Welcome Current Affairs Bird Feed to another very special, super special episode of the Current Affairs podcast.

This is Sparky Abraham Finance Editor. I'm here today with Sam Yang.

Sam Yang is a martial artist, a podcaster, a writer, and a philosopher.

He hosts the Southpaw podcast, which offers a mix of martial arts history, MMA commentary, interviews with

everyone from socialist academics to leftist gym owners. I've been a fan of the Southpaw podcast for a while.

I'm really excited to have Sam on to talk about the weird cross sections of lefty politics

and combat sports. So thanks and welcome, Sam. How are you doing? I'm good. Thanks for having me.

I think I told you that when you contacted me, it felt like the mothership was calling me.

Yes, which blows my mind a little bit. I don't know. I still find it hard to understand that

people like listen to our podcast. Well, for me, when I was starting, I thought about like pitching story ideas to current affairs,

but I never did.

But it was like kind of like, oh, but that would be like one of the places I would want to

write for.

And then I downloaded the editorial guidelines that you all have.

The writer's guide, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Not because I wanted to, well, like I said, I was thinking about pitching, but I never

ended up doing it.

But that wasn't the reason why I downloaded that.

I was downloading it because when I was starting my podcast, I was like, we need,

me and my co-host, we need some kind of format. So we didn't tailor it like one for one, but it was like,

these are ideas that they use to frame what they do. We should have something comparable to cover

...