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The case for saying no to new gadgets: This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that ...
05/31/2026

The case for saying no to new gadgets: This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.

I love new gadgets and gizmos, and I’m constantly trying new sites and apps. So I was intrigued by the title of Eric Athas’s upcoming book, Saying No to New.

Athas is an editor at The New York Times, where he helps journalists make the most of new tools. He’s also a lifelong early adopter. He told me he used to wait in line for new iPhones. But his upcoming book argues for thinking twice about acquiring new stuff.

1. The Vanishing Gap Between Wanting and Getting

When Athas and I were growing up, if you wanted to buy something cool you saw on TV, you’d have to drive to a store. You or your parents would have to spend cash. If you ordered something by mail, you’d wait weeks for delivery.

Today, you can tap on a phone and the thing that caught your eye appears at your door the next day. You can even buy now, pay later, so you don’t need cash. Coming next? AI agents that shop for you proactively. They anticipate what you want so you don’t have to make any decision at all.

Athas calls this the collapse of the “new-thing gap.” The time, distance, and cost between seeing something new and acquiring it has shrunk. That gap used to protect us from buying on impulse.

* One-click ordering eliminated distance.

* Free shipping removed the physical effort of the pickup errand.

* Deferred payments eliminated financial friction. You don’t even need the money.

Athas suggests we reintroduce friction by pausing long enough to ask whether the new thing will actually matter a month from now.

2. Show and Tell: Our Gadget Graveyards

Athas and I compared old odd gadgets in our offices.

From my desk:

* Multiple VR headsets. I have at least three, including one with the plastic still on it. You slot your phone in, close it up, and get an immersive view. Remember when The New York Times announced in 2015 it would ship a million Google Cardboard VR headsets? Athas confirmed that the headset now lives in The Times’s in-house museum.

* Lumo posture band. This posture sensor had a belt that wrapped around my waist and buzzed when I slouched. It was a cool, if weird, concept, but the buzzing was distracting, I still slouch, and the product was discontinued. It’s lived in my drawer for years.

* Plaud AI recorder next to my brother’s old tape recorder. The old one has a red Record button, a Play button, and a Stop button. You know exactly what to do with it. The Plaud is sleeker but less intuitive.

* Sand timer. This one is both decorative and useful. It’s silent, easy to use for timing, and never needs to be charged. I use it to stay focused during hard tasks.

From Eric Athas’s desk:

* A USB coffee mug warmer. Cracked. Unused. Athas’s take: Once you introduce a USB cord into the coffee experience, it loses its magic.

* NeeDoh stress balls. A kid craze. Athas’s children wanted them, squeezed them for a day, and abandoned them. He wrote about the NeeDoh fad here. I have multiple stress balls, and I use them often. Consumer Reports warns they can create a sticky mess or worse.

3. New Things Worth Saying Yes To

Athas’s book isn’t about rejecting everything new. It’s about choosing things thoughtfully so that the genuinely useful things don’t get crowded out. Some of the new tools we like:

* Seek app. Free. Point your phone at any plant or animal in nature and learn what it is. I discovered it during the pandemic and still use it regularly.

* Merlin app. Free. Record birdsong and the app identifies the species. Athas and I are both fans.

* Granola. AI meeting summaries. It’s now part of my workflow. Here’s why: It’s infrastructure for me, not novelty. Free for basic transcriptions and summaries. I pay $14 per month for additional features, like storing meeting notes for months and querying them with Claude.

What these tools have in common: They solve a real problem, they’ve lasted, and we’ve stuck with them.

4. Our Brains Chase Seductive Novelty

Athas’s new book is grounded in neuroscience. When we encounter something new, we get a dopamine hit. That neurological response evolved to help our ancestors survive. New food sources, new paths, new shelter: Those discoveries were rewarding.

But sometimes novelty seduces us without offering anything meaningful. In one study Athas describes, rats repeatedly crossed an electrified grid just to explore an unfamiliar area. They chose pain plus novelty over a known food source. Humans do something similar. We covet a new phone partly for its camera, but partly just because it’s new. Then we do it all over again. Even if we can’t afford it. That’s one reason why so many Americans are in debt.

I recently read Dopamine Nation, a surprisingly engrossing book by Dr. Anna Lembke, about how our brains are so readily seduced by pleasure.

What results is an unfortunate cycle. We get something new, enjoy it briefly, and soon we’re scanning for the next new thing. My college adviser, Daniel Kahneman, studied and wrote about this “hedonic treadmill” effect.

His research showed that we overestimate how much a new purchase will improve how we feel. And novelty tends to wear off quickly. He called it “hedonic adaptation.”

That doesn’t mean we should avoid all new things. But it does mean we should think carefully about whether there’s something genuinely meaningful behind the new shine.

5. Experiences Outlast Products

Research shows that trips, cooking classes, concerts, and other new experiences tend to give us more lasting delight than new products do.

That’s partly because experiences tend to be social. You go with someone. Or you meet people there. You talk about it afterward. Trips have a beginning, middle, and end. You have a story you can retell. A new pan doesn’t generate much conversation after the first week. Its novelty fades fast.

Kahneman, who was one of the best teachers and advisers I’ve ever had, introduced me to the related “comforts versus pleasure” theory. It was originally described by Tibor Scitovsky in The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction. It changed the way I think about spending money.

Comforts are things we buy and then quickly adapt to. A nicer couch. A bigger TV. They feel great at first, then they fade into the background.

Pleasures, on the other hand, are transient experiences: a delicious dinner with friends, a live concert, surprise flowers, or a summer walk with someone you love in a new city.

These kinds of experiences are brief, but they retain their emotional charge when you reflect back on them. Kahneman’s argument, supported by numerous studies, was that pleasures enhance happiness more durably than comforts because we don’t adapt to them. The research findings’ bottom line: If you want more happiness, splurge on special experiences with loved ones rather than expensive things.

Athas’s suggestion: If you’re drawn to something new, try turning the purchase into a social experience. Waiting in line with a friend for trendy cookies transforms a dopamine-seeking buying excursion into an experience and a fun shared memory.

Daniel Pink recently made a compelling video on the same theme: how to spend money so it actually makes you happier. His take aligns with Athas’s and Kahneman’s. Spend on experiences, not things.

6. Ask These Questions

Athas suggests a few questions to ask before you acquire something new:

* Will I still use this in a month? Will this serve an ongoing purpose, or will it get stuck in the background? (I’ll use this one the next time I’m tempted by a kitchen gadget or iPhone app).

* Is it intuitive to use? Athas points to modern car dashboards as a cautionary tale: Touchscreens that look futuristic can end up being more confusing than the k***s and buttons they replaced.

* Is it likely to distract you? A sand timer, a paper book, a physical photograph: These do one thing well without pinging you. A single-purpose app on your phone, on the other hand, puts you one swipe away from email, Instagram, and other Internet rabbit holes.

7. Good Enough is Sometimes Enough

Athas’s coffee maker still works. His wife wants him to upgrade. He resists, not out of stubbornness, but because it does exactly what he needs. He programs it at night. He wakes up to fresh coffee. No learning curve.

His suggestion: Before replacing something, ask whether what you already have is still good enough. Something better always exists, but if the upgrade is just about novelty, it might not be worth the effort, expense, or space.

I have more than 600 apps on my phone. I use only a small fraction regularly. But I’ve realized that going back and manually deleting everything I’m not using is a waste of time. In the digital domain, unlike the physical one, unused things don’t take up much space. Going back and deleting emails or apps one by one feels like more of a waste than letting them sit idly in the graveyard.

8. Paper Books and Quiet Treasures

About two-thirds of Americans still read books on paper despite the convenience of ebooks. Part of what’s appealing about them is sensory: the way pages turn, the way a book feels in your hands, the smell of the paper.

But there’s another advantage. A paper book doesn’t send notifications. It offers no tempting apps. The same goes for vinyl records, Polaroid photos, sand timers, and handwritten journals. Each of these enables you to deeply focus on what you’re doing.

My grandfather taught me to use a Minolta camera when I was little. The quality of its pictures doesn’t match that of an iPhone. But old objects like the Minolta have intrinsic value beyond their function. A hand-me-down camera is a reminder of love.

I have more than 50,000 photos on my phone. That abundance, paradoxically, devalues each individual image. When film was limited and developing took days, every picture felt more precious. Anticipating which pictures might turn out was part of the thrill of photography. I don’t want to return to that era. But the photos my wife and I have printed and framed mean more to me than many of the ones sitting in my phone’s camera roll.

9. Choices Are Contagious

The last chapter in Athas’s book is about invisible influence. If your friends are constantly upgrading their homes, devices, or apps, you might feel the pull to keep pace. It’s tempting to follow the cultural lead of those around us.

The reverse is also true. Choosing to stick to what you have quietly signals to other people that it’s okay to keep the old thing, to skip the trend.

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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.

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The Pentagon says laser weapons are nearly ready for prime time: This article is republished with permission from Laser ...
05/30/2026

The Pentagon says laser weapons are nearly ready for prime time: This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

The U.S. military is pushing to demonstrate high-energy laser weapons engineered for fielding at scale in the next two years, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s top science and technology official.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee on May 19, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, told lawmakers that the science of laser weapons “is largely done.” He said the Pentagon is focused on addressing the engineering challenges that come with transforming exquisite prototypes into mass-producible capabilities—the “scaled” element of the department’s “scaled directed energy” critical technology area.

“We now have a suite of directed energy products that go from low end to high end, and now we have to scale production of those,” Michael said.

When questioned by Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., about the three-year timeline for fielding laser weapons at scale that defense officials previously publicized in March, Michael stated that President Donald Trump’s planned “Golden Dome for America“ domestic missile shield would accelerate those research and development efforts due to the initiative’s “big reliance” on directed energy. He added, “Our experience in Iran has also doubled our interest in these systems.”

“A lot of the money allocated to Golden Dome is going to go to the fundamental engineering of these systems so that we can make them cheaper, smaller, and more proliferated,” Michael said. “And because the commitment was made to the president that we’re going to have a demonstration that includes directed energy in our Golden Dome architecture, there’s a lot of energy going into that.”

The directed energy demonstration is expected to occur during the summer of 2028, Michael said, part of a series of Golden Dome-related events.

“There’s never been more effort in the department on this particular capability,” Michael said. “There [are] several companies that are emerging that have developed it, and several companies that are taking what they’ve already built and making it cheaper and better.”

Michael’s comments effectively tie the future of U.S. military laser weapons to a presidential priority with serious money and a hard deadline behind it. The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget request contains $452 million in proposed R&D spending for the “development, integration, and assessment” of directed energy weapons in support of Golden Dome alone, more than triple the $142 million enacted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reconciliation package Trump signed into law in July 2025. In addition, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy together have laid out plans to spent $675.9 million over the next five years on a containerized 150-300 kilowatt Joint Laser Weapon System (JWLS) as part of the military’s broader Golden Dome architecture. In addition, Michael’s mention of Iran as having “doubled” the Pentagon’s interest in directed energy adds an operational urgency that budget numbers alone don’t capture.

But there’s a problem with Michael’s declaration that the science of laser weapons is “largely done” and the engineering is what remains: Engineering is exactly what has sunk U.S. military programs in the past. Building effective laser weapons means ensuring they can be operated and maintained across a range of tactical environments by soldiers who aren’t laser specialists. Consider the Army’s 50 kW Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD), which the service determined was “not mature enough” to become a program of record after rocky operational testing in the Middle East in 2024 exposed issues with the system’s heat dissipation and reliability in its vehicle-mounted configuration. (Robert Rasch, a retired Army lieutenant general, summed up the problem with real-world directed energy weapon deployments in August 2025: “We can’t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat.”)

The Pentagon has been burning drones out of the sky with lasers since 1973, but it has yet to consistently translate demonstrators into battle-ready weapons that American service members can actually rely on outside a controlled environment.

Indeed, the last decade has proven a graveyard of promising laser weapon programs. Beyond DE M-SHORAD, the Army has also abandoned its 300 kW Indirect Fire Protection Capability-High Energy Laser project after downshifting from an eventual program of record to a single testbed that will inform future JLWS efforts. The Navy’s 60 kW High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance system, which only recently began testing at full power and successfully engaged drone targets aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Preble after years of delays, has effectively disappeared from the service’s fiscal year 2027 budget request outside a handful of sustainment dollars. The Marine Corps returned its five much-hyped Compact Laser Weapon System units to Boeing without a replacement program in sight. The Air Force spent years testing Raytheon’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System before abandoning it without a program of record.

These failures share a common pattern diagnosed in a detailed 2023 Government Accountability Office report: promising laser weapons advanced through prototyping without ever securing formal transition partners or drafting agreements that would bind developers and the acquisition community to shared requirements, timelines, and funding responsibilities, dooming them to obsolescence simply because the bureaucratic will to fight for them across budget cycles and shifting service priorities didn’t exist. In his posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee in April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called it “institutional inertia.” While Michael pointed to the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 counterdrone group as a demand signal aggregator alongside and Golden Dome as a political forcing function, neither of those things solves the transition problem on its own.

Two efforts—likely Michael’s “suite of directed energy products that go from low-end to high-end”—will serve as the clearest early indicators of whether the Pentagon’s engineering confidence is warranted. The first is the Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL), the Army’s modular 30 kW system explicitly envisioned as the service’s first directed energy program of record—and it appears to be moving faster than almost any laser effort before it. Based on Army documents, E-HEL’s design philosophy looks like a direct response to DE M-SHORAD’s shortcomings, with the system decoupled from a specific vehicle platform and built for soldier-performable sustainment using line-replaceable units. The service plans to “produce and rapidly field” 24 E-HEL systems over a five-year period, with the first prototype expected no later than the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 and initial procurement units slated for delivery by the end of fiscal year 2027. If this timeline holds, E-HEL would mark the first time the U.S. military service has successfully transitioned a laser weapon to a genuine program of record.

The second is the aforementioned JLWS, the Joint Laser Weapon System. The Navy plans on awarding $31.7 million in contracts for the development of a Joint Beam Control System—a critical component “capable of supporting” a 300-500 kW laser weapon system, according to the Navy’s fiscal year 2027 budget request—as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, with another $30 million in contracts for the procurement and testing of containerized hardware expected by March 2027. That timeline makes a Golden Dome demonstration in the summer of 2028 plausible, but it also means whatever system appears will likely be an early-stage weapon rather than a mature one. The current JLWS R&D roadmap runs through fiscal year 2031, and while a successful demonstration in two years would be a genuine milestone, it would still represent the early stages of a fielding process.

Whether the U.S. defense industrial base is ready to answer either program’s call remains an open question. Manufacturing expansions from defense contractors like Huntington Ingalls Industries, AV, IPG Photonics, and nLight are encouraging signs, but the industrial building blocks for laser weapons—from specialized optics with 12-to-18-month lead times to critical materials and rare earth elements sourced from Chinese-dominated supply chains—do not yet appear in place to enable the production systems at the scale Michael is describing.

The development of laser weapons has been defined for decades by a seemingly inescapable cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Ellen Pawlikowski, a retired Air Force general and former program manager for the service’s YAL-1 Airborne Laser effort, perfectly captured the longstanding Pentagon consensus around directed energy in an interview for the 2018 book Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon: “I’m tough on laser people these days. It’s because they have a reputation of overpromising and underdelivering.”

With institutional support at a historic high, the Golden Dome-driven demonstration planned for summer 2028 may end up proving a moment of truth for the engineering challenges that have imperiled laser weapon programs past—or, at worst, yet another setback for the U.S. military’s long pursuit of directed energy.

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

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Your AI-dar probably doesn’t work: A report from the Harvard Crimson published earlier this week presents a dire view in...
05/29/2026

Your AI-dar probably doesn’t work: A report from the Harvard Crimson published earlier this week presents a dire view into how one of the country’s top colleges is struggling to adapt to the AI age.

Harvard students are already using LLMs widely, and some have learned to evade professors’ more technical countermeasures, including hidden text meant to flag AI-generated work. Teachers have given up on reported suspected AI use to the school’s honor council, because there’s no real way to prove when AI was actually used. Some instructors even suggest they may push back on the technology’s proliferation by simply analyzing the—well—vibes of student submission.

“If your submission reads like it might be AI work, I’ll have you redo the assignment in its entirety. I am uninterested in proving whether you did or did not use AI,” one professor’s syllabus states, according to the Crimson. “I’ll just ask for better work, in your unique voice, reflective of your unique interests; that’s all.” (Just in case, students taking this class must submit their Google Doc version history, which may be analyzed, too).

This position reflects an enduring belief that there are some obvious tells that a piece of content was produced by AI. In prior chatbot generations, these AIisms included excessive use of em dashes. More recently, skeptics report that LLM usage is revealed by a sort of tell-tale evenhandedness: ChatGPT loves to tell you something on the one hand, and then something else on the other. A chatbot might tend to suggest that something is also this, but also, that.

These alleged AI proclivities lead plenty of people on the internet to say they simply know when something is written by AI.

But perhaps these people don’t know! The challenge for amateur AI investigators is in the long run, their detection methods might be doomed to fail. This is unfortunately obvious if you use these systems: it’s relatively easy to coax an LLM to perform to meet various standards set out by a professor, whether that’s using more adverbs, or inserting extra-long sentences, or even inserting some very human typos. The same is true of actual content. It’s also pretty easy to push an AI system to express a more unique or individual tone. You can simply coach it to! In fact, these platforms even offer ways to meld how an AI communicates to your own personal preferences.

While there may be some broad patterns to how AI writes, overall, these are just patterns, and it’s very easy to mold AI content for your own purposes—and to whatever standards are set out by instructors.

There is plenty of evidence that the quest to detect AI writing isn’t working, including the reports of Harvard professors. A recent New York Times poll indicated that lots of people can’t really tell if writing was a great work of art, or just generated by Claude. Yes, there are technological tools that show some signs of being able to detect AI prose, but not all of them work, and MIT even cautions people from relying on the tools. (Deepfake detection companies are facing the same problem, and find that their human detectors are increasingly fooled by ever more convincing image generations). These AI detectors could struggle even more as models improve as computerized ghostwriters.

Broadly, it’s hard to believe that there might be an abundance of deterministic methods for identifying the product of a stochastic process. It’s going to be wrenching to accept, but in many cases, there may be no easy way to tell, from looking at a piece of writing, that it was generated by a large language model. Consider that yes, there is a lot of AI slop, but there’s also lots of human slop. We still don’t seem to have a great sense of how to parse the difference. Our false positives and false negatives are all mixed up with one another: Plenty of people are being falsely accused of using AI to write, and plenty of others are simply getting away with it

Students cheat because they either don’t have the time or resources to complete an assignment, or because they don’t want to. These are all higher-order problems than AI itself. In the end, the quest to stop AI writing lies in convincing people that it’s not worth doing, which it really isn’t, on principle. On the other hand, a puritan approach predicated on fear of policing seems to be destined to fail. We may well learn that lesson the hard way.

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Prediction markets and sports betting apps are luring in teens. Here’s why experts are concerned: When Rory McIlroy won ...
05/28/2026

Prediction markets and sports betting apps are luring in teens. Here’s why experts are concerned: When Rory McIlroy won the Masters for the second year in a row, Kalshi shared a photo of him on Instagram with the words, “Wait he’s goated.” When a video of NBA player Damian Lillard recovering from an injury circulated online, Kalshi’s main competitor Polymarket posted, “The league is cooked.”

If you don’t know what either of those phrases mean, it’s because you may not be the target audience.

The posts and hundreds of others like it are exposing younger people to prediction market platforms, where users can put money on the line for the outcomes of real-world events — or absurd ones like when the U.S. will confirm that aliens exist or whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027.

Once on the platforms, companies keep users hooked with what they market as low-stakes, casual opportunities to make an easy buck, creating an environment that some say feels more like a game and less like a risky financial transaction with potentially harmful consequences. Indeed, recent academic research looking at 588 million trades on Polymarket found that profits were concentrated to just a very small group of top traders while the majority of users — 69% — lost money.

Kalshi, Polymarket and some sports wagering platforms are available to users starting at 18, mirroring the minimum age requirement for investing in the stock market but younger than the age limit of 21 for gambling in most U.S. states. That three-year window is critical to cognitive development, according to some experts, who note that teens and young adults are more vulnerable to developing problematic gambling behavior and addiction than older adults.

“The adults in the room are not taking the fact this is meant to be an adult activity seriously, so when adults don’t take it seriously, why would the kids?” said Dr. Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and the co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, who notes that the “velocity of gambling” combined with the “frictionless” access to it creates a dangerous slope for young people.

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., introduced legislation last week with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Con., that would bar social media companies and advertisers from showing sports betting ads to minors. Blumenthal said sportsbooks and prediction markets are “treating young people like a gold rush, flooding the internet with advertisements and promotions to hook them on gambling when they’re young.”

Hot air balloon diving, chimps and memes

The humorous, meme-driven approach by both prediction markets and sports wagering platforms is not simply in pursuit of social media clout but a deliberate, carefully curated strategy to reach young people, says Jason Levin, the founder of Memelord Technologies. His company offers marketing tools like meme templates he says both Polymarket and Kalshi have used.

“If you want to attract a younger audience, you’re going to use memes. You’re going to use unhinged humor,” Levin said. “You’re going to try to get in front of them by any means necessary.”

One recent Polymarket ad on Meta’s social media platforms shows an influencer hanging off a hot air balloon before letting go and plummeting. Another from Kalshi shows chimpanzees wearing suits in party settings. And Fliff — a free-to-play platform that calls itself a “social sportsbook” — uses a common meme template of a car dashing to make an exit on the highway. Ads for these platforms also appear on mobile games and in several other places online where they can reach young people.

Kalshi spokesperson Jack Such told The Associated Press memes are “just a part of corporate branding nowadays” and their usage isn’t necessarily related to the age of potential viewers. The average age of a Kalshi user is 33, Such said. Polymarket declined to comment.

‘The hardest wager to get is the first wager’

About 3 in 10 of American adults under 30 said they placed a sports bet in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in summer 2025. About 2 in 10 Americans under 30 — including 21% of men and 16% of women in that age group — said they wagered online in that period, up from 7% three years earlier.

Prediction markets have tried to distinguish themselves from gambling by emphasizing that their users aren’t placing bets; they’re making a prediction on the probable outcome of an event. And because the platforms are regulated by the federal government via the the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, they are not subject to state-level restrictions or bans in place for traditional gambling and sports betting, including higher age limits.

But even some online sports wagering platforms are open to users starting at 18, including Fliff, which doesn’t require users to pay to participate, emphasizing the entertainment value instead. Many of these platforms operate on a sweepstakes-based model, making them accessible to users 18 and older in many U.S. states. Users are not technically required to pay to use these platforms but are often incentivized to do so if they want to see a real-money payout.

Stephen Findeisen, a YouTuber with more than 4 million subscribers who goes by Coffeezilla online and investigates internet scams, said the motivation behind appealing to young users is the possibility of gaining loyal, long-term customers.

“If you’re one of these platforms, you are incentivized to try to target them as soon as you can get them as a customer, so you can be the first kind of business they engage with in that space,” Findeisen said. Many platforms also offer a low monetary entry point for placing bets or making predictions to “lower the friction of getting involved” since “the hardest wager to get is the first wager,” he said.

For young people, that can come with big downsides. Paris Woods, an author and financial educator, said that around age 18 is the most important time to start becoming financially stable and building long-term wealth. But gambling and trading on prediction markets can create a “cycle of addiction and debt.”

“It’s not just eroding the present and sort of taking their hard-earned money out of their hands at 18 or 19, but it’s actually taking money out of that 40 or 50-year-old version of themselves,” Woods said.

Borrowing from video game features

Risky financial behaviors like sports wagering are reinforced by the rush of a win, or simply if they’re fun. Gamified features such as leaderboards, challenges and rewards, and other video game-like tools are built into some sports wagering platforms. Those, in turn, keep people on platforms longer and more intensely engaged, said Adrian Hon, a game designer and author of “You’ve Been Played.”

“They tighten the loop of setting a bet and getting the feedback,” Hon said. “And so it does make it more visceral. It makes it more exciting. It makes it more real-time.”

Fliff, for instance, is designed with bright colors and engaging art. Users can customize an avatar to represent themselves and write a bio on their account page where their statistics are displayed. They can gain followers, chat with others, move up the leaderboard and earn achievement badges.

Fliff said in a statement that it provides a “fun, social and rewarding experience” for users to compete in free-to-play games, while also “taking measures to ensure this activity is done responsibly.” The average age of a user who makes a purchase is 26, the company said.

The “social gaming experience” on Fliff has many “no-cost avenues for users to participate in predictions and engage in friendly competition,” the statement continued. “Our in-app social features are similar to those that exist more broadly within many consumer applications.”

Kalshi and Polymarket each have leaderboards on their platforms as well as comment sections where users can interact with each other through text and even GIFs. Kalshi’s Such said those functions help users make trades with as much information as possible and called them “core elements” of the platform.

The company has rejected proposals to include more gamified features like confetti appearing on screen when a user confirms a trade, Such said. Kalshi has also put in safeguards to prevent kids from accessing the platform, including asking some new users for a live selfie before they are approved for an account and using facial recognition when signing in.

Intentional or not, wagering platforms and prediction markets expose young users to “highly stimulating, highly novel, highly intense things,” said Fong of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program — and that carries consequences.

“A young brain that’s not fully formed — that’s going to leave a significant mark,” he said. “And that brain is going to want it again.”

—Kaitlyn Huamani, AP Technology Writer

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