Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / How the Public Shaming Machine was Built with Jon Ronson

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How the Public Shaming Machine was Built with Jon Ronson · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and one of my favourite thinkers, writers, commentators and what a week to have John Ronson on the show.
• 0:14
  He was sort of the godfather of the idea of public shaming, of what came to be called cancel culture.
• 0:20
  when in 2015 he wrote the book on the subject, So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
• 0:26
  At the time, it was an interesting new phenomenon, which then blossomed into all of the madness of the late 2010s and early 2020s, and this week is a particularly poignant time to revisit it with someone like John, because of the tragedy that unfolded in the UK with the death of Jason Arday.
• 0:46
  We talk about that a little bit.
• 0:48
  If you're not sort of across it or you've just sort of vaguely seen headlines, I'll just remind you of the sort of contours of that debate so you don't get lost.
• 0:56
  Jason Arday was the youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge University.
• 1:04
  Very illustrious.
• 1:05
  Cambridge had been under a lot of pressure for quite some time from faculty and from the wider public to diversify its academic staff.
• 1:13
  and hire more black people.
• 1:15
  Jason was a working class lad from, he grew up in public housing to Ghanaian immigrant parents, had a sort of perfect story of having been, having lived with disabilities in his youth.
• 1:28
  He claimed to not have even spoken until the age of 11 and to have autism and to have had brain cancer and to have had all kinds of different things.
• 1:38
  But he overcame these odds and got his PhD by the age of 30.
• 1:43
  He ran apparently 30 marathons in 35 days.
• 1:46
  I think it was extraordinary, extraordinary feats of achievement.
• 1:49
  And Cambridge took this at face value and hired him.
• 1:53
  And when journalists and fellow academics started asking questions, fairly simple questions, really, like if he'd actually run marathons like that, then the world's sort of cohort of elite professional athletes would have heard of him and they never have.
• 2:10
  Cambridge doesn't seem to have called people who knew him when he was a child to verify the nonverbal thing, or even just to call developmental experts to ask how rare it is for a child who is nonverbal at the age of 10 to get a PhD by the age of 30.
• 2:27
  because apparently, according to the New York Times, who did talk to developmental experts, that is so rare that it has never been documented in the history of medical literature.
• 2:35
  So there were red flags all along.
• 2:37
  And it was some of his colleagues who had looked into plagiarism accusations.
• 2:43
  And
• 2:43
  Some of these had come from some people who you might think of as being sort of anti-black people.
• 2:49
  I don't want to say that they're racist, but there were a few sort of conservative champions of Western civilization who just found the whole thing a bit egregious, that Cambridge was obviously using affirmative action to elevate this guy and to platform him.
• 3:03
  And so they went snooping around and found serious accusations of plagiarism.
• 3:10
  And actually, the Times Literary Supplemental Times Higher Education, one of these very august publications that looks into higher education, thought there was really something here.
• 3:20
  They put together a 60-page dossier and apparently sent it to Cambridge University, outlining all of the ways in which his PhD thesis was lifted, allegedly, in direct whole chunks of it from other works without attribution.
• 3:34
  And Ade's defense was, well, because I'm autistic, my mind works that way, and sometimes I don't realize what I'm doing.
• 3:42
  And Cambridge University, instead of doing what they would normally presumably do—I mean, this is a more than 800-year-old institution.
• 3:49
  This is the University of Sir Isaac Newton.
• 3:52
  This is not a place that is unfamiliar with how to verify facts—
• 3:57
  Instead of doing what they would presumably ordinary do, which is actually go and investigate the thing, they just sort of kept passing the buck.
• 4:02
  And they just kept saying, well, I mean, the PhD wasn't issued by us, that was issued by another university, so you have to ask them about that.
• 4:09
  Instead of applying the normal due diligence that you might expect.
• 4:12
  And many people's eyebrows were raised and thought, well, they're only doing this because they're standing beside a token hire, essentially.
• 4:20
  In fact, they called all of the questions into him a vile campaign.
• 4:24
  That's a direct quote.
• 4:25
  The head of the department at Cambridge went on BBC television with Jason Arday and looked into his eyes and held his hands and said that he is one of the most brilliant minds in his field.
• 4:36
  And fellow academics thought, well, that just doesn't seem to be really true.
• 4:41
  Anyway, they defended him for as long as they possibly could.
• 4:43
  So did his publisher, Simon & Schuster, who was publishing a memoir that turned out to be full of fabrications.
• 4:50
  And by the time he eventually resigned, it was in the context of an enormous tabloid media pile-on where really the position that Cambridge University had put him in was impossible.
• 5:04
  And, you know, not to wave away his own sins.
• 5:08
  I mean, he certainly didn't respond to the accusations flawlessly when fellow academics emailed him with questions specifically.
• 5:15
  He reported that academic to the police, and the academic was investigated for harassment.
• 5:21
  When journalists asked him questions, he hired one of Britain's most vicious defamation law firms to go after them.
• 5:32
  The education publication that was going to publish this piece about the 60-page dossier that they had sent to his employers were refrained from doing so.
• 5:42
  They were so cowed by his threat to sue them and, you know, shrieking racism all the while.
• 5:49
  Tragically, after he resigned, he was found dead at the age of 41.
• 5:56
  And it's been enormously unedifying to watch the responses to that.
• 6:00
  A lot of the right-wingers who were hounding him and attacking him personally and now have this kind of syrupy sympathy for him.
• 6:09
  And a lot of the left-wingers who put him in an impossible situation in the first place are passing the bark and saying, well, it's all because the right-wingers ask questions.
• 6:17
  When, in actual fact, the right-wingers were asking questions because Cambridge University had been sufficiently keen to score its own anti-racist brownie points that it put him in a position that probably wouldn't have put a white academic guard.
• 6:32
  So this whole sorry situation of public shaming, which I'm about to write about in my column this weekend in the Australian Financial Review, should you choose to check it out, forms the backdrop for this conversation with John Ronson, who's really spent his life and career looking at the way that culture deals with dissidents and dissonance inside its own tribes.
• 6:54
  Um, his original book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, actually inspired an episode of Black Mirror, the terrific television show.
• 7:00
  Um, John was sort of the Louis Theroux before Louis Theroux, and the two have been close friends and, uh, sometimes enemies and frenemies and colleagues and compatriots over the years.
• 7:11
  Um, John also wrote a book called The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was turned into a movie starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey.
• 7:19
  scandal noted um he has a couple of ted talks with tens of millions of views he has a bbc podcast called things fell apart which is about the culture wars about things just falling apart in general in our society he's a contributor to this american life to the new york times magazine to gq in the united states he writes for the guardian in the uk he has a new book coming out it's called the castle
• 7:41
  And he has an upcoming tour of the UK and also Australia.
• 7:45
  So if you're listening to this in Australia, go online and try to find tickets for John Ronson in your neck of the woods.
• 7:52
  It was a perfect time to wrestle with ideas of cancel culture and wokeness and the woke right and what's happening to us all.
• 8:00
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only John Ronson.
• 8:11
  I just had some Swiss friends out here and we did the Bondi to Coogee walk.
• 8:17
  Isn't it lovely?
• 8:17
  It's great.
• 8:18
  Did you go to Coogee Pavilion when you got to Coogee?
• 8:20
  Do you know there was a big...
• 8:22
  When you reach Coogee from the walk, the first large structure on your left is a kind of a pub, hotel, restaurant complex.
• 8:32
  And downstairs, there's a huge indoor pavilion area which has fabulous food, incredible seafood.
• 8:39
  It's quite expensive, but it's all...
• 8:41
  It's great, anyway.
• 8:42
  Oh, okay.
• 8:43
  No, I don't think I did.
• 8:44
  I don't think I did.
• 8:45
  I'm coming back to do a show, and I'm doing my castle show.
• 8:51
  I've got a new book coming out called The Castle.
• 8:53
  I know.
• 8:54
  And I'm doing a live show.
• 8:55
  It sounds fascinating.
• 8:57
  It's amazing.
• 8:58
  And the live show is amazing too.
• 8:59
  Anyway, I'm coming back to Sydney and I go, no, no, I wouldn't.
• 9:04
  You would see self-doubt.
• 9:06
  You'd see flickers of doubt in my eyes.
• 9:09
  But not this time, no doubt.
• 9:11
  But I'm going to come back and I'm going to walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach because it's just my favorite walk in the world.
• 9:17
  I love it.
• 9:17
  The other nice thing to do is to go down to the rocks and walk around, which is the oldest part of Australia from your European point of view, where they first settled.
• 9:28
  And then you walk around, um, the around circular key, which takes you up to the opera house.
• 9:35
  And then you can go around into the botanic gardens and you can loop around the gardens.
• 9:40
  And it's very pretty.
• 9:41
  And, you know, if it's a nice day, you've got the twinkling waves of the harbour, and you've got the opera house right there, and you've got the big harbour bridge in front of you, and it all feels...
• 9:49
  If you're in Sydney for the first time, which I know you're not, it's one of those overwhelming, gobsmacking, sort of like walking across the Golden Gate Bridge or something, or getting a ferry on Hong Kong harbour.
• 10:01
  Yeah.
• 10:01
  Well, you know, I think the very first time I went to Sydney, I did do that.
• 10:06
  I walked in the botanical gardens and stuff and just fell in love with the place.
• 10:10
  I love Sydney.
• 10:11
  You're very lucky to live there.
• 10:12
  I know.
• 10:13
  Well, I lived in New York for a long time.
• 10:14
  I don't even know whether you remember that coming on my live show in Brooklyn in the late 2000s, I started a show.
• 10:23
  I was working at HuffPost Live.
• 10:25
  I was living in New York and I launched a show called We the People Live and we would go to pubs in Brooklyn and we would get three entertaining people to banter about the news and drink cocktails in front of a live crowd.
• 10:38
  And you were so kind because you got it off the ground on...
• 10:42
  I mean, you just randomly said yes.
• 10:44
  You had no idea who I was and we never kept in touch after that.
• 10:46
  But I think Artie Lang from the Howard Stern show...
• 10:51
  I don't know if you were on his show.
• 10:53
  And the women, and the two women from the Guys We Fucked podcast.
• 10:57
  That's right.
• 10:57
  They were great.
• 10:59
  And I don't remember if you were, but Jim Norton came on.
• 11:02
  I was just amazed that New York, it's really a testament to New York as a city, I think, that...
• 11:08
  But someone who just wants to do something can just sort of randomly hit up all of these incredibly talented and famous people.
• 11:16
  And, you know, 9 out of 10 might say no, but 1 out of 10, you know, they don't have anything on that night.
• 11:22
  It's not that far to travel.
• 11:24
  It's kind of a fun thing.
• 11:25
  People are in New York because they want to be involved in things and they're creative and they like doing shit.
• 11:30
  It was a total vibe difference from when I've lived in Los Angeles where I would try to do things like that and people would say...
• 11:36
  Well, you know, who's going to be there?
• 11:38
  Are there going to be any agents?
• 11:39
  Are there going to be managers?
• 11:41
  Like, is there a fee?
• 11:42
  It would always be pushed through the prism, in my experience, of like, how does this fit on the ladder of my own success?
• 11:50
  And how do I put this into my career?
• 11:52
  Whereas in New York, I was so grateful to people like you for just going, yeah, sure, I'll go and have a cocktail and talk shit.
• 11:59
  Yeah, I agree.
• 12:02
  I like that about New York.
• 12:03
  It's like New York is everybody's home.
• 12:08
  Maybe that's the difference between New York and LA.
• 12:10
  In New York, the city is everyone's home.
• 12:12
  You'll just see people doing things that they really ought to be doing in the privacy of their home out on the streets, whatever that may be.
• 12:18
  Your homes aren't large enough to have a home as a home.
• 12:21
  You have to have the street as a home.
• 12:22
  Yeah.
• 12:23
  Yeah, exactly.
• 12:25
  Because people don't have gardens, so they just go to the park.
• 12:29
  And I love that about New York City.
• 12:30
  And you're right, Los Angeles is much more... Everybody stays in their bubbles and everybody's very house proud, but nothing really is happening out on the streets.
• 12:41
  Yeah.
• 12:41
  So yeah, what you experienced there is- I get angry emails whenever we talk shit about Los Angeles from people who say, well, you just don't know it well enough, but if you really scratch the surface, then you really try hard and you know all of the little places to go and you have a local to kind of say, oh, this little back street has this little thing, then there are quite a few cool places to which I say-
• 13:04
  Well, it's a city of 20 million people.
• 13:05
  You'd fucking hope there are a few cool places.
• 13:07
  I mean, that shouldn't be the standard.
• 13:09
  It shouldn't be like, don't worry, it's not entirely an irradiated wasteland.
• 13:13
  There are a few pockets.
• 13:14
  Like, you don't need- New York doesn't need a lot of pocket searching.
• 13:18
  It's right there in your face.
• 13:19
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• 13:24
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• 13:29
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• 13:35
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• 13:53
  There's things I love about LA.
• 13:54
  I love the colours, I love the desert, I love all the hikes.
• 13:58
  But it's a very weird and dysfunctional place if you're living there and working there.
• 14:02
  You see these... You go to Runyon Canyon and you see these people, these kind of spectral figures, just hiking Runyon Canyon.
• 14:11
  And they've been in LA for 40 years.
• 14:14
  And they've made a living writing scripts, getting paid to write scripts, but nothing's ever been made.
• 14:20
  And so their lives don't exist.
• 14:23
  Stephen Bannon, the British actor, had a great line about Los Angeles.
• 14:28
  He said, in Los Angeles, they kill you with encouragement.
• 14:32
  And I really get that because you go to a meeting and they tell you the greatest voice of your generation, and then you never hear from them again.
• 14:41
  and people could do that for decades.
• 14:43
  It's amazing.
• 14:43
  And in the end, you just see these shadowy figures at Runyon Canyon.
• 14:48
  I know.
• 14:49
  It's so true.
• 14:49
  I mean, when you said you like the hiking, I was going to interject and say, I mean, the hiking is good if you like doing it alongside 280 other people with dogs and facelifts who are all hiking up Runyon Canyon at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
• 15:05
  But yeah, it's almost like...
• 15:06
  I don't mind that.
• 15:06
  There's a different culture
• 15:10
  You're right that the taboo that we would normally have, I think, in the UK and Australia and much of the rest of the US, I think, against being full of shit about, you know, your plans for somebody or your plans with somebody doesn't seem to exist in the context of Los Angeles entertainment where it's almost like going to China and you just have to learn the different norms or, you know, you have to take your shoes off at the door or something.
• 15:36
  They just do things completely differently.
• 15:37
  It's fine, but I just have to understand that things are done completely differently.
• 15:40
  And anytime I'm in a meeting in which they're talking about how fabulous I am, I have to just contextualize that as part of the weird LA cultural thing and not put it in the same box as it would exist in normal civilization.
• 15:53
  Yeah.
• 15:53
  Is everything okay there?
• 15:54
  Are things falling apart?
• 15:55
  Yeah, I just, I dropped my AirPod case.
• 15:59
  Oh, that's all right.
• 16:00
  That feels like a small drama.
• 16:01
  Yeah, on the whole.
• 16:03
  I'm having a coffee.
• 16:04
  Are you having a beer?
• 16:05
  What are you drinking?
• 16:06
  Well, yeah, because it's not morning when I am.
• 16:09
  It's not the morning.
• 16:10
  Can I judge you through the same time?
• 16:12
  Can I judge you as if it were 9am on a Wednesday morning?
• 16:17
  No, it's 7pm, so beer is entirely acceptable.
• 16:21
  Yes.
• 16:22
  The other thing about LA is the weird culture of alpha male aggression and bullying, which I see every time I go there.
• 16:31
  Every time I've said... Oh, talk to me.
• 16:32
  This might have missed me.
• 16:36
  Yeah, it's just...
• 16:38
  There's a weird...
• 16:39
  The first time I visited a film set, I've met lots of very nice LA people.
• 16:43
  This is mostly the producers, actually.
• 16:45
  The actors tend to mostly be very nice, and the writers.
• 16:50
  But I don't know.
• 16:51
  I've been...
• 16:53
  The first time I went on a film set, I was thinking... Because just to explain to people, you've made a couple of movies, you've written a couple of movies.
• 16:59
  Yeah, I've been involved in three movies that got made.
• 17:03
  I mean, it's not my main thing.
• 17:04
  My main thing is non-fiction, like when you book the castle, or the psychopath test or whatever.
• 17:11
  So you've been publicly shared.
• 17:13
  But on three occasions, I've been involved with movies that got made.
• 17:16
  The Men Who Stare at Goats was based on one of my books.
• 17:19
  Yes.
• 17:20
  And then I co-wrote the movies Frank and Oakjah.
• 17:24
  But yeah, the first time I went on a film set, I thought, where have I felt this atmosphere before?
• 17:31
  And then I realized it was Cardiff High School when I was 15 and I just was trying to avoid getting the shit kicked out of me.
• 17:39
  Poor little Ronson behind the toilets having his head crumbled in by the police.
• 17:46
  Yeah.
• 17:46
  I mean, it's not that I was going to get beaten up on a film set, but I definitely got the sense of just an intensity.
• 17:52
  Yeah, beaten up metaphorically, spiritually, emotionally, just not literally.
• 17:57
  So, yes, you mentioned, so you've been publicly shamed, probably the urtext of the beginning of the, I guess, what we now call the cancel culture period.
• 18:08
  I never liked the phrase cancel culture because it always came to encompass so many entirely different sets of circumstances.
• 18:18
  A cancel culture suddenly came to mean the kind of things I was writing about, which was some private individual getting disproportionately punished for some minor transgression.
• 18:28
  That was what interested me.
• 18:30
  But also, you know, everyone, a politician who sexually assaults someone, suddenly they're saying I'm a victim of cancel culture.
• 18:37
  So it just became a meaningless phrase to me.
• 18:39
  It was an annoying phrase to that.
• 18:42
  I mean, isn't that just the trajectory of language that once something attains either a sufficiently positive or negative valence, then it gets misused by, you know, that people will try to expand it into as capacious a meaning as they possibly can to include themselves in the club.
• 18:59
  um yeah yeah i guess yeah all of that but yeah yeah absolutely well i was i was going to say woke too like i i i never liked that word either but i sort of succumbed to it a little bit at the end do you have a shorthand uh do you have a shorthand for the phenomenon that you prefer now uh i i try to never use the phrase cancel culture i really dislike that phrase i i just say like public shaming um that's just an easier way of describing what about woke uh woke um
• 19:30
  I've started using woke just for want of a better term.
• 19:35
  But it's important to point out that wokeness has mutated from being a weapon being used by the left to being a weapon used by the right.
• 19:47
  I think that, you know, everyone still uses it when they get the opportunity.
• 19:50
  But now it's... What do you mean by wokeness on the right?
• 19:56
  Oh, I mean, you see it over and over again.
• 20:02
  There's a case in Britain at the moment, which encompasses this a little bit.
• 20:08
  The Jason Arde thing.
• 20:11
  He was being powered on by the anti-DEI right.
• 20:16
  Anybody who takes a human being, flawed or otherwise, and makes them the representative of some kind of ideological battle is something I'm always against.
• 20:31
  No human should ever be representative of an ideology.
• 20:36
  in other places.
• 20:38
  Wherever it's coming from across the spectrum, it always ends badly.
• 20:41
  And it's always completely unfair because ideologies are all about seeing things in terms of black and white, and human beings are always a complicated grey area somewhere between black and white.
• 20:52
  So it's always wrong, it's always stupid, and it very often ends in disaster.
• 20:57
  G'day, humans.
• 20:59
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• 21:06
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• 21:07
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• 21:33
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• 21:36
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• 22:18
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