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The Dopamine Expert: Anna Lembke on Addiction, Screens, and AI Companions (The Diary Of A CEO)

Jan 2025 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

In this January 2025 episode of The Diary Of A CEO, host Steven Bartlett interviews Stanford addiction psychiatrist Anna Lembke in a wide-ranging conversation about dopamine, childhood, and addiction. Lembke connects her clinical addiction-medicine framework to social media and AI-driven products, including AI companion toys marketed to children, arguing that recommendation systems and conversational AI are often built to hold a user's attention rather than to serve their wellbeing. She expresses particular concern for adolescents, describing their brains as still developing and therefore more susceptible to compulsive engagement with digital and AI products, and notes a pattern of some teenagers meeting more of their social needs through digital interaction rather than in person. TechKids Foundation cites this interview for its discussion of newer AI-companion products alongside the more established social-media and smartphone concerns already in this library.

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Bartlett, Steven, host. "The Dopamine Expert: Anna Lembke." The Diary Of A CEO, 2 Jan. 2025.

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