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Hello and welcome to Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 and this is a special episode of the excerpt.

Addiction to tech is a topic that resonates with almost everyone. We live in a world where screens and devices are ubiquitous.

And our smartphones are often the last thing we look at before we go to bed

and the first thing when we wake up.

What tolls is taken on our work lives, our families, and society overall?

And what about our children?

Well, dozens of states are now blaming technology giants like Meta for the mental health

crisis in our youth and are suing to come up with a fix.

Our guest is Adam Alter, professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of

Business and an expert on addictive technology and what we can do about it.

Thanks for joining us, Adam.

Thanks for having me.

So let's start by defining an addiction to tech.

Is there a generally accepted metric here, so many hours a day online on your phone, on a specific app?

What's the yardstick here?

You know, we talk traditionally about substance addictions, but here this is a behavioral addiction so there's no

substance that you're ingesting into the body but if your phenomenological

experience in other words what it feels like subjectively to use the screen is

similar in certain ways then I think it rises to the level of addiction.

And for me, that is where you feel compelled to return to that device over and over again,

...