Jon Ronson discusses public shaming on Twitter and psychopathy, citing research showing roughly 1% of people are psychopathic, rising to 4% among CEOs. He draws on his book The Psychopath Test and attempts to interview figures like Bernie Madoff and Al Dunlap about corporate psychopathy.
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Hi. Hello. Hi. Thank you for having me. I noticed last night that Inbound 15 was trending worldwide on Twitter, which usually only happens when you've done something terrible. I think the thing about Twitter is that it's a stage for these kind of constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. And you don't seem like sickening villains, so you must be magnificent heroes. Anyway, I've got notes, but I'm going to try not to refer to them. But I probably will refer to them because I've got a terrible memory. I've got the worst memory. In fact, quite recently, my wife booked me as a special treat, a spa weekend, which she should know is like a terrible special treat for me because she knows I don't like being touched. Anyway, when I was at the. I was being massaged, and it was awkward, and I was trying to make conversation with the masseur, so I told her about my terrible memory. I said, I've got a terrible memory. I don't remember anything about my childhood. It's all gone. And as she was massaging me, she said, well, most people who don't remember anything about their childhoods, when they recover their lost memories, it turns out that they were sexually abused. So I said, well, I'd remember that anyway. Gonna talk about public shaming on Twitter. But I think, I suppose I was trying to remember when what the genesis of this new book was. And I think it was actually a moment in a previous book of mine called the Psychopath Test. And in the Psychopath Test, I learned how to become a professional psychopath spotter. I went on a course to teach me how to spot psychopaths, and I'm now a certified in that I have a certificate of attendance and also extremely adept psychopath spotter. The statistic, by the way, is that one. This is according to Robert Hare, who's like the kind of father of psychopathy study. The statistic is that 1 in 100 regular people is a psychopath. So there's how many people in this room right now? There's about 2,000 people in this room. So 20 of you are psychopaths. So it could be carnage by lunchtime. But that figure 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 at the bottom, according to Robert Hare. So I was wondering what I should do with my new psychopath spotting skills. And I thought, I won't put them to philanthropic good What I'll do instead is think about all the people in my past who had crossed me to see which of them I could out as psychopaths. So top of the bill was a Sunday Times columnist called A.A. gill, who had just written a column about how he'd shot a baboon on safari. Because, like all of us, he wondered what it would be like to shoot a person, which is classic psychopath. Plus, he always gives my television documentaries very bad reviews, which is classic psychopath. I actually bumped into AA Gill quite recently at an awards ceremony, and he came bounding over to me and said, I hear I'm in your book about psychopaths. Don't worry, I would never sue another journalist. So I said, you know how you wrote that column about how you'd shot a baboon on safari? Because like all of us, you wondered why, what it'd be like to shoot a person. I said, it's not all of us. It's not a normal thing to think. It's just you. So he said, oh, well, you don't hunt, so you wouldn't understand. So I said, I sell more books than you do. So I won. I won psychopathically, anyway. But then Robert Hare, the man who taught me how to spot psychopaths, I should say he hates me paraphrasing what he does in that way, said, no, what you need to do with your powers is tell the story of corporate psychopathy. He said, this is the biggest story in the world, corporate psychopathy, and nobody's thinking about it. He said, why the wars? Why. Why the economic injustice, corporate psychopaths? Because capitalism, at its most remorseless, rewards psychopathic character traits. The lack of empathy, the lack of remorse. He said, you should get yourself some corporate psychopaths to interview. So I thought I'd give it a try. So the first thing I did was I wrote to Bernie Madoff, and I said, can I come and interview you in prison to find out if you're a psychopath? And he didn't write back. So I changed tack. I wrote to a famous asset stripper called Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Al Dunlap was famous for going into a failing business, and he would shut down 30% of the factories, close, fire 30% of the workforce, and he'd always do it with a joke. So one time somebody said to him, I've just bought myself a new car. And he said, you may have a new car, but I tell you what, you don't have a job. He was considered such a quintessential psychopathic boss. In fact, that Fast Company magazine and their list of 50 worst corporate psychopaths of all time put him in the list. And he was the only person in the list who was still alive. So I wrote to Al Dunlap, and I changed tack, and I said, I believe that you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you fearless and interested in the predatory spirit. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly? And he said, come on over. So I went over to his house, remembering, by the way, that one of the items on the psychopath checklist is cunning, manipulative. So I turned up at his house, which was filled with sculptures and paintings of predatory animals. Here's Al. So he was giving me a tour of his garden. He said, over there, you've got sculptures of lions and tigers and panthers. And he was saying this to me in a less effeminate way. I said, it's like Midas and the Queen of Narnia flew over a particularly fierce zoo and transformed everything into stone and then deposited everything here. And he said, what? And I said, nothing. And I said it was just a jumble of words that became confused in my mouth. And he said, okay. So then we went into his kitchen, and it was Al, his wife Judy, and his bodyguard Sean. And I said, you know how I said in my email that you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you fearless? 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 psychologists would say that this makes you. He said, what? And I said, a psychopath. And in fact, I have in my pocket a list, a checklist of psychopathic character traits. Can I go through it with you? And I think what saved me is that Al Dunlap, like all of us, loves nothing more than a mental health checklist. So he said, okay. So I got it out. And I said, item one, grandiose sense of self worth, which would have been a hard one for him to deny because we were standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself. And he said, well, you got to believe in you. I said, manipulative. He said, that's leadership. And so he went down the checklist, redefining most of the items as business positives, shallow affect, and inability to experience a range of emotions. He said, who wants to be weighed down by some stupid emotions? And so on. So I did notice, though, something happening to me the day that I was at Al Dunlap's house.
