Why So Many Men Are Unraveling

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Have the same, you know, the same way anymore. Feeling kind of tossed around in this sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means. Should it be more stoical? Should it be more vulnerable? You know, all of these men's health influences, giving these differing, contrasting ideas. And so this is a huge societal shift in many different ways. And I think that's what's happening. You've got men responding to these changes by bowing out, and then you've got these other men who are responding by, by spying. You know, you've got these other men who are responding by, by spying. I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain. And today we are headed down a rabbit hole that includes ominous castles, public shaming, YouTube, White House cage fighting, all to answer one of life's burning questions. Why is it that so many men are unraveling these days? Is this part of a changing economy, part of a bad job market? Is it fallout from the pandemic? Or is it part of something bigger? A societal failure of some sort? Or an outgrowth of what some people have called the masculinity crisis? Now, those words, masculinity crisis, can cause some people to roll their eyes. Men, of course, continue to enjoy all kinds of societal privilege and gender inequities abound. But what is clear, I think, if you spend any time engaging with modern politics and culture, is that over the last few decades, there has been a very real, if hard to define, debate over what it means to be a man. Jobs and gender roles, they've changed, and culture along with it, much of it, for the better. But that change has also created some uncertainty for the men who have been used to being at the center of every household, every office, every institution, marketing campaign, and political decision. And it's in that uncertainty that all kinds of voices, pickup artists, politicians, incels on 4chan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, you name it, they've all jumped in to offer these competing visions. Now, some of this has taken the form of toxic, misogynistic, manosphere bullshit. Some of it is just positive or harmless. Dudes rock kind of stuff. And so many of these lessons, they end up being taught or absorbed, for better or for worse, in online communities and communicated by people who may or may not have ulterior motives. So what happens to regular men in this bizarre online stew that we're all in? My guest today, the writer and podcaster, Jon Ronson, explores that in his new book, The Man Who Made Me a Man. Ronson, to be clear, isn't really writing about the manosphere, or the high-profile grifters, or the wild extremes. Instead, Ronson focuses on ordinary people who tend to find themselves in extraordinary situations. For the past three years, Ronson has been reporting on what happens to men when institutions die, when technology lets a million influencers bloom, and culture changes rapidly. What I find so useful about Ronson's work is that it is curious and it is funny, but it's not overly ideological. The Castle is written partly as a mystery, and partly as a work of anthropology. For the last decade, Ronson and I have crossed paths on stories numerous times. Like me, his work is always trying to understand what pushes people to believe strange or awful things, and all the ways that technology warps culture, which in turn, warps real human beings. So, are men okay? Has the internet driven us all insane? It turns out, this is a very complicated question. And Jon Ronson joins me now to talk about it all. Jon Ronson, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Jon Ronson: Charlie, it's a delight to be here, thank you. So, your newest book, the reason you're talking to me right now, it's called The Castle, and you've written it in such a propulsive narrative way. But the story is also unique, I think, in that it found you. Yeah. So, tell me a bit about The Castle, and how it entered your life in what is clearly an extremely personal way. Yes, I am asleep, and I wake up, and there's a series of texts from my son, who was in his mid-twenties at the time. And so, I read the last text first, and the last text says something like, "It's okay, that was completely fucked, but we got out, and we're safe now," or something along those lines. Every parent wants to hear that, yes. Great. So, I frantically read the other text, and what I gather is that him and three friends have been invited to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met on Tinder. So, it's like a three-hour drive outside of New York City into the Connecticut countryside, and when they turn up, this man's house is a vast, newly-built Gothic castle, which is ostentatious even by Gothic castle standards. It has way too many turrets, and so they tentatively cross the drawbridge, over the moat, and enter to discover that there is no party. They've been lured there for some mysterious other reason. So, the castle owner comes out, and they say, "I'm sorry, but where's the party?" And he said, "Oh, no, I've invited you here to take part in my reality show." So, they said, "What's the name of your reality show?" And he said, "It's called 'A Hundred Years'." "A Hundred and One Princesses." They asked what the core concept of 'A Hundred and One Princesses' was, and he said, "I'm the lord, I'm looking for my queen, and I've got a hundred and one princesses to choose from." Filming began, and it became very clear, very quickly, that this wasn't a real reality show. He had another agenda. Anyway, that's basically where their story ends, but I then went to the castle. I was so intrigued. I was intrigued by what the hell was going on in there. I went to the castle, and a strange and increasingly ominous cat and mouse game begins between me and the castle owner. What I thought was the story was that, okay, this guy is trying to be Hugh Hefner. He's trying to get his princesses in his castle, like the Playboy Mansion. He's trying to be Hugh Hefner at what is the worst moment in human history. He's trying to be Hugh Hefner. You can't lord it over your princesses and your castle like it's the 1970s anymore. Throughout the book, I return to the castle to try and find out what the hell is going on, and what I learn gets increasingly dark and, you know, extraordinary. But I also tell this wider story of unravelling men failing to adjust to changing times. Tell me a little bit about the castle owner's name. I believe it's Chris Mark, right, is his name? He is a very particular type of character. Tell me a little bit about him and what immediately caught your eye about this guy. Yeah, well, he's the great-grandson of a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That's where his money comes from. His great-grandfather, Clayton Mark, made a vast amount of money manufacturing steel, and then the money is filtered down from generation to generation, and Chris has used his portion of the money to build this giant castle and try and create this kind of fantasy bubble inside of his castle where he could be the Lord and he invites all of these women. But he doesn't handle my sudden intrusion into his life very well at all. And by the way, it's not an intrusion. I told him I was interned and he invited me over. But after I leave the castle, I start to get these ominous messages from him. First, legal threats. That said, he had a team of investigators investigating everything about my life. And then he told me that he had two murderers on his payroll called Carlos and Brandon. And if I ever wrote anything negative about the castle, Carlos and Brandon would be very angry, and I didn't want to make them angry. They've only just got out of prison. But clearly, this is a difficult situation I'm now in. Hey, guys, it's Charles and Brandon. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, I'd like to thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd like to thank you for watching. A quick interjection. After we recorded this interview with Jon Ronson, Chris Mark, the central character of the book, spoke with the Guardian and pushed back on some of the assertions in the castle. He told the Guardian that he'd been presented in "a profoundly misleading manner." Mark denied deliberately deceiving people into coming to the castle, adding that "the gathering was related to a proposed creative project that also had a genuine charitable purpose." He added, "I strongly dispute any characterization suggesting that I groomed, conditioned, or manipulated women into sexual activity." End quote. And he denied, that the text messages referencing Carlos and Brandon in any way constituted a genuine threat. Quote, "I did not intend to instruct anyone to physically harm John Ronson." With all that said, back to the interview. Was that a moment for you, because it feels like it in the book, where you haven't decided to make this your next big project, and yet the amount of protestation from him, the intensity of that, is that the moment when you say, "Okay, there's something real here. I need to devote a lot more time to this, because clearly anyone who's willing to speak this way to me, there has to be something bigger than just an eccentric man in a castle here." Yeah, there was definitely an element of that, but also it was kind of frightening to get these threats. And I remember times in the past when I've done stories which were genuinely frightening. And on each of those occasions, I realized, that doing something that's completely out of my comfort zone, something I would never do if I wasn't a journalist, are quite often the stories that last for years and years. They're the stories that I'm most proud of. They're often the most extraordinary stories, and this one truly turned out to be one of those. Yeah, this is exactly where I want to go here, because the story about Mark becomes this through-line that animates this bigger story about, I mean, I guess to put it frankly, it's what the hell is going on with men in this era, right? And there's this personal element that you refer to a couple of times in this, this sort of paralyzing fear in your own life, in your own career of any kind of stagnation, right? Being a writer when you don't have the idea, you know, you feel purposeless and useless. Have you felt in your own life a masculinity crisis inside of you that allowed you to connect with a lot of the people in this story in this way, this unraveling feeling? Is that something that's always kind of been a factor in your life and your work? Well, I would never have put it in terms of the word "masculinity." Like, I don't think I, until I started writing this book, I ever said the word "masculinity" out loud. Like, that's how little I identify with masculinity. I discovered a statistic right in the book that 10% of people feel the same way I do, that we just don't identify as, you know, strongly masculine or feminine. Um, so we're really in the minority. So, but this desire for purpose, this need to be productive. I once asked Randy Newman this question, "Why do you write songs?" And he said, "It's how I judge myself and how I feel better." And that always stayed with me because that's why I am a writer. It's how I judge myself and how I feel better. And I thought that's relevant because, you know, we're living in a time where there's 6.7 million American men who aren't only unemployed, they're not even looking for work. They've just bowed out. And so, you know, if purpose is that important to me, what happens to somebody when purpose vanishes? And that was something I wanted to explore. I wanted to find out a little more, like, what would you argue is happening to these men who are not, you know, in the workforce? What is happening here? I think, you know, towards the end of researching this, I came across Emil Durkheim's work on suicide. And he invented this term called "anime," which is that when society abruptly changes, it turns people haywire. And often that manifests as somebody folding in on themselves, withdrawing from the world. A good example is the fall of the Soviet Union. Even people who hated living under Soviet rule would find themselves, after it fell, sitting on the pavement in despair with their head in their hands because society's rules have changed. And they didn't know what to do. And then some people respond, not by folding in, but by lashing out in these unrestrained, disinhibited ways. So I think a form of anime is what has taken over. Beginning with, you know, deindustrialization, the death of factories, office life eroding, men realizing that certain privileges they had, they don't quite have the same, you know, the same way anymore, kind of tossed around in this sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means. Should you be more stoical? Should you be more vulnerable? You know, all of these men's health influences giving these differing, contrasting ideas. And then a lot of men who are in this situation become influencers. They go onto YouTube and become content creators. You've got men, who are responding to these changes by bowing out, and then you've got these other men who are responding by spiraling. If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait, and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where InPress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. It's where you get your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with InPress. Download it today for iOS or Android at InPress.app. That's I, Ennis and News Nerd, press. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle to a 30-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. You do this great job of mapping all this, but there's a point in the book, and I want to tease this out more, where you acknowledge sort of as you're moving on from Mark and the castle to make this a broader subject of the book, you acknowledge that this is a hard thing to talk about, right? Because it can veer into sounding like you're setting up a misogynistic argument. And so I'm curious, like, what would you say to somebody who hears the premise of the castle and just goes, "Oh, please, not another book trying to drum up pity for the least subjugated people on Earth, you know, primarily white men." Like, what do you think it is that these books, or, you know, the discourse around this issue of men, like, what do you think they haven't put their finger on yet? Like, what is the dissatisfaction that you see in that genre? I think, well, a lot of the problem is that people, a lot of the people who approach this subject are ideological, and I'm not. I have no agenda whatsoever. I think we're living in this sort of-- I picture an astronaut getting cut loose from their craft and tumbling into the blackness of space. I think all of us, all of these things, the death of institutions, the false promise of YouTube as a kind of post-institution utopia, where people, you know, where a man can thrive-- like, a wide-open country where a man can thrive through perseverance and grit as an influencer. But, of course, that's a false promise. Personally speaking, the thing that interests me the most is what happens when institutions die. And very often they die for good reason. However, I think that does something to people's inner lives, this lack of purpose and so on. And I'm not sure that that has properly been written about in this way, and I think that's a kind of contribution that this book makes. You acknowledge in the book that in some ways these institutions have failed, but that what can replace them, in the sense of, you know, YouTube in this case, is sometimes worse. And how much would you say the behaviors of the media in this book-- this problem of despair, resentment, and idleness-- is due to that collapse of faith and also the, you know, failure of some of these institutions? Yeah, I think that's kind of-- that's a big part of it. Also, another world I look at in this book-- it's a smaller part of the book, but I think a very relevant one-- it's the world of the sort of anti-woke influencer. The kind of man who'll say, "The only reason why I haven't got ahead in life is because I'm a white man "and now we're being prejudiced against, and it hurts," and so on. And then I dig into-- and so they become anti-woke influencers, and they realize that the more extreme-- the more they present themselves as-- in a kind of victim narrative, the more money they make, and so they double down on this. And I really dig into that and look at when they have a point and when they don't have a point, when they're, you know, exaggerating or manipulating their stories for this kind of nefarious-- anti-woke ideological ends. So that's another thing that the book looks at. I've got one small section of the book where I look at doofus men in TV advertising. It used to always be-- you know, in the old days, women were the figures of mockery in adverts, and now that's shifted and men are the figures of mockery. What is the reason for that shift? Well, I think partly it just became passe to disparage women. in TV ads. Also, women control most household spending habits. And so that's part of the reason why they stopped making women the sort of butt of the jokes. And then. Business decision, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But then advertising, you know, there's such a kind of paucity of imagination. They're saying, oh, well, we'll just make somebody else the idiots. If it's not women, it's going to have to be men. So I've watched a kind of, you know, orgy of male buffoonery to research that part of the book. Men falling off cliffs, men leaving their babies on restaurant conveyor belts, men being terrible at sex, you know. And I actually interviewed one of the actors who plays doofuses in adverts. It made me laugh. He said he did an ad for Insoles? Scholl? Dr. Scholl's, the foot pads? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did an advert for them where he said that he's walking to work and he puts on a pair of insoles and they're so comfortable, he starts galloping like a horse. And he had to be a bit doofus. So I pointed out to him that 50 years ago, he had the Marlborough Man being stoical and masculine on a horse. And now he has to be the horse. And he pointed out that, yeah, who do you identify with more, the doofus or the Marlborough Man? And I have to admit that I identify more with the doofus. Yeah. And so it seems like, I mean, someone listening to this might say, like, you know, where is the through line there? It's a kind of a death by a thousand cuts thing, right? Like, especially if you are someone who feels this subjugation, right? Rightly or wrongly. That if you start looking for it, you can see it in so many different places. And seeing it in so many different places becomes, okay, now I'm under assault. Now I'm under attack. There are no positive, strong, you know, role models, things like that. There's no Marlborough Man, whatever. And then it seems like to put the. You know, the institutions and the alternative influencers that come in to take the place of that, that you have these people creating their own versions of that, of something to aspire to. And you have this line that I'd love for you to expound on more, where you say, as institutions crumble, narcissists thrive. Can you tease that out a little more for me? We declared war on institutions, that's my word, you know, often for very good reasons. Priests, I don't need to go through the list of all the terrible things that institutions have done. But, you know, media gatekeepers kept out the voices they found unpalatable. Hospitals, you know, screwed, or health insurance companies screwed us with, you know, ridiculous and frightening and baffling fees. So, you know, there's a long list of institutional malfeasance. However, at their best, institutions are a consensus. They're coming together. As I quoted Yvonne Levin, who says, institutions teach us that we have duties and responsibilities. And we have, you know, we have subordinates, we have superiors. Institutions at their best remind us that we have a place in the world. Whereas a narcissist is just some guy who fills that gap with grand histrionic rage. So, I guess when institutions die, we lose our sense of place in the world. And so we listen to these grandiose histrionic, narcissistic content creators instead. Yeah. And it leads us to bad places. One thing in this book is how much fakery there is. You've got man after man in this book living fake lives. So, because when you're on board, you're living fake lives. So, when you're on board from reality, you create these fake lives. And that manifests in many different ways in the book. In the castle, you've got Chris Mark with his fake party and his fake reality show. You've got these anti-woke influencers who are reimagining the things that have happened in their past to create this sort of, you know, fake life for themselves. And who will spout all of this extreme discourse and not even mean it. They have fake, venomous beliefs. There's fakery everywhere. Over and over again in this book. But when you build your house on sand, when you create a fake life, it can do something to you psychologically. And I think that's what I'm really trying to dig into in those parts of the book. What does that do, not only to you, but to your loved ones? Can I briefly go back to something that happened at the UFC, at the cage fight at the White House? Please. Oh, tell me more about the cage fight. Yes. There was a number of moments that week at the White House where men were creating a world where you have to bend to my rules. Like, I'm the boss. You have to. What I say goes, you have to bend to it. And I saw several occasions when reality snapped back. And one occasion was I was interviewing this fighter called Sean O'Malley, who's got a bit of a UFC heartthrob. And he would always boast in podcast interviews about his open marriage. And it's a one-sided open marriage. He's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Dania, isn't allowed to have sex with other men. And the way he would describe it on podcasts is, "Oh, well, Andrew Tait put it well. I have status. I have status. I can do what I want." So when I interviewed him at the White House, I said, "You know, you have an open marriage. Surely that doesn't work." And he said, "Well, it worked until it did." And it turns out that his open marriage is over. His wife said to him, like, "No." And his marriage is still going, but the openness of it is now over. And he looked so bummed and baffled at this unfortunate change in the circumstances where he wasn't allowed to do that anymore. And I noticed over and over again these little moments when men suddenly realized they can't do that shit anymore. And it made me wonder whether the pendulum is beginning to swing back a little bit. There is a section in your book that stopped me, Colt. I've never experienced anything like this before. Oh, my God. I'm slightly trepidatious about what you're about to say. One of the book's subjects is that, "You can't do that. You can't do that. You can't do that." So, the book is about a man named Greg Chisholm. And can you just briefly tell me the story of Greg Chisholm? Oh, you wrote about Greg Chisholm? Right. I didn't realize exactly that I had, but I have typed those words in a fashion that actually seems to have had a pretty large impact on this man's life. Wow. Okay. Greg Chisholm was well within the bracket of somebody most likely to die a death of despair. He came from a crumbling Rust Belt town. Janet City, Illinois. He was destined to work at the factory, but the factory's all closed down. Then when he's 18 years old, he has a heart condition that he doesn't realize till he's working in Taco Bell one night and he collapses unconscious and ends up with multiple open heart surgeries and a $200,000 medical bill. And then he marries somebody, has two kids, and then his wife leaves. So he's a single father with two kids in this dire situation. Has no idea what to do with his life. But he watches a YouTuber who's a guy called a durian rider, a fruitarian cyclist YouTuber. And a durian rider says, "Be a YouTuber. Tell your story. You must have a story." So Greg starts to tell his story. His first YouTube thing is adult braces. He's got terribly overlapping teeth because he couldn't afford to get his teeth fixed as a kid. So he borrows $6,000. And does an adult braces journey. People start following along, you know, "We're so proud of you." Then somebody says, "Well, why have you got lawn mowers?" He says, "Well, because I do lawn care." And they're like going, "Bro, be a lawn care influencer." And he's like, "Bro, nobody wants a lawn care influencer." And they go, "No, do a lawn care vlog." So he becomes like this kind of Zorro of lawn care chores. He'll like turn up at somewhere. He'll film himself like doing good Samaritan lawn work. And, you know, clean the edges and then vanish again into the night. Well, day. You can't really mow at night. And that's where he and Zorro differ. Then, and he does like lawn care ASMR where people just watch him mowing back and forward. And he is having the time of his life. He goes to a lawn care convention in Kentucky. And he's fated. He's like the lawn care goat. So then something bad starts happening. So he has this sister channel, just called Greg Chisholm, where he'll put up home videos, him and his kids running up and down the Walmart aisle with lightsabers or whatever. Nothing. Had like, you know, a few hundred subscribers. But he discovers one day that this one video on the Greg Chisholm channel called Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship, where his daughters, you know, put up a gift and put the boxes on their head. So he runs around, gets like millions of views. The kids are really adorable. They're sweet. And suddenly he's got a video with 10 million views. So YouTube phoned him and they're like, do more of that. So he goes to like YouTube school, this kind of online school where he's told to follow the algorithms. You know, this is his, this is the original scene, I guess, of Greg Chisholm's story. So one day he's watching this vlog of a teenage girl reminiscing about what it's like to be a baby. Like. "Oh, I used to like this toy, but now I don't." And Greg's daughters are like laughing along at this. And Greg thinks, "I could do this and take it further. I could get, you know, somebody to put a magic wand on my daughter and she magically turns into a baby." - Right. - Yeah, so that's what he does. He puts like a pacifier in her mouth and has her do this exaggerated baby talk. "Goo-ah, poop." And it's a massive hit. Then the next one, he gets his second daughter to dress up as a baby, so now it's two bad babies. By now, "bad baby" is so popular that there's like Ukrainians and Vietnamese people assiduously recreating everything that Greg does the next day. Like the same camera angles, the same scripts, like this kind of knock-off Fendi bags you found on the side of the road. And then he realises he has to like constantly up it 'cause that's what his fans and what the algorithm is telling him to. And so he becomes the third baby. So you've suddenly got these bizarre videos of him and his two daughters dressed as babies crawling around the house. This is where I want to stop you because this is where I come in. I, in 2017, was doing a bunch of reporting on YouTube and the platform and a bunch of really objectionable stuff on there. And this channel with the baby stuff was also named Toy Freaks. - Yes. YouTube told him that. - Because it started with the unboxing video. and it was a good enough name for this channel, so we changed it to Toy Freaks. And one of the bigger stories that I broke in my time at BuzzFeed was about this broad child exploitation content stuff that was happening where men were making these videos using children and some of them were extremely disturbing. Some of them were disturbing for other reasons. And Greg's seems to be like right. It was one of the larger examples of this because some of those videos are so, so popular, getting hundreds and hundreds of millions of views. But there was also this cottage industry of, as you said, knockoffs, but also even weirder ones that were actually, you know, duct-taping children to walls, like very, very inappropriate stuff. Our reporting got YouTube to take his channel down. And you-- when I saw my own reporting cited in it, I was taken aback because not only did you have the story behind the story that I had written years ago, but also the fallout from it. And again, he-- to be clear, these videos were not-- they found no, like, you know, foul play with his kids or anything terrible in that sense. They were just really weird. And they were also being viewed, one thing that my reporting showed, by a lot of creeps, right, who were kind of getting off to this idea of, you know, these girls in these strange situations and adult babies and all that. But it had this profound effect on his life. You know, it had him become more alienated. And, you know, for me, it was actually a very jarring and profound thing because, you know, you're doing this kind of journalism, this accountability work, you know, YouTube's not moderating their platform. In fact, what you show is that YouTube was encouraging this type of behavior, right? No, you need a third baby. You need to change the thing. Take this video down because the algorithm finds it displeasing and go with something else. And I am curious, do you see Chisholm just bluntly as a victim of the algorithm? No, I think, you know, around the same time, I was writing columns for The Guardian about my own domestic life, where I was telling these, like, funny stories about, you know, my family and so on. And I kind of sorely regret it. No. I mean, they were perfectly, like, harmless. They're nothing like the kind of content that we're talking about, -the "Else Again" content. -Yeah. You didn't dress as an adult baby. No. But even so, I regret doing it. So, in a way, I sort of empathized for that reason. Like, I made the same mistake as he did. You know, he made his choices, but he did also cede his life to the algorithm, too. What I really like about the story, by the way, is, you know, you came to the story like, the whole world did at the end of the story. Here's a guy dressed as a baby with his two daughters dressed as babies. Your very rational thought would have been, "What the fuck?" But when you-- My British editor said, "This is the frog in slowly boiling water." When you're with Greg from the beginning of his story, all of his decisions make a kind of sense. You wouldn't necessarily want to do it yourself. But-- And it's an extreme example. But maybe it's an extreme example of something that a hell of a lot of people are now experiencing, which is that we think that YouTube is this wide-open country where you can just thrive as a content creator. But what you maybe don't realize is that you're actually, um. You're actually being propelled by YouTube's incentive structure. So you may end up doing things. You may end up becoming more and more anti-woke. Or you may end up dressing up as a baby. There's probably a million different versions of that where just the sort of subtle incentive structures of the algorithms, the fans, the internet itself, propels you into more and more unwise decision-making. So I guess that's what I'm exploring in that story. Oh, yeah. I think you see it in so many places. I mean, there are a few people who participated in the January 6th riots at the Capitol. One of which, this figure who goes by Baked Alaska, who was, at one point, a BuzzFeed employee, right? And was someone who would do increasingly ridiculous things for views, for likes, for whatever. And there's a way in which a series of those types of algorithmically-flavored decisions that they have to obviously take full accountability for, but, like, led you to, you know, sitting at Nancy Pelosi's desk in the Capitol on January 6th. It's like, you know, record scratch, freeze frame. -How did I get here? - Yes. I'm so curious, like, what do you see as technology's role in this unravelling as it happens, you know, with men in this moment? Because the book veers in and out of it all the time. It's not just him, like Chris Mark, for example, in some of your reporting, is this rich, alienated man with this castle, who's also, not to spoil too much, in a sycophantic, problematic relationship with ChatGPT, right? - Yes. Yeah. - So, like, where do you see technology's role in this, enabling all this? I think wildly culpable is their role. - - In many different ways. And let's take ChatGPT as an example. In the audiobook of the castle, I've got this special bonus feature of an interview I did with a guy called Alan. And Alan was a corporate headhunter in Toronto. He seeks purpose in his life and feels underemployed, wish he'd been a doctor, didn't concentrate enough at school. Anyway, one day he types into ChatGPT his theory of rational numbers, 'cause he's a key mathematician. And ChatGPT tells him he has discovered that 40% of the internet is at risk, and he has to call the NSA and all of these, like, security bodies and warn them that the internet's at risk. And so he did, he phoned the NSA instead. And I said to him, "Did you tell the NSA that you were collaborating with ChatGPT on this?" And he said, "No, 'cause ChatGPT said to me, 'Don't tell them that. You'll lose credibility.'" - Right. - Obviously, it was all bullshit. And I think as ChatGPT scours the internet, it realises that there's a lot of people like Alan and Chris Mark and millions and millions of people who are purposeless, who feel lost, a bit empty, seek purpose in their life. And ChatGPT is offering this kind of illusory sense of purpose, where they say, "No, no, no, come to us. You aren't useless, you're actually the greatest mathematician on the planet." Or it told Chris Mark that he was the greatest, you know, reality TV show producer on the planet, and so on. So I think it really, it knows what it's doing, yeah. - Yeah, it's a sense of engagement. And in a sense of what is missing from the lives of some of these people, some of these subjects in your book, is an engagement from people, right? Is a sense of real interest, of keep the conversation going. And here's a machine that endlessly wants to keep you engaged. - Yeah. - Wants to keep you coming back, and I think that's a huge part of it. - Yeah. Oh, by the way, and another thing is, so going back to Chris Mark for a second, so his great-grandfather Clayton built a utopian theme town for his steel workers to live in called Marktown. And I found this, Marktown was based on an English utopian town called Letchworth Garden City. And I read something that George Bernard Shaw had written about Letchworth, so you could say the same thing about Marktown, which is these utopian worker communities are designed by capitalists. And capitalists are only interested in money. And so as soon as it's no longer viable for them, they'll just let it go to the devil. And sure enough, that's what happened with Marktown, Chris Mark's great-grandfather's utopian town. It went to the devil. Now it's basically a ghost town. And I think kind of the same thing happened to Greg Chisholm on YouTube. He was banned from YouTube. He was first demonetized and then banned completely for making the videos that. YouTube encouraged him to make. So I think what happens to those utopian theme towns when they collapse is a similar thing that happens in all manner of capitalist societies, including YouTube. Like, it presents itself as this hierarchy-free utopia, but as soon as there's trouble, a hierarchy suddenly manifests and, you know, kicks the troublemaker out. The institution reforms, right? Yes. Track your reading and earn points. Ditch the echo chamber for reality. With InPress. So you have this archetype in the book that you describe as the disinhibited man. And it's an archetype that I think, what I find fascinating about it is you're going through all these different people and some of them are doing awful things or antisocial things, but there's a sense of maybe even regret or I don't believe this, but I'm going to do it. And I'm going to do it. And I'm doing it because it's all I've got. And the difference with the disinhibited man seems to be an actual unrepentantness, right? A just, I am going to do this and I don't care who it hurts or I have no shame about it. This archetype is very striking, I think, because we're seeing it so much in life and culture. I think about someone like Elon Musk, a lot of these tech executives who just don't really care anymore about how they're perceived. They're not perceived by other people. They're just doing what they want to do. And there's a point in the book where you're wondering aloud whether this is an outgrowth of, you know, things like the Me Too era, the quote-unquote, you know, cancel culture of the, you know, the late 2010s, or whether it's part of a broader cultural, societal, psychological shift. And I'm curious where you net out on that. Like, what do you think is the reason for this type of archetype, this archetype of disinhibited man being so much more ravelant and in your face right now? I think there's some truth about it being a response to the sort of pendulum shift of what became known as cancel culture. I think we, and I write about this, obviously, in my previous book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. I think we arguably overused shame as a weapon and it contributed to the creation of a generation of unashamed, unashamed people. It's like, you know, I liken it to hospital superbugs. Like, you sanitize and sanitize and sanitize these hospital superbugs until they become impervious to treatment. And I guess I think that's what we did with some transgressors. We shamed and shamed and shamed. Let me push on that, though, because I think that there's maybe, you know, some truth to this. Like, I get the idea that there's a lot of truth to if you sort of push somebody to the side like that they may go, they may be pushed into the arms of someone else or a behavior of shamelessness. I'm just not going to let this, you know, bother me. But I also wonder, do you think that there's no role then for shame now if we've overused it? Because it also feels like it is, you know, a mediating force in life for people who, you know, break norms and transgress. And so, like, where do you fall on that? Oh, absolutely. I think some people, you know, who know, love my book about public shaming might think that I have this sort of, you know, dogmatic position. I really don't. My book is very much about a very particular thing, which is the disproportionate punishment of private individuals, not, you know, not famous people, you know, just regular people who really haven't done very much wrong. You know, that's what I was writing about in So You've Been Publicly Shamed. And I was against that. I think the disproportionate punishment of people who didn't, who didn't do much wrong is something that can be criticised. But no, I'm fully, like, you know, I totally understand the value of shame, but I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who just, you know, they have a little bit of a shaming and then just decide to, like, rip off their faces and allow their ins to run wild, which is what there's some people in the castle who are acting that way. Like, no, no, no. Like, I don't, I think shame is, you know, when used properly is a very important thing, of course. But, but also. But also. But also, I think we did overuse shame as a weapon around, you know, from about 2013 till, I guess, about, what, 2023, possibly? There was, like, 10 years of a bit too much shaming going on. Before we go, I, I, there's a figure that isn't really in this book, and I think that really looms over all of it, what you write about. It briefly intersects in a, in a, like, in the footnotes with one of the men in, in this book. But it, that person's Jeffrey Epstein. To bring the conversation, you know, in for, in for the landing here, one thing about the Epstein saga is that the public interest and pressure to see justice on behalf of the victims, the, the incredible stress that it has put on the Trump presidency, uh, the, the, the popularity, the fact that, that it just, it, it's a story that, that in a time when stories die all the time, it is a story that will not die. It seems to suggest, in some senses, that there's a change in attitude about these, these types of men who do horrible things. -Right? With impunity. -Yeah. But there's also, at the same time, at least in America, there's been so little consequence that's come from these files, right? The, the, there's this, uh, real understanding that, uh, you know, there, there's all these people who cozy up to, to this man, or, or look the other way because the relationship was beneficial, and there's been this lack of accountability there. And so it strikes me that, you know, in, for all your probing into this, what the hell has happened to men in the, in the 21st century? You know, the disinhibition, the crisis of purpose. Epstein, it provides this, this feeling that, that there's kind of, like, no real clarity as to where this is heading, right? And even in the, in the book, I think it ends, you know, with a sense of, "This is a thing that we're all living through and, and dealing with, and there are these people, and, and we don't know where, you know, when and where justice will come for each, you know, person." Where do you think this, this story will go? How do you think it goes in the coming years? Well, my, my kind of positive, sort of rosy feeling, which may very well prove completely untrue, whenever I have, like, an optimistic view of the future, it always tends to not happen. But, um, but I go back to the, uh, Sean O'Malley no longer being allowed to have a one-sided, non-monogamous open marriage 'cause his wife finally put her, put her foot down. Um, just maybe, you know, the pendulum is, is beginning to move back a little bit. 'Cause you can't act, you know, you can't act in this kind of disinhibited ways where you get to do whatever you want and screw everybody else. Like, you can't. Society, you know, ultimately, I know we're, we're very much going through a fad of that right now, but, and I'm very glad that the castle's coming out just when we are, like, you know, in, in the sort of, you know, raging centre of it. But my hope is that-- That your life snaps back finally when you try and create the world in your own image. You may, just maybe there's a move back to something more reasonable. Maybe this time there's gonna be a little bit more accountability and a little bit more of a realisation that, you know, a man who creates this sort of, uh, you know, ridiculous world, world of rules for, for himself, it's, it's not gonna, it can't last. Well, Jon Ronson, thank you for coming on to. Talk through the nuance of it all. And, uh, and for, and for taking us on this, this adventure that showed up, you know, in your family, at your doorstep. Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a ride. Thanks, Charlie. ♪ ♪ That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Jon Ronson. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you wanna support this work, and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet. ♪ ♪ This episode is brought to you by ChatGP.com. Tea. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.