#895 - Piers Morgan - Trump, Elon Musk & The Future Of The West

Speaker 1 You wanted Trump to pardon Hunter Biden, but his dad has beaten him to the punch.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I think it would have been a very smart move by Trump to send a unifying message to a very fractured and divided America if he was to do it.

Speaker 2 But for Joe Biden to do it after assuring the world, including the American electorate, repeatedly in the last few months up to the election, I'm not going to do that.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to pardon him, to get the White House press secretary to repeatedly say it from the lectern in the White House, I think that's pretty disgraceful. So there's two ways of looking at this.

Speaker 2 I think if Trump had done it, smart move in unifying the country. For Biden to do it, actually a pretty shameless act of rank hypocrisy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not a very nice nail in the coffin of what will be probably not a particularly well-remembered presidency.

Speaker 2 I think he'll go down as one of the worst presidents. He stayed on way too long, and clearly, cognitively, he was in decline.

Speaker 2 I think the botched coronation of his vice president was another fiasco which came mad to haunt them.

Speaker 2 And I think the problem with Joe Biden is that he, the whole issue of Hunter Biden and the way he's now pardoned him,

Speaker 2 he's always positioned himself as the whiter than white candidate against Trump. That Trump's the liar.
Trump's shameless.

Speaker 2 Trump's corrupt. Trump is hypocritical.
All these things. That was the stick he repeatedly used to beat Trump.

Speaker 2 And now in one fell swoop, one action, because it's it's not just he's pardoned him for the things of which he's been convicted, he's pardoned him for anything else he may have done since 2014 in that period.

Speaker 2 Decade of crime. It's like, what else has gone on here? A lot of rumors about much bigger stuff that may have happened.

Speaker 2 And you look at it and you think, wow, that's the kind of thing that, honestly, they talk about a banana republic relating to Trump.

Speaker 2 This is about as close to a banana republic act as you could imagine.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I want to talk about this on your show later on, but there's this rise of the bro-ligarchy and bro-politics at the moment.

Speaker 2 Which is fascinating.

Speaker 1 I think it's really interesting, but this

Speaker 1 prioritization of doing good over looking good, of sort of efficiency over optics.

Speaker 1 And, you know, this is one of those examples, I think, where both have gone awry, both the thing that you did and the way that it was done and the way that it was led up to.

Speaker 1 But in stark contrast to Vivek Ramaswamy doing debate prep with his top off hitting four hands on tennis court or Elon Musk, you know, sending rockets into space.

Speaker 1 Sort of a world of people doing things. Even if you don't agree with the things, you can't deny that they're doing stuff.
And yeah, I wonder what the medium-term future looks like now for America.

Speaker 2 Well, I think one of the most important things of the broligarchy in terms of its impact is that so many young men gravitated to it because they've been feeling lost. You've talked about this a lot.

Speaker 2 I've talked to you about this a lot. I've got three sons from 23 to 31.
I've seen it at firsthand. How they've been struggling, not just my sons, but

Speaker 2 their friendship group have been struggling to understand what it means to be a man in this weird age that we're now in.

Speaker 2 Social media driven age, virtue signaling driven age, a weird time when losing is almost more celebrated than winning, where the old alpha male chest beating is now seen as something to be ashamed of,

Speaker 2 where weakness is almost now seen as a greater characteristic than strength. And I have been on this for years thinking thinking this is a ruinous way for society to go.

Speaker 2 And suddenly, along in America,

Speaker 2 you have this group of very alpha male guys, all chess beaters, from RFK Jr. to Elon to Trump to Vivek to Joe Rogan, all of them.

Speaker 2 Very strong-minded guys, to a lesser degree in a different space.

Speaker 2 Andrew Tate and his brother, who wield extraordinary influence, but I think have a streak of blatant misogyny in Andrew's case, which I really don't like.

Speaker 2 But a lot of the reason for his appeal is that lost young men gravitated to him because he was pounding a drum of take care of yourself,

Speaker 2 be proud of being successful, aspire to be better than you currently are, etc. And that resonates with people.
I'd add Jordan Peterson to the best.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, even though Jordan's not a massive fan of Andrew, the message in principle isn't that different. No.

Speaker 2 No, and the message is be proud to be a man again.

Speaker 2 You've been ashamed ashamed of being a man for many years now, since the avalanche of Me Too, of Time's Up, which absolutely had an important role in society in correcting a historic imbalance in the gender, no question, and historically bad behavior by a lot of men towards women.

Speaker 2 I absolutely do not denigrate either of those movements. But what it did do, as I knew it would do, the pendulum swung so far the other way that actually it freaked the hell out of young guys.

Speaker 2 And they were suddenly like, what am I supposed to be how am i supposed to behave and women listening to this might think well it's easy you know how to behave actually it's not that easy particularly if you've been conditioned to think that being a man is xyz and suddenly you're told all those things are things to be ashamed of and now we've had the pendulum swing back a little bit and you're seeing a sort of corrective balance where i think people have begun to work out where the boundaries are, where the lines are to a degree.

Speaker 2 I think it's still complex out there.

Speaker 2 And you're seeing it at the moment with the whole Greg Wallace scandal in the UK.

Speaker 2 And, you know, from American viewers, very simply, he's a guy who does a cooking show on TV who's been very laddish for 20 years or so.

Speaker 2 And now that laddishness has come back to be user stick to beat him. And he said a lot of things which are pretty unpalatable to women who've now ganged up to complain about him.

Speaker 2 But again, that raises that whole area of workplace banter, workplace relationships, right? I mean, I read that until 10 years ago, 40% of all marriages began with a workplace romance.

Speaker 2 That stat cannot exist today because how does it start? Historically, it would be a guy in a superior position with a woman in a lesser position.

Speaker 2 That's historically because of the gender imbalance in the workplace. So, how do people meet now at work? They're not really allowed to.
So, what happens then? Then you gravitate to dating apps.

Speaker 2 They're all pretty, they're going out of fashion too.

Speaker 1 They seem to create a flimsier relationship as well. They drop off more quickly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that's you've seen that their popularity is decreasing so i do think well how are people meeting each other actually with difficulty yeah elon said cancel culture had been cancelled yeah something he'd been harping on about for a while

Speaker 2 you think that's true well i like i like the idea of it i certainly think that when you've got a thumping win for a guy like donald trump who's been helped over the line by people like elon like joe rogan and others who simply don't tolerate or believe in the concept of cancel culture that's incredibly powerful.

Speaker 2 And I think they send a message to the woke world.

Speaker 2 And I always temper this kind of part of a discussion about wokeism by saying

Speaker 2 when wokeism originally began back in the 60s in America,

Speaker 2 it came out of music actually. And it was just, it was a clarion call for people to be more aware of social and racial injustice.
By that criteria, alone, I'm woke, happy to be woke.

Speaker 2 It's just the way it's been hijacked in the last 10 years by what I call, I call them fascists. They hate it because they hate fascists.

Speaker 2 But I say, do you not understand that when you operate on a principle of cancel culture, of virtue signaling, of fact-devoid bullshit about things like supporting trans athletes in women's sport to the...

Speaker 2 point where it just destroys the integrity of women's sport irrevocably.

Speaker 2 When you pound those drums, actually you're behaving like a fascist, where you want people to think like you to act like you to speak like you to have the same values to have the same principles to have the same heroes to read the same books to read watch the same movies to laugh at the same jokes and if you deviate we're going to destroy you that's fascism actually

Speaker 2 and they don't seem to either understand that or they're in denial but this election's a big wake-up call

Speaker 2 because I think this election was you had Karmala Harris progressive pretty far left progressive throughout her entire political career, desperately trying to move to the center when she became the nominee.

Speaker 2 But it was all too late because the receipts were there.

Speaker 2 And the receipts were used against her memorably in that trans ad that the Trump campaign did, which they reckon moved the needle by up to three points, where it simply ended with Carmela Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you.

Speaker 2 That was very simple, but very effective, because actually, personal pronouns are bullshit. And we all kind of know they're bullshit.

Speaker 2 And now I've noticed on my emails, people have stopped using them because they now realize actually it's made them look a little bit ridiculous, particularly those who insist on calling themselves they.

Speaker 2 As Joe Rogan said about Sam Smith, there's only one of you, buddy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do you think it's a

Speaker 1 repudiation of that? Obviously,

Speaker 1 you've made the claim that walkism's dead and identity politics is dead and virtue signaling is dead and stuff.

Speaker 2 But I think the concepts are dead. The actual execution of the death may take some time.

Speaker 2 But I do think that if it wasn't dead, you'd have seen a massive victory for a progressive far-left candidate in Carmela Harris, who pretended she wasn't, but actually is to her bootstraps.

Speaker 2 And she got wiped out. And I think that that's an indication of three things.
One, Americans trusted. Trump to fix the economy and illegal immigration better than they trusted her to do that.

Speaker 2 Secondly, there's something about him on the world stage, the swagger that Trump brings to the office, which annoys a lot of people, but he's actually quite effective.

Speaker 2 And I think that that was partly in people's minds, particularly when he put his fist up after being shot.

Speaker 2 He showed the world that the potential president of the United States was a badass, strong guy.

Speaker 2 And I think that moment may have won him the election when we look back in history to that moment, particularly when he then got back on a debate stage the week later, a rally stage, and did it all over again in front of 20,000 complete strangers.

Speaker 2 I spoke to him at night.

Speaker 2 He rang me because he'd seen me talking about it on fox and i said i gotta say whether people love you or hate that is a badass statement of personal courage and he was he was interesting because he he actually said in that call

Speaker 2 you know i knew if i didn't get back out there now i might never get back out there which i thought was an interesting you don't often hear trump a little bit of vulnerability a little bit where he kind of knew himself talk to me about what happens when your phone rings and you pick it up and it says donald jump

Speaker 2 which is dj t actually.

Speaker 2 It's a weird thing. I mean, it's weird to other people more than me.
I've known Trump for nearly 20 years.

Speaker 2 You know, I competed in the Celebrity Apprentice, the first season of it in 2007, eight, and I won it. And I spent about 100 hours around Trump.
I worked out later in that season.

Speaker 2 And that was very informative, particularly in the boardroom filming scenes, which could last up to three hours. I saw a lot of the way Trump is over hours in the way he interacted with people.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it always struck me there was a disconnect between Trump, the politician, and particularly the president, and the guy I saw in that boardroom. The guy in the boardroom was much warmer,

Speaker 2 much less combative.

Speaker 2 He liked mischief and he liked stirring things up and he liked drama, all those things. But he had a streak of empathy towards contestants and stuff, which I've never seen him show as a president.

Speaker 2 He believes that he's got to be a strong man all the time. I think right now, because of the shooting and because of the scale of his win, which has basically knocked all his critics out.

Speaker 2 I think he's showing a bit more of that side now, the dancing on stage, you know, to YMCA.

Speaker 2 I mean, the ultimate joke, really, that the guy who's called the most bigoted president in history chose the number one gay

Speaker 2 in history

Speaker 2 to sing on stage. And he's got America dancing the Trump dance, right? I see him laughing a lot more in public now, relaxing, enjoying dinners, which are filmed and put out there.

Speaker 2 I see him doing a lot more interaction with people. I think, yeah, that's the guy I remember from Apprentice, the Boardroom, when he did the McDonald's stunt, when he did the garbage truck stunt.

Speaker 2 And I've seen this really accelerate since he got shot. I think he's a changed man since then.

Speaker 2 I don't think he's going to lose the pugilistic side or the trash talking side or any of those things which are part of his DNA as a new New York real estate guy.

Speaker 2 But I do think he's got that empathy streak he's always hidden, is now coming out more.

Speaker 2 And I think he's a happier and more relaxed guy this time because we haven't seen what we saw in 2016, which is the mass protests, the fury, the venom, the visceral hatred from the mainstream media, the Russia collusion thing for years and so on.

Speaker 2 You take away that side and you take away the thing that Trump talks about in his book, The Art of the Deal, where he says, if someone punches you in the face, you hit them back 10 times harder.

Speaker 2 And he means metaphorically as well as physically. And for the first four years of that presidency, he was punched all the time and he reacted by punching.

Speaker 2 It became just basically a brawl between him and the media and his political opponents. This time around, there's not that same atmosphere.

Speaker 1 He doesn't have to be as harsh. He doesn't have to be as defensive.
He's won.

Speaker 2 And he's had four years to think about what he did right and wrong the first time.

Speaker 1 You had a couple of chats with him recently on the phone.

Speaker 2 What did you learn?

Speaker 2 The last time he ran me this week, the week before Thanksgiving,

Speaker 2 Wednesday of that week. And he said, Piers, it's Donald.
He said, I was just watching you on TV and you were looking great. And I just thought I'm going to call you and tell you.

Speaker 2 Now, I suspect that isn't actually what he was thinking. He just wanted to have a chat, but it's classic Trump.
Immediately, you're like, was I?

Speaker 2 And I was laughing.

Speaker 2 But we do have really good conversations. And he was telling me about all sorts of stuff, you know, Ukraine and Russia.

Speaker 2 his cabinet and so on and so on. He knows I'm not going to repeat that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 But it was a very, there'd been very warm conversations, very open.

Speaker 2 And I just sense in him that the shooting in particular and then the big scale of the win, they've had a profound effect on him. You know, he's nearly 80.
He doesn't have to fight an election anymore.

Speaker 2 He only has to worry about a legacy. You can tell from his cabinet picks, he's gone for people who are not establishment.

Speaker 2 Because last time he chose establishment people who then basically, a lot of them, did him in and probably were there to do him in from the start.

Speaker 2 This time he's got people who are ferociously loyal and in many cases have been very successful in their own fields, which are completely different. You know, we see WWE, right,

Speaker 2 as being a criteria for selection to his cabinet.

Speaker 2 But why not? I mean, why not choose people like that?

Speaker 1 What do you think happens if Trump is unsuccessful and doesn't make any positive change to America, given that he's got all of the things that he could want? Electoral College, Popular Vote, House.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's no excuse. But

Speaker 1 where does that leave American politics if you've had both parties have a is there a lot of despondency that'll come down the line if that doesn't I think there'll be a lot of Schadenfreude.

Speaker 2 A lot of people say, told you.

Speaker 2 I think Trump knows that.

Speaker 2 I think he's aware of the potential opportunity here, the chance to, in a way, have a second go at his legacy, because he had one go at it, which ended catastrophically with the January 6th rioting, which was a shameful moment in American history.

Speaker 2 And that was on him. And I think that he was then sent to the wilderness.
I wrote a column or two in early 2022 where I was like, this guy's finished. He's a busted flush.

Speaker 2 It's all about Ron DeSantis now. Back off, Don.
I look at that now, think, wow, how has he got back?

Speaker 2 And he got back even stronger than last time. And actually, it's because the Democrats did a number of acts of self-harm.

Speaker 2 They went after him through the law, weaponizing the justice system, choosing ridiculously pathetic things like whether he shuffled paperwork over a one-night stand with Stormy Daniels 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 Who cares? Americans don't care about that. They care about the fact they can't feed their kids.

Speaker 2 They care about the fact that nearly 10 million people have come over the border in the Biden administration four-year period. That's what they care about.

Speaker 1 It's that looking good over doing good thing again, right? Like optics versus.

Speaker 2 I think it's also a visceral hatred of Donald Trump. It is this Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing.
I have friends of mine who are completely unhinged. I have family members.

Speaker 2 If you mention Trump or if I post a picture of me and Trump with some congratulations on winning again, utter mania.

Speaker 1 The Russian sleeper agent activation code.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And I'm like, you've got to sit back and get the bigger picture with Trump and understand why he's so popular.

Speaker 1 I saw from The Hill that AOC is rumored to be running for the city.

Speaker 2 I mean, utterly.

Speaker 1 What do you make of her chances?

Speaker 2 What a shrieking, even more progressive, even more far-left candidate version of Kamala Harris. I mean, Trump, they must be rubbing their hands.
Please, please give us AOC.

Speaker 2 Because almost everything she stands for bears no relation to what Americans actually care about. Anything.
So she would be the worst possible candidate.

Speaker 2 If the Democrats don't wake up, A, they've got to get rid of all this progressive left stuff. It's got to all go.
They were at their most electable when they had someone like Bill Clinton.

Speaker 2 Go back to the Bill Clinton playbook.

Speaker 2 He didn't bother with any of that crap.

Speaker 2 He just kept it pretty centered.

Speaker 1 You can say to people that go, well, the world's different now.

Speaker 2 It's not. It's not.
We've been told it's different. We've been told we now have to believe the sky is blue when it's actually red.

Speaker 2 And eventually people have gone, well, hang on. It's red.
Why have I got to call it blue? And people have gone, actually, I'm done with that, thanks.

Speaker 2 No, and I'm done with the constant offense that everyone's taking about absolutely everything. I'm done with everyone losing their jobs over the tiniest

Speaker 2 transgression of the woke worldview rulebook.

Speaker 2 I'm tired of all of it. I'm tired of identity politics.
I'm tired of the ruination of meritocracy, the altar of

Speaker 2 wokeism, when it doesn't matter how good you are. It matters what your skin color is or your gender.

Speaker 2 None of that does anyone any good, least of all people from ethnic minorities, or least of all women. If you're trying to promote women's rights, I mean, it made me laugh in the election.

Speaker 2 Carmela Harris was, I'm for women's rights, abortion. Okay, I agree with you.
Okay. On that, I agree with you.
Because we, in Britain, it's a settled issue.

Speaker 2 We don't, you know, we just don't really have debates about abortion here. We have one of the most lax abortion laws in the world, actually.

Speaker 2 And I'm all in favor. I'm all for pro-women having the choice.
Nothing to do with me, Gov. You just decide, women, what you want to do with your bodies.
All in favor of that.

Speaker 2 But how do you square being the candidate for women's rights when you're also supporting trans athletes in women's sport, as Carmela does? You can't because you're eroding women's rights.

Speaker 2 And then people like J.K. Rowling, who put their head over the parabet, they get abused, not least by the, by the Harry Potter stars who owe her their fortunes.

Speaker 1 But Rupert Grint's got a 2.8 million tax bill.

Speaker 1 So maybe he'll be back in a good way.

Speaker 2 Maybe that's penance, you know, for being, you know, I haven't seen his views about her, but I mean, a lot of them have been very scathing about her.

Speaker 2 And when I sit with them, I had a debate the other day with a guy called Ernest, who comes on quite a lot. He's one of our pundits.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he's a funny guy. We have good debates about stuff.
He defends the indefensible most of the time, and I quite enjoy it.

Speaker 2 But he was talking about how you've got to respect people's right to limitless self-identity. In other words, if you identify as whatever you like, I have to respect it.
Okay, fine.

Speaker 2 So if I identify now as a black man called Ernest,

Speaker 2 do you respect him?

Speaker 2 And of course, after about 10 torturous minutes, he had to admit he wouldn't respect that. So the premise of his argument was all.
complete bullshit.

Speaker 2 And I've done this before on International Women's Day a couple of years ago. I identified as a black lesbian.
And people, when they first heard it, whoa, whoa, whoa,

Speaker 2 you can't use those words on the airways.

Speaker 2 Well, you can when you're having a debate on International Women's Day about whether gender identity should be completely limitless and sexuality is a movable feast.

Speaker 2 And actual racial identities, we've seen some people who are black pretending to be white or white pretend to be black. This has to stop.
You have to actually get back to a fact-based society.

Speaker 1 I wonder at the moment if the left-right distinction is breaking down a little bit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no question.

Speaker 1 Anna Kasparian is turning based.

Speaker 2 Cheng Hugo last week.

Speaker 1 Cheng Hugo and Bernie Sanders are either collaborating with Elon or complimenting him in one way or another.

Speaker 1 So I really wonder.

Speaker 2 So you're seeing a return to the centre. You're seeing, and actually, most governments in American and British political history have pretty well been hovering around the centre.

Speaker 2 You don't really see extremities on either side. You don't see the far right or far left getting power, really.

Speaker 2 Um, and it's the more centrist parties with centrist leaders who tend to have the most longevity and most success.

Speaker 2 And I think that's what I always say about Trump: people think he's extreme, he's not really.

Speaker 2 If you take away his rhetoric, then his first term of office, he was a pretty moderate Republican president. He didn't even go to war anyway, almost unprecedented Republican president.

Speaker 2 So, you know, it's it's Trump's rhetoric is really 90% of the reason people hate him. But I think a lot of people this election went, you know what, I'm kind of done with that stuff.

Speaker 1 Well, we see more optics than we do impact now.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 it is very difficult. No one cares about what the Fed's budget spending this quarter is and show me a spreadsheet.
But they will care if somebody says something a bit lewd on a video. Right.

Speaker 1 Because that now is what you optimize for, overlooking good, over doing good.

Speaker 1 That's not to say that everything that Trump does is good.

Speaker 2 But virtue signaling is a very insidious new scourge in society where you attach. I mean, I told a story in my last book about after the George Floyd murder, which I did a lot of stuff on.

Speaker 2 I wrote very strongly worded columns about it. Did a lot of stuff on air on Good Morning Britain, which I was hosting at the time about it.

Speaker 2 But there was a day when we were supposed to all do a black square on our Instagram, and I couldn't understand why.

Speaker 2 What's the point? And I went to my local squares in the middle of the pandemic and I just had a bottle of wine. It was a nice sunny afternoon.
And I'd forgot all about what I was supposed to be doing.

Speaker 2 And I posted a picture of my bottle of wine in the twinkling sunlight on my Instagram. And my sons all,

Speaker 2 within about half an hour, were like, dad, you've got to take that down. I said, why? Dad, we're getting abused by all our friends and you've got to take that down.
I said, I don't understand.

Speaker 2 Why are you being abused? Because you've got to do the Black Square don't. I said, no, I don't.
Why? To prove what? I've written column after column about the horrific murder of George Floyd.

Speaker 2 I've said hours and hours and hours of interviews with people about this on air.

Speaker 2 Do you think that meeting a black square is going to make any difference to the promotion of racial equality or correcting racial injustice?

Speaker 1 What do you think would happen if the black square demand was made in 2024?

Speaker 2 It wouldn't have anything like the same pickup. In fact, it probably wouldn't even be suggested.
People have realized these are vacuous, meaningless things.

Speaker 2 And that the moment that that needle on the clock got to midnight, in came the Instagram influencers with all their you know topless bikini slaps it's like whatever they couldn't wait they were itching itching

Speaker 2 get me off this black square it's killing my business right and so to me it was just vacuous virtue signaling the worst kind it doesn't help anybody but this kind of uh on the back of it the kind of bullying that goes on to bully people into going along with the herd it's got to stop it's like the the taking my knee thing i was completely in support of that uh But I didn't think people should be compelled to do it.

Speaker 2 You know, it's a very interesting case in British football.

Speaker 2 There's a Northern Irish footballer called Maclean who comes from a little part of Northern Ireland in Derry where Bloody Sunday happened, where literally people in his street were killed by British paratroopers in one of the worst incidents of the Troubles.

Speaker 2 And the British troops that day behaved appallingly. And he doesn't want to wear a poppy, which we wear to celebrate Remembrance Day, because it doesn't just remember people in the world wars.

Speaker 2 It remembers all armed conflict involving British troops ever. And that includes Bloody Sunday in his eyes.
And he said, I can't look at people in the eye in dairy.

Speaker 2 And all the time, every year he gets the same abuse. And every year he refuses to wear it.
And every year I'd normally post at some stage, why would we expect him to?

Speaker 2 Why should he be compelled to wear something which actually supports a group of people who, in that particular moment in Northern Ireland, killed his own people.

Speaker 2 And I don't think we should bully people like him into doing it.

Speaker 1 It feels legitimate. You know, this person's evidently got a thought-through, very well-rounded, established, good.

Speaker 2 It's a good argument, which makes sense, but most people don't want to hear it. They just say, He won't wear a poppy, he's a disgusting disgrace.

Speaker 1 I understand that that is the progeny of people who are using these sorts of social campaigns inappropriately as well. Yeah.
Because it causes people to have a reaction.

Speaker 1 The boy who cried, what?

Speaker 2 The boy who cried woke.

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 you have this immune response that immediately gets triggered because you're not happy with it.

Speaker 1 Something else, you know, one of the most interesting things I think over the last few years has been to see your arc through legacy media and now joining us in the muck in the mire as a YouTube degenerate.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Talk to me about how you sort of come to conceptualize the different worlds, what you've learned since coming over to my side of the fence.

Speaker 2 Well, it came about because I launched this new show, Piers Morgan, I uncensored and we were launching it on talk tv in the uk which was a new network launched by rupert murdoch and um concurrently we set up a youtube channel and it was really interesting like i was doing big interviews with donald trump and cristiana ronaldo and kanye west and all these people uh ye as he calls himself now and

Speaker 2 we found that we were getting a pretty small audience on talk tv which was a linear platform an hour-long show live with commercial breaks very traditional but on youtube without any restrictions, we could run the longer versions of interviews if we pre-taped them and so on.

Speaker 2 And we were getting 10, 20, 30, 40 times the audience. And it would be far more cost-effective to not produce a linear television version.

Speaker 2 And when this went on for a year or two, I was eventually like, why are we doing this? Why are we losing money hand over fist to cater to probably quite an aging audience?

Speaker 2 You know, if you look at the average age of cable news in America audience, it's 70 now for Fox, CNN, MSNBC.

Speaker 2 They're old people, right? I mean, that means a lot of them, probably 80.

Speaker 2 Young people do not watch television, apart from live sport. I know because I've got four kids from 31 to 13.
None of them watch TV.

Speaker 2 So you can either pretend that what's happening in front of your eyes isn't happening, or you can see how your habits of your kids are and look at what's happening literally on the numbers.

Speaker 2 And so we got to about a year ago, February of 2024, and I came off linear TV completely. And we just went full YouTube.

Speaker 2 And we've now got three and a half million subscribers, which you will appreciate. It's not bad in two and a half years.

Speaker 2 It took Joe Rogan four years to get to a million. Not that I'm comparing.
I am comparing. And

Speaker 2 we now get millions of views for our content.

Speaker 2 uh on almost pretty much everything and sometimes we get real poppers like the basim yousf the egyptian uh comedian political activist 22 million people watch that the real life stalker from, or Martha, alleged stalker from Baby Rende, again, 16, 17 million people watch that on our YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 We've never got anything like that on the near television.

Speaker 1 What about from the sort of rhetoric perspective or from your,

Speaker 1 you know, journalisming, you always wanted to be a journalist, always loved the news, so on and so forth. But this, how much is this a new...

Speaker 1 way to assess the day's stories and what has it unlocked anything or is it just just kind of a different package?

Speaker 2 I think for me, what I love, I love two parts of it. One, being a ringmaster to really good debates with smart people.

Speaker 2 I have a no-dummies rule, and we've exercised it a few times where people don't get invited back if they're too dumb because nobody wants to hear dumb people debating serious topics.

Speaker 2 We do a lot of serious debates, whether it's American election debates, whether it's Ukraine-Russia, whether it's Israel-mass war, you know, P. Diddy scandal, whatever it may be.

Speaker 2 You need smart people, and that's my criteria for booking guests for the debates. But also, I want to balance it up.
I want to have equal numbers on both sides smart debating it.

Speaker 2 And when you get it right, it's magic because there's very few places in the world doing that. I mean, we're pretty the only ones in the YouTube space who don't have an ideological position.

Speaker 2 You know, if you look at people I really admire in the space, people like Ben Shabiro, Megan Kelly, and others, they obviously come at it from an unashamedly conservative bias. I don't.

Speaker 2 Similarly, on the left, Mehdi Hassan and others, come

Speaker 2 Chenk Yuga, although he's beginning to move quite rapidly, I've noticed, to the dark side, side, as he would put it.

Speaker 2 But they're there from the left. I'm in the middle, genuinely in the middle.
People could not position me into Republican or Democrat or here, conservative or labor.

Speaker 2 I don't position myself in that way. I see myself foremost as a journalist.
And what I like now is I can literally act as a journalist to everybody.

Speaker 2 Just when they say something, fact check it in real time, ask them the right questions, you know, challenge everybody equally. And I think people learn a lot from those kind of debates.
I do.

Speaker 2 I literally, my favorite debate is at the end of 90 minutes. I go, Do you know something? I've really learned a lot today.

Speaker 2 You might all have different slants on what you've been telling me, but I've learned a lot of basic information about this.

Speaker 1 You spend a lot of time either arguing with people or watching people argue with people.

Speaker 2 I love a good argument.

Speaker 1 I can tell.

Speaker 2 What's your

Speaker 2 more nuanced, calmer? Yeah, I think

Speaker 2 which again, I also really like as well. And occasionally, I will do that with people.
But as a rule of thumb, I like a good old heated knockabout debate.

Speaker 1 I've noticed, yeah.

Speaker 1 What's your advice for disagreeing better with people?

Speaker 2 You've got to listen to what you're being told by the other side. You can't have a blindly implacable view of anything.
I respect, for example, take the Israel-Hamas war.

Speaker 2 The people I've had on the most respected have been able to concede, if you're on the Palestinian side, for example.

Speaker 2 And I am, to a large degree, supportive of a lot of what they say about the way Palestinians have been treated.

Speaker 2 But if they come on and they say that they won't condemn Hamas, it's to ask everyone the same question. It became a bit of a running joke on social media.
But there's a reason I ask it.

Speaker 2 If they condemn what Hamas did on October the 7th, I can move forward to a debate where I know that they're intellectually honest.

Speaker 2 If they can't, I know I'm dealing with somebody who's so blindly, implacably hateful towards Israel that they can't see the wood for the trees and they won't see mass murder in front of their eyes.

Speaker 2 They won't see a terror attack in front of their eyes and call it out for what it is.

Speaker 2 Similarly, on the pro-Israel side, if they don't have any empathy or sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people going back decades, it's very hard to have a conversation with them where you think they're being intellectually honest.

Speaker 2 They're not, because you can have both opinions, as I do.

Speaker 2 So, I think that intellectual honesty is a powerful tool.

Speaker 2 You know, when I've had Israel guests recently who've admitted quite readily that the expansion of the settlements on the West Bank is just plain wrong and probably constitutes a war crime.

Speaker 2 I think, great, that's intellectual honesty there because obviously it is.

Speaker 2 But if they don't, if they try and even defend that, you know, you're dealing with people who are just so hyper-partisan, they're not prepared to even look at an obvious wrongdoing by their side and admit it's wrong because they think it's weak.

Speaker 1 What about the regulation of your emotions during that? I've heard you say that you're not a particularly emotional guy. I think you've cried once or twice over the last decade or so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm not. I don't cry.

Speaker 1 Which is less times than Hunter Biden has commit crimes, actually.

Speaker 1 Look at his current record.

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 1 even you must feel the heart rate rise, the cortisol levels.

Speaker 1 What about that? What about staying cool during?

Speaker 2 It's very important for me to stay cool. But not to lose passion sometimes.
You know, you can take people on and you can show some fire in the belly when it's something you care about.

Speaker 2 I've done that a lot through these war periods when I felt that, particularly when I feel people are being just crass and completely insensitive to things, then I feel the blood boiling a bit.

Speaker 2 But I come back to the best debates to where I have people from both sides and they take on each other and I just ringmaster it and try and have a viewer at home in mind who genuinely doesn't have a horse in the race, but really wants to learn more about what's happening.

Speaker 2 That is where I think we've become a really powerful show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like Jerry Springer for the 125 IQ generation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I knew Jerry Springer very well.

Speaker 2 Jerry was a host on America's Got Talent for a year, two years, I think. And we lived in the same hotel in LA, the Beverly Wilshire.
And we used to hang out by the pool and we'd just chat.

Speaker 2 Jerry was a fascinating guy. He'd been mayor of Cincinnati.
He'd been a news anchor for 10 years of a serious news program. And then he got asked to do this pilot for a show.

Speaker 2 He thought it was terrible, but it was so popular. It became the biggest show on television.
He thought it was terrible. Terrible.
Right to the end, he thought it was terrible.

Speaker 2 He said, I make the worst show on TV. But he was also making hundreds of millions of people.

Speaker 1 Like, Q Hefner hating porn.

Speaker 2 Right. So Jerry knew it was awful,

Speaker 2 but he also never talked down about the people that came on.

Speaker 2 I felt that quite strongly about the Jeremy Kyle scandal, too.

Speaker 1 I was literally about to say that. What happened to Jerry? What is Jeremy doing now?

Speaker 2 He's doing great. He's working over at Talk.
He does a show there.

Speaker 2 Don't want to speak out of term, but I know he's got some big plans because he told me, which are going to be in the news quite soon.

Speaker 1 Do you think he was Jewer Redemption Arc?

Speaker 2 For the people that don't.

Speaker 2 I think this was basically the inquest.

Speaker 2 Well, the inquest found he didn't do anything wrong, right i mean he never had done he had thousands of guests yeah one guest who came on who later took his life which is incredibly sad but as the inquest established it wasn't jeremy carl's fault and

Speaker 1 again there was a lot of snobbery about that show and the kind of people who went on it these were working class people who wanted to go on that show and wanted to air their feelings right if you taking your argument if they all had iqs of 150 plus and were talking about feelings on news night we'd all applaud them for their their courage right i mean mean it look i'd say this to my american friends all the time the fact the word posh i've never once heard be used by an american no but class is so baked into the british system the british culture and there is this and snobbery it did almost feel a little bit you're right it almost felt kind of like a zoo for working class people for middle class people to watch working class people yeah like oh you dance dance get angry

Speaker 2 you never saw many contestants complaining about their experience or complaining about the show.

Speaker 2 Not contestants, what would you call them? Well, the people who appeared on it. I don't know how they're with caliber.
Contestants are the wrong word. Felt like they were occasionally, but

Speaker 2 you just guess, right? So I never saw them complaining much about the way they were treated or what happened. Or they were all quite happy to have their moment on television and to air their...

Speaker 2 dirty linen. Now, you can be snobbish about it and say, well, how dare you do that? But I see smart people do that all the time.

Speaker 2 I mean, barely a week goes by without a major celebrity in the world emoting in some interview with Oprah or whoever it may be. What's the difference, actually?

Speaker 2 If you're emoting, but you happen to be a Hollywood star or you happen to be a tycoon or something.

Speaker 1 The politicians of your delivery is really the only difference.

Speaker 2 The principle is exactly the same. You're just airing your dirty linen.
I mean, if Harry and Megan do it with Oprah, I felt it was just a posh royal version of what you saw on the story.

Speaker 2 Exactly the same. It's exactly the same.

Speaker 1 What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment? It really feels like we've got a lot of turbulence going on. Two million people voted for, signed a petition for Keir Sarma to leave.

Speaker 1 Then this insanely surprising U-turn from Keir Starmer about immigration saying that the Tories ran an open border policy, all of the riots that we saw across the country this summer.

Speaker 2 What do you...

Speaker 1 How do you come to think about it? It's a country that you've chosen to live in?

Speaker 2 I think that America has got its confidence back and Trump has been responsible for that, as has Elon Musk. I think the little thing, the rockets going off, right?

Speaker 2 They just instill in people a sense of America's firing rockets again. They're taking us to the moon,

Speaker 2 maybe to Mars. There's something heroically ambitious about the way that people like Musk feel and Trump being down there at the last launch with just great imagery.

Speaker 2 He's making people feel confident against the music.

Speaker 1 That's really competence.

Speaker 2 Yeah. In the UK, there's no sense of that.

Speaker 2 There's a sense at the moment of we're just existing and that nothing's really working, that public services are decaying fast, that we're getting far too many people coming in, that obviously we need immigrants to work as a country, but you can't have a net migration of nearly a million people and expect already struggling public services to not struggle even more.

Speaker 2 You just can't.

Speaker 2 And they said they'd fix the boats. The boats have, I think, more people are coming in than ever.

Speaker 2 But it's actual legal migration is a big problem, bigger than the boats issue.

Speaker 2 And we've gone through years, again, going back to what we discussed earlier, where you couldn't talk about this if you even raised an eyelid on question time about the number of people coming in.

Speaker 2 Racist, you are racist, uh, in the same way that if you talk about trans athletes and sport, you're transphobic. But we just

Speaker 2 and that all that has to stop.

Speaker 1 But we've just seen Keir Starmer say, uh, give a two-minute statement, which went ballistic on social media, that the conservatives couldn't have gotten away with three, four years ago, could not have said that.

Speaker 1 So, two things. Has the Overton window shifted?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 And secondly, is this just a guy that's had 2 million people put a petition together for him going, I need to do something to slow it down?

Speaker 2 Well, I don't think it's that so much, but he will certainly have looked at what happened in America and why Trump won.

Speaker 2 And he'll think, if I don't fix the cost of living, illegal immigration and stop the woke crap investing my party, I'm done for.

Speaker 2 Particularly if you've got someone circling like Nigel Farage, who is the UK version of Trump and is a good friend of Trump's, right? And Farage is, you know, Farage's views were considered extreme.

Speaker 2 They're now considered increasingly mainstream because he's been proven on immigration to be right, right? Not about everything.

Speaker 2 And some of the language he's used has been, in my view, wrongly inflammatory.

Speaker 2 But his basic principle about if you don't have a border, as Ronald Reagan said, if you don't have a proper border, you don't have a country.

Speaker 2 That's coming back to be clearly the case. So we need to be able to to have an honest debate about this without people being called racist if they raise concerns about what is an obvious problem.

Speaker 1 Well, every country wants to have some borders.

Speaker 2 What are you doing? Well, you're not a country if you don't.

Speaker 1 Precisely correct. Elon Musk rumors a threat of $100 million to be tossed at Nigel Farage.
You and him had a bit of a run-in earlier on this year.

Speaker 1 What do you make of that? Would you be happy to see Farage get 100 mil from Elon?

Speaker 2 I don't think he can do that legally in our country. Someone was saying there's a legal impediment to him actually doing that as a foreign citizen.
As far as he can get around it.

Speaker 2 As a foreign citizen. Yeah.
Look, he obviously had a big effect on Trump winning. I think there's no question of that.
No, I think Elon's a lot of do what he likes. He's a free citizen.

Speaker 1 But would it help the UK politics to have that position?

Speaker 2 Well, he would balance it out because at the moment, Labour certainly have a lot more money coming in than the Tories in the last election. So look, they all take money from people, right?

Speaker 2 Some take money from very dodgy people indeed.

Speaker 2 All of us pretend we hate it, but it carries on on both sides. If they all want to give up all outside donations, fine.

Speaker 2 They can't really afford to do that.

Speaker 1 If the Conservatives are as dead in the water as people think in the UK, is reform where the attackers are...

Speaker 2 Form's in a very, very good position.

Speaker 2 I mean, Kemi Badnock's got to do something pretty radical and pretty quickly with the Conservative Party, or my prediction would be that Farage may well end up being the next Prime Minister, as Elon Musk has said.

Speaker 2 I don't think that's a mad idea at all. But he might be by then running a

Speaker 2 Conservative Party which has had reform flip into it.

Speaker 2 That's where my smart money would be, is that they'll do a deal, they'll merge the parties, and that probably Farage ends up contesting the next election.

Speaker 2 And if Keir Starmer has not delivered by them on all his promises

Speaker 2 or any of them, then he could be political toast.

Speaker 1 I've had Dominic Cummings on the show, and he also did a podcast recently where he talked about some

Speaker 1 theatrics, I think he could say, in government, that there was sort of a fake meritocracy, fake responsibility, fake government. He also said that cabinet meetings are fully scripted.

Speaker 1 Based on what he says, based on what Rory Stewart says,

Speaker 1 I don't know, it really does not feel like we have the brightest buttons in the bunch. We don't.

Speaker 2 We have a very mediocre tier of politicians now. I mean, you go back to the Thatcher years and their cabinets,

Speaker 2 just packed full of very smart people.

Speaker 2 Tony Blair's cabinet, you know, for the first two terms in particular, incredibly smart people. People like Gordon Brown as Chancellor, just unbelievably brilliant brains.

Speaker 2 So I think that that's certainly true. I think a lot of smart people, particularly if they've made good money, don't want to get into politics because it's just going to ruin their lives.

Speaker 1 The worst paying, most negative, boring.

Speaker 2 In Singapore, famously, they pay their politicians a million dollars a year.

Speaker 1 Do you know what the head of UK cybercrime wage was? It was offered a couple of years ago, £65,000 a year.

Speaker 2 So why would you expect anyone of caliber to do that? So we don't pay people enough for important jobs in this country. I would personally pay the politicians an awful lot more.

Speaker 2 What they couldn't do is have any outside interests. So I might even pay them half a million pounds a year, but I'd say you cannot have any stock investments.

Speaker 2 You cannot have any outside business interests.

Speaker 1 Richie Sunak could be fucked.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, he would, yeah. But in a way, I didn't like the fact that Richie was stinking rich.
I was fine about that. I think you don't make decisions then based on what's going to benefit you.

Speaker 1 So in some ways, it insulates you from.

Speaker 2 I wonder if a lot of Tories have not got sellers' remorse about Richie, actually. I think the way he behaved after he lost, he was very impressive in the comments after that.
I always liked him.

Speaker 2 I think he made a few strategic missteps, but actually, pretty smart, committed, hard-working guy. And yeah,

Speaker 2 the fact he was rich didn't bother me at all. But no, I think it's going to be very interesting.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I do think

Speaker 2 we're deliberately attracting mediocre people to politics now because we don't make it attractive enough

Speaker 2 to attract the smart people.

Speaker 1 The UK is second in the world in millionaire exits in 2024. First in the world world is China with about, I think, 13 to 15,000.
And the UK is about 10,000. But we are 3% of the population.

Speaker 1 We have more than India. And India is

Speaker 1 20 times bigger.

Speaker 1 We have the same number of universities in the top 10 in the world as America do,

Speaker 1 but we have one-fifth the number of startup founder entrepreneurs.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 1 Well, because there is not even bottom-up, you know, we can talk top-down what's happening in Whitehall, the hallowed corridors of Westminster and stuff.

Speaker 1 But I think even bottom-up, you know, I'm from Stockton, working-class town. And I saw some videos of Middlesbrough riots going through Acklam, like places that I know,

Speaker 1 places that I've been, and

Speaker 1 like just working-class rage, people disgruntled, and this, you know, sick.

Speaker 2 Well, hang up. Okay, let's talk about these riots for a minute.
Here we go.

Speaker 2 Because that wasn't why they were rioting.

Speaker 1 Of course, that's my point.

Speaker 2 My point is...

Speaker 2 They were rioting because they were whipped up by people who should know better and probably did know better into believing a certain set of circumstances had happened surrounding an appalling attack, right?

Speaker 2 They hadn't. It wasn't actually an illegal asylum seeker who committed these actions.

Speaker 2 And so people were exacting in a way on a smaller, it was a smaller version of the Iraq war, which I opposed so specifically. I'll tell you why.
It was

Speaker 2 on an entirely false pretext. Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction,

Speaker 2 that war would have been justified.

Speaker 2 Had the person who perpetrated this crime been an illegal asylum seeker, you're not entitled to commit violence, but you're certainly entitled to feel rage about that happening at a time when this whole issue of illegal asylum seekers, you know, coming in and

Speaker 2 taking over the country, all that argument they put forward, it would at least have had some validity that that was why they were angry.

Speaker 1 Even the premise wasn't accurate.

Speaker 2 But everything about it was wrong, right? So the riots were whipped up by people, malevolent voices who should have known better. Tommy Robinson,

Speaker 2 Andrew Tate and and others. I took on Tate about this a few days later.
And that's the problem with social media. Now,

Speaker 2 let's go further to when a lot of people were put in prison because they tweeted things. That I don't agree with, right? And I don't agree with that because it seems a ridiculous overreach.

Speaker 2 And when you overreach to that level where people are literally, you know, grandmothers are being put in prison for two years for something they put on Facebook, that's not a sensible response to this either.

Speaker 2 If people are actually chucking Molotov cocktails at an asylum seeker hotel, yeah,

Speaker 2 chuck him in prison for a few years, but a granny gobbing off on Facebook? Come on. Is that what we're really about in this country?

Speaker 1 There was a the thing I realized when I watched those videos in Middlesbrough was a lot of the people that were walking down the street, there was a new build house

Speaker 1 with fresh windows. And it was, you could tell because it still had that sort of tape papering over the outside.

Speaker 1 And, you know, people were out in the streets going through a classic northern terraced working working class neighborhood and someone just picked up a brick and threw it through the window of this brand new house and that was the point where i was like this has got nothing to do with the immigration rightly or wrongly false pretext or correct pretext it's just this sort of well that would be an angry resentment to but to what well people having what you don't have and you and your fear and hey look who knows what's going on these people

Speaker 2 i understand but i understand the rage of people who maybe through the pandemic have come out and they've got no job maybe they've gone through a horrible divorce maybe they've got no money They can't afford to feed their kids.

Speaker 2 Their lives are shit. And I understand they're going to feel angry.
Of course I do. And by the way, there are lots of people in this country who are in that position.
Lots.

Speaker 2 And you've got to understand what is driving

Speaker 2 a sense of anger and resentment.

Speaker 1 I lived half of my life was spent in that world. 50%.
I'm 36. I've been there.
I was there until I was 18 and then I left to go to university in Newcastle. So I know these people.

Speaker 1 I know that culture very well. It's like it's electric.
It's like the air before a thunderstorm begins.

Speaker 1 And it's this sort of ambient malevolence below the surface this disgruntledness but it feels to me like the uk has a very very sort of potent version of this great video that i saw um this american that lived in london for six months and he describes the way that british football fans behave he's like they're not just passionate they're angry like they will they would happily if there weren't police officers between them and the other people hang on again again i know i knew this was gonna happen they're like a fight name let's not let's not overthink overthink football hooligans, right?

Speaker 2 I've seen them in action. Most of them just like a good old punch-up.
They're like a drink, probably some drugs, and a fight. And they actually love it.

Speaker 2 And to understand the mind of a football hooligan, you need to start from that. It's not some great...

Speaker 1 I mean, even the normal fans, you don't need to be one of the hooligans. Even the guys in the back row, they seem to...

Speaker 2 Yeah, the mob mentality can brew up very quickly. Of course, I've been a football matcher.

Speaker 1 Do you think they're downstream from the more aggressive parts of the yes?

Speaker 2 I think a lot of football hooligans. I mean, look, when I was young, football hooligans dominated every single match.

Speaker 2 It was pretty scary and thrilling at the same time you can't pretend otherwise when i was 18 19 watching battles on the terraces was exciting in a way that watching a ufc fight can be exciting um but i'd rather have the more controlled environment than having it happening on a plot where it can spill over into your seat and now yeah now it doesn't but i wouldn't over intellectualize the average british football hooligan who they may like to see themselves as political polemists with their fists, but they're not.

Speaker 2 Most of them just like a good fight.

Speaker 1 You used to have, no longer, used to have a Twitter bio. One day you're cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.
What did that mean to you?

Speaker 2 Well, it was handed to my great-uncle John, who was a war hero. He got the George Medal for heroism in the war.

Speaker 2 Actually, a brilliant story because he was in the army in World War II. He'd been invalided temporarily out with some bad injuries.

Speaker 2 And he was in a pub where he's being billeted with his, I think it was the RS regiment. And

Speaker 2 uh a prototype german bomber landed in the field near the pub and the guys all grabbed their guns and they went and had it out with the german crew because it hadn't exploded and they heard one of them say bomber bomber and my great uncle john jumped jumped in looked around found the bomb which was designed to blow up the prototype plane so the allies couldn't get the information from it and threw it away into a pond where it blew up and he got the the george medal would have been been the George Cross, which is the military version, but at the time he was actually

Speaker 2 deemed to be a civilian because he was invalided. He was going to go back.
And it was actually, it was the Battle of Graveny Marsh. You can read about it.

Speaker 2 It was the last time that British troops engaged an enemy in British soil and it was 70 years ago. And they had the anniversary about, this must have been 10 years ago.
My brother went down.

Speaker 2 He was an army colonel with my grandmother, whose brother it would be. And they had a lovely day down in Graveny Marsh.

Speaker 2 And that was the last time and he won the medal for that yeah it's just a great story and the other great part of it was he went to get his george medal up in uh up from uh bucking palace i think it was from must have been from the queen i guess and he went out the night before with the regiment got blind drunk came back told the porter outside I've got an appointment with the Queen at 11 o'clock.

Speaker 2 He thought the guy was obviously just making this up, laughed, didn't wake him up, overslept. Nearly missed it.
Wow. He did get it eventually.
But great Uncle John, a fantastic guy.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the point of the story is that it was his, he was at Covent Garden talking to a flower seller. And the flower seller was imparting these phrases.
And one was,

Speaker 2 life ain't much, but it's all you got. So stick a geranium in your hat and be happy.

Speaker 2 And I'm not sure if the other one, the cock of the walk, my grandmother always gave me this phrase, one day you'll cock of the walk the next to feather duster.

Speaker 2 But she would send it to me with pictures of a cock of a cockrel

Speaker 2 when I was going through a particularly good time just to remind me, be careful, because the Feather Duster might be around the corner. Very, very good device.

Speaker 2 So I'm not sure if she got that from Uncle John, but he certainly got a lot of his sayings from this Coven Garden Flower Cellar. So, you know, you've had a,

Speaker 1 you say, tumultuous, turbulent, some would say, fun journey.

Speaker 2 Yes. Fun.
I mean, I don't see it as turbulent as other people do.

Speaker 1 Well, it's certainly been ups and downs.

Speaker 1 How would you not let failure get to you too much?

Speaker 2 Well, I come from the Winston Churchill school of thought. Failure is going from

Speaker 2 success is going from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm. And he was the greatest Britain of all time, but he had a lot of failures.
He had a lot of successes.

Speaker 2 I love Michael Jordan's view about success and failure is that he could remember making thousands of baskets, but he could also remember the 26 times he had the shot to win a match and he failed.

Speaker 2 And And he said, Without that, you never do the rest. And I do, you know, Wayne Gretzky, who I met in a New York restaurant actually a few months ago, fantastic bloke.
I had a great chat with him.

Speaker 2 Greatest ice hockey player in history. Famous for the quote: you'll miss 100% of the shots you never take.
I have gone through my entire life with that attitude. Just have a go.
Have a go.

Speaker 2 See what happens. Sometimes it's been spectacularly successful.
Sometimes it's crashed and burned.

Speaker 1 It's okay. In the moment, do you how do you deal with sort of regulating that?

Speaker 2 Count to 10, slowly. Okay.
Literally count to 10.

Speaker 2 Literally, deep breath,

Speaker 2 however bad it is, whatever it is, I count to 10.

Speaker 2 And at the end of 10, okay, now crack on. There's nothing you can do about it.
There's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 What was the,

Speaker 1 is there a particularly intense count to 10 or a particularly long one that comes to mind?

Speaker 2 I mean, look, all the things that people know that have happened to me, you know, I've had moments when I've lost big jobs or whatever it it may be.

Speaker 2 They always seem worse to other people than they do to me in the moment, I would say. I just literally do the count to 10, whatever it is.

Speaker 2 I just think short of death or terminal illness, everything is recoverable from. It's entirely down to you.
I do think mental strength is the number one thing that you can have to succeed in life.

Speaker 2 Look at Donald Trump, right? That guy has got the thinnest skin in history.

Speaker 2 He'll react to absolutely everything, but he also has a thicker skin in that he can take stuff that no other politician has ever taken and keep pounding forward.

Speaker 2 And I love the scene in Rocky in the sixth film when he's got the spoiled bright son who's in his 20s who hates being Rocky's son and moaning and whining. And he's just a spoiled little brat.

Speaker 2 And Rocky eventually has it out with him on the street. And he says, listen, life is not a

Speaker 2 bunch of flowers or something. He starts, he says, it's not about how hard you can hit.
Life is about how hard you can get hit. Get back up and keep moving forward.
That's how winning is done.

Speaker 2 And I love that speech so much. My sons have it on.

Speaker 1 And that's pounding to you as well, right?

Speaker 2 Keep pounding, right? Because something will happen.

Speaker 2 But if you don't have the right mental attitude to when negative stuff happens to you, you're not going to be able to exploit the good stuff when it comes your way.

Speaker 2 I remember Kelvin McKenzie, the infamous but brilliant editor of The Sun, the only editor I ever worked for, actually.

Speaker 2 And I worked there for five years when The Sun was selling like four or five million copies.

Speaker 2 And he used to rampage around from morning, noon, and night. It was a terrifying spectacle.
But it was the paper crackle with great energy. It was the days when papers were very, very important.

Speaker 2 And I remember he said, you know,

Speaker 2 the most annoying thing about you, Morgan, after one tremendous bollocking you've given me, eyes bulging, neck straining, the whole thing.

Speaker 2 He said, is every, because I'd gone back in about an hour later with a good scoop. He said, the most annoying thing is I can't break you.

Speaker 2 So every time I give you a bollocking, you just come back quickly with a scoop. He said, I admire it and I hate it in equal measure.

Speaker 2 and um i do and i i have always tried to be like that but i just think there's such wasted energy to wallow in misery or negativity or something that's bad that's happened to you i've always celebrated i mean mars the confectioners used to apparently celebrate chocolate bars that didn't work because it was so rare that all their testing didn't turn out to be a success.

Speaker 2 They'd celebrate the failure because they'd learn more from the failures. I completely agree.
And it toughens toughens you up. You know, tough stuff in life toughens you up.

Speaker 1 I've heard you say things that feel terrible in the moment very rarely are.

Speaker 2 Always look back on the worst things that have ever happened to you. If you're still alive, think about the worst things have ever happened to you.
How bad do they feel now? And guess what?

Speaker 2 You woke up this morning. It wasn't as bad as you thought.

Speaker 2 Right? So it's a really, I think that's a really powerful way to look at it. Think about all the bad, however old you are, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, you carry on.

Speaker 2 But look back at the worst moments of your life, the moments you thought you'd never recover from. Look where you are.
You recovered. Well, like I say, if you're dead,

Speaker 2 that's bad. If you're terminally ill, that's bad.
Right. But after that,

Speaker 2 what's stopping you bouncing back other than yourself? So it's entirely down to you. Just take my advice.
Count to 10, then go out with your mates, get blind drunk. turn your phone off, go on holiday.

Speaker 2 Clear here, whenever a friend of mine lose a high profile job, it happens a lot in the media. I will say the same thing.
I said, turn your phone off and piss off for three or four months.

Speaker 2 Just go to a beach, write a book, lie down, just chill. Don't take any offer you're given for the next three, four months because your head won't be in the right space at all.

Speaker 2 It's the best advice you can give anybody. Clear.

Speaker 1 It's weird that, you know, in the moment, it does feel like everything's going to, it's this huge whirlwind and the chaos is occurring and you're overthinking and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 But you'll probably just end up working it out like you always have.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 But I do think we are not training young minds the right way. I've felt very strongly about this for a long time.

Speaker 2 What would that look like? Well, I see so many, my youngest son, in particular, his age group, have a lot of anxiety issues. And I've been wrestling with why.

Speaker 2 And I read Jonathan Haight's brilliant book about mobile phones, you know, and cell phones, and how actually since 2010, the incidence of anxiety and depression in young people has massively accelerated.

Speaker 2 So there's a clear connection between phones when they went smart, and they are smart, but they're also very dangerous on impressionable young minds, and the effect it had on young people.

Speaker 2 And I want to really tackle the anxiety epidemic. That's what it is.
I think they're being exposed to way too much negative dopamine all day long on their phones.

Speaker 2 They are seeing imagery from Gaza, from Ukraine, that we never would have been able to see when I was that age, ever. You couldn't see it.
You were protected.

Speaker 2 Newspapers wouldn't put that stuff in the paper.

Speaker 2 The two or three news channels on television wouldn't have put it on air there was no internet there were no phones how did you see it you couldn't see it if somebody was eaten by a crocodile in florida right on a golf course you didn't even know about it now you're watching the video of the guy from someone's camera phone being eaten by the crocodile that's not going away well it's not going away but look at what australia has done with banning social media for under 16s i agree with that and it's not a free speech issue it's a brain it's a free the brain issue would you support that in the uk i would actually yeah i do think that social media for under 16s is dangerous i do because they're not regulated like a newspaper or a tv network they're just not look at twitter all day you think it's regulated it's not look at facebook is it regular they're not regular they are putting way too much bad stuff on there and because they can't control it because of the sheer volume of stuff coming in all the time in real time because they can't control it we should control the access that impressionable young brains have to that material as we would anything else.

Speaker 2 And I think that's a really important thing. I've seen the reactions.
It's quite an interesting reaction. What do you think?

Speaker 2 Well, it's quite split. Like, I've seen people on the right and the left agreeing and disagreeing, which makes me think it's an interesting debate to have.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 What do you think of it? I've got four persons.

Speaker 1 I would back it all day. I mean, I'd be tempted to back it up to 18.

Speaker 1 I just don't like.

Speaker 2 But the argument here is you can get married at 16.

Speaker 2 So they're going to get married at 16, but not use social media to your ideas yeah exactly well why are you going to find your wife you know what i mean it's not going to be at work it's going to have to be using social media so it's going to be i think 16 is a good age limit yeah my daughter's 13 i don't think she her life gets benefited at all in the next three years by being exposed to everything that's on social media yeah what's next for you

Speaker 2 well uh i want to make Piers Morgan on a sense the biggest YouTube channel in the world.

Speaker 1 What does that mean? Plays?

Speaker 2 Well, I would say at the moment, yeah, I think the potential for a brand like mine to expand the brand to bring other people in, uh, a bit like the Daily Wire, big create a network, create a network of uncensored people doing uncensored things, YouTube channel, books, documentaries, merchandise.

Speaker 2 One of my favorite stories of Daily Wire is that they had someone run in with an advertiser about hair gel or something. So, they launched their own hair gel line.

Speaker 2 It's just chocolate. It's making like 10, 20 million a year, right? Um, yeah, I'd love a bit of Morgan merch.

Speaker 2 Um, but I think the potential for what I'm doing and what you do is obviously potentially massive.

Speaker 2 This was the first YouTube election in America where more people watched analysis and election coverage on election night on YouTube than broadcast or cable news.

Speaker 2 Also, the first podcast election where one candidate did endless big podcasts and YouTube shows. What if the one?

Speaker 1 What if the 2028 debate was hosted by Piers Morgan?

Speaker 2 Yeah, why not?

Speaker 2 Why not? You get a bigger audience.

Speaker 2 No question.

Speaker 2 Love to do that.

Speaker 2 I would love to do that. I'd watch it.

Speaker 1 Piers Morgan, ladies and gentlemen. Piers, I appreciate you.
It was very good to catch up. Good to see you.
We need to leave and go and do your show now.

Speaker 2 We do.

Speaker 2 Good to see you. And you.

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