Episode 473 - Jon Ronson

Episode 473 • Released February 23, 2014 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Marc:okay let's do this how are you people what what was that okay let's do this how are you what's up with what is my intro

00:00:21Marc:okay let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck sticks what the fuckstables what that still doesn't feel right what's happening to my brain hey it's mark yeah it's me mark maron oh my god this is wtf welcome to the show what's happening what is happening am i having a stroke hey okay let's do this how are you what the fuckers that's how it goes right oh my god what just happened

00:00:49Marc:Take a breath, man.

00:00:51Marc:I shouldn't have gone on that jog.

00:00:53Marc:I'm Mark Maron.

00:00:54Marc:This is WTF.

00:00:55Marc:Welcome to the show.

00:00:55Marc:I hope I make it through this one.

00:00:57Marc:What is happening to my brain?

00:01:00Marc:On the show today, author John Ronson, a British fellow, a British Jewish fellow, which, as you know, if you listen to my show, fascinates me.

00:01:08Marc:The existence of Jews that speak with that accent, it always blows me away for some reason.

00:01:14Marc:He's the author of several things that you may know.

00:01:18Marc:The Men Who Stare at Goats is his book.

00:01:20Marc:Them, Adventures with Extremists is another one of his books.

00:01:23Marc:The Psychopath Test, A Journey Through the Madness Industry.

00:01:27Marc:Was the one that got me in there.

00:01:30Marc:He was here from Britain.

00:01:31Marc:From the UK.

00:01:32Marc:And I seized the opportunity.

00:01:34Marc:I'd been on his radio show.

00:01:36Marc:And I wanted him to be on mine.

00:01:37Marc:And we had a nice chat.

00:01:38Marc:That is coming at you momentarily.

00:01:40Marc:The psychopaths.

00:01:42Marc:Psychopaths and sociopaths.

00:01:45Marc:Who hasn't been called a sociopath, huh?

00:01:48Marc:Well, if you haven't been called a sociopath by a woman, you haven't lived.

00:01:53Marc:If you haven't been called a sociopath by a lady you broke up with, you didn't do it right, I guess.

00:01:59Marc:Word gets bandied about a bit without necessarily being grounded in anything, but anger and heartbreak, not necessarily clinical diagnosis.

00:02:10Marc:Huh?

00:02:10Marc:Am I being too vague?

00:02:12Marc:Hey, look, the past is the past.

00:02:15Marc:What's going on with me, you ask?

00:02:17Marc:Is that of interest to you?

00:02:19Marc:I bought a bicycle.

00:02:20Marc:I bought a bicycle impulsively.

00:02:23Marc:I bought a bicycle because I had to.

00:02:24Marc:I bought a bicycle to make my lady happy.

00:02:28Marc:It's already starting.

00:02:30Marc:Things are being accumulated to make the lady happy.

00:02:35Marc:Yeah, that's happening.

00:02:37Marc:She had mentioned maybe a week or so ago how fun it would be to maybe ride bikes around where she lives, down a bike path.

00:02:46Marc:She had mentioned the bike riding.

00:02:47Marc:We went to look at bikes.

00:02:48Marc:I said, I'm going to get a bike.

00:02:49Marc:I connected with this black cruiser, seven speed, no frills, nice big, you know, the handlebars weren't like, look, I'm doing something athletic.

00:02:57Marc:The handlebars were more like, hey, I'm riding a bike.

00:03:00Marc:It had the, hey, I'm riding a bike handlebars, not the, man, I'm pushing it handlebars.

00:03:05Marc:And I'm like, that looks cool.

00:03:07Marc:Big old black bike with a cool green stripe on it.

00:03:10Marc:I might get that bike.

00:03:11Marc:So I bought a bike.

00:03:14Marc:And we went bike riding.

00:03:15Marc:And it was pleasant and nice.

00:03:18Marc:And then we got back to her house, a little sweaty.

00:03:22Marc:And that's when the chaos began.

00:03:26Marc:I'm trying to get to know her nine-year-old daughter and that's going well because I decided that I'm just going to lay back and be myself.

00:03:37Marc:That was my plan.

00:03:38Marc:Just going to be myself and let it come around.

00:03:42Marc:Just be myself.

00:03:45Marc:And we were at dinner the other night with another mommy and a kid, her daughter's friend.

00:03:54Marc:And I had scrambled over to dinner after trying to get some stuff done.

00:03:58Marc:I'd just gotten out of the shower and my hair was wet and I went into dinner and Matilda, Moon's daughter, looked at my hair and she goes, what's going on with your hair?

00:04:06Marc:And I go, it's, before I could even say anything, she said, I think you're trying too hard.

00:04:15Marc:What?

00:04:17Marc:And I said, it's wet.

00:04:19Marc:And she goes, yeah, I think you're still trying too hard.

00:04:20Marc:I said, there's no gel in it.

00:04:23Marc:Feel it.

00:04:23Marc:It's just wet.

00:04:24Marc:She felt it.

00:04:24Marc:She goes, yeah, it's wet.

00:04:26Marc:So I'm not trying too hard.

00:04:27Marc:It's just wet hair.

00:04:28Marc:There's no gel.

00:04:29Marc:There's no product.

00:04:30Marc:There's no product in the hair.

00:04:31Marc:This is a conversation I'm having with a nine-year-old.

00:04:34Marc:she goes yeah okay i said look i just i just took a shower because i know you're sensitive to smells and i didn't want to stink when i came to dinner and then she goes yeah see you're trying too hard boom set up punch so after the bike ride we get back to the house and

00:04:55Marc:And that's when a bit of chaos breaks loose.

00:04:58Marc:A little bit of chaos.

00:05:00Marc:Turns out the babysitter or the daughter's friend or the daughter's friend's mom who was hanging out, somebody had fucked with the remote out in the back where the TV is.

00:05:11Marc:And this is where I learned that nobody fucks with Moon's remote.

00:05:14Marc:So that was rough for a few minutes.

00:05:17Marc:It's hooked up to a home entertainment system.

00:05:19Marc:I don't understand the remote.

00:05:21Marc:Something's been fucked up in any number of several machines.

00:05:24Marc:It was chaos, emotional chaos.

00:05:27Marc:She was trying to fix it.

00:05:29Marc:I didn't know the remote, but with a little time, I could probably figure out the remote.

00:05:33Marc:Maybe.

00:05:34Marc:But that wasn't an option.

00:05:36Marc:I couldn't even suggest anything without some emotional shrapnel coming my way.

00:05:41Marc:And then she says, well, my ex-husband set up this remote.

00:05:45Marc:And I go, well, maybe we should not think the entire world is ending and that you no longer have your electronic babysitter or your relief mechanism to enjoy movies and stuff.

00:05:55Marc:Let's not let the world crumble.

00:05:59Marc:It's not the end of Fight Club here.

00:06:02Marc:It's a remote control problem.

00:06:03Marc:Why don't you call your ex-husband, see if he can tell you on the phone what the fuck is going on with the remote.

00:06:11Marc:Here's the funny thing is that she really didn't know how to fix the remote, but she was pretty sure that nobody else did.

00:06:16Marc:I understand that sentiment.

00:06:19Marc:So she left.

00:06:19Marc:I didn't know what she was doing, so I hit a couple buttons.

00:06:22Marc:I didn't see any change in the remote, but I didn't know how to work that remote anyways.

00:06:26Marc:I didn't know what the hell the system was.

00:06:30Marc:And then I took a breath.

00:06:31Marc:I was trying to be the grounded, calm one in this situation so everything wouldn't fall apart.

00:06:39Marc:And I walked in.

00:06:39Marc:I'm like, what's up?

00:06:40Marc:She's like, well, Paul's coming over.

00:06:41Marc:So the ex-husband is now coming over to examine the remote situation.

00:06:47Marc:So then Paul comes over, who I met a few times.

00:06:50Marc:We get along.

00:06:51Marc:He left the dinner table.

00:06:53Marc:This is a pretty decent ex-husband and father, if you ask me.

00:06:55Marc:He came over to check the remote out at his ex-wife's home.

00:06:59Marc:He goes out back with her, and they come in, and he says, there was nothing wrong with it.

00:07:04Marc:And Moon says, you fixed it, Mark.

00:07:06Marc:And I'm like...

00:07:07Marc:Well, you know, it's weird.

00:07:09Marc:I didn't know I fixed anything.

00:07:10Marc:I'd like to take credit for it, but I was not aware of it.

00:07:13Marc:I just pushed a couple of things on there, and I'm glad I fixed it.

00:07:16Marc:I did feel good about that, but I couldn't feel the full victory because I didn't know I fixed it.

00:07:20Marc:I was just out there pushing buttons.

00:07:22Marc:And let me ask you something, folks.

00:07:24Marc:How often do you push buttons and get good results?

00:07:29Marc:Huh?

00:07:30Marc:How often?

00:07:32Marc:Exactly.

00:07:33Exactly.

00:07:34Marc:So, look, I think right now, I think I feel the presence of a drop-in guest.

00:07:39Marc:Is that possible?

00:07:40Marc:I feel the presence of a drop-in guest just by coincidence.

00:07:46Marc:The star of Review, it's a new show on Comedy Central that you can watch at ComedyCentral.com, Andy Daly.

00:07:52Marc:Thank you for having me here.

00:07:54Marc:Absolutely.

00:07:55Guest:I'm excited.

00:07:56Marc:It's been a while since I've seen you.

00:07:57Guest:I know.

00:07:58Marc:That's true.

00:07:58Guest:I've been hiding from you.

00:08:00Guest:You've been hiding from me.

00:08:00Guest:Yeah, kind of.

00:08:01Marc:I heard someone yelling my name in front of my house and Andy Daly was in the neighborhood.

00:08:06Marc:Let's play it like that.

00:08:07Guest:Okay, that's good.

00:08:08Marc:Spontaneous.

00:08:09Marc:Yes.

00:08:10Marc:I wonder what Mark's doing.

00:08:11Guest:I'm wandering around trying to, well, I printed up flyers about my new show on Comedy Central and I'm just going door to door, putting them on windshields and in mailboxes and stuff like that.

00:08:19Marc:Well, can you do me a favor?

00:08:20Marc:Yeah.

00:08:20Marc:Take that fucking thing off my car, all right?

00:08:22Marc:No, it's- It's my property.

00:08:23Marc:It's private property.

00:08:24Marc:You don't come up and put flyers on people's private property.

00:08:27Guest:Well, but I think you're going to thank me once you read it and you tune into the show.

00:08:30Guest:I feel like I'm glad that was on my car.

00:08:32Marc:This is starting to feel like you had an agenda.

00:08:34Marc:What do you mean?

00:08:34Marc:When you're just walking around my neighborhood handing out flyers, you come in, you think, well, maybe we'll sit down with Mark.

00:08:39Guest:I made it seem kind of casual.

00:08:41Marc:It started off casual.

00:08:42Guest:You started in with the agenda very quickly.

00:08:45Guest:I'm aware that you have a show here and that there are microphones that I-

00:08:48Guest:Took me an hour to massage my way back here into the garage.

00:08:51Guest:Well, you got a podcast now too, right?

00:08:52Guest:That's true.

00:08:53Guest:We might as well just do an Andy Daly plug fest.

00:08:56Guest:I think that would be a great idea.

00:08:57Guest:Since you're in the neighborhood.

00:08:58Guest:Can we redo my WTF?

00:08:59Guest:I don't think I came off well on that.

00:09:00Guest:Let's just do a whole hour.

00:09:01Guest:Want to just do it quickly?

00:09:02Guest:Yeah, sure.

00:09:03Guest:All right.

00:09:04Guest:Sum it up.

00:09:05Guest:Look, I'm great.

00:09:07Guest:There's no reason to be self-deprecating.

00:09:08Guest:I was overly self-deprecating the last time I was here.

00:09:11Guest:I'm great.

00:09:11Guest:I've always been great.

00:09:12Guest:Everything is going great.

00:09:15Guest:People should take a look at me.

00:09:17Guest:Okay.

00:09:17Guest:That's all.

00:09:18Guest:That's all I wish I'd said.

00:09:19Guest:How do you like that?

00:09:19Guest:We don't even need to do another hour.

00:09:20Marc:I think we covered it.

00:09:21Guest:Okay, good.

00:09:22Marc:So we got that out of the way.

00:09:23Marc:Wonderful.

00:09:24Marc:That will be considered your second WTF.

00:09:26Guest:This supersedes that first WTF where I made a very compelling case against myself for an hour.

00:09:31Guest:I think there was some honesty there and perhaps you feel better today.

00:09:35Marc:Perhaps things are going better for you now, but let's look at that as a portrait of Andy Daly in a self-doubting, more self-deprecating mode.

00:09:41Marc:Okay, fine.

00:09:41Marc:I think you felt pressure to have something wrong with you.

00:09:44Marc:Yeah, I have some problems.

00:09:46Marc:I feel okay, but that's not what Maren wants.

00:09:48Marc:Right.

00:09:48Guest:I got to dig into the past to find some things that I've done wrong.

00:09:51Marc:He's going to start poking around.

00:09:53Guest:Yeah, right.

00:09:54Marc:Well, look, I'm thrilled that things are going well for you because I'm a fan of yours.

00:09:58Marc:Thank you.

00:09:58Marc:I enjoy your work on Eastbound and Down and the other things, everything else you show up in and where everyone goes like, hey, there's Andy.

00:10:06Marc:That was just Andy Daly.

00:10:08Marc:You're one of the great character actors of the character of you.

00:10:12Marc:Thank you.

00:10:13Marc:I appreciate that.

00:10:13Marc:Do you find that you're the guy that they go to for an Andy Daly type of guy?

00:10:17Guest:I get a lot of Andy Daly types.

00:10:18Guest:Yeah.

00:10:19Guest:I get a lot of friendly doctors and friendly principals, friendly professionals.

00:10:23Guest:But capable of going over the top, if necessary, with some strange, controlly anger.

00:10:29Guest:Right, exactly.

00:10:30Guest:Very passive-aggressive.

00:10:31Guest:Yeah.

00:10:32Guest:Very angry guys bubbling up under the surface.

00:10:35Guest:So what's this podcast?

00:10:36Marc:What have you thrown your hat in the ring with?

00:10:38Guest:Yeah.

00:10:39Guest:Well, I did this thing.

00:10:40Guest:I do characters on Comedy Bang Bang, and the thought was to give each character I've ever done on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast his own podcast.

00:10:48Guest:And so each guy has one episode of his own podcast.

00:10:51Guest:It's called the Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project.

00:10:55Guest:Uh-huh.

00:10:55Guest:And it's great.

00:10:58Guest:That's an earwolf.

00:10:58Marc:And I'm great.

00:10:59Guest:That's an earwolf thing?

00:11:00Guest:That's an earwolf thing.

00:11:02Guest:But look, I'm only doing eight of them.

00:11:03Guest:That's what makes it special.

00:11:05Guest:Oh.

00:11:05Guest:I'm doing eight of them, and then I'm walking away forever.

00:11:07Marc:For the ages.

00:11:08Marc:Eight for the ages.

00:11:09Marc:Eight for the ages.

00:11:10Marc:No reason to chase that dragon.

00:11:11Guest:That's right.

00:11:12Marc:You just say, I got a plan.

00:11:13Marc:Yeah.

00:11:14Marc:Succinct number of episodes.

00:11:15Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:11:15Marc:There'll be cult classics.

00:11:17Marc:Right.

00:11:17Marc:People will find them when they find them.

00:11:19Marc:Yes.

00:11:19Marc:No pressure on me.

00:11:20Marc:I got other things to do.

00:11:21Marc:That's exactly right.

00:11:22Marc:Yeah.

00:11:22Marc:Goddamn, I'm having my own interview with you.

00:11:25Guest:So what is this television business?

00:11:27Guest:Well, that's more important because it's more profitable.

00:11:30Guest:The television show is on Comedy Central.

00:11:33Guest:It's called Review.

00:11:34Guest:It premieres March 6th.

00:11:35Guest:Review with Andy Daly?

00:11:36Guest:No.

00:11:37Guest:Just Review.

00:11:37Guest:I am in it.

00:11:38Guest:Andy Daly's Review.

00:11:39Guest:Incorrect.

00:11:40Guest:That's not the title.

00:11:41Guest:It is.

00:11:41Guest:I am in it.

00:11:42Guest:It is Andy Daly's.

00:11:43Guest:Andy's Reviewing Shit.

00:11:44Guest:That's not the title.

00:11:45Guest:The title is just Review.

00:11:47Marc:Andy Daly.

00:11:48Guest:All the other things you're saying about it are true.

00:11:50Guest:It is with me, but that's not- I'd like to add that.

00:11:53Guest:I think you should call them.

00:11:54Guest:Listen, there's going to be the- I'm going to have the billboard over there over Pink Dot.

00:11:58Guest:You can get up there with some- You're going to get that billboard?

00:12:00Marc:They're going to give me that billboard.

00:12:01Marc:Your big fucking mug?

00:12:03Guest:Yeah.

00:12:03Marc:Your mug's going to be on above Pink Dot where I met Axl Rose?

00:12:06Marc:Is that where you met Axl Rose at Pink Dot?

00:12:07Marc:I didn't meet him.

00:12:07Marc:I high-fived him.

00:12:08Guest:Was he delivering for Pink Dot at that time?

00:12:09Marc:I don't know what he was doing.

00:12:11Marc:I knew it was him, and I went, Axl, and I high-fived him right under where you're going to face is going to be.

00:12:15Marc:Beautiful.

00:12:16Guest:I know.

00:12:16Guest:I'm also going to be in Times Square on a billboard, but it's a video billboard, so it's probably me and 100 other people cycling.

00:12:22Marc:Not gotten billboards.

00:12:22Marc:I've never had a billboard.

00:12:23Marc:Is that right?

00:12:24Marc:Yeah, I don't know what IFC's doing, but I've never had one.

00:12:26Marc:I would have liked one billboard, IFC's Marin on Sunset.

00:12:30Marc:That would have been a big thing for me, but I didn't get that.

00:12:32Guest:I would be cool sharing my billboard with you.

00:12:34Marc:Can I just put something up there maybe at night?

00:12:36Guest:Yes, please.

00:12:36Marc:Please do.

00:12:36Marc:Just maybe a little poster, Marin on IFC.

00:12:38Marc:I would like that very much.

00:12:39Marc:On your face.

00:12:42Marc:Tell me about this show review, Andy.

00:12:43Guest:Well, it's an adaptation of an Australian series.

00:12:46Guest:Holy shit.

00:12:47Guest:You just ripped off an Australian series.

00:12:49Guest:See?

00:12:50Guest:No, they're happy about it.

00:12:52Guest:These guys are delighted.

00:12:54Guest:No, this is- They're happy to be ripped off.

00:12:55Marc:Many great American shows have been taken from the format of a foreign model.

00:13:00Guest:Listen, it has an international pedigree mark.

00:13:02Marc:It's a selling point.

00:13:03Marc:I have no problem with it.

00:13:04Guest:Good.

00:13:05Guest:So they ran it for two years over there, and it's about a guy who reviews life experiences rather than reviewing books, movies, or food.

00:13:11Guest:People will say, what's it like to have road rage?

00:13:13Guest:What's it like to be a racist?

00:13:15Guest:What's it like to be addicted to drugs?

00:13:16Guest:You're going to be talking to people.

00:13:18Guest:No, I go out and do it.

00:13:20Guest:This character that I play named Forrest McNeil receives this and believes himself to be doing something important for the good of humanity and to be capable of unique insights into all facets of life.

00:13:30Guest:And so he goes out into the world and he experiences these things.

00:13:33Guest:and rates every experience on a scale of one to five stars.

00:13:36Guest:And in the process, all sorts of things get ruined.

00:13:39Guest:His wife, his job.

00:13:41Marc:So this is a scripted thing.

00:13:43Marc:That's correct.

00:13:44Marc:Oh, see, that's why that's not review with Andy Daly or Andy Daly's review.

00:13:48Marc:I had no idea there was a high concept in that it was scripted, and you're not playing Andy Daly.

00:13:52Marc:You're playing a character.

00:13:53Marc:I'd say it's the highest possible concept.

00:13:55Guest:Yeah.

00:13:56Guest:It used to be called Review with Forrest McNeil, but somebody pointed out that that's a fictitious name that doesn't mean anything to anybody and won't encourage anyone to tune in on it.

00:14:03Marc:You're hoping that eventually it will mean something to people.

00:14:06Marc:Right.

00:14:06Marc:Maybe in season two.

00:14:07Marc:That guy, Forrest McNeil's an interesting guy.

00:14:09Guest:Yeah.

00:14:09Marc:Andy Daly's doing a good job playing him in that show, Review.

00:14:11Marc:Because he's great.

00:14:12Marc:Yeah.

00:14:12Marc:And take a look at him.

00:14:13Marc:And he feels good about everything.

00:14:15Guest:He's feeling great.

00:14:16Guest:Nothing's wrong.

00:14:16Marc:Nothing is wrong.

00:14:17Marc:Yeah.

00:14:18Marc:How is everything?

00:14:21Guest:I've got a lot of problems.

00:14:22Yeah.

00:14:23Guest:Did you shoot them all already?

00:14:24Guest:We shot them all.

00:14:25Guest:We shot nine of them.

00:14:26Guest:Uh-huh.

00:14:26Guest:And yeah.

00:14:28Guest:How'd they go?

00:14:28Guest:They went great.

00:14:30Guest:They really went incredibly.

00:14:31Guest:We had Andy Blitz and Leo Allen and Kevin Dorff writing for it and Jeffrey Blitz who directed that.

00:14:36Guest:One of those guys lives in my old apartment.

00:14:39Guest:Really?

00:14:39Guest:Mm-hmm.

00:14:40Guest:You guess which one.

00:14:40Guest:Andy Blitz.

00:14:41Guest:Nope.

00:14:42Guest:Leo Allen.

00:14:42Guest:Yes.

00:14:43Guest:Good.

00:14:43Guest:Second try.

00:14:45Guest:Carol Kolb of The Onion also wrote on it.

00:14:47Guest:Jeff Blitz directed that documentary Spellbound.

00:14:50Guest:Andy's brother.

00:14:51Guest:Yes, that's right.

00:14:52Guest:Yeah.

00:14:53Marc:I like that documentary.

00:14:54Guest:Yeah.

00:14:55Guest:So this is a very mockumentary style and he's amazing at that.

00:15:00Guest:So, and was there improvisational elements?

00:15:03Guest:There was a lot of improvisational elements.

00:15:05Guest:As a matter of fact, we were originally supposed to only shoot eight, but we did so much improvising on the set that at some point we were like, oh, we have nine episodes.

00:15:12Guest:So there's nine.

00:15:14Guest:How does Comedy Central feel about this project that you've done for them?

00:15:17Guest:They feel it.

00:15:18Guest:They seem excited about it.

00:15:19Guest:You know, it was originally supposed to premiere last summer and they pushed it because they felt like they wanted to get behind it a little bit more with billboards and stuff like that.

00:15:28Guest:And they didn't have the promotional budget at that time.

00:15:30Guest:So they were like, let's push it till a time when we can really afford a billboard.

00:15:33Guest:Yes, pretty much.

00:15:35Guest:Which is absurd.

00:15:36Guest:Not really.

00:15:37Marc:That's what it's all about with them.

00:15:39Marc:That's how it is.

00:15:39Marc:You only get a certain amount of money per quarter.

00:15:41Marc:That's right.

00:15:42Marc:For promotion.

00:15:43Marc:That's exactly what happened.

00:15:44Marc:Right.

00:15:45Marc:And they're like, we're a little short.

00:15:46Marc:Yes.

00:15:46Marc:We'd like to give you more than the flyers that you're handing out in my neighborhood.

00:15:51Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:15:52Guest:They literally could not afford a billboard in 2013.

00:15:54Guest:That is why we had to sit around for eight months.

00:15:58Marc:So do you want to do the call for splitting the billboard?

00:16:03Marc:Should we call somebody over there?

00:16:05Guest:Look, it's going to be awkward because you're on a different network.

00:16:07Guest:Let's just say it right off.

00:16:08Guest:It's not going to be an easy sell to Comedy Central.

00:16:11Guest:Should we go the gorilla way?

00:16:12Guest:Yeah, I think we go the gorilla way.

00:16:14Marc:Should I have Shepard Fairey put my picture up there?

00:16:16Marc:He would be happy to do it.

00:16:17Guest:Yeah.

00:16:18Marc:Yeah.

00:16:18Marc:Black and white.

00:16:19Marc:You might come off looking a little heavier than you are.

00:16:21Marc:Right.

00:16:21Marc:And it just says Marin underneath.

00:16:23Marc:Yeah.

00:16:24Marc:And then obey.

00:16:26Marc:Obey Marin.

00:16:27Marc:But not hope.

00:16:28Marc:No.

00:16:29Marc:No, there's no reason.

00:16:30Marc:There's no hope.

00:16:31Marc:Reason to push that.

00:16:33Marc:I'm not that guy.

00:16:35Marc:I'm the, maybe it'll work out.

00:16:37Marc:Maybe it'll work out.

00:16:38Marc:That's too much.

00:16:39Marc:If I try hard, but not too hard.

00:16:40Marc:So what are you doing now?

00:16:41Marc:Are you just going to go on flyering?

00:16:44Marc:Yeah.

00:16:45Marc:I'm staying with that conceit.

00:16:46Guest:Yeah.

00:16:47Guest:I have 10 more flyers.

00:16:49Guest:I have to figure out strategically where to put them.

00:16:52Guest:York's kind of popping right now.

00:16:54Guest:There's a lot of things down there.

00:16:54Guest:what's your opinion of donut friend be honest you know be honestly uh you know i'm gonna judge a donut without shitting it okay yeah so let's just take the donuts as they are they're a little dense i said i'm glad i knew you'd have a true answer to that question because i feel the same way i don't need all the fancy toppings right the donut itself though it's better than i'm getting at any of the other donut areas in the neighborhood true so i go in there i ask for a plain a chocolate donut with some glaze on there and i'm usually i'm quite happy but don't i don't need any of the bells and whistles

00:17:22Marc:Well, I mean, it's a nice option, but it's like you're still going to judge your donut.

00:17:26Marc:So you like the donut.

00:17:27Marc:I do.

00:17:28Marc:Not too cakey.

00:17:29Guest:I've had better donuts.

00:17:30Guest:Okay.

00:17:31Guest:But I have not had a better donut within a 10 mile radius of donut friend.

00:17:34Marc:I support his business.

00:17:36Marc:Yes.

00:17:36Marc:I am glad he's here and people seem to be enjoying it.

00:17:38Marc:Yes.

00:17:39Marc:But I had an old fashioned, which is frankly my favorite kind of donut.

00:17:42Marc:Uh-huh.

00:17:42Marc:Also called a buttermilk donut.

00:17:44Guest:Okay.

00:17:45Marc:And that was good too.

00:17:46Marc:I think my experience on basing the cakey is just on the basic donut.

00:17:50Marc:Yes.

00:17:50Marc:You know, the, what would you call them?

00:17:52Guest:I just want to point out we have now talked about Donut Friend for far longer than we talked about Review.

00:17:57Guest:And that's a real problem.

00:17:59Guest:Review with Andy Daly, your show.

00:18:01Guest:Yeah.

00:18:03Guest:I'm just afraid somebody at Comedy Central is going to say, did you go down to Marin's Garage to promote the donut shop around the corner or to promote the TV show?

00:18:11Marc:Let me be honest with you.

00:18:11Marc:All right.

00:18:12Marc:This is between you and I. They're not paying me extra for this, I don't think.

00:18:15Marc:Comedy Central is not?

00:18:16Marc:No, I think I said Andy Daly.

00:18:18Marc:I would like to help him with his show.

00:18:20Marc:Thank you.

00:18:21Marc:I already do a deal with Comedy Central.

00:18:23Marc:We'll be plugging it anyways.

00:18:24Marc:This was a friendship thing.

00:18:26Marc:Yes, I know.

00:18:26Guest:And I appreciate it.

00:18:27Guest:So what you're saying is it's my job to keep us on topic.

00:18:30Marc:No, I want to talk about donuts now.

00:18:33Marc:We talked about your thing.

00:18:36Marc:Okay, all right.

00:18:37Marc:No, no, it's over now.

00:18:38Marc:Now it's over.

00:18:38Marc:It's uncomfortable.

00:18:39Marc:Do you want to go get a donut?

00:18:40Guest:I do, actually.

00:18:41Guest:I really do.

00:18:43Marc:Review with Andy Daly playing who?

00:18:46Guest:Huh?

00:18:46Marc:Well, Forrest McNeil is the name of my character.

00:18:49Marc:Starring Andy Daly.

00:18:50Marc:Yes.

00:18:50Marc:Playing Forrest McNeil.

00:18:52Marc:McNeil.

00:18:53Marc:Yes.

00:18:53Marc:Is a guy who goes out and does things where he reviews things in life.

00:18:58Marc:Yes.

00:18:58Marc:From one to five.

00:19:00Marc:That's right.

00:19:00Marc:Give me some examples of...

00:19:02Marc:Of what he reviews.

00:19:03Guest:In the first episode, he reviews stealing.

00:19:05Guest:He just, you know, what's it like to go steal some things?

00:19:07Guest:And he gets into it.

00:19:08Guest:He discovers that he has a facility for it.

00:19:10Guest:He reviews addiction.

00:19:11Guest:He goes ahead and gets addicted to cocaine just to review it on a scale of one to five stars.

00:19:15Guest:And then he reviews going to the high school prom.

00:19:19Guest:All in one episode.

00:19:20Guest:All in one episode.

00:19:21Guest:That's loaded.

00:19:22Marc:That's jam-packed.

00:19:23Marc:It is.

00:19:23Guest:It took me years to get addicted to cocaine.

00:19:25Guest:You did it in less than 20 minutes.

00:19:27Guest:Did it really take years?

00:19:28Guest:No, you were probably hooked from the first time you tried it.

00:19:31Marc:I think I enjoyed it, but I didn't really commit to it until later.

00:19:34Marc:Okay.

00:19:35Marc:Yeah, the first time I was like, this is something I might want to ruin my life with, but I'll wait until I'm in college.

00:19:39Marc:Right.

00:19:39Marc:Yeah.

00:19:40Marc:When it really counts.

00:19:40Marc:Yeah, exactly.

00:19:41Marc:Yeah.

00:19:42Marc:Well, this sounds like a great show.

00:19:43Marc:Thank you.

00:19:44Marc:And Donut King has pretty good donuts.

00:19:47Marc:Yeah, that's what we learned.

00:19:48Marc:And you're great.

00:19:49Marc:Everything's great with you.

00:19:50Marc:I think the billboard is going to be me, you, and Donut Friend.

00:19:54Marc:No, it's going to be you with a Shepard Ferry poster of me on your face eating a Donut Friend donut.

00:20:00Guest:I think that's perfect, and I think it'll sell all three of us beautifully.

00:20:02Marc:Yeah, look for that on Sunset Boulevard above the pink dot where I met Axl Rose.

00:20:06Guest:He might still be there.

00:20:07Marc:Nice to see you, Andy.

00:20:08Marc:Thank you so much.

00:20:09Marc:Wasn't that pleasant?

00:20:10Marc:Andy Daly.

00:20:12Marc:who is very funny, and you can watch a full episode of Review right now on ComedyCentral.com.

00:20:20Marc:Boy, this has been some show already.

00:20:22Marc:A lot of things going on.

00:20:24Marc:Pushing buttons.

00:20:26Marc:Did you hear that part earlier?

00:20:27Marc:Okay, so let's talk to John Ronson about psychopaths and sociopaths and his journey through that and also just other stuff.

00:20:35Marc:I like talking to people from the UK.

00:20:38Marc:Feels exotic to me.

00:20:40Marc:I always assume from the accent that they're much more educated and sophisticated than I am.

00:20:45Marc:That's a secret between us.

00:20:47Marc:All right, let's talk to John Ronson.

00:20:50Marc:Get right up on it.

00:20:56Marc:Okay, that's good.

00:20:57Marc:What do you do at the BBC?

00:20:59Marc:Don't they have these kind of microphones?

00:21:00Marc:This is what you do there?

00:21:01Marc:I guess.

00:21:02Guest:I guess so.

00:21:03Marc:Right?

00:21:03Marc:Can you hear yourself all right?

00:21:04Guest:Yeah, although I'm not really doing anything at the BBC anymore.

00:21:07Marc:Well, I talked to you on a radio show.

00:21:09Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:10Guest:But then they kind of decommissioned that show about a year ago.

00:21:15Guest:What was that show?

00:21:16Guest:It was called John Ronson On.

00:21:18Guest:What happened was I was doing stuff for This American Life.

00:21:20Marc:Yeah.

00:21:21Guest:And they said to me, well, I thought I'd sort of offer This American Life without telling This American Life I was doing this, that I'd offer it to the BBC.

00:21:30Guest:It's such a great show.

00:21:31Guest:It should be on the BBC.

00:21:32Marc:Yeah.

00:21:32Guest:And so I went there and said to them, can I, you know, you should take the show This American Life.

00:21:38Guest:It's fantastic.

00:21:39Guest:And they said, no, it's too American.

00:21:41Guest:Why don't you do a show?

00:21:44Guest:And I thought, well, I've got all these This American Life, so they rejected because the gate to their garden of acceptance is very high indeed.

00:21:54Marc:Yeah, no kidding.

00:21:55Guest:Yeah, I know.

00:21:56Guest:Jesus, I had like 30 stories that I pitched to This American Life that didn't want to know.

00:22:00Guest:So as soon as they- 30?

00:22:01Marc:Pretty much, yeah.

00:22:02Marc:I gave up after like two.

00:22:03Marc:It was fortunate for me that Ira took a liking to my show, but I've never been on there in a story way.

00:22:10Guest:Yeah, I still do.

00:22:11Guest:I mean, I still do stuff for them.

00:22:13Guest:I did something for them just like the other week.

00:22:15Guest:So you're in now.

00:22:16Guest:I am kind of in, I think.

00:22:17Guest:Good.

00:22:18Guest:But there were some stories that they rejected.

00:22:20Guest:And so that's how I started doing my show on Radio 4.

00:22:23Marc:And it was an investigative sort of show because I remember you talked to me about joke stealing.

00:22:28Guest:Yeah.

00:22:28Guest:I talked to you about Carlos Mencia.

00:22:30Guest:Specifically.

00:22:31Guest:Yeah.

00:22:31Marc:Yeah.

00:22:32Guest:Yeah, I guess.

00:22:33Guest:I mean, it was kind of similar to Smoke and Life.

00:22:35Guest:We would take a theme and we'd do stuff around the theme.

00:22:39Marc:And why'd they let it go?

00:22:40Marc:Why'd they stop it?

00:22:41Guest:I did like 30 of them and we were old and tired by the end of it.

00:22:45Marc:Isn't that nice, though, in some way, I think about the UK is that they know when something's done.

00:22:50Marc:yeah it's true yeah because i think there's less money involved in some weird way well there was no fucking money involved right my service because like even like here like with tv you know there there's an argument to be made that uh something should be stopped fairly quickly uh and and maybe they could be appreciated more if they didn't drive themselves in the ground but the but the profit margin is what matters yeah so you just have to deal with the redundancy of that kind of uh commercialism

00:23:17Guest:It's true.

00:23:18Guest:We did like, I don't know, we did about seven series of genres and that's kind of really, that's unusually a lot.

00:23:24Guest:That's like, I don't know, 30 episodes or something and that's like way more than most people get.

00:23:29Guest:No, I think, you're right, I think we're good at, you know, finishing things while they're still good.

00:23:35Marc:Is it, but is that, is it, sometimes, some people I've talked to, like Edgar Wright, it's somewhat of a choice sometimes to just stop and other times it's just sort of the BBC saying like, okay.

00:23:45Guest:yeah someone else's turn yeah well Edgar Edgar stopped spaced after what two series yeah it's perfect yeah just enough yeah it was done he was going to turn one of my books into a film which one them my first what happened to that I thought that's not happening anymore no it was like my white wrote a screenplay and you wrote it

00:24:05Guest:Yeah, Mike wrote it and Edgar was attached to direct it.

00:24:09Marc:So the screenplay would have been you moving through the world of those people?

00:24:14Marc:Were they conspiracy theorists and extremists of different kinds?

00:24:16Guest:Yeah, in the screenplay, I think the conspiracy theories turned out to be true.

00:24:22Guest:That would be Edgar's touch to these?

00:24:23Guest:Well, actually, that was Mike White's idea.

00:24:25Guest:You know, one of the people in them is David Icke, who believes that the shadowy elite.

00:24:30Guest:Lizard people.

00:24:30Guest:Yeah, lizard people.

00:24:31Guest:And my book kind of broke the lizard story.

00:24:37Guest:For the world?

00:24:38Guest:Pretty much so.

00:24:38Guest:It was kind of small.

00:24:40Guest:I don't know.

00:24:40Guest:People kind of knew it.

00:24:41Guest:You know who knew it?

00:24:42Guest:People believed it.

00:24:43Guest:Yeah, people believed it.

00:24:44Guest:I had this thing.

00:24:45Guest:So basically, okay, so this guy said to me, Fenton Bailey producer said to me, you've got to do David Akin.

00:24:51Guest:He believes he's kind of nuts.

00:24:53Guest:He believes that 12-foot lizard, you know, paedophile lizards secretly rule the world.

00:24:58Guest:And I said, you know, that's just too nuts.

00:25:01Guest:There's nothing to hold on to there.

00:25:03Guest:But then I was in the offices of the Anti-Defamation League and I picked up this Jewish newspaper and

00:25:10Guest:And it said, David Icke believes that 12 foot blood drinking child sacrificing paedophile lizards secretly rule the world.

00:25:17Guest:He's evidently using code.

00:25:19Guest:And what he actually means is Jews.

00:25:22Guest:And I thought, well, I mean, I thought that's great because it's like.

00:25:26Guest:But don't they usually just say Jews if they mean Jews?

00:25:28Guest:Well, I said to David Icke.

00:25:30Guest:You know, he said, no, I really mean, he said, I really mean lizards.

00:25:33Guest:Yeah.

00:25:33Guest:And I said, well, that's, you know, so I said that to the ADL and they said, oh, that's code too.

00:25:37Guest:So you kind of can't win.

00:25:41Guest:But yeah, so, but I love that.

00:25:43Guest:I thought that was like a sort of pressure cooker of craziness on both sides as David, you know, as the extremists get crazier, so do our responses towards them.

00:25:51Guest:So Mike White wrote a screenplay.

00:25:53Guest:Oh, Mike White, yeah.

00:25:54Guest:Yeah, in which that came true, that the ruling elite really was 12-foot blood-drinking lizards.

00:25:59Guest:Did you like the screenplay?

00:26:00Guest:Yeah, loved it.

00:26:01Guest:They'd rip off their faces and they'd be like, listen, I thought it was great.

00:26:04Guest:You know, just great in a kind of Mike White way.

00:26:06Marc:Yeah.

00:26:07Marc:Well, that's a little outside of the box for him, isn't it?

00:26:09Guest:Yeah, I guess so.

00:26:10Marc:Like sci-fi, he's sort of a, you know, toils of the human heart dude.

00:26:14Marc:yeah i mean this is quite a long time ago this is like like 2001 i think really yeah well i read that i just finished the other book the new one the newest one the psychopath psychopaths test right you know it's really interesting so wait are you writing on this are you writing on me um

00:26:30Marc:No, you're not a psych.

00:26:31Marc:You're too fucked up to be a psych.

00:26:33Marc:Right, but I'm just saying in general, like, is this experience of you being here something you're going to be writing about?

00:26:38Marc:How would you feel if I did?

00:26:40Marc:Fine.

00:26:41Marc:Well, maybe.

00:26:42Marc:I just didn't know if you were on assignment.

00:26:44Marc:No.

00:26:45Marc:We were going to go at it with each other to figure out what your experience of this is.

00:26:49Marc:How you experience this in your own words would be interesting.

00:26:54Guest:Well, I kind of think if it goes badly.

00:26:55Guest:I mean, if it goes well, there'll be nothing to write about, right?

00:26:58Guest:Then you'll find something.

00:27:00Guest:Okay.

00:27:00Marc:There'll be a moment where you could rip open and examine.

00:27:04Guest:I was a bit worried about doing this because you're quite sort of intense presence.

00:27:09Guest:Am I?

00:27:10Guest:I think so.

00:27:11Guest:And so I was a little nervous about it.

00:27:13Guest:But you're pretty intense, aren't you?

00:27:15Guest:Not in that way.

00:27:18Guest:Yeah.

00:27:20Guest:So basically in the psychopath test, you've got these psychiatrists, leading Harvard psychiatrists will say that, you know, that the ruling elite, they look human, but they're not quite human.

00:27:32Marc:They lack human traits, psychological traits.

00:27:35Guest:Yeah.

00:27:36Marc:Conscience, empathy.

00:27:37Guest:Yeah.

00:27:38Guest:So they're psychopaths who pretend to be normal.

00:27:41Guest:They kind of hide their madness behind a veneer of normality.

00:27:44Guest:And all those people are kind of hailed as... And then David Icke says, these people who rule the world, they look normal, but underneath, they're not normal.

00:27:51Guest:They're different.

00:27:53Guest:It's exactly the same theory, right?

00:27:54Guest:But with David Icke, it's lizards.

00:27:56Guest:And with the Harvard psychologists, it's psychopaths.

00:27:58Marc:Psychopaths.

00:27:59Marc:Yeah.

00:28:00Guest:That's really interesting.

00:28:01Marc:But what is it that you're gunning for?

00:28:04Marc:Well, first of all, let's start here.

00:28:06Marc:You're in Malibu.

00:28:07Marc:but you're not living in britain anymore no i've been living in new york for about a year and a half like on a visa or you in yeah no visa but i'm gonna get a green card i think so you're living in new york and we're what part of new york in the upper west side so you landed in the upper west side yeah i do feel like i fell asleep in london and woke up the next morning i was living in new york i've got no kind of rational it's no oh okay so and how are you experiencing it

00:28:34Guest:That's all right.

00:28:36Guest:What are you doing there?

00:28:37Guest:Just writing?

00:28:38Guest:Yeah, exactly the same as I was doing in London, just with fewer friends.

00:28:41Guest:I feel like a kind of exiled monk.

00:28:45Guest:It means I'm writing a lot more.

00:28:46Marc:But are you doing it mostly for British publication?

00:28:49Guest:Yeah, pretty much.

00:28:50Guest:I'm trying to write a new book.

00:28:52Guest:What's this book?

00:28:53Guest:I'm writing a book about people who've been publicly shamed.

00:28:57Guest:I like...

00:28:58Guest:I'm interested in the fact that I think with each of my books, the people I'm sort of chronicling, I'm looking into, are getting closer and closer to us.

00:29:06Guest:Me and you?

00:29:07Guest:Yeah, and the people listening to this and the people on Twitter.

00:29:12Guest:I mean, the way that we all gather together to routinely destroy people.

00:29:17Guest:I'm really interested in that.

00:29:18Guest:I think there's got a mass...

00:29:19Marc:But where do you where does boundaries come into the conversation?

00:29:22Marc:I mean, how do we exist at my my current struggle with the whole thing is that, you know, there's issues of transparency and there's issues of accessibility.

00:29:31Marc:Right.

00:29:31Marc:So how you know, how do we what do we protect anymore?

00:29:35Marc:You know, what is ours?

00:29:37Marc:You know, and I mean, I guess also in some of your books, there's there's a facade of of of.

00:29:44Guest:of character you know hiding something but it becomes harder and harder harder to hide anything yeah and the problem then is what happens when we all start to get um defined by our worst aspects uh-huh and that's what's happening on you know on the internet more and more

00:30:03Guest:I mean, it happens in the mental health world.

00:30:04Guest:And this is what the psychopath tests about, I think, is how we, you know, how more and more people are being defined by the aspects of their personality that would be described as mental disorders.

00:30:15Marc:As having a clinical explanation.

00:30:17Guest:Yeah, exactly.

00:30:18Marc:That is not whatever the norm is, which doesn't really exist.

00:30:20Marc:So I think the point that I read in the psychopath test was that we're all judged against this as mad as you can be.

00:30:28Marc:There's degrees of it, but it doesn't seem like culturally we like to hold on to any real gray area that we can't accept.

00:30:35Guest:Yeah.

00:30:35Marc:That like everybody has elements of borderline narcissism, psychopathology, all that stuff.

00:30:42Marc:We all have those things.

00:30:43Marc:And if you're a person that's seeking definition for yourself and want to frighten yourself, you can go categorize yourself.

00:30:49Marc:But I I think that you're talking about control and people needing some sort of easy way to say, like, well, you're that and I can do what I will with that information.

00:30:59Guest:Yeah.

00:31:00Guest:And as journalists, what we do is we travel around the world with our notepads in our hands and we look and we wait for the gems.

00:31:06Guest:And the gems are always the most outermost aspects of that person's personality.

00:31:12Guest:Compelling.

00:31:12Guest:Well, it's like your Carlos Mencia.

00:31:14Guest:I mean, you know, most of your shows that are most popular, the ones where people kind of fall apart.

00:31:19Marc:Yeah, but I didn't expect that.

00:31:20Marc:I was not gunning for it.

00:31:22Marc:You know, I mean, you're running around, you know, pushing people's buttons on purpose.

00:31:26Marc:No, I'm not.

00:31:28Guest:I'm trying to do the opposite.

00:31:30Guest:I'm trying to de-demonize the demons.

00:31:33Guest:I'm trying to demonize people.

00:31:33Guest:You're poking around in their soft spots.

00:31:36Guest:What I'm trying to do is find a good balance between not humiliating people, but looking into these kind of darker, shadowy aspects of our personalities.

00:31:46Marc:And I appreciate the approach of, I guess, what would be called the gonzo approach of offering up enough of yourself.

00:31:54Marc:as a point of reference to have the reader judge against your own struggle and your own journey into understanding this stuff.

00:32:03Guest:Yeah, which is why, actually, I always thought I was the most appropriate person to write about psychopaths because I'm the opposite.

00:32:10Guest:I'm the kind of neurological opposite of a psychopath and not my amygdala life.

00:32:13Guest:massively overperforms, and I'm sort of constantly getting these kind of anxieties.

00:32:18Marc:But what do you think about that whole business?

00:32:19Marc:Is that if you can psychopathologize everything to a chemical transaction, I mean, what are we really worth anyway?

00:32:26Guest:Yeah.

00:32:26Guest:Well, I remember saying to some psychopath spotters at a course that I went on, you know, if it's... The Bob Hare thing?

00:32:32Guest:Yeah, Robert Hare's thing.

00:32:33Guest:I said, you know, okay, if it's all just neurological, if it's our underperforming amygdala, you should feel sorry for them, right?

00:32:39Guest:And he said, well, why should we feel sorry for them?

00:32:41Guest:They don't give a fuck about us.

00:32:43Guest:So, yeah.

00:32:45Guest:Conventional empathy.

00:32:46Guest:Yeah, but exactly.

00:32:47Guest:All the things that kind of keep us morally good, the empathy and, you know, the guilt and the remorse, these are all kind of painful feelings, right?

00:32:57Guest:The amygdala kind of shooting these signals up and down.

00:32:59Guest:So psychopaths don't have that.

00:33:01Guest:So psychopathy has to be the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders, right?

00:33:06Guest:They walk around, which is why so few of them want to be kind of cured, because it's a great feeling to have no remorse and no guilt.

00:33:12Guest:It's just they just walk around...

00:33:13Guest:Right.

00:33:14Marc:But the fact is, is that once they become aware of it, that the manipulative element of it is that they can sort of act that stuff if necessary to get what they want.

00:33:28Marc:Well, it's the same with manics.

00:33:29Marc:I got manics in my life.

00:33:30Marc:I got bipolar people.

00:33:31Marc:They don't want to be medicated because they're just waiting for that next run.

00:33:34Marc:Right.

00:33:35Marc:You know, the ecstatic feeling of that.

00:33:37Marc:Yeah.

00:33:38Marc:But what did you come away with all that after talking to all those people and going on this journey for yourself, you know, and waffling in between judging yourself by the psychopath checklist and talking with real psychopaths?

00:33:50Marc:I mean, what was the feeling at the end in terms of your own ability to empathize or put them into context?

00:33:55Yeah.

00:33:55Guest:Well, I came with the strong sense that we have this weird desire to judge people by their madnesses, by their maddest edges.

00:34:07Guest:And that is creating a more kind of conformist, conservative society.

00:34:12Guest:So psychopaths definitely exist.

00:34:14Guest:You know, I'm no kind of Ardy Lang fan.

00:34:16Guest:You know, psychopaths definitely exist.

00:34:18Guest:However, there's this kind of massive need in all these different aspects of society, from journalism through to the pharmaceutical industry, through to psychiatry and psychology, where all these different groups have vested interests to define people by their madnesses.

00:34:33Guest:And I think we do that.

00:34:35Guest:And the reason why I want to write this new book about public shaming is because I think we all do it routinely too.

00:34:41Guest:Somebody fucks up slightly on the internet and they become that thing for the rest of their lives.

00:34:47Marc:Okay.

00:34:48Marc:Well, that's interesting.

00:34:49Marc:But like with the pharmaceutical industry, the psychiatric industry, and with the media...

00:34:57Marc:They're predatory and desperate to exploit in order to increase their profit margin.

00:35:06Marc:But personally, it's a different thing.

00:35:11Marc:I think that we like to have the ability to sum people up so we know how to engage with them, that there's a tremendous risk.

00:35:19Marc:I think that...

00:35:21Marc:What I do here, for us to sit down and have a free-form conversation, is something that people, I think, used to enjoy doing, perhaps.

00:35:29Marc:Spin the yarn, get at some stuff, have a discussion, and take some emotional risks along the way.

00:35:35Marc:But I think now, because of the pace of culture and the pace of society, that seems to be a burden.

00:35:40Marc:So it's a lot easier to go like, well, that guy's fucked up.

00:35:43Marc:Or that guy's got that problem.

00:35:45Marc:He's that.

00:35:45Marc:Without experiencing the nuance because there's too much going on, you know in order to just even make a relationship with somebody It's taxing because our brains have changed.

00:35:55Guest:We don't have that kind of time anymore Yeah, you're right and this is why what you do and in fact the rise of the whole podcast culture is a really great thing these long-form Conversations, but what do we do?

00:36:06Marc:Like what do you tell me about this shaming thing?

00:36:08Marc:So what because in my mind?

00:36:12Marc:What's happening, and I also think what is happening in media culture outside of psychiatric profiteering and pharmaceutical profiteering is that there's juice there.

00:36:24Marc:It's titillating.

00:36:27Marc:That it's more satisfying, but it also implies a distance, like with the internet and with shaming, that you don't look at people as people.

00:36:36Guest:Yeah.

00:36:37Marc:And the titillation of like, oh, that person did that.

00:36:40Marc:There's a rush.

00:36:42Guest:Yeah, there is a rush.

00:36:43Guest:And so what are we getting from that?

00:36:45Guest:There's a woman actually I met in the psychopath test who was a talent booker for daytime.

00:36:49Marc:I know, that was great.

00:36:51Marc:I thought how she became cynical was interesting.

00:36:53Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:36:54Guest:She would ask them what medication they were on.

00:36:55Guest:Right.

00:36:55Guest:And that was her way of trying to work out who was the, she was looking for the right sort of madness.

00:37:00Guest:Because if it was like lithium, she said, that's whoa.

00:37:04Guest:You know, I could have them on our show.

00:37:05Guest:You don't want them to go on the show and then go off and kill themselves.

00:37:07Guest:But if it was a medication that implied a kind of fun-sounding mental illness like Prozac, she would have them on the show.

00:37:14Guest:And I guess the idea is that we're worried that we're getting crazy, and so we want to watch these people who are a bit crazier than we are, which will entertain us and will make us feel better about ourselves for not being as out of control as we're worried that we might be.

00:37:29Guest:But they're not so crazy that we feel like we're being exploitative by watching them.

00:37:34Guest:So it's the right sort of madness for entertainment for television is madness is people who we feel are just a little bit crazier than we are.

00:37:42Marc:I guess.

00:37:42Marc:I sometimes feel like, you know, if I watch Hoarders or I watch Intervention, like you empathize more, right?

00:37:51Guest:Right.

00:37:51Guest:Yeah, I agree.

00:37:52Guest:Hoarding is really interesting.

00:37:54Guest:It's a different thing.

00:37:55Guest:With Hoarding, we watch for a different reason.

00:37:57Guest:We watch because we are worried that that's what we are turning into.

00:38:02Marc:Also, there was there, you know, more so on that show, like, you know, you know, being a sober person myself, when I watch intervention, the arc of someone's struggle and decision to try to, uh, to change your life is, is satisfying.

00:38:14Marc:Yeah.

00:38:15Marc:Uh, you know, I know the odds are against people, but you know, at least they, they find that window to, uh, to try.

00:38:20Marc:Yeah.

00:38:21Marc:But with hoarding, you never end one of those shows thinking like that.

00:38:24Marc:Things are going to be okay over there.

00:38:25Marc:Yeah.

00:38:25Marc:Never.

00:38:26Marc:Uh,

00:38:26Marc:It's a funny thing, Holden, because I think that the... Look around me.

00:38:30Marc:Look, I'm close.

00:38:31Marc:You're getting close.

00:38:32Marc:But I want it gone.

00:38:34Marc:It's just, to me, it's a matter of laziness.

00:38:36Marc:I have some things.

00:38:38Marc:Well, what's your take on it?

00:38:40Guest:On Holden?

00:38:41Guest:Yeah.

00:38:42Guest:I think, okay, I think the TV producers have a different agenda to we have as viewers.

00:38:46Guest:I think the TV producers love it because it's just about the most visually startling of all the mental disorders.

00:38:53Guest:You're just waiting for the bag of poop or the dead cat.

00:38:55Guest:Yeah, they want the maggots.

00:38:56Guest:They want the kind of mountain rain, the kind of mountains of tchotchkes.

00:39:00Guest:They kind of love that stuff.

00:39:02Guest:Whereas we watch it because we're worried.

00:39:05Marc:Yeah.

00:39:06Guest:We think that's us.

00:39:07Guest:So why then are we all suddenly...

00:39:09Guest:Because, I mean, hoarding, it's like, in fact, it feels like the Mormon church of mental disorders in that it's incredibly fast growing and nobody quite understands why.

00:39:21Guest:And my feeling is that it's not simple to say this is like we're kind of fucked up by consumerism because actually the big difference between people who are massively into consumerism and hoarders is that hoarders want to sort of keep themselves, they don't want people seeing their stuff.

00:39:38Marc:They're building a fortress.

00:39:39Guest:Yeah.

00:39:40Guest:In fact, there's a word for it.

00:39:42Guest:You know, hoarders have got this little room where they kind of sit in amid all their stuff, where they kind of do their bills.

00:39:48Guest:It's called the cockpit.

00:39:49Guest:It's like hoarding intervention experts call it the cockpit.

00:39:51Marc:Oh, really?

00:39:52Guest:Yeah.

00:39:52Guest:And you can see that light.

00:39:53Guest:It's like a cocoon.

00:39:54Guest:You're inside the womb of it.

00:39:55Marc:Sure.

00:39:56Marc:But it's also like, to me, it's sort of a reaction to powerlessness that you invest all this meaning...

00:40:04Marc:to random things that just keep stacking up and when it comes right down to it you know when it's sort of like something you never you haven't seen in years you're like oh no i was gonna like they're they're it's it's an empire of emotional insulation yeah oh and like a lot of anxiety disorders it's a disease of moral goodness

00:40:23Guest:Same as OCD, right?

00:40:25Guest:I mean, hoarders want to do it because when you look at what it is that people hoard quite often, it's quite often things that make you a sort of good mainstream moral person.

00:40:36Guest:It's like Martha Stewart type stuff.

00:40:37Guest:There's a lot of Martha Stewart hoarding going on.

00:40:40Guest:So it's all about trying desperately to kind of be this functional person.

00:40:46Guest:I remember meeting a hoarder who, it was all to do with dinner parties, but she had so much shit in her house that there's no room for a dinner party.

00:40:57Marc:But she didn't see herself as a hoarder.

00:40:59Guest:No, no, she did.

00:41:00Guest:She did.

00:41:00Guest:And she could see that it's like out of control.

00:41:02Guest:So you buy all this kind of crockery because you're going to do the best dinner party ever.

00:41:05Guest:You can never have a fucking dinner party because there's no space anymore.

00:41:10Marc:It's a manifestation of some sort of psychological malignancy of unmet expectation.

00:41:17Marc:You know, it's like cancer.

00:41:19Marc:You know, it starts with one thing and then like the ideas get bigger.

00:41:21Marc:It's like, well, I'm going to do this.

00:41:22Marc:I'm going to do that.

00:41:23Marc:And this is going to be part of this.

00:41:24Marc:And I need to have this for when I want to do that.

00:41:26Marc:And then you just all of a sudden, you know, it just becomes a complete, you know, physical manifestation of a mental disease.

00:41:32Guest:Yeah.

00:41:33Guest:And exactly.

00:41:34Guest:And it's a disease of moral goodness.

00:41:36Guest:And it's totally.

00:41:37Marc:So how is OCD a disease of moral goodness?

00:41:39Guest:Oh, I think OCD is totally a disease of moral goodness.

00:41:42Marc:I guess maybe I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of moral goodness, that there's good intention behind it.

00:41:48Marc:And it's all about being a good person.

00:41:50Guest:OK, so a classic OCD thing.

00:41:52Guest:You mean organization?

00:41:53Guest:No, no.

00:41:54Guest:Like being a kind of moral person.

00:41:56Guest:Like if you live in the Bible Belt,

00:41:59Guest:of America, quite often your OCD will manifest itself that you're convinced that Satan lives inside you.

00:42:04Guest:You're a bad person.

00:42:06Guest:It's like the opposite of a psychopath.

00:42:08Guest:It's like, I could throw this baby out of the window.

00:42:10Guest:Now, a psychopath would think I could throw this baby out the window and lie.

00:42:14Guest:That's fine.

00:42:15Guest:somebody with OCD could think, I could throw this baby out the window.

00:42:18Guest:Fuck, that means I must be a terrible person.

00:42:20Guest:I've just had that thought.

00:42:22Guest:And that thought gets lodged in your brain.

00:42:24Guest:And, you know, that's because everybody has these intrusive thoughts, right?

00:42:27Guest:I could pick up this baby and throw it out the window.

00:42:29Guest:But with OCD, it's like the thought, you're such a good person.

00:42:32Guest:How could I think that?

00:42:33Guest:Yeah, how could I think that?

00:42:33Guest:And then fuck I, and then you start just all swooping around inside your head.

00:42:37Guest:Damn you, Satan.

00:42:37Guest:Yeah, exactly.

00:42:38Guest:What's really interesting, I think, is that in the Bible Belt of America, it's like, oh my God, I've just had this terrible thought, I must be satanic, I must have Satan living.

00:42:47Guest:In liberal London, it's like, oh my God, I just had this terrible thought, I must be a racist.

00:42:51Marc:Yeah, right, right.

00:42:53Marc:Yeah.

00:42:53Marc:Well, the battle with Satan, I think that when it comes down to, you know, all your investigations is that, you know, how people make sense of the world and the existential struggle to exist within it and justify one's actions to rationalization or beliefs is is vast.

00:43:10Marc:Yeah.

00:43:12Marc:And and that, you know, to really sort of assess it like the fascination with conspiracy theories.

00:43:18Marc:You know, I've been that guy that, you know, that, you know, what it really is, is a revisionist organization of events, you know, put into a context either by you or somebody else that gives you some sense of control and some, you know, illusion of secret information.

00:43:35Marc:Power.

00:43:36Marc:Yeah.

00:43:36Marc:And, you know, it's very, but usually if you do some rational research into most of it, either the conspiracy is plain to see and they're not hiding or it's just bullshit, but it becomes a belief system, not unlike organized religion.

00:43:53Marc:That I have found that people who believe in the Tower 7, in the 9-11 truth, that that belief system has tenets and dogma and moral principles, not unlike Christianity.

00:44:08Marc:That the belief that you have to suspend in order to absorb it and live it is religious.

00:44:15Guest:Yeah, except, I mean, yeah, I totally agree with you, except they become very, especially with the 9-11 truthers, I think they become very kind of dehumanizing.

00:44:26Guest:For me, it stopped being funny with the 9-11 truthers because, you know, they just didn't give a fuck about the victims and they would stalk the victims.

00:44:35Marc:Yeah.

00:44:35Guest:Yeah.

00:44:36Guest:I've got this friend who was who was on one of the trains on July 7th in London.

00:44:41Guest:You know, we had this.

00:44:42Guest:You wrote about that.

00:44:43Guest:Yeah.

00:44:44Guest:Yeah.

00:44:44Marc:And did that make the final copy of the book?

00:44:46Marc:I think I read it.

00:44:47Guest:Yeah, no, it did.

00:44:48Guest:Yeah.

00:44:49Guest:And she so she was she survived this terrorist attack in London and then one day was was looking herself up on Google.

00:44:56Guest:And all these people were discussing and they were discussing that she didn't exist because she'd become like a spokesperson for the.

00:45:02Marc:Right.

00:45:02Marc:She was part of a conspiracy that the bombs weren't real and that they were under they were done by the government or the or the story was put forth by the government because of a power surge.

00:45:14Marc:But why would the government go out of the way to hide that?

00:45:16Marc:Just the accidents happen all the time.

00:45:19Marc:Yeah.

00:45:19Marc:But they would create this convoluted conspiracy to hide a power surge that caused an accident?

00:45:25Guest:Yeah, an accidental power surge on the London Underground.

00:45:29Marc:But then they had to accommodate the bus bombing.

00:45:31Guest:That was all actors and stuntmen.

00:45:33Guest:Subterfuge.

00:45:33Guest:Yeah, stuntmen.

00:45:35Guest:I mean, it's insane.

00:45:36Marc:It was subterfuge to make the other terrorist story more credible.

00:45:41Marc:Right, right.

00:45:42Marc:Because of an accidental power surge.

00:45:44Marc:What the fuck did you find?

00:45:45Marc:Where does that...

00:45:46Marc:Why do these people do this?

00:45:48Marc:To be a true psychopath, to have certain qualities of discipline, boundaries, even sort of relatively ambitious aggression that isn't harmful, that doesn't mean you're clinically a psychopath.

00:46:01Marc:But what about these, what did you find from talking to, the story about the guy in the psychopath test who was one of these, the M15 dude, the spy.

00:46:12Guest:David Shailer.

00:46:14Marc:The arc of that guy's story.

00:46:16Guest:That was amazing, right?

00:46:17Guest:Okay, so he, yeah, he was an MI5 spy and then he became a whistleblower that I think the British were trying to kill Gaddafi.

00:46:28Guest:Yeah.

00:46:28Guest:That was the thing.

00:46:29Guest:And then he was like, he went on the run and he ended up going to prison and then he came out as a 9-11 truther.

00:46:37Guest:And then it's a July 7th truther, so this is where he kind of intersects with my friend Rachel, who's like on the train, bomb goes off, 20 people are killed in her carriage, body parts everywhere.

00:46:49Guest:The survivors form a kind of group, you know, they just meet in pubs and start just chatting.

00:46:57Guest:And she becomes like a spokesperson for the survivors.

00:46:59Guest:And then David Shaler, who is now convinced that it was holograms that flew into the Twin Towers and the 7-7 train was just an accidental power surge, becomes convinced that Rachel doesn't exist.

00:47:13Guest:Right.

00:47:14Guest:Because she's a team of MI5 agents tasked to spread disinformation.

00:47:21Guest:Yeah.

00:47:21Guest:So Rachel did what I think you and I would do, which is email them.

00:47:25Guest:And so actually I do exist.

00:47:27Guest:And it's not nice to read this about yourself, especially when you've just been blown up on the tube, which they took as all the more evidence that she didn't exist.

00:47:36Guest:And then finally she met them and they ended up yelling at each other and he accused her of being mentally ill.

00:47:45Marc:That's where everything fell apart.

00:47:47Guest:Yeah.

00:47:48Yeah.

00:47:48Marc:Yeah.

00:47:49Marc:But then he goes on to think he's a messiah and he's a crossdresser and has clearly other problems.

00:47:53Guest:Yeah.

00:47:54Guest:All of that happened afterwards.

00:47:56Marc:That was his next move.

00:47:57Marc:Is that like, I'm Jesus?

00:47:58Guest:Yeah.

00:47:59Guest:I'm Jesus.

00:48:00Guest:And then he became a crossdresser, called himself Dolores, I think.

00:48:05Marc:And at that point, he's got no credibility.

00:48:07Marc:And you talked about that, that there was a breaking point.

00:48:09Guest:Yeah, the right and the wrong sort of madness.

00:48:11Guest:When he believed that holograms flew into the Twin Towers, he was on TV everywhere.

00:48:15Guest:But as soon as he started saying he was Jesus, it was like, yeah.

00:48:19Guest:Not as interesting.

00:48:20Guest:Too crazy.

00:48:21Guest:But also hackneyed.

00:48:23Guest:Hackneyed, plus it doesn't do anything for us.

00:48:26Guest:Yeah.

00:48:27Guest:In fact, we feel bad.

00:48:29Marc:talking about it because suddenly it's no longer smoke and mirrors exploitation which is the kind of exploitation that makes us happy yeah it's real exploitation right because he's got problems yeah exactly and if you're jesus do a trick yeah if you got no tricks there's a very funny exchange between the woman who used to be his landlady and him saying that you know you've already blown it yeah you're not doing the messiah thing right yeah yeah you know you shouldn't uh like if you're a real messiah people would gravitate towards you you know you shouldn't be out here pitching yourself right

00:48:58Marc:It's very funny.

00:48:59Marc:Yeah.

00:49:00Marc:But why do people like you and me... Like, you know, when I read the... Like, when I see the 9-11 truth stuff, even the hologram thing, even the reason that that was compelling was because there is this sense that there are forces outside of us that are within human control that we have no idea what the range of possibilities are within those.

00:49:20Marc:They're clandestine.

00:49:22Marc:And... But what part of us, you know, wants... Has that moment where you're like, I don't know.

00:49:27Marc:You know, it's...

00:49:28Marc:Maybe.

00:49:28Marc:Maybe that's true.

00:49:30Marc:Why?

00:49:31Marc:Maybe it's true that... There were holograms.

00:49:36Guest:Okay, there's definitely a kind of Miss Marple thing going on, right?

00:49:39Guest:I mean, one of the most compelling conspiracy theories is things like chemtrails, which is really fucking easy.

00:49:46Guest:All you have to do is look up and you see it in the sky.

00:49:48Guest:So in the sky, there's evidence.

00:49:51Guest:On YouTube, of course.

00:49:53Guest:You don't have to do any legwork anymore to be like an investigator.

00:49:58Guest:You just have to go onto YouTube and watch Alex Jones' videos.

00:50:01Guest:And then it's like, OK, I've got my information from this person.

00:50:05Guest:So it's a kind of lazy form of investigative journalism for a start.

00:50:09Guest:So you want to see some sort of physical...

00:50:12Guest:evidence of the grand conspiracy but you don't actually get on any planes and do any work right I mean when we were doing them and the series Secret Rules of the World you know we were on planes all the time sneaking into the Bilderberg group sneaking into Bohemian Grove you know we were kind of doing all of this stuff but to be a conspiracy theorist he says you don't actually have to do any of that stuff

00:50:33Marc:You just have to buy someone else's framing of the situation.

00:50:36Guest:Yeah.

00:50:36Guest:And then why?

00:50:37Guest:What do we get out of it?

00:50:38Guest:I mean, you know, what people say is, you know, the world, people don't want to think, oh, how uncontrollable the world is.

00:50:44Guest:We want to kind of give, we want to give patterns to an unpatternable world.

00:50:52Marc:Right.

00:50:52Marc:You want something to blame or something to explain, something that seems like that is incomprehensible.

00:51:00Marc:Because the truth is not as interesting.

00:51:04Guest:Or possibly more frightening, right?

00:51:07Guest:That nobody controls anything and it's just fucking, it's just chaos.

00:51:10Guest:Things happen.

00:51:10Guest:Yeah.

00:51:11Guest:But of course, there are conspiracies.

00:51:13Guest:I mean, this is the counter side of it.

00:51:14Marc:Well, that's the way that the ruling elites, which they exist, have always controlled things is through, you know, relatively secret societies, but not that secret.

00:51:25Marc:How people are trained, you know, at the upper levels of money and power.

00:51:32Marc:There are initiations.

00:51:33Marc:There is a way of life that is maintained.

00:51:35Marc:There is training.

00:51:37Marc:You know, Ivy League schools were training camps for those people.

00:51:40Marc:Yeah.

00:51:40Marc:There is access that is only allowed to people of certain class and certain blood and certain family.

00:51:45Marc:I mean, it's not a mystery.

00:51:47Guest:It's not in hiding.

00:51:49Guest:Yeah.

00:51:50Guest:And the Bilderberg group really does exist.

00:51:52Guest:I mean, when I was trying to get into the Bilderberg group, people

00:51:55Guest:actually thought it didn't exist because the only people who were speaking about it were at the time either far right or far left people.

00:52:03Guest:It sounded so much like the Illuminati.

00:52:05Guest:People thought, oh, this group doesn't even exist.

00:52:07Guest:The next thing I know, I'm being chased by the Secret Service men through the streets of Portugal.

00:52:12Guest:So, and by the way, I completely, as soon as I started getting chased by the Bilderberg group, I completely weren't native straight away and became as paranoid as anybody.

00:52:22Guest:For how long?

00:52:24Guest:Kind of a, well, nothing happened.

00:52:26Guest:I mean, you know, I wasn't killed.

00:52:27Guest:So it kind of, I was probably for about a month.

00:52:30Marc:But how is the Bilderberg group different than the G4 conference or different than the Bohemian Grove meetings?

00:52:35Marc:I mean, how is it, you know, is it just a group of people at a certain class that are trying to have a discussion about, you know, how things are going with running the world?

00:52:46Marc:Yeah, I think it's got a slightly different agenda too.

00:52:48Guest:What about the Trilateral Commission?

00:52:50Guest:Yeah, I never tried to sneak into them, but I did get into Beamy and Grove.

00:52:54Guest:That's just a stupid party of rich people.

00:52:57Marc:Yeah.

00:52:58Marc:It's nothing.

00:52:59Marc:It's where they go and they dress in drag and they put on shows and they do comedies and they eat dinner and they laugh at, look at powerful people can have fun in the woods too.

00:53:11Guest:yeah right it was funny because i snuck into beaming grove with alex jones and he because he was convinced that the owl was a symbol of moloch the devil god so the fact that there was like owls everywhere was like evidence that this was like actual devil worship the actual reason why there's owls everywhere giant owl sculpture is because it's in the middle of the redwoods and there's like owls there's owls everywhere yeah it's like an owl sanctuary and

00:53:35Guest:So it's really funny seeing Alex in there because Alex had to dress preppy to, like, sneak in.

00:53:43Guest:Did you like hanging out with Alex?

00:53:46Guest:No.

00:53:47Guest:He's... No, he's kind of intense and...

00:53:51Guest:It was a good night, though.

00:53:53Guest:Should I backtrack to kind of explain the situation?

00:53:55Guest:Sure.

00:53:56Guest:We ended up getting there.

00:53:58Guest:So I'd heard about this place, Bohemian Grove.

00:54:00Guest:Yeah.

00:54:01Marc:I don't know if everyone's heard about it.

00:54:04Marc:This is sort of deep conspiracy stuff on some level.

00:54:07Marc:People who are interested in secret societies will have heard of it.

00:54:12Marc:At the time when I was more interested in it, I had heard of it.

00:54:15Marc:But it's a secret meeting once a year in the woods of California of the ruling elites and their guests.

00:54:24Marc:And it's closed off.

00:54:26Guest:And on the Saturday night, the rumors always weren't.

00:54:29Guest:I mean, there's prostitution.

00:54:30Guest:There's all this kind of shit going on.

00:54:31Guest:But on the Saturday night, they all dress up in robes and they have a ritual that culminates in a human effigy being thrown into the fiery belly of a 50 foot stone owl.

00:54:46Guest:So I thought, that can't be true.

00:54:50Guest:So I decided to try and sneak in and find out if it was true.

00:54:54Guest:I didn't want to go on my own.

00:54:56Guest:So I phoned up David Icke.

00:54:58Guest:And I said, do you want to come into... He said, that's where they transform themselves back into giant lizards.

00:55:01Guest:You know, people vanish in those forests.

00:55:03Marc:So that's where the wizard people meet.

00:55:05Marc:Yeah, that's where the lizard people meet.

00:55:06Marc:So he wasn't going to go.

00:55:07Guest:No.

00:55:07Guest:So I phoned up Alex Jones.

00:55:08Marc:Because they were onto him.

00:55:09Marc:Yeah.

00:55:09Marc:Of course.

00:55:10Guest:And people, you know, people get sacrificed.

00:55:13Guest:Sure, sure.

00:55:14Guest:So I phoned up Alex Jones, who I'd met.

00:55:17Guest:Actually, I went to the rebuilding of David Koresh's church at Waco.

00:55:21Guest:And Alex Jones had funded the rebuilding of David Koresh's church.

00:55:26Guest:And he seemed quite kind of fearless and gung-ho.

00:55:28Marc:How's that church doing?

00:55:29Guest:I think it's silent.

00:55:30Guest:They're doing all right.

00:55:31Marc:Yeah.

00:55:31Marc:And they are still the Branch Davidians?

00:55:34Guest:Apparently.

00:55:34Guest:This was a while ago when I went there.

00:55:36Guest:But yeah, there weren't that many left.

00:55:38Guest:But those that were left, I think, sort of just moved back into the church.

00:55:42Guest:I remember a bumper sticker saying, you burn it, we build it.

00:55:45Guest:Yeah.

00:55:46Guest:And Randy Weaver was there, who I got to know quite well.

00:55:49Guest:From the shootout?

00:55:51Guest:Yeah.

00:55:51Guest:Ruby Ridge.

00:55:52Guest:Yeah.

00:55:52Guest:In fact, I went with Randy Weaver and we met Alex Jones there.

00:55:55Marc:What do you think defines those people?

00:55:58Marc:What was your experience of them?

00:55:59Marc:What is their sense of, what does freedom look like for them in a real sense?

00:56:04Guest:I remember Alex Jones calling a guy over and saying, show this English guy what freedom looks like.

00:56:11Guest:And the guy opened up his jacket and there was a gun in there.

00:56:14Guest:So that's what freedom looks like.

00:56:17Guest:A big gun.

00:56:19Guest:And what do you make of that?

00:56:21Guest:What do you make?

00:56:23Guest:Fucking nuts.

00:56:23Guest:I mean, yeah, I'm an Englishman.

00:56:26Guest:I have no conception of why the Americans want to have guns.

00:56:31Guest:It just seems like crazy.

00:56:33Guest:I don't understand why you want to have guns, and I don't understand why you don't have free health care.

00:56:37Marc:Yeah.

00:56:37Guest:It's like those are the things that fuck everything up.

00:56:41Guest:So it's just a mystery to me.

00:56:42Marc:But those people that have guns are against free health care.

00:56:45Yeah.

00:56:45Marc:Yes.

00:56:45Marc:On principle, because they think that, you know, we should have the choice to die without treatment.

00:56:50Marc:Yeah.

00:56:51Guest:And that's nuts.

00:56:53Guest:So I went into Beeman Grove with Alex Jones.

00:56:55Guest:I phoned him up and I said, I'm thinking about doing this.

00:56:58Guest:And he goes, I'll come in.

00:57:00Guest:I'm going to come in and I'm going to sneak a camera in and I'm going to get a camera right in their faces.

00:57:04Guest:And I'm going to confront these devil worshippers going about their wickedness.

00:57:09Guest:so i said i think um i think stealth would be a better approach yeah okay stealth so we went in there so just preppy yeah this is my favorite part of the night how did you get in though how do you have tickets well we we this this is going about like 15 years um so we met a guy in the town who did himself infiltrated the grove

00:57:30Guest:And he said, you just dress preppy.

00:57:31Guest:Just walk up the drive.

00:57:33Guest:Because Alex had this plan that he'd, like, climb, he'd, like, sail along the river and then get out and then climb up the mountain and then go down the other side and get in that way.

00:57:43Guest:And then this guy, this lawyer in the town who'd, like, snuck into the grove a few times said, no, no, if you're going that way, you're going to get yourself killed.

00:57:50Guest:And Alex got out.

00:57:51Marc:Because of the terrain, not because.

00:57:52Guest:Yeah, yeah, because of the terrain.

00:57:53Guest:So Alex wrote down on his notepad, going in that way, dash, killed.

00:57:58Right.

00:57:58Guest:He said, all you need to do is, like, go to Eddie Bauer.

00:58:04Guest:Go and get yourself some preppy clothes.

00:58:07Marc:And you just walked in.

00:58:08Guest:Yeah.

00:58:09Guest:But Alex was practicing, like, in the run-up to the infiltration.

00:58:14Guest:I was just, like, walking up and down this hotel corridor, practicing being preppy, you know, in case he was, like, confronted.

00:58:19Guest:And Alex's version of being preppy...

00:58:22Guest:You know, he like went into this, we used to have this show called Mr. Ben in England, this TV kids show, where like Mr. Ben would walk into the dressing room at the costume store, you know, like a businessman and would come out looking like a cowboy or an Indian or something.

00:58:36Guest:And Alex went into Eddie Bauer looking like a kind of far right wing nut Texan redneck and came out looking like, you know, Jay Gatsby, you know, with the tennis racket, in fact, everything but the tennis racket.

00:58:47Guest:So then he was walking up and down the corridor, like practicing being preppy about having these sort of slightly effeminate conversations about microprocessors.

00:58:55Guest:And I said, have you got anything to say?

00:58:58Guest:Like if you get caught, have you got, you know, if they like confront you, have you got something to say?

00:59:03Guest:And he said, yeah, I've worked out what I'm going to say.

00:59:05Guest:I said, what are you going to say?

00:59:06Guest:He said, I'm going to say, don't get them any closer.

00:59:09Guest:I said that's not preppy Alex that's a threat but don't you think that he's I have a hard time knowing whether or not he believes his bullshit or not yeah you know so we went into the grove

00:59:25Guest:and witnessed the owl ritual, which was, just as you described it earlier, just kind of stupid, grown-up, skull-and-bones, frat-bollocks.

00:59:35Guest:I mean, you know, weird that George Bush would want to spend his summer holiday doing that, but not evidence of actual satanic activity.

00:59:46Guest:But Alex came out of it convinced...

00:59:49Guest:well, made a video that this could have been an actual child sacrifice that we witnessed.

00:59:54Guest:And so I totally spun it out of control.

00:59:56Guest:And I said to him, Alex, I think this is kind of irresponsible of you to do this.

01:00:01Guest:I mean, you saw what I saw, that this was kind of stupid and intense and weird, but it wasn't satanic.

01:00:08Guest:And he said to me, you know, you know what my people want to hear, basically.

01:00:15Marc:I got a show to do.

01:00:16Guest:Yeah, I got a show to do.

01:00:17LAUGHTER

01:00:17Guest:So I think Alex, I mean, obviously Alex believes this stuff a bit, but he is a showman.

01:00:22Marc:Yeah.

01:00:23Guest:So why do they do it?

01:00:24Guest:I mean, sometimes I think there's like this kind of weird pattern thing going on in their brain that they just have to, they feel this kind of real need to form patterns for everything to make sense.

01:00:34Guest:Right.

01:00:35Guest:And then their political stuff comes into it, which means everything has to make sense in this kind of evil globalist way.

01:00:42Right.

01:00:42Guest:You know, I had a sort of epiphany coming out of Bohemian Grove, actually, which was that Alex took it really seriously.

01:00:49Guest:Yeah.

01:00:49Guest:And all the men of wealth and power, all these kind of Mr. Burns and the Simpsons, were taking it really seriously as well in their own way.

01:00:57Guest:You know, it wasn't like fun and games to them.

01:00:59Guest:It seemed to be some sort of thing to make them feel like an elite.

01:01:05Marc:Well, it's a tradition.

01:01:06Marc:It's a ritual of tradition.

01:01:08Marc:It's like hazing or anything else.

01:01:09Marc:It's secret handshake shit.

01:01:11Guest:Yeah.

01:01:11Guest:And I thought the only sane person in the entire Redwood Forest seeing that this was just stupid was me.

01:01:19Guest:I was like the only person who like, this is fucking nuts, you know?

01:01:23Marc:But it's just a reaffirmation of the brotherhood of power, right?

01:01:27Guest:Which is the same as Skull and Bones.

01:01:28Guest:It's weird that they need that thing.

01:01:31Guest:They need those rituals to actually make them feel like they are special enough to carve up the world.

01:01:37Guest:Right.

01:01:38Guest:I tried to sneak into the Skull and Bones Club.

01:01:39Guest:Actually, before I ended up doing the Men's Day at Goats, we were like desperately flailing around looking for stories to do.

01:01:44Guest:And one of them was trying to get into Skull and Bones Club to try and... At Yale?

01:01:48Guest:Yeah.

01:01:49Guest:But then I realised I was like a grown man trying to... Yeah, they're good.

01:01:53Guest:Kids.

01:01:53Marc:They're kids.

01:01:54Marc:And I'm sure that their sort of like approach at this point is sort of passive.

01:02:01Marc:And that, you know, like if Geronimo's skull is there, it's like, oh, you want to see something weird, right?

01:02:07Marc:Yeah.

01:02:07Marc:This is real skull.

01:02:08Guest:I try to prove that as well.

01:02:09Guest:Yeah.

01:02:11Guest:It was Bush's grandfather had grave robbed Geronimo's grave.

01:02:13Guest:Yeah.

01:02:14Guest:This is good.

01:02:14Guest:This is like kind of, you know, like on iTunes when it's like, you know, like the third, like the, what do they call it?

01:02:20Guest:When it's like the, you know, if you like these songs by the fall, listen to these ones that no one's ever heard of.

01:02:26Guest:It's like, you know, do you know in Geronimo's skull?

01:02:29Guest:I'm impressed that you really do know your conspiracy shit.

01:02:31Guest:I thought I was like the only person who knew that the theory that Bush's grandfather had stolen Geronimo's skull.

01:02:37Marc:Yeah, you know, I've been down that rabbit hole.

01:02:39Marc:Everybody's looking for meaning.

01:02:41Marc:Right.

01:02:42Marc:But what compels you?

01:02:43Marc:I mean, where did you grow up?

01:02:45Marc:Cardiff.

01:02:46Marc:And that's in Wales?

01:02:47Guest:Yes, the capital of Wales.

01:02:49Marc:And how did you grow up?

01:02:51Guest:It was just a sort of, you know, regular kind of suburban.

01:02:56Guest:It's funny, you know, the other day I was at a spa and a therapist.

01:03:00Guest:I said to the therapist, I can't remember anything about my childhood.

01:03:03Guest:Because when you describe that, it's kind of vague.

01:03:06Guest:I said, I can't remember anything about my childhood.

01:03:09Guest:It's all gone.

01:03:10Guest:And she said to me, well, you know, most people who don't remember anything about their childhood, it means that they were sexually abused by their parents.

01:03:18Guest:And I said, I'd remember that.

01:03:21Guest:I don't remember that much.

01:03:23Guest:I grew up in this kind of suburban house in Cardiff, and I went to the local high school, Cardiff High School, and had a kind of rough time of it.

01:03:31Guest:Why?

01:03:32Guest:Why?

01:03:32Guest:um just i was like you know i was i was a awkward quiet fat kid i was the i was a i was i was fat and i just stand there in silence basically for like the first 16 or 17 years of my life the fat thing is uh is a bit harsh yeah yeah it's uncomfortable yeah and and you were made fun of

01:03:58Guest:Yeah.

01:03:59Guest:Actually, I was thrown in a lake once.

01:04:02Marc:For being fat?

01:04:03Guest:Yeah.

01:04:04Guest:What?

01:04:05Guest:Yeah, they threw me in a lake.

01:04:07Guest:And then years later, I woke up like about five years ago.

01:04:12Guest:I realized I was still angry about it.

01:04:14Guest:And so I found one of them on the internet and emailed to tell him that I'm now a best-selling author.

01:04:22Guest:And he...

01:04:23Guest:did he say are you still fat no no he emailed me back and said the reason why they threw me in the lake was because I was a pain in the ass and the tenor of my email leads him to suspect that I hadn't changed oh you blew it I did I fucked it up you walked right into it yeah it turns out I was thinking well I'm you know I must be doing better than you and I looked him up and turns out he goes I'm fucking plain oh really yeah

01:04:53Guest:No closure there.

01:04:55Marc:You're going to have to process that anger on your own.

01:04:59Guest:Yeah.

01:05:01Guest:And what did your dad do?

01:05:03Guest:He was a wholesaler.

01:05:06Guest:Like he owned a warehouse.

01:05:07Guest:Yeah.

01:05:08Guest:Yeah.

01:05:08Guest:Importing and exporting things like cutlery.

01:05:11Marc:And you grew up Jewish?

01:05:12Guest:Grew up Jewish.

01:05:13Guest:Your mom's Jewish from Liverpool?

01:05:14Marc:Yeah.

01:05:15Marc:I don't know why I'm constantly fascinated by the reality of British Jews.

01:05:20Marc:It's ridiculous.

01:05:21Marc:Yeah.

01:05:21Marc:I'm ridiculous.

01:05:22Marc:Cardiff had a, you know, we had kind of a big Jewish community in Cardiff.

01:05:27Marc:Yeah, pretty big.

01:05:28Marc:I don't know what, you know, people get mad at me for like, enough with the Jew shit, you know, but it's like, it's fascinating to me.

01:05:33Guest:Well, it's fascinating to me.

01:05:34Guest:It is?

01:05:35Guest:Yeah.

01:05:35Marc:Do you hold on to it?

01:05:36Guest:No, fuck.

01:05:37Guest:No, the last time I went to synagogue was the day of my bar mitzvah.

01:05:40Guest:Yeah.

01:05:40Guest:I never went back.

01:05:41Guest:Really?

01:05:42Guest:Yeah, because it's fucking nuts.

01:05:43Guest:The whole thing's nuts.

01:05:45Guest:It's like, you know, people hit themselves and the men and women have to sit separately.

01:05:50Guest:What'd you grow up?

01:05:50Guest:You grew up Orthodox?

01:05:51Guest:Yeah.

01:05:52Marc:Yeah.

01:05:52Marc:Oh, that's different.

01:05:53Guest:Yeah.

01:05:54Marc:Oh, my God.

01:05:54Guest:Well, I mean, I say I grew up Orthodox.

01:05:56Guest:It was an Orthodox synagogue that I went to, but there was nothing particularly.

01:05:59Guest:We had a car crash when I was 10, and my dad made us go to synagogue.

01:06:03Guest:It's like if we've not been punished once with a fucking car crash, I now have to go to synagogue every week because we didn't die.

01:06:09Marc:Because you didn't die.

01:06:10Marc:Yeah.

01:06:10Marc:And he thought it's time to get straight with God.

01:06:12Guest:Yeah, exactly.

01:06:13Marc:Yeah.

01:06:13Guest:So I was punished twice.

01:06:15Guest:First we have the fucking car crash, and I have to go to synagogue every week.

01:06:19Guest:Yeah.

01:06:19Marc:I've been laughing for a while.

01:06:21Marc:But, you know, in the books, you sort of write about this sort of anxiety thing.

01:06:25Marc:Do you find that the reason, what was the moment where you decided, like, I'm going to be a journalist?

01:06:30Marc:What was the intent?

01:06:32Marc:Were you trying to feel better?

01:06:35Guest:Yeah, I think... I sometimes wonder whether... I mean, you know, if it is connected to me having a bad childhood, whether it's to go and meet frightening people and then sort of de-demonize them in my mind, you know, to try to understand...

01:06:51Guest:I do think, you know, I do think actually that having a kind of shit childhood is exactly the kind of thing a journalist should have because we should be mistrustful.

01:07:02Guest:We should feel like outsiders, mistrustful of power.

01:07:07Guest:And what better way to feel that than to be kind of shoved to the edge of the playground at school?

01:07:13Guest:Yeah.

01:07:14Guest:So I do think it was a good thing.

01:07:15Guest:I think being bullied is what a journalist should have had happen to them as a child.

01:07:20Marc:Because you're not politically motivated.

01:07:25Guest:No.

01:07:26Guest:It's people.

01:07:26Guest:I'm interested in why we behave the way that we do.

01:07:30Guest:That's like all my stories.

01:07:32Guest:Why do we behave in the kind of absurd, ridiculous ways that we do as human beings?

01:07:38Guest:I mean, quite often it is to do with power because it's why, you know, why do we fuck up other people so much?

01:07:47Guest:Which is why I'm interested in public shaming, actually, because, you know, when we all get together to shame someone like Justine Sacco on the plane the other week, you know, that story.

01:07:57Guest:Which one?

01:07:57Guest:She was this woman.

01:07:58Guest:She was about to get on a plane.

01:08:00Guest:I'm going to South Africa.

01:08:01Guest:I hope I don't get AIDS.

01:08:04Guest:Oh, no, I won't because I'm white.

01:08:06Guest:And then she obviously chuckled to herself, turned off the phone and got on the plane.

01:08:11Guest:And by the time she'd landed, it was like, fucking, did you miss all of this?

01:08:14Marc:Yeah.

01:08:14Marc:Is she a public personality?

01:08:15Guest:No, no, she's a PR woman and destroyed.

01:08:19Guest:And part of the reason why she was destroyed was because there was a kind of real glee.

01:08:23Guest:We're destroying her and she doesn't even fucking know it because she's on a plane.

01:08:27Marc:Yeah, that's a new thing.

01:08:29Guest:Yeah.

01:08:30Marc:How quickly it can happen.

01:08:31Guest:Yeah.

01:08:31Guest:By the time she got off the plane, she was just destroyed.

01:08:36Guest:So, you know, I think my book about public shaming is also about power because it's about the intense power that we all have when we get together to destroy someone.

01:08:44Marc:But also, the potential of it happening so quickly and so virally and on such a massive scale is probably less than a decade old, really.

01:08:56Guest:Yeah, I know.

01:08:56Guest:It's amazing.

01:08:57Marc:What are you finding when you talk to people who have been in public shame?

01:09:01Guest:It's like the worst pain in the world.

01:09:04Guest:One of them said it was worse than being very badly beaten up by his father.

01:09:08Guest:Mm-hmm.

01:09:10Guest:Yeah.

01:09:11Guest:So... What's their recourse?

01:09:13Guest:For many of them, there's like no recourse, right?

01:09:15Guest:Yeah.

01:09:16Guest:That's it.

01:09:16Guest:You're fucked forever.

01:09:17Guest:Yeah.

01:09:18Guest:I'm interested in the people who get trapped in it, trapped in that moment.

01:09:21Guest:Like, I presume like Michael Richards.

01:09:23Guest:So I haven't met.

01:09:24Guest:Have you met Michael Richards?

01:09:26Marc:No.

01:09:26Marc:Okay.

01:09:27Marc:Are you going to talk to him?

01:09:28Guest:No, he wouldn't talk to me.

01:09:30Guest:No?

01:09:30Guest:No.

01:09:31Guest:It's just, I think it's too haunting for him.

01:09:33Guest:And it was years ago.

01:09:35Marc:It wasn't that long ago.

01:09:36Guest:Actually, it wasn't that long ago.

01:09:37Marc:Well, I mean, comics that I've talked to have sort of framed it as a failed attempt at something.

01:09:42Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:09:43Guest:Do you worry about it?

01:09:44Guest:Do you sort of think, have I just... Do you worry that you're going to tweet the wrong thing and then your life will be over?

01:09:53Guest:Do these thoughts cross your mind?

01:09:56Marc:Not so much that one.

01:09:57Marc:I mean, I kind of compulsively tweet stuff and I think about it

01:10:04Marc:I'm not one to make racial jokes or be, I've been insensitive and I've sort of answered to it, but usually they're oversights and perhaps things that I haven't thought through.

01:10:20Marc:But I think that, how do you, my fear is character assassination.

01:10:28Marc:Because that, you know, like you're saying is that if somebody puts something out in the world and people choose to believe that no matter how untrue it is, you know, if they choose to believe it, then that's what it is.

01:10:39Marc:And you're fighting against something that just became, you know, defining you.

01:10:44Marc:And it's like that has nothing to do with anything.

01:10:46Marc:Yeah.

01:10:47Marc:You know, it's just a malignant attack.

01:10:49Guest:It's a little, yeah.

01:10:51Guest:If there's truth to it, it's a slither of who you are as a human being.

01:10:55Guest:I mean, this is what frightens me about the way things are going with the internet, is that, you know, this tiny slither of somebody's life can lie, you know, like a cancer.

01:11:07Marc:Yeah, define them.

01:11:09Marc:I guess what's more interesting in terms of what you're talking about and the group mentality or mob mentality of it is that pile on thing.

01:11:21Marc:That people that may or may not have anything going on in their life find meaning and satisfaction in the piling on.

01:11:29Marc:I imagine it's not that different than a lynch mob mentality.

01:11:33Marc:And I'm not I'm sure that has been explored by psychologists.

01:11:36Marc:I don't know if you've done any.

01:11:37Guest:Oh, sure.

01:11:37Guest:I've been I've been looking into all of this stuff a lot.

01:11:40Guest:I think that what you know, because, you know, it is what we're saying.

01:11:44Guest:We don't want to think this because it's like to see ourselves as kind of nonconformists.

01:11:47Guest:But when we're piling on to somebody, what we're actually saying is, look at us.

01:11:52Guest:We're normal.

01:11:53Guest:This is the average.

01:11:55Guest:So what we're doing is we're defining normality by becoming furious with people outside of normality.

01:12:04Guest:So that's why I think this is making us a much more... But that's the case with madness.

01:12:08Marc:But it's something else.

01:12:10Marc:If it's justice-driven, that's different.

01:12:13Guest:Right?

01:12:14Guest:Well, everyone who's been publicly ashamed has done something wrong.

01:12:18Guest:But in a way, I mean, I can underwrite this book if I sort of...

01:12:21Guest:don't make that the focus of it.

01:12:23Guest:Because of course they've all done something wrong or they wouldn't have been publicly shamed.

01:12:26Guest:So really it's like the power.

01:12:28Guest:But sometimes doing something wrong is being misunderstood.

01:12:31Guest:Yeah.

01:12:33Marc:Or contextualized as a means to an end.

01:12:38Guest:Yeah.

01:12:39Guest:But you know, public shaming was banned as a punishment in the 19th century because it was too inhumane.

01:12:44Guest:And we were routinely doing something that was banned for being too inhumane in the 19th century.

01:12:51Guest:You know, the victim of that, you know, has no defence.

01:12:55Guest:There's no possibility of re-entry.

01:12:58Guest:At least built into the prison system is they've done their time.

01:13:02Guest:Now they can be allowed to re-enter society.

01:13:05Guest:With public shaming, that possibility of re-entry is narrowed to practically nothing.

01:13:10Marc:You really have to decide if you have the power to sort of publicly shame somebody like on Twitter or whoever you are, you're somebody of prominence that, you know, your moral compass better be very fucking solid, number one.

01:13:23Marc:And also, what are you really getting out of it?

01:13:25Marc:You know, I mean, why are you the judge and executioner?

01:13:28Guest:I think we quite often shame people for the thing that we're most worried that we do ourselves.

01:13:34Guest:I think we feel this kind of dopamine rush when we realize that we're part of a big group of people who all feel the same way.

01:13:44Marc:But it comes from shame.

01:13:45Marc:That's an interesting thing to me.

01:13:48Marc:And that shame can be vague.

01:13:50Marc:But if you're a shaming person,

01:13:52Marc:You're overcompensating because, you know, you feel that way about yourself.

01:13:56Guest:Yeah.

01:13:57Marc:Shame's tricky business.

01:13:58Guest:Yeah, I know.

01:13:59Guest:I know.

01:14:00Guest:You've got, I saw you tweet a copy of the book, Letting Go of Shame.

01:14:03Guest:Yeah.

01:14:04Guest:So you feel this way.

01:14:05Guest:Do you feel like you've got too much shame?

01:14:08Marc:Well, I feel that, you know, my shame is specific and it's body image related, most of it.

01:14:18Guest:Right.

01:14:20Guest:Because you were, because you had this, did you have a sort of fat?

01:14:22Marc:I had a very judgmental mother and whose love was very conditional to, you know, whether or not I looked how she wanted me to look.

01:14:31Guest:Yeah.

01:14:32Guest:I mean, how often would she, I mean, was this like a kind of weekly thing?

01:14:35Guest:Would she make a kind of comment?

01:14:36Marc:It was just, it was an ideology that, you know, she was ideologically anorexic.

01:14:42Marc:because of her own shame of being a fat child right so i was brought up you know without much nurturing and with a constant sort of judgment of whether or not my weight was proper so would you like be putting something in your mouth and then your mother would say something yeah she'd make a little comment yeah do you need that

01:15:00Marc:And that, you know, that goes way back.

01:15:04Marc:So like that, you know, and this is just coming up for me now.

01:15:09Marc:And, you know, how do you deal with that?

01:15:10Marc:That, you know, you literally that the person that was supposed to at least pretend to unconditionally love you was judging you from day one.

01:15:18Guest:Yeah.

01:15:19Marc:So you don't have any context of or I don't have any context of of being nurtured or being anything.

01:15:25Marc:But, you know, I hope she, you know, likes me because, you know, now I'm chubby.

01:15:32Guest:But it doesn't help you to think, well, she did that because she was fucked up.

01:15:35Guest:So it's not personal.

01:15:36Marc:I guess, but how do you, you know, intellectualizing any of this stuff is all well and good, but, you know, how do you effectively, you know, experience the grief of that being taken away from you is the really tricky thing.

01:15:47Marc:Yeah.

01:15:47Marc:I mean, yeah, I can understand a lot of shit, but does that change my behavior?

01:15:52Marc:Does that, you know, does the awareness of it in and of itself facilitate change?

01:15:58Marc:No, because, you know, you have to get in there and tap the emotional processing of it in order to sort of like move through, you know, or you're never going to get back what you what wasn't given you.

01:16:11Marc:Yeah.

01:16:11Guest:So, you know, it's kind of weird because I've I mean, I've basically had a great life from the age of 18.

01:16:18Guest:I'm 46 now.

01:16:19Guest:I've had, you know, I mean, it's been great.

01:16:23Guest:But for some reason, I so often go back to like age 16 to 18.

01:16:29Guest:Two years out of those, you know.

01:16:32Guest:Hell?

01:16:33Guest:Yeah, two years of hell.

01:16:35Guest:Why do we keep going back to that?

01:16:38Guest:You know, why not just be happy with the fact that everything's been great for the last 30 years?

01:16:44Marc:I have that, but I have it with... Because what I found for me is that

01:16:52Marc:Whatever was the emotional resonance of that, that some part of you must have thought you deserved it.

01:17:03Marc:And somehow you got wired to think that whatever that was, was really the truth.

01:17:10Marc:But why do you think you go back to that period between 16 and 18?

01:17:14Guest:I mean, in some ways, I think... I never really think about this.

01:17:16Guest:It's sort of interesting, I think, to think about it.

01:17:18Guest:Like, why?

01:17:19Guest:In some ways, I think it's good, because I think, like, every situation I go into now, like, as a writer, as a journalist or whatever...

01:17:26Guest:I've got this sort of slightly, you know, neurotic, awkward sort of fucked up.

01:17:35Guest:You know, I'm never going to be a completely mainstream part of society because for those two years at, you know, Cardiff High School, I was like being told over and over again that I'm not part of this.

01:17:47Guest:I'm some guy on the edge of it.

01:17:50Guest:But that was the only time that happened?

01:17:51Marc:Yeah.

01:17:51Guest:Yeah, pretty much.

01:17:53Guest:Well, it's maybe three or four years.

01:17:55Marc:But isn't there some party because I'm the kind of guy that I never felt like I fit in?

01:18:02Guest:Yeah, but that's what I mean.

01:18:03Guest:Exactly.

01:18:03Guest:So that stayed with me forever.

01:18:05Guest:So every time I go into a situation now...

01:18:07Guest:And I'm always a little bit mistrustful of somebody.

01:18:10Guest:I'm always wondering... There's a British journalist called Jeremy Paxman who says that every time he interviews a politician, the thought that goes through his head is, why is this bastard lying to me?

01:18:22Guest:And I think those kind of years of having such a rough time at Cardiff High have stayed with me in that way.

01:18:27Guest:It's like every time I go into a situation, it's like if you're fine, if you walk into a room and you're fucking fine and everybody loves you and it's all fine, you're not going to see the world...

01:18:36Guest:It's clearly, as you'll see it, if you have a fucked up teenage years, right?

01:18:42Marc:Or a fucked up, all of it.

01:18:44Marc:Yeah, it stays with you.

01:18:45Marc:So maybe it's good.

01:18:46Marc:But it defines your point of view.

01:18:49Marc:But still, the truth of the matter is that, like in the Psychopath book, I mean, you want to be liked, and you're susceptible to charm.

01:18:59Guest:Certainly am.

01:19:03Guest:Yeah.

01:19:03Marc:So, you're vulnerable like that.

01:19:07Marc:And when you're like that as a teenager, it's almost impossible not to get hurt.

01:19:14Marc:But you seem to be more calculating in that.

01:19:16Marc:What you find is that you get a sort of like, aha.

01:19:22Yeah.

01:19:22Guest:I knew these fuckers were trying to fuck me.

01:19:26Guest:Right, right.

01:19:28Guest:No, I wouldn't say calculate, because I do like people, you know?

01:19:31Guest:Yeah.

01:19:32Guest:I mean, you know, I'd be a terrible writer if all I did was think...

01:19:37Guest:why are these bastards lying to me?

01:19:39Guest:Because I do really like people.

01:19:41Guest:And in fact, the way it's morphed itself over the years, particularly as I've got older, is not like these people are monsters and they're out to fuck me, but we're all fucked, we're all damaged, we're all vulnerable, and let's enter into the situation...

01:19:57Guest:thinking that which is why I'm so against you know public shaming and it's why I'm so against that sort of journalism of humiliation and abuse because implied in all of that is I'm great and you're an idiot whereas everything I do is based on we're all fucked and instead of like trying to have a sort of power game about it let's just accept it and in fact

01:20:21Guest:think it's kind of, you know, like, enjoy it and laugh about it and sort of revel in life's absurdities and kind of de-demonize it that way, you know?

01:20:32Marc:No, no, I'm the same way.

01:20:34Marc:And I feel that that's what I'm looking for, and it is connection.

01:20:38Marc:And, you know, sometimes when you find, you know, to find connection, it's really around those emotional wounds

01:20:50Guest:So if you find yourself like with somebody who's like fine and not at all damaged and everything about them is like fine.

01:20:56Marc:Yeah.

01:20:56Guest:Do you think I've got nothing?

01:20:58Marc:No, it's like good for you.

01:21:00Marc:You know, there's a because no, because I believe that I believe that there are some people that were either, you know,

01:21:07Marc:Had some stability growing up even if they were bad kids or whatever that the one thing that I and I've talked about this before on the show is that you know I didn't have parents that had the fortitude to to discipline or really guide me you know with certain values other than their own panic so You know I think that people that you know if they were up against parents that were somewhat strict or made them do things for their own good

01:21:32Marc:though they didn't realize it, that sometimes those people are a little more stable in a lot of the things that I'm not particularly stable in.

01:21:39Marc:Because I have no confidence around any of that.

01:21:41Marc:I don't know how to be a good loser.

01:21:45Guest:I'll tell you another good thing that's come from all of this, of having a kind of rough teenage years.

01:21:50Guest:is you don't, it took me quite a few years to realize this, but it's okay to be a sort of, it's all right to be an outsider.

01:21:59Guest:It's okay to sort of aim low.

01:22:00Marc:Yeah, it took me a long time to get that.

01:22:01Marc:You think it's aiming low or do you think it's like realizing that there is no normal, that the mainstream or what you're talking about in terms of public shaming, you know, is something that it's not a good part of humanity.

01:22:16Marc:It's not, you know, it's very, it's dismissive, it's cruel, it lacks, you know, a concern, and it feeds something that's very unattractive.

01:22:26Guest:Yeah, and it's okay to just opt out of it.

01:22:29Guest:I remember there's this radio award in Britain called the Sony Award, and every year I get nominated and don't win.

01:22:37Guest:And I started to think it was like a kind of conspiracy to get me into a fucking tuxedo and send me into central London, only to tell me to fuck off back home again.

01:22:45Guest:And one year, about two years ago, I didn't win.

01:22:50Guest:And so I went outside and I saw a friend of mine who'd also just not won, a guy called Adam Buxton.

01:22:56Guest:And we kind of stood outside, you know, the Grosvenor Park Hotel or whatever it's called, Grosvenor House Hotel.

01:23:01Guest:And Adam said, do you know why we never win?

01:23:04Guest:And I said, why?

01:23:04Guest:And he said, because we're marginal.

01:23:07Guest:He said, the people that we like are marginal and it's fine.

01:23:11Guest:And in fact, I've written a film, or co-written a film called Frank, which is about to get it.

01:23:17Marc:Is this a new one?

01:23:18Guest:Yeah.

01:23:19Guest:And it's kind of all really based on that, that we're marginal and it's fine.

01:23:23Marc:What is it about?

01:23:25Guest:It's about when I left Cardiff for a couple of years, I joined a band called the Frank Side Bottom, Oh Blimey Big Band.

01:23:33Guest:And the singer wore a big fake head that he never took off.

01:23:37Guest:with a sort of cartoon face painted on it.

01:23:41Guest:And in his kind of glory years, there was much speculation as to who he was underneath the head.

01:23:48Guest:But you knew.

01:23:49Guest:I knew.

01:23:50Guest:But the first time I met him...

01:23:54Guest:It was like the sound check.

01:23:55Guest:What happened was I was in an office and the phone rang and it was this guy and he's like in a frantic voice saying, you know, we're supposed to be playing tonight.

01:24:02Guest:It's in this entertainment's office in London.

01:24:04Guest:We're supposed to be playing tonight, but our keyboard player's like, yeah, fuck it, we can't make it.

01:24:07Guest:So we're going to have to cancel unless you know any keyboard players.

01:24:12Guest:So I said, I play keyboards.

01:24:15Guest:And he said, well, you're in.

01:24:17Guest:And I said, but I don't know any of your songs.

01:24:21Yeah.

01:24:21Guest:And he said, wait a minute.

01:24:23Guest:And he came back and he said, can you play C, F and G?

01:24:28Guest:He said, yeah.

01:24:29Guest:He said, what are you in?

01:24:30Guest:Soundcheck, five o'clock.

01:24:32Guest:So I kind of got to the soundtrack and I was sort of looking.

01:24:35Guest:These men were there like fiddling with stuff.

01:24:37Guest:And I said, I wonder which one's Frank.

01:24:38Guest:Because I knew that he wore big fake hair.

01:24:40Guest:Didn't know what he looked like.

01:24:42Guest:And then out of the shadows, there's...

01:24:44Guest:This face turns towards me and it's Frank at the soundtrack.

01:24:48Guest:Nobody there, just the band.

01:24:50Guest:And he's wearing his big fake head, just staring at me with this, it's a mobile face.

01:24:56Guest:And I knew that his real name was Chris.

01:24:58Guest:So I said, hello, Chris, I'm John.

01:25:00Guest:Silence.

01:25:02Guest:And I said, hello, Frank.

01:25:05Guest:And he went, hello.

01:25:06Hello.

01:25:06Guest:So I joined this band.

01:25:09Guest:How come I don't know what this band is?

01:25:10Guest:Were they popular?

01:25:11Guest:No, I mean, you know, not.

01:25:13Guest:No, we were never.

01:25:15Guest:I mean, you know, in our kind of glory is we could play to maybe a thousand people a night, like 750.

01:25:20Marc:And this was his gimmick.

01:25:22Guest:Yeah, but it was more than a gimmick.

01:25:24Guest:I mean, it was like it consumed him.

01:25:27Marc:Was it a conceptual conscious piece of art that he was involved with?

01:25:32Marc:Or was he justifying something else?

01:25:34Guest:No, I think it was a kind of conceptual piece about innocence.

01:25:39Guest:He was a kind of innocent figure, Frank.

01:25:45Guest:Anyway, so I was in his band for like three years, and then he fired us all for tax reasons.

01:25:52Guest:He owed £30,000 back tax, and so he had to fire us all.

01:25:56Guest:And then I didn't hear anything from him for like 20 years.

01:25:59Guest:And then the phone rang, and his voice went, Oh!

01:26:03Guest:And I went, Frank.

01:26:04Guest:And he was staging a comeback.

01:26:07Guest:And he said, did I want to write something about my time in the band, you know, to kind of help him with his comeback.

01:26:12Guest:So I wrote this little thing in The Guardian.

01:26:13Guest:And we wrote a film based on this, about a fictional character who wears a big fake head.

01:26:21Guest:And yeah, it's all finished now.

01:26:23Guest:We've got Michael Fassbender playing the man who wears the big fake head.

01:26:27Marc:That's a big deal.

01:26:28Marc:Yeah.

01:26:29Marc:What was compelling to you about the character of that?

01:26:33Guest:I think it was like that night when I kind of turned up at the soundtrack, it was like Alice being plucked from the suburbs to join this band.

01:26:45Guest:It was like Alice through the looking glass, stepping up on stage and being part of this band.

01:26:50Guest:And I think there was that.

01:26:54Guest:And also I think it was like a tribute to marginal people.

01:26:58Guest:You know, however much he might have wanted to make it in the mainstream, and I don't actually know whether he ever really did want to make it, but people like that.

01:27:06Guest:There's certain people out there, however much they want to make it in the mainstream, they never will.

01:27:11Guest:And when they come to that realisation that it's okay...

01:27:14Guest:So it's like a tribute to people like him and to Daniel Johnson and to the Shags and that kind of crowd of people.

01:27:24Marc:But it's interesting that that moment, like some people don't, that was never necessarily their aspiration.

01:27:29Marc:They just couldn't help themselves but to do it the way they do it.

01:27:33Marc:And at some point you have that moment where you're like, why don't more people like me?

01:27:40Marc:And then you have to, what I did was realize, well, I'm not really for everybody.

01:27:45Marc:And if I can find the people that resonate with me, then that'd be nice.

01:27:52Marc:And this facilitated that.

01:27:54Marc:But in the still that you sent me, and in reading your work, all I had to go on

01:28:00Marc:was this picture from this movie and the swipe write-up about Fassbender, you know, an attractive man playing this man who was wearing a mask, but I didn't have any idea of the story.

01:28:11Marc:But having read your stuff, was there any fascination with what people put upon that?

01:28:22Marc:Yeah.

01:28:22Marc:You have this prosthetic that assumes a consistency of appearance and expression and sort of something funny, but people project onto that.

01:28:36Marc:There's a mystery to it, but there's also something interesting about an unchanging...

01:28:41Guest:Yes.

01:28:42Guest:Head.

01:28:43Guest:Yeah.

01:28:44Guest:And in the film, actually in the film, for a little while, because he doesn't want to intimidate people.

01:28:50Guest:Yeah.

01:28:50Guest:So for a little while, he says his facial expressions out loud.

01:28:53Guest:Yeah.

01:28:54Guest:So like welcoming smile.

01:28:56Guest:Oh, really?

01:28:57Guest:Yeah.

01:28:57Guest:I think it's sweet.

01:28:58Guest:Yeah, I wonder whether, I mean, certainly in the film and in real life.

01:29:03Guest:Who directed it?

01:29:04Guest:Lenny Abrahamsen.

01:29:05Guest:He's an Irish director who made Garage and Adam and Paul and What Richard Did.

01:29:12Guest:And I co-wrote it with Peter Straughan, who wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

01:29:15Guest:And he also wrote The Ministeric Goats, which I wrote the book and he wrote the screenplay.

01:29:19Guest:And yeah, I mean, there's no question.

01:29:24Guest:My happiest memories of being in Frank's band in real life was when he would decide for whatever reason to just carry on being Frank.

01:29:32Guest:So it'd be like 2am and we'd be driving up the M6, you know, back towards Manchester.

01:29:37Guest:And I'd be sitting there in a van next to a man wearing a big fake head.

01:29:42Guest:And nothing makes a young man feel more alive.

01:29:45Guest:Yeah.

01:29:45Guest:on an adventure than that.

01:29:50Marc:Did you get to know him beneath the head?

01:29:53Guest:A bit, yeah.

01:29:54Guest:He was always quite secretive about his family when I was in the band.

01:29:59Guest:One time he decided to become more professional sounding.

01:30:01Guest:He went through that thing that we were just talking about where he thought, you know, I need to become more popular.

01:30:06Guest:You know, I can't just go through life with only 750 people in any one town liking me.

01:30:11Guest:So we decided to become more professional.

01:30:13Guest:But not take off the head.

01:30:14Guest:Not take off the head, but getting a saxophone player and a proper guitarist.

01:30:19Guest:And I got a call from the manager saying, Frank wants to rehearse.

01:30:24Guest:And my heart sank, you know, because there was never any need for us to rehearse because we were terrible.

01:30:29Guest:And I thought we were jumping the shark.

01:30:32Guest:And I turned up at his house.

01:30:34Guest:There was a sax player, this kind of bass player that's all funky.

01:30:37Marc:But so, you know, to tie it all in is that

01:30:41Marc:To me, and I think that as I got older, hopefully you become this, but it seems like some people who are creative or have a certain charisma that people like you and I seem to be attracted to seem to have...

01:30:59Marc:made this decision earlier on, either consciously or not.

01:31:04Marc:Usually if it's done consciously for a reason to exploit it, it doesn't hold.

01:31:12Marc:But some people are painfully themselves and can't help it.

01:31:16Marc:And if they're public personalities, there's something very attractive about that.

01:31:21Marc:I know people in my life, certain performers, who fare either horribly or okay, but rarely transcend that level of marginality.

01:31:33Guest:are really the the the most uh you know honest people because they can't help themselves yeah and in fact when you try um be more mainstream and be more professional you just come over it yeah you know it's kind of nuts and nobody likes it at all yeah yeah yeah it's good right yeah and it's a it's kind of mature to come to that realization if you are one of those people that you know fuck it it's enough it's fine yeah it's fine so are we enough

01:32:01Guest:Yeah, this is fine.

01:32:04Marc:All right.

01:32:04Marc:Thanks for talking to me.

01:32:05Guest:Thanks, Mark.

01:32:11Marc:That's it.

01:32:12Marc:That's John Ronson.

01:32:13Marc:I was happy to talk to him.

01:32:14Marc:It is a great book if you're interested in that, The Psychopath Test.

01:32:19Marc:I enjoyed it.

01:32:20Marc:I enjoyed it.

01:32:20Marc:I enjoyed the book.

01:32:22Marc:Look, just go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.

01:32:26Marc:Maybe leave a comment.

01:32:27Marc:Pick up the app.

01:32:28Marc:For you newbies, the app.

01:32:30Marc:Get the free app.

01:32:31Marc:Upgrade to premium.

01:32:31Marc:You can stream all 400 and God knows how many WTFs right into your head.

01:32:36Marc:Just like that.

01:32:38Marc:All right, you guys.

01:32:40Marc:Things are okay.

01:32:41Marc:All right?

01:32:43Marc:Things are okay.

01:32:44Marc:Right?

01:32:45Marc:Boomer lives!