'I'm Gonna Have To Live With It..." Brian Tyler Cohen's Obama Interview + Trans Shooters Debate
Former President Barack Obama caused a stir after he appeared to confirm the existence of aliens during an interview with Brian Tyler-Cohen, with many wondering why Brian didn’t ask any follow-up questions - and in today’s Uncensored, Piers Morgan asks him about it. Also joining Piers to discuss the latest in US politics, including the shocking deadly shooting in Canada is TV legend Dr Phil, Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown, Young Turk's Ana Kasparian and broadcaster Blaire White. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Where Are The Aliens00:03:00
What was the first question you wanted answered when you became president?
Where are the aliens?
Where are the aliens?
You've been criticized for not then saying, what?
Doing an Oprah in the Harry and Megan interview.
What?
In retrospect, would I have asked the follow-up?
Yes, of course.
And frankly, that's something that I'm just going to have to live with.
You know, I think that this is such a Democratic candidate.
We have to stop providing cover for their mediocrity.
That answer was terrible, and you know it.
So don't provide cover for it.
More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama.
It's the same problem with the media refusing to cover anything that paints the left in a negative light.
With Kathy Griffin holding up a severed head of Donald Trump, Madonna threatening to blow up the White House.
We identify the suspect as they chose to be identified.
To ignore the trans element of this, I think, is to ignore a key component of the psychological struggle.
Over 90% of school shooters tell at least one person.
Normally, at about this time of the week, the world is feverishly dissecting, disputing, and debating the latest outbursts from the American president.
This week, it's the turn of the former American president, Barack Obama, who's given a big interview to Brian Tyler Cohen, in which, among other things, he confirmed the existence of aliens.
Couple questions here.
Are aliens real?
They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51.
There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States.
What was the first question you wanted answered when you became president?
Where are the aliens?
Where are the aliens?
Well, many people felt this was a massive revelation by a U.S. president.
Wonder why Brian didn't ask any follow-ups.
In a moment, I'll ask him a follow-up about his failure to follow up.
But amid the inevitable frenzy caused by those comments, Obama's clarified that he meant they are statistically likely to be real and that he didn't get any special presidential evidence to confirm their existence.
He might need to find some special presidential evidence to clarify this.
The other side does the mean, angry demagoguery, you know, exclusive, us-them, you know, divisive politics.
That's their, that's, that's their home court.
Yeah.
Our court is coming together.
Our court is, look, you know, a great example.
Wasn't political.
Bad bunnies halftime.
I knew you were going to say that.
Derailing Trans Narratives00:07:28
Well, it was, it resonated.
It was smart because it wasn't preaching.
It was showing.
It was demonstrating and displaying.
This is what a community is.
Now, I happen to agree with President Obama that the outrage of a bad bunny show was frankly absurd.
But it's surely even more absurd to suddenly claim that his side doesn't do preaching, angry, exclusionary, shaming, or divisive politics.
They pretty much invented it.
It brings to mind a stunning broadside against woke culture from all the way back in 2019.
The woke left thinks the way of making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.
The quote begins.
If I tweet about how you didn't do something right, I can sit back and feel good about myself because, man, did you see how woke I was?
People who do really good stuff also have flaws.
Very wise words, which were spoken, of course, by the same Barack Obama.
Well, we'll debate all this and more with my panel very shortly.
But we're going to begin with the deadly mass shooting last week in Canada.
At least eight people died and dozens were wounded when an 18-year-old transgender shooter killed his mother and stepbrother before attacking a high school.
There has, of course, been a transgender link to a series of high-profile killings over the past year, sparking ongoing discussion of a trans gun ban in the US and an editorial in the New York Post entitled, How many High Profile Trans Killers Can the Media Ignore?
Well, psychologist and broadcaster Dr. Phil joins me now.
Dr. Phil, welcome back to Uncensored.
As with all these things, we're going to be on the headlines.
Yeah, good to see you.
I sort of just look into this statistically.
And it is very interesting.
Trans killers were responsible for less than 0.1% of all mass shootings in America between 2013 and 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
But of around 220 school shootings logged by the American educational news organization Education Week in America and Canada since 2019, four have involved trans shooters, accounting for 16 of the 150 fatalities.
So there seems to have been an increase in the number of mass shootings being perpetrated by people identifying as trans.
What do you think is behind this?
Well, I think we would do ourselves a real disservice to focus on the trans element of this.
I think that the fact is, Pierce, we know a whole lot more about who the shooters are than we're using right now.
And focusing on the trans aspect of this would really derail something that needs to be happening right now.
And that is we, look, we don't have the ability to predict who the next shooter is going to be.
But we do know, as I say, so much more about who the shooters are that we have the ability to be more effective in derailing some of these before they happen.
We don't have a screening device.
We don't have the ability to pick out which shooter, which student is going to be a shooter or which former student is going to be a shooter.
But we do have information that we're not using and we need to disseminate that information.
And on the short list is not going to be trans students.
They are an immaterial characteristic of who's likely to pick up a gun and shoot.
Now, they may have some characteristics in common with those who do.
So they might be part of that group because of some mental challenges, some isolation, some marginalization.
But I don't think being trans has anything to do with whether or not you're going to pick up a gun and shoot somebody or not.
I think that's a byproduct of other things that are predictable.
And we can do a much better job of controlling this than what we're doing because we have more information than we're using.
How much do you think may be down to medication in the sense that a lot of people who identify as trans are taking some form of drugs?
I know from having studied a lot of mass shootings before in America when I was campaigning against the NRA that a lot of young mass shooters were medicated to the gills on this, on various drugs and so on.
How much are drugs playing a part, do you think?
I think we have to take that into consideration.
But I think that we need transparency on the possible side effect of medications, especially polypharmacy.
I think the interaction between some of these drugs can be profound.
And we're not excusing the behavior by talking about that, but understanding it.
So I do think medication can have a big part of it.
But there are identifiable traits and characteristics that we do know.
You can't know if somebody is on medications or not, but there are traits and characteristics that are knowable and observable.
For example, there's leakage among these shooters.
Over 90% of school shooters tell at least one person and almost two-thirds tell more than one person what they're going to do before they do it.
They tell somebody, here's what I'm going to do, here's when I'm going to do it, here's where I'm going to do it.
They tell somebody what they're going to do, but the people don't know what to do.
They don't have a methodology.
And if you go to the police and tell them, hey, somebody told me they were going to do this, the way the laws work, you can't arrest somebody for what they're thinking about doing or talking about doing.
You can only arrest them for behavior.
But there are methods for intervening.
And we have to, the people who really know, and the current case in Canada is a perfect example.
The people who really know who's at risk for these things are the people that are around them every day.
Those are their classmates, their co-workers, and especially their family.
In this case, family members certainly knew this was a very disturbed individual.
They knew this was not a psychologically healthy individual.
He had guns before, and the shooter had guns before, and that license was pulled, and they politicked and pushed to get the right for this individual to have guns again.
Pulling The Trigger Again00:15:02
And he used those guns to kill family members that fought to get the right to have his guns back.
And then he took those guns to school and shot several people, including himself.
So we have to make sure that we're deputizing all of the students in schools so they understand what to look for and what to do with the information once they get it.
Telling is not tattling.
Using this information to talk to authorities is saving lives, including the shooter's life because most of these are violent suicides.
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You're 70% off with the code Pierce.
When it comes to the guns themselves, you know, I've debated this a lot in America, and it was made pretty clear to me, we don't want to hear this from someone from Britain.
Thanks.
We drove you out of our country 250 years ago with guns.
Okay, point taken.
But there are over 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, and more than a million new guns are sold every month.
Where does the line, Phil, for you come between the Second Amendment right to bear arms and that staggering sum of potentially, obviously, lethal firearms in circulation and so easily available to people with disturbed minds at this point.
There is probably, what, two, 300-year supply of guns on the street.
If you're going to have an impact on this that can really change things for this generation or many generations to come, you need to focus somewhere else.
You need to focus on the shooters, not what they're shooting.
You need to focus on how to identify and derail these things.
You can ban guns today, and there's a two or 300-year supply on the street.
So you're just running around in circles.
You're not going to have an impact, whatever you do about that, because of what you said.
There are so many guns already on the street.
You're not going to have an, those guns aren't going to wear out for hundreds of years, if ever.
So, you know, that's just mental masturbation.
What you have to do is decide, I need to figure out how to identify who is likely to do the shootings and figure out a way to intervene before they do it.
Look, these aren't monsters until they pull the trigger.
Up until the moment they pull the trigger, they are a disturbed, in pain, young person.
Almost 100% are young males.
And if you can get to them before they pull that trigger and show them some compassion, show them a path towards some help, they will maybe never return to that low point again in their life.
We need prevention, not intervention.
And that's the key here.
Most of the killing happens within the first 30 to 60 seconds.
Intervention doesn't work here.
We need prevention.
And we know what to look for.
If we can deputize every student in America by teaching them what to look for, what's observable, and give them somewhere to go with the information.
Whenever there's a school shooting and they figure out who it was and you talk to the students afterwards, they'll go, yeah, no kidding.
That was not a surprise.
The kids know.
Even the teachers know, and certainly the parents know.
They just don't do anything about it.
Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Dr. Phil, as always, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
All right, Pierce, let's talk about this again sometimes.
It's good to talk to you.
Yeah, no, it's an ongoing issue, and you've got such, as always, common sense views about it.
Thank you very much.
Well, joining me on the panel is Isabel Brown, host of the Daily Wire's Isabel Brown Show, Blair White, host of the Blair White Project, Anna Kasperin, executive producer and host of The Young Turks, and Brian Tyler Cohen, host of No Lie.
Well, welcome to all of you.
We're going to get into a number of issues.
I just want to start, Isabel Brown, with this sort of strange pattern we're seeing, not overwhelming, not particularly conclusive.
Dr. Phil thinks it's being kind of a bit of a distraction to the real problem.
But there's certainly been a steady spate of mass shootings being perpetrated by people identifying as trans, including this appalling mass shooting in Canada.
What do you feel is behind that?
It's a different trend to what we were used to.
It is, Piers, and you're absolutely correct.
This is an observable pattern of behavior, objectively speaking.
Before I get into any of that, I want to say I'm glad to see you back on the show, and I hope you're healing well.
We're thinking of you often, and it's a pleasure to be having this conversation.
So we're praying for you every day.
But ultimately, look, I think we have to learn how to have a transparent conversation across ideological boundaries here from the foundation that all school shooters are mentally ill.
You have to have an element of mental derangement in order to be driven to the point of massacring innocent children in a school.
We used to be able to say that until about five minutes ago in society, but in order for us to be intellectually consistent about this conversation, I think we have to also acknowledge that relatively recently in human history, gender dysphoria itself was considered a mental illness.
And we owe it to society to start asking ourselves, is gender dysphoria, A, or B, how we are treating gender dysphoria with the affirmative care model and this mass psychosis of medication that we've seen across Western civilization, as you just pointed out a few minutes ago, contributing to further mental illness that is driving an epidemic of violence?
If the answer is yes, dramatic changes need to be made in our society.
But unfortunately, we're living in a time where the media only seems to be wanting to perpetrate the division further by calling this Canadian shooter from last week a female, even though we know that was not psychologically or biologically correct whatsoever.
And with all due respect to Dr. Phil in particular, I have nothing but respect for him.
To ignore the trans element of this, I think, is to ignore a key component of the psychological struggle that we are starting to see pop up all over Western civilization.
This person started transitioning in Canada at the age of 12, which of course is likely to be linked to later psychological issues in their life that inevitably led to one of the most deadly shootings in Canadian history, injuring 25 and claiming the lives of nine people, including a mother and a stepbrother to this shooter.
That is mental illness.
And until we can acknowledge that universally, it's a tough conversation for us to even have in the first place.
Anakas Berry, what's your response?
I'd like to jump in on this.
Yeah, my response to it is the Daily Wire would be nothing if it didn't have its bread and butter fully invested in getting Americans to hate each other or be afraid of one another based on various differences and characteristics.
I'd like to actually focus on something a little alarming that Dr. Phil said in the context of that interview.
I happen to agree with him that the transgender angle, which tends to get rolled out for political reasons here and there, isn't really material to the issue here.
I think the big issue is that this shooting is being used to justify mass surveillance programs and these so-called pre-crime efforts that corporations like Palantir have a financial interest in pushing for.
So I do think that mass shootings are a problem, whether you're talking about it in the United States, where it's definitely pronounced, or in places like Canada.
And if we want to address mental health concerns, that's one thing.
But this issue of like surveilling people and focusing on pre-crime, I don't want to live in a society like that.
And I suspect most Americans don't either.
But doesn't, I mean, didn't Dr. Phil make a strong point there that if 90% of all mass shootings, when they investigated them, they discovered the mass shooter had told at least one person in advance, normally someone they were at school with or a friend or whatever, about their plan.
Is that not clear evidence that actually what he's suggesting makes perfect common sense?
In other words, just alerting people.
Well, his argument.
But if you are informed.
Right.
If you're informed by somebody that you know, they're going to commit.
But his argument, Pierce.
What is wrong with them being encouraged to tell people?
When these individuals go to the law enforcement, law enforcement, the way that our laws work, they don't move quickly enough or respond quickly enough.
So I'm not quite sure what his solution would be here because he even gave us the theoretical situation in which a student hears from a fellow classmate that they plan on shooting up the school.
They immediately report it to the authorities and the authorities, because of the way things work, don't respond to it sufficiently.
Okay, so then what is the pitch here?
What is he pitching for?
What exactly would happen in a case that doesn't include the authorities because the authorities aren't sufficient in handling these situations?
I just think that right now there is a concerted effort to repeal or do away with some of our privacy rights because there is a very real competition happening in AI.
And at the World Economic Forum, you know, you have major actors in the Western world talking about how we can't compete with AI because we have privacy rights that China doesn't have to worry about.
So just be very mindful of calls for surveillance where they exploit tragic mass shooting incidents or any other incident in order to get Americans or people in the global sphere to really reconsider whether their privacy matters in the face of these boogeymen or, you know, security issues.
You know, it's interesting.
I mean, I was talking about the gun aspect of this with Dr. Phil.
And I do remember being stunned that I think it's 35% of Americans do not believe they should even be required to register their guns as to where they keep them because they were genuinely concerned about their government becoming tyrannical and therefore having a database of exactly who had guns and where they were keeping them.
And that struck me as a sort of bizarre way of looking, what is about, to me, is a clear part of the problem, which is America has an extraordinary prevalence of firearms, which is unlike anywhere else in the world.
But anyway, Blair White, let me come to you.
You've been waiting patiently.
You are a trans person, so you're best qualified to discuss this in many ways.
What do you feel?
I mean, do you feel there is no causal link here in this increasing number, albeit still relatively small, but increasing number of mass shootings involving people identifying as trans?
Do you feel, as Dr. Phil did, that it's kind of a bit irrelevant that people from all types are doing these things?
Or do you think that there is a relevance in terms of gender dysphoria, maybe gender-affirming drugs that people take and so on, that that could all be playing a part?
Yeah, well, first of all, first and foremost, what I feel is an incredible amount of sadness for the fact that this person killed their family and then, you know, obviously the children that were victims in the school.
It's a tragedy from a 360 view.
So that's first and foremost.
I think you have to look at this from a multi-dimensional perspective.
And I very much agree with Anna when she brought up the concerns over AI and privacy.
I was also going to say that, you know, the only other time there was a shooting like this in Canada's history, there was a huge rollback on gun rights for Canadians.
So I do have a concern about that for them.
I have probably more of a concern for them than they have for themselves about that.
When it comes to the trans aspect, I'm going to be a little in between Anna and Dr. Phil here.
I don't think it's entirely irrelevant, but I think that there's so many other factors.
So, for instance, when it comes to Canada, there's a huge pipeline issue where people with a number of comorbidities and other mental illnesses are being funneled through the trans healthcare system.
So, it's currently illegal in Canada for a therapist to push back in any way, give any amount of criticism, or even questioning someone who they're seeing and is questioning if they should transition or not.
They basically just have to support that, even if they suspect or know that that person has other mental illnesses.
And when it comes to this shooter, he did have other mental illnesses.
Apparently, he was using SSRIs.
He had multiple illnesses he posted on Reddit himself.
He was using drugs, psychedelics, and cross-sex hormones.
So, I think that's a really terrifying cocktail of different things coming to play.
And, you know, there's been a lot of statistics posted recently.
I think I saw Elon post one that trans people are the most likely to shoot up schools.
I have an issue with that because that same graph says that Asians are the second most likely.
And I don't think anyone thinks that Asians are committing more crime than white people when it comes to mass shootings, unfortunately.
White people, we have to kind of take that a little bit.
I think it's a complicated issue.
And I think that when you look at the things that cover all demographics that commit these violent acts, SSRIs are a huge common factor that we don't want to talk about.
I also unfortunately have to piggyback more on what Anna was saying: you know, when it comes to these last few trans shooters in America, since 2020, there is an uptick from it.
And not to be conspiratorial, but to be conspiratorial, several of them had links to the CIA.
Their parents worked for Palantir and for different AI companies that were working on this pre-crime stuff.
And so it is a thing.
And I don't know how deep you want to go on that, but again, I'm somewhere in the middle.
I think that the trans part matters in the sense of the trans healthcare system, especially in Canada, is incredibly destructive.
And people who should not be transitioning are under their rules.
But also, when it comes to SSRIs and mental health issues, those seem to be, and even fatherlessness.
Mass Shootings Beyond Borders00:07:12
You know, the father of this shooter came out and posted, I have nothing to do with this child.
I'm not in his life, seemingly as a way to distance himself from his child, if that makes him look any better.
But we have a lot of statistics going back decades about what fatherlessness can, you know, cause in people in terms of incarcerations, violence, drug abuse.
So I think it's a lot of things, and society is in a really sick place.
And so you're going to see that spread across everybody and everything.
And I'm just really sad this happened more than anything.
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You know, it's a lot of interesting things.
I...
I've done a lot of research into this over the years, particularly into mass shootings.
And I think the bottom line is this for me: America has about the same amount of mentally ill people, pro-rata per capita, of most of the top 20 countries, developed countries in the world, including the UK.
The difference that America has is that it has 80% of the world's painkilling medication is taken by Americans, I think I read.
And certainly, when it comes to the prevalence of an easy access to guns, America's out on its own, certainly compared to someone like the UK, where hardly anybody ever gets shot.
So I think it's the combination that America has, which is why America has so many mass shootings.
And I don't think there's an easy fix.
Yeah, Brian, by all means, yeah.
Yeah, I also think like we would be crazy to ignore the fact that the political focus on trans individuals who commit mass shootings is because it is politically advantageous for one side to focus on trans individuals who commit mass shootings.
I mean, there is Adam Lanza and Nicholas Cruz and just a countless number of straight young white men who do the same thing, but it's not politically convenient to talk about those people.
You've all identified a lot of factors that play into these shootings, whether it's mental illness, whether it's family issues, whether it's the prevalence of guns in this country, medication, whatever it may be.
But to pretend like this is some issue with just trans individuals is clearly allowing politics or disdain for a certain subset of people to cloud everybody's vision for what is a tragic and frankly uniquely American occurrence that overwhelmingly takes place at the hands of young white men in this country.
So again, I understand, like I've worked in politics long enough to understand why it is a convenient scapegoat to point to trans people who commit mass shootings.
But to do that, I think is just oozing in bad faith.
And I think it is, frankly, doing a disservice to the real problems at the core of this stuff that I think we would all be well served to try and figure out.
But of course, politics pervades everything.
You know, Piers, if you jump in there.
Yeah, by all means, yeah.
Yeah, I just, I'm hearing some interesting accusations being thrown out there about disdain for trans people or people trying to drive further division here or just downright hatred for an entire subset of the population.
I don't think that that's really where most people are coming from and wanting to have this conversation.
It's certainly not where I'm coming from.
Ultimately, I think Dr. Phil said it beautifully that this is a preventative issue.
If we can take into our hands in society the opportunity to prevent the level of psychological derangement that people are having in killing indiscriminately young children in their school, that is the most important thing we can do.
If that involves having extra compassion for people who are already struggling with the weight of mental dysphoria of their gender, when they look in the mirror and they don't see themselves in the reflection staring back at them, I think that is something worthy of society to go further into.
Affirmative care is being thrown out the window by most leading medical experts in the West today.
Several countries have come out to say there is little to no scientific evidence whatsoever in support of transitioning, especially children and adolescents.
And in fact, the potential dangers are substantially higher than any potential benefit so-called affirmative treatment protocols would ever provide to young people.
The UK has been a leading country on this issue.
Sweden, Norway, most of the Scandinavian countries, the United States and Canada are very, very far behind the eight ball.
And as Blair mentioned, are really leaning in further to this affirmative care model where people are getting their medical licenses taken away or being told they'll be fired from their schools if they express any sort of are you sure sentiment to a young person saying that they are the opposite sex.
Uh, this is a really severe problem.
But it is rooted in compassion and ultimately, I think if we can start having that conversation, that we care about people enough not to want them to end up at this level of far beyond help psychological derangement, that's where we can start having some real serious progress in society.
Well, I think also, I think two things can be compassion, to frame mass shootings as a trans issue.
Just to be clear, when you find that issue as a trans issue, that's not passion.
Just want to put that.
Don't mishear me and i'm not saying whatsoever that every trans is a school shooter.
I was gonna make a similar, I was gonna make a similar point.
So that kind of thing.
Two things can be true at once.
Correct.
Hang on.
I want to move on, but two things can be true at once.
One is that the vast majority of mass shootings are not committed by trans people, but there's also been a significant uptick, albeit still relatively low percentage, of mass shootings committed by trans people.
I don't think it's so significant that you can frame this as a trans problem, but nor do I think it's so insignificant, the uptick, that you can say there's no relevance that an increasing number of people identifying as trans have been committing mass shootings, including the latest horrific one in Canada.
So there's a lot to do.
Can I jump in on that?
And you know, yeah, very quickly, because I do want to move on.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just going to say that uptick is specifically 2020 and beyond.
And anyone who knows anything about this issue, obviously, trans people predate 2020 and beyond.
So I think it's something that we can look at in this most recent time period as well.
And we can also see that other mental health issues have skyrocketed at the same time.
So I think it's just a matter of looking at it from a multimensional, multi-dimensional perspective, like I said.
Yeah, and I also think that the uptick in the last six years, as you rightly say, I would argue a lot of that is down to the massively increased volume of people identifying as trans, many of whom potentially are not actually trans, but are following what they perceive to be a fad fueled by social media.
Migration And Political Debate00:15:03
It's been one of the big issues that we've been exploring in the UK.
I think it's a real phenomenon.
Okay, let's move on.
Brian, congratulations on your Obama interview.
I thought it was terrific.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, made a lot of news.
And I'm going to ask a follow-up to my own praise for you there, which is about your lack of follow-up, which has been capturing the attention of the mainstream media, all of whom would, of course, be so much better at getting an Obama interview had they managed to get one themselves.
So, you know, first of all, I did genuinely really enjoy it.
He's a great interview, Obama.
I've never interviewed him.
I'd love to.
I thought it was really interesting on many levels, contentious on some, and we'll get to that.
But on this first point of where he just casually reveals, yeah, there are aliens, you've been criticized for not then saying, what?
Doing an Oprah in the Harry and Megan interview.
What?
Why didn't you do a follow-up to the aliens' confession of the former president of the United States?
It seemed clear to me when he said, Yes, but I haven't seen them.
There's no Area 51, that what that he was saying, that he was expressing his belief in the concept of aliens, but that he made it clear enough, at least to me, that he doesn't believe in, you know, that there wasn't any evidence of some government facility that was housing aliens.
Obviously, if there were aliens and he was interested in seeing them, which he clearly was, and if the government had them, then he wouldn't have said that he hadn't seen them or that the U.S. government doesn't know about them or that, you know, if they were there, it would be evidence of some grand conspiracy where even the president of the United States wasn't aware of them.
And so that was clear to me in the moment.
It was clarified and proven in his clarification that you've put on the screen right here.
So I just, you know, it just made enough sense to me that in the moment, okay, I get what he's saying.
Obviously, you don't always know when you do these interviews what's going to pop off and how people are going to perceive stuff.
And you do your best in the moment.
And look, in retrospect, what I have asked the follow-up, yes, of course.
And frankly, that's something that I'm just going to have to live with.
And there is a lot of criticism and that sucks.
But, you know, that's how it goes in politics.
I'm sure that you've had interview guests and you've wanted to ask a question that you didn't have the foresight or whatever to ask.
And again, that's something that I'm going to have to live with.
But I am grateful that he issued the clarification.
For the record, Brian.
Put for the record, what would the fun now you've had time to think about it?
What would your follow-up have been?
I think the follow-up would have been: when you say yes, what do you mean?
And frankly, and frankly, look, and again, I own that that's something that I'm going to have to live with.
I've interviewed over a thousand people at this point.
I've never been accused of not being curious enough or not doing adequate follow-ups, but look, all it takes is one.
With that said, I think I've heard from so many people in the alien community, which I like didn't understand was this vibrant, thriving community online.
And so, there are other questions I actually would have asked, which is, you know, does the government have evidence of UFOs or UAPs?
You know, there's a whole deep dive I would have done.
And frankly, this was during a speed round.
I would have nixed the entire speed round and just gone on a deep dive into aliens, but hindsight is 2020.
Well, let's get to some of the other things he said, which I thought were really interesting.
We had one of the clips in the monologue.
His sort of assertion that somehow people on the left are the opposite of Republicans because they're not divisive, they're inclusive, they bring people together, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I got to say, I replied to this on X yesterday, just saying, Really?
I mean, the woke left in the last few years, to me, have displayed themselves to be, and I'm not necessarily saying Obama is woke left.
In fact, he has regularly criticized the woke left.
But the woke left have been intolerably, insufferably divisive and non-inclusive, in fact, dramatically exclusive, wanted to cancel everybody they don't agree with, almost fascist-like in their behavior.
I've discussed this many times as somebody who used to identify as liberal, now more centrist.
But I've just found it incredible that Obama could sit back and pretend that his side, the left, are the template of tolerance and inclusivity.
Were you surprised?
No, I mean, look, this is a guy who ran his campaign.
I mean, you have to think about this from Obama's perspective as well.
Like, Obama ran his campaign as yes, I can, a very, I mean, he cobbled together a coalition unlike anything we'd seen in politics before.
And he was succeeded by a guy who launched his campaign, basically denying the citizenship of the first black president, of saying that Mexicans are rapists and immigrants, which obviously today has culminated into mass deportations and the secret police force killing Americans in the streets with no recourse.
And so the difference between the leaders of these two political parties could not be more apparent.
Are you going to be able to find individuals in the coalition within the coalition who disprove every rule?
Of course you are.
You're going to be able to find woke scolds on the left and you're going to be able to find Nazis on the right.
Everybody's going to disprove every rule that's put forward.
But I think in terms of the leadership that was displayed between at least him and his successor, at least Barack Obama and Donald Trump, there is no universe where it's not abundantly clear who represents what and who leans in on demagoguery versus who leans in on hope.
Okay, let me bring it up.
I agree with you on demagoguery.
But sorry to interrupt, but I do have a question, another question about fire follow-ups, because, look, to be quite honest with you, I'm not in the UFO community, so I don't care about that non-follow-up at all.
I think you did a fine job conducting the interview.
Well, one follow-up that I think would have been interesting, Brian, is whether or not former President Obama sees his leadership as, or his response to the economic crisis of 2008 as what led to the ushering in of the Trump administration, right?
Because I agree with you about the demagoguery, right?
Obama carries himself in a lot more professional way, in a way that's dignified.
You can make that argument.
But we have to ask why Trump came in as a popular alternative to what Obama was selling to the American people.
Do you think it would be interesting to hear him talk about whether his response to the economic crisis led to, you know, Obama's, I'm sorry, Trump's first term?
Yeah, I mean, look, would it have been interesting?
Of course it would.
And I wish I, you know, could ask him every question in the world.
I think we would be remiss not to also take into account the racial implications of Trump's rise, like an avowed racist president's rise to power in the aftermath of the first black president's rise to power.
And I mean, you know, we were told, and this is not, because I completely agree with you, Anna.
This is not all.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, Brian, Brian, Brian, hang on.
Let me say one sentence.
Let me say one sentence.
All right, explain.
And that is that we were told so much in the aftermath of Trump's election that it was the result of economic anxiety.
And we have seen so many instances where it's like almost laughable, the extent to which the Trump coalition acts and comports itself.
And it's so clearly not the result of economic anxiety that obviously the racial implications of all of this come in.
And look, that's also not to say that that's everybody because it's not.
But I mean, to ignore that aspect of it, I think would be acting in bad faith.
Okay.
I mean, my obvious response is...
I think the Trump administration offered a significant...
Hang on, hang on, Anna.
I am going to jump in there.
Go ahead.
My obvious response to that is, if racism was the factor in Trump winning in 2016, because we'd had a black president, how did Obama get re-elected in the first place?
I mean, the guy won two terms, right?
Which is not an illustration of a racist America turning on a black president.
I would argue that after eight years of Obama, he did a lot of things which actually were very contrary to his nice, happy, clappy, Mr. Nice Guy image.
He deported over 3 million people, right?
Which is a record, by the way, even including Donald Trump in both of his terms, including the second one so far, pro-rata, by far the biggest deporter in the history of the United States of immigrants.
He dropped more bombs in a calendar year outside of World War II than any American president in history.
He campaigned in 08, 09 on closing Guantanamo Bay.
It's still open.
And he's a lawyer who believed it was an illegal torture chamber and so on and so on and so on.
So yeah, he can sing like Al Green and he can talk a good talk and he won the Nobel Peace Prize for a few speeches.
And in many ways, he's a civil, courteous man, and these are laudable qualities.
But I do think this sort of notion that somehow Trump only won because he was the white guy and American black guy.
I just don't think that bears any scrutiny.
I'm not saying that he played.
I don't think it had any impact.
I think, honestly, I don't think it played anything.
I do think that race played no role in Trump's rise?
You think that Trump hasn't harnessed racism or xenophobia or any bigotry in how he has presided over this country?
Well, I would point out that.
Well, again, talk about second terms, right?
So I would argue if that was the case, then why when Trump was re-elected did more Latinos in huge numbers, bigger than voted for Carmen Harris, vote for Trump?
Why did his share of the black vote actually go up, right?
In other words, if he really was this racist demagogue, then how did he win again with a larger vote of non-white voters?
Again, that makes no sense to me.
No, I mean, look, that's, again, that's not to say that the only factors that played into this were race-based or discriminatory factors.
I think that obviously the economy was the principal issue in 2024, and that superseded any of the other issues.
But I would also ask you right now, now that he's not just running some theoretical campaign, he's actually presiding over this country.
What are his numbers among black people now?
What are his numbers among Latinos now?
I'm sure we saw these latest, we saw these latest special elections.
Latinos are swinging upwards of 50 points.
Like that doesn't, you know, there is a difference between how minorities in the United States can listen to somebody, you know, campaign in prose, and that's exactly what happened.
Trump ran into his campaign.
Listen, I don't disagree.
Yeah, Brian, I don't disagree with that.
And I would say one of the major factors in that, actually, is that whilst he did brilliantly in shutting down the southern border after the ridiculous hemorrhaging sort of open border under Biden, and whilst he was quite right in assessing that Americans, broadly speaking, from all the polls are happy for people who are in the country illegally who then commit crimes unconnected to their status to be deported.
It's the behavior of ICE on the streets of American cities and towns in going way too far with people who may have been in the country for 10 years, raised kids, got jobs, paid taxes and so on.
That is not supported by the American people.
And of course, a lot of people that have been rounded up are Latinos.
So quite clearly, you're going to see, as we're seeing, a real backlash there.
And I suspect the damage is done.
And in the midterms, Trump is going to get the whiplash back from that.
And they're going to lose the House.
And then he'll become effectively, as everyone does in that scenario, a bit of a lame duck president.
And if that happens, he'll only have himself to blame for going too far with the way that ICE has been on the streets is what I think will happen.
Let me bring in Isabel here.
I mean, look, there are lots of different reasons why people get elected and so on.
I thought what was interesting about Obama, I want to play a clip, not just from Obama, but then I want to play a clip from him and then Hillary Clinton.
The first clip is from his interview with Brian, where he talks about immigration.
And then I want to play a clip from Hillary Clinton at the Munich Security Conference because they're basically singing from the same song sheet.
Let's take a look at these two clips.
But what is also true is that we're a nation of laws, we have borders, and we've got to figure out an immigration policy that is orderly and that is fair and is enforced in a sensible way that is compatible with our values, but may not fully capture the degree to which that kid should have the same chances in life as a U.S. citizen kid.
But, you know, we've got to accommodate the reality that the majority of the American people think that there's a difference between somebody who's a U.S. citizen and somebody who's not, and that they want an orderly immigration system.
And sometimes I think what happens in the online debate is if somebody suggests, well, we have to have some immigration enforcement, then somebody is going to point at that child and say, so you don't care about that kid.
So you must be a bad person.
Migration has been a huge flashpoint.
More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump's second term.
There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration.
It went too far.
It's been disruptive and destabilizing.
And it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don't torture and kill people.
And, you know, Isabel, before you respond here, you know, my response to that would be, A, she sounds a bit like Trump when she's talking about the problem, as does Obama, actually.
And secondly, the reason why we didn't hear so many negative stories about their own deportation records, by her own admission, her husband, Bill Clinton, and Obama deported way more people than Trump is because the mainstream media was indisputably not as interested in what Democrat presidents did in this area than they are in Trump.
Deferring To AOC On Foreign Policy00:11:59
They're obsessed with finding the negative with the way Trump goes about it.
They weren't interested in any of this.
I used to ask my liberal friends at dinner party for fun, how many people did Obama deport?
They never had a clue.
They didn't care.
Three million.
They didn't care.
They didn't know.
It didn't matter.
So I do think it was a very interesting tribal thing that we watched where the media turned a blind eye to what Democrat presidents were doing here and a very focused eye on what Trump's doing.
But they all actually, all these presidents, have the same view of the problem.
You're absolutely correct, Piers.
And honestly, I'm finding myself nodding along with those clips, right?
I mean, that's a very sensible position to be taking.
It shouldn't be a partisan one.
It shouldn't be one vilified by the media.
And yet, we don't really hear that rhetoric from most of the loudest voices in the Democrat Party today, who, let's be honest, are not former President Barack Obama or failed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
You're hearing instead from the individuals who are elected officials in Minnesota telling their own constituents to put their bodies on the line to interfere with immigration enforcement, to make sure that you're willing essentially to give your life up for all of this.
And with the media refusing to cover all of this, it's just indicative to me that it's the same problem with the media refusing to cover anything that paints the left in a negative light over the past several years.
It's the same reason you can get away with saying you're a racist if you supported Donald Trump, but very few people know that Joe Biden on the campaign trail actually uttered the words, if you don't vote for me, then you're not black.
And it is that rhetoric and only one-sided narrative being covered in the mainstream media that's contributing to the most heinous, outrageous calls for violence and extreme name-calling we've seen toward the political right in the last decade in America, with Kathy Griffin holding up a severed head of Donald Trump, Madonna threatening to blow up the White House, teachers across the country celebrating in their classrooms when Charlie Kirk was violently assassinated on a college campus less than six months ago.
And even now what we're seeing to put your body on the line to interfere with federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement.
This is a novel problem in the last decade in America.
And until we can have an honest, two-sided conversation about it, nothing is really going to change.
Anna Kasperian, it is extraordinary that when you hear those clips, they all just sound the same, right?
They all identify the same problem.
Too many people have come into the country illegally.
That's not good for the United States.
It also pisses off people who've gone through the legal process, often for taking years in some cases and a lot of expense.
And they're pissed off that people just wandering over the border.
And like I say, you know, shutting the southern border has been a good thing by Trump.
The ICE activities in recent months have been a bad thing that's going to come back and haunt him.
So, obviously, the way you implement immigration policy is important, but something has to be done, right?
Well, I mean, the way that immigration was controlled in previous administrations was the correct way of controlling immigration and securing the borders.
Now, that didn't happen under the Biden administration.
But the reason why you didn't get all of this media attention or media coverage of either the Clinton administration or the Obama administration's efforts in deportations and controlling the border is because they didn't roll out a like flashy PR campaign where they're making a point that cruelty is like the whole point of what they're doing.
I mean, you have the Department of Homeland Security rolling out videos, essentially mocking people as they're being rounded up and deported.
When you do that, obviously it's going to attract attention.
It's going to attract news articles and news items about it.
With Obama, he was turning people away at the border, deporting them immediately.
That didn't get any attention because he wasn't making a big deal about it.
And he probably didn't want the attention.
The Trump administration wants the attention.
Let's stop pretending like that's not the case.
And cruelty was the point in the way he carried it out.
And it turns out that that was incredibly counterproductive for the goals that the right wing has in these so-called mass deportations.
When you're more interested in KFABE or political theater and less interested in rolling out policies that actually work and coordinate with state and local government, well, then you're not actually going to accomplish your goals here.
And so that's what I see happening right now.
Yeah, I actually completely concur with that.
We're running out of time.
So Blair, I want to talk to you about something a little different.
It's AOC, Alexandra Keja-Gortez, with what has been described as her Taiwan word salad.
She was asked about what would the U.S. do in terms of committing troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move on Taiwan and she was part of an administration.
This is what she said.
Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a very long-standing policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
Do you know what, Blair?
I still have absolutely no idea what she was trying to say there.
I don't think she had any idea what she was trying to say there.
Do you have any idea what she was trying to say there?
Not really.
And it's a bit scary amidst all the people on the left floating the idea of AOC being the next candidate in 28 and vying for more power.
That's a little scary to me.
So I don't really know.
Does that mean that she would or she wouldn't?
I guess I don't have any thoughts about that clip other than I don't know what the hell she was saying.
I don't think she knows.
I think that's super unfair.
I think what she's basically being asked here is if the U.S. should like engage in what may be tantamount to a war with the other biggest global superpower on earth.
And that's not an easy question.
That's what she was asking.
Yes, that's not an easy question to answer.
And I actually think, yeah, she stammered in the beginning, and God knows that we've all stammered in the beginning of difficult questions, but I think that her answer was that we need to engage in diplomacy so that it doesn't get to that point is a perfectly acceptable answer.
And frankly, a much better answer than Donald Trump saying, no, we do need to like annex Greenland or bomb Cuba or take over the Panama Canal.
I mean, what are we doing here?
AOC gave a perfectly reasonable example, even if it wasn't as clean as we would have all hoped, a perfectly reasonable response, a diplomatic solution in the face of an administration right now that is doing the polar opposite and basically ushering in a new era of imperialism.
I would 10 times out of 10.
1,000 times out of 1,000 defer to AOC's answer here as far as international relations go than what we are currently living through in this very moment.
I think I may have just heard that.
That's a false choice, Brian.
You know that.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
We need to have higher standards.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
We do, though.
We need to have higher standards for Democrats.
That's a false option.
I agree with you in regard to the Trump administration's penchant for war.
I think that's very clear right now.
But in regard to Democratic candidates, we have to stop providing cover for their mediocrity.
That answer was terrible, and you know it.
So don't provide cover for it.
So tell me what you think would have been a more acceptable answer.
Well, a sensible answer would have been exactly what you said.
When being at the end of the day, which you claim she said, but she didn't say that.
You read that from her statements.
But her statement was more than just clamoring.
It was just a bunch of word salad nonsense because she's not an expert on foreign policy.
This is a weak spot for her.
So this is an area where she should have done a lot more homework before deciding to speak at the Munich Security Conference as she did at this panel.
She didn't know what she was talking about.
She was blindsided by the question, and it doesn't look good.
Let's just be honest about it rather than providing cover for it.
That's what I'm saying.
Because look, honestly, the quality of candidates has been really bad lately.
And it's because of this like left versus right media structure where the left provides cover for left-wing candidates, the right provides cover for right-wing candidates.
And in the end, the American people suffer because we get nothing but mediocre, terrible candidates.
She should have done better.
That's my voice.
I completely agree.
Brian, I want to ask you a question to end on, because I looked at the prediction markets.
Polly Market as a big market on a Democrat nominee for 2028.
Gavin Newsom is on the lead at 28%, followed by AOC on 9%.
So she's the second favorite in the prediction markets to be the nominee, which is why everything she says is significant and important.
Then Josh Shapiro, Carmela Harris, John Olsovic on 5%, Pete Budigej on 4%.
You know, my question for you, just to round this off, Brian, is the thing I felt when I was watching your interview with Obama, and I would have felt if you'd interviewed Bill Clinton, is that the Democrats in those two guys had really skillful political leaders, right?
You may not agree with everything they did, and I certainly don't in many cases.
I'm more aligned to Clinton than Obama, but they were very skilled politicians, two of the most gifted, I would say, in modern American politics.
And even their opponents would grudgingly concede that.
I just don't see anything of that caliber in the Democrat ranks now.
And one of the issues that the Democrats have with Trump is they have not put anybody up to beat him.
You know, Carmela Harris was useless.
Let's be honest.
The fact that she's running again is extraordinary to me.
The fact that we're heading into the midterms where the Republicans will probably get a good beating does not mean to me that they will lose the next election.
You could easily see a JD Vance or somebody like that winning the 2020 election almost by default.
The default being the Democrats cannot find anybody that can actually energize the party, energize America in the way that Clinton and Obama did.
Would you concede that at the moment?
Yeah, look, I think that I think I can't really speak to Bill Clinton because I was too young at the time, but I think that Obama was a generational figure, and I don't think that we have anybody who can match what he was able to do.
And I think a lot of people probably sat there and watched that interview, as did I, and thinking, like, why can't we have nice things?
You know, like somebody who is, you know, who's got the virtues that he has.
And do I think that we have anybody who can match those virtues right now?
And I don't think so.
You know, luckily, we have a primary process that's going to play out over the next three years where people are going to be able to hone their skills.
And I hope they do.
But I think that right now, I mean, there is a reason that Obama is a generational figure and that it's not that easy to just have somebody who can replicate what he did.
But he is partially a generational figure because we whitewash what he did and didn't do.
I mean, he killed multiple American citizens with drone strikes.
You know what I mean?
And what he was saying in the interview with you about how, you know, there's some sort of monopoly on the left for, you know, not being divided, sorry, on the right for divisiveness or for tearing people apart.
I think it's clear to most people, especially lately, there is a sort of realignment happening that both sides are equally as divisive towards each other.
Realignment And Divisiveness00:01:05
I don't know.
I think like this Obama, you know, missing the Obama era, a lot of it is fake.
Just like you mentioned, Piers, he deported way more people than Trump.
I think a lot of it is optics and whether or not you buy into them.
Yeah, look, I think he was the more skillful politician.
But unfortunately, we've run out of time, Brian.
Look, I began by saying I really enjoyed your interview.
I did really enjoy the interview.
And actually, really would have liked to have heard the answer to your follow-up, which you forgot to ask him.
But you've made that clear.
And you're right.
We've all been there, mate.
And I feel for you.
But it was a great interview.
Otherwise, I wouldn't give it a moment's thought.
Thank you all very much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Pierce.
Thanks.
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