Jon Ronson

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Ramona Koval: . And Jon Ronson joins us now from London. Great to speak with your again, Jon.

Jon Ronson: Hey Ramona, it's great to talk to again. This is, what, probably our fourth conversation in ten years?

Ramona Koval: It is.

Jon Ronson: Yes, it's like my conversations with you mark the inexorable marching on of time towards an inevitable death.

Ramona Koval: That's right, and also each book you bring out too is marked by our conversations.

Jon Ronson: Yes, absolutely, which is great, right? Long may it last.

Ramona Koval: Your talking about death actually reminds me that you talk about your own anxiety all through the book, and you say you've panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe. So what is an anxious man doing investigating psychopaths?

Jon Ronson: It does seem kind of stupid for somebody who suffers some debilitating anxiety to spend years hanging out with people who would quite happily kill me. It does seem like an odd dichotomy. I think the honest answer is that, like all anxiety sufferers, my anxiety tends to manifest itself in quite irrational ways. So I can be quite fearless. I think this is the same with people who suffer things like OCD. I can be very fearless in ordinary situations, in situations of actual danger, but then when you're taking the dog for a walk and you let the dog off the lead you become debilitated with terror at the possibility that the dog is going to run into the bush and never come out again. So that's the funny thing about anxiety disorders.

Ramona Koval: I wonder what the funny thing about being married to you is, because a friend asks you in the book how Elaine, your wife, is dealing with your new hobby horse of psychopaths. How does she deal with your interests?

Jon Ronson: Actually with psychopaths Elaine, like loads of people (I didn't quite realise this when I was writing my new book) was really, really interested. With The Men Who Stare at Goats she couldn't care less, and then Them...I mean, she hasn't even read The Men Who Stare at Goats, she just sees it as a kind of niche story about military men a long way away that speaks nothing to her. But for some reason psychopaths and the opposite of psychopaths which is me, overly anxious people, we're the neurological opposite...and to try to get inside the brain of people who do harm in society has been of enormous interest to people.

One of the things I do in the book is go on a psychopath spotting course, so you learn to root them out, because you need it when they are feigning normalcy. And for Elaine and for others that has been of incredible interest. So this is the first time I have written something where Elaine has actually been passionately interested.

Ramona Koval: You say that these interests of yours are like fascinating puzzles to be solved for you, and that when you get into a newly cleaned rental car, the smell of it is for you the start of an adventure of sleuthing.

Jon Ronson: Yes, absolutely, which is sometimes why people think I haven't done my research, you know, I'm with somebody and he turns out to be a Nazi and if I'd done a little bit of research I would have known in advance that that person was a Nazi, and people call it faux-naivety. But it is not that at all, what it is is wanting to jump into an unfolding mystery, that's what fires me up as a writer, and I think that really comes off the page, to jump in somewhere and just see a twig in the tidal wave of the narrative and just allow it to take me anywhere. So I deliberately jump in without doing a whole lot of research first because that's what makes the sleuthing adventure all the more exciting.

Ramona Koval: And even when you were saying to yourself if someone offers you an opportunity to go somewhere with them or to do something or to get into some place, and every cell in your body is screaming no, no, no, Jon Ronson says, 'Okay.'

Jon Ronson: Yes, I take no pleasure from putting myself into dangerous situations, and in fact I noticed...I went to a famous mental hospital in Britain called Broadmoor for this book and I noticed myself yawning uncontrollably on the journey there. You know how dogs yawn when they're anxious, that's what I was doing. So it does put me through some kind of turmoil, going into these dangerous places, but the problem is that when the narrative kicks in, because I'm not a novelist, because I have to experience it in real life, you have to go where it takes you. And sometimes it has taken me to places where in real life I would never go to in a million years, like in my first book Them I trespassed in a secret club where people like Bush and Kissinger go in the forests of northern California, and that was terrifying. And in this book I had to hang out with a CEO who has been accused of being a psychopath, and I had to go to his mansion and ask him if he was a psychopath and if I could do the psychopath test on him. And that, believe me, was not pleasant, but it is where the story takes you and you just have to do it.

Ramona Koval: We'll come to Al Dunlap who was the CEO of Sunbeam in a little while, but let's go back to this question of how to tell if someone is a psychopath, and this is where this test...well, a book really, the DSM4 I think is the latest one...

Jon Ronson: The fifth is coming out in about a year I think.

Ramona Koval: Tell people what the DSM is, and really what got you into this interest about psychopaths.

Jon Ronson: Yes, this is how it started really, I was at a friend's house and I saw a copy of the DSM on her shelf and it's the manual of mental disorders. And when the DSM1 came out after the Second World War, it was a very thin book, there were very few mental disorders back then, just a handful, I think it was about a 65-page book. But by the '90s when DSM4 came out, it was a 886-page book with 374 mental disorders. So they have discovered a lot of mental disorders these past few decades.

Ramona Koval: And of course you, like anybody, you read them and you actually think you might have some of them as well.

Jon Ronson: Yes, I wondered whether I had any, so I leafed through it and immediately diagnosed myself with 12. I've got generalised anxiety disorder, which is a given, I diagnosed myself with nightmare disorder, which is categorised if you have recurrent dreams in which you're either pursued or declared a failure. I don't know about you, Ramona, but all my dreams involve someone chasing me down the street yelling, 'You're a failure!' And I have malingering. I think it's quite rare, by the way, to have both malingering and generalised anxiety disorder because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.

Ramona Koval: So it is a feedback loop or something.

Jon Ronson: Yes. And then I noticed that there was some mental disorders that seemed to propel the sufferer to positions of power, like for instance narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder were categorised...it's all checklists, and one of the items on the checklist was a mad striving for power. And that reminded me of something that psychologists always said to me which was that there is a certain sort of mental disorder which is so powerful it leads people to remould capitalism, to remould society, and that's psychopathy, and psychopaths rule the world. This is something that psychologists have said to me over the years. I've always thought that was a huge thought, so I wanted to know whether there was any truth to it.

Ramona Koval: And one of the ways that you devise to learn more about psychopaths was to investigate the people who had a lot of criticism of modern psychiatry, and those were the Scientologists. This is an unusual angle to go on, but that's not unusual for you.

Jon Ronson: I was kind of interested in meeting the Scientologists anyway, and the Scientologists are the world's most fiercest critics of psychiatry, so I thought it would be interesting to meet a polemical opponent of psychiatry. Also they've got an amazing...because they are so fundamentalist and so driven in their hatred of psychiatry, they've got probably the world's best archive of occasions in which psychiatry has got it wrong, and I thought that would be really interesting. And also they turned out to be weirdly helpful. I said, 'Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudoscience and can't be trusted,' and they said, 'Yes, we can introduce you to Tony.' And I said, 'Who's Tony?' And they said, 'Tony faked madness, he is in Broadmoor, which is Britain's most notorious former asylum for the cruelly insane, and he faked madness to get out of a prison sentence and now he is stuck. And the more he tries to convince psychiatrists he's sane, the more they take it as evidence that he is mad, so do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?' So I said, 'Yes please.' And that was the beginning of the journey really.

Ramona Koval: Why don't you read to us from The Psychopath Test, and this is the part where you do meet Tony.

Jon Ronson: [Reading from Patients began drifting in... to ...and I like to dress well.']

Ramona Koval: Did you really buy it...?

Jon Ronson: Buy Tony's story?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Jon Ronson: Well, he seemed completely sane and normal to me. He says it is much harder to convince people that you are sane than it is to convince them you're crazy, and he's been spending 12 years trying to convince people he's sane. And I did buy it, but I decided I wanted to write to his clinician to find out their point of view. So when I left Broadmoor, I wrote to his clinician and he wrote back and said, 'It's true, we accept Tony story, we accept that he faked madness to get out of a prison sentence because his delusions were very cliched and they vanished the minute he arrived at Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him and we've decided that what he is is a psychopath. Faking your brain going wrong is exactly the kind of manipulative, deceitful acts of the psychopath.' And I said, 'What else?' And he said, 'Well, the pinstriped suits, that's classic psychopath, that speaks to items one and two on the checklist.'

Ramona Koval: We'll talk about the checklist in a moment.

Jon Ronson: Yes, but the amazing thing was, everything that seemed sane about Tony was evidence, his clinician told me, that he was mad in this different way, that he was mad in a psychopathic way.

Ramona Koval: So do you think that Tony should be there?

Jon Ronson: This is such a huge question because...by the way, he is not there any more, he has very recently had an absolute discharge...

Ramona Koval: And is he suing them?

Jon Ronson: I think he is considering it. He would have done five years for beating somebody up, in a jail that would have been filled with psychopaths. Here is the statistic, according to Robert Hare, the inventor of the checklist: 1% of everyday walking-around people is a psychopath, which means a complete absence of empathy, a neurological absence of empathy. 25% of the prison population is a psychopath, and they are responsible, by the way, for 60% to 70% of unrest inside prisons. So psychopaths really are the rock thrown into the still pond, creating ripples all over the place. And 4% of CEOs are psychopaths, and we're talking a high score, you're talking a score of 30 out of 40. Basically the checklist is 20 points, you score zero, one or two. So if you've got 29 or 30 you are a clinical psychopath, and Hare's contention is that 4% of CEOs and top business leaders score 30 or more on the checklist.

Ramona Koval: Tell us about the Hare checklist, Mr Hare, and what's on the checklist.

Jon Ronson: It's a 20-point checklist, so the big one really is a lack of empathy, that's the barren desert of the brain, and then in the absence of empathy really the other 19 items on the checklist grow. So you've got a grandiose sense of self worth, superficial charm, and need for stimulation, proneness to boredom (which is the one that I fess up to out of the 20), pathological lying, cunning, manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt. An interesting one is shallow affect, which basically means an inability to experience a range of emotions. One way of spotting a psychopath...and this is a serious thing, this course, care workers, clinicians, parole officers, all these people go on this course and learn how to do it, it's an important part of life. One way of spotting a psychopath is if they are only faking emotions. If you can tell...for instance, I once interviewing this Haitian death squad leader called Toto Constant, and at one point while professing his innocence he started to pretend to cry in front of me, which at the time just seemed odd, but now I think, well, was that shallow affect and inability to experience a deeper range of emotions.

Ramona Koval: Did you think it was pretend crying or real crying?

Jon Ronson: No, it was definitely pretend crying. I remember at the time thinking this man is pretending to cry in front of me and that is really odd and creepy. Then you've got things like promiscuous sexual behaviour, poor behavioural controls, early behavioural problems that begin to manifest themselves around the age of ten. So in some ways it is kind of amateur sleuth territory, but in other ways it has to be because, unlike any other mental disorder you can think of, psychopaths seem utterly normal. So you need to study the nuances of their language and so on to spot them.

Ramona Koval: Yes, it's not like you're making light of psychopaths actually because what you're doing is saying it's probably pretty important to work out who is going to be a serial killer, for example, around you...

Jon Ronson: Or just a very malevolent husband or boss, somebody who just wants to get inside your brain and screw with you.

Ramona Koval: Because there are people like this, you're not denying that.

Jon Ronson: No, absolutely not. I was sceptical at first of the whole thing, I thought you can't just demonise somebody with a label like 'psychopath'...

Ramona Koval: Like 'serial killer'.

Jon Ronson: Yes, because they score on some silly checklist, that seemed nuts to me. But I'll tell you, it's two years later now and the checklist is correct, there are people out there like that, they do exist. There is terrible moral ambiguities about becoming a professional psychopath spotter, because you start spotting them everywhere and demonising all your enemies. In fact Sean Hannity, the famous right-wing broadcaster in America, was apparently using my book the other day on Fox to diagnose Obama as a psychopath, which obviously is missing the point of my book. But they do exist, so it's a useful thing, the checklist, as well.

Ramona Koval: I had no idea Canada was the Wild West of psychopath studies in the 1960s.

Jon Ronson: Yes, it's kind of unbelievable. Canada has always been kind of odd, certainly in its mental hospitals. In The Men Who Stare at Goats I write about these experiments called MK-Ultra where the CIA would take over Canadian mental hospitals and brainwash people. The 'best' psychopath treatment program I'd ever come across, it was in a mental hospital called Penetanguishene, and basically the psychiatrist there was a bit of a hippy, a guy called Elliot Barker, and he'd gone on this odyssey to have naked hot-tub encounter sessions in California and LSD sessions and hanging out with people like RD Laing and therapeutic communities and so on. And he decided to bring all these ideas back to his ward of psychopaths to try and bring their madness to the surface so that it could be treated.

So he got all these psychopaths and stuck them in a windowless room and got them all to take all their clothes off and take a whole load of LSD, and then they had to go to their rawest emotional places to try and bring their madness to the surface. They were in there for weeks and the only food was liquid food that they would suck through a straw. It was like The Men Who Stare at Goats for asylums for the criminally insane. They'd be strapped to each other. And finally they were declared cured and released into the world after going through all this LSD and nakedness. And later on there was a long-term study done of the long-term recidivism rates, and normally 60% of high-scoring psychopaths go on to re-offend, but the ones who had been through the naked encounter sessions, 80% went on to re-offend.

Ramona Koval: So he made them worse.

Jon Ronson: He made them worse, not because he turned them nuts with the LSD and the nakedness, but because he taught them how to...one of them admitted he taught them how to fake empathy better. All the tearful chats about empathy while they were all on LSD taught him how to fake empathy better, which meant he became a better criminal.

Ramona Koval: You have some very interesting things to say about journalism and psychopaths and the uses of psychopaths or the uses of insane people to people reality television programs. What did you find?

Jon Ronson: Yes, and friend of mine, a documentary maker called Adam Curtis told me...about halfway through writing this book, he said, 'Jon, you've got to look at yourself in all of this. You've become completely drunk with power with your psychopath-spotting abilities,' which I had to admit was true, and he said, 'And it is what journalism is based on, we travel around the world with our notepads in our hand and we sit in someone's house and just wait for the gems.' And the gems are invariably the kind of behaviour of our interviewees that would score on the DSM, it is the moments of madness, it's the extreme anxieties or the extreme psychopathy. He said, 'We are part of the madness industry, we're like mediaeval monks stitching together a tapestry of people's madness to serve up as entertainment for the masses.' It's true. So in the latter part of the book I turned the spotlight really on myself and on my profession of journalism, to show how reality TV shows and those Jerry Springer type shows are peopled by guests who are the right sort of mad to be useful to the public.

Ramona Koval: And it sounds like some of the producers too have absolutely no sense of what they might be doing to the people that they have on, what the results might be the exposure.

Jon Ronson: Yes, absolutely. One producer told me that she has this trick when deciding who to pick for her show. She asks them what medication they're on, and if they are on a medication for a frightening mental illness, something like lithium, she won't have them on. But if they say they are on something like, say, Prozac, something that is kind of fun, like they are angry and they are upset and they're ready to blow, that is the right sort of mad for reality television. So it can be that calculated.

Ramona Koval: What about that poor girl who was not an attractive person who was going to be in one of the makeover programs. Tell us what happened when they interviewed her family.

Jon Ronson: Well, basically they goaded the family into saying...she came from a very supportive family but they goaded the family into saying, oh yes, she is so ugly, everybody realises how ugly she is, so thank goodness she is going to go through this Cinderella-like makeover. And then they worked out that the schedule didn't permit her to have the dental work done in time so they dumped her from the show. The producers goading the family to mock the sister upset everybody so much that one of their family members committed suicide. There is quite a body count actually of reality TV contestants.

Ramona Koval: Yes, I think this brings us to the other area, from journalism to business, and Mr Al Dunlap and Sunbeam. He was the guy you brought in when you wanted to sack everybody, is that right?

Jon Ronson: Yes, because he seemed to have no compunction about firing people, he seemed to actually quite enjoy it. He would always fire people with a quip, he was famous for it. So somebody would say, 'I've just bought myself a new car,' and he'd say, 'Well, you may have a new car but I'll tell you what you don't have; a job.' So first a toilet paper manufacturing company called Scott, then a toaster manufacturing business called Sunbeam both brought him in to lay waste hundreds and hundreds of...factories closed, the biggest workforce reduction in American history. And every time in this ruthless, remorseless psychopathic way, the share price shot up, and there was a direct correlation between the two, which really made me think that capitalism rewards psychopathy, and perhaps capitalism is like a physical manifestation of psychopathy, certainly at its most ruthless. So I went to see him at his home in Florida where he...

Ramona Koval: And what let him let you in?

Jon Ronson: Well, I didn't mention 'psychopath' in the introductory email. I said, 'You may have a special brain anomaly which leads you to strive for greatness.'

Ramona Koval: That sounds like you are appealing to number whatever-it-is...

Jon Ronson: I was appealing to grandiose sense of self-worth, but I was also demonstrating, one might argue, lack of empathy and pathological lying and cunning, manipulative...so, three on the psychopath checklist myself at that moment. However, as soon as I got to his house I said to him, 'I need to tell you something. You know how I said in my email about your amygdala? Well...' So I told him straight away that this might make him in the eyes of psychologists a psychopath, and after looking very disappointed he gamely agreed to do the psychopath checklist with me, and he basically redefined most of the items on the checklist...

Ramona Koval: Because he saw them as really important advantages, didn't he.

Jon Ronson: Yes, like leadership positives. He turned the psychopath checklist into Who Moved My Cheese?. So he could hardly deny having a grandiose sense of self-worth because there were giant oil paintings of himself all over his house. Lack of remorse? 'Well,' he said, 'you've got to believe in you.' Kind of amazing.

Ramona Koval: And did you feel that he would be dangerous in the wrong context?

Jon Ronson: Well, in the end the reason why he left business was because he was involved in this huge accounting fraud. Whether he is or isn't a psychopath...and in fact there was some key...and I write about this in the book, there were some key things that he didn't fit into, for instance there's no evidence of promiscuous sexual behaviour or any short-term marital relationships, he's only been married twice. Admittedly his first wife said in her divorce papers that he'd threatened her with a knife, but he's been married to the same woman now for 41 years. Also he got accepted into West Point and so he says, 'Well, I couldn't have been a juvenile delinquent because they would never have put me in.' So that was persuasive and slightly disappointing to me and I thought, well, I won't put any of that in the book, and that was the moment I realised, gosh, becoming a psychopath-spotter has turned me a little bit psychopathic.

Ramona Koval: Because you're prepared to lie a little bit.

Jon Ronson: Exactly, just like my friend Adam said, like a medieval monk stitching together a tapestry of people's madness for entertainment. So that was a real wake-up call for me actually and the second half of my book becomes a bit of a cautionary tale of 'don't do what I did'.

Ramona Koval: 'Don't go down this path'.

Jon Ronson: Yes, exactly. And Dunlap would never obviously...you know, most people who would score high on the psychopath checklist would never become violent, but Hare, the inventor of the checklist, would say they always become malevolent, they always become problematic, they always leave some kind of trail of destruction in their wake, because in the absence of empathy, that's all there is.

Ramona Koval: So in the end are you not just saying that psychiatry is an inexact science?

Jon Ronson: I think the book is saying a lot more than that. I think it's quite a moral book about what sort of human beings we want to be. So, for instance, I was at a cross-roads in this book; one was a kind of cold-hearted, almost psychopathic desire to define everybody by their maddest edges for my own gain and for journalism's gain and even for the reader's gain, and on the other path was a moral, anxious, empathetic person who wants to define complicated people by their sanity in a kind-hearted way. So really it's a book about what kind of human beings do we want to be. I say at the end of the book that there's no evidence that we've been placed on this Earth to be especially normal or especially happy, and in fact the maddest aspects of our personalities are quite often the things that lead us to do rather interesting things. So it becomes much more than just a book looking at whether psychiatry is scientific or pseudo-scientific. I think it's a book about what kind of people we want to be as humans.

Ramona Koval: And what's the subject of your next book? Where do you go from here?

Jon Ronson: I've just started...the main thing I'm doing next is I've just finished writing a movie about being in a band called Frank. The movie may not end up being called Frank. But that's really what's been occupying my time mostly over the past couple of years, writing this movie. And I've got to say, it's very funny, so I'm quite excited about it.

Ramona Koval: And where does this spring from?

Jon Ronson: Well, I actually was in a band when I was in my 20s, I was in a band called the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey! Big Band, and the lead singer...

Ramona Koval: What did you play?

Jon Ronson: I played keyboards. You didn't have to be a particularly good keyboard player because all of our songs only ever had three chords; C, F and G. In fact when they asked me to join the band I said, 'I don't know any of your songs,' and they said, 'Do you know C, F and G?' And I said, 'Yes,' and he said, 'Well, you're in.' So a few years ago I wrote a little memoir, a fairytale memoir about being plucked from the suburbs and asked to join this band, and now I've written a movie that's completely fictional but inspired by that. It's a strange, dark fairytale.

Ramona Koval: Do you think it's going to be made? You know these things...

Jon Ronson: I think so. You never know. Stanley Kubrick's lawyer said to me...because I was making a documentary a few years ago about Stanley Kubrick, and I said, 'They might turn my book The Men Who Stare at Goats into a movie,' and he said, 'Don't bet your son's school fees on it.'

Ramona Koval: And they did.

Jon Ronson: Yes, but he said to me, 'Let me tell you something, I've been in this business 60 years, no film ever gets made.' But they did make The Men Who Stare at Goats into a movie, and this film similarly is beginning to get a bit of an engine behind it, people are getting interested to the extent that even line producers are getting on board and casting agents and stuff.

Ramona Koval: Uh-oh, that sounds serious, doesn't it.

Jon Ronson: I mean, we're not yet past the point of no return, but we are veering towards the point of no return.

Ramona Koval: And who could possibly play you, John?

Jon Ronson: Well, I do have an idea, but I can't say. I mean, who would ever have thought that Ewan McGregor would play me, that I'd be played by a Jedi? I know who'd I would like to play me but I can't say it because imagine how unpolitical that would be.

Ramona Koval: No, I wouldn't want you to be that, for the first time in your life not to take any chances, Jon.

Jon Ronson: No, exactly. But I have got an idea for another book, but it's so early, it's just a glimmer of an idea.

Ramona Koval: Is it something kind of crazy?

Jon Ronson: It's similar to The Psychopath Test actually, it's got definite echoes. I think every book...I mean, this is probably a little bit grandiose of me, but each one of my books feels like it's passing the bat on to the next book. So Them, which was about madness on the fringes of society, passed the bat on to Goats, which was about madness at the heart of military, which passed the bat on to this book which is about actually madness with a capital M. And I feel like this next book seems to be the next appropriate stop upon the way.

Ramona Koval: Well, we're hanging out for it. Jon Ronson, thank you so much for speaking to us on The Book Show again.

Jon Ronson: Thanks Ramona, it's lovely to talk to you again.

Ramona Koval: The book is called The Psychopath Test: A journey through the madness industry, and it's published by Picador.

Publications

Title: The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry

Author: Jon Ronson

Publisher: Picador