Welcome to the rush hour. Your daily dose of pop culture for your rush hour ride. Buckle up and

enjoy the drive with your host, stand-up comedian Dave Neal. Good morning, everybody. Happy

Hump Day to you on this November 12th, 2025. I got all of your stories for your rush hour right to work. Special episode

for you today. Did my first in-person interview here at the studio at the Rush Hour podcast Enterprise.

I've got Mike Cortiz. He's running for Congress here in Tennessee. Fantastic conversation,

really about Americans of all shapes and

sizes coming together. Whether you live in a city or a farmer, it's a very diverse community out

here in the Nashville area. And I think you're going to love this conversation. But first,

how about this news? It looks like they're ready to find out about them pesky Epstein files.

Thomas Massey tweeted this yesterday. The 218th and final signature for the Epstein discharge

petition will happen tomorrow. Now, the reason why they need a discharge petition is because

the Speaker of the House won't bring this to a vote. He gets to decide what

they vote on and what they don't vote on unless you have a certain amount of signatures.

They haven't had those signatures because he has refused to swear in the representative

elect Adelaidec Rivalda. But he says he's doing that today, Wednesday, at 4 p.m. Eastern time.

So we'll have to see. Are they going to actually release the Epstein files, or will this just

lead to a whole other rabbit hole? We have to go down. Who the hell knows? I'm here to

hold them accountable. We don't care who's in those files. We want them exposed. All right, well, let's jump to it. Here's my conversation with Mike. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Rush Hour podcast on this morning episode, The Hump Day, November 12th, 2025, special guest in studio here. This is my debut, this is my debut having a guest in studio. He's running for the

5th Congressional District here in Tennessee. It's Mike Cortice. How are you? Good, man. How you doing? I'm so excited to have you here right now. Yeah, I appreciate you having me in. Yeah, of course. Now, we met. Now, there we got to spill. It's Christian, like, you just got to, we met probably at one of these Democratic Party events here in Tennessee.

I moved a year and a half ago, and it's been wild to see this movement in the area around, you know, just like it feels like a changing time, not just here, but in the country.

But tell me about your running for office, your decision to and all that.

Yeah, man. So I'm very fortunate. I get to serve in the fourth district in Davidson County now. What made me get interested in this was back in 2016, you know, and tell me if this resonates with you, I started seeing the tenor of our public discourse really change. It got very vitriolic. And I saw neighbors start looking at other neighbors as enemies and that was very scary for me so for me when I was a kid I grew up in an abusive home my wife's dad was in jail for a good portion of her life I remember our first date she was telling me she goes like my friends used to bring nickels and dines to school so I could buy lunch I was like oh I get that because the shop owners of my town used to take care of me when things would get rough.

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