You can watch my latest music video, “Hold Calls”, on YouTube here, and view “Anxious Generation” author Jonathan Haidt’s LinkedIn post about it here.

I made “Hold Calls” in collaboration with Jon and his team, to promote his book and social impact campaign, with the goal of rapidly changing norms and laws to reverse the current societal trend towards a developmentally-damaging “phone-based childhood”, and instead restore the developmentally-enriching “play-based childhood” familiar to all of us who came of age before the advent of smartphones and social media.

My cohort grew up in Canada with a glorious degree of playful independence as kids, and Jon’s book tragically catalogues the gradual paranoid trend towards restricting childhood freedom to play and explore, while at the same time giving kids unfettered access to internet-connected devices, which in practice means trading extremely low-probability physical harms in the real world for high-probability psychological harms from social media and device-addiction, with skyrocketing anxiety and depression among young people around the world as a predictable result.

If you agree that this trend must be reversed as soon as possible, please follow Jon’s campaign at AnxiousGeneration.com, subscribe to his After Babel SubStack to review the mounting evidence, and share my video with all parents, teachers, and especially teenagers who can still be rescued from the void.

I have also had the opportunity to join a couple of zoom calls with groups who are working towards this goal, performing ‘rap up’ recaps of their discussions, with the resulting videos viewable in my ever-growing “Smartphone Impacts Collection” on YouTube (watch “Phone Free Schools” if you only watch one of them).

As you can probably tell, as the father of an 8-year-old and an 11-year-old who don’t have smartphones but are surrounded by peers who do, this is a topic I care a lot about, and maybe, if the stars align, it will be the topic of my next “Rap Guide” album and show.

Fingers crossed!

Read my LinkedIn post on this topic from 03/06/25.