Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

This is out to get them. When we were kids, it was easy to have a passing interest. We had phases. We fell for fads.

We were exposed to new things, art, and music, ideas, and people, and we could explore them and abandon them if we learned they weren't for us. Many of those things now seem like a distant past to us, because it is. We've grown up, we've matured, we've shed that old skin, we've moved on. but sadly that that process itself is sort of a thing of the past. Although there are so many wonderful life-improving facets of being a kid in this safer,

brighter, modern world, there are also so many downsides. One of which is that our kids live in a

world of algorithms that are largely designed to amplify and even compel to take a person

down a rabbit hole. Your teenager watches one clip on YouTube and now they're being served hours and

hours of podcasts by increasingly strident voices on that topic. They follow a couple accounts on

social media. Now they're a target for advertisers and influencers who want to capture that exact

confluence of demographics

and interests. Of course, Spotify and Apple Music can expose a person all sorts of new music, but the

algorithms can also lock you into more and more of the same stuff. The point is algorithms are not

our friends. They're working on us, working for the interests of the platforms that created them.

They decide they know us and

then they use us. Their interest is not our interest or in our kids' interests. It's to drive

engagement not to create well-rounded people. And this is why social media so often radicalizes

people. It's easier and more profitable to show someone increasingly extreme content than it is

to expose them to a wide, diverse sampling,

especially if they might dislike some of it.

We want our kids to be able to experiment and learn not to have chance encounters compounded

until it permanently forms their personality.

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