Louis Theroux

Hello, Lewis Feerox here, aka Louis Theroux.

Exciting news, my multi-award nominated podcast returns for an eighth series next Tuesday with guests as varied as footballer, pundit and podcasting titan Gary Lineker, high-kicking Spice Girl Melanie See,

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Looking forward to the conversation.

So to dial back...

I mean, I'm very self-conscious about not being an expert on this specific subject.

I'm a generalist and I do all kinds of documentaries on forms of human, what I call weirdness.

It's not a very exact term, but ways in which we as people...

act in ways that are sort of self-sabotaging, that are informed by some kind of tribalism or bigotry sometimes or criminal action or impulses coming from the most basic parts of our brain.

And in a way, the settlers and the occupation of the West Bank speaks to several aspects of that, which is,

Informed by a kind of religious nationalist tribalist mindset and supported by a kind of military slash judicial infrastructure backed up by the army, the IDF.

So I've done cult stories in America.

I've done stories about racism and nationalism in America.

I've done crime stories in America.

And this is all three unfolding in this relatively small area of the West Bank.

So that was what took me there in 2011.

And it was extraordinary, just to say, in the kind of the broad buffet of the things that I do, it was extraordinary to see extremism sort of played out

live before your eyes in such a mainstream way.

It's hard to put it more exactly than that.