TRIGGERnometry - Piers Morgan： Why I Don't Care About My Critics

00:00:01.000 We are going down a very slippery slope where we are beginning to celebrate weakness and losing more than we do strength and winning.

00:00:10.920 I'm not going to call him she because he wants to call himself she. Of course he does. He's not a she. He's a he.

00:00:18.660 How can you be a leader if you can't even say what a woman is? Who's going to follow you? Who's going to take your lead?

00:00:26.000 I've changed my mind on a few things with Covid because the science changed. I think that was it was everyone slightly lost their mind and people will say, well, you're banging on about freedom.

00:00:37.560 Where were you for the freedom of people to espouse views you didn't agree with on Covid? And it's a tricky one when a lot of people are dying.

00:00:45.200 But of course, the whole point of fighting for freedom is sometimes a lot of people die for freedom.

00:00:50.160 Have you always had this thick skin?

00:00:52.160 Yeah, I don't know. I think my only real talent is thick skin.

00:00:57.080 Is it part of you that thrives on conflict, Piers?

00:00:59.680 Absolutely. Love it.

00:01:01.760 Why?

00:01:02.960 Because it's fun.

00:01:04.080 You're going to piss off all the right people so gloriously.

00:01:08.360 And who are the right people to piss off, Piers?

00:01:10.760 Erm, Wokies.

00:01:12.560 Wokies are the world's most ludicrous people now.

00:01:22.160 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on location from our favourite restaurant, Il Portico, on Kensington High Street.

00:01:36.000 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:37.240 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:01:38.360 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:43.240 Our brilliant guest today has been a long time coming. He's a journalist and author, Piers Morgan.

00:01:47.560 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:48.160 Buongiorno.

00:01:49.160 Come on, Stan.

00:01:50.160 You've offended the entire staff in here.

00:01:52.760 We were just talking about shit Italian actors just before you got here.

00:01:55.480 There you go.

00:01:56.120 But listen, welcome first of all.

00:01:57.880 Thank you.

00:01:58.360 One of the questions we always ask our guests is who are you?

00:02:01.000 Now, you're one of the most famous people we've ever had on.

00:02:03.880 Everyone knows Piers Morgan.

00:02:05.720 But I think actually not many people know who you are, your backstory,

00:02:09.400 how you come to be sitting here talking to us.

00:02:11.400 So tell us that.

00:02:12.840 Well, I mean, I grew up in a country pub down in the south coast,

00:02:16.680 a little village called Fletching, a tiny village, went to the primary school.

00:02:21.240 My parents owned around the pub.

00:02:23.720 And I think my most formative memory of that was I used to do the bottling up

00:02:28.200 where you replace all the empties and you go in and it would all be stinking of

00:02:32.760 booze and fags and everything else.

00:02:34.520 And you would go in there and you'd get all the stuff from the cellar

00:02:37.720 and you'd replenish all the empties.

00:02:39.640 They know what it's like in here.

00:02:41.000 And I actually got a warning from the school to my mother.

00:02:44.920 I was six and we're just a little bit concerned that Piers is smelling of alcohol.

00:02:51.640 So that was an early formative memory, really.

00:02:55.800 Fags are cigarettes for American Indians, by the way.

00:02:58.040 Fags are cigarettes over there.

00:02:59.400 Yes, yes.

00:03:00.040 Nicely pointed out.

00:03:02.200 But I grew up and I had a very nice upbringing.

00:03:04.360 We didn't have particularly loads of money, but we had a lot of love in the family.

00:03:10.760 Three siblings, so four of us.

00:03:13.400 Lovely village lifestyle, local lifestyle.

00:03:16.280 Moved to the next door village.

00:03:18.040 I had two types of education.

00:03:19.320 One fee paying until I was 13 and then stayed educated from 13 to 18.

00:03:24.280 I think they can either give you a chip on both shoulders or a chip on neither shoulder.

00:03:28.360 I think I went with the latter, where I've always found the great benefit of being educated

00:03:33.560 in two different ways, in two different environments.

00:03:35.960 One very exclusive and one very non-exclusive.

00:03:40.040 It's allowed me to probably, a bit like you guys, I think, sit down with anybody,

00:03:44.760 whether it's Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, which I've had the pleasure of doing,

00:03:49.160 meeting the queen, or just the average guy in the street.

00:03:53.000 You know, I don't have any highfalutin desire to be with rich and famous,

00:03:59.080 powerful people, any more than I do people that I meet on the high street and have a chat with.

00:04:03.880 So I think that comes from my upbringing and my education.

00:04:07.160 And then I went to journalism college.

00:04:09.640 I had an absolutely clear idea from the age of about six or seven.

00:04:13.000 I wanted to be a journalist, which is a great asset.

00:04:15.720 Six or seven?

00:04:16.600 Yeah, my mum remembers me reading the Daily Mail, which was the paper we got at home,

00:04:19.720 which may explain a lot of things.

00:04:21.720 The Daily Mail, from cover to cover, avidly aged six or seven, and studying headlines.

00:04:26.840 I mean, it's a weird thing for a six or seven-year-old kid to be doing.

00:04:29.320 But I was fascinated by news.

00:04:31.240 I wonder if my daughter, this morning, suddenly produced the house newspaper.

00:04:35.160 I went, what's this?

00:04:36.200 And she's done a whole newspaper, aged 11, based on the events in our house,

00:04:41.080 mainly centred around the two kittens we've got and the drilling next door,

00:04:44.600 where she seems almost psychopathic and had a desire to deal with these builders.

00:04:48.120 But interesting to see her do that.

00:04:49.960 One of my sons did the same thing around the same age.

00:04:52.360 So there's clearly something in the genes there.

00:04:55.400 But yeah, I was fascinated by news, very nosy, very curious,

00:05:00.200 wanted to get answers to things, and loved the idea of being first with information.

00:05:05.400 And that's never left me.

00:05:06.600 I have an absolute craving.

00:05:08.120 It's why Twitter is perfect for me, because Twitter, you can be first with everything.

00:05:11.880 Someone, someone's going to tell you before anybody else.

00:05:14.120 You just catch the tweet at the right moment.

00:05:16.120 And I think that's why I love the immediacy of something like Twitter,

00:05:19.800 because for me, it feeds my addiction, which is news.

00:05:22.680 So then I just went, I think the rest is probably well known.

00:05:25.720 I went on to local newspapers, the Wimbledon News, had a great time there.

00:05:32.360 Funny enough, the news editor at The Sun, who was the guy who first gave me shifts in Fleet Street,

00:05:38.360 he died last week, a guy called Tom Petrie, incredible guy, brilliant news editor,

00:05:43.640 wonderful with young people.

00:05:45.640 And he always encouraged me.

00:05:47.640 I couldn't understand why he was always so encouraging.

00:05:50.440 But he was always so encouraging.

00:05:51.880 Every time I called, Piers, like I was his best mate.

00:05:54.280 How are you?

00:05:55.000 Blah, blah, blah.

00:05:55.640 What have you got for me?

00:05:56.520 And I give him little local Wimbledon stories.

00:05:58.520 And sometimes, because it was London, you get a good one, and they pay you for it.

00:06:02.200 And that was exciting.

00:06:02.840 You get a big check from The Sun.

00:06:04.120 And then they gave me some shifts.

00:06:05.720 It was only later I discovered that there were two Piers Morgans.

00:06:10.200 But I've met about three others now.

00:06:11.800 There's about five of us in the world.

00:06:12.920 The others keep very quiet for obvious reasons.

00:06:14.600 But Tom Petrie's real mate was a guy called Piers Morgan from Kent, who was a photojournalist,

00:06:22.120 who had regularly given him stories for years.

00:06:24.200 So he thought it was him ringing up, just sounding a bit more fresh voice involved.

00:06:28.280 And then we started getting each other's payments.

00:06:30.120 It was like, hang on, what's going on here?

00:06:31.480 I didn't do that.

00:06:32.040 Anyway, that was it.

00:06:33.560 There's a story of two Piers Morgans.

00:06:34.840 But Tom was great.

00:06:36.120 And he got me onto the paper.

00:06:37.240 And that was when Kelvin McKenzie, the legendary, notorious beast of the sun, ran it.

00:06:43.880 And it was probably one of those brutal journalism schools imaginable, albeit always laced with

00:06:49.640 extraordinary high-octane energy and humor.

00:06:53.720 And a lot of people that went through the Kelvin McKenzie sum went on to edit newspapers.

00:06:59.480 I mean, I would say probably more journalists became editors from that reign of terror than

00:07:05.480 any others, which will play slightly into what we may come to later about my view that as workplaces

00:07:11.800 get softer and softer, because everyone's so offended all the time and so upset, you're not

00:07:16.920 allowed to shout at people or berate them or even criticize people anymore.

00:07:21.400 The downside of that is that for people with my personality, I found it a fantastic environment

00:07:26.840 to work in.

00:07:27.320 I wanted the stick.

00:07:28.760 I didn't mind a bit of carrot, but really, I wanted the stick to drive me to be better.

00:07:32.840 So that was that.

00:07:34.200 And then I got made editor of the News of the World at 28 by Rupert Murdoch.

00:07:38.120 That was a crazy time.

00:07:39.240 He flew me out to Miami.

00:07:40.360 We walked along Miami Beach in the surf for a few hours.

00:07:43.320 I had no idea what I was doing there.

00:07:45.160 And then he introduced me at a Fox affiliates party that night to somebody else as the new

00:07:50.520 editor of the News of the World, his biggest selling paper.

00:07:52.840 That's how I found out.

00:07:54.200 He literally went, this is my friend Pierce from London, his new editor of the News of the World.

00:07:57.160 I went, what?

00:07:58.120 No negotiation, nothing?

00:08:01.480 No, nothing.

00:08:02.920 Wow.

00:08:03.320 I literally found out when he turned to the person in the next bit of the party and went,

00:08:07.160 he's a new editor of the News of the World.

00:08:08.440 That's a powerful way to be able to be in the world in his position, isn't it?

00:08:12.520 It's the kind of thing Rupert Murdoch's done his entire life.

00:08:15.080 You know, he's a maverick and he backs himself.

00:08:17.480 He backs, again, a great lesson, backs himself.

00:08:21.400 You know, he always, he once said to me that he'd gone against his gut instinct three times,

00:08:25.800 each time it had gone wrong.

00:08:27.880 And he said, the trouble with that is, if you go with your gut instinct,

00:08:31.720 you've only got yourself to blame if you're wrong.

00:08:33.880 When it's not your gut instinct, it's somebody else's, and it goes against your gut,

00:08:38.600 and it's wrong, then you want to blame other people.

00:08:41.880 Different mentality.

00:08:43.880 And that was great.

00:08:44.520 And then I defected to the Daily Mirror, had nearly 10 great years there,

00:08:49.320 and then got fired in pretty big circumstances.

00:08:53.640 The Iraq botos scandal, as some people put it.

00:08:57.400 And then I went into television.

00:09:00.520 Simon Cowell took me out over here, actually, at the Belvedere in Holland Park.

00:09:04.680 And he said he was thinking of launching a new talent show.

00:09:08.680 And did I want to be on it?

00:09:10.440 And interestingly, it was Britain's Got Talent he was thinking about,

00:09:15.160 but it wasn't called that.

00:09:16.120 It was going to be called Paul O'Grady's Got Talent.

00:09:18.520 A little secret for you.

00:09:19.960 Paul O'Grady was the biggest star at ITV at the time, along with Simon.

00:09:22.920 And then what do they call it?

00:09:23.800 Paul O'Grady's Got Talent.

00:09:25.480 And all the acts would be in the audience.

00:09:27.480 And we did a pilot.

00:09:28.600 And it was me, Simon, and Fern Britton, of all people,

00:09:31.880 that we used to be on this morning.

00:09:34.280 And we did this pilot, fantastically successful.

00:09:38.360 And it was all about to be greenlit.

00:09:39.800 My comeback was assured.

00:09:41.080 Primetime TV, two fingers to the world.

00:09:43.800 He'd been reveling in my downfall.

00:09:46.120 And Paul O'Grady fell out with ITV, told them to go stuff themselves,

00:09:51.720 defected to Channel 4.

00:09:53.320 Project died.

00:09:54.600 End of comeback before it even started.

00:09:56.520 And then I got a text six weeks later from Simon saying,

00:09:58.680 I've sold the Got Talent format to NBC in America.

00:10:01.800 And they repackaged it as America's Got Talent,

00:10:04.520 which immediately to me went, what a great idea.

00:10:07.800 And I can't be on it because of American Idol, he said.

00:10:10.520 So I'm trying to think, who do I know is arrogant, obnoxious,

00:10:14.120 and vile enough to step into my shoes?

00:10:16.840 And your name is obviously immediately sprung to my hand.

00:10:19.160 And three weeks later, I was on the set of the Paramount movie lot

00:10:22.600 on Melrose in Los Angeles.

00:10:25.080 I'd rented an Aston Martin just for the sheer hell of it.

00:10:28.200 I could drive my Aston Martin through the famous Melrose gates of the Paramount movie lot.

00:10:32.520 And I drove through these famous old movie backdrops thinking,

00:10:36.360 what am I doing here?

00:10:37.480 How has this happened?

00:10:38.600 I got to a trailer next to David Hasselhoffs, who was one of the judges.

00:10:42.760 And that was that.

00:10:43.800 Show went to number one.

00:10:45.000 I then did Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump.

00:10:47.640 I had the first series of that.

00:10:49.000 I won it.

00:10:49.480 That's how I got to know Trump, who then became President of the United States, of course.

00:10:54.920 And then I replaced Larry King at CNN for nearly four years.

00:10:59.480 I had a great time doing that.

00:11:01.320 And then left there and came back to the UK to do the morning show.

00:11:05.320 And then had to leave that.

00:11:07.160 Not quite how I would have wished, because Meghan Markle didn't like me disbelieving her,

00:11:11.560 which now seems quite extraordinary.

00:11:13.880 I would have thought now I'd be probably let go for believing her.

00:11:18.440 And that was that.

00:11:19.160 And then, you know, here I am now at Falk TV here, Fox Nation America, Sky News Australia,

00:11:25.960 with a show called Here's Morgan Uncensored, back working with the guy that gave me the

00:11:30.520 big break in the first place.

00:11:31.880 So it's been a full circle.

00:11:33.320 So that's a long version of my story, but that's it.

00:11:35.880 No, it's very interesting.

00:11:37.400 And one of the things you touch on there is you're someone people will like or dislike or whatever.

00:11:42.440 You're someone who has dealt with in his life with a number of big setbacks.

00:11:47.240 Some self-inflicted, some not, right, people would argue.

00:11:51.400 And none of which actually, when I look back, turned out to be a setback.

00:11:55.400 So the key theme I would say, I remember Kelvin McKenzie saying to me,

00:11:58.600 the most annoying thing about me was that he would scream at me until his eyes were popping,

00:12:04.760 his neck veins were bulging, you know, almost wanting to physically hurt me.

00:12:09.640 And then, because I've done something wrong.

00:12:11.640 And then I come back an hour later with a big grin on my face and say,

00:12:14.120 I've got a great scoop.

00:12:15.000 It needs to really annoy him, my ability to bounce back.

00:12:17.880 But I've always taken the view, what's the point wallowing in what's just happened?

00:12:22.680 And even more so, change the narrative, right?

00:12:25.000 If you've had a setback or a negative in any part of your life, then change the narrative.

00:12:30.200 No one really cares.

00:12:31.160 After about a week, even if you're involved in the biggest story in the country,

00:12:35.240 take Gary Dennecke, right? All over the papers for a week, whatever.

00:12:39.480 I can guarantee you in a week's time, nobody cares.

00:12:41.800 I told him that. Just get on with it. Because no one cares, right?

00:12:44.760 And if you lose a big job, people give you about a week where they care, then they moved on.

00:12:49.960 So the best thing to do is change your own narrative. Find something that will change

00:12:54.760 that story that you're just washed up has been, which I've had a few times, and show them you're not.

00:13:00.760 But Piers, there is a sensitive side to you as well. So for instance-

00:13:04.440 You're going to try and make me cry?

00:13:05.240 Yeah. I'll turn you into a West Ham fan, mate.

00:13:08.840 That would make me cry.

00:13:10.680 So for instance, with Good Morning Britain, where you walked off, there's a lot of people who said

00:13:15.160 that was staged. I don't think it was.

00:13:17.080 No, no. And that also wasn't why I left. I mean, many American viewers of this will probably

00:13:24.280 still think I walked off and never came back. In fact, I only walked off for about 10 minutes,

00:13:27.720 because it was either that, or I was fairly sure I was going to whack the weather guy on TV,

00:13:32.440 which would have been great telly, but not a great idea. And he was the deputy weather guy too,

00:13:37.640 which was even more ignominious. No, I was a bit fired up about the reaction to my critique of the

00:13:44.520 Meghan Markle, Harry, Oprah Winfrey wine-a-thon, because I felt instinctively I was right, that a

00:13:50.920 lot of what they were saying was simply not true. And I wasn't going to buy into the narrative that the

00:13:55.160 royal family were a bunch of callous racists, just because these two said so for their own

00:14:00.040 financial gain. And I think history has proven me to be pretty spot on with that.

00:14:06.120 But it was all building, building, building. The mob came online and the mob got to my bosses.

00:14:13.080 And my bosses crumbled, and they also crumbled because Meghan Markle wrote to the female

00:14:18.440 chief executive of ITV, my top boss, and demanded she find me. That happened overnight. And so I was

00:14:25.480 told, look, either you apologise or you can't come back. I said, what am I apologising for?

00:14:30.120 I said, I mean it. They said, no, we know you do, but can you not just say sorry? I went,

00:14:34.040 why? For something I believe. I don't believe her. I don't think she's telling the truth.

00:14:39.320 Why would I apologise for that honestly held belief? I thought, we're living in a democracy,

00:14:43.720 aren't we? I don't have to believe people, do I? Is it written in my contract, thou must believe

00:14:49.480 Meghan Markle, Princess Pinocchio, when she opens her mouth? No thanks.

00:14:54.680 That was a very strange thing to be going through in a supposed democratic society,

00:14:59.960 that I was basically being shoehorned into a place where they knew I wouldn't apologise. So

00:15:03.960 I had to leave a show that, at the moment I left, was now the most watched show on

00:15:08.520 breakfast TV in the country. We'd finally beaten the BBC with this great holy grail that we thought

00:15:13.640 we'd get to. It was absolutely on fire. Ratings through the roof, everyone talking about us,

00:15:18.600 everyone tuning in to get my opinions, which I had been specifically hired to express in a strident

00:15:24.040 manner. Literally. When they launched me on Good Morning Britain, they used Sympathy for the Devil

00:15:30.280 by the Rolling Stones as my comeback music, because I'd done a week's trial which went chaotically well.

00:15:36.760 And then when I came back, the people of Britain were told basically the devil was coming back,

00:15:42.280 because of my opinions. And yet for having those opinions, honestly hell, that in the end became

00:15:47.640 the reason I had to leave. And so how much of what you do is actually calculated? How much of it is

00:15:55.720 you thinking, right, I can say something in a more provocative fashion, which I know will get

00:16:01.720 a bigger reaction. And how much is what you say, what you would just say to your friends?

00:16:06.200 No, I'd say I'm exactly the same on air as I am in the pub with my mates. I'm the same. I can be

00:16:11.800 just as obnoxious. I can be just as offensive sometimes, depending on their viewpoint. Remember,

00:16:18.760 people are offended if they don't hear something they agree with, right? That's the era we now live

00:16:23.240 in. When I was young, never like that. You could all just gob off in the pub and that was accepted.

00:16:27.720 We'd all have different opinions and we'd all get drunk together and go, I'm quite happy. Now,

00:16:31.960 it's like people just exist in weird bubble tribes. They only really want to hear the same views that

00:16:39.240 they believe they have. But as I always say to them, how do you expect to evolve or change your

00:16:44.360 views or adapt or move with facts if you're so intransigently stuck in your tribe? It makes no

00:16:50.440 sense to me. But that's where we are. And it's a dangerous place for a democracy to find itself.

00:16:55.080 How did we get here, Piers? Because you mentioned the Meghan Markle thing as well,

00:16:59.240 and it's just like everything is racist now. And that's not to say that there aren't racist

00:17:04.040 people. I'm someone who's a first generation immigrant. I know there are racist people in

00:17:07.560 this country, but I don't remember a time when, you know, office air conditioning was sexist and

00:17:12.440 this was racist. It's ridiculous. But how did this happen?

00:17:15.960 Well, the most ridiculous example I can give you wasn't actually me, although I was accused of

00:17:20.680 being racist for disbelieving Meghan Markle's truth, which was a lie, which seemed to be

00:17:26.120 preposterous. And obviously my critique of her had nothing to do with her skin color and everything

00:17:30.920 to do with the fact she was telling a bunch of whoppers about the royal family and causing them

00:17:34.360 enormous damage. But the worst thing was Sharon Osborne, who was at the time co-hosting a show

00:17:41.160 called The Talk on CBS, had been for 10 years, very successful. And I'd been on The Talk many times.

00:17:47.000 And she tweeted that I was entitled to my opinion. She didn't say she agreed with it.

00:17:53.640 So I was entitled to my opinion. And she was then set up on her show. So Cheryl Underwood,

00:18:00.440 who was one of the black hosts of The Talk, basically played the race card in an incredibly

00:18:06.440 unpleasant manner, deliberately, to try and gotcha Sharon. And basically made out that she accused

00:18:13.320 her of supporting somebody who'd said racist things. So Sharon kept saying, what are you

00:18:18.120 talking about? What did he say that was racist? And she couldn't answer. What did he say that was

00:18:22.520 racist? He said racist things. And eventually, well, he may not have said racist things, but he's

00:18:26.520 thinking. In other words, if I didn't believe Meghan Markle, who's from a biracial couple,

00:18:33.320 a white father, black mother, if I didn't believe her, it had to be because I was racist.

00:18:38.680 And it was an extraordinary thing. Sharon then lost her job over this, because she reacted so

00:18:44.440 angrily to the suggestion that I was a racist, and therefore she was supporting a racist. None of

00:18:50.120 that was true. And so to your point, that's where we are. How did that happen? How did we get here,

00:18:55.880 in your opinion? Because you would have seen this in your lifetime. I've seen it in my life.

00:18:59.320 Well, identity politics is the biggest problem, mixed with a society that now values and celebrates

00:19:07.160 victimhood and weakness and losing over previous generations who valued higher strength, winning,

00:19:18.120 resilience, and all those things. That's what's happened. So you now see a ridiculous situation

00:19:24.040 with the gymnast, Simone Biles, who in the Olympics pulls out of the team competition. And she's

00:19:33.080 obviously the star talent for the Americans. And the Russians end up winning it because she's having

00:19:39.080 anxiety issues, makes a dramatic recovery three days later to take part in the individual,

00:19:44.520 comes third, and she normally wins all the goals, comes third. And really, it's because she's just

00:19:49.160 slightly lost her power. She's just not as good as she was. That's the real problem. And she knew it.

00:19:53.400 She tumbled a couple of times in the team competition, and it freaked her out that she

00:19:57.000 isn't as good as she used to be, in my opinion. But she turned the whole thing into a mental health

00:20:01.960 thing. This was all about mental health, all about her brave anxiety, facing down her brave

00:20:10.520 issues like anxiety and so on. And everyone celebrated her, the cover of every magazine,

00:20:16.600 for coming third, and for bottling it in the team competition and letting her teammates down so they

00:20:23.000 lost. And then recovering in time to take part in her own thing. And I looked at all this, I went,

00:20:27.400 well, we've all gone nuts. How can she be celebrated more for losing and coming third and falling over

00:20:34.120 and letting down her teammates than she did when she won all the goals? And it's funny, Michael Johnson,

00:20:40.360 the brilliant 200 and 400-meter runner, he pipes up on Twitter at me, has a go at me for suggesting that

00:20:48.680 winning bronze is not somehow the greatest thing of all time. I went, if it's so great,

00:20:52.920 how come your Twitter name is MJ Gold? And in your Twitter bio, all you mention are your gold medals?

00:21:01.960 And there was a silence. Because of course he doesn't celebrate losing. That's why he's Michael

00:21:06.760 Johnson. Usain Bolt has a bronze medal dangling on his toilet wall. Of course he doesn't. So we've moved

00:21:13.080 away now from what I think is important in life, which is that you understand that the more you work,

00:21:20.200 the harder you put in, the more you get back. And actually winning is a good thing in life,

00:21:25.000 in all aspects of life, whether it's relationships or work or friendships, whatever it is, or sport,

00:21:32.280 anything. Winning is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Competition is a good thing. Being able to lose

00:21:39.880 and get back up and think, that sucked. I don't want that to happen again. Alex Ferguson at Manchester

00:21:45.800 United used to say to his players when they lost a big title race, don't ever forget how you're

00:21:52.360 feeling right now. Don't feel that again. He didn't go, well done, lad. You lost to Arsenal. Let's all go

00:22:01.320 party. It's party time. Let's celebrate losing and being a bunch of losers. That's not how he got to

00:22:08.520 be the most successful coach in history. But we are going down a very slippery slope where we are

00:22:14.760 beginning to celebrate weakness and losing more than we do strength and winning. And that's part

00:22:20.360 of the problem. So the relationship to all the racism and sexism and your transphobia, all that kind

00:22:26.920 of stuff that goes on now about everything. It's because people want to identify as part of these

00:22:32.280 tribes. They want to be part of the trans activist tribe, which means anyone who says anything about

00:22:39.240 any issue involving trans people is immediately a transphobe. You raise any concern at all. So if a

00:22:45.960 male rapist puts his hand up, as he did in Scotland, and says, I'm now a woman, so I want to be in a

00:22:50.680 woman's prison so I can attack other women and get an easier time than I would in a men's prison,

00:22:54.600 everyone goes, absolutely right and proper that you should be in a women's prison.

00:22:58.920 Until we all go, hang on, this is completely insane. And the woman who was behind it, Nicola

00:23:03.960 Sturgeon, first man of Scotland, has to lose her job. And then he gets put right back where he

00:23:07.720 belongs in a male prison. And I'm not going to call him she because he wants to call himself she.

00:23:12.280 Of course he does. He's not a she. He's a he. He's a male rapist who raped women with his penis.

00:23:18.920 It's ridiculous. So that's where the madness goes, if you're not very careful. And in

00:23:24.120 lost in all this are people on the trans side, for example, I know some trans people

00:23:29.160 who feel that they're just being made laughingstocks by this debate. They feel that the woke

00:23:35.000 efforts to try and protect them have the complete opposite effect, that actually they make trans

00:23:40.760 people look ridiculous. Well, we've interviewed a bunch of people like that, trans people on our

00:23:44.840 show to talk about this very thing. But Piers, you talk about tribes. And one of the interesting

00:23:50.040 things for me was when I was on your show, you were talking about how you're more liberal than

00:23:54.040 not. Yeah. And I don't think anyone that I know in our old industry, the stand up comedy industry,

00:23:59.080 like we are sitting right now in their eyes with the King Gammon, you know, the sun, the Daily Mail.

00:24:05.880 Yeah, you have my book, Wake Up. Anyone who reads that book will know that I'm what I would call an old

00:24:11.880 fashion liberal, the kind that tolerate other people's opinions, the kinds that believe that,

00:24:18.600 like I said, I mean, all the issues we've been talking about are all in here, that identity

00:24:22.200 politics is dangerous, that the woke mentality is destructive. It's basically a new form of fascism.

00:24:29.560 And that's why they don't like me. Because secretly, they kind of know I'm probably ideologically not

00:24:34.760 far from them. I'm just not a nutcase like they are. And the moment I say nutcase on your podcast,

00:24:40.280 there will be people writing and saying, how dare you, you must be fired, you're belittling mental

00:24:46.200 health. And it's obviously bullshit. So I say, read that book, and you'll get my point. Look,

00:24:52.200 I don't really consider myself to be ideologically left or right. I'm a journalist who likes to take

00:24:57.560 them all down and expose the hypocrisy on both sides. Really, that's fundamentally, my ideology is,

00:25:04.040 they're all probably scamming us. So let's call them all out and get to the truth. All I care about

00:25:08.600 is getting somehow to the truth, which is increasingly hard when people think they can

00:25:12.280 have their own version of the truth and call it my truth, as if somehow that's different to

00:25:16.840 factual truth. It's obviously an absurdity, but that's what people think.

00:25:20.680 So I think that you're right. A lot of people on the left assume I must be some right wing

00:25:27.240 hate banger, because they probably see a few TikTok clips, which are taken in isolation where I'm

00:25:32.520 saying, for instance, the other day, there's a TikTok clip where it went very viral,

00:25:35.800 had 5 million views. And it's me on International Women's Day saying to a woman who was in an

00:25:43.320 argument about gender, I said, so I can identify as a black lesbian, can I? And she said, well,

00:25:50.680 that's ridiculous. I went, well, that's not, is it? It's the logical extension of what you've just said

00:25:55.880 about gender should be limitless. Now, in the whole context of the whole conversation, everyone could see

00:26:01.240 what I'm getting at. If all you've seen is a TikTok clip of me saying, I'm Piers Morgan,

00:26:06.040 and I'm a black lesbian. There he goes again, a right wing lunatic. Look at that gammon, you know,

00:26:12.440 belittling black people, racist, belittling gay people, homophobic. Of course, there's none of

00:26:18.840 those things. I'm simply saying, if you have limitless gender, if you can basically put your

00:26:23.480 hand up and say, you can be whatever you want, if you just identify as it, that's what happens.

00:26:28.840 And if people don't believe me, look at the Scottish rapist who literally took it to the

00:26:33.320 worst possible degree and got away with it. So that's, I think they don't like me calling them

00:26:40.520 out on the logic of their arguments, because a lot of it is illogical. Bill Maher in America is one of my

00:26:46.520 favorite commentators in the world. But he's on the left. He's probably like me, politically,

00:26:53.640 probably a liberal guy, really, at heart. And he finds them completely insufferable,

00:26:58.600 the woke brigade. Insufferable. And of course, it's not electable, this kind of mentality. Most

00:27:03.720 people aren't like it. You go down Kensington High Street, and you talk to 100 people, and you put

00:27:08.440 five woke positions to them, they'll think you're nuts. You'd be put in some asylum.

00:27:12.280 But do you not worry, Piers, that we talk and we focus on gender and wokeism. And look,

00:27:16.840 there's something that we need to talk about. But you're a journalist. You realize that this

00:27:21.000 country is in a dire, dire situation, financially, economically, societally. And it just distracts

00:27:28.840 from that. And we don't talk about that.

00:27:30.120 Yeah, but that's why you're wrong. I'll tell you why. Because it's not a small thing. Actually,

00:27:34.760 the way that we tackle big stuff of the kind you're talking about, it comes down to leadership. How can

00:27:39.960 you be a leader if you can't even say what a woman is? Who's going to follow you? Who's going

00:27:45.960 to take your lead? What kind of person are you? Sekir Starmer is very impressive in many ways.

00:27:51.720 I like him personally. But he just refuses to say what a woman is. Rishi Sunak, to his credit,

00:27:56.520 when I interviewed him, immediately said, it's an adult human female. Great. It's not difficult.

00:28:01.400 It's not a trick question. But that's the answer. Biological sex is just an irrefutable fact.

00:28:07.400 So when a politician can't answer that, it answers your question. He might be leading the country

00:28:12.360 in two years' time, Keir Starmer, a man who won't say what a woman is because he's too scared.

00:28:16.360 Does that comfort you? It doesn't comfort me. So I don't think these are small things. I think the

00:28:22.360 battle for freedom of speech, we saw it with Gary Danica again recently, the battle for someone's

00:28:28.520 right to have an opinion, the battle to save what I call old-fashioned debate, the battle against this

00:28:34.840 woke fascist mentality that you will agree with us or you will be destroyed, J.K. Rowling,

00:28:41.240 must be destroyed at all costs, the order of political correctness. All that has got to be

00:28:47.000 fought and won. Otherwise, the rest of it can't get fixed. You're going to end up with leaders

00:28:51.800 who are incapable of leading because they can't even answer basic questions because they're too scared.

00:28:58.120 That would be my answer. They're all interlinked. It's all about leadership. It's all about

00:29:04.440 freedom. It's all about understanding that what the cornerstone of a democracy is, is freedom.

00:29:09.880 And the moment you infringe on that right to freedom for the British public, the American

00:29:15.000 public, for any so-called democracy, that way hell lies because that way you're heading into fascism.

00:29:21.080 Do you think, Piers, as well, part of the problem is, in the days of Blair or Thatcher, they had to

00:29:28.520 liaise with the tabloid press in order to create a good story, in order to create positive headlines.

00:29:33.320 But now, politicians seem more and more to be at the behest of Twitter. And Twitter is its own world,

00:29:38.920 and a politician can be plunged into its Twitter storm for saying something which we all know to

00:29:44.200 be true. 20% of the public are on Twitter in the UK and the US, about 20%. Of the 20%,

00:29:49.720 80% of the noise is made by 10% of the 20%. And it tends to skew to the extremities of the debate,

00:29:56.360 on right and left. More left than right, actually. You can get an impression of all this stuff

00:30:03.160 being sanctioned by the majority. Of course it's not. That's why Twitter gets everything wrong.

00:30:08.760 Twitter assumed Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister, assumed Hillary Clinton would become

00:30:13.240 president, assumed Donald Trump would be completely wiped out in 2016. It assumed Brexit would never

00:30:20.600 happen. You know, it just makes all these assumptions based on the 80% of the 10% of the 20%

00:30:27.800 screaming away that that's what's going to happen. But it's not what 80% of the public, you don't even

00:30:32.760 know what they think. You don't ask them. They're not on Twitter. They're not howling away all day.

00:30:36.360 Now I love Twitter as an information source and as a source of stirring up debates because I'm in the

00:30:41.720 debate business. And if you ask me what my job is, it's to create debate on television, in columns,

00:30:47.320 on Twitter. It all feeds into debating for me. I like a good argument. Always have done.

00:30:53.000 And I have a real problem with people who can't argue without throwing my toys out the pram

00:30:57.080 in a way that is ludicrous, where they just want to cancel you for having an opinion. I think that's

00:31:01.640 pathetic. But yeah, to me, the fundamental cornerstones of these things all come back

00:31:07.320 to the basic principles of a democracy, which is free speech, freedom of expression, freedom.

00:31:13.320 And the moment you start to infringe on that, it's all over.

00:31:16.680 Well, Piers, talking of freedom, one of the things that, I'll be honest with you, surprised me. When I

00:31:21.000 did your show in person afterwards, I said, mate, now that we're good mates, how about you unblock me on

00:31:26.760 Twitter? And you went, oh, I've blocked you on Twitter. And I went, yeah, I took the piss out

00:31:31.560 of you over COVID. And that's when you surprised me because you went, yeah, I deserved it.

00:31:35.720 Yeah. I did not expect that, actually, given your public persona.

00:31:39.480 I've changed my mind on a few things with COVID because the science changed.

00:31:43.400 So I'll give you an example. And I'm quite happy to admit this and talk about it. And people are like,

00:31:48.200 ah, there you go. Yeah. Because to me, it changed. So I'll give you a classic example.

00:31:52.600 I, when they said that vaccines couldn't transmit the virus, I said, okay, right. In that case,

00:32:00.520 anyone who doesn't have the vaccine right now represents a clear and present threat to spreading

00:32:05.560 this virus and killing people. So you're selfish bastards, and I'm going to call you out on that.

00:32:10.200 And by the way, those who do have the vaccine, they should have more freedoms because they're not

00:32:14.200 going to be able to transmit it once they've had the jab. You are, and you don't care. Very strident,

00:32:19.320 very emphatic, based on a completely erroneous scientific assessment, which was it couldn't.

00:32:26.600 Now, you might say, well, you shouldn't have said it anyway. I would sort of agree.

00:32:29.720 I would say something else, actually, which is, I think that you have a duty to be skeptical.

00:32:34.760 As a journalist, that is your job.

00:32:36.120 And I've learned a lesson in the pandemic about that. Definitely. Definitely. And I would totally

00:32:40.440 accept that. I think I was too strident anyway, got too kind of wrapped up in it all. But, you know,

00:32:46.360 I had good reasons for it. I had, you know, one of my colleagues at Good Morning Britain,

00:32:50.840 Kate Garraway, her husband was in a coma from COVID. I had four or five friends and family who

00:32:56.040 lost loved ones, had to say goodbye to their parents on FaceTime and care homes where it had

00:33:00.680 ripped through and so on. So I was very, like, emotionally invested in it. Probably too much

00:33:05.160 so for a journalist. I accept that. But on that key point of the transmission, the scientists then said

00:33:10.760 a bit later, actually, it turns out there's not much difference between whether you've had the

00:33:16.120 jab or not for transmission. And at that point, I realized everything I've been saying was completely

00:33:20.520 wrong and completely unfair. And then it becomes a personal choice if you want to. Now, again,

00:33:25.880 someone will say, well, it should be a personal choice anyway. Well, yeah, yeah. But if we had,

00:33:30.040 for example, as one of the Oxford AstraZeneca professors put it to me, if this had been the

00:33:36.120 the plague come back with a 30% to 40% death rate, including kids, how would people feel then?

00:33:42.840 If we had a vaccine that was proven to be largely successful and stopped transmission and people

00:33:49.560 were refusing to have it, and we were seeing not 3,000 people die a day, but 50,000 die a day,

00:33:56.360 I would say that people's views of that argument might change quite quickly.

00:33:59.560 But you wouldn't need to force anyone to take a vaccine if it was the plague, because people would take

00:34:03.000 the vaccine. So my point being that the argument would play slightly better if there were much

00:34:08.920 higher numbers of people dying, which would come back to my sort of thing that if the principle's

00:34:13.480 the principle, it shouldn't really matter what the scale is. But I totally accept my rhetoric was over

00:34:18.520 the top. And I think that people, once it was known that you could transmit it, whether you've been

00:34:23.320 jabbed or not, I think it's entirely your personal decision to then have the vaccine or not. And that's

00:34:29.160 a complete U-turn on what I thought. But the scientists did a U-turn. So I was basing all my

00:34:34.760 emphatic, passionate rhetoric on what I believe the science to be. Another lesson from the pandemic,

00:34:39.640 science evolves. Facts change. They find out more information. I don't think, as some people do,

00:34:44.760 that all scientists are evil. I don't think they're deliberately setting out to mislead people.

00:34:49.400 I think they're trying to get to the truth. It was a novel virus. Early on, when there were no

00:34:53.400 vaccines and no hope of any, there had never been a coronavirus vaccine. So in those first few months,

00:34:58.360 when people were dying in big numbers, there were no therapeutic drugs, really no vaccine.

00:35:03.160 And it looked incredibly serious for mankind. At that point, I felt the only answer was the

00:35:09.080 blunt instrument of a lockdown. As it went on, I think the argument for lockdown became less and less

00:35:15.720 convincing. And I always believed that all the subsidiary effects of lockdown on other health issues,

00:35:22.120 heart disease, cancer, and so on, were going to come back and haunt us. The question then was,

00:35:29.000 where was the pendulum on that deal?

00:35:30.840 Well, look, Francis and I both supported the first lockdown. And actually, someone

00:35:34.280 quote tweeted a tweet of mine from the very first moments when I was saying, we need to

00:35:38.680 work together and stop thinking solely about ourselves. And people are now using that against

00:35:43.000 me. So I know the position that you're in. But I think the one thing, sticking with the theme of

00:35:48.280 freedom that we've been talking about, that I found very concerning is the amount of censorship

00:35:52.360 that was happening of scientists, very prominent scientists, including Nobel, David Davis, who was

00:35:56.840 a guest on our show, made this point. Nobel prize-winning scientists being censored for talking about

00:36:02.680 things that are in their era of expertise.

00:36:04.120 I agree.

00:36:04.440 Lab leak, right? All of this stuff.

00:36:06.440 I totally agree. I totally agree. I think that was, it was everyone slightly lost their minds.

00:36:14.520 And people will say, well, you're banging on about freedom. Where were you for the freedom of

00:36:19.160 people to espouse views you didn't agree with on COVID? And it's a tricky one when a lot of people

00:36:24.520 are dying. But of course, the whole point of fighting for freedom is sometimes a lot of people

00:36:28.600 die for freedom. So I totally accept that. And I've evolved my opinion. If there was another health

00:36:33.640 crisis, I would probably behave rather differently.

00:36:36.120 I think we all would.

00:36:36.920 You know, it's the same. I would say the same thing about when I campaigned against

00:36:41.400 guns in America. I was a British guy telling Americans how to lead their lives.

00:36:46.040 They have 420 million guns. We have hardly any. And so what do I really know about their gun culture?

00:36:52.520 The truth is, I thought I knew better than them and shouted at them louder and louder to try and

00:36:55.640 get them to give up guns. And they sold more and more guns because of my shouting. They had the complete

00:37:00.040 opposite effect to what I thought. And if I had my time again, I would dial down

00:37:04.520 the rhetoric and I would try and have a much more open and constructive debate. Or I would even

00:37:10.760 suggest, let's stop calling it gun control. Call it gun safety. How do you make it safer?

00:37:14.920 I know you can't take all the guns away, so how do we make it safer? Much more interesting

00:37:18.120 conversation than a British guy who, with an accent like mine, we've been driven out with guns to get

00:37:25.080 them independence in the first place. I mean, Jay Leno got it right with me. I think he said to me,

00:37:31.080 Piers, look, the smart crowd in LA and New York, the smart liberals, he said, we can't have all

00:37:37.080 agreement with you, right? You're right. It's madness, this guns thing. It's madness. He said,

00:37:40.760 but most of the rest of America thinks, who's this snoddy British guy with this

00:37:44.520 British accent telling us what to do? He said, it'd be like you're going to Germany and saying they

00:37:48.520 can't speed on the Autobahn. Again, the smart liberals would be like, he's right, too many people die on the

00:37:53.400 Autobahn. We should reduce speed. And the rest of Germany's going, I don't want to hear this from

00:37:57.880 this guy, and I definitely don't want to hear it from my accent. And he's right. He was right.

00:38:02.360 It would be like an American coming over here and saying, I want to ban cricket, because people get

00:38:07.000 injured. And what would we do? We said, sod off, annoying American. Go back to him. That's what

00:38:13.080 we would think, right? So I broke that sort of cultural rule, which is you don't go to someone's

00:38:18.440 restaurant. And you don't go to someone's house and tell them their curtains suck. You might think

00:38:25.080 and you might hope they'd change their curtains, but you just don't shout at them. Your curtains are

00:38:29.960 disgusting because it's their curtain. So I think that I've learned definitely through that. I've

00:38:36.200 learned through the pandemic that if the primary function of a journalist is to be skeptical of

00:38:41.480 everything and to be open to all opinions, I would qualify it slightly. There were a lot of demented

00:38:49.000 anti-vaccines who are completely implacably opposed to all vaccines, who were peddling utter lies about

00:38:56.840 the vaccine. And so I make no apology for taking them head on. They were really the people I was

00:39:03.480 targeting. But when I look back at some of my tweets around the issue of vaccine transmission,

00:39:09.560 I made a presumption the science was always going to stay the same. And when it changed,

00:39:14.040 I was made to look stupid and dictatorial and freedom bashing and all the things that I hate.

00:39:21.080 And that was a wake-up call. Wake up, Piers.

00:39:25.640 But Piers, moving on. So you started in newspapers and you saw the absolute beasts that were the tabloid

00:39:32.840 newspapers at the time. They were so powerful. The reality is...

00:39:36.520 They were great. Yeah. Just for the record, the British tabloid press is the most vibrant,

00:39:41.720 dynamic press in the world. And from all parts, the mirror I edited, the mirror was left-wing,

00:39:47.480 the usual world was right-wing. I did both. And I will always defend the British tabloid press here.

00:39:53.160 So you can call them a beast. I call them a wondrous entity. Floored, not perfect, but wow,

00:40:01.000 do people in this country have to be concerned about the press holding their feet to the fire.

00:40:06.040 And that's what you need in a democracy. I agree with you. But the reality is that

00:40:11.000 press is no longer anywhere near as powerful. I think it was last year, a couple of years ago,

00:40:15.320 The Sun declared £62 million losses, which for a paper like The Sun is and was unheard of.

00:40:23.240 So where are we moving now? Well, we're moving online. I mean,

00:40:26.520 there's no doubt. My kids are in their 20s. They don't reprint newspapers. They read everything

00:40:30.120 online. But they do read newspapers online. So I think there's going to be a migration,

00:40:34.040 bit like in the music industry. How long that takes, I'm not entirely sure. But you can see

00:40:38.360 the graphs on all the circulations have all been steadily falling. Mirror sold two and a half

00:40:42.840 million a day when I was editing it back in the 2000s, early 2000s. And now it's probably,

00:40:48.600 I don't know, a tenth of that. So there's no question of the way the graph is going.

00:40:54.040 But there's also no question that the digital readership of all the papers is rising pretty

00:40:58.360 fast, too. So it's really what happens when it all washes out and you end up with just digital

00:41:03.560 papers, which will be the next generation after mine, aren't going to buy print newspapers,

00:41:08.120 I would lay an even bet, in the same way they don't buy vinyl records. So I think that that's coming.

00:41:14.600 But does it mean the influence has changed? I'm not so sure. I think a great front page of The Sun,

00:41:18.760 why don't you ask Matt Hancock how influential The Sun newspaper is? Because it was him and his

00:41:25.400 shenanigans being put on the front page of The Sun that led to him having to quit his health

00:41:29.080 minister in the middle of a pandemic. So I take issue with the inference that papers like The Sun

00:41:35.560 don't have that influence. They've still got it. I mean, just ask politicians. They still wake up

00:41:40.440 and check the front pages and make sure they're not on them. But surely, if young people aren't

00:41:45.400 engaging with them as much as they used to, that therefore means they're no longer as powerful.

00:41:49.000 Well, they are engaging in a different way. They're reading tweets from these papers. They're

00:41:52.600 reading stuff that goes viral from these papers. They're disseminating the content. They're just

00:41:57.080 not disseminating it in the old-fashioned way of buying a newspaper and sitting down in the cafe

00:42:01.720 and reading it like I like to do. Still do. Still get five papers a day and sit in a cafe and read them.

00:42:06.600 I love the feel of newsprint. My sons don't give a damn about that. They don't read books in print

00:42:12.360 form. They read them on Kindles and stuff. I would say that the information is still being

00:42:18.440 disseminated. Just the mode of travel and the way it's being put around and published, if you like,

00:42:24.680 has just radically changed and is much faster. Yeah, but also as well, they're not making the money

00:42:30.760 they used to make. Isn't that a significant problem, Piers? It depends on how much money you can make from

00:42:36.280 the digital side. A lot of them are making good money from the digital side. That will take time

00:42:40.440 because you're in that mid-period now of the slow death of print papers and the inexorable rise of

00:42:47.480 digital. Obviously, a lot of advertisers at the moment are still on the print side, but they will

00:42:52.760 move over time. 15, 20 years time, I'd be amazed if there are any national print newspapers whose print

00:43:00.680 sales are still much of a force. I'd just be amazed just based on numbers of my kids and their mates.

00:43:06.360 They don't reprint newspapers. So that clock is ticking. I think it's ticked longer than people

00:43:10.680 may have feared, actually. And can you make a lot of money out of digital papers? Absolutely, you can.

00:43:16.040 Absolutely. So I don't share the doom-laden view. I think everyone thought about records.

00:43:22.200 Stop selling records. It all gets streamed. We're going to make the same money. They all make a lot of money.

00:43:26.840 No one should worry about the record industry.

00:43:29.000 Yes. And sticking with the theme of journalism, one of the things that occurs to me is you are

00:43:33.080 someone who has dealt with very powerful newspaper proprietors in a very direct way. And everyone has

00:43:41.080 got an opinion about why Rupert Murdoch does what he does. What drives these people who want to own

00:43:47.080 a newspaper or a media empire? What do they want?

00:43:49.560 Well, I think in Rupert Murdoch's case, he likes being at the center of things. He always has done.

00:43:55.320 That's why he likes owning newspapers, television stations, movie companies,

00:44:01.000 publishing houses. He's just one of the world's great media figures. And in my opinion, the best

00:44:08.520 that I've ever worked with or for. There's something about having somebody at the top of a company

00:44:14.760 where it's their train set. As I discovered, when you go for a company like ITV, which has a lot of

00:44:20.440 engine drivers, but they're all dependent on their next standing up in front of shareholders and

00:44:26.040 they can be bullied by Meghan Markle into getting rid of presenters of hot TV shows,

00:44:30.200 that doesn't happen under someone like Rupert Murdoch. Because he wouldn't even take the call

00:44:34.280 from Meghan Markle. So I think that there's a power that comes if you work in that environment.

00:44:40.360 And I, listen, I owe him an awful lot. You'll never get me saying a bad word about Rupert Murdoch.

00:44:44.760 What have you learned from him?

00:44:46.840 He's an unbelievable maverick, that he backs himself, absolutely backs himself, to the extent

00:44:53.480 that he has the most extraordinary vision for things. Sky News here, Sky Sports revolutionized

00:44:59.480 the way sport was covered. The way when Sky bought the Premier League. Absolute game changer for

00:45:04.120 football in this country. Why is the Premier League the best in the world? Rupert Murdoch.

00:45:08.200 I mean, bottom line, doesn't he get the credit he deserves, but it was. You'll never see that in

00:45:13.000 the profiles of Rupert. You'll see all the devil stuff. I did it myself as a devil on the front page

00:45:17.480 of the mirror. When he was trying to buy Manchester United, we did him up in pointy ears and horns,

00:45:23.640 and said red devil. He's the only person in Britain who thinks Rupert Murdoch should own

00:45:27.320 Manchester United, raise their right index finger. And he was going like that. I think he quite admired

00:45:31.480 the word, because I was the rival editor. It would have been a nightmare if they'd bought Manchester United,

00:45:35.320 because the sun would have got all the exclusives. I just think he's driven, for my estimation,

00:45:41.720 Rupert was driven, and still is, just by news. He loves news. He loves being at the center of

00:45:47.480 what's happening, knowing what's happening. And he loves the vibrant and dynamic reporting of that,

00:45:54.440 commentary on that. That's what I think gets him up in the morning. He just can't wait, like me,

00:45:59.960 to find out what's going on, and what are people thinking, and who's doing what, and who's going

00:46:04.680 to run the country. It's all intoxicating to him, which it is to me.

00:46:08.360 Well, this is one of the things, Francis, and I wanted to ask you both. I mean,

00:46:12.520 you're very famous. You've got tons of money, I assume.

00:46:15.320 You know, you...

00:46:16.360 Little Notre Dame.

00:46:18.360 I can even afford a meal in here.

00:46:25.160 Why do you do what you do? You could be on a beach somewhere for the rest of your life.

00:46:28.520 Well, I don't do it for money. And I mean, I like to value myself correctly,

00:46:32.040 but that's a different argument. I don't do it for money. I do it because I like being at the

00:46:37.720 center of things, too. I love it. Like I said, I'm a news junkie. So for me, waking up, you know,

00:46:42.920 I wake up at five o'clock in the morning, normally, and the first thing I do, get to it,

00:46:46.200 what's going on? What have I missed? What have I missed? You know, when I'm on holiday,

00:46:50.280 the nightmare, my wife will tell you that I'm one of these people that if I get cut off from

00:46:55.880 information, I become a twitching wreck. If she just lets me do my thing and just every hour check

00:47:03.800 what's happening, I'm very relaxed. I can have a nice holiday. But you cut me off from that supply

00:47:08.920 chain of stuff happening, I'm a nightmare. But isn't there a part of you when there's a Twitter

00:47:15.800 storm or everything explodes in the zeitgeist and you get pilloried as, you know, the enemy

00:47:21.800 of the people, whatever they want to do? It's funny. Is it funny to you? Twitter storms are

00:47:25.480 hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. A bunch of geeks in their mum's dungeon screaming abuse at you.

00:47:30.680 It's hilarious. Okay, but when the Michael Markle thing happens...

00:47:33.880 Twitter storms last about 36 hours. They haven't got the energy, these people. These young

00:47:39.160 wokeys, they haven't got the energy or commitment to stuff. I can wage feuds with people for 20 years

00:47:44.600 with great passion. They give it 36 hours and they moved on to somebody else. They haven't

00:47:49.240 got the energy or commitment. But when people are calling you racist,

00:47:52.040 for example, that has got to hurt. Well, it's just dumb. But I'm in a good

00:47:56.600 position. I've got nearly eight and a half million Twitter followers, two million Instagram followers.

00:48:01.000 I've got a pretty powerful platform. I've got a show that airs every day in the UK,

00:48:04.840 Australia and America. I can create a lot of noise back if I want to. And I don't hesitate. And that's

00:48:12.040 one of the good things about Twitter. They can tell me with their 40 followers, you're a racist.

00:48:17.080 And I can reply to 8.5 million people. No, I'm not. You're the problem. And then what normally

00:48:23.960 happens is they delete their tweet. And then you see 10 minutes later, account deleted. I call it

00:48:29.000 vaporizing. It's a bit like a Star Trek. They just zap things. They just disappear. I like vaporizing

00:48:34.680 Twitter accounts. Have you always had this thick skin? Yeah. I think my only real talent is thick skin.

00:48:44.120 In the sense that I think everything comes from that for me. My ability to soak up crap and just

00:48:50.440 let it wash off me is an ability I've realized over time not a lot of people have to the extent that I

00:48:56.200 have it. And the resilience streak. My favorite movie scene is Rocky in the sixth film when he

00:49:03.240 finally has it out with his spoiled son in the street. And he gives him the speech about life

00:49:07.800 being a tough place. It's going to beat you down. And it's not how hard you can hit. It's how hard you

00:49:14.040 can get hit, get back up and keep moving forward. And that's how winning is done. I love that speech.

00:49:20.120 Because that to me is my view of life. Say it to my sons. They'll cringe if I mention Rocky in the

00:49:26.120 speech to his son. But they know instinctively I'm right. I said, nobody cares about a whining

00:49:32.600 moaner who's just going to play the victim all the time. Nobody cares. You might think they do,

00:49:37.800 but they don't. Don't wallow in bad stuff. Short of death and terminal illness, everything is

00:49:43.400 survivable and thrivable from. I'm living proof of it. A number of times I've had people write me off,

00:49:49.640 he's finished. We've got him this time. He's done. Really? I'm fine, thanks.

00:49:55.400 But that's a mental resilience. Where did you get that, Piers?

00:49:58.200 I think my family are very strong people. My mom's very strong. My grandmother was very strong.

00:50:03.160 Dad's strong. My brother was an army colonel. Served in wars and stuff. That gives you that

00:50:09.400 very important thing, perspective. I think a lack of perspective is one of the problems with

00:50:14.120 young kids today, why they're so anxious about stuff. They don't really have a perspective. I used to

00:50:19.000 say they had it easy compared to previous generations. Statistically, they did. But

00:50:23.240 actually, in the last few years, they've been hit by a once-in-hundred-year pandemic,

00:50:28.120 a new war raging in Europe, cost-of-living crisis, the lack of which we're all civil

00:50:32.760 time. Housing crisis, which affect young people.

00:50:33.800 Housing crisis. Suddenly, they have been hit with real problems. They are actually discovering

00:50:37.880 perspective the hard way, which is a lot of people going through some really bad stuff.

00:50:42.120 So, you getting all upset about an exam result, or your car being dented, or a girlfriend,

00:50:49.240 or whatever it may be, you've got to get perspective. And it's not as bad as you think.

00:50:54.920 I can guarantee you it's not as bad as you think. And I always say to my sons,

00:50:58.360 whatever, always come to me, I said, have you got something bad? Because the likelihood is I've done

00:51:03.080 something the same or worse? And they look at me and they laugh and go, really? I went, really?

00:51:10.200 Really? I'm 58. You don't get to be 58 with my career trajectory and not have probably done

00:51:15.960 a lot of things. And you think, God, I got over that. Somehow came through it. Especially in the

00:51:22.200 public place. So I think that being able to do that, having a thick skin, having mental resilience,

00:51:28.440 is really a crucial tool of life. And without it, I think you really struggle. I never feel anxiety.

00:51:37.480 Only about Arsenal. In the running now to the Premier League, if we don't win now, I will be a

00:51:43.720 bubbling wreck. But other than football, honestly, nothing makes me anxious. Live television doesn't,

00:51:50.120 being attacked on Twitter doesn't, losing jobs doesn't, because I've learned over time I normally

00:51:54.840 get a better one with more money. Nothing I don't think is ever irrevocably bad. It's down to you,

00:52:02.680 though, to change that narrative. Don't expect other people to. If you're fired on a Friday,

00:52:07.720 by Monday, most of your mates have gone back to work and couldn't care less. They'll think about

00:52:11.800 you once a week. Reality check. So don't expect everyone to keep calling you and stroking you and

00:52:17.720 saying it's all going to be okay. How can we help? Get on with it.

00:52:23.160 Is it part of you that thrives on conflict, Peter? Absolutely. Love it.

00:52:28.360 Why? Because it's fun.

00:52:30.840 Yeah, I'm like you. I couldn't imagine not thriving on conflict, because that means you never express

00:52:35.160 opinions. You never argue with people. It basically means you're a dullard. And who in the world wants to

00:52:41.720 be a dullard? Someone who just sits there, soaking up stuff, never challenging, never questioning,

00:52:49.160 never falling out with people. I mean, I love all that stuff. Making up is always such fun.

00:52:56.120 Nice long lunch with your sworn enemies. I even did it with Jeremy Clarkson. This scar on my head is

00:53:01.080 from his right fist at the British Press Awards. You've made up with Jeremy Clarkson. At the Scarsdale pub

00:53:05.720 around the corner. He messaged me at one in the morning and said, Morgan Clarkson here, drink.

00:53:10.440 I went to Scarsdale, Monday, 7pm it went. See you there. We went in like old enemy combatants.

00:53:18.600 And all I remember is he got very drunk on rosé, which I thought was a bit girly. No offence.

00:53:25.880 I was drinking pints of foaming ale, like Alan Partridge. And we got blind drunk and then his

00:53:30.840 daughter turned up. And I realised we had to have one of my kids for the peace settlement. I called my

00:53:36.520 eldest boy on the phone and we put him on and we had a formal peace settlement.

00:53:40.440 The handshake was made. And the war was over. I think it's still simmering slightly.

00:53:44.920 It wouldn't take a lot. We were in here one night. The wine was raging. We had an argument

00:53:49.800 about something. It wouldn't take a lot. The old scar would start twitching and I'd be like...

00:53:53.960 My army brother was like, you didn't hit him back. It's pathetic. What's the matter with you?

00:53:59.000 Any regrets, Piers, when you look back at the career?

00:54:01.160 I'm Edith P.F. To my veins. What's the point? Regret is such a waste of energy.

00:54:08.600 What's the point? You've got to think about it. What do I mean about changing the narrative?

00:54:11.960 You're much better off expending energy on changing your narrative.

00:54:15.320 Doing something which stops people looking back on something that's gone wrong for you.

00:54:19.800 That is a key part of my resilience and my thick skin. It's like I sit there and everyone else is

00:54:25.560 going, oh God, you know, whatever. And I'm sitting there thinking, what's next? What can I do?

00:54:30.520 What can I do? And to be able to get to where you want to get to, you've got to have a fresh head.

00:54:35.880 And I always say to people, when you get fired from a job or whatever, or you're involved in some

00:54:39.400 scandal, whatever it may be, go and clear your head. Just take four or five months and clear your head.

00:54:43.560 Go to a beach. Go and get fit. Go and do yoga, whatever you want to do. Clear your head. Turn your phone off.

00:54:48.440 Don't get engaged. Don't spend every minute of the day fretting over what your next move is going to

00:54:52.920 be. If you've got a clear head, you'll start being offered some interesting things. You'll make the

00:54:57.800 right call because you've got clear head. And then when you're ready to go again, you're full of energy

00:55:01.480 and you're fit and you're ready to go. That's been my experience. And then you can hit the ground

00:55:05.320 running. Whereas if you wallow in what's happened and think how unfair it all is, A, nobody gives a

00:55:09.960 shit. Honestly, outside of your family and closest friends, nobody cares. I'm not sitting there at home

00:55:16.040 when I've been fired or whatever, with people going, poor old Piers Morgan. They're like,

00:55:20.280 great. We got him this time. Jump on his grave. Jump on his head. And I know that. I'm laughing

00:55:28.840 because I think I'm going to have the last laugh on you, love.

00:55:31.000 Is that it? Because I'm like that. I'm like, I'm going to show you.

00:55:34.520 Yes. And it's going to be so satisfying when I do. It's going to piss off all the right people

00:55:40.280 so gloriously. And who are the right people to piss off, Piers?

00:55:45.160 Wokies. Wokies are the world's most ludicrous people now because they've become the very thing

00:55:53.320 they profess to hate most. They've become fascists and they can't even see it. And so they want to

00:55:59.320 cancel everything. They want to shame everything. They want to destroy everything. They want everyone

00:56:04.520 to think the same, act the same, have the same beliefs, have the same values, enjoy the same

00:56:11.800 films, enjoy the same rewritten books, enjoy the same statues, you know, celebrate the same parts

00:56:19.320 of history. That's called fascism. Literally what fascists do to a country. That would have been here

00:56:28.120 if people hadn't fought for freedom in the way that they did. And those people gave their lives

00:56:33.560 so that we could not only express opinions, but so that we would listen to people whose opinions

00:56:39.240 we completely disagree with. And we would go, you know what? You're entitled to your opinion.

00:56:43.960 And we seem to have lost that more and more.

00:56:45.640 We have lost that. And yet 90% of the public that I talk to, maybe more, think it's terrible that we've

00:56:52.600 lost that. Where's their voice? Actually, it's probably people like me fighting that fight for them.

00:56:58.120 And do you think that's why you get the ratings that you get? You get people following you is

00:57:03.160 because you are willing, unlike a lot of people in the media, you are the one who actually strays

00:57:08.920 from the party line. You are the one who challenges.

00:57:10.920 I think it takes a certain amount of balls to put your head over the parapet in this environment.

00:57:16.440 That's what I would say. I'm not going to blow too much smoke up my own backside. I don't mind

00:57:22.280 doing that, obviously. But I just think the reality is you've got to have some people prepared to have

00:57:28.600 this fight. And it doesn't make you popular. Although if you walked around with me for an hour,

00:57:35.400 you'd be amazed at the number of people that would come up and say, thank you for what you're doing,

00:57:41.720 even if they don't really agree with everything I'm saying. Because free speech matters to people

00:57:46.280 a lot more than I think people realize. And Piers, another thing that might surprise people,

00:57:52.360 given the public perception of you in certain circles, as you rightly say, actually, the Twitter

00:57:56.440 circles, is everyone I've spoken to and every time I've done your show, the people who work for you,

00:58:02.280 they really like you. Really? Yeah, they do. Well, don't tell anybody that. There's almost like

00:58:07.400 a sycophantic feel to some extent. It's brand damaging. And I've done your show on ITV. I've

00:58:12.680 done your show on Talk TV. That theme seems to be constant. And we know people used to work for you

00:58:18.200 way back when. And no one has a bad word to say about you, unlike out there in the media where

00:58:23.960 everyone has a bad word to say. Yeah, but it's interesting, isn't it? Because a lot of the journalists will base

00:58:29.320 their perception of what they think the public think of me based on Twitter, which is full of

00:58:33.960 lunatics. Whereas again, if you walk around with me, I never get any crap in the street from anybody,

00:58:39.560 whether I'm in New York, LA, Sydney, London, Scotland. It's universal. Normally, people laugh,

00:58:47.320 they smile when they see me, and we have a laugh. And it's not because they agree with everything I say

00:58:52.520 at all. In fact, quite the opposite sometimes. They just like the way I say it. And they like the fact

00:58:56.520 to have the balls to say it, to say what I think. And that has really resonated with people.

00:59:00.520 I don't get any problem at all when I walk around. Nothing. I can remember one person

00:59:06.440 after the Meghan Markle debacle. I was out with my daughter walking in the park and one of my sons.

00:59:12.920 And I was literally mobbed by about six or seven people, different groups of people coming over

00:59:17.800 who wanted to show their support. I had a crazy period after that. And then this woman came up,

00:59:22.680 it was obviously a Guardian reader. She had this sort of pinched face, you know, vegan-looking head,

00:59:28.920 tight helmet, too tight. It was cramming her cranium in. And she just came up and she said,

00:59:33.320 you're all revolting, revolting people. And my daughter, who was like nine or 10, just went,

00:59:39.400 include me. That was funny. But it was, but that literally, I can count on one hand.

00:59:45.560 Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't happen. It's a Twitter thing. And then the mainstream media assume,

00:59:52.680 because Twitter's blowing up at me all the time, that's what the public think. But they don't.

00:59:58.520 Not in my experience. I mean, maybe they all do and they just lie to my face, but that's not the

01:00:02.040 British way. So I think that Twitter is a fantastic tool, but it also skews a lot of things. Like I said,

01:00:09.320 it makes people assume all sorts of things are going to happen, which never happen. And it also creates an

01:00:14.520 atmosphere around high-profile people, which often bears no relation to the truth.

01:00:19.800 J.K. Rowling is hated on Twitter. But I bet you 90% of the British public probably agree with her.

01:00:27.080 Certainly agree. Probably more, yeah. And they look at what happened with the rapist in Scotland,

01:00:31.960 and they think, well, that's exactly what she was talking about. Exactly. That's it. Right there.

01:00:36.280 That's why she's right. And yet for expressing her opinions and turning up at an event two doors down,

01:00:44.120 the windows of this place got bashed in. So I know you've covered on your-

01:00:47.960 Well, we had James on the show to talk about it, yeah.

01:00:50.200 Really outrageous. Outrageous.

01:00:53.080 And to me, the hub of those particular types of opinions seems to be the BBC. Now,

01:00:59.640 where do you think the BBC goes from here?

01:01:01.560 No, it's pretty simple. I actually think what they should do is have a license fee for the BBC news and

01:01:08.760 current affairs and all the things that come off that. And if you want to pay it, it's voluntary,

01:01:14.840 like it is for Amazon, Netflix, all the rest of it. But if you want to get pretty unparalleled news

01:01:20.040 coverage, largely done, I think, in an impartial way, albeit by a lot of people who often in their

01:01:25.960 own lives are not remotely impartial. So there's a slight bias, which comes from the fact, I always

01:01:30.920 joke you could shoot a harpoon around the BBC newsroom and not hit a conservative.

01:01:34.600 But I do think that most of their output is pretty down the line. But I would take news and current

01:01:39.720 affairs and charge a subscription for that. And everything else, just make it completely

01:01:45.720 commercial, right? Sport, entertainment, why shouldn't it be? I mean, they all express opinions

01:01:49.960 all day long on Match of the Day, for example. I did Gary Denica, a football presenter, can't express

01:01:54.520 an opinion. And the current rules are so vague about non-newspeople. It was Laura Koonsberg or Hugh

01:02:01.320 Edwards, the main news people at BBC. Of course they can't express news opinions.

01:02:05.800 Gary Denica, you know, standing up as he would see it for refugees.

01:02:10.840 Really? Is that going to have any material effect on how people vote in this country?

01:02:14.680 No. What it did do, actually, was raise a big light on the policy, which probably hasn't worked out

01:02:22.360 for the Conservatives quite how they hoped, because it shone a light on some of the problems of the

01:02:26.840 policy. But as for Gary, he is a friend of mine, to full declaration. But I would say that if it was

01:02:32.200 a right-wing presenter. I mean, there aren't many who admit to doing that. But if it was somebody who

01:02:38.120 agreed with the small boats policy, for example, I would defend their right to have that opinion.

01:02:43.160 I actually wrote a column saying, I don't agree with what Gary said, actually. I think he's very

01:02:47.560 naive about a lot of this. And when you've got whatever it is, 30-odd percent of all the

01:02:52.200 people coming over on small boats turned out to be young economic migrants from Albania,

01:02:56.920 a safe country. Clearly, the system is deeply flawed. And you should be able to say that.

01:03:01.480 And so a lot of the woke left refused to accept even that demonstrable fact, which I think is

01:03:07.320 ridiculous. But in Gary's case, obviously, you shouldn't have compared it to 30s Germany.

01:03:12.920 I just have a rule of thumb. Just try and leave Hitler and the Nazis out of it.

01:03:17.720 Take another dictator.

01:03:19.640 Just anybody, anybody, anybody. And then you get ludicrous when people start comparing him

01:03:23.800 to Putin. And you're like, well, what's the difference? So I think it was all a bit crazy.

01:03:29.000 But at the heart of it is free speech. And I think that the BBC's problem really is

01:03:32.920 the license fee is anachronistic. My sons aren't going to pay a license fee. They're just not.

01:03:36.840 Piers, before we wrap up and ask you a final question, another friend of yours,

01:03:41.640 or maybe former friend of yours, looks like he's going to run again.

01:03:45.240 Donald. Donald. Big Donald.

01:03:47.160 He's running here.

01:03:48.920 What do you think about that? Is that going to be a good thing for America?

01:03:52.120 I think I'm hearing the same stuff I heard in 2015, that he hasn't got a cat in hell's chance

01:03:57.000 of winning. Absolutely, he's got a chance of winning. He wins a Republican nomination,

01:04:01.640 and that's probably going to be the toughest challenge he has. I would say that cyclically,

01:04:05.480 are people going to want another four years of Joe Biden, given how old he already seems?

01:04:12.040 And Doddory has been unkind for a moment, but he is Doddory. He's 80. He'll be 82 at the election,

01:04:17.960 86 at the end of his next term, if he runs again. I don't think people will vote for that over

01:04:22.840 someone like Trump, who's never had a drink in his life, never had a cigarette and never had a drug.

01:04:27.000 So for mid 70s, he's unbelievably full of energy. I mean, not crazy compared to Biden.

01:04:33.400 So I think he would beat Biden, actually, this time. And all he's got to do is get the nomination,

01:04:41.000 but I don't think he can get a nomination. I think Republicans are going to veer to someone

01:04:46.200 like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. I think. But with Trump, everything's unpredictable.

01:04:52.120 Is it going to be a good thing for the world?

01:04:55.000 Well, look, with Trump, I always felt, if you took away all the rhetoric and the tweeting.

01:04:59.480 If you took away all the things that make Donald Trump, Donald Trump.

01:05:02.520 If you take all the things that come out of his mouth, which make him very electable,

01:05:05.960 as we saw. I remember 10 million more people voted for him a second time around than first.

01:05:10.520 If it took four years, look at him and like what they saw in America.

01:05:14.520 He still got beaten, but he had the second highest number of votes in history, second time.

01:05:18.120 Right. Right. So we've got to get these things into perspective. And I spent a lot of time in

01:05:21.640 middle America doing crime documentaries in Alabama and, you know, Arkansas and, you know,

01:05:28.280 all these places, Miami and Dallas. And you get a very different view of Trump when you're down

01:05:33.960 there to the one you get in New York and L.A. And I always say that I wouldn't put it past him.

01:05:38.200 He's got a lot of legal stuff going on and who knows where that all goes. But I've not seen a real

01:05:43.080 smoking gun yet with him, which could, I think, bring him down or prevent him becoming potentially.

01:05:48.200 I mean, look, can you imagine if he won again? The inauguration speech, the gloating that would go

01:05:53.640 on. It would be literally insufferable. But he could do it. He could. I'd never bet against him.

01:05:58.760 One thing I've learned with Trump, he's a very he's got extraordinary charisma. And I don't say that

01:06:04.280 necessarily is a great compliment. You know, you've had very malevolent political leaders.

01:06:09.240 You've had extraordinary charisma. I don't want to mention him, but Hitler would be one, right?

01:06:14.600 I thought you were going to say Jeremy Corbyn.

01:06:16.360 Well, he didn't have charisma. But you have malevolent dictators like Hitler and others who,

01:06:22.440 Mussolini, they've all got great charisma. And that enables them to inspire a big following.

01:06:27.960 Trump has that. He's not as malevolent, certainly, as those two were. But he can be quite malevolent in

01:06:33.560 some of the things he does. But it's often within more the way he says stuff than what his actual

01:06:37.880 policies are. He's actual policies. If you simply took him on policy, they were quite popular with

01:06:43.400 people. Control your borders, lower taxes, you know, be America first. I mean, if you don't think

01:06:50.440 most Americans go along with all that, they do. So I think that his problem is what comes out of his

01:06:57.080 mouth and what comes off his fingers. That's been the problem with him. So I think it's everything to

01:07:03.880 play for. If you're going to beat him as a Republican candidate, then I think you're

01:07:08.840 definitely going to have what it takes to be president. Because the biggest battle they're

01:07:12.360 going to face, when they get on that first debate stage, whoever it is, they know Trump is basically

01:07:17.560 King Kong. And he's going to try and smash them all down, one by one. And it's whether any of them

01:07:22.680 can beat him. That's going to be fascinating to watch. Did you like him? Or do you like him?

01:07:26.680 I do like him. Yeah. He does things that I hate. But then I think I've got a lot of friends like

01:07:34.120 that. There are lots of people like that who I like, but they do stuff I don't like.

01:07:42.360 So I don't think he's the devil as some people think. And he's certainly not as angelic as some

01:07:48.520 of his more diehard supporters think. I think he's somewhere in between. But I will say to my liberal

01:07:52.680 friends, on migrants, for example, how many migrants did Barack Obama deport in eight years?

01:08:02.920 And there's always a stunned silence. And then I say, well, give me a number.

01:08:06.760 And this is people from the smart crowd here. And in America. And then they start guessing and they

01:08:11.560 go, in eight years, I don't know, 100,000? And someone else would go, half a million?

01:08:17.320 10? Some will say, 10? Because that's the presumption. Barack Obama must have been a

01:08:22.040 really nice guy with migrants. And the actual answer is three million migrants were deported

01:08:26.360 under Obama, which is the highest prorata of any president ever. And he was known as deporter-in-chief

01:08:32.840 in Mexico. He campaigned in 08-09 to shut down Guantanamo Bay, because as a legal brain,

01:08:39.080 he thought this was unconscionable. And it's still open. He dropped more bombs in his last year than

01:08:44.600 I think any American president in modern history. He launched all the secret drone programs.

01:08:49.960 There's another way you can skin this cat with Obama being actually doing some pretty bad stuff

01:08:56.920 that liberals gave him a pass for, and Trump doing a lot of good things amid all the mayhem,

01:09:01.880 which he doesn't get enough credit for. I would look at what he did. I mean,

01:09:05.720 he didn't go to war in four years. Pretty amazing. The only Jimmy Carter in modern times has been another

01:09:11.560 president that could say that. He always said to me, he just thought war was too expensive,

01:09:16.760 which is a Trump way of looking at it. It wouldn't be about people dying. It's just too expensive.

01:09:20.760 But to his credit, America didn't just start invading places when he was president.

01:09:26.520 He took on ISIS very effectively. You'd look at the way that perhaps Putin and Kim Jong-un and others

01:09:35.480 reacted to Trump and behaved around him. It's an interesting point. Would Putin have invaded Ukraine

01:09:41.480 if Trump had been president? I'm not sure about the answer to that question. Certainly worth thinking

01:09:45.480 about. Because he was unpredictable. And it's a great asset, actually, for an American president

01:09:50.280 to be unpredictable. Biden is very predictable.

01:09:53.000 Yeah. Piers, well, thank you so much. It's been a great chat. Pleasure.

01:09:57.560 We're going to ask you a few questions from our supporters that only they will get to see the

01:10:01.080 answer to. But before we do that, our final question is always the same. What is the one

01:10:05.000 thing that we're not talking about as a society? And I know that you talk about everything you think,

01:10:08.760 but what is the one thing that we are not talking about as a society that you really think we should be?

01:10:13.400 Well, Arsenal winning the league, obviously.

01:10:16.600 Plenty of people are talking about that.

01:10:18.440 I think, my honest answer would be, I think the biggest crisis facing young people is mental

01:10:26.600 health. And what we're not talking about is the best way to combat mental health problems. I'm not

01:10:34.280 talking about diagnosable mental illness. I'm not talking about clinical depression and things like

01:10:39.160 that. I'm talking about this epidemic of anxiety. And I think we're going about it completely the wrong

01:10:44.920 way. So I would like to have the mental health debate completely reframed into a constant barrage of

01:10:53.960 influential, high profile people talking about, as I've done in this interview, about mental strength

01:11:00.440 and resilience and thick skin and dealing with life's problems. I'd like the Rocky Balboa speech to his

01:11:06.040 son played on loop in schools every morning at assembly. I'm serious, right? Instilling kids that normal

01:11:13.480 life shit is not life ending, right? Because what's happened in the last few years, the more I've

01:11:19.560 noticed that we talk about everyone being mentally ill and suffering from acute anxiety and kids being

01:11:26.520 depressed and all these things, the more we've talked about it, I've just noticed the more of it

01:11:31.320 there's been. The more anxious they've got, the more depressed they've got, almost like they're all kind

01:11:36.920 of wallowing now in this world of misery that they're constantly being told there's things wrong

01:11:42.840 with them rather than celebrating what might be right about them and focusing them on that and

01:11:48.920 getting them out of this thinking. I mean, the number of young kids now at university taking

01:11:54.280 antidepressant medication is terrifying or anti-anxiety medication. I was young, we didn't even have those

01:12:02.040 things. You had to have a thicker skin just to get through the day, right? And now it's just like

01:12:07.640 there's a constant crutch. But I don't like the narrative from the top down. All these celebrities

01:12:14.360 talking all the time about, I nearly killed myself. I nearly, you know, I've had acute depression. I've

01:12:18.920 got OCD. I've got this. I've got PTSD. All of them have got 20 things wrong with them. And they talk

01:12:23.960 about it all the time. And then all these young, impressionable people are looking and watching this

01:12:27.800 and hearing it thinking, oh yeah, I've got that. I've got that. I've got that. Self-diagnosing,

01:12:31.880 hitting Google. And then before you know it, they're all medicated up. That's what's going on.

01:12:36.280 So I would like that narrative to change. I couldn't agree with you more, man. And

01:12:40.360 it's actually one of the reasons that I oppose wokeness so much is that it's training people to be

01:12:46.040 fragile. Yes. Well, it's telling them not only to be fragile, but that you will be celebrated for it.

01:12:51.320 And there's money and then they're fragile hills. You can be a celebrity and a success story

01:12:56.680 just by saying, I've got all these things wrong with me.

01:13:00.760 It's a great point to finish on. Piers, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:13:03.880 I recommend everybody get the book, of course. And we will see you very shortly with some

01:13:07.800 questions from our local supporters. But for now, thank you for watching and listening.

01:13:11.080 We'll see you very soon. Another brilliant episode like this one or our show. All of them

01:13:15.320 go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

01:13:19.080 it's always available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:13:22.520 Do you think Meghan will dump Prince Harry?

TRIGGERnometry - March 23, 2023

Piers Morgan： Why I Don't Care About My Critics

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