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Published · transcript-backed

Tony Fadell: belief

7 Jun 2026 Lenny's Podcast Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell

“There's unintended consequences, and the unintended consequence was social media happened, and social media, Apple's not a social media company, but it does distribute the apps or make available those apps. And so the way I think about it is we have lots of junk food, and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food, and it takes us to regulate our consumption to do that and get healthy tools.”

— Tony Fadell

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Tony Fadell
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
7 Jun 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…A lot of people look at the iPhone as this thing now that everyone's hooked on. It's so good. We're just like, it's too good. And there's all this data showing all the impact it has on people and things like that. Just how do you think about that and the impact the iPhone has had on people? Well, the first thing is the iPhone wasn't set out to be that. There's unintended consequences, and the unintended consequence was social media happened, and social media, Apple's not a social media company, but it does distribute the apps or make available those apps. And so the way I think about it is we have lots of junk food, and we have an obese nation or obese world because of all the junk food, and it takes us to regulate our consumption to do that and get healthy tools. And there's nutritional elements on the back of things. If you want to make a better decision, you can, and I hope AI and these assistants will help people be able to get better control of those kinds of things where our lizard brain is being stimulated in a way that consume more, consume more of physical food. And now the same thing's happening in digital food, but we have digital food that doesn't have the nutrition labels, doesn't have the warnings, doesn't have the regulation that it needs to have, just like we do with our physical food because, oh, you can't let innovation, whatever, be slowed down. I'm not saying again, being a nanny and all the other stuff, but we got to have some balance, and it's just swung too far. And I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you, because you could go to the... iPhone's just a refrigerator, and you can put in junk food or you can put in good food. And even if you put in good food, you could go to the good food every five seconds. You have a refrigerator in your kitchen. You can put good food or bad food. You could open it all the time and keep consuming. So we need to learn habits. We need to teach habits. We need to put in regulations. We need information. We need tools to help us monitor and manage that stuff, and they need to be supplied. And just like we have rules around who can buy something when they're 21 or under 21. We need all those kinds of things, and it needs to happen because why? Sure, you could have a short-term gaining of customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers. Let me just say for folks that haven't read your book, I just want to communicate how great it is. There's very few books that are both tactically useful that give you, like, here's how to do a thing and also just inspire you to build and make great things. And Build does that in such a great way. I think everyone knows about it. I don't know if everyone's read it. So highly encourage you to read it. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to maybe learn about the stuff you're up to now, and how can listeners be useful to you?…

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