I don't think that I'm serving producers well with the arrangement as it currently is because what I think it really comes down to is like am I being paid to research or am I being paid to chit chat with every producer and based on your notes that I've been reading all these years.

I do think we have a clear winner to that question. There are plenty of opinions about government available to those who want to find them, you know, most political podcasts. That's what they are.

But like who else is reading laws and digging for the context to understand how and why they were crafted.

You know, where else can we find the details about where our tax money is going. So I feel like there's plenty of chit chat branded as information if that's what you're looking for, but I feel like it's the research that makes congressional dish valuable and I really need to focus on that.

I am so damn tired of being lied to. I don't think I can deny it anymore.

If you can't stick to your story, if you think it flies. But I'm not going to buy it anymore.

Hello, my friend and thank you for listening to this bonus. Thank you episode of Congressional dish. I'm your host Jennifer Briny.

If this is your first time listening to congressional dish, I highly highly highly recommend that you go to a numbered episode one that doesn't have thank you in the title and start there because this is a podcast about Congress and those are the main episodes.

Those are the ones that are going to tell you about bills and laws and hearings and Congress and because Congress does a lot of investigations and basically I do deep dives on Congress because I want to know what they're doing and what they're finding out and where my money is going.

And I figure if I'm doing this research, I might as well share it with you. So those are the main episodes of congressional dish. Please start there because these episodes, these thank you episodes are intended to be for producers because this is a listener supported podcast.

And the people that are paying for the show are the producers. And so for about two years now, I've been reading all of the notes that have been sent in by producers and thanking everyone one by one who wants to be thanked on the air.

And with that in mind, I am going to start this episode today with an announcement about how we're going to be doing congressional dish from now on because as you just heard in that intro, the thank you episodes are different from what congressional dish started out as back in the day when I first started the show.

I was thanking producers at the end of the main episodes. It would take five or 10 minutes because we had like four people listening and maybe two people were contributing and so it didn't take very long.

But then 15 minutes turned into 30 minutes, which turned into an extra hour at the end of the main episodes and that was scaring people away because they thought that there was, you know, two hours of content when really the meat of the episode was only an hour.

So about two years ago, I split it out and I made main episodes and thank you episodes.

But the last thank you episode, which ironically was the most fun thank you episode I've ever recorded, it was three hours long.

And even though I really enjoyed doing that, there were still a lot of notes that we didn't get to.

And it was, you know, it's three hours to record it, but then I also have to listen to it on the other side because we put golf swings over all of my profanity.

And you know, my dad did say, you know, Jennifer, you could just not swear and then you wouldn't have to do that.

And even though the man has a point, we're not going to do that here. I need to talk like I talk and I talk like a trashy sailor.

So we put the golf swings over all of the swears on the public feed because there are countries, very large countries with billions of people in it, like China and India.

They don't allow podcasts with the explicit tag in their podcast directories, which would mean that anyone living in China or India, who is a voter here in the United States, wouldn't have access to any of my episodes, if even a single one of them has to have the explicit tag on it.

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