Empire: World History - 361. Louis Theroux On The Settlers, The Manosphere, & Tribalism

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

William and Anita are joined by Louis Theroux to discuss his documentaries on the Settler movement in the West Bank, and explore how extremists operate. What are the commonalities between HS TikkyTokky and the mother of the settler movement, Daniella Weiss? How do the extremists in these documentaries use shamelessness to their advantage? And what does Louis think about having invented “The Theroux Method”? To listen to our series on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, head to episodes 346-353.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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slash empire. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnond and me, William Durumple. Very recently, as part of our series on the Arab-Israeli conflict, we talked about military occupation of the West Bank after the 1967 war and how it marked the beginning of the settler movement. And I think certainly the most impactful piece of media that has shown a light on this in the last couple of years. Certainly the most important thing and the most watch thing on the BBC about this was Louis Theroux's 2025 documentary The Settlers, which actually was not his first foray into. this territory. He had earlier done a 2011 documentary about the same movement called the ultra-Zionist. Today we're very lucky to be joined by Louis to discuss his work on this topic.

Welcome, Louis. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. Well, I mean, we're thrilled to have you because, you know, in a way, you've had two bites at this particular piece of fruit. Tell us why, you know, it was important to go back because 2011 was ultra-Zionist. And, and, and, and, you know, That was a film where the protagonist of your second film sort of makes a brief appearance. And then you had set-clos. Yeah, she's almost a cameo in that. 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 self-sabotage. 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 area of the West, 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. I know exactly what you mean, though. Aspects of sort of a kind of conspiracy-minded or gun-obsessed American extremism

you would see in the hills of Idaho or Montana or, you know, I mean, all over, but kind of isolated locales, but generally not backed up by the army or by law enforcement. And here it felt like it was part of day-to-day life. In the years that followed, I moved on to other stories. I made three trips for that 2011 film. Post-October 7th, I'd been reading that the situation was even worse. I mean, it never kind of, it was never too remote from my thinking. Like, whenever I thought back about story, I'm always thinking about revisiting.

But for this one in particular, because it was, as I say, so extreme, it felt like this well, there's a form of apartheid taking place in the West Bank and to see that, you know, not in history books, but in plain sight in here and now. So having read about it in the New York Times, the New Yorker and a couple of other places post-October 7th and hearing that it was more, if anything worse, that the displacement was going on at a higher rate, that the level of de facto ethnic cleansing was taking place more intensively, I thought it would be worth going back. I mean, it is such a powerful piece of television.

If you're one of the maybe three people who hasn't seen this already, go and watch it. Just give you a taste of this. I mean, there is a moment in your Settler's documentary, which to me really stands out. It's that moment when a 79-year-old woman shoves you in the chest hard. And not just any 79-year-old woman, we should say. We're talking about the God. mother of the Israeli settler movement. And when I said, you know, she played this came a role in your first and then she came back.

We're talking about a woman called Daniela Weiss, who has the ear of Netanyahu's office. That comes across beautifully in your documentary. Tell me, what makes you think she said yes to you? Because you have a reputation now. Basically, people don't come out very well after you scrutinize them. You know, you ask them to face what it is they're saying and doing. Why did she say yes? Well, I sometimes think that people when they watch my films see what conforms to their way of thinking.

So that in other words, if I do a story about something like the Westboro Baptist Church in the Midwest, you know, a religious hate group kind of a cult, you know, you or I might watch them think these people are deeply destructive. They watch that film and think, yeah, I think we did a pretty good job of getting our message across and the idiot journalist doesn't get it, right? Right. So I think Daniela Weiss would see that film, you know, the settlers or indeed the ultra-Zionists and think, yeah, it's what I expect from a kind of brainwashed BBC journalist. And that's fine. She will speak to almost anyone. Like I think even if Al Jazeera asked for an interview, she'd probably be inclined to grant one. She's so uninterested in the reactions of people outside of her. way of thinking that she couldn't care less. In fact, I think it's really striking. You know, she's just rather, I should say, paint a picture for those people haven't seen it. She's sort of kind of rather a charismatic as many people on the extremes are. Like, certainly in leadership positions. Her level of, you know, for her age of her ability to galvanize and kind of win over

the cohorts of the people who are inclined to sympathize is extraordinary. Alas, it's dedicated to this very exclusionary vision of a greater Israel that takes over not just the West Bank and Gaza, as we see in the film, but in fact, I think she'd like parts of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and so on. But she'll speak to anyone. And I think, in fact, when she pushes me, it's almost, I want to say this hesitantly, she pushes me, I should say, as a way of illustrating, when I ask her, you know, is she not troubled by the actions of settler extremists, these people who who are on video going about torching, intimidating, attacking, shooting, Palestinians. I say, like, you've seen this.

Like, this is going on all the time. And she says, well, that's only ever a reaction. And you're only seeing half the story. That's in reaction to something probably much more horrific that's taking place. And for example, if I push you and she pushes me, you're going to push me back. And then surprise, surprise, like I choose not to push you. You stand there and she sort of, again, do watch this and I will never do this justice, but she sort of just looks at you for a while. And it's in the silences that, you know, we as the

audience can get to feel all the feels and think all the things. But she does say right at the end, she goes, I wish you would have pushed me. I wish you would push me. But the other revealing thing, because there's a second, I met her three, on three occasions on that trip. And the first interview is at her house. And I mentioned to her that moving, civilian populations into an area that's under military occupation is considered a war crime, as I understand. Yeah, I mean, you're very brave. You go straight out and put it to her.

Yeah, thank you. I don't know how brave it was, given she's an older lady. I think I could take her. If we rumbled, I think I could have taken her. And she laughs. Her reaction is, she laughs. And so you are sitting, so you are involved in the war criminal or something like that. And I said, well, I'm interviewing you.

But in other words, she, finds it funny, so negligible, so trivial that it's actually amusing. The only time you see her lose her composure, because even the push, I would argue, is playful, is intended playfully. But when I say that actually by the Israeli establishment itself, that even by figures from the security establishment, they view her activities as dangerous and terroristic, like that she's been described by Ronan Barr, who I think was the head of Shinbet. She got quite shirty about that. As a terrorist, then she gets really angry.

And I think it speaks to that thing which you were referred to, the idea that she cares nothing for the judgment of the world. But within her fraternity of the religious Jewish community, the idea of them pushing back, the idea of them passing judgment on her is deeply offensive. because they're, in her eyes, traitors to their own cause. No, before you do one of these things, and you go to, I mean, you've got some pretty, you know, extreme folk, not just weird, but folk, but some pretty extreme folk over the course of your career. Do you, does your sort of heart sink when you're sort of about to enter a settlement, or do you sort of salivate at the prospect of copy, that, that, that, the slither of ice in the heart of the journalist that you need?

I don't think I'd be doing the job I did if my heart sank. Every time I was going to meet someone with views that I found objectionable, maybe what does it say about me? But I'm not sure. But I do, there's a part of having a front seat, a front row seat to the extremes of the human experience that I genuinely enjoy. And I know that sounds, there wasn't as awful as, you know, what's happening in the West Bank is extraordinarily awful. Like before doing this call, I was thinking about how do I convey what it's like? And I was thinking about the activities of ice in America and the fact that last year two people in Minnesota, I think in Minneapolis, were shot dead by ICE, the immigration enforcement agency. And I was thinking like, but what's happening in the West Bank is like that day in, day out.

On a much bigger scale. Yeah. All through the year being done by a military force that isn't even from that place. You know, imagine a military force coming in and shooting people in the streets for alleged infractions. And so the outrage should be commensurate with the awfulness of how that looks. But having said that, when I was there, there wasn't a day when I woke up when I didn't think, what a strange and dark privilege it is to be able to document that and to be able to be on a story that feels worthy of the world's attention.

And it is, I mean, there's lots of reasons to be anxious doing that sort of A, obviously, it is potentially quite violent and difficult, and you did have lots of people with guns and there are stone thrown at cars in the West Bank and, you know, there's a lot goes on there. And particularly at the moment, it's a rough time. But also, it's the hottest of all potatoes to get through a broadcasting system. It's the hottest of all potatoes in terms of audiences. People feel very, very strongly about this. Were you anxious that you were going to tread on landmines? The short version is yes.

I give credit to the BBC for allowing me to make the film, and it was invigilated and supervised scrupulously, almost infuriatingly so, at every stage, but not just in terms of doing justice, like absolutely being scrupulously correct about how Israeli military actions or settler activities are discussed, but also doing kind of correctly. There's this sort of gravitational pull towards an Israeli narrative

because for whatever reason, I think allies of Israel's actions have done an amazing job of making their presence felt and making sure that any sort of overstepping, overstatement, woolly phraseology gets policed, right? I feel as I, you know, there's a estimate of that that's healthy, you know, would that it were the case on all sides. But similarly, we have to interrogate that the Palestine, that we're doing the same level of care to represent Palestinian reality. It's truthfully, I got critiqued from both, like, in terms of like some people who watched it, who were sort of sympathetic to the Israeli kind of way of looking at things, we're like, oh, well, it's one-sided.

You haven't really shown how this, you know, these people are just crazy. No one takes them seriously, which, by the way, is not the case. You know, Daniela Weiss enjoys enormous influence. But similarly, on the other side, some people are like, well, it's 15 or 20 minutes before you meet a Palestinian person, right? And it's a farmer speaking in Arabic. And then I quickly move on to talk to an Israeli peace activist. And across the board, I'm giving, you could argue, a megaphone to the settlers. and so I think some people felt well you've kind of erased

you've sort of erased the Palestinian place So uncomplained you didn't tell the Nakhba story didn't they? Yeah, there was a guy who I met in a village who was like you didn't really discuss how we've already been displaced. He told me a story on camera about how he'd ended up in this village in the West Bank near Hebron but prior to that he'd been in what's now Israel and displaced from that I believe

and so there's a sort of ongoing compounding of refugee state and he was understandably upset. And realistically, and I've been at screenings where people have made similar complaints. And I just have to say, I work in a way when I make films that tends to be perpetrator-focused. I try and interrogate those people who have the most power. And the ones who have the most power. And this actually speaks to the idea that, oh, it's one-sided. In a sense, you could argue it is because I'm looking at the people who are in control of the tanks.

and who actually are benefiting from the occupation to interrogate their choices and other films could be made, but this is the one that I wanted to make. So, I mean, I'm really interested in that sort of journalistic vibe that comes from you, because, you know, in a way, every journalist, and, you know, we three have all done this job,

you want to get to the truth. But when you have somebody who is saying black is white, white is black, and I'll give you the thing that I'm thinking about, You know, you go with Daniela Weiss and you're on this hill above the Palestinian town of Beta. And you're asking her about settler violence. And she said, there is no such thing. And then you point out the footage that you've got in the film of an armed settler shooting a Palestinian protester at point blank range.

By the way, he gets his gun confiscated, but he's not imprisoned. And an Israeli soldier is standing by. And she says, well, you know, she kind of like doesn't. accept that that settler violence. Now, if you can't get to somebody by showing them to their face, something that we can all see, what does that do to, you know, your sense of fairness or journalism? You know, it's not an unfamiliar role for me to be talking to someone who's obstinately refusing to see the facts in the way that she does. I think I mentioned, I did a story about a cult in the Midwest in which one of the leaders was this woman called Shirley Phelps Roper. She had a similar

energy. The Westbro one. Amazing. Amazing. So she had a similar energy. And I feel as though it would have been a problem in the film if, if as a viewer you hadn't already seen video from, from, you know, filmed of settler violence. But because you have, then the view is able to draw their own conclusion as to how credible Daniela is. You know, And she is quite evidently willfully refusing to see the facts. And it's almost a terminological issue. Like, you know, it was Max Weber who said that the state is the institution that has the monopoly of legitimate violence in a given area. You could argue she's speaking in a Weberian sense.

She's saying any violence that's inflicted by settlers in the West Bank is, a kind of law enforcement activity that is part of their monopolistic right to control and occupy the region that God gave them. You've talked about the very strong leadership, but I really want to know whether in all of your travels and talking to the people who follow these people, whether you see a commonality in tribalism, if we can put it that way. Is there something in the human condition that means people switch off their own questioning and follow people who say black is white and white is black. I think that Daniela Weiss is an extreme version of something that exists in all of us.

And, you know, one of the, you know, I try not to be overly invested in how well I've done, you know, in a film. But genuinely, like, when I watch that encounter with Daniela Weiss, there's a moment where I say like, she's talking about, look, I know there's beta over there. She says, pointing to the Palestinian town. She says, I don't think about beta. I think about here is a settlement and here is a settlement and here is a settlement. So she would say like she has no animus against Palestinian people.

She just doesn't think about them. Like she is only thinking about how to advance the cause of Jewish nationalism in the region. And I say to her, you know, to think about your own people first is understandable. but to think about other people not at all seems sociopathic. So the reason I say, I'm quite, I'm sort of pleased that, because it's kind of pious to say like, oh, I don't distinguish between my own children and children halfway around the world, right? That's clearly not the case. But that's also the beginnings of tribalism, isn't it?

Sure. And that, I mean, that is also the Westboro Baptist Church. You know, it's us in the church. We're the ones that matter. And, you know, everyone outside is potentially an enemy. And actually we don't care. We don't think about them. You know, we will do what we do because we care about our family.

Does that depress you about the human spirit that so many people are willing to switch off the part of themselves that thinks, you know what? This person who is standing either surveying a smoldering village or is protesting at a funeral of a dead servicemen, that they're willing to switch that off. and follow? What have you learned about the human condition that that can happen? Well, I sometimes pretentiously quote Nietzsche and say, as one does. As one does, especially if you're a perennial kind of existentialist student, you know, plonker. But, you know, one of his things is madness in individuals is rare, but in periods of time, nations and religions, it's the norm. So that we are all capable of being indoctrinated in forms of irrationality. So is it depressing? Yes. Especially in light of so much of it is informed by an

infrastructure of Jewish persecution. You know, the idea of like, we've suffered across the centuries as Jewish people and that therefore, the extrapolation from that is like, how could we ever be accused of hurting others, of displacing or inflicting genocide on? on others. But I think, you know, what is the conclusion? It's just that it requires this sort of endless attempt to police your own impulses. You know, I think, I was always always say, like, selective compassion isn't compassion. It is tribalism, right? So it's about trying to throw with your arms around a wider community. But, you know, it all sounds a bit nambi-pambi when you put it like that, and it's easier said than done. Louie, on this podcast, we spend a lot of

I'm looking at the kind of mechanics of empire, how young Scotsman gets sent out to the East India Company in the 18th century to rule over a million people, how Belgians were taught not to see Congolese suffering, even though they were cutting the hands and the feet off these people. Did you feel that you understood how that sort of thing could happen when you're in the West Bank with someone like Daniela Weiss, who can just take the water and the land of people that really have very little and they're taking more and more

and they're driving them out and they're really not thinking about what happens to these people other than they've got to go this is our land these guys don't belong here they've just got to go there's a couple of dimensions

to that I think I think oppression tends to it tends to like obviously it happens in different contexts but one is a sense of victimisation like if we

take our foot off his neck then his foot will be on our neck. And that's very much the thinking among parts of the settler community. We'll get a jihadistate state here. That sort of thing. Well, not wholly without merit. Like there's so much anger, understandable anger and resentment. And you hear a lot, well, look how many Muslim nations there are, they'll say. And we want one Jewish nation, and now they're trying to take that away from us. I also think, you know, never underestimate people's ability to just go along with whatever's happening, right? You know, Milgram's famous

experiments on authority, where you found that people were willing to inflict electric shocks on strangers. If someone above them were saying, don't worry, I'm in charge, and you have to do this. You know, you have to remember, in the West Bank, there's several constituencies, you know, apart from the sort of the three million Palestinians who live there and have lived there for generations, you have 700,000 settlers thereabout, of whom most of them would consider themselves non-ideological. They're living in relatively suburban style homes in settlements that are not ostensibly like stockades, like they would look maybe like a suburban community in the Midwest somewhere or in the West, in Phoenix, Arizona.

And they're just looking for cheap housing. And people tune out. They tune out what they don't see. It's half the price of stuff in Tel Aviv. Young couples go there. You get a house. A lot of them are from abroad. They might have come in and found out they've come in from maybe Russia or America,

and they're getting cheap housing and various benefits. They've been incentivized. And there's this extraordinary extent to which the Palestinian experience is made to be invisible. You know, the architecture and the infrastructure of the place is explicitly designed. to make the Palestinian world invisible. Much as prisons are here. Like I drove down to Onsworth at the weekend and we drove past ones with prison.

I was like, it's amazing how there's trees planted so that you can see ones with common on one side, but you can't actually see the prison. And a similar thing happens in the West Bank where behind walls and kind of these sort of blast walls and then a series of checkpoints, there'll be a Palestinian city that might have, you know,

or 500,000 people in it that you would never, if you were a settler driving on a settler road, you would never know about. So it's hard to feel compassion for something that you never see. And then within the consentering ring of that, you have armies following orders who have this slightly guilty way about when you interact with them sometimes. Not always, but sometimes there's a bit like, unfortunately, yes, you know, we have to stop you. And they're just, as it were like the Scottish guy, you know, sent out to Burma following orders. And then you have the engine room, which is the fanatical ideological settler, who is often not from abroad.

Like it might be a homegrown Israeli, and they are following the will of God as they see it and completely committed to the vision of recovering the land. You know, when I talked to Ari Abramovich, he was from Texas originally, but his whole thing was like, if people just understood, like, this is going to create peace for everyone, like every nation. Like his idea was like, and they'll talk, they don't talk about recovering the temple mount, but that's always slightly in the background, this sort of messianic idea that, and then we're going to, then if we can just build the temple on the dome of the rock, on the temple mount, then I don't quite know the theology of it, but the idea is, and then there'll be peace on a, for millions of years. So they see themselves as idealists. I mean, I've been sort of looking at your work over many years. And I think what you do is really interesting. And I think the space that you give people to speak and also the fact that you leave the spaces in, to me is utterly fascinating. And if you work, as I do, I work for the BBC, but I work in in news and you don't have

room for the spaces. It seems to me that you've been studying the same question for around 30 years now, which is how ordinary people end up sort of holding either extreme or fringe beliefs, whatever, and then acting on them. And I wanted to bring in the thing that's, you know, just blown up for you this year inside the Manosphere on Netflix. And just again, I mean, if you are one of the two people who hasn't seen this now, this is all about sort of men selling courses and lifestyle. It's a particular brand of swigering misogyny. And they target teenage boys largely. Now on the surface, you couldn't get something that's more different from the settlers. It's a film about, you know, land and military occupation. But watch them back to back as I have,

and it's all about the construction of an enemy who isn't quite human. He's, you know, not human, but, you know, communities of men who've decided that those people are outside our tribe and empathy. They don't deserve it. I mean, am I overreaching, or is that something that you feel? Well, that's a really good point because when you started speaking, it was like, These worlds are so different. One is primarily financial. Like those influences online are mainly money motivated. Their outrage is often almost a kind of...

Confected. Almost a shop window to what's behind, which is an attempt to sell a kind of dodgy financial product, an app or an online course or something. Whereas the settlers, the ones that I was meeting, they live almost in an impoverished way some of them like one of the characters I met was called Malkiel and he's a horse wrangler living in a tent in a caravan

It's like a gypsy encampment wasn't it? It was like a gypsy yeah A lot of them look like cowboys They have this sort of frontier almost ragged They have guns on their hips and cowboy hats It's not a grift like they're not doing They're not in it for the money Yeah

You know Daniela Weiss herself lives abstemiously But I think you identify something correct, which is that... Oh, few, because I thought you would greed with me and then with demolishing me. No, no. But I think the part that's correct is, yes, they're both... They're identities that are constructed on the idea of an other, and a kind of venomous and dangerous cabal, if you like. And a sense that there's these evildoers who attempt to do act them

and that they in turn have to match the end at the perceived level of threat of the enemy by being just as dangerous or more dangerous. So I think that that's very true. And oddly, in the Manusphere, it's a kind of conspiracy that they cast as having a Jewish, they put a sort of Jewish lens. They put a Jewish character on what they perceive as what they call a matrix, this sort of international cabal of powerful finance. and thought leaders who are attempted to keep the population subjugated.

And among the settlers, they see the Palestinian other, but Palestinian other that's being supported by the West, by European loans and kind of globalist kind of enemy. The anti-Semitism thing came as a surprise, because I just thought they hated women. I thought they hated me. But, you know, it turns out that they have this whole idea that this is a, you know, there are puppet masters who are working all of this and anybody

who opposes them is sort of being funded by or brainwashed by this cabal as you've just described is. A satanic cabal. Yeah. A satanic, you know, pointing to pictures saying, look, there you see, there's a sign that there's Satan. But what interested me is when you sort of push them, they say, and you make it very clear that it sounds preposterous. In fact, with the satanic thing, you say, are you serious? Are you really saying, Satan is running the world, they'll back off it sometimes. I mean, not the Satan guy, but a lot of the time they will back down and come back. Does that mean that the manosphere, are you saying, is artificial completely? Because I really feel they hate women. I don't think that's artificial.

I don't think it's all artificial, but some of it is performative. And I do think to some extent, these modes are not binary. Like we all go in and out of different registers, right, and perform ourselves in ways that aren't consistent. I think that I think there's a time you know, I think there's times when they say things for effect that like HS Tiki Tokey, real name Harrison Sullivan and Essex influencer and fitness guy who we follow. There's a moment where he goes around, we see we see footage of him going fuck the Jews again and again chanting it. And and truthfully, I don't think there's much thought behind it. Like I don't think he's really particularly troubled by the idea of Jewish people.

I think he just knows that it's outrageous and it will be picked up. But at the same time, I think he is genuinely sexist, like in the old-fashioned sense. I think he's someone who thinks that women are basically just a way for him to get his sexual needs met, and at the same time, he deplores the idea of women being promiscuous. So it's complicated. The internet is very lucrative. I sometimes say like it's very lucrative to be a dick on the internet. It's almost become a job to actually like go online and be a plonker.

And at the same time, it doesn't come from nowhere. They know it resonates with people, partly because it's funny to some and partly because they're connecting with the idea of feeling disempowered and that there needs to be a reset and that men aren't getting taken seriously enough. We're going to take a break in a moment. But just before we take the break, do you not find, you're not a very depressed man, because if it is that easy to monetise rage, I mean, why are we going on, Louis? What's the point of any of this, you know, if it's that simple?

Right. Well, as a program maker, having sort of lived through this disruption of the media landscape, that part of it I find quite depressing, like, you know, the fact that all of the big channels, the legacy channel, BBC Channel 4, ITV are struggling, right? That I do find depressing. As a student of the human condition, who has a kind of pyromaniacal pleasure in observing the degeneracy of how we are as people, like something I think I might have got from my dad.

I do actually quite enjoy, sort of luxuriating in the awfulness of what we are. Okay, well look, let's take a break and come back after the break. Actually, Willie's very keen to talk to you about your dad. This episode is brought to you by The National Archives. It's Tom Holland here from Goldhangers's The Rest is History. Now, American independence is often painted as a quest for freedom, a triumph of democratic ideals. But it was also a period of immense risk and violence which turned the colonial world upside down. So if you want to go beyond the familiar tales of the Boston Tea Party and red-coated battalions, I have some marvellous news for you. The National Archives is holding a free exhibition.

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great combinations. Chocolate and peanut butter, obviously, but there's more than one way to Rises. From indulgent Riesus Big Cups with caramel to crunchy Riesces pieces and Ries's miniatures, there's a delicious Rieces for every mood. It's the same combo you love, just with more ways to enjoy it. So, whether you're snacking, sharing, or just treating yourself, nothing else is Reese's. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had the tantalizing dangle of Louis Thru's dad. Also a favorite topic of Willie Dauhumpur over here.

You were jumping up and down in your seat going, oh, he's dad. I know his dad. Well, no, I don't just know his dad. I grew up worshipping his dad. I will embarrass Louis by saying this. But for my generation that started doing travel writing in the early 80s, the Great Railway Bazaar was our Bible. And he'd sold something like 1.5 million copies. And it showed that we could just go off on trains or go wandering around sort of Turkey and write a book.

It was too good to be true. But are you updating what he did? Is your version of, you know, you've obviously got a camera rather than writing books and you're not jumping on trains so much as sort of, you know, driving around and talking to people? But do you feel that there's a great commonality? Have you talked this over with him? No, I haven't. And first of all, it's high praise. It's very high praise.

My dad is, as you know, a serious literator, someone who's brilliantly gifted novelist and travel writer with an international reputation, more than 50 books to his name, Garland did. My other life is one of my favorite novels. I love that book. And I think the novels perhaps deserve more attention than they're. given. The travel writing is very, is very well read and well regarded. I grew up reading his novels first. There's a version of you in my other life. He comes to the school gates. You said you're going to go and see your kids at the school gates. Oh, geez. Yeah. I think that was my brother. Yeah, I think that was probably my brother. I've got an older brother, but there's versions of himself

in various of his books, although he's got lots of, you know, he doesn't exclusively write versions of his, some people just write versions of their own life. He doesn't. He doesn't, do that, but there are a few that do. And he's typically got one son. So I always think it's not a conflation. It's mainly my brother. But I don't, I never sort of set out to, you know, like the short version is I always thought, oh, I'm supposed to be a writer. Like that was the family law. The family thing. You've got uncles that do it too. Yeah, the family thing, basically, you leave university and then you write a travel book or a not, like that was, you know, The aristocracy of letters was a thing in our household.

That was the highest calling. I think I probably still believe that. Anything like TV or film is kind of poor cousin in terms of the arts. I got into TV peak slightly displaced from the pressure of feeling, oh, I can never write a book as good as my dad's. So I thought I'll write for television and I'll write something like sitcoms were big. This was the early 90s. and then I struggled to get hired on a sitcom

and then I got hired by Michael Moore for his series TV Nation and began presenting segments. So there was never, there was never a thing like, oh, I'm going to do the Great Railway Bazaar, but as a travelogue, I don't even like travelogs on TV that much.

Like as a genre? You can do without Portillo, can you? I haven't watched much Portillo. I mean, I do, I like Michael Palin. But my go-to has always been, classical documentary, especially immersive documentary, where you are absolutely, you have a kind of continuity of character through the film that maybe there's a reporter, like Alan Wicker was something of an influence, for those who can remember, that idea of someone who's

immersed in an experience, who's the, who's sort of the straight man in the comic sense, in a world gone mad, navigating through, and especially where they get out of their depth in some way and they're exposed to the extremes of the human condition. So I never, I struggle with that authorial, and I'm talking way too much. But this is, this is going to quite a deep place. That authorial voice of the travel writer like, and then I went here and I, and I went to see the Spanish steps and a man did, vomited on my shoe and I went back to the hotel. And I always thought, I don't really, I'm not, you know, I think I'm more, I'd like to see, I'd like to sort of see someone immersed in their lives somehow.

You prefer, I want Temple Mount and someone shot me with the Luzi. Basically, yeah. But one thing, Louie, I mean, you know, there is now this thing that's called the Theru method. You must be aware of this, you know, sort of being slightly, very polite, slightly bewildered, asking the obvious questions again and again and really giving the subject enough rope. And I wonder if some of the, I mean, we talked about two people here, H.S. Tiki-Toki. and Daniela Weiss. And I wonder if there are any parallels between them

and that, you know, they are unembarrassable. They are, you know, is there anything else that sort of links them together in your mind? First of all, thank you for the Theru method. I didn't know what it was. It sounds a bit like a massage technique, right? Or musicians use it, you know, to improve their posture when they're playing their instrument. The Theru technique. It's controversial.

No, yours is a method. It's Alexander's got the technique. You've got the method. I've got the through method. I apologize for having propagated a journalistic method. I do think that there's parallels. I mean, just purely technically and structurally, they occupy the exact same place in their respective programs that you see them both three times and the climactic moment of both films involves a showdown, as it were, where I basically present my case and say, here's why I have a problem with what you're doing. Have you. having gathered my data, having done my research and due diligence, I'm presenting my case against you. She pushes me. He pushes me virtually in the sense of he actually films me. Instead of push me, he's had something much smarter, which is he films me, live streams me, and then crowdsources questions that will embarrass me and then clips them and goes viral with me looking stupid. That's the first observation. What do they have in common objectively as people? It's just, yeah, it's I think a quality of shamelessness.

You know, a quality of, you know, in a culture based on shame, if you're shameless, it's a superpower. If you have no, if you're unembarrassable, if there's nothing, if you have complete conviction. And I think actually on that metric, Daniela has the advantage over HS. Like I saw HS uncomfortable. There were times when he seemed worried by things that I did. He was terrified that he was going to get hug up. Yeah, he did this thing, which we used throughout the film, which is do monologues to his followers on social media.

About you. Exactly. Yeah, anytime I left, which is great. He gave it a sort of Shakespearean grammar where he was doing soliloquies between scenes. You know, the beginning and end of scenes, like, was ever wretched in this woman wooed, you know, except he's going like, I think Faroo might be trying to cook me. I'm not too sure.

You know, it's like Iago, isn't it? Yeah. But I think, so he had that uncertainty, and she never cracked. There's not a scintilla of vulnerability that I ever saw in her. I'm sure it's there, but I never saw it. I mean, some people will object to the comparison. And the reason they both came to my mind, I think, is because they're both the most recent protagonist of your most recent films.

Who do you think would object to the comparison? Well, I suppose some people would say, Look, one has an ideological belief. I'm saying people who sort of follow, you know, one has an ideological belief and the other one has a six-pack and makes money. Which one is rich? Daniel and Weiss doesn't have a six-pack. No, okay.

All right. Very funny. Very funny. Final question, because we are running out of time. Who is the person you really want to get who's proving hard to get? Because we might be able to help you. You know, 90 million downloads. I know it's nothing to you, but, you know, they might be listening.

Who'd you want to get? There's so many people. I don't know where to start. I find the world of AI bafflingly intriguing. So I think someone like Peter Thiel, who runs Palantir, this... He would be fascinating. I was giving a lecture in L.A. last year, and he was giving another one upstairs on the Antichrist in the same building.

But sadly, his security was a bit tight. Yeah, and there's a religious dimension there, but also this sort of sense in which he seems to be invivary. vision, a world in which we transcend the human form. And by we, I think I just mean a few, a handful of billionaire tech bros will upload their consciousnesses to, to sort of data farms and be roaming around the kind of the digital ether like gods. But if I can't get him, I've been trying to get Demis Hussarbus, who's the most brilliant, gifted AI expert, developer, programmer in the UK. And,

he's up in North London. So, and he seems a rather benign figure. So I'd love to talk to him. And then on a more prosaic note, the comedian Peter Kay. That's going to be lovely. No one's going to push anyone. There we go. That seems more achievable.

No one's going to shove anybody in that one. Hopefully not. It's going to be quite a letdown to people who expect a certain benefit of brutality. Louis, to return to our settlers, my final question, the settlers, in 20 years' time, where do you see that? Do you see any conceivable reverse button on what they're doing? Because it felt my biggest anxiety watching it was that it's now so strong and so irreversible. They are so full of conviction, so well-organized.

And the Palestinians are so much on the run that another NACPA seems more probable than not. Would you agree on it? Or what do you feel? I think it's hard to see the likelihood of a shift. of in the balance it seems only to be going in one direction and more than that and I've said this before I think others around the world are looking at how other authoritarian and ethno-nationalist regimes are looking at what's happening in the West Bank admiringly you know figures like mille in Argentina maybe Bardella in France that this sort of under

Underground, international underground, or underground, I mean not underground, but it's a sort of, there's this sort of community of, kind of in the vanguard of Trump as well, who's sort of, and I think, you know, to the broader point, I think they see Islam generally as a threat. I think that's where, that's how they would try and explain what they were doing. They would say like, well, we're just trying to protect ourselves. And so there's a sympathetic international constituency in the West for what is happening in the West Bank. And in the end, you know, disappointingly, even the regimes in the Middle East, from what I see, don't seem massively invested in the preservation of a kind of rule of law and basic civil rights. And those agencies that are attempting to police what's happening, like the ICJ or the UN, are just increasingly being marginalized and there's an effort to discredit them. So it is very, it is a dispiriting outlook. Listen, it's been so great talking to you. I know we have to let you go because you've got a school run. And that, as we all know, is the most important thing. Thank you so much for being with us.

Louis' documentary, The Settlers, is on BBC Eye Player, inside the Manosphere. You can find that on Netflix. And until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg. Thank you so much.