The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 181. Baron Black of Crossharbour | Lord Conrad Black

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

In this Season 4, Episode 35 of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Jordan is joined by Lord Conrad Black. Conrad Black is a Canadian-born British peer, and former publisher of The London Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, and founder of Canada's National Post. He is a columnist and regular contributor to several publications, including the National Review Online, The New Criterion, The National Interest, American Greatness, The New York Sun, and the National Post.

Hey guys, just so you know, we've moved the podcast to once a week to give my dad some more time. He's not feeling well. It'll be released every Monday for the foreseeable future. Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode 35. In this episode, dad is joined by Lord Conrad Black. Conrad Black is a Canadian born British peer and former publisher of the London Daily Telegraph, the spectator, the Chicago Sun Times, the Jerusalem Post, and founder of Canada's National Post. He's a columnist and regular contributor to several publications, including the National Review Online, the New Criterion, the National Interest, American Greatness, the New York Sun, and the national post.

Lord Conrad Black and my dad discuss his very interesting life, how he got into history, education, the newspaper business, living in Britain, his experience with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, incarceration, becoming a tutor and more. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, my favorite mattress company. I've had a terrible time sleeping with travel, mostly stress, and since I had a baby, everything wakes me up at night, Helix has super comfortable mattresses and they deliver to your door and they have a 10-year warranty and you get to try it out for 100 nights and return it if you don't like it. Their company has made it totally risk-free to try their mattress. You can go to helixleap.com slash Jordan, take their two-minute sleep quiz,

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Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners at helixsleep.com slash Jordan. That's helixsleep.com slash Jordan for up to $200 off and two free pillows. Hello, everyone. Conrad Moffit Black, Baron Black of Cross Harbor, KCSG, born 25th of August 1944. Is a Canadian-born newspaper publisher, financier and writer? He is the author of ten books, mostly dealing with Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec Premier Maurice du Plessie, and US President Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, as well as two memoirs. He's currently writing a political history of the ancient world concentrating primarily on the Romans and the Greeks. His father

was businessman George Montague Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail and media businesses through part ownership of the holding company, Ravelston Corporation. In 1978, two years after their father's death, Conrad and his older brother Montague took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, they sold off most of their non-media holdings to focus on newspaper publishing. Black controlled, holinger, international. Once the world's third largest English-language newspaper empire, which published the Daily Telegraph in the UK, the Chicago Sun Times, the Jerusalem Post, the National Post in Canada, and hundreds of community newspapers across North America.

Before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company's assets, he is one of Canada's most recognizable and influential figures, and has known many of the great political actors and cultural figures of the last half century. My great pleasure to have him as a guest today. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. And not at all, Jordan, all was a pleasure to speak to him. Yeah, well, it's very nice to see you again. It's been a couple of years since we've had the pleasure of speaking.

And so I'm glad we have this opportunity, even though it's mediated by electronics. I missed you. So I want to talk to you biographically, essentially. I'd like to walk through your life. And so, let's start as far back as we can. Tell me about your childhood, if you would, and what stands out for you in relationship to your parents. And...

Well, I was born in Montreal. My parents moved here to Toronto when I was very young, not even a year old, and just at the end of World War II. And we lived in what was then just the edge of metropolitan Toronto beyond us were farms, and that was up for those of your viewers who know Toronto. I'll write out to the baby you have in you, passes York University, a Glendon campus and the Granite Club, and Crescent School. Just beyond that was where we lived, and that was the outer limit of the city,

in terms of the built-up area. So there weren't many young people around to visit within the neighborhood. So the result was that I spent more time I think it was the beginning of the television area. Everyone had a television set but they just got it in the last few years and there were only a few channels on the air. And for the most part, you had I do those funny antennas sitting on top of the receiver or antenna on the roof of your house. And so I spent a lot of time reading and that was how I developed my interest in history.

And I started reading about interesting historical personalities. And my father, although he was a successful businessman, had been a very accomplished academic as far as he went. But that was in the thirties and his father came under great financial pressure. So my father became a chartered accountant in the theory that there was, as he put it, no such thing as an unemployed charter

to count. And in those days, people really had to think in terms of how could they do things that made it as likely as possible that they would be able to make an income and provide a for to get married and provide for families. It was a much more financially pressurized era than it is now. That he graduated in 1937 and we were starting as a society to recover from the depression by then, but there were still huge numbers of unemployed. He had to set aside his academic interest. But with

that said, he was a particularly fortunate in adding Yamabard for me to the else as a parent who encouraged that historical interest. I knew rather a lot above many of the things that I, you know, that I took an interest in early on. And then as a, a really a remarkable gesture, my parents took my brother, it was just the two of us in the family, took my brother and myself to Britain in 1953

at the time of the coronation. And we toured around all these monuments. And was still the war damage in London, was still very evident then. So we saw what the war was like for much closer than any alien experience to the North America. And I remember it is very young people do remember visiting the Duke of Wellington's house

in St. Paul's Cathedral and things like this. And so I always had an interest in history and was encouraged by my parents, my father in particular. And that was a, I think that was the only thing that was pretty clean, if not exactly nowhere, they had bit different from most of the people I went to school with because they lived closer into town and had more social than I did. So you speak of your father fondly by the sounds of it? It sounds to me like he was an encouraging figure in your life from a very young age. Is that a reasonable presumption?

Yes, I remember both my parents very fondly. My father, and it is an era I wouldn't want to for obvious reasons, get into too much, but on, he became at times a slightly depressive personality. And his career was something of an anti-climax. He did very well and made a significant amount of money. And he was working with, I mean, with slash for a very famous Canadian industrialist, EP Taylor. And in the brewing business, he was the chief executive of what was then the largest, well, one of the largest

brewing companies in the world, but certainly the largest in Canada, it was called Canadian breweries limited in those days. And he had a disagreement on policy with Mr. Taylor. And he said, look, instead of, instead of having an argument with this, I've done this job now for 10 years, and I don't need the salary. I don't need it to live in the way I've become accustomed to. So I will retire now. It's probably time for change, I have continues. You do whatever you want with the company and we remain friends and don't strain our relations.

And that's what happened. And they remain friends to the end of his life. But so he retired at the age of 47. And he was a well-to-do man. He didn't black for anything in the material way, but the balance of his life nearly 20 years was an anticlimax. He just sat in his house and read and saw steadily, slowly, steadily declining number of people.

He just never did anything particularly after that. I don't mean that he should have charged up and got a job, but it's not for me to say and wouldn't have served any purpose anyway. Unless he was particularly enthused about it. But someone like, I've found it's a perfectly good thing. And often a very renovating thing to change careers. But and I'm sure you would, in your experience notice, and believe the same thing, it is a bad thing

to simply do nothing, just sit in a rocking chair. That leads to a steady and accelerated level of decline. And that unfortunate is what happened to my father. I mean, he was 65 when he died, but which is not really a good lottery ticket nowadays. But it was an anti-climax. But he always was an interesting man. I would even, even after I left, I moved at the house to go to university when I was, gee, I was only 18 and apart from that, apart from one year, I didn't live with my parents again,

but I was in Toronto much of the time. And I always saw them a lot. And it was always interesting, always had a good relationship. I had a somewhat turbulence period in my teens and looking back always interesting, always had a good relationship. I had a somewhat turbulent period in my teens and looking back on it, I can see that my parents treated me with greater patience

than probably I would have I written there position. And, but I believe that, you know, that was just a phase. And our last, the last five years, my parents died only only 10 days apart. And our last 10 years or so, couldn't have been more cordial.

You know, I was curious about your father because I'm curious psychologically about the role that fathers in particular play in relationship to encouraging their children, which seems to me a primary paternal role. And so when I see someone who's successful and who I suspect in some sense isn't intrinsically rebellious in their central spirit,

maybe that's wrong. I'm always curious about their relationship with their father. I mean, you started to read early, you were reading history. He obviously, did he push books your way? Did he guide your reading? How did that all? Sometimes, he, I'm in particular. He gave me when I was 13. He handed me a book and he said, obviously, it's not for me to tell you what to read. But I do recommend this. And if you just read a few pages in it, I think you will want to continue. And it was A.G. McDonald's book, Napoleon and his Marshalls. To people interested in Napoleon, it's a very famous book. And for example, one of the great

tomes on Napoleon, David Chandler's, the campaigns of Napoleon, a book of 1300 pages of tremendous work of scholarship and very well written in the in the forward credits, A.G. Macdonald, and people who write about Napoleon often do. It's a tremendously readable book and and and and it gave me a huge interest in Napoleon that I've kept up. I mean, after a while, you feel enough about somebody. But it was a great encouragement and excitement and confirmation of the intrinsic interest in studying these very interesting personalities of the past. And he did a number of things like that and in slightly different fields. Another one some years later,

two or three years later, he gave me a copy of Nancy Mithurd's pursuit of love. Now it's a novel, but about real people, but the names changed. And it was a particularly satisfaction to me in later years when I was living in Britain, and I was the chairman of the Daily Telegraph, and I met a lot of these people. My Nancy mythrude unfortunately had died, but her sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire Iñel and the but her sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire Iñel, and the lady, mostly the widow, Srazova, mostly the fascist leader, I met her. And Jessica Mitford, who was married to a communist, was very eccentric British family.

So, why gap in their political bias? And Nancy Mitford himself had tremendous, torrid romance with one of the most prominent figures in the Anterage of General De Gaulle and when he was the president of the Fifth Republic and prior to that. And so these book, I just cite those two in particular, but they were tremendously readable interesting books

and they did launch my interest in different fields. He did that a number of times, but he was never oppressive or dogmatic about it. Actually, quite subtle. I remember my parents took us on Easter holiday in 1955. So I was 10 years old. My brother's four years older, out to the West Coast by train and back, but we got around a bit at the West Coast. And on the train, my father gave us a reward if we would memorize Lincoln's address at Gettysburg.

Now it's only ten sentences, you know, it's not that hard to memorize it. And we did, but it did inc insight my interest in Mr. Lincoln. And of course, he's one of the great and arresting figures of modern history as well. So yes, he did that. You put me in mind, please. No doubt if this was the chief focal point of our discussion, I could identify a good many other things,

but I cite those ones. And how about the Nancy Mipford piece? I have a house that is referred to in a pursuit of love, is one that they love to go to, because unlike their own house, it wasn't drafted, it wasn't that eccentric British rural nobilities, terribly uncomfortable house without real hot water. and the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the

interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the

interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest of the interest that would be of any interest any one that was there other than my wife, but it was it was as if I'd been there before from having read it was just a very interesting connection with my past. How old were you when you started to read seriously? that when I was nine or 10, I remember reading, I remember reading the first volume of General the Goals War Memoras when they were first published in English. They're the ones that begin all my life. I've thought of France in a certain way. And it's beautifully written by Leigh. I mean, the goal was a wonderful read.

He's not always historically reliable, but political memoirists rarely are. I mean, the same could be said of Mr. Churchill, but he is a lovely writer. And so from then on, I wasn't writing, I mean, for a while, I read the boy's book of the Navy, and I think I went through the hearty boys, and that kind of thing for approximately one month when I was seven or eight, but I moved on to the history of the Navyied boys, and that kind of thing for approximately one month when I was seven or eight, but I moved on to the history of the Navy or some sports figures, like Ted Williams or something like that. And then I got into my got into the history thing when I was nine and stayed out of that.

So how much were you reading when you were getting say 90? Well, I wasn't a fast reader, but I was a retender reader. So when I read something, I tended to remember it well. And you know, a couple of hours a day, every day, and then a little more in the weekends. When would you do that before you went to bed? Did you have a routine? Yes. It pretty much. Yeah, I know. I'd have, you know, I was supposed to do my homework, and we're some television programs that I watched that I like. But yeah, I wasn't one of these young people who was just stuck glued in front of a screen every free moment.

A lot of youngsters nowadays are with the video games and things. I wasn't like that. I mean, it is possible. And I look at Jordan as you would, and I know there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who do sit staring at a television set all day. As long as we had television, there have been people who have been thoroughly captivated by it.

But I was always rather more choosy in programming. I mean, I like things like war, a victory you know, as a drama about the US Navy. Yeah, that was a great series. I know that series. It's good to be honest with Richard Rogers music was really taken from Wagner, powerful beginning and showing the, you know, the aerial shots of the Pacific fleet is this colossal maybe moving forward. But and some of the humorous programs like the Honey Miners, which I think least not like, but I would I would know a program to watch and go and watch it for half an hour and then go back and read something. I wouldn't just sit there waiting for whatever it came next. And were you up all night with flashlight under the covers reading? Not all night, but often a little bit and it has to be said that my parents were not overly authoritarian.

I was relatively large. I had my mother would come up once in the course of the night and make sure everything was fine. But I normally hear her coming. But in any case, they didn't get particularly excited about my reading with a flashlight. Because they correctly assumed the 9 or 10 or 11-year-old would fall asleep anyway. So, when he felt like it.

So, any idea what it is about history in particular that attracted you? Because, obviously, you have an intrinsic interest in it. You didn't even gravitate towards fiction when you were a child. You gravitated towards nonfiction and history pretty fast. So what is it for now? I must say I went on a binge of fiction in university. And when I started, as one does, I found that with my own sons of daughter. And you suddenly become interested in writing, and you read a lot to the road, and you're onto an extra, so in that way, I read a huge number of novels by famous novelists.

And is that what you did? You'd find a novelist you really liked and then read everything and then move on to someone else? Basically, yeah, and especially the Americans, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck, and so on, and the latter two were alive. I was reading it, I'm reading the words. And, but I got into others, but not as comprehensive.

I mean, I think I read four or five of the books I mean, I think I read four or five of the books of George Eliot and most, well, you know, I had a number of Thackery and the obvious ones, you know. I was like, yeah. And so what, what was it about history, do you think

that attracted you so much and so young? Because many, I mean, the personalities I was reading about were terribly interesting. I had extraordinary careers. And it started to give me a missounds, little, you may, you and your viewers make concluded that I'm a psychiatric case or something, but it's not as if I identified at all, let's say, man like Napoleon, it's just that in his career, you could see points where absolutely everything was at risk, and he persevered successfully, and points where he was, fortune had not smiled upon him, and things looked terribly bleak, and then suddenly things opened up. Now it was a revolutionary time,

unlike Canada in the 50s and 60s. I mean, you could seriously think of them in less revolution in place. And, but the pattern of events, where people's fortunes change so quickly and in both directions. I mean, of course, Napoleon ended up in St. Helena, but he actually attempted to commit suicide after he came back from Russia. And we were referring earlier to Abraham Lincoln, and there were moments where everything appeared to be terribly gloomy, appeared to be a failure, was widely mocked for bride divisions, including his physical appearance, which in photographs is actually rather impressive. But it appeared to be hopeless, and that he was consigned to being a failure who had tried to prevent the breakup of this country unsuccessfully

and had propagated a war that was not successful. And of course, it all turned. And, and, and you, you end up appreciating the qualities of these people, both those to emulate and those to try to avoid. Now, Mr. Lincoln's case, it's a particularly striking example because it is almost impossible to find something negative to say about him. He was a self-made man, but with none of that chippiness

that self made people up in that, he was a genuine intellectual, but an auto-diedact. And never with any of the pomposity or dogmatism of some intellectuals. And he was always saddened rather than angry at the many betrayals and disappointments he suffered. And while he was a rather morose man in some ways, he had a splendid sense of humor,

he had a terribly difficult life and had two sons die as boys. And this tragedy did not, these tragedies and afflictions didn't, didn't compromise his ultimate sense of optimism. And he was really a remarkably admirable character as well as the extremely effective statesman. And of course, he was a wonderful wordsmith. of elected statesman. And of course, he was a wonderful wordsmith. I mean, we were talking about the Gettysburg address. I noticed when I first read it

under the incitement to memorize it, that for example, where he said, fun, well, he said, for those who year gave their lives that that nation might live. I mean, just to use the same word as the noun and the verb in the same sentence is slightly artistic. And in the second inaugural, when he said fondly, do we hope fervently, do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. I mean, that is in fact a line of power. He was a remarkable words. And you were noticing that the way that words were crafted as

well when you were reading history? Not as well as one does after a bit of practice, but I started to notice and then started to look for it. So you were reading well in advance of your years, what was it like for you going to school when you were a child again before you went to university? University? Well, you always did the necessary to be on the same wavelength, if you will, as your friends. I didn't want to be thought of as a slightly eccentric. I didn't want to be thought of as an odd person. And in fairness, a lot of the other students were interested in a lot of things. I went to relatively, I guess, relatively good schools. I didn't like them very much, but I loved university, I didn't like school very much. But I remember in 1958, it was 13, and because it was well known that I was interested in France, when

the disturbances came in the spring of that year, at the end of the fourth republic, our class teacher asked me if I would, because this was this was in the front pages of the newspapers and led the news every night, the return of the goal from Colombe in 58. And the threat of the revolt by the army and Algerian. And the teacher asked me if I would give a five minute comment on the following day. So I did. And I was careful to try and not be pompous or and not get into obscure things. And I don't mean to put on the heirs of somebody was any in fact great authority in these matters. But I was flattered that he

asked and I made an effort to try and make it interesting. And it was appreciated. It was one of those little experiences in life that was very positive and reassuring to me that my classmates didn't think I was just a cook, because they were reading about it too, and they were, you know, way saying, well, what's going on in France? I mean, in Canada and Britain and the United States, you know, you didn't have the army threatening

to return to the capital by parachute and take over the country. And everybody going out into the country 120 miles to talk to a retired general, but whether we wanted to take over the government or not. I mean, we didn't have that in the speaking country, so it was a bit different. Do you remember anything of your ambitions at that time? So it was a bit different. Do you remember anything of your ambitions at that time? Well, here I must say I was somewhat influenced by my father's meal. Yeah, Toronto in those days was if I may say it without I hope sounding like an old

doger or something, a terribly plain austere place. There wasn't any flare to it. It had nice residential areas, but it wasn't a good looking city at all. soaked black and telephone poles everywhere. We had done thick clusters of wires. And an inordinate amount of that old sort of Victorian reddish but not red brick, or the color of Queen's part, but with the dust of years on it. Apart from a few individual buildings like the Old Bank of Commerce, for example,

and that was good all. And some of these, there weren't many nice looking building stand-out. It was not a nice looking city, the way Montreal was or let alone the New York or something. And there, you know, it was a virtuous place, but it was a terribly sober place. You couldn't go to the cinema on Sundays.

There wasn't a Sunday newspaper. Now, I, of course, was just a boy, and I didn't drink or anything. But if older people, for your cousins of mine, who were older for some of them, and they wanted to go out with a date, they had to go to a hotel to find a restaurant, but was licensed. I mean, it was not only changed with John Roberts in the 60s. And so my father's friends, businessmen, as far as I could see, were the only people that had any sort of style, you

know, Mr. Taylor and Mr. McDougald and Colonel Phillips, who was the chancellor of the University, that he was associated with them and others who were friends of his, like John Bassett. So they had some style and some Claire and they were wealthy wealthy but been in a tasteful way. And it was kind of an attractive thing to aspire to be wealthy and enjoy it but in a tasteful way. I mean, Mr. Taylor built the Jackie Club. It was just a bunch of milk, wagon horses and fixed races until he took just a bunch of milk, wagon horses and fixed races until he took it over and fixed it up and you know made it a great horse racing operation. And so I was sort of attracted to the idea of getting into business in a way that I could raise my network and standard of limit. But, but all was, I had a, if not exactly an academic interest, certainly a, an interest to study history and potentially to write some, although

it took me a long time to summon the courage to write any. Yeah, so you've covered your interest in history, and now we've delved into a little bit into the origins of your interest in business. So that does leave that third issue hanging to some degree. So let's go to the time when you went to university. You said you read a tremendous amount of fiction in university. What did you major in? And what was it like for you?

How do you remember your university experience? A very fun way. I went first to Ottawa, pardon me, to the, to Carlton University. And I had a somewhat rumbuscious career in high school and changed schools a number of times. And finally, I came, if I may just back up slightly, says, if anyone is interested in my story, this is an interesting part of it. It's not for me to say whether it is in the abstract, interesting enough. But in grade 13, I finally concluded that these schools

were so incompetent, and most of the teachers in them were so incompetent, and in addition malicious some of them, that I discovered that you could, in fact, write your matriculation examinations on your own. You didn't have to do it in a school. So I informed my father that this is what I was going to do in February of my last year in high school except that in those days you had nine examinations and you had to pass all, or you didn't matriculate. So, I was really taking a leap here,

but, and the examinations were written in the old armory on University Avenue, where just immediately to the west of Osbed Hall, it's now Supreme Court building, but there was an armory there. And several hundred of us of all ages, mainly older people, came in each day, put down five dollars, and we could write the examination.

And I worked like a beaver to prepare for those examinations, and I passed them all. And if you'll pardon me of quite a personal recollection, the way my father's housework, he stayed up late. This is a habit I got from him. He stayed up late. He slept in. I mean, he got a lot done in a day, but he was operating on a slightly different clock for most people. Well, in those days, the post office delivered the mail to the house at about 8.30 in the morning, on one particular day in the spring of 1962, my mother got in, she saw this letter from the Ministry of Education addressed to me. So she surmised, might be my result, so she brought it to me. I opened it and I said, well, it was a scrape.

I had a 50 and a 51, but I passed everything and I had matriculate. And I'm eligible for university, though I won't get into McGillic Toronto, which is what I want it, but I'll get into one of them. So she disappeared and something that was unheard of in her eyes, at about ten minutes to 9 in the morning. I heard the unmistakable footfall of my father, in his dressing gowns, turned out, he said, I congratulate you, extend to his hand, I shall cancel him.

And he went back to bed. Now, it sounds absurd, but it was a very moving experience. When he congratulated me, I said, well, you've been more than intelligent. And I thank you for that. He said, it's fine, congratulations. It was, it means a lot. And what do you, what do you think motivated him

to congratulate you at that point? And why do you think it meant so much to you? I had great, we had our differences in those days, not in later years, but you know, as one does, you know, one does have differences with parents sometimes. And but I, he was a very, very intelligent man and a good man. And I'd great respect and admiration for him and for him to congratulate me in a way that wasn't perfunctory. It wasn't well done if you'd want to hand it courageously. The way he said it, he imparted a seriousness to it that made it clear to me that he thought that what I had done was a major achievement and the fact that he thought it was not only confirmed

my view that it was in fact something achievement, but the fact that he thought it was a major achievement. And the fact that he thought it was, not only confirmed my view that it was, in fact, something achievement, but the fact that he thought it was a major achievement, coming from a very successful and intelligent man, which he was, and who was, after all, the principal male figure in my life, it was a milestone. And what do you think made that accomplishment particularly worthy of both memory and note? What did it do for you? Now, you have alluded to the fact that you were causing some trouble in high school.

Yeah, yeah, looking away at legitimized the comparative hell raising of my late high school years, it's sort of white, the slate clean, the score at the end of the game is you win. You've graduated. So you weren't just a rebel without a cause? Yeah, well, I maybe didn't have a cause, but at least the rebellion ended with me still in one piece and and and Defensible shape morally, if you will. I mean in terms of the

The my ability to defend my conduct as a whole not a part of it Right, right. Yeah, so you can share. I mean, all the nonsense and the foolishness that I had my full share of it for people at age, it ended well. And it was, look, it embarrassed me to say this, and particularly at this remove in time, but it actually was simply an achievement for somebody who hadn't been in the habit of really concentrating that much on schoolwork to buckle down, study all of these things. And I had some good scores.

I mean, my overall average was not that. And to do it all and pass it all the way I did was, it was an achievement. Right, well, it sounds like that's when you learn to actually do some academic work. That's right. I think that is I think that is absolutely correct. Right. And that's a good good preparation for university because you do a lot better at university if you can work on your own. I mean, when I went to the I especially when you went and you're getting close to the exams, you have to really swat it up.

Yes. Yes, yes. I mean, I didn't work in high school and I learned to work in university. And there was a big difference and it was very much worthwhile learning to work. So you went off to university and I have specific reasons to ask you about university. I've had discussions with a number of people recently

about their university memories. Some young people, including Ion Mi Park, who is a refugee or an escapee from North Korea, who just spent four years at Columbia in New York, which was a dream of hers and described it to me as a complete waste of time and money. And when I pushed her on that insisted that she didn't have one course or one professor worthy of note, which was terribly shocking to me. And then I followed that up with Rex Murphy who went to Memorial University in the 1950s and late 1950s and had nothing but positive things to say about his experience. So, and for me, when I went to, I went to a small college to begin with, but I had excellent professors there. They taught me, they were admirable people.

They paid a lot of attention to me and to my friends. I learned to write, I learned to work, I learned how to buckle down and be serious about my academic pursuits. So for me, all the memories, almost all the memories are certainly my early university education and my graduate education for that matter were positive. But things may have changed since then, but your experience. I imagine that young lady, I from all I hear, most of these well-known American universities has just gone to pieces, but maybe the graduate departments are better, I don't know,

but I imagine she had least enjoyed living in New York City. She'd learned something from that, and it was such a vital city. But the, you actually set this up for me very nicely and put me in mind a couple of things. As an undergraduate, the, I did encounter a professor who, who, who did have a very profound impact on my ability to focus on things and, and my things and my interest in certain subjects. You may even know her for all, Naomi Griffiths. She would now be in her early 80s, I think, but she's a specialist in a Kadian studies, she was very friendly with the late Governor General Romeo LeBlanc, but she was a very fine lecturer and also very kindly and sociable person. And I got to know her a little bit. And she did help focus me in certain

historic areas. But what happened after I graduated from Curleton was, we were, I was in 1965 and we were getting into the sort of run up to the Centennial and especially in Ottawa, there was a great emphasis on, you know, biculturalism and the, it was clear that things were starting to really simmer in unpredictable ways and go back, unpredictable politically. And it was in the autumn of that year that in, and the guys seeking a majority. Mr. Pearson and his advisors, some of whom I got to know quite well, subsequently called an election in a real mode was to bring in some strong federalists from Quebec

that they had never really replaced Mr. Salaron as the federal leader in Quebec. Salaran as the federal leader in Quebec. And that was when Pierre Trudeau and Jean-Margis Changer are Peltier and others came in. And they were starting to sort of pivot to meet this challenge to federalism from Quebec. And one thing led to another. Because I was unsure what I wanted to do, for a year, I operated. I bought for practically nothing because it wasn't worth anything from a good friend of mine

who, Peter White, who had lived as my sub-tint in my place in Ottawa my last year when he was working with Marie Sove, but subsequently the concept of the governor general, but he was a junior minister and a minister of Pearson's government. But the first of that, I've owned guard from a sort of new Quebec to say, and he owned a little newspaper in the Eastern townships, about 60 miles east of Montreal and, um, about 60 miles east of Montreal and and no off and go back. And I bought a half interest net for 500 dollars, which is 499 dollars more than it was worth

commercially. But that's what I did for a while and it it and that was while you why why are you a student? You know, it was it was after I finished as an undergraduate and before I went on to to my next university. And and so what happened was that infected me with interest in the newspaper business. I'd always had some because I was interested in me again, the style of some of these famous newspaper owners, you know, like William Randall first, for example, most obvious example, or Colonel McCormick on the Chicago Tribune, and up to a point some of the British press owners, eight-page half tabloid was a long way from living in

San Clementa, you know, Mr. Hearst, famous, I heard from California, but it also infected me with an interest in Quebec and French Quebec. And even though it was an English paper, obviously one was in a largely French milieu. So the upshot of that was the next year, became a lost student at La Valle University, French University in Quebec City. And that was a terribly interesting and positive experience. I have to say, even though we were, I think, only 15 English speaking law, I mean,

primarily, they're speaking law students in a faculty of 500 or so. And in the graduate arts building where we were at all building, we were, the co-day, there were thousands of students coming and going, and there couldn't have been more than 50 of us who were basically French speaking, and in many cases, exclusively French speaking. And it was an entirely positive experience. There was no absolutely no ethnic antagonism.

I mean, people got on well, but they didn't, but not for ethnic reasons. And I have to say those people, all of them, could not have been more welcoming and pleasant as a group. And I've always had bias in favor. Three questions to come out of that is, what did your undergraduate career do for you? Why were you motivated to buy this newspaper? And why did you go to a French speaking university for law school? Ah, well, my undergraduate career was the point at which

I turned from being largely a social operative, effectively studying as frankly Jordan, I think most young men do is undergraduates studying chiefly female andathomy and contents of the containers of alcoholic beverages. And I was more successful the second than the first, but one got on, and then you did, you studied as much as you needed to. Well, Naomi Griffiths helped motivate me to treat it as a little more than something where you just passed the years and checked the box

of going from first to second, the graduating year. What did she do to do that? She gave me the vision of actually becoming an authority on some part of history and also writing about history. Then, so that would be my main answer to first question. Your last one was was why a French University, but you're saying it was why I bought the newspaper, right? Yes. I was at Lou Saint, as you say. So frankly, my friend Peter White said, look here, I need an editor of this paper.

I'm here in Ottawa. And then at the end of it, the government changed and Quebec, and the Union national one. Do you plus use old party one, but Mr Johnson, Daniel Johnson, senior. And he hired Peter White as his chief English language assistant, he was head of the English language section

of the premier of Quebec's office, which is a serious position. And the English community of Quebec, that is an important position. And he conducted it extremely well. Mr. Johnson was a very impressive man, I thought, and still think, but he said, I look, I gotta have an editor for this paper.

I'm gonna close the paper. Why don't you buy a half interest for nominal sum and be the resident editor for a while until you decide what to do? And then one thing led to another, and he was an alumnus of the law faculty of LaValle, and the number of famous English names were most famously Brian Mulroney. He was, he was in Peter's class. I mean, they're older than I am there, but five or six years older than

that. And Michael Mayn's another senator. And so now I think the chancellor of McGill University's grandfather was the prime minister. And, and others and others and and so once I got into that media because the crew I knew I got a little bit into the edges of Quebec politics and I met Premier Johnson and our papers serve the English residents of the vice-premier Quebec and the subsequent premier Jean-Jacques Bertrands. So I got the, I don't mean no in the sense that there's any other, you know, bourgeois or something, but I got to serve into the edge of that. And that period coming up to 1967

with the fermentation in Quebec, which was very active politically, but not nothing violent about it at that point. It was an exciting atmosphere. And you also said that you had become aware of newspaper owners approximately at this point. Well, just the way they lived, I mean, I've never had aspired to live in. They've been the oriental, monarchical, faction of a William Randall first,

made most famous in caricature, then Citizen Kane, which Orson Wells officially denied anything to do with hers. But as Time Magazine put it, lawyers for Mr. William Randall first have determined otherwise and prosecuted accordingly. But the developed along that way. So I became motivated academically, then had a reason to move to go back and get involved in this most modest scale. You can be sort of just being a newspaper delivery boy, but in a position where I did everything, I was the publisher and

the editor, my head and an assistant, it did the actual clerical work, but you know, I sold the ads, I produced the circulation campaigns such as they were and I wrote most of the content. So as you know, that's the way you're writing. So how much were you writing? But they were all, you see. You're right, right? And then I thought it would be a good idea to pursue my studies in Quebec, in a French university, and Peter White helped me.

And indeed, the premier allowed his name to stand as a recommendation. Now, in Quebec City in 1966, if someone appeals for it, or applies for entry to the law faculty and one of the sponsors, is the prime minister, Quebec. I mean, unless it's a joke, and this guy has never got past grade 7, he's going to be admitted. And it was an entirely positive experience, but you must understand it was a double and ultimately a triple experience, but I made a elaborate. I really had to learn the language, I knew it, kind of basic French,

high school graduate, Ontario, knows where I would know a few words, but I didn't really know how to put a serious sentence together or speak fluently. And at that age, my early 20s, I wanted a social life. I didn't want to live like a monk, and so you really have to pick it up. And so I was learning the language, and also it came up that in 1969, when I was into my final year in the law school, the Sherbrook Daily Racket, and we're into a daily newspaper here, I'll be a small, an eight or 9,000 circulation, came up for sale on a distressed basis because they over committed to buying a press, thinking they could sell enough business on the press to pay

for it, and they didn't, so they were, they were stringed. So Peter White and a third friend of ours and I bought that paper. So in that space of time, I became, you know, I, I made a major advanced market in my career, qualified myself as a log graduate. qualified myself as a log graduate. It picked up, if I may say, a pretty good solid competence in French and became a newspaper co-owner. I believe I was the only publisher of a daily newspaper. It's certainly the only one I've ever heard of, any who was at the same time, a lost you.

Now, there may have been others, but I haven't heard of anything like that. And so that it was really out of that brief period, the rest of the way much of the balance of my career was launched. And that, you know, that that happens to everybody, I suppose, but it was a slightly different pattern for me the most. What why law? Yeah, look, it's, it's the neutral place. It was not that I ever particularly

desired to be a lawyer, but you never go wrong with it. It always helps you as a qualification for whatever you're going to do. And parts of it are an interesting subject. Now I focused on constitutional and international and, you know know if you have them help anyone relying on my recollections of a covex civil code to get them through a you know a media and wall case or some one of these funny minor bits of litigation you get but but you know the laws have brought field and there's lots of stuff that's interesting you know I never particularly you know, the laws of broad field and there's lots of stuff that's interesting, you know, I never particularly desired to practice, I never did practice. I had a couple of minimum wage cases where our company was to defend them. And I got I got Brian Mulroney, he was a labor lawyer to coach me a bit,

I did exactly what he told me to, and he won the two cases about that was the on bus helmet practice I've ever had. I will say, but it's been very useful to me. I mean, unfortunately, I've had a great deal of legal experience as a client of lawyers, including some very famous lawyers in the United States and Brittnayn Canada. But that does help you. If you know something about the basis of the law, it does help you in dealing with one.

So how did you manage your career as a publisher and your studies at that point? Well, I was a pretty much an absentee publisher. I would come there when I could and do certain things. I called upon certain advertisers in Montreal and Toronto when I was able to. But that was what nine months before I graduated. After that, I was a resident publisher

and then we started to build the business in branch data about more papers and crew and crew. So the first paper that you bought, you did, you said the bulk of the writing. And so how much time were you spending writing in a week at that point? Oh, when I was the resident publisher of a weekly paper. Yep. It took probably eight or ten hours to write the main contents of the paper.

So for each week, I mean, you know, it's not, it's not absolutely the, you know, the chronicles of, you know, it's not the best collected editorials of the London Times. No, but you have to commit to producing. No, yeah, you got to, you got to get it to paper, yes. I mean, when people are often curious about what it takes to be a writer, and I mean, one of the things that it takes to be a writer is to write and to produce constantly and on a schedule, at least that's how it seems to me. And it appears that you had a deadline that was continually renewing itself. And you had to produce content come hell or high water fundamentally. Yeah. And what you said is very perceptive is now, I mean, you some reason why

you would know this, but I have millions of readers in the United States. I write these columns enough for them every week in the US. And it's just what you said. It's a deadline that comes up all of that. Now, yeah, it's only 1200 words. So it's not, you know, it's not that much writing. But on the other hand, you know, it's a highly competitive field, and no one's gonna pay you, no one reads you. So you have to put down something. Yeah, well, and that's still 365,000 words,

no, not a year, you said weekly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So 100,000 words a year, it's a book a year. 200,000 words a year, yeah. Right. No, this is true. And now, the news news cycles what it is, and it's always plenty to write about. But, but that got me into that habit, you're absolutely

right, where you're writing your deadline, and you can't talk about the deadline. If I could make a detour here, but a relevant one, as you know, and many of your viewers would, I was, for a time, a guest of the people of the United States and the Bureau of Prison Sound. I ultimately won that battle, and I won it entirely in an addition, ultimately the charges were retroactively withdrawn, but, and it was an outrage from A to Z, but my, what I did while I was there

was I was a tutor to students who did not succeed in the program, the US Bureau of Prison As of requiring everyone who was not graduated from secondary school to do so. And so they have teachers and examinations every month. And those who were unsuccessful have sent to me and I recruited other tutors. I recruited a former Head of the torpedo room of the nuclear submarines my sciences Tutor because I'm not qualified to do that and for mathematics the head of mathematics former head of mathematics of a large high spill in Little Rock, Arkansas was also a successful commodity straighter And these were people that were imprisoned at the same time? Yes, yeah,

but you know the non-violent things, I think one was a tax case, and the other was a alleged fraud to use of credit card or something, but they, but they're highly qualified to be able to say so the three of us were, were tutoring these people and, and, and the, these people would be sent to us, and they would arrive very kind of someone suspicious, which the conduct of the American criminal legal system invites and insights and then largely justifies. And I would give them a little speech that they didn't have to do a thing if they didn't want to.

But if they wanted to leave there with their foot on the up escalator and an excellent chance to make a good living in a way that didn't lead straight back replace like this, I could help them. If they didn't want that, that was fine. I didn't care. But I was there if they wanted, but the one thing I didn't want was for them to imagine that I was part of this awful system. I was a bigger victim of it than they probably were, because I didn't commit any of it. With that, the whole thing turned and they became fully

cooperative and it wasn't. So why did that speak? Okay, why did you formulate that speech? Why did you think it was justifiable and why did it have a positive effect on the people that you were discussing? Because they had, in that great rich country of the United States, and I'm not a socialist, but they had not had a fair deal. Most of them, it was scarcely at any idea that the father was. And from early times, their mother or somebody was saying, somebody's got to get some money here. We're going to be at the street. And they were just tanning father in the drug war.

I mean, they were at the last age. They were at the last age of transfer. So some drug eaters picked up. They say, where did you get that from? And they'd figure that person. And they were caught. So off they went to prison terribly over since. I went on my students, got 25 years for driving a truck loaded

with marijuana. He wasn't even a user himself. Anyway, a lot of 23 or something. By the way, one thing I am proud of in that same senselessly, my initial graduation from high school myself was that all of my lads passed 206. So some of them had to take exams more than once, but they all graduated. How long were you, how long were you in prison in doing this? Three years and two weeks. How long did it take after you were in prison before you started doing this tutoring and why did you

do it? No, I mean it wasn't how long after I arrived in prison, did it start? Yes. Only about a month because one of my books was in the library and I had a education said, look here we've got to do something with these guys who just keep failing. I mean, there's nothing wrong with her IQ, but let's try something different. Instead of our teachers, would you do it? And then I would, to answer your question, why I gave them a little speech, so it was hardly a speech, but I pretty much said to you what I said to them. It was because I knew that they initially would think I was part of this evil system that they hated. And I had to make them understand that I was one of them

and not one of the others, you see. And that wasn't a pretense. It wasn't a falsehood. I was. I mean, my heart was with the prisoners and not with the- But you were also selling them something. You were selling them literacy as an escape from their current condition.

That's it. I was selling them self interest. And as you know, that's what that's, that's, that's the Australian say. It's a tryer. Yeah. I mean, that's one that'll go, you know. And, and, but what I was going to say about them was, and this is going back to what you were saying about meeting deadlines, the American, or at least the Florida matriculation system, that's where it was, required an essay.

And so I said, all right, you know, write an essay and they had various topics that we usually use, so I said said take your pick of these. And some of these fellows literally couldn't write a word. They had a mental block that couldn't write a word. And the way I got around that was I said, look, we'll change the subject here. You write on the sexiest woman you've ever seen. And you can use your imagination, but it doesn't have to be such a woman. You can just make her up. And only I will read this. So if it will help you, be as coarse and vulgar as you want. Use any sexual word you want,

any way you want it, anything, just write what comes to mind. And that got them all going. None of them had a mental block after that. Why in the world did you take that tack and what made them, why in the world did they trust you? And then I have another question too, which is why did they pass? Why were you successful when the other teachers, let's say, or the system that was hypothetically designed to educate them failed? Well, because they wouldn't put out for them. They thought it was another trick of the establishment to use them. And in their minds, they were obliged to provide them food and shelter. They were obliged to provide them food and shelter. And as long as they would just sort of solently went along with things,

they didn't harass them too much. And that, so that was minimum compliance, but it was a survival regime for them. And that was really where their lives were reduced to at that point. And so I produced a sort of spark of light that they could actually better their lot raise their higher ability and therefore their legitimate by which I mean legal income aspiration because they matriculated for my school they were more higher And, indeed, in the case of a number of them, I assisted them in becoming correspondence students in universities. And indeed, I had a couple of them who started there, then were released and continued physically at the university and graduated.

I'd won a couple of years ago, wrote me when he graduated from the University of Alabama. It was more than a couple of years ago, now it was about six years ago, but he graduated from the University of Alabama. It was more than a couple of years ago now, it was about six years ago, but he graduated from the University of Alabama. And so the extent I'm in touch with these people are all doing fine.

They're all well-worn, she's doing fine. You obviously take pleasure in this particular accomplishment. You see, it was ironic, Jordan, because I didn't, I mean, I had a few teachers I liked. We all remember the teachers we liked, but there weren't that many of them, in my case. And most of them I didn't like. I bought into the view that really they were teachers because they couldn't make it in the world of adults.

So they sought success in a place where they could assert their authority over smaller people. And I mean, this was my concept of the motivation some of the teachers I had. But, and you know, Shah's famous comment, he who can, doesn't, he who cannot teach us. I sort of believe that. I thought they were, you know, I thought,

there were exceptions, but in general, I thought these teachers were people who couldn't make it in a more substantial activation. Now, that was an unfair judgment, but on the other hand, when I see what level of education those departed schools achieved nowadays, I'm not so sure it was an unjust judgment, but in any case, that's what I thought. But I saw the other side of it when I was tutoring these guys in the prison system. I saw the satisfaction of it. And I will give the Bureau of Prison Assist,

they devised this graduation ceremony, and all the families would come. And they were emotional occasions. And I'm not a particularly emotional person, but one of a few seriously emotional, positive emotional moments I've had was when my two colleagues and I were introduced and this whole pack room stood up and cheered

for about five minutes. And the girlfriends or wives or parents or whatever, my students would meet my wife in the visiting center and say, oh, your husband is, you know, my guy's a teacher and we're so grateful to him and all of this stuff. It was very touching. And incidentally, Jordan, the person isn't the place for those people. I was in a low security place. None of these guys were violent and they weren't habitual offenders. It wasn't the right place for me. That's not the way we should treat these people. They're not bad people and they're not

unintelligent. And that's, I say, everyone of mine passed. The problem was they just got a wrong turning early on. So let's return to the to the newspaper business. So now you're out of law school and you've you have a second newspaper and you've graduated. Now you've taken on the role as a publisher. Your empire starts to expand at that point. It does, but I had one more one more. A lot to run on the educational side. Please do.

I became a masters candidate and did receive the degree from McGill in French Canada studies. Now this came from another divestment that I'm volunteering it that I went because I knew Premier Johnson a bit. I don't know how conversant you are with modern Quebec history, but he was often referred to as the son Duplacé he never had. Mariste Duplacé, as you probably know, was the only person in history to serve five terms, his premier Quebec and he died in office. And Dijon Lozage told me that he lived, he would have been elected, he really knew how to if he had lived he would have been elected. He really knew how to organize that province politically. But he was a bachelor, but he advanced Johnson quite quickly, very witty way of talking. And he inspired my interest in duplastic. As up until then, I was the conventional English

Canadian view. The duplastic was really a retrograde political character and a scoundrel, a colorful man, a clever man, no doubt, but a cynic and essentially much too authoritarian. I mean, there's some truth in that, that the fact is he produced the modernization of Quebec, he built the autorews, he built the schools, he built every university except McGill. I mean, he was reelected because he delivered for the province. And but his technique was to get the nationalists and the conservatives to vote together, which is very difficult to do.

Either you're two nationalistic and frightened the conservatives, which happened to him in 1939, or you're not nationalistic enough and they get impatient with you, which is what happened to Jean-Jacques Bertrand 1970. I mean, Duplassie had it all organized for Paul Sovi to follow him and Daniel Johnson to follow him, but Duplassie was a strong man. It was almost 70 when he died, and obviously those two died in office in the early 50s, and then the whole thing broke up. But my point was that Johnson stirred my curiosity, but you press it, because there clearly was a story to this man that wasn't being told.

He was reviled as the author of the great darkness and all the sort of thing. So I went to a colloquial, happened to get an invitation and it came from Miss Griffiths, who I mentioned, it was my old professor at Carleton who said, you might be interested. And then so I went to it in three rivers and it was a discussion of the Epluses and there was a panel and there was one pro-dupe

Epluses, two anti-dupe Epluses. And I went up to the pro-dupe Epluses, you want to at the end of it, it was somewhat well known historian, Robert Runeet, a Frenchman originally, who was a member of Axion Frontseis, you know, Charles Morales, and he was at a demonstration in the plus to La Fipe de la 1926, and the person next to him was shot dead, and with that, he left France and never returned,

immigrated to the back. Anyway, he, I congratulated him on upholding duplacé, and we conversed for a while, and then I gave him a ride back to Montreal, and it turned out that he had been commissioned by an outfit called in French, the Society of Friends of the Honorable Maurice Duplacé, to write a book about Duplacé,

and they had all Duplassies papers. And so the idea is it came to my mind, well, look, you're writing in French, would they have any interest in allowing an English-speaking person to look at them and write about that? And Eastern Postsworth, the Tricerar, I sure all recommend you, you say. And then it happened ahead of the subject, it's worth the try, I sure, I'll recommend you, you say. And then it happened ahead of this outfit, was the former minister of cultural affairs in Johnson and Bear Trans government, John O'El Trump, you may remember.

And he's still alive, he's very old, and so he said, yeah, well, that's fine, sure you can do it, but you know, you've got to keep them yourself, all of which the rules I respected. And so I had all this stuff. And then when I saw what I had, I realized I did do something about it. And this is what takes me back to having developed at least the ambition to write some history. So I calculated that if I enrolled at McGill, citing this as my proposed thesis topic,

that would get me halfway through, and if I got halfway through, I'd have the momentum to finish it. That's where my first book came from, which is called Render and a C sort of a life of Maurice II plus it. And so I got that side of things going at the same time as we built our newspaper company.

And we bought within a few months a daily newspaper in Prince Edward Island and one in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. So I could say with a semi-strike face, we have a newspaper chain that spans the country for motion to motion. But I said, the links are rather wide and not many of them. So you're writing, you're done your law degree, you're writing now as well, and you've got three newspapers at this point?

Well, then there were some weeklies. We were up to probably as many as 10, but then we had some weekly surround Quebec, and then we got, we said, there were some available ones in British Columbia, daily and weekly. So we built it up. It was still a small company compared to the ones that owned the big newspapers in the country.

We built it up to something, but did it scale and stature fairly quickly. But it was a very profitable business. And normally we would, we would make a, make a bid based on the profitability of the press donor. And, and very rarely were these people who owned the papers running them as profitably as they could. They were taking a nice salary for themselves and they weren't that concerned with what the profit was. Well, we had an idea of what we could do with the problem. And, and then, and then in those days, you could go to the local bank and say, look, we, you know, we want to buy this paper.

And we want, we were asking her to loan us half the money. We'll take care of the rest. What we do is we give the vendor a balance of sale in the rest. So we didn't put up anything, not a cent. But we always did raise the profit. We always raised the quality of the product, too. And our position always was that the best way to raise the profit was to raise the quality of the product. And even them, people who bought and read a newspaper were what is called ABC one readers, either high income or high education, relatively speaking.

I mean, ignorant people didn't buy newspapers. And for the most part, poor people didn't buy newspapers. People advertisers wouldn't be interested in, wouldn't buy any newspaper. But anyone who bought an e-paper is someone an advertiser wants to get it because he has disposable income. How much was your ability to make these newspapers that you purchased profitable and also to see an opportunity there? A consequence of you having how much manpower you needed and almost all of those places had more manpower than they needed. Now, you know, we handled gently, you know, we

moved them out, you know, basically a lot of them were elderly, so we just gave them early retirement, topped up their pensions, a bit of things like that. But, and they're small, so you're not talking about a lot of people, but if you've got a newspaper of 50 employees and you get eight of them to take early retirement, you've got the payroll by almost 20%. And it's not that early retirement. And in addition to that, there are all kinds of things to do to enhance revenue. I mean, very few of them at any notion of how you can height the circulation relatively easily, with contests and things like that.

I was astounded at the people where we really saw this as an England, or the daily telegraph, the daily circulation over a million broadsheet papers, the biggest broadsheet paper in Europe. The British love these, as far as I'm concerned, accurately ridiculous contest, but if you give them a contest, even to get a free subscription to the spectator, which we also long,

they'll plunge into it, it's a circulation bill. So that's the sort of thing that a, you know, an individual sitting in for argument's sake Nelson British Columbia having owned this newspaper for 30 years, he wouldn't know that. It wouldn't matter. He lived well. He was an influential person in his community, made a profit every year having taken a nice salary for himself, there's three or four relatives in the payroll. The company owns this car and owns this speed boat and the lake and all this kind of stuff. I'd maintain that's all it needs, which is fine. But the fact is you can double the profits quite quickly. So now do you have a plan at this point? You're being successful in purchasing newspapers and increasing the profitability.

So you're building up more capital. Are you planning, you have a aim at this point just to continue expanding? And do you have an end in mind? Yeah, this is our plan. And we brought it a long way forward. The biggest paper we had when things changed because of that shakeup in the rables to the largest thing that you mentioned in your intro. Where when I started to focus on finance,

was Lisselae in Quebec City, which is a real for Luria, it was once the chairman. And that was a newspaper about 120,000 circulation a day. It's not big for Toronto, but that's what is it it's you know I'm trying to say I don't know these paper circulations now I've been out of the business for a long time but you know that's 120,000 paper today is respectable size paper it's not a huge newspaper but it's not it's not like the northern eastern townships advert. And there was some history to the Sala as well, so well known paper and go back. So you, by the way, the history part that I best knew

was from my studies of Duplacé, where it was, as I said, Sir Wilfred was the chairman at one time, is an absolute dyed in the wool liberal newspaper, but the owner Jacques Cobb, Nicole, and the own the newspapers in the three rivers and Sherbrook, also, he was one of the few people as a Senator and the Legislative Council, the Upper House of Quebec in those days,

he was both at the same time. And he was the liberal party chairman for 20 years, provincially, while they were in office just before Du Bois, and for nearly 20 years after when they were in office in Ottawa. He was a very powerful man of Quebec. And in the early days of television, he got the license, Douglas threw his political contacts for Eastern Quebec, a Scythe Eastern Quebec around Sherbrick. And the best place to put his transmitter was at the top of Mount Orford,

which is a provincial park. So he asked Diplacie if he could put his, you know, his transmitter there. And Diplacie said, you know, you can put it there and you don't have to pay me more than $1 rent for meeting the problems. But not as long as right under the words, let's say, on your leading newspaper or the words, the liberal organ. You said, right, at that point, Lyslay, never mind that Mr. Nicole was a liberal senator and legislative counselor became a Union national newspaper. Just switched like that and he got his license.

Anyway, that's, that's, that's, in a way, a red-airing, but I thought it might have amused your viewers a bit. All right, so you're building up a newspaper empire. It's in Canada. It's limited to Canada at this point, but you start to expand. Is it first in the US or first in the UK? And how does it go? No, but we started to move in the US and let me think now we got going there in about about 75, we bought a paper just over the border in Vermont, and then it grew. I mean, of course, in a market that's science. We've fairly rapidly bought a huge number of these small papers. We had a formula to operate them, and you could bundle them together by region. And then when you combine their circulation, it became quite substantial in circulation.

You've got an envelope. And as you said in your intro, we had hundreds of these papers. And were you running writers across the papers or were you these all in independent fiefdoms? There were a few that we could run or buy from the outside of the discount for ourselves rather than the unit cost

that it obtained if we were only buying for one little paper, 10,000 sales, something like that. So we got economies to scale to the degree. But the papers like that, you absolutely have to serve the local public. And you're relatively speaking, not under threat from television, let alone once it came the internet, as much in those local paper, because CBS or the CBC or every one are not going to carry the strawberry festival of the town, your papers publishing, you know, they just have the room for it. So you're giving people what they can't get anywhere else.

And is that still the case? Are the smaller communities still managing? The Internet has become so pervasive now. I think it's a threat even to those papers, but not as much as it is to a metropolitan area. So how are you managing your time at this point? You have an increasingly large media empire. You're also still writing, right? Well, we divide it into regions. And I had the East and Associates had the West.

And then the big turn came in the matter you were afraid to when the, what was called at the time, the Argus group companies the control of it became available and that that was quite an intricate business because the number of voting chairs involved was quite small so you you know I because my father had his position he died in 1976 so my brother and I I, we technically, we didn't inherit a stock, we bought it from the state, but in effect we inherit it. And then there was a shareholder's agreement, the principal associate died and there was some jockeying around, and in a case, in accordance with the shareholder's agreement, we bought the other stocks.

So we had control of the voting shares, which had of this company, which had influential blocks of stock and historically controlling blocks of stock. Although, for in most cases, they weren't a majority. It shares of a number of famous companies, Massie Ferguson was one of the farm equipment maker, Dominion Stores, the grocery store, Dom Tarr, the old forestry products company, and the most interesting in a way was the old Holland remaining company. He didn't do much mining, but it owned 60% of a night fit that own

big iron ore positions in Labrador and Northern Quebec and long-term contracts. Shipped the ore that produced about $40 million a royal these every year. basically no cost, the steel companies and their affiliates in the United States took the ore and paid us the royalties. So we had that cash to work with. And then what I did was over a period, I reoriented that flow of cash and that business into the newspaper business. And we really, really took off when, when I bought control of the London Daily Telegraph, which was in a distressed financial state for $30 million, which we ultimately sold for $1.327 billion. How much, how, how long a period of time you lapsed between the purchase and the sale? From 1986 to 2004. So 18 18 years 18 years yeah well that's quite the return on investment. So are you in England? You buy the telegraph. Are you spending much of your time in Britain at that point?

And you buy the telegraph. Are you spending much of your time in Britain at that point? Well, after we bought it, I went there for two years in the summer's only, and then I made it my chief residence after that for about 15 years. Yeah, so what was it like moving from Toronto to Britain? Well, I kept my home and my office here, but in the sense you mean it. I mean, yes, I moved my main residence.

Well, look, it moving into Britain as an owner of a big newspaper is not like just getting off the planet he throw and going through the want ads to find a job for yourself. So I was rather well received because of the position I had. But it was very interesting. It's a, I was fortunate to get the very tail end of that era when a newspaper owners were very influential people. I mean, I don't think they are particularly influential now,

but it's not a good business now. But London is one of the world's greatest cities. And if you're well situated in London, you meet a tremendous variety of interesting people who either live there or come through. They're virtually everybody you can think of comes through London at some point in a year. And there's normally some sort of occasion for them.

So my wife and I were constantly receiving these formidable sort of stiff, gold-aged invitations to come to have dinner with someone, so we're lunch with someone, so or something. And it was a sumptuous life. But I mean, my interest in it was really in the socializing with people, as well as at that time, I was a supporter of Miss Statcher and it was a very interesting and active time politically in Britain as she effectively dessocialized the country. How well did you know her? I got to know her very well. She was my sponsor in the House of Lords, and she and Dennis came to our wedding party,

and they often came to dinner with us. So you went to, you lived in Britain after you were in Canada. How, it'd be interesting for me to hear how you would contrast the cultures. What was it like being in Britain? I mean, I know you were in a very fortunate position when you moved there, and so you entered in the upper echelons of society, but you had a chance to see Britain from the inside and to contrast it with Canada and with the US to some degree. So, what did you observe and what did you conclude? and with the US to some degree. So what did you observe and what did you conclude?

Well, it was a country being renewed, you know. I mean, Britain at the time that Fatcher was elected, very narrowly elected in 1979, was a country with tight currency controls, top personal tax rate of 98%, so there's a lot of tax cheating going on. And the British don't like that, you know, I mean, the real problem with Britain and Europe

was not immigration, it was the authoritarianism of directives for Brussels. And, you know, the French and the Italians essentially ignore the government as much as they can anyway. And they don't care what these directors are. They're not going to pay much attention, unless they absolutely have to.

And the French in particular, not going to take seriously anything that comes from the Belzets and are at least from within Belzets. And the Germans are the leading power in Europe and they're accustomed to regimentation. So it doesn't bother them. But the British like to be law-adviding. They like to obey the law,

but they have to be sensible laws and they have to be imposed by people that are accountable. So if you don't like what they're doing, you can throw them out, the voting ties. And that was the problem. Well, that in addition to the economic stagnation, finally, finally, boiled over when thatcher and her friends, Keith Joseph and others, pushed out Ted Heath, Sridward Heath, and took the conservative party of Great Britain, conservative and unionist party to the right,

not the extreme right, but to a level of conservatism that conservative fiscal policy and tax policy, in particular, and attitude to labor unions, that the conservative party had not occupied really since the early days of Stanley Baldwin. And it wasn't back to them, but it was ideologically a similar position that obviously refined to reflect changes in society over that period of more than 50 years. And so it was very interesting to see, and she was successful. I mean, I was there for her third election victory. She was the first prime minister since before the first reform act in the early 1830s to win three

consecutive full terms, majority terms as prime minister. And she did it on the basis of radical change to the country. And it was quite exciting. Now, at that time, I was, I was in the late 80s. Brian Mulrini was an old friend of mine. He was, he was, I mean, you're questioned didn't deal with politics only, but that given my position as a news in these favorite business politics that I'll have to deal with it. Brian was doing something about it. Canada as old was operated much closer to the middle of the field. I didn't ever got that far left and he didn't move it as far as that shirt moved Britain. in any case, it's not a unitary state like Britain's a much different system, but you didn't have, I mean, I thought

Brian was a good prime minister, but you didn't have that sense of profound change and radical change and exciting policy formulation. I mean, it was one of the few periods in my life where I sort of transmogrified into a, into a semi-policy wonky, because we had that positions and all this stuff. And the other aspect I was the Cold War was still going on. And there was still some controversy in Britain in that there was always in the left wing of a labor party, especially in the far out-old the left wing of a labor party especially and

and the far outgoled imperialist wing of the Tories as well. This antagonism to the United States and when I moved there it was in the latter Reagan years and of course he was an important president and an eventful period is present. And I happened to Indian too, and I'd known him before he was president. And so I, I, you know, I wasn't under the illusion that I was at the center of things. I wasn't, but I was,

I was actually pretty close to the center in Britain because my first trip there is the chief shareholder of the telegraph company, the prime minister invited me to lunch on Saturday at checkers, and she said, look here, we need you, we can't win without you. Are you with us? And I said, oh, I'm with you all.

And I said, let me ask you something. And this was right after Mr. Murdoch had made his big change over and moved to a new plant and de-certified and basically dismissed the old pre-print and printing unions that used to shut the papers down all the time, arbitrarily. And the shop foreman would have a, you know, lose a game of darts and just pub or something and come in and call all the workers out. It was almost as bad as that. And she, since Murdoch was acting within the law, she ensured that his titles could be

produced. I said, look, I don't think we're going to get to the point that Rupert said, but we're putting through voluntary retirements, but you don't know. And if we need to import people from other countries to help get our papers, I'd chain her up to me and say, I'll sign the work permits myself. That was it as Charles Poeau, her long-serving chief secretary, very distinguished public servant in Britain, wrote politically speaking,

it was love at first sight. I mean, he was there at that luncheon. We just got on like smoke and did right to the day she died. Well, she was a little non-compos-non-compos-manus laterally. But I do her well. I do her very well. And as I said at our barbers in my wedding party, I thanked her and said, you know, I never would have come to this country or wished to do business in this country

that wasn't for you, and that was true. So what made her able to do what she did? I mean, she was a woman in a sea of men. She was a radical leader in many ways, obviously on the conservative front. She had apparently had tremendous strength of character. Like, what did you see in her that made her able to do what she did?

She was an extremely courageous person and she was that type of person who focused exclusively on relevant sequential facts in analyzing the problem. And she had been, I believe, the education secretary and the Heath government, 70 to 74. And was the co-founder of the Center for Policy Studies. She came to the conclusion, along with a number of others. Some of them were intellectually more, frankly, sophisticated than she was, like Keith Joseph, that Britain simply had to change that what was called the aptly settlement

where it was colloquially written called butscoism after Rob Butler and Hugh Gates going was Gates go with the leader of labor party between climate athlete and Harold Wilson. And, and, and Rob Butler was the deputy prime minister for, and, and, and, old was the runner up to leader all through the Churchill, Eden, Macmillan years into the, into the Heath period and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and that was she and also. And it was kind of a look like, how do we know where they agreed most things.

And that murder concluded, this isn't working. Britain is falling behind. Our standard of living is not keeping pace with the Germans or the French or the Americans. And this is why, and we've got to change. And she was absolutely right. But, you know, sometimes just stating home truths in simple ways is so far from what people are used to. It sounds more radical than it is. What she was saying wasn't in fact all that radical. She was saying things like, we can't have just completely irresponsible work stoppages. We can't have capricious middle level union officials is calling everybody

out for the fun of us whenever they've, you know, had a bad night or something. And, and, and we can't take 98% of people's income. I mean, it's nonsense. I mean, it's just nonsense. It'll, it'll cost 99 cents to collect the 98 cents. I mean, your collection cost get to high, cheating becomes a very, just rich people move away. It's just nonsense.

And she had a way of putting it very clearly and very persuasive. And that group was an ideal team for that time. She had some people Nigel Lawson, for example, was a former editor of the spectator, senior writer for the Financial Times, academic economist, but a fine debater. And he put through absolutely radical budgets,

where they cut the top tax rate between Jeffrey Howe and Nigel. They cut it from 98% to 40%. And she had a group that could argue with parliament and in the country. She had an academic group led by Keith Joseph and her Center for Policy Studies group, Kenneth Minogue, I don't know if you know these people,

well-known academic economist and specialists in other areas who could put it forward in a way that was where they could defend it against, the best debaters of the left. And she was a powerful leader who kept the whip on the backs of the Tory party and said, this is what must be done. And this is why we have to do it.

And when she said, the lady's not for turning and sacked half of government and so forth, she showed, I mean, she was right. But there's no doubt that at times, traditional opinion within that party, and the Tory grandees didn't approve of her, and they never liked her, and they stabbed her in the back in the end. But even those who were involved and that had to admit that she made a tremendous difference in the, and the best of them.

For example, Michael Hezleton, very able man. I'm a very good defense secretary and then came back in other roles. But he agreed with her policy. He couldn't stand her person and she couldn't stand him. But he was no slacker when it came to the policy. She was the right person for the right time. Now, unfortunately, as so often happens when people in democratic countries

have held an elected office for a while, she started to lose her sense of political self-preservation. And I became, because we had a big parliamentary contingent in the press gallery and did a lot of political reporting. And Neo-Kinnick, the leader of the opposition, labor leader, told me one day that the first parliamentary report he read every morning was ours, because even though we were rapidly profiting paper, the reporting was always fair and always perceptive.

And that was our standard, that was what I always tried to enforce everywhere in every country. And all our papers was to separate reporting and comment, which you rarely get notice. And as the agitation with that, youers authoritarianism within the conservative parliamentary party increased we would hear it naturally and the editors would tell me the same. So I said, all right, look, put 10 more people into the press gallery. And they give a press pass to anyone that the telegraph asked for given our position. And I mean, you know, we were the backbone of the nation. We had over a million sale, 98% of them were conservative voters. And I said, for once, I will ignore your expense accounts at which outrageous, they always are from journalists. And I almost sacked the editor when he expected me

to pay for chartering a helicopter to take him to drinks party in Brighton. But I said, look, I'll ignore all of that. Tell these guys, divide it up, take the entire conservative parliamentary party, every empty, divide them up into groups. And over the next few months, have your guys take them all out and apply them a drink and find out what is really going on there. And when I had all this,

I asked for an appointment, the prime minister's office said to come over later that day. And I said, look, this is what I've done. I did, obviously, I didn't name anyone, I've been dishonorable, I did not give one name. But for example, the chief whip, Rensham, his name was, it couldn't wait to see the back of that. And I don't think she had that. She had the clue of this. So I didn't mention him. I didn't mention anybody. I said, I'm telling you, Prime Minister, your parliamentary party is seething with this content. There's an absolute rancid element there and it's very, it's gone a long way into that group and you've got to, if you pardon my being so impurious here, you've got to, I'm not saying you should accommodate or appease them, but make if you course

corrections that went, you know, that attract more of them, turn, break them on mental of this. And I was shit out of the show, I have to say rubbish. She said they're all slackers, they're cowards. I said, of course they're cowards, that's what makes them dangerous. And Vino, and it was only a few weeks later that she pushed Pearl Jeffrey out

and the 1922 Society, the group of non-Cabin MPs in the governing party, essentially gave her the high jump. It was very unfortunate. We ran an editorial on the front page was very rare the day before and which I contributed the last sentence of a beddeter Max Hastings was not a pro-thedric person. But the last sentence was that Margaret Thatcher is one of the great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history. And as long as she wishes to remain prime minister, she may count on the support of this newspaper. And she wrote me a handwritten personal letter

thanking, but she went. And I told the editor to put a black border around the story. And he said, please, you're not serious. So I've spared it in that. But that's how I felt. It was a tragedy, not a tragedy, but a sadness. She was a great leader.

But, you know, Jordan, I don't believe in turn limits. I mean, basically, the voters will decide. And if they've got a good person in the office, let's keep the person there. And in the United States, the only time in the history of that country where anyone saw the third term, the entire future of our civilization, dependent on his being elected and I was friend when D Roosevelt in 1940, because the Republicans would never have come up with when Lee's and Britain and Canada could not have continued in the war. And they wouldn't have got a war leader as good as that. Anyway, Wendell will keep us a good man, but he was no FDR. But if we look back at him in the last,

what, 50 or 60 years, the only leaders in, in important countries who've left office in good physical health and good political health were the term limited Americans, Eisenhower and Reagan, and maybe Clinton, but more Eisenhower and Reagan. I mean, if they had been allowed to, and it chose them to do it, either one or one or third term easily, they're very popular. But, you know, as Roosevelt said, you've got to have a new, even though it's you running for re-election, it has to be for a new reason. You have to give the people a new reason to vote for

at which he did. I mean, he was, you know, beat the depression, you know, accelerate prosperity, stay out of war, win the war. You know, you had a different thing each time. But I digress. Now Margaret Thatcher was, she was very courageous and very admirable. I have to, and also a wonderful person in small ways. I mean, the staff at Downing Street and Checkers Loved

or she's terribly polite to these people in a way that, you know, in some of the labor premise, there's like Kallahann Wren, particularly. And certainly a man like Ted, he had no manners anyways. He wasn't polite anyway. I mean, I'd rather like him as a person than he was an interest in man in a way. I didn't particularly like him politically,

but he wasn't very polite. And but Margaret that she was very polite to those people no matter how rough she was in her own minister, she felt they could defend themselves. But you know, some in serving tea at Downing Street was couldn't, so he had to be polite to these people. And she was never condescending about it. I mean, she was from Grantham,

or if I know there was a grocer, and he was ultimately the mayor of Grantham. So father was a grocer. And he was ultimately a mayor of Grantham. So he was a well-known man in Grantham, but he, but in the world of Western and stir and Belgrade, the great and the good, the use of a rich and everything, they worked upon her as a hand. You can glue the Christmas figures.

I mean, some, you mean, some jumped up battle acts from the Midlands. And she was never particularly self-conscious about that. But it must be said, she was always a little awkward. And in that way, I had a kind of a pass because I wasn't part of an awful class system in Britain. I wasn't anything. I was like from another planet, because I wasn't part of an awful class system in Britain. I wasn't anything. I was like from another planet, but I have to say this better. She did not have a good sense of humor.

She occasionally said funny things, but she wasn't a naturally humorous person, which is not the end of the world, but it's nice that he got better sense of humor in she and and she was a little oversimplified in the view sometimes. I mean, the fact is when you get to write down to it, she didn't like Europe because she didn't like the main European nationalities. I mean, the Germans and the French didn't mind the Italians, but she couldn't take the Italians seriously, but she'd rather like them. But she never forgave the Germans for the war, and she thought the French were sharpers

and slide cunning and devious people. And she sort of worked in stereotypes. Now, if she met an individual person from Germany or France, obviously, perfectly polite to them, but fundamentally, she didn't trust either of those countries and she didn't feel it was really Europe's job to lead the dames and the Dutch

in all these smaller countries that wanted Britain and to help them. She rather liked the Americans and she never forgot and she told me this many times, she never forgot what the United States did in World War II, how desperate Britain's condition was and how overwhelmingly helpful the Americans were. She had great admiration for Roosevelt. And she said, in each year from 1942, we'd seen more and more of the Americans in Britain.

And I know there were the reflections here and there and things. But to us, it was just wonderfully reassuring. More and more of these big tall strong American boys would arrive ready to invade Europe. Her family were practicing methods, and every Sunday they would invite an American serviceman that they'd see in the church service to come back with them to have lunch. I thought it was a nice thing to do to young men overseas who are missing the families and so and to show some hospitality. I mean, she was a very genuine traditional low church Protestant, but tolerant, no religious animosity as of any kind. Most of her constituents were Jewish.

And just great, what you saw is what you got, but a very strong, good, well-rounded leader. But if what you need, which is what they did need, was someone to make radical change and say the lady is not for turning, and this is what we have a mandate to do, and we're going to do it. She was the perfect leader. Once you've got into a a suppler situation, that would not be her forte. I mean, she wouldn't confuse her with Israelaliy or something. I mean, if she'd gone to the Congress of Berlin and said of Israelaliy, they would have ended up in war with Bismarck. I mean, she

probably started the starting a sinister train life, but but you know, it was horses for courses and she was a wonderful leader for the time. As a person, she was an outstanding person, absolutely loyal. I've great admiration, great admiration and for Dennis too. You knew Reagan as well. I did. Not as well, but I knew him. I knew him before he was president, my name was president and after he was president. And what were your impressions of him?

A extremely formidable man. He was to start with one of the most charming men I've ever met. I mean, practically all politicians are reasonably charming when they put their minds to otherwise they're in the wrong business. But he was, he was disarmingly pleasant without being stacker and are over-ingenuous. It was just a charming guy, good rack on terrific rack on terrific, very good conversations.

And I think he was a great leader. I don't know, I don't know, he's not dead about that. He was a wonderful speaker. He kept it to a few basic points. He, he, he vulgarized, I must say, made these complicated issues simple and it was almost impossible. Is that something you shared with that,

your that capability? Yes. And but in a slightly different way, he had more, he would throw in a humorous aspect that was disarming. And he would also, he'd make it a little more anecdotal in folks, but not where his argument deteriorated. He was a very skillful debater.

If you're interested in this, you can find on the internet that the debate he had with Robert Kennedy over that business about the left-wing academic in New Jersey, a Geno Vesa, where he was a far-left, and was a dispute about his ability to remain at a state university, because he was communist.

And at the end of it, Robert Kennedy said, don't ever put me into the date of that guy again. I mean, Reagan, I had some conversations and where I was astounded, even, well after he was president, and was supposedly in decline, where he had an astounding recall of the details. He was a much more comprehensive, re-intelligent person and was widely known because he sometimes seemed flat-footed

when a direct question was put to him. You know, the American tradition is not one of the debate, like it is in the parliamentary tradition. I mean, he was a governor and then the president, and he never debated with anybody that anybody chose to, as with Kennedy here when he actually was in the elections. And, but he, this idea that he was, you know, what did Clark Clifford call him

and Amy will dance or something. Yeah, I knew Clifford too, and Brigham was a smartest Clifford, a different type of intelligence. But he was a very intelligent man. There was, he was in a way an inspirational figure because in his life, he only had six jobs. He was a life guardian of people swimming.

What do we, you know, what lifeguard? Yeah, lifeguard at Tampeco, Illinois. And then he was a baseball announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, California, bound in the Great Depression. And then screen actor, including, I think six terms as a head of the screen actors guilt, but his job as an actor.

And then he was the vice president for public and personal relations for general electric court, and then governor of California and president of the United States. And he only, I believe in that, four elections, he beat Edmund G Brown, who defeated Richard Nixon four years before,

by over a million votes, and he defeated Jesse Unra, by over a million votes, running for reelection Unra by over a million votes running for reelectionist government. And he beat President Jimmy Carter by I think nine million votes. And then Walter Mondale just died the other day by over 15 million votes. I mean, it was just a very modest career. He was like graduate of Urika College.

And then he just went all the way up to the top of the country and stayed there. And he undoubtedly was a very good person. No, from this talk. But I gotta say this Ruben, Jordan, he, he wasn't Mr. Nyska. He came across brilliantly as Mr. Nyska. And that sense, he was a little like FDR.

Came across a very charming, nice guy. He came across brilliantly as Mr. Niske, and that sense he was like, if the R.I. came across the very charming nice guy. But Ronald Reagan didn't go to the funerals of the people who launched his career like Alfred Bloomingdale and Justin Dirk and Henry Selbotoritz. Nancy Reagan for all her peculiarities was a very human person.

Reagan had wonderful human qualities. I don't know if you or I, if we had a general out of the eggs that are round in the chest and collapsed long would walk into the't, you know, you know, recording a film there. I mean, he really did have a bulletin test, but, but he, he, he, he was fixated on certain targets. And while he was always, he was always sort of pleasant to everybody, I never got the impression he was a wash with human sentiment, where in a way Nancy was, you know, and that way she was kind of his ambassador to, you know, let your hair down, be spontaneous. Yeah, you sound like you were fond of her too. Yeah, I didn't know her as well. I thought she was admirably devoted to him. I mean, look, there's something about that California thing that spooks me a bitch.

Now, where she can sell these astrologers, see Sears and all that. I go, I go, I go, I go, whatever works for you. But that kind of thing makes me a bit uneasy. But yeah, she was very nice to you. I have to say whenever I met her, she was very, very nice. Like, I have to say whenever I met her Hillary Clinton was nice. So I don't like it politically. All right, so you're back in Britain,

you're running the telegraph, and you're also moving up through the ranks of British society, you're made a lord. How did that come about? Well, if you own a big newspaper, you don't have to do very much for that, you set up your party in an office, or indeed, now you don't even have to have that. I was installed by

Blair, but I was put up by the conservative leader at the time, William Egg. That's basically an ex officio thing. My predecessor, I had a news predecessor, was, you know, I was Lord, Lord Hartz, but when immediately they had a man prior to that Lord cameras. And what did it mean to you and what were the responsibilities that are associated with it? Well, it's what you want to make out of it. I mean, if I hadn't had my career interrupted as it was, I would have came in as an active peer and I gave a number of speeches in my arrangement, but the conservative whips office was that I would not presume to advise the British on their pensions

or even their schools, but I'd speak on foreign policy and the alliance matters, and that's what I did. And that was at the time of the Iraq War, when incidentally the Blair needed us, because while there were whips and has the comments, it can normally control the votes. It's a life of point and in the Lord. So you can do anything you want. Peers can get stuff. There's nothing I can do, but. And Blair needed the conservative peers to support his policy. So he, he, he phoned a number, including me, and we did support him. But it's the, if it's a serious subject, it is the best-devaking forum in the world. And you know, it has this image of being a bunch of

you know, down at the heel, probably drink sod and descendance of people who did brilliantly in a hundred years war or something. That isn't what it is. It's the numbers fluctuates around 800 members. Now, there are a fixed number of about 100 that are hereditary, but apart from a few specific officeholders, like the Duke of Norfolk, as Earl Marshall and Premier Duke and the Marcus of Solesbury and a couple of others. The elected, I'm sorry, the hereditary peers are elected by other hereditary. So they have a runoff to him,

and my friend Lord Rodermeer, owner of the Daily Mail, he didn't win. He was defeated by his fellow hereditary, Lord Ross Chow, Jacob Ross Ch Mail. He didn't win. He was defeated by his fellow paratroopers. Lord Ross child, Jacob Ross child. He didn't run, but he didn't run because he knew that he wouldn't win. And by the way, those are two people. There should be there. They're very good people. But they end up obviously influential people., in a serious debate, you know, you'll remember you have the previous chiefs of the defense staff, you have the heads of the main universities, you have leading academics,

Ace of Briggs, for example, you have cultural figures like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Yehudi Minu, when I began, and you have leaders of great corporations, the main trade unions, trade union congress, and so on. And senior cabinet officials, I mean, when I spoke in the Iraq war debate, it was right after the last previous defense secretary, and prior to him, the lastemer. And the way it works is it's very fair. The leaders of the parties

and I support it's determined an issue to be debated. And if people in their groups want an issue to be debated for support for they did that, so they meet me, I will give this, make it a say of 12 hour debate. I'm over several days. And then whoever leads and closes for each party, they're fixing it within reason and speak for as long as they want. The rest of the time is divided up equally between all of those who signed the desire to speak, which isn't put in public place. I mean, public to the people who have any business being in the policy west minister, not in the

street, but, you know, anyone, you know, any peer going by, right, I'll speak in that, he puts his name up, and's divided up equal allocation of time. There's a clock on all the four walls, the Lord Chancellor presides, and you can see your time, and you don't go over your time. There are no rude interruptions, and that awful main calling and barnyard imitations

you get nice account as a thing, very polite. And you sit down when you're finished and if you don't, there's sort of a clerk and Lord Chancellor stands up. At that point, you really have to say and everyone does. And then when the debate ends, everyone goes to the Pierce Bar and it continues. But on a serious subject, you get absolutely brilliant speakers. And it's just extremely well done. What's the net effect on British policy? It varies. I mean, sometimes the government needs it. And there are always some members of the government who sit in that sort of

frequently the Attorney General, for example, because they always want an extremely respected barista as the Attorney General of the country. And that person is likely not an MP, so you'll put in those lords and that's a researcher. But as a matter of fact, as the business of the country unfolds, generally speaking, the influence isn't great. I mean, they may add an amendment here or there, but these are technical matters. But the times arise when because there are no lips, and there is no discipline. I mean, people vote how they want to vote. The position of the laws of the courts can be very important.

Then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, when I was there, I'd expect to get back to this when all these days, you know, all of a sudden, you're a phone's ring and you're from, you know, some prominent figure in the government, you haven't heard from for the last five years, you know, they need your vote. And are the debates made available to the public

in any form other than... Yes, no, they're on television, as that comes into my mind. I should know that. And of course, they're also recorded and available to anyone who wants to, you know, in written form. So, all right, so does your empire,

your media empire at this point? Does it reach its peak with your acquisition of the telegraph? Are you growing this now? No, no, we went on after that. We bought the Chicago Sun times. We bought the Fairfax papers in Australia, very distinguished papers, and then we bought the Southam papers in Canada in 1996 and found out the national post little after that.

And so at that point it was right in there was when I was at its height. And it was a big company. In that industry it was a big company compared to Microsoft or something, but it was a big company in that industry. So what's happened to your relationship with Canada while you're in, while you're in Britain? Well, I came back often and I kept my house and office here. So I kept it up well, you know, I mean, I come back a lot and spend the practically the whole summer here. So, you know, I wasn't as if I was absent all together by any means. And, you know, when we had all the papers here, and I would see the papers,

I'd be talking to my associates in one business and another here all the time, it's in the United States a lot, you know, or headquarters in New York. So, I was moving around a lot, you know. I had home from different cities. All right. And are you pleased with the way things are going at this point in your life? Yeah, I am now. It was a very difficult patch.

And it was, it was very difficult. But, yes, now I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm pleased with everything's going on. I have been for, for some years. Yeah, I, well, sorry. I, I wasn't, I wasn't clear. I'm, when, when, when you're in your, your, the stage of expansion that you just described? Yes. Yes.

Although I started to have real misgivings about the future of the newspaper business, and they were well-founded misgivings, but we had an exit strategy that was being conducted very successfully until, as you said, near intro, those problems arise. So we talk about that a little bit. Okay. So what happened? You hit a peak, you were running this incredibly influential company

and trouble started to brew. Why, and what do you see when you look back? Well, I took a good look at the internet. I just did not see how newspapers could continue as a growth industry. And so although it was painful. And this was win. Starting in the, we see now starting, it was really, in starting in the early 90s, around 93. And so we sold Australia the very handsome profit and had a range no way where it came through with no capital gain assessment on a company. We bought basically a bankruptcy, not because it wasn't a good company.

It just been over levered financially. So it was a financial problem rather than operational one. And then where it really were, it really turned was with when I sold most of the Canadian newspapers to Issy Asper, Israel Asper, who owned the Global Television Network. And we were continuing to do that. We were rolling these papers out, and the idea is we keep the telegraph and basically and some of the smaller ones in the US that were particularly profitable. If you've seen the movie Groundhog, Punxatani, Pennsylvania, we own that paper. It's 50% of its total revenues were pre-tax profit. It was a very rich paper.

Not a big big, but very profit. And that's where we were proceeding when the legal problems arose. I mean, we were going to distribute the money, not as dividends, but buying in and canceling shares out of, you know, in a way that was voluntary. People wouldn't be, you know, they would tend to their shares to us because our offer would be good. And so we would compact the company and keep some cash and reposition it in different businesses.

But before we got into the implementation of the expensive part of that, these legal problems arose and then the whole thing moved sideways and downwards after that. What did you see on the horizon for newspapers that made you nervous about the continued viability of the business? I just didn't see how we could hold the readers

against the internet, that the incursions of the internet would be so. Irresistible. Yeah, we just didn't ultimately have a defense against it. And we tried various things. We ran, we put up internet sites, but they were really just enticements to come into the physical paper.

And essentially, that was the problem with the newspaper industry as a response. It put things on the internet, but most of you just give your content away free, in which case you're eventually going to go bankrupt, you're really trying to entice people to buy your product and pay for the huge physical plants with a print of papers and the vast networks that distribute them. And that was the problem. The internet had no cost of use, print and no cost of delivery.

Yeah, well, it's an also an incredibly effective place to advertise. And so, you know, my prognosis was right, and my remedy was right, is the, there were problems, but there weren't problems created by me. And what caused the legal problems? Well, we're getting into a real jungle here,

but essentially what happened was that some activist shareholders who were essentially in the greenmail business, they would buy into a company where they saw that ultimately the value of it could be greater, and then agitate for sale. So they would start stirring up shareholders creating scenes of the shareholders meetings and things like this. Well, I never had any problem with the shareholders meetings. And I write to the end, I never had the slightest problem

winning any vote at those meetings. But what they did was they exploited an American provision of the Securities and Exchange Act as amended, but enabled them to set up a special committee to review what they were complaining about, which was that some of these people when they bought assets from us, pay a non-compete fee to my associates and myself personally. And this is done in that business. And for example, in Canada, when we sold to busy Asperg, at the same time, the sun papers were per sailed because I believe McClean Hunter had a cross-media problem where they couldn't own the television cable and the newspaper in the same city. So you had papers coming up for sale in Calgary and Edmonton and Ottawa where we had papers. So Asperd wanted a non-compete from us.

You're saying we wouldn't then take his money going by another paper, hire everyone away from the place we just left and compete with them. So I was a reasonable thing to do. But anyway, we had people who complained and said it shouldn't go to us. And now in the case of Asper, that didn't go any more because you wrote me a letter saying that they wanted this and he wanted it from us. And there was no ambiguity about that. But some of the cases in the US were more ambiguous, but we could have managed all of that.

But once it got going, the special committee and its council discovered that the associate of mine had done some naughty things. And in the American manner, having done the naughty things, he said, all right, look, I will give evidence against Mr. Black. Never mind that Mr. Black had not done any nothy things. I'll give evidence against him if you will give me this deal. You say, and this was done through counsel. It's, you know, the plea bargain system is completely undermined, but

The plea bargain system is completely undermined, but entire functioning of the criminal justice system. So this was done. And so the next thing I knew, we were all being charged with things we didn't do. And I've ultimately been found not to have done. But meanwhile, it took 15 years of my life to get rid of it. All in the asset was destroyed. Everything we'd all worked 30 years to build

was reduced to nothing, the bankers say, you know, which incidentally meant that more than one and a half billion dollars of shareholder value on the hands of people, you know, the shareholder governance movement. It was a complete fraud. There's a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites taking fees for themselves and ruining companies. How did you, how did you survive it? What enabled you to stay? Well, I knew that I was... Well, to stay functional enough to serve as a tutor, for example. Well, I knew that I was... Well, to stay functional enough to serve as a tutor, for example. Well, I knew that I had not in fact broken the law, so I was fighting the righteousness to fight. And I had the historic knowledge that the alternative to fighting was to be just absolutely eliminated in every respect except physically and conceivably in that way too. I just lost her altogether.

I lose the will to lose. You have to fight. You just have no, you know, it's the cornered, it's the cornered animal. You have to fight or you're going to be, you know, it's the cornered animal you have to play, or you're going to be, you know, white dead. And then, and then, in the area, I think you're getting at maintenance of morale, you know, it was very difficult at times, but I'm of that view that believes that essentially life is a privilege. And you make the most of it, however bad it is. And unless you're, you know, for terminally ill in a death story, you can always derive

some satisfaction from the privilege of life, even if it's just going outside breathing the fresh air and looking at a blue sky and seeing leafy trees moving around in the breeze. It's still wonderful when you compare it to nothing, which is the alternative. And so there is a duty to carry on and both my experience individually and as an observer and such acquaintances I have with history shows that fortunes change. And if you, you know, if you can persevere long enough, you come through things and live to fight another day. So, I mean, it sounds. And you end up. And no, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say so.

Not when it's not when it's acted out in reality. And you said that you're, you're satisfied with your life at the moment, that it's full in its rich. Oh, it's good now. It's good now. I know. Look, I'm following in the Polans' advice to regain lost territory in the first order of their loss. So I'm sort of bootstrapping myself up in one way and another. But, you know, I look, I have a new perspective now that I would not have had. And I look, I'm not saying I'm glad I went through all I did, but it had its rewards and its rich experiences, including the ones you mentioned about the prison. But I would never have had the prominence as a commentator, but I do. I have millions and millions of readers in the United States.

And I'm astounded at how many people read my stuff. And when I get invitations to speak and go on tours and things, you go out and, you know, when we're not hobbled by a pandemic, go out and cruise us in the Mediterranean and talk to people and cruise ships and things and you go out and you know when we're not hobbled by a pandemic, go out and cruise us in the Mediterranean and talk to people and cruise ships and things. And it's also you know when I when I when I when this came upon me I'd written two books the Duplest you went and then went about my stealth which was really just to deal with accounts of my career that I considered not to be accurate. I was just setting the records right. I didn't think they were malicious. I didn't think they were very informative.

So that's what I did. But I had written two books on it. And as you kind of mentioned, they had said I've written eight since then. And they've all been from modestly to very successful. And I like being right. And I absolutely would not have had the time to do it if I'd had to be a functioning chief executive of a $2 billion a year sales company.

I mean, it is a full-time job, and you've got to do it right. So when you look back, what do you think you did right? If you're, there's lots of people who are watching this interview, who are trying to put their lives together in one way or another and looking for guidance in their attempts to do that. What, what is it that you've done or what is it that you've seen other people do that you admired and that were successful that were, was particularly, was particularly productive and useful were successful, that was particularly

productive and useful and meaningful, let's say, and maybe even right. Well, I think people who do what they have an aptitude to do are much happier than unfortunately very large number of people who are stuck in occupations they don't like. So it's been my good fortune that either I was able to do what I wanted to do and had some aptitude to do. I was able to make that choice or I locked into it. I didn't realize. I had absolutely no idea that I had an aptitude for it, but as a turned out, I did. I mean, I, it's like anything else, I guess I had always assumed that practically anybody who wrote a book of history really knew a lot about it, I was competent writer and did a good job. Well, now that I've done some of them, as you

said, I wrote a book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There's a vast literature about Roosevelt. And some of the people have written about him, been very good. But a lot of them, it's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. It's not well written, and it's not accurate. And they miss a lot of things. It's even more so the case with Mr. Nick's name, so terribly controversial. And indeed, the reason I wrote about this to men

was to fill a gap. I never write where I think I have nothing to do at. I felt that Roosevelt was divided between worshipers and these people uttering this nonsense about him being a communist. The traitor that was class who gave Eastern Europe a way to style and all those kind of nonsense. And the thing that it was to put it out, he was neither a saintly man nor a communist.

He was extremely important and capable and talented and political leader and leader of the government. But for the reasons I enumerated, not out of Kant and the emotionalism. And with Mr. Nixon, he was just in pillory, essentially, and then with a clove and feed and horns on his head, and he wasn't. It was very good present. And by the way, there's still no probative evidence that he committed to crimes. He admitted himself. He made some serious mistakes. And certainly some of the people must enter out to commit to crimes.

But there's no evidence that he did. And the one term that he served was one of the most successful in the history of the country. If you take into account that when he came in, there were 550,000 American draftees at the ends of the area with no exit plan, 200 to 400 coming back dead every week. No relations with China, no arms control talks, riots everywhere in the US every week, all over the place. He stopped all that. I think that's very, very good present. Anyway, it was reassuring to me that I could actually do that, because

I had always assumed before that the people who did it did it adequately. Well, some of them do, but a lot of them don't. And there's always room for improvement or almost always. And so I gradually, my horizons expanded. And now I'm in finance and rebuilding my fortunes somewhat, but the exact opposite to how I began in business where I mean, as far as anyone in the public would know, where because I took over a company that was made famous by a very famous businessman, EP Taylor, and Bud Maccigald in particular.

I was in the public eye all the time. And as a young man, it's naturally gonna be irritating to a lot of people. Well, now I'm not. I mean, I am up to a point, but as a commentator, no one has a clue what business is. They are private and they're in different countries and no one knows.

And so I don't have that problem of sort of wrestling with a public relations monster all the time. And I think you mentioned in one of the books that I read that you in retrospect wish that you would have handled the public relations end of things, I suppose in a more sophisticated manner or earlier, and you didn't realize how critically important it might be. Is that, am I recalling that accurately? Is that a fair solution?

With substantially so, yes. But my view was there's no way to avoid a lot of attention. So what I should do is meet it head on and at least cause to be discarded the caricature that all business people are fundamentally stumbled bombs itself expression. I can't actually give a fluent explanation of what I'm doing. And secondly, to advance the idea that business is in fact not just a bunch of grubby businessmen scruffing for cash. It actually isn't an interesting subject. And I thought those were correct premises and I was successful at that. But where what you said is exactly right is I didn't appreciate as much as I perhaps

should have or would have if I were more experienced. How tired people can get of someone who doesn't have a natural call in their attention. I think this incidentally was one of the chief problems of the immediate former president of the US. He always believed, I've known him a long time, he always believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity, no matter how apparently negative it was. Well, up to a point he was right, but not it wasn't right once he became president,

because once he got to be in Roosevelt's phrase, the head of the American people, he didn't need the publicity. And he didn't want to, was undignified for him to be seeking, let alone from the tolerate so much of it, to be beating sessions, whereas his enemies challenged him and he responded.

I mean, he had reached a position where you can safely rise above most of that. and just spoke when you have something to say. I went my book, Red Roosevelt, there's a little piece in a letter he sent to someone who had been a colleague of his in the Wilson administration, where he was saying how a president has to know when to be in front of the public and when not, and when it will irritate the public and when not. Well, I wish I had, obviously I never had a position, 1% of the consequence of being President of the US, but I wish I had taken that on board, even at the modest scale of where I was, you know, before I embarked on this. But, journalists. But part of surviving and growing older is your learning

things. I think perhaps that's a good place to stop. OK. Well, I've kept you too long. I hope I hope either people find somebody interesting or if not, they should put it on when they're afraid they may be suffering from insomnia. Well, look, thank you extremely for for talking with me today and for. No, it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure, Jordan. I appreciate it very much and I hope we get to do it again. There's many things that we didn't talk about. I didn't talk about any of your opinions about current about current affairs or or about future many things that I would have like to have discussed but we can do it another time.

Great. you