Speaker 1: I get a team.
Speaker 2: Welcome to another installment of your favorite bloody podcast. It's
Speaker 2: a beautiful day in the thriving metropolis. I've got to
Speaker 2: tell you twenty five degrees in Melbourne. It's almost April.
Speaker 2: It's bloody uncanny. I've been out and done my ten
Speaker 2: thousand steps, very proud of myself. But it wasn't hard today.
Speaker 2: So I hope wherever you are, whatever you do on
Speaker 2: this finds you well. We've got some exciting news coming
Speaker 2: up very soon from probably our favorite typ guest, I
Speaker 2: would assume is we probably get the most feedback about him.
Speaker 1: Are you a big walker, Gillespoe?
Speaker 2: Do you get out and about I can't see you
Speaker 2: getting out in suburbia just clocking up your steps or
Speaker 2: checking your stats.
Speaker 3: Ah? I do, actually, but I do it at four
Speaker 3: in the morning.
Speaker 4: So I take We've got two dogs and I take
Speaker 4: them for a walk in the bushland across the road
Speaker 4: every morning at about four am.
Speaker 1: Is that not? Is that not pitch black? Dark in
Speaker 1: the bush?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I have a headlamp. Yeah, okay, possums and things?
Speaker 1: What kind of X murderers? What's kind? Yeah? Fucking criminals?
Speaker 1: What kind of dogs do you.
Speaker 3: Have Kelby water Collie crosses.
Speaker 2: So the fucking the genie of the species they are,
Speaker 2: they are, they well trained.
Speaker 3: They can be when they want to be.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're smart enough to know when they should behave
Speaker 4: but they can also be fools.
Speaker 3: When they're not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but they are. I know this is not
Speaker 2: our topic, but we're dog glovers here. They're kind, They're
Speaker 2: need crazy exercise, right, They're not a.
Speaker 1: Sitting in the house. They're not a sitting around dog.
Speaker 4: One of the ones that we got him from a
Speaker 4: farmer's you know, they that are at a farm and
Speaker 4: it's got to see the parents working. And the farmer
Speaker 4: was saying to us, look, he's heard that you can
Speaker 4: you run them nine kilometers in a day and then
Speaker 4: they start to feel a bit tired.
Speaker 3: They're not they're not getting anywhere, they're not killing meets
Speaker 3: with me.
Speaker 2: But which ry, Well, I'm sure you do your best,
Speaker 2: but well, the thing is, you can walk five k's
Speaker 2: and they'll run ten cas while you're walking five because
Speaker 2: they're not walking step by step beside you.
Speaker 3: I know, I put them on a lead, you know.
Speaker 4: I when I had one a little while ago, it
Speaker 4: was a bit better behaved than this pair, and he
Speaker 4: you could let him off, but this pair just dig
Speaker 4: each other on.
Speaker 3: I prefer to have him on the lead. How old
Speaker 3: are they one and two?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you've got ten years at least of
Speaker 2: exhaustion ahead of you. It's like, well, at least you've
Speaker 2: got an accountability partner or two for your walking.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: They won't let you stop that.
Speaker 3: No they're not. They're not letting me sleep in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's probably a good thing. How are you. How's
Speaker 1: things up in Sunshine?
Speaker 3: Statement? Pretty good?
Speaker 4: About the same as there weather wise, Well, it sounds
Speaker 4: of a twenty six degrees beautiful day.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2: We're not getting too many of these generally, but this
Speaker 2: whole week in Melbourne is very atypical. So I'm pretty
Speaker 2: excited about. It's like mid twenties every day. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I don't know why, but I'll take it. But speaking
Speaker 2: of good things, so you've got a good thing, shameless plug.
Speaker 2: You've got a new book coming out next Tuesday, which,
Speaker 2: by the time people hear this, it will be Tuesday.
Speaker 2: So to listeners today today, Gillespo's book is called The
Speaker 2: Attention Recovery. The attention recovery plan, how to win the
Speaker 2: battle for focus in a world built to break it?
Speaker 2: What was the I know we've touched on this before,
Speaker 2: but let's just start at the genesis. What was the
Speaker 2: impetus for this?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a lot of things.
Speaker 4: So I've written two books previously about this kind of stuff,
Speaker 4: So Team Brain back in twenty seventeen and Brain Reset
Speaker 4: in twenty nineteen, and they were.
Speaker 3: Both about the fact that.
Speaker 4: Phone software on phones is being explicitly engineered to break
Speaker 4: teenager's brains, which was the initial one in Team Brain,
Speaker 4: and Brain Reset is about how that extends into mental health,
Speaker 4: so not just addiction, but anxiety, depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, all
Speaker 4: of that stuff and ADHD. So what this book is
Speaker 4: is people have read those first two books and they've said, well, geez,
Speaker 4: thanks for scaring us half to death, but what on
Speaker 4: earth are we supposed to do about it?
Speaker 3: This is this is.
Speaker 1: You went, You went like, here's the problem.
Speaker 4: The end, the end, it's pretty awful, and it's getting
Speaker 4: worse by the second.
Speaker 3: Enjoy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for buying my book over and out on Davidson.
Speaker 4: But since then, and this is twenty nineteen is last
Speaker 4: time I wrote about this, and since then, you know,
Speaker 4: we've had massive increases in mental health issues in Australia,
Speaker 4: not the least brought on by the whole COVID thing,
Speaker 4: but they were happening anyway. I mean, we've seen three
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty percent increase in diagnosis in adult ADHD
Speaker 4: just in the last four years. We've seen doubling of
Speaker 4: the rates of anxiety and teen anxiety. And this is
Speaker 4: a disease that psychiatrists weren't even confident existed in the nineties.
Speaker 4: That is that teenagers could have anxiety depression going off
Speaker 4: the scale. Massive increases in things like schizophrenia, so public psychosis.
Speaker 4: People are having psychotic breaks in public, those kinds of things.
Speaker 4: We are in brand new territory impulse controlling teenagers, which
Speaker 4: is underlying much of what we're seeing in the current
Speaker 4: obsession around crime, you know, teenage crime and so on,
Speaker 4: and all of that is linked to a single point
Speaker 4: of failure in the human brain, which is explicitly engineered.
Speaker 4: So when you pick up your phone, you are engaging with.
Speaker 3: Millions of.
Speaker 4: Software developers engineering one of the most powerful ais ever
Speaker 4: built with one purpose in mind. Its only purpose is
Speaker 4: to keep you on that phone a second longer than
Speaker 4: you would otherwise would have been and when it gets that,
Speaker 4: it'll keep you there for another second. Its only purpose
Speaker 4: is that. So when you pick up your phone and
Speaker 4: you think you're having a bit of a scroll through
Speaker 4: your socials or playing a game, you are engaging with
Speaker 4: a machine and thousands of developers on the other side
Speaker 4: of that screen whose sole purpose in life is to
Speaker 4: keep you on that screen. Yes, and against that, not
Speaker 4: surprisingly we fail. And when we fail. And now, okay,
Speaker 4: that might be bad. People might waste time, and that
Speaker 4: would be a bad thing, I guess, But who am
Speaker 4: I to say what people should spend their time doing.
Speaker 4: Where it becomes really bad is that in order to
Speaker 4: make that happen, the science tells us they actually have
Speaker 4: to change your brain.
Speaker 3: Now, people would.
Speaker 4: Say, well, hang on, how can something that I don't
Speaker 4: inject or eat, you know, how can it change my brain?
Speaker 4: We know that the science of changing and rewiring a
Speaker 4: human brain can be done without chemicals, without interaction, without anything.
Speaker 3: Being put in your body.
Speaker 4: We've known that for centuries, and the reason we know
Speaker 4: that is something called gambling. We know that we can
Speaker 4: addict someone without putting anything in their body, and gambling
Speaker 4: is the pre eminent example of that. Pornography is probably
Speaker 4: a close second.
Speaker 1: I was I was just writing that down.
Speaker 2: I was thinking, it's almost from a virtue point of view,
Speaker 2: it's like porn addiction was the forerunner to what we're
Speaker 2: talking about now.
Speaker 1: Almost.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, And they're both powerful addictions. They're both capable
Speaker 4: of changing the human brain. And the ones we're talking
Speaker 4: about now, the ones that are on phones, besides those two,
Speaker 4: which are also on phones, just as capable of doing this.
Speaker 4: And the people who've designed them have learned the lessons
Speaker 4: from gambling and porn. They understand what they have to
Speaker 4: do to break your brain. And when I say break it,
Speaker 4: I mean actually physically change your brain. When you use
Speaker 4: these addictive things in the way they intend you to
Speaker 4: use them, your brain will change. A chemical bill will
Speaker 4: be released in your brain in response to it, called
Speaker 4: delta foss B, which actually affects your sensitivity to stimulation.
Speaker 4: It makes you much more tolerant of stimulation. At the
Speaker 4: same same time, it makes you crave more stimulation and
Speaker 4: also degrades your impulse control, significantly increases your anxiety, and
Speaker 4: significantly increases your likelihood of depression. It also degrades your
Speaker 4: ability to focus. So people say, oh, okay, sure, I
Speaker 4: understand that when I'm scrolling through my feed, Yeah, I
Speaker 4: get you three seconds of a real and move on
Speaker 4: to the next. And so I'm a bit scatter brained there.
Speaker 4: But that's that's the nature of the software I'm using.
Speaker 4: But the problem is by changing your brain, it isn't
Speaker 4: just there that it's having the effect. Your brain is changed.
Speaker 4: So when you go out into real life and you
Speaker 4: put the phone down, you have a three second attention
Speaker 4: span and that continues in everything you do. Now, you
Speaker 4: present to a doctor and describe that and they'll die
Speaker 4: diagnos you with ADHD. Which is why I wrote the
Speaker 4: article that I did that we're presumably going to talk
Speaker 4: about today, which is a four corner story, fabulous four
Speaker 4: corner story that came out this week about why the
Speaker 4: wealthier suburbs have the worst attention spans.
Speaker 1: You would have loved that.
Speaker 2: I saw when that came out, I went, if it
Speaker 2: is what I thought it was going to be, which
Speaker 2: I didn't watch it yet, I've recorded it.
Speaker 1: I'm like, Glespo will love this. I think.
Speaker 2: Also, I just want to jump back. You know, you
Speaker 2: said like their purposes to break your brain, and I'm
Speaker 2: not pushing back or disagreeing, but I feel like obviously
Speaker 2: their purpose is to make money for shareholders as but
Speaker 2: it's like the avenue or the path to that is
Speaker 2: by getting you addicted. The path to that is keeping
Speaker 2: you using that thing.
Speaker 4: And oh yeah, I think today it's like the cigarette companies.
Speaker 4: I mean, a cigarette company's purpose was to give you
Speaker 4: un cancer.
Speaker 3: They don't want to do that.
Speaker 2: It's a byproduct I don't care about. But I don't
Speaker 2: think they's care. Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 3: But you get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean people expect I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think people think that this thing called, you know,
Speaker 2: corporate altruism or corporate morality exists, and it's like that
Speaker 2: their job is not to look after your body or
Speaker 2: your brain or your health. All they care about is
Speaker 2: profit and loss, which is the purpose. Well, I don't know,
Speaker 2: not all organizations, but all companies. Basically their purpose is
Speaker 2: to make money. And if they can do something that
Speaker 2: isn't illegal, it is accepted. You care whether or not
Speaker 2: it's a moral, whether or not it's good or bad.
Speaker 2: They don't give a shit about that. Like their purpose
Speaker 2: is to sell stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and no one ever went broke selling addiction, okay,
Speaker 4: And I mean that takes a particular talent to have
Speaker 4: an addictive product and still not make money out of it.
Speaker 4: So you might wonder why someone like Instagram or Facebook
Speaker 4: or you know, the owning company Meta or any of
Speaker 4: the others are not picking on them, would spend billions
Speaker 4: and it is billions of dollars a year, employing thousands
Speaker 4: upon thousands of programmers to give a piece of software
Speaker 4: away for free. How much did you pay for your
Speaker 4: Instagram or your Facebook or you know not a.
Speaker 1: Sand Yeah, yea.
Speaker 4: So they spend billions of dollars on that and continue
Speaker 4: to spend billions of dollars on it so you can
Speaker 4: have it for free. Now, what kind of insane business
Speaker 4: model is that? It's clearly not the business model. When
Speaker 4: the product is free, you are the product. And here,
Speaker 4: our attention is the product, our engagement is the product.
Speaker 4: Its sole purpose is to keep us engaged and to
Speaker 4: be the only person who keeps us engaged. So they
Speaker 4: are competing with each other, obviously, and there's thousands of
Speaker 4: people out they are trying to do this and get
Speaker 4: a poll of this gig as well, and they've got
Speaker 4: to keep them at bay as well. So their goal
Speaker 4: every day is to improve their product, and what they
Speaker 4: mean by improve their product is improve engagement. And what
Speaker 4: they mean by improve engagement is improve addiction.
Speaker 3: So every single thing they.
Speaker 4: Do is targeted at just that, which is keeping you addicted.
Speaker 4: And if the only downside to that was wasting your time,
Speaker 4: then boohoo. But it's not because to addict you, they
Speaker 4: actually have to change your brain and that comes with
Speaker 4: a whole series of really awful consequences for society.
Speaker 1: You said, correct me if I get in and those
Speaker 1: numbers wrong.
Speaker 2: But there's been a three hundred and fifty percent increase
Speaker 2: in diagnosis of adult ADAHD has over what timeframe is
Speaker 2: that from now to back to when? Like, what's this
Speaker 2: darting point, like twenty years a lot?
Speaker 4: No, No, I think it's the last five years. I'll
Speaker 4: have to check that, but I think that the number
Speaker 4: was in the Full Corner show. I just don't have
Speaker 4: it immediately to hand.
Speaker 1: That's cool, it's very very recent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in general terms, when people are going to
Speaker 2: see clinical psychologists or neuropsychologists for these diagnoses, which It's
Speaker 2: like every second person that I seem to talk to
Speaker 2: is diagnosed with something in this kind of neurodivergent space,
Speaker 2: right any of them talking about, like other than prescribing pills,
Speaker 2: powders and potions and drugs, are any of them talking
Speaker 2: about like what you're talking about right now, like in like,
Speaker 2: drugs are not the answer.
Speaker 1: The answer is that you use your phone.
Speaker 2: Less, that you scroll, less that you are as Is
Speaker 2: that an impractical piece of advice for someone who's addicted.
Speaker 4: Oh that's a big question. Let's break it down into
Speaker 4: a few different things. First of all, they're not getting
Speaker 4: an endless selection of drugs here.
Speaker 3: They're getting amphetamines.
Speaker 4: And some of your listeners might know amphetamines by their
Speaker 4: street name, which is speed. So you might think to yourself,
Speaker 4: I'll hang on. If the symptoms of ADHD are hyperactivity
Speaker 4: and an ability to focus, then why would giving someone
Speaker 4: speed be a cure for that? What turns out it
Speaker 4: is because what those are symptoms of is insufficient dopamine
Speaker 4: to allow you to focus. Dopamine is the thing that
Speaker 4: allows you to focus. So what enables you to focus
Speaker 4: long enough on food or sex or whatever? It is
Speaker 4: that your body needs in order to get it is
Speaker 4: sufficient dopamine. And what happens when you become addicted to
Speaker 4: something is that the level of dopamine required increases because
Speaker 4: you become tolerant of the dopamine, You become acclimatized to it,
Speaker 4: and so.
Speaker 3: You need more and more and more.
Speaker 4: But what that also means is that your baseline levels
Speaker 4: are not enough to keep you focused, so that they're
Speaker 4: not enough for you to read a book or hold
Speaker 4: anything in your mind for more than well what study
Speaker 4: suggests forty seven seconds seems to be about the average
Speaker 4: attention span.
Speaker 3: Now, so when you don't have enough dopamine.
Speaker 4: The cure to that, some smart person figured out was, well,
Speaker 4: why not just give them some dopamine. Well, the easiest
Speaker 4: way to give someone a dopamine it is to do
Speaker 4: something addictive. Give them a cigarette, give them a drink,
Speaker 4: which is why people often refer to that as self medicating,
Speaker 4: or give them speed, which is what these drugs are,
Speaker 4: which is a lot more you know, fharmacol acceptable way
Speaker 4: of doing this, particularly with kids. So give them a
Speaker 4: dopamine stimulant and the dopamine will get to a level
Speaker 4: where they can focus, which is why people who have
Speaker 4: these symptoms report immediate improvement in their ability to think.
Speaker 4: They say, as soon as that thing hits their stomach,
Speaker 4: they suddenly feel normal. They can focus again, they can
Speaker 4: get stuff done, they can be clear headed, the voices
Speaker 4: turn off in their head.
Speaker 3: So it's no wonder. I mean, there are very.
Speaker 4: Few drugs for anything that have that kind of I
Speaker 4: mean even headaches don't do that.
Speaker 3: Yes, have that kind of effect. Problem.
Speaker 4: They wear off after about three or four hours, and
Speaker 4: so they have to take more. They do have longer,
Speaker 4: longer lasting versions they can give to kids that will
Speaker 4: last a whole school day now, but that's what they're
Speaker 4: giving them. The trouble is, and you might spot at
Speaker 4: the bit of a paradox in this, If the thing
Speaker 4: that's causing you to have the problem in the first
Speaker 4: place is too much dopamine stimulation, and the cure for
Speaker 4: that is a drug that stimulates dopamine, then you're eventually
Speaker 4: going to get to a point where nothing works because
Speaker 4: you're still going to be driving up that set point.
Speaker 4: You're still going to be driving up your tolerance for it.
Speaker 4: And when you get to that point in the human brain,
Speaker 4: what you develop is something called psychosis, which is anxiety
Speaker 4: about things that do not exist, so hallucinating around danger
Speaker 4: to yourself that doesn't exist. So it is anxiety taken
Speaker 4: to the next level. And in the four Corner Show
Speaker 4: on Monday night, they had one of the ED doctors
Speaker 4: presented saying, one of the things she's noticed with this
Speaker 4: massive wave of increase in the prescription of these drugs
Speaker 4: is many, many more presentations of psychosis or psychotic episode
Speaker 4: at ers m.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the thing is like, as you said,
Speaker 2: there's a diminishing return. So the thing that worked really
Speaker 2: well in inverted commas question mark three, four weeks or
Speaker 2: months later or whatever, it doesn't work now you need too.
Speaker 1: If you don't need one.
Speaker 4: It's usually about five years that it seems to be
Speaker 4: the accepted in the medical literature. You'll get about five
Speaker 4: years out of it, depending I guess on how bad
Speaker 4: you were to start with. But the interesting thing is
Speaker 4: that when this was first discovered, so this was discovered
Speaker 4: by accident, as most of the great drug stories are
Speaker 4: by a chap who was trying to deal with what
Speaker 4: were then called rambunctious kids, which today we would have
Speaker 4: diagnosed as hyperactive or ADHD. And these were the kids
Speaker 4: of the depression in the United States. So the other
Speaker 4: way you can make this happen, by the way, is
Speaker 4: with chronic stress. So chronic stress produce this is exactly
Speaker 4: the same result. So if you are if you are
Speaker 4: not sure you've got a roof over your head tonight,
Speaker 4: or you're not sure that the money is going to
Speaker 4: last long enough to pay the rent.
Speaker 3: If you're not sure of that, you're in a situation
Speaker 3: crank stress. If you've got an.
Speaker 4: Alcoholic father coming home and beating the wife and the
Speaker 4: kids up, you know, because he's been unemployed for a year.
Speaker 4: So there was a lot of that going around in
Speaker 4: depression era in the United States, and there was a
Speaker 4: sort of a wave of kids who were appearing with
Speaker 4: these symptoms. So we're appearing with what today will be
Speaker 4: diagnosed as ADHD or hyperactivity. At the time, they just
Speaker 4: called them highly rambunctious kids. And the doctor who discovered
Speaker 4: this operated a facility in New York City which was
Speaker 4: essentially a large farm, a large hotel on a farm
Speaker 4: which he managed to inherit, and he had hundreds of
Speaker 4: these kids there and his prescription for fixing them was
Speaker 4: to bring their life certainty. So certainty fixes this. By
Speaker 4: the way, when the cause of it is uncertainty, the
Speaker 4: cure is certainty. And all he did was give them
Speaker 4: three square a day and a place to play outside,
Speaker 4: and it's ordered them out in three months. So he
Speaker 4: was fine with that. But then the drug company said
Speaker 4: to him, oh, Loosten, you know, he was having experiencing
Speaker 4: some of the kids were having headaches with things, and
Speaker 4: he tried out a drug that was around at the
Speaker 4: time for headaches, which was essentially an amphetamine nasal injection
Speaker 4: nasal spray, which he tried. It didn't do anything for
Speaker 4: the headaches, but the kids suddenly could focus instantly. They
Speaker 4: didn't have to wait three months. They could take this
Speaker 4: and instantly they were fixed. They could focus, they could
Speaker 4: do their school work, they behaved perfectly. But he recognized
Speaker 4: the problem immediately. I mean, he didn't know all the
Speaker 4: science of dopamine, etc. But he immediately recognizing problem is
Speaker 4: that if you did this day after day after day
Speaker 4: after day, the kids actually got worse, and so he
Speaker 4: stopped using it and the experiment stopped there. It was
Speaker 4: rediscovered again by drug companies in the nineteen sixties who
Speaker 4: did it again and hence what we now have, which
Speaker 4: is these things now being prescribed for this. But what
Speaker 4: was actually a pretty rare phenomenon in the seventies and
Speaker 4: eighties is now exceedingly common and getting more and more
Speaker 4: common every day.
Speaker 2: So it seems we're treating the symptoms and not the problem, right,
Speaker 2: the underlying problem.
Speaker 1: And so is your book.
Speaker 2: Taking a look at the actual cause, like, what is
Speaker 2: creating this experience? What is creating this end result, this
Speaker 2: physiological outcome in kids?
Speaker 4: It is, Yes, it is, but so did my previous books.
Speaker 4: And so it doesn't stop there. It summarizes all of
Speaker 4: that and tells you all the bad news and exactly
Speaker 4: what's causing it, and goes through each of the apps,
Speaker 4: and it describes exactly what they're doing to cause this
Speaker 4: to happen, exactly what their mechanisms are and how they work.
Speaker 4: And then, and this is the important bit, tells you
Speaker 4: what to do about it. Awesome, because the easy thing
Speaker 4: to do about it is throw the phone in the bin.
Speaker 3: Okay, but that's not going to work. This is addictive.
Speaker 4: I mean, listeners could try put the phone in another
Speaker 4: room for a day and see how you go.
Speaker 3: You'd be twitchy. By the end of it, I just
Speaker 3: want to I just need to, I just need to
Speaker 3: check it isn't going to happen. This is an addiction.
Speaker 4: If it were that easy to break it, it wouldn't
Speaker 4: be an addiction. And that's why you get so much
Speaker 4: fight when you try to take a PlayStation off a
Speaker 4: fourteen years old boy. They're just as addicted to that
Speaker 4: thing as any drug addict. That's why you get so
Speaker 4: much fight when you tell us a fourteen year old
Speaker 4: girl she can't have a phone in her bedroom. It's
Speaker 4: an addiction. If I said to my fourteen year old girl,
Speaker 4: you can't have broccoli in your bedroom, she'd say, knock
Speaker 4: yourself out, take it away immediately.
Speaker 3: I so you can't.
Speaker 4: If I say you can't have your phone, that's a
Speaker 4: different thing altogether.
Speaker 1: I'm with a fuck broccoli.
Speaker 3: So the important thing is also what do you do?
Speaker 3: What do you do? How do you deal with that?
Speaker 4: And so this book lays out all the strategies for
Speaker 4: all the different types of apps and what you should
Speaker 4: be doing to try and step yourself down and away
Speaker 4: from this. And I it works because one of my
Speaker 4: kids actually just finished reading the book and he said, ah, Dad,
Speaker 4: you know, I know you've heard you bang on about
Speaker 4: this stuff for years, but this book's the first one
Speaker 4: where I actually found I had it gave me a
Speaker 4: plan for what to do. And what he did was
Speaker 4: not that he's ever admitted this to me before, but
Speaker 4: he said, look, I felt I'd been spending too much
Speaker 4: time on Instagram.
Speaker 3: And he said, you know, no particular thing.
Speaker 4: I just had a sense that it was that I
Speaker 4: was too much. So he said, so I got one
Speaker 4: of the apps you recommend. I think it's called mindful
Speaker 4: or something that limits your access to Instagram. So it
Speaker 4: only allows him to use Instagram, and he's at the
Speaker 4: time between seven pm and seven thirty pm every night,
Speaker 4: so he knows he can access it then, but he can't.
Speaker 4: The thing that the app just won't open for him
Speaker 4: at any other time. And so he said that the
Speaker 4: effect on him has been incredible. He's only been doing
Speaker 4: it for two weeks, and he said the effect is unbelievable.
Speaker 4: He said, I suddenly feel so clear headed and like
Speaker 4: I've got so much more time in my day. He said,
Speaker 4: I swear I've got an extra three hours every day.
Speaker 4: And I didn't think I was taking anything out of
Speaker 4: my day, and he said, and suddenly everything is so
Speaker 4: clear and focused for me. And that was just one change.
Speaker 4: So I go through all of the possibilities, all the
Speaker 4: things you can do, and you know, it's a real
Speaker 4: pick and mix people. I'm not saying you must do this,
Speaker 4: this is the only way to succeed. I'm saying, here
Speaker 4: are some things that the research tells us work. Try these.
Speaker 1: What kind of.
Speaker 2: What kind of response do you think you'll get from me?
Speaker 2: You know what I'm going to ask you from people
Speaker 2: who go you don't understand it. You're a bloody lawyer,
Speaker 2: which I know you do, and I know the vast
Speaker 2: amount of research you do, so you're probably more informed
Speaker 2: than I would think most people about this, including medical people, which.
Speaker 1: I know that bothers people.
Speaker 2: But it's like, you know, you don't like it doesn't
Speaker 2: cost anything other than time, energy, focused commitment to do
Speaker 2: the kind of research that you do. Everyone can do it.
Speaker 2: Everyone can access you know, scientific literature and data and studies,
Speaker 2: and it just takes so much time, effort and energy
Speaker 2: that most of us won't commit. And it like, here's
Speaker 2: the thing with you, right, I'm not trying to piss
Speaker 2: in your pocket but like it's hard to argue with
Speaker 2: you because you don't really give opinions.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the you know, you.
Speaker 2: Might tell a story, right, that's cool, but also that
Speaker 2: that's not your evidence. That's just an anecdote, which is good, right,
Speaker 2: Like the evidence is there when you write.
Speaker 4: And also so in this book, just like all of others,
Speaker 4: but each one it's more in depth the last. You know,
Speaker 4: thirty forty pages of this book are references. So every
Speaker 4: single thing that I say he is referenced. You don't
Speaker 4: have to believe me. You can say you know what,
Speaker 4: he's full of it. I'm just going to go and
Speaker 4: read the study he's talking about.
Speaker 3: Well you can. You know it's there. The full reference
Speaker 3: is there.
Speaker 4: You can go look it up yourself and read it
Speaker 4: yourself and decide whether you agree with what I've said.
Speaker 4: I don't have a dog in the fight. My income
Speaker 4: doesn't depend on whether or not you believe what I've written.
Speaker 4: I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist. You know,
Speaker 4: I'm not a drug manufacturer. My day job has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with this, So I don't need you to
Speaker 4: believe me. I'm simply telling you what the science says
Speaker 4: and setting out the science I'm talking about, so you
Speaker 4: can go check.
Speaker 1: And also like what is good.
Speaker 2: Yes, people can go read the actual papers if they want,
Speaker 2: good luck with that. But you have an ability to
Speaker 2: seminate complicated stuff in a user friendly way, which makes
Speaker 2: it makes a great impact.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, if people want to go
Speaker 1: hang on, let me.
Speaker 2: Just check that they can because everything's you know, sided
Speaker 2: through the text and then referenced at the end, and
Speaker 2: so everybody can check everything, and even you know, even
Speaker 2: for the you know, the skeptics and the you know,
Speaker 2: the people that might go, well, that's not how I
Speaker 2: think it works. As you said, you're not guessing. You're
Speaker 2: just leveraging off the research that's been done on this
Speaker 2: anyway and trying to I think that's the beauty of it,
Speaker 2: is somebody who's stumbling towards the finished line of his
Speaker 2: own kind of study stuff. You know, I can explain
Speaker 2: my research to somebody pretty comp comprehensively. Literally this is
Speaker 2: I think this is an indictment on my research. But
Speaker 2: I can give a five minute snapshot of what I've
Speaker 2: done and how I did it, and how I ran
Speaker 2: my studies and who was involved and what my own
Speaker 2: and what we now know in about five minutes. And
Speaker 2: that's all my research. So if anyone's an expert in
Speaker 2: inverted commas in this space, of this particular topic the
Speaker 2: way that I've analyzed it, it's me so. But I
Speaker 2: can explain it to you in a way that you
Speaker 2: will understand and then potentially operationalized if you feel the need.
Speaker 2: You know, and that's we need people like even and
Speaker 2: I don't mean to sound weird, but you and me
Speaker 2: who are trying to share information that's powerful and helpful,
Speaker 2: but you don't need you don't need to be a
Speaker 2: genius to understand it and use it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess the other thing here is I wouldn't
Speaker 4: bother writing this stuff if all I was going to
Speaker 4: write was what you could be told by your psychologists
Speaker 4: or psychiatrist or the standard textbooks in this area. What
Speaker 4: I the reason I'm writing what I'm writing is that
Speaker 4: there are dots to be joined here when you read
Speaker 4: across verticals of science. So one of the problems with science,
Speaker 4: and you would have encountered this in what you do,
Speaker 4: is that it's very siloed. So you know, a psychiatrist
Speaker 4: reads the papers.
Speaker 1: I got in trouble. I got in trouble for using that.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's very it is very siloed. It's not
Speaker 2: integrated and even across you know. So the thing that
Speaker 2: I'm looking at is meta accuracy, meta perception, right, But
Speaker 2: from different fields of psychology, the same concept or the
Speaker 2: same thing is called different things. There's not even any
Speaker 2: kind of real convergence of terminology even about the same thing,
Speaker 2: depending on which area you're working in are looking at.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I agree with you, it is very siloed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And in a way you can understand that because
Speaker 4: to be expert enough, to be as expert as some
Speaker 4: of these people are, they have to dedicated their lives
Speaker 4: in a very focused fashion to just one little thing,
Speaker 4: and you can't expect them to know or care about
Speaker 4: something that even is right next door to them because
Speaker 4: it's just not their gig. So they very much most
Speaker 4: experts are very much focused on the bark on the
Speaker 4: trees rather than the forest. And what I do is,
Speaker 4: I'm flying above the forest and I can see, oh,
Speaker 4: there's some trees with red leaves in that part, and
Speaker 4: I wonder what they have in common. Yes, and that's
Speaker 4: the benefit of not being an expert, which I'm not.
Speaker 4: It's the benefit.
Speaker 1: It's also benefit of not being.
Speaker 2: Academically or emotionally or professionally tied to a certain story
Speaker 2: or you know, a certain kind of philosophy or ideology
Speaker 2: around that thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So an example of that is, when I first started
Speaker 4: writing about the effects of addiction, I hadn't joined up
Speaker 4: the addiction that the same thing that breaks the human
Speaker 4: brain in addiction is exactly the same thing that breaks
Speaker 4: the human brain in anxiety. And I hadn't joined that.
Speaker 3: Up at all.
Speaker 4: But then I started reading papers about both of these
Speaker 4: areas and found out they were talking about the same thing.
Speaker 4: They didn't ever reference each other because they're two completely
Speaker 4: different areas of research, but they were talking about the
Speaker 4: same thing. And when you started to look at the
Speaker 4: neuropharmacological research for both of them, they're starting to look
Speaker 4: at the same targets. And so it occurred to me, oh,
Speaker 4: hang on, if they're both talking about dopamine and these
Speaker 4: things could be related, is there a unifying theory here
Speaker 4: that would relate addiction and anxiety? And I felt there
Speaker 4: was that you joined the papers. They're talking exactly the
Speaker 4: same language about exactly the same things. They just hadn't
Speaker 4: realized that they were both working on the same thing.
Speaker 4: And then I started to expand that out, first into
Speaker 4: depression and then psychosis, then schizophrenia, and then more recently
Speaker 4: into ADHD and finding that this is all remaining logically consistent.
Speaker 4: When you're drilling into the science in each of these areas,
Speaker 4: they are talking about exactly the same things. Yes, and
Speaker 4: you know you're right when you find drug companies investing
Speaker 4: in those core things.
Speaker 3: So you know, the obvious one.
Speaker 4: Is of course giving people stimulants, which is really counterintuitive.
Speaker 4: When you see a kid bouncing off the walls, last
Speaker 4: thing that occurs to you is, ge, you know what
Speaker 4: that kid needs is he needs a stimulant.
Speaker 3: It's more energy, that's right.
Speaker 4: But when drug companies invest in something like that, they
Speaker 4: know the mechanism and they know how it works. And
Speaker 4: the same things happening now in the area of addiction,
Speaker 4: where they're talking about how do we create a drug
Speaker 4: that depresses delta foss b, remembering that delta foss B
Speaker 4: is the thing that allows us to become accustomed to dopamine.
Speaker 4: That builds our tolerance of dopamine. It naturally builds up
Speaker 4: when we do addictive or dangerous things. And the drug
Speaker 4: companies are looking at and they're spending a lot of
Speaker 4: money on this. What's something we could give someone that
Speaker 4: would artificially lower delta foss B and therefore make them
Speaker 4: harder to addict. There's money in that, there's real money
Speaker 4: in that.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting question.
Speaker 2: And also if you can do that, prove that market
Speaker 2: that get approval for it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, So the fact that anyone's prepared to spend billions
Speaker 4: of dollars trying to find an answer to that tells
Speaker 4: you they know what the mechanism is.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, Yeah, that's fascinating. Hey, I just want to
Speaker 2: read a little bit. So there's a really good article
Speaker 2: which kind of opens the door and all of this
Speaker 2: on substack everybody, why the wealthiest suburbs have the worst
Speaker 2: attention spans. I just want to read a little bit,
Speaker 2: then maybe riff on that for a bit and then
Speaker 2: we'll say goodbye. If you look at a map of
Speaker 2: Australian tension spans, you're forced to a grim conclusion. Either
Speaker 2: the brains of our wealthiest coastal residents are spontaneously malfunctioning
Speaker 2: or we are missing an industrial scale medical grift. According
Speaker 2: to the data unearthed on ABC's Four Corners last night
Speaker 2: and astonishing, four point four percent of adults in the
Speaker 2: leafy enclave of Fremantle, WA are currently medicated FORREDYHD. For
Speaker 2: women under forty four, it's over six percent. Meanwhile, in
Speaker 2: the working class suburbs of Fairfield suburbs of Fairfield, New
Speaker 2: South Wales, the rate barely scrapes the zero point five percent.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to repeat that. So women are under
Speaker 2: forty four in Freemantle it's over six percent, but the
Speaker 2: other stat from Fairfield is zero point five so literally
Speaker 2: a twelve x difference.
Speaker 1: That's bloody amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Does that mean that the people in Fairfield have less
Speaker 4: of those symptoms? Probably not, because what the Four Corners
Speaker 4: story was about was the ease with which, given appropriate
Speaker 4: amounts of money change hands, you'll get a diagnosis for
Speaker 4: ADHD and therefore access to the stimulan drugs. And they
Speaker 4: had some really interesting numbers on one of the most
Speaker 4: popular drugs, which is vive Ance, which is an amphetamine,
Speaker 4: has really taken over the market from ritalin, and it's
Speaker 4: exploded in terms of the amount of prescription and it's
Speaker 4: covered by the PBS. So there is a whole market
Speaker 4: out there in getting people prescribed with these things using
Speaker 4: telehealth than online questionnaires. And that's what the four Corners
Speaker 4: story was about. But I'm taking a slightly different view there.
Speaker 4: I mean, yes, that's terrible and it is, but they're
Speaker 4: just diagnosing something that really is there, which is a
Speaker 4: large percentage of our population now have a total inability
Speaker 4: to focus without drugs.
Speaker 1: M what what is the if I walk in?
Speaker 2: Are we talking about GPS prescribing this or neuropsychologists or
Speaker 2: it depends where you live.
Speaker 4: So in I think New South Wales and Queensland, and
Speaker 4: I think they're the only states at the moment GPS
Speaker 4: can prescribe these drugs.
Speaker 1: Can they can they die?
Speaker 4: They can diagnose, So in New South Wales and Queensland
Speaker 4: they can diagnose ADHD and prescribe the drugs. And that
Speaker 4: that is in order to cope with this enormous tom
Speaker 4: aren't okay because people are complaining I can't. I have
Speaker 4: to wait six months before I even get an appointment
Speaker 4: with a psychiatrist. So there has been a enormous demand,
Speaker 4: and so the governments in those two states have responded
Speaker 4: by allowing some GPS. I don't think it's all GPS,
Speaker 4: but some GPS to diagnose and prescribe the drugs. In
Speaker 4: other states, it needs to be done I think, either
Speaker 4: by a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist, probably a psychiatrist.
Speaker 3: And so the way that's done, and this.
Speaker 4: Is what the four Corner Show was about, is you
Speaker 4: do a telehealth appointment where you go through a questionnaire
Speaker 4: with them and then they diagnose you for the little
Speaker 4: sum of three thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I love this. I love this. I love
Speaker 1: this bit.
Speaker 2: Here what four Corners expertly documented is the rise of
Speaker 2: a uniquely modern racket called cosmetic psychopharmacology. We've built an
Speaker 2: environment in engineered entirely to fracture our focus. We are
Speaker 2: bathed in addictive digital addictive digital design so nice, our
Speaker 2: dopamine receptors are strip mined by algorithms. Our cognitive resilience
Speaker 2: is at an all time low.
Speaker 1: And the market's.
Speaker 2: Response to this environmental environmental crisis is a tragedy of
Speaker 2: modern medicine. It offers a five minute telehealth consultation, a
Speaker 2: rubber stamp diagnosis, and a lifetime prescription for amphetamines. Put
Speaker 2: your teeth in harps like. So if I do a
Speaker 2: telehealth consult I could potentially get diagnosed just by the
Speaker 2: words I use and choose in five minutes.
Speaker 4: And then I don't know about five minutes. That's probably
Speaker 4: the follow up. But they'll probably give you a questionnaire
Speaker 4: to fill in and then they'll perform the diagnosis on
Speaker 4: the basis of your answers to the questionnaire.
Speaker 2: Right right, wow, wow, it's bloody amazing. Well, I'm looking
Speaker 2: forward to it. It is out today everyone. That is Tuesday?
Speaker 2: What is that's not really Tuesday? The twenty eighth, of
Speaker 2: course in all shit and good bookstores and can people,
Speaker 2: I guess people can buy it online, order it online day.
Speaker 3: You can order it now, you know. It's all the
Speaker 3: places that sell books.
Speaker 2: So the Attention Recovery Plan is the name of the book.
Speaker 2: David Gillespie is the author. Can you send me a
Speaker 2: signed copy?
Speaker 4: I have to buy one, No, of course, I'll send
Speaker 4: you a saga looks on air begging from the host.
Speaker 1: Of course, yeah yeah, yeah, times are tough. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to buy one and send it to you.
Speaker 4: Ah, surely, look Craig, surely.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I suppose times are tougher.
Speaker 1: Ye yeah, well mate, all the best with a book.
Speaker 2: We appreciate all the work you do or all the
Speaker 2: help you give us here at typ and we'll say goodbye,
Speaker 2: but as always, thanks for your time.
Speaker 3: Again, absolute pleasure. Thanks free.
Speaker 1: I think that was good mate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do want.
Speaker 4: Me to ask the publisher if I can get you
Speaker 4: a bunch of books for do a giveaway for your listeners.
Speaker 1: I'd love to. I mean, if you know, if that's.
Speaker 4: They sometimes do that, I'll put the word on them
Speaker 4: and see what they come up with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean that'd be great. And if that's
Speaker 2: a yes, let me know. I'll send you out you
Speaker 2: probably tomorrow.
Speaker 1: All right, I appreciate you, thanks so much now. Thanks
Speaker 1: by man