The Ben Shapiro Show - Piers Morgan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 64

00:00:00.000 At what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people?

00:00:08.000 It's a fundamental question for the public health of the country.

00:00:11.000 And treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for America, right? - Hey, hey, and welcome to the show. 0.84

00:00:24.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

00:00:26.000 I am really excited to welcome to the set, Piers Morgan.

00:00:30.000 You know him, of course, from our infamous interview set on CNN, but also he's, of course, the host of Good Morning Britain on ITV, and he's a columnist for the UK Daily Mail.

00:00:38.000 You can check out all of his work at DailyMail.com.

00:00:40.000 Piers, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:00:41.000 I would say it's a pleasure, but let's see how it goes.

00:00:44.000 Probably too hasty here.

00:00:45.000 Well, I mean, I do have to start off by thanking you.

00:00:47.000 We have 100 employees, and at least, I would say, 50 of those are probably due to the fact that you had me on your show several years ago.

00:00:54.000 I still get sent on Twitter the clip, you know, where I go after you about your little book, Being the Constitution.

00:01:00.000 Just to clarify for your listeners and your viewers, I meant the physical size of the book, not the enormity of the content.

00:01:08.000 I appreciate that.

00:01:09.000 And I promise we will get to, for all the viewers, we'll get to gun control a little bit later.

00:01:13.000 The reason I don't want to start with that is because we could do that the entire hour and then we rehash all the stuff that we've done before.

00:01:18.000 Plus, my audience knows your position on gun control.

00:01:20.000 Your audience, I'm sure, knows my position on gun control.

00:01:22.000 But I promise we'll do a little bit later.

00:01:24.000 I want to start off with asking, sort of, what is your background?

00:01:28.000 So for a lot of American viewers, they first became familiar with you when you were on CNN or when you were on America's Got Talent.

00:01:33.000 You've done this wide variety of stuff.

00:01:35.000 So what was your pathway to celebrity, effectively?

00:01:38.000 I was a journalist, so I trained as a journalist in England, and I went on to various newspapers, national newspapers, after a full training on local newspapers.

00:01:48.000 And I became, at the age of 28, the youngest newspaper editor that Britain had seen of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's Biggest selling newspaper in Britain.

00:01:59.000 So that was my big break.

00:02:01.000 I owed it to Rupert very much.

00:02:03.000 He took a big gamble on me.

00:02:04.000 And then after two years I defected to the Daily Mirror, which was the slightly left of centre tabloid up against Rupert Murdoch's son.

00:02:14.000 In Britain, we have, as you may know, a ferociously competitive newspaper market.

00:02:19.000 Tabloid there, I've always said, doesn't mean tabloid like National Enquirer.

00:02:23.000 Tabloid, it means probably New York Post, New York Daily News kind of battle that was going on.

00:02:28.000 And we were the slightly left-of-center version of that.

00:02:31.000 So, I then ran the Daily Mirror for 10 years, producing 3,500, 4,000 newspapers in that time.

00:02:38.000 And then I got unceremoniously fired over a scandal involving photographs of British troops apparently abusing Iraqi civilians.

00:02:48.000 It followed the Abu Ghraib scandal here in America very soon afterwards.

00:02:52.000 And to this day I don't really know what those pictures were or how we came to publish them other than we did it in good faith, contrary to mythology.

00:03:02.000 I didn't deliberately publish fake pictures.

00:03:04.000 My own brother is a British army colonel.

00:03:06.000 He was on the front line in Basra at the time.

00:03:08.000 So a very, very difficult situation for me.

00:03:11.000 I was the editor of a paper that opposed the Iraq war and then got fired over an element of that.

00:03:17.000 So I was then thrown into the Wilderness of having had a big job and suddenly, like, I lose everything.

00:03:25.000 Quite sobering for a few minutes, then quite, like, liberating, actually.

00:03:30.000 And I was like, OK, I've done 10 years chained to the desk of this newspaper.

00:03:34.000 I'm now going to go and try other things.

00:03:36.000 And I tried a few different things.

00:03:37.000 Then Simon Cowell rang me up and said, I've just sold the rights to a show called Got Talent, a new show that he created, to NBC.

00:03:46.000 And I need somebody to be a judge on that. 0.94

00:03:48.000 He's going to be as arrogant and as obnoxious as I am. 0.79

00:03:52.000 And I can't do it because I'm doing American Idol and your name has immediately sprung to mind. 0.92

00:03:56.000 And I got parachuted out here.

00:03:58.000 I literally flew out the next day, met NBC executives who'd never heard of me, had to give them the full Morgan Bullshit Cell, which you yourself have heard many times.

00:04:08.000 And I got the gig.

00:04:09.000 And three weeks later I began on America's Got Talent, which gave me, for the first time, a profile in America.

00:04:14.000 And I did that show for six years.

00:04:16.000 I then did Celebrity Apprentice, which is another NBC show.

00:04:19.000 At the same time I was doing Talent.

00:04:21.000 And of course, Donald Trump was the host.

00:04:23.000 I ended up winning that first season of "Ceberity Apprentice" and that also, probably more significantly in the long term, developed a friendship that I had with Donald Trump, which has lasted to this day.

00:04:34.000 Then I joined CNN, as you know, because you were one of my repeat guests, actually, several times, and it was always good television.

00:04:42.000 I did nearly four years at CNN and then I think Americans got pretty fed up with me and I got pretty fed up with Americans and I went home and I went back to cricket and mushy peas and proper beer, you know the warm kind and watching and playing cricket and that was a probably a good thing for all of us to have a little break from each other.

00:05:01.000 So in a second I want to ask you about the sort of nexus between celebrity and journalism because you got to experience both in the United States obviously for a lot of folks who saw you on CNN and didn't know of your history in Britain it was like why is the guy on America's Got Talent suddenly doing a journalist thing when the truth is that obviously you had a long history as a journalist before that.

00:05:18.000 So I'm asking where you think the proper line should be drawn between celebrity and journalism and particularly in the United States where it seems to have merged.

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00:06:28.000 Let's talk about the merger of celebrity and journalism stories.

00:06:31.000 So obviously, you know, there are a lot of us in the journalistic space in the United States.

00:06:35.000 I'm an opinion journalist, so I get to give my opinion for a living.

00:06:37.000 But journalists have now become celebrities in the United States.

00:06:40.000 And in your case, from American eyes, even though you were a journalist first, it was a celebrity becoming a journalist.

00:06:46.000 Do you think that's good for the country?

00:06:47.000 How do you think journalism should be done, since you've experienced this?

00:06:49.000 Well, in my case, I was certainly a journalist, as far as I was concerned. 0.86

00:06:52.000 I didn't get the CNN job because of my ability to judge piano-playing pigs.

00:06:56.000 I got it because I'd run a daily newspaper for 10 years, and they knew that.

00:06:59.000 I also, in Britain, had an hour-long primetime interview show, which had been running for a few years, which was very successful.

00:07:06.000 So they saw me interviewing world leaders, huge stars, and so on.

00:07:09.000 That was really why I got the CNN job.

00:07:11.000 It wasn't America's Got Talent.

00:07:13.000 That was the profile to go with the back catalogue, if you like.

00:07:17.000 I think the interesting relationship between celebrity and the media goes back a long way.

00:07:21.000 It goes back to probably the late 60s, I think, when newspapers suddenly embraced all things celebrity.

00:07:29.000 and they began to put celebrities on the front pages.

00:07:31.000 If you go back to look at newspapers 50, 60 years ago, you wouldn't find many celebrities on the front page.

00:07:36.000 You certainly wouldn't see a news agenda driven by celebrities.

00:07:40.000 So the world of celebrity became much bigger through that period.

00:07:43.000 Then you had the internet in the last 20 years, propelling everyone into Andy Warhol's world of 15 minutes of fame, if you like.

00:07:51.000 You can be famous for anything.

00:07:52.000 You can kill someone and be famous.

00:07:54.000 Particularly in America, I think, where there's such a huge media and such a huge volume of stuff in the ether, the noise, if you like.

00:08:02.000 And it's allowed celebrities to be journalists and journalists to be celebrities.

00:08:08.000 Honestly, I think that there are Good sides to that and bad sides.

00:08:12.000 The good side is that if you become a celebrated journalist, more people will listen to you.

00:08:17.000 And if you're a good voice, an important voice in American popular culture, I think that's good.

00:08:22.000 The bad side is that you can see now that I think a lot of people who should be impartial journalists, and masquerade as impartial journalists are now drifting towards being celebrities.

00:08:34.000 And right now in America, in Trump's America, the only way to be a celebrated journalist is predominantly to be a liberal, Trump-hating journalist.

00:08:45.000 And that's where it gets dangerous for me.

00:08:46.000 When I look at CNN now, for example, when I was there, the standards and practices around impartiality were extremely, extremely rigorously enforced.

00:08:56.000 You could not remotely be seen to be looking like you were impartial.

00:09:00.000 You were partial politically.

00:09:02.000 Now I look at it and I just see open sneering at Trump 24-7.

00:09:06.000 And I'm like, OK, well, things have changed.

00:09:07.000 Because when I was there, you couldn't do that.

00:09:09.000 And I think that's problematic.

00:09:11.000 America needs CNN to be impartial.

00:09:13.000 You have MSNBC on the left.

00:09:14.000 You have Fox on the right.

00:09:16.000 People have always understood that.

00:09:17.000 CNN itself becomes partial.

00:09:21.000 I'm partisan.

00:09:22.000 I find that a big problem.

00:09:24.000 I find it a problem that some of their reporters want to be big stars.

00:09:28.000 You know, anchors, they're going to be stars because they're anchoring.

00:09:31.000 But when you're a White House reporter or correspondent, you really should be doing the late night chat shows?

00:09:36.000 I don't think so.

00:09:37.000 So I think that there's a line there which is getting crossed more and more, which I think is a problem for American people and their ability to cut through all this and get to the truth.

00:09:49.000 Yeah, I mean, as I'm fond of saying, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta over at CNN.

00:09:54.000 And I like Jim Acosta.

00:09:55.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:09:56.000 And he's a very good correspondent.

00:09:57.000 He's a very good on-screen reporter.

00:09:59.000 Do I want to see Jim Acosta doing books about Trump while he's still president and he's still reporting on him and then going on a, you know, he came on Good Morning Britain.

00:10:06.000 Fine.

00:10:07.000 No problem.

00:10:07.000 I had a good interview with him.

00:10:09.000 It's just I don't think that's probably what he should be doing.

00:10:12.000 And I don't think it's what CNN should be doing.

00:10:14.000 And I say that as somebody who likes CNN and has a lot of friends there.

00:10:18.000 But they have gone so partisan.

00:10:20.000 You know, what happens at the end of all this?

00:10:23.000 Once you've basically abandoned your pretense of impartiality, where does it leave you afterwards?

00:10:28.000 And for the American right, I think the critique actually does predate the Trump era.

00:10:32.000 I really, you know, object to there's this characterization that President Trump, by ripping on the fake news media, that he was the one who collapsed trust in the media.

00:10:40.000 And if you look at the polls, that really isn't true, particularly on the right.

00:10:42.000 And my parents cancelled the LA Times back in the 1990s because they were detecting bias in the way that things were being reported.

00:10:48.000 And that does raise the question as to whether we should even be aspiring to objective journalism or whether we should sort of go back to the original, at least in America, the American partisan model that was sort of prominent at the founding of the republic.

00:10:59.000 I think holding your hands up and saying, I'm a, I'm a partisan journalist, right?

00:11:04.000 I'm coming at this from the right or I'm coming at it from the left.

00:11:07.000 I have no problem with that.

00:11:08.000 I've got no problem at night flicking between Fox and MSNBC, getting a bit of Rachel Maddow and getting a bit of Tucker Carlson or Hannity.

00:11:16.000 I think it's healthy to get both.

00:11:17.000 I think it's probably unhealthy if you only watch one of them all the time, because they're coming at it from a skewed position and they will see the news through their own lens.

00:11:27.000 If you see both lenses, you can, I think, work it out for yourself if you've got half a brain.

00:11:33.000 So I agree that it's been around a long time.

00:11:36.000 I have never known it like it is now, and I think it's being massively exacerbated by social media, which has turned us... I think you've touched on this yourself many times.

00:11:47.000 It feels like we've gone back 2,000 years and we're back into tribes.

00:11:51.000 You have it with Trump here in America, where it's just blind.

00:11:55.000 You have to be in one tribe or the other. 1.00

00:11:57.000 You're not allowed actually to say, Well, on the one hand, I think he's doing some good things here, here, here.

00:12:02.000 On the other, I don't like what he's doing here.

00:12:04.000 It's everything about this man and everything he does and says.

00:12:07.000 Every time he breaks wind, it offends me, right? 0.98

00:12:11.000 Or, I love him and everything he does is fantastic, even when Trump does something ridiculous.

00:12:16.000 And I know that you, you know, you actually have come through as, I think, a pretty reasonable voice in all this, and I've tried to be that.

00:12:24.000 I know it's shocking.

00:12:24.000 You and I have found common ground.

00:12:26.000 It's strange, you know.

00:12:27.000 You were saying you've read most of my columns and you kind of agree with most of them.

00:12:31.000 And I find myself looking at your Twitter feed and not being nearly as offended as I used to be.

00:12:35.000 It's uncomfortable for both of us, right?

00:12:37.000 But it's because I think we both come at it from the same mindset, which is actually The most important thing is to maintain the ability to have a democratic debate with people, and to be able to sit with people that you fundamentally don't agree with, and to listen to things that you find fundamentally offensive, but actually respect someone's right to think differently to you.

00:12:55.000 And again, coming back to this tribal thing, You know, if you go back 2,000 years, you'd be in your tribe, you would never venture outside of the confines of your tribe, and you all dressed the same, you thought the same, you behaved the same, and that was the accepted way that you believed existence occurred.

00:13:12.000 And then, as you began to move out through the years, and you began to encounter other tribes, they dressed differently, they thought differently, they behaved differently, and the tribe, the original tribe's only response to this was to find them so terrifying, these people, they had to kill them. 0.72

00:13:28.000 And the other tribe felt the same way.

00:13:30.000 I look at social media some days now, and I'll give an example, and we'll come to this, I'm sure, but the recent horrendous weekend of mass shootings.

00:13:40.000 You go about 30 years, if that had happened in America, regardless of any politics, I think the country would have had a pause.

00:13:47.000 It would have had a pause where that kind of tribal partisan shrieking was just put on hold to actually pay respects to the people who were killed and their families and the first responders and so on.

00:13:59.000 This time, literally, you could count the seconds.

00:14:02.000 Before the whole thing had to play out as a tribal, politically partisan debate with fury behind it on both sides.

00:14:11.000 And I find that a really insidious and unpleasant facet of modern debate, whatever your debate.

00:14:17.000 Yeah, there's no fundamental assumption of good faith that takes place.

00:14:19.000 And I'm not even talking about on policy, I'm talking about on basic humanity. 0.98

00:14:23.000 So it turns into As I've been saying all week on my podcast about this, this should be a moment where everybody goes, okay, at least we all agree that white supremacist terrorists are evil, right? 0.98

00:14:33.000 And instead it turns into, no, you're in league with the white supremacists. 0.99

00:14:35.000 You actually are a white supremacist. 0.97

00:14:37.000 Or conversely, you want to take all of my guns. 0.96

00:14:39.000 And there's no point at which anybody actually just stops and says, no, actually, this thing here, we all agree this is evil.

00:14:44.000 Let's figure out some ways to deal with it.

00:14:46.000 Instead, we immediately go to, how can we beat each other up over it?

00:14:49.000 I think Twitter has been awful for this.

00:14:51.000 Of all the social media sites, I think Twitter is by far Which is brilliant in so many ways.

00:14:55.000 I love it.

00:14:55.000 I mean, I use it all the time.

00:14:56.000 Yeah, so do I. But I think in terms of embedding these tribes into these mindsets, it's been horrendous.

00:15:04.000 It's like the boo box.

00:15:05.000 I mean, I've described it as the boo box from Hook.

00:15:07.000 You remember there's that scene at the beginning of Hook where they take a pirate and like, admit that you did something.

00:15:11.000 You made a boo boo. 1.00

00:15:12.000 And now we just throw you in the boo box. 1.00

00:15:13.000 Then we throw scorpions and snakes in there until you repent. 0.77

00:15:16.000 And that's what it is.

00:15:17.000 And everybody spends their five minutes in the boo box once every couple of weeks and trends on Twitter.

00:15:21.000 You've been through it.

00:15:22.000 I've been through it.

00:15:22.000 It's really ugly.

00:15:23.000 But it's the inability to have a debate without wanting to cancel people, to wreck their lives, to make them lose their jobs, all that kind of thing.

00:15:31.000 This no-platforming phenomenon, which has now come to Britain.

00:15:34.000 We now have this no-platforming thing where someone like Jordan Peterson is not allowed to speak at Cambridge University, for God's sake.

00:15:40.000 I mean, what is happening in the world when somebody with that kind of mind, you know, in many ways a brilliant mind, I don't agree with half of what he says perhaps, but I certainly can see he's got a brilliant mind and he likes to challenge people's thought process, make you think.

00:15:52.000 What is the point of being at university?

00:15:55.000 If you're not going there to be challenged and to have your own views challenged and to have people you don't agree with.

00:16:02.000 I mean, that's the whole point of it, isn't it?

00:16:04.000 And yet now suddenly, unless the guest speaker, I'm sure you get this all the time, this nonsense, you know, Bill Maher was no platform from Berkeley.

00:16:13.000 I mean, for God's sake, Berkeley was the home of free speech.

00:16:16.000 I required 600 police officers when I spoke at Berkeley. 0.96

00:16:19.000 Ridiculous. 0.65

00:16:20.000 This was the place where free speech began in the 60s. 0.93

00:16:23.000 You know, the kind of campaigning for it.

00:16:25.000 And now look at them.

00:16:26.000 Now you need 600 police officers to protect you.

00:16:29.000 Why?

00:16:30.000 What are you going to do to these people?

00:16:31.000 You're not going to commit a violent act against them.

00:16:34.000 You're going to express your opinions.

00:16:36.000 And you, knowing you as I do, will enjoy the to and fro of them coming back at you and saying, actually, Shapiro, here's where I think you're wrong.

00:16:45.000 And having a debate.

00:16:47.000 It's called democracy.

00:16:48.000 So where do you draw the line with regard to the First Amendment?

00:16:51.000 We've talked a lot about the Second Amendment before between the two of us, obviously, but the First Amendment, obviously, Britain has a slightly different standard than the United States.

00:16:58.000 The United States is very free and very open.

00:17:00.000 We have much more lax standards when it comes to libel and slander.

00:17:04.000 And also we don't have any restrictions on so-called hate speech, which Europe obviously has attempted to put restrictions on.

00:17:10.000 Where do you stand on that particular debate?

00:17:11.000 Well, I think that any hate speech which actually acts as a catalyst for people to commit acts of violence to me is unacceptable wherever you are in the world.

00:17:21.000 Well, incitement is illegal under the First Amendment, but it's an actual legal standard.

00:17:24.000 You have to incite violence.

00:17:25.000 It can't just be something that offends somebody.

00:17:26.000 Yeah, right.

00:17:27.000 What is more problematic for me in Britain, for example, the libel law is incredibly draconian, and the onus is on the publisher to prove that what they published was 100% true.

00:17:37.000 It's not on the onus to the person who is suing you to prove that it's wrong.

00:17:43.000 Now, that sounds like, OK, fair enough, until you get into the weeds of what that really means.

00:17:47.000 You know, as a newspaper editor, I used to publish stories I knew 100% were true.

00:17:52.000 Could I actually prove it in a court of law?

00:17:55.000 When somebody sued us, sometimes that would be impossible, even though we all knew the story was true.

00:18:01.000 That wouldn't happen in America.

00:18:03.000 In America, it would have to be not just publishing a story, even if it was completely wrong, you would have to prove malice was there from the intent.

00:18:11.000 In other words, it was deliberately designed to damage somebody.

00:18:14.000 That's the difference.

00:18:15.000 In Britain, that's not the case at all.

00:18:17.000 And I think that we have a far worse all-encompassing free speech environment in my country than you do in America.

00:18:25.000 So, you know, in our battles over the Constitution, a lot of the U.S. Constitution, I think, is extremely solid, not least the First Amendment.

00:18:32.000 If you remember when there was a petition to be deported from America started by our old friend Alex Jones of Infowars, and it was signed by 150,000 peoples.

00:18:43.000 So it was a White House petition, which meant the White House had to respond because it passed the threshold.

00:18:49.000 Barack Obama actually saved me for the American people.

00:18:52.000 It came as a bit of a shock to the American people, but he did.

00:18:55.000 And he cited the fact that under the First Amendment, I was entitled to comment, however egregiously, to gun lovers in a negative way about the Second Amendment.

00:19:05.000 And there, right there, was an example that I went through of the power of the American Constitution and the right to freedom of speech.

00:19:12.000 So I understand Which do you think is healthier, the British media ecosystem or the American media ecosystem?

00:19:21.000 Because it is very different.

00:19:22.000 I mean, I've experienced both sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, obviously.

00:19:26.000 I think the advantage we have in Britain is that we have, certainly in television terms, we have two 24-hour news networks which are completely impartial.

00:19:34.000 The BBC and Sky.

00:19:36.000 Sky, which until very recently was owned by Rupert Murdoch who created it.

00:19:40.000 And for all the aggro that he gets over here in America for supposedly partisan, well not supposedly, obviously Fox News is nakedly partisan in many ways in terms of its right-wing coverage.

00:19:52.000 And his newspapers have been accused of that too.

00:19:54.000 There's no doubt that in Britain Sky News is a completely impartial broadcaster.

00:19:58.000 So the Brits have an advantage in the sense that we have at least two places to go.

00:20:03.000 The only cable news, if you like, that we have is completely impartial.

00:20:07.000 The only rolling 24-7 news networks that we have are impartial.

00:20:12.000 I mean, is that true about the BBC?

00:20:14.000 Putting aside my own... They have a perceived liberal bias.

00:20:17.000 And there's no doubt if you shot a harpoon around the BBC newsroom, you wouldn't catch many right-wingers.

00:20:23.000 That is true.

00:20:25.000 I watch it all the time and I believe it's fundamentally, at its core, it's an impartial broadcaster, in my view.

00:20:32.000 So I think we're fortunate in that respect.

00:20:34.000 I know Americans now who watch BBC America because they want to get a completely unvarnished opinion of what is happening in their own country.

00:20:42.000 And I understand that.

00:20:43.000 It's very hard when every news network in America now is biased.

00:20:48.000 Where do you go for what you believe is genuinely unbiased opinion?

00:20:48.000 It's hard.

00:20:54.000 Now, not opinion, but news.

00:20:56.000 And I think it's important to have that amid all the obviously opinionated and either side views that are being put out there.

00:21:04.000 So in just a second, I want to ask you about, shift topics for a second, ask you about President Trump, because obviously you're friends with him and he is the news.

00:21:10.000 Not just he's in the news, he is the news now.

00:21:12.000 We'll ask about that in just one second.

00:21:14.000 First, You know, whenever there's an emergency, you hear on the news about how people can't get to the supermarket and how some people are left unprepared.

00:21:20.000 Well, don't be that person.

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00:22:26.000 So let's talk about your association with President Trump.

00:22:29.000 So you became friends with him when you were on Celebrity Apprentice?

00:22:31.000 I'd met him briefly before actually on America's Got Talent.

00:22:34.000 He came on as a guest one day and I had a little chat with him and obviously we knew all about Donald Trump in Britain.

00:22:40.000 He was this great larger-than-life character.

00:22:42.000 Then I'd go on Celebrity Apprentice.

00:22:43.000 The interesting thing for me with that show was that I Day one, I met him, and he came up to me and he went, you're Rupert's guy, right?

00:22:51.000 He used to work for Murdoch.

00:22:52.000 I went, yeah.

00:22:53.000 He said, you were like his youngest editors or something.

00:22:55.000 I said, yeah.

00:22:55.000 He said, OK, then you must be smart.

00:22:58.000 You must be smart.

00:22:59.000 And I was laughing, going, OK, I'm off to a good start.

00:23:02.000 The host of the show thinks I'm smart.

00:23:04.000 I'd also read Out of the Deal three times, so I began to play the game exactly how I thought Trump would play it and began to talk to him almost like Trump, which was definitely a successful strategy.

00:23:14.000 What I remember being struck by is interesting.

00:23:16.000 One, that he was over the hundreds of hours I spent with him.

00:23:20.000 In that boardroom, it's three or four hours a session.

00:23:23.000 And you see, you know, no one can cheat who they are for hundreds of hours.

00:23:27.000 And I'm quite good at, you know, being perceptive about human beings through all my journalistic training over the years.

00:23:34.000 I saw a guy that was clearly very smart, much smarter than I think his critics give him credit for.

00:23:40.000 Very charming.

00:23:41.000 In those boardrooms, a side I do not see enough of as president.

00:23:45.000 He's come in, he's decided to play the whack, whack, whack president because he's getting whacked all the time.

00:23:52.000 And almost it brings out the worst in both him and his critics, I think. 0.82

00:23:56.000 If you read out of the deal, his whole strategy to people that criticize him is to punch them 10 times as hard.

00:24:00.000 That's what Donald Trump's DNA is about.

00:24:02.000 It was very successful in real estate.

00:24:04.000 It got him elected president.

00:24:05.000 I would like to see more of the charming Donald Trump that I saw in the boardroom.

00:24:09.000 I think it would go a long way if he just gave us more of that.

00:24:12.000 So, you know, I find that a frustration of somebody who genuinely likes him personally.

00:24:16.000 But I also saw somebody very decisive, pretty solid judgment.

00:24:21.000 He fired all the people I would have fired.

00:24:23.000 He was very good, though, at also creating a lot of controlled chaos.

00:24:27.000 He liked people crashing together and arguing and all that kind of theatre and drama, all the stuff we see play out now every day in his presidency.

00:24:37.000 He definitely enjoyed that.

00:24:39.000 He likes conflict and he thrives off it.

00:24:43.000 Donald Trump, if you ask him, would say, I'm sure he's at his best when he's under fire.

00:24:47.000 The problem now is that he's two and a half years into his presidency and every day it's a fire.

00:24:52.000 It's a firefight.

00:24:54.000 And I'm not sure the American people are being well served by this.

00:24:57.000 And I don't blame just Donald Trump.

00:24:59.000 The media now is predominantly a liberal media and they just like poking the bear and the bear likes swatting them back.

00:24:59.000 I blame everybody.

00:25:07.000 But in the middle of all this are the American people and they're like every day just seem so dramatic. 0.57

00:25:14.000 Rather than actually, can't we just get some stuff done here amid all the shrieking and the punch-ups?

00:25:19.000 I mean, in terms of the interpersonal, my theory about him has always been, because I grew up in Hollywood, that he's basically a performer, meaning that he is great with people who are in the room.

00:25:27.000 And you see when he's doing a live speech that he's playing off the crowd in a way that a stand-up comedian would play off the crowd, not like a normal politician plays off the crowd.

00:25:34.000 And that means that he's mainly appealing to the people who really are almost literally within his eyesight, that playing to the people who are out there beyond the scope of the camera It almost doesn't seem to occur to him that there are hundreds of millions of other people who are watching this in a way that it might have occurred to him doing The Apprentice, where it's explicitly a product that is made for hundreds of millions of people to watch and is being edited in the back room.

00:25:56.000 Also, I would say that his strengths are often his weaknesses too.

00:26:00.000 You know, the unfettered insight into the American president in real time on Twitter is fascinating and really riveting on occasion.

00:26:08.000 But it also obviously can be very damaging and destructive as well.

00:26:12.000 You know, he told me that he likes to wake up in the morning, he sees all the TV screens.

00:26:16.000 If he doesn't like what he's seeing, he just gets up, does a tweet, and watches it all change in real time.

00:26:20.000 You know, that is powerful.

00:26:23.000 He changes the news agenda with his own hand, with his thumb.

00:26:28.000 Boom.

00:26:30.000 If I was his opponent, or if I was one of the Democrats running against him, I certainly wouldn't run a strategy of just screaming abuse about Donald Trump.

00:26:37.000 It didn't work for Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:26:39.000 It won't work for any of the candidates this time.

00:26:42.000 The only way you can beat Donald Trump is to play your own game against him, not the one he wants you to play.

00:26:47.000 He wants to suck people into a punch-out.

00:26:49.000 It's where he feels more comfortable. 0.93

00:26:51.000 You know, he will always justify his actions, good, bad, and ugly.

00:26:55.000 By the number of people that attack him.

00:26:57.000 He'll say, well, look at these people.

00:26:59.000 They're attacking me, left, right, and center.

00:27:01.000 Why shouldn't I attack them?

00:27:03.000 We all know that's what he's like.

00:27:05.000 So as the media, I think you have an option, the collective media, do we spend all day attacking this guy, hoping that he reacts?

00:27:14.000 Is that really in the best interest of how we cover this presidency, given that's what we know he's like?

00:27:19.000 And I think at the moment, it's like they're in an abused relationship, the media and Trump.

00:27:25.000 And it's ugly.

00:27:27.000 And I don't think it works for the American people.

00:27:30.000 I think too much important stuff is getting forgotten about.

00:27:33.000 You know, every day the only story is Trump.

00:27:36.000 Every newspaper front page, every news bulletin, every cable news show, it's just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

00:27:44.000 Other things are happening in the world.

00:27:46.000 We have the same thing in Britain with Brexit.

00:27:48.000 It becomes all-pervasive, all-dominant.

00:27:50.000 It sucks the life out of everything else.

00:27:52.000 And it, of course, fuels the tribes that we talked about earlier.

00:27:57.000 Absolutely.

00:27:58.000 He'll destroy them. 0.99

00:27:58.000 He's Godzilla. 0.99

00:27:59.000 You can't just be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Nice Guy.

00:28:00.000 Forget it.

00:28:00.000 feeling like the American people are sick of the chaos.

00:28:02.000 Suburban women don't like President Trump's personality. 0.99

00:28:05.000 They feel he's too abrasive.

00:28:07.000 All I have to do is basically sit here and be a human.

00:28:09.000 And I have a good shot at winning.

00:28:10.000 Or do you think that Trump is too aggressive for that?

00:28:12.000 Absolutely.

00:28:13.000 He's Godzilla. 0.99

00:28:14.000 He'll destroy them.

00:28:15.000 You can't just be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Nice Guy.

00:28:18.000 Forget it.

00:28:19.000 It's not going to happen.

00:28:20.000 And I'll watch all the candidates, the Democrats.

00:28:23.000 And apart from the absolutely politically suicidal strategy of allowing the squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her friends are sucking the party so far left, they've become completely unelectable. 0.97

00:28:35.000 In fact, completely unpopular within their own party.

00:28:37.000 You know, People forget that the squad is not popular amongst Democrats, never mind anybody else.

00:28:43.000 How are they possibly going to win as a party if that becomes a face and voice?

00:28:46.000 So what does Trump do?

00:28:48.000 Trump goes after them because he wants them to be the face and voice.

00:28:52.000 And the challenge for Democrats, I think, at this election, if they really want to beat Trump, is they have to forget that noise, and they have to make themselves the face and voice of the party, and they have to offer a vision for America which resonates in a better way than Trump's making America great.

00:29:08.000 Which, by the way, was brilliant marketing.

00:29:11.000 Trump, at his heart, is a marketeer.

00:29:13.000 I don't think he has many ideological bones in his body.

00:29:16.000 But he's a brilliant marketeer and, as we saw last time, a phenomenal campaigner.

00:29:21.000 And he hasn't really stopped campaigning.

00:29:22.000 He's down doing rallies every week.

00:29:25.000 Massive rallies.

00:29:26.000 Huge turnouts.

00:29:27.000 If you see the videos sometimes, they're going around the blocks.

00:29:30.000 These people will come out and vote for him.

00:29:33.000 You know, his approval rating is nudging up.

00:29:35.000 So I'd say to the Democrats, yeah, you can all scream and shout and lie on the floor.

00:29:39.000 You know, they have these sort of anniversary parties, don't they, on the anniversary of his election, where you go and lie on the floor and you scream at the sky as if somehow this is going to beat Donald Trump.

00:29:50.000 He wants you to do that.

00:29:51.000 You're all falling into his trap.

00:29:53.000 And I look to all of them on the Debates the other day, the Democrats.

00:29:58.000 And I thought, who could stand there against Trump and beat him?

00:30:02.000 Possibly Biden.

00:30:03.000 I've always felt that he would have been a better candidate for them last time.

00:30:06.000 I think he would have not made the mistakes that Hillary made.

00:30:09.000 And he seems to be gathering a bit of momentum now.

00:30:13.000 But of the others, you look at them and you think, really?

00:30:15.000 You're going to beat him?

00:30:16.000 Kamala Harris or, you know, Marianne Williamson or any of them, really?

00:30:21.000 I think, I can't see you beating him.

00:30:24.000 And ultimately, politics is about power.

00:30:26.000 If you don't have the power, you can't change anything.

00:30:28.000 So you can bang on about changing the world, but if you don't get power and wrestle it away from Donald Trump, you are powerless.

00:30:34.000 So the current strategy that the media and the left seem to have about Trump for two years, it was that he was a Russian stooge. 0.61

00:30:39.000 Then the Mueller report came out and that, of course, completely collapsed in on them.

00:30:42.000 Which massively helped Trump.

00:30:44.000 So the media's ridiculous over-obsession with Russia collusion, which turned out to be complete nonsense, actually has just fueled Donald Trump and made him more popular.

00:30:54.000 Because it looks exactly like he's been saying. 0.79

00:30:57.000 The fake news media making something up about me, screaming about it for two years, and then it all turns out to be nonsense.

00:31:05.000 And yet, you know, in that Mueller report there were genuine questions about potential obstruction of justice and stuff.

00:31:11.000 But as I said to people, imagine if you're down in Florida or Texas and you're thinking, hang on, this guy was accused of something he didn't do.

00:31:20.000 And now apparently the really bad thing, because that turned out to be untrue, is that he was trying to obstruct justice into something he never did.

00:31:28.000 How does that work?

00:31:29.000 Now, we know how it works legally.

00:31:30.000 It does work legally.

00:31:32.000 You can obstruct justice into something you didn't do.

00:31:35.000 But in terms of the noise around the Mueller report and what that did for Trump, massively helped him.

00:31:42.000 So I say again to the media, who are you helping here?

00:31:44.000 By going so ridiculously over the top on such meagre scraps in the way that they did.

00:31:50.000 And you know what it was, Ben?

00:31:51.000 They wanted it to be true so badly that they all forgot about being journalists.

00:31:57.000 And it was hideous to watch.

00:31:58.000 And they all got the punishment they deserve, which is egg on their face in spectacular form.

00:32:04.000 But more importantly, they've helped Donald Trump.

00:32:07.000 Just as they all helped him before.

00:32:08.000 Well, without any shift in time, they immediately moved into the secondary narrative, which obviously has been promoted thanks to the actual very real rise in white supremacist violence in the United States. 0.96

00:32:20.000 That Trump is a racist, that he's a white supremacist, that he's egging all of this on. 0.69

00:32:24.000 Where do you come down on this question? 0.99

00:32:25.000 Because this is the question of the day.

00:32:26.000 Is Donald Trump a racist? 0.96

00:32:27.000 Is he a white supremacist? 0.99

00:32:29.000 Is he egging it on?

00:32:30.000 And they may be three separate questions.

00:32:31.000 I don't think he's a white supremacist.

00:32:32.000 And I don't personally think he's a racist because I've seen him interacting around a lot of non-white people in my time.

00:32:39.000 I've never got a sense at all of him having any issue in terms of being, in his heart, a racist.

00:32:47.000 However, and it's a big however, he knows his base likes it when he fires up racially incendiary comments.

00:32:54.000 At what point, if you say enough of them, do you actually lend support to the theory that fundamentally you've become racist?

00:33:04.000 That you're using racism for votes, that you're using racism to make yourself popular with your base.

00:33:10.000 And that's where I've got a problem with Donald Trump and what he's been doing.

00:33:13.000 When he said to Miss Omar Go home.

00:33:19.000 That's a racist comment.

00:33:21.000 You can argue the semantics to the cows come home.

00:33:24.000 It's a racist comment to say to somebody who is an American citizen, go home, and he doesn't mean America.

00:33:31.000 And he doesn't need to do it.

00:33:32.000 The Squad is inflammatory enough and helpful enough to Donald Trump, politically, because they're so far left and they're getting so much oxygen of publicity.

00:33:41.000 He doesn't need to play that card with them.

00:33:44.000 But he did.

00:33:45.000 And when he does that, I cringe.

00:33:48.000 Do you think he's doing that out of strategy?

00:33:49.000 I mean, this does come back to a question that you were speaking to before.

00:33:52.000 There's two theories.

00:33:52.000 From the right, the theory is that everything he does is 4D chess, underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos.

00:33:57.000 Every move is planned.

00:33:58.000 It's all part of a grand game that he's playing. 1.00

00:34:00.000 And on the left, it's that he is simultaneously an evil genius and also a complete moron who doesn't know what he's doing, stumbling around in the dark. 0.99

00:34:07.000 I don't think he's like any of those things. 1.00

00:34:09.000 But do I think he's capable of saying moronic things? 0.99

00:34:11.000 Absolutely. 0.99

00:34:12.000 Do I think he's capable of saying things which are, in my opinion, racist?

00:34:16.000 Yes.

00:34:17.000 Do I think in his heart he's a racist?

00:34:18.000 No, I don't.

00:34:20.000 I definitely don't think he's a white supremacist.

00:34:21.000 Do I think white supremacy is a problem in this country?

00:34:23.000 Absolutely.

00:34:24.000 There is clear and cogent evidence that it is a rising problem in exactly the same way that it was a problem with ISIS and that ideology, fueled by internet, fueled by people sitting in their homes, you know, reading and watching all this stuff late night, infiltrating their brains.

00:34:40.000 You know, one of the big issues I think right now is how people's minds are being permeated and influenced by the internet.

00:34:47.000 It's a huge problem.

00:34:49.000 I've got family members and friends on Facebook who've gone nuts about Brexit or Trump.

00:34:54.000 I've had to unfriend them.

00:34:56.000 Unfriend your own family, right, in some cases. 0.79

00:34:58.000 Because I can't deal with the kind of ludicrous stream of consciousness that comes out of their fingers on their social media.

00:35:08.000 And it's driven very deliberately by groups that have a vested interest in this.

00:35:13.000 And it's a very big problem.

00:35:15.000 You know it.

00:35:16.000 You have a really important influence in this country now.

00:35:19.000 You're able to get to millions of people with these shows.

00:35:22.000 It's why I've come on.

00:35:23.000 Because I know how big your podcast is.

00:35:25.000 And congratulations.

00:35:27.000 And the reason I've come on is, I think actually, amid all this noise, you try and be balanced and you try and listen to alternative views.

00:35:35.000 But you're in the minority.

00:35:36.000 Most people out there who are doing the kind of thing you're doing are hyper-partisan.

00:35:43.000 And whether it's people having an effect on Islamists who want to cause carnage or people who have white supremacist sympathies who want to cause carnage, what is driving it is they're getting influenced.

00:35:56.000 Their brains are getting damaged.

00:35:59.000 And in America you could add the massive over-medication as a potential factor in all this.

00:36:05.000 You have 80% of the world's painkillers get bought and used in America.

00:36:10.000 80% of the world's painkillers!

00:36:11.000 What is going on?

00:36:12.000 What's going on is this country's being massively over-medicated and you're getting young kids whose brains are getting flipped.

00:36:19.000 They're reading all this stuff online.

00:36:21.000 Are they Genuinely white supremacists?

00:36:25.000 Or are they people attaching themselves to white supremacy as something to somehow filter their hatred?

00:36:32.000 I don't know the answer to that, but I know it's a real problem.

00:36:35.000 And it's a problem being fueled by the internet.

00:36:37.000 It does feel like a lot of the militating social institutions have dissolved, that all of the places people used to go to meet each other and hang out in real life are gone.

00:36:44.000 I mean, there was a poll recently that said a plurality of young people say they have no friends, which means that they're looking for some sort of connection online.

00:36:51.000 And it's not hard to find connection with pretty terrible people online.

00:36:55.000 In the absence of that, you're going to find the tribe.

00:36:56.000 I mean, you're going to find whatever tribe most allows you to gravitate toward it.

00:36:59.000 So you've had a really interesting sort of path on Brexit.

00:37:02.000 So originally you were anti-Brexit.

00:37:04.000 Now you say that if you came up for a vote again, you would vote in favor of Brexit.

00:37:07.000 So where do you come, where is that coming from?

00:37:09.000 Well, my, I think my position on Brexit was it was the referendum, which caused Brexit to happen, was driven by David Cameron, the then conservative prime minister, for pure political expediency.

00:37:21.000 There was no real reason for him to call that referendum other than it suited him politically.

00:37:24.000 He thought it would empower his position and his party's position to finally deal with this issue once and for all.

00:37:31.000 The Europe issue had been bubbling away for a long time.

00:37:34.000 So he calls the referendum in the certain belief that he would win it.

00:37:38.000 Never crossed his mind that he would lose it.

00:37:40.000 We'd had the Scottish independence referendum just before Brexit and he led a very successful campaign.

00:37:48.000 To make sure that Scotland stayed part of the United Kingdom.

00:37:52.000 So, you know, David Cameron was pretty confident that with Brexit, of course, we'd stay in the European Union.

00:37:57.000 Why wouldn't we?

00:37:58.000 But what he underestimated, exactly as I think the Democrats underestimated here, was that there are now basically two countries in Britain.

00:38:07.000 You've got the metropolitan elites, for want of a better phrase, and you have the rest of the country, particularly up north, where issues like immigration have become really important.

00:38:16.000 And there's no doubt, there's a town... I did a political show for the BBC called Question Time, the big punditry show.

00:38:24.000 And we did it near a town near Norwich in the east of the country.

00:38:28.000 And it's a town where in the space of 15 years they now have twice the size of population and all those who've come in to double the size of the population are from Eastern Europe, from when the border was opened in Eastern Europe.

00:38:41.000 Now, I'm very pro-immigration.

00:38:43.000 But you can't look at that town and the strain and stress that this has put on all their services, from hospitals to schools and others.

00:38:51.000 And it's not because the people of that town are racist that there's been a problem.

00:38:54.000 It's because they've just had this extraordinary change in the culture of the town that they live in.

00:39:00.000 And no one's really thought about this or dealt with it properly.

00:39:03.000 Now, if you replicate that around Britain, that's why immigration became the key issue in the referendum.

00:39:08.000 It wasn't about money or about what we pay the EU.

00:39:11.000 It was about immigration.

00:39:13.000 And Nigel Farage and others hit that very hard.

00:39:16.000 I kept telling David Cameron and his people, you're fighting the wrong battle here.

00:39:20.000 It's not about money.

00:39:22.000 It's about immigration.

00:39:23.000 You've got to deal with it.

00:39:24.000 And it's really about assimilation, actually, is the bigger problem.

00:39:28.000 So they had the referendum.

00:39:29.000 They woke up and discovered to their shock and horror.

00:39:32.000 I voted to remain in the European Union.

00:39:34.000 I thought the European Union is a pretty anachronistic organisation.

00:39:37.000 It's not perfect by any means.

00:39:38.000 But actually, I prefer Britain not to think of itself as the empire it once was, but as a major cog in the big wheel of the European Union.

00:39:46.000 Almost the United States of Europe, if you like.

00:39:48.000 I felt there's power in numbers and strength from volume.

00:39:52.000 But the country voted the other way.

00:39:54.000 And it didn't just vote the other way in small numbers.

00:39:56.000 17.4 million people.

00:39:59.000 voted in Britain, to leave your opinion, the biggest democratic vote in our country's history.

00:40:05.000 And their wishes must now be respected.

00:40:08.000 Democracy must be seen to be done.

00:40:11.000 And in the same way that you had here with Hillary Clinton, she won the popular vote. 1.00

00:40:15.000 So it doesn't count.

00:40:16.000 Sorry?

00:40:18.000 It's all about the popular vote.

00:40:20.000 It's the Electoral College is how you get elected here.

00:40:23.000 It's not playing a game of chess and actually playing, you know, some other thing like checkers and say, well, hang on, we're playing chess.

00:40:29.000 We're not playing checkers.

00:40:30.000 Trump played to win chess, not checkers.

00:40:33.000 In Brexit, exactly the same.

00:40:35.000 The Remainers, or Ramoners as they've now become known, have simply for three years refused to accept the result. 1.00

00:40:41.000 They think that the people that voted to leave were too stupid. 1.00

00:40:45.000 Rather like Democrats here think the people that voted Trump were just too stupid to understand what they were doing. 1.00

00:40:49.000 No, they weren't. 1.00

00:40:50.000 They like Donald Trump.

00:40:51.000 And here's the shock for you.

00:40:52.000 They still like Donald Trump.

00:40:55.000 So now we're in a position where Boris Johnson's become prime minister because his predecessor, Theresa May, was a Remainer.

00:41:02.000 And everybody knew that.

00:41:03.000 She couldn't have any conviction about driving a train somewhere she didn't want to get to.

00:41:08.000 Boris Johnson does want to get there.

00:41:09.000 And the question is, can he now deliver on Brexit?

00:41:12.000 My position is, I still fundamentally believe we shouldn't be doing this.

00:41:17.000 But I'm much more concerned myself about the power of democracy and to see the people's will respected and delivered on by the government that's paid to serve them than I do about getting my vote to be the right one.

00:41:32.000 In other words, I might think it's right, but the majority in the country thought it was wrong.

00:41:37.000 And this comes back to social media in particular, the self-righteousness of people that lose elections now or referendums, right? 1.00

00:41:45.000 And they say, no, no, no, you're too stupid. 1.00

00:41:48.000 No, actually, we have to do this all over again. 1.00

00:41:50.000 We should ignore the result of this election because I know more than you.

00:41:54.000 I'm more intelligent than you. 1.00

00:41:56.000 You're stupid people. 1.00

00:41:58.000 That's where we've got to. 1.00

00:41:59.000 And if that is accepted, Where every result is simply declared null and void unless liberals, let's be honest, Get what they want, democracy dies.

00:42:10.000 So what do you make of the broader argument that's been made about Brexit and President Trump as part of the same generalized phenomenon that you're seeing in other countries in Europe as well?

00:42:17.000 You've seen it in Italy, you're starting to see it in some of the Nordic countries, that there is a resistance to a generalized elite, people who want to control your life from top down, who may sneer at you.

00:42:28.000 It seems to me that... Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable.

00:42:32.000 And I speak as a liberal, OK?

00:42:35.000 In my core, I'm probably more liberal than not.

00:42:37.000 Although, fundamentally, I see myself as a journalist and I'd like to see both sides of all these things.

00:42:41.000 And I can argue both. 0.95

00:42:43.000 But liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal. 0.95

00:42:47.000 And it's a massive problem. 0.92

00:42:49.000 What's the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don't allow anyone else to have a different view?

00:42:54.000 You know, this snowflake culture that we operate in, the victimhood culture, the, you know, everyone has to think a certain way, behave a certain way.

00:43:02.000 Everyone has to, you know, have a bleeding heart and tell you 20 things that are wrong with them.

00:43:07.000 And, you know, I just think it's all completely skewed to an environment where everyone's offended by everything.

00:43:15.000 And no one's allowed to say a joke.

00:43:16.000 If you said a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody, you can never host the Oscars, you know?

00:43:21.000 So now there's no host for anything.

00:43:23.000 The Emmys now just said they're not going to host either.

00:43:25.000 So hosts have gone.

00:43:26.000 And soon every award winner will go because everyone's a human and they're all flawed.

00:43:31.000 So no one can win awards anymore because there will be no platform before they even get on the podium.

00:43:36.000 So then no hosts, no stars.

00:43:39.000 And no one can make any movies because we're all flawed, so no actors, right?

00:43:44.000 So suddenly, where are we?

00:43:45.000 The liberals get what they want, which is a humorless void where nothing happens, where no one dare do anything or laugh about anything or behave in any way that doesn't suit their rigid No thanks.

00:44:02.000 So what's happening around the world?

00:44:03.000 Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture.

00:44:07.000 They're fed up with snowflakery. 1.00

00:44:09.000 They're fed up with everyone being offended by everything.

00:44:11.000 And they're gravitating to forceful personalities who go, this is all nonsense!

00:44:16.000 Which, by the way, it is in most cases.

00:44:19.000 So why are we surprised?

00:44:20.000 I'm not surprised.

00:44:22.000 It doesn't mean to say that I agree with all of it.

00:44:24.000 But it means I can understand it, and I understand why the liberals, my side if you like, are getting it so horribly wrong.

00:44:33.000 They just want to tell people not just how to lead their lives, but if you don't lead it the way I tell you to.

00:44:39.000 It's a kind of version of fascism.

00:44:41.000 If you don't lead the life the way I'm telling you to, then I'm going to ruin your life. 1.00

00:44:46.000 I'm going to scream abuse at you. 0.99

00:44:48.000 I'm going to get you fired from your job. 0.99

00:44:49.000 I'm going to get you hounded by your family and friends. 1.00

00:44:52.000 I'm going to make you the most disgusting human being in the world because you said a joke 10 years ago. 1.00

00:44:58.000 And that's the attitude we're now operating in. 0.99

00:45:00.000 It takes forceful personalities to rise above it.

00:45:03.000 Donald Trump rose up and went like Godzilla.

00:45:06.000 OK, you want to fight?

00:45:07.000 I'm here.

00:45:08.000 And guess what?

00:45:09.000 Millions of people in middle America went, that's our guy.

00:45:12.000 That's our guy.

00:45:13.000 He's the one that's going to help us.

00:45:15.000 Same thing happening across Europe.

00:45:16.000 So one of the things that I insisted on, so we have our leftist tears tumbler here.

00:45:20.000 I always distinguish between leftists and liberals specifically because of this.

00:45:23.000 I think everyone cries.

00:45:24.000 I mean, that's true.

00:45:26.000 That's true.

00:45:27.000 Some of us more than others.

00:45:27.000 But the fact that there is a distinction between leftists and liberals is something that I've pushed very hard on.

00:45:33.000 I think that there is a left.

00:45:34.000 There's a radical left.

00:45:35.000 Right, that's censorious and nasty.

00:45:37.000 And then there are liberals who just want bigger government and higher taxes and more government regulation, but fundamentally agree with basic human classical liberal freedoms.

00:45:46.000 Like we get to have a difference of opinion without you destroying my business and destroying my life and boycotting Equinox because the owner funded Donald Trump or something.

00:45:53.000 That's a classic story, isn't it?

00:45:55.000 Absolutely classic story that Equinox and SoulCycle, no one can ever go to again.

00:45:58.000 Of course, I've noticed in LA, they're all going there.

00:46:01.000 They're all screaming about it, but they're all actually going there.

00:46:04.000 It's really about… I mean, otherwise they'd have to go to the 24-hour fitness.

00:46:07.000 I mean, that place is downscale.

00:46:08.000 Right, right.

00:46:09.000 So, they're not actually going to deprive their own lives of the pleasure of SoulCycle and Equinox.

00:46:13.000 What they want to do is virtue signal.

00:46:15.000 They want to actually attach themselves to this and say, actually, this is so disgusting, I have to scream about it for the next 24 hours.

00:46:21.000 I'll move on after that.

00:46:22.000 But in the meantime, this poor guy who decided to have a fundraiser because he's allowed to, in a democratic country, he's allowed to have a fundraiser, he's allowed to like Donald Trump, the President of the United States, and he's allowed to also have business interests.

00:46:35.000 And he's allowed to have people that come there he doesn't agree with.

00:46:39.000 He probably doesn't agree with half the people or more that use SoulCycle.

00:46:42.000 It's a liberal fest.

00:46:44.000 I've been down there myself.

00:46:46.000 That's fine.

00:46:47.000 That's actually allowed in the world.

00:46:48.000 You're allowed to be on a bicycle next to somebody that supports something you don't support.

00:46:53.000 It's really allowed.

00:46:54.000 It's OK.

00:46:55.000 It's really OK.

00:46:56.000 But no, he had to be hounded.

00:46:59.000 And everybody had to cancel their... I mean, the ultimate for me was when Trump went down to El Paso and he said some conciliatory things after that shooting.

00:47:09.000 And the New York Times had the audacity to run a headline on the front page which said, Trump urges unity versus racism, which is exactly what all the radical left and the more overtly illiberal liberals had been screaming at him to do.

00:47:25.000 And the moment he does it, they then immediately start shrieking on Twitter that the New York Times has to be cancelled.

00:47:31.000 As Ocasio-Cortez said, they're now supporting white supremacy. 0.94

00:47:34.000 So they have to be cancelled, the people that wrote the headline have to be cancelled, everybody has to basically die.

00:47:39.000 It's because they ran a headline which accurately reported what Trump, the president, had said, which may be riddled with hypocrisy and that's a separate argument, which was argued in the piece by the way, and the New York Times caved and just did a different headline because the liberal mob had come after them on social media and threatened to damage their business because they had the audacity to faithfully report what the president said that day about unity and racism.

00:48:06.000 What's the result of that?

00:48:08.000 The result of that is that Trump just thinks, well, why am I bothering?

00:48:11.000 You know, why am I bothering?

00:48:13.000 He's got a point, doesn't he?

00:48:14.000 I mean, why is he bothering to say anything that mollifies people that hate him?

00:48:19.000 If the reaction every time he says what they want him to say is to scream even louder.

00:48:24.000 Whereas, what kind of Trump would you get if you actually gave him due credit occasionally?

00:48:27.000 That's what I say to people.

00:48:29.000 Give him credit when he's right, and then you might get a different Donald Trump.

00:48:33.000 Read Art of the Deal, and you'll understand the man you're dealing with.

00:48:37.000 But they don't want to understand him.

00:48:38.000 They just want to have him as a demonising figure that they can scream about all day long because it makes them feel good.

00:48:42.000 Well, that final point, I think, is the one that really is telling about so many folks on the left.

00:48:47.000 AOC being a prime example.

00:48:48.000 She put out a tweet thread where she explained that we are all rife with the virus that is white supremacy.

00:48:53.000 She never defines white supremacy anywhere in her tweet thread, of course.

00:48:55.000 White supremacy is just anything that she disagrees with and that she can use as a brick bat to hurl at somebody. 1.00

00:49:01.000 That is leading to this reactionary move on the part of the right, which is, okay, I'm just going to disagree with everything you say.

00:49:06.000 It's not that you can—if people on the left refuse to acknowledge that they are not defining terms well and not calling out their own when their own do bad things, why would they expect people on the right not to violate the game theory and just, we're now in a prisoner's dilemma where you may as well cheat?

00:49:22.000 Trump and North Korea, right?

00:49:24.000 So Trump initially was very bombastic about North Korea.

00:49:28.000 Lots of incendiary tweets, right, about Little Rocket Man and so on, right?

00:49:31.000 And the left go completely nuts, right?

00:49:34.000 How dare you? 1.00

00:49:34.000 You're being disgusting. 1.00

00:49:35.000 You're supposed to be the president. 1.00

00:49:36.000 Be presidential!

00:49:37.000 You know, what are you doing?

00:49:38.000 You're taking us to the brink of war.

00:49:40.000 What are you thinking about?

00:49:41.000 So he goes and sees Kim Jong-un.

00:49:44.000 And he starts talking in an upbeat way, a positive way.

00:49:48.000 He wants peace, as Trump has seemed to want about everything, actually.

00:49:53.000 He's one of the least warmongering presidents America's had.

00:49:56.000 You'd never believe that from the rhetoric about him.

00:49:59.000 And yet he did the opposite to what people thought he would do.

00:50:02.000 And so far, so quite good, actually.

00:50:04.000 His relationship with Kim Jong-un seems to me to be serving the global interest, which is not having a war between North Korea and America.

00:50:12.000 Same with Putin, you could argue.

00:50:14.000 Same with almost everything Trump does on the international stage.

00:50:16.000 He seems to me to be a force for peace, not war.

00:50:20.000 He thinks wars are too expensive.

00:50:21.000 And you might say, well, where's the integrity in that?

00:50:23.000 He's just a business guy.

00:50:25.000 OK, but isn't it better that he's forging peace with these countries than wanting war with them?

00:50:31.000 Looking how ruinous war has been to America, both in terms of the loss of life to the servicemen and women, and also in terms of the enormous cost to the American economy.

00:50:40.000 So why not give him some credit?

00:50:44.000 When he's trying to forge peace, why not encourage him and give him credit?

00:50:47.000 But no, he can't win either way.

00:50:50.000 The only answer with Trump from his critics is to scream about everything.

00:50:53.000 So he can't win.

00:50:54.000 He can't actually say anything that modifies him.

00:50:56.000 And that's a real problem for me.

00:50:58.000 You know, I've written maybe 80 columns about Trump since he first ran as candidate.

00:51:03.000 You can go back and check, but I'm pretty sure probably at least half would be negative.

00:51:08.000 Half would be positive.

00:51:10.000 Defending him against people who are refusing to acknowledge that anything he can do is actually the right thing.

00:51:17.000 So let's talk about your general view of what government ought to do.

00:51:21.000 So what makes you a liberal in sort of, not the classical liberal sense where we agree, but the part where we disagree?

00:51:25.000 What do you think government ought to do?

00:51:27.000 Well, it should be as small as possible, right?

00:51:29.000 I don't believe in massive governments, sprawling government agencies with lots of people doing jobs they're not quite sure what they're doing, soaking up public expenditure.

00:51:37.000 I think government should be responsible.

00:51:40.000 It should take action, even if it's against the popular will of the people.

00:51:45.000 You're made to be a government Because people expect you to take difficult decisions and to govern.

00:51:51.000 An example I would use is someone like Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

00:51:54.000 I would compare her to the other female Prime Minister, Theresa May. 1.00

00:51:57.000 Margaret Thatcher was prepared to make difficult, tough decisions.

00:52:00.000 She was a Conservative.

00:52:01.000 But Theresa May wasn't. 0.95

00:52:03.000 She just wanted to please everybody.

00:52:04.000 I don't believe in people pleasing governments.

00:52:07.000 I believe you are elected by the people.

00:52:09.000 You should live up as far as possible to the manifesto that you ran on.

00:52:13.000 And I think Trump, to his credit, has basically delivered on most of the things he said he would deliver on.

00:52:18.000 And he certainly tried to.

00:52:19.000 You couldn't argue that he's been elected and done a completely different thing.

00:52:22.000 So I think that, you know, that central part of government is to do whatever the administration that's been elected has decided it wants to do.

00:52:30.000 That's why they got elected.

00:52:31.000 Doing what the people have elected you to do is important in democracy.

00:52:35.000 So I believe in that. 0.99

00:52:37.000 I don't believe in a nanny state, except to the point where the public can sometimes be too stupid for his own good. 0.97

00:52:43.000 Do I think that government should occasionally interfere in the well-being of the people? 0.98

00:52:47.000 Yes, I do, actually.

00:52:50.000 So where do you draw the lines around that? 1.00

00:52:51.000 What's the limiting principle when it comes to... Because people are very often quite stupid, as it turns out. 0.99

00:52:59.000 And if you're on the right, you think that's the left. 0.99

00:53:00.000 And if you're on the left, you think that's the right.

00:53:02.000 The truth is that in personal habits, people make lots of mistakes, make lots of bad decisions.

00:53:06.000 Where do you draw the line around?

00:53:08.000 Where is the government's role in bettering people's lives?

00:53:10.000 Because I think this is a fundamental distinction between liberal and conservative.

00:53:13.000 Take cigarette smoking, right?

00:53:16.000 Most smokers knew it was bad for them.

00:53:19.000 They know it's bad, cigarette smoking, but they want the right to smoke, right?

00:53:22.000 It's not a constitutional right, but they want to have the right to smoke.

00:53:25.000 It's my life.

00:53:26.000 Fine, okay, it's your life, but actually what has happened in countries like Britain and America in the last 20 years is you don't now go into a bar and be full of smoke if you don't want it to be.

00:53:36.000 That, to me, seemed to be sensible government.

00:53:38.000 Yes, you are impinging on the right of a civilian to lead the life they want to lead, which is to walk into a bar and have a cigarette at the bar.

00:53:46.000 But actually, if most people in that bar don't want to have a cigarette, why should they be subjected to unhealthy smoke from you in the way that they were being?

00:53:56.000 Now, is that nanny state by government to ban smoking from public places?

00:54:02.000 I would think it was the right thing to do.

00:54:04.000 I'm a non-smoker.

00:54:05.000 I smoke the odd cigar.

00:54:07.000 But most smokers I know actually shrugged their shoulders and kind of accepted it.

00:54:11.000 And there's a kind of template there, I would argue, Mr Shapiro, for the gun debate, which we haven't had yet, but I'm sure we're coming to, which is at what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people?

00:54:27.000 At what point do you bring them together?

00:54:29.000 At what point do you try and reach a consensus where the smokers can still smoke or they can still have a gun?

00:54:36.000 But actually what they can't do is go into a bar and shoot it up.

00:54:40.000 And how do you stop them doing it?

00:54:42.000 It's a fundamental question for the public health of the country.

00:54:45.000 And treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for America right now. 0.99

00:54:50.000 It might take the politics out of it, which has become so vicious and polarizing.

00:54:54.000 In Glasgow in Scotland, they had a huge problem with knife crime.

00:54:56.000 A lot of knife murders, young kids, mainly white kids, stabbing each other.

00:55:00.000 So they treat it like a public health debate.

00:55:03.000 And they've massively reduced knife crime.

00:55:05.000 In Scotland, which has been great.

00:55:07.000 So, you know, Nanny State to a point, I believe in people's fundamental freedoms, but the cigarette debate to me was an interesting one.

00:55:15.000 You know, drink driving was an interesting debate in America, wasn't it?

00:55:19.000 You go about 50 years, you could get in your car and have a few drinks and drive around.

00:55:23.000 And then Mothers Against Drink Driving, MAD I think they were called, rose up after a particularly heinous drink driving incident, and they affected real change.

00:55:34.000 And now you can't do that.

00:55:36.000 Now, there will be people who still think, I want to have a few beers and have a drive.

00:55:39.000 OK, but you can't, actually, because you might kill people.

00:55:43.000 And they have as much right to not be killed as you do to get in your car with a few drinks.

00:55:53.000 Here is really about externalities, meaning that the reason that we have laws about not smoking in public places, and there you'd have to distinguish for me even between public parks, which are run by the government, and public establishments, which are run by a private business owner.

00:56:07.000 So in my view, the government actually shouldn't be involved in that.

00:56:09.000 If a private business owner wants to have a successful business, they will stop people from smoking in their business in most cases because they're going to lose business because most people don't smoke and it's annoying to have people smoke there.

00:56:18.000 But take the drunk driving example.

00:56:20.000 It's a better example.

00:56:21.000 So the drunk driving, obviously, there are obvious externalities to people weaving all over the road.

00:56:26.000 And the way that you actually police drunk driving is by pulling somebody over who is weaving all over the road and driving recklessly.

00:56:32.000 So you could theoretically have a crime defined as reckless driving without the actual drink being a part of it, per se, because, you know, if you drink in your home... Fundamentally, and again, this comes back to the guns debate for me, right?

00:56:45.000 Fundamentally, you want to stop people getting in their car drunk.

00:56:48.000 That's really what you want.

00:56:49.000 You want to affect a cultural change in thinking.

00:56:52.000 And the undeniable reality is that a far smaller percentage of Americans now get into a car under the influence of alcohol than used to because of the effect of that campaigning.

00:57:05.000 And most Americans accept that.

00:57:07.000 America, you've got to remember, one of my sort of strange things about the gun debate was that America's probably one of the most regulated countries on Earth in so many ways.

00:57:17.000 If I want to buy a car, I couldn't believe the amount of paperwork I had to do.

00:57:23.000 If I wanted to buy a pet dog, my God, I mean, you're there all day.

00:57:26.000 In other words, my 21, it's now 26, but my 21-year-old son at the time, six foot two inch, long hair and a beard, with his mate, he's the same.

00:57:37.000 Took them to Gladsters in Malibu for a lunch and they wanted a non-alcoholic beer.

00:57:43.000 And they got refused because it didn't have their ID on them.

00:57:46.000 A non-alcoholic beer.

00:57:48.000 Because it has 0.001% alcohol in it.

00:57:51.000 I didn't even know that.

00:57:52.000 And when I asked them to explain why, they went, yeah, I'm afraid that's the problem.

00:57:55.000 They can't prove they're 21.

00:57:56.000 And you have to be 21 even to have a non-alcoholic beer.

00:57:59.000 The same month up in Arizona, an eight-year-old girl went to a Bullets and Burgers had her burger, then went to the range, was handed by a former Marine a load of firearms, loaded, fired them, eventually got handed an Uzi submachine gun, fired two bullets, then lost control and shot the instructor in the head and killed him.

00:58:22.000 A terrible tragedy.

00:58:24.000 She will never get over that, I'm sure.

00:58:26.000 Her parents were videoing it on their phone, and you see them suddenly lose control of the phone.

00:58:30.000 They won't get over it.

00:58:32.000 The guy's dead.

00:58:33.000 His family won't get over it.

00:58:34.000 What I won't get over is the extraordinary disparity between this draconian ruling on my son, aged 22, to have a non-alcoholic beer, In L.A., and this 8-year-old girl, I have a 7-year-old girl now, an 8-year-old girl being able to fire an Uzi machine gun, submachine gun, loaded at a gun range, and that remains legal because it's her constitutional right to do that.

00:59:01.000 That's where I have a problem.

00:59:02.000 It's more the disparity of the way that America regulates these things.

00:59:07.000 Well, I think that the real question there is criminalizing recklessness.

00:59:10.000 Meaning that it's a weird thing to criminalize a 21-year-old drinking a non-alcoholic beer.

00:59:15.000 Right.

00:59:16.000 And in the other case, obviously, I would think that it should be criminal recklessness to hand an 8-year-old girl a gun she's not capable of controlling.

00:59:23.000 And that would be chargeable, in my view, you know, just under probably basic negligence laws.

00:59:28.000 But it was.

00:59:28.000 I mean, I don't know a particular case, but in my view, that should be, although not necessarily as an effect of banning guns per se, because as we've discussed now several times, I think that the countervailing view is that there are lots of law-abiding citizens who do want to be able to own a gun and should be able to own a gun.

00:59:44.000 I understand why Americans want to defend themselves.

00:59:47.000 In a country with 330 million guns, I understand why Americans... I've heard Bill Maher say he has a gun, right?

00:59:53.000 Because he knows he has threats and he knows that they may come with guns.

00:59:57.000 The countries are washed with guns.

00:59:58.000 What I don't get, and this is the same debate we had before, but let me make it probably a simpler debate for the purposes of this, which is There has been an undeniable increase in the number of massacres.

01:00:11.000 I'm not talking about shootings of two, three people.

01:00:14.000 Mass shootings on a grandiose, horrific scale in the last 20 years.

01:00:20.000 They are accelerating for whatever reason.

01:00:23.000 And the firepower that's being used is ferocious.

01:00:28.000 The guy in Dayton, in a higher reasoning, He was shot dead within 24 seconds of firing his first bullet.

01:00:37.000 But because he had an AK-47, he was able to get off, I think, 41 rounds and hit 26 people, maybe more, of whom nine died.

01:00:46.000 And at that point, I'm like, OK, surely, surely, if you're concerned about gun safety, and you fundamentally believe in the principle of regulation, you have it in every other part of your life, right?

01:00:59.000 You have it in every part of your life.

01:01:00.000 You also accept, I presume, Machine guns are bad, right?

01:01:04.000 Automatic weapons are bad, right?

01:01:05.000 So you've accepted regulation on guns.

01:01:08.000 So I say, well, why can't you go a step further now?

01:01:10.000 Accept that the preferred weapon of choice of almost every one of these massacre shooters, they all use these rifles, right?

01:01:17.000 But that is the countervailing question, is whether what we are actually doing here is reverse engineering the regulation by focusing in on the mass shootings.

01:01:24.000 Meaning that every year in the United States, approximately 400 people are killed with rifles.

01:01:28.000 Approximately 1,600 people are killed with knives.

01:01:30.000 Right.

01:01:32.000 30,000 people die of handgun wounds.

01:01:34.000 Many of those are suicides.

01:01:36.000 So are we focusing in on the mass shootings because we are focusing in on the rifles?

01:01:41.000 Or are we focusing on the rifles because we are focusing in on the mass shootings?

01:01:44.000 Why not just go for a full gun ban, in other words?

01:01:46.000 I don't propose a gun ban.

01:01:48.000 I accept there are too many guns in circulation.

01:01:51.000 It's not like Australia, where after the Hobart massacre in the mid-90s, They banned almost all guns from civilian circulation.

01:01:59.000 Even then, only one third of guns were turned in in the Australian gun buyback.

01:02:02.000 But that's a lot of guns.

01:02:03.000 It's certainly a lot of guns.

01:02:04.000 The equivalent here would be 110 million guns.

01:02:08.000 100%.

01:02:08.000 I mean, the murder rate in America went down faster after the Hobart gun ban.

01:02:11.000 I know all the numbers.

01:02:13.000 And our gun supply increased, obviously.

01:02:14.000 Sure.

01:02:14.000 You and I, we can argue the details.

01:02:16.000 Yeah, we can do a whole other hour about this.

01:02:17.000 There's a bigger thing, which is a cultural response to these kind of massacres.

01:02:22.000 I found it extraordinary After Sandy Hook when 20 young first graders are literally blown to pieces in their classroom, that America, the number one superpower in the world, was incapable of coming together and finding a unified response to try and prevent that happening again, of any kind.

01:02:41.000 In Britain we had a direct equivalent of Dunblane in Scotland, but there was a cultural reaction from Britain, from left and right, it was never political at all, that after 16 children were killed in Dunblane in Scotland in a similar attack, by a lone gunman that something fundamentally had to change.

01:02:59.000 And we were very draconian, as you know.

01:03:01.000 We banned almost all guns from civilian circulation.

01:03:04.000 Interesting thing happened.

01:03:05.000 For five years, gun crime ticked up a bit, actually.

01:03:09.000 And then they said, OK, we need to make it more punitive.

01:03:11.000 So now it's a five-year mandatory prison sentence if you're caught with one of these guns.

01:03:16.000 And ever since that moment, gun crime has gone down.

01:03:20.000 We have other issues in Britain, like knife crime.

01:03:22.000 Very serious problems with knife crime.

01:03:25.000 And the reaction from the British is the same.

01:03:27.000 We've got to stop this.

01:03:28.000 What can we do?

01:03:29.000 Let's limit the amount of knives. 0.99

01:03:31.000 Let's make it draconian to carry a knife in the street.

01:03:33.000 In other words, our reaction to knife crime epidemic now is the same as our reaction to gun crime, which is we can't allow this to continue.

01:03:40.000 Let's bring in laws to change it. 1.00

01:03:42.000 And it's not left and right arguing about it.

01:03:45.000 The three things I've always tried to campaign for here.

01:03:48.000 Universal background checks.

01:03:49.000 I don't think you're against that.

01:03:51.000 Not in concept, although if it does end with a massive government gun registry, I have a problem.

01:03:55.000 Right.

01:03:55.000 And I understand why, because that comes back to the threat of tyranny and everything else, right?

01:03:59.000 I get that.

01:04:00.000 But I've always campaigned for that.

01:04:01.000 I think there should be a limit on all magazines of 10 bullets.

01:04:05.000 I don't understand why anyone would need more.

01:04:07.000 You don't need it for hunting.

01:04:08.000 You don't need a sports shooting, you can do that.

01:04:10.000 In Britain, if you want a sports shooting, you have a license.

01:04:12.000 Why can't you have that here?

01:04:14.000 And thirdly, I don't see a need, a need, In the same way that the only possible need for a machine gun is to kill lots of people very quickly, I think that has now become the preferred way of using one of these assault rifles.

01:04:27.000 And I don't understand why the argument against machine guns is this, and the argument against these assault rifles is a different argument.

01:04:35.000 To me it's the same thing, you're just extending common sense.

01:04:40.000 So are you talking about a ban on the sale of ARs and so-called assault rifles, which are really all semi-autos?

01:04:46.000 Are you talking about a full confiscation?

01:04:48.000 Because there are 100 million of those in circulation right now.

01:04:50.000 I think you would try and do what they did in Australia.

01:04:53.000 You would have a buyback.

01:04:54.000 You know, you'd say, look, we are going to try.

01:04:56.000 I know.

01:04:57.000 I know.

01:04:57.000 Good luck.

01:04:58.000 Because at the moment, people are so entrenched about this, driven by political partisan debate.

01:05:03.000 But actually, I would appeal to the concept... Also because you're talking about confiscating 100 million guns on the basis of 400 yearly deaths.

01:05:09.000 Not confiscating, asking people to give them up.

01:05:11.000 Well, I mean, unless you're going to punish them.

01:05:12.000 And you're going to pay them.

01:05:13.000 Are you going to pay them?

01:05:14.000 Unless you're going to pay three times what they're going great as.

01:05:16.000 Nobody's going to turn that in.

01:05:18.000 But you have to do something, is my point.

01:05:20.000 So I want to continue this conversation about gun control.

01:05:22.000 If you want to hear my answer and Piers' answer and then my answer to Piers' answer and all the rest of it, you have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

01:05:29.000 Go subscribe right now.

01:05:30.000 Join our club.

01:05:31.000 We really appreciate it.

01:05:32.000 You can hear the other side of the conversation after this break.

01:05:35.000 Piers Morgan, thank you for stopping by.

01:05:37.000 We've got to do this more than once every six or seven years.

01:05:39.000 You know what?

01:05:39.000 I was waiting for the call.

01:05:40.000 And I enjoy your podcast and I like the fact that you're prepared to sit with people who you don't agree with and who you're prepared to debate with.

01:05:46.000 Well, it's more fun.

01:05:47.000 I mean, it's a cornerstone of democracy.

01:05:49.000 Without that, there is no democracy.

01:05:50.000 So thank you.

01:05:51.000 Thank you.

01:05:51.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:06:03.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.

01:06:05.000 Associate producer, Colton Haas.

01:06:07.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:06:09.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.

01:06:12.000 Editing by Donovan Fowler.

01:06:14.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

01:06:15.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:06:18.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:06:20.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 18, 2019

Piers Morgan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 64

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