Megan McCain has entered the chat.

Welcome back to Megan McCain has entered the chat.

We have some very exciting news.

I was just told by you, Miranda, that right this second, as we're taping,

we are number three on Apple in news podcasts and number 17 in podcasts overall. Our little

engine it could seems to be doing like it's pretty okay right now. I'm honestly just so glad we're not

a huge failure. Thank you so much for all your hard work. Rand, are you excited?

I just, I can't believe it. I feel like it's a dream or a trick. I don't, like, I just keep looking at

it and like waiting for someone to be like, oh, you guys just dropped your bottom down.

I mean, we got to keep it going now, but honestly, just people listening and caring and, you know, we came into this space wanting to do something a little different. We want to talk about news and everything in our chats and culture and everything. But, you know, we want to be respectful and there's no yelling unless there's something really insane that happens. And no one is ever going to leave our podcast having a bad experience, which is

just, I think, a little bit of a vibe shift from everything out there right now.

So I'm very, very, very grateful.

So thank you.

Thank Kara.

Thank Matt, our engineer in here and everyone who is listening and caring.

It's a wonderful feeling.

I think people can tell we're having a good time.

We're having a good time. Except when you have COVID like you do now. Oh, God. Yes. COVID.

It's horrible. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. So we want to talk about today's episode. We have

my friend Lori Blackford, who is an Emmy Award winning political journalist and most recently

the producer of the Showtime

Political Documentary Series The Circus. She's also just a dear friend of mine. And I thought we'd bring

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