Jon Ronson: Nine things we learned when he spoke to Louis Theroux

With his eight-episode series Things Fell Apart complete, Jon Ronson sits down with his friend, and one-time rival (more on that later), Louis Theroux. Together they look back on the events and conversations that inspired Ronson to make a series about the culture wars, the things he’s discovered along the way, and their history as tellers of unusual stories. Here are nine things we learned about Ronson from their fascinating chat.

In creating Things Fell Apart, Ronson says he was keen not to make a series about the culture wars because “stories about the culture wars become part of the culture wars; they elicit rage from the audience.” Instead, he decided to focus on people who were involved in events that started the culture wars. For Ronson, this meant telling stories that weren’t about people on the fringes of society but people who have become part of mainstream culture. “I think we both started with going way out to the furthest corners of society to find our stories,” he says to Theroux. “As we’ve grown older, we’re going more and more into mainstream society. This story is about us. The reason I wanted to make this show is because we’re the ones falling apart on Twitter, we’re the ones who are getting so angry, or our loved ones are getting so angry.”

Ronson is ostensibly a documentarian, but he doesn’t see himself as looking for incendiary situations to report on. He doesn’t look for events, he looks for stories. “I don’t think in polemical terms, I only think in storytelling, human terms,” he says. His entire intent with making Things Fell Apart was not to create a history of the culture wars but tell a human story each week, “because the whole thing about unfolding human stories is they’re way less ideological than polemics… You’re not evoking rage, you’re evoking curiosity and empathy.”

Ronson and Theroux have a chat about where they find their ideas. Theroux says Ronson finds a lot that “aren’t on my radar”. Ronson says ideas can come from a single paragraph in a book. He found the story of Frank Schaeffer, featured in the episode 1000 Dolls, about abortion in America, via a fleeting mention in a book called A War for the Soul of America. Many of his ideas come from “obscure papers written by psychologists in the 60s and 70s”. Shocked, Theroux says he feels he’s “missing a trick”.

In 2008, Ronson made a film about the singer Robbie Williams and his interest in UFOs. Clearly the pair have stayed in touch as Ronson says it’s Williams who partly inspired him to make Things Fall Apart. “I got contacted by Robbie Williams during the pandemic… He was toying with QAnon,” says Ronson. QAnon began life as a conspiracy theory about a powerful satanic paedophile ring in Washington DC but grew into a larger conspiracy-based political ideology. Williams was interested in it but didn’t believe it because he was named as being part of it, which he knew wasn’t true. He wanted to know Ronson’s thoughts. “It was so early that I didn’t really know much about QAnon,” says Ronson. Ronson became curious and decided to investigate more. He was struck by how quickly people believed the conspiracy theories. He thought, “something’s happening to us that’s making us change in this way. So that was my starting point.”

Ronson thinks the birth of the culture wars goes back to libertarians creating the internet: “The internet was created by libertarian, utopian tech engineers, and part of their utopia was… no rules. Everything should flow unencumbered. Doesn’t matter whether it’s good ideas, bad ideas. All the chaos, all the fighting, all the screaming… the fake news, the presidents who rose through fake news, the abuse, the suicides, the cancelling, the public shaming – it’s all come about because we allowed libertarians to design the internet.”

Part of Ronson’s job is to ask difficult questions of people who don’t want to answer them. The same is true of Theroux. “You’re conflict averse, I’m conflict averse, yet we spend our time putting ourselves in very conflict-heavy situations,” says Ronson. To explain his reason for pursuing “conflict-heavy” situations that he’d usually rather avoid, Ronson quotes Theroux: “I once heard you say, ‘Not doing it is worse’. When you’re back home and you need the material to put together your story, there’s nothing worse than not having that material.”

Asked to pick a favourite episode of Things Fell Apart, Ronson immediately names the third episode, A Miracle. It’s the one about TV evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and her meeting with Steve Peters, a gay pastor with AIDS. “It’s the one uplifting, moving episode,” says Ronson. “It’s about things coming together instead of things falling apart.” He says it got the best response of all the episodes and he wondered why. “The message of the story is connection and empathy. It’s warring factions coming together.” He says the show was the fastest one to put together. “It just goes to show, I could agonise for six weeks on a radio show… but a really good story can also be made very quickly.”

Ronson’s books and podcasts involve talking to people he often fundamentally disagrees with. He says it’s essential he approaches everyone with empathy, even those he doesn’t like. “I go into every situation from a position of empathy,” he says. “There must be something we can connect over, even if I find your views abhorrent.” Maintaining it can be difficult. “Sometimes they behave in such a terrible way, or you learn something about them that’s so terrible that your empathy is challenged and then eroded.” However, he says the erosion of empathy can itself become “the arc of the story”.

You may not guess it, given how affable both men are, but there used to be a significant professional rivalry between Theroux and Ronson. They both started to find fame in the late 90s, both via their love of exploring unusual stories. Apparently, that is now all over. As the interview closes, Ronson says, “I feel so glad there’s no animosity between us. It’s all over… I’ve matured my way out of any destructive thought spiral I might have had about you in the 90s” Theroux says he was hoping for a bit more of an emotional reaction about how their friendship has grown. “When you win BAFTAs, all I do now is cheer,” offers Ronson.