#1559 Emerging Addictions - David Gillespie

a shock for me. And I know that sounds really like egotistical or whatever, but it just it's the way it was for me. And I was really really lucky in the teachers I had because a lot of them recognize that, and just to stop me being a pain in class, which I would tend to be if I got bored, they would find things to, you know, keep me out of everyone's way.

You're great, other great stuff you do, and you've got forty seven children of your own, And do you think that being this is like almost a contrary question, but do you think that sometimes being gifted is not the advantage that it might seem like academically, intellectually, creatively, you know, in a sporting sense, I feel like it's an advantage, but for some people it ends up becoming a disadvantage.

good at, or better than the average brown bear. And in that something, I guess you either learn to use that as an advantage and really excel at it's because natural talent only takes you so far, you know, if you imagine it sort of like where your talent is at level nine and everyone else starts at level two.

Eventually they get to level nine with enough training and persistence, and we'll go past you to level ten, eleven, and twelve because they've had to work really really hard to get to level nine and they know how to improve from level nine, whereas you have always been at level nine and you know nothing about getting to level ten. So I think, yeah, it can be a distinct disadvantage if you want to excel in the thing that you're naturally talented at.

to fail school if I didn't actually do so. All of these kind of things kind of intersected. But I think for me, being mediocre was highly motivating because it started with losing weight and I successfully changed my body like dramatically in about four months. And while the physical change was good, it kind of opened a door in my brain that went, oh, what else could I do? Like if I do work, make decisions, be committed, get uncomfortable and keep getting uncomfortable, what else could I create?

So for me, it was like almost that default setting of mediocrity was what gave me the drive to not be mediocre. Does that make sense?

as me. And you know, my undergraduate degree, my first undergraduate degree, I think I came in with a solid four average or something like that, you know, going with the thing of four's open doors. I don't know if it's the same everywhere in Australia to four as.

in my life had I had to learn that. And that's kind of what I mean is if if you start from from what you're talking about, we start at a place where you're saying, well, I don't think anything about the way I look or my physique or whatever is good enough, and I'm going to learn how to improve it. And then you do. Then it becomes something that you become really really good at improving, whereas someone who's born looking like an Adonis and has to do nothing is never going to learn.

impervious to putting on weight. They have a sculpted physique and are actually doing nothing to achieve that, and so when the biochemistry catches up with them and their body metabolism stabilizers in their twenties, suddenly they have no recipes for how to change the inevitable and fairly swift decline that occurs. Then. So whereas someone like you, perhaps who worked to get to that point, understands the rules and understands how to change them.

But by the time I, you know, like I built a studio at home, and I did all these things, and I paid Melissa who works with me, and Tiff, and you know, by the time we paid everything and everyone, we were still losing money for like two years, which is not the longest apprenticeship in the world. But we did three shows before the U Project that didn't work. So by the time this thing actually became sponsored and consistently sponsored, in in the black and a consistently decent audience.

And yeah, it was four years. And people say to me all the time, not all the time, but at least fifty times I've had someone say to me, oh, yeah, I tried a podcast, but you know, the market's just saturated. It wasn't going to work. And they did, like the average podcast does seven episodes. That's how long the average podcast lasts. And when I ask people how many episodes

they did, it's never more than twenty or thirty. It's usually less than ten, and I go, I did, including my other you know, I did hundreds before it even and it also I'll let the audience figure out whether or not I'm any good at this. But before I got to a point where I thought, well, I'm not shit at this, it was still hundreds of episodes, you know, yeah, yeah, And.

He's been doing it for four or five years and losing money hand over fist. No one's getting him to do it. He's basically providing a public service. And yet suddenly people are asking him can they purchase his data

and can they purchase subscriptions to his data? And in the last few months he started getting serious orders for something that for the last four or five years, he was losing serious amounts of his own hobby money in essence running and it was just out of sheer persistence of knowing that this is something that had value, knowing

that it needed to be done, and just persisting. That got him too a point where now when his siblings hear about him making yet another sale and you know, making more in a sale than he makes than they make in a year, you know, they're they're regarding him as an overnight success when he's anything but because you've had to really really grind and just like you with

the podcast, do that for so long. And the same thing happened with me with the Sweet Poison books, which were the first thing that sort of got me the publishing deals and so on. Is for the first two years of Sweet Poison being out there, I think they sold maybe two thousand books. You know, there was word of mouth, I guess, going around it. There was no real evidence that anyone cared. And then suddenly, all of a sudden it just took off and people would look

at that and say, overnight success. Sure, but what about the three or four years you pore that?

But I think what happens is under the surface enough people here at enough times, from enough different people that it suddenly translates into an obvious movement.

the Morning show with David and Kim. It was it was a national show. I think I got into. I don't even know what the topic was, but it was on my at that stage. It was very health fitness exercise based. I did that and then after I did the interview, I got called up to the executive producers. One of the people on the floor with a clipboard and the fucking microphone like the Hungry Jack's headset came and said, oh, the executive producer once talked to you,

and I go, that sounds terrifying. Anyway, I went. It was a lady called Sandy.

a big deal. Now. It didn't change one thing. Like it didn't like I thought, I'm going to be so big in about two weeks. And I mean, you know a few people like it had.

the biochemistry of it all and worth knowing. By the way, if you're number two child in a rush or number three child in a rush, is it all the good stuff might have been used up on the first child. I am an eldest child, by the way.

I'm a reasonably articulate, I'm reasonally good communicator, And even when I was a young fat kid, I was probably a better communicator than most of my peers in terms of I could hold conversations with grown ups and you know, and kind of be right there in the middle of it and have been needed to be, didn't you because you know it was going to be all to otherwise. That's reminds you of something that a mate said to

me when we were, you know, eighteen year olds. And he was a fairly wealthy family and his parents bought him a pretty flash car when he was an eighteen year old. And I managed to buy my own Hold and Gemini out of my earnings at working at the sports store, and no one was was a secondhand blue nurse's car, you know, one of those really nice pale

blue Hold Geminis. And he used to say, have a go at me and say, you know you're never going to pick up in that car, right, And I said to him, mate, if a girl interested in me when I'm driving this car, then she's interested in me, not the car. That is. That is very good retort and true that is.

all the time. I let myself in at four o'clock when I got home, or three forty five when I got home. Mom and Dad got home at six. And in the country kid, I was one of them. Yeah yeah, And I mean like I had everything I needed. I didn't live in a house with any violence or any alcoholism or any abuse. So I was very fortunate. But you know that, like there wasn't any kind of doting,

so to speak. And so when by the time when I was doing Year twelve, like a couple of months in, Mom and Dad sat me down because we moved a lot. I thought Dad was a drug dealer, but he wasn't. But we moved a lot. No, he worked in retail. Then he got off at a job in Tasmania, a state manager for an organization called Brashes, which you might remember Brashes Yeah still yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, they moved. I was seventeen, so I stayed and that was the

last time I lived with him. I was seventeen years old, and I lived essentially, I boarded with a family, but essentially lived by myself. But so when I came out and I started working, I was already resilient. I was already making decisions, I was already sustaining, and I was seventeen years old. Then at eighteen, I moved to Western Australia by myself. Worked on a construction site through the day and worked in gyms at night, and then worked in pubs three nights a week. After that, I had

three jobs when I was eighteen. And not saying that's good or bad, but I feel like sometimes now maybe where over I don't know, over molly coddling or protecting our kids to the point where when they do leave the nest, maybe they don't have the resourcefulness and resilience that's going to hold them in good stead.

in the nineties, and that was relatively late. You know, a lot of her friends had already had their first child, you know, twenty three, twenty four years old. You say that to a twenty three or twenty four year old now and they will think you're insane. They do not have an expectation that they will be having children until their mid thirties if then, And that reflects what's going

on in the population in general. According to the ABS statistics, at least when I wrote teen Brain, which is a few years ago now this is probably much higher than this, But when I wrote that, I think was something like thirty three point five. So is the average age of

the mother at their first child. So it's that extension of childhood from on average mothers having their first child in their low twenties to their low to mid thirties means that there's an extended period where the child is probably effectively being looked after by their parents, and probably

having their housing provided by their parents. And that's a consequence of the economy that's been built by honest so quite honestly quite weird tax policy where we subsidize the investment in property, and all of that added together means that adolescence doesn't finish at eighteen or anything like it, or seventeen in your case, it's more normal to be thinking about a thirty year old as what you were at seventeen.

physical potential, you know, relationships, communication. I feel like, you know, if we're we're delaying their development so to speak, or they're you know, they're basically becoming twenty five year old teenagers, what's that doing to their capacity for growth and learning and optimizing their either intellectual potential or whatever.

get from every older generation is ah, these rat bag you know, you got it in the sixties and the seventies and the eighties and so on. But there is a fundamental difference with this generation, and it started thirteen years ago and we are just now starting to see it make a difference. And the thing that happened thirteen years ago is the iPad was released. And this is not to say that, you know, Apple is the enemy of the universe, it's just that they were the first.

And why it mattered that the iPad was released is suddenly you had Internet on a stick, in the sense that prior to that, if you wanted to access the Internet, you really had to be somewhere near a computer, which had to be somewhere near a PowerPoint, and somewhere near an Internet connection, usually a cable. And what the iPad and a few years before the iPhone had done is unshackle all of that, so that suddenly you had the

Internet twenty four seven heaven, anywhere you were. And that's a very, very big change if it's coupled with some other things that happened around about the same time, which is the invention of or at least the getting big of things like Facebook, Instagram, first person shooter gaming, online gambling,

and a high resolution free pornography. Now old fellas like us will remember Craig that it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to engage in the looking at nude young ladies, you would have to make a trip to your local newsagent.

who say simulation can't be addictive. So often when I talk about addiction to groups, people you know, are quite clear on the fact that you know, obviously nicotine is addictive, and alcohol is addictive, and cocaine's addictive, and heroin's addictive. That's all very clear. These are substances clear as But often people will say when I say, okay, well yeah, but so gaming apps, and they'll say, oh, yeah, but that's that's just a simulation. You know, that's that's not

real and it's not a substance. No one's injecting that into your veins. And pornography is a great example of a simulation that is quite addictive. You know, it's got a syndrome that we know is related to high levels of addiction. And then as people say, oh, that's a bit of a stretch, I don't know any porn addicts, well, you know, you might be mixing with the wrong crowd, because we certainly know about gambling addicts, which is yet

another simulation addiction. And so it shows that it's possible to addict the human brain by simply running a simulation

that stimulates dopamine, which both of those things do. And what we did in twenty eleven is distribute a device, a delivery platform which allowed simulations of dopamine stimulation to be distributed, so not just pornography, not just gambling, but some new fangled ones like the one that simulates oxytocin stimulation, which we call social media, or the one that O you know, that simulates dopamine stimulation from fear, which is what we call gaming. So we did that thirteen years ago.

So no parent today can say they know what it's like to be a teenager today. Because no parent today grew up surrounded by addiction. No parent today grew up with addiction available twenty four to seven, and that's very,

very different. And remembering that the only time you can really become addicted as a human is those ten years between the start of puberty and your early twenties, because that's the only time the brains defenses against addiction are down, then no parent of life today can understand what it's like to have grown up in an age where addiction

was available for all of those ten years. So we've gone from a situation where in our day as teenagers, if you wanted to get addicted to something, you had to be pretty damn risk, high risk taker to You had to find a way to get access to something that was potentially addictive, and you had to be able to do it regularly, so adventurous and the high risk takers were the ones who became addicts, which was very

very small percentage of the population. Now, if you want to become an addict, and even if you don't, all you have to do is turn on your phone and you have total privacy to do that anywhere, anyhow, anytime. Now, the kids these days aren't kids these days. They are a completely different beast because they're the first humans where every single one of them has been exposed twenty four

to seven to addiction. Now, the interesting thing is it's taken us thirteen years, but we are finally seeing every single day in the paper. Every day, every time I pick up the paper, I see yet another story about social media addiction and how the government wants to limit the age of access and all that good stuff. Well,

that's all really fabulous. None of it will have any effect because that is not the primary source of addiction and it's not going to change anything making a rule about whether someone has to be seen in order to access it. But the good news is at least they're acknowledging that there's a problem.

yes it's great that we're talking about it. And yes it's great that we're recognizing that it's possible to create addiction using something as innocuous as a social media app. But there's a long pathway to go there.

believe me, would stimulate dopamine. But you get to do it a thousand times a day rather than once in your lifetime.

that binds us together. We feel good when people in our group tell us they like what we're doing. So that's the oxytocin which generates the dopamine stimulation. Social media multiplies that by factors of a thousand, because all you've got to do is put a picture up and see alike, and every time you see that like, you get the little oxotocin hit. So these simulators, when you do them frequently enough, generate lots of dophin. Now, as you say,

some of them have other side effects. So for example, that one, the one that's created by first person shooter, you're getting testosterone stimulation, you're getting adrenaline stimulation, and they all have their own side effects. But people would say, okay, but let's pull back from that. Is there any real problem of people being addicts? Yes, there is. Yeah, if you look at people being addicts to substances, you'd say, sure, there's a real problem, but they're the problems associated with

the side effects. So if you say the problem with people being alcoholics is that they're drunk, So if you could be an alcoholic without being drunk, would there be a problem. You'd be feeling good most of the time, no one else would notice, and it wouldn't affect the way you worked. You're still an addict. But it's the side effect that causes people to be concerned about addiction.

And so they would say, Okay, well, this electronic addiction we're talking about here, if it weren't for the fact that you lose money by gambling, would having a gambling problem be a problem? The answer is yes, it is because the biochemistry that creates the addiction, and I know we've talked about this before, perverts the way our brain perceives risk and creates anxiety, depression ADHD, ultimately psychosis and schizophrenia. So it puts our brain on a pathway to in essence,

insanity and depression. And so the downside to addiction shouldn't be confused with the downsides of the side effects, which is what everyone focuses on. Ie, if you're an alcoholic, you're drunk all the time, that's a downside. The much worse downside to addiction is not the side effect of a substance. Because we're now talking increasingly about addictions which

aren't substance based. The downside to the addiction is what it does to the human brain, which is why we are seeing teen anxiety, teen depression, teen ADHD, teen suicide at levels we have never seen it before, because we are exposing that entire population to addiction.

That's twenty one k a year on cigarettes before he eats a sandwich or has a beer, or pays a bill or puts gas in his car. I'm like fuck. I mean, apart from all the horrible consequences of smoking, you need to be rich to smoke.

wouldn't be an addict. And that's the interesting point that everyone forgets when they start making moral judgments about addiction.

and I find it fascinating. I also find it fascinating if you are ask it to say, look at a narrative arc that you've created. You know, so what the

storyline is going to be. You say, this is going to happen, and then that's going to happen, and this character is going to have that happen to them, etc. You give it that narrative arc, and then you say, right, I want you to line this up with narrative arcs typically used by this or that author, and it'll come back with adjustments to the narrative arc which we'll say things like, well, what about if we kill this character off here, or if we impose risk on this character here?

And I find that's an interesting use of the technology as well.

but I and finish it. So I just typed in chatter GPT can you give me a synopsis of the book, And it just gave me this fucking amazing one page overview, like like, so, I mean, I know it's not you know, it's concise, but I'm like, I've got a reasonably good understanding of the core messages and key messages in three or four minutes, which doesn't replace reading it. But then the other day I was often when I I'm doing something, I don't type it in. I just talk into my phone.

I go, you know, what are the what's the you know, at what age does the average Australian give birth for the first time or something? You know? And I said, I said to it, how trainable like this is? I said, to chat to you, how trainable are you? I said, can you use my name when we talk? Goes sure, Craig. Would you like me to use it at the start of the conversation or would you like me to weave it through our conversations? And I didn't tell it my name.

Obviously it has acts as to that information. But it was creepy how quick it went Sure Craig and then just started talking to me like we were on the phone. Yep, it is fucking amazing.