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It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Now that we've loosened up a bit, I'm going to chase down an audio setting real quick.

All right, so all you do that, I am going to say hello to Stephen Cook,

who we've decided today, just today, is our favorite guest.

Nice!

Yeah, we were having a contest between Matthew and I and we both voted and we decided it was you.

That's good because I got a text message from an old girlfriend not long ago today who said that my wife must be a saint. So she's balancing it out. I'm your guy's favorite. Clearly my old girlfriend does not

feel the same way. Yeah. Don't talk to either of my ex-wives.

Since...

Well... Well, thanks. Thanks for coming on just to, oh boy things are bad. Yeah. Oh boy,

let me, I want to give my own personal context here because,

please. So I got, I got shit cans laid off right from Vice because they're,

because they don't want to be in the news business anymore.

Well, all right, it's all right.

It's the way the business is.

Backing up even farther.

We had a gentleman named John Spencer on to talk about Israel several weeks ago.

I would say I came away displeased as maybe the wrong word but like unsettled from the conversation.

We can get into that maybe a little bit later, but then I got laid off and then I like when that happens there's a lot of paperwork and a lot of union meetings and I kind of shut my brain down to

everything that was going on outside of my own personal bubble. So does my understanding,

like I've been getting kind of glimpses of what's going on over the past two weeks. Can I, can one of you

deliver me? It all seems very bad, but can I get the headline version of what's been happening?

...