The Hidden Man | Piers Morgan | EP 295

I said to do you mind if I just speak frankly to you? Said sure. I said look the thing you've lacked this year, and it may be you just don't have this valve, so be honest with me, but you've lacked empathy. You haven't been comforter in Chief. You don't seem to have that tool in your Armory. You just want to be the strong commander-in-chief. And I said that lack of empathy is going to cost you because you're up against Joe Biden, who everybody knows from his own personal tragedies has huge amounts of personal empathy for people, and it would go an awful long way.

But then I watched him go out the next day and do some press thing, and he was just exactly the same as normal, so I don't think he really has an empathy valve. Well, he's capitalized on being disagreeable. If you're in the public eye like that and you're a critic and you want to say what you have to say, and you want to separate the wheat from the chaff, it's useful to be disagreeable. But you can't be disagreeable all the time. It does look to me like this is an Achilles heel for Trump, this tendency to devolve into a very effective but somewhat juvenile bullying.

And then combined with that, this proclivity to play the victim, which I really think is stunningly off-brand for him, it leaves everyone on the conservative side in the same position that the radicals on the left want to put conservatives, which is to abandon all faith in the credibility of institutions.

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Hello everyone, I'm very pleased today to have with me Mr. Pierce Morgan. Mr. Morgan is an English broadcaster, although he's well known outside of the UK as well. He's a journalist, writer, and TV personality. He began his career in the UK in 1988 at quite a young age at The Sun, the newspaper. In 1994, at 29, he was appointed News of the World editor by Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul. He was the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than 50 years. From 1995 to 2004, Pierce edited the Daily Mirror and then served as first news editorial director from 2006 to 2007.

On TV, from 2009 to 2021, Pierce hosted the ITV talk show Life Stories, the CNN chat show Piers Morgan Live from 2011 to 2014, and the ITV breakfast program Good Morning Britain from 2015 to 2021. He was a judge on both America's Got Talent from 2006 to 2011 and Britain's Got Talent from 2007 to 2010. In 2008, he won the Celebrity Apprentice U.S., appearing with future U.S. president Donald Trump.

We're going to talk today about Pierce's career, about being a journalist and a celebrity, as well about interacting with celebrities. But I think we're going to start with a brief discussion about an interview that Pierce conducted with me in the UK a couple of weeks ago, as of the taping date of this interview and discussion. So it seems to have attracted a fair bit of positive attention, I would say, perhaps for both of us. And what do you make of it?

Well, first of all, it showed me what my belief was before I interviewed you, which is that you are an internet phenomenon in all guises. The attention that the interview attracted online was, by our standards of our fledgling show and network of six months or so, absolutely staggering. In fact, right up there with my first interview, which was Donald Trump.

So I found that very interesting to go into a world on YouTube, in particular, in which you are so dominant and so well known. To see that an interview could be cut up in the way that we did it with various clips and see each of them be watched by millions and millions of people, and I found that very interesting.

It also played into my sort of sense that the most interesting interviews actually are with people who have something to say. You know, you and I both know that we've interviewed lots of people over the years who often don't have very much to say for themselves, and they could be the most famous people on the planet but be incredibly boring. I would rather take interesting, controversial, polarizing, perhaps divisive people, or certainly the way that they are portrayed perhaps by the media, and interview those types of people because it makes for more interesting interviews.

So I found the experience of interviewing you fascinating. It lived up to every expectation. It was surprisingly moving. You got surprisingly emotional at one stage, which I wasn't expecting. But I think that it also, I thought, showed you in an extremely good light. And I don't mean that as false flattery. I just think that you came over as, to me, very sincere when you showed that emotion. And it also showed me that even someone like you, that's been criticized a lot as well as praised, that certain things do permeate your skin and do genuinely upset you, and I was surprised by that.

But I also thought that appeared to be very genuine. So I thought the whole experience for me, Jordan, was fascinating. I think I said to my three sons, who are all in their 20s, they were the most excited I'd ever seen them about an interview outside of Cristiano Ronaldo, our mutual friend from the world of football, which I found very interesting because they're three boys in their 20s, all quite different, but they all watch YouTube avidly, and they perceive you to be the sort of king of YouTube up there with Joe Rogan and a few others.

And so they found it an utterly compelling interview, and they were able to compare it to many that you'd done and felt that it was right up there with one of the best they'd seen. So I was very pleased professionally that actually I felt I'd conducted a good interview.

But I do come back to the basic premise, I think, of any interviewer. You're only really as good as the tools that you work with, and in your case, you came, I think prepared to be very open, to be very honest, to be emotional, and I found that actually very moving.

So you said a couple of things there I would say on the technological front that I thought were very interesting. So one of the things about YouTube, I would say perhaps that distinguishes it in some way from Legacy TV is that YouTube really rewards straightforward, untrammeled, and unscripted discussion. And it's really what people expect on the platform.

And the fact that the discussions can go for a long while without any of the somewhat artificial constraints that are placed on the broadcast media means that people can and or are more likely to reveal themselves in all their positive and negative aspects. And I think that's part of the reason that Rogan has become so popular, apart from the fact that Jill always asks questions that are actually questions. Right? He's always in some sense honestly digging for information rather than trying to set someone up or play for a cheap laugh or a cheap takedown, which is something that's very characteristic of a certain type of journalist, and that doesn't play well at all on YouTube.

Interestingly enough, it makes people infamous very rapidly. And so it's an interesting medium in that regard, partly because of the lack of restriction on bandwidth. And then you also mentioned the clips issue. And one of the things that's quite remarkable about YouTube and makes talking there much different than publishing a book, let's say, well, first of all, the audience is much broader on YouTube than it is on the publishing front by an order of magnitude, likely, which is a lot.

But also, you can't sell a book by the sentence or the paragraph, but YouTube videos are infinitely fractionable, and you can clip one minute or three minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, and there's an independent market for every one of those lengths of clips. And so that's a very interesting new technological possibility to delve into. And you've seen TikTok emerge in YouTube shorts and Instagram, all these social media platforms that have their own culture that capitalizes on that capacity to fractionate video.

And so it's very interesting to try to contend with all that. I also thought, for what it's worth, that you talked to me in a very straightforward manner, and I certainly appreciated that. I had many people on my team who were concerned about the potential manner in which the interview might proceed, not least because we've had plenty of fun with British journalists before, although that often turned out well.

But you also said during that interview, or maybe it was before, maybe it was before we talked, that you had been thinking about listening in a way that was somewhat new for you, or at least new in part. I mean, everybody learns as they go along, and so I was curious afterwards about what exactly that meant because I really felt that during the interview you did listen to me and that we had, and vice versa hopefully, and that as a consequence we had genuinely communicated, and I think that that was part of the reason that made the interview successful.

Yeah, I mean, it actually, it was my middle son who's a young actor and photographer and listens avidly to YouTube and most of your stuff he's watched in recent years, most of Joe Rogan's stuff he's watched, and he said, "Dad, look, you can't do your normal sledgehammer act. You can't just go in and start interrupting every five seconds like you normally do," which is a fault line of mine.

It works well actually when you're interviewing a politician who's trying to obfuscate or answer different questions or simply avoid the one you're asking. Sometimes you do have to be slightly bully-boy in the way you interrupt a politician to get an answer out of them, so it's a different technique. But actually, the point that my son Stanley made to me was that, said, "Dad, if you want to get the best out of Jordan Peterson, he said, trust me, you have to listen."

And so that was constantly in the back of my mind. He was actually at the back of a studio, as you know, with my youngest son Bertie, and he was adamant that that was the way I would get the best out of you, and he was completely right. And it was a learning curve for me. It might sound slightly odd that I'm getting to this stage of my life, 57 years old, I've been a journalist for, you know, since I was in my early 20s, to suddenly learn the art of interview, but I've been through many guises as a journalist and interviewer.

When you're a newspaper interviewer, as I was for many years, or I did big interviews also for GQ magazine, often the interviewer can talk a lot to get a one-line revelation. So you can keep talking, keep talking, keep talking, and then lull your interviewee into saying something that maybe you were trying to get. It's a very different discipline on television or on any form of on-camera interview.

And I was also struck by the fact this wasn't the first person who'd given me the advice to listen. I remember the great Sir David Frost, who did the Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon, some of the great interviews ever seen in political journalism, and he always said to me, "The most powerful tool of any television interviewer is silence." Because the interviewee will always fill that void at some stage after one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds. An interviewee will fill the gap. They won't just sit there in silence, too.

And sometimes the most powerful revelations you can get from people come when they have their own moment to really think about what they're going to say, and they say it. And if you're too busy, as you said earlier, and I've been very guilty of this myself, of talking too much, expressing your own opinions, not really listening to what the person is saying, then you can sometimes miss these moments of real gold, which come actually from the power of silence.

So I think that, you know, I think the experience I had with you is really informative to me of when you're interviewing somebody obviously very intelligent, obviously very used to doing interviews, perhaps coming with a slight sense of suspicion after what happened with you on Channel 4 news. And I watched that interview live, as I told you, and I just felt that interview, I know the interviewer Kathy Newman, and I felt that she didn't really know who you were, hadn't done quite enough research into what you really felt and what you really thought, and had made a series of presumptions about you which you were able to bat away quite quickly.

And it made for very uncomfortable viewing if you were a Channel 4 News viewer because it was quite clear that you were slightly on parallel lines. So I think that, yeah, I found our experience really, really good actually. I felt that had I done my political interview technique with you, I think you would have clammed up. We wouldn't have clammed up, but I think it would have been a much more confrontational exchange, which I wasn't seeking to get because I actually agree with a lot of what you say.

So it to me it does depend who the interviewee is. It might depend too on, well, it might also depend on exactly what the purpose of the stage is. So if you're a political actor, let's say, and you're acting instrumentally, so you have a purpose in the interview that's a priori, then you're going to be inclined as the person being interviewed to craft your words and to make sure you don't step in anything toxic and to deflect anything that might be too penetrating.

And so what that seems to me to necessitate on the part of an investigative journalist is a much more adversarial and antagonistic stance because the journalist is going to be required, especially if the interviewee is obfuscating or deceiving, to dig with a relatively sharp blade. And so I can really see that there's utility in that adversarial stance when what you're trying to uncover is a web of intrigue and self-serving instrumentalism and deception.

And this also segues quite interestingly, I think, into the main one of the main topics I want to talk to you about today, which is something approximating temperament and fame. And so one of the cardinal personality dimensions is agreeableness, and agreeable people, it's really a maternal dimension. And agreeable people are compassionate and polite. They're very interested in people and in serving people, and it's likely a dimension that maximizes the capacity to take care of the weak and the infirm and infants and the outsiders.

And now the disadvantage to being agreeable is that you can be taken advantage of because you can't stand up for yourself very well, partly because of your self-sacrificing nature, let's say. And so you can be a pushover and then become resentful and angry and bitter and feel that you're in an unfair world giving all the time and never receiving. On the other side, you have the disagreeable temperament, which is more masculine, and I say that because women are reliably higher in agreeableness and men reliably lower, and that's true cross-culturally and maximizes in egalitarian countries.

And so what happens in journalism is that journalists tend to be selected for two personality traits, perhaps more, but at least two. They're extroverted because they like to talk to people and they like to talk, and they have lots to say and they're verbally fluid, but they're also disagreeable. And the problem with those two traits, extroversion and disagreeableness, is they tilt people towards narcissism. So, and it's what was it, nature, I think the German philosopher said, great men are seldom credited with their stupidity.

And so you need these traits of extroversion and being disagreeable to put yourself in the public eye and to enable you to be adversarial. But there's a set of probable sins that go along with that, and those include the sins, let's say, of narcissism. Now, if you're conscientious and you keep your word, you can ameliorate that. A guy like having disagreeable people around because they tell you what they will tell you what they think. They don't pull any punches, and that can be harsh and even callous at times, but at least you get the damn information.

Whereas agreeable people are always trying to keep the peace at any cost, including the cost of their own well-being. So in your situation, this is what I'm very curious about. You have to be adversarial and you have to be antagonistic to the degree that you're uncovering deception and obfuscation, those sorts of things, to the degree that you have to counter the tricks that people are bringing to bear on the situation.

One of the things, I guess, that makes YouTube different and Rogan in particular is I don't think Rogan tends to speak with people who are doing that. Right? He just, like, I've talked to him, for example, about speaking with politicians, and he tends not to speak with them. And I think the reason for that is that he's not interested in that adversarial discussion, and he doesn't want his platform to be used for people who are trying to score political points now. Fair enough, and that's worked very well for Rogan, and I understand exactly why he does that.

And I don't like to conduct adversarial interviews either, but it's still the case that there is a need for that adversarial conduct on the journalistic front if part of the rule of journalism is to keep dishonest narcissists as honest as possible. And so obviously one of the things that you're attempting to calibrate properly, I presume, is well how much you listen and allow the conversation to unfold and how much you dig without digging too much and without being an utter prick about it. Right? Because obviously it's possible to go too far on that front.

And so my suspicions are that you also have the temperament to be able to engage in a fight, and without that, you can't be adversarial. So how you said you're still learning to do that. The silence issue is interesting too because I think that's particularly tough on broadcast TV because you're called upon in some sense to fill every valuable second. And then to let a pause occur, you have to be willing to risk the potential price of dead space, and that's quite intimidating if you're while using up valuable broadcast space, which isn't such an issue on YouTube, let's say.

But there's very weird constraints in broadcast TV that people aren't aware of when they're just watching it. So tell me about the adversarial relationship and how you think you've managed that part positively and also negatively. Yeah, I'm going to give you two great examples, I think, where I got it right and then got it wrong. One was when I was at CNN and Sandy Hook happened, the mass shooting at the school. And I'd been editor of the Daily Mirror back in the UK in 1996 when the Dunblane school massacre happened in Scotland where 16 young children were killed by a lone gunman.

And so I, at the time, campaigned in the UK for much tougher gun control measures, which all were passed by a combination of left and right-wing governments, John Majors and then Tony Blairs. So, it was much easier here to affect change because very few people actually had guns. So, I was under no delusion that America is a very different culture to be waging a similar campaign. But what it brought back to me when Sandy Hook happened were the emotions I had when Dunblane had occurred and how horrific it was.

And how just this idea of 16 in Dunblane and 20 children in Sandy Hook having their lives snuffed away by some maniac with a gun, that it seemed to me unconscionable that any society could not want to affect some change to stop it happening again. And yet, recently in America we had another mass shooting in a school almost identical in the word it was carried out, and nothing had been done since Sandy Hook. So, if you take the apocryphal, I think it was Einstein quote of definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, well also I would say the definition of insanity is doing nothing again and again and expecting the same thing not to happen.

So when I blew up at CNN at the time against the NRA, for example, it came from a position of real raw emotion. I could think of only a handful of times in my career when I've been rendered to tears by a news story. Dunblane was one of them and Sandy Hook was another. So I was being driven by genuine raw emotion, no question. And I think in the early stages of my coverage of that story on CNN it really resonated with people. People thought it was very powerful, it was compelling, and I was broadly right that something had to be done.

But I would say I slightly over-egged the emotional soufflé and I think it began to have the opposite effect to what I hoped. So I hoped to genuinely affect change but I couldn't stop being over-emotional in the interviews I did with some of these pro-NRA, pro-gun people that were coming on the show and ended up shouting at them, losing my temper with them, slightly straying into performative art, perhaps even straying into a dash of narcissism myself, where you start to believe your own hype. I was getting emails from Barbra Streisand congratulating me and so on.

It's all very intoxicating, but of course, if you're not careful, and I think it happened to me there, it can lead to you actually achieving the complete opposite to what you hope. And in the end, I think all I managed to do with my over-emotional response over time was probably sell more guns in America, which was a great opposite effect right to what I wanted because people thought this guy is the new George III. He seems to have forgotten we got rid of the Brits with guns. We don't want a guy with this accent telling us how to lead our lives, etc.

And I would say similarly in the UK in the pandemic, in the first wave in early 2020, I built up a reputation pretty quickly for skewering British politicians on air in a very, very aggressive and volatile manner in which I felt they were completely dropping the ball collectively as a government, making a series of catastrophic and deadly mistakes. And I saw it incumbent on me to try and almost hammer them into making better decisions. And for a long time, I think I would say that I did a very good job of that.

But again, I think towards the end, I overdid things a little bit and when I look back at some of the later interviews, I was perhaps trying to recreate the theater of whatever before, which was very organic and real, and when you start to recreate something that's organic, it ceases to be organic. And so I think those were two good examples where a lot of people would have been cheering me on, but also in both cases, what happened there in the UK was the government actually pulled all their ministers from any interviews with me for eight months. They just did a complete blanket ban.

And that doesn't help anybody because then my viewers don't get served by anything. They have no ability to hear from people in government about what's going to be happening. So I felt in both cases that I let myself down in the end, albeit with the right intentions. And the danger line for anyone that does that kind of interviewing is where it strays into performative art rather than organic anger and emotion. So I don't regret the early emotion and anger, but I do regret the way it strayed into something a little different, and I think that's a really interesting lesson for people if you're going to do those kind of slightly more volatile interviews.

And I do think sometimes you have to, as a journalist, I like passion in journalists, I like emotion, but never lose track of actually what you're doing and how you're feeling, and never try and replicate something that you've done before because it will always come across as slightly fake.

Okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. So the first thing is that the first thing you said there was that when you're being lauded by a lot of people for your actions, first of all, we might point out that it's useful to take that seriously, right? Because one of the things you want to see in someone is that they are responsive to social response. The person who's not socially responsive to social response is either completely unskilled or psychopathic, or maybe is in a different category altogether where they can handle public response appropriately, which is very, very difficult.

So you had every reason, if people were responding positively to you, to assume that what you're doing was broadly regarded as positive and therefore might even be positive. But then you said it enticed you in an egotistical direction to some degree. So one of the, I spent a lot of time trying to understand Adolf Hitler psychologically, and in some sense, I would say trying to develop some sympathy for him insofar as that was possible.

And I think you develop sympathy for people by putting yourself in their position, and that's very difficult to do with someone like Adolf Hitler. First of all, it's very unpleasant to do that, but it's also very challenging because at minimum he had a very complex life. But you imagine here's a statement: you can tell me what you think of this. If 20 million of your countrymen are telling you that you're the savior of their country, who are you to disagree?

And so you wonder why someone like Hitler could have his ego blown up to the proportions that it became blown up to. And the answer is, well, do you really think that you'd be able to resist the positive blandishments of so many people? Because that in itself could easily be a form of egotism. Right? I don't care what people think. It's like, well, yeah, you probably do, and you probably should.

And then the question is, well, how do you keep yourself straight when you are the target of positive adulation? And so one of it, you said you should know what you're doing, so one possibility is, and I think I learned this mostly from Carl Jung, is that you need to distinguish yourself from the principles for which you stand. Right?

Because so one of the things that happens to me quite often is that people tell me how helpful my work has been, and I think to the degree that I can think this, I think, well, it's not surprising that it's been helpful in large part because it's not exactly my work. A lot of the things I've learned, and perhaps the vast majority, no doubt the vast majority of the things that I've learned, I've learned because I've studied great thinkers who in turn have studied great thinkers, and so I've been able to derive a certain amount of wisdom, and I'm able to communicate that.

But I'm doing my best to ensure that I separate myself from that wisdom, and that's a hard thing to do because of course here I am as a person as well, and the ideas that are being transmitted through me are focused on me at that moment for that reason. But it's very difficult, that's the idea of rendering unto God what's God's and unto Caesar what's Caesar's in some sense, right?

Is that you have to remember it's okay to attract the positive attention because it reflects well on the principles that you're trying to espouse, but as soon as this becomes about your status and your specific success and your instrumental maneuvering in the world, then you replace what is being praised with yourself, and that's a sin of pride, and the consequences of that will is that you'll definitely fall into a pit.

And on that point, it's interesting you've made me think of something very specific, which I think is a good example. Tony Blair was a very successful British prime minister for many years. He was elected for three terms. But I remember after 9/11, he flew to the United States and he spoke to Congress and said we would stand shoulder to shoulder with the American people. And Congress gave him a lengthy standing ovation, and it was an image that went round the world.

And I could almost see Blair in Congress standing there taking this extraordinary adulation from the most powerful room in the world and then basking in the glory of his position, here is the great supporter and defender of the United States at the most difficult hour. And it was almost like he puffed up, visit me, in front of us like a peacock, you know? He was loving it, right?

He was loving this attention, albeit in a very serious time. And then you cut forward to the Iraq War within two years. And I'm absolutely convinced that Tony Blair's ego drove him to wage that war. To go along with the Iraq War when every part of his legal brain, he was a lawyer, and his slightly, you know, left to center political brain would have told him this was insanity.

That actually to go it alone without a United Nations second resolution, which would be endorsing military conflict, that without that this was mad. And I had many conversations with him at number 10 Downing Street in his flat, but we literally would share a beer and have a chatter battle with. And I could see that it was the problem he'd dug himself was that from that moment he became the peacock opening his wings proudly to soak in the adulation of the United States.

That he then felt almost a duty to go along with whatever action the United States government took, even if it was against the British national interest, and even as it turned out, if it turned out to be a pretty much a disaster the Iraq War. And I genuinely think it was the process you've just described, where the initial instinct of going to Washington, standing shoulder to shoulder with America was absolutely correct.

So the praise that he was getting was completely justified, but it then turned him into something which I think looking back he must surely regret. He probably would never admit that, but I saw it happen to him where the ego needed to continue to be praised by America, and he had to make a calculation, do I go with the Americans on this Iraq war journey or do I do what the British people want me to do, which is to not go on that war?

1.7 million people marched through London, many of them carrying placards which I had produced as editor of the Daily Mirror, which was the labor supporting newspaper, and he was a labor prime minister. And these placards said no war. And you'll see if you go back and look at the footage, you'll see thousands of people clutching Daily Mirror placards. So he and I had a real split over this. And when I looked back it was exactly the way that you just described that process.

Right, right. Initially correct and then sucked in through ego and perhaps a bit of narcissism into a place he would never have instinctively wanted to be.

Well, okay, so let's talk about this politically and theologically for a minute. So I was in the UK in London when Queen Elizabeth passed away, and it was quite remarkable to see the response. It was quite something to see the Brits put on this amazing show, which happened very rapidly, which is extremely well organized and very, very, very well done, very beautiful, and which I believe attracted more viewers on TV than any event in human history, which is really saying something.

And I really like the monarchical system because I think the Queen serves a confessional role for politicians. She'd reigned over 13 different Prime Ministers, and you can imagine that it would be very useful for someone who's in a position like Tony Blair or any other prime minister to have to go face this woman who's seen everyone from Churchill to the present prime minister, Liz Truss, and to feel themselves in some sense less dominant and less powerfully positioned than at least someone in the room and to have to do that on a regular basis.

And that strikes me as a replication in the secular realm of what confession and the search for redemption and atonement was when it was practiced religiously. Let me tell you a story. So back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamian Emperor was required to undertake a ritual at New Year's. And I believe that a fair bit of our New Year's ritual mythology, you know, the death of the old year, the old man, and the rebirth of the baby, their echoes of this Mesopotamian structure.

The idea that the old year is coming to an end and the new year is going to be rekindled with all the possibilities that go along with it and the fact that people make resolutions, which are some sense confessional; I did these things wrong and here's how I could improve in the future when there's a new year. The Mesopotamian Emperor would be taken outside the walls of the central Mesopotamian City, so out into No Man's Land, right outside the safety of the community.

And then he would be required to strip himself of all his kingly garb and kneel. And then a priest would slap him and then he would be reinforced to recount all the ways that year he wasn't a good Marduk. Marduk was the monotheistic deity of the Mesopotamians and he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words. And so Marduk was a god of careful attention and proper speech.

And so the Mesopotamian Emperor had to reflect on how he hadn't upheld the proper principles of sovereignty as a consequence of being humiliated before, before, what would you say, a transcendent power that was greater than his? And when I said earlier that you have to remember that it's not you but the principles for which you stand that is something like the proper ordering. And so it would have been reasonable for Prime Minister Blair to be very pleased with the fact that the UK was standing in solidarity with the United States.

But not pleased, not appropriate for him to be pleased that Tony Blair was on the side of the Americans, because it's actually not about Tony Blair. And so getting that confused. And then you've got to have sympathy for people too because it's not surprising that people would get that confused.

I mean, one of the things I've noticed about celebrities is a big danger. Imagine you become famous and as a consequence of that, now you have a persona, and there's a certain brand significance that goes along without us, reputational significance, and a value, even an economic value. But the problem is, is it can become a trap because if you can only be what you've already been, then you can't be anything new.

And that's where people fall into this trap that you described of something like self-mimicry. Right? This worked for me before, look at the effect. It produced, I just will do that again. But then you're instantly false, eh? You're instantly false when you do that. It's like you're sacrificing your future self for whatever your past self once attained, and then you lose that spark that actually is likely the driving force of whatever made you attractive to begin with.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I always say to my sons, really, my basic rule of life is, is try never to go back, full stop, with anything. It's never the same. There's always a reason that you've moved on from whatever it is. And to try and replicate previous behaviors, to try and replicate previous relationships, to try and replicate perhaps a job that you once loved and lost, to try and go back, I think you often forget why you left in the first place or why things didn't work out.

You read it and see it all the time. You tend to, you know, memory tends to sugarcoat things. Right? It's only when you actually, if you do allow yourself to fall back into these previous habits or behaviors or whatever it may be that you then realize it wasn't what you thought. Now, the mind, I think, plays tricks with you a little bit.

So I think that I do think particularly with politicians, particularly with sportsmen, entertainers, you're right about the brand thing as they can very quickly get pigeonholed as to this or that or this, and then they start to play up to the thing which they were originally identified as being. And maybe it was what they're actually like or maybe it wasn't, but either way, it becomes a very difficult thing to then escape from. You become tagged with that.

You know, I know pop stars who are still seen as the nicest people in showbiz. I know them to be utterly horrific. Conversely, I know people I've met in business or politics who have terrible reputations but actually are very nice people. So it's an interesting thing that that public branding of people can be instantaneous and very long-lasting and often completely wrong.

But the danger for any public figure is to try and play up to your caricature. Now, I think the one saving grace you can have is self-awareness. To me, there are two types of public figures: those who've got self-awareness and those who don't. I think that I have a big persona, a big perhaps slightly caricature persona sometimes. I’d like to deliberately antagonize a great debate and so on, but I always do it with a sense of self-awareness.

And the times I described to you earlier where I've slightly lost the plot and become a performative theatrical artist, if you like, rather than a proper journalist is when I've forgotten the self-awareness streak. When I've been driven by adulation and praise, usually into thinking that somehow, right, this is the new me, and this is great. And I'm going to be this person rather than just being honest with yourself about who you are.

You know, I think I'm pretty aware of who I am, warts and all, and some of the traits which other people see as disagreeable, I'm very relaxed about. I felt I'm less relaxed about some of the more positive traits. You know, when people say, "Oh, you're such a nice person," but it sounds almost brand damaging to me. I don't want to be just nice. I can't think of anything worse than being nice. I'd rather be challenging.

I'd rather be right. Right. It's a shallow version. Yeah. Why would you aspire to just be nice? It seems to me that people who are inherently known as nice people, A, they rarely live up to that brand in my experience in terms of high-profile people I know. And it must be an unbearable pressure to constantly wake up every day and think I have to be nice all day when in fact your natural and more honest instinct may be to be disagreeable from time to time because that's what you're actually feeling, and often you'd be right by the way to be feeling disagreeable about something.

So I do think that, I mean, I think I just struck by something you told me when I interviewed you, that you felt as you got older, you’ve evolved and you've learned things about yourself, and I feel exactly the same way. I'm not the same person I was. I think I still have the same sense of virtues which perhaps were instilled in me when I was a child by my family who had a very strong family, a very strong upbringing. But I do think I've evolved as a person, and I do think if you don't evolve as a person, I'm not sure what you're doing here.

You know, the world's a tough, difficult, complex place and you should evolve emotionally as you get older and hopefully in the right direction.

I think you turned into an actor, so I spent a lot of time analyzing pop culture and I focused a lot, as many of the people who are watching and listening to this will know, on analyzing the great Disney animated classics, which were extraordinarily influential, popular productions. And one of the movies that has struck me most particularly, although I don't think it's the greatest of the Disney movies, is Pinocchio.

And there are a number of, so Pinocchio is a puppet, so someone is pulling his strings, right? There's forces behind the scenes that are making him who he is and he's unconscious, he doesn't know it. But he has a good father who is a very positive figure who sends him out in the world to free himself of the behind the strings marionette players, and he faces a number of temptations.

And there's four cardinal temptations which I think are extremely well laid out. One is hedonism, narrow and shallow hedonism, and that's played out in the scenes of Pleasure Island. And the consequences of becoming a narrow hedonist is that you end up as a voiceless slave. That's how you end up, turned into a donkey that can do nothing, Bray sold as slaves to work in the salt mine. So that’s the fruits of hedonism.

Another scene that perplexed me for a long time was that Pinocchio is enticed into being an actor. And I thought, what in the world does that mean? Because the people who made this movie were obviously Hollywood types, and what's so wrong with being an actor? But the answer is to be found in the discussion that we were just having. If you're playing a role and you're doing it as a fictional character and you're playing a role in a movie, let's say, and everyone knows that what you're doing is fictional, that's one thing.

But if you're an actor who's attempting to play a role for your own egotistical gratification, then that's a catastrophe. And what happens in the Pinocchio movie is that he is enticed into going on stage as a puppet, and he does a wild dance and tangles himself up in his own strings and ends up face down in front of the crowd and then also enslaved.

Oh, the one of the other temptations, just interestingly enough because it's germane to our current culture, is that the fox and the cat, who are agents of Mephistopheles, essentially also entice Pinocchio into playing the sick victim. And so that's actually how they entice him originally to go to Pleasure Island, to become hedonistic. They tell him that he's sick and unable and has been victimized and needs a break.

And as a consequence of his poor victimized position, it's perfectly okay for him to be narrowly and self-servingly hedonistic. And so it's a lovely narrative layout of the sort of plethora of moral problems that beset people as they try to transform themselves, let's say, into real boys because of course that's what the movie is about.

And it's very interesting to sketch out the nature of those temptations, this acting temptation. You see celebrities become their own mimics. They be like Elvis in some sense became an Elvis im imitator by the time that he ended. You know, he came to the near the end of his life. I mean, he could still put on a wicked performance, but you could see that immense pressure, the category pressure building around them.

And you can imagine how intense that is, especially perhaps at the time he lived because he was a singular celebrity. There's lots of celebrities now, but there were much fewer back then, and the pressure to abide by the way you've been defined must be almost overwhelming. And it isn't obvious that we really know how to rectify that.

I think the confession idea is a good one, is that you need to keep your inadequacies foremost in your mind and you need to serve some principles that are higher than yourself. But that's easy to say in the abstract. It's not so easy to actually do it when you're the one being tempted.

Yeah, I think you also rightly said you have to have people around you who perhaps are disagreeable enough to be completely bluntly honest with you. You know, I, whether it's my mother or one of my brothers or my sister or my sons in particular encouraged them to be very independent-minded and to let me know if they see or hear something I do which they think is wrong and explain why, and they do that regularly.

And I find that litmus test from people who really know you better than anybody else, so they really understand when you're making a fool of yourself or just behaving like a bit of a dick, right? You just see, someone is going to tell you. And one of the big problems with modern celebrity is because I've interviewed a lot of very famous people, is that they often surround themselves with pure sycophancy.

And they don't tolerate anyone drifting outside in sycophancy. All the teams around them are so fearful of losing their very cushy jobs that they render themselves as useless permanently to avoid upsetting. So they may almost be almost wrongly second-guessing the people they work for who might be perfectly okay people because they think if they're not sycophantic, they're going to lose their job.

So there's constant kind of pressure to blow smoke up the derriers of these people, which doesn't help the stars themselves. It certainly doesn't help the people who work for them who are behaving in such a ridiculous manner. And the celebrities I know who I think really thrive over a long period of time tend to have people in their entourage who are straight talkers, who literally will say to them in front of people, "Stop behaving like a dick," literally.

And you need those people because if you don't have those people in your entourage, or whoever it may be, manager and agent, I had a fantastic manager who sadly died of pancreatitis three years ago, and he was one of my closest friends. And he transformed my career. He was the one that put me on Celebrity Apprentice, which I won, and that led to joining CNN and replacing Larry King and then the morning show.

He did all these things for me, and we were very, very close, and he died literally four days after getting ill with pancreas. It was horrific. But he was the one really who would call me sometimes, having watched maybe on the morning show, watch me in LA at 11 at night, and he'd see or hear me do something which he felt he had to say something about it. And he called me and said, "You shouldn't have said that. That's not you. That's not what you believe.

I know it isn't. And the way you phrase that, the way you went after someone, he hated if it ever felt like I was punching down, not up." Yeah, right? He thought I was at my best when I—I, he thought I was at my best when I was basically producing Robin Hood TV, where I would be the Robin Hood figure looking after the downtrodden against the sheriffs of Nottingham, be they from energy companies or political parties or corrupt tycoons, whatever it may be.

He said, "You're at your absolute best when you're Robin Hood, right? When you start to behave like the Sheriff of Nottingham, you're…it's not you. It's not what's in your heart. I know you." And B, is performative bullshit, which you shouldn't be drifting into, and it doesn't work on any level.

Now, I really miss that in my life, that guy having those kind of conversations because I have to respect the person to want to listen to it. So when you lose someone like that in your life, it's really difficult because I had such huge personal respect for him, and I knew we've been through an awful lot together. He nearly died 10 years before. He'd been in Cedars-Sinai hospital for three months with a staph infection. He'd been in a coma. He wasn’t expected to survive. He’d had the last rites and so on, and when he came out, he got fired when his company merged.

And I was the only one of 50 clients who went with him, so he went from being one of the biggest power agents in Hollywood to one client, me. And then we rebuilt things very successfully, so we had a real bond professionally and personally. But I think everybody needs someone like that who knows you and knows what—knows when you're not being yourself.

Well, that's a beneficial adversary, that's the translation, by the way, for the word that God uses to describe Eve in the Garden of Eden. Help me means in the original Hebrew it means beneficial adversary. And it's someone to have around. This is what a marriage can do for you too, if you're fortunate, because you have someone there who can help you calibrate your aim as a consequence of continued disagreement in some real sense.

Because there isn't much difference between disagreement and getting back to perceptions and identities. This brings us to two things I would say. So there's an immense push in our society right now to insist that identity be entirely subjectively defined. Right? Which means that as God said to Moses, “I am that I am,” and that's a very difficult, that's a very dangerous thing for people to take upon themselves to say “I am” to be treated only the way that I define.

And we just spent a fair bit of time outlining why that's so wrong because you're what keeps you sane. This friend of yours, this agent you had, he was part of what kept you sane. So you're moving up the status hierarchy, and it might not even be obvious to you while you're moving up when you're punching up and when you're punching down, because your relative position is actually changing.

So I've run into this problem; I criticized a swimsuit model on the cover of Sports Illustrated and an actress who had undergone a sex change publicly on Twitter, and I got kicked off of Twitter for the latter criticism. And one of the criticisms I faced was that I was punching down. And it didn't really occur to me when I was making those comments that I was punching down because the actor or actress that I criticized was quite famous in now I'm having pronoun trouble in his/her own right.

And I was also irritated that these fashion spreads that were conducted after the sex change operation got 1.5 million Instagram likes, which didn't strike me as all that socially useful. But it's not easy to figure out when your own position is shifting, when you're going after someone, let's say at your level of influence or higher, and when you've even accidentally entered into the fray that you shouldn't be entering into and brought too much force to bear on the person.

But also, what would you say, undermine your own authority by doing so? And so having these disagreeable people around who say, you know, you're not being who you are, and you're not who you think you are, and you're not aiming properly, that's actually how you stabilize your identity. And so identity is actually socially negotiated. If you're healthy, identity is socially negotiated all the time, and in that has to be a fair give-and-take of criticism because it stops you from getting above yourself if you're fortunate.

And so you have to listen to how other people define you, but then we run into the adulation problem, perhaps. And then if you listen too much to how other people define you, well, that's its own egotistical trap. So, but having people around, I'm fortunate because my wife is very sensible, and she's an astute beneficial adversary, and my kids are like that too. And I have a lot of very good friends who are, what would you say, they're forces in their own right, and they're perfectly willing to tell me when they think that I haven't conducted myself according to the standards that I would like to abide by.

And it's unbelievably useful while navigating a complicated situation. And it is in some sense the definition of sanity, right? Is to have enough feedback around you that's balanced so that you move forward on the right path. That is not subjectively defined identity. That's one of the things that's so pathological about that insistence because that just swallows you up in the ultimate egotistical solipsism.

If you can be whatever you say you are from moment to moment, and no one has any right to object, how do you think you're going to turn out? You're going to inflate like mad until you burst. That's definitely the case. Speaking of disagreeable people, you worked on America's Got Talent with Simon Cowell. And I really like Simon Cowell, for what it's worth. I mean, he's got this tremendous capacity to give credit where credit is due, which he does very well, and as far as I can tell, 100% genuinely.

I think, and I'd sure like your comments on this, that the America's Got Talent and Got Talent platforms have brought a tremendous amount of ability to light. And it's really quite remarkable to see him flip from this disagreeable critic who puts up with pretty much zero nonsense to someone who's completely floored when someone comes out and is genuine and truly talented. I really like watching Simon impose his discriminating judgment, especially in a world that thinks that all discrimination and judgment is pathological.

And one of the consequences of that is that he can bring all this talent to light, this true talent. What did you enjoy working with with the Got Talent shows and why did you do that, and tell me about the judge process. I'd like to know more about the whole background enterprise.

Yeah, so I’d known Simon a long time from when I was the show business editor of The Sun newspaper doing all the pop culture stuff, and Simon was trying to basically be a record company A&R man flogging records and trying to get a paper to write about him.

So I got to know him, liked him very much. He was a great force of personality. He wasn't on television then. No one knew who he was outside the music business. Then he becomes the biggest TV star on the planet with American Idol, I mean like stratospheric fame, which happened, interestingly, not in the first series or season, but the second season it suddenly exploded.

And so when he took me out for lunch after I lost my job editing the Daily Mirror, and a little bit of big controversy here, we'd published some photographs of British troops purportedly abusing Iraqi civilians illegally, which had just followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in America where their troops had been doing the same thing. The government and the regiment said these were fake photographs. I was fired. I'm still not sure exactly what those photographs were, but that was the end of my career as a newspaper editor after 10 years.

And Simon took me for lunch very near where I'm talking to you actually in Kensington and West London, went for a nice meal. And he pulled out a napkin and put it on the table, and he said, "You know what's really missing on in world television?” He said, “The old Gong Show in America, and opportunity no and a show very similar show in the UK called Opportunity Knocks, and then new faces."

And they were basically, he said, "Any talent, not just singers but any talent." And he said, "My idea is we'd have three judges. You'd have a tough meanie who keeps everything, you know, honest. You'd have a slightly crazy person," he said, "like Paula Abdul was on Idol with a big heart but slightly crazy. And you'd have someone probably a comedian who would make people laugh, and you'd have the perfect judging panel."

So then we did a pilot for this show. It's quite interesting. Genesis of the story for Britain's Got Talent was originally going to be called Paul O'Grady's Got Talent, who's a British entertainer, but he had a huge falling out with the network and left. And then Simon said, "Well, that, unfortunately, we're not going to do it." So it was all shelved in the UK where he was intending to launch it.

Six weeks later, I'm thinking my brand-new prime-time TV career is over before it even started. And I get a text from Simon saying, "Because I've just sold the rights to Got Talent to NBC in America; they want to repackage it as America's Got Talent."

Which I immediately thought was a brilliant idea to wrap the flag and the country and patriotism around this show. And he said, "I can't be on it as a judge because I'm on American Idol, so I need to find somebody as arrogant and as obnoxious as me and judgmental, and your name is immediately sprung to mind."

So, long story short, he flew me straight out to Los Angeles. I met with some NBC executives, managed to bullshit my way through quite a long meeting with them. And three weeks later, I'm on the Paramount movie lot in Hollywood. I've got my own trailer next to David Hasselhoff and Regis Philbin, and I'm the judge of America's Got Talent and I'm the new Simon Cowell, which was not a place I ever thought I'd find myself.

But it was really interesting and Simon came to—I remember never forgot this—on day one he pulled up in his brand new Ferrari outside my trailer, and he came in and said, "Right," and I was like, "This is fantastic. I can't believe this. I'm living the dream." And he said, "Look here's the deal with our kind of stick. You have to be right 80% of the time. And if you are and the viewers agree with you 80% of the time, you can be as mean as you like."

Right? He said, "You can be a straight blunt honest meme, whatever you want to call it, you can be whatever you want to be, you just have to be right 80% of the time. Because if you're mean or tough or ruthless and you're wrong a lot, the act doesn't work."

Right? And it wasn't acting. In a way, talent shows are theater, obviously. You've got people performing on stage and whatever. But I always tried to be, I think this is a key thing I think about public life generally, I always tried to be authentic. And I think Simon's always authentic.

You know, he might be guided by a producer, "Hey, this is a really good act," but he doesn't feel it, and he'll say, "I don't like it." So he was always authentic and I picked that up, and I always tried to be very authentic whilst being pretty blunt, pretty British, pretty, you know, full-on. But I was always mindful of just call it exactly as you're actually feeling, really.

Just be honest with yourself. Never mind the audience. And if you are normally you're going to be right because it's what they're all feeling at home. Then you have to have that ability to gauge what an audience might be thinking, but ultimately be authentic.

And if you ask me what is the number one tool of really successful people, it's authenticity. They are true to themselves. The most successful people I've encountered ultimately are authentic. They don't get drifted or pulled into places where it's not them, where they're playing an act. You do get some that come through who I think are completely fake and wing it and get away with it.

But broadly speaking, and the same applied with the talent shows, so you could have all these acts, and a lot of them were faking it, a lot of them were trying to be somebody. They were trying to—they were trying to be Beyonce. They were trying to be Madonna. They were trying to be a dance street, whatever it may be. They were trying to be somebody else.

The most successful acts that I ever saw on the British show and the American one were the ones which were truly authentic. And I'll give an example: a guy on the second season of America's Got Talent—it's actually quite a funny story behind this because Simon Cowell owned the rights to the show and he had the rights automatically to manage any of the winners of the show, and I think even the top 10 finalists that was built into his contract.

So the second season, first season number one Summer show in America, so my life has changed dramatically. Second season, there are two standout early candidates for potential winners. One is a white reggae star who was fantastic and a beautiful singing voice, and Simon literally was radiating the word "ka-ching" every time he heard him before because he thought this guy is a money-making machine right in front of me.

He looks the part, he sounds the part, amazing singer carries himself great. But I was more drawn to the complete opposite, which was a guy called Terry Fator. And Terry Fator was a slightly overweight, permanently sweating, ill-fitting suited guy who had gone up and down America for 20 years in his van earning 500 bucks a week at most doing a ventriloquist act.

And he'd had an extraordinary turn of fortune shortly before he applied to be on America's Got Talent where his act used to be that he would sing impressions himself, so he would sing Roy Orbison, Crying, for example, and then he would talk through puppets, a turtle, you know, and so on. And he went to do one gig and two people turned up.

There's a real lesson here for everyone. Two people turned up, but he still gave them the best act he could. And one of them turned out to be a talent agent, and he said to him, "Have you ever tried doing the singing impressions through the puppets?"

Simple thing. They've changed this guy's life. So Terry Fator went away and found he could actually throw his voice through the puppets as a singer better than he could do it from his own mouth. And at that point, his whole act changed.

So he then applies to America's Got Talent, comes on stage, and I immediately find him very endearing as a personality and I love his backstory. He's the ultimate kind of this guy's been going 20 years wanting the break. This is the moment maybe. And as he progresses through the competition, I keep supporting him.

Simon’s on my case, "Stop being so supportive. He's going to win." And I can't make any money out of a ventriloquist. Go with the other guy. Go with the reggae singer. I was like, "Simon, this guy's what the show's about. This ventriloquist."

Anyway, he ends up winning, mainly because I'm so effusive of my support, and by then the American viewing public had viewed my opinion rather like the calm on American Idol is the one that was most significant as far as they were concerned. So he wins, and Simon in a fit of peak says, "I can't make any money out of him, so I'm not going to manage him."

So the guy is left without a management. So he disappears, and a guy who used to work on the Rolling Stones management team and was now working on his own heard about this guy, had a chat with him, and took him on, decided to manage him and just try his luck. And a few months later, literally three months later, Danny Gans, all-around family entertainer in Las Vegas, one of the biggest stars on the Strip, drops dead. That's it.

And the casino where he operated had to fill a massive gap in their schedule. They didn't have an all-around family entertainer. The Rolling Stones management guy who'd picked up Terry Fator recommends Terry Fator. Terry Fator does a three-month trial; he sells out every show because grandmothers love him, mothers love him, kids love him, dads love him, everyone loves Terry Fator.

He's now got 50 puppets. He's singing all these amazing songs through these crazy puppets, and on the back of the three-month trial, he signs a five-year, $100 million contract to be the biggest star on the Las Vegas Strip, which if Simon Cowell had kept the management rights would have earned him $20 million.

So, if you want to really piss off Simon Cowell, just say, "Hey Simon, how much money did you make out of that ventriloquist?" So it's, in that story, in many ways, it has a lot of useful things to go with it. Yeah, yeah, one is don't judge a book by its cover.

You know, if you took them purely on aesthetics, you'd go with the white reggae star every day. But there was something about this guy's personality and the uniqueness of his act, and the fact that he'd taken advice from someone who was one of only two people in an audience, so never give up. Always give every—always give everything.

Everything, because you never know who's watching. I say this to my actor son. If there's not a big audience in one night, you don't know if in those 20 people there's a guy that's going to change your life. Absolutely. So I think that all these lessons from the Terry Fator story, he's still on the Vegas Strip now.

You go to, I think it's the Mirage or whatever; he has his own theater named after him. He signed another $100 million contract. He's the most successful breakout star in the history of any talent show ever, and that's his backstory. And to me, it was, that was what the show was all about, rather like Susan Boyle.

Yeah, we remember Susan. You bet that was amazing. Never, never. Well, she never sang outside of her village. Yeah, and was 47-year-old spinster, you know, who'd been starved of oxygen at birth and had slight issues because of that. And yet she came on stage, I'll never forget this. Again, never judge books by their covers.

She came on stage in Glasgow. I can remember it like it was yesterday, and I'm with Simon on the British show. We're both judges on the British show with another judge, and Susan Boyle comes out. And we're talking, what are you going to do? I'm going to sing from Les Miserables, "I Dream a Dream." And we all start rolling our eyes.

Yeah, more like my, my God, you've got to be kidding. It's been a long, long day. We'd seen some terrible talent, and she began. She began to sing, and in that moment, the magic happened. It turned out she was an unbelievably good singer. She went on to sell 30 million albums. I interviewed George Clooney.

Yeah, I interviewed George Clooney for CNN, and halfway through, he says, "By the way, how's Susan?" which I have to say she was very chuffed about. Yeah, yeah. Robin Williams—I did The Tonight Show with Robin Williams, and my manager, my late great manager and Robin Williams bangs on the door. He's the other guest, and he comes into our dressing room and does a 15-minute act, which was basically half Mrs. Doubtfire, half Susan Boyle.

Oh, cool! So these two stories, to me, Susan in the UK one and Terry Fator on the American one, they personified actually what the shows should be about, what the American dream and the British dream are really about, about chasing a dream and never giving up about having a talent and making it work. All these life lessons really were encompassed in these two stories, and they could have been ignored.

Their lives would have been what they were. Terry Fator has made, I don't know, $300 million. And everyone else's life would have been lesser. Well, Simon and the other judges and the show are very good at separating the wheat from the chaff. And one of the things I think that makes Simon so attractive, especially in our culture, is that his fundamental virtue isn't being nice.

Now, he's one of the things that makes him heartwarming, weirdly enough for such a rough character, is that when someone does well, he's floored by it. And you can see that constantly. And it's one of the lovely things about watching the judges’ period.

I mean, the judges have their personality pack of deals, and the fact that you have assembled the judge panel to reflect a variety of different personality types is very interesting, and you can see that the judges have had long days and that sometimes they're a bit more initially critical and suspicious than they might be. But that makes it human.

But to see everyone on the panel truly light up when someone knocks it out of the park—that's so cool. And it's so—I think it's such a service to people, not only the people whose talent is being revealed but to everyone that's watching. It's not surprising to me that the show has become so popular. It's extraordinarily well done, and I think Simon's ability to like or love talent so much that he's willing to state forthrightly when it's not there, which was also the role that you were playing, that’s truly something to be commended.

I also think that part of the reason that this show is so popular is because that ethos of extraordinarily penetrating criticism and separating excellence from falsehood or sheer lack of talent, that's very disagreeable. Because these people come to the show and they're hoping sometimes genuinely and sometimes narcissistically that they're going to have their dreams validated, but if they're talentless and narcissistic, they're going to hit a brick wall very hard.

And it's not that easy to be that brick wall.

No, now, I knew if I had a friend who taught me something. He's a very disagreeable person. He took my personality test and he was like the most disagreeable person in 10,000. So he's a rough character. He looks like a pirate. I like the sound of him already. Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely. Well, corporations used to hire him to go in and clean up when things had got messy.

So he would start at the bottom of the company and he said he would ferret out people who were taking all the credit when anything went right and then distributing all the blame when anything went wrong and stealing people's ideas and not doing their job. I talked to him one day. I had to deal with some issues in my lab. I had students who were underperforming, and the higher performing students who were doing their job were getting demoralized because of that.

And so I had to do something about it. And I really don't like firing people. I'm not someone who likes conflict at all. I tend to—I tend to—I don't like it at all. I don't like it prolonged, and I won't engage in the long run, so I tend to settle issues right now because I don't want it to propagate.

But I was talking to my friend about firing people. I said I really can't stand it. How do you manage it? Because you've fired hundreds of people. He said, "I really like it." And I thought, oh, well, I've never heard anyone say that before. And he said, "Yeah, I go into these companies and I find these people who are exploiting everyone around them and making life miserable for everyone and trying to gain credit where no credit is due and being narcissistic and manipulative, and I ferret them out and I stop them, and it's just fine."

And I thought, good for you. And his career has been very interesting because he has his own independent business, and he's very good at it. He's an engineer, but he's moved from corporation to corporation playing this role. And he starts in the lower rungs, and then moves up, and then as soon as he moves up high enough to start to, what would you say, threaten the powers that be who also might be behaving in a corrupt matter, they fire him, and then he has to go do that at a different place.

But he's also one of the people I have around who's been very useful at, let's say, calling me out when necessary and who will definitely make his opinion known when it's necessary to make it known, and he does that in search of excellence. You know, and that's the thing that's so cool about America's Got Talent, Britain's Got Talent. Simon said to you that you had to be right 80% of the time, and you said in order to do that you had to rely on your authentic judgment, and people will forgive judgment and see that it's necessary if it's authentic and not self-serving.

And I think those shows have really fulfilled the mandate of bringing hidden talent to light, which is a very noble cause, maybe the most noble cause in some ways. It can also—you can also have moments in there where people, you know, I can think back to one example. There was a young lady who did a rock violin act where she played electric violin and danced and sang, and it was all pretty crazy.

I didn't think she was quite ready yet for fame and fortune. Her name was Lindsey Stirling. And I was pretty mean actually, probably unnecessarily. And I said that whilst I found her act interesting, I did think at points she sounded like—I think I said a sack of rats being strangled, right? So people on—I don't know. Yeah, that's a little—yeah, pretty mean—and everyone's going—she's like a sack of kittens being strained?

Yeah, exactly, the fact it was rats made it even worse. So it all, it was all very sort of dramatic, and it was quarter-final, I think, and she left, and she was upset, and afterwards, a little bit like maybe I went a bit far, blew up on Twitter, and so on. But she's now a really successful act, like incredibly successful, touring around, and she now has a tombstone on her stage act with my face on it.

So she never forgot the strangle rats line, and it says, “R.I.P. Piers Morgan.” I flash up a couple of times; it gets a huge ovation from the crowd. They all know the backstory. And in a way, sometimes you could see that it—you could be very mean on people, and sometimes in life you could be mean on people who can't take it, and you might regret it because it has a negative impact on them.

When I was a newspaper editor, so I could be pretty tough and pretty ruthless sometimes with stuff if I felt they were underperforming. But I learned over time there are certain types of people who respond well to criticism, even to very tough criticism, and there are certain types of people who just don't, and you've got to work them out because actually they can all be talented.

Some people can take it, and some people can't. Some people thrive and fuel off it. You know, I just played a pro-am golf tournament called the Alfred Dunhill Links up in Scotland. It's probably that, after along with Pebble Beach in America, the most prestigious prime. You're playing with professionals in a four million pound tournament, and for the first two days, I've played the most shocking golf probably seen in the history of the tournament.

I haven't played much in the last few months. I've been working too hard. It was all a nightmare. And on the last day, I played with a Belgian professional called Thomas Peters, and he said, "Pierce, how do you want to play it today? How do you want to get on?" I said, "Just sledge me," which is criticize me harshly every time I play a bad shot. I want mockery. I want taunting. I want laughter. I want you to be all over me like a cheap scent. So he did.

He reveled in his role and I played the best round of my week because actually what I needed was somebody to do that rather than somebody politely going, “So when I—I, when I myself worked for an editor,” he was a pretty infamous newspaper, is it called Kelvin McKenzie at The Sun?

And he said the most annoying trait about me was that he could give me a monstering, as he called it, where he would scream abuse until his neck's bulging, and an hour later I'd bounce back into his office with a hot story and a smile on my face, and he found that completely annoying because it was not what he wanted to do. He wanted to trample me down for a few days, but he then said he knew then I would have what it took to be a newspaper editor.

And I do feel in society we have moved so far away from that kind of atmosphere now in workplaces that I do wonder about people like me who genuinely thrive and get fueled by harsh criticism. Is that happening anymore? Are there any workplaces left in the world where anyone is allowed to be exposed to tough critiques? Have all talent shows now gone way too soft?

Do you ever see a really harsh strangle rats critique which might fuel the intense to then go and be a huge star to prove you wrong? In other words, I really feel this; that with my old talent show, I think things have moved so fast and have gone so much softer, and in my view, so much weaker.

And that's not because I don't think some people can't take it, because some people can't take it. So you've got to be mindful of them, but what about the vast ways of people who actually revel in that kind of atmosphere? Who revel in noise and aggression and passion and criticism? It fuels them, inflames them, makes them better people, makes them better at work, makes them better perhaps in their lives.

I don't know the answer, but I think the pendulum has swung way too far, and we're now becoming such a saccharine uninspiring, unpassionate collective workplace in particular, where the slightest joke told out of turn leads to you being frog-marched to Human Resources.

I just feel like it's gone way the wrong way, and the talent shows actually have moved with that. But everyone on a talent show now is great even when they're terrible. I scream at them. I catch them occasionally. My daughter loves watching Britain's Got Talent. She's 10. And she said, "Dada, they're terrible! Why are the judges all saying that was great?"

I went, "Because they feel they have to." It's like, "Because if they don't, someone's going to say, 'Well,