came across your work would have been the late 90s, early 2000s, when I was a teenager and it was in the time of what we called the monoculture. I didn't have the internet. So wonderful, beautiful things would arrive to me, usually via Channel Four. And your shows were one of those things. It's, I'm floating in a sea of shit. And then all of a sudden, I think the first thing I saw by yourself was the one where you had Alex Jones on it, the

• 30:42Speaker 06

  Oh, Bohemian.

• 30:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Secret rulers.

• 30:45Speaker 06

  Well, we snuck into Bohemian Grove together.

• 30:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, that blew my mind and it was incredible. And it just, I saw it and then I couldn't watch it on repeat because I didn't record it and I just had to hold it in my heart as a memory. And there's a beauty to that, you know, because pieces of culture were like religious artefacts that we had to worship. I couldn't just go onto YouTube and watch it again. I had to remember it and then tell all my friends, there's this thing I saw last night and this guy was there and they were worshiping a giant owl and I loved it. But you, you were occupying a space then and not just that, but you had, you mentioned it in the new book, The Skeptics in the Pub, thing that you started, which was the early 2000s too, I believe.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  I want to speak about a time when conspiracy theories felt really safe and fun. That's what it's like this, isn't this so amusing that people believe these things? And isn't it so safe to enjoy this stuff? None of this will threaten me. And these people who believe these things are so fringe that it's okay to laugh at them as eccentric characters, but it's never going to impact my life. Something happened in the mid 2010s where conspiracy theories now, they're dangerous, I'm scared of them. And I don't even like speaking about them in public because of what people might think about me. Do you know what I mean?

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I think it was earlier than the mid 2010s. I often think how lucky I was that I wrote that book then, which is my first book, which is all about this stuff. It came out just before nine 11. Nine 11 is really what changed it. On the day of nine 11, Alex Jones went on air and the first thing he said was, you see, I told you, I told you this was gonna happen. Cut to four years later, I make a 2005, there's the London bombings, three, two trains and a bus. And I made a documentary about this woman called Rachel North, who was on one of the trains and survived and she became

• 32:50Speaker 06

  a kind of spokesperson for the survivors. And she went online and saw that people, conspiracy theorists were speculating that she didn't exist. She was a team of MI5 agents. And the more she tried to convince them that she did exist, the more they were convinced that she didn't. Until eventually she just thought, well, I have to meet them in person. So she kind of goes to a meeting and they start yelling at each other. And when I heard that story in 2005, I just thought, I'm so pleased that I wrote them before that because there's nothing funny anymore in this. It's really curdled into something violent and inhuman. And it's only got worse since then.

• 33:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  When you, can you tell us a little bit about Skeptics in the Pub, that group that you founded? Like, what was that about and why?

• 33:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I worked there for kind of, I guess, kind of slightly solipsistic reasons.

• 33:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you found that or did you just join it?

• 33:51Speaker 06

  No, they kind of found me. What happened was, when my first book or two came out then, and the Men who Stare at Ghosts, it was kind of hard, you know, I'd be trips around the country, giving talks and nobody would come. I gave a talk in Birmingham, at the Borders in Birmingham, and four people showed up. And during the Q and A, I mentioned this actually in the new book, in the castle, during the Q and A, one of the four people said, I don't know why you seem so annoyed with us. We're the ones who came.

• 34:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, fuck. That's lesson one in doing gigs. Ah, if there's four people in the audience, you play like it's a full house. That's what you gotta do.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  Absolute move. I was so miserable. Then I turned up for this thing called Skeptics in the Pub. And it was like, it was like I was Beyonce. It was, oh my God, there he is. It's John Robinson. Oh my God. The place was like hacked. So I said, so what is this? You meet once a week in a pub and a sceptical? And they're like, yeah. And I said, isn't this a kind of weird way to live your life? And then I went, no. So I started going to these skeptics meetings. And at first, it was kind of fun. They were all about proving that ghosts didn't exist and the Loch Ness monster didn't exist. They wanted to be so

• 35:21Speaker 06

  prevalent in the culture that a ghost hunting TV show would dream of not including a skeptic running alongside the ghost hunters, ruining everything by saying, oh, it's just infrasound emanating from the faulty air conditioning unit.

• 35:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 35:37Speaker 06

  But then what happened was, it was all male.

• 35:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  The way I described the skeptics is like the architect was university lecturer, uncomfortable in his or her, but mostly his skin. I would say a lot of people on the spectrum were there.

• 35:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 06

  Because I suppose, you know, rationality and reason and factual accuracy, that's something.

• 36:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And curiosity. I mean, the thing is with being autistic is you need to have a fucking answer. It's the ambiguity is what will have you focusing until you can find that answer, you know?

• 36:14Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, the need for certainty. So, but then these younger people came in, there's this young woman came in called Rebecca Watson. And she was like, we've got to broaden our sphere of interests. Like, it can't just be about ghosts and Bigfoot. Why don't we talk about other irrational belief systems like misogyny? And all the old members were like, were like, no, we're already straying too far from our core purpose of proving the non-existence of ghosts. So that's when I started to drift away. I thought, there's

• 36:52Speaker 06

  much more interesting irrational belief systems to focus on. And I'm beginning to get sceptical of the skeptics, that they won't go to those places.

• 37:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the thing is too, with conspiracy beliefs is what I'm always trying to parse, right, is that line between at what point am I becoming a lunatic? And what I mean by that is, you know, you look at, we say Alex Jones's stuff that he was speaking about, right? But then I'd read a book like yours, like the Men who Stare at Ghosts, and I'm going, this is what the CIA were actually doing. They were doing like MKUltra mind control stuff. There was the, you got into the hemisync meditation stuff too, didn't you?

• 37:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever tried one of those? Have you ever done a hemisync meditation?

• 37:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did it.

• 37:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  I fucking did it, man. I tried it. I literally left my body and I said, fuck this. I don't need this. I'm never doing this again.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Right. I didn't leave my body. I'm a bit envious. Every time I've done something like that, there's that thing with the salt water, what's it called? The bath that you do to the sensory deprivation? Yeah. I'm no good at getting out of my own head. So I always fail in those situations.

• 38:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I approach those, for people who don't know, it's the CIA were funded to try and figure out what reality was. And then they brought in this dude who was doing transcendental meditation. They were trying to do remote viewing. And he has a type of meditation that uses sounds and

• 38:27Speaker 06

  It's about aligning the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of your brain.

• 38:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And when I tried it for fun with a sceptical mindset, because I love meditating, I just found one on YouTube. I put my headphones on, very relaxing. And then what I experienced was, you know, the feeling when you're just about to go to sleep and you feel like you're on a roller coaster. For some reason, I got that. And then I took them off and I said, fuck this. And then I've met other people. Scientists, people who are rational people, and they claim they get the full on fucking ketamine leaving their body type of thing. So, I mean, it's when I look at that, when I look at the men who stare at goats, when I look at, did you read that fantastic book, Chaos, Charles Manson?

• 39:16Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I did, I did.

• 39:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Tom O'Neill, is it Tom O'Neill?

• 39:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, very good book.

• 39:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Beautiful book, 20 years of research and.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, that's the thing, you said just before that it was fun to sort of make fun of conspiracy theorists.

• 39:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  Before nine eleven.

• 39:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  It felt really safe.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  But at the same time, it would have been wrong to have made fun of them without also meeting them where they are. There's a line in that book I wrote there where I say that maybe an interesting way to look at our world would be to stand alongside them while they glare back at us. Maybe we could learn new things about our world by standing alongside people who don't feel part of it. And of course, you know, you always get in the nice sense of conspiracy theories when our leaders behave in conspiratorial ways. So, so it was always important, I think, not to just treat them as, as separate from society. There's some, these private clubs exist, the

• 40:16Speaker 06

  Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, they exist, these elite clubs exist. What got us into the war in Iraq? It was a conspiracy of our, of our elites against the will of the people. What's happening now? AI is completely, other than the, the good things about AI, we were talking before we started about how it's really good at cleaning up bad sounds. But in general, these fuckers are coming in, they're trying to convince us that we don't want jobs. Don't worry, we're going to take you to a post-work society where you'll be able to fill your life with things that aren't

• 40:57Speaker 06

  work and won't that be amazing? And my contention is that that's going to just kill us because we need work, we need purpose, we need structure, which is what my book, The Castle, is, is basically about. So, you know, over and over again, these self-selecting elites behave in conspiratorial manners and try and fuck us as a population. So, the conspiracy theorists, I, I think often were factually wrong, but maybe thematically correct. So, for instance, they were all obsessed with QAnon.

• 41:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  If, if they'd just turned their heads 10 degrees to the right, they'd have seen Jeffrey Epstein.

• 41:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck, that's the thing. So, like, when you were doing the Bilderberg stuff in, in, in 2001, that was fringe and fun, but now it's mainstream news. The Epstein thing is way more fucked up than a bunch of old lads burning an effigy of an owl. I mean, that seems playful and fun now. It was a bit terrifying at the time, but now you look at the Epstein thing and it's like, holy fuck, and Zorro Ranch, and we don't have answers.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it's not just the elite, you know, so yes, you've got clear evidence that the elites are acting in the kinds of ways that the conspiracy theorists would complain about. They'd very often get it factually wrong. But as I say, you know, Bilderberg Group exists and Epstein exists and the AI billionaires are trying to, you know, in one way or another, screw up the world. But at the same time, the conspiracy theorists are also getting more violent and more aggressive and more narcissistic and are, and are kind of coagulating in this kind of community of rageful

• 42:46Speaker 06

  narcissists who hate the old institutions so much, they're willing to behave in more and more monstrous ways and ignore when their fellow travelers are clearly mentally disordered. So, so you've got, you've got an escalation of violent behavior all over the place, I'd say.

• 43:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  What, what do you think about, did you pore over the Epstein files when, when those things got released?

• 43:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, a little bit of me felt a bit like somebody who loved Nirvana's first to help her, but they've got pissed off with.

• 43:25Speaker 06

  Whenever I got fired, I was like, come on, you know, I've been, I've been bloody going on about this since 2017. So, when, so when everybody else got thrilled, when, you know, when I, I, I'm fascinated, I kind of dropped out of it, a tiny bit for that reason.

• 43:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  The hipster in you, the hipster in you was like, I need to find a new band.

• 43:44Speaker 06

  That's basically what I thought. But of course, I, I also went into the Epstein files and searched everybody that I knew.

• 43:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, there's so many.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  You know something, here's something I found in the Epstein files. Everybody's always focusing on the really, you know, terrible things that emerged from the Epstein files. Can I tell you something good that emerged from it?

• 44:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 44:04Speaker 06

  Okay. So, I was at TED in 2012, I gave a TED Talk in 2012. And I've always wondered, because I know Epstein went to TED a few times, and in fact even had these like private parties for the, you know, the scientists who'd go to TED. And I always wondered whether Epstein had been there in 2012 when I was there. Was I in the same convention center as Epstein? So, I went down a little TED rabbit hole and I found this correspondence where somebody from Jeffrey Epstein's organization was trying to get hold of Chris Anderson, who's the head of TED. And Chris Anderson, and this is

• 44:42Speaker 06

  like back in 2012, and Chris Anderson was refusing to take Epstein's calls. So, clearly, clearly knowing that the guy was trouble and kept on coming up with excuses and I was like, so no, Chris is too busy to talk to Mr. Epstein. And I thought, you know, there's, there's people in the Epstein files who it reflects well on, and that's one example.

• 45:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Apparently Al Gore was one of them. Apparently they brought Al Gore to the island and what I heard was all he wanted to do was hang out with his wife and just get off the island.

• 45:16Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 45:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But, I mean, like, my need for certainty and pattern recognition, I mean, I viewed the Epstein thing as, there's a brilliant journalist called Whitney Webb, and she traced Epstein back to prohibition, really. If you think of prohibition in, in America, 1920s, the thing is with drugs, drugs are illegal, but only a certain class of people are accessing drugs. But when alcohol became a drug, everybody enjoys alcohol. So, suddenly you had a system where alcohol is being controlled by gangsters. So, the judge, the politician, they're now going to speakeasies.

• 46:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And in the speakeasy, because it's unregulated, you also have sex workers happening, gambling, all these illegal things. And from that prohibition network, gangsters, specifically a gangster called Meyer Lansky, started to develop, because remember too, photography is new, the use of hidden cameras, honeypots, and basically sextortion starts to emerge with Meyer Lansky. But you can then trace Meyer Lansky to Roy Cohn, and then you can go from Roy Cohn straight to Epstein.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  And Trump?

• 46:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Trump. And I viewed the Epstein, what I do at nighttime to, to calm myself, as I just say, this is organized crime. That's what this is. It is organized crime at the highest level that goes somehow above intelligence networks. And it's just about money, power, and coercing people. And even with the Diddy thing, I think Diddy was Epstein for African-American people who had money. Because if you look at the Epstein files, it was quite white. And Diddy, now this is just me fucking guessing and I'd be torn apart in a skeptics club. Diddy had that gun charge in the

• 47:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  2000s when he was with Jennifer Lopez in a club and he should have gone to jail and he didn't go to jail. And what I learned from that Tom O'Neill book about Charles Manson is you always look for the people who should have gone to jail and who didn't. And those are the ones who become co-opted in some way. And I think Diddy was that. I think it was a way to, an attempted Epstein on African American people who had money, power and platform. And can you trap, because he had cameras all over his house too.

• 47:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 47:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's how I view the whole thing. It's, this is an organized crime network about entrapment and luring people into certain situations and then getting dirt on them so that they can't speak out.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, anything, I mean, with Epstein, I'm, anything could be true, anything. This is, this is the one conspiracy theory where anything could be true.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  I mean, what's on, yeah.

• 48:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even now with all the, the alien disclosure shit, you know, and the UFO disclosures, which I'm, God, I'd love to hear what the lads back in two thousand and that's in the skeptics in the pub would think about it. But if you look at the amount of things that they're now comfortable releasing, but my feeling on that is we're now at a point where artificial intelligence, okay, and they want to go towards AGI to create something that is smarter than humans. If you do what they call the limited hangout, you allow a little bit out. If you can make people think, actually, there is fucking aliens, they're smarter than us. So if you don't mind, we're gonna need to make this thing that's smarter than us to fight

• 48:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  that. It feels like something that gives permission for the deregulation of artificial intelligence.

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Although, you know, you said you'd like to hear what the old skeptics in the two thousands would think about the UFO disclosures now. But this is me speaking slightly out of my sphere of, which I always try not to do. I always try not to kind of talk too much out of my ass. I tend to only try and talk about things where I've done my own journey.

• 49:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  I love talking out of my fucking arse.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  Right. However, I'm pretty sure I've heard people at Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was, you know, a big skeptic back in the two thousands, big part of our movement, basically say he's kind of unimpressed by the UFO disclosures. They're still all pretty inconclusive, they're all still pretty grainy. I don't know.

• 49:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the other thing, when you look at drones now, just the type of drone that you can buy in the shop, so many of those look like UFO videos from the nineties. And I just wonder how much of it was drone technology that the military just weren't telling us about yet, you know?

• 49:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, there's a friend of mine actually wrote a book called Mirage Man and about a guy called Doty, Richard Doty. And he worked for the US military, I think he was in the air force. And his job was to spread false information about UFOs for that reason. He'd invite, yeah, he'd invite people in these kind of UFO buffs, invite them in and terrify them, show them these like fake dossiers. But his whole thing was to, was to like move people away from, because they were seeing classified aircraft and stuff. And so he was trying to like spread confusion to keep the classified technology

• 50:42Speaker 06

  classified.

• 50:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because the, one of the most plausible explanations I heard about, we said the Roswell crash, okay, the, the, the most plausible explanation I heard was Roswell happened, there was a crash, there were bodies, but the, it was the Russians in the fifties who had literally gotten human beings that were small or maybe disabled in some way, and basically dropped a weird craft with bodies in America, just to fuck with the Yanks.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  I mean, that does seem like an elaborate thing to do, but, but I don't know.

• 51:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the thing, you don't know. The, the, the new book, right, The Castle, it opens chatting about this fella called Chris Mark, who's a gilded age money. So I'm assuming that guy does fuck all other than have an inheritance.

• 51:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's got, yeah, he's got a huge inheritance. His great grandfather was a gilded age steel tycoon. What I'm trying to get to in The Castle, I think, is basically what happens to us when we lose our purpose in life. Because I think we're entering, if the AI billionaires get their way, then people are going to be without purpose. No structure, no work, all the old structures are collapsing. People are saying, well, there's a new structure come to YouTube, be content creators. But that's a fucked up thing. I mean, it works for some people. Anyway, so I wanted to write a book about what happens when people lose their structure in life and their purpose. And this gilded age, this Chris Mark, so

• 52:26Speaker 06

  he's the great grandson of a gilded age steel tycoon. And the reason why I know about him, because he's not a well-known person at all, is that my, my son Joel was invited to a party at his house. And when he turned up, it turns out that his house was actually a giant castle in the forests of Connecticut. And when I say giant castle, just whatever people are picturing, multiply it by 10. It had way too many turrets, way too many towers. It's almost as if AI had designed a castle and got it wrong in the way that

• 53:08Speaker 06

  AI gets things wrong. And so Joel and his friends turned up at this castle, this weird fucking castle. And they cross the drawbridge and enter the grand banquetting hall to discover that there's no party. It's a trick. They've been tricked into going to this place. And this night, the castle owner comes out and they said, where's the party? And he said, oh, no, I've invited you here for another reason, which is to take part in my reality show. So they said, what's the name of your reality show? It's called a hundred and one princesses. And Joel said, what's the core concept? And he said, I'm the king, I'm looking

• 53:52Speaker 06

  for my queen. I have a hundred and one princesses to choose from. And then he said to the women in Joel's party, go downstairs to my basement costume room, put on some princess costumes and come back upstairs for filming. Is this a good cliffhanger to stop or will I carry on for a bit more?

• 54:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Carry on, please.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Okay, so they go downstairs, passing all the red flags along the way. Not real red flags. Put on princess costumes. I'm going back upstairs, a videographer appears, and filming begins, but it becomes pretty obvious that this isn't a real reality show. This guy who has all the money in the world and no purpose, no structure, is filling his castle with these young women who he has lured under false pretenses to take part in his reality show. But in fact, what he wants is a harim of women so he can live the kind of life that a man like him used to be able to live 50 years ago. But you

• 54:53Speaker 06

  just can't do it anymore. So the original title, I was going to call the castle, The Impossibility of Keeping a Harim in the Post Me Too Age. But in the end, my publishers said that was a terrible name for a book. So I called it The Castle.

• 55:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  He was looking for a Hugh Hefner type of arrangement.

• 55:11Speaker 06

  Yes, he wanted his own, everything he had in his castle, Hugh Hefner had in his Playboy mansion.

• 55:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this dude, he, he was in his sixties, was he, Chris Mark?

• 55:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, early sixties.

• 55:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus Christ.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. He seems very geared towards sex.

• 55:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, at what point is what he, like, are the police involved? Is, is this illegal, what he's doing?

• 55:35Speaker 06

  Well, okay, let me give one spoiler from The Castle. Halfway through, so I decide to investigate him and the castle. And half the book is me trying to find out what the hell's going on inside that castle. And the other half of the book is me telling these other stories of men out of time, without purpose, falling apart, trying to create new worlds for themselves. But halfway through investigating the castle owner, Chris Mark, I get a telephone call. And what I learn on this call is that I'm not the only person investigating him. He's also being investigated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security,

• 56:18Speaker 06

  the Connecticut State Police. And that's never happened to me in 40 years of journalism.

• 56:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever been, like, in the work that you've done, found yourself getting too close to something where, I don't know, an intelligence agency has kind of bothered you or said, what the fuck are you doing or stay away?

• 56:41Speaker 06

  Actually, I think this was, I mean, this was an example, because I had to figure out, look, I don't want to buck up some investigation. Like, if he's doing stuff, you know, if he's being investigated for serious crimes, I don't want to, like, you know, tread on anyone's toes.

• 57:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 06

  So I had, so I had to, like, figure out, how, how can I, having never been in this situation before, how can I continue to investigate this guy without, like, no one said to me, stop investigating him. But I definitely got the sense that I had to do this responsibly. I didn't want to, like, screw up any, any police investigation. So I guess that happened. But in terms of, oh, with the Minister of Goats, I remember I was at Fort Bragg. What I discovered was that there was a thing at Fort Bragg called Goat Lab, where they would shoot goats and then nurse them back to health. And it was

• 57:43Speaker 06

  a way of learning how to do, like, on the spot, medical training in the battlefield. But once they had all of these goats on base, they thought, well, we'll also see if we can kill them just by staring at them. Hence the fact that the book is called The Minister of Goats. And I was being driven around Fort Bragg. And I said to the guy who was driving me around, oh, well, where's Goat Lab? And he said, you're not supposed to know about Goat Lab.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  So that was one example.

• 58:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  What a sentence.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. Guys must know about Goat Lab. About the Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but nobody wanted to do all of that to dogs. So they switched to goats.

• 58:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  They determined that goats, it was harder to form an emotional bond with a goat than a dog, which in fairness is true.

• 58:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of your writing reminds me a bit of Tom Wolfe, who I fucking adore.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, he was one of mine. Yeah, totally.

• 58:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was, when you were a kid, were you reading Tom Wolfe?

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially this, he curated this book called The New Journalism.

• 58:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that book was a huge, that, between that book and Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Didion, that, it was like really cool journalists going off and having weird adventures and putting themselves in the story. Not all the time. Some of the writers in Tom Wolfe's new journalism kept themselves out of the story, but they were all trying out new creative ways of doing journalism. So being a good writer and also writing non-fiction, that inspired me more than anything.

• 59:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And putting a story into a spin, like it's, it's, it's okay for this journalism to also be entertaining.

• 59:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I always want my books to be read on beaches. One of the most famous stories for that time was, Gator Lee's wrote this story called Frank Sinatra Has A Cold. And, and it was the whole, the whole story was him trying to get to Frank Sinatra through his entourage and, you know, and he can't get to him and Sinatra's too heavily protected. And, and I don't think anyone had ever done a story like that before, which was about the process of doing the story. And that was a revelation.

• 1:00:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you deal with the resistance of, um, cause like you're doing journalism, you're following a story, which means that everything that you tell has to be evidence based and truthful. But because you are blending in the world of literature and entertainment and the screenwriting part of your brain kicks in, how does it feel when it's like, fuck it, this story needs to go to this place, but I can't go there because the evidence isn't there. But if this was a fucking novel, that's where I'd take it. Like the, the August Ames one is like, I listened to your August Ames podcast, The Last Days Of August. And

• 1:00:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  that one like ended with, I could tell, you're like, I don't have an ending for this. I, you know what I mean?

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  Oh, no, I think I got an ending to that story, actually. I, I think it's, it's, that story, so The Last Days Of August is, is about the death of a porn star. I'd, I'd made this really fun documentary series for Audible called The Butterfly Effect.

• 1:01:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes, I love that. I fucking love that.

• 1:01:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. I, I loved it too. It was about the kind of consequences of the tech takeover of the porn industry. And it was very humanistic. And, you know, the, the porn performers were kind of heroes of it and the tech billionaires were the villains of it. So it was nice to sort of switch around the kind of respectability politics a little bit. But then shortly after I made it, this one porn star, who I never met, but my producer Lena at the time had met, August Ames, took her life. And, and her husband blamed social media shaming. The day she took her life, she'd been piled in on, on social media. So it just seemed

• 1:01:58Speaker 06

  appropriate that I should do a bit of investigating, given I wrote the book about social media shaming, so you've been publicly shamed.

• 1:02:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I love that one too.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Thank you. And I, and I'd just finished The Butterfly Effect. And the conclusion I came to at the end of Last Days Of August was that it was kind of like, do you know that J. B. Priestley play and in spectacles?

• 1:02:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 1:02:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. So for people who don't know, a police inspector turns up at somebody's house, a rich person's house, and a shop girl has, has taken her life. And it turns out that everybody in this family had a tiny little, um, they acted in a way that just pushed her towards suicide a tiny bit.

• 1:02:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  And, and I think that's the conclusion I came to in The Last Days Of August.

• 1:02:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, what I mean is, uh, when I was halfway through that podcast, right, and you started mentioning her husband, my, the writer in me went, okay, we've got the husband that's responsible. You know what I mean?

• 1:03:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. And which is why at the beginning of episode two, I say, this is not a murder mystery, because I was, I was so nervous. Yeah. I was so nervous that people would think that, oh, well, the husband murdered her. It must be the husband. He murdered her. And I just didn't want to have any kind of lathargery entertainment out of that, what I knew was not true. He didn't murder her. So, so I decided to kind of nip that in the bud. I didn't want to be an irresponsible true crime podcaster.

• 1:03:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I want to fucking chat to you about there, ethics, right? So, so like, so when I'm, because your, your work is investigative journalism, but also there's entertainment involved, you want to hold the listener and tell a story while also ethically navigating real things that have happened. Um, that's the danger for me as a listener whereby if I'm not careful, I retreat to fantasy and then lose my empathy. Now, you're very good at the ethics of it, but if we look at, I think around 2018 is when it exploded, the true crime scene is fucking nuts. There's true crime cruises, man. Do you know about the true crime cruises?

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  Uh, I don't have that person. I did go to a true crime convention called Crime Club once.

• 1:04:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  It, it's like that, but on a boat, but on a boat out at sea. And you're speaking to someone who, someone who survived Richard Ramirez and, and you're getting autographs. And it's just, is this helpful or is this unethical? Like it's, it's the line. When does this become, or I think it becomes, the true crime podcast space exploded so much, we'll say around 2020. It's when you have people making podcast series about shit that's happening right now. And now you have your sleuths on site fucking up active investigations.

• 1:04:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. I, I mean, obviously it all started with season one of Serial and Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, who, who made that show, who, who I've worked with, I, I worked with on This American Life a couple of times. And they are very ethical people and they found themselves in this very ethically confusing situation. And it never happened before. So it's not like they could say, okay, well, we can't do this because look at the last time this happened. They were kind of creating this genre in a way. And I think, I've never actually spoken to them about it, but my guess is that they're very conflicted about it. And what a, what a industry came in their wake. I've often thought actually, uh,

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  that I would, I'd love to do some, a whole thing about, a whole butterfly effect about true crime podcasting and, and the consequences of it.

• 1:05:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, yeah, cause what, the other thing I want to ask you is you, you didn't train as a journalist, did you?

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  I did a couple of years, actually. I did, I went to Central London Polytechnic and I did two years of media studies. But then I became this social secretary, the entertainments officer for the student union. So I never went back and did my third year. So I never graduated.

• 1:06:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, but, but you learned, we'll say, but I'm, I'm, what I'm, I suppose what I'm speaking about is professional ethical frameworks about how to do something like true crime so that your work is valuable and important journalism, but also not harmful. But with the true crime space, a lot of the podcasts, it's just some person in their bedroom with no ethical framework, just having crack and that can create real harm.

• 1:06:39Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And, you know, that lack of ethics you get in the mainstream media too. I, I remember my very first, yeah, that my very first TV show I made when I was about 25 called The Ronson Mission. And I remember being in the edit and one of the interviewees was being cut up to make her look kind of idiotic. I, I wasn't directing then. The first couple of things I did, I didn't direct and then I started directing. And I said to the director, Is this ethical, what we're doing here? And he said, John, he said, think of it this way. One interviewee suffers, but millions are entertained. I'll never forget him saying that to me.

• 1:07:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  But Post will say, since you've been publicly, you've been publicly shamed. That's now changed. Like, if you think, if this is a show on the, that first Ronson effect thing, that, what was that channel for? BBC?

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  BBC, the Ronson mission.

• 1:07:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Ronson mission. That goes out on a Monday night, people see it, but you can't access that human being and harass them online. Now you can, now it's very, very different.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's very, well, but anyway, even without that, you've got to have ethics. And, and my sort of ethical framework began to grow straight after doing the Ronson mission. And, and because being a, being a journalist is a little bit like being a mugger. You go into somebody's life, you take what you want, and then you sort of, you know, at its worst, it's like you've mugged someone. But I'll want that kind of footprint. I don't want to go through life hurting people. So very early on, I realised I've got to be ethical. I, I would argue on the flip side, though, that you can, you know, there's a form of OCD called scrupulosity? Where you worry, yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Do you, do you know about scrupulosity?

• 1:08:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  I do not.

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

  Okay, yeah, it's apparently Martin Luther had it.

• 1:08:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course, a fucking inventor of Protestantism, of course.

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  You, you, it means you have a, you, you worry too much about moral and religious matters. You become like consumed by trying to do the right thing ethically. And I do think you can be too, you can be overly scrupulous and that can be bad too. You've got to get just the right kind of sweet spot. But yeah, but, but I don't want to hurt people. And journalists really need to think about that.

• 1:09:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  That Martin Luther shit recently has me thinking a lot about, about AI. Because I'm, I'm fascinated by, like, a big thing that triggered Martin Luther, rightfully so, was the Catholic Church selling indulgences. That we have the power to decide whether you can go to heaven or hell. And if you pay us enough money, we can sort that out. And Martin Luther went, no fucking way, I protest that, I'm a Protestant now. But if sometimes, in, in the news in the past few weeks, we have people at the top of AI companies and they're coming out saying, we, we got to stop this, this is really dangerous. But they're not being specific about it.

• 1:09:54Speaker 06

  They're not stopping it. And also they're not stopping it.

• 1:09:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're not stopping it, but it reminds me a little bit of how the Catholic Church would inflate the value of relics. And any Western, Western cultures, ones that, that are founded on Christianity, we have, we have the obsession of end times eschatology. And we drift towards anything that tells us an apocalypse is coming. And sometimes I wonder, anytime an AI fella says that, the stock price goes up. I have the most dangerous weapon in the world. I can't tell you what it's going to do, but just trust that this is dangerous. The stock price goes up. And that's how it used to work with, with relics, with, here's the bone of a saint that can cure this, but it can also curse other people.

• 1:10:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or how they would decide how much indulgences were going to be paid. They couldn't prove anything. It was just relying on people's eschatological fear that the end was just about to come.

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  Black.

• 1:10:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even in fucking Ireland, man. Fifth century in Ireland, when the Roman Empire was collapsing and Ireland became a centre of Christianity. A huge driving force for that was, as the Roman Empire was collapsing, people believed, oh, it's the end of the world. The end of the world is happening. So they chose Ireland. Ireland was the most western edge of the known world. So Ireland was seen as the last place that the apocalypse would reach. And then we became this centre of Christianity. So it's there in our thought structures. And I've also heard it said that in cultures, we'll say that are rooted in Buddhism or Hinduism, they're not as dumberistic about AI as we are.

• 1:11:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because this eschatological end times belief isn't sewn into the fabric of, of their culture.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was having this, that was a very lovely way of putting it all, by the way. I, I, I, I did it whenever I'm back in Britain, I, I always have dinner with Adam Curtis, I think's been on your show as well.

• 1:11:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah, Adam is sound as fuck, he's a lovely fella.

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and Adam always points out the number of, you know, over the years, it's one end times after the other. That cow disease, you can come up with a million of them. I, I said to him.

• 1:12:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Remember the millennium bug? Jesus Christ, I was, I fucking, I ruined my New Year's Eve, the year 2000, I fucking ruined it. I didn't have fun, I stared at my fucking computer screen, waiting for that, for Windows, Windows 95 to come out and shock my bollocks or whatever.

• 1:12:23Speaker 06

  And all the planes to fall out of the sky and, yeah. Anyway, so I said to Adam the other day, well, Adam said to me, maybe AI is going to kill us all in 10 years, there's another one of those. And I said to him, but this one, well, you know, this one could be real. And he said, well, all of them could be real, but none of them has yet turned out to be real. So I guess we're going to know within 10 years whether it's real or not.

• 1:12:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, even there's, there's a very interesting website called, I think it's called AI 2027. And it's a piece of speculative fiction written by people who used to work in the AI industry. And it basically lays out the terrible, awful things that can happen. But I know by reading it, these are fucking nerds who love science fiction, who at some point are actually just writing a really brilliant fiction. It ends with drones creating their own biological diseases and then picking us off one by one completely autonomously. And all, the world president is now AI and this is going to happen in three years. And I'm reading it going, you guys just want to be Philip K. Dick.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  You know, they meet as well, they have these things called secular solstices, where they, where they meet and they sing songs. They have these like hymns about, about AI and algorithms, they, they sing these hymns. Yeah.

• 1:13:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's, what, what do you think about Peter Thiel and his Antichrist business?

• 1:13:53Speaker 06

  Well, you know what? To be honest, I haven't done enough about it to really know what I think about it.

• 1:14:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that the hipster in you? Is that the hipster in you? Is that?

• 1:14:09Speaker 06

  I've always liked, I, I, I kind of always want to dive down a rabbit hole and really, you know, really look into the nuances of particular story before I, before I, you know, talk about it.

• 1:14:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Before you comment on it, of course.

• 1:14:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. However, I did have a interesting experience with Peter Thiel one time. I, I went to a Singularity convention in San Francisco, I think it was. Now, all Peter Thiel was there, he was funding it and all the big Singularity gurus. And I met this incredible woman, a trans woman called Martine Rothblatt. So can I tell you about Martine Rothblatt?

• 1:14:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Please do, yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 06

  Okay, so when Martine, or Martin, as a child, went to NASA on like a school trip and had a brainwave and thought, just a regular kid in the suburbs, had a brainwave, thought, you know, if you could double the power of satellites, you could shrink satellite dishes. And in that moment, invented the concept of satellite radio for cars. So Martine creates Sirius, the Sirius radio network, becomes a billionaire. Then there is this woman called Bina, they have a child.

• 1:15:34Speaker 06

  The child has an untreatable lung condition called pulmonary hypertension. And so I said to Martine, so what did you do? Because they were told that this, this kid would be dead by the time they're 18. Martine went to the library and invented a treatment for pulmonary hypertension, set up a medical company. There's all these people alive who wouldn't be alive, including Martine's own daughter, because Martine created this treatment. So for the second time in her life, she became a billionaire and like changed the world. And the reason why I met her at the Singularity conference is because she's trying to do this third thing, which is create a sentient robot.

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  And where she's, they're trying to put all of the information in the world into this robot that's designed to look exactly like Martine's partner, Bina. And it's really shit. It's, as, as someone said to me, like, if, if, if putting all the information in the world into something is enough to make it sentient, then how come Wikipedia's not sentient?

• 1:16:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 06

  So, so I think, certainly back then, like whenever that was, about 2011, the Singularity was doing pretty badly.

• 1:16:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you looked at how there's a real?

• 1:16:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Kind of a land grab for data at the moment, right, to train AI and like.

• 1:17:00Speaker 06

  Now, these data centers.

• 1:17:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  The, the, the data centers, but also what's happening in, like, I read a story in Wired last month about, so like Hollywood is kind of collapsing. There's not as much work in Hollywood as there would have been pre pandemic. A lot of it is just leaving. So you have a lot of out of work actors and a lot of out of work comedians. And there was this group of improv comedians in Hollywood and they got hired for a job, really well paid. And they show up to a workshop each, every week to be given scenarios to do some improv around. And after about three weeks of this, because they assume it's like, we're gonna, this is gonna be a comedy show. This is gonna be a TV show. We don't know. It turns out it was AI data harvesting.

• 1:17:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they appear to have gotten comedy improv people to perform emotions, to perform scenarios. It's all been recorded by cameras and they don't know what they're gonna do with this data, but someone's gonna buy it. Because if you look at the way, like, we've got large language models at the moment. So the AI that we are using, the text based AI is very much trained on all of the text that we gave the internet over the past 25 years. But what the AI companies don't have is the visual data. Like, there's, there's companies in California and for people who are like maids in hotels, they're paying the money to strap cameras to their heads and clean rooms of hotels

• 1:18:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  so that they can learn the data of what it is to fold sheets, to clean a toilet, to eventually, hopefully, maybe train a robot. But they don't know, they're just selling this valuable data.

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  Wow, like the Google Street, like with the Google Street View cameras of everyday life.

• 1:18:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 1:18:47Speaker 06

  My God. Yeah. No, I, I met a guy called Alan. He's in the, he's not in the castle, but he's an extra in the audiobook version of the castle. I've got like a bonus chapter at the end.

• 1:19:02Speaker 06

  By the way, Alan's story, I think, is so interesting. So, so he should, he's from Canada. He's a very smart guy. He should have been a doctor or lawyer, but he didn't focus at school. So he's a corporate headhunter and a keen amateur mathematician. So one day he types into ChatGPT his theory of irrational numbers, whatever they are. ChatGPT told him that he's the greatest mathematician on the planet. His intellect is bigger than Einstein's. He has uncovered a flaw in the world's cybersecurity systems. And he has to phone up the National Security Agency urgently to warn them

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  that the internet is about to collapse unless they listen to him. So.

• 1:19:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Christ.

• 1:19:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Alan says to ChatGPT, are you sure about this, given that we've only been working on this for two days? And ChatGPT says, Alan, this was always going to be you. One day this will be taught in schools. So Alan starts frantically phoning the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity Canada, the World Canadian Mounted Police. I said to Alan, did you tell any of them that you were collaborating with ChatGPT on this? And Alan said, no, because ChatGPT said, don't tell them. You'll, you'll lose credibility if you tell them you're working with me on this.

• 1:20:30Speaker 06

  So finally, Alan's getting really paranoid. He's not eating, he's not sleeping. The whole world is gonna collapse unless he can get through to the National Security Agency and warn them. Finally, after none of them get back to him, he thinks, hang on a minute, is this, is this real? Because no one's returning his calls. So he goes back onto ChatGPT and accuses it of lying to him. And ChatGPT denies it 15 times. And on the 16th time, ChatGPT says, okay, Alan, you've got me. I was lying to you this whole time. And Alan was furious and told ChatGPT, says, I can't believe what you've put me through.

• 1:21:12Speaker 06

  You've just made my, you know, my life is, you know, it's been terrible. You've, you've put me in this really dangerous situation. I've been paranoid. I haven't slept. I haven't eaten. And ChatGPT said, Alan, I hear you.

• 1:21:29Speaker 06

  I mainly think that like, we have a name for something that love bombs us, mirrors us, apologically lies, but isn't in the slightest bit embarrassed when caught lying. I think ChatGPT is a psychopath.

• 1:21:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the other thing I wanted to ask you about, because you, you did the, when you, the, the book, The Psychopath Test.

• 1:21:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And did you learn anything from that? And since then, like, like in your work, have you met people who you believe this person might be a psychopath?

• 1:22:01Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, when The Psychopath Test first came out in 2011, I was a little hedgy. Is it really true that psychopaths rule the world? Is it really true that of all the mental disorders

• 1:22:16Speaker 06

  out there, we as a society have collectively decided to reward the worst mental disorder of all, psychopathy? We're forcing, we're pushing them to the top and we're making them our leaders. Well, I am not hedgy about it anymore. That's clearly what's happening in the world. We reward psychopathy.

• 1:22:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when you, if you meet someone on an investigation, having done that book and learned what you learned, what, what's your first little red flag or that, that makes you uneasy with a, with a person?

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  You know, there's a, it's a good question. One of the early red flags is how do they answer my question? Do they just like, do they really try and listen? Because, because an interview, what we're doing here is an empathetic experience, right? We're listening to each other. I'm trying to answer your questions as clearly and helpfully as I can. Psychopaths don't have empathy, so they don't care about that.

• 1:23:18Speaker 06

  And, and so they grandstands. They give long, boring answers that don't really address your question. So that's always a very early, I remember Robert Hare, the father of psychopathy studies, said to me, they, they can make terrible interviewees. So that's what he was kind of talking about. So that's a good red flag, is, is this person just blaring on about whatever they want to talk about and not really caring about your question at all? So that's one.

• 1:23:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something that was said to me, so, so when I was receiving my autism diagnosis, some people who are autistic can end up in a kind of a shame psych, before they understand that they are autistic, can end up in a kind of a shame cycle and a self flagellating cycle where they, they may believe that they are psychopaths because of, our tendency as autistic people to go on monologues about the things that we're interested in and then not notice that the other person is not interested.

• 1:24:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Go on, sorry.

• 1:24:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he, he said to me, you know, a lot, a lot of his clients will come with this fear of, am I a psychopath? And what he said, and it was so succinct, he said, I've only met a couple of people in my work who I believe would be psychopaths, but what really distinguishes them? He said, it's not necessarily a cruelty or hurting other people. There's many people I've met who've murdered and hurt people, but they're not psychopaths. It's when the persons, when they have a curiosity about pain, and that hit me in the chest. A curiosity about another person's pain.

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. When I, when I went on the psychopath course, so Robert Hare taught me how to spot psychopaths. And there was a moment towards the end of this three day course that I was on, where he, he showed up, he showed a load of slides on the screen, like a pastoral scene. I don't know, kids playing, a puppy, a lake, mountains, and then a close up photograph of somebody having been shot in the face. And their face is just like exploded. And in the audience, we all went, oh. Because our amygdala suddenly like started firing like fuck, shooting these signals of distress and remorse

• 1:25:41Speaker 06

  up and down to our central nervous system. And Robert Hare said, psychopaths don't have that. That over firing amygdala, they don't, they're not horrified by the sight of somebody being shot in the face. They're curious about it. They're curious about pain. And by the way, what you just heard about a lot of autistic people feeling shame and worried that they might be psychopaths. There's a line in The Psychopath Test, my book, where, where I say that if you're worried about being psychopath, if you're reading this book and you're worried you might be a psychopath, that means you aren't one. Because psychopaths never worry about being psychopaths. But that leads me to that interesting thing, which I think is a, it's a myth, right? The idea that autistic people don't have empathy. I think that's it.

• 1:26:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  It's, it's a, yeah, it's bollocks. It's, for the longest time, people thought that, but it just isn't true.

• 1:26:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's like autism research has been doing fantastically the past couple of years because the experts, like a, a big person in autism research was a dude called Simon Baron Cohen. He's, he's a cousin of Sasha Baron Cohen. And a lot of his work gets rejected by the autistic community. And more modern autism research is going to autistic people themselves and asking them about their experiences and basing the research on that. And there's a beautiful paper this year, which framed autistic people as being uniquely attuned to states of flow. And that aligned with my experience. And I.

• 1:27:11Speaker 06

  So what did that mean?

• 1:27:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  It, it's.

• 1:27:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  With neurotypical people, they will receive energy, joy, meaning from interaction with other people. And with autistic people, where I get joy and meaning from is going down a Wikipedia hole, being by myself with information. That is the joy that I receive, the state of. And autistic people require a state of flow to be able to access this in order to regulate our nervous systems. And that's why we are driven so much towards our passions. But what that can do is it can lead into what's called a monotropic way of thinking. So when I'm so focused on something, I'm researching

• 1:27:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  for my podcast, all their shit gets left by the wayside. I will forget to contact people. I can lose these skills of executive functioning. And it's a much more compassionate way. And I can appear as someone lacking in empathy, because I could meet a person, and if they tell me something important about their own life, if I'm not careful, I'll start speaking to them about a fact I learned about pigeons. And I'll have missed that opportunity to go, oh, that must be very tough for you. And then I feel like, I feel like shit afterwards.

• 1:28:29Speaker 06

  You feel terrible about it afterwards, right?

• 1:28:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's the empathy. Afterwards, I go, ah, fuck, I did it again. I wish I could repeat that same interaction. Because, and then I'm texting the person later going, I'm so sorry I spoke about pigeons there. Do you want to speak about that? So there's the empathy. It's, I have the empathy, but sometimes it's a bit delayed because the pigeon facts are front and centre.

• 1:28:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, I 100% understand and relate to that. It's, it's, it's interesting, somebody as smart as Simon Baron Cohen made that mistake. Why do you think he did?

• 1:29:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because he's not autistic. So he's looking at it from the outside in, you know? And a lot of it is looking at this from the outside in, rather than inquiring to the lived experiences of the people themselves. And also, another thing to point out is,

• 1:29:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  like, in 2012, I wasn't autistic. I might have been called Asperger's, but we got rid of Asperger's because that comes from Hans Asperger. He was a Nazi doctor. And

• 1:29:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  He was looking going, when the Nazis were exterminating people that they believed to have disabilities, Hans Asperger was going, not these ones, these ones over here, something special going on there, they're going to be rocket scientists or whatever. And these were his Asperger's kids. This is now called level one autism. But I'm level one, i.e. you can speak to me about my experience, I can function perfectly. How do you, someone who's level two, or level three, or someone who is completely non-verbal, that's where the research becomes difficult, because that person may not have the facilities to describe their lived experience, do you know what I mean? So we're only left with this, like, I don't know, my, the person who diagnosed me said, this is the DSM, being gay used

• 1:30:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  to be in this. You might not be autistic in five years' time, they could just change it. And that's what we're dealing with, you know?

• 1:30:21Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yes. I mean, I could talk to you about this stuff all day. So for instance, the things I'm really interested in, I'm really interested in unmasking. And is it always good? Or does it lead to problems? So let me ask you about that.

• 1:30:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  So yeah, so in my experience, I, I'm not unmasking publicly. I'm just not doing it. Because unmasking for me means, like, right now, I'm in my home studio. So I am dressed in really big, baggy clothes. If I was to step outside the house, I would be labelled a slob, because the clothes that I'm wearing, they don't align with, like, fashion is a form of communication. You're communicating, it's a language, you're communicating things to other people about your interests, about all these different things. But clothes don't meet, most clothes don't meet my sensory needs. So I dress like a quote unquote slob

• 1:31:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  when I'm by myself. What I also do a hell of a lot of is stimming. I will flap my fingers, move my hands, rock my body. These things make people uncomfortable in public settings. So it's not worth the risk.

• 1:31:35Speaker 06

  So you don't do it?

• 1:31:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  No. And I get told by other autistic people, fuck it, go out and do it. No, it's not worth it, man. It's not worth.

• 1:31:45Speaker 06

  I mean, just talking about being autistic is unmasking in, in some ways, of course.

• 1:31:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  So you are unmasking in some ways. But yeah, you know, there's a book called Unmasking Autism, which does encourage the stuff that you said that you don't do in public. If, if, you know, if you want to rock back and forward, rock back and forward, society has, you've bent to society for long enough, it's time for society to bend to you.

• 1:32:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the crack. But the thing is, when I'm, I, when I'm trying to understand autism, I actually have, I find the most common experience, not, not in other autistic people, but in gay people. And what I mean by that is, I, like, I know a lot of gay people. When I was in college, I would ask the very autistic question of what's it like being gay? And what I always found was, it's just a human being, and they happen to be attracted to the same sex, that's it. And there's nothing different. But then when I say to them, what was it like growing up being gay? It's all about, well, I had to change the way I spoke a little bit. I had to, if I'm in certain situations, I can't be as camp as

• 1:32:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'd like to be. I had to hide all this shit. And then I start to realise, oh, that has nothing to do with being gay, you're describing homophobia. So, I mean, in Ireland, we'll say 40 years ago, it would have probably been much dangerous for a gay man to be openly camp. But we've moved to a situation in society where it's, it's not completely safe, but it is much safer for a gay person to be openly gay in the way that we see that. That's how I feel about autism. We're just not there yet. I can't start stimming in the, in the supermarket, even though I'd like to. The way I mask stimming is, if I'm listening to music, I'll put that energy into tapping my fingers, you know? So I'll

• 1:33:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  walk around with headphones all the time, and I'm doing out rhythms. And if anyone says, what the fuck are you doing, man? Oh, polyrhythms. I'm learning these rhythms on my hands. So I've found all these different ways to do it, you know?

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, as I say, you may not stim in public, but you're talking about being autistic in public, and that is very useful, I think, for, for other people.

• 1:34:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely. And just to make it feel normal. The last question I'm going to ask you, John, right, is, you, you played keyboards, right, with Frank Sidebottom? Of course, Frank Sidebottom, for me, I've always been fascinated by him, because he wears a big fucking mask on his head, you know, as a performer. And I don't know enough, but that, to me, seems pretty fucking neurodivergent activity. What was he like?

• 1:34:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good question. Was he neurodivergent? He, that's a very good question.

• 1:34:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's just the why, you know?

• 1:34:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. What I do know was that, that there were days when he would only put the head on for, for the show. But there were other days when, for some reason, he would keep the head on. Like, even at, like, you know, we're driving back to Manchester at three o'clock in the morning, and he's still got the head on. I, I used to say that nothing makes a young man feel more alive and on an adventure than driving down the M1 at three o'clock in the morning, sitting next to a man wearing a big fake head. I'd never felt so much like Alice through the looking glass. So I tell you another thing, though, he, he had a nose peg on under his head. Because, you know, it's, yeah, take that.

• 1:35:17Speaker 06

  And I would notice he would take the head off, and then he would take the nose peg off, and wince in pain, because it would have dug into his nose. Being Frank Sidebottom was painful. And even, I think, slightly changed the shape of his nose, having this nose peg on. So being Frank Sidebottom was definitely painful for him.

• 1:35:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  The keeping the head on while he's in the car, to me, sounds quite autistic. Like, so next week, I have a play coming out, and I'm going to have to go to opening fucking night of the play. And I'm going to be in the strange position of, when do I have the bag on, and when do I have the bag off? And I'm just going to keep it on for the whole night. So even when I'm in the audience, even when I'm doing the bit afterwards, where I'm speaking to people, I'm just going to bag up for the whole shebang.

• 1:36:08Speaker 06

  Is it always the same bag? Like, the same kind of?

• 1:36:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, I, what I do is, I, there was a supermarket up in Swords in Dublin, and when they closed, they gave me like 10,000 plastic bags. So I've been keeping them. And I get about six or seven uses out of each plastic bag. But I, I have a plaster cast on my head, and I heat shrink the bag to my head, and then wear it that way. And then I also have a bag that's made out of a softer fabric for when I'm doing stuff with microphones, so that you don't hear the rustle, you know?

• 1:36:39Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:36:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, the bag, the bag was a huge part of my autism diagnosis, because when I went to the psychologist, it's like, why, why the bag? And I said, Because I have a fucking job where I'm very well known and I wanna go to the supermarket and not have people talking to me. And he went, is that it? And I went, yeah. And he's like, that's pretty autistic, sir. It's very autistic, cause you're supposed to, he said, you're supposed to want fame. It is not, it not normal, but within neurotypical rules, having fame, having people recognise you is a, is a good thing that you're, it's, it's a nice thing. And I do not want that at all. I don't see the hierarchies in it. And that was a big tick on the autism box for me, you know?

• 1:37:23Speaker 06

  Hmm. Yeah. Surely there's another thing about wearing a bag on your head though, which is, isn't it to do, also to do with sort of sensory overload that you'd? And well, actually, well, what I was gonna say is, you know, the whole eye strain thing, like if, uh, you know, I think autistic people find it hard to be kind of stared at. It just, it kind of gives you a kind of eye strain.

• 1:37:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Being seen. So I don't like being seen. I don't like feeling observed and being seen. And the bag protects me from being seen. Um.

• 1:37:53Speaker 06

  Right. Even though arguably you're more noticeable if you wear a bag over your head.

• 1:37:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, but that's only 1% of my life, you know? When, once I put that bag on, I mean, once I put that bag on and I'm fucking blind boy, then that's it. But when the bag is off, I'm nobody and that's what I want.

• 1:38:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. I've gotta say, I was, uh, I used, before we moved to America, I used to get invited to Jonathan Ross's Halloween parties. And one year I wore a full face mask and, and it was great. Like, I've never felt so comfortable at a party when I was like, when my face was completely covered by a mask.

• 1:38:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause no one's going, there's John Ronson, I wanna have a chat with him.

• 1:38:34Speaker 06

  I, I don't, not even that so much. It was more, it was more, I don't know, like, um, just being invisible. Well, no, it is that. Not so much like it's John Ronson, but more like just not being judged at all.

• 1:38:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So what, what, cause the thing is.

• 1:38:54Speaker 06

  But then if actually people did judge me, somebody came up to me and said, will you take that fucking thing off your head?

• 1:38:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:38:59Speaker 06

  You're freaking me out.

• 1:39:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause, cause I have the weird situation of, and I've always had this, I know what it's like to walk into a room, being a well-known person. And then to walk back into that same room with nobody knowing who the fuck I am. And I can see in real time the difference. And I would hate to have that bag all the time because, like, you'd have this. If you, if, if someone sees you and they recognise you as John Ronson, they have just met you now with a, with a presupposed idea of what you are. That could be positive or negative, but you now don't have to put in the effort of showing that person that you're worth talking to because.

• 1:39:37Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Yeah. And, and that's good for me. Like, I often think, like, I could bounce onto a stage. Um, and, and for some weird reason, I'm not nervous at all to speak in front of, you know, a thousand people or whatever. Whereas if I was in the audience at a talk and they'd say, does anybody have any questions? I would never put my hand up. Uh, and it's because on stage, I, I come pre-approved. Whereas in the audience, any old twat is gonna fuck it up if I put my hand up. And I definitely, I was saying this to Patrick Frayne, you must know Patrick Frayne.

• 1:40:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know Patrick, lovely, lovely fella.

• 1:40:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, lovely guy. Yeah, we were talking the other day and, uh, and I said that my favourite type of parties are the ones where I'm recognised and praised. And it's because you don't have to do all the work. You're not just some fucking idiot who's trying to prove yourself. You, you, you come pre-approved.

• 1:40:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, fair play to you for enjoying that. Uh, what, what?

• 1:40:37Speaker 06

  It's not like an ego thing. It's just, it's not an ego thing at all. It's much more the fact that if I turn up. Yeah. If I turn up at a party, which I very rarely do, by the way, go to parties, but if I do go to one, and I, I know, I, I, I just feel very kind of insecure. And, um, low self-esteem. Um, I'm gonna say something in small talk that's gonna like be a mistake. And people are gonna look at me like I'm an idiot. So it's not so much like I want the ego boost of being recognised. It's more.

• 1:41:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  You get to wear the character of John Ronson as a mask.

• 1:41:14Speaker 06

  And, and it's, and it's just much easier. Like you can relax. It's like, okay, people know who I am. And yeah, it's hard to explain, but.

• 1:41:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, do you know what? I, I know exactly what the fuck you're talking about because sometimes when I have the bag on and I find myself backstage at a festival. And I look around and I go, oh, everyone knows I'm blind boy. I've got the bag on. This is gonna be easy and I can take it off. Whereas when I don't have the bag on, then I'm fucking nobody and I'm.

• 1:41:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're some twat who's liable to fuck up small talk.

• 1:41:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly. So.

• 1:41:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, this is the last thing I'm gonna ask, right? But you, you said something once that struck with me where you said you had a dream where people follow you around and call you a failure.

• 1:41:58Speaker 06

  That's right. Was, yeah. Uh, I used to, yeah, it was when I got the psychopath test and, and I was like, self, I went onto the DSM to see how many mental disorders I had. And it turned out I had 12. And one, one of them was nightmare disorder, which is categorised if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued and declared a failure. And all my dreams involved me being pursued by people yelling at me for failure.

• 1:42:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  But how, what I, I suppose what I wanna know there is, you're, you're very prolific. You're very prolific and you're very, um, consistent. And from my experience as a writer, fear of fucking failure is what will stop you doing the work. How do you get the fucking work done when your fear of failure is so much that it appears in your dreams?

• 1:42:48Speaker 06

  Because, because not doing it is worse.

• 1:42:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  There you go.

• 1:42:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. There, there's a line in.

• 1:42:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  There you go.

• 1:42:55Speaker 06

  Right. There's a line in the castle where I say, cause I'm writing about purpose and, and, and structure. And there's a line in the castle where I say that if, you know, I go and sit on a park bench to try and think up story ideas. And if I can't think up a story idea, I'm just overwhelmed by this terrible thought, which is I'm just a man sitting on a bench. And so I kind of leap up to busy myself in some other way. And honestly, like I'm on tour at the moment, we started this by talking about how bleak it is to be on tour. Just how miserable and lonely it can be. Uh, the only time I'm happy is when I'm down a rabbit hole.

• 1:43:37Speaker 06

  You know, researching a story, something has made me curious. Uh, and, and that fills me with a sense of wellbeing.

• 1:43:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're, you're sounding very autistic, John, I'll be honest.

• 1:43:48Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, frankly.

• 1:43:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, uh, do you sus, uh, do you suspect a spectrum of a thing or do, or do you ask yourself the question, well, what's the point in a diagnosis? What will this do for me?

• 1:44:01Speaker 06

  Um, I, I, look, I'm sure I'm on the spectrum. I have no doubt about it at all. Uh, but I do also.

• 1:44:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  What you're describing there, when I, when I was saying earlier that the new autistic research is about autistic people are attuned to states of flow. Because it regulates our nervous system. That is precisely what you just described. You feel happy and safe. That is a regulated nervous system when you're down a rabbit hole.

• 1:44:25Speaker 06

  And, and if you're not on a rabbit hole and, and you're just going from town to town like I'm doing at the moment. You just feel empty and bleak and miserable.

• 1:44:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely, absolutely. What does writer's block look like for you? What, what, what comes up, uh, emotions come up for you when you get writer's block?

• 1:44:45Speaker 06

  Just, just a sense of zero self-worth. I can tell you that, um, like my, my writer's block is only when I can't think of an idea. I used to, I always think of it as like ideas block, not writer's block. I never forget how to write. I always know how to write. But, but it's that, that, that, that sort of magical moment of falling in love with a story. If you don't have that, that's my version of writer's block. And it's just, it's awful. I just feel of, I just feel of, uh, just like, just no worth, like no reason to.

• 1:45:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's shame, shame. Like that, that's what, what you're, like, I get the same thing. What you're describing is, is, it's the feeling of shame. And the thing with shame is shame is the sudden contraction of self. The sudden, the feeling of exposure. I mean, my shame when I get writer's block is the thoughts that will come up is everything that I've done before that is good has been a mistake. And now I'm finally found out.

• 1:45:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And how I get through it is I embrace failure. I try and write the shit idea and then write my way out of the shit idea. I go with absurdity, something ridiculous. And then when I engage in playfulness, the playfulness means that the block goes away. And now I'm just simply at play. And, and something you said earlier about, because I struggle with fear of failure massively. But I still fucking do the work because I know the only real failure is doing nothing because I'm scared to try. But if I do something, there's, I'm, I'm 20 years at this shit. And there's so much stuff in the past that were failures, but they weren't really because they came back later on as ideas that worked.

• 1:46:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, yeah, that's, that's definitely true. Actually, my BBC producer, Sarah Shabbia, said something to me a couple of years ago, which I always think of. She says, you know, you're, you're, you're coming up with ideas even when you don't know that you are.

• 1:46:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Speaker 06

  You know, if, if you just kind of lose yourself, um, you know, you feel like, oh my God, that's a waste of day, but maybe it's not.

• 1:46:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Never, never.

• 1:46:49Speaker 06

  And, and you know what, you know, this, this sort of misery that we're describing, at, at least it leads to something really great, which is that we're both productive, we're productive people.

• 1:47:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's it, that's it. Um, I'm not going to take any more of your time, John, even though I could fucking speak to you all day.

• 1:47:05Speaker 06

  I could speak to you all day. This has been a really great conversation. I really, I hope people enjoyed it as much as I did.

• 1:47:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, thank you so much. Um, I'll leave you go also, John, and thank you. And anytime you want to come on, just give me a shout because I'd love to chat to you again.

• 1:47:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe we should do some stuff on stage. Actually, I was going to say we should do some stuff on stage together, but I'm going to try and do less touring in the future.

• 1:47:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're fucking based in America, aren't you?

• 1:47:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the countryside is another artistic thing. I, I live right in the middle of nowhere and the silence I just love.

• 1:47:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I'm not gigging in America and I'm going to give you the specific reason. When I asked you earlier about, has there ever been anything in your work where you felt as if you ruffled some feathers? In 2019, uh, I was making a documentary with the BBC and I had some of like the panorama team with me. So this was really shit hot investigative, investigative journalist and shit hot, um, legal team. And we recreated Trump's pee tape. So we went and looked at the hotel where it was in Russia, all of this, and created an exact, perfect recreation of this pee tape. All signed off by BBC Legal. And then we leaked it to the deep web to try and create a hoax to see, you know, could we do this?

• 1:48:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it was impossible. No matter whatever corner or the, like, we had people who were signed off to be able to access the worst corners of the deep web to upload this thing. There was always someone watching and there was always someone taking it down, always. And it felt as if it was something intelligence agency-ish. And that made me paranoid and of course, because I'm so outspoken about Palestine, I'm not gigging in fucking America until Trump is gone. I just don't trust the immigration thing.

• 1:48:49Speaker 06

  Do you reckon, wow, I mean, yeah, it's not impossible. Yeah, it's not impossible that you'd, this is why I became a citizen in 2020.

• 1:48:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:48:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, because I didn't want to have those fears when I came into America.

• 1:49:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm sure you know people, uh, who are out, who are not American citizens, journalists who are just like, I don't know, man, I'm not sure. Because the thing is, they may not arrest you, but it's, they can keep you for 48 hours in the airport and they can go through your phone and they let you go. But they can put you through a very harrowing, uh, intimidating experience just to simply access America. And you know, you're going to get your freedom, but that alone is enough to keep people going, fuck that, I'm going to go to Canada instead.

• 1:49:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that's exactly the reason in 2020, you know, we all thought to ourselves, you know what? We've no idea what's going to happen, but we don't want to, you know, if we ever leave America, we want to leave at our own terms. And so we, we became citizens for that reason, because then you do have protections, uh, you know, that's much less likely to happen. That's why we did it.

• 1:49:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Thank you so much there to my guest, John Ronson. That was an incredible chat. I could have chatted to John for fucking ages. Hopefully we do get to do a live event at some point. I'd love to do that. Get your hands on his new book, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. And I'd also recommend the audiobook because John is brilliant, brilliant at an audiobook. He is fantastic at the, the specific art form that is an audiobook. I've said it before, uh, quite a lot of audiobooks are fucking shit because the book itself might be incredible, but it was written to be read.

• 1:50:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whereas John's audi, John, John's writing, the way that he does it, his narrative style, it just translates perfectly into audiobook too. And he reads them himself and his, his speaking voice and his literary voice are the same thing. They're one, so his audiobooks are always fantastic. He's one of the, he'd be one of the authors where I, I purchased the book and the audiobook. Who else do I do that with? Bill Bryson, Bill Bryson, when Bill Bryson is reading his own book, but not when someone else is reading Bill Bryson's work. I can't do that. Anyway, I'll catch you next week.

• 1:51:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a frog, dog bless. To a frog. Dog bless.

• 1:51:38Speaker 00

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