Psychiatrist and Chief of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University, Anna Lembke is one of the world's leading voices on the neuroscience of addiction and compulsive behaviour. Her bestselling book Dopamine Nation revealed how the modern world has engineered an unprecedented crisis of overconsumption, exposing how digital platforms, social media, and algorithmic design deliberately exploit the brain's dopamine-driven reward systems to maximise engagement at the expense of human wellbeing. Her work forces us to ask a deeply uncomfortable question: in optimising our digital environments for attention and engagement, are we rewiring what it means to be human?

In this opening interview, Anna Lembke examines what it means to be human in a world optimised for compulsion. Drawing on neuroscience and decades of clinical experience, she confronts the structural challenges of resisting technologies built to override our capacity for self-regulation, and asks what it might take to reclaim our autonomy. Join Lembke for a conversation about pleasure, pain, and the future of human agency.