What do we get wrong about conspiracy theorists?

Jon Ronson has spent decades sitting across from the people the rest of us cross the street to avoid - cult members, conspiracy theorists, actual diagnosed psychopaths - and his book The Psychopath Test changed how a lot of us think about who ends up running things. Not the guy in prison. The guy in the corner office. When he and I spoke for today’s podcast episode, we poked around in how we are both afraid of and celebrate psychopaths

“We’re taught to be afraid of psychopaths, but what if we’re rewarding them by putting them in positions of power?” Ronson asks. “If we’re not careful, we might be creating a culture that encourages psychopathic behaviour.”

Here’s the stat that stopped me: psychopaths make up around 25% of the prison population, yet they’re responsible for 60 to 70% of the unrest inside. Now stretch that same idea over a boardroom instead of a cell block (nobody’s handing out shivs at the Apple AGM, but you get the idea). “If the head of Apple isn’t a psychopath, but the head of a rival cell phone company is, that leads everyone to be a little bit more psychopathic to keep up,” Ronson says.

Nobody wakes up and decides to become more ruthless. The market just quietly selects for it, and everyone else has to keep pace or get left behind.

Sound familiar?

Where things really start to amp up is when two of these people meet, for example when a narcissist and an ideologue find each other (which - if you’ve been anywhere near a timeline in the last decade - you already know doesn’t end well).

“When a super-confident narcissist meets an ideologue, something magical happens,” he says. “They start to believe they can fix everything, and people start to follow them.” He points to Trump and Alex Jones as the case study, two men who spent years enabling each other’s worst instincts in full public view.

We also get into something heavier: how anti-Semitism is showing up right now, and the strange, uncomfortable way it’s landing on the left as much as the right. “I’ve been noticing a rise in anti-Semitism, especially since October 7th,” Ronson says. “It’s not just about government policy; it’s about conflating Jews with white supremacy.” As a Jewish journalist who’s spent his whole career studying extremism from the inside, he’s not talking theory. He’s talking about what’s aimed at him.

I went into this conversation thinking I’d be learning about other people. I came out thinking very differently about the thin line between reality and calamity.

“We’re all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking; it’s not just about the right or the left,” Ronson says.

Have a listen or watch the episode here.

You might recognise someone in it.

You might even recognise yourself.

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