Hey everyone, this is Filip and welcome to another episode of News from the Forest! Episode 136, and it’s a packed one. We’ll talk about how AI is reshaping schools — from typewriters at Cornell to a school with zero teachers in Chicago. How Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue. We’ll discover a brand-new island near Antarctica and find out how the war in Ukraine is devastating nature on a massive scale. And at the end, you’ll try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. Let’s go.

What do you tell your kid when you know the technology you’re building will rewrite the rules for an entire generation? The Wall Street Journal asked exactly this question to the heads of the biggest AI companies — Daniela Amodei from Anthropic, Jaime Teevan from Microsoft, Ethan Mollick from Wharton. And you know what’s fascinating about their answers? Not a single one said: learn to code.

That Wall Street Journal piece really got to me. Because if I asked you — what should kids study to thrive in a world full of artificial intelligence — most of us would say: STEM, coding, data science. Makes sense, right? Except the people who are actually building AI are saying something completely different.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the AI model that, full disclosure, also helps me produce this podcast — says, and I’m paraphrasing: “What won’t be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.” This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is coming from someone whose company just surpassed OpenAI in revenue.

Ethan Mollick from Wharton, who wrote the brilliant book Co-Intelligence, advises his teenagers to avoid hyper-specialization entirely. His logic is straightforward: if your job consists of repeating one specific cognitive task, AI will eventually do it faster, cheaper, and without complaining. The future, he says, belongs to people who bundle three or four distinct skills — communication, judgment, creativity, accountability.

And that word — accountability — is key. AI can analyze data, write reports, propose solutions. But it can’t be held responsible. A human does that. And the ability to say “I own this” is, according to these people, the most valuable currency of the future.

So here’s the paradox: the people building AI are telling their children — be as human as possible. Learn how to learn, be flexible, communicate, take responsibility. And above all — don’t be a narrow specialist, be a generalist.

This theme — the tension between technology and humanity — runs like a red thread through today’s entire episode. Let’s start with how it’s playing out in schools.

I’ve got three stories about education that seem to come from three different universes. And yet they’re all happening right now.

Story one: Typewriters at Cornell

At Cornell University, one of America’s most prestigious schools, a German language instructor named Grit Matthias Phelps does something once a semester that completely blows her students’ minds: instead of laptops, they find manual typewriters on their desks. No screens, no online dictionaries, no spellcheck, no Delete key.

She started doing this in 2023 because she noticed students were submitting grammatically perfect German essays — thanks to AI and online translation tools. As she puts it: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself?”

And the students? Catherine Mong, a 19-year-old freshman, said: “I was so confused. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works.” One student was puzzled by the key labeled “Return” — and then realized you physically have to return the carriage to the beginning of the line. “Oh, that’s why it’s called Return!”

But the most interesting observation came from computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong. He said: “The difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you.” Without screens, no notifications. Without Google, he had to ask classmates for help. Suddenly, they were actually talking to each other. As he put it: “That was probably normal back then. But it’s drastically different from how we interact in the classroom in modern times.”

This analog wave is spreading. It’s part of a broader national trend — back to handwritten tests, oral exams, pen-and-paper assignments. Because schools are looking for ways to verify that students are actually thinking.

Story two: Sweden goes back to books

Now one at the national level. Sweden — a country that was a pioneer of digital education for twenty years. Every student had a tablet or laptop, textbooks were replaced with digital content. And now? A complete 180.

The Swedish government is investing over 100 million euros to bring printed textbooks back into classrooms. Starting in 2026, mobile phones will be banned in compulsory schools for the entire school day. For preschool children under two, only analog learning tools may be used.

Why? Because student outcomes — reading comprehension, ability to focus, deep understanding of text — were declining. Researcher Linda Fälth from Linnaeus University summarizes it: Sweden positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.

Sweden’s education minister called it “an experiment that wasn’t scientifically based.” And UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report backs this up, warning against uncritical adoption of technology in classrooms.

Story three: A school with no teachers in Chicago

And then there’s Alpha Schools. A private school opening in Chicago this fall that goes in exactly the opposite direction. No teachers. At all. Core academics — math, reading, science — are delivered in a two-hour daily block entirely through AI software. Kids from kindergarten through eighth grade sit at computers while the AI adapts to them in real time.

Instead of teachers, they have “guides” — adults who motivate, provide emotional support, and lead afternoon workshops on robotics, entrepreneurship, public speaking, even running their own food truck. Guides don’t need teaching degrees, just a bachelor’s. Starting salary: $100,000 a year.

Tuition? $55,000 per child per year.

Founder MacKenzie Price says AI will “unlock the greatest untapped resource in our world, which is human potential.” Alpha claims their students grow 2.6 times faster than the national average and rank in the top one percent on standardized tests.

But experts are skeptical. A 2026 Stanford review of over 800 academic papers found that while AI can improve student performance, the benefits become less clear when students are later asked to work without AI support. And philosophy professor Joe Vukov from Loyola University put it bluntly: “I worry that you’re changing the nature of what learning and education, at its best, has always looked like.”

So three stories: typewriters as a cure for AI cheating, an entire country returning to books, and a private school that eliminated teachers entirely. All happening now. All responding to the same question — what role should technology play in education?

And what fascinates me is how perfectly this mirrors what those AI executives tell their own kids. Build human skills. Accountability, communication, adaptability. Exactly the things you learn better from a typewriter or a book than from a chatbot.

Now from a completely different angle — business and technology. Because something happened this week that would have been unthinkable six months ago.

Anthropic — the company behind the AI assistant Claude — announced that its annualized revenue has topped $30 billion. At the end of 2025, it was $9 billion. In four months, it tripled. And with that, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI — which sits at roughly $24 to $25 billion — for the first time in history.

How? The key is the customer base. While OpenAI earns heavily from consumer-facing ChatGPT — 900 million weekly active users — Anthropic bet on enterprise. Eighty percent of its revenue comes from business customers. Over a thousand companies now pay more than $1 million annually for Claude services. That number doubled in under two months.

A massive driver is Claude Code — the agentic coding tool that alone generates over $2.5 billion in annual revenue. It’s become what analysts are calling generative AI’s first true killer app for enterprise.

And then there’s Mythos. Claude Mythos is a new model that first leaked in late March when Anthropic accidentally left internal documents in an unsecured public data store. What emerged was striking: Mythos is so capable at coding that it autonomously discovers security vulnerabilities in software — at a level that surpasses most human experts.

Anthropic says Mythos Preview found thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. One of them was a 17-year-old bug in FreeBSD that allowed complete root access to any machine running NFS. Mythos found it and built a working exploit entirely on its own.

In one test, Mythos chained together four vulnerabilities into a single browser exploit that escaped both the renderer and operating system sandboxes. In another, it solved a corporate network attack simulation that would have taken a human expert over 10 hours.

That’s why Anthropic chose not to release Mythos publicly. Instead, they launched Project Glasswing — a coalition including Apple, Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, CrowdStrike, and the Linux Foundation, who get access to Mythos to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers do.

The Wiz security blog compared it to a Y2K moment — we have a window to prepare, but it’s closing fast.

After that heavy tech block, let’s lighten things up. Travel!

A new island near Antarctica. This sounds unbelievable in 2026, but it happened. An international expedition aboard the icebreaker Polarstern, with 93 scientists on board, was studying ice loss in the Weddell Sea. Bad weather forced them to take shelter near Joinville Island — and in an area where charts only showed “unexamined navigational hazards,” they found an island that wasn’t on any map. Using sensors and a drone, they surveyed it: 130 meters long, 50 meters wide, rising 16 meters above sea level. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will once the registration process is complete. In 2026, we’re still discovering new pieces of land.

15 most beautiful trails in Europe. The Times put together a ranking of Europe’s best walking routes, and — this made me personally happy — Bohemian Switzerland, where I live, made the list! Thanks for the tip, Míra.

Abandoned Spain. If you’re drawn to more melancholic travel, Spain has over 3,000 abandoned villages and towns. There’s a great video linked in the description — a fascinating look at how rural depopulation is transforming the landscape.

And a fun one — walking, cycling, running, that’s all very trendy. But what about visiting friends by plane? Not a commercial flight — a small ultralight. There’s a video about it in the show notes.

And if we can’t make it to the beach this year, there’s a new game where you can build sandcastles on a virtual beach. So there’s that safety net.

From travel to nature. And here I have two stories that are like two sides of the same coin.

War and nature in Ukraine. Czech Radio (iRozhlas) published an in-depth report on how Russia’s war is devastating Ukrainian nature. The numbers are alarming. Four years of war have produced 311 million tons of CO2 — equivalent to the annual output of all of France. The estimated climate damage: $57 billion.

But it’s not just emissions. Trenches destroy ecosystems, shelling contaminates soil with toxic metals and explosive residues, fires devastate forests. The Russian army occupied protected areas like the Kamianska Sich National Park. And after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023, an ecological catastrophe of enormous scale followed.

Professor Tomáš Cajthaml from Charles University says the war has set back nature conservation structures — built over decades — by a hundred years. In principle, the aggressor should pay for remediation — that’s Russia. But international criminal law doesn’t yet recognize “ecocide” as a crime.

And yet there’s an unexpected glimmer of hope: in the area of the former Kakhovka reservoir, a new forest ecosystem began forming spontaneously — young willows and poplars covered an area of 140,000 hectares. Nature can recover, if given the space.

Returning species in Czechia. And that’s a beautiful transition to the second story. In the Czech Republic, species once considered extinct are slowly returning. Wolves, beavers, European wildcats, lynx, white-tailed eagles — all making a comeback. The beaver, absent since the 19th century, now has a population of around 15,000. The European wildcat, nicknamed the “forest ghost,” was recently captured for the first time by researchers in the Doupov Mountains — camera traps confirmed its return.

It’s proof that conservation works. When you create the conditions — protected areas, hunting bans, connected migration corridors — nature finds its way back. And as a volunteer nature warden in Bohemian Switzerland, that’s news that deeply resonates with me.

Two quick nature mentions: there’s a new app called Bugsy — it’s like Pokémon Go, but instead of Pokémon, you photograph and collect beetles and insects. And the Czech science journal Vesmír published a fascinating piece about rainforests that once grew in Antarctica. Links in the description.

And now my favorite section — the unclassifiable.

Kodak! Yes, that Kodak — the textbook example of a company that catastrophically missed the digital revolution. Well, Kodak just released a new photographic film: Ektacolor Pro and Ektapan. For those of us who love analog photography, this is great news. Film photography is experiencing a genuine renaissance, and Kodak is responding.

Then there’s a website where you can try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. It’s called donothingfor2minutes.org. Literally nothing — don’t touch your mouse, your keyboard, your phone. If you move, it resets. Thanks for the tip, Michelle. And honestly — it’s surprisingly hard.

Office chair racing! Have you seen the video? People in corporate offices racing on rolling chairs. Link in the description. I guarantee it’ll brighten your day.

And one last thought, no link, just a question: do you limit your kids’ social media? And what about WhatsApp? They need it for communication, right? Well… think about how much time they actually spend on WhatsApp and what they’re really doing there. That’s a question worth sitting with over the weekend.

What I’m reading: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. A classic of Greek literature about an intellectual who meets a wild, uninhibited Greek man who lives life to the fullest. I’m reading it now while spending time in Greece, and it fits perfectly with the local approach to life.

What I’m listening to: The new album from Paul Cauthen — a Texan blend of country, soul, and rock’n’roll. Perfect for late-afternoon listening as the sun goes down.

What I’m watching: Your Friends & Neighbors, season two. A solid thriller for anyone who enjoys stories about neighbors who aren’t as innocent as they seem.

Interesting app: Cursor version 3. If you’re a developer or work with code, Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that just got a major update. Worth trying.

You know what struck me most about this episode? The contrast. On one side, an AI model that autonomously finds security holes in operating systems. On the other, a student at Cornell holding a typewriter for the first time and saying: “That’s why it’s called Return? Because you return to the beginning?”

Maybe the answer to how we live with AI is exactly that — sometimes, return to the beginning. To paper, to a book, to a conversation with a classmate, to a walk in the forest. Not because technology is bad. But because being human requires both.

Thank you so much for listening. Take care and see you in two weeks!

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