Jon Ronson's The Butterfly Effect podcast: Live Show

Jon Ronson, journalist, investigator, and author of best-sellers including Men Who Stare At Goats, The Psychopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed released his seven-chapter series, The Butterfly Effect, for free to everyone on Audible, iTunes and other platforms in 2017. For five nights only in October 2018 he is bringing a live version of The Butterfly Effect to the Leicester Square Theatre in London.

The podcast focuses on the porn industry, but deals with the topic in a way that almost all TV documentaries on pornography fail to do. Ronson and his team argue that the difference is in the fact that it isn’t ‘judgemental or salacious’, and it takes a deliberate step away from the presentation of the industry as sleazy.

The springboard for the podcast is Ronson’s conversation with Fabian Thylmann, who was the founder and a managing partner of MindGeek, then called Manwin, an online porn business which owned almost all other free porn websites in the early 2010s. Ronson examines the ‘butterfly effect’ of Thylmann’s actions, and the impact of widely available free porn in today's society. The investigation takes some unexpected detours, looking at phenomenon including the bespoke porn industry, and the effect of search engine keyword optimisation on the titles of porn films.

The documentary-maker also considers the separation between pornography and the porn industry – a separation which one of the ‘tech guys’ at MindGeek’s headquarters describes as ‘healthy’ in his discussion with Ronson, but one which results in employees being distant from the people whose work is being pirated for their profit, and which can prevent porn performers from being seen as real people.

Ronson humanises the porn performers he talks to, and highlights the huge array of hypocrisies within the world of pornography. This is a truly engaging and insightful podcast which is, in Ronson’s words, only ‘sort of’ about porn, and is well worth a listen even if you’re dubious about the subject matter.