G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up

at Uncomfortableconversations.substack.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.

G'day, humans. Imagine, if you will, you're walking down a street on an evening in Brooklyn,

in New York. It's an early summers night. It It's hot and it's muggy. And a little

cobblestone street, you hear from coming inside a pub, a bar, a dive bar, some laughter and you

push open the door and you go inside and you can smell the stale vodka. And in a back room of this bar are four people on a stage,

one of them, some Australian host, three of them, fabulous, smart, funny individuals, bantering

about the week's news, you get yourself a cocktail and you perch yourself down on a barstool and you listen to them

banter. That was the vision for We the People Live, the first podcast I ever did. It launched

in June of 2015 and it was my attempt to just think, well, if I was going to do like a panel

show about the news with smart funny people bantering about the news, what would I do?

The podcast then evolved into just being my version of an interview show, which became a precursor, I suppose, to this show.

But this is, from the archives, never before heard since We the People Live went extinct some years ago, episode one of We The People.

My producer at the time had reached out to Jim Norton, who is a legend, an icon of the New York

comedy scene, a radio titan, and a stand-up god. And bizarrely, he said, yeah, I'll do it for free. I'll come down to your

rinky dinky little pub and banter. You can just buy me some drinks. He joined Abby Crutchfield

and Kevin Allison. They were fantastic. The whole thing is rough around the edges as hell.

But it's just interesting if you're

interested in what was going through our minds and what we were trying to do at the time.

It is surreal to hear what our attitude was towards the news as well. This is June of 2015.

So Obama is the president. Trump is not yet by far the nominee. Believe it or not, this is the week that Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And you will hear from the way that we discuss it and how little time we give to it. What a joke it was perceived to be. We're talking about Ted Cruz. we're talking about Marco Rubio, we're talking about

Jeb Bush, and Trump is a footnote. This also happens to take place in the week of, do you remember

...