Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

There's a moment in Friends where Chandler quotes "and that's how a bill becomes a law" — a reference to the little Schoolhouse Rock parchment paper sitting forlorn on the steps of Capitol Hill waiting to be passed into legislation. The bit is the joke. Made in the 70s, played for laughs in the 90s, somehow still living rent-free in my brain in 2026.

I bring this up because I genuinely cannot tell you what I learned in AP Government, but I can tell you that little guy (the bill) could be sitting in committee for a long time. I can tell you he sits on those steps. I can tell you the cadence of and he's sittin' here on Capitol Hill.

I don't think that's the only thing AP Government was supposed to leave behind, but it's what's there.

I've started to think this is the actual rule of memory: what sticks is what entertained you, not necessarily what was important or what was assigned. What delighted you on the way in is what tends to stay.

Take state capitals. For the millennials who remember, the Animaniacs had a song where Wakko sings every US capital. I don't remember the whole thing, but from the few sections I do remember, I can tell you — Springfield, Illinois; Des Moines, Iowa; Pierre, South Dakota; on down the list. Not because I studied but because Wakko sang a banger that is still relevant to this day.

I've been watching this happen in real time with my nephew, who's about 20 months old. We're giving him a bilingual upbringing in English and Cantonese, and I keep noticing that words and cadence land on different layers. He picks up English words, but he also responds to Cantonese cadence well before he has the vocabulary to know what's being said. Say bye-bye with the right tonal rise and fall (bai bai), and you can see comprehension flicker across his face. We're more of a bai bai family than a buh-bye family. He's getting the rhythm before he's getting the words — which makes me think the "way-in" isn't really the song, or the language, or even the meaning. It's the tonal undercurrent of it all. Vocabulary and meaning ride on top of cadence.

In senior year of high school, we did something called Mock Congress. (Some schools call it Model Congress or Congressional Debate.) Students simulate a session of the US Congress: bills, committees, floor debates, votes, parliamentary procedure, the whole bit. We spent weeks on it, graded partly on participation and partly on the bills we put forward. It was the most fun I had in any class that year.

The seniors got to be the congress members while some lucky juniors got to be pages, and their entire job was to run around the room passing notes from one side to the other. Real notes: tiny folded pieces of paper saying will you second this? or vote with us on this one or just look alive over there.

What stuck with me wasn't the legislative process but the understanding, while watching the room work, that adult Congress is probably almost identical. Note-passing, talking hot goss, negotiating on small pieces of paper to second a proposal or push something to a vote.

That's the version of the lesson I actually carried out: real systems are less complicated and less scary than they look. If a band of high school seniors can credibly run a session of Congress, most of the adult world is probably more accessible than you've been led to believe. You have a shot at understanding it — and at making something inside it.

When I look back at the things I actually know — really know, the kind of knowing that's still there decades later — almost none of it came through the official channels. AP Government didn't teach me government. A cartoon, a song, and a roomful of high schoolers playing Congress did. The world entertains us into being who we are.

In an age when every piece of information is one AI query away, this matters more, not less. The bottleneck was never access. It was always attention. Whoever makes the fun stuff — the Schoolhouse Rock version, the Wakko song, the high schoolers passing notes — wins. And they have been winning since the 70s.

Which makes me wonder if the real question for the future of education is just this: how do we make the important stuff digestible enough that it sticks?

Some of this is already happening. Google's NotebookLM can take a pile of notes and turn it into a two-person podcast — suddenly your reading list is something you listen to on a walk. Someone at my company, Mimosa, built a small game that teaches a kid the difference between plus, minus, multiply, and divide before they ever see a worksheet. The format is a choice now in a way it never was, and AI is making more formats available than we've ever had access to.

The optimistic version of this is that somewhere out there is a brilliant educator who finally has the tools to do what Schoolhouse Rock did in 1976, but for everything. AI can't make people care. But put it in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're trying to teach — and what makes a thing fun — and you might end up with the next Animaniacs hit.

On the topic of making a hit and communicating a message through entertainment, no one did it quite as grandly as Ridley Scott in Gladiator. In the movie, Russell Crowe plays Maximus, a Roman general who was enslaved and became a very famous gladiator.

In Gladiator, Proximo, his mentor, tells Maximus that being a great killer isn't enough — to be free, to have any real power, you have to win the crowd. The thesis of that film, if you sit with it, is that the entertainers had more power than the people in actual power. Commodus, the emperor of Rome, held the title while Maximus held the audience. And in Rome, "Rome is the mob."

Same pattern, different costumes. The Schoolhouse Rock writers didn't pass any legislation; they taught a generation what legislation was. The Animaniacs writers never sat on a school board and yet they taught half the country to remember that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota. The men and women who write our cartoons, our songs, our shows, our endless scrolls — they don't hold any official titles, and they still shape what an entire civilization remembers and how.

Which is the part that's both beautiful and terrifying. The same mechanism that made me remember Pierre, South Dakota is the mechanism that gets used for propaganda. The crowd that turns on Commodus is the same crowd that, on a different day, gets whipped up into an ugly mob. "Bread and circuses" isn't a compliment — it's the original critique of a civilization that pays more attention to its entertainers than to its rulers. The technology of attention has no morals built in. The only thing that decides what it does is who's holding it and what they're trying to teach.

So when I say I hope somebody's writing the next Schoolhouse Rock for the AI age, I don't just mean it as a wish. I mean it as the actual question of the moment. Whoever wins the next crowd — whatever song or game or short-form whatever they put in front of the next generation of 20-month-olds — is going to shape what that generation knows in their bones. Forty years from now, those kids will be running things. Whatever they're still humming will be running things too.

That's the part worth taking seriously. Not whether we'll keep being entertained — we will, that's not in doubt. The question is who gets to do the entertaining, and what they choose to make stick.

Savoring this moment with you,

Kevin L