YouSaid · the spoken record

Louis Theroux

lines on the record: 132
first: 2022-11-24
most recent: 2022-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Countercultural kind of dudes, or are you going to be like Victorian parents? Like, which is it? But in general, I kind of got it. I kind of got, I kind of got that. You know, that it was about there was a foundation of love and approval was unconditional. And I think if I had anything. To sort of reflect or approach them for, not reproach, but sort of reflect on things that in hindsight could have been different It's the feeling that because they were work focused and also because their relationship was complicated, sometimes it felt like”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of 13 to 18 or 13 to 17, they were part timing it. And if mum and dad, if you're listening, I'm sorry about that. That's what it is, right? I mean, it was a weekly boarding and they got me in the holidays, but other than that, they were getting me half of Saturday and Sunday. So I've got kids who are teenagers. And, you know, that's where a lot of the conflict kicks in. So when I look back at how I related to my parents, there were times when it felt they didn't get me or they were being too hard on me or the mixed messages because they were sort of one hand being free-spirited and saying, if you want to smoke some spliff, Louis, like, that's fine. Just be careful you don't get caught, that kind of thing. Or other times you'd be like, how dare you? You're going out there, you know, what are you doing? It was like, well, which part of the...”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know like There was a sense of. Of them having boundaries that I would respect and observe also they slightly cheated because we went to boarding school, me and my brother aged 13. So those difficult teenage years”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like Humour is really important. That's so dead, it's cringe. I wonder if my kids' voices in my head, but, you know, humor is a very important way of communicating. Humor is really, I often think in terms of how I see life. Why I'm worrying I sound a bit humorless. But anyway, how I see life is like humor is like the missing dimension in terms of, it almost can't really be expressed, but we shared a sense of humor as a family. And so we would make each other laugh and So teasing was important, just not taking yourself too seriously. My parents I would say like I respected them. I see how my kids behave towards me and I'm that classic thing of like, God, if I did that to my parents, that would not have gone well. It's not that I think of them being especially strict. I didn't feel they were at the time, but I wouldn't have dared to.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was kind of a bonus, but I didn't rush to show them. Like, I got all A's or, you know, I was, I came first in all the exams or whatever. I wouldn't really talk to them about it. Like that was just something that I did for me.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even though I think there's a tendency or a temptation nowadays to look back and be thinking about things that could have been otherwise and I think, you know, parts of that therapy culture are really valid, but there's also a sense in which you can focus on negative stuff. And I'm not sure at a certain point how healthy or helpful it is. And so for me. I never kind of questioned. The love, the love that they had for me. And it was never the case that I felt I was kind of. seeking their approval. Like I remember friends at school saying, well, my parents say if I do well in common entrance they're going to get me a watch. And I remember thinking that's quite weird, you know, or my parents never, I never felt like they needed to be that I was in any sense doing, like working hard for them. And if they took an interest in”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel really lucky that my parents. I feel as though they were, you know, they worked hard. I had a working mom, my dad was, as I say, had a huge drive to be successful, but I always felt like the love that they had for me was just taken as red. Like I never questioned it. Do you know what I mean? In a way that felt positive.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember feeling stressed when a friend said that to me and thinking, because then you feel like if you say, oh, you're my best friend and then it feels a bit inauthentic.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't feel particularly impressive. Like it felt like, well, I guess I can do well if I work hard. It's not like I'm kind of brilliant like my older brother. But I think when I, you know, again, in hindsight, I think mainly what I see is A sense that I just felt like this was something I had to do. It wasn't a choice. And I even later on when I was at university, I sometimes used to worry that I wonder if I'm missing out. You know, people say it's the best years of your life and you should be just going wild, having fun. I did some of that, but I was also conscious of maybe I'm missing out by working, by studying too hard.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“self belief or her sense of her own destiny whatever it was and in her small peer group of kids who were educated at a state school and then through her own hard work and the support of her teachers going to Oxford you know in the 60s as a woman that was extremely unusual so that was in the air but in the end and my older brother who was very studious and the other thing just to reflect on is that I saw my brother as the more brilliant child like he was the way I saw at the time was more effortlessly brilliant like sort of child prodigy material you know and I thought I was just kind of sort of irrelevant bit of afterbirth that you know trailed around after him and so when I noticed that I was getting fairly good results when I saw 1112”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just without any leg up in life is an amazing thing. And I wonder if I've ever told him that. I hope I have. Anyway, he'll listen to this probably because he follows my career with interest. So some of that I would have taken on board just through osmosis of seeing that likewise my mum being super studious going to Oxford. She grew up in tooting and her sense of”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was all of the above. Like my dad's got, both my parents have work ethics that border on the sort of being over the top. My dad would, you know, he's a, as I said, he's a writer, and at the weekends, like, he didn't really take weekends off. Like, certainly Saturdays you would often be writing and Sunday mornings, he was often writing. And he's an extraordinary, I want to give both my parents a shout out. See, my parents were. were basically first generation university educated came from very much not at the high table of life and so for my dad To sort of become a wealthy literary writer is kind of an amazing thing that he did. You know, in the world of... It's one thing to be a popular novelist. That's hard anyway. To be a novelist or travel writer who's extremely successful and sold hundreds of thousands or millions of books.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who I am. And I think, you know, I could say, oh, well, I was a younger child. My parents found me funny and I wanted to perform and I wanted my dad. I wanted to get the approval of my parents by being silly. But the fact is, who knows? Like, I just know that. Things like your sense of humor or your inclination to be cheeky. Just always been in me, you know, I'm slightly wary of attempting to. to sort of unpick where that comes from because I just know that's always been in me.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I say, it would have been maybe five or six, seven years old, and the teachers were like, really? Yes, he's a very sensitive, like, just be mindful that, you know, things you can say might hurt his feelings, something like that. And they were struggling to recognize her description of me. And then on the way out of class, she passed the classroom and could see through one of the glass windows in the door. And I was running along the desktops or doing a dance on top of a desk. In other words, like, It was almost like in the setting itself I was a wild child and running amok, but also I had like his doubling. Then I go home and kind of be worrying about small, which I think is probably still true of me in some ways that I have that sort of disruptive trickster impulse alongside certain. Certain sensitivity.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a sort of rambunctuous side and almost in social settings, my mum tells a story essentially in my book of how when I was about five or six I would come home and I'd be really sad. I'd be like, I don't know. I don't think I don't like school anymore. And she'd sort of think, well, Louis's obviously not getting on well at school. I need to talk to his teacher. And she went into class and talked to the teacher.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite attached to this narrative of myself as sort of super SWAT, right? Super studious. And I've looked at some of my old report cards and some of them are. Especially when I'm six or seven, sort of say, you know, Louis, a pleasure to have in class, but sometimes it would be nice if you would let other pupils speak. He enjoys the sound of his own voice kind of thing, which is very apropos for this podcast, probably.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are subconscious. Like, I'm not thinking, oh, how can I control my anxiety? But I would just find that if exams were coming up, I'd get super anxious. And I don't mean to pathologize it. Like I've never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. I've just slightly worryed. And as it happens, I've become less worry prone as I've grown up. And it may be that there were other things going on, you know, in my family life, who knows my parents' marriage wasn't always happy. They subsequently divorced. There were other things that probably were going on that were stressful. But for whatever reason, I found that almost without meaning to, I would took my studies very seriously. I have to sort of slightly check myself when I say this because I'm also aware that I've looked back at some of my reports.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what it is is um Well, I worried about things in general. And, you know, one of those worries was. Homework or doing well in school. Another worry was getting on with my peer group, but insofar as I can control those sources of anxiety, Work is actually relatively straightforward. Like, in terms of how do I get more, you know, how do I attempt to relate to people better? Well, that's kind of hard. It's like mysterious, but how do I do well at these assignments I'm being given? Then you just sit down and do them until you get it right. And a lot of these things are”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then having done well at Oxford, left university and at that point was like, well, what happens now? That was when it felt like, okay, now I've no longer really got a clear path. Does that make sense? I think If you are if your academic, if you find academic work not easy, but you find that you do well at it because it's not easy, but you apply yourself and you do well, then sometimes life can be a weird. Bump in the road, like real life. It's something like, well, where are the exams? Because I know I can do those. You know, what do I do now? So for a while, I thought maybe I would be like a professor or an academic or something. But then something in me told me that wasn't quite right. So then the rest of life is another story, but I hope that sort of answers your questions about those different.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not true at all. If anything, my friends were just as naughty and were leading me astray, but nevertheless, because I could go home and then become sort of organized and focus on my work, I got for a brief period I got labelled as the troublemaker. Anyway, going through school, I sort of the lodestars for my sense of who I was and how I would progress in life such as it is. I mean, I was never that tactical, but as I went through school, I thought, well, I'm pretty good academically. I guess I'll just do well in exams and stuff and then see what happens. And meanwhile, with my friends, we'd be seeing movies. I got into rap music in the late eighties and would dress like a hip-hop nerd. I was smoking quite a lot of weed, but still studying. Again, age 16, 17, but it never really interfered with my work. I went on to Oxford.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not consciously, but again, looking back by working hard by sort of just sort of becoming almost like super focused on academic work. And as a result, I did very well in school. You know, like those people who look back and say, like, well, I was a fuck up in school, I was the opposite. Like, I didn't always, you know, I would get in trouble. Like, and sometimes I was regarded as, especially when I was younger, 12, 13 as a disruptive element because I was also quite cheeky and sometimes tried to communicate and connect with people via teasing, right? Which is, I don't know, that's a common, it's quite a British thing in a way. It's certainly a big thing in my family was what's now called bants, right? And sometimes I try and do bants with my teacher and then it wouldn't go well. And so, but in general, which is confusing, like regarding being regarded as black sheep in class or a disruptive person in class and then, but then also getting in trouble, they said like, it's fine for you to mess about and get in trouble. And then you do the homework and you're fine, but you're a bad influence on the other kids. I used to get told that you're a bad influence on your...”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an old English or maybe British tradition where there's a big poll. I think it's like a fertility rite. It's a touch of wicker man about it. You know, it's an enormous kind of mast, a pole, like maybe like a totem pole almost like 20 feet high. And then there's ribbons around it. And as children, you would skip around it and you would sort of braid the ribbons together to form nice patterns. And I remember seeing them doing it in primary school and thinking like, that looks really hard and I'm going to have to do that next year and I don't know how I'm going to do it. I remember being preoccupied with how am I going to learn how to do that. I only mention that as an example like there were other things like just reading before I could read and remember seeing my older brother reading and thinking, I don't know how you do that and just getting very worried about it. I'm someone who is, I know everyone worries, but I just feel as though that feeling of worry and anxiety was quite a strong background note. And sometimes I would control my anxiety”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the other part of it was that I was quite an anxious child. So I worried about everything. I would think about things that were on the horizon. Like when I was five or six years old, I remember fixating, you know, there were various things that came and went that really worried me, but one was the idea of maypole dancing, which was a big, I don't know if it's still in state primaries at that time, every May holiday, like you would do maypole dancing.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of read back, read back what I do now into that. But I just know that that friendship group was very important to me. And maybe counteracted some of the more, because I was academic. I did really well at school. I could just go on and on. Shall I keep going”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The countervailing impulses of growing up in the seventies and eighties in South London and being exposed to funny creative people, and my friendship group, who some of them had gone on to work in a civilian, quote-unquote lives as restaurateurs or music, other stuff, but saliently were Adam Buxton, Joe Cornish, and another friend Zach Sandler, who were super creative. Adam and Joe went on to have their own TV show and I was conscious of falling in with a little group Amelia of like-minded kids who were very funny, really into movies, TV, and that was where I suppose I began to feel that there was, well, you know, I don't want to, in hindsight, it's tempting to.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think underneath it always a feeling that to really count in life, you should be a literary writer. That was without me fully maybe acknowledging it, that was underneath this thing that you should really, I think still my dad probably feels that. Like he's very supportive of me and my TV making, but he's like, Lou, have you thought about writing another book? Lou, you've got time, you've got the talent. I don't want to push you into this, but Lou, you should think about writing a book. That's a great idea from a book, you know, that kind of thing. Anyway, so all of that was underlying my attitude to life. Then they sent me off to school, primary school. I'm going to have to, I mean, you wanted a long answer. This is maybe more than you bargain for. I suppose alongside that is the influence of friends. And, you know, I can start.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite like other people. You know, other people were maybe not quite as smart or not quite as literary. And I don't, I don't, you know, I strive not to endorse whatever is in me remains in me of that I try to unpack and eradicate. But nevertheless, that's the way, looking back on it, that's something that I see and pick up on. My dad's a writer, a novelist, my mom is a, you know, after teaching, my dad became a very successful literary novelist and travel writer. My mom went on to become a radio producer and worked for the BBC World Service, which is, for those who don't know, that's the service that broadcasts all over the world. And it's a bit like Radio 4, but this tiny language is extraordinary institution. It sort of represents in some ways the best of the BBC. So I was growing up sort of aware that we were a family that loved books and loved reading. We watched TV and listened to pop music and did the normal things.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As people who really encouraged us to open our minds and maybe it was 99% positive, 1%, I think like a lot of people, people use this term social justice warriors, right? That's a form of judgment about overly do-gooding. There's an element of I don't tend to use that term because it's been weaponized. But I suppose in a sense my parents were kind of social justice warriors. Like they were very much encouraging me to challenge or us to challenge racism where we saw it, to challenge sexism, to be open to new experiences, not to fall into easy judgments about other cultures and other countries and other people. And I only say the 1%, sometimes that can be inflected with a little bit of a sense of superiority. And I talk a bit about that in my book, a slight feeling that we weren't really like.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well first of all my parents are my mum's British, my dad's American. They are both in different respects free thinkers. They grew up in the sixties and they embraced aspects of the counterculture. They regarded their own parents as being in certain respects limited and cloistered. And so my mum joined VSO volunteer service overseas to get experience of life in Africa. My dad joined the peace corps. He would have been probably enlisted to serve in Vietnam and he didn't want to do that. So he went to teach in Africa as well. And that's where they met. So I was raised in Singapore where they were teaching. My brother was born in Uganda where they were teaching at that time. My older brother. But then they settled in London. And so growing up, I was conscious of them.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my goodness, we could, I could spend two hours answering that question on its own. I don't know how interesting it would be. I'll try and give you a brief answer”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My relationships as a life support system for my kind of work self instead of the other way around, saying to my wife, well, this is what I do. I did a lot of great segments just by being available at a moment's notice. I just think, oh, this isn't going well. So it became a bit of an impasse.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just so curious about what takes someone to that place. Why people do the things that they do. The question I get asked most often is how do you not get angry with some of these people, especially the ones who are sort of spewing hate? If people see you're attempting to wrestle intimacies from them, that's never going to go well. I think also at some point we think maybe the other person's got it figured out and I haven't.”
2022-11-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Louis Theroux: "The Thing That Makes Me Great At Work, Makes Me Bad At Life!" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT