Latest / Blocked and Reported / Episode 321: Losing The Plot (with Jon Ronson)

Transcript

Episode 321: Losing The Plot (with Jon Ronson) · Blocked and Reported

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Blocked and Reported.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Katie Herzog,
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: and joining me while Jesse is waiting at the decoy Zoom for this interview to start,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: we have the very esteemed John Ronson.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: John is an author, a journalist, a documentarian, a podcaster, a Welshman.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: He's been in a famous band that I'm too American to understand,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: and he is one of my very favorite storytellers in the world.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: John Ronson, welcome to Blocked and Reported.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Katie, how are you doing?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: This episode has been a long time coming.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've wanted to have you on the show for years.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Something always got in the way.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I always choose to choose a fifth column.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's the fucking problem.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have a text in to you,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: and then all of a sudden,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: I hear you talking to Michael Moynihan, and I'm like, fuck, Michael got there first.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's the problem.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you really have like a thing between you that you won't do?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's what I try to avoid is having the same people on that like all
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: of our sister shows are going to have on at the same time.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's unavoidable, but this has happened multiple times.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: It also happened with Jamie Kerchick after his Army Hammer piece came out.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to have Jamie on and then Jamie's doing Fifth Column.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to avoid flooding because we have so much audience overlap.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, they haven't us.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: No, not this time.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, fuck you.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Fuck you, Camille.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: I got him first.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, fuck, fuck.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you were going to do a live show when Jesse and I did a live show in New York.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: You were going to do that with us.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: You agreed to do that.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then our show ran long.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I got to give you the fantastic news that we didn't have time for you,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: which is, you know, it's always a pleasure to cancel on a homebody.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I still went, but I've got to say I went.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you should go.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole time I was just thinking, I am so glad I don't need to do anything.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think I can just sit here.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thrilled to finally get you on the podcast.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm thrilled to be.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: All right, John, we have a lot to talk about today.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: You have a new book coming out in the U.S.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it is released in the U.S. today, the day that this airs.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: What day does it come out?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: September 1st.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's been out for 10 days in the United Kingdom.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and September 1st in the United States.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is the only time they get something before we do.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's very true.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been great in Britain, by the way.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's gone very well.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: People like it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: The thing I like the most is that regardless of the themes of the book,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: what people are really responding to is just what a sort of strange,
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: funny, propulsive mystery adventure story it is.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's always what I aspire to, like a page turner.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And people are really responding to that.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we are going to talk more about the book in the second half of the show.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to ask you to tell me one of my favorite stories from the book.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very bar pod story.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: I deeply resent that you told this story before I could find it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Jon has also agreed to stay on after the free show and take questions
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: from our Primo subscribers.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get to any of that,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: you are really the perfect guest to have on right now because public shaming is in
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: the air.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: You are something of an expert on the subject.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: You noticed this phenomenon before most people did.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Jon, what was your sort of...
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: First realization that we had entered a new era of public shaming.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: This was well before we had the term cancel culture.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: You were writing about what is now known as cancel culture.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I just noticed,
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: just as I was coming to a realization about how we should respond
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: to our fellow humans,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: it felt like Twitter was coming to the exact opposite realization.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I thought the best way to treat people,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: this is like 2012,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I guess,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: was when I started having these thoughts,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: is that the best way to think about people is with curiosity.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're wrong about that.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's why you're still on next and I've got the fuck out.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Curiosity and just,
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know, treating people as like kind of what we actually are, which is grey areas.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're complicated.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Good people do stupid things, vice versa.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The truth lies in the grey area between... And yet Twitter became this...
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Some stage for constant artificial high drama where everybody's either
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking that's just,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: you know, we all know that that's not true about our fellow humans.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So why have we created this sort of weird bubble where we're all pretending that's true?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I was interested in that.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was also interested in the fact that, you know, the early shamings on Twitter were...
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: they were about,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I remember, well, the very first shaming was LA Fitness that I remember.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the very first Twitter shamings.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: They refused to cancel the membership of a heavily pregnant woman
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: who didn't have money to pay the membership.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And Twitter just steamed in and they immediately cancelled this woman's membership.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, so...
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, so she was pregnant and she wanted them to, I'm confused, she wanted free membership?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: No,
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: she was paying like a monthly fee and she wanted to cancel because she didn't have
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: the money and the terms and conditions were like, no, you can't.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so this lazy bitch didn't want to work out while she was pregnant.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm hearing.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided to take
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, cancel her.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: So LA fit this like immediately back down.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly you realize, oh my God, we have a power that they don't have.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: This could be a force for good.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: But then very quickly that turned into something else.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like a day without a shaming became a day shredding water.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: People just felt weird and empty when there wasn't somebody that we could get.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so our standards slipped.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like we went from... We went from...
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Publicly shaming companies that have committed transgressions or whatever,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: or powerful people who would hurt people,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: to misspeakings, to getting people for telling a joke that comes out badly.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: we are punishing people with the punishment
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: that we would be most afraid would happen to us.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it all felt so hypocritical.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I wanted to do something about the justice system,
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: but this felt like more interesting than real courts.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So those were the reasons why I decided to try and write about it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so in 2015, you published, so you've been, it was 2015, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: You've been publicly shamed.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And this book was extremely helpful to me when I went through my own cancellation
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: after I wrote about Detransitioners in 2017.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: I started sending that book to,
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that this has happened to you when you're publicly shamed or when you write
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: about public shaming, people start reaching out to you with their stories.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I started sending people your book,
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: your book,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: and also Alice Drager's Galileo's Middle Figure were the two books that really sort
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: of helped me through that period.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think I have bought more copies of your book than anyone in America.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're welcome for that.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny that when I wrote that book, I called it Seeping Publicly Shamed as a kind of joke.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, who's that couch in the Simpsons?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I never actually thought, at the time I thought, I'm writing this book for the shamers.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'll show them the reality of what they're doing.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'll show them that they're causing disproportionate pain to people
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: and they'll change their ways.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, that did not work at all.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody did.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what did happen was that every time somebody got publicly shamed, they read the book.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I really didn't anticipate that.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: I really thought this would be a book for the shamers and not the shamed.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's really interesting.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no,
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: it was extremely helpful just in the sense of like, oh,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: there are other people who have gone through this and who have been ostracized
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: and here's how they dealt with it.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Here's how they dealt with it in a way that was helpful or how they dealt with it
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: a way that wasn't helpful.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and people sort of feeling that they're not alone and people realize
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: that some people,
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was focusing in this book on You know,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: the rule I sort of set for myself in this book is
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not even consciously, was who's being hurt here?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: If the only person being hurt is the person being powered in on,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: and no one else is getting hurt, then I'm kind of on their side.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if that person has hurt somebody else, then I'm kind of less eager to get involved.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's...
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So my first interest in this came because of selfishness,
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: because I had been publicly shamed for writing this story,
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: and I didn't think I'd done anything wrong.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so...
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Initially,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: when I started writing,
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: I started covering stories much like the ones in your book,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: just people who had been At that point, canceled.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and few of them had really done something wrong.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like our friend Helen Lewis, you know, her voice was erased from a video game.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And Helen's career is doing amazing.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like this did not hold her back at all.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: But that was sort
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: of my primary interest was what I thought were wrongful accusations or shamings
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: over minor offenses.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: But then you have stories of people who really have done something wrong.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to Jason Arday.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is the disgraced Cambridge professor who died by suicide after he was found
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: to have plagiarized.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And more damningly, the plagiarism to me is honestly whatever.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's a boring sin.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: More damningly, he told these really florid lies about his own life.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: He said things that couldn't possibly be true.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, John, have you been following this story?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, not massively.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: This story all happened while I was incredibly busy bringing out the castle.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually am way behind most people.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm going to be a little disappointing with this part of it.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So afterwards, I don't know, like, you know, I'm reluctant to say much.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why is because I definitely consider myself to be a kind of immersive journalist.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'll leap into a story and I'll meet everybody and I'll think about it for ages.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I emerge with something interesting to say.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm not immersing myself in the story, I'm kind of a shit commentator.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Which is why I always stay away from like Walking Dead type shows.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So anything I came up with with Jason Allarday was pretty banal.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I thought, you know, nobody is really coming out of this very well.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think the person who came out the worst in this whole episode was Jesse.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote about it in the New York Times and then Jason Arde saw that article,
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure, and then immediately killed himself.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was the sequence of events.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: So after he killed himself,
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: there was this immediate leap on the part of people to sort of retcon his reputation
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: of what had happened.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like there was this piece on NPR that completely didn't mention...
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: They said that his sin was plagiarism.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't mention that.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Actually,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: what this man had done was tell really incredible lies about himself,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: about his own life.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And lies like he ran 600 miles in six days.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: He said that he was mute until the age of 11.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: He said that he couldn't read until he was 18.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the stories were, that's sort of the minor stuff.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: The major stories was that he had these sort of nebulous racist enemies
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: who did things like send a severed pig's head in the mail to his parents' house.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: He said he was attacked twice on campus by men who immediately disappeared into the ether.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody saw it.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: So my question for you,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: John is,
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Immediately after he was killed,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: there was this rush to blame the media in cases like that.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you've covered stories where people have been publicly shamed and
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: then have committed suicide.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: When that happens, I mean,
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: do you think it's the media's, do you think it's the journalist's responsibility?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you think about that?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I, well, no, I don't believe that.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, because I think that
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever we do a difficult story,
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: and I've done many,
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: many difficult stories over the years,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: you can't... No, I don't think a journalist...
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: But this is why I really want to be careful here, because there's degrees, right?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: On the one hand...
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: On the one hand,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: I tell a story,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: and so you've been perfectly shamed, about this vicar who has a sex club going on.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Arnold Lewis, right?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Arnold Lewis.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He has a consensual sex party going on, completely harmless.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's getting hurt.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Just this sort of kooky British guy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: The news of the world.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: He's an infiltrated sex party,
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: bringing the numbers up from two to four,
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: like these were not successful sex parties.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: He begged them not to publish.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: He said, if you publish, I'll kill myself.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think he said that.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there were very similar cases, and they published anyway, and he did kill himself.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's one thing.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then you've got another,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: let's say,
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a fictitious story about,
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a sex offender who says the same thing.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not saying it's like one size fits all,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: because you have to look at each thing holistically.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: But by and large, I would say journalism...
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't,
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't work if people say,
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: if you publish this story, I will, you know, it's just like, I don't think you can.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So at the same time, though, so I agree with you there.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, though,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: in my sort of limited knowledge of what's happened since Jason Hardy's death,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: it does feel like everybody's blaming everybody else and nobody's looking inward.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: You also wrote in Shame about the case of a guy named Ben Strong.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was about, yes.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So he was a similar thing, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was a chef.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was a chef and he wanted to have, like, he wanted to be a swinger.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Again, consensual.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: He goes upstairs, comes down looking like Frank Conferta from the Rocky Horror Show.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: They then reveal themselves to be News of the World journalists.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this was a consensual situation.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, please don't publish.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you publish, I'll kill myself.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they published and he killed himself.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those stories to me, they make my skin crawl as a journalist.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because to me, there's no public interest in these two guys who...
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're just people who have weird sex lives.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree with you that some of these stories are in the public interest
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: or are just so fascinating that there's no way they're not going to get published.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them are not.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: So two guys who have kinks, who gives a shit?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: But then there was a story about this mayor in Alabama.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So already then you've got a guy in a position of power who's a crossdresser.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then it turns out that he also had been writing a violent erotica
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: about his constituents by name.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And someone finds out about it, publishes this story, and he immediately kills himself.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, that's the story that's...
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: If I had found this story as a journalist and I found out the mayor of
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: a small town was writing violent erotica about his constituents,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I would have published that story and I probably would have felt like I had blood
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: on my hands.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's the thing.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is why it's really important for this to not be a kind of one-size-fits-all conversation.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because those two guys who I mentioned in the...
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: The vicar and Ben Strong, they were not in the public interest.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: This was neither the world bullying and prurience and taking what should be
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: a private and entirely consensual sex situation.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then they begged them not to publish.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: They said, you know, that's it.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, if you publish, I'll kill myself.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they published anyway.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Not an idle threat.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: then there's other stories where publishing is in the public interest
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: because let's say that a person is hurting people.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if they threaten to kill themselves and then the journalist thinks,
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: well, you know, I won't publish because I'm too scared of what's going to happen.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then they carry on hurting people.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then that's an entirely different set of circumstances.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I really think like, you know, you can't do a one size fits all in a situation like this.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just did this story.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: We just finished a three-part series about this psychologist, and she's sort of a psychologist.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: She has a PhD in psychology.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: To call her a psychologist,
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think, would be misleading because people would think that she could practice.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not what she does.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Her name is Jessica Taylor, and she...
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: When she figured out what the story was going to be based on the questions
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: that I asked her,
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: she sent me this long email essentially begging me not to publish the story
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: and telling me it was going to put her and her family at risk.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: I had already come to the conclusion that she was a fabulist.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so that email had very little impact on me, very little sway.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't really factor into my decision making there.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was expected.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: But there have been other stories where Not when the perpetrator of something,
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: but I have, like,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: there's a story I didn't do years ago because the person who was a victim
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: of something begged me not to do this story.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you didn't do it?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I did sort of, I didn't do it.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I did sort of feel like I'm a, I will never be a great person.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: A great reporter because I'm too easily swayed by sad stories.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you've got to listen to your inner voice.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to listen to your morality and just think, well, what is that thing to do here?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Are there stories that you haven't done because you feared...
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Harming other people?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm sure there are.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's no individual one that's kind of sprung to mind straight away,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm sure that's happened.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: But no, it's difficult and painful.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I should say, by the way, that cops don't have all of these OCD things.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: They just go ahead and do it.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: you can worry too much about a story.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think I suffer.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that I need to bear in mind.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think I suffer a little bit from this condition called scrupulosity,
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: which is like a form of OCD.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: I heard, by the way, that Martin Luther suffered from scrupulosity.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's why he created the Lutheran Church.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's such a fucking terrible church to be in,
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: so stringent, because everybody has to live underneath.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther's Scrupulosity.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Were you raised in a churchy household?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was raised Jewish.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, right.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we went to the Orthodox synagogue, but that's only because that was the nearest one to...
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, but yeah,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: that thing, oh God,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say something,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: that's about,
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: people have been asking me about my time in the Skeptic Society,
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: because I write a little bit about it in the castle.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: The sceptics were like desperate to bring down believers in the paranormal.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know,
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: they wanted to be,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: our ambition of sceptics in the club,
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: in the pub,
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: was to be like so ubiquitous in the culture that
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: a ghost hunting TV show wouldn't dream up.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: having ghost hunters running down the corridor,
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: there was a skeptic running alongside them ruining everything
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: by saying it's probably just a faulty air conditioning unit.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought a lot about that because once in a while,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: the people who the skeptics were targeting And I ended up going
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: on this Sylvia Brown cruise,
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: this psychic cruise,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: where Sylvia,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sylvia Brown was a psychic at the time who basically,
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: like she'd go on Montel and people would say, my child's gone missing.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if Sylvia Brown said, you know, she'd go, your kid's dead.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what I threw,
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: what it became clear was that if Sylvia Brown told you your kid's dead,
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: They were alive somewhere.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: She was wrong 100% of the time.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a case where like, okay, this is the sceptics.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing something good here.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're stopping this woman from harming people.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: But then the sceptics would go after like Uri Geller with just as much excitement
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: when all he did was bend a couple of fucking spoons on Johnny Carson.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you've got to be careful to not allow your biases,
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: your view of the world,
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: your ideology to flatten the people who you're interested in that way.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the woman, what was her name?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sylvia Brown.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to her?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Did the skeptics,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: did they take her down so much that she is no longer telling people
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: that their children are dead?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, she's dead.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess so.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: They killed her.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm hearing.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: I went on a cruise.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: I went on a Sylvia Brown cruise and I asked her these questions.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then I jumped ship a day early and she gave She had a great big speech.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: She gathered all the...
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a great story, Sylvie Brown.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, all these people paid to go on this psychic cruise.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we all turned out.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone was, like, so excited.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then Sylvie Brown would, like, you know, stomp on stage and sit down on this giant throne.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And she'd say to me, like, you can't get a builder these days.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I tried to put a...
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: I tried to put, like, an extension on the back of my house.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: They put it on backwards.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, has anyone here eaten tofu?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: What the fuck's that all about?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: It tastes like shit.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's like eating a sponge.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then like, who's got questions?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: So like a lot of people in this woman would be like kind of sobbing and saying like,
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: you know, you know, why did my son, why did my son kill myself?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you're sobbing and she'd go, he had a bad leg.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what I realised on this cruise was that they were reliant on,
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: she was reliant on people being polite because she was getting it wrong all
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: the time, but nobody wanted to say anything.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I spoke to that woman afterwards and her son didn't kill herself because he had
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: a bad leg, it's because he suffered a depression.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: So Sylvie Baum was relying on people's goodwill to not...
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like as a psychic, that would be a pretty good catch-all.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was depressed.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Your son killed himself as he was depressed.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious, John, so you've had this incredible career.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: You've done things that I wouldn't say that going on
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: a cruise necessarily takes great physical bravery,
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: but some other things that you have done have.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: You're a Jew who has gone to cross burnings.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was outed as a Jew in a jihad training camp one time.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Was it the glasses?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was that how they figured it out?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where it was Omer Bakri,
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: like he never asked me,
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: he must have known all the time,
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: but he said to me,
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in a room of, you know, Omer Bakri and all of these like jihad warriors.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Omer said, look at me with the infidel John, who is a Jew.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we all went, oh.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Horns sprouted out of your head.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: I said, surely it's better to be a Jew than an atheist.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I heard someone go, no, it isn't.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, it isn't.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: The ridiculous thing about that moment is that, like, I am an atheist.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: So of all the places to decide to,
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: like, assert my Jewishness for the only time in my life I chose ever.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so, but you don't, you also, so you've done things like this.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: You do these immersive, you go places.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't do this.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: I talk to people on the phone.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm feeling really brave, I'll do a Zoom.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mostly stay home.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You go places and you talk to people.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: You don't strike me as someone who would enjoy physical feats of bravery
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: or you seem like an introvert.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: You seem like someone like a homebody.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: You'd rather be home with a dog.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, God, yeah.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't enjoy physical feats of bravery and I also don't enjoy meeting new people.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: How do you force yourself to do these things?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: my pal Louis Theroux was once asked that question and his answer was because not.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Doing it is worse.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And not doing it is worse.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: An adventure not had, a journey not undertaken.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just, it's fear of missing out?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the problem?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of that.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: But mostly, like, this is the kind of writing I do well.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: What I really love is sitting in this room that I'm now sitting in,
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've gone out, I've had the adventure.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like that Dorothy Parker line, like they said to her, do you enjoy writing?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she says, I enjoy having written.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like I enjoy having adventure to now I'm back at home and I'm making it work as a story.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the moments I really live for.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: You also strike me as somebody who is good in, and Louis too.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Good with an awkward pause.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Good with silence.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think Louis is better at that than I am, actually.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Louis is really brilliant in the moment in a way that's kind of,
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think, kind of unprecedented in our current culture.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: I can do it, but I think I'm better actually at it.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: I really like diving into something and not knowing what's going on and trying
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: to understand it and being like a sort of feather in the wind of the story.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because the thing about the brilliant silence that Louis does so well is
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: that he's thinking in the moment what's going to be working well on it.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I guess that's why I'm less good at those pauses.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the awkward pause is such a powerful tool because people want to fill the silence.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's very true.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm one of those people, whereas Louis is much better at not filling the silence.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let people start confessing because they just have to say something, anything.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, um...
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: I want to go back to Shames just for a moment.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you write in that book about the case of Max Mosley.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: So this is someone who thrived despite public humiliation.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: So tell us this story.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I really love this story.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: when Shame came out,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: it was the Justine Sacco AIDS tweet story that everybody was focused on.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I always loved Max Mosley.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Go on.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Justine Sacco,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: this was a young woman who she she tweeted a joke about about going to she was
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: on her way to Africa and she tweeted a joke about what was the verbatim?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe going to Africa, going to Africa.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Believe me, I know.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: You got it tattooed on your brain.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Going to Africa.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hope I don't get AIDS.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just kidding.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm white.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think the joke is fine.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: people people thought that the joke was like obviously the butt of
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: the joke is herself.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: She's playing this sort of this this White American, or like white girl.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, making fun of her own privilege, like a Randy Newman song.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like the reason why I got the joke was because I'm a big Randy Newman fan,
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: and that's what he does all the time.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: The unreliable narrator,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: making fun of their own privilege by doing an exaggerated version of it.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it seemed very clear to me.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: But you know,
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm certain that many of the people who piled in on her got the joke too,
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: but just decided to, you know, willfully ignore it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Height of Gawker days, yeah.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Max Mosley.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: When the book came out, everybody was focusing on that story.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Max's story is amazing.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: So Max's father was Oswald Mosley, Britain's fascist leader.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody who's watched Peaky Blinders will know all about Oswald Mosley.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Max had a better life.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: He had a kind of Ralph Nader type life,
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: getting involved in car safety and motor racing and so on.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: But then one day,
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: goes to the newsstand,
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: front cover of the News of the World is fascist leader's son in sick Nazi orgy.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a grainy photograph of Max wearing, I think, leather, bent over and being whipped out.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: By a woman in German uniform.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: So Max's first thought, as you can imagine, is my life is over.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: But then he thought to himself, no, the news of the world has made a terrible mistake.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: The orgy was definitely German army themed, but there were no swastikas.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as he said to me later, if he's wanted swastikas, they're not hard to come by.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty easy design.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you really see it everywhere.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he sued the News of the World and won and became a hero, like across the board.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like he was never a particular popular or indeed known figure in British life.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: But suddenly all these sex positive people on the left loved him.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, he became like a real hero.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I said to him, like, how did you manage to survive when so many other people just crumbled?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I don't know.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: He said, maybe I'm a bit sociopathic.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: He said, but I don't know.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Give me some time to think about it.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So he came back to me and he said, I think I've figured it out.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: A shaming is a pact between a shamer and a shamey.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as the shamey steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed,
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: the whole thing crumbles.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: And back in wherever it was that I spoke to Max,
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: like the early 2010s, that was a very novel thing to think.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Most people were just broken by the shamings.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, that feeling of unashamedness just became very ubiquitous across the culture.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I would say that that is most embodied by,
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: of course, Donald Trump who seems completely immune from consequences and shame.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then when Donald Trump came along, all sorts of people started doing it.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: There was that story of the Virginia governor,
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: his name I've forgotten,
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: who they found his yearbook photograph of him wearing blackface.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, blackface.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was a Democrat.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone was calling for him to resign.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he just said, no.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually everybody just sort of, you know, yeah, went away.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I forgot about it.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember his name.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that is good advice.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you must get questions all the time from people saying, John, I've been publicly shamed.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do I survive this?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have sort of general advice for people?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've pretty much got some general advice at this stage,
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: which is that don't do anything is my response.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do anything.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Almost always, that's the best thing is to not do anything.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Don't respond to it at all.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just be silent.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just totally.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: People will forget almost immediately.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, I did the Jonas Brothers podcast a couple of days ago.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Joe, Nick, and Kevin, all three Jonas Brothers.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Jonas has the dreamiest eyes.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was like staring at me over Zoom with these.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that many a teenage girl can agree with you on that.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Although those teenage girls are now in their 30s, so 30s and 40s.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, he made a good point.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: He said back when I wrote Seaman Publicly Shamed, he's like a fan of my books.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he said back, you know, 10 years ago, a shaming would last weeks.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now a shaming quite often lasts 24 hours.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what makes the Jason Arde story so exceptional is just the vast size
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: of the campaign.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then the fact that he killed himself has made the story last weeks.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Even longer.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's still think pieces coming out today.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, that is surprising and increasingly rare.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that one also, that one touches on it's not just the act itself.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's because he became a symbol of, on one side of the spectrum, of sort of DEI run amok.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: Here's this guy who's clearly unqualified for this position, being...
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Lifted up as this brilliant scholar when you can read his work and see that he clearly wasn't.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And on the other side, he becomes a symbol of a victim of racism.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of the perfect story, a perfect culture war story.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean,
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: definitely those are the shamings that continue for longer periods is
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: when they're ambiguous, they're gray areas.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is about Justine Sacco's story, actually.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't think the Justine Sacco story is a gray area at all.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think she was clearly joking.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's those kinds of stories are the ones that carry on for ages and ages.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has something to discuss.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm contacted, I'm contacted by one of three people.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I get these things all the time.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I'd be publicly ashamed.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Can you help?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: So most often times I would look up to see what it is that they've been accused of.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost always rape.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And those ones I just ignore.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I never get back to them.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just ignore it.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're...
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second category is I look it up and it's nothing.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like they think they're being publicly shamed,
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: but it's like eight people are giving them a hard time on Facebook.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And those ones I tend to ignore too.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's only a small number of people who I think fit into the kind of public shaming system.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: it seems like the way that certain people are able to survive and even thrive,
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: like Max Mosley.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: I do wonder, Max Mosley, if part of the reason that he thrived was because
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you could tell me if I'm wrong, because News of the World itself was seen as a villain.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Also, he had the money to sue them.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have cases like Jonah Lear.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is another one that you wrote about in the book.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Jonah Lear was a New Yorker writer.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: He was taken down by our frenemy,
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Michael Moynihan, who was some sort of idiot savant, maybe just an idiot, who...
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: Who read Jonah's book and realized that he had fabricated some Bob Dylan quotes in the book.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, by today's standards,
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to say,
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: one of Jonah Lehrer's main transgressions was,
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, really dumb, but quotes at the end of the D.A.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Pennebaker, Bob Dylan documentary.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Dylan's reading this article about himself in the newspaper.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: He smokes 60 cigarettes a day.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Bob Dylan looks up and says, I'm glad I'm not me.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: And which is a great line.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: And anyway, Joe Delera quoted it as, I'm glad I'm not me.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I'm not that.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the kind of level of what Michael discovered.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then self-plagiarism.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: He was also accused of self-plagiarism.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: I always think self-plagiarism is like a funny thing.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, if you... You're not
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: stealing from anyone.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, exactly.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if I go and see Bruce Springsteen, I want to hear Born to Run.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, I know it's slightly different, and it is slightly different.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea is,
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: there's a lot... Well,
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you why I have a funny relationship about this whole self-plagiarism thing.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: I once wrote, okay,
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: so I tried for six months to write a book about the credit card industry
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: and I failed.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't do it.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I couldn't do it was because the perpetrators of all
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: of these like evil tricks to keep us ensnared are just so boring.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote this line in a Guardian column where I said,
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: what this has taught me is if you want to Get away
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: with wielding true malevolent power.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Be boring.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great line.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, journalists want to look good too.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I wrote that in The Guardian.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: No one paid any attention to it.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I put that line in my book, The Psychopath Test.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like one of the most quoted lines in The Psychopath Test.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: You are also guilty of self-plagiarism.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like, I think that's resourceful.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like I had a good line.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody noticed it first time around.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I did it again and it worked.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, you know.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I have done the exact same things.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: There are stories I wrote in my book that I had reported elsewhere.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: I did cite them.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And part of the reason I bothered to do that was because I didn't want to be accused
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: of self-plagiarism, but I agree with you.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got to say, by the way, I don't do it now.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I stopped doing it because I was surprised that people didn't like it.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I stopped doing it.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: But at the time,
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: I thought,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: plucking this line out from The Guardian and putting it in the psychopath test
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: and finally it gets the chance.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when a band,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: releases a single and doesn't do well, so they re-release it and it's a hit.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: And people reuse their own stories all the time.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the in that case,
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: maybe it's if anything,
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's a copyright violation against the original publisher of the piece,
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: because if they own the copyright and you're using it anyway,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: it seems like a minor thing.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: But Jonah has really not recovered from from his this career ending moment.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Have you kept up with him at all?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, not at all.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've kept up with Michael, of course.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was doing well.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but oftentimes when I meet Michael, the conversation arises.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think, you know, speaking of Jason Hardy and everything, Michael...
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think has really genuinely,
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: has agonized for years about whether or not he did the right thing with Jonah.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: he got a call from Jonah Lehrer's agent at one point,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: a sort of hotshot,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know, big agent, who said, is this enough to ruin somebody's life over?
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so Michael was in this situation in a really...
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hot,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: profound way where he was,
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: like, outside, like, chain-smoking, thinking, do I publish?
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: Do I publish?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: And Jonah Lee was, like, folding him up, saying, please don't publish, please don't publish.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: But he did publish.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Michael, to this day, is like, did I do the right thing?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Jonah made it worse for himself because he lied to Michael.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: He...
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: He tried to, what was it?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: He said that there was like that this Bob Dylan footage was taken from like some
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: lost movie.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Albert Gross or Bob Dylan's manager.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Dylan's manager had given him special access to.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was really the cover up.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: But so I was just curious yesterday and I just Googled.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Joni yesterday,
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: and the only thing I could find,
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: he's still writing,
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: obviously,
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: he was in New York,
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: he was at Wired,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: he was at New Yorker,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: really at the,
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: sort of this young,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: handsome neuroscientist,
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: really at the top of the game,
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: and he has very much disappeared,
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: and I found an interview that he did last year,
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: a YouTube interview with 55 views, zero comments.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: He just seems to have had this real fall from grace.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And also,
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: there's a line in Saving Publicly Shamed where I say that our shameworthiness lies
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: in the gap between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's another thing that Jonah,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: that was bad for Jonah because he presented himself to the world as this kind of,
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: great thinker from the top of the tree, pontificating, knowing the answers.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't really, you know...
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: My kind of writing is like I'm uncertain,
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: like it's all about not knowing,
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: whereas Jonah presented himself as a kind of slightly all-knowing person.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's part of the reason why his
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: shaming was so bad.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes down to it,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: his sins were really pretty minor when you consider the grand scope.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to the world.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, exactly what happened a couple of years later.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do sort of feel like sometimes, like you were very early to the cancel culture beat.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was later, but I was still sort of early in.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Early compared to what happened to it.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I do sort of feel like sometimes I feel this way about about the trans thing to
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: when I saw,
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: an NBA basketball player wearing a t shirt that said a woman adult human female
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: on it the other day at a WNBA game.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like when you're, you know, your favorite indie band gets big.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: And like, why is everybody fucking talking about this?
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why is Trump talking about cancel culture?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is our thing, you know?
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's been stolen and webinized.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite band is in a Gap commercial.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's stolen weaponized in a pretty, you know, skeevy way oftentimes.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: I remembered when Saving Public Shame first came out,
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: because of my Justin Sacco story, I was like piled in on mostly by...
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Progressives,
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: even though the night of the Justin Sacco shaming,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: everyone piled in on Justin Sacco.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Progressives, misogynists, hipster trolls.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: One of the tweets I remember was, I'm dying to go home.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: For people who don't know, all of this happened while she was on a plane and oblivious.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: So she tweets,
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: gets on a plane,
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: falls asleep, and then that's when Twitter takes control of her life.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that was hilarious to people, the fact that she was oblivious.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was hilarious to people.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a form of torture.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: There was like 100,000 people waiting for a plane to land
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: so we could all like jump out of the darkness and shout boo.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: And someone did show up at the airport, right?
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't just progressives that went after Justine that night.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was like everyone.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump went after her that night.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, of course.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: So when that book came out,
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: because it was mostly the left that powered in on me,
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm suddenly getting these emails from, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think even Ann Coulter saying, come on my podcast.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I noticed that was happening a lot at the time.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like some kid would say something, a joke that comes out badly.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: The left would like eject him and the right would be waiting with open arms.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm so glad that I was suspicious of that at the time.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's very compelling.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, okay, these people are being really helpful.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: These people are being nice.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to go to the nice people.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it's such a mistake to do that.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't lose your morality.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: And because look at what's happened now.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: As soon as those fuckers got the power to shame, they went at it, you know, just as much.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: And with teeth.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: lips of TikTok is worth a hundred glads when it comes to actual having effects.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: On schools being shut down because of bomb threats.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, honestly, it's kind of sickening to me.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't,
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say who it is because I don't want to publicly shame them,
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: but I did an interview the other day for the castle with a heterodoxy guy.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he, and I'm very glad I pushed back on this.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, basically said, well, they hurt us, so we're going to hurt them.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no, you know.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Politics should not be fucking team sports.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is something that we've talked about on the show a lot,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: is this tendency for people to choose,
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: to not vote on policy,
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: but to vote based on who is more annoying on Twitter,
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: who has been mean to them on Twitter.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which I understand it's a completely understandable human response,
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: but it seems very short-sighted to me.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's an understandable human response and one that you should...
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely no is the wrong response.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to hurt like I do.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: You created this, I'm going to do it back to you.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's such bullshit.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's disingenuous bullshit.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's get to the castle.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: But first, let's do housekeeping.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: We are a podcast.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is Blocked and Reported.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: You can reach us at blockedandreportedpodcast at gmail.com.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And most importantly,
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: if you want to support the show and get much extra content, get access to our lives.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: And here's our extra segment at the end of this show where John answers questions
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: from our primo subscribers.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Join us, blockedandreported.org.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: It is cheap and a good deal.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can also get access to my three-part extravaganza on Dr. Jessica Taylor, PhD.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, John.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Your new book, The Castle, Adventures in the World of Unraveling Men.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: So give us the backstory here.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: How did this come about?
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is a story that crashed unannounced into my life while I was asleep.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: You were Justin Sacco in this case, on your plane.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I woke up and there's a series of texts of my son.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the last text says...
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: We left.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: That was completely fucked.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're okay now.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: So then I read the other text and basically him and three friends had been invited
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met earlier that week
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: on Tinder.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: So they drive into the Connecticut forests to this guy's house.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: And his house is a massive, ostentatious, newly built Gothic castle with way too many turrets.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: How many turrets is too many turrets?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: What's the right number?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Count Dracula would look at this and think it was a bit much.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: So gay Count Dracula.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: I get it.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the great iron gates open and they walk across the drawbridge.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: The castle owner is standing there with a much younger woman and a huge guard dog
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: whose name was... How do you pronounce it?
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: Severus?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, like the Harry Potter character, like Severus Snape?
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's the multi-headed hound that guards the gates of Hades.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's like not a... You know, my dog's called Bonnie.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Mine is Moose, yeah.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: They enter the Grand Banqueting Hall to discover that there's no party.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a trick.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: They've been lured there for some other reason.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the castle owner comes out, and they say, sorry, where's the party?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: They say, no, I'm invited you here for a different reason.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would like you all to take part in my reality show.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is nightmare fuel.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Not only is the idea of going to a party bad enough,
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: a party in a castle that's actually a reality TV show, nightmare.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: So they said, what's the name of your reality show?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: He said, it's called 101 Princesses.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they said, what's the core concept?
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I'm the king.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking for my queen.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: I have 101 princesses to choose from.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said to the two women in Joel's party,
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: go downstairs to my basement costume room,
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: put on some princess costumes and then come back upstairs for the filming.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: So they went downstairs.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why did they go downstairs?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why did they continue to participate in this immediately?
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's like a few possibilities.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: One is that they were just,
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know, susceptible to the pressure that he was putting on them in the moment.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Two is like all in for a penny.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: Three...
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which actually is one that I think is like the most melancholy of all
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: the possibilities,
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: which is that, you know, these are young people trying to make it.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the hint of a work opportunity.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to catch a break out there.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly, you know, I don't know how much the job's a job.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Job's a job.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And like, it's hard to catch a break.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, they went downstairs, put on princess costumes.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole costume room with like racks of princess costumes and tiaras.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: So princess costume,
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: when I imagine a princess now,
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking of Kate Middleton wearing slacks and a sensible cardigan.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: This wasn't that.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: This wasn't that.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is more your OG princess costumes.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: The costume room is right next to his nightclub,
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: his underground nightclub, which has a pole for pole dancing and cages.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Cage activity.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Max Mosley would have been right at home.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: There was also an underground botanical gardens, purple tinted with hot tubs.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they come back upstairs, start filming.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: The videographer appears,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: they start filming, but it becomes pretty clear that this isn't a real reality show.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder, what was the
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: clue?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the clues was that the videographer had this other duty,
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: which was to cut up meat for the castle owner.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: He had a huge slab of meat.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is this for the dog or
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: for the people?
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Just the castle owner.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: None of the princesses were offered any meat.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: No craft services.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Joel and his friends refused to participate in 101 Princesses
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: and he was getting increasingly irritated.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he kicks them out and then they tell me the story and then I immediately go to
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: the castle to find out what the hell was going on.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Partly because actually I was just out of hospital.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just had a foot of my colon removed.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I, and I was definitely feeling some sort of, you know, purposelessness.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: I really hate feeling purposeless, like it's the worst feeling in the world.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so instead of convalescing,
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: I just jumped in my car and went to the castle,
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: which meant that every time,
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: like when I got to the castle and his,
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: and Silberus immediately lunged at me and grabs hold of my foot and I like move in
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: the wrong way.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: so he probably heard your squeal and thought, my princess is here.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: He'd let me in by then.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: I said, your dog does like biting me.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, oh, it's not a negative thing.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: So what I thought was happening at the time was that he's trying to be Hugh Hefner.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: At the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: Me Too era Hugh Hefner.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to call the book The Impossibility of Keeping a Harem in the post-Me Too age.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's a mouthful, but I like it.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my publishers very much talk me out of that.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll call it The Castle.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so the book is about, it made me realize that he lacked purpose too.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he was filling that emptiness with So the book is fundamentally
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: about what we might call the masculinity crisis.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, although I really don't like that phrase or the manners.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like any of those phrases because I think it gives people the wrong idea
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: of what the book is.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the book is this really weird journey,
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: this adventure into these strange worlds of very ordinary people, like ordinary men.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way that Serving Publicly Shamed wasn't about Rupert Murdoch being shamed.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was about a PR woman with 100 Twitter followers.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted this to be a book about the sort of You know,
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: the unraveling of very ordinary men and women.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think this sort of crisis of purpose,
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: I know everybody's trying to be content creators,
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_00: is something that impacts women just as much as women.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: There was this,
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're not on Twitter anymore,
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: X anymore,
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: so you might not have seen it,
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: but there was this piece that was getting some attention
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: a couple weeks ago called Ordinary Abundance.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: Did you see this?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, uh-uh.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost hard to describe, but it was basically about objects.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was this graphic and it would be like zoom in on a phone.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it was sort of interactive in a way almost.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's like a little bit of the history of the phone.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: So like then a paragraph about sort of the amazement that people first felt
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: when they encountered electricity or fresh fruit or,
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know, a fresh mango or whatever.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: And these things that we're just surrounded with all the time become so ordinary
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: that we really lose sight of them.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: And yet at the same time that we have,
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: we are just even the poorest of us in the Western world are rich in abundance.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: What we don't have is purpose.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me is a lot about what your book is about.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, very much so.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think this new purposelessness that's crashing into all of our lives is
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: a really big and important thing to think about because I think it wreaks havoc
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: on people and on their loved ones.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Durkheim called it anime,
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: this idea that when society's rules abruptly change,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_00: even if they change for the better,
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: It upends the way people engage with society and turns people haywire.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this kind of crisis of purpose is really what's underlying all
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: the stories in my book.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, then you get a generation of children who want to be influencers.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: But apparently 39% of Americans now identify as content creators.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I find that horrifying.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: And yet when I think about what I do for a living...
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Am I not a content creator?
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think the difference between a podcaster and a content creator is
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: that they show their faces, but that might be the only difference.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: But one of my favorite stories in the book,
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: because obviously, you know, I hate gatekeepers as much as anyone.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: I spent years begging to be let in.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: So a kind of gatekeeper,
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: like a world without gatekeepers,
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: theoretically, is a really great world where everybody can thrive.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And YouTube presents itself as this kind of post-hierarchy platform.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: Post-institution utopia where anyone can thrive through grit
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: and persevere is like manifest destiny is like an influencer.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: So some of my favorite stories in the book are like when that goes wrong.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's get into one of those stories.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is the story.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is my favorite story from the book.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's the platonic ideal of a Blocked and Reported story.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: And fuck you for getting there first.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is the story of Greg Chisholm.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about him.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Greg Chisholm comes from a dying Rust Belt town.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you know the book,
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: Deaths of Despair,
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: he was like well within the bracket of people most likely to die a death of despair.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: Dying Rust Belt town, he would have worked in the factories.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: His father worked in, let the factory move to Mexico.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: So he has no prospects.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then his life gets even worse.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: At the age of 17, he's working at Taco Bell and he collapses unconscious.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out he has like a serious heart condition, ends up multiple open heart surgeries.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: And by the age of 18, he owes the health insurance companies $200,000.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is like the early 90s.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: Mm hmm.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then he gets married, doesn't work out.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: She leaves him with two children under the age of two, these two daughters.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a guy who like, you know, just things couldn't be worse.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then one day he has this Damascus moment.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's on YouTube and there's
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: an Australian fruitarian cyclist called Durian Rider who's like,
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: cycling along,
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: stops in the Australian outback, stops his bike and He says, I used to be in prison.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've lived on the streets.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: But look at me now.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm cycling through Australia.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm making a YouTube video.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can make a YouTube video.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's your story?
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: Tell a story.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a story.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Greg was just like, he was just so inspired to make it.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what was Greg's story?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Durian Rider...
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Easy for him, he had his bicycle and his fruit.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: What was Greg's story?
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: Greg realised that his story was his overlapping teeth.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: He couldn't get his teeth fixed as a kid because they didn't have the money.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: So he takes out a $6,000 line of credit and does an adult braces journey.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: And people start finding him and suddenly he has friends on the internet.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, you go, Greg, you know, I'm on week three of my adult braces journey.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then one day, one of them says, how come we've got lawnmowers behind you?
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, oh, I do lawn care.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, bro, do a lawn care vlog.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, bro, nobody wants to see a lawn care vlog.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, dude.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone wants to see a lawn care vlog.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: So Greg does a day in the life of a lawn care provider and becomes...
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: America's first and greatest lawn care influencer.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: He's like the lawn care goat.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: He'll do good Samaritan lawn work.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's the best.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: I watch some of these guys.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: They just roll up on some ramshackle house and take out their lawnmowers and fix...
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: I love this content.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_00: Then they vanish again into the night like the Zorro of lawn care chores.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not the night.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do lawn care at night.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: They vanish in the day.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then he does this lawn care ASMR where he'll like mow up and down for like
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: an hour and everybody's at home going, you know, Greg, don't miss that spot.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then he'll hit it and they'll go, oh, cool.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: So Greg is like the lawn care king at this point.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to a convention in Kentucky, a lawn care convention, and it's like Rihanna showed up.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: People are like, oh my God, it's Greg Chisholm.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that's exactly when things start to go wrong.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: So...
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: He has these two young daughters and one day his daughters get a Barbie cruise ship
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: for Christmas.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: So they're playing in the box like his daughter's got the box over her head
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: and she's running around the house and he films it and it's sweet.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: The kids are like fun to watch and he puts it on this other channel,
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: not his lawn care channel,
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: but just like a channel called Greg Chisholm, which no one subscribes to.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: But for some reason, this video cuts through and it gets a million views.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then within a week, it has 10 million views.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's just gone viral.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: So he gets a call from YouTube and YouTube are like, you've got 10 million views here.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to learn how to get more videos like that?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Greg's like, yeah.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: Greg was like, all in.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: He starts making these other videos with his kids.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: They do like Food Fight in the Truck.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that starts getting like 25 million views.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, people are loving watching his kids who are very sweet and fun on camera,
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: throwing food at each other.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they become really popular.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: But what Greg realises is that the viewers are easily bored.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: You do five Food Fight in the Truck videos.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: The truck must have been destroyed.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: He said there was ketchup down the vents.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because, dude, it was ruined.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: So he has to constantly come up with new seasons.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_00: He does Sharky.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's got this...
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's the key.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: So he realises that sharks are a huge SEO term.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he gets this toy shark called Sharky and chases the daughters around with the shark.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 50 million views.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: Crazy.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: So then one day...
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: His daughter, his older daughter, Victoria, is laughing at a YouTube video.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they drift over and watch it.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this teenage girl vlogger.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: And she's reminiscing about what it was like to be a baby.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she says, I used to love this toy, but now I think it's stupid.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they're all laughing at this girl's video.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then Greg thinks this girl was onto something, but she blew it.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: What if he...
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_00: Gets a magic wand, taps his daughter on the head and she becomes a baby.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: So he does it.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and it gets, you know, so many, 50 million views.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: So then he does two bad babies where both of his daughters now are babies.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're wearing onesies, sucking on pacifiers, a hundred million views.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: Then he thinks, how am I going to, you know, how am I going to keep people engaged?
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then he realized there's only one way.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's only one way.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: No, Greg, no.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: And everything in his life has been leading up to this moment.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: The factories closing in Granite City,
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: Illinois,
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: the $200,000 he owes the healthcare company,
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: but also the idea that a man can provide for his family
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: by mastering search engine optimisation.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: He said to me, I have to become the third baby.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there's these videos out there of Greg and his two daughters.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, YouTube is encouraging this.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: He has his own bespoke advisor.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's these videos of him and his two daughters crawling around like babies,
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: spitting food in each other's face, binkies in their mouths, making baby talk.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: People love it.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: People who've been with Greg along the journey love it.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: By now, between 2016 and 2017, Greg is getting a total of 13 billion views.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I was oblivious to this.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, totally.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: It shows how weird the world is now.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's so fragmented.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: I had never heard of this guy until I read your book.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's micro-celebrities that are incredibly...
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: 15 year olds who are more famous than fucking Whitney Houston, then I've never heard of them.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's so bizarre.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: So suddenly, though, well, what happens is that Greg starts getting imitators.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's like suddenly the Ukraine.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: Australian and Russian and Vietnamese men who the day after Greg uploads one
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: of his Bad Baby videos will ape it exactly.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: They'll bring out their own video where they copy everything,
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: the music,
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: the camera angles,
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: just with these two adult women playing the part of Greg's daughters,
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: Victoria and Annabelle.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing they don't capture is Greg's American accent.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's all like, you're Victoria, you're my baby.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: Different audience for that, probably.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if Greg is like pushing his bad babies through a Walmart somewhere in Illinois,
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: then somewhere in Kiev, some guy's doing exactly the same thing the next day.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: With an adult.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then those videos get their own copycats, each one more skeevy than the last.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: By now you've got these videos of these cartoons of...
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: Victoria and Annabelle,
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: the children in a pool and cartoon Greg comes over and pees in the pool.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the channel's called Toy Flicks.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: So anybody thinks it's Greg, but it's not.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's the name of his channel.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this Russian content farm.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then the same thing's happening all over the place.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: So YouTube kids are keeping Elsa and Spider-Man off the channel because Marvel,
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: copyrighted.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: So now all of these people in Quebec City are sensing an opportunity.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: They dress up as Elsa and Spider-Man and make these amateur videos
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: in their homes called Elsa and Spider-Man Fun in Real Life,
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_00: put it onto YouTube Kids, and they're getting millions of views.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's SEO farming, basically.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they get their own copyrights too.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: So suddenly you've got these incredibly disturbing cartoons and videos
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: that these knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs of these really grotesque,
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: disturbing content.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's being fed
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_01: to kids.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: Millions of kids.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: The scandal became known as Elsagate.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: Also, you've got families a bit like Greg's, where they really are abusing their kids.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think there was a YouTube channel called Family of Five,
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: where it turns out the guy really was abusing his kids, I believe.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: So suddenly it explodes because it's all on YouTube kids.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: The YouTube algorithm is indiscriminately feeding all
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_00: of these increasingly disturbing videos to millions of kids
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: who think they're watching Peppa Pig.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they watch a Peppa Pig, a real Peppa Pig video.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then the next video is one of these fake Peppa Pig videos
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: where Peppa Pig is like eating her own father.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_00: With like blood spurting everywhere, like these grotesque fabric adventures.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where like BuzzFeed and everyone else like pays attention.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the only person that they can identify is Greg.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because everybody else is all, these are like Russian people.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: Content of farmers, right?
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: And there's one American they can find.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: So Greg becomes...
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: The original.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_00: And Greg, who is doing all of this for completely innocent reasons, he's not like the others.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's just trying to make money.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's just trying to support his girls.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the great thing about this story for me is that, like,
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: if you come to the story at the end,
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_00: like BuzzFeed did, you're just seeing a guy and his two daughters...
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: Both wearing, all wearing onesies and crawling around dressed as babies.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: That looks really fucking weird.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's extremely creepy.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're with Greg's story from the beginning and you're
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: with him every decision that he makes,
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: you can disagree with some of the decisions, but they make sense.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way I've told the story and I'm so pleased with it.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Greg's life is destroyed when BuzzFeed publishes an article basically naming him
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: and accusing him of being...
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, BuzzFeed and others too.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just BuzzFeed.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember who else did it, but a few people did it at the same time.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: There was a very viral article,
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: and I've got to say a very beautifully written article called Something is Wrong on
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: the Internet by a guy called James Bridle, who...
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: How did you get that?
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: I do this very rarely.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've only ever done it twice in my whole life,
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: where I've written to Justine Sacco and I wrote to Greg Chisholm and I say,
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: look, I think you've been mistreated.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think your story is different to the way the world thinks it is.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Greg sort of wrote to me and I said, Greg, the Justine Sacco story.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: And Greg wrote to me and was like, I've been waiting seven years for an email like this.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you write in the book about the aftermath of these stories.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: Journalists coming in and sort of parachuting into the story,
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: not understanding the full context, and people were calling the police on him.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: There were CPS investigations into his family.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: It went well beyond...
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_00: Come home, fall asleep, wake up just in time to bring the kids home from school.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_00: And his life is still kind of like that.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's back to doing lawn care influencing.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he's hoping that my story,
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm speaking to you on Friday,
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: the 28th of August,
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_00: in two days time,
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_00: the New York Times is going to run an excerpt for my book and it's going
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_00: to be this story.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know,
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's going to,
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit like happened with Justin Sacco, I think it's going to turn it around.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: I hope so, for his sake.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you also talked
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_01: one of the BuzzFeed reporters who covered this story as well.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, I talked to James Bridle, who wrote the original thing.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, the other day, I did talk to Charlie Wazell.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: He interviewed me for his Atlantic podcast.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he said,
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: and he was one of the people who exposed Greg,
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: and he said to me,
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_00: so this isn't in the book, it was in the interview that I did with Charlie.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: He said like he couldn't get up off the sofa.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: He said he was floored, like reading this.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: To find out.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to find out that he was in the book, his reporting was in my book.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he said he just couldn't believe the aftermath of the reporting.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he was shocked.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Did he feel bad?
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think so a little bit.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, look, I get it.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_00: When you come to a story at the end, it looks really fucking weird.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there was real abuse going on.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But not in his household.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: But not in Greg's household.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Also, it was slightly probably like if the skits that Greg had filmed
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_00: with his daughters were for Nickelodeon filmed in a studio,
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_00: they wouldn't look as creepy.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_00: But people were like stumbling.
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And also they were doing this kind of ritualistic, repetitive.
• 1:10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Relative movements and so on.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it looked like you'd stumbled onto the,
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: it was like,
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_00: imagine like Teletubbies,
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: but instead of Teletubbies,
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: it's the home movies of some ordinary random Midwestern family who were all,
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: whatever their age is, all babies.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like you've got to think this is fucking weird.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't want to give like Charlie or anybody else a hard time because I kind of get it.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time,
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I did something that none of them had done,
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_00: which is I went back to Greg and I got a story from the very beginning,
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: from the granite sitting, factories closing right through to the end.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's an incredible story.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And there's more twists and turns in the story and in the book,
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_01: which I highly recommend people read.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: I read a ton of your work and this is up there with my favorites.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I really love the weird adventure story aspect of this book.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's funny and And it's got a proper weird journey to it.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Freemose, that is all you get.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: John is going to stay on and answer questions from our premium subscribers.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_01: We got some great questions.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about his relationship with Graham Linehan.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're also going to talk about the infamous Mishfest triple murders.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And quite a bit more.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to listen to that whole thing, join us, blockedandreported.org.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: As always, this show is produced with help from Jessica, the 80s baby.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, John Ronson.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you all for listening.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.