I get our team, David Gillespie, Tiffany and Cook, Craig, Anthony Harper, and you the audience, our audience. Let's start with the absent tee who has fucking graciously decided to swander it through the typ door for the first time in forever. Where have you been cooked?
Oh? What is this carry on? You're talking about?
Now? Well, me and gillespa I'm talking about I seem to have had a lot of conversations. I'd say the last three have been me and Dave.
So that's six weeks.
That's six weeks.
Yeah, I'm sorry, Sorry, Gillaspo, that long.
I'll devastate. Well, I don't know whether that's accurate, but it has been a long time. That's right.
It's not all about you, Tip. I mean he's got needs, he's got podcast needs. Sure, he's got a wife in twenty seven kids and nineteen children. But I mean you're his cyber girlfriend. You need to show up every now your's virtual kind of dream.
You don't know now that she's here.
Imaginary relationships are my favorite. They are my expertise lo on commitment.
Yeah, you were telling us before we went live that the last relationship you had was six months long and he didn't know about it.
I know the relationship wasn't six months long. That was we lived together for six months or maybe a year. The relationship was longer than that.
No, No, the one before that where you said you were in a relationship but he didn't know.
Oh oh, that's most of them. That's most of them pretty quickly if they find out about it.
That's hilarious. Ah, dear, Hey, how old were you when you got married?
Gillespo very young by today's standards. I think I was twenty two, maybe twenty three.
That is, that is young.
That is aby face, not.
As young as my wife was two years younger than me.
Wow.
Wow, it still is amazingly, wow, amazingly.
Yeah. Well, it's funny that it's a constant. Did you were you religious or something or you just know what.
Back in the day and you would remember this? Great because I feel we're a similar age. Yes, that back in the day. That's what kids? Did you know? You left home and you got a job and you got married.
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
I engaged you have what age were you engaged?
Now? That is a very good question. Tiffany and Cook who could imagine me engaged. But yes, I was engaged at I'm going to say twenty one or maybe twenty two, I think twenty one.
And was that unusual?
That was even? That was even? I mean, okay, so that was twenty one, twenty one, so that was nineteen eighty four, so that was still a long time ago, forty years ago. But yeah, that was That was a little earlier than normal, but it wasn't ridiculous. But I will say the rationale behind that decision was I was in my very churchy phase where everyone I was in a church where every one got married young.
Yeah. Well, it wasn't a particular religious thing to me. So we got married in nineteen ninety and it was not an unusual thing for people in the early twenties to be being married.
Yeah, yep, yeah, well, and I mean, I know this is not what we're talking about. But by the way, didn't that shout out to Janine, my ex fiance, didn't you dodge a bullet? Jeanine? Lucky you ock? Now she's been breathing a sigh of hard sire let for forty years And what was I going to say? Yeah? I think that what's the average age now where people get.
Married, it's well north of thirty three. The last time I looked it was thirty three, but it was going out quickly.
And didn't you say that the average age that ladies having or giving birth.
For the first time, isty, it's now into the I think it's around thirty five. Yeah. Wow, which starts to run into a bit of a biological reality which we can talk about a different show, which is that when you look at the statistics on birth defects, they travel along just fine sort of. I mean, the best time to have a child obviously is when you're fourteen, but the law has something to say about that from a
biological perspective. But you know, you're pretty good from a health perspective right up through the twenties, early thirties, And but the starts to take a nasty turn at about thirty five, so you know, we're starting to run into that being a real problem for a lot of people, whereas before so when I and my better half were married, he was really unusual for people to be having their in their mid thirties. Wow.
If this is a weird question, and you can feel free to cut this out of the show, because you're the editor. If you could miraculously, if you could miraculously have a healthy kid, like a baby that was yours and some super genetically blessed donor, would you do that? If you could have a kid like because you're forty one?
No, No, I've never wanted one. I've never wanted a child. But funnily enough, earlier this week I interviewed a girl who runs the Solo Mum Society. So there's a lot of mums getting sperm donors and having children on their own and doing away with that whole concept of prince charming.
Yeah wow, Yeah, well that's probably not a great idea, the prince charming idea anyway, is it? Because there aren't too many Dave and yeah David, Dave's married and I've got issues, so fucker now. It's about as prince charming as I can. Jack the ripper I am. But anyway,
all right, so let's get on to tonight's topic. You sent me an article which I thought was very interesting, and it was talking about this idea of a video game form of treatment for adults with ADHD which had just been approved by cleared by whatever we want to call it. The FDA, the US Food and Drug Administration. Let's unpack that, doctor.
Yeah, so there's a couple of really interesting aspects of this. I guess the surface level one is that you've got the FDA, who are the people who approved drugs approving a treatment that isn't a drug, it's a video game. And that's interesting in itself, and we'll come back to that.
But have we entered the age of digital drugs where the reality that you and I have been talking about now for years, which is that you don't need to be taking a substance to be an addict, and yet until now almost well all treatments that you're likely to be given by a doctor for addiction or anxiety or depression or ADHD is substance based. So and we've I know we've done episodes before about ADHD, but a little bit of a refresher on what the science says is
going on there. I mean, we're in the middle of an ADHD epidemic. There's been reports even today about how one in twenty Australians are affected by ADHD. It's a massively growing diagnosis and the prescription of the only drug treatment for it, which is rittleen or things like it, which you know, as we've discussed before, is speed. It's an mpetterment and you know, on the street it would be called speed, and but in the pharmacy it's called riddlin. And I want to talk a little bit about why
that works. So we know that ridlan does work. It really does work. It works on a very short term basis, in that it only works for about four hours. But let's talk about the definition of works and what's in fact going on with ADHD. So ADHD is an inability to focus for extended periods of time, so you lose the ability to focus. And you know, you know, psychologists and people who like talking rubbish about mental health conditions.
He's talking about me. Everyone.
Yep, we'll say things like, oh, well, that's caused by you know, that's this modern media environment where you know, news is presented in three second clips and if there's not a visual with it, it's not news. And and you know, no wonder, everyone's got a short attention span EO and everyone's got ADHD. So that's the narrative answer to that.
But thankfully there's a biochemical answer as well, which is significantly more convincing, which is that what ADHD probably is is in fact dopamine resistance, and I need to explain that a little bit. So what happens is that when you're exposed to an extremely stressful environment, you have a system of adapting to that in your brain, which increases your resistance to the dopamine input that you're going to
be getting from those stresses. So every time you're exposed to anything that stresses you, you'll get a shot of dopamine every time that happens. If it starts happening really, really frequently, then you become resistant to the dopamine so that you don't overreact to an environment where there's a lot of stress. And we've talked about this before. If you're in a war zone, you don't want to be jumping out of your skin every time you hear an explosion.
You just want to be jumping out of your skin when you hear the ones that are likely to hurt you. So that's the way the brain's way of filtering out the background noise of danger, and the same thing happens on the reward side of the brain with exactly the same mechanism. So whenever we do something that gives us pleasure, we also get a hit of dopamine, and the brain
adjusts that if we're getting them frequently. So for an environment where there's a lot of pleasurable things going on, where there's plenty of food to eat, where there's plenty of sex to have, where's all that sort of thing, then our brain starts moderating that and making us resistant to those dopamine things so that we don't overreact, so that we don't chase every possible pleasure, we only chase the really good ones. And we call la state of
the brain addiction. The trouble is that the thing that sets the resistance point, the thing that says how much dopamine we need, stays high for three months from when the last dopamine hit occurred. And if it's sitting there too high, there's a number of consequences for our brain. But one of them is that our brain thinks it needs more doper mean to focus than it actually does. So because we're dopamine resistant, we need a lot of
dopamine to remain focused. But the brain says no, no, no, we're not getting enough no dope mean, and we can't focus. And what I've just described. There is ADHD, which is an inability to focus. Now in boys, that usually manifests as physical activity, which is what it used to be called hyperactivity. It used to be called, you know, hyperactivity syndrome or something like that, and in girls it's often character it often looks more like daydreaming. So they're not
they're not running around or hitting people. They're just spacing out because they're unable to focus in, you know, on some things, so they're just jumping from thought to thought to thought without actually doing anything. The boys are doing the same thing, but they're also manifesting a physical activity. So that's what ADHD is, and that leads you to the obvious treatment to it, which is, well, why don't
you just give them a dopening hit. I mean, if the brain is saying we don't have enough dopamine to focus, then give them some dopamine. And so some very smart fellow almost by accident in the nineteen forties, came across the fact that soldiers were given amphetamines to focus, and so they thought, why don't we try this on kids who've got this condition? And if you go, they did
that and it was like magic. They had kids sitting in classrooms who couldn't focus for the life of them, couldn't do anything, couldn't achieve anything because of their ADHD. They gave them some amphetamine and bang, they're just back to normal, instantly, perfectly perfect cure. The problem was, it only us as long as the emphetamine stays in their system, which is about four hours, So they're perfectly cured for four hours and then they're back to the way they were.
And so the people when they first noticed this said, Okay, well, this will help for a kid who really needs to learn something and needs to focus on something, needs to get something done in school. But this isn't a cure. In fact, it's the opposite of a cure, because what we're actually doing is ramping up their dopamine resistance every time we do this, because we are actually giving them
a hit of dopamine which increases their dopminions. Is so long term it's a bad idea because we're actually making the problem worse. But in the short term it's a terrific idea because it makes the kid controllable, it makes them focused, It may improve their cognitive performance, their thinking skills, their ability to focus, the ability to get things done.
So initially, when it was discovered in the nineteen forties, the doctors who discovered it said, yeah, okay, it works great, but we don't really want to be giving this to kids. Let's come up with a different solution. And for many, many years they did use a different solution, which was to just take the dopamine producing things out of their lives. So what they did was they sent these kids off
to farm type schools and things like that. Well, this was no stimulation other than you know, you go and you play in the outdoors and so on. And what they're effectively doing was giving them three months of rehab, getting them away from the dopamine stimulus, getting them away from the stresses and so on, and those kids were returning to normal that way. It took longer, but ultimately
was a longer term cure too. Okay, roundabout way of talking about this press release, which is some smart character in this company, this is a startup company that has done this thing, has said, well, look, if you can give a kid a dopamine hit with speed, just do it the way every kid's doing it now, which is with gaming. So there you go, instant instant drug that shit.
If all of everything I just said is true, if all of that is true, then anything that produces a dopamine hit should have the same effect and should give benefits to a kid on ADHD, at least immediate benefits. And so these people have said, well, hey, why produce a drug, Why get into the business of selling amphetamines. Why not just do what the gaming industry already does, which is provide artificial stimulation of dopamines. Now, they could have done this with gambling, they could have done it
with social media. They've chosen gaming, and they've done some really high faluting studies which you can read if you feel like it. There are links in that press release I sent you where you can track through it actually see the study they did. What they've done is Inventor game, which, by the way, you can download There's a link in that press release and you can probably follow that through. You can download it this thing. It works from the app store on Google and all that sort of thing.
And you'll look at it and you'll say to yourself, well, this is just a game. This is a game just like any other game that I could play. You know, first person, you know you're going through a maze type thing, dodging things and all that sort of thing. It's designed to be addictive. It's designed to produce a dopa mean hit. And by the way, before you rush out and get it, kids itself administering this cure all the time. So kids are doing this all day, every day. They're giving themselves
their own dopa mean hits. They don't have to go out and buy riddle and to do it. They can do it on a game. And they will all tell you, just like a smoker will tell you or a drinker will tell you, that this is stress relieving behavior and they feel better when they do it. And the other thing that they might not have measured, but these folks, because it's their business, have actually measured is they think
better when they do it too. And you might say, okay, well, before we start rushing off and signing up, you know our kids would just be playing games all day long to cure their ADHD. You've got to remember the downside and the reason why the folks who initially discovered riddlin didn't keep doing it, because ultimately what you're doing is making the problem worse. And so the bizarre thing is where now in an age of what I call digital drugging, where now suddenly the cure of ADHD is going to
be anything that stimulates dopamine. And whilst that might be a bit of a danger to the folks who manufacture facture Riddlin, it's an even bigger danger to the rest of us, because now we're actually saying the cure to ADHD is to make people even more dopamine resistant. And you might tell you what's the downside to that, You know,
why is that a problem? Well, the problem is that in creating addicts, the other things that happen are really really bad consequences for the individual and society because the brain in that state of dopamine resistance is a brain that's highly anxious, highly depressed, and on its way to psychosis and schizophrenia.
And also, imagine if you remove that drug in inverted commas, that electronic drug, then they're going to if all of a sudden you say no, you can't play this game. Now you've got someone in with rural. Now you've got somebody who's you know, in chaos and who's.
And anyone who's ever had anything to do with a fourteen year old kid who's gaming and then suddenly says to them, you're not going to be doing that anymore, that they'll be able to relate to you that that's not one of the most pleasant experiences of.
Their lives and with you like, it's funny that the FDA literally Food and Drug Administration, that's who that that was the go to organization to clear this.
Te and it's been cleared as a drug. Effectively, it's it's something administered as a treatment for attention deficit disorder, so you know, it's got a proper drug type name a K L to T zero one. And you know, the game itself sounds like a drug. Actually it's If you go and download the game, it's a what is it endeavor OTC is the name of the game, and you download it and it looks like something like Fortnite
or something. It's it's just a game. But when you read the studies on it, you know, they say, oh that you know this is this is this might look like a game, but what it's actually doing is stimulating you know, the prefrontal cortex of the which is another way of saying that actually it's built on a selective stimulus management and engine, which is the core technology designed to stimulate and activate the fronto parental net varietal network. So, in other words, a dictive.
I feel like there's a complete blurring of the lines here with like calling that a drug. Obviously it's not a drug, but also.
It's a digital drug.
Well if now the drugs aren't digital, so it's not a drug.
But kind of we're getting into the realm here where not a drug? No, No, let's talk about.
A drug, not a drug. Evaping is still doing something physiologically, well physically, well, yes, it's got a finger, it's got a.
Crooked little there's a question from Tiff.
Everyone's back down the hatches.
Everybody, boys, sit down?
What is it?
If it is between kids just scrolling on social media every day, why is that not a drug? And what that's not helping ADHD? So why is this game helping or is it just another pack of people making up rubbish and making money off it.
No, it does help, and the scrolling on social media helps too, because while the kids are actually doing it, they will tell you I feel better when I'm doing that. It's when they get off it that they say I am in withdrawal from it.
Well, he's not saying if he's not saying that it helps over the long term, it definitely doesn't help. It's actually a problem.
But the reason it's help, saying is is because they don't have to get anything done. How does this help them focus on what they need to focus on and actually get a result?
It does, while they could they could have done the same research with Fortnite and got the same outcome. They then called that an electronic intervention for treating bloody ADHD as well just.
Give it a bottle of vo then, well that would work too. Yep. Well, look we're giving them speed at the moment, so you know, in essence, what's the difference. It's it's interesting in a way that this is a sort of an admission that that's what they're treating and how they're treating it. So by giving them a game that stimulates dopamine in exactly the same way as a drug does, they're saying, well, the dopamine stimulation is the important part of addiction, and we're being distracted by the
substance type associations with it. So if you think Craig about smoking and vaping, now the problem with smoking, people say, well, you shouldn't smoke. They don't say you shouldn't smoke because it's addictive, although they kind of do. But it's the reason people shouldn't smoke is because of all the damage that is done by the side effects of the substance. So it gives you lung cancer, it gives your heart disease, you know, it wrecks your breath, you know all those
great things about it. And often the argument for vaping is it doesn't do any of those things. It just delivers the nicotine, which is the addictive, but it doesn't cure the addiction at all, but it gets rid of all those other things which are associated with the substance itself. And then there's this sort of assumption, well, are we suggesting then that the addiction, the pure addiction, the nicotine,
doesn't damage you. The answer is it does. And in a way, this is kind of the same thing, because there are lots of substance type side effects from giving people speed, but this is a cleaner way of doing it innocence in that you're giving them the dopamine hit without the substance side effects. So in a way they're saying, well, isn't it better to be just a pure addict to the dopamine rather than the substance that's delivering the dopamine hit.
I wonder if we I mean, you know how with all medications, when you get it, it comes with a basically a leaflet that tells you about the potential you know, the more likely and less likely side effects. I mean, there are still side effects of this, So there are still.
Negative a big there are big side effects. But going back to TIFF's point about why don't you just give them a bottle of vodka, Well, because there are side effects from drinking vodka that have nothing to do with the addiction. So, you know, you get drunk, you'll fall down, you'll have car accidents, all of those sorts of things that have nothing to do with being an addict. The side effects. Yeah, so are we back to tests love life?
Are we We're back to TIFFs Saturdays? Anyway?
But people almost say by focusing on the side effects, are ignoring the primary problem, which is that when you addict the human brain, when you put it in that state of dopamine resistance, you are making it significantly more anxious, significantly more depressed, more likely to be prior to suicide, more likely to end up in a psychotic state and
ultimately schizophrenic. So we are in the middle of a massive wave of increases in anxiety, depression, suicide, psychosis, schizophrenia in our society because we've suddenly given access, and I mean suddenly in the last ten years, access to highly addictive things to every teenager, which is the prime age for addiction. So it's not cleaner in that sense. It's cleaner in the sense that they're not consuming substances, but it isn't cleaner in the real consequence of addiction is
not the side effects from the substances. It's the anxiety, depression, suicide, schizophrenia, psychosis that's the problem. And the ADHD. Obviously it's I like how.
When I say like, I've put an asterisk next to that. I like how they've video game treatment for adults with ADHD. And I listened to this everyone, how they've written this, You'd think this was the best thing. Ever, the FDA recently cleared the Digital Therapeutic Endeavor OTC in brackets aklto one and over the counter treatment for adults with a tension deficit hyperactivity disorder. It through a video game experience
sounds wonderful. Ak LT one is indicated for adults with primary inattentive or combined type ADHD who've demonstrated attention issues. The studies supported ak l TO one's clearance showed an improvement in focus of eighty three percent in two hundred and twenty one participants with a verified diagnosis of blah blah blah, seventy two point five reported and improvement in quality of life and forty five point absent met a
pre specified threshold for clinically meaningful improvement. You'd think that it was a fucking wonder drug, David. It is like, this is so positive, this article.
Yeah, but if your metrics are those which is does this thing improve focus? They're the same metrics that are being used for ridlin, and the answer is yes, it does improve focus. There's an asterisk after that, as there is after this, which is, oh, by the way, it
wrecks you long term. But if your measure is does this improve focus in the two to three hours after it's consumed, the answer is it definitely does the problem is that people are self administering drugs like this all day, every day as we speak, and it's not curing anything.
So I mean, it just goes to show you that people can be honest. I'm using an asterisk again, but still deceptive, misleading, an unethical, because what they're saying here is true, but it's what they're not saying that we really need to know.
Well, they're putting that in the in the basket of not my problem.
You know.
What I've done here is I've delivered something that gives at least as good a result as giving someone a drug. So give them this instead.
And how do they make dough? Do we have to buy this? I guess so despite the thing.
Yeah, yeah, right, So like those games, there's a free version, and then there's a version that removes the you know, I haven't actually played this one, so I don't know. I've just looked through the videos and the screenshots of it. So I'll bet there's a mechanism in there somewhere where if you want the good stuff, you you have to pay for it.
And I'm sure if you're a child, not an adult, apparently it's for adults, I'm sure you.
Have a child version. They have a child version as well.
If I can see her, she's she's what are you doing?
I can see you send me the bloody link.
Oh, I'll put it in the chat.
Here we go.
Hang. Oh god, it's terrific podcasting listeners.
I'll make sure you've got the link in the show notes too.
Yeah.
You can be playing it while you're listening to this and think bang on about.
Alkali A K I L I interactive all one word dot com forward slash.
So the first one at the top of that page if the endeavor O t C dot com, I think, is where you get the download links.
Yeah, all right, I'm clicking on that now as well, which is also terrible podcasting. There it is introducing in dev OHTC, a game based treatment clinically proven to improve attention and focus, specifically in adults with a d HD except all cookies. That's you TIF You're a cookie? Are you? Are you? Are you cookie? Except except the cookies?
And I click on the click on the visit The big blue button says a visit endeavor OTC dot com.
Oh, there we are. I'm clicking on that as well. This is who carest the cookies.
Again, They're going to be editing. There's going to be some editing involved.
No, no, just leave this bit in fuck it. Leave this tap into your potential. Oh god, they're marketing like fucking champs, aren't they. It's all very attractive too.
I just don't understand how playing a video game is going to improve focus in other areas of your bloody life. I can sit and scroll on social media for nineteen minutes in bed in the morning. Doesn't make me get up and do what I want to be focusing on.
Well, you don't know what it'd be like if you didn't do that.
Yeah, you might just lie around in bed all day like a bloody do gong, like a bloody land based do God. All right, well we might pull.
Up in their quality episode.
I'll tell you what people are like, Oh my god, what is going on, doctor Gillespie? Not really doctor, but you're a doctor to me, doctor doctor. Thanks mate, we appreciate you, Tipp. Are you going to put the links and stuff in for people?
Yeah? I will, I will. I don't want to. I don't want to be promoting it, but we'll have a sticky beak people.
Yeah, people want to have a look.
They can. Yeah, we're not. We're not opening the addiction door at all or I made thank you.
Than anyone else.
It