The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 295. A Conversation with Piers Morgan

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXhDr. Jordan B. Peterson and Piers Morgan discuss the art of interviewing, the importance of living truthfully, the pitfalls of sycophancy, and go into depth regarding the 2016 election, and the aftermath of Donald Trump.Piers Morgan is a British journalist and television personality who started his career working as a freelance writer for the Sun. Later he would be chosen by Rupert Murdock as editor for his publication, News of the World. This appointment would make Morgan the youngest British news editor (29) in more than fifty years. He would go on to be the editor of publications such as the Daily Mirror and MailOnline before ramping into a career on television. He would introduce documentaries for the BBC, and had a channel 4 political interview show with Amanda Platell, all before his stint as a judge on America’s Got Talent. Morgan would compete on and win the 2008 season of Celebrity Apprentice, and later famously interview the show's host, Donald Trump, after he had become the 45th US President. Morgan would work on numerous talk shows and documentary series before starting his current day production, Piers Morgan Uncensored. This show, on which controversial and celebrity guests debate Morgan, would be the first launched on talkTV, and welcome back President Trump for its premiere and second episodes.—Links—Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s interview on Piers Morgan Uncensoredhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpnvGA-wJIE&t=1567sFor Piers MorganInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/piersmorgan/?hl=enTwitter: https://twitter.com/piersmorganWatch “Piers Morgan Uncensored” https://nation.foxnews.com/piers-morgan-uncensored/?cmpid=org=nat::ag=mediastorm::mc=cpc::src=google::cmp=brandpmax&utm_source=cpc&utm_medium=google&utm_campaign=brandpmax/&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4omaBhDqARIsADXULuXq8QDhaosLNOooBhEcCFwNZzHet8PBr-fSWz2E3X6SjcfTJlu0hmQaArkvEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds— Chapters —(0:00) Coming Up(1:17) Intro(4:47) Dynamics of Youtube(10:05) Art of the interview(15:53) The power of disagreeability(20:35) Volatile interviews, losing track(26:13) Adulation and changing focus(30:14) Tony Blair and the Iraq war(33:23) Queen Elizabeth, Mesopotamia(36:53) When you become your persona(42:03) Pinocchio, Elvis, and hedonism(46:08) The danger of sycophants(50:44) Subjective identity, punching down(54:25) Simon Cowell and AGT(1:01:13) Terry Fator, Susan Boyle; truly authentic(1:09:23) The value of actual judgment(1:19:05) President Donald Trump// SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.co...Donations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate// COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com// BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-...Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-m...// LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast// SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson#JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus #Psychology 

Hello everyone, I'm very pleased today to have with me Mr. Pierce Morgan. Mr. Morgan is an English broadcaster, although he's well-known outside of the UK as well. He's a journalist, writer, and TV personality. He began his career in the UK in 1988 at quite a young age at the Sun, the newspaper. In 1994, 1994 at 29, he was appointed, News of the World Editor by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul. He was the youngest editor of a British National newspaper in more than 50 years. From 95 to 2004, Pierce edited the Daily Mirror and then served as first news edited the Daily Mirror and then served as first news editorial director from 2006 to 2007. On TV from 2009 to 21, Pierce hosted the ITV talk show, Life Stories, the CNN chat show, Pierce Morgan Live from 2011 to 2014. The ITV Breakfast Program, good morning, Britain from 2015 to 2021, and was a judge on both America's Got Talent from 06 to 11, and Britain's Got Talent

from 07 to 2010. In 2008, he won the celebrity apprentice, US, appearing with future US president, Donald Trump. We're going to talk today about Pierce's career, about being a journalist and a celebrity as well, about interacting with celebrities. But I think we're going to start with a brief discussion about an interview that Pierce conducted with me in the UK a couple of weeks ago as of the taping date of this interview and discussion. So it seems to have attracted a fair bit of positive attention, I would say, perhaps for both of us.

And what do you make of it? Well, first of all, it showed me what my belief was before I interviewed you, which is that you are an internet phenomenon in all guys' is the attention that the interview attracted online was by our standards of our fledgling show and network of six months or so absolutely staggering. In fact, right up there with my first interview, which was Donald Trump. So, I found that very interesting to go into a world on YouTube in particular, in which you are so dominant and so well known, to see that an interview could be cut up in the way that we did it with various clips and see each of them be watched by millions and millions of people. And I found that very interesting.

It also played into my sort of sense that the most interesting interviews actually are with people who have something to say. You and I both know that we've interviewed lots of people over the years who often don't have very much to save for themselves. And they could be the most famous people on the planet but being incredibly boring. I would rather take interesting, controversial, polarizing perhaps divisive people, or certainly the way that they are portrayed perhaps

by the media and interview those types of people, because it makes for more interesting interviews. So I found the experience of interviewing you fascinating. I lived up to every expectation. It was surprisingly moving. You got surprisingly emotional at one stage, which I wasn't expecting. But I think that it also,

I thought, showed you in an extremely good light. I don't mean that as false flattery. I just think that you came over to me very sincere when you showed that emotion. And it also showed me that even someone like you that's been criticized a lot as well as praised, that certain things do permeate your skin and do genuinely upset you. And I was surprised by that, but I also thought that appeared to be very genuine. So I thought the whole experience for me, Jordan was fascinating.

I think I said to you, my three sons who were all in their 20s, they were the most excited I'd ever seen them about an interview outside of Cristiano Ronaldo, our mutual friend from the world of football, which I found very interesting because their three boys in their 20s all quite different, but they all watched YouTube avidly and they perceive you to be the sort of king of YouTube up there with Joe Rogan and a few others. And so they found it an utterly compelling interview and they were able to compare it to many that you've done and felt that it was right up there with one of the best-seid scenes. So I was very pleased professionally that actually I felt I conducted a good interview,

but I do come back to the basic premise, I think, of any interviewer. You're only really as good as the tools that you work with. And in your case, you came, I think, prepared to be very open, to be very honest, to be emotional. And I found that actually very moving. So you said a couple of things there, I would say, on the technological front that I thought were very interesting. So, one of the things about YouTube, I would say, perhaps that distinguishes it in some way from legacy TV is that YouTube really rewards straightforward, untrammeled, and unscripted

discussion. And it's really what people expect on the platform. And the fact that the discussions can go for a long while without any of the somewhat artificial constraints that are placed on the broadcast media means that people can and or are more likely to reveal themselves in all their positive and negative aspects. And I think that's part of the reason that Rogan has become so popular apart from the fact that Rogan has become so popular, apart from the

fact that Joel always asks questions that are actually questions. Right? He's always, in some sense, honestly digging for information rather than trying to set someone up or play for a cheap laugh or a cheap take down, which is something that's very characteristic of a certain type of journalist. And that doesn't play well at all on YouTube, interestingly enough. It makes people infamous very rapidly. And so it's an interesting medium in that regard, partly because of the lack of restriction on bandwidth. And then you also mentioned the clips issue,

and one of the things that's quite remarkable about YouTube and makes talking there much different than publishing a book, let's say, well, first of all, the audience is much broader on YouTube than it is on the publishing front by an order of magnitude likely, which is a lot. But also you can't sell a book by the sentence or the paragraph, but YouTube videos are infinitely fractionable and you can clip one minute or three minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes and there's an independent market for every one of those length of clips. And so that's a very interesting new technological possibility to delve into. And you've seen TikTok emerge in YouTube shorts and Instagram, all these social media platforms that have their own culture that capitalize on that capacity to fractionate YouTube or to fractionate

video. And so it's very interesting to try to contend with all that. I also thought for what it's worth that you talk to me in a very straightforward manner and I certainly appreciated that. I had many people on my team who were concerned about the potential manner in which the interview might proceed, not least because we've had plenty of fun with British journalists before,

although that often turned out well. But you also said during that interview, or maybe before, maybe it was before we talked that you had been thinking about listening in a way that was somewhat new for you or at least new in part. I mean, everybody learns as they go along. And so I was curious afterwards about what exactly that meant because I really felt that during the interview

you did listen to me and that we had and vice versa, hopefully. And that as a interview, you did listen to me and that we had, and vice versa, hopefully, and that as a consequence, we had, we genuinely communicated, and I think that that was part of the reason that made the interview successful. Yeah, I mean, actually, it was my middle son, who's a young actor and photographer, and listens avidly to YouTube, and most of your stuff he's watched in recent years, most of Joe Rogan's stuff he's watched, and he said, Dad, look, you can't do your normal sledgehammer act, you can't just go in and start interrupting

every five seconds, like you normally do, which is a fault line of mine. It works well actually when you're interviewing a politician who's trying to obfuscate or answer different questions or simply avoid the one you're asking, sometimes you do have to be slightly bully boy in the way you interrupt a politician to get an answer out of them. So, it's a different technique, but actually the point that my son Stanley made to me was that said, Dad, if you want to get the best out of Jordan Peterson, he said, trust me, you have to listen. And so, that was constantly in the back of my mind. He was actually at the back of a studio,

as you know, with my youngest son, Bertie. And he was adamant that that was the way I would get the best out of you. And he was completely right. And it wasn't learning care for me. And it might sound slightly odd that I'm getting to this stage of my life, 57 years old, a bit of journalists for,

you know, since I was in my early 20s to suddenly learn the art of interview. But I've been through many guises as a journalist and interviewer. When you're a newspaper interviewer, as I was for many years, or I did big interviews also of a GQ magazine, often the interviewer can talk a lot to get a one-line revelation. So you can keep talking, keep talking, keep talking, and then and then lull your your interview e into saying something that maybe you were trying to get. It's a very different discipline on television or on any form of on camera interview. And I was also struck by the fact it wasn't the first person who given me the advice to listen. I remember the great

Sir David Frost who did with the Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon, some of the great interviews ever seen in political journalism. And he always said to me, the most powerful tool of any television interviewer is silence, because the interviewee will always fill that void. At some stage, after one second, two seconds,

three seconds, four seconds, an interviewer will fill the gap. They won't just sit there in silence too. And sometimes the most powerful revelations you can get from people come when they have their own moment to really think about what they're going to say and they say it. And if you're too busy, as you said earlier, and I've been very guilty of this myself, of talking too much, expressing your own opinions, not really listening to what the person is saying, then you can sometimes miss these moments of real gold, which come actually from the power of silence. So I think that, you know, I think the experience I had with you was really informative to me. When you're interviewing somebody, obviously very intelligent, obviously very used to do

interviews, perhaps coming with a slight sense of suspicion after what happened with you on channel four news. And I watched that interview live as I told you. And I just felt in that interview, I know the interviewer, Kathy Newman, and I felt that she didn't really know who you were, hadn't done quite enough research into what you really felt and what you really felt and what you really thought, and had made a series of presumptions about you, which you were able to batter way quite quickly, and it made for very uncomfortable viewing if you were a channel for

News Viewer, because it was quite clear that you were slightly on parallel lines. So I think that, yeah, I found our experience really, really good, actually. I felt that had I done my political interview technique with you, I think you would have clammed up. It would have been, well, you wouldn't have clammed up, but I think it would have been a much more confrontational exchange, which I wasn't seeking to get, because I actually agree with a lot of what you say. So to me, it does depend who the interviewer is. It might depend, too, on, well, it might also depend on exactly what the purpose of the

stage is. So, if you're a political actor, let's say, and you're acting instrumentally, so you have a purpose in the interview that's a priori, then you're going to be inclined as the person being interviewed to craft your words and to make sure you don't step in anything toxic and to deflect anything that might be too penetrating. And so what that seems to me to necessitate on the part of an investigative journalist is a much more adversarial and antagonistic stance because. agonistic stance because the journalist is going to be required, especially if the interview is obfuscating or deceiving, to have to dig with a relatively sharp blade. And so I can really see that there's utility in that adversarial stance when what you're trying to uncover is a web of intrigue and self-serving instrumentalism and deception.

And this also segues quite interestingly, I think, into one of the main topics I want to talk to you about today, which is something approximating temperament and fame. And so one of the cardinal personality dimensions is agreeableness and agreeable people, it's really a maternal dimension. And agreeable people are compassionate and polite. They're very interested in people and inable people, it's really a maternal dimension. And agreeable people are compassionate and polite. They're very interested in people and in serving people. And it's likely a dimension that maximizes the capacity

to take care of the weak and the infirm and infants and the outsiders. Now, the disadvantage to being agreeable is that you can be taken advantage of because you can stand up for yourself very well, partly because of your self-sacrificing nature, let's say. And so you can be a pushover and then become resentful and angry and bitter and feel that you're in an unfair world, giving all the time and never receiving.

On the other side, you have the disagreeable temperament, which is more masculine. And I say that because women are reliably higher in agreeableness and men reliably lower. And that's true cross-culturally. And it maximizes any egalitarian countries. And so what happens in journalism is that journalists tend to be selected for two personality traits, perhaps more, but at least two. They're extroverted because they like to talk to people and they like to talk and they have lots to say and they're

verbally fluent, but they're also disagreeable. And the problem with those two traits, extroversion and disagreeableness is they tilt people towards narcissism. So, and it's what was at Nietzsche, I think the German philosopher said, great man are seldom credited with their stupidity. And so, you need these traits of extroversion and being disagreeable to put yourself in the public eye and to enable you to be adversarial. But there's a set of probable sins that go along with that. And those include the sins, let's say, of narcissism. Now, if you're conscientious and you keep your word, you can ameliorate that. A guy like having disagreeable

people around, because they tell you what they will tell you what they think. They don't pull any punches. And that can be harsh and even callous at times, but at least you get the damn information. Whereas agreeable people are always trying to keep the peace at any cost, including the cost of their own well-being. So in your situation, this is what I'm very curious about, you have to be adversarial and you have to be antagonistic to the degree that you're uncovering deception and obfuscation and those sorts of things, to the degree that you have to counter the tricks that people are bringing to bear on the situation. One of the things I guess that makes YouTube different, and Rogan in particular is, I

don't think Rogan, Rogan almost never talks to people who are doing that. Right? He just, like, he, I've talked to him, for example, about speaking with politicians. And he tends not to speak with them. And I think the reason for that is that he's not interested in that adversarial discussion. And he doesn't want his platform to be used for people who are trying to score political points.

Now, and fair enough, and that's worked very well for Rogan and I understand exactly why he does that. And I don't like to conduct adversarial interviews either, but it's still the case that there is a need for that adversarial conduct on the journalistic front if part of the role of journalism is to keep dishonest narcissists as honest as possible. And so obviously one of the things that you're attempting to calibrate properly, I presume,

is, well, how much you listen and allow the conversation to unfold and how much you dig without digging too much and without being at utter prick about it, right? Because obviously it's possible to go too far on that front. And so, and my suspicions are that you also have the temperament to be able to engage in a fight. And without that, you can't be adversarial. So how you said you're still learning to do that, the silence issue is interesting too, because I think that's particularly tough on broadcast TV, because you're called upon in some sense to fill every valuable second. And then to let a puzzle curve, you have to be willing to risk the potential price of dead space.

And that's quite intimidating, if you're while using up valuable broadcast space, which isn't such an issue on YouTube, let's say. But there's very weird constraints in broadcast TV that people aren't aware of when they're just watching it. So tell me about the adversarial relationship and how you think you've managed that positively and also negatively. Yeah, I mean, I give you two great examples, I think, where I got it right and then got it wrong. One was when I was at CNN and Sandy Hook

happened, the mass shooting at the school. And I'd been editor of the Daily Mirror back in the UK in 1996 when the Dumb Lane school massacre happened in Scotland, where 16 young children were killed by a lone government. And so at the time, campaigned in the UK for much tougher gun control measures, which all were passed by a combination of left and right wing governments, John Majors

and then Tony Blair's. So it was much easier here to affect change because very few people actually had guns. So I was under no delusion that America is a very different culture to be waging a similar campaign. But what it brought back to me when Sandy Hook happened, with the emotions I had when Dom Blaine had occurred and how horrific it was and how just this idea of of 16 in Dom Blaine and 20 children in Sandy Hook having their lives snuffed away by some maniac with a gun, it seemed to me unconscionable that any society could not want to affect some change to stop happening again. And yet recently in America, we had another mass shooting in a school, it almost identical

in the way that it was carried out, and nothing had been done since Sandy Hook. So if you take the apocryphal, I think it was Einstein-Quotive Definitive Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, also I would say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, also I would say the definition of insanity is doing nothing again and again and expecting same thing not to happen. So when I blew up at CNN at the time, against the NRA for example, it came from a position of real raw emotion. I think of only a handful of times in my career when I've been rendered to tears

by a new story. Dom Blaine was one of them and Sandy Hook was another. So I was being driven by genuine raw emotion, no question. And I think in the early stages of my coverage of that story on on CNN, it really resonated with people. People thought it was very powerful, it was compelling, and I was broadly right that something had to be done. But I would say I slightly over-egged the emotional souffle, and I think it began to have the opposite effect to what I hoped. So I hoped to genuinely affect change, but I couldn't stop being over-emotional in the interviews I did with some of these pro-NRA pro-gun people coming on the show. And I'm shouting at them, losing my temper with them, slightly straying into performative

art, perhaps even straying into a dash of narcissism myself, where you start to believe your own hype, you start to read the media, saluting what you're doing, I was getting emails from Barbara Streisand congratulating me and so on. It's all very intoxicating, but of course it can, if you're not careful, and I think it happened to me there, it can lead to you actually achieving the complete opposite to what you hope. And in the end, I think all I managed to do with my over-emotional response over time was probably sell more guns in America, which was a really opposite of fate,

to what I wanted. Because people thought this guy is the new George III. He seems to have forgotten we got rid of the Brits with guns, we don't want a guy with this accent telling us how to lead our lives, et cetera. And I would say similarly, in the UK, in the pandemic, in the first wave in early 2020, I built up a reputation pretty quickly for skewering British politicians on air in a very, very aggressive and volatile manner,

in which I felt they were completely dropping the ball collectively as a government, making a series of catastrophic and deadly mistakes. And I saw it incumbent on me to try and almost hammer them into making better decisions. And for a long time, I think I would say that I did a very good job of that. But again, I think towards the end, I overdid things a little bit. I want to look back at some of the later interviews. I was perhaps trying to recreate the theatre of what I've done before, which was very organic and real. And when you start to recreate the theater of what I've come up before, which was very organic and real. And when you start to recreate something that's organic, it ceases to be organic.

And so I think those were two, those were two good examples where a lot of people would have been cheering me on, but also in both cases, what happened there in the UK was the government actually pulled all their ministers from any interviews with me for eight months. They just did a complete blanket ban. And that doesn't help anybody because then my viewers don't get served by anything. They have no ability to hear from people in government about what's

going to be happening. So I felt in both cases that I let myself down in the end, albeit with the right intentions, and the danger line for anyone that does that kind of interviewing is where it strays into performative art rather than organic anger and emotion. So I don't regret the early emotion and anger, but I do regret the way it's strayed into something a little different. And I think that's a really interesting lesson for people. If you're going to do those kind of slightly more volatile interviews, and I do think sometimes you have to as a journalist. I like passion in journalists. I like emotion, but never lose track of actually what you're doing and how you're feeling. And never,

never try and replicate something that you've done before, because it will always come across as slightly fake. Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. So the first thing is, the first thing you said there was that when you're being lauded by a lot of people for your actions, first of all, we might point out that it's useful to take that seriously, right? Because one of the things you want to see in someone is that they are responsive to social response. The person who's not social responsive to social response is either completely unskilled or psychopathic or maybe isn't a different category altogether where they can handle public response

appropriately, which is very, very difficult. So you had every reason if people were responding positively to you to assume that what you're doing was broadly regarded as positive, and therefore might even be positive. But then you said it enticed you in an ego-tistical direction to some degree. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand Adolf Hitler psychologically.

And in some sense, I would say trying to develop some sympathy for him in so far as that was possible. And I think you develop sympathy for people by putting yourself in their position. And that's very difficult to do with someone like Adolf Hitler, first of all, it's very unpleasant to do that, but it's also very challenging because at minimum, he had a very complex life. But you imagine, here's a statement,

you can tell me what you think of this, if 20 million of your countrymen are telling you that you're the savior of their country, who are you to disagree? And so, you wonder why someone like Hitler could have his ego blown up to the proportions that it became blown up to and the answer is, well, do you really think that you'd be able to resist the positive blanchesments of so many people? Because that in itself could easily be a form of ecotism, right? I don't care what people think. It's like, well, yeah, you probably do and you probably should. And then the question is, well, how do you keep yourself straight when you are the target of

positive adulation? And so one of it, you said you should know what you're doing. So one possibility is, and I think I learned this mostly from Carl Jung is that you need to distinguish yourself from the principles for which you stand, Right? Because so one of the things that happens to me quite often is that people tell me how helpful my work is being. And I think to the degree that I can think this, I think, well, it's not surprising that it's been helpful in large part because it's not exactly my work. A lot of the things I've learned and perhaps the vast majority, no doubt the vast majority of the things that I've learned, I've learned because I've studied great thinkers, who in turn had studied great thinkers. And so I've been able to derive a certain amount of wisdom, and I'm able to communicate

that, but I'm doing my best to ensure that I separate myself from that wisdom. And that's a hard thing to do because, of course, here I am as a person as well. And the ideas that are being transmitted through me are focused on me at that moment for that reason. But it's very difficult. That's the idea of rendering unto God what's God's and unto Caesar, what's Caesar's in some sense, right? Is that you have to... So you remember, it's okay to attract the positive attention, because it reflects well on the principles that you're trying to espouse,

but as soon as this becomes about your status, and your specific success, and your instrumental maneuvering in the world, then you replace what is being praised with yourself. And that's a sin of pride. And the consequences of that will, is that you'll definitely fall into a pit. And on that point, it's interesting, you've maybe think of something very specific, which I think is a good example.

Tony Blair was a very successful British prime minister for many years. He was elected for three terms. But I remember after 9-11, he flew to the United States and he spoke to Congress and said we would stand shoulder to shoulder with the American people. And Congress gave us a lengthy standing ovation and it was an image that went around the world. And I could almost see

Blair in Congress standing there taking this extraordinary adulation from the most powerful room in the world. And then basking in the glory of his position here is the great supporter and defender of the United States at the most difficult hour. And it was almost like he puffed up visibly in front of us, like a peacock, you know, he was loving this attention, albeit in a very serious time. And then you cut forward to the Iraq war within two years. And I am absolutely convinced that Tony Blair's ego drove him to wage that war, to go along with the Iraq war.

When every part of his legal brain, he was a lawyer, and he's slightly left to centre political brain, will have told him this was insanity, that actually to go it alone with other United Nations second resolution, which would be endorsing military conflict, that without that this was mad. And I had many conversations with him at number 10 down in history in his flat, where we literally would share a beer and have a chat about all this. And I could see that it was the problem he dug himself was that he from that moment he became the peacock opening his his wings proudly to soak in the adulation of the United States. That he then felt almost a duty to go along with whatever action the United States government took.

Even if it was against the British national interest and even as it turned out, if it turned out to be a pretty much a disaster, the Iraq war. And I genuinely think it was the process you've just described where the initial instinct of going to Washington, standing shoulder to shoulder with America was absolutely correct. So the praise that he was getting was completely justified, but it then turned him into something which I think looking back, he must surely regret. He probably would never admit that, but I saw it happen to him,

where the ego needed to continue to be praised by America, and he had to make a calculation. Do I go with the Americans on this Iraq war journey, or do I do what the British people want me to do, which is to not go on that war? 1.7 million people marched through London. Many of them carrying placards, which I had produced as editor of a Daily Mirror,

which was the labor supporting newspaper, and he was a labor prime minister. And these placards said no war. And you'll see, if you go back and look at the footage, you'll see thousands of people clutching Daily Mirror, placas, so he and I had a real split over this. And when I look back, it was exactly the way that you just described that process,

where initially correct, and then sucked in through ego, or perhaps a bit of narcissism into a place he would never have instinctively wanted to be. Right, well, okay, so let's talk about this politically and theologically for a minute. So I was in the UK in London when Queen Elizabeth passed away and it was quite remarkable to see the response. It was quite something to see the Brits put on this amazing show which happened very rapidly which is extremely well organized and very very very well done very beautiful

and which I believe attracted more viewers on TV than any human history, which is really saying something. And I really like them on article system because I think the queen serves a confessional role for politicians. She'd reigned over 13 different prime ministers. And you could imagine that it would be very useful for someone who's in a position like Tony Blair or any other prime minister to have to go face this woman who's seen everyone

from Churchill to the President or to the President. President Prime Minister, Liz, Tuss, and to feel themselves in some sense less dominant and less powerfully positioned than at least someone in the room. And to have to do that on a regular basis. And that strikes me as a replication in the secular realm of what confession and the search for redemption and atonement was when it was practiced religiously. Let me tell you a story. So back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamian emperor was required to undertake a ritual at New Years. And I believe that a fair bit of our New Year's ritual mythology, you know, the death of the old year is coming to an end and the new year is going to be rekindled with all the possibilities that go along with it, and the

fact that people make resolutions, which are some sense confessional, I did these things wrong, and here's how I could improve in the future when there's a new year. The Mesopotamian emperor would be taken outside the walls of the central Mesopotamian city, so out into no man's land, right, outside the safety of the community. And then he would be required to strip himself of all his kingly garb and kneel, and then a priest would slap him. And then he would be reinforced to recount all the ways that year he wasn't a good Mardak. Mardak was the monotheistic deity of the Mesopotamians and he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic

words and so Mardak was a god of careful attention and proper speech and so the Mesopotamian emperor had to reflect on how he hadn't upheld the proper principles of sovereignty as a consequence of being humiliated before what would you say, a transcendent power that was greater than hits. And when I said earlier that you have to remember that it's not you, but the principles for which you stand, that is something like the proper ordering. And so it would have been reasonable for for Prime Minister Blair to be very pleased with the fact that the UK was standing in solidarity with the United States, but not pleased, not

appropriate for him to be pleased that Tony Blair was on the side of the Americans, because it's actually not about Tony Blair. And so and getting that confused. And then you've got to have sympathy for people too, because it's not surprising that people would get that confused. I mean, one of the things I've noticed about celebrities, and it's a big danger. Imagine, you become famous, and as a consequence of that, now you have a persona, and that's you defined by the social crowd. And there's a certain brand significance that goes along with that as reputational significance

and a value, even an economic value. But the problem is it can become a trap because if you can only be what you've already been, then you can't be anything new. And that's where people fall into this trap that you described of something like self-mimicry. Right? This worked for me before. Look at the effect it produced.

I just do that again. But then you're instantly false, say. You're instantly false when you do that. It's like you're sacrificing your future self for whatever your past self once attained. And then you lose that spark that actually is likely the driving force of whatever made you attractive to begin with. Yeah, I completely agree. And I always say to my sons, really my basic rule of life is try never to go back, full stop with anything. It's never the same.

There's always a reason that you've moved on from whatever it is. And to try and replicate previous behaviors and to try and replicate previous behaviors, to try and replicate previous relationship, to try and replicate perhaps a job that you once loved and lost, to try and go back, I think, you often forget why you left in the first place or why things didn't work out. You know, you read it and see it all the time. You tend to, you know, memory tends to sugarcoat things. And it's only when you actually, if you do allow yourself to fall back into these previous habits or behaviors or whatever it may be, that you then realize it wasn't what you thought. And the mind,

I think, plays tricks with you a little bit. So I think that I do think particularly with politicians, particularly with sportsmen and detainers. You're right about the brand thing, is they can very quickly get pigeonholed as to this or that or this. And then they start to play up to the thing which they were originally identified as being. And maybe it was what they're actually like

or maybe it wasn't, but either way, it becomes a very difficult thing to then escape from. You become tagged with that. I know pop stars who are still seen as the nicest people in showbiz. I know them to be utterly horrific. Conversely, I know people I've met in business or politics who have terrible reputations,

but actually are very nice people. So it's an interesting thing that public branding of people can be instantaneous and very long-lasting and often completely wrong. But the danger for any public figure is to try and play up to your caricature. Now, I think the one saving grace you can have is self-awareness. To me, there are two types of public figures. Those who've got self-awareness and those who don't.

I think that I have a big persona, a big, perhaps slightly caricature persona sometimes. I like to, I like to deliberately am tagging eyes and create debate and so on. But I always do it with a sense of self awareness. And the times I described to you earlier where I've slightly lost the plot and become a performative theatrical artist, if you like, rather than proper journalist. And when I've forgotten the self-awareness streak, when I've been driven by adulation and praise, usually, into thinking that somehow, right, this is the new me, and this is great, and I'm going to be this person, rather than just being honest with yourself, but you are. You know, I think I'm

pretty aware of who I am, Watson all. And some of the traits which other people see as being in me disagreeable, I'm very relaxed about. I'm less relaxed about some of the more positive traits. You know, people say, oh, you're such a nice person, but sounds almost brand damaging to me. I don't want to be just nice. I can't think of anything worse than being nice. I'd rather be challenging.

I'd rather be... Right, right, right, it's a shallow version. Yeah, and why would you aspire to just be nice? It seems to me that people who are inherently known as nice people, A, they rarely live up to that brand in my experience, in terms of high profile people, I know. And it must be an unbearable pressure to constantly wake up every day. I think I have to be nice all day. When, in fact, your natural and more honest instinct may be to be disagreeable from time to time because that's what you're actually feeling. And often you'd be right, by the way, to be feeling disagreeable about something.

So I do think that, I mean, I think I was struck by something. You told me when I interviewed you that you felt as you've got older, you've evolved and you've learned things about yourself. And I feel exactly the same way. I'm not the same person I was. I think I still have the same sense of virtues, which perhaps were still in me when I was a child on my family, a very strong family, a very strong upbringing.

But I do think I've evolved as a person. And I do think if you don't evolve as a person, I'm not sure what you're doing here. It's, you know, the world's a tough, difficult, complex place, and you should evolve emotionally as you get older and hopefully in the right direction. I think you turn into an actor. So I spend a lot of time, I've spent a lot of time analyzing pop culture, and I focused a lot as many of the people who are watching and listening to this will know on

analyzing the great Disney animated classics, which were extraordinarily influential popular productions and one of the movies that has struck me most particularly although I don't think it's the greatest of the Disney movies is Pinocchio and there are a number of so Pinocchio is a puppet So someone is pulling this his strings, right? There's forces behind the scenes that are making him who he is, and he's unconscious. He doesn't know it.

But he has a good father who is a very positive figure, who sends him out in the world to free himself of the behind the strings, Mary and Ep, players. And he faces a number of temptations. And there's four cardinal temptations, which I think are extremely well laid out. One is hedonism, narrow and shallow hedonism. And that's played out in the scenes of Pleasure Island. And the consequences of becoming a narrow hedonist is that you end up as a voiceless slave. That's how that you end up turned into a donkey that can do nothing

pray, sold as slaves to work in the salt mine. So that's the fruits of hedonism. Another scene that perplexed me for a long time was that Pinocchio is enticed into being an actor. And I thought, what in the world does that mean? Because the people who made this movie were obviously Hollywood types and what's so wrong with being an actor. But the answer is to be found in the discussion that we were just having. If you're playing a role

and you're doing it as a fictional character and you're playing a role in a movie, let's say, and everyone knows that what you're doing is fictional. That's one thing, but if you're an actor who's attempting to play a role for your own egotistical gratification, then that's a catastrophe.

And what happens in the Pinocchio movie is that he is enticed into going on stage as a puppet, and he does a wild dance and tangles himself up in his own strings and ends up face down in front of the crowd and then also in slave. One of the other temptations just interestingly enough because it's germane to our current culture is that the fox and the cat who are agents of mefistophiles essentially also entice Pinelchio into playing the sick victim. And so that's actually how they entice him originally to go to Pleasure Island to become hedonistic. They tell him that he's sick and unable and has been victimized and needs a break. And as a consequence of his poor victimized position, it's perfectly okay for him to be narrowly and self-servingly hedonistic. And so it's a lovely narrative layout of the sort of plethora of moral problems of

beset people as they try to transform themselves, let's say, into real boys, because of course that's what the movie is about. And it's very interesting to sketch out the nature of those temptations, this acting temptation. You see celebrities become their own mimics. They be like Elvis in some sense became an Elvis imitator by the time that he ended, you know, he came to the, to the near the end of his life. I mean, he could still put on a wicked performance, but you could see that immense pressure, the category pressure building around him. And you can

imagine how intense that is, especially perhaps at the time he lived because he was a singular celebrity. There's lots of celebrities now, but there were very, there were much fewer back then. And the pressure to abide by the way you've been defined must be almost overwhelming. And it isn't obvious that we really know how to rectify that. I think the confession idea is a good one, is that you need to keep your inadequacies foremost in your mind and you need to serve some principles that are higher than yourself. But that's easy to say in the abstract.

It's not so easy to actually do it when you're the one being tempted. Yeah, I think you also rightly said, you have to have people around you perhaps are disagreeable enough to be completely bluntly honest with you. You know, I, whether it's my mother or one of my brothers or my sister or my sons in particular, I've encouraged them to be very independent minded and to

let me know if they see or hear something I do, which they think is wrong and explain why. And they do that regularly. And I find that litmus test from people who really know you better than anybody else. So they really understand when you're making a fool of yourself or just behaving like a bit of a dick, right? You just see someone who's gonna tell you. And one of the big problems with modern celebrity is, because I've interviewed a lot of very famous people, is that they often surround themselves with pure sickofancy,

and they don't tolerate anyone drifting outside of sickofancy. All the teams around them are so fearful of losing their very cushy jobs, that they render themselves as useless sickofans permanently to avoid upsetting, so they may almost be almost wrongly second-guessing the people they work for, who might be perfectly okay people, because they think if they're not sick of fantic, they're going to lose their job.

So there's constant kind of pressure to blow smoke up the dairy areas of these people, which doesn't help the stars themselves. It certainly doesn't help the people who work for them who are behaving in such a ridiculous manner. And the celebrities I know who I think really thrive over a long period of time, they always tend to have people in their entourage

who are straight talkers, who literally will save them in front of people, stop behaving like a dick, literally. And you need those people, because if you don't have those people in your entourage, or whoever it may be, a manager, an agent, I had a fantastic manager who sadly died of pancreatitis three years ago. He's one of my closest friends,

and he transformed my career. He was the one that put me on CBD apprentice, which I won, and that led to joining CNN and replacing Larry King, and then the morning shade. It all was things for me, and we were very, very close. And he died literally four days after getting ill with the pack of dyes. It was horrific. But he was the one really who would call me sometimes. Having watched me on the morning show, watched me in LA at 11 at night. And he'd see or hear me do something, which he felt he had to say something about it. And he called me and say, he shouldn't have said that. That's not you. That's not what you believe. I know it isn't. And the way you phrase that, the way you went after someone, he hated if he ever felt like I was punching down, not up. Yeah, right. He thought I was at my best when I,

he thought I was at my best when I was basically producing Robinhood TV, where I would be the Robinhood figure looking after the downtrodden against the sheriffs of Nottingham, be they from energy companies or political parties or corrupt tycoons, whatever it may be, you said you're at your absolute best when you're Robinhood. When you start to behave like the sheriffs of Nottingham, your A, it's not you, it's not what's in your heart, I know you, and B is performative bullshit, which you shouldn't be drifting into, and it doesn't work on any level. Now, I really missed that

in my life, that guy, having those kind of conversations, because, you know, A, I have to respect the person to want to listen to it. So, when you lose someone like that in your life, it's really difficult, because I had such huge personal respect for him. And I knew we've been through an awful lot together. He nearly died 10 years before we'd been in C. Dessign, I hospital the three months with a staff infection. He'd been in a coma. He wasn't expected to survive. He'd had the last rights and so on. And when he came out, he got fired when his company merged. And I was the only one of 50 clients

who went with him. So he went from being one of the biggest power agents in Hollywood to one client, me. And then we rebuilt things very successfully. So we had a real bond professionally and personally. But I think everybody needs someone like that who is, who knows you, who knows you and knows when you're not being yourself? Well, that's a beneficial adversary. That's the translation, by the way, for the word that God uses to describe Eve in the Garden of Eden. Help me means, in the original Hebrew, it means beneficial adversary. And it's someone to have around. This is what a marriage can do for you too if you're fortunate, because you have someone there who can help you calibrate your aim as a consequence of continued disagreement in some real sense because there isn't much

difference between disagreement and thinking. This brings us to two things I would say. So there is an immense push in our society right now to insist that identity be entirely subjectively defined, right? Which means that, as God said to Moses, I am, that I am. And that's a very difficult, that's a very dangerous thing for people to take upon themselves, to say, I am, to be treated only the way that I define. And we just spent a fair bit of time outlining why that's so wrong because you're what keeps you sane, this friend of yours, this agent you had, he was part of what kept you sane. So you're moving up the status hierarchy, and it might not even be obvious to you while you're moving up when you're

punching up and when you're punching down, because your relative position is actually changing. So I've run into this problem. I criticized a swimsuit model on the cover of sports illustrated and an actress actor who had undergone a sex change publicly on Twitter, and I got kicked off of Twitter for the latter criticism. And one of the criticisms I faced was that I was punching down. And it didn't really occur to me when I was making those comments that I was punching down because the actor or actress that I criticized was quite famous in, now I'm having pronoun trouble, in his, her own right. And I was also irritated that these fashion spread that was conducted after the sex change

operation got 1.5 million Instagram likes, which didn't strike me as all that socially useful. But it's not easy to figure out when your own position is shifting, when you're going after someone, let's say, at your level of influence or higher, and when you've even accidentally entered into the fray that you shouldn't be entering into and brought too much force to bear on the person, but also what would you say undermine your own authority by doing so. And so having these disagreeable people around who say, you know, you're not being who you are and you're not who you think you are and you're not aiming properly. That's actually how you stabilize your identity.

And so identity is actually socially negotiated. If you're healthy, identity is socially negotiated all the time. And in that has to be a fair good leave enough. Criticism, because it stops you from getting above yourself if you're fortunate. And so you have to listen to how other people define you. But then we run into the adulation problem perhaps. And then if you listen too much to how other people define you, well, that's its own egotistical trap. So, but having people around, I'm fortunate, because my wife is very sensible, and she's a stupe beneficial adversary.

And my kids are like that too. And I have a lot of very good friends who are, what would you say, their forces in their own right and they're perfectly willing to tell me when they think that I haven't conducted myself according to the standards that I would like to abide by. And it's unbelievably useful while navigating a complicated situation. And it is in some sense the definition of sanity, right, is to have enough feedback around you that's balanced so that you move forward on the right path.

But that is not subjectively defined identity. That's one of the things that's so pathological about that insistence, because that just swallows you up in the ultimate egotistical solipsism. If you can be whatever you say or for a moment to moment and no one has any right to object, how do you think you're going to turn out? You're going to inflate like mad until you burst. That's definitely the case. Speaking of disagreeable people, you worked on America's Got Talent with Simon Cowell. And I really like Simon Cowell for what it's worth. I mean, he's got this tremendous capacity to give credit where credit is due, which he does very well.

And as far as I can tell, 100% genuinely, I think, and I'd sure like your comments on this, that the Americans got talent, the got talent platforms have brought a tremendous amount of ability to light. And it's really quite remarkable to see him flip from this disagreeable critic who puts up with pretty much zero nonsense to someone who's completely floored when someone comes out in his genuine and truly talented.

I really like the shows, the God Tell It Shows, I watch them quite a lot. They often bring me to tears, which turns out not to be such a difficult thing, but it's quite something to see people suddenly reveal something about themselves that's so utterly stellar. And I really like watching Simon impose his discriminating judgment, especially in a world that thinks that all discrimination and judgment is pathological. And one of the consequences of that is that he can bring all this talent to light, this true talent. What did you enjoy working with it, got talent, shows, and why did you do that?

And tell me about the judge process. I'd like to know more about the whole background enterprise. Yeah, so I'd known Simon a long time from when I was the show business editor of the Sun News paper, doing all the pop culture stuff. And Simon was trying to basically be a record company, a.n.r.man, flogging in records and trying to get a paper to write about them. So I got to know him, liked him very much. He was a great force of personality. He wasn't on television then, no one knew who he was outside the music business. Then he becomes the biggest TV star on the planet with American idol. I mean like Stratospheric Fame,

which happened interestingly not in the first series or season, but the second season, it suddenly exploded. And so when he took me out for lunch after I lost my job editing the Daily Mirror, and it'll be a bit controversy here, we published some photographs of British troops purportedly abusing Iraqi civilians illegally, which had just followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in America where their troops had been doing the same thing. The government and the regiments said these were fake photographs. I was fired. I'm still not sure exactly what those photographs were, but that was the end of my career as a youth paper editor after 10 years. And Simon took me for lunch, very near where I'm talking to you actually in Kensington and West

London, went for a nice meal and he pulled out a napkin and put it on the table. He said, you know what's really missing on world television? He said, the old Gong show in America and opportunity not to show a very similar show in the UK called Opportunity Knox and then New Faces. And they were basically, he said, any talent, not just singers, but any talent. And he said, my idea is we'd have three judges. You'd have a tough meanie who keeps everything honest. You'd have a slightly crazy person.

He said like Paul Arabdoll wasn't I at all. The big heart was slightly crazy. And you'd have someone, probably a comedian who would make people laugh. And you'd have the perfect judging panel. So then he, we did a pilot for this show. It's quite interesting, Genesis of the story. For Britain's Got Talent was originally going to be called Paul O'Grady's Got Talent, who's a British entertainer.

But he had a huge falling out with the network and left, and then Simon Simons said, well, unfortunately, we're not going to do it. So it was all shelved in the UK, where he was intending to launch it. Six weeks later, I'm thinking my brand new primetime TV career is over before it even started. And I get a text from Simon saying, be as I've just sold the rights to Got Talent to NBC in America. They want to repackage it as America's Got Talent, which I immediately thought was a brilliant idea to sort of wrap the flag and the country and patriotism around this show.

And he said, I can't be on it as a judge because I'm on American Idol. So I need to find somebody as arrogant and as obnoxious as me and judge mental, and your name is immediately sprung to mind. So, a long story short, he flew me straight out to Los Angeles. I met with some NBC executives, managed to bullshit my way through quite a long meeting with them. And three weeks later, I'm on the Paramount movie lot in Hollywood. I've got my own trailer next to David Hasselhoff and Regis Philbin and I'm the judge of America's Got Talent and I'm the new Simon Cowell, which was not a place I ever

thought I'd find myself, but it was really interesting. Simon came to, I remember he'd never forgot this on day one. He pulled up and he's brand new for our him outside my trailer. And he came and he said, right, and I was like, this is fantastic, son. I can't believe this. I'm living the dream. And he said, look, here's the deal with our kind of stick. You have to be right 80% of the time. And if you are, and the viewers agree with you 80% of the time, you can be as mean as you like, right? Isn't it?

You can be a straight, blunt, honest meme. Whatever you want to call it, you can be whatever you want to be. You just have to be right, 80% of the time. Because if you're mean or tough or ruthless and you're wrong a lot of the time, the act doesn't work. Right. And it wasn't acting away.

In a way, talent shows are theater, obviously. You've got people performing on stage and whatever. But I always tried to be, and I think this is a key thing I think about public life generally. I always tried to be, and I think this is a key thing I think about public life generally. I always tried to be authentic, and I think Simon's always authentic. You know, he might be guided by a producer, hey, this is a really good act, but he doesn't feel it, and he'll say, I didn't like it.

So he was always authentic, and I picked that up, and I always tried to be very authentic, whilst being pretty blunt, pretty British, pretty, you know, full-on, but I was always mindful of just call it exactly as you're actually feeling it. Really, just be honest with yourself, never mind the audience. And if you are, normally you're going to be right because it's what they're all feeling at home. Then you have to have that ability to gauge what audience might be thinking, but ultimately be authentic.

And if you ask me, what is the number one tool of really successful people, it's authenticity. They are true to themselves. The most successful people I've encountered, ultimately are authentic. They don't get drifted or pulled into places where it's not them, where they're playing an act. You do get some that come through

who I think are completely fake and wing it and get away with it. But broadly speaking, and the same applied with the talent shows. So you could have all these acts. And a lot of them are faking it. A lot of them are trying to be somebody. They were trying to be Beyonce.

They were trying to be Madonna. They were trying to be a dance troupe. Whatever it may be. They were trying to be somebody else. The most successful acts that I ever saw on the British show and the American one, were the ones which were truly authentic. I'll give an example, a guy on the second season of America's Got Talent. It's actually got a funny story behind this because Simon Cowell owned the rights to the show and he had the rights automatically to manage any of the winners of the show.

And I think even the top 10 finalists, that was built into his contract. So the second season, first season, number one, summer show in America. So my life has changed dramatically. Second season, there are two standout early candidates for potential winners. One is a white reggae star who was fantastic and a beautiful singing voice. Simon literally was radiating the word kachin every time he heard it in before because he thought this guy is a money-making machine right in front of me. He looks the part, he sounds the part, amazing singer, carries himself great.

But I was more drawn to the complete opposite, which was a guy called Terry Fater. But I was more drawn to the complete opposite, which was a guy called Terry Fater. And Terry Fater was a slightly overweight, permanently sweating, ill-fitting suited guy who had gone up and down America for 20 years in his van, earning 500 bucks a week at most, doing a ventriloquist act. And he'd had an extraordinary turn of fortune shortly before he applied to be on America's Got Talent. Where his act used to be that he would sing impressions himself, so he would sing Roy Orbison crying, for example.

And then he would talk through puppets, a turtle, you know, and so on. And he went to do one gig and two people turned up. There's a real lesson here for everyone. Two people turned up, but he still gave them the best act he could. And one of them turned out to be a talent agent who said to him, if you ever tried doing the singing impressions through the puppets, simple thing, they changed this guy's life. So Terry Fader went away, I found he could actually throw his voice through the puppets as a singer better than he could do it from his own

mouth. And at that point, his whole act changed. So he then applies to America's Got Talent. Comes on stage, and I immediately find him very endearing as a personality, and I love his backstory. He's the ultimate kind of, this guy's been going 20 years, wanting the break. This is the moment maybe. And as he progresses through the competition, I keep supporting him. Simon's on my case. Stop being so supportive.

He's gonna win. I can't make any money out of a Venturelliquist. Go with the other guy. Go with the reggae singer. I was like, Simon, this guy's what this shows about. This Venturelliquist. Anyway, I was like Simon, this guy's what this shows about, this ventrally quest. Anyway, he ends up winning, mainly because I'm so effusive in my support,

and by then the American viewing public viewed my opinion rather like the cowl one, American Idol is the one that was most significant as far as ever concerned. So he wins. And Simon, in a fit of peak, says, I can't make any money out of him, so I'm not gonna manage him. So the guy is left without a management.

So he disappears. And a guy who used to work on the Rolling Stones management team, and was now working on his own, heard about this guy, had a chat with him, and took him on, decided to manage him, and just tried his luck. And a few months later, literally three months later, Danny Gantz, all-round family entertainer in Las Vegas, one of the biggest stars on the strip, drops dead. That's it. And the casino where he operated had to fill a massive gap in their schedule. They didn't have an all-round family entertainer. The Rolling Stones management

guy who picked up Terry Fater recommends Terry Fater. Terry Fater does a three month trial. He sells out every show because grandmothers love him, mothers love him, kids love him, dads love him, everyone loves Terry Fater. He's now got 50 puppets. He's singing all these amazing songs through these crazy puppets. And on the back of the three month trial, he signs a five-year, $100 million contract

to be the biggest star on the Las Vegas strip, which if Simon Cowell kept the management rights would have earned him $20 million. If you want to really piss off Simon Cowell, just say, hey, Simon, how much money did you make out of that ventriloquist? So that story in many ways,

it has a lot of useful things to go with. One is, the old don't judge a book by its cover. If you took them purely on his fetics, you go with the white reggae star every day. But there was something about this guy's personality and the uniqueness of his act. And the fact that he taken advice from someone who was one of only two people in an audience. So never give up, always give everything, because you never know who's watching. I say this to my actor, son, if there's not a big audience in one night, you don't know in those 20 people, there's a guy that's going to change your life. Absolutely.

So I think, you know, all these lessons from the Terry Fater story, he's still on the Vega strip now. You go to the, I think it's the Mirage or whatever he is. He has his own theater named after him. He signed another $100 million contract. He's the most successful breakout star in the history of any talent show ever. And that's his backstory. And it was to me, that was what the show was all about, rather like Susan Boyle. Yeah, right.

I remember Susan, you bet. That was what the show was all about, rather like Susan Boyle. Yeah, right. I remember Susan, you bet. That was amazing. Never, never, was she never sang outside of her village and was 47-year-old spinster, you know, who'd been starved of oxygen at birth and had slight issues because of that. And yet she came on stage. I'll never forget this. Again, never judge books by their covers. She came on stage in Glasgow.

I can remember it like it was yesterday And I'm with Simon on the British show where both judges on the British show with another judge and Susan Bull comes out and we're talking to what are you gonna do? I'm gonna sing from Lameez Orab a dream a dream and we all start rolling our eyes. Yeah, yeah, all like my my God You've got to be kidding. It'd been a long day. We'd seem some terrible talents Yeah, yeah, and she began to be kidding. It'd been a long day, we'd seem some terrible talents. Yeah, yeah. And she began to sing, and in that moment, the magic happened.

It turned out she was an unbelievable bigger singer. She went on to sell 30 million albums. I interviewed George Clooney. Yeah, I interviewed George Clooney for CNN. And halfway through, he said, by the way, how's Susan? Which I have to say, was very chaffed about. Yeah. Robin Williams, I did the tonight show, the Robin Williams,

and my manager, my late great manager. And Robin Williams bangs on the door. He's the other guest and he comes into our dressing room and does a 15 minute act, which was basically half Mrs. Doubtfire, half Susan Boyle. Oh, cool. So he was Susan Boyle, but as Mrs. Doubtfire, half Susan Boyle. Oh, cool. So he was Susan Boyle, but as Mrs. Doubtfire, just for the two of us in our dressing room.

Oh, fine. So these two stories to me, Susan in the UK won and Terry Fator on the American one. They personified actually what the shows should be about, what the American dream and the British dream are really about, about chasing a dream and never giving up, about having a talent and making it work. All these life lessons really were encompassed in these two stories. And they could have been ignored. They may not have entered, and their lives would have been what they were. Terry Fade has

made, I don't know, $300 million. And everyone else's life would have been less or well, Simon and the other judges and the show are very good at separating the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things I think that makes Simon so attractive, especially in our culture, is that his fundamental virtue isn't being nice. Now he's one of the things that makes him heartwarming, weirdly enough, for such a rough character is that when someone does well, he's floored by it. And you can see that constantly.

And it's one of the lovely things about watching the judge's period. I mean, the judges have their personality peccadillos, and the fact that you have assembled a judge panel to reflect a variety of different personality types is very interesting. And you can see that the judges have had long days and that sometimes they're a bit more initially critical and suspicious than they might be, but that makes it human. But to see everyone on the panel truly light up when someone knocks it out of the park, that's so cool. And it's so, I think it's such a service to people, not only the people who, who's talent is being revealed, but to everyone that's watching. It's not surprising to me that the show has become so popular. It's extraordinarily

well done. And I think Simon, his ability to like or love talent so much that he's willing to state forthrightly when it's not there, which was also the role that you were playing, that's a, that's truly something to be commended. I also think that part of the reason that this show is so popular is because that ethos of extraordinarily penetrating criticism and separating excellence from falsehood or sheer lack of talent, that's very disagreeable because these people come to the show and they're hoping sometimes genuinely and sometimes narcissistically that they're going to have their dreams validated, but if they're talentless and narcissistic, they're going

to hit a brick wall very hard and it's not that easy to be that brick wall. No, now I knew if I had a friend who taught me something, he's a very disagreeable person. He took my personality test, huh, and he was like the most disagreeable person in 10,000. So he's a rough character. He looks like a pirate. I like the sound of him already. Yeah, yeah, Well, absolutely. Well, corporations used to hire him to go in and clean up when things had got messy. So he would start at the bottom of the company and he would ferret out people who were taking all the credit when anything went right and then distributing all the blame when anything went wrong and stealing people's ideas and not doing their job. I talked to him

one day. I had to deal with some issues in my lab. I had students who were underperforming and the higher performing students who were doing their job were getting demoralized because of that. And so I had to do something about it. And I really don't like firing people. I'm not, I'm not someone who likes conflict at all. I tend to, I tend to, I don't like it at all. I don't like it prolonged and I won't engage in the long run. So I tend to settle issues right now because I don't want it to propagate. But I was talking to my friend about firing people. I said, I really can't stand it. How do you manage it? Because you fired hundreds of people. He said, I really like it. And I thought, oh, well, I've never heard anyone say that before.

He said, yeah, I go into these companies and I find these people who are exploiting everyone around them and making life miserable for everyone and trying to gain credit where no credit is due and being narcissistic and manipulative. And I ferret them out and I stop them. And it's just fine. And I thought, good for you.

And his career has been very interesting because he has his own independent business and he's very good at it. He's an engineer. But he's moved from corporation to corporation playing this role. And he starts in the lower rungs and then moves up. And then as soon as he moves up high enough

to start to, what would you say? Ha, threaten the powers that be who also might be behaving in a corrupt manner. They fire him. Then he has to go do that at a different place. But he's also one of the people I have around who's being very useful at, let's say calling me out when necessary and who will definitely make his opinion known when it's necessary to make it known. And he does that in search of excellence, you know, and that's the thing that's so cool about America's Got Talent and Britain. Got talent. Simon said to you that you had to be right 80% of the time. And you said in order to do that, you had to

rely on your authentic judgment. And people will forgive judgment and see that it's necessary if it's authentic and not self-serving. And I think those shows have really fulfilled the mandate of bringing hidden talent to light, which is a very noble cause, maybe the most noble cause in some ways. You can also have moments in there where people, I can think about to one example, there was a young lady who did a rock violin act,

where she played electric violin and danced and sang, and it was all pretty crazy. Very unusual. I like the unusual part. I didn't think she was quite ready yet for fame and fortune. Her name was Lindsay Sterling, and I was pretty mean, actually, probably unnecessarily. I said that whilst I found her act interesting, I did think of a point she sounded like, I think I said a sack of rats being strangled, right? So it's

pretty full on... That's a little, yeah. Pretty mean. And everyone's doing, and she's like... You've got to say, kids are the sack of kittens being strangled. Well, yeah, exactly. The fact it was rats, it made it even worse. So it was all very sort of dramatic, and it was like a quarter final, I think, and she left and sort of dramatic and it was a quarter final I think and she left and she was upset. And after a little bit like maybe I went a bit far, blew up on Twitter and so on. But she's now a really successful act, like incredibly successful, touring around and she now has a tombstone on her stage act with my face on it. So she never forgot the strangled rats line. And it's RIP is Morgan. I flash up a couple of times. It gets a huge ovation from the crowd. They all know the backstory.

And in a way, sometimes you could see that that you can be very mean on people and sometimes in life, you can be mean on people who can't take it. And you might regret it because it has a negative impact on them. When I was a newspaper editor, I could be pretty tough, pretty ruthless sometimes with stuff if I felt they're underperforming. But I learned over time, there are certain types of people who respond well to criticism, even to very tough criticism. And there are certain types of people who just don't. And you've got to work them out, because actually they can all be talented. There's to some people can take it and some people can't. Some people thrive and fuel off it.

I just played a pro-am gulf tournament called the Alfred Dunhill Link, up in Scotland. It's probably the after, along with Pebble Beach and America, the most prestigious prime. You're playing with professionals in a £4m tournament. And for the first two days, I've played the most shocking gulf, probably seen in a four million pound tournament. And for the first two days, I played the most shocking golf, probably seen in the history of the tournament. Haven't played much in the last few months. Been working too hard. It was all a nightmare.

And on the last day, I played with a Belgian professional, good Thomas Peters. And he said, Pears, how do you want to play it today? How do you want to get out? I said, just sledge me, which is, criticize me, harshly. Every time I play a bad shot, I sledge me, which is, criticize me harshly. Every time I play a bad shot, I want mockery, I want taunting, I want laughter,

I want you to be all I've made like a cheap scent. So he did, he reveled in his role and I played the best round of my week because actually what I needed was somebody to do that rather than somebody politely going, so when I myself worked for an editor, he was a pretty infamous newspaper that is called Kelvin McKenzie at the Sun. And he said the most annoying trait about me was he could give me a monster as he called it where he would scream abuse until his neck is bulging.

And an hour later I'd bounce back into his office with a hot story and a smile on my face. And he found that completely annoying because it was not what he wanted to do. One of the tramplums would be down for a few days. But he then said he knew then I would have what it took to be a newspaper editor. And I do feel in society, we have moved so far away from that kind of atmosphere now in workplaces. But I do wonder, what about people like me who genuinely thrive and get fueled by harsh criticism? Is that happening anymore?

Are there any workplaces left in the world where anyone is allowed to be exposed to crutt-tough critiques? Have all talent shows now gone way too soft? Do you ever see a really harsh, strangled rat's critique which might fuel the contestant to then go and be a huge star to prove you wrong? In other words, you know, I really feel this that with my old talent show had on.

Things have moved so fast and have gone so much softer. And in my view, so much weaker. And that's not because I don't think some people can't take it, because some people can't take it. So you've got to be mindful of them. But what about the vast ways of people who actually revel in that kind of atmosphere, who revel in noise and aggression and passion and criticism. It fuels them, inflames them, makes them better people, makes them better at work, makes

them better perhaps in their lives. I don't know the answer, but I think the pendulum has swung way too far. And we're now becoming such a saccharine, uninspiring, unpassionate, collective workplace in particular, where the slightest joke told out of turn leads to you being fronk marched to human resources. I just feel like it's gone way the wrong way, and the talent shows actually have moved with that. But everyone on the talent show now is great, even when they're terrible. I scream at them, I catch them occasionally, my daughter loves watching, Brick has got talent. She's 10. And she said, Dad, are they terrible? Why are they all, why are the judges all saying that? That was great. I went because they feel they have to.

It's like, because if they don't, someone's going to say, well, you're damaging my mental health. Well, fine. I can respect, I can respect mental illness. But come on, you're going on a talent show about millions of people, and you want me to respect your mental health by not criticizing it. If you're not talented, and you go out on the public stage, eventually, that's going to catch up with you and devastate you. And so it's better to have it early in the morning. Well, speaking of disagreeable people, let's talk about Donald Trump. Now, you've known Trump for a very long time, and you worked with him.

Now, did you meet him for celebrity apprentices? What was that like? And tell me about Mr. Trump, and let me ask you some questions, if you would. So, you have a very lengthy experience with him. So, I met him first on America's Got Talent. He appeared as a guest star. I think introducing one of the shows. I met him briefly backstage. He was intrigued by me because he knew that Rupert Murdoch,

who was somebody he greatly admired, had made me the youngest newspaper editor for 50 years. So he knew about that part of my background, and that was all he was interested in really. It was like, it's a Ruby, you want a Rupert's guy, right? So that's how we had a sort of a media early connection. Then I entered celebrity apprentice, which he was obviously the host of.

And it was a pretty fascinating experience looking back because night after night, I ended up winning the show, pretty much by behaving how I thought Trump would want me to behave. So I read the art of the deal, his book about four times before I went out there and displayed it tough and hard and to win, which I knew would be all traits he would find impossible to say were not good things. To the degree, actually, that when I won, his last words were, "'Pers, you arrogant, you're obnoxious, you're possibly evil,

but you beat the hell out of everybody in my separate apprentice. When he won the presidency, I sent him the same note. You're not right, right? You're obnoxious, you're possibly evil, but you beat the hell out of everybody and you're the president of the United States. So we had that little thing going, but on the separate apprentice, what I remember most vividly was that he was a very different character in those boardrooms for three hours a night than I ever saw when he was president. When he was president, he was the ultimate alpha male.

I believe playing a role. I believe we didn't see the real Donald Trump. We saw the disagreeable side of him most of the time. The bully boy, the braggard, the you know, the alpha guy who would never apologize for anything because it's too weak, he was abusive, he was disrespectful and so on. In the boardroom for hour after hour, he could be very heartfelt, he could be very moved by people, he could be very funny, he could be very warm. I remember all those things, I think, what happened to that guy?

Why don't you show the world any of that stuff? Because if you did, it would be incredibly disarmy. So I won the show that I then went back in to celebrity apprentices each year as one of his boardroom advisors for a few years. Then I joined CNN, interviewed him 30, 40 times at CNN. Then he becomes the president of the United States. And suddenly, I've got this guy that I've become

pretty friendly with who used to ring me every three or four weeks for a chat about life. And now he's the most powerful man in the world. From a loyalty perspective, which I think is a trade overlooked with Trump, when he became president, I rang him and I said to him, you know, well, actually first I would say when I left CNN, he was one of only three or four people in America,

he bothered to contact me afterwards. And he contacted me every month for a few months. How are you doing? Are you okay? Can I help you? Right now, people might say, he had a vested interest in case he popped back with a big job, or maybe, but so did lots of people. And he was one of only a handful of people that bothered to actually contact me regularly

to check I was okay and could he help? I never forgot that. Similarly, when he won the presidency, I rang him and we had a chat about a week later. And I said, I'm just one favor. Of course, champion, he always called me Chan because I just one favor. Of course, champion. You've always called me, Chan, because I wanted to show. Of course, Chan, what is it? I said, I just wanna have your first

international television interview. I'm gonna do a domestic one in the America, but first international, done, done. And a few months later, I was at Davos in Switzerland, a 45 minute wide ranging interview with the president of the United States, which was spectacularly good for my career, and he kept his word.

So Trump, if you were loyal to him, was very, very, very loyal back. And I thought of that with him recently because I just can't buy into all this stolen election nonsense, and I've told him to his face. And he just, he just wanna hear it. Well, I think part of the reason, I'm gonna lay out some theories

and you tell me if I'm wrong, okay? I think part of what happened to Trump was that that tough part of him played well, especially to working class people. And I think that there was an element of that that was very genuine, especially contrasted with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, what would you call it, patronizing attitude towards working-class people. A Trump could speak to people directly and he had that bluntness that disarmed them in some sense and made them believe that he was at least in many ways dealing an honest hand. Now, he suffered a tremendous amount of assault through vitriol when he was running for president and when he was president, probably more than any president that I can remember, including Richard Nixon, who I think might have run second for having

most abuse dumped on him. Whether or not that's deserved is independent. I think in Trump's case, it was over the top in quite a remarkable way. And so I think that that probably elicited more of that bullying behavior that might be perhaps a weakness. I've been trying to understand him. And the bullying, the last interview you did with him, I believe, one of the things I noted about Trump was that he would do something about every 10 minutes that was markedly out of the ordinary conversationally. And so I watch for that because I'm a clinician.

And so I always watch people talk to see when they're going off script, let's say, because there's always something underneath that. And one of the things Trump does, and I don't know how much of this is conscious and how much of it is reactive and how much of it has become habitual is he'll say utterly proper. He'll say, you know, make statements that are. Way over the top. So I think he said, for example, when you were interviewing something like I tell the truth more than anyone ever has in history. Or he's, and then he said about 10 minutes later, something like, I've run the best administration in American history.

And they're over the top preposterous statements and they have this self aggrandizing element that's got a juvenile flavor to it. And I'm not doing a global critique of Trump's personality because I suspect, as you've already indicated, that he's a multifaceted person. But there's an element of him that's, he's got this ten-year-old bully part of him that also has a compensatory element.

And so to say, I tell the truth more than anyone has in history or something along those lines, I think, well, who are you comparing yourself here to exactly? You tell the truth more than Jesus Christ. You run a better administration than Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. It's market because people don't generally do that in conversation, right? They don't come out with a preposterous statement about how remarkable they are with some degree of regularity. Now it seems to me to be associated with some other tendencies that he has.

He has a tendency to nickname people and he has unhearing accuracy in doing that. And it can be devastating. And that also reminds me of someone who's like a very professional 11-year-old bully. And a few of them can bring a teacher to their knees if their attacks are targeted. And they can certainly do that with their classmates. And so I wonder with Trump if he's been, so he's pushed into a corner because of all the vitriol. The bullying and bragatautial tendency has become exaggerated. Maybe he's more surrounded by sycophants now than might be helpful. Now I don't know that for sure, but it looks to me like

something that, like that is happening. And he's trying to calibrate himself even during your interview because he comes out with these statements, something like, well, look at how wonderful I am. And I think, well, maybe if he would have got credit for some of the things that he did that were actually pretty positive, like not having America dragged into a war and like also fostering the Abraham Accords, that he wouldn't be so inclined to be compensatory in that manner. And then that bullying tendency seems to me the inverse of that is this victimization routine which he's wandered into. Now, Trump claims the elections were stolen by corruption. And I would say, part of the reason people find that credible is because the American left

weighing establishment and the liberal establishment for that credible is because the American left-wing establishment and the liberal establishment for that matter were unbelievably vitriolic to Trump and stooped pretty much to anything in order to devalue and criticize him, no matter how unfair and how over the top. And that generated a fair bit of sympathy on people's part. And I think it generated a sense that he was in some global sense treated unfairly. But I can't see that there's any legal evidence that's been compelling that he's been able to bring forth that the elections were legally conducted in an improper and corrupt manner. And so then what I see happening with Trump is that he's fallen prey to the very victimization narrative that he purports to stand against.

And so he's gone off brand. It's like, well, Mr. Trump, you're the winner. You're the guy who doesn't have things stolen from him by KELOL fools. You're the leader of the free country. You can stand up to the dictator of North Korea and to Vladimir Putin himself. You're a winner. And that's your brand. And yet, the election was stolen from you.

And now your story is it was stolen and everything's corrupt. And all the institutions are corrupt, which is exactly what the left wing radicals are saying. And there's very little positive messaging tied up in that. And it's hamstringing the Republicans. And so, well, that's how it looks to me. And so I'm wondering, you know Trump very well. Am I not giving the devil his due in this situation?

Am I off in my analysis in some important way? No, I think you're spot on. And I think it's a interesting point he raised there. And I've always thought Trump is a unique character in that he has the thickest skin of anybody I've ever seen in public life, and also the thinnest skin. So he'll react with ridiculous over-sensitivity to every slight and come out punching, but he's able to withstand the kind of pressure or scandal that would engulf and destroy every other politician I've ever encountered.

So he's a unique hybrid of thick and thick skin. I think that his book is very's a unique hybrid of thick and thick skin. I think that his book is very educational, the art of the deal. It's a really entertaining read, and actually has a lot of good business stuff in it. So I recommend people who just want to read it. It's quite fun.

Remember, he's a real estate tycoon in Manhattan. His whole persona for 50 years before we became president was to just to show off inbellish and exaggerate everything. Every one of his buildings, you could imagine the pitch, this is going to be the greatest building New York's ever seen. That was in his DNA. So it's perfectly normal for me that he would take those kind of natural traits to the presidency and continue to be self aggrandizing in the way he was about his buildings. He'd done it for 50 years. That's how he

squeezed big prices for his buildings. Everything was the best and the greatest ever seen. Yeah, well, that's part of that American salesman routine, right? I mean, that's deeply embedded in the American DNA. Right. He's not the only New York real estate tycoon who's like that. Trust me, I've met a few. But I also think that he, he also in the books, as if somebody punches you, punch them 10 times harder. But that was in his DNA too. Trump has come from a ruffles school of New York business people, where the only, the ones who survive and thrive are the ones who they get hit, metaphorically or perhaps even physically. They hit back 10 times and harder.

That's always been Trump's way. So if you insult him, he'll come for you hard, hard. And if you can survive that, well good, but many people, including all the candidates in 2016 on the Republican side, they couldn't withstand the nicknames. I mean, the name thing was fascinating. To watch him call Marco Rubio, little Marco, and you suddenly thought, wow, he's quite little, isn't he? Low energy jet, jet bush.

But bush couldn't work out whether to be, to carry on being himself and potentially radiate low energy, or what he ended up doing, which was being sort of like a hyper bunny, going way too far the other way to contradict the rumors of being low energy, and he looked completely insane. So Trump was able, lying dead, about to take Cruz, crooked Hillary, simple tanks they found

very hard to truck. He's a brilliant marketer. He knows how to sell things, he knows how to market things and he knows how to do it in a very damaging way to opponents. And he was said to me, people want me to change, because I said, why don't you dial down the Twitter rhetoric? A little bit. Just try to be a little bit more appealing to Middle America,

to the independence perhaps, who are not like die hard, mega fans. And he said, why should I dial down anything? I've become the president of the United States, despite being the most under-qualified candidate in history. Why should I change? I've just beaten you, said the most qualified candidate. The country's ever seen in a reclinton.

I kept being told, I was the least qualified, she was the most qualified, and I've beaten her to the White House. Why should I change who I am? And what you're seeing now, I totally agree with you about this with Trump. He's becoming the very thing he hates most, the biggest sore is loser in the world. Yeah, right.

And I've tried to, and I've tried to tell him, this is just, you've got to leave 2020. Nobody cares. Everyone's looking forward to 2024. And if he was able to pivot, you know, I think Trump's real problem. He's become his own mimic, right? Just this problem that we talked about it to begin with is that people tend to fall into the image and then they can't escape from it.

And he loves doing the rallies where he has tens of thousands of people who buy into his greatest hits of being what Donald Trump was in 2016. But I do think his real problem now is that he can't let it go, he can't let the past go, he's willing to re-litigate the 2020 election. And I think it ultimately will cost him any chance of winning again.

When, in fact, if you've been able to pivot slightly, I think he would have had a good chance, and I'll give another parallel. One of the reasons I fell out with him in the pandemic period was when he said, from the presidential podium, that you should use bleach, household bleach to zap the virus out of your body,

which is clearly a stupid and dangerous thing for a president to be saying of any culture, the United States of America, when so many people were dying. And he hated me saying that and unfollowed me on Twitter, which given only followed 50 accounts, it was quite a big deal. And when he hated me saying that and unfollowed me on Twitter, which given only followed 50 accounts. It was quite a big deal. And when he rang me eventually to sort of seal peace, a few months later, just before the election, I said to him, do you mind if I just speak frankly to you? He said,

sure, I said, look, the thing you've lacked this year, and it may be you just don't have this valve. So I'd be honest with me, but you've lacked empathy. You've lacked empathy over the pandemic. You've made it all about yourself and the stock market crashing and made it look like you've taken it all personally. You haven't been comfortable in chief. You don't seem to have that tool in your armory.

You just want to be the strong commander in chief. I said, on the George Floyd killing, same thing. No real empathy for what a lot of Americans were feeling. And I said, that lack of empathy is going to cost you because you're up against Joe Biden, who everybody knows from his own personal tragedies, has huge amounts of personal empathy for people because he lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash. He lost his son to a brain tumour. And I said, I just think think you showed a bit more empathy. And it would go an awful long way. But then I watched him go out the next day and do some press thing. And he was just exactly the same as Norfolk. So he sort of agree with me on the call,

but then wasn't able to deliver it. I don't think he really has an empathy valve. Well, he's capitalized on being disagreeable, which is part of what we've discussed through this whole show, is that if you're in the public eye like that, and you're a critic, and you want to say what you have to say, and you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, it's useful to be disagreeable. But you can't be disagreeable all the time. One of the things that happens to people as they mature, maybe they start out disagreeable, but as they become more sophisticated, they're able to incorporate agreeable and compassionate

virtues and skills into their personality. And then they can use them when that's necessary and they can be disagreeable when necessary. And then you have a personality that's extremely broad and capable of dancing with every situation. And so I do see, it does look to me like this is in Achilles heel for Trump, this tendency to devolve into a very effective but somewhat juvenile bullying and an inability, well, and then combined with that, this proclivity to play the victim, which I really think is stunningly off-brand for him. I can't see that that's going to be a successful ploy because it leaves everyone on the conservative

side in the same position that the radicals on the left want to put conservatives, which is to abandon all faith in the credibility of institutions. And then what do you have? All you have is blind faith in the leader, and then of course the leftists criticize that for being the worst of populism, and in some sense they've got a point. Now I think in Trump, the leftists and the liberals for that matter had a large hand in creating their own monster, because they chewed on him so hard and were so I especially saw this with the Abraham Accords because when the Abraham Accords which brought

a fair bit of peace to the Middle East for those of you who are listening who don't know a historic signing of a peace accord between Israel and the number of Islamic states, Muslim states, between Israel and the number of Islamic states, Muslim states, Morocco, and among them, and Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, and others with the Saudis apparently fully on board, although not exactly signing the treaty. This happened when I was ill, and I didn't pay much attention to it, but when I recovered, and I saw what had happened in the Abraham, of course, it just floored me that this had received almost no attention and no credit because it's a really big deal. And so the devil was never given his due in Trump's situation, and I think that made him a much bigger devil than he would have otherwise been. Yeah, I totally agree. I think I always said that. I always, I wrote about 120 columns for the

Daily Mail US website about Trump during his presidency. And after he left, I worked out about half of them had been supportive of things he'd done or said, and half of them were critical. And I felt that was a much more accurate take actually on the Trump presidency. A lot of the things he did, albeit delivered often with very blunt and unappealing rhetoric, were

right. He was right about a lot of things. He was absolutely, as been proven right, about Europe's overreliance on Russian energy. Completely proven right about that. He was right about a lot of European countries not paying their proper dues to NATO, and he was completely correct to call them out on that. I think he was writing many things that he did. The problem with Trump was all... Well, he was right to call out the sanctumony of the Democrats. Yes, and there's no doubt he did get treated in a ridiculously over the top way by his opponents. There's also no doubt he fueled that by constantly going into battle with them.

My real problem with Trump in the rhetoric was not that he could be blunt and aggressive. It was when people like Colin Powell or John McCain died, just basic instincts should tell you, if you got nothing good to say, probably don't say anything, right? Because these were two American war heroes, regardless of politics.

And he came out on both occasions within 24 hours and criticise him in tweets as they were basically a few hours dead. And I felt that was just unbelievably graceless. And I don't think most Americans are graceless. I just don't think they are, my experience. And I think I would have, I don't want to grated was a lot of Americans who may have been tempted to go with Trump's policies, but just thought the guy just, how can you do that? It's just not American to do that, I don't think. So he lets himself down a lot, actually, with stuff like that.

But you shouldn't, you know, I don't think we should move away from about. A lot of his instinctive gut feeling about policies were correct. And I could see a situation where some alike like DeSantis, the governor of Florida, ends up winning the Republican ticket because he basically perceives Trumpian policies, but without all the stupid rhetoric and the silliness and the scandalous stuff which goes with being Donald Trump. And he might well end up being president. A presidency Trump could have won if he'd look back at his first four years in office and pivoted to end up being president. A presidency Trump could have won if he'd look back at his first four years in office and pivoted to something more agreeable. Instead, he's done

what you and I said at the start of this interview, he's made a mistake of going back to what he what he was before and tried to replicate it. Yeah, well, one of the problems too, which is quite surprising for someone who's as sales-oriented as Trump. And perhaps this is maybe a sign of exhaustion, because it could be, is that he hasn't formulated a positive vision. It's all predicated on this idea of corruption and theft. And as I said, that casts him as a victim, which isn't a good look for him at all,

or for his supporters. It, I've been quite surprised, because I've had a lot of interactions with conservative politicians in the United States and Canada and throughout Europe. It is difficult for conservative types to generate a positive vision, because they tend to stand for tradition. It's not that easy to generate a compelling, forward-looking story when you're fundamentally reliant on tradition. It can be done, but it's very difficult. But it's sad and upsetting to see that Trump hasn't been able to reinvent himself

for this next election. I do think that one of the best possible outcomes might be that DeSantis can take some of the energy that Trump generated and move forward in somewhat the same manner with less of the juvenile overlay. Yeah, the key thing I'd say about Dysantis, which I've noticed, apart from the fact his resume is very impressive. This guy went to Yale and Harvard Law School. He was the Senior Legal Counsel

to the Commander of SEAL team one in Fallujah during the surge, which was the year the America lost most of its soldiers in that war. He's an incredibly well-qualified guy. He also has a strong personality, but he has a respect for the system. He has a respect for the presidency. When Biden has had to deal with him on

disasters and things, there's a mutual respect there, which I just never saw with Trump. He would rather shoot himself than be like that. And I think that he has a respect for the office. I think if DeSantis lost an election, he wouldn't spend the next few years claiming it had been stolen. So I think that he has a respect for democracy, which Trump doesn't have. Trump has a respect for it, so I'm going to see his winning. Yeah, well, so that's a, that's an example of putting not yourself, but the principles for which you stand forward. And it is necessary, if you're a politician, to have, do respect for the institutions and traditions that you serve because they are larger than you.

And if you don't believe that they're valid, although they need to be modified in the details, if you don't believe that they're valid and they gave rise to you, then there's an internal contradiction there that's not trivial. And so, well, it'll be interesting to see if the Republicans can negotiate this through the next election cycle coming up very, very quickly without shooting themselves in the foot over the schism in the Republican side over Trump. So I guess we should probably bring this to a close. We've been talking for as long as we're supposed to talk. And so it's a good to end, I think, on the DeSantis note and to end with that analysis of Mr.

Trump, which I hope was relatively even handed and productive. I would like to thank you very much for first of all the interview that you conducted with me, which I was very, well, was I pleased about it? I thought it went extremely well. I thought I had an opportunity to say some of the things that were necessary to say.

And I enjoyed very much talking with you and meeting your sons as well and appreciated the opportunity that you presented to say. And I enjoyed very much talking with you and meeting your sons as well and appreciated the opportunity that you presented to me. And I appreciated the opportunity to talk a little bit about the so-called in-sales, you know? These disaffected young men. I was talking to a friend, what would you call it, an associate, someone who has knowledge of Olivia Wilde

who had recently made comments about me being king of the insels and it's probably worth pointing out that she married a multi-millionaire prince and so right so she's the she's the absolute epitome of female hypergamy that her ergamy that that makes females very judgmental in their choice as they should be but for her to have nothing but contempt for men who are struggling forward to try to make themselves attractive to women is a sign of a deep, of a kind of deep narcissism that on the female side, I would say, that deeply affects our culture. And so it was good to have an opportunity to clear some of

that up. No, I've talked to lots of young men around the world about how they might make themselves more attractive on the friendship and career and dating front. And that usually has to do with telling them that, well, they have to subject themselves to that harsh judgment. And if all the women are rejecting them, either because they're too timid to put themselves forward or they don't have anything truly to offer,

which is something like productive, stable, wise, judicious generosity in the highest order. Why would they expect a woman to make herself vulnerable, especially on the childbearing, especially on the childbearing front to them? And so if everyone is telling you that you don't live up to the necessary standard, well, then you can demolish the standards or you can put yourself together. And one of the things that's been really heartening on that front is that many of the young men who have been listening to the ideas I've been generating and promoting have in fact put themselves together. And they come to my shows and they're standing up straight and they're dressed

in it often a three-piece suit. And now they frequently have a girlfriend with them and they say something like, you know, I decided to start being authentic and tell the truth and I decided to adopt some responsibility and to grow up and all of a sudden everything's better and the problems I had are going away. And so that's the solution to the in-sell problem and demonizing people for being loansome and isolated is not exactly helpful because it's actually quite enough problem to solve. So anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you and talking with you and say hello to your sons.

And I will. They'll be thrilled to hear that. Yeah, you can thank them on both our behalf for their wise counsel. And I've tried very hard again to listen in this conversation. My says, Stan, you in particular, be very happy with that. You're taking all the credit. Well, for two extremely noisy people, we probably listened to reasonable about. Exactly. I've already enjoyed it. Well, thank you very much, Pierce. It was a pleasure meeting you.

Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.