Jay Morton (former SAS Legend) - The James Smith Podcast

i'll crop an editor somewhere i'm the edit king so sweet sweet today ladies and gentlemen i'm privileged to have jay morton as a guest hello welcome thanks for coming on jay cheers james thanks for having us all the way in australia mate and uh any of you watching on youtube you'll see that i have uh professional lighting set up jay's sitting there a little bit a little bit dark i can see you but when when i did it is it too dark is it mate i'm sure this is just how you operate you know camouflage um you're trying to you're trying to sit there and operate in the shadows i don't know don't don't try and get that past me i went i did a podcast for james i've gone for the psychologist's couch mate yeah because this would be like quite a good therapy session i was going to go full lay down method mate i can't actually see from the bottom down so if you laid down i wouldn't have a clue so i think it's very smart from you when i did a podcast with james haskell he was like how do you look so good what's that like you've got there and i'm i'm i'm an author 13 army i need anything i can to keep me looking a little bit young if you need the technical setup i'll help you out i need the tips man i just stay in the dark i'm i'm close to 40. mate no you don't look it you don't look it so jay we we first met portsmouth uh last year that's right on your live it was this year was it yeah it was january or february january yeah it was it was january that was cut yeah that feels like quite a long time ago yeah and this uh even myself like i keep saying to people oh yeah i was on tour last year but it was it was january yeah this year's been like a massive blip hasn't it mate i i remember being uh kind of backstage it was like you can't really say backstage it was in like a club in portsmouth and they were like oh some of the uh sas su des wins boys are here and i was like shut the [ __ ] up and when i came over i was like yo lads and it was kind of a surreal experience for me to have i still find it weird that the people come along to the shows as it is um but to see you boys there was was absolutely class yeah man yeah i was a good uh good little number like um i was weirdly in that club uh last week i met up with uh a good friend of ours who lives in portsmouth and we uh we went for some food in that same club it's a it's a weird old place i think i think portsmouth's a weird place the best of time and i hate how people i think most of the coat i think i think most of the coastal cities are quite weird places though and they call it pompey right which gets on the nerves because they've not taken away any syllables portsmouth two syllables pompey two syllables like it's not like you've you've actually reduced it at all and yeah coastal cities are quite weird whereabouts you situated at the moment uh so i'm down in dorset on the south coast so it's it's similar right i think like um i come from preston originally the north um and like we like grew up around blackpool and blackpool's exactly the same like the coastal cities just seem to attract weirdness like blackpool is like the epicenter of just weirdness like it's you see the most bizarre people to be honest most of the northern towns are exactly the same you see some right weirdness but yeah like same down here in like bournemouth portsmouth southampton i'm basically slagging off all the coastal towns so uh hey i am i'm gonna get i'm gonna get some death threats yeah you probably will you live with uh quite a famous uh swedish dj at the moment don't you yeah that's right yeah a swedish dj called svenga vinson he's moved he's moved back in after he was supposed to be touring um ibiza but obviously a beef is all closed down and all his gigs have turned off so yeah i wake up every morning at around 7 30 to uh loud opera music so one of uh one of one of the main reasons i was keen to get you on today is that i need i need a new teammate in call of duty warzone and i hear you might be i'm hoping to get my position i'm hoping to get my position on call of duty i'm dying for him to make a character of me i need you to check my loadout make sure that i'm using the right attachments on my weapon and also um what i like to do when i'm playing online is to pretend i'm a soldier and talk in soldier talk so i might need if i see an enemy do i call them a tango do i call them a bogey uh so enemies are bravo all right bravo's um let me get this right a building's an alpha charlie's a car c car um and then you've got females so females are echoes um kids are kilos surprisingly so you need to speak in code at all times then you break down buildings as well you can break down buildings so you've got like the front of the building is the i always remember it you know the the train the train company gwr yeah great western rail so the left-hand side of a building's green front of the building is white and the right-hand side is red and then the back's a black aspect mate i am i play with a few lads and one of them's from uh i think it's from sutton he's from london but he sounds like proper london and we're playing and he's one of these guys that speaks he's like gunshots local gunshots local and he's like and when i'm playing i'm like this is so funny but like when we got headsets on you're playing with other people and sometimes you're just there like i'm i'd like to laugh if there's randoms in there i'm like guys you need to say over at the end of your sentence and then someone's like oh [ __ ] i'll mark up the enemies i'm like you mean mark up the enemies over and we have a bit of fun you play playing in war zone i don't i don't james no never i've done i'm just feeling like your skills could be wasted yeah but like it's all fingertips right mate this is all in the head this is all mental and you know can you can you do it on can you do it on it's a what's the the hardest setting it's like what's the name they give to it realistic mode and then you've got expert is no you've got isn't call of duty you've got like expert and then it goes into like realistic or something i can't remember the name it could be but maybe you've got to feel like you've got to mate who's like biggest achievement in life is to complete it in all four of the difficulty settings mate online is where it's at like you might think it's all just fingertips this is mental some nights if i'm in a tough game i can't sleep because my adrenals and you got there you got their headsets right and i'm not trying to say that i've served in the military but it's close do you get flashbacks um not quite but a lot of the time you know there's something called the gulag when you die you go one-on-one with another guy in the showers and you've only got one weapon that's you're not you don't get to decide what it is and whoever wins gets to read yeah whoever whoever gets the showers yeah it's called the gulag in a shower block it's like an old child like a like a like like a yeah like a well like the concentration camps aren't they the cool legs yeah yeah so it's one of them and then you're given a weapon one view one you don't know where each other are and all the other people who have died get to watch you and throw rocks i'm i mean all the yeah it's realistic it's real yeah and you've got you've got headsets right mushroom trip no no it's it's this is what gaming is these days i was six years clean so i thought it was just multiplayer it's really leveled up and with the headphones you can hear where gunshots are coming from and when a bullet whizzes past your head with your headset you know what direction it's come from and you hear steps as people come into the building so when you're in a building you know when a door's open you know where steps are coming from and as you position your your player around you can tell which door they're coming through so the world of online gaming from like uh from that standpoint it's really really leveled up and uh this is quite an interesting thing i was going to talk about i was going to join the army when i was younger do i ever tell you this no so i believe you're a power right yeah yeah i wanted to join remy more electrical mechanical engineers yeah okay yeah screamers it was the uh well i was in army cadets for maybe four or five years and yeah i think i think i was about 13 when i joined so i know how to wear a beret properly i remember a change parade like marching can you march yeah i can march but you know someone asked me show them the other day i was like now i was like no you don't know it was one of those things where it seems like a distant a distant life and one of my favorite things on it was uh shooting and we i've fired tutus like peashooters um but the sa-80 which is the british army rifle we used to use a slightly modified one called the l98 aigp cadet rifle still remember and on my school yeah and they're horrible weapons horrible and on my jnc okada as the lance corporal i had to take one apart and put it together blindfolded and i forget that i've i still remember where the what you call the pins that you use uh to just uh not a firing pin where you start to unattach the weapon which one you have on the side yeah yeah just um oh what are they called assembly pin maybe i think yeah and i still remember where it is something because they've got all those like military words where the words back to front it's like pin firing for like firing pin or like bolt safety or safety catch instead of like well catch for safety wouldn't work but some reason the military has a way of like reversing the words i still remember all the safety drills of ensuring that the weapon didn't have a round in the barrel um where you'd [ __ ] it back you would check the safety you would even wave your hand under where the magazine went in i still have all of this in my mind what maybe 15 years later and i sometimes think about it do you think you're transferring those skills over to call of duty 100 and that's why you know that's why i'm in there and i'm like listen guys you need to listen to me but i lost it's muscle memory it's repetition isn't it it's the same thing with it's annoying and this must annoy you right in films how ridiculous some of the ways they handle weapons and just there i bet you see so many things that people are doing wrong you're like that wouldn't happen yeah um pretty much everything like there's a few realistic movies that have come out and so zero dark 30 was quite realistic um captain phillips to a point was quite realistic borrow a couple of the shots that they took uh lone survivor was quite realistic like all the films that were made from the the american seal teams they're all quite realistic but they're kind of hollywood movies where someone's firing an automatic for like an extended period of time and then they're absolutely like no like their ammunition doesn't run out or you know even like throwing a grenade like a grenade and a flame comes out um as you'll know from call of duty grenade on like a pyrotechnic where flame comes out it's literally a frag so it's an explosion where little shards of steel disappear into people's bodies around them so yeah like movies i mean you know what like it's entertainment right it'd be some of those movies would be pretty boring if they constantly run out of ammunition i watched the chris hemsworth uh film recently i can't remember what it was called but it was dreadful the one on netflix yeah it was so unrealistic the guy was taking apart like 30 40 people but there was one point where his pistol ran out of ammo and he changed the magazine but the uh kind of cocking mechanism is still back and he uses someone's chest to get the round back in the chamber and i'm sat there like someone directing this film has gone let's make that bit realistic and i'm like you've made that bit realistic but the rest of the film is absolutely shite and really it annoys me in that sense and they like you say i always wonder what like military people do when they watch filming that's not real that's not what night vision looks like that's not that does it but yeah i can imagine it's something we've just got to get on with um anyway enough of the enough of the war zone chat i might have to send you a playstation and a headset yeah i'd lose my life i think it's one of those things i've got quite an addictive personality and i think if i started that stuff i just i'd lose my life there's there's uh how many hours do you put into it i invest a couple a day and and the thing is you know what do you get in return for investment you know when you go sober for a bit you start to judge other people you're like you know you go like three weeks without booze and you start looking at drunk people and you're like you're disgusting yeah you know and you're like oh sorry all the time so i do this with warzone and like you know i spend the whole day in my room playing i come out and i go you are doing nothing social distancing you know and you can start to become sanctimonious almost that you know you're above people so gamers at the moment are quite high up in society because we stick to ourselves we we hide away from the rest of the world and if everyone game that little bit more we could slow the spreader covered you're probably correct there i actually remember playing uh grand theft auto do you know when it went from that overhead view to that to the actual like first person kind of my city yeah vice city and i remember playing it so so much that i went out on the piss that night and i came out of a nightclub and i actually thought that i was in i was like looking around and i was like it feels like i'm in grand theft auto and i should just go and like rob a car did you get that with call of duty um i actually feel like really drained after it because there are there are points in it it gets adrenally drained adrenally i like [ __ ] sweat patches a lot because uh you you get down to like are you putting on weight for this james ear are you like no no some days i'm knackered and i realize it's my adrenals from how far we're getting along in the game there's like me and three of my best mates they're now best mates and um you know you go away for a couple hours uh we've got my mate tom we've got my mate freddy and we go deploy we're deploying together you know we're brothers in arms we went for a beer one of them the other lad we we'd spent maybe 15 20 hours in the war zone i hadn't seen him in six months so we went for a beer and i was like i had to interact with him on a normal basis i was like this is very strange um but anyway we'll get away from otherwise this is just gonna become a chat about call of duty which came in yeah um i'm you've said that your power talk me through if you had to tell everyone in two minutes your career to date from being a young adult how would you succinctly put your career into two minutes um probably left left school um went to college hated college hated school um left college after just left just short of a year i had like a load of [ __ ] jobs where i think i worked in a factory making windows i worked in a delivery factory and then decided to join the military because it aligned with a lot of stuff that entered that that i'm interested in like teamwork and uh being outdoors uh did four years in the paris and at the time that was when afghanistan kicked off so we were the first guys over to afghanistan in 2006. um did one tour of iraq two tours of afghanistan and then joined uh went on selection in 2008 for the sas and then literally for the next 10 years uh in the sas and that was kind of the time when afghanistan was you know the biggest the biggest country that we were deployed to so i spent a lot of time over there in afghanistan and then um pretty much from there just trained a lot in the mountains and i got the opportunity to go out to germany and become a mountain guide over there and then came back from that and just found myself climbing high at the tube mountains so am i right in saying that people or soldiers first deployed to afghanistan in 2001. yeah british soldiers did yeah yeah yeah took kabul so we're looking um yeah no i would say that carry on there's we soldiers been in afghanistan for nearly 20 years and yeah people in in our in retrospect our vietnam war terrible seems like a big war you know but 20 years in a country is absolutely crazy and there are still soldiers there now right yeah i believe um the british army's redeployed there which is like absolutely mental and if i you know not to hijack the course of the conversation but i had a really stern sit down my parents where my dad wanted me to go into the army as an officer and for the same reason as yourself i did not do well at school and he thought if i just went in as a squaddy not to you know speak down about squaddies he was like i've just got an idea of you going in as an officer and this was probably in the early 2003 to 2004 and i applied for welbeck college which was like a officer training college the officer training yeah yeah and um i went for an interview so i interviewed with him but i'd had a previous run-in with the police which uh i had to disclose at the point but then it got so political that my dad at the time was like i want nothing more for you to join the army but i don't when you go into afghanistan he was like this isn't a proper war how how did it kind of feel for for you your family like when you first got deployed what i want to know is were people behind you or was everyone you know was anyone there like challenging you and being like maybe you shouldn't do this or kind of what happens there uh no not in my family um i guess it all came quite quickly um so i got deployed to to iraq uh for three months and it was kind of towards the end of the iraq tour that the americans went over and and re-invaded or or went back over to afghanistan and um we were kind of getting told that we may or may not be going um and anyway it came down to the point that we're gonna go so we pretty much came back from iraq and six months later we flew out to afghanistan and um do you know what like i was 20 years old um and you're pretty excited to just go overseas and do you know at the time you know we didn't realize how kinetic it would go um it was seen as more of a peacekeeping uh deployment and um i kind of remember the early stage the early days of it you know we turned up to what would be cambastian and which was like the largest british camp in the whole of afghani afghanistan and um there were no roads built there were like no kitchens no accommodation like we were going for for runs like uh platoon runs on these like dirt like this horrendous this is like this like really fine dust that used to just get up your nostrils and we'd go out flight put platoon runs on these dusty tracks um but yeah there's like no infrastructure and we thought we were there for kind of peacekeeping and yeah the first job that that we deployed on was a job in a place called nazad and um i remember just running off the back of the ch-47 helicopter in the middle of a farmer's field and it was like the first crack and thump of a of a round flying over your head and like would literally just like run out into this field and just run out into a massive scrap and um we had like a call sign that was on the ground so a patrol's platoon that was already deployed and they'd come under this massive contact um which i believe some of the guys got written up for at that time and there's [ __ ] rpgs and machine gun fire flying everywhere so that was you know we were we were kind of prepared for what would be peacekeeping but it just turned into yeah it turned into like turned into very quickly just a a massive um you know kinetic tour kind of my understanding of like human physiology we have fight or flight and we are designed to be able to withstand huge amounts of stress but only for short periods of time the human body isn't designed for prolonged periods of stress when you're in a place like afghanistan you must be on alert all the time is that right um yeah not so much right because you'll fly into a camp or a base where you'll base yourself out of and generally those locations are pretty safe so you know you're going to the gym you're walking around in shorts and t-shirt some of the places have you know pizza hut and coffee places um you know that's quite a safe environment and then you know when i was when i was in the paris that maybe was a little bit different to when i was in the in the sas in terms of job description but in the paras you would fly out to an area so that 2006 tour for example uh my platoon or my company was predominantly predominantly in a place called sangin which sang in you know if you speak to any kind of british military person sangin was the the shittest place and and probably the most dangerous place to be to be based um so yeah whilst you're there it is kind of you know again we we built a base it was um an old building that that the governor had lived in and apparently the governor was getting death threats and that's the reason that we went into into this base you know it was just a building when we walked in there and we just we occupied this building and just you know we were building trenches um or like what you would call a sandbag position so you fill a sandbag up with dirt you compress that and that becomes a bulletproof um catchment so you build a wall out of that and we didn't have enough sandbags so we were just built we were just finding like cardboard boxes and bricks and just making these like machine gun positions which we give overwatch to in the town uh out of like cardboard boxes and brickabrack and all sorts of stuff but we managed to fortify ourselves in this location um and then yeah you you it was twitchy like we were getting reports i remember we dug this trench and uh my section was it was our job to look to to overwatch this orchard area and we dug the trench in the middle of this orchard and we got a we got a call on the radio that night that they were going to send guys over this wall and attack us and i remember just sat like sat there as a 21 year as a 20 year old kid in this trench in the middle of an orchard in afghanistan just thinking like like [ __ ] oh like this is you know this is pretty serious and yeah and it was the first night where i don't think anyone really slept you get like an hour's sleep but the rest of the time pretty much everyone was just sat staring out of this trench um but yeah you know go back to your question like that kind of deployment yeah i mean you you switched on a lot right you you you're um you get used to it so you get you get that almost false sense of security and that dull down of of fear so you're not going out and essentially you know you don't feel like you're on edge all the time and then if anything happens it's usually over and like well the sas stuff it's usually over quite quickly but back then you'd have scraps for kind of you know hours days kind of thing what's what's it like coming back to normality so once you come back from a tour or a time or a stint did you ever kind of struggle or have issues with coming back to civilian life um you know not the majority of the tours i didn't like you know you go through a period what was called decompression where you went over to cyprus um and you'd have two or three days where you just got you know it was a transition period from what you were doing to going back and and hugging your kids and family and it was just a period where like lads used to just drink and or not like you know not drink for the full three days but you'd have like a piss up where everyone would just like air their problems and just get stuff off their chest and then transition into going back to the uk and there was one there was one like one of the operations where um and this is whilst i was serving in the special forces where the period leading up to us returning back to the uk was was uh you know pretty fast-paced we were going out and um you know without saying too much it was you know just we basically dismantled the full uh network in this certain area and um yeah it was so busy that you know we were pretty much out on jobs every day up until the point that we flew back and i got the call to say that i was going to fly back early which meant that i wouldn't go through cyprus and do the whole decompression thing which at the time it was like a bonus right i didn't have to go and sit in cyprus for three days like waffling crap teammates about the same stuff you've been waffling crap to for the last six months so like i literally came off a job and i remember it to this day i came off this job and it was we ended up doing three three jobs in a bounce right so we went after one target got that target went straight after another one went straight after another one finished came back decated quick shower flew on a helicopter back to the main camp and then 24 hours later i was on the tube in london and then that was a weird time right it was like i was on the train i was heading back up north to see a girl i was seeing at the time and like internally i just didn't i felt like there was there was something wrong um and i just couldn't you know it was ptsd or whatever you call it uh whatever the label is for it but at the time i was just like i just didn't feel right inside um and something was just like i had this internal dialogue inside my head just kind of saying you know at some stage this feeling will pass and you'll feel normal and it probably took about three weeks but but progressively over the course of three weeks i kind of just felt a little bit more normal every day because you get to a stage right when you're overseas where you learn how to suppress a lot of the things that are happening and you kind of and this is probably why ptsd happens right because you you experience what a normal person or what whatever you're seeing is a traumatic incident so someone's been injured or whatever has happened in front of you and you just have an ability to be able to just put that to a side and just crack on unemotionally and i guess a period of that built up over three months and then being put back into a position where you've got to be emotional right i've got to interact with other people and interact with my girlfriend and tell her i've missed her and all that kind of stuff when inside you just like the same person that you were 24 hours before yes just listening to that it's absolutely mental and you know it imagine anyone listening to this you're sat on the tube the person opposite you could have been in probably the highest stress environment in the world a few days before and to think that you know a lot of the time at face value i think it's very strange and we live in a world where you know we have technology we have planes we have things where people can literally have to transition from such an intense gunfight like where you say you've got to be ready if someone gets really severely injured i've got to put a tourniquet on this guy to save his life and then suddenly a week later you've got a you know be a chivalrous gentleman i mean oh sorry i should be carrying the shopping you know and these transitions i don't think people give really enough enough credit to and i've got friends who have left the military and i think it it can sometimes maybe not be worse but people don't take into account that if you join the military at 16 or 17 i'm not sure the youngest you can actually join when you come back into the civilian world if you serve 10 years you've never experienced the normal world and a friend of mine said that he served from 15 to 16 to 26 he came home and he got up first thing in the morning and he stood in his mom's front room he didn't know what to do like literally not not just for the day in life he'd never sent an email before he'd never done any of these things and you know you have ptsd but then you've probably got a normal stress of you know being identified as a soldier for so long and i don't think there's enough empathy uh for people that have had to have to go through this and then transition back um so that's very interesting that you say that uh i've got some kind of like faster fire questions which can be jovial which you can have some fun with um what's your weirdest experience serving in the military um weirdest experience so there's so many of them um like you could picture you know what god um oh god weirdest experience you've got to be careful what you're saying i've got i know yeah yeah like the first thing that sprung to mind was like all like the initiation ceremonies and stuff like that and um but i mean yeah there's yeah there's there's a load of them weird experiences i've got to be careful the military boys are a bit like rugby players in the respect of uh you know i'm i'm yeah like exactly the same it's exactly this i'm reading dylan and james's james haskell's book at the minute and it's the sense of humor is exactly the same like i probably won't go there just because it'll you know probably lower than my career forever but um yeah i did have this weird experience right and it's not jovial it's probably a little deeper and more serious but um i was on yeah i was i had this like moment just before i left the military where um i was on top of this building um and it was during a big uh fire fight and i was in charge of this um what's called a 40 millimeter cannon forty mike cannon and i'd like gone forward with all these local guys and i was firing this like cannon into this town sounds like a call of duty thing but um anyway whatever's going on there and then like massive scrap just just happened and i remember coming off the top of this rooftop and what like incomplete everything's in complete ruins right everything's blown up to pieces and we're coming back down off this building and um i could hear this like weird noise this like like screaming like they're not screaming but just like this um like a squeak and i looked to my feet and there's like this like little like puppy like it's not even a puppy it's like a newborn it's like blind and almost like wet you know like just no hair on it like malnutrition and i just kind of i don't know i had like a weird moment where i just kind of thought i'm like like humans are just weird creatures right we're all just upstairs like blowing each other up and then you've got this little puppy that's just been born you can't see and he's just like scrabbling around for um for oxygen and food um i don't know like i didn't put my set my mind set off in just a completely different direction after the um don't mean to tamper the mood no no i often uh i often think about human beings being like ants and i was like if if aliens were to come by and look at us like ants like we how we look at ants they would be like imagine if you were like walking past little ant hill and they'd just go into town dead ants everywhere and you're like what's your objective here young ants and then you see them do other weird [ __ ] where you know the ants go down to a puddle and they dip in the puddle then lay on their back next to it like we do at the beach i was like as a race we are very strange and we're very territorial and we're we're very hardwired and uh again like there's there's so many things that we do like oh imagine an ant is moving itself up and down in a squat like why are you doing that all the m wants to get stronger and yeah i bet there's probably quite a few moments of clarity serving in the military where you're like what what's the objective here why why is this going on yeah because i do you know like and it's i just sometimes think like what is the point to all this as in like all the fighting and you know i think i've heard it time and time again it's like you know a lot of military people or people have been in combat wish for peace in the world because one at the end of the day the all the war all the war that's all over the world it's them that are being deployed to it but i think just the act of witnessing all that kind of stuff it's you know it's like what's the point like do you know what i mean it's like and it's never gonna stop that's that's the reality of it like everyone's at war like you're at war with your family you're at war with your friends you argue over football you argue over whatever it is it's like that's just on a micro level right on the macro level is countries going to war and people trying to kill each other and like that's for some reason hardwired and ingrained in our in our dna you know so we were on a little chat about about kovid before we went live and i was like you know what let's have this conversation live because you were saying that you can't play golf you know like peop you know remember do you not think we've moved a bit away at the beginning it was wash your hands hand sanitized hand sanitized and then a few months later they're like oh it's actually airborne so no one's no one's really getting on the hand sanitizer now and in the shops here when you walk into a shop they they make you put hand sanitizer on we don't have to wear masks but they make you put that on but some shops levi's if you're listening it smells like bigfoot's dick so i'm there with your hands i can't shop anymore because my hands stink a [ __ ] bigfoot's dick so now i've got this perfect system where in some shops i pretend that i've put it on and you know there's there's kind of all this crazy stuff going on and it's to save lives right and i i'm fully behind saving lives i'm fully behind social distancing but when you look at something like golf you were saying or tennis socially distant sports not being able to play it and the government also sorry why can't we play golf or you know we need to protect lives on the flip side you're like hold on you deployed [ __ ] 30 000 troops to afghanistan you you know how can political powers that be you know i'm just thrown out there be so okay with going to war and keeping troops in a foreign country but you know how many people on a british high street you know why are we in afghanistan but they could tell you who won the football with the weekend yeah the covert thing's a weird one right like we've just gone into lockdown two point over in the uk and like we were saying before like i don't know like golf spin band and tennis has been banned and it's just like i don't know seriously like this is the this this is the state that we're in right now where people can't play a sport where you know the closest you come to each other is way more than two meters away um i don't know i don't know it's a it's a weird one right like we're not experts at it um but i don't know i don't think this thing's going away i think i mean i'm not a politician right we're not politicians but there's probably better ways of dealing with this problem than the ways that have been deemed to us so far and i think it's quite contradictory in the uk that you know schools can stay open universities can stay open how much harder would it been to just let people have gyms and yeah james is a big one right like like this is the scary thing that that's concerning me more is is the is the knock-on effect that the lockdown has and the closing of gyms which has shown to have like a like a really minimal uh infection rate um like the knock-on effect for like mental health and people losing the jobs and you know this this is like this is going to turn into the real pandemic is the knock-on effect from you know what the virus was not the virus itself it's great i did a podcast with some uh pete not peter she was some school teachers in the uk and they said when schools came back they couldn't believe how much more overweight the majority of the kids were and you're like you're not surprised you've been locked down for however long and you know imagine if the government were just to say we're going to keep gyms and martial arts gyms open and if you attend them out of respect you know just have your social circle your gym your martial arts gym and your home that's that that be it and i appreciate that there's not a simple science then you know if someone has got family members or wants to visit a care home or works in the hospital then maybe say to them look you're you know you work in hospital we're going to ask you not to attend a martial arts gym or whatever it is but there should be some kind of leeway because the majority of gyms and martial arts gyms in the uk are gonna be open and secret like this let's not get any anything they're gonna do it anyway but what you've done is just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and and you're you box a bit don't you yeah a little bit yeah yeah yeah and i've seen a bit of a bit of inspiring footage and i'm sure that whenever you've got pent-up aggression or you know and like you say human beings i believe we are hard-wired to be combative and i think that's why you find so many people in the military and you know some people love to go to war because it's part of their personality trait and when we look at ufc fighters when i was looking at uh justin gaichi i was like you know if you had two armies and you decided to send one fighter from each just engaged he would like send him to the front because he genuinely loves it and there are people that live in normal society that box that do jiu jitsu that do mixed martial arts and they use these as ways to vent their aggression of their natural persona and to take that away from people i think is actually quite cruel and yeah it's it's very much a tough one what kind of things are you doing to remain focused and almost sane during your time um i don't know what i think i think the biggest thing is probably just staying away from media and just staying away from the news i think that you know the news is is quite bad in putting negative messages out that could probably send you into the complete fear spin um and like you know if you take away the news and the media then you're essentially not really in a lockdown you just just you take you take it's your hair is you just at home it's like i don't know we get so strung up on all these words like pandemic like lockdown like all these they're all like really kind of negative words that if you say the word to someone it's like it it has an instant reaction to to them adrenaline or whatever whereas if you just go right i don't watch the news anyway like i'm just gonna live in my house like i'm gonna go to the supermarket yeah i can't go to a bar like to be honest the bars weren't even that entertaining anyway with the the whole like 10 o'clock curfew and only being able to have six people in there like my job's pretty entertaining like i get to you know speak to people and you know speak to people like you and do podcasts so for me that's something that i'm doing that's you know meeting new people all the time that's keeping me going you know do some fitness yeah all right i can't go to a gym i can still walk i can still run i've got you know a mini gym out the back i can still train there and then obviously i've got spent for entertainment so that's that's doubles everything um but you know what i just think you know just get out of that whole thinking of lockdown as like you know being i don't know i speak to some people and they're like yep just gonna lock myself down in my house for the next four weeks and it's like that's not really it it's like you can still do certain things i mean you can't play golf and tennis but you can still meet up with one person from another household i think um we have to check the the fine print because our there's a lot of conflicting stuff when you get you're like hold on you said this but i can't do this um i even travel right even travel like i was looking because obviously you can go to greece and when you come back you there's no quarantine so i was looking at going there recently and um it was like i was supposed to go just before lockdown happened and then i was looking at the government website uh during lockdown and it advises against non uh what is it an advisor advise against non essential travel all right so you advise so that doesn't mean that it you can and can't right it's not black and white it's advised and then it's non-essential travel right so what's essential and what's not like if i need to get out of this country because i'm gonna have an absolute breakdown i class that has a potential to get some headspace get some clarity go to a country that's relatively safe in terms of the pandemic and and covert enjoying myself you know have a pina colada sit in the sun i'll be a happier better person right i'll come back more chill i try it's crazy what you say about uh the media and i think about this so if anyone's tuned into the tv they're like oh my god if donald trump wins it's the end of the world and people are really getting upset and have you noticed in 2020 a lot of white a lot of white people are getting offended on behalf of other people so black lives matter so many white people are offended you know there might be like a you know a misogynistic comment and all the men are offended and then with with the u.s election all non-us people are so invested and british people are now like oh my god if donald trump wins and you're like hold on he was he's been president for four years not once in four years have any of my friends or anyone on social media moaned about him being the president a bit sure but now there's an election and the news and everyone's there is it's made the situation worse and like you say we lock down if someone in a preston accident was going to say stay home have beers in the fridge avoid the pub like you'd be like oh that sounds you know it sounds much much better um but yeah uh moving on to the next question that's supposed to be classified i'm feeling you get it this is going to have to do with a mountain but what's your hardest physical feat everest by far and can i can i ask you a question why the [ __ ] would you climb everest um do you know what like i went out walking this morning i was doing a bit of thinking i was just like life's simpler and it's the same reason you go when you're in the military you enjoy being away on ops because you literally just go away for six weeks and you've got one purpose to climb this mountain um you eat you know eat climb [ __ ] repeat it's like that every day um and that's all you've got to do right there's hardly any wi-fi for social media or phone uh phoning people it's it's quite just simple living with a sole task of climbing a mountain is there is it true there's quite a lot of [ __ ] and rubbish on the way up uh the poo um that i know the companies get fined if they leave [ __ ] there so they barrel they get these big blue barrels and almost like whack it onto the side of donkeys and you've got these [ __ ] donkeys and yaks it just head back down the mountain with all this poo um and then yeah there's loads of rubbish to be honest it's quite i mean [ __ ] you know you've only got to walk outside of the english countryside to find rubbish but um yeah like a lot of it just i don't know it's just some expedition teams are quite lazy so they'll leave uh like quite quite a lot of rubbish after the expedit expeditions i mean you're supposed to be at like fine expedition companies for for leaving it there but there's not going to be many people like ticket wardens are there that's that kick yeah you'd be surprised because like you can find out where someone's camp was so if there's rubbish there like a lot of it you can you can generally get them fine and are there bodies on everest i've heard there's dead bodies still there yeah um yeah like so you usually get some dead ones from from that year um so for example last year when i climbed um like when you're on your way up you usually see a few few that are on the way down um and then yeah there's kind of there's probably about three or four and then the first time i climbed it 2017 i was climbing up from camp four and it was pitch black i had my head torch on i was the only person there like i was on my own i'm going up this head torch not going like left and right i literally just locked up and there's this yellow summit suit with a dead dude in there and i literally shot my head torch in his face because i thought it was someone sat down it's just this this like dark wrinkled you know cryogenically frozen sunburnt face just sat there i was like ah that's that's [ __ ] savage that's ptsd as well right and [ __ ] me like there are so many people you've done it i'm like you know what hats off to you but the people that died i'm like [ __ ] hell there was a vegan that did it to prove that she was strong and she died and like not having vegans but if you're if you're gonna you know from an ethical standpoint partaking a diet that's gonna make a lot of things difficult in life stay the [ __ ] away from everest because she had kids and i'm like you know and then i know a lot of people are feeling sorry for him they it was almost like an assisted suicide they probably paid thousands of [ __ ] pounds to end their own life and you know literally yeah it it that that blows my mind it's fifty thousand pounds fifty thousand you know yeah i mean you could do it on a shoestring for like twenty five thousand pounds but if you really if you wanna make sure that you going with a decent company then i mean you could pay up to like 150 000 pounds like some of the big end companies like you turn up there's you've got your own tent it's got its own radiator and heater and um you know the food's better you've got beer wine all that kind of stuff you've got an entertainment room with a cinema and um and and yeah call of duty on top [ __ ] that literally is glamping at base camp paul o'connell played there uh last year did like the highest that's pretty sad ever yeah because but there was like no one there so he turned up like really early before all the climbers got there so there was like a few sherpas and a handful of people that were so keen they got there a week before they should have so like you're your former sas if someone says everest you've got to do it because you're probably you're you're technically one of the hardest [ __ ] in the uk right so that's mental physical uh and from a stamina perspective but dave who's an it manager from norwich what the [ __ ] is he doing at the top of everest they some people go you know would you climb everest for me it's an absolutely [ __ ] not like i'll do skydives i'll do you know bungee jumps and all that but i i i don't know i don't know when people you know maybe wouldn't survive the climb would do something that's mental um moving on from that hardest mental feat was something that you challenged with because i'm going to get out your book in a second but mental aptitude that's the right word what what what's the hardest thing that you recall uh do you know probably again everest is quite you know up there mentally tough do you know like leaving the military was quite hard trying to adapt to civilian life and trying to i don't know find you know find activities and stuff to put my energy into outside of the military that you know that i got the same feeling that i did when i was in the military for um you know just the whole adjustment from i was quite like you know a lot of the lads laughed when i got out and said you're pretty much a civi when you're in anyway um just going from that whole you know being around like a group of lads that are all thinking feeling doing the same thing and you know it's like it's like a sports team right it's like you're all you all got good banter and you know everyone's taking a piss out of each other and that's how you get through things and then to go from that to kind of you know sat in a flat on my own in london just trying to figure out what the hell to do was probably a massive you know mental challenge for me there are going to be tens of thousands of people that share this same kind of mental challenge because like you say is it's a such a big change and you know what the only kind of experience of something similar uh probably you know it would be with professional rugby players my favorite john one of the best things that happened to me was not being that great at rugby i played at a pretty all right level but so many of my friends at uni went on to play championship and to play high high level so that like you say they're with the boys all the time they're playing game consoles resting it's physio it's training it's having a laugh and it's being surrounded by the lads you know putting bibs on and tripping people up at training they do that for 10 years then they come out and with the military you know you've developed skills you know you've um earn a good living you know all of these things that at least you know you're you're proper put together but a lot of my professional rugby friends have come out and they're like now what and if you don't quite make it to the level that you want to in your profession you're left very much stunted where they're just like right i've got to put a suit on after 10 years of putting boots on every morning and yeah for people to adjust to normal life it's something that i think a lot of people do take for granted where and then another kind of interesting question i have with the the mental side of things being a soldier coming back from tours all of that you then get some tv exposure um or generally just mainstream exposure did you ever have a bit of an issue where you'd be sat on the tube one day and someone's looking at you and you're thinking this person might just be looking at me and then you go maybe this person has bad intents and you go maybe they've seen me on tv and then did you ever find that because i take it your profile would have been very much below the radar then suddenly very much above the radar especially when um you know you're on tv in the evenings how was that for you yeah again it was just a like another massive change in my life it was like you know i left the military in like august 2018 and like that was like a wild roller coaster because you know i left like went into the outdoor clothing world with like two other mates and then yeah the tv thing was just like completely different and then i don't i don't know it like it almost normalizes in a way like it doesn't feel weird um and when the show came out like i was i'd go sainsbury's down here and you know get pinged in sainsbury's and people will be coming over chatting to me and like it happens less now but um generally now people i can i can it's like the tube thing you just said someone will spot me and they'll be looking over at me and they won't know that it's me because i've not been on the tv for like the last you know eight months or whatever but they're like i recognize that guy definitely recognize it i've had a few times like recently when i've just gone up to ask someone for something or um some guy started talking to me on the beach the other day and he's like i recognize you don't i and it's always that one now i recognize you just like yeah do you ever feel like a bit of a i sometimes feel like a bit of a narcissist when sometimes you assume someone will get the phone out and they'll they'll be looking and then you go nah you'll just be in the nasties you just think they know but then they do it yeah yeah i know you you're you're that person from the tv um yeah all right move it it's weird though right it's like i'm not like i never i've never i never seeked it out it's like a byproduct of what i've done so i'm in a weird place and there's also a very weird covered barrier where people they're like it was it was easier before people just come here no one's talking to you yeah yeah completely people come up and just say wouldn't they whereas now no one knows whether to [ __ ] speak to each other or not and we've all got masks on i'm not allowed to i'm not allowed to be out past 10 p.m but does that mean i can talk to someone that i've seen on tv they're like you know they probably advise against it you know unless it's an essential essential conversation yeah [ __ ] you know um all right what's your weirdest habit or weirdest thing that you've started since covid um like then everyone's got a weird one at home weirdest [ __ ] habit there must be something you're kicking about the house like you know you've started doing something a little bit different or there must be something going on uh mate you've caught me out on this one tv netflix you like we can come back to this uh yeah yeah yeah you know what about you and sven do you ever get up to anything weird all the time i've got this but in the best way right in the best way so one of my one of my housemates he's in his crotch he's seen his cracks yeah the new color ones are unreal he's getting sent him all the time now it's brilliant he went to the mercedes carriage yesterday and he was he wore them bright colored crocs just fun walking around in him he's owning it as well which i think is a is very important i'm really glad that he's uh he's living with you down there because i feel like you need to have like a bit of a strange mate with you and i'm i'm the strange one in my house where one of my mates never locks the door when he has a shower so every time he has a shower i just bowl in and either scare him or just tell him something or randomly go in and like uh this morning at maybe five past six in the morning he's there brushing his teeth i'm bowling and um he's left his washing on the floor for like two minutes outside the machine i'm like is this some kind of joke you're leaving you're washing it and like he's like what the [ __ ] it's five past six in the morning i'm like no i only only messed mate you want a coffee and like i'm sneaking up on him all the time there are times during like covered and locked down spending a lot of time at home i think i'm losing my mind but really i'm i'm going to be a good way though in a healthy way yeah an amazing way i feel i've got no all the best people lose their minds though right yeah i'd dance around the house uh see how far i can slide on the wooden floor in socks all this kind of stuff um all right moving on to the book you're a fellow author a lock down author that lockdown writer tell me about tell me about the new book um yeah so soldier respect is earned um so yeah like i kind of didn't want to do an autobiography just because i don't know i still feel like i've got plenty of time left to do more stuff and cram more stuff in so this is this is more of just kind of the last 14 years of my sf experience just crammed all into a book and it's kind of part story in part you know that the chapters are broke broken down into kind of the seven characteristics which i see as being the key characteristics to you know be be the best all-rounded soldier and human and individual uh that you need so yeah it's basically just from my 14 years experience just just that in a nutshell and a lot of people do cash in coming off of tv with an autobiography so i do think it's uh commendable that you know you've you've said actually i want to talk about these kind of traits and i think it's important for listeners to realize that you you don't make it to the the places that you have without systems and without and behind every person who's done well from yourself power sas even television clothing company whatever it would be very naive for people to assume that was just luck and i think it's great with people such as yourself when you start to expose the systems the traits uh you know all of these things that kind of got you there in the first place and and with that what was your favorite part of the book so it would be a mindset and self-development book what what would be people are still going to get it don't worry if you give it if you give a good chunk away what would be your favorite part within that book that you you kind of because i know that when i think about my book and especially when someone goes to what's it about i'm like [ __ ] i can't remember like there are so many different big bits but yeah but that's that's it right it's like i'm like you know you get asked this all the time right and i'm like how do i condense what the book is down into one um but yeah do you know what there's probably two bits that really stand out for me and um it's probably the first chapter itself which is all about understanding yourself and um try like being able to categorize yourself in a certain certain way and understand your personality type and then how that how how you can then take that and fit it into teams and fit into you know whether that's you know for me that was teams and the special forces but for for other people that might be teams in work or sports teams um and i like i'm quite a deep person right i go deep on the old self thing and and trying to understand myself better and why i make decisions so that's what that chapter is all about and then the second one is is the fourth or fifth chapter is all about danger um and it's all about you know lot of my life has been evolved around danger whether it's over you know on tour overseas with the special forces or whether it's doing the expedition stuff it's it's all been you know exposure to danger and it was you know this chapter's more about you know why it's good to be exposed to danger and it's you know it's not necessarily danger in itself but it's more just things that you know you fear or you see as difficult difficult obstacles or difficult tasks that you need to do and it's all about just throwing yourself out that stuff and understanding that if you do throw yourself at it you'll gain massive amounts of benefit from that it's uh yeah i think that with danger with stress with kind of external pressure that's where people develop it's where they do well and to be risk averse or to avoid danger can sometimes stun the growth from a mental and physical kind of standpoint um how many copies of your book would i have to buy to get you to do a mo for movember before we did this i was i john i had a little uh google images search j morton i was like trying to see if there was anything that came up you know maybe something the daily mail had done maybe you're in sunlight and then i realized you've got a good face and facial hair and i was like imagine jay morton with a mo just a dirty handlebar mo and have you ever have you ever seen me with with my beard off no i look like a lesbian honestly i have a female face i i used to do is luckily when i went to special forces like you could grow a beard or you could have stubble and thank god for that seriously like the last 13 14 years i've probably had a beard because i look horrendous without a beard in the military you like you say you have to be clean shaven but you can have a mustache can't you you can't have a mustache and if you're in the navy certain ranks you're allowed to grow a beard and smoke a pipe you're joking seriously it's the thing like you're allowed to smoke a pipe indoors with a beard that's incredible so you you're there with military soldiers you're like listen guys couple more promotions you get a beard and a pipe i think that's that's excellent um all right now this is this is the bit of a wrap up this is the bit where we legitimately try and do fast fire okay um book or film that changed your life um do you know what book probably changed my life was there's two right sapiens and uh james smith um it's not a diet book what did you like about what do you like about uh sapiens uh just the whole view of like why we're here and how we ended up like um how we ended up just just coming to now i wasn't going to say james smith this is a diet book but that is that is in there so it's three books um the other one was cosmos i keep getting this wrong the planets the planets the brian cox book i've probably listened to that book more than any other book so it's interesting i get a weird feeling after listening to it there's a there's there's sapiens i think is great because it's so much about humanity but then when you venture outside of that uh neil degrasse tyson i did astrophysics for people in a hurry and i listened to them i've done that one too and yeah it's mad and like you say they're i'll become so obsessed with space at the moment and like when there's a new black hole discovered i'm like oh my god it's amazing i i can't understand that not more people have got obsessions with things like the cosmos and space and how big it is yeah i don't know like i i'm in the circle of people that are obsessed by it another place i just remember we're gone i just remember reading that book and just going like i don't know like it's it's the whole point of like we're on a pebble just spinning around a you know a ball of fire that's everything's scale right and we're like these tiny and we're that we're like these tiny we're small in comparison to the sun right but then the solar system's the sun is tiny in comparison to the solar system and everything's scaled and i just closed my mind it's absolutely mental exactly that you know we're literally just the speck of dust and uh funnily enough the other person that's that shared like a big space passion was paula lima so i go around this house and i go around i see all these books on space and i'm like these are these guys they're mine jimbo in his like irish accent i was like i was like paul lima [ __ ] off no way he's like jimbo i love space and i was like you're one of us you're one of us um but yeah when uh there's if you haven't it's like the spock thing that isn't it yeah yeah but you can have that between people have you done cosmos with neil degrasse tyson on amazon prime um is that the no not actually it's like a documentary yeah it's like a series um and it uses like cartoon depictions of different bits so anyone listening if you haven't done that that's a good one i will check that out um favorite quote either yours or that you've heard that means the most to you from either your book or someone else's um probably one of my favorite ones is um how we do anything is how we do everything and i've absolutely no idea where it came from but i've always just kind of said it um and it's just i just like it i just like how it's about um you know like if you're lazy in one aspect you're generally lazy and a load more like you know it's that whole like making your bed thing if you make your bed in the morning you're more likely to you know dress smart or prepare better for a meeting or or for a job or whatever it is and train smarter and like everything has a knock-on effect i like that i like that one a lot it sounds quite military as well uh what song do you do yourself up with you're at home you need to train you're feeling a bit fat which you're not and you're like right i'm going on spotify i'm finding a song it's your go-to if someone was to do like a montage of you training what song are you pulling out oh do you know what i like that can i just do playlist go on i do that um rap workout on spotify rap it's got like it i'm sure it's rap workout it's got a dude on a bench lifting weights on my front of it so you're like you're into your app i cracked that up yeah [ __ ] for training all right i'll be showing you a training playlist after this uh favorite thing you've watched in lockdown uh the michael jordan thing oh my god uh i can't remember the name of it yeah but definitely um yeah me that was the last dance yeah the last dance yeah i'm not like a i struggled to sit in front of the tv for like long periods of time and that thing was just like had me glued he's a he's a top guy there's it's an interesting one though where i see people that excel so far in their careers like such as himself i don't know this but i was often thinking where are your family where are your relationships where like i can feel that being that driven in something could be quite a lonely ambition because when you and i'm sure that you know if you were managing a company or uh you know a group of soldiers if you want to be the best leader sometimes there isn't a space to be friends and chummy people because you want the absolute best from them and i almost sensed that with michael jordan where i was like you probably robbed a lot of people the wrong way with your obsession to win yeah um yeah massively um he did like i think there was a lot of dramas with his family and stuff wasn't that what was i thinking about when you're talking about tiger woods as well i i thought of something tiger woods yeah yeah he um was so driven he was phenomenal right but then you can't just have that in one aspect of your life you can't be that intense a sport and then just be able to switch it off and and be a different personality and i think that even um i've found the topic that's really fascinated me recently is narcissism and how yeah narcissism is perceived as a negative trait but actually people who are narcissists get the advantage on most people because of their belief in themselves and their own skills and there's a certain amount of narcissism you need to excel but then you can often go too far you know too far nasties and music and donald trump who's like paranoid and uh you know he's almost too sure but you know people it's the same with the ego as well right it's like everyone everyone moans about ego but like you need a certain level of ego to have belief in yourself to be able to progress further in whatever you want to do 100 um yeah that was uh sick sick uh yeah yeah but like that's what i thought of when you were talking about them is like i think like some of these these people it's like almost like what level of insecurities do they have at the start to be able to fire themselves so much in that direction to want to be the best like be the best basketball player in the world because like i like i don't know like you must you've got to think your [ __ ] to want to be able to develop yourself because if you think you're amazing at something like you're never gonna train and to that level to be any better exactly how i got into personal training i hated the way i looked hated my knowledge that i was so annoyed with how little i knew and it became this like journey and it was obviously egocentric i was like i want to be able to beat my chest and know more than other people i want to be able to to do this and let you say without that bruised ego to begin with you almost need to come back from a bruised ego in that respect um and it like when people say oh you've got an ego or you you're narcissistic like you say there's there's a sweet spot with that that people are going to need there's no way you can be a leader without it and you know obviously some people uh have got too much and when you look at people that have actually got a deranged narcissism like you know hitler trump mussolini all these people you know that too far but yeah it's a very important part but it's like balance right it's like it's like a it's like you know you talk about a good leader a good leader knows when to be narcissistic but he also knows when not to be yeah like for example if one of his guys comes up to him and turns around and says hey mate i'm having troubles at home like he doesn't need to be a narcissist then so it's about understanding the values and understanding like when the best time is to be a narcissist and understanding and the best time to use your ego is and then like when you're at home like just chilling with mates or something you don't have to be that same person right having the ability to turn it on and off because there have to be different masks that you wear in different parts of your life and i'm sure you know that more than more than anyone else where you know your job for so many years tinder mask is completely different from your hinge mask yeah plenty plenty of fish there is no masks yeah because they're like above the age of 40 right so that's you can go any mass they mean business um yeah you know what date nuts is a funny one i found that the weirdest uh kind of experience in the last weeks now however many years i was on i was on hinge hinge is my favorite one so far currently seeing someone at the moment so i'm not in it anymore and i found people started on following me when i matched them and then they would pretend they didn't know what i did for work yeah and then i'd meet them and they'd be like so what'd you do and i'd be like we've you know we've actually exchanged messages six months ago when you tagged me in your story and um yeah very very strange um weird thing because i prefer the old-school method of just speaking to people i did that about maybe even a year ago um chatted someone up and i was like hey can i get your number and she was like by the way i'll follow you and i was like [ __ ] hoping i could uh go under the radar with that um how how do how do you take your coffee like you're in the world just black just black no sugar strong minimal water double espresso shot minimal water see wait you've been to australia much no never we'll get you to australia at one point you might not go back so warn your loved ones but i think that you know the best coffee is a long black so a large black coffee is called long black what you're talking about would be called a short black and a long black with milk just a splash of milk just you know a bit of fun and it it's exactly what i'm drinking right now i think you're missing the tree that's milk uh any milk i say to them more whatever's closest it's not an ethical debate for me okay look if you've just made an almond latte chuck some of that in it if you've just had an oat coffee chop that whatever's easiest to the person there but we'll get you to australia um and we'll we'll get you a proper coffee and we'll change that funnily enough i met aunt middleton and some of the other boys when i was last in the uk i got to the airport and um i saw him and olliolton and uh i i couldn't believe it i was like oh we were coming here to australia they i think they were coming here for the australian version of uh who dares wins um beer was an interesting interesting one uh i don't think people realized until we had a picture with anne that darren and i are quite tall when i meet people in real life they go oh you're a bit taller than i thought and i was like yeah yeah he's he's surprisingly tall me and him at the exact same height um and yeah when we got a picture it kind of blew up the internet for a bit they were like and i was like guys just want to show you do and i are quite tall um what are you looking forward to the most in 2021 um travel golf hopefully fingers crossed yeah golf tennis um i do you know what like i i think the thing that i missed during this whole year is just travel just being able to go wherever i want and yeah yeah i'm getting quite not like cabin fever of just staying in the same place for a long time because like what i do i'd usually be traveling around all over the place anyway yeah it's just like when you're told you can't do something you know like you know when like when you're on an airplane and they're like oh you've you know you've got a movie bag or you've got to put your tray up and you're like what you're like we're going at 550 miles an hour if we crash we're all [ __ ] dead don't tell me to put my tray up you know and then you're like okay no problems and you're like why can't i read my book with the [ __ ] tray down this isn't gonna kill anyone and just because you've been told not to do it as soon as they leave you put that tray back down and we're having these suppressions like you say the cost of this to our people's mental health ongoing is going to be mad and then the demand for travel is going to be so high that only the wealthiest people are going to be able to afford the tickets and the trips and it's going to create a bigger segregation between kind of the wealthy and the middle class or whatever you want to call it and uh yeah i i i'm like peter pan when i travel and um yeah i think that a lot of people look forward to traveling yeah where are you gonna go uh i think it's a case of where we're allowed to go fair enough um like it's like i would have yeah i just yeah like i was supposed to get them all these because that's the only place that you can go at the minute um next month but or it was supposed to be this month but that's been i mean we can't even fly out of the uk so it's it's crazy i'd take i'd take anywhere i'd take auschwitz right now [ __ ] hell um i'd take siberia [ __ ] speedos just just to get something i need to complain about um yeah at the moment in australia australians aren't permitted to leave without a valid reason so australians have to ask for permission from the government to even leave um and then when you get here like uh our mutual friend lucy lord uh you gotta sit in a hotel room for two weeks with no window uh that you can open and like i understand that but it it's [ __ ] it's like prison but prisoners get an hour outside and when travel does literally you literally cannot leave that room can't leave the room there's a chair outside the front um they patrol the hallways you can't crack your window it's two weeks in the hotel room and it it cost about 1500 pounds and they're getting like bread rolls and salads for lunch and um yeah if you're in a family imagine being two adults and a child or two kids in a hotel room for two weeks just to get back into your own country yeah painful and even then because uh countries with low infection rates such as australia they're only letting in 300 people a week into the state so that's 300 people per 8 million people imagine only letting 300 people into london in a week so a lot of the flights are empty which from an economic standpoint doesn't make sense it's very difficult to get on a flight so even get getting put in prison for two weeks is a privilege over here and it does scare me in which direction the kind of lockdown's gonna unwind but i think everyone would share that with you and final question where can people get your book when is it uh when is it out am i right thinking it's next week yes a week today or so in date terms that's 12th of november um and it's available amazon uh waterstones uh wh smiths um yeah it's available and all those you can get signed copies on waterstones as well that's it uh and james smith's gonna buy a thousand then i'm gonna shave a mustache into my beard tonight he's gonna have a dirty mo a lesbian face mustache a lesbian face right yeah jamie i've i've really enjoyed that um i've had a really good chat with you today um i hope that a lot of people would have taken as much from that as me and you would have have in the chat um on social media where can people find you where you most uh yeah mainly instagram so jw underscore morton uh also on twitter and facebook uh just j morton okay i'm gonna hit the the stop on the record button here any any final closing comments um and no cheers bringing the pleasure golf bring back yeah tennis at least table tennis for the love of god boris

Channel: James Smith Media

Views: 25,311

Rating: 4.8066463 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: NSGyYLTS7lM

Length: 79min 23sec (4763 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020