Talk

Brain Rot Emergency: These Internal Documents Prove They're Controlling You! — Jonathan Haidt & Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

Feb 2026 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

In this February 2026 episode of The Diary Of A CEO, host Steven Bartlett brings social psychologist Jonathan Haidt together with physician and stress-resilience researcher Dr. Aditi Nerurkar for a conversation the show bills as a 'brain rot emergency.' The two guests describe short-form video and near-constant phone use as associated with shrinking attention spans, a pattern they nickname 'popcorn brain,' and with reduced memory accuracy among heavy users. Haidt extends arguments from his own published work linking phone-based routines during childhood to the teen mental-health concerns this library tracks, while Nerurkar raises AI chatbots as a newer front in the same attention economy. Neither guest frames these patterns as a diagnosis; both describe them as risk factors compounding for a generation raised online. TechKids Foundation includes this entry because it carries two credentialed voices already in this library to a mainstream business-and-culture audience well beyond their usual readership.

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CITATION

Bartlett, Steven, host. "Brain Rot Emergency: These Internal Documents Prove They're Controlling You!" Interview with Jonathan Haidt and Aditi Nerurkar. The Diary Of A CEO, February 16, 2026.

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