Happy New Year, strangers. I just want to say before I jump into today's story that I'm so

grateful for all of you. If you've been a listener for a while, thanks for sticking around.

If you're brand new, welcome. I always love hearing from my strangers, whether that's on

Instagram or through email. So many of you have sent really encouraging and supportive messages, and I'm

thankful for each one. And today, especially for the snail mail letter I got from listener David

Donaldson. Thank you so much, David. Your letter was so thoughtful and kind. I'm way behind

in replying to emails, but I'm getting there. And unless you wrote in to tell me I'm a misandrist or some other such nonsense, I will reply.

For those of you who joined us over on Supporting Cast, thanks so much for the extra support.

It really does help keep the show going in a material way.

And if you haven't joined and want to, here's your reminder. And if you don't

want to join, that's cool too. Subscribing, downloading, and listening is awesome. I do also want to

acknowledge for my subscribers that I was doing strange news for a minute last year, which I know you

all really liked. And then I just stopped doing it.

The main issue was that I had to edit and engineer Strange News myself,

and it was eating into my time to work on actual episodes.

I'm doing this thing where I'm really trying to avoid using AI for anything,

so I was pretty much editing without AI, and it took too long.

Contrary to popular belief, strange and

unexplained is a very small machine. I have a couple of researchers, Joe Gordette and

Keeley Hyes, and sometimes Becky Berger. Occasionally, my good pal Eve Kerrigan, writes drafts

of episode scripts. My former producer, Becca D. Grigorio, is back on the team doing research organization

and editing. I have an amazing audio engineer, Jeff Devine, and Amanda Rossman, one of my partners

...