Jon Ronson - Gonzo Journalist For The Digital Age

Full transcript: Jon Ronson on London Real

6:59 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With me today is Mr. Peter Irving, who is a mixed martial arts fighter in London. He’s also a writer for Fighters Only Magazine.

7:08 Your next K1 bout is in what, two weeks? That’s in two weeks time, yeah. on the UCMMA down here in London. Okay, fantastic. Excellent, you would have first met Peter as a guest sitting in that chair about nine months ago.

7:20 The episode’s called The Warrior Poet if you wanna learn all about Pete. It’s a really good one. You’re quite honest on that show. I’m always honest, I don’t need to tell the truth. Fair enough, man.

7:30 And our guest today is Mr. John Ronson, who is a Welsh journalist, a documentary filmmaker, a radio presenter, and a non-fiction author, whose works include The Men Who Stare at Goats, which you might have seen on the movie theaters with Ewan McGregor and George Clooney, the Psychopath Test, which you did a TED Talk about, and your most recent work, which is Lost at Sea, the genre on some mysteries. Welcome to London Real. It’s good to be here, Brandon. Hi there, Peter.

8:00 How are you doing? Honest in what way? That was sort of left hanging as a kind of mystery. Yeah, I just tell the truth, you know. Sometimes people think I’m a little bit cruel, perhaps.

8:10 You were struggling, we asked him a lot of questions about being a fighter and he was just like really honest. You’re like, well, one time I got beat up bad and one time I got this and you know, sometimes you expect from fighters, like the whole, you know, I don’t know, boxing Muhammad Ali, I’m the greatest, but you know, I thought it was really. My son was into, when he was like really young, at four or five, he was into like Jeet Kune Do and round here in fact, it was a guy called Bob Breen.

8:34 Oh yeah, for him. Yeah, who trained with, Dan and Asanta who trained with Bruce Lee. So, you know, he was like, you know, one step away from Bruce Lee and loved it. My son loved it and became incredibly muscular like at the age of five, which was, you know, slightly weird, but had like a six pack. And then one day realized it for the last, you know, year, all he’d really done was the same moves over and over and over again.

8:58 And he kind of went off it for that reason. He realized it was kind of insanely repetitive. And even at Bob Breen, who’s like, as good as it gets, there was still this kind of repetitiveness. Do you find that, do you have to kind of repeat the same movement? Yeah, yeah, I mean, things are different now, you know, that people like, people demand to be entertained, you know, and so you have to give them a variety, which in excess of what’s maybe good for them, you know.

9:22 So actually, especially at, when you’re young, repetition of, repetition of fundamentals and basics is really the essential thing. But people get carried away with, you know, what’s fashionable, especially with like, mixed martial arts was like, Jeet Kune Do’s like the predecessor of. It’s so complex and it’s like, it’s not really one sport. It’s like an amalgamation of many. So there’s so much stuff to cover that you wind up just doing too many things.

9:47 So yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said actually for just making people just roll the basis. But he’s probably talking about like the kata old school journalist where you would do this move all alone on a mat over and over again and then that can be very repetitive. Yeah, yeah, I think so. There’s also the thing that you get negligent teachers just giving people the same thing cause it’s really easy to do and then go, Okay, you can have the next one and drip feeding people information.

10:10 Well, these guys weren’t negligent, and they were amazingly impressive, and he was the star of the class, my boy, but then I guess when you’re obsessively into something, you can obsessively lose interest too, I think. Yeah, definitely. You know, John, I just have to ask, you’ve been called a gonzo journalist, and I just wanted to get your take on being called that. I mean, I think Hunter S. Thompson was the original, I think, and best known.

10:39 And I was just wondering if you could, in your opinion, define causal journalism and then say, is that you? Okay. Well, I think I could be wrong about this, but I think the phrase was invented. I really could be wrong by Ralph Steadman, who was Hunter S. Thompson’s cartoonist.

10:54 Did all the cartoons with me and loathing. But that might be wrong. It might be Hunter S. Thompson. Certainly, you know, Huntress-Thompson’s considered like the first and great God as a journalist.

11:06 And I guess it means two things. It means putting yourself in the middle of the story and making yourself then the prison by which the story is told. And it’s also in Huntress-Thompson’s case about taking a huge amount of drugs and then putting yourself in the middle of the story. So the first, and then he would go to like a police conference in Las Vegas and he’d be off his head on drugs that would be the comedy of it. So the first part of it is true.

11:34 I’ve felt, I’ve always felt that putting yourself in the middle of the story is the most honest way of telling a piece of journalism because when a journalist goes into the room, everything changes, you know, of course, everyone’s different, you know. I’m a rock thrown in a steel pond. So if you pretend that you don’t exist, that’s what’s weird and dishonest. So, and also if I’m going into kind of strange areas, which I do quite often go into kind of shadowy places with mysterious people, it’s kind of nice to have somebody who’s basically normal in the middle of it, you know, to have a, for the reader to kind of connect to somebody.

12:14 And I’m very anxious and neurotic, which is kind of great for the stuff that I write about because like I hung out with psychopaths. So, who are the opposite, who are literally the kind of neurological opposite of an anxious person. So there’s kind of a good sort of comedic reason for me to be in the middle of these stories. But in terms of the drugs, I don’t take them. So that aspect of gonzo journalism isn’t true in my case.

12:43 So. Was that a conscious decision you made in the beginning? But were both of those conscious decisions, were both, one was I am going to be a gonzo journalist as in I’m gonna be part of the story of all my books. And was the second one, I’m not gonna be, I’m not gonna put a bullet in my head like Hunter S. Thompson?

12:56 Yeah, well, I mean, if I ever took drugs, I would just become incredibly maudlin in silence. So I wouldn’t be very good for my stories. I’d just get even more kind of anxious and pathetic. Is the comedy just the side effect of your investigative journalism because the subject matter is inherently funny? Or do you consider yourself a comedian?

13:16 I certainly look for the humor. I don’t consider myself a comedian, but I do always look for the humor. And if I fail to find it, I think I’ve kind of failed. But the humor’s always kind of, it’s always respectful. It’s never, it’s never, and increasingly so as I get older, never at the expense of the person I’m hanging out with.

13:35 The humor, if it’s at the expense of anyone, it’s at the expense of me. Or it’s a kind of shared absurdity, like, aren’t we all nuts? You know, but I don’t consider myself committed. But yeah, it was always deliberate to put myself in the middle of the stories. I found it the easiest way to write, for a start.

13:56 It’s like I get out of a hire car, and I sort of go into a house, and that’s the journey, that’s the kind of adventure, whatever happens, so I find it really easy to write that way. But also, when I started taking myself out of the stories a little bit, I began to get a bit self-conscious about it, and everyone told me to put myself back in, and now I’m just sort of fine with it. I feel like I’ve found a way of writing that just kind of works for me, and telling stories is so hard, that if you find a couple of things that work, you know, just see something.

14:25 I mean, with the psychopath test, I know in that you’ve said, I’ve noticed the change in myself while I’m writing this. And you must have felt that with a few of the books. I know you said- All the good ones, actually. Yeah, it’s funny. You were saying that the men who stare at goats is, in your opinion, not your best work because you didn’t, you said it took a while to actually find the story and you didn’t get immersed as much in that one.

14:45 Yeah, because I’d never allowed myself, well, I never believed that these paranormal things were possible. Okay, ever. You could never take that leap. No, although I do remember one time, I was with these remote viewers, these psychic spies. They were like third generation psychic spies, one called Prudence Calabrese.

15:03 And she told me that this was like when all the sort of post-9-11 stuff was happening and everyone was like on high alert for terrorism. And she told me that London Zoo was about to be destroyed by a dirty bomb. And then I went back to London and a couple of days later I found myself at London Zoo and I was walking through it I was thinking, you know, only I know all these innocent people, they had no idea that, you know, I’m sort of struck with the burden of this terrible knowledge.

15:34 And anyway, it turns out that I worked out why London Zoo wasn’t going to be blown up by deity bong was that in her psychic vision, she said the elephants were screaming in agony. And that was the most painful thing about the psychic vision. And it was only later I realised that like a couple of years earlier, all the elephants at London’s open moved to Whipsnade, so yeah, so that’s what broke the thing for me. But yeah, I couldn’t believe it, I mean, so, so it became, there was a mystery to solve in the Ministeric Goats, and the mystery was, you know, why did this really serious, important place, the U.S. military and the Pentagon, why did they succumb to believing in paranormal things where there was no evidence that any of them would actually work? So there was that mystery. But actually, that mystery was kind of easily solved. I said to this guy called Ray Hyman, a skeptic, you know, why? And he said, well, people are crazy. Everyone is crazy.

16:33 And it was California in the 70s. Yeah. I mean, I loved it. It was a lovely human story, but it didn’t have those kind layers of mystery that my other books I’ve practiced and them have. You don’t start with the mystery and then go to the story, you just start with the subject matter and then look for the story within it. Yes, but if I don’t find the story within the subject matter, I dump it. So for instance, I’ve tried a couple of times to write about the financial world, especially credit cards, but I couldn’t find… So that started with the subject, but then I just couldn’t find the story, I couldn’t find the mystery and so I gave it up. Because Does it have to be a real story or can you make one up?

17:11 Yeah, no, it has to be a real story and it has to be also I do set myself difficult difficult parameters It has to be a real mystery that I really don’t know the answer to so a really good example of that is the psychopath test where you’ve got all these psychologists and psychiatrists who all believe that that literally believe that psychopaths rule the world, that this is a brain anomaly that’s so powerful, it’s actually remolded society or wrong, and capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior, and that means that basically these very damaged people, psychopaths, are actually influencing world events. And that kind of struck me as like an enormous thought. And I thought, in a sort of flash, I thought, A, is that true?

18:03 B, can I prove it? Because actually none of these people had never done what I then thought I had to do, frightening as it sounded, was learn to become a psychopath spotter and then journey, like do a course, and then journey into the corridors of power to try and spot psychopaths in high places. And so immediately that was frightening to me and genuinely mysterious. And so suddenly it all fell into place, like, well, this is a book that has to be written. I can’t remember if you drew a conclusion at the end.

18:34 Well, I mean, I’m such a liberal that the conclusion I drew was like, it’s sort of true. One of the things I like about your books is that you sort of leave it a lot out there for you to draw your conclusions and just sort of present the evidence in a very personal way. And then, you know, the other thing I liked as well was that you sort of unite all these pretty disparate stories. When I came to explain what the psych, what was in the psych path test, I was thinking, David Shale and stuff. It wasn’t a psychopath at all. And I remember reading through it thinking like, this seems perfectly, perfectly. I thought it was great. And then when I came back to think about what was in there, I think, how did you string that together, which I thought was a real skill.

19:11 And then when I read criticism for this, you know, actually the Guardian themselves, which I thought was a bit cruel, considering. Yeah. Oh, no, they love to. They don’t understand like, that’s because it works. Yeah, yeah. So I thought I was going to mention the A Gill as well, which I thought would get you started on that. But yeah, that’s what I thought was great. And then that’s what seemed to be the thrust of criticism that does get thrust your way.

19:37 And I think, you know, it’s a fine line. You know, when you tell, I think, I only knew this word because Louis Theroux used it to describe the first book then, he said it was picaresque. And I think picaresque is the word that’s used for telling that sort of journalism, when you’re kind of on a journey and you meet people like Don Quixote, you know, and you kind of form a sort of narrative for meeting these disparate people. And I agree, I think it’s a fine line. And when you get it right, it’s great. But it’s very, very easy to get it wrong. The David Shailer thing, actually, you’ve pinpointed the thing that I’m most… To this day, I can’t work out. It’s kind of a strange chapter towards the end of the psychopath test where it does feel like it’s taken an odd turn and I’m still kind of for me the jury is still slightly out about whether that was right to be in the book. It seemed reasonable at the time when I was reading it and then I couldn’t figure out what it was doing there after the fact. Well I can tell you what it was doing there and it’s that and it sort of answers the previous question about whether I do think the psychopaths or the world. What I began to realize was that in becoming a trained psychopath spotter it had sort turned to me a little bit psychopathic. I was spotting psychopaths everywhere. I was like shoving everybody into a box marked psychopath. And I was trying to reduce everybody to their

20:57 Modest edges. It was a really, you know, it was a kind of ethical, it was kind of morally problematic. Who have you spotted? Well, you mentioned AIG earlier, yeah. Classic psychopath.

21:06 Who is that, by the way? He’s a critic. He’s the times that we critic. I’ve never actually seen him, but I saw a picture of him. He’s a dandy.

21:18 Did it take a few months after the book was finished to where your psychopath radar eased off a little bit? Well, no, it happened in the book, actually. It was a sort of moment for me, because yeah, the first thing I did after becoming a professional, well, I wouldn’t say professional, but certainly certified, because I have a certificate of attendance, psychopath spotter, was, instead of thinking, you know, will I put these powers to philanthropic good? I thought, no, what I’ll do is think about all the people in my past who have crossed me to see which of them I could out a psychopath. So obviously, the first on first was a girl who he’d written a he’d just written this column in the Sunday Times, saying that he’d shot a baboon on safari because like all of us he wondered what it would be like to shoot a person which is classic psychopath. Plus he gives all my television documentaries very bad reviews which is classic psychopath. So actually I put some of this in the book and then I bumped into him at an award ceremony about a year later and he came bounding up to me and he said you know I hear you put me in your book I would never sue another journalist And I said, you know how you said you weren’t shot up a boon on safari?

22:34 Because like all of us, you wondered what it’d be like to shoot the person. I said, that’s not all of us. It’s not a normal thing to think. It’s just you. And he said, well, you don’t come, so you wouldn’t understand.

22:47 So I said, I sell more books than you do. That’s exactly what I say. No, no, no, that actually means that I won. Okay. But anyway, so I became this sort of chronic, because I don’t know if I didn’t say he was a psychopath, but I became like drunk with my psychopath spotting powers. And then I realised at one point that this is something that journalists do a lot, you know, we utilise the maddest edges of somebody’s personality and then we kind of stitch them together, leave the normal stuff on the floor and create this sort of slightly grotesque version of people and it’s what you know so much journalism is based on and it’s not you know something that we don’t like to talk about but it’s and we know it’s true and we know it’s a bit odd so the reason I put the David Shaler chapter in there was because I wanted to write a story about that very point about how when David Shaler who is it who is he by the way okay I’m innocent in itself an amazing story he’s an mi5 former mi5 spy became a whistleblower went to prison for whistleblowing then came out as like a leader of the conspiracy, the 9-11 conspiracy movement and got written about an awful lot and then came out again and said he was the son of God and it sort of dropped off. The chapters it’s about looking for the right sort of madness it’s like why did one sort of madness be entertaining for everybody and another sort of madness became a little bit sort of sad for people. So I was trying to dissect why journalists

24:28 Utilise certain sorts of madness for the purposes of entertaining people, whereas other sorts of madness are a bit too scary or feel too exploitative to write about. It was a section of the book which I called the right sort of madness. I don’t know if I’ve explained myself properly. No, I think you have. No, I think essentially what you say about journalists, especially you being one of them, how you do peace, take those pieces out of people. And then if you, And then when you realize that it’s not the right thing to do, because it’s not, what do you then do about it?

24:58 How do you then continue to make, to tell good stories about people when you’re deliberately not caricaturing them and you’re deliberately trying to bring the normal stuff, the empathetic human ordinary stuff back into the story. So that’s… But does that sell? Well… Or does that have to be done in the exact perfect way?

25:16 Yeah, it doesn’t always sell. This is the problem, you see, I made this documentary a few years ago about the Alpha Course, which is teaching agnostics how to become Christians, and I was so careful to make everybody in it seem lovely, and no one watched it, no one liked it. But I think I’ve reached a really good place now where I can write about people in a totally, in a way that doesn’t humiliate them whatsoever. It’s really, it’s a full rounded human character portraits It doesn’t shy away from putting in people’s absurdities, but it’s always, you know, what’s always at the heart of this is the realisation that we’re all absurd, and if we put ourselves above them, then we’re lying to ourselves.

26:00 And now I feel like I’ve actually managed to do all that in a way that people also want to read. Do you ever picture your publicist something and say, I’m thinking about doing this, and they’ll be like, it’s not John Ronson enough, it’s not weird enough. Well I sort of, well actually funnily enough I censored myself with this credit card book I was trying to write. I spent months and months and months trying to write a credit card, a book about credit cards before the financial collapse and my American publisher keeps reminding me that if I’d carried on with the book it would have come out just when all the banks collapsed and I would have been a financial collapse success story.

26:41 But I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t make these people light up the page, they were too boring. I’d like to think now though, it’s now what, four or five years later, and I’d like to think now that I’ve matured enough as a writer that if I tried it again now, I could do it. I wouldn’t need to go to somebody, to the weirdness of somebody, to make it a good and entertaining story. Okay. It strikes me that with editing, you can make anybody look really, you know, pretty crazy or pretty bad.

27:09 I don’t think about like if somebody followed me around and then just showed highlights. I’d look fucking nuts, you know. But you know, it’s, yeah. And it’s a real, it’s a problem, you know, it’s… Sometimes I think when I see like Louis Theroux, is the comparison reasonable?

27:27 It’s funny, for years and years, I think both me and Louis, but definitely me. Well, who is Louis for anyone who doesn’t know that’s listening? He’s, he’s, a lot of people compare the two of us, he’s a documentary maker, I mean doesn’t write much and and I don’t do hardly any TV anymore but we write very similar subjects. In fact to the extent that one time I was in this white separatist compound that was like so far into the middle of nowhere that it took us like eight hours to get there and it wasn’t a shop for you you know for like 76 miles was the nearest store and I turned up and the first thing somebody said as we got out of the car was oh we had to let me through here last week That’s how much the two of us are kind of connected and for ages I think we were both slightly, we were very aware of each other because we were forever being compared to each other but now that we’re older we’re sort of borrowing about it now but anyway yeah you’ve said that. I just I don’t know I like Ruth through it, I’m a fan but he’s sort of the stuff that he gets criticized for is that he sort of comes across a little bit coy and so deliberately naive but he clearly knows what he’s up to and then he graciates himself with people and gets them to reveal their weirdness.

28:38 That’s like a mechanism to make them drop their guard, or at least that’s what he’s criticized for. I don’t know, I find you more a little bit warm under your subject. Well, I think both me and Louis, as we’ve got older, have got much better at not doing that. And in fact, you know, the latest stuff that Louis done, he’s done some incredibly, I mean, the last couple of years, he’s done some really interesting stuff. In fact, very similar stuff.

29:08 Once again, I saw him at a party when I was just finishing the psychopath test, and I said to him, you know, please don’t write that, please don’t make a film about psychopaths, it was a bad thing. Because we’re constantly doing the same thing, you know, he made something about over-medication, over-medication of children in America, and I write about that in a psychopath test. He did something about these civil commitment centers for pedophiles in America.

29:34 It’s this extraordinary thing that, and Fay connected to the psychopath test actually again, that if you score high on certain checklists, if you’re a convicted pedophile and you score high on certain checklists, which are quite often taken in your absence, you’re not invited to take part in your own diagnosis, and then it’s considered that you’ve got a much greater and higher reoffending, you know, possibility, once your prison sentence is done, you’re kind of taken from prison and taken to these civil commitment centers, which are like something out of one foot of the cookie’s nest, and you kind of shove there for the rest of your life. And which obviously, if everything I just said is true, you know, you could say, well, yeah, that’s fine. But a lot of people who work at these civil commitment centers are utterly convinced, and you’ll see a lot of them in interviews to the press over the years, that a huge number of these people in this prison are of no threat to the public.

30:32 They did their prison time and they should be let out and yet they’ll probably spend the rest of their lives in these kind of airless places. And so Louis went, I write a bit about that in the Psychopath Test and Louis went into one of those places and made a documentary about it, which is quite a lot about the sort of tyranny of the relationship between psychiatrists and these patients and how the patients had to act in a certain way towards the psychiatrists who were these kind of nurse ratchet types. It was really chilling, and there was nothing in those documentaries that were sort of morally problematic as far as the way Louis dealt with people.

31:07 So I think he and I have both, I think, yeah, if I’m being totally honest, you know, like, you know, taken on board that criticism, actually. Is psychopath movie material, and I also wanna know what it was like to be on the goats set and to watch one of your, I don’t know if you call it babies, be made into a movie with real actors and it was quite a big production. So yeah, the two questions. It was a psychopathic movie and do you want it to be? Well, yeah, I’ve actually, it’s been developed by a few people, Manda Posey and Fanola Dwyer, who made an education.

31:48 And in fact, they’re making another nickel thinkers, Amanda’s also happens to be married to Nick Colby and they’re doing A Long Way Down which is another Nick Colby film and there’s also some American, some Hollywood interest in that as well and it’ll end up being something very different from the book because the book isn’t obviously a filmable, it’s a movie thing. Right, how did you feel about the adaptation of Men of Thera Court? I liked it, I thought it was kind of very warm-hearted and kind batty in a sort of sweet sort of amateurish way and some of the jokes were were really really funny. I really liked it and it sort of divides people I think some people really love it. If I’m ever on Twitter I’ve got stare at goats as a saved search on Twitter and then once in a while I mean I wouldn’t say like you know what maybe once a month I sort of just click on stare at goats and have a look at the last eight hours and it’s always the same thing is always half the people say I just saw The Men’s Day It Goes, you know, funniest movie I’ve ever seen and I’ve just seen The Men’s Day It Goes, that’s the worst film I’ve ever seen. I’m surprised that it divides people’s…

32:54 Is that because they’ve read the book and they didn’t like the adaptation or… I don’t know what it is that they don’t like about it. I think I prefer that and we’re already going, that was average. Yeah, you definitely get huge sway. And being on the set, it was funny so I…

33:10 Do you have a lot of control or did you have a lot of control? No control, zero. Okay. Is that because it was one of your first books to sell? I mean, like, if you do Psychopath, will you have more control?

33:19 I’d have some more control, and there’s a couple of things that I’d be really adamant about with Psychopath Test, and one is that it doesn’t… It’s not a movie that just sort of blindly says, Psychopaths, Secretly of All the World. My book is as much a book about the sort of tyranny of labelling and diagnoses, and you know the psychiatry and the sort of madness industry in general has got this kind of increasing desire to label what’s essentially normal human behaviour is a mental disorder. So it’s as much about the tyranny of the label as it is about the tyranny of psychopaths and I think any film would have to reflect both aspects of those. Psychopaths are really… Tom Cruise will want to put you in that.

34:03 Well there’s a bit of anti-sanctology, well not anti-sanctology but the Scientology is in the book as well. But they like it actually, funnily enough, the Scientologists are kind of happy with the book, so maybe would be. But I was gonna say, so yeah. Goats. Well, I was just gonna say quickly about the psychopath test.

34:21 It’s a very sort of fine line with the psychopath test because psychopaths definitely exist and they definitely harm a lot of people both physically and also psychologically also in terms, you know, if you get one at the top of the business, it can turn the entire business because that’s so charismatic. It can turn the entire business into a sort of manifestation of psychopathy. But the complete opposite side of that is true, which is people are way too ready to label people as psychopaths. So the book is complicated because it’s got a lot of time for these two polar extremes of opinion. And so, you know, any film would me to reflect that. You’re in a screen play, like an actual direct screen play. Yeah, which is just, they’ve finished filming and they’re editing it now. It’s called Frank and it’s about being in a band. It’s a comedy about, when I was in the 80s, I was in a band called The Frank Side, Bottom O’Blimey, big band. I was like, I was like Alice in the Looking Glass. I was kind of plucked from the suburbs to being this mad band. Where was this?

35:32 Well I was actually, well I was the entertainment officer of Central London Polytechnic. One day I was in my office and the phone rang, sort of frantic voice near the end of the phone going, we’re supposed to be playing it at college night, it says Frank Seibach is manager, we’re supposed to be playing it at college night but our keyboard player has had a breakdown, I can’t remember if it was a breakdown, it was ill or something, our keyboard player is ill, can’t make it, so we have to cancel unless you know any keyboard players, so this kind of silence that I went, I play keyboards and he went, whoa you’re in? And I said, but I don’t know any of your songs. And he went, wait a minute. I said, then he came back to the phone, he said, can you play CFNG?

36:21 And he said, whoa you’re in? So that’s how I joined the band. And it was this lovely sort of sort of Alice in the Looking Glass moment, you know, so that was the starting point of the film, but we completely fictionalized our Frank. We started saying things that were, there was a couple of reasons why we had to go slightly away from the truth. The main reason being that the real Frank Seibot loved the chaos, you know, we loved it when everything went crazy, and I was actually not the easiest thing to write about because the stakes were really low then.

36:56 Like if everything went wrong, if the guy didn’t mind, it’s like, where’s the kind of stakes, you know? So we changed that aspect to Frank and then we started changing more and more. And also Frank, Chris who played Frank is dead now, but before he died, he was like, he didn’t want it to be the Chris Seavey story. He didn’t wanna, you know, he wanted it to be fictional. So we fictionalized it.

37:21 So now our Frank is a fictional character, but very much inspired by Frank Seidman. And that’s been shot, that movie’s in the can. Been shot in the can of editing it now. In fact, I’m straight after this, I’m going to Dublin, I’m gonna drop in on the edit, the editing it in Dublin. What was it like writing a screenplay?

37:36 I loved it. It was really hard for the first couple of years, this was like five years, when I had to kind of relearn how to write because I’ve never written anything like that before. But I wrote it with Peter Straughan who wrote Menestee at Goat’s movie, and he wrote Tinkertail of Soldier Spies. So he kind of taught me, you know, he kind of taught me a lot. And then Lenny Abrahamson, the director, came along and he became, you know, the third writer and he taught me a lot too.

38:06 And then when it sort of adapted in my head, like I can take all the things I do well in nonfiction and like move them into this new thing. You probably never collaborated before on a writing project. No, never. That must be weird. It was weird, I was definitely the quietest.

38:20 We’d have these conference calls. made me realize how conference calls and sort of brainstorming sessions are terrible for the introvert because we’d have these like 45 minute conference calls where I’d be like, like Peter and Lenny, because, no, we had this, ah! And I’m like, totally silent for like 45 minutes. But no, it was all great. I mean, Peter and Lenny are both genuinely brilliant people.

38:45 I mean, you know, Ticker Taylor’s older spire, you know, everyone loved him. Peter really is a brilliant screenwriter. Lenny is a brilliant director. So I was incredibly lucky to have him. And then were you on set for that movie as well?

38:57 Only for two days. The things, there is no place. I mean, people always surprise me with a writer. There’s no place for the writer, you know? And in fact, I think they actively, I think you’re actually not wanted.

39:10 It’s not like not only that there’s no place, you’re actually not wanted. And The Irish Times interviewed Michael Fassbender about our Frank film. They went onto the set and they said to Michael Fassbender, have you met John Ronson? He went, no. And he said, why, you know, why did you not wanna meet the writer?

39:27 And he said, because films can’t be one person’s voice, it’s too easy. I mean, I would love to go on a film set and tell everybody exactly what to do, but that’s not how films work, you know? Michael Fassbender has to be the author. Lenny Abramson has to be the author. Donal Gleason, you know, everybody has to be the author.

39:44 It’s like a relay race. You know, you can’t give the baton to somebody and then frantically run after that person to try and get the baton back, you know. Good analogy. Yeah, so film has to work that way and it’s unrightly so and that is what it is. So you were on the set of Goats and you…

40:02 I did nothing, I stood there for two days. The first day it was like, oh my God, the author’s on the set. Oh, how nice to meet you. And then the second day I was like, why is the author still on the set? So in fact, me and Peter went to the beach and stared and started writing Frank.

40:14 Okay, but the screenwriter’s on set or not? No, no. I don’t wanna hear that either. Pass the baton on to the director. Exactly.

40:20 Exactly. And, you know, really, I’m not, I really think, and rightly so, you know, I really think that. I listened to some interview, I think it was Schwarzenegger who said, once you choose the director of the film, you have to give it to him. Yeah. And no matter what you think it should be or anything, unless you give them ownership as the director of the film, then you’re going to get this, you know, crappily manifested mixture of everyone’s version and it doesn’t come out right.

40:47 Absolutely, and there always has to be a kind of leader. I mean, apparently in television drama, it’s the writer. The writer has the power that the director has in film. So it’s kind of strange that that’s happened in film. But you know what, it’s not strange.

41:01 And I tell you why it’s not strange because in film it is all about pacing and aesthetics and mood and tone, and all that stuff is created by the director. And then I don’t think TV has really got the time, it to to create like incredible tone and look and and so what TV is very good at is story and so that’s why the kind of writer is king in TV. That’s why psychopaths should be a TV show like Game of Thrones like ten episodes and you can really get into all the ideas because if you try to like get all these really weird perspectives that you have and try to cram it into a two-hour film it I don’t know if it’s got to be done really well otherwise they’re not going to get all the nuance you’re talking about I don’t think. Yeah although when it does work it works and I produce it no I mean when it works when film works it works brilliantly right but it’s something it’s more simple and I mean you know for me the greatest film of the last five or ten years by by mile is let the right one end the Swedish yeah and you see the remake you see the American remake I deliberately I didn’t want to heartbroken did you I watched a bit of it and yeah you know you know if you hadn’t seen the original it would been an entertaining movie, just like with Dragon Tattoo. If you hadn’t seen the original, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but I saw both of the originals. I liked them quite the way they were.

42:20 Right. Well, you know, look at that film. You can write the plot of that film in one line. I won’t do it because I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but it’s the most beautiful emotion that hits you on such a level, and it’s a very simple story. And so film can work, the simplicity of film can work really well if it’s done right.

42:38 Was it not based on a book? was, and he wrote the screenplay actually, unusually I think for most times. Nicombe said to me, I should never adapt to one of my own stories, because you spend ages building the castle and then you have to knock it all down to rebuild it in a different way. Do you ever find it to be right in fiction? Well Frank actually, it’s so far from the true Frank Seibert story now that it is fiction.

43:07 It was hard though, because like, you know, if I was writing about this, you know, for the minute I walked in, everything that happened would be my material, you know. And, but you know, you walk into a room in fiction and there’s no fucking room, there’s nothing. It’s like, you can do anything in that room. And it was the, it was the infinity of fiction that freaked me out so much when I started writing Frank. If I wanted to, I could put my Frank, I could have him jump in the air and land on Jupiter.

43:36 I mean, I couldn’t have done that because of the budget, but, you know, theoretically you can do anything. And I found that infinity like completely overwhelming. Like some boundaries. Yeah, but then the further, what I realized that was so revelatory for me was that, you know, so you begin to create these characters and then, you know, so then when Frank starts acting that way, you begin to realize, well, he wouldn’t act in another way. So, so you do start creating boundaries.

44:02 It’s all about creating boundaries and the further into the process you get, the more it becomes like journalism because the more stuff is then existing to be molded. What’s New York like? You moved there nine months ago. Part of me thinks that the evolution of John Ronson, of course he must have to move to New York because it’s a sea of more ideas, but is that why you moved there, and what did you think? I have no idea why we moved there.

44:26 Honestly, it was like completely on a whim. And for the first five months, I was so, I hated it so much. It was like, you know, we were finding it hard to adapt and it was unbelievably cold and you’ve never experienced cold till you’ve lived through a New York winter. It’s unbelievable. I felt like I was being attacked by the weather.

44:48 So I’d have all these kind of difficulties, lots of personal difficulties that then to try and solve I had to like get through you know these vicious vicious weather and I kind of hated it I was really so I’m very miserable you know to the extent that I did this TV show when I was there and I can’t watch it back because I just look so unhappy and then I know and then but then something happened around we’re like mid-may now we moved in August end of August and something happened around March well like everything got better you know the weather got better and all our problems or our sort of difficulties disappeared friends make a few friends yeah well I sort of knew some people anyway and I’m doing some stuff for this American life which I’ve been doing stuff for you know I sort of feel like I belong there and and suddenly I kind of really love it I really love the fact that you can wear shorts all summer and how does that affect your creativity, do you?

45:49 Well, I mean, I’m still writing frantically and anxiously and thinking that it’s all going to collapse. Is it cool whether, or pop whether it didn’t make any difference to that? There’s no happiness or unhappiness, so do you find some use of that? Happiness, definitely. I was so much of it.

46:03 Better ideas are born out of happiness. Actually, no, better ideas are probably born out of unhappiness. So probably creatively, having such a miserable time. You’re thinking that the whole time, like, oh, this one’s just horrible. It’s going to pay big dividends in my writing in one year.

46:16 I wish I could have found something to hold on to, but it was nothing. I started hating it so much that even the words New York written on a piece of paper would like, fill me with misery, but I’m really glad we stuck it out because suddenly I really love it. I feel you, I lived there for many years and I find it to be really intense when I go back, almost sensory overload sometimes, just with all the taxis and the traffic and everything. It’s just like on all the time and sometimes it’s great when I was younger, but no, I just find it a little crazy, but…

46:48 Right, where did you live? I was in East Village. Oh, it was the best place to live. Yeah, it was fun down there, always. And it’s kind of low rise, and it’s, every place is different, but…

46:56 Well, it’s the last place, and the Lower East Side seems to be the last place that hasn’t been julianied up into some sort of, you know, overly safe. Yeah, it’s probably there now. You probably have to go into Brooklyn and East Place, although some parts of Brooklyn are probably becoming… Yeah, my god, you should… Are you on the lookout for madness there when you’re going around?

47:15 The same way that we were looking for psychopaths, you just always look for weirdness or? Well, there’s definitely a lot of madness near where I live. I did begin to think that it’s the place where people yell at nothing. But is there madness? I always wonder in Manhattan, is there madness there anymore?

47:31 Because it seems all built up and everything’s been pushed out, so do you have to go into Queens and we’re in deep into Brooklyn to find the real crazy people that used to be on Avenue B 15, 20 years ago? Well, there’s different sorts of craziness in Ashley. I think one thing that’s really happened in New York, which I’m not gonna write about, a thought for a while, whether I should write about it or not, is this incredible pressure of our own kids, not just in private schools, but in public schools as well, to be excellent.

47:58 There’s a madness in New York about the pursuit of excellence, which really surprised me. Because over here, if you fail maths, that’s a while because it’s something else. But over there, there is a kind of pursuit of excellence, which I think puts an incredible pressure on everybody and it’s become a sort of self-perpetuating thing which really surprised me actually. I think kids kill themselves. There’s a fantasy school not too far from where we’re living called Dalton, where a kid, and I know this happens all over the world, but it felt, it did feel like a very New York story to me.

48:35 A kid wasn’t prepared for a Latin test, so he cheated and then he was caught cheating and he immediately went upstairs to the roof and jumped off. And as I say, I know that happens all over the place, but, and then conversely, you’ve got this thing called stop and frisk, you know, this NYPD policy, where the kids who aren’t the excellent ones, you know, the kids who are kind of deemed problem kids by virtue of, you know, their color or where they live, are being stopped and frisked like every day on the way home from school. and it’s unapologetic.

49:16 Is that just a New York city, right? I wonder where else it goes. When I heard that, I was like, I didn’t think that was constitutional in America, but apparently they can, and then they try to limit it to suspicious people, and then obviously there’s a for racial profiling. It’s total racial profiling. Seems really horrible to me.

49:31 Yeah, it’s people who don’t look like, well, and in fact, gentrification, I’ve asked a little bit about this in this piece, I’ve just wrote about internet outlaws. You know, they sort of gentrify the cities, and then move everybody into the ghettos and then police the ghettos, they stop and frisk. So basically, if you’re in Queens, if you’re in Astoria, Queens, you’re like a mile away from Hipster, Brooklyn, and it’s like, if you don’t look like a preppy hipster, you don’t actually even have to be black, you just don’t, it’s like if you just look like a kid who’s not a preppy hipster, you’re stopped and frisked on your way from school, you know, maybe three or four times a week.

50:13 Don’t think that’s limited to America. I know it happens. See a phenomenon here. It’s true that like the London riots, if you ask kids why they rioted, they would say, you know, we felt humiliated by constant police aggression. So I agree with you.

50:30 But again, it feels like a very New York thing and… Also the police in New York feels very aggressive. They do carry themselves in an aggressive way. And it is a definitely don’t mess with us type of aura that hits you, I feel. I didn’t know they could stop and frisk in the UK.

50:48 That’s something I can’t do. It was, it was happening, it was definitely happening sort of around the riots and before the riots. And a kid said that was the reason for the rioting, I think, or a version of it. I don’t know, I’m slightly on it. Do your fans think you’ve sold out by moving to New York?

51:03 Do you get any flak or do you care? I have no flak, I mean, it’s a great story. And I come back here every kind of eight weeks. I’m here for the rest of the week, so I feel like I’m living in both places, actually. But I think it’s really interesting about America then, also about New York, because there’s no welfare state, so, which is obviously a very bad thing, you know, and people have to pay a fortune on health insurance and stuff like that.

51:27 But in the absence of all of that stuff, you have this rather lovely sort of community thing where people, like every weekend, you get like sort of, you know, cake sales for cancer and it doesn’t justify the lack of a welfare state but what it does do is bring out, it’s bring out something really nice in people that they, and so you start to see like, so in the winter when the freezing cold is like biting me, all I could see was the dark stuff, you know, the stock and frisk, this kind of almost this kind of horrific pursuit of success and excellence, the lack of an NHS, the lack of a welfare state. But now the weather’s starting to be nice. I’ve started seeing like the good things now, you know?

52:12 I mean, they’re more generous there because the state isn’t being generous. Yes. People kind of fill the gap. I’m not saying that people aren’t generous where there is a welfare state, but that is what’s happening in New York in a way that I’ve found really pleasant. I never saw a lot of generosity when I was there, but maybe I was younger or.

52:27 Or maybe it’s like a newer thing. I just didn’t see, I don’t know. You know, you’ve done so many art forms, I know people know that you do, You’ve done a lot of radio, you do documentaries, you’ve now written a movie, you’re obviously right. Is there any form of media that you enjoy more than the others right now? Yeah, definitely books.

52:45 I think it’s a thing I do best and understand the most and just enjoy the most actually. Is making a documentary difficult? Yeah, I never thought I was, I made a few good documentaries. I made about 20 documentaries And I’d say maybe about five of them were good. That’s a lot of documentaries.

53:06 But it also means that 15 of them were a bit shit. And so I began to realize I was just better at writing books. I was just better. I felt self-conscious on camera. And it meant that I wasn’t sort of, my mind wasn’t flowing as well as it would do if I, you know, if I’m interviewing, if I’m here just with my iPhone, I feel, I don’t feel in the least bit self-conscious.

53:30 I can sort of immerse myself in a story. But with a camera, I started to feel self-conscious, so yeah, so that’s a reason why. Other projects on the horizon for you, or can you talk about that stuff? I’m writing two books at the moment. I’m writing one, I don’t wanna talk about it all, and another one.

53:49 In case we’ll be through next time. I’m writing a book about humiliation. And it’s actually after like two years banging my head against the wall it’s actually it’s actually coming together now so yeah it’s about humiliation. Wow okay. Yeah I feel like I’m the right person to write about humiliation. Why is that? It’s something you know it’s a weird you know I sort of you know it’s a paranoia in my life the fear of being humiliated and also you see it you start to see it in other places you start the power of humiliation, the way that, you know, just the importance of humiliation in society. I don’t want to talk much more about that.

54:40 As a writer, do you find it gets easier after you’ve been able to sell successfully a bunch of books, or do you find it’s more difficult for you personally? It buys you more time, because if your books are selling, then, you know, it means, I I mean it buys you a little bit more time because it means that you’re getting some royalty checks so you’re not like desperate to finish something because you’re you know it’s still you know you’re making a bit of money for your previous books and it also buys you more time because I mean the publishers have to trust you that you’ll only deliver a book when it’s what it’s good because you don’t want to let people down I mean you know I would never deliver a book that I don’t think is you know that I wouldn’t feel proud stand up on stage and talk about I think if I did that you know everyone would rightly go off me so so that’s the easy stuff and the hard stuff I think is that the older I get and the more mysteries I solve in my mind I can’t go back there so I can’t go back to the paranormal world or the military because the men stay at goats I can’t really go back to the conspiracy world because of them I feel like I understand what conspiracy theories are all about now. I can’t go back to the mental health world although I might actually go back to the mental health world because it’s so big and wonderful and you know fascinating so that’s that’s one exception. But it does mean that the amount of things you can

56:07 Write about slightly diminish as you understand the world more because I could only write about something I don’t understand. I don’t know why that is but for some reason that’s okay. Well, it makes you the accessible point again, doesn’t it, you know, if you’re the newcomer. Yeah, but there are writers, aren’t there, who write about exactly what they know. You know, you get like historians who write lots and lots of books about a period of history that they know like the back of their hand, but for some reason with me it has to be a world I don’t know and want to learn about.

56:40 That’s like your style, I think. People kind of want to see you jump into this new world, get submersed in it find out what’s crazy how it affects you what’s and then it’s a good then like report back to us yeah and sort of funny stories about serious important things as well you know yeah exactly you did this um uh robbie william’s uh you know uh radio 4 show where he was going to the ufo’s and i just wondered how you got hooked up with him and how you enjoyed that process yeah it was it was really great actually that i um let’s check the time and we’re fine yeah okay yeah we’re good Yeah, I got a call out of the blue in about 2005 actually from Robbie Williams, who actually from Catlamaran, the writer, who said, stand by your phone, Robbie Williams is going to phone you.

57:27 And then I thought to myself, well, I don’t, I’m too, I find that too stressful. So what I’m going to do is turn my phone off, and then if he wants to leave a message, that’s fine. So I did, I turned my phone off. I went out for dinner, I came back and there was this really long message from Robbie Williams. That’s good advice for any anxiety management. Just turn off the phone.

57:47 Yeah, exactly. And him saying that he wanted to spend it out in a haunted house. And could I set one up for him? And he was a fan of… This is because in my first book, Them, he was a big fan of.

57:58 And I knew that already because in the Chris Heath biography of Robbie Williams, he goes off to his hotel room and reads Them. So I knew he liked the book. I can kind of see that your agenda is not cynical, but it appeals to cynics. If I was Robbie Williams, I’d be thinking, I might come off looking bad here. Well, actually, Robbie’s sort of perfect because he’s really, he’s got a foot in both camps.

58:23 He’s got a foot in the believer camp and also a foot in the skeptic camp, and I think that’s why he liked me actually, is because he felt that I wasn’t a kind of hardcore I mean, I sort of am, I’m much more sceptic than a believer, but I’m not, I don’t attack believers, you know, I sort of, you know, it’s like a shared, you know, empathy of the kind of craziness of the world. So anyway, so we wanted to spend a night in a haunted house and I said I’d set one up, so I started like frantically calling up all these ladies of the manor, emailing them like, dear lady blah blah, I read that if the portrait in the odd drawing room is is moved, a ghost apparently manifests itself. I’ve recently been contacted by the pop star, Robbie, so I think, you know, can we spend, can I spend it out in your house?

59:13 And I thought I wouldn’t hear that from anyone, but 100% of the people who, who I contacted emailed back straight away to say, you know, yes, Robbie can come whenever he likes. I said, I wrote about it and said, like they were throwing their ghosts at Robbie’s if they were their debutante daughters. Anyway, then Robbie changed his mind and said he didn’t want to spend a night in a haunted house after all, so I could have got a bit grumpy and thought, you know, no wonder Robbie Williamson ghosts get on so well, they only ever manifest themselves in the suits.

59:48 But then we kept talking and I liked him a lot and went to stay with him in LA and spent a week sort of in Beverly Hills, staying with him and liked him hugely. And then eventually he said he was going to go and meet alien abductees in Nevada, and did I want to come? And I said… For a guy who’s maybe a little bit sensitive about being perceived as losing his mind a little bit, he’s picking funny subject matter to get involved in. True.

1:00:16 It was definitely… I mean, I came up with my sort of COD psychological theories as to why, and it was basically… I felt, you know, in this world there’s nobody more amazing than, you know, being Robbie Williams or McDonald or Lady Gaga, you know, player. And he is that person and he found it wanting. So he was looking for something even better. And what’s better than that? And also, I think he was really frazzled. He’d just come off this tour where he was playing like it was one of the biggest stadium tours of all time. And one thing I began to realise very quickly about Robert Williams is that he really didn’t like standing on stage in front of 50,000 people. You know, he did it because he knew he was good at it.

1:00:53 And that’s kind of what he had to do. But he wasn’t, he didn’t take pleasure from met, you know, he found it really difficult and I think he saw me actually and the whole UFO thing as like a holiday from his real life, you know, and some people said that it was a sign that he was going crazy, but actually I also thought as the opposite, I thought the stadium tour was the thing that had turned him crazy and all of this was the thing that was making him better again and yeah and I still think that’s a good observation yeah and so he threw himself into this you came along and kind of documented it yeah and it was a lovely it was a lovely thing you know we all we had a private well we had a private plane he had a private plane the funniest moment my favorite moment of the day actually was when we we turned up at the private plane and the woman standing there and she says you know Mr Williams, Mr Williams’ friends, you know, welcome to your place, you’re playing for the day. I want to tell you some things though, I want to tell you Snoop Dogg uses this plane a lot. What I’m saying is you can do anything. And there’s this kind of silence and we all look as well like our 40s now. None of us could kind of think what anything could possibly entail. So Robbie’s friend Brandon said, are we allowed to stand up as the plane lands. So that’s what we did. That was our version of it. That below the head to the side was like, whoa.

1:02:27 I like it that Snoop Dogg’s held up as the standard for it. I’m trying to work. You can’t imagine anything so bad that Snoop Dogg hasn’t done it on that plane. I know. I’m trying to imagine what it was, you know.

1:02:38 Yeah, what they did. What an amazing… Yeah. So I don’t want to make any suggestions or I’m going to tick boxes on the sacrifice Wow, so you did that with Robbie, that must have been a nice kind of break in SI. Do you get requests like that from celebrities to kind of jump on this project or that?

1:02:53 Or did you get more after Robbie said? No, no. I mean, and rarely, that was definitely a sort of one in a million, nothing like that’s ever happened since I can think of. But if you’re a celebrity listening and you want to do something great, they should contact you. And, in fact, Robbie will vouch that he was very happy with the results.

1:03:14 Okay, that’s a good record. You must get approached by young writers all the time, and I always ask our guests here what they would say, you know, to the 20-year-old listening, and I mean, just curious what you say to someone who wants to become a writer. I know that’s a really general question, but what do you usually tell people? Well, I mean, I do have answers to this. I think you’ve got to find something that you’re genuinely passionate about because that passion really comes over.

1:03:40 If you’re writing journalism, if you’re writing non-fiction, there’s very few journalists out there, I think, who actually care as much about the way they write, the sentence construction and the kind of literary merit as they do about the story. So if you’re into both, if you’re as much into the way you tell the story as you are into what the story is, I think you’ve got a really big head start. I think you’ve got to be kind of good. I don’t know how much, you know, being a good writer can be taught.

1:04:11 I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. But so I think write well about the subject that really fascinates you. And I tell you, journalism is not it’s never been well, certainly not in my years, a closed shop. You know, editors are desperate or have been desperate to find new people. Because if you if you’re the person who finds the next Captain Moran or whatever, it’s going to be great for you.

1:04:37 So if there’s ever any sort of idea, oh, I’ll never get to write for The Guardian, I’ll never get to write for Slate or whoever, that’s just not true. And especially not true now that everything’s so open with blogs and Huffington Post or whatever. So don’t worry about that. The door will be open for you if you’re good. I think be good and find stuff that you really want to write about.

1:05:00 That’s my biggest challenge. Do you have to live? I mean, a lot of writers have said they only wrote about stuff when they’ve actually gone out and exposed themselves to the world and had these crazy experiences. Yeah, and also, you know, you get better as you get older as well, I think. Although I think that probably reaches like that, you know, I think that reaches a bell curve when it starts to get worse again, which could happen to me any day now.

1:05:22 But yeah, I think you have to go out and meet people and experience the world. I think don’t be patronizing. Don’t put yourself morally above the people that you’re writing about, you know, remember that we’re all flawed.

1:05:39 But I sort of think, kind of embrace those flaws. I think it’s fine to put yourself in the story. I mean, that kind of works for me. It sort of unlocks the way I can tell stories.

1:05:54 Somebody else asked me actually tips for interviewing the other day, and I said, don’t write any questions in advance, because that way. I do think that if you take away that safety net you have to then, I mean it can fuck up but usually you have to be a kind of twig in the tired away from the conversation. You have to be a bit more present then I guess and just go to where the conversation’s going. Yeah and but I always wonder whether that’s justification for myself for being lazy and and not writing any questions in advance.

1:06:32 But I do do a lot of research. I think that’s important. If you’re not writing questions in advance, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t research. For interviewing, you mean? Yeah.

1:06:40 Or even if you’re about to go into work. But then, contrarily, don’t do too much research. Because, for instance, in my first book, a lot of it was about me trying to sneak into the secret group called the Bilderberg Group. And I got chased away, and this isn’t them. And then I discovered that the person I was, just died actually, Jim Tucker, wrote for a newspaper called The Spotlight which has had Nazi ties in the past and so I don’t think Jim actually, I don’t believe Jim was ever a Nazi, but certainly people in his world were. And if I’d known all of that, if I’d known in advance what the Bilderberg Group was, what Jim Tucker’s magazine was, it would have solved a whole load of mysteries before I’d had the adventure. So I think do a lot of research, but don’t do too much research you don’t have to solve the mystery in advance. Yeah I can agree sometimes I do watch so much tape on someone where my head’s about to explode and I’m just like enough. Yeah let me meet them first. Yes absolutely so it’s just getting that balance right. You know there’s just a twist on this on that same question about what you say to a 20 year old that we always ask and and it’s if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Jon Ronson and give him some advice and it can’t be keep doing what you’re doing buddy it has to something. What would you say to him? What was he doing for the 20-year-old John?

1:07:57 You know what? He was a total slacker. I was living in squats. I had no ambition. I was living in a squat in Islington called Strident House. I was doing really badly at college and in fact wasn’t in the least bit interested. I was just about to meet Frank’s side bottom and the man from Der Monte moved to Manchester when my life was kind of beginning. But I had two years in the ages of 18 to 20 of like hedonistic, ambitiousness, squatter life, which frankly I loved and it sort of washed away, you know, growing up in Cardiff. I needed something I think to probably wash that away and that did and so I loved it actually, I loved it.

1:08:44 What did it wash away from Cardiff? Just, you know, just I wasn’t a, you know, didn’t sort of fit into Cardiff Society quite as well as others did. Okay. I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t that, didn’t do that. Now you see, I didn’t think I’d say that, I was just going to say that.

1:09:07 No, I think I’d get what you think. Didn’t do all that social, sporty, fit into a small-town stuff. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know what, I’m not going to blame everybody else. I was kind of annoying, you know, I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with me back then.

1:09:22 I was very uncomfortable in my own skin, very awkward, you know, quiet. I remembered myself being quiet. I don’t know, people might remember me differently. So you know, I didn’t do myself any favors at all. But then something happened, I moved to London and the day I moved to London, I was like, I was great, and everyone loved me, and literally, it was September 1985, and in August 1985, I was this kind of gawky idiot, and then in September 1985, I was like, this fantastic person.

1:10:00 It just worked out brilliantly. Wow. Okay. So what advice would you give then to the 20-year-old? Just…

1:10:06 Move along then. Yeah. Well, I was really in London by then. So 20 is when you kind of came out of it, came out of it? Yeah.

1:10:13 But I had no ambition then. I only kind of got an ambition when I was probably about 24, 25. Hedonism is kind of an ambition. Yeah. I mean, carry on doing that.

1:10:24 Maybe made me a bit more confident, you know. I saw some pictures of myself back then and I was good looking. I should have had a little bit more self, I should have been, should have had a little bit more confidence in my looks. Okay. So that would be the advice.

1:10:39 Have gone for more girls, that’s what I would have done. I would have said, you know what, aesthetically, you can actually do pretty well here. Well, it’s always a loaded question, so thanks for answering. I would love to sit here and talk with you some more. I know we’ve got to get you on a plane so you can get to Ireland.

1:11:02 I hate to cut it short, but thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Peter. I really enjoyed it. I’m glad I could be here for this one.

1:11:07 Thank you. I really enjoyed it, and I hope I didn’t blab on too much. No, it was perfect. I think we got some great insights. I’m sure we could talk forever, but we’ll have you back some other time, maybe when your next book comes out.

1:11:18 It’d be great. Fantastic. I’d love to come back. Thanks. I’m really glad that I came out here to show that it should do this.

1:11:22 Cool. Awesome. Good. Well, if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe. If you want to see the very good-looking John Ronson, we are on YouTube at Channel London Real TV, and we’re on Twitter, we’re on Facebook.

1:11:34 I just wanted to thank the guys at X-Brain for sponsoring this episode. You can get Bulletproof Coffee, Alpha Brain, all over at xbrain.co.uk. And that’s it. Thank you both for being here. Peace.

1:11:45 Thanks for having me. Perfect to have because he’s a huge fan of your work. He’s read all your books and it was just great having you, John. Thanks guys.