The Anvillain

Fast-and-cheap shipping is now foundational to the American way of life, thanks in large part to Amazon Prime. Still, when producer Grace Tatter sees a video of a man claiming that he's continuously ordering and returning an 110-pound anvil from Amazon with no repercussions from the tech giant, she has questions. Is this legit, or is it a Wile E. Coyote-level scheme? Unlike an anvil, the answer can't be found online. Show notes: "this guy has been buying and returning 110lb anvils on Amazon for 8 months now" (Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonemployees/comments/1m9cg00/this_guy_has_been_buying_and_returning_110lb/) This man keeps buying and returning 110- anvils on Amazon (Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/91392404/this-man-keeps-buying-and-returning-110-pound-anvils-on-amazon) Johnbo's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@stocklett This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by Grace Tatter, Ben Brock Johnson, and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  You have opinions?

• 1:00Amory Sivertson?

  And we want to hear them. Help us keep bringing you more of what you love.

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• 1:19Amory Sivertson?

  So bespeak your mind in our survey.

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 1:22Amory Sivertson?

  Everyone who does is going to get a special bonus episode Bonus! from us, in which Ben and I confess some things to each other.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  The link to the survey is in our show notes, so go get her done. And thanks.

• 1:36Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:48Amory Sivertson?

  Producer Grace Tatter, you have a story for us today, I hear.

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Grace, what up?

• 1:54Speaker 05

  As usual, I've been scrolling TikTok, and I want to tell you all about a TikTok video. This one, actually, my friend Andrew sent me.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  How much do you pay Andrew to digest and curate TikTok for you?

• 2:09Speaker 05

  My undying and enduring friendship.

• 2:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:16Amory Sivertson?

  Priceless.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  So Andrew sent me this TikTok and it was posted by an Amazon customer.

• 2:25Speaker 06

  It's been 10 months, 10 months of continuously buying and returning anvils on Amazon. That's 263 orders, 28,930 pounds of freight. That's almost a whole truck, maybe, maybe even two.

• 2:46Speaker 06

  Every day I click add to cart on that anvil and every day I think, maybe today they'll finally disable my mom's account.

• 2:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know this, I know this guy and I love this guy.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  I've seen this, I've seen this, I know this.

• 3:02Amory Sivertson?

  He is saying anvils, right?

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Anvil, yes, as in a very heavy piece, wily coyote.

• 3:14Speaker 05

  This video that Ben has also seen was posted by a guy who identifies himself on TikTok as John Bo Stockwell. His handle is Stocklet. And as John Bo is talking, he clicks through his Amazon order history. And indeed, you can see several pages worth of orders and returns of a 110 pound anvil that costs $227.31.

• 3:43Amory Sivertson?

  What's the shipping charge on that?

• 3:44Speaker 05

  It's free, baby, Amazon Prime. Ben, it sounds like you were also entertained by this?

• 3:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the nihilistic, anti-capitalist cartoonish vibe that I appreciate in the boring dystopia that we live in.

• 4:06Speaker 05

  So yeah, I too was also intrigued and I think it's because I think about Amazon a lot in my relationship with Amazon. You're gonna say anvils. Anvils, I think about anvils all the time. They're always on my mind. I'm always looking out for them. But the recycling room in my apartment building is constantly overflowing with cardboard Amazon boxes. I like the idea of shopping local, but I feel like so often I'm like, this is the only place I can buy this random item. And I am not the only one. In 2024, do you want to guess how many orders Amazon delivered per hour?

• 4:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh my God, this is gonna be a terrifying number. I'm gonna say 600 million.

• 4:53Amory Sivertson?

  I'm gonna say every hour, there is an order for each of the 7 billion people on this planet.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  Okay, well, the good news is it's not that many.

• 5:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're both ridiculous.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  700,000 orders per hour. And that's in the United States, I should add. But that's still a lot. That's a lot of orders.

• 5:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's a lot of packaging. That's a lot of dumb blue tape.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, and a lot of people are getting that free shipping through Amazon Prime.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Okay, so this video with John Bo showing how he's been ordering this anvil back and forth, back and forth, ordering, returning for 10 months. We see his order history and then he tells his viewers that he started a new anvil related project.

• 5:42Speaker 06

  Every time an anvil arrived at my home, I chipped a piece off. And every time I chipped a piece off, I welded to the other pieces I'd chipped off until eventually, well, I'm not just buying anvils anymore. I'm making them.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  What do you all think about that? Because I'll admit, I was with Jon Bo in the first part of this video. I believed him. I saw that order in return. I was like, OK, he's really doing this. But once he said he was forging a whole new anvil, one piece at a time, I personally was skeptical, although I will admit it does look like like he's doing some real metal forging or something.

• 6:25Amory Sivertson?

  He's making sparks fly, but he's got his back to the camera. So we can't see what he's doing.

• 6:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  I believed him hook, line and sinker in terms of what he was doing, but I found it to be slightly more problematic. Where it's like, if you're just in the game to screw over Amazon, OK. But if you are then, one could argue, stealing by chipping off pieces, then I feel like that's a little more morally questionable.

• 7:00Speaker 05

  OK, so there are a lot of unanswered questions here. Is this guy actually trolling Amazon 100-pound anvil at a time? Or is he trolling us?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I'm Grace Tatter.

• 7:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 7:18Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Anne Marie Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, The Ann Villain.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  OK, so Ben, you think that Jon Bo is potentially treading into some morally questionable territory with all this buying and returning of anvils? But you're not skeptical that he's actually doing it.

• 7:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was not skeptical like you and Anne Marie were, but you guys are smarter than me. So maybe I should have been skeptical.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Well, my friend Andrew wasn't skeptical either. I said to him, I don't know if this is real. And he was like, I'm pretty sure it is. And when I started looking in the comments on TikTok and Instagram, I realized I was in the minority. Many, many people seem to think that this was real, including this person on Instagram with the username te underscore Erica.

• 8:23Speaker 07

  This man is trolling Amazon workers, and it's not funny. Imagine these workers who have to deliver the 100-pound anvil and then return it back to the sender. He is stressing them out for no reason and then laughing about it. That is not cool.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  I don't know how much you all know about Amazon delivery workers' conditions. Many of them aren't getting any benefits like health insurance or paid time off, at least not from Amazon. I actually thought this was interesting. UPS and FedEx drivers average $35 an hour in pay. Amazon drivers, who are driving like the blue vans, average only $19. So that's a pretty big pay discrepancy. Yeah. And that's why a lot of the commenters might be mad on behalf of the workers, right? Because they're like, they already seem like they have a tough job, and lugging an anvil might just make that job even tougher.

• 9:22Speaker 05

  That's one camp of why people are mad at John Bo. Other people are mad because Amazon doesn't own the anvils. A smaller company does called Vivor, and they just use Amazon as a marketplace. They're a third-party seller, and their business could take a hit from all of this ordering and returning, ordering and returning. They're obviously not operating with the same margins as Amazon. Then there are the people who are mad about the impact on the environment. Probably takes a lot of fuel to transport something that heavy. And finally, there were people who are mad on behalf of themselves. I'll have you read some of their comments.

• 10:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep, and that's what's gonna cause Amazon to stop shipping stuff back for free. And people's gonna have to start paying to ship stuff back to them. So yeah, that's a great idea, dude. And people wonder why the world is the way it is because of people like this.

• 10:15Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, here's another one. Someone says, "It's because of people like this that refund policies become more and more strict. People with less IQ than room temperature should not be allowed to buy online."

• 10:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's doing a lot of work. Less IQ than room temperature. And here's this one. "Great way to drive up prices for the rest of us. Doing your part to increase inflation?" Question mark.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  I would say all of these random people, just how mad they are, whether it's about the workers, the environment, or the risk of themselves losing free shipping. You're not that mad unless you're really buying the story, right? But that's, that's one thing. These are random people on the internet. I don't know their expertise in Amazon shipping and logistics. But I also found several threads about this from people who actually do work in this world. And many of them also seem to find Jumbo's scheme plausible. On an Amazon hosted forum for third-party sellers, someone posted Jumbo's video and called him abusive. Others called him disgusting.

• 11:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think it's more complicated than anyone and everyone is laying it out to be, right? People's reaction to him, like accusing him of being part of the problem of why Amazon kills its pre-returns policy or whatever. That seems maybe a little outsized in the assumed impact. But it's, yeah, it's all, it feels very messy. It doesn't feel very clear. It's not, um, you know, Wile E. Coyote in Roadrunner is a lot more, you know, clear who's on the, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. But in this situation, I'm, I'm not sure. Cause I feel like what Jumbo's doing is in some ways,

• 12:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  it's forcing us to think about something.

• 12:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  And that seems valuable.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Jonbo posted his first video about this way back in June. So I was not the first journalist to become interested in this. Fast Company did a piece and the headline to that is "This Man Keeps Buying and Returning Anvils on Amazon." Another publication called The Daily Dot did a story that was then republished by Yahoo News. "Man's Self-Declared War on Amazon Involves Shipping Back 100-Pound Anvils One at a Time." Both of these articles, these headlines are kind of framing it as like, this is something that's actually happening, right? And certainly neither article debunks this story. But neither of them exactly confirms it either.

• 12:46Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so these articles come out and he has kept releasing new videos about these anvils since?

• 12:53Speaker 05

  Yes, he's kept releasing new videos and hadn't, did not give at least these journalists any quotes.

• 12:59Amory Sivertson?

  So if this is real at all, this would mean that Amazon is not, their spidey senses are not tingling. They have not picked up the fact that this person is doing this. Not enough to, as he said, shut down his mom's account. Which is like, another little detail in all of this is like, and you're doing this from your mom's account? Okay.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  At this point, we have news articles, we have people who work in this business seeming to think that this is actually happening. I had noticed that Jonbo had tagged his location in the video. He said he was based in Chicago. And by sheer coincidence, the morning that Andrew sent me this video, I happened to be flying to Chicago that very evening.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  So I messaged Jonbo on TikTok and asked if I could see this anvil for myself. If I could like go by his house and see if I could catch a sight of a big box on his stoop or something. And I didn't expect to hear anything because he hadn't talked, as far as I could tell, to any other journalists yet. But he replied right away.

• 14:04Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, grace, a journalist after my own heart.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  And so, much like an anvil available on Amazon Prime, I showed up at his door the very next day.

• 14:20Speaker 08

  I feel like I should give you a tour of the place just to be polite, but...

• 14:24Speaker 05

  Okay, so that's John Bo. He actually goes by John in real life. And he lives with his wife Rebecca, who was also home when I got there.

• 14:32Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 09

  I'm constantly getting texts like, "Did he really do that?" And I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about yet."

• 14:39Speaker 05

  So John and I, we walked outside to his garage-turned-workshop, where he was supposedly welding this new anvil. And when we entered the garage, I was pretty surprised by what I saw. So I'm seeing actually multiple anvils, which I didn't expect. I thought I was just going to see one.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Oh my God. Okay. What Grace discovered in a minute.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 15:35Speaker 10

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• 15:44Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In-flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 16:32Amory Sivertson?

  So before the break, intrepid producer Grace Tatter was in John Stockwell, aka John Bo's garage in Chicago, trying to find out if this guy, who'd gone super viral on TikTok for seemingly buying and returning a bunch of 100-pound anvils on Amazon, was telling the truth.

• 16:53Speaker 08

  So this is the one that I actually purchased.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  Oh, and you kept it?

• 16:58Speaker 08

  I kept one of them.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 08

  It makes a really lovely noise, too, when you ding it. It's just like...

• 17:07Speaker 05

  It's beautiful. So here's the truth. John did order an anvil from Amazon and then return it, and then order it again.

• 17:16Speaker 08

  I ended up on some TikTok where they were talking about, "Yeah, you can get an anvil on Amazon." And I saw that and I was like, "What?"

• 17:26Speaker 08

  And I looked it up and like, on top of being able to buy an anvil on Amazon, you get free shipping?

• 17:37Speaker 08

  Which makes just incomprehensible. Like, in no world does that make logistical, economic, or any sense.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  So John is a stand-up comedian, and he joked about ordering an anvil on Amazon and then immediately returning it for one of his shows. But then he thought, you know what would be funnier than joking about ordering and returning an anvil on Amazon repeatedly? Actually doing it. So he floated the idea to the group chat, as one does, and some of his friends were like, "No, no, do not do that."

• 18:14Speaker 08

  I bought it, probably within 10 minutes of sending that message. I didn't even really wait for their feedback. It came next day in the afternoon. It was stupid fast.

• 18:33Speaker 08

  Posted a story on my Instagram, just being like, "Yep, time to ship it back." And then more discourse erupts in the chat, a little more critical of me at this point, which, you know, justified. Like, I wanted to, I wanted to go about doing this legitimately, but like, just from a fundamental perspective, like, Amazon 100% would just, they have measured that would just automatically, you know, ban my account. My mom would be pissed, you know, and then on top of that, you know, there's just all of the other, the potential

• 19:13Speaker 08

  for harm, you know, maybe, maybe I should not do this. Let's do the next best thing. Let's lie about it. Let's make people think that we're doing it. How can I do that?

• 19:26Speaker 05

  John needed a fake orders page that he could click through to show all of the anvils that he had supposedly ordered and returned. Luckily, in addition to being a comedian, he is also a software engineer.

• 19:38Speaker 08

  So I wrote a Chrome extension that like, that updates the content of the orders page when you have it installed on your like computer and like you navigate to that orders page on Amazon. And I was just like fiddling with that. It looked pretty good. It looked, it looked damn decent.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  Which I would agree. It fooled me. Same.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  So John clarified that the two times he did have the anvil delivered, it was delivered by UPS. So those drivers are paid a little bit more than the Amazon contractors and they had special equipment.

• 20:18Speaker 08

  No workers were harmed in the purchasing of this anvil. The UPS guy pulled up on a dolly, dropped it on my front step and just walked off. He seemed, it was quite leisurely. He strutted, actually.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Also, returning the anvil actually wasn't free. John had to pay $6 for UPS to pick it up again.

• 20:42Speaker 08

  Really great deal for returning an anvil.

• 20:43Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 08

  Really great deal.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  When John posted his first viral video about this back in June, he was surprised by how many people took him seriously because his page is mostly just him doing comedic bits.

• 20:56Speaker 08

  Medieval Times wants to treat me like a king? Okay, let me behead a peasant then. I want to behead a peasant.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  And even his anvil videos contain elements that are obviously untrue. In one, he claims to reveal where he lives while standing outside of what he claims is his house. He's standing in front of a sign that states "The area is protected by the U.S. Secret Service."

• 21:22Speaker 08

  Look, if you don't like what I'm doing with the anvils on Amazon, come by to my place. 5046 South Greenwood Ave, Chicago, Illinois.

• 21:29Speaker 05

  If the Secret Service signs weren't already a giveaway, you can Google that address. That is the Obama's Chicago house.

• 21:37Amory Sivertson?

  Oh.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  John posted the video that went the most viral in October. That's the one we heard earlier, where he claims to be making a whole new anvil, the claim that made me so skeptical.

• 21:52Speaker 08

  I started with like a wood frame with chicken wire.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  He used insulating foam and car paint. He put a metal frame on it so he could actually make the sparks fly for that video.

• 22:04Speaker 08

  I had to shave the shaping of it and then start sanding it. And then it just, it started to get tiring, like dealing with it. So I was just like, fuck it, I gotta just put it out, see what happens.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  And we know what happened, right? It went super viral, even more viral than the videos he had posted before. And yeah, and a lot of people believed it. But also, a lot of people talked about it. It made a lot of people think about this whole conceit of free shipping and if it's actually free.

• 22:32Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm. Does he, do you know if he uses Amazon himself? Like, was he using his mom's account because he doesn't have one?

• 22:42Speaker 05

  I think he does use Amazon himself because as I was leaving his house, there were Amazon packages on the stoop. They were not anvils. I mean, I didn't pick them up, that seemed. That seemed maybe too intrusive, but they didn't appear to be in full size.

• 23:00Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so the Amazon troll also seems to be an Amazon customer. Got it.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Well, John does have some questions about especially the environmental impact of Amazon and fast and cheap shipping. He's mostly doing this for the bit. He is a comedian through and through. But one of the rewarding things for him that he didn't expect has been engaging with people about issues he does feel strongly about. So he would consider himself to be on the left of things politically, and some of his other content reflects that, particularly on Instagram. He made posts protesting ICE raids in Chicago last fall, posts after Charlie Kirk was murdered that were critical of Charlie Kirk's rhetoric.

• 23:45Speaker 08

  Because of the viral videos, people reach out and see like the things that I like support and will, they'll just like, you know, message me calling me a libtard, just like dumb things.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  John doesn't block or ignore these messages. He asks them, why do you say that?

• 24:05Speaker 08

  Nine times out of 10, you come away still disagreeing and, you know, obviously not making much progress with folks. But like nine times out of 10, you recognize like, like this person will acknowledge like, oh, okay. Like it always ends with like, it ends in the most dude way where it's like, you know, you and me, we gotta get a beer. I could talk politics all day, all day with you, bud.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  To John, this means that even if he doesn't change someone's mind, they see him and maybe then other people who they disagree with as human beings. So to him, it's a small chip off the anvil of political division.

• 24:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, I'm amazed that you found him and that you went and talked to him. Good on you, Grace. I'm, even though I would have believed the whole thing, I'm, I guess I'm still not shocked that it was a bit, right? Like, it's, yeah, it seems like it's a bit that's a good, that's good for the world. He's forging new relationships.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, and we encounter a lot of content that is kind of absurd, or you can't tell someone's, even though sometimes it seems like people go through such great lengths, I kind of can't imagine the time, having the time to convince people that something outrageous has actually happened that hasn't happened. I feel like that is a huge genre of internet content.

• 25:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  But like, often, it's interesting or it's funny, but there's not a lot of substance in the discourse around, like, those kind of viral rage baity posts. And I did think that was something different about this one. Like, regardless of why people were mad, they were thinking a little bit about something that, at this point, we might all take for granted, just because, like, like we said, those Amazon delivery vans are everywhere.

• 25:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I feel like we all feel beat down sometimes by this endless hammering of having to order things and having them delivered to us. So I feel like this is good, this is good comedic fuel.

• 26:17Amory Sivertson?

  Well, I, maybe I'll be the voice of pushback here, because while I can appreciate that this video generated maybe more substantive discussion in the comments than many other viral videos, I also want to see that critical discussion turn into some action and some changes of behavior. And if you don't, if you support the idea of trolling Amazon in some way, then...

• 26:51Amory Sivertson?

  Then I'd like to think that we wouldn't just all go along with our lives continuing to order however many packages from Amazon a week or a month that we do. You know? Maybe I'm just being cynical here.

• 27:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I think that's right. I think you, it's good to like, expect change from the world and want us to be like, thinking about that stuff. I'll tell you a separate, slightly funny story, which is that my neighbor, his wife has decided that she's off Amazon, which also includes Whole Foods.

• 27:22Amory Sivertson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  And she caught him the other day because he had Find My turned on.

• 27:27Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh.

• 27:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  And he was in Whole Foods. And she busted his ass. She was like, you went to Whole Foods to buy this, whatever it was that he bought on the way home. And he was like, damn it.

• 27:42Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  So.

• 27:44Amory Sivertson?

  That was a good use of spousal surveillance.

• 27:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exactly. And a relatively low stakes one, we could say. So, you know, Amory, just so you know, some of my neighbors, they're, they're making the change.

• 27:56Amory Sivertson?

  I get that we're all just doing the best that we can, but I also think at a certain point, we need to draw some, some lines for ourselves and say, hey, if we're gonna make Amazon the like butt of our jokes, or the, the source of our wrath, we actually do need to change our behaviors around what we buy and where we buy it from. As of this recording, John is still not sure how the bit will end. He's made a few more silly videos about ordering and returning anvils without acknowledging that it is a bit. But he has a lot of ideas how to wrap it up.

• 28:38Amory Sivertson?

  So maybe, Amory, he'll, he'll take some of your food for thought into account.

• 28:43Speaker 08

  I'm seeing down the line, like, next narrative point, you know, this anvil company sues me. I'm looking for money. I'm looking for money fast. I start selling products on the TikTok shop. I need to make up money so I can pay my, my legal bills. We start, we start subjecting products from the TikTok shop to the anvil test. Where I just, I get free samples and then I drop an anvil from my roof on the backyard.

• 29:19Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Grace, Ben Brock Johnson, and me, Amory Sivertson.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, our production manager, Paul Veikas, and our managing producer, Suma Tajoshi.

• 29:40Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between doing it for the bit and sticking it to the man.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved Anvil mystery, or another story from the internet you want us to tell, hit us up. [email protected].

• 29:57Amory Sivertson?

  And if you are keeping track of all of the Anvil puns that Ben was dropping on us in this episode, hit us up as well. Count them up. Let us know. [email protected].

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 30:46Speaker 11

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 30:51Speaker 12

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 30:53Speaker 11

  Oh, my gosh. Individualized support, right? Personalization. And to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities. For example, speakers of different languages. There are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 31:43Speaker 13

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• 32:12Speaker 12

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