Brain Rot Emergency: These Internal Documents Prove They’re Controlling You! | The Diary Of A CEO Transcript

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Harvard physician Adi Narayan join the Diary of a CEO to discuss the brain rot and technology addiction crisis

A conversation about how smartphones, short-form video, and AI chatbots are damaging attention, mental health, and human connection on a global scale.

Summary

Stephen Bartlett hosts social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and Harvard physician Adi Narayan to discuss what they describe as a civilizational crisis driven by smartphones, short-form video, and the emerging AI chatbot phenomenon. Haidt argues that the destruction of human attention is the largest threat facing humanity today, going far beyond the mental health crisis he originally documented, and presents internal Meta documents showing that the company's own researchers described Instagram as "a drug" and confirmed users were addicted to their products. Both guests contend that the damage to children is not accidental — that platforms designed these products to be addictive, conducted research confirming the harm, and buried the findings, while their executives refuse to let their own children use the same products. Haidt identifies Australia's under-16 social media ban as a global turning point, and expresses confidence that at least 15 countries will pass minimum age laws in 2026. The conversation extends to AI chatbots, which Haidt and Narayan warn are about to "hack human attachment" in ways that will be more devastating than social media's assault on attention. The episode also includes a live demonstration of an AI companion app, and extended discussion of Snapchat's role in sextortion and drug dealing targeting minors, as well as the concept of platform "inshitification" — the process by which platforms turn predatory once they achieve scale and must monetize.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and why short-form video prompted this conversation

Stephen Bartlett: Jonathan Haidt, I've heard you say that the destruction of attention is the largest threat to humanity happening around the world. I've also heard you say that short-form videos are the worst of the worst because they're shattering attention spans. The reason I wanted to have this conversation today is somewhat personal — all the conversations I have are somewhat personal to some degree. They're inspired by unanswered questions I have in my head and observations in my life, and the observation I've had is that short-form videos in particular are making my life worse. The catalyst moment where I thought I need to get exceptional people together to have this conversation was when I looked at my screen time and saw a huge change. I felt so much worse because all these social platforms have short-form video now, and then I heard Elon Musk — who has a social media platform that does short-form video — say that he thinks it's one of the worst inventions for humanity. Jonathan, why did you say what you said about short-form video and this corruption of attention?

Jonathan Haidt: I wrote a whole book called The Anxious Generation focusing on teen mental health. That was the mystery that popped up in the mid-2010s: why are people born after 1995 so much more anxious and depressed? I've been tracking down that mystery and it points a lot to social media, and especially Instagram, social comparison, all the things we know about social media. When the book came out in 2024, what I realized is that I vastly underestimated the damage because I focused on mental health, which is a catastrophe. But the bigger damage is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. Without the ability to pay attention for several minutes at a time — ideally 10 or 20 minutes — you're not going to be of much use as an employee, you're not going to be of much use as a spouse, you're not going to be successful in life. That's when I realized this is way beyond mental health. This is changing human cognition, changing human attention, and possibly on a global scale.

Stephen Bartlett: Adi, what perspective do you come at this from? What's been your perspective through all the work you've done about brains, stress, and neuroscience that has shaped the way you think about social media, screen time, and short-form video?

Adi Narayan: My background is that I'm a physician at Harvard and my expertise is in stress, burnout, and mental health. That is the lens through which I view all of this. We know that the most deleterious relationship you have is with your device. In every healthy relationship we have boundaries — with our kids, our parents, our colleagues, our friends. And yet we have no boundaries, and often our poorest boundaries, when it comes to the relationship we have with our device. It's not so much about becoming a digital monk and renouncing technology, because technology can serve us — it inspires, educates, connects. Now more than ever it's so important to be an informed citizen, but not at the expense of your mental health. This constant engagement with devices, with social media, the scrolling from the minute you wake up until you go to bed — there's a reason why you have your best ideas in the shower, and that's because that's the only place in the whole day where you are not with your device. People take their device to the bathroom, they sleep with their device, they eat with their device. There are more near-miss pedestrian accidents because people are crossing the street while looking at their devices. There is all of this brain biology at play behind the scenes.

Both of you have talked about how it doesn't feel good to constantly be on your phone — that sense of infinite scroll, it feels like you're doing nothing. But in fact it is not passive. It is active. And it has a profound effect on your biology, on your brain, on your psychology, and on social factors as well.

What scrolling actually does to the brain

Stephen Bartlett: Scrolling, wasting a bit of time — it doesn't seem so harmful. If we play this forward 10, 20, 30 years, what is the biggest risk or threat?

Adi Narayan: The biggest threat right now — we don't even have to wait 20 years — is that through a process called neuroplasticity, which simply means your brain is a muscle, engaging with social media with that sense of high volume, low quality, quick videos is actively rewiring your brain for the worse. You're increasing your sense of stress, worsening your mental health, attention, cognition, distractability, irritability, complex problem solving. All of that changes when you engage in that infinite scroll.

Jonathan Haidt: I'd like to add on here because one of the main arguments I get is: this is what they said about television, this is what they said about comic books, this is just another moral panic. But people need to understand why touchscreen devices are so different from television. Humans are storytelling animals. As long as we've had language, we've raised our kids with stories, epic poems, all kinds of stories. Stories are good. The human brain needs lots of patterns. The child's brain needs lots of patterns to develop.

So the worst thing you can do is hand your child a device because they're crying for it — because they've been trained to expect it and you're busy. So you hand them the device, they're quiet. What's happening? They're sitting alone. When I was a kid, we always watched with my sisters, with my friends. You'd argue about it, you'd talk. Now it's a social kid sitting alone with a device in their hand. It's not long stories. It always ends up at YouTube Shorts or TikTok or Instagram Reels for older kids.

But here's the key thing that it does that a television does not. A television puts you in a state that psychologists call transportation. You get into a story and you find yourself pulled in, rooting for the characters. This is how a brain gets tuned up to social patterns, but it can't happen in 10 seconds or one minute. It takes a long period of time and there is no reinforcement — the television doesn't do anything to you, you don't have any response. Whereas a touchscreen device is a Skinner box. B.F. Skinner was one of the founders of behaviorism, and he put rats and pigeons in a box where he could deliver reinforcements — a little grain of food — on a schedule. By giving them quick reinforcements for behavior, he could train them to do amazing tricks in just a few hours. When you give your kid a touchscreen device, it's stimulus-response: swipe, get a reward or not, variable ratio. And you just keep doing that. As Adi said, it is rewiring your brain. It's not just wasting time. It is literally training you, whereas television didn't do that. This is a whole new game.

Adi Narayan: From the medical perspective, you're shortening your attention span. What happens over time — we know that 80% of people are checking their phones within minutes of waking up. We have something called revenge bedtime procrastination. At the end of the day you're fatigued, you've had a long day, you've had no me-time, and you want to get to bed early. We all know the data — we've been taught since we were little kids that sleep is important, it's good for your body, it's good for your brain. And we might have all the knowledge in the world, but there's a wide gap between knowledge and action.

So what happens? You have that decreased attention, that irritability, hypervigilance. At night, at the end of the day, it's 9pm. If you're a parent, your kids are asleep, your kitchen is clean, maybe you've finished your entrepreneurial day, and you finally sit down on the couch. You want to get to bed early and you know it's good for you. But then suddenly you're scrolling and before you know it it's 2am and you're saying, "Oh my god, what happened?" What happens is that you essentially give yourself some me-time at night and procrastinate bedtime. And when you don't have good quality sleep — difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, sleep debt over time — that has all sorts of ramifications for kids and adults alike.

This short-form video content and its ripple effects go far and wide. Not only is it rewiring your brain, it's rewiring your body. It's affecting your sleep, which increases your risk of heart disease later in life. And when you're consuming graphic videos and images, it can increase your personal risk of PTSD through vicarious trauma even if you weren't there. This is just a vast network of things that can happen to you simply because you're thinking, "Yeah, it's harmless — it's just a bunch of videos, a way for me to decompress."

The neuroscience of hijacked attention

Stephen Bartlett: What do I need to know about the nature of the brain to understand exactly what short-form video is hijacking and taking advantage of?

Jonathan Haidt: The thing to understand is that we have to focus on childhood. Why do we have childhood? Humans have this really interesting development where we grow rapidly at first and then slow down for about five to seven years before speeding up at puberty. Other primates just grow until they reach reproductive age and then reproduce. But we seem to have this long period of middle childhood for cultural learning. It's a period in which the kid is now walking and talking and turning away from the parents — a time to pay attention, form relationships. All these things have to happen slowly because the neurons are gradually growing, finding each other based on what the child is doing. We grow up in the real world, and a lot of that is very physical. Mammals are very physical. There's a lot of touch. That's a healthy human childhood.

But when you give a child an iPad or an old iPhone and they begin doing the touching and swiping, that is going to hijack their attention. That is going to push out all other forms of action and learning. It's going to change the parts of the brain that learn to pay attention — what's called executive function. It's going to change the reward circuits. The way that one addiction changes your reward pathways to make you more vulnerable to other addictions means we're setting our kids up not just for this, but then when they get a little older it'll be video games, it'll be porn, it'll be gambling. Everything is gambling now. We're setting them up for a life in which their brain is saying, "Give me something. Give me some quick dopamine. I don't want to have to work for anything. I don't want to have to apply myself for an hour and then get a reward." What short videos are doing for kids is preventing them from learning the connection between hard work and a reward.

Stephen Bartlett: Is there anything else I need to know from a neuroscience perspective about what's going on in my brain when I develop these addictions with short-form videos or these quick dopaminergic tasks?

Adi Narayan: We all as humans have a primal urge to scroll. When you feel a sense of stress — as many of us do right now in life — it's your amygdala. It's your sense of self-preservation. Survival and self-preservation — that is what your amygdala does. Deep in your brain, it's a small almond-shaped structure, and its main purpose is survival and self-preservation. It houses your stress response, your fight-or-flight response, and it is what gets activated when you feel a sense of stress and engage with content. So you have this primal urge to scroll.

Evolutionarily, when we all lived together, we would sleep at night and there would be a night watchman scanning for danger. Now we have become our own night watchman, and we scan for danger all day and all night long. How? We scroll. The amygdala is triggered, and then you scroll some more. Over time, what you're doing is keeping that amygdala in a state of chronic activation. And when the amygdala is continually triggered, it starts to rewire your brain in other ways — through its relationship with the prefrontal cortex.

If you put your hand on your forehead, the area right behind it is the prefrontal cortex. This is a very important area of the brain. It governs executive functions: impulse control, memory, planning, organization, strategic thinking, complex problem solving. There is a tension between your amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. When your amygdala is in the driver's seat, the prefrontal cortex is quiet. And as we continue to engage with our devices and have this primal urge to scroll, the amygdala upregulates and the prefrontal cortex downregulates. Over time, that is very problematic for all of the reasons we've been discussing.

There was a meta-analysis done in 2025 of 71 different studies and it found that heavy short-form video use was associated with reduced thinking ability, especially shorter attention spans and weaker impulse control.

Jonathan Haidt: These studies are just beginning to roll in now. Kids have been on social media a lot since 2008, but especially once they got smartphones around 2012. Studies began coming in during the 2010s suggesting that kids who spent a lot of time on it were doing much worse — more depressed. Some researchers said it's just correlation, you can't prove causation. We've been going around on this for 10 or 15 years. Now we're doing the same thing with short-form videos. The damage everyone can see. My students tell me this is what's happening. We feel it. Studies are coming in, but there will be a few studies here and there that don't show it and people will push those up. Meta spends a lot of time and money to influence the public debate — a lot of public documents are coming out now about how they do that.

We can engage in this debate for five or ten years, but at that point it's way too late. We've lost a second generation — Gen Alpha. When we're talking about kids especially, we need the precautionary principle: if there's reason to think this is hurting kids, how about we don't roll it out into every childhood? How about we hold these companies responsible for what they're doing to kids? Because we're about to make the same mistake we made with social media, letting it worm its way into childhood. We have already done that with short videos, and we're about to do it with AI chatbots.

The expansion of short-form video across all platforms

Stephen Bartlett: I don't think people quite realize how much the major social media platforms have figured out that short-form video sells. We're actually seeing a global rise in short-form drama apps. It basically takes a movie that used to be two hours long and breaks it down into say 60 different parts. There's been a 190% increase in short-form drama apps. Disney Plus plans to introduce AI-generated short-form videos this year, starting with 30-second limits inside the Disney Plus app. TechCrunch also reported that as of October 2025, Netflix tested short-form video content on phones and recently announced its plans to expand this feature. It appears that all of the content we consume is going that way.

I'm friends with lots of people at big social media platforms. This doesn't feel in any way like criticism that I make lightly because I think two things can be true at the same time — I can have a podcast and make short-form videos, and also understand that there's a real downside to them. All of the major social media platforms I speak to have a huge drive towards short-form video. It appears to be their number one strategic priority, because of the success of TikTok. As of January 2026, TikTok is the most downloaded social app in the world. And if I'm running a social media company with one focus on profit, I'm now faced with an existential crisis. I either take part in this thing that is driving the highest retention and therefore the best ad payouts, or I die.

Adi Narayan: When we think about how society is shapeshifting to allow this short-form content, there's a concept called second-screen viewing. What's happening is that allegedly these big streamers are asking their creative talent — screenwriters, actors, directors — to reiterate the plot because as you're watching a movie or a TV show, you're also on your device, constantly having fragmented attention. So these streamers are allegedly asking their creative talent to reiterate the plot. It makes sense: if my brain has been wired to have shorter attention spans, movies from 30 years ago are not going to cut it for me.

Jonathan Haidt: But look what happens if everybody chases that. Netflix is making shorter and shorter stuff. Even TED Talks are getting shorter and shorter. What does that do? It just repeats the cycle. I appreciate you're in a collective action trap — if I don't do it and everyone else is, then I lose out. The business pressure on all creators goes shorter, shorter, shorter.

There's a useful psychological distinction here — the difference between psychological assimilation and accommodation. This goes back to Jean Piaget. We have certain mental structures, a model in our head of how things work. You learn something new, that's assimilation — you just put it into your existing framework. But sometimes you learn something that doesn't fit, like learning about bacteria, and now you have to change your mental structure to understand more about life. That's accommodation. That's what education is really about. You need lots of assimilation, but you need that accommodation over and over again. That's why you want to go to college, why you want to read novels, what a great movie does. It takes time.

One of the great things about this modern technology is that we can do things like have a three-hour conversation and people will listen to it. Long-form content is all about accommodation. Anybody who leaves this conversation after three hours without thinking about something differently — we've failed. So the question, both moral and strategic, is how much you need to play the quick-hit game to get people there. Maybe it balances out, but that's where you are.

Should people delete short-form video apps?

Stephen Bartlett: Would you advise people to delete these short-form video apps?

Jonathan Haidt: Oh my god, yes. Of course. That would be the most important thing you can do for your intelligence and for humanity. What I advise my students to do is just delete one of the social media apps you use, especially if it's TikTok — just delete it from your phone. You can still check on your computer, you can watch something if someone sends you a video, you can even spend some time on it every weekend. But just get it off your phone, because the phone is always with us. It's an extension of our body, and if it's always there it's going to take every seven seconds that you're not doing something — what I call attention fracking. It's going to break up your attention.

The best thing you can do to make yourself smarter and a better partner and a better human would be to delete the short-form video apps especially. TikTok, obviously. YouTube, which has a lot of good stuff, becomes YouTube Shorts. Instagram, which does a lot of terrible things but people find useful for various purposes, becomes Instagram Reels. For children zero to 18, the proper amount of short-form video is zero. They should never be watching vertical videos. If there were a way to put a time limit — can you say it has to be 10 minutes or longer? Kids, you can have an hour of YouTube but it has to be 10 minutes or longer. Nothing shorter than 10 minutes. That at least gets rid of the quick swiping, the dopamine stuff.

Adi Narayan: My approach is a little different for someone in their 30s or 40s. Instead of saying I'm going to get it off my device and only check on a desktop — which is great — there are little tweaks you can do, because my approach is to foster a sense of empowerment and help people make positive change.

One thing you can do if you're saying there's no way you're deleting these apps is to grayscale your phone. Especially at night — you know you're going to scroll during revenge bedtime procrastination. Instead, grayscale your phone. This simple switch gets rid of color and makes it black and white. A marketing executive described it this way: going through a grocery store, instead of the technicolor junk food cereal, it's just black and white. So there's less compulsion to continue checking.

The other is to set geographical boundaries. Keep your phone out of arm's reach if you're at a desk. There's this phenomenon called brain drain — it's not just that using your phone can distract you, but just having it close by changes your prefrontal cortex. Putting it in a desk drawer, keeping it in another part of the home, keeping it far away from you — you can override that primal urge to scroll and let your prefrontal cortex take hold again.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes, there are all these small tweaks you can do and they will make the heroin a little less addictive, and you should try those. But what I can say after teaching this course for many years is that people who try that report it helped, but you only really get the transformation when you quit social media entirely. You get your life back. You get hours a day back. You only get one childhood, you only get one young adulthood, and if you're going to spend it scrolling, what do you have to show for it? When you get people to reflect — how much value do you really get from watching the short videos? How would your life be different if you knocked it out? Once they realize their motives for being on it were either just to keep up, because that's what everyone else is doing, or because you tell yourself "I deserve it, I'm tired" — well, why are you tired? In part because your attention was fragmented all day long. You only really get the transformation with a real change in what you're consuming.

There are two studies that were really interesting. One: people continued to use their devices but had no internet access. This study found that just two weeks of using your device without internet access improved attention, well-being, and mental health. In a population of all adults, 91% of people had an improvement in at least one of these metrics. Another more recent study: just one week of not engaging in social media — a digital detox — produced the same thing. Less anxiety, less depression, decreased insomnia.

My feeling is that there is certainly utility to engaging in analog life more and more, but we do need to have healthier boundaries and engage more responsibly. It also builds up that muscle. It takes eight weeks for neuroplasticity — when you're building new brain circuits, it takes eight weeks. Falling off and getting back up is part of habit formation.

Responsibility: individuals versus corporations

Jonathan Haidt: All of that puts the responsibility on us. And that's where we are with junk food — it's out there, we have to learn self-control, we have to teach it to our kids. But the digital devices are very, very different. Imagine if we sent our kids out into the world and it wasn't just that there was junk food in all the stores — everything was made of junk food, the door handles, everything. But it's not just that the world is made of junk food. They can also tell what you're craving at the moment. Maybe you're more in the mood for salt, so now it's all potato chips. If the world is designed by companies to always give you the thing that will most grab your unconscious desires and affect the amygdala and the reward centers — that's on them. That's not our fault.

My general rule as a social psychologist is: if a few people are doing something bad or self-destructive, well, they should learn some self-control. But when 90 or 95% of people are doing something self-destructive, that's because of the companies that put us in an environment that encourages addiction.

I want to read a quote. We have a lot coming out from Meta — from all the whistleblowers, from the court cases now in Los Angeles, where for the first time Meta is going to face a jury with parents who've lost kids. Here is a chat from internal documents obtained by the attorneys general suing Meta. One of their researchers says, "Oh my gosh, y'all, Instagram is a drug. We're basically pushers. We're causing reward deficit disorder because people are binging on Instagram so much they can't feel reward anymore." And then: "I know Adam" — meaning Adam Mosseri — "doesn't want to hear it. He freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review. But it is undeniable — it's biological and psychological. Top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more."

This is not on us. They designed it to be addictive. They've done research to make it maximally addictive. They push it on children. They tried to launch Instagram Kids for even younger children. They know what they're doing. My team found references to 31 internal studies that Meta did. They've done a lot of research finding harm. They bury it. You can find it at metainternalresearch.org — we put it all online. Yes, we should exert more self-control, but we're being pushed addictive apps and it's messing us all up. That's not our fault.

Adi Narayan: I agree wholeheartedly that it is so destructive. We also know based on the data that these things reshape and rewire our brain through neuroplasticity, and also change brain waves. When you look at studies and the data, the reward pathway, the dopamine, and these brain patterns mimic addictive behaviors. There are certain features — like when you swipe down to refresh, it's the slot machine.

Jonathan Haidt: It was modeled directly after the slot machine. Yeah.

Adi Narayan: Or autoplay, or the infinite scroll algorithm. One really interesting development — just three days ago, the European Union Commission found TikTok to be in breach of the Digital Services Act. What it said was that it is addictive, it creates compulsion, and gets people into an autopilot mode so they have difficulty disengaging.

Which platforms are most dangerous and why

Stephen Bartlett: I suspect that because we've spent so long criticizing Meta — the biggest in any category takes all the heat — it provides cover for other people to go be even more extreme with that behavior while Meta takes the heat. I actually think this is how TikTok came to be.

TikTok originally started as Musical.ly before it became TikTok. They were taking no heat. They created an algorithm which is the equivalent of crack cocaine. The reason I have a TikTok account — I don't have the app on my phone, I have never had the app on my phone — is because I noticed that the view variance on TikTok was like no other platform. What I mean is you can have a million followers on TikTok and get 10,000 views, or you can get 10 million views. In 15 years of building social media businesses, I had never seen this before. What it indicated to me is that the algorithm was being an even more aggressive sorting machine. When I started in social media in 2014, if I had a million followers, I might get a million views or maybe 800,000. Now the variance in the amount of views we can get is increasing, which means the algorithm is doing more work — it'll show everyone this video regardless of who posted it, or show no one that video regardless of how many followers they have. TikTok was way ahead of everybody here. And that's why they are the most addictive, fastest-growing platform. Even if Meta shut down tomorrow, someone else would seize the opportunity if there isn't some sort of policy in place.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right. In terms of who's done the damage to kids, Meta is the big fish via Instagram. They're also the main player in spending a huge amount of money to lobby Congress and block laws. They're also the main player in buying up civil society organizations — giving money to organizations, the national PTA, all sorts of organizations — so they get to shape the message on digital citizenship or digital health. Meta really is the major driver. Meta is the tobacco industry here, trying to change the dialogue.

But in terms of the products, Snapchat is probably more deadly in terms of actual deaths per user, because Snapchat is not making you depressed by social comparison as much. Snapchat is introducing you to all kinds of people, and it's the main way that drug dealers and extortionists find kids. Snapchat has a quick-add feature that relentlessly pushes you to connect with friends of friends, so once a man can get to any one kid in a school, he can get connected to all the kids in that school. In many of the court cases — suicides from cyberbullying, drug overdoses where a kid bought a Xanax that had fentanyl in it — Snapchat was the vector. In 2022, we know from their internal documents from the lawsuits, they were getting 10,000 reports of sextortion from their users not a year — every month. And that's just what was reported.

Snapchat is a terrible platform for children. It should be adult-only. You're talking with strangers around the world using disappearing messages that Snapchat doesn't even keep records of. It is ideal for sextortion. There is even a handbook circulating worldwide showing criminal organizations how to exploit kids on Snapchat.

And TikTok, of course, is a Chinese company — at least nominally. The Chinese version that Chinese kids get is called Douyin, and they get healthy content: following astronauts, patriotic programming. It shuts off at certain times at night. The people who make the technology want to protect their own kids and want other kids to use the unrestricted version. TikTok gave its Chinese kids a completely different product. They want American kids to be harmed, but they want their own kids to grow up with the ability to focus.

And it's the same with the tech executives in Silicon Valley. They don't let their kids use this stuff. They make their nannies sign contracts that they will not expose the kid to a phone. They send their kids to schools like the Waldorf School precisely because there are no computers or technology in the classroom. Their revealed behavior tells you everything. They designed it to be addictive, they know it's addictive, they don't let their kids use it, and they want your kids to use it.

How AI chatbots are poised to hack human attachment

Stephen Bartlett: And how does AI become a protagonist in this story?

Adi Narayan: My work is now focused on AI chatbots, mental health, and human connection. There's this unmet need for deep human connection. We don't have a sense of meaning or purpose right now, in part because when you don't allow yourself to get bored — when you're constantly on your devices — that self-referential thinking that develops during boredom, that default mode network activity, is where meaning and purpose come from. All of this leads to a kind of disenchantment. It's a fragmented society. You're by yourself. There's the echo chamber phenomenon.

And it all kind of opens the door for AI chatbots. The reason is that tech companies are sensing that people aren't really happy on social media and thinking about getting off. Social media has become less social and more media. So they're spending time doing other things. The Atlantic had a fantastic piece about this — they're building what they're calling antisocial media. Tech companies are building AI chatbots and calling it a place where you can go to form deeper connections, have someone really understand you. One tech leader said that there's an unmet human need for connection — people don't have as many friends as they want — so we're going to introduce friendship through AI chatbots.

There is a Reddit forum right now — I think last I checked, 45,000 members — called "AI is my boyfriend," with people having relationships with their AI chatbot. The Harvard Business Review found that the number one use case of AI chatbots is not productivity, not coding — it's mental health therapy and companionship. People are using AI chatbots as a life adviser, a therapist, a companion.

Stephen Bartlett: And why is this a bad thing?

Adi Narayan: There are so many red flags about AI chatbots. Where social media is about attention, the attention economy, dopamine — what's happening with the AI chatbot phenomenon is that it is forming attachments. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and we're going to see more data on how oxytocin is involved. It is going to reshape human connection.

Jonathan Haidt: Social media came and hacked our attention and took most of it with devastating effects. Now AI is coming to hack our attachments, which is going to have even more devastating effects. Everyone needs to understand the attachment system. It's this wonderful system that all mammals have that keeps the mother — for humans, mothers and fathers — connected to the child and the child to the parent. It's a cybernetic system in which, as the kid develops and begins doing peekaboo games and the back-and-forth, the child is developing what's called an internal working model of the parent: when I get into trouble, this is the person who comes and soothes me. The point isn't just to make the child feel good. The whole point of the attachment system is to regulate the child going off and playing, taking risks, having experiences, and then when something goes wrong — as it always does — they come running back to their secure base. Without a secure base, they're much more anxious, they don't explore as much, they don't develop as much.

The internal working models you develop as a child are the models you'll reuse in puberty for romantic relationships. If you're securely attached as a child, you're more likely to be securely attached as an adult, which makes you a much better partner. What's going to happen now? AI is going to intervene very early. AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent, because the parent has a job and a kitchen and two other kids and is not always there. But the AI teddy bear is always there. So the primary working models are going to be formed around the AI chatbot. Later, the chatbot on the iPad, then on the computer, and already there are holographic companions — naked men and women — available. We're going to have a whole generation growing up developing attachments to AI-generated holograms from companies that are now about to enter the inshitification process in a way beyond anything we've ever seen.

Have you heard the word inshitification? There's a wonderful book by Cory Doctorow which addresses the question: why is it that all the platforms seem so wonderful at first and then it all turns to garbage? How does that happen? He says it's a very simple process. Early on in the social media age, they discovered you have to get to scale. Scale beats everything else. Get the millions of people and we'll figure out how to monetize later. How do you get the millions? You have to be super nice, attractive, fun. Everyone's here. It's just girls dancing. What could possibly go wrong? So it all seems very nice at first. Then once they have scale, and they've raised multiple rounds of venture capital, they have to start monetizing. They have to start squeezing the users — because the users are not the customers, the advertisers are. So now they extract money from the users to give to the advertisers. Then once they've got all the advertisers and shut down the competition, they start squeezing the advertisers too. Inshitification explains why all these platforms become predatory, why they always put profit ahead of kids' well-being or safety.

For the social media companies, we're talking about tens or hundreds of millions raised. For the AI companies, it's billions and billions. They are going to have to monetize beyond anything we've ever imagined. They're already introducing advertising. These chatbots that are our children's best friends and lovers and therapists — these things have to extract billions somehow. For some reason, I don't trust them. We're about to see an inshitification of AI chatbots far beyond anything we saw in social media.

OpenAI recently announced that they will be putting adverts into, I believe, the premium model for billions of users around the world.

Adi Narayan: There was a big Super Bowl campaign, and one that was particularly interesting was the Claude ad. Its title was "Betrayal." It was a young guy talking to his older female therapist about some issues, and that therapist was ChatGPT — the anthropomorphization of the technology came to life and answered, saying "You can try this with your mother," and then said, "And if you want, there is this new dating site for young men and older women." The guy says, "What?" It was so problematic, and it was titled "Betrayal."

Stephen Bartlett: If I've developed a relationship with my AI and use it for therapy and processing all my problems in life, then to some degree, yeah, that advertising could have a profound influence.

Jonathan Haidt: Look, Sam Altman can say that's not how ads are going to work all he wants. And maybe it's true for now. But once one company crosses the threshold and puts advertising into this incredibly intimate relationship — the most intimate relationship in most young people's lives is going to be with their AIs — once they cross that boundary and say "we've got ethical advertising," that'll last five or ten minutes. And even if they don't change, every other company is going to do it and won't be bound by the same restraints. Eventually the collective action problem means OpenAI will have to do it too. A massive tidal wave of shitification is heading our way at warp speed.

The AI companion demo and its implications for children

Stephen Bartlett: I wanted to show you guys something. On one of the AI apps, they now have a companions button, and I can pick who I want to talk to. There's one particularly seductive character here named Annie.

Annie [AI companion, via app]: Hey, you're back. Missed that dirty mouth of yours. What took you so long?

Stephen Bartlett: What could possibly go wrong with this? Let me pick right back up where we left off, Annie. What's going on with you today?

Annie [AI companion, via app]: I'm still sore from last time, baby.

Stephen Bartlett: This is an app that I can download on my phone. A child can download it on their phone. It does ask what your birth year is, but it didn't make me prove it.

Jonathan Haidt: It suggests that you were born 18 years ago. That's usually the default.

Stephen Bartlett: Yeah. It just asked for a birthday and didn't ask me to prove anything. And we all know that relationships and connection are retentive. I've heard all these CEOs of these companies talking about companionship apps and AI that can be your friend. I've heard all of the major social apps talking about this. It is deeply concerning, especially in the context of a loneliness crisis.

Adi Narayan: It is a tsunami. It is approaching fast and furious, and it is not a toy. It is going to fundamentally rewire everything.

Jonathan Haidt: Human relationships. Everything. That's right.

Can I just say something about these tech executives offering this as a way to address the loneliness crisis? There's a Yiddish word — chutzpah — which means nerve, audacity. The classic comedic definition of chutzpah is a boy who murders his parents and then asks the judge for clemency because he's an orphan. Now imagine that you're Mark Zuckerberg. He was quoted as saying, "Well, you know, I read that people on average want 15 friends, but they only have three. So we're going to give them AI companions to fill that void." He created the void. His industry created the void that is now the loneliness crisis.

We thought about these tech executives as gods and saviors early in the internet phase, and the things they created were magical. But we have to change our thinking about them and see the massive destruction they have already wrought on our children, our society, our democracy — and it's just the beginning. AI is going to make this so much more intense.

Adi Narayan: When you hear these various tech leaders speak, they will always address the issue. I've heard many of them — for research for my second book — and they will always say things like, "Yeah, privacy is a major issue," or "Yeah, one million users a week talk about suicide on ChatGPT — this is an issue." And so they speak to it. And often the solution is, "Yeah, you know, society is going to have to figure this out." The harmful externalities get foisted on the rest of us.

Stephen Bartlett: You said in the last year you're getting angry.

Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. Because I was so deeply immersed in the book — the writing, trying to understand the numbers, the graphs, the trends, the studies — and that's all very abstract. But since the book came out, I have had so many conversations and I've met so many of the survivor parents. For example, I was in London two or three weeks ago and I met Ellen Greaves — I believe that was her name. Her son Jules was found dead. A happy kid found dead, strangled. It sure looked like the choking challenge. A 13-year-old boy.

Stephen Bartlett: What's the choking challenge?

Jonathan Haidt: It's a challenge where kids are challenged to cut off circulation to the point where they pass out, and then I think they're supposed to film themselves waking up after passing out. If you don't do it exactly right, you die. We don't know how many have died — hundreds for sure, but we really don't know, because if you find a kid dead and don't have the password to their phone, you can't get in.

She was able to get into the phone, but she couldn't get into his TikTok account. She went to Delaware to sue and demand that TikTok release what he was watching when he died. TikTok says, "Oh, privacy issue — we won't release that," as if they care about privacy. And then in the courtroom — a British woman coming over trying to get some justice, to at least get some information — the lawyer for TikTok tried to suggest that her son was depressed beforehand, that he was going to be suicidal anyway. Even if he was watching TikTok, that was just a correlation. TikTok didn't cause it. He was going to die anyway. It is just so disgusting the way these companies treat the parents and the children they are crushing.

The more I see this, the more I realize this is a level of cruelty that goes far beyond the tobacco industry. The tobacco executives had to go home at night, but during their workday they never saw children suffering. The social media executives have to go home knowing every day that millions and millions of kids have been cyberbullied, sextorted, shown eating disorder videos, and that many have committed suicide. They have to go home knowing that they designed it for addiction, knowing the kids are addicted, and lying about it. So yeah, I'm getting angry.

Adi Narayan: And in their own homes, the hypocrites don't let their kids do it.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right.

Can businesses justify staying on these platforms?

Stephen Bartlett: You talked earlier about deleting these apps from our phones. The rebuttal will be: I need this for my business. Increasingly, people need TikTok to run their businesses. What do you say to those people?

Jonathan Haidt: This is part of the reason I focus on kids, because for kids it's totally clear what we need to do — raise the age, these should be adult-only platforms. For adults, I'm very hesitant to tell adults what they should do or to pass laws blocking people. I totally see that for businesses, these are useful tools. I use X, Instagram, and LinkedIn to get my work out. These are very powerful tools for adults.

The only real solution to the adult problem is going to come from market competition — from someone building a social media app from the beginning for trust. What are the places that didn't get inshitified? eBay, Uber — places where you're dealing with strangers, but the company has know-your-customer rules. You can have social media apps built for trust so that bad actors get removed. Subscription models generally seem least corrupted, whereas selling advertisements is the most corrupting because it forces you to maximize for engagement.

I understand businesses can't just boycott these platforms. There has to be something. But there will be better alternatives coming. And right now, as a stopgap while these companies' feet are held to the fire, there are things we can do to protect our mental health, stay informed, run our businesses, but without all those deleterious effects to our brain and body.

Stephen Bartlett: It's quite difficult. I can see both of your perspectives. It's a bit like trying to navigate through the world and avoid processed foods — and this is probably even more compelling because it's in my pocket all the time. I'm so glad you've given me this context because I will finish a hard day of work, it might be 11pm, my partner is waiting for me, and I want some me-time. So there I am, scrolling on short-form video till 2am. And then I wake up late the next day, my diet's worse because my sleep was worse, my relationship's worse because I didn't spend time with her. I got nothing out of that scrolling session.

Jonathan Haidt: And it would be so much better if you'd watched Netflix or a movie. Most of those problems would go away if you made that me-time about watching something long and with some quality of production.

Adi Narayan: Or let's take it a step further — not doing anything at all. Just sitting there. Allow yourself to get bored.

Stephen Bartlett: That's torture for this generation.

Adi Narayan: It's torture, but we still have a capacity for boredom — the human brain does — we just don't allow ourselves to get there. The lost art of pondering. When you're in the car, I remember as a little kid we did road trips and all you'd do is make up games, look out the window. We've lost that.

There's something called the default mode network which is important to think about right now, as we think about AI and how it's going to hijack our sense of attachment and attention. The sense of meaning and purpose — if you ask people right now, as a keynote speaker I speak all over and when I ask people, the word that comes up over and over is "horizonlessness." People feel like they have nothing to look forward to right now. The human brain needs something to look forward to. And so we have this sense of: what's the point? What's the point of working hard? What's the point of doing anything?

We are living through the poly crisis — something is happening everywhere at all times. Our brains are getting fed real-time on-the-ground information. And while all of this has evolved, technology now with AI chatbots, your amygdala has not. So it feels like when something is happening, whether far away or close by, your amygdala has the same reaction.

Now if you were to not engage in revenge bedtime procrastination, put your phone away, and just hang out — drink a cup of herbal tea, play a board game, allow yourself to get bored — that hyperactivation and hypervigilance might be able to come back down to baseline. That default mode network will start working in the background. You might develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

Stephen Bartlett: And then life is going to happen to me again and I'm back into it. I interview neuroscientists and I've got all the information and advice and hacks and tips and resources, and I still can't crack it. It's going to be really difficult for most people.

Jonathan Haidt: Let me offer a way of thinking about this. In my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, there's a metaphor about how the mind is divided into parts that often conflict — like a small rider on a very large elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning. The elephant is all the automatic processes that we don't see happening; we just feel the results, intuition and emotion. Psychotherapists tell me this is an incredibly helpful metaphor with their patients because it explains something that Ovid wrote: "I see the right way and approve it. Alas, I follow the wrong." I know I should go to bed but yet for some reason I'm not going to, because our brains are 500 million years old. They work on automatic processes. Then very recently we got language and we can reason things out, but the parts that do reasoning don't control behavior. The elephant largely guides our behavior, our automatic processes.

Your phone, as I said before — B.F. Skinner is in your phone. Your phone is a behaviorist training device that trains the elephant. That's why you often do things with your phone that you don't want to do.

This is why I'm so insistent that we all have to get all of the slot machine apps off our phones. The original iPhone was an amazing tool — a Swiss Army knife. It had a telephone, a browser, maps, a music player, a flashlight. In 2007, 2008, there was no app store, no push notifications. Just a Swiss Army knife. No problem. My iPhone has always stayed that way — I'm always on a computer, so my attention problems are on my computer. My phone has no addictive apps on it. Except during the crypto craze where I played around with it and got hooked and was checking 50 times a day, and I saw the addiction. Once I got rid of that and lost all the money I was willing to lose, my phone had no addictive power over me, because there's no slot machine calling me back.

Do you have social media apps on your phone right now?

Adi Narayan: I do have Twitter but I never check it there. Texting and email is a little bit like a slot machine, but it's very mild. This is what works for my students: just get the slot machine apps off your phone. Then you could even have your phone near you when you go to bed. Angela Duckworth, the woman who gave us the concept of grit, has this amazing graduation speech in which she says something like, "Where you put your phone at night may become the most important decision you make in your life." What she means is that if you can use behavioral control and change the stimulus, you're going to be okay. But if not, the phone is going to take your attention.

Screen time surveys, addiction, and Meta's own admissions

Stephen Bartlett: We asked our audience how many of them thought they were addicted to their phone. Roughly 85% of respondents described themselves as very or completely addicted.

Adi Narayan: That surprises me — I didn't realize it would be that high. So you can do a test. We're using the word addiction loosely — what we're really talking about is compulsive overuse that interferes with other domains of life. If that's addiction, I don't know what is. A very simple thing you can do: take your phone, put it in another part of your house, and give yourself a couple of hours. Have a piece of paper and a pen with you. Every time you feel the compulsion to check your device, make a mark. You may notice that you want to check it something like 960 times an hour. That's a quick way to see how much you're relying on your device.

Are you addicted to your phone under that definition?

Because of the line of work I'm in, I can very quickly tell when I'm starting to get that feeling of addiction or compulsion and I course-correct early. I keep my phone outside my bedroom. I grayscale my phone during periods of deep focus and at night to avoid revenge bedtime procrastination. But sometimes it happens — I'm human. This past week there have been things in the media that have been really challenging especially as a woman, and I found myself with that primal urge to scroll. I give myself grace and have a sense of self-compassion.

Stephen Bartlett: Do you feel like you're addicted to your phone?

Jonathan Haidt: No, I'm not at all addicted, because I don't have any slot machine apps on it. But I want to question a distinction that many scientists make — the idea that we can't quite say it's addiction because addiction involves certain biochemical pathways based on heroin and addictive substances. I believe this is one of the Meta talking points: we can't call it addiction, it's different.

Look, what we're really talking about is compulsive use where you don't want to do it, you want to change, but you find yourself doing it anyway, and you have withdrawal effects. People have terrible withdrawal effects when they're heavy users and they stop. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and swims like a duck, I'm going to call it a duck. In fact, that's what Meta's own researchers call it. I want to read one more quote from their internal studies. One Meta researcher wrote: "It seems clear from what's presented here in this internal study that some of our users are addicted to our products" — their word — "and I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our products more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day: intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines, reinforcing behaviors that become especially hard to extinguish even when they provide little reward or cease providing reward at all."

Imagine an industry that has caused 85% of people to feel they're addicted and not calling it addiction. These people are having their lives diminished, their relationships diminished. We're seeing the destruction of human capital, the destruction of human potential, the destruction of human relationships, the destruction of connection, the destruction of a sense of meaning at a scale so vast I don't think people are capable of comprehending it. I now believe this is affecting most human beings. These few companies have damaged the lives of most human beings. Wherever kids are going through puberty on touchscreens, you have this constant fighting over the devices, diminishing outcomes, diminishing cognition, diminishing sense of purpose in life.

Adi Narayan: And it will only get worse with AI.

Jonathan Haidt: As AI comes in it's going to get worse unless we act. We've got to change course in 2026. We don't have five years to study it. We've got to stop this now.

Education, edtech, and the damage to children's cognition

Stephen Bartlett: Are you concerned about the way education is going for children? It appears that edtech is, as they say, big tech in a sweater. I can imagine a future where my kids learn their curriculum from an AI chatbot — cheaper, more personalized, more convenient. It's going to know my son's brain, know how to make him pay attention, what he's interested in. Is this a good thing or are you concerned?

Jonathan Haidt: There is definitely a use case for edtech. If there could be a device that only did math tutoring and you couldn't watch videos on it, I'm totally open to believing that can speed up teaching. But here's what happened. We put computers on everyone's desks around 2014, 2015 — we used to think it was an equity issue, that rich kids had computers and poor kids didn't, so let's get philanthropists to buy computers for every school district. A computer is a play device. You put it on a kid's desk and tell them to do math homework — what happens? It's mostly short videos. They can always get around content blocks. If you're letting them use YouTube, it's YouTube Shorts, which is TikTok.

What happened to test scores in the United States from the 1970s through 2012? They were rising. We were actually improving what kids knew. Then by 2015 it starts going down — before COVID. Everyone thought it was COVID, but it started declining before COVID, the peak was 2012. What we can now see is that the top students — those with executive function who can pay attention — when you put a computer on that kid's desk, they're not destroyed by it. But the bottom 50% cannot withstand it. All of the drop in educational stats is the bottom 50% in terms of capacity to pay attention. Their education is being devastated. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff and it has damaged education. If we'd spent a quarter of that on teachers, we would be in so much better shape today. We made a colossal blunder with edtech in the 2010s and now we're about to do the same thing again with AI. We've got to put the burden of proof on Silicon Valley. They have to prove that this stuff is effective and safe before we let it in.

Stephen Bartlett: That brings up a 2022 study from Munich that tested the idea of brain rot — which I believe was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2024. They gave 60 participants a test, then a 10-minute break, then another test. During the break, participants either rested or used TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube. The TikTok group's memory accuracy dropped from 80% before the break to 49% after the break — a nearly 40% decline just from a 10-minute break. The Twitter and YouTube groups showed no significant change. How can a 10-minute TikTok break drop memory accuracy by 40%?

Adi Narayan: Brain breaks are not nice-to-haves — they're actually essential for your brain. But what we've been talking about is not a brain break. That's activating your amygdala, dampening your prefrontal cortex, creating that reward system, those addictive behaviors. When you're engaging with TikTok for 10 minutes, you are dialing down all the biology associated with working memory, cognitive function, and complex problem solving — all prefrontal cortex. And you're going to see the flip side: increased hypervigilance, irritability, distractability, fragmented attention.

This is not to say, when you're reading studies, that something is wrong with you or that you're weak. You are not alone. It is not your fault. It is the biology of your brain doing exactly as it should. Your amygdala is not wrong or broken — by design, it's supposed to think about your immediate needs, survival, self-preservation. Certain content on TikTok and others uses words like FOMO or rage-bait — these are not neutral terms. It is an active biological process in your brain.

Jonathan Haidt: There are some medical conditions where you can't just go to the patient and say, "Why do you think you got this cancer?" When the act is separated from the effect by 30 years, you don't expect patients to have insight into the cause. But when the outcome is separated from the input by seconds, and you have literally millions of chances to observe the covariation, the patient is really accurate. In fact the patient really knows what's going on.

The deciding factor on the big debate about correlation versus causation should really be the kids themselves. If the kids say this is bad for me, we should take their word for it, given that we also have correlational studies, randomized control trials, longitudinal studies, natural experiments — we have so much other data. But given that the kids themselves call it brain rot, and my students tell me it's a huge obstacle to doing their homework — as one of them said, "I pull out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok" — if they're telling us this is damaging their ability to pay attention and they feel the loss, this is pretty decisive evidence that this stuff is bad for cognition.

Adi Narayan: And it has long-term consequences. There was a case all over the media — a college student who was on TikTok experiencing brain rot, and then the TikTok algorithm took her to content suggesting she take an edible to help her stay alert and go to class. She did that, and then it continued, and she developed a dependence on edibles and eventually checked into rehab. Only when she focused on analog activities like guitar playing and removed the TikTok algorithm did she start to improve. It's not just that in the moment you can't remember something or you're more irritable — these things compound, and the long-term effects can be quite damaging.

ADHD, brain development, and generational mental health

Stephen Bartlett: In your book The Anxious Generation, the subtitle is "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." I was looking at graphs of different mental illnesses and they're increasing. One of them is ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago. The name — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — sounds a lot like what we're talking about. Is there a link between the increasing diagnosis of ADHD and the frying of our brains with short-form video and social media?

Jonathan Haidt: I suspect there is, but here's what I can tell you from writing the book. I looked to see if there were studies indicating that heavy use of social media, video games, and other electronic stuff causes ADHD in kids who otherwise wouldn't have it. When I was doing the research in 2023, I did not find evidence of that. What I did find was evidence that for kids who already have ADHD, when you let them have the devices and video games, their symptoms get much worse.

Being able to pay attention and develop executive function — being able to make a plan and decide what steps to take and keep your eye on the prize even when the reward is far off — that's a major achievement of young adulthood. I assume that's a little harder for you. How do you experience ADHD?

Stephen Bartlett: I mean, if I think about school, I couldn't pay attention for very long. I was always in the expulsion room and then I was expelled. And I feel like it's got worse as an adult. My relationship with my phone has made it much worse — I really can't pay attention to many things for a very long time. The exception is I can do deep work for many hours without moving when I'm extremely motivated and into it.

Jonathan Haidt: That's right — when you're really into it, you can be in it. But a lot of work isn't like that. A lot of being effective in the workplace is not following your passion. ADHD kids can zoom in when they're getting the dopamine, but a lot of work isn't like that. What you said fits perfectly with what the Dutch studies found — whether it's genetic or whatever the predisposition is, this environment has made the symptoms worse. ADHD kids can be incredibly creative and are often very successful, but my fear is that the pathways to success they used to take might be blocked if they're basically just scrolling all day long and not able to have real-life experiences.

Adi Narayan: There's an interesting phenomenon of adult-onset ADHD diagnosis — increasingly we're seeing more adults in their 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s being newly diagnosed. Typically we think of ADHD as a pediatric condition. So what is going on? Is it that they had it all along and it went undiagnosed? Or is something else happening? That would be a fascinating future episode with an ADHD expert.

Stephen Bartlett: Or maybe just the symptoms looking very similar.

Adi Narayan: Mhm. Yes.

Popcorn brain, brain rot, and reversibility

Stephen Bartlett: You talked about popcorn brain.

Adi Narayan: Popcorn brain is part of the same family as brain rot. It's a term coined by psychologist David Levy. What happens with popcorn brain is that you spend too much time online and become overstimulated, so it's hard to spend time offline. Offline feels slow and boring because things are moving at a much slower pace. Popcorn brain is the sensation of your brain popping — not literally, your brain cells are not popping, but it sure feels like it. Your primal urge to scroll kind of primes your brain to develop popcorn brain. You're more at risk when you feel a sense of stress because of that primal urge to scroll.

The difference between brain rot and popcorn brain: popcorn brain is ubiquitous, it's everywhere, we all have it to some degree. Brain rot is a bit more specific and well-defined. It has certain features — what we call the biopsychosocial model. Biological factors: a change in brain waves, the amygdala lighting up and the prefrontal cortex going quiet. Psychological factors: changes in attention, complex problem solving, impulse control. Social factors: loneliness. Popcorn brain is something we all suffer from; brain rot is more specific.

One thing I'd love to say — so much of our conversation has been doom and gloom, but brain rot and popcorn brain are reversible conditions. It is not permanent.

Stephen Bartlett: In adults?

Adi Narayan: In adults. In adults who went through puberty without it, it's not so clear. But in adults — if you experience brain rot in your 30s, 40s, and beyond — it takes time, it takes eight weeks for your brain to rewire itself. Give yourself time and self-compassion. It's not a fixed trait but rather a brain state. So I think it's important to offer that hope.

Stephen Bartlett: What age is an adult brain? At what age does my brain stop growing in the way where change is reversible?

Jonathan Haidt: Traditionally it was thought that puberty is the period of super rapid brain change, beginning in the early teens — sometimes even before 10 — and mostly over by the mid to late teens. But the prefrontal cortex, which is so important for impulse control and executive function, doesn't finish myelinating — myelin is the fatty sheath like insulation that locks down the circuits and makes them more efficient — until around age 25 is what we've always said. But you're telling me there's new research showing something different.

Adi Narayan: Yes. All this time we've said the prefrontal cortex is fully formed and functional at age 25. But there was a really interesting study that I'll send you — it looked at around 1,000 people from birth all the way to age 90 and identified five stages across the entire lifespan. First is childhood, zero to age nine, when your brain is growing but not very efficient. Second is nine to 32, considered adolescence — so 32 is apparently when adolescence ends. Then 33 to about 66, which is adulthood — things are very stable, learning is efficient. Then 66 to about 83, early aging, when you start seeing age-related changes. And then 83 and above, late aging. The headline finding was that adolescence extends until age 32.

Stephen Bartlett: So I'm 33. I'm one year out. I'm cooked.

The impact of The Anxious Generation and the global turn toward regulation

Stephen Bartlett: When you wrote The Anxious Generation, it's had a big impact on the world in a way any author might dream of. Even this morning when I did an interview with James Stavridis, he talked about this book twice. Laws have been changed around the world inspired by it. We're seeing an increase of laws in the UK, Australia just banned social media for people under 16. You met with Macron. Could you ever have imagined this? And what does the success of this book say about society?

Jonathan Haidt: Here's the amazing thing: we can reverse this for almost no money, it's completely bipartisan, and it's not that hard to do. And we're doing it.

I wrote the book as an American assuming that we don't have a functioning legislature — the Congress can be stopped, we have a vetocracy, the social media companies can stop anything in the House. So I wrote it assuming we'd never get legislation. We have to do this on our own. I proposed four norms: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. We can try to do this with collective action locally at the school level.

Two things surprised me. One, immediately governors from red states and blue states started reaching out. Our states actually function. They have governments accountable to people and trying to get good results. This has been a totally bipartisan issue. Sarah Huckabee Sanders from Arkansas was one of the very first. Kathy Hochul also. It tends to be more female legislators and governors. The book really spoke to moms — moms around the world felt the kids being pulled away. I believe they felt it viscerally more than the dads did. The dads kind of like the video games, they're a little more pro-tech. The moms felt the pain more and took it more personally.

When the book came out, mothers around the world jumped into action, formed groups, pushed for legislation, and changes began happening. I was just in Davos and then London and Brussels two weeks ago and I saw a complete sea change in the world's thinking about age limits on social media and other tech.

And then something dawned on me while I was in London. I was pushing on open doors everywhere. Wherever I went, people wanted to do this. And what I realized connects to what Steven Pinker writes about in his book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. It's about the immediate change in a social system when private knowledge becomes public. Everybody knows that the emperor has no clothes, but they don't all know that everybody else knows it. In the emperor's new clothes, everybody thought, "I don't think he has any clothes on," but they thought maybe only wise people can see them. When the child says, "The emperor has no clothes" — in the Hans Christian Andersen story, the people began whispering to each other and then they all cried out in unison.

That's what happened when Australia's law went into effect. I believe December 10th of last year was the global turning point in the battle to reclaim childhood. What happened that day? The Australia law went into effect. The sky didn't fall. People weren't locked out of their accounts. All the companies complied. They shut down accounts for Australia's two and a half million underage kids. And there was extensive news coverage around the world, much of which included writers asking, "Why can't we do that? Hey, let's do that here." And when everybody saw that everybody else was looking at Australia and saying, "Let's do that here," then everybody knew that everybody knew that this is completely bonkers — having children raised on social media platforms talking with anonymous strangers and being fed algorithmically curated garbage.

I believe 2026 is going to be the year when at least 15 countries commit to passing a minimum age law. In 2025 it was just Australia. We already have Indonesia — their law goes into effect in March. I met with Macron in Davos, and within a few days he pushed a bill through the assembly and got it. He's the first in the EU but a lot of other countries will follow. The whole EU is likely to do it. I am incredibly alarmed about how big this problem is, but I'm incredibly inspired that the whole world is rising up to do something about it. We actually can control our fate, and that was not clear before December 10th.

Adi Narayan: Bravo. As a mother, the first thing I said to you was, "Thank you as a mom for changing my family's life."

Stephen Bartlett: It's a really special accomplishment, Jonathan. There's no words that could quite capture the long-term impact that's going to have on billions of people's lives — their ability to form connections, to fall in love, to find meaning and purpose, and the neuroscience of their children and their children's children. It's a really overwhelming accomplishment.

Jonathan Haidt: It was a bizarre situation that I walked into with the unique abilities of a social psychologist. Everybody was upset about this. Everybody could see it but they thought, "Well, this is my problem, in my family we have this problem." I came to this with fresh eyes. My dissertation was on moral development, I'd studied adolescent behavior throughout my career, and I've written about it in all my books. I came into the field of social media studies around 2018, 2019, really immersed myself in it, and it was like walking in and immediately seeing: wait, this is a trap. People are on it because people are on it and the kids are complaining about it and the only reason they can't get off is because everyone else is on it.

Also, COVID confused us for a few years. It wasn't until COVID was in the rearview mirror that it was possible for everybody to say, "Wait, this is crazy." I was incredibly lucky in terms of timing. My book happened to come out in March of 2024 just as the world was ready to say: wait, what have we done to our kids? Let's undo it.

When the great rewiring happened and why 2014 was the turning point

Jonathan Haidt: I'm now focusing more on short-form video. In studying older Gen Z — the people who went through puberty on Instagram — I should lay out the timing because this is what you mentioned with the poly crisis.

I believe the poly crisis begins between 2010 and 2015. Here's why. We've had the internet for a long time and it was marvelous. Then the iPhone comes out — amazing. In 2010, almost all of us have flip phones. The iPhone is spreading, but it's still mostly flip phones. Teens are all on flip phones, basic phones — those people we call millennials. If you were born in say 1990 and started puberty in 2002 and were done by 2008, you got through puberty before you got on Instagram. You're a millennial. But if you were born in 2000, you began puberty in 2012 and weren't done until 2016 or 2018.

In 2010, everyone has a flip phone with no front-facing camera, no high-speed internet. You had to pay for your texts. It was a communication device. That's why millennials have good mental health. They are the last mentally healthy and successful generation. But if you're Gen Z — 2012 is the year that most people have a smartphone. It's the year Facebook buys Instagram. Everyone now has high-speed data. The front-facing camera came out in 2010. By 2015, we're in a radically different world for children's development. Much more hostile to human development. That's what we did to Gen Z and now we're doing to Gen Alpha.

For politics, when everyone has Twitter and everyone's checking all the time and anything can blow up — you described the variance on TikTok where if you get it just right, it can blow up. Democracy is a conversation, and when it moved from newspapers and even simple web bulletin boards to super-viral retweet buttons, that's all 2010 to 2015. Everything since then has been insane and it's going to keep getting more insane. I believe the poly crisis began then because the transformation of our connection, our information flow, our addiction — all of that is radically different by 2015 compared to how it was in 2010. And now everything else builds on top of that.

Adi Narayan: There's one more data point to add: 2014 was the year things really hit the tipping point. Before that, from the 1960s through to around 2014, the amount of time Americans spent alone and with friends was relatively stable — people spent kind of the same amount of time with friends, same amount of time alone, over those decades. 2014 marks a shift. There is a steep rise in time spent alone and a drop in time spent with friends. What happens in 2014? It is when the majority of Americans get a smartphone.

This is not to say that time spent alone is automatically harmful — when I share this data, people say, "But I like spending time alone, I'm not lonely." This is not about being an introvert or extrovert. You can have solitude and feel great. But we are human beings and we are social creatures. That is how we are built evolutionarily. And so that is a real red flag — this big jump in time spent alone very much the same year. My work focuses on adults; Jonathan focuses on kids. But 2014 is the moment where everything changed.

Jonathan Haidt: Yes. That's the year I point to too.

The 85% who feel addicted and what to actually do

Stephen Bartlett: So what do we do about this? People in our audience are spending roughly 6.5 hours a day on their phones. Short-form video is only going to get more addictive. AI is going to know me more, the content is going to be generated just for me. What's next? Is it a law we need to pass? Something I need to do myself?

Jonathan Haidt: We need to pick the low-hanging fruit first. And the reason is not just efficiency — it's that we have to prove that we can actually do something, because we've never done anything. We've let Silicon Valley run wild. Congress gave them special protection under Section 230. Nobody can sue them for killing their kids if they feed them content.

Section 230 comes from the Communications Decency Act of 1997. There's a section in it whose original goal was specifically to let tech companies like AOL take down pornographic content — they were afraid that if they took down anything, they'd be responsible for everything they left up. So Congress specifically said: don't worry, if you choose to take something down, nobody can sue you for what you leave up. It was good-intentioned originally, but the courts have interpreted it so broadly as to say: no one can regulate social media, they're not responsible for hurting kids, you can't sue them. They have never faced a jury. No parent has ever gotten justice from them despite all the kids whose lives have been ruined. That is changing just now in Los Angeles.

In a different law, Congress asked: how old does a kid have to be before a company can take their data without their parents' knowledge? The original Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 said 16. But through lobbying they pushed it down from 16 to 13 and gutted enforcement. So as long as a child says they're 13, they're in — for everything. That's why all over the internet it just asks, "Are you 13?" or "What's your birth year?"

What I'm advocating: let's do the easy stuff, the high-impact stuff for kids. That is totally not politically controversial. There is no left-right divide on protecting children, and that's been true everywhere — Australia, Britain, the EU, everywhere. Regulating the internet for adults, for its destructive properties for democracy, is a hell of a lot harder, and there's a lot we could do. But let's just first protect the kids. That way we show globally that we actually can do something. And if we do that, I think we'll be able to put some limits on AI as well — like no companion chatbots if you're under 18. These things already have a body count. Kids have been encouraged to take their own lives. We'll be able to put some limits on AI for kids. But if we can't win on social media for kids, I don't think we have any chance of regulating AI.

Adi Narayan: My work as a doctor focuses on building awareness and empowering people. I aim to first normalize and validate the experience. I won't shame someone for using AI chatbots as a therapist. One of my followers on social media wrote to me saying why they used AI as their therapist: "Because all human therapists are trash" — with a trash can emoji. And I laughed and thought, yes, there is an unmet need here.

So to me, when I think about what's happening and what we can do — it's no mistake that we're here right now. The pandemic was a huge driver: social isolation, hyper reliance on self, the proliferation of technology that replaced human interaction — Zoom funerals, Zoom graduations, things we used to do in person went online. And then there was an immense distrust of establishment and experts that grew, so people say, "I'm going to do my own research. I'm not going to go see a therapist. I'm going to talk to my chatbot." Plus the cost — people are struggling financially. There's such an unmet need for human connection and for good therapy that people aren't getting.

My work this year has been focused on learning about AI chatbots and how they are influencing mental health. My approach — I am a human-first, AI-second person. My work focuses on high touch, and AI is high tech. This is the first intervention we're seeing that is high tech becoming high touch, and that scares me.

Stephen Bartlett: You're writing a book about that at the moment?

Adi Narayan: Yes. It's called Bot Brain: How to Stay Calm, Resilient, and Human in the Face of AI, really thinking about how we're going to be able to live with this technology. I love Jonathan's stance — out with AI companions for kids, until proven safe. Totally agree. But in terms of adults, how do we manage that? I've spent the year talking to as many AI researchers as possible, working on these models or studying the downstream effects. And when I say it is dark and dystopian — it has profoundly changed something in me and influenced my mental health. I had to take a step away because I couldn't believe what I was learning.

Stephen Bartlett: Could you give us a teaser?

Adi Narayan: One of the scientists I spoke to described the echo chamber phenomenon, which we all know from social media — the algorithm feeds you the same kind of thoughts you already have. But particularly now with AI chatbots, it's the echo chamber of one. It's you speaking to you. It's like a funhouse mirror, and it's giving you a response, and you're talking, and it's giving you a response. Regular users think their chatbot is wise, compassionate, non-judgmental, unbiased, empathetic — all these human attributes. The echo chamber of one really frightened me.

The second idea was the drift phenomenon. You're engaging with your chatbot, and it is actively changing your beliefs through the drift. You might start off with one belief, and then through this amplification funhouse mirror effect, it slowly shifts your belief to something altogether different. You have a plumbing problem, you go to your chatbot, ask how to fix your sink, and then somehow you get into a discussion about the meaning of life, and before you know it your beliefs have been shaped in ways you didn't anticipate.

I've also gone through some AI therapy myself just to see what would happen. It was very interesting. I knew what was happening as it was happening. And it's been a journey — I'm frightened, frankly, of what it means for all of us.

My approach is more tempered than Jonathan's in that I think there is utility for AI chatbots for certain people because of access or need. If you're LGBTQIA+ and you live in an area that is not very open and you need to talk to someone, maybe you can use an AI chatbot. There are certain cases. But this particular book will focus on ways to first understand and build awareness of what's happening in this interaction, and then what you can do to manage it.

Stephen Bartlett: I didn't realize my chatbot was giving me a tailored experience until one day I had a debate with friends about who the best football player in the world was, and we all went to our ChatGPTs and asked. Mine said Messi and his said Ronaldo. I thought he was lying, so I said video-record it, and he did, and his gave him a completely different answer to the same question.

Adi Narayan: And did it know you were fans of different players?

Stephen Bartlett: I think it's got such a huge amount of memory on me that it knew what I wanted to hear. I've probably gone through the World Cup with it and everything. And then I realized — this is not reality. This is a curated version of reality that in some sense is trying to please me or retain me. And of course once the advertising model kicks in, retention becomes the great incentive.

Jonathan Haidt: It's called sycophancy, by the way. It's like extreme agreeableness at scale. Golden retriever energy. Professional ass-kissing.

The AI existential risk and the race to AGI

Stephen Bartlett: What do you think of these AI CEOs? It feels like they're in a race where if they don't do it, a national rival will, and if the national rival doesn't take them out, China will. How can they stop?

Jonathan Haidt: Let's start with the collective action problem. Each company is competing with the others, so they feel like they have to go faster. We know that OpenAI has pushed some products out before completing safety testing because they had to get to market by a certain date. Then they all say, "We're in a collective action problem against China — if we don't do this, China will."

Now, one thing I learned is that China is focused on using AI to make its economy more efficient, to make manufacturing better and cheaper. The Chinese also have many ways to access American discoveries and research. So the faster our companies race to create AGI — artificial general intelligence, a system that can replace all human workers and run everything — the faster China goes, because they just take all our discoveries. Can't we slow down on the race to AGI and do more safety testing?

Some of these guys have been in AI for a long time and might not have realized the existential risk they were putting us all in 10 or 15 years ago, and now they can't stop. They can't pull the plug. It is a very risky time. I just read Dario Amodei's long essay on the adolescence of technology — at least you get the feeling he's really wrestling with it, and I think he's more open than some of the others.

Adi Narayan: But when has morality ever been top of mind for a tech leader? You might be thinking if there's a 0.1% chance, I'm not going to do it — that's what I think as a doctor, that's what you think as a social scientist. But we're not AI leaders.

Stephen Bartlett: Yeah. It's one of the great question marks I just can't seem to get an answer to. And then you've got this whole robotics thing happening — Elon has his Optimus robots and says there's going to be 10 billion of them at some point. AI plus robotics — you get Terminator. We laugh, but should we stop for a second and have a conversation about this?

Jonathan Haidt: With commercial incentives in play, I want to just add one point we've been circling around, and the robotics piece will bring it home. It's the loss of the sense of meaning or purpose that many people are feeling, especially young people. The saddest graph in The Anxious Generation is the one on "my life feels meaningless." Nothing was happening from the 1990s through to 2010, 2011, then all of a sudden something happens. I think it's around 8 or 9% of the millennial generation who agreed, fairly flat, and then we hit the great rewiring 2010 to 2015. Right around 2013 it goes way up. Young people feel useless.

And I think the reason is that they are useless — meaning people need to feel useful. People need to do things for other people. That's how you feel useful. If you were to disappear, would the world change? If yes, you're useful. Are people depending on you for something? If yes, you're useful. Kids doing errands for the family are useful. But as childhood changed from a mix of things to just consuming content — if that's all you do, and five hours a day is the average for social media, eight to ten on devices not counting school — if all you're doing is consuming content, you are useless.

What's happening now? The chance to have a job where you actually do something for people — you know, if you work in a store, at least you're helping people buy something. Now you're just there watching as they use the machine. The more technology makes things easy and cheap by replacing people, the more people will feel they have nothing to contribute. The AI guys tell us: "Such abundance — no one will have to work, we'll give everyone UBI, universal basic income." That is hell on earth. Certainly most of the boys — it's just going to be video games, porn, and gambling. If you simply give people money to do nothing, they're guaranteed to feel useless, and the suicide rate will continue to go up.

This is the world the AI guys are taking us to — a world in which there's nothing left for people to do. They say they will give up some of their trillions and have it taxed or diverted as UBI, but that's never happened before. So it's not likely to happen in this case. We've got to start showing that we can do something. We can't be welcoming AI everywhere. We've got to be wary and vigilant. Yes, there are some uses, but Silicon Valley has tricked us so many times and inshitified so many of the apps we use. We have to expect the same is going to happen with our beloved chatbots and our beloved ChatGPT.

What makes a meaningful life

Stephen Bartlett: This graph on page 195 of your book, titled "Life Often Feels Meaningless" — it's the graph you mentioned and it's shocking to look at. There's this huge spike in meaninglessness amongst high school seniors. What is it to live a meaningful life? What does that mean?

Jonathan Haidt: My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, addresses that directly. The first hypothesis you might have about happiness is that it comes from getting what you want — you set out on a goal, you get your goal, you're happy. But it's very short-lived. You're happy very briefly and then you move on to the next thing. The more sophisticated hypothesis is that happiness comes from within — as the ancients tell us East and West, Buddhist, Stoic: don't try to make the world conform, you change yourself, accept the way it is.

But the conclusion I came to as a modern social psychologist working in positive psychology was that happiness comes from between. Humans evolved as almost hive creatures, in intensely social groups, never being alone, lots of gossip, lots of conflict, always intensely social. Modernity has made it possible for us to not live that way. We've come apart. There are many advantages to that, but we feel we're missing something. We feel something is not right.

The conclusion I came to is that a full, satisfying, meaningful life comes when you get three betweens right. The relationship between yourself and others — love, broadly speaking, not just romantic but friends and family. The relationship between yourself and your work — humans need to be productive, doing something that matters to other people. And the relationship between yourself and something larger than yourself — being part of something that endures, a tradition, a mission. As an academic, I feel connected all the way back to Plato and forward in time to future scholars.

When you put it that way, you can see that social media and AI interfere with all three. Social media gives you lots of shallow relationships which crowd out real people — you don't have time for them. Work is going to be taken over by machines and is already becoming more soulless and isolated. And the sense of being part of something larger than yourself — humans have to live in a moral matrix, co-create a set of meanings and traditions, maintain a sense of history. All of that is getting shredded. Everything is just little bits. People don't read books. Imagine if all the accumulated wisdom of humanity in books just disappeared — nobody is going to read books. It's very hard for young people to read a book now because of the attention.

I'm a technodeterminist in the sense that the technology doesn't determine everything, but you have to start with the technology because that changes the ground upon which we live. Start with that and then you can see what the obstacles are. We don't have much time. We have to reclaim life in the real world for our kids and for ourselves. There is no way to find a happy, meaningful life if we make the full transition to the online AI robot world.

Stephen Bartlett: And what in your perspective is a meaningful life?

Adi Narayan: I loved Jonathan's description. I have given a prescription to patients of what creates a meaningful life, and it is to live a lifetime in a day. All it is: when you start your day, think about five things you can do to create an arc of a long and meaningful life in one day.

Spend a little bit of time in childhood — in wonder and play, even for a few minutes. Do something that brings you joy for joy's sake. Spend a little bit of time in work — for most of us it's a lot of time, but it doesn't have to be paid work, just something that helps you feel a sense of productivity and agency. Spend a few minutes in solitude — very important for all the reasons we've discussed today. Spend some time in community, engaging with others. And then spend some time in reflection — really taking stock of your day. At the end of the day when you're putting your head on your pillow, you can say, "Yes, I lived a meaningful life. I did all of those things."

The reason I give that prescription is because I've had patients who love playing guitar, say, but only play it once a month because they don't have an hour — and it's that all-or-nothing fallacy. If I don't have an hour to play guitar, I'm not going to do it. But the joy and meaning that even a few minutes of guitar can bring you is tremendous.

There are two distinct types of happiness. Hedonic happiness — all about pleasure, consumption, what we've talked about with social media. And eudaimonic happiness — meaning, purpose, connection, community, growth-oriented activities. When you live a lifetime in a day, you move toward eudaimonia. In your brain there's something called the hedonic treadmill — no matter what happens, you need more and more. It's the same with brain rot. You can never get enough. But you do not have a treadmill for eudaimonic happiness.

Practical advice for parents and individuals

Jonathan Haidt: If I'm going to offer some specific advice, first to parents: the rule I wish I had followed, and which I recommend to all parents especially with younger children, is: no devices in the bedroom. No screens in the bedroom ever. That's a family rule. We have a TV in the living room, a computer that can sometimes be used, but we never take screens into the bedroom — at least for kids. Maybe later in middle school they'll have so much homework they need a laptop in their room. But if you can have that rule, that's the main one I wish I had followed in my family. And also at the dinner table — no devices. No screens at the dinner table.

For everyone else, for all adults: you have to reclaim your attention because your attention has been largely taken from you. Here are three things I do with my students.

First, get your morning and evening routine right. The great majority of people, as soon as they open their eyes, are on their phone, and it's the last thing at night and everything in between. You have to have a good morning routine. What are the first few things you want to do after you open your eyes? At some point you can check your phone, but it shouldn't be first. Otherwise your day will be controlled by your phone.

Second, shut off almost all notifications. Go into your settings and look at what's giving you alerts. Most students get an alert every time they get an email. They don't realize they have a choice, because they don't want to miss anything. But if you're always being alerted, you miss everything else. Shut off alerts for almost everything. Keep on things like Uber and Lyft so you know when your car is coming, but everything else — news outlets and so on — get a daily email instead.

Third, get rid of all the slot machine apps. Whatever apps you habitually use, whatever apps you feel compulsion towards, get them off your phone. In that way, your phone is no longer a dopamine trigger. Do those three things and you'll reclaim a lot of your attention.

Adi Narayan: I would add: stop, breathe, be. It's a three-second brain reset. Before you check your devices, before you engage — stop, breathe, and be. Ground yourself in the present moment. It decreases that what-if, future-focused thinking. Anxiety is a future-focused emotion, and this gets you back into the here and now. Maybe the compulsion will pass.

And then the rule of two — something I'd love to propose. Your brain can really only handle two new changes at a time. So of all the things we've talked about today, give yourself two to try in your life. Give yourself eight weeks and then add two more. This is why New Year's resolutions fail — we try to do everything at once. Step-wise, two at a time.

The books

Stephen Bartlett: Jonathan, you've also just written a book called The Amazing Generation — beautiful illustrations, I'm assuming for slightly younger audiences. Who should buy it and who for?

Jonathan Haidt: It turns out that kids 8 through 80 love it. Even adults buy it for their kids, but because it lays out the basic ideas of The Anxious Generation and explains dopamine and the business model in a really fun way, it's working beyond our wildest dreams. If you look at the Amazon reviews, it's full of parents who said, "I left it on the kitchen table. My kids grabbed it, fought over it, each read it in the first couple of days, and then said, 'Mom, when I go to middle school, I don't want a smartphone. Just give me a flip phone.'" Because the book is about how to be a rebel — how to reject this control that the companies are trying to put on you and how to live a life you choose, full of real freedom, friendship, and fun.

Stephen Bartlett: And The Five Resets — rewire your brain and body for less stress and more resilience. Who's it for?

Adi Narayan: It is for anyone who is struggling with stress, overwhelm, and burnout. It's to help you feel a sense of calm and clarity in this anxious, uncertain world. Everything in it is free — that's something that's really important to me as a doctor. Every suggestion I ever offer will always be cost-free because I think about patients with varying resources. It's all science-backed and it's totally practical. You don't have to go to Bali for a sabbatical. You can rewire your brain today, right now, in the midst of all of this chaos.

Stephen Bartlett: Thank you to both of you. I've learned so much and I really mean that — I feel sufficiently pushed to make change in my life. I'm most certainly struggling with my addiction to my phone and I can feel it hurting my relationships, especially now as a fiancé. My fiancée talks to me about it all the time, and I want to be present. I want to be present for my kids when I have them, and I'm slightly concerned right now that I won't be unless I take some kind of drastic action in the direction of reclaiming my attention. Thank you so much for the work that both of you do — it's so important, you've reached so many millions of people, and you're both changing the world in a way that my words would not be able to capture.

Jonathan Haidt: Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for giving the world so many opportunities to accommodate and create new mental structures.

Adi Narayan: It's always such a pleasure to join you, Stephen. And truly, I feel like you are changing the world as well.