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Sept. 13, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:11
20230913_piers-morgan-uncensored-luis-rubiales-reaction-nei
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Rubiales Kiss Scandal 00:14:49
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensore, the kiss, the crisis and the comeuppance.
After facing me for two hours, Luis Rubiales is now preparing to face a criminal court.
But does he deserve it?
Kim Jong-un meets Vladimir Putin as the deadly dictators broken deals over weapons in space.
Have the real Star Wars begun?
I'll talk to Stargazing superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson about that and a lot more.
But should we have to repatriate antiques over their colonial links?
The BBC expert sparks a furious debate.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening, Francis.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
The story of Louis Rubiales has dominated headlines for many weeks.
More people have seen that kiss than probably watched the Women's World Cup final, which is a travesty in itself.
But that's because this has become a story about so much more than football.
It's about the way men treat women, about abuse of power, about cancelled culture, about our changing times.
At its heart, there's a man who clearly overstepped the mark in a moment of wild celebration.
The way he's behaved since, kissing Jenny Hermoso, has turned sparks of controversy into a raging inferno.
Rubialis shouldn't have done what he did.
He could have doused the flames much sooner by admitting his mistakes.
After sitting next to him for nearly two hours, I think he's still making some mistakes.
Throughout our interview, he wouldn't apologize directly to Jenny Hermoso.
You keep saying you're sorry and you made a mistake and you shouldn't have done it.
But you won't say sorry to Jenny personally.
And I'm curious why you're reluctant to do that.
So what we had is a spontaneous act, a mutual act, an act that both consented to, which was driven by the emotion of the moment, the happiness.
Many times he declined my, well, my offer to him to say sorry to the woman that he kissed that way.
But despite admitting that he was wrong and he shouldn't have done it, he wouldn't say sorry.
I thought that was a mistake.
He was also very prepared to immediately issue a very grovelling apology to the Queen of Spain for grabbing his crotch in front of her and her 16-year-old daughter.
You were sitting just a few seats away from Queen Letitia of Spain and her 16-year-old daughter, Infanta Sophia, the princess, and you very provocatively grabbed your crotch in a way that, frankly, I watched that and thought that just with members of the royal family sitting there and a young 16-year-old girl, again, was completely inappropriate.
For this, I am truly ashamed.
Do you apologize to the Queen?
Have you personally apologised to her?
No, of course I couldn't have the opportunity to speak with the Queen.
Would you like to apologise to her now?
No, no, yes, I did.
I did.
I mean, directly to her.
Yes, of course.
Happy to apologise to the Queen, who was sitting a few feet away, but not happy to apologise to the woman that he kissed in the way that he did, which he admits was wrong.
I'm sure the Queen and her daughter didn't appreciate the crotch grab, but Jenny Hermoso is a woman who didn't appreciate that kiss.
She's made that pretty clear in the last three weeks.
And of course, the celebrations of winning the World Cup, the greatest moment of any football player's life, have been completely overshadowed by that kiss.
Surely Rubiales should be the one saying sorry to the person that he did that to, but he wouldn't.
And when you peel back the layers of this saga, it does get quite complicated.
Rubiales insists, and this may be why he won't offer the apology, that he asked Jenny Himoso if he could kiss her.
And he says lip readers will be able to prove that.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
It's clear that Jenny Himoso initially downplayed the incident.
This is what she said on radio immediately afterwards.
So it was nothing apparently, but then it became something.
It's also clear from the videos on the team bus on the night that they won the World Cup.
There's lots of laughter, chants of Prezi, Prezi, president, and Bezo Bezo kiss.
No sign there really of any great traumatic experience that had just occurred.
No sign of the fury and scandal that was to come.
Now, that doesn't mean that what he did was right.
It wasn't.
It doesn't mean that a woman can't change her mind about whether she thinks something was acceptable or not in the way that Jenny Himoso did.
But it does mean that for whatever reason, the goalposts moved in the few days that followed what happened.
Now, on Friday, Rubioes will appear in court in Spain.
He's kissed goodbye to his job dramatically during our interview, and he could kiss goodbye to his freedom too.
If he's found guilty, he could face one to four years in prison.
Hamoso filed a criminal complaint of sexual assault against Rubiales and will testify at the High Court in Madrid.
But is that really where this saga should end up in a courtroom?
There are powerful forces on both sides of the debate who are wrestling to reframe our sense of right and wrong.
The Guardian reviewed the interview, called it sickening and an illusion of good journalism, which I took as being one of the best reviews I've ever had from The Guardian.
He also slammed Rubiales as a symbol of macho culture, prevalent and embedded in capitalist society worldwide.
Wow.
Well, I've been waiting to review any word exclusive in The Guardian for a very, very, very long time, but they don't actually break any.
And honestly, when I read the review, I found that rather sickening and clichéd and predictable.
Surely the reasonable verdict on the Rubiales scandal is this.
He made a mistake.
He got overexcited.
He was wrong.
He was inappropriate.
He should absolutely apologize.
And perhaps he should have lost his job.
Although I think the jury is out on that, to speaking to people anecdotally that I've spoken to about this.
But some people, I suspect a lot of people at The Guardian, won't be happy until he's locked up in a prison cell and taking the blame for every male sin in this world of apparent toxic masculinity that everyone has to endure.
And I think that is wrong too.
Well, joining me to debate this is football journalist Mina Rizuki, the president of the Norwegian Football Association, Lise Clavernus, Spanish football journalist and author, Guillaume Belegi, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author Heather McDonald.
So we've got a great panel for this, and it is complicated.
Now, Mina, I can see you slightly rolling your eyes at some of the things I was saying there.
What's your view of this?
I am outraged.
So I am one of those people that I'm sorry, but I do agree with the way that The Guardian has put this.
I don't think this is what has been portrayed in this interview is that this is an isolated incident.
This poor man went on stage and he kissed a girl out of celebration and now we're debating whether or not it's...
Well, no one called him a poor man.
I didn't express any sympathy for what he'd done.
I said what he did was wrong, as did he.
The question becomes: was what we witnessed literally in one of the most watched events in the world, the World Cup final podium, as they're all getting in there, was that a crime?
You have to apply context because everything in this isolation is regarded.
We are now debating what happened as an isolated incident.
But what we need to know is the man.
We need to understand the full context of this.
But that won't be relevant to any court case.
The court case will be about whether what he did constitutes sexual assault.
There won't be the context of what may have gone on with disputes over pay and stuff with the Spanish women's team.
It will purely be about the kiss.
So we're debating early whether or not this is a criminal case.
I think so, because I think that he's lost his job.
So you can say that could take in all the other stuff.
All right, maybe he shouldn't be president.
And that's a perfectly legitimate argument.
I just don't think what we witnessed constitutes any kind of crime.
And I'm not sure that most people feel that.
But do you?
Yes, I do.
I feel that if my boss comes in and decides to celebrate with me by kissing me and cultural conformity, and as women have learned to do on most occasion, is taken on the chin, or not perhaps make a big deal out of it, perhaps, you know, slap him on the podium there and then, go in and, you know, everyone's just won the World Cup.
You have to just celebrate with everyone, but you, in your heart of hearts, understand that something's gone wrong, but you cannot or have the emotional capacity to process this.
But he is still your boss who has launched himself on you and then gone downstairs to the dressing room to then tell everyone that he wants to marry you and they're all invited to this, I think that that would put me in a very vulnerable state.
And if I was to process that emotion, what exactly are my options over here?
How is this man allowed to do this?
And then at the end of the day, I am being questioned.
They are threatening me with legal action.
They are calling me a liar when he has done this action in front of everyone and has shown time and time again that he has quite disregarded.
And I think you make some very good points, particularly about the way they tried to demonize her.
I thought it was completely wrong.
They should never have done that.
How do you explain the radio interview she gave, dismissing it all as nothing?
The fact that on the team bus they're all laughing and joking, the fact that in the dressing room actually, when they're offered the trip to Abiza, and he's obviously joking about the marrying thing, but that, again, the atmosphere appears to be very light and jocular.
So I've been in certain positions before as somebody who works in men's football, especially, in which you walk into a situation and they joke with you, but it's all jokes.
And there was no seat available for our production meeting.
And they will say, come sit on my lap.
What is exactly my options to respond to this?
I either laugh and joke and play it off, because that is my instinct to survive or to culturally conform to society ideals, or I make a big deal of it and then I put my job on the line.
And these are the decisions that we're faced with every day.
I understand that.
So everyone keeps talking about whether or not, or her reaction.
So if I was to abuse a little boy every day, but he doesn't go to the police or he doesn't show himself to be trauma-induced or sitting in a corner, then it's okay.
I can continue to abuse this little boy.
It's not about how she has reacted to the situation.
It is about what he's done.
And we don't talk about enough about what he's done as being the problem.
And if we don't stop this now, what is the next step?
He has lost a very high-profile, powerful job as a consequence of this.
So the consequences are clear.
I think my point would be, let's bring in Professor MacDonald here.
My point, Professor, is about whether this is proportionate now to take this to a courtroom.
Do you think it is?
Well, I would say this, Piers, that if women are so fragile and so vulnerable that a spontaneous split-second kiss in the context of mass elation, almost mass hysteria, can traumatize women to that degree.
I don't want them serving in combat units.
Which is it?
Are women strong and capable of fighting wars?
Or are they so fragile that a spontaneous act that is never to be repeated can send them into a state of complete breakdown?
As Mina said, context is all.
This happened in the context of group mass elation.
Clearly, he did not walk up to her in out of the blue in a boardroom meeting.
This happened.
She... lifted him up first.
She's that strong.
She is no shrinking violet.
Her behavior in the locker room afterwards, she was guffawing, grimacing to the camera, tattooed.
She is not a fragile woman.
She said herself in her initial statement, this was an absolutely accurate portrayal of this event.
It was a mutual gesture, totally spontaneous, prompted by joy.
Feminists have become martinets.
They have no tolerance for ambiguity, for human foibles.
This is a travesty that he is being criminally prosecuted for something that had no lingering effects.
I can guarantee you, Hermoso does not fear that she is going to be stalked by Luis Rubiales.
Let's bring in again, Belle.
You know, you are the token man on this panel, Guillerm.
So a lot rests on your next few words.
I've read your tweets on this.
I know you've been quite scathing about Rubialis.
You think it's right that he stepped down.
What do you feel about the wider context of this as it now heads towards a courtroom?
Do you think we've lost a sense of proportion or do you think that actually he should be held accountable criminally potentially for what happened?
In fact, you lose a sense of proportion when all you talk about is the kiss and Rubialis.
This is part of a wider context.
My question to Rubiales would be, how can you think that what you've done was right and that you needed a whole wave of social protest for you to actually change your mind?
And I must say, the apologies that he did to you were much more sincere than the ones that he did the day after.
And for me, if Me Too was about pointing out criminal behavior of men towards women, in this case, the Ciacabo, the Enough is Enough hashtag that Alexioputé has put in first, it's about let's stop things that have been normalized like a boss.
And Piers, you said the context is not important in a court case.
In this court case, it's very important because it's a boss doing it to an employee.
Oh, no, no, no, sorry.
Just to clarify that, that is so important.
Yeah, to clarify that, I think that's absolutely important.
The power imbalance, I think, is important.
What I meant was the history of the kind of arguments that have been going on between the Spanish Football Federation and the women's team, which led to so many of the women not playing in the World Cup and so on, about pay, equal rights and so on.
I don't think any of that is going to be relevant in the courtroom.
The courtroom will simply be studying this kiss to see whether it constitutes a sexual assault.
Power Imbalance in Courts 00:04:28
And he was very firm in the interview, repeatedly, that he believes that the full evidence, when it's laid bare, will support his view that he asked permission first.
Now, if that is true, if he's able to establish that, does that change the narrative?
If he establishes that, we may change the narrative and let's see what the co-case and the judge decides eventually in the high court.
Because legally, cases similar like that have come out with a yes, he's guilty and no, he's guilty.
So we cannot get into the legality of it.
And that's why, by the way, he did not deal with Jenny Romoso.
I apologize into Jenny Romoso.
He would have put him in a weaker position to the meeting that he's going to have Friday, the co-case that comes forward.
But I go back to this idea.
In which world does he live in where he thinks that this is fine?
I'll tell you the world he lives in.
A world in which the Assembly, the General Assembly of the Federation with 43 members, only seven are women.
A world in which, and these are decision makers in the Federation, a world in which the heads of the local federations of Spain that also choose the next president, they're all men.
That's the world he lives in.
And these are people that he's chosen, that he pays directly or indirectly for them to say yes to him.
That's the world that he lives in.
And I think he's in shock that the majority of Spanish people almost unanimously are saying, enough.
That's definitely not on.
I do think he was in shock.
I think he was in shock in the immediate aftermath, hence his kind of attack on his critics.
Then the penny began to drop that he'd done something which most people found completely unacceptable.
To say to his credit, he didn't try and hide the fact that he realized now what he'd done was completely wrong.
I think the only debate left is whether it should now move to a criminal court.
Let me bring in Lisa Clavin, who's been listening very patiently, president of the Norwegian Football Association.
So you hold this job in Norway.
What have you made of the whole scandal?
Of course, I've paid much attention.
I was there in the final.
Luis Rubiales is a colleague of mine.
I know him from before, not personally, but met him several times during my campaign when I ran for the UFA EXCO as the first woman in history to run for an open position.
And I met him as a friendly and respectful colleague.
So it's a difficult case to comment on an individual basis because now it's a criminal case and that's not relevant to me.
So the context I see it in is in the football context.
Jenny Romoso to me is a great football player.
She's a world champion.
She's of course the robust player.
She's a great passer, great finisher.
So that's the context that is overshadowed.
And that is also the context we have to see it in.
And I feel responsible to bring in that context because it's also societal important that we do it because it's the biggest sport in the world for girls and women.
And it's been systematically unbalanced for 50 to 100 years.
And now we see this frustration piling up.
And of course, for Rubiales, it's what he called it mediatic tsunami.
Of course, it's to him and to Jenny Romoso.
This is now we're going to follow them and see how do they act.
Of course, they're both under tremendous pressure.
But what he has to realize, and I think he will realize, every person can make mistakes.
But the context here was also that the Federation was in a fight or in a battle with the female players for years and years.
So that is also a context that is very relevant also to the whole society and that we really need change.
We really need change.
I think the real shame of this, actually, is that it totally eclipsed the magnificent achievement, not just of the Spanish team winning, but actually the event itself being such a dramatic success with huge sell-out stadiums, massive TV ratings.
This was the real coming of age, I think, of women's football as a global sport and a massive success.
And rather than talking about that and all the positives, we've spent three and a half weeks talking about a bloke kissing the winning captain, which seems to me completely wrong.
Unfortunately, we've run out of time.
I'm really sorry, but thank you very much to an excellent panel.
A lot of range of opinions here.
You know, for what it's worth, as I said at the start of all this, I don't think he should be heading to a courtroom.
I think the punishment enough of losing his powerful job as president and being humiliated globally, which he has been for the last three and a half weeks, should probably suffice.
But we will see.
Thank you very much indeed to my panel.
I appreciate it.
Aliens on the Moon 00:08:38
And since the next world famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson turns to one sense and he's promising to take us to infinity and beyond.
You don't get that one, every guest.
Welcome back to Peersborganized Center.
Kim Jong-un of Vladimir Putin met at a Russian spaceport today, talking about potential weapons and satellite technology deals.
The world's most deadly and shortest dictators tooled the rocket launch site before sitting down for a press conference where they talked about prioritizing the strategic importance of North Korea-Russia relations, which should send a shudder down all our spines.
Is this new worrying development in the real Star Wars, or are Kim and Vlad just trivial bit part players in a new global space race?
Well, who better to ask than the world's most brilliant and the world's most famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson?
So pleased to have him back on the show.
Neil, great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me back.
So, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and space seems an unholy trilogy.
What is your view of what went down today?
Yeah, I mean, I wasn't in the conversation, but seeing the images, it's a little bit worrisome because space is, we've known for decades, though, it's a new high ground.
And from a military strategic perspective, high ground gives you power, power that you didn't previously have.
So, yes, this alliance of nations that we're not friendly with now, that we're not friendly with, concerns me.
But what concerns me even more is space can be a place where we all come together for peaceful purposes, more so than anything we might ever do on Earth's surface.
So for me, it's an extra offense for anyone to speak of space weaponry.
Because in space, while you can have borders of countries on Earth, in space, there are no borders, right?
It's just space.
And so to me, it's a violation of a human species contract with the universe, if I can call it that.
Yeah, no, when you saw, for example, India launching rockets last week, I think it was, I mean, I found that very uplifting to watch that.
It was amazing to watch it, exciting.
I remember it took me right back to the 60s and 70s when I used to watch all the rocket launches as a kid.
What did you feel watching all that?
Yeah, so you're probably talking about the mission that they landed near the south pole of the moon, as the graphic there shows.
So they're the first country to land in that part of the moon.
The South Pole might have a repository of water trapped in the base of craters where the sun don't shine because the rim of the crater is higher than the angle that the sun will ever reach it.
And so the history of comet impacts and other things, water brought to the moon would evaporate where the sun shines, but stay forever where the sun doesn't shine.
And so they're the first there.
This was great.
They were dancing in the streets.
Yes.
And I was so, and they become the fourth country to softly land on the moon, joining.
So the idea that this becomes a world where countries participate so that it becomes the solar system becomes our collective backyard.
Am I too naive to think that that's possible?
I don't know.
What is interesting is it's a bit like artificial intelligence.
You know, a lot of it is incredibly exciting and wildly like, you know, you can go into wild new frontiers of potential.
And of course, there's another part of me thinks this is going to be incredibly dangerous because the wrong people will get their hands on AI and do bad things with it.
Yeah, so that's a very important observation to make because the press that AI is getting today leads people to think that all AI is bad when in my field we've been using AI for decades at some levels or another and every next power of AI that comes on online, we absorb it because let it do the work.
I don't want to do the work.
I have other things I can do.
Yeah, so it shouldn't indict the entire enterprise of AI because you can imagine some parts of AI turning rogue.
So with space, yeah, I want space to be peaceful.
Think about it.
In the International Space Station, it is a joint project with Russia and the United States and other countries.
So if countries can't get along on Earth, do you expect astronauts in space to say, okay, separate, don't talk to each other because our leaders can't get along?
That's almost childish to expect that when you have scientists and engineers in space doing real interesting work for the benefit of our students.
There are two stories, Neil, that when I saw them, I thought of you immediately.
One is that scientists at NASA have announced the existence of a possible planet that could sustain life.
Tell me about this.
Yeah, so that's the James Webb Space Telescope, if it's the new story I'm thinking about, it has the power to observe the atmosphere and the chemical composition of the atmosphere of exoplanets.
If the planet passes in front of the host star, light from the host star will move through the air and the chemicals in the atmosphere will leave its fingerprint in the spectrum that we receive.
And it found methane, it found carbon dioxide, and these consider these as biomarkers.
If there's evidence of life on the surface, if there's life on the surface, it may manifest in the chemistry of the atmosphere.
And it's in the Goldilocks zone where you can sustain liquid water.
Too close, the water evaporates.
Too far, the water freezes.
Everywhere there's liquid water on Earth, there's life.
If not fishes, then there's microbial life.
So NASA's mantra is follow the water if you want to find life.
And if we, so if this, so if I'm ready for the list of planets to go to, we'll rank them based on these kinds of evidence to say, if we want to have a second Earth or move somewhere, try this one first and then the next one and then the next one.
Because plenty of the exoplanets would be fully inhospitable to life as we know it.
Fascinating.
The other thing was UFOs.
So the US Congress convened this panel about unidentified anomalous phenomenon, UAPs, to try and work out what we do and don't know.
At the same time, as we're speaking, and this is freaky, but as we're speaking, apparently the Mexican parliament, someone's just produced images of alien corpses in the Mexican parliament and said they're alien corpses.
So I guess my question for you, Neil, is do you believe that there are loads of aliens out there?
Do you believe that governments perhaps know more than we do?
And should we be fearful about this?
Yeah, so first of all, those are not images of alien corpses in Mexico.
Those are presented as actual alien mummified aliens from like a thousand years ago.
So here's what you do.
When we went to the moon, we brought moon rocks back, and NASA allowed scientists of the world to analyze those rocks.
It shared samples with everyone rather than give it to only one lab.
So if those are actual mummified aliens found in Mexico or wherever they were, I overheard the press conference, they said they carbon-14 dated it.
It has 30% overlap DNA with humans.
If those are aliens, that would be amazing.
But in science, you need verification from independent sources.
So what they should do, as we know from mummies, there's still a soft tissue in the mummies.
Carbon-14 dated that, I don't know if he did it on the soft tissue or on the bones, but my point is you share the data with other laboratories.
And when you have agreement among what is measured, then you can talk about it as a discovery.
But the press loves chasing singular stories by one laboratory that says no one else has this, but we do.
You all just run to that and report it like it's the truth.
So, but science is not established by single measurements or observations.
Science vs Faith Unknowns 00:04:26
Are you saying we tend to sensationalize these things now?
Did I say that?
Yes, you did.
Yes, you did.
Let's take a short break.
I want to come back and talk about your brilliant new book, To Infinity and Beyond, and about vegans and about God.
Maybe not even in that order.
Welcome back to Petersburg Sense.
I'm talking to arguably the most popular scientist in the universe ever, Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, whose new book, just to do a bit of media sensationalism, Neil, his new book, To Infinity and Beyond, is out this month.
It's absolutely riveting, Rhea.
You write about this stuff so brilliantly.
You bring it all so alive.
I want to go into a few things.
But first of all, the key question for me with all this, especially when I was reading your book, how much do you think we know and how much do you think we don't know about what's out there?
That's a great question.
And I can actually quantify that answer.
So there are these things, there's dark matter you might have heard about.
So dark matter is 85%.
It's responsible for 85% of the gravity in the universe.
And we have no idea what it is, but we can measure it.
There's dark energy responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe.
We can measure that, but we don't know what's causing it.
And then you add up all of these sort of what these forces are doing in the universe.
It's 96% of what's driving the universe.
And all the forces of nature that we know and love, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, life, chemistry, biology, physics, that's in 4% of the universe.
So we know enough about the universe to quantify our ignorance.
So we know 4% of what's going on out there.
But also keep in mind that as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.
And that is the very soul of science.
That there are questions, people say, what questions do you want answered?
Yeah, I don't think that way.
I think, what question do I not even yet know to ask?
I think that's the really interesting part, is that you're probably not even thinking of the great question, right?
Because there may be something.
Correct.
I lose sleep over that, yes.
Now, I know you're an avowed atheist.
How can you be so certain that there is no supernatural, godlike entity out there, given that we know so little?
Well, first, I don't count myself among the ranks of avowed atheists.
And I'll give a fast example why.
A friend of mine went up to fix the Hubble telescope, okay, on the space shuttle.
And on my Facebook feed, I said, Godspeed to the space shuttle astronauts.
And then in the comment thread, it said, I thought you were an atheist.
How could you possibly say that?
And so the fact that I gleefully said that and atheists complained about it, clearly I'm not an atheist.
What are you?
Favorite, my favorite Broadway musical of all time is Jesus Christ Superstar, which I saw in real time in New York City.
I don't know that atheists can, so I don't know.
So, is there a god then, Neil deGrasse Tyson?
I'll be about to have breakfast.
I don't know.
Is there a god?
Okay, so I will tell you is that there are a lot of unknowns in the universe, but just because they're unknowns does not mean there's a deity in the unknown.
If you're going to that which doesn't mean there isn't, that's correct.
So, you're more of an open mind about this, right?
Everyone should.
If the unknown is the unknown, but the track record of people saying God is behind this, and then you add a little science to it and you find out, no, we can completely explain it and control it, then the history of that exercise is so rich with science discovering the unknowns that were previously ascribed to deity, like lightning bolts and weather systems.
There was Poseidon, there was Zeus, there was, just look at the history of this.
Vegans and Animal Care 00:02:14
I'm not given reason to say we're going to find something.
God is going to be at the center of that, and there'll be no science to apply.
I'm going to look for the science first, because that's how the history of this exercise has unfolded.
I want to play you a clip.
This is you talking to Joe Rogan about vegans.
If you want to save animals, I've never seen anyone say, save the leeches.
No, no one cares about bugs, save the ticks.
And you can ask, if you're really into animals and don't want to kill them, if you heard that ticks were endangered, would you start a movement to protect ticks?
Would you do that?
And if you would, more power to you.
But I'm thinking you're not.
They're not.
It's the little guys they don't care about.
I've had this debate with vegans.
I had one last week.
I have it every month.
And I always point out most vegans I know munch away on almonds and avocados, and they turn a blind eye to the fact that this causes the mass murder of billions of bees, mainly in California.
They don't want to have that debate because they don't care about the little guys, Neil.
My only reaction there is: that comment was addressing only vegans who are vegans because they don't want to kill animals.
Yes, no, I agree.
Other reasons to be vegan.
Of course.
No, no, I'm talking specifically the ones.
The ones who run into steak cows is playing sounds of cows being slaughtered.
They're the ones that munch avocados and almonds, invariably.
Yeah, and by the way, and they are dining upon the reproductive organs of plants.
That's kind of weird.
And I imagine if a plant-based alien visited Earth, they would freak out when they saw vegetarians.
Yes.
Because the vegetarians would be eating them, right?
And vegetarians target not only the reproductive organs, the nuts, the berries, the flowers, but they also target the infant versions of it, with baby lettuce, baby carrots, baby.
Oh, my God.
This would terrify a plant-based alien.
So that's just a cosmic perspective on that.
No, no, you have given me a whole new line of attack.
The flower babies.
Einstein's Iconic Mustache 00:02:44
I love it.
This is fantastic.
I find these.
That's dangerous.
It's dangerous to feed you more lines of attack because I don't know what you're going to do with it.
But I always like to take these things debates to their logical end, right?
And it seems to me when it suits them, they care about the bigger animals, the cuddly ones.
But when it comes to the little guys, they're not interested.
Now, I want to talk about something even more iconic, actually, than God or vegans.
And it's your moustache, which has become one of the world's most famous moustaches.
And here's extraordinary.
There's a whole website that's been set up called deGrasse Tyson's Moustache.
And we did a bit of research ourselves, a bit of scientific research.
And there's a mustache montage that we have here, which is quite extraordinary.
It turns out almost every brilliant scientist has had a magnificent Tash.
Nikola Tesla, the inventor extraordinaire.
Great Tash.
Louis de Broglie, the discovered the wave-like nature of all matter.
Great Tash.
Hans Geiger, famous for the Geiger counter.
Robert H. Goddard built the first liquid-fueled rocket.
And of course, Albert Einstein, probably the one nearest to your own.
You, I mean, you've become the modern-day godfather of science mustaches, but very much running in a sort of a great long historic list of great Tashes.
I never thought about it.
This mustache, I've never shaved it in my life.
Yes, I've trimmed it, but ever since I could grow a mustache, I've had a mustache.
So it's just part of my life.
And even it was kind of out of style a few years ago.
And I was a little bit, I did get rid of my mutton chop sideburns.
I figured, okay, that's from 1978.
I could lose those.
But I did keep the mustache.
But if I were to vote among those mustaches, I would say, you know, we remember Einstein as this wire-haired, you know, gray, big bushy eyebrows.
But he was a dashing young man.
You see him in a tuxedo.
Yes, look at that mustache.
That's like a magnum PI mustache right there.
If you could...
Final question, Neil.
If you could have dinner tonight with any scientist in the history of recording mankind, who would it be?
Yeah, it would be, oh, no question about it, Isaac Newton.
But I think about that all the time.
And I'd say, Isaac, come for dinner.
And he'd look out the window and he'd see these things moving.
He said, what are those?
And I'd say, well, they're horse-drawn carriages without a horse.
He said, well, how do they move?
Well, they use gasoline.
What's gasoline?
Oh, it's fossil fuels.
What's fossil fuel?
Antiques Roadshow Ethics 00:09:49
And after five minutes of this, I say, go back to where you came from.
Also, unfortunately, your answer.
There's so much that has happened since then.
Well, your answer is that I don't know if I have the patience.
Well, you killed my theory also, because Isaac Newton famously was clean-shaven.
Oh.
Well, Newton, we see him with these big locks of curls, but I think that was actually a wig on top of much shorter hair.
And the statue of him in Cambridge in Trinity Church in Cambridge, you see him with short hair.
Wow.
So I was so disappointed when I heard of that.
Yeah.
Neil, I could honestly interview you every single day and it would never get boring.
You've got a fantastic way of bringing this stuff to life.
To Infinity and Beyond, A Journey of Cosmic Discovery.
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsay Walker.
It's a number one New York Times bestseller, as all your books are.
It's a fantastic reading.
Great to have you back at Ancensa.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, Ancestor's next.
You'll be unsurprised to hear that Sam Smith has done something stupid again and will debate whether antiques should be returned to their native countries.
Here's back is next.
Did you worry that you may lose everything?
Do you feel a great loss that you didn't have the love of your parents?
You sound like my wife.
How long did he say you had to live?
You've remained extremely loyal to him.
If I can have a friend that 15 other people don't like, I could give f ⁇ what everybody else thinks.
Are we going to see Conor McGregor?
Money changes everything.
The incident on New Year's Eve.
This is where we're going with this interview, huh?
Welcome back to Piers.
That was a promo for my fascinating interview with Dana White, one of the most interesting people in world sport, the founder of UFC, has become this multi-billion dollar business, and he's a really interesting guy.
That's tomorrow night for the hour, Dana White.
Honestly, even if you don't know about him, you will want to know about him by the time you finish watching.
It's very interesting stuff.
I'm joined by my pack now, socialist commentator Grace Blakely, Associate Editor of Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire.
Talk to V's Esther Kraker.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Antiques Roadshow.
Shall we have a little clip from Antiques Roadshow to get this going?
So if there's a call for these things to be repatriated, would you be happy to do that?
Absolutely.
Definitely.
So this came about because Sir Harold Kittermaster, governor of the protectorate between 1926 and 1931, this was back in Ethiopia, was given a golden robe and personal letter by Haile Selassie, who then was running the country.
And apparently, now he should be giving this back, right?
The family should be giving this back.
What do we feel about this, Grace?
I mean, this is all part of the sort of, I guess, paying reparations for sins of our ancestors, giving stuff back that countries took from each other centuries ago.
I don't really see the point of all this.
Because once you start, where do you stop?
Well, I mean, the point is, you know, it's you often see in response to problems like this, the idea that, oh, we'll have to undo all of human history because things have changed hands so many times over the course of, you know, millennia.
But what we are living with today is a system of ongoing extraction and kind of colonial domination that exists in the world economy, which means that countries like Ethiopia remain very poor because their resources are extracted, because, you know, they are the people that live there are unable to move because they are on the forefront of issues like climate change.
And we, as a country, are very rich in part because of the legacy of colonialism.
And that's not something that we've ever really recognized.
What does that have to do with this, though?
Because this was a gift from Haile Selassie.
It was actually a gift.
Well, it wasn't stolen.
Well, this is, I think, the question, you know, we can talk in the abstract about whether or not reparations are good or bad, whether or not we can get a lot of people.
Well, shouldn't we be talking about whether the BBC in their flagship antiques roadshow program, whether they should be lecturing people who bring their heirlooms along that have been handed to them as gifts, send it back and sort of morally bullying them or black?
I think it's ahistorical because it actually, you know, people that had these artefacts from back that date back to millennia, actually there's an educational element there.
So there was a point in southern US where they found a giant drum that was traditional to the Akan people in West Africa.
And they're like, how the hell did this get here?
Well, because it was sent over as a gift, right?
You have so many periods in history where you see artifacts that are a result of trade or some sort of interaction between different types of people.
Why would we suddenly have this discourse of giving it back?
It was a good idea.
Let me bring in Kevin.
Look, according to Ronnie Archer Morgan, an antiques expert in an ethnic tribal and folk art, the robe is valued in the region of £4,000 to £5,000.
It's not a huge amount of money.
I just don't like this idea now that everyone that goes down to Antiques Roadshow, one of the least controversial programs imaginable.
You literally open up your garage, take your stuff down and find out if you've got lucky.
Now you've got to feel, as with everything in modern life, that the woke brigade get their hands on.
This antique woke show, they're calling it on social media.
Now you've got to feel guilty.
You've got to be bullied into sending it somewhere out of the country because your great-great-grandfather, who was gifted it, didn't realize in 100 years' time we'd all feel so guilty about everything.
Do you feel bullied by the antiques roadshow?
It's true.
No, I actually feel like it's a good thing.
I feel sad the antiques woke roadshow has been woke up.
It's the biggest row about the antiques roadshaw since viewers complained that they interrupted the programme to show the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison.
It's not there for poppy.
Look, it's a programme that does try to have a more general understanding and just saying there's a table that's worth 10 quid.
And so I think it's a fair question to ask now and again.
And the two granddaughters who have possession of this rope, we saw, they didn't object.
They said they'd consider it.
And there is a whole issue.
She goes and takes some artefact to Antiques Roadshow, then gets told it's worth a few grand and goes immediately, oh yeah, I'm just giving away.
Nobody does that.
If you go to art galleries and museums, there's all sorts of stuff that's donated to be seen by wider people.
It could be the case here.
It would be if there was a widespread outcry amongst the Ethiopians for that particular artifact.
But the chances are they're giving something that was given as a gift back to the Ethiopians and they probably don't have any value for it.
Has anybody asked Ethiopia if they even want the damn thing?
Well right now.
That was the question that they were about to ask.
Bring them up.
Hey, do you want this road back to some old boomberg?
They just said, should we consider asking whether or not this should be repatriated?
Why are you asking these questions?
Because look, look, look, if you go to the British Museum, it's full of looted treasure in London.
The Greeks would legitimately want back the Parthenon south.
Then I want stuff back from the Greeks.
Which, Lord Hellgood.
There's bound to be stuff in Greece which belongs to us.
Well, I want it all back.
Well, there we are.
Let's try and do a deal.
Oh, you find me?
Why not?
You can see the importance of sleeping artifacts like this.
Can I just make one point, Piers, because I think this is really important.
Ethiopia is currently in the middle of a devastating humanitarian crisis that's linked to an ethnic conflict in the country that has been raging for a very long time.
It's nowhere in the headlines.
Nobody knows anything about the Tigray conflict.
No one's talking about it.
At the same time as the country's been ravaged by climate breakdown, an issue that Ethiopia has done almost nothing to create, which is largely caused by countries in the global north.
And this issue of reparations is all very well and good, but let's actually start thinking about how we can undo the injustices that are causing the suffering of those people today.
And we don't.
But I would rather we focus all our attention on how to improve the lot of people right now than worrying about what was going on 300 years ago when laws and morals and ethics were all completely different.
Now, let's try and end on something, A, that's hilarious, I'm told, because I haven't actually seen this yet.
I'm told when it's played to me, I'm going to react in utter horror.
So we'll see.
This is a TikTok video from Sam Smith.
Yeah, just I don't even know where to start.
I don't think there's ever been, and I speak as something of an expert in this genre, an attention seeker quite like Sam Smith.
And it works.
It works.
It will.
I don't even know how we debate what I've just watched.
Well, he's got a career as a children's entertainer.
With a kid's face on his thing.
It's kind of creepy, isn't it?
Yeah, it's kind of creepy.
Can't we agree he's creepy, Sam Smith?
No.
Don't know.
I mean, he's doing like, I would say probably like 60% of the stuff on TikTok is creepy.
That's like what gets people to watch.
Well, you've got the wrong algorithms.
Mine are.
Mine are mine and golf shots and Ronald Reagan.
You know what the thing is?
Oh my God.
That's creepy.
That is creepy.
Sam Smith not so bad after all.
I actually think Sam Smith sits there thinking, how can I troll Piers Morgan?
I do.
I think he thinks, how can I wind him up today?
And it's working.
And he's working.
And every single time I fall for it.
And I used to love the Telly Tubbies.
Now he's ruined it forever.
Anyway, great to see you, Pat.
Thank you very much indeed.
Whatever you're up to, keep it a bit like Sandsmith.
Unsensitive.
Good night.
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