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Premium: Louis Theroux - From The Archives · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
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  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
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  This is a special bonus episode of Uncomfortable Conversations. It's from the archive,
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  and it's a bonus content which is just for subscribers. So thank you for being a subscriber,
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  thank you for actually pulling your finger out and bothering to join the community. And this is
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  one of the benefits that you're getting. This is a conversation that I had on my last podcast.
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  We, the people live in 2017. And without further ado, I will just introduce it. Obviously,
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  needless to say, all of the topical references that we may talk about are old, but it's still
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  well worth listening to. I hope you enjoy it. Regular programming coming next week.
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  Today, a very special one-on-one with a man who needs no introduction, but I'll give him one.
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  Anyway, because that's courteous. Louis Theroux is one of the most beloved broadcasters in
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  the English-speaking world thanks to his captivating TV documentaries in which he parachutes into
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  odd subcultures or entirely unord-everyday cultures and unveils their weirdness and their humanity
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  by playing the role of the inquisitive outsider, the innocent alien transplanted down to planet
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  earth. What better fit then as a target of his curiosity than a community that quite literally
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  believed we are aliens transplanted to planet earth. Louis Theroux's new feature documentaries
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  entitled My Scientology Movie. Louis, thanks for being on We The People Live.
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  Thank you for having me, Josh. It's great to be here.
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  Now, every time that I need to fill out my occupation on a customs form on a plane, I scratch my head
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  a little bit and have to make something up. Everyone in Britain and Australia already knows who you are,
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  but some people in America I feel still don't. So for them, what are you, Louis?
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  I'm a documentary maker and a journalist, although I don't direct documentaries, I appear in them,
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  as a reporter and a writer, but I do it in a participatory way. So I go into worlds that are in
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  some way extreme or offbeat or involved high levels of emotional and psychological angst,
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  and I attempt to form relationships with the participants thereof. I really do try to get to know
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  people who may be many outsiders have only seen as controversial or demonized figures or figures
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  who are little understood. Over the years, I've done many different documentaries for TV, I've done
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  two on the Westboro Baptist Church in which I spent several weeks, more or less alongside them
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  and inside their homes. I've done one on neo-nazis in California, I've done the porn industry in LA,
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  I've done gangster rap wrestling, gambling in Las Vegas, and many, many more.
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  One of the things that I love about hopping on a Qantas flight is going and seeing if there are any
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  new Louis Therouxs that have dropped so that I can binge watch them across the Pacific. And the
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  number of different scenarios that you end up putting yourself in is, well, let me put it this way,
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  it strikes me that there are two types of things that you do, but that much of your appeal is in
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  on the one hand, making things that strike us as natural seem peculiar, and on the other hand,
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  making things that strike us as peculiar seem natural. So as you say, the Westboro Baptist Church,
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  everyone thinks that that's crazy, but when you go there, it becomes somewhat understandable,
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  and conversely, there are everyday things like the prison system, which we take for granted as
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  being normal, but when you go there, I finish watching the episode and I think, well, that's
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  deeply weird that we have this thing. Do you think of those two sort of missions as being
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  related projects, or are they just accidental corollaries of the same project?
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  Well, I sometimes say that the weirdest thing about weird people is how normal they are,
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  which is, on the one hand, kind of just something that sounds cool, but what it means, I think, is
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  that when you're among people who you've gone to seek out because they do or involved in something
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  that's absolutely outside the mainstream, you come to be surprised by how in many respects they
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  are just regular people, like the Phelps clan, the Westboro Baptist Church, they do their
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  particulates and they have horrendous signs with anti-gay messages that they waive at the
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  funerals of soldiers and celebrities, which is horrendous. But then they go home and they cook
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  Chinese food, right? And they sit around and listen to pop music or watch TV,
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  sort of junk TV of the type that everyone else would watch, and do things that suddenly seem
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  all the more weird for the fact that the person doing them in someone who just minutes ago was
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  screaming at a funeral, I think the other thing to remember is that weird behavior usually comes
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  from a place of very relatable human impulses, you know, that we are all, whether it's me or you
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  or someone in a neo-Nazi group, looking to be somehow the heroes of our own lives and to get
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  our emotional needs met, albeit in dysfunctional ways. I think there's something in that human
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  condition that is weird, you know? I don't think there's ever been throughout human history,
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  a society that did not have crime. Probably there's never been one that didn't have
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  addiction or some kinds of sexual weirdness and that it seems to me, you know, that even the
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  condition of being mortal if you live, the idea that you are alive and that you will one day die,
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  you know, that's that in itself is just a very bizarre existential position to be in.
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  So there's no shortage of material and I never tire of experiencing these other lives which
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  somehow make me feel slightly better about my own life somehow. Do they, there are a couple of
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  things I want to follow up on there. Firstly, do you, you mentioned mortality and the weirdness of
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  that as an existential state to be and do you think that gives rise to some of the pathologies that
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  you look at? I would think so. I mean, I have no professional training in psychology or philosophy.
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  I studied history at university so all I can go on is my kind of my own instincts about from
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  people from what I've read and seen and and the people I've talked to in my documentaries.
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  People, the reasons people tend to give for their beliefs are usually not the reason why they
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  believe the things they do. I mean, it's almost a sort of Richard Dawkins type question.
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  You know, I think many of our psychological behaviors come from our heritage as sort of Darwinian
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  survivors over the years, you know, and that we're conditioned in certain ways to be, I don't know,
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  to sort of to impress mates to have survival strategies to kind of vent our strength in various
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  ways, but also to be, you've got this countervailing impulse to be social creatures. I mean, I'll
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  be totally honest, Josh, I'm a little out of my depth on this stuff. I just know that people
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  behave in ways that seem absolutely illogical and disconnected from our normal understanding of things,
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  but that that isn't just common to, you know, delusional people on sight wards or even
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  psychologists. You've got Christians who believe that, you know, the communion way for turns into
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  the body of Jesus. Well, do they relate? This is another question. There's so much that I want to unpack,
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  but to what, and I also will, I'll push back on your claim that you're not an expert on this,
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  because there are different kinds of expertise and the wisdom that I get from watching you engage,
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  as I say, like an alien who's just been transplanted into these communities is a different kind of
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  wisdom, but a wisdom nonetheless than what you would get from having a psychologist or a psychiatrist
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  diagnosed precisely what it says that these people are suffering from in the diagnostic manual,
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  right? I mean, we are humans as well as, we are complex, messy, emotional creatures as well as
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  merely being brains in a, in a, in a vat, and you sort of, you, you prod at the former in really
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  interesting ways. So I think you've probably gleaned something over your career about, about the
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  reasons why we do the things that we do, but has it, has it made you in any way more of a, you mentioned
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  that we, the weird things that we do are all stemming out of sort of common desires or common
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  conditions? Has it made you any more of a, a relativist towards the way that people behave to see
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  them all acting out in these very, very different ways, whether it's drug use or whether it's pornography
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  or whether it's religion or whatever it is, or has it made you more able to retain a sense of your
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  own self about what is right and what matters? These are really, that's a really good question,
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  and it's not an easy one to answer. I think, you know, it's almost a case of both. I, I definitely
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  feel that when you come to examine the first principles of human behavior, right? You start to really
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  say that in many cases, they're on a sort of shaky foundation, right? And that, in other words,
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  that the things we think of are, of as our most fundamental kind of code of ethics or systems of
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  belief, they aren't really founded on anything philosophically, that's strong. A lot of these things,
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  things like human rights or, you know, that you shouldn't torture or enslave, these are systems of
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  ethics that are, you know, are kind of evolved in the late, you know, in the late modern period or
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  the early modern period in, in Western society, you know, there's a sort of enlightenment and all of
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  these things that we hold dear, I'm aware from speaking to people, you know, they, a racist will tell
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  you, you know, it's only now in the late, in the early twenty-fourth century that racism is viewed
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  as weird, like we haven't, racists have not been considered weird, putting it very bluntly, but
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  there's a sense which racism has not really been considered weird in Western society for the last
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  two thousand years, if you like. Well, and in some ways, it's only now considered weird in Western
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  society. It's been the status quo assumption of every tribe throughout history, really, hasn't it?
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  Right, and in fact, you know, human sexuality, you could go either way, you could say actually
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  for two thousand years or at least fifteen hundred years of Christian hegemony, homosexuality has
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  been viewed as a mortal sin punishable by death in, in Christendom, if you like. You could also say,
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  and then in ancient Greece, there were different morays, homosexuality was, or sort of
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  pederastic homosexuality was viewed as the ultimate example of love, the highest form of love that
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  humans were capable of expressing. So, you know, I'm giving a long wind in dance, but that does
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  tempt you towards kind of relativistic, I suppose, way of thinking. But in the end, you know,
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  I feel as though you can get too philosophically kind of prissy, and you don't, you know,
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  paralysed if you think too much in that way, and I think most of the time you do have a sense of
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  what abuse looks like, and a sense of what bullying is that the, as much as they might, certain
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  definitions might change in time and place, there's a sense in which one knows when cruelty
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  is taking place. And so, I do try more and more as I work to resist easy moral judgments,
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  but also to really take a kind of responsible position. And I really don't try new systems
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  of thought. I try not to be overly political, or impose a political framework, or a sort of
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  theological framework, or even a particularly thought-out humanistic framework in terms of how
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  I approach the stories. I really try to see things for what they are in a clear way on the ground
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  when I'm immersed in them. Do you think that we are getting better or worse at getting in touch
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  with that sense, that sort of true sense that you're pointing at inside ourselves, which knows
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  what's good or bad or right or wrong, simply on the basis, I'm not talking about some kind of
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  spiritual or divine sense, so just mean the sort of common sense that you're talking about that
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  you kind of have a little bullshit detector inside you that knows when someone else is hurting
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  or when you're being a bit of a shit. I feel like politically and culturally at the moment,
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  we live in such an amazing era that I fear that maybe we're not getting as good as we used to
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  be about being in touch with when we're harming other people, or wronging other people, or not
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  hearing other people. Do you have a sense of that? It's a really, that's a hard question to answer
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  because I'm only really exposed for the most part at least firsthand to American culture,
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  to an extent, what's going on in Europe, stories I've done in Africa a little bit, but
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  if you're talking globally, I'm not really sure. I do think that there are markers of progress
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  that really do indicate positive change. I think the attempts to wipe out things that are just
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  just on the face of it and quite clearly bad like being a female genital mutilation,
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  the persistence of slavery, the stigmatisation and torture and persecution of children,
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  seen as witches in certain African nations. I think there's been progress on gay rights,
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  and I think all of these are positive indicators, but it's easy to be clipped because the world
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  is so vast. Who knows what's going on in China? There's some signs that it seems to be opening up,
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  there's more freedom, more environmental awareness, but I just don't really feel qualified to
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  make a big statement on that. I mean, I guess I was alluding more locally to just more
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  perocally to the politics that we've seen in the West with Brexit and Trump and the rise of the
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  yacht right and the rise of Marine Le Pen maybe in France. I think on that stuff it's too early to say
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  that it was still really in the immediate aftershocks of something and time will tell how whether
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  that's just a sort of localised bullet. I mean, on the Trump thing, do you slightly feel that it's
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  the last gas of a sort of Christian white ethno-nationalist impulse and that just on pure demographic
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  faces alone, that that's going to be a thing of the past in 20, 30, 40 years, that just the numbers,
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  the rates at which different groups are reproducing means that it won't be feasible for much longer
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  for a president to run a candidacy based on a sort of a coded appeal to white people.
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  Yeah, I don't know what I think about that, Louis. I think the data... 13% black people in the US,
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  as I understand it, about 13% but a rising, rapidly rising number of Latino. I don't know,
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  yeah, you tell me what you think, because it's not something I've studied, but that was my...
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  Yeah, I think your sense is right if you assume that the white nationalism is intrinsic to the problem.
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  I think your claim hinges on a faith that authoritarianism and strongman politics can't have a larger
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  community of people who are not just brought together by their race or ethnicity,
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  but also by a sense of being besieged from without by forces beyond their control,
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  be those economic forces or forces of another religion like Islam.
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  And I just worry that the coalition of the concerned could be expanded to include Latinos and
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  could be potentially expanded. I mean, I don't know, I'm just sort of spitballing,
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  but it strikes me that there's something more than just white nationalism going on. There's
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  something more than... What would you say is the common factor, then, that what is the kind of
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  the core appeal of something like Trump or Brexit? I think there is a sense that
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  the world has been stitched up for a number of decades by Phoney A. Leitz, who have done a deal
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  between Wall Street and Washington DC and lobbyists and whatever their counterparts in the UK are,
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  that have systematically prevented decent, honorable working people from getting ahead.
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  They've dismantled a Western civilization, or they've started chipping away at a Western
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  civilization that was one of the greatest things that humankind had ever produced and had
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  its kind of apex in the 1950s, I suppose, with the nuclear family and traditional Judeo-Christian
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  values, and that an entire regime is coming apart at the seams, thanks in part to globalization,
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  thanks in part to technology and robotics, and that nobody is hearing anybody scream,
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  that people are screaming into the ether about all of this disruption that they don't want to be
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  happening, and both left and right keep trotting out the same platitudes and cliches, and meanwhile,
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  the Middle East is in flames, and bombs are going on in flames.
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  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma. Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and
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  Instagram for all the latest, may your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous,
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  and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.