Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Weekender. I'm not even going to lie to you. I'm not opening a can of anything. It's early. I'm drinking coffee. Nick Houseman's still waking up. How you doing, bud? I am still waking up, but I'm here. I'm present. I'm ready to go. I'm looking forward to, you know, existing with you for a little while pre- Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for existing with you. That is a lovely way to put it. Thank you so much.

Everybody, we have a big, giant double-stuffed, triple-stuffed mailbag of listener questions that we're

going to get into today. And I'm very, very much looking forward to this. There are so many

questions on so many different topics and things that we don't always

get to touch on.

I'm very, very pumped.

For those who are listening to the free preview, a reminder, go to Patreon.com slash

Mike Rick Podcast, get the whole episode, access to the Weekender, the Discord, all that good

stuff.

I want to say in the week of Thanksgiving, Nick, I am very, very thankful that people have been coming to listen to this show, supporting the show, particularly as I don't know if you've seen the numbers about what's happening at like CNN and MSNBC.

Like there are shows that are getting like tens of thousands of viewers at this point.

People are obviously coming to independent media because they want to hear what's going on. I am very, very grateful for that. And thank you for everybody who's supporting the show. And then also just a little blue sky shout out. You know, I getting much more engagement all of a sudden there. Oh. And just saying how well, how much they enjoy the show, which, you know, on the other

site, like, you know, I don't want to ever, no one responded to me on their site. So I feel really grateful to, to, it feels like this is something happening. We're getting away from that area. And we're going to forge ahead, which could be part of what we're looking for right now. Yeah, and, you know, in the interest of being earnest and

honest and open, you know, I think one of the things that's happened after the election is,

one, I think a lot of people are getting serious about what's going on. And number two,

I think they're grateful for people who are having actual conversations about what's going on,

as opposed to continuing to peddle like unearned hope

towards them that basically bottles them away from being able to change anything.

So I am very, very grateful that people have given us their trust.

You know what's interesting about the unearned hope you mentioned is it's a little bit of

a parallel to what Trump does in this sort of bullshit reality he tries to create

...