Hello, everybody.

Welcome to 372 pages.

We'll never get back.

The podcast where I and Mike Nelson read books that we do not expect to like.

And Mike?

Podcast.

Podcast. Yes. Wow, is that the new new is that all the kids are pronouncing it that way oh god uh we're off to a strong start this is the augen podcast

yes uh where we read books that we do not expect to like to like mm-hmm andhmm. And we're reading Bridge 2, Bat City by Ernest Klein,

uh, acclaimed author of Ready Player 1 and author of Ready Player 2 and Armada and this new book

for young adult and or mid-grade children.

Mid-grade children.

That sounds like, uh like you're really just

insulting them, doesn't it? Like, it's like the, we were talking yesterday, my wife and I, about how,

because she's doing this old movie, about how before the 50s, there were no, the teenage culture. So all these old people are

scratching their heads. What is this new teenage phase? That's me with the mid-grade. I don't know.

What are they? What kind of things do they like to listen to? I don't know. It does seem like

you've unnecessarily parsed things out where like early, you know, when I was growing up, you'd be like, yeah, you, you hit 10 years old, you've re-bridge to Terribithia, the kid dies and you get sad. Like there's no, there's no need to be like, well, he's eight and a half, so can he read the animorphs about the golden retriever yet, or is that still crocodile animorphs? That doesn't... Yeah, they're slicing the stuff too thin, but that's fine. We're reading the book.

Yeah, I think it's mainly just to see which market is the more lucrative. And when you hit these

lucrative markets of, you know, potentially being able to to market a book to, you know,

every single school age kid in the country for the

world for the for the next three decades, maybe even longer, you start to maybe take some

risks and we've found some very interesting things out about this book. Our listeners have found

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