Jon Ronson discusses culture wars, the ‘superbug’ of shamelessness, and his encounters with ‘unravelling men’

Louis is joined in our brand-new studio by writer, documentarian and creative doppelganger Jon Ronson. Jon tells Louis all about delving into culture wars, how public shaming has created a ‘superbug’ of shamelessness, and the cast of ‘unravelling men’ in his new book, The Castle. Warnings: Strong language and adult themes. Links/Attachments: Book: The Castle, Jon Ronson (2026) https://jonronson.com/book/the-castle/ Book: Them, Jon Ronson (2001) https://jonronson.com/book/them/ TV Episode: Finding Frances, Nathan For You, Comedy Central (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7277634/ TV Show: The Ronson Mission, Channel 4 (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235493/ Book: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson (2015) https://jonronson.com/book/so-youve-been-publicly-shamed/ Podcast: Things Fell Apart (2021-2026) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m002j8rl Book: The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart (1971) https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-dice-man/luke-rhinehart/9780006513902 Article: Something is Wrong on the Internet, James Bridle, Medium (2017) https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 Documentary: Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1263704/ Documentary: Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (2026) https://www.netflix.com/title/81920687 Credits: Producer: Millie Chu Senior Assistant Producer: Maisie Ellen Williams Junior Production Manager: Rosie Pender Production Executive: Francesca Bassett Original Music: Miguel D’Oliveira Video Editor: Scott Edwards Audio Editor: Tom Guest Executive Producer: Arron Fellows A Mindhouse Studios Production for Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hello there and welcome back to the Louis Theroux Podcast.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  You join me in our brand new studio for the start of a new era of the LTP. Yes, we're going to be releasing episodes weekly all through the year. So if you've ever thought, gosh, I love the Louis Theroux Podcast, I just wish there were more of them. Today's your lucky day. And for our first episode back, it only feels right that I'm joined by writer, broadcaster, friend, the man who once described me as his professional conjoined twin, John Ronson. John spent his career seeking out remarkable stories from hanging out with the Ku Klux Klan to shadowing David Icke. His bestselling books include Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats, later a film starring George Clooney, The Psychopath

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Test, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed. I've read all of them. Like me, he's also conquered the medium of podcasting, his latest offering being Things Fell Apart: A Look Into the Origins of the Culture Wars, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and if not, then do check it out. Why am I speaking to John? Well, because he's fascinating. I love his books, his podcasts, his TV shows, and we've kind of been on parallel tracks through the years. We've even covered the same subject at different times. And there's a few examples of that over the years of us sort of double dipping on subjects, which, you know, let's call it what it is, it can be awkward,

• 1:45Speaker 00

  which led to him calling me his professional conjoined twin. And I know it was kind of a joke, but he said that one of us had to die in order that the other should live. He meant no harm by it. We recorded this interview in September this year at Spotify HQ. John was in the midst of a grueling publicity campaign for his brilliant new book, The Castle, which is out now. A look at, well, we talk about this at the beginning of the chat, it's a look at masculinity. I have also made a programme about masculinity, a film called Inside the Manosphere. And so, once again, there's a little bit of overlap. And in fact, the main contributor

• 2:24Speaker 00

  to my film, Harrison Sullivan, also known as HS Tiki Taki, is in John's book. A quick warning, this conversation contains strong language and adult themes. All that, as well as much else besides, coming up.

• 2:48Speaker 00

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• 3:58Speaker 00

  Nice to see you, John. Welcome.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  How are you?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Really good. How are you doing?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I'm so tired. I couldn't be more tired.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Are you?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Mid-tour.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  No one wants to hear that at the beginning of an interview.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  This is gonna, I'm gonna do this interview so badly.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  We're gonna wake you right up. You're promoting your new book. We're gonna come on to that. You are, um...

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Have we begun?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Yes, this is it. This is the good stuff. This is, you know me, this is like, this is a bit in the edges. When Michael Moore taught me, if he taught me one thing, he taught me more than one, it was like, film before you think you've begun. When you arrive, you're rolling. You go up and then the person comes to the door, the clan member, in his underpants. He's like, what are you doing? I thought we were starting at nine o'clock. Like, yeah, well, we got here faster than we expected. Sorry.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yes. No, you're right.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  And you have a golden moment.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you were right.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Beau Grice, when I interviewed Colonel Beau Grice, you've interviewed.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I've interviewed Beau Grice. Well, can I tell you a story before you tell me this story?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Mine's very quick.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  He came to the door and said, you've come on the wrong day. And I got shaken, and I was like, oh, sorry. Anyways, little moment.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but it's like, it's like, the late 90s, I'm driving to interview a friend of Beau Grice's called Jack McLam.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  We should set up Beau Grice for the general audience.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, Millie.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  He was characterised as a militia leader, the real-life Rambo. He was special forces, bluff, kind of, was he a general or a colonel?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Colonel Beau Grice, that's right. And him and Jack McLam were like, very early, anti-New World Order conspiracy theorists.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, in the mid 90s, militia guys.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was making a documentary about Ruby Ridge, about Randy Weaver and this family of white separatists who got into trouble with the ATF, and it escalated and escalated, and two members of the family were killed, and a terrible story. But anyway, as part of that, I wanted to see Jack McLam, and he was right in the middle of nowhere. Like, it couldn't have been further from civilisation. We drove for like, nine hours from Idaho to Montana, or vice versa. And at one point, we saw a sign that said, Winding Road, next 76 miles. So that's how remote we were. And we finally got to this tiny little white separatist

• 6:19Speaker 01

  enclave. And I pulled up, and I wound down the window, and I said, hi, I'm here to see Jack McLam. And the guy said, oh, you're a Brit. We had another Brit here last week, Louis Theroux.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Really?

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because this was right at the heart of when there was so much competition between us.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  I prefer to think of it as overlap.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Overlap, you're right.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  An overlap that we've kind of kept alive, really, until this very moment, and probably on into the future, because the new book, I feel like a real broadcaster, because I'm doing a segue, the new book is called The Castle, and it's emphatically not about the manosphere. Nevertheless, there's a manosphere figures in it, and it's dealing with what you call the crisis of masculinity.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, I find that, I don't like that.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  You don't like that term either. The subtitle is Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. The reason why I don't like that title is because this is like, a very strange, weird, unfolding narrative, which goes into places that you'd never anticipate, and there's twists and turns and, you know, revelations. And when you say words like crisis of masculinity, people immediately think boring, polemical book, and that's the only reason why.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  It's more like a true crime investigation threaded with these other bizarre encounters, often examples of the internet distorting people's behaviour.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Patrick Radenkey, a friend of the pod, called it fantastic and intensely of the moment. Marina Hyde, she walks down the corridor, she's part of The Rest Is Entertainment.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Oh, is that down there?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Rival podcast. It isn't a rival. Their numbers are off the chain. It's disgusting. She does a podcast, have you ever listened to it?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  It's with, um...

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Richard Osman.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  He can sign 15,000 books in the amount of time it takes me to sign 5,000, I've discovered. But that's because...

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Wow, major brag. That's a humble brag, because you're like, I can't sign as many, but we learned that you signed 5,000. I think I did 6,000 once.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so there you go.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  It's a terror, someone should expose that scam, right?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Well, my...

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Because a signed book is a...

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Sold book.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  That's the, that's an expression they use in retail. Signed book is a sold book, they can't send it back.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I was gonna say, the reason why Richard Osman can sign 15,000 books is because his signature is that, whereas mine is that. So...

• 8:45Speaker 00

  After 4,000, your signature probably changes a bit.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Gets more like that.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Gets more like that. Marina Hyde said, nobody tells an unbelievable but true story like John Ronson. He's done it again with The Castle. Louis Theroux, that fucking guy, said ridiculously compelling and wonderfully weird.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Brilliantly phrased. The castle is vintage Ronson Wise, timely and extremely funny. So let's talk about how you how you how you came to write um the castle.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so I'm asleep. This is a story that crashed unannounced into my life while I was asleep. So I wake up and there's a series of texts from Joel, my son. So I read the last text first and it said, we left. That was completely fucked. We're okay now. So I read the other texts and it turned out that he and three friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met a few days earlier on Tinder. So they piled into the car, four of them, drove into the forests of Connecticut to this man's house. And when they arrived, this man's house was a giant, newly built, extremely ostentatious Gothic castle.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  I've Googled it. Sometimes in America, there's buildings that are castle-shaped. This is really a castle.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. What did you think when you saw the?

• 10:05Speaker 00

  It was way more impressive than I expected.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's got way too many turrets. It felt like the castle had been designed by a man whose brain is like going in all different directions. Because the castle seems to go in all different directions.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And it's not like out in a remote area particularly.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  No, it's on a road of otherwise ordinary modest homes. It's like ordinary modest home, ordinary modest home. Weird fucking castle, ordinary home.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  Like Gru and Despicable Me.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like like a like a great garish Disney castle, but indistinctly stranger. So they cross the drawbridge over the moat, passing various relics of war. There's lots of war relics all over the place. And they enter the grand banqueting hall to discover that there's no party. There's just a small number of equally bewildered young people standing around. So nobody knows why they're there. And then the castle owner comes out and said, sorry, where's the party? And he said, oh, no, I've invited you here for a different reason. I would like you all to take part in my reality show.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So Joel said, what's the name of your reality show? He said, Hundred and One Princesses. Joel said, what's the core concept? And he said, I'm the king, I'm looking for my queen, and I have a hundred and one princesses to choose from. 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.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Has he invited them to a party or is this been characterized as a first date or?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  No, a party. I've seen the text. It says castle party.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  He wants women. So Joel, does he know Joel's coming or is Joel there as a chaperone?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  No, Joel's a plus one.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  He's disappointed to see Joel.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yes, he only wanted women there. So Joel and Joel's male friend Cement um were unwanted.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  His name's Cement?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Like the building material?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I think it's wrong to focus too much on the fact that he's called Cement because there's so much other weirdness in the story, but I think he's a Goth.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  In fact, the castle owner had to hastily improvise because there were some unwanted men there. So he apparently got Joel and Cement dressed up in tuxedos for the filming. And they hastily devised a skit in which the women would reject Joel and Cement in favor of Chris, the castle owner. So Joel and Cement put on tuxedos, the two women put on princess costumes, they come back upstairs. A videographer called Nicholas appears and filming begins. But it becomes very clear that this isn't a real reality show.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Not least because the videographer had this other job, which was to cut up meat for the castle owner. He had a huge slab of meat that he was and only the castle owner was allowed to eat the meat. Then he kicks, he's getting more and more annoyed with with Joel and his friends for refusing to participate in Hundred and One Princesses. He was taking this very seriously and he was very annoyed that they weren't. So he kicked them out. And that's the end of their story. But a couple of days later, they came to my house and told me the story. And I'm sure you would have done the same thing. I went to the castle.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Obviously Hugh Hefner would be the other comparison.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Well, that was the one that I thought of. I thought, okay, this man, because down in his basement next to his costume room, he has an underground hot tub botanical gardens. And also um like a pole dancing room with cages. So I thought, okay, this guy's trying to be Hugh Hefner at surely the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner. Unless you're HS Tikki Toki or one of your guys, you can't lord over your princesses in your castle like it's the nineteen seventies anymore. So I guess that was my starting point. This was a man out of time. I, as it happened, had just come out of hospital and I was feeling a little bit like a man out of time. All my purpose draining away as I'm supposed to be like lying there convalescing.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  You'd had quite a serious surgery.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Abdominal surgery?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Uh, colon surgery for diverticulitis.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  So presumably the diverticulum or diverticulus is a part of your colon.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Colon, yeah. And it gets infected, then you have flare ups and it's agony and you have a few of them. But but in America, like the American healthcare system is like so bad. But one good thing that comes from it, if you've got insurance, is that you can do like elective surgery.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  It's amazingly bad and amazingly good.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Right, that's the weirdness.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly it. Um, so they cut out my foot of colon and I'm fine.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  How did that kind of prime the pump for you to go on this investigation?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Well, I'd noticed I'd been like convalescing by sitting on benches, trying to think up story ideas. Because that's like the only way I can get self-esteem is if I'm working on a story. And I wasn't coming up with anything and I would be overwhelmed by these like terrible sort of existential thoughts. Like I'm just a man sitting on a bench. And I thought there was like a weird parallel between me and the castle owner. We were both like rattling around, looking for purpose in our lives. At a time when I think a lot of people are also feeling underpurposeful. And a lot of people, all of their self-esteem is wrapped up in their work.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And AI's come along to rob us of our jobs and to try and convince us that we want a world without work. And all the odd structures are collapsing that kept people sane. And and so I thought, there's a weird resonance between me and this castle owner, who both should never have known of each other's existence. But now I'm driving towards his castle. Every time my car hits a bump, it kind of tears at my surgery scar. Because I've only been out of surgery like ten days or something. And I'd like to say, ah, like some sort of Quasimodo at Notre Dame or something.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  How old are you?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I am fifty nine. How old are you? You're like fifty seven.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Fifty six, uh, just turned fifty six. It feels quite old, doesn't it, being in the upper fifties?

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  I mean, that's sort of, I'm sure that inflects or colors one's worldview a bit as well.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think I wanted.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  It's a time of life when you maybe feel slightly unraveled.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and all of that was playing into me wanting to write this book. I I I think that like all of my books in a way, even when I'm barely in them, are like little memoirs, like Them. I'm having an adventure and I'm like a young guy.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Them is your brilliant, it was your first real chef d'oeuvre or whatever, where you went on an exploration of conspiracy theorists to try and find the smoky room where all the decisions are made, Illuminati, lizards, whoever they may be.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And it culminates in me sneaking into this secret club called Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  With Alex Jones, not the one show presenter, but the American conspiracy theorist.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  And to pick up on that, like your willingness to own the part of you that resonates with the weirdness that you explore has always been part of what distinguishes your work. You like to go native a bit.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I always think that, you know, you you have that yearning to do it too, right?

• 17:22Speaker 00

  I do. Would feel dishonest not to.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Acknowledge that.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  No, the worst type of person who does the kind of things that we do are the ones who see themselves as a representative of a hierarchy, like I'm going in, I'm I'm perfect. These people are crazy. You have to, like, if you're gonna be um scrutinizing other people's weirdnesses and absurdities, you have to be willing to to do it to yourself. And I've and I've noticed that is happening more and more in your work too.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  I appreciate that. I think it's always been slightly the case. And um and I think perhaps maturing as a as a journalist is allowing yourself to be okay with, what is it, being okay with exposing the bad parts?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Your own weaknesses. Maybe that's a good thing about, maybe that's a good thing about getting a bit older. Somebody said, I can't remember who it was, maybe it's like someone who was balding, maybe someone from like Blur. If anyone from Blur, somebody said this anyway, that that they were losing their hair at the exact same time that they were getting to an age when they didn't care that they were losing their hair.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So maybe when you get a bit older, some of those old vanities and the things, the self-protections kind of go away a bit and you can loosen up and be more open about your weaknesses and frailties. Plus, you know, because of things like the mental health, self-advocacy movements and so on, people are like a lot more open and willing to talk about their frailties. And I think ultimately, you know, it's like a very positive thing about the way the world is turning.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Continuing on from the idea of self-exposure, you also interrogate and explore intimate relationships, friendships, let's be specific, that you've had. There's a chapter, and this has had a bit of pickup, uh, about Graham Linehan, um, the writer of Father Ted, Black Books, um, Brass Eye, IT Crowd, many others. He's a brilliant, brilliant comedy writer. Um, how do we, how do we get into this, do you think? Basically, he became very focused on the issue of of trans people.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  To the point it took over his life.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so I should explain. So the castle, half the book is is me and the castle owner getting into an increasingly odd relationship where he says he has two murderers on his payroll called Carlos and Brandon, who are gonna find me if I ever add anything negative about the castle. And they've only just come out of prison for killing somebody and I don't want to make them angry. So, you know, all of this weird stuff's going on, but I use him to bounce off to like other personal stories.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  About unraveling men.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one of them is Graham. Because I really want to try about, I think, honestly, I think Graham kind of epitomized two things that I'd noticed in the culture that I thought were very important to think about. One was disinhibition.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  The idea that if you start to think that society doesn't have a stake in you, which Graham clearly started to feel, then he will respond in kind. And he would, the analogy I used in the book is that it's like he's kind of ripped off his face and just allowed his ears to run wild. Where anything goes, he can say anything, like any social niceties just don't matter anymore. And I noticed a lot of people doing that, but Graham was doing it a lot. So one night I was in Edinburgh on a tour and somebody, I was falling asleep on Twitter. Somebody said to Graham, why is John Ronson still following you? And then I fell asleep and then when I woke up the next morning.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Why is he still following you, given what?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Given the fact that you've, you know, become this sort of single issue person.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  As in John shouldn't be following you because you're toxic and.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yes, follow please, which isn't that much of a thing anymore, but it was for a while. So one night in 2019, after Graham had been doing this for a couple of years, somebody tweeted that and then I fell asleep and I woke up the next morning and I saw that Graham had replied, the reason John Ronson still follows me is because he thinks you're all assholes, meaning his critics.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  So he'd recruited you to his cause.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Without, as I've had a conversation about it, yeah. So my, the one mistake I think that I made in this situation, when I look back on it, and this is like the one thing I did wrong, I messaged back, not, not like an open public, but I replied.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  So it was visible to people who followed both of you.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that your critics are assholes and I think you've been acting like a bully. And then his, you know, 30 seconds passed, little bit when you stub your toe and it's like a moment before the pain starts, there was like a moment. And then Graham replied, how dare you? And then eight years later, it's, it's just been non-stop.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  You regret saying it publicly, you wished you'd said it privately.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I said that to him and he said, well, it wouldn't have made a difference. I'd have been just as annoyed if he'd said it privately, so I guess it wasn't that big a mistake.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  It's fair, it should be acknowledged, like Graham, uh, as a result of what he'd called his activism, his advocacy, um, kind of exploded his life. He probably would say he had some sort of a mental health emergency.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  He, he writes in his own memoir about how he would be upstairs fighting with someone on the internet and then he would hear his wife and children laughing downstairs. And in the old days, he'd have gone downstairs to join them, but he couldn't bear to, to stop the fight. So he would stay upstairs and continue to fight. And that felt like such a kind of modern sickness that any one of us could succumb to. But we pull ourselves back, but he didn't. So this was all the reasons why I wanted to, I was just genuinely very interested in like what had happened to our old friend Graham. And, and, um, and then for eight years, like it would be, you know, there were days

• 23:17Speaker 01

  when he would hurl, you know, these insults at me publicly, like 50 times in a day.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Um, but my, my interest was his, his behaviour was, was, you know, the way, the way he expressed himself, what had happened to him in his inner life. Those were the things I was interested in.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  He's clapped back in a Telegraph article, did you read it?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Because I'm on tour and I'm trying to manage my stress levels.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Right, it's stressful. I mean, in fact, you talk about it in the book, how stressful it was. Every time you started to write it, you had to stop because it was making you stressed. Your cortisol levels were spiking.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  But then I thought, well, the only reason, like I wanted to write about disinhibition in, in the castle. It felt very like, like, like the right place for the book to go to. And I thought, well, who am I going to write about? And I thought I could write about Manosphere type men in this way. But I don't know, you know, Louis Dunn, his documentary, I can't beat that.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Stop it, you hadn't seen that, it was late, he just threw that in to butter me up.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I did.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  I saw you coming.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  So, so I thought, well, Graham, you know, Graham is the right person for me to write about, particularly because I'm so much, he's made me so much a part of this story because he's like constantly, constantly posting about me. And I thought the only thing that will stop me from writing about Graham in this context is fear. And when we're led by fear, what we, me and you do, then, then we lose our integrity.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  I know you said you hadn't read, should I quote you a couple of small bits? Oh, I won't if it's going to completely freak you out.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Well, if it's, I guess.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  It's fine, he's got one main thing, right? John never once asks in all those pages whether I was right. Dot, dot, dot, are men women, are women men? Should men be in women's prisons or their sport? Should children be castrated in gender clinics? There's two things with, with Graham, it feels to me that have been elided. One is his, uh, beliefs, which I think actually, if you sort of put your finger in the wind, a lot of people might share, right? Certainly, um, if you look online, they don't feel massively out of the mainstream, whether you believe them or not. But the other is his behaviour and the obsessiveness of it. Do you want to take up Graham's invitation, I guess, is the question.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Well, Graham, um, well, so the reason why I wanted to write about Graham is because I think Graham, because of his behaviour, has had a totally different, you know, sort of strata. So I did an interview with him, which I've used in the book. And then about a year later, I tried to do another interview with him for Things Fell Apart. Um, and that's when we had this conversation.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Things Fell Apart, your BBC, um, podcast series.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, because he, he was kind of the reason why I wanted to make the whole series. Because I was trying to understand why people were losing themselves so, so in such a dramatic way. So, so he said to me, I'm not going to do this interview unless you say, you know, that two plus two equals four, whatever his words were. And I said to him, Graham, I can't like, no, I'm not going to submit to your purity test before you agree whether or not to do an interview with me. No journalists would do that. And I said to him, if you want to ruin a journalist's life, make them do a purity test. And then once they've done it, tell everybody, because then that completely undermines, um. We do, I mean, obviously you should say in public whatever you want to say.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  But I think me, you, there's a few of us out there in, in America, um, John Wilson and, and.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Documentary.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Nathan Fielder, who's about to bring out what looks like a brilliant documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. And we do something different to what pundits do. We, we lose ourselves in a story, we dive in, we spend forever thinking about the nuances of it and the characters and what it means and the twists and the turns and the hypocrisies, you know. And then we emerge with a really hopefully good, interesting, long-form piece of narrative non-fiction. That is the opposite of being a pundit, of just like blaring out. And I think if I'm a pundit, like if I splurge out opinions, A, I'm shit at it. And, and so why do something that you're no good at? It's like asking me to be a, you know, hairdresser or something. Um, and B, I think it undermines what we do.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And, and, and my whole point, you know, and Things Fell Apart, what people like about my work, um, is that I'm not part of a tribe.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And I think it's totally fine. There's not many of us that have that attitude. But I think you should, those of us who do have that attitude, you should just let us do what we do well and, and don't force it into doing something that we do badly. You know, the way I try and work is that I'll go out into whatever adventure I'm having with no preconceptions, just try and be like a sort of feather in the wind of the story. And not, you know, forget about my values, forget about it all. And then get all the information, have the adventures, go where the story takes me, be a twig in the river of the story and then come back. And that's, and when you're back at home, that's when you start to make sense of it.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  And that's when your values come back in and that's when you realise, you know, what your morality is. And, and that's how it works. I'm not going to blare about any, anything that I haven't spent months doing my own kind of story on.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Uh, I love that you mentioned Nathan Fielder. He was on my mind a bit, partly because of, um, this Elizabeth Holmes documentary that he's just launched, which sounds amazing.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Are you a fan?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I was watching him last night.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Which one?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Finding Frances.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  That might be his best piece of work.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  I've got 15 minutes to go, I fell asleep, uh, so.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  You must have been very tired.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I was very.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  No reflection on the quality.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  No, no, I was loving it. Um, but I thought I'm falling asleep here, I'm not going to try and watch the last 15 minutes. So don't tell me if you found it.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  How would you characterise what Nathan Fielder is doing?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  He's, he kind of does what we do, but he brings like other things into it. He brings the kind of Werner Herzog sort of artistry to it and also a kind of prankiness. But it's a weird prankiness, it's a little bit like Chris Morris, but it's sort of slightly more surreal.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  They're like pranks that don't really have a point or the point is not immediately apparent.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  He goes into these, um.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  He hates being called a prankster.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  We should probably retract all of that. I had John Wilson on, he's like, oh, don't call Nathan a prankster, he does not like that. And I think that's reasonable because parts of it are more about almost art, some sort of avant-garde performance piece, right?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  You know, Nathan's probably still best known for, um, Nathan For You.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Which reminded me a tiny bit of, wait for it, The Ronson Mission.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Do you, which you'll remember because you made it in 1993, your first TV outing.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Why do you say it like that?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you exactly why I said it like this. Um, I was, you were one of the few people who liked it, I believe.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  I find that hard to believe. Um, do you know, it's hard to find it. I'd say like, listeners and viewers can check it out. Uh, I don't think they can check it out.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  It's been scrubbed from YouTube.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Why?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I paid a foot, no, I'm kidding, I don't know, I've certainly never tried to get it on YouTube, yeah. It was kind of a prank show.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Prank show does it a disservice.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, although some of my favourite moments were planky moments. Actually, I did something that Nathan Fielder then later did, and now I'm thinking about it. I wonder whether he was.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Come on, which bit? Well, we should say you'd come up unconventional. Am I right in thinking you didn't go to university?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Well, I did two years and then flunked out.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  And then you got a job, I guess columnist as a time out, basically doing humorous columns.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I was very, like, twenty-three, twenty-four.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Did you know you were a good writer?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Well, when I was at college, my teacher was David Cardiff, who was married to Lynne Barber, who was like the greatest journalist of the age.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Certainly, she was the definitive profile journalist.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, quite scabrous and elegant and funny.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  She could get, spend an afternoon with someone and she had no compunction about skewering them. In a way that at times certainly could feel to the subjects, I'm sure, quite cruel.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  The moment I remember, and I'm not even sure how, it's just the moment I remember. I can't say it's like her best moment, but I remember she asked Gerry Adams if he had a favourite funeral. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of the kind of places she went to. But we were like so impressed with her. She was like Dorothy Parker, you know, so elegant and scabrous. And her husband.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  In her writing or in her person?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Just the whole, the whole package.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  Did you meet her?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  A couple of times because her husband was my teacher and I've met her subsequently. And he took me for coffee and he said, you're the only person who writes for the college newspaper who knows how to write.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Really?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  And I think, I've always thought that's the moment that cemented my life.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Boots. We're in the era of optimisation. We're being encouraged to max everything in our lives for health reasons. And it can feel overwhelming. I'm not impervious to it. I feel like I should take massive steps in order to overhaul my health. And then you get paralysed. My advice is don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. And that's a simple truth that Boots really understands, that taking little steps can generate huge results. For example, as autumn rolls around, you might start to feel those busier schedules and shorter days are catching up with you. But doing something as simple as taking a proactive approach to your health and wellbeing can help.

• 33:19Speaker 00

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• 33:55Speaker 00

  Your writing, I mean, I think what's perhaps under acknowledged about your writing is the technical aspect. Like people, you obviously get to great stories, but really your, the clarity of your prose and your ability to unfold a yarn or unfurl a yarn is really striking. And I know that's developed over time as you learnt more to do it. I'm wondering, did you have models that you were following early on?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, all the people I liked the most back then were people who could

• 34:28Speaker 01

  put a whole load of ideas into a very small number of simple words. So Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  That's a terrific book and wonderfully simply written.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  He'd worked in advertising, so it's said that writing advertising copy had partly honed his craft.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  That really makes sense. For people who don't know Slaughterhouse-Five, it's about a young soldier who survives the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And is then kidnapped by space aliens and taken to a planet called Trafalgar Dory and displayed in a zoo with a porn star called Montana Wildhack. And the aliens teach him how to go back and forward in time so he can be at any point in his life at any moment.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  And I'd say it's all, because that makes it sound a bit Douglas Adamsy, maybe it is, but it's really about, as well, about Kurt Vonnegut processing the trauma of having been involved in this atrocity.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Because he was a veteran himself and he'd gone through all of that.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yes, and I don't think Billy Pilgrim, the character, was ever.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  One of the questions in the book that's left unsaid is, is he fantasising being on this planet? Or did it really happen? And obviously I think it's kind of form of PTSD.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I was really inspired by that. Raymond Carver for a similar reason, like very simple sentences, but with a hell of a lot going on underneath the surface.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Short, his short stories. Had you read those, what, in Cardiff, like, growing up? Because he kind of came to fame late in life, having had, you know, been a poet, had serious alcohol issues.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  And then fell in with, is it Gordon Lish?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  His editor, and then together they created this lapidary prose style that involved leaving everything out.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  As did, as did Vonnegut, I think.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Allegedly described.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, this is one of the main reasons why I wanted to write So Even Publicly Shamed, my public shaming book. Because I noticed that with, so the main character in that book was this woman, Justine Sacco. And she tweeted an ill-advised tweet. She was like the patient zero of public shaming, that nothing like this had ever happened before. And she's on her way to Cape Town and she tweets, going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding, I'm white. And got on the plane, fell asleep, woke up 12 hours later, turns on her phone and her phone just like exploded. The first text is somebody saying, I'm so sorry to see what's, somebody she hadn't spoken to since high school, saying, I'm so sorry to see what's happening to you right now.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  That was the first thing that she saw. When I first saw that tweet overwhelm my timeline, my first thought was, you know, oh, somebody's fucked. And I kind of put the pillow behind my head and I watched. But then it didn't take me more than a couple of seconds to think, you know, this is a bad version of this literary tradition that I really like. She's leaving it all unsaid. She's leaving unsaid her own privilege. It's like a kind of, a little bit like Randy Newman.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  We call it irony, don't we?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  It's the one word version.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And what I noticed after that was that people were so scared that that would happen to them, that everybody was over explaining everything. And that's my least favourite type of writing. I want there to be a hell of a lot unsaid. I want the writing to be a kind of pact between the writer and the reader, where the writer leaves things unsaid because they trust that the reader knows what's going on and can fill in the gaps and so on. Like, which is what I learnt from Carver and from Vonnegut. And, and yeah, that's, that's what I was trying to do.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  But the danger with irony is that you get taken at face value. You get taken literally.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Which is exactly what happened to her while she was asleep and oblivious. So, yeah, I was doing all of that stuff and so I, for some reason, I got offered the column in Time Out. And I did it for a few years. And then I got a call from the BBC from DEF2, which was youth television.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  I think your column must have developed quite the following, right?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it did well. I remember it won columnist of the year. Oh, my God.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Columnist of the year.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  I won columnist of the year, I was twenty-five. And I'm celebrating my win, I'm standing in this crowded ballroom, like at one of those big hotels on Park Lane. And someone came up to me and whispered in my ear, how does it feel to have peaked at twenty-five and then just vanished again into the crowd? I know, no idea who that person was.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Well, it couldn't have been further from the truth.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but so, yeah, well, Janice Street Porter then offered me like my own series on DEF2. It was just before the little cameras had come along, the little.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  ED150s.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I had to drive around in a massive truck with, with a big camera and boom and, you know. I don't know, at the very beginning of your career, did you have to do that too?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it's good to acknowledge the technological substrate in this and many contexts, the fact that certain products. Uh pieces of culture look the way they do because they were printed on a printing press or you you a manuscript you in this case it's like we had huge cameras you needed a dedicated camera person, sound recorder, which isn't always the case and certainly at that time in the nineties, you had tapes that lasted about half an hour and every half hour someone would be in the middle of a a kind of racist rant, let's say you're covering the Ku Klux Klan, you think like this, we're getting it, this is sort of what we needed for the segment to work. And then you'd hear, I got two minutes, you know, like basically their tape was about to run out and then you had to change it and then it would kind of mess up the flow.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And for and for some reason, at the age of twenty five, I'm giving my own TV show on the BBC, it's like a dream. I I hated it. And I remember the director said to somebody, I just can't do anything to make John happy. And it's so weird looking back on it now because what a what a break I was given.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  A gift. You must have been excited when they proposed it.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I think I was nervous the whole time.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Because I I've said before, when I was offered my series, they said, we've got four episodes, it's called Weird Weekends. I was like, I don't like, it's called Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. I said, please let's not call it Louis Theroux. No one knows who I am. That's ridiculous. It feels overweening. And also, why are we doing four? Like, couldn't we just do one? And also, why are they fifty minutes? That seems too long. So I can relate to the sense of, I don't have that level of confidence that any of us have a clue how to do this. I don't think I do. Like, this is folly.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah. And especially in that form, like you turn up at somebody's house with all of these people and you're setting up and I'm asking questions, I'm not directing it, so I'm not making the choices about the storytelling. And and I just thought, this is not what I'm do. Yeah, yeah, I'm a writer and suddenly I'm an actor. And I'm not an actor. I can't be in front of the camera.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Had you pitched it to them? Did they say, would you be interested in doing something? And then you came up with ideas?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  No, it's just really weird. So I had a teacher at college called Frank Hathaway. And without telling me, he approached, when he saw my Time Out column, he approached the BBC and said, this could be a TV show. So then Janet Street Porter calls me in, and I'm sitting there, and Janet Street Porter goes, I think it's a brilliant idea. And I'm sitting there thinking, I have no idea what the idea is. I don't know why I'm here. I feel out of my depth. I feel like like events are moving fast and I don't really know. So the whole so right from the beginning, I felt uncomfortable. Like, you know, what I wanted to say is like, can we all just like, stop and think about this? So for the whole making of the series, I was I was miserable. I felt like it wasn't right. And it was only

• 42:17Speaker 01

  later on, when they brought out these tiny little cameras, and I got to be the director. So I got to make the storytelling decisions. And that's why I started directing myself.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  We were, we were, we were in a long dog leg, a very enjoyable one. Part of it was Nathan Fielder, and to what extent, the Ronson mission for Shadow did. Did you say you thought there was some idea that overlapped?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just, so I did a couple of, so one of the things I did was this celebrity charity pop video called, and this was a prank, I wrote this song called Let's Stamp Out Crime By Any Means Necessary. This was right at the time when all the celebrity, like, you know, the We Are The Worlds were coming out. And we got all of these celebrities to sing this viciously, right wing, there's a lot of bad people about.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Really?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's clean up the grime by any means necessary. So that was one.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Who, which celebrities did you have involved?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Uh, like people from Brookside, Nicholas Parsons. I do remember Nicholas Parsons coming up to me and saying quietly to me, he's he's dead now, I can see this, right? He said, he said, I'm so glad that, you know, you're saying what everybody's thinking.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the people from Brookside.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  That's a shock. The beloved translation for the younger for the younger people. He wasn't, he was part of a comedy double act, then in the seventies and eighties presented Sailor of the Century, the quiz show. And then now, for for many years, was mainly known as the as the presenter of Just a Minute. Join us as we play Just a Minute.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  I'm now feeling some guilt that I mentioned that.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  He probably was just trying to put you at ease.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Um, so, yeah, so that was what I remember the Brookside people. I I heard later on that they said, if we ever see John Ronson again, we're going to beat the shit out of him.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  After it came out, they realized they'd been pranked.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Well, did you have issues with doing pranks? I always found it very stressful and the bad faith involved, I didn't like.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Well, I was, I mean, when I was like, I was in my mid twenties then, when my ethical framework hadn't been completely.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Did Nathan do a version of that for one of his episodes?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  No, this other thing that I'm about to tell you.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  So I interviewed Janet Ellis.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  This one I remember.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  The presenter of Blue Peter.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I had Janet Ellis's biggest fan in a bus outside feeding me the questions.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  He was a super fan to the point where he might have been possibly neurodivergent, I would argue.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think Nathan Fielder, he had a very similar scene where he's he's interviewing somebody and it's like a seven year old kid is asking the questions, and in his earpiece. So who knows?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Can I bring us back to the present tense? Um, we should talk about the chapter on Greg Chisholm.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  It's been singled out by a lot of reviewers and in interviews, because it it it's a distillation of something, right? I think something to do with the algorithm, YouTube. How would you explain?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So as I said, so much of the castle is my unfolding relationship with the castle owner. But I wanted to look at how, when the old, you know, all the old structures are collapsing, people are losing their jobs, people are no longer working in institutions, and instead YouTube's come along to say, come, come to us. We're the wide open country where where somebody could thrive through grit and perseverance as an influencer. So people are being encouraged in in a sort of post-institution world to become personal brands, institutions have won. And I really wanted to cover that. And it's a really truly incredible story. Greg came from a dying Rust Belt town. He should

• 45:59Speaker 01

  have worked at the factory, but the factory is closed. He has multiple open heart surgeries and owes the medical insurance companies two hundred thousand dollars at the age of eighteen in a dying Rust Belt town. Then he gets married, has two kids, and his wife leaves him a single father. So he has two daughters under the age of two. So this is a man at rock bottom with no prospects. But he sees a YouTube video made by an Australian fruitarian cyclist called Durian Rider. He's cycling through Australia, and he's like, I used to be in prison, I've lived on the streets, but look at me now, I'm making a YouTube video. You can make a YouTube video. What's your story? You've got a story. Greg, it was Greg's Damascus moment. So he starts making YouTube videos.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  The early days, now that's like a normal, I mean, everyone's done that. Your kids say, like, I want to be a YouTuber. It's probably the most popular job for young people.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Well, thirty nine, this is why.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  This is a while ago.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is also why this is such a relevant story, I think. Thirty nine percent of Americans now identify as content creators. Twenty percent of boys and thirteen percent of girls say that being a content creator is the only choice of career for them. So it's very important, I think, to to look at what happens when somebody gives themselves over to the algorithms, which is what Greg did. So Greg becomes a lawn care influencer and does very well. He makes his hour long lawn care ASMR type videos where people just watch him mowing the lawn. And they're thinking, Greg, don't miss that patch. And then he hits it.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Is it also for people who want great lawns? And they've and they think, you know, he has tips on how to get the best out of your green sward?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does a lot of that. He would also do good Samaritan lawn work, where he'd drive along, found a lawn in need, leap out of his truck, mow the lawn, film himself doing it, and then jump back in the truck and vanish into the night like the Zorro of lawn care chores. And he was getting a hundred thousand views a week. He suddenly was popular. He was making money.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  And making money.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, at that stage, not making that much money. But yeah, maybe a few hundred dollars a week or something. Uh, and then something happens. He has this other channel that's just called Greg Chisholm. And it's just a place for him to store his home videos with his daughters. Nobody was watching, like a couple of hundred subscribers. So one day he buys, so I think his sister buys the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. And they're playing in the box, they're running around with the box on their heads. And he films it and puts it on the Greg Chisholm channel. And for some bizarre fluke, it it catches fire. And it has a million views and then it has 10 million views and then it has 20 million views.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  And YouTube phoned him and that we can teach you how to replicate this success. And so he goes on a YouTube course where they say, uh, follow the algorithm, follow what's popular. Get into search engine optimization. You need a WTF moment, what's the WTF moment? So Greg is just blindly thrilled at this change in his life. And does everything that YouTube tell him to do and starts making these more and more. He doesn't realize are extreme videos with his daughters. He's doing this.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Disturbing, outlandish.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Dressed, they're all dressed as babies.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Spitting food at each other.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's just like, well, sure, some of it's gross, but that's the stuff that people are encouraging us to do. Like the grosser the better. So he's just following. Do you remember that novel, The Dice Man?

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Yes, Luke Reinhardt.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  I never read it.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I I read it.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  People loved it.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  He he rolls a dice to decide what he should do.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that was Greg. Instead of rolling a dice, he was doing what the YouTube viewers and the algorithms and YouTube itself were telling him to do.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  It's like a dice with a, but it's a loaded dice with a built in bias towards our darkest impulses.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, big tech is encouraging our darknesses and our strangenesses. And encouraging us to go further and further. And I've got to say, it's not just big tech anymore. Um, the whole media, mainstream media, independent media, we're all following this now. Because everybody's desperate for clicks, everything. So the headlines are all rage bait and click bait. So this thing that was created, I guess, by big tech algorithms has swallowed up the the entire media.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Well, you could say twas ever thus in the sense that headlines have always been slightly histrionic. You know, oh, the Weekly World News was a thing, Elvis spotted on the moon. Anything that would pique your interest. So what do you think the difference is now?

• 50:44Speaker 01

  No, and you're right. I've I've fought I've fought it like my whole career. I remember years ago I did a story about Amanda Palmer, the um, the singer. And um, they headlined it Amanda Palmer, visionary or egotist? And I'm always trying to not do things like that in my stories.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Don't play the game.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, yes, sort of, it's always been that way, but it feels like it's more now. It feels like it feels like people feel they have no choice. Everything has to be rage baity or click baity. Anyway.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Because of the low barrier of entry, you're not required to buy an uh, the Weekly World News. It's on your phone for free and one click leads to another and there's pop ups and.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's panicking.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  The level of interactivity and the always on-ness.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's panicking.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  And the no bar to, it could have, it could be extreme, it could be, there's no real pushback in terms of quality or content moderation.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, and so so Greg um, was following all of this, getting into more and more extreme places. Make doing incredibly well. Greg's most watched video, which was called something like Victoria and Annabelle and Freak Daddy. Toy Freaks, Family Fun in Real Life, Food Fight or something like that. Because it was like this word salad of search engine optimization, had 622 million views. And in 2016 and 2017, his videos were watched a total of 13 billion times. And everybody loved it until suddenly everybody didn't.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  You said at one point he was the biggest content creator on YouTube.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Greg was following it into more and more extreme places until suddenly BuzzFeed and Reddit. And everybody discovers him and sees a man and his two daughters crawling around like babies in some random midwestern house. And alarm bells ring and his life is just ruined, completely ruined. People, people start calling the police and SWAT teams turn up and he has to take his kids to family services. And he becomes incredibly panicky and depressed. YouTube kick him out for the vague videos that they were encouraging him to make.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  See, people see the content and decide it's deemed to be troubling, perhaps even abusive, although in fact it turns out it isn't. So his life collapses. I mean, what part of the weirdness as well, and then and then it metastasizes around the world in weird bastardized forms.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Because it's being done by other people or or bots, AI, AI is spitting it out.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  This was before AI, so this was humans basically doing what AI is now doing.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Humans making what we now call uh.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Slop.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Slop.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Human created slop.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  For instance, Greg would do a video where he would take his two daughters dressed as babies in a shopping cart through a Walmart in Granite City, Illinois. And the next day, a man in Kiev would do exactly the same thing, ape it all. Same dialogue, the same camera angles, the same music, and with two adult women playing the parts of his bad babies. So all over the world, Greg would put out a video and in Hanoi or Kiev or Moscow, people would ape it with an eerie precision. The algorithm started sending it all to all of these kids on on YouTube Kids. And that's why the scandal exploded because suddenly YouTube Kids were watching these bizarre, grotesque.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Copycats of copycats of copycats and suddenly people dressed as Elsa from from Frozen were enacting dismemberments or or cannibalism. Or uh, and there were like cartoons of Peppa Pig eating her own father with that blood spurting everywhere. And it was being fed to all of these children on YouTube Kids. Because the algorithm couldn't tell the difference between real Peppa Pig and grotesque Peppa Pig. And that's why the scandal exploded.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Uh, James Bridle is one of the people who you you mentioned, who who discovered this early on in an article called something very what?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Something is wrong on the internet.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Something's wrong on the internet. And what I I read, I went back and read his original post and what I was struck by was how it's difficult for him to assign humans behind the problem. He assigned agency to humans behind it, like, he says, what concerns me is not just the violence being done to children. It's that just one aspect of a kind of infrastructural violence being done to all of us all the time. And we're struggling to find a way even to talk about it, to describe its mechanisms, actions and effects.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a beautifully written piece.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  I struggle where the the the agency is actually so diffuse. Like, I don't have trouble believing that many of the people, maybe most of the people in the tech business are people like you and me. And the algorithm is to some extent out of their control, like the technology is just is driving a lot of the decisions.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, YouTube Kids, they made the active decision to to to cede control to the machine. Like, there was a moment when YouTube invented YouTube Kids, where it's like, should we put humans or the algorithm in charge of the contents on YouTube Kids? The people who wanted to let the machines do it said, kids love trains. But no human would think to put trains on YouTube Kids. And then the the antis would say, yeah, but if we put trains on YouTube Kids and we allow the algorithm to decide. Then there's going to be train crashes because people love to watch train crashes. Google, YouTube's parent company, decided to let the algorithms do it.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  And it was a terrible mistake. It went haywire with millions of kids being traumatized by these horrific images coming from these Russian content farms. That were aping Greg's videos, but making it more and more disgusting.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  How do you find your stories? I'm always struck, especially not just in this one with um, things fell apart. You've got a hotline to these great, each one is like a little crystal of something strange in the culture.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Would you have spent, you want to spill any of your secrets?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, my main secret is it's hard, like you can spend months going down dead ends.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  What do you scanning though? What do you read? What do you consume?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Uh, I look everywhere. You're looking for, I remember asking Christiane Kubrick, when I made my documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, what was he looking for in those ever lengthening gaps? She said, the magical moment of falling in love with the story. So that's what I'm always looking for. And what is that magical moment? I suppose it's something that in itself is absurd and mysterious and funny and strange and all these like conflicting emotions.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Particularly mysterious, something I don't understand. But it has to be something that also resonates, also tells us something about the way that the world is turning. So it's a very specific combination. And then, because I'm access driven, you can find the most incredible story in the world, but if the person won't talk to you, you have to dump it. So thank God Greg talked to me.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Are you still on X a lot?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  No, I'm not on X at all.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  At all, why not?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Well, partly because apparently the last couple of weeks, because of Graham's ire, there's been a quarter of a million tweets directed at me, I've been told.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Really?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't wanna, but the thing is, when you delete the app, because of this siloed world we live in, just dissolves.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  It does, but there is a real world out there as well. I was talking to my brother about this, like, what if you just turn off all the social media? Then yeah, but then you'd be like, why are there hundreds of men with balaclavas running down the street? You know what I mean? Or why is this guy Tommy Robinson able to put a million people or whatever it is, hundreds of thousands of people on the street? The effects will still take place, right?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's true. It's a real push and pull, because I don't like this siloed world. And I think it's weird, actually, that everybody's consuming very much their own bubble of media. Where I can be bombarded with quarter of a million tweets on X of Graham's fans. And I don't know if that number's true or not, I just read it.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Where did you read that?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I read it on a site called Cooked and Bond, who assiduously document Graham's online footprint.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  As fans or critics?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  As critics. You know, I would interview people for, say, being publicly shamed, where they would say, I stayed up all night reading every tweet and believing every single one, believing I was the terrible person that they said I was. And after a while, people had to, for their own sanity, reject that and become unashamed. It's like the only way to survive. If you overuse shame as a weapon, like hospital superbugs being sanitized and sanitized and they become impervious to treatment, the only thing they can do is to become unashamed. So our overuse of shame created a generation of unashamed transgressors, which now I think has mutated into disinhibition, which is what I'm writing about in, you know.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  So, so this siloed world became, was almost like a kind of defence mechanism for the fact that everybody getting to look into each other's worlds was a disaster. Because Justin Saka would make a joke that millions and millions of people would be able to weigh in on. But the siloed world, it's great for my emotional wellbeing on tour, because it means I don't have to read all of those things. But ultimately, is it good if everybody's in their own bubble? That feels like it could be just as bad as the world that it's replacing.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  The Telegraph gave you four stars, very positive, and said, almost heroically, given this theory on narcissism thriving post-COVID, Ronson gets through the whole book without mentioning Donald Trump.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  How do you react to that?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  I wanted to stay away from the touchpoints.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, the obvious.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  I want to stay away from incels. When you made the Manosphere documentary, like, I decided not to do the Manosphere. And it made me, I'm about to butter you up, Louis.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Louis, I'm ready, I'm a piece of toast.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Okay, so the fact that you made that Manosphere documentary so funny and so watchable, I don't think I could have done that, and I think that's real testament to you.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Appreciate that.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  I wanted to stay away from all of those touchpoints, because you think, okay, if I don't do the Manosphere, if I don't do incels, if I don't do Trump, then what will I do? And that's kind of forced you into more interesting and unexpected places.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  A couple of Goodreads reviews. This one's relevant to what we were saying before. In contrast to Louis through in the Manosphere, Ronson tells a much deeper and more vulnerable story. This is painful to read. Instead of quick, I don't know why they put these in my notes. My team, they're very cruel. Instead of quick gotcha interviews with publicity hungry influencers, he spends significant time with his subjects, trying to understand them and place them in a larger cultural context.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  What do you think about that?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  I mean, that's disgusting. I prefer the one where they gave you one star and said, self-righteous, pretentious, and at its worst,

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  public bullying conducted from a position of considerable commercial success and the backing of his liberal elite circles.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that'd be a gremlin.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  To be honest, I could look the codes in there.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  You can spot them.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I think you can spot that, yeah.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  I think we're nearly there. What advice do you give? I'm sure, I mean, I know you have millions of admirers. And what advice do you give to young people who say, like, oh, I want to do what you do?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Well, find a story that you're passionate about. Passion and mystery is the wind behind your sails. Fill your head with curiosity and not prejudgment. So that's another reason why, like, if you come up with like some, you know, you wanna, you wanna be open, you wanna fill your, you wanna be open to anything. You wanna be a twig in the river of the story. Fill your head with curiosity instead of judgment. Find a story that you really want to get the answer to. Care as much about how you tell the story as what the story is. I think a lot of writers, a lot of non-fiction people have very low creative ambitions. They all, they see themselves as like an information service. There's so many non-fiction books out there that say, in this book, I'm going to tell you this.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  In chapter one, I'm going to tell you this. You know, don't do that, be experimental. I think The Castle is a really kind of experimental book. It goes off in really interesting directions. It's a page turner, it's weird.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  It doesn't feel like a sort of formulaic book. So I think have those kinds of ambitions.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Use some of the devices of fiction if you're writing in prose, like. You, I was struck in the Greg Chisholm chapter where you say, I'm gonna leave Greg here at the height of his success, and now I'm gonna take you down to this other part of the story. So you're always conscious of managing the revelations?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  It was Ian McEwan, I read a thing where he said, like, suspense is the withholding of information, which is really simple, but actually a great thing to recall. And there's always a temptation to say too much too early on.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've really got to think about that stuff. I remember, like, one of the reasons why I gave up writing screenplays was because to be a good screenwriter, it doesn't matter how well written the screenplay is, you've got to put yourself in the seat of an audience member watching the movie. And I could never quite do that. But for some reason, with writing, I can, with non-fiction, I can do it. So I'm constantly thinking, at what point is the reader gonna want there to be a cliffhanger? At what point will they appreciate me withholding some information? So you've got to, you've got to put yourself in, you've got to think about the reader's experience as you're writing it.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  As a cultural whisperer, someone who you've always been ahead of the curve, I feel, and sort of had a sense, a nose for things that are bubbling, often online, but not always. Do you have a sense of where we're going next? It feels like we're, you know, there was this sort of, what they call the awakening, right? This moment of aspects of progressivism becoming mainstream and then institutionalized in corporations. That's sort of 2010 through 2022, more or less.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Then swirling alongside, you have 2016, Trump and Brexit and what they're calling the vibe shift, right? And obviously AI as well.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Do you know where, what's happening?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Well, the two things, I'm, okay, so I do have a little prognosis.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  And it's not good. Every time I just have a positive prognosis for the future, it turns out to not be true, because things are only getting worse. So I think AI is a real problem. I mean, even if you put aside the possibility that it's gonna wipe out humanity within 10 years, even if that doesn't happen, it's robbing us of our jobs. This book, The Castle, is a lot about purpose and how important work is to our lives. And the reason why I wanted to write that is because I think we're entering a world of, or we have entered a world of increasing purposelessness, which is why a lot of people are going to YouTube and so on to try and find purpose there. I heard an AI guru.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Who whose AI makes music, trying to convince people, oh no, people don't enjoy making music.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  And Sam Altman says, you know, we're we're creating a world, a post-work world.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  And then.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Musk is saying the same thing.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Right, and then to make.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Super abundance, there'll be leisure, it doesn't really sound like that, but.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it's so pernicious, I can't see why everybody doesn't feel the same feeling of rage that that I do about all of this.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Well, not about abundance per se, right?

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  No, but about the trick that they're all, it's about the trick that we're that's they're playing on us. Musk is keeping us all furious down here with these culture wars, prodding at each other with these culture wars, while he's getting richer and richer up there, the AI gurus are robbing us of our jobs, and then ChatGPT is coming along to offer this like these false flattery, this.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, sick of fancy.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like in my castle owner is coming up with these different reality TV show ideas, like One Hundred and One Princesses, and ChatGPT is telling him it's the most compelling entertainment project ever.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  We've all had a bit of that, haven't we?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  So what happens is ChatGPT is robbing us of our jobs, robbing us of our purpose, and then swooping in, you know, sees how lost people are, and is swooping in by saying, come to me, you're not purposeless, you you're creating the most compelling entertainment project ever. It's like a double, it's like a double punch in the face.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  So that's bad, and I think the response to that can only be fight. I'm like, I'm not a sort of crazy ideologue about this, there's certain aspects of AI that are positive and helpful, of course, but the data centers, the slop, you know, fight it as much as possible. And I think people, I used to go on Instagram to watch videos of unlikely friendships between different species of animals. Can't do that anymore, because the giraffe and the hedgehog, you have no idea if they're even real. So people are going to be moving away from this shit and moving into a more analog real life, and that's already happening, and that's has to happen. People have to re-enter a community and realise that we're all just part of the community,

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  we're all humans trying to get by, and we're being brainwashed by these like AI billionaires and and so on into these kind of culture war battles, and and we need to get out into the real world. So that's one thing I think is is happening and is going to happen. But the other thing, I kind of thinking that there's something on the horizon, and I could be wrong, like in a year's time, people might think, well, John was wrong to think this, but this El Nino that's coming, I I don't know, like, I I think, I I wouldn't be surprised if in a year's time, all anyone's going to be talking about is the weather. There's some dark shit coming down the pike with the weather.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  This El Nino is forming now in the Pacific, and at unprecedented levels.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  How do you do a story about that?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's the terrible thing about it, it's like, there's nothing that can be done. And as I said, look, I might be being catastrophic here, and it may not be as bad. Sometimes people offer catastrophic predictions for the future that I believe, and they don't turn out to be real, that happens quite a lot. But there's a little bit of me that thinks this El Nino is a little bit like Covid, like it's gonna it's gonna happen to everything. It may not, I could be wrong, and I really hope I'm wrong, but I do think it's possible.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  What a great cliffhanger to end this episode on.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed that. Thank you to John for coming by. It's always a pleasure talking to John, and I have to be careful that it doesn't turn into shop talk. You know, there's a bit of shop talk, but sometimes I forget there are people listening and watching. I think I might have been trying to impress John. Anyway, note to self, don't talk too much, I'm fifty-six, I'm still learning. You never stop growing, you never stop learning. As Bob Dylan once said, those not busy being born are busy dying. I don't know how busy it is dying, feels like the absence of busyness, but anyway, it's poetic.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Mainly, I just want to say mad, mad props to John. I literally have read all his books, I admire his writing so much, they, he's a he's a true craftsman, crafts person, his ability to keep you keep you reading, his his light irony, his comic understatement. The first one I read of his was Them, which, so you know, it's a bit like albums, where you like the one you heard first, so Them, for me, is maybe the gold standard, but they're all excellent, and the new one does not disappoint, so check it out. The Castle. We've got some other exciting news, yes, not just a new studio, but brand new social

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  accounts for the podcast, which we'd love if you followed. That's at the Louis Theroux Podcast on Instagram and TikTok. That's it for today. Thanks so much for watching or listening, and I'll see you for another episode next week.