Jon Ronson on Writing, Hustle and the Psychopath Test

I mean, it is a dream career. And I worry for people starting out right now.

Here's a big tangent — I don't think it'll be worth going down, but when I was starting out, I needed to convince gatekeepers, who tended to be Oxbridge types. And I came from lower-middle-class Cardiff suburbs. There was a little bit of prejudice, I'd say, looking back. My dad ran a warehouse, my mum was a social worker, we lived in Cardiff.

Where it started to go right was when I was 16, 17 and my mother forced me to volunteer at the local radio station in Cardiff, which was called CBC at the time. Because of that, I got a place in a pretty prestigious journalism course, what was then called the Polytechnic of Central London. That was a foot in the door. They took that particular course seriously. And as far as I know — I think they cast it each year, because there were about 2,000 applicants. The figure I was told was, "You'll never get into this course. It's 2,000 people applying for 30 places. It's incredibly competitive." But I did get in.

And I think the reason I got in was that they cast it each year. Like the year above me, there was somebody just like me — nerdy and awkward and a little bit unprofessional and shambolic. And I think they looked for one of those people each year. The fact that I'd been volunteering at the radio station meant I had some gumption. So that's how I got from Cardiff suburbia into something approaching the media — just doing that course.

Then I started writing for the college newspaper, which was called McGarel. And I was good at it. It was the first time in my life I'd found something I was any good at, and my college lecturer told me that. So I started sending things off to magazines while I was still at college, when I was 18, 19. I sent stuff to Smash Hits, which was a teenage music magazine at the time. And Chris Heath, who's gone on to have an incredible career writing some brilliant books, was an editor there. He gave me a chance to write some film reviews. And then I used those film reviews to hustle my way into other places — The Guardian and The Sunday Correspondent. So that's how it happened.

But to circle back to the beginning: there weren't that many platforms, and I needed to convince gatekeepers to give me access to them. That's not the case anymore. You could have a very good career with no gatekeepers at all. That's what YouTube's all about.

And I think it's good and it's bad. On the one hand, I hated having to humble myself to people who were a little bit prejudiced towards me. Not Chris Heath and Smash Hits, but other places — at the time there were certain people at The Guardian who thought I was a bit of a toerag because I didn't go to one of the good universities. So that's all been eliminated. But at the same time, it's probably harder to get noticed now than it was. If you do make it through into people's gardens, then you get noticed. Now you don't need permission, but it's harder to get noticed, maybe.

The honest truth — and I hope this doesn't sound egotistical — is that in the very early days at The Guardian, they kind of wanted to get rid of me. I've never really talked about this before. They didn't think I was any good, and they wanted to get rid of me. Not everyone — Kath Viner, who's the editor now, was always a big champion of mine, thank God, and she was always an important voice there. But other people just thought I was crap and didn't want me. The reason I stayed was that the readers liked me. Reader feedback about me was really positive. And so they couldn't get rid of me for that reason. They would have otherwise.

It's a really good question. When I was younger, I don't know what I would have done, because I was more tireless and could produce a lot of stuff — I was writing weekly columns. I could never go down that Substack route now, simply because I'm slow. I'm a slow, slow worker. I see myself as a kind of dollhouse maker — I intricately work away on my new Chihuahua very slowly. And people don't want that if they're subscribing to you on Substack or on a podcast feed. They want constant content. So now I think I need to be in the old legacy media for that reason.

I wish it wasn't the case, to be honest. I wish I was the sort of person who could produce three podcasts a week, or several Substacks a week. Because A, you can make more money that way, and B, I like it as a fan — if I'm subscribing to a podcast, I don't want eight episodes a year, I want two episodes a week. So that says what people want, but unfortunately it just doesn't match the way I am now. Back then, maybe I'd have been more tireless and could have done that.

Yeah. You can never anticipate it. I was thinking about this the other day. Pretty much every story I do takes place with me down a rabbit hole, very enthusiastically searching around and constructing a story, getting super obsessively enthusiastic about whatever the subject is. And then I emerge with a big smile, saying, "Look at this — that's The Psychopath Test, that's So You've Been Publicly Shamed, that's an episode of Things Fell Apart," or whatever. By the time I'm back out of the rabbit hole, I feel like, okay, I've found the best possible way of telling the story. And I was so excited and enthusiastic when I was down there — I'm sure you will be too.

And sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not, frankly. It's really hard to predict. The Psychopath Test — I had to do almost no work to convince people to read that book. It was like a dream. I sat at home watching TV and people were just buying the book. That rarely happens. Most of the time you have to hustle in the same way you have to hustle to get the story told: you also have to hustle and hustle to get people interested in it.

And quite often they're not. The first episode of season one of Things Fell Apart is about the origins of the abortion culture wars, and it's the most incredible story. We ferreted out the story of this teenage kid in the Swiss Alps in the 1970s, dreaming of being a Hollywood director. It's an incredible twisty, turny path from one thing to another. And I thought that story would go insane, because it's such an insane story. But it kind of didn't. It did a bit, but not as much as I thought. You really can't tell. Sometimes you bring something out and it catches fire; other times it just doesn't. And in the end, your job is to make the best story possible and then let the fates decide.

Isn't that how Jordan Peterson started out?

It was either Quora or Reddit. I think it was Quora, exactly the same thing. This was back in the days when I thought Jordan Peterson was interesting — I thought 12 Rules for Life was a good book. He obviously, like so many people, spiralled off subsequently. But anyway, go on, I didn't want to interrupt.

I've got to say, I really love these in-the-weeds questions — so thank you for asking such stimulating questions. Analytics, I never look at. Just never. I don't think I ever have.

However, there's a version of that that I did one time when I was writing The Psychopath Test. I went on a psychopath-spotting course — I learned how to spot psychopaths on a course in a marquee in West Wales. And I remember so clearly, on the train — this must have been like 2010, so really the early days of Twitter, maybe 2009 — I was going back to London and I tweeted, "I've just been on a psychopath-spotting course for my next book. Does anyone have any questions?" And the entire journey, I was getting question after question after question. I was thinking, "Whoa, this is really great. People are really interested in psychopaths. This is going well." So I guess that's my version of that instant feedback — just like you said about people going on Quora. It certainly put the wind behind my sails, thinking people really want to know about this stuff.

But most of the time I don't do that. Most of the time I'm very secretive, and I don't quite know why I've become so secretive. I'm sure there's an element of paranoia — will somebody scoop me? Which has nearly happened once in a while. When I made The Last Days of August, I was almost scooped. Somebody got hold of an embargoed review copy and basically spilled the whole thing in their magazine. I found out the night before, I phoned up the editor and begged them not to publish it — I was saying, "I'm being stolen from." And they didn't publish it. So that paranoia can be justified sometimes, but I think it's basically just paranoia.

Well, it's not just paranoia. On the one hand, I don't want to tell people what I'm working on because I don't want them to steal the idea. But there's another reason: if I told you what my next book's about now, I'd be staring at you, looking for any flinch of disappointment in your face that you can't control.

And I'd still be staring, looking for those little subconscious flickers of "that doesn't sound like a very good book." I think that would be enough. I sent a chapter of my new book to my editor the other day and he sent it back saying, "This is so great — it's so fantastic to see your style on the page again after a few years." And that was really good editing, because at this early, fragile stage, if somebody says the wrong thing, it could really knock you off course. So I find that I just want to internalise it all, in case that happens.

I think it's a bit of both. If somebody in the same genre as you, somebody really similar to you, is doing a really similar idea, that can cause trouble. I remember having a Christmas party when I was writing The Psychopath Test, and Louis Theroux came to it, and he said, "What are you doing now?" I said, "I'm writing a book about psychopaths." And I felt this huge bolt of nerves, and I said, "Please don't do anything about psychopaths for the next six months, until my book comes out." So that would have been a disaster if — but ultimately, I think execution is the most important thing.

Many times I've worried I've heard there's another book coming along that's similar to mine. That happened with So You've Been Publicly Shamed — there was a book coming called Is Shame Necessary?, which was going to be published at the same time. I was a bit worried about that, but ultimately it's the execution. Which is a good reason to be idiosyncratic — if you're off on your own journey, ploughing your own furrow, then even if somebody comes out with a book that's very similar in subject matter, it quite often doesn't matter. If your book is well written, a page-turner, idiosyncratic, and very you, I think it doesn't matter. Ultimately, execution matters more.

It's an interesting question. It reminds me of Woody Allen saying that if he runs out of inspiration, he just goes into another room, which is a version of that. I find that if I'm getting cabin fever, I'll go for a big, long hike, and a couple of times during that hike I'll email myself with an idea that's popped into my head. At the moment I'm doing a psychopath night at the end of 2024 — like 20 psychopath shows — and the other day I was hiking and a couple of ideas for that popped into my head, so I emailed them to myself. So that's a version of what Tim Ferriss said, but instead of going off and getting another job, it's more: go off to a different environment, go for a walk, go to a different room. That works. But I've never had another job — I've only ever been a writer.

Right. Well, it's one of my favourite parts of the process. If I'm suddenly down a rabbit hole and I've found something — with The Psychopath Test, the brainwave was, "I'm going to go on a psychopath-spotting course, and I'm going to journey into the corridors of power to see if I can spot any psychopaths in high places, in boardrooms." I thought, that's a real brainwave. And it could lead me to so many other areas: who runs the psychopath-spotting course? Are there competing courses? If so, do the course leaders all hate each other? And the answer is probably yes, because they're academics, and academics hate each other. And is it fair? Is it ethical to do this? Maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to tell me it's not ethical to armchair-diagnose people as psychopaths. Question after question after question. Each one of those questions can potentially take you to a whole new area. You go down a bunch of those roads and think, "Yeah, that's not so interesting," but maybe one or two will take you to a whole other chapter you never anticipated.

Well, no — that makes it sound like you're passive, and you're not passive. You're actively thinking, "Could I go down this road? Could I go down that road?" It's hugely important. I'm doing this at the moment — I won't tell you what the thing is, but it's taken me to the Boer War, which is something I know nothing about. I presume there was some South Africa involved; that's all I know. One thing I'm going to do over the next couple of days is go down a little rabbit hole about the Boer War. Maybe it'll give me a paragraph, maybe it won't, but it'll be a fun thing to go down.

Shit. Well, luckily I always got the Heathrow Express.

Well, it's never bad. I used to be good friends with Zoe Ball when she was insanely famous — she presented The Big Breakfast, she was practically Kate Moss level of fame in the nineties. And I remember her saying to me, "You have the perfect level of fame. It's just enough that it massages your ego." But she said, "I've got people hiding in my bushes, waiting for me to leave the house." And she envied my level of fame — it was just enough.

My whole life, that's been the case. In America, I don't get spotted very often, and I actually don't go out very often — I'm not a party person. I basically stay home and work, then go for a hike or a run, then watch TV. So most of the time I'm either alone or with my wife, or my wife and son. In Britain, when I come back, I'm recognised maybe once or twice a day. Someone will come up to me, and that's a perfectly pleasant amount.

Once in a while — okay. Not long ago, I had a little bit of a strop about something in public, forgetting that anybody would know who I am. And somebody at the end of my strop looked really disappointed and said, "I'm a fan of yours." So I suppose if I have a little meltdown or a strop, that's the downside of being well-known: you can't just anonymously do it and nobody knows it's you. You can't have a bad day. That's the one downside. But otherwise, it's great. It's only ever been just enough to massage my ego a little bit, never anything that impedes me.

Maybe. Then again, here in upstate New York, the chance of anyone being impressed by me is pretty slim. So even if I go back to Britain — yeah, it's fine, it's not something I worry about. I'm friends with Robbie Williams, and I was at a restaurant with him one night, and Stephen Fry was there. He was sitting with us, and a couple of women went up to him and told him what a big fan they were. Afterwards I said to him, "Does that ever get annoying?" And he said, "Oh, nothing like that. That was just delightful." And that's kind of what I feel too. If somebody comes up and says they like my work, 99 times out of a hundred, I just think it's delightful. It's not like you're walking around on cloud nine for the rest of the day — the feeling diminishes almost immediately and you go back to your usual worried, anxious self — but it's never a problem. It's never been a problem.

Sure, absolutely. So I pitched this to This American Life. The reason you know about it is that when I gave writing workshops, I read this out as a good pitch. And I know it was a good pitch because Ira Glass put it onto This American Life's website as a perfect pitch that should be emulated. Okay, here we go:

This story is about the Scientologists. It's about the crack team of Scientologists who are dedicated to destroying the industry of psychiatry. They think psychiatrists are the most evil people in the world. Anyway, I had lunch with one of them and he told me about a guy named Tony. He said Tony had beaten a guy up 13 years ago and had subsequently faked madness to get into a mental hospital. He thought it would be cushier than a few years in prison, but to his horror, they believed him too much and sent him to Broadmoor, which is Britain's most notorious asylum for the criminally insane — that last line, maybe I overegged it a little bit. He's surrounded by serial killers, he's totally sane, and no one will believe him. And this was like 15 years ago. So I went to visit Tony. All the other Broadmoor patients had given up and were overweight and wearing sweatpants, but Tony came to meet me in a pinstripe suit like a young businessman. So is Tony telling the truth, and he's trapped like a real-life Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Or is he a psychopath, and the Scientologists are petitioning to get a psychopath released? Let me know if this interests you.

So there you go. That was the pitch. Which I could tell, reading it back, that I wrote in 10 minutes — this wasn't something I agonised over.

Reading it back just now, what I liked is that I start off by saying, "This story is about the Scientologists," but it's not about the Scientologists at all. It's about Tony and Broadmoor. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Funnily enough, the other night I was at a party upstate and somebody came up who'd read The Psychopath Test and was talking about the Scientologists. And I said, "One thing I like about The Psychopath Test is that other people would have written a book entirely about the Scientologists. But my Scientology section is just a few pages. It's like I'm packing a whole bunch of books into one book — I'm giving people five books for the price of one." So the story is packed with really interesting things I'm not dwelling on. I'm not dwelling on the fact that it's about the Scientologists and they've got a crack team who want to destroy the industry of psychiatry.

But most of all, the reason it's interesting is obviously Tony — there's a central mystery, and it's an extraordinary mystery. There's a real-life Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; he's trapped at Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. That's immediately an intriguing, mysterious, funny, absurd story about a really unexpected, dark, important thing. So there's dissonance there — between the comedy and the horror, the silliness and the intrigue. I think all of that really works. It's got a sort of Kurt Vonnegut-ness about it.

In fact, I could read you what Ira Glass wrote about the pitch underneath. He said: "It's a story in the most traditional sense. There are characters in some situation, and a conflict. Also, the story raises some bigger question or issue, some universal thing to think about." That's exactly what I said, and Ira said it too. And I told the story as if I was telling it to a friend in a pub. I've noticed that over and over again — because there's the story, and then completely separate to the story is the way you tell the story to people. And that becomes part of the process every time, because at some point you have to introduce the story to the world. You have to say, "This is what my next book's about." And that's a whole different thing to writing the book. Ira says — and I completely agree — that a really good way of telling the story to somebody is the way you would tell it if you were just having a coffee with them.

My friend Maeve Higgins — when I made the show The Debutante last year for Audible — said, "What's it about?" And I heard myself say, "It's the story of a Tulsa debutante who, as a result of a series of unlikely and often very bad life choices, found herself in the midst of one of the most terrible crimes ever to happen in America." And I thought, wow, that's a great way of telling this story. So I made that the first line of The Debutante — only because it just came out when I was talking in a relaxed way to my friend Maeve about it.

Yes, I think so. It partly comes from a sort of paranoia that I don't want to write a book anyone else could possibly think of. So you really want to go off on your own. And there's a certain confidence to that too — not a confidence I have in fiction or screenwriting, only in nonfiction — that I can go off on tangents other people don't really think of. That's what people like about my writing. It also means I'm not in competition with anyone else, because nobody else would have thought of that tangent.

I'd say the real king of what you just described is George Saunders, the short-story writer and novelist. He'll pack an extraordinary novel into a paragraph, over and over again. The example that just popped into my head is a story he wrote called "The Wavemaker Falters," which is about a guy who runs one of those wave machines at a lido. He loses concentration and somebody dies in the mechanism of his wave machine, and to pay penance, he sneaks into that person's family every night and does chores — he deburrs the dog, or paints their fence secretly in the middle of the night. Now, that could be a whole novel, and it comes and goes in two sentences in that George Saunders book. I thought that was so powerful, to pack a whole idea into a paragraph.

My producer Sarah said to me — Things Fell Apart season two is about to come out — "Episode one could have been a whole series." And she's right, it could have been. But there's something nice about giving people a whole series in one episode.

It's funny — it reminds me of my friend Mike West. When I lived in Manchester, he was in this band, The Man from Delmonte. And he said to me, "You do realise, Jon, that the second time we met, you were already talking about old times?" Like I was creating a mythology of our lives — "Do you remember?" So yeah, I think I do automatically do that. Isn't there a pop song about walking down the street imagining a commentator commenting on everything you're doing? So I think I just do that. I create a sort of mythology of my otherwise far more mundane life.

Yeah — hustle. I mean, hustle. At the beginning of this we talked about how, when I was starting out, you had to convince gatekeepers to give you a chance. So right from the beginning, it's all a hustle. You have to hustle to convince people to talk to you, to get access to things, to get your story published. Tireless hustle.

It also helps if your entire self-worth is wrapped around your work — because then all you want to do is have work all the time. I love work. Nothing makes me happier than making a sentence that didn't work, work. I feel like a puzzler — one of those people who sits there doing thousand-piece jigsaws every day, but it happens to be story construction.

Which leads me to another piece of advice: try always to do stories that you want to do, as opposed to stories other people are encouraging you to do. Because it's such a long, desolate process, I think you need the wind behind your sails. And that happens when you've got a story you're passionate about telling — a mystery you want to solve, or whatever it is that spurs you on. Go for that. Because as Roald Dahl said in his storytelling tips, nobody's sitting there making sure you do the work. You have to be entirely self-motivated. So finding a story you really want to tell, a mystery you want to solve — that helps a lot.

I wouldn't say it's always been like that. Sometimes it's been a chore — the sort of relentlessness of having to write every day, especially if you're doing a weekly column, it can become a chore. But I should say that at this point in my life, I feel really lucky that I only work on things I really want to work on. And that means I work all the time, and really hard, because I'm enjoying it.

I think that's absolutely true. When you said that, a memory popped into my head. When we lived in London, in Highgate, my son went to the same school as Jonathan Ross's kids. And when George Clooney announced he was going to turn The Men Who Stare at Goats into a movie — I can't remember whether I told Jonathan Ross or whether he'd heard — but he came up to me in the school playground and said, "You see, Jon, you stick around long enough, you know..." And it was a slightly passive-aggressive thing for him to say, because I'd been at it for so many years. But he was right. If you stick around long enough — look, if you quit, nothing's going to happen. If you're not writing, then you're not writing. So I think it's true. If you stick around long enough, stuff will happen.