I think it's time for the next talk. Don't get confused by this German slide. It's in English, so Stay in here. Come come to the front before joining over to Andy who will talk about survival survival industry and About a bug tracker about it Maybe I will please you to take your trash with you if you leave the room So and now please welcome Andy To explain an English disconfusion here. This is the letterhead of the Papers that were coming from the raid of the Egyptian Ministry of State Security and All these letterheads have this in the name of Allah the Almighty then it continues with investigations the state security Branch of information technology group electronic surveillance department for hacking Originally, I wanted to have this thing this to have people singing it, you know in the name of Allah the Almighty Department for hacking but Egyptian people I talked to said it's blasphemy. So, okay, I Want to introduce Buck planet. I think this light needs to be switched off to probably view those lights from the beamer Light Technology, hello. All right Basic principles what I'm gonna talk about is the surveillance industry governments and the countries of this planet the country alright That's what happens if you write your floats too late was violence industry is Quite an industry like others they invest into products and to development They market this they market of course first to those customers which are most easy to approach Of course with this type of technology surveillance Listening to phone calls Bugging people's computers and so on. This is a very macho realistic way of marketing It's like oh may we help you to suppress your citizens a little bit more efficient way Governments on the other hand side are often ruled by control freaks just by nature because they are working for administration of a governments and Their job is in a way to keep the system in a controlled fashion So while some of them do simulate democracy the intelligence sector often due to is secrecy Surroundings is very limited involved in the democratic process because These people are not working within a controlled framework. I mean in theory. Yes in practice There's lots of gaps between what people know and what people don't know To ensure freedom of communication and thinking and acting for citizens and so on I think it's very important to limit this industry And to get a little bit more aware of what's happening even if I have one more typo in here Actually the point is that some of these technologies are going to talk about our market to Countries which are not very democratic Still they are market under names like lawful interception, which is very true in some countries lawful interception means there is a Basic human rights principle. There's a court There's like a constitutional chapter on secrecy on privacy and in other countries The law is a single person and if that single person says I don't trust anybody here I want to like have everybody's phone calls on record That too is lawful interception It's just a different law the basic concept of Buck planet is just a public wiki for the collection of information on this thing like Industry on the communications surveillance technology on the companies including all the information That we managed to get about ownership of these companies Turn around so their financial figures the persons involved in this where I don't have really an answer But I do have the question how much privacy deserve people who make themselves as a living business concept to Invade the privacy of whole nations of thousands of millions of people The products and services offered by these Companies and run by the country so we will also look at specific countries and the wiki has a page For each country where I'm trying to nail down which vendors appeared with what technology and so on Also the global installations for signal intelligence communication intelligence So that's the boys game that the old boys name game of the national security agency and so on So those collecting communication intelligence data For a long time and do it globally If we talk about surveillance technology, it is very important to distinguish between the tactical level and tactical instruments and The strategic level Tactical means that these tools are to be used at Hawk. That's like What we call tactical interception instrument for example is what others call a buck So a small thing that records what's spoken in the room or maybe you have tactical gsm Interception that is a machine that is just doing semi passive how they call it Interception so there's no network involved. There's no structural backbone of maybe Legal processes and so on involved. It's just a tool that you can use to do something Well, the strategic level is What is applied to whole country as a concept? So if companies advertise strategic interception this means Intercept record monitor all communication of the whole country.  This machine is a tactical instrument to drill holes in walls very silent very slow and You get this in a suitcase you open the suitcase you put it next to your wall that drills and noise The very low noise Hole in it and then you can it stops automatically before the wall paper at the other side of the wall and you can put a fiber Optic instrument through this or an electronic box. So this is used to Intercept noise from the door next to you from the room next to you Here is the optical microphone used for this this can be used as you see up to one kilometer So the beauty of using an optical microphone is you can't detect it with anything searching for electronics So this can be used to be brought into a building through the sanitary installations meaning the toilets and It just gets a little bit over the water surface and you can search the whole building for electronics Nothing is there and just a kilometer away Someone is intercepting you by the small membrane vibrating and there's through a laser beam going through the optical cable and Watching the vibration of this membrane Other interesting tactical instruments is for example a government key copying system where Finally, we know why they need CCTV everywhere This is a machinery capable of copying keys just from an image from a key So whenever you enter room where the camera is in Place and you put your key Collection on a table to maybe do something whatever This is enough to copy your keys and then enter your home. How nice other tactical instruments are You know this you can guess is something sounding something I just found the names are nice to informant So this is also by the way Often in criminal investigations the case that sometimes a witness appears or is mentioned to have brought some kind of Information where this witness does not exist as a natural person It's technical means but they are not disclosing the fact that technical means have been used So they call it informant so-and-so Was bringing in some information This is also a tactical instrument a very nice one so to say This is a body one array microphone as you can read It's a kind of a jacket with 24 microphones built in so this guy can sit With this type of jacket at the other side of a restaurant turning his back to you They record 24 channels simultaneously Digitally and then afterwards can browse through the room who was speaking in which corner about what? but just Separating the Chitnals the signals and the stuff coming from it So you get a roughly idea and also it's very obviously if you look at this type of Presentation the interrogation room kit. No, it didn't say torture. It just said cover camera Making video footage or creating video footage of an interrogation This obviously does not sound exactly like what we're used in democratic states to have a Intergration with a hidden camera So it's quite obvious to whom this technology is maybe in this case market To get you the other side what we talked when we talk about strategic instruments as I said the So-called strategic telecommunication interception also market as so-called massive interception That's the term the French company amazes for example used Means a total recording and storage of all telecommunication of the country Also stuff like infection proxies which come a little later and the whole set of monitoring Intelligent analytics platforms with speech recognition profiling pattern recognition and so on so if you look this is a part of marketing Presentation from a South African company called fast stick And they say like the new approach is not you target someone or some people and you intercept them You just capture all You have an intermediate storage your filter and then you end up at a long-term storage This has to do with bandwidth reason it doesn't means they lose any calls in the long-term storage It just means they reduce it to a bandwidth which is more cheaper to store and So you can later add new targets. You say well someone I didn't Care about the last three years now has become a prime suspect in whatever doing political protest organization or whatever Now we want to grab his phone calls and the information whom he was calling to and who was in contact with last Three years, and then you just add this as a new target and get it from the long-term storage So I made a Small sample calculation just to get over this little Skeptical point in everyone of us wait a second. You're talking about recording the whole telecommunication of the whole country over years Yes, this is what we're talking about the German regulatory Authority also for telecommunication Has published the statistics for 2010 quite some months ago That was 196.4 billion minutes of plain symbol telephone network calls. So that includes ISDN in this case They have said it was 101 Billion minutes of GSM was a data volume of 65 million gigabyte and a data volume of 3.2 billion gigabyte in broken network So if we look at the presentation of the total storage solution system Here is like the summary of which codex to use so which bit rate samples to use and What they say is that 8 kilobit per second is providing acceptable quality for most intelligence applications. That means speaker recognition So identifying who was speaking what he was speaking and getting also what they call The breeze rhythm. So if someone is excited you can read his emotional pattern So he's involved his emotional involvement from just the breathing frequency while he speaks So if it if he really doesn't care about what he's saying or if he's personally like touched or involved or something So when you make this calculation with a 196.4 billion minutes in the Landline phone network of Germany for 2010 you make it with 8 kilobit per second. You end up with 11.784 Terabyte and then if we add some overhead like call parameters who was calling whom at what time and synchronization and so on That's roughly 15 terabytes. So what does this cost us if you just Google on the internet What cost me a petabyte storage?  So let's take these figures if we want 15 petabyte We take 80,000 euro roughly per petabyte. That means we're talking 5.7 million euro What is that compared to the budget of bonus nachi deans of foreign intelligence or to the military? That's like nothing and even if you say, okay You need some money for installation for the personnel for the energy maybe for the bribery to get the excess to the fiber optics and so on If you're not the government, but if you're a private mafia organization Then you end up maybe with 20 30 million euro. So that's totally affordable if you compare to government buildings or aircraft carriers or weapons or what what other toys governments buy that's quite doable In private enterprise point of view, okay, that's subject to return of invest calculations So if you're bugging a country due to interest in their oil industry or whatever in specific Contracts dealings tenders that might make sense as well so It's being done. It's Probably done in many also European countries for quite some time now You might want to have a look at the companies providing this is all their technical specifications out there We haven't Gotten their financial figures yet. So how many installations they sold we know some of them But you might want to analyze this for your own country Another interesting strategic approach is quite I would say new one It's called infection proxies That's part of this Finfisher thing Finfisher is Like a whole family of products provided by Gamma and element to companies who are marketing front-end for a lot of products from other companies The specific component infection proxy which in their language is called Finfly ISP You will find and the WikiLeaks release as of the advertisement video that Explains this on a dummy level is a tool to Which is here roughly explained So what you can do is you can either put it to your on this on the tactical side You can put it inside an ISP to specific targets So you could say you just want a few people or the strategic level you put it where your ISP is connected to other countries This is the way it was done. Obviously in Oman and possibly in Turkmenistan Where the government had the idea that they wanted to infect so meaning install trojans to all computers that have connections with non national Other networks and use systems like Skype or whatever So this is large-scale and scalable Torian Horace installation so to say While element and Gamma Are more or less well-known companies With element is German Swiss company Gamma is a German British and also Lebanese They have at least an office there company dream lap so far was not known to be involved in this. They are more or less Security expert Hacker style run company in Switzerland Which we're known to be involved in lawful interception That's the normal stuff that ISP's intercourse need to provide to governments to allow tapping on request But there's a whole bunch of other Yeah companies connected to this game and dream that seems to be involved in the Development of this which brings me which brings me to an important issue And that's the complexity of the company structures if and that's what I'm trying to do with this wiki analyze How they are connected together So a journalist friend of mine who will hopefully forgive me that I disclosed this year But it will not be in the presentation. I'm handing out Try to get an idea about the three like main prisons. That's Lucen Alexander Nielsen Rumscheidt the guy called Eugen Fusso which companies they are Involved into and who is connected in which way from an analyst notebook quite a few that's like intelligent software that's used by the police and by investigators to try to find Connections between companies and people it looks roughly like this What we can I will explain it a little bit more in detail the results, but the the complexity comes from different Games these companies planes for example gamma is a company that exists as gamma International Deutras or international GMB are registered in Germany it regists also as gamma international in the UK So the same company name in two different countries and what has happened is when the first journalist reported that gamma international GMB are so the German one was involved in this and that they got sued The company said no we didn't do that which is technically correct because one of their Seven other companies or however it ever are that is named gamma international has done this So they are playing shadow games. It's putting the same company name in different countries Also what we are seeing as shareholders of companies are sometimes cross-connected and sub iterate jurisdictions so what we saw for example is that Elamann is a German Registered company. It's also a Swiss registered company and the Swiss registered company We have the main shareholder from gamma also being one of the shareholders there But again, you need to be very carefully if you publicly as a journalist or whatever write about this to keep this legal fine structure clear What is a big problem is of course if for example in the case of trovee core trovee core is the former A part of what once was a Siemens department called voice and data recording that got sold to Siemens Nokia networks and Then got again separated because Siemens sold this lawful and deception stuff to Iran the Iranian government used it to Identify people from protest get them from the street tortured imprisoned and so on So what they did was saying okay Siemens made a public statement that they don't want to be involved in this Technology anymore because it brings reputation issues and so on so they put it in a company called trovee core Trovee core is owned by a private equity fund. It's called peruza. Peruza is a German Has a German administration office in Munich But it's registered in Jersey And girls a somewhere that is British crown Private on a ship. It's not British Not United Kingdom And it's hard if not impossible to find out who really owns Trovee core which is many journals Are following this at the moment What we often see in this Yeah Industry is that they're separate companies for development and for marketing So some of these Marketing companies like element gamma. They have huge catalogs. You will see the element catalogs in this by far So I maybe have seen it. It's like hundreds of pages of tactical strategic all kinds of instruments But it doesn't mean that they all produce it if they produce anything at all Maybe they just produce catalogs and all these small companies Producing the real technology are a bit more hard to find and in the case of Fin Fisher It was more or less Yeah, it was work of German television to find out at all who was developing it So again an example William loosen using Interestingly a guy having most of the names his son has as well, but his son is called loosen No, he's called to news and loosen Alexander Nielsen So this guy is about 80 years old now. He is like only the father of the main player But this is his appointments in different companies and what we see here is gamma TSE limited gamma 2000 waste management limited where you think and wait a second What are these guys doing? Are they running? Maybe the recycle bin in my windows computer or are they maybe a providing Paper trash service for governments, which happens also in Germany that the intelligence if they are interested in someone They replace the normal paper recycling car are coming and collecting your paper trash with a government one Which looks the same? They will take all your trash Separately and we'll scan it in and look on what they can learn from you. This happens But there's also companies like G2 systems limited gamma TSE unlimited gamma international limited and Fin Fisher limited so clearly a nice collection of company positions and so This again is what I'm trying to do in the wiki to get really who is connected in which way and that is Yeah, not the most easy thing There is some policy issues Which become important because at the end of the day, we're not talking about Companies as abstract things. We're talking about people persons human beings involved in Actings and they use this complex instruments of different companies to hide Also So there is people who are clear-cut involved. There's like CEO shareholders Registered signing rights people. So what is in Germany a prokourist? whatever Then there's people who have at least missing deniability of being involved like Involved in marketing Appearing on the ISS conference. That's this intelligent support systems conferences Doing promotions and so on and then there is those behind the scenes the developers the exploit researchers the security experts who provide the knowledge to develop these tools and Well, here we come right where we are here Because the hacker scene has become a very important area for this people as information can be gathered very effectively From the computers from the telephones from the PDA since one of the people out there So the hacker scene has become a key area of phishing for information Through hired spices of what call it so people in the scene who work as consultants or whatever to these type of companies To keep updated on technical trends. We have of course seen them here in the Congress for many years To identify and hire those who are likely to accept specific offers. So this is about analyzing persons Who maybe don't have so strong political opinions, but to have great technical knowledge and maybe need a job and so on and activities to do get this Approach who follow this approach is Includes it's not limited to sponsoring conferences parties around conferences Including free drinks generous service. So maybe you have also seen some conferences Which were sponsored and you didn't had to pay something and all the food was nice and you found very interesting people to talk to and Some of these companies also simulate hacker culture, you know, they study here at the Congress What you know that it needs to be club matter offered and not coke and They all don't wear tires because that would bring away the hackers They just dress casual and and then young people come with technical knowledge and think oh, this must be a hacker company right so this must be nice people and Here you are So and there is hidden agenda and this operations these companies run go up to the level of information warfare So examples I talked about dream lap a little bit. You can this is just a small except from the wiki about the involvement of this company So with this thing with Oman and took me is done and the involvement in Fin fly SP so the infection proxy and then you have conferences Which are regularly taking place in Switzerland called the zero sec Organized by dream lap and you know, it's all all nice there free drinks buffet nice food hacker Events people who are also speaking at CCC conferences Speaking there maybe knowing maybe not knowing what they're doing there and so bringing the taste of the hacker community To a company that from my point of view is engaged in very pure evil Also on the ISS which is a clear conference for this market Just recently this year is December 2011 7th, so that is like 20 days ago We had in the track for law enforcement interior security and the intelligence community So this is the closed track of that conference with only for the governmental people We have a cast knoll from the security research labs in Berlin Talking about GSM and Jeeper as defense friends. Oh, how nice and he will speak just about 30 minutes from now on in Room number one upstairs about defending mobile phones So here's my question. Yeah, it's the enemy line here. Is this the enemy line that we are talking about with this 28c3 with this behind enemy line.  We are not aware about Involved in development and so on so feel free to contribute The whole idea is this is to get like more people involved Decentrally to look what are the companies maybe visit them or so Let them know that we have an eye on them identify the people working there might make nice pictures Ask them about if they feel something for privacy if it comes maybe to their own privacy So trigger them. Let's find out How they feel about this I think it's very fair to address the people involved in this kind of stuff So look where they're traveling to Identify their that's by the way what we have been doing for months now with a bunch of journalists like trying to find out Who's traveling where to find out where other customers and where are possible people to talk to to get trunk contracts and stuff? Of course, it's very important to identify the legal framework. We have been talking about The idea of banning surveillance technology the same way encryption technology is banned indeed Encryption technology said to protect from surveillance of telecommunication cannot be freely sold on this planet There's the vase in our conference and that's agreements because this is so-called dual use goods Which can be used in the civil or in the military way But if you're selling surveillance technology interestingly, there's no export controls so you can sell whatever you like There was a try from the Green European Party to get this restricted as well but that was refused due to economic reasons and This could have to do with the fact that some of the persons involved have at least previous governmental Obligations, maybe also some of these companies are not companies. Maybe this is just private branches of intelligence agencies who try to get into other countries And this is of course a very comfortable way to get hired for surveillance And then you get the data and also a little bit of money and you know who's the guys running the shop and so on So there is a lot more to be explored. Yeah. Well, that was roughly it. I mean, I could now go into Explaining but I guess you can do that yourself What what you will find in the wiki so There's a categorization so that you can go category persons you will see there's already some people in there About 205 at the moment. So and then if you look at people you will see Whatever we know about them where they are born Date of birth is always very important if you're researching people Because you might find people with the same name and you need to distinguish them Where they have been appeared where they've previously been working and so on. So the idea is to Yeah, make these people trackable and Get the whole discussion also to level where you can look in a country If you look at Syria, for example that you see, okay, who's the ISPs who's in place in which companies appeared? we have tracked down about Five companies in Syria at the moment with different With all the articles and so on so to create this is not an intelligence operation. This is pure public service Follow public domain so to be able to track down and of course all the companies then are here linked with the articles And you can get to the companies and where they are and which people are there and What we know about them and what kind of information we have about them and so on So what I'm trying very hard to do is to distinguish Between what we really know about a company and what we maybe know but can prove because everything of this will be If it comes hard to hard subject to legal a battle So the idea is to distinguish and put everything which we can prove for will the father moment in a section called Unconfirmed rumors to say well, you know, we've heard this we can prove it. Maybe it's true Let's look for some evidence But don't pretend to know stuff that we don't know because that can be very dangerous I guess the day will come that these companies will You know send their army of lawyers and look what is bulletproof and whatnot? Well, that was roughly the presentation Maybe there is some more questions now From the audience or maybe someone has better ideas and what to do with the people involved or Yeah, okay, we got people microphones coming right away. Thank you Just wanted to ask if you could put on the slide with your drop points again With your drop targets again the slide Which one yeah, this one. Thank you. Okay. Yeah Points of contact Is it a full-time job for you? Next to that I'm a little bit member of the board of the CCC and running a company and doing other stuff now This is like my hobby But I found it very satisfying because there's so much work to do and it's like you can put all your energy Into such a wiki to you know collect the prisons I'm doing I mean most of the research and that what I would also if if you guys want to help support Or just want to research yourself use tour use anonymizes don't leave too much faces about yourself Take care of what's called operational security Because we are playing here with people who are Experts in targeting and in collecting intelligence about people So there's a bit of security measures No, this is not a full-time job, but I do spend maybe some hours per day on Playing around with this and putting some energy that Just comes when I look at this shit Into something useful Very possible danger that the companies and people you're targeting might try to Inject wrong or misleading data into your wiki. How do you? Yeah, well the point is that this is not an open wiki at the moment I just accept this some people helping was putting stuff in but exactly because of this We are like it's not an open wiki because that might be a problem. I mean next to back up and so on The information needs to be accurate and that's why we are collecting and Whatever we can confirm goes into the section of the page called unconfirmed rumors But indeed what you will find here is most of the stuff is quite public what I have been doing There's like some great tools if we for example look at this company who provided the Trojans for the German government As public information you can get their registered Documents from the European It's called Yeah, in this case it's electronic bonus and talk about the European company database for Financial turnovers, it's a European law that all European companies need to put their financial turnovers into a database once a year So we can see how much money they make Per year. There's also what is very nice There's a European tender database Where you can see who has bought stuff because public If you see here for example, that's the customs police That they need to make a tender to buy surveillance systems And so they need to put a rough description of what they have done and who has got the job and what was the Total amount of it. This is a two million Installation for German customers going to the company Digitask The tech dot Europe dot EU is by the way available in all languages that In Europe are What you call it in the European member states are there trouble is You will only find the full document with all the specifications in the national language of those Entity who were submitting the book documents say most of the time only give a very rough translation Where many facts are missing? But still you can look for a keyword and for example We found with a keyword in the catcher we found Here in the catcher Procurements of the in this case Bavarian police which we had indeed not been known about so this is 3g Units so two units of 3g in the catches for about 400,000 euro. Hey, that's quite cheap by the way So with the right keywords tap dot Europe dot EU is a very nice toy You just need to look so you can either look for the companies Which is sometimes hard work or you can look for the keywords. So we have identified quite some business activity with this toy and This is I mean, that's the point. Okay, the point is this is public information. I don't disclose here any secrets or whatever I'm just we're just trying to collect and give it this as a place for Journalists also if they're researching company to help them a little bit with Collecting public information and of course, I mean if WikiLeaks like this here in this case They also brought from Copham. That's a British company providing emcee catches if Material brochures and so on Ends up with WikiLeaks, that's of course helpful to put a link down because then it's Published already Yeah, maybe some more. I see a hand there you get a microphone Actually over here Have you have you noticed any companies as they've been put under closer scrutiny? I guess How they reacted and are you do you have any measures or ideas about how to? Deal with them adapting their corporate structures in a more complicated fashion to kind of obfuscate their relationships with these unsavorable entities Well in the case of gamma It all started with this raid the Egyptian Ministry of State Security and we got the whole Company structure from gamma and also the names of the people involved in so on and journalists where indeed researching them there is cases of Criminal Careers of at least one person involved for bribery an African country, which is also a very interesting field But indeed when we came to the German company German gamma we have a guy called Martin Munich and people people have identified his home address and this is just like from some other web forums where these people have been discussed and Then journalists try to reach this gentleman for a comment and so on he refused and his partner was Talking with the journalists, but then refusing an interview they sent them They hired some lawyers and the lawyer sent letters that if you will write anything about this company we will you know Whatever deal with you Nothing has happened, but what we know is that these people have changed their living address. They moved somewhere else They became a little bit feeling unease of the public discussion of their private details Which I think is very fair if you look at what they have been doing as living with other peoples But yes, I think This is a way to make these people think about privacy and I don't see many other ways As they refuse to participate in the public dialogue, so That would be the alternative maybe So but yes, this will be very interesting to see but I mean Gamma is already a company living in a very complex structure if you try to find out where Losing John Alexander lives Like in some of his companies he's and for the German tax He's living in the United Kingdom and some of his British companies then he's living in Lebanon So I'm not sure at the German tax company or a tax office Will send someone to Lebanon of the British will do might be that there is some tax reasons here for the complexity Then actually we have his former Company has been working for a very well-known German company called PK electronics with lots of stuff. So Gamma is The At least the most complex company structure I've seen so far But it will be interesting to see on how they maybe will change to disappear again from the surface That's subject of the experience So let's see But I mean at the end of the day these guys want to make business, okay? And so that's where we get them they advertise they are in contact. They use distributors But still they want to make money So and if they want to make money they need to be Findable somewhere Have you ever Felt that these companies are trying to suppress you for not doing your work for not Opening this information I'm not sure I got your question right you mean that they pressure me for yes For not opening their information To not get it right you mean or to not Collect this information No, not yet. Not yet. I guess I guess they will I will the day will come I will get very interesting letters. I just got some Emails, but they were so ridiculous that I simply ignore them like I don't want to be in your wiki The company is dissolved. I'm no more doing this but you know Bring up some arguments so By the way, and this is also an Interesting case the gentleman The gentleman Mr. Yule who wrote me an interesting email the other day I was in a company called gts Which could be no more exist looks like it There have been a German company Distributing some very interesting technology for example, they have been the exclusive distributor for a fast-tech and also for The net witness which is Sensor ship stuff. So as I said fast-tech This company only has one product that's for a tragic telecommunication Interception so it's very interesting alone the fact that a German company is their Disributor it means there must be a customer Otherwise, they wouldn't have a distributor or at least someone trying to market their stuff So a fast-tech is really worth studying and if here's someone from South Africa Would love to get more from their official records tax payments and so on we need to know more about these guys here They will Teach us or their records will teach us in which countries we have this strategic telecommunications communications installations Interception installations Okay, we have one question from the signal angels Yeah, so the IRC is concerned about your wiki in and wants to know whether you run a mirror or a backup because And someone also was also curious whether you have like a list of the bad guys So where you we list them so you don't have to go to any person and there's this thing called category persons and here you go Thanks, right Yeah, of course I run daily backups and I mean there's nothing secret and this wiki they can hack it of course Can be deleted every day and so on it's just a media wicket But I'm keeping daily backup. So that should be okay to detect whatever has happened There are more questions Excuse me, what was this tribe core company again tribe a core V-core, sorry, it's Trophy core And they and you want to look at the there if you look at their ownership You need to look for that somewhere here For Pivuza Yeah, this one. That's the private equity fund officially owning it With Guernsey Registration or whatever Doing all kinds of nice stuff With confirmed activities in Iran Bahrain and Syria All very nice democratic countries respecting human rights Almost Okay, so it says he missed no more questions. I would like you to thank him for this great talk Have a nice evening


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


Hello, this video will discuss weathering and erosion and we'll get into detail on mechanical weathering. This video coincides with the OpenGeology.org textbook that us at Salt Lake Community College have developed. So for weathering, first we'll define weathering and talk about how it's different from erosion and then discuss the two major types of weathering and finally get into the details of mechanical weathering. Weathering is essentially the physical and chemical breakdown of rocks near the surface and eventually if kept in place, these rocks become sediment also known as soil, right? So two types of weathering are mechanical weathering, which is the physical breakdown and chemical weathering, which is the chemical reactions that break down the rocks into smaller pieces and the difference from weathering and erosion is that erosion implies the movement. That's the major way that it's different from weathering and those erosive forces can include water, ice, wind, and gravity, right? So let's talk a little bit more detail about mechanical weathering specifically. What mechanical weathering does and it works in a team with chemical weathering is it increases the surface air area of the thing that it's acting on. So it'll break the rock down into smaller pieces and if chemical weathering has more surface air to work with, more surfaces, the chemical reactions can occur on, then you can make that chemical weathering happen more quickly. If you are just attacking the outside of one very large block, you're just affecting that that surface on that large block and not any part of the inside volume. But if you break that block into much smaller pieces, that chemical weathering has much more surface air to work with. So that's how mechanical and chemical weathering can work together. So here are the few different ways that mechanical weathering can happen. One way that's common, especially here in Utah, where we have these freeze-thaw cycles, is frost wedging. So water has this amazing ability to expand when it freezes. And what will happen is water will seep down into cracks and things of that nature, fractures and fissures. And when it's warm and then when water freezes during the winter time, when it gets colder, it'll expand and push apart that rock slowly. And when you do this repeatedly over time, you can mechanically weather and disintegrate rocks. And a similar idea, you can also grow salt crystals. You can have ions charged atoms dissolved in water like groundwater or ocean sea spray. And as that water evaporates or leaves the area, it can potentially precipitate or leave behind these salt crystals. And as these salt crystals grow, they can push apart the grains in the rock and physically, mechanically weather that rock over time. You can get textures like tafone, which is kind of like the Swiss cheese looking effect in this rock here. Another way you can mechanically weather rock is this pressure expansion. So believe it or not, rock has an elastic property to it. That means it can bounce back to an original shape. If you bury a rock deeply, you're compressing it. And as erosion removes stuff that's overlined that rock, you're releasing that pressure. And that pressure is released over time. The rock bounces back and can deform brittily when it's bouncing back, especially if that happens quickly. And you see this in Batholus especially, like the Batholus at Yosemite or in Little Cottonwood Canyon. You get this sheeting of rock popping off and coming off of these big plutons of granite over time. This unloading can cause this sheeting, this exfoliation. Here's a link to an actual video of somebody recording this exfoliation happening before their eyes. It's pretty amazing. Of course, biological activity plays a significant role in the breakdown, the physical breakdown of rock material via mechanical weathering. You can have plant roots wedging their way in between cracks and crevices looking for water. And as they do so, they push apart that rock material. Another great mechanical weathering agent is burrowing animals, churning up, breaking apart, pushing apart rock material over time. And then abrasion kind of falls into this category as well. It involves erosion because there's moving sediment pushing up and grinding up against rock material. And this is how rivers, streams and glaciers do a lot of the mechanical weathering on material. And it kind of overlaps with erosion because there's moving material involved. But here are some potholes. There's a picture of pothole with a person for scale. This is kind of a depiction of how that pothole might form over time. And so that's it for mechanical weathering. In the next video, we'll discuss chemical weathering in more detail and especially dissolution, karst and a little bit of oxidation and hydrolysis. Thanks for listening and please do subscribe if you're interested. And I hope these were helpful in teaching you some geology.


The moment that my wife and I came to Seven Clinic and interviewed here, we honestly fell in love. And professionally it's the best fellowship there is, but then personally, life outside of work is unbelievable. To have this as your backyard is really spectacular. We came from a big city, frankly we were very comfortable there and we thought that was kind of our life and we enjoyed it and this has been a big change, but it's been a great change and being able to travel with the ski teams, go to different countries and places and experience that and then, you know, in your backyard when you have some time off of work, be able to go different hikes to go up and ski on the mountain and just enjoy everything that's there is in the bell valley, it's been great. You know, from the research side of it, at the Steadman Philpond Research Institute, you know, that's a real gem of this fellowship. I think the cornerstone of our fellowship is the mentorship that we get from, you know, Dr. Philpond, Dr. La Cron, Dr. Millet, Dr. Hackett and Dr. Provencher. And they take an interest in us, they enjoy hanging out with us, they enjoy teaching us and, you know, that really is a special relationship and a special, you know, bond that we have. Our kind of go-to resource as we, you know, get into, you know, interesting questions and dilemmas, getting into our own practice. It's a great year, but then to be able to be, to be able to experience it with people that you love and people that you enjoy both working with, as well as, you know, spending time outside of work, it's a unique thing and we're really lucky to have, you know, the group that we have.