“85 Unofficial Sharia Courts” - Piers Morgan On UK Migrant Crisis & Tommy Robinson | PBD Podcast 682
Patrick Bet-David sits down with Piers Morgan, British journalist, broadcaster, and host of Piers Morgan Uncensored, known for his fiery debates and fearless interviews. They discuss immigration, extremism, socialism, Trump, Israel, Epstein, and the rise of wokeness. Piers breaks down London’s identity crisis, defends free speech, and calls out hypocrisy on both sides.
------
👞 GET THE NEW FLB 1'S: https://bit.ly/4mXV9gd
📕 REGISTER FOR BPW 2025 - FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12TH 2025: https://bit.ly/3IU2YWx
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: https://bit.ly/4g57zR2
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A
Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso
Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP
🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj
🍋 ZEST IT FORWARD: https://bit.ly/4kJ71lc
📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": https://bit.ly/41rtEV4
👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2
📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or
💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
03:07 - Mamdani & Sadiq Khan
07:47 - Tommy Robinson & Immigration
12:45 - Muslim Population
21:12 - Winston Churchill
26:43 - Next UK Leader & Future of the U.K.
33:42 - Welfare & Ungratefulness
45:23 - Obama & October 7th
55:41 - Alex Jones, Candace & Tucker
1:09:00 - Prince Andrew & Epstein
1:22:43 - Britain's Got Talent — Most Viewed Clip
1:23:22 - Woke Is Dead
SUBSCRIBE TO:
@VALUETAINMENT
@ValuetainmentComedy
@theunusualsuspectspodcast
@HerTakePod
@bizdocpodcast
ABOUT US:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
I think he's the first three-term mayor in London ever.
Muslim guy himself.
What happened to London after he came in that New Yorkers can expect?
This is a seismic moment for New York.
Here you've got a guy out there not just espousing a socialist philosophy, but it's seemingly utterly determined to try and deliver it.
Would you be okay with a Muslim prime minister of UK?
Listen, I don't want to radicalize Muslim running the country.
I don't want to radicalize anything.
You get Christian extremists in America who've committed appalling atrocities.
You're comparing the two?
What do you think about what Tommy is showing when he's going in the streets, having 100,000 people showing up?
There is a rising concern, which Robinson has tapped into.
We're losing our identity as a country.
Everybody feels that this is getting unsustainable.
What's your position with who Epstein was?
I think he was a predatory pedophile.
We don't know the full story yet about Andrew, but we may well find out.
I think he's been lying.
Where is your position with everything that's going on within the Republican Influencer Party?
I've never met or interviewed Fuentes.
The stuff he said on the record is so appalling in many cases.
You have to go after him about.
You had Alex Jones on when he came in with the whole...
Well, he had a petition to deport me.
And this idea that he didn't know that he was spewing lies is bullshit.
Of course he knew.
Did you ever think you were me here?
You want to push it on something second chase sweet little Adams.
What's your point?
The future looks bright.
My handshake is better than anything I ever saw.
It's right here.
You are a one-on-one.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
We're finally doing this.
I can't believe it.
I'm here.
Yeah, it's normally through the Zoom and you're out there doing your thing, but it's great to sit down together.
Thank you for having me, but also the scale of your empire here is quite something.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, most people, when they come, they're thinking, you know, and then they see what's going on.
It's exciting.
Very impressive.
Yes, and I know you and Vinny, you guys have a very unique bond together.
He loves being on the show.
I love him coming on.
Vinny has an energy unlike anybody I think I've ever met in my life.
And what I love is he just gives it back to everyone that gives it to him.
There's no quarter given.
But also, he's an unpredictable guy.
You can't box him in in the way that people like to.
They try and box him in as you're this and you're that.
And he'll often say, actually, I don't think that.
He's an interesting character.
Yeah.
Made for TV.
Period.
Made for TV.
Every time I see these thumbnails and Vinny's pictures like that, or he's so animated, so you can always pick something.
But Pierce, I'm trying to see what angle to take with you.
So there's a couple.
I want to talk to you about your relationship with the president.
I want to talk to you about some of the stuff with Israel that you've hosted.
So I think you hosted the first big one with Basim Yosef came on that one fiery, 30-something million views.
And then it was a back and forth.
But also with what's going on with London.
So right now in U.S., Mamdani just became the mayor of New York City, financial capital of the world.
Prior to that, the financial capital of the world was London, right?
So you guys had a 400 years.
We had a 400 years.
And, you know, when Americans sometimes look at Europe and they look at EU, they're like, wow, look, London's lost.
They've lost their identity.
Look what's going on to them.
And we had Dominik Tarjinski who was here from Poland.
He said, we'll never do what London is doing.
We'll never do what EU is doing.
What can New Yorkers, if you can give them advice to what look for?
You guys have Sadiq Khan.
I think he's the first three-term mayor in London ever, right?
Muslim guy himself.
What happened to London after he came in that New Yorkers can expect?
It's interesting because I think there's been a slight mischaracterization of the comparison between Mamdani and Sadiq Khan.
They're both Muslims, but Sadiq Khan is very much a establishment labor figure in the UK.
He's not a progressive woke left guy on many issues.
Mam Dani is full-on self-acclaimed socialist.
That's not Sadiq Khan.
Sadiq Khan, the parallel I said with Mam Dani, he keeps winning elections because the opponents they put up against him have been universally useless.
This is Sadiq.
Yeah, so he's had a very easy run.
And to be fair to him, he's won re-election twice.
Mam Dani was up against Cuomo, who I always felt was damaged goods.
I felt if you're going to put a moderate up against him who actually was new and fresh and interesting, he probably could have done better or she could have done better.
So Mam Dani had a bit of a clean run against a damaged guy, I felt.
But there's no doubt this is a seismic moment for New York.
I mean, it's the biggest city in America.
It's one of the great capital cities of the world.
It's in many ways the heart of capitalism itself.
And here you've got a guy out there not just espousing a socialist philosophy, but it's seemingly utterly determined to try and deliver it.
Now, I would say, look, Mr. Mamdani, this is all very well offering everybody everything for free, but there's a reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere in the world for any sustained period of time.
At some point, somebody has to pay for this.
So who's going to pay for all this?
And the answer will be what's happened with the Labour government in the UK.
The taxes aren't set by Sadiq.
He has a tiny bit of power over local taxation.
But the Labour government came in with a thumping majority just over a year ago.
Massive, one of the biggest majorities of modern times.
A real repudiation of years of very poor rule by the Conservative Party under a series of prime ministers.
And they promised all sorts of things.
You know, prosperity is coming, hope is coming, all these things.
And it's been a complete disaster.
And they're now about to unleash a budget in about three weeks' time, which they're already setting the stool by is going to be a total U-turn on all their pledges in the election campaign.
They said they wouldn't raise income tax.
They're going to.
They said they wouldn't do this, wouldn't do that.
They're going to do it all because they've realized they can't pay for all the promises they made.
And I think this is what's going to happen in New York.
How ugly things is going to be in New York?
Well, it's going to get very interesting politically, I think, because Mam Dani is clearly the most charismatic figure the Democrats have had, really, for a long time, since Obama, you could argue.
Maybe even more charismatic than Obama.
Maybe.
He's more engaging.
I think he's more engaging.
And look, he's an Arsenal fan like me, a big Arsenal fan.
So we have that in common.
And it's not that I object to his aspirations.
It's just that often with socialists, there's a complete disconnect between the aspiration and the ability to deliver.
Now, you know, if we come back in two years' time, let's be clear, if Mam Dani, within two years, manages to deliver on his socialist agenda in a way that is deemed to be successful and popular, massive transformative moment for the Democrats leading into the next general election.
I don't think he can.
I think the opposite will happen.
I think he'll either, like a lot of his guys, once they get power, pivot more to the center ground, or he will try and force through the socialist policies.
It won't work, and he will become the stick to beat the Democrats with leading into the next general election.
So there's massively high stakes here because the Democrats have nobody else who has any real charisma.
Nobody.
And in fact, the most charismatic people on the left in America right now, you could argue, are Mam Dani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders.
So you've got a bunch of socialists dominating the news cycle for them.
Yeah, and what do you do with that, right, when you're seeing that part taking place?
Because, you know, on the other side, Nancy Pelosi stepping down.
Newsom, you hear that voice coming up.
And you're an interesting place because you do business in New York.
You have a property, I believe, in LA.
You're in London.
You're going back and forth.
So you kind of are able to, you know, compare all those different climates.
But going back to UK, London, so we see the videos.
We see Tommy Robinson.
Have Tommy Robinson.
I know you guys have had your set of back and forth and I've followed it over the years of what's happened.
But what do you think about what Tommy says?
Not his background, not any of the criminal stuff, not any of that stuff that maybe you guys have issues with.
I'm not trying to do the personal stuff.
What do you think about what Tommy is showing when he's going in the streets, having 100,000 people showing up?
A lot of people in London finally are coming out saying the Overton window of immigration, not even people in London.
The story came out last week.
They're even more aggressively pro-anti-immigration than America.
They're like, we don't want any more of this for you, somebody who is from there.
What have you noticed the changes in London since Muslims started entering decades ago?
Well, I think the problem has been massively exaggerated.
However, there is a rising problem.
That's how I would categorize it myself.
Tommy Robinson resonates with people because of two things, I think.
One, he was absolutely right about the grooming gang scandal in the north of England.
It was a horrendous scandal involving almost exclusively British Pakistani men abusing young white English girls.
That was the scandal.
And it was going on for years.
It was horrific.
These girls were being appallingly abused by a particular section of the community.
But nobody dared say what that community was because they were trapped in woke ideology that you can't name a criminal that doesn't suit the woke agenda.
And so Tommy Robinson was one of those people that early on began calling this out.
And he was right to do so.
And he deserves credit for doing it.
Mainstream media weren't completely oblivious.
One guy on the Times actually exposed it originally and kept banging that drum.
But many people in the establishment in the UK conspired to cover it up.
They didn't want this.
They thought it would be too much of a powder keg to say what actually happened, which is this was British Pakistani men abusing white English girls.
That was it.
And they should have been clear with what was going on.
So Tommy Robinson deserves credit for that.
Let's not get into his background.
I have my issues about it.
I have my issues about some of the sanitization of who he is when he comes on American shows because he tends to, I think, be very disingenuous.
But park all that.
Why is he also gathering momentum now with his marches?
What used to be, you know, really a bunch of thugs running around, you know, attacking police and so on.
But this morphed into a much bigger number of people.
Many of them are completely peaceful.
Many of them share his concerns about immigration failures in terms of policy failures in the country for decades now.
And again, on that specific, he's right.
And the reason he's right is you can go back to really, it's interesting that I think the way this has played out.
Tony Blair in the early 2000s opened the floodgates on immigration, but to Eastern Europe.
And so we suddenly had a massive influx of people from Eastern Europe into the UK.
And this was deemed to be a good thing.
And then it became a thing that was slightly out of control.
And then generally, immigration seemed to spiral out of control, both legal and illegal.
We started getting this problem on the boats coming over from France.
It's now up to 50,000, 60,000 people a year are coming in illegally on these small boats.
No one appears to have any idea how to stop this happening.
But more, I think more damagingly, two years ago, we had a net migration in the UK of legal migration of nearly a million people.
Now, to put it in context, we only have just under 70 million people in the UK.
You bring in a million people a year, legally, and add them to the already creaking infrastructure.
You know, we have our much vaunted national health system, the NHS, was designed in the 50s for a population of 50 million.
We now have a population of nearly 70 million.
So comparative to America, we're a fifth of the size.
But in comparison to where we were in the 50s, we are massively bigger population.
The strain on all of our infrastructure, all our public services, has been getting worse and worse and worse in direct correlation to the size of our population.
And that is what's been fueling a lot of the anger.
A lot of people, add the pandemic, add the cost of living crisis, so add years of really tough times for a lot of people, particularly working class people in Britain.
And they see a lot of people coming in either illegally or with the blessing of the state, with many dependents.
And they see with the illegal migrants coming over on the southern border, they get put in three four-star hotels.
They get treated way better than the way that many people are living their lives who are in the country illegally already.
And it causes a lot of resentment.
Then you add inevitably when you get these kind of numbers coming in that you're going to get migrants committing crimes.
And when they do, this becomes a hugely inflammatory thing.
So again, on that aspect of it all, Robinson is correct.
So if you look at this number, this is estimated Muslim population in the UK by percentage from 83 to today.
I'm sure you've seen this.
Half a million in 83, 1%.
And in a crack, 1 million in 97, 14 years later.
And then 2 million and then 4 million and a 4.5, some say 5 million today, 6, 7% of the population.
You have flirted with the concept of wanting to run for prime minister.
I heard, you know, whether you're joking or you're being aware of it.
I'm joking.
You know, if there is a crazy personality that could pull it off, you probably have the personality to pull it off.
But let's just say you do say, you know what, I'm going to get in there and I'm being hired as a, you know, true, you know, strategic, or I'm going to run for this.
Do you think this growth, the way it's going right now, getting to 10, 20, 30%, do you think it is a good idea to keep allowing people to come in to combine the Islam way of thinking, what their ideas are, and coexist with the Western ideology?
Well, I think certainly there are issues which are serious to be considered.
For example, it's been reported there are as many as potentially 85 unofficial Sharia courts in the UK now, which are not operating under UK law.
They're operating in their own law for their own communities.
That clearly is not a good thing in a country like the UK.
I would say, look, we have a very high Muslim population now comparative percentage-wise to the United States.
In fact, I think they're not far off in terms of total numbers to the whole of America.
So we have a lot of Muslims who live in the UK.
We've always been a very multicultural, very tolerant place.
That's why people want to come and live there, a bit like America.
I would say the vast majority, I've said this before and I say it again, the vast majority of Muslims living in the UK have assimilated perfectly well and lived perfectly peaceful and lives which contribute to society.
The problem is, I think, coming with the sheer volume of people coming in and the sheer volume coming in illegally as well, whereas you've had in the United States, people have actually no idea who these people really are, how radicalized they may be, what their plans may be when they get to the United Kingdom.
And then you see the quite disturbing spectacle of protests, say, in London during the Israel-Hamas war, where people are brazenly supporting Hamas in these protests.
And, you know, Hamas is a prescribed terror group in the United Kingdom.
That should be not happening.
So there is a rising concern which Robinson has tapped into.
And some would say his critics would say he's fueled it for his own devices, but he's tapped into a genuine concern.
And the worrying thing for the government should be that as their popularity plunges, the popularity of people like Robinson and like the Reform Party under Nigel Farage, although those two don't get on, you're seeing a rising sentiment in the UK that we're losing our identity as a country.
And what should we do about that?
Whilst preserving the UK's historic position of being a welcoming, tolerant country, proudly multicultural, how do you juggle that with the sheer volume of people coming in and the impact that's having on local communities?
And how do you stop communities developing within communities?
In other words, how do you stop the fragmentation of our society where you have little separate worlds developing in all major cities and towns?
These are genuine concerns.
And for people, the old days used to be shut down, these conversations by people saying, well, you're racist.
We're long past that stage.
People now openly talk about this in the UK on political shows and so on.
And you're no longer just labeled a racist if you express concern about immigration.
Everybody feels that this is getting unsustainable.
So the question is, what do we do about it?
So you have how many kids?
You have four kids?
Okay.
So four kids, but they're grown, right?
They're grown.
They're 32 down to 13.
Okay.
Oh, so you do have a 13 year old?
13 year old, yeah.
Okay.
And then what's the oldest after 13?
32.
Okay.
Well, my youngest boy is 24 and 20.
24.
So 13.
If you were to start all over again, and you're 25 today, and you know you're capable, meaning you know you shine on camera, you know you're very comfortable being under the fire.
That's your comfort zone.
You know you're going to go make money no matter where you go.
Here or any other country, would you choose to raise your four kids where you're at or would you move out of the country?
I would.
I would.
And I would remind people we've been through a lot more difficult times than this.
I think a lot gets amplified by social media.
And that can be a very good thing or a very bad thing.
My grandmother was 19 at the start of World War II and she was 25 when it ended.
As she always said to me, I lost six of the best years of my life.
She said, however, I then went from 25 to 94 and had a brilliant 70 years after that.
So imagine living through World War II.
Imagine the kind of conversations you and I would have been having about that, about the impending threat of Nazi domination, of Nazis taking over the UK.
You know, we face bigger challenges than this.
This is a challenge that's come, in my opinion, across the whole of Europe.
The sweeping migration, much of it coming from countries that have been at war, whether it's Syria, Iraq, or wherever it may be.
But you've had millions and millions and millions of people deposed from their homes or fleeing war-torn situations and sweeping across the continent of Europe and wanting a better life for their families, which I completely understand.
But it has got unsustainable.
And it's obvious a problem for the UK.
It's a problem for Germany, for France, for many of the European countries.
They're all facing the same challenges.
Nobody at the moment, it seems to me, has a clear idea of what we do about this.
Other than I look at somewhere like the United States, I look at the way Donald Trump just slammed the brakes on the southern border almost instantaneously and reduced the number of people coming in from two and a half million a year to literally a couple of thousand a month.
And you look at that and you think, well, okay, you can control borders.
You just have to have the determination to do it.
I also think Trump has universal support in America when he says that anyone who's here illegally in the United States who then commits a crime outside of their immigration status should be deported.
Where the flashpoint comes and where it's an interesting thing as to whether other countries like the UK follow the Trump philosophy on this is where you start deporting people who have been here for a number of years illegally, but who have been maybe working, paying taxes, contributing to society, bringing up kids and so on.
What do you do with those people?
I understand that they want to create an atmosphere of you have to come in illegally, illegally, and if you don't, then you can't stay here.
I understand that, but you don't want America to lose its inherent sense of compassion and empathy either.
And I think some of the images for me of ICE running into Home Depot and grabbing people who are undocumented and wanting to throw them out, living in LA, as I do a lot of the time, the fear that's engendered amongst the community in LA is not a good thing.
So I think there's a balance to be struck here, albeit you cannot look at Trump's overall immigration policy and not think it's been extremely effective so far.
And you've got to look at the hypocrisy of the left when they go after Trump.
That's like my favorite question for my lefty friends, my liberal woke friends.
And I used to identify happily as liberal.
I just find nothing in common with these people.
But I say to them, how many people did Barack Obama deport in eight years as president?
They never know, for one.
They can tell exactly how many Trump has, but they never know how many Obama did.
And then I tell them, it's 3 million people.
Just Google it.
You can Google it.
So A, they don't want to know.
B, when they find out they're completely shocked.
C, I said, he was known as deporter-in-chief in Mexico.
That was his nickname.
That's right.
This guy deported more people pro-rata per year than any president in the history of the United States.
And yet the same rules do not apply to Obama than do to people like Trump.
So, you know, I think there's a lot to learn from the way Trump's gone about it, albeit with some caveats.
Yeah, so you said something about your grandma being 19 to 25 during the war.
I lost six of my best years, but I lived to 94, 70 years, some of the greatest years of my life, right?
Okay.
When you had to overcome that war, you had this one guy named Winston Churchill, right?
So just curious.
You're saying, you know, Muslims that come in and they assimilate.
Great, no problem.
I don't have any problem.
We have Muslims in our company that we work with and they've assimilated.
They love America, right?
If you ask the Muslim Council of Britain, it'll say that 75% of Muslims in Britain have assimilated and see themselves as Brits.
I'm a Brit.
I consider myself proud Brit as well, but 25% don't, depending on the numbers you look at.
How would Winston Churchill today, would Winston Churchill be tolerant with the borders?
Would he be like, yeah, it's okay, let him come in.
No.
Would he handle the threat?
Think about how his wiring was.
This is your world.
What do you think he would have done today?
No, I think he'd have been tough.
I think he'd have been very in what way?
Well, I think he'd have been very protective of our borders in a way that was very protective against the threat of Nazism to our way of life.
I think that he would have understood inherently, I think, that actually having open borders, as Ronald Reagan said, right?
The best line ever was the simplest one.
If you have an open border, you don't have a country.
Of course you don't.
The very definition of a country is something that has a border.
So the moment you allow your border to be completely open, you're just going to be a hostage to your own misfortune.
And that's what we're seeing happening.
You know, again, it's a big problem for the continent of Europe.
It's not just a problem for the UK.
The difference we have is twofold.
One, we're an island, the United Kingdom.
And secondly, we're detached from the European Union, not just geographically, but financially and every other way now through leaving the EU, through Brexit.
So, you know, we haven't got a lot of friends in France, for example.
They're not really that bothered about helping us with the small boats crisis because why should they help us at all given the pain we inflicted on them by leaving the EU?
So there's a lot of that going on.
But they've all got their own problems.
I was in Paris recently.
And, you know, you could say, I think you'd be fair to say Paris is a very different place when you walk around to what it was like 30 years ago.
You know, I know, you know, my wife is half Brisbane, was born and raised there.
And so you see it changing.
Now, I've got no problem.
You know, America is the classic example of a country where every city you go to, you'll meet myriad people from myriad different countries, myriad different backgrounds, and so on.
And the United States is a great example of how this can work.
But you have to have control of your borders and you have to have a sensible, tough immigration policy.
The irony for me is when you try and become like I have, I'm an exceptional alien is my status on my visa service for the United States.
I always laugh.
They literally call you aliens.
My visa is pegged to my work and I'm here as an, so I'm a little bit perturbed that I have to be called an alien, but the fact they call me an exceptional alien, I'll take it.
Yeah, but the amount of paperwork and money you have to spend on getting through your visa immigration status each time I have to renew it is indicative of a country that does apply these rules.
And the reason that people get so angry about those who circumnavigate the rules is a lot of them have had to do the same.
If you go through the proper process to go into a country legally or to set up your home there with your family, whatever it may be, obviously you're going to really resent people who wash up on a small boat who might be criminals.
You've no idea because the UK government has no idea, by the way, who's on these boats, for example.
We found in one purge that 30% one year all came from Albania, which is not a war-torn country.
It's a country in Eastern Europe, but there's a lot of gangs.
And these were gang members coming into the UK, predominantly the major cities, to deal in things like drugs.
So they did a deal with the Albanians and it stopped that stone dead.
But now we have people coming in from other countries.
What would Churchill have done?
What do you think he would have done?
What would he have done?
Seriously, what do you think he would have done?
Just think his profile.
I certainly think right now he would have put the clamps down on more people coming in.
Except in essential circumstances.
Would he have sent anybody back from the 7% that came here?
How would he have treated some of the criminals?
How would he have treated some of the knife that's going on?
So I would say he certainly wouldn't have just picked out the Muslim community.
We have a lot of different communities.
Like I said, the grooming gang scandal in America was very high profile and attracted a lot of heat, obviously.
But we have a lot of different religions, nationalities living in the UK.
I don't think he would have singled out Muslims.
I think what he would have taken a more pragmatic view and gone, we have too many people in this country now.
There's too much pressure on our public services.
Some people are going to have to leave.
Who are those people?
Well, anyone who commits a crime who's come in here to this country legally but commits a crime should be deported.
I think most people feel that.
And then you've got to stop the people coming in illegally.
What is the most effective way of doing that?
No one's had a good plan so far.
The Conservative Party boasts about their Rwanda plan, but it was so ridiculous.
It was like a tiny handful of people would have ever got on those planes to Rwanda.
It was never going to work in the way they kept trying to promise it would.
So what is the most effective way to do it?
I actually think that if Trump was in charge, for example, he'd probably say to Emmanuel Macron, if you don't stop these boats leaving your shores, because it has to be done at the French end, then we're going to tariff you 1,000% on your wine and cheese coming into the UK.
He would have taken a brutal move like that.
Why are they not doing that right now?
I don't know.
I don't know why they're not tougher on the French.
You've got to do a deal with the French on this.
You've got to say, look, sorry, you're letting all these people get on these boats.
Once they're at sea, there's hardly any way to stop them.
And once they wash up on our shore, they are legally allowed to remain as potential asylum seekers.
Is it fear?
Is it something you guys need from them?
Is it something, is it a history of, you know, Patrick, it's tough leadership.
You know, Churchill was a very flawed character in many ways.
You know, he was a big smoker, big drinker.
You know, he said some pretty ugly things over the years about people.
All of these things.
But he was also brilliantly talented, an amazing writer, a painter, a musician, also, incredibly complex, talented, brilliant man.
But when it came to our biggest ever challenge of facing the threat of Nazism, he was the one who stood up and convinced the British public we can beat these people when nobody else thought we could.
And for that alone, he's my greatest ever Britain, albeit like all my great Britons and all my great favorite people.
Flawed, right?
But I think we need a strong, probably flawed character to come forward and go, right, we have this problem.
What are we going to do about it?
Let's have a proper open debate where people who contribute are not immediately branded racist if they think we have too many people in the country and too many people coming in both legally and illegally.
What are we going to do about this?
And stop putting people who come in illegally in very luxurious hotel accommodation, which enrages local communities who are living in far lower standards of living.
Who are some names?
Who are some names?
Because remember, Roger Stone was the first guy that looked at Trump and said, you hear the stories where it's like, this guy's going to be the president one day.
You can be the president one day.
You can go become president one day, right?
And Trump's like, nah, I'm a business guy.
I'm doing what I'm doing.
Who are some names that you say they would have the brass and the balls to go out there and put their foot down?
Here's the problem.
I don't really see the person.
I'll tell you why I don't think I see that person.
We now have a very mediocre tier of politicians in the United Kingdom.
All the smart ones who've been genuinely successful in their own lives, they don't want to poke their head into the political arena.
It's become too toxic, too damaging.
You tend to get absolutely fried for every peccadillo you've ever done in your entire life.
Nobody who's got probably the smarts and has been a success themselves wants to do it.
So you're left with a mediocre, it's like being any company and suddenly a sort of lower ranking, lower middle management team suddenly run the company.
Well, there's a reason they're lower ranking middle managers in most cases.
They're not as capable as the ones actually running the company.
I feel like that about a political class in the UK.
They're just across all the parties, there is a paucity of people that I think have the drive and the smarts to do this.
Nigel Farage's reform party are getting a lot of traction, I think, by default because the others are so useless.
But even he, when I listen to his economic policies, they don't make any sense, right?
He's basically a bit of a one-trick pony.
He's strong on immigration, albeit I'm not entirely sure he's got the answers.
But I hear him on the economy.
I think you could be left-wing.
So this is a problem.
We've got to get back to attracting the best of the best to want to come in to run the country.
Could you see, would you be okay with a Muslim prime minister of UK?
Yeah.
You'd be okay.
That wouldn't do that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So your concern isn't that at all?
No, not at all.
No, listen, I don't want to radicalize Muslim running the country.
I don't want to radicalize anything running the country.
You know, there's a lot of radicalized elements of all religions, of all nationalities.
I don't like anyone who's radicalized.
It's dangerous for any country to have people at the helm who are radicalized.
Do I think we have a particular problem in the UK with radicalized Muslims?
I'm not convinced by that.
I think there are radicalized Muslims.
And clearly, the Muslim population is rising exponentially fast compared to other populations.
So we are going to have to look at this and say, well, what do we do about this going forward in a way that you don't look like you're just picking on people because of their Muslim faith?
I respect the tolerance that you have of what could happen to Brit long term, because I think sometimes when you're in it and it's gradual, like you know, the whole thing about you put a frog and a boiling water and you boil it slowly, and then boom, he's dead.
It's too late, right?
I think sometimes when people are in it, they're like, yeah, well, it's okay with this.
It's okay with that.
It's okay with this.
I think UK is flirting with be intolerant and it'd be interesting to see who would rise up and want to do something about it.
Well, look, I go to a lot of Muslim countries.
I've been in Saudi Arabia, I've been in...
To me, the biggest thing is the extremists.
It's not a...
No, exactly.
Here's my point, though.
But also, they have zero tolerance of people wanting to operate under their own laws when they go to those countries.
For example, so the whole debate about Sharia law and so on, you know, I can understand why a lot of Brits get exercised about that.
Because if I went to Saudi Arabia or Qatar or somewhere and decided I would ignore the country's laws and operate under my own laws while I was there, you wouldn't get away with that.
So why wouldn't you be okay with that?
Why would you be okay with that?
Well, I wouldn't.
No, no.
But what I'm saying is: so, if you were okay with somebody who was a Muslim to become a prime minister, and then say they're the noble one, right?
You know, and they're coming in, they actually love Britain, but it opens it up, and an extremist, like, I want to get in.
Then they come in and they say, Sharia, what are you going to do about it?
Then what?
Because you're making it a step ahead.
Yeah, but I don't think you can, you can't tar the entire Muslim population with the brush of potential extremism in the same way that you get Christian extremists in America who've committed appalling atrocities.
I don't assume that every Christian, I'm a Christian, I don't assume every Christian in America is a potential extremist.
You know, I just think it's there's got to be a lot of comparing the two, you're comparing the two.
No, no, I'm just saying extremism is extremism, yeah, isn't it?
Isn't it?
It is.
Well, it's the same, isn't it?
It is.
No, I think extremism is extremism.
To me, that's not the part of it.
But when you look at the percentage of who is, like, for example, in America, if I don't care what part of the world you're in, when Japanese came to the World Cup, do you remember the story about the Japanese when they went to the World Cup?
What were they doing afterwards at the end of the game?
They were cleaning up the arena.
Everybody's like, what are they doing here?
That's what we do in Japan.
So would I want 1,000 Japanese neighbors?
Yes.
Would I want 10,000 Japanese neighbors?
I don't care what religion they are.
I don't care what God they believe in.
They are their own people.
They raise kids.
They go and work.
They don't hate America.
They don't get up there and commit terrorist crimes.
You don't hear stories like that from them.
They just go and do their part, right?
But I would argue this back.
So I went to the Qatar World Cup, for example, for a week, felt completely safe.
There was no hooliganism whatsoever.
But that's not the same as the extremists.
These are two different.
No, no, I agree.
I agree.
But again, I think there's extremists everywhere attached to all different groups.
And I would say that I like the way the Middle East has been opening up in the last decade.
I think it's exciting.
It's dynamic.
I just interviewed Cristiano Ronaldo in Rio at his home there.
One thing he said, it just feels really safe.
And it feels like it's opening up in a way that's good for families and everything else.
And I think that's great.
I think we should be encouraging countries like that to continue the evolution that they're on.
Without sort of, I don't like the tinge of you're all potential extremists until you prove otherwise.
No, because I think it's unfair to a whole I mean, how many Muslims are there in the world?
1.4 billion?
You know, are we really suggesting that 1.4 billion Muslims are all potential extremists?
Because I don't get that sense of the Muslims I know in London.
I walk down my high street in London.
There are Muslims running all sorts of different businesses.
And honestly, they're not extremists.
When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast.
We had the choice to make it cheap.
We chose neither.
Instead, we chose Tuscany Rolly.
We chose true Italian craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skilled hands.
We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step.
Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection.
Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary.
Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.
If we look at immigrants that come to America, what percentage of them are on Snap the most?
Have you seen this chart?
No.
Can you pull up this chart, Rob?
So if you statistics are going to show it to you.
So if you look at stats on what percentage of SNAP in America, what communities are taking advantage of it the most?
Rob, I think we send it in Twitter in a group text where it breaks down who uses it the most and who doesn't use it the most.
And stats will tell you, guess what?
You'll be able to look at that and say, okay, these communities, if it's Armenian, if it's Assyrian, if it's Persian, if it's this, I want to know about it.
And then from there, you have to sit there and say, when people come here from XYZ country, they make America a great place.
Let's get some more of them.
When people come here from XYZ countries, they don't make the place a better place.
Well, let's do something about it as well.
Did you find Iraqi?
I'm looking right now.
Hey, Umberto, can you guys send the chart?
I think you know which one I'm talking about that breaks down exactly the SNAP benefits.
You will see in America, so while the government shutdown took place, food stamps by ethnicity, 45.6% of immigrants from Afghanistan are on SNAP.
42.4 from Somalia.
35% from Iraq.
Then it's Dominican, Caribbean, native, Puerto Rican, Cuban.
So if I look at this number here, keep going all the way down, Rob, keep going all the way down, all the way down, all the way down, all the way down.
Okay, so then what do you see?
Indians, 4.4%.
Why are Indians not our SNAP?
Indians are not Christians.
I don't care what the religion is.
Okay.
I'm not sitting here saying, well, you know, but if you go all the way to the top and you look at SNAP, so why are we inviting more from Afghanistan?
Somalia.
I mean, I need to study this in more depth, but certainly Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraqi.
I mean, these are people, I imagine, predominantly who have fled war-torn countries.
So they, by definition, when they come to America, going to be impoverished.
Yeah, but when America was founded, it's about getting the best to come over here, right?
Like you run a business.
You have one of the top shows.
When it comes down to debate, you're running the number one show in the world when it comes down to debate.
I don't think anybody is doing a better job than you when it comes down to the debate shows.
But you would sit there and you would say, all right, can we look at the last 100 hires that we made?
Yes.
What school did they come from?
Okay, and we'll see a pattern.
Who's been here that has the highest retention rate?
And they'll say, University of Florida, their tenure with our company is 3.8 years.
You know, Florida State is seven months.
I'm just making stuff up.
FIU is 1.1.
You know, such and such is.
And like, guys, no more recruiting from FIU.
I don't know the people at FIU.
I don't know the people from Florida State.
All I see is the tenure.
When they come in, they're contributing to society in a positive way.
I think from that standpoint, you have to consider who it's coming in.
I don't care if you're Muslim, Christian, you know, Jehovah's.
Let me ask you a difficult question.
So you fled your family from Iran.
I lived there for 11 years.
From a war-torn place.
We did.
Right.
So take Iraq, for example.
When I was editor of the Daily Mirror in the UK, I opposed the Iraq war before, during, and after it.
Cost me my job in the end.
Yeah.
After 10 years running the newspaper.
But I think I was vindicated by what happened afterwards.
That war was fought on a false pretext.
Saddam Hussein are weapons of mass destruction.
They never found them.
And also there was this kind of subliminal, we need to respond to 9-11.
We can take out Saddam.
I never saw that connection.
It seemed to me completely wrong.
Much more arguable to go after where bin Laden and his people were in Afghanistan.
So I look at Iraqis, right, who were displaced by a war, which many people, including me, would say was an illegal war in their country that caused utter devastation.
And they come to somewhere like the United States, which has been the home for people like that ever since its inception and is lauded around the world for that, for being a place that you can come to, right, from places like that.
But is there not a particular duty of care?
Maybe you don't think there is, but it is there not a duty of care to people who come from a war-torn place like Iraq, where the United States, along with the UK and other countries, wage that war, in my view, completely wrongly, in a way that caused their displacement, caused them to lose their homes, maybe lose their loved ones, and they come here for a better life, but when they get here, they have nothing.
Now, that may explain some of those numbers.
I don't know.
But certainly in that case, you've got to think, well, okay, if they're the ones who are getting the snap benefits, okay, what is the correlation between the ones who were displaced because of the actions of the United States and the UK and the other allies that fought the Iraq war on their presence here in the United States?
And is there a duty of care towards them?
I don't think we should lose in the mix of all this a compassion towards genuine asylum seekers, particularly from countries ravaged by wars which we may have been complicit in starting, in my opinion, on a false pretext.
Yeah, I think that is a, I would sit there again.
I would sit down and I would say, if we're looking at anybody that's coming in, if we caused some of this, let's see what we can do about it.
Now, of course, somebody in America could say, well, you caused all of it, right?
Okay, no problem.
But if you're coming to America and you hate America, I have no tolerance for you.
I agree with you.
I agree.
And you don't want to give anything back to the company.
I have a country.
I have a hard time.
I agree.
To me, you know what it's like?
When I came here, I served the Army.
I've worked since the day I came to America, even when I was selling hats and shirts when I was 13, 14 years old.
I love everything about this country, America, for me.
And I think what ends up happening is when you're in a family and was your father rich?
Do you come from a wealthy family?
Not at all.
And I would add, my brother was a British Army colonel in the Iraq war, right, fighting on the front line.
My brother was.
My brother was.
It's not like I didn't have a vested interest.
You know, half my family have been British.
Do you know where I'm going?
Here's kind of where I'm going.
Your kids, your four kids, you have money.
When something happens, your money is going to go to your kids, right?
Now, are you going to give it equally if one of them says, I hate my dad, he's the worst dad in the world.
You're not going to give it to me.
No, and I agree with you about people who come here and then vocally.
That's the problem that appears.
So the problem ends up happening is...
That's a separate problem to the one I'm articulating.
But what I'm saying is the filtering.
To me, it's the filtering.
If I see, if we do want, and by the way, the argument, some people in America are like, look, we don't want anybody else to come in here.
This is plenty, right?
There are people that I've had on the podcast that wouldn't even want me to be here right now.
They're like, you got lucky getting in here, which is their argument.
They have the right to have that.
But how wrong is that argument?
I will tell you, like, I'm having this conversation.
I got four kids.
I'd like to have 20 kids, right?
So I flirt with my kids the other day.
This was about six months ago.
I said, so it's 50-50 jokes.
It's not 100% of a joke.
So I said, hey, guys, what do you guys think about surrogate?
If daddy wanted to go with mommy and we have a surrogate, we have five girls that are going to have a surrogate.
He's going to have five siblings.
My youngest son looks at me.
Tell me what surrogate is.
I think I know what it is.
I said, well, it's mommy and daddy.
It's really our kid, but somebody carries for nine months.
I don't want any of that.
I said, why not?
I don't want any of that because it's not in mommy's belly.
We run a mommy's belly.
I want someone that's a mommy's belly.
If you guys want to make another kid, it has to be a mommy's belly, right?
The level of pride this kid has to be in a bed David that the mommy gave birth to the kid.
I actually understand it and respect it.
You understand what I'm saying?
Of course.
I respect it.
So if somebody's born in America and they're kind of like, look, man, yeah, maybe we got lucky with you, Pat, but we got a lot of ones that came through and we didn't get lucky with that, hate America.
To me, when I think about guys like Churchill, you're talking about, or Trump we're talking about, you know, I cannot believe what he's doing with ICE and, you know, he is single-handedly closed up the border.
Crime has gone.
Even Kamala Harris said we got the border wrong and they did a better job of it.
I think that there's a little bit of a flirting with tolerance and just looking the other way.
Where we're.
You know when we, when I talk anyone anytime I have somebody here from UK that I'm talking about UK stats.
UK government doesn't give any stats.
You guys can't even study what's working, what's not working.
It's like a secret.
No, because if you guys knew it would so much more of the crime.
Who was doing the crime?
At least in America we can sit down and look at, is black on black crime the most?
Is it white on white crime?
Is it white on black?
Is it black on white?
What is it percentage?
Not based on numbers, because of course there's more whites living here, nobody's.
Oh shoot, we'll show it, even though it goes against what the Democratic party wants to see.
No, we don't want to talk about that because of fatherless communities.
We need some stats.
So I think if you looked at the stats and the data and it shows that any of the immigrants are coming from a certain country, who assimilate, love the country, don't want any entitlement programs, they create businesses, they create jobs.
They make it safer.
Let's get more.
If not listen, keep it where it's at.
To me, that's where it stops.
Well listen, I I don't disagree with the ideology behind that.
I mean you should only want people who are going to come and contribute to society.
I would add the caveat of the Iraq caveat, which is, if you go and bomb a country and you destroy people's lives, I do think a country like the United States, most prosperous country in the world, does have a duty of care to bring some of those people into its country, as it has done with the Iraqi community.
What if that's?
What if that's a royal screw-up on another administration that you never agreed with them?
Because Trump doesn't agree with Bush?
And remember, if there's any guy that has moral authority to say I never supported that war, it's the guy that bought a full-page ad.
I think it was in USA today.
Remember that one thing that he did back in the days.
It's like I am not for this war, right?
So maybe he's saying, I didn't do that, Bush did that.
That wasn't my doing.
I'm changing it.
We're going to do different.
Well, the good thing under Trump is that, clearly and unusually for a Republican president of modern times.
He is a man who prefers peace to war, and then he shows that with his actions, first in his first term, and what he's done now.
I mean now?
I mean this idea, the debate about whether he gets a Nobel Peace Prize.
Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for two fancy speeches eight months into his first tenure.
I mean absolutely insane.
The idea Trump wouldn't get one for simply getting the hostages released, never mind anything else.
You want to know the craziest thing about Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize?
You ready?
You're gonna lose your mind when I tell you this.
So you know how we always say, eight months into being president, eight months into being president, do you know?
To win a Nobel Peace Prize, they have to nominate you before january 31st.
He didn't take 11 days.
11 days, if two.
That's ridiculous.
I think someone did it the day he's inaugurated.
I know that's the step right there.
The deadline for No Peace Prize nomination is january 31st.
The guy wins 2011.
I didn't know that, did you not know?
That's what it makes wildest story when you think about that, even more insane.
So uh Piers, for you the, the one thing that I think you uh probably are have a lot of moral authority on this is the following, october 7th happens Hamas attacks Israel and we watch the whole thing right.
And then you do Basom And you host all of these debates.
And you're like, wait a minute.
What did they do to power?
What is it going on?
So you kind of go from depending on, because I personally watch it go like this three, four times, because it seems like you're coming from a place that we're like, wonder, they're doing that.
I'm not with that.
Where did you go there, day one, to where are you now?
Probably the most reasonable opinion is where you are today, because you've kind of watched it going back and forth.
What's your opinion on what happened there?
Well, first of all, October the 7th was one of the most heinous terror attacks of modern times, the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust in World War II.
These are undeniable facts.
Hamas committed an act that day which immediately established them as a terrorist organization who therefore renounced any rights to any governmental power at the end of all this.
So that all happened on October the 7th with the scale of what they did.
1,200 people killed, nearly 7,000 wounded, 255, six people kidnapped.
I mean, absolutely despicable, horrific thing.
So for many months after that, to the angst of many on the pro-Palestinian side and fury in some cases, I steadfastly defended Israel's right to defend itself.
In fact, I said they didn't just have a right to defend themselves, but given that the Hamas official spokesman went on the airways about a week after the October the 7th atrocity to say, we're going to keep doing this again and again, the Israeli government had a duty, not just a right, but a duty to defend its people from further attacks from Hamas.
So, okay, I laid my credentials down.
People like Bassa Musu came on and gave me a very hard time, but I always platformed people like him.
I platformed people on both sides throughout.
Always.
And the bigger the followings I had, the more passionate, the better, because they were the ones getting most of the hearing on the airways.
And I believe my job is to hear all the voices, challenge them all, and let the viewers work out where they think the reality lies.
And I continued, and I would still defend Israel's right to defend itself.
I mean, Hamas are a terrible organization.
I've never disputed that at all, and I don't dispute it today.
So when people on the really sort of more extremities of the pro-Israeli side, you know, accuse me of being a pro-Hamas guy, it's so pathetic.
Nothing I've ever said is anything other than they're a disgusting terror group and should have no power after all of this.
And they should lay down their arms, and that's going to be the big debate as to whether they do.
But then this year, and in particular, several things happened.
One was the three-month blockade, which, you know, I've heard the arguments that there was no starvation, you never saw a starving Palestinian, blah, And one of the inherent problems actually with that and with a lot of the IDF blanket denials of things, or we're going to set up an inquiry and investigation when things go wrong, funk of war, stuff happens.
But the Israeli government's persistent, to this day, refusal to allow independent media into Gaza to do their jobs has been a massive problem for their credibility.
If you've nothing to hide or worry about in terms of what you're doing, let war correspondents do their job.
And as a journalist, I think it's a fundamental principle which they have continued to abrogate in a pretty shameful way, actually.
And it does inevitably raise in me as a journalist suspicions about what they're hiding, which means they don't want to let journalists in, particularly even since the ceasefire.
Still, journalists aren't allowed in by the Israeli government.
So the blockade I felt was likely to pass the threshold of the criminal act.
You know, when you have a country that has the control over a border like Israel does over Gaza, allowing hardly any supplies of food or aid to go in, then I think that is a criminal act.
Now, a lot of the official bodies like the United Nations and others said the same thing, but Israel doesn't take any of them seriously.
So again, I don't know for sure what was happening in that period because I didn't see any independent journalists reporting on it.
I do know Palestinian journalists reported on it and 220 odd have been killed during the conflict.
So there's not just a fog of war about this.
There's a deliberate suppression by the Israeli government of allowing journalists to do their job, international independent journalists.
I think that's to their great discredit.
So I didn't like, I thought the blockade was just crossed every line.
Then they undid the blockade, but the bombardment was relentless.
And I kept saying to people throughout the war from day one, I don't know what a proportionate response is here.
There have been flare-ups in this conflict going back seven decades.
We have never seen anything on the scale of what Hamas did that day.
And we've never seen anything on the scale of the response by the Israeli government.
They've killed 65,000, nearly 70,000 people.
None of the ones we know about.
Obviously, again, you have to take the figures from the Gaza-run Health Authority, the Hamas-run Health Authority, Gaza, because there is no other way of establishing it.
Historically, those figures have normally proven to be quite accurate, but Israel keeps trying to foggy those numbers, deny them, obfuscate and so on, to which I say, well, let the journalists in.
Let's find the truth.
They don't want to do that.
So again, that's my big bugbear with this, how you get to the actual truth.
Do you think it's a genocide or a war?
I don't think it's a genocide simply for one reason.
The word genocide gets banded about a lot.
It means the willful systematic destruction of a people.
And I don't think that's what we've seen in Gaza, much as people on the pro-Palestinian side try and get me to say it.
No actual declaration of genocide has been waged against any.
I mean, even in Rwanda, they never established it as an international court, but it was a genocide.
So I didn't know.
I learned all this actually covering all this on my show.
I had a bunch of genocide experts on.
Many think it is a genocide, but many don't think it is.
But they all pointed out that actually the bar for reaching genocide is exceptionally high.
And, you know, as people have pointed out, there are other flashpoints around the world right now where probably many more people are getting killed.
No one cares.
No one's putting any spotlight on it.
So I think that the rhetoric that's come from people like Smodrich and Ben Gavir on the Israeli government side, who keep, you know, every time they gob off, and they're very extreme far-right guys, they clearly have had a plan almost from day one of this to turn the events of October the 7th into an opportunity to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians.
And by that, I mean, just kick them out.
And they've now been openly talking about this this year.
So once I saw that happening, I was like, okay, there are elements of this government who genuinely do want, not just to dismantle Hamas and get the hostages released.
They want to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza.
They want to annex the West Bank.
They said it.
You can hear the tapes.
And then I hear, well, they don't matter.
Their opinions don't matter.
They're senior members of the government.
So I just felt that was, to me, yeah, this guy, I mean, this guy is an absolute lunatic, as is Smodrich.
And I'm sorry, they do matter.
They're serious players in this Israeli government.
And so they have been waging a rhetorical campaign of wanting ethnic cleansing, which is a crime.
So I don't think it's reached the bar of a genocide simply by comparison to other places where it's not been called a genocide.
However, and I do, you know, I've bought the argument that if Israel clearly has nuclear weapons, they don't admit it, but they clearly have them.
If they wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, they could have done.
I understand if you're waging a deliberate genocide of a whole populace, you could do that.
I get that argument, okay?
But I do think they've got to be more accountable for what these guys on the government have been saying because what they're talking about is ethnic cleansing.
Now, to Trump's great credit, I think, for this alone, you should get the Nobel Peace Prize.
Never mind anything else.
He got hostages released, but he also made it clear to Netanyahu, you are not going to annex the West Bank.
And I want the Palestinian people to come back to Gaza, and we're going to rebuild this with a coalition of people helping to rebuild it and try and, once and for all, get this situation sorted in a way that we had with Northern Ireland, for example, near my country, where after decades and decades of conflict between warring neighbors, in the end, when nobody thought it could happen, in the late 90s, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair,
Senator Mitchell got together and they managed to barrel through a peace plan that has pretty well held steady ever since and the killing stopped on both sides.
This can be done.
It's incredibly difficult, but I am delighted that Donald Trump, in my opinion, has barreled through some common sense into Netanyahu, who was being fueled by these guys.
Have you interviewed Netanyahu?
Yeah, three times, but not since the war started.
Okay, that's the part.
I'm talking about during the war.
So have you reached out to him?
Yeah, yeah, he won't come on.
Why do you think?
He doesn't want to answer these questions.
So you've invited him, but he won't come on?
Yeah, many, many, many times.
I've interviewed him three times before.
I went to Jerusalem.
I went to his office for CNN back in 2011, 12.
So if he agreed to have you on and go, you'd go to Israel to interview him?
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah.
Very interesting that he hasn't come on with you.
Okay.
In regards to, you know, you've had Ben Shapiro on when he was super young.
You know what I'm talking about?
When you had him on your Constitution, when you guys had that conversation, you had Alex Jones on when he came in with the whole 1776.
Well, he had a petition to deport me.
And it was quite funny, actually, because he said that because of my opposition or criticism of the Second Amendment, that I should be deported.
And in fact, Obama was president, and it was done on the White House petitions page.
And if it reached, I think it was a threshold of 25,000 signatures, the president had to give a verdict.
And it went to like 120,000 people, signed the thing, to have me deported.
And Obama, I was on air at the time, and the news came, you're not going to believe this.
Obama's just saved you for the American people.
What do you mean?
They said you can stay.
He said that you're covered by your First Amendment rights, which apply to anybody who's living in America, citizen or not, you're covered by your First Amendment right to criticize the Second Amendment.
And he was absolutely right.
I was.
So, you know, I don't want to relitigate my whole view about guns in America.
It rapidly became clear to me that whilst I may have validity to my views, these were not views shared by many Americans.
And I didn't want to hear a Brit lecture them on how to lead their lives.
I get it.
But on that point, they both missed the fundamental point, which is I was entitled under my First Amendment rights to criticize the Second Amendment.
And so I should be.
And your position hasn't changed about the Second Amendment?
Well, no, I mean, my position has changed in this regard.
I would say that I come from a country that used to be steeped in guns.
Everybody had a gun 200 years ago in Britain.
And now very few people have a gun.
We had a horrific mass shooting like Sandy Hook at Dunblane in Scotland in the mid-90s.
I was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time.
It led to a very interesting campaign started by a Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, taken up by Tony Blair, a Labour Prime Minister.
It was a cross-party agreement that we were going to stop most private ownership of guns to try and stop this happening because the person who did it in Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton, had built up a big arsenal of private weapons.
And it was successful.
And now we've not had a mass shooting since.
In Australia, they had a horrific one in Hobart in Tasmania.
35 people got murdered around the same year, actually.
They did a buyback program, and I think six, 700,000 guns got handed in, and the government paid people for them.
They've not had a mass shooting like that since Hobart.
So, you know, it's different culture.
Are you more open to it now?
Well, no, what I would say is this.
America has 400 million guns in circulation.
Neither Britain nor Australia had more than a tiny problem.
But with all the knife crimes that's going on in London, we have a problem with knife crime.
Okay, so why do you think you have a knife crime problem?
Too many knives in use on the streets.
I mean, I would make the punishment for being caught with a knife on the street extremely poor.
But we have a lot.
We probably have more knives than you guys have.
How come you don't have a lot of knives?
You have a gun violence problem.
We have a knife crime problem.
What is the ratio of the knife to gun problem?
In the UK?
Yeah, you can't.
We have hardly any gun violence at all.
No, no, no, no.
What I'm saying is the number of knife crime problems in the UK compared to the gun crime problems that we have in the US.
Oh, well.
What's the ratio?
Well, I mean, I think you have still between 80 and 90,000 people a year in America die from guns.
That includes suicide, which is a large number of that, but it also includes homicides and accidents.
UK has a tiny, tiny fraction of gun, but also the knife victims would be a tiny fraction of that.
So we're talking a very, very small percentage of your gun deaths a year.
If you were to be the prime minister, would you consider opening up and having folks in the UK have guns?
Or you have zero tolerance?
Well, I think you have to.
I think it's interesting.
There are lots of aspects of that gun debate I had here where I understood the American viewpoint.
I mean, Jay Leno said to me, Piers, it's like you're going to Germany and lecturing them every night on television about speeding too fast on the autobah, right?
They don't want to hear it.
They don't want to hear it from you, and they definitely don't want to hear it from your accent.
It's safe to drive 150 an hour.
Get there.
And he said, let the smart crowd know you're right.
He said, because too many people get killed.
He said, but most Germans wouldn't want to hear it from you, and they definitely don't want to hear it from your accent.
I get it, okay?
This was not a debate that could be led by a British accent.
However, however, I would simply put this caveat out there.
And I wish I'd made the debate actually about gun safety, not gun control.
I think the word control to the average American is total anathema.
It's like a warning sign goes off.
And I get that.
But I do think in a country with over 400 million guns in circulation, with the amount of gun deaths you have a year and general gun violence, you have an almost unique cultural issue with guns in America, which never gets tackled at all.
A million new guns get sold every month in America.
So the number of guns in circulation rises exponentially all the time.
And it's logical to assume that the number of gun deaths will rise exponentially too, in line with the amount of guns in circulation.
My targets were never law-abiding, peaceful people who want to use guns for shooting.
My brother was a British Army colonel, one of the best shots in the army.
I don't think you get shooting for sport or in the military or any controlled environment.
The problem is when you have it in such open usage in civilian usage, to me, I get the self-defense thing, particularly if everybody else has a gun.
But at some point, I do think the amount of mass shootings you have in America, at some point, there has to be a mature, non-confrontational debate about what actually as a society can be done to make things safer.
Let's use the word safety, not control, and let it not be a Brit like me that leads this debate.
Let it be Americans having a debate amongst themselves in a way that can remain calm and rational and simply focused on reducing the number of people who get killed by guns.
Have you had Alex Jones on since that first time?
Yeah, I have, yeah.
So you guys have done stuff together.
Yeah.
My issue with him was actually, a lot of it was performative.
But my issue with him was the defamation case brought against him by the Sandy Hook families.
He was, it emerged in the case that there were graphs that are showing that every time he went on the airwave to lie about the Sandy Hook thing being staged and the families being behind it, two things would happen.
One, there'd be a massive spike in his earnings.
We're talking tens of millions of dollars were coming into him every time he did this on the airways.
They showed how that worked.
And secondly, you would have people then believing this who would go to gravesides and they would urinate on the graves of the child victims.
And I'm sorry, to me, it's just unconscionable that someone would do that.
And this idea that he didn't know that he was spewing lies is bullshit.
Of course, he knew.
So he was deliberately perpetrating a lie about Sandy Hook being staged to make money and in doing so, endangering the lives of all those things.
I interviewed those families.
I was like, it's unconscionable.
I had an argument with Elon Musk about it because he was going to come on my show and he pulled it at the last minute because he found a clip that someone sent him of me criticizing him for allowing Alex Jones back on the platform.
You may remember when he bought X, bought Twitter, he said he was going to keep Jones off the platform because he didn't like the way he danced on the graves of children.
I agree with him.
And I was disappointed when he let him come back on because I think that he was his whole business model was telling deliberate lies about grieving families.
I was disappointed he let him back on.
Yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
By the way, you've had Ben on.
You've had Candace on.
Have you had Tucker on?
You've done stuff for Tucker as well, right?
Okay.
What do you think about what's going on right now?
Especially this week, Ben Shapiro comes out, makes the video about the fact that Tucker had Nick Fuentes on and makes a 41-minute video calling him out and how dare you have somebody that's celebrating Stalin and Hitler and all this other stuff.
Where's your position with everything that's going on within the Republican influencer party?
Really interesting.
I like a lot of them.
I get on very well with Tucker, with Candice, with Ben, always have done.
I've never met or interviewed Fuentes.
My issue was Tucker gave me, we met in Riyadh in the desert by chance.
We were both speaking at the same event earlier this year, and we did a 90-minute interview on each other's shows.
Me interviewing him, then him going after me.
When he went after me, if you watch it back, it was very entertaining, very enjoyable.
It was a good old, you know, tussle.
But a bit like when he went after Ted Cruz and stuff, he held nothing back going after me and Ted Cruz.
But with Fuentes, I just thought he was oddly like not doing that.
And so the question then becomes to me, well, why wouldn't you go after someone like Fuentes?
The stuff he said on the record is so appalling in many cases.
There's so much stuff that as an interviewer, you have to go after him about.
So my criticism was not that he platformed.
And Tucker is right.
He can platform anybody likes.
It's one of the biggest platforms in the world.
My only criticism was, why didn't you give him as hard a time as he gave me?
I think that's fair.
I think that's what I'm doing.
So you would house Nick Fuentes.
Well, I think in light of all the controversy about him, it would be quite interesting to get him on my show and actually do an uncensored number on him where I go after him about a lot of the stuff he said on the record.
I think now it's...
You would lose your Jewish donors if you do that.
So I just want to prepare yourself.
I don't care about things like that.
You're going to lose that kind of stuff.
I never care about any financial impact to anything I do.
I think you've got to be intellectually honest in this game.
I think you are.
When I watch you.
I appreciate that.
You know what I would say?
When I think about our jobs, what we do, versus think about the non-profit job.
The non-profit job, guys are giving you a few million dollars.
They're not going to get anything in return because they support the cause.
So imagine if all of a sudden you're like, well, you know, like Heritage, we are, no matter what they tell us, we're going to protect and be for Tucker forever.
And then the next day, listen, we were a little bit inappropriate with our comments and we have changed our position because the donors threatened to walk out.
So that charity, the non-profit sector, is a slippery slope because you worry about losing that $4 million fund, the $2 million fund, the $3 million guy that's going to take the money away.
You know, I had this kind of debate about the platforming with people like Andrew Tate and stuff and Candice Owens when I platformed.
And I kind of evolved my view a little bit to the degree that I think that these people have huge, huge followings.
You can either pretend they don't or you can accept they do.
And they either have an unchallenged platform of their own to just say whatever they want to say.
Take with Candice, for example.
I've had a couple of big bust-ups with her about this ridiculous assertion that Brigitte Macron is a man, right?
I think it's 100% bullshit.
I think she knows it is, but she's now being sued by Brigitte Macron, who will probably prove very easily she's a woman in court.
And Candice will lose, but I'm sure spin it into some kind of Pyrrhic victory.
And that's her business.
But if I have her on, I challenge her about it.
We have a proper old ding-dong about it.
And actually, I do think that probably society and democracy is better served by having people who have big, big followings give them a platform, but challenge them.
That should be the challenge for everybody.
I mean, I do that with anyone, but I just think having people who've got very contentious views on where you don't challenge them, that's an abrogation of your duty as a platformer, because otherwise, what are you really doing?
You're just giving them more oxygen for views.
And if you don't agree with them, you know, I thought it was very interesting when Tucker went after Ted Cruz and said, well, what's the population of Iran?
He didn't know.
It was a viral moment.
And we all thought that was a brilliant moment.
But you do think, well, why was there no viral moment like that out of your two-hour interview with Fuentes?
You know, I can guarantee there would be if I was with Fuentes, he'd probably give me some hammer too.
Fine, fair enough.
I can take it.
But I do think he needs to be challenged.
Fuentes has a massive following, increasingly influential amongst young men in particular, as does Andrew Tate.
I've interviewed Tate a few times, and I think I hold his feet to the fire and he gives it back.
And actually, young people who watch it, who maybe have a view of him that is unchallengeable from his own arena, see him being challenged and can maybe change their views.
Who did you interview that in the UK when he walked on the streets?
You went to restaurants.
People said, I cannot believe you, you know, put him on platform.
Who was the number one person that you got criticism in the streets?
Probably, probably Andrew Tate.
Above everybody.
I think so.
Yeah, he's the most divisive figure that I interview on a more regular basis.
Yeah.
And it's a tricky one.
You know, I'd sort of buy into Tucker's thing that you should, if you got a platform, you should be able to interview how you like.
I mean, when he did Putin, for example, he got a lot of stick for doing it.
But would any journalist turn down the chance of interviewing Vladimir Putin?
And if you're honest, would you go to Moscow and then start haranguing him to his face?
Probably not.
So, you know, I would probably say I'll interview Mr. I can't even go there because I'm on his sanctions list.
But if I, if I, if I said, look, next time you're in Washington or London, I'll do an interview with you.
I'd probably feel more comfortable because then you can ask him tougher questions.
Just azu, Tate?
No, Putin.
Oh, Putin.
Yeah.
So have you reached out to one of Sit down?
Yeah, we've had no from him.
Yeah, he's getting no from him.
Yeah.
I did Zelensky in Kiev.
That was a good interview.
Yeah, he would be interesting.
But by the way, where are you at with the Epson story?
And the reason why the Epstein story is interesting with you is Prince Andrew.
He's gay family.
He's not a prince.
I know he's not a prince anymore.
They change it.
You have to even say the name correctly.
What did we call him the other day, Rob?
It was like a full-on name.
Andrew Mountbatten.
Yeah, Andrew Mountbatten.
So, you know, with all this stuff over the years, what's your position with who Epstein was?
I think he was a predatory pedophile.
I think that he operated with other people who knew that these girls were underage and were happy to abuse them.
I've interviewed David Boyes, who was Virginia Dufray's lawyer and represented many of the other victims.
He's seen the files.
He thinks there are six to a dozen high-profile men named in them who should potentially face criminal prosecution, which begs the question: why do we not know who those people are?
Why are they not being prosecuted?
In Andrew's case, I had a view about this early on, which was you could legitimately say if you knew Epstein before his conviction for pedophilia, you could legitimately, I think, with your head hold high, say, or with credibility, say, I didn't know anything about that.
But the moment I found out about it, I never saw him again.
Okay, there were people that did that.
Donald Trump, I think, is one of the people who had nothing more to do with him after his conviction for being a pedophile with a 14-year-old girl.
Anyone who didn't do that is willingly continuing to consort with a convicted pedophile.
Very different credibility stakes.
Andrew's problem, and his wife, Sarah Ferguson's ex-wife, had the same problem, was they made public declarations that we never saw him again after a certain time.
And then the U.S. Congress has been going through all the files and releasing emails in drops, which have contradicted those claims.
It's now clear that Andrew and his ex-wife continued to have contact with Epstein way after they publicly said I disowned him.
And so they were caught lying, which is why it's now spiraled in the last few weeks to where Andrew has now been effectively deroiled by his brother, the king, because the king had no option.
And also, if we already know he's lying, what more is coming down the pipe from these Congress leaks?
I mean, who knows, right?
So it could get worse for Andrew before it gets any better.
He might well end up in a courtroom.
You know, the FBI are desperate to interview him under oath.
I don't think he has any chance of ever making any return to any form of public life if he doesn't go under oath to the authorities and say everything he knows.
I think he's been lying.
I think he obviously knew Virginia Dufray.
I think he obviously did have sex with her.
I think that he has been very disingenuous about all that.
And I think he's now been shamed and disgraced and everything else.
But he hasn't been brought to any criminal account.
And many people will feel that he should be.
How embarrassing do you think this is for the family?
Do you think this is something where the family is sitting there saying, you know, because this is a different challenge than Harry and Megan?
There's no comparison.
Harry and Megan are annoying little grifters who now use their royal status to trash the royal family, trash the monarchy, and make millions of dollars.
I don't like what they do.
I think it's horrible.
How miserable do you think Harry is right now?
Oh, he looks completely different.
Do you think he really is happy in love?
He looks like a doped-out misery yards to me.
And I just think it's the full reality.
I mean, look, who could be happy when you're estranged from all your family?
And she's estranged from hers, by the way, too.
Apart from her mother, her father lives 50 miles away, has never met her husband or her two kids.
He's the guy that brought her up on his own for eight years, remember?
It's a very weird story, the whole thing.
But I think, look, the level of what they've done, Andrew's on a different class higher of shame he's brought on the family.
There's a big difference between being grifters, making money out of trashing a family, and actually being actively involved in one of the worst pedophile scandals of modern times with this guy, Jeffrey Epstein.
And I think that we don't know the full story yet about Andrew, but we may well find out through the criminal process that's ongoing.
What do you think is more likely?
Andrew being innocent, going back in the family, becoming a prince again, or Harry leaving Megan, going back, apologizing, and being received again.
Well, Andrew will never be a prince again.
That ship has definitely sailed.
I don't think he'll ever go to America and be interviewed.
So he'll never clear his name either.
I think he'll live a life of shame as a pariah.
I think it's more, I mean, look, who knows about Harry and Megan?
I think they kind of deserve each other.
They're kind of joined at the hip now in their situation.
But almost everything they do is so cack-handed.
Like the other day, they went to the baseball.
She posts some cringe video of dancing around.
Right, do you have this?
Yeah, I've been doing it.
Can you play this?
This has got to be the worst fake celebration thing I've seen in my life.
And you met her before, right?
You and Megan had a actually met her once, but we'd had a we followed four of them on suits.
I used to love watching suits, and I followed four of the characters.
And she immediately direct messaged me, which was quite telling looking back on it, saying she DM'd you?
Yeah, oh my god, I'm your biggest fan, all this kind of stuff within about five minutes, right?
So, her and another guy called Rick Hoffman, who played Lewis Litt, who was her big friend on the show.
The three of us then used to exchange messages, all just quite fun.
They'd send me clips from future episodes and so on.
And then she said, I'm coming to London.
Can we meet up for a drink?
I went, Sure.
Took her to my local pub.
Actually, got on very well.
I thought she was very nice.
And that was very great.
Really enjoyed it.
Sent the pictures to Rick back in, wherever he was.
All very nice with her.
And then bang, suddenly never heard from her again.
Never heard from him either, Rick Hoffman, who was neither of them were known in the UK.
I was like, Who are you two little?
What's happened, right?
And then, of course, I see the story about Harry.
I was like, okay, well, that makes sense.
But Hoffman, you, you disowned me as a friend of the person now.
Yeah.
Well, no, he actually was quite funny.
He sent me a groveling message.
I've still got it.
Groveling message the day after the wedding, which he attended, saying, Piers, I'm so sorry.
I hope you understand.
It's all been so difficult.
I was like, oh, do fuck off.
But anyway, it turned out she had a pattern of basically disowning every single person from her life, including her father, who might somehow be a problem.
Because obviously, Harry hates the papers.
I used to run a tabloid paper.
I got that.
But she just wanted to cut loose anybody.
We saw it with friends and family and ex-husbands and so on.
Anyone that might be a problem for her world plan, which was getting her claws into a British royal prince, yanking him back to California and making hundreds of millions.
And we've seen how the rest has played out.
Was the conversation that was it flirty with the two of you or no?
Just like meeting nothing crazy.
No, People have tried to paint it as that.
It's so funny.
I mean, you know, just look at pictures of my wife.
No, no, I get that.
I'm just saying because this is them, Rob, at the baseball deal celebrating the Dodgers.
Yeah, I believe this is their home theater.
Oh, my press it.
Oh, my God.
It's like geese.
I was geese being attacked.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Absolutely.
Okay, how many times do you think they did that?
That's take three or take eight.
One of them, also, he's now given an apology for wearing a Dodger's cap.
You see him there in the Dodgers' cap.
So why is he sitting there miserable and her gloating, given that the week before he'd been at one of the World Series games in a Dodgers cap in the Dodger owner's dugout?
None of it makes any sense.
Now, suddenly a week later, he's sitting there miserable because the Dodgers have won.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, listen, she to me is one of the most, what's the word I'm looking for?
Cringe, annoying, narcissist.
She has to be the combination of those three.
I don't know anybody more annoying than her.
But, you know, and what's challenging is she's attractive.
Well, you look at that personality.
You wonder, if you go on a date, if you married her, what would happen?
Don't do that again.
Put your hand over here.
Hold me.
Why don't you hold me tighter?
Come closer.
I don't like your mother.
There's something about your dad.
There's something about your sister.
There's something about you.
I need you to stop talking to that person.
I don't think it's inappropriate.
You make me feel this.
You make me feel small.
Oh, I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with you, sweetheart.
This is going to be an incredible romantic journey we're going to go on.
By the way, crazy question.
When you were on, was it Britain's Got Talent or America's Got Talent?
You did both for the talent.
I didn't know.
I did both for like six years or whatever the timeline was.
There's one of them I saw, and I have to ask you this.
Can you go up all the way to the part?
This is one of my favorite ones.
Okay.
And go back a little bit, go back a little bit, go right there, right there.
Okay, no, no, no, no, go 10 seconds.
So, you know, which one this is, okay?
Shaheen.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He crushes, right?
And they put him up and he comes in, he sings the song, and then all of a sudden, Simon says, No, no, no, we got it all wrong, right?
And I'm sure they're not going to let us have this in the clip.
But played Rob from here.
So he comes on, plus play, incredible voice.
Okay, so sometimes I go out by myself and I look across the water.
So he's good, right?
And I think Simon is doing what Simon is doing.
And in my head, I'm paying a fee.
He puts his hand up.
Okay.
The look on your face here.
I don't know if you remember this song.
Are you smiling?
Are you smiling because this is like you guys know you guys were going to do this?
No, Okay.
No, no, it was never planned.
Stop.
This is not a plan.
Simon refused to allow any planning.
Oh, he wanted everything to always feel spontaneous.
So why do you smile?
What do you think going on here?
Because he comes out.
This guy is.
Well, I'm smiling because I've seen Simon stop people before.
And he always had a fixed idea of the kind of, you could hear someone sing.
You've got an amazing intuitive ability to do this.
Where he'd hear someone sing in particular, and he would know that the type of song they were singing was not showing off their range properly.
So he was often saying to them, Why don't you just try a different type of song?
And he crushes.
And sometimes they come back and it'd be a disaster.
And that's why I'm like holding my head going, this kid's great, Simon.
Don't do that to this kid.
But then, of course, he was great.
So this has nothing to do with the fact that it's set up because he comes back.
He does Michael Jackson.
Yeah, he's great.
And then from there, they love his voice so much that he ends up performing at his funeral a year later, whatever the timeline is.
So right after this, you come down, and I think you get Larry King's job after this, right?
So how does that happen?
Well, actually, no, in between, I won Celebrity Apprentice, which is where I meet Donald Trump.
So I was doing NBC's America's Got Talent, and they also then launched the first season of Celebrity Apprentice, which was the celeb version of the regular apprentice show.
And I immediately got on well with Trump.
And of course, I spent about 100 hours in the boardroom opposite him.
So I got to know him very, very well because I was there right to the end.
And then I won.
And when I won, I remember him saying in the live finale, he said, Piers, he said, you're tough, you're vicious, you're probably brilliant.
I'm not sure.
He said, but you beat the hell out of everybody.
You're my celebrity apprentice.
So when he won the presidency years later, this is 2008, 2016, he becomes president in 2015, 2016.
And I said to him, I sent him a note.
I said, Dear Donald, I said, you're tough, you're vicious, you're probably brilliant.
I'm not sure, but you beat the hell out of everybody.
You're the president of the United States.
Oh, yeah.
He rang me straight away.
We had a brilliant conversation.
He was like, he said, can you believe the journey we've been?
He said it again.
I rang him the morning after he put it.
I put this in my book.
The morning after he won.
So he wins at like 2 a.m., makes his victory speech, goes to bed.
Now, I know he never sleeps, but I was like, even by his standards, he's sleep-deprived.
So I thought, I'll just leave it.
Rang him at nine in the morning on his cell phone, and it rang and rang around.
Eventually, this very sleepy horse, Piers, can you believe this?
I went, actually, I can.
It's amazing.
Complete clean sweep.
And he said, Can you believe the journey again?
The journey we've been on.
I said, with all due respect, Mr. President, you've been on a slightly bigger journey than me.
I've gone from judging piano playing pigs to winning your show, to replacing Larry King, to a morning show and now doing a YouTube channel.
You have gone from making me your celebrity apprentice to becoming president of the United States twice.
And it's been an unbelievable.
So, you know, I have a long time I've had of being a friend of Donald Trump's.
I see the good, bad, and ugly in him.
Overall, I think he is a force for good.
And I think this time around, what you're seeing is somebody who's thought really carefully about all the things he didn't get right the first time around and the people he had around him in particular.
If I had a lot of disloyal people first time, you can notice this time there's hardly any briefing against him internally, very loyal group of people he has.
And I think they're on a mission to knowing the midterms are coming after two years.
You get basically a two-year window.
This is why he's gone so fast to stuff to try and really entrench Trumpism into making America great again.
And we'll see how successful he ends up being.
But I certainly think there's more good and bad than bad in Trump.
And I think people who try and over-demonize him, call him a new Hitler and so on, it's so fatuous and ridiculous and so self-harming.
All it did in the end was get him re-elected.
Yep.
Big name.
By the way, your book that's coming out, folks, before we talk about your book, Woke Is Dead, I want to play a clip for you.
Do you know what your most viewed clip is on YouTube?
Don't go to it.
Let's first see if you can guess.
Do you know what's your most?
It's a short.
Really?
Do you know this or?
It's not the one from Baby Reindeer, is it?
No.
No.
Okay, which one is it?
This is, it may be Baby Reindeer.
Yeah, it may be.
Played Rob.
This is your most viewed clip, 58 million views.
And I think this is appropriate to play this.
Yeah.
Because this goes right into your book.
Rob, if you have it, press play.
Why are you so triggered by a flag?
I'm not triggered by a rainbow flag.
I'm triggered by the fact that everywhere I go for a gallon of puff, everything has to be a rainbow flag.
Well, I'm triggered that everywhere I go for the entire year, everything has to be straight.
Why is straight flag?
Where's my straight flag?
Why am I constantly going to be a bad guy?
Where is my straight flag?
When have you ever seen a straight flag?
Where's my straight flag?
It's everywhere.
It's never been a straight flag.
Both of you are straight, and you're saying you're exactly.
How do you know I'm straight?
How dare you guess my straight flag?
Let's not play game here.
How many letters are there now in your life?
Wait, let's go.
How many are there?
I don't even know.
How many are there?
I don't need to know.
Exactly, I don't need to know because it's not about.
There are so many letters now.
We can't keep up with it.
It's all about your rap.
So, what's crazy about this leads to your book, Woke is Dead.
Yeah.
How common sense triumphant in an age of total madness.
Why'd you choose to write this book?
Because I felt in a way that Trump's re-election was the ultimate repudiation of a really insidious thing, this woke mind virus, as Elon Musk calls it, which for years had kind of dominated our lives.
It was best described to me.
An Australian woman came up to me in the street in London.
She said, Mr. Morgan, I hope you don't mind me interrupting your walk.
She said, but keep it these wokeys.
They're the most joyless people in the world.
They want to suck all the joy out of life.
And I was like, God, what a brilliant description.
Because if you think about it, the woke disciples wake up every day.
They don't find any joke funny.
They don't think we should be watching half of the TV shows we like, the movies we like.
We shouldn't be revering the historical figures we revere.
You know, they want to tell us how to talk, how to dress, what things we can wear are culturally appropriate and appropriate, and so on and so on.
It's a constant scolding, but also it's laced with a very nasty streak, particularly from those who have be kind hashtags in their bios, I've noticed, where they're the most vicious people.
And anyone who deviates from their kind of woke worldview has to be shamed, vilified, scolded, destroyed, cancelled.
And as we saw, ultimately, if you call everybody disagrees with a fascist, even when they're not, and you have this sort of narrow prism, which people don't follow it, they have to be cancelled.
You end up with deranged minds doing what the shooter did with Charlie Kirk.
There's a direct line that goes from that kind of thinking where you only allow one type of opinion.
And the irony of someone like Charlie Kirk, who openly welcomed other opinions, would openly debate with anybody.
He would go onto these campuses with thousands of people who didn't agree with him and say, come and prove me wrong.
It's hard to imagine a better standard bearer for actual free speech in a democratic society than someone like Charlie Kirk.
And he would listen to them with respect and everything else.
And for that, he got a bullet.
which killed him.
And he got it from someone who put anti-fascist slogans on the bullets because he believed Charlie Kirk was a fascist because that's what everyone had told him.
And he didn't like what Charlie Kirk says and believes.
That is fascism.
That's the irony.
These people became the new fascists.
It is so true.
I'm fully with you.
And I'm so glad you wrote this book.
Folks, if you haven't placed the order yet, go click on a link below, order the book, support this message.
God knows we need more of this message spreading around the world with the mandates we experienced the last five years and not thinking it's over with because it's still there.
We still got some fight to do it.
We were shown a video earlier today of a lady who goes to Gold's gym and she's in the gym and this guy's hanging there with his dangling hanging out.
She's like, what are we doing?
I'm just trying to work out.
I'm a woman and she's a lesbian woman in the bathroom.
So it's still there in certain pockets.
And she got banned.
And she got banned.
And the guy who apparently his name is Alexis, whatever his name is, Grant or Alexis, I don't know what his name is, but he was allowed to stay in the gym and not the other way around.
He went back into the woman's bathroom.
Pierce, great to have you on.
As usual, it's always a good conversation.
I love talking about it.
And I love the fact that it's this way around.
Yes.
So I want to learn more about where you're at as well.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Likewise.
Appreciate you.
Great to see you.
Thank you.
Take care, everybody.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast.
We had the choice to make it cheap.
We chose neither.
Instead, we chose Tuscany Italy.
We chose true Italian craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skilled hands.
We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step, introducing the Future Looks Bright collection.