Reply All - #181 Absolutely Devious Lick

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

This week, producer Anna Foley investigates a viral prank plaguing schools across the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's show is brought to you by your childhood piano, violin, drum, or clarinet teachers. God bless them. They really showed up week after week, acted like they didn't know you waited until just 50 minutes before each lesson to practice. And I'll look at you. You're an adult trying to learn an instrument again. Crying now that you know how much those lessons actually cost. So shout out to Mr. Lanars. You're right, my guy. Okay. Now for the real lads.

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And this week I am here with Reply All producer Anna Foley. Hey Anna, how's it going? Hey, Alex, I'm good. How are you? I'm good. You have a story you want to tell me.

I am dying to hear it. So can you hit me with it? Can you hit me with your best shot? Fire away. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm in it now. I have a story for you. And it all starts with a question from a listener who reached out to us.

You want to start just by introducing yourself what your name is and where you are in the world? Sure. My name's Elisa, and I live in Belton. It's a really small kind of conservative town in central Texas. It's about an hour north of Austin. Okay. Elisa works at a school as a specialist in school psychology, working one-on-one with kids. Are you at an elementary and middle high school? I've worked at all levels, but right now I'm at a middle school. Got you a very formative time. Very. I love it, though. So Elisa had written in about a school prank, one that had just gotten completely out of hand.

Okay. What was it? Alex, have you heard of this thing called The Devious Lick? Is it how many licks it takes to get to the Tutsie Roll Center of a Tutsi Pop? Mr. Owl said that it was three. Story done. That's it. Have you not heard of it at all? You like, you don't, okay. Since hearing about Dvius'I. is like, I've learned that it is a trend that seems to have started on September 1st, 2021. When this kid with the username Jug 4 Elias posted a video on TikTok, the video was super brief.

There was a little B song playing underneath. It went like, and so the video was this kid showing off a bunch of surgical masks that they'd stolen from school and hidden in their backpack. And they posted the video with the caption, A month into school, absolutely devious lick, should have brought a mask from home. And a lick just means stealing something. Got it. So this video totally took off on TikTok.

And it inspired a bunch of copycat thieves to follow in Jugfort Elias' footsteps. I talked to a bunch of people across the country about this trend. Teachers, my own family members, kids in middle and high school in New York City. People started stealing from like small, like pretty much unnoticeable things. Mostly it's like really, really weird things.

In all of these TikTok videos, you see kids in their school bathrooms taking rolls of paper towels, soap out of the dispensers. Hell not. Who stole the fucking soap? They all started using that TikTok voice, you know, like the warm and friendly AI one that kind of sounds like Siri. Can't even watch my hands cause of this trend. But then the thievery became... A little bit more brazen, kids were stealing toilets. Why would they steal toilets? What do you get out of that?

Oh, hell no. The school's wild. Somebody took the fucking dryer, bro. L&FAO, someone stole the teacher's desk. The progressively worse that it got, the name changed a little. Like, from devious lick to diabolical lick. People also say, like, despicable lick. This whole thing was getting really serious.

No, one person I think they're. sink was stolen. Because somebody stowed off a sink bomb, they had to do a gas leak test, and that set the district back about $10,000. Oh, my God. Yeah, bro, I saw somebody steal the keys to the school bus.

What? And they just drove away. Did they make it for a joy ride? Yeah. Like, you're going to go from divi-lick to devious licking the damn jail cell. Schools were obviously scrimfling

to figure out what to do. Kids were also posting their principles reactions to it, like principles announcing over the intercom. That's kind of funny. I'm sorry. Well, let's go and take a look at some of these extremely mad principles. You've got to stop this trend. It's come to an end.

It's come to the point where it's absolutely unbearable. All right, the delicious, devious lick trend on TikTok needs to come to an end. Okay, I've had enough. Everybody was freaking out about this. And what ended up happening next was TikTok actually did something. They banned the hashtag devious lick. They took down any content that had anything to do with the devious lick. And that seemed to help.

Like, all of these adults were getting to take this huge sigh of relief because it looked like devious licks was dead for the most part. But then, around the end of September, rumors started to spread saying that devious licks might be done with. but there was something new and worse and just far more sinister that was coming down the pipe. Here's Elisa. I'm a part of, you know, different school psychology groups on Facebook. But in the last couple of weeks, I've seen this list of TikTok challenges being passed around Facebook. And I can try to find it if you want. Okay.

So here we go. Elisa told me this list that she'd seen on Facebook was a month-by-month calendar that told kids what prank. they should play on their schools for the entire rest of the year. She said she'd seen a couple different versions floating around, but she sent me one of them. And the thing that she wanted to talk with me about was the challenge for the month of October, which was slap a teacher. What? That's quite an escalation. I know. We're going from bathrooms to assault, just real quick. And I want to show you some of the stuff that's on this list because it's pretty gross.

like, okay, November is kiss your friend's girlfriend at school. December is, okay, I'm going to read it to you the way that it's typed out in the list that was given to me. But then you're just going to see. Okay, so December is, quote, deck the halls and show your B star, star, star, star in school halls. B star, star, star, do you want to say? Who's going to have to say? It stuck the holes and show your balls. Oh, I didn't even get it.

January is jab abreast. Okay, so we're back to a stult. This sucks. Like attacking people? And then it just kind of goes into some more vandalism challenges. Like April is grab some eggs, which is in quotation, whatever eggs means. I think it's testicles. That's your opinion, and it is valid.

But that's April. And then May is Ditch Day. June is flip off the front office. Definitely did that in school and definitely got in school suspension for it. Oh, interesting. Whenever I was pissed off at a teacher, I would shove my hands in my pockets and do the middle finger. Like, I was so afraid of authority, but I was really pissed off at teachers. That's incredible.

You're incredible. Uh-huh. Well, sometimes I would also wait till the end of the day and give the middle finger in bed before I went to sleep. It's just like one more fuck you that I've been holding in all day. Did you ever like, do you ever get detention or anything? Never. I never ever did. That would have ruined me as a child.

Sound really cool. You sound fun to hang out with. I was a blast. But back to Elisa. when she was looking at this list of challenges, she just felt like she was staring down the barrel of a year of hell from teenagers, which is... Yeah, I mean, if it's legit, it sounds awful.

Yeah. And, like, I think hell wrought by teenagers is maybe one of the worst types as an adult. But then, you know, Elisa starts looking at the list a little closer. And as somebody who works with teenagers all day, every day, she started to notice some things that just gave her questions on the list. The wording, the wording of it is just so unusual. This version of it says smack a staff member on the back side. I don't know of any middle schooler or any high schooler that would use the word back.

My other favorite April's challenge is supposed to be grab some eggs. eggs is in quotation marks and there's a Z at the end. Okay. The edgy youth of today used Z to make things plural. That's fun. So Elisa felt like

the language that was showing up in this list was like some kind of weird retro language that she would hear in a TV show that is filmed now but set in the 90s. Like not how kids today talk at all. Which made her feel suspicious at the idea that students had really come

up with this whole list in the first place. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to imagine a kid saying stuff in the way that it is written on that list. But more than that, it's like just hard for me to imagine kids actually engaging in this behavior. It's pretty extreme. Yeah, totally. But at the same time, when I was talking to Elisa, she told me that it wasn't so easy for

everybody in education to write it off kind of like we are now. What really got to me is how a lot of people in education that I was seeing, you know, just on Facebook, we're really dreading this month because school districts are taking it very seriously and they can't afford not to. Because like I said, just being in education the last couple of years is absolutely brutal. From Elysa's perspective, people in education have had to spend the last year and some change dealing with a bunch of stuff that I feel like we all think that we know about ambiently. You know, like being around unvaccinated kids, worrying about the school budget being cut,

Even the practical stuff has been terrible. Like, it's all crazy. Yeah, but one of the biggest things that's weighing on these teachers' mind is just kids returning to school in general. Because these kids are dealing with the same trauma that we all have been dealing with. And in a lot of cases, these kids haven't had a normal education in almost three school years. So it makes sense to her that teachers would be scared that these challenges were going to happen because everything else. around them is already crumbling, why wouldn't this too? Totally.

And while Elisa was suspicious if these challenges were actually going to happen, she really didn't know what to completely think. She wondered how worried should she be and where the hell had this thing come from? Who was behind it? So I went to go find out. And right after I got off the phone with Elisa, I started seeing news that teachers were getting slapped. Now we have the story of a student who's accused of assaulting a teacher.

teacher as part of a TikTok challenge. And now Braintree is confirming that a middle school teacher was a target. There were cases in Massachusetts, South Carolina, a teenager was arrested in Louisiana. An 18-year-old Covington high school students seen right on this side, I should say, is now behind bars for punching her 64-year-old disabled teacher. Police believe it was all part of a TikTok challenge. My first step was to say, okay, are these incidents that I'm seeing all over the news, actually showing up on TikTok.

But the weird thing was, when I went on TikTok, there weren't any videos of teachers getting slapped or really even people talking about doing this challenge at all. I searched the entire app and I just could not find anything. And so I thought maybe TikTok had done something similar to what they had done before, you know, like rerouted a hashtag that was related to this. And so I wrote TikTok about it. And I was like, hey, what's going on here?

And they were like, we haven't seen anything of this nature on our app. Like the TikTok spokesperson said the first time I saw this list, it was a screenshot. It was not a video on TikTok. There wasn't any evidence of this happening on TikTok at all from what we could see. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. But it was clear that the idea of this list was spreading, which just seemed dangerous.

The more people who knew about it, the more likely it seemed like something bad would actually happen. But if it wasn't kids on TikTok spreading this list, where was it spreading? And was it even kids at all? And when I started looking further into the origins of this list, I came across a post on Reddit. It was on the subreddit that's just called Teachers. And basically, what the post was saying was, hey, I know everybody's talking about this list. It's getting passed around a lot.

but I think I might have found where this list came from. Whoa. Yeah, which was really exciting to me when I saw it. The Reddit post said that this list came from an adult man in Idaho. His name is Officer David Gomez. He's a school resources officer, which is literally a cop that works in schools. So I called him. When we talked, he was in his office at school.

Oh, you are breaking up. I'm breaking up. One of us is... Yeah, yeah. We'll give you just a second. Yeah. I'm up in the mountain, so sometimes my internet goes a little bit strange. But you probably have beautiful views. So maybe it's real good. We have beautiful views. I mean, we have deer and elk in our backyard. So it sounds like we got our connection back. Okay, cool. Again, thank you so much for talking to me. Can we just go ahead and start by what's your name and what do you do?

So I am Deputy David Gomez. I'm a school resource officer. Okay. My job is I work at the school full time, full uniform. I have a patrol car outside. When I talked to Officer Gomez, he was wearing his uniform with the badge on his shoulder and everything. He had a buzz cut. He loves his job. But what he's most known for is his Facebook page. Okay.

So I'm going to send you the page. And I want you to tell me what you think. So you open the page and the first thing you see is the banner picture. And it says Officer Gomez. It's in white and black and orange. And it says the truth about youth. Yeah. So what I found early on is that there was very little, I call it non-politically correct information for parents.

So sometimes you just have to tell parents how it is. And then as I started teaching classes, it was the same way. I have to tell parents exactly how it is or they're just not going to listen. And it's the same with kids. I have some very direct conversations with kids. Same way. because if I don't, they know it just doesn't carry the message the same way. He's almost like an influencer in this ecosystem of parents and teachers and people who work at schools

and just concerned adults in general who are trying to warn each other about the dangers of social media and children on the internet. So Alex, he writes these long posts about all sorts of things, like how your kids are buying. vapes and weed, how to tell if your kid is sending inappropriate photos to their friends, things of that nature, you know? Yes. And Alex. Yes. It was on September 22nd that he posted the list of TikTok challenges.

Got it. Okay. So I wanted to know what Officer Gomez could teach me about the origins of this list. Like, I doubted that Officer Gomez had written this list himself, but maybe he had gotten it from a kid or just had some clearer idea where it had come from. When did you first see that list? So I got the list from two different sources. And you don't have to give away like names or anything, but who were your sources?

So I belong to some different groups. You know, some of them are internet groups. Some of them are drug recognition groups. In fact, this one came on a drug recognition group that I'm part of. When we get drugs that we don't know what they are or haven't seen, we post it so that people can, other officers can see. But they said, hey, look, this is what's coming. And then I got it from a couple of parents as well. I had sent me screenshots.

Hey, look, my kid says this is what's coming next. How did you determine that this was actually, like, from a kid, you know? So there's no way for me to know that it's from a kid. When I was talking to Officer Gomez, I felt like I actually had more information about this list than he had, which is not where I expected this conversation to go. Officer Gomez hadn't really spent a lot of time worrying about whether this whole thing was real or not.

In fact, confusingly, he himself had felt pretty suspicious of the list of challenges from the beginning. I know that's not how TikTok works. Kids, you know, I know kids more than most, they can't plan a week out, much less the year out. Oh, okay. So you were skeptical of the list, but you still think of it as like a possibility? Right. So I know this is not going to happen. like that. But I want a parent to see, hey, look, these are the possibilities. You need to talk to your kids.

Yeah. Should we watch out? Should we talk about these things? Absolutely, right? This is a new world. And might it be slap a teacher? Maybe it might be something completely different, right? Put a thumbtack on their chair. It's our kids and they're always going to do things. The problem was when Gomez had posted this on his Facebook page, he hadn't included any of the caveats that he was telling me in this conversation. He just posted the list, said these challenges. were coming down the pipeline and that people should talk to their kids about it. When I pushed him on the idea that he might have spread a harmful rumor, he didn't seem concerned. I guess I'm curious just how you feel about posting information that you're not totally sure if it's totally true or not, like on your Facebook feed. So what part would not be true? Just the fact that like these these challenges might not adhere to every month or they might not take the exact form of slap a teacher on the backside or slap a teacher.

Like there's all of these caveats in there, but a teacher or a parent might not see that. Okay. I am totally fine with erring on the side of this is a possibility. There's no way I can tell the future. So if I can't be sure of it, am I not going to put out warnings? No, I'm still going to put out warnings. Even though Officer Gomez thought what he was doing was harmless, his intentions didn't end up mattering that much because his post, it caught the attention of a lot of people.

Alex, I thought that his Facebook page was just this weird little niche corner of the internet, but 40,000 people follow his account. And this post about the list was shared over 1,300 times. Wow. It starts spreading pretty significantly. He said that people from TikTok reached out to him to learn more about what he knew. So basically... People from TikTok the company.

Yes. Wow. Yeah. Like one of the biggest apps in the world was treating Officer Gomez as an expert on this, even though he really hadn't looked into it much. He also said that multiple law enforcement agencies reached out to learn more.

And the more I started trying to figure out where this thing had come from, the more I started to feel like it wasn't students or kids who were spreading the idea of this challenge. It was adults. And in the days after Officer Gomez posts the list, it really picked up pace on the internet in a pretty major way. Like countless Facebook pages are talking about it. There's Instagram accounts who are sharing things about it.

There's YouTube videos that are made about it. And it sparked this whole conversation amongst teachers in the comments of all of these different posts on all these different places on the internet about the validity of this list. About whether it's real or not. Yeah, yeah. Like on one side you had teachers who were saying, you know, this list of challenges is fake and it's just scaring other teachers unnecessarily. And then on the other side, there were teachers who were saying they were nervous because a thing that actually does happen is teachers actually do get hit by their students. Yeah. TikTok challenge aside. It's just a thing that happens in schools. God, what a no-win situation. It's like you want to not. inspire hysteria and actually give kids ideas about hitting their teachers, but you also want to have a lot of caution. Yeah, and you want to validate all of these teachers who are saying that they've had these really awful experiences in schools. And when I was looking at all of the things that were

being shared surrounding this list, it felt like there was one thing that could maybe help me make sense of all of this. And it was on one of the most popular versions of the list that was being spread around. There was this paragraph on top of it that was attributing the first person to share this list and really get the word out to this superintendent near Fresno, California. Huh. Wow. Documentation. It was pinning it to a specific place in the country and a specific person. Interesting. And so I wondered, is Fresno Ground Zero? Yeah, exactly. After the break, Fresno County, California. Welcome back to the show. So Anna's going to...

I was going to say that. Let me say welcome back to the show. Steamrolling, yeah. Go ahead. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. So, Alex, before the break, I had learned that this list of challenges hadn't been spread by teens on TikTok. The people who were really talking about it online were nervous teachers and parents. Right. But I still wanted to know where they had gotten this idea from.

And I'd found this lead, the name of a school district, where a lot of the list that I had seen were pointing to as the beginning of this whole debacle. And these lists said, the superintendent of this school district, she is the one who is leading the charge against these challenges. My name is Lori Villanueva, and I'm superintendent of the Kalinga Huron Unified School District, and we are in Fresno, Fresno, County, in Central California. Gotcha, gotcha. So what is your job as superintendent like? It's actually very exciting. I love being superintendent.

Lori's been superintendent for this school district for about six years, which she told me as a long time. Most people apparently only last around two as superintendent. Lori has this friendly but authoritative energy. And I wanted to understand how she had come to be the center of this list of challenges. She told me it started after an extremely harrowing month of dealing with all of the bathroom vandalism, the devious licks. She said that the seven schools in her school district had been his. particularly hard by the challenge in September. And some of it had been the usual stuff, you know, like 46 missing soap dispensers.

But then there was the vandalism that was a lot more frustrating to deal with. One of the worst things was they were using red dyes that stained the porcelain and the tile to make the bathrooms look like red. You know, we couldn't get it out. How did you tamp down on it? What we did is we put every single available personnel that we possibly could. we stationed at bathroom doors. And so our bus drivers that usually drive like morning and afternoon, we had them stationed at doors during the day.

Wow. We had like our cafeteria workers that get off a little bit earlier. We had them helping in the afternoon. So every available hand that possibly could was stationed at bathroom doors. Talking to Lori, I hadn't really realized how expensive the devious lick trend could be. Like for her, she had to spend all of this money on overtime and supplies to fix the bathrooms. and it was just a lot of money that she didn't really have to spend on a dumb prank. And just in general, Devious Licks sucked so much time and energy out of everybody around her.

And for what? I've been trying to imagine while working on this story of how I would react to this in high school. And, I mean, to be honest, I was a bit of a goody-to-shoes. But I think I would have been really annoyed at the kids who did this and, like, annoyed that I wasn't able to go to the bathroom with quite as much freedom as I maybe would have been before. or whatever. Exactly. And actually, because of that, that's how we ended up getting

the list of the other TikTok challenges. We did have a good citizen come forward and go, like, we don't like this. So, you know, heads up, here's what's being circulated. Was it a student that gave you the list? It was a student.

Yes, it was. Okay. So a teacher that was trusted by the student, you know, just gave it and, you know, teacher passed it on. Wow. So for the first time, this thing has bubbled up from the youth.

not from another parent reposting it. And just like when the screenshot of this list arrived on your computer, do you remember how you felt when you were first looking at it? I do. I was flabbergasted. And I went from being kind of shocked, kind of the language and the items that are on there

to becoming angry that now I had to spend more time and more energy and more resources to try and counteract. It's like it. Lori sent me this list. And it honestly reads more like a kid wrote it to me. All of the things that Elisa, the woman at the beginning of the story, was skeptical about, like how the word backside was on this list. That's not on the thing we're looking at, right?

Like October says instead of backside, it says smack a staff ass. November, kiss you dude's girl at school. school is spelled S-K-O-O-O-L. December, deck the halls and show us yo-balls at school halls. There's a very similitude that no adult could ever accomplish on this. And when I was looking at that, it made me wonder, you know, maybe the list that Elyza had gotten and the list that was being passed around the most, some adult had taken a list that looked more like this and edited it,

kind of PG'd it because this list that we're looking at right now, very PG-13, and then put out that version instead. Uh-huh. Okay. And I so wanted to know if Lori had any insights into the more authentic non-PGed list. But it turned out the investigation into that particular list hadn't gotten very far. What sort of investigation did you do around the list? So the investigation around the list kind of died because we didn't want to.

really expose the students. Okay. Do you have a sense of where they got the list? I do not know. What would you say to teachers who are saying, like, this list isn't real, like, I don't think that this is going to happen because of TikTok? Right. I would say that it's better to be prepared and aware than surprised and sorry. At this point, I do feel like I have a pretty strong idea of what happened here. So here's my best guess. Okay. It all starts with devious licks, which is a real trend that started with a real kid stealing masks from their school and putting it on TikTok. But then, you know, it takes off organically and other kids start stealing all kinds of bizarre things from their schools, and it just gets out of

control. And then that slowly shuts down. The meme wave passes. People have lost interest in stealing. for the sake of stealing. Exactly. Okay. And then this list of challenges pops up, not on TikTok, but it's trying to kind of ride the wave of the devious licks trend, you know, trying to be like an alley-oop. Oh. So this is like a failed attempt. This is like a boy band that never popped off.

Well, it probably starts as some kind of like not very funny, edge-lordy joke that most kids actually don't know about. But where it really gained traction where this list actually becomes really popular is with adults, like Lori, who, when she got a hold of it, passed it around to school administrators and other adults. And she thinks maybe it got out from there. But she also says she wasn't the only one. She'd heard of other admins at other schools who had gotten a version of this list. And then what happens next is this thing springs onto a new level from principal offices to Facebook. Starting on the morning of September 22nd, you can watch this list ping pong wildly across Facebook in just a 24-hour period. In the morning, a principal in California posted it to a private principal leadership Facebook group.

Then at 5 p.m., it's on this Facebook page full of cops talking about drugs and alcohol. And then at 10 p.m., Officer Gomez takes a screenshot of a couple of other Facebook posts as evidence, types out the list, and post it himself. And by that point, it's just everywhere. It's on Facebook and Instagram. It spills onto the local news. New details now about a new TikTok challenge that starts tomorrow. It calls for students to smack their teachers. I can't even believe it.

We tried to fact-check all of the headlines from the beginning of the story about kids who were slapping their teachers because of a TikTok trend. And when we did that, no one would give us any evidence for the claims that the assaults were related to TikTok. In one case, the school district said flat out that the slapping case had, hadn't ended up being related to TikTok. When I reached out to Facebook about this list spreading on their platform, they said that they actually hadn't seen it, but they told us that they have policies against posts that coordinate harm or posts that promote or encourage dangerous viral challenges. I ended up sending them some screenshots of the posts, but they haven't responded in time

of us publishing this episode. Of course, the thing that we do have plenty of evidence of is that a major place where this was being spread was on Facebook. and Instagram, and it was being spread by adults, many of whom had good intentions. Right. Which makes me think that it's completely possible that in some of these slapping cases, the kids learned about it not from their peers, but from worried adults. Oh, that sucks.

Yeah. One of the few TikToks that I actually did find about this, which I want to show you, Alex. Oh, yeah. Show me. Okay. All right. It says, bro, literally all my teachers were talking about a new trend. Smack a staff member. Bish, I didn't even know that was a trend.

Right. Can you read some of the comments of that video? Who lied to them? I just got an email about it. It's not a trend. They're making it up now. My mom talked about it too. It must have been a Facebook post by some random parent that blew up.

Brough, it wasn't a trend. They just given us ideas at this point. I didn't even know this was a thing until they told us. Definitely ain't no trend. They want everything to be about them. Oh, my God. Bro, I feel like they definitely made this up. For real, my school said that on the intercom.

This is amazing. Hello. Hey, how are you? Good, how are you? Good, thank you. Now it is the end of October. And I called back Elisa, the woman who, originally come to us with a question of what she should believe about this whole challenge.

First of all, I'm curious how the past couple weeks have been for you. Quiet. Yeah? I mean, they've been busy in terms of, like, actual work, but they're, I haven't heard anything as far as, like, you know, no staff members that I know of have gotten smacked on the backside or anywhere else. Well, that's good news, right? But, yeah, I just wanted to, like, tell you some of the stuff that I learned.

I'm here. Well, so, okay, to just kind of walk you through. So, like, after we got off the phone, I obviously did the thing where, like, I spent. So I told her everything I'd been able to figure out about the validity of these challenges and where it had come from. So I guess I'm curious, like, why do you think this happened and this really took root now? It's like we're all living in this period of uncertainty. There was already an uncertainty. There was already an uncertainty. to begin with, COVID just up the ante. I'm trying to think of the word like, because it's like, you know, there's no, there's nothing to hold on to. It's disorienting. And I don't know if finding that list and like sharing it was like an expression of trying to maybe kind of giving a place for those feelings to go and maybe trying to see some control over, you know, maybe we can prevent this bad thing from happening. On one hand, it's easy. for teenagers and for the rest of us to laugh at all of these adults who are freaking out about this list.

But on the other hand, for the past couple of years, throughout COVID, those very adults, teachers and other school workers, they're the ones that have been making really hard decisions with very little information in an effort to keep all of their students and themselves safe. I talk about this with kids often, is to gauge the actual size of the problem. and then gauge reaction to it. We don't have a reliable way of gauging the size of our problems right now. Sometimes you lash out when you shouldn't. And you react, you end up reacting in ways that, you know, to things that turn out to be not so threatening.

I mean, it feels weird to thank you for letting me go on this quest, but thank you for telling us about it. Well, thanks for taking us seriously. Of course. We'll be in touch about like the rest of if we need anything else from you. And I hope you have a good evening. You too. So is this going to be like an actual episode then?

Oh, yeah. Oh, this is going to be an actual episode. Yeah. Awesome. So yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Okay.

Have a good evening. Y'all too. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. This episode of Reply-All was produced by Norgill, Fia Bennon, and me, Anna Foley. It was edited by Damiano Marquetti.

And, of course, the episode would not have happened without the rest of the reply-all team. Alex Goldman, Emmanuel Jochi, Tim Howard, Jessica Young, and Lisa Wang. Our intern is Esperanza Rosenbaum. The show is hosted by Emmanuel Jochi and Alex Goldman. This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan with fact-checking by Isabel Cristo. Music and sound design by Luke Williams. Additional music in this week's show is by Breakmaster Cylinder and Mariana Romano. Special thanks goes to Abby Richards.

She is a TikTok misinformation researcher. You should definitely go and watch some of her TikToks. They are extremely interesting. Also, special thanks to Ariel Fodder, Eileen Vidal, Maria Del Carmen Needham, and Wendy Zuckerman. Also, this is our last week with producer Norkegill. We have loved having Nora on the show. She is extremely smart.

She is extremely good at her job. We wish her all of the luck in what she does next. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see y'all in a few weeks.