 If we all went a little nuts during the COVID lockdowns, it's absolutely true that some of us, including many of our country's leaders and people in the media, went absolutely batshit crazy, often to disastrous ends. Exactly why that happened is the subject of author John Ronson's latest season of Things Fell Apart, a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago. I talked with Ronson about how the creation of a fake medical condition called Excited Delirium in 1988 ultimately led to the death of George Floyd in 2020, how law enforcement fixations on white supremacy warped the investigation into a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and how the director of the massively influential, pandemic documentaries was actually rewriting Star Wars. Ronson is best known as the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, an account of a U.S. Army unit that tried to perfect paranormal powers like walking through walls and ended up influencing interrogation techniques in Guantanamo. And so you've been publicly shamed, which helped define cancel culture just as it was becoming widespread via social media. John Ronson, thanks for talking to reason. Nick, hello. So, Things Fell Apart, you just released the second season, there are two seasons. Tell me, what's your vision of the series, both season one and two, and then we'll talk more about season two, since it's just that. So, I guess the image in my head is, you know, you go to a party and the party has gone really badly. And when you turn up, everyone's like yelling at each other, and you've got no idea how it started. And I think, you know, so I wanted to tell these stories that go right back into the, you know, the history, you know, the pebbles thrown in the palms, those the origin moments, that tiny little human moment that then expanded and expanded and then just engulfed society. I mean, what I love about the series is, you know, both season one and two, is that you go back to, you know, you kind of wind the tape back mostly to the 80s, where a lot of this, like a lot of basic cultural issues, you can locate the origin point of this is when it became kind of recognizable in the fashion it is. And then it kind of, like a retro virus kind of disappears and then pops back up. Totally. Yeah. And it's just something very nice about, you know, these weird paths that my story's taken things fell apart, that you start somewhere and you've got no idea how this is going to be relevant to our lives, often until 25 minutes into the show. Right. And I love that. I love the kind of audacity, the kind of story telegordacity of it. I tell you the other kind of big reason I wanted to make this show was I've noticed, well, you know, in 2015 I brought out this book saying you've been publicly shamed, which is like, you know. That helped define cancel the cancel culture without necessarily calling it. It wasn't even, that term didn't even exist then. So I've been kind of interested in this stuff for 10 years. But I started to notice, you know, more and more friends falling apart on social media. And obviously everybody knows this now. They've, everybody's got somebody in their life who, you know, between this tweet and that tweet two weeks later has completely changed. They've become a kind of extreme caricature of themselves. They've kind of tripled down. They've gone down a rabbit hole that they can't escape from. And their brains have become like that scene in Poltergeist where you open the door and everything's spinning around really fast. And I was just so interested in the kind of mechanics of that. How did that happen? Do you think that's mostly a function or not mostly, but in many ways is a function of social media in the sense that we are now privy to more of everybody's thoughts. And you know, and it's the type of thing where you will see, you know, it could be a politician or an intellectual or a friend where most of the time you don't hear every fucking brain fart they have and then suddenly they'll be like this law is going to have this kind of effect on the economy. And the next thing they'll be like, you know, oh, I really like the color purple or something. You know, it's right. It's like a Larry King column come to life, right? Where it's just random thoughts, but now vulgar, profane, profound all just strung together. Yeah. I think, I mean, a lot of us do it being wounded. You know, Twitter feels like a sort of wounding machine. The thing I love most about Twitter when I joined it in about 2009, I guess, was it offered like little windows into people's lives, into people's worlds. It reminded me of like a Robert Altman film where, you know, here's Stephen Fry with his million Twitter followers stuck in an elevator and he's live tweeting being stuck in an elevator. And right underneath that is somebody with 100 Twitter followers who's got some mental health condition and you're getting a window into that. And it was a place to be sort of delighted and curious in its early days. And people just bringing up old stuff, right? Or like showing clips of things or hipping you to something you wouldn't have encountered. And it was like a, it was a place for de-shaming back then. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves and people go, Oh my God, I'm exactly the same. It was a kind hearted and I had to use this word. I'm sure I could think of a better word, sort of healing place. And then instead of it being a place where people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, it mutated into a place where we would hunt for people's shameful secrets. And instead of having a kind of delighted look into other people's lives, we would find fault and we'd start to wound people. And I think one thing that's happened is there's been a almost like a sort of epidemic of narcissism that narcissists, if you wound a narcissist, then it's really hard. They don't seem to have the kind of psychological capability of getting out of that. Someone said they just lash out and lash out and lash out. I just follow up on the psychology here. Why, you know, the one thing you can do with a narcissist, especially on Twitter is just walk away, right? You don't have to engage them. Why do you think so many people are willing to kind of keep the conversation going? Because we've created a world for ourselves where we define ourselves as being an opposition to other people, which is a very unhealthy, well you can see, I mean society is very unhealthy right now. And that's one reason for it, I think. You know, instead of curiosity, we reach for judgment. I didn't want to make a show that was about issues. I wanted to make a show that was about stories, human stories. So I wanted to take all of this mess and bring it down to like beautiful, surprising stories. Which you do and in the, you know, the first episode of season two, which is really about how COVID, everybody went mad in COVID. And what's great about it is like, I wouldn't say you're quite an equal opportunity offender, but like, you know, it's like, you know, the premise of the show is all of us kind of went nuts, because we all had cabin fever on some level. But you start, the program starts in Miami in the 1980s. And it's about a bunch of weird murders. Can you talk a little bit about excited delirium and what that means? It's such a crazy story. It's a story that really should have been a lot better known. And I think the reason why it wasn't better known is because of prejudice. So yeah, Miami in the 80s, 32 women have found dead in mysterious circumstances. They have certain things in common. They're all black sex workers. They're all found naked from the waist down in similar situations like junkyards at low levels of cocaine are found in their systems. And the other thing they have in common is that the police were confounded. One police officer in the very small amount of media that covered these deaths. You have to imagine because people just don't care about black sex workers very much. The police said this is the most mysterious deaths we've ever come across. Because there was no sign of cause of death. No gunshots, no stab wounds, nothing. So the deputy chief medical examiner of the time, Dr. Charles Wetley, declared that he'd cracked the case. He said the women had all spontaneously dropped dead as a result of a combination of cocaine and sex. They'd had sex. It all makes sex, right? I said that to you must know Nancy Rommelman. I said that to Nancy Rommelman while I was in the middle of making the show. And she said, well, how come I'm not dead? So yeah, they'd had sex. The sexual excitement had somehow combined with the cocaine in their body. And they had spontaneously dropped dead. And he gave it a name, Excited Delirium. So then a 14 year old girl called Antoinette Burns turns up dead without cocaine in her system. And she wasn't a sex worker. So that was like the first significant kink in this theory. And then a woman turns up alive and says she was having sex with a guy. And he, quote, went from a nice gentleman to a damn maniac, tried to choke her. So now they had a suspect. And it turns out that it wasn't Excited Delirium. It was a serial killer. I mean, Occam's razor, you would have thought from the beginning, of course, this is a serial killer. Serial killer called Charles Williams. But none of this dawn to Dr. Wetley. He just left Miami, left the scandal behind him and carried on promoting this theory of Excited Delirium. And it stopped being about women actually. It started being about men. Women, after the scandal in Miami, there aren't that many cases of women being diagnosed after death with Excited Delirium. But it all became about men. Men go berserk. They take too much drugs. They rip off their clothes. You see them running through traffic. They're like the Incredible Hulk. Superhuman strength, impervious to pain, and then they spontaneously drop dead. So that became the new, and the reason why Excited Delirium endured when it really should have gone the way of hysteria. It's kind of like a male version of hysteria. It's taking these male traits and pathologizing them, particularly black male caricature traits, superhuman strength and so on. So Wetley and some of his protegees are all promoting this theory, and so are Taser. Taser buy up 1,500 copies of this book called Excited Delirium Syndrome and give it to every forensic pathologist in America, because that suits them down to the ground because if somebody dies in police custody after being tased, they can say, oh, here's another possible explanation. So Taser promotes it, Wetley promotes it. It starts getting taught in police training schools across America, pictures of the Hulk in these power points, pictures of the Hulk or Jack Nicholson in The Shining, next to phrases, Excited, next to phrases, superhuman strength, impervious to pain, and who learns about Excited Delirium and how you have to restrain them Derek Chauvin. And as they stood around George Floyd's body, they were discussing Excited Delirium. So there's a very direct part from these murders in Miami to George Floyd in the middle of lockdown. And the reason why I first wanted to tell that story is because I wanted season two of Things Fellas Park to all be about culture wars that sprung up during lockdown. Yeah. And the idea of Excited Delirium, it changed. I mean, what you're talking about is a decades-long shift in the way police handled de-escalation of conflicts. So instead of doing various types of de-escalation, it became heavy on tasing people, using tasers, restraining them, et cetera, and leading to the types of circumstances similar to the one that George Floyd died during. Right. And yeah, because it's all about, they're out of control, they're a danger to themselves, they're a danger to other people, you have to restrain them. And yes, as somebody says in my show, when somebody's tased, they're often not just tased, they're beaten up, they're heavily restrained and so on. So it's impossible to say in a lot of the cases what the cause of death actually is because all sorts of brutality is done to these people. But it's not Excited Delirium because Excited Delirium doesn't exist. Right. Some people listening to this will presumably be thinking what I was thinking at the time, which is, well, we've all seen videos of some guy in Florida running down the street acting crazy. So I said to a forensic pathologist, is Excited Delirium ever a term that should be used? And she said, no, because it could be anything. It could be diabetes mellitus. It could be a reaction to some dodgy drug from, spice drug from Asia that I've never heard of. Calling it all Excited Delirium, pulling it all into that box, that's what causes the trouble. With that, there's a new documentary out that argues that George Floyd, Derek Chauvin did not kill George Floyd, etc. Does that change your calculus at all? Well, that documentary came out after we finished that particular show. So I didn't go down a rabbit hole about that. In a sense, kind of not really though, because I'm looking at this junk science that flourishes in high important places. I mean, the Excited Delirium conversation was certainly in the Rodney King Beating, where you watch video of it and you see somebody who is surrounded by cops who cannot threaten them because they keep beating him and each time he moves, etc. I mean, right from my book, The Menister at Goats, I've been interested in pseudoscience in important places. The Menister at Goats is about craziness inside the CIA and armed intelligence and so on. It would be more interesting to report on the sanity within the CIA perhaps, particularly during certain aspects of the Cold War. Right. Exactly. There was a psychologist at the time called Ray Hyman, who was asked to evaluate the psychic spine program in the CIA. So I met him afterwards and I said, well, how come? How come there's so much craziness inside the CIA? And he said, because people are basically nuts. So you're going to get nutty people everywhere, including inside the CIA. So I've always been interested in that in pseudoscience and irrational thoughts in powerful, important places. So for me, Excited Delirium is another example of that, courtroom junk science. You know, another episode focuses on Judy Mikevitz. Who is she and how does she end up contributing to the kind of mad discourse of the COVID lockdown era? Right. Judy Mikevitz is a story that's exactly the kind of story I wanted to do for things fell apart, because here's an example of a smart person who falls down a rabbit hole and, as far as I can tell, just can't get out of it again, becomes this kind of extreme caricature of herself. And why, why did that happen? So she was a scientist, she worked for the National Cancer Institute, gave it all up for love, moved to California to be with her husband, David, starts volunteering at a local yacht club. And to cut a long story short, at the yacht club, she hooks up with this group of people, some very rich people with children sick with a mysterious illness, chronic fatigue syndrome. She starts working for this Institute, trying to find a cure for chronic fatigue syndrome or even find the cause of it. And after a couple of years announces, and a huge fanfare in Science magazine, that they determined the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. It's a little known mouse virus called XMRV. So loads of us are walking around asymptomatically with this infectious disease, this mouse virus giving each other chronic fatigue syndrome. So this was like a huge deal. So after Science published her findings, the government spends millions trying to back it up or disprove it. And nobody can replicate Judy's findings. Judy doubles down. Science starts saying, you know, you've got to retract like nobody can back up your findings. And a counter narrative started, which was maybe the materials that she was using in her experiments, these cell lines, maybe they were infected with XMRV, but never, it was never in the blood of the people that she was testing, it was in the materials. But Judy refused to accept it and became very hostile, refused to hand over her stuff like her bosses at the institute or like hand over the cell lines. And she's like, no, I'm not going to have you know, she became very protective of her findings. She ends up getting fired. She goes on the run, the police are after her because she took her own notebooks or colleague of us took her notebooks. Now she's hiding out on a boat. And the police are after her because of this employment, you know, conflict. And then she becomes so, I mean, my theory anyways, that she becomes so bruised and wounded by this terrible situation when she ended up in jail for five days. She then reemerges early in the pandemic with this documentary called Plandemic, which arguably was her revenge on the medical community. It was her revenge. There are people out there who if they're hurt, will dedicate the rest of their lives to seeking revenge. And I guess let's talk about Plandemic and the creator of that, Mickey Willis, who you also talked to, who's a former child actor or would be child actor who had a brother who died from AIDS. And how does, you know, I mean, part of what you're talking about in and the season of things all apart is the way that all of these different strands kind of come together and just explode during the pandemic. So what does Mickey Willis do with his, you know, his Judy Mykovitz story? Well, so Mickey Willis, yeah, he has a couple of really bad blows as a young man. One is he goes to Hollywood. He's a very, you know, handsome young man, goes to Hollywood, signs up with an acting coach, and then the acting coach tries it on with him, he refuses, and he gets kicked out of the acting class. And at the same time, his brother has AIDS and is dying of AIDS. And Mickey gets it into his head that it's not the AIDS that's killing his brother, it's the treatment, it's ACT. Now ACT was, from what I can tell, like a brutal treatment with terrible side effects. You know, these AIDS patients had to basically decide whether to die or go blind. I mean, these were terrible times. And the early treatments, including ACT, were often over-prescribed or mis-prescribed so that, yeah, the effects of the drug that you're taking to cure the thing could be as bad. It's kind of like chemotherapy. Sometimes you die of chemotherapy rather than cancer if it's misaligned. I believe, like I'm no world expert on ACT, but I believe that if there were deaths specifically from ACT, there were almost none. And it wasn't a disease that killed people. It wasn't a drug that killed people. That's just what I've been told. But yeah, so between these two things, Mickey became, again, like ejected from the community. This is what I'm about to say you've been publicly ashamed. Just the psychological turmoil that being ejected from the community can bring. But these are people also, like the people you're talking about, unlike, at least in certain cases, unlike some of the people who were publicly shamed, science writer, Genelaire or Justine Sokka, the publicist who's tweet about AIDS in Africa cost her career and life. These are people who punch back, right? They don't kind of slink away. Yes. And it's so interesting that change that happened. There's actually a moment in so you've been publicly shamed. I interview a man called Max Mosley. It's funny, everybody, whenever people think about that book, they always think about Justine Sokka, because she really was like the ground zero and shaming on a plane, oblivious to her destruction. Patient zero. Patient zero, yes. Justine, for people who don't know, she's about to get on a plane to Cape Town. She tweets, go to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white. Now, you don't have to be a genius to figure out what she was trying to do there. She was trying to be like South Park or Randy Newman. She was actually making a liberal joke, mocking her own privilege by doing an exaggerated version of it. And by the time she lands in Cape Town, and she's not online because this is at a time when Yeah, no, go, go on that plane. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she lands in Cape Town, turns on her phone, and the first text is from somebody she hasn't spoken to since high school that said, I am so sorry to see what's happening to you right now. I mean, you know, she's lost her job. She's forever the AIDS tweet woman. It must have ruined her vacation. People were in bars all over America tweeting, like, I'm dying to go home, but I can't until Justine Sacco's plane lands. It was hilarious to people like torture. Right. It was a form of torture. What we were doing to her that night. Anyway, you actually slunk away. She did what everybody was doing back then, which was apologizing and going quiet. But there's another person in that book called Max Mosley who did the opposite. And he, his story actually turns out to be maybe the more relevant to the way society has gone now. So Max, his father was a fascist Oswald Mosley, like Britain's fascist leader. He's a big character in Peaky Blinders. Oswald Mosley. Okay, I've got to get around to Peaky Blinders. I've been wanting to watch it. I really have. We've just finished Friday Night Live, so we're looking for something new to watch. That's a boring digression. Yes. So Max has a good career, like he's a formula, a bit like Ralph Nader. He's like a lot to do with car safety, Formula One guy. One day, he goes to the newsstand and there's a photo of him on the front of the news of the world with the headline, Formula One boss, son of fascist leader in sick Nazi orgy. So the photograph is Max in sort of S&M gear, getting spanked. And of course, Max's first thought was like Othello, you know, it's all over. But then he thinks to himself, the orgy was undoubtedly German themed, but there was no Nazism. So he sues because he's rich, he can do this. He sues the news of the world. And the poor news of the world journalists have to go through every frame of this grainy video they shot, looking for swastikas and there weren't any. So Max wins the case and becomes like a hero for sex positivity, I guess. And one of us I can't for the life of me, I can't remember whether he said it to me or I said it to him. But what we agreed was that the reason why he endured when something like Justin Sacco slunk away was his realization that a shaming is a pact between a shamer and a shamer. And if the shamer refuses to be shamed, it's nothing they can do. The shamer is just slink away. That's what and then you started to see that happening more and more with Trump, with Ralph Northam, the Virginia governor who was either in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan hood in his medical school yearbook. Yeah, not 18, by the way. As far as I remember, it was like 25. Yeah, no, no. And he never said which one he was, although he was a Michael Jackson impersonator. So he was probably the one in blackface. But he just refused to leave. Refused to leave. And it happened again, people slunk away. Now, I think people probably assume that I'm all in favor of that. And in some ways, I guess I am if you've been disproportionately shamed for something that you don't deserve. Justin Sacco, for instance, I felt was a wildly disproportionate shaming. She was just trying to be like South Park. And it completely upended her life. But that's very negative. As far as I can see, there's really negative consequences to this too. Talk a little bit about Mickey Willis because he became a documentarian and he did the film Pandemic, which kind of mainstreamed a particular type of conspiracy theory about COVID that included, because then this is the AZT or the aid zero tie in is that Anthony Fauci, who I'm no fan of, I must say, and who has kind of admitted that he's lied or dissembled at various points in public discourse, but he was involved in the attempts to kind of figure out how to help people with AIDS. So he was a villain lingering in Mickey's subconscious, right? Because Mickey wrongly, as far as I could tell, thought that AZT, which Anthony Fauci actually really didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, from what I understand in the AIDS crisis days, Anthony Fauci was doing very much what he's doing during the pandemic, which was to be like the public face of science but wasn't involved in the development or the promotion of AIDS. I mean, there are, depending on who you talk to, he held back. The way the FDA and other health authorities during AIDS were really trying to slow walk stuff and it was the gay community really pushing people to say like, you know, get out of our way. We're dying anyway. Let us try things. Yes. And yeah, he was slow to the gate. But later on, as far as I know, as far as I understand, he was paramount. And this is getting slightly out of my sphere of, so I apologize if what I'm about to say is wrong. But as far as I understand, he was like paramount in promoting the idea of a cocktail of drugs. So eventually, millions of lives were saved. To a point now where we don't, we think of AIDS more as a chronic condition that is managed rather than a death sentence. Right. But yeah, to circle back to all of that, Mickey Willis, Judy Mike of AIDS, and a lot of other people I can think of, some of whom in my personal life, some of whom in the show are much more like Max Mosley. It's like they just refuse. It's like, fuck the work. Yeah, I refuse to be shamed. Fuck him. I'm going to double down. And it's partly the fault of the shamers and that we overused our weapon. But they're like, they've become like the transgressors have become like hospital superbugs and previous to treatment now because of the overuse of shame. And that's not a healthy. I don't see that as a healthy thing. No, no. Well, and with the Mickey Willis story, one of the other threads that you had, and this is to me what makes the show so powerful as one of the other strands then is Star Wars. And can you explain how something that is related to Star Wars kind of weaves through to why a documentary like Plandemic, which I think it's like the Fast and Furious franchise, there's like 10 of them or the Star Wars franchise. But what is the Star Wars angle? This was amazing to me and a real gap in my knowledge. In fact, we're recording this in Greenwich Village and I spent about a week walking around Greenwich Village listening to every podcast interview that Mickey Willis did to try and find some way in for me. And suddenly he starts talking about Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, which I'd never heard of. And I think I might be the only person in the world that never heard of it. I don't know why. I don't know how you graduate from high school without having heard of a hero with a thousand faces. Right, I did. Cardiff High School didn't teach it. Too busy beating each other up, I suppose. But yeah, so it was a great rabbit hole for me to go down completely virgin because I didn't knew nothing about it. And yeah, so Mickey Willis, like a whole load of people, including someone texted me the other day, Andrew Tate is another example of somebody who's dedicated their lives to living like the hero in Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. So Joseph Campbell's hero's journey for like one other person listening to this who's never heard of it. It's this idea that it's in video games, it's in movies, it's just a narrative structure. Hero enters a new world, there's threshold guardians, there's mentors, there's people trying to stop them and then they fight the dragon and then they win and they're the hero. Now I spoke to somebody from when I heard Mickey Willis rhapsodizing about the hero's journey, I just thought that's very interesting. So I spoke to the Joseph Campbell Foundation who's said to me, yes, this was all popularized by George Lucas. Right. And Bill Moyers, the American broadcaster who did a whole thing with Joseph Campbell called The Power of Myth that brought in George Lucas who also was clearly retrofitting. Right. So it's weird all the way. Right. And Mickey Willis saw that, those VHSs in a bookstore in San Francisco and changed his life and he wanted, you know, he thought of the hero's journey as a way for him to live his life as a self-help book as opposed to literary observations about story structure. So I think there's an amazing story out there and I may do more on it myself about how people are wrongly utilizing the heroes because if you're a documentary maker, you know, like Mickey Willis, you shouldn't see the world in terms of heroes and dragons. Life's more complicated than that. I'm constantly banging on in the TED Talks and everything about how people are gray areas. We're a mix between hero and dragon. Well, this is, you know, and I don't think it gives away the, you know, the pleasure of the different episodes are you start out with something, you know, it's and, you know, that it seems totally remote from today and then you bring it around to, oh, this helps explain the past couple of years and you certainly do that with that. But you say at the end, you know, the hero versus the dragon or the, you know, that the hero's journey makes sense for art, particularly movies like Star Wars or, you know, the Lion King is a classic example of this. But then in documentaries, you know, in real life, people are neither heroes nor dragons completely. How does Mickey respond to that? Kind of pervaricated. He didn't really, he didn't really answer the question when I put it to him. He was basically that we've all got, you know, we could all be like Anthony Fauci, we've all got the proclivity of like turning evil. So he didn't really grapple. He didn't grapple with it. One of the things that you show in that, and I mean, for me, this is, you know, there are various things when I'm listening, I'm like, okay, I agree with this. I disagree with that. I have a negative appraisal of Anthony Fauci overall for various reasons, including his noble lies given during COVID, you know, like, oh, don't wear a mask. They don't work. Oh, I was saying that because we needed to save masks for, you know, first responders, that kind of crap. But you, the people you talk to, you actually pull out their humanity. So like, you're not, obviously, you don't want to trust your medical research to Judy Mike events, but you work to understand her. Yes. Where does that come from? Like, how do you engender that kind of empathy? You, in all of your work, I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, but also like, you know, share your mindset with our audiences that you try to present the other person's point of view as fairly as possible, no matter how bizarre or insane it might. Yeah, I think, I think that the sort of change to me, I remember thinking when I was starting to write, so you've been publicly shamed, that I've kind of gone from the prosecution side to the defense side, like somewhere along the line. I don't think I was ever like total prosecution. But for instance, in my book then, when I sneak into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones, right, like, I really know where I stand on all of that. And you hate Bohemian Grove. I think Alex was very much mischaracterizing what we saw inside Bohemian Grove. We didn't see an actual human sacrifice. But yeah, somewhere along the line, I think it was when I was writing my book, The Psychopath Test, I just thought, you know, people were complicated. Like, there's great values to mental health labels, but also were complicated. And sometimes you don't want to reduce people to a diagnostic label. And then, you know, I'd watch on Twitter, everybody getting reduced, you know, to some poorly judged words in a tweet. And like, everything about their life no longer matters. It's just, they are this thing, they're this one tweet, like Justin Sacco, her age tweet is the only thing that matters about her in her life. And I started to think this is just, it's pseudoscientific. It's just wrong on every level. Curiosity is so much more important than instant judgment. I mean, your work in many ways is an ongoing critique of the media. It's, you know, because like individuals, you know, they're going to live their lives or whatever. But those of us in the media should do more engagement and trying to figure things out. In one of the episodes, which is titled Spicy Brando, you talked to a guy who got caught up in the supposed plot conspiracy to kidnap and hold for ransom the governor of Michigan, right? First off, explain what Spicy Brando is. But then what did you find out as you delved into the media coverage and actually the legal prosecution of the people involved in this plot? Right. So Spicy Brando is a sandwich. I was in two months about calling this show Spicy Brando. I actually called it the show. That was a joke. And then it just never changed it. Spicy Brando was the sandwich that he had every night at work. He worked as a machinist and a Ford plant. And every night he'd fold up subway and order his Spicy Brando. I can't remember what it was, but they named it after him. Anyway, one night he orders his Spicy Brando, eats it. Somebody says, oh, the boss wants to see you. So he goes to the boss's office and it's one of those offices where you walk and it's dark and then the lights come out automatically through movement. Anyway, he walks into his boss's office and the light doesn't come on. And then immediately 15 guys just tackle into the ground. Stop resisting. The thing that made me laugh when I said it to Brandon was that this is what you've been training for. Yeah, he's a member of a kind of militia group. Training constantly for a moment exactly like that. When it happens, he blows it. Yeah, what happens in that case, though, is that it kind of turns out in this the press seemed less interested as this unveiled that of the 10 or 12, if even people who were plotting, like half of them were FBI informants or agents provocateur. And they really were provocative. Like they would say come with a, you know, oh, we've got a great new site. I'll pay for the hotels. Don't you worry. It was a real clusterfuck that case. But actually, I ended up veering into a slightly different thing about that case, which is less well chronicled than that. I mean, all the undercover federal stuff is really fascinating and funny and startling. But there was something else about that case that I found even more startling. And it's something I actually look at in this other show that I made for Audible last year called The Debutant. Similar thing. It's why is there this drive to call everybody in a gun club in Michigan or whatever, white supremacists who are not just white supremacists, but white supremacists who are out to kickstart an ethnic based civil war. That's a really specific allegation, really specific way of seeing them. Like they're not a loose collective of nuts, some of whom with really objectionable views. But there were coordinated conspiracy of white supremacists who were trying to start an ethnic based civil war. And there's a couple of books out there that are really promoting this idea. One is called Bring the War Home. And another one is called House of War Start. And I'm just not sure how true that is. And so I dig into that in in Spicy Brando. And I think that for me, that's the most interesting part of the story, because it's all about data models, basically without going into too much detail and people should should listen. This notion is actually coming from research conducted overseas and not research into American militia groups. Anyway, there's a whole fascinating rabbit hole there, which I look into in Spicy Brando. And I also look into it in The Deputant. It's a really interesting area. Yeah. And I mean, there's a paranoid, there's a paranoid element in American politics, which often gets ascribed only to kind of right wing nuts. But in fact, it's in the center, it's on the left. Like we're always trying to draw that kind of extreme attention that the facts that actually support. And I think that's really important that obviously the mistake when you're looking at cultural issues is to do it in a partisan way. And what you just said is absolutely true. There is irrational thought on the right, you know, and these sort of, you know, untruths, these lies happen on the right, they happen in the center, and they happen on the left. It's a holistic thing. The other just point, and then I have a couple of other larger kind of thematic questions, but in one of the episodes, you talk with the author, you talk about how the overuse of the term or the globalization of trauma has undergirded a lot of our responses, particularly under COVID, which was, you know, an amped up, highly anxiety inducing state. But you talk to the author of a book called The Body Keeps a Score, which went from a well-respected but little red academic book to one of a kind of major text of our time. Can you talk what was The Body Keeps a Score about and how did the author tell you his concepts were being misapplied in everyday life? Right, yeah, but The Body Keeps a Score turns out to be lockdown's biggest non-fiction bestseller. It was number one for ages that sold millions of copies and it's an academic, pretty boring academic book about PTSD and complex PTSD. I know there's a whole bunch of people out there who very much disliked that book for lots and lots of reasons. There's a whole body of thought about complex PTSD being pseudoscientific. Anyway, I don't go into any of that, but I think that other people, but it's an interesting area I think people want to go down. What I'm interested in is, you know, the concept group of the term trauma. So The Body Keeps the Score, even if you are critical of Bessel van der Kolk, the author of that book, what he says in my show is, I think it's hard to criticise, he says PTSD is for people who've been in war or have been raped or who've, you know, committed, you know, who've experienced the most terrible abuse. And now trauma is for people who read texts that challenge them. I mean, you talk about students that read college in Oregon, you know, famously progressive school, who were traumatised by the idea that certain books were being taught in classes, they weren't even necessarily taken. Yeah, and actually, no, they were made to take the course, it was mandatory. Okay, yeah. But yes, they didn't want to read Plato. They thought it was traumatic to read, to be forced to read Plato. And so they start protesting, like angrily, loudly protesting the teachers. And one of the teachers, a woman called Lissia Valdivia, has actual diagnosable PTSD. So here's a woman who has to go to work to this incredibly hostile work environment every day, being screamed at for causing trauma, because she wants people to read Plato. And she's the one who has actual PTSD. So there's clearly an irony there. So yeah, I'm looking, so in that episode, I'm looking at the concept creep of the term trauma. And I think the reason why I really wanted to do that is because one of the great mysteries of our time, obviously, Jonathan Highton, other people look into this, is how come all of these debates over free speech and so on, that stayed on campuses for years, including when I was in college in the 80s, you know, all of these debates were being have about free speech. But suddenly, they explode out of colleges and into the workplace. And I've always been really interested in trying to figure out what happened, what was the tipping point. And I think the concept creep of trauma, and how you can't, you know, if somebody says you can't publish that, it'll be traumatizing to people, is part of the reason why I think that explosion out of colleges and into media institutions happened. How did you spend COVID? Did you, you know, were you freaked out by it? Were you like, you know, this is, I'll deal with it, whatever. How did you? I was weirdly calm at first. In fact, I tweeted something along the lines of, because I've got all sorts of anxiety disorders, many. I tweeted, is there anybody else with anxiety disorders right now who are feeling strangely calm? And I got like a thousand responses and the overwhelming, there was a couple of people who said, I've got generalized anxiety disorder, and I'm freaking out, and I'm offended by what you just said. But almost everyone, like 95% of people were, oh my God, I can't believe you bring that up. Yes. Why did you feel calm? I wonder, it couldn't be that we've spent our lives thinking about catastrophic situations. And so I think the real truth is, is that anxiety is a weird disorder in that you always worry about stupid shit. Right. If I can't get my wife on the phone, she must be dead. And I've lost so much of my life to those kinds of completely irrational worries. But when something genuinely anxiety-inducing happens to people like us, we kind of deal with it with a plum. Like I've been in Jihad training camps where people have surrounded me and asked me if I'm Jewish. Similarly, Ku Klux Klan, I was at the Aryan Nations one time, and all these skinheads were like asking me if I was Jewish. And you are Jewish. And I am Jewish. And I'm Welsh. Welsh, yeah, even worse. Yeah, that's, yeah. Well, that might, for the Aryan Nation, that might be like, oh, that's honorary Aryan. Yeah, yeah, so it does balance out a bit. But I handled that really well. So there is something weird about anxiety, that when it's something genuinely anxiety-inducing happens. Do you think that we've evolved to be able to deal with like difficult things, but our environment certainly for the past 50 years doesn't, you know, we don't have any real stuff to worry about. You know, most of us. So you end to, you fixate on bullshit. Yeah. So then when something more real comes along, you actually can deal with it. I guess, because that certainly is how it is in practice. Like when it was clear that we were all about to go into lockdown, yeah, I was the one going to chemists to buy the hand sanitizer. Like, it's like, I know what to do here. I know how to deal with this. Do you think overall, you know, was COVID over-hyped? Well, or how do we deal with that? Because obviously COVID was real. People died from it. We rolled out vaccines that were effective in, you know, record time. But, you know, what I guess in a way, I guess I'll just say like we clearly overreacted in many profound ways. But we're through that now. What are the lingering effects of this shock to our kind of body politic? Right. And I should say that even though I was calm to begin with during lockdown, I would definitely after a few months find myself letting out little shrieks as I'm like running down the country lane. So it was impacting. It was sneaking its way into my brain in the way that I think it was sneaking its way into lots of people's brains. Well, one of the legacies seems to be that all of this brewing culture war rage, there was kind of been brewing since, I guess, 2012, 2013. And so you've been publicly shamed. I think, you know, I come down to like 2012, 2013 as being when it all started really exploded during COVID. We were locked inside becoming all the more suspicious of our neighbors and our institutions. And often our institutions did let us down. Sometimes they didn't sometimes. But yeah. And as I said earlier, we began to define ourselves as being in opposition to other people more and more possibly because we were just left at home with the internet for company, partly because people did feel let down by institutions. And I guess that's the lasting thing is we've become way more entrenched, way more caricatures of ourselves. Funnily enough, Jordan Peterson makes two appearances in season two of Things Fell Apart. In the first appearance, he's offering young men or branding, sensible advice about self-esteem. Yeah, like, you know, shave, you know, work out, make your bed, that type of stuff. Be somebody that you're proud of. Yeah. And I read 12 Rules for Life and I thought this is all good stuff, you know. I found myself bantering with a workman in a way I might not have done. It definitely kind of prodded at my maleness in a very unusual way for me. But yeah, and then the second appearance of Jordan Peterson is he's spreading conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities that don't hold up to scrutiny. People really do did become kind of extreme caricatures of themselves. And I think lockdown had a lot to do with it. And that, by the way, the 15-minute city episode you talk about, this is, you know, about Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum and the whole idea of the Great Reset. What is fascinating about that is you look at the various threads, including the guy who came up with what became known as the 15-minute city, which isn't what the guy was talking about. But you do get people at the World Economic Forum, well, some of them, to be like, yeah, maybe calling it the Great Reset and being very declarative in our statements. At least one person says, oh yeah, that was probably a mistake. Yeah, poor Eda Orkin, who's been completely upended by all of this. She's the one who wrote this thought experiment essay about imagining a world in 2030 where all products would become services. So it's like an interesting thought experiment. And especially because it's like, yeah, you're not going to own a car because you're going to use Uber and you only use your car like 3% of the waking hour or the hours of your life. Why own it if you can just rent it for the minutes that you need it. But then the essay got retitled and kind of pushed. Yeah, this is from the world. And it does get into this slightly uncomfortable area that, in a way, the World Economic Forum to an extent to blame for everything that went on because they bring out this video where they're advertising Eda's essay with some smiling guy and underneath it says, you will own nothing and you'll be happy. Yeah, you point out you couldn't tell if it's a parody of it or was it produced by Alex Jones or the World Economic Forum? Right. Eda herself, I had to tell Eda that that video wasn't a conspiracy theorist's terrified response to her essay. Yeah, this is the World Economic Forum doing it. Promoting her essay. But then they took the essay down, like as if that's going to make it disappear. And Klaus Schwab is, he's a Bond villain, right? He has a German, I mean Swiss accent and lives on a mountain and runs an institute or something. He's blow for it. They're definitely, the World Economic Forum definitely did themselves no favors with that. But at the same time, poor Eda Orkin, like she was, she meant no harm. Right, right. In fact, yeah, she said afterwards that maybe politicians, because she's a Danish politician, she said maybe politicians shouldn't try and be asked them off and imagine future cities. And the guy, I guess he's a British traffic engineer, who was having the 50 minute city comes out of his plan to have dedicated bus lanes to reduce traffic. Yeah. And so he turns up at Chipping Norton Town Hall, which is exactly how you imagine it is. And everyone's like screaming at him. He's like, I'm just trying to make bus lanes better. And everyone's like, they're having marches with his faces on placards calling him a traitor. So at the end, you end the series really with kind of a great plea for among other things decency and critical thinking. Because the fact of the matter is now we're all consuming all sorts of information. I think it's great, I suspect you do for the most part, that it's ungatekeepered in the way that in the 80s, God, it was hard to find any information that didn't come through very particular channels, often state associated, or just like giant corporate news gathering. Now we all have the raw material to build our own narratives and live in those worlds. We can create our own hero's journey. How do we get to a point where we treat each other on a different relationship level where we're not Alex Jones and we're not just living in a fantasy world, whether it's a right wing, a left wing, progressive, regressive, whatever. Right. And well, everything you just said is very interesting. And I agree with you. I hate gatekeepers. I hate hierarchies. I used to drive me crazy going into TV companies and just begging them to let me make documentaries for them. I remember when I was writing my book The Psychopath Test, I'd go into British TV companies and I'd say like, this book is honestly like, it's going to be a hit. I'm really onto it. And it was a hit, The Psychopath Test. Please let me make a documentary to go alongside it. And they were like, no. And so when a world came along where you didn't need gatekeepers, it was a undoubtedly, it was a happy world for me. But that doesn't mean that we should be allowed slipping standards. The old legacy institutions had their biases and their flaws. But we should not be. I mean, look, I don't, I don't like Elon Musk's world of let's throw everything in there and let the people work out what's true and what's not true. What's the alternative? Well, my friend, I'm going to, my friend, Adam Curtis, who's who I've, you know, I've been like a, you know, he's almost like a sort of mentor to me. Adam thinks that there's, you know, if you go onto Twitter, and after, you know, I was on Twitter after the Jeffrey Epstein papers were released. And the first thing I see is, you know, forgery, saying that Jimmy Kimmel was part of it. And just because there's some community notes saying no, Jimmy Kimmel isn't, this is a forgery. After five minutes, I just threw my hands up and thought this isn't for me. Like, I'm not going to be able to figure out what's true and what's not true. And I went, and I, and this is the part of the interview where people are going to be saying, I liked John Johnson up until this point, but I don't like him anymore. I scuttled back to the legacy media. And I think, and this is what Adam said to me, that, you know, if social media, if these, if this gatekeeper-less society is going to be like a John Carpenter movie from the 80s, of all of these warrior gangs, you know, attacking each other, then most people are going to scurry away to somewhere safer. Because most people don't want to live in escape from New York or the Warriors. We want a safe world. And I think if this gatekeeper-less world continues to be the kind of clusterfuck that it is with no real standards about what's true and what's not true, inevitably there's going to be a return to the legacy media. Do you think that's underway? Or do you think, you know, is it possible that we learn, you know, that everything is not just, you know, going back and forth that maybe there is a dialectic where there leads to a synthesis. So, you know, in a world where, you know, we've seen gatekeepers, we've seen the explosion of kind of unfettered internet-empowered media, including things like social media, et cetera, and then people start going to places like Substack or, you know, people build a reputation that exceeds just whether or not people agree with them ideologically. I mean, things like Substack, Patreon or whatever, you know, I can absolutely say, you know, there's something nice about people who've been, you know, excluded from the culture, can still have a life on Substack. There's a practical problem, actually, though, which is that you can only really do well on Substack and places like it. If you produce a hell of a lot of stuff, like if you bring stuff out like every week or two or three times a week, you can do very well on Substack. And I've got friends who are doing incredibly well on Substack. But for someone like me who produces like three hours of content a year, we're kind of fucked. Like the only way we can make money is through the legacy media is through, you know, things fell apart was for the BBC. A lot of my podcasts were for Audible. For somebody like me, I have to. It's funny to say Audible, of course, is not the legacy media, right? Audible is a company and how old is it, right? It's a 21st century phenomenon. And even Channel 4, right? You do a lot of stuff for them. So that's like, you know, an offshoot of the Beeb, right? Well, they're different to the BBC, but I can see why people get them mixed up. You know, they're both like public service or have been through periods of like, you know, public service, education and so on. So I mean, I guess for me, the answer is that it's going to be a patchwork. I would never want to go back to a, you know, three broadcast networks, pre-cable, you know, and I've just, I've evacuated those and I live in a different world. But like, it's a patchwork of legacy media. The New York Times, oddly, is probably more important now than it's ever been, even if it can't really open and close Broadway plays and things like that. But we have all this other stuff and it's up to us to kind of figure out how do we navigate this stuff critically. It's definitely up to us. People, when they've been publicly shamed came out. People got really annoyed with me for not doing a sort of chapter at the end where I do a list of, you know, almost like a self-help chapter. I thought, God, I'm not a lifestyle guru. It's not my job to tell people how to behave. But there was a real call for that. And I, but the answer is exactly what you just said. It's up to us. If we want the power that we didn't used to have, but now we do have it, we have to use it responsibly. Right. We can't just be assholes who make up bullshit. We have to have high standards. And that's when it comes to shaming people. And it comes to bringing out journalists. Do you feel like there are in ways with kind of public shaming and that, you know, in its variants. I was thinking about when I read some of your work and listened to it, you know, there used to be up to some point probably in the early nineties, maybe where if you were a female performer and I'm thinking of people like Madonna or Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, nude photos come out and then you're done. Like you're done. Madonna kind of broke the back of that and many other kind of cultural motifs or mores or something where it's like, you know, it's not mandatory that you do a sex tape if you're a female performer, but it doesn't kill your career the way that it did 30 years ago. That's good. Yeah. But do you think in other ways like where can we be mistaken? Can we be, you know, the world in the world we live in, we can either become more vituperative and, you know, mean to people or we can become more forgiving because everybody realizes we're all idiots through large parts of our lives. Well, one, you know, positive clue to us being more forgiving is episode three of season one of Things Fell Apart is an episode called A Miracle and it's about two warring factions coming together in the eighties, Christian Evangelists and the gay community. And when that episode aired, I can't tell you the number of emails, you know, messages I had from people saying that they had to pull over the car because they were crying so hard. Now, part of the reason why they were crying was because the lead, like the main voice in that episode, a guy called Steve Peters, was an extraordinary moving man. But I think also the reason why people were crying was because that was a story in a season about things falling apart. This was an episode about things coming together. And I think people desperately wanted that without even realizing that they wanted it. Look, so much of the culture was being fought by rageful, extreme thought leaders. Most people, like my friend Adam said about, you know, the internet becoming like a John Carpenter movie, most people don't want that. Yeah. And we see that in real life, you know, where I live upstate is very 50-50, Trumpy, Biden-y. There's no conflict in our village. I mean, if there is, it's very small. You know, everybody gets on well with each other. We all meet in the bar in the town and everybody's nice. So people don't want these wars. We've just allowed ourselves to be led by, you know, asshole, angry, wounded narcissists and addicts and people who want to double down and become extreme versions of themselves. But most people don't want that. There's times when we think we want it, but we basically don't want it. So I'd like to think that, you know, deep down inside all of us is somebody who actually wants harmony and curiosity and empathy and kindness instead of rageful judgment. All right. We're going to leave it there. John Ronson, the latest thing is the second season of Things Fell Apart. Thanks so much. Nick, it was a pleasure. Thank you.