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The Dopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine! Your Childhood Shapes Future Addictions! — Dr. Anna Lembke

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

In this January 2025 episode, Stanford addiction-medicine psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke discusses how she believes modern products — smartphones, sugar, and increasingly AI companions — create dependency-like reward loops, and connects adult patterns of compulsive use back to childhood experience. She extends her clinical framework to AI companion products, including companion toys marketed to children, arguing that recommendation systems and conversational AI are frequently built to hold attention rather than serve a user's wellbeing. She expresses particular concern for adolescents, describing their still-developing brains as more susceptible to compulsive engagement, and notes a pattern of some teenagers meeting more of their social needs through digital interaction than in person. TechKids Foundation cites this interview for its early discussion of AI-companion products alongside the more established social-media and smartphone concerns already documented in this library, ahead of Lembke's return appearance a year later.

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Bartlett, Steven, host. "The Dopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine!" Interview with Anna Lembke. The Diary Of A CEO, January 2, 2025.

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