Our first podcast of 2011 finds us in a reflective but ultimately positive and upbeat mood, filled with hope and good cheer for the new year and all the challenges and opportunities for change and self-improvement and spiritual fulfillment it may bring: perhaps an unnecessary and expensive hair transplant like the already financially unstable Gordon Ramsay, or an unhealthy, slightly creepy obsession with a murder case like the tabloids, or a documentary about yourself on Channel 4 like Britain's Fattest Man, or the living nightmare of a vast, intricately staged Truman Show-style illusion in which your so-called life is populated by actors on a loop whose job it is to make every development in your existence here on earth seem like a cruel and ironic joke designed to drive you to nervous breakdown or suicide or the decision to sell your house and go and do missionary work in India or at the very least a few sad Tweets. But despite all this, we vow to carry on doing the podcast. If Richard's stupid Mac "disk" lets us. (His disk is all part of The Truman Show, too, of course.)

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