On the pavement exterior the Netflix workplace, I stand in the rain, confused. Was that interview a bit of off? Louis Theroux appeared not to like my questions, which have been typical interview questions, associated to him and his huge shiny Netflix debut, Inside the Manosphere. He appeared, I don’t know, prickly? A bit testy? I’m inclined to rumination, so maybe I’m overthinking. Because Louis Theroux is an effective man, proper? He skewers the unhealthy guys. And but right here I’m, baffled. The solely factor to do is sit in a restaurant and replay the tape.
Theroux is solicitous, flippantly ironic in tone. “Louis,” he says. “How do you do?” I’m advantageous. Looking ahead to our chat, as you might think about. Theroux, 55, is perhaps north London dad in look – specs, gray T-shirt, black denims, sneakers – however he’s the grandmaster of each the immersive documentary and interview type. The son of American author Paul Theroux (a nepo child earlier than they existed), he has constructed a 30‑yr profession in tv, a lot of it at the BBC, making a advantage of being a socially awkward verbivore, hyper‑curious, super-funny.
His 90s stuff noticed him embedded in American subcultures – Nazis, gun nuts, porn stars, apocalyptic cults – simply to see what occurred. It was TV of its period in that it was gonzo, shock-driven, maybe a bit of ethically unsound in tone and the approach that it poked enjoyable at and portrayed its topics. Later, got here prisoners, opioid addicts and the Church of Scientology. Then there have been the interviews. The most well-known was with Jimmy Savile earlier than the crimes of the youngsters’s presenter grew to become public, to whom he posed the tentative query, “People say that you are a paedophile?” (He replied, “Nobody knows whether I am or not.”)
More just lately, Theroux joined the podcast universe with a present billed as “in-depth and freewheeling”. Then he grew to become a viral sensation when Jiggle Jiggle, a rap he composed in 2000, resurfaced. Perhaps as a result of there’s nothing gen Z likes greater than nostalgia plus a curiosity plus a dance routine, clips on TikTook and YouTube have been streamed a whole lot of thousands and thousands of instances. Shakira carried out it, as did Snoop Dogg and Megan Thee Stallion. Now the children knew who he was (to the despair of his personal – “Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?”). A-listers similar to Barry Keoghan, Paul Mescal, Florence Pugh and Justin Theroux, his cousin, appeared on the present.
While Theroux is accustomed to reward – together with for his current BBC documentary on the violence of ultra‑Zionist settlers in the West Bank – his podcast interview with musician Bobby Vylan in October was so controversial that British Airways paused sponsorship of his show.
He requested Vylan (actual title Pascal Robinson-Foster) what he’d meant by his “Death to the IDF” chant at Glastonbury last summer. Vylan mentioned he needed to finish the IDF as an establishment, however “end to the IDF” didn’t scan. Theroux mentioned he didn’t agree with “death to” chants full-stop. But there have been these, together with Dave Rich, writer of Everyday Hate, who have been offended that Theroux didn’t press Vylan on earlier requires “death to every single IDF soldier”. This, Rich argued, made the interview sound like a “soft-soaping” in distinction to his normal needling type; many listeners additionally balked at Theroux’s use of the phrase “post Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism” when discussing Israel and the struggle in Gaza. Theroux stood by the interview. While it was “painful” to lose a sponsor, he mentioned final month, his is a “unique place in the British broadcasting landscape. I’m willing to have difficult conversations and long may it continue … I’m very proud of how we handled the interview and how we did it.”
Now Theroux has a contract with world streamer Netflix, and that is the place we’re, in a windowless brown room on the fifth flooring of their London headquarters. He pantomimes a juggle asking the place I need him to sit and asks how lengthy I need him. He can’t final way more than an hour earlier than “the truth comes out. I have to watch myself.” The reality is sweet, I say, the reality is what we wish. He shrinks from my recording gadgets as if they’re two black scorpions. “That’s not off-putting at all to have two screens pointing at me. One of them showing literally what I’m saying as it comes out of my mouth.” He begins studying the transcription aloud in a type of repetitive meta-loop that would go on for ever if I don’t interrupt him. “Louis was stalling,” he tells the tape.
We’re right here to talk about Inside the Manosphere’s content material creators, promoters of utmost misogynistic ultra-masculinity. The documentary is well timed, coming after Adolescence (not an affect, he says) and the Epstein recordsdata. He calls it “the final boss subject in the video game of my career”, as a result of it attracts on themes he’s explored earlier than – the grownup movie trade and cam women, which is “adjacent to the OnlyFans” stuff right here, plus the far proper. Also, conspiracy theories.
And Savile, in fact. “I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but there’s so much Savile overlap. Savile would always say” – he slips into Savile’s nasal supply – “‘I can’t live with women. They’re brain-damaged. It doesn’t mean I don’t like them, but I can’t be around them too long.’ That’s kind of a manosphere concept,” he says, including extra, “‘I love women, but they’re not like men. They’re different, and they need men to show them what to do.’” He says Savile mentioned off-camera {that a} psychologist had informed him there was one thing in all ladies that wishes to be a prostitute. “Another manospherism, right?”
Theroux’s first encounter with the manosphere was through his three sons, now 20, 18 and 11. “Like everyone else, I realised they were on the phone consuming some of this content.” Nick Fuentes, the rightwing America First live-streamer, about whom Theroux made a movie 4 years in the past, has simply obtained “bigger and bigger”, he says. “He’s now saying he likes Epstein. That’s his latest bit of diablerie.” He spells D, I, A, B, L, E, R, I, E into the tape recorder and I do not forget that years in the past he entered a spelling bee in the US and did effectively.
Role fashions when he was younger included John Noakes, Peter Purves, Peter Duncan, whereas children now have characters similar to HSTikkyTokky, Sneako, Clavicular – he of “looksmaxxing”, the development, which originated in “incel” culture, for younger males to enhance their look. “On Blue Peter, they were teaching us to make a house out of sticky-back plastic. ‘Send in your old keys or stamps to raise money for Africa!’ Kids today are looking at streamers going, ‘Bro, look at that gyatt.’” He smirks like a schoolboy after utilizing this slang for a powerful butt, and says, “Too much?”
I point out Jordan Peterson and he stops me. He desires me to perceive that the time period manosphere, like numerous phrases which have captured the zeitgeist, is inexact. “I’m going to sound super-pretentious, but it reminds me of studying history. People talk about the English civil war and puritans and you’re, like, who was a puritan? They always said, ‘Puritanism is in the eye of the beholder’”– as in, subjective and used generally in a derogatory approach – “Manosphere, to some extent, is also in the eye of the beholder.” He says that at one finish are males like, say, Peterson, who promote old school or conventional views, “saying, like, ‘Oh, men and women are different and, actually, why can’t a man be a man and a woman be a woman?’ And you’re, like, OK.”
At the different finish are these in his programme who take their cue from the poisonous creed of Andrew Tate, who together with his brother Tristan is being investigated in connection with human trafficking. Theroux had needed Tate to play an even bigger position in the movie, “because he’s kind of Exhibit A in the culture”. They had “extended back and forth” on textual content with Tate sending lengthy voice notes. “I think part of him wanted to do it. He does do interviews,” Theroux says. He suspects Tate was in the end nervous. “I suppose I should be flattered that he didn’t, in a weird way.”
Instead, he tails HSTikkyTokky (actual title Harrison Sullivan), Ed Matthews, Sneako (Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), in addition to podcasters Myron Gaines and Justin Waller. They are proponents of “red pilling”, a time period borrowed from The Matrix, claiming to “see the truth for what it is” (eg feminism is evil; a secret cabal runs the world, and so forth). There’s a phase wherein Gaines tears aside younger ladies on his Fresh and Fit present. “You’re huge, you’re not attractive and for you to behave in the way you do is a fucking embarrassment to society,” he tells one. “You fat fucking bitch, get the fuck out of my studio.”
Amazingly, these males gasp if you name them misogynistic. They “love women”, they are saying. “I actually understand them,” Gaines tells Theroux. “And since I understand them, I know what is best for them.” “Better than them?” asks Theroux. “In many ways, yes.” Waller thinks the world is fucked up as a result of males are born with no worth and have to attempt to obtain it. There is a Sexual Market Value calculator standard on manosphere boards, the place males can enter their particulars – peak, earnings, health, penis size. Women, supposedly, have extra innate “value” and due to this fact extra energy. A younger lady challenges Gaines, “How are we born with value?” “You literally have a vagina and titties,” he spits again. Gaines says all the things about ladies is a lie as a result of they put on make-up and you can’t inform when they’re menstruating. He, like others, believes in “one-way monogamy” (the males can cheat). Waller boasts that his spouse packs his condoms earlier than he goes on journeys. Meanwhile, the ladies simply look pained.
It’s enraging to watch all this spew, I inform Theroux, and he says, “Good.” He desires it to be a difficult watch. At the identical time, it’s a tough panorama to navigate as a result of the terrain has been “policed”. “I was very keen that it shouldn’t be, like, ‘Oh look, there’s some people being sexist on the internet. There’s some people on the internet who don’t read the Guardian, let’s make a documentary about them.’ It’s about something far darker and deeper.” I ask what the suggestions from ladies has been on the movie and he says he charges the opinion of his spouse, Nancy Strang, though her favorite bits have been when the ladies have been talking. Which wasn’t usually.
As with all his work, Theroux walks the knife-edge between permitting topics their invective whereas making an attempt to get behind the facade. It’s no secret that there’s a deep vulnerability for which numerous manosphere figures are overcompensating, he says. “We sort of pull the layers back.” While enhancing he was struck by a selected second. They’d used an web clip wherein Tate says, “My dad beat the shit out of me. You grew up real quick, one good ass whipping.” “You realise how physically abused he was,” Theroux says. “You feel, ‘You absolutely are scarred by things that you lived through, aspects of that you’ve then internalised. You and your brother have created this trauma-bonded unit and projected these qualities of self-reliance.’ This brutal, almost apocalyptic thing that they’ve lived through has birthed an outlook that they then retail and sell.”
As effectively as the “lift yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative, manosphere influencers flog health and funding merchandise; questionable crypto “that no one can really understand”; actually, “anything that does well on the internet”, together with entry to OnlyFans women. There’s a “strange incongruity”, Theroux says, of advocating conventional values, whereas surrounded by women in bikinis. “It’s hard to separate the ideology from the grift. They will literally do or say anything that drives the algorithm.”
In January, a handful of those influencers “jumped the tracks”, in Theroux’s phrases. Sneako, Gaines, Waller, together with the Tate brothers, Fuentes and Clavicular filmed themselves driving round Miami singing alongside to Ye’s Heil Hitler. At the Vendôme membership the identical night, the music was performed whereas rightwing influencers raised the Nazi salute. It was, says Theroux, an enormous second in the tradition. “A new benchmark for outrageous and offensive behaviour.” He’s not happy with this, however in a purely journalistic sense he felt a twinge of reduction. “I had the dark pleasure of seeing that our story was still relevant. You have this fear that your story will not be relevant. If anything, it’s the reverse.”
The drawback with these screaming edgelords is the place to draw the line between not taking them too significantly and taking them significantly sufficient, he says. The concepts are outdated. They are “repurposed” from locations like the author Iceberg Slim’s playbook, the language of the so-called pimp code. Lately, Tate, Sneako and Gaines transformed to Islam in what seems to be like a race to discover a extra conservative ideology. But Theroux additionally argues that we shouldn’t underestimate the means of youngsters to learn stuff in opposition to the grain: to deconstruct, to grasp irony. He provides his children credit score for having the ability to largely see it as ironic. “Which isn’t to try and excuse how horrible some of it is.” He makes the questionable case for exposing children to it “in a way that allows them to sort of build an immune system” somewhat than “Oh, actually, this is genuinely distorting your worldview. I tend to think tiny amounts of horrific content are quite healthy to build your immune system, like being exposed to a pathogen.”
He shies away from the topic of Epstein after I increase it in the context of the male energy constructions that get rebuilt nevertheless a lot we tear them down. He agrees to the extent that there’s a hazard of seeing Epstein as an outlier. It reminds him of Savile (once more). “I take issue with the idea that this isn’t going on routinely,” he says. “So it feels a little bit tokenistic to me.”
“What do you think about Ghislaine Maxwell?” he asks all of a sudden. “Her level of complicity and what was going on with her psychologically?” I ask what he thinks. “I’m not sure. I’d like to know more.” He’s at the moment ploughing by way of the many documentaries on the couple. “These collapsing of categories of predator and victim, these qualities can infuse each other. Some of the victims were themselves recruiting other girls into the scheme, and at the top of that was Ghislaine.”
I watch for him to say extra about youngster rape, grooming, internalised misogyny. Instead, he says he’s “more intrigued by how Epstein got so much money. That, to me, is the mysterious part. The fact that he was able to prey on vulnerable people is horrific, but not surprising. His ability to seemingly defraud and inveigle money from sophisticated financiers, bankers, business people – I find much more weird and interesting.”
This being a profile, I – like Theroux when he considers his topics – am focused on what formed him. He grew up in the 70s, in a home that shone with educational brilliance. He has talked about that his working mom went to Oxford and that they’d live-in au pairs, and additionally that he spent hours watching the TV. He has joked that he trailed his extremely prized older brother (the author Marcel Theroux) like “an irrelevant bit of afterbirth” – his phrases – and that “teasing” was a huge characteristic of the household dynamic. There was additionally the “stash of Playboys” (his father printed tales in the journal) and Theroux mentioned he made liberal use of them – “it’s possible he thought I was reading his fiction”. Was it a aggressive house? “I had an older brother. We were competitive. Not in a negative way.” Right now, Theroux is discovering the couch uncomfortable, shifting like possibly it’s made not from black foam however sizzling coals. “Just fillet the childhood bit from my book,” he says, impatiently. “Available on Amazon, £9.99; audiobook free on Spotify. Whatever I said in there. Sorry,” he provides after a beat. “I’m not trying to be a dick.”
Paul Theroux’s infidelities aren’t any secret. Arguably there was one thing of the “one-way monogamy” of their marital set-up. As Theroux writes in his memoir, “My mother had a policy of being OK about sex on location when my dad was away and, to be fair, in the early days his trips could last as long as several months. Eventually his relationships with other women became more consuming, and the strain too much for the marriage to bear. But, like most parents of that era, they were figuring it out as they went along.”
So, was it a patriarchal house, I ask. He umms. “No.” He debates aloud how chores have been divided – sure, his mom did extra laundry, however then it wasn’t as if his dad was doing any vacuuming – which wasn’t precisely what I meant. “It gets petty when you start trying to interrogate it too much,” he says. “And then the sexual dynamics … Probably I’d let them speak to that.” He directs me each to his mom’s e book and a podcast he did with Germaine Greer as a result of, “my mum admired Germaine Greer’s writing and a lot of the things she had to say”. He will get irritable after I ask whom he felt nearer to rising up. “Come on. I’d get in terrible trouble if I answered that. They’re alive! When you asked that, did you think, am I going to get away with this?” He mimics, “Which one are you closer to …?”
He has described his mother and father’ resolution to ship him to board at Westminster (which wasn’t removed from house) as “cheating” as a result of they didn’t need to take care of the tough parenting stuff. “They were the opposite of helicopter parents,” he mentioned. Westminster is certainly one of the nation’s most elite colleges, so I ask if it gave him that exterior polish so usually referred to when describing these privately educated in British public life. Did it assist him navigate sticky confrontations in his movies?
“No, but come on,” he says, sounding concurrently bored and aggravated. “I definitely didn’t think, ‘If I just get my charming veneer going, then everything’s going to be fine and I’ll get a high-paying TV job.’” This isn’t what I meant. “I’m sure I do the same thing you do,” he continues, “try to be approachable and fun to be around, curious, interested and attentive.” He sighs. It’s not a cheerful sigh.
The story of how he was plucked from obscurity aged 23 by Michael Moore and given a possibility that he spun into gold is far rehearsed. He lived in New York together with his girlfriend, whom he calls “Sarah” in his memoirs, not her actual title, a time marked by staying in for days on finish to smoke portions of weed and watch movies employed from the retailer on the nook. He casts himself as a sort of ineffective boyfriend, incommunicative, petrified of intimacy and dedication, however they nonetheless married, then drifted, then divorced. He met Nancy at the BBC in 2003 – she was an assistant producer in the historical past division and he observed her as she handed him in the hall on her approach out to smoke. He fell in love on their third date. As effectively as discovering her “filmstar beautiful”, she equipped a few of the “emotional hinterland” he lacked.
They lived in Los Angeles and then, with two small children in tow, moved again to Harlesden in north-west London, Theroux persevering with with lengthy work journeys whereas Nancy stayed house. The set-up was unsustainable; the supply of limitless slanging matches, in accordance to his e book. (Theroux, “I’ve made lots of compromises.” Nancy, “Name one!”) Theroux mentioned he stumbled into “certain phrases that … I wasn’t supposed to say”. Not least, telling Nancy that she knew this was his job once they met. “What was I doing when we met?” she fired again. “I was making programmes, too. I wasn’t sweeping up bits of rice from under the table.” She referred to as his excuses “bullshit”. Then, throughout a minibreak for her birthday, she informed him she’d had ideas about different males. The disclosure seems to have been a jolt. They married in July 2012 and in his memoirs Theroux recounts his brother’s finest man speech, which drew comedy from a Twitter deal with Theroux used, “Loubot2000”. “Its conceit was that I was a temperamental bit of hi-tech kit that needed a troubleshooting guide.” He quotes, “Congratulations on purchasing your new Loubot 2000! … The Loubot 2000 is highly introspective and may sometimes go into power-save mode. To restore normal functionality, try asking one of the following questions: was Jimmy Savile really a paedophile? What do Scientologists actually believe? Are chimpanzees dangerous? This should reboot the system.”
Theroux has described the small joys of home bliss: listening to Radio 4’s Loose Ends whereas cooking; watching Match of the Day. He nonetheless reads, not with the drive of youth, when he consumed epic portions of historical past and philosophy (a celebration trick, or at the least an interview trick, is quoting Nietzsche). “I’m very boring,” he insists now. “I was thinking on the way here, ‘I think I’m the most boring person who ever lived.’”
It’s true that he brightens most when speaking about the “biological tracker” on his wrist. “I’m not going to give its name, because they don’t pay me,” he says earlier than whispering the letters W, H, O, O, P into the tape recorder. It provides him a sleep rating, which he checks solely as soon as Nancy has left the bed room (she finds his obsession annoying) and then congratulates himself when he will get 95%. “Sleep is my superpower,” he says.
So addictive is the tracker – and I can’t inform if he’s stalling or he’s genuinely this – he finds even unhealthy scores mesmerising. He had the three-week flu just lately and couldn’t take his eyes off his sluggish descent into the “red zone”. “Like, oh my God, I’m barely alive. I’m at 10%. There’s a paradoxical thing where you’re, like, ‘Oh, I want to make it go lower. I want to see how low my life force, can be.’ I’ve gone down to about 7% on a bad hangover and not much sleep. Like, New Year’s Day I’m right down there in deep, deep red.”
He has mentioned that he follows his morning exercise with two swift coffees, which makes him sound like a lion roaring at the day, however honestly he’s simply overwhelmed. He’ll wander round retailers forgetting what he got here in for. “I think my executive function is rather underdeveloped.” Is that one other approach of claiming he has ADHD? “Well, we all think we have ADHD, don’t we?” Actually when he reads about any situation he tends to diagnose himself. “I’m on the spectrum. I’m bipolar. I tick all those different things. Although I definitely don’t have the one that means you are very decisive or a psychopath.”
I ask, given his mom has educated as a therapist, if he goes to remedy. “No. Do you think I should?” I say the lexicon generally leaks into his commentary. “I’m an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists,” he provides. “I’ve never mentioned that in an interview before” – he was invited after doing programmes on anorexia, forensic psychological well being and postpartum psychosis. “I don’t think I can prescribe drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he laughs, however it’s not a cheerful snicker.
Drugs, by the approach, are one thing he talks overtly about. He helps the legalisation of hashish, and has mentioned, “without giving too much away”, that mushroom oil may very well be a very constructive expertise for some folks. On his podcast he requested Michael Palin if he’d ever carried out a “cheeky line” – that means cocaine – so I ask him the identical query now. “Have I taken a cheeky line?” he repeats again. “I think I’ll try and slip that one. I’ve got children.”
I say that I’d learn that he didn’t cry. “No, I can cry. Would you like me to cry now?” I say that I’d not. “I’m a man, though, so I don’t cry readily because we’ve been so imprisoned in these gender identities, it’s hard to break free, right?” Is he joking? “Listen to my interview with Germaine Greer.” For a cut up second he’s the grubby schoolboy once more, “That was a good [interview]. I asked her about Wap.” (Later, I do hear to the excruciating second wherein Theroux explains “wet ass pussy” to Greer.)
What may make you cry? I attempt now.
“Chopping onions.”
Did you cry when your children have been born?
He elongates the phrase “Wowwwww.” Then, “I don’t think I did, no.”
Did you reduce the wire?
“No offence, Charlotte, but that’s a kind of a cheap way of getting to a deep place. That’s like a podcast interview where they go – mocking voice – “‘What was your lowest ebb?’ I joke with my friends about those podcasts, ‘What was your lowest ebb?’ ‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’ Like, really?”
But I didn’t ask about his lowest ebb, I say. I add that he retains repackaging my questions into issues I haven’t requested. He recovers. “It would be quite weird if I cried all the time. And there’s no judgment, men who cry. But [I cry over] normal relationship stuff. I don’t want to get specific, but it wasn’t because I didn’t win a Bafta. Or because my interview wasn’t going well. It was probably something deep. Human feelings. Arguments. Misunderstandings. Relationship stuff. I cry because of life. How often do you think it’s normal to cry?”
I’d like to cry extra usually, I say. “Me too! Sometimes I’m, like, ‘Come on.’” He mimes screwing up his face making an attempt to cry. Then he tells me a narrative to illustrate. Last September, whereas dropping his eldest at college, he considered the journey they’d began 18 years earlier. He seemed round in any respect the different mother and father. “Greying dads with glasses, dressing 10-20 years younger than they are, in skinny jeans. I was, like, ‘I’m not an individual, I’m a demographic. I’m just a vector for various sociological forces creating my identity.’ It was a strange feeling.” And then he had a revelation. This wasn’t only a ceremony of passage for his son, however for him, too. It was his brother Marcel who mentioned to him, “‘It’s a bit like you’ve been delivered a parcel when he’s born, and then you successfully deliver it to the university and your job’s done.’ Which obviously it isn’t, life goes on, but I was, like, ‘Wow, this feels really emotional.’ And then I was, like, ‘I think I’m about to cry. I wanted to, I wanted to cry. And I felt, like, ‘It’s coming. It’s coming.’” He turned to his spouse. “‘God, can you think back to when he was born? Do you think we did a good job?’ And she’s, like, ‘Oh, knock it off.’ So we sort of aborted and I didn’t actually cry. But I think I could have done. So that’s what I was talking about: that’s normal relationship stuff.”
I ask about his alopecia. On Instagram he has been documenting his journey with the situation, which causes patches of hair loss, since 2023. “My hair seems to be growing back, not completely, but would you agree?” I say that I can see an enormous enchancment since the documentary footage. “Unfortunately for my Netflix debut, my hair was at its lowest ebb.” Alopecia is induced, he explains, “by your body attacking itself, thinking that your hair follicles are enemy agents. So, it eliminates them or disables them, as I understand it. I don’t have the hair I had 10 years ago, but the lesions seem to have gone and my hair is relatively normal now.” He exhibits me the place it has grown again white and gray as an alternative of brown. “But that’s all right, I don’t mind that.”
He has no thought what induced it. “I’d love to believe that it was because I was so stressed during lockdown, but I never felt that stressed, so that feels a bit dishonest. Like, it feels like a good card to play in an argument with your significant other – he play-acts a row – ‘Look what you did to me! My hair’s all falling out!’ But I don’t think it was related to stress. Who knows?”
It made him realise, nevertheless, how grateful he was for the hair he’d at all times regarded as unmanageable and unruly. He relates it again to the manosphere. “It’s this strange feeling of ‘Oh, my sexual market value is going through the floor, big time! Cratering!’”
Did dropping hair make him take into consideration his personal masculinity? “It’d be weird if it didn’t, right? Perhaps that’s one of my gifts as an interviewer or documentary-maker: I am quite available when I’m in a story, emotionally, and also kind of conceptually. I’m trying to be honest and think things through and figure out what part of this is correct, and what part of it is awful. You know what I mean?
“So in terms of the manosphere, yeah. You get a little bit of respect for being a successful broadcaster, but less respect because it’s legacy media, you are part of the highly sus BBC lineage about which they’re obsessed. You get credit when they see how big your social media following is and being 6ft 2in (6ft 3in is optimal). So, I’m thinking, like, ‘Oh wow, I’m kind of ticking a few of the boxes.’ Penis length is another one.” He clocks my face and says, “I know. Is that TMI? Another thing is how much money you have.”
How a lot cash does he earn? “Come on,” he says. He raised it. And he has requested others the query himself. “I probably have. I wouldn’t expect to get an answer.”
What does he spend his cash on? He begins mocking me once more, “‘What was the most expensive thing you bought?’ I feel like I could write better questions, Charlotte.”
I counsel that interviewing is harder than folks suppose. He concedes that it’s, particularly in the one-to-one format we’re doing now. Compared with this, he says, documentaries are “low-pressure”. The podcast retains him on his toes. “Sometimes you talk to someone who’s not all that forthcoming, but you can still get something interesting out of it and I go away and think, ‘Oh well, I think I did a good job.’” I ask how he copes with folks mendacity or being evasive. “I’m trying not to quote Nietzsche too much, because it sounds pretentious, but he says, ‘Even when you lie, you nevertheless tell the truth with the shape your mouth makes when you’re doing so.’ There’s metadata that gives the game away.” Indeed.
