So we're living in this strange day and age when we've essentially biohacked all of the things that we do

and really come to organize our lives around our little rewards, right?

So we wake up in the morning, we reach for our phones, we have our cup of coffee, we have our favorite muffin.

Anna Lemke is a psychiatrist, professor, and medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University.

She's the author of Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

This is of course the great paradox that although we want to avoid pain, our efforts to avoid pain actually lead to more pain.

How if technology and modern living led to mass compulsion and overconsumption in America?

What is the societal impact of polarization driven by digital media?

We are not present for other people when we are entranced by our phones.

And this is going to have devastating generational repercussions for all of us.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanyi Kelluk.

I'm Alente.

Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So I'm going to read something that I think might sound controversial.

One of the biggest risk factors for getting addicted to any drug is easy access to that drug. So in the world where harm reduction policies for drug abuse

and so forth are kind of the norm,

this seems like an incredibly controversial thing to say.

Well, it is surprisingly controversial in this day and age,

and yet it's very evidence-based.

If you look at, for example, opioids, it's very clear that if you have a region in which

opioids are readily available, either because of porous borders and being imported illegally,

...