Welcome to me, you've lived your life like a candle and the wind.

Never fading with the sunset when the rain set in.

Welcome to Michaelas. I'm Will Sloan and back in the saddle.

Fan favorite Luke Savage, Here he is, folks.

Well, thank you. It's good to be back. I am in fact alive and I won't say I'm feeling 100%, but

definitely feeling a lot better. Yeah, just had to be put under for a few hours for a minor procedure on my nose,

which I didn't realize until a few days before the operation was basically going to make me

completely dysfunctional for 10 days or so after. So I'm feeling a lot closer to normal.

Not addled on painkillers, or not too addled on painkillers right now. So I think I should

be able to do this.

But I want to say a big thanks to Ashley McCray of Current Affairs, to Jack Frane Reed of the

Real Politic podcast, and also, of course, to a gentleman scholar, a longtime friend of the show

Alex Ross for filling in for me during my absence. I was thinking about it and I realized that absent kind of

bonus content like when you interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum and there was one episode last year where I was

in the States. Besides those, I couldn't really think of any instances where I've taken a step back

from the show or not been on an episode. you know, since we started it in whatever month of

2016 that was, I mean, is it, was it April, May, June? I can't remember when I, what month it was

when I got that fateful message from my longtime friend Will Sloan that said something like,

fuck it, let's do a Michael Moore podcast, which was an idea.

I think those were the exact words, yes.

We toyed around with for a bit.

But anyway, like I said, I don't think I'd taken a step back from the show like this.

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