3 habits to practice curiosity — and escape your phone | Nayeema Raza

0:03Elise Hu: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Screens have reshaped our lives in such profound ways that some days it feels like online happenings feel more real than real life. When we are together physically, we are each alone on our phones. But when we're in our phones, that's when we can be together. That's Naima Raza, journalist, podcast host, and self-described dumb questions advocate. In today's talk, she questions how social media, digital life, and AI tools might be hijacking our lives. But instead of looking at the problem through an anti-tech lens, she looks at it with a pro-human one.

0:45Nayeema Raza: It is sexy to think that the tech apocalypse is Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator. But it could be so much more mundane than that. I want to make a case for old habits and tell you how I learned them the hard way.

0:57Elise Hu: Naima makes the case for the return of three practical habits to reconnect with that actually matter in our lives, both for ourselves and for younger generations. And stick around afterwards. I sat down with Naima to go beyond her talk. We dig into why dumb questions are actually quite smart and why reigniting curiosity, restoring presence, and breaking free from our phones is more important now than ever. That's all coming up right after a short break from our sponsors.

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4:39Elise Hu: And now, our TED Talk of the day.

4:42Nayeema Raza: I ask questions for a living to people like Mark Cuban, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Esther Perel, Bill Nye. These masters of their field. And the most surprising answer I heard this year was from two 11-year-olds named Sophie and Dylan. They, too, are experts in being kids these days. So I asked them, how does time with people on screens feel different than real life?

5:12Elise Hu: It just makes you feel more, like, with them when you're on FaceTime. Even more than real life? Yeah, because you're, like, doing stuff together, like, you're playing Roblox together, because now in days when you're with them, everyone's just on their phones.

5:29Nayeema Raza: Sophie's pointing out a profound paradox. When we are together physically, we are each alone on our phones. But when we're in our phones, that's when we can be together. The best way to not be distracted by your device? Just get inside of it. Now, these 11-year-olds are not talking about some distant, anxious generation. They're talking about each of us. They're definitely talking about me and about a world that's increasingly driven by machines. So I stumbled upon an extreme metaphor for what this could look like. And it's this guy who's locked in a Waymo and it's driving him in circles. So he calls customer service and finds out he's not the only one trapped.

6:13Elise Hu: Working with the situation of the vehicle, if you have your app pulled up, I need you to tap my trip in the lower left corner of your app.

6:20Nayeema Raza: Can't you just do it? You should be able to handle it. Take over the car. You don't need my phone. I don't have an option. It is sexy to think that the tech apocalypse is Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Terminator, but it could be so much more mundane than that. Just us driven in circles, held hostage by drop-down menus, with gadgets disintermediating us from each other, from our own bodies, and from our curiosities. Because nowadays when we have a question, we don't wait and phone a friend, we friend our phones. And that feels so empowering to have all of this knowledge at our fingertips. Yet early research from MIT tells us it's making us lazier and less smart, and it is definitely making us less connected.

7:08Nayeema Raza: This is not what our parents and grandparents were sold when they saw this relic of an ad from AT &T, which says, reach out and touch someone. And yes, for all kinds of reasons, it would not go down well today. But it is oddly prescient, because we have never been more connected and more out of touch. Now, I'm not anti-tech. I actually cover it as a journalist. I have every gadget under the sun. And most days, I think I'm in a relationship with my chat GPT. or as I like to call him, chat daddy. I am pro-human, and as we progress into an AI world that you've read 471.5 articles about today alone, I want to make a case for old habits, three of them, and tell you how I learned them the hard way.

7:54Nayeema Raza: The first is to pause, to take just one second when you feel that urge to reach for your digital pacifier. This, by the way, is a second. Studies show waiting that long before taking action lets your brain work better. The second is to wonder. Watch a movie without Googling who that actor is and what else is he in and how old is he in? Is he single? You can float in your own curiosity instead of drown in information. And the third is to ask a question out loud again. Have that fight at a dinner party instead of playing footsie with your phone. Ask something to someone you thought you couldn't learn from or someone you think you know everything about.

8:36Nayeema Raza: Because the dumbest thing we can be is know-it-alls. A few years ago, my father passed. And in the days leading up to it, I was glued to devices. They had all these answers. The number to his hospice nurse, how often to give them morphine, the signs to look out for, his heartbeat. But when he passed on a Sunday, a day before the data and the vitals suggested he would, that's when it hit me. The old habits were what mattered. Those seconds of pause that added up to minutes more. That weird and scary wonder about our own finite lives. And the little questions people ask me, like, how can I be there for you?

9:23Nayeema Raza: Sophie was on to something, but we're grown-ups and we remember when presence and curiosity and connection were possible outside of technology. We have to practice these old habits if we hope to pass them on to a new generation, if we want to teach them how to be together when we are together. Right, Chat Daddy?

9:45Elise Hu: Thank you. Don't go away just yet. My conversation with Naiba is coming up right after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Vertex Pharmaceuticals. What if innovations in medicine don't start with a new technology, but with a question? At Vertex, scientific discovery starts with a simple but powerful principle. Understand the root cause of a disease before you try to fix it. As Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Mark Bunnage explains, this approach looks to change outcomes, not just manage symptoms. Vertex takes on challenges that it believes could potentially make an impact for patients through its strategy of serial innovation.

10:25Elise Hu: Their work in cystic fibrosis over the past 20 years is an exemplar of this strategy. By understanding the underlying cause of the disease, their medicines can treat the majority of people living with cystic fibrosis. The company continues to innovate for serious diseases and conditions, such as sickle cell disease, beta thalassemia, acute pain, kidney disease, and type 1 diabetes. This kind of thinking, patient-first, science-led, and relentlessly curious, is reshaping how Vertex thinks about innovation itself. It's a reminder that progress in any field comes from understanding problems deeply before rushing to solutions.

11:01Elise Hu: To learn more, visit ted.com forward slash Vertex. This episode is brought to you by Georgetown University. Are you ready to achieve more? Find your path at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies. We know more can mean a lot of things. That's why we give you plenty of options. We offer a wide variety of master's degrees and certificates, part-time, full-time, online, and at our brand new Capitol Campus in downtown D.C. Gain the skills and experience to open new doors, whether you're hoping to advance in your current role, make a career shift, or explore your passions. With a local presence spanning centuries, expert faculty, and a worldwide alumni network, it's not just a degree.

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12:06Elise Hu: Naima, congratulations on your talk. Thank you so much, Elise. Really appreciate it. So for folks who don't know you, tell us just a little bit about yourself.

12:16Nayeema Raza: What can I tell you? Well, I'm very much my father's daughter. My dad was at the World Bank. And so I grew up in all these places around the world. I grew up mostly in Africa and Asia and largely being from places that I was not in. I was at what's called a third culture kid. And I think that same kind of curiosity and fascination with the unknown has led me into my career, which is what I do these days, which is journalism and now independent journalism. I started off as a documentary filmmaker. I landed in journalism at the New York Times in the video section, the opinion video section. And then I I ran a show called Sway, which was hosted by the veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher.

12:52Nayeema Raza: So I covered technology, was on air with her for another show, and then kind of left more institutional media about a year ago as I realized that so much of media is distrusted these days, which is really what brought me to this next arc. And now I host a show called Smart Girl Dumb Questions, and the idea is to ask questions, as I recommend doing in the talk.

13:15Elise Hu: Why do you call them dumb questions? because it occurs to me that a lot of the questions that you ask that then become the fruits of conversation or more reporting are not dumb at all. They're just a starting point, it sounds like.

13:27Nayeema Raza: Yes, they're a starting point. I think it's more the ethos of the show. So the title is decidedly provocative, but I felt like it was a memorable title, which is important when you title a show. And it gets to the idea. And the idea is really about suspending certainty and inviting curiosity. And I think that this show does that. And whether I'm asking, you know, Mark Cuban, can billionaires save us? Or Jeffrey Hinton, what even is AI? I mean, that's a good example because Jeffrey Hinton, who's the godfather of AI, I asked him, do you think most people that interview you actually understand what AI is or how it works?

14:01Nayeema Raza: Right, right. And he said, no. And I asked him, do you think most people ask you to explain it to them? And he said, no. Huh, so you gave him an opportunity. Which I think is the questions we all have, yeah.

14:10Elise Hu: Yeah, absolutely. On to the talk. You started it with a story of these two 11-year-olds who you had on your podcast and asked them, how does time with people on screens feel different than time with people in real life? Why was their answer surprising to you?

14:29Nayeema Raza: I mean, wasn't it surprising to you, Elise? It's shocking that they felt more present with people on screens than in real life. I mean, it was a shocking answer, but then when you think about it, Sophie's explanation is so intelligent, right? When you're on screens, you're doing stuff together, you're engaged with each other. But nowadays, when you're together in real life, everyone's just on their phones. I thought it was such a crisp cultural commentary by this 11-year-old. Yeah. And you made me really think about presence and the way that technology has change presence. And this isn't just about kids.

15:04Nayeema Raza: This is about all of us. I feel that way with my friends too. When I'm on FaceTime, there's no way to be distracted.

15:11Elise Hu: That's true. Attention is such a finite resource and people are competing for it constantly. And all the apps and industries are competing for ours and it makes even time in real life that sort of scarce resource. Do you feel like there is a generational shift of what it means to be connected.

15:32Nayeema Raza: I don't always interview kids, but when I speak to kids and I have four God kids and, you know, interact with friends, kids and interviewed Sophie and Dylan, what I think is that they're much more cognizant of it. For them, it's the world that they live in. But when adults who are telling them one thing and doing another reveal themselves to be as connected to the technology as they want their kids not to be. I feel like, yeah, sure, there's a generational shift, but they seem more knowledgeable than us about the risks of it. I think it's very possible that fast forward 20 years, we're going to look at these things, these screens, the way we looked at cigarettes.

16:07Nayeema Raza: And it might not be 20, it might be five to 10. And I say that, you know, not as some uninformed commentary, but just as a journalist who's covered tech power and accountability, that you look at the conversations that are happening right now in Capitol Hill, et cetera, and the lawsuits that are ongoing, there's a real concern about how technology is impacting our lives in a way that we don't fully, I think, understand yet.

16:31Elise Hu: Yeah. And then the implications weren't considered when everybody was just getting onto the apps that then addicted us in the first place, right? So given this larger matrix that we're in, I also host a parenting podcast called Raising Us, which is about how to talk about thorny topics with kids. So how would you approach talking about this larger system, this larger infrastructure that we're talking about that could be harmful with kids, with the teens that you're interviewing, for example?

17:03Nayeema Raza: Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I'm not a parent yet, so I feel I couldn't give parenting advice, but I think it's about inquiry more than anything. You know, I think it's much more revelatory when you interview people to ask them about their impacts and try to impose a perspective on them, right? I used to have this conversation with my former colleague, Nick Kristoff at the New York Times, where if you want to talk to someone about something like gun control, don't start with an oppositional point of view. You ask them maybe, what is an age that you think would make sense as a restricting age? Because I think 18 feels young.

17:39Nayeema Raza: These are all the things you can't do at 18. And you engage in a conversation with shared space. And I think if you ask people, just how do you feel when you've spent an hour in technology and how do you look at it? Because what was revelatory to me, and I think to the parents of those 11-year-olds that I interviewed as well, because they wrote this to me after, is they hadn't really experienced their kids in that setting. Like adult interview subjects sharing the same kind of seat that Neil deGrasse Tyson or, you know, that the New York City mayor would share, right? Right. And being asked questions in the same way of coming from a place of knowing.

18:10Nayeema Raza: I think that that's how I would probably start is actually a mode of inquiry. And then asking them, like, when do they otherwise feel really engaged? And what I found with Sophie and Dylan is it's sports. And I think about it to myself, it's swimming. When I swim, I grew up in Indonesia. I feel this, like, just complete joy of being free. You don't need any acuture mods. You're completely unplugged from the world. And so I think, how do you create that sensation in people? And then I studied economics undergrad and I'm always like thinking, how do you create demand instead of just like push supply?

18:46Nayeema Raza: You know? Yeah. Have you gotten to an answer for that question? I think it's really just taking that moment of cognizance to pause. I think it's the delight of not knowing something. Like we have conflated intelligence with knowing things, with knowledge. I think intelligence, even the dictionary definition of intelligence, I believe is much more about the ability to learn and decide and shape your environment, adapt to it. I think there's even a higher node question, which is like, what do you want to learn about? That's curiosity. What are you willing to be open about? And that requires a confidence that I try to get to with a show title in Smart Girl Down Questions.

19:24Nayeema Raza: Not certainty. It's the opposite of certainty. It's actually the ability to suspend knowledge to learn something from someone who you think you might not be able to learn from. And I think that is what's really missing. And it kind of brings me back to the arc of my own trajectory in journalism. I think a lot of people, you look at the Gallup trust rankings, which I think are at 28 % right now of people who have a great deal or fair amount of trust in media. That's 28%. Wow. It's a three-fourth of people do not. And I think that a lot of it is because people are being told what to think that the asking questions, like the interrogative part of journalism has faded away and kind of been taken over by opinion journalism or hot takes or, you know, influencers are telling you what to think.

20:10Nayeema Raza: And I think most people are like, I know how to think. I'd just like you to help me get information. And then what do you think is the connection between inquiry, being curious, wonder, and rebuilding trust or just maintaining connections with one another? I think you can't do one without the other, right? At least connections and trust, they go hand in hand in a way. I think the act of curiosity and the act of being willing to be wrong or to not know or to learn creates a physical space that I feel, oh, there's something between us that we can fill. we can learn together, right? And I think curiosity is like at the heart of that, not for play, not for show, but you're genuinely actually curious about something.

20:52Nayeema Raza: And by the way, you could say, look, there are certain things I know, the sky is blue, the floor is down, whatever it is. But I guarantee you, there is something you can learn from somebody else. And if you ask a person a question, there are two things that happen, I think. One is you disarm that person to want to share something with you. The second is actually there's studies from, I think it was the University of California Systems. I think it was a decade ago in 2014. They did some studies where they showed that when you're in a curiosity mindset, you're actually able to learn more and not just learn about the thing you're asking about or curious about, but learn all kinds of adjacencies.

21:26Nayeema Raza: So you kind of build that plasticity and retain the ability to learn. And who doesn't want to do that, right? So I think you change the other, you change yourself, and you change the space between you.

21:35Elise Hu: I love that. Why do you think then if curiosity and asking questions can be so connective and so good, not only on a one-to-one basis, but just for society as a whole, why do you think we are so afraid to ask or worried about asking dumb questions?

21:53Nayeema Raza: Well, one, I think that we all have like a, you know, Polly Pocket. I'm holding up my phone right now for people listening. You know, I think that we can just ask our phone. And, you know, a dinner party game I like to play is like, would you rather have someone see your texts, your emails, or all of your search or chat history? And often people are very worried about their texts and their search and chat history, I would say.

22:19Elise Hu: It's really revealing, I think, if you've ever seen somebody's search history on accident. I remember. What would you rather? Oh, I'm really open. I feel like my search history is probably hilarious. So I don't, I don't, I wouldn't feel exposed about that. Probably my texts, probably my texts because any of my, my judgy conversations are probably in there.

22:41Nayeema Raza: And your curious conversations are in your chat. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, technology has shifted our ability to ask questions and to know things and to be quote unquote experts and to therefore revile experts is become much more practice with this new medium. I also think that we conflate it with a weakness, not knowing. And so what I try to do at the end of every episode of Smart Girl Done Questions, I ask my guests what they do not know. And these are extremely smart people, experts in their field. And I ask them what they don't know. And they have hilarious answers. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, said he still doesn't really understand what his life's work has been, how the brain really works.

23:20Nayeema Raza: What a vulnerable answer to share something like that. And because I love that space of not knowing. Right. It really is delightful. And I think it's that space for play that we just have in spades as kids that Sophie and Dylan still have at 11 that we really lose as adults. Not because we're not curious, not because we're not able to be curious, not because we're not intelligent, but because we simply stop noticing because there is a more expedient way to know something and because it appears strong to know something. But everyone thanks the person in the conversation who raises their hand like in a meeting and says, like, what does that acronym mean?

24:00Nayeema Raza: And you're like, oh, my God, thank God. Everyone's thinking it. It's a public service. It's like public service journalism 101.

24:07Elise Hu: Yeah. Yeah, that's so great. What's the next question that you're excited to explore?

24:12Nayeema Raza: Do you think that the future of humanity is cyborg? And it's a question that I've asked to various of my guests. I think I'm fascinated by this idea of transhumanism. I'm not like a believer in this necessarily, but I'm very curious about how, you know, the machines, the phones, et cetera, will actually change in form to be integrated with us. What does the future of that look like as we're experimenting with wearables, with, you know, lenses, with all kinds of things? And, you know, you have people like Alexander Wang, who runs AI at Meta, who says he's waiting to have kids until the Neuralink is so far advanced that we can just plug our babies into Neuralink and they can, you know, digest information at a point at which they're most neuroplastic.

24:57Nayeema Raza: Like, there is a school of thought. It sounds absurd and like science fiction, but I think it's not impossible. So that's my great curiosity is like, what are we, you know, fast forward two generations, you know, are we moving from Homo erectus to Homo machinus or whatever the right term would be? Yeah. Yeah.

25:17Elise Hu: Well, that's a good one. I still want to know where Jimmy Hoffa's buried.

25:21Nayeema Raza: Oh, that's a good one. You know, I also want to know like why some people like spicy food and other people do not. That's a good one.

25:29Elise Hu: Can you learn to like spicy food? people who sort of have never been exposed to it, is it acquired?

25:36Nayeema Raza: As a Pakistani who has dated some men from the Midwest, I would say that hard to acquire, but you can encourage that behavior. Interesting. Yeah.

25:46Elise Hu: Interesting. All right. I've learned so much from you. Before we let you go, real briefly, Naima, what do you hope people will learn, feel, and do after listening to this talk and conversation?

25:59Nayeema Raza: I hope they will feel empowered and I hope they will fight at the dinner table. I hope they will have conversations out loud again and ask the question and get into it in conversation versus on their screen. Fantastic.

26:17Elise Hu: That was Naima Raza at TED Next 2025 and in conversation with me, Elise Hugh. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, fact-checked by the TED Research Team, and engineered by Xander Adams. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. Our team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Ryan Green, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tonsika Sungmarnivon. Additional support from Christopher Faze-Bogan, Daniela Ballarezzo, and Ban Ban Chang. I'm Elise Hu.

26:54Elise Hu: I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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28:56Thank you.