K8s CRI not running

Has anyone hit this error with kubeadm?

chuck@k8smaster:~$ sudo kubeadm init

[init] Using Kubernetes version: v1.26.0

[preflight] Running pre-flight checks

error execution phase preflight: [preflight] Some fatal errors occurred:

[ERROR CRI]: container runtime is not running: output: time=“2022-12-15T21:43:49Z” level=fatal msg=“getting status of runtime: invalid character ‘\’’ after object key:value pair”

, error: exit status 1

[preflight] If you know what you are doing, you can make a check non-fatal with --ignore-preflight-errors=...

To see the stack trace of this error execute with --v=5 or higher

running --v=5 just shows the same error text

I don’t really do any Kubernetes work, but perhaps someone here might be able to help.