Hi, everyone, and happy new year. To start 2026 off, Moira and I had a big plan, a three-part

series on the rights love of education and educational grifting, ranging from Peter Thiel's

Antichrist Lectures to, you know, various YouTube universities with heavy, heavy quotation marks,

to the actual scam universities that

right-wingers from Donald Trump to Barry Weiss are so fond of. Well, we did record two and

half hours of material for this series, and we just felt it wasn't quite up to snuff yet.

We're going to re-record. We're going to do this series for sure.

But for now, what we decided to do was to give you a little bit of a teaser of an episode

that went up on our Patreon just last week.

It's an in-depth discussion of Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto, which has been burning

up the worst of year lists across 2025.

Michael was kind enough to stop by and talk to us about this book. We all three read it, and now we're inflicting it on you. So this is

going to be the first 15 minutes of our Patreon conversation. If you want to hear the rest of it,

please subscribe to our Patreon. It really helps us do this kind of show. And while we're obviously a little

bit embarrassed to have recorded two and a half hours and then listen to it and we're like, yeah, we can't

inflict this on people. Your support through Patreon does make that possible that we can just sort of say,

look, this isn't good enough. We edited it and we listened to it. We didn't think it was quite up to

snuff. We're going to go back to the drawing We didn't think it was quite up to snuff.

We're going to go back to the drawing board and do a new version of this episode, talk to some

experts, maybe get some guests and figure out how to tell this story right. That takes time

and honestly it takes some money as well. So yeah, it kind of feels right to inaugurate 2026 with a plea for our Patreon and for your support.

If you can't do it, if you can't make it, don't worry about it. We totally get it. But you do

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