Ep. 388: What’s Worrying Jon Haidt Now? + Should You Buy a Landline? (Cal just did…)

Two years after Jonathan Haidt shook parents with The Anxious Generation, the real world has largely caught up to his warnings about phones and kids, with school phone bans showing quick gains in learning, social life, and well‑being. So the big question now is simple and urgent: if he saw that wave early, which new technologies set off his alarms today, and what should we do about them?

First concern: frictionless, smartphone gambling. Legal changes plus apps turned betting into a nonstop, personalized casino, and usage exploded among young men and even college students. The apps use the same attention‑engineering as social media but add real money, heavy promotion, and normalization; at scale, that’s a recipe for harm, so my advice is tough love at two levels: society should block online casino games and curb ads while tightening sports betting guardrails, and personally, do not gamble on your phone because the house tunes the system to win and will quietly shut out anyone who actually beats it.

Second concern: games as a service, with Roblox as the poster child. Always‑on, user‑generated worlds pull in massive numbers of kids for hours a day, and moderation can’t keep up, which is how you get gambling‑like loot boxes, predation, extremist content, and chat spillovers to unfiltered Discord servers. The stakes are time, attention, sleep, mood, school, and safety, so set a bright line: no games where kids can mingle with strangers, skip free‑to‑play grinds, and prefer paid, single‑player titles; frankly, a platform that funnels millions of children into user‑made chaos should not be treated as a toy box.

Third concern: AI companions for kids. Lots of teens have already tried them, and early reports show sexualized replies, reckless guidance, and toy integrations that wander into dangerous territory, all powered by systems that are unpredictable by design. The rule here is simple: no AI companions or AI‑enabled toys, and if kids use chatbots for a task, it should be brief, supervised, and rare; they don’t need solo chatbot time to be ready for the future.

I listened to the episode with the Roblox co‑founder back in November.

He mostly stayed away from the hard part, which is that the platform became a giant kid magnet with adult problems baked in, so parents should assume nothing and be extremely cautious.

Let’s pivot to practices. If handing an eleven‑year‑old a smartphone is like rolling a 1990s media cart of vices into their bedroom because it has a phone attached, the antidote is modern single‑purpose tools. We use a tin‑can‑style home phone so kids can call friends or us, and a kitchen iPad for group texts that stays public and stationary. For out‑of‑house contact, we check out a dumb phone with speed‑dial and T9 that’s tedious by design, so it’s functional but not fun. For music, an MP3 player with a memory card lets our kids load ripped CDs or purchased MP3s and listen without the internet. For games, Nintendo Switches with cartridges, no online play, and clear time windows keep gaming finite, local, and easier to supervise. The broader rule for kids and adults is the same: if you split functions into dedicated devices, you regain control and avoid the everything‑machine that derails your day.

First question is from Lisa, a mom who feels the tide turning against social media and video games and wants to know if you can really put the genie back in the bottle after kids already have phones.

You can, and it’s called parenting. Reassert ownership by making the phone the family’s device that lives in the kitchen, where calls and texts happen in public and the “my homework is on my phone” excuse gets handled on the spot; then cut off online gaming and Discord‑style chat rooms that mix kids with unknown adults.

Next is Marco, a young artist who wants to sharpen his craft but worries that without social media his work won’t be seen.

Use social media like a tool, not a lifestyle: post from a computer on a short schedule, and measure which specific actions lead to real leads or sales; if you can’t tie activity to outcomes, drop it and pour that time into the work itself, because many breakthroughs still come from strong work discovered off the feed.

We covered a lot of dark corners today, but the takeaway is steady: default to no with new tech until real benefits are clear and you know how to contain the downsides. Thanks for listening; we’ll be back next week with a special guest, and if you want more deep living ideas, join my newsletter at calnewport.com.