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#2113 Digital Vodka - David Gillespie · The You Project

0:00
Speaker 1: Good team. It's the bloody project. That's you, Tiffany and
0:03
Speaker 1: Cook over there in the fancy ritchy area of Melbourne
0:07
Speaker 1: that she lives in Glaspow up there in the bloody
0:10
Speaker 1: jungle in Queensland. Will start with the smart one. Good I, tiff.
0:16
Speaker 2: Good I.
0:17
Speaker 1: We'll go to the beautiful one next. How are you?
0:19
Speaker 1: How's your day been?
0:21
Speaker 2: I've been fabulous? Thank you.
0:23
Speaker 1: Well you should thank me because I just finished twenty
0:25
Speaker 1: minutes ago training you and your gorilla boyfriend. You're the
0:29
Speaker 1: andethal boyfriend who can cook chock brown in like world
0:32
Speaker 1: class apparently. Yeah, oh well, good for you, doctor Gillespie.
0:39
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Fourteen days later, here we are,
0:42
Speaker 1: how are you?
0:43
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good good? Yeah, it's been a yeah follo out.
0:48
Speaker 3: Fourteen days for me actually feels like several months.
0:51
Speaker 1: Actually, I thought you tried to avoid work as much
0:54
Speaker 1: as possible. How dare you? Yeah?
0:57
Speaker 3: Well, the new book's coming out twenty eighth of April,
1:00
Speaker 3: and so there's a bit of stuff that has to
1:02
Speaker 3: happen ahead of that, including producing the actual book.
1:05
Speaker 1: So yeah, Well, because you're you're the world's worst at
1:09
Speaker 1: fucking self promotion. If I managed you were, if I
1:12
Speaker 1: was your agent or any I'd be like, dude, do better,
1:15
Speaker 1: so give us, give us without doing anything sales. You
1:19
Speaker 1: just tell us about what you can about the book.
1:22
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, I'd rather than at the moment.
1:26
Speaker 1: That's a terrible start my case.
1:31
Speaker 3: It's called the Attention Recovery Plan, right, and it is.
1:35
Speaker 3: There's a lot of stuff written about, including by me,
1:38
Speaker 3: about the damage that devices and addictions are doing to us.
1:45
Speaker 3: So you know, the social media gaming, all that kind
1:49
Speaker 3: of thing, and I've written a lot about that and
1:54
Speaker 3: made it really really clear that the biochemistry tells us
1:59
Speaker 3: that this is no different to substance abuse, and it's
2:02
Speaker 3: having the same consequences, which is severe addiction, anxiety, depression, psychosis, schizophrenia.
2:09
Speaker 3: And you know, we're going to hell in a handbasket
2:12
Speaker 3: as a society because the rates of those things are
2:14
Speaker 3: increasing incredibly quickly because we're addicting everybody. And so I've
2:21
Speaker 3: written about that before. We've spoken about it before, I've
2:25
Speaker 3: written books about it. The most recent time was a
2:28
Speaker 3: book I wrote called Brain Reset a few years ago.
2:32
Speaker 3: This is about Okay, that's brilliant, thanks for scaring me
2:36
Speaker 3: to death. What do you do about it? And the
2:40
Speaker 3: answer can't be well, chuck your phone in the bin,
2:44
Speaker 3: because if it were that easy, it wouldn't be an addiction.
2:48
Speaker 3: So that's not what this book's about. This book's about
2:53
Speaker 3: how do you intentionally recover your attention? How do you
2:58
Speaker 3: intentionally recover your focus? How do you, I guess, for
3:03
Speaker 3: want of a better term, go through a focused workout
3:07
Speaker 3: to make sure you can still do it and you
3:10
Speaker 3: can still apply your mind. And how do you combat
3:16
Speaker 3: the inevitable disease wave that comes with addiction, the anxiety,
3:21
Speaker 3: the oppression, the ADHD, all of those things. So this
3:26
Speaker 3: is an intensely practical book about what do you do?
3:31
Speaker 3: So there's a little bit of science in there, some
3:33
Speaker 3: of it you're recognize from things that we've discussed over
3:36
Speaker 3: the years, but it's mostly about what do you do
3:40
Speaker 3: about it? And there's a lot of step by step
3:42
Speaker 3: guide's a lot of planning exactly what to do, how
3:46
Speaker 3: to organize your workspace, how to organize your personal life,
3:51
Speaker 3: all of those sorts of things to ensure that you
3:54
Speaker 3: maintain focus, fitness.
3:57
Speaker 1: Wow, that's good. And the fact that it it's outlining
4:02
Speaker 1: the problem but really talking about and presenting a solution.
4:06
Speaker 1: I love and it is. It is interesting when you
4:10
Speaker 1: think that, like whether it's booze or whether it's gambling,
4:13
Speaker 1: or whether it's drugs, or whether it's pawn or whether
4:16
Speaker 1: it's foo, it's I mean, it's the addiction is kind
4:22
Speaker 1: of the same in a way. It's just a different
4:24
Speaker 1: pathway to a similar addiction, right.
4:28
Speaker 3: It's exactly the same. From a biochemical perspective. Your brain
4:31
Speaker 3: can't tell the difference between a gambling addiction, a gaming addiction,
4:38
Speaker 3: a social media addiction, or an addiction to heroin. It
4:41
Speaker 3: can't tell the difference from a biochemical perspective, They're all
4:45
Speaker 3: exactly the same.
4:47
Speaker 1: And without giving away anything, you can't, so feel free
4:51
Speaker 1: to not answer it. Did you where did you? Did
4:57
Speaker 1: you talk to people who had overcome this addiction? Did
5:00
Speaker 1: you talk to addiction specialists? Did you read a million
5:04
Speaker 1: papers as you do? From where? Did you kind of
5:08
Speaker 1: create or formulate your suggestions or your kind of recovery models.
5:16
Speaker 3: It's a combination of a few of those things. The
5:18
Speaker 3: book has a lot of stories from you know, anonymised obviously,
5:22
Speaker 3: but a lot of real world stories from people who've
5:26
Speaker 3: struggled with these things. You know, things like dating app addictions,
5:30
Speaker 3: gaming addictions, gambling addictions, and so on, and real life
5:36
Speaker 3: stories of that. And the reason for putting those in is,
5:40
Speaker 3: rather than me just banging on about all this is bad,
5:43
Speaker 3: I want people to be able to read the story
5:45
Speaker 3: of a person and identify them, see themselves in the story,
5:49
Speaker 3: see something that they're doing, because one of the difficulties
5:52
Speaker 3: with addiction is it usually comes with an enormous moral judgment.
5:58
Speaker 3: As this there's this general sense that if you're an addict,
6:06
Speaker 3: it's because you're weak or you're in some other way faulty,
6:11
Speaker 3: and you just need to get your act together and
6:13
Speaker 3: we can't help it. It's just it's ingrained in the
6:17
Speaker 3: way we operate as humans. You know, if you see
6:21
Speaker 3: someone addicted to pornography, it's because they've got something wrong
6:25
Speaker 3: with them, or you see someone addicted to gambling, they're
6:27
Speaker 3: weak in some way. But that's not what's going on.
6:32
Speaker 3: What's going on is a very intentional perversion of some
6:37
Speaker 3: biochemistry in the human brain by people who are doing
6:41
Speaker 3: it to make money. And we need to not lose
6:46
Speaker 3: sight of that that this is a business model we're
6:50
Speaker 3: talking about here, and this book is about fighting that
6:56
Speaker 3: business model and keeping your own brain to get us.
7:01
Speaker 1: And I guess the reality is, as much as we
7:03
Speaker 1: don't want to hear this, if we put aside morality
7:06
Speaker 1: in all of that, just for this hypothetical, it's in
7:10
Speaker 1: the interest of a lot of these companies and apps
7:16
Speaker 1: and all of that to get people addicted because it's
7:19
Speaker 1: financially rewarding.
7:21
Speaker 3: Well, we've said this before. You know, when the product
7:24
Speaker 3: is free, you are the product. And that's what's going
7:28
Speaker 3: on in when people are selling addiction. It's the point here, say,
7:34
Speaker 3: for whether it's a playing games or gambling or on
7:37
Speaker 3: social media, it costs billions of dollars to develop, maintain,
7:43
Speaker 3: and run something like Facebook or Instagram, and what does
7:48
Speaker 3: it cost you to do it? Nothing? Not a sense.
7:53
Speaker 3: That just doesn't make sense as a business model. That's
7:55
Speaker 3: totally insane. And that's because that's not the business model.
7:58
Speaker 3: The business model is capturing seconds of attention, yes, or
8:04
Speaker 3: engagement as it's often called, and then reselling that to
8:07
Speaker 3: the highest bidder, and the best way to do that
8:10
Speaker 3: is to addict people.
8:13
Speaker 1: We talk about it a fair bit, but it feels
8:16
Speaker 1: to me like everyone kind of like what we've well,
8:19
Speaker 1: some of what you've said so far will be revelatory
8:22
Speaker 1: to some of it will bit like, oh wow, I
8:24
Speaker 1: didn't really think about it. But I think most of
8:26
Speaker 1: us kind of know that there's a problem around social
8:29
Speaker 1: media and the like. But I also feel like while
8:32
Speaker 1: we we kind of get intellectually that it's a potential
8:36
Speaker 1: threat for some people in some ways, if not all
8:38
Speaker 1: of us, we don't hold it in the same regard
8:42
Speaker 1: as booze or heroine or gambling or some of the
8:47
Speaker 1: I guess the addictions that we would call life destroying
8:50
Speaker 1: or destructive, but it seems like which it isn't, but
8:54
Speaker 1: it can almost seem like, oh yeah, it's kind of
8:57
Speaker 1: an addiction, but it's not one of them, the danger ones.
9:02
Speaker 3: There's two aspects to addiction, which people often mix up
9:08
Speaker 3: because when you talk about let's say a substance addiction
9:12
Speaker 3: or you know, things like her and cocaine, etc. People
9:16
Speaker 3: talk about the symptoms of that and the badness associated
9:20
Speaker 3: with that, and what they're actually talking about is the
9:21
Speaker 3: side effects. So in order to produce the dopamine spike
9:26
Speaker 3: and create the addiction, those things come with side effects
9:30
Speaker 3: because they're drugs, and a lot of those side effects
9:33
Speaker 3: are what people associate with addiction, but that isn't addiction.
9:37
Speaker 3: Addiction is the dopamine spike that's produced in the first place,
9:40
Speaker 3: and the damage done by that is not from the
9:44
Speaker 3: side effects, or it's not the primary damage from the
9:46
Speaker 3: side effects. If you didn't think about something like gambling,
9:49
Speaker 3: there's no real side effect from gambling in the same
9:53
Speaker 3: sense of substance abuse, but no one would fight with
9:56
Speaker 3: you over the notion that it's very definitely an addiction.
10:01
Speaker 3: What's going on there is that dover meanspike is being
10:04
Speaker 3: produced by behavior, which is gambling, and that dover meanspike
10:09
Speaker 3: is having the consequence that you become anxious and depressed,
10:15
Speaker 3: that you create chaos in your life by running out
10:17
Speaker 3: of money, and that in turn makes it even worse.
10:22
Speaker 3: So that's a pure form of what happens in addiction.
10:29
Speaker 3: And when people wave away things like Instagram or dating
10:33
Speaker 3: apps or gaming and say, well, that's not the same thing,
10:38
Speaker 3: they're mixing the two up. Yes, there are no instant
10:42
Speaker 3: downside side effects from substance consumption, but the effect on
10:46
Speaker 3: the brain is identical, which is why we're seeing anxiety
10:49
Speaker 3: rates in teenagers go through the roof. It's why We're
10:52
Speaker 3: seeing depression go through the roof. It's why schizophrenia is
10:55
Speaker 3: that epidemic proportions, It's why suicide is going crazy. It's
11:00
Speaker 3: because these are the flow on effects of addiction. So
11:06
Speaker 3: people waving away something because it doesn't have a substance
11:09
Speaker 3: abuse side effect doesn't make it any less addiction.
11:15
Speaker 1: It's so funny. I've even with adults, and maybe for me,
11:19
Speaker 1: it's almost like this is like the impact of if
11:23
Speaker 1: we had an impact scale of these things that went
11:26
Speaker 1: from zero to ten, and we go, well, ten is complete.
11:29
Speaker 1: It's hijacked your life in your brain and you really
11:33
Speaker 1: need you really need help, and then write down to
11:35
Speaker 1: almost like disordered eating through to an eating disorder. So
11:40
Speaker 1: I think, you know, the level of impact kind of
11:43
Speaker 1: grows without us even realizing. But it still comes down
11:50
Speaker 1: to like our awareness around it now, willingness to acknowledge it.
11:55
Speaker 1: But I was having a chat yesterday with a made
11:58
Speaker 1: of mine who's fifty five. Was something he's got grandkids
12:01
Speaker 1: and his kid, his son took his iPhone off his
12:06
Speaker 1: well I don't know, nine year old or ten year
12:08
Speaker 1: old for a week, and the kid lost his shit.
12:12
Speaker 1: I mean he and he was there when that, like
12:16
Speaker 1: he happened to be there and I don't know what
12:18
Speaker 1: the kid did, but the consequence of what he did
12:20
Speaker 1: was no phone for a week. Well you think you
12:23
Speaker 1: would think, he said to me, it's like they fucking
12:25
Speaker 1: chopped his leg off.
12:27
Speaker 3: Or it's like any other addict when you take away
12:31
Speaker 3: the thing that they're addicted to. M that's what's going
12:37
Speaker 3: on here. And people will often say to me when
12:40
Speaker 3: I talk like this, they'll say, yeah, but I'm not,
12:45
Speaker 3: as you know, I don't really have addiction. Sure, I
12:47
Speaker 3: don't mind a bit of gaming or a bit of
12:49
Speaker 3: gambling or you know, get on the social media or someone,
12:52
Speaker 3: but I'm not. I'm not addicted. You know, there's no
12:54
Speaker 3: problems there. And often I'll say to them, well, sure, well,
12:59
Speaker 3: there's an easy way to put through that, you know,
13:02
Speaker 3: just to lete the apps, and they go, sure, easy,
13:04
Speaker 3: do it tomorrow, and they will, knowing in the back
13:08
Speaker 3: of their mind that they can reinstall them anytime they want.
13:11
Speaker 3: But if I say to them, well, just delete the
13:13
Speaker 3: accounts too, then they're then they're not so easy to convince.
13:19
Speaker 3: No one wants to delete the accounts because that really
13:23
Speaker 3: is stopping and they in their own minds are behaving
13:27
Speaker 3: the way that kid is behaving, which is, you know,
13:30
Speaker 3: they're rebelling against the notion of stopping this, and that's
13:33
Speaker 3: a sure sign of addiction. But even if you're not
13:35
Speaker 3: prepared to acknowledge that, there are other signs. The early
13:39
Speaker 3: metabolic signs of addiction are insomnia and focus difficulties, or
13:45
Speaker 3: what people are now currently describing as ADHD. The massive
13:49
Speaker 3: title wave of adult diagnosis of ADHD is in fact
13:55
Speaker 3: diagnosis of the functional effects of addiction, which is should
14:00
Speaker 3: focus that comes from being an addict. It's been measured.
14:04
Speaker 3: It's forty seven seconds I think is our average ability
14:08
Speaker 3: to stay on task at the moment, and that has
14:13
Speaker 3: been a massive decline. And what's happening on a society
14:18
Speaker 3: wide basis is we're fracturing everybody's focus. That's the first
14:22
Speaker 3: thing to go. Focus is the first thing to go.
14:24
Speaker 3: It's the first sign that there's a problem. Then you
14:28
Speaker 3: start noticing things like insomnia, you start noticing stress growing
14:33
Speaker 3: to anxiety, growing to depression and so on. But ask yourself,
14:39
Speaker 3: am as I am I as focused as I remember
14:42
Speaker 3: being ten years ago?
14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's yeah. Well, I mean everyone who
14:52
Speaker 1: is addicted thinks they're not addicted, or most people, if
14:56
Speaker 1: they do.
14:56
Speaker 3: Or if they do, think they're addicted, or no, they're addicted,
14:59
Speaker 3: or at least suspec most of them don't like the
15:03
Speaker 3: fact that they are and will deny it.
15:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I had to, like, in all
15:11
Speaker 1: of my meetings and stuff, even if I just had
15:14
Speaker 1: my phone near me and it would chime or it
15:17
Speaker 1: would like there would be something I would I would get.
15:23
Speaker 1: I would in the middle of the thing. I wouldn't
15:25
Speaker 1: pick up my phone, but I would. I would. My
15:29
Speaker 1: attention would shift a minute to the fucking phone. And
15:31
Speaker 1: it's not like I went, oh, that dinged I think
15:33
Speaker 1: I should. I just looked before I'd thought, like, it's
15:37
Speaker 1: Pavlov's dog.
15:38
Speaker 3: You know, it's exactly like Pavlov's dog.
15:42
Speaker 1: It's a trained response.
15:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, And just you know, if anyone's not across those experiments,
15:47
Speaker 3: what Pavlov did was get some dogs to cellivate when
15:53
Speaker 3: they heard a bell ring, and the reason was he
15:55
Speaker 3: ring the bell and then give them something to eat.
15:57
Speaker 3: And then he got them to ring. Then the experiment
16:00
Speaker 3: progressed on and it'd ring the bell and not give
16:02
Speaker 3: them something. To eat and they'd celebrate because their brains
16:04
Speaker 3: have been trained. When that bell rings, I'm going to
16:07
Speaker 3: be rewarded. And that's what's going on with notifications. That's
16:10
Speaker 3: why there are notifications. By the way, it's not by
16:13
Speaker 3: accident that every app is sending you a million notifications
16:16
Speaker 3: a minute. It's that they know that this is part
16:20
Speaker 3: of the addictive mechanism and it's a very important part
16:24
Speaker 3: of it. In fact, so important that there's a whole book,
16:26
Speaker 3: in a whole chapter in the book dedicated to notifications
16:30
Speaker 3: and why theyre an important part of addiction and why
16:35
Speaker 3: they have to be turned off.
16:38
Speaker 1: Bro, you should be doing workshops on this in every
16:42
Speaker 1: fucking school in Australia. No, you don't have the time
16:44
Speaker 1: or the energy, but I mean, it is so important,
16:48
Speaker 1: and it's like I think everybody, like even I'm thinking
16:52
Speaker 1: about now and what do I and I know we're
16:54
Speaker 1: going to have another conversation probably we'll see how we go.
16:56
Speaker 1: We didn't intend to have one, But this is how
17:00
Speaker 1: we work, isn't it. But the door's open down we've
17:02
Speaker 1: kind of but I just think, like, and I know
17:06
Speaker 1: this is often discussed, but talking about real practical like
17:10
Speaker 1: what's really happening physiologically, psychologically, and strategically from the companies,
17:16
Speaker 1: and then what's happening in your body and your nervous
17:19
Speaker 1: system and your brain chemistry when just to like, you
17:22
Speaker 1: know that seek first to understand, like try to understand
17:25
Speaker 1: what this is actually doing to you, not via some
17:29
Speaker 1: meme on social media, but actually to try to understand
17:32
Speaker 1: a little bit about your own body and your own
17:36
Speaker 1: brain and the way that things work. And being able
17:39
Speaker 1: to recognize that. And the other thing too is because
17:42
Speaker 1: like there's a diminishing return on the same dose. So
17:47
Speaker 1: what used to fucking light you up doesn't light you
17:49
Speaker 1: up five years to light you up, now you need ten.
17:52
Speaker 1: Three months later, you need two hundred to get the
17:55
Speaker 1: same response that you used to get from five. So
17:59
Speaker 1: you're training your self up. Oh god, you know.
18:03
Speaker 3: And even that's pure biochemistry. We've got to switch in
18:05
Speaker 3: our brain that every time we give it a dose,
18:08
Speaker 3: it moves up a notch. It's a rat. So so
18:11
Speaker 3: every time we rapchet it up one, it means we
18:14
Speaker 3: need a bigger dose next time. And that's by design.
18:18
Speaker 3: So that's the way our brain works, it's the way
18:21
Speaker 3: our physiology works, and the companies know that and exploit that.
18:25
Speaker 3: Now that has really really bad effects on the way
18:28
Speaker 3: our brain works, but they don't care about that as
18:31
Speaker 3: long as we remain addicted to their product. Mmmm. It's interesting.
18:37
Speaker 3: One of one of the things I suggest people do
18:39
Speaker 3: is is introduce the idea of friction. Intensionally, introduce friction.
18:47
Speaker 3: One of the things that an addictive anything tries to
18:50
Speaker 3: do is remove friction, so it tries to make it easier.
18:53
Speaker 3: So and I give the example of you know, if
18:58
Speaker 3: you're a gambler and you had in order to gamble,
19:02
Speaker 3: you had to you know, get dressed, walk five miles
19:06
Speaker 3: to the casino and then gamble, You'd be much less
19:10
Speaker 3: likely to do it. Then if you could just pull
19:13
Speaker 3: your phone out of bocktt and have a bet right
19:14
Speaker 3: there and then so that you get dressed, leave the home,
19:18
Speaker 3: walk to the casino is friction. And everywhere you can
19:22
Speaker 3: introduce friction between you and the addictive behavior is.
19:27
Speaker 1: A good thing. And you may or may not have
19:31
Speaker 1: any insight into this specifically, but I'm sure you'll have
19:34
Speaker 1: an opinion. The how is the under sixteen band working
19:40
Speaker 1: in Australia? Is that making? Is that doing anything? Or
19:44
Speaker 1: is that a is that window dressing.
19:47
Speaker 3: I think it's important, but not for the reasons that
19:51
Speaker 3: it's often promoted as being important. People get lost in
19:54
Speaker 3: the weeds about this and say it won't work. You know,
19:58
Speaker 3: kids will get around this this marter than we are.
20:00
Speaker 3: They'll figure it out and they will just the same
20:04
Speaker 3: as they have around alcohol. Band. Did you know that
20:08
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to drink if you're under eighteen in Australia.
20:12
Speaker 1: I've heard of that.
20:14
Speaker 3: You wouldn't know it from observing the average under eighteen,
20:18
Speaker 3: but it is the law. And you're not supposed to
20:21
Speaker 3: smoke if you're under eighteen either, But it is because
20:24
Speaker 3: it is the law. The fact that it is the
20:28
Speaker 3: law does, however, introduce friction. It does, however, mean that
20:33
Speaker 3: a parent can say to a kid, no, you are
20:35
Speaker 3: not having a beer because you are seventeen. It gives you.
20:40
Speaker 3: It gives a parent the ability to fall back and say,
20:44
Speaker 3: I have the support of my society. The law is
20:49
Speaker 3: that this is not possible. Sorry, I don't know. If
20:51
Speaker 3: you can hear the dog barking in the background, Well.
20:55
Speaker 1: That's great.
21:00
Speaker 3: Saying I have the backing of society when I tell
21:03
Speaker 3: you you're not doing this. So in that way it's
21:07
Speaker 3: a good idea. In that way is it allows parents
21:11
Speaker 3: and others to say, no, you are not having access
21:15
Speaker 3: to this thing because it is against the law. Will
21:18
Speaker 3: may still break the law, Yes they will. Does it
21:21
Speaker 3: make it harder, Yes it does.
21:25
Speaker 1: There's a guy who comes in to the cafe I
21:28
Speaker 1: have a coffee out every morning. I'm going to give
21:32
Speaker 1: me a shout out. He used to play footy in
21:33
Speaker 1: the AFL Force and killed her. James Gwilt James. And
21:37
Speaker 1: he's got the gorgeousest little girl in the world, cool rosie,
21:43
Speaker 1: and she two and a half and she's got blonde,
21:45
Speaker 1: curly hair, and she looks like something out of a
21:47
Speaker 1: fucking nursery rhyme. And every time she comes in she
21:50
Speaker 1: comes straight to me because she sits on my lap
21:53
Speaker 1: and watches pepper Pig. That sounds creepy. I don't mean
21:56
Speaker 1: it too. Her dad's there. It's all good, right, but
21:58
Speaker 1: it's and she goes from mayhem to complete focus. By
22:04
Speaker 1: the way, we only watched two or three minutes of
22:07
Speaker 1: pepper Pig, but talk about like this tiny little bundle
22:11
Speaker 1: of energy goes to this fully focused cyborg. In a
22:15
Speaker 1: matter of seconds, just watching Pepper Pig and she only
22:19
Speaker 1: comes to me. She don't wonder, she's not interested in me.
22:22
Speaker 1: She's like, I'm the pathway to Pepper Pig. I'm the
22:26
Speaker 1: conduit to the thing that she wants. Dealer, Yeah, that's it.
22:31
Speaker 1: I'm just handing out a little bit of cartoon over
22:33
Speaker 1: here in the corner. And I said to her dad,
22:36
Speaker 1: how much of this does she Yeah? No, we don't
22:38
Speaker 1: let her at home. So that's why she fucking loves you,
22:41
Speaker 1: because she gets whatever her three minute hit every second
22:44
Speaker 1: day or whatever it is. But now I'm feeling like
22:47
Speaker 1: I'm a dealer. Now I'm feeling like I'm enabling some
22:52
Speaker 1: two and a half year old into a lifetime of
22:55
Speaker 1: bloody potential addiction. But it is even at that age
23:00
Speaker 1: can have a massive It's not just fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
23:03
Speaker 1: year olds, you know, it's toddlers.
23:06
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely. I mean you don't have to walk into
23:08
Speaker 3: a supermarket to see that. I mean, you know, all
23:11
Speaker 3: the kids in the in the prams are sitting there
23:14
Speaker 3: set to stunt with an iPad in front of their faces.
23:18
Speaker 3: And I'm that sounds like I'm having a go and
23:22
Speaker 3: I'm not that is a direct consequence of the business
23:27
Speaker 3: model that is being used. The younger you can get
23:31
Speaker 3: people on these things, the better as far as that
23:33
Speaker 3: business model is concerned. And it's not a judgment about
23:40
Speaker 3: what's going on. It's just an observation, and I want
23:45
Speaker 3: people to stand back from it and say, wow, I'm
23:48
Speaker 3: not sure I want that to happen. I will happily,
23:54
Speaker 3: you know, give these kids a shot of vodka to
23:56
Speaker 3: calm them down. Am I happy to do it with
23:58
Speaker 3: digital vodka? Hmm? I saw you laughing there. She's thinking, yeah,
24:04
Speaker 3: I would actually, yeah.
24:05
Speaker 2: Like the term digital voca.
24:07
Speaker 1: No, that's good. That's I'm going to write that down.
24:10
Speaker 1: That could be today's podcast titled digital vodka. So, I mean,
24:16
Speaker 1: I know you're not nostradamis, but you're pretty nostrodharmasy. So
24:21
Speaker 1: obviously you're trying to make a dent, which is great.
24:25
Speaker 1: And we've got more awareness, which is great. I think
24:27
Speaker 1: we've got a few more rules and REGs or laws
24:30
Speaker 1: in place, which is good. But like just humor me
24:35
Speaker 1: go like left unchecked, like we just let this be
24:39
Speaker 1: a fucking free for all with no awareness or no
24:42
Speaker 1: kind of speed bumps put in place for these people
24:45
Speaker 1: who are addicted or if not addicted, like significantly influenced
24:52
Speaker 1: in their behavior. Like, what's the end of the line,
24:55
Speaker 1: just a total.
24:56
Speaker 3: Blind is you just have to look at a graph
25:00
Speaker 3: of the rates of anxiety depression ADHD diagnosis in Australia
25:05
Speaker 3: and these things are off the charts, right. These are
25:08
Speaker 3: growing by multiples of four or five times in just
25:12
Speaker 3: the last five years. So these things are in steep
25:16
Speaker 3: upward climbs, and you know, we see it occasionally surface
25:21
Speaker 3: in crime statistics, you know, and people sort of vaguely say, oh,
25:26
Speaker 3: you know, us holds are up because of mental health
25:28
Speaker 3: or what they mean there is that there's lots of
25:30
Speaker 3: there's an epidemic of schizophrenia in the community. Now schizophrenia,
25:35
Speaker 3: for those of your listeners who aren't quite sure what
25:38
Speaker 3: that is. That's people having hallucinations, being believing that people
25:44
Speaker 3: are out to get them and acting on those beliefs.
25:47
Speaker 3: So it's an extreme form of anxiety about the intentions
25:53
Speaker 3: of others, or an extreme form of paranoia about the
25:55
Speaker 3: intentions of others. And once again there's a tendency to
25:59
Speaker 3: be judging about that and think that all these are
26:02
Speaker 3: poor weak people. But it's not the case. This is
26:06
Speaker 3: an inevitable consequence of doing this to the human brain.
26:10
Speaker 3: You keep pushing that dopamine requirement higher and higher and higher,
26:16
Speaker 3: and you eventually get into the territory of schizophrenia. You
26:20
Speaker 3: don't want to live in a society where there are
26:23
Speaker 3: a lot of people who are suffering hallucinations and suffering
26:29
Speaker 3: extreme paranoia and are prepared to act on the belief
26:34
Speaker 3: that you are there to harm them. And you know,
26:40
Speaker 3: a more obvious and earlier sign of this is the
26:43
Speaker 3: massive increase in ADHD diagnosis. It's what I'd call functional ADHD,
26:47
Speaker 3: which is the symptoms look the same as the traditional ADHD.
26:55
Speaker 3: The inability to focus at all on anything at any
26:59
Speaker 3: time without medication, and that is on an absolute tear.
27:06
Speaker 3: You know, we already have teachers saying they have classrooms
27:10
Speaker 3: that you know, you know, twenty years ago they might
27:13
Speaker 3: have had one kid if that, suffering from something like that.
27:18
Speaker 3: But now you know, five, six, seven, eight of the
27:21
Speaker 3: kids in your average twenty twenty two kid class I
27:25
Speaker 3: have those problems and or need to be medicated to
27:28
Speaker 3: control them.
27:31
Speaker 1: Teaching has got to be the hardest job. Like at
27:34
Speaker 1: the moment, I thumb and there's a lot of hard jobs,
27:36
Speaker 1: but it's got to be in the top for nursings
27:38
Speaker 1: up there and a lot of you know people who
27:40
Speaker 1: work in that space.
27:41
Speaker 3: But down the front they're the front line. Both of
27:44
Speaker 3: those professions are the front line. They're seeing this day
27:48
Speaker 3: by day. They're seeing the increase in mental illness, they're
27:52
Speaker 3: seeing the increase in ADHD and kids.
27:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's going to sound like a weird question,
27:59
Speaker 1: not a normal question. I would ask you it's more philosophical.
28:03
Speaker 1: But what what drives you to write a book like this?
28:09
Speaker 1: I know it's not for money because you make about
28:12
Speaker 1: the thirteen cents every time you write a book. We
28:15
Speaker 1: know how profitable books are in Australia. I also know
28:20
Speaker 1: what is it because you just see that there's a
28:22
Speaker 1: need and you want to highlight that and potentially talk
28:25
Speaker 1: about some you know, strategies or solutions. Or is it
28:29
Speaker 1: because you have a personal interest or you've this has
28:33
Speaker 1: been something's happened to you or around you that's triggered this,
28:37
Speaker 1: Like where does that come from?
28:39
Speaker 3: You're all all of the above, So it is it
28:42
Speaker 3: is a combination of I'm just naturally a person who
28:46
Speaker 3: needs to understand how things work, and I rarely buy
28:52
Speaker 3: this is a complex problem that we don't know how
28:55
Speaker 3: it works. I think the science is good enough now
28:57
Speaker 3: that we know how most things work, if we're prepared
29:00
Speaker 3: to have an open mind in looking at what the
29:03
Speaker 3: science is actually telling us. There's a lot of people
29:07
Speaker 3: out there in your future profession who still favor the
29:11
Speaker 3: psychobabble and one narrative explanations for all of this, but
29:18
Speaker 3: it isn't. The narrative explanations are useless. This is neurochemistry
29:22
Speaker 3: we're talking about, and you push the right buttons, the
29:26
Speaker 3: same things will happen every single time in every single human.
29:30
Speaker 3: And we know enough now The science is good enough
29:33
Speaker 3: for us to be able to put those blocks together
29:35
Speaker 3: and say this is what is going on. I want
29:38
Speaker 3: it to stop. I want the society that we're living
29:43
Speaker 3: in to return to a state where not every second
29:46
Speaker 3: person is potentially suffering from mental illness. I want that
29:50
Speaker 3: to stop, and I want it to go on to
29:52
Speaker 3: reverse because I think we're a better society if we're
29:54
Speaker 3: not all sick. And I at a personal level, yes,
30:00
Speaker 3: I have seen things like this, both in myself and
30:03
Speaker 3: in others that I think this, if you apply the
30:09
Speaker 3: things that I set out, can be corrected. And I'm
30:14
Speaker 3: not suggesting it's easy, but I think it's a lot
30:16
Speaker 3: easier if you've got a plan.
30:20
Speaker 1: If to you on the one to ten ten being
30:23
Speaker 1: it's hijacked your life and brain. Do you think you
30:27
Speaker 1: have an issue? Not an addiction necessarily, but are you
30:31
Speaker 1: challenged in this space? Do you feel like you need
30:34
Speaker 1: to be on less or use it less? Or that's
30:37
Speaker 1: not a loaded question, that's curiosity.
30:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely, like what what.
30:42
Speaker 1: Would be the thing that you would want to reduce.
30:45
Speaker 2: Or if you're definitely that's.
30:51
Speaker 1: What did he say?
30:52
Speaker 3: Less porn?
30:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, David Gillespie like comment.
30:56
Speaker 1: That that is that's him getting edge, that's him just
31:01
Speaker 1: like letting his hand opportunity for a joke about time.
31:08
Speaker 1: Fucking welcome to the club. Do it, will you?
31:11
Speaker 3: And sorry for interrupt let us please tell us.
31:15
Speaker 1: I am aware of loo.
31:17
Speaker 2: I noticed myself pick up and open apps and open
31:21
Speaker 2: apps mindlessly without it happening like I do that. I
31:24
Speaker 2: do that a lot. And yeah, so I think I
31:27
Speaker 2: use social media and things way too much.
31:30
Speaker 1: Mmm, I'm a little bit the same. I'm not as
31:34
Speaker 1: bad as I was, but I'm still not there, so
31:37
Speaker 1: that one of them.
31:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, the app, and when I'm when I'm going to
31:42
Speaker 2: do something and forget and then open three social media
31:48
Speaker 2: apps and then go, oh, I want to pick up
31:49
Speaker 2: my phone.
31:50
Speaker 1: For why have I opened that app?
31:52
Speaker 2: Because the finger just going straight to that app? You know,
31:54
Speaker 2: it's silly.
31:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have this default where if I I'm just
32:00
Speaker 1: doing nothing, I'll go, I wonder else, see who liked
32:03
Speaker 1: that post I put up like that? Will I'm not thinking,
32:06
Speaker 1: oh geez, I'll ring mum, I'll go, I wonder how
32:09
Speaker 1: that post is traveling? Oh really, do you know what
32:12
Speaker 1: I mean?
32:13
Speaker 3: But what your brain is saying is just give me
32:15
Speaker 3: another dopamine hit. Because what your brain wants when you
32:19
Speaker 3: do that and check how the post is going is
32:21
Speaker 3: they want to see the number of likes gone up.
32:24
Speaker 3: And because every every single like is an oxytocin hit,
32:28
Speaker 3: which produces a dopamine hit. And that's what's going on
32:32
Speaker 3: in your brain. And you might say, oh, it's harmless,
32:34
Speaker 3: I'm just looking at stuff. Well, sure, but it's rewiring
32:38
Speaker 3: your brain just as effectively as anything else that produces
32:40
Speaker 3: a dope. Meine it's and then there's also the time cost.
32:46
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've noticed, but you only get
32:49
Speaker 3: one life, and the minute that you spent doing that
32:54
Speaker 3: is a minute you never get back.
32:57
Speaker 1: M M yeah it is. It's like cost benefit analysis.
33:01
Speaker 1: What is this? What am I investing? Time? Energy, money,
33:06
Speaker 1: maybe focus, attention? What am I getting back? Fucking an addiction?
33:11
Speaker 3: Like you're also getting some ads?
33:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, there's not a great ROI if we're talking
33:16
Speaker 1: about digital investment in terms of our attention and and
33:22
Speaker 1: I know there's no three step plan, but surely, like
33:25
Speaker 1: as you're talking, I'm like, yeah, that's that's not me,
33:27
Speaker 1: that is me. That's a bit me. Tiff is probably
33:31
Speaker 1: the same. I know there's no single entry point or
33:35
Speaker 1: stepping off point, but if it.
33:37
Speaker 3: Is, this is not meant to be like alcoholics anonymous
33:42
Speaker 3: or something. This is meant to be for everyone who
33:46
Speaker 3: has who sees a little bit of themselves in all
33:49
Speaker 3: of the stories that I put in this book, who
33:51
Speaker 3: sees some of the things there that they are doing too.
33:55
Speaker 3: And the plans I put forward for what to do
33:59
Speaker 3: about it are relatively easy to implement, and they're not
34:03
Speaker 3: things like throw your phone in the bin. They are
34:06
Speaker 3: things like introduce friction by doing this instead of this,
34:12
Speaker 3: you know, introduce delay by doing it this way rather
34:15
Speaker 3: than that way. And I walk people through that in
34:18
Speaker 3: this book and then describe why it matters and what
34:23
Speaker 3: effects doing that will have on your brain biochemistry.
34:27
Speaker 1: Do you touch on? And we'll wind up now because
34:30
Speaker 1: I know you've got to get back to your computer game.
34:33
Speaker 1: Do you touch on? Do you touch on? AI? I
34:40
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, so many of my friends don't
34:43
Speaker 1: actually write whatever it is they're writing. They don't actually
34:46
Speaker 1: write it anymore. They just put in a prompt and
34:48
Speaker 1: AI writes it for them and that becomes the letter.
34:53
Speaker 3: It's a slightly different thing in that AI is not addictive,
34:56
Speaker 3: but it is something else and it's related. And I
34:58
Speaker 3: was actually having this thought today and I thought we
35:00
Speaker 3: might talk about this today, but we've got a little
35:02
Speaker 3: bit sidetracked. I was thinking, if a guy is doing
35:06
Speaker 3: our thinking for us, and increasingly it is, isn't this
35:11
Speaker 3: just like the Industrial Revolution when machines started doing our
35:15
Speaker 3: lifting for us. So the idea of there being a
35:19
Speaker 3: gym or you're doing a workout in the early eighteen
35:24
Speaker 3: hundreds would have been frankly laughable because people were just
35:28
Speaker 3: doing that every day anyway, it was the job. And
35:35
Speaker 3: for that to have become something that has been created
35:40
Speaker 3: is really really interesting, which is you know, you probably
35:45
Speaker 3: know about Eugene Sandow, sort of the father of bodybuilding
35:49
Speaker 3: modern bodybuilding.
35:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the actual mister Olympia, which is the biggest
35:53
Speaker 1: comp in the world. The trophy is called the Sandow Yeah.
35:58
Speaker 3: And I mean he was the I guess, the original
36:01
Speaker 3: fitness influencer. If it had an Instagram account, it would
36:05
Speaker 3: have been mad. But he was a product of something
36:09
Speaker 3: called the physical culture movement, which really spread throughout Europe
36:15
Speaker 3: the United States as a result of the Industrial Revolution,
36:19
Speaker 3: and it was based in this notion of you are
36:23
Speaker 3: no longer using your body for what it was designed
36:26
Speaker 3: to do, what it has been doing for the rest
36:29
Speaker 3: of time up until now when we had all these
36:32
Speaker 3: Now I got all these machines that do it for us.
36:34
Speaker 3: So you need to keep training it, you need to
36:37
Speaker 3: keep using it, or it will disappear. And I wonder
36:42
Speaker 3: is there something like that necessary with AI, because what
36:47
Speaker 3: a lot of people are doing now with AI is
36:49
Speaker 3: using it to do their thinking. And if we use
36:54
Speaker 3: a machine to do our thinking, do we need something
36:58
Speaker 3: like the physical culture movement, where we actually design programs
37:02
Speaker 3: that where people can do a mental workout every day.
37:05
Speaker 3: And I'm not touring a sudoku or something like that.
37:08
Speaker 3: That's the equivalent of lifting a tin of beans and
37:11
Speaker 3: calling it a workout. I am saying programs that are
37:15
Speaker 3: actually designed to make sure your brain still functions. Yeah.
37:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny when you think about eugen stand out onwards, right.
37:27
Speaker 1: Imagine you know, for however long depends, they keep changing
37:30
Speaker 1: the timeline. But three hundred thousand years where men and
37:34
Speaker 1: women were active, most men and women active all the time,
37:38
Speaker 1: lifting shit, like fixing shit or whatever, just moving their
37:43
Speaker 1: body a lot, expending physical energy a lot, naturally functional
37:47
Speaker 1: and strong, and them projecting forward going, oh, in two
37:51
Speaker 1: hundred years, nobody will do any of this, but they'll
37:53
Speaker 1: go to this room and then they'll pretend to Yeah,
37:57
Speaker 1: they'll pick something up and put it down for an hour,
38:00
Speaker 1: and then they'll go back and sit in their lounge chair.
38:03
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it's well, there was no need really, no,
38:07
Speaker 1: there was no.
38:07
Speaker 3: Need recently, and and to me, I'm wondering there was
38:12
Speaker 3: no need for the similar things for brains. And I
38:18
Speaker 3: think we're going to need it, and I think there's
38:21
Speaker 3: a new Eugene Sander. Maybe it's you and new Eugene
38:25
Speaker 3: Sander waiting in the wings to do the same thing
38:29
Speaker 3: for brains because of what AI is going to do
38:32
Speaker 3: to or is doing to us.
38:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do actually talk about the importance of training
38:37
Speaker 1: our brain, like the importance of maintaining, if not optimizing
38:43
Speaker 1: cognitive function and solving problems and being creative and doing all.
38:49
Speaker 3: It's not just that it's the physical brain interaction. It's
38:54
Speaker 3: high kinetic sports and so on that have high rates
38:59
Speaker 3: of thinking and action associated. So you know, not surprisingly,
39:03
Speaker 3: I would use handball given my association with handball, with
39:06
Speaker 3: that where that's an extremely high speed, high cardio sport
39:10
Speaker 3: where things are changing second by second. It's the interaction
39:13
Speaker 3: of the brain and the body in that motion that
39:17
Speaker 3: I think will become more and more important.
39:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's another one which I would just because I
39:24
Speaker 1: have been a tiny bit involved in, but I've trained
39:27
Speaker 1: quite a lot of athletes who do Brazilian jiu jitsu
39:30
Speaker 1: Tiff knows one of them, and like it's such a
39:35
Speaker 1: cerebral sport where they're on the map, which if you
39:38
Speaker 1: haven't seen it, you wouldn't think that. You think it's
39:41
Speaker 1: just two bullf ed's just squeezing each other and strangling
39:44
Speaker 1: each other.
39:45
Speaker 3: All highly kinetic sports, fencing, jiu jitsu, all of the
39:51
Speaker 3: martial arts where your brain has to be functioning at
39:56
Speaker 3: light speed and incredibly focused or you are going to
39:59
Speaker 3: get messed up.
40:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Oh I'm excited. What's the ETA on
40:05
Speaker 1: the book again?
40:06
Speaker 3: Did you say twenty eighth of April, just after transit?
40:10
Speaker 1: All right, well, we'll do a promo when it comes out.
40:13
Speaker 1: It's yeah, that was good, mate, that was so interesting.
40:18
Speaker 1: But just also shout out everyone on David's substack page.
40:23
Speaker 1: You wrote an article today which I actually read in
40:25
Speaker 1: preparation for this, which god, I know, so I've actually
40:30
Speaker 1: got it under the under your faces, well can't see
40:34
Speaker 1: your face. You're always just a black box, like a
40:36
Speaker 1: fucking mystery thing on a plane. But anyway, may I yeah, yeah,
40:41
Speaker 1: that's right. But the article is called the Purchased Health Halo.
40:46
Speaker 1: We might talk about it next time, but it's on substack.
40:49
Speaker 1: Just go David Gillespie substack. It will come up on
40:53
Speaker 1: Google or whatever. It's fucking great. So have a read
40:56
Speaker 1: of that and maybe we'll explore that next time, but Mate,
40:58
Speaker 1: appreciate you as always and thanks for the chat and Tiff,
41:02
Speaker 1: thanks for hanging out, Thanks lads, Thanks Jo