A Quick Update (Times are Changing)

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last published. Since then, Kanso has experienced a lot of growth:

• We hosted our first college event at University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of a two-day series of mental health programming alongside Two Bridge, Rhone, Zac Clark and Alex Warren.
  

• We ran our first two NYC events that I wasn’t physically at. It was incredible to see our small but mighty team take full ownership and create such a strong experience.
  

• Myself and Kanso we’re featured in Shopify, Business Insider, and the NY Post (the title and framing of this article are laughable and partially inaccurate, but at least my quotes were solid).
  

• We hosted our first phone-free concert in San Diego with four amazing local artists

I’m now deep in planning mode, working through how to 10x the business next year.

During this same period, I’ve been collecting ideas for future essays. Most revolve around how today’s rapid technological progress is erasing many of the simple pleasures that make us human:

• How our growing dependence on LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude is weakening critical thought + leading to a death of the arts
  

• The shift from friend-based to algorithm-driven feeds, where homogenized content creates homogenized thinking
  

• How mobile-based prediction markets and sportsbooks are causing a youth gambling epidemic
  

• The implications of deepfakes across everyday life and the deterioration of consumer trust
  

• The overlap between screen dependence, loneliness, and the rise of AI
  

• The rise of social-media-driven propaganda machines

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be publishing many of these pieces as I get back into a regular writing cadence. I’ve been sitting with these ideas for a while, trying to make sense of how we move forward without losing the parts of life that actually matter.

Technology is moving faster than our ability to process it. What once felt like innovation now often feels like overhyped bullshit: products that overpromise, underdeliver, and in many cases, probably shouldn’t exist at all.

When everything is automated, optimized, and on-demand, it’s easy to forget that friction is part of what makes life meaningful.

Unfortunately, even most tools created to “fix” our relationship with technology focus on output and optimization. Scroll through the marketing copy of any screen-time app or blocker and you’ll see the same words repeated: “focus,” “productivity,” “performance.”

It’s missing the forest for the trees.

What we’re really losing isn’t efficiency. It’s a deterioration of balance, and our health alongside it.

Every time we pick up a device, there’s a physiological and psychological response — blue light exposure, stress-inducing content, and the subtle manipulation built into app design.

Our relationship with technology influences everything: who we spend time with, how we sleep, what we eat, and how we move.

Over the next five years, this will become one of the most important and complex pillars of wellness, and it’s time we start treating it that way.

Kanso exists to help rebuild our relationship with technology from the ground up, with our broader health and wellness at the forefront.

The goal isn’t to disconnect from the modern world, but to reconnect with what makes us human.

A lot more to come on this soon.

— Randy