I have watched 400 hours of Ms. Rachel and I need to talk about the four-second pause

​

I'm not doing a bit.

I'm going to lay out what I've actually observed and you can decide.

**THE UNIFORM**

Pink shirt. Denim overalls. Bow. She's adorable...

Not literally the exact same outfit every time, before somebody here makes a spreadsheet, but close enough that my kid could identify this woman from a police lineup before he could identify half our relatives.

You'll say branding.

I'll say that a garment you wear consistently in front of a population that cannot read your name is an identifier.

For people who don't have language yet.

That's the whole point.

**THE PAUSE**

This is the one that got me.

She says:

*"Can you say ba ba ba?"*

Then she STOPS.

Holds the lens.

Four full seconds sometimes.

My kid answers.

Out loud.

To a television.

The television does not contain Ms. Rachel.

Ms. Rachel cannot hear her.

She does not care.

The protocol does not require her to.

That's a call-and-response structure, and I want somebody to explain to me why a prerecorded video is built like a two-way conversation with a child who doesn't understand that it's prerecorded.

**THE CREDENTIALS, WHICH ARE THE ACTUALLY ALARMING PART**

This is not some mom who bought a ring light and accidentally became famous.

She has two master's degrees, in music education and early childhood education.

Her husband is a Broadway music director.

The man has credits on *Aladdin*.

He writes those songs.

So a guy whose literal profession involved putting melodies into roughly 1,800 adult brains a night, multiple nights a week, took that entire skill set and redirected it toward an audience that cannot yet reliably say the word "no."

Broadway spent generations figuring out how to make grown adults remember a chorus after hearing it once, and these two basically looked at that technology and said:

*"Okay, but what if the target demographic still eats crayons?"*

And the vowel-stretching thing she does?

Parentese.

That's real.

Exaggerated pitch, stretched vowels, simplified language.....all of it designed to hold a baby's attention and support language learning.

She isn't accidentally good at this.

She knows exactly what she's doing.

And she's doing it at scale.

**THE COVER STORY**

Her son had a speech delay, so she started making videos to help him.

Genuinely lovely.

Also the single most unfalsifiable origin story available to a human being, because the second you ask one follow-up question you sound like you hate children.

Very convenient.

Very airtight.

**THE ROOM**

Beige wall.

No window.

No clock.

No weather.

No season.

No skyline.

No street noise.

No meaningful indication of a city, a month, or even a decade.

You cannot date a single frame of that footage.

Could be filmed in Brooklyn.

Could be filmed in a facility.

Could've been filmed in 2019.

Could've been filmed last Tuesday.

There is no timestamp anywhere in that universe.

Ms. Rachel exists outside normal spacetime.

Sesame Street at least has a street.

**HERBIE**

A hippo.

On an arm.

Never introduced.

No origin story.

No explanation.

No paperwork.

He simply appeared one day with full access to the children and everybody collectively decided this was normal.

I have more questions about Herbie than I do about anybody else involved.

**HERE IS WHAT I ACTUALLY THINK IS HAPPENING**

She isn't teaching kids to behave.

That's not even really what the videos are about.

She's handing them the words they're going to think in.

The vocabulary.

The phonemes.

The rhythm of how a sentence feels before they even understand what a sentence is.

She's getting in at the operating-system level.

First word in my house wasn't mama.

Wasn't dada.

You already know what it was.

Then Netflix picked her up.

That's not a career milestone.

That's a distribution upgrade.

We went from local deployment to cloud infrastructure.

Anyway.

I'm not saying it's a psyop.

I'm saying turn on one episode, mute the TV completely, and watch what her face is doing.

Watch her look directly into the lens, ask your toddler a question, and then hold eye contact with them in total silence for four seconds.

Then explain to me why **you** start feeling uncomfortable first.

**EDIT:** Yes, I still let her watch it.

She picked up like 40 words in a month.

Do you understand how little that helps my argument?