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