#895 - Piers Morgan - Trump, Elon Musk & The Future Of The West
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You wanted Trump to pardon Hunter Biden, but his dad has beaten him to the punch. Yeah, I mean, I think it would have been a very smart move by Trump to send a unifying message to a very fractured and divided America if he was to do it.

But for Joe Biden to do it after assuring the world, including the American electorate, repeatedly in the last few months up to the election, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to pardon him. To get the White House press secretary to repeatedly say it from the lectern in the White House is

I think that's pretty disgraceful. So there's two ways of looking at this. I think if Trump had done it, smart move in unifying the country, for Biden to do it, actually a pretty shameless act of rank hypocrisy. Yeah, not a very nice nail in the coffin of what will be probably not a particularly well-remembered presidency. I think he'll go down as one of the worst presidents. He stayed on way too long, and clearly cognitively he was in decline.

I think the botched coronation of his vice president was another fiasco, which came about to haunt them. I think the problem with Joe Biden is that he, the whole issue of Hunter Biden and the way he's now pardoned him, he's always positioned himself as the whiter than white candidate against Trump. That Trump's the liar. Trump's shameless. Trump's corrupt.

Trump is hypocritical, all these things. That was the stick he repeatedly used to beat Trump. And now in one fell swoop, one action, because it's not just he's pardoned him for the things of which he's been convicted. He's pardoned him for anything else he may have done since 2014 in that period. It's a decade of crime. It's like, what else has gone on here? A lot of rumors about much bigger stuff that may have happened. And you look at it and you think, wow, that's the kind of thing that honestly, they talk about a banana republic relating to Trump.

This is about as close to a Banana Republic act as you could imagine. Yeah, I want to talk about this on your show later on, but there's this rise of the broligarchy and bro politics at the moment. Which is fascinating. I think it's really interesting, but this...

prioritization of doing good over looking good, sort of efficiency over optics. And this is one of those examples, I think, where both have gone awry, both the thing that you did and the way that it was done and the way that it was led up to. But in stark contrast to Vivek Ramaswamy doing debate prep with his top off hitting forehands on tennis court or Elon Musk, you know,

sending rockets into space, sort of a world of people doing things. Even if you don't agree with the things, you can't deny that they're doing stuff. And yeah, I wonder what the medium-term future looks like now for America. Well, I think one of the most important things of the broligarchy in terms of its impact is

is that so many young men gravitated to it because they've been feeling lost. You've talked about this a lot. I've talked to you about this a lot. I've got three sons from 23 to 31. I've seen it firsthand. They've been struggling, not just my sons, but their friendship group have been struggling to understand what it means to be a man in this weird age that we're now in. Social media-driven age, virtue-signaling-driven age,

A weird time when losing is almost more celebrated than winning, where the old alpha male chess beating is now seen as something to be ashamed of, where weakness is almost now seen as a greater characteristic than strength. And I have been on this for years thinking this is a ruinous way for society to go. And suddenly along in America, you have this group of very alpha male men

guys, all chess beaters from RFK Jr. to Elon to Trump to Vivek to Joe Rogan, all of them. Very strong-minded guys, to a lesser degree in a different space, Andrew Tate and his brother, who wield extraordinary influence, but I think have a streak of blatant misogyny in Andrew's case, which I really don't like.

But a lot of the reason for his appeal is that lost young men gravitated to him because he was pounding a drum of take care of yourself, be proud of being successful, aspire to be better than you currently are, etc. And that resonates with people. I'd add Jordan Peterson to the product. I was going to say, even though Jordan's not a massive fan of Andrew, the message in principle isn't that different. No. No, and the message is be proud to be a man again.

You've been ashamed of being a man for many years now since the avalanche of Me Too, of Time's Up, which absolutely had an important role in society in correcting a historic imbalance in the gender, no question, and historically bad behavior by a lot of men towards women. I absolutely do not denigrate either of those movements. But what it did do, as I knew it would do, the pendulum swung so far the other way that actually it freaked the hell out of young guys. And they were suddenly like,

what am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to behave? And women listening to this might think, well, it's easy. You know how to behave. Actually, it's not that easy. Particularly if you've been conditioned to think that being a man is X, Y, Z, and suddenly you're told all those things are things to be ashamed of. And now we've had the pendulum swing back a little bit and you're seeing a sort of corrective balance where I think people have begun to work out where the boundaries are, where the lines are to a degree. I think it's still complex out there. Um,

And you're seeing it at the moment with the whole Greg Wallace scandal in the UK. And for American viewers, very simply, he's a guy who does a cooking show on TV who's been very laddish for 20 years or so. And now that laddishness has come back to be used as a stick to beat him. And he said a lot of things which are pretty unpalatable to women who've now ganged up to complain about him. But again, that raises that whole area of workplace banter.

Workplace relationships, right? I mean, I read that until 10 years ago, 40% of all marriages began with a workplace romance. That stat cannot exist today because how does it start? Historically, it would be a guy in a superior position with a woman in a lesser position. That's historically because of the gender imbalance in the workplace. So how do people meet now at work? They're not really allowed to. So what happens then? Then you gravitate to dating apps.

they're all pretty they're going out of fashion too they seem to create a flimsy relationship as well they drop off more quickly yeah and that's you've seen that their popularity is decreasing so i do think well how are people meeting each other actually with difficulty yeah elon said cancel culture had been cancelled yeah something you'd been harping on about for a while you think that's true well i like i like the idea of it i certainly think that when you've got

A thumping win for a guy like Donald Trump, who's been helped over the line by people like Elon, like Joe Rogan and others, who simply don't tolerate or believe in the concept of cancel culture. That's incredibly powerful. And I think you send a message to the woke world

And I always temper this kind of part of a discussion about woke-ism by saying when woke-ism originally began back in the 60s in America, it came out of music, actually. And it was a clarion call for people to be more aware of social and racial injustice. By that criteria alone, I'm woke, happy to be woke.

It's just the way it's been hijacked in the last 10 years by what I call, I call them fascists. They hate it because they hate fascists. But I say, do you not understand that when you operate on a principle of cancel culture, of virtue signaling, of fact devoid bullshit about things like,

supporting trans athletes in women's sport to the point where it just destroys the integrity of women's sport irrevocably. When you pound those drums, actually you're behaving like a fascist, where you want people to think like you, to act like you, to speak like you, to have the same values, to have the same principles, to have the same heroes, to read the same books, to watch the same movies, to laugh at the same jokes. And if you deviate, we're going to destroy you. That's fascism, actually.

And they don't seem to either understand that or they're in denial. But this election is a big wake-up call because I think this election was you had Kamala Harris, progressive, pretty far left progressive throughout her entire political career, desperately trying to move to the center when she became the nominee. But it was all too late because the receipts were there. And the receipts were used against her, memorably in that trans ad that the Trump campaign did, which they reckon moved the needle by up to three points.

where it simply ended with Kamala Harris is for they, them. Donald Trump is for you. That was very simple, but very effective. Because actually, personal pronouns are bullshit. And we all kind of know they're bullshit. And now I've noticed on my emails, people have stopped using them. Because they now realize, actually, it's made them look a little bit ridiculous, particularly those who insist on calling themselves they. As Joe Rogan said about Sam Smith,

There's only one of you, buddy. Yeah, do you think it's a...

a repudiation of that? Obviously, you've made the claim that wokeism's dead and identity politics is dead and virtue signaling's dead. Well, I think the concepts are dead. The actual execution of the death may take some time. But I do think that if it wasn't dead, you'd have seen a massive victory for a progressive far-left candidate in Kamala Harris who pretended she wasn't but actually is to her bootstraps and she got wiped out. And I think that that's an indication of three things. One, Americans trusted

Trump to fix the economy and illegal immigration better than they trusted her to do that. Secondly, there's something about him on the world stage, the swagger that Trump brings to the office, which annoys a lot of people, but he's actually quite effective. And I think that that was partly in people's minds, particularly when he put his fist up after being shot. He showed the world that the potential president of the United States was a badass, strong guy.

And I think that moment where one in the election, when we look back in history to that moment, particularly when he then got back on a debate stage the week later, a rally stage and did it all over again. If I had 20,000 complete strangers, I spoke to him at night. He rang me because he'd seen me talk about it on Fox. And I said, I got to say, whether people love you or hate you, that is a bad ass statement of personal courage. And he was, he was interesting because he, he actually said in that call,

I knew if I didn't get back out there now, I might never get back out there, which I thought was interesting. You don't often hear Trump

A little bit of vulnerability. A little bit, where he kind of knew himself. Talk to me about what happens when your phone rings and you pick it up and it says Donald J. Trump. It says DJT, actually, in my phone. It's a weird thing. I mean, it's weird to other people more than me. I've known Trump for nearly 20 years. I competed in the Celebrity Apprentice, the first season of it in 2007, 8, and I won it. And I spent about 100 hours around Trump. I worked out later in that season. And

I was very informative, particularly in the boardroom filming scenes, which could last up to three hours. I saw a lot of the way Trump is over hours in the way he interacts with people. Yeah. And it always struck me there was a disconnect between Trump, the politician, and particularly the president, and the guy I saw in that boardroom. The guy in the boardroom was much warmer, much less combative.

he liked mischief and he liked stirring things up and he liked drama all those things but he had a streak of empathy towards contestants and stuff which I've never seen him show as a president he believes that he's got to be a strong man all the time I think right now because of the shooting and because of the scale of his win which has basically knocked all his critics out I think he's he's

He's showing a bit more of that side now, the dancing on stage to YMCA. I mean, the ultimate joke really that the guy who's called the most bigoted president in history chose the number one gay anthem in history to sing on stage. And he's got America dancing the Trump dance, right?

I see him laughing a lot more in public now, relaxing, enjoying dinners, which are filmed and put out there. I see him doing a lot more interaction with people. I think, yeah, that's the guy I remember from Apprentice, the boardroom, when he did the McDonald's stunt, when he did the garbage truck stunt. And I've seen this really accelerate since he got shot.

I think he's a changed man since then. I don't think he's going to lose the pugilistic side or the trash-talking side or any of those things which are part of his DNA as a New York real estate guy. But I do think he's got that empathy streak he's always hidden.

is now coming out more. And I think he's a happier and more relaxed guy this time because we haven't seen what we saw in 2016, which is the mass protests, the fury, the venom, the visceral hatred from the mainstream media, the Russia collusion thing for years and so on. You take away that side and you take away the thing that Trump talks about in his book, The Art of the Deal.

where he says, if someone punches you in the face, you hit them back 10 times harder. And he means metaphorically as well as physically. And for the first four years of that presidency, he was punched all the time. And he reacted by punching. It became just basically a brawl between him and the media and his political opponents. This time around, there's not that same atmosphere. He doesn't have to be as harsh. He doesn't have to be as defensive. He's won. And he's had four years to think about what he did right and wrong the first time. You had a couple of chats with him recently on the phone. What did you learn?

The last time he rang me this week, the week before Thanksgiving, the Wednesday of that week. And he said, Piers, it's Donald. He said, I was just watching you on TV and you were looking great. And I just thought I'm going to call you and tell you.

Now, I suspect that isn't actually what he was thinking. He just wanted to have a chat. But it's classic Trump. Immediately, you're like, was I? And I was laughing. But we do have really good conversations. And he was telling me about all sorts of stuff, Ukraine and Russia and his cabinet and so on and so on. He knows I'm not going to repeat that kind of stuff. But there have been very warm conversations, very open conversations.

And I just sense in him that the shooting in particular, and then the big scale of the win, they've had a profound effect on him. You know, he's nearly 80. He doesn't have to fight an election anymore.

He only has to worry about a legacy. You can tell from his cabinet picks, he's gone for people who are not establishment, because last time he chose establishment people, who then basically, a lot of them did him in, and probably were there to do him in from the start. This time he's got people who are ferociously loyal, and in many cases have been very successful in their own fields, which are completely different.

you know, we see WWE, right? As being a criteria for selection to his cabinet. But why not? I mean, why not choose people like that?

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What do you think happens if Trump is unsuccessful and doesn't make any positive change to America, given that he's got all of the things that you could want, electoral college, popular vote? Yeah, there's no excuse. But where does that leave American politics? If you've had both parties have a – is there a lot of despondency that will come down the line if that doesn't? I think there'll be a lot of schadenfreude. A lot of people say, told you. I think Trump knows that. I think he's aware of the potential –

opportunity here the chance to in a way of a second go at his legacy because he had one go at it which ended catastrophically with the january 6th rioting which was a shameful moment in american history and that was on him and i think that he was then sent to the wilderness i wrote a column or two in early 2022 where i was like this guy's finished he's a busted flush it's all about ron de santis now back off don i look at that now i think wow how has he got back yeah

And he got back even stronger than last time. And actually, it's because the Democrats did a number of acts of self-harm. They went after him through the law, weaponizing the justice system.

choosing ridiculously pathetic things like whether he shuffled paperwork over a one-night stand with Stormy Daniels 20 years ago. Who cares? Americans don't care about that. They care about the fact they can't feed their kids. They care about the fact nearly 10 million people have come over the border in the Biden administration four-year period. That's what they care about. It's that looking good over doing good thing again, right? Like optics versus... I think it's also a visceral hatred of Donald Trump.

It is this Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing. I have friends of mine who are completely unhinged. Our family members, if you mention Trump or if I post a picture of me and Trump with some congratulations on winning again, utter mayhem. It's like that Russian sleeper agent activation code. Yeah. And I'm like, you've got to sit back and get the bigger picture with Trump and understand why he's so popular. I saw from The Hill that AOC is rumored to be running for. I mean, utterly absurd. What do you make of her chances?

What a shrieking, even more progressive, even more far-left candidate version of Kamala Harris. I mean, Trump, they must be rubbing their hands. Please, please give us AOC. Because almost everything she stands for bears no relation to what Americans actually care about. Anything.

So she would be the worst possible candidate. If the Democrats don't wake up, A, they've got to get rid of all this progressive left stuff. It's got to all go. They were at their most electable when they had someone like Bill Clinton. Go back to the Bill Clinton playbook. He didn't bother with any of that crap.

He just kept it pretty centered. What would you say to people that go, well, the world's different now? It's not. It's not. We've been told it's different. We've been told we now have to believe the sky is blue when it's actually red. And eventually people have gone, well, hang on. It's red. Why have I got to call it blue?

And people have gone, actually, I'm done with that, thanks. No, and I'm done with the constant offense that everyone's taking about absolutely everything. I'm done with everyone losing their jobs over the tiniest transgression of the woke worldview rulebook.

I'm tired of all of it. I'm tired of identity politics. I'm tired of the, of the rumination of meritocracy, of the altar of, of wokeism, where it doesn't matter how good you are. It matters what your skin color is or your gender. None of that does anyone any good. Least of all people from ethnic minorities or least of all women. If you're trying to promote women's rights, I mean, it made me laugh in the election.

Kamala Harris was, I'm for women's rights. Abortion. Okay, I agree with you. On that, I agree with you. Because in Britain, it's a settled issue. We just don't really have debates about abortion here. We have one of the most lax abortion laws in the world, actually. And I'm all in favour. I'm all for pro-women having the choice. Nothing to do with me, Gov. You just decide, women, what you want to do with your bodies. All in favour of that. But how do you square being...

the candidate for women's rights when you're also supporting trans athletes in women's sport, as Kamala does.

You can't because you're eroding women's rights. And then people like J.K. Rowling, who put their head over the parapet, they get abused, not least by the Harry Potter stars who owe her their fortunes. Well, Rupert Grint's got a £2.8 million tax bill. So maybe he'll be back in a good place. Maybe that's penance for being – I haven't seen his views about her, but a lot of them have been very scathing about her. And when I sit with them – I had a debate the other day with a guy

called Ernest, who comes on quite a lot. He's one of our pundits. And he's a funny guy. We have good debates about stuff. He defends the indefensible most of the time, and I quite enjoy it. But he was talking about how you've got to respect people's right to limit their self-identity. In other words, if you identify as whatever you like, I have to respect it. Okay, fine. So if I identify now as a black man called Ernest, do you respect him?

And of course, after about 10 torturous minutes, he had to admit he wouldn't respect that. So the premise of his argument was all complete bullshit.

And I've done this before on International Women's Day a couple of years ago. I identified as a black lesbian. And people, when they first hear it, go, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't use those words on the airwaves. Well, you can when you're having a debate on International Women's Day about whether gender identity should be completely limitless and sexuality is a movable feast and actual racial identities. We've seen some people who are black pretending to be white or white pretend to be black. This has to stop. You

You have to actually get back to a fact-based society. I wonder at the moment if the left-right distinction is breaking down a little bit. Yeah, no question. Anna Kasparian is turning based. Yeah, interviewed her last week. Cenk Uygur and Bernie Sanders are either collaborating with Elon or complimenting him in one way or another. So I really wonder. You're seeing a return to the center.

And actually, most governments in American and British political history have pretty well been hovering around the centre. You don't really see extremities on either side. You don't see the far right or far left getting power, really. And it's the more centrist parties with centrist leaders who tend to have power.

the most longevity and most success. And I think that's why I always say about Trump, people think he's extreme. He's not really. If you take away his rhetoric, then his first term of office, he was a pretty moderate Republican president. He didn't even go to war anyway, almost unprecedented for a Republican president. So, you know, Trump's rhetoric is really 90% of the reason people hate him. But I think a lot of people this election went, you know what, I'm kind of done with that stuff. But we see more optics than we do impact.

now. It is very difficult. No one cares about what the Fed's budget spending this quarter is and show me a spreadsheet, but they will care if somebody says something a bit lewd on a video because that now is what you optimize for over looking good, over doing good. That's not to say that everything that Trump does is good. But virtue signaling is a very insidious new scourge in society.

I mean, I told a story in my last book about after the George Floyd murder, which I did a lot of stuff on, wrote very strongly worded columns about it, did a lot of stuff on air on Good Morning Britain, which I was hosting at the time about it. But there was a day when we were supposed to all do a black square on our Instagram, and I couldn't understand why. What's the point?

and I went to my local squares in the middle of a pandemic and I just had a bottle of wine. It's a nice sunny afternoon and I'd forgot all about what I was supposed to be doing. And I posted a picture of my bottle of wine in the twinkling sunlight on my Instagram. And my son's all within about half an hour, dad, you got to take that down. I said, why? Dad, we're getting abused by all our friends and you got to take that down. I said, I don't understand. Why are you being abused? Because you got to do the black square, dad. I said, no, I don't.

Why? To prove what? I've written column after column about the horrific murder of George Floyd. I've said hours and hours and hours of interviews with people about this on air. Do you think the meeting of Black Square is going to make any difference to the promotion of racial equality or correcting racial injustice? What do you think would happen if the Black Square demand was made in 2024? It wouldn't have anything like the same pickup.

In fact, it probably wouldn't even be suggested. People have realized these are vacuous, meaningless things. And at the moment that needle on the clock got to midnight, in came the Instagram buzz.

with all their topless bikini slaps. It's like, whatever. They couldn't wait. They were itching, itching, get me off this black square. It's killing my business, right? And so to me, it was just vacuous, virtue signaling, the worst kind. It doesn't help anybody. But this kind of, on the back of it, the kind of bullying that goes on to bully people into going along with the herd

It's got to stop. It's like the taking my knee thing. I was completely in support of that. But I didn't think people should be compelled to do it. You know, it's a very interesting case in British football. There's a Northern Irish footballer called McLean who comes from a little part of Northern Ireland in Derry where Bloody Sunday happened, where literally people in his street were killed by British paratroopers in one of the worst incidents of the Troubles. And the British troops that day behaved appallingly.

And he doesn't want to wear a poppy, which we wear to celebrate Remembrance Day, because it doesn't just remember people in the world wars. It remembers all armed conflict involving British troops ever. And that includes Bloody Sunday.

in his eyes. And he said, I can't look at people in the eye in Derry. And all the time, every year he gets the same abuse and every year he refuses to wear it. And every year I'd normally post at some stage, why would we expect him to? Why should he be compelled to wear something which actually supports a group of people who in that particular moment in Northern Ireland, uh,

killed his own people and i don't think we should bully people like him into doing it it feels legitimate you know this person's evidently got a thought through very well-rounded established good argument which makes sense but most people don't want to hear it they just think he won't wear a popper he's a disgusting disgrace and that that is the progeny of people who are using these sorts of social campaigns inappropriately as well yeah because it causes people to have a reaction the boy who cried what the

you have this immune response that immediately gets triggered because you're not happy with it. Something else, one of the most interesting things I think over the last few years has been to see your arc through legacy media and now joining us in the muck in the mire as a YouTube degenerate. Talk to me about

How you sort of come to conceptualize the different worlds, what you've learned since coming over to my side of the fence? Well, it came about because I launched this new show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, and we were launching it on Talk TV in the UK, which was a new network launched by Rupert Murdoch. And concurrently, we set up a YouTube channel.

And it was really interesting. I was doing big interviews with Donald Trump and Cristiano Ronaldo and Kanye West and all these people, yay as he calls himself now. And we found that we were getting a pretty small audience on Talk TV, which was a linear platform, an hour-long show live with commercial breaks, very traditional. But on YouTube, without any restrictions, we could run the longer versions of interviews if we pre-taped them and so on. And we were getting 10, 20, 30, 40 times the audience live.

And it would be far more cost effective to not produce a linear television version. And when this went on for a year or two, I was eventually like, why are we doing this? Why are we losing money hand over fist to cater to probably quite an aging audience? If you look at the average age of cable news in America, audiences are 70 now for Fox, CNN, MSNBC. They're old people, right? I mean, that means a lot of them are probably 80.

Young people do not watch television apart from live school. I know because I've got four kids from 31 to 13. None of them watch TV. So you can either pretend that what's happening in front of your eyes isn't happening, or you can see how your habits of your kids are and look at what's happening literally on the numbers. And so we got to about a year ago,

February of 2024. I came off linear TV completely and we just went full YouTube and we've now got three and a half million subscribers, which you will appreciate is not bad in two and a half years. I think it took Joe Rogan four years to get to a million. Not that I'm comparing. I am comparing. And, uh,

And we now get millions of views for our content on almost pretty much everything. And sometimes we get real poppers like Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian comedian, political activist. 22 million people watch that. The real-life stalker from Martha, alleged stalker from Baby Reindeer. Again, 16, 17 million people watch that on our YouTube channel. We've never got anything like that on any television. What about from the sort of rhetoric perspective or from your perspective?

You know, journalisming, you always wanted to be a journalist, always loved the news, so on and so forth. But this, how much is this a new way to assess journalism?

the day's stories and what has it unlocked anything or is it just kind of a different package i think for me what i love i love two parts of it one being a ringmaster to really good debates with smart people i have a no dummies rule and we've exercised it a few times where people don't get invited back if they're too dumb because nobody wants to hear dumb people debating serious topics we do a lot of serious debates whether it's american election debates whether it's

ukraine russia whether it's israel mass war p diddy scandal whatever it may be you need smart people and that's my criteria for booking guests for the debates but also i want to balance it up i want to have equal numbers on both sides smart debating it and when you get it right it's magic because there's very few places in the world doing that i mean we're pretty the only ones in the youtube space who don't have an ideological position

You know, if you look at people I really admire in the space, people like Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly and others, they obviously come at it from an unashamedly conservative bias. I don't. Similarly, on the left, Mehdi Hassan and others. Cenk. Cenk Uygur, although he's beginning to move quite rapidly, I've noticed, to the dark side, as he would put it. But they're from the left. I'm in the middle.

genuinely in the middle. People could not position me into Republican or Democrat or here, conservative or Labour. I don't position myself in that way. I see myself foremost as a journalist. And what I like now is I can literally act as a journalist to everybody. Just when they say something, fact check it in real time, ask them the right questions and

challenge everybody equally. And I think people learn a lot from those kind of debates. I do. I literally, my favorite debate is at the end of 90 minutes. I go, do you know something? I've really learned a lot today. You might all have different slants on what you've been telling me, but I've learned a lot of basic information about this. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Nomadic Trash.

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back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount and see everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. You spend a lot of time either arguing with people or watching people argue with people. I love a good argument. I can tell. You're a more nuanced, calmer environment, which again, I also really like as well. Occasionally, I will do that with people, but

But as a rule of thumb, I like a good old heated knockabout debate. I've noticed, yeah. What's your advice for disagreeing better with people? You've got to listen to what you're being told by the other side. You can't have a blindly implacable view of anything. I respect, for example, take the Israel-Hamas war. The people I've had on are most respected, have been able to concede. If you're on the Palestinian side, for example,

And I am, to a large degree, supportive of a lot of what they say about the way Palestinians have been treated. But if they come on and they say that they won't condemn Hamas, it's to ask everyone the same question. It became a bit of a running joke on social media. But there's a reason I ask it. If they condemn what Hamas did on October the 7th, I can move forward to a debate where I know that they're intellectually honest.

If they can't, I know I'm dealing with somebody who's so blindly, implacably hateful towards Israel that they can't see the wood for the trees and they won't see mass murder in front of their eyes. They won't see a terror attack in front of their eyes and call it out for what it is. Similarly, on the pro-Israel side, if they don't have any empathy or sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people going back decades –

It's very hard to have a conversation with them where you think they're being intellectually honest. They're not because you can have both opinions, as I do. So I think that intellectual honesty is a powerful tool. You know, when I've had Israel guests recently who've omitted

quite readily that the expansion of the settlements on the West Bank is just plain wrong and probably constitutes a war crime, I think, great. That's intellectual honesty there because obviously it is. But if they don't, if they try and even defend that, you know you're dealing with people who are just so hyper-partisan, they're not prepared to even look at an obvious wrongdoing by their side and admit it's wrong because they think it's weak. What about...

The regulation of your emotions during that. I've heard you say that you're not a particularly emotional guy. I think you've cried once or twice over the last decade or so. Yeah, I don't cry. Which is less times than Hunter Biden has committed crimes, actually, if you look at his current record. But yeah, even you must feel the heart rate rise, the cortisol levels. What about that? What about staying cool during- Very important for me to stay cool, but not to lose passion sometimes.

You can take people on and you can show some fire in the belly when it's something you care about. I've done that a lot through these war periods when I felt that, particularly when I feel people are being just crass and completely insensitive to things, then I feel the blood boiling a bit. But I come back to the best debates are where I have people from both sides and they take on each other. And I just ringmaster it and try and have a viewer at home in mind who genuinely doesn't have a horse in the race but really wants to learn something

more about what's happening. That is where I think we've become a really powerful show. Yeah, it's like Jerry Springer for the 125 IQ generation. Well, I knew Jerry Springer very well. Jerry was a host on America's Got Talent for a year, two years, I think.

and we lived in the same hotel in la the beverly wilshire and we used to hang out by the pool and we just chat jerry was a fascinating guy he'd be mayor of cincinnati he'd been a news anchor for 10 years of a serious news program and then he got asked to do this pilot for a show he thought it was terrible

but it was so popular that it became the biggest show on television. He thought it was terrible. Terrible. Right to the end, he thought it was terrible. He said, I make the worst show on TV. But he was also making hundreds of millions of dollars. He was like Hugh Hefner hating porn. Right. So Jerry knew it was awful, but he also never talked down about the people that came on. I thought that quite strongly about the Jeremy Kyle scandal here. I was literally about to say that. What happened to Jeremy? What is Jeremy doing now? He's doing great. He's working over at Talk. He does a show there. I'm...

don't want to speak out of turn, but I know he's got some big plans because he told me, which are going to be in the news quite soon. Do you think he was due a redemption arc for the people that don't? Well, the inquest found he didn't do anything wrong, right? I mean, he never had done. He had thousands of guests. He had one guest who came on who later took his life, which is incredibly sad. But as the inquest established, it wasn't Jeremy Kyle's fault. And...

again there was a lot of snobbery about that show and the kind of people who went on it these were working class people who wanted to go on that show and wanted to air their feelings right if you taking your argument if they all had iqs of 150 plus and were talking about feelings on news night we'd all applaud them for their their courage right i mean it look i'd say this to my american friends all the time the fact the word posh i've never once heard be used by an american no but

class is so baked into the british system the british culture and there is this and snobbery it did almost feel a little bit you're right it almost felt kind of like a zoo for working class people for middle class people to watch working class people yeah oh you dance i get angry you never saw many contestants complaining about their experience or complaining about the show

or not contestants, what would you call them? The people who appeared, I don't know how they were called. Contestants are a wrong word. They felt like they were occasionally, but you just guess, right? So I never saw them complaining much about the way they were treated or what happened, or they were all quite happy to have their moment on television and to air their dirty linen. Now, you can be snobbish about it and say, well, how dare you do that? But I see smart people do that all the time. I mean, barely a week goes by without a major celebrity in the world saying,

emoting in some interview with Oprah or whoever it may be. What's the difference, actually? If you're emoting but you happen to be a Hollywood star or you happen to be a tycoon or politician... The slickness of your delivery is really the only difference. The principle's exactly the same.

you're just airing your dirty linen. I mean, if Harry and Meghan do it with Oprah, I felt it was just a posh royal version of what you saw on Springer. Exactly the same. It's exactly the same. We'll get back to talking to Piers in one minute, but first...

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slash modern wisdom. What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment? It really feels like we've got a lot of turbulence going on. Two million people voted for, signed a petition for Keir Starmer to leave. Then this insanely surprising U-turn from Keir Starmer about immigration, saying that the Tories ran an open border policy. All of the riots that we saw across the country this summer.

How do you come to think about it? It's a country that you've chosen to live in. I think that America has got its confidence back and Trump has been responsible for that, as has Elon Musk. I think the little thing, the rocket's going off, right? They're just instilling people a sense of America's firing rockets again.

They're taking us to the moon, maybe to Mars. There's something heroically ambitious about the way that people like Musk feel and Trump being down there at the last launch with just great imagery. He's making people feel confident again. Mastery, competence, conquer. Yes, yeah. In the UK, there's no sense of that. There's a sense at the moment of we're just existing and that nothing's really working, that public services are decaying fast, that we're getting far too many people coming in

Obviously, we need immigrants to work as a country, but you can't have a net migration of nearly a million people and expect already struggling public services to not struggle even more.

You just can't. And they said they'd fix the boats. I think more people are coming in than ever. But it's actual legal migration is a big problem, bigger than the boats issue. And we've gone through years again, going back to what we discussed earlier, where you couldn't talk about this if you even raised an eyelid on question time about the number of people coming in. Racist. You were racist. Yeah.

in the same way that if you talk about trans athletes in sport, you're transphobic. And all that has to stop. But we've just seen Keir Starmer give a two-minute statement, which went ballistic on social media, that the Conservatives couldn't have gotten away with three, four years ago. Could not have said that. So two things. Has the Overton window shifted? Yes. And secondly, is this just...

a guy that's had two million people put a petition together for him going, I need to do something to slow this. Well, I don't think he's that so much, but he will certainly have looked at what happened in America and why Trump won. And he'll think, if I don't fix the cost of living, illegal immigration, and stop the woke crap investing my party, I'm done for. Particularly if you've got someone circling like Nigel Farage, who is the UK version of Trump and is a good friend of Trump's.

And Farage's views were considered extreme. They're now considered increasingly mainstream because he's been proven on immigration to be right.

Not about everything. Some of the language he's used has been, in my view, wrongly inflammatory. But his basic principle about if you don't have a border, as Ronald Reagan said, if you don't have a proper border, you don't have a country. That's coming back to be clearly the case. So we need to be able to have an honest debate about this without people being called racist if they raise concerns about what is an obvious problem.

Well, every country wants to have some borders. Like, what are you? Well, you're not a country if you don't. Precisely correct. Elon Musk rumors a threat of $100 million to be tossed at Nigel Farage. He and him had a bit of a run-in earlier on this year. Yeah.

What do you make of that? Would you be happy to see Farage get 100 mil from Elon? I don't think he can do that legally in our country. Someone was saying there's a legal impediment to him actually doing that as a foreign citizen. He's rich, he can get around it. Yeah, look, he obviously had a big effect on Trump winning. I don't think there's a question of that. No, I think Elon's allowed to do what he likes. He's a free citizen. But would it help the UK politics to have that position? Well, he would balance it out because at the moment, Labour certainly have a lot more money coming in than the Tories and

in my last election. So, look, they all take money from people, right? Some take money from very dodgy people indeed. All of us pretend we hate it, but it carries on on both sides. If they all want to give up all outside donations, fine. But they can't really afford to do that. If the Conservatives are as dead in the water as people think in the UK, is reform where the

Formed in a very, very good position. I mean, Kemi Badenoch's got to do something pretty radical and pretty quickly with the Conservative Party. Or my prediction would be that Farage may well end up being the next prime minister, as Elon Musk has said. I don't think that's a mad idea at all. But he might be by then running a...

Conservative Party which has had reform flip into it. That's where my smart money would be is that they'll do a deal, they'll merge the parties and probably Farage ends up contesting the next election and if Keir Starmer has not delivered by them on all his promises or any of them then he could be political toast. I've had Dominic Cummings on the show and he did a podcast recently where he talked about some political

theatrics, I think you could say in government that there was sort of a fake meritocracy, fake responsibility, fake government. He also said that cabinet meetings are fully scripted based on what he says, based on what Rory Stewart says.

I don't know. It really does not feel like we have the brightest buttons in the bunch. We don't. We have a very mediocre tier of politicians now. I mean, you go back to the Thatcher years and their cabinets, just packed full of very smart people. Tony Blair's cabinet, for the first two terms in particular, incredibly smart people. People like Gordon Brown as Charles are just unbelievably brilliant brains.

So I think that's certainly true. I think a lot of smart people, particularly if they've made good money, don't want to get into politics because it's just going to ruin their lives. The worst paying, most negative, boring. In Singapore, famously, they pay their politicians a million dollars a year. Do you know what the...

head of UK cybercrime wage was. It was offered a couple of years ago, £65,000 a year. So why would you expect anyone of calibre to do that? So we don't pay people enough for important jobs in this country. I would personally pay the politicians an awful lot more. What they couldn't do is have any outside interest.

So I might even pay them half a million pounds a year, but I say you cannot have any stock investments. You cannot have any outside business interest. Rishi Sunak would be fucked. Yeah, well, he would, yeah. But in a way, the fact that Rishi was stinking rich, I was fine about that. I think you don't make decisions then based on what's going to benefit you, right? Yeah, in some ways it insulates you from-

I think the way he behaved after he lost, he was very impressive in the comments after that. I always liked him. I think he made a few strategic missteps, but actually pretty smart, committed, hardworking guy. And yeah, the fact he was rich didn't bother me at all. But no, I think it's going to be very interesting. I mean,

I do think we're deliberately attracting mediocre people to politics now because we don't make it attractive enough to attract the smart people. The UK is second in the world in millionaire exits in 2024. First in the world is China with about, I think, 13,000 to 15,000. And the UK is about 10,000. But we are 3% of the population. We have more than India. And India is 20 times bigger than...

We have the same number of universities in the top 10 in the world as America do, but we have one fifth the number of startup founder entrepreneurs. Why?

Well, because there is not. Even bottom up, you know, we can talk top down what's happening in Whitehall, the hallowed corridors of Westminster and stuff. But I think even bottom up, you know, I'm from Stockton, working class town. And I saw some videos of Middlesbrough riots going through Acklam, like places that I know, places that I've been. And like just working class rage, people disgruntled. And this, you know, sick. Well, hang on. Okay. Let's talk about these riots for a minute. Here we go.

Because that wasn't why they were rioting. Of course, that's my point. My point is- They were rioting because they were whipped up by people who should know better and probably did know better into believing a certain set of circumstances had happened surrounding an appalling attack, right? Yeah.

They hadn't. It wasn't actually an illegal asylum seeker who committed these actions. And so people were exactly, in a way, on a smaller, it was a smaller version of the Iraq war, which I oppose so specifically. I'll tell you why. It was fought on an entirely false pretext.

Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that war would have been justified. Had the person who perpetrated this crime been an illegal asylum seeker, you're not entitled to commit violence, but you're certainly entitled to feel rage about that happening at a time when this whole issue of illegal asylum seekers coming in and taking over the country, all that argument they put forward, it would at least have had some validity that that was why they were angry. Even the premise wasn't accurate. But everything about it was wrong.

So the riots were whipped up by people, malevolent voices who should have known better. Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and others. I took on Tate about this a few days later. And that's a problem with social media. Now,

Let's go further to when a lot of people were put in prison because they tweeted things. That I don't agree with, right? And I don't agree with that because it seems a ridiculous overreach. And when you overreach to that level where people are literally, you know, grandmothers have been put in prison for two years for something they put on Facebook, that's not a sensible response to this either. If people are actually chucking Molotov cocktails at an asylum seeker hotel, yeah.

Chuck him in prison for a few years, but a granny gobbling off on Facebook? Come on. Is that what we're really about in this country? The thing I realized when I watched those videos in Middlesbrough was a lot of the people that were walking down the street, there was a new-build house with fresh windows. And you could tell because it still had that sort of tape papering over the outside. And people were out in the streets going through a classic northern town

terraced working class neighborhood. And someone just picked up a brick and threw it through the window of this brand new house. And that was the point where I was like, this has got nothing to do with the immigration, rightly or wrongly, false pretext or correct pretext. It's just this sort of- Well, that would be an angry resentment. But to what? Well, people having what you don't have and your fear. And look, who knows what's going on in these people's lives, right? I understand. I understand the rage of people who maybe through the pandemic have come out and they've got no job.

maybe they've gone through a horrible divorce, maybe they've got no money, they can't afford to feed their kids, their lives are shit, and I understand they're going to feel angry. Of course I do. And by the way, there are lots of people in this country who are in that position, lots. And you've got to understand what is driving that sense of anger and resentment. Half of my life was spent in that.

world. 50%. I'm 36. I was there until I was 18, and then I left to go to university in Newcastle. So I know these people. I know that culture very well. It's electric. It's like the air before a thunderstorm begins. And it's this ambient malevolence below the surface, this disgruntledness. But it feels to me like the UK has a very, very potent version of this. Great video that I saw this

American that lived in London for six months, and he describes the way that British football fans behave. He's like, they're not just passionate, they're angry. They would happily, if there weren't police officers between them and the other team. Hang on again. Again, I knew this was going to happen. They're like a fight, mate. Let's not overthink football hooligans, right? I've seen them in action. Most of them just like a good old punch up. They like a drink, probably some drugs, and a fight. And they actually love it.

And to understand the mind of a football hooligan, you need to start from that. It's not some great political... I mean, even the normal fans, you don't need to be one of the hooligans. Even the guys in the back row, they seem to... Yeah, look, mob mentality can brew up very quickly. Of course, I've been at football matches. So you think they're downstream from the more aggressive parts of the stadium, so to speak? Yes, I think a lot of football hooligans... I mean, look, when I was young, football hooligans dominated every single match. It was pretty scary and thrilling at the same time.

I can't pretend otherwise. When I was 18, 19, watching battles on the terraces was exciting in a way that watching a UFC fight can be exciting. But I'd rather have the more controlled environment than having it happening on a football terrace. Where it can spill over into your seat. Yeah, now it doesn't. But I wouldn't over-intellectualize the average British football hooligan.

who they might like to see themselves as political polemics with their fists, but they're not. Most of them just like a good fight. Every day for over three years now, I've started my morning the exact same way, which is with element in a cold glass. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

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Well, it was handed to my great uncle John. He was a war hero. He got the George Medal for heroism in the war. Actually, a brilliant story because he was in the army in World War II. He'd been invalided temporarily out with some bad injuries. And he was in a pub where he's being billeted with his, I think it was the Irish Regiment.

And a prototype German bomber landed in a field near the pub. And the guys all grabbed their guns and they went and had it out with the German crew because it hadn't exploded. And they heard one of them say, bomber, bomber. And my great uncle John jumped in, looked around, found the bomb, which was designed to blow up the prototype plane so the Allies couldn't get the information from it, and threw it away into a pond where it blew up.

And he got the George Medal. It would have been the George Cross, which is the military version. But at the time, he was actually deemed to be a civilian because he was invalided. He was going to go back. And it was actually a Battle of Graveney Marsh. You can read about it. No way. It was the last time that British troops engaged an enemy in British soil, and it was 70 years ago. And they had the anniversary about – it must have been 10 years ago. My brother went down. He was an army colonel with my grandmother, whose brother it would have been.

and had a lovely day down in Graveney Marsh. And that was the last time, and he won the medal for that. It's just a great story. And the other great part of it was he went to get his George medal up from Buckingham Palace. I think it must have been from the Queen, I guess. And he went out the night before with the regiment, got blind drunk, came back, told the porter outside that,

I've got an appointment with the queen at 11 o'clock. He thought the guy was obviously just making this up, laughed, didn't wake him up, overslept. Nearly missed it. Wow. He did get it eventually. Great Uncle John, a fantastic guy. Anyway, the point of the story is that it was his, he was at Covent Garden talking to a flower seller and the flower seller was imparting these phrases and one was,

life ain't much, but it's all you got. So stick a geranium in your hat and be happy. And I'm not sure of the other one, the cock of the walk. My grandmother always gave me this phrase, one day you'll cock with the walk, the next you'll feather duster. But she would send it to me with pictures of a cockerel when I was going through a particularly good time, just to remind me

Be careful because the feather duster might be around the corner. Very, very good device. So I'm not sure if she got that from Uncle John, but he certainly got a lot of his sayings from this Covent Garden flower seller. So, you know, you've had a...

you say, tumultuous, turbulent, some would say, fun journey. Yes. Fun. I mean, I don't see it as turbulent as other people do. Well, there's certainly been ups and downs. How would you not let failure get to you too much? Well, I come from the Winston Churchill school of thought. Failure is going from, success is going from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm.

And he was the greatest Briton of all time. But he had a lot of failures. He had a lot of successes. I love Michael Jordan's view about success and failure, is that he could remember –

making thousands of baskets but he could also remember the 26 times he had the shot to win a match and he failed and he said without that you never do the rest and i do you know wayne gretzky who i met in a new york restaurant actually a few months ago fantastic bloke had a great chat with him greatest ice hockey player in history famous for the quote you'll miss 100 of the shots you never take

I have gone through my entire life with that attitude. Just have a go. Have a go. See what happens. Sometimes it's been spectacularly successful. Sometimes it's crashed and burned. It's okay. In the moment, how do you deal with sort of regulating that? Counter-tem, slowly. Okay. Literally counter-tem. Literally deep breath, however bad it is, whatever it is, I counter-tem. And at the end of 10, okay, now crack on.

There's nothing you can do about it. There's nothing you can do about it. What was the – is there a particularly intense count to 10 or a particularly long one that comes to mind? I mean, look, all the things that people know that have happened to me. I've had moments when I've lost big jobs or whatever it may be. They always seem worse to other people than they do to me in the moment, I would say. I just literally do the count to 10, whatever it is. I just think short of death or terminal illness –

everything is recoverable from it's entirely down to you i do think mental strength is the number one thing that you can have to succeed in life look at donald trump right that guy has got the thinnest skin in history he'll react to absolutely everything but he also has a thicker skin in that he can take stuff that no other politician has ever taken and keep pounding forward and i i love the scene in rocky in the sixth film when he's got the spoiled bright sun

He's in his 20s, who hates being Rocky's son and moaning and whining. And he's just a spoiled little brat. And Rocky eventually has it out with him in the street. And he says, listen, life is not a bunch of flowers or something. He starts, he says, it's not about how hard you can hit.

Life is about how hard you can get here. Get back up and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. And I love that speech so much. My sons have it on repeat. And that's keep pounding to you as well, right? Keep pounding, right? Because something will happen. But if you don't have the right mental attitude to when negative stuff happens to you, you're not going to be able to exploit the good stuff when it comes your way. I remember Kelvin McKenzie, the infamous but brilliant editor of The Sun, the only editor I ever worked for, actually.

And I worked there for five years when the Sun was selling like four or five million copies. And he used to rampage around from morning, noon, and night. It was a terrifying spectacle. But it was a paper cracker with great energy. It was the days when papers were very, very important. And I remember he said, you know, the most annoying thing about you, Morgan, after one tremendous bollocking he'd given me, eyes bulging, neck straining, the whole thing. He said, because I'd gone back in about an hour later with a good scoop. He said, the most annoying thing is I can't break you.

Every time I give you a bollocking, you just come back quickly with a scoop. He said, I admire it and I hate it in equal measure. And I've always tried to be like that. I just think there's such wasted energy to wallow in misery or negativity or something bad that's happened to you. I've always celebrated. I mean, Mars, the confectioners, used to apparently celebrate Christmas

chocolate bars that didn't work because it was so rare that all their testing didn't turn out to be a success. They'd celebrate the failure because they'd learn more from the failures. I completely agree. And it toughens you up. You know, tough stuff in life toughens you up. I've heard you say things that feel terrible in the moment very rarely are. They always look back on the worst things that have ever happened to you. If you're still alive, think about the worst things that have ever happened to you. How bad do they feel now? And guess what? You woke up this morning. It wasn't as bad as you thought.

So I think that's a really powerful way to look at it. Think about all the bad, however old you are, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, carry on. But look back at the worst moments of your life, the moments you thought you'd never recover from. Look where you are. You recovered. Well, like I say, if you're dead, that's bad. If you're terminally ill, that's bad. But after that, what's stopping you bouncing back other than yourself?

So it's entirely down to you. Just take my advice. Count to 10, then go out with your mates, get blind drunk, turn your phone off, go on holiday, clear your head. Whenever a friend of mine loses a high profile job, and it happens a lot in the media, I'll say the same thing. I'll say, turn your phone off and piss off for three or four months. Just go to a beach.

Write a book, lie down, just chill. Don't take any offer you're given for the next three, four months because your head won't be in the right space at all. It's the best advice you can give anybody. Clear your head. It's weird that, you know, in the moment, it does feel like everything's going to – it's this huge whirlwind and chaos is occurring and you're overthinking and so on and so forth. But you'll probably just end up working it out like you always have. Yes.

But I do think we are not training young minds the right way. I've felt very strongly about this for a long time.

What would that look like? Well, I see so many, my youngest son in particular, his age group, have a lot of anxiety issues. And I've been wrestling with why. And I read Jonathan Haidt's brilliant book about mobile phones and cell phones and how actually since 2010, the incidence of anxiety and depression in young people has massively accelerated. So there's a clear connection between phones when they went smart

And they are smart, but they're also very dangerous on impressionable young minds and the effect it had on young people. And I want to really tackle the anxiety epidemic. That's what it is. I think they're being exposed to way too much negative dopamine all day long on their phones. They are seeing imagery from Gaza,

from Ukraine that we never would have been able to see when I was that age ever you couldn't see it you were protected newspapers wouldn't put that stuff in the paper the two or three news channels on television wouldn't have put it on air there was no internet there were no phones how did you see it you couldn't see it somebody was eaten by a crocodile in Florida right on a golf course

You didn't even know about it. Now you're watching the video of the guy from someone's camera phone being eaten by the crocodile. So that's not going away. Well, it's not going away. But look at what Australia has done with banning social media for under-16s. I agree with that. And it's not a free speech issue. It's a free the brain issue. Would you support that in the UK? I would actually. Yeah, I do think that social media for under-16s is dangerous. I do. Because they're not regulated like a newspaper or a TV network.

They're just not. Look at Twitter all day. You think it's regulated? It's not. Look at Facebook. No, they're not. They are putting way too much bad stuff on there. And because they can't control it because of the sheer volume of stuff coming in all the time in real time, because they can't control it, we should control the access that impressionable young brains have to that material as we would anything else. And I think that's a

A really important thing. I've seen the reactions. It's quite interesting, the reaction to Australia. What do you make of it? Well, it's quite split. Like I've seen people on the right and the left agreeing and disagreeing, which makes me think it's an interesting debate to have. I don't know. What do you think of it? I've got four kids. I would back it. I would back it all day. I mean, I'd be tempted to back it up to 18. I just don't like... But the argument here is you can get married at 16.

So how can you get married at 16 but not use social media to your age? Yeah, exactly. Well, where are you going to find your wife? You know what I mean? It's not going to be at work. It's going to have to be using social media. But I think 16 is a good age limit. Yeah. My daughter's 13. I don't think her life gets benefited at all in the next three years by being exposed to everything that's on social media. Yeah. What's next for you? Well, I want to make Piers Morgan Uncensored the biggest YouTube channel in the world.

What does that mean? Plays? Well, I would say at the moment, yeah, I think the potential for a brand like mine to expand the brand, to bring other people in, a bit like the Daily Wire. Create a network. Create a network of uncensored people doing uncensored things, YouTube channel, books, documentaries, merchandise. One of my favorite stories of Daily Wire is that

that has someone running with an advertiser about hair gel or something. So they launched their own hair gel line. Razor's chocolate. It's making like 10, 20 million a year, right? Yeah, I'd have a bit of Morgan merch. But I think the potential for what I'm doing and what you do is obviously potentially massive. This was the first YouTube election in America where more people watched analysis and election coverage on election night on YouTube than broadcast or cable news.

Also the first podcast election where one candidate did endless big podcasts and YouTube shows. What if the 2028 debate was hosted by Piers Morgan? Yeah. Why not? Why not? You get a bigger audience. No question. Love to do that. I would love to do that. I'd watch it. Piers Morgan, ladies and gentlemen. Piers, I appreciate you. It was very good to catch up. Good to see you. We need to leave and go and do your show now. We do. Good to see you. And you.