Jon Ronson on Conspiracy, Masculinity and Writing

The Blindboy Podcast

Host Blindboy interviews acclaimed journalist Jon Ronson to discuss his new book, 'The Castle,' and the shifting landscape of modern culture

Key takeaways

• Jon Ronson's new book 'The Castle' examines the loss of structure and purpose in men within a changing world.
• Conspiracy theories transitioned from 'safe' entertainment in the 90s to violent, dangerous movements after the 2005 London bombings.

Main topics

• Evolution of conspiracy theories
• Autism and neurodivergence

Notable quotes

Conspiracy theories were fun. They felt safe, they were enjoyable, they were interesting.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of how societal and technological shifts impact

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Dangle from the jangly balcony, you scandalous anthonies. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast. So familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. This week's podcast, I think, you don't need to familiarise yourself with the lore. This is a very straightforward podcast this week. Because I'm having a wonderful chat with one of my fucking heroes, John Ransom. He's an internationally best-selling author. He's a journalist. He's a documentary maker. He's done screenwriting. What I adore about John Ransom is his skill as a storyteller. His ability to find a riveting story. Speaker 2 (0:49) within factual information without needing to retreat into fiction. I've been consuming John's work in one way or another since I was a teenager. Chances are if you're listening to this podcast you're already a John Ronson fan and if you're not familiar with him you are familiar with his work because like some of his books like The Men Who Stare at Goats was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster called The Men Who Stare at Goats starring George Clooney. He's been consistently way ahead of the curve when it comes to putting his finger on the fabric of culture, identifying the zeitgeist. He's the first person to... like identify and highlight the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the documentary The Secret Rulers of the World which I watched when I was a teenager. It came out I think in the year 2000. That documentary would have been the first time that I encountered like the Illuminati conspiracy theories. Things which unfortunately now are just mainstream news and I speak to John about that. I speak to him about When I was a kid, conspiracy theories were fun. They felt safe, they were enjoyable, they were interesting. You had the X-Files. It was okay to be interested in UFOs in Bigfoot. If you were interested in these things, they weren't necessarily a dog whistle that you had maybe more extremist or dark or racist beliefs. They were just a bit of crack. It was okay to speak about these things. without needing to distance yourself from them. I'm talking about the time when The X-Files was the biggest TV show, or you could pick up a copy of a ridiculous newspaper called Weekly Wild News. The monoculture. When we understood... What information was reliable and from a trusted source and what information was ridiculous before algorithms? So me and John sat down for 90 minutes and had the best crack in the whole world and chatted about everything and anything. Check out any of John's work. His books. The Psychopath Test. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Which came out in 2015 I believe. Which was again one of the first pieces about what would become known as cancel culture. And John is on. He's on this week because he has a new book out right now called The Casa. I'm halfway through it because it just came out. It's a banger. It's about alienation. Male alienation. Online radicalisation. and like a crisis of purpose and meaning right now. Any of John's audiobooks that I've listened to over the years or podcasts that he's made have been a massive influence on how I make my podcast. His work helped to show me how to tell a story over an audio medium. JohnRonson.com is his website if you want to check out all his crack. J-O-N, not J-O-H-N, John Ronson. So anyway, I'm literally just about to leg it for a flight right now. I'm heading over to London to do some promotional work for the upcoming tour of England, Scotland and Wales, which is next month. I'm hoping I can get even an hour to flake into a museum for a tiny bit of downtime, but it's unlikely. I think I'm going to be incredibly busy. The chat I had with John, it's so much crack. I don't want to interrupt it. I wanted to leave it run through. So I'm going to do the Ocarina Pause right now before I get into the chat that I had with John Ronson. First off, Patreon. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, if you enjoy it, if it brings you mirth, merriment, a sense of routine, distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider funding the podcast directly because this is a listener-funded podcast. This is my full-time job. This is how I rent out my office, purchase my equipment, pay my bills. Most importantly, how I have the time and space to do what I do to deliver a podcast each week and maintain consistency because I adore, I fucking love and adore this work. If you see me on Instagram this week... I'm trying to make short form video on Instagram, which I'm trying to find a way to make it enjoyable. To do what I do each week here, but in a shorter format for Instagram videos. But what makes it difficult is the facial aspect of it. When I show up here and I'm just speaking into a microphone, it's just my voice. Or when I write a book, when I write a collection of short stories. When it's words, I feel very relaxed and it's easy for me to access a state of flow. But when it comes to recording video content, even when it's about a subject that I'm deeply passionate about, I think it's because I'm an autistic person. The extra effort and cognitive load of recording my facial expressions, being aware of my eye movements, being aware of am I making eye contact with the... camera lens, looking at my own expressions. That's not my comfort zone as an autistic person. That is an area of difficulty. So it's harder for me to reach flow state and effortlessly enjoy the process of making Instagram videos, even when it's about subject matter that I'm deeply interested in. And it's something I learned about myself this week when I was trying to do it. I made an eight minute video. on Instagram about some of the topics that I covered last week. And the process was so much more painstaking and so much more effort and frustration because I'm in the land of facial expressions rather than here where I'm in the land of pure fucking audio joy. But here's the thing with creativity in any work. It's wonderful when you can identify why something is difficult or why something is frustrating. Because once you can identify it, then you can work on it through practice. But anyway, if you do enjoy this podcast, this aural experience, consider supporting it directly. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And for that, you get four podcasts. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Just listen. Listen for free. Listen for free. Because everybody gets the exact same experience, whether you pay or not. And the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. And if you are paying, you're paying for someone else who might not be able to afford to pay. And that's enough for me to be able to earn a living and show up and do the work. So I adore that model. I absolutely love it. And I'd never change it. So that's patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. And if you're a new person signing up. don't sign up for Patreon on the Apple app on your iPhone because Apple take 30%. So if you're a new patron, sign up on a browser because Apple are greedy bastards. Upcoming gigs next month. My biggest ever tour of England, Scotland and Wales. Kicking it off on the Brighton Dome on the 18th of October, which is nearly sold out. Cardiff in Wales on the 20th. Speaker 2 (8:49) Coventry, the Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry on the 21st of October, then over to Bristol Bristol's looking like it's going to sell out soon at Beacon Hall, Guildford then in G Live, I've never been to Guildford, I'm looking forward to that I have a day off in London I'm going to haunt the fucking British Museum, I'm going to haunt it and if I'm not completely burnt out from all those gigs I might chance a little fucking podcast, a little walk around podcast in the British Museum. I would love to do that. I can't promise it because I'll have done four or five gigs and I might just need a day to not talk at all. On the 26th of October then, London, Barbican Hall, that is sold out. Thank you to everyone in London. Day off, Glasgow to fuck. Up to Glasgow at the Pavilion Theatre, which is sold out. That's sold out. Might release a few guest lists. I don't know, but that's sold out. Then on to Gateshead on the 29th and finishing the whole shebang off in Nottingham at the Theatre Royal on the 1st of November. Then I'm going to chill out with touring, except for one gig in Sligo, which is sold out. I have a fucking play on as well up in the Abbey Theatre. And that opens next week, I believe. It's called Animals, if you want to go up and see that in Dublin. I am not in the play, but it's a play that is adapted from several of my short stories. And some profoundly talented people at the top of their game are making that happen. And it's a huge honour. I'm just fucking pinching myself. I can't believe it's real. an honour to be up in the Abbey Theatre to see my writing up on stage in the Abbey Theatre which is an institution in Ireland. My Australia New Zealand tour. This one you're really talking about being down to the last tickets for this so if you are considering even though it's April and it's a good way away Like, Brisbane and Perth, fully sold out. Melbourne at the Palais Theatre on 11th of April, that's ready to go. Sydney Opera House sold out, but I released an additional 300 tickets. The only place really where there's tickets left is Auckland Town Hall in New Zealand. I won't be adding any additional dates there because you kind of can't do that when you're going to the other side of the world. So get your tickets for that tour, for whatever's available on that, because you don't want scalpers charging you twice as much. All Speaker 1 (11:35) of those tickets will be on theblindbuypodcast Speaker 2 (11:37) .ie. The UK tour is going to be feign.co.uk forward slash blindbuy. Also, throw me a DM on Instagram at blindbuybowclub if for any of those dates you want to suggest a nice local guest. Who do you think I'd have good crack with? Right, ocarina pause now. And then we get into the chat with John Ronson. They're selling bass ocarinas online. I'm going to get my hands on a bass ocarina. Speaker 2 (12:20) That was the Ocarina Pause. You'd have heard an advert for some bullshit right there. Now into my chat with the magnificent journalist, author, documentary maker, pioneer, that is John Ronson. His new book is out now. It's called The Castle Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. All right, John. Speaker 2 (12:43) I suppose the first thing I want to chat to you about is you're on tour. And before I started recording, we were both reflecting on how uniquely strange and terrible being on tour is. Speaker 1 (12:55) It's the worst. I'm just in a state of complete bleakness, like lonely. I mean, I realise it's melancholy coming from a position of privilege. But nonetheless, it's still melancholy. So what about you? Do you go on long tours and just hate it? Speaker 2 (13:18) Yes, yes. Even to the point, John, I was once on a tour. You and I were in the same hotel and I sat down at breakfast and saw you across from me and just said, no, I'm not going to introduce myself because John is in the same position as me and I'm just going to let him have his breakfast here on tour. Speaker 1 (13:40) Was I looking? Could you divine from my facial expression whether I was having a terrible time or not? Speaker 2 (13:46) I think I might have been projecting. It's just like there's someone who's doing the same shit that I'm doing and that breakfast is very important and I'm not going to walk up. And as well, I didn't know if you knew who the fuck I was. So it's just this Irish fella going, I wear a plastic bag in my head, but I'm not wearing it right now, but I really like your work. Right. Speaker 1 (14:05) Well, you should have done, Chris. I just find that some tours I enjoy and then some tours, it's all down to like the state of mind that you're in, right? I mean, you can change your mood, I think, one has the capability of doing that. But on this tour, for some reason, I'm just, I'm alone and I'm lonely and I'm just, you know, trudging from town to town. It's very nice to be on stage and it's very nice to meet people who like your stuff. It's the bits around it. It's the bits around Speaker 2 (14:33) it. But what I find is the being on stage is wonderful. That bit's amazing. But then there's the waiting and then you get off stage, you get back to the hotel and your brain is wired because you've just spoken to so many people and it's hard to go to sleep. Speaker 1 (14:48) Yeah. And then you wake up in the morning and you're all on your own. I mean, I'm running every day. I'm in Attenborough right now and I just ran along a part of Attenborough I've never been to before. The leaf. water it's like a kind of little river that runs through Edinburgh with a beautiful I Speaker 2 (15:04) love fucking Leith man I used to go cycling out by that canal yeah Speaker 1 (15:08) that's exactly why I was running this morning and that was beautiful is it the Speaker 2 (15:11) old it used to be a railway track and now they made it a running track I Speaker 1 (15:15) think that is where I was this morning something Speaker 2 (15:19) about touring which I think you'd be very interested in this because I'm I'm it's the type of thing that would excite you in terms of what to write about so I've got lots of friends who are tour managers so they would not be the level of touring that you and I would do we might do it once or twice a year but I'm speaking to people who they're on the road nine months a year people who are tour managing for like Guns and Roses or the Cranberries and something I was told about by my friend was there was a dude who was working March And he is on the road in hotels nine months of the year. So returning home for him is hell. He cannot allow himself to experience the comfort of what home is. So he had a bedroom in his house built exactly like a Holiday Inn room. He got the Holiday Inn people to his house so that when he goes home for those two months, he's staying in a Holiday Inn. And that way it doesn't hurt him when he's on tour. But the other thing too, have you ever seen Prince's house, Paisley Park? I've been there. It looks like a fucking call centre. Speaker 1 (16:33) It's like a great big mall. Speaker 2 (16:36) My theory about Prince's house, because I haven't been there, but I've done the Google tour, is when I would look inside, I was just, it's like, why does Prince have fire retardant carpets? Why does he have the type of doors you see in an office? And I think because Prince was such a workaholic, I don't think he allowed himself to have a feeling of home. So he needed to perpetually live backstage. And that's what his house is. It's the perpetual backstage. Speaker 1 (17:06) Well, I'm friends with Robbie Williams. And when I went to his house, he doesn't live there anymore, but I went to visit him in like 2005 in Los Angeles. And it was a pretty, you know, like it was like a big mansion, but it was kind of modest by pop star mansion standards. And his rooms were like really small. I said to him, like, why did you choose this house? And he said, I basically, I got it out of a catalogue. Like I sort of basically chose it remotely. And the reason why my, why the rooms are all so small is because I really hate big rooms. And I realised this is somebody who liked to play stadiums the whole time. So for Robbie, it's like the opposite. He hates being on tour. He hates playing stadiums. And so when he goes home, he wants a house with very small rooms. Speaker 2 (17:59) He's interesting. He recently got diagnosed with autism and so much of it now makes sense. Like even when I loved that documentary he made for Netflix, where it's just him in his underpants on the bed looking at a laptop, knowing that he's autistic, it made so much sense. In order for him to speak in an honest way and to really give us what he gave in that documentary, his sensory needs needed to be met. And for him, that was, I need to be in my underpants on the bed. I can't dress up in a suit and do this with a bunch of cameras around me. Speaker 1 (18:29) You being autistic, does that make touring harder for you? Because autistic people want routine and hate breaks some routine. Speaker 2 (18:39) The biggest struggle for me is a thing called burnout, right? And burnout... The hardest part of touring for me is the amount of small talk I have to have in a day with several strangers. You get to a venue. Here is the sound person. Here's the lighting person. And I have to engage in the act. I have to put on my little performance of being a normal person and not info dumping facts. The effort of that every single night. After about six days, I kind of I lose the ability to read clocks. I might leave my hotel room and forget that I'm wearing shoes. It's called executive functioning skills, that the skills that we have to just get on with life, to be an adult, to plan. These things disappear when I expose myself too much to the neurotypical world. So that's the tough part of touring for me. So Speaker 1 (19:34) does that mean that you find, do you do book signings after your shows? Speaker 2 (19:39) I Speaker 1 (19:39) can't Speaker 2 (19:39) do Speaker 1 (19:39) that, Speaker 2 (19:39) no, unfortunately. For that Speaker 1 (19:40) reason? Speaker 2 (19:41) Yeah, I can't. That's way too much small talk with too many different people, you know, even with the bag on my head. Speaker 1 (19:48) Whereas this conversation's okay because it's remote and we're not looking at each other. So there's no like eye strain. Speaker 2 (19:56) So really in the modern podcast environment, what I should be doing here. is you and I should be speaking on camera. And then I have this whole interview as a video and I can put that as clips on Instagram. If I was chatting to you, John, right? And I then have to also read your facial expressions. I'm not going to have as good a conversation as I will if I'm simply listening to your voice. So when I'm just hearing you, I can be me, I can relax. But reading another person's face and taking their words in, that got me a big... tick on the spectrum. But, you know, you know yourself from the psychopath test days. Like, fuck it, man. I'm autistic because the DSM decided I'm autistic. Before I was autistic, I was just a mad artist, you know, and I would look to all the artists I looked up to who were a bit eccentric and go, I'm just one of those. But then 2013 happens and they changed the DSM and now I'm autistic. And sometimes I'm a little bit. skeptical of that you know it's here's this manual and yeah Speaker 1 (21:02) so do you mean right so do you mean like because you know because you're so clearly high functioning then what does is the diagnosis useful is that is that what you mean yeah Speaker 2 (21:16) um it would have been very useful to me in school because Because Speaker 1 (21:22) you could say, look, these overhead lights are killing me. And all of that becomes much more explicable, if you realise. Yeah, I remember you saying when you were diagnosed as autistic, you've always been autistic. It's not like on the day of your diagnosis, you became autistic. You've always been autistic. That was an interesting thing to say, I think. Even Speaker 2 (21:43) the word diagnosis. When you receive a diagnosis, it's like, oh, I have a disease now. And it's like... I don't know if all that happened when I found out that I was autistic is I received a new suite of language. That's all it is. I had different words. I was eccentric. I was an artist. I was a bit kooky, a bit scattered. And now I find out this is autistic. The danger is. Speaker 2 (22:08) everyone on the spectrum is different. And now that I receive a diagnosis, I have to be very careful to not identify with that diagnosis and wonder, am I autistic enough? Or like, I don't really have that much of a problem with lights, but other people do. But I start saying to myself, maybe should I have a problem with lights? Speaker 1 (22:27) Right. Well, isn't this the thing about, isn't this the downside of identity? politics in general, that you can lean too heavily into the diagnosis and that can cause you problems. Well, once... Speaker 2 (22:43) Lean Speaker 1 (22:44) too heavily into the behaviour, like just what you just said. Speaker 2 (22:48) I'm always conscious about self-esteem and identity. If I speak so much about being autistic and then I receive feedback from other people where they're like, thank you so much for speaking publicly as an autistic person. That then impacts my sense of worth, my sense of self. And if I'm not careful and if my self-esteem and identity starts to align with that, then it becomes something I need to protect. And when we start needing to protect these things, I mean, this ties in with... Speaker 2 (23:20) So the first question I wanted to ask you, John, I first came across your work would have been the late 90s, early 2000s when I was a teenager and it was in the time of what we called the monoculture. I didn't have the internet. So wonderful, beautiful things would arrive to me, usually via Channel 4. And your shows were one of those things. It's I'm floating in a sea of shit. And then all of a sudden, I think the first thing I... saw by yourself was the one where you had Alex Jones on it, the Secret Rulers. Speaker 1 (23:56) Where we snuck into Bohemian Grove together. That Speaker 2 (23:59) blew my mind and it was incredible and it just, I saw it and then I couldn't watch it on repeat because I didn't record it and I just had to hold it in my heart as a memory and there's a beauty to that, you know, because pieces of culture were like religious. artifacts that we had to worship. I couldn't just go onto YouTube and watch it again. I had to remember it and then tell all my friends, there's this thing I saw last night and this guy was there and they were worshiping a giant owl and I loved it. But you, you were occupying a space then and not just that, but you had, you mentioned it in the new book, the skeptics in the pub thing that you started, which was the early 2000s too, I believe. Speaker 1 (24:40) Yeah. Speaker 2 (24:41) I want to speak about a time when conspiracy theories felt really safe and fun. That's what it's like. This isn't this so amusing that people believe these things and isn't it so safe to enjoy this stuff? None of this will threaten me. And these people who believe these things are so fringe that it's OK to laugh at them as eccentric characters, but it's never going to impact my life. Something happened in the mid-2010s where conspiracy theories now, they're dangerous. I'm scared of them. And I don't even like speaking about them in public because of what people might think about me. Do you know what I mean? Speaker 1 (25:22) Yeah. I mean, I think it was earlier than the mid-2010s. I often think how lucky I was that I wrote that book, Them, which is my first book, which is all about this stuff. It came out just before 9-11. 9-11 is really what changed it. On the day of 9-11, Alex Jones went on air. And the first thing he said was, you see, I told you, I told you this was going to happen. Cut to four years later, I make a 2005, there's the London bombings, three tube trains and a bus. And I made a documentary about this woman called Rachel North, who was on one of the trains and survived. And she became a kind of spokesperson for the survivors. And she went online. and saw that people, conspiracy theorists, were speculating that she didn't exist. She was a team of MI5 agents. And the more she tried to convince them that she did exist, the more they were convinced that she didn't. Until eventually she just thought, well, I have to meet them in person. So she kind of goes to a meeting and they start yelling at each other. And when I heard that story in 2005, I just thought, I'm so pleased that I wrote them. Before that, because there's nothing funny anymore in this, it's really