Lulu Garcia Navarro
speaker
2,001 appearances
28 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Jun
Lulu Garcia Navarro’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
You published your book, Dopamine Nation, in 2021 with the thesis that the overabundance of modern culture has us constantly stimulated by dopamine. And that's only accelerated since your book was published. And I'm just wondering, broadly, does it feel like a whole new world for your research has opened up just since you've written your last book?
You work in Stanford's Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, which is a bit of a mouthful, but essentially you see patients, right, about addiction. Yes. So generally speaking, have you seen things in your practice that weren't there before that you're seeing now since the pandemic? Yes.
This is like a timeline of like our culture that that is very, very and I'm going to use the word sobering because it is very sobering. Yeah. Yeah. I do want to sort of establish some of the basics of your work and some of the language that you've already used so we can understand what it means. How do you define addiction?
Is there a difference between addictive behaviors and being an addict?
And I'll tell you why I asked this. Because my understanding has always been that addicts cannot control their compulsion. And then addictive behaviors are more habits that can be moderated or controlled. But I think what I'm hearing from you suggests that that's not the right way to think about it.
And when you're saying it's like a judgment call, is that a judgment that one makes oneself or is that a judgment that someone like you would make if I went to go see you?
So, you know, we've become extremely attached to our phones. And phones do seem to be like the gateway to a lot of these new addictive behaviors. Online sports betting has exploded. Pornography use, as you mentioned, is up, even as actual sex is down. I mean, I was reading a study that said in 2024, Gen Z spent six to seven hours a day scrolling on average.
So I guess it seems like it's more a systemic problem than an individual problem.
You've called this the plenty paradox, right? Which is the more we have, the worse off we are because we're being bombarded all the time with dopamine producing things and that makes us actually feel worse.
Do you see us all as addicts now?
I mean, you know, you have great authority and expertise on this area, but also you are part of the Anthropocene era and you are a human in this world and also a mother. And I'm just wondering how you navigate this for yourself and for your family.
You didn't even have internet in your home?
I am going to tell the New York Times that I am just unplugging from the Internet and I don't think it's going to go very well.
You know, I'm imagining this beautiful utopia where we have communal spaces where there's no Internet. And obviously you can get that by going out into the wilderness. But the way that our society is moving is that we are now having wearable devices like glasses. There are discussions about implants in our heads. And we have, of course, the rise of artificial intelligence.
I mean, the New York Times just published a profile of a woman who fell in love with her AI boyfriend. I mean, it seems like a lot of these technologies are actually going in the direction to pushing us to even more engagement.
After the break, Dr. Lemke shares her theory about why modern life is making us so susceptible to addiction.
So even as we've seen the rise of temptations, we've also seen the rise of other things to counterbalance them. In 2021, I was an early adopter of the Zempik, which is part of that class of drugs known as GLP-1s. And I had done everything to lose weight, including surgery, but this was the first thing that really worked for me.
And I know we don't know exactly how these drugs work, but one thing that we are seeing is that it seems to curb other addictive behaviors. And I'm wondering what you make of that.
You know, in your book, you seem to be skeptical of medical interventions. And one undercurrent of the conversation around GLP-1s is how long people should stay on them. Do you encourage people to create new habits to try and get off the medication? Or is there no problem as far as you can see it with staying on them long term?
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, talking to you because one of the things that you emphasize a lot are like the systems that we live in, the food systems, the pharmaceutical systems, the cultural systems that we inhabit. And I also do wonder what you make of these large cultural shifts that we're seeing in regards to behaviors.
Showing 1861–1880 of 2,001 · page 94 of 101
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