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Well, thank you for inviting us to have a little alcohol. I don't have any beer left but I do have the last vino in the house.

It's probably quite bitter by now but we're going to see. Well, wine only gets better with age, haven't you heard?

I know that's especially true of the cheap $12 wine that you're probably drinking.

Yes, it's true. I'm on a budget these days. Earlier last year I was splurging $18, perhaps even $20 on my trips to the wine rack.

But now we're back to 12.

When I spoke to you earlier today I was pretty stressed out because there was a lot on my plate but I felt like even though it's Thursday I thought I'll have one beer because I actually did get through the mountain of things that I had to do today.

It's only Thursday but it's been a pretty productive week so I felt like knocking back a cold one while we recorded this.

And you, the listeners out there, you can crack open a cold one too or a non-alcoholic beverage if that suits you better and pretend you're the third mic.

Pretend you're the third pal in the room just kicking back after a long week.

We should probably officially start the show. Welcome back everybody to Michael and us where we sound a little laid back here but we do have an actual show plan for you.

I'll tell you about some of the stuff that I've been working on this week.

Something I did today was work on a piece partly inspired by the Netflix series Dirty Money.

Have you seen any episodes from that?

I have not. No, I haven't even heard of it.

It's quite good. So it's a Netflix series.

One of the executive producers was Alex Gibney, the documentarian who did going clear the Scientology documentary and a number of other things.

And, you know, each, each episode is concerned with a different sort of instance of corporate malfeasance or corruption or, you know, scandal or something like that.

And the topics are pretty varied. You know, there's one about, I haven't watched this one but there's one that's about the theft over several months, I believe, of more than 3000 tons of maple syrup in Canada.

But there's also ones about Jared Kushner's Slumlord Empire. There's one about a drug company implicated an awful price gouging scheme.

There's a really good episode on Donald Trump actually called Confidence Man.

I mean, the subtext of it is basically like he's been doing the same con like ever since he, you know, started and essentially like the political con he pulled is exactly the same as like all of his business cons.

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