The Louis Theroux Interview

November 17, 2022·55 min·4 clips

A 1997 book co-authored by Jacob Rees-Mogg's father predicted 'persistent make-believe' media and violent nationalist backlash from the internet — and its authors later founded Newsmax.

A microphone changes hands. Gabriel Gatehouse starts by calling the series what it is: a story about a crazy conspiracy theory, a cabal, and an election that may or may not have been stolen. Then Louis Theroux steps in. The handoff is playful, but the subject stays serious, because the weird stuff is treated as something worth looking at closely. Spelunking becomes the image they keep coming back to. Theroux and Gatehouse talk about dark spaces as places to inspect, with jokes acting more like small lamps than escape routes. America is the ground under all of it. The conversation shifts from conspiracy folklore to a theory of power shaped by the internet and its decentralized effects. A book becomes the trail. They describe it as scary, interesting, and basically a guide to making money during mass upheaval. The claim is blunt. Nation states, in this version of the future, lose their ability to collect taxes and keep a monopoly on violence. Something else takes their place. Sovereign individuals become the imagined winners, a handful of people rich and powerful enough to rule where states once ruled. The promise sounds close enough to touch. Gatehouse and Theroux point out that, like the American dream, it stays out of reach for most people. The names get heavier. Peter Thiel sits near the argument, through his foreword to the reissued book and his place on the Republican right. Elon Musk is handled with care: Gatehouse says he does not know whether Musk is a big fan of the book. Bitcoin enters the family tree. Its believers see blockchain money as a way to pull control from the state and hand it back to sovereign individuals. The absurdity never leaves. What starts as a trip through strange claims turns into a sharper question: who profits when upheaval becomes an investment thesis?

As heard by us

A careful, unnerving conversation about conspiracy culture, power, and the stories that take root around both.

The Coming Storm gives Louis Theroux room to do what he does best: stay curious without pretending the answers are simple. It starts with Jacob Chansley, aka QShaman, then moves through Peter Thiel, The Sovereign Individual, Bitcoin, and the argument that the internet's…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want conspiracy culture traced with intelligence, irony, and no free pass for the nonsense.

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