author of "so you've been publicly shamed" "the men who stare at goats" and more. he took viewer questions and discussed his body of work on booktv's "in depth" program. >> host: jon ronson, who are "them"? >> guest: oh, them two different types of people. they're the secret rulers of the world who kind of exist and kind of don't exist depending on what package you bring to the situation. then -- them is a book in which i hung out with conspiracy theorists and tried to sneak into the secret room where they believe the shadowy cabal was trying to secretly rule the world. the them are the extremists and conspiracy theorists and they're also the objects of their possibly paranoid delusions, possibly correct interpretation of how the world works.

p.m. .. i went to these things in central portugal. and i went there was a conspiracy theorist from this town who has now departed and we tried to infiltrate the builder bird mating and obviously lots of conspiracy theorists from all different stripes of the illuminati so we scouted around the i was about to tell you i just read that because this is what conspiracy theorists' believe. it was never in the mainstream media. i thought was just the fantasy

so i went there. i thought something is happening but i am sure it is not important. we scouted the hotel tried to ford contacts with waitresses and chambermaids which was really an successful and then we left and i noticed a dark green lamp was following us and chase ensued. when i say chase, i was going ferry miles an hour, so was he. if i had gone faster he would have gone faster. so we are driving to portugal and i am panicking. i have never been chased by the shadow we henchman, nothing to compare this to. i have been yelled at by a neo-nazis on a number of occasions l.a. kind of know what is going on. never been chased by a plunge in dark glasses belonging to a chatham reorganization that i

didn't know existed so i stopped the car and he stopped his car and i went to his window. it was a man in dark glasses. knock on the window to try to explain myself and he wouldn't look at me. looked straight ahead so i got back in the car, carried on driving and he carried on. the first thing i did was phoned my wife and i said this is really bad. i am being chased by this group and i'm really upset and don't know what to do and i am out of my depth. and i'm not even sure whether i will see you again and my wife said you are loving it. i phoned the british embassy and said i am being followed by a

dark green lab fear and the woman at the british embassy when to go on. i heard you take a sharp breath, she said what you doing here? i said i am recently a humorous journalist out of my depth. to you think you might phone the group and explain that? i am here with a conspiracy theorist calls victim tucker. that might be the problem. maybe you can explain i am in the car with him. she said -- everything fit happened that day this stays with me the most, she said the good news is if you know you are being followed they're probably just trying to him intimidate you. the dangerous ones would be the

ones you don't know are following you so i took comfort in that. what if these people are the dangerous ones and i just happen to be naturally good at spotting them. we got back to our hotel and i hope -- this is three hours. we got back to the hotel and the woman from the british embassy telephoned me and said i have spoken to them at the hotel and they said nobody is following you, how can they call someone who doesn't exist? so i said he is behind the tree. there was a man behind the tree. the next month, i would say, don't know exactly when it starts because i imagined myself

being chased for weeks but at some point it stopped and i wasn't being followed anymore. >> so they do exist? >> the first hotel where they met in 1954. eventually like everybody -- nobody wrote back. the next day we went back to the hotel and stayed and watched limousine's going up the drive david rockefeller henry kissinger, vernon jordan hines, you know stuff was going on. so eventually i wanted to speak to really important ones, one was denis healey, one of the founding members and he explained what it meant to him which is this is the second world war and they lived through

hitler and they believed that giving power to business they believe in money, there are savings to the have power in the hands of over the ideological politicians. we will be global list, we will invite up and coming politicians with heads of business and have private conversations and try to promote the idea of globalism. >> host: do you enjoy your time with jim tucker? >> guest: at the time it was terrifying of course. now i am older. i also snuck into the kenyan growth, the weird right wing

version. where they have rituals were effigies are thrown into a fiery bellies of giants don't owls. all of these adventures at the time you want to do nothing less than this stuff. i am not an adrenaline type person. looking back these are the great days. >> host: had the become o r's chauffeur? >> guest: he was an islamic militant living in london in 1995. dirksen senate office building and rest until he was flying over downing street, he lived a couple miles from me in north london and i thought it would be funny back in these days -- in

my dirksen senate office building 0s, why did i want to do this? it was always the same. it might be funny. things but back then lava is looking for it might be funny. i thought it might be funny to sneak in and it might be funny to hang out with a omar while he tries to overthrow democracy and establish an islamic state. he was calling himself bin laden's man in great britain. we called him up. known successful movie director i said can we spend a year with you? he said okay and on the first day of the first thing we did was watch the lion king, the only way he can relax. they call me the lion, the great warrior, the great fighters. he needed a collection box for hamas so he went to the local wholesale warehouse and the only

collection boxes they had in stock release giant novelty plastic coca-cola bottles so i citizen to funny that you are collecting money to overthrow of the west indies palpable symbols of western corruption and he was like yes. didn't want to engage in the comic irony. then we spent a few months chauffeuring him to office world, islam is the future of britain pamphlets were photocopied. it was a special price promised if you find a copy at office world, and the one time i was with omar, he was getting some leaflets that said crush the pilot state of israel and a couple feet up there was a

hasidic jew getting sheet music for a bar mitzvah law. o law was like taking a sideways glance, oh my turned to me and said the sensitive moment. he said i let you in my life, i would like something in return. i said what? he said can you drive me to is this meeting? i drove him to what was basically a secret terrorist meeting, it was definitely a secret radical islam meeting. they wouldn't match us in. of mark got into trouble for bringing us a long. so we had to wait in the parking

lot while omar brought this -- we were in the car and i said we are doing god knows what in this sort of house in birmingham and then omar out of me as a jew. a training camp near the airport, he said you have been with me for a year and never discussed my religion but he said -- he suddenly said look at me with the infidel trainees. looked at me with the infidel john who is a jew. they all went -- and i said it is better to be a jews and an atheist. someone in the crowd went -- who says that? actually i am an atheist.

they all surrounded me and asked what it was like to be a jew, they had never met a jew as retreating like a rare discovery on a coral reef. this was in 1996-1997. i remember at the time being on the board of deputies the jewish anti-defamation league, he said -- i think he meant me as britain -- hasn't woken up to what is monetarism actually means. i am thinking, paranoid. four years later and ever since 2001 omar's people have been implicated in acts of terrorism. there have been a number of occasions a suicide bomber has

blown themselves up and would have omar's numbers stored in his mobile phone. that has happened on the number of occasions. somebody wanted the drivers, whether he had training camp end ed up blowing himself up somewhere and omar is in prison in beirut so a few people have said where were you? this was happening and you were making it a kind of comic story. this was a burgeoning thing and you were in the middle of it but you presented this as the comic story. what happened happened. the comedy and absurdity happened. we were there. we were there by luck in a way but we were there and so i think it is a valuable record of the

world being about to change with nobody knowing it was about to change. >> host: was your time with randy weaver and his family for the same reason? >> guest: no. of all the stories in my book, that is the one story that i took a completely different attitude. it was a terrible human tragedy. what i love about that story, it is the first time i ever told a story where the people who most people would represent as villains come over as humanistic, flawed randy weaver is certainly flawed and i am sure feels responsible for what happened to his family. i am sure he does but nonetheless it was a really interesting story for me as a

journalist where the weaver family was -- the kind of heart of the story in every way. i had never done that before. never written a story where the people most people would think of as the villains were the people who i was feeling great sympathy and empathy for. should i explain what the story is? i think lot of people have forgotten it. family of white separatists, conspiracy theorist, believing in all this stuff, new world order, go to live on top of a mountain in idaho thinking if we can't live on top of a mountain in idaho where can we live free and would go to the nearby area -- aryan nation supremacy group

and he insists he was never a white supremacists but it was the kind of overlap in what the weaver is believed and what the white supremacists believed that he never considered himself -- anyway. he would go there for picnics and so on, the kids were young 9, 10 years old including the girl i got to know and to like is hugely rachel weaver and anyway, like a lot of white supremacy hangouts this -- can i take a slight detour for a second. when i was writing the ring in the weavers sorry i went to aryan nation foolishly thinking of ice at a time that -- i drove has assigned sedna 02 jews allowed, jews and pack now.

and immediately got surrounded by these skinheads, terrifying men, young men. aryan nations was about the close down and they had nothing to lose and they surrounded me and started yelling at me what is your genealogy and i said my genealogy? church of england. one of these guys made a joke, the ones to make you give your money, made a joke and kind of relax and i often wondered whether that have been an engine to protecting my ass and that moment. it goes to summer camp and so on and a couple agents -- presumably thought somebody to

work with a slightly crazy person who spends time with crazier people that asked if he would be an informant and he said no included grand standing wave. like a big no. so then they send somebody, will use again? he said yes. will use of the gun there? he sawed away and it was below the legal limit. they said you sold descent illegal weapon you will go to prison and as you come and work with us and he said no and randy dug his heels in, put his family in the cabin stayed there for a long time, like year-and-a-half you won't take me off this land stupid. and the agents were watching, and one day one of the agents at

the cabin, the dogs started barking, they started chasing the agents and randy's little boy who looks much younger and 9, chase the agents down the hill, the agent hid in the bush came out and shot the dog and killed the dog he said you shot my dog you son of a bitch. and fired, didn't hit anybody but fired and the agents opened up and sammy yelled dad is coming home, dad ran up the hill and the agents shot him in the back and killed him. one of the agents got shot and killed at the same time.

may be as family friends, people don't know. i presume people don't know. they drag the body into the cabin or the ship. the next day randy came out and they shot randy. the fbi. and they shot vicki weaver in the head as she was holding her baby in the doorway and the siege ensued for 12 days until the family came out and the family of the girls were awarded $1 million each in compensation. that was a story office -- the whole thing about them, it is a book about a kind of pressure cooker of craziness. the conspiracy theorist sir getting crazier and our

responses toward some, things just going up and up and up and the book came out just before 9/11. >> host: randy weaver is still alive. what is he doing? >> he is selling his book at gun shows. have your picture taken with randy weaver for $100 or

something. randy despite the people we decided have no merits. they have no merit. and you know give them back their human qualities. their empathy and passion i only tell a story i passionately want to tell so i go to people and i think the passion i think you can see that. >> host: somebody you talk to about your new book was featured

in your new book "so you've been publicly shamed". let's watch a little bit of video here and we will come back. >> there are no perimeters about how people publicly observe you and put you in a public stock age and there is a personal price publican of the asian and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price. reality programming, politics, news outlets and hackers all traffic in shame. it is a permissive environment online which lends itself to

trolling invasion of privacy. >> trafficking in a shame. on social media we feel we are like unpaid shaming intern's for google and twitter out there making good money people shaming and we are getting nothing and it is getting worse than nothing, a contributing to a flat cold conservative conformist society. we talk about people being demonized in my book. right now at this moment people have the most power on social media and convey social justice people and we are finding it really hard to distinguish,

differentiate between serious transgressions and non serious transgressions and someone makes a joke, and torn apart, their life and cataclysms because of the foolish and erroneous belief that some bad the worded joke is a clue to that person's inherent evil. labeling culture which i write about, this terrible tendency we have as human beings to want to define somebody -- we do within the mainstream media as well and we do it because it is fun and makes us feel good, it is cuts article, someone wrote about my

book, and as human beings we love to declare other people in sane and we do it to make ourselves feel good and we do it because on social media we surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do so it becomes an approval machine. the film maker calls it mutual grooming. monica lewinsky, or in my book, become like data passed around in disapproval machine. at some point, should explain -- we can show empathetic people, in our ferocious desire to be good empathetic people the flame burns really hard and we commit these incredible things like we

did. >> host: some shot put in this? >> guest: there is the drone strike operator in us that we can just press a button and continue happily with our day. don't need to think about the village. the snowflake is not responsible for the avalanche. it is the earnest desire to do good. we do do good. making enormous, a columnist makes a racist comment in a column we can punish the newspaper. when i say we sometimes it is becoming sometimes it is other people. the protests that work to an

extent there is powered fair, a day without a shane is likeming is like a day picking fingernails. >> host: here is a picture of just seen arriving at the cape town airport. >> guest: i really love justine in my story. this has been written about a lot, much more tonight other books. one of the editorials, write a book about mob mentality on social media but why did he have to make justine as sympathetic

character. don't tell me i can write about this person but not this one because of the baggage. justine, a pr woman in new york city had 170 twitter followers looks like good looking. evidently has fun at parties in new york and a lot of people out there. and followers the worst joke ever made endeavor will make. and tweeted going to africa,

just kidding, i am white. >> we will show that tweet. >> chuckled to herself. got no replies. the internet doesn't congratulate us. and said were you surprised? i had 170 twitter followers and never got any reply is. no one ever talks about that so switched off her phone. welker up 11 hours later in cape town, turned on her phone and there was the text from someone she hadn't spoken to since high school. i am so sorry what is happening

to you. and call me right away, you are the world wide number one sending topic on twitter. she didn't intend. better not wheat to overwhelm that. everybody -- everybody was tweeting it. this is a terrible human being. she was asleep on a plane, oblivious to the destruction and that became part of the hilarity that she didn't know. her employer said the latest tweet was unreachable on international flights. it was like oh man i can't wait

for justine to l.a. and. we were about to watch her get fired in real time before she knows she is being fired. hoping she would be raped by somebody hiv-positive and find out of her skin color projects us, nobody went after that person that person got a free pass, so excited and happy to tear apart justine that nobody could handle the complexity of tearing apart somebody who inappropriately tearing apart justine. that is how simple-minded social media shamings are. she just -- the first thought was this was exciting watching a person get destroyed. thirty-second later i am not sure that was intended to be a racist tweet, a tradition of

people doing this type of tumor, not flaunting privilege but mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege with exaggerated version. randy newman's short people got no reason to live. south park, maybe i thought -- not being as good as that. may be that is why it is taking forever just not very good. it was broken and crushed. end up living in america, and louis working for the newspaper.

and she tweeted i am not sure that joke was intended to be racist and she said straight away the privilege -- she said to her shame, shut up. as human beings we are supposed to stand up to the police to in justice. people were too afraid to stand up for injustice and that made me all the more -- all mom more certain. >> host: did she want to talk to you? >> guest: nobody -- deeply wounding, haunting traumatizing

moments in their lives. justine agreed to talk to me. she finally agreed to meet me three weeks after it happened. the deal we had was i could take conversations that she would like to deferred judgment as to whether she would let me use it. a couple months went by. just one time to give one interview to show people how insane it was that the punishment was so wildly disproportionate to the crime. on the record those interviews came on the record and as the book was coming closer to publications started talking to me. she was really nervous. and open it up again.

it was nice people, thousands of nice good people told her she was worthless and had to get out. it was a deeply traumatizing thing. and the context came out, she mailed me, and said glad you told my story. the way it should be told. >> what is she doing? >> she has a new job in public relations after a deer of trusting the wilderness. she has a drop in -- basically she couldn't date for a while. what do you get? google doesn't start -- she is

fine and happy and law lot of people said to her after the book came out i can't believe what we did. nobody said i can't believe what we did. and i got a backlash. first it was like the compaction and kind of. i remember when comment said what racist hate will be on next. i mentioned extreme ones and this benefits me because the more ludicrous ones were never on my side so i realized i am slightly biased. the other 1-third higher remember i didn't reply to any of them. one thing when it came out when this backlash started, i wrote by the way this is not a

stand-alone article. it is an extract from my book and i saw a bunch of people tweeted and extract from a book, it was always an extract. the only thing, nobody replied -- did not apply to anybody and somebody tweeted somebody else only applies to men. so something that was said to me in the book was i have to remember i am just blank for people to put ideologies on and in that moment i realized i was a black can this for people's ideology and there were two types of people in the world. and the type of people who value ideology over humans.

maybe that is too simplistic. if there are those two types of people in the world i am the first tight. >> host: you are watching booktv on c-span2, nonfiction books and doctors every weekend and this is our "in depth" program. this month we have a best-selling author jon ronson. he first wrote a book in 1994 we will ask about that in just a minute. best seller came out in 2001, the men to stare at go to 2004 that became a movie. "the psychopath test: a journey through the madness industry" 11 came out in 2011. that is being made into a movie. "lost at sea: the jon ronson mysteries" 2012, "frank: the true story that inspired the movie," you can see the cover just came out last year and this year his most recent book is "so

you've been publicly shamed". what is club class? and you made a face again. >> i made a tv series was really in my early 20s. i hated everything about that. the little cameras hadn't been invented so you come up with these giant cameras and i was a journalist i was an actor, not a journalist. i was in my mid 20s and the only offer of work i was given was to write a book really fast.

and the idea was i was such a young person biased by my youth. the idea was to lack my way around the world and a $5 way, that is how i get a free trip. on the q e 2, and i went to zimbabwe and the big game hunt. the most exciting thing that happened was i ended up in the many wall in south africa. people remember orifice, the neo-nazi group, around the time of the election, to get elected, they ended up in this place the big casino and where killed and

i was there, stranded and kind of exciting but it was -- in the absence of having my own voice -- i was trying to the british version of those people like lewis smith. i am embarrassed about the book because it wasn't my voice. i first found my voice when i got examined in 2001. >> host: we are going to but the numbers that because "in depth" is a call in program. if you want to talk with jon ronson 202-748-8200. in the stands and full-time loans 748-8221. mountain and pacific and further out in hawaii as well, booktv@c-span.org is our e-mail address. if you can't get through on the

phone lines you can send a tweet@tv or make a comment on our facebook page facebook.com/c-span. he will be with us for and other two hours and 15 minutes. jon ronson what is a psychopath? is there a definition? >> guest: according to the master of this a checklist of 20 rates. i could probably name all 20. lack of empathy, lack of remorse, grandiose self worth, superficial charm, impulsive become irresponsibility, cunning, manipulative, the main one is lack of empathy. and amazing amount of public

shaming called james gilligan, a different view on this but according to her there is the kind of lack of empathy that kind of makes them different as human beings. where there should be empathy is kind of twisted forest grows. like grandiose self worth. the reason i stumbled on the story, wanted to write a book about psychopaths was a totally different story we were having for my bbc radio 4 series about this woman, just started i made a story about this and this is where it started and this is and in the book. she was internet date mr. j, so

gallant, held the door open bought her flowers walked on the road side of the sidewalk. i didn't even know that was a gallant thing and if you think about it. like i open the door, way too early. so anyway. they fell in love and was about to marry him and i don't know anything new about this guy i am about to marry. and american company's house about people had this other

house, drove to it and it was the of mansion news a see near edinburgh. said she confronted him and he went into another room and talked on the phone and came back and said i can tell you, i work for the cia. for various documentations to prove it and so on. over the next seven years it was my turn and he would get these messages for the cia he is fine and for seven years of this got a call one day, the woman said yes, the other mr. jordan.

as it turns out wasn't working for the cia he was a bigamist. and this other family, he was a bigamist and pedophile and roger. i came across this because i wanted to talk about the victims so i said to our brilliant producer, find me the victims, i was talking to mary, must have been incredibly upset and she said no. he is a psychopath and the will to be upset when being chased by the lion. i said wow, i never thought of the world that way before. then i talked to the psychologist who wrote the sociopath next door, and she said not only do they exist but

there are more of them than you think. is is the kicker for me they ruled the world. i you telling me there is a particular mental disorder that is so powerful that it is -- has remold the society? she said yes. capitalism rewards psychopathic character traits. you are more likely to have a psychopath at the top at the head of your business than you are -- i remember saying to her this is a huge thought. if you think of this this is a refuge thought. she said yes, it is a cute thought. that stuck with me. this is all like the preamble to this. none of this is in "the psychopath test: a journey through the madness industry". a started talking to the psychologist who spent time with psychopaths and he told me about

robert hair and then, interested in labeling and disorder and mental disorders, used to be a pamphlet in the 50s back then. bigger than the biggest -- 886 pages long. falling 374 disorders and even more. there were a bunch of others. i thought this was extraordinary. suggesting all these things if i qualified, generalized anxiety disorder which is a given.

parent/child relational problems. arithmetic, learning disorder yes. nightmare disorder, like recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure which is all of my dreams. yes. then i thought okay. either i am much crazier than i thought i am or maybe it is not a good idea to die in as a mental disorder if you are not a trained professional or maybe the psychiatric profession has a strange desire to label what is essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. i did notice psychopathy wasn't in the d s m. north sociopath. what is in there is anti-social

personality disorder. so then i thought i shouldn't worry at all about just going on. i would like to meet some critics of psychiatry. it would be fun, there's a great piece in harper smocking labeling culture. i entered up having lunch with a sigh and colleges with a crackcientologist with a crack team

of psychiatry destroyers. a friend of mine to make such entries as making documentaries about scientologists, they're making a documentary about him. why am i so excited about seeing a scientologist's documentary? so i was really nervous but i had gotten quite well there was no pressure and i said to him okay, approved it prove to me your views at psychiatrist is like a wicked pseudoscience that can't be trusted. like an industry -- who is tony? broadmore hospital in the old days, asylum for the criminally insane. i said what did tony do? and bryan said hardly anything,

he beat somebody up with something that that is not the point. he faked madness to get out of a prison sentence and now he is stuck and nobody will believe he is sane. do you want us to get you into broadmore to meet tony? i said yes o'brien did something scientologists are really good at which is circumvent bureaucracy and got me into a broadmore. i have to say i was a scholar instead of a journalist. so we turned the broadmore. the guy on the desk was funny and cheerful. have you got a phone with a cake with a hacksaw inside? oh my god, this was in the book, we were put into this waiting

area between security fences with this woman. who are you? and he said this is my son, both of my sons are here and later on i saw her, just at the sunday lunch, dressed in her best to see -- and would like to see them one at a time. we got taken into the place where you meet the patient caldwell the center. brian said to me tony is the only person to have permission to meet people in the wellness center. what does that stand for? personality -- it was the most

dangerous thing. did it was not crazy. the patient started arriving and they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants and brian nestande to me. it was like the worst thing in the world and bryan said to me -- this guy was walking toward the wearing a suit, a pin-striped suit and had it outstretched. evidently the outfit of someone who wanted to convince me he was very famous and it was tucked down. i said to brian year later you gave me the best arrangement, thank you, the best story. is it true you fake your way in here? he said yes. i'd be somebody up when i was 17

and my cell mate said to me you are looking at 5 to 7 years in prison. what you need to do is fake madness and tell from you are mad, you get sent to local she hospital playstation, nurses, how do you do it? asked to see a prison psychiatrist. i have just seen a film called crash in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. i said i get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. i told the prison psychiatrist i wanted to watch women as they diet because it would make me feel more normal. where did you get that from? the biography of ted bundy at the prison library. it turns out i take madness too

well. they said the to broadmore anthem and i got here there has been a terrible misunderstanding. how long has he been here for? i had gone to prison for previous bodily harm, got 5 to 7 years. i had been there for 12 years. it was much harder to convince people you are and to convince them you are crazy. you stay away from other patients. en on the other side -- stayed in his room a lot. he saw his medical notes that he wrote. only in broadmore, not wanting to hang out with serial killers. hit tried to convince them he was sane by talking about normal things like football. that is what you would do? yes. i subscribe to the new scientist.

about how they were training bumblebees as an explosive. i said to the psychiatrist, i said to the nurse did you know they are trading bumblebees to find explosives. they wrote in my medical notes believes bees can sniff out explosives. the only thing he tried to convince them he was sane made him seem more crazy. how the usage in the same way, cross your legs in the same way, or like that? to my left, not completely normal to me. but what did i know? note that .. broadmoor and he seemed completely normal to me. ..

>> guest: that he was psychopath. and then one of them said he could contact robert hare who's the master of this stuff. so i did, and we had a number ofd conversations, and eventually he said to me, you should come to one of my courses. so i did. and it was a three-day course where he taught clinicians andur so on how to, you know, identify, how to use a checklist responsibly. and so i did and at one point hare said to me, you know what frustrates me so much is the

fact there's a huge story here and it's corporate psychopathy. and nobody was interested about that. i thought sort of the group and then i kind of popularized the idea of people thinking about corporate psychopathy and the psychopath test. and then i think a lot of people went to robert hare's books after that like "snakes and cities." he said this is the biggest story in the world. he said basically what matthew stafford said to me, why the wars, why the injustice? corporate psychopaths. he said you should really try and find yourself some corporate psychopaths to interview. so i did. i wrote to bernie madoff and i said can i interview you to find out if you're a psychopath, and he didn't write back.. [laughter] and then i took a step back, i became more cunning and manipulative. i wroteat to al dunlap, and i said

i believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you feel less interested in the present spirit. canç i come in and see you about your special brain anomaly? hexd said, come on over. over. >> host: and al dunlap is the gentleman for a while. if you've read the psychopath test journey through the madness industry come you can find out what happened to tony in the end. we are going to go to phone calls. robert is influential. all over the world have accepted his attention that psychopaths are incurable and everyone should concentrate their energy instead of learning how to route them out using his pcl checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. is that indicative that the industry part?

>> also, yeah. about halfway through the book i become a joke with my psychopath studying powers. i start thinking about all of the people in the past of interest to me to determine in a television documentary bad reviews. and i am blind to it. i went through the checklist within and when he said no too many short-term relationships he said no to juvenile

delinquency. my guess is to west point. i remember thinking that it's okay. and it online may i am so drunk with my psychopath powers. the second half of the book is kind of the more tyrannical side and somehow children as young as two and three are getting labeled as bipolar because they go higher in the bipolar checklist. rebecca four years old died because her parents gave her cyanotic psychotic medication.

unbelievable. that is what they mean. none of this is to impute robert hare who has spent a lifetime developing object is, which is a serious thing. people come to my course and says that think a real burden. people come to my course and pick their fingernails and then go back because they score higher on the checklist. what happened to me was i became a cautionary tale to not see what they do in the first half of the book. i think what this book, you know, this book is about the gray area between under one extreme to scientologists.

>> host: what is the threat amongst all of your books? >> guest: i think it's about power and power becomes absurd and people inside bubble with power commit but all of that from a position of humanism and empathy. it is all kindness and compassion. so it is tried to humanize these inhuman situation. we are not the people in the bubble. we like to destroy and not feel bad about it. and so my job is to both

humanize her and asked. you know, to explore this last between power and humanity in a way that doesn't repeat mistakes. >> host: tear from america. we will begin with christopher in nashville, tennessee. you are on with jon ronson. >> caller: hi, thank you for taking my call. i was calling because your story at the beginning obviously seems like you're talking about people in power. i was wondering what your thoughts were on the documentary has been a lot of talk here in america about the monotony and hollywood and some stories that few. what do you think i'm not in my second part of the question -- my second order of discussion is you talk about people with power. i was just recently reading

about the ussr collapsed and the oligarchs that cavemen and most of them were jewish people. i noticed a lot of jewish, not so much practicing of their religion, but part of their identity taking control in the major media outlet and major government forms. i was wondering your statement on those two issues. >> guest: well funny enough i was talking about this yesterday, having a conversation he was on one of the protest in new york. i was talking to somebody after the protests. we were talking about the raster tiles. here's the problem. there's a lot of power in the

world. they happen to be one of the jewish. this is -- this is sometimes a euphemism quite quickly into anti-semitism. because throughout history people have considered the illuminati back through the elders of zion. if you read the first, it is ridiculous. it is supposed to be like the secret minute of a secret jewish meeting and they think they are merciless engines come agreed. we will not rest until we've established our international super government.

can you honestly imagine. still, people believe this. so i am always saying how other and secret group success. if you want to know how many are actually jewish. almost none. the comedian said the reason he was invited was to trim 11 the place that. there were so few steps to better with almost embarrassing. it gets to the codeword.

>> host: in one of your books i forget which one maybe "them," you go to hollywood. >> guest: gap, i ago with tony kaye. >> host: -- [inaudible] >> guest: yeah, they were trying to wrestle the film from him because he wouldn't believe it. and so, he invited a rabbi and he brought a rabbi a catholic priest and a tibetan monk and he took them all within today's meeting. it was kind of embarrassing because they rabbi didn't actually believe the ideas.

it didn't work at all. i do talk about code words. the anti-defamation league, dave go a little bit total eclipse. that last call some people do use code words. but also in this kind of crazy. did new yorkers, i think they've got an overly generous dictionary of code words. but there are codeword speared >> host: matthew is lansing michigan. thanks for holding. uri with jon ronson. >> caller: hi i was wondering what mr. ronson's opinion was why so many horrible people make

so many despicable comments on the internet and yet people like justine sacco are punished horribly for what they said. >> guest: thank you so much for that comment. it is so ridiculous. it happened the other day with this woman mckinlay, is that her name? the espn woman. her car is impounded, so she goes to get her car out and launches into this kind of horrible tirade like i'm better looking than you. >> host: kind of an entitlement tirade. just go these days motion where the offense is the misuse privilege and entitlement, which is much harder to get upset about. the problem is the word

privilege is being bandied around. the word privilege is now being used. chastain, even if she had 150 twitter followers. it's pretty much the same case. yes. i've got better at keeping you. i've got better hair than you. and it was all filmed of course what happened is terrible i will credit your. so we punish people with exactly the same transgression. so that is my ironic in itself.

they said this is sent suggested. what they did to justine sacco was a cathartic alternative to social justice. it makes you feel like you or rosa parks, but you're not. tearing apart a woman on a plane as she slept is not courageous. however, the six cops who were arrested yesterday or the day before yesterday, the guy who filmed put it online and save big on for social media. this is what we should be doing. now the powers that are hand. we know how to differentiate between a serious transgression

and a non-serious transgression. right now doing proper good work. we are also creating a surveillance society routinely. one of the people in my talk, but one basically sad it's fine. this is somebody -- you know getting eaten up and relax as bad. this is a bad. doesn't hurt at all. i've worked with people being destroyed on social media for transgressions. sometimes nothing. it mangles people's mental health. i met people suffering from depression suicidal thoughts waking up in the middle of the

night, forgetting who you are. you know, poster manic stress disorder agony. but when you are the object of the shaming those feelings are shameless. something happened to me a couple of weeks ago for a line from the galley of my boat was taken out and publish. somebody tweaked it out of context and made it look worse than it was. the next thing i said coming in now, it goes to show what an impact on the mental health and social media and somebody tweaked it me stop whining.

if you are the object of a shaming, any feelings that you have are laughable. that is why wanted to write a book, which human eyes. people say it's like watching a horror movie. your heart is pounding. you feel that it feels like to be at the end of a social media shame. you feel that dreadful dread. and they also say such a great page but that is what i wanted to do with this book is make people feel that. i think it is much harder. >> host: it even, brooklyn. good afternoon. uri with jon ronson. >> caller: mr. ronson said i think you are one of the most decent people in public life today in writing.

i have a question about the mideast and the emotional pull to take extreme positions. i would just love to hear whatever you have to say. i will hang up now. thank you. >> guest: i have wanted to do in israel palestine story for a long time. i did do a story a few years ago about astroturf, about how government will pretend to be kind of social media. i've never been to gaza or the west bank. what i would say if i want them to feel like i'm a good person because i've got no strings.

i'm not a polemicist. i am a tree and 11 who feels no kinship to israel. i've often thought maybe i should do that story. >> host: were you raised in the faith? >> guest: yes, raised orthodox in the synagogue. cardiff yeah. my great-grandfather was on his way to new york and ran out of money. you are a sun ray thin and even though they went to the reform synagogue, i have to go to the orthodox one where everybody hit themselves.

and every things in hebrew. i discovered that i could have basically done mine in english. it takes years of hebrew school. then i have to go three times a week like other kids at the orthodox synagogue. i think the fact that the man who performed my bar mitzvah was murdered a couple of years later by neighbors. which is kind of a confluence. i would smuggle into the synagogue to show them what it was like a mayor. it felt kind of weird. but then now is 13 14 i

started going to the reform synagogue. i remember one time we played this game and it was like capture the flag. and the guy said you were the israelis. then they went to the reform synagogue is like summer camp in winter camp. hanging out with girls. so i've never had the chance. i never believed a word of it either. i didn't believe a word of it. but love to continue to love jewish people. >> host: is you ever get to

know christopher hitchens before he died? >> guest: no, never did. >> host: needed nelly tweet and allow shamus to command on search results. >> guest: okay, here's the thing -- no. somebody said to me when i was writing this book, you know, google has a formal toby eagle but it has anything happened whether it's good or bad. i worked with some economists which was made tonight adjusting sacco's shaming because november 2013 she was googled 40 times. on december 2013 googled 1,220,000 times.

so we were out using mathematics with several million dollars. the most was half a million and i think $120,000. >> host: you've got it in your book "so you've been publicly shamed, the psychopath test." i look toward a moment ago but couldn't find my mark. we will go to barbara in seattle. >> caller: hi, i want to ask a question. do you think that the cia and the u.s. government is more site go or lifecycle event had a date? i have been to move next door to a person and he would not kill any women with children.

certainly that was the story that is why you would feel the way that i did incredibly unsympathetic. while she stood on mind in the doorway and we know this kind of stuff happens a lot. in my book, i suppose it looks how inside the bubble people convince themselves of these extreme interrogation techniques more psycho than ted dundee --

ted bundy presumably different. the reason i stopped and slow down of course that this thing goes back, the psychopathy is so powerful that it remotes institution to become more psychopathic. i go back and forward on it if you want to know my honest feeling about it. i go back and forth on it. i think that there's certainly some truth to it. they feel less rewarded in business politics and so on can review a sense of self-worth, lack of remorse and so on.

they may be it's a bit of labeling to play both the cia. that also feels kind of good. it's because i swing back and forth on that. >> host: make use in scottsdale arizona. >> caller: wow, this is just wonderful. he is a prophet. i think that he does that work on this area as a science. we need to bring all of their scientists who were that it is organizational. there is the one group dynamic. you are putting your hand on it. you know how much they are suffering from?

g know how many families in the east of turkey and israel and middle east are suffering from the mothers with the psychopath tendencies for the power connected themselves to the power to survive. you are just fresh air. but you need to talk about more remedies. come up with the mindfulness training. i decided later in my age after shaking hands and putting. seeds in their and all the good things that bring awareness. >> host: already. we are going to leave it there and give it to mr. ronson. just go to one thing was mindfulness. the next time i am in need i'm going to go for mindfulness because people swear by it.

>> host: what is mindfulness >> guest: you know maybe the caller can answer this. it is this new thing that is sweeping the therapy world. it doesn't involve medication. everyone says it's amazing. you've got a tri-mindfulness. maybe a mindfulness therapist can give it very brief explanation of exactly what it is. >> host: will land, miami. go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: hello i'm so happy to be on your program. like the previous caller said, a breath of fresh air. my question would be somebody was in dealing with the emotional, quote unquote, issues for a long time and right now struggling with girl grande done who has been labeled undiagnosed and is struggling right now to find a way now have

to navigate his journey with the help of parents who are well-meaning and grand parents who love him but our laws because we have been does mr. acted in so many areas to the justice system. >> host: can i ask if this is -- >> guest: adhd initially, but i don't pullback to any standard because no one has ever confirmed for giving me a reason to believe it is true. it may well be but i suspect there's so many of the things involved in coming to a conclusion on what people are and why they came to be who they are. >> host: what age is the grandchild? >> caller: 18. >> guest: i am sorry for the troubles you've been going through. i mean, there is undoubtedly an

epidemic of labeling and diagnoses going on. >> host: you rate first about how they come up with these diagnoses, who comes up with them and often the loudest person in the room. >> guest: it is extraordinary. the reason why it went from being that they thought because his mother was very unhappy nobody helped. and then she died and growth of this 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 other one was masochistic personality disorder and it was women who stayed in abusive relationships. i've gotten attacked by the feminists, with self-defeating personalities. i'm a terrible liberal. i only see both sides. i do believe that there is some disorders were a label is only good thing.

he's got caves. you got ocd. you know, there are kids everywhere right now to think of themselves my god i can throw this at you. this makes me a terrible person. i could yell out something racist. i must be terrible. and they get haunted by this. they go and see a psychiatrist eventually and a psychiatrist says everybody has these thoughts. this does not make you a bet person. it pops into your head and then they pop out again. and then a lot of people are cured by that realization.

that's okay. it's normal. here are the ways you can help. you know, in my new book "so you've been publicly shamed, the psychopath test," talked about social media in the early days. paper words nervously on social media and other people would tweet back zero oh my god, i'm exactly the same. i loved that. it was incredible. basilica garden of eden. people said they had a voice. we would have someone who would publish like a racist newspaper, but also to have this kind of

terrible. there is even a phrase back bad. facebook is worry to entry and lied to your friends and tell the truth to strangers. then they laugh at our faces because people got so drunk with wanting to do good cow with wanting to be a good social justice person. instead of people openly and unselfconsciously admitting their secrets, suddenly people were being defined and destroyed by the secret. i felt so compelled to write "so you've been publicly shamed, the psychopath test" because to see us wonderful thing into a whole

surveillance culture was just heartbreaking. >> host: bestseller not their jon ronson is our guest on "in depth" this month and booktv. we often ask guests to come on. seriously jon ronson told us. ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> 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." 748-8201 for those of you in the mountain in pacific.

next month, lauren wright will be our guest out of chicago printers row let's fast. in chicago we will be talking here. he has a document bearing on the issue. were you happy with the misery? did you have any say so? >> guest: i didn't have any say so. in fact i wrote a screenplay about a year ago in england and we re-watched it for the first time because it had been so long. it's got a few problems in the last half, a little bit complicated and long winded. other than that, great. george clooney was lovely and very charming. one of the famous people whose

very considerate to everyone who's around 10. and yes, i liked it. >> host: where did you find general stumble by them? did you make of that name? >> guest: no when it came out it was like my first-ever. on channel four -- here is another. make more. i was like i don't know what to do. my producer said take the money.

i'm sure this is going well. i think it's a good danger when you've got to just be more. indeed we had no idea what we are doing. they try to do the skull and bones story at yale. a man in my 30s going off. then we tried to do the story about how they possibly grave

rocked. so they got nowhere. my producer at the time jumped out in what had happened is the book i just come out and do this on cuddling the fact that the cia -- and it would've serious book and of course in this stuff came out in the mid-90s right up until the mid-90s i said we've got to do something. so we ended up with this guy in las vegas and be employed and he

was a skeptic. and i was panicking awake enough . the few times in your life you just ask one question and it happened at this meeting. i just said to him you know when you start assessing did you notice anything else going on? he said there was this major general who thought that he could -- [inaudible] another who was like a

lieutenant colonel. i said we've got to find this story. we uncovered the whole saga which is a sickly or big breakthrough in hawaii. i met this guy who is kind of who george clooney is based on in the movie. he said he was part of the secret to great unit. i said what was bubble wand. level one was observation.

so i said what was level two? a fork in the road you go left right. so i said what was level three? i said that is quite a leap from level two. he said that first, but after a while we adopt it to trying to find a way. he sent level for could stop the hearts of the coat. and i said he got damaged in the

process. i said was that go fighting back? he said is what was known as a sympathetic interest. one time we had a room. goat number 60, goat number 70. so i went back to london and i came into the party. and then this is how the movie starts that he thought because the human body is made up mostly of space in the wall is made mostly of athens.

that means he would get up from behind his desk. the head of army intelligence would last into the hall. he said one time the colleague with domestic abuse. so i think 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. ..

>> guest: you know, what seems to be happening now is that a kind of extreme end of the social justice world who is so passionate and outspoken that they're kind of, because they're quite frightening. they're kind of winning. and it's like, it's like if you're not as radical as we are is and as ideological as we are, then you're part of the problem. and that feels a bit, to me like bullying. >> host: paula tweets in, your genius is born from curiosity and goes on to ask, what does mr. ronson see as the biggest ideological differences between britain and america? >> guest: i've been living in america for three years now, so i should have some good answers forl that.

one, i think one slightly negative thing i've noticed since publicly shamed has come out is even though sort of ingrained in the american culture is the idea of redemption and second chances and, you know, we're all flawed and we all make mistakes, i think e some, some american people -- you know, brits too but the american justice system and also some americans don't really feel that way. you know, they don't really feel as if people should have second chances, and there's a kind of draconianism and justice amongst some americans that personally i wish wasn't there. i want to live in a world where transdepressions are put within -- transgressions are put within a wider human context. and i want to live in a world

where w people get second chances. soe that's one difference i've noted. but to balance that out with something more positive, because i've been living here three years and i love it here. i feel 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. v .. 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. i loved your book on the "the psychopath test: a journey through the madness industry" 11 particularly where you mentioned the gray areas. i am a mental health professional. i have 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 it because and i think you would agree there is mental illness but the diagnoses

are not objective medical conditions like diabetes or heart disease which are diagnosedable through objective tests. they are basically symptoms and behavior's that are observed by a clinician and they amount to myths that are based on socially constructed norms that you spoke of and the problem and here is the end of my comment. the problem is labeling people based on these myths these labels preclude clinicians from addressing the gray areas that you spoke so eloquently of in your testimony. >> guest: i'm so sorry i hung up on him. >> host: maybe will be possible for him to call back. why don't you try to phone back.

what was your question? >> guest: serious question. you have 400 or so mental disorders, does he feel that way about every one of them or does he think there are some disorders that are absolutely right? because i numb from a world of gray areas and some disorders are fascinating and ridiculous but then others -- >> host: if he calls back he will get on the line so you can ask him that question. samantha, you are on with jon ronson. >> caller: i am excited to talk with you. thank you for greg programs like this. i'm wondering how long from idea to do something when it strikes you to completion?

does it take with research and everything to complete a project, do you just work on one at a time or do you have several things going on at once? does it make a while between projects? it seems like you are so into whatever you are working on, whatever book or topic does it take a while afterwards to get that out of your system? how does that process work? >> guest: it takes me forever to come up with the subject and it takes me forever to write it. that i whistle and whistle and whistle because for some reason preparatory to leaving not to leaving a little a.d. hd i am always getting nervous about

boring people so a superfluous word in a sentence, i will strike it out. that is why my books -- you can read them in a day and have. and you get abscessed forever until there's a prospect in particular, i talked about that book, the two and a half years to write and i talked about it for two years and i was yearning for a day when i would be giving a duck on a stage and i was board. i wanted to become bored with the talks of i could get it out of my system. and wrapped something new. it takes me forever. i don't have another book yet. oh the i am writing a movie with

the director at the moment. >> host: what is the topic? >> guest: forbidden. >> host: "the psychopath test: a journey through the madness industry" is being made into a movie. >> guest: i put some ideas in it. but yes. christian gore is writing the screenplay, and broad comedy like meet the parents like incredible political drama like game changed, scarlet johansson is set to star in it.

>> no idea. and that was a movie i co-wrote and this. the provider of the source material, said hello because the screen writer does not want you leaning over a soda and doing that. is the relay race and you get in the bathroom. has far as i know, at christmas i have deliberately let some get on with it. i didn't know what it was going to be. in the same way that frank was. people tend to like my work. i don't put obvious move the narrative is in my book but i offer great dialogue, great moments comedy, a different way

of seeing the world. a screenwriter can stitch that into a new narrative. >> host: we have jeffrey on the line from fort lauderdale, jon ronson had a question for you. >> guest: did you hear the question? >> caller: go ahead and repeat it. restated for the viewers. >> guest: you said you are mental health professional and you are skeptical of the manual of mental disorders. my question is a silly question but in gray areas, my view has always been some of the facilities -- carley absurd and ridiculous but they got it right, the checklist is the scientific way of identifying that particular mental disorder. and in its entirety, do you

think that when is okay, that one is not and so long? >> caller: it is an excellent question and i appreciate in general in your book to strike a balance. my short answer is yes and no. all of the diagnoses lack scientific validity. why? because they lack of objective criteria because there is no objective tests that can accurately 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 but 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. there are some disorders that are so ridiculous such as adjustment disorder or oppositional defiant disorder which is basically childhood. >> guest: let me tell you my opposition. i know a little girl who was diagnosed with those see the end didn't get over it after her run of behavioral therapy. cognitive behavioral therapy that diagnosed the girl. >> caller: i thought you said oc ocd

ocd. i was referring to odd. >> she didn't get through it in the requisite period. and additional diagnosis. >> caller: you and i basically on the same page but i would say dsm is the only game in town for doing diagnosis. none of the diagnoses are valid. the national institute of mental health is into the long gain to identify the objective brain anomalies that cause mental disorders but this is the best show on tv right now, to have you, such a pleasure and the talk was so inspiring and so well done i really appreciate it. >> host: this time we are going to hang up and not call you

back. >> guest: via the ridiculous one, they got bipolar disorder because little kids would be diagnosed as bipolar at the age of 2 or 3 because they have temper tantrums. they made an effort to move away from that and came up with a new disorder called disruptive mood circulation disorder which is what it sounds like. a teenager or at child having mood swings. >> host: kim on our face book page, if you can't get through on the phone lines try our social me addresses, we will flashed those on the screen, on public shaming on social media whatever happened to the development of what used to be called building a fixed in 2 other people's comments. when i was young i was taught to ignore stupid and mean comments.

i understand the public nature of social media makes it more serious that people react too strongly to what others say on social media. don't feed the trolls. >> guest: i understand that but the problem is someone at the end of a big statement, a whole bunch of things happen. firstly you get fired. because many companies if we don't get rid of this person it could be us next. he is up. day . you get fired. she has a learning difficulty and is on a tour to d.c. the

lincoln memorial washington monument and ends up in arlington, the tomb of the unknown soldier. lindsay, great employee, lovely young woman, has this running joke with her friends where they pose in front of a sign and do the opposite of the signs of a smoking from the main non smoking sign or a leader in front of and no loitering sign, just a joke and post it on facebook. arlington casey assigned to this keep off the grass and another sign that says science and respect so they can instantly strike. we -- pretending to shout. posts it on facebook. some military friends i know you

girls, it is ridiculous. and lindsay says to her friend, take it down. airtran says take it down. lindsay says nobody will think about it again. months later they are in a restaurant. it has gone by roll all over the place. what lindsay did that night was go home young woman suddenly being told by tens of thousands of people that she is up monster. everything from outrageous troll's like we are going to rape and murder you on social media and over the telephone, got hold of her home number. we are disappointed in you. you are a bad person. you disrespect the military and so on. lindsay was up all night

tweeting every single comment about her. she was fired from her job. for months would read every comment and those comments make their way, mangled up her mental health, depression in sunny yet, anxiety, basically didn't leave home for a year and a half. what brought her back, i want to tell you a story in my book and finally -- now everybody is incredibly nice, brought her back in because when this happens on that kind of scale that is impossible to know what it feels like. is terrible. it can ruin people's mental-health. to be cast out is horrific. and what skewers it is to be brought back in with compassion

and kindness and empathy. >> host: loretta, hi, loretta. >> caller: hi, thank you, john, for your chronicling of the social media situation. i have a question. i would like to take it back to justine. to me that is the buffets of some of what i am hearing about the wonderful things you have said, 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 cumin communication perspective that only involves ranting and raving it is what are called

upper case in your face verbal slaps that in my way of thinking shot the other person down. it is very unlikely that justine is going to respond to a barrage. i understand twitter has a minimum number of things you can say but why is it you think most of that this is not the case, please help me out here why is it that that is the way it went rather than as i think many people trained to think about is a more recent question kind of normal verbal roads that would facilitate a sense that both sides are being heard. in other words, the shaming the

thing as opposed to i know you can't do this on twitter, let's talk about what you thought you were saying and whether or not you stepped down to realize -- >> host: we are going to be it there. cannon house office building -- >> guest: you are talking about democracy, they may disagree and argue and listen. that is how communication should be. what happens on social media is the opposite of democracy. you surround yourself with people, what is greater is organizing, great organization and organizing protests and so on but it is not democratic because what happens if you surround yourself with people who feel the same way you do? that is house social media is set up. when things are going well that is great.

i tell a joke, people tell me how great i am, it is great. i don't think you find people who have a similar point of view to you but then what happens? this echo chamber, this approval machine. you don't want to hear. a reviewer feminist writer in england she wrote on a shaming i don't think justine was intending to be racist. i had a whole bunch of people say you are just a privileged bitch too. get out of our network. screening somebody out. that is not democratic. to destabilize that mutual approval is bad. people don't like it. they throw you out. you hear what the person has to

say, you hear what the person has to say if they want to say it. it was such an important moment in the development of this new media partly because she was asleep on a plane and that became part of it. we are about to watch this justine psycho bitch get fired in real time before she even knows she is getting fired. a disgraced pop science author who committed some journalistic things, lost his job roundly but then this moment happened later, was given an opportunity to publicly apologize for what he

did. he said the estate, didn't know what to make of it. and evaluate. turns up at the foundation. what they didn't know, they had erected a giant screen twitter feet giant screen, we can never monitor -- to try to apologize, he could read what people are tweeting in real time, real time responses for his quest for forgiveness as he tried to apologize the tweets one coming up in huge letters, don't allow of this, a sociopath that word again we want to destroy somebody but we don't want to feel bad about it so we demonize

with this lexicon. he has not proven he is capable of feeling shame. disbar raj as he tried to apologize. imagine if that was an actual call and the murderer tried to explain circumstances and the jury were yelling out board, sociopath, if we were watching up court room drama at the cinema and that scene happens we wouldn't think that was good. yet you put the power in our hands and that is how we abuse it. even though when we watch the courtroom drama and we like? and atticas' finch. give us the power we're like a hanging judge, and why the reason why is because we are, i include myself, where social justice people. we want a punch up and attack people, but when he was desperately trying to apologize

after being disgraced and ruined, that wasn't true. . that was somebody on the floor. we felt we were punching up but we were kicking someone when they were down. >> host: politician, legitimate targets? representative aron shock had to resign recently. >> guest: certainly -- i felt most comfortable, lindsay stone ordinary people being disproportionately punished for tiny transgression, i had to draw that line because it would be ridiculous saying i am against criticizing any transgression. i am not against satire or journalism or curiosity, i am not against holding powerful

people to account. this book isn't against any of those things. would this book is against is our new widespread proclivity to ruin ordinary people for nothing. >> host: next call from david in portland, ore.. >> caller: i was wondering what your favorite performing artists are? i particularly get a robyn hitchcock vibe from you. >> host: why do you ask that question? >> caller: i'm curious. i am always a little curious what music and art people enjoy. and i get a feeling you probably like good music. wikipedia >> host: good music to you is? >> caller: music with some sort of sold. that is a tough question.

>> caller: i listened to lot of english punk, that is something i go to most of all. i listened to the fall everyday. so great. and so criminally and known in this country. the reason i have been working with the scottish band, a short film that i made with matthew perry, a comedy with matthew perry, i listen to them a lot. has made a documentary about randy newman and the sentiment, has already been -- that

process at very much. >> host: what about this gentleman, frank sidebottom? >> guest: i was in his band in the 80s. moving to london, i became -- became the entertainment -- one day the phone range. and can't make it. i play keyboards. can you play c, f and j.? luckily those of the three notes i could play. i said yes. you are in. so i was in frank's bent for three years.

it was amazing. nothing makes a young man more alive than cruising up the motor wet 1:00 in the morning. so i would look in awe and wonder why he kept the headline. he kept the head on. so we would play these venues, 500 people 550 people. one time frank was booked to play in a boy band, the one direction at the time. 50,000 people his biggest audience ever, 49,500 people but it showed through a series of

things -- in ten minutes. one gig we played was the night club in the west midlands. probably the word dudley on c-span hardly anybody 20 people at the audience and the audience ignoring us, split up into two teams, got out of football and got off stage took office head and underneath and then he fired for tax reasons and in 50 years passed and i was in the park with my son and my phone rang and this voice said hello and i said frank? oh yes. i said how are you?

he put chris coin. kris cox on the line. hello, john. he said he was going to stage a come back and the blues brothers, i want you to write something about the band. there was a little piece in the guardian and it really came out emotional, midlife crisisy, writing about that moment i got on stage with him for the first time being in this crazy band with a guy, this was very emotional and after i wrote the piece my friend peter who wrote the screenplay for the minister's goes and an amazing -- on pbs at the moment,

wonderful series. he said to me i always wanted to write fake music, what would happen if capt. be was a live in the 1950s but your idea is better. i said i have no idea what you are talking about. what idea? having a fake head. this is what happens at. for the next four or five years writing a screenplay about a fix it all -- fictional band with the fake head that he never takes off. we got it made. i imagine frank to be a mix of the real frank and capt. beef and daniel johnson, incredibly talented songwriter.

the only thing one of the things i admired more than anything was the documentary about daniel johnson called the devil and daniel johnson which i recommend to all of you. so we imagined frank to be a mix of all these people, completely out of the blue, michael fast bender said he wanted to play frank. definitely aware -- he is aware. so he was a great thing. chris passed away when we were doing that screenplay. publicly shame about bad things that happened on social media. something good to happen. chris died and the day after his death it was announced in the local paper that he was going to

be buried in a plotless grave. what is that? have we gone back in time 200 years? it turns out there was such a thing. if you died penniless. i sent one week, a few thousand county could be scared this grave and by the end the day over a thousand people had sent in 23,000 pounds which was more than enough to bury him exhumed and reburied him after a certain time. that is when we got together. >> host: robert in las vegas says it is hysterical brian williams is set up for what the press has been doing for a long time. >> guest: exaggeration? yes. the reason i am reluctant is i

happen -- until the brian williams scandal, i had never heard of brian williams of the reason i am slightly you reluctant to weigh in is i don't quite understand brian williams means? was he a really respected go to news commentator with absolute sincerity or he was a showman? that is the reason i tend not to weigh in on the brian williams thing. i don't understand what the name brian williams has with it. >> host: marcus in portland ore.. >> caller: thanks for taking my calls. really enjoying the conversation. kind of amused at the beginning when you looked questioningly at peters that you could go on.

>> guest: the dance contest of the interview. at the end of the interview i will start sobbing and peter will take me outside and kill me. what courses don't know. >> caller: more on the social media bit. i am a skimmer of your books and it seems to me that in the last decade course so that book by nicholas clara, all the shallows which i quite like, people know a lot of different things that getting in depth which is why i like this show is a struggle. i wonder if you could speak a little bit to that in terms of really getting in depth into a topic and as a follow-up can you mention what you do to recharged after you have gone in depth to a lot of different things besides peter holding your sobbing -- thanks very much.

>> guest: for me when i really lose myself in a story in a very real way when we were on our way to toronto for the premier has said to peter, i know how to spot psychopaths. is a rule world and i know how to spot them. peter looked at me like i had gone insane. that is ridiculous. i love moments like that when i genuinely turn from one human being into another human being and it happened at 10, like people listening all the way backward, being chased and how it became really paranoid and started imagining myself being chased. you kind of go crazy, this agony

that is not pleasant and you're walking around parks thinking this is such a mess. contradictory fought swirling around my head. and i for or against it? for easy but this aspect of things, and old lease things, don't understand and it is painful, and remembers this coach, and it is a quote, the u.s. supreme court judge, i would not give -- for simplicity this side of complexity but i would give my life for

simplicity on the other side of complexity. that is what i try to do in my books. you lose yourself in all of this and examine it from every possible including the craziest aspects. end you drown in it all and come out at the end with something simple. yet all the complexity is in fair. i can't say it is fun to write but that is what i am aiming for. how do i recovery? honestly i take half a day off and feel guilty and start working again. >> host: jon ronson, do you read a lot of the reviews critiques of your books? are you focused on that? >> guest: i tend to skim and if

i see a word like delightful or superb, okay, good. if i see a word like falls equivalency -- a vague idea. once -- if a you read a good review how happy are you? how unhappy are you. i gave myself -- going to be exactly as unhappy about good criticism. that worked for ages and now being publicly shame there have been some backlashes against the

book which -- one or two people have said -- why women get it worse than men in shaming when the book is entirely about why women getting worse in shaming so i think it would just unlike me. i think there is a misrepresentation. >> host: john is in brooklyn. >> caller: you produced a video called escape and control, did not go over well among members of the jewish community. could you and large bond that? are you up fan of max. and fall -- max. and fall --blumenthal.

>> caller: "escape and control" is a web series i did about controlling the internet. i don't think it is too bad. one episode where i went to israel and looked at how certain -- stylists -- it was an episode that was not great. to and really get a lot of control as far as i can remember. i don't remember it being anything. there were a couple of episodes that were good. i hooked up with patrice wilson. and l a producer. if you like a rich mother with a

teenage daughter, i will record a video for you and right in and tell petrie's wilson what your likes and dislikes are and recall the video for you. and it went viral. and it was like -- friday. the others talk about friday mike friday was going to -- so i wrote to patrice about a silly thing, to one from the edge he said what do you like or dislike? i had thought about this. on tuesday evenings i sometimes get to go to the cinema by myself. it is a couple hours to myself. i go to the movies by myself. that is probably my favorite

thing. a i gave that response i am getting older ♪ my life is over ♪ so that one went -- i honestly don't remember -- i don't remember -- >> host: your level of fame in great britain, can you walk down the street in great britain? >> guest: i get recognized but you have it perfect, enough's thing this but not so much. you can do anything you want. i can talks in london or glasgow or the next thousand people.

>> host: on your book tour? >> guest: about 600 people came. and may be 150 people came. that was nice in santa cruz 150 people. >> host: frank in kansas, good afternoon. >> caller: good interview. >> guest: in our movie frank, frank, is from west kansas. >> caller: 9 interested in the economics of all this. not heard it on the show today.

just been gets fired because she was an economic liability to her employer. dsm 3 is useful because it allows psychologists to bill for their services. what i am most interested in is the economics of destructive industries. the for profit industry, you have some in great britain and i have also fought against the fracking industry, very successful in both fights. both of them were driven to this incredible recklessness by the money that drives them. in kansas we have experienced in my home seven or eight errors quakes, the way fracking waste is injected and private prisons the companies have scams

localities to build economic prisons and screwed bondholders in order to build these things and make a profit of operating them they have to invent a reason for literally tens of thousands of people to be held in prison. >> host: bring this to a conclusion. >> guest: it is close to my heart. a book about the american prison system -- >> host: his last book is command-and-control. >> guest: something about the american prison system. profit prisons an incredibly interesting -- >> host: have you picked a new topic for your next book? >> guest: in the prison system, haven't gotten there and the answer to that question, and the

pharmaceutical industry and what i focus in on a pot is bipolar disorder because it is a baffling and unbelievable. and having been publicly shamed google and twitter, acts of shaming we get nothing. >> host: cynthia, a few minutes left with jon ronson, colorado springs, colorado. >> caller: in the interest of full disclosure when the movie came out the minister of the time is on the reviewing organization and i agree with your characterization of the difference between the movie and the film but since we are talking about so many wonderful topics and you have given me two more books i have to get right away the book and the movie picked up while their more colorful aspects to remote feeling and i wanted to know did you actually get into many of the actual data because there is

so much value to a lot of the work they did and that they are still doing teaching people how to do this and i didn't want to leave people with the impression the only part of the revealing is the funny wild party or something to be shamed you might think. >> guest: thank you for the question. i did sit in on some remote viewing sessions. i met mcmanday. there is a lot of revealing. i didn't do much about that. the main reason i didn't was this book was for remote viewers and i didn't want to kind of

tread on his turf. there is only one chapter about remote viewing. most of it is about this other stuff. it is the tip of the iceberg. the stuff that hadn't come out at all. i wrote a skeptical -- skeptical comic-book about all of this stuff. it was more like the comic. >> host: that is the last time we give a guest a monitor of what is coming next. who is in this picture? leah looking at this in "so you've been publicly shamed". >> guest: and magazine asked me -- you might be mistaken for thinking it was the initial --ye

--yentl --yentl. what happened was i was asked by a magazine dress up as a woman. there is professional journalism, black like me about a white man who says stained his skin dark and live in segregated louisiana in the 1960s and after 9/11 someone said to me will use stay in your skin and go live there? and we have got one. it will be so interesting. then you can get -- exactly like

a woman. give it a try. make me a prosthetic head and islip to non and the gigantic head forget about the prosthetics. we can make you look exactly like a woman. here's the padded bras, let you walk like a woman and here's of whig. they dressed me up and the photos were taken and i walked up to the editor in the office and -- you look so much like a woman, now go out and experience life as a woman. i was like i don't think i look like a woman. go. you look just like the woman, go, go. it was like a scene in good fellows, go get the fur cap. i loved walking to the other

side looking nothing like a woman. suddenly i realized oh my god, humiliation factor is so largely in the life of a journalist. the personal avoidance, going to other people. i can do this. and disappointed the editor. i couldn't do it. when i was writing "so you've been publicly shamed" i started looking at my own fear of shaming and realize that photograph of me as a woman would have been utterly horrific. in an attempt to eradicate shame for my life i included that in the book. >> host: on our face book page i once saw an obscure documentary called "stanley kubrick's boxes". i would like you to share your

thoughts about stanley kubrick his films and the making of that documentary. >> guest: the first documentary i ever made in 1995 was called "hotel auchwitz" about the marketing of the concentration camp. shortly after it came out i got a telephone call, my employer by copy of your documentary. i said to is your employer? he said i am not at liberty to tell you. i said go on. stanley kubrick. so i sent the tape. and waited and nothing happened. then stanley kubrick died. a few months after he died this man phoned again and said -- he was kubrick's head and for 15 years. come to the house for lunch.

everyone knew stanley kubrick lived in this mysterious house north of london. it was the stuff of legend. there were all these rumors that he was alive, this crazy house. i went up to this house that was full of boxes, boxes everywhere. it looked like the internal revenue service had taken over this house years ago because it was huge and opulent but there was no opulence it was all utilitarian, boxes and filing cabinets and so on. i said what is in the boxes? they said everything. stanley never threw anything away. so i went back home and said to my wife boxes, have to look through the boxes. i looked through the boxes and said okay.

i said yes a couple times a month going up there. a big guardian peace in my collection. and a documentary of "stanley kubrick's boxes" where i look through every single box. my favorite things i found in the box, on my first day i saw box that said -- the severed head from full metal jacket. i will hold up by the fire and christian kubrick walked by. i found a head. is it ryan o'neal's 5? no, 8 is the sniper in full metal jacket. but she wasn't be headed. she was shot. i said i know. i fave for one was all these photographs behind the house.

in southeast england thousands of doorway is costume shops, and going off to do this, took a 30,000 photographs. was it a good year? it was a great year. he said the best moment this was my favorite moment from the hole kubrick adventure, to break wants in to take a photograph of this long street in london for commercial road. he didn't want the buildings tilting back or forward. we had to take a ladder. so he climbed the ladder to take the photograph and then lose the ladder and it takes weeks and weeks and kubrick said you knew the fare? nearly finished? finally he gets it and synapses snaps, gets the photos

developed take some all together, a perfect panorama of the whole of commercial road, it takes it back to kubrick down a long corridor, kubrick comes out of the room, looks at it and goes it sure beats going fair. >> host: that will be the last word with other jon ronson on "in depth". thank you. >> c-span greeted by cable companies 30 years ago and brought u.s. up public service by a local cable or satellite provider. >> here is a look at some books being published this week.

look for these titles in bookstores this coming weekend watch for the authors in the near future on booktv. >> what i did was i tried to assess each of the 17 crises on two taxis. the first was how old the president's response was and whether it was successful in the long term or a long-term failure and applauded them based upon not just my analysis but assessments from experts throughout the foreign policy world's, aggregated grades rather thing giving them a be cd put them in the appropriate quadrant because none of us would agree exactly where this one should go but we could agree meaning it was precious and it

was a failure and up here, the cautious successes and over here the bold successes both of which have an asterisk on them and these are the bold failures. .. sales and signing. welcome to you all. i'm the moderator my name is pam >> i cover immigration and