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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow
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or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in every month to watch the show in person
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opinions to me are the spice of life if you don't have an opinion there's
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something wrong with you i'm peters morgan uncensored show some damn respect
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why do you want to deport me am i allowed to respond yet i'm a news junkie and it started when i was six or seven i
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mean as i got through my teens i became very opinionated i read a report last year said 33 million people in britain
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are mentally ill no they're not it's crap we're spending too much time
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encouraging a kind of wallowing in self-pity people will misunderstand the use of the word but hang on hang up the
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risk i see is being the judge of whether someone's feelings are worthy of the
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emotion i'm done with this i left on a point of principle and the principle was i'm
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entitled to my opinion why should my sons be exposed to death threats simply for being my children cancer culture is
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a virus as deadly over time as a coronavirus the public wants someone to cancel cancel culture i want to
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stimulate debate and to get to some kind of truth have you ever regretted anything you've said
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so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo usa edition i hope
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nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] this stephen this is quite quite
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interesting you're usually on the uh i already feel uncomfortable right i watch your stuff you're forensic you
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know you go deep and i'm like i don't know i don't really know why i'm doing
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it other than at least one of my sons is a massive fan of yours and said daddy you've got to do this podcast everyone
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listens to this podcast so whatever you're doing it's working so i'm here you make great
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kids well thank you for being here um the the thing i was thinking thinking where do i start with this conversation
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and honestly the the the center point of my curiosity is how you came to be the person you are today and i look through
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your story especially your early years the loss of your father certain experiences you've had when
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you're younger you're a self-aware guy you're an honest man what are the factors
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at that pre-teen age that went into making pierce morgan the man that we all know is this media anomaly i'm a junkie
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i'm a news junkie and it started when i was six or seven which is just weird i've had four kids
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myself the idea of being six or seven and being addicted to what's happening
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in the world to news to newspapers i used to sit and read the daily mail my parents used to get the mail i used to
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read it from cover to cover when i was six or seven so from a very early age i had that kind of
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fascination and curiosity with what was happening and i wanted to know what was happening and what to think about it i
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mean as i got through my teens i became very opinionated you know to regularly get thrown at my local pub on a saturday
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night for getting drunk and disorderly disorderly they meant just to opinion they'd been too loud so i'd argue with
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people and then it would get out of hand and i'd be thrown out i always got myself back in why why would you argue
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with people uh because i used to feel strongly about stuff you know people see me hyperventilating about vegan sausage
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rolls i think how can any sensible human being in the world get so enraged by a vegan sausage roll i don't know except
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that when i was young i used to get enraged by all sorts of things now not to the point where i'd hit people
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or you know manifest itself in any sort of violence but i would be passionate about arguing and most of my
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family are the same my grandmother was very opinionated my mom's very opinionated my siblings on they're
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probably the quiet is one of the three of us when we go out of all of us um so opinions to me are the spice of life if
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you don't have an opinion there's something wrong with you to me you've
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got to care about what's happening in the world and you've got to work out
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what you think about it and i particularly think it's important now and there's so much opinion flying
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around that people go to the right people so that they hear the right kind of stuff because there's so much
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nonsense being spewed into the sort of twitter sphere and so on on facebook but that's why i think your show is so
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successful your podcast because then people appreciate the more reasonable take that you have on things and the way
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you try and get to the truth about people and about things so there's on one hand um
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loving to have a discussion and to have your opinion be heard and and to convey information and then there's this other
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part which i tried to understand which was you repeatedly said even at 16 and 17 years old that you liked being the
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center of attention so i'm like where does because that feels like more of a psychological thing
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a lot of people don't like being the same i just wanted to be famous i used to practice my autograph when i was a
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kid why regularly i wanted to be fabulous i used to collect autographs so i was a massive cricket fan in
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particular me and my brother used to go and stand outside pavilions at professional
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games and wait for players to come out and get ian botham's autograph rich's
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autograph and i used to practice mine then i began writing to world leaders i've got all
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these letters from my margaret thatcher and ted heath when he was prime minister
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and world leaders around the world i've got letters from donald bradman you know
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whole shaftland the greatest cricketer that ever lived i used to just write to him and used to write back so i used to
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spend my entire time in weird correspondence with the world's most famous people and quietly thinking to
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myself i'd love to be one of these people must be great center of attention everyone looking at you talking about
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you good bad and ugly so yeah i mean there are bits of paper at home that my mum's kept with just endless best wishes
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appears morgan best wishes i mean it sounds ludicrous and extremely vain and presumptuous of me but now i'm at the
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stage where ironically i've got to a stage where if in the old days i had this level of recognition i'd be
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starting autographs all the time but nobody wants autographs anymore everyone wants a selfie
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so when i finally got there yeah actually all the grass had gone out of fashion it's now selfie time you're very
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you're very honest about that a lot of people wouldn't i don't think
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i think 99 of my guests would not have the whatever to say i wanted to be famous and by the way most of them are
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lying yeah right so i i like to think that whether you love me or hate me i do have a kind of brutal honesty about what
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i've set out to achieve what i have achieved what i've failed at i don't try and sugarcoat things nor do
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i try and pretend i'm something i'm not you know you don't have to like me to
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respect the fact i think that i speak my mind i give honest opinions about stuff
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they're not always opinions people agree with but i want them to be i don't want
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people to agree with me necessarily i want to stimulate debate and to get if hopefully get to some kind of truth
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which is the most important thing in in a world where truth is so difficult to find i also wanted to be famous and
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i've only really realized this in hindsight that i definitely wanted to be famous not for the wrong reasons but i
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think the reason i wanted to be famous is because it was the antithesis it was the
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opposite of what i was sometimes when i was younger when you're a kid trying to
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fit in on the playground only black kid in an all-white school people calling me
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the n-word relaxing my hair to try and be white like my friends were and i think i thought fame as
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acceptance on a mass scale so i thought an admiration so i thought that's what i
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wanted when i read about you going to that comprehensive school i you were also subjected to quite a
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rough treatment yeah well my full name is piers stefan pugh morgan it's a double barrel surname imagine having
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that name when you go to a local comp so you know on day one i had the local skinhead who had a mohican come up and i
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think smacked me in the face and that carried on for quite a while but it carried on people doing that kind of
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thing until my brother jeremy's now a british army colonel joined the school
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and he was like the old thing of mike tyson you know everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face
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everyone had a plan about me until my brother joined and punched him in the face so i realized then that fall
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sometimes it's not a bad thing that when you're subjected to bullies actually
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there's only one language most of them understand i feel that as i did about
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the playground at the time and i feel about vladimir putin now what's going on
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in ukraine it's the same principle when someone's bullying you either show them
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fear and weakness or you stand up to them did you like school even though you were both yeah i loved it i went to a
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prep school until i was 13. so i had a lot of privilege at the prep school you know played sport every day
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great academic uh levels and so on i then went to the local comprehensive which was a great school great very
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successful comprehensive but suddenly you were playing sport once a week i realized then the massive gulf
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between facilities and resource at a comprehensive compared to a fee paying prep school and how that was seemed so
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unfair to me but i also discovered that people they had chips on their shoulders in
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both environments you got the snobs at the prep school and you got the yobs at the
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comprehensive most people were fine at both but you got those two types of people who would have chips on their
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shoulders about in the snobs case looking down on people in the yobs case hating people
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who had more privilege than them i think i came out of that environment both environments with quite a healthy you
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either have a chip on both shoulders we have no chip at all i think my ability to
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be exactly the same whether i'm sitting with nelson mandela and the queen or my
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old village mates comes entirely from that dual pronged education i had where i saw great
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privilege and no privilege and had to work out a way of thriving in both environments i think
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that was good for me actually if i removed that experience of that comprehensive school especially that
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before your brother arrived um and saved you from the bullying per se um what would if i removed that experience what
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would i remove from adult pierce morgan um i think resilience and mental strength these are two things i'm
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extremely hot about i think this generation in particular has lost the ability to look at mental strength and
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resilience and triumph over adversity and being tough in difficult times as badges of honor they've almost become
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badges of shame where people feel like it's wrong to have a stiff upper lip to be
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strong-minded to be resilient to be tough under pressure and i looked yes i was watching the golf the masters tiger
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woods look at tiger woods the story i mean unbelievable 21 is the greatest golfer
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that's ever lived destroying everybody he has it all he wins 14 majors then he
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has one of the greatest falls in the history of sport and it all involves you know vegas mayhem and so on and his
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world collapses then he has horrific injuries he becomes number 1100 in the world he's finished there's a whole
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mashup of clips of people saying he's washed up he's finished he'll never win
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again whatever and there's also a video of him watching that mashup just after he wins the 2019
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masters which no one said he could do again and again now he has a horrific car crash you know a year ago and yet
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here he is competing in the masters he's made the cut again the guy is a freak of
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nature but he's a freak of mental strength and i look at him and i see rocky balboa in mentality and
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i look at many other sports stars at the moment who think it's fine to quit to
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give up to walk away to complain all the time to moan about their lot in life and
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i think how have we come to this how even in high level sport has quitting now becomes something to
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celebrate now it's a contentious issue and people say you're mocking mental
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health when you do this but i don't think so i think we treat the whole mental health debate the wrong way i
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think we should separate mental health from mental illness i don't think mental health is an issue
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to even be debated particularly we all have mental health but if you have a mental illness you need help you need
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treatment right now people are it seems to me looking at normal life stuff as some form of mental illness
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and anxiety is exploding people saying they're mentally sick the incidence of that is exploding how
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can that be happening when it's all we're talking about 24 7. i think we're
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going about it the wrong way i think what we're losing in this debate is a celebration of resilience and
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mental strength i really believe that and i think i think schools should have more people in there teaching kids how
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to be tougher about how to deal with normal life stuff and i'm not talking about people who have clinical
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depression or suicidal tendencies or any of those things those are serious mental
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illnesses i'm talking about people who are thinking that normal stuff that's
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happening in my life which we all have to go through grief when you lose a loved one
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trouble at work trouble with relationships whatever it may be you've got to learn to be more resilient
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about these things because that is life life is rocky balboa said it's it's not
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a it's not a better roses life is tough you know and it's not about how many times is rock he said to
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his son and the famous scene in the sixth of the franchise when they're that
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scene in the street with the spoiled entitled sun whining away about everything and rocky turns on him
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finally and says look it's not how many times you can hit it's how many times you can get
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hit get knocked down and get back up and keep moving forward that is what life's
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about and i don't think we spend enough time helping people to be mentally strong and
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resilient we're spending too much time encouraging a kind of wallowing in self-pity and weakness and it's it is
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i'm afraid it's not working demonstrably not working i remember when you did an
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interview with a famous world leader i think he was a terrorist and you said to him about his daughter what if your
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daughter had dated a jewish yeah so uh president in the judge of iran yeah so so the i'll use that same
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technique if if one of your children comes to you and they and they express some kind of symptom which could either
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be a lack of mental resilience or it could be but they do yeah they do and how do you know the difference though
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well you don't i talk to them yeah and i talk i try and with all my kids they're
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all very different but they've all come to me at certain stages with issues they they want help
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with and i always try and drill into them perspective the great thing you get as
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you get older and i'm 57 now you learn about life good bad and ugly you learn from mistakes you learn from
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stuff that's gone bad in your life you learn that actually you either give up or you keep pounding as i keep always
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say to them keep pounding just keep pounding it'll be fine and it invariably is fine so they start
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to realize over time that i'm right that actually just keep going right don't
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give up whatever it is if it's a work issue if it's an exam issue if it's a
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relationship issue whatever it is i have these conversations all the time on my kids you know they're like the people i
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spend most time talking to and i try and you know and they all need different advice and different help in different
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ways but what i try and do is perspective all the time and based on my own experience
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it's like i've been there i've been in this position it feels like the worst
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thing in the world you know you lose a girlfriend that you love you lose a job that you love you
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you know you crash a car you lose a family member that you love whatever it may be
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there are all sorts of things that will come and test you especially as you get older you lose your first friend who
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dies when you're young i can remember losing one of my closest friends before
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he was even 30. devastating absolutely devastating but when it happens again and again with people that you care
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about you realize that's life life is what it is you have one life and people
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die and people you love die and people you care about die and you've got to learn to ride that
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that wave of grief and it's not mental illness it's not anxiety it's
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actually just something we all have to deal with but too much i think too many young people today
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feel unnaturally anxious about these things as they did about the pandemic or about the war in ukraine an interesting
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conversation i had with dr phil out here in america actually about this who said when he was young he gave the
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analogy when he was young if someone was eaten by a crocodile on a golf course in florida very unlikely
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that anyone would know that outside of the immediate area you know there were very few as one or
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two main television news bulletins a day there were very few national newspapers
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most state or county newspapers and so it might get reported in the local paper that would be it but
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certainly nobody outside of florida would likely ever hear about that the difference now is
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young people will see the video of the person being eaten by the crocodile within 20 minutes of it happening
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quite likely someone will have got it on a camera on their phone so they're being
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exposed all the time to a sensory overload of quite grim stuff ukraine is a very good example
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of the first time really we've had a war of this kind where we're all watching it
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in real time unfurl on social media we're seeing all the videos we're seeing the horror in
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real first hand exposure and that has to have an effect on your senses it has to increase your
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anxiety levels i get all that um you know my grandmother was 19 in world war ii when it started 25 when it ended she
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didn't see all this stuff you just didn't get exposed to it but if she had
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been it would have probably had a devastating effect on her so i think that i have sympathy with this generation i
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think in many ways they're a great generation they're better informed than
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any previous generation i think that these networks like instagram facebook twitter
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and so on they've certainly given people an amazing connection with each other
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but they've also got this terrible fomo which has been created which i see the
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first time with my kids one of their summer and all their mates are somewhere else all they're seeing is all the fun
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going on on instagram and it makes them a bit anxious i never had that i didn't know what my
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friends were doing in the next village so things have changed technology's changed it's good in one way it can be
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bad in other ways and we've got to work out a way to help young people but ultimately i come back
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to i don't want to be unsympathetic certainly i want to help but i do think we're going about it the
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wrong way i think we're encouraging or wallowing we're celebrating self-pity
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we're celebrating victimhood in a way that everybody now is like you see stuff
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on twitter like you know i've just failed my driving test for the fourth time but i'm so proud of myself for the
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journey i've gone on what are you talking about which means you're proud of yourself you
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just failed you're driving desperately thought let's be proud of i get that
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part the bit that i i still i'm still struggling to get on board with is having sat here with even i know you
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know roman kemp yeah and his love right having sat here with roman kemp and hearing this what he went through
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with his his friend who was on his radio station with him i'm very aware of that
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yeah killed himself out of the blue yes and never spoke to anyone and roman said
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if i'd lined up 20 of my friends and said which one is suicidal he would have
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been named last yeah in my estimation so when i reflect on that and i i look at male suicides in particular and a lot of
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what the mental health organizations say the causes of that one of them is that men just don't talk about how they're
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feeling and then that results in alcoholism and these are but i do talk about it yeah and i do encourage people
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so this is what i'm saying so when someone says the use of the word wallowing that sounds very similar it
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depends what they're wallowing in if they're wallowing in but you know when you use those words
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yes you know because you're a smart man and you you you write you know that people
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will misunderstand the use of the word and there's harm in them that's them
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misunderstanding what i mean by it okay it's a bit like the debate about obesity
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we're now at the ludicrous stage of this debate we're not allowed to call people
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fat you're not allowed to it's offensive so we now have a situation where you see
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a 310 pound model on the cover of cosmopolitan who's five foot two she's
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dangerously morbidly obese but the cover the picture and the interview six pages
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inside never mentions that it celebrates her body positive image nothing body positive about being morbidly obese
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she's going to die if she's enabled in this way going forward i'm not afraid to
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say that and there's a society that doesn't go there and pretends that this is all perfectly
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acceptable is doing that woman an incredible disservice so when you say well you can't use the word wallowing
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but i would say to you stephen i didn't say that because you're implying it yeah
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yeah because i would say to you a lot of people do wallow i see them what's the
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difference between wallowing and coming to a friend and saying i'm feeling really or even tweeting it so i'm
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feeling like there's something wrong with me what's the difference between
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wallowing well there's a line i don't know i know exactly what the line is but
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i do know when friends or family members come to me either they come to me with something
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where i think yeah they've got a valid reason to feel this way or sometimes you
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just got to go get over it and then they might laugh and have a drink and they get over it i
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think by the way you're not allowed to say that anymore there'll be people
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watching this your younger audience will be going oh my god did you just tell people to get over it it's all about
00:21:03
people with mental illness no i'm not no i'm not be very careful that you listen
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to what i'm saying i distinguish between people who i believe have mental illness
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and people who i believe are genuinely wallowing because society has decided that it wants to celebrate people who
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have something wrong with them more than it celebrates now people who are successful and tough achievers and talk
00:21:25
about having grit and stiff upper lip and all these things that's all become
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sticks to beat people with i have it used against me a day you talk about a stiff upper lip why shouldn't i
00:21:36
why shouldn't i i have a stiff upper lip i've been through a lot of crap in my
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life and i've decided that that's the way i deal with it you may not like it
00:21:44
and maybe you like to deal with it by going woe is me and one of my favorite poems is a uh d.h lawrence poem called
00:21:51
about self-pity it's only three or four lines and it says a wild thing never feels
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sorry for itself a bird will die frozen on a bow of a tree before it feels self-pity or something like that it's a
00:22:03
brilliant poem so that's it it's only about four lines and i get that point is in the in the
00:22:09
jungle in the world of animals self-pity doesn't exist wallowing in your own woe doesn't exist
00:22:15
you've got to get on with it you know one of my favorite conversations ever with with sir roger bannister who sadly
00:22:21
died but he was the first man to break the four-minute mile and he i asked him he used to live in
00:22:28
the square i live in london and he came to one of the 200th anniversary of the square and i had a chat with him and i
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said did you only you know when you won this amazingly killed it collapsed at the line i said did you have any sort of
00:22:38
motivational quote that drove you and he went funny enough he said i have one it
00:22:42
was an anonymous proverb from the african bush and it was when a lion wakes up in the
00:22:47
morning it knows one thing it has to run faster than the slowest gazelle or it won't eat
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and when a gazelle wakes up in the morning it knows it has to run faster than the slowest line or it's going to
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get killed so whatever you are in the african bush one thing's for sure when the sun comes up you better start
00:23:09
running and that motivated him and it's a great quote and i think it's a great quote for
00:23:15
all your viewers listeners in this podcast to take away from this interview if you
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take one thing away get running get moving be positive don't let normal life stuff
00:23:26
drag you down because if it does it will dominate your life and you'll become one
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of those sort of miserable self-obsessed people in the wrong way where all you're thinking about is you
00:23:36
and your problems and your woes it's like there are a lot of people a lot worse off than you when i see some of
00:23:41
the crap i'm watching at the moment on social media of people feeling sorry for
00:23:45
themselves when you see what's happening in ukraine it actually makes me puke
00:23:49
it's like watch what's happening to the people of ukraine and get a perspective
00:23:54
about your life and i'm sorry if that sounds tough but i'm not sorry actually
00:24:00
i get you i completely get the point about mental resilience and i think there's so much of what you said that i
00:24:04
really agree with especially about a younger generation i'm i've said on this podcast many times i
00:24:09
am scared of over labeling things things that might just be a bad mood or whatever with something else which is
00:24:14
much more medically um concerning and when i asked that question then you said it depends what it is yeah in terms of a
00:24:22
friend coming to you with mental health disorder the problem is you'll know that these things are so
00:24:26
subjective so when uh when someone comes like people could genuinely be suicidal genuinely be
00:24:32
suicide not well faking or looking for attention over losing a cryptocurrency investment i
00:24:38
read an article about that the other day guy's crypto investment goes down kills
00:24:41
himself so i i the risk i see is being the judge of whether someone's feelings are worthy
00:24:47
of the the emotion that's the risk it's like you know like i think there are because
00:24:53
there are millions of people out there prepared to do what you're talking about i i'm a
00:25:00
very rare voice in the public platform arena who's prepared to give a slightly different
00:25:06
perspective on this stuff and to me there's room for both of us you know you
00:25:10
don't need any more people who are going to give 24 7 coverage to mental health
00:25:15
as an issue as on the assumption we're all slightly mentally ill i just don't buy it i read
00:25:20
i read a report last year said 33 million people in britain are mentally ill no but not
00:25:25
it's crap crap and when when a society pretends that is the case because a lot of people are identifying
00:25:33
as mentally ill when actually they just have anxiety about exams or relationships or whatever it may be
00:25:38
when we do that it means the people who really need help are not getting it it means they're slipping through the
00:25:44
cracks in my opinion and that's the problem with it um and you know it's not about being
00:25:49
callous or insensitive my i think my kids would tell you i spent hours and hours
00:25:55
sometimes talking through problems with them but always i come back to look life's tough and you've got to keep
00:26:01
pounding that's my mantra because this one i've applied to myself and my family have had a lot of stuff to
00:26:08
deal with and they've kept pounding because what's the alternative really
00:26:12
the alternatives you give up and that to me is not an option not an option that would bring me any
00:26:18
pleasure couldn't look in the mirror having just given up all the time why would why would that bring anyone
00:26:22
pleasure i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast for many years
00:26:28
people have been asking for a coffee flavoured huel and quite recently he'll
00:26:33
release the iced coffee caramel flavor of their um ready to drink heels and i've just become hooked on it over the
00:26:39
last couple of weeks i've been on a really interesting journey with huel which i've described and talked about a
00:26:44
little bit on this podcast i started with the berry ready to drink then i moved over to the protein salted caramel
00:26:49
because it's 100 calories and it gives you all of your essential vitamins and
00:26:52
minerals but also gives you the 20 odd grams of protein you need and now i'm
00:26:56
balanced between them both i drink mostly the banana flavor ready to drink i've got really into the iced coffee
00:27:02
caramel flavor of heels ready to drink and now i'm drinking that as well as the
00:27:06
protein make sure you try the new ready to drink flavors that the caramel flavor
00:27:10
is amazing the new banana flavor as well is amazing and obviously as i said the iced coffee caramel flavor has been a
00:27:17
real smash here so check it out let me know what you think on social media i see all of your tags and instagram posts
00:27:23
and tweets about you back to the podcast one of the things that i love about your
00:27:28
um well i was really compelled by by your story as i read through your early professional career was clearly for some
00:27:34
reason which i couldn't figure out from just reading you got a head quite quickly
00:27:39
kelvin gave you a shot yeah at the sun rupert murdoch gave you a shot at news of the world when you were 28 he made
00:27:45
you the the editor of the largest newspaper in the western hemisphere if i'm not correct 28 years old so when i
00:27:51
was reading that i i thought i've got to ask him why what was it about you well i think that
00:27:57
i remember alex ferguson saying i know you're a big united fan of my sympathies
00:28:00
at this different time i remember him saying that he loved youth because there was a fearlessness of youth i think i
00:28:06
was quite fearless in my 20s certainly you know before you get responsibility before you get married you have kids and
00:28:11
so on you get other people you're responsible for there's a fearlessness
00:28:14
that comes with youth and i think i had that certainly it was instilled by the confidence came from my family very
00:28:21
strong women in particular in my family my mum my grandmother tremendously strong people who come through a lot of
00:28:28
adversity um never wallowed in self-pity to quote the awful phrase i know drives
00:28:34
you mad but they never did and that was just not allowed it was always like just get on
00:28:38
with it dust yourself down get on with it and i like that to be honest i thrived under that mantra and i remember
00:28:44
kelvin mckenzie was a mercurial genius in many many ways brutal but brilliant you know hilarious
00:28:49
and barbaric i mean he's like everything but the sun had an amazing power and
00:28:54
voice when he was in charge of it and he said the most annoying thing about me was that he could give me the most
00:29:00
savage bollocking where literally his sort of neck veins would start to explode and within an hour i'd bounce back into
00:29:08
his office bouncing with excitement because i had a scoop for him and i was completely
00:29:13
unfazed by the bollocking it had motivated me to go and prove him wrong and get and get a good story i think
00:29:20
that's how people should be in life i think it's a shame that in the workplace now you're not allowed to
00:29:25
raise your voice you're not allowed to it's bullying everyone's a victim of bullying you
00:29:30
can't have any banter anymore can't be fun all the joy's been sucked out of life by
00:29:35
this woke brigade of in my view awful people who just think that life should be humorous
00:29:43
banterless uh everything is bullying every criticism is bullying everything is terrible people are awful
00:29:52
you can't have fun you can't do anything i don't buy it it's not what most people
00:29:56
are like most people aren't like that they don't actually believe the crap they're coming
00:30:00
out with they don't it's not how anybody wants to lead their lives we know from
00:30:04
the pandemic what it's like when our freedom our basic freedom gets taken away why would we come out of a pandemic
00:30:10
would we want to lead a joyless existence how do we fix this because i agree with you i i think that common
00:30:15
sense has to come into play i think the problem with the the woke council culture as i put it is if you go and
00:30:22
study i read a whole book about this last year it was a massive bestseller because people understood it right so i
00:30:27
think you know where i come from probably politically we're not that far apart from each other i guess from what
00:30:31
i know about you um but i i want to study the origin of the word woke and what it meant i by that definition i'm
00:30:38
woke i believe in promoting uh campaigns against racial and social injustice i've done it all my career as
00:30:46
a newspaper editor and as a television broadcaster you know i've done that it
00:30:50
doesn't cut the ice though with the modern word brigade because they've stolen
00:30:55
wokery and they've now used it as a new form of fascism where they want to dictate to people how
00:31:01
they lead their lives what they can find funny what movies are acceptable are not
00:31:06
acceptable what television shows they can enjoy you know what haircuts they can have that aren't inappropriate or
00:31:11
cultural inappropriation you can't celebrate any other culture anymore it's
00:31:16
all inappropriate every joke is inappropriate every comedian has to be cancelled people can't host the oscars
00:31:22
if they told a inappropriate joke 10 years before uh yet roman polanski was given an oscar
00:31:29
after he raped a child i mean the sort of warp morality of all this is absolutely extraordinary to me but at
00:31:35
its center a woman came up to me in kensington a few months ago after the markle
00:31:40
debacle as i call it and she said she said mr morgan i'm an 80 year old australian woman but don't hold either
00:31:46
of those things against me i meant to laugh on the streets he said the trouble with these wokies is they want to suck
00:31:52
all the joy out of life and i thought what a brilliant way of describing it and they've literally become the very
00:31:58
fascists that they profess to hate most and we have to counter it and so my ambition with my new show for example is
00:32:06
to cancel cancer culture to go back to what a democracy should be to what society should be when it's supposedly
00:32:12
democratic where you and i can have a spirited debate about something and agree to disagree and go and have a beer
00:32:19
or maybe we reach points of consensus to what used to happen i've had ferocious
00:32:23
arguments with my friends and family my entire life the idea i would disown them
00:32:27
as you see happening all the time now with people falling out with friends and family because they're so blindly
00:32:32
self-righteous about their own opinion that they can't tolerate another opinion
00:32:36
the idea we have university campuses where only one certain type of voice is tolerated at a university a place you're
00:32:44
supposed to learn all sorts of disparate views hear all different voices and make
00:32:48
your own mind up now no unless they're woke speakers no one else is allowed if
00:32:54
you're a conservative which by the way many millions of people are in this country in america and australia if
00:33:00
you're a conservative you are the enemy to be crushed and destroyed and no platformed really
00:33:05
how do we get there how could any student have their mind developed or evolved in
00:33:12
an environment that cancels anybody for deviating from a woke agenda it's madness
00:33:20
you know and when i look at what's happening with the transgender debate i support transgender rights to fairness
00:33:26
and equality i always have publicly in columns on television on twitter i've been very clear i want transgender
00:33:35
people to have equality and fairness right to the point where trans activism leads to an erosion of women's rights as
00:33:44
we're seeing all over the place not least in the world of sport if anybody genuinely wants to sit here and say to
00:33:51
me that what's going on in women's sport with transgender athletes is fair or
00:33:55
equal i'd love to listen to it because it's [ __ ] we all know it's unfair and what's being
00:34:02
caught in the crosshairs of this is that many trans people who don't want to get
00:34:06
involved in this debate and just want to be able to go about their lives and try
00:34:09
and have a life of fairness and equality they're getting subjected to mockery and
00:34:14
ridicule because it's so ridiculous what's going on with transport and so i say to people yeah you can say
00:34:22
to me you're bigoted and you're transphobic but i'm not i'm actually just the voice of common
00:34:28
sense when you see even jk rowling cancelled because she believes in the biology of sex
00:34:35
it's just madness sex is not something you can just pretend like gender it could be anything
00:34:41
you make up on the spur of the moment it can't be you you've seen how this is
00:34:46
got progressively more let's say the world has got progressively more work i think
00:34:52
the world has moved from being woke right okay by the original i think that most people in the 60s 70s and 80s
00:35:00
wanted to see better racial equality and social equality most people but that's what the original definition
00:35:09
of woke was the modern day woke is nothing to do with that the modern day woke is a form of fascism okay so you
00:35:16
will abide by our rules or you get destroyed that's the difference to me so the world has got more of this modern
00:35:22
day wokism yeah right um and it's i i've seen it on social media the way that
00:35:27
algorithms work as well they show you more of the same they keep reinforcing you then they then because you build an
00:35:31
audience of the same people they clap more when you say a certain thing yes kind of reinforcement you appreciate
00:35:34
your choir yeah you know i i i you know geologies you go about two thousand years we lived
00:35:40
in tribes yeah that's written in your book yeah right and i told the story you
00:35:43
never used to come out of your tribe so everyone in the tribe would look the same same attitudes eat the same food
00:35:48
drink the same drink same senses of humor because you never moved out of this group of people
00:35:53
and then people began to move out of their tribes and meet other tribes who dress differently thought differently
00:35:58
laughed at different things maybe spoke differently and both tribes in that moment decided the only answer to this
00:36:05
was to kill each other well that's where we've gone back to are you optimistic that not really no so
00:36:11
this is what i wanted to say is your antidote for this new workism is to lead and to create a counter narrative which
00:36:18
is what you're doing with your new show piece you haven't centered what you did
00:36:21
with your book as well are you optimistic deeply that that will win well let me ask you a question so i'm
00:36:26
i'm described as highly controversial right i've been called all sorts of
00:36:30
names people say that what i say things i say are outrageous when you read my book how many times did
00:36:36
you stop and think that's outrageous no i didn't really disagree with anything
00:36:39
right so that's my point i don't think i'm the controversial one well so i
00:36:44
think i come at this from a reasonably common scenario i didn't disagree with
00:36:47
you at all because you were talking about things like populism and liberalism and how it's changed i
00:36:51
completely agree i think i used to identify as being on the left now i don't because the the
00:36:56
the because they're nuts a lot of them yeah a lot of it is absolutely nuts i
00:36:59
also don't really identify with being on the right either because they're nuts i
00:37:02
agree i find myself you get nuts on both sides and we're moving to the extremities but
00:37:06
i'll get cancelled from both sides yes because i don't wear the football kit of
00:37:09
either i'm the same yeah so i want to bring back a more consensus related society
00:37:15
where consensus where you reach points of agreement through debate and you don't try and
00:37:21
shame or cancel each other by having different opinions because that's at the core of this you
00:37:27
know they call themselves liberals they're not liberal liberalism isn't about
00:37:31
an inability to tolerate other opinions it's the opposite you're supposed to tolerate and respect
00:37:37
other opinions and agree to disagree we've lost this in society because a small group of people
00:37:44
but very vocal and very angry about everything all the time they are driving an agenda which if we
00:37:51
go down that road we'll be the end of a democratic society as we know it so i
00:37:55
see my self humbly as trying to defend democracy genuinely and humility is not something that comes
00:38:03
naturally to me but genuinely trying to defend what democracy really is and trying to educate these
00:38:10
wokies about what real liberalism is what democracy actually means what free speech means free speech is not about
00:38:20
you in an echo chamber all agreeing with each other as churchill said free speech
00:38:25
is about listening to views you just don't agree with but allowing people to
00:38:28
have different views you're you know it's funny i i went around the world when i was running my
00:38:33
marketing business um before i resigned and i used to have one slide on my presentation deck that had your face on
00:38:39
it and do you know who else's face was on that same slide deck i went all around
00:38:42
the world with this presentation with apple amazon i had pierce morgan katie hopkins kanye west and donald
00:38:49
trump and i used to tell people that this a very important thing to learn from these four people because whether
00:38:55
you like them or not in marketing the least profitable outcome is indifference when you don't
00:39:00
carry either way and people have an opinion it's funny because you know i was talking to the girls on
00:39:04
my team here yesterday and they don't always agree with you but they're always
00:39:08
listening yeah and sometimes you know on the covered issues or this issue they'll
00:39:10
be behind you and then they'll be against you but do you realize strategically
00:39:16
um the art of being the sen being the center of conversation yes and and what are the principles
00:39:23
if if it's a brand trying to be relevant or the center of attention or if it's a
00:39:27
person in their personal brand for you what are the principles for one to replicate what you've done with that
00:39:33
confidence confidence in yourself self-belief yeah i think the one thing i have is a lot of self-belief i'm i'm
00:39:39
firm i remember a friend of mine kevin peterson the cricketer his big mantra with himself when he played cricket for
00:39:44
england was back yourself back yourself whoever you're facing he was one of the
00:39:49
few players in history to demolish shane warm at his peak in the 2005 ashes series because he backed himself but
00:39:56
it's smashing it's risky we've seen from your cause it's risky but as wayne
00:39:59
gretzky the greatest ice hockey player in history said brilliantly you'll miss a hundred
00:40:04
percent of the shots you don't take you've got to take risks in life you've
00:40:08
got to learn from failure mars the confectioners used to celebrate chocolate bars that didn't work more
00:40:15
than they did chocolate bars that worked they worked on the assumption that most
00:40:19
of their bars would work they tested them tested and tested and knew what they were doing so most of their
00:40:24
new bars would would work but if they occasionally had a failure out of nowhere stunned everyone they would
00:40:29
celebrate that because they reckon they learn more from the failure than they did from the endless success and i agree
00:40:36
i've learned more from failures and success success is easy when you're successful everyone must
00:40:41
have a piece of the pie and i've had great success and i've had wonderfully you know cataclysmic moments
00:40:48
of doing and when you get the doing the old cliche you find out who your friends are
00:40:53
is completely true you find out who your friends are you find out who actually cares about you who's prepared to stand
00:40:59
up for you you know i remember after my dramatic departure from good morning britain sharon osbourne
00:41:06
tweeting uh that i was entitled to my opinion she knew by doing that there could be
00:41:11
massive repercussions for her given how incendiary the whole debate was it cost her a job
00:41:17
scandalously scandalously she was described as a racist sympathizer on her show the talk but when she asked
00:41:25
them to describe what racist things i'd said they weren't able to do so because
00:41:29
guess what i'd said nothing racist nothing i thought about mega market was driven by
00:41:34
anything to do with her race or skin color why would it be i just thought she was a disingenuous
00:41:39
piece of work smearing the royal family i'm entitled to that opinion you may not
00:41:43
agree with it i think most people who watch the interview probably ended up agreeing with me it doesn't really
00:41:47
matter whether you agree or not but the idea that sharon osborne was destroyed at the altar of
00:41:55
cancel culture because she had the audacity to say i was entitled to an opinion not that she
00:42:01
even agreed with my opinion just that i was entitled to one that in that moment said to me
00:42:08
how ridiculous this culture has got ridiculous and i'm delighted that sharon
00:42:14
is now going to be back on talk tv in the uk in the show after mine on a show called
00:42:19
the talk she's going to be uncanceled by us because she should never have been
00:42:24
cancelled in the first place and when people say counseling doesn't exist look
00:42:28
at what happened to sharon look at the effect it had on her and her family devastating she couldn't get a job in
00:42:33
america where she'd worked for 40 years so it's going on and i i want to cancel
00:42:39
that culture i think it's wrong so so one of so that led to the first point there was confidence in backing yourself
00:42:44
yes i think the other thing you've got to have a bit of bravado a bit of hutzpah
00:42:48
you've got to have an ability to know how to stir things up and wind people up
00:42:52
i like to annoy all the right people who are so permanently offended by everything they're easy to wind up do i
00:42:58
enjoy that yes i love sometimes just putting a tweeter i mean the vegan sausage roll debate was one of the
00:43:03
funniest things ever i had the flu on holiday in italy i was in bed sweating with a raging fever and i saw greg
00:43:10
saying the wait is over finally it's here the vegan sausage right so what on earth are you talking
00:43:17
about who's been waiting for a vegan sausage roll apart from anything else like brew with the french where it's
00:43:22
illegal to market uh vegetarian or vegan products using meat language a sausage roll is meat
00:43:31
if vegans want to eat their gruel fine go and have a joyless existence munching your lentils don't take my language
00:43:38
don't pretend your sausage rolls are real sausage rolls they're not and they're tasteless and they've got more
00:43:43
calories than mcdonald's cheeseburgers so my point is do i care look i don't care as much as i
00:43:48
do about ukraine but in the moment it really annoyed me that there was a presumption we'd all
00:43:52
been waiting for a vegan sausage roll and i was also annoyed that you were seeing stories of
00:43:57
vegans charging into state restaurants and playing music of cows being killed it's like shut up and go away i don't
00:44:04
come into your gruel restaurant ever and shout about what you do to the bee community in california when you eat
00:44:10
your almonds and almond milk right billions of bees exterminated every year in a six week cull in california so
00:44:18
vegans can eat almonds and eat avocados but do you care about vegan sausage rolls uh i care about the hypocrisy that
00:44:25
surrounds the debate actually so anyway i did a tweet saying this is ridiculous and
00:44:32
and everyone went nuts i wasn't allowed to think that this was ridiculous i had
00:44:36
to agree that vegan sausage rolls are fantastic everyone goes bonkers greg's love it because they sell i think
00:44:42
about a billion dollars worth more of their products that year in fact the ceo thanked me personally at the end of year
00:44:48
results so they cleaned up in fact i'm thinking about going to a business where
00:44:52
all i do is take big checks from companies to attack their products and probably make a fortune and but the
00:44:57
whole thing to show me that everyone was allowed to love vegan sausage rolls but
00:45:01
if you deviated from that and said you hated them you had to be destroyed this wasn't acceptable
00:45:07
the work brigade decided vegan sausage rolls were untouchable you had to support them you had to think they were
00:45:13
great this was brilliant even though they're bad for you literally worse for you than a
00:45:17
mcdonald's cheeseburger uh in terms of salt and calorie intake and even though the whole thing was
00:45:23
predicated on this utter hypocrisy around vegan food that somehow they're leaving the little the animals alone
00:45:29
when they exterminate the little guys the bees and i feel sorry for the bees no one ever hear vegans talk about bees
00:45:35
here it's always the big animals they care about cows not the little guys i'm
00:45:39
a little guy i'm the robin hood of this debate i look after the little guys against the
00:45:43
sheriffs of nottingham sure well i think about that so okay you play that you play you know i know from what
00:45:52
you've said here you know that it's part of it is a game and it's a very
00:45:54
profitable it's all fun right to a point but there's also a serious point behind
00:45:58
it which is that actually the vegan food business is a massively burgeoning business and that's fine people want to
00:46:05
eat that that's fine but i do agree with the french that actually you shouldn't
00:46:08
be allowed to pretend what you're doing is meat related because it's not so there's a
00:46:13
genuine point there which i do feel quite strongly about the french have made it illegal you can't use meat
00:46:19
language to sell vegan products i think we should go the same way you have your world and we'll have ours you know your
00:46:25
career has been pretty filled with these moments of like where you are the center
00:46:28
the orbit of sort of you know debate and controversy controversy when you go for a period and people aren't
00:46:34
tweeting at your abuse and stuff and they're not kicking off do you feel a little bit like [ __ ] was i've made a
00:46:38
mistake i remember donald trump telling me when he got to the white house he put
00:46:41
four tvs in his bedroom i used to wake up in the morning at five o'clock because he doesn't sleep
00:46:46
and he'd look at the tvs and if he didn't like what was on the screen or if
00:46:48
it wasn't about him he'd just pull his phone out and tweet something and next
00:46:51
thing they'd all change in real time breaking news president trump says blah
00:46:55
blah blah and i kind of related to that it's like i wake up in the morning and
00:46:59
i'm not trending it's like there's a problem and i have to deal with it so
00:47:01
yeah look i'm in the opinion business it's very lucrative for me i make a lot
00:47:05
of money out of it i get a lot of notoriety and fame out of it people love me or hate me but you know that's
00:47:12
part of being in the opinion business if you don't want to be loved and hated
00:47:17
then you don't express opinions about anything and that way to me madness lies
00:47:21
you know i'd much rather be it's like the old again churchill uh you know he
00:47:25
said that if you've got enemies it means at some stage in your life you stood up for
00:47:29
something that you believe in good that's good when you've had those you you called
00:47:34
them catastrophic events in your life where you know and well other people see them as
00:47:38
catastrophic i've never really seen it that way myself like when i got fired
00:47:41
from the mirror for example yeah after 10 years other people were far more agitated about that and thought it was
00:47:48
far more characterism than i did the mirror good morning britain and this was the other thing about your story which i
00:47:52
found really i wanted to ask you about is you have these these ups and then these downs and these ups and these
00:47:57
downs and your twitter bio i think is probably quite an an apt um summary of of maybe your views on this
00:48:04
which is i can't remember exactly but one day of the cockpit one day you're
00:48:07
the [ __ ] of the war next to feather duster yeah so and then i read that you know after like
00:48:12
the mirror situation you slept a lot yeah and then and then also it seems that after every firing or push getting
00:48:18
pushed out whatever you go and get pissed no again churchill who i love as you may
00:48:24
have gathered again churchill who's now being reviled by the white brigade of
00:48:28
course because he saved the world from nazi germany so of course he has to be destroyed
00:48:32
but churchill you know he he also said that the best definition of success is going from failure to failure with no
00:48:38
discernible loss of enthusiasm now i think i've had a lot of success and occasional failure but i don't look upon
00:48:44
any of the downs in the same way that other people do about my career i'm very
00:48:48
relaxed about my level of success and failure i think it's all been greased to
00:48:52
the mill normally i've left somewhere in explosive circumstances and it's lit to
00:48:58
something better invariably so i'm very optimistic about it my glasses always
00:49:02
are full i think that one chapter ending is another chapter about to start you just have to make sure you get something
00:49:08
good if i spoke to your wife i mean even your kids and i said how does pierce's
00:49:13
emotional state change after in one of these moments of catastrophic failure getting kicked out
00:49:20
they'd say what i'm saying he doesn't change at all barely at all barely at all no i don't i don't i
00:49:27
probably if anything i'm more relaxed that's all because when you're in one of
00:49:30
these cauldron jobs editing a daily newspaper or doing a morning tv show you know and you've got the adrenaline
00:49:36
whirring and you're caffeined up and so on it makes you slightly wired to be
00:49:39
around when you're not doing that you're more relaxed i'm probably just calmer a
00:49:43
bit more relaxed and then that gets a bit boring and i want to get back in the game again because in that in that gap
00:49:48
between one job and the next that you've had many of those those gaps what's
00:49:52
going on in your life and how are you not because it must be very easy for you to just to rush into something else the
00:49:57
next day yeah but the gap between you leaving good morning britain i always advise people
00:50:01
when they lose a big job take your time just go and clear your head you'll get offered loads of things but
00:50:07
don't react to it let the dust settle you know i left good morning britain it
00:50:12
was a massive global firestorm uh and i just took my time i had loads of people offering me stuff every day
00:50:18
all sorts of jobs from around the world could have taken any one of them uh but actually i thought i'm gonna take
00:50:23
my time just chill watch some football watch some cricket see some friends uh get fit you know unfortunately then
00:50:30
got covered and that was the end of the fitness camp over a few months but the the principle is clear your head you get
00:50:36
these moments a few times in your life where you get a chance to reset recalibrate clear your head and then
00:50:42
work out what you really want to do next because it won't be the same thing three
00:50:46
or four months down the line as it feels in the moment most people's tendencies
00:50:50
when they leave a big job in dramatic circumstances i've got to do the same thing somewhere else
00:50:54
prove my point i don't feel i need to prove anything to anybody you know i was
00:50:58
a talent show judge for six years loved it number one show on british tv and american tv for six years great then i
00:51:04
left i i just couldn't think of any more things to say about piano playing pigs
00:51:09
it's time to move on you know i did larry king's job at cnn after him for
00:51:13
nearly four years i did 1200 shows on prime time cnn around the world people call it a failure it's like well that's
00:51:20
1200 more than any other british person i've seen do a prime time talk show in
00:51:24
america so it's all about it's all relative isn't it about what your
00:51:28
perception of failure is had a great time in cnn and actually i wanted to come home i then did breakfast tv which
00:51:34
i never thought i'd ever want to do or even enjoy i loved it and we absolutely
00:51:38
crushed it we took the ratings from a 14 share to 36 share they've now gone back
00:51:43
to 18. so people could do the maths you know i think it was a massive success and yeah i still meet some people go uh
00:51:50
yeah all went wrong for you didn't i said not really no no it was a brilliant
00:51:53
success good morning britain uh we became the number one breakfast show in the country on my last
00:51:59
day i left on a point of principle and the principle was i'm entitled to my opinion
00:52:05
you may not like it i'm entitled to my opinion and in each case where i've had
00:52:09
a career-ending sort of moment it's really been where the bosses have lost their bottle with me
00:52:16
so i need i've now gravitated back to my first big boss in the media rupert murdoch who's got balls of steel
00:52:23
and he's not going to take a phone call from meghan markle demanding my head on
00:52:26
a plane i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as we all know
00:52:31
energy independence and living a little greener has never been more important for a better future it's a journey i've
00:52:37
been on over the last couple of years that i've shared with you sporadically
00:52:41
ever since i sold my range over sport and bought an electric bicycle and there's a lot of people out there that
00:52:46
listen to this podcast that are looking to make that sustainable switch in the things that run their daily life whether
00:52:52
it's their home their car their vehicles whatever it might be so when a good
00:52:56
friend of mine at a company called my energy called jordan told me she was interested in sponsoring this podcast i
00:53:02
jumped at the opportunity so for those of you that don't know my energy are a
00:53:07
uk renewable energy brand whose mission is to increase the usage of green energy
00:53:11
helping people like you and i to save time and money when it comes to making sustainable switches in our lives so if
00:53:17
this resonates with you and you're the type of person that's been looking or
00:53:20
thinking about going on your own sustainability journey i highly recommend checking them out at
00:53:27
meghan myenergy.com right not going to go into the issues of that i'm really not personally that
00:53:31
interested in it but what i was i didn't want to ask you as i saw when you spoke
00:53:34
oxford they you were talking about jeremy clarkson getting in a fist fight with him yeah going down the pub making
00:53:40
up after and there you said i do like to fall out with someone in the makeup again yeah
00:53:45
what would it take for you and meghan markle to make up she could do she did an interview like
00:53:52
this with me be very interesting you know it's like meghan markle to me has lost all sense of reality about life
00:54:01
she needs to sit with someone like me not an oprah winfrey enabling interview fueling your victimhood she needs
00:54:09
someone to give her some perspective i talk to her about perspective where i say you know you are you aware
00:54:14
that when you preach to us about climate change and the environment and carbon footprint from elton john's private
00:54:20
plane it doesn't sit very well are you aware that when you tweet as they did on the
00:54:26
day of her half a million dollar baby shower in new york with all her celebrity friends
00:54:31
when you tweet from your twitter account about poverty it doesn't sit very well
00:54:35
are you aware that when you preach about equality from your 11 million california
00:54:40
mansion it doesn't sit very well are you aware that when you rip our beloved
00:54:45
prince away from the bosom of his family and take him to america and woke him into submission it doesn't sit very well
00:54:52
with the british people are you aware that when you make very serious allegations of racism and
00:54:58
callous disregard for suicidal thoughts you actually have to produce some evidence to support it otherwise
00:55:04
everyone at the palace and the royal family gets smeared by association with those comments is she aware of any of
00:55:11
those things i don't know but i'd love to ask those questions she didn't get
00:55:15
asked them by oprah oprah's went what what what repeatedly just believed everything she said we now
00:55:23
know at least 17 statements that meghan markle made in that interview were false
00:55:29
so am i still supposed to believe her is it a job-ending moment if i don't believe her so i think she's a piece of
00:55:36
work i think she i was one of many people that she used along her her path up the slippery ladder that's
00:55:44
fine i don't care he met her once but the way she treated me on a very small level is not dissimilar the way
00:55:50
she disowned her father the guy that brought her up on his own for six seven years
00:55:55
you know he got disowned he lived 70 miles away she never sees him he's ever
00:56:00
met his son-in-law i miss crazy stuff right she had one member of her entire family at the wedding
00:56:06
where her family should have been on either side was oprah winfrey and george clooney do me a favor
00:56:13
so i see right through it people still want to believe her that's fine people
00:56:19
love meghan markle think what's happened to harry is great that's fine too i just
00:56:23
don't agree and i'm afraid you have to respect my right to have that opinion um i'm
00:56:29
getting about as bored with it as you are to be honest with you yeah so i don't want to be defined by meghan
00:56:33
markle even though she was personally responsible for me losing a job that i i loved
00:56:39
you know she was the one who wrote to the boss of itv on the monday night that led to me
00:56:44
leaving the next day um talking about being we're both women and we're both mothers you've got to get rid
00:56:50
of him do people think that's right is it right that uh that a person like meghan markle from the
00:56:58
california mansion should leave her a british television broadcaster out of a job he's enjoying that viewers are
00:57:05
enjoying him doing in that way i don't think so is it right that my right to
00:57:10
free speech was so impinged that i had to leave a job if i didn't apologize for
00:57:14
disbelieving someone who said false things i don't think so i thought the whole thing was ridiculous as did ofcom
00:57:21
the government regulated months later who ruled in my favor so i thought the whole thing frankly was preposterous but
00:57:29
in answer to your original question let's do an interview megan let me put all these questions to you and answer
00:57:35
some difficult questions because i don't wish them harm i don't wish them to be unhappy but i hate what
00:57:42
they've done between them to the royal family and the monarchy i think it's
00:57:46
been incredibly damaging do you ever do you ever get concerned that on a real human level that some of the words you
00:57:53
say say for megan or sam smith or on good morning britain or even around i know is
00:57:59
it tessa who was the front cover of the magazine yeah the the cosmo covergirl cover do you ever has it ever crossed
00:58:05
your mind that the words or tweets might actually hurt someone do you think it's crossed
00:58:11
did you well has it across meghan markle's mind what she did to me you know like on the
00:58:16
suicide megan i didn't cost her a job you know she was saying she was suicidal
00:58:22
again i don't want to go back to the point of mental health but did you ever
00:58:26
like think is this going to hurt this person on it she she said that two people at the palace when she told
00:58:34
them she had suicidal thoughts said she couldn't get treatment because it would be damaging to the
00:58:39
brand yeah i don't believe that and no evidence has been brought forward to support it those are extremely
00:58:46
incendiary allegations in my view weaponizing mental health and suicide to portray yourself as a victim if
00:58:54
meghan markle has proof that two senior members of the royal household refused to let her get help
00:59:01
for suicidal thoughts i want to know who they were when they said it and they shouldn't
00:59:07
have those jobs but we are now a year and a bit later no evidence similarly with her racism
00:59:14
claims one of them we knew immediately was untrue it's completely untrue that
00:59:18
her son was prevented from being a prince because of his skin color demonstrably
00:59:23
untrue factually wrong and the other claim was that a member of the royal family
00:59:28
expressed concern about archie's skin color who was it and what did they say
00:59:33
and what was the context in which they said it because the damage that she calls by calling the royal family a
00:59:39
bunch of racists is incalculable as we saw on the recent tour of the caribbean with william and kate so i don't think
00:59:45
it's i don't think it's harsh to want some evidence to support such incendiary claims and when it comes to
00:59:53
do i use tough language yes sometimes i think i do but i don't regret doing that because i
00:59:58
think they've been using pretty despicable language themselves have you ever regretted anything you've said in
01:00:03
terms of sometimes you think oh i mean sometimes no i encourage all my kids to be free thinkers and sometimes they'll
01:00:10
be on me you know like dad you went too far you shouldn't say that and we'll
01:00:14
have a spirited debate about it and sometimes they they change my mind about stuff tell me one example i knew that
01:00:20
i tried to think it has happened it has happened i mean they'll be saying that my middle son stanley is an actor
01:00:25
and photographer he loves your podcast he's my favorite son yeah exactly he's like oh he's on
01:00:31
mine all right i have all my sons of the same and my daughter um but he would say now that's talking
01:00:37
about meghan markle yeah just don't bother don't and he's right there comes
01:00:41
a point what's the point the problem is they make themselves newsworthy all the time my job is to
01:00:46
talk about the news and obviously have a vested interest in the mark called debacle because it cost
01:00:52
me my job so i still feel that i have a sort of involvement in that in that story but he would certainly be saying
01:00:57
that move on to other stuff you know just do something else in this interview that's more interesting than
01:01:04
megan bloody markle and he's right actually so that would be an example i've had
01:01:09
that conversation with him and my other sons but we argue we have we have a what's up group me and my sons if people
01:01:15
read that or they laugh because they hammer me my kids about all sorts of stuff sometimes we agree a lot of the
01:01:21
time we don't agree and we have really vociferous arguments but then we all go out there and have fun together
01:01:27
and that's the way it should be i want my kids to be independent-minded i want
01:01:32
them to challenge me i want to challenge them and sometimes it gets really heated
01:01:36
you know as a dad when you're leading at such a crusade as i'm sure you'd call it
01:01:41
um about free thinking and free speech and these kinds of things surely there's some kind of consequence for
01:01:48
your kids right because you're put not i mean fame in and of itself creates a consequence
01:01:53
for you they get picked on because they're my dad but i always say to them you also get lots of benefits because
01:01:57
you're my sons right and my children all of you right we go and have a we have a
01:02:02
wonderful time right we get treated like royalty in restaurants we you know we have lovely holidays we have a lovely
01:02:08
place in beverly hills they come to all this is because of my fame for one of a better word and
01:02:15
success as amid the failings and i say you got to take life in totality there'll be some annoying bits
01:02:22
of being my children and there'll be some very good benefits of being my children you know i
01:02:28
got cristiano ronaldo when i interviewed him to do a uh video to my sons naming them all right they were like oh my god
01:02:37
but they wouldn't get that if i wasn't who i am so they have a wonderful moment
01:02:41
and then they might get trolls as in one case happen making death threats to my oldest son on his instagram and i did
01:02:49
take that to the police because why should my sons be exposed to death threats from some disgusting troll and
01:02:55
it's interesting with the process it's been over a year now and it still hasn't
01:02:58
come to court it was a clear and demonstrable death threat specific to my son and me and to his mum my
01:03:05
ex-wife and it's like how can this be allowed to happen and we're still a year
01:03:09
a year and a half later and we're still no action against the perpetrator i'm
01:03:13
hoping there will be it's going through the process but shows you the frailty
01:03:17
and weakness of social media that someone can make a specific death threat and nothing gets done for so long so
01:03:25
that's a downside of being my you know when in the good morning britain thing blew up all my sons were
01:03:31
being abused on social media in the most horrific manner by a targeted mob of people normally who have the be kind
01:03:39
hashtag in their bio while spewing vile abuse of my kids simply for being my children they didn't
01:03:46
even agree with me about a lot of it outside of losing people when does pierce morgan cry
01:03:56
nafta i mean really the last time i cried was my grandmother's funeral 2013.
01:04:03
before that i remember welling up at a movie um i was trying to i think it was it was a
01:04:09
movie that ends in a horrible fashion with a young son being shot dead i can't
01:04:15
remember what each one it was um i think it was paul tom hanks maybe paul newman or something like i can't
01:04:22
remember the movie but i was at the cinema i was watching it and it reminded me of my sons
01:04:29
and when the kid gets killed in the kind of horrible denis montes movie i did actually well up and i was surprised i
01:04:35
learned normally i don't well up at most things because i think also as a newspaper relative for 10 years you get
01:04:40
quite immune to shocking things even if they're real in your world you get immune to it you get used to dealing
01:04:47
with you know you've had to cover stories like the dumb lane massacre or 911 or
01:04:53
diners death or whatever it may be these things are huge emotional things for the
01:04:57
country for the world and over time you learn to be able to handle that and do your job so you
01:05:04
become quite tough quite thick-skinned on the outside doesn't mean you have to feel things
01:05:09
inside i do that's what i'm curious about because reading through what you've been through in your career the
01:05:12
ups and the downs i was like if i was this man i would have had suffered with anxiety pretty badly i think i don't get
01:05:18
anxiety do you ever get anxious no never not really no i don't i don't get
01:05:24
nervous i don't get anxious i'm very self-confident i think i'm pretty
01:05:27
self-aware which i think is really important i'm i'm very aware of who i am what i am
01:05:33
how i operate i'm also aware over time the things that seem terrible in the moment very rarely
01:05:40
are everything is survivable apart from death or you know some sort of terrible illness
01:05:46
that you can't get rid of um you know the most frustrated i've probably ever
01:05:49
been was i got long covered uh last year after i got the delta varium so i had a week of very
01:05:56
high fever and stuff then got six seven months of long cove no smell no taste endless fatigue no energy which for me
01:06:04
was like the worst thing you know i broke an ankle the summer before and i didn't mind that too much it was
01:06:09
annoying physically i couldn't do golf and stuff like that but i was able to function as myself but
01:06:16
when you lose energy it's a really interesting thing i i found that really debilitating and in a way quite
01:06:22
depressing you know over time as the months went on because no doctor could tell you what the cure is and i have
01:06:28
great sympathy with all the millions of people out there with a form of long covert it's a very brutal virus even if
01:06:34
you've been as i was fully vaccinated it can cause you a lot of problems but as i sat there month after month
01:06:40
after month with the energy not coming back and no taste couldn't drink my favorite fine wine only drink terrible
01:06:46
wine because the sharp tastes i could actually just about make out so you're
01:06:50
down to your leapfrown emotion really awful pinot grigio as opposed to my normal you know chateau la tour it
01:06:57
was a it was a difficult moment stop wallowing these are first world problems and i am wallowing um
01:07:04
but it made me realize that if you've got good health you've got a wealth really
01:07:10
far better than any actual physical wealth that really if you've got your health make the most of it i've got a
01:07:17
lot of sympathy for people who have debilitating illnesses either mental or physical that's why i always try and
01:07:23
debate about mental health to park the two things i know people who've got clinical depression it's an awful thing
01:07:30
and they need constant help and constant medical attention and treatment and drugs and so on i've got great sympathy
01:07:36
for people in that position in a way when i had the long covid it it felt like i guess this sort of brain fog that
01:07:42
comes with it which anyone who's had it will know what i'm talking about if you
01:07:45
don't you just wonder what the fuzz is all about but you get this kind of brain
01:07:49
fog that sits in your head and i'd imagine that it's on a much worse level
01:07:53
for people with clinical depression i can kind of understand a bit more now about what that must feel like but
01:07:58
that's not the same as feeling anxious about normal life stuff it's the levels of anxiety completely
01:08:03
out of control so i don't get anxious about things i don't get nervous about
01:08:08
stuff i get excited i get that kind of adrenaline excitement excitement nervous excitement
01:08:15
pierce morgan uncensored tell me then why how are you finding your excitement in doing this having had such a long
01:08:22
career what is it about this new show that's exciting you it's brand new it's
01:08:26
starting from scratch i had lots of offers to establish shows established networks around the world and i thought
01:08:31
you know what i like this idea i like going back to work for rupert murdoch he's been a great mentor for me in my
01:08:37
life he's 91 i dinner with him here in la a couple of nights ago and he just
01:08:40
his brain at 91 is just staggering and his extraordinary drive to always be thinking of the next thing he's just
01:08:49
been down to spacex and was in so enthused by what elon musk is doing with that he never looks back he just only
01:08:56
ever looks forward it's very contagious and he believes completely in free speech and it's made him a very
01:09:01
polarizing figure himself as it has with me but he believes completely in that and i find that intoxicated so going
01:09:06
back to where it started with the person who gave me my first really big media job uh with a global platform so no
01:09:13
one's really tried doing a daily show that airs in the uk the us and australia
01:09:18
three different continents at the same time and my gut feeling is the world's a
01:09:23
small place with debena that actually we've got to a place now where because
01:09:28
of social media whether you're in sydney london new york you're all having the same arguments
01:09:34
everyone's talking about the will smith slap or ukraine and zolensky and putin
01:09:39
or trump whatever it may be it's the same conversations the same people being
01:09:44
held around the world and i think what people want to know is not what's happening because they're seeing that
01:09:48
all the time they're getting an overload of information they want to know what to
01:09:52
think about it and i'm in the opinion business i'm going to tell people what i
01:09:56
think about stuff i don't expect you to agree with me but i do want to challenge what you may
01:10:01
be thinking yourself i want to be firm about what i believe about situations and if you want to persuade me i'm wrong
01:10:08
come on i'm going to have people from the left from the right i don't want to
01:10:11
be a partisan show i don't park myself into the right or left at all i think i'm a voice for common sense i
01:10:18
see it i don't actually think i'm that controversial in terms of my opinions i
01:10:23
think anyone who read my book knows that i think i'm pretty much on the side of
01:10:27
the 80 majority in most places but it's going to be a challenge and it you know
01:10:31
i'm hoping it will work i'll give it everything i've got and it's a big big
01:10:36
challenge probably the biggest i've ever had but i find that exciting i love
01:10:40
starting from scratch brand new studio we built an ealing out of rubble literally out of concrete slabs we built
01:10:46
this amazing high-tech studio um i've just been on a global tour to australia
01:10:52
to america and it was so exciting the energy that i was getting everywhere about this it's a lot of
01:10:57
support from this massive company to make it work but ultimately it's the wayne rescue thing maybe i'll miss
01:11:03
we'll see but it won't be through lack of trying and it won't be through lack of
01:11:07
confidence and it won't be through lack of self-belief that i have that this is
01:11:11
the right show for the right moment the public wants someone to cancel cancel culture and because of what
01:11:17
happened with good morning britain i became for better or for worse a very public defender of free speech
01:11:24
and the right to have an opinion and that will be the core of my show and we've got to get back to that i think
01:11:30
it's a war and i think cancer culture is a virus as deadly over time as a coronavirus it
01:11:37
really is the damage it can do to society i think is extremely serious and it's getting worse not better and i want
01:11:45
to cancel it and what could be a better legacy than the man who canceled cancer culture
01:11:52
pierce thank you um you know as you can tell you know there's much we agree on
01:11:56
there's some things we don't agree on as well i followed trump not because i
01:11:59
agree with everything he says but because i don't want to be trapped in an echo chamber of people that are just
01:12:03
telling me things that i already believe and there's this quote i read one day
01:12:06
which really resonated with me which is if your friends have the same opinions of you they're probably not your
01:12:11
opinions yeah but i would say my own kids are like that yeah they don't agree
01:12:14
with a lot of the things they agree with a lot of things as well but they also understand the perils of this culture
01:12:21
that we're going down this slippery path and they understand actually how important this debate is
01:12:28
to get back to where we used to be with debate it is we have a closing tradition
01:12:32
on this podcast always where the previous guest writes a question for the next question ah they don't know who
01:12:36
they're writing it for okay and you won't either but um the question that's
01:12:40
been written for you is okay interesting so i don't ever get to read it tony jack reads it slope in the
01:12:48
book what advice would you give to your five-year-old self just live exactly the dream you're
01:12:57
currently dreaming good bad and ugly warts and all find something you're passionate about
01:13:04
and at five i was passionate about news i don't know why i can't explain it
01:13:10
but i was and so i pursued a path of wanting to be in the news business and it's been the greatest
01:13:19
journey i could ever have imagined good and bad i wouldn't change any of it nothing so
01:13:26
my advice to five-year-old peers would be yep go for it there you have it thank you pierce thank
01:13:33
you really enjoyed it appreciate it [Music] [Music]