Mike Graham - Common Sense Needs To Prevail: How Our Leaders & Media Have Misled The Population

Full transcript: Mike Graham on London Real

1:57 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mike Graham, the British journalist, national radio host and former newspaper editor. Over the past three decades, you have operated your own news agency in New York City. Been the foreign editor for The Daily Express and reported from dangerous environments around the world, including the Bosnian War. Your show, The Independent Republic of Mike Graham on talk Radio, is dubbed The Home of Common Sense. Where you question our leaders decisions and the dubious role of the mainstream media in political agendas. You have consistently called for an end to the coronavirus lockdown in order to reignite the.

2:32 Economy and take in a clear stand against reactionary cancel culture and dangerous pandemic fear mongering. Mike, Welcome to London Real. thank you very much indeed. You make me sound like a bit of a sort of a caped crusader there. But listen, there’s a lot to fight against right now, so, you know, I’d rather be on the side of the underdog. I’ve always preferred that, and people have always said to me, Oh, you’re a Tory, you’re a conservative, you support the government.

2:54 I did support the government up until the moment at which we decided that now it’s time to lift the lockdown. Because I think they had to do that, they had to lock it down. But now they need to stop locking it down. And and I’m going to have a go at them until they do. Yeah, and I appreciate you doing that, and I want to get into it all right now. Before we start, I just want to announce we’re streaming now in our Digital Freedom platform, which is a censorship free, independent broadcasting system. That is of the people, by the people, for the people. And it’s available exclusively on our website at Freedomplatform DOT TV.

3:19 Just want to ask everyone now to please share this link via the sidebar to all your social media channels. And let me just repeat that. Can everyone share the link via their sidebar to their social media channels? I always say, Just ask your friends and family to give us 15 minutes and then they can decide. Mike, I pledge you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed or banned. And that anybody in the world can watch the full version of this free at Freedomplatform.

3:41 DOT TV forward Slash Graham thanks to the generous donations of over 35 000 people around the world that I call the London Real Army. For anybody wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, they can go to Freedomplatform. TV forward Slash. Give to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights. Here at London Rio, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And, Mike, I’m excited to have you here today. I want to talk about censorship first, because the reason we’re streaming on this digital freedom platform is because four months ago, on August 6th, Um, we had a broadcast right in the studio. It was the second largest YouTube live stream in the world that day, second.

4:17 Only to President Trump’s coronavirus briefing. Um, and based on the numbers of that episode in a previous one, we thought this would probably be go on to be watched 30 or 40 million times. It was a massive episode, David Ike was in the house and we got out of here and we’re like, Wow, this is going to be massive. 30 minutes later, YouTube deleted and banned the video. And we’ve been in this weird fight with censorship ever since, and we’ve been told in no certain terms by YouTube that I’m one upload away from being completely de<unk>platformed, right? And I’ve got a quarter of a billion views. 8, 000 videos. Nine years probably made a millions of dollars in advertising revenue. So I’m in this weird situation where I’m like in the penalty box, and I’m curious you guys are growing massively. You’re getting big on YouTube, it’s amazing to see. I’m curious because I feel like it’s maybe only a matter of time before you start bumping up against some of this censorship. What do you think of some of these digital platforms?

5:07 And you know the fact that you might start coming up against some of the censorship? Well, it’s interesting, you say, because, I mean, you say you’re in a bouncy box, but I don’t know where who sets the penalty box up, who puts people in it, you know who decides what should make you go in there in the first place because there’s no actual set of rules. You know, it’s a bit like the new rules that we get told how to behave during this lockdown. You kind of go, So, uh, so I’m going to stand over there, but I couldn’t stand over there with you because you’re from a different household. But I could go to the pub over here and meet you in the pub. Even though I don’t know you. And I could start talking to you and that would be okay.

5:39 That’s just kind of for me how YouTube operates, you know, because you don’t know until you’ve done something that you shouldn’t have done it. Which makes it a bit difficult to operate as a broadcaster because you don’t know quite where the rules are. It’s slightly different for us because we are technically speaking a radio show which is broadcast on YouTube as a video, right? So we are already behaving within our set of regulations, which are set by Ofcom, right, who are inside the radio business, which means you can’t say.

6:03 Certain things well, there are things that you have to be careful about, you have to try and be as balanced as you can possibly be. Right, um, there’s always an argument going on about whether you’re balanced as a broadcast itself or whether you’re broadcast, whether you’re broadcasting in general, is balanced, right? You know, that’s something that people go backwards and forwards on. There was an interesting piece actually written funnily enough, I think in The Guardian by somebody from Ofcom who actually said, You know, I think if the balance can be achieved overall, then that’s okay, because it’s kind of ludicrous to expect a personality<unk>based radio station to not have personalities who have opinions. Yeah, and you have to have opinions. And I mean, there’s nothing worse for me than broadcasters who pretend that they don’t have any opinions, but they actually do. For example, let me make this on News night.

6:45 You know, when she launches an attack on Boris Johnson, it’s clearly, Um, you know, it’s clearly a biased opinion. I don’t care that she’s got it, but let’s not pretend that it’s not right and pretend that it’s some kind of, you know, much earlier than Thou. Kind of a measurement of what everybody thinks of the Prime Minister. So, yeah, I mean, you’re right, the bigger you get. I mean, I’m already getting more flack, I would say on social media from the lefty brigade. Because they now know who I am and they don’t like what I do, and they quite like to shut me down. So there’s quite a few instances of people kind of piling on me.

7:13 You know, I’m big, boy, I can take you, I don’t really mind. But I think it’s interesting that all of the kind of, uh, cancel culture appears to be canceling in one direction rather than another. Yeah, do you ever bump up against Ofcom regulations? have you been censored or said, Don’t? I’ve had complaints against me. I think most radio journalists have radio presenters will have because the trouble is with the system.

7:34 Um, that you can be broadcasting to a million people and one person can complain, and that’s a registered off<Unk>com complaint. And then they have to investigate it and they have to find out whether or not. Uh, you breach the law and breach the rules, and sometimes they could find you quite heavily, which hurts a lot of businesses, even if they’re big. Businesses because, you know, nobody wants to have to pay out 20 grand or 30 grand or 100 grand over fine. Just because somebody said something wrong, you know, and you have to be careful what you say off platform. Because I remember I had Max Kaiser in here who had a show on RT.

8:03 And he said, Brian, don’t ask me about the Queen. Don’t ask me about the election. Because if I say it, even on your show, the off<Unk>com can come after me. Um, well, I’ve never had that conversation with anybody. No, um, but generally speaking, because I am a radio broadcaster and because I work on on the radio for a company, that company would expect me to be consistent. I suppose you would say so I wouldn’t certainly turn into some rabid version of Rogue might grow. When I came on here, I probably will sound very much as I would sound when I’m onto a radio.

8:31 Because, you know, I’m not going to make claims about things that I don’t know to be true, and I’m certainly not going to dismiss things. I don’t know to be true either. Um, I’m going to listen to people’s arguments. This is the reputation that we’ve got. I think it’s already aware, you know, you don’t have to agree with me?

8:46 Um, you know you and I were talking before about Howard Stern. I mean, he’s a guy who I, I sort of grew up in America listening to and watching. Um, and he always used to say that, you know, people who, like me, listen for 20 minutes, people who hate me listen for half an hour, you know? And so that’s kind of one of my mantras that I that I repeat to people and go, You know, I don’t mind who you are or what you do, or whether you agree with me or not, as long as you’re listening. But it’s an important point, I mean, I think in order to know what your point of view is, you need someone with the opposite point of view to articulate an argument. So you can actually say, Well, actually, do I feel that way? And let me let me talk about that, and that’s what censorship really bothers me, because there’s a lot of points of view. So, for example, when we had that episode, you know questions about CoviD questions, about 5G questions about vaccines, and YouTube said You can’t talk about it. Because of this community policy, it’s very subjective.

9:32 I’m sure it’s better to talk about it rather than it is to not talk about it. Because all you then do if you are. If it is a conspiracy theory, for example, that’s just going to make it worse by shutting it down. The people who really believe it, even though it might not be true, are going to be even more convinced that there’s a kind of establishment cover<unk>up going on. Yeah, I had, a scientist said. He said The solution to bad information is more information. Yeah, and also I said, Look at the flat earthers, they’re, they’re doing all this stuff and like, if you want to, I believe in flat Earth. God bless, I don’t right, um, but that’s those videos are everywhere on YouTube. But if you put up a theory that maybe COVID<Unk>19 test is false, positive or negative? Or the RNA doesn’t make sense.

10:05 Or that maybe 5G lowers the immune system. Offcom freaks out, YouTube freaks out. God bless you, say anything about a vaccine, you’re you’re done. So again, there’s no debate, there’s no argument, and it starts to the suspect. And again, these are controlled by a handful of people in Silicon Valley. The four guys that were in Congress, basically, yes, that was a strange viewing experience, wasn’t this fascinating? I was watching it and I’m sitting in my living room and I’m thinking to myself, You know, these guys are probably the owners of about 50 of the world’s wealth, just between the four of them. Yeah, and they’re actually sitting there like school boys like school boys, as if they really want to be there, as if they really want to help. And I didn’t believe a word of it. No, they were acting like schoolboys, but they were also answering like they really didn’t give a and there wasn’t much.

10:49 You’re gonna do anyways, and we’re going to be nice to you, but also, yeah, you, but also, yeah, it’s like in the back of my house. Got this like death machine, which I’m going to point at your building. And I’m going to throw everybody in it. You know, yeah, or a point, because, you know, competitors in the race who builds a ridiculous looking clock in the desert. You know, which cost him something like 10 million or something, and he kind of going, What do you think?

11:10 Obviously you’re not going to tell me, Uh, and before anybody starts to say that this should be banned. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jeff Bezos was developing some kind of, you know, mad scheme. Uh, because he’s got that much money, why wouldn’t he? I mean, if you’re that. Wealthy, You know you would be. He’s probably building the Death Star or something in his back garden, you know what I mean? It’s very possible, it’s very possible. So you got the left there that are also doing their thing and potentially, you know, making calls when it comes to these new technology platforms. So I’m kind of curious. I mean, you’ve watched the whole, you know, evolution of the press. I mean, you know, you worked here in London in the press rooms, and you’ve seen it come all the way up to where. Now you’re a YouTuber.

11:46 Yeah, you know, I know it’s crazy, it is, but what do you see? I mean, you, you have a wealth of knowledge that I don’t have the YouTubers don’t have. I mean, you’ve watched the press of into the state now where you know you’ve got like you were telling me earlier. You got likes and comments to worry about a whole Nother version, but also something that scales you to. Potentially, tens of millions of more people. Yeah, are you happy with the way the press has evolved, or do you wish?

12:09 It was like the old days? I think inevitably it did have to evolve from what it was. But just because of all the other things that were happening around it. Because, you know, when I tell my my kids, you know, when I used to have to go and find somebody, um, I used to. I used to get on a plane from New York. I remember going to Kansas City wants to find some family who were doing something or other. Did you being a reporter?

12:29 Shoe leather on a plane get get into the higher car drive into the center of Kansas City. Find a public library, find all the phone books, start going through the phone books to look for. The, uh, the names of the people get a list of maybe 10 addresses. Get in the car, go to every single one until you find them, and they’re looking at me like what you did, how long did that take? I said, Well, sometimes it took a couple of days, but then we found them and then we did the story. And so now, of course, you know, they just go. Google, Yeah, and a lot of people now, um, not my children, because I won’t let them do it. Don’t learn anything because they just figure they could look it up.

13:02 Yeah, you know, I mean, I’ve had people that work with me. Uh, young producers in their 20s and and like, How can you not know that? And they go, Well, I don’t need. To know anything, if I need something, I’ll just look it up. And so, for the newspaper point of view, you know, most people. Funnily enough, I was watching an old movie with with my 15 year old. Mr.

13:17 Blandings built his dream house. You might have seen it about a guy I said. Carrie Grant film, Where he Goes Live, goes up to Connecticut, buys a house, has, it’s a complete nightmare, everything goes wrong. He works in the advertising business in New York, and he’s in his apartment in New York. And he goes to the front door, answers it and takes a newspaper. And I said to my son, I said, That’s the first moment that he will know what happened in the world yesterday, right? He’s reading a newspaper today about what happened yesterday, and again he’s looking at me like what I said now we know what happens in Lebanon.

13:47 Yeah, literally the second, the bomb goes off, yeah, the same second, and it’s broadcast all over the world. And I think for me, what really changed the world of newspapers certainly was the first Gulf War because I was working in America. Um, and in those days, I would call up and say, Somebody’s been shot on this. On the the courthouse steps outside of a divorce court in Florida, they’d go to write Page one great story now. I would call them and say, Oh, have you seen that? Um, you know, Bush is doing this then? Yeah, we’re watching it on. CNN So they have CNN on In The Newsroom in London. And that was the end. I think of the old,<unk>fashioned kind of reporting really. So everything was changing already because the 24<Unk>hour News 24 hour news channels. And so Ted Turner kind of, I guess, started that revolution. And even then people were saying when Sky started up, people were going, Who’s going to watch the television news for 24 hours?

14:35 And, well, a lot of people do some. Some people only watch the news 24 hours because there’s nothing else worth watching. So I think newspapers have had their time, basically, and I think their influence is dwindling. Um, I think they’re now more likely to be the deliverers of something else, you know. For example, The Times has got a very successful digital subscriber system now where you can get an iPad version of The Times. Which I happen to love.

15:00 Um, it’s not just because they’re in the same company because some people don’t. Do very well. The male, for example, which is a great product, doesn’t do its iPad version very well. Neither does a Telegraph. They’ve got people you’ve got to pay to get behind a paywall. It’s just not worth doing. But I remember when I was working for the Mail on Sunday at one point a week. It was during that period when they would give away a DVD of a movie with the paper and the magazine editor. That I was working with at the time said, You know, one day they’ll be giving a paper away with a DVD. And she was right, because, actually, you know, who buys a newspaper anymore? I mean, when I see them in the mornings, I mean, I love ripping up the garden as you probably know.

15:35 Um, and it’s one of my favorite pastimes. But I would not actually physically buy a newspaper for anyone. I never thought when I was working for them, I’d ever say that. Yeah, so let’s talk about you ripping up the Guardian and let’s talk about newspapers and mainstream media in The New York Times. Like, What are they these days? Yeah, because you’re critical of these. Yes, well, I was always very critical of The New York Times because The New York Times is very far up its own backside. You know, even when I was working in New York and, uh, in the 80s and 90s, they thought of themselves as these wonderful kind of, you know, writers.

16:04 And, you know, they didn’t have. As far as I could see a news bone in their body, they didn’t really know what a story was. We used to joke about them. The fact that, uh, you know, they had full correspondence in Africa, but they didn’t have anyone in the Bronx. And we used. So I won’t be gone even in prompts to which they would say, Well, we’ve got any readers there. And you’d be like, You haven’t got any regions in Africa either, but you’ve got four people there, you know? And that was kind of the beginning, I suppose.

16:26 Um, of my distaste for what I call snobby journalism okay, and also kind of leftists. Yeah, I mean, it was difficult for me at first to kind of get my head around because they were obviously very pro<Unk>israel, right? Which meant that normally, speaking from where I came from, that would make them right wing. Okay, but they weren’t. They were left<unk>wing and pro<unk>israel. And it was my introduction, I guess, to the whole kind of New York thing where, you know, I say to people, I think I was born and raised a Catholic I.

16:52 Went to Catholic schools, but because I lived for 10 years in New York, I feel sort of half Jewish. You know, because you’ve become part of that culture and it’s a great culture. But I was quite puzzled at the beginning. It didn’t seem quite as far left then as it is now. Well, there used to be really clear lines back then, too. You were left and you thought these things, you were right, these things, and nothing was mixed because there was no real nuance to explain it. These days, you’ve got, you know, Candace Owens, Uh, Black woman who’s massively conservative and against Black Lives Matter and you’ve got everything in between. Yeah, and people can understand it right, and people can’t quite work out where they’re supposed to be, I think, and I think that’s the problem with a lot of journalism these days, Is is sort of practiced by very well educated people, you know, whereas where I, when I came into the newspapers, I was coming in at the end of, what was it? All intents and purposes of trade? You know, you didn’t have to go to universities to be a reporter, you know, basically, you know, you could leave school at 16. You could go learn shorthand, do a do a typing course and get hired by the local paper. And, you know, make your way to Fleet Street. Which was all great and very good and successful, and people got paid well. But they weren’t all from private school, they weren’t all from sort of, you know, Oxbridge, which is what we have a lot of

17:57 Now. You know, a lot of people on TV don’t know what real ordinary people’s lives are like. They just have no idea. So they’re in an ivory tower and they’re just judged so they can’t understand. For example, you’re, you know, your formerly labor voting working<unk>class. Man in Sunderland who wants to leave the European Union because it doesn’t do anything for it, right? They couldn’t even get their heads around that because they live in places like Chiswick. Or they live in places like barns. Or they live in places like, I don’t know, um, even Canary Wharf, right? So, you know, they vote the same, they don’t understand these other people. No, they well, I mean, I think the change in the Labor Party structure has has shown that. Because what the Labor Party now is is, or what it’s definitely not, is a party for the working people of this country. It’s a party for sort of pseudo<unk>intellectual.

18:37 Guardian readers And that’s it. That’s why the only place they won an actual vote, uh, in a very of any worthless. Partly southwest London, where the housing is average of one a million and a half, you know? But they lost the red Wall that all went, because there’s nobody who can believe in what the low body stands for anymore. Wow, so completely out of touch.

18:56 They’re totally out of touch, they’re all about, you know, uh, supporting transgender people, right? Which a lot of people in Sunderland and I’m not, you know, just picking on Sunderland. But I mean, people in working class areas don’t really talk about that. It’s not something on the top of their agenda. They talk about work, they talk about Brexit, they talk about, you know, going on holiday. They don’t talk about whether or not, you know, a woman has a cervix that a man doesn’t.

19:17 Well, let’s talk about this, why are we talking about this stuff? is that part of this whole world generation? I think it is and what is going on? Why are we having these strange conversations where, you know, there’s all these different gender types, and we’re going all down a very dark rabbit hole? Yeah, when it comes to this stuff and then you’ve got most of the mainstream media, you know, pushing this line. I think a lot of the mainstream media were frightened because we now live in this culture.

19:39 Whereby, if you do stand up for something which is not thought to be, you know, trendy or woke. You don’t get attacked by all these people who are supposed to be the new, tolerant people, but who are actually the least tolerant people around. And so they’ll come, they’ll come for you and they’ll come after you and they’ll make you. And it’s like Peter Hitchens has said to me, They don’t want you not to argue with them. They don’t want you to speak, they just want you to shut up and not say what you want to say.

20:01 Yeah, they don’t want to have an argument, they don’t have a debate about it, they just want to shame. You, cancel you. Yeah, it’s not to be debated, you know, you’re a bad man, so therefore you should sit over there and stop talking. Is that also a product of digital communication? Like, would this have happened? If we were actually talking to each other and like in the past, well, you know, I think the trouble now, and I say this often, um, much to probably the chagrin of some people.

20:22 But everybody’s now got an opinion, whereas when I was a lot younger, everybody didn’t have an opinion right? You know, now you’ve got the ability to publish it because you’re on Twitter or you’re on Facebook or whatever else. Microblogs Yeah, I mean, the number of people that write vlogs that literally nobody reads. And, you know, you come across these people on social media blogger, and then you go and look at it, and it’s got how many views. Oh, no views, so no literally nobody has looked at this right. You’re not really a blogger, and if you are a blogger, so what? Why would I care what your opinion is because, you know, I take the view that, you know, of course you’re entitled to have an opinion. But I used to say when I did an overnight radio show, which was very interesting. It was full of people who had all sorts of bizarre thought processes and conspiracy theorists and all the rest of it. And and I used to say to some of them, I said, Look, your opinion is not worth it. They would say My opinion is just as worthy as yours. I’d say, No, it isn’t, it is actually not because you haven’t done what I’ve done, you haven’t been where I’ve been, you haven’t talked to people the way I’ve talked to people. So, actually, no, your opinion isn’t valid, so shut up or come back with a better opinion, right that that’s proven, that has some logic to it.

21:22 That’s fantastic. Debated stress tests right? And then talk to me. Whereas the trouble I think now is that we’re living in a society where, as long as enough people agree with you. Because there’s this word consensus that they use a lot, you know, of course, the scientific consent census around climate change is that, you know, the climate’s heating up.

21:37 Well, I don’t care, you know? There used to be consensus about the moon being made of cheese or the Earth. Being flat, you know, doesn’t make it right, just because a lot of people agree, do you worry that all this quote<unk>unquote science has all been co<unk>opted and politicized and weaponized to where nobody trusts anything anymore. Well, that is the other problem. Yeah, I think that is the problem. I mean, we’ve been told since the beginning of this in March that, you know, the Government has followed. The science problem is the science has been all over the place. And if you were following the signs, you’d.

22:05 Actually, be dizzy now from all the different places that you had to follow it to because it changes every week. So let’s get yours, don’t wear a mask. Yeah, you know, wherever we your opinion. MIKE GRAHAM The last five months, how do you rate Britain’s response to this China virus? Well, you know, I’m not one of those that gives the government too hard of a time. Okay, um, there are those who would do that, um, I think lately it’s been all over the place. I think they’ve sort of lost the plot in the last three to four weeks. But I would say, Um, that at the beginning, I don’t think anyone really knew what to do. You know, when Boris Johnson was shaking people’s hands at Twickenham, he was doing that because he thought that was the right thing to do. He wasn’t being blase about it. And in the end, I remember somebody saying everyone will probably get this disease at some point or other. Most people will get it and not have a problem. Some people will die. Mr. Patrick Balance was talking hurt immunity early on. Yeah, so and I, I did a vlog saying, I’m ready to get it. It’s only a matter of time. We thought that in the beginning absolutely still might be true, it still might be true. And I mean, we might have all had it for all. I know, you know, because, you know, we can test each other at certain points. But not all tests are good. Apparently, sometimes if you get tested, you might have been tested too late since before

23:14 You had it. You know, lots of people have said to me they thought they had something like it before the end of last year. You know, sort of November, December time, which then feeds you into. The other argument is, Well, could this already be the second wave? Then? Maybe this is the second wave, but it’s very, very difficult to judge. I think the problem has been that people understood the first instruction. You know, stay home, just don’t go out, and lots of people did that.

23:37 But you can’t do that forever. And it’s a lot easier to lock it down than it is to open it up. And now I think they’re sort of floundering around. So so I would start off by by saying they handled it pretty well as well as anybody else could. But I mean, now, for example, I mean, I was asking the question in March, Why are we not quarantining people coming here from Italy, from Tehran and from?

23:56 China flights were still coming in every day and nobody was was checking them and I was told by the scientists in those days, Oh well, there’s no point, really, because, um, the disease is already here, so now they want to quarantine people and I go, Uh, why quarantine them now? Oh well, because we want to keep the spread low, right, and these are the same people. So you kind of go, and if you’re sitting there and you’re Boris Johnson, who is obviously slightly spooked by this because he nearly died. Right, um, and I’m certainly not one of those who thinks that was all just a ruse, by the way before. In case you want to ask me that, I spoke for a lot of reasons because it controls the economy, which controls his approval right? But there’s clearly a fight going on inside Downing Street between Chris Witty, the medical officer. And Boris and Dominic Cummings is somewhere in the mix. Who I’m also told is quite frightened of it as well.

24:43 Because he, I think, was quite ill that they seem to be incapable. I’ve said this week that they’re standing on a kind of crossroads. Now they need to make a decision, they have to decide if this is going to be here for a long time. Let’s find some kind of strategy to live with it, rather than just being frightened of it. So every time two people get infected on a train, you shut the train service down. I mean, you just, you can’t operate like that. It makes no sense. Did they overdo the fear? Do you think in March and April? Well, I think they overdid the fear because everyone was a bit frightened, and that was the only way to get people to actually stay home. I don’t think I did it deliberately, I think I actually genuinely thought that this was the next big killer. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I was never one of those who was frightened to go out because I continue to go to work. But I was careful, um, and I really didn’t know. Yeah, serious college numbers, and they were massive.

25:28 Yeah, two million dead in America, half a million dead here, right? And I remember having that moment, you know where I was like, Jesus, this could be like, You know, are my children gonna take that? And also I didn’t. I don’t think any of us thought in March that we’d still be here now. I think we all thought, Yeah, it’d be about a month, and then something will kind of.

25:45 Change, and we’ll be back to normal because you couldn’t possibly even visited this. That this would be where we are, that I not able to go and visit my mother in America because I need to quarantine, you know, for two weeks. And also, I don’t really want to give her a COViD because she’s 96 years old. I don’t think she’d live through it. You know, I haven’t seen my daughter, she who works in Dubai, she’s currently in America, but she can’t come through London. Because there’s, you know, there’s quarantine and she can’t quarantine here, so, you know, it’s bizarre, it’s. I don’t think any of us could have seen this coming, really. I mean, in retrospect, in hindsight’s always 20 20. They probably overlocked it down, they should have locked down. Maybe the people that were, you know, potentially dangerous. So, I mean, I think a total of 400 people under 60 in the UK died from this. It’s, it’s, yeah, the numbers. I mean, the numbers of people who have died under the age of 40, I think is in single figures, right? You know who, who did not have something else wrong with them, right? But again, when you’re dealing with something, this much of an unknown. And we didn’t really give much help from China, and we didn’t get much help from the World Health Organization. UH, who also didn’t. Until I think the end of Jan January, towards the beginning of February, even say that it was a problem.

26:49 They were saying in mid<Unk>january that this would not be transmittable between humans. This is the World Health Organization. Yeah, you know, what do you think about all that relationship with the World Health Organization and China? What Trump did gates the whole thing? Well, I mean, I think she’s, I think, funnily enough, Trump is getting a lot of flack for the way he’s dealt with it. But again, I don’t think you can have a go at Trump for doing anything wrong. I mean, the one thing he, the one interesting he had that was right was to stop people flying into America. Yeah, who were from other countries. Yeah, I mean, Americans were still flying in, um, but he would have been getting the same kind of advice, I guess, from from his people, uh, as to how to defend it. But in America, as you know, better than me, it’s not so easy to lock people down.

27:31 Because, you know, people are going to stand for up for their freedom and. They’re going to go, No, I’m not going to be told. I mean, I’ve seen people being interviewed, so I’m not going to be told what to wear. I’m not going to wear a mask. You know, it’s harder, and then there’s a federal versus state that makes a little trickier. And also, I think China generally, you know, is a very bad actor here. You know, China has never done us any favors. You know, they were secretive, um, they didn’t do things they should have done, they pretended nothing was wrong. They lied to the World Health Organization, you know? And one thing I think that I noticed probably before any of this happened was that there was a lot more Chinese tourism going on around the world. Suddenly, you know, in the last two, three years, you know, you wouldn’t see. Very, very many people from China in the center of London or in the center of Paris or in New York. Now, I mean, I think when the outbreak happened, there was something like a million Chinese abroad traveling, you know? And that’s the scale of the problem, because in this day and age, that’s how quickly it spreads. So I think China is, is, I mean, I at one point have said that I think they should be paying some kind of reparation to every country in the world because they got the money.

28:31 You know, they they owe everybody’s death and they they own it all, so I think they should become somehow recompensing us. You know, if it’s costing us, I don’t know, 100 billion to to support our economy, let’s get it from them. Yeah, good luck with that, huh? Well, if you were, if you were a Prime minister right now, what would you do? If I was Prime Minister right now, I would insist on the Civil service coming back to work. For a start, I would stop this kind of ridiculous. Um, oh, we’re too frightened to go back to work business, which seems to be going on because there’s no reason to be frightened. To go back to work. You know, if you’re genuinely at risk because you’ve got some kind of condition, then fine. But I think we’ve got to take the view that, you know, if we don’t do something soon, there’s going to be nothing left to save.

29:12 You know, if all of London is as it is now, which is pretty much shut down. I mean, you might think that there’s people working and there are, but nothing like in the numbers that they should be you. Know, Canary Wharf I haven’t been to. I used to work there, I’m told as a complete ghost town. Because people like Goldman Sachs who have got space for 10, 000 people in their office are letting in something like 200. And you, you know you can’t sustain, you know, they’ll Burley’s, Uh, you know, Sandwich shop, where you pay 10 quid for a sandwich. They’re not going to be open, so they’re not going to be making any money, they’re not going to be paying any tax. The people that work for them are being furloughed by the government, so it’s costing us money. They’ve got to, they’ve got to get everything back as best they can as quickly as they can. But I’m unsure really, about how commerce is going to deal with that. What about London? As a city, I mean, again, I walk around and this is not sustainable. The city’s gonna die at this standpoint and but this is a beautiful, amazing, vibrant city and it.

30:07 But it needs to get back to work, but people need to get a push back to work somehow, right? Seemingly, people are frightened of traveling. You know, I don’t know whether it’s combination, I mean, I hear this from from my listeners. It’s a combination of people not wanting to get on a train because they’re worried about getting an infection. And then there’s other people who don’t want to get on a train because they refuse to wear a mask.

30:25 I don’t think it’s 50 50, I think it’s probably like 80, 20 and the smaller number of the numbers. You don’t want to wear a mask, um, because the roads are absolutely jam<unk>packed, incredibly jam<unk>packed, right? Um, because one of the things that people forget about the way our society has changed. And so all these online purchasing that people do creates a hell of a lot of traffic. Yeah, you know, if you order five things on five different days, you’ve got five different vans coming to your house right now. You can’t tell me that’s not going to have some kind of impact, but millions of people are doing it on an hourly basis. You know, um, and so the trains are still empty, so, you know, people that I know who are coming into work in London, say from Kent, an hour, 45 minutes away on a train, literally deserted at Russia, same with the tubes. Nobody’s on them. Yeah, I mean, I took one this morning from my place.

31:11 Nobody’s on there. There was an article in The New York Times your favorite. Place but recently said that actually, the subway is one of the least likely places to to catch it. Because people aren’t talking on there, they’re, they’re spaced apart. New York is the same thing, they’re at 20 capacity, and this is the lifeline that city, as you know. But you got to do something to get these people back to work and back in offices. London is 20 of GDP in this country, and at this rate, if it’s doing 20 of the business it was doing, I’d be shocked. Right? And long term, it just doesn’t bode well for anything this company. Well, I don’t understand what the buildings people are doing. I don’t understand how commercial rents are not absolutely plummeting. Yeah, and I don’t understand, um, how even ordinary residential properties are plumsy. Because I’m here, I’m hearing that a lot of people are moving out of London. I think we’ve got this, we’ve got, unfortunately we’ve got this kind of I don’t want to say it, but I’m going to say it. Bedwetters kind of organization of society where people are frightened of everything and they just, you know, my father would say they’re not people for the trenches, you know, because when the hits the fan, these guys are all running in the opposite direction. They’re not worried about you, they’re only worried about themselves, and they just go, Oh no, I’m not going to do, they’re not going to get involved. I’m

32:13 Just going to leave, leave the city, and I’m just going to work remotely on my laptop. Because it’s made in China, it’s made by Apple, but I’m a very fine, upstanding person. I read the Guardian and I won’t have any right wing nonsense in my house. And you go, Yeah, what are you doing for the country? Exactly nothing, so that’s my question, is this? All related is the wokeness and the cancer culture related to the snowflake culture. Who doesn’t want to come back to work and suck it up? Yeah, I mean, look, two things. I was here for the bombings in 07 and I I, and it was. It was horrific, but one thing I noticed is I think they were on a Thursday. The next Friday, Londoners went back to work. Yeah, and I was like, Wow, and they went back on the tube as soon as they came. I was like, These are some badasses and I was in I was New York for 9 11 and that city was reeling for a while. Yeah, and I was like, Okay, these are things Britain, these people go, they they sip up her lip, they.

33:02 Go back to work. I was impressed, but now, but now I’m not as a broadcaster now, if you say, you know, let’s get back to the Blitz spirit. You get ridiculed by these people because they actually they’re ashamed of their own history, they’re. These are the kind of people that would attack me. Uh, for saying Churchill was a great man. Let’s take his statue down, why, well, because he fired from Dresden. Yeah, well, we were at war with them. If you don’t mind me saying so, you know that’s why. And I’m afraid if you start attacking other countries, you might be facing a bit of an attack yourself. You know, war’s horrible, but we won, and if we hadn’t won, where would we be? We’ve been told what to wear, what to do and what to eat, but like now. But you can’t say it ironically, right? But you can’t say that now, right? It’s much worse than America, but they say this, everything comes here a few years later, so it’s gonna get worse. Um, don’t understand what’s happening in America. Because when I lived there, it was a very. I wouldn’t say, Um, you know, peaceful place, but it was a very lovely country. And I, you know, one of the many reasons that I wanted to live in America was I was admired it. You know, I was admired. In the same way that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan got along, there was a certain kind of thing about America first and about. I remember getting in a cab I used to have these skyline cabs that we used to use all the

34:10 Time. The big Blue Buick Oh yeah, yeah, there were driving places. Yeah, I never took you to the airport stuff because I was also going to the airport and I got in. There was a guy called Charles Bremner, who at the time was The Times correspondent there, and he’d been in Russia, he’d been the Moscow correspondent. We got in this car and the guy was clearly Russian. Uh, he had a very Russian heavy, heavy accent, and Charles very sort of, you know, slightly pompously turned to me and said, Yeah, I watched this and he said to him, Where are you from? and the guy goes, You’re jersey, and that was where he was from. Of course he was from Russia originally, but as far as he was concerned he was an American. He was a guy that lived in New Jersey and and that was now where he was from. And that kind of for me, encapsulated America that people could come to America, particularly New York, from all over the world. And they were New Yorkers almost.

34:54 Immediately, you know, because it really was that kind of place, and now I see some of the stuff that goes on like Portland. I had no idea what that’s all about. I watched the report last night on Channel 4 News, which I watched just to get annoyed. Really, because Channel 4 News, I hate with a passion, but um, why just because it’s so biased, okay, and so pretendingly straight, you know, I mean, Jon, Snow cycles to work every day. I’m not a big fan of cyclists for a start.

35:19 Um, he also, uh, it’s a token gesture like Cameron used to do. Yeah, you’re like, What are you doing? Yeah, you got your SUV following you to work, what do you, what point are you trying to make? What point are you trying to make? And, you know, I’ve always said that anyone who wears a tie that’s more accentuary than he is, um, isn’t very eccentric. And he likes to think of himself, he’s also, he’s not a very nice guy. Jon Snow I mean, I’ve met him a few times, um, but they just did this ridiculous kind of relentless lefty journalism. But they’ve been doing this piece about Portland and it was basically going. The problem is, and even they’d actually seen it. They were interviewing Black people saying, This is not what we want, you know, we don’t want people writing on our behalf. Most of these people writing are Antifa, they’re fascists, they’re, you know, they’re all white, you know, they’re looting, they’re smashing up the place, they’re chucking things at the police.

36:02 They’re not doing it in our name, but except they are right. And that’s very strange that that kind of whole Antifa thing didn’t exist in the 80s in America. I never saw it. Not at all. No, I mean, back then, you know, when I grew up, we we looked up to heroes, we didn’t look up to victims. Yeah, but that changed. It changed kind of when the world got digital, too.

36:20 Yeah, like you said, where everyone maybe had a voice, and then now it’s gone, accentuated where you celebrate the victim. Well, somebody said to me, Actually, I think the first iPhone came out in something like 2005. Yeah, it was 07, I think, but yeah, seven, it was one. It’s around there and really, since then it’s all started to go a bit wrong, right, you know? So there must be a correlation, citizen, journalism and, well, everyone has a voice. Yes, okay, and that’s the other problem with some of these, like citizen journalism. Uh, escapades you don’t like.

36:46 Those people do you well, the thing is because you put in your time. Well, it’s not just that I put in my time, but there’s a reason why I do what I do, and there’s a reason why. I believe what I believe and I know what I know. It’s because I have to stress, test everything, and you can’t just walk into a room and see what you see. If you’re not trained to see what’s actually going on, you don’t see it, and I think that’s the problem. So a lot of people who think that they know what they’re doing as journalists make massages. Why Katie Hopkins made so many mistakes because she’s not a journalist, she said. The wrong things at the wrong time, to the wrong people and to the wrong audience, okay, what’s another example of that? Like a citizen, journalists will go to like a Black Lives Matter protest, and they’ll see one thing. Whereas if you went there, you would say, No, no, this is happening. I see this and I see this and I see the police. And also, I mean, one of the things that worries me a lot is all of the videos that you now see doing the rounds on on Twitter. I’m very, very cautious with those I tend not to retweet anything that I can’t verify. Okay, because I’ve seen in the past where you’ve got, I mean, for example, there was a picture going around at the weekend of this March in Berlin, where loads of people, supposedly a million people were marching against wearing a mask. Yeah, now, according to the official figures that I

37:50 Saw, and again, you can always say, Well, how do you trust the official figures? Um, it was 17, 000, which is still pretty sizable. Nothing wrong with that, but why say it’s a million, and why show a picture of a different march? Yeah, I saw two pictures, too. I saw the first one that was like, thirty thousand, right? And then I saw some other one. That was like the bridge was packed right? And I was like, These are not the same, it’s not the same, and that’s the trouble. I mean, you can watch a picture of, say, a police officer beating somebody up and for all I know, because I can’t see everything. It might not be a real, um, image, or it might not be a current image. It might be from two years ago. It might be from four years ago or it might be real, but if I don’t know the source, then I’m very wary.

38:26 Well, let’s talk about that because I’m speaking with a guest recently that talked about that concept. Um, where a piece of video like people look at it, as in that must be the truth. Yeah, but without context, you don’t know what the truth is, and yet when you retweet it, it becomes almost the truth. Yeah, and then everyone interprets what they want. And then later, if you come back and say, Oh, by the way that was on the back of that, that that is too late.

38:50 There was a picture, a famous picture from one of the Black Lives Matter protests in London. Where a guy was a black guy was carrying a white guy out of a crowd. Yes, after he was supposedly being beaten up, right? Supposedly helping this guy who was, um, some somehow a falling foul of this black criminality. Okay, so I thought that was real too well.

39:08 I think it’s a real picture, but by looking at that picture at that moment, you don’t really know what’s going on. Yeah, all you know is that here’s a guy carrying another guy out now. For all you know. He might be carrying him out to give him a good kicking on the ground once he’s away from the police. You just don’t know, so it’s really dangerous for people to just assume. And of course, the lefties all went with. Oh, look at that, this, this shows you what’s really going on here. The Black Lives Matter. People are really nice people. Look, he’s helping him right, and that may well be what was the case? But I mean, it might not be as well. You know, how does this play out? and how come you know? 80 of the mainstream media seems to be cow towing to this readership that wants to be spoon fed back. And they virtue signal that we’re on your side, like, How, how does this play out because it can’t sustain? You know, I had George Farmer on here here, who’s Candace Owens, husband, his father’s Baron Farmer? And he said, He said, Brian, they’re going to eat their own, he said. Look at them now, they already eat their own, like, You’re not woke as me and I’m gonna cancel you because you’re not. Well, I mean, look, what happened to J.K. Rowling? I mean, you know, she was until that moment when she said the wrong thing about a cervix and about a period or something.

40:09 Um, she was one of them now she’s not, now she’s in the same camp as I am. And probably as you are, you know, the evil, the criminal, the nasty, the ghastly, the horrible people who don’t care about anything. Because everybody knows if you’ve got any kind of rightway opinion at all, you just don’t even care about. People, which is another complete and utter myth How is that even sustainable? I know, I mean, you know, we’re reasonable people. I think the reasonable people all the time that have views that are conservative or right, lean or just not super woke radical left Marxist views.

40:37 Yeah, and a lot of people have them, but they can’t say it. In America, you can’t put a Trump hat on or you think you get a beat down, and so it’s become this. This is why polls have become so pointless, right, because people don’t admit to which way they’re actually going to vote. You know, the shy Tories they used to call them, I mean, nobody predicted that ATC majority back in December. In fact, as I was about to come in to do the overnight show that night, because we were counting you down from, you know, when the polls close at 10 30, we were going to be there till six in the morning. And already the Uh, that Sky and and and BBC were reporting what was looking like a labor victory because it looked like it was a labor victory on Twitter, right? And they were saying things like, There’s been a massive turnout in all these. Funnily enough, all southwest London constituencies, which one they actually did win. And I was suddenly going into work thinking, Christ Almighty, what if we get to the end of this show tonight? And Jeremy Coleman’s? The Prime Minister? And I started to feel quite depressed about it, you know, and I was thinking, Because the man is a completely not a joke of an individual. Never mind he’s grumpy, he’s he’s a Communist, you know, he hates people like me and you, Um? He wants us all to behave in a particular way, which which only he will advocate. And he’s just, you know, he would have been an absolute, I mean, he would

41:47 Have been a nightmare in this situation in the whole coven situation. Even if you were co<unk>opted by a media that got you thinking that for a second. Even though it was never the case, and of course, it was never the case. You’re smart enough to know better, and still it tricked you. But still I’m thinking, Right, what if they’re right, what if they’re right, right? And of course, the the exit polling that was then done started to look like more. Actually, of what reality was was like. And we were hearing suddenly around about sort of just before 10 something like a A Tory win, but nothing like the.

42:16 80 seats that they ended up getting, you know, because people just won’t admit they voted for them. Because, I mean, I’ve spoken to people who say who tell me, You know, they’re going to take their kids to school. They can’t tell the other parents at the school gate. So they voted Tory right because they’d be ostracized and their kids would be ostracized. Even worse. Yeah, and that’s a really terrible place to be, I think, but this can’t last.

42:37 And so my question is, is how much further does it have to go to the other side before it comes back? You mentioned Portland, we’re seeing this crazy chas chop City, you know, let’s defund the police, let’s do it ourselves. And then an obvious your socialism experience fails. We see a lot of these things failing. We see the Black Lives Matter protests where you know, uh, bricks are all of a sudden on the side of the road. And it’s been funded by George Soros. Like at one point, Dude, does the walk wake up? Yeah, right? Well, I think when they grow up, perhaps because I think part of the problem here is that it’s a kind of youth movement. And I said to people when they started marching around in London, this won’t last forever. This cause. Most of these people have got very short attention span right, you know, and most of them are pretty well off. They’re not really struggling with anything. Most of the Vince University, there’s a few.

43:21 There’s a small kind of anarchistic types who are, you know, our version of a pound shop. The Antifa, you know, because I mean, when you see the the guys over there with guns and so more or less militia type outfits in America, in America, the ear pieces, yeah, and it starts to think, Blimey. I mean, that was funded. Yeah, very well, a lot of money coming, a lot of guns, you know, a lot of very expensive guns. Um, so there’s definitely a point at which that madness doesn’t cut through to the main body of the hall. If you know what I mean, yeah, different than like in the 60s, when, yeah, you were going to get drafted, yeah, you were going to go to Vietnam and you were going to die right, so you were in for the info. Maybe the longer haul right, this, you see a trendy thing. I want to get out there, start some mayhem, yeah, but it’s not going to last. It’s not gonna last because actually the reason texts work because there isn’t actually an aim to it. I mean, I had a guy called Gary.

44:09 Um, Gary McFadden or Gary McLaren, or somebody like one of the guys from the Black Lives Matter movement here. Okay, uh, who came on? And, uh, and he said some really bizarre things. But when I said to him, You know, when does this end, what is the actual end point? What, what is your aim? He couldn’t answer, right? They don’t really have a name, because just to just the kind of mealy<unk>mouthed say, Well, we want equality and we go, Well, what you know you have, you have quality, what’s the problem, you know, what is it that you can’t do, you know? And of course, there might be some discrimination, there might be situations where people get discriminated against, I get discriminated against. I mean, what do you think would happen if I went to the BBC and said, Can you give me a job? Please?

44:44 They’d go, No, you’re white, you’re middle<unk>aged, you’re homes, you’re heterosexual. Nearly said. I was homosexual, you’re heterosexual. We haven’t got any openings for anyone like you, and that would be the true. The truth, well, exactly discriminate all the time, presumably made fun of right. SHERMAN Tank Yeah, septic tank Yeah, right, and that’s just life, okay, and you know, of course, yeah, we’re getting we’re going to get roasted for this. If the person is white privilege, yeah, I know exactly. Well, I’ve said this. I’ve started to say this now as a bit of a mantra that, you know, I did not think that in my my 50s. Uh, you know, being a white, heterosexual male would actually maybe part of the counter culture, but that’s how it feels. It feels like I’m kind of out there, like some kind of rebellious. TIMOTHY LeARY You know, yeah, in the 60s. If you’re proud of yourself and proud to express yourself, then, yeah, I guess you are part of the counter culture. Well, I am because most people are actually like me in terms of a lot of the views that I have in this country. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have an ATC Tory majority. You know, most people, the viewership you have well, and you know, you know, ours are going up, the BBCs are going down, there’s a reason for that.

45:47 Trust in the BBC is an all<unk>time, low trust in the media generally. Is that an all<unk>time low? I mean, I’m doing a story this week, which was started up by Nigel Farage last week about this company called Circo, who I’d never heard of right until this moment. These are the people who are being paid billions of. Pounds by the government to house illegal immigrants in hotels up and down the country, right? Nobody’s writing this, nobody’s doing the story and the new European, which is actually run by a friend of mine.

46:12 Um, actually did a story against Virology’s report saying, And I actually put tweet apps, and I said, You know, actual newspapers are now criticizing real journalism because they’ve forgotten how to do it because they don’t go out anymore. They don’t actually investigate anything. They just look and see what’s on the Internet and they write about it. So see what’s on Twitter and regurgitate it and give them a spin on it. And I mean, the number of stories I now read were saying something, you know something so caused outrage, they caused outrage, and then they quote a few people on Twitter. It’s like, That’s not a story, they haven’t caused any outreach. You’ve gone looking for something and you’ve sat in a chair and you’ve written it and it’s crap. Let’s talk about the BBC because you’ve been pretty critical, but yet you’re still buying, you’re still paying for TV licenses. You know, when I started London Real in 2011, my tagline was putting the BBC out of business right, which was also a joke, You know, it’s not bad. They didn’t think an American could make a joke, but my joke was is, You can’t put them out of business because you get thrown in jail if you don’t pay your TV license. But also, we’re kind of seeing it come true.

47:07 By the way, BBC were the ones that broke the story of YouTube banning us. I really said they pressured YouTube to do it. Apparently they were doing this story at the time on YouTube’s community policies not being enforced. And they called them and said, How could you let this show go on, right? So they’ve been after us as well, right? But what’s your read on the BBC, you, you? You said they used to serve a function they did, now they don’t. Well, the two big one for one thing, okay, um. My belief about the BBC is that they should and they still do employ a lot of good journalists, but they employ 25 000 people, right? There’s not that many good journalists in Britain, I’m afraid, and the problem is that they have this kind of again feeling of entitlement. You know, they think that because they’re the BBC, um, they can tell everybody how the world is, well, they can’t do that anymore.

47:47 Because people have got other ways of finding out how the world is right um they they’ve taken over the internet in terms of the way that they fund their um their website their website isn’t particularly good but it makes it very difficult for any independent website to operate it makes it really hard for example for local newspapers to operate because they basically just use up all of the resources in the area they hire all the people in the area if you go to somewhere like Surrey you’ve got BBC sorry you’ve got BBC Sussex you’ve got BBC Kent three separate radio stations within the space of you know a demographic where they don’t even need a radio station because they’ve already got all the other radio stations nationally you know and I just think that they’ve over expanded um and they represent again this kind of minority view in this country which is you know people have gone to University people that tend to be leaning towards the left-hand side of politics and people who live a pretty privileged life you know they there’s not much of the BBC for your working man and woman yeah so you seem to just toe the government line especially the last six months when they’re worried about their funding being cut yeah the article they wrote about us just felt like it came straight out of off-com or something it just didn’t seem independent it didn’t seem thoughtful it just sounds like they were just reacting reacting reacting and

48:59 Again you know I think if you were going to be philosophical about it you can’t be completely and utterly objective so don’t pretend that you are right you know and if you are going to go for people just say you’re going for them yeah and be honest about it you know because I think people can see through all that now I had again Max Kaiser on the show and he you know he works for RT and I always give him a hard time I’m like the Russian government funds your your show and he said yeah when I’m on YouTube it actually says funded by us you know funded by a government or something and he said but when the BBC’s on it doesn’t say that right he said why right so it’s it’s the same thing and it’s happening and yet they don’t have any disclaimer they don’t have to say what’s happening right but they really are biased in that sense as well and Also, if they are supposed to be the state broadcaster, what are they doing paying? Gary Lineker, you know, multi<unk>million pound deals, what are they doing bidding for? I mean, they haven’t done it so much now. But bidding for sporting events against commercial operators like Talk Sport, which is also in our building. You know, what are they doing, spending public money on that they shouldn’t be doing that? You know, football. The Football League wants a five million dollars, five million pounds for, you know, showing them a football match. They shouldn’t be able to to bid for that because it’s our money.

50:00 Similarly, they shouldn’t be doing things like Strictly Come Dancing. You know, it’s too expensive, they shouldn’t be, you know, it’s not affordable. Yeah, I agree, you know, is it going to be cut back? I think it is. Boris has them in there, I think Boris definitely got it in for them, okay?

50:13 And if he ever decides to, you know, take his thumb out of his backside and actually do something and make a decision. I think he will go after them, I think he will limit what they can charge money for, and I think they’ve got. They’re going to have to end up eventually as some kind of subscription channel, and, you know, I might even subscribe to it, you never know you might. I might, but there’s so many options out there now. You might not. I might not, I might not. Yeah, um, Boris, how’s he doing? What does he need to focus on the next few years? I think he has to focus on the economy absolutely right. I think it’s back to work. I think so, but the trouble is, I think he’s, he’s got this kind of, you know, good and bad guy on each shoulder.

50:48 And one of them is the medical people saying, You know, you’ve got to be really careful. I think he’s he’s kind of governing with what is future hindsight, which is a difficult concept of grass. But it’s what he thinks is going to happen in the future. When they look back at what he did today because he’s worried about this, uh, you know, some kind of public inquiry. He doesn’t want to be seen to have been putting people’s lives in danger because people will go for it for that. But I think he’s, I think we he’s going to have to try and put the medical people to one side and say, Look, here’s what we now have to do. We have to look at the world as if it was going.

51:19 Back to normal, except as this kind of disease that you can get. So how do we best get that back to normal the best way we can because without tourism, this country is done? I mean, if we, I mean, we have so much money coming in here from foreign tourism and nobody’s coming here. Yeah, you know, forget about the people going back to work. We need people coming back here, you know, to tour around the museums and stuff. So he’s got to focus on that, he’s going to focus on Brexit as well, which is quite important, I think, and that that will actually now seem pretty easy, I would imagine, because the Europeans have kind of folded, they’re in the worst place and we are in terms of funding in terms of money. You know, Italy’s been devastated, Spain the same.

51:51 They haven’t got the cash coming in from us anymore, so I think they’re going to be in real trouble. King Boy should be forceful and ask everybody to just man up and show up back to work. Or, yeah, you can’t get away with that these days. No, because, but, but in the end, if you did do that, and if I was advising him, I’d tell him that’s exactly what you should do. Because all the people that are going to have a go at you would be having a go at you anyway, right? You know, the people who think that you’re is this macho bully womanizing scumbag? They’re going to think that no matter what you do, so, you might as well do something that actually will upset them and make it make something happen. Insane. That’s what he is, I don’t think he is. No, I’ve never actually met Boris Johnson funnily enough, okay? I’ve met some other members of his family. I I don’t have a personal view of Boris Johnson, you know, I really don’t care what he does. I don’t care how many women he sleeps with, I don’t care how many children he’s got. It’s no, no, my business, but equally I don’t want him telling me how to live my life. He’s supposed to be a Conservative prime minister. Yeah, the equivalent in America is Trump. So again, he’s got the two things on his shoulder, he’s got Fauci and Berks on one side. His gut feel knows to get America back to work. Except in this case, there’s an election coming up in three months from now, so he’s got

52:54 That to deal with. And a lot of divisiveness and everything we just talked about is about times five or ten. In America, when it comes to cancel culture. Awoke ideology, leftist, Marxist. You name it, what’s your read of what’s going on there and then the election?

53:08 When I find Joe Biden to be a ridiculous choice of candidate from Democrats, I mean, he must be kicking themselves that he was the nominee. Well, I can’t. I mean, there are those who have a theory who, which is that he picks a running mate who happens to be a woman who’s probably going to be a Black woman. Yeah, we’re not sure who, but there’s a couple of candidates. And he gets into the White House. And then is so dodgery that he just kind of hands over to the vice president. Now I could buy into that possibly, you know, um, because I can’t see Biden running anything. I mean, he literally can’t tell the difference between his wife and his sister, right?

53:38 Didn’t know where he was the other day. He wants and goes on stage. Everyone goes, Oh well, you know, that’s what happens when you’re on a tour. And he’s up 15 points in the poll in the in the biggest country. But this is why you don’t believe the polls, right? Because I had a funny enough, a bet with my sister, who’s a bit of a champagne socialist herself, you know. Nice Big House in Connecticut Apartment Manhattan Votes Democrat. You know, they used to ring up when I was there, the Old Democrat fundraising people, and I just tell them to get lost, put the phone down. She’s become a Republican slap, she’s like, Who’s that? No one? You know, it’s like the Vanity Fair crowd, right? It’s actually okay.

54:09 Um, and I had a bet with her, um, four years ago, I said, Trump’s going to win, and all of her friends were like, No chance, so I bet her 100 bucks. How did you know that, or think that because I knew that there was a feeling abroad, that Barack Obama had been a complete announcer? Failure in the same way that the people in this country knew that Boris Johnson was the only guy that could get them Brexit. And so they voted for him in massive numbers. And people were fed up with this whole kind of, you know, the the kind of the coronation. If you like of Michelle and Barack Obama, you know, as if they were the greatest people that ever walked the Earth. You know, if they were sort of walking off into the sunset together, you could almost see.

54:44 You know, somebody painting a picture of them, you know, walking hand in hand into this glorious sunset, and he was one of. The worst presidents America ever had, he did nothing, and in fact, racism was worse under him. You know, he fired even more missiles than Bill Clinton did. At various, you know, caves around the world and various different encampments of, Uh, you know, terrorists. And he just didn’t achieve anything other than the fact that he occupied the chair, you know? And she was a slightly more palatable version of Hillary Clinton to me. Oh, you get two for the price of one. Well, I don’t want two for the price of one, you know, I want one for the price of one who does something.

55:19 Um, and this whole kind of, you know, cult of personality around him, I just thought, and also Trump is a very smart guy. I mean, I kind of know him from years ago, when I worked in New York in the 80s, when he was kind of everywhere. Right? You know, you see those pictures of him with Epstein, that’s the Trump that I knew, right? You know, um, part of the culture, yeah, dominant to build in his buildings.

55:36 But also, you know, I spoke to Judge Jeanine Pirro, who has a show on Fox, and, you know, she’s not known him for 30 years. And she said, Brian, you don’t understand. We used to walk down the street and everybody construction workers to the chef in the back. They all loved him, yeah, and because he was, whether you like it or not, the embodiment of the American dream. Now, all these people, all these people who go, Oh yeah. But he started with load of money that his dad gave him. Doesn’t matter, you know, he was flash, he had he built casinos, I mean, bizarly, one of the few casinos actually went bust in New Jersey.

56:05 Yes, where I spent the night once and I ate in a restaurant where everything was black, including the plates, which made it quite disconcerting. But you know, but people like that guy, yeah, you know, um, and and when he is that guy, they like him even more. And like we’ve said earlier, people don’t want to admit that they vote for him because they think that people will think they’re not very nice people. But all he has to do is get the same people who voted for him, so vote for him again. That’s all he has to do. He doesn’t have to get any new voters.

56:31 He I don’t think he’s going to lose any voters, because if you voted for Trump, you’re going to vote for him again, aren’t you? I would think so He looks a little, uh, less confident lately, looks a. Little well, I think it’s kowtowing to the corona people and trying to give them a line. Even though he’s kind of, you know, you know, slamming fashion on the side, but he doesn’t seem confident when I see him at his press conferences, not even as much as he was at the coronavirus briefing. I thought he showed great leadership there. Yeah, he came out, he was himself. He gave the the country and the world some some calmness, some at least. This is what’s going on, that’s what we planned. But lately he just seems a little bit rattled. But I think, you know, you’ve worked in high profile situations, you’ve been in pressurized situations, you know, relenting. Pressure, I think, gets to everyone in the end. And I think if you wake up every morning and everybody’s saying you did a crap job and you’re an idiot and you’re useless. I mean, even somebody like him will eventually kind of go cry so much. I mean, it’s like whenever I’ve had myself involved in the old Twitter spat. You know, if it reaches this kind of nuclear proportion, there’s a point in which you just go bloody hell. You know, I just need to go and hide for a while and just get away from it all. And when you’re president, you can’t, you know? And it must be tough. And he’s got, I mean, the problem

57:40 For him about he doesn’t have very many friends in the room. Because all of the people that have ever worked at the White House have eventually gone. And said horrible things about him, you know, yeah, or yeah, but I mean, he can’t really trust anyone around it. It seems to me because they all disappear and they all write about it and they’ll give interviews, and he slags them off. And it’s kind of becoming a recurring theme.

57:59 Maybe just running out of people to to actually talk to, Okay, I mean, who can he talk to? I don’t think he talks to Melanie much, uh, his sons, maybe, maybe, yeah, but he’s just, you know, I think he kind of does it himself. Yeah, I don’t think he’s got much of an inner circle. It doesn’t seem as though he’s got a kind of a I mean, Pence looks literally like he’s been manufactured somewhere down in in, you know, Virginia somewhere, you know about the factory. I did like his calm demeanor at the coronavirus briefings, but I also imagine there’s no way you can have this guy after you’ve had a Trump like, No, I just don’t know how we could, but he’s the perfect guy.

58:32 For Trump, because Trump needs a guy that’s super loyal, he doesn’t need the spotlight, doesn’t really say much. It will just show up and do the work. And also, uh, count out all the liberal governors in America and tell them what they want to hear. When Trump wants to tell them to go to hell, so he’s they’re making things. I suppose. Disturbing for Americans is that the best they can do from the Democrat side is to come up with Joe Biden. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense, it really doesn’t. I mean, now we’re not sure if there’s going to be a debate. I had someone on the show, one of the guys from Fox last week, and I said, Is there any time in modern history in American presidential race? But there wasn’t a debate, he said. I don’t know, I got to go back to the books. It might be 50, 60 years pre<Unk>television. Well, I guess the first television debate was was the candidate. Yeah, and since then I doubt they’re they’ve missed one. I don’t think so, but he’s now.

59:18 The rumor is there will be maybe one, maybe three. I still don’t see how that’s going to happen, but now it’s going to be all fact checked. But also they’d have to do without an audience, and they’re saying remote, but then they’re saying if it’s remote, then they said, Biden’s gonna have all his place cards up on a Zoom call and it’s just going to be ineffective. Uh, I don’t know, it’s it’s just. I think the thing with Biden is whenever he opens his mouth, he loses.

59:38 Popularity, loses more points because it’s when he says nothing thing that the pole ratings go up. As soon as he actually has to go and do anything, people go, Christ, what’s wrong with this guy? You know, he’s not very well. He clearly got some form of early stage dementia. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying that, you know, but he’s going at 40 50 chance of being the leader of the free world. But you know, what’s also interesting? I think being the leader of the free world isn’t all.

1:00:00 It’s, uh, cracked up to be, and I don’t think it’s what it used to be. You know, I think when, for example, Ronald Reagan was was president, and that was kind of my era. Yeah, in America, you know, before Clinton came in, um, I think, uh, and before Bush came in as well. I think that, uh, you know, that was a very powerful America, you know, the America that basically dismantled the. Soviet Union Why is that? Do you think you think? He had a massive defense budget? And we had a real enemy like the Soviet Union. And he and he had a lot of support that he could do more. Or do you think things have changed behind the scenes? I think things have changed fundraising. I mean, I think it’s not so much what happened in America, it’s what’s happened elsewhere. You know, you’ve now got India as a kind of a mini superpower. Financially speaking. Because of the numbers of people that live there, be because of the numbers of consumers that they’ve now got China the same. You know, it’s grown up into this superpower.

1:00:46 Not just, but I’ve didn’t of being a Communist dictatorship, but now a global kind of financial superpower. You know, they own property all over the world, they own basically all the mineral rights in Africa, they’re doing the same in South America, the United States of America. On the other hand, I’ve seen it going from what was a very proud and very admirable nation with great infrastructure. I mean, when I moved to America in 1983, back in 1983, I was moving from a very troubled Britain, you know, a very backward Britain, both politically and economically. You know, it was still coming out of the 70s, which has been a terrible, disastrous decade where we’d been strike them in strikes with every place. There was piles of rubbish in Leicester Square because nobody was emptying the bins.

1:01:28 Um, you know, the minor strikes had happened. Thatcher was trying to rebuild the economy and I went through this gleaming. It was, I mean, he called it the sepulcher on the hill, you know, and it was. It looked like it was in Sepulcher on the Hill 80s America, and it was like anything could happen. They invented TV, I would sit for hours watching MTV and this is unbelievable, it’s amazing and everything worked. Whereas in England it was the opposite. When I came back, um, to America, after I, after I’d left there, sort of came. About 92 went back there, sort of around about the late 90s.

1:01:56 It seemed like everything was reversed and Britain was somehow back and was on the rise and America was somehow in decline. I’m not quite sure why, but, you know, things weren’t working very well. The train suddenly started crashing. You know, my sister used to boast about the fact that they didn’t have train. Crashes in America when I went there until I think until about two years ago they were running the same trains. In terms of the rolling, stock up the the shoreline from New Haven, up to sort of, you know, the Metro to Guilford and all that. Yeah, really old, right? And they didn’t have any money. The roads were terrible.

1:02:30 Suddenly, you know, and so something’s gone wrong. I don’t know where or exactly when, but in America generally, it’s kind of lost its luster. I think you lived in New York for about 12 years, 10 years, nearly 10, yeah. When you look at Bill de Blasio, when you look at the mayor of New York, try to make some sense. To just help me with this mic painting in Bright Orange Black Lives Matter, which is a political movement on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower.

1:02:57 Um, and you see, the defunding of the police murder rates up to 300 percent, like, What the hell do you see? Well, idiocy complete, and that’s an idiocy. I mean, I was in New York shortly after it had gone bankrupt. I guess in the 70s and head coach was the mayor who was brilliant, you know, they came up with. I remember seeing this first for the first time they had a sign and just said, Don’t even think of parking here. Yeah, but it was very New York and it was brilliant, you know? And when I remember, um, the year that the Mets won the World Series, and I think it was 86, um. They had to play Pittsburgh in one of the playoffs before the before the World Series final. And there was a press conference and Koch was there, and somebody said, Oh, the mayor of Pittsburgh says, Um, something or other about, you know, New York, he says, where he just went, where they don’t care, don’t know anything about Pittsburgh. Never heard of it, you know, and that was the New York. That was, you know, punchy, that Trump kind of straddled like a leviathan.

1:03:48 You know, yeah, that’s when he built his buildings in his empire. Yeah, in the 80s, yeah, and I mean, for. For this is the thing I mean to to sort of personalize a political argument, which is what they do with Boris here as well. Whereby, you know, everything Trump does is horrible. Let’s paint a sign outside of his of his building. I mean, it’s pathetic, isn’t it?

1:04:04 It’s just, it’s just toy town politics, yeah, and de Blasio is an awful mayor by. Anybody’s account, you know, but really, really. Giuliani, by contrast, was a terrific bear, you know, and now he’s kind of vilified because he works for Trump. Yeah, but I think for de Blasio, he’s clutching at the only straw he has, so he’s finding anything he can weaponize. And right now, it’s It’s Black Lives Matter and it’s supporting this movement, and that’s how he’ll get reelected. Or they think they can get Trump out of office, so they’re just putting all their money on this. And it’s it’s been a good bet. So well, I guess the problem for, I suppose, Trump supporters. There’s not many of them in New York City. You know, it’s a little bit like London metropolitan elite types, you know, who can afford to go and pay. I mean, it was like when Robert De Niro banned Trump from his restaurants and Trump went well. Not many of my supporters can afford to pay 250 for a steak, so that’s fine, not a problem.

1:04:50 You know, they totally out of touch these people. Yeah, yeah, it’s the Vanity Fair crowd, right? The ones I always like to joke about, you know, Vanity Fair, because they write all the liberal articles, and it’s next to all the Prada ads and the jewelry ads. Does anyone notice a disconnect? Where do you think they’re making all that stuff? You know, yeah, if you think there might be some slavery involved by any chance, you know, so that’s New York, let’s talk about London.

1:05:13 I’ve lived here for 20 years, and yet I don’t recognize this city in the last year or two. We got a guy in the mayor’s office at Econ who he’s a broken man. I mean, this guy is is, you know, he’s suffering, he’s depressed over the COVID part. He’s being marginalized by Number 10. He’s whining and complaining about it. That the Tube is in a mess. The Met Police is needs funding, needs, training, knife crime is up. Uh, we had all sorts of issues, this this city needs leadership. There are parts of it which are completely lawless as well. Oh my gosh, yeah, you know, and the homelessness and it. Right now we need leadership, we need to bring business back. This is an amazing, thriving one of the top five cities in the world. When it’s on point with great ideas, great creativity, it could bounce back and be a new, reinvented version of itself. But if Sadiq’s back, it’s going to be another three years of nonsense, and this is when.

1:06:05 You begin to wonder if there’s something else going on here, you know, does they can’t prefer it when we’re in this kind of, you know, war zone mentality? Because there are some politicians I think you do, there are some. I mean, you know, they always used to say in America, didn’t know. If you’re having domestic problems going to start a war somewhere, you know, go and invade Vietnam or something, you know, see if that takes everybody’s mind off. It never let a good crisis go to waste. And now he’s got something to complain about, no, he’s got something to complain about. I mean, it’s the same guy who went over to Brussels in the midst of the UH, you know, the Brexit backwards and forwards situation, and whilst actually serious, actually asked the the European Union. If London could be made some kind of associate member of the EU, how do you go and what you know? Sorry, mate, and I just. I had the same argument with him about the statutes because he’s now formed this Heritage Commission. Or something where they’re going to look at all the names of the streets, and this is in the midst of, as you say, a crisis for London. And then you look at all the statues and they’re going to look at all the names of the streets. Which he claims are all kind of harking back to the Victorian era and that nobody’s really thought about. But which, first of all, is B.S. right? Because most of London has been part of, uh, an entire history all the way

1:07:08 Back to the Romans when it was called Londinium. You know, when there are street names all the way back to there when there are roads that were built by the Romans? It’s got nothing to do with the Victorian slave traders, right, right? But here’s a guide Romans had some slaves. I think, too. I think they did, they enslaved most of Europe, you know, but it doesn’t stop us talking about them. But here’s the but so here’s a guy who basically, um, wants to create conflict, doesn’t you know he? I’ve invited him on my show 15, 20 times. We’ve given up asking him now because he just doesn’t come on, but he’ll happily go on LBC. He’ll happily go on any other radio station. That gives him a nice time, but he won’t come on, I show, and he’ll probably say it’s because he thinks I’m a racist or something like that, and that would be why. But we don’t even get an answer out of his office.

1:07:48 They’re just not interested, right? And so he’s worried about renaming streets when. We need someone to step up and just show some leadership. Well, we want the streets to be safe for a start. Yeah, one of the things that I’ve seen lately, which worries me a lot, are these kind of illegal raves that have been going on.

1:08:01 Where, basically, it’s almost as though it’s one of those movies where they’re inviting the police in so they can give them a hammering. Because these are people who are not scared of the police now, if you’re not scared of the police, that’s a dangerous place. Yeah, I’ve saw that, I mean, that boggles my mind. Yeah, you know, when you see that I see the police running away, yeah, I mean, that is just unacceptable. It doesn’t send a good message, and the more it happens, the more it’s going to happen. Uh, the last thing the city needs. It’s like almost decaying into New York City in the 70s. You know, yeah, and I would never thought London could do that. I mean, I tend to spend most of my weekends outside of London, so I don’t really see it, and because I’m not of that kind of age. I’m not out and about on a Friday Saturday night in clubs or anything like pubs or anything like that, but I would imagine that’s quite a dangerous place to be right now.

1:08:43 You know, yeah, and you’d have to be very careful where you went. Yeah, we need to get this man out of office. Are there any alternatives? Not really at the moment? Sean Bailey Nice guy, um, but really too ineffectual, I think I mean, Susan Hall, funnily enough, who is the head of the Tories in the London Assembly? Quite a feisty woman, um, she could probably do a better job than Sadiq Khan because she’s she’s all about common sense. She comes with my show quite a lot. It’s very critical of Sadiq Khan because she says that not only does he not do his job, he doesn’t like scrutiny. You know, they’re supposed to have Mayor’s question, which is meant to be like Prime Minister’s questions.

1:09:15 Once a month, I think, and he skipped a couple of them on the ground coronavirus, and she’s like, That’s not, that’s not acceptable. We need to know what you’re doing. And he spends money like it’s going out of fashion. He’s already screwed up. TFL Yeah, right, because, um, he didn’t manage it properly. We did an investigation with Taxpayers Alliance into Transport for London TfL. They’ve got something like, Um, 25 or so or more people earning more.

1:09:39 Than six figures, right? Their top guy makes about 700 000 pounds a year and you’re going, you run a train set, what do you, what do you need? 700 000 quid for, you know? And it’s this kind of publicly funded quango mentality that these people all pat themselves on the back. And now he’s got his begging bowl out, saying to Boris Johnson, I need more money because nobody’s traveling on the train. Yeah, well, guess what? Make the trains safe, make the trains feel as if people are going to be comfortable with with what’s going on and get people back on them. Yeah, tell some leadership, so Sean Bailey don’t know a couple of the random candidates. So we need someone to get in there and show us some leadership.

1:10:13 Yeah, I think I mean, Boris was a great mayor. People forget, um, when they say, always ship, Yeah, and I know people who worked for him when he was in City Hall, okay? And they say the thing that he is very good at is surrounding himself with a decent team of people and then leaves it to them. You know, he makes decisions, obviously, but he also employs the right people because he’s intelligent enough and brainy enough and confident enough not to be frightened of hiring people.

1:10:36 That might be clever than him, right? He doesn’t worry. I mean, it’s a bit like me. I mean, I don’t care who is up against me on the radio networks that I that I go up against because I know none of them are as good as I am. People will accuse me of being arrogant. Well, I’m good at what I do. I’ve been doing it a long time and I could argue both sides of any argument and win. And so I don’t care what you think you can do against me, you know, I’m not, I’m not bothered, so I think Boris is the same. What we need is somebody like that who can go in, who knows how to manage a big organization.

1:11:04 The problem for seek Khan is he’s not, he’s not equipped for that, you know? He’s a sort of tough and safety lawyer from Tooting, who hasn’t really done much in his life. Apart from being a labor apparatic, yeah, and he’s running effectively on the biggest corporations in the world. I know it’s mind<unk>boggling and you’re right. We need someone that can show some leadership, a little flair.

1:11:21 Do what Boris does, get some great people behind him get people excited about this city. And that will lead to the Middle West administrator as well. More than A. Politician, you might need to, you know, go into Goldman Sachs and find somebody that actually could run it, who would actually know how to make it work. Yeah, rather than just be a kind of, you know, box ticker to say, Oh, well, now we’re going to ban this picture of a woman in a bikini because, you know, it might offend some people. Really. Is that? Is that your job?

1:11:44 It’s ridiculous. All right, to be continued. All right, we need some new names out there for the race, for sure. Tell me about you What are your plans for talk, radio and your show? Your you know you’re a YouTuber now, you know you need to get purple hair or something, and, you know, do that kind of thing. You know, you’re embracing this new media video, and, you know, some people say you have a face for radio, I disagree. I think I think you’re photogenic. I like watching you with the headphones on. Yeah, I feel I like watching it right, so something good, you know, it’s funny. We on the night of the election, um, we decided to do the first sort of proper live streamed, um, show, okay, and we’d never really done one before. And inside of News UK, we’ve got some proper TV studios.

1:12:22 Um, which I used to do that show Plank of the Week, which is which is off the radio. It’s just a video show that we do every week and it goes out on YouTube. It does. Okay, you know, not massive numbers, but not bad. Um, and there’s going to be more of that.

1:12:33 I think the idea is to do more off radio type material, you know, um, but when we did the election night, I was going to be on from one in the morning. Julie Hartley Brewer was there from 10, she left at one and was coming back to do breakfast. I mean, because we work hard when we work on the radio, even though it doesn’t look like it. And, uh, well, you guys go hard, I mean, you go three hours straight, Yeah, every day, right? Yeah, and it’s not. I mean, you know, people look at it and go, Oh, you only work three hours a day, which is true, but there’s a lot going on in the meantime.

1:13:00 You know, I’m constantly kind of reading stuff and picking things up, talking to people. Um, but I woke up. I went home, um, and I woke up around about eight o’clock, had some dinner thought about, you know, heading into work for around. About midnight and I suddenly sort of woke up in a panic and I was like, I’m gonna have to do live. Stream television for five for six hours, starting at one o’clock in the morning.

1:13:23 In a very fast moving atmosphere of news breaking, which I’ve never done right, that’s something I’ve never done anything like that. You’ve done live radio, I’ve done radio video, but this was on camera, live streamed, uh, on YouTube. It ended up, I think, doing only slightly worse than Sky in terms of the numbers and we didn’t have to play. John Burko, 60, Grand to come in and tell us what was going on. Um, and I actually really enjoyed it, and it was, and it was different. It wasn’t headphones, it was an earpiece. Okay, um, and it was a little mic here. And we had a panel and we had people coming in and out. Some of them were slightly more well<unk>oiled than others when they came in because it was the middle of the of the night. There was a party going upstairs with with, you know, very senior executives from the company. And it went so well that they were like, This is this is fantastic. And anything we didn’t really have was the graphics that obviously the BBC and Sky and all that can do because we didn’t have the ability to do that. Okay, but we will, and with every single month that goes is by we’re trying to do a few more things, doing a bit more outside broadcasting.

1:14:22 And we did a broadcast from a pub. Okay, um, on July the 4th because we decided, Hey, listen, the pubs are opening, let’s do a show. So we went down to a pub not far from the office and sat outside. Social distance drank beer at 10 to 10 o’clock in the morning. And we’re like, You know, we’re officially opening Britain’s pubs.

1:14:39 And people love that, you know, it’s like it’s it’s in touch with people. Ordinary people who wanted to go back to the pub, and that’s our audience, you know, and it’s cheap to do these things. Yeah, people, uh, appreciate that, like they don’t need the big off fancy studio that the BBC has, or the rotating cameras like they they want and you don’t have to pay. I mean, it’d be very nice if they want to pay me a million quid a year, but you know, they don’t have to, right?

1:15:00 Um, because you don’t need to. Yeah, you honestly don’t. Well, people crave authenticity. Yeah, that’s why they love you, yeah, and that’s why the BBC just. Seems like something some, you know, it’s an anachronism. Somehow somebody coming on and giving you the news that they don’t, you don’t even know if they believe it right. They’ve been told what to say. It’s, you know, I think people, the thing I think that people don’t realize is the BBC and I’ve worked at the BBC. I just I did a show at the BBC in Scotland for a little while.

1:15:25 Um, when I got sacked from one of my many jobs that I’ve been sat from, it’s a radio you did. This was BBC Radio Scotland. Yeah, it was a Sunday show, it was, I think it was. I think it was only one hour. We had three studio guests we had, um, people being interviewed on the phone like journalists and and politicians and stuff like that. We did a paper review, we had a different person that came in and did that. I had a producer. This was a Sunday show producer from Tuesday just to work on the show. Okay, and to talk to me and to set things up and to go and interview people which they would then use. And on the day, there was about 10 people in the control room. You know, when I went to work for commercial radio after that, there was one, you know, and that’s the difference. And when you see things like News Night and you see things like the Nine O’clock noon or 10 o’clock news, you have no idea how many people are behind the camera. Well, you probably do, but I mean, there’s loads of them, yeah, and they’re all, and they’re all deciding what the kind of you know.

1:16:14 The policy is what the BBC policy is on this, that and the other, you know, and they haven’t done yet. This the Circo story that I’m doing, you know, I don’t know and didn’t know until now that there are three separate companies that are in receipt of money from the government to house illegal immigrants in hotels. Who knew, Wow? And we’re finding out more and more every day. But if there weren’t old school journalists like you, we would not know about these stories. No, you wouldn’t, because they’re not interested in covering them, right? They’re just not because they think it might create racism and to tell you what by not doing it, you’re creating racism. Yeah, do you get hate? Do you worry about the hate because you know you’re you’re human, you are sensitive to the comments, Oh yeah, but you also are secure in your own view.

1:16:59 Yes, I mean, I think if it was only hate and it was relentless hate, I think it would probably get to anybody. But it’s not, you know, there are sort of little flames of it. I mean, I have. I’ve had rails with vegans, um, cyclists who are quite vitriolic. Uh, I’ve had rails with Tommy Robinson’s fans because, you know, I said some things about him. They didn’t like. I’ve had some real right<unk>wing nutters on my case who are kind of, you know, the people who who are actual white supremacist types. You know, I’ve had massive Corbinistas having a go, so I sort of have the whole gamut really okay. You’ve offended them all.

1:17:31 Yeah, I’ve offended them even Sunderland once, because I made a joke about Sunderland. That’d be a very good place to live. And, you know, um, but the thing about social media hate is that it only really goes for about 24 hours, right? It’s unusual. If it lasts longer than that, if it lasts longer than that, then you must have done something really bad. But they move on. I liken them to those, you know, those old, um, hammer horror films where the mob from the village goes up to Dracula’s castle. And they’ve got their torches and then they see something over there and they all run over there. And it’s, well, there’s something else over there. And so they don’t hang around for long. Yeah, it’s 12 year old kids in their Mars basement, and I get a lot of praise as well. I mean, I get recognized quite a bit now, which is interesting, so I have to be a bit careful, um, about what I get up to. Who’s doing what you’re doing right now in media in Britain? I don’t think anyone is, I really don’t.

1:18:13 Um, we have a great platform because we, you know, we talk about the mainstream media. Some people say, Well, hang on a minute, you are the mainstream media, you’re owned by News UK. And yes, there’s another truth to that. But we are very much a, um, a sort of a sibling very far down the packing order. When you consider the numbers the BBC get for for their viewers and their readership and their listenership, same goes for some other commercial operators. But we’ve doubled our audience in the last two years and so if we double it again, we will be very close to where OBC is. And they’re worried. Okay, and they should be. Do they have anybody doing straight talk like?

1:18:44 You or does, or is it hard to find people like you that have the experience that can really speak from the heart? And they’re willing to put it out there every day. Yeah, I think I think it’s true. I mean, it is difficult to find people, you know. Also, there’s a lot of people in the media who are not. I mean, you were mentioning authenticity. You know, I’ve never trained to be on the radio, you know, it’s not really my thing. A lot of people who were trained to be on the radio have worked in music radio. Then they go and do speech radio. And it’s not the same. You know, you can’t just go from being somebody on nice and chatty on Radio 2 to suddenly doing a polemic political show. Yeah, you know, you need to know a bit and you can’t just sound good a lot. I think a lot of people in radio just think as long as they sound okay, that’s going to be fine. You know, I think that can be their downfall. Sometimes they have these radio voices, they were taught in school, and nobody wants to hear that. Or they associate that with the breakfast show, yeah, and then when they when they hear someone talking normally, they’re like, Okay, this is authentic, right? And and so a lot of people don’t really reveal what they actually think right for some reasons, because it’s actually probably quite unpalatable.

1:19:48 Um, but for other reasons, they say what they think people want to hear. And my view is is that I say what I want to say, and if you agree with me, that’s great. And you should, because it’s common sense, you know. And if somebody once said to me, how could you disagree with common sense? You know, it’s a great slogan, because common sense is is what everybody wants to hear. Right? Yeah, um, and so, um, I think, yeah, I mean, I think, no, I don’t think anybody else is doing it quite in the way that we’re doing it. It’s already generally and in the way that I particularly do it. Um, it’s it’s gaining us a lot of fans, because because there’s nowhere else to see that being done. When you have guests on. And I’ve seen you talk to, you know, some of these defunding police people and the Black Lives Matter people who again. I’ve watched that interview. And it felt like he was just regurgitating ideas that he had heard right because there were no conclusions at the end, right, but like, How do you?

1:20:34 Prepare for those guests. And then is there a point where you’re like, I’m not gonna push it too far? Like some, it feels like you don’t try to completely crucify them and annihilate them. It feels like you’re like, I want to win with logic, but also you don’t mind getting a little bit combative. Yes, well, that guy Gary McFarland was good, because I let him just kind of hang himself really true because he, the more he spoke, the more ridiculous he sounded right, but you’re not always that lucky. So, you know, I was like, Look, um, I could sometimes get irritable with people, um, more generally on the phone than in person, although I did get quite irritable with Femi. You might have seen that video where he came into our old studio, where we before we moved into New Zeco’s building. Yeah, and one of the reasons that I got kind of gnarly with him was partly because he insisted on coming into the studio. On that particular day, I had quite an inexperienced producer on and not unbeknownst to me. When she had called him up to come on, he had apparently said, Oh, I’m not far away, I’ll just pop in. And this is the kind of thing that people like Fermi does, because Femi to me, is an absolute nobody, right? He has no real reason to to have an opinion on anything other than the fact that he’s out there kind of spreading his EU. To say that, you know, the EU is great, and how dare you not want to be in it because this is all the great benefits of it,

1:21:47 Right? And so suddenly turns up, and I’m like, What are you doing here? he said, Oh, I thought I should come in and I took her so well. I said, Look, you don’t tell people you don’t let people come in unless you invite them. You know, unless I invite this guy in, you know, he’s not welcome, right? And she said, Well, it’s not really time to go away because it gives him more of a platform if he’s in studio.

1:22:05 Yeah, okay, because also generally speaking, I think in terms of, Um, psychology, it’s easier to be nice to somebody. If they’re sitting in front of you right or more difficult to be nasty to them, right, unless you’re me, yeah, unless you, because I don’t care right anyway. So I said to him, You get a regret coming in, I’m afraid, so we’ll see in five minutes and he came in and I just. Went for him and of course, what he didn’t, he started off with his the usual trotted out nonsense of, Well, the great thing about the European Union is we’ve had peace in Europe, you know, ever since the second world. You gave him the history lesson and I gave him the Bosnian history list right, which he didn’t know much, which he obviously knew nothing about. Right, Um, and then I said to him, Um, you know, so how many, um wars did we have between 1945 and 1973, when the EU was formed? And he was kind of a pardoned. Well, I said, How many wars, John?

1:22:50 He said that the EU was responsible for bringing peace to Europe. He said I don’t think there were any wars I said, Right, So so from 1945, when there was no EU, so 1973, when it was formed No Wars. So what exactly did you need to make peace for? And he just didn’t know where to go and I was quite rude to him and I shouted him down. And there’s still quite a lot of people that I mean, that one’s been seen by. I think nearly half million people now.

1:23:13 Um, which I know is not much compared to what you guys do. But, um, we were pretty proud of it. And he said, You also have to be careful because you don’t want to be that guy every time, or do you? Well, that’s the thing. I mean, it’s the same when you go about the, you know, people kind of want me to rip up the Guardian, but if I did it every day, it would be boring. Yeah, so now I do it sort of, sometimes, surprisingly, sometimes not.

1:23:33 Um, you’re right, because because I think it’s all about different speeds, you know, we have a laugh. I mean, you know, there’s a certain person who I don’t heard her name who works on on LBC at the same time as me. Who only has one speed? You know, he’s just miserable, he doesn’t make people laugh, he’s not funny, He looks like he’s having a terrible time. You know, it’s like he’s making, he’s been paid very well. He lives in a nice big house in west London. What’s the problem, you know? Whereas we make people laugh, you know, and we we can have a laugh, but we can still do the serious stuff. You know, what does your show look like five years from now? If it’s going where you want to go, I mean, you know, you know, you’re you’ll be the oldest YouTuber out there, yeah, but when I live through the covered, uh, pandemic, that’s true. That’s true, but like, what do you want it to be?

1:24:16 Because, you know, you’re already getting creative, and there’s so much creativity with this medium and the fact you can stream anywhere you know you could stream from your phone if you want from a pub, you know, is it just like I would like it to be more interesting? I mean, people have been asking me lately whether there’s going to be any live shows, that kind of thing. I mean, we could certainly do more of that once they start opening up theaters or once they start opening up. Kind of, you know, one of the things I love doing with an audience was having, yeah, was having the tent down in Westminster. Okay, intent of common centers. I used to call it, um, and I would invite these politicians in and just give them a going over, and they weren’t quite sure what was going on. You know, Lisa Nandy was particularly good as one. That’s one to look for where she came in and tried to explain to me that there had never been a deal right?

1:24:56 And I said, Well, hang on a minute. You’re telling me that Theresa May didn’t go to Brussels three times and bring back a deal and you guys didn’t vote it down, she said. That’s right, there was no deal. I said, Well, you called it a deal, and if you started getting into this kind of ridiculous, semantic argument about whether it was actually a deal. The fact was it wasn’t the deal because it was a preview to a deal. And I’m like, and I said, This is why people hate you. I said, This is why people are watching you right now and saying, you’re talking absolute nonsense, you’re talking in riddles. I said, Do your job, and then she started going to me, You know, Well, I’m the one that’s doing my job. You’re not doing your job, all just spreading lies and deceit. And then I said something else, and she said to me, Um, you’re just being difficult now. And when I got home at that weekend, the mother and my children said, She should try living with you, okay? Most politicians talk, a lot of politicians are very stupid, which is what I’ve been quite surprised to discover. Right, Um, they can do a monologue in there, they don’t like to be disagreed with, right? I had old Lord Hesseltine in once, and I was in, obviously in his, um, in his, by his way of thinking. I was impertinent by questioning something that he said, and I just said to him, I just, that’s blatant.

1:26:03 Nonsense, I said, What you’ve just said is absolute rubbish. Some bollocks about the European Union. And he looked at me as if I just shot him, because no one said People don’t say that to him, right? Because people treat them with great respect. And it’s like Vince Cable, they keep trusting Vince Cable out, you know, or in Vince Cable brings our show. We don’t put him on, so why don’t we put him on? He’s nobody cares what he says, nobody’s got any interest in listening to him, he’s yesterday’s man. He wasn’t much good when he was today’s man, you know? So I treat them as very skunked regard. I treat my listeners more importantly than the politicians. I think that’s the other thing.

1:26:32 Excuse me, that other people don’t do. And when you say, treat your listeners, what do you mean by that? Are you thinking about them on every show or they’re at the end of the world? Okay? I’m always thinking of, What would they be sitting here asking this book, this bloke? If he was in front of them, right, what would they ask him? Okay, because it’s not, you know, that’s the other problem with the media. They’re kind of looking for the macro economic argument. You know, rather than you saying to me, Well, what should Boris Johnson do? how should he get out of this? Rather than saying, You know, well, should you? You know, Uh, you know, let’s talk about the, you know, the inflation rate and the borrowing levels, and, you know, let’s get into macro economics and analyze the figures that wish you sooner.

1:27:09 No, just tell me if my Cornish pasty is going to cost me more money, right? That’s what ordinary people care about. Ask the simple question that every man is thinking, Yeah, don’t, don’t say something to make you look intelligent, right, right? And that’s what a lot of people I mean. All you got to do is watch those ridiculous briefings. Robert Peston Right.

1:27:23 I was actually in the car one day when they were still doing them and, um, pest, and started asking a question. My phone rang, so I took the phone, took the phone call hands free, of course, before anybody starts shopping me to the police and I had a quick five or six minute chat with a friend of mine. And I said, I better go because I’m trying to listen to the briefing anyway, got back to the briefing. Preston was still asking his question. And it was like, six minutes in, and you’re kind of going, What is wrong with?

1:27:48 You are you like trying to impress your dinner party mates who are going to say, Oh, that was a great question. You really caught them out with that one, Robert, And it’s just it became like a pantomime, you know, Laura Kudzberg, Beth Rigby and UH, and Preston. I used to kill him with three Stooges. Because you knew that every question they asked would start with, You know, do you now regret? or you know, Can you now confirm that? What you did was wrong? And nobody who wanted to know what was actually going on would ever ask those questions? You know, yeah, those are real snoozers, really, really, Yeah, I mean, I remember best Rigby went well, so can I sunbathe, um, on a Monday or can I, somebody on a Sunday? And the only question everybody else was saying was would just Please don’t. Sunbeam We don’t want to see you with not many clothes on.

1:28:32 Thank you very much indeed. Just go over there, you know, and that’s I’m afraid, how most people think, How does this all play out? Four years from now? What does America look like? What does it look like here? Does the left eat itself? Does it not like, Really, how does this end? Whether Trump gets elected or not, I think if Trump wins, the left has to recede into the background.

1:28:52 I mean, you may disagree with that. You probably know America better than me, though. Well, again, for me, it’s all about the, um, the extremes. You know, if if the ordinary people of the country are fed up with Donald Trump, they’ll vote him out? But I don’t think they are. And if the extreme left, do not bring the mainstream of Democrats with them. And I already see cracks appearing there that, you know, there are people who are moderates, like my sister, for example. You know, she’s an American citizen, she has a vote, she can’t stand any of this mad lefty stuff. Okay, a lot of her friends are the same, you know? And they’ve given up giving money to the Democrats because there just isn’t any point. Because they don’t see them really, until they’ve got a proper candidate being worth supporting, you know? And I think if the extreme left can’t take those people with them, then they’ll fade into the background and they’ll become irrelevant. I think okay, but what has to happen, though, is the governors and the the Democrats who are in positions of power. Have to start disowning these people and they have to.

1:29:48 Recognize that what they want to do is destroy America, and it’s not about left politics, it’s about killing off a way of life, you know? And I think, and I think if Trump does win, then they will die off, and if he doesn’t win, I don’t know. I would. I would not want to be living in America under a Biden presidency. Yet. I’ve been told many by many guests lately that these people hate America, they keep saying that these people hate America. And like you said in the 80s, you could be hard to find someone that hated America. Uh, but now there’s a lot of people that hate it. They hate the history, they hate the monuments, right?

1:30:21 They hate everything. It stands for and it’s leaking over here a little and it might come. I think a lot of that is also down to what’s being taught to people. Because if you think about the ages of a lot of these kids mid<unk>20s, maybe down to sort of mid<unk>teens, you know, they’ve been through this ridiculous kind of revision revision that they can’t say. Revisionist history of what America was like and what Britain was like in the Empire and all of that. And they’ve been told that we were horrible to people and that we were ghastly individuals and that we were kind of, you know, cruel. And like the Nazis, I mean, I’ve seen people actually like in the British Empire, to the Naz season, you go the hell are you talking about? Yeah, but this this kind of education system has been allowed to do it, and I think that’s a shame, and I think we need to change that. But I don’t know how we do that, because if that doesn’t change, you’re just going to get more of the same. Yeah, I mean, my, I’ve got two sets of kids, I’ve got my two older ones, who are 29 and 25. I’ve got two younger ones who are 15, 13, and luckily they’re all pretty, Uh, reasonable. I would say, you know, my son lives in California, not far from Newport Beach. Actually, okay, um, works in a skate shop, smokes a lot of dope. Okay, um, you know, moved to California because they legalized marijuana. And, you know, as happy as Larry doesn’t have a lot of money, but, you know,

1:31:31 Makes videos for a living and, you know, does okay. My daughter works for CNBC in in Dubai. Um, but they’re all pretty tolerant people, you know, but reasonable, they’re not crazy, they’re not, um, you know, drawn. To any kind of extremes, my two kids who live here are very tolerant. You know, I find that they’re very tolerant of, particularly things like trans issues.

1:31:51 They don’t care about any of that, you know, they don’t really talk about it, but if they do, they say, Well, you know, people can do what they want. So they’re very kind of almost libertarians without me making them so, which I think is good. It’s a good sign and they’ve got a good, healthy kind of, you know, skepticism of authority, which my father gave me. I think everybody should have. Yeah, you know, don’t just do what you’re told, you know, ask them why I have a 16 year old daughter, and I was. I’m really encouraging her to go to a university in America. I’d have the American experience.

1:32:17 But now I’m wondering is, like, Is she gonna go over there and just be co<unk>opted into all these crazy ideas? I mean, there must be some universities which are not like that, like Hawaii. But I’ve heard, but I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t either. I mean, it’s very worrying. Um, I guess all we can do is make sure that our kids are individuals and that they don’t. You know, I was never one for the group, let’s be honest. And so whenever I see groups of people all agreeing with each other, I immediately go the other way. It’s just, it’s just part of who I am, you know, whether it’s the government or whether it’s the opposition. I’m really not, um, a party political individual, you know, I don’t even vote right, why is that? I know you don’t, actually, because I don’t think I should. I think if I am going to be purely about issues, which is kind of what I am about, I’m not about, you know, I don’t believe that because I’m a Tory, I should be absolutely in agreement with everything that every other. Tori believes it because you can’t. So I’m not sorry because I tend to look at things on an issue to issue basis, you know, um, and I honestly think that if you vote for a particular individual or a party, you can’t be neutral. And I genuinely am.

1:33:24 And it comes out in your policy, I mean, in your show, I mean, people have, so I mean, two. Three weeks ago, when I started to be critical of Boris, people started tweeting me going, Why? Why are you turning into all the rest of them? You’re having to go. And I said, No, this, that’s not right, I’m having a go at something.

1:33:37 Because I think it’s wrong, and I think they’re doing it wrong, and I’m going to say that I’m not going to defend what I think is wrong. And now they’re not saying it, because now they’re listening to it and going, Oh, she’s got a point, Wow, you know, tell me about you, Mike. If I were to ask five of your friends, what is Mike’s superpower? How are you able to do all the things that you do? What would they say? It is because, you know, you’re pretty prolific. Yeah, well, I mean, I love working. It’s one of the things that I’ve always loved doing. I mean, I could probably say that some parts of my life suffered as a result of the fact that I just love working. When I was in newspapers, I worked a lot more hours at 12 30. Nowadays. You know, um, that was where we did it, and then he’d be out at night. Yeah, you know, it’s not always with the right people.

1:34:20 Um, sometimes with other people, you know, not always making it home. Um, and but but it’s always been about the job for me. You know, I’ve always loved the job. Um, I’m an enthusiast, I guess I’m an optimist. I would say I always see the glass half full, I never see it half empty. I’m always hopeful people that something better is going to come along, and I’m never.

1:34:39 I’ve never been jealous of anybody, really. I admire people for what they do. Um, and I think I just, I just, I’m kind of just like everybody else, I don’t, I’m not, I mean, I’m I’ve got a big ego, but it’s such a big ego that it doesn’t actually affect me. You know, because, you know, you could say anything to me and I wouldn’t walk out of here with my head. You know, on the ground, I would be like, Okay, you think that about me? That’s fine, it’s up to you, you know, and did this stuff come from your parents? I think it came from my dad, my dad was very interesting when both were Americans were Scottish and he was an artist. He trained at Glasgow School of Art, but he also trained as a kind of lithographer, and he could do calligraphy. I mean, he could write in Times Roman with his free hat, Wow, and he was taught how to do all that stuff.

1:35:20 Because in newspapers, that’s what you had to do. And my, my. The best way for me to sum him up was when he was. He worked for a paper called The Evening News Here, which which was the sort of same as Evening Standard, and he was in charge of. The art Department. They brought in some management consultants to look at everything. And he was called to this meeting and the guy said to him, We were looking at your rotors, um, as to how people work and how they work and what days they work, and we don’t really understand them.

1:35:44 And he said, Well, let me know when you do understand them, and I’ll change. And that was him, you know, he was argumentative, he was a problem, he was problematic, he couldn’t be herded, you know, couldn’t be coerced into doing anything. But he was very funny, very smart and sort of self<unk>educated. And so you got all that kind of straight from here. Yeah, I think so, and your mum and my mother was a teacher, but also very sort of fiercely independent, very strong woman. And because she was a Catholic. And he was a Protestant, which in those days in Scotland in the 50s, was kind of a no<unk>no. And they moved to London. And also to work as a woman.

1:36:16 Um, back in those days was quite unusual. So she’s very much an influence as well, and she’s quite, um. She can be quite vicious when she needs to be much more so than him, so I’ve got a bit of that as well. Yeah, to get that from her, yeah, when you need it, of course. Um, and, uh, tell me a bit about you, what was the, uh, best day of your life? And the worst day? Like, See, this is when it starts to get tricky.

1:36:37 Because if you start talking about births of children and things like that, they’re going, Well, hang on a minute. You can’t say the birth of one of them was better than the birth of all the others. True, so you had to pick a different topic. Um, I mean, I could. I could wimp out and say the bursts of all my kids, which were fantastic days. But let’s stick to, Um, I guess we should stick to work. Yeah, something that really s you remember is like, Wow, that was a great day for you professionally. I’ll tell you what was a great week. And people might be critical of me for this, but I mean, people in the news business are often misunderstood.

1:37:10 But when Princess Diana died, that was one of the most extraordinary periods. I think of my journalistic life. I was working with Daily Express, I was a night editor. We literally couldn’t print enough papers because so many papers were being flying out the window and. Being sold, you know, wow, um, and I wrote the headline, which appeared on the front page of The Express, which said Show us your care.

1:37:32 Which is a picture of the flag at Buckingham Palace. When it was still flying, it wasn’t flying half mast. The Queen was in Balmoral and this was interesting, actually, as a time for the kind of country. Because Tony Blair announced the Campbell were milking it to the Nth degree because they thought, This is our chance. This is my chance to get rid of the monarchy because they’re being so tone deaf about the death of Diana. They’re just going about their normal business, and you can’t imagine that now, right, you know? But here’s the the former wife of the Prince of Wales who’s died in a tunnel in a black Mercedes being chased by paparazzi photographers. And you just kind of go, Oh my God, really, and they still haven’t put the flag at half mast, you know? And so sure. She came as a headline, Um, which pops up in the, Uh, the film The Queen.

1:38:18 Um, which was, uh, which was made a few years ago. Yeah, so that was a pretty proud moment. I would say, Wow, um, because it was a very privileged place to be, and we had a whole week. You know, from the death of of of the of the for the car crash happening to the funeral? And again, if you remember the pictures of the of the two boys, you know, we live in Harry walking behind the coffin. Yeah, and it was just an extraordinary week of flowers, just the whole. Yeah, the whole thing the whole country was, I mean, in a way, funnily enough, that was the beginning. I would say of woked him because it was people openly weeping in the street. You know, the whole kind of British stiff upper lip thing went out the window. Yeah, you’re right, people. I had friends who traveled from like the West Country to London to lay, and these were friends of mine who used to work in a city. Funnel enough, I’ve been real for, you know, made millions. Yeah, really, they’re supposed to be bastards, right?

1:39:06 They made millions before they were 30 retired to sort of, you know, the Somerset levels or something, you know, with two dogs and bought a local business and just never really worked again. Drove all the way up to London to lay flowers at Kensington Park Gardens and. You just think, Wow, that’s incredible, you know, yeah, so that was a remarkable time. I remember that I just moved to London, it was August 97. I think right around then, yeah, I just moved, I remember. And did you sleep at all that week, or was it just not a lot, not a lot, because you, just your brain, must be exploding? And oh, yeah, and also there was kind of, I think we produced the final edition of The Sunday Express.

1:39:46 Um, normally, you know, the last edition would go about 10 o’clock on Saturday night. They did a sort of 5 a M update because I got a phone call funnel enough from my sister. Because, I mean, this is how long ago it was, there was no Internet properly to speak of. Yeah, we had a thing called CFAX, which you might remember, which was a sort of a ticker types of news service on the TV. Okay, because after midnight, there wasn’t really much on right. I got a phone call and I’d been out for dinner funnily enough. And I was living in Wiltshire at the time and my sister was on the phone.

1:40:13 So have you seen what’s happened to Dino? And I’m like, What she likes to be in a car crash. I’m like, What are you talking about? I said, and I was like, You’d be reading the National Inquirer or something, what are you going on about? She’s like, No, she’s they think she might be dead. I’m like, what? Because at this point she wasn’t right.

1:40:27 Um, and so I rushed downstairs, put c facts on which was the only thing that I could get at that point. Um, and it said, You know, Princess of Wales in car crash, Jody fired dead and I was like, Jesus Christ, and so I rang the office because at that time I was not night editor. Um, and I said, What’s going on? and they’re like, Uh, we we don’t. We think she’s still alive, We don’t know. I said, I’m coming in. They were like, You don’t need to, It’s fine, Just come in in the morning, Um, because you know, there’s no point you come in now. It’s like the middle of the night, um? And so I rang my friend who lived in the next village, who was the news editor?

1:41:02 And, uh, I said, Have you heard about Diner? He’s like, Yeah, I said, What am I? The only person who hasn’t been told about this, why has nobody killed me from the office? And I said, He’s going in, he’s like, Yeah, so we, he said, I’m going to sleep for three hours. We drove it at 7am um, and then just stayed in London for that whole week and it was incredible.

1:41:19 Just amazing. Um, and you sometimes forget about stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, you know, Bosnia was pretty intense as well. Um, but I could never say that it was a bad time, even though, Um, you know, there was a couple of hairy moments when I was driving around and I. Unfortunately for me, The Daily Express did not buy me or rent me, um, a hard car as we used to call it. I had a soft car, which meant if anybody shocked me, it would have come straight through the windscreen. The Daily Telegraph had an armored Land Rover. And I’m like, What have I got this shitty ladder, which they’ve given me?

1:41:52 They were like, That’s the company car, Um, but those are all the good days, those are all the good days. But, you know, I’ve been very lucky because it’s an incredible business, the news business, and, you know, I’ve been in a lot of cool places. I’ve had a few unfortunate bosses that weren’t very nice to me and I’ve been fired loads of times, never because of something that I did just because of a new regime coming in and sort of sweeping me away. Well, I basically I basically got fired from that job of the expressions. I wasn’t a woman because Rosie Boycott came in. You might remember, she’s the former editor of something called Adam’s Rib, which was a sort. She was one of those old,<unk>fashioned feminists from the 70s. Okay? And she got appointed by Lord Holick, who had just bought the paper as a labor peer. Because they wanted to turn it into a labor supporting paper.

1:42:34 And basically I wasn’t open. They replaced me with a woman and they said, You know, they effectively said, Well, you’re you’re the wrong gender. So hug her off. And it was paid me money, so it was always okay. You know, Um, worst moment, though, I don’t know really hard to imagine what the worst moment was. I don’t know, foreign, I literally don’t think I’ve got one.

1:42:55 Really. Any lows in New York City or a major firing that made you think, Oh my. God, this is going to be hard to get back. No, because, say again, I’ve never had, I’ve never really had that view. I mean, it’s it’s not always been easy. Right, um, to to come back, um? And each time I got fired, I thought to myself, I’m never gonna get back to that sort of job.

1:43:16 Um, but then I was lucky because I discovered radio somebody said, Why don’t you do a radio show? and they gave one you gave me. And I said, How do you know, I’ll be any good? And this guy was like, You’ll be fine because of the way that I, I kind of spoke. You know, yeah, um, because there’s a guy that still works with us, um, one of the bosses at UH Wireless Group when they wanted to hire me to work in Edinburgh and he called me and we made an arrangement to meet in this.

1:43:38 Um, this bar in in Edinburgh and Northbridge. And I got there and he wasn’t there, so I left a message. I said, You know, I’m here, you know, and I’ll see you whenever I see you. 15 minutes went by and I was like, a second message was, You know, Well, I’m here, I don’t know where you are, but it might be good if you could just let me know if you’re coming anyway. By the third message, it was about half an hour. I was like, I don’t know who the you think you’re dealing with here, but if you want to talk to me, you better get your ass over here. Otherwise I’m not going to be interested in working for you. And he walked in and he still talks about today, so that was one of the funniest messages. I think I’ve ever been left by a potential employee. Because I was like, Don’t mess me around, man, you know, Um, and we get on really well now, Dee, how are you? Yeah, um, what scares you, Mike?

1:44:23 I suppose that would bring the children into it really, because you, you know, there’s nothing worse than than the parental worry. Yeah, yeah, of something bad happening to your kids. And funnily enough, my daughter travels all around very interesting places. I mean, she was in Lebanon not very long ago. She she covered the elections in Israel. She goes to Saudi quite a lot. You know, Um, she goes to places which are quite dangerous, um, but I never worry about it when she’s not in London, but when she’s in London.

1:44:49 I’m I’m a bundle of nerves, I’m like, Just call me when you get wherever you’re going. You know, if you’re coming back tonight to stay with me, just make sure you let me know. But she could be in, you know, the back and beyond in in. Uh, you know, the middle of Oman. And I don’t bother her, that’s funny, and so I worry about her. Also, my I do worry a little bit about my teenage sons because I know what kind of world we’re going to be giving them. What kind of, uh, world they’re going to be operating in, you know, yeah, um, well, I don’t want it to be, as I’ve seen some organizations putting out scenarios and and job, um, sort of vacancies. To say that I’m sorry. You’re kind of a job, you’re the wrong color, you know, is that happening? Well? The BBC have been advertising for people.

1:45:31 Um, and this job is only open to members of of the black and ethnic minority community. Which doesn’t seem to me to be the way forward to obtain. They were going to change legislation in America to where they would take affirmative action out because that was racist or something. So they would take it out. So now it was the weirdest kind of opposite thing that you thought that that, yeah, I mean, it’s tricky. I mean, listen, I’m I’m all for getting people into jobs that maybe otherwise they’re not doing, because for some reason, because there’s there’s no place for them to go, but I don’t. I’m not convinced that there’s a reason why most journalists in this country are white.

1:46:10 The reason for that is because most people in this country are white, you know, and it’s it’s a controversial thing to say, perhaps, but it’s true, you know. The the percentage of people who are non<unk>white in this country is about the same as the representation of those different ethnic minorities in jobs. So, you know, change it if you want, but don’t say that there’s anything necessarily, you know, going on, which is in some way. Uh, racist, Yeah, well, it’s interesting, you say that, because there’s a lot of people that won’t say that. No, and then there’s a lot of, you know, arguments to the other side, and it’s interesting to see how this plays out.

1:46:43 And then when you go to all the other ways of dividing us, from the genders to the persuasions to the everything it’s. It starts to get to this. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I genuinely don’t see the color of somebody’s skin, you know, I talk to everybody in many different countries of the world, I’ve been to lots of different countries of the world. You know, I’ve been on buses in southeast London, where I’m the only white guy on the bus, but it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t make me think of anything in particular, you know, in the same reason, I’ve been walking through the streets of New Delhi, and you’re the only guy there who’s not an Indian. Yeah, well, I feel the same way, um, but but what they do is if your self<unk>esteem isn’t as high as it needs to be, they’ll get in your face, especially in America. Yeah, it’s the fragility, it’s the privilege. If you don’t admit it, then that means you were there. And then it goes down to this argument to where most people or some people will finally have to throw their hands up and say, You’re right, I’m racist, well, that’s it. And I mean, also this idea that all white people are somehow privileged. Well, you try going to some of the, you know, estates. Counseling states around this country where very poor white underclass kids live and they don’t have any privilege. Trust me, I think as humans, we all have struggles, we all sabotage ourselves. I’ve had many struggles that

1:47:51 I’ve talked about in my movies, from, you know, heroin overdoses to all sorts of things. And like, I think we all get dealt with some pretty tricky cards that we have to deal with. I think people need to take some responsibility, take some ownership and be held accountable to step up and take their lives to the next level. And that’s the way the learning is going to come back as well. But is, if we, if we keep cutting checks and cutting slack to people and putting handouts, it’s not going to empower anybody. It really isn’t. And if you expect something, this is what I’m told, a lot of the kind of millennial generation does. They’ve never been told no by anybody they’ve always, and it’s probably maybe our fault.

1:48:26 You know, my older kids, who are pretty self<unk>sufficient, I have to say, Um, weren’t always self<unk>sufficient but have kind of got there now. Um, I don’t think they were treated like that, you know they would. They would kind of slightly more old,<unk>fashioned skills differently, you know, but Mike got. Divorced from from their mother. When they were still quite young, you know, so they could be all sorts of screwed up, but they don’t seem to be, Um. But again, as you say, you get dealt certain hands, you deal with it, you know, you overcome adversity, that’s what life is. There’s no point in having life. If it doesn’t challenge you in some way. You know, if everything was really easy, what would you do when things got tough? And I think that’s the problem for people now, they don’t know what to do. You know, you get people like Beth Rigby say, Well, can I sunbathe on Sunday? Well, just do it. Yeah, you know, you don’t need permission from the government to sunbathe. Yeah, like people go, but I can’t meet with people in groups of more than six. Really, that’s going to stop you, because it’s not going to stop me. I know we need people just to stand up and say, No, this doesn’t make sense. No, I’m not wearing a mask in the gym or when I go outside and I’m just not having it right.

1:49:30 You know, right, we need more of that. And the worrying thing for me is that there’s a lot of people in this country. and I suspect in other countries who love being the kind of meddling official. There was a story the other day, which I did on the radio about a woman who was handed a fine for littering because she was eating a sausage roll in a park in Manchester. And some of it dropped onto the ground and the pigeons were eating it.

1:49:52 And I think if somebody tried to give me a ticket for that, there might be a bit of a problem. You know, I’d shove it somewhere where they wouldn’t see it again. And then you end up in this kind of ridiculous situation where you get arrested for no reason at all. And all that’s happening is the state is becoming this kind of judge, jury and executioner of. Yeah, I know we gotta make sure it doesn’t go down there. Yeah, definitely.

1:50:13 What keeps you awake at night? The heat is the only thing that keeps me awaken now I’m not a worrier. Okay, I’m really not a worry, in fact. Um, I would say that my friends would say the more serious the jam is that I’m in, the more calm I become. Okay, nice, you know, and I’ve been in a few of those like you, some of which I’ll.

1:50:32 Never admit to, Um, but um, but yeah, I don’t. I don’t ever worry about going to sleep at night. I mean, people used to say that to me when I was working in trouble. It’s like, How can you sleep at night? I go very well, I’m usually drunk and what we’d be surprised to learn about. Mike Graham Something you do, that’s, you know, I don’t know on news Manly and whatever you know, something you do in your spare time. Well, I do occasionally, despite the fact that I bang on about the fact that I, most of it’s a bit of a racket. I do occasionally, uh, do the odd nice thing for somebody charitably. Okay, you know, I occasionally give money to people that I know who are doing something worthwhile. You know, like, Um, some of the politicians I know who actually do quite like, Um, not many of them count them in one hand. A couple of them got involved in a couple of projects in Malawi, I gave them some money for that, you know, bringing water to the local, you know, okay, people, I think, would be quite surprised that I had such a kind of philanthropic bone in my body. Okay, but most charities are rackets they are, they really are, yeah, and I certainly would never give money to Oxfam, I would never give money to save the children. I would never give money to any of those big charities, but I would and do occasionally help out. You know, smaller ones, community ones, okay, I always ask a few questions at the end, I’m gonna ask you if you could pick up a

1:51:44 Phone and ring up the 20 year olds like Graham, and you’re probably, Where are you at this point, are you in London? Uh, and when I was 20, I was, Yeah, I think I was in London. Okay, actually, no, I was in Bath because I went to university in the West Country. Okay, there you go. If you could give that young man some advice based on your almost 60 years on this planet, what would you tell them?

1:52:08 I would tell him, Um. The following success secrets are only available inside the London Real tribe, where you get exclusive access and insights from our high performance. Guests on wealth creation, productivity, leadership, morning routines, health and, well<unk>being to join our tribe community, go to LondonReal TV forward Slash Tribe. Now let’s continue with the show. Strong advice. Yeah, uh, I appreciate.

1:52:37 Everything you do, I really enjoy your story, I mean your show, I enjoy your story as well, but, um, keep doing what you’re doing, and I’m wishing you all the success. I hope you double and quadruple that can be the next YouTube. Listen, I’ve enjoyed talking because it’s unusual for me to be asked questions. Normally I’m the guy doing the question. So, um, I hope it was all right, no, it was great. And it’s nice to hear. Maybe a little bit of your backstory because you probably don’t get too much of a chance to talk about it. Not really. No, I mean, I have actually written a book fairly enough because one of the things that I needed to do.

1:53:05 Um, towards the end of, I guess it was last this time last year, I think it was. I used to work with another guy who we’ve had a falling out. Yeah, the two mics, yeah, and and I thought, you know, now’s a pretty good time, because I’m not doing as much to actually just write this book, so I’ve written a book. I haven’t got it published yet because the whole kind of it all ended just as coronavirus kind of kicked off. And so I haven’t really been able to think about it. I’m thinking about maybe making it into a, um, a podcast of some kind, or just something to get it out there, you know, because I’m not that bothered about making money out of it, but it’s just quite it’s kind of my. It’s my kind of life and times in journalism. And some very funny stories, like the Jermaine Jackson Thing, kind of kicks it off.

1:53:42 Um, chasing George Michael down Beverly Hills, Um, Rodeo Drive. You know, all sorts of stuff being in Bosnia, you know, and it’s it’s a right riveting read, as they would say. So I’m hopeful that maybe at some point that’ll get out there. So you could do an audiobook version or some type of audio piece. I think so, because I think a lot of people do it that way. And in fact, audio books are now probably a better way of making money if you can, but you need some platform to put it out on. I think, yeah, there’s no great mediums there. I mean, there’s a Navy SEAL in America call named David Goggins. And so he just, yeah, New York Times bestselling book. He was here in the studio he was doing pull<unk>ups in my pull<unk>up bar. But, um, he did an audio book. But then, in between each chapter he did, like with his writer, he did like a little almost podcast show.

1:54:24 And they would kind of riff about what he just wrote. Okay, and no one had ever done that, and it was incredible. So it was like a mix between a podcast and an audiobook, right? And it was a nice, fresh, creative way of telling a story. And we’re seeing a lot of that happen these days, that’s interesting. Well, this is the great thing about the way the media has kind of diversified. Now there is literally no limits of what you can try and do. Yeah, and it’s so cheap now. I mean, you can try things, you can really try things and you can. You know, I’m sure this doesn’t come true. The surroundings you’ve got here, but you know, you don’t need to have a massively professional organizational out film. And I do a food podcast, right? MG’s Kitchen, which I started doing. I literally just do it in my kitchen, talking into an iPhone and cooking, and people love it. I love it, you know, it’s authenticity. Trump’s production value in this New Age? Yeah, it didn’t 30 years ago, they wanted to see the desk and the BBC and the things. But now authenticity does it all the time, which is why, you see, you know, YouTubers that are knocking it out of the park.

1:55:17 Compared to these traditional media? I mean, we had more traffic on Sunday on our website than The Guardian. My kids were very impressed when I told them I was coming to see you. Oh, really, I know, you know, we gotta go. I finally got cool there you go with your kids. Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times. Yeah, we got a bit of a culture because they know, but they’re on YouTube all the time. Yeah, I mean, the idea, for example, that I can’t remember what it was that some somebody in government was like trying to get kids to watch less TV. It’s like they couldn’t watch any less TV. They don’t watch it. Yeah, they’re not on it, they’re on YouTube, yeah, they’re on YouTube and YouTube knows what they want and suggest the next thing. And it’s a great way to build an audience and build a cult following, which is what you’re doing, too.

1:55:50 So so I appreciate you keep doing what you’re doing. I know you will anyways, but there’s not many voices. Look, I’ll be honest, I have a lot of people from America on my show lately talking about this stuff. But it’s not many people in the UK doing it, and I appreciate the fact that you’re doing it. And we need more of these voices to talk some sense into everybody and also we’re finding.

1:56:07 Lots of good voices, too, just put on as guests. Okay, you know, we get Peter Hitchens on on a regular basis. We found Esther Krakow, who’s a really interesting young, black conservative woman. Okay, um, and they talk sense. It’s all about common sense. You know, yeah, that’s what we want to hear. Yeah, good, all the best with YouTube. If we can help in any way, let us know. And, uh, yeah, always, uh, love having people on the show and follow you.

1:56:27 What’s the best way you’re on Twitter? I’m not on Instagram, I am on Instagram, it’s not something I use an awful lot of. Okay, you know, um, it started originally, that was the one I just did with my kids, but so now I’ve got a second Instagram. But it’s way low numbers. Twitter’s really the main place for me. I’m on Facebook as well.

1:56:44 Um, so you can find me there. But at IROMG, which is independent Republican MIKE RAM, Okay, nice, and you can have your own YouTube channel. Maybe at some point, well, maybe you never know. Okay, you never know. I might have to come and seek advice on that. Well, the doors open. Okay, thank you so much, Mike, good all the best. Thank you.

1:56:58 Appreciate you. Good to see you foreign.