Ryan Vet takes the final twenty minutes of Austin Petersen’s October 6 broadcast to work through his COLLIDE essay on the kindergarten class of 2039 — the children who started school this fall, nearly three-quarters of them born to millennial mothers in 2021. Austin arrives having read the piece, so the segment goes to the arguments rather than the summary: which of the eight predictions have stopped being predictions (millennial parents, no classroom masks, homeschooling doubled from 1.7% to 3.4% between 1999 and 2023, and the split between parents doubling down on devices and parents retreating to free play) and which are still bets. Ryan’s sharpest correction is on the phone bans now in force across 38 states plus DC: in most districts the ban covers the personal phone, not the Chromebook, which he calls backwards — you can’t have your phone, but here’s a computer to stare at all day. From there he argues that a child who can speak any question into an answer learns to trust a device rather than the adults in the room, that the rite of passage was never the driver’s licence but the freedom it delivered, and that his son’s lopsided paper mache earth beat every 3D print in the room because pride only attaches to work you actually did. He names the Velocity Gap as the reason to distrust his own forecast, and closes on the case that the future can be more human — Barnes & Noble’s 60 new stores, the returning mall — but only for a generation trained to enjoy being in a room with people.
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