Penguin Speakers Bureau

Speaking Topics — Jon Ronson

Them—The Search for The Secret Room
In Jon Ronson’s hit cult book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, he takes the conspiracy theorists at their word and tells them, “If there really is a secret room, where the shadowy cabal secretly rule the world, let’s go and find it.” When Jon hooks up with the conspiracy theorists, they try to enter the fabled Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove; what follows is a hilarious, eye-opening, and sometimes frightening journey into the belly of the beast. Jon took a video camera with him, and in this illustrated talk he recounts what happened when the conspiracy theorists came face-to-face with the object of their paranoia. A story about being tailed by men in dark glasses, about hanging out with people who believe that the secret rulers of the world are giant blood-drinking lizards that have adopted human form, and about the crazy ceremonies that our leaders actually do take part in when they think no one is looking.

The True Story of The Men Who Stare at Goats
Jon tells the true story of the crack team of Special Forces soldiers and intelligence chiefs who believed in the 1970s and 1980s that with the right mental preparation, they could learn how to become invisible and kill goats just by staring at them. It was his book that inspired the major motion picture starring George Clooney. In this illustrated talk, Jon traces how these initially lovely ideas mutated over the decades and came to life during the War on Terror, influencing the kinds of notorious interrogation techniques seen at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
This is a story about madness. It all starts when Jon meets an inmate in a hospital for the criminally insane who swears he faked having a mental disorder to get a lighter sentence but is now stuck there, with nobody believing he’s sane. He meets the influential psychologist who developed the industry standard Psychopath Test and who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are in fact psychopaths. Jon learns from him how to ferret out these high-flying psychopaths and, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, heads into the corridors of power . . .Combining Jon’s trademark humor, charm, and investigative incision, The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through an unsettling industry where many of the people at the helm are, in their way, as crazy as those they study. It is a deeply honest book that unearths dangerous truths and asks serious questions about how we define normality in a world where we are increasingly judged by our maddest edges.