The URL to IRL Playbook

Author

Randy Ginsburg
June 19, 2025

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.

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.

But that kind of presence only happens when you care about what you’re doing. Most people haven’t found that yet which is why they bounce back to their phone the second there’s a gap in the day.

The only way to find that better thing is to give yourself time to try. But that’s the part that most people skip.

To find that thing, you need time to try shit.

Now, that time is stolen by algorithmic consumption and doomscrolling. It’s entertaining. It feels familiar. But it quietly erases the conditions you need for self-discovery — boredom, friction, depth.

And then one day you look up. You’re older. You’ve got a job, a partner, maybe a toddler melting down in the other room. The ideas are still there. The energy’s (maybe) still there. But the time to act on it is a lot harder to access.

At that point, the phone stops being a break from boredom and more a break from responsibility. And the longer you reach for it, the harder it gets to carve out space for reinvention.

That’s what makes this so dangerous.

If you don’t give yourself room to experiment, you don’t discover.

And if you don’t discover, you don’t find the thing that changes everything

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:

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

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