and i said to brian a year later you gave me the best story, thank you. but is it true you faked your way in here? and he said yup i beat somebody up when i was 17 and my cell mate said to me you are looking at 5-7 years in prison what you need to do is fake madness and you will get sent to a cushy hospital with your own play station, nurses bringing you tea. i said why did you do it and he said i just saw the film crush when people get sexual pleasure from crushing cars into walls. well i asked to see the ... psychiatrist and i had just seen a film called crash in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. so i said i get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.

i told the psychiatrist that i wanted to watch women as they died because it would make me feel more normal. i said where did you get that from? >> said the biography of ted bundy that they have at the prison library. anyway it turns out i faked madness too well. they didn't send me to a cushy hospital but they sent me to broadmoor and the minute i got here i said there has been a terrible misunderstanding. i said how long have you been here for? >> said i had just gone to prison i would have gotten five to seven years. i have been at reidemar for 12 years. he said it's much harder to convince people that you are saying that than it is to convince somebody you are crazy. he had to stay away from the other patients. he had a strangler on one side of him and a rapist on the other side so we stayed in his room a put side of madness. he tried to convince him he's

the same to talk about normalcy like football. he said they want to be a scientist. suffice it to the psychiatrist, i said to the nurse elected through my medical notes. he said how do you fit in the same way that more you felt comfortable but so have a left and he seemed normal to me so i went to the clinician and he wrote back and said we accept

the story because of the delusions are clichéd to begin with. however he's been assessed and we've determined he is a psychopath taking madness. hit a grandiose sense of self-worth. all things that seem most normal but he was a psychopath. and one of them said he is the master of this stuff. we had a number of conversations

conversations. she talked about is a checklist responsibly so i didn't end into the fact that there is a story here i kind of popularized the idea. he said this is the biggest story in the world the words. >> selected. i said i brain anomaly can i

come in to see you and he said come on over. >> host: and if you read the psychopath with a subtitle a churning through the madness industry you can find out what happened to tony in the end to this is what happened to robert, the justice department and purple ports all accepted his contentions in terrible and everyone should concentrate

their energy on how to root them out on the checklist. is that indicative of the industry purpose of the? >> about how they could there is a huge shift. i start thinking about all the people in my past who interest me or who had given me that interviewsreviews. i am blind to my biases. i went through the checklist but

when he said no to certain things and he said no to juvenile delinquency and a bunch of things and i run under thinking well that's okay and then it donned on me and then the second aside is how children are getting labeled as bipolar because they are hired on the

checklist. one died because her parents gave her an overdose of her medicine. none of this by the way is to include robert that had a lifetime of developing this checklist to and he said this is brutal. some people score higher on the checklist of what happened to me is for the second half of the book a cautionary tale.

i think with this book is about the gray area of the one extreme extreme. >> what is the thread among all of your books? >> guest: i think it's about power and when people overcommit absurd or a polling tasks that all of that from the position of human empathy and compassion so that's trying to humanize the

situations are the people with

power and i was rating after the oligarchs and a noticed part of their identity in the majorntrol i media outlets and i was wondering your statement on both of those issues. >> guest: he was one of the protests talking to sunday after the protest.

here's the problem they've always been suspicious of people focusing on a lost child. this is sometimes a euphemism and because throughout history this goes back to that document

it's supposed to be like the secret minutes and it had a pair merciless vengeance. can you imagine this merciless vengeance text people believe they actually did say that so [inaudible] if you want to see how many come almost none. they told me that the reason he was invited as there were so few it was kind of embarrassing. there is power in that there are

powerful families but when you start to talk about hollywood becomes a code word. >> host: in one of your books you go to hollywood. he's the one with the limousine that says jewish. >> guest: he decided to go give up the phone company and keep the rabbi and a monk.

anyway it was kind of interesting -- embarrassing. i do talk about codewords. it was on my side of the fence they go codeword crazy sometimes. it shows people to use code words and euphemisms but also it was kind of crazy like that new yorkers the globalists they had an overly generous codeword, but there are.

>> host: matthew thanks for holding. you are on with john. >> caller: i was wondering what the opinion is why so many horrible people make so many despicable comments on the internet and yet people are punished probably for what they said. >> guest: take you for that comment. it's ridiculous. it happened the other day with a woman her car is impounded so she goes to get her car out and because these days it's a much

better than thing to get upset about the problem of support privilege is getting everybody to everything. yes she would say i've got better taste than you and it was all filmed. but of course what happened is in punishing the -- publishing that if you think about things like them coming to rape you

the numbercomeup a number of things i can remember hearing, we punish people for the same transgressions. it's like this is what with somebody from a boston magazine said about my book. this isn't social justice. it was an alternative to social justice. it makes you feel like rosa parks but you're not a. however the cops that were arrested yesterday or the day

before setting out for social media because right now as proper good work we are also creating a society where lives are getting ruined routinely. one person is used to be an editor said it's fine. i went around the world for three years meeting people who have transgressions sometimes serious, sometimes nothing.

it's not fine. its main goals people's mental health. suffering from depression, suicidal thoughts disassociating from your party. but when you are the object taken out before it was published was taken out of context if i was up worried about it and the next day i said it goes to show that an impact

on your mental health into somebody told me stop whining. so it's like if you're the object of any feelings that you had or read. so the best complement this book has it's a people said it's like watching a horror movie you feel what it feels like to be at the end of the social media shaming. and also [inaudible] that's what i wanted to do with this book because i think it is harder. >> host: brooklyn, good

afternoon you are on with john. >> caller: first i want to say thank youthank you or one of the most decent people today in writing. i have a question about the mideast into the emotional pull to take extreme positions. i would love to hear whatever you have to say. >> i've wanted to do a story for a long time. i was doing a story about how the government will pretend to be social media people. because i've never been there

but i would say is i've often wanted to and feel like i've would be a good person to do it because i i feel no kinship to the state of israel and have often thought maybe i should do that story. >> host: were you raised in the faith? >> guest: orthodox synagogue. my great grandfather [inaudible] and stopped.

even though we left before synagogue i had to go to the orthodox one and it was all in hebrew. then i discovered that i could have basically done this in english after years of going to hebrew school for nothing i never experienced any anti-semitism except for the fact that mammoth cost me my bar mitzvah was ordered by a neighbor. it's kind of a relatively tough. and i think sometimes smuggled

us into the synagogue to show them what it was like but then i started going to the reformed synagogue. i remember one time they played this game and it was like after the flood is. it was like summer camp adventure camp in to the best of my teenage years to get another never religious, never believed a word of it ever.

i didn't believe a word of what i was singing. >> host: did you forget to have christopher hitchens before he died? >> guest: though i never did. >> host: is it fair to google search after a public shaming allows chambers to allow top billing on the search result looks. >> guest: no. somebody said to me when i was writing this book they have the sense don't be evil but anything can happen whether it is good or bad. i worked for some economists

because november 2013 into december 2013 it was 1,000,223 times. so we worked out using mathematics that i can't quite render no. the most was -- only in the end i think a conservative number was like $20,000. >> host: you've got it in your book and i looked for a minute ago but i can't find my mark. we will go to barbara in seattle. >> caller: i want to ask a question. do you think the cia and u.s. government is more or less sycophants have done the? i happen to live next door to a

person that drove across my state with ted bundy and he wouldn't kill any woman with children. >> guest: that was a story when you feel hard-pressed to not feeling incredibly sympathetic. we know this kind of stuff happens. in my book i write this kind of stuff about how inside that bubble people convince themselves that atrocious acts

are okay. it's obviously a big phrase presumably it's because this goes back to what martha stout says that the three most institutions to become more psychopathic. i go back and forth on it if you want my honest opinion. i think that there is some truth to it in the politics and sports

and so on and lack of empathy and remorse and so on. it may have been a bit to label the cia. >> host: key in scottsdale arizona. coke this is wonderful. he's a puppet. [laughter] i think that he does the work on this area as science. we need to bring all the other

scientists to work with you. it is organizational. do you know how much income families in the east are suffering with psychopathic tendencies in the power to survive cliques you are fresh air but you need to talk about more remedies will i decided later in my age. >> host: we are going to leave it there. >> guest: is i've decided that

the next time i need therapy i'm going to go by mindfulness is. refers to this mindfulness? >> guest: maybe somebody can: an answer that question. it's different and it doesn't have the dedication and you've got to try mindfulness but maybe somebody else can give a very brief explanation of exactly what it is. >> host: lily in miami please go ahead. >> caller: hello. i'm so happy to be on your program. it's like the previous caller said a breath of fresh air. someone that has been dealing

with emotional issues in my family for a long time right now i'm struggling with an 18-year-old grandson who's been labeled and diagnosed to death at his struggling to find a way to navigate his journey with the help of parents that are willing and grand parents that love him but we've been misdirected in sunni areas in the education system to the justice system. it was adhd initially vital for but i don't hold us to any standards because no one has really confirmed or given me a reason to believe it is true. it may be that i suspect there are so many things involved and coming to the conclusion of how they came to be.

>> guest: how old? eighteen. i'm sorry for the trouble you've been going through. undoubtedly, an epidemic of labeling and overdiagnosis going on. >> host: you write how they come up with the study process, who comes up with them and often the loudest person in the room is the one who -- guest for this extraordinary. so the reason why they want something that big is because his mother was very unhappy and nobody helped. and then she died and he grew up

with this featured hate trade. so when he became a psychiatrist and took over the ds said he decided to basically emphatic a psychiatry and replace it with something more scientific. i think it was inspired by psychologists like robert hare. but can you identify for sort of mystical reasons. so he hired a room and for years years -- it was like a typewriter of that account adhd.

within a proposed or mental disorders that you said no to. he said a typical child syndrome. the problem when i asked a man proposing that the same characteristics were. the otherone as he said the other one was a personality disorder of women thatstayed in abusive relationships. i changed its name to a personality disorder. i always see both sides of it.

and i do believe that there are some disorders where a label is always a good thing. but i would say is a cd. you've got your kids with ocd. you've got these intrusive -- you're being haunted -- there are kids everywhere until who think to themselves i could table. and they get haunted by this and they could to see a psychiatrist eventually they say everybody has these thoughts. it doesn't need to be that

person. and then a lot of people are killed by that realization that it's okay and it's called ocd and it's a way that can help. i talk about how social media in the early days was kind of like that. people would nervously admit shameful secrets about themselves on social media. and other people would see back i'm exactly the same. it was a rapid than the shaming place. it was incredible. it felt like a kind of importance that the voiceless peoplegraceless peoplesuddenly have a voice. one of things that would happen is we were publishing up for a

better phrase. somebody that would publish like a racist comment in the newspaper. but also people helped each other. like i have this kind of terrible horrific idea it's okay. this is that feeling. there's even a phrase back then facebook is where you play to your friends and twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers. they got so struck with wanting to do good at pointing to be a good social justice person it just inserted and instead of people admitting the shameful secrets of my people were being destroyed by the shameful secrets.

that's the reason. to see us through this wonderful thing and record surveillance coach or was heartbreaking. >> host: john is our guest on in-depth investment on the tv. we often ask the guests who come on some of their influences, what they are reading into their favorite books and here is what john told us. ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ speech ♪

♪ >> host: 202 is the area code if you want to talk with three. his most recent book is "so you've been publicly shamed, the psychopath test."

for those of you in the mountain and pacific. this is booktv in-depth program. three hours with one author. next month warren's rate will be the guest of the chicago printers will be very fast and he will be our guest in chicago. we will be talking with the audience there as well. he's written a book on scientology documentarian on that issue. then in spirit goes unwritten happiness of the movie and didn't have any say how it turned out? >> guest: i didn't have any. about a year ago i was at a film festival in england and kind of the first time you left it and it's got a few problems in the last act i think it gets a little crooked and long-winded

but other than that it's great and it was a nice experience. george clooney was lovely and is one of those people who [inaudible] yes i liked it. >> host: when do you find the general? did you make up being? costco happened is when it came out i decided to go with them and write my first ever hit. >> host: on bbc or channel four? >> guest: channel four said nick some more.

it's money. and i was like i don't know what to do. my producer said don't tell them that. take the money and make something. it never happens, you just get money. so i thought okay but i'm not sure this is going well. i think it is like a danger to. that's where failure lies because we took the money and try to do more with the way to come so we wasted a huge amount to the story at yale. i just felt kind of dread. i'm likingi like him in my 30s.

you know what i mean? then we tried to do the story about how it got nowhere. then my producer of at the time said what should we do and what has happened is this book had come out and is discovering the fact cia had a secret program and they had put a serious book. people said that's crazy. so i thought i'm not sure.

but we've got to do something. so he was a psychologist who'd been employed by the cia to process the secret spy unit. so i was interviewing him and asking him about assessing the unit and i was panicking and a few times in your life will just have one question that the change of life. i just said to him when you are were assessing them did you notice anything else going on?

he said yesterday was a major general we thought he could burst closed pointing at them. another wicked lieutenant colonel [inaudible] by the end of the entry is basically have to tell them this could be our stories with search be uncovered .-full-stop the which was a big breakthrough in hawaii is a intimate described george clooney was based on an entity. he said he was a part of a secret military unit and he said

it was a series of puzzles. he's available when the six nation you walk into the room and so i said this level to reset its intuition and four and the road you will left or right so i said what is level three, disability? that's quite a leap from little to. he said after the wildly adopted to try to find a way so i set like camouflage and he said no. of all fours you have a master

sergeant. i said to the other manager was got damaged in the process fighting back but he didn't stand a chance. he's one timehe said one time we had a room which i guess is collateral damage. so i was watching the tape and my wife came in and i said you have to watch this. and this is the movie starts.

it is made up of the things it is possible to merge the spaces that he would get up from behind his desk and run in a plastic dolls but he never mastered it. he said that one time that he did a bruise his nose will if i had just been domestic abuse. abus so yes for me the moment when i thought this could be a book was the realization by glad we can make other people.

i said it's almost like a kind of soap opera about this struggle and the people involved in these things back in the 70s were also involved in guantánamo bay and abu ghraib. and so it's kind of a more serious explanation about these tiny country and how these ideas mutated. >> host: and in fact you either fact, use their quotes were interviewed lindsay england, saying what happened at abu ghraib was holding the prisoner on a leash with a military intelligence. >> guest: i wonder what they think now, but at the time that is what they were saying. and it's by themselves.

they were told to do this stuff. and it's like publicly shamed, by the way. i remember one of the nonlethal people said to me the holy grail of interrogation at guantánamo and abu ghraib is let's imagine late at night walking down the corridor and it jumps out in front of you when you scream and then you realize it's your wife. that's two parts working. he said the cuckoo of fact if he interrogated holding onto that moment before you realize it's your wife. and you hold onto that moment.

just blah, blah, blah all of that. you've accomplished the effect. as thinking about the cuckoo effect when i was writing hundreds of thousands of people were tweaking i can't wait. everybody in this bar has just landed yet. can't look away. maybe millions of people. i thought oh my god twitter discovered.

>> host: odds in oklahoma. you are on with author jon ronson. >> caller: yeah, good to have access here. listening to u.n. tv the other day i found a lot of what you're talking about with social media to be quite interesting. i struggle about. i am in my 50s. i struggle a lot with social media, the value of it. i think it is a jaded situation that kind of bears that saul on the society, the collect of society at the same time. i want to run something by you. i do a lot of writing about false paradigms of power that are propped up and held up and continued to extinction writing about this.

i describe our society as it presently exists and i like to give feedback from you on this here on the phone. i don't have my tv on. so what i am seeing is a society that is essentially like a fear why did in his loaded onto and it's unloaded onto constantly. but it's never emptied out so it never has the potential to steal and it never arrives anywhere in it never remains anywhere. so the culture is in question constantly in this creates a great deal of anxiety, which you speak of quite eloquently. i so enjoyed the details with which you examine things going on here. i also want to say this. >> host: we are going to have to get an answer from our guest.

if you are going to listen to the phone, i will leave you on while you are listening. >> guest: some of the faces -- again, when you talked about the fear wagon and we know that politics in the mainstream media trade that has happened throughout history you know, the trade with tear and make money off of terror. the way of social media is fear outrage. so now the somebody transgresses, we determined that somebody is outside of our acceptable norms, our social circle, our mutual approval.

we are out there. of course it is much more conservative world. i was giving a talk in london quite recently. somebody came up to me and he said pretty much every child is damaged because of some event happened on social media. everybody is getting defined. you talk about people peddling fear the war on terror, the cave in bin laden's high-tech caves and over and over again and fight the spreading of fear for business or political ends. the fact is outrage on social

media. all about humanizing people, all about labeling. it is all about pretending that it's a clue to their inherent evil. erroneous understanding about how it works and how you are a mix of wisdom. so yes, what we know on social media is the opportunity to do something new. in the distance we are trying to batter. ..

so passionate and outspoken but that kind of quite frightening and it's like it's like if you are not as radical as we are as ideological as we are then you are part of the problem and that feels to me a bit like that.

>> host: paula tweets in, your genius is worn from curiosity and goes on to ask what does mr. ronson see as the biggest ideological differences between them? >> guest: i have been there for three now's -- three years now so i should have good answers for that. i think one slightly negative that i have noticed since "so you've been publicly shamed" came out even though ingrained in the american culture is the idea of redemption and second chances, we are all flawed and we all make steaks i think some american people the american justice system and also some americans don't really feel that way. they don't really feel people

should have second chances and there is a kind of draconianism and justice amongst some americans that personally i wish wasn't there. i want to live in a world where transgressions are not wired to human context. i want to live in a world where people get second chances. so that is one difference i have noticed. but to set out with something more positive i love it here and i feel like it's becoming my home. i think america is very can-do and if it's unforgiving about transgressions, it's very open to giving people a chance. very open to first chances and

quite close to second chances. if i wanted to do a comedy club i would go to meetings. if i want to do a comedy club in brooklyn i'm doing one within a month which i am doing and that's something that feels very american. >> host: jeffrey in fort lauderdale, good afternoon to you. >> caller: good afternoon. jon, it's a real treat having you on the show. i love dear ted talk on the psychopath test and in particular when you mentioned the gray areas and that's where you -- and i'm a health professional. i've been in the field for 30 years and i would like to make a brief comment and then just listen to what if anything you have to say to that. the diagnostic and statistical

manual of mental disorders, the so-called bible, i am a critic of the dsm because it lacks scientific validity. now i think you and i would agree, there is mental illness but that diagnoses in the dsm are not object if medical conditions like diabetes or heart disease which are diagnosable through objective tests. they are basically symptoms and behaviors that are observed by a clinician and they amount to myths that are based on socially norms that you spoke of. and the problem and here's the end of my comment, the problem is labeling people based on these myths these labels

include clinicians from addressing the gray areas that you spoke so eloquently of in your ted talk. >> host: let's leave it there. >> guest: no can i ask -- >> host: i'm so sorry i hung up on him. >> guest: no i wonder if you could phone back. i don't know if it's possible. >> host: jeffrey if you are hearing that when you try to phone back. what was your question? >> guest: my question was going to be, this is a question for -- there are 400 or so mental disorders in the dsm. does he feel that way about everyone every one of them or does he think some checklists and some disorders in the dsm have validity. that's a genuine question. i come from a world of gray areas that demand thinking some of the disorders in the dsm are baffling and ridiculous but then others they seem okay so i believe your question is good.

>> host: at the call stack and we will get them back on the line so you can ask another question. samantha and el paso thanks for holding. your on-the-job ronson. >> caller: hi. i'm excited to talk to you. i love your work and thanks to c-span for great programs like this. i was just wondering how long from the idea to do something when it strikes you to completion does it take with research on everything to complete a project and you just work on one at a time or do you have several different things going on at once? and is it take a while between projects because it seems like you are so into whatever you are working on, whatever book or topic. does it take a while afterwards to kind of get that out of your system or how does that process work? >> guest: thank you. the answer to every questioner question or is its loan. it takes me forever to come up

with the subject and it takes me forever to write it and then i'd i whittle and whittle and whittle it down because for some reason not to go into overtime and show adhd i'm really nervous about boring people so if i find a superfluous word in a sentence i will strike it out. which is why in my books can take three years of constant success of work yet you can read them in a day and a half for that reason. and then you get obsessed forever. the psychopath test, talked about that book. it took me two and a half years to write and i talked about it nonstop for two years. i was really yearning for a day having giving a talk on stage and i was bored.

i always become bored with the topic so i can get it out of my system and write something new. so really that took me forever. it takes me forever because, and i don't have another book yet. luckily i have a movie with a great south korean so i'm making a movie with him at the moment. >> host: what is the topic? >> guest: i am forbidden from saying. i'm for bed and from answering that question but it's good. >> host: what about the fact that "the psychopath test" is being made into a movie? >> guest: no yeah. i actually poured some chai tea over myself a few minutes ago but yes kristin coal who is a brilliant writer is writing the

screenplay. there's everything from meet the parents to incredible political dramas like game change. scarlett johansson is set to star in it but beyond that -- >> host: what role? >> guest: no i have no idea. what i've said over the years from "the men who stare at goats" and this if you are the provider of the source material stay the hell out the the screenwriter does not want you leaning over their shoulder and nor should he do that. it's the relay race that you have given the battle over in tuesday the hell out. as far as i know, had dinner with kristin at christmas and i haven't spoken since then. i deliberately just i just let

them get on with it. i know it's going to be fictionalized in the same way "the men who stare at goats" was in the same way that "frank" was. i obviously don't like narratives in my book what i do offers great dialogue, great moments and comedy different way of seeing the world and the great screenwriter can-that together in a great narrative. >> host: we have jeffrey back of the line from fort lauderdale. jeffrey, jon ronson had a question for you. >> guest: no did you hear the question? >> host: go ahead and repeat it. >> caller: you stated for the viewers. guess what you were saying you were a mental health professional and you were very skeptical of the dsm disorders. my question is as a gray area liberal my view has always been

some disorders in the dsm clearly are absurd and ridiculous but others we assume have got it right. that the checklist is the scientific way of identifying that particular mental illness and mental disorder. my question to you was you are suspicious of the dsm in its entirety and you think that one is okay and that one is not and so on? >> caller: it's an excellent question and i appreciate you amen general and your work to strike a balance. my short answer is yes and no. yes, i think all of the diagnoses in the dsm lacks scientific validity. why? because they lack object of criteria because there is no objective test that can act really make the diagnosis. however, no i don't discount all

the diagnoses and agree with you because there is such a thing as severe mental illness such as psychosis and mood disorders. however, and we need some basis to diagnose and the dsm is the only game in town. the national institute of mental health however is doing the right thing the research to actually identify the brain anomalies associated with mental disorder. one last point, jon. there are some disorders that are so ridiculous such as adjustment disorder or oppositional defiant disorder which basically is childhood. guess what can i tell you this story? i know a little girl who was diagnosed with ocd and didn't get over the ocd after her run

of behavioral therapy so that cognitive behavioral therapist that diagnosed the girl is having oppositional defiant disorder. >> caller: okay because i thought you said ocd. and i was going to direct you and say i was referring to odd. >> guest: this little girl got an ocd diagnosis but when cbt didn't get her throat with the requisite period the therapist gave her an additional diagnosis of odd. >> caller: i think you and i are basically on the same page but i would just close by saying the dsm is the only game in town for doing diagnoses but none of the diagnoses are valid and the national institute of mental health is into the long gain to actually identify the objective

brain anomalies that correspond to mental disorders. this is the best show on tv right now to have you. it's such a pleasure and that ted talk was so inspiring and so well done i really appreciate it. >> host: jeffrey this time we are going to hang up and not call you back. >> guest: jeffrey that's really good. you know they got rid of childhood bipolar disorder because little kids were being diagnosed as bipolar at the age of two and three because they had temper tantrums. in the dsm five they made an effort to move away from that but they came up with a new disorder called disruptive moods dysregulation disorder which you know what it sounds like. it's a teenager or a child having big mood swings. >> host: tim on our facebook

page and by the way the can get through on the phone lines and want to make a comment you can try our social media dresses and we will flash those up on the screen. tim posts on public shaming on social media whatever happened to the development of what used to be called tilting a thick skin to other peoples comments? when i was young i was taught to ignore stupid ending comments. understand the public nature of social media. it makes it more serious that people react too strongly to what others say on social media don't feed the trolls. guess now i understand that. the problem is when somebody is at the end of like a big -- someone like justin sacco of whole bunch of things happen. firstly you get fired because there are many companies that are like whoa abbado deridder this person is going to be us next. so you get fired so you lose

your livelihood. worse than that i would say and i can say this because i have met people in the situation. a lovely woman comes to washington d.c. works with adults with learning difficulties so she is bringing them on a tour to d.c.. like the things i did yesterday going to see the lincoln memorial and you know the washington monument and in arlington and the tomb of the unknown soldier. so wednesday, great employee, a lovely young woman has this kind of running joke with her friends where they do the opposite of society. so they smoke in front of the non-smoking sign or loiter in front of a no loitering sign and posted on facebook. anyway arlington you see a sign that says keep off the grass. no we don't want to get in trouble and you see another sign

that says silence and respect. so the inspiration strikes. lindsey poses in front of the sign. >> host: we are showing the picture right now. >> guest: that's the joke about the sign. posted on facebook. a couple of military friends say that's kind of offensive and it's ridiculous. forget about it. and then lindsey said to her french and we take it down? jamie her sister such we take it down and lindsey says no let them think about for a day. a month later they were in a restaurant and its gone viral and gone all over the place. what lindsey did that night was go home. there's this completely unequipped young woman suddenly being told by tens of thousands of people that she is a monster. everything from outrageous

trolls we are going to rape you and murder you on social media and over the telephone. they got ahold of her home number. concerned, nice people which in a way is like worse. we are disappointed in you. you are a bad person. you disrespect the military and so on. lindsey was up all night reading every single comment about her. she was far from her job -- fired from her job so for months she would read every comment and those comments mangled her mental health, depression, insomnia anxiety basically didn't leave home for a year and a half. what brought her back, i wrote two or three times. i said i want to tell you a story about my book and finally i convinced her to talk to me. now everybody is being incredibly nice.

until it has happened to you on a kind of scale is impossible to know what it feels like. it's terrible. it can ruin people's mental health. to be cast out as a social creature, to be cast out as horrific and what cures it is to be brought back in with compassion and kindness in that kind of thing. >> host: the weather in white plains new york. hi. >> caller: hi, how are you? thank you jon for your chronicling of the social media situation. i have a question i would like to take you back to justine i believe because to me that is kind of like the essence of some of what i am hearing about all of the wonderful things he said in these personality types whether they have been diagnosed or not. here is my thought. why is it that most of what you have mentioned coming off of

this twitter shaming that was done to her, it seems to me comes up as an approach from a human communication perspective. it only involves ranting and raving. it's kind of like what i call uppercase in-your-face global slaps that in my way of thinking shut the other person down. that's number one. it's very unlikely that justine is going to respond to a barrage. i realized that twitter has a minimum number of things you can say, but why is it that you think most of, and that this is not the case, please help me out here why is it that is the way it went rather than as i think many people were trained to

think about is a more reasoned question kind of normal verbal words that would facilitate a sense that both sides are being heard. in other words the shaming thing as opposed to i would say okay justine and i know you can't do this on twitter. justine, let's talk about what you thought you were saying and whether or not you have stepped back to realize the thought. >> host: we are going to leave it there. jon ronson. >> guest: what you just described there is democracy. people listen to each other they may disagree and argue and they listen. that is how communication should be what what happens on social media is the opposite of democracy. you surround yourself with

people and tech utopians call social media type of democracy. what is greater is organizing, greater organization and organizing protests and so on. but it's not democratic because what happens is you surround yourself with people who feel the same way you do. that's how social media set how social media set up and when things are going well that's great. i tell a joke and people tell me how great i am and it's great. also you find people who have a similar point of view. but then what happens is you were locked up in this bubble this echo chamber this approval machine and you don't want to hear -- i said this earlier in the program but i will repeat it. a woman called helen lewis a review of my book she wrote on the night of justine sea shaming i don't think justine intended to be racist. whole lot of people said to her

you are just a privileged woman too. so it was like get out of our network. that screening somebody out is not democratic. to destabilize that mutual approval is bad for you people don't like it. people don't want to hear injustice. you hear what the person has to say and in court u.k. were at the person has to say. justine sea was such an important moment i think in the development of this new media partly because she was asleep on the plane and oblivious to her destruction and that became part of the joy of it. part of the joy of it was where about to watch this justine sea who got fired in real-time before she even though she's getting fired. another point of my book, i write about a disgraced pop science author called jill meyer who committed some journalistic

things and lost his job rightly but at this moment happened later when i was spending time on the book where he was given an opportunity to publicly apologize for what he did at the foundation called the knight foundation. >> host: as the knight ridder. >> guest: e. he sent his speech and i didn't know what to make of it because it seemed like a jonah lehrer and narrows -- space. so jonah turns up at the foundation. what they didn't know was they had erected a giant screen twitter feed right next to jonah's had with another monitor monitor. so while jonah was trying to apologize he could read what people were tweeting in real time. real-time responses to his quest

for forgiveness and another chance. as he's trying to apologize the tweets were coming up in huge letters were jon the layer ordering us. jonah lehrer it is just a sociopath. there's that word again. we want to destroy somebody that we don't want to feel bad about it so we demonize with the word like sociopath. jonah lehrer has not proven he is capable of shame and his barrage as he is trying to apologize. imagine if that were an actual court in the murderer standing in the dark trying to explain their circumstances and the jury is yelling out bored, sociopath. if we were watching a courtroom drama at the cinema and that scene happened we wouldn't think that was good. yet, you give us power. you put the power in our hands and that's how we abuse it. even though the courtroom drama

gets -- gives the power become the hanging judges and the people people being rival that whippings and why? the reason why is because we are and i include myself in this, we are social justice. we want to attack people but while jonah lehrer was desperate to try to apologize in front of that screen after being disgraced and ruined for 10 months, that was a privilege. we felt we were punching up but actually we were kicking someone when they were down. >> host: politicians legitimate targets represented aaron shock shock. they did his office like "downton abbey." >> host: when i was writing "so you've been publicly shamed" i felt most comfortable writing about ordinary people who are being disproportionately punished from a time of transgression.

i thought i had to draw that line because it would be ridiculous if suddenly i was saying i'm against you now criticizing any kind of transgression. i'm not against satire. i'm not against journalism. i'm not against curiosity. i'm not against holding powerful people to account. this book isn't against any of those things. what this book is against is our new widespread forest fire or quiddity to run people, ordinary people. >> host: the next call for jon ronson comes from david in portland there again. portland oregon. hi david. >> caller: hi. i was just wondering what your favorite performing artists are and particularly -- [inaudible]

>> host: why do why do you ask that question, dave it? >> caller: i'm just curious. i'm always a little curious about people. i get a feeling. [inaudible] >> host: good music to you is? >> caller: music with some sort of soul and depth to it. that's a tough question. >> host: thank you. >> guest: thank you. i listen to a lot of anguish funk. every day i listen to the full. it's so great so criminally unknown in this country. i listen to the full. i have started working with the scottish band ben sebastian that that -- i made a silent comedy with matthew perry and the scroll for that.

i listen to them a lot. i once made a documentary and i said then it that every thought i have ever had has already been been -- i do think it's my thought process. so him very much. >> host: what about this gentleman showing on the screen now, frank sidebar. if you listen to him? >> guest: i was a player in the late 80s. when i move to london i became, i became the entertainer of my local college. one day the phone ring and this voice said our keyboard player can't make it so we have to cancel. unless you know any keyboard players. so i said, i play keyboard and

they said you are in. but i don't know any beer songs. he said can you play c, f and chi and locally those were the three note that i could play. i said yes. he said while you are in. so i joined the band for three years and it was amazing. he was the avant-garde comedy. he wore these fake cats but they never took off and nothing makes a young man feel more alive than cruising up the motorway next to a man wearing a big fake hat. so i would look in the off. i wonder why he had the hat on. sometimes in the band he kept the hat on so we would play these venues with five other people, 750 people. one time we played wembley

supporting this boy band group that was the one direction at the time. this was 50000 people. this was his biggest audience ever by 49,500 people but he chose to do a series of terrible versions with his hat on. i got batted off stage after that 10 minutes. one gig we played was at jb's nightclub in the west midlands. it was probably known as dudleys for people on c-span. there were probably 20 people in the audience and halfway through the show the audience split up into two teams. some people got out of football and play the game. we got off stage and he took up his hat and underneath his real name is chris. he said that the show we ever played.

and then he fired us all for tax reasons. 15 years past and i was in the park with my son joel and my phone ring in this voice said hello. and i said frank? and he said oh yes. i said how are you? he said i'm fine. i said put kirson. so chris came on the line. hello jon. he said he was going to come back and could i rejoined the band. i had seen the blues brothers. he said no i want you to write something about her time in the band. i wrote this little piece in the guardian and it really came out emotional. then he came out with a midlife crisis. that moment where i got up on stage iv the first time and being in this crazy band with this guy.

it was very emotional and after i broke the peace my friend who wrote the screenplay for "the men who stare at goats" and the screenplay for an amazing -- hillary mental's book which is on pbs at the moment. a wonderful series. anyway he said to me i have always wanted to write a fake music bio, like what would happen if captain beefheart was alive in the 1950s. but your idea is better. i said i have no idea what you are talking about. i said a man with a big fake hat trait that's not my idea. it actually happened and this is what happened. so me and started writing a screenplay about a fictional job joining a fictional band about a man that wears a big fake hat.

he would never take off his hat. andy got married so i imagined a mix of the real frank and captain beefheart and daniel johnston who is this incredibly talented bipolar singer-songwriter. an early question about musicians i admire. one of the things i admire more than anything is the documentary called the devil in -- johnson which i recommend to all of your listeners. and so we imagined a mix of all these people and completely out of the blue michael fassbender said he wanted to do subboard. are you aware that he wears was a big fake hat the entire movie and he never takes it off and he said he was aware. he got married and it was a great thing. unfortunately chris passed away

while we were writing the screenplay and never got to see the movie. you know i have been telling stories because my book "so you've been publicly shamed" about bad things happening from social media. here's something good that happened. chris died and the day after his death it was announced in the local paper that he would be buried in a poor person's grave. we came back in time 200 years. but it turned out there was such a thing. so i set out once a week and said over a thousand people sent and 23-pound -- 23000 pounds which was enough to exhume him and rebury him a half a dozen times.

>> host: rivered e-mails and rivered e-mails and it's hysterical that brian williams is being set up for what the press has been doing for a very long time. >> guest: exaggeration. the reason why i am reluctant is because until the brian williams scandal i had never heard of brian williams so the reason i weighed in on it was i don't quite understand what brian williams means -- means in the american landscape. was he really respected go to news commentator who -- or was he more of a showman? that is the reason why i tend not to weigh in on the brian williams thing because i don't quite understand what the name

brian williams brings with it. >> host: marcus from portland oregon, hi marcus. >> caller: thanks very much for taking my calls. jon, really and join the conversation. i was amused at the beginning venue looked questioningly as that you could go on. >> guest: no this is the marathon dance contest of the interview. at the end of the interview i'm going to start sobbing and they will take me outside and kill me. i apologize. carry on. >> caller: i didn't want to give too much more on the social media bit but still i'm brought back to it. i miss skimmer of your books and it seems to me that in the last decade or so the book by nicolas carr is people know a lot about a lot of different things

beginning with "in depth" which is why elect a show and i was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that in terms of really getting in-depth into a topic and then as a follow-up can you just mentioned what you do to recharge after you have gone in-depth a lot of different things besides holding your sobbing -- >> guest: my sobbing corpse. thank you. the one i lose myself in a story story, and a very real way -- to when we were on our way to toronto for the premiere of "the men who stare at goats"," on the plane i said to i know how to spot psychopaths. they rule the world and i know exactly how to spot them and i now have this power. looked at me like i had gone insane. he was like don't be ridiculous.

and i love moments like that when i congenitally turn from one human being to another human being and people listening hours ago i was being chased by the bilderberg group and i became really paranoid and started imagining myself in chase. this agony is not pleasant and thinking this is such a mess all these contradicting thoughts are swirling around my head. like the dsm with a psychopath test. am i for the dsm, and mike and the dsm? is a good good, as good, as it back? assigned colors are crazy but maybe they aren't crazy about this aspect of things and does that make me crazy? all these thoughts swirling around. it's painful and agony. you know when i was writing "the

men who stare at goats" there was a quote. when i was writing "the men who stare at goats"" you know i may not be able to remember it. it was a quote by a u.s. supreme court judge. i would not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity but i would give my life to simplicity on the other side of complexity. that is what i try and do in my books. you lose yourself in all of this stuff and you examine it from every possible including the craziest aspects. and you drown in it all. and then you come out at the end with something simple yet all the complexities and they are the fun page to read. so i can't say it's fun to write but that is what i mean. how do i recover?

honestly i take half a day off and then i start to feel guilty and start working again. >> host: jon ronson do you read a lot of the reviews, the critiques of your books? are you focused on that? >> guest: no no, i tend to skim and if i see a word like delightful or superb, i think okay good and i stop reading. and if i skim and i see a word like equivalencies i'm like wow. i have a vague idea of the interview. i did give a role to myself once about if you read a good review like a great rave, how happy are you? you are happy for about three seconds and then you're

miserable again. if you read a bad review how unhappy are you? you are massively unhappy for ages. years ago i've made myself a rule. i'm going to be exactly as unhappy about it criticism as i am happy about no criticism. that worked for ages and there have been a couple of backlashes against the book which i should say by the way i don't think are fair. one or two people have said i don't understand i don't write about why women get it worse than men when in fact it's entirely about why women get it worse than men and shaming us. i think it would just annoy me because there is misrepresentation. i'm not reading anything at all. >> host: doug isenberg in massachusetts. doug you are on with author jon ronson. >> caller: hello. you produced a video called

escaping control which didn't go down too well among members of the jewish community or some of them at least. can you talk about that and if you had a chance to -- goliath? [inaudible] >> guest: russ what is escaping control? just go escaping control is a web series i did about control of the internet. but i don't think it's true that thing about the jewish community. i did one episode where he went to israel and looked at how certain zionist can't even remember. it was an episode that wasn't that great but it didn't really get any controversy as far as i can remember.

nobody really watched it. there were a couple of episodes in the series that were good and we are really watched. including i hooked up with patrice wilson. he is an l.a. producer and if you like a rich mother with a teenage daughter he writes a song unrecorded video. so you tell what your likes and dislikes are and patrice a few thousand dollars were recorded video for you. one of the songs went crazy viral. i have not heard it after that. rebecca black's friday he wrote this song about friday. i can't remember so i wrote to patrice and i said can you do

one for me? what are your likes and dislikes and i talk about this and they said well on tuesday evenings i sometimes get to go to the cinema by myself. and it's nice. it's a couple of hours to myself going to the movies by myself and that is probably my favorite thing. so he came back with this song that went i'm getting older. my life is over. it's not that bad. so that one went super viral. i honestly don't remember what i did in israel and i don't remember getting any criticism for it read. >> host: your level of fame in great britain as opposed to here, you walk down the street in great britain without being recognized over there? >> guest: i get recognized

that i remembered a big star wants it to make you have got it perfect. you have enough fame to make your ego feel good but not so much like, you can do anything that you want to if i do a tour in britain in london or glasgow or manchester i can imagine about 1000 people will show up. i don't get that recognized. >> host: do you fill it book store on your book tour? >> guest: e but smaller. we did a show in san francisco and about 600 people came. and then stores in nashville where 100 or 150 people came. that was nice, to be able to go to santa cruz and fill it with 150 people is amazing. >> host: frank from lava city kansas.

>> guest: no i wow. in our movie "frank," frank comes from lots kansas. >> host: i am -- >> caller: i am interested in the economics of all this. one thing like justine sea got fired because she's an economic liability to her employer. dsm-iii is useful because it allows psychologists and psychologists to bill for their services. what i am most interested in is the economics of very destructive industries and i have fought personally against the private prison industry which you want or charlie have some in great britain and also fight against the fracking industry and i've been very successful in both fights. both of them are driven to this

incredible recklessness by the money that drives them. and here in kansas we have experienced in my home seven or eight earthquakes a day because of the way fracking chemicals are injected deep underground. private prisons, the companies have scammed -- scanned the localities to build economic prisons and bondholders to build these things and to make operating than they have to invent a reason for literally tens of thousands to be held in prison. >> host: frank can you bring this to a conclusion? >> guest: no it is really close to my heart. if eric schlosser warned about to put out a book about the american prison system i would love to write a book about that. >> host: his last book was command-and-control.

guess though that's right. it has always stopped me from doing it because it's an incredibly interesting topic. >> host: depict. >> host: depicted a topic for your next book? >> guest: not yet. i would have done the prison system if he hadn't done it before me. in the "so you've been publicly shamed" i focus in on childhood bipolar disorder because it's so baffling and it's so unbelievable. in "so you've been publicly shamed" i write about both senses of the word. >> host: cynthia a few minutes left in our program with jon ronson. colorado springs, colorado. >> caller: hi jon. in the interest of full disclosure when the movie came out i was in that -- and i agree

with your -- about the film and since we are talking about wonderful topics and you have given me two more books i have to go out and get write a book the books and the movie pick up the while the more colorful aspect through remote viewing and i wanted to know could you actually get into any of the actual data because there was so much value to a lot of the work that they did and they are still doing teaching people how to do this. didn't want to leave people with the impression that the only part of remote viewing is the funny while part or something to be shamed you might think. guess though right. thank you for that question. you know you have obviously read this "the men who stare at goats" book and i did sit in on some remote viewing sessions in calabrese and i met skip atwater

so i met a lot of the big remote viewing luminaries. in the end i didn't do much about that. the main reason i didn't was because jim had written his book remote viewers and i did want to to, didn't want to tread on his turf. cerelli "the men who stare at goats" there's only one chapter about remote viewing. most of it is about this other stuff. the stuff that hadn't come out at all and it's true that i wrote a skeptical comic. a skeptical comic about all of this stuff. i wouldn't say it's fair to say shaming. it was more enlightened comic. >> host: that is the last time

we have been given the guest an idea of what's coming next. who is in this picture cracks. >> guest: no a magazine asked me. >> host: is this you? >> guest: e it's me. you might mistake it for yentl. i was deeply ashamed. basically what happened was i was asked by a magazine, you know there is a tradition in journalism and black like me a white man that would stain their skin dark and live in segregated louisiana in the 1960s. and then i remember after 9/11 somebody said to me what you stay in your skin and go live in a muslim community? you want me to spy on muslims?

i was like no. i wouldn't do that. and a very persuasive editor said to me okay we have got one. like black like me but it will be so interesting. we want to make you a woman and then you can live like a woman. i will get a prosthetics artist who can make you look exactly like a woman and you can walk like a woman. i will give it a try. they spent ages making me a prosthetic head and i slipped it on. i basically look like a woman with a gigantic head. i said forget about the prosthetics because there will make me look exactly like a woman. here is a padded and will make you walk like a woman and here is a wig. and then dress me up and test photographs were taken. i walked up to the editor in the office and they went you look so

much like a woman. and i was like why do you think i look like a woman. he looked just like a woman, go go. there's a scene in goodfellas go get the -- and she's looking back. if walking into the outside world looking nothing like a woman and my heart is pounding. humiliation factors so largely in the life of a journalist. the professional -- of people. i can do this. i can't do it and i stopped. and she was very disappointed that i just couldn't do it. i don't think anyone has seen the photographs so when i was writing "so you've been publicly shamed" i started to look at my

own fear and shame and i realize that photograph of me as a woman would have been utterly horrific if it would have gone now. that is why in an attempt to eradicate shame for my life i included that by doing the book. >> host: to fall post on our facebook page at what point did the documentary about you called stanley kubrick's boxes a guy would like you to share about his films and the making of that documentary. guess that the first documentary ever made in 1995 was called hotel auschwitz and it was about the concentration camp raid shortly after came out i got a telephone call from this posh found the man who said my employer would like a copy of your documentary. i said to a sure employer and he said i'm not at liberty to tell you. i said oh go on and he said okay okay. it's good to break so that was easy. so i sent the tape and waited

and nothing happened. as i said cooper died and a few months after he died this man phoned again and said do you want to come up to the house and everybody knew he lived in this mysterious house between north of london and it had become the stuff of legend. there were rumors when kubrick was alive in this crazy house so i went up to this house, huge huge house that was full of boxes boxes everywhere. it looked like the internal revenue service had taken over this house a few years ago. it was huge but there was no

occupants. it was utilitarian, boxes and filing cabinets and so on. so i said what is in the boxes and they said everything. so stanley never threw anything away. i went back home and i said to my wife these boxes and she said you have to ask them if you can go through the boxes. so i asked them and they said okay. i spent years maybe a couple of times a month. this is extracted in my collection "lost at sea" and stanley kubrick's ox is. my favorite actually there's a few favorites. on my first day i saw this locks that said sniper had scary so i opened it up and it was a severed head of a sniper. i'm holding the head by a tear just then kubrick what passed

and i said i found they had. she says that ryan o'neil said and i said now is the head of the sniper and she was shocked. i said i know and that was it. but my favorite one was i found all these photographs behind the house photographs of london. thousands of doorways, mortuaries, costume shops. they were almost all taken by kubrick's nephew meant well. i went to go see men well and he had 30,000 photographs over year. i said was it a good year and he said it was a great year. he said the best moment, so this is my favorite moment, he said kubrick wanted to take photographs of this long street in london.

it's a long street and he said come he didn't want the buildings tilting back. every day he would go and take a photograph come down and move the ladder for weeks and weeks. kubrick would call up and say are you nearly there? you must be nearly finished. they get the photos developed tape them altogether into this perfect panorama of big hole commercial world takes it back to kubrick's house on this long corridor. a kubrick comes out of his room and looks at it and goes i'm sure it's going there. he could have