Garrett Graham
speaker
369 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Jul
Garrett Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right. But I should also say there does seem to be a real non-malicious cultural difference here, which is just like... There are different boundaries in different countries around journalism. And one of those differences in the UK is that reporters are a bit more comfortable offering sources like some compensation for information.
Like I found some poll data saying that 53% of reporters in the UK believe paying people for confidential information is justified on occasion compared to 5% of journalists in the US.
And on the other, like, this is also just a guy who has sustained an entire career off of selling the information that he does have. So, like, it shouldn't be totally surprising that he's asking for this. Like, in some ways, it's a perfectly reasonable request. But the agent ends up offering us the butler for 1,500 pounds, which is like 2,000-ish dollars. We politely decline. Yeah.
But actually it was okay because this is around the same time that we're about to fly to England.
And honestly, like, it's funny that you say it that way because that is kind of the extent that I thought about it. I was just like, oh, it's over there. Like, we'll be closer to the object of our reporting later.
Oh, Derek. Maybe. Honestly, it's a little embarrassing listening back to this that we just kind of hopped on the tube and went to Buckingham Palace without a reporting plan.
We show up, there was a massive crowd. There's like a royal marching band, like playing brass instruments as we walked by. But bad news was like the reason why it was such a madhouse outside of the palace gates, we quickly realized was that we happened to be there in a month when the palace was closed to tourists, which meant for us that we weren't gonna be able to get inside of the palace.
So we walk around the perimeter of the palace, literally like looking at my phone's Google Maps to like see how many feet we were away from the indoor pool.
I just wanted to know if we could see it, like if there was some gap in the shrubbery that would allow us a glimpse of the building in real life. It was a noble idea. There wasn't. There wasn't.
So that was attempt number one, which was in May. But honestly, I personally left feeling not that disheartened because I knew I was going to be back in London because I had a friend getting married there in August. And so I knew I'd have another shot. And also August happens to be a month that Buckingham Palace is open to tourists.
And so I booked not one, but two palace tours while I was going to be over there.
And I show back up, my second time at Buckingham Palace in about two months. And the first tour I had booked was like the actual inside of the palace, like as much of the interiors that they'll show to visitors. And so I walk up the side entrance and I go through what's pretty much airport style security.
There's metal detectors, there's bag screeners, there's an announcement that no photos will be allowed inside the palace. But I put my iPhone in the front pocket of my shirt so I can talk to myself and take notes as I'm walking through the palace, like audio diary style.
And so I enter the palace, I walk down what's actually kind of like a dingy hallway that's poorly lit that pretty quickly opens up into the fancy part of the palace. Okay, we are officially inside the palace. It's very quiet in here. The first thing I see is the inner courtyard, which is the first time you get a sense of just how massive this place is.
I think it's something like a football field in both length and width. Yeah. So you get shuffled along from there into what they call the Grand Hall, which is exactly what it sounds like. The tour more or less proceeds as you would expect. I mean, you're going through the state rooms, which are the fancy rooms that have historically been open to the public.
And they're all filled with like impossibly expensive looking decor. A lot of gold, a lot of gold. And maybe the coolest grandfather clock I've ever seen. Honestly, I had the feeling like I was walking inside of Ashley Hicks' book.
I definitely thought on multiple occasions, like I think I can outrun some of these guys. There were like secret looking doorways off to the side. I was curious where some of these things went. I think that they mostly just lead to servant corridors where food and other items get ferried through the palace that visitors can't see.
So I'm kind of like shuffling somewhat quickly through this first tour because the second tour is in the back gardens. And the back gardens is where the building that we're interested in sits. Like the back of the palace is where the swimming pool is. So then I show up to like the sign that says this is where the second tour starts. And I'm about to start the garden tour, which...
you won't believe, happens to start directly in front of the swimming pool. Seriously? So can you like see through the windows? I was standing on the steps. Obviously, I'm walking directly up to it to try to look in, but it's very opaque two-way glass. Oh.
Like my assumption is you're inside the pool and you can look out on the beautiful back gardens of Buckingham Palace, but from the outside, you cannot see anything. Like the panes just look like ink-stained squares of glass. which was honestly so tantalizing. Like a quarter inch of glass is what was separating me from the answer to this question that I had been thinking about for months.
Showing 341–360 of 369 · page 18 of 19
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