TRIGGERnometry - Trans Activists Tried to Ruin My Restaurant

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Restauranteur James Chavaliani joins us in the studio to discuss how a fundraising dinner for Ukrainian orphans with JK Rowling lead to his family-run business being attacked by trans activists.  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Appreciate that. This is not how this is, this is not how this should ever go. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest is a friend of the show

and a restauranteau James Cavarini. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me both. Listen, man, it's great. have you on. I wish the circumstances were different. We'll talk about that in the second. But before we get into that, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Right. So,

both my parents came over from Italy to open restaurants in the UK. My father was part of the sort of first wave of Italian restaurants that opened up. Remember that we've only really had restaurants in this country for like 55, 60 years. My dad settled on a little place in Kenton High Street, Hortle of Portugal, which opened in 1967, I believe. And then started working his absolute butt off as hard as he could. And then got married to my mum. My mum joined the business again. And, you know, fast forward 55, 56 years.

And here we are still going strong. And it's a, you know, it's a restaurant where we go to celebrate birthdays and occasions and all of that. You are great. The food's great. Everything is great. But there have been some events recently. Yeah. having there. Yes. So basically the whole point about having a neighbourhood restaurant is you have to be

a central part of your neighbourhood, I believe, and that you want to plug yourself in as much as you can into the community. You want to be, if you want to be successful, you've got to be indispensable, right? So when, in the good times and the bad times, for example, so during COVID, we made sure that everybody was taking care of in terms of dropping around food to elderly people and vulnerable people. And obviously, when things happen around the world that your customers are interested in, you want to be part of that. You really want to play. yourself into that because it's very important. And it's a very emotional business.

And you want to be there for your customers when they need those kind of those kind of events, right? And JK Rowling, who is a woman that I admire greatly, not just for her hard work, but also for her courage as well.

Basically with Suzanne Moore, ex-Guardian columnist, another woman who I admire, we decided to raise money for JK Rowling's charity in Ukraine called Lumos. Lots of people got on board. We decided not to publicise the event prior because of the negative attraction that it might bring with it.

And then after the event, Joanne, JK was kind enough to basically put out a tweet thanking me for raising money for Lumos. We raised almost £20,000. Which was for one night's dinner, which is just, you know, not bad. And all that money is going to go to help, you know, orphans in Ukraine and help kids where, you know, who genuinely need that money.

unfortunately because she has her views which are entirely you know fair enough in my opinion people then jump on the bandwagon and I start getting you know one-star reviews on Google and you know don't go to this restaurant because this guy's a transphobe and this and this and the other and then I go to work one day and find that the place has been the windows at the front which we had sort of tempered security glass has been smashed another pane of glass has been smashed somebody's got entry into the place

and ransacked stupid stuff, you know, like smashed up a bit, bottles of booze, that kind of stuff, with their left. Now, what's really important is that there is zero hard evidence connecting the physical attacks and the online stuff. The online stuff you know is coming from trans rights activists because they say things like that I'm a homophobe, I'm a transphobe, and all this kind of stuff, which is absolutely baloney.

But the fact that it happened 24 hours after the first online attacks happened made me very, very suspicious. How many times have your restaurant been smashed up in the 55 years that has been in existence? I mean, you're always going to get some sort of break-ins, but we haven't had any trouble for at least a decade. Right. And then it happens 24 hours after this.

Yeah, okay. Right. And what was that like turning up at your restaurant and just seeing the effect that it's had? The thing is that when, the first thing you feel is just, just like, you know, you just like DefCon 5 levels of anger. You know, you just think, well, why the hell do I have to deal with this kind of crap? Yeah. That's the first thing.

And then you realize, well, you know, why shouldn't I have to deal with it? Everyone else in the world has to deal with crap. Why should I be any different, right? So, like, you know, the whole why me, why not me thing. Yeah. You know? And then you start to realize, and then, I don't know, man. I mean, it's like maybe it isn't connected.

Maybe it is a coincidence. The truth is, you know, will I ever know? I don't know. I got another person, you got other people now online, you know, somebody now from Florida has got involved in telling that they're going to talk to the place. You know, so it's like, I don't need this kind of stuff, it's like, apart from the fact that, you know,

JK Rowling's views are J.K. Rallin's views, my views are your view, and my views are my views, and everybody has their own personal views. It's like, it wasn't a gender-critical event. We weren't going around saying to people, we support, you know, the exclusion of trans people from women's only space. We weren't saying any of the sort. We were there exclusively to raise money

and to help a deference situation in Ukraine, and that was it. I just can't believe that we're having this conversation, really. When did you start noticing that something was up? Was it the moment that the tweet came out and you started to then start to see responses? Or did it take a little bit of, a while? It took a little bit of while because I'm very careful about what I put out on social media.

I mean, most people, you know, I think you have to be guarded, especially when you've got a public-facing restaurant. And also, I don't like to get involved in politics and my customers. And you shouldn't be, I honestly believe that if you're, if you've got a public business, you should be there for the public. And it doesn't matter if people are left being right-wing, trans rights activists or gender critical, as far as I'm concerned, everybody's welcome in the restaurant because they're there to, they're there to have time. And by the way, that's always been my experience. Like, we get on, but I don't know what your political views are because that's not what we talk about. Yeah, but why would you, why would you bring that up over dinner, right?

You don't want to go and ruin somebody's decent dinner and go and talk about religion or politics. It's just like, just leave them alone. Yeah. You know, they're there on a date night or they're there for whatever and, you know, and they're there to have a good time and you're there to facilitate that process. Unless you don't want the date to go well. And so that's actually it. So the idea that we kind of like, you know, put out this, take this political stance. It's absolutely. only. But obviously you can't help have a bias by liking certain tweets. And I've liked certain tweets by Julie Bendel and Suzanne Moore of things that I think are eminently sensible personally.

And so people then link two and two together and come up with the wrong number. And therefore start calling me a transphobe and a homophobe and all this kind of other stuff. Did you ever think that you'd be in that position where you put on an event? Yeah. Which is not connected in any shape or form to this particular issue. Yeah. And then you just get sucked into this vortex where you become another talking point in the culture war.

I think that at the end of the day, it's almost like, it's like spin the bottle some days on Twitter, who the outrage is going to get directed at. And you guys have probably had it a lot more than I have. I mean, it's quite, I mean, this is the first... Yeah, but James, sorry to interrupt, there's a difference, man. Like, what we do is political by design.

Yeah. Right? If when we get shit on social media, we're like, well, that's fair enough, it's what we do. I mean, the show is called Trigonometry. That's fine because we discuss controversial issues and some people aren't going to like that. Yeah.

But you didn't do that. This is kind of why I really wanted to speak with you about this because I am so angry about this on your behalf because, look, I don't think it's legitimate for people to go and destroy your place, whether that's online by writing fake reviews or physically. Even if you did a gender-critical event, but you didn't even do that.

it's just this person who happens to have written some really, really popular books, who happens to have taken, by the way, a very nuanced and carefully worded position on the gender issue. And you did a fundraiser for something completely unrelated with her.

And now you're coming to your restaurant, which is a family restaurant. You've got kids there. You've got people there, right? You've got staff there. And it's getting attacked because you stood next to a person who said some things that some people don't like.

Yeah. That's basically where we're at. That's exactly where we're at. And you message me afterwards going, like, it's sort of something along the lines of serves me right for sticking my neck out. You didn't even stick your neck out. You didn't do anything. Yeah.

There is that. You didn't do anything. I know. I know. But the thing is that at the end of the day, people will say, well, it's guilt by association. Yeah. People, and this is just to play devil's advocate. People will say, well, you shouldn't have had an event of the J.K. Rowling.

Well, she's not fucking Hitler, mate. She's not Hitler. I mean, she used to some people, ma. But you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get it. Conner, I totally get it. I know, I know, it's bonkers. And the thing is that I don't really care about the break-in.

I know. And that's partly because I don't care about it for two reasons. One, because it's a pane of glass. If it was my house, I would have cared where my wife and my children's sleep, that would be different. But I've also got a big 55-kilon mastiff at home, so she would have dealt with that. So I don't really care about the pain of glass. I don't really care about the man-a-glass thing,

because at the end of the day, it's only stuff. Yeah. Okay. I do care about the one-star reviews. because as you know, having a digital business, it stays on there forever. And somebody calling me a transphobe, and I can report that to Google,

and I can say to Google, look, this is BS. You can see that this is BS, please can you take it down? And then they see that that gets taken down, and then start getting clever about it. And then they're like, the owner's really mean and the food's crap. It's like, come on, man, it's like, fair enough.

I'm not always missed a way of sunshine. But like, you know, leave the poor chef alone. He's been there 35 years, and he knows how to cook a bowl of spaghetti by now. the fact that you've got these reviews, what kind of impact does it have on your business? It's huge, especially now coming out to tourie season. You've had three years of the most tolered possible time for hospitality, right?

You've had lockdown, then unlocked down, then masking, then social distancing, then you can only serve outside and it's pissing down with rain. You know what I mean? As you've got all that crap to deal with, you're just coming out of that. We're now coming into a massive economic recession. Food costs are through the roof, staff costs. through the roof, your customer's feeling the pinch as well. So the absolute last thing you need now is, you know,

a shit cloud of basically problems. So it's just bringing more stuff to the fall, which you just don't need. And at the end of the day, you know, like I said, it's like your digital shop fund. Most people will check out a restaurant on Google before they decide to walk through the door. Most people will read an Amazon review before trying to buy a product now.

So whether you like it or not, you have that digital shop front. And it's literally the equivalent of somebody like, you know, painting on your shop sign, do you not bother eating here. This place will give you hysteria or something. You know, that's what the equivalent is. So you will lose,

and you will never be able to measure how much business you'll lose because of it. Because you don't know how many people will look on that and see those one-star reviews and think, well, you know, they're not going to know the new ones. Yeah. A lot of them won't even realize what's happened. They'll just see lots of one-stars

and go, oh, this restaurant's gone downhill. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the way that the way that we're set up, well, you know, from an evolutionary perspective as well. In fact that, you know, you need about 25 or 35-star reviews to counteract, to counteract every bad one-star review because a negative comment holds so much more sway than a positive comment.

You always remember the things you did badly. You never remember the things you did well. That's just human nature. That's with all of us. You know, so a one-star review is like, I'll just stick a five-star review above it. It's like, it's not that simple. It's not like for like. You know, I think Andre Agassiz said that.

when he, you know, he said, you know, the thrill you feel when you win a tournament is nothing compared to the dejection you feel when you lose, you know, and that thrill goes like that, but their dejection stays with you forever. And it's the same with Donald and the views, you know, that one star thing is really massively, massively damaging. And people don't realize, because they just think, I should spit a fun, I'll just stick one star. Apart from the idiot who said he was going to burn down my restaurant, who I'd quite like to meet in person. With the mastiff in right there.

But we're joking about it. But as somebody who has received death threats, we both have. Even there's the logical side of your brain which is going, look, this person is X, Y and Z. But there's still a little bit of you that goes, well, hang on a second. Yeah. I don't know this person. Yeah. I don't know what they're capable of.

I agree. Yeah. I agree. I agree. It's like the theory of the drunken driver always has the right of way. Yeah. Like if a guy's careering down the road On the opposite side of the road going straight for you

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Ridge.com forward slash trigger. That's ridge.com forward slash trigger and use our special promo code, which is of course, trigger. This is why I'm so angry, James, because you know, you're a fighter and you've always been and your restaurant's gone up and down and you've always worked extremely hard. And that's actually what we usually talk about, the importance of working hard and being courageous in the face of difficulty. And I really admire that about you in this situation too. but I'm angry about it on your behalf because what this is is intimidation and bully and it's trying to stop people from even going near a person

who happens to have an opinion that some people don't like. Yeah, yeah. But they didn't even know my opinion. That's what I'm saying. I'm like one step removed from the opinion. I just happen to own a bricks and water site where somebody with an opinion raised money for charity. Well, actually, I raised money to charity with her and with Shuz-Emort.

Yeah. You know, and it's like the whole guilt by association, thing is just absolute lunacy. It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And I think it's interesting because you you look at the profiles for people who do criticize you on Twitter. And you look at the profiles of people who are

writing these one-star reviews. And there is a sort of correlation of the more deranged the comments are the number of flags and the number of little emojis they have after their name, right? So you think, okay, fair enough, maybe these people, maybe they're just having a tough time with life, whatever, maybe they're angry, maybe they're incredibly resentful.

I don't know what's going on with their lives, so who am I to judge? But leave me the hell alone, man. It's like take out your anger on something that's worth fighting for. This is not worth fighting for. Me helping to raise money for orphan kids in Ukraine is not the right target here. And I think a lot of people, I think they're just confused.

They don't even know where they are now. They don't even know what the target is because I think that things change so quickly now on social media that it just seems to be this kind of endless, you know, barrage of abuse. Like I said, it's almost like a game to spin the bottle. It's like, well, the bottle is spinning over there, so let's all just direct our bile and our hate over this direction. And I think a lot of it is just misguided nonsense.

They just don't understand, almost in one sense. You know, and I think it's kind of, you know, it's kind of a bit like veganism in one sense, you know? He wants more people to hate him. No, but I mean, in the sense that I have vegan friends and, you know, That is the worst excuse. I'm a racist, I've got a black friend. I think he said love the dolls don't count. But I mean, it's true that I've got vegan customers.

I do generally have vegan friends. But it's interesting that when it comes to their specific reasons for being vegan, a lot of it, a lot of it has come from a very almost myopic view of the food chain, a myopic view of how they want to interact with the food chain. And I think it's sort of similar with people who view of their role in society. How do you mean to talk to us more about the vegan thing? Well, it's like, you know, so it's like most people who live in the countryside, most people who see how, you know, how the sort of natural world operates, you know, aren't vegan.

It seems to be an extremely urban thing. It seems to be a very young urban thing. Like 93 or 91% are vegans at age between 20 and 30 or between 20 or 35. Because they'd die after that. most of them don't have kids. Right. Most of them live alone and most of them live in urban areas. So they have this very kind of like filtered view.

And it's a bit like what, you know, our mutual friend, Rob Henderson, would say about luxury beliefs. They had this belief that they think enables them to consider themselves a better person because of animal welfare and all that kind of stuff. But what they don't realize is the knock-on effect that it has later on down, you know, further on down

the social chain towards maybe those in a kind of more service economy or those in a more rural economy and that kind of stuff, right? So, for example, they don't think about the effect of maybe the woman who has to harvest their Kinwar and Bolivia who can no longer afford the staple crop because the prices shot through the roof because somebody in Islington is prepared to pay 10 times their value for it. Or they don't think about maybe the deforestation for soy to make their, you know, their soy milk. Or they don't maybe think of it. Or they don't maybe think about the fact that there are whole villages in Central America now that don't have any clean, portable water

because it's all being diverted off avocado plantations because everybody wants avocados and toast. And they don't make that connection. For them, it's just like, plant-based equals good, meat equals bad, and that's the world that I'm going to want to live in. And it's very similar, I think, with, you know, I think there are a lot of these beliefs. I think there are a lot of these things that they don't,

they just don't see how it can hurt other people, And that's not to say that they're bad people for having their beliefs. You know, I don't believe that vegans are terrible people for the, you know, Christ for the love of God. I just think that they have their view. But I think if they actually went out and actually had a look at the reality of the food chain and the reality of what it takes to actually bring food from a field into your plate, maybe they would look at things a little bit differently.

You see what I mean? And I think that's the same with a lot of trans rights activists. I think it's the same with a lot of people who have a lot of these, you know, these beliefs. you know, and, you know, they just, they just, you know, we all live in a bubble, really. But I think in an urban environment, I think that tends to be a lot more to, you know. It's also about certainty, isn't it? Because if your narrative is incredibly simple, then you can be very certain about it. Yeah.

This is, it's a black and white issue. Yeah. This is completely wrong. I am outraged. Yeah. Something needs to be done. Yeah. But if the issue is complicated and requires thought

and it's got nuance and actually you kind of see both sides of the particular issue, it's very difficult to be outraged about it and to generate traction. Because you have to put yourself in the other person's position. You have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to put yourself in the position of the person that you're arguing against in order to see it from their side. And most people don't want to do that because it gives them a sense of it.

Because then in a way it takes away your immediate righteousness and it takes away the immediate, the feeling that you must be, it's the right side of history claim. And then you takes away your crutch of saying, well, I can do whatever I want because I know that fundamentally I'm going to be vindicated in the end because people will look back on this and see that I was right. You know, are you sure about that?

Yeah, the thing that I find so discomforting about the idea of the right side of history is it comes down to certainty. Yeah. How do you know that you are on, inverted commas, the right side of history. You must either be incredibly intelligent and have powers where you can look into the future

or you're actually very arrogant. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, these people claim to be on the right side of history what, you go and smash a local family-owned businesses' windows and you were on the right side of history by doing that. Well, yeah. No. Yeah, I mean, I just would caveat that by saying that,

We don't know for sure. We don't know for sure. We don't know for sure. You smash it virtually with one-star reviews, which I'm more damaging. Or you spend three days basically on Twitter saying that I did it myself by saying that the glass broke the wrong way. Somebody with a forensic thing. You know what really bothers me about all of this as well? Because before you came in, I was saying to the boys here at the studio, I was going,

do you think we talk about trans so much now? And the thing that gets lost in the conversation for me is we've had a bunch of trans people on the show who identify or dress as or behave as or whatever words you want to put to it as the opposite sex to the one that they were born. And we're perfectly happy to treat them as they present. But why wouldn't you do?

To respect them for what they are. And my problem with all of this is, how is this helping trans people? How is any of this helping trans people? This isn't about trans people. This is about some people wanting to have some kind of righteousness. And I went and I did and I... You haven't helped trans people.

What's happening now, man, is the research is showing it. Now, acceptance of LGBT people is going down. It's going down because of shit like this. You're not helping trans people these people. Yeah. I mean, there was my very good friend Hadley Freeman said this really, really brilliant. She was like, look, I get the whole fact that each generation wants to have their cause.

You know, our parents had their cause, you know, for gay rights or before that was civil liberties and gay rights and everything. And you get to a point, and you know, and even Douglas Murrayarch uses, you get to a point where it's like, well, for an organization like Stonewall, for example, you know, set up by my friend Simon Fancho, who was at the event as well, you get to a point where you're like, okay, great, so we're now on equal paring in terms of the law. So, you know, gay couples can then get married, they can adopt children, just the same way that heterosexual couple girl.

So it's like, so what else we're going to fight for now? You know, and Anne Hadley would argue and I think she's right in the sense that you know, it's also a great way of telling off your parents if you're a kid. If you're a 16-year-old kid, what's the thing that you really want to do?

You want to tell her if you're dad and you want to call him a bigger because you've got that whole testosterone and surgeon through your system and you want to break out this old dad, you don't know what it's like. This is the 2022, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, we've all done that.

You've all been there. So it's like, so what's the cause, right? What's the cause? It's like, yeah, okay, fair enough. Fight for the planet. Okay. You know, fight for, I guess, animal rights. I guess if you're entitling with a vegan thing.

And then, you know, you can't really fight for gay rights anymore. You can't really fight for civil rights anymore. Because legally, in the UK, at least, thank God, we're at the point now where we don't have to worry about that anymore, for the most part. So then you're like, well, how else can we do it? You know? And I think, I think it is, I think a lot of it is that. And I think that's why a lot of people, I think,

they get to a certain point in their life, especially maybe when they hit middle age, and they kind of start to understand more the sort of nuance of history. And then maybe they come out of it, maybe they don't. I mean, we'll have to wait and see what happens now. But it is worrying that something happens online

and it's now filtering into the real world. Because before we would have said, like, look, maybe three or four years ago, we would have said, oh, these are just a few idiots on Twitter. But then it's having real world impact on your business with the Google review. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 100%.

And again, going back to the luxury belief things, you don't realize that I employ 27 people. So we've got 27 people. If my business goes down, like any small business, like any labor-dependent business, when your income starts coming through the door, it starts to end. The first thing you're going to have to do is make layoffs.

Because, like, fully 5% to 50% of all your income gets spent on staff. Absolutely. Right. So they don't think about the poor guy who has to get laid off because of the one-star reviews. They don't think about

That kind of stuff. They just don't make that connection. They just think, you know, this guy's associated with JK Rowling. He deserves, you know, a one-star review and Google for it. That's the end of the story. And it's like, really, come into the restaurant.

Let me introduce you to the guys who work here. Let me show you what they're doing. Let me show you the way that they're turning their arms around. Let me show you how they're looking after their family and how they're putting food on the table for their kids, you know. And the thing is about the restaurant business, as a general rule is that anyone who's read down and out in Paris in London, or kitchen confidential

or has worked in restaurants understands that it's a bit of a pirate ship you're working with guys who don't fit the mould of quote-unquote polite society. It's like comedy. It's like comedy.

You're dealing with guys that aren't quote-unquote employable in an office and a 9-to-5 Monday to Friday. And there are more people like that in society than most folks realize. They just don't see them. Yes. They don't see them because they're delivering,

their delivery on a Friday night, they're cooking their dinner, they're washing their dishes on a Saturday night in the local restaurants, and they're doing all this stuff, this kind of whole hidden economy of workforce. And the thing is that we've always had a really amazing agreement in this country

since the days of the empire, which is you come and do the jobs that we don't want to do, basically, and we'll leave you in peace. And, you know, all of us come from immigrant families in this room, right? And we all benefited from that. Hell, I know my family

did. You know, my dad came here as a 17 year old or 18 year old, death illiterate immigrant, worked down the mines in Cumbria, in White Haven, six mile down, digging out iron ore underneath the North Sea, and then eventually

set himself up in business. There was, like, he could not have done that if Britain hadn't been welcoming towards that. But the agreement was that he had to do the jobs that they didn't want to do. And it works. And so, long as that's open and that's fair, then everybody realizes that. The thing is that when those businesses that rely on the service economy like restaurants, when they start to falter, you know,

and one-star reviews will make them falter, what happens to those people? Where are they going to go? Because if they don't have stable jobs, and if they're not working 55, 60 hours a week, put food on the table and sending money back home and raising the standard of living everywhere that their money goes, what's going to happen? Do they go on benefits? Because that's pretty much, you know, or they just get a job somewhere else. Do you know what I mean?

It's like you've got to think about this kind of stuff. And we employ guys who are ex-prisoners. One of our best guys spent seven years in Brixton. He's come out. He's got a steady girlfriend. He's got one kid. He's got another kid on the way. And he's really doing well.

But he needs work. He needs discipline. He needs to be steady work because otherwise he can't do it. I've got guys who come over from, you know, from every country imaginable to send money back home, mostly at the moment, Romania, and they send money back home, and they raise the standard of living in Romania. And the best way to do that is just to allow immigration, because they can earn five, six, seven, eight, ten times more what they can in Romania

than they can do in London just by doing the jobs that no one else wants to do. Pot wash, salad wash, food prep, all that kind of stuff, right? And it's easy to sneer at these people, and it's easy to say, all that kind of stuff doesn't matter. until you get to a point that we're at now where that labour force gets turned off because of if you're a remainder you blame Brexit and if you're a Brexiteer, you blame COVID and furlough

the realities we're never going to know. We don't have a pipeline in place to replace that labour force, right? So that gets shut down, that gets turned off and then all of a sudden people start getting their holidays cancelled and they go, well, I can't go on holiday to Tuscany in half term because EasyJets cancelled my flights. and it's only then that they realize. It's like, dude, who do you think's been humping your baggage around the airports for the last, you know, for the last seven years?

And it's only now that they're starting to make that connections, you know what I mean? So anything I can do to raise that awareness to say, look, guys, any opinion that you have about all this stuff and anything that any kind of, what I was going to say, any kind of footprint that you leave online, especially for businesses, matters. because, you know, at the end of day it all boils down to employment and it all boils down to people putting foods on their tables for their kids. But it's like you said, they didn't think about that.

They kicked the one star. Yeah, they left a, you know, a crappy comment. They don't. They don't care. They're on the right side of history and they go about their day and they've probably forgotten about it now. And they probably, and if they do it to me, they'll probably spend all day in front

on that computer sat there in their underpants going one star, one star, one star, one star. And it's like, what can you do with these people? people at the end of the day. It's like how can you convince them to become stand-up members of society and go out there and stop being somebody who just breaks stuff all day? That's the thing, James, because destroying things is always easier than building them. You know that. You've built a business. That's what we're doing here. And that's why, you know, I've always admired you as a person because of your attitude. But also, people should know El Portico is a great restaurant. The food

is incredible. Like, my wife is always banging on, when are we going back? When are we going back? When are we going back. It's the place we go to celebrate the birthdays, the big events, the good months that we have here. And you're a great host. The people are wonderful. The food's amazing. So I know that our audience will really resonate with what you've said here. And I know that you'll see a lot of them coming through the door supporting the business. And it's not supporting the business. It's enjoying great food and a great place. So I'll encourage all of them to go out and check it out. And we'll be coming back very, very soon, James. Very, very soon. you know what

we've always got one more question and I have a feeling you're going to have a very interesting answer to her the one that we always ask at the end which is what's the one thing we're not talking about but we really should be I would honestly say what's the biggest knock on effect of your opinion

anybody's opinion what's that knock on effect look like you know what's the knock on effect of your your whole life philosophy that everybody wants to pin their lives around now that's what I would say James, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for all the best to you. Look, I always believe that, you know, when we started the show, we were just two idiot comedians who wanted to, you know, find out why the world seemingly was going mental around us. But now I feel that so much of this, this cancel stuff and destroying people's lives over things they've said or who they stood next to or who they raised money with or whatever, the only way that ends is if people who are victims of that

are rewarded for making a stand. Yeah. And I know that that's going to happen here with you. Yeah. Yeah. And the outpouring of love has been amazing. And I want more of that to happen. There are a lot of people who are going to watch this.

And I know that all of them, there will be people among that who will contribute to that. So I'm determined. That's why I was desperate. When you send me that message going, serves me right for sticking my head out. I was like, no, no. This is not how this is going to go. Appreciate that. This is not how this is, this is not how this should ever go.

And you're not the sort of person that's seeking out attention or trying to to put yourself in a position to be cancelled so you can profit from it. You're just a good guy who happened to raise some money and this has happened and I'm determined that you benefit. You do better out of this and I'm sure that you will. Thank you. Thanks for coming on, man. I'm sure our audience will be supportive of you. Thank you for having me. And thanks for your time. And actually some very interesting thoughts. We'd love to have you back sometime to talk about the restaurant business about any time. Thank you so much, guys. If you've enjoyed this show, episodes always go out Wednesdays and Sunday 7pm UK time

raw shows are always 7pm UK time same time and for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go it's also available as a podcast take care and see you soon