You Don't Understand What Happened on Piers Morgan | Russell Brand

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]You know, I'm not the only controversial thing in the world. Catholicism is controversial, Daily Wire is controversial, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is controversial, me going on Piers Morgan and taking a wild >> That was fun. locate the rest of the stuff.

[00:00:13]>> [laughter] >> I watched it last night. Um How did you think it went?

[00:00:20]Well, I was do I mean, I did two interviews in a pretty short period of time. And one I thought was pretty good.

[00:00:24]With him or Megan?

[00:00:25]>> Megan Kelly was you know, I would say ultimately not like usually beneficial. And one that I felt at the time degrees of discomfort also didn't go well. But like Matt, I'm beginning to These are the inquiring of inquiries that I'm making to myself right now.

[00:00:46]Why are you going on podcasts? What do you want? What do you want? How am I supposed to reconcile? And indeed, am I supposed to reconcile or is there someone undertaking reconciliation on my behalf? And indeed, reconciliation and substitution are also central to his role that my role is almost redundant.

[00:01:05]But nevertheless, how do I reconcile me knowing One thing I've always known about myself is that I was motivated by some sort of culturally born appetite for fame, celebrity, success, power, all of the trinkets that anyone would recognize that still dominate what is now known as the manosphere in many places, male status symbols, affability, ability to attract mates, that is all those things. How And yet, I also had and I feel it's still what feels like that the spiritual equivalent of a pathology towards mission. Yeah. Something that you are going to do this no matter what. If this kills you, you will carry on doing it. I felt both of those things, self-god, self-god before I had that vocabulary.

[00:01:54]Before I knew how to make them distinctions, before I knew that that was a paradigm that's described scripturally. Well, I I'd love to ask you why you're on cuz I'll tell you why I'm having you on. I even though it's a show on the Daily Wire, I'm not terribly interested in politics, not cuz politics can't be interesting or isn't important, but what I'm really excited to talk to you about is how your journey to Jesus Christ. We have your book, How to Become a Christian in 7 Days. May take 50 years of sin and serious effort to get started. Um and then also like you know, you're a big name and so that helps my channel. Those are my two honest reasons interviewing you. What's your honest reason for being on my show?

[00:02:27]>> My honest reason is that I'm promoting that book and I'm interrogating even now whether or not like this Guess what I read today.

[00:02:37]I've got some notes doing this and I >> [laughter] >> Bookmarks are in place. They actually totally truth, Isaiah 43:18, which is what I was looking for in the now it seems ridiculous to say famous meme like a meme. Um it was already bookmarked. It's already bookmarked. It's It was there This has been there for like weeks.

[00:02:59]Um forget the former things. Do not dwell on the past. See I'm doing a new thing. Now it springs up. Do you not perceive it? I'm making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, but I think really as I was so I was looking for it and I was thinking isn't this is early in Isaiah, isn't it? It's about Isaiah 10. Where is that? I was like sort of looking We've all been there.

[00:03:19]And yeah, well, I suppose look, I am questioning my own integrity in selling a book and then my point when I picked up the Bible just then was to bring us to 2 Corinthians.

[00:03:32]But while we're looking for that, I will make the point that if something is sort of innocuous as looking for a page in the Bible or looking for a quote in a book to decouple it from ideology and theology, you know, have you ever looked for a quote in a book and not been able to instantly and urgently find it if it wasn't something you were preparing or really even thinking about that day.

[00:03:53]If that is looked at so nefariously, it makes you wonder how many other relatively innocent things might be being deliberately reframed as negative for some other purpose because surely uh there is an appetite to condemn. An appetite to condemn is one of my teachers, the writer of this book actually, Jamie Winship, who you should definitely have on your show, said to me, he goes, "Well done. For 72 hours >> [laughter] >> for 72 hours, it weren't about Jews or Muslims or LGBTQ plus or Trump supporters or Democrats or whatever. It was about you for 72 hours. Well done."

[00:04:30]You cuz the people that are doing that, they were doing it before and they're doing it now about something else. For a minute, you just passed through it. Now, like my little challenge is not to take myself seriously while somehow still having the fuel to go through my life.

[00:04:44]So, what happens as a result of it? Well, what happens as a result of it is I, you know, I read Corinthians today, 2 Corinthians in fact, and actually I'm not sure that I can find the actual and direct quote, but one >> sit here for a minute while you find it.

[00:04:58]>> Yeah, yeah, you just I'm just going to take my time with it. Actually, I found it already. Thank you, God. Uh it says here in two um in two Corinth in 2 Corinthians chapter 2, we're around 15, "We do not peddle the word of God for profit. We do not peddle the word of God for profit." And like so when I'm on Piers Morgan and I've sort of I'm realizing from the moment I saw the truth enter the Associated Press buildings, and this these are the kind of buildings I've been in a lot of times, a kind of sterility and bureaucracy that brings further wisdom yet to C.S. Lewis's device in The Screwtape Letters of depicting the realm of demons as an institutionalized bureaucracy cuz bureaucracy is a kind of pose of managerialism and therefore neutrality.

[00:05:46]We're just functionally doing what's necessary. But, it is dehumanizing by its nature. By its nature, a bureaucracy strips away our humanity. Anyone that's waited on the now press three for now press two or I'm unable to help you is more than my job's worth. We no longer have the ability to be in the flow of the living water interacting with one another.

[00:06:05]>> each other like human beings.

[00:06:06]>> And they interact and like, you know, for for good or for ill. Like, you know, we've become dislocated.

[00:06:11]>> I thought this yesterday. I was at the airport and, you know, they have the self-scan checkouts. And I thought, "Don't give me that option cuz I will choose it. But, I would much rather have to look someone in the eye and have a conversation." But, we're getting to the point where we don't need to have pesky conversations with strangers anymore.

[00:06:26]>> When you're in a grocery store and like using the self-checkout and sometimes the few remaining folk that work there will direct you towards it.

[00:06:34]>> Yeah. Knowing that in a way they're signing their own sort of penury because the in the end they won't be required.

[00:06:42]We won't be required. But, perhaps it's no more significant than the I identity that peasants had when working in agriculture yielded to the identity they had when working in industry to the identity we have as some new lanyard class propping up some AI counterfeit system of total control and centralized managerialism where your free will and your self-sovereignty and your connection to God are just inadvertent private secrets that you mutter in some corner somewhere lest you should be like Daniel politely disobedient praying towards Jerusalem until the day Okay.

[00:07:18]All right. So, that's how you felt going on to Piers's show. Well, how I felt was just confused because also I am a creature of Babylon. I lived there a long time. I'm a creature of Hollywood.

[00:07:28]Like, you know, I I've been on this merry-go-round a long time it seems to me. Like, I've been on it a long time.

[00:07:37]When you when you first become famous is incredibly validating and for a moment sort of golden. Like, oh my god, I'm surely you've had your own version of like this thing that I do and did out of love and just started doing it and now I'm being remunerated and I can do it more and this is gosh, thank you, Lord.

[00:07:51]Thank you. You know, even if you're a sort of secular person or even if your religion's as diffuse and baffling as the sort of neo-pagan attempts at grasping at meaning that I knew as a just a a working-class person from Essex, drug addict, confused, pursuing something, a dream that I feel like was bequeathed by the culture.

[00:08:12]Become famous. If you want to mean something and you feel like you mean nothing, become famous. Develop some sort of status in the system. So, you know, when I first got famous, there is a moment where all of those no's turn to yes's where no, you can't have a TV show. No, you can't have a radio show.

[00:08:27]No, we're not interested in your column, your book, your stand-up, anything you've got to say becomes yes. Yes to it all. And that's sort of feels for a moment like a facsimile or at least a shadow of glory.

[00:08:38]Um but quite quickly, it transpires if you are in any way attuned, and I suppose to a degree we all are, and perhaps addicts and alcoholics are especially attuned to some real meaning, real nutrition. You recognize this wasn't it. This wasn't what I was looking for. Not hedonism, not decadence, not approval, not personal satisfaction. It feels so thin. It feels so thin and empty.

[00:09:00]Um but, you know, these cycles are easily perpetuated. You can get people in a real rhythm in them mazes, dropping a pellet to the rat, keeping them going round and round and round. So, when I go back, what I felt like in the Associated Press building is, oh, I know these places, News International's offices in Southeast London where the Times and the Sun and Virgin Radio and TalkSport Radio are all housed. I know these turnstiles, these chrome anonymous turnstiles where the fodder of a person is, you know, like the cogs in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. We're cogs in this machine, this simulation, this counterfeit thing. We're cogs in machine, we're being made machine-like.

[00:09:39]Um you know, and then the there there them kind of elevators where there's no button, but you're allocated to go to elevator C16, and it will take you to where you got to go, and then they're all windowless rooms, no people. One person, Peter, I think he was called, like a person that worked for the AP, who was actually a really sweet person who actually eventually ended up getting me some water the ninth time of asking for the living water, praying like Elijah for that water to come. Eventually, it turned up.

[00:10:06]And as you see, um when I even went to the bathroom prior to doing it, um you walk past Associated Press photographic imagery. And these images, if you're like me and you're raised to worship the culture, you'll see them almost as if you're looking at an exhibition from Man Ray, black and white prestigious images, serious photography from serious journalists, but only afterwards, man, I thought, "Hold on a minute, these are images of execution and brutality, that famous Vietnamese man captive having his head blown off."

[00:10:37]And it made me sort of question the real neutrality of the way that media, and the word, and the etymology of the word just means conduit for information, communication. There is no neutrality, except for perhaps that type of neutrality that always metastasizes into sin. So, I felt very uncomfortable, but I always felt uncomfortable when I'm doing the MTV VMAs. I'm not like, "Wow, man, aren't I fantastic?" I felt kind of ill ill in those environments, sometimes thinking, "You better start trying to enjoy this, because one day you're going to look back at him, people maybe will ask you, and all you're going to say is, 'I didn't like it.'" While I was watching it last night, I thought, "Whatever I have to do so that he doesn't call me darling, is what I'm going to do."

[00:11:16]Darling. Do you know how that got back in my vocabulary? It was cuz of a Christian. It was cuz of a Christian, Michael Emmet, God rest his soul. He was a gangster, found the Lord in jail after doing time for the largest drug bust of of a turn kind in my country.

[00:11:31]And him and his dad found Lord through the Alpha course.

[00:11:34]>> Yeah. And Michael was like, "You were all right, darling." He's like old school lock, stock, kind of gangster.

[00:11:40]Our Lord, he he's a man's man, you know, he weren't no He didn't pee sitting down, Jesus Christ. Right, he was very gangster about it, and very affable, and he like he started to use dar- he called me darling, and he called people darling.

[00:11:55]And uh in a sense it it didn't feel like a show business word no more. It started to feel like a um Like a term [snorts] of endearment.

[00:12:04]>> Yeah, and a bit gangster. But that may- I'm sensing from what you're telling me >> [laughter] >> that's not how it came across.

[00:12:11]>> don't know. On Uncensored with Piers Morgan >> two things he made uh a big deal of, and not for no reason, is the allegations that have been leveled against you, and then the insinuation, if he didn't come right out and say it, that this Chris- Christianity thing is just a grift. So, I know you can't speak a lot about the former, but I do need to ask about it.

[00:12:33]Um, allegations have been made about you. In some of the interviews that I've seen you I think right >> [snorts] >> rightfully said that and I would say the same thing about myself back in the day was a imbecile and an idiot and made bad choices. But then you've said didn't commit rape. And that you think that if somebody did commit rape, even 20 25 years later, should be thrown in jail.

[00:13:01]Can we talk about that or not? Well, as as since the Piers Morgan and Megan Kelly interviews, the Crown Prosecution Service, that's the equivalent of the AG Mhm. contacted me via my lawyers to say that if you talk about this case at all Okay. we will withdraw your bail, and you will wait for trial in custody. Or at least I don't know fully the reason in custody.

[00:13:22]>> about that. Yeah, so I mean Okay. So, really I don't think I can add to anything that I've already said publicly other than acknowledging that of course there would be interest in such heinous allegations so publicly made.

[00:13:38]You know, yeah. But you fully deny them and have denied them since the beginning. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed that clip, you are going to love the full interview. Please click it and watch it or else I will tell on you.