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- [00:07]
A
Hey, everybody, we got a doubleheader for you today, and it's going to be a doozy. I've been trying to get Piers Morgan to have the tables turned on him for a while now, and so he booked this date, not planning that the Graham Platner campaign is going to blow up the night before. And so I didn't kind of want to waste time with him on that. So if you want Platner takes, we've got plenty of options for you, me and Sarah over on the Bulwark takes feed did almost an hour on Platner alone. The Next level, which comes out on Tuesday nights. Sam is in for jvl. We're all still sending our love to JVL and his family, but we'll be discussing Platter more there. We'll also be discussing Mitch McConnell, who is MIA so there'll be some discussion of that as well. So if you're looking for Platinum McConnell takes TNL or head over to the Bulwark takes feed on this show. It's a double header. We get into serious business about military affairs in the world with Mark Hertling in segment two. So make sure to stick around for that. But up first, it's Piers Morgan. All right. He is the host of Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube. It's Piers Morgan himself. The tables are turned. Welcome to the show.
- [01:23]
B
I'm a bit apprehensive about this because I suddenly realized you, you've never interviewed me and I've had you on my show many times. Thank you. But this is like the real poacher turn gamekeeper, as we would say in England.
- [01:34]
A
I love that you're apprehensive. Well, I'm going to start with a compliment. We're going to start, you know, we're going to butter you up at the beginning because we may have some disagreements to get to. I've been trying to have you on since your interview with Russell Brand. It was a real moment of professional jealousy for me for this reason. For people who didn't watch it, you were asking him about what Bible verse he was referencing. And let's play what happened?
- [02:00]
C
Thank you for asking me. Thank you.
- [02:02]
B
That didn't hurt, did I?
- [02:04]
C
A little bit. It was this from Isaiah. You're right. Beer did say, you know, be chilled. Sometimes I lose the chill, man. It's pretty. Is this. They don't like that, do they, in the old gallery. But remember, you just said it's a hired spot. This is from Isaiah. Excuse me. It says here. The verse that I was Looking at that day was not this. I can't actually, I can't actually find the verse that I had that day, but this is good enough. This is from Isaiah 12.
- [03:39]
A
That goes on for over 100 seconds. Piers, how did you do that? What was going through your head? How did you summon the will to just sit there and let him turn the pages for almost two minutes?
- [03:52]
B
Well, as you know, in our game, silence is normally the enemy, right? I mean, everyone talks about dead air and it can be just a few seconds. When I was at cnn, if you had three, four seconds of silence, it was something that we launched an investigation into. So obviously my team were in my ear saying, you may want to get in now, let's get in now, you know, because it was. As it went on, but I could just sense this was something quite magical unfurling, which was that this grifter, and I think we can safely say he's a grifter who had become a born again Christian seven months after all these allegations flew against him, had gone into court in England clutching this Bible which had all these little notes attached to it and passages underlined and so on. And I. So I asked him the obvious question, which was, well, you know, which of the passages brought you most succor at your difficult moment? And he said, well, there's one in particular. Now, if you were a genuine born again Christian and you were really, as he claims to be, completely immersed now in daily life with your new relationship with God and the Bible and Christianity and so on, you would probably remember the verse that you're talking about which was the one that was most important to you in your hour of darkness. But not only could he not remember it, he couldn't remember where the hell it was in the Bible. So as he continued to rustle, pun intended, I realized this was very illuminating because I think what it really showed, and this was the view of most people who watched it, was that it's probably all a bit of a grift and he's not really reading the Bible every day and he's not really into this quite the way he would like us to think. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but that was certainly my take. I don't think so. And I learned that you got that one right. And you know what, Tim? After four decades of being in the media, it was very unnerving to discover that actually the most powerful weapon I have in my toolbox was silence. And that maybe I should just shut up more.
- [05:45]
A
It's also human nature to try to Bail people out, even if you realize it's a quasi adversarial interview like sometimes you just can't overcome. So I was impressed. You also did the Office look straight into the camera at one point. It was a 10 out of 10. Not all your episodes are 10 out of 10. So we gotta hand that I had somebody come up to me where the crawfish boil. You probably don't know about those. It's a Louisiana thing. I do have bugs. I do know about the crawfish. So I'm out of Boyle. Some guy comes up to me, he's like, are you the guy on Piers Morgan? And I was like, yeah, that's only happened to me one time. And no offense to this Piers, but I was like, why do you watch the show? Like, what do you watch? What do you get out of it? And he says it's kind of like for me, Jerry Springer, but politics. I just kind of like watching the food fight. And on the one hand I understand that. On the other hand, I wonder if that gives you any, I don't know, self doubt about the seriousness or the value of what's happening.
- [06:40]
B
Well, I think, look, people like Joe Rogan and others have used that analogy of Jerry Springer in politics. First of all, I knew Jerry Springer very, very well. I loved Jerry Springer. I actually was on America's Got Talent with Jerry Springer. I was a judge and he was the host. We lived in the same hotel, the Beverly Wilshire in LA for years and we used to meet three times a week for dinner. So when I get compared to Jerry, I take that as an enormous compliment. Jerry Springer was a former mayor of Cincinnati. He was a news anchor for 10 years, very serious news anchor, and was one of the smartest people I've met in my life and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, his show wasn't for everyone. And I don't think my show is like the old Springer show except in one sense, which is most people, I think at the moment get fed a diet through their algorithm or their choice, which is of either people on the left or people on the right and they're banging a drum which will continually hit the same beat of Trump's the biggest disaster in the history of mankind, or Trump can do no wrong extrapolated out to all the other issues. And I think that's a problem, actually. And I think it's become an increasing problem in fermenting tribalism. Quite toxic tribalism in a way. We've gone back, we regressed 2,000 years when tribes used to exist on their own. All shared the same views, all dressed the same, spoke the same as on. And then they slowly went out and encountered other tribes and the only solution they found was to kill each other. And it's a little bit like that, I think, on social media. So I think I actually have a valuable place in the public space in this, which is I sit in the middle. I'm a genuine centrist. I voted in the past for Conservative and left wing candidates in the uk, for example, from Margaret Thatcher on the right to Tony Bear on the left. I always tend to gravitate towards a leader more than a party because I think a great leader can make a huge difference and a terrible leader can have the opposite effect. So I see myself as a centrist. I do love a good debate. I used to get thrown out of my local pub when I was a teenager for arguing with people too obnoxiously on a Friday night after 10 pints of scrumpy. So I do like a good noisy debate. Let me finish my point. So my point being, but it's not just about noisy debates. Anyone who watches the show regularly will know we regularly do big one on one interviews with, you know, I went to Kyiv and interviewed Zelensky. I've done Trump several times. I've done Kanye west several times. I did lots of one on one interviews with people. Russell Brand was a good example. Two hours of Russell Brand. So it's not all about the noisy debates, but I do think the debates do one thing which is really important, which is I bring people normally with big loud followings on big platforms with lots of followers and they rarely go at each other. And I think for the viewer trying to work out where they sit, who's not parked into a tribe necessarily, they at least get to weigh up both sides of an argument. I, I think that's a good thing.
- [09:34]
A
Yeah, I guess. It's not exactly like Firing Line with William F. Buckley though. And some of the people you're having on are like full of shit, full of.