Without Adversity, There is No Triumph: A Conversation with Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux: There will be people in the future when you speak they will have to be quiet because you've gone through something extraordinary. And this is a privilege to be tested in this way. And the price of it is that you will have to go through it, but at the other side are the sunlit uplands of having done it. So I hold onto that, without adversity no triumph.

Michael Rivo: That was award- winning British documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux, sharing his thoughts on how he thinks the pandemic will shape us. Louis is best known for his immersive documentaries that look into the often controversial and complex aspects of the human condition. Welcome back to Blazing Trails, I'm your host, Michael Rivo from Salesforce studios. And joining me to introduce today's conversation is Musi Jorgensen, UK energy and utilities head here at Salesforce. Well Musi, what an incredible opportunity to get a chance to speak with Louis Theroux, what was it like for you?

Musi Jorgensen: Wow, so lucky that I got to spend some time talking to him, he's somebody who I've admired professionally for a long time, just because I think for me, his connection and how he connects to people is just fascinating to watch. For those of us who've seen his documentaries over the last 20 years, the thing that stands him out is that he is very approachable and he's disarming in how he builds those connections with people who on the face of it should be difficult to build connections with. So that was something for me that was a real privilege to get to understand a little bit more about how he does that, because he makes it look so easy.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. It's interesting that in the world of business there's so much of that empathy required and those human relationships that are really at the core of everything that we do, from the product, from the sales process to all of it.

Musi Jorgensen: Absolutely.

Michael Rivo: Well Musi, thank you so much. I'm excited to get started with this episode. So let's let you and Louis take it from here.

Musi Jorgensen: So welcome Louis Theroux to the Salesforce Blazing Trails podcast. I'm really excited to have a chat with you.

Louis Theroux: Thank you.

Musi Jorgensen: You're an acclaimed journalist and documentary maker and arguably lots of people would say one of the world's best interviewers.

Louis Theroux: Wow. Would they?

Musi Jorgensen: I think they probably would. Yes. So with that, what advice have you got for me to make a really good interview?

Louis Theroux: Well, the good news is you are ahead of the game because this is a podcast and podcasts almost always feel more intimate. It feels like you're not really doing an interview. It's a relaxed and authentic space. So I feel already inclined to be forthcoming, to confess all my secrets, my missteps, to share the human side of myself. I do think that the whole notion of an interview in a weird way gets in the way of making a connection sometimes. I prefer to think of what I do is having encounters, or conversations, or just making a connection. Interview sounds somehow clinical and detached. And what I aim for is something intimate and warm, something that ends up being, there I say a win- win, I don't think I'm just trying to steal in and get the goods. So my advice is just be you, which I think you are being.

Musi Jorgensen: I am.

Louis Theroux: But then how would I know if you weren't? My feeling is you are, and that was by the way, a great opening question because it's what we in the biz call a meta question, because it was a question about the nature of the conversation we were having, you stepped outside the conversation to commentate on what we were doing, which is something I do, if all else fails, this has become a little awkward, or you've gone very quiet, or I feel as though I just said something I shouldn't have. Make the problem part of the conversation.

Musi Jorgensen: So on that, I think you do really form remarkable connections with people, and that's the thing that everybody loves you for, I think. And when I was thinking about how I think you do, I'd love to know a little bit more, but I think you're authentically approachable, I think you're courageous in how you ask your questions, and kind in how you ask your questions without making people defensive. And I think there's an element of you showing some vulnerability as well. Is that all part of... have you got a recipe for how you do this stuff?

Louis Theroux: I wish I had a recipe, because then I could sell it online for large sums. It would be like the interview a version of Scientology. I could actually go out there and license it to people and sign them up to longterm programs. I think really I stumbled into this in 1993, it was, when I was working in a magazine in New York called Spy. And some friends went to work in television for a new program called TV Nation, that was being hosted by Michael Moore. And Michael is well- known, and was then known for various documentaries, including Roger& Me. And Michael I think saw in me, I think, I went there to try and be a writer, or a researcher for him. And instead he ended up putting me on TV as a presenter, and I think what it was, was some quality of awkwardness, some kind of all those things that you would think would disqualify you from being a TV host or a TV presenter, I think he saw as assets. And I think in the end that's ended up being my meal ticket because I can't really be much other than myself. And the more I think about what I do, it disables me. So I think being open to experiences, looking for real connections with people, trying to just get along and then make jokes, if things aren't going well, just try and bond with people through humor, but also maintaining, if I may say so, a certain journalistic focus, all of that, I think can create a powerful piece of television, or a powerful conversation.

Musi Jorgensen: Yeah. Well, it's fascinating to watch because I think what you do in that process is really peel back the layers of people and get to the nub of who they are and what's important to them. So it works.

Louis Theroux: Well, that's nice to hear that. And just to say, I really did come into it by accident. I originally thought that maybe the funniest or the best bits of television I could make, this is way back, because I was 23 when I started and I thought, Oh, well, I'll just go, and the first segment Michael sent me on was about people who think the end of the world is about to happen, apocalyptic sects. And I thought, well, I'll go in there and this'll will be slightly cooky weird guys, and many of them were. Some thought there was a UFO fleet that would land in 2001, another thought that Jesus was coming back later in that year, 1994, and were preparing for that. And I thought the secret will be me asking silly questions and getting them to take me seriously. I suppose it was before the era of people like Sasha Baron Cohen and Borat, but I suppose I was aspiring to do something a bit like that. And later when I looked at it, actually the material that worked was when I showed more vulnerability and where I was on the back foot and in different ways showing something of myself. So you mentioned vulnerability and I think maybe it's a quality of being slightly vulnerable and acknowledging those parts of you that are frail, or human, and in creating a connection through that, that can actually serve you better than you might think, better than maybe being slick, and having a great wardrobe and arriving in a helicopter.

Musi Jorgensen: Because looking at some of your early work, did you consciously know that that was what you were doing? Because I think as you've developed, that appears now even more so, but is that something that you set out to do to be vulnerable?

Louis Theroux: Very much not. I hoped I might get away with being suave sort of conventional TV presence. And it was only later that I realized that that wasn't who I could ever be, nor was it who I should be. Sometimes I worry that I've become too competent. Sometimes I worry that actually after 25 years I've acquired the basic skills of being a more or less normal TV interviewer, or TV correspondent. And that maybe I've lost some of that ineffable naive magic of stumbling through. I'm a comfortable middle aged man now, but I don't want to lose my hungry edge. So it's a bit of a paradox, it's like pop groups who have a couple of amazing albums and then they fizzle out and become a bit boring. I think I'm in danger of being in my boring phase, feel free to disagree.

Musi Jorgensen: I strongly disagree. But how do you keep your edge? Where do you find your inspiration from?

Louis Theroux: I think in the end, it's about keeping yourself interested and not settling into anything that's too comfortable. And I think at the point where I felt like I was getting a little too comfortable, or I just needed fresh pastures, I would move on to something else. I think it's pride as well as a sense of professional pride. And thinking that being on TV is a huge privilege that you have teams who work around you to support you, to make you look good, you end up getting most of the credit because I'm the one on camera and everyone thinks that I'm more or less doing it all myself, which of course I'm not. And so I think the least you can do is acknowledge what a privilege it is by putting a 110% in, and also just really scrutinizing every creative choice you make to make sure that it's not self- indulgent and that it's going to do something different and will intrigue viewers in a different way.

Musi Jorgensen: Absolutely. And we're in a very historic moment in time right now, aren't we? With a global pandemic and UK having just gone into the second wave of lockdown. And it seems to me that we are very unsettled and a lot of people are very polarized about how they feel about things right now. So how do you cope with all this mental time world that we're going through?

Louis Theroux: Well, like everyone I've found the COVID era that we've lived through one of the strangest, if not the strangest situations that I've found myself in. I remember a year ago, December, 2019, on the radio a story saying," And in China, in the Wuhan province, someone's died from a virus." And thinking, well, excuse me, but no disrespect to the man and his family, but that doesn't sound like a big story, someone's died in China. I couldn't quite understand why we were being told, but I imagined there was a reason. I definitely didn't think, Oh, that means tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people will die in a slow tsunami over the following months. And it's been extraordinary and weird and depressing watching it unfold, but tied in with that is a dark sense of privilege to be living at a historic moment and to feel that alongside lots of other people we're being tested to see how we fare, to see whether we can measure up to the ideals that we have of ourselves. I've struggled, the first lockdown we had kids at home, I've got three boys, aged 14, 12 and 6, and the whole homeschooling scenario was an absolute car crash. I was literally running around the house grabbing iPads and devices out of the hands of my kids saying," Guys, I know you're not at school, but you are at school. You are at school, literally not physically, but you are at school now," and they were looking at me like I'm demented. We obviously not at school, we're sitting downstairs in the front room, have you lost your mind? And I had to relax and my wife who's, newsflash, the more sensible partner in our relationship. She was like," Louis, you've got to take a chill pill," as they say, and because we're all going through a lot and you can't be a [inaudible 00:12: 06 ], like a Prussian military officer, you actually have to cut some slack. This is how kids communicate, they're in a virtual playground, right? They're virtually talking to the neighbors at their desks by using their phones, the idea that you can have a lockdown on their phone use, that's a double imprisonment. That's a double lockdown, but all of that had to be grappled with. I've powered through it on an appetite surfing a tidal wave of Aperol and Prosecco. That's been smoothing the way somewhat, and then quite a lot of bourbon in the evening. And then keeping my mind right through a daily exercise, I do 15 minutes of online exercise, usually with Joe Wicks on YouTube, he has free videos that you can do, but it's not been easy, I think, well, I don't think for anyone, and I know there's people who have it far worse than I do, but here we are still in it and we have to get on with it because there's no alternative.

Musi Jorgensen: Tell me about it. We also have three children, three girls. I hear your pain.

Louis Theroux: Yeah.

Musi Jorgensen: It's very difficult. But I guess with that, there's been time to reflect, hasn't there? With all this extra time that we're given, being at home. Have there been things that you've, insights that you've come across you and what matters to you, what the next stage is going to be?

Louis Theroux: Well, so first of all, to acknowledge the fact that in a strange way, a lot of the work that I've done over the years has been some preparation for this. I mentioned people who thought the world was ending, oddly enough, the idea that a man somewhere might eat a bat that had eaten a pangolin, or a pangolin that had eaten a bat, that scenario never came up. UFOs came up quite a lot, angels, supernatural entities, but not pangolins eating bats, but that being said, large- scale ructions, disturbances in the civil fabric, all of that has been much discussed over the years in my programs. And in a general sense, all my programs, if I try and think about what the DNA of them is, it's to do with coping with adversity, people in different ways, either through quirks of psychology, through strokes of misfortune, or through extremely weird and self- sabotaging lifestyle choices, that they've come up against themselves and actually are involved in deep anguish and angst. And I think that in a grand sense is what we're all in now. And what I've learned is that, two things, I suppose, one is that human beings are immensely irrational, as much as we might like to think that we make the best choices for ourselves, in different ways, due to our wiring and our programming and probably our evolutionary heritage that we don't always make the best choices, sometimes we make terrible choices for complicated reasons due to the need for meaning in our lives, or some sense of significance. But the second part of it is that we also are enormously resourceful. When the UFOs fail to land, or when the Messiah doesn't turn up on time, you move on. And I remember even saying once to a guy who had predicted the end of the world afterwards, I said," Isn't that a little embarrassing?" When the world didn't end, I was like," Isn't that embarrassing? You've literally preached to thousands of people that the world was going to end. And here we are, several years later, and it was no ambiguity, you said it was going to happen then, you did a whole program for what was going to happen day by day, on Thursday, the mountains will crumble, on Friday, the forest will be laid waste and stars will drop from the sky. None of that has happened." And he said," Louis, it's a little like falling off a bike, you just get back on and ride again." He was from Scotland in case that wasn't coming through.

Musi Jorgensen: I didn't get that. Thank you. And you touched on those who have very strong beliefs of their way of life, or the end of the world, as you said, and we talk a lot at Salesforce about businesses striving for a single source of the truth when it comes to connecting with our customers, et cetera. And I think in everyday life that translates particularly now into striving to find the truth amongst this era of fake news, et cetera, that we're in. So I'd love to know a little bit about the process of you landing on finding the answers really, to all of the questions that are posed by people who've got different views?

Louis Theroux: Good question. And actually I feel like I'm at the perfect age to answer this. I turned 50 earlier this year in lockdown, had a lockdown celebration, but I remember when the internet first, well let's say when the world wide web first came along and it was around 93 and when it somehow emerged, there were a lot of articles, I was living in New York, saying, there's this new thing it's called the web, and there are hyperlinks and you click on them and you can see pictures. And I had only the year before got my first modem, it ran it 2, 400 BPS, bits per second. I don't know if that means anything to you, but based on extensive research, it took about two hours to download a photograph of a naked person. Okay. I don't know how long it took to download a photo of someone with their clothes on because that wasn't research I ever undertook. The following year, I got a 14, 400 BPS modem, I thought, wow, things are getting exciting now, this is really moving quickly. 20 years later, we think nothing of streaming a high definition film, but alongside that flow of information comes distorted information, distorted facts. And we have to pick our way through this overabundance, it's a kind of buffet in which you can eat anything you like, but the bad news is 10% of the food is poisoned. It all looks amazingly delicious, but unfortunately some of it will kill you. So, that's the world we find ourselves in. And I wish I could say, Oh, trust, only Legacy Media, but I tend not to think that. I don't see it as absolutely the case that all the Maverick voices are completely wrong and all the mainstream voices are completely right. That would be easy to deal with, but actually there's aspects of the free market of information that have been positive. I do think some of the bypassing of the gatekeepers has been positive, but it's incumbent on us to investigate and interrogate our sources. I do tend to trust, my main diet are the more traditional outlets of the New York Times, the New Yorker, I suppose, The Guardian, the BBC, of course, but alongside that, I get stuff off Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. And you just have to use your intelligence and to some extent, yeah, you have to trust your judgment and double check and triple check your information.

Musi Jorgensen: And how, when you know that something that somebody is telling you, one of your contributors is utter rubbish. I'm assuming there have been many times when you've been with those that, at the back of your mind, you don't believe what they believe. How do you remain [crosstalk 00:19:12].

Louis Theroux: Or indeed at the front of my mind.

Musi Jorgensen: Well, but when somebody believes so strongly that what they see is true, how do you challenge that without wanting to shake them and say for goodness sake, can't you see?

Louis Theroux: Can't you see sense? Can't you see what's in front of your face? Absolutely. Well, I think the key is, there's two answers to that. One is, because in a sense, my mission isn't to change people's minds, right? It's actually to elucidate the truth and bring home the material that will allow me to create a truthful portrait of a story that will connect with viewers. So part of challenging, sometimes it's just challenging directly. I remember having a conversation with a guy who was part of the Westboro Baptist church and he was called Steve Drain. And there are a hate group who go around picketing outside funerals with a unbelievably homophobic placards. And he was talking about Jewish people in a fashion that I found antisemitic. And I said to him," Newsflash genius, Jesus was Jewish," which was really wasn't designed to change his mind, I was just trying to come with a pithy zinger in order to get one over on him, and so viewers at home would feel that I'd hit one for the team. Do you know what I mean? But in the same spirit, there are times when you actually think it's more powerful to reach someone and to make a connection that will lead to them making different choices. In which case, direct challenging, or providing them with different facts, or real facts, doesn't always cut it, or tends not to be the answer, because humans are more influenced by a sense of shared humanity, like integrity, if you can connect with people emotionally, right? And let them know in some way that they mean something to you and vice versa, that's the foundation for a opportunity to actually connect and change people's minds. And it's speaking in a soft voice, it's speaking non- judgmentally, it's giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming that where they're incorrect, it's based not on a willful unwillingness to read the facts, or obtuseness, or a deliberate attempt to be deceived, it's to do with a good faith mistake, and a generosity of attitude that will... Because I do think people actively wishing to do wrong is the extreme rare case. Most people like to think of themselves as contributing to the welfare of society and the world, and that they are good people. Most people are trying to be good people most of the time.

Musi Jorgensen: And I wonder if one of the threads that joins up all of those people is, and we talked about vulnerability earlier, but is that they're trying to find security together in the beliefs that they have and in the way they live their lives, et cetera. And I think security is something that we all strive for, isn't it? As humans. And that when we don't have that's when we're vulnerable, which as you said earlier, is something that you tap into. Have you seen that element of coming together and feeling safe as one is something that drives a lot of people?

Louis Theroux: Yeah, for sure. But I also think then it comes a crunch time when people get so pressured that it becomes more complicated, the picture becomes more complicated. And I think in the first lockdown, what we saw was people banding together. There was something rather wonderful about different communitarian acts like clapping the NHS, or sending money to Colonel Tom who was walking a marathon to raise money for the NHS. And they're just different kinds of people reaching out, connecting and helping one another. Now we're in the second lockdown and the mood is slightly different. So we're in choppy waters. And I think the more we can do to try and keep the goodwill going the better. You read about far worse situations in history at times of war under tyrannical regimes, it would be wonderful to imagine that oppression brings out the best in people, or being brutalized does, but actually that's not always the case either. Suffering is not always enabling, so we can't become complacent. Sometimes extreme situations cause people to turn on one another. So at the risk of sounding a gloomy note, we need to keep an eye on that and make sure that people don't get scapegoated and try and preserve our civility and our sense of civic mindedness.

Musi Jorgensen: Yeah. And it's the uncertainty that everybody feels and how we're all going to navigate that together, I think, in looking out for each other and things like mental health massively impacted and, well, I think we'll see people have been changed at the end of all of this suddenly.

Louis Theroux: Absolutely. And by the way, what will the end of all of this look like? Because I think it's clear, it won't look exactly the same, even if it just means people will wear masks at concerts, right? Or live sporting events, or even if it means that if you're going to a place where there's older people, you will have to get temperature checked at the door, these all seem like realistic long- term ways of coping with the pandemic. But I do think the positive part is that if someone asked me, well, do you think we'll all be more serious after this? And I thought, well, if you mean serious as the antithesis of funny then no, because I think actually humor has been a brilliant way of dealing with this, and I think there's a comedy that is incredibly soothing because it relieves the tension, like a well timed joke in an extremely stressful situation is one of the most beautiful things in the world. But if you mean serious as the antithesis to trivial, then I think maybe yes, because the scope and scale of the loss of life and the deprivation mean that suddenly features in color supplements about what's hot and what's not, scarves they're so out, but Robbie Williams he's back or, you know what I mean? Ed Sheeran, hot, the Pussycat Dolls, well, they're not hot anymore, it's like, this is irrelevant. We've got people dying, and all of that feels ridiculous. And maybe that's good, if some of that nonsense melts away, I would think that's quite a good thing. I was thinking this morning about a time when I was at school and I hurt my elbow and I was in a queue with a school friend, well, he wasn't a friend, but he was at school with me. I was about 13, I think. And he said," What's the matter?" I said," Oh, my elbow really hurts." He said," I can make that elbow feel better if you want." I said," Really?" He said," Yeah." I said," Oh, go on then." And he slapped me around the face quite hard. He said," How does your elbow feel?" I said," What's wrong with you?" I was really shocked, but the truth was, my elbow felt fine because my face hurt so much. And I think COVID's been a big slap around the face, hasn't it?

Musi Jorgensen: What's been the most surprising thing, given that all of your, the past 25 years of studying human behavior, for want of a better word, what's been the most surprising thing that you've found out as part of speaking to all these people you've spoken to?

Louis Theroux: I think it would be nice having done this kind of work for all these years to have a pithy life lesson that I could impart and people could take away with them. I think that maybe the main thing is that we're all in different ways, struggling. We imagine that there's this illusory human, or utopian person whose needs are all taken care of, emotional, spiritual, and otherwise. I guess you'd say the enlightened individual, but my fervent belief is that that person doesn't really exist. And that we're at peace, forgive me for sounding morbid, when we're dead. And that actually you should embrace the nature of the human condition, which is to struggle. You don't arrive. I'm not trying to sound like a guru, I have a bad habit of sometimes doing that, but the nature of the journey is the journey itself, not the destination and that when you look back at life and you recollect those moments, that meant the most to you, I tend to think, it's not times when I was blissfully floating on a lion hole, it was times when I was up against it and struggling, but maybe did better than I expected or came good in some way and made it out of a given situation. For good or real, we are as humans, the human animal, isn't a logical creature, we are motivated by mysterious impulses that to a great extent are hidden from us. We crave the role of being the hero in our own lives. And sometimes that involves doing things that massively wrong- headed, or just weird, because they feel right to us or they give us some sense of significance. A guy once said to meet," Have you ever argued with someone in the Flat Earth Society?" I said," No." He said," Because it's maddening because fundamentally they don't hold their beliefs because they're correct, they hold them because they make them feel important." And that was a light bulb moment, that actually we hold very often those beliefs that give us some sense of significance. I'm more often surprised when people are not behaving weirdly sometimes, maybe that's a sign that I've been doing this too long.

Musi Jorgensen: Yeah. Not that you've been doing it too long.

Louis Theroux: I'm more surprised when I find that someone that I speak to is not beset by the ordinary human frailties, self doubt, confusion, insecurity, all of the above.

Musi Jorgensen: Well, I think it's something everyone struggles with, no matter what your beliefs are. I absolutely agree. The greatest growth that we go through professionally and personally is when we're overcoming adversity, and when we're learning how to overcome something, that's been a struggle and so we can either not meet that again or do something in a much better way. So I think you absolutely nailed it on the head.

Louis Theroux: Oh, thank you. That will be a first then. We'll have to transcribe this later so I can remind myself what it is that I say when I'm asked that question. And sharing those vulnerabilities is the basis for connection. And people sometimes say that, Oh, well it must really grind you down doing those programs where you go and meet people who've been trafficked for sex and pimps, or you meet people in mental hospitals, forensic mental hospitals, who've in the grip of psychosis, done dreadful things, or even God forbid spent time among sex offenders and pedophiles who are either in therapy or in some sort of supervise living situation. And my honest answer is I always feel a little bit fraudulent because I know I'm expected to say yes, it's really harrowing, and but luckily I have a wonderful wife and my kids when I get home and that's a bomb that salves the wounds. But the truth is, I feel as though my stories are really about people in abject situations in different ways, but trying to be better, even the darkest people, the people with the darkest impulses, the most questionable deviant impulses like sex offenders in a mental hospital, are in a place where notionally, they are trying to be better. There's a regime, a medical establishment that is trying to make them better. And as a foundation for seeing the world that going among people who in different ways are up against it, but trying to do better, I regard that as a positive act and I find that, forgive me, but I do find that quite an enriching thing for me personally. Did I just say that I find it enriching going into mental hospitals to talk to sex offenders?

Musi Jorgensen: We know what you meant.

Louis Theroux: Yeah, thank you.

Musi Jorgensen: That's fine. So what are you hopeful about Louis? Just as we wrap up, what's the future for us?

Louis Theroux: Well, I'm hopeful that we will come out of this with a restored sense of priorities. I feel as though we will come out of this with a sense of having survived, right? And having just to get through this, we should feel good about ourselves. I often think about, I've been lucky enough never to have been conscripted, I've never been part of a war. I think back to the generation of my grandparents and even my dad who basically could have been conscripted into Vietnam, but he went into the Peace Corps, and I dodged that particular ordeal, but I often think about the phrase from Henry the fifth, where King Henry is rallying the troops and says those who are abed will hold their manhood cheap, that they will not hear a Crispin's day. Right? The idea that you will be, when he's saying, you have to get through this extraordinary experience of facing the French, no disrespect to the French, in battle. And this is a terrifying thing that we're going to have to do, but you should consider yourself lucky, there will be people in the future when you speak, they will have to be quiet because you've gone through something extraordinary. And this is a privilege to be tested in this way, and the price of it is that you will have to go through it, but at the other side are the sunlit uplands of having done it. So I hold onto that, without adversity no triumph.

Musi Jorgensen: Absolutely. Well, it's been a huge privilege to talk to you and to get to know you a little bit more, and understand some of the insights that you've had in your fantastic career of speaking to an understanding people. Thank you so much.

Louis Theroux: Thanks Musi. I really enjoyed talking to you. Those were great questions and thanks for inviting me to be part of the podcast. It's different to be on the other side of the microphone as they say. I hope I did okay.

Musi Jorgensen: Well, you were a very generous guest. Thank you so much.

Louis Theroux: Cheers.

Musi Jorgensen: Thank you.

Michael Rivo: That was documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux speaking with Salesforce's Musi Jorgensen. For insights into this topic and others head over to salesforce. com/ blog for resources to help guide you through today's changing economic and social environments. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce studios. Thanks for joining us today.