The Hidden Man ｜ Piers Morgan ｜ EP 295 (-aFcTbf8yI8)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-aFcTbf8yI8

I said to him, do you mind if I just speak frankly to you? He said, sure. I said, look, the thing you’ve lacked this year, and it may be you just don’t have this valve, so be honest with me, but you’ve lacked empathy. You haven’t been the comforter in chief. You don’t seem to have that tool in your armory. You just want to be the strong commander in chief. And I said, that lack of empathy is going to cost you because you’re up against Joe Biden, who everybody knows from his own personal tragedies, has huge amounts of personal empathy for people. And it would go an awful long way. But then I watched him go out the next day and do some press thing, and he was just exactly the same as Norpol. So I don’t think he really has an empathy valve. Well, he’s capitalized on being disagreeable. If you’re in the public eye like that, and you’re a critic, and you want to say what you have to say, and you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, it’s useful to be disagreeable. But you can’t be disagreeable all the time. It does look to me like this is an Achilles heel for Trump, this tendency to devolve into a very effective, but somewhat juvenile bullying. And then combined with that, this proclivity to play the victim, which I really think is stunningly off brand for him. It leaves everyone on the conservative side in the same position that the radicals on the left want to put conservatives, which is to abandon all faith in the credibility of institutions. Designed for anyone to sell anywhere, Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big businesses. An all-in-one e-commerce platform, Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. Whether you’re selling succulents or stilettos, start selling at a low price. You can get the most out of it, and it’s easy to sell to anyone from anywhere. You can start selling at a low price. You can start selling at a high price. You can start selling at a low price. 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I’m very pleased today to have with me Mr. Piers Morgan. Mr. Morgan is an English broadcaster, although he’s well-known outside of the UK as well. He’s a journalist, writer, and TV personality. He began his career in the UK in 1988 at quite a young age at The Sun, the newspaper. In 1994, at 29, he was appointed News of the World Editor by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul. He was the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than 50 years. From 95 to 2004, Piers edited The Daily Mirror and then served as first news editorial director from 2006 to 2007. On TV from 2009 to 21, Piers hosted the ITV talk show Life Stories, the CNN chat show Piers Morgan Live from 2011 to 2014, the ITV breakfast program Good Morning Britain from 2015 to 2021, and was a judge on both America’s Got Talent from 06 to 11 and Britain’s Got Talent from 07 to 2010. In 2008, he won the Celebrity Apprentice US, appearing with future US president, Donald Trump. We’re gonna talk today about Piers’ career, about being a journalist and a celebrity as well, about interacting with celebrities, but I think we’re gonna start with a brief discussion about an interview that Piers conducted with me in the UK a couple of weeks ago as of the taping date of this interview and discussion. So it seems to have attracted a fair bit of positive attention, I would say, perhaps for both of us. And what do you make of it? Well, first of all, it showed me what my belief was before I interviewed you, which is that you are an internet phenomenon in all guises. The attention that the interview attracted online was, by our standards of our fledgling show and network of six months or so, absolutely staggering. In fact, right up there with my first interview, which was Donald Trump. So I found that very interesting to go into a world on YouTube in particular, in which you are so dominant and so well known, to see that an interview could be cut up in the way that we did it with various clips and see each of them be watched by millions and millions of people. And I found that very interesting. It also played into my sort of sense that the most interesting interviews actually are with people who have something to say. You know, you and I both know that we’ve interviewed lots of people over the years who often don’t have very much to say for themselves. And they could be the most famous people on the planet, but be incredibly boring. I would rather take interesting, controversial, polarizing, perhaps divisive people or certainly the way that they are portrayed perhaps by the media and interview those types of people because it makes for more interesting interviews. So I found the experience of interviewing you fascinating. I lived up to every expectation. It was surprisingly moving. You got surprisingly emotional at one stage, which I wasn’t expecting. But I think that it also, I thought, showed you in an extremely good light. And I don’t mean that as false flattery. I just think that you came over as, to me, very sincere when you showed that emotion. And it also showed me that even someone like you that’s been criticized a lot as well as praised, that certain things do permeate your skin and do genuinely upset you. And I was surprised by that, but I also thought that appeared to be very genuine. So I thought the whole experience for me, Jordan, was fascinating. I think I said to you, my three sons, who were all in their 20s, they were the most excited I’d ever seen them about an interview outside of Cristiano Ronaldo, our mutual friend from the world of football, which I found very interesting because their three boys in their 20s, all quite different, but they all watch YouTube avidly and they perceive you to be the sort of king of YouTube up there with Joe Rogan and a few others. And so they found it an utterly compelling interview and they were able to compare it to many that you’d done and felt that it was right up there with one of the best they’d seen. I was very pleased professionally that actually I felt I’d conducted a good interview, but I do come back to the basic premise, I think, of any interviewer. You’re only really as good as the tools that you work with. And in your case, you came, I think, prepared to be very open, to be very honest, to be emotional, and I found that actually very moving. So you said a couple of things there, I would say, on the technological front that I thought were very interesting. So one of the things about YouTube, I would say, perhaps that distinguishes it in some way from legacy TV is that YouTube really rewards straightforward, untrammeled, and unscripted discussion. And it’s really what people expect on the platform. And the fact that the discussions can go for a long while without any of the somewhat artificial constraints that are placed on the broadcast media means that people can and are more likely to reveal themselves in all their positive and negative aspects. And I think that’s part of the reason that Rogan has become so popular, apart from the fact that Joe always asks questions that are actually questions. He’s always, in some sense, honestly digging for information rather than trying to set someone up or play for a cheap laugh or a cheap take down, which is something that’s very characteristic of a certain type of journalist. And that doesn’t play well at all on YouTube, interestingly enough. It makes people infamous very rapidly. And so it’s an interesting medium in that regard, partly because of the lack of restriction on bandwidth. And then you also mentioned the clips issue. And one of the things that’s quite remarkable about YouTube and makes talking there much different than publishing a book, let’s say. Well, first of all, the audience is much broader on YouTube than it is on the publishing front by an order of magnitude likely, which is a lot. But also you can’t sell a book by the sentence or the paragraph, but YouTube videos are infinitely fractionable. And you can clip one minute or three minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes. And there’s an independent market for every one of those lengths of clips. And so that’s a very interesting new technological possibility to delve into. And you’ve seen TikTok emerge and YouTube shorts and Instagram, all these social media platforms that have their own culture that capitalize on that capacity to fractionate YouTube or to fractionate video. And so it’s very interesting to try to contend with all that. I also thought for what it’s worth that you talk to me in a very straightforward manner. And I certainly appreciated that. I had many people on my team who were concerned about the potential manner in which the interview might proceed, not least because we’ve had plenty of fun with British journalists before, although that often turned out well. But you also said during that interview, or maybe it was before we talked, that you had been thinking about listening in a way that was somewhat new for you, or at least new in part. I mean, everybody learns as they go along. And so I was curious afterwards about what exactly that meant, because I really felt that during the interview, you did listen to me and that we had, and vice versa, hopefully, and that as a consequence, we had, we genuinely communicated. And I think that that was part of the reason that made the interview successful. Yeah, I mean, actually it was my middle son, who’s a young actor and photographer, and listens avidly to YouTube. And most of your stuff he’s watched in recent years, most of Joe Rogan’s stuff he’s watched. And he said, dad, look, you can’t do your normal sledgehammer act. You can’t just go in and start interrupting every five seconds like you normally do, which is a fault line of mine. It works well actually when you’re interviewing a politician who’s trying to obfuscate or answer different questions, or simply avoid the one you’re asking. Sometimes you do have to be slightly bully boy in the way you interrupt a politician to get an answer out of them. So it’s a different technique. But actually the point that my son Stanley made to me was, said, dad, if you want to get the best out of Jordan Peterson, he said, trust me, you have to listen. And so that was constantly in the back of my mind. He was actually at the back of the studio, as you know, with my youngest son, Bertie. And he was adamant that that was the way I would get the best out of you. And he was completely right. And it was a learning curve for me. It might sound slightly odd that I’m getting to this stage of my life, 57 years old, and being a journalist since I was in my early 20s, to suddenly learn the art of interviewing. But I’ve been through many guises as a journalist and interviewer. When you’re a newspaper interviewer, as I was for many years, or I did big interviews also for GQ Magazine, often the interviewer can talk a lot to get a one line revelation. So you can keep talking, keep talking, keep talking, and then lull your interviewee into saying something that maybe you were trying to get. It’s a very different discipline on television or on any form of on camera interview. And I was also struck by the fact this wasn’t the first person who’d given me the advice to listen. I remember the great Sir David Frost, who did with the Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon, some of the great interviews ever seen in political journalism. And he always said to me, the most powerful tool of any television interviewer is silence, because the interviewee will always fill that void. At some stage, after one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, an interviewee will fill the gap. They won’t just sit there in silence too. And sometimes the most powerful revelations you can get from people come when they have their own moment to really think about what they’re going to say, and they say it. And if you’re too busy, as you said earlier, and I’ve been very guilty of this myself, of talking too much, expressing your own opinions, not really listening to what the person is saying, then you can sometimes miss these moments of real gold, which come actually from the power of silence. So I think that, you know, I think the experience I had with you was really informative to me, of when you’re interviewing somebody, obviously very intelligent, obviously very used to doing interviews, perhaps coming with a slight sense of suspicion after what happened with you on Channel 4 News. And I watched that interview live, as I told you, and I just felt in that interview, I know the interviewer, Kathy Newman, I felt that she didn’t really know who you were, hadn’t done quite enough research into what you really felt and what you really thought, and had made a series of presumptions about you, which you were able to bat away quite quickly, and it made for very uncomfortable viewing if you were a Channel 4 News viewer, because it was quite clear that you were slightly on parallel lines. So I think that, yeah, I found our experience really, really good, actually. I felt that had I done my political interview technique with you, I think you would have clammed up, it would have been, well, you wouldn’t have clammed up, but I think it would have been a much more confrontational exchange, which I wasn’t seeking to get, because I actually agree with a lot of what you say. So to me, it does depend who the interviewee is. It might depend too on, well, it might also depend on exactly what the purpose of the stage is. So if you’re a political actor, let’s say, and you’re acting instrumentally, so you have a purpose in the interview that’s a priori, then you’re going to be inclined, as the person being interviewed, to craft your words and to make sure you don’t step in anything toxic and to deflect anything that might be too penetrating. And so what that seems to me to necessitate on the part of an investigative journalist is a much more adversarial and antagonistic stance, because the journalist is going to be required, especially if the interviewee is obfuscating or deceiving to have to dig with a relatively sharp blade. And so I can really see that there’s utility in that adversarial stance, when what you’re trying to uncover is a web of intrigue and self-serving instrumentalism and deception. And this also segues quite interestingly, I think, into one of the main topics I wanna talk to you about today, which is something approximating temperament and fame. And so one of the cardinal personality dimensions is agreeableness. And agreeable people, it’s really a maternal dimension. And agreeable people are compassionate and polite. They’re very interested in people and in serving people. And it’s likely a dimension that maximizes the capacity to take care of the weak and the infirm and infants and the outsiders. Now, the disadvantage to being agreeable is that you can be taken advantage of because you can’t stand up for yourself very well, partly because of your self-sacrificing nature, let’s say. And so you can be a pushover and then become resentful and angry and bitter, and feel that you’re in an unfair world, giving all the time and never receiving. On the other side, you have the disagreeable temperament, which is more masculine. And I say that because women are reliably higher in agreeableness and men reliably lower. And that’s true cross-culturally, and it maximizes in egalitarian countries. And so what happens in journalism is that journalists tend to be selected for two personality traits, perhaps more, but at least two. They’re extroverted because they like to talk to people and they like to talk and they have lots to say and they’re verbally fluent, but they’re also disagreeable. And the problem with those two traits, extroversion and disagreeableness, is they tilt people towards narcissism. So, and it’s, what was it, Nietzsche, I think the German philosopher said, “‘Great men are seldom credited with their stupidity.‘” And so you need these traits of extroversion and being disagreeable to put yourself in the public eye and to enable you to be adversarial. But there’s a set of probable sins that go along with that. And those include the sins, let’s say, of narcissism. Now, if you’re conscientious and you keep your word, you can ameliorate that. I like having disagreeable people around because they will tell you what they think. They don’t pull any punches. And that can be harsh and even callous at times, but at least you get the damn information. Whereas agreeable people are always trying to keep the peace at any cost, including the cost of their own wellbeing. So in your situation, this is what I’m very curious about, you have to be adversarial and you have to be antagonistic to the degree that you’re uncovering deception and obfuscation and those sorts of things, to the degree that you have to counter the tricks that people are bringing to bear on the situation. One of the things I guess that makes YouTube different and Rogan in particular is, I don’t think Rogan almost never talks to people who are doing that. I’ve talked to him, for example, about speaking with politicians and he tends not to speak with them. And I think the reason for that is that he’s not interested in that adversarial discussion and he doesn’t want his platform to be used for people who are trying to score political points. Now, and fair enough, and that’s worked very well for Rogan and I understand exactly why he does that. And I don’t like to conduct adversarial interviews either, but it’s still the case that there is a need for that adversarial conduct on the journalistic front if part of the role of journalism is to keep dishonest, narcissists as honest as possible. And so obviously one of the things that you’re attempting to calibrate properly, I presume, is well, how much you listen and allow the conversation to unfold and how much you dig without digging too much and without being an utter prick about it, right? Because obviously it’s possible to go too far on that front. And so, and my suspicions are that you also have the temperament to be able to engage in a fight. And without that, you can’t be adversarial. So how you said you’re still learning to do that. The silence issue is interesting too, because I think that’s particularly tough on broadcast TV because you’re called upon in some sense to fill every valuable second. And then to let a pause occur, you have to be willing to risk the potential price of dead space. And that’s quite intimidating if you’re while using up valuable broadcast space, which isn’t such an issue on YouTube, let’s say, but there’s very weird constraints in broadcast TV that people aren’t aware of when they’re just watching it. And so tell me about the adversarial relationship and how you think you’ve managed that positively and also negatively. Yeah, I mean, I’ll give you two great examples, I think, where I got it right and then got it wrong. One was when I was at CNN and Sandy Hook happened, the mass shooting at the school. And I’d been editor of the Daily Mirror back in the UK in 1996 when the Dunblane school massacre happened in Scotland where 16 young children were killed by a lone gunman. And so I had at the time campaigned in the UK for much tougher gun control measures, which all were passed by a combination of left and right wing governments, John Majors and then Tony Blair’s. So it was much easier here to affect change because very few people actually had guns. So I was under no delusion that America is a very different culture to be waging a similar campaign. But what it brought back to me when Sandy Hook happened were the emotions I had when Dunblane had occurred and how horrific it was and how just this idea of 16 in Dunblane and 20 children in Sandy Hook having their lives snuffed away by some maniac with a gun, that it seemed to me unconscionable that any society could not want to affect some change to stop it happening again. And yet recently in America, we had another mass shooting in a school, almost identical in the way that it was carried out and nothing had been done since Sandy Hook. So if you take the apocryphal, I think it was Einstein quote of definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, also I would say the definition of insanity is doing nothing again and again and expecting same thing not to happen. So when I blew up at CNN at the time against the NRA for example, it came from a position of real raw emotion. I can think of only a handful of times in my career when I’ve been rendered to tears by a news story, Dunblane was one of them and Sandy Hook was another. So I was being driven by genuine raw emotion, no question. And I think in the early stages of my coverage of that story on CNN, it really resonated with people. People thought it was very powerful, it was compelling and I was broadly right that something had to be done. But I would say I slightly overreagged the emotional souffle and I think it began to have the opposite effect to what I hoped. So I hope to genuinely affect change, but I couldn’t stop being over emotional in the interviews I did with some of these pro NRA, pro gun people coming on the show and ended up shouting at them, losing my temper with them, slightly straying into performative art, perhaps even straying into a dash of narcissism myself where you start to believe your own hype, you start to read the media saluting what you’re doing. I was getting emails from Barbara Streisand congratulating me and so on. It’s all very intoxicating, but of course it can, if you’re not careful and I think it happened to me there, it can lead to you actually achieving the complete opposite to what you hope. And in the end, I think all I managed to do with my over emotional response over time was probably sell more guns in America, which was the complete opposite of fate to what I wanted because people thought this guy’s the new George III, he seems to have forgotten we got rid of the Brits with guns, we don’t want a guy with this accent telling us how to lead our lives, et cetera. And I would say similarly in the UK in the pandemic in the first wave in early 2020, I built up a reputation pretty quickly for skewering British politicians on air in a very, very aggressive and volatile manner in which I felt they were completely dropping the ball collectively as a government, making a series of catastrophic and deadly mistakes. And I saw it incumbent on me to try and almost hammer them into making better decisions. And for a long time, I think I would say that I did a very good job of that. But again, I think towards the end, I overdid things a little bit. I wanna look back at some of the later interviews, I was perhaps trying to recreate the theater of what had gone on before, which was very organic and real. And when you start to recreate something that’s organic, it ceases to be organic. And so I think those were two good examples where a lot of people would have been cheering me on, but also in both cases, what happened there in the UK was the government actually pulled all their ministers from any interviews with me for eight months. They just did a complete blanket ban. And that doesn’t help anybody because then my viewers don’t get served by anything. They have no ability to hear from people in government about what’s gonna be happening. So I felt in both cases that I let myself down in the end, albeit with the right intentions and the danger line for anyone that does that kind of interviewing is where it strays into performative art rather than organic anger and emotion. So I don’t regret the early emotion and anger, but I do regret the way it’s strayed into something a little different. And I think that’s a really interesting lesson for people. If you’re gonna do those kind of slightly more volatile interviews, and I do think sometimes you have to as a journalist, I like passion in journalists, I like emotion, but never lose track of actually what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. And never try and replicate something that you’ve done before because it will always come across as slightly fake. Okay, so let’s take that apart a little bit. So the first thing you said there was that when you’re being lauded by a lot of people for your actions, first of all, we might point out that it’s useful to take that seriously, right? Because one of the things you wanna see in someone is that they are responsive to social response. The person who’s not social responsive to social response is either completely unskilled or psychopathic, or maybe is in a different category altogether where they can handle public response appropriately, which is very, very difficult. So you had every reason if people were responding positively to you, to assume that what you’re doing was broadly regarded as positive and therefore might even be positive. But then you said, it enticed you in an egotistical direction to some degree. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand Adolf Hitler psychologically. And in some sense, I would say, trying to develop some sympathy for him in so far as that was possible. And I think you develop sympathy for people by putting yourself in their position. And that’s very difficult to do with someone like Adolf Hitler. First of all, it’s very unpleasant to do that, but it’s also very challenging because at minimum he had a very complex life. But you imagine, here’s the statement, you can tell me what you think of this. If 20 million of your countrymen are telling you that you’re the savior of their country, who are you to disagree? And so you wonder why someone like Hitler could have his ego blown up to the proportions that it became blown up to. And the answer is, well, do you really think that you’d be able to resist the positive blandishments of so many people? Because that in itself could easily be a form of egotism. I don’t care what people think. It’s like, well, yeah, you probably do and you probably should. And then the question is, well, how do you keep yourself straight when you are the target of positive adulation? And so one of it, you said you should know what you’re doing. So one possibility is, and I think I learned this mostly from Carl Jung, is that you need to distinguish yourself from the principles for which you stand. Because so one of the things that happens to me quite often is that people tell me how helpful my work has been. And I think to the degree that I can think this, I think, well, it’s not surprising that it’s been helpful in large part because it’s not exactly my work. A lot of the things I’ve learned, and perhaps the vast majority, no doubt the vast majority of the things that I’ve learned, I’ve learned because I’ve studied great thinkers, who in turn had studied great thinkers. And so I’ve been able to derive a certain amount of wisdom and I’m able to communicate that, but I’m doing my best to ensure that I separate myself from that wisdom. And that’s a hard thing to do because of course, here I am as a person as well. And the ideas that are being transmitted through me are focused on me at that moment for that reason, but it’s very difficult. That’s the idea of rendering unto God what’s God’s and unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s in some sense, right? Is that you have to, so you remember, it’s okay to attract the positive attention because it reflects well on the principles that you’re trying to espouse. But as soon as this becomes about your status and your specific success and your instrumental maneuvering in the world, then you replace what is being praised with yourself. And that’s a sin of pride. And the consequences of that is that you’ll definitely fall into a pit. On that point, it’s interesting, you’ve made me think of something very specific, which I think is a good example. Tony Blair was a very successful British prime minister for many years. He was elected for three terms. But I remember after 9-11, he flew to the United States and he spoke to Congress and said we would stand shoulder to shoulder with the American people. And Congress gave him a lengthy standing ovation. And it was an image that went around the world. And I could almost see Blair in Congress standing there, taking this extraordinary adulation from the most powerful room in the world. And then basking in the glory of his position here as the great supporter and defender of the United States at their most difficult hour. And it was almost like he puffed up visibly in front of us, like a peacock. He was loving this attention, albeit in a very serious time. And then you cut forward to the Iraq War within two years. And I’m absolutely convinced that Tony Blair’s ego drove him to wage that war, to go along with the Iraq War, when every part of his legal brain, he was a lawyer, and his slightly left-of-center political brain would have told him this was insanity. That actually to go it alone without a United Nations second resolution, which would be endorsing military conflict, that without that, this was mad. And I had many conversations with him at number 10 Downing Street in his flat, where we literally would share a beer and have a chat about all this. And I could see that it was the problem he dug himself was that he, from that moment, he became the peacock opening his wings proudly to soak in the adulation of the United States. That he then felt almost a duty to go along with whatever action the United States government took, even if it was against the British national interest, and even as it turned out, if it turned out to be pretty much a disaster, the Iraq War. And I genuinely think it was the process you’ve just described, where the initial instinct of going to Washington, standing shoulder to shoulder with America was absolutely correct. So the praise that he was getting was completely justified. But it then turned him into something which I think, looking back, he must surely regret. He probably would never admit that. But I saw it happen to him, where the ego needed to continue to be praised by America, and he had to make a calculation. Do I go with the Americans on this Iraq War journey, or do I do what the British people want me to do, which is to not go on that war? 1.7 million people marched through London, many of them carrying placards, which I had produced as editor of the Daily Mirror, which was the labor-supporting newspaper, and he was a labor prime minister. And these placards said, no war. And you’ll see, if you go back and look at the footage, you’ll see thousands of people clutching Daily Mirror placards. He and I had a real split over this. And when I looked back, it was exactly the way that you just described that process, where initially correct, and then sucked in through ego, or perhaps a bit of narcissism, into a place he would never have instinctively wanted to be. Right, well, okay, so let’s talk about this politically and theologically for a minute. So I was in the UK in London when Queen Elizabeth passed away, and it was quite remarkable to see the response. It was quite something to see the Brits put on this amazing show, which happened very rapidly, which is extremely well organized, and very, very, very well done, very beautiful, and which I believe attracted more viewers on TV than any event in human history, which is really saying something. And I really like the monarchical system because I think the Queen serves a confessional role for politicians. She’d reigned over 13 different prime ministers, and you could imagine that it would be very useful for someone who’s in a position like Tony Blair or any other prime minister to have to go face this woman who’s seen everyone from Churchill to the president, or to the present prime minister, Liz Stoss, and to feel themselves, in some sense, less dominant and less powerfully positioned than at least someone in the room, and to have to do that on a regular basis. And that strikes me as a replication in the secular realm of what confession and the search for redemption and atonement was when it was practiced religiously. Let me tell you a story. So back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamian emperor was required to undertake a ritual at New Year’s. And I believe that a fair bit of our New Year’s ritual mythology, you know, the death of the old year, the old man and the rebirth of the baby, there are echoes of this Mesopotamian structure. The idea that the old year is coming to an end and the new year is going to be rekindled with all the possibilities that go along with it, and the fact that people make resolutions, which are some sense confessional. I did these things wrong, and here’s how I could improve in the future when there’s a new year. The Mesopotamian emperor would be taken outside the walls of the central Mesopotamian city. So out into no man’s land, right, outside the safety of the community. And then he would be required to strip himself of all his tingly garb and kneel, and then a priest would slap him. And then he would be re-forced to recount all the ways that year he wasn’t a good Marduk. Marduk was the monotheistic deity of the Mesopotamians. And he had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words. And so Marduk was a god of careful attention and proper speech. And so the Mesopotamian emperor had to reflect on how he hadn’t upheld the proper principles of sovereignty as a consequence of being humiliated before, what would you say, a transcendent power that was greater than his. And when I said earlier that you have to remember that it’s not you, but the principles for which you stand, that is something like the proper ordering. And so it would have been reasonable for Prime Minister Blair to be very pleased with the fact that the UK was standing in solidarity with the United States, but not pleased, not appropriate for him to be pleased that Tony Blair was on the side of the Americans, because it’s actually not about Tony Blair. And so, and getting that confused, and then you’ve got to have sympathy for people too, because it’s not surprising that people would get that confused. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed about celebrities, and it’s a big danger, imagine you become famous, and as a consequence of that, now you have a persona, and that’s you defined by the social crowd. And there’s a certain brand significance that goes along with that, a reputational significance and a value, even an economic value. But the problem is, is it can become a trap, because if you can only be what you’ve already been, then you can’t be anything new. And that’s where people fall into this trap that you described of something like self mimicry. This worked for me before, look at the effect it produced, I just will do that again, but then you’re instantly false. You’re instantly false when you do that. It’s like you’re sacrificing your future self for whatever your past self once attained. And then you lose that spark that actually is likely the driving force of whatever made you attractive to begin with. Yeah, I completely agree. And I always say to my sons, really my basic rule of life is try never to go back full stop with anything. It’s never the same, there’s always a reason that you’ve moved on from whatever it is. And to try and replicate previous behaviors, to try and replicate previous relationships, to try and replicate perhaps a job that you once loved and lost, to try and go back, I think, you often forget why you left in the first place or why things didn’t work out. You read it and see it all the time. You tend to, memory tends to sugar coat things. And it’s only when you actually, if you do allow yourself to fall back into these previous habits or behaviors or whatever it may be, that you then realize it wasn’t what you thought. And the mind, I think, plays tricks with you a little bit. So I think that, I do think particularly with politicians, particularly with sportsmen, entertainers, that you’re right about the brand thing, is they can very quickly get pigeonholed as to this or that or this. And then they start to play up to the thing which they were originally identified as being. And maybe it was what they’re actually like, or maybe it wasn’t, but either way, it becomes a very difficult thing to then escape from. You become tagged with that. I know pop stars who are still seen as the nicest people in showbiz. I know them to be utterly horrific. Conversely, I know people I’ve met in business or politics who have terrible reputations, but actually are very nice people. So it’s an interesting thing that public branding of people can be instantaneous and very long-lasting and often completely wrong. But the danger for any public figure is to try and play up to your caricature. Now I think the one saving grace you can have is self-awareness. To me, there are two types of public figures. Those who’ve got self-awareness and those who don’t. I think that I have a big persona, perhaps slightly caricature persona sometimes. I like to deliberately antagonize and create debate and so on. But I always do it with a sense of self-awareness. And the times I described to you earlier, where I’ve slightly lost the plot and become a performative theatrical artist, if you like, rather than a proper journalist, of when I’ve forgotten the self-awareness streak, when I’ve been driven by adulation and praise, usually, into thinking that somehow, right, this is the new me and this is great and I’m going to be this person, rather than just being honest with yourself about who you are. I think I’m pretty aware of who I am, warts and all. And some of the traits which other people say is being a me disagreeable, I’m very relaxed about. In fact, I’m less relaxed about some of the more positive traits. People say, oh, you’re such a nice person. Sounds almost brand damaging to me. I don’t want to be just nice. I can’t think of anything worse than being nice. I’d rather be challenging. I’d rather be… Right, right, right, it’s a shallow version. Yeah, why would you aspire to just be nice? It seems to me that people who are inherently known as nice people, A, they rarely live up to that brand, in my experience, in terms of high profile people I know. And it must be an unbearable pressure to constantly wake up every day and think, I have to be nice all day. When in fact, your natural and more honest instinct may be to be disagreeable from time to time because that’s what you’re actually feeling. And often you’d be right, by the way, to be feeling disagreeable about something. So I do think that, I mean, I think, I was struck by something you told me when I interviewed you, that you felt as you’ve got older, you’ve evolved and you’ve learned things about yourself. And I feel exactly the same way. I’m not the same person I was. I think I still have the same sense of virtues, which perhaps were instilled in me when I was a child by my family, had a very strong family, a very strong upbringing. But I do think I’ve evolved as a person. And I do think if you don’t evolve as a person, I’m not sure what you’re doing here. It’s, you know, the world’s a tough, difficult, complex place. And you should evolve emotionally as you get older and hopefully in the right direction. I think you turn into an actor. So I spent a lot of time, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing pop culture. And I focused a lot, as many of the people who are watching and listening to this will know, on analyzing the great Disney animated classics, which were extraordinarily influential, popular productions. And one of the movies that has struck me most particularly, although I don’t think it’s the greatest of the Disney movies is Pinocchio. And there are a number of, so Pinocchio is a puppet. So someone is pulling his strings, right? There’s forces behind the scenes that are making him who he is. And he’s unconscious, he doesn’t know it. But he has a good father, who is a very positive figure, who sends him out in the world to free himself of the behind the strings, marionette players. And he faces a number of temptations. And there’s four cardinal temptations, which I think are extremely well laid out. One is hedonism, narrow and shallow hedonism. And that’s played out in the scenes of Pleasure Island. And the consequences of becoming a narrow hedonist is that you end up as a voiceless slave. That’s how that you end up turned into a donkey that can do nothing, bray, sold as slaves to work in the salt mines. So that’s the fruits of hedonism. Another scene that perplexed me for a long time was that Pinocchio is enticed into being an actor. And I thought, what in the world does that mean? Because the people who made this movie were obviously Hollywood types and what’s so wrong with being an actor? But the answer is to be found in the discussion that we were just having. If you’re playing a role and you’re doing it as a fictional character, and you’re playing a role in a movie, let’s say, and everyone knows that what you’re doing is fictional, that’s one thing. But if you’re an actor who’s attempting to play a role for your own egotistical gratification, then that’s a catastrophe. And what happens in the Pinocchio movie is that he is enticed into going on stage as a puppet. And he does a wild dance and tangles himself up in his own strings and ends up facedown in front of the crowd and then also enslaved. One of the other temptations, just interestingly enough, because it’s germane to our current culture, is that the fox and the cat, who are agents of Mephistopheles, essentially, also entice Pinocchio into playing the sick victim. And so that’s actually how they entice him originally to go to Pleasure Island to become hedonistic. They tell him that he’s sick and unable and has been victimized and needs a break. And as a consequence of his poor victimized position, it’s perfectly okay for him to be narrowly and self-servingly hedonistic. And so it’s a lovely narrative layout of the sort of plethora of moral problems that beset people as they try to transform themselves, let’s say, into real boys, because of course, that’s what the movie’s about. And it’s very interesting to sketch out the nature of those temptations, this acting temptation. You see celebrities become their own mimics. Like Elvis, in some sense, became an Elvis imitator by the time that he ended, he came to near the end of his life. I mean, he could still put on a wicked performance, but you could see that immense pressure, the category pressure building around him. And you can imagine how intense that is, especially perhaps at the time he lived, because he was a singular celebrity. There’s lots of celebrities now, but there were much fewer back then. And the pressure to abide by the way you’ve been defined must be almost overwhelming. And it isn’t obvious that we really know how to rectify that. I think the confession idea is a good one, is that you need to keep your inadequacies foremost in your mind, and you need to serve some principles that are higher than yourself. But that’s easy to say in the abstract. It’s not so easy to actually do it when you’re the one being tempted. You also rightly said you have to have people around you perhaps are disagreeable enough to be completely bluntly honest with you. Whether it’s my mother, or one of my brothers, or my sister, or my sons in particular, I’ve encouraged them to be very independent minded and to let me know if they see or hear something I do which they think is wrong and explain why. And they do that regularly. And I find that litmus test from people who really know you better than anybody else. So they really understand when you’re making a fool of yourself, or just behaving like a bit of a dick, right? You just see someone who’s gonna tell you. And one of the big problems with modern celebrity is, because I’ve interviewed a lot of very famous people, is that they often surround themselves with pure sycophancy, and they don’t tolerate anyone drifting outside of sycophancy. All the teams around them are so fearful of losing their very cushy jobs that they render themselves as useless sycophants permanently to avoid upsetting. So they may almost be almost wrongly second guessing the people they work for who might be perfectly okay people because they think if they’re not sycophantic, they’re gonna lose their job. So there’s constant kind of pressure to blow smoke up the derrières of these people, which doesn’t help the stars themselves. It certainly doesn’t help the people who work for them who are behaving in such a ridiculous manner. And the celebrities I know who I think really thrive over a long period of time, they always tend to have people in their entourage who are straight talkers, who literally will say to them in front of people, stop behaving like a dick, literally. And you need those people because if you don’t have those people in your entourage of whoever it may be, a manager, an agent, I had a fantastic manager who sadly died of pancreatitis three years ago. And he’s one of my closest friends, and he transformed my career. He was the one that put me on Celebrity Apprentice, which I won, and that led to joining CNN and replacing Larry King, and then The Morning Show. He did all these things for me. And we were very, very close. And he died literally four days after getting ill with pancreatitis. It was horrific. But he was the one really who would call me sometimes, having watched me on The Morning Show, watched me in LA at 11 at night, and he’d see or hear me do something, which he felt he had to say something about it. He shouldn’t have said that. That’s not you. That’s not what you believe. I know it isn’t. And the way you phrased that, the way you went after someone, he hated if they ever felt like I was punching down, not up. He thought I was at my best when I was basically producing Robin Hood TV, where I would be the Robin Hood figure looking after the downtrodden against the sheriffs of Nottingham, be they from energy companies or political parties or corrupt tycoons, whatever it may be. He said, you’re at your absolute best when you’re Robin Hood. When you start to behave like the sheriffs of Nottingham, you’re A, it’s not you. It’s not what’s in your heart. I know you. And B, it’s performative bullshit, which you shouldn’t be drifting into. And it doesn’t work on any level. Now, I really miss that in my life, that guy, having those kinds of conversations. Because A, I have to respect the person to want to listen to it. So when you lose someone like that in your life, it’s really difficult because I had such huge personal respect for him. And we’ve been through an awful lot together. He nearly died 10 years before. He’d been in Cedar Sinai Hospital for three months with a staph infection. He’d been in a coma. He wasn’t expected to survive. He’d had the last rites and so on. And when he came out, he got fired when his company merged. And I was the only one of 50 clients who went with him. So he went from being one of the biggest power agents in Hollywood to one client, me. And then we rebuilt things very successfully. So we had a real bond professionally and personally. But I think everybody needs someone like that who knows you and knows when you’re not being yourself. Well, that’s a beneficial adversary. That’s the translation, by the way, for the word that God uses to describe Eve in the Garden of Eden. Help me means, in the original Hebrew, it means beneficial adversary. And it’s someone to have around. This is what a marriage can do for you too, if you’re fortunate, because you have someone there who can help you calibrate your aim as a consequence of continued disagreement in some real sense, because there isn’t much difference between disagreement and thinking. This brings us to two things, I would say. So there’s an immense push in our society right now to insist that identity be entirely subjectively defined, which means that as God said to Moses, I am that I am. And that’s a very difficult, that’s a very dangerous thing for people to take upon themselves to say, I am to be treated only the way that I define. And we just spent a fair bit of time outlining why that’s so wrong, because what keeps you sane, this friend of yours, this agent you had, he was part of what kept you sane. So you’re moving up the status hierarchy. And it might not even be obvious to you while you’re moving up, when you’re punching up and when you’re punching down, because your relative position is actually changing. So I’ve run into this problem. I criticized a swimsuit model on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and an actress actor who had undergone a sex change publicly on Twitter. And I got kicked off of Twitter for the latter criticism. And one of the criticisms I faced was that I was punching down. And it didn’t really occur to me when I was making those comments that I was punching down, because the actor or actress that I criticized was quite famous in, now I’m having pronoun trouble, in his, her own right. And I was also irritated that the fashion spread that was conducted after the sex change operation got 1.5 million Instagram likes, which didn’t strike me as all that socially useful. But it’s not easy to figure out when your own position is shifting, when you’re going after someone, let’s say, at your level of influence or higher. And when you’ve even accidentally entered into the fray that you shouldn’t be entering into, and brought too much force to bear on the person, but also, what would you say, undermined your own authority by doing so. And so having these disagreeable people around who say, you know, you’re not being who you are, and you’re not who you think you are, and you’re not aiming properly, that’s actually how you stabilize your identity. And so identity is actually socially negotiated. If you’re healthy, identity is socially negotiated all the time. And in that has to be a fair good leave enough criticism, because it stops you from getting above yourself if you’re fortunate. And so you have to listen to how other people define you. But then you run into the adulation problem, perhaps. And then if you listen too much to how other people define you, well, that’s its own egotistical trap. So, but having people around, I’m fortunate, A, because my wife is very sensible, and she’s an astute, beneficial adversary. And my kids are like that too. And I have a lot of very good friends who are, what would you say, they’re forces in their own right. And they’re perfectly willing to tell me when they think that I haven’t conducted myself according to the standards that I would like to abide by. And it’s unbelievably useful while navigating a complicated situation. And it is in some sense, the definition of sanity, right? Is to have enough feedback around you that’s balanced so that you move forward on the right path. That is not subjectively defined identity. That’s one of the things that’s so pathological about that insistence. Because that just swallows you up in the ultimate egotistical solipsism. If you can be whatever you say you are from moment to moment, and no one has any right to object, how do you think you’re gonna turn out? You’re gonna inflate like mad until you burst. That’s definitely the case. Speaking of disagreeable people, you worked on America’s Got Talent with Simon Cowell. And I really like Simon Cowell for what it’s worth. I mean, he’s got this tremendous capacity to give credit where credit is due, which he does very well. And as far as I can tell, 100% genuinely, I think, and I’d sure like your comments on this, that the America’s Got Talent, the Got Talent platforms have brought a tremendous amount of ability to light. And it’s really quite remarkable to see him flip from this disagreeable critic who puts up with pretty much zero nonsense to someone who’s completely floored when someone comes out and is genuine and truly talented. I really like the shows, the Got Talent shows. I watch them quite a lot. They often bring me to tears, which turns out not to be such a difficult thing, but it’s quite something to see people suddenly reveal something about themselves that’s so utterly stellar. And I really like watching Simon impose his discriminating judgment, especially in a world that thinks that all discrimination and judgment is pathological. And one of the consequences of that is that he can bring all this talent to light, this true talent. Did you enjoy working with Got Talent shows? And why did you do that? And tell me about the judge process. I’d like to know more about the whole background enterprise. Yeah, so I’d known Simon a long time from when I was the show business editor of the Sun newspaper, doing all the pop culture stuff. And Simon was trying to basically be a record company, A&R man, flogging records and trying to get a paper to write about him. So I got to know him, liked him very much. He was a great force of personality. He wasn’t on television then. No one knew who he was outside the music business. Then he becomes the biggest TV star on the planet with American Idol. I mean, like stratospheric fame, which happened, interestingly, not in the first series or season, but the second season, it suddenly exploded. And so when he took me out for lunch after I lost my job editing the Daily Mirror, and it had all been a big controversy here. We’d published some photographs of British troops purportedly abusing Iraqi civilians illegally, which had just followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in America where their troops had been doing the same thing. The government and the regiment said these were fake photographs. I was fired. I’m still not sure exactly what those photographs were, but that was the end of my career as a newspaper editor after 10 years. And Simon took me for lunch, very near where I’m talking to you actually, in Kensington and West London. Went for a nice meal and he pulled out a napkin and put it on the table. And he said, you know what’s really missing in world television? He said, the old Gong show in America and Opportunity Knocks, and a show, a very similar show in the UK called Opportunity Knocks and then New Faces. And they were basically, he said, any talent, not just singers, but any talent. And he said, my idea is we’d have three judges. You’d have a tough meanie who keeps everything honest. You’d have a slightly crazy person. He said, like, Paul Abdel was an idol, with a big heart but slightly crazy. And you’d have someone, probably a comedian, who would make people laugh. And you’d have the perfect judging panel. So then we did a pilot for this show. It’s quite an interesting genesis of the story. The Britain’s Got Talent was originally going to be called Paul O’Grady’s Got Talent, who’s a British entertainer. But he had a huge falling out with the network and left. And then Simon said, well, unfortunately, we’re not going to do it. So it was all shelved in the UK, where he was intending to launch it. Six weeks later, I’m thinking my brand new primetime TV career is over before it even started. And I get a text from Simon saying, Beers, I’ve just sold the rights to Got Talent to NBC in America. They want to repackage it as America’s Got Talent, which I immediately thought was a brilliant idea, to sort of wrap the flag and the country and patriotism around this show. And he said, I can’t be on it as a judge because I’m on American Idol. So I need to find somebody as arrogant and as obnoxious as me and judgmental. And your name has immediately sprung to mind. So long story short, he flew me straight out to Los Angeles. I met with some NBC executives, managed to bullsh- my way through quite a long meeting with them. And three weeks later, I’m on the Paramount movie lot in Hollywood. I’ve got my own trailer next to David Hasselhoff and Regis Philbin. And I’m the judge of America’s Got Talent. And I’m the new Simon Cowell, which was not a place I ever thought I’d find myself. But it was really interesting. And Simon came to, I remember, never forgot this. On day one, he pulled up in his brand new Ferrari outside my trailer. And he came in and he said, right. And I was like, this is fantastic, Simon. I can’t believe this. I’m living the dream. And he said, look, here’s the deal with our kind of shtick. You have to be right 80% of the time. And if you are, and the viewers agree with you, 80% of the time, you can be as mean as you like, right? He said, you can be a straight, blunt, honest, mean, whatever you want to call it. You can be whatever you want to be. You just have to be right 80% of the time. Because if you’re mean or tough or ruthless and you’re wrong a lot of the time, the act doesn’t work. And it was an act in a way. In a way, talent shows are theater, obviously. You’ve got people performing on stage and whatever. But I always tried to be, and I think this is a key thing, I think about public life generally. I always tried to be authentic. And I think Simon’s always authentic. He might be guided by a producer. Hey, this is a really good act, but he doesn’t feel it. And he’ll say, I don’t like it. So he was always authentic. And I picked that up. And I always tried to be very authentic whilst being pretty blunt, pretty British, pretty full on. But I was always mindful of, just call it exactly as you’re actually feeling it. Really, just be honest with yourself, ever mind the audience. And if you are, normally you’re going to be right because it’s what they’re all feeling at home. Then you have to have that ability to gauge what an audience might be thinking. But ultimately be authentic. And if you ask me what is the number one tool of really successful people, it’s authenticity. They are true to themselves. The most successful people I’ve encountered ultimately are authentic. They don’t get drifted or pulled into places where it’s not them, where they’re playing an act. You do get some that come through who I think are completely fake and wing it and get away with it. But broadly speaking, and the same applied to other talent shows. So you could have all these acts. A lot of them are faking it. A lot of them are trying to be somebody. They were trying to be Beyonce. They were trying to be Madonna. They were trying to be a dance trupe, whatever it may be. They were trying to be somebody else. The most successful acts that I ever saw on the British show and the American one were the ones which were truly authentic. And I’ll give an example. A guy on the second season of America’s Got Talent. It’s actually quite a funny story behind this because Simon Cowell owned the rights to the show and he had the rights automatically to manage any of the winners of the show. And I think even the top 10 finalists. That was built into his contract. So the second season, first season number one summer show in America. So my life has changed dramatically. Second season, there are two standout early candidates for potential winners. One is a white reggae star who was fantastic and a beautiful singing voice. And Simon literally was radiating the word ka-ching every time he heard him perform because he thought this guy is a money-making machine right in front of me. He looks the part, he sounds the part. Amazing singer, carries himself great. But I was more drawn to the complete opposite, which was a guy called Terry Fater. And Terry Fater was a slightly overweight, permanently sweating, ill-fitting suited guy who had gone up and down America for 20 years in his van, earning 500 bucks a week at most, doing a ventriloquist act. And he’d had an extraordinary turn of fortune shortly before he applied to be on America’s Got Talent. Where his act used to be that he would sing impressions himself. So he would sing Roy Orbison crying, for example. And then he would talk through puppets, a turtle, and so on. And he went to do one gig and two people turned up. There’s a real lesson here for everyone. Two people turned up, but he still gave them the best act he could. And one of them turned out to be a talent agent. He said to him, have you ever tried doing the singing impressions through the puppets? Simple thing. It changed this guy’s life. So Terry Fater went away and found he could actually throw his voice through the puppets as a singer better than he could do it from his own mouth. And at that point, his whole act changed. So he then applies to America’s Got Talent, comes on stage. And I immediately find him very endearing as a personality. And I love his backstory. He’s the ultimate kind of, this guy’s been going 20 years wanting the break. This is the moment maybe. And as he progresses through the competition, and I keep supporting him, Simon’s on my case. Stop being so supportive. He’s going to win. I can’t make any money out of a ventriloquist. Go with the other guy. Go with the reggae singer. I was like, Simon, this guy’s what this show’s about, this ventriloquist. Anyway, he ends up winning, mainly because I’m so effusive in my support. And by then the American viewing public had viewed my opinion rather like the cowl on American Idol as the one that was most significant as far as they were concerned. So he wins. And Simon in a fit of pique says, I can’t make any money out of him. So I’m not going to manage it. So the guy is left without a management. So he disappears. And a guy who used to work on the Rolling Stones management team and was now working on his own heard about this guy, had a chat with him and took him on, decided to manage him and just try his luck. And a few months later, literally three months later, Danny Gantz, all-round family entertainer in Las Vegas, one of the biggest stars on the strip, drops dead. That’s it. And the casino where he operated had to fill a massive gap in their schedule. They didn’t have an all-round family entertainer. The Rolling Stones management guy who’d picked up Terry Fater, recommends Terry Fater. Terry Fater does a three month trial. He sells out every show because grandmothers love him, mothers love him, kids love him, dads love him. Everyone loves Terry Fater. He’s now got 50 puppets. He’s singing all these amazing songs through these crazy puppets. And on the back of the three month trial, he signs a five year, $100millioncontracttobethebiggeststarontheLasVegasstrip,whichifSimonCowellhadkeptthemanagementrights,wouldhaveearnedhim$20 million. So if you want to really piss off Simon Cowell, just say, hey Simon, how much money did you make out of that ventriloquist? So that story in many ways, it has a lot of useful things to go with, I think. One is the old, don’t judge a book by its cover. If you took them purely on aesthetics, you go with the white reggae star every day. But there was something about this guy’s personality and the uniqueness of his act. And the fact that he’d taken advice from someone who was one of only two people in an audience. So never give up, always give everything everything, because you never know who’s watching. I say this to my actor son, if there’s not a big audience in one night, you don’t know if in those 20 people, there’s a guy that’s going to change your life. Absolutely. So I think, you know, all these lessons from the Terry Fater story, he’s still on the Vegas strip now. You go to, I think it’s the Mirage or whatever he is. He has his own theater named after him. He signed another $100millioncontract.H{e}^{\prime }sthemostsuccessfulbreakoutstarinthehistoryofanytalentshowever.Andtha{t}^{\prime }shisbackstory.Anditwastome,thatwaswhattheshowwasallabout.RatherlikeSusanBoyle,youmayremembertheScottishsinger.Yeah,right,IrememberSusan,youbet.Thatwasamazing.Well,sheneversangoutsideofhervillageandwas47yearoldspinster,wh{o}^{\prime }dbeenstarvedofoxygenatbirthandhadslightissuesbecauseofthat.Andyetshecameonstage.I^{\prime }llneverforgetthisagain,neverjudgebooksbytheircovers.ShecameonstageinGlasgow.Icanrememberitlikeitwasyesterday.And{I}^{\prime }mwithSimonontheBritishshow.W{e}^{\prime }rebothjudgesontheBritishshowwithanotherjudge.AndSusanBoylecomesoutandw{e}^{\prime }retalkingtoher.Whatareyougoingtodo?I^{\prime }mgoingtosingfromLesMiserables,IDreamaDream.Andweallstartrollingoureyes.Yeah.Andw{e}^{\prime }relike,myGod,yo{u}^{\prime }vegottobekidding.I{t}^{\prime }dbeenalongday.W{e}^{\prime }dseensometerribletalent.Yeah,yeah.Shebegantosingandinthatmoment,themagichappened.Itturnedoutshewasanunbelievablygoodsinger.Shewentontosell30millionalbums.IinterviewedGeorgeClooney.Yeah,IinterviewedGeorgeClooneyforCNN.Andhalfwaythroughhesays,bytheway,ho{w}^{\prime }sSusan?WhichIhavetosayshewasverychuffedabout.Yeah,Ibet.RobinWilliams,IdidtheTonightShowwithRobinWilliamsandmylategreatmanager.AndRobinWilliamsbangsonthedoor.H{e}^{\prime }stheotherguestandhecomesintoourdressingroomanddoesa15minuteact,whichwasbasicallyhalfMrs.Doubtfire,halfSusanBoyle.Oh,cool.SohewasSusanBoyleasMrs.Doubtfire,justforthetwoofusinourdressingroom.Oh,funny.Andsothesetwostoriestome,SusanintheUKoneandTerryFetcherontheAmericanone,theypersonifiedactuallywhattheshowsshouldbeabout,whattheAmericandreamandtheBritishdreamarereallyabout,aboutchasingadreamandnevergivingup,abouthavingatalentandmakingitwork.Alltheselifelessonsreallywereencompassedinthesetwostories.Andtheycouldhavebeenignored.Theymaynothaveenteredandtheirliveswouldhavebeenwhattheywere.TerryFetche{r}^{\prime }smade,Ido{n}^{\prime }tknow,$300 million. And everyone else’s life would have been lesser. Well, Simon and the other judges and the show are very good at separating the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things I think that makes Simon so attractive, especially in our culture, is that his fundamental virtue isn’t being nice. Now he’s, one of the things that makes him heartwarming, weirdly enough for such a rough character is that when someone does well, he’s floored by it. And you can see that constantly. And it’s one of the lovely things about watching the judges period. I mean, the judges have their personality peccadillos and the fact that you have assembled the judge panel to reflect a variety of different personality types is very interesting. And you can see that the judges have had long days and that sometimes they’re a bit more initially critical and suspicious than they might be, but that makes it human. But to see everyone on the panel truly light up when someone knocks it out of the park, that’s so cool. And it’s so, I think it’s such a service to people, not only the people whose talent is being revealed, but to everyone that’s watching. It’s not surprising to me that the show has become so popular. It’s extraordinarily well done. And I think Simon, his ability to like or love talent so much that he’s willing to state forthrightly when it’s not there, which was also the role that you were playing, that’s truly something to be commended. I also think that part of the reason that this show is so popular is because that ethos of extraordinarily penetrating criticism and separating excellence from falsehood or sheer lack of talent, that’s very disagreeable because these people come to the show and they’re hoping sometimes genuinely and sometimes narcissistically that they’re going to have their dreams validated. But if they’re talentless and narcissistic, they’re going to hit a brick wall very hard. It’s not that easy to be that brick wall. Now I knew if I had a friend who taught me something, he’s a very disagreeable person. He took my personality test, huh. And he was like the most disagreeable person in 10,000. So he’s a rough character. He looks like a pirate. I like the sound of him already. Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely. Well, corporations used to hire him to go in and clean up when things had got messy. So he would start at the bottom of the company and he would ferret out people who were taking all the credit when anything went right and then distributing all the blame when anything went wrong and stealing people’s ideas and not doing their job. I talked to him one day, I had to deal with some issues in my lab. I had students who were underperforming and the higher performing students who were doing their job were getting demoralized because of that. And so I had to do something about it. And I really don’t like firing people. I’m not someone who likes conflict at all. I tend to, I don’t like it at all. I don’t like it prolonged and I won’t engage in the long run. So I tend to settle issues right now because I don’t want it to propagate. But I was talking to my friend about firing people. I said, I really can’t stand it. How do you manage it? Because you fired hundreds of people. He said, I really like it. And I thought, oh, well, I’ve never heard anyone say that before. And he said, yeah, I go into these companies and I find these people who are exploiting everyone around them and making life miserable for everyone and trying to gain credit where no credit is due and being narcissistic and manipulative. And I ferret them out and I stop them and it’s just fine. And I thought, good for you. And his career has been very interesting because he has his own independent business and he’s very good at it. He’s an engineer, but he’s moved from corporation to corporation playing this role. And he starts in the lower rungs and then moves up. And then as soon as he moves up high enough to start to, what would you say, threaten the powers that be who also might be behaving in a corrupt manner, they fire him. And then he has to go do that at a different place. But he’s also one of the people I have around who’s been very useful at, let’s say, calling me out when necessary and who will definitely make his opinion known when it’s necessary to make it known. And he does that in search of excellence. And that’s the thing that’s so cool about America’s got Got Talent, Simon said to you that you had to be right 80% of the time. And you said in order to do that, you had to rely on your authentic judgment. And people will forgive judgment and see that it’s necessary if it’s authentic and not self-serving. And I think those shows have really fulfilled the mandate of bringing hidden talent to light, which is a very noble cause, maybe the most noble cause in some ways. You can also have moments in there where people, I can think back to one example. There was a young lady who did a rock violin act where she played electric violin and danced and sang. And it was all pretty crazy, very unusual. I like the unusual part, but I didn’t think she was quite ready yet for fame and fortune. Her name was Lindsay Sterling. And I was pretty mean actually, probably unnecessarily. I said that whilst I found her act interesting, I did think at point she sounded like, I think I said a sack of rats being strangled, right? So it’s pretty full on. That’s a little, yeah. Pretty mean and everyone’s booing. You could have said kittens, a sack of kittens being strangled. Yeah, exactly. The fact it was rats, it made it even worse. So it was all very sort of dramatic and it was quarter final I think. And she left and she was upset. And afterwards I was a little bit like, maybe I went a bit far, blew up on Twitter and so on. But she’s now a really successful act, incredibly successful, touring around. And she now has a tombstone on her stage act with my face on it. So she never forgot the strangled rats line. And it has RIP Piers Morgan. I flash up a couple of times. It gets a huge ovation from the crowd. They all know the backstory. And in a way, sometimes you could see that, that you could be very mean on people. And sometimes in life you could be mean on people who can’t take it. And you might regret it because it has a negative impact on them. When I was a newspaper editor, I could be pretty tough, pretty ruthless sometimes with stuff if I felt they were underperforming. But I learned over time, there are certain types of people who respond well to criticism, even to very tough criticism. And there are certain types of people who just don’t. And you got to work them out because actually they can all be talented. There’s just some people can take it and some people can’t. Some people thrive and fuel off it. I just played a pro-am golf tournament called the Alfred Dunhill Links up in Scotland. It’s probably the after, along with Pebble Beach in America, the most prestigious pro-am. You’re playing with professionals in a four million pound tournament. And for the first two days, I played the most shocking golf probably seen in the history of the tournament. Haven’t played much in the last few months. Been working too hard. It was all a nightmare. And on the last day, I played with a Belgian professional called Thomas Peters. And he said, Piers, how do you want to play it today? How do you want to get on? Just sledge me, which is criticize me harshly. Every time I play a bad shot, I want mockery. I want taunting. I want laughter. I want you to be all over me like a cheap scent. So he did. He reveled in his role. And I played the best round of my week because actually what I needed was somebody to do that rather than somebody politely going. So when I myself worked for an editor, he was a pretty infamous newspaper editor called Kelvin McKenzie at the Sun. And he said the most annoying trait about me was he could give me a monstering as he called it, where he would scream abuse until his neck bulging. And an hour later, I’d bounce back into his office with a hot story and a smile on my face. And he found that completely annoying because it was not what he wanted to do. He wanted to trample me down for a few days. But he then said he knew then I would have what it took to be a newspaper editor. And I do feel in society, we have moved so far away from that kind of atmosphere now in workplaces. But I do wonder, what about people like me who genuinely thrive and get fueled by harsh criticism? Is that happening anymore? Are there any workplaces left in the world where anyone is allowed to be exposed to tough critiques? Have all talent shows now gone way too soft? Do you ever see a really harsh strangled rats critique, which might fuel the contestant to then go and be a huge star to prove you wrong? In other words, I really feel this that with my old talent show hat on, things have moved so fast and have gone so much softer. And in my view, so much weaker. And that’s not because I don’t think some people can’t take it, because some people can’t take it. So you’ve got to be mindful of them. But what about the vast swathes of people who actually revel in that kind of atmosphere? Who revel in noise and aggression and passion and criticism. It fuels them, inflames them, makes them better people, makes them better at work, makes them better perhaps in their lives. I don’t know the answer, but I think the pendulum has swung way too far. And we’re now becoming such a saccharine, uninspiring, unpassionate collective workplace in particular, where the slightest joke told out of turn leads to you being frog-matched to human resources. I just feel like it’s gone way the wrong way. And the talent shows actually have moved with that. But everyone on a talent show now is great, even when they’re terrible. I scream at them, I catch them occasionally. My daughter loves watching Britain’s Got Talent, she’s 10. And she said, Dada, they’re terrible. Why are the judges all saying that? Well, great. I went because they feel they have to. And it’s like, because if they don’t, someone’s gonna say, well, you’re damaging my mental health. Well, fine, I can respect mental illness. But come on, you’re going on a talent show in front of millions of people, and you want me to respect your mental health by not criticizing you? If you’re not talented and you go out on the public stage, eventually that’s gonna catch up with you and devastate you. And so it’s better to have an early warning. Well, speaking of disagreeable people, let’s talk about Donald Trump. Now, you’ve known Trump for a very long time, and you worked with him. Now, did you meet him for Celebrity Apprentice? Is that, and what was that like? And tell me about Mr. Trump, and let me ask you some questions, if you would. So you have a very lengthy experience with him. So I met him first on America’s Got Talent. He appeared as a guest star, I think introducing one of the shows. And I met him briefly backstage, and he was intrigued by me because he knew that Rupert Murdoch, who was somebody he greatly admired, had made me the youngest newspaper editor for 50 years. So he knew about that part of my background, and that was all he was interested in, really. He was like, oh, so you’re one of Rupert’s guys, right? So that’s how we had a sort of immediate early connection. Then I entered Celebrity Apprentice, which he was obviously the host of. And it was a pretty fascinating experience, looking back, because night after night, I ended up winning the show, pretty much by behaving how I thought Trump would want me to behave. So I read the art of the deal, his book, about four times before I went out there, and just played it tough and hard to win, which I knew would be all traits he would find impossible to say were not good things. To the degree, actually, that when I won, his last words were, Piers, you’re arrogant, you’re obnoxious, you’re possibly evil, but you beat the hell out of everybody, you’re my Celebrity Apprentice. When he won the presidency, I sent him the same note. Dear Donald, you’re arrogant, you’re obnoxious, you’re possibly evil, but you beat the hell out of everybody, and you’re the President of the United States. So we had that little thing going. But on Celebrity Apprentice, what I remember most vividly was that he was a very different character in those boardrooms for three hours a night than I ever saw when he was president. When he was president, he was the ultimate alpha male, I believe, playing a role. I believe we didn’t see the real Donald Trump. We saw the disagreeable side of him most of the time. The bully boy, the braggart, the alpha guy who would never apologize for anything because it’s too weak. He was abusive, he was disrespectful, and so on. In the boardroom for hour after hour, he could be very heartfelt, he could be very moved by people, he could be very funny, he could be very warm. I remember all those things. I think, what happened to that guy? Why don’t you show the world any of that stuff? Because if you did, it would be incredibly disarming. So I won the show. I then went back into Celebrity Apprentice each year as one of his boardroom advisors for a few years. Then I joined CNN, interviewed him 30, 40 times at CNN. Then he becomes the President of the United States. And suddenly I’ve got this guy that I’ve become pretty friendly with who used to ring me every three or four weeks for a chat about life. And now he’s the most powerful man in the world. From a loyalty perspective, which I think is a trait overlooked with Trump, when he became President, I rang him, and I said to him, actually first I would say when I left CNN, he was one of only three or four people in America who bothered to contact me afterwards. And he contacted me every month for a few months. How are you doing? Are you okay? Can I help you? People might say he had a vested interest in case you popped back with a big job. Well, maybe, but so did lots of people. And he was one of only a handful of people that bothered to actually contact me regularly to check I was okay and could he help. I never forgot that. Similarly, when he won the presidency, I rang him and we had a chat about a week later. And I said, I just have one favor. Of course, Champ, he used to always call me Champ because I won his show. Of course, Champ. What is it? I said, I just want to have your first international television interview. I know you got to do a domestic one in America, but first international, done, done. And a few months later, I was at Davos in Switzerland, a 45-minute wide-ranging interview with the President of the United States, which was spectacularly good for my career. And he kept his word. So, Trump, if you were loyal to him, was very, very, very loyal back. I’ve fallen out with him recently because I just can’t buy into all this storm election nonsense. And I’ve told him to his face. And he just want to hear it. Well, I think part of the reason, I’m going to lay out some theories and you tell me if I’m wrong, okay? I think part of what happened to Trump was that that tough part of him played well, especially to working class people. And I think that there was an element of that that was very genuine, especially contrasted with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, what would you call it, patronizing attitude towards working class people. And Trump could speak to people directly and he had that bluntness that disarmed them in some sense and made them believe that he was, at least in many ways, dealing an honest hand. Now, he suffered a tremendous amount of assault through vitriol when he was running for president and when he was president, probably more than any president that I can remember, including Richard Nixon, who I think might have run second for having most abuse dumped on him. Whether or not that’s deserved is independent. I think in Trump’s case, it was over the top in quite a remarkable way. And so I think that that probably elicited more of that bullying behavior that might be perhaps a weakness. I’ve been trying to understand him and the bullying, the last interview you did with him, I believe, one of the things I noted about Trump was that he would do something about every 10 minutes that was markedly out of the ordinary conversationally. And so I watch for that because I’m a clinician. And so I always watch people talk to see when they’re going off script, let’s say, because there’s always something underneath that. And one of the things Trump does, and I don’t know how much of this is conscious and how much of it is reactive and how much of it has become habitual, is he’ll say utterly proper, he’ll say, he’ll make statements that are way over the top. So I think he said, for example, when you were interviewing something like, I tell the truth more than anyone ever has in history. Or he, and then he said about 10 minutes later, something like, I’ve run the best administration in American history. And they’re over the top preposterous statements and they have this self-aggrandizing element that’s got a juvenile flavor to it. I’m not doing a global critique of Trump’s personality because I suspect, as you’ve already indicated, that he’s a multifaceted person. But there’s an element of him that’s, he’s got this 10-year-old bully part of him that also has a compensatory element. And so to say, I tell the truth more than anyone has in history or something along those lines, I think, well, who are you comparing yourself here to exactly? You tell the truth more than Jesus Christ. You run a better administration than Abraham Lincoln or George Washington. And it’s marked because people don’t generally do that in conversation, right? They don’t come out with a preposterous statement about how remarkable they are with some degree of regularity. And now it seems to me to be associated with some other tendencies that he has. Like he has a tendency to nickname people and he has unerring accuracy in doing that and it can be devastating. And that also reminds me of someone who’s like a very professional 11-year-old bully. And a few of them can bring a teacher to their knees if their attacks are targeted and they can certainly do that with their classmates. And so I wonder with Trump, if he’s being, so he’s pushed into a corner because of all the vitriol, the bullying and braggadocio tendency has become exaggerated. Maybe he’s more surrounded by sycophants now than might be helpful. Now I don’t know that for sure, but it looks to me like something like that is happening. And he’s trying to calibrate himself, even during your interview, because he comes out with these statements, something like, well, look at how wonderful I am. And I think, well, maybe if he would have got credit for some of the things that he did that were actually pretty positive, like not having America dragged into a war and like also fostering the Abraham Accords, that he wouldn’t be so inclined to be compensatory in that manner. And then that bullying tendency seems to me, the inverse of that is this victimization routine, which he’s wandered into. Now, Trump claims the elections were stolen by corruption. And I would say part of the reason people find that credible is because the American left-wing establishment and the liberal establishment for that matter, were unbelievably vitriolic to Trump and stooped pretty much to anything in order to devalue and criticize him, no matter how unfair and how over the top. And that generated a fair bit of sympathy on people’s part. And I think it generated a sense that he was in some global sense treated unfairly. But I can’t see that there’s any legal evidence that’s been compelling that he’s been able to bring forth that the elections were legally conducted in an improper and corrupt manner. And so then what I see happening with Trump is that he’s fallen prey to the very victimization narrative that he purports to stand against. And so he’s gone off brand. It’s like, well, Mr. Trump, you’re the winner. You’re the guy who doesn’t have things stolen from him by callow fools. You’re the leader of the free country. You can stand up to the dictator of North Korea and to Vladimir Putin himself. You’re a winner and that’s your brand. And yet the election was stolen from you. And now your story is it was stolen and everything’s corrupt and all the institutions are corrupt, which is exactly what the left-wing radicals are saying. And there’s very little positive messaging tied up in that. And it’s hamstringing the Republicans. And so, well, that’s how it looks to me. And so I’m wondering, you know Trump very well. Am I not giving the devil his due in this situation? Am I off in my analysis in some important way? No, I think you’re spot on. And I think some interesting points you raised there. And I’ve always thought Trump is a unique character in that he has the thickest skin of anybody I’ve ever seen in public life and also the thinnest skin. So he’ll react with ridiculous oversensitivity to every slight and come out punching, but he’s able to withstand the kind of pressure or scandal that would engulf and destroy every other politician I’ve ever encountered. So he’s a unique hybrid of thick and thick skin. I think that his book is very educational, The Art of the Deal. It’s a really entertaining read and actually has a lot of good business stuff in it. So I recommend people who just want to read it. It’s quite fun. Remember he’s a real estate tycoon in Manhattan. His whole persona for 50 years before he became president was to show off, embellish and exaggerate everything. Every one of his buildings, you can imagine the pitch, this is gonna be the greatest building New York’s ever seen. That was in his DNA. So it’s perfectly normal for me that he would take those kind of natural traits to the presidency and continue to be self-aggrandizing in the way he was about his buildings. He’d done it for 50 years. That’s how he squeezed big prices for his buildings. Everything was the best and the greatest ever seen. Well, that’s part of that American salesman routine. I mean, that’s deeply embedded in the American DNA. Right, he’s not the only New York real estate tycoon who’s like that. Trust me, I’ve met a few. But I also think that he also in the book says if somebody punches you, punch them 10 times harder. That was in his DNA too. Trump has come from a ruffle school of New York business people, where the ones who survive and thrive are the ones if they get hit, metaphorically or perhaps even physically, they hit back 10 times and harder. That’s always been Trump’s way. So if you insult him, he’ll come for you hard, hard. And if you can survive that, well, good. But many people, including all the candidates in 2016 on the Republican side, they couldn’t withstand the nicknames. I mean, the nickname thing was fascinating. To watch him call Marco Rubio, little Marco, and you suddenly thought, wow, he is quite little, isn’t he? Low energy Jeb, Jeb Bush. But Bush couldn’t work out whether to be, to carry on being himself and potentially radiate low energy or what he ended up doing, which was being sort of like a hyper bunny going way too far the other way to contradict the rumors of being low energy. And he looked completely insane. So Trump was able, and lying Ted, about Ted Cruz, crooked Hillary, simple tanks they found very hard to shrug. So he’s a brilliant marketer. He knows how to sell things, he knows how to market things. And he knows how to do it in a very damaging way to opponents. And he is, look, he always said to me, people want me to change. Because I said, why don’t you dial down the Twitter rhetoric a little bit? You know, just try to be a little bit more appealing to middle America, to the independents perhaps, who are not like diehard MAGA fans. And he said, why should I dial down anything? I’ve become the president of the United States, despite being the most under qualified candidate in history. Why should I change? I’ve just beaten, he said, the most qualified candidate the country’s ever seen, Hillary Clinton. I kept being told, I was the least qualified, she was the most qualified. And I’ve beaten her to the White House. Why should I change who I am? And what you’re seeing now, I totally agree with you about this, with Trump. He’s becoming the very thing he hates most, the biggest, soarest loser in the world. Yeah, right. And I’ve tried to tell him, this is just, you gotta leave 2020, nobody cares. Everyone’s looking forward to 2024. And if he was able to pivot, you know, I think Trump’s real problem. Well, he’s become his own mimic, right? Just this problem that we talked about to begin with is that people tend to fall into the image and then they can’t escape from it. And he loves doing the rallies where he has tens of thousands of people who buy into his greatest hits of being what Donald Trump was in 2016. But I do think his real problem now is that he can’t let it go, he can’t let the past go. He’s wanted to re-litigate the 2020 election. And I think ultimately it will cost him any chance of winning again. When in fact, if he’d been able to pivot slightly, I think he would have had a good chance. And I’ll give another parallel. One of the reasons I fell out with him in the pandemic period was when he said from the presidential podium that you should use bleach, household bleach, to zap the virus out of your body, which is clearly a stupid and dangerous thing for a president to be saying of any country, let alone the United States of America, when so many people were dying. And he hated me saying that and unfollowed me on Twitter, which given he only followed 50 accounts, it was quite a big deal. And when he rang me eventually to sort of seal peace a few months later, just before the election, I said to him, do you mind if I just speak frankly to you? He said, sure. I said, look, the thing you’ve lacked this year, and it may be you just don’t have this valve, so be honest with me, but you’ve lacked empathy. You’ve lacked empathy over the pandemic. You’ve made it all about yourself and the stock market crashing and made it look like you’re taking it all personally. You haven’t been comforter in chief. You don’t seem to have that tool in your armory. You just want to be the strong commander in chief. I said on the George Floyd killing, same thing, no real empathy for what a lot of Americans were feeling. And I said, that lack of empathy is going to cost you because you’re up against Joe Biden, who everybody knows from his own personal tragedies, has huge amounts of personal empathy for people because he lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash. He lost his son to a brain tumor. And I said, I just think you should show a bit more empathy and it would go an awful long way. But then I watched him go out the next day and do some press thing, and he was just exactly the same as normal. So he sort of agreed with me on the call, but then wasn’t able to deliver it. I don’t think he really has an empathy valve. Well, he’s capitalized on being disagreeable, which is part of what we’ve discussed through this whole show is that if you’re in the public eye like that, and you’re a critic and you want to say what you have to say, and you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, it’s useful to be disagreeable. But you can’t be disagreeable all the time. One of the things that happens to people as they mature, maybe they start out disagreeable, but as they become more sophisticated, they’re able to incorporate agreeable and compassionate virtues and skills into their personality. And then they can use them when that’s necessary and they can be disagreeable when necessary. And then you have a personality that’s extremely broad and capable of dancing with every situation. And so I do see, it does look to me like this is an Achilles heel for Trump, this tendency to devolve into a very effective but somewhat juvenile bullying and inability. Well, and then combined with that, this proclivity to play the victim, which I really think is stunningly off brand for him. I can’t see that that’s going to be a successful ploy because it leaves everyone on the conservative side in the same position that the radicals on the left want to put conservatives, which is to abandon all faith in the credibility of institutions. And then what do you have? All you have is blind faith in the leader. And then of course the leftists criticized that for being the worst of populism. And in some sense, they’ve got a point. Now I think in Trump, the leftists and the liberals for that matter, had a large hand in creating their own monster because they chewed on him so hard and were so, I especially saw this with the Abraham Accords because when the Abraham Accords, which brought a fair bit of peace to the Middle East, for those of you who are listening who don’t know, a historic signing of a peace accord between Israel and a number of Islamic States, Muslim States, Morocco and among them and Sudan and the United Arab Emirates and others, with the Saudis apparently fully on board, although not exactly signing the treaty. This happened when I was ill and I didn’t pay much attention to it. But when I recovered and I saw what had happened in the Abraham Accords, it just floored me that this had received almost no attention and no credit because it’s a really big deal. And so the devil was never given his due in Trump’s situation and I think that made him a much bigger devil than he would have otherwise been. Yeah, I totally agree. I think I always said that. I wrote about 120 columns for the Daily Mail U.S. website about Trump during his presidency. And after he left, I worked out about half of them had been supportive of things he’d done or said and half of them were critical. And I felt that was a much more accurate take actually on the Trump presidency. A lot of the things he did, albeit delivered often with very blunt and unappealing rhetoric, were right. He was right about a lot of things. He was absolutely, has been proven right, about Europe’s over-reliance on Russian energy, completely proven right about that. He was right about a lot of European countries not paying their proper dues to NATO. And he was completely correct to call them out on that. I think he was right in many things that he did. The problem with Trump was all- Well, he was right to call out the sanctimony of the Democrats. Yes, and there’s no doubt he did get treated in a ridiculously over-the-top way by his opponents. There’s also no doubt he fueled that by constantly going into battle with them. My real problem with Trump and the rhetoric was not that he could be blunt and aggressive. It was when people like Colin Powell or John McCain died, just basic instincts should tell you, if you’ve got nothing good to say, probably don’t say anything, right? Because these were two American war heroes, regardless of politics. And he came out on both occasions within 24 hours and criticized them in tweets as they were basically a few hours dead. And I felt that was just unbelievably graceless. And I don’t think most Americans are graceless. I just don’t think they are, in my experience. And I think what I would have grated was a lot of Americans who may have been tempted to go with Trump’s policies, but just thought the guy just, how can you do that? It’s just not American to do that, I don’t think. So he lets himself down a lot, actually, with stuff like that. But you shouldn’t, you know, I don’t think we should move away from that. A lot of his instinctive gut feeling about policies were correct. And I could see a situation where someone like DeSantis, the governor of Florida, ends up winning the Republican ticket because he basically pursues Trumpian policies, but without all the stupid rhetoric and the silliness and the scandalous stuff, which goes with being Donald Trump. And he might well end up being president, a presidency Trump could have won if he’d looked back at his first four years in office and pivoted to something more agreeable. Instead, he’s done what you and I said at the start of this interview. He’s made the mistake of going back to what he was before and tried to replicate it. Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the problems too, which is quite surprising for someone who’s as sales-oriented as Trump, and perhaps this is maybe a sign of exhaustion, because it could be, is that he hasn’t formulated a positive vision. It’s all predicated on this idea of corruption and theft. And as I said, that casts him as a victim, which isn’t a good look for him at all, or for his supporters. I’ve been quite surprised because I’ve had a lot of interactions with conservative politicians in the United States and Canada and throughout Europe. And it is difficult for conservative types to generate a positive vision because they tend to stand for tradition. And it’s not that easy to generate a compelling forward-looking story when you’re fundamentally reliant on tradition. It can be done, but it’s very difficult. And, but it’s sad and upsetting to see that Trump hasn’t been able to reinvent himself for this next election. And I do think that one of the best possible outcomes might be that DeSantis can take some of the energy that Trump generated and move forward in somewhat the same manner with less of the juvenile overlay. Yeah, the key thing I’d say about DeSantis, which I’ve noticed, apart from the fact his resume is very impressive. This guy went to Yale and Harvard Law School. He was the senior legal counsel to the commander of SEAL Team One in Fallujah during the surge, which was the year the America lost most of its soldiers in that war. He’s an incredibly well-qualified guy. He also has a strong personality, but he has a respect for the system. He has a respect for the presidency. You know, when Biden has had to deal with him on disasters and things, there’s a mutual respect there, which I just never saw with Trump really. He would rather shoot himself than be like that. And I think that he has a respect for the office. I think if DeSantis lost an election, he wouldn’t spend the next few years claiming it had been stolen. So I think that he has a respect for democracy, which Trump doesn’t have. Trump has a respect for it as long as he’s winning. Yeah, well, so that’s an example of putting not yourself, but the principles for which you stand forward. And it is necessary, if you’re a politician, to have due respect for the institutions and traditions that you serve because they are larger than you. And if you don’t believe that they’re valid, although they need to be modified in the details, if you don’t believe that they’re valid and they gave rise to you, then there’s an internal contradiction there that’s not trivial. And so, well, it’ll be interesting to see if the Republicans can negotiate this through the next election cycle coming up very, very quickly without shooting themselves in the foot over the schism in the Republican side over Trump. So I guess we should probably bring this to a close. We’ve been talking for as long as we’re supposed to talk. And so it’s good to end, I think, on the DeSantis note and to end with that analysis of Mr. Trump, which I hope was relatively even-handed and productive. I would like to thank you very much for, first of all, the interview that you conducted with me, which I was very, well, was I pleased about it? I thought it went extremely well. I thought I had an opportunity to say some of the things that were necessary to say. And I enjoyed very much talking with you and meeting your sons as well and appreciated the opportunity that you presented to me. And I appreciated the opportunity to talk a little bit about the so-called incels, disaffected young men. I was talking to a friend, what would you call it, an associate, someone who has knowledge of Olivia Wild, who had recently made comments about me being king of the incels. And it’s probably worth pointing out that she married a multimillionaire prince. And so, right, so she’s the absolute epitome of female hypergamy, that herergy that makes females very judgmental in their choice, as they should be. But for her to have nothing but contempt for men who are struggling forward to try to make themselves attractive to women is a sign of a kind of deep narcissism that on the female side, I would say, that deeply affects our culture. And so it was good to have an opportunity to clear some of that up. Now, I’ve talked to lots of young men around the world about how they might make themselves more attractive on the friendship and career and dating front. And that usually has to do with telling them that, well, they have to subject themselves to that harsh judgment. And if all the women are rejecting them, either because they’re too timid to put themselves forward, or they don’t have anything truly to offer, which is something like productive, stable, wise, judicious generosity in the highest order, why would they expect a woman to make herself vulnerable, especially on the childbearing front, to them? And so if everyone is telling you that you don’t live up to the necessary standard, well, then you can demolish the standards, or you can put yourself together. And one of the things that’s been really heartening on that front is that many of the young men who have been listening to the ideas I’ve been generating and promoting have in fact put themselves together. And they come to my shows and they’re standing up straight and they’re dressed in often a three-piece suit. And now they frequently have a girlfriend with them and they say something like, I decided to start being authentic and tell the truth. And I decided to adopt some responsibility and to grow up. And all of a sudden everything’s better and the problems I had are going away. And so that’s the solution to the incel problem and demonizing people for being lonesome and isolated is not exactly helpful because it’s actually quite a tough problem to solve. So anyways, it was a pleasure meeting you and talking with you and say hello to your sons. I will, they’ll be thrilled to hear that. Yeah, you can thank them on both our behalf for their wise counsel. And I’ve tried very hard again to listen in this conversation. My sister Stanley in particular will be very happy with that. Yeah. He’ll be taking all the credit. Well, for two extremely noisy people, we probably listened a reasonable amount. Exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Well, thank you very much, Pierce. It was a pleasure meeting you. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.