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

25:44They just say, you won't wear a pop, you're just a disgusting disgrace. You're right, son, 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, the boy who cried, what, the boy who cried woke, that you have this immune response that immediately gets triggered, because you're not happy with it. Something else, you know, one of the most interesting things I think over the last few years has been to see your Ark through legacy media and now joining us in the muck in the myers are you degenerate 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 defense Well, it came about because I launched this New show Piers Morgan are censored and we were launching it on top TV in the UK Which was a new network launched by Rupert Murdock And concurrently, we set up a YouTube channel.

26:39And it was really interesting. Like I was doing big interviews with Donald Trump in Christiana Ronaldo and Kanye West and all these people, yay, as he calls himself now. And 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 -tape them us on. 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. And when this went on for a year or two, I was eventually like, why are we doing this?

27:17Why are we losing money hand over this to cater to? Probably quite an aging audience. You know, if you look at the average age of cable news in America audience, it's 70 now for Fox, CNN, MSNBC. They're all people, right? I mean, that means a lot of them probably 80. Young people do not watch television, but from life's fault. I know, because I've got four kids from 31 to 13. Another much TV. 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. And so we got to about a year ago, February of 2024, and I came off, linear TV completely.

28:02And we just went full YouTube. And we've now got three and a half million subscribers, which you will appreciate. It's not bad into an half years. I think Joe Rogan four years to get to a million, not the long comparing. I am comparing. And we now get millions of views for our content on almost pretty much everything. And sometimes we get real poppers like the Bass and Usyf, the Egyptian comedian, the Implifical Activist, 22 million people watched that. The real life stalker from, or Martha, a led stalker from Baby Rendir, again, 16, 17 million people watched that on our YouTube channel. We would never got anything like that on the Nutella vision.

28:40What about from the sort of rhetoric perspective of from your, you know, journalisming, you always wanted to be a journalist, always loved the new son and so forth, but this, how much is this a new way to assess the day's stories and what has it unlocked anything or is it just kind of a different package? I think for me, I love two parts of it. One being a ringmaster to really good debates with smart people. I have a no dummies rule and we've exercised it a few times where people don't get invited back for too dumb because nobody wants to hear dumb people debating serious topics. We do a lot of serious debates whether it's American election debates, whether Whether it's Ukraine, Russia, whether it's Israel, the mass war, you know, P.

29:23Diddy's scandal, whatever it may be, you need smart people. And that's my criteria for booking guests to the debates. But also I want to balance it up. I want to have equal numbers on both sides smart debating it. 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. You know, if you look at people, I really admire on the space, people like Ben Jibiro making Kelly and others. They obviously come at it from an unashamedly conservative bias. I don't. Similarly, on the left, Medi Hassan and others come at you.

29:56Chang, you go, although he's beginning to move quite rapidly. I've noticed to the dark side, as he would put it. They've, they've, they're from the left. I'm in the middle, genuinely in the middle. People could not position me into Republican or Democrat or hear conservative or labor. 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. 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 kinds of debates.

30:30I do. 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. You might all have different slants on what you've been telling me, but I've learned a lot of basic information about this. You spend a lot of time either arguing with people, or watching people argue with people. I love a good argument. I can tell. What's your... You're a more nuanced karma. Yeah, I think I borrow it, which again, I also really like as well. Occasionally, I will do that with people. But as a rule of thumb, I like a good old heated knockabout debate.

31:00I've noticed, yeah. What's your advice for disagreeing better with people? 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, the Israeli -Hamas war, the people I've had on are most respected, have been able to concede if you're on the Palestinian side, for example. And I am to a large degree supportive of a lot of what they say about the way Palestinians have been treated. But if they come on and they say that they won't condemn Hamas, is to ask everyone the same question, came a bit of a running joke on social media.

31:36But there's a reason I ask it. If they condemn what Hamas did on October 7th, I can move forward to a debate where I know that they're intellectually honest. 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, they won't see a terror attack in front of their eyes, and call it out for what it is. Similarly on the pro -Israel side, if they don't have any empathy or sympathy for the plan 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.

32:13They're not because you can have both opinions as I do. So I think that intellectual honesty is a powerful tool. When I've had Israel guess recently, who've omitted quite readily the expansion of the settlements on the West Bank is just plain wrong and probably constitutes a war crime. I think great, that's intellectual honesty there because obviously it is. But if they don't, if they try and even defend that, you know you're dealing with people who are just so hyperpartisan, 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.

32:52What 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. Yeah, I'm not, I like crying. Which is less times than Hunter Biden has commit crimes, actually. Look at his current record. But yeah, even you must feel the heart rate rise, the cord is all levels. What about that? What about staying cool during a... 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 you, when something you care about.

33:25I've done that a lot through these war periods when I felt that, But I feel people are being just crass and completely insensitive to things. I feel the blood boiling a bit. But I come back to the best debates 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. That is where I think we've become a really powerful show. Yeah, it's like Jerry Springer for the 125 IQ generation. Well, I knew Jerry Springer very well.

34:00Jerry was a host on America's Got Talent for a year, two years ago. And we lived in the same hotel in LA, the Beverly Walshia. And we used to hang out by the pool. And we just chat. Jerry was a fast -standing guy. He'd been mayor of Cincinnati. He'd been a news anchor for 10 years of a serious news program. Many got asked to do this pilot for a show. 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. He said, he said, I make the word show on TV, but he was also making hundreds of millions of dollars.

34:31He was like, you have not hating porn. Right. So Jerry knew it was awful. But he also never talked down about the people that came up. I felt that quite strongly about the Jeremy Kiles scandal here. I was literally about to say that, what happened to Jeremy doing now? He's doing great. He's working over at talk and he does a show there. I don't want to speak out of turn, but I know he's got some big plans because he told me, which are going to be in the news quite soon. Do you think it was Jewel redemption arc for the people that don't? Well, he was basically the... Well, the quest found he didn't do anything wrong, right?

35:00I mean, he never had done. I mean, here are 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 again, there was a lot of snobbery about that show and the kind of people who weren't on it. These were working class people who wanted to go on that show, wanted to air their feelings, right? If you're taking your argument, If you all had IQs of 150 plus, some are talking about feelings on newsnight, we'd all applaud them for their courage, right? I mean, I'd say this to my American friends all the time, but the fact the word posh, I've never once heard be used by an American, but class is so baked into the British system, the British culture, and there is this, and snobbery.

35:43It did almost feel a little bit your right. It almost felt kind of like a zoo for working class people, for middle class people to watch working class people. Yeah, oh you dance, get angry. You never saw many contestants complaining about their experience or complaining about the show. Or not contestants, what would you call them? The people who appeared on it. I don't know how they would kind of contest in some other word. Oh, they were, occasionally. But what would be the, 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 dirty linen.

36:19Now, you can be snobbish about it and say, well, how dare you do that. But I see smart people do that all the time. 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? If you're emoting, but you happen to be a Hollywood star or you happen to be a tycoist or a politicianist of your delivery is really the only difference. It's all the principles exactly the same. You're just airing your dirty linen. I mean, I mean, if Harry and Meghan do it with Oprah, I felt it was just a posh royal version of what you saw on the screen.

36:55That's very, very, very good. Exactly the same. It's exactly the same. 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, it's signed a petition for Kierstarm at a leave. Then this insanely surprising U -turn from Kierstarm are about immigration saying that the Tories ran an open border policy, all of the riots that we saw across the country this summer. What do you, how do you come to think about it, the country that you chose until 11? I think, I think that America has got its confidence back and Trump has been responsible that as has Elon Musk.

37:31I think the little thing, the rocket's going off, right? They're just instilling people a sense of America's firing rockets again. They're taking us to the moon. 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, which is great imagery. He's making people feel confident against it. In the UK, there's no sense of that. 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. Obviously, we need immigrants to work as a country, But you can't have a net migration to nearly a million people and expect already struggling public services to not struggle even more.

38:20You just can't. And they said they'd fix the boats, the boats, I think more people are coming in than ever. But his actual legal migration is a big problem, bigger than the boats as you. 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 racist. You are racist. In the same way that if you talk about trans athletes and sport, you're transphobic. But we just see. And that all that has to stop. But we've just seen Keir Starmer say, give a two minute statement which went ballistic on social media that the conservatives couldn't have got away with three, four years ago.

39:00Could not have said that. So two things, has the Overton window shifted? And secondly, is this just a guy that's had two million people put a petition together for him going, I need to do something to slug. I don't think he's that so much, but he will certainly have looked to what happened in America and why Trump won. And he'll think, if I don't fix the cost of living illegal immigration and stop the woke crap infesting my party, I'm done for. Particularly if you've got someone circling like Nigel Farage, who is the UK version of Trump. And he's a good friend of Trump's, right? And Farage is, you know, Farage's views were considered extreme.

39:38they're now considered increasingly mainstream because he's been proven on immigration to be right. Right, not about everything. Some of the languages you use has been in my view, wrongly inflammatory, but it's basic principle about if you don't have a board as Ronald Reagan said, if you don't have a proper board, you don't have a country. That's coming back to be clearly the case. So we need to be able to have an honest debate about this, without people being called racist, if they raise concerns about what is an obvious problem. But every country wants to have some borders. Like what are you, well you're not a country if you don't precisely correct.

40:12Elon Musk rumours a threat of $100 million to be tossed at Nigel Farage. You knew him had a bit of a run in earlier on this year. What do you make of that? Would you be happy to see Farage get a hundred mill from Elon? I don't think you can do that legally in our country. Someone was saying there's a legal impediment to him actually doing that as a foreign. He's rich, he can get around it. As a foreign citizen, yeah. Look, he obviously had a big effect on Trump, I don't know, I think he's a question of that. I think Elon's allowed to do what he likes, he's a free citizen. But would it help the UK politics to have that position?

40:43Well, he would balance it out, because at the moment, Labour certainly have a lot more money coming in than the Tories in my last election. So they all take money from people, right? Some take money from very dodgy people, indeed. 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. If they can't really afford to do that. If the Conservatives are dead in the water as people think in the UK is reform where the attention should be. It's a very, very good position. I mean, can we bad not just go to do something pretty radical and pretty quickly with the Conservative Party?

41:14Or my prediction would be that Farage may well end up being the next Prime Minister, as Elon Musk has said. I don't think I'm some mad idea at all. But he might be by then running a Conservative Party which has had reform flip into it. That's where my smart money would be. is that they'll do a deal, they'll merge the parties and that probably Farrah gends up, contest him an ex -election, and if Kirstaama has not delivered by them on all his promises or any of them, then he could be political toast. I've had Dominic Cummings on the show and he also did a podcast recently where he talked about theatrics, I think he could say in government that there was sort of fake meritocracy, fake responsibility, fake government, he also said that cabinet meetings are fully scripted.

42:04Based on what he says, based on what Rory Stewart says, I don't know, it really does not feel like we have the brightest buttons in the bun. We don't. We have a very mediocre tier of politicians now. I mean, you go back to the FATCHER years and our cabinets, just packed full of very smart people. Tony Blair's cabinet, you know, for the first two terms in particular, it could be smart people. People like Gordon Brown as Charles, they're just unbelievably brilliant brains. So I think that's certainly true. I think a lot of smart people, but if they've made good money, don't want to get into politics because it's just going to ruin their lives.

42:40The worst paying most negative boring... In Singapore, famously, they pay their politicians a million dollars a year. Do you know what the head of UK cybercrime wage was? It was offered a couple of years ago, £65 ,000. 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. What they couldn't do is have any outside interest. So I might even pay them half a million pounds a year, but I say you cannot have any stock investments, you cannot have any outside business in that. Richie soon, that could be fucked.

43:12Yeah, what do you would? Yeah. But in a way, I didn't, in fact, I've richie was sinking rich. I was fine about that. I think you don't make decisions then based on what's going to benefit you. Right? So in some ways it insulates you for me. I wonder if a lot of tours have not got sellers remorse about Rishie actually. I think the way he behaved after he lost, he was very impressive in the comments after that. I was like to it. I think he made a few strategic missteps, but actually pretty smart, committed hardworking guy. And yeah, the fact he was rich didn't bother me at all. But I think it's going to be very interesting.

43:44I mean, I do think we're deliberately attracting mediocre people to politics now because we don't make it attractive enough. Well, we're second. To attract the smart people. The UK is second in the world in millionaire exits in 2024. The first in the world is China. We're about, I think, 13 to 15 ,000. And the UK is about 10 ,000. But we are 3 % of the population. We have more than India. And India is 20 times bigger. We have the same number of universities in the top 10 in the world as America do. but we have one -fifth the number of startup fund -rodge pronates. Why? 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, but I think even bottom up, you know, I'm from a Stockton working class town, and I saw some videos of Middlesbrough, right?

44:39It's going through Acklem, like places that I know, and places that I've been, and like just working class rage, people disgruntled, and this, you know, Well hang on, okay, let's talk about these riots for a minute. Here we go. Because that wasn't why they were rioting. Of course, that's my point. My point is 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? They hadn't. It wasn't actually an illegal asylum seeker who committed these actions.

45:12And so people were exactly in a way on a smaller, it was a smaller version of the Iraq war, which I oppose. So, the difference is, I'll tell you why. It was full on an entirely false pretext. Had Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That's water, but he'd been justified. Had the person who perpetrated this crime been a legal 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 a legal asylum seeker's coming in and 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.

45:48Even the premise wasn't accurate. But everything about it was wrong, right? So the riots were whipped up by people, malevolent voices who should have known better. The Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and others took on Tate about this a few days later. And that's a problem with social media. Now, 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? I don't agree with that because it seems a ridiculous overreach. And when you overreach to that level where people are literally, you know, grandmothers have been put in prison for two years, but something they put on Facebook, that's not a sensible response to this either.

46:26If people are actually chucking Molotov cocktails at an asylum seeker hotel, yeah, chucking me in prison for a few years. But a granny gobbling off on Facebook, come on. Is that what we're really about in Miss Country? Right. There was a thing I realized when I watched those videos in middle sprints was a lot of the people that were walking down the street, there was a new build house with fresh windows. And it was, you could tell because it still had that sort of tape papering over the outside. And people were out in the streets going through a classic northern terrorist working class neighborhood.

47:01And someone just picked up a brick and threw it through the window of his 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 and retext, it's just this sort of... Well, that would be an angry resentment. But to what? Well, people having what you don't have and you'll feel, and who knows what's going on in these people's lives, right? I understand. But like, I... I understand the rage of people who may be 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, their lives are shit, and I understand they're going to feel angry.

47:34Of course I do. And by the way, there are lots of people in this country who are in that position, lots. And you've got to understand what is driving that anger and resentment. I lived half of my life was spent in that world. 50 % and 36, I was there until I was 18 and then I left to go to university in Newcastle. So I know these people, I know that culture very well. It's like it's electric, it's like the air before a thunderstorm begins. And it's this sort of ambient malevolence below the surface is disgruntledness. but it feels to me like the UK has a very, very sort of potent version of this.

48:09Great video that I saw 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 would happily, if there weren't police officers between the other two. Hang on again. Again, I know. They like this. They're like a fine name. It's not overthink football legends, right? 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. And to understand a mind of a football hooligan, you need to start from that.

48:42It's not some great. 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... Yeah, the mob mentality can brew up very quickly. Of course, I've been a football match. You think they're downstream from the more aggressive parts of the stadium? Yeah, I think a lot of football hooligan... I mean, look, when I was young football hooligans dominated every single match, it was pretty scary and thrilling at the same time. I can't pretend otherwise. When I was 1890 watching battles on materias, it was exciting in a way that watching a UFC fight can be exciting.

49:10But I'd rather have the more controlled environment than having it happening all over the world. 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 who they may like to see themselves as political polenis with their fists, but they're not. Most of them just like a good fight. You used to have no longer used to have a Twitter bio one day a cock of the walk the next to feather dust. What did that mean to you? Well it was handed to my great uncle John. It was a war hero. He got the George medal for heroism in the war.

49:43Actually a brilliant story because he was in the army in World War II. He'd been invalidated temporarily out with some bad injuries. and he was in a pub where he's been his being billy -sy with his I think was the Irish Resurant and they were 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 they hadn't exploded and they heard one of them say bomber bomber and my great uncle John jumped in looked around, found the bomb which was designed to blow up the prototype plane to the Allies couldn't get the information from it and throw it away into a pond where it blew up and He got the George medal would have been the George Cross, which is the military version But at the time he was actually Sealed it didn't mean deemed to be a civilian because he was invalid He was gonna go back and And it was actually it was a battle of Graveney Mars.

50:41You can read about it It was it was the last time that British troops engaged an enemy in in British soil and it was 70 years ago. And the anniversary about, it must have been 10 years ago, my brother went down, it was an army colonel, with my grandmother, whose brother it would be. And they had a lovely day down in Graveney Marsh. And that was the last time, and he won the medal for that. Yeah, so it does a great story. And the other great part of it was he went to get his Jordan medal up in, up from Bucky and Palace. I think it was from, I still be from the Queen, I guess. And he went out the night before with the regiment, got blind drunk, came back, told the porter outside.

51:19I've gone the appointment with the queen at 11 o 'clock. 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. So it's a great uncle John, a fantastic guy. Anyway, the point of the story is that he was his, he was at Covent Garden talking to a flower cellar. And the flower cellar was imparting these phrases. And one was life ate much, but it's all your gods. So stick a drony in your out and be happy. And I'm not sure if the other one, the cock of the walk, my grandmother always gave me this phrase, one day, or cock of the walk, the next to feather duster.

51:56But she would send it to me with pictures of a cock of a cock roll. But I was going through a particularly good time. Just to remind me, be careful, because the feather dust might be around the corner. Very, very good device. So I'm not sure if she got that from Uncle John, but he certainly got a lot of his sayings from this Covent Garden Flower Center. So, you know, you've had, you say, tumultuous, turbulent, some would say, fun, journey, yes. I mean, I don't see it as turbulent as all the people do. Well, it's certainly been ups and downs. How do you not let failure get to you too much? Right, come from the Winston Churchill School of Thought.

52:35You know, failure is going from, what would know? Success is going from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm. And he was the greatest bread of all time. But he had a lot of failures. He had a lot of successes. You know, the great, 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. 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 bloat, had a great chat with him.

53:10Quite a size occupant 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. See what happens. Sometimes it's been spectacularly successful. Sometimes it's crashed and burned. It's okay.' In the moment, do you, how do you deal with sort of regulating that with time to time? I'm going to go back to the gym slowly, okay? Literally counter -temp. Literally deep breath, however bad it is, whatever it is, I counter -temp. And at the end of 10, okay, now crack on. There's nothing you can do about it.

53:45There's nothing you can do about it. What was the, is there a particularly intense counter -tenor, a particularly long one that comes to mind? 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 may be. They always seem worse to other people than they did to me in the moment, I would say. I just literally do the count to tell me whatever it is. 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.

54:19Look at Donald Trump, right? That guy has got the thinnest skin in history. He'll react to absolutely everything, but he also has a thick skin in that he can take stuff that no other politician has ever taken and keep pounding forward. And I love the scene in Rocky in the sixth film when he's got the spoil bright sum. He's in his 20s who hates being Rocky Sarn and moaning and whining and he's just a spoiled little brat and Rocky eventually has an album in his street and he said listen, life is not a 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.

54:58That's how winning is done. And I love that speed so much. My son's have it on. And that's keep pounding to you as well, right? Keep pounding, right? Because something will happen. 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. I remember Kelvin McKenzie, the infamous but brilliant editor of the Sun. The only it is for either work for, actually. And I worked for five years when the sun was selling that for five million copies. And he used to rampage around from morning, noon and night.

55:28It was terrifying, it's critical. But it was in the paper crackle with great energy. It was a days when papers were very, very important. And I remember he said, you know, there's this, there must have been no thing about you Morgan, after one tremendous bolicking, he gave me eyes bulging, neck straining, the whole thing. He said, is every, because I I've gone back in about an hour later with a good scoop. So the most annoying thing is I can't break you. Every time I give you a bolicking, you just come back quickly with a scoop. He said, I admire it and I hate it in equal measure. And I do, and I've always tried to be like that.

56:05I just think it's such wasted energy to wallow in misery or negativity or something that's bad has 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 as success. They'd celebrate the failure because they'd learn more from the failures. I completely agree. And toughens you up. Tough stuff in life, toughens you up. Have you said things that feel terrible in the moment, very rarely are? They always look back on the worst things that have ever happened to you.

56:39If you're still alive, think about the worst things that have ever happened to you. How bad do they feel now? And guess what? You woke up this morning. It wasn't as bad as you thought. Right, so to 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, carry on. But look back at the worst moments of your life, the moments you thought you'd never recovered from. Look where you are. You recovered. Well, like I say, if you're dead, that's bad. If you're terminally ill, that's bad, right? But after that, What's stopping you bouncing back other than yourself?

57:16So 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. Clea, whenever a friend of mine loses a high profile job, and it happens a lot in the media. I was saying the same thing. I said, turn your phone off and piss off for three or four months. Just go to a beach, write a book, lie down, just chill. Don't take any off of your given for the next three or four months because your head won't be in the right space at all. So best advice you can give anybody. Clear? 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.

57:52But you'll probably just end up working it out like you always have. Yes. But I do think we are not training young minds or right away. I felt very strongly about this for a long time. I see what that looked like. Well, I see so many, my youngest son in particular, his age group had a lot of anxiety issues and I've been wrestling with why and I've read Jonathan Hates' brilliant book about mobile phones, you know cell phones and how actually since 2010 the incidence of anxiety and depression in young people is massively accelerated. 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.

58:36And I want to really tackle the anxiety epidemic. That's what it is. I think there being exposed to way too much negative dopamine all day long on their phones. They are seeing imagery from Gaza, from Ukraine that we never would have been able to see when I was at age. Ever. You couldn't see it. You were protected. Newspapers wouldn't put that stuff in the paper. 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. Somebody was eaten by a crocodile in Florida, right, on a golf course. You didn't even know about it.

59:13Now you're watching the video of the guy from someone's camera phone being eaten by the crocodile. So that's not going away. Well, it's not going away, but look at what Australia's done with banning social media from the 16th. I agree with that. And it's not a free speech issue. It's a free, the brain issue. When you support that in the UK. I would actually, yeah, I do think but social media of under 16 is dangerous. I do because they're not regulated like a newspaper or TV network. They're just not. Look at Twitter every all day. You think it's regulated? It's not. Look at Facebook. Is it right now?

59:45They're not regularly, 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 to impressionable young brains have to that material, as we would anything else. And I think that's a really important thing. I've seen the reaction, it's quite interesting the reaction. Well, it's quite split. Like I've seen people on the right and the left agreeing and disagree, which makes me think it's an interesting debate to have. I don't know. What's using it?

1:00:19I've got four kids, so maybe I would back it. I would back it older. I mean, I'd be tempted to back it up to 18. I just don't like, but the argument here is you can get married to 16. So I'm going to get married to 16 but not your social media to your age. Yeah exactly. Well, why are you going to find your wife? You know what I mean? It's going to be at work. It's going to have to be using social media. So it's going to be 16 to good age limit. Yeah. My daughter's 13, I don't think her life gets benefited at all the next three years by being exposed to everything that's on social media. Yeah. What's next for you?

1:00:50Well, I want to make, here's Morgan on a sense of the biggest YouTube channel on the world. What does that mean? Well, I would say at the moment, yeah, I think the potential for a brand -like mind to expand the brand to bring other people in a bit like the Daily Wire, big, big, big, great network, credit network of uncensored people doing uncensored things, YouTube channel, books, documentaries, merchandise, one of my favorite stories of Daily Wire is that the heads are running with an advertiser about hair journal something. So they launched their own hair gel line, and it's making it chocolate.

1:01:24It's making like 10, 20 million a year, right? Yeah, I'd have a bit of Morgan merch, but I think the potential for what I'm doing and what you do is obviously potentially massive. This was the first YouTube election in America where more people watched analysis and election coverage and election night on YouTube than broadcast or cable news. Also the first podcast election where one candidate did endless big podcasts and YouTube shows. What if the 2028 debate was hosted by appears Morgan? Yeah. Why not? Why not? You get bigger audience? No question. Love to do that. I would love to do that. I'd watch it.

1:02:03Pears Morgan, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate you. It's very good to catch up. Good to see you. We need to leave and go and do your show now. We do. Good to see you. And you.