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April 12, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #369

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	Music Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, This is podcast episode 369 on the 12th of April.
	I'm your host, Harry, joined today by our special guest, Dominic Frisby.
	How are you doing?
	I'm very well, thank you, Harry.
	Thank you for having me.
	Thank you for being on here with us.
	And just for anybody in the audience who might not be aware, would you like to just introduce yourself to everyone?
	Yes, I have a weird double life.
	I'm part comedian.
	I write comic songs.
	Probably my most famous song is a song called 17 Million F-Offs, which got very popular during Brexit.
	That's a sentiment that I can get behind.
	And then, in addition to that, I also write...
	I'm a financial writer, so I write for a magazine called Money Week, and I've written various...
	It's okay.
	And I've written various books.
	I wrote the first book about Bitcoin back in 2014, and my latest book's all about taxation.
	So, comedian and financial writer, the world's only one.
	Taxation is a subject that you could get me started on, so let's...
	Carry on.
	Before we go into any of the segments, we're going to be talking about J.K. Rowling and the Fellowship of Turfs, the leftists discovering the revolutionary idea of marriage, and also how school standards across the West are plummeting.
	Before I get into any of those, just want to make anybody aware, all our premium subscribers, that later on there will be a premium hangout talking about Is It Real Communism?
	Where Carl and Thomas are going to be discussing intersectionality and trying to figure out whether it is real socialism or communism or whether it's something else entirely.
	So join us for that one later on at 3.30.
	It'll be some good fun, some good old-fashioned internet blood sports for anyone who's been itching to see a good old debate about this.
	Now, got that out of the way, let's get into it.
	So, J.K. Rowling has gotten into trouble with the left on the internet again.
	How aware of this sort of stuff are you?
	Well, I haven't followed the J.K. Rowling story in any great detail.
	I was a sort of anti-J.K. Rowling person because she spoke out against Brexit.
	As many of us were back in the day.
	But I really like the way, not just her, but a lot of high-powered intellectual women have come together.
	And there's this alliance.
	And it's sort of...
	It's across politics, really.
	It's left and right, libertarian and maybe not so authoritarian.
	But there's this...
	This sort of coming together of women to defend their status and defend their position.
	And JK Rowling's, for whatever reason, is one of the figureheads of it.
	And all I say is good luck to her.
	Yeah, that's a great position to take on it.
	I would say I like the framing of the high-powered intellectual women coming and actually being independent women, doing what they want to.
	You know, always good by me, but what are you talking about?
	I think they've got the support, I was going to say tacit support, but it's not that tacit, but they've got the support of a lot of men.
	But I think this is a particular battle that...
	In order to win it, I think women are going to be the ones that go over the top, so to speak.
	There is a contingent of women who are trying to stick to reality, as I would say it, and are definitely coming to the forefront, sticking up for themselves, which I respect massively.
	But what she's got into trouble for this time is, of course, something as innocuous as meeting up with all of those other high-powered, intelligent women and going for lunch.
	And being photographed online, going for lunch with all of her friends, which is now a crime of the highest order.
	Before I go any further, I just want to...
	It's like going to lunch with Jordan Peterson, Andy Ngo, you know, Carl Benjamin, me, Leo Kersen...
	Oh, can you imagine the outrage?
	That would be terrible.
	But before we go any further, I just want to bring everybody's attention to this recent article from Thomas.
	It's part of our Deep Think series, where we go a little bit more in-depth on certain subjects, where he's talking about what he sees as his attempt to explain what's going on currently culturally, unlike many who would throw out the postmodern neo-Marxism remark that Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay throw out there.
	Thomas has a different perspective, saying it's postmodern neo-capitalism, where he's saying that it's...
	It's capitalism's fault or partially to blame with this.
	I've not listened to it yet, but it's Thomas, so it'll be a very interesting perspective that you don't often get on these sorts of subjects.
	So check that out if you're interested.
	So let's carry on.
	So this is the image that sparked the initial outrage.
	As you can see, a number of Is that Suzanne Moore there as well?
	Yes, there is J.K. Rowling in the middle, there's Suzanne Moore, Julie Bindle, Joanna Cherry, Rosie Duffield and a few other people.
	Basically what you would refer to as, I suppose, feminist dissidents, They've tried to label them all as the TERFs, the trans-exclusionary radical feminists, but as J.K. Rowling has made very clear a number of times, she doesn't actually have much of a problem with trans people in and of themselves, more that they're trying to co-opt the identity of women altogether, and also trying to remove the distinctions between men and women that exist in biological terms and social terms, which...
	Yeah, I mean, this whole argument has just got so stupid.
	Because there are various...
	Like, I used to have a...
	I had my ex-girlfriend a long time ago who was like as hardcore a left-wing feminist as you would ever get.
	And one of the things she always used to say is, biology is the enemy of the feminist.
	It's true.
	And there's a certain amount of truth to that because, you know, the fact is...
	Women want to have kids, and so that makes them leave the workplace, that sort of biological drive.
	And all sorts of other examples, you know, men are stronger.
	And it seems that somehow in this trans row, it's like biology has become the enemy of trans, if you see what I mean.
	Yes.
	But there are three, there's almost like three categories.
	There's the, you know, there's the psychological, I suppose, and legal category.
	element to this thing of some people feel they weren't born in the wrong bodies and for whatever reason they want to change well that's fine if you want to do that that's your business and you go about it but then there's the sort of the safe space issue when some people are exploiting that privilege to go for example to be put in a women's prison rather than a male prison where they then commit rape or for all sorts of you know this stupid thing of women in sports like at what point are we going to have a trans boxer Oh,
	well, we've already got there with MMA. Are you aware of the Fallon Fox?
	I wasn't, no.
	Fallon Fox is a male-to-female trans person who entered into the Females League of MMA. And while I do believe that she lost a few fights, the people that she fought against said that she hit a hell of a lot harder than any other women they've ever fought.
	It's just wrong.
	It is.
	It's just wrong.
	And the...
	I'm just struggling to articulate the...
	Yeah, it's...
	It's when it gets abused.
	As I say, it's fine for an individual to do whatever they like, but it's when it creeps into what should be a safe place for women and now no longer is.
	And I think anyone from...
	And I think all the stuff that's going on with kids, by the way, of trying to...
	Oh, yeah.
	I just, that is really bad.
	Especially...
	And I think a lot of kids just do it because maybe they're slightly lonely and a lot of kids are slightly lonely and they sort of drift through life and nobody notices them and then suddenly if they say they want to be trans they get a load of attention.
	I think it's that simple for a lot of kids.
	Oh, I get attention if I do this, I'm going to be trans.
	And they don't realise the damage they're doing to their lives.
	Yes, the stuff related to the kids is something that we especially are hammering home quite a lot recently, just because of how prevalent it is.
	And we've actually got a premium podcast that you should check out if you're out there and haven't watched it yet, where we actually examine a Seattle public school curriculum on gender and queerness that goes from kindergarten through to fifth grade.
	So five to ten year olds being told that, oh, gender identity is this thing separated from biology.
	You can be whatever you want.
	It's just confusing children.
	It really is.
	And also, I remember when I was a kid, I used to dress up in my mum's clothes.
	And I think, you know, girls like dressing up as boys and boys like dressing up as girls.
	It's sort of part of being a kid.
	And men, you know, the drag queen, it's like one of the great traditions of comic theatre.
	It's been around for hundreds of years.
	You know, it's blokes dressing up as women.
	It's just, it's normal, if you see what I mean.
	For there to be this sort of fluidity.
	But it doesn't mean you can go to a women's loo or a women's prison and participate in women's sport.
	Within certain contexts, yes.
	And then when you start to get the idea of drag queen story time, where it's like drag queens going and telling stories to children who are like five years old.
	I think many of us are just saying that's just not appropriate.
	Yeah, but you go to Panto and you have Widow Twanky and everyone roars with laughter, but they're not indoctrinating the kids.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But yeah, getting back to this.
	So, interestingly enough, I think Maya Forstater was the whole reason that J.K. Rowling got kicked off of her initial pedestal that she'd been on with the internet left, of this sort of queen bee of leftism.
	Because before then, she'd been going on retconning all of her stories with Harry Potter, saying, oh, this person was gay, that person was gay, here's who was actually having sex with one another, which was just...
	They're kids' stories, Joanne.
	Please calm down with all this.
	But then she comes out in support of Maya Forsnatter, gets cancelled, and they're trying to remove her from her own franchise, essentially.
	I don't know if you're aware, the 10th anniversary was a...
	Yeah, I saw that, yeah.
	Well, actually, it was the 20th anniversary, and she wasn't even invited.
	Talk about ingratitude.
	I know, all of these people whose careers...
	It's literally like banning Tolkien from The Lord of the Rings.
	Yes.
	It's equivalent to that.
	And then, like, Orlando Bloom or anyone else showing up anyway.
	It's like, the only reason you've got a career is because of the story this person wrote.
	Well, certainly, Orlando Bloom already had a bit of a career, but he's only got a boost.
	But certainly the kids...
	Yes.
	What's her name?
	Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe and so on, yeah.
	Yeah.
	But, as I said, this has got some backlash.
	Pink News, of course.
	Are you aware of Pink News?
	I'm not, but I'm about to discover their...
	They are a radical queer publication online, and when you say...
	We always point out the distinction between, say, being gay or a lesbian and being queer, which is, you know, I'm a person who happens to be gay or lesbian, whatever.
	Queer people make it the entirety of their identity to...
	Flaunt themselves as that sexuality rather than build anything else on top of their personality.
	And this is very much the publication for those types of people.
	Just messing with people's heads.
	Everything has to be filtered through this prism.
	So, J.K. Rowling enjoys boozy lunch with anti-trans lobby while thousands march for trans equality.
	Can you believe the absolute audacity of her to go and have lunch with friends while there are bad things happening in the world?
	Can you believe that she would do that?
	So she enjoyed a boozy lunch with a host of anti-trans activists, including members of the lobby group Get The L Out, while thousands protested for trans equality.
	Although Rowling was once promised her trans followers that she would march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans, she was nowhere to be seen on the day of the protest.
	So this seems to be the major complaint they have with this.
	Oh, you said that you would march with trans people if they were marching.
	Well, they are marching and you're not doing anything.
	But she promised that like two years ago.
	And a lot has changed since then.
	For instance, her being cancelled, receiving many online death threats from people within these lobbies.
	And also, as I've said before, they've tried to co-opt her own franchise and removed her from it.
	So I think there's a few things that you could say about...
	I think it's reasonable that she may not want to support those sorts of people anymore.
	And also, given that she has received a number of death threats, would she feel safe going into a crowd full of these people who have probably sent death threats to her?
	Even if she hadn't had the death threats, when somebody's that rich and of that kind of status, it's not like she's a six-foot-four bloke with big muscles.
	No, exactly.
	It's not like she's a trans woman.
	There's inevitably going to be safety concerns.
	Yeah, no, exactly.
	And they carry on, Get The Yell Out describes gender-affirming healthcare as a form of misogynist medical abuse against lesbians, which promotes the medical transition of lesbians and pushes harmful drugs and unnecessary medical practices on lesbians' healthy bodies.
	And so obviously they're approaching it from a very old school feminist sort of critique of it.
	But there is a bit of truth to that, especially when you're talking about the younger people transitioning, like we've discussed already.
	A lot of these people are confused.
	They've probably got some form of anxiety or something they're dealing with as their hormones change.
	And also a lot of these people, I think the studies have shown if they do detransition or fall out of that phase later on in their teen years, they'll often end up just being a gay man or a lesbian woman who were confused and presented with these options.
	And they go, OK, I guess I'm a woman then.
	You know, a lot of stuff like that.
	The group also believes that the LGBT community is coercing lesbians to accept penises as female organs and heterosexual intercourses as lesbian sexual practice.
	Well, that's true.
	We've had a BBC article from that last year, which was honestly shocking coming from BBC, where a number of lesbians were saying that they were being...
	Pressured by trans women into having sex with them, despite the fact they still had penises, purely because, well, I identify as a woman, you're obviously transphobic.
	Absolutely ridiculous.
	We oppose this manipulative ideology and denounce it as a form of rape culture aimed at lesbians, as well as a form of conversion therapy.
	Back in the day, I would have laughed at these sorts of claims of rape culture, but...
	I think they're right.
	I just want to go back.
	Can I just read that sentence, that previous sentence?
	Oh, yeah, of course.
	Because it's just the most amazing sentence.
	The LGBT community is coercing lesbians to accept penises as female organs and heterosexual intercourse as a lesbian sexual practice.
	I mean...
	I'm just sort of shaking my head and going, this is nuts.
	That's one of the craziest sentences I've ever read.
	It's true, though, that certain elements...
	I know, I don't doubt it's true, but somebody's having to say that.
	I know.
	This is how far we've fallen as a culture in the society, sadly.
	But they also said that other guests at the lunch party included elected politicians Joanna Cherry and other such people as Rosie Duffield.
	So they were just very, very angry about this.
	And Rosie Duffield, who they say has made false claims that trans children in the UK are cutting body parts off and rendering themselves completely infertile.
	Well, Pink News seems to be denying the very existence of the Tavistock Clinic.
	Are you aware of the Tavistock Clinic?
	No.
	They are a London-based gender-identity-affirming clinic which goes for children...
	Well, which caters to children as young as eight and possibly younger as well.
	I looked up at their page.
	And it's quite interesting...
	How can parents allow their kids to get involved in this stuff?
	It's ridiculous.
	Here's the page itself that says...
	If you scroll down a bit, you can go to the actual little bit that I'm talking about here.
	So, they talk about Matt, who doesn't want to talk about his gender or the fact that he was born a girl.
	This is not helped by his diagnosis of autism and his problems with communicating.
	He just wants people to accept him.
	While mum Rachel must grapple with losing her daughter, she must also give consent to 11-year-old Matt...
	To give 11-year-old Matt hormone-blocking drugs to stop him becoming a woman.
	So an 11-year-old going on puberty blockers that will stop her natural development.
	I'm sorry.
	I've got four kids.
	And one of the things you learn when you have kids is you always think kids end up How you bring them up.
	But the more kids you have, the more you become a believer in nature rather than nurture, if you see what I mean.
	A lot of kids are how they are from a really, really young age.
	And, you know, for example, one of my son's best friends when he was about three...
	You knew that kid was going to be gay from about the time he was two or three.
	You just knew he was going to be gay.
	And he's now 21 and he is gay.
	And there was another boy.
	You could just see that kid was going to be the most sort of alpha male...
	Sport Billy, whatever.
	And you just see it, almost not quite from the moment they're born, but from very early in their childhood.
	And I remember when I was four, one of my best friends was this girl who wanted to be a boy.
	And she was just what we would call then a tomboy.
	And she's grown up to be gay.
	And so, I don't know.
	I just think this kind of...
	What kids are going to be is almost probably a lot of it's determined from when the sperm meets the ovary.
	It's probably that early.
	And this kind of interference and intervention is evil, bad and wrong.
	Yes, I agree.
	And the interesting thing when you talk about where we can try and track down where it originates from is that we might have more information on that if it weren't for the fact that a lot of the activists who are pushing all of this stuff don't start screeching and protesting and destroying people's property the second that somebody says, I'm going to start looking into this, because they see it as a complete removal of that person's identity if you don't affirm it for them.
	And that's why you suddenly get people saying that, oh, if we don't do this, it's genociding trans people, which is...
	Absolutely ridiculous.
	Do you know what this boils down to?
	And it's a much bigger thing.
	There seem to be, if you like, two types of people.
	And there are some who are of a libertarian mindset.
	They tend to be much more laissez-faire.
	You look after your own bit of the world and you take care of that and maybe your family helps you out, whatever.
	And there's that libertarian mindset which wants to get on with less government.
	And then there's...
	and less state intervention.
	And then there's this other mindset that at every turn they demand some kind of government action, some kind of government intervention, some kind of government subsidy.
	And I'm afraid the way the world is at the moment, the Western world, it has been taken over by that mindset.
	So at every...
	Every corner of the economy, every evolution in, you know, every turn of the world, if you like, it keeps, you know, government, and democracy is part of the problem, because government has to promise it's going to do this in order to get elected.
	But there's this constant demand for government intervention, and it's that sort of authoritarian mindset.
	But I hate to disappoint you people, but the government is not going to solve your problems.
	Now you're speaking my language.
	Democracy is part of the...
	Sorry, I've been reading some Hopper recently, and that really speaks to the anti-statist within me, because, yeah, you're absolutely right.
	We are surrounded by statists.
	Every organisation, whether public or private, is infested with statists, and you're right, this isn't how we're going to solve the problem.
	It needs to be ground-up action from the community.
	Have you noticed when...
	There are, and there's a guy called Simon...
	Fan Shaw, comedian, gay comedian.
	He won the Perrier in 1988, I think.
	And he was one of the founders of Stonewall.
	And I was talking to him the other day, and he said, Stonewall should have just stopped in about 2013.
	We'd got everything we were fighting for.
	But in order to exist, Stonewall needed to find new things to fight for.
	So it's like...
	So it just found all these ludicrous battles to fight for.
	And, you know, Stonewall is behind so much of...
	These far-left campaign groups.
	A lot of government pressure.
	Yeah, and that's the problem.
	In order to exist, a lot of these campaign groups have to find new battles once they've won the original battles that they were put into existence for.
	Yes, and as you said, with democracy, it makes it very, very easy for politicians to latch onto these claims made by increasingly fringe groups because they tend to be...
	Easily pulled by the whims of these small fringe, small minority interest groups at the expense of everybody else.
	Because like you say, that's kind of how they attach themselves to social causes and win votes.
	There's an even deeper philosophy here, which almost goes right back to the beginning of the conversation, which is the difference between natural law and positive law.
	And this is an argument that the physiocrats had, I think, in the 17th century.
	But the idea of natural law is things are as they are.
	And I think a lot of philosophers would say English common law has its roots in natural law.
	But then you have positive law, which is laws that mankind has imposed, tries to impose on nature.
	Often found through legislation and such.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And this, you know...
	Men and women, sorry, women and men, women can have penises.
	It's a classic example of natural law and positive law.
	It's humankind sort of trying to indulge in its own hubris to change the very nature of reality.
	But natural law takes priority over positive law.
	Yes, that's why it always ends up the...
	Gold would be the money of natural law, whereas fiat money would be, you know, the money of positive law.
	Yes, return to the gold standard, absolutely, as if that would happen currently, sadly.
	But yes, just carrying on...
	Might happen quicker than you think, but anyway, we can come to that if you like.
	Yeah, we'll see.
	But yeah, so just to finish off this segment, because we've sort of run over just having an interesting discussion there.
	So yeah, we do have examples and evidence of trans women trying to pressure lesbians into having sex with them.
	This was this article from BBC News in October, which of course was highly controversial and got a lot of people asking to take it down.
	We've also got responses to the original tweet put out, because what do these people have better to do with their day than rage at people?
	So...
	This is the recent trans rights, because trans people apparently don't have the rights that the rest of us do.
	Name one, please.
	But this trans rights protest, as if I would expect J.K. Rowling to wade out into that and feel safe, let's be perfectly honest.
	We've got other people commenting on it, so it feels exactly right that thousands of people were protesting against trans conversion on the streets while the gender-critical movement were having a small, posh get-together with J.K. Rowling.
	They were having a meal.
	They were having a nice lunch.
	Oh man, one of the greatest pleasures in life is to share a meal with people who share a similar worldview to you.
	It is one of the great pleasures, particularly if you don't get a chance to see them very often.
	You meet up, they're having their lives, they've arrived to similar conclusions to you.
	It is one of the great pleasures to feast with such people and good luck to her.
	It absolutely is.
	But yes, that says a lot about what's happening here.
	Yes, it does.
	I just don't think it's saying what you want it to, Aidan.
	We've got other people, so we've got the classic Sean, a YouTuber, saying JK Rowling hanging out with these people is evil because they're automatically calling for discrimination.
	We've got people saying that they are being tortured, that apparently trans people are being tortured through the...
	No, that's not what's happening.
	The UK government is banning conversion therapy.
	Excluding trans conversion therapy for some reason.
	Now, personally, I don't think the government should be doing this at all, because a lot of the conversion therapy with gay and lesbian people is completely opt-in, voluntary, no one's being forced into it, and the question of whether it works or not is dubious at best, and so the government shouldn't really be stepping into it.
	Of course it shouldn't.
	Do you think Ernest Bevan, if Ernest Bevan saw NHS money being spent on this kind of stuff, he'd turn into a radical far-right, no NHS private welfare...
	If only.
	But we've also got Rosie Jones saying that she had a mad angry cry about the photos of J.K. Rowling.
	Do you have nothing better to do with that?
	How is it hateful to go and have lunch?
	I know.
	It's obvious nonsense as well.
	Nobody's seeing a picture of J.K. Rowling and just bursting out in tears.
	But then again, actually...
	Wait a minute.
	Who's attacking who?
	Well, this has always been the question.
	J.K. Rowling comes out and says, actually, I believe women are women.
	The trans community goes, you're attacking us, and then tries to de-platform her from her own franchise, get everyone to hate her.
	So that question has always been...
	I just wanted to draw people's attention as well to the fact that there was a recent article published with the Washington Post, which shocked me and kind of indicates that there may be a shifting of the general opinion, or at least perhaps more people are coming on to this opinion of...
	People saying, what I wish I'd known when I was 19 and had sex reassignment surgery, because people are starting to recognize that the whole problem of detransitioning for people who transition and then realize later on in life, hold up, this isn't what I want, is pretty harrowing and pretty awful for those people.
	Even at the age of 19, which is where I would say people are able to make their own decisions without the parents, it's still a very young age to make such drastic changes to your own physical biology.
	I've just had an idea for a song you'll be delighted to hear.
	I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I had a really good idea.
	I'll keep an eye out for that one.
	But I think I'll end that there, so we'll move on to the next segment.
	We'll be looking at how leftists and some intersectional feminists seem to have rediscovered the idea of marriage.
	And for this, I just wanted to point out, there were two things I wanted to point to.
	First of all, that Carl, back in November, wrote an article about the heroism of women.
	No, I would not.
	So salute to all the women in chat right now because it is very heroic.
	You should check that article out.
	Very interesting.
	And also a more recent one where Carl had a discussion in a premium video with John talking about the feminist argument for abolishing the family because this seems to be something that they are harping on.
	A lot of the more modern intersectional feminists don't seem to have a particularly rosy view.
	Yeah, I mean, this comes back to our positive law and natural law thing again, and the state and the growth of the state.
	Natural law, the way nature intended us, was to live in families and extended families, and we've replaced the family and the responsibilities of the family with the state.
	Yes, and when the state can subsidize any old thing all the way from single motherhood to anything else like that, you're just encouraging the breakup of the tradition.
	But once the state takes responsibility for something like welfare or healthcare or whatever, then that responsibility...
	It's taken away from the family, and in taking away that responsibility from the family, you actually erode the power of the family.
	And that's before we get on to the subject of tax.
	And a lot of these people I would describe, the people begging for government subsidies, I would describe as leeches.
	LAUGHTER And parasites, to put them in somewhat Randian terms.
	Maybe they don't know.
	They don't know what they're doing.
	They are acting upon their own rational self-interest, but at the same time, they're relying on the coercive force of the government to enable their own self-interest, which was where I would start to question the morality of it, personally.
	But, so, as a result of the fact that some Western states, or at least states within the US, have started to push back on a lot of this stuff, and it seems that some feminists are beginning to rediscover that you can, in fact, foster social cooperation without the force of the state being involved, and also stealing from others to fund yourself.
	Isn't the most morally justifiable thing to do.
	As a result of all of this, leftists seem to have rediscovered the concept of marriage.
	With this article, hilariously titled, Let's Start Charging Men to Have Babies.
	As if in any society before the current one, it worked in any other way.
	That was what the whole man goes out and does the work while the woman rears the child thing was about.
	We're...
	In a financial sense, being charged to have the babies, but it also comes together with the wholesome completeness of the family itself to create something that works much better than anything we could have intended.
	It's just such a crazy interventionist worldview.
	I know.
	The idea that you would have some kind of fee, some kind of, like, so imagine for a moment you're a woman and I want to have a baby with you, so you would charge me...
	Do you charge me the fee, or do I have to go and pay the fee to the government?
	Is this a tax, a baby tax?
	Well, she's pushing this as a market solution, so it's a personal fee.
	You have to pay me specifically so that I will have your baby.
	And who's going to administer?
	Who knows?
	who knows i suppose it's just up front and then who knows i might just take that money and run i might give you the baby and then take the money and run who knows it's not not a great deal but but if you if you were like a woman in a in you know somewhere poor uh you know eastern europe 25 years ago or thailand or somewhere and you had a rich western family who would pay a woman to have a I believe that went on in some cases.
	Maybe rich Americans would go and almost pay a foster mother, if you like, to have...
	I don't think foster mother is quite the right word, but they would pay women to have children for them.
	Maybe the mum couldn't have a child herself.
	And then they would take the child from that woman.
	Like, that was...
	Deemed heartless, awful, an exploitation of the woman even if all parties were willing, and so on and so forth.
	But that's exactly what she's describing with that headline anyway.
	Things always come back round full circle and now apparently that regressive and barbaric attitude is now progressive.
	So let's just read a bit of this.
	Sorry, I keep interrupting.
	It's no worries, I'm enjoying the conversation.
	But let's see what it is that this woman actually has in terms of a practical solution to this problem.
	Women had a good pandemic the last time round.
	Something actually came of it compared to this one, which is total S. Just over a century ago, the 1918 flu pandemic may have vanquished a decent chunk of the global population, so Already we're starting with absolute nonsense.
	We might have killed a decent chunk of women, but women still came out of it looking rosier than they did before.
	But after witnessing mass death, plus the loss of their children from other preventable diseases like diphtheria and meningitis, women decided to actually do something about it.
	The women who were left over, I suppose.
	And I respect the positive attitude and looking on the bright side of life, but this might be Pushing it a little bit.
	When, brackets, white American women get the vote two years later, because you've got to bring race into something like this, don't you?
	They use their newfound political power to immediately pressure local and federal governments into action, resulting in the largest expansion of public health spending in US history up until that point.
	So, pushing for greater state power, public ownership of private enterprise, and more spending.
	So, they're not really...
	She's not really selling me on this idea so far.
	Do you know why women got the vote?
	No, actually.
	One of the core arguments was in the First World War, many women entered the workplace in order to do the jobs that men had previously been doing because men were off fighting at war.
	I'm talking about the UK here, but the same will apply in the US. And one of the big arguments in the House of Commons to justify women getting the vote was the fact that women now paid tax.
	That makes sense.
	So they were invested in society, in other words.
	Yes, that makes sense.
	And Josh has an interesting idea, which is that the washing machine did more for women than feminism did.
	It did.
	It's true, but also very funny, and not particularly PC to say nowadays, but...
	they carry on.
	It was wildly successful fueling later large-scale door-to-door household hygiene campaigns and driving an 18% decline in childhood infectious diseases, with 25,000 fewer annual deaths compared with pre-suffrage mortality rates.
	Attributing all of this to the government without looking into whether there are any other Potential rationales for all of this happening.
	Interesting to me.
	Then as now, women were overwhelmingly the early adopters of that revolution, washing their hands, boiling milk to kill bacteria, and refrigerating meat, while men generally resisted even the most basic public health directives, much as they've resisted wearing masks today.
	What publication is this?
	This is thenation.com.
	This is insane.
	This is...
	Nonsense, isn't it?
	It's just nuts.
	It's like she's got some stats off, I presume it's a woman writing this, but it's like they've got some stats off Wikipedia and then rewritten history.
	And this idea that just as men don't wear masks today.
	And the only reason people boil milk and boiled milk and refrigerate things nowadays is all down to the government and government subsidies.
	Who invented the refrigerator in the first place?
	I know.
	But once again, there's much better evidence of the benefits of refrigerating food and killing bacteria than there is to the effect of other certain things that she mentioned.
	Don't want to step on YouTube toes, just in case, but I think you know what I'm referring to.
	Who was advising people to wash their hands?
	Probably men.
	Of course it was!
	They would have come out of medicine, which would have been, at the time, a male-dominated industry.
	God almighty!
	People claiming these historical victories.
	I think you need to understand the focal point of all of this, which is quite simply, more children lived because politicians actually responded to the flush of new female voters and their demand for less death Has government often been the facilitator of less or more death historically, would you say?
	I think it's fair to say that the biggest murderer in all history has been government.
	I would agree with you there.
	So this must sound like a sick joke to over 3.5 million mothers who've watched COVID-19 kill their careers, and then West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin cancel any hopes of paid leave or state-subsidised childcare, which is in reference to Joe Manchin's opposition to the Build Back Better Yeah,
	you had the government backing you up because you can't take responsibility for yourself.
	No, no one could read it.
	It was that long.
	So who knows what else they slipped in there.
	So thank you, Joe Manchin, for avoiding that.
	Now, as we're starting to the complete loss of Roe v.
	Wade and a new bill in Missouri where the party of life, as long as it's cis, straight, male and white, just proposed and scuttled after a massive outcry, a ban on abortion for non-viable pregnancies.
	Women everywhere are taking shallow breaths, apart from all of those women who were probably supporting the abortion ban as well.
	It's a death cult of motherhood that treats child-rearing as a moral redemption for the sin of womanhood, a compulsory test of character for where there can be no cheating like accessing modern healthcare, having a job or securing affordable daycare.
	Do you see how awful this mindset is?
	This idea that having a child in and of itself is not something positive, is not something that can enrich your life, but is instead a moral and physical burden on you.
	Because that's how this is leading to me.
	I've, you know, as I say, I've got four kids and having a child changes women, I think it does.
	It changes their worldview.
	And, you know, feminists would probably jump on me, but when you're at the birth of a child, a woman is nature's vessel.
	I mean, you could say a man is nature's vessel as well because it's his job to fertilize the woman in the first place or impregnate or whatever word it is.
	But, you know, at the birth of a child, I think there's no experience that puts you more in touch with the meaning of life than to be at a birth.
	Possibly you could say the same also to be at a death.
	But in that moment of childbirth, a woman is nature's vessel.
	And my experience is that many women mellow.
	I mean, we mellow with age anyway, but you mellow when you have a kid and your values change and your priorities change and your worldview changes.
	Everyone I've known who's had kids, and I can't wait to have kids of my own, but everyone I know who's had kids has immediately said it just completely changes your outlook on life.
	Many people become more, like you say, mellow, but also more conservative, more protective, because they want what's good for their kids, and they can recognize intuitively what's good for their kids.
	And what's good for their kids is not this.
	Not this attitude, in the slightest.
	I mean, I live a sheltered life on the internet.
	I've got my little...
	Things that I read, my little blogs on Substack and people I follow.
	I'm sorry to introduce this to you.
	And of course, you know, I can't believe this stuff is going on.
	And I guess it's every...
	All these crazy ideologies that you see, they've all got all these...
	Kind of articles and blogs and no doubt videos and podcasts that are reinforcing it and developing it and exploring it.
	It's nuts!
	This is the prevailing attitude in the schools as well.
	When I was growing up in high school, one of my teachers was actively telling everybody that they shouldn't have kids.
	This was a geography teacher who was very, very popular, actively telling us that if you have kids, you are going to be playing a part in the downfall of the world.
	actively trying to get us to put our hands up and say who's not gonna have kids because you're gonna be saving the world and it's just complete indoctrination and I can only look back now that I'm mature enough to recognize it and see that that's what was happening just don't factor in progress how we get better at doing stuff that don't factor that in but so according to this woman the only solution is to lean into our exponentially consumer driven society and deploy a market strategy where women need to start charging men to have babies revolutionary Revolutionary.
	One hero is already leading the way.
	In a viral Reddit post, a 34-year-old man describes his 29-year-old partner's all-business approach to having babies.
	Because that's what you want in a romantic relationship, an all-business approach.
	Complete, complete with a 16-page ring binder breaking down the cost-benefit analysis and its impact on her career.
	Mate, mate, get out of there.
	If she's giving you a 16-page binder for just maybe thinking about having the baby, imagine what it's going to be further on down the line when it comes to, like, college and university.
	Good God.
	I thought marriage vows.
	Is that not marriage vows?
	It's a 16-page cost-benefit analysis.
	There's marriage vows!
	There's something a bit more, I don't know, wholesome about marriage vows than here's our business agreement.
	The TLDR is that it sucks.
	By now, our anemic American standards The woman in the Reddit post is lucky because her company offers six months of page leave at 50% of her salary, but considering the immediate income reduction she faces and her likelihood of getting mommy tracked, i.e.
	following a career path that offers greater flexibility to devote time to child rearing, costs and raises promotions, she proposed that her partner pay her $50,000 to compensate for the loss in earnings, and I can only assume that this is upfront.
	This is ridiculous.
	What you can do is if you get married, you can do this amazing thing where you spread the cost out over time.
	Because kids will end up costing you way more than 50 grand in the first place.
	And even as a market solution, being someone who appreciates markets and free markets myself, I can recognise that's a terrible deal.
	Why would you accept that deal?
	I think it's 300 grand to bring a child to the age of 80.
	18 is the average, just under 300 grand, and that's not including school fees.
	Yes, university and such.
	I've actually got the figures up.
	I'll talk about them in a moment.
	So, once again, that's an awful deal no one would take.
	So what guarantees would you have that the woman, especially one this demanding, isn't just going to run off with your money?
	And also, it's not factoring into alternatives, which is that if I'm a man who can afford to pay up front 50 grand, That probably means that I've got some good money behind me, meaning I could probably go out and find a woman who's a lot less demanding than this one, because money talks, BS walks.
	This was apparently a huge turn-off for our author, who at no point suggests that he might have to take any leave, paid or otherwise, offered by his equally well-paying employer.
	It never occurs to him that his behaviour might also be a Boner killer for her, or that her relatively modest proposal, 50 grand relatively modest, doesn't even begin to make up for the lifetime hit to her finances and career prospects.
	So, she is purely material here.
	It's like, if I have a kid, I won't have all of this money and career prospects, as if that isn't made up for by the fact that you're going to be a mother, you're going to be raising a child, doing something that I would describe as more meaningful than just climbing the soulless corporate ladder.
	But the beauty of her approach is that it doesn't matter whether he likes it or not, this isn't your grandmother's free baby store, since when were babies free?
	Where men get to spawn and then carry on with their lives at no cost.
	And I've got the figures up here, if you want to...
	Highlight these for me.
	Thank you, John.
	So, the basic cost...
	What?
	71 grand?
	Apparently, this is from last year, but this is the absolute lowest.
	So, cost of raising a child up to the age of 18 in the UK is 71 grand for a couple and 97 grand for a single-parent family, which is interesting because it means that the costs of raising a child by itself actually increase.
	The cost can depend on the sex of a child, since it costs up to $79,000 to raise a boy and up to $110,000 to raise a girl.
	For all children, when taking into account additional costs, it increases to $152,000 for a couple and $185,000 for a single-parent family.
	So that probably rounds up to about $300,000 in dollars, for instance.
	Maybe that's where you've seen the figures.
	No, no, no.
	I thought it was about $280,000.
	I must have got it wrong.
	Well, this is just the figures that I found.
	Yours might be more accurate.
	But overall, having a kid, no matter what the circumstances are...
	It's not cheap.
	It's not cheap.
	Not cheap.
	Pretty expensive, especially if you want to put them through university.
	So if we go back to the article...
	Can you just go back to that Motley Fool and just raise the next bit?
	What are the additional costs?
	Additional housing, food, clothing.
	Okay.
	I mean, it's all slightly arbitrary how they calculate it, but in London it's much higher.
	Just look at the cost of housing in London.
	I can imagine.
	Anyway, I have a London-centric view of the world.
	If we just go back to the article and get through the rest of this relatively...
	No, no need to apologise.
	So she's found another way to rebrand the myth of the wage gap.
	Right there.
	And just to point it out, women without children in the same position as men, in the same age, earn on average slightly more than men in those positions.
	So it's all down to a matter of priorities.
	Do you want to be a mother?
	Because it's always been a choice nowadays that you can just decide to throw it away and not have kids if you want.
	But it's whether you want that or not, and I don't think most women do, and this is not the solution for that.
	It carries on, but I'll just sort of go to the end, and it goes...
	Oh my god, I forgot about this part.
	Oh, and once all the baby-making is over, here's the next condition.
	mandatory vasectomies as a condition for sex.
	Mandatory vasectomies.
	By then, Republicans will have fully criminalized birth control.
	No, that's not what Republicans want, which is itself already a responsibility born disproportionately by women who are expected to reroute their reproductive systems to maximize male pleasure.
	This last part is a long shot, I'll admit, since relying on men to compromise themselves in any way is a fantasy, but then again, and this won't appeal to you at all, this next sentence, but then again so is crypto and that doesn't stop them.
	Maybe the solution is to re-band our kids as IRL NFTs and sit back as men fall over each other to invest.
	Sure, they may be disappointed when their bored apes turns out to be a crying baby, but at least they'll have gotten something out of it, which right now is a hell of a lot more than women can say.
	Can you feel the vehement hatred emanating from this paragraph?
	If this is how this author, Alexis Grenell, thinks of men in general, I don't know why she's even considering having a baby in the first place.
	Yeah, she doesn't like men.
	Yeah, she absolutely doesn't.
	So that's some nonsense for you.
	Ladies, even if you don't want kids, don't listen to anything that this woman has to say to you because it's all absolute nonsense that we're going nowhere.
	Yeah.
	Talk about drawing in weird stuff.
	Where did the crypto thing come in first?
	She's obviously got a bloke, a fella's obviously speculating in crypto, and he's slightly hooked on that, as a lot of people get.
	And it's just annoying, and she can't deal with it.
	Crypto is a bloke thing, mostly, though.
	It's like, you go to a crypto conference, it's like 90% blokes.
	Not really that surprised, but let's move on to the final segment where we're going to be talking about how school standards across the West, but primarily in America, are plummeting.
	It's been a joke since the 1990s that kids are handed out participation trophies, but...
	That doesn't make it any less true just because it's a joke, and it is only getting worse.
	This is a point that we've been hammering on quite a bit recently, especially in regards to children being indoctrinated in schools, but we're going to keep hammering on it because we cannot allow political ideologues to be teaching our children.
	It's just not good for any of them.
	And what we're going to be talking about may not be the rule for every school out there, but there is a lot going on that indicates that it's getting pretty bad.
	I mean, I don't know about your experience with your own kids in school.
	How are they getting on?
	If they are still in school, of course.
	Well, there are four, and the 21-year-old and the 19-year-old have both left school, and the 17-year-old and the 15-year-old are both still at school.
	But I have no doubt that...
	Schooling standards have slipped.
	Like, my eldest daughter, who's 19, got ABB in her A-levels, and there's no way she's an ABB. But you still love her, don't you?
	Of course I do.
	I adore her.
	But, you know, it was all because of the COVID and they just handed out grades willy nilly.
	And, you know, I would say she's probably more likely BCC.
	And when I was at school, she probably would have, you know, maybe even CCC or something like that.
	And it's really interesting if you look at the, you know, we talk about the debasement of, you know, the history of money.
	We came off the gold standard 1971 in the US and ever since the 70s, we seem to have seen these declining standards in just about everything.
	It's not just the fall in the purchasing power of money and the inflation of the money supply and the debasement of currency.
	We see so many values seem to have slipped away, but we also see the debasement of education and the debasement of and grade inflation, they now call it.
	They actually use that word inflation, grade inflation.
	That's true.
	You know, you get boys who just don't read a book after the age of about 10.
	And why would they read a book when their phone, I hardly read now, because every time I go to read a book, I pick up my phone instead, and my phone is a bigger drawer.
	But the standards in schools have definitely slipped.
	The encouragement to, there's so much of actual fact-based stuff has been replaced with dogma.
	Which is a big problem and indoctrination and they're teaching them values rather than actual stuff.
	And I think that's because the state has replaced the church in education.
	I mean, it's the church's job to teach values, but not...
	They're not the same values as the state has.
	They're not useful values nowadays.
	Yeah, and there is a decline in standards.
	There just is.
	The thing about learning is that it is...
	So much of it is self-motivated.
	Like, if you're interested in a subject, you will learn about it because you're interested.
	It's a virtuous cycle.
	If you're not interested in a subject, you won't.
	You'll just switch off.
	And so much of learning is...
	So, for example, if you were to teach geography, I bet a kid, if he went and did a geography field trip or a biology field trip and went to the local reservoir and got all the animals out of the pond and did all that stuff he used to do, you'll learn way more from doing that than you will learning about it in the removed...
	Sense of a textbook, if you see what I mean.
	And so it's just that thing, and it's the job of the teacher to motivate and inspire that learning.
	And I feel sorry for teachers now, because there's burden with such unreasonable expectation.
	And there was a time when teachers...
	We're some of the most high-status people in society.
	Adam Smith, Socrates, Aristotle, they were all great teachers.
	I suppose you could say Jordan Peterson is a similar kind of figurehead today.
	But most, you know, if you look at what teachers earn compared to what, I don't know, lawyers or bankers or whatever earn, they're not on the same pay scale.
	And they're, you know, particularly when they work in the state sector, but the private schools are also so heavily regulated teachers.
	It's not quite as bad as in the state.
	They're just under so much pressure and being pulled in so many directions and their hands are tied in what they can actually teach because they have to stick to all these guidelines.
	And again, it comes back to what we were talking about straight away.
	State, it's too much government involvement and it creates more problems than it solves.
	And the solution of many on the left is always to demand more government.
	They have to do this in the schools.
	They have to do less.
	Actually, I think the solution is no state education whatsoever.
	We had no state education in the 19th century, and within the course of two generations, the British people went from essentially being field labourers to coming to the cities.
	And by 1870, when we had the Forster Act and education started to become mandatory, most people were already literate by then.
	The world that Charles Dickens described in his books was, you know, we'd moved on.
	We tend to think of the 19th century as Charles Dickens.
	We had moved on.
	And...
	Literacy rates, incredibly, are not that much better now than they were in 1870 when education started to become mandated by state.
	And the evidence is that the first thing that people spend money on after food and shelter and clothing is self-improvement.
	Absolutely.
	And you look at YouTube, the videos that get the most hits are all instructional videos of some kind or another.
	How to do this, how to do that.
	They get the most hits.
	They're all educational.
	The internet is the most powerful educative tool ever invented in all history.
	And for the most part, it is free beyond the cost of your broadband connection.
	And, you know, if you want to learn about something, just go on the internet.
	And you will learn about it pretty quickly.
	We don't need the state involved in education anymore.
	I absolutely agree.
	And to add just another example on top of that, Thomas Sowell often talks about black education after the abolishment of slavery in America.
	And it's very interesting to look upon how people like Booker T. Washington, who of course escaped from slavery, he knew that for, as he put it, his people to be able to bring themselves out of the mire that they'd been left in after the abolition of slavery...
	Education was the number one priority, and he set up schools like Dunbar High School, which was absolutely brilliant and had amazing levels of academic achievement, and blacks in America, for instance, were achieving far higher educational standards before the Civil Rights Act, where, obviously, abolition of forced segregation was fantastic, but then all of the other standards that the state put in and the forced busing to certain schools and such...
	Actually ended up hindering rather than helping.
	So the government steps in, tries to help, makes everything worse, as usual.
	Absolutely.
	The government is inherently incompetent.
	And why would you trust it?
	To educate your kids?
	And there are so many questionable morals, like who determines what's taught?
	What if their values are different to yours?
	And you look at educational standards and privately educated kids across the world consistently outperform public school educated kids.
	And home-educated kids outperform privately-educated kids.
	It's the less state there is, the better kids perform.
	And even if you were to home-educate a kid and he were to have no lessons at all, he would just learn, you know, for example, he would learn basic maths by going to the shop and...
	Paying for something.
	Or going to the market and buying some fruit or whatever it is.
	Or doing some basic DIY. He learns some basic physics or basic geometry, whatever it is.
	Basic maths.
	Or, you know, teaching a language, going out and hang out with some people who happen to speak that language rather than learning it through a textbook.
	They consistently outperform even when there is no regimental syllabus, if you like.
	That's very interesting.
	I might have to look into that and find out about that myself, why that might be.
	That's very interesting.
	Because there's no state.
	Yeah, almost certainly.
	That's the answer.
	I wrote a book called Life After the State, by the way.
	I'll have to check it out.
	Well, you can feel free to shill that if you want.
	Check that out if you're interested in hearing more about Dominic's ideas on Life Without the State.
	Very interesting.
	Life After the State was the name of the book.
	Life After the State, yes.
	Now let's get into the actual segment properly.
	That was a really interesting discussion.
	I like that.
	So just before we go any further, so we've got this article recently came out called Hippies and the Modern Left, where Seb Whitehouse is trying to connect the dots between the hippie movement of the 1960s and the modern left as we can see them today.
	And you can see certain similarities between them, this whole idea of, like we've discussed, trying to abolish reality almost and try and manipulate natural law to the will of people.
	And also, obviously, the fashion sense as well.
	The colourful hair, hippie outfits and such, although very interesting because I do think it's kind of paved the way for the atmosphere that we're in at the moment.
	So let's just go through a few examples of the school standards slipping because I don't just think it's also standards for students that are slipping.
	I think it's also standards for the actual teachers.
	The teachers who are being let in are not of the same calibre that they were 50, 60 years ago.
	I feel sorry.
	I mean, most teachers want to, there's a study, it's nearly 50%, I think it was in yesterday's papers, and it's something that 46% of teachers surveyed want to leave not just their job, their profession within the next five years.
	It's such a hard job because they're burdened with such unreasonable expectations.
	The thing is, I don't know, well, I'll show you an example of a lot of the teachers that I think are bringing these standards down.
	And it's a basic human instinct to want to teach, particularly as you get older, you want to share your wisdom.
	Yeah, I mean, since I've gotten more into politics, I've been very eager to tell all of my less informed friends about everything, sort of educate them in a sense, even if they obviously don't want to listen.
	That's indoctrination, not education.
	Well, tell them about things.
	I'm not trying to indoctrinate anybody, maybe.
	I am.
	But yeah, so here's one that I included as part of the recent premium podcast where it's talking about leftists teaching kids.
	So Seattle schools had recently abolished any grade other than A or incomplete.
	So the parents of special educational students are protesting Seattle Schools District's plan to give high school students grades of either A or incomplete during the school closure.
	This was during 2020, during COVID-19.
	Teachers, too, questioned the wisdom of the distance learning grade policy.
	So the only thing that you needed to achieve to get the A for this was show up.
	You needed to be in attendance.
	At the lectures and school classes that were going on over Zoom.
	It's nuts.
	You know, if the parents don't like it, they have to protest, they have to demand a change of this.
	The people they're protesting against are no doubt set in their own ways.
	You know, a lot of the time people don't home educate because they literally cannot afford to.
	But to achieve any sort of change, there's no choice.
	They're confined by the school that's close to them, by the school where their kid is.
	I just say, 15% of the government spending goes on education.
	Just knock 15% off taxes.
	Leave education to the free market.
	You'll see the cost of education fall dramatically.
	As I say, look at the internet.
	15% extra off their tax for everyone else, and suddenly education will become a lot more affordable.
	Yes, I agree completely there.
	So the interesting thing with this as well, the protests weren't even necessarily because, hold up, you're not actually going to be teaching our kids anything or at least nothing useful with this sort of plan to abolish grades entirely.
	The protest was because it was inequitable.
	Meaning that certain kids of different racial backgrounds will fall behind even with standards as lax as this.
	So I think a lot of this, as we'll find out as we go on, seems to rest on some very old-fashioned racial stereotypes.
	So don't you understand that if all they need to do to get an A is show up, the black kids are going to fall behind?
	That's the sort of thinking that we've got here, because apparently we can't expect these children to just even attend.
	These lessons.
	And one of the more recent ones I've got here is that Princeton...
	There's a confusion between the qualification is supposed to demonstrate a skill acquired or a level of learning acquired.
	And it's become all about the qualification rather than about what you've actually learned.
	Yeah, I've learned far more after leaving university than I did in my three years at university.
	I'll say that for sure.
	But this is from last year.
	So, Princeton boasted a new class having 68% students of colour...
	After waiving SAT score requirements.
	Now, this is not sending the message that I think that they want it to send.
	So, I'll go through the article.
	The Ivy League institution announced in April that it admitted almost 1,500 students for the class of 2025.
	Full 22% of admitted students are first-generation college students and 68% self-identify as people of colour.
	Self-identify is very interesting because...
	Anyone can self-identify as anything nowadays, apart from race, despite the fact that Ibram X. Kendi himself had an annoyed tweet last year about white people pretending to be black or Native American to improve their chances of getting into school because affirmative action leads to this sort of stuff.
	I hate that expression, people of colour, because it assumes that I have no colour.
	Oh no, it's a ridiculous counterproductive term.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	But they also talk about the record number of racial minority admittees comes after the school removed its standardized testing requirements, citing a lack of access to testing sites.
	Students were allowed to submit their standardized test scores, though they allegedly play a limited role in the admissions process.
	So completely useless.
	Any qualification that you get from Princeton now is either completely useless or perhaps if you're out of toilet paper, maybe it'll be nearby.
	But I think this is one damage.
	I do get the network, though.
	You do get the network.
	That is a big value in universities, the network of friends you build up.
	But as an Ivy League institution, you are damaging the standards and reputation of your own institution right there.
	And also, if you're not having any standards for people getting in, but you're potentially keeping the standards the same for the actual lectures and classes themselves, you're going to get record numbers of dropouts.
	Because you're going to be putting people in those positions who aren't ready for that level of work, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out a number of times.
	Let's move on just so we can get through a few of these quickly.
	So here's one of the absolute subversive degenerate things going on.
	New Jersey public school students as young as 10 could be taught that puberty blockers are an acceptable way to manage adolescence, a very damaging way to manage it, and that masturbating a few times a day is a healthy way to relieve stress.
	It's not what it says in the Bible.
	Exactly.
	Well, they don't care about the Bible nowadays, do they?
	But yeah, so your 10-year-olds might be being taught to masturbate a few times a day in New Jersey, so be wary.
	Some of the teachers might be trying to throw out practical examples, so...
	Maybe keep an eye out.
	Here's some of the actual teachers that we've been talking about.
	A lot of the teachers in these schools pushing these sorts of messaging are people like this.
	If you want to scroll down, I'm not going to play the clip.
	But this man says that if your parents don't accept you for who you are, F them, I'm your parents now.
	And of course this man is a representative of the state.
	So it's once again another example of how the state and its representatives don't think that you own your children.
	They think that they own your children.
	They are now vassals for the state.
	Nothing more than empty heads to be moulded in the way that they want, regardless of the parents' wishes.
	And this is why Democrats in America are getting absolutely trashed.
	He thinks he's doing good, that bloke.
	He really does.
	He really does.
	And he doesn't understand that he really isn't.
	My kids were going back to back in California, released this email saying it's not enough to be racist to not be racist.
	You must now be anti-racist.
	These kids are not even remotely racist.
	Like, they have all sorts of different kinds of friends.
	I've never heard them discuss it once.
	It's just like, I like this person, she's nice to me, and we like to play together, and we both like the same things.
	So to tell a nine-year-old that you have to be anti-racist, well, they go looking for racism.
	They're going to look to confront it.
	Which is an excellent point, because I think what they're actually doing, especially with nine-year-olds, is they're teaching racism to these children.
	They're teaching them that you need to divide each other by the colour of your skin and then treat each other differently, which is awful.
	What you're not hearing in all these arguments is how it's messing everyone up.
	It's giving white kids a complex, but on the other hand, you know, there's so much anger has unnecessarily been created amongst, you know, to use that BBC phrase, amongst the black and Asian communities.
	Yes.
	But there is just so much anger on the other side of the coin.
	And this, it's just causing so much division and I cannot see that it ends well.
	I thought it's already ended badly.
	You cannot treat people differently on the grounds of their race.
	You just can't.
	Yeah, I mean...
	And as soon as you do that, you excuse this guy because of slavery and you, whatever.
	It's like...
	I just dislike personally the idea of treating racial categories as if everyone within them is part of a hive mind.
	Everyone who's black has to think the same thing.
	This is why they're so angry at black conservatives like Larry Elder in America.
	They absolutely hate them.
	There's other stuff, like, just what's going on in California?
	California's doing terribly.
	I mean, California's been doing terribly for a while, and they voted back in Gavin Newsom, so I suppose you get what you deserve.
	You didn't clear them out in time, I suppose.
	But California public schools enrollment spirals, dropping by 110,000 students this year alone.
	And something that will make you happy is that looking into it, a lot of people are entering private schools.
	And then also homeschooling also increased as families either did not want to comply with pandemic safety measures such as masking or were concerned about the health risk posed by in-person learning.
	One of the benefits of lockdown is dramatic rise in homeschooling.
	Yeah, so hopefully we can see the results of that if it comes to some more positive results, which hopefully it will.
	We'll see that later on down the line when all of these homeschool kids are doing demonstrably better than their publicly school-trained friends.
	And as a result of the numbers dropping, Californian school budgets are also dropping, which is very nice to hear in this article.
	So the loss of public school families has already upended many districts, resulting in layoff notices, budget cuts, and school closures, Good.
	Sounds good to me.
	It sounds like California is being governed into the ground, which is not unusual.
	I think a lot of people are leaving.
	Yeah, and a lot of people are leaving.
	They're getting record numbers of people leaving.
	And I think they also have the lowest numbers in the whole U.S. of people from other states moving in.
	It's not just that they've got this massive migration out of the state.
	They've got nobody wants to move to California.
	For understandable reasons.
	That's one of the beautiful things about the states is they've still got those competitive states so you can leave one state and go to another without having to leave the country.
	But that sort of competition is a bit like the old city states in Italy and that You know, you just see everyone moving to Texas, Florida, away from California, New York.
	I mean, why would you want to live in California or New York when you've got Florida and Texas right now?
	Well, precisely.
	Yeah, the problem is, at the federal level, they've still got a bloated growing state, but at the local level, at least there's some competition.
	Yeah, so I've got a story here in this article from a woman saying, Hercules' parent Gloria Bossi didn't plan on her two kids being part of the yearly count again when she pulled her two children, a fourth grader and a second grader, out of West Contra Costa Unified in October to homeschool them.
	At the time, her second grader couldn't read.
	Both of her children had fallen behind academically during the pandemic, along with many classmates.
	I was extremely concerned the kids did not want to go back next year.
	My fourth grader said she's learning so much more at home.
	Her son is now reading at grade level.
	She also said that requiring masking caused severe and at times bleeding eczema on his face, which cleared up as soon as he was able to take it off in homeschool.
	The education, I can give them in comparison to traditional schools, she said.
	I think they're learning a lot more now.
	Which really says it all, doesn't it?
	And just to point out as well, there was one other thing, which was CNN pointed out a California school wherein some kids were being told to do an anti-Joe Biden chant.
	And I just want to point this out so that we're not hypocrites.
	If you're in a public school, as much as I don't think that they're particularly effective, I don't think you should be pushing anybody Any political agenda, even if it's one that I agree with, or something that I just find kind of funny.
	So if we need to be principled and consistent, we have to argue that even this is inappropriate at schools, even if it does align with our politics.
	But overall, I think you can see that at least in public schools and even in some private schools, standards are slipping, so maybe think about homeschooling your kids.
	Alright, I think that's everything for there, so let's jump into the video comments.
	Choosing Sheffield as a prime target in a Soviet first strike for its then-vital steel industry, the film's threads imagines the Cold War turning hot and the effects on the lives of local characters, from innocent families to emergency local area controllers.
	The film combines drama with the most accurate portrayal of a nuclear war the writers could gather from available intelligence at the time.
	It is strongly influenced by the unaired and shockingly depressing protect-and-survive public service broadcasts that were leaked in the early 1980s.
	Very interesting.
	Thank you very much for that, Alex.
	I've heard of that film, was told about it in university, and keep meaning to watch it, but it just sounds so harrowing.
	I've heard that that's a very, very difficult film to watch, so thank you very much for telling us about that.
	Are you alright there, Dominic?
	Yeah.
	Everything alright?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Just asking for a cup of tea.
	Okay.
	Guests, eh?
	The final nail in the electric car's coffin are batteries.
	A Tesla battery stores about 82 kilowatt hours of energy inside of it, taking up about 400 liters of volume.
	An equivalent amount of gasoline has more than 3000 kilowatt hours of energy inside of it, more than 40 times as much.
	To give you a comparison, a Tesla battery has the equivalent energy of about 9 liters of gasoline.
	Very interesting.
	The more I hear about this whole push to try and ban petrol cars and all fossil fuels and all sorts of things, the more I just think it's just another pipe dream.
	It's nuts.
	If you look at what fossil fuels have done for mankind, the things that fossil fuels have made possible, we should be embracing them.
	They are the most powerful form of energy there is, and it's like we've got up into our treehouse, We're good to go.
	So that's one factor.
	Most green energy, in order to get to the point where green energy is productive, it is going to involve so much burning of fossil fuels, you wonder if it's even worth the bother.
	You know, all that lithium in a battery, or the copper, or the cobalt, or the tin, all that mining requires, there's no such thing as green energy.
	Green energy mining.
	It's just not possible.
	And it's deluded.
	And just because you're not seeing the burning of the fossil fuel in your groovy electric car right in front of you, it is still likely that at some point in your groovy green electric car, the original source of that fossil fuel was...
	The original source of that energy was a fossil fuel being burnt somewhere else.
	Probably coal.
	Just because it's out of sight, it doesn't mean it's not there.
	Well, that's the problem a lot of people nowadays.
	If it's out of sight, it's out of mind, isn't it?
	And they don't consider the further ramifications of any of their goals or actions.
	But yeah, a lot of the green movement just seems like a death cult to me nowadays.
	Well, and you have to understand something fundamental about it.
	A lot of that green, not all of it, but a lot of it, there's a massive crossover in the Venn diagram, is people who want to end capitalism.
	They do not want progress.
	They do not realise that humans have got better and better at consuming energy.
	If you consume, even just looking in London, if you compare the diesel engines of the 90s compared to cars today, the air is so much cleaner.
	You couldn't cycle in London without a mask in the 90s.
	You can today.
	Thank you.
	In Stone Age times, in order to, you know, trap an animal, they might, you know, dig a trench on one side of the wood and then start a fire so that the animal falls in the trench and then they trap the animal.
	That would involve just to trap one animal for, you know, how long an animal would feed you.
	They'd burn down a whole section of a forest.
	Now how is that And you'd sort of think, oh, well, Stone Age Man was much more environmentally friendly than we are.
	He lived in tune with his surroundings, yes, but he was not, you know, we are much better at consuming energy today and you just need to look at the lifestyles we enjoy.
	And, you know, it's the classic thing of tweeting anti-capitalist stuff on your brand new iPhone.
	It's that.
	Yeah, I think a lot of the intersectional movements, as much as some people might want to protest at this, do have a lot of their roots in very communistic ideals of just seeing capitalism as this big Sort of nebulous force that in their own mind just means evil, just means selfish, greedy people.
	They watch a film like Wall Street, Oliver Stone films from the 1980s, for instance.
	They see, what is it, Gordon Gekko, and just think, that's what I'm fighting against.
	No, what you're fighting against is social cooperation between people trading freely between one another.
	Sure.
	And even the Gekko quote, greed is good.
	It's true.
	You know, it was deliberately muddy.
	They used that word greed to create controversy.
	But the essential thing is, you know, it's Adam Smith's invisible hand.
	It's not from the benevolence of the baker, the butcher, or the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.
	It's people acting in their own self-interest that make the world a better place.
	You know, Steve Jobs didn't give us the iPhone because he was charitable.
	He did it with his own...
	Because he thought he could make some money off it.
	Sure.
	And the same goes for everything that's good.
	Somebody's acting out of their own self-interest.
	Everything boils down to that.
	And that's what Gecko meant when he said Guido's good.
	The problem with a lot of people, when they think they're attacking capitalism, what they're actually attacking is crony capitalism.
	And there's a distinction between the two.
	Crony capitalism is when, you know, something like the rails, when you have a private...
	The trains, when you have a private...
	Every body awarded a government monopoly.
	And so you create this society in which private interests lobby the government to grant them special favour.
	And that's not a free market.
	That's, you know, cronies being granted special favour.
	The trains are an example of that.
	I'm afraid it's rife within the NHS, all these suppliers.
	The NHS is run in favour of the supplier, not the consumer.
	In America, the patent industry and the medical...
	Patenting.
	Oh my God, it's cronies and cronies.
	Yeah.
	Josh and I actually recently did an article talking about antitrust laws and how they are basically the grant of government monopoly.
	Google spends more on lobbying than anyone else.
	No one's surprised there.
	Let's move on to the next video comment.
	So what do all the numbers on ammo mean?
	Well, the number indicates the diameter of the bore.
	First we measured that in gauge, which is how many lead balls of that diameter could be made from one pound of lead.
	Then we started measuring the bore in hundreds of inches and called it the caliber.
	Then the French had to make it worse by adopting the metric system and create a third way of measuring things, and then it got even worse with metallic cartridges adding a second dimension.
	Now, Normal countries named rounds of the same caliber after their creator, their use, or by how many grains of powder it held, but those weirdos over there instead removed that in favor of raw emotionalist numbers, akin to replacing gendered language with comrade or birthing people.
	Very interesting.
	Thank you very much.
	Don't you just hate that whole birthing people phrase that's come about nowadays?
	Assigned female at birth, all that nonsense.
	Completely denying reality, like they always do.
	Carry on.
	It's the word assigned, as though like...
	It's so clinical and cold, isn't it?
	There's no magic to it.
	There's somebody going around sticking labels on people's heads with what you're assigned.
	You know.
	Let's carry on.
	Carl and Callum managed to beat me to it.
	I was going to go over the fact that, yeah, essentially just the NHS being able to say, yeah, but I want to get paid but not actually do my job and, you know, provide healthcare to people, kind of, um, leads to the death of people.
	And I know I've said this before, But I decided to bring it up on the Monday episode with video comments because two of my grandmas died because of that, and it turned out to be cancer, and my grandad was a close call not too long ago, so kind of a personal one on that.
	Oh, very interesting.
	I hope your grandad's alright there, Harry.
	My grandad died because of an NHS incompetence.
	Not a surprise, sadly.
	Tony D and Little Joan, we're going to show you, Ritz, what a cheese steak is all about.
	Purchase some thin steak, this is certified Angus beef.
	Fry the steak with some onions.
	Add some jelly cheese, not the cheese that's wrapped in individual slices.
	Place on a roll with lettuce, tomato, the fried onions, ketchup, oregano, garlic powder, salt and pepper if you'd like, balsamic vinegar, and a little bit of olive oil.
	And you're ready to go.
	Sounds pretty tasty.
	Thank you very much for that.
	Normally he gives us ghost stories, but apparently today he just felt like making a sandwich for us.
	It did.
	Thank you very much.
	I'm surprised you guys didn't cover the results of the Karen Shitmer governor kidnap case with the Federal Bureau of Instigation trying to entrap a bunch of folks.
	A bit daft.
	But yeah, two of them got off and two of them were deadlocked so the judge threw the cases out.
	I wonder if they'll be brought up again.
	I guess the guy who pled out has got a lot of egg on his face.
	Maybe the feds will take care of him.
	Who knows?
	I don't want the feds...
	See, the feds taking care of anyone has very negative implications in my mind.
	Very interesting, though.
	I might have to look into that.
	Honestly, I wasn't aware of the story that you're referencing there.
	I'll have to take a look a bit.
	Hello, Callum.
	Sorry if my last comment came across the wrong way.
	I meant to say that as a Sargon fan since 2015, I was skeptical about this weird new Lotus Eater's name and the new people joining him.
	But you proved me wrong.
	You're awesome.
	In fact, I'm going to stand up for you.
	I thought it was very low of Harry to make fun of your height.
	Harry, don't stoop to that level.
	It's quite beneath you.
	Here, have one on me, gents.
	One for me, one for Harry, and one for Callum.
	I promise to never belittle you, Callum, because between you and me, I'm just a bigger man.
	Sadly, Callum's not here right now to hear all that, but I will make sure to show him that clip afterwards, Chad.
	Dad, I think he'll really appreciate that one.
	You've not met Callum yet, have you?
	No, I haven't.
	No, he's a bit diddy.
	So just something I kind of noticed in the last podcast, but whenever you mention teachers and their students, you always mention them as their kids, as in the students of the teacher.
	You're granting them the premise that these kids are their kids as opposed to the kids of the parents who have the rights over those kids.
	Small gripe, but I think it's important to actually differentiate and keep them from getting that premise.
	Thank you for reminding me of that, because it's just something that I do kind of as a habit, because it's ease of language just saying, oh, they're kids, but I recognize that in doing so, it might be giving them a little bit too much credit for what they're actually doing.
	Greetings, Lotus Eaters.
	Congrats on episode 309.
	All this gender and sexuality stuff for kids is really weird, isn't it?
	You know, girls were considered icky when I was a kid.
	You know, we'd spend our time arguing about who was going to be what Transformer and what colour Power Ranger.
	Yeah, no, as far as I'm concerned, that is still what kids should be concerned about, and I imagine most of them at the base of it are concerned about is that girls are icky, I want to play with my toys.
	That sort of attitude, but it's the teachers ramming this into their heads constantly, that this is how you've got to behave, this is how you've got to see the world, which is what's negatively affecting them so much.
	Right, let's move on to some of the video comments.
	We've got one directed straight at you, first off, from Joseph Booth, saying, Hey Dominic, love your work.
	The other week I showed my lefty uni student friend a few of your songs.
	She was amused until I started playing the more based slash political ones, and then said, I'd love to see this guy try and debate my mate from uni.
	He's very smart and studies economics.
	You can picture my facial expression.
	I mean, honestly, lefty economics is an oxymoron in the first place, so...
	I think you'd have the upper hand there a little bit.
	So, the Minicus Monarchist on J.K. Rowling says, I see a lot of people on the right cheering people like Rowling on nowadays, even going so far as to call her based.
	I think this is a mistake.
	What we should actually be doing is cheering on the monkeys fighting like in that Simpsons meme.
	Have you seen that one where it's the two monkeys with knives fighting each other?
	People like her are part of who brought us to the point where we're in the first place, and should we actually succeed in rooting out into sectionality, the old school feminist should be next on the list.
	Just because she's temporarily fighting the same enemy we are doesn't mean she's on our side.
	She's basically World War II Stalin, a temporary sister in arms at best.
	There's a bit of an extreme example, but I kind of get what you're going for, Minicus, because I do agree.
	Like I say, before she got cancelled, I would not have been supporting J.K. Rowling.
	I actually enjoy the Harry Potter franchise and books, but her as an individual, she was insufferable.
	Before all of this came about.
	But since then we do kind of have to recognise people's opinions can change.
	I don't think she has changed any of her opinions really.
	But we do kind of have to support her when she's doing such an effective job at fighting back against this.
	I love the way in the culture wars that these, or political wars, whatever you want to call them, that these different alliances form.
	And so, for example...
	During Brexit, you had this sort of alliance between the Thatcherite right and the Benite left, who traditionally absolutely loathe each other.
	And that sort of alliance has continued.
	And you've got this sort of alliance now between the sort of libertarian, slightly Corbynist, if he actually...
	Was a bit more honest about what he stands for, left, and the sort of libertarian, you know, Jacob Rees-Mogg right, if you like.
	And sides change, you know.
	So, for example, Brexit was one little war, and now this trans war, you know, who's on which side has slightly changed.
	But I think gradually what's happening is actually just more and more people are coming onto our side.
	Perhaps.
	With J.K. Rowling, I don't see any indication that perhaps she's any more right-wing than she used to be.
	It's just that those on the far extremes of the left have been able to hold such sway over culture as it stands.
	They've just yanked the Overton window to the point where all of a sudden J.K. Rowling does find herself on our side.
	I imagine she's a sort of Blairite centrist, a sort of social democrat.
	I don't know, but...
	And economically, I couldn't tell you.
	Socially, but like I say, before her cancelling, she was very much on the side of all of the progressive movements and such.
	But once again, I think as an asset in the ongoing culture war, I think she's very useful right now.
	It's useful to have the most high-profile, one of the richest women in the world fighting on behalf of women's rights to recognise that women are in fact a biological fact of reality.
	Which, once again, it's ridiculous we've even got to this point in the first place.
	But if this is what we've got to take, I'll take it.
	Kevin Fox says, While that is all true, I do think that is kind of an inbuilt failure of democracy, is that that's always going to happen.
	It's always going to be that those loud voices that make up the minority are going to have the most pull over the politicians.
	Because the vast majority of people actively don't want to be involved in politics.
	Most people don't care.
	They don't want to care, at the very least.
	They just want to go about their lives.
	So if you have a situation where most people don't care, they're going about their lives, whereas the minority can keep shouting up and shouting up and pulling the politicians their way, you're only ever going to get movement in one direction.
	Which, generally speaking, has been a leftward direction for the past 60 years at least.
	Do you have anything?
	Okay.
	Minicus Monarchist against...
	I had a moment where I logged out.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	Zoned out for a moment, I beg your pardon.
	Oh, it's alright.
	I get these lapses, it's a senior moment.
	Okay, yeah, you go ahead.
	I'm back in the room.
	I'm back in the room.
	That's the only reason.
	I'm sorry.
	The Minicus Monarchist again says, Harry, will we be getting a Hopper book club any time in the future?
	I think something like Democracy, the God that Failed would be a very good choice.
	His short book, Getting Libertarianism Right, is actually what woke me up to the distinction between a libertine progressive libertarian and being an actual libertarian a couple of years ago.
	I'd love to see some content on his ideas.
	It is something I'd be interested in doing.
	I'm actually reading, well, listening to the audiobook of Democracy, At the moment, which has been very interesting and very eye-opening to some of his arguments.
	I'm currently on the chapter, Conservatism and Libertarianism, where he's making the argument that the only way to be a true conservative is to be a free-market libertarian, and the only way to be a true free-market libertarian is to be more socially conservative, which is very interesting.
	But I've also been reading the great fiction as well, which has been very interesting.
	He's got very interesting ideas on things.
	Have you read Hopper?
	I've read bits of his stuff.
	I've seen him speak.
	I went to his conference once upon a time.
	He has this sort of annual conference in Turkey, which was good fun.
	Oh, I bet.
	Yeah.
	Nice guy.
	He seems like an interesting guy.
	Oh, yeah.
	His books have got great titles.
	Yeah, he's very smart as well.
	Oh, I'll say.
	Massively logical in all of his praxeology and a priori reasoning for a lot of things.
	I quite enjoy that approach.
	On Leftists Discovering Marriage, Drew Doomhand says the biggest mass murderer in all history has been government.
	Hello, new libertarian slogan.
	Where have you been all my life?
	It's just obvious.
	It's just a logically consistent statement, really, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's in one of my books, so...
	Yeah, well, there you go.
	Check out his book if you want to find more about that.
	I can't even remember which one it is.
	I might have stuck it in all three.
	I mean, it's a pretty good one.
	That should be the opening sentence of all of them.
	Student of History says, I've seen it happen.
	Buddy of mine impregnated his girlfriend and instantly stopped drinking all night because he had to take the responsibility of taking care of his wife and daughter.
	Kids changing mentality.
	I agree.
	agree i think it really forces a lot of men to grow up yeah basically because before that you don't have the responsibility you don't have anything that is really relying on you you can just act like a big kid that's why you find single men in their late 30s who still act like teenagers whereas if you find the same sort of man at the same age married with kids they're going to be acting like a grown-up it's just how these things go based ape
	could you imagine being married to someone with a 16 page binder referencing her own children as a cost benefit analysis i have visions of this woman drowning her kids in the bathtub while fantasizing about that 4.6 apr the tax breaks on her Oh yeah, that's the sort of...
	Anti-humanist attitude that we're getting going there.
	Michelle Burniston says, We used to have a word for transactions regarding possession of human beings.
	Very progressive.
	Also a good point.
	Captain Charlie the Beagle says, Regarding leftists discovering marriage, this goes to show that horseshoe theory is real and applies to the social life, not just political.
	Or in other words, when every degeneracy has been tried, reality will always reassert itself.
	That is true.
	Reality and natural law always comes back to bite people and their utopian ideals, I find.
	Onto school standards.
	Silly Mid-On says, on state education, I feel there should be a balance as the state backing away would just leave the accreditation and assessment companies like AQA and OCR to be the ones pushing the message as private companies.
	Now, you sound like you've thought about this quite a lot.
	What do you think to that?
	I hadn't actually thought about that particular aspect.
	He's talking about the qualifications.
	They're the exam boards.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, I mean, as long as their monopolies are not government awarded, but freely determined by the market, then I guess we're okay.
	And there's no reason why other exam boards couldn't...
	challenge them and compete which currently it's quite hard to do yeah i mean to go full rothbardian the only kind of monopoly that could exist in a true free market would be a monopoly of competence that's the only thing that you could do that's the only way to win that kind of market share is to just be the best that nobody else wants and even needs to go to anyone else because there's always the opportunity for other competitors to come up and usurp you if they provide a better service
	saverian nox says giving all kids highest grade possible is obvious way to hide how much damage lockdowns did to kids.
	That's a good point, actually.
	I didn't think of that.
	Damage control measures right there.
	Ignacio Junquera says, the drop in standards in education is incredibly toxic to society.
	As a personal example, I got to enter public university just to drop out half a year later because I'm a below average student.
	All my life, the tune of society was go to university.
	I went through my education barely passing and no one thought to tell me maybe consider something else Absolutely, because what you're talking about there is a wasted opportunity cost and wasted time right there, because you're not going to get that time back, but it's at least good that you're able to recognize half a year.
	It may have been half a year, but imagine if you'd gone for the full three or four years.
	Yeah, this idea that university is the be-all and end-all is a deluge.
	Yeah, I agree.
	And also, just a few more of the honourable mentions here, saying, UK Minicus, I like Dominic.
	Good resonance and happy vibes.
	Thanks, guys.
	And John Kendrick says, Top Stuff.
	Was wondering when you were going to get Dominic on here.
	Well, we've got him now, and I hope you've had a good time, because that's about all we've got time for.
	Thank you very, very much for tuning in.
	Be sure to check us out again tomorrow at 1 o'clock British Summertime, where you'll find us again.

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