So what is Scientology? Tell us a bit about this religion.

I think you probably have to start with L. Ron Hubbard, who was the founder of Scientology.

So Hubbard was born in 1911 in Nebraska in the US.

He was a pioneering science fiction writer in the '30s, and then in 1950, he writes a book called Dianetics, which was a kind of do it yourself psychotherapeutic method which claimed that people could essentially free their minds up by going back to past traumas in their life and working through them, and it quickly became a huge sensation around the US, which at that time was in the grip of a broader psychotherapeutic craze.

Hubbard then built on Dianetics and said that actually a lot of the people who've done this course have found that they were able to remember traumatic events from past lives.

That then led him to claim that there was such a thing as a thetan, which is a, in Scientological terms, is a immortal, eternal spirit, uh, it, which passes from body to body through a process of reincarnation after you die.

What happened to him? How did he end up leaving the church?

Well, Amir, as I said, is a very curious young man, and when he was working in the church's public-facing department, he first became aware of some of the criticisms and allegations that had been made about the church in the past.

Huge thing after huge thing.

I mean, if I talk about pinch me moments, and as I think I've mentioned, I've had a couple.

Golden Buzzer, Gary Barlow.

I genuinely think Abbey Road at the moment is my number one pinch me moment.

And I've been so fortunate, so fortunate that I've been there twice.

More times than I probably should have been let back.

It is a beautiful studio filled with history.

The idea here is that this whole podcast is... not only giving you know my audience an insight to you but your audience an insight to yeah and it's questions that you know you don't normally get asked so no never in mind with that in mind and the fact that nostalgia is a big theme of this particular podcast and something that is coming up for you um yeah how about we talk a little bit about um your musical upbringing

How worried are people in Israel about this, the idea of another prolonged invasion?

I think by and large, public mood i-is in favor of this offensive.

It's in favor of the, the war in Iran overwhelmingly, and similarly with this offensive being couched as a, as an attempt to eradicate the threat on Israel's northern border once and for all.

I think m-most people you would ask would say that it's, it's a necessary operation to undertake.

I did, though, I s-spoke to a man named Eyal Margalit yesterday, who's a former member of the, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and himself had taken part in the nineteen eighty-two campaign as a special forces soldier.

And he, he was one of the few people that I've come across who offered a, a, a countering narrative.

And he essentially was saying that while he fully supports the Iran war, he felt that opening too many frontiers at the same time was not necessarily the wisest things that the IDF could be doing, and that military means wasn't necessarily the, the way to get rid of Hezbollah in the way that Israel wants to.

How is that statement going down in Israel? Is there any appetite to deescalate and, and sit down to talks?