I'm very glad that this episode of Denseness History is brought to you once again by Hello Fresh. Hello, Fresh is revolutionizing, eating and cooking across the U.S. They send you fresh, pretty measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes right to your door. I occasionally try and cook. I go out, I buy some things, I get home and the little recipes are just, yeah, just put some oregano and I'm like, I don't have oregano. I'm not someone who just has these things in my kitchen.

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I love Hello Fresh because I want to eat better and also I want to support real farmers as well. Doing good work. Go to Hello Fresh Dotcom Down Snow Ten and use the code. Dan Snow. Ten for ten free meals including free shipping. Hello, Fresh America's number one meal kit. Hello, everybody, welcome to Dance News History. Thank you for all those people, listen to all the podcasts and the last few days, the one with David Baddiel was really interesting.

He has just published a best selling book in the UK about anti-Semitism. And it was so fun. Listen back to that interview we made a couple of years ago. And hearing his kind of thoughts coalesce around that subject was also bizarre. And what you guys felt that I could be in the same room as somebody. It was so different and it really struck me. How much nicer is when these interviews are conducted in that flesh and we can interrupt each other and laugh and bounce ideas off each other.

And those days are returning and soon, everybody. So thank you very much putting up with this. In the meantime, we doing the best we can remotely, but cannot wait for us to get back in a little recording booth, have some good ol chats in the months and years to come. Speaking people I'm really looking forward to seeing, Helen Carr is right up there. She is long time fans and followers of history will know that Helen was with us right from the beginning.

Helen Carr is a fantastic historian. She's a broadcaster. She's made several shows for history TV. She's been on the podcast before and for a long time. She's had a book in her. She's been writing about Joan of Gaunt, the very powerful, important son of Edward, the third younger brother to the black prince, uncle to Richard, the second and famously father of Henry, the fourth Rampa family. The faith is the key intersecting ancestor around which the Plantagenet family split and eventually beats itself to death.

But actually, his other children also give us the Tudor dynasty. So really, he is the royal ancestor and he's the ancestor to which many of us in Britain can trace ourselves back. Although, as Adam Rutherford has said on this podcast before, we are pretty much all descended from John. So don't get too excited if you can put him on the top of your family tree, because we all can. All right. We're all royal. In fact, the rolls are all us.

I think more importantly, it's a fascinating historical figure in royal pretensions in Spain. He was at the centre of the dispute that led to the peasants revolt. He was alive during the black death. This guy is like the Forrest Gump of the 14th century. You got to check him out. And Helen has written a book about him on the podcast. Now talk all about him if you want to watch Helen Carr's brilliant documentaries that she's made in the past for history, including a very cool documentary, she went to the Savoy in London and tried to find out more about John Gould's magnificent palace that once stood there.

You can get a history hit TV, the Netflix history, thousands of podcasts, TV shows. It's all on there. You love history. Go and check it out. You're not going to regret it. But in the meantime, everyone here is the wonderful Helen Carr talking about John of Gaunt.

Helen, great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, well, it's good to have a key member of the history family. You've got so many shows still on the History Channel. I'm going to get to do more soon. But you took all this time out to write your amazing book, so tell me it's done finally. What's it like having got it done?

To be honest, it was the biggest anticlimax because it was in the middle of lockdown. So everything that I thought I was going to do, I didn't do. And I just sort of fell asleep for about a week and then woke up and was like, well, that's damn cool.

And then it was Christmas. So it wasn't as exciting as I hoped it would be. But maybe, just maybe when it's published, it might be. The book is all about Julia Gordon, he's probably one of the most famous and important members of the royal family who never wore the crown. Why is a thing like I mean, there's plenty of younger sons knocking about in the Plantagenets. Why is John a towering figure in English and to a certain extent, European history?

Well, I think it really came out of his dynasty. So John Gaunt, as an independent figure, created a whole dynasty under his name. So he created a house in Spain. And he also was the father of the Beaufort's in the beaufort's as we went through the War of the Roses with Margaret Beaufort. And that is how the Tudor dynasty came to for so St John of God. Once you have the Beaufort's, you have dynasty in Spain, which I'm sure will go on to talk about.

But then he also had obviously his son became Henry the fourth. He was king of England as well. See, then you also had the royal line come through him there. So he's kind of like the beacon of all of these superpowers going forward.

My dad and everybody else is descended from John of God. Like what in genealogy was about. John, why don't we just say about the third? Because, John, why don't we all say, oh, well, but the second is it because of the second thing? I mean, like, why does everyone go? I can trace myself about John of God.

It's like, well, yeah, I often say if I had a pound for everybody, he told me that they were related to John of God. I would be having a really lovely time right now. I mean, I would have nothing to worry about in the future because I'm speaking to the genealogist, Adam Rutherford, about this. And I think it was something like 42 million people are likely descended from John of God. I don't know exactly where it was.

And he thinks that there was some kind of infidelity around this period. It could be through the Beaufort Sea, could be somewhere else. We're not entirely sure. But, yeah, there is a huge amount of people that claim to be descended from him. Some infidelity, I mean, I think there's probably a truckload of it, and I think there was a fair bit going on with her, but the second is wife. But anyway, let's not forget about the second wife invaded her husband's country with her boyfriend.

So, John of God, ignoring his fecundity and the fact that he spawned the house of Lancaster over the fourth and fifth and sixth. And then obviously, what about him? Like when he was alive, before everyone knew that he was this common ancestor. Older brother was a rock star prince as well. The black prince. What was his reputation? Was you in the shadow of his older brother? Yeah, definitely in his time.

And then arguably beyond his time, we've all heard of the black prince use this sort of rock star super figure. I mean, he was in A Knight's Tale. He was this really cool, really talented, exciting prince. But he actually didn't live all that long. And his legacy was far less impactful than John of Gaudens. He was his younger brother. He had a lot more power and sway throughout his career and his legacy was more than his older brother.

The black prince was so popular in his time, and that is because he was the eldest son. He was the son and heir of the super King Abdullah said he was the warrior prince. So he was the hero of Partya. He was the epitome of chivalry. And what they considered a prince should be. And in many ways, Jonathan, who is considerably younger than the black prince in the spare time, he was eight, 10 years younger than him, but he was coached by the black prince in his youth.

They actually live together and they were brothers in arms. And he was massively influenced by his brother, but he was more of a politician than his brother was. His brother was an appalling politician. Jonathan was actually quite a good one. But John, of course, was terrible at war and his brother was very good at it. So I think that that's what the difference was. And that's why the black prince was ultimately more popular and better known in history.

And, John, you point out in the book he was born in Ghana. So actually Gaunt is derived from Ghent. What is the role of a younger brother at the height of Plantagenet, England?

I think, as you said, like many kings, he had a series of sons, John, of course, his third surviving son. So he had the black prince, then another son called Lyonel, who survived into adulthood. So the role of the younger brothers really was for and so very much was to extend Plantagenet influence throughout Europe and also within to strengthen England as a country as well. So John of Gaunt was quite soon married to Blanche of Lancaster, which is where he inherited the Duke of Lancaster title.

His older brother Lionel, was married into Italy before he quickly died afterwards. And then the black prince is a bit of an anomaly because he went margin of Kent. But that's a different story. But I think the whole point of the younger brothers was to strengthen the dynasty and Frederick the third. I think he had quite a continental ambition. I think he wanted to extend Plantagenet interest in a way that was akin to the ancient empire. I think that that's what his ultimate goal was.

He was an incredibly ambitious king. He's incredibly hot headed. And I think that he pushed his sons to have that same sort of drive. And John of Gaunt, he was as loyal as a dog to his father and he was as loyal as a dog that interests. And that's something that he continued to see throughout his life.

You say as loyal as dogs, his father, unlike some of the earlier Plantagenets father and sons, didn't get on to it. First and foremost was a soldier like his big brother in the hundred years war was underway.

Yeah, he tried to be I think he was quite unlucky in war. Those are actually that many battles in the Hundred Years War. So people think of this war, it must have been constant. A lot of it was actually evasion. So the English will go into France and campaign in the French would sort of avoid them and just wait for them to get fed up and leave. That happened quite a lot. So there's actually fewer battles that happened than we might expect.

The main ones of secrecy party, those happened when John Galt was quite young. He was effectively a child. One of the main battles that people don't really know about is the battle of Najara. And that happened in thirteen sixty seven in Castiel. So this was John of Gaudens only and formative experience of Petch battle, and that was the only battle that he ever fought with his older brother. So the background to that was there was a fraternal feud going on in Castile, which is Spain.

So Spain at the time was made up of different kingdoms. You had like the Kingdom of Navarre, your Aragón Casti only had Portugal on the left.

So because Spain was made up of all these different kingdoms, it was meant that Castile was the heart of it. The centre was the largest territory and there was this fraternal feud going on. It spilled out into Europe and then the French got involved and the English got involved and it just all became part of the politics of the Hundred Years War. So the English and the black prince took the side of King Pedro Pedro the Cruel as he was known for murdering his wife and other people.

He wasn't particularly kind. And then Enrique Trustmark, who was Pedro's bastard half brother. So this feud ensued between them and the French and the English kind of jumped. On board either side, and it culminated in this ground battle at Najara, Sir John of God led the vanguard at the battle of Marjah, along with the great John Chandos, who is one of the chroniclers at the time. And so we know quite a lot about this particular battle.

And it was really vividly described in The Chronicles, and it was an English success. It all fell apart after that because that is possibly where the black prince got sick, which then led on to his final illness and death and everything sort of fell apart for the black prince after this battle. But for John of Gaunt, it was massive. He had this amazing experience. He fought alongside his brother. He led the vanguard. He was victorious. And, you know, he even commissioned a poem to be written about this brotherly success.

He was probably the only one that sort of felt strongly about the battle in a positive way, because afterwards it sort of fell apart for everybody else. The two brothers ended up having it out, rolling about in the dust until one of them stabbed the other. And that's how it ended in Spain. So he went off and decided from that point that Spain was going to be his focus, which kind of shifts things. When you think of the Hundred Years War, it kind of shifts things away from the interplay between France and England.

But if you're a younger son of the king of England, that's a good show. You know, it reminds me of their Norman ancestors heading off the Mediterranean. So his father would have been quite pleased with that call. Yeah, he was.

I think John was incredibly ambitious. I think he was forward thinking and he kept this focus throughout all of the tumult that happened in the following years after the battle. So he clung on to this idea of expansion into Spain and he realized that Spain in Castile was an important superpower, wasn't just about kingship in France. It was actually about looking what other large territories one could occupy, therefore expanding that Plantagenet interest.

And he married a Spanish woman of royal blood and actually tried to establish himself as king.

Yeah, which is remarkable, really, because that's something that people certainly don't know much about. John God. And this is where he managed to create this Spanish line going for the Spanish dynasty. So he married the eldest daughter of King Pedro, who fled to the court, the black prince, after her father was killed. She was called Constance and she was young. She was 17 when he married her. I should mention by this point that his first wife, Blanche, had died.

So he was the Duke of Lancaster, but he was free to remarry. And he saw an opportunity with Constance to marry her and then claim the kinship of Castile through her as her husband.

You're listening to dance news history. We've got Alan Carr talking about John of Gaunt more after this. He invaded and it didn't go so well, no. So he spent 20 years between the battle of Najara in England, being a diplomat and managing the ascension of Richard, the second managing the aftermath in the currency of the peasant revolt, as all of this politics that was loaded onto him, which he was constantly having to push back this ambition that he wanted to invade Castiel.

So he did try a couple of times. First time is through his younger brother. So he sent his younger brother to lead an army in his place because he was too occupied. He was too important in England at the time to leave the young King Richard, the second on the throne, to fend for himself. So he sent his younger brother, Edmund of Langley, to Spain to try and conquer Castile, which was a massive failure. So he did go finally in thirteen eighty six, almost 20 years after the battle of Najaf to try and lay claim to Castiel himself.

And it was a disaster. So he took on some Portuguese galley's from Plymouth to Galatia, which is on the coast of Castillos. It's just above Portugal. And he landed there and he first marched into Santiago de Compostela, which is kind of the equivalent of Reames in Spain. So he went into the holy city. He was given the keys. It was all very ceremonial, but then it all fell apart because the trust and King Juan, who was the son of Enrique, who had died by now, he applied scorched earth policy and he basically stripped the land of everything and pulled all of the supplies, all of the people, all of the food sources into castles, which basically peppered Castile at the time.

So these fortifications. So, John, have God, despite having prepared immensely for this campaign, taking a contingent of knights and young men with him, Thomas Chaucer went on this campaign. He was ultimately unsuccessful because the heat was a massive problem. This was armies that were used to fighting in France is a very different climate. When you're in the center, in the dust and parched land of central Spain in July and August is pretty uncomfortable when you're in Omagh.

They had real problems and they couldn't find water sources. They couldn't find food. They were forced to ally with the Portuguese. That didn't work. And there was these descriptions of Portuguese soldiers having no food, that they were looking inside Bird's Nest to try and eat the remains of whatever eggs and things might be in there. And John Foster, who is a well-known chronicler of the 14th century, describes the heat setting in in the day and these men becoming thirsty and drinking strong red wines.

And, you know, they used to drinking things like ale and just becoming so dehydrated and drunker and drunker. And then they pass out and they wake up in the middle of the night freezing cold. And he couldn't control the structure. He couldn't control the climate. And eventually this just laid the opportunity for an epidemic to set in. And it did. And it claimed about a third, if not more than half of his army. And it was all very tragic because he ended up in the state of melancholy.

I think you wouldn't come out of his tent and he was in a state of depression, possibly even sickness himself, and it forced his men just to flee. And they were trying to obtain passage back through, never having to ask permission from the Castillian King. And John of Gaunt eventually had to admit defeat, and he handed his crown to the Castillian King and then he never went back. So it was actually very tragic and a very, very sad story of a wasted 20 years of his life.

But his daughter by his Castillian sort of princess queen, his daughter would marry back into the royal family and eventually produced people like Catherine of Aragon. Amazing. So the royal line springs from the royal line of Castile. Let's come back to England because he's there in England doing all sorts of important things, notably the peasant revolt, which he made a film about the history. How important is he as his father, Edward? The third kind of decline is towards India, doesn't he?

And in predeceases him. How important is John in that period politically in England?

He's so important. He's practically leading the country at this point. And I really feel for him at this stage in his life because he's got his brother who is so unwell that he's having to be carried about on a letter. John of God has literally just spent the last year, two years in France trying to clean up the mess that is Aquitaine and the Princes Courts Bordeaux. He's trying to claim back territory that rebel barons have abandoned to the French from English lands.

And actually in these hard fought lands, he's been busy. So he comes back to England. The prince is incredibly sick. But then Edward the third is also increasingly unwell. He's suffering a series of strokes. He is just starting to lose control of the country. His queen has died. He's embroiled in quite a consuming relationship with his mistress, Alice Para's. So John of Gougne is left to face the wrath of the Commons himself, which is what led to what is called of the good parliament, which is the longest parliament that ever ran in history.

I think it went on for something like three months, and it was only because the king of third had been proroguing Parliament for so long that it finally came to this climatic head. And all of the corruption that had been happening within the king's inner circle started to emerge. And Jonathan was left to deal with that whilst his brother was incredibly sick. He actually even died during the good part of it. So he was left to manage all of this rage and deal with all of the country's politics whilst having to process the grief of losing his brother, who was he was incredibly close to.

And then shortly after the parliament and a year later, his father died as well. So everything was fallen on his shoulders and he had to arrange the funeral of his father and then also the ascension of his nephew within the space of weeks. I should ask, by the way, John would have been a kid under the age of 10 when the Black Death first came to England, do we know anything about how his family fared or how he felt during those waves of bubonic plague?

There was nobody who was fully protected from the Black Death. Of course, peasant classes in the lower classes were hideously affected, but he definitely was. There are some references to him, I believe, when the first wave hit in 1948 to nine, he was in York and he took sanctuary in Saint Mary's up in New York with his brother and his sister, Joan. She was a victim of the black death. So she was traveling as it was coming into England.

She was actually travelling over to France. She was going to be the bride of the late King Pedro, the Cruel. So I don't know what fate would have been better for her in a way, but she was going to be the bride of Pedro. And so she was going over into France, going to cross over to Spain when she and her cohort became sick with the plague. And later in his life, there is evidence and sources of Joan have gone in dying and obits, which is a sort of continuing pious demonstration of affection to his sister, even though he wouldn't have known her for much of his life.

So I think that he was very conscious of the people close to him who had been affected by the epidemic.

But we did do a bit of detail that the pandemic, because it's on all our minds, obviously, at the moment, how responsible, easy for the peasants revolt and how did he survive. But how does his property fare during the revolt?

Yeah, I feel like he gets a really bad rap with the peasants revolt because a lot of people think he was incredibly unpopular. And that's true to an extent. But he was incredibly unpopular in certain areas of the country, most particularly in London. The city hates him. He was unpopular with the merchant classes because he did not like their power over government at the time and the amount of influence they wielded over the young king and the way that the government was run because they had the money.

That's where all of the wealth of England was coming in from at the time, the World Trade, etc. So they had a lot of power. But he was a royalist. He really believed in royal power, royal authority, and that came up again and again throughout his life and was a point of contention. So he was very unpopular in London. He was unpopular with the Commons in London, elsewhere in the country. He was quite popular. He was a very good land owner.

He looked after his tenants. He was a good feudal overlord. He was respected. And when the peasants revolt kicked off, actually tenants on his lands often defended him and defended his property. However, that was very different in London. So John of fortunately for him, was up in Baric on the border of Scotland, dealing with Anglo Scottish Relations and Peace treaty at the time when the revolt kicked off. So he left the Savoy Palace, which was his main residence in London, which was this Lancastrian property that he had inherited, which was on the Bank of the Thames.

So if people know London now, it's exactly where the Savoy Hotel is. And I would really recommend if anyone listening wants to just go and have a walk around, do go and walk around the streets around there, because there are so many unassuming reminders of the Savoy Palace. There's even a pub with Gould's top, something like that. And this portrait hangs. But it was this massive vicinity. It was so wealthy and it was this Camelot type palace that loomed over the Thames.

It was crenellated. It had these whitewashed walls. It had roses growing in the garden. Rumor has it that it was the red rose of Lancaster that grew in the Savoy Palace Gardens. It was an incredibly beautiful palace. It's so sad that it was destroyed. So John of Gaunt left London in May. That was the last time that he uses for Palace to move up Scotland. And the revolt happened in June. So London, as it was London specific contingent that managed to break into the Savoy Palace and they just destroyed it from the inside.

So they ripped apart everything that was in their expensive bedding, tapestries, jewels, plate. So things like cups and plates, silver. And they created a pile of goods that belonged to John of God and anybody that tried to steal anything. And there was a lot of wealth inside this palace. Anyone that was trying to steal anything was attacked by their own contingent. And they said the whole point was to destroy the rich, not to steal from the rich.

And they really wanted to make an example, John, of Gaudens. They found his clothing. They took what was called Jack, which is a sort of jacket, sir, coat type item of clothing. And they stuck it on a pike. And according to the Chronicle sources, they shoot arrows at it and they hacked out it with axes and really aggressive attack on his person. You know, even though he can be there. What they weren't aware of was that some of the items that they were loading onto this pyre of goods included gunpowder.

So barrels of assumed were goods or jewels they pushed onto this. And as they lit fires all around the Great Hall, which they did in many of the properties they destroyed in London, it ignited and it really just engulfed the entire hall. And I think what's a remarkable story about this particular section is that there was a contingent of rebels who had found their way into the cellars where Joan of Gold kept all of his delicious wine from Gascony, as the nobility did at that time.

And they got really drunk and they basically had a party in the cellars. But then as the Great Hall and the walls of the Savoy came crashing down on them, they became trapped in this rather macabre description of the voices and screams of the rebels being trapped underneath the Savoy Palace. But what I think is remarkable is this was the largest amount of destruction done to one property during the peasants revolt, and he never rebuilt it as well, which I think shows for me his attitude towards London going forward and the fact that he wanted to absent himself from the city.

And I don't think that he felt like he could or should have property there thereafter, not the first or the last monarch didn't feel at home in the commercial capital.

What about his last wife? And it's a remarkable relationship with the most famous Englishman of the 14th century.

His last wife is the subject of many people's fascination, admiration. Catherine Swinford was his long term mistress, so she first pays in the records as the mistress of his daughters from his first marriage to Blanche. And she was the wife of one of his retainers, Hugh Swinford, who died in service in Aquitaine after his father's death after the death of Blanche of Lancaster. At some point when Joan of Gold had returned with his new wife, Constance, they began a relationship and it was through Catherine that the Beaufort's were born.

So they had a number of children together, a number of both the children, including the ancestors of Margaret Beaufort and the cheater's later on. But Catherine, I think, was remarkable because she was a low order nobility. Her father, panderer, was a member of Queen Filipino's. Gosh, he was a warrior. Her and her elder sister, Philippa, were really just taken under the wing of the queen as a charitable offering when they were children.

So that's how they became sort of connected to the royal court. And her older sister, Philippa, actually married Geoffrey Chaucer. So that's quite a well known connection as well. And that's how Chaucer became Joan of Golden State's brother in law. Like any woman in this period, there's not a lot about her. They had a close relationship.

They had a very open relationship. He treated her as if she were his wife. She had apartments at Kenilworth Castle, which was his main castle building project at the time in the thirteen seventies, and she went everywhere with him. They were always together. He was incredibly public with her, which I think on his part was quite feckless. I don't think he really cared what was being said about their relationship because he was so powerful. This was a point when he was the most powerful man in the country.

He had his nephews on the throne. His nephew was practically a child. I mean, he was really running the show and so people didn't really dare to say anything. And it was really only after the peasants revolt, things changed. And that was that there was a dramatic severing of ties between John and Catherine Swinford at that point because he had to change his whole outlook. It was made very plain to him that he was an unpopular Macnee. He was an unpopular man.

And if he didn't make some changes, this could go really, really wrong. I mean, he had to retain as he had lost men during the peasants revolt in cold blood, people were really furious with him and he had to do something about it. So one of the notable things that he did was end his relationship with Catherine. And it's clear he did that because they'd certainly had no more children. There is actually a record that does state that she is no longer in his service and she's given some property elsewhere and she goes and lives quietly in Lincoln.

But I think that he always had a lot of respect for her. He sent her wine for her household. He allowed her to have all of her property in her own name. And I think that they retained a mutual admiration and friendship that endured. And also, I think what I found was a really emotional point was in his register shortly after the peasants revolt, about a month afterwards, he had a shrine built in Katherine in Espera after their relationship ended.

So I think that that does demonstrate that he felt very strongly for her. And then, of course, later on, twenty years later, down the line, very romantic. Nearing the end of his life, he sweeps of her feet and they get married is a very. Our romantic notion to think, oh, well, you know, this must be because they're madly in love, but I think in a way it was really to secure his dynasty.

And I think that he wanted to legitimize the Beaufort's who were illegitimate at this point. And he appealed to the king to which of the second to legitimize them. And I think marrying Catherine was he felt like it was the dutiful thing to do. It wasn't so much about having an immediate because he had one with Henry the Fourth. But I think that he felt he demonstrated penitence towards the end of his life. And I think that it was wrapped up in that.

So let's finish up. Don't ask. Did John of Gordon's son, Henry Bolingbrook, invaded after John Roberts death, stole the crown of his cousin Richard? Second, do you think John would have approved the John of God? Have royal ambitions for his son?

Is such a dramatic ending. And I loved writing this because it just felt so fast and it felt so writable and narrative and so tied up with emotions as well. And so Henry Bolingbroke was exiled to France at the end of his father's life. And then when John died, having not been able to have his son at his side when he died, and Henry Bolingbroke finding out that his father had finally passed away and that his cousin had almost seemed glad about it, and then finding out that his cousin Richard, the second had stripped him of all of his Ducci property and title, which is a huge amount of land and wealth.

So he comes and he's given a choice and he is actually even beseeched by members of the nobility. Come and take back your property. Come and take back your right, Richard. He was a bit mad. He wasn't a great king. He was unpopular. There had already been rebellions against his rule. So Henry had a decision to make and he could either take back the Lancastrian lands, take back his father's efforts to build these lands and maintain these lands as Lancastrian.

Or he could sit back and stay quiet and be loyal, which his father had always been. So it was a catch 22. So he couldn't really when I think that John of God was a royalist, he was loyal. And he swore on his brother's deathbed that he would protect the interests of Richard. So I don't think that he would ever have recommended that his son did that, but I think that his son did do the right thing.

Interesting. Interesting. You're also Lankester girl. Fascinating. Well, listen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What is the book called?

It's called The Red Prince, and it's out on the 15th of April.

Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

Praying for him. I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask.

Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review. I really appreciate that. It's tough world law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts.

It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.