The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 469. Finding Signal Against the Noise | Piers Morgan

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist and broadcaster Piers Morgan. They discuss the rapid success of “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” the utility in the mindset of a true journalist, false versus substantive activism, why proper and open debate resonates so strongly today, Donald Trump, and the pressing need for everyone to speak their minds. Piers Morgan is an English broadcaster, journalist, writer, and television personality who has become one of the most preeminent and influential figures in global media. His meteoric ascendency in the industry began at The Sun newspaper, and he later became the youngest ever editor of The News of The World before taking over as Editor of the Daily Mirror. After leaving the Daily Mirror, Piers pivoted into a career in television gaining prominence as a judge on the reality television show, “Britain's Got Talent,” and its American counterpart, “America's Got Talent.” Piers now hosts “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on YouTube, amassing over 3 million subscribers in two and a half years, making it the fastest growing YouTube channel in broadcasting. This episode was recorded on July 9th, 2024 - Links - For Piers Morgan: On X https://x.com/piersmorgan Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@PiersMorganUncensored Wake Up (Book) https://www.amazon.com/Wake-Up-World-Gone-Nuts/dp/0008392609  

Hello everybody. I'm in London, UK today, just arrived this morning. I had the opportunity to speak with Pierce Morgan. I've got to know Pierce a little bit. He's always treated me very fairly as a journalist and also my daughter, who he's interviewed a couple of times. And so we had a chance today to sit down and talk. And Pierce has moved out of mainstream legacy broadcasting and into the online space. And he's actually kind of a first mover on the European and UK side with

regards to such a move and so he has a very popular enterprise, Piers Morgan Uncensored, which is actually kind of a hybrid between a legacy media news approach and the more free-flowing conversation and investigation that YouTube in particular enables. And so we talked a fair bit about how he got to that point, the development of his career. We talked a fair bit as well about Britain's got talent and America's got talent and the strict meritocracy that those shows represent and the implications for the value of meritocracy in the public landscape we talked about his

orientation is increasing orientation in relationship to his own curiosity his desire to change his mind and to learn and how that plays into learning to listen and into running an increasingly successful private news and public affairs operation, which is what he has on YouTube, a very, very rapidly growing channel. We talked a little bit about the British political scene. As most of you know, the UK people elected a new government only a few days ago headed by Keir Starmer. We had a chance to talk about that as well and that made up the bulk of our interactions. So join us.

So tell me what you've been doing that's particularly interesting. I'd like to know about your work on online in particular. You've really blown up as a journalist and so what do you think you're doing right and what have you been doing that's interesting? I would say the most interesting phase of my entire career has been the last few months and the reason I would say that is I've run national newspapers for nearly 10 years in the UK. I've judged massive talent shows. America's got talent.

Britain's got talent. I did CNN, replaced Larry King at CNN. All of these jobs were fascinating. Did a morning show over here, but transitioning out of conventional linear television completely, because we were running with Piers Morgan on sensor, both a linear vehicle for it and also YouTube. And what was happening was we were getting 100,000 people watching the big shows on the linear version.

And we were getting 10 million watching on YouTube. And eventually I went, why are we bothering with the TV version? Because- There's the question. Why are we bothering with the TV version? Because there's the question, why are we bothering with the TV version? Well, I think it's like our global question. And I think the answer in 10 years time is nobody will be. Yeah. And I think people like yourself, people like Joe Rogan, people like Ben Shapiro,

I think everyone has worked out that anyone under 45 doesn't really watch linear television. They watch it for live sport. Yeah. They might watch it for a massive breaking news story. But actually what most people under 45 do is they watch apps on their TVs. In America recently, 10% of American television watchers, it was revealed in a major study, now watch everything on their smart TV through the YouTube app. So that's one in ten. And that's going to massively, exponentially increase, I think, very quickly.

So to me, I joke about it, but in a way I feel like the kind of Justin Bieber of journalism only very late in the day, where he was a YouTuber who cracked the pop market. And I think I'm now someone who's gone the the other way gone from a kind of slightly stuffier Old version of doing things and I'm now doing it in a far more streamlined quick Interesting and genuinely global way and is working. Yeah. Well, you're you're you're on the cutting edge of that in the UK in particular I mean my my sense of the UK YouTube market is that it's three or four years behind the North American market in terms of what's people's acceptance of YouTube as the primary, or at least online video, as the primary video source.

But you've also managed the transition successfully, which is so you've managed a lot of transitions in your life successfully, right? That's, it's hard to be successful at one thing. It's a lot harder to be successful at successive things and a lot of the things you've done have been quite different. So, But what is one common thing? Yeah. I'm a journalist. And actually, what is a journalist? It's somebody who's curious, who's quite judgmental,

who's interested in people, who's interested in talent, normally, or people who are able to display a talent at something. I find most journalists are drawn to that. They want to get to the truth. They want to get to answers. When I look at whether I was a newspaper editor, whether I was a talent show judge, whether I was even competing in Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump on his show, whether I was doing a morning show, whether I was doing any of these things,

or what I'm doing now, the common thread of all of it, of those skillset that I developed as a young journalist, I think has held me in brilliantly good stead for every single thing I've done. And you think that that's been transferable as well to like Britain and America's Got Talent because that seems like a fair departure from journalism. Well, Simon Cowell hired me for America's Got Talent, which was the first one of the whole franchise because he said, you're just as arrogant, obnoxious, and as judgmental as me. I see, I see.

And what he wanted was somebody who was going to be not afraid to give strong opinions, not afraid to be judgmental, but also had, as he put it, a journalist's eye for talent. You're somebody, he said, who would put pop stars on the front page or television stars or whatever it may be, or politicians who were on the front page or television stars or whatever it may be or politicians who were on the rise. So part of your job every day was to look for the next big thing and to look for the next talented politician, singer, entertainer, whatever. And he said, I want you to apply that same discipline to judging acts on the stage. And actually he was completely right. It's exactly the same thing. When I saw all these acts, I've never been a juggler or a fire eater or had any experience of piano playing pigs. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, everyone's tried, but I've never had any real experience of being any good at any of the things that the people in front of me were doing. But what I was good at was identifying ones I felt a mass audience would like, that they would think were good. So I was able to judge talent far better than I was able to do any of the things that they were all doing for me. That comes down to the journalistic chops that I think were in honed in me from a young age. Part of a journalist job when you're running a newspaper, when you're doing a big CNN nightly global show, doing a loud noisy morning show, part of it is identifying what you should be talking about and what you think other

people would be interested in talking about. So that again just comes down to having an instinct, which I think a lot of journalists have. So I think the running theme is the journalism. Yeah, well, it's that capacity to separate wheat from chaff. I mean, I've watched Britain's Got Talent and America's Got Talent a fair bit. I have a real soft spot for it. It always makes me tear up.

And Simon Cowell is a very interesting person because he's a very strange combination of extremely sentimental and extremely judgmental. And so you can really see, and it seems to me that his judgmental capability is actually nested inside his discernment, that he really does care that the people who are making an effort and who are genuinely talented rise to the top. And the price you pay for that obviously is that the people who aren't genuinely trying or talented don't get to rise

to the top. And he's also, I would say, got more sentimental and less judgmental since becoming a father, which is interesting. Because I've known Simon for nearly 40 years. Testosterone decrease. Yeah, before he had any commitments, he was wham, bam, take everybody down if he didn't think they were any good.

Now he's much more empathetic, and I'm sure it's becoming a father that's done that too. I've noticed it tangibly on screen, and it reminds me of Sir Alex Ferguson, who was the greatest sporting coach in history, I would argue, who was the great Manchester United football coach. And he always said that he loved to pick kids like 18, 19 year olds, because they played

with utter fearlessness. And he said once they started getting married, having kids, having responsibilities, their risk taking and fearlessness started to diminish. So the peak time for a lot of footballers, in his estimation, was 18... Soldiers too. 18, 19, 20, 21. It makes perfect sense, but interesting to have the greatest coach of all actually outline that this was a real thing that he saw time and again.

It's interesting to me, again, to watch, say, those talent shows and see that that capacity for discernment is also very tightly associated with it's something like the desire to mentor right and there's something about that that's very masculine because the masculine element of developmental facilitation is something like mentoring it's something like encouragement and you can really see that in Cowell and well everybody who works on those talent shows is actually quite good at that, but he's He he all he seems to be genuinely interested in Facilitating the development of the career of the people who are in fact talented and trying and goes out of his way to do that I think it's it's part of the appeal of the show, you know to watch him exercise that

I think it's part of the appeal of the show, you know, to watch him exercise that careful judgment that's also on the side of the person who's striving upward. Yeah, it's a little bit- I mean, he said to me, when I replaced, well, didn't replace him, he couldn't be on America's Got Talent because he was on American Idol.

So even though he created America's Got Talent, he wasn't able to be a judge. And he said to me, look, here's the deal. I remember I was in Dreamland. I'd been fired from my job as a newspaper editor thinking that's the end of my media career. And literally, a few months later, I'm on the Paramount movie lot in Los Angeles in my trailer next to David Hasselhoff's trailer and Regis Philbin's trailer. I'm thinking I could get very used to this. And then Kyle roared up in his Ferrari or whatever he had at the time and he came and had a cup of tea with me, full very British in my trailer and he said here's the deal, you can be as judgmental as you

want and you can be as brash as you like and you can be everything that I know you to be when you want to be that tabloid editor kind of mindset. But you have to be right 80% of the time or more. Otherwise the act doesn't play with the audience at home. If they're looking at you being mean, but you're wrong and they don't agree with you, the act doesn't fly. And that was very good advice because it concentrates your mind to think not just what are you thinking at something, but actually what are the audience at home likely to be thinking here? And that particularly comes down to the empathy that you would want to show certain acts.

A good example would be Susan Boyle, who became probably the greatest breakout star of any talent show anywhere. I mean, there was a 47-year-old spinster from a Scottish village who never performed outside of her little community, who suddenly became the biggest superstar in music in the world sold 27 million albums and when the finale of the show took place live there were news crews from NBC ABC CBM it was insane insane and we all having initially been very judgmental in a way, if you look at the original clip,

rolling our eyes, who's this? This is gonna be terrible. The evolution very quickly of wow, we've got something special here, and then our desire collectively to then be very protective to Susan, because she'd had a tough upbringing, she'd been starved of oxygen when she was born

and that made her a little socially awkward with a lot of people. And we would determine that she would get protected. And Simon was particularly determined. It was his show, this was one of his breakout stars. And that's all part of it. And I think that that is a side of him that people don't often see, but I saw it.

His desire to protect Susan and people like her who were just so unused to the limelight. But she was extraordinary. I remember going to the Rockefeller Center in New York. It was snowing, literally like two feet of snow. And they had an outdoor stage, and she was gonna sing I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables, the one that she sang on the show,

live at 8 a.m. And she was vomiting in her dressing room 10 minutes before from fear. Utterly terror struck. And at eight o'clock sharp, she was on that stage, now age 48, in the center of New York on NBC's Today Show, and she absolutely sang it completely faultlessly in front of the big crowd outside.

Amazing. And I remember looking at that going, that's extraordinary. That's for sure. So she had something. You never know what's inside people. And she had something magical. And the beauty of those talent shows is,

you know, I always believe everyone's got something. Everyone has a talent. I genuinely believe that. And I remember going to the Soweto township, for example, in South Africa once, and the kids singing and dancing and singing, some of them are thinking, when you would literally win America's Got Talent if you sang like that on a stage.

And these are penniless kids in a township in Soweto. So I think everybody has a talent. You just have to find a way to unlock it. Yeah, yeah, well, the other thing that's very interesting Everybody has a talent. You just have to find a way to unlock it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the other thing that's very interesting about that show, maybe why it's received such incredibly widespread public attention is because it is strictly meritocratic. Yes. Right.

And there's such an ideological assault on the idea of meritocracy. I was just watching a congressman from the US today claiming that the critics of Biden after the last debate are ableist. Yes, I saw that. Well, I don't even know what to think about that. It's like, I see. So now here's your theory. Your theory is that it doesn't matter whether the President of the United States is able,

because all discrimination between being able and unable is a form of prejudice, and that even applies with regards to the President of the United States. And so that means that all the people who are concerned that there might be something astray with him cognitively that we're being lied to about at a level that's almost inconceivable are now equivalent to like KKK racists from the 1940s. That's your argument. And by the way in relation to the same critique of his vice president, should you dare to criticize Kamala Harris, you are de facto a racist. That the only reason-

Yes, Gavin Newsom said that the other day. Yeah, that the only reason that you would feel the need to criticize this black woman who's vice president is not that she's been completely incompetent in her job, which any impartial observer would conclude, but it has to be because of her skin colour and her gender. Even though that's why she was put in the damn position to begin with. Joe Biden said publicly, I want a black woman, right? And then he gets a black woman who is

massively underperformed, which hasn't helped him at all, but no one's allowed to criticise her, because if you do, you'll be called a racist. And I find that one of the laziest tropes out there in modern society. It's a way of, I think we've discussed it before, but it's a way of stifling honest debate. It's a way of censoring legitimate criticism. It's a way of asserting moral superiority that's unearned. That's a lovely way.

And actually, none of them really mean it. I mean, it is the genuine epitome of virtue signaling. What they're really, I mean, I remember the, you know, for example, I remember when the George Floyd murder happened, it was a horrific incident, of course. But I remember that soon after that, there was a Black Square Day announced on Instagram, where everybody had to signal their virtue about this by doing a black square. Now I'd spent the entire morning on Good Morning Britain, hosting debates about the George Floyd killing and showing enormous empathy and support for Black Lives Matter and what

had happened. This is very early stages before a lot of stuff came out about the organization, Black Lives Matter, which put a rather different gloss on them, but the principle that this had been a terrible killing, that this man should never have been killed, that it was possibly racially motivated, all that kind of stuff. I was debating this with an absolutely open mind of being very empathetic to all these arguments.

But I didn't do my black square on Instagram. And my sons got in touch with me and said, Dad, you gotta do your black square. I went, why? We're getting criticized because you haven't done it. And I actually had posted a picture of a bottle of rose wine, because I was having one in my local square,

and I hadn't given any thought to the rule that I had to signal my virtue about this thing. And I then got absolutely annihilated by people saying, how dare you do this? Where is your black square? And I remember thinking, but all of you are gonna go right back tomorrow morning to posting inane, self-aggrandizing photographs

of yourselves on beaches or in nightclubs or in Ferraris or whatever. None of this means anything to you. Whereas tomorrow morning I'll be back on air doing another three hours of debate about this to try and get the society in the world in relation to this issue back to a place of better racial justice. Now, which one is going to have a better effect on influencing people's minds? There you go, being ableist again. Right, and that's the point, is that I found it such a trite and kind of pointless example of this cult of virtue signaling.

It's worse than that. So, I just finished a book which is going to be published in November and I walked through a sequence of biblical stories trying to explain what they meant psychologically, and I spent some time on the book of Exodus for obvious reasons, and there's a commandment in there that people misapprehend, so I think it's the third commandment, don't use God's name, thou shalt not use the Lord's name in vain. And people think that means don't swear or curse, and it sort of means that. There's peripheral meaning that is associated with that casual use of the sacred, let's

say, but that isn't what it means. It means don't claim divine virtue when you're working for your own purposes. And the same thing happens in the gospel account, say, because the Pharisees, who are Christ's primary enemy, are the people he accuses of utilizing the sacred, the deepest. So you could say compassion, even, given its proper place, for their own self-aggrandizement. They're praying in public, they're trying to occupy the best seats in the marketplace, they want the best seats in the synagogues, etc. That's the accusation. And so that virtue signaling, it's not merely, it's an expression of an unbelievably deep and ignorant narcissism, right? It's part of the victim-victimizer narrative, first of all, which explains all of history

with no cognitive effort. And then it's these performative gestures that make you morally virtuous, right? And one of the consequences of that too, is as soon as you're morally virtuous like that, you get to specify the victimizer who's your enemy and tear them into shreds, and that's actually a moral act.

And I mean, you saw a bit of that, you said, with the black square. But it's an unbelievably pathological. But it was fascinating to me that my own children, all in their 20s at the time, that they were being contacted by friends, saying, why has your dad done this picture of a bottle of wine, where's his black square?

And they were kind of damned by association, and were keen for me to rectify this problem. And I had to say- But there's a tribal signaling there too. Yeah, and I said, guys, I'm not going to do it. Sorry, I'm just not going to feel bullied into doing something that I think actually is pointless and trite, and that all the people doing it don't really care much about this cause and will be very quickly back to their normal work on Instagram, which is pumping themselves up and showing off and all the things people do on Instagram.

I said, I'm just not going to play this game. Well, there's no cost to doing it, right? To putting up a black square. You can indicate someone's commitment. That's exactly right. There's no sacrifice. There's no hard work required. Why did you use sacrifice?

Is that? Well, because I think that to really support a cause, whatever that cause may be, at some point you have to show a bit of sacrifice to that cause. You have to, you have to commit time or money or resources or whatever it may be to support reputation, put your head over the parapet. There has to be an element of risk and an element of sacrifice. Now if all you're doing is following the hashtag trend of the day, there's no sacrifice, there's no risk taking.

In fact, it's the opposite. It's reversed. It's actually more courageous to say, I'm not going to do that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do this. And it's a far more tangible and effective way of trying to get racial injustice to a better place, which everybody should share that desire. And I just feel that it's that it comes back to what you said earlier about the victimhood generation. The one common theme of the people who play that victim card all the time is they almost never show any sacrifice to anything.

It's all about themselves. It's all about how can I get pity? How can I be showered in sympathy? How can I become almost famous for failure and celebrated for it, rather than the way I was brought up, which is you celebrated success, you drowned your sorrows with failure and you didn't let it take you down or destroy you, and you dusted yourself down and got back on with it. But the idea of celebrating failure, the idea of celebrating coming last at the school sports day, you know, the idea that everyone had to get a participation prize, even if they

were terrible at something, no. You know, I wasn't very good at athletics at school. I was very good at cricket. I was one of at cricket. I was one of the best cricket players, age 12 in the country. And my dream was to be a professional cricketer. I never made it. My other dream was to be a journalist. I made that. But I was terrible at athletics. My two brothers were brilliant at athletics. They used to win everything. But I used to always win the non-finalist race. And I was very happy about

that. Because what I said to my what is that well so everyone who didn't win a race got put in the non-finalist race so you were the kind of lepers with the most fingers right for one of the crass phrase and the point was that you you were competing against other losers but you could still win something. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to be the best loser because I'm crap at this. I can't really run or hurdle or throw javelins or anything like that. But I can beat this lot. And I was proud of that. But I never mistook it for actual glory or winning. And I think people that, you know,

I see people on social media that say, I'm so proud of myself. I just passed it for actual glory or winning. And I think people that, you know, I see people on social media that say, I'm so proud of myself, I just passed my driving test at the 11th attempt. And I'm like, why would you want anybody to know that? Why would you want anyone to know that you're so completely clueless at driving? They took you 11 attempts to pass your driving test. And what do you want me to do?

Do you want me to send you champagne? Do you want to, you know, do you want to be trending number one around the world for being the worst driver in the world? What are you celebrating here? If you passed your driving test at 11th attempt, I'm pleased for you, but I'm not proud of you. This is not something that should instill pride in you. And I think that that's where society's so warped now.

We celebrate failure. We also celebrate pride. And pride. Like formally. Right, exactly. And we also, we've started to feel bad about winners. We don't really feel comfortable with winners anymore. Especially if they're a little bit self-confident.

And yet I think they're the best possible role models out there. People that can perform in the cauldron of great sports or entertainment, whatever it may be. You know, I watched all the sort of jealous sniping about Taylor Swift, for example, and then I went to her concert at Wembley. Absolutely mind-blowing experience. It's not because she's the best singer in the world or the best dancer or the best actress

or the best pianist or the best guitarist, even though she does all those things. It's just I've never seen an audience so up one with the performer where she gave them what they wanted. Three and a half hours of banging hits on a massive stage with huge theatrics. Every kid there, including my 12 year old daughter had a fantastic time. But the sniping, she doesn't sing every song live, she's this, she's that. She's written all these songs herself. She's grossing $2 billion on this tour. Pro Rata, the biggest tour in the history of music, bigger than the Beatles when they played Shea Stadium. And yet the natural reaction of a lot of people is to snipe, while pretending, you can almost bet they all have hashtag be kind in their ex bios.

In other words, I'm a really kind person. I'm a tolerant person, I'm a nice person, and I'll destroy any of you fascists who deviate from my woke worldview. But when it comes to Taylor Swift, I'm gonna bitch all over her, I'm going to bitch all over her. I'm going to trash her. I'm going to be envious and resentful and jealous

and all these things, which flies completely in the face of what they're pretending to be. And it's that complete double standard that I see with so many of the, for what I'm better afraid, the woke brigade, as I call them. But it is, as Elon Musk has said, it's a mind virus.

And they are actually leading lives and behaving in a way that is completely the opposite of what they are masquerading as. And I find that deceit and that fraud actually pretty offensive. And it's like, it just exposes them for what they are. Well, I think to bring it back to the talent shows, I think that that's all dramatized

in America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent, right? Because it's, people come out there and they can't help in some sense, but show who they are very rapidly. Yes. Right, they're on stage and they're naked on stage, right? And then they're judged and if it's done well, then the cream rises to the top

and everybody's thrilled about that, thrilled about that. And so now you said something right at the beginning that I'd like to return to too. You talked about the shift that you've made into online journalism. And so you're, I presume, much more autonomous, but you also said that you're I presume much more autonomous but you also said that you're having the most interesting time of your career.

Okay so what exactly has I mean you had some positions where you presume that you had a fair modicum of editorial freedom and so forth so what's the what's the cardinal difference with what you're doing now in terms of its effectiveness publicly but also in terms of its effectiveness publicly, but also in terms of its effect on your own motivation and your quality of life? I would take the Israel Hamas war as an example of why I feel this is a very exhilarating time for my career. And it was because for some reason that we weren't really sure why this was happening. And it was because for some reason that we weren't really sure why this was happening. Very early on we started getting gigantic numbers on YouTube for our debates about the war.

And I interviewed people like Bassam Youssef and 22 million people watched that interview on our YouTube channel. And this carried on. Lots of different voices from Andrew Tate to the Palestinian ambassador to whoever it may be. But I had people from both sides of the divide arguing very passionately. And then I began putting them together. And I became almost a ringmaster to a sort of fulcrum for really smart, passionate debate by intelligent people who were diametrically opposed about a big issue. And it really resonated with people.

And then I began to realize it was resonating globally. So we were getting a massive audience in America for these debates, massive audience in the Middle East, massive audience in Australia, massive audience in a lot of Europe. And so we then did the same again with the US presidential race, exactly the same. So what it showed me was that almost every media outlet

and conventional mainstream media now has a position. They have their tribe, you know, and they don't really deviate much. They don't allow too many open debates between people who vehemently disagree. They would rather reaffirm their bias to their audience. They're going for the sure thing there. They're going for the sure thing,

which they believe is the thing. I think what we've done, and listen, it's something you've been doing for a very long time. I'm not professing to be the only person that does it, but probably what's unusual about what I've been doing is yes, I do the big one-on-one interviews with lots of interesting people,

from Donald Trump to Cristiano Ronaldo to you to whoever it may be. Kevin Spacey recently was a very powerful interview. But actually, I think that what if people you ask them, what is Piers Morgan uncensored on YouTube about? It's about bringing people together for a proper animated, passionate debate. And you also have the stomach for that. Yeah, I have a hard time with conflict fundamentally.

Yeah. You know, and so but you you, you're, you kind of remind me of Douglas Murray in that regard, is there are people who are, well, it's probably, I don't know if you've ever taken my personality test at understandmyself.com, but it- I did one test that said I was borderline psychopath. Well, I'd be interested in, I'd be interested in your agreeableness scores, you know, because, well, and it's also with Cowell, because it takes a certain degree of emotional stability, so low neuroticism, and a certain degree of disagreeableness,

which is, and those are very masculine traits, low neuroticism and low agreeableness, to be able to, well, first of all, even tolerate conflict, but also, you know, with Douglas, for example, there's an element of him that really enjoys it. He likes that combat. I do too. Right, right.

See, I find it- And I get it from all sides. I mean, Douglas obviously has a position about that war where he's very, very pro-Israel, will take on all comers about it. I'm a more nuanced sort of ringmaster to people with strong views on either side, including I've had Douglas a few times, very powerfully. But I like having people on both sides.

I did one last night, which was very, actually, it was about an hour long, it was very animated, two pro-Palestinians, two pro-Israelis going at it. And it was a really interesting hour of debate and I at the end of it will get accused by people on social media of supporting both sides. Right, right, right. Right, I'll get the usual flurry of death threats, I'll get the usual abuse and everything else but I think it's a price worth paying to actually, what I think is, is rebuild an atmosphere in democratic countries of a genuine democracy. You know, places where this kind of vigorous open debate can take place and

at the end of it, actually, I can thank everybody and we can all go back to reasonably civil lives and not want to kill each other. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the hope. You know, I think, you know, I wrote a book last year called Wake Up, and at the start of it I told the story of several thousand years ago, people existed in tribes, and they all had the same haircuts, they all had the same clothes or whatever loincloths they were wearing, they all had the same attitudes to life, they all liked the same kind of foods

and drinks, because that's what the tribe did. And there were lots of these tribes, and then they ventured out eventually from their area and their tribe, and they met other tribes who dressed differently, sounded differently, had different attitudes, looked different, and their instinctive reaction was to try and kill each other.

And through social media, I felt we regressed back several thousand years to those days of tribes encountering each other, and their natural visceral reaction was to try and destroy each other. And so everyone on Twitter was just screaming all the time. And what I want to do with Uncensored, as the name on the tin says, is actually try and make people understand. It's fine to be passionate. It's fine to argue your case with great emotion. But what you shouldn't do is be deliberately

in denial about facts, right? Truth matters, not my truth or your truth. The truth matters. Facts matter. You can have an opinion about facts, but what you can't do is ignore obvious, clearly provable information, which should change your opinion about something,

simply because you've decided you're so embedded in your tribe that to do so is somehow disloyal. And that's where we've got to. So have the debates been the most popular thing that you've been doing? Yes, I mean, the really big interviews will always blow big. But actually the consistent power of our debating, whether it's about Trump and Biden,

whether it's about Israel Hamas, whether it's about the royal family, whatever it may be, getting smart people on, and I don't want dummies on, I don't want people who can't articulate themselves. I wouldn't have Joe Biden on right now in his current condition. That's because you're an ableist. Exactly. But smart people who have passionate informed views about the subject, but I want

people from both sides. And I want to be there to try and forge an atmosphere consistently of the kind of atmosphere I had in my local village pub when I was a kid. I first started going to the pub. We'd have a few beers and a big old argument about something. I used to get chucked out of my local pub for being too opinionated when I was 18. That's hard to believe. Very, very hard to believe. But you know, 10 pints of scrumpy and off I'd go. And I was just as opinionated then as I am now. And the landlady, Mary, would throw me out. But she'd always forgive me and let me back in because I'd turn and I was just as opinionated then as I am now and the landlady Mary would throw

me out but she'd always forgive me and let me back in because I'd turn up with some flowers or something so I knew how to turn things around but that's been a consistent theme of my career actually. But actually you know in those days there wasn't social media to kind of whip everyone up into tribal frenzy and people there wasn't understanding that facts were facts. And you can have an opinion about facts, an interpretation of facts that's different from other people. But you can't have your own set of facts which aren't facts.

You know, Ben Shapiro's, I think it still is his pinned tweet, is facts don't care about your feelings. We're now a feelings-led world where people feel that the power of their feelings can supersede actual facts. People talk proudly about my truth. What does that mean? What do you mean, my truth?

You mean do what I want. My truth means it may not be true, but because I feel it, it is actually a form of truth. And I find that a ridiculous concept concept which doesn't make any sense and a lot of people fall for this and it's fueled again by social media. So what I want to do, I genuinely want people to come together, have a good old tear up, but at the end of it, you know, metaphorically they're often not together. Yeah. But just to metaphorically shake hands and the thing I like most is doing a big debate

at the end of it it I see four smiling faces because I've said something to sort of thank you all for being such a great panel. Oh, thanks, Piers. And we all go our separate ways. I don't want people ending debates and thinking I want to kill that person because I don't agree with it. Free speech is supposed to be the substitute for war.

Yeah. Right, you either let your stupid ideas die or you die. Those are kind of the rules. So now, in terms of, you talked about your motivation too, that you're at a particularly exciting stage in your career, particularly because of the way that you're approaching things online. And so what has that done for you that you didn't have, do you think, in the other positions that you've held? I just have noticed a massively larger number of people coming up to me all the time, skewing young who are really grateful for what I'm doing. I've never had that. I've had people talk about stuff I'm doing and say, I enjoyed that or enjoyed this, that was funny, the

talent show guy or loved your celebrity apprentice going after, you know, so and so and all that. I've had all that kind of reaction or I hated your views of this or all that. It's perfectly normal to have a lot of younger people come up and say, what you're doing is really important. There's nowhere else I can see this kind of thing. I don't get it at school, I don't get it at university anymore, you know, there are no people on the other side of the argument allowed in universities to talk about it, they're on the conservative right, for example, and I like the fact you get everybody on, I can make my own mind up. That's a great feeling, because that to me is the bedrock of a democracy, which we've been in real danger of losing. So if I can be part of restoring the genuine ethos of democracy to a democratic country

like the UK or the US, whatever it may be, that is a great thing to be involved with. You know, I think you're part of that, Joe Rogan's part of that, you know, people that allow people to come on from all different guises and have their say and be challenged and talk about what they believe, but ultimately that we genuinely do believe in the power of free speech and people are not afraid to say what they think. You know, it's so weird. Or they say it anyways, even if they are afraid. Or they do what, this is why Donald Trump.

And like Susan Boyle. Right, right. And it's also why And like Susan Boyle. Right, right. And it's also why people like Donald Trump are so popular. Yeah. He's popular because he says what he thinks. He doesn't give a damn. I know he can't even help it. He made an erection joke during the presidential debate.

Of course. I mean that takes a lot of gall. And I know I watched him, I thought, he can't even help it. That's one of the things that's very interesting about him. He is insanely funny. And you know, this is also, I don't think that people with dictatorial tendencies are marked by their sense of humor. No. You know, so now, you know, Trump, does Trump make jokes at his own expense? See, I don't

know that. No. He's very, no. I've never heard. Well, he might if he thinks it actually makes him look good in the long run. Okay. But I think that Trump is not a great self-joker. He is a narcissist. I've got no doubt about that.

But he is very entertaining. I will say to people, if you watch a Trump rally speech for two hours and you don't laugh once, you've got a problem because he can be very, very funny. Now, it's a sharp humor. It's a brutal humor. It's a New York trader kind of humor. Most New York real estate guys are like Trump, you know, it's the environment he grew up in and you're a product of your environment to a large degree. But he, you know, I've known him a long time. He can make me

laugh like very few people. I mean he's genuinely laugh out loud funny. I remember talking to him about Theresa May, that it was then British Prime Minister, and by common consent, extremely boring. And when she left office, he'd been president when she was Prime Minister briefly, and he called me for a catch-up conversation when we were having a chat. He said, by the way, what happened to Theresa May?

I went, well, funny enough, I'm just reading a story this morning that she's now on the Speaker Circuit. He went, what? I went, yeah, she's getting 140,000 pounds of speech. And Trump, are you effing kidding me? He said, I'd pay 140,000 pounds not to hear her speak. Now that's just funny. Now I wrote about that and she then ripped me

very amusingly at a magazine, the Spectator magazine had an awards thing and she tore me to pieces over that and got a big laugh herself. So there were no losers here. The funniest work came at my expense when I was having a laugh with President Trump about how boring she was. So good, good, well done her.

But point being, it was a funny line. It's a naturally sharp, funny, quite witty guy. Now he's got lots of faults, but if you try and pretend he hasn't got that in his armory, you will never understand the appeal of Donald Trump. That's for sure. Which is, he's not like any other politician. He shoots.

Well, and working class humor tends to be rough. Yes. And so Trump pulls that off extremely well. Yeah, of course. Definitely. No question. I mean, I come from a village of working class people, predominantly when I grew up, and that's absolutely the humour. It's sharp, it's brash, it's in your face. Right. It's the worst thing you can say and the worst thing you can take. That's kind

of the judge of character. And it's a very fun game. It's something I really missed as I sort of climbed up the actual ladder. Are your best friends people that you laugh at or with or people who laugh at you? Yeah. In other words, have you got the ability to laugh at yourself as much as others? I look at my friends and I think, actually most of my best friends,

if they didn't have the ability to laugh at themselves, I couldn't really be friends with them. Right, right, right, right, of course. And if they couldn't let me mock them in a way that I'm quite happy to be mocked myself, which I am, I'm not sure I could be a friend of someone like that. Because I think it's such a key component to surviving life. That's how you transcend your own stupidity. We're all pretty absurd, right?

And I think that once you realise that, there great scene in faulty towers one of the great comedy Series of all time only 12 episodes ever got made with John Cleese There's a great thing we've got this cast of completely ridiculous characters in the hotel the hotel from hell and They're all bonkers and that one stage Please if his character Basil faulty is the most bonkers of all and he's standing standing in the middle of them, and he goes, my God, he said, am I the only normal person around here? And it always makes me laugh out loud. Because actually, none of us are normal.

The beauty of being a human being is we're all slightly abnormal. We're all slightly nuts. I think everyone has it in them to be slightly nuts. But the common thread of my friends and people that I gravitate to is an ability for me to take the piss out of them and they laugh.

And you can only really be like that if you yourself can take it, which I can. There's very little that would ever upset me, although I wouldn't laugh at it as a joke at my expense. And I think that can be a disarming quality with people. So let me ask you, I've done a couple of interviews of some of your increasingly famous, internationally famous UK subjects.

So I talked to Nigel Farage this week and Tommy Robinson. So I wanna ask you about a number of people on the UK political front. So let's start with, well, let's start with Keir Starmer. So in Canada, we have a liberal government, although it's not a liberal government, it's a radical socialist government. Trudeau is farther to the left by a large margin

than our leftist political party has been traditionally. And I gotta tell you, it's a bit of a disaster, you might say. Canada now has our GDP is 60% per capita of that of the US, right? We have real estate prices that are twice as expensive. And those are just the things we know about. And so I would say the leftist tilt in Canada over the last nine years has been a much worse disaster than we even know yet. And now I can understand why people here turfed out the conservatives because, well, by my estimation they weren't conservatives at all. But God only knows what sort of pack they've brought in.

So what are your thoughts about, well, what do you think's on the table for the UK for the next four years? Well, I've interviewed Starmor a few times. Yeah. I've done it for my Life Story show, which is like a two and a half hour interview. And I think, probably like you probably believe, that if you interview someone for two and a half hours, they can't hide the entire time. Yeah. You're going to work out really what they're like.

I think he's fundamentally a decent guy. Yeah. I think he's a kind of regular guy as I think particularly flamboyant or special about him. He's a self-made man. He had a very tough upbringing. His mother was very ill for a very long period of time and he effectively was a carer of a lot of the time, a bit disenfranchised from his dad, no money. And he rose to become a top of the legal profession, director of public prosecutions, the top lawyer in the country, and now he's risen to be the top politician in the country, to be prime minister.

That's a pretty remarkable achievement. He's no silver spoon guy at all. He is somebody who drifted out to the far left in the Jeremy Corbyn era, said he thought Corbyn would make a good prime minister. That's a blotch on his thought process because Corbyn would have been a total mad far left disaster. But interestingly, and I think encouragingly, Stammer is not so intransigent in his views

that he's not prepared to change. The example being the issue of trans women in women's sport. He started off by saying that all trans women are women's sport. You know, he started off by saying that, you know, women, all trans women are women and should be treated as such. Even the violent rapists. Even, which is, you know, it's a problem. Those edge cases.

You and I completely agree about this. He's obviously preposterous. But it's interesting to watch him change positions and now he's, I think he now says 99% of women don't have penises was his last statement on the thing. He's come a long way, right? So, you know, I think he's, he understands that to be successful in Britain as a politician, you've got to occupy the centre ground. Really, historically, almost every leader we've had in modern times effectively has been in the centre ground.

From Blair to Thatcher to, you go back and you pick any of them. They're all pretty well hovering in this kind of area. And then you have the extremities who create a lot of noise but never actually get elected. And I think that Starmes has done very, very well, not withstanding the uselessness of his opposition, to bring his party more to the center. And he's understood he's got to, he's got to have middle England feeling he's not a threat. Now the challenge for him is there's no money. You know, we're a pretty bankrupt country at the moment

in terms of money to spend as a government. He's already ruled out three quarters of all tax revenue potential, saying he's not going to do this, not going to do that, not going to do this. So he's do that, not going to do this. So he's left really with a tax the rich strategy. He's going to hammer people like me. He'd hammer you if you were in this country.

He's going to come after money from the houses, money from schools. He wants to put VAT on private schools, independent schools, et cetera, et cetera. He's going to raise tax for the rich and so on. I don't like politics of envy, generally. And I don't think it works. So he's gotta have more tools in his box. He's banking on the economy improving. He might get lucky, but you've gotta have growth

to do the things he wants to do about public services. Our health system is crumbling. Our education system is crumbling. Crime is soaring. You go through almost any metric, the seas are full of sewage. Everything is wrong right now, but to fix it, you've got to spend significant sums of public money. If you're going to do that without taxing three quarters of the country, you're going

to end up just taxing people who may say, you know what, I'm gonna leave. Yes, or their money's going to leave. Then you have a brain drain of the creative bosses who might be employing thousands of people, and then where you left. So I think he's got a lot of challenges, but I wouldn't underestimate him. I think anyone that's seen off the far left

as he's done with his party, and he's quite sure. I think he's done that fairly effectively. He was pretty courageous in the campaign when he supported Israel pretty emphatically, despite the fact that there were a lot of, I mean, five million Muslims in his country, most of whom would have been persuaded to probably vote Labour. And there's no doubt that would have hurt him in the Muslim communities. I think he factored in that better to do the right thing and we're still gonna win anyway and I think that's you know it was a bit of moral courage shown there so I don't underestimate him. What about the people around him? I think he's

got quite a smart cabinet actually. Oh you do? I do and I think they hit the ground running in quite a smooth way. Look, his whole strategy is gonna be don't scare the horses and the children, right? Let's just steady as we go and it may be that Britain's ready for that after a very turbulent five prime ministers in five years. The chaos of Boris Johnson, the madness of Liz Truss, and Orishi soon that really got a horrible hospital pass. I think we're ready for a bit of just calm stability. And you think he could offer that? I think he can offer. I've already seen signs since he became prime minister of a well-organized man with a well-organized team who seem to know what they're doing.

You've got a plan. And whether it works or not is another issue. Part of the conservative problem was everything they promised they didn't deliver on from stopping the small boats coming over from France, from the raging legal migration, which has gone from tens of thousands to 700,000 people last year, net legal migration, which has gone from tens of thousands to 700,000 people last year, net legal migration, completely unsustainable. The Tories kept promising we're gonna take it back

down to tens of thousands. They never did. They said they'd sort out the NHS waiting lists. They're the worst they've ever been. You know, my mother had a heart attack eight, nine months ago and was left on a trolley in accident and emergency out in the corridor for seven hours having been diagnosed with a heart attack and there were 35 other people

on trolleys out with her. That's the state and Canada too. This is modern day Britain. Now he's not a Trudeau. You know I watched a clip of Trudeau when he's with students and someone says something about mankind. You went, oh no, clip of Trudeau when he's with students and someone says something about mankind, you went, oh no, no, no. We say people kind.

So he would literally change the most iconic line in the history of modern world, which is one small. Well, he would also insist that you change it too. Right, but you know, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Neil Armstrong, the first lunar landing, would now have to be one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Neil Armstrong, the first lunar landing would now have to be one small step for a person, one giant leap for people kind. That's the world that Trudeau wants. He is insanely woke. And the truth is, if you are like that, it

doesn't work, as Canada sadly is seeing. I don't think Stammer's like that. I think he's much more pragmatic. Also think you don't get to be director of public prosecutions in this country. The number one lawyer in the country. If you're not a smart person, and I think he is a smart person, but can he somehow navigate us to a better place?

Possibly. Is he gonna be a transformative prime minister where we all wake up in two, three years and think, wow, the Stammer revolution, I don't think so. Well, you know, that's better than it might have been. Well, I'm so, I spent quite a long time working with Democrats in the US and I got very disillusioned about that partly because they showed Zero propensity to draw a line between the moderate Democrats and the radicals like or even to admit that the radicals existed or even to admit that by equity they meant

Equality of outcome it was really quite stunning and I've talked to I don't know how many It was really quite stunning. And I've talked to, I don't know how many reasonably high ranking Democrats, but plenty. And it was the same thing all the time. And so, and then I also saw it in the liberal government in Canada that the radical leftists really took over the joint, let's say. And so I'm very, well, concerned that the same thing

is likely to happen in the UK. It won't. Well, that's good. Okay, that's good. That I can say with some certainty. I just don't think Starmer's going to do that. Okay. I do think he's going to operate attacks the rich mindset across the board.

And I am concerned about the brain drain that might cause. Yeah. But I think in terms of what you're talking about, I don't think he's going to fall into that trap. I think he's seen what's happened with the Democrats I don't think he's going to fall into that trap. I think he's seen what's happened with the Democrats, he's seen what's happened with Trudeau. I don't think he sees that as something he wants to be doing here. Now, I hope I'm right.

I don't sense that with him. At his heart, I think he's a pragmatist. He's a well-organized guy. He's intelligent, he's thoughtful. He's never going to light up a room with his presence. Yeah, maybe that's okay for a while. Well, we're kind of done with the Boris Johnson, you know, shtick.

You know, the guy bouncing in with a scruffy hair, cracking jokes and everyone thinks it's hilarious. It's hilarious right to the point you have a pandemic and he turned out to be completely useless and ended up having lots of illicit parties while locking everybody else up in their homes. It's that kind of one rule for me, one rule for you mindset is what killed the Tories in the end. And I think that Stammer certainly won't be that.

And he will want to deal with things like poverty in this country in a way that the Tories, I think, have neglected. He will want to rise people up rather than kick them down. And I think he's got the right kind of mindset for that. I just worry there's not enough money to pay for this. Nigel Farage. You know, I used to get on well with Nigel, but I discovered to my personal cost

he's a treacherous little snake. Ooh, that's rough. It was rough. I was disappointed in him. And the very short version is that when he, he was working for GB News, I was working for Talk TV, we were billed as rival new networks, even though I didn't see it that way, but we were.

And he was the figurehead for them, I was the figurehead. So we were kind of rivals. And I was three months away from launching my show on the new network here, and he was already on GB News, they were already up and running. And he interviewed Trump, who he knows as well as I do. And I sent him a text message, I still have it. Congratulations on your interview with Donald,

I thought it was terrific, well done. He went, well thank you, that's very gracious of you. You know, honor amongst rogues in the world of broadcasting. And then three months later, I got an interview with Trump at Morillago. And I went down, it was a big team, a lot of money it cost to set everything up there. About to start, and someone comes and said,

we have a problem, I said, what's the problem? And they showed me three pieces of paper. And on it were all the most critical things I've said about Trump in the previous year, on air, in columns. And I criticized him a lot about the way he handled the pandemic, about the storm election claims,

about January 6th, I've been pretty critical. But he'd always known I was someone that would praise him if he felt he deserved it and criticize him if he didn't. That's why he made me his celebrity apprentice. I was like, it's my personality. And right in the middle of all these quotes were two positive quotes from Nigel Farage, which raised alarm bells with me

about where this all may have come from. And sure enough, it later emerged very quickly. Nigel had sent this to him. He'd had dinner with him at Murralaga two days before, heard I was coming, and his response to my graciousness in congratulating him on his interview was to try and sabotage mine. And I only pulled it round by going to see Trump

in his office, and he was effing and blinding and shouting and raging at me, understandably, because of the way this had all been edited to make it look like this was all I said about him which wasn't true and I thought wow what a snake what a snake to do that when I'd actually gone out of my way to congratulate him on his and I don't like people that do that so I thought I knew Nigel Farage quite well and I was mistaken. I take people exactly as I find them.

And I find it very, very difficult to forgive when people do that kind of thing. And he did it very deliberately to sabotage my interview. So yeah, not a fan. So what do you think? I would also extrapolate that, that I think that's part of his, to me, part of the smoke and mirrors thing with Farage is he's great at saying, hey, we can do this, this, this and this and this. And then when it happens, he disappears and it doesn't happen.

Brexit. He was the architect of Brexit and then he't happen. Brexit. He was the architect of Brexit. And then he just disappeared. He only ran this time for parliament because I was on BBC's Question Time show with him and kept calling him out for being a bottle job and bottling it and not running. And the audience got on his back and he looked really uncomfortable.

Two days later, he announced he's running. And it's actually been a successful election for him, successful campaign. I think the whole reform thing is smoke and mirrors. I don't think they could deliver any of the pledges and promises they've made. I know they can't. So to me, he's a bit of a straw man. It all sounds great, but he's a bit of a straw man who couldn't possibly deliver on a lot of what he says he can. And on a personal level, I found that he was not to be trusted. So I'm not a fan.

And so what do you think the reform movement's relative popularity indicates for the Conservative Party in the UK? It indicates the Conservative Party had a complete breakdown in trust with the electorate, particularly with Conservative voters. Farage is a very good communicator. He's by far the best communicator in British politics right now. He knows how to, you know, hold a crowd. He knows all the right things to say.

He knows the points he's going to get applause at. He knows how to sell himself. All those things he's very, very skilled. Far more than most of the other politicians in the country. He will clearly now have a big influence over the Conservative Party going forward. Will reform end up doing a deal with the Conservatives? Possibly will they have to tilt to the right to make that deal happen? Many Conservatives say they should be doing that.

What do you think a tilt to the right would look like in Great Britain? Probably like a more old-fashioned conservative party. I mean, part of the thing about the conservative party hasn't really felt that right wing. And I don't mean right wing is a stigma or a badge of dishonor. I just mean that if you go back to the... Well, net zero is not a conservative policy, for example. No, exactly. Exactly.

And I think that, you know, go back to Margaret Thatcher, who was a very divisive Prime Minister in many ways, but that was, you know, she had conservatives pouring through her blood vessels. I've not felt that with the Conservative Party for many years. They weren't a conservative party really. They were trying to be people pleasers and ended up pleasing nobody. And Margaret Thatcher never even read the newspapers. She would get a report, a one page report report, what was in the papers, and most of the time

didn't even bother with that because she believed that newspaper headlines would divert you from doing the right thing. So she would just do what she believed was the right thing and be judged accordingly. And she was a three-term prime minister. Tony Blair was similar. He was a three-term prime minister, Tony Blair was similar. He was a three term prime minister. And he instinctively understood the mood of the country at the time, as did she for a long time. Both of them became quite divisive, if not hated. But for a long time, they understood the mood

of the country. I don't think this conservative party has any idea what the mood of the country is. And Farage was able to tap in with reform into a lot of the things that people are really concerned about. But does he have the answers? I don't think so. So I think it's smoke and mirrors with him. Could he be effective in reshaping the Conservative Party to be a more effective political force? Absolutely.

And in that case, I would be pleased to see that happen. Because you know, he's a good politician, there's no question of that. He's just not someone you trust with a family silver. Well, let's close this section with this. What are you doing in the future? What's your plan for example, for your online media? Well, what I want to do is actually is do some of the things you've done which is one thing I want to do. I've been really struck by there's a whole new world out there of going on tour, taking your show and what you do and these interviews to a big stage with a big crowd.

I want to do that and I want to do it around the world. I want Uncensored to be a really much bigger brand. I want to have other people under the Uncensored umbrella. I want to start developing it into a proper business. So I think that we've captured something that's reasonably unique in the space and the way we do our debates and stuff. And I want to maximize that and exploit that to build a much bigger business.

And I think it's really very possible. Well, there's something about the live space that's made even become more important as the AI revolution continues, because it's going to get harder and harder to discriminate between what's real and what isn't. And one of the things that you do have... Live is live. Well, that's the thing. It is live. Well, that's the thing. It is live. And I also think that people are starving for that

to some degree because they're... Well, the social media immersement is too abstracted. And so, and the live events really go along with it. I've seen your stuff, you know, I've watched it online, but I've seen you do massive arenas and things and it's a crackling energy to it and it's obviously it's lucrative from a business point of view but it's also serving a real need from the public who actually do want to hear unfiltered, uncensored opinion and debates about things that they're kind of curious or feel too ill-informed about. And they want to hear smart people talk talking a smart way and whether it's

you doing it or like I say Ben Shapiro, people like this, there's no reason I can't do that from my own perspective and to host big debates in front of a big audience. I think they'd be very popular. So I think that I want to do that sort of thing around the world. I'm doing another book. I have done a lot of crime documentaries actually, which I quite enjoyed doing where I interviewed serial killers and psychopaths and things like that. That's another string to my bow that I've enjoyed doing for many years. But I think generally speaking, I've hit on something that really suits me, which is uncensored. You know, I would love to be

known as somebody that really dragged the debate back to proper debate. Somebody who will have everybody on and let them all thrash it out and leave the viewer at home better informed and in a better position, hopefully, to make a more considered informed view about what they think and not be afraid to express it. You know, the number of young people who come up to me and say, you know, I won my debating thing the other day and it was because of you. You know, I just decided, no, I'm going to say what I think. I love that.

Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I can understand that. I was in my debating society at school. I love debating things. I've got a letter from Margaret Thatcher when I defeated a campaign for nuclear disarmament person debating against me. And I wrote to her to tell her,

and she wrote me a congratulations letter. I've got that somewhere. And that was what I think a democracy's about, actually. And we've got to get back to that. I think one of the reasons that that comes up with young people, it's something I've seen a lot talking to people, say after my lectures or on the street

for that matter is that people die without meaning in their life because life is very difficult and so then the question is where do you find genuine meaning? And one of the things that I've come to understand is that there's genuine meaning in the truth because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth. All sorts of weird things happen, because you have to let go. If you're just going to say what you think, you have to let go. You can't plot the outcome. You have to assume that you're going to say what you think and something's going to happen

and whatever that is, well, it's the consequence of telling the truth. And so even if it doesn't look like it to you, it's the best thing. And by the way, Mother Teresa could be on Twitter if she was still alive. And she could tweet, I want an end to child poverty. And she would get trolled. Right. She would enrage people. Mother Teresa, if she said she wanted an end to child poverty.

You're only saying that because of this. What about you? You once bought a ring, you know, all that. It was the instinctive reaction of the mob. And what you've got to have in this modern era, you've got to have a pretty thick skin. Again, it's one of the things I like about Trump is he not only has the thinnest skin of any human being I've met, he also has the thickest. So he reacts to absolutely everything by going to DEFCON 3, but he can soak up even more extreme DEFCONs

in a way I've never seen any public figure do. That would break anybody, and he just barrels on through. And actually that's part of existing in life and making the most of it. You know, it's not good to survive in life. You've got to thrive. You've got to find your thing that allows you to thrive. The point you're making, at least in part, is that you're going to pay a price for whatever you say.

Yeah. And so, at least the advantage of saying what you think is, well, first of all, you figure out what you think. Yeah. And second, it's a relief, but that's also you being expressed. And so the consequences of your speech are, I think the consequences of your truthful speech are indistinguishable from your destiny.

And I think your destiny is an adventure. Yeah, and people say to me, what's the, like there was a guy started here doing television for the first time. He's a print journalist. And he asked me for advice. I said, I've got one bit of advice. Be authentic.

Be you. Don't try and be me. Don't try and be somebody else. Don't try and be someone you've seen on TV. Be yourself. And if you are you, and I know him, he's a charismatic, funny, smart guy, it'll take you a while to get used to the environment

of being a television presenter, but you will bring an audience with you because they'll like you. But they'll take you a while to get used to the environment of being a television presenter, but you will bring an audience with you because they'll like you. But they'll like you, not because you remind them of somebody else. And I think authenticity, whether it's TV presenting or anything in life, is the single most powerful weapon you have. To thine own self be true, and it follows thy cants be false to any man. To borrow the words of Shakespeare. Well that's a good place to end this part.

So everybody who's watching and listening, I'm going to continue this discussion on the Daily Wire side. And so I think I'll dig a little bit more into, well, issues of truth and free speech, I think is a good topic that we could continue developing. So if you want to join us there, you're obviously more than welcome to do that. Thank you, Pierce. It's very good to see you here in London. Always good to see you.

It's lovely to do this in person. We haven't even talked about your jacket, which is absolutely magnificent. My crazy suitmaker, thank you. Yeah, well, he made this for my tour. And so, we who wrestle with God. When I do my tour, I want to talk to your jacket maker. I will introduce you to my suit maker. I'll introduce you to my suit maker.

We can have Arsenal footballers on mine. Well, you can have the lining custom made as well. All right, well, thank you very much. It was real good talking to you. Pleasure, great to see you. Yeah, and so join us on the Daily Wire side, everybody.