Welcome to the 20 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) If you’re looking to spend quality offline time with quality people, I’d highly reccomend checking out one of Kanso’s Here & Now phone-free events.

• New York - 10/22

• San Francisco - 10/23 

2) Some of you have let me know that these emails are no longer hitting your main inbox. If that’s the case, drag this email back to your primary inbox and shoot me back a reply to let the email clients know this is content you want to see :)

Life has been in a whirlwind recently in the best way possible. Much of this has been due to the growing momentum of my company, Kanso.

This all dates back to last August, when I decided to run a social experiment

What would happen if you put 50 ambitious, driven New Yorkers in a room together and locked away their phones?

Turns out a bunch of really great things.

Immediately after the event, I had people come up to me saying it was the best experience they’ve had in New York. Guests stayed well past the allotted event duration, and many went on to form real friendships after meeting there. One guy even met an investor who wired money into his startup the very next day.

pic from our first event (if you aren’t embarassed by your first product you aren’t shipping soon enough!)

It was clear that I was onto something, but I still didn’t know exactly how it would take shape. So I sat on the idea for the rest of 2024.

At the start of 2025, I decided to really commit to building a company focused on helping people create healthier relationships with technology. Kanso was born.

My take on screen time is simple: the best way to cut it down is to design a life so full of purpose, novelty, and experience that scrolling doesn’t even feel appealing.

At the core of that is people. And with the data clearly signaling a booming loneliness epidemic, it’s clear we’re not spending nearly enough time with those around us.

So I set out with a simple equation: How can we help people meet more like-minded people in their own communities and turn these interactions into real friendships?

In the last 10 months, we’ve hosted 14 events in New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and London, bringing in close to 500 people and partnering with over a dozen brands and organizations.

The ‘Here & Now’ event format that we've landed on is deceptively simple:

1. Show up (sounds easy, but the idea of going phone-free for some people even for a short amount of time is scary)
   

2. Lock your phone away in our phone lockers (completely off your person, because even having it off but near you hurts your thinking)
   

3. Spend quality time, fully present and undistracted, with the quality people around you

And it works so damn well. Here’s why.

When you meet someone out, you’re going to fall into small talk. No one loves it, but every relationship starts there. What happens after small talk decides whether a relationship flourishes into a friendship or fizzles out.

After 5–7 minutes, you hit a crossroads:

• Ask a deeper question, sit through a brief moment of awkward silence, and move forward.
  

• End the conversation by pulling out your phone.

Pulling out your phone is a huge fuck you to the other person. When this happens, (aside from being offended), the other person will mirror you, pull out theirs, and both of you retreat.

At our events, that choice doesn’t exist. I’ve watched countless people hit this exact moment, reach for their phone as a social crutch, and then laugh because they realize what they’re doing.

No phones means you’re forced to ask a question that digs deeper and gets to really know someone. Once you break through the initial friction, like anything, there’s a lot of great stuff on the other side.

Just like the first event, we constantly now have people who stick around well after we’ve technically ended, simply because they’re enjoying being present for the first time in a long time. I’ve literally had to beg them to take their phones back so our team can go home.

In just a handful of events, hundreds of new friendships have formed. People have gone on dates, started group chats, opened offices together, and much more. Being part of it feels incredible.

Here are a few of my favorite pics from our NYC event last week:

love this shot

fully present

7+ months ago, Kyle replied to one of these newsletters. We got on the phone and immediatley got along. Now he’s been helping as one of our Kanso hosts! (and doing a damn good job).

The good news: we’re just getting started, and we’re looking for people to help grow this mission.

• If you live in the U.S. and want to start a Kanso chapter in your city, reply to this email.
  

• If you live anywhere in the world and are great at organic social media growth (ironic, I know), reply to this email.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this experience so far, it’s this: people are craving uninterrupted, unbombarded, undistracted time offline. They want to meet new friends and do fun things with them. We’re social beings that have become incredibly unsocial due to a variety of factors, addictive tech design being one of them.

If there’s one thing you can do for your health this week, it’s to find a friend or someone in your community and spend quality time together without your phone.

Bonus points if you can organize a small dinner or gathering. So many people want to be more social but feel like they don’t have the time, courage, or organizational abilities to make it happen. Being that person is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

The art of human connection is fading. We have a rare chance to bring it back.

But only if you do your part.

That’s it for this week, see you on the flip!

— Randy

Welcome to the 15 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) If you’re looking to spend quality offline time with quality people, I’d highly reccomend checking out one of our Here & Now phone-free events.

• New York - 9/24

• San Francisco - 10/23 (updated date)

2) Our 24 Hour Offline Challenge is happening THIS WEEKEND. Saturday September 13th 9pm EST to Sunday September 14th 9pm EST, fully offline. RSVP here to be a part of it.

3) Some of you have let me know that these emails are no longer hitting your main inbox. If that’s the case, drag this email back to your primary inbox and shoot me back a reply to let the email clients know this is content you want to see :)

Our phones and the internet are two of the greatest tools in history. But their overuse (and the exploitative software design that fuels it) has simultaneously robbed us of many of life’s simplest pleasures.

One of those pleasures is boredom. Yes, boredom.

I speak with hundreds of people every month about their phone usage. At least three-quarters admit they reach for their devices specifically to avoid sitting with their thoughts. I’ve done it too.

Stress and existential uncertainty make the caveman brain feel bad; dopamine makes the brain feel good. Simple math.

That’s what makes reaching for your phone in every pocket of stillness so dangerous. Not only does it fry your attention spans, but it also deprives them of the deep thought required to wrestle with big ideas.

This video from Dr. Arthur Brooks and the Harvard Business Review has been making the rounds recently.

His call to action is simple: As humans, we hate boredom because it makes us think about the meaning of life. Some hate boredom so much that they’d rather shock themselves than sit alone with their thoughts, despite this solitude being exactly what they need.

When the brain isn’t actively processing external tasks, it flips into the default mode network (DMN). This is when we daydream, reflect, and wrestle with abstract questions. It’s also when discomfort surfaces.

With near-instant access to novelty, the device annihilates boredom before it begins. A red light or commute used to be an interval for thought. Not anymore!

By always killing the pause, we are building what Brooks calls a doom loop of meaning: the more we suppress boredom, the harder it becomes to find coherence in our lives, and the more we reach for the very devices that prevent reflection.

If you never allow the DMN to run, you never confront existential questions, and those unasked questions metastasize into anxiety and depression.

In other words, by dodging boredom, you outsource your mental life to whatever fills the feed.

Read the biography of any great thinker, writer, or politician and you’ll find boredom lurking in the margins. Long stretches of solitude and quiet reflection were the raw material behind many of the breakthroughs that shaped the hyper-convenient lives we enjoy today.

The irony is that boredom, when practiced, actually makes life feel fuller, as it cracks open the space for questions of purpose and significance. It’s a breeding ground for creativity.

We are living through the first era where boredom can be nearly eliminated. That shift carries consequences we haven’t reckoned with. If the DMN is the brain’s mechanism for building coherence, what happens to a civilization that collectively disables it?

These are the types of questions that I’ll personally be reflecting on in my periods of boredom during our 24 Hour Offline Challenge. I encourage you to join me ;)

See you then,

Randy

Welcome to the 10 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) In the next three weeks, Kanso’s Here & Now phone-free event series is hitting three cities (ticket links below):

• San Diego - 9/3

• San Francisco - 9/10

• New York - 9/24

2) Our 24 Hour Offline Challenge is official. September 13th evening to September 14th evening, fully offline. RSVP here to be a part of it.

3) Some of you have let me know that these emails are no longer hitting your main inbox. If that’s the case, drag this email back to your primary inbox and shoot me back a reply to let the email clients know this is content you want to see :)

A few days ago, I read a quote from Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last, that woke me tf up:

“It is said that if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you crave is a drink, you might be an alcoholic. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone to read e-mail or scan through your social media before you even get out of bed, you might be an addict.”

Despite being very cognizant of my digital habits, my screen time has been out of control recently. A lot of it has been intentional work use, but still. Not great.

It’s conventional advice to keep your phone out of the bedroom, yet I’ve never followed it since I use it as an alarm.

I don’t check it in the middle of the night, but it is always the first thing I grab in the morning — blasting my eyes with blue light and spiking my cortisol levels as I check my emails before my dreams have even fully faded.

Considering 87% of Americans keep their phone next to their bedside, I know I’m not alone.

I’ve justified it by telling myself I need to make sure no business fires popped up overnight (they rarely do) or because I’m excited to see if a deal closed.

But that quote made it very clear: I was dependent on my phone to start my morning routine, and have been doing myself zero favors by immediately exposing myself to stressful stimuli the moment I open my eyes.

So, I decided to see what my mornings were like without it. For the last few days, I’ve waited an hour before checking my phone after waking up. I also dusted off the ol’ Hatch alarm clock and kept my phone charged in the kitchen rather than the bedroom.

I wish I could say it was easy. It wasn’t. The last three mornings, I’ve felt anxious, a little irritated, and found it hard to focus because I was stuck on what texts/emails/DMs I might have missed overnight.

Even scarier, the low-grade anxiety vanished the second I finally checked my phone.

If you framed this “withdrawal” in the lens of any other substance, it would be undeniable. I have a problem.

And I can almost guarantee most of you reading this do too. You just overlook it when it shows up in your own life or with your friends and family.

As for how I plan to address it, the answer is brute force. My girlfriend (who I learned has a habit of checking her notifications in the middle of the night) and I have deemed the bedroom a phone-free zone, and I’ll be continuing to spend the first hour of the day phone-free.

Maybe phones in the bedroom isn’t an issue for you. Even then, I’d encourage you to take a moment and re-read Simon’s quote. Then replace “wake up in the morning” with a handful of other everyday scenarios, like:

• “face a stressful situation”

• “begin your workday”

• “sit down for a meal”

• “finish a conversation with a stranger”

Plug in any of these phrases and the same logic applies. If you find one that fits your life, try to eliminate your phone from the equation. See how you feel. I’m starting to learn that we are far more dependent on our devices when we think.

Heavily looking forward to the 24 Hour Offline Challenge. It will be a challenge for sure.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 22 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) Kanso’s phone-free event series, Here & Now, will be back in NYC on August 19th. 40+ ambitious people gathering together to lock away their phones, build deeper relationships, and be fully present for the first time in a long time. If this sounds like your vibe, RSVP here.

2) Last email, I teased the idea of a 24 Hour Offline Challenge, which many of you showed interest in. Well, it’s official. September 13th evening to September 14th evening.

If spending a full day offline sounds equally as exciting as it does scary, you should sign up and bring your friends and family along for the ride (it’s free). RSVP here.

Last week, I flew back to NYC for 30 hours to attend a few important meetings and events.

During this trip, I had the pleasure of being a guest at Verizon Unplugged with Mel Robbins: a conversation with Mel and her college-aged son Oakley about finding phone-life balance, moderated by Verizon's CMO Leslie Berland.

The event was a clear signal of Verizon's continued foray into the world of digital wellness. There's something both ironic and necessary about telecommunications companies leading conversations about technology moderation — the very companies that profit from our connectivity are also investing in our ability to disconnect thoughtfully.

We desperately need more conversations about healthy tech use (especially from prominent public figures), so I’m glad they’re starting to make this a core focus of their larger mission.

While the conversation was mostly geared towards parents finding better solutions for their families, I found it very interesting. As a childless 28-year-old, I anticipated much of the discussion material would be irrelevant to me, but this event made me examine my own relationship with my phone in ways I wasn't expecting.

Mel opened the event with an important quote, something I regularly echo within this newsletter: "Where you put your attention determines the quality of your life." Your attention is one of the most valuable things you have, and it reminded us how easy it is to give our focus away without even realizing it.

Mel also made it clear that she is not anti-tech. Very much the opposite. Multiple times she reiterated that the phone is both a connector and a wedge. It lets us reach the people we love, and it pulls us away from the people sitting in front of us. Her framing was clear: the device is not the villain. The absence of guardrails is.

With that said, here are Mel’s five tips for creating a better phone-life balance:

1) It starts with you.

The idea here is simple. Your kids are a mirror of your own habits. If you want to instill better habits in your family, the work needs to start with you. You can’t blame the device.

Don't be the person who spends 10 minutes scrolling, ignoring the important people in their lives (kids, friends, partner) and then complain when they are doing the same thing to you. This hit me because as someone without kids, I realized how often I do this with friends and my girlfriend. Recognizing the hypocrisy here can be tough, but it’s important to have someone to call you out.

On Jan 2, I wrote an article titled Your Screen Time Starts with You which pulls on a similar thread. Looks like great minds think alike :)

2) Be curious, not controlling

She encouraged parents to step into their perspective rather than stepping on it. That parents should see their kids' phones as "their friends." At first, it hit me as depressing — do we really want to cement the idea that chat bubbles are equal to in-person connection? But the reframing matters: if you think of it as their friends, you start from empathy instead of restriction.

This doesn't only work with kids. Whether it's a partner or friend who you'd like to see change their phone habits, people don't want to feel forced. Instead of "You're on your phone too much," try asking "What do you love about being on your phone?" It opens up actual conversation.

3) Let them lead the way

This one is definitely the most parent-specific. If you know your kid is struggling to find a balance, here's what Mel recommends doing instead of calling them out on it and immediately forcing a change.

Sit together, name your concern, and solve it with them. Ask "Have you thought about what you want to do about this?" Working with them builds confidence and trust. The changes that actually stick are the ones people choose for themselves, not the ones imposed on them.

4) Two daily habits to practice every day

1) No phones in bed or next to your bed while you sleep.

2) No phones at the dinner table. More eye contact, more talking. Ask your kids (or friends!) to call you out when you slip, which creates two-way accountability.

Despite being fairly conventional knowledge, Mel was really honest about how hard these are to implement. She talked about how our phones have basically colonized our most sacred spaces. The bedroom should be for rest and the dinner table should be for connection. But we've let these devices into spaces where they don't belong.

The sleep one hits different because so many of us use our phones as alarm clocks, which gives us an excuse to keep them right next to our heads all night. Mel suggested getting an actual alarm clock (revolutionary, I know) and charging your phone in another room (turning your mobile phone into a landline at home is a fun and effective trick).

If you've read any of my previous writing, you know that I find the dinner table to be the single most important piece of social technology we have at our disposal. I'm all for any idea of how to preserve that magic.

5) Create a rocking family group chat

Use it for celebration and laughter, not just logistics. This one really got me thinking because it's such a smart pivot. Instead of seeing group chats as another way technology is taking over family life, it was encouraged to reframe it as a tool for connection — sharing memes, celebrating small wins, or sending encouraging messages throughout the day.

What I love about this approach is that it acknowledges reality. Kids will be on their phones, and group chats will be an integral part of their social world. So instead of pretending that's not happening, why not make your family chat one of the highlights of their phone experience?

If you want to check out the full talk, you can do so here:

Hopefully, this got your gears turning. Maybe enough to join our 24 Hour Offline Challenge :)

See you next week!

— Randy

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 12 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) Kanso’s phone-free event series, Here & Now, will be back in NYC on August 19th. 40+ ambitious people gathering together to lock away their phones, build deeper relationships, and be fully present for the first time in a long time. If this sounds like your vibe, RSVP here.

I’m working on an essay that ties together nearly everything I’ve written over the past year. A look into where we’re headed if the three converging technosociological forces I mentioned last week continue to accelerate:

1. Compulsive screen use across all generations

2. A deepening loneliness epidemic across all industrialized nations

3. AI innovation far outpacing regulation or historical precedent

It’ll be worth the wait. But in the meantime, I want to reshare one of the more tactical pieces I wrote over a year ago, something you can put into practice right now. It addresses the one thing we still don’t have enough of when trying to make positive strides with our screen time: data.

The common misconception is that ‘reducing screen time’ is the easy end-all-be-all solution to excessive technology use. That couldn’t be farther from the truth for a handful of reasons.

But the big one is that not all screen time is created equal.

Using Google Maps for three hours as I explore a new city or spend an hour FaceTiming a relative that lives across the country is far different from hurtling myself down a 2 hour TikTok brain rot rabbit hole. Even all social media screen time isn’t created equal. I’d take 3 hours over creating over 30 minutes of consuming any day of the week.

But unfortunately, Apple’s native Screen Time app gives you damn near no accurate data to work off of (and it’s certainly not nuanced) which makes getting a clear overview of your phone usage pretty hard. It also only lets you look back on a month of ‘rolling’ data. Not even month over month.

But most critically, most of this screen time data is inflated thanks to the infamous gray bar issue that Apple has yet to address after years of people begging them to do so.

(The total screen time displayed in-app is a lot higher than your actual screen time, if you were to add up the totals of each app individually. The ‘difference’ are these gray bars that nobody knows the true meaning of.)

Peep the gray bars

Anyway, here’s what they provide (with daily & weekly views) :

• A total screen time number

• Itemized screen time by app and app category

• Total notifications

• Total phone pickups

And unfortunately, because this data is locked within the ScreenTime API which Apple gives developers no choice but to build around, this is the same data that is fed into every screen time app.

(I can’t speak to Google’s Digital Wellbeing app since I don’t own an Android, but from what I’ve read it’s fairly similar.)

So, I built a solution to this problem. Yes it requires a bit of time and effort, but if you’re truly dedicated to making this change in your life (like myself and the people that I work with are), then this is the best way to get a clear view of your tech habits.

Step 1: Habit Tracker (15 min)

The habit tracker helps you get a clear picture of how much time you spend on specific apps each week and month. It’s not the prettiest spreadsheet, but you need this data to input into the Conscious Screen Time Plan (much prettier!).

Document Link: Here

1. Go into the weekly view of your Apple Screen Time app and enter the name of every app that you used over the course of the week along with the app’s corresponding total weekly screen time.

2. Do this for the past four weeks, writing each weekly total in the corresponding column. Do not duplicate apps (if you’ve used Instagram all 4 weeks, only write it once in Column A)

3. You will see your monthly totals for each individual app in Column F

Example of a filled out Habit Tracker (fake numbers)

Step 2: Conscious Screen Time Plan (10 min)

The Conscious Screen Time Plan is the best tool (to my knowledge) to give you a true audit of your screen time. It’s also a great resource to help you build a plan to improve these numbers go forward.

Document Link: Here

1) Start by entering your total daily waking hours into the first box.

2) Next, you'll see two sections: Fixed Screen Time and Variable Screen Time (read more about the difference here). Enter each app's name, monthly total (numbers from Column F on the Habit Tracker), and purpose in the right section.

Simply put, fixed screen time is for essential apps you need for life or work, like Phone, Calculator, Maps, and Slack. This usage is pretty consistent over time. Variable screen time includes everything else, like social media and gaming, where usage can vary pretty heavily over time.

Some apps might fit into both categories. If that's the case, estimate how much time you spend on each and split the totals accordingly.

Entering in monthly screen time #s from the Habit Tracker into respective categories. You’ll see Messages and FaceTime fall into both buckets, so I split time across both.

3) These numbers will then populate a Current Summary section, where you’ll see your total monthly screen time broken down into fixed and variable, along with your monthly digital distraction ratio.

If you’re Digital Distraction Ratio is actually this high then please seek help lol

4) The next section will ask you a few questions to help you reflect on the data you’ve just uncovered and start thinking about potential goals.

5) Finally, the ‘Top 3 Time Consuming Apps’ section will automatically highlight your top three most time-consuming apps (from both fixed and variable categories) to help you identify areas where you can start to cut back.

6) Once you’ve filled everything out, click ‘Save as a Text File’ to download your information to keep on hand.

That’s all for this week! Looking forward to seeing you put this into practice. If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn/Twitter or reply to this email.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 49 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2500+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) Kanso’s phone-free event series, Here & Now, will be back in NYC on August 19th. 40+ ambitious people gathering together to lock away their phones, build deeper relationships, and be fully present for the first time in a long time. If this sounds like your vibe, RSVP here.

2) Officially crossed 2500 people across the globe who receive + read this newsletter every week. Thank you so much for your support 🙏 — only the beginning.

Got an important topic today…

Most of my days are spent digging to understand the technology shaping our future and then trying to build products that can counteract the darker paths it’s accelerating us down.

Now, this isn’t me saying rapid tech innovation is bad. It’s not. I’m a pro-innovation, tech-nerd to my core. But as someone who gets to see what’s coming, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little frightened.

I’m fairly certain most people realize the precarious position humanity is in, largely driven by three powerful, converging forces.

1) Almost every generation is addicted to their screens. I used to shy away from that word, "addiction," in this context. But after doing more digging, it's the only fitting term. Addiction isn't a binary state; it’s a spectrum. And almost everyone I've met, myself included, has an unhealthy dependence on their technology that falls somewhere along that line. We're battling applications and devices designed by armies of developers with nearly endless resources, all engineered to exploit our fundamental human hardwiring. Hardware form factors will soon get smaller and more immersive. Not an easy fight.

2) The entire human population, especially in the U.S., is facing a loneliness epidemic. All generations are affected, but teens and young adults are spending far less time with friends than ever before. This creates a destructive feedback loop: loneliness pushes people toward compulsive screen use, offering a false sense of connection, which in turn leads to more loneliness as real-world interactions dwindle. Or, depending on the person, that cycle can reverse, with excessive screen time leading to isolation that feeds the need for more digital distraction.

3) AI is evolving at a breakneck disgustingly insane pace. Far faster than any previous technological innovation, and it’s damn near impossible for regulation to keep up. More people are gravitating towards AI-based social companions, AI therapists, or frontier LLMs for comfort and convenience's sake, plus the fact that the near instant output of AI tools plays nice with our already fried dopamine receptors.

Many products that can be made but probably shouldn’t be are being shipped out as cash grabs, instead of considering the broad range of long-term consequences they can have on their users.

Despite all this, yes, I am still bullish on where technology will take the world. But, only if we can get very intentional about how to build guardrails into our daily lives. That means treating our relationship with technology not as a productivity problem to solve, but as a core pillar of our overall well-being.

Most people still view their tech habits through the lens of efficiency:

If I could only free up more time, I would get more done.

But this approach misses the forest for the trees.

Poor tech habits not only steal time away from more productive pursuits. They are likely silently subtracting years from your life.

Every time you reach for your phone, there’s a physiological cost:

• Blue light exposure (especially at night) disrupts circadian rhythms by suppressing melatonin production, throwing off your body’s natural circadian rhythm, and leading to less restorative sleep. Read Why We Sleep and you’ll understand very quickly how poor sleep can mess up the rest of your life.
  

• Consuming ‘stressful’ content elevates your heart rate, increases cortisol levels, and keeps your sympathetic nervous system in overdrive. Chronic stress alters immune function, increases systemic inflammation, accelerates cellular aging, and impairs cardiovascular health. Over time, this background stress profile contributes to a higher incidence of hypertension, gastrointestinal issues, sleep disorders, and mood dysregulation.
  

• Continuously opting to stay in and chat with your AI friend vs grabbing a few drinks with your colleagues will atrophy your social skills and eventually lead to chronic loneliness. In one study, people who experienced social isolation had a 32% higher risk of dying early from any cause compared with those who weren’t socially isolated.

shared this before, but relevant here too

As more data emerges on the physiological toll of our digital habits, it will become harder to treat digital wellness as a side note. The siloed approach won’t hold.

We don’t separate air quality from respiratory health, or diet from heart disease. Our relationship with technology deserves the same integration into how we think about wellness, because it affects everything.

I’m fairly confident this shift won’t come from another productivity app or another mindfulness subscription, but rather a cultural recalibration and understanding that the way we use technology affects not just how we work, but how we feel, age, parent, and connect.

Carving out periods of tech-free time and meaningful, offline living must be a public health imperative, especially for younger generations, who are developing neural wiring and behavioral norms in environments saturated with screens, endless dopamine hits, and synthetic social interaction.

With every new frontier LLM update, the importance of building Kanso expands by an order of magnitude and the urgency to act becomes harder to ignore.

My goal for these essays is to inspire action to be more mindful of these factors in your own life and recognize that small, consistent shifts in your relationship with technology can fundamentally change how you feel, think, and connect.

In a few weeks, I’ll be formally announcing our first 24 Hours Offline Challenge. It’s completely free + the title says it all.

If you’re interested in joining, just reply to this email and I’ll get you the info.

Until next time,

Randy

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

You may have noticed that I missed your inbox last week. Maybe you didn’t.

Either way, I’m pretty bummed about it. My nearly 40-week publishing streak gone.

Given my focus on content diets, I have a strict rule of thumb for every piece of content I create for myself and Kanso. These two criteria also work as a great filter for content consumption (I encourage you to steal this):

1) I want it to be deep. The enshittification of content has diluted our attention spans to near nothing. I can’t get through a full-length movie anymore without checking my phone. It sucks. I want every piece of content to help rebuild your attention span.

Sidenote: One of the worst “trends” to come out of the most recent AI boom is the summarization of long-form media. While I agree that many non-fiction books (specifically self-help) could probably be a blog post and most meetings could be an email, there is still magic in consuming something in its full and intended form. You never know when a seemingly irrelevant single sentence or soundbite can pinpoint exactly how you feel in a specific moment.

2) I want it to leave the viewer feeling better than when they started. This can take shape in many forms, but examples include inspired, educated, heard, seen, aware that they aren’t alone.

This means the content I make needs to be great. Novel. Thoughtful. Driven by real-world experience. 

And last week, I had nothing great to give.

Good creative output requires rich, multi-sensory input. Recently, most of my time has been spent collecting a lot of great input which will surely create great output over the coming weeks.

In the last 30 days, I’ve hosted Kanso Here & Now events in San Francisco, London, and NYC. Popped over to Toronto for a childhood friend’s wedding. Probably spent 30+ hours on flights or in an airport. As I write this, I’m on a 5.5 hour flight back to San Diego.

Below are some highlights from all three:

Instagram post

Instagram post

For some, this sounds exhausting (and at times it was), but I’ve found it incredibly energizing for one main reason: the people

Every day, I’m more convinced that relationships are the single most important investment you can make, along with your health. Not money, career capital, or productivity. 

Everything good in life (including all of those) compounds through people.

Your ability to communicate is the lever. It blows my mind that “speaking” is still considered a “soft” skill. It’s the skill. And it’s damn hard to master.

The only way you get better is by putting in the reps. But reps don’t happen in isolation. You can’t learn this through texting, TikTok doomscrolling, gaming with your friends, or even reading How to Win Friends and Influence People alone in your bedroom. You learn by being out in the world, meeting people from different cultures, fumbling through awkward conversations, bombing small talk, recovering, trying again.

In most social interactions, small talk ends the same way: someone pulls out their phone. It’s the modern-day period at the end of a sentence. A clear signal that the conversation’s over, and we’re retreating back to the safety of our screens.

But at our events, that exit isn’t available. With no digital escape hatch, you’re forced to stay in it. You push through the friction and sit in the silence for a beat longer. And on the other side of that discomfort is something rare: deeper conversation and connection. 

It’s not hard to see where our society is headed. People see their friends less than ever. Every age demographic is finding solace – sexually, platonically, and emotionally – with AI companions. They are being integrated natively into nearly every social platform with billions of users across the globe, employing armies of developers to figure out how to get people to use them more.  

Sadly, we’re trading the messiness of human interaction for something easier, lonelier, and far less real.

That’s the scariest part. It’s not that AI and social media algorithms are getting better (it is, and it’s a constant mindfuck to think that it’s the worst right now that it will ever be) but it’s that millions of people are opting out of trying to be social altogether. 

The world is tilting toward isolation, and the people who can still create presence in a room are going to stand out. Massively.

If you can be the person who brings warmth, energy, and attention, you’ll have an advantage in every part of life. Work, love, friendship, leadership. It all compounds through human connection.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. There has never been a better time to be a people person. 

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 24 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) On July 8th, Kanso’s Here & Now is coming to London. If you’re looking to spend quality time with quality people, completely unplugged, this is for you. 

Kanso: Here & Now (London) · Luma

You spend your days building, thinking, pushing. Always plugged in. Always on. But deep down, you’re craving something that can’t be found on a screen. So we…

lu.ma/2a5tvkr2

We’ll also be back in NYC on July 16th!

Kanso: Here & Now (NYC) · Luma

You spend your days building, thinking, pushing. Always plugged in. Always on. But deep down, you’re craving something that can’t be found on a screen. So what…

lu.ma/obeqpy21

3) If you’ve been to a recent Here & Now event, you’ve probably seen our Kanso-branded Meople connection cards. My friend Rebecca started Meople as a way to help people create beautifully customized board games and bring friends and family together offline around the love of play. If you want to pick up a card set for yourself, you can do so here.

Got a fun one this week…

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the URL to the IRL pipeline — my playbook for starting relationships on social media and bringing them to life in the real world.

To say it was well received was an understatement. Many of you replied with positive feedback, and I had one person reply that “this was the best piece of mine he’s read.” Another said that he’s “yet to find someone better than me at capturing great ideas around 'making meaning + genuine relationships in the digital age.'” (Thanks friends!)

But alongside the praise, I also heard the question:

Okay, but how do I actually do this?

While taking relationships from URL to IRL sounds simple in theory, it’s harder to execute, especially in an environment engineered to keep you endlessly scrolling, watching, and reacting.

So, today I want to pull the thread a little bit further on how I approach my time on social media as a whole to build real relationships without getting sucked into the scroll.

If you know me personally, you know my mind works in analogies, puns, and similies, so I’ll defer to the favorite arrow in my quiver — the analogy.

I view social media like going to a casino. Of course, this comparison has been made plenty of times before (the apps are literally designed like slot machines), but I’m taking a different angle here.

Your main goal is to expose yourself to new ideas and meet new like-minded people. These are the "wins" at the social media table – the moments of genuine connection and digital interaction that can enrich your ‘real’ life in the future.

But just like at the blackjack table, these wins are often interspersed with losses. No matter how well-curated your feed is, you're eventually going to hit something that either pisses you off, forces you to self-compare, triggers you, or makes you feel worse than when you started. If somehow you are mentally immune to all this, then eventually the realization that you just wasted your time staring at a black rectangle will make you feel like shit.

The house (the app and the endless feed of algorithmically served content) is always designed to keep you at the table, subtly enticing you with the promise of the next "win." This is where the "willpower to get up from the table" becomes paramount.

The intentional social media user understands that while a quick ‘win’ (a meaningful comment, a valuable insight) can be exhilarating, staying too long will inevitably lead to a deficit.

I treat it like stepping up to the blackjack table with a set limit in mind. I’m there to play a few hands: to share an idea I’m working through, to add value in a comment, to drop a thoughtful DM to someone I respect.

My goal is singular: to spark genuine connection that can move offline, into the real world, as fast as possible.

The idea of URL to IRL is precisely this act of cashing out. This could be exchanging phone numbers or emails, moving the conversation to a video call, or planning a real-life meetup if proximity allows.

This deliberate disengagement is equally crucial if your sole goal is information. You must approach it with the specific objective of curating your feed so effectively that you can extract the necessary data and immediately walk away. On platforms like Twitter or TikTok, this means actively avoiding algorithmic recommendations like the “For You” tab and sticking solely to the ‘Following” tab.

Personally, I find success in making niche accounts for specific subjects, interests, or industries. If I only follow 10 people and keep my attention on the ‘following’ tab, there is a finite amount of information for me to consume at any given time. This allows me to sit down at the table, collect my winnings, and ‘cash out’ as quickly and with as few ‘losses’ as possible. When using apps on the browser, it could even mean employing a newsfeed eradicator altogether and searching only for the specific content that I came to the platform to see.

example of newsfeed eradiactor on web

Similar to gambling, the dopamine rush from the unexpected is potent: you don't know if you'll "win" with a valuable piece of information or "lose" time on irrelevant content.

When you stumble into a "good hole," feeling deeply interested and productive, that's the moment of greatest vulnerability. The true art of information curation lies not just in finding what we need, but in cultivating the discipline to switch off precisely when that need is met.

The same logic also applies to posting content: share your ideas, then get up from the table. Resist the urge to keep checking for likes and comments, subjecting yourself to a dopamine drip every five seconds. This constant validation-seeking, the digital equivalent of watching the slot machine reels spin endlessly, drains your mental energy and transforms an act of creation into an act of passive consumption of feedback.

Of course, I’m not perfect. Shit happens. It’s impossible to avoid entirely. But I hope you think about this analogy every time you open your favorite social or news app.

Let it serve as a constant reminder that every scroll, every check-in, every moment spent passively waiting for a notification, you’re gambling with your most precious resources.

The house always wins if you stay too long. So, choose to be the disciplined gambler who knows when to get up, cash out their chips, and invest those winnings back into the rich, unpredictable, and truly meaningful experiences of the real world.

And now, I’m about to board a flight to the UK and do just that 🙂 

If you’re looking to build a healthier relationship with tech and the people around you, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Here & Now Experiences - Here & Now is a phone-free social experience where strangers become friends through thoughtful conversations, shared moments, and intentional time offline.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. Just launched a new site with a ton more info on this.

The Digital Reset Journal - A guided daily journal to help you rethink your tech use, stay present, and build healthier daily habits.

an awesome photo of the Digital Reset Journal sent to me by one of our customers after his morning pages!

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week! Now stop scrolling and do something great!

— Randy

Welcome to the 15 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

After 7 sold-out NYC events, I’m pumped to be bringing Kanso’s Here & Now phone-free experience to San Francisco (June 25th) and London (July 8th). Grab your tickets below.

Kanso x Cushy: Here & Now (San Francisco) · Luma

You spend your days building, thinking, pushing. Always plugged in. Always on. But deep down, you’re craving something that can’t be found on a screen. So we…

lu.ma/b7p0g5yg

Kanso x Club SOL: Here & Now (London) · Luma

You spend your days building, thinking, pushing. Always plugged in. Always on. But deep down, you’re craving something that can’t be found on a screen. So we…

lu.ma/2a5tvkr2

Onto today’s essay…

It’s never been easier to know of someone and never harder to truly know them.

We live among an endless feed of faces, voices, and names. We absorb their opinions, routines, and quirks. We track their breakups and recognize their living rooms.

We know who’s balling out in Cannes right now or who’s trying to spend less time online, because they keep posting about it (hey!).

What we rarely do is say hello. At least not directly or without reason.

The algorithm gives us proximity without accountability. And so we hover, watching each other live.

It’s a form of connection, but a very odd one. A mutual awareness stripped of friction, awkwardness, and stakes.

This is the paradox of our social internet: parasociality is now the default mode of relating. We are saturated in “connection” but starved for actual friendship.

And yet, many of the meaningful relationships I’ve built in the last few years have started on the internet and flourished in real life, simply by breaking that pattern.

I’ve learned that when you create online instead of only consuming, your work becomes a magnet for people who think like you. But with one caveat.

The magnet only works if you actually make something worth being drawn to.

The internet is massive. Billions of people are scattered across platforms and time zones. Your people are out there, I promise you.

But they can't find you if you're lurking in the comments section or double-tapping someone else's thoughts.

You have to give them something to grab onto that shows how your brain works, what you care about, and what makes you tick.

Once you do, you can easily run what I like to call the URL to IRL Playbook.

Here’s how it works: You put something real out there that shows how you think OR send a thoughtful DM to someone whose work you appreciate for no purpose other than showing love.

Next, one of two things happens…

1) People will see your work*, and something clicks. They reach out not with some bullshit networking message, but because they recognize themselves in what you wrote. You message back. They respond. Normal human conversation starts happening.

*This may not happen right away, be patient and keep posting!

2) Your DM stands out from the others because you aren’t asking for anything transactional. They reply and you start a conversation.

Then comes the moment most people bail: suggesting you meet up (if you’re in the same city) or move to a Zoom call.

When you actually show up, something shifts. You're not profile pictures anymore. You're actual humans sitting across from each other, talking about things you actually care about.

Once this happens, the one-to-many relationship (content) then becomes one-to-one (personal interaction) dinner, coffee, or workout.

Do this enough times, in the same location, with the right kind of people, and the one-to-one becomes one-to-many again in the form of a group dinner, event, group chat, or a more robust IRL community.

Most importantly, this work compounds. When people know how you think and what you like, they can introduce you to more people, which will naturally unlock more opportunities. More opportunities mean more relationships. The flywheel spins.

I saw this compound effect in action last week when I posted a note on LinkedIn about leaving New York for San Diego. Ironically, the same exact thing I tweeted a few hours before.

Twitter tweet

It POPPED tf off. 88,000+ impressions, 100+ comments, 75+ DMs still trickling in as I write this.

(Pro tip: If a piece of content works on one platform, there’s a strong chance it will work on another. Maybe tweak the formatting, but the core usually translates.)

Two things struck me:

First, people here in SD are incredibly kind and open to real connection. I'm genuinely grateful.

Second, this was a result of almost a decade of compounding relationships (tagging friends, commenting, making text intros etc), many of which started the same way that many of these new ones are about to. In their messages, many of the people also referenced being interested in Kanso, my writing, or my entrepreneurial story.

This is the part that rarely gets acknowledged in conversations about building connection or community online.

You can’t skip the solitude that comes with making something worth admiring. And you can’t do that while you’re perpetually distracted, spending all your time consuming others’ lives.

The work that attracts people comes from experimentation, presence, and creation. Not having your head buried into a screen.

As I wrote in ‘Your Phone is Killing Your Obsession’…

The algorithm can open the first door. It can surface your work to people who need to see it, connect you with others who think similarly, and amplify signals that cut through the noise. But it can't do the deeper work for you. It can't make you interesting or give you something worth saying.

What happens next depends on whether you're willing to walk through it and whether you’ve done the work, privately, to have something worth bringing with you.

The internet has given us the tools to find our tribes in ways that were impossible before.

But the tools are only as good as what we choose to do with them.

That my friend, is totally up to you.

If you’re looking to build a healthier relationship with tech and the people around you, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Phone-free social experience for ambitious people craving real connection. We create curated gatherings where strangers become friends through thoughtful conversations, shared moments, and intentional time offline. See all upcoming events here.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining our next cohort, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Coaching - Personalized, high-touch coaching to help you take control of your tech use. Get daily accountability, habit tracking, and expert guidance to reduce screen time, stay focused, and build a more intentional digital life.

The Digital Reset Journal - A guided daily journal to help you rethink your tech use, stay present, and build healthier daily habits.

an awesome photo of the Digital Reset Journal sent to me by one of our customers after his morning pages!

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @unplugwithkanso too.

That’s all for this week! Now stop scrolling & doing something great :)

Welcome to the 13 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

Announcement: Tomorrow (Thursday, June 12) at 6:30pm ET, I’m hosting Before You Block—a free live workshop to help you rethink your screen habits from the inside out.

We’ll identify your why, get clear on what you’re actually making space for, set focused screen time goals, and build a personal plan of attack (all before you try another tool or app)

If you’ve ever downloaded an app blocker and still found yourself scrolling, this is for you.

Reply to this email with the word “Workshop” and I’ll send you the invite (yes, it will be recorded too).

We’ve got a fun one today…

A few weeks ago, multiple friends sent me the same podcast episode from a show I’d somehow never heard of called Search Engine.

How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)

Search Engine · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/20Lw3QIw7ojBdppKyVTH9W?si=D4tL8CPuSb-96pe_fI9oXg

I trust their taste, so I gave it a listen.

Spoiler: it was excellent.

Not just because the host’s voice was suspiciously soothing (it was), or because the advice was sound and surprisingly actionable (it was that too).

What caught me was one suggestion buried in the middle of the episode. Something I hadn’t heard before in the ocean of recycled digital wellness content.

Unfortunately, most of the advice you’ll come across about beating tech addiction is the same. Turn on grayscale. Install app blockers. Keep your phone out of the bedroom.

These tips aren’t wrong, but they’re rarely enough. Everyone tells you what to do, but few explain how to make it stick or acknowledge how hard it is to unwind habits reinforced thousands of times a day for over a decade. There’s little nuance, and even less discussion of the inner work required to rewire the psychology behind our tech use: the boredom, avoidance, and anxiety we keep outsourcing to our phones.

What stayed with me was one suggestion buried in the middle of the episode. A workaround so obvious it felt a little profound.

Before smartphones, the internet had a physical boundary. It lived in a room or an office. You’d walk down the hall, sit at a clunky desktop computer, and enter the internet the way you’d enter a library.

There was friction and, more importantly, a boundary.

random photo from Reddit that perfectly describes what I’m talking about

That boundary is gone now. The internet follows us everywhere. We’re never not online.

Which is exactly why this suggestion felt smart: buy a 10-foot charging cable. Plug it in somewhere central in your environment, like the kitchen (aka not your couch, bed, or desk).

Then set a simple rule: when you’re home (or at work), your phone stays plugged in. If you want to use it, you go to it. But you don’t unplug it and take it with you.

Yes, it’s basically reinventing the landline. But hey, everything old becomes new again right?

It takes restraint, and it’s not a magic fix, but it reintroduces something we’ve lost: designated spaces for designated behaviors.

This is one I know I personally will have a near-zero success rate with, but still worth aspiring to.

As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, behavior is often shaped less by willpower than by design. Friction (or the lack of it) is what makes a habit effortless or impossible. The easier it is to reach for your phone, the more likely you will. The harder it is, even by a few seconds or steps, the more room you create to make a better choice.

Just bought two 10-foot cords for my new apartment and excited to give this a shot. Will report back once I’ve lived with it for a bit. Lmk if you end up trying it too!

Pumped to see some of you guys in the workshop tomorrow!

— Randy

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to build a healthier relationship with tech and the people around you, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Phone-free social experience for ambitious people craving real connection. We create curated gatherings where strangers become friends through thoughtful conversations, shared moments, and intentional time offline. See all upcoming events here.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining our next cohort, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Coaching - Personalized, high-touch coaching to help you take control of your tech use. Get daily accountability, habit tracking, and expert guidance to reduce screen time, stay focused, and build a more intentional digital life.

The Digital Reset Journal - A guided daily journal to help you rethink your tech use, stay present, and build healthier daily habits.

an awesome photo of the Digital Reset Journal sent to me by one of our customers after his morning pages!

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week! Now stop scrolling & doing something great :)

Welcome to the 15 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) After 7 sold-out NYC events, I’m pumped to be bringing Kanso’s Here & Now experience to San Francisco on June 25th. A phone-free evening with 35 thoughtfully selected guests, built for real conversation and deep connection. Grab your tickets here.

2) Officially moved to San Diego on Sunday! I’m a big believer in using social as the first touchpoint for meeting people and then taking those relationships offline. I call it the URL to IRL pipeline.

Yesterday, I tweeted about the move and was met with a very warm welcome, with 20+ folks offering to meet up, grab coffee, and show me around. I’m definitely critical of social media, but you’re lying to yourself if you can’t acknowledge its benefits too.

A big one today…

I wanted to save this post for Thursday because, as of a year ago today, I revived my personal writing habit.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been an avid writer for a while. Five years ago, I published a book exploring the link between childhood bullying and entrepreneurship. Then in 2020, I launched a newsletter and wrote 1–2 times a week for two years about whatever interested me (tech, startups, psychology, etc.)

Then in 2022, I started my content agency, and client work took over.

Just like eating your favorite dessert every day, the last thing I wanted to do after “work” was write more.

So my personal writing habit stopped.

Last year, it was my goal to get back into a consistent publishing cadence, and I’m so glad that I did.

There is truly no higher leverage task than putting your thoughts out on the internet.

There are a handful of you who’ve been here since the EARLY posts…reading, replying, sharing with friends.

I see it, and I’m very grateful.

I’m always looking for new ways to connect with readers, help you build healthier relationships with technology, and more importantly, design lives so damn rich that scrolling doesn’t even sound appealing.

A bunch of you expressed interest in free live workshops, so next week I’m going to be testing something out..

On Thursday, June 12th at 630pm EST I’m hosting a free hour-long live workshop to help you design a strategy for changing your screen habits, starting with why you want to change, not just how.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you’ll know that I have a bit of a grudge against distraction-blocking apps.

Not because I think they’re entirely ineffective, but because I find that they don’t address the root cause of the issue. A band-aid on a bullet wound, if you will.

What actually works is starting with the inner work and building a strategy from there.

That means combining self-reflection with real data to understand your habits, identifying your sticking points and top priorities, and setting actionable goals. Not just to reduce screen time, but to reinvest it into whatever actually matters to you.

Only then, once you have a clear strategy, can you choose the right tools to get you to where you want to go. Whether that’s an app, a physical blocker, or an accountability system, the tools should support your hyper-specific personal goals.

(Spoiler: This is a big part of the first (and most important) part of the entire Reset45 process.)

In this workshop you’ll learn how to:

• Identify your ‘why’ (the core motivators that we’ll tie everything you do back to)

• Expose the emotional loops behind your scrolling

• Decide what you’re actually making space for

• Clarify your SMART screen time goals

• Build a personal roadmap to attack these goals, before you try another tool

If you want to join in, reply to this email with the word ‘Workshop’ and I’ll send you a calendar invite.

If you can’t make it, don’t stress. I’ll send out a recording a few days after.

BIG P.S. – The next Reset45 cohort kicks off June 17th. As a thank you for your support, I’m giving away one FREE spot ($497 value) to one person who replies to this email with a short note about why they’re ready to make a change in their relationship with tech. You must be willing to put in the work!

Hope to see you there,

Randy

Welcome to the 24 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

A few exciting announcements before we jump in…

1) Another great Kanso Here & Now experience in the books. Teamed up with Sprout Society to bring 35 beautiful people into one room, with all phones checked at the door. Shout out to the crew at Novos and The Plug Drink for keeping us hydrated and healthy, and Meople Connection Cards for bringing us closer together.

If you attended (or are just curious), you can check out some photos of the event here.

2) Here & Now is expanding! San Francisco next. June 25th. Come unplug & hang.

3) I’m looking for a freelance social media strategist to help blow up our events across Instagram/TT (ironic, I know). If that’s you, shoot me a message.

Let’s get to it.

Like most idea guys, I’ve got a long, chaotic list of Notes app thoughts. Business ideas, sentences I might turn into essays, stray observations about people on the subway. The usual.

A few months ago, I opened up my notes app and ‘jotted down’ a simple question.

‘What is the nicotine patch to smartphone addiction?’

It sat there collecting dust ever since.

Until…a few days ago, a friend sent me this TikTok.

@askcatgpt

Completely clear phone spotted in San Francisco on May 14…?!? Wtf?????? 🤭🤫 Link in bio for more deets. (NOT SPONSORED)

It broke the internet with 26 million views on the original video (and millions more across the internet) over two days.

The viral clip shows a woman in San Francisco standing in line holding what appeared to be a completely transparent smartphone, with no images or UI.

At first glance, people assumed it was a prototype or maybe CGI. But it wasn’t.

In a follow-up video, the woman (@CatGPT on TikTok) explained that the object was just a clear block of acrylic. Her friend had created it as an experiment, dubbing it the Methaphone.

@askcatgpt

I’m sending out a batch of methaphones to people who have ideas for (safe) social experiments they’d like to run with them— break it out o... See more

According to the TikToker, the ‘Methapone’ was created by her friend to replicate what it feels like to hold a smartphone in your hand in an effort to help curb phone addiction.

The creator wanted to know: if so much of our phone addiction is muscle memory, what happens if you replace the object but not the action?

In other words, what happens if you cut the cord between the ritual and the reward?

And that’s what stuck with me. Most people, when they talk about phone addiction, point to the apps. They blame TikTok, or Instagram, or whatever algorithm is most efficient at hijacking your brain chemistry.

But the apps aren’t the first domino. The reach is.

If you talk to people who’ve tried to quit smoking, they’ll tell you that the hardest part isn’t losing the nicotine, but rather the ritual of smoking.

That’s why “vapes” like Fum (essentially a vape shaped device where you suck in oxygen instead of vapor) still sell.

It removes the chemical but still gives them the oral fixation.

Same thing here.

While most of us are addicted to the consumption of information, there are a lot of other reasons we reach for our phones. Checking it to avoid sitting in silence, looking weird in line, or feeling like everyone else is doing something and you’re just... there.

The Methaphone doesn’t truly solve that. But it does expose it and shows how deep the muscle memory goes. How much of our time is just us running a loop we didn’t design.

But I can’t stop thinking about it. Most “solutions” to screen time try to get you to use your phone better. This one tries to get you to look at your phone use and ask: what the hell am I actually doing?

I see it every time I run a phone-free Kanso experience.

We make everyone check their phones at the door. Within minutes, people start patting their pockets, looking down at empty hands, glancing toward the table where the phones are locked up.

It’s one of the few times when they truly realize their dependence on picking up a silly little black mirror every 2 minutes. Phantom limb syndrome at its finest.

That’s what makes this stuff harder than people think. You can’t fix a behavioral loop by deleting Instagram or setting a time limit.

Why now? What are you avoiding? What are you craving?

Is it boredom? Awkwardness? The discomfort of not having a task? Validation? The fear of seeming idle?

If you never sit with that feeling, you never interrupt it. You just reroute it. Delete one app, open another. Swap TikTok for email. Instagram for podcasts. Nothing changes but the app icon.

The point isn’t to never reach. It’s to know why you’re reaching.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining our next cohort starting June 17th, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Coaching - Personalized, high-touch coaching to help you take control of your tech use. Get daily accountability, habit tracking, and expert guidance to reduce screen time, stay focused, and build a more intentional digital life.

The Digital Reset Journal - A guided daily journal to help you rethink your tech use, stay present, and build healthier daily habits.

an awesome photo of the Digital Reset Journal sent to me by one of our customers after his morning pages!

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 20 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

1) Another amazing Kanso Unplugged Social in the books. It’s been great meeting some of you in person and every event reminds me how much people are craving real connection. I’ll be hosting events in SF, LA, London, and Denver over the next few months. If you’re in any of those cities and want to join or just grab a coffee while I’m in town, reply to this email and we’ll make it happen.

2) At the end of the month, I’ll be moving from NYC to San Diego (don’t worry, the NYC events aren’t going anywhere!). I’m moving there knowing almost nobody, so if you're in the SD area, shoot me a message. Would love to grab a coffee / beer!

With all the chaos that comes with a cross-country move, today’s post will be a bit shorter (and one day late, sorry!).

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’m a big believer in building a healthy content diet. The info we consume (books, podcasts, videos, posts, etc) shapes how we think, how we feel, what we pay attention to, and in many cases, who we become. I’d argue that the content we feed our minds is just as important (if not more) than the food we put in our bodies..

As a general rule, I try to make every piece of content I create accomplish two things:

1. Go deep. Offer real depth and insight that pushes people to think critically about a topic.
   

2. Leave people better than when they started. That could mean they’re more informed, more reflective, or just feel a little happier than they did five minutes ago.

To do that, I also need strong inputs. My content diet is just as important for staying sharp, keeping my creativity up, and making space to think clearly.

Here are a few recent pieces that hit both of those marks:

1) Scott Galloway x Dr. Anna Lembke - Dopamine Nation and the Age of Digital Drugs

I’m a big Scott Galloway fan. Some people find him abrasive, but I think he’s hilarious, sharp, and one of the few people in media who’s actually willing to say what he thinks, even when it’s uncomfortable. He blends humor, data, and brutal honesty in a way that makes serious topics feel accessible without watering them down.

In this episode, he sits down with Dr. Anna Lembke, one of the leading addiction experts in the country and author of Dopamine Nation, to unpack how tech, social media, and constant stimulation are rewiring our brains.

They dive into the dopamine economy, what’s happening to kids growing up in this environment, and why so many of us are struggling to moderate our consumption.

It’s one of those rare conversations that’s easy to follow, genuinely entertaining, and still hits hard.

2) They’re Lying To You About Blue Light, 5G, & EMF TOXICITY w/ Tristan Scott

I’d always heard anecdotal claims about phone radiation and EMFs being harmful, but never really looked into it, until this. Tristan Scott (Head of Operations at Daylight Computer) goes deep on the science behind EMFs, blue light, and 5G, and how they might be impacting sleep, fertility, brain function, and more.

The episode sent me down a research rabbit hole. Half the internet thinks we’re in a silent public health crisis, while the other half thinks it’s total tinfoil-hat territory.

Tristan is clearly brilliant, and while I’m still figuring out what to believe, this episode pushed me to better question how tech is shaping our biology. Definitely got my gears turning.

3) I Moved Into a Retirement Home for 48 Hours (Yes Theory)

Yes Theory is hands down my favorite YouTube channel. Their whole mission is built around one idea: seeking discomfort. They ‘say yes’ to experiences that push them—and others—outside their comfort zones, all in service of deeper human connection.

In this two-part series (part one below, part two here), the crew spends the night at a senior living home and talk with residents about life, aging, and meaning. They meet a remarkably vibrant 102-year-old woman named Dorothy who’s been to every continent except Australia.

When she tells them it’s the one place she’s always dreamed of visiting, they decide to make it happen, planning an entire trip and helping her become the oldest person to ever fly from San Francisco to Australia.

Killer production value and a beautiful display of humanity. Near impossible not to cry.

4) The Molecule of More by Daniel Z Lieberman

This book was recommended to me by a reader of this newsletter (shoutout Leonardo!), and it’s definitely lived up to the hype. The Molecule of More breaks down how dopamine (aka the chemical that drives desire, ambition, novelty-seeking, and future-thinking) shapes nearly every aspect of our lives, especially our relationship with tech.

It’s fairly dense from a neuroscience perspective, but still accessible, and I found myself underlining something on almost every page.

As I try to deepen my understanding of the science behind habit formation and tech addiction for the work we’re doing at Kanso, this book has been incredibly valuable.

Here’s another good Ted Talk from the author:

That’s all I got for this week. If you watch any of these, let me know your thoughts. Always enjoy putting people onto good content and hearing what’s hitting for you too.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining our next cohort starting June 17th, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Coaching - Personalized, high-touch coaching to help you take control of your tech use. Get daily accountability, habit tracking, and expert guidance to reduce screen time, stay focused, and build a more intentional digital life.

The Digital Reset Journal - A guided daily journal to help you rethink your tech use, stay present, and build healthier daily habits.

an awesome photo of the Digital Reset Journal sent to me by one of our customers after his morning pages!

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 64 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2400+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

A few exciting announcements before we jump in…

1) Last week’s Kanso Unplugged Social was our biggest yet, with 50 people in one room, all phones checked at the door. Shout out to the crew at Last Call for making sure we all felt great the next morning.

If you attended (or are just curious), you can check out some photos of the event here.

2) We’re back at it on Tuesday May 20th, in Tribeca, for another Kanso NYC phone-free social experience. All proceeds go to Sprout Society, a nonprofit focused on combating the loneliness epidemic. Grab your tickets here.

3) The next Kanso Reset45 cohort is kicking off on June 17th. If you’re interested in learning more, reply to this email or book a time to chat here.

One of my favorite parts about running Kanso is hearing people’s stories about how they’re actively trying to cut down on screen time and be more present.

Almost everyone I talk to admits their relationship with tech could be better, but the amount of effort they put into changing their habits is highly variable.

What’s consistent though, is that most have tried something before and struggled to stick with it. This makes sense.

Willpower alone isn’t reliable. When you're tired, stressed, or overwhelmed, your brain will always default to the path of least resistance, and our devices (and nearly every social media app) are designed to be exactly that. They're frictionless. Instant. Rewarding.

So even with the best intentions, it’s easy to slide back into deep-rooted patterns if there's nothing in place to catch you.

The best way I’ve found to change that is through building real habit-changing systems into your life over long time horizons and anchoring them on relentless, consistent accountability.

For some people, this accountability is as simple as telling a friend what they’re doing and asking them to sporadically check in. For others, it’s joining a group of others working toward a similar goal or working with a 1:1 coach. Some people go as far as pledging money to a cause they don’t support if they miss their goals.

There’s no single right way to do it.

The key is making your intention visible and your commitment personal, so it’s not just a private thought you can quietly walk away from.

Recently, I’ve been nerding out on using iOS automations to create simple systems that prompt reflection and make it easier to stick to your screen time goals.

Not perfectly, but consistently.

If you’re just getting started, here are two practical tips I share with clients and friends who want to build real systems into their day-to-day. It takes five minutes to set up and helps you stay mindful without relying solely on willpower.

Now onto the new stuff…

Shortcut 1: Scheduled Nudge to Yourself/Accountability Buddy

The first automation is dead simple. Every day at 6 PM, your phone will send you (or a friend) a message with something along the lines of: “What’s your screen time today?” 

From there, you can open your screen time settings, take a screenshot of your stats, and send them to your coach, friend, log them yourself, etc.

I use this with multiple clients and it works well. You don’t want to be the one who keeps dodging the question. That quiet pressure makes a difference.

How to set it up:

1. Open the Shortcuts app

2. Go to the Automation tab → tap + → Create Personal Automation

3. Choose Time of Day (e.g., 6:00 PM) → repeat Weekly or Daily

4. Add Action: Send Message

   • Message: “What’s your screen time today?”

   • Recipient: Yourself or your accountability buddy

5. Tap Next → Turn off Ask Before Running → Done

Shortcut 2: Daily Screen Time Check-In & Reflection

This one is a bit more complex, but oh so worth it.

Every night, your phone asks you about your screen time progress and logs your answer either in your Notes app or as a text to an accountability buddy (or both).

You can also customize the check-in prompt & options to fit whatever makes the most sense for you.

Some people like to keep it simple with Good, Average, Bad.

Others set it up based on total screen time—Under 2 hours, 2–4 hours, Over 4.

You can even get more specific and tie it to the app you’re trying to cut back on. Something like: Did I stay under 1 hour on Instagram today? Yes or no.

After you choose, the shortcut gives you the option to elaborate, either by typing a quick note or using voice input.

So if something felt off, or you crushed it that day, you can capture a little context while it’s fresh.

That way, you’re not just logging numbers. You’re logging how it felt. Which is usually the part that matters most.

I think of it like journaling for people who hate journaling. A way to track patterns and gently call yourself out when things start to slip. It takes that vague feeling of “I’ve been on my phone too much” and turns it into something you can actually see and learn from.

That said, the whole point is to customize it into something that you’re genuinely excited to use. That’s the only way this will stick.

Here’s a video of the full workflow and a walkthrough of how to build it yourself.

Step 1: Create the Automation

1. Open the Shortcuts app

2. Tap the Automation tab

3. Tap the + icon and select “Create Personal Automation”

4. Choose “Time of Day” and set your desired time (for example, 9:00 PM), then set it to repeat daily

5. Tap “Next”

Step 2: Add the Prompt

1. Add the “Choose from Menu” action. In the prompt field, type the question you want to be asked—something like “How do you feel about your screen time today?”
   

2. Then add three menu options: Good, Meh, and Bad. You can customize these to fit your own goals—for example, by screen time ranges, specific app usage, or anything else you want to track.
   

3. For each option, do the following inside its branch:

   • Add a “Text” action and type in the same label that matches the option (for example, “Good”)
     

   • Add a “Set Variable” action and name the variable ScreenTimeStatus. Set its value to the “Text” action you just created

     

Step 3: Add Reflection and Logging

1. After the menu branches (outside of them), add an “Ask for Input” action
   

   • Prompt: “Want to reflect on this more?”

   • Input type: Text

     • When adding your note, you can also use dictation to speak it instead of typing.
       

       

       this is what this will look like

       
       

2. Add the “Current Date” action
   

3. Add another “Text” action and type the following, then use the variable selector to insert each of those fields dynamically.

[Current Date]  
Status: [ScreenTimeStatus]  
Note: [Input from reflection]

It should look like this:

4. Add either:

• “Append to Note” (select or create a note called “Screen Time Log”), or

• “Send Message” (to yourself or a friend), using the text you just created

(or both)

The final result will look something like this:

or

Step 4: Finalize

1. Tap “Next”

2. Turn off “Ask Before Running”

3. Tap “Done”

Boom!!Just like that, you’ve built a lightweight screen time reflection tool, baked right into your iPhone. No extra apps or subscriptions.

Just two intentional systems that run daily and help you stay a little more mindful about your progress.

If you're on Android and want to set up something similar, shoot me a message. Happy to work on putting together a version tailored for you too.

Curious to hear how this lands with y’all. If you try it out, let me know if it helps or if you tweak it in any interesting ways.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining our next cohort starting June 17th, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching -High-touch, personalized support with daily accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 35 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2300+ smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

A couple of points before we jump in:

1) A few spots left for tonight’s NYC phone-free social experience. 630pm. East Village. Grab your tickets here.

2) A few days ago, I released my pod with BePresent co-founder Jack Winston. Received a lot of great feedback on this one, so dropping it again here if you missed it!

Onto this week’s essay…

Before we start, I’d highly advise you to watch this clip (1 min 53 seconds) as it will serve as the foundation for the rest of this piece.

Twitter tweet

If you can’t watch/listen, no stress. You’ll be able to understand everything I’m about to say.

Last week, Zuck Daddy went viral for explaining Meta’s plan to create personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones.

In the clip, he confidently cites pulls out of his ass a loose statistic around friendship and loneliness…

The average American has around 3 friends, but the capacity and demand for 15.

Unconvinced, I decided to dig into these numbers a bit further. I found that while he was somewhat accurate on the first part of the statistic (a 2023 Pew Research study showed that 53% of American adults report having one to four close friends, with 38% having five or more), there was no data to back up the ‘demand’ portion.

That said, his notion sticks true. People are lonelier than ever and this isolation has grave consequences.

According to the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes or drinking 6 alcoholic drinks per day.

Zuck is right that most Americans probably have less friendship and connection than they would prefer, but he’s dead wrong that providing them with personalized AI counterparts is the solution.

He argues that Meta’s AI companions won’t replace physical human friendship, but instead will fill the gaps where none exist.

But that framing misunderstands the problem and ignores how behavior change actually works.

And quite frankly, it’s the biggest sack of bullshit I’ve ever heard.

I've written before about how phones compress the period for discovery and obsession, whether it be of interests, self, or socially. The things that make someone interesting — the hobbies they’ve stuck with, the stories they can tell, the emotional intelligence they’ve developed through failure.

None of that forms by accident, but rather through boredom, trial and error, being alone with your thoughts, and making real contact with the world.

All of which have become increasingly rare.

If you’re a well-rounded person with curiosity, opinions, and some social fluency, it’s easier to make friends.

Not because you’re more deserving, but because you’re more discoverable.

You’ve naturally expanded your surface area of luck. There’s more of you to find.

But if you’ve spent every idle moment with your head buried in a screen, consuming instead of exploring, that surface area shrinks.

You end up with fewer stories, fewer questions, less depth, and people can feel that.

Especially in adulthood.

This is where the damage compounds. If you don’t develop the raw material for friendship early on, it gets harder to improvise later.

And if you’ve never built the habits or confidence to approach someone, listen to them, relate to them, then even the desire for friendship starts to feel like a liability.

So instead, people retreat to their AI-powered echo chambers.

When you introduce a frictionless, always-available alternative to something hard, messy, and unpredictable (like human relationships), you are rewiring expectations of human connection.

Human connection isn’t efficient. It’s frustrating, often boring, and sometimes painful. But it’s precisely those qualities that make it invaluable. Trust is built by showing up even when it’s inconvenient. You learn who you are by pushing against someone else’s reality.

We saw it with painfully sycophantic GPT-4o update. AI models are fickle and placing too much emotional stock into any virtual companion or LLM is a slippery slope.

No matter how ‘close’ you think you are with a virtual friend, it won’t pick you up at 2 a.m. after a flat tire, help you move apartments, or make you laugh until you cry.

The longer you talk to an entity that never interrupts you, never disappoints you, and never asks for anything back, the harder it becomes to tolerate real people.

The real risk is not that AI companions replace something people don’t have, but that they slowly weaken their ability and desire to build it in the first place.

Zuckerberg treats connection as a fixed commodity that AI can safely top up. In reality, connection is a learned behavior. Remove the incentive to practice, and you deepen loneliness.

The same logic applies to attention and content. Nobody intended for TikTok to become the default entertainment experience. It just happened to be the easiest, fastest, and most personalized. Now it’s hard to watch anything longer than 90 seconds without checking your phone.

The standard shifted. The inputs got flatter and more reactive, and now our brains expect everything else to adapt to that speed.

Why would friendship be any different?

My issue is not that people are finding solace in relationships with AI. It’s already happening for good and bad with Character.AI, Replika, and hundreds of NSFW bots accessible by a simple Reddit search.

I frequently use ChatGPT for business advice, as a therapist, and to help examine new angles of inner reflection that I may not have previously thought of. I know many of my friends do the same.

overheard in some SF coffee shop

But Meta is a different beast. They have scale, distribution, regulatory pull, and more behavioral data than any company in the world. When they move into this space, it stops being niche and starts shaping norms.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: the most effective way to reduce compulsive tech use is to design a life that is so rich with meaning, challenge, and connection that checking your devices feels like a step down.

People are at the core of all of that. Collectively, they form the scaffolding around your identity. Who you spend time with quietly determines what you normalize, what you pursue, and who you become.

Every successful person in any domain will attribute their success to people.

The most important thing you can do today is invest in your relationships. Show up for your people. Be someone who listens, remembers the small things, and makes time for spontaneity.

Last year, I wrote about the advantage of being human and declared that it’s never been a better time to be a people person.

Every day, I believe that statement to be more true.

I’d like to leave you with a call to action: Pick up your phone and call a friend today. No agenda, just call. If you don’t have a friend that comes to mind, step out of your comfort zone and sign up for an in-person event in your city.

The best way to build friendship is to practice it.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Back with another new episode of The Kanso Show.

For episode four, I sat down with Jack Winston, co-founder of BePresent, a screen time reduction app helping hundreds of thousands of people break their phone addictions and build a healthier relationship with their devices.

Jack started the company with his brother after realizing that breaking free from mindless scrolling was the keystone habit that unlocked everything else: clearer thinking, stronger relationships, and more meaningful work.

We first met through a mutual friend in NYC and quickly bonded over our shared obsession with digital wellness and the challenge of actually living by the principles we preach.

In this episode, we get into:

• Why time limits and self-control usually fail

• The science behind dopamine, motivation, and screen addiction

• How to build a life that’s better than scrolling

• The biggest screen-time pitfalls Jack sees in users—from students to remote workers

• What it’s like to run a tech company that helps people use tech less

• The hidden social status of being offline

• Why breaking the addiction is just the first step

Excited to hear your feedback.

See you Wednesday,

Randy

Welcome to the 23 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2300+ smart, curious people trying to survive the internet with their brains intact, by subscribing here:

Before we get into it…

If you’re in the NYC area, I’m hosting another Kanso Unplugged experience on May 7th. No phones or distractions. Just great people and thoughtful conversations in a beautiful cocktail bar in East Village. You can grab your tickets here. 

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet that caught my eye:

Twitter tweet

If you’re a frequent reader of my work, you’ll know that I often draw parallels between digital wellness and our more familiar struggles with physical fitness and nutrition. I’ve also written at length about the inequality gaps that recent technological advances tend to create, both in knowledge and income.

What’s happening with screen time today mirrors, almost exactly, the historical arc of food consumption. For most of human history, being overweight was a signal of prosperity. Only the wealthy could afford the luxury of excess calories. Thinness was not fashionable, but rather a marker of poverty.

Today, the inverse is true. Processed foods are cheap and omnipresent. Organic, nutrient-dense options are costly. Discipline around food (and the visible signs of it) has become a modern form of status signaling, with fitness and careful eating becoming aspirational markers for a class of people who can afford not only the food but the time and resources to structure their lives around it.

As the tweet suggests, I strongly believe digital consumption is following the same trajectory. Soon enough, being "chronically online" and consuming brain rot will mark you as lower status. The ultimate luxury will be digital balance, a refined content diet, and a primarily ‘offline’ life.

Tbh, it’s already starting.

Cigarettes provide the clearest historical roadmap for how this kind of status inversion unfolds. For decades, smoking was glamorized. Movie stars smoked. Doctors smoked. Intellectuals smoked. Lighting a cigarette was a small but powerful act of cultural belonging and even a symbol of freedom. 

Then suddenly, it wasn’t.

Smoking became synonymous with poor health, bad breath, premature aging, and yellow teeth. What once looked cool started to lose its status and attractiveness.

The shift didn’t come from public service campaigns or health statistics alone, though those played a role. It changed because the cultural meaning flipped.

It didn’t matter how common it was: once it became unattractive, it collapsed.

We’re heading toward a similar moment with our society’s tech habits. What once felt normal is slowly starting to be viewed as embarrassing and unattractive.

The dinner guest who can't stop checking their phone under the table isn’t multi-tasking, but rather revealing a lack of attention, care, presence, and self-regulation. The same goes for the person who feels the need to broadcast every private moment to Instagram, signaling that without an audience, the experience feels incomplete.

On the surface, these may seem like tiny social annoyances. But over time, they erode the core traits we instinctively look for in others in friendship, work, and romance: focus, curiosity, restraint, discernment.

And while individuals may come to these realizations on their own, history shows that lasting cultural change rarely comes from quiet reflection. It tends to come all at once.

At some point, the discomfort compounds. The cracks become too visible. And then, something tips.

Shifts of this scale usually need a cluster of unmistakable moments happening close together. A high-profile tragedy that brings everything into focus. A prominent influencer whose life unravels under the pressure of constant exposure. A surge in health issues directly tied to screen addiction. A mass conversation about the neurological toll of living inside the attention economy.

We’ve seen this pattern before. For cigarettes, it took a cocktail of regulation, death, health data, media outbursts, and youth disinterest to finally puncture the cultural narrative.

For digital addiction, we have not yet had our definitive moment, but oh baby, there are signs.

Just to list a few…

• Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, called for warning labels on social media, framing it as a public health threat tied to a loneliness epidemic.
  

• Australia has banned social media for kids under sixteen.
  

• Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and his surrounding media tour kicked off a massive cultural conversation about what phones are doing to kids' brains.
  

• Celebrities like Tom Holland and Jonah Hill have stepped back from social media, while creators like Emma Chamberlain have periodically pulled back from YouTube, all citing burnout, addiction, and the toll of being constantly online.

Among younger generations, the earliest signs of cultural reversal are already visible. On TikTok, you’ll find videos romanticizing guys who stay off social media, painting them as more mysterious, grounded, and confident just because they are not caught up in the noise.

@zozoschott

I pray for this every night 😌

The tech elite’s behavior provides another revealing signal. Steve Jobs famously did not let his children use iPads. Bill Gates forbid his children to have phones until age 14. I attended an event last year where Randi Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg’s sister and early Facebook builder) was highly vocal on monitoring her children’s screen time.

Those who best understand the addictive pull of digital technology are the ones most eager to shield their families from it.

Even at the aesthetic and prestige level, the cracks are appearing. Kids are switching back to flip phones. Dumbphones are all the rage. The Minimal Phone launched last week to the tune of 1.2m impressions and many comments with high-purchase intent.

Twitter tweet

Physical products like these are an intentional status signaI. Digital absence, rather than digital omnipresence, is becoming the ultimate flex.

None of these shifts, taken individually, would amount to much. But together they suggest a quiet reordering of the status hierarchy.

And when the wealthy, educated, and influential begin treating something as toxic, history shows that cultural norms do not take long to follow.

For any of this to result in a true behavioral shift, however, the change must tap into something far older and deeper than rational understanding.

It must reach our primal instincts, and judging by the examples above, it’s starting to do so.

Our brains evolved in environments where social acceptance was not a nice-to-have. It was life or death. To be rejected by the tribe was to die alone, and this evolutionary wiring still governs our behavior today.

It’s simple. We crave acceptance from the group. We crave attraction, sex, and acceptance from romantic partners. Anything that threatens either sets off our monkey brains in panic.

This is why most people don’t exercise primarily to extend their lifespan or reduce the risk of heart disease. They exercise to look better naked. Weight loss works as a motivator because it is visible. It advertises discipline, control, youth, and sex. These things are attractive because they’re easy to see. They’re legible.

Digital overuse, by contrast, corrodes things that are less visible but arguably more valuable: attention span, ambition, composure, originality. These traits are less superficial and take longer to notice in a person, but one could easily argue are far more important to long-term tribal acceptance, healthy sexual relationships, and broader happiness.

Because in the end, nobody wants to date, hire, or hang out with someone who’s mentally somewhere else. People don’t make real long-term habitual change because they read about reducing screen time and feel inspired. They change because someone they want to impress or get closer to notices their behavior and finds it unappealing.

My gut tells me that society’s digital behavior will change not because people suddenly grasp the abstract dangers (although the data will help), but because social penalties will become unavoidable.

The dad who always has his phone in hand starts paying attention when his son stops asking to play.

The friend glued to TikTok at dinner starts to notice when the invites dry up.

The guy taking pictures of his food at dinner won’t change out of concern for “mindfulness”, but he’ll sure as hell pay attention when his date excuses herself early and never texts back.

That is how it always happens. Quietly at first. Then brutally obvious.

Unlike nutrition and physical health, status tied to digital wellness will not just be about how you look. It will be about how you think. The people who can control their inputs will control their outcomes. They will choose depth over brainrot. Signal over noise. Stillness over constant stimulation.

They will have the ability to stay bored, stay focused, stay selective.

Meanwhile, everyone else will be drowning in algorithmic junk food, not because they want to be, but because they will not know how to do anything else.

The new status economy is already here. Most people just have not realized it yet.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy

Welcome to the 25 new readers who have joined us since last week! If you haven’t subscribed, join 2300+ smart, curious people trying to survive the internet with their brains intact, by subscribing here:

Before we get into it…

1) Dropped a new episode of The Kanso Show with Memelord Technologies founder Jason Levin, where we talked about humor and humanity, building a journaling practice, unhinged marketing, and of course, memes.

Give it a listen here:

2) The next NYC Kanso Unplugged event is on May 7th at a beautiful cocktail bar in East Village. No phones, no distractions — just great company, thoughtful conversations, and a menu of cocktails (NA included). Grab your tickets here.

Last week, I shared a revised version of one of my earlier posts from a time when the audience of this newsletter was a lot smaller. It was cool to see the feedback from newer readers and hear about them going down rabbit holes of my writing.

My goal with content is to always build a binge bank, so it was amazing to see that play out in real time.

Today, I’m sharing with you one more ‘oldie’ from my earlier archives, updated with some new insights from recent experiences.

Over the last six months, I’ve had hundreds of conversations about how technology plays a role in people’s lives and whether or not they’re satisfied with that relationship.

These people live across all continents and despite the miles of distance, various socioeconomic backgrounds, and general life differences, they all struggle with the same issues: excessive and compulsive doomscrolling, uncontrollable feelings of self-comparison, guilt about spending time on their devices vs their priorities, feeling the need to be ‘on’ to stay ahead of their career etc.

Many of these people had made attempts to curb their screen time in the past, and even after periods of success, eventually reverted back to the mean. They were problem aware, but desperately lacked the accountability and resources that worked for them and their lifestyle.

Truly amazing & fascinating to see.

Now, I want to share with you the same questions I asked during these conversations to hopefully spark some deeper reflection and action in your own lives.

• What role does tech play in my work? In my downtime? In my relationships?
  

• What does “enough” look like for me online?
  

• What would it mean to feel in control of my digital life?
  

• How would you describe your current relationship with technology— productive, distracting, or somewhere in between?

  

• What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to balancing digital habits with your personal or professional life?

  

• Have you noticed any signs of burnout or fatigue related to your digital use?
  

• How do certain devices, software, or content impact your stress levels and ability to disconnect?

  

• What have you tried in the past to reduce your screen time or improve your relationship with technology? How did that work for you?

  

• What impact do you think technology has had on your personal relationships or social interactions?

  

• Do you ever feel anxious or guilty about the time you spend on your devices? If so, how often?

  

• How do you feel after spending extended time on your phone or computer? Do you feel more drained or recharged?
What apps or content contribute to which feelings?
  

• What kind of example do you want to set for others (family, colleagues, etc.) regarding your tech habits?

  

• If you could reduce your screen time and related stress by 50%, how valuable would that be in your life?
 


I’d highly encourage you to sit down with a pen and paper and write out your answers. And if you’re open to it, feel free to reply to this email with your thoughts. I’d love to read what you came up with. Always happy to offer advice or support wherever I can. 

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

Follow me across platforms:

X/Twitter (@GinsburgRandy)

Instagram (@randy_ginsburg)

YouTube (@KansoRandy) - a lot more coming here soon

LinkedIn

You can find Kanso across Instagram and TikTok @getkanso too.

That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy