PRESENTER: Good afternoon,
everyone.
Authors at Google New York
is pleased today
to welcome Jon Ronson.
[APPLAUSE]
JON RONSON: Hello.
Hi.
So "The Psychopath
Test." It began--
I was at a friend's house, and
she had on her shelf a copy of
the DSM manual, which I'm
sure you all know about.
It's the manual of
mental disorders.
It started off in the '50s
as a very slim volume.
There were very few mental
disorders in the '50s.
And then it grew and grew and
grew, and it's currently 886
pages long, and it lists every
known mental disorder.
And there's currently 374
mental disorders.
So I was leafing through the
book, wondering if I had any
mental disorders, and it turns
out that I've got 12.
I've got generalized anxiety
disorder, which frankly, I
didn't a book to tell me.
I've got nightmare disorder,
which is categorized if you
have recurrent dreams of being
pursued or declared a failure.
And all my dreams involve
people pursuing me and
declaring me a failure.
I've got a parent-child
relational problems, which I
blame my parents for.
I've got malingering.
And I think it's actually
probably quite rare to have
malingering and generalized
anxiety disorder,
but there you go.
I've got both.
The new edition, as I'm sure
you'll know, is about to come
out in May, and they've just
announced some of the new
disorders that are going
to be in there.
Intermittent explosive
disorder.
There's a version of it
in the current DSM-IV.
But now I met the head of the
new DSM a couple of weeks ago,
and I said to him, OK, if you
break a bottle against a wall
twice in a year in anger, does
that mean you've got
intermittent explosive
disorder?
And he said, yes.
So there you go.
Also, they've been thinking
about putting internet
addiction into the new DSM.
But now they've decided to put
it into the appendix, which is
the graveyard of mental
disorders.
Which actually, I'm kind of
pissed off about, because the
times when I've accidentally
typed my name into Google and
inadvertently pressed Search,
and I found people slagging me
off, I kind of like the idea of
them being declared insane.
But unfortunately, internet
addiction isn't going to be a
full-blown disorder.
Much later, by the way,
I was wondering why.
You know, with these mental
disorders, was I much crazier
than I thought I was?
Or maybe it's not a good idea
to diagnose yourself with a
mental disorder if you're not
a trained professional.
Or maybe the psychiatry
profession has a kind of
strange fetish to label
increasingly normal behavior
as mental disorders.
I didn't know which of those
things was true.
But I thought it was really
interesting to try and solve
that mystery.
Much later, by the way, I met
the man who turned the DSM
from a pamphlet into
a brick of a book.
It was called Robert Spitzer,
who is now in Princeton.
At the time, he was
at Columbia.
And Robert Spitzer's story
is that he hated Freudian
psychoanalysis, because his
mother was miserable her whole
life, and she died unhappy,
and she'd gone to Freudian
analyst after Freudian analyst
and none of them helped her.
So he grew up with this kind
of hatred of Freud.
And when he took over the
editorship of the DSM, he
decided that it was his destiny
to eradicate Freud
from psychiatry and replace all
that sleuthing around the
unconscious with checklists.
So he called all his like-minded
people into
conference rooms at Columbia,
and he'd say, who's got ideas
for the mental disorders?
And people would go, oh, ADHD!
And he'd go, what's
the checklist?
And he'd type it into
his typewriter.
And that's how ADHD came to
be a mental disorder.
And it's how bulimia came to
be in the DSM, and so on.
The person who shouted the
loudest, he would listen to
them, and he'd type it into his
old typewriter, and there
it was, sealed in stone.
And I said to him, when I met
him in Princeton, a couple of
years ago, I said, were there
any proposed mental disorders
that you rejected?
And he said, yeah,
there was one.
Atypical child syndrome.
He said the problem with it
was when I asked the man
proposing it what the shared
characteristics were, he said,
that's very hard to
say, because the
children are very atypical.
[LAUGHTER]
JON RONSON: He said he was
also going to put in
masochistic personality
disorder, which would be for
women who remained in abusive
relationships.
But he said he got into terrible
trouble with the
feminists, and so he changed
the name to self-defeating
personality disorder and shoved
it in the appendix.
So this was much later.
And when I was at my friend's
house, I was wondering, well,
what is this with mental
disorders?
What's the issue?
And so I decided to meet a
critic of psychiatry to get
their view, which is how I ended
up having lunch with the
Scientologists.
And it was a crack team
of Scientologists.
This was in London.
They're called the CCHR.
And it's their destiny
to destroy
psychiatry wherever it lies--
probably because of difficult
relationships between L. Ron
Hubbard and psychiatrists,
back in the day.
And I had lunch with the head
of the London branch.
His name was Brian.
And I said, can you prove to me
that psychiatry is a wicked
pseudoscience that
can't be trusted?
Can you prove your
ideology to me?
And he said, yes, I can
prove it to you.
And I said, how?
And he said, I can introduce
you to Tony.
And I said, who's Tony?
And he said, Tony's
in Broadmoor.
And Broadmoor is Broadmoor
Hospital.
It was Britain's most notorious,
mythologically
notorious asylum for the
criminally insane.
It's now called, of course,
Broadmoor Hospital.
And I said, what did Tony do?
And Brian said, hardly
anything.
He beat someone up
with something.
But the point is, he decided to
fake madness to get out of
a prison sentence, and he faked
it too well, and now
he's stuck in Broadmoor.
And the more he tries to
convince the psychiatrists
there that he's sane, the more
they take it as evidence that
he's crazy.
Do you want us to get you into
Broadmoor to meet Tony?
So I said, yes, please.
So I'm going to read a tiny
bit from "The Psychopath
Test," what happened when
I went to Broadmoor.
I got the train there.
I began to yawn uncontrollably
around Kempton Park, which is
what dogs also do
when anxious.
And I got to Broadmoor, and I
met Brian, and we were taken
through high-security gate after
gate after gate into the
Wellness Center, which
is where you
get to meet the patients.
And it's all calming colors,
like peaches and pine.
And I'm going to do a little
microphone experiment of,
like, leaning back a bit
and seeing if you
can still hear me?
Is that OK?
Because I was getting a--
great.
OK.
So the Wellness Center at
Broadmoor, it's all peach and
pine and calming colors.
It looks like a kind
of travel inn.
And the only bold colors are the
reds of the panic buttons.
And Brian said to me, you know,
Tony's the only person
in the entire DSPD unit to have
the privilege of meeting
people in the Wellness Center.
And I said, what does
DSPD stand for?
And Brian said, Dangerous and
Severe Personality Disorder.
And I said, is Tony in the part
of Broadmoor that houses
the most dangerous people?
And Brian said, yeah,
isn't that insane?
And then the patients started
drifting in, and they're all
quite overweight and wearing
sweatpants and shuffling, and
they had sort of doleful eyes.
And Brian whispered to me,
they're medicated.
Which, to a Scientologist, is
like the worst evil in the
world, but I'm thinking it's
presumably a good idea.
And then Brian said,
here's Tony.
And a man was walking towards
me, and he wasn't overweight.
He was in excellent physical
condition.
And he wasn't wearing
sweatpants.
He was wearing a
pinstripe suit.
It was evidently the outfit of
a man who wanted to prove to
me that he was incredibly
sane.
So we sat down, and I said, is
it true that you faked your
way in here?
And he said, yeah, absolutely.
I beat a man up in Reading,
which is just west of London.
And I was on remand, and my
cellmate said, you're looking
at five to seven
years for this.
What you have to do
is fake madness.
Tell them you're mad.
You'll get sent to some
cushy hospital.
You'll have your own
PlayStation.
Nurses will bring you pizzas.
So he says, so that's
what I did.
And I said, how to do it?
He said, well, I asked to see
the prison psychiatrist.
And I'd just seen a film called
"Crash," in which
people get sexual pleasure from
crashing cars into walls.
So I said to the psychiatrist,
I get sexual pleasure from
crashing cars into walls.
And I said, what else?
And he said, oh, I told the
psychiatrist that I wanted to
watch women as they died,
because it would make me feel
more normal.
And I said, where'd
you get that from?
And he said, oh, from a
biography of Ted Bundy that
they had in the prison
library.
So anyway, I faked
madness too well.
They didn't send me some
cushy hospital.
They sent me to Broadmoor.
The minute I got here, took a
look around, asked to see the
psychiatrist.
I said, there's been a terrible
misunderstanding.
I said, how long have
you been here for?
He said, well, if I had done my
time for the original GBH,
I'd have got five
to seven years.
I've been in Broadmoor
for 12 years.
It is an awful lot harder,
Tony told me, to convince
people you're sane than it is to
convince them you're crazy.
I thought the best way to seem
normal, he said, would be to
talk to people normally about
normal things, like football.
That's the obvious thing
to do, right?
I subscribe to "New Scientist."
I like reading
about scientific
breakthroughs.
One time, they had an article
about how the US Army was
training bumblebees to
sniff out explosives.
So I said to a nurse, did you
know that the US Army's
training bumblebees to
sniff out explosives?
Later, when I read my medical
notes, I saw they'd written,
"thinks bees can sniff
out explosives."
An then when Tony said this to
me, I thought it was probably
good idea that I hadn't met any
psychiatrists when I was
writing "The Men Who Stare At
Goats," which if people don't
know, it's full of that stuff.
It was my previous story.
I was in Hawaii and I met a man
called Glenn Wheaton, who
was part of a secret
US military unit
called Project Jedi.
And I said, what was
Project Jedi?
And he said it was a
series of levels.
And I said, what
was level one?
He said, level one
was observation.
You walk into a room.
How many chairs are
in the room?
The super soldier
would just know.
And I said, what
was level two?
He said, level two
is intuition.
You're at a fork in the road.
Do you go left?
Do you go right?
You go right.
And I said, what was
level three?
And he said level three
was invisibility.
And I said, that's quite
a leap from level two.
I said, what, actual
invisibility?
And he said, at first, but after
a while, we adapted it
to just trying to find a
way of not being seen.
So I said, like camouflage?
And he went, no.
[LAUGHTER]
He said, level four was we had
a master sergeant that could
stop the heart of a goat just
by wanting it to stop.
And I said, did he
ever manage it?
And he said, one time.
But his heart got damaged
at the same time.
And I said, what, was the goat
psychically fighting back?
And he said, no, the goat
didn't stand a chance.
He said, it's what's known
in paranormal circles as
sympathetic injury.
He said one time they had 30
goats in a room, and they were
all staring at goat number
16, and then goat
number 17 fell over.
Which I guess is collateral
damage.
[LAUGHTER]
When you decided to wear
pinstripe to meet me, I said,
did you realize the look
could go either way?
Yes, said Tony, but I thought
I'd take my chances.
Plus, most of the patients here
are disgusting slobs who
don't wash or change their
clothes for weeks on end, and
I like to dress well.
Tony said he didn't like
hanging around
with the other patients.
He said on one side of him, he
had the Stockwell Strangler,
and on the other side of him, he
had the Tiptoe Through The
Tulips Rapist.
And he said he found them
unsavory and frightening, so
he stays in his room a lot.
And he said they took that as
a sign of madness, because
they said it demonstrated that
he was aloof and grandiose.
So only in Broadmoor would not
wanting to hang out with
serial killers be considered
a sign of madness.
Anyway, Tony seemed completely
fine to me.
Just normal and sane.
But obviously, what
did I know?
So when I got home, I wrote to
his clinician, Anthony Maden,
and I said, what's the story?
And he wrote back to me,
and he said, it's true.
We accept that Tony faked
madness to escape a prison
sentence, because his delusions
that had seemed very
cliche to begin with,
just vanished the
minute he got to Broadmoor.
However, we have assessed him,
and we've determined that what
he is is a psychopath.
And in fact, faking madness is
exactly the kind of cunning
and manipulative act
of a psychopath.
It says on the checklist.
Item eight, cunning,
manipulative.
And I said to the clinicians,
what else?
And one of them said to me,
the pinstripe suit--
classic psychopathic.
Speaks to items one and
two on the checklist--
grandiose sense of
self-worth, and
glibness, superficial charm.
Not wanting to hang out with the
other patients was classic
psychopathic.
It spoke to lack of empathy
and also grandiosity.
So all the things that seemed
most ordinary about Tony was
evidence, according to its
clinicians, that he was crazy
in this new way.
He was a psychopathic.
And Tony Maden said to me, if
you want to know more about
psychopaths, you can
actually going on a
psychopathic-spotting course
with Robert Hare, who's the
creator of the checklist, for
PCLR psychopath checklist.
Like the grandfather of
psychopathy studies.
So I did.
I went on a Hare course.
And I am now a certified--
I have a certificate
of attendance--
and I have to say, extremely
adept psychopath-spotter.
So these are the statistics.
One in 100 regular people
is a psychopathic.
So one in 100, walking around,
regular people, are
psychopaths.
This, according to Robert
Hare and his group.
But that rises to 4% of CEOs
and business leaders.
You're four times more likely
to have a psychopath at the
top of the tree than you are to
have one as your underling.
Because, of course, capitalism
at its most remorseless
rewards psychopathic behavior.
It rewards the lack of empathy
and the grandiosity and the
impulsivity and the
irresponsibility.
These things are rewarded by
an out-of-control system.
This was what Hare
was saying to me.
I have to say, when I was
learning all of this, I'm
wondering what I should
do with my new-found
psychopathic-spotting skills.
I thought I wouldn't put them
to philanthropic good use.
What I would do is think about
all the people in my past who
had crossed me to see which
of them I could out as
psychopaths.
So the first on the list--
I don't know if there's any
British people here, or
indeed, "Vanity Fair" readers.
Because the first on my list
was AA Gill, the critic AA
Gill, who is a classic
psychopath.
He gave me very, very bad
reviews on my television
documentaries over many years,
which is classic psychopathic.
Plus he once wrote a column
about how he wanted to shoot a
baboon on safari.
He'd been on safari and he shot
a baboon, because like
all of us, he wondered
what it would be
like to shoot a person.
Classic psychopath.
So I met AA Gill, actually,
quite recently at a journalist
award ceremony in London.
And he came bounding up to me.
And somebody had told him
I'd put him in my book.
And the first thing he said was,
I would never sue another
journalist.
So I said, that thing that you
wrote about wanting to kill a
baboon on safari, because like
all of us, you wondered what
it would be like shoot
a person, I said
it's not all of us.
It's not a normal
thing to think.
It's just you.
And he said, well, you don't
hunt, so you would never
understand.
So I said, I sell more
books than you do.
[LAUGHTER]
So by all criteria, I won.
And then I thought of somebody
who was possibly more
psychopathic than AA Gill.
And this was a man I'd met
15 years ago in New York.
His name was Toto Constant.
And he was a Haitian dictator.
I won't go over his crimes,
but they were terrible.
And he'd got away with it,
because at the same time, he
was working as an informant
for the CIA.
So when he had to flee Haiti, he
moved in with his mother in
Queens, and was allowed
to remain.
He said, if you don't let me
stay here, then I will spill
the beans about the CIA.
So they let him stay.
The rule was that he
had stay in Queens.
Queens was to be his prison.
He was never allowed
into Manhattan.
I should say, he was
constantly going into Manhattan.
So I thought, at the time--
I was young and I was
just starting out.
I thought it would be funny to
go and meet a dictator who had
to move back in with his
mother in Queens.
[LAUGHTER]
But I have to say,
it was not funny.
There was nothing
funny about it.
I turned up in Queens,
and he was there,
wearing a pinstripe suit.
Very hot day.
And all he wanted to do was
protest his innocence.
That was my only purpose that
day, was to listen to him
protesting his innocence.
And it was nonsense.
The evidence against him is
completely compelling.
One of the items on the
checklist, by the way,
according to Hare, is compulsive
lying and not
caring about being
caught in a lie.
So a kind of shamelessness.
But so all he wanted to do was
protest his innocence.
And so I left.
I was frustrated.
I couldn't connect with him on
any kind of empathetic level.
And I never did anything
with the interview.
I found it kind of creepy.
And at one point, he started
crying, and I looked up, and I
realized he was only
pretending to cry.
Shallow affect is one of the
items on the checklist, an
inability to experience
a range of emotions.
But now I'd done a
psychopath-spotting course.
I was suddenly incredibly
excited about my
day with Toto Constant.
So I decided to write to him
again, to see if you would
meet me again.
And it turned out that he was
doing 12 to 37 years in jail
in upstate New York for
mortgage fraud.
So that's item 20 on
the checklist.
What is item 20?
Oh, I'll get back to
what item 20 is.
Criminal versatility.
So I wrote to him, and I said,
I don't know if you remember
me, but we met 15 years ago.
And he wrote back and said,
I remember you very well.
Please come and visit.
Nobody ever visits me.
It would just be wonderful
if you came to visit me.
So I'm going to read another
little bit from "The
Psychopath Test" as
to what happened
when I met Toto Constant.
Why didn't you come and
see me last Tuesday?
he asked me.
That volcano erupted in Iceland,
and everything got
put on hold, I said.
OK, he said.
I understand.
When I got your letter,
I was so excited.
Really?
I said.
All the inmates were saying, the
guy who wrote "The Men Who
Stare At Goats" book is
coming to visit you.
Wow.
Everyone here has heard
of that movie.
Really?
I said.
Yes.
We have a movie night,
every Saturday night.
Last Saturday was "Avatar."
That movie touched me.
It touched me, Jon.
The invasion of the small nation
by the big nation.
I found those blue
people beautiful.
I found a beauty in them.
Are you an emotional man?
I asked.
I am emotional, he nodded.
By now, I'm thinking I'm wasting
my fucking time.
I've driven up all the way from
New York, and New York
state turns out to
be a big state.
And it had taken me, like,
hours to get there.
Then I see him, and he's
obviously not psychopathic.
Oh, shit.
Which I guess is slightly a
callous lack of empathy, which
is item six.
Anyway, a couple of moments ago,
they chose "The Men Who
Stare at Goats" movie.
Most of the inmates didn't
know what the
hell was going on.
They were saying, what's this?
But I was saying, no, no.
I've met the guy who
wrote the book.
You don't understand
the guy's mind.
And then you wrote to me and
said you wanted to meet again,
and everyone was so jealous.
That's nice, I said.
When I heard you were coming
last week, my hair was a real
mess, but I wasn't scheduled
to have my hair cut, so
another inmate said,
you take my slot.
We switched slots at
the barber shop.
And someone else gave me a brand
new green shirt to wear.
Oh, god, I said.
And then he just started to say
to me, you know, I really
want people to like me.
It's very, very important
that people like me.
It matters a lot to me
that people like me.
And after a while, I said to
him, isn't that a weakness?
Your desperate desire to
have people like you,
isn't that a weakness?
And he said, oh, no.
It's not a weakness, and
I'll tell you why.
If you can get people like you,
you can manipulate them
to do whatever you
want them to do.
So I said, you don't really
want people to like you.
He goes, oh, no, no, no.
So I left Toto Constant's house
that day feeling like a
psychopathic-spotting genius.
I had cracked him open with
the word "weakness." And I
just felt incredibly
proud of myself.
And I was driving back
to New York, and then
I started to panic.
And my amygdala shot signals
of fear and distrust and
remorse up and down my central
nervous system, which my
amygdala does a lot--
which makes me, by the way, the
neurological opposite of a
psychopathic.
Their amygdalas under-perform.
And my amygdala was, like,
over-performing.
I was, like, veering across the
road, and I was thinking,
oh my God, what if Toto Constant
reads my book and
decides to kill me?
And then I thought, well, that's
not going to happen,
because he's doing 12
to 37 years in jail
for mortgage fraud.
But what if, like, one of his
friends or relatives decides
to kill me?
And I panicked, and
I kind of pulled
into a drive-in Starbucks.
And I went through my notes, and
I've got to the part where
he said, I've lost everybody
who ever loved me.
I don't have anybody
left in the world.
Anybody who ever loved me has
betrayed me and gone.
I have nobody left.
And I thought, well,
that's OK, then.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, I recounted all my
findings to Robert Hare, who
was unimpressed.
And he said forget about
some Haitian dictator.
Forget about some guy
at Broadmoor.
The big story is corporate
psychopathy.
This is like the world's
biggest story.
And I have to say, back then--
things have slightly changed.
But back then, it was true, what
Robert Hare said, that
this was like a hugely important
story, but nobody
was interested.
Nobody cared when he told them
that it was the solution to
the greatest mysteries of all.
Why the wars?
Why the corruption?
Why the tax evasion?
While all these terrible
things?
Corporate psychopaths.
This was Hare's contention,
that psychopathic behavior
will both propel you to the top
of the tree, because of
the kind of person it turns you
into, and also, the system
rewards it.
He said this was an
enormous story.
Why is nobody interested?
He said, you should get yourself
some corporate
psychopaths to interview.
And so I tried.
I wrote to Bernie Madoff,
saying, can I come and
interview you to find out
if you're a psychopath?
And he didn't write back.
So then I changed tack.
I wrote to "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap,
the famous asset
stripper from the '90s.
I said, I believe you may have
a very special brain anomaly
that makes you interested
in the
predatory spirit and fearless.
Can I come and interview
you about your
special brain anomaly?
And he said, come on over.
So I went to Al Dunlap's
place.
Al Dunlap, if people don't know,
would go into a failing
business, fire 30% of the
workforce, always with a quip.
For instance, he once
told somebody--
somebody once said to him,
I've just bought
myself a new car.
And he said, you may have a
new car, but I'll tell you
what you don't have-- a job.
Plus, he once threatened his
first wife with a knife, and
said he always wondered what
human flesh tasted like.
Plus he didn't turn
up to either of
his parents' funerals.
So I went to his house, which
was filled with sculptures of
predatory animals.
It was like he was giving me
a tour of the gardens.
It was this grand mansion.
He was going, over there, you've
got lions and tigers
and more-- he was saying this
in a less effeminate way.
Tigers and falcons and eagles.
It was like Narnia.
And then we went into his
kitchen, and it was Al and his
wife Judy, and his
bodyguard Sean.
And I said, you know how I
said in my email that you
might have a special
brain anomaly?
And he said, yeah, it's
an amazing theory.
It's like "Star Trek."
You're going where no
man has gone before.
And I said, well, some
psychiatrists would say that
this makes you [INAUDIBLE].
And he went, what?
And I said, a psychopath.
And I've got a list in my pocket
of psychopathic traits.
Can I go through
them with you?
And he looked intrigued,
because what saved me
was like all of us.
He loved nothing more than a
mental health checklist.
And he said, OK.
So I said, grandiose sense
of self-worth?
Which I have to say would have
been a hard one for him to
deny, because he was standing
underneath a giant oil
painting of himself.
And he said, you've got
to believe in you!
And I said, shallow affect?
And he said, who wants to be
weighed down with some
nonsense emotions?
And I said, manipulative?
And he said, that's
leadership.
So he basically went through
much of the checklist,
redefining it as business
positives.
But I have to say, something
happened to me the day I was
at Al Dunlap's, which was
whenever he said something to
me that was non-psychopathic, I
thought, well, I'm not going
to put that in my book.
So he said no to juvenile
delinquency.
He got accepted to West Point.
He said no to many short-term
marital relationships.
He's only been married twice,
and his second marriage has
lasted 41 years.
And all of those things.
I thought, well, I'm not going
to put that in my book.
And then I realized, of course,
that becoming a
psychopath-spotter had turned me
a little bit psychopathic,
in the way that I was desperate
to shove Al Dunlap
into a box marked psychopath.
Desperate to define him
by his maddest edges.
And I mean, I think that's kind
of what we all do is as
journalists.
As my friend Adam Curtis
said to me, when
I got back to London--
he's a British documentary
maker--
he said, here we travel around
the world with our notepads in
our hands, and we wait
for the gems.
And the gems are always be
outermost aspects of that
person's personality.
And we're like medieval monks.
We stitch together the gems and
leave the ordinary, normal
behavior on the floor.
And those gems are always the
things that would be defined,
within the DSM, as
mental disorders.
And he said, we all know that
what we do is odd--
and kind of leading to a
nefarious conformity.
But we don't like to
think about it.
What does it say about our
own mental health?
And I think Adam's right.
I think that that is what
we do, as journalists.
And I suppose for the last few
years, I've been trying to do
the opposite of that.
I've been trying to not define
people by their maddest edges.
And I think it's a good point,
and I'll finish here.
Don't know if anybody wants
to ask me questions.
And I just think, as the new
DSM's about to come out and
it's going to be even bigger
than DSM-IV, there's going to
be even more mental disorders
in there, I think it's
probably a good time to think
about defining people by their
gray areas, as opposed to
their maddest edges.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
JON RONSON: I don't know if
anybody's got any questions.
Hello.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
[INAUDIBLE]
psychopath.
PRESENTER: Please come
to the microphone.
JON RONSON: Oh.
Yes.
Like that.
PRESENTER: Think about the
psychopathic list.
I wonder if you think, from an
evolutionary perspective, that
the traits that made somebody a
psychopath was giving them a
competitive advantage, a
lift through evolution.
And even now, in today's
messed-up society, to use your
words, if you think that it
still gives them an advantage.
JON RONSON: Yeah.
And that's certainly
what Hare thinks.
And there's a new writer on the
block called Kevin Dutton.
He's just brought out a book
called "The Wisdom of
Psychopaths." So he
believes that.
In fact, Kevin Dutton
would say that and
would go one step further--
and it's not a step that
I would take--
which is that it's actually, we
can learn from psychopaths.
It's good.
We can learn coolness
under pressure.
So not only is it evolutionary,
but it actually
could be considered
to be positive.
Which is something I don't buy,
because I think if you
don't have empathy, if empathy
just literally is absent from
your brain, what would always
grow in the barren landscape
is, you know, malevolence, is
this is the other items on the
checklists, and always
malevolent.
And an Army recruiter
once told me--
it's a very popular belief
that capitalism rewards
psychopathic behavior.
And I think that is true
to a certain extent.
I think it's true in the kind
of industries where a
short-term kill is beneficial,
like hedge funds, you could
say, or fucking health
insurance industry.
And so on--
journalism.
But I think in businesses where,
actually, the long term
is important, it's never
going to work out.
There's always going to
be a transgression.
It's always going to chaos.
And an Army recruiter said to
me, contrary to what certain
people believe, we don't want
psychopaths in our battalions.
It's the last thing we want,
because they make terrible
team players.
Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks
for coming.
JON RONSON: Thank you
for having me.
And I think for [INAUDIBLE]
I feel like Ray Kurzweil.
AUDIENCE: What's that?
JON RONSON: Nothing.
It's OK.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So, question.
How young do children
start to exhibit
some of these qualities?
And are there tests that are
specifically geared for them?
JON RONSON: There's actually
camps. "The New York Times"
did this incredible piece, a few
months ago, about summer
camps for psychopathic
children.
Because the fact is, one of the
items on the checklist is
early behavior problems.
And the behavior tends
to manifest
itself from the ages--
almost always, actually.
This surprised me, when I asked
Robert Hare about this.
He said this was
like a big one.
Between the ages of 8 and 10.
And that's obviously an age when
you're thinking about PR,
and you're not thinking about
your career, so you will
display these characteristics
in a pretty open way.
And it's either 8 and
10 or 10 and 12.
I think it might be 10
and 12, actually.
I think I've got that wrong.
Al Dunlap's saying that he had
no early behavior problems,
and if he'd got accepted into
West Point, that proves it,
shows that he's actually not, as
much as we all want him to
be, a classic psychopath.
So yes, between the ages of--
it's either 8 and
10 or 10 and 12.
I can't remember.
And there's an incredible "New
York Times" piece, which if
anybody wants to read more
about the possibility of
psychopathic children, I would
recommend you read that.
Thanks.
Hey.
AUDIENCE: Hey.
So your stories are just
awesomely random.
I was wondering how you choose
stories, and also, how often
you choose ones that
don't go anywhere?
JON RONSON: Well,
I mean, often.
And I find it--
very hard to--
you spend months and months on
Google looking for the page
that nobody else has ever
found, for the story.
And quite often.
The most depressing one that
went nowhere, actually, was I
was going to write a book about
the credit industry.
I had a prophetic sense that it
was all going to collapse.
Because I wrote the piece in
"Lost At Sea," which is my new
collection-- which
is available for
sale just over here.
I wrote a piece called "Who
Killed Richard Cullen?" about
a man who committed suicide
because he was out of his
depth with credit cards.
And people kept on saying
to me, you know, this
is a house of cards.
This isn't going to last.
And I became obsessed with
writing a book about the
credit industry.
And I spent months and months
on it, and I failed.
And the reason why I failed,
the terrible truth, is that
the people who I met, the people
who were coming up with
the tricks to keep
people enslaved--
the terrible stuff
they were doing.
The late fees--
they were boring people, and
I couldn't make them
light up the page.
And I'd go and meet them, and
nothing exciting would happen.
And I say, in fact, in "The
Psychopathic Test," if you
want to get away with
wielding true
malevolent power, be boring.
Because journalists like
writing about colorful,
engaging people.
It makes us look good.
So don't like Blofeld, all
monochord and ostentatious.
Be boring.
And then the next thing,
I suppose, is--
OK, you've got a mystery
to solve.
And I like to think my books
always start with a mystery.
And the mystery in "The
Psychopath Test," I suppose
there was a few of them.
One of them was, is it true,
what psychiatrists say, that
psychopaths rule the world?
Is that true?
It's a huge thing to say, and
it almost sounds like a
conspiracy theory.
Yet the people who say these
things are eminent.
And so that's the mystery
that you leap into.
And then you have to be
completely open to wherever
the story takes you.
So in the book I'm writing now,
the opening mystery is,
why do court experts get it
wrong far more often than
other sorts of scientists?
And that's the mystery that's
leading me into a whole bunch
of incredibly interesting
areas, I think.
And yeah, you have to be open.
Not polemical, just open to
wherever the story takes you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
JON RONSON: Hi.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
for coming.
JON RONSON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: So the thing I
wonder-- you gave an example
while talking about
your book--
is talking to these people and
confronting them about this
classification of
their behavior.
I think if I were to do that,
I would panic, like you did
coming down from upstate
New York, every time.
So how, as a person with
generalized anxiety disorder,
how did you manage to do that?
JON RONSON: Well, you know what
I think the answer is?
And this is true for
people I know--
I've got loved ones
who have OCD.
And I think it's absolutely
the same.
The weird truth of it is-- and
I'm sure this isn't true for
everybody, with any kind of
anxiety disorder, but I think
it's true for a lot
of people--
which is that the anxiety always
manifests itself in
completely irrational ways.
And in real life frightening
situations, just
like everyone else.
You know, you analyze--
what risk am I actually
in, here?
And work it out, in a kind of
completely rational way.
But you can't let your bloody
dog off the leash in Central
Park because of an irrational
fear it's
going to get run over.
So that's the truth of it.
It's that anxiety disorders tend
to manifest themselves in
irrational ways that don't
actually have any resemblance
to reality.
And when you're in genuine
anxiety-inducing situations,
you're fine.
Don't ask me why, but that
seems to be the case.
AUDIENCE: And I've also been
asked to ask if you know if
Tony's still in Broadmoor.
JON RONSON: Well, OK.
I--
I--
is "The Psychopath Test" for
sale up there, or is it just
"Lost at Sea?"
PRESENTER: Just "Lost at Sea."
JON RONSON: OK.
In that case, does anybody mind
if I sort of give away
what happened to Tony?
The book's still fine anyway,
even if you know the ending.
OK.
Tony called me, and
for a while, I
didn't take his calls.
Because frankly I found
the label terrifying.
And then after a while,
I took his calls.
And he said, you know why
you've been calling me?
And I said, because they said
that you're a psychopath.
And he said, look, I'm
not a psychopath.
And he said, trying to prove
you're not a psychopath is
even harder than trying to prove
you're not mentally ill,
because one of the items on
the checklist is lack of
remorse, and another one is
cunning, manipulative.
So when I say I feel terrible
remorse for what I did, they
say typical of a psychopathic
to cunningly say they feel
remorse, when they don't.
He said it's like witchcraft.
They turn everything
upside down.
And he said, anyway, I've
got a tribunal.
And it actually was partly do
with me, I have to say,
because before my book was
published, I told Tony's story
on "This American Life," and
it had a bit of an impact.
And Tony sent it to various
lawyers and got himself a
tribunal, in part, I think,
because of the publicity
because of "This
American Life."
And he got a tribunal.
And in the tribunal,
they let him go.
He'd been in Broadmoor
for 14 years by then.
12 years in Broadmoor, two years
at the Maudsley, which
is a similar place.
And they let him go because they
said that you shouldn't
be locked up for the rest of
your life because you score
highly on a checklist
that would imply a
greater-than-average
recidivism rate.
It's almost kind of Orwellian.
And out in the corridor, Tony
came up to me, and he said,
you've got to realize, Jon, that
everybody's a little bit
psychopathic.
He said, you are, I am--
well, obviously, I am.
And I said, what are you
going to do now?
He said, there's this
woman in Belgium I
fancy, but she's married.
And I'm going to have to get her
split up from her husband.
But you know what they say
about us psychopaths.
We are manipulative.
And then he disappeared off
into the British night.
And everything was fine
for about six months.
Brian, the Scientologist, would
give me updates, and he
was making up for lost time.
Which I know sounds
ominous, but
wasn't necessarily ominous.
That he got into a bar fight
and ended up going
to jail for a month.
As part of the release, part of
the probation, he couldn't
go back to the mental
hospital.
He had to be treated by
the prison system.
And by the way, the unit he was
in closed down, because
the government actually began
to think the same thoughts
about the DSPD unit.
So the unit closed down.
So he went to jail
for a month.
Then he came out.
And that's the last I heard
until about two weeks ago,
when I got a tweet from somebody
in a bookstore, who
said that somebody in the
bookstore had said that he was
one of Tony's care workers,
and they'd got
talking about it.
He was back in prison.
So I looked him up--
I'm one of the few people who
know his actual name.
And sure enough, he had racially
assaulted a station
guard somewhere just outside
London, and had gone back to
prison for--
I don't know how long.
I think maybe a few months.
And that's the last
I've heard.
So it's not a happy ending.
Which by the way--
let me just say.
It then begs the question,
well, is it right
that Tony was out?
And it's a very difficult
question, but I still think,
yes, it was, for all the
obvious reasons.
AUDIENCE: It seems like there's
sort of a movement
towards thinking that people who
have mental disorders that
have, you know, psychopathy or
things like that, should be
treated as criminals or
dangerous and locked up.
What do you think about that?
JON RONSON: Well, this
is the big thing.
And it's a huge thing in
America at the moment.
There's these places
for pedophiles.
There's one in Los Angeles
called Coalinga, where the day
somebody's done their time and
is released from jail, they
immediately get sent to
Coalinga, and they're locked
up, kind of, for the rest
of their lives.
Because once you're in
that nexus, it's
impossible to get out.
And there was a story in "The
Los Angeles Times" where one
of the doctors at Coalinga has
said a huge percentage of the
people there shouldn't
be there.
And Robert Hare said that the
people who determine who is
and isn't a psychopathic on
behalf of Coalinga, he said he
teaches them, and they're just
picking their nails, and
they're doodling.
And they're going to go off and
kind of have a huge effect
on people's lives.
So on balance, even though
there's no question that
psychopaths exist, and there's
no question that they're
incredibly problematic, and
that they'll reoffend and
reoffend and reoffend, it's
still really hard, it's still
a real problem to think, well,
OK, lock them up for the rest
of their lives.
It feels wrong, right?
So I feel that you just have
to take your chances.
Lock them up for the amount of
time that each individual
crime deserved, because the
alternative is worse.
But you know, I mean,
what do I know?
This is like three, four years
of my life, and that's the
conclusion I came to.
But it's not an easy topic.
Please can we not end on that?
[LAUGHTER]
JON RONSON: Maybe we
can end on that.
I've been told I can see rooms
at Google that people don't
get to go to, so that's
exciting.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JON RONSON: Sorry?
AUDIENCE: The ones with
padded walls.
JON RONSON: Right.
The ones with the padded walls.
[LAUGHTER]
JON RONSON: When I was at TED,
I feel like Scooter.
I was in the elevator, coming
up, and talking about going
when I was at TED.
But when I was at TED, there was
this kind of lady who runs
DARPA, and she kind of
released her killer
hummingbird.
And everyone was kind of wowed,
and then they're, oh my
God, this hummingbird
can just kill.
And now she's a bigwig
at Google.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: We can't comment
about [INAUDIBLE]
hummingbirds.
So there's a suggestion that 1%
of people are psychopaths.
Have they done a big enough
population sampling for that
to be reasonable?
JON RONSON: I've got to say,
this is completely subjective.
Hare is absolutely adamant
that that's
the percentage, 1%.
And Hare is like a very
respected, eminent person.
I've always thought
that sounds a bit
high, I have to say.
AUDIENCE: The thing is, if it
skews, I don't know, white,
and it skews male,
and it basically
skews living in America--
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Those numbers
seem atomically high.
If it's 1%, and you're
up at 5% of all--
JON RONSON: CEOs.
It seems high, I've
got to tell you.
I mean, Hare is very--
he is cautious.
I mean, I did have my slight
issues with him.
There was this time-- and
I put this in the book--
when I met him at a
hotel in Heathrow.
And I was looking for
him everywhere.
It was late at night.
I couldn't find him.
We arranged to meet.
And I decided to go to the
concierge desk to phone his
room, because the queue was
so long at the desk.
And so I went to the concierge's
phone and pressed
0 to get through to
the operator.
And the concierge was kind of
storming toward me, going, put
down my phone!
And I said-- and he grabbed the
phone and slammed it down.
And then I met Robert Hare,
and I said, you wouldn't
believe what just happened.
The concierge just grabbed the
phone off me, and it was quite
frightening.
And Robert Hare said, well,
that's because he's one.
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, really?
And he said, you should
put that in your book.
And I said, I will.
So I mean, I agree.
This is something I don't say
very often, because I have a
lot of respect for Robert
Hare, and I really do.
And I think his checklist
is onto something.
But I've always thought
1% seems high.
Yeah.
OK.
Well, look, well, thank you.
Thank you very much indeed.
And happy Christmas.
[APPLAUSE]
