All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
June 5, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
44:23
20230605_piers-morgan-uncensored-schofield-scandal-noam-cho
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Free Speech Under Attack 00:14:39
Good evening Monday.
Welcome to Piers Bonnet Centre.
It's good to be back and it's good, but it's Pride Month, which of course used to be about celebrating gay rights and quite right too, but it's now mostly about advertising campaigns by brands celebrating their own righteousness.
Big businesses love to signal their virtue in English-speaking countries where gay rights have been hard-fought and hard-earned, but not so much in the Middle East where it's often illegal and punishable by death.
And with everything from burgers to banks and beers now bedecked in the rainbow flag, companies have to work a little bit harder to prove just how virtuous they are.
Glamour magazine has chosen to make Logan Brown its Pride Month cover star.
I'm a pregnant trans man and I do exist, he said.
No matter what anyone says, I'm living proof.
Living proof of what?
Logan is living proof that biological women can get pregnant, as hundreds of biological women do every single year.
That's it.
That's all this proves.
This is precisely where this movement loses everyone with a shred of common sense.
It's not about trans people.
It really isn't.
Most people watching this have probably never even met a trans person.
Most people, including me, who have, just want equal rights and respect for anybody who suffers from gender dysphoria, who genuinely believes they're born into the wrong body.
This is about the increasingly hysterical campaign to make us all believe the sky is green and the grass is blue and that anyone who disagrees is a hateful transphobe and a bigot.
It's a campaign that petrifies politicians, leads us to the remarkable position that the two opposition leaders in British politics now make statements like this.
A woman can have a penis.
Nick, I'm not.
I don't think we can conduct this debate with, you know...
Sorry, I'll get this.
No, no, no, it's just...
No, no, no, I just...
Can a woman have a penis?
Well, I've just answered that question.
They can.
Listen, I've made it really clear that if people, the vast majority of people will have the same gender as their biological sex, but a small number won't.
So a woman can have a penis?
Well, quite clearly.
Quite clearly, a woman can have a penis.
I mean, that happened before I went away, and I spent the whole week I was in France mulling over that answer and concluded it was a completely stupid thing to say, wasn't it?
Can you imagine if I'd said 10 years ago that British politics would pivot on the question of whether women have penises, or that the most terrifying question in the world would be, what is a woman?
The documentary of that name, What is a Woman, calmly eviscerates this absurdity by allowing the people who advance the looniest arguments to tie themselves in their own knots.
Please, if one person could tell me what a woman is.
You are not here for women!
We ask you to leave!
What is that?
A woman is not anything in particular.
There is not one particular thing.
It could be many things to many people.
Some women have penises, right?
Some men have vaginas.
Women only know what women are.
Are you a cat?
No.
Can you tell me what a cat is?
You want to tell us what a woman is?
I'm a biological woman that medically transitioned to appear like a male.
I will never be a man.
The interview's over.
Let's start off the cameras.
Excuse me.
I just want to know what is a woman.
And you're not going to find out.
Well, that documentary was posted to Twitter at the end of last week, so it could be seen far and wide for free to mark its anniversary.
But in a sign of these fevered times, it was censored for the crime of misgendering.
Misgendering.
Well, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, personally intervened and then recommended the film to his gazillions of followers.
And in a second sign of our times, the tweet promoting the film has now been viewed 172 million times.
So the biggest film in the world right now isn't Little Mermaid, Spider-Man, or That Is Fast and Furious.
It's What is a Woman by Matt Walsh, which I think shows the level of sheer exasperation there is and this relentless campaign to subvert reality and bully anybody who refuses to go along with it.
For the avoidance of doubt, a woman is an adult human female.
That's it.
Beginning and end.
The percentage of women with penises is zero.
Well, is that even why is Matt Walsh, the filmmaker of the year right now, joins me.
Matt, well, congratulations having the biggest movie in the world.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
It's been a staggering week for you.
I mean, it was a great film when I watched it originally, because it just basically kept asking the same question I've been asking on the show for the last year.
But it's a question which flummoxes everyone from Supreme Court justices to male politicians here to anyone you care to think of in public life.
When you put it on Twitter and then it got suppressed and then Elon Musk intervened, what was your feeling about that whole process?
Well, when they first decided to censor it, it was kind of this feeling of, oh, well, well, here we go again, because this is what we're used to from big tech.
It's, you know, every single big tech platform is run by the radical far left.
And especially on this particular issue, they don't want you to talk about it.
They don't want it acknowledged.
There are basic truths that aren't allowed to be discussed.
We were just demonetized by YouTube on misgendering grounds, you know, just a couple of weeks ago.
We thought that Twitter would be different under Elon Musk, and then they kind of pulled the rug out from under us.
And at first, for me, it was sort of this, okay, well, I guess Twitter is the same as all the rest of them until Elon Musk, as you say, intervened.
And next thing you know, where there are resignations and all these sorts of things happening happening over at Twitter in their brand safety department, which makes it clear that, no, in fact, Twitter is the one exception.
It's the one major big tech platform where free speech is allowed.
So I was happy that, of course, how it worked out, but also that this film, on top of dealing with the gender issue, also could succeed in really a victory for free speech.
I think it's a really important victory for free speech, because if it had gone the other way and Twitter had decided to keep this film censored, then that would set a really dangerous precedent, I think, for all the other platforms.
Yeah, no question.
Elon Musk said this in reply to someone who tweeted him.
This was a mistake by many people at Twitter talking about the suppression of your film.
It's definitely allowed.
Whether or not you agree with using someone's preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.
I should know that I do personally use someone's preferred pronouns, just as I use someone's preferred name, simply from a standpoint of good manners.
However, for the same reason, I object to rude behavior, ostracism, or threats of violence if the wrong pronoun or name is used, which I think is a pretty reasonable position.
I mean, is that a position you would share?
No, I don't personally share that position.
I'm not going to use preferred pronouns.
I'm going to use the pronouns that are accurate.
I just reject the concept of preferred pronouns.
You can prefer whatever pronoun you want or whatever adverb or noun you want, but that doesn't mean that I have to use it.
You don't get to put words in my mouth.
However, the position that Elon Musk has on this is it's a position a lot of people have.
And at the very least, it respects free speech.
So this is what he's going to do.
But you can say what you want because you can't force someone else to share your perceptions.
That's what the preferred pronoun thing is all about.
They're trying to not only put words in your mouth.
They want you to affirm their perception of reality.
And the idea that we would be forced to do that, either legally or even according to the terms of service of a big tech platform is just insane.
What it is.
And of course, the argument they use is what's offensive.
But of course, the whole point of free speech really at its heart is that you should be allowed to offend people.
I mean, that's the point of free speech.
It's not that everyone agrees with each other.
It's that you should be able to vehemently disagree or be offensive or rude, if you want.
And people should be able to tolerate that because that's what happens in a free society with a thriving democracy that believes in free speech.
Yeah, that is the importance of free speech.
And like I said, a lot of this story is about a victory for free speech, which is really important.
But I also want to note that what's happening here is on an even deeper level because on the left, what they're trying to shut down, it isn't just speech generally, and they are trying to shut down speech, but they're trying to shut down true speech.
So it's not just speech.
It's in particular, basic fundamental truths of life that they're trying to stop us from saying.
And that makes it all the more dangerous and egregious.
I mean, your issue with YouTube was they demonetized you effectively by saying that you had misgendered Dylan Mulvaney, who's this transgender influencer that, of course, has created Bud Light's revenue by taking part in a PR stunt for them, which enraged the core customers at Bud Light.
What did that whole thing tell you?
I mean, A, what happened to you guys in terms of the way YouTube responded, but also about what happened to Bud Light?
Yeah, I think it shows that people are, as far as Bud Light goes, people are exhausted by this.
The left, you know, they were able to run roughshod over the culture in Western culture generally for years.
And I guess they assumed that there would never be any, that there would be never be any pushback.
And they kept going and kept going until normal people just finally had enough of it.
You know, I wish we had enough of it much sooner, but at least now, finally, a line is being drawn.
And I think one of those lines is when you're trying to get people again, trying to force them to affirm and celebrate something that's just not true at a certain point.
I think it's too far for the average person.
That's what we're seeing now.
This is not, despite what the left says, you know, this pushback against LGBT pride and against the transing of kids, this is not some sinister, right-wing, well-funded conspiracy.
This is really a groundswell thing.
This is grassroots.
These are just normal people who've had enough of it.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And then Dylan Mulvaney's case, I mean, Dylan Mulvaney identified as a gay man until last year.
And a lot of women have been genuinely outraged that Dylan Mulvaney has been putting out these videos, effectively mocking women, actually, if you look at them.
And that's been my problem with what Dylan Mulvaney has done.
So Dylan Mulvaney can call herself whatever she wants.
I don't care.
What she can't do, I don't think, is make millions of dollars mocking the concept of womanhood when until last year, she identified as a gay man and is clearly a biological male.
And it's also the irony that we hear so much about the dangers of appropriation these days, even when it comes to things like Halloween costumes where someone is clearly just having fun and they put on a Native American Halloween costume, whatever it may be.
We're told that that's horrifically racist and it's demonizing and it's a caricature of the person who wears the costume of.
Well, that's exactly what Dylan Mulvaney is doing.
He's making a caricature of womanhood.
This cover of Glamour magazine involving Logan Brown, who is a trans man, appearing to be a pregnant man on the cover.
But of course, Logan Brown is a biological female.
So it's actually a pregnant female that we're looking at on the cover.
When a magazine, a mass market, mass-selling women's magazine like Glamour does that to celebrate Pride Month, what does that say about where we've come to as a society?
Well, I'll tell you one thing it actually says is it makes the opposite of the point they're trying to make, because the point it actually makes is that women are still women no matter how they identify.
I mean, I read that article and they're making a big deal about, you know, Logan Brown was saying, well, yes, I exist.
I'm pregnant.
This is real.
I know it's blowing people's minds.
Well, no, it doesn't blow anyone's mind.
We know that you're a woman.
Even if you cut your hair short and you give yourself a different name, you're still a woman.
You still have the biological function and capacity of a woman.
So that's actually what it proves is that this biological identity is inherent.
It's immutable.
You can't get rid of it.
You just are who you are, no matter how you identify.
No, that's not the point they were trying to make, but to me, that's what it proves, that even a quote-unquote trans man can still get pregnant proves that she's a woman.
We've seen, as I said, Bud Light, we've seen the revenue collapsing after the De La Malvani thing.
We've seen Target, a big supermarket chain in America, suffering similar problems after really going very hard on pride merchandise in the children's departments.
We've seen your film try to be cancelled and then bouncing back within days to become the most watched film in the world.
I'm getting a gut feeling, Matt, that the woke worm is turning, that common sense is beginning to win the day.
And it's because the majority of people who've been silent and been cowed into silence are beginning to find their collective voices enacting.
I think that's exactly what happened.
And that's something that even when we were filming What is a Woman, which goes back, you know, we were filming it in 2021, a large part of 2021.
And, you know, I can remember going around the streets in various different cities and doing these man on the street interviews with people talking about these issues with them.
You know, what is a woman?
How do you define womanhood?
And people were just the average person on the street was terrified to even discuss the issue, especially on camera.
I think that if we were to do that part of the film again right now, I think we would get a different kind of response.
I think there'd be a lot more people willing to talk about this because I do, I agree, people are finding their voice.
Everyone has always known that this is crazy, the idea that sex can be changed and all of that.
People know that it's crazy, but they've been cowed into silence.
And all it took was just to realize that it's okay.
You can speak up and say what you know is true.
And once that starts happening, I think it builds momentum.
And I think the left is really worried about that.
Sometimes if you want to know it's raining, just open the window and have a look when it's raining and you'll see rain.
And the moment you start to deny that is where the trouble starts.
Matt Walsh, congratulations on having this monster film.
You're bigger than Spielbo right now.
ITV Management Lies 00:13:15
I'll take my hat off to you.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
The media scrutiny around this morning presenter Philip Schofield has been relentless since he stepped down more than two weeks ago and sit down interviews with the son on the BBC.
He talked about losing everything after admitting an affair with a young male colleague.
I understand how Caroline Flack felt last week.
If my daughters hadn't been there, then I wouldn't be here.
Who knew on the team?
Nobody.
Well, today the key member of his team, of course, Holly Willoughby, his co-host, returned to this morning saying she feels shaken, troubled, and let down.
Imagine that you might have been feeling a lot like I have.
Shaken, troubled, let down, worried for the well-being of people on all sides of what's been going on and full of questions.
You, me, and all of us at this morning gave our love and support to someone who was not telling the truth, who acted in a way that they themselves felt that they had to resign from ITV and step down from a career that they loved.
That is a lot to process.
Well, we all know about stepping down from jobs we love at ITV, but there are big questions left to answer over this scandal.
Or is it time to say enough is enough?
Join me in discuss all this, a journalist and author Jenny Kleeneman, talking to Vee's Richard Tice, and Rosanna Lockwood, my stand-in.
But not for long.
Like all stand-in, she's plotting and planning to seize the big chair.
All right.
No comment.
Well, if you're not, you should be.
Rosanna, what's your take on all this?
I've been off for a week reading about it, obviously, while lying on a sunbed, and it just reached a crescendo after Schofield gave his interviews.
Where I looked at, I've known him a long time, 35 years.
I wrote a biography of Philip Schofield, literally in the 90s.
And I looked at the guy and I thought, you are completely broken.
Yeah.
And when someone is in that condition, even though I felt that his comparison to Caroline Flack was clumsy and he probably shouldn't have said that, he probably meant it.
He probably did feel that he was genuinely what's left.
I may as well kill myself.
What do you think of the whole thing?
Where are we now with this story?
I mean, the question that you lined this up with was, should we still care about it?
Is it too far now?
I'd say it was too far a week ago.
I was saying this when I sat in your chair this time last week.
Why?
Why do the public care about this?
I don't really give two hoots about it.
It's a television show, perhaps a bit reductive.
I know it's representative of other issues in society.
I know people are interested, but sometimes what's in the interest of the public isn't what's in the public interest.
Richard.
For me, Piers, actually, he probably was right to give that interview because it highlighted to everybody just how he was feeling.
And I think that was the moment at which actually people stopped attacking him and focused on which I think is the right thing to focus on, which is the appalling, incompetent leadership and management of ITV, which is actually a seriously important company.
Well, at the one brand within the UK.
But one thing I know for sure, a lot of people at ITV knew about the rumors about this relationship.
I mean, everybody knew at ITV, right?
Let's be crystal clear.
That building was a buzz with this for about three years, because three years ago, the National TV Awards in the ITV box, the young man concerned in this story, confessed his undying love for Philip Schofield.
Everybody knew that.
So this idea that the whole management are basically going, we didn't know anything.
Come on.
That proves my point.
That I know is not true.
I mean, she has presided over an absolutely catastrophic performance of this company.
The shares are down 60%, the dividends down 40%.
She's being summoned to the select committee.
And yet, the non-exec directors, they're saying nothing.
The company has said nothing at the corporate level about this.
And Dame Carolyn, God bless her, she was the CEO when I left Good Morning Britain.
And they put me in a position where I had to either apologise for disbelieving Princess Pinocchio or I had to leave immediately.
There was no inquiry for me.
It was just like, you either now publicly apologize for disbelieving Meghan Markle's lies, as it turned out, or you have to leave immediately.
So I took the leaving immediately option.
But what's fascinating is two days after that, after I'd left, the Telegraph newspaper runs a story that says that Meghan Markle had written to Dame Carolyn on the Monday night before I left on the Tuesday, demanding my head on a plate.
Nobody thought to mention that to me.
And had they had done, I wouldn't have been so hasty in leaving.
I would have said, I'm not leaving because some princess tells you to make me leave, right?
So now, to bring it up to full speed now, the same Dame Carolyn McCall has repeatedly said in public that it had no bearing on the decision to force me out.
That is a lie.
If you're watching, Dame Carolyn, that's a lie.
You know it's a lie.
I know it's a lie.
I don't want an ongoing fight with ITV.
I had a great time at ITV.
Although I didn't even get a carriage clock when I left.
Not even a carriage clock.
But 15 years, not even a clock.
I mean, what would you do with a clock?
Even if you work at a factory, somebody gives you a clock, right?
I didn't even get a thank you, right?
At least Philip Schofield got 30 seconds of Derma O'Leary on the Monday thanking him.
I got nothing.
I trebled the ratings.
Not even a carriage clock.
On a serious point, here's my, well, here's a serious point.
My point really is, my experience of ITV management from the top down is that when it suits them, they'll lie through their back teeth.
Secondly, that the way they handle talent is morally schizophrenic.
Depending who you are and how important they think you are to the firmament at any given moment or how important your agency is, in the case of Philip Schofield, Anton Deck, and so on, people like that, Holly Willoughby.
They look at all those things.
They make moral judgments based on that kind of stuff.
That's where they lose me.
It's not consistent.
There's no consistent.
Right.
But the thing is, that will all come out because there's going to be an inquiry.
And I think that's a really good thing that there is going to be an inquiry.
I think if this had happened on the BBC, they would have had to have called an inquiry a long time earlier.
I do think, though, that there has been a feeding frenzy which has been spurred by some people who have a personal beef or maybe jealousy of both Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield that has allowed this story to have a momentum to go on and on in a relentless way that perhaps it doesn't necessarily...
Well again look Phillip Schofield made quite a lot of enemies.
It's not a secret.
I know quite a few people well, mutual friends who can't stand him, right?
And they really can't stand him.
And they made no secret of it.
Amanda Holden, Eamon Holmes, people like that.
They can't stand the guy, right?
So that was not a secret.
But I wrote a piece.
It's a little bit chalk and cheese though, Piers, as you know very well.
You know, like some people.
Yeah, I prefer to be a pleasant surprise than a bitter disappointment.
My argument about the ITV daytime firmament was that so many of them were just total fakes.
I wrote this piece for The Sun when this first broke 10 days ago.
That the whole thing is basically fake, right?
They're not real people, a lot of them.
So they say to your face, I love you, I love what you do, you're so fabulous, Piers.
And then behind your back, you hear almost immediately that they despise you and can't wait to get your job.
It's like the whole edifice is fake.
Isn't a lot of broadcasting like that?
It is fake.
Yes.
It is, yeah, it is.
And it's a lot of bosses telling you you're wonderful, you're wonderful.
Daytime TV seems to have a particular thing.
You normalize lying, and that seems to be what's happened here, is that the lies went on and on.
You know, if something is fake, it's essentially a lie.
And that's gone throughout the whole organization.
Can Holly really not have known?
Well, is it similar to her speech?
I mean, her speech today reminded me, we've got a bit of a here, I think.
Let's have Holly again, yeah.
Imagine that you might have been feeling a lot like I have.
Shaken, troubled, let down, worried for the well-being of people on all sides of what's been going on.
I knew what it reminded me of.
It was this.
Mitz Kessler, my co-host and partner of 15 years, was fired today for sexual misconduct.
All right, stay strong.
First and foremost, I want to offer our sympathy and support to the women.
We are devastated that this happened on our watch, and our hearts are with you.
And to you at home, I understand how you must be feeling because I and the whole team here at the morning show are feeling the same way.
Shock, disappointment, disbelief.
She's throwing me under the bus.
Well, I mean, apart from the white dress, which was a good touch, the angelic look, I like Holly Willoughby.
She's a good friend of mine.
I've known Phyllis Goville a long time, right?
I like Holly.
And she's in an impossible position.
She had to come back contractually and do what she did.
It's just, again, I wrote this piece, the speed with which people go from heroes in this game, right, where charities are falling over themselves to use them to people they think are their friends at work.
Here's a message.
They're not in most cases.
In most cases, they will chuck you under a bus and into a grave as soon as look at you while simultaneously ringing the bosses trying to get your job.
It's just what the nature of the beast is.
It's ruthless, it's horrible, and we've seen it laid bare at its worst.
But Rosanna, my question, I guess, we started with this, aren't we?
At some point, you've got to move on from this.
Unless something comes out, unless the young man concerned in this story that Philip Scoville had the affair with, unless he comes out and contradicts Philip Scoville's version of events, or somebody else comes out with new revelations.
What else do people want?
Philip Schofield is a broken guy.
He's not going to work on television again, almost certainly.
He's lost everything in his life.
I don't know what more the baying mob on Twitter want from Philip Schofield that he hasn't already lost.
And that was what was so evident from that interview.
He was an empty husk.
And I agree with you, it's clumsy, the Caroline Flack comparison.
But I remember watching her documentary where she say she used to go home after recording her shows and just read all the tweets and all the comments and feel empty and emptier.
And it reminds you that, yeah, showbiz people, presenters, they're overpaid.
It's a lovely life, but they're also human.
And it really does kill someone's soul to be attacked like that mercilessly day after day.
But I will say this, have the ratings for this morning ever been higher than they were this morning?
I don't know.
We'll find out.
I mean, the problem for Holly would be if they were gigantic for the first half a minute and then plummet.
I mean, we'll see.
Look, it's not funny for her.
She's obviously being very tight.
It's tough.
It's difficult.
You're in an arranged marriage with these situations.
I was in one myself.
Suddenly, suddenly you're divorced, right?
It's very, you know.
Very hard to maintain.
And when you say what do people want, they want her destroyed.
They want the show acts.
And there are some people who have, you know, like proper professional beef or who want the job and are going to keep on going as soon as, you know, when the results of this inquiry are on.
And I'm not saying they're all going slightly nuts, but this was the boss of this morning, Martin Frizel, who's a good guy, from my experience.
But this is how you reacted this morning to Sky News.
Tell you what's toxic.
I've always found toxic.
It's aubergine.
Do you like Aubergine?
Do you?
Is there a toxic work environment?
Do you like Aubergine?
Because I don't like Aubergine.
It's just a personal thing.
Is there a toxic work environment at this morning?
I've heard of what about is in fact.
That's a new one.
Somebody mentioned it might be an emoji reference.
I don't think we really want to go there.
But these situations do send everyone slightly nuts.
This probably goes quiet until the inquiry comes out.
And if the inquiry finds that actually the management and the leadership and the board knew about this, then I think the whole pack of cards comes down and it's a start again.
You know, the hardest problem for Holly Willoughby will be who to replace him with because poor old Susanna Reese, she's been through about 15 blokes now and none of them, none of them live up to me.
And that's a heartbreaking, heartbreaking moment.
Hard act to follow.
You couldn't wait to say that, could you?
Saving that up.
I was trying to say that with Australia Face.
You're all like, oh, really?
It's a joke.
Mind you, when one of them is Alastair Campbell, you can quite understand it.
My God.
Talk about creatoring the audience.
Maybe could she not do it?
Could she lead it and then have a sort of guest host each week?
Yeah.
Well, that's what she's doing, I think.
Anyway, look, we've got to leave it there.
It's a fascinating scenario.
I just think probably most people in the country now, if not the wider world, have just bored with it.
They're bored.
They're done.
Short of a new bombshell, move on.
Don't be thinking.
Yep, I think so.
Welcome back to Piers Organized Sensor.
Approaching Global Doomsday 00:02:48
Is it me or has politics the world gone completely nuts?
The US president can barely walk and talk.
The former president's been indicted on criminal charges.
A British prime minister had a shorter shelf life than a lettuce.
Vladimir Putin launched a war in Europe and thinks he's winning it.
Well, Noam Chomsky is a linguist, a philosopher, a fiercely outspoken political activist, and honestly one of the world's great political minds.
I spoke to him at length for a riveting interview on Trump's return, the state of the world, and on the end of the world.
Pleased to be with you.
I wanted to start by asking you: there's a famous doomsday clock based on what a lot of experts perceive to be the moment the world basically ends.
That clock is now heading towards the dreaded midnight.
You're 94 years old.
You've led an extraordinary life.
You've seen lots of things, not least world wars.
What do you think about the state of the world right now?
And are we right to be perhaps concerned that doomsday is on its way?
Well, the doomsday clock was set in 1947, shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At that point, it was seven minutes to midnight.
Later, the analysts abandoned minutes altogether, moved to seconds.
It's now set at 90 seconds to midnight for good reasons.
We're now facing questions that have never arisen in human history.
They will have to be answered soon, or else we're essentially finished.
One, of course, is the threat of nuclear war, which is growing both in Europe and in Asia.
The other is the inexorable march towards climate destruction.
We have a couple of decades in which to deal with it.
Methods are pretty well known.
If we don't pursue them, we will pass irreversible tipping points, and there will be a steady decline to undescribable catastrophe.
That's where we stand now.
I mean, I would add a third to that, potentially, purely based on what Professor Stephen Hawking told me in what turned out to be his last television interview, which, when I asked him what was the biggest threat to mankind, he said when artificial intelligence learns to self-design, then that's it.
There are some experts out there in the world of AI who believe we may be approaching that eventuality.
Critical Race Theory Wars 00:05:18
What's your view of AI and that threat?
I think that's mostly science fiction.
I mean, in principle, it is possible to reach what's called singularity, to reach a point where AI might move on independently.
But this is such a remote contingency that I really don't see any.
It doesn't seem to me worth considering very seriously, especially when we think of the imminent catastrophes that are quite real.
On the catastrophes that you outlined, taking the first one of nuclear war, how close do you think we're getting to that potentially happening with this war in Ukraine?
In other words, if Ukraine with its offensive was to push Vladimir Putin back, if it looked like back home in Russia, he may be losing the war or is even driven out altogether.
Do you think he's potentially the kind of person who might actually use a nuclear weapon to seize back initiative?
It's conceivable.
Tactical nuclear weapons have apparently been placed in Belarus.
The West is taking a ghastly gamble.
They're assuming that if Russia faces defeat, which does not look too imminent, but if they do, that Vladimir Putin will pack his bags and slink away silently to oblivion or worse,
and will not use the weapons that everyone knows he has to escalate the war up to the point of attacking NATO supply lines in western Ukraine, in which case there's growing confrontation with NATO.
Once you step on the escalation ladder, it's very hard to stop.
So it's possible.
Okay, let's move to another issue I think we have more common ground on.
Free speech, it seems to me, has never been under more ferocious attack in the West than it is right now.
Why is that?
And what do we do about it?
There definitely is an attack on freedom of speech, even freedom to read.
In the United States, Ron DeSantis running for president, as he just announced, has imposed regulations, laws in Florida, which make it illegal to teach authentic American history.
You have to teach a kind of history which glorifies the United States, nothing about what actually happened.
This is happening in Republican legislatures around the country.
Libraries are being forced to throw out books.
There's laws passed to say there are topics you're not allowed to talk about.
Well, he would argue, I mean, DeSantis would argue, I've interviewed him, he would argue that he is focused on things like critical race theory, which he feels is inappropriate for teaching young children.
He thinks that gender ideology should not be taught to young children.
And it has a lot of support.
A lot of Floridians agree with him about this.
Critical race theory.
What is critical race theory?
Does anybody know?
Critical race theory is a slogan invented by the right wing.
And the person who invented it, Christopher Ruffo, has been very open and frank.
He says we just use this as a way to refer to everything we hate.
If you want to know what critical race theory actually is, it's a small academic discipline which suggests, which investigates systematic elements of racism in American education.
They certainly exist.
It's never reached the schools.
Schools wouldn't even know what it is.
This is invented by the right wing exactly as Rufo stated to refer to everything we want, we hate and want to destroy, like teaching American history, like teaching gender issues.
We hate that, so we'll call it critical race theory.
Who has been for you the best American president of your lifetime, and who's been the worst?
In my lifetime, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And the worst?
Too much competition, I'm afraid.
I know you're not a massive fan of Donald Trump.
How do you feel about him running again?
No.
If he runs again, it'll be a disaster for the world for many reasons.
For one thing, Trump, as you saw during his first time, is dedicated.
Trump's Two Commitments 00:08:21
Actually, he has two commitments.
One commitment is to himself.
He's a megalomaniac psychopath.
All that concerns him is me.
The other commitment is to serve corporate power and great wealth abjectly.
His one legislative achievement was a huge gift to tax gift to the ultra-wealth, ultra-rich, and the corporate sector and nothing else.
But he is a major climate denialist.
He denies that global warming is taking place.
He wants to maximize the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, and to eliminate regulations which might mitigate the catastrophe.
That's a death sentence for the human species.
If we knew this was going to be our last day on Earth, I asked Professor Hawking this, actually.
I said, how would you spend it?
And he said he would get his family together.
He would play Wagner very loudly and he would drink fine champagne.
If you knew it was all about to end, how would you spend your last day?
I would get my family together, but skip the rest.
Finally, Noam Chomsky, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
So fascinating.
I've talked to you for hours.
What would you like your legacy to be?
If you could write your own heading on your own tombstone, here lies Noam Chomsky.
What would you like the rest of that sentence to say?
He tried his best.
I think that's absolutely correct.
And your best was extremely good and is extremely good.
Noam Chomsky, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Well, it was a much longer and really fascinating, wide-ranging interview.
You can watch the whole thing in its entirety on the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel, the fastest growing news channel of its kind on YouTube in this country right now, at 1.1.2 million subscribers.
So join the party and watch content like that full interview with Noam Chonsky.
Let's talk about ruthless television.
Oh, I've got some stories.
Let me onto a book called Toxic TV.
Toxic TV.
So when I worked in newspapers, it was always a bit more honourable.
They'd stab you in the chest, journalists, not in the back.
Although there's been a few sneaky ones recently.
I'm joined by the journalist and author Jenny Kleeman again.
I've talked to you, presenters, Richard Tyson, Rosanna Lockwood.
Let's remember, never get mad, just get even.
That's my key life philosophy.
Very Sicilian like that.
Noam Chomsky, fascinating guy.
The whole interview is really riveting.
I mean, literally, he's in his mid-90s, one of the great minds.
But Rosanna, we pondered this question.
If you knew it was the end of the world, and he clearly thinks this might be heading our way.
If you knew it was the last day, what would you do?
I'd keep it uncensored, Piers.
Oh, God.
I like that.
I like it, Richard.
A lot of champagne.
Yeah.
A lot of champagne.
Anything else with the champagne?
Well, your family, your friends, ideally, but just a lot of champagne.
Forget the cheese, just cheese.
Jeremy, what are you saving?
You're not your ways live.
I would go and listen to lots of loud live music and drink a lot of champagne as well.
I think I'd fly to Club Sank on Sank in Saint-Tropez with about 50 mates.
Maybe a couple of family.
It might include my kids.
Club Sank on Sank, Magnums of Rose, C Bass, off we go.
Dancing on the tables, cigars, brandy, death.
Wasn't that the week you just had?
Wasn't that the week you just had?
It actually felt like it was about to happen in the middle of last week, actually, but that's the way to go, isn't it?
Definitely.
Isn't it?
Interesting character though.
I mean, when you looked at his take, Rosanna, of the ways the world may end.
Yeah.
Quite interesting.
Very.
I was quite surprised that he didn't think AI was a threat, that it could be.
I think he's wrong about that.
I hesitate to correct an intellect of that brilliance, but I think he's underestimating the threat of AI.
I think AI is the biggest existential threat right now to the world.
But it's funny the people you speak to, Jaron Lanier, is another great brain on artificial intelligence, and he says it isn't as big a threat as you think, because when humans invented the car, the car can go faster than the human, but that doesn't mean it's better.
No, but if a car learned to self-design, which if Elon Musk continues with his trajectory of self-driving cars and so on, if the machinery inside it, computers start to be able to think for themselves, they probably would just kill all the humans, right?
This is the problem with AI, is that actually they think like robots, right?
But if you give them human deviance, if they're morally corrupted by humans training them to be morally corrupt and they don't care, they'll actually think that we humans are pointless.
What's the point of this?
Exactly.
I mean, that's the point.
If computers can think in such a way and develop it to the point they don't care, then that's a much greater risk, frankly, than the risk of nuclear war that troubled No Moore.
And you don't even have to, I mean, they're already teaching themselves new languages.
If you can get an AI to bioengineer a medicine, it can also bioengineer a chemical weapon.
Of course.
It can bioengineer a virus, you know.
And we're actually quite close to that.
I think it's very good that we're having these discussions now about regulation.
That is a positive thing before we're quite there.
But yeah, I was really surprised that Noam Chomsky was so relaxed about it.
He said it was like science fiction.
It really, really isn't.
People thought pandemics was science fiction.
Yeah.
I mean, look, we've been in a way since World War II as a world, we've been quite cossetted historically, comparatively, right?
I mean, it's actually statistically even now the safest time to ever be alive.
There are fewer wars.
People are living a lot longer.
There's less child poverty.
There's more cures for disease and so on.
So it's actually a great time to be alive.
It doesn't feel like it because of social media.
If social media had been around during the days of the plague, trust me, it wouldn't have felt great.
Anxiety levels may have been quite high.
But yeah, I mean, the other thing I thought was interesting about Chomsky was his assessment of Putin and Ukraine, which is really the great unanswered question.
If Putin, if this counter-offensive that's about to start, we think, goes on, and Putin really looks like he's starting to lose and some of these mercenaries he's hired to do the fighting turn on him, what does he do?
I mean, a cornered Vladimir Putin is a dangerous thing.
The tourism that strikes me most about, you know, I'm deeply interested in Russia and I've studied it a lot, is that the most dangerous thing to come out of the pandemic was Putin was left alone in a bunker with nothing but history books for two years and did something to his psychology.
He's always been that way, it's essence.
But this cornering him like that, but was interested that Chomsky said, you know, that sort of escalatory thing that could happen and it worried him when Chomsky has lived very much through the Cold War, managed to de-escalate.
I think we should listen to him.
By the way, do you hold your glasses to look more intelligent?
Yeah, occasionally I put you since we let you do a bit of anchoring.
I've noticed a lot more of that going on.
Yeah, Richard, Ukraine, what happens here?
Well, actually, I think the risk that we're learning about of these private militia, private armies, and how they react, both potentially in Ukraine, but much more seriously within Russia, that could be the greatest threat.
I agree.
Who knows where that goes?
How do you think it ends?
Well, the concern is that it's a zero-sum game and Vladimir Putin, who knows how far he will go to say face.
We haven't offered him a way out, really.
The most worrying thing to me about Ukraine is that still more than half the world basically sides with Putin.
Understand that, and you understand global geopolitics.
Large swathes of this planet do not think like we do here.
Thank you, Pat.
That was a surprisingly intelligent conversation.
I'm getting quite worried about you all.
That's it from me.
What are you up to?
As Rosano quietly observed, keep it uncensored.
Not just for your last night either.
The nine.
Export Selection