Hey everyone, it’s Cosmo.

Walk into any coffee shop, subway car, or waiting room, and you'll see the same scene: people hunched over glowing screens, thumb-scrolling through infinite feeds, completely disconnected from the world around them. I catch myself doing it too.

The iPhone gave us incredible power—the sum of human knowledge in our pocket, instant connection to anyone, anywhere. But it also gave us something we didn't bargain for: a mental health crisis.

Now, two people intimately connected to the iPhone's creation are speaking honestly about what they helped unleash. In a recent Financial Times interview, Jony Ive admits: "Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment. Humanity deserves better."

Laurene Powell Jobs is even more direct: "We now know, unambiguously, that there are dark uses for certain types of technology. You can only look at the studies being done on teenage girls and on anxiety in young people, and the rise of mental health needs, to understand that we've gone sideways."

Their candid assessment hits differently coming from the architects of our smartphone world. Technology wasn't designed to make us anxious, isolated, or addicted—but that's exactly what happened.

Here's the thing: we're barely coming to terms with the smartphone's impact on our collective psyche, and we're already facing the next seismic shift. AI isn't waiting for us to figure out the last technological revolution.

Last week brought news that OpenAI acquired Jony Ive's hardware startup io, with hints of a mysterious new AI-powered device in development. Details are scarce, but their announcement rhetoric focuses on "elevating humanity"—and I want to believe them.

I'm not an AI doomer, but I'm not naive either. AI will be transformative in ways both wonderful and terrifying. The question isn't whether we can stop it—we can't. The question is whether we can learn from our smartphone mistakes and build something that serves us, rather than the other way around.

I'm working on exactly that with the product I'm building. More to share in the coming weeks.

Until then, maybe try looking up from your phone a little more often. The world is still there, waiting for us to notice it again.

Magic Beans of the Week

Thank you for reading. Till next week! 😊

Best,
Cosmo