It took cigarettes 34 years to go from Surgeon General’s warning to multi-billion dollar settlement.
 
Social media has officially done it in three.
 
I’ll come back to that in a moment.
 
But first, the photo above…
 
That photo above is from my younger son Bradley’s classroom. Hand-drawn in colored chalk, on an old-school analog blackboard.
 
There isn’t a single screen in this school building.
 
A few years ago, when we started to see technology enter his prior school in a not-so-positive way, we made the decision to enroll him in a Waldorf school.
 
Waldorf, if you’re not familiar, leans into many of the analog traditions most schools abandoned a generation ago: Woodworking. Writing in cursive. String ensemble. And the meditative art of handwork (as in, learning to make clothing, by hand.)
 
Time outdoors in nature, every day, rain or shine, is a non-negotiable.
 
And notes are taken by hand in a bound portfolio that can only be described as a living work of art.
 
No pedagogy is perfect. But for our family, Waldorf provides a centering counterbalance to the omnipresence of technology in nearly every other corner of modern life.
 
Like many families who were attracted to Waldorf, we are not Luddites. In fact, as the Times has reported, an increasing number of technologists are sending their children to Waldorf Schools.
 
(One of the many sub-movements of the Return to Real revolution taking shape…)
 
But this analog counterpunch is just one small example of something much bigger that’s brewing beneath the surface.
 
And that is the subject of today’s conversation.

1 | How the Last 10 Days May Have Changed Everything.

Three things happened in the span of ten days, from August 26th to September 2nd:
 

• On August 26th, a bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general secured up to $17.1 billion from Meta for what its platforms have done to kids.
• On September 2nd, New York City banned AI in its public schools for roughly 600,000 students, through the eighth grade, for at least a year.
• And in between, on August 31st, the world lost Wendell Berry, at 92.

 
On the surface, these may seem like unrelated stories. But they are connected in several important ways that are not immediately obvious…

2 | Haven’t We Seen This Movie Before? What Cigarettes Can Teach Us About Where AI May Be Headed.

In Return to Real, I write about something that has always made me uncomfortable:
 
Many of the Silicon Valley founders behind the technology we use on a daily basis keep their own children, and themselves, away from the very screens and software they’ve created.
 

• Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, famously does not use a smartphone.
• Mark Zuckerberg has hidden his children’s faces from public view on social media, despite building a platform that monetizes the faces of billions around the world.
• Steve Jobs limited how much technology his own children used at home, and famously wouldn’t let them near the iPad.

 
In some ways, it feels akin to the tobacco company executives of the 1950s, knowingly peddling poison while refusing to touch the stuff themselves.
 
Return to Real had already been sent to the printer when the Meta settlement came down.
 
But you’ll find a passage within it disturbingly prescient.
 
Because if you look at how we, as a society, have handled a technology that was first unlimited, and then was eventually restricted…
 
The tobacco industry serves as a fascinating foil.
 
In fact, depending on the lens you choose to look through, the patterns are strikingly similar. Check it out…

There was a time and place where smoking cigarettes in a car, windows sealed shut with an unseatbelted child by your side, was not only commonplace… it was good parenting.
 
Correction always seems to start with children.
 
In the last 60 years, cigarettes have gone from being used by 42 percent of American adults down to just 11 percent today.
 
Right now AI usage, of course, is headed the opposite direction.
 
But if there is some sort of correction on the horizon…
 
And if the correction isn’t going to be less AI… then what might it be?
 
Hold that thought.

3 | The Take-Home Midterm that’s Disrupting Higher Education.

This past spring at Brown University (my alma mater) an economics professor named Roberto Serrano did something he hadn’t done in two decades of teaching the same course. He gave a take-home midterm.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat
The class usually draws around 30 students. That semester, 86 signed up.
 
The midterm average test score came back at 96 percent. Historically, it had never been higher than 80.
 
Serrano ran the exam through ChatGPT. The answers matched.
 
So he moved the final exam in-person.
 
Eighteen students dropped the class. Nine more stayed enrolled and simply didn’t show up.
 
The average on the final: 48.6 percent. The lowest in the history of the course.
 
Serrano’s words afterward: “We cannot choose to become idiots.”
 
Eighty-six students may be an anecdote.
 
But twenty-six thousand students is data.

4 | The China Study that Confirms What We’ve Suspected.

A study published this summer followed 26,811 students across nine subjects in China, over 30 months, as they adopted AI.
 
Homework scores went up 18 percent. Homework time went down 30 percent.
 
But closed-book exam scores went down 20 percent. In just six months.
 
The losses were largest among the high achievers.
 
And roughly 80 percent of them came from students who were, in the researchers’ own words, outsourcing their homework.
 
As I write in Return to Real:
 
“The modern, domesticated, digital way of life has left us dumbed down, defanged, and dying young. If we’ve outsourced the work of our bodies for decades and watched our physical health decline, what happens when we begin outsourcing the work of our minds?”
 
I think we’re already beginning to see the answer.
 
Which brings us back to the question I asked a moment ago. If the correction isn’t going to be less AI, then what is it?
 
The researchers behind the China study have their own answer. Shift the weight back to closed-book, in-person exams. Stop grading the output. Pay attention to the input: time and effort.
 
In other words: Put the friction back.

5 | A Tale of Two Schools

If you caught last week’s issue of The Digital Contrarian, [Issue #115] “How to Make a Grown Man Cry,”  then you know that while Bradley was working in his Waldorf classroom, we were dropping off our older son Henry at boarding school.
 
In the welcome ceremony for incoming students, the head of school had some words for us as parents about the school’s somewhat contrarian stance on digital devices, social media, and AI.
 
The campus is phone-free throughout the day. And every evening, students place their phone in a lockbox before bed.
 
The reasoning is simple: the science overwhelmingly supports it. And the school’s student outcomes since adopting this policy confirm it.
 
What’s interesting is that this is one of the most selective schools in the country. Applications are at an all-time high and acceptance rate is at an all-time low. And it’s embarrassing how much they’re able to charge for tuition.
 
We toured more than a dozen boarding schools across New England. And at every one of these schools, the students are all incredibly bright and talented.
But one of the things that made this particular school stand out is what you immediately see with the students.
 
When you walk across campus, students make eye contact with you. They say hello with a smile.
 
Not a single one is holding a phone.
 
They’re present. They’re awake. They’re alive.
 
And you can feel it.

6 | The Market Is Speaking. Are You Hearing What It’s Saying?

On the surface, it might seem like we’re just talking about kids here.
 
But I want to invite you to think about this is telling us:
 
Parents are spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to put their kids in environments like this across the country that are decidedly screen-free. And demand for spots in these schools has never been higher.
 
People are paying a premium to reintroduce analog into their lives, and into the lives of their children.
 
If you’re an entrepreneur, that should be making the hair on the back of your neck stand up right now. Because it means there is a massive opportunity.
 
I started writing about this back in 2024, in a short special report I titled Going Analog. In many ways, it was one of the early foundational building blocks for what’s eventually turned into Return to Real.

Here’s a passage from that report:
 
Screen time may be something we limit for ourselves and our kids and which we know should come with a Surgeon General’s Warning… But time in the physical world? That’s something we all want more of right now. Less time in front of a screen, more time with hands in the dirt.
 
Analog requires intention. Analog requires effort. Analog has a cost.
 
And people are willing to pay it.

7 | Analog by Design: How to Return to the Real World.

As I write in Return to Real:
 
“There are trillion-dollar tech companies that will not stop until every minute of human attention has been consumed and monetized, including yours. If you are not analog by design, you will become digital by default.”
 
So every day, every moment, we must choose.
 
Which is why I wanted to give you a way to consume Return to Real that doesn’t pull you out of the analog world.
 
The words inside Return to Real were written to be read.
 
But in many ways, even more so, those words were meant to be heard.
 
Which is why, when it came time to record the audiobook, I chose to read it out loud in my own voice. So you could hear those words spoken in the way they were intended to land.

I recorded this audiobook specifically, so you could listen to these words while you’re engaged in the real world.
 
While you’re on a hike. While you’re driving your kids to school. While you’re cooking dinner for your family.
 
While you’re spending time outside. Or working solo in the garden.

In short:
 
Return to Real is a book that was made to be listened to while…. you’re living your life.
 
Which brings me to the BIG announcement I’m excited to share with you here today.
 
Because I’m VERY excited to announce that after months in the making…
 
The AUDIOBOOK is now officially available for pre-order on Amazon!
 
And when you ORDER today, I’ve got something super special in store.

8 | My Invitation Today to YOU.

If you have not yet pre-ordered your copy of Return to Real, I would LOVE to invite you to pre-order the audiobook on Amazon today by clicking this image below:


When you pre-order your copy on Amazon TODAY using that link, you will get $286 worth of FREE bonuses along with it, including:
 

• NEW! The RTR Roundtable Series, a brand-new three-session series I’m hosting for readers, where we’ll explore how to apply each of the Three Shifts in Return to Real, including the Analog Advantage, in far more depth than we can get into in this newsletter.
• NEW! A brand-new Missing Chapter that I’ve literally just written on how Return to Real applies to the latest developments in AI, and which isn’t in the main book.
• The Practices Guide and the Reflections Guide, the two companion resources on how to apply everything you’re about to discover in your business and in your life.

 
So my invitation to you, if you haven’t already grabbed your copy, is to grab a copy of the audiobook on Amazon TODAY.
 
(And if you HAVE already grabbed your copy, but want to help me out by boosting early Amazon audiobook preorder sales, I invite you to jump on this as well :-)…)
 
It’s only a few dollars.
 
AND when you order through the link in this email, you get access to $286 worth of bonuses simply by sharing your receipt.
 
The steps to do that are simple:
 

1. Pre-order the audiobook on Amazon using the link in this email.
2. Come back to the same page, enter your name, your email, and your order number, and we’ll get you set up with all the bonuses.

» Pre-Order the Audiobook + Claim Your Bonuses Here
 
Just make sure to claim by Saturday, September 12th, so we can get you onto the Roundtable list before this opportunity closes.
 
By the way, if you’ve already ordered a different version of the book from our website, you’re automatically in for these new bonuses. I always reward my early adopters :-)
 
Okay, I’m going to leave you with that for now.
 
I want to invite you to THINK about the opportunities to inject ANALOG into your business — and take advantage of the increasing market demand taking shape…
 
AND if you haven’t already, I want to invite you to preorder the audiobook version of Return to Real so you can learn more about what this opportunity means for you.
 
Have a great rest of your weekend.
 
Remember to hug the ones you love.
 
And until next week,
 
Ryan :-)
 
P.S. This week, we lost one of the greatest writers of a generation.
 
Wendell Berry, whose work has deeply influenced not only my writing, but the farmer/writer life I live, died on August 31st at the age of 92.
 
Berry left a promising literary career in New York City to return to his roots in Kentucky to live on the land.
 
I thought I’d wrap this issue with one of my favorite poems of his.
 
It’s titled “The Peace of Wild Things.”

* * *
Guys, remember to hug the ones you love…
 
Because it really does go by too fast.
 
Have a great weekend.
 
And lots of love from me to you.
 
All my best,
 
Ryan :-)