Jamie Oliver: “I’d gone from being skint to having a lot of money, I felt like a fake.”

Full Disclosure with James O'Brien

Global

Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before he became one of the world’s best-known chefs, Jamie Oliver was a dyslexic kid growing up in his parents’ pub in rural Essex, learning the value of hard work, fresh food, and family.

In this episode of Full Disclosure, James O’Brien sits down with Jamie to trace his journey from peeling veg at his parents’ pub to fronting The Naked Chef, reshaping school dinners, and building - then losing - a restaurant empire. They talk about the resilience required to recover from failure, his uncompromising campaigns on child health, and why he still feels driven to “stir the pot” when government policy falls short.

Candid, emotional and often surprising, this conversation goes beyond the celebrity image to reveal Jamie as a father, activist and creative obsessive- a man who sees food not just as sustenance, but as a way to change lives.

Find out more about Jamie Oliver’s Eat Yourself Healthy here

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a global player original podcast.
0:11.2	Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio.
0:19.3	Jamie Oliver, welcome.
0:20.4	Will you let yourself down now.
0:21.8	I'm shut up already.
0:23.8	We've done this before in various different formats and various different lengths.
0:28.4	I think the very first time I interviewed you, you were slightly unnerved by how much I knew about you.
0:33.1	Because I'd been a lifelong fan and a proper admirer.
0:36.4	And also I sensed, and I don't think you're like this anymore,
0:39.2	is that you wouldn't immediately trust somebody if they told you that they loved you,
0:43.1	somebody in my profession.
0:44.3	Yeah, well, I guess when you grow up working in the media,
0:49.6	you hear lots of things and you get naturally a little bit like, really,
0:53.6	or a little bit
0:54.4	defensive but I think as I've 25 years now and I think part of one of my relationships with the media
1:01.1	and journalists is kind of like they can like you they can dislike you but hopefully if you
1:08.4	played the right cards I've tried to like I've never lied to them so you're and i'm
1:12.5	quite consistent at the things that i do so i find that it makes life a bit easier and secretly i love it
1:18.0	when people say they love what i do and they can reference meals i mean one of the best bits of
1:21.9	my job is when someone said oh i've done that dish and we had it this part of our life or i followed
1:26.7	this program and it was it so of course
1:28.9	that's an enjoyable thing for me I did the cuscus from the first book on Saturday night really
	...

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