AI Slop Summer

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are all of the 404 Media co-founders.

The first being Sam Cole.

Hey.

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hello, hello.

I'm traveling this week, so I'm on a different mic.

So if I sound different, that is why.

Thank you for bearing with us if it sounds weird.

Please bear with us.

So let's jump straight into it.

Jason, you've just published a couple of stories in very, very quick succession based on something that went viral.

And we'll all get into that.

And you've got a ton more, tons more information about it.

And it actually sort of symbolizes a lot that's happening in the media industry and with AI as well.

But the first story, the headline was, Chicago Sun-Times prints AI-generated summer reading list with books that don't exist.

This thing starts blowing up on social media definitely Tuesday, potentially Monday as well.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

What was this thing that was blowing up on the face of it?

Yeah, so the Chicago Sun-Times is a newspaper in Chicago that's been around for a long time.

There's a Chicago Tribune, and then the Chicago Sun-Times is like the second newspaper in Chicago, and it still exists.

But basically, they ran

this special insert in their Sunday paper this past Sunday

called

Heat Index,

Your Guide to the Best Summer.

And this was a 64-page special section of the newspaper that was like

what you should be doing this summer.

We can talk more about like what was in it.

Yeah, it was just like, yeah, like have fun in the sun.

Like, here's books you can read over the summer.

Here's things that you can do, so on and so forth.

And in that they had an article called summer reading list for 2025

and in that reading list they suggested a bunch of books that do not exist uh so they were real authors like isabella yende

um you know andy weir who wrote the martian uh but they they suggested reading the last algorithm by andy weir and then the text of the article says quote or like the blurb in the article says quote this time the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years.

This book doesn't exist.

Like Andy Weir has not written this book.

Isabella Allende did not write a book called Tidewater, which is what they said to go read.

So,

you know, this is noticed by actually a book talker on threads of all places, and then it got picked up on Blue Sky and it went like mega, mega viral because it was an example of like a printed article that was clearly AI generated in some way.

Yeah.

And I guess that's what makes it a little bit different because obviously longtime listeners of the show and readers of the site will know there's tons of AI slob everywhere all the time, AI generated articles or press releases or whatever.

But this is different because it's, as you say, the Chicago Sun-Times is basically like an institution or at least an incredibly long running

newspaper and media company, right?

So it's a little bit different almost now to have this physically printed AI slob.

Or I suppose I should back up a little bit.

And was it just clear from the get-go that this was probably AI generated just because it was getting stuff wrong?

Like, was that the implication?

I mean, that's what people were saying.

Like, that was how it was shared on Blue Sky.

And so I went and I bought a digital copy of the newspaper from the Chicago Sun-Times.

And I scrolled through it and I downloaded this heat index section, which again was 64 pages long.

And I started scrolling through it.

And my origin story in journalism is that I first worked as an intern at Washingtonian magazine, which is a magazine in Washington, D.C.

And my job was to fact-check articles like this, or like sections like this.

I mean, it was all sorts of things, but basically, like every local newspaper or magazine does this thing where they're like, summer is coming up.

are outdoor movies you can see here's new restaurants you can check out here's concerts you can do and they source this by like having a bunch of interns go to the websites of every music venue in a city and like compile this like that's how i it used to be that's how i did it and very specifically it will be like

go see this concert at this chicago

music venue.

Like that that's what this section probably should have been.

And something that I noticed right right away was that it was super generic.

Like they didn't mention Chicago even one time in the entire section.

The entire section starts off with like a hundred things to do on your summer bucket list.

And it's like, go snorkeling in the crystal clear waters near your home.

And it's like, no, yeah,

there's, yeah, Lake Michigan is not crystal clear.

I don't know if you've ever checked it out.

And the Chicago River,

I don't know.

I mean, it is like a fun place to be in the summer, but it's not crystal clear snorkeling waters.

And so I was just like, this is not

like, at the very least, it's incredibly, incredibly generic.

And then I saw that, you know, none of these books existed.

And there was actually no byline on the book list, but

was that common when you did this as well?

Like when you did this work, would the intern's name be on there?

Or was it also no byline?

Well, it's funny.

Often it was not on there because it would just be like a calendar listing.

So it was like, it wouldn't say like Jason Kebler compiled this list of concerts.

Usually our name would be like in the front of the magazine saying that like we worked at the magazine.

And then to get a byline, you had to actually like write something.

So you would have to write some blurbs and sometimes you would get your like initials in there and sometimes you would get your actual name.

And it was actually like a big to-do whether you got a byline or not um but i noticed that like every single bylined article in the entire section

said uh marco buscaglia like it was it was all done by one person and so i emailed that person and i was just like what's going on here this is going viral did you use ai And he pretty much immediately responded to me and was like, I did use AI and I'm very sorry.

And I'm like, I got caught.

I'm embarrassed.

He said, and then he called me or I called him rather.

He gave me his phone number and I called him.

And he said, quote, I do use AI for background at times, but always check out the material first.

This time I did not.

And I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious.

No excuses on me 100%.

And I'm completely embarrassed.

And then

I talked to him on the phone and he sort of reiterated the same stuff.

He was just like,

honestly, like, visibly shaken.

Um, I could tell he was pretty upset, uh, and just saying, like, he, he's, he knows that this is a big deal,

that he's really embarrassed, and you know, knows that there's probably going to be consequences for him.

Yeah, which sucks because it sounds like a genuine mistake, right?

So, you get the information, you identify the author, you speak to them for a little bit, you publish this story um you then

get some more information because of course

well there's still the remaining question of well who actually made this as in who produced this because as you say

one part of it being really really generic is like almost an indicator of it potentially being ai generated but there's actually more of a business reason because it turns out this inlet wasn't just in the chicago sun times right i think it was in a philly paper or something as well so then you published a second story called viral ai generated summer guide printed by chicago sun-times was made by magazine giant hearst how did that come about

yeah so i talked to people at uh the chicago sun-times like i talked to executives there and they basically explained how this happened and they bought this entire package from

Hearst, which is a huge magazine company.

Like William Randolph Hearst is like one of the first like media executives in the United States ever, like very, very famous.

And they own a ton of magazines, but they also own this company or this subsidiary called King Features, which does syndication.

And they syndicate things like car talk and hints from Eloise, which is like

how to clean your kitchen.

Like it will be, it's like an advice column.

They also do some horoscopes.

They do some crossword puzzles.

And then they do a lot of comics.

They also weirdly do a column by Dr.

Oz.

And so like newspapers around the country will buy this content and put it into their newspapers because it's cheaper to do that than it is to like do real journalism.

And this is like a

this is not a new thing.

Like this has been going on forever.

Like

newspapers will not

have their I mean some of them have their own cartoonists for example, but very often like the journalism in a newspaper will be produced by the journalist at the newspaper, but then the comics will be nationally syndicated.

And so like all of the, you know, they'll buy Garfield from this company and put it in there.

Yeah, they'll buy a crossword puzzle and put it in there.

And so as part of this business, King Feature sells these inserts, which are just separate, like basically mini newspapers that go into the newspaper.

And the Chicago Sun-Times was like, we actually actually don't even read those.

We just bought it, put it, like sent it to press, and it got in there.

And now we are upset because clearly we should have been reading it, but we did not.

And now this is very embarrassing for us.

That was the saddest part of the story, in my opinion.

Like, obviously, the AI component of it is something we report on all the time, and it's bad.

But I'm aware of it.

The fact that somebody at the paper was like, we We just straight up said we don't read what goes in our own paper, and maybe we should, is so messed up and not what I expected.

I also

started out writing in printed newspapers.

I hate to sound this old, but like that's just where the entry-level jobs were back in the day when I was trying to get into this industry.

And I wrote for these type of inserts.

Like a thing that I would do is there was like a weekend edition or a holiday edition of the paper, and they wanted like a gift guide type thing.

And I wrote about video games, so I was like, Here's 50, you know, things you can buy for your kid.

And I definitely got edits, you know, even though it was like an insert and it was sponsored, and it was like definitely looked down upon, which is why I was able to get that type of work.

I got edited by like a real newspaper editor before they printed it because it was in their newspaper.

And I thought that was the standard.

And the fact that this isn't the standard at the Chicago Sun-Times is frankly shocking to me.

And I just want to add, like, yes, it's an old newspaper.

I don't know the ownership history.

I'm sure it changed hands multiple times, but it's currently owned by Chicago Public Media, which also manages WBEZ, which is their public radio station, which is a major, it's like one of the biggest public radio stations in the country.

That's where this American Life comes from.

It's like this very well-respected organization as well.

And they have some news sites that I think are well-respected locally.

So it's not like some fly-by-night operation that's like flipping AI-generated websites for money.

It's like a real news organization that is doing this and just like really sad state of affairs for printed media.

And I think possibly

where,

you know,

new media, hollowed out new media companies might be headed because newspapers have been gutted and kind of

stumbling along for decades at this point, which I think is maybe how you get such low standards.

Well, yeah, I think that's really important.

And like, we're not going to do a history lesson about the Chicago Sun Times here because I would get something wrong.

But

like

it was failing for a long time.

Like the paper was in like a really precarious situation for a long time.

And it changed hands multiple times in the 2010s when a lot of local newspapers died.

And

like the fact that Chicago public media bought it was seen as this like really big deal because they bought it and they're like, we're going to focus on local journalism and a non-profit model and um

you know it they sort of like took it back from this like investment firm that owned it and so

there had been a lot of trust lost already over the years because the newspaper had been like super hollowed out and over the last few years like under

this public radio nonprofit situation and also as a unionized newsroom, like they focused a lot on reporting on Chicago news again.

And so then for something like this to happen,

it really like undermines a lot of that like really hard-earned trust.

Like you can lose that very, very rapidly.

And I feel really bad for the journalists at this newspaper because They had nothing to do with this like at all.

And the union gave us a statement saying like we didn't even know that this was happening like in any way shape or form because why would they they're busy writing articles and doing reporting and publishing things and then like a business person somewhere has run a calculation that if they buy this package from this third-party company and then load it up with ads they can make more money than it costs to you know, actually like buy the content within there.

And clearly, like the newsroom just doesn't have the resources to

review this sort of thing, which is not me saying like this should have happened, but

it's like a really

sad situation, in my opinion.

Yeah.

And I mean, Emmanuel touched on it with sort of the shock that this stuff isn't even edited.

But Jason, just to go back a little bit, when you have this conversation with Chicago Sometimes

executives, What was the vibe in that conversation?

Because you've spoken to the author, now you're speaking to the actual paper.

Like, what was the vibe of the second conversation?

I mean, they were kind of like a hard day, hard day for us.

Like, we're going through this.

I do think that

I don't know how to say this, and it's in the article, but he was basically like, we are creating guidelines for how our journalists use AI in the future,

and that they don't have a public version of it yet because they're still working on what those will be.

But it's very clear that the rule at Chicago Sun-Times is not going to be don't use AI.

They're like, we already use AI for some data processing and things like this.

And

I mean, we talked about it a million times on this podcast, but

it's just like

one mistake like this where you invent quotes, you invent a person, like AI invents some numbers or research that doesn't exist, and you publish it, it's like you lose your credibility immediately.

And so, I mean,

I'm curious what y'all think, but like, as you mentioned at the top of this show, Joseph, we have talked about AI slop endlessly on this show

and at 404 Media, and some of them get a lot of attention, but like this story went extremely viral.

Like, everyone is talking about this story.

And I'm curious why you think this captured

so much attention so quickly.

Well, Sam,

I feel like it's funny because whenever Sam or any of you say, whoa, this thing is really big on my timeline, I go to my Blue Sky.

I'm like, I'm not seeing this at all, but I think I follow like 100 people and I don't really scroll.

But Sam, I feel like you have a better grasp on what is going viral on Blue Sky.

Any idea why this particularly popped off over there?

Yeah, I mean, I think your Blue Sky in particular is like Infosec Opsec people, right?

Mostly.

Mine is like a lot of like AI ethics research people and also just like normal people who are interested in the stuff that we're interested in.

Blue Sky really, really hates AI, like as a, as a group, I think I can like generalize and say that like that platform specifically, when something chaotic or catastrophic or even just like embarrassing happens in the world of AI, and especially slop,

people point at it and say, This is what we're talking about, this is what we've been warning people about, this is what we're mad about when people use AI in general, because

then you start to see the crack show in the form of print media.

And I think maybe it being print

hit hit different for people.

I think

people still see print journalism as like this kind of sacred thing,

which is funny because it's so desperately underfunded and disrespected.

But if something happens in the digital media world,

I think it it's different to people than in it getting sent out to your house.

and hitting the printers and things like that.

Did we all start at newspapers?

I also started at a print newspaper and watched the printers

put my stories out there.

We're all old as hell, I think, is what we've learned.

I don't think I've ever worked for a newspaper.

Like, Washington is like a glossy magazine,

which is like notably not a newspaper just because they were like,

oh, we only do this once a month.

Like, take your time, call.

Like, I remember I used to have to call restaurants to ask them what their phone number was.

So I would call the restaurants.

So you're always calling them.

And then I'd be like, okay, is this the right restaurant?

Okay, good.

Is your refrigerator running?

I used to read the Washingtonian.

I was a fan of it.

But yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, I think people still have this idea, this like lofty idea of print as

infallible or something.

And, you know, in a way, it's like, once it's out there, once it's printed, you can't just like make an edit, make a, you can make a correction as part of another issue, but you can't just go in and fix the errors and have it reflect the record reflect that.

It's like, once it's out there, it's out there.

So, you know, I think that's why people were they saw this a little bit differently.

Also, I think there's, you know, there was obviously this noble effect of things going viral.

When someone's mad about something, everyone loves to be mad about something.

So that happens a lot on social media in general and probably happened here.

But it ended up being like a really interesting path to follow.

So I'm glad Jason did the

like work on tracking the guy down and also tracking down the executives responsible for this.

Yeah, I think

the last thing I want to say is, like,

we wouldn't do this.

Um, as in, like, I'm not, I don't want to defend sort of like anyone involved,

but I think

there's like a really big pylon at the moment of the fact that this occurred.

And

I think that

the issue here, like, I don't want to defend anyone who did this, but the issue here is like a really, really bad, horrible, horrible systemic issue

where the economics of local newspapers are not making any sense.

And a lot of the people who are running them, not speaking about any specific newspaper, but broadly,

the people who are running them like don't really know how to figure it out.

And so they are like throwing shit at the wall.

And that includes like, oh, we will just like

syndicate this random section from this random company and put it in our newspaper and not even read it because we had to lay off all our copy editors because there's only like two people who work here now or whatever.

And that's happening like all over the country.

And then also,

I don't want to defend the person who did this.

Again, like I don't use AI in this way and I don't think that people should use AI in this way.

And I think it's like bound to keep like blowing up in people's faces when they do this but a lot of companies are forcing their employees to either hit productivity levels that are impossible

they're being like told that they must use AI or they will be replaced I don't know what happened here like as in I don't think that anyone told this person to use AI but at the same time like putting together an entire 64-page summer guide, there's like 30 articles and he wrote, he wrote, or like his name is on every single one of them.

And like, he was assigned all of those.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just like, I mean, I doubt he was paid very well for it just because of the nature of what it is.

And

I just like, I think that we're in like a super, super, super bleak situation.

And so like, if it wasn't this person, it would have been someone else who did it for some other newspaper at some point.

And it's like, this is a fight that people are wanting to have right now.

And I think for very good reason.

But, like,

you could easily replace these characters with any other person.

Like, this is going to happen again.

We've already seen it happen a few times to online publications.

And it's a symptom of like the disastrous economic situation that journalism is in, that newspapers in particular are in, that local news in particular are in, and then also the fact that in order to like quote unquote fix this problem, they're like, oh, we'll just like use AI.

It will make us a lot like more

effective and efficient and blah, blah, blah.

And that's happening in every industry right now.

And it's, it's like leading to disastrous

like public trust issues, disastrous economic issues.

Like, it's not, it's just like not a good situation.

Yeah, totally.

I'm sure it will happen again, as you say.

All right, we'll leave that there.

And when we come back, we'll talk about

more about trust in, I guess, public institutions, but more education.

It's all about chat GPT and AI in schools, and a bunch of documents that Jason got as well.

We'll be right back after this.

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All right, and we are back with the

second set of stories here, or the singular story.

The headline is, American schools were deeply unprepared for chat GPT public records show.

Jason, you wrote this one as well.

It's not really in response because you did this in parallel that you'll get into, but there was a really deep New York magazine article recently that I think all of us

read or at least saw people talking about.

Everyone is cheating their way through college.

And some of the anecdotes in there are just insane.

Like

people going to college and university or whatever and basically becoming completely reliant on chat GPT and sort of just breezing their way through education and not really learning anything.

I'm sort of summarizing it, obviously, at a super high level, but that's basically what the takeaway was.

In

parallel, or I guess before, Jason, you had done a bunch of public records requests, like FOIAs, but to state and local agencies.

What were the requests for, and who did you file them with?

Yeah, I actually filed these back in December 2022.

What?

Yeah,

they're really, really old.

I thought you were going to say 2024.

Jesus.

Okay.

No, I filed them a really long time ago.

And the reason that I filed them was ChatGPT came out in November 2022.

And soon after that, there was a scandal, I believe in Florida, where it was like

students cheat on essay question by using ChatGPT.

And it became like it became national news.

This became national news that like a couple of students used

ChatGPT to write an essay.

And so at the time, I was like, oh, what are school districts?

Like, how are they thinking about this?

How are they teaching their teachers to think about this?

So I filed 50, I filed like 65 public records requests.

They were all identical.

I filed with every single state, and then I filed with New York City, Los Angeles, Unified School District,

like a few in Maryland, because that's where I grew up.

So, I was curious what they were up to, and just some like other school, like local school districts to see if they had anything mentioning Chat GPT,

which is really funny because just the way that public records work, as we talked before, is like it took in some cases years to get answers back.

And

so, what I got are documents from like January, February, March of 2023.

And so, it captured like the ways that schools were thinking about this in the earliest days of Chat GPT.

So, like, for example, the entire state, like the the California Board of Education had not heard of it.

Like, that was their official.

At that point in time, yeah.

But this, we're talking like March 2023, which is after a series of like news cycles where it's like millions of people have downloaded ChatGPT.

Like, it was pretty hyped, if you recall.

Yeah, the

biggest app launch ever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they were like, it wasn't that they didn't have any documents about it.

It's that the documents they did have were

people

saying,

like, there were media requests being like, what is your policy on ChatGPT?

Like, what do you think?

And they're like, we actually don't know what that is.

We have no policy and we're not thinking about making a policy because we've never heard of it before.

Whereas other states,

like New York State, for example, had brought in some like they had put together some presentations for professional development for teachers, like here's what you need to know about AI in the classroom, so on and so forth.

Very interestingly, New York City banned ChatGPT almost immediately.

And then they brought in this group called Project Recess,

which is like a nonprofit that is a Google partner.

It's like a, it's kind of unclear exactly what they do, but they have funding from Google.

And they came in and they were like, ChatGPT and AI is actually good.

Here's how you can use it in your classroom.

And here's how to get it unbanned.

Uh, like, here's how to put in a formal request asking for it to be unbanned in your classroom, which is kind of wild.

Yeah, so again, it's really, really early on, or relatively early on, and some haven't heard of it, but already then there's like the pro-AI crowd going to these schools, it sounds like all these

institutions or whatever, and basically singing the praises for

AI.

Do you think,

well, I mean, do you have any sense of how the schools then reacted to that?

Like, is that in the documents?

Did they go, oh, okay, sure, whatever.

Or, you know what I mean?

What was their reaction to that?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because a lot of states brought in consultants to be like, how should we think about this?

And in those early days,

you're not going to have like anti-AI consultants.

Like, that's just not how this works, really.

Like, there has to be a thing before there's a backlash to the thing.

And so, there was this presentation called Chat GBT and AI in Education that was given by three different consultants to, I believe it was Mississippi,

where each of those people who made this presentation have since written books about how teachers can use AI and teach people, teach students how to use AI in the classroom.

And And it had a slide that said, like, warning, going back to writing essays only in class can hurt struggling learners and doesn't get our kids ready for their future.

It had a slide called It's Time to Rethink, quote, plagiarism and cheating.

And then it talked about like the new engineer is the prompt engineer and things like that.

And so

I think that generative AI and ChatGPT in general have like,

forgive me, but disrupted society to a point where

it's impossible to like ask teachers and school districts to be like, oh, why didn't you stop this?

Like, why didn't you nip this in the bud and tell your students not to use it?

Like, they were going to use it regardless.

I don't think that there was like any way to prevent this from happening.

But at the same time, it's very clear from these documents that very, very, very few schools were

thinking proactively about how disruptive this technology was going to be.

And that's why I wanted to write this story in the first place.

The reason that it took me, like, why I didn't publish it before, was because,

frankly, like, I was busy.

There were thousands of pages of documents, and they came back slowly over many years because it just took a long time.

And then I saw the New York Mag article, and I was like, oh, I actually have all these documents.

Like, let me go back through and look at what was happening because

the fact that

AI is like completely disrupting the school experience for both teachers and students is a huge, huge, huge deal at this point.

And so I was curious, like, what, like, what did the early days of this look like?

And it did not did not look very good.

Yeah, it's definitely instructive and shows us.

how we got here where I don't know that there was that anecdote the other day where a teacher I believe a university enforced handwritten essays in class so people can't use chat GPT because you're literally not doing it on a laptop or a computer and you're doing it in the class right there and then some students were saying you're discriminating against my learning style like as if

using chat GPT is the same as being a visual learner or something.

And then maybe I've just said something really, really bigoted.

I'm going to regret it now in like a few years or a few months or so.

But that's a wild thing to say.

My learning style is using AI.

I don't know, man.

Just sounds like you're not learning.

I think to try and save Joe from cancellation, there was like.

Thank you.

I appreciate that.

There's

many reasons

why

students would want to

speak their answers to teachers or like type them instead of doing them by hand.

There's like motor skill issues that are legitimate issues.

But I believe the students had some other like he formulated

questions

in a particular way, so Chat GPT would not be able to answer them.

And they said that that interfered with their learning style, which is different than having some sort of like learning disability.

Yeah, totally.

And again,

I suppose this wouldn't really be clear in the documents, Jason, from just themselves, because they were a very point in time.

But when you combine that with what Emmanuel was just saying and the New York Mag article, and it feels like a different article comes out every week or so about this same thing like are we cooks when it comes to education like is this it

well so I also wrote this article because I wanted teachers to check to hit me up and say like their current experiences with it so there'll be a follow-up article probably next week about this and I would say that the responses I'm getting I expected them to be bad.

I expected the situation to be bad.

I didn't expect some of the anecdotes that I have heard,

which I guess I'll just leave it at that.

But I think we're pretty cooked.

I think it's pretty scary.

I think it's probably a hollowing of the middle, probably, where it's like

students who are sort of at the top end of their classes will probably still read books and learn how to write and will like reject.

AI to some extent, whereas

a lot of the people in the middle who were like just just barely getting by in the past but were still learning things are

going to like start farming out a lot of their work to chat gpt and or other tools and what i've heard from teachers is like

the the tools to to catch students doing this it's like one it's kind of a losing game because

what you're gonna like fail every single one of your students it's like the teacher the parents aren't going to allow that like i'm not a parent i'm going to paint with a super broad brush right now and get myself canceled but it's like

parents don't let teachers fail their kids anymore it's like they will like go karen on their asses like um

as is what i've heard and it's like students have their phones in class there's like been a huge fight about you know

getting kids to pay any attention at all in class because they have their phones because they're on social media all the time, blah, blah, blah.

And it's just like, I don't know, I'm going to sound like I'm 10,000 years old right now, but it's like, it seems extraordinarily bleak to me where it's like a mix of

phones, social media, TikTok, AI,

like fighting, like

the crumb of attention span that kids have left is like

teachers are sort of fighting for that crumb of attention span and it's just like not

going super well.

I want to pull up one anecdote.

The scariest anecdote is that a Spanish teacher in high school hit me up and she was like, I can't teach these kids Spanish because they don't know the words in English that I need to teach them.

They're like,

they do not even know the words in English of Spanish one when I'm like,

Libro means book.

I mean, they probably know the word book, but like, there's a lot of words that they're like, this is what, this is how you say this, and here's what it means in English.

And she's like, they don't even know, they don't even know the English words.

And it's like, be scary.

Sorry, Emmanuel.

Yeah, you need to start with more foundational concepts like Fortnite dances, kind of build from there to like spoken language.

No, I was going to say that like I generally agree that you're just going to see like an acceleration of like have and have nots, probably like the hollowing out of the middle, as you say.

But I'm starting to, My son is very young, he's like not even two years old, but we're starting to like have conversations about schools.

And I'm talking to parents.

And

what surprised me is that I think it's just like a way more varied, dynamic environment than when we were growing up.

Like there were different types of schools, but now there's like so many different types of schools and so many different

ideas of like what is correct schooling, which ranges all the way from like super test score focused and like preparing for college and just like, you know, maxing out like your stats.

And then there's like a totally opposite, no homework, no sitting down at your desk.

You make up your own classes and your own goals and there's no grades.

And like parents are really concerned about like, I don't want my kid to be sitting down all day.

And I didn't even know that was like an idea that existed and was popular, but it is.

And there's a whole bunch of stuff that exists in between those two extremes.

And it's like, TBD,

what is best for kids?

We don't know.

Like, it's all changing really fast.

And

I think it will be bad.

I don't know, but it will certainly be very, very, very different than what we were familiar with.

Yeah.

I'm sure you just made a bunch of really good points, but I was playing Subway Surfer, so I have no idea what you're going on about.

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