Love him or hate him, you have to admit London Real’s host, Brian Rose, knows how to dress.
“I was so sick of being a banker,” says the popular – now notorious – podcaster.
“I hated who I was. So I just started phoning it in with jeans and an Oxford shirt. But about 10 years ago, I found a mentor, Dan Peña, who calls himself the Trillion Dollar Man. He's got a castle in Scotland, and he wore three-piece Savile Row bespoke suits, and I realized it's important what you wear. So now I use his tailor, who also does all the suits for the royal family. I wear a three-piece suit every day. I put it on in the morning like a suit of armor. It tells the world I'm ready. It tells me I'm ready. It's now become a part of my brand.”
His brand is wildly more controversial these days than his dapper couture.
After quitting banking, moving to London, and emerging from a dangerous period of wrestling with hard drugs and alcohol, Rose created his London Real podcast. It was far from being an instant hit, although it has since become the flashpoint of an international firestorm.
Watch Brian Rose at METAL
“Nobody would watch my show. Even my friends and family wouldn't engage. No support. Nothing. It was hard to get guests. Every year I would look in the mirror and say, ‘What are you doing? You're insane.’”
Podcasts hadn’t yet exploded in the UK, where tech trends, he claims, tend to lag by five years.
“It was no business. It was going nowhere. I would have quit but I have a really bad habit of not quitting. Sadly, that was true when I was drinking and nearly drugging myself to death – but fortunately it’s also true for my podcast. This time it helped.”
What kept him pressing onwards?
“At that mirror I also began to say, ‘hey, I don't know where this is going. But I'm happier. I have friends, and I'm improving myself as a person. So I’m gonna give this one more year. And then again – one more year. I had so much shame after graduating MIT and rising on Wall Street. The drink and drugs took my self-esteem to the depths. London Real solved all that because it got me connected to the world.”
Covid turned that connection into a cyclone.
PODCASTER MEETS PANDEMIC
“When Covid hit, I’m an MIT engineer, I’m in love with science, so I believed the party line at first. I'm taking the vaccine, and I'm gonna do whatever the government says. And I believed the virus came from natural causes. But then I invited David Icke onto my show.”
Icke was vocal, challenging the dubious origins of Covid and was a virulent anti-vaxxer, claiming the whole “hoax” (Trump also called it that in the beginning) was a power play to establish an authoritarian state.
“I was uncomfortable with a lot of what he was saying and pushed back a lot. David was looking at me like I got horns growing out of my head. By the end of the interview I'm thinking this guy's insane.”
What happened next changed everything for Rose.
“Literally, I think it was the next day, London gets locked down and I start seeing all these things around me that just don't make a lot of sense. The mayor was unilaterally shutting my city down. The taxi drivers who drove me home at night were suicidal. My buddies who owned wine bars and restaurants were also suicidal, going out of business. I was so angry.”
By his next interview with Icke, three weeks later, Rose’s views on how governmental power was operating had shifted. Almost everything Icke said was coming true.
“I'm starting to ask questions about what's going on. Then it got worse. YouTube deleted and banned and censored that video. That was the second largest YouTube livestream in the world. We were a partner at YouTube. I've been to their headquarters and made them millions of dollars. All these signs were coming in that something was off. Why weren't we allowed to challenge the top-down narrative coming from the authorities? Why weren’t we allowed free speech?”
WHEN YOU LIE DOWN WITH DOGS
This is where it gets sticky.
His guest, Icke, is also on record insisting that the members of the British royal family are actually alien reptiles in human skin-suits, and he has promulgated vile and hateful antisemitic conspiracy theories across media. More pertinently, he also claimed a link between the COVID-19 pandemic and 5G mobile phone networks.
Rose, in his defense, has taken what you might call the “Joe Rogan Stance” of allowing guests to speak their minds and allowing the public to make their decisions. “I don’t have to agree with everything a guest says to give them a platform.”
Both Rogan and Rose have also hosted Alex Jones multiple times. Jones, of course, also challenged the dominant Covid narrative and raised important questions. But he, too, carries a toxic stench from, among other things, his repeated and execrable claims that the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people – including 20 children – was a false flag operation staged by the government and intended to promote gun control policies.
As the saying goes, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. In Rose’s case, he woke up to broad, swift, and debilitating deplatforming.
Not for his guests’ other offenses, but for their offense of challenging the dominant pandemic narrative in a period of intense fear, confusion and, it can fairly be said, some significant misinformation.
“At the time I was a big fan of freedom of speech,” says Rose. “Still am. I think everyone has the right to speak, and we have the right to listen or turn them off. But those interviews were watched hundreds of millions of times from people around the world.”
Rose recently recounted what happened to his videos and then his entire channel.
“Focusing on what it described as ‘medical misinformation,’ YouTube made it clear that any content which went against the accepted wisdom would be banned, and that further transgressions would be punished.”
Despite Rose's disclaimers and disagreements with Icke during their interviews, the content was deemed by YouTube to potentially cause “significant harm to viewers.”
In scenes of what Rose describes as “reminiscent of a totalitarian regime, my channel with over 12 years of long-form interviews, tens of millions of views and hundreds of incredible conversations were gone forever.”
Rose says it was a shock. “I was one of YouTube’s most popular content creators with over two million subscribers and a thousand deep interviews with some of the most important voices in the world. I was always a huge advocate for YouTube’s mission which is ‘To give everyone a voice and show them the world.’”
Dropbox, LinkedIn and others followed.
FIGHTING BACK
Brian Rose is a fighter.
When London got shut down, he didn’t merely protest. He ran for mayor. Twice. “At first my team thought I was kidding, but we did it. We spent seven months and three million pounds. We lost, but we ran hard.”
And when the Silicon Valley giants deplatformed him, he launched his own website, the Digital Freedom Platform and created LondonRealTV to continue broadcasting to his audience “uncensored and unfiltered.”
Then, on May 31, 2024, London Real streamed its new documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced” generating over three million views in its first weeks since release.
He released it on X, Elon Musk’s freewheeling redo of Twitter.
“I needed to shine a light on the murky practices of some of Silicon Valley’s most recognizable brands, and illustrate how we need to protect our free speech now or face the prospect of losing it forever. Which is why I decided to make the documentary chronicling our battle with YouTube, to serve both as a cautionary tale and rallying cry for everyone across the globe who is concerned about censorship.”
London Real remains Rose’s multi-million follower megaphone.
“I continue to force myself into a room to listen to people I don't necessarily agree with, because I know I'm wrong most of the time, and I don't want my show just to be an echo chamber of what I believe.”
He’s not the only one listening.
Says Rose, “We Will Not Be Silenced, since premiering on X, has become more than a movie. It’s now a movement.”
Written by Adam Gilad
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