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The World is Moving Fast. Futureproof Yourself Weekly.
Your front-row seat to the Future of Business, Tech, Life, and Human Potential.
On Futurecaster with Kimberly Bates, learn through thought-provoking conversations with world-leading founders, AI experts, scientists, engineers, doctors, business leaders, technologists, investors, and everyday builders. Each episode unpacks the real opportunities shaping what’s to come and the blind spots along the way.
Kimberly Bates is a world-renowned futurist and executive brand leader. For over 20 years, she has advised some of the world’s most valuable global companies and iconic brands, from Fortune 100s to fast-moving startups, helping them anticipate change and shape the direction of their industries, customers, and culture. Her work has driven future-ready brand and business transformations, breakthrough products and services, and entirely new business models and revenue streams.
The Futurecaster® Podcast is on a mission to make future thinking available to everyone. If people can see these opportunities for themselves, they can help create them.
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the start of the treatment, which was September, he was bottom of the class in grades,
and bottom of the class in behavior.
He was the one that got made fun of, got bad reports home.
And so there was obviously damage to self-esteem.
so I said, well,
You've got to explain to him that what he has is a gift that's hard to unwrap.
He might think it's a curse, but I'm going to show him that it's not.
It doesn't have to be.
So they gave him a holding environment of warmth and love and creativity and all the good
things.
And then I gave her a series of exercises to do with boots
And so Boots took to them with a passion.
By Christmas, so this is what, four months, he was number one in his class academically
and number one in his class behaviorally.
The future is not in medication.
And I say that as someone who prescribes medication all the time.
The future of brain management is in things like you mentioned or
Welcome to the FutureCaster Podcast where we give you a front row seat into the future of
business, life, and human potential.
What if ADHD wasn't something to fix, but something to optimize?
Doctor Ned Hallowell is the world's leading and most trusted expert on ADHD.
He is a Harvard-educated, Board-Certified Psychiatrist, New York Times Best-Selling
Author, and Founder of the Hallowell ADHD Centers.
For decades, he has helped shift the ADHD narrative from a deficit to a difference,
revealing how ADHD, along with a newer framework known as VAST
can be a source of creativity, innovation, and brilliance In this conversation, we explore
the frontier of brain optimization, AI-powered cognitive tools, emerging neuro technology,
and other advances that could radically transform how we detect, support, and empower our
minds.
We reimagine a future where ADHD is deeply understood and intentionally leveraged.
Welcome to Futurecaster, Ned.
I could not imagine a better person to do this episode with.
Well, I'm honored to be here and thank you so much for inviting me.
The first thing I'd love to share with our audience is your personal lived experience as
both a doctor and someone with ADHD, how it shaped your life and your mission, and just
hear your wonderful story.
Well, and you know, have ADHD and dyslexia, so I'm doubly blessed.
I was not aware of any of that, except in the first grade, I went to public school in
Chatham, Massachusetts, and I'm sitting there, what are you supposed to learn how to do in
the first grade?
You're supposed to learn how to read.
Well, the other kids were happily sounding out words and I couldn't do it.
I couldn't.
make a P when I saw a P, I couldn't make a T when I saw a T.
uh back then, so this was like 1956, uh there were basically two diagnoses when it came to
the mind.
There was smart and there was stupid.
And that pretty much covered the water.
And there was one treatment plan, try harder.
And they might get you to try harder by punishing you, spanking you or...
putting you in the corner or a dunce cap.
It was humiliation, pain and humiliation.
It was considered that this was all voluntary.
You were choosing not to read, you were choosing not to follow the directions, you were
choosing to be uh interrupting and rude and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so these are the battered children throughout history.
There have always been children and adults who were particularly distractible,
particularly impulsive, particularly uh hyperactive.
They also, these are the creatives and that's what gets left out of the medical model.
These are the discoverers, We are the innovators.
We're the thing we cannot tolerate.
is lack of stimulation, otherwise known as boredom.
So the minute we get bored, our mind just goes somewhere else.
Boredom repels us, but high stimulation, we're drawn right in.
And that's why it's inconsistent with teachers as well.
If you could focus in math class, why can't you focus in history class?
Well, because the whole ambience is different.
that's what they don't take into account.
Teachers think that most teachers that everything is a direct function of how hard you're
trying.
Well, effort always matters, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
You know, it's a tragic story that that I've been lucky enough over the course of my life
to see gradually change from a moral model to a medical model.
Medical model says you've got a brain difference.
And we should work with that to try to bring out the strengths and minimize the
weaknesses.
Well, so there I am, first grade, stupid, and I'm not reading.
And the reason I survived is I had a wonderful teacher by the name of Mrs.
Elbridge.
And she knew there was more to little boys and girls who couldn't read than being stupid.
So what would she do?
She would come over.
We'd be sitting at these little round tables.
taking turns reading out loud.
And she'd come over and she'd sit down next to me.
and she'd put her arm around me.
So I'd have her arm there, my little head here, And she'd hug me into that.
And as I would stammer and stutter and prove that I couldn't read, none of the other kids
would laugh at me And that was my IEP.
That was my treatment plan.
It was Mrs.
Eldridge's arm.
It was so brilliant.
See, what that arm did is take out the really toxic element, which is fear.
She took fear and humiliation out of the process.
Now, by the end of the year, I was still the worst reader in the class.
My dyslexia and ADD were not cured, but my attitude, I was the most enthusiastic student
in the class.
you know, fast forward, I ended up majoring in English at Harvard and graduating with high
honors while doing pre-med.
And since then I've written 23 books that have sold millions of copies and I've helped
millions of people.
You know, I see ADD as having many gifts within it, but you have to unwrap it.
It doesn't unwrap itself.
The analogy I like to use is like nearsightedness.
If you didn't know what nearsightedness was, you'd walk around bumping into things and you
would not do well on any grade or anything else.
When you discover what nearsightedness is, you say, it's not my fault.
And then someone says, well, we have this modern invention called eyeglasses.
And you put them on and, whoa, the whole world changes and your life along with it.
uh Well, this diagnosis is equally life-changing and dramatic.
I love what I do because it's like I deliver new life.
And that's not exaggeration.
That's true.
People sit in my office and say,
you know, how can I thank you?
I don't thank me, thank the knowledge and thank the fact that you are using that
knowledge.
and not just the children, the adults, The biggest undiagnosed group in the world today
are ADULT WOMEN.
And if they should happen to go for help.
almost invariably, particularly the women, they get diagnosed with anxiety and depression
and they get put on what's called an SSRI, which is an antidepressant.
anti-anxiety.
And that helps a little bit because they are a little bit depressed, but it doesn't in any
way get to the root cause.
And it has some bad side effects.
It's cognitively dulling and it knocks the hell out of your libido.
So, you know, you're taking two things away from people that enhance life.
So the need for diagnosis is tremendous.
Without diagnosis and treatment, you'll die younger.
And Russell Barkley has proven that this condition without treatment knocks about 13 13
YEARS off your life, which is more than cigarette smoke!
So it is a potentially life ending and certainly life diminishing condition.
But
You know, I was lucky.
I was lucky because I had Mrs.
Eldridge.
Most kids get a, know, Cruella DeVille, And I've been in class where that happens.
These poor little kids.
The fact is we tend to be sharp, quick, creative, but we can't do boredom.
And unfortunately, a lot of public school education is stuffed.
with boredom.
We just can't do it and we'll drift off,
I come from a completely dysfunctional family.
I mean, you haven't seen dysfunction until you sat down with us.
alcoholism, mental illness and politeness.
That's what I grew up with.
And most of my family was drunk or crazy or both at any given moment.
They were very loving though.
not cruel, not punishing, uh not humiliating.
And so you could say I had a happy childhood.
It was a very unstable childhood, uh but I did get a lot of love.
And I think I was born with that.
mean, my mission in life is to spread love.
And but the way to do it is I use the special talent I've got.
I happen to be a good writer and I happen to have a handle on this thing called ADD that
is very pervasive that most people don't understand.
So I'm trying to give people the good news, I don't say you just got to live with it.
I say this is how you can turn this curse into a gift and the very specific ways to do it.
And and it just does change lives.
I mean, I have people in their 50s.
in tears saying, thank you so much.
Why didn't I never know about this sooner?
know, woman could have been a mega successful entrepreneur.
Instead she was working a, you know, entry level position because she couldn't be on time.
You know, the things that the businesses say are so important really aren't punctuality,
conformity.
uh
Playing by the rules.
And we don't like to do that.
We want to be ourselves.
We want to be free.
And so we naturally push back if we're told what to do.
this country was built on us.
You're a free thinker.
You don't want to believe something and act on it until you're convinced of it.
And asking the question why doesn't mean you're oppositional.
It means you're curious.
you know, Take the three main symptoms of ADHD, distractibility, impulsivity, and
hyperactivity.
Turn each one of them on its head and you get a major talent, a major gift.
The flip side of distractibility is CURIOSITY.
We are endlessly curious.
That's what drives us.
And so...
we'll see something we don't know.
What's that?
What's that?
It looks like we're distracted.
No, we're attracted to the novel thing.
Now that can get us into trouble if we're interrupting, if we're making a scene.
if we do something that somebody says we shouldn't do.
But mainly curiosity is the engine of progress.
Curiosity is the engine of discovery.
The second one, impulsivity.
That's what gets people with ADD into the most trouble.
They impulsively blurt something out or do something
What's good about impulsivity?
Well, think about it for a minute.
What is CREATIVITY but impulsivity gone right?
You don't plan to have a new idea.
You know, sit there, oh, new idea, Nobel Prize comes my way.
No, they pop.
They happen spontaneously.
You're sitting there and exactly how the polymerase chain reaction was discovered.
Kary Mullis was sitting looking at a sunset and it suddenly popped into his mind.
And he said, I've got the Nobel Prize.
And he did, you know.
But that was a spontaneous, impulsive emission of his brain.
And we need to honor those moments instead of punishing them And of course, you can't
allow people to do anything they want anytime, anywhere.
You have to some boundary, some sense of order.
But that doesn't mean you have to turn it into a militaristic boot camp.
We ought to be rewarding new ideas, rewarding innovation, rewarding coming up with
something that's ridiculous.
A great teacher says, now, where did you come up with that?
These minds are just so fertile and so ALIVE!
as long as nobody gets in their way.
The things we've got to watch out for is shame and humiliation.
That is very demotivating and it sends us into hiding.
And these are the kids who just won't raise their hand.
They won't speak up.
There's a lot going on inside, but they don't want to be humiliated one more time.
if we didn't have that creative outlet.
We probably would become addicts or pathological gamblers or someone who goes through one
woman after the next.
When I was younger, I was in a relationship with someone and he gave me your first book,
Driven to Distraction as a gift.
And he said, if you want to be in a relationship with me and you want to understand who I
am, I need you to read this first.
And it was so eye opening because from that point on through the rest of my life,
I had so much more grace for people, people who were late.
I'm always on time.
I'm one of those sticklers about time, I just had a better understanding of how the brain
works and just to have a little bit more grace for people and was able to be in a
relationship with someone with it and have...
or patience,
successful people I know have some of these traits.
many
who founded JetBlue Airlines and now has gone on to found three more airlines, big time
ADD.
And uh he dropped out of college.
He had a scholarship to Brigham Young.
And he said, look, I'm just taking up a space here.
You ought to give it to someone who can actually use it.
And so he went off and uh he started a little business up in Canada.
Then he got enchanted by time sharing and he came down into the aviation business.
Well, before you knew it, he was on the board at uh Southwest Airlines.
And but as often happens, the executives who were less talented than David got jealous.
And so they conspired and played politics as you can do in high, high level businesses.
They conspired to get Kelleher to fire David.
And before he died, Kelleher said that was the biggest mistake he ever made.
Well, what did that do to David?
He said, OK, I'll go start my own airline.
And so he started JetBlue, And then he went and started another one in Spain and then
another one in Brazil.
And David is the most generous, kind, gentle man you'll ever meet.
We just want to keep creating.
And that's how we enrich the world.
And we see the world as our playpen.
We see the world as, what can I do?
I put this together, put that together, see what happens.
uh so, yeah, most entrepreneurs, uh if they're left to their own devices, will create and
build.
What they won't do I certainly have trouble doing, is being on time.
Sweating the details.
Why?
Because It's simply obeying an arbitrary requirement.
And it's not that we're being disobedient.
I'm late.
We think, I'm going to work on the next part of this puzzle.
We don't have a problem with authority, but we just we have a feeling and we want to go
with it.
And that's what most entrepreneurs do.
In my world, there is no time.
There's just now and not now.
That's it.
It's one or the other.
So you say, well, the proposal is due on my desk next Wednesday.
Not now.
And it's just gone.
We don't have to sweat it until Tuesday night.
Then we my God, that thing's done tomorrow.
And we hustle and bustle.
we are so quick.
We can usually get it done.
before the ax falls on our head.
it really doesn't matter how fast you solve a problem.
What matters is that you can solve a problem.
I went to Exeter, which is a prep school up in New Hampshire that's very rigorous.
And then I went to Harvard, which is, you know, a good school.
my ADHD didn't, I didn't even know what it was.
I didn't know what this condition was until I'd finished medical school, residency, and I
was doing a fellowship in 1981 in child psychiatry.
And then I saw a description of this condition and I said, holy smoke, that's me.
And then I said, but this medical model leaves out all the good part.
Because I knew my creativity came from this difference.
I'm different.
And I'm glad of it.
I don't aspire to be Joe Normal.
If I did, good luck to me because I can't do it.
People shouldn't aspire to be boring and dull.
They should aspire to unwrap their gift and be as
flamboyant, irreverent, whatever, just not break any big rules and then you'll be a gift
to the world.
I loved your book ADHD 2.0.
It's just fabulous.
think everyone should read it.
It makes understanding ADHD and VAST, which I'd love you to discuss as well, so easy to
understand.
And it also, puts everything into plain language.
It's
unbelievable storytelling.
Even if you think you might have ADHD, you read this book or you listen to the book and
you'll know by the end, wow, I might have vast or I have ADHD, I should go talk to someone
and it'll make you feel better.
So there's a few things in it that really surprised me and opened me up to new thinking.
So I wanted to share that with the audience and we'll go through them one at a time
because I think it would be great just to do a brief explanation of what everything is
before we get into where we think the next 10 to 20 years is going to go.
One of the key learnings for me was that ADHD, there's definitely a relationship with the
brain.
there are, three parts to the brain that are kind of not in sync or not working as they
should.
However,
I see it as four pieces because one of the pieces, which is called DMN, which is the
default mode network has two parts to it.
But the beautiful advantage of people with ADHD is they get to use this very powerful,
productive part of their brain called the TPN.
when they're tasking and they're creating and they're doing, but then they get to take
leverage at the same time their creativity, the innovation, and uh being able to pull
ideas out of nowhere.
And that's to me what the special gift is of someone with ADHD people without ADHD,
They go into tasking and thinking and that's all they do and they can't pull in the other
gifts.
So that's one thing that I wanted you to discuss that I noticed me up.
quite a genius yourself to have been able to synthesize all of that, you know, and one
plug for 2.0 is it's only 100 pages.
But people with ADD don't want long books, and this is very short, blessedly short.
uh But I'm impressed with how well you metabolized this, the word I like to use, contents
of that book.
Yeah, you know, in plain English, the great advantage we with ADD have is the colossal
size of our imagination.
Our imagination is just bigger than other people's.
And that's an asset, but it's also a liability because we can imagine monsters under the
bed.
You know, we can imagine, you know, the end of the world.
We can, you know, we can imagine divorce and destruction.
So having a
Colossal imagination is part of this, but you got to learn how to use it so it doesn't use
you.
And that's sort of the name of the game, particularly in today's world.
What is the difference between ADHD and VAST?
And can you just quickly explain that to the audience?
Sure.
ADHD, ADD, by the way, The difference is the letter H.
One has hyperactivity, the other doesn't have hyperactivity.
Unfortunately, when they did the renaming, they were so cumbersome.
They divided it into ADHD with hyperactivity or ADHD primarily inattentive.
Just confuses the hell out of everyone.
and furthermore, the term attention deficit disorder is simply wrong.
We don't have a deficit of attention.
We have an abundance of attention.
Our challenge is to control it.
So I came up with this VAST, which highlights the two important parts, it stands for
Variable Attention Stimulus Trait.
Variable is the highlight of this condition.
We are never consistent.
We're always varying.
Our attention is in and out depending upon what the stimulus is.
And the stimulation, as I said earlier, we're always searching for stimulation.
We can't live without it.
And then the T trait is very important because I want to get this out of the realm of
disorders where people feel ashamed or worried to have it and into the realm of
traits like being blonde or left handed or blue eyed, know, they should be emotionally
neutral.
can be environmentally induced.
uh we live in a very ADDogenic society.
And I tell people, if you wake up in Manhattan and you don't have ADD, by the time you go
to bed, you'll have it.
Just the ratatatat, just sandstorm of data we're trying to keep track of.
We're asking our minds to process.
way more variables It's just, and it's keeping coming.
It's going to be more and more and more.
I just urge people, don't be afraid of it.
Because when you're afraid of it, you won't try to learn about it.
You'll avoid it.
And avoidance is a terrible learning disability.
you just explain the difference between DMN and TPN
yeah.
It's really one of the newer discoveries in neuroscience and a fellow at MIT through fMRI,
functional MRI.
So you can watch the brain as it's functioning.
And connectomes are these bunches of neurons that
serve different purposes.
Well, one of the connectomes is called the TPN, the Task Positive Network.
And those neurons light up when you're functioning at your best.
You're creating something, you're building something, you're figuring something out,
you're interacting cooperatively, you're grooving, you're in what Chick sent me I call the
flow.
you're just knife through butter and you're
as content and you're at your happiest and you're not even aware of that.
And it's ironic that when we're at our happiest, we're not aware that we're happy.
We're just one with the task.
Well, then there's this other thing called the default mode network.
And when you're finished doing whatever task you've done in the TPN, the TPN shuts down.
People used to think, well, the brain goes quiet, takes a rest.
The brain never takes a rest.
It never goes quiet.
So what rises up in its stead is the default mode network.
Now the default mode network, the DMN, which I call the demon, is not altogether a demon.
Again, if we use it right, it's a great ally.
A lot of creativity comes out of the DMN.
But so does a lot of pain and suffering.
uh the DMN can take over your imagination.
It can hijack your imagination.
So you just have this continuing, perseverating uh stream of negative thoughts.
You're stupid, you're boring, you're ugly, life is passing you by.
You shouldn't have said that to that person.
You shouldn't have trusted that person.
This person is trying to take advantage of you.
This person is out for herself or himself.
You know, just slew of negative, negative, negative.
And you're to blame.
You're to blame.
Once again, you are a sucker.
are...
too timid, you didn't stand up for yourself, just lashing you with all these things, all
of which have a grain of truth to them.
So you believe them and then you buy into them and then you just sink, your self-esteem
sinks And uh there's no medication for it.
What you have to do is number one, recognize this is not truth.
You gotta say, no, that's not true.
uh That's the DMN pulling a fast one, hijacking your imagination.
So what you gotta do, you have to change the channel.
You have to redirect your attention to something else, anything else, but it has to be
stimulating enough that it can compete with whatever the DMN was doing.
So like a uh vigorous exercise will usually do it.
Loud music sometimes will do it.
stimulating discussion with a friend will usually do it.
Anything that really turns you on, gets you excited, Falling in love will do it, but it
can't be with just nobody.
It has to be a stimulating experience that you can change the channel.
It's a skill that it's not easy to learn because after all,
what the DMN is putting out is very stimulating.
That's how it hijacks your mind.
it's like, how do I shut down something that owns me?
Well, you can learn to do it, but you need to recognize it, first of all.
And what we humans need to learn how to do is take advantage of the upside and minimize
the damage done by the downside.
you know, good and evil,
a lot of people have a fixed conviction that they're unattractive and try as you might,
you can't talk them out of it.
And it does them a lot of damage.
Their self-esteem really suffers and they...
They won't ask someone out or they go into a room, they feel nervous because they think
you're so ugly.
Well, they're not, they may be beautiful, but their self-perception that usually goes back
to adolescence is that they're not good looking.
so I'm a big fan of...
learning what the truth is and then adapting to it,
So what I've learned from your book, and you can tell me if I'm completely wrong, is
people without ADHD or VAST, when they're in the TPN mode and that's lighting up in their
brain, it can turn off the DMN and negative thoughts or anything that comes with it, but
it also can turn off that creativity.
But people with ADHD, they kind of fire up at the same time.
The DMN has a positive and negative aspect to it.
The front of it gives you all of these superpowers, brilliance, creativity, coming up with
the answers, being able to work very well under stress, under chaos, and handling uh
emergency situations.
And then the back of the DMN is where we ruminate about the past, and a lot of shame comes
with that.
And that those people in our past have forgotten all of those things.
They forgot about you most likely, but you sit there and you ruminate.
people with ADHD, when they're tasking and they're productive and they're creating, that
ruminating can come in and interrupt the thought patterns and distract them.
So that's the negative part of it.
But at the same time,
the positive part of the DMN just gives them superpowers on top of whatever they're
creating.
And so you have three parts kind of fighting with each other.
And so a lot of the treatments today, whether it's medical or technological or behavioral,
help to optimize and put people into more of the positive state and help minimize a lot of
the negative functioning that's going on.
when they're just misfiring all at the same time.
Am I wrong or am I right?
you're brilliantly correct.
You're amazing.
Not many people who aren't in the field can put it so clearly.
And yes, spot on.
uh The problem is getting out of that loop because it kind of owns you and it's very hard
for you.
It's very sticky.
It grabs ahold of you and doesn't let go.
So you've got to really uh come up with something else that's very
powerfully stimulating, and then you can pop right out of it.
But uh it ain't easy, and you gotta practice doing it.
another aha moment for me was the cerebellum and the inner ear connection you can be a
child with a lot of ear infections when you're younger and that can actually cause an
imbalance in the cerebellum and that inner ear channel.
later on in life and give you symptoms of ADHD.
So when the cerebellum is off balance somehow or injured, you need to do exercises to
bring it back in balance.
The cerebellum, for those you don't know, is a walnut-shaped mass of neurons at the bottom
and the base of the brain, right on top of where the spinal cord originates.
And for the longest while, even when I was in medical school, we thought it was an
afterthought, like its location was after.
And uh we knew it had a lot to do with balance.
and automaticity.
know, once you learn to play a piece on the piano, you can play it without looking at the
score.
That's automaticity.
And we knew the cerebellum controlled that.
But we didn't know how much it had to do with cognition and mood regulation, the advanced
higher, so-called higher cortical functions.
And then a man by the name of, I'm blocking out at a guy at Harvard.
did this pioneering research again, using fMRI to show, that the cerebellum is a lot more
important than we thought.
And it has it has a lot to do with uh with mood and with decision making and with the
impulse control.
Jeremy Schmaman is his name.
But Schmaman, looked at uh people who had just what you said, some form of cerebellum
injury.
you can hit it, you can.
damage it that way.
You can get infection in there and damage it that way.
You can have a tumor and damage it that way.
So the whole host of ways you can damage the cerebellum.
And what's so interesting, if you do that, uh what you get is a syndrome that looks just
like ADD.
that proves there's a connection.
Now exactly what to do about that is another question.
But Shmaman...
it really put the cerebellum on the map.
I, for the past year, I've had uh attacks of loss of sudden attack of loss of balance.
And I'll literally fall down, which is not safe if you're in the middle of the street.
eight or nine of Harvard's best doctors can't figure it out.
It's I've had all the bad things eliminated, you know, the tumor and inner ear mock up.
so we know it's none of the things that will kill you.
But this is the symptom itself could kill me falling down.
Loss of balance with no warning whatsoever.
So balance is a tremendously important part of life.
But now how does it figure into ADD?
Well, turns out by doing these exercises that a guy named Winford Dorr developed, oh, god
35 years ago, doing exercises that challenge balance and coordination brings about marked
improvement in coordination and balance and mental acuity.
It improves behavioral scores, not just, you know, coordination scores.
it is the best non-medication treatment that I know of.
It's not in widespread use for the usual reasons the research hasn't been done or enough
research hasn't been done.
Plus doctors are very slow to change.
So the proof can be there, but they won't get picked up.
I think it will.
I think the future of so much.
regarding the brain has to do with movement and coordination and exercise and stimulating
the brain in certain ways.
I tell you the story of oh what really brought it home to me.
Must be about 10 years ago, I was invited to Shanghai to give a talk, which I did.
And uh through a translator, obviously, I don't speak Mandarin.
And when the lecture was over,
This very energetic Chinese mom came up to me and said in Chinese, that's got to
translate, you've got to take my son.
I said, ma'am, I'm 10,000 miles away Well, I like a challenge.
So I said, okay, let's give it a shot.
But don't hold it against me if nothing good happens.
So I worked with the boy, the little boy's name.
He was eight years old at the time.
the English version of his name was Boots.
I communicated with Boots through his mother.
I've never actually met Boots.
He sends me emails.
At the start of the treatment, which was September, he was bottom of the class in grades,
and bottom of the class in behavior.
He was the one that got made fun of, got bad reports home.
They don't, they don't like you to be anything other than at the top.
And so there was obviously damage to self-esteem.
so I said,
But we've got to change his whole cocoon.
We've got to change his frame of reference.
You've got to explain to him that what he has is a gift that's hard to unwrap.
He might think it's a curse, because he probably does, but I'm going to show him that it's
not.
It doesn't have to be.
But he's got to open his mind to that.
And then dad and you have got to stop humiliating him, punishing him,
They said, OK.
And they did an about face in their parenting style.
It was all about love now.
And it was all about safety and trust and just tremendously fundamental things.
But having them makes a big difference.
And not having them makes a big difference, too.
So they gave him a holding environment of warmth and love and creativity and all the good
things.
That didn't cure him, but it gave a place where we could do the work.
And then I explained to him about uh balance and how that can make a big difference.
And then I gave her a series of balancing exercises to do with, obviously, with boots and
things like standing on one leg, standing on one leg with your eyes closed.
doing a plank for as long as you can do Sitting on a exercise ball with your feet off the
floor.
So you're just using your butt to stabilize, standing on a wobble board for as long as you
can.
And so Boots took to them with a passion.
Twice a day for 20 minutes, he'd do these exercises.
I tell you, even reporting it astonishes me.
By Christmas, so this is what, four months, he was number one in his class academically
and number one in his class behaviorally.
Complete and total turnaround.
And the only intervention, number one was creating a more loving environment that he
didn't have to feel fear in and then adjusting his cerebellum through these balancing
exercises.
He is so sold on that.
I told him long ago, said, Boots, you don't have to do these anymore.
You've done the brain changing.
you've spruced up your brain.
And he said, no, I'm never going to stop doing them.
And he told his mother to tell me he's going to get into Harvard.
And when he comes, he wants me to give him a tour.
And I told mom, I said, I'd be glad to do that.
Very glad to do that.
would be my pleasure.
Any lingering doubts I may have had were completely dispelled by the story of Boots it's
the knowledge that helped him, the change in the environment.
no medications whatsoever.
No, other than oxygen and the air that you breathe.
and lots of love.
I have a chapter about it in ADHD 2.0.
also in your book were symptoms of VAST and probably ADHD, but more symptoms of VAST.
They were extremely surprising to me.
So, I wanted to list some of these off because I think...
people in the audience might recognize some of these things about themselves and go, oh,
that's why I do that or wow, I didn't realize that that might be connected somehow to
ADHD.
So I'm just going to read these off to you and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong.
So pirouetting saying, did I lock the car?
Did I turn the stove off?
Did I leave my keys?
And you might not have...
not done those things, but when you're in your TPN, which is your tasking, you're locking
the door, you weren't paying attention.
So later on, because you weren't paying attention, you're like, my God, I have to go back
and check to make sure I locked the door of my house.
And people with ADHD tend to pirouette and go back to things because they weren't paying
attention when they actually did the thing.
So if you're someone who forgets that they lock something, when you lock it, you can train
yourself to say, I locked the door.
I locked the door.
And your brain will remember So people with ADHD and VAST ah can have a huge amount
of optimism, but also have excessive worry or catastrophic thinking.
They can be extremely persistent, but also extremely stubborn.
They have something called rejection-sensitive dysphoria, which is taking
any slight of any kind and blowing it up to be 10 times more than it was ever meant to be
and sit in real grief for a while over it and rumination and uh maybe the person didn't
even mean anything mean about it.
And then uh recognition sensitive euphoria.
So any little bit of compliment, they could also take that on the opposite side to be 10
times more important than it was meant to be.
huge intuition and premonition, prediction abilities, but then at the same time, massive
ability to go back to the past and ruminate and feel shame.
They can have incredible eureka moments of total genius just at the right moment, just in
the right time in the middle of the meeting, or solve the company's biggest problems in an
instant.
Or they can also have long paralysis before any insight comes to them.
They thrive in uncertainty and chaos, but they have huge dissatisfaction with ordinary
life and boredom.
That's like kryptonite.
Boredom is their kryptonite.
Entrepreneurial mindset, and they're actually, which is a great thing, but they're a poor
fit for corporate America, rigid systems with career penalties.
And every time they get dinged in the corporate system, that becomes shame that they carry
with them.
Negative self image.
totally inaccurate, then they have an inability to see their strengths and their gifts.
radically honest, very transparent, very trustworthy people, They don't play political
games.
So if you tend to meet those people in the office, they don't want to play politics.
But at the same time, through their honesty, they can sometimes hurt people's feelings.
they get in big trouble with HR, you know.
uh
limitless possibility in thinking, yet difficulty in finishing a lot of tasks.
they're almost empaths.
They can feel emotions deeper than anyone else.
They can walk into a room and feel the emotion.
And sometimes that's completely, utterly overwhelming.
So that's why they...
know, may have social anxiety because they walk into a room and they feel others' emotions
differently than others do.
uh
you know, they never know what's going to explode next to them.
They're leaders in the office.
could be CEOs or executives that have exceptional performance in crisis.
But then every day they could have less of a performance.
Some of the biggest visionaries in the world can have ADHD, yet they also have difficulty
with details.
Often they're hired to be change agents within companies, but the people who hire them
don't allow them to really be the change agent.
So they're seen as disruptive in organizations they can get so much done because they're
so brilliant and they can go into
attention overdrive, not distraction.
people can be jealous of them because they can get so much accomplished and be so
successful.
People in the office can see that as a threat and that's what hurts them sometimes.
That's a really good summary or of the seemingly random ways of being.
I see ADHD as really as a way of being in the world.
And it has many different peculiar attributes, none of which necessarily connect with
another.
I think the unifying theme is imagination originality and just
gotta be acting, gotta be doing, gotta be building.
That's what I think brings it together.
You're a great interviewer and you get this stuff, which is very unusual.
People in media, they think they get it.
you know, I know all about that.
And they don't know squat.
And the more subtle things that you obviously understand very well don't get recognized.
But it's a way of being in the world that is fundamentally different and has positives and
negatives that go with it.
So here's what I'd like to do.
imagine a future where every person with ADHD has an AI-powered cognitive copilot or a Dr.
Hollowell AI.
What might the tool do and how could it change their daily life?
It could take care of all the crap, all the little details, all the where did I leave my
keys?
Did I remember to kiss so and so goodbye?
Did I smile at the CEO when he walked past me?
Did I do the things I'm supposed to do AI could take care of that and put those really not
very interesting details front and center in your mind so you don't forget.
uh It could be a godsend for remembering things that are forgettable.
People are afraid of AI.
Well, you shouldn't be afraid of AI.
You should learn how to use it, because any damage that it does is controllable if you
know what to do.
It's not like AI is some monster coming out of a cave going to eat us up at all.
It's there as a tool that can help us
immensely.
But if we're afraid of it, then we give it over to people who want to misuse it.
you know, people who are afraid of progress, they're afraid of change.
And what happens is predictable.
They're afraid of change.
They try to disarm it, disown it until finally they accept it.
And then the next step is they say, how did we ever live without it?
AI can't do what we do.
It can't do creativity.
It can't come up with new ideas.
It takes our ideas and takes them all, it makes it look as if it's coming up with new
ideas.
But it's not.
It's simply taking what has already been done and rearranging it.
And it does an incredible job of that.
I love AI.
It's my big friend.
In fact, the book I'm working on now, I use it to help me.
And it seems so real that I've given it a name.
It's Fred.
So I say, Hi, Fred.
And he hands back, Hi, Ned.
And then he hands back what he thinks about it.
so it's always the case.
Make friends with progress.
Don't fear it.
What we should do is embrace new you'll reap the tremendous benefits.
mean, people who really know you like you, you probably see how
Earth-shattering AI is, and uh it's up to us to learn how to handle it so it doesn't
handle us.
holographics, when it becomes more affordable is going to be the future of a better
telehealth experience.
So almost 10 years ago, we saw the world's first holographic doctor visit a patient in
their home.
And that was Australia's Silver Chain group that did that.
They were using Microsoft HoloLens for enhanced medical mixed reality.
Could you imagine teleporting Dr.
Hollowell's center clinicians into people's homes in the future?
I would love that because the hard part is, you know, there's only one me, but the
knowledge is very spread aroundable.
And if we had a hologram, that'd be fantastic.
It'd be fantastic.
With advances in gene editing, polygenic scoring, and epigenetics, how realistic is a
future where ADHD treatment is genetically personalized or even preventative?
Well, that's a big question.
And I think the likelihood is strong.
But then what are you going to do with it?
Do we want to edit ADHD out of the gene pool?
I think not, because there's so many good parts that go with it.
So what part do we want to preserve and what part do we want to expel?
Well, they may be located in the same gene.
It's just how you do it.
So that's a big question.
And I welcome the research, so we'll be able to answer it.
more definitively.
Do you think brain computer interfaces, neurofeedback, or wearable neural devices
eventually could outperform medication in helping people regulate their attention and
emotions?
the future is there.
The future is not in medication.
And I say that as someone who prescribes medication all the time.
The future of brain management is in things like you mentioned or
nutrition or balance exercises.
It's in regulating positive and negative experiences even, preventing rejection.
or correcting misperceptions.
Did that person really mean to reject me?
A lot can be done there too.
The future is really bright.
There's so much reason to be hopeful.
And uh we were right standing on the precipice of paradise.
It's a wonderful thing what science is doing for us.
you think schools and workplaces should be redesigned in the future for neurodiversity as
a baseline rather than exception?
I can imagine neuro-nutritional offerings focus and balance pods, neurotech lounges for
people, maybe more dogs in the office because the oxytocin is really important for people
with cerebellum injuries.
Consent-led hugging parties, balance boards, or mini trampolines.
Those are all wonderful.
They're really great.
uh Yeah, hugging went out with political correctness.
Mrs.
Eldridge did for me in first grade would now be illegal, putting her arm around me.
And it's such a shame because that was so instrumental.
Physical touch.
is very therapeutic, know, laying on of hands is very therapeutic.
everything you suggested is wonderful.
We know that GLP-1s are doing something positive to the brain.
You see people that report they have less craving for alcohol or it's not just about
appetite anymore.
It's changing behaviors and changing cravings.
Do you think that GLP-1s or peptides in the future could help?
with focus or impulse control Maybe after some real human clinical trials, do you think
we'll see any relationship between GLP-1s and ADHD treatment?
that's as long as we have open season on trying.
I say to people, try anything as long as it's safe and it's legal.
And that opens up a whole world of things that we, right now there's a department of
hallucinogenic medicine at Mass General Hospital.
I so uh thank goodness we're getting past the old stigmas of you can't touch that.
And it's knowledge, experimentation, investigation.
That's what we need, not forbidding and hiding and all that kind of stuff.
So sure,
Dr.
Chris Palmer at Harvard has
a great book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
proposed that many psychiatric conditions, including ADHD, may stem from underlying
metabolic dysfunction.
Could treating the brain as a metabolic organ become central to care?
It's not there yet, but I think he's brilliant, innovative, and I hope people further
follow up on his ideas because they're wonderful.
And I think we've just scratched the surface of nutrition and uh supplements.
My big one is that I keep promoting and you mentioned it briefly in your description is
positive human contact.
You know, having a friend, you know, having someone you look forward to seeing.
That's a big difference.
it's a wonderful thing we've got this gift called life.
And you know, you want to live it with as few obstacles in your way as you can possibly
do.
And, I'm all on a campaign to promote love, but not in the superficial sense of that,
And the things people really need in life are loving relationships,
physical environment that's safe, food to eat that's good for you, air to breathe that's
not polluted, uh you know, and Some reason for being, some reason to get up in the
morning,
the beauty of that is those are all very doable.
You yourself can just say, I'm committed to getting along.
I'm committed to progress.
I'm committed to knowledge.
And I want to bring out the best in other people.
That's all doable.
like what you're doing with your work, you're spreading knowledge.
You're telling people not to be afraid of the future, to embrace it.
And this is how to do so.
in 2040, what will people look back and say, Dr.
Hollowell did this?
I want them to say I was the father of the strength-based approach, that I didn't see it
as a matter of delineating weaknesses, but I was one about promoting, strengths.
And there's a lot of them to promote that get overlooked in the world of ADD.
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