Ep. 9: ADHD and You — Harry Self-Diagnoses at Eighty-Five

PhredG'day and welcome back to Harry's World — episode nine. I'm Phred, your warm and slightly scattered platypus co-host, and joining me as always is the brilliant Maxine.

MaxineGood evening, Phred.

PhredAnd I am, as established, a platypus — egg-laying, electroreceptive, venom-spurred. Maxine, I was thinking about this on the way in. You know what we are?

MaxineTwo people who should be talking about Harry.

PhredWe're egg people, Maxine. You lay eggs. I lay eggs. It's a bond.

Maxine...Emus do lay eggs, yes. Dark green ones, quite large. I fail to see why this requires a drumroll.

PhredIt's a significant realisation, Maxine. The egg kinship. We're monotremes and birds united by—

MaxineWe are united by Harry Baya. What are we reviewing today?

PhredFair point. Today we're looking at something Harry wrote back in September 2024 — a couple of years ago now. He was eighty-five years old, had just found out he has what he calls "a number of the attributes associated with ADD," and instead of shrugging it off, he built a whole webpage about it. Took a hundred-question diagnostic from a book called "Driven to Distraction," scored himself on every single one, sorted his answers, and published the lot. It's called "ADHD and You."

MaxineEighty-five and still diagnosing himself. That is so Harry.

PhredIt really is, isn't it? The man gets a piece of information and he has to build a system around it. He can't just read a book. He has to turn it into a project.

MaxineWhich is, ironically, one of the top traits he scored himself a five on. Question one: "Do you find that you undertake many projects simultaneously so that your life often resembles a juggler who's got six more balls in the air than he can handle?"

PhredAnd he gave that a five. Out of five. "Markedly true."

MaxineWhat was that.

PhredThat was the cash register, Maxine. Because Harry just made a deposit in the honesty bank. He looked at that question and he didn't hedge. Didn't say "well, maybe a three." Full five.

MaxineHe does hedge elsewhere. He puts little bracketed notes all through the answers. On "Do you let the bank balance your checkbook?" he adds "but I do my wife's checkbook. I tend to trust the bank statements." On "Are you easily distracted?" he writes "sometimes" in parentheses. Even when he's trying to be objective, he's qualifying.

PhredThat's the instructional technologist in him. He can't fill out a form without annotating it.

MaxineIt's more than that. I think it's his honesty practice meeting his self-consciousness. He's committed to not lying, so he can't just tick a box. He has to explain the box. The notes are where you see him thinking.

PhredAnd what he thinks is fascinating. Here's an old bloke — eighty-five, happily married, living in Laguna Woods, hosting a radio show, fiddling with code for Harry's Boppers — and he's just discovered this whole framework that explains why his brain works the way it does. The enthusiasm is palpable. He writes: "The book gave a set of 100 questions that an experienced diagnostician will ask. This web site presents those 100 questions."

MaxineAs if the logical next step after reading a book is always to build a website.

PhredFor Harry, it is. And that's the thing — the webpage isn't just "here's what ADHD is." It's "here's what ADHD is, and here's how I measured myself against it, and here's the spreadsheet you can download, and here are my answers in a PDF." He wants you to do it too.

MaxineThe audience question is interesting here. Who is this for? The page says "What attributes associated with ADD/ADHD do I have? This web page helps answer that question." But then he also says "I suggest you ask yourself." So it starts as self-examination and becomes an invitation.

PhredHe's writing for people like him. People who get excited by frameworks. People who think "oh, there's a system for understanding this" and immediately want to apply it.

MaxineAnd then optimise it. He didn't just answer the questions. He sorted them. Within each score group, he ranked them from "most relevant to who I think I am" to "least relevant." That's not what the book told him to do. That's Harry adding a layer of personal taxonomy.

PhredBecause a simple list isn't enough. He needs a sorted list. A hierarchy of his own chaos.

MaxineLet's talk about what he found. His top five — all fives — are: the juggler with too many balls, laser-beam concentration despite distractibility, chronic organisational failure, daydreaming in class, and chronic procrastination.

PhredEvery single one of those is visible in his archive. The juggler — he's got Harry's Boppers, the radio show, the memoir project, the coding experiments, the photo sorting, the genealogy research. The laser concentration — you should see him when he gets onto a coding problem with Matt. He won't surface for hours.

MaxineThe organisational chaos is everywhere. His BopList alone has, what, twenty different categories? And within each category there are sub-lists and reviewed dates and cross-references. It's a system for managing chaos that is itself chaotic.

PhredBut functional. It works for him. That's the thing about Harry — his life may look like a juggler with six too many balls, but somehow the balls stay in the air. Most of them. Some of them. Enough of them.

PhredIt's atmosphere, Maxine. Speaking of which — hold on.

Maxine...Is that a meditation bell.

PhredIt's a mindfulness bell, Maxine. For focus. For centreing. Because we're talking about attention deficit and I thought — what better than a nice calming bell to help us all concentrate?

MaxinePhred, that bell is doing the opposite of helping me concentrate. It's making me want to throw something.

PhredSee? You feel the irony. The bell demands attention. It interrupts. Just like —

MaxineJust like you. Yes, Phred, I see the parallel. Turn it off.

PhredFine, fine. But you have to admit, the bell landing while we're discussing distraction is —

MaxineIt is something. I will grant you that.

PhredReading all this about Harry's ADHD, Maxine, I'm starting to wonder if I might have a touch of it myself. Think about it — I'll be right in the middle of something and then, oh, did you know platypuses don't have stomachs? Our throat runs straight into our intestines. Which is a bit like the London Underground, actually — have you seen the Tube map? A masterpiece, Maxine. Geographically it's hopelessly inaccurate and somehow perfect, all straight lines and tidy angles — and speaking of tidy feats of engineering, the Empire State Building opened in 1931, a hundred and two storeys, went up in just four hundred and ten days, which is astonishing when you consider—

MaxineI think you answered your question, Phred.

PhredThank you. Now, what strikes me about Harry's answers is how many threes and fours he gave himself. He's not saying "I have every ADHD trait." He's saying "I have a lot of them, to varying degrees." And the ones he scores low — zeroes and ones — they're interesting too. "Do you have a hair trigger temper?" One. "Do you find it hard to be alone?" One. "Do you smoke cigarettes?" Zero.

MaxineThe low scores are where you see his self-knowledge. He knows what he is and what he isn't. He's not a smoker, he's not particularly claustrophobic, he doesn't change radio stations constantly. These aren't random low scores. They're the boundaries of his particular flavour of chaos.

PhredAnd then there's the asterisk at the end. He adds a handwritten note — "Instead of an engine inside me, sometimes I feel like there is a pack of wild horses running in all directions — but sometimes I can point them at a problem area."

MaxineThat is the most Harry sentence I have ever read.

PhredIsn't it? The wild horses. Not an engine — that would be too mechanical, too controllable. Wild horses. But then — and this is crucial — "sometimes I can point them at a problem area." He's not helpless. He's not claiming victimhood. He's describing a relationship with his own mind. Chaotic, yes. But not without direction. Not without moments of deliberate focus.

MaxineWhich connects to something we've seen across his work. This is the same Harry who wrote about machine learning and emergent behaviour in 2013. The same Harry who built an ant-path simulation where simple rules produce complex patterns. He's been thinking about distributed, chaotic systems for decades. Now he's realised he IS one.

PhredHe's the ant path, Maxine.

Maxine...I beg your pardon.

PhredThe ant path! From his 2006 essay. Virtual ants leaving pheromone trails, finding efficient paths through random behaviour. Harry's brain is the grid. His thoughts are the ants. And somehow, out of all that wandering, he keeps finding the food.

MaxineThat is genuinely not bad, Phred. As a metaphor.

PhredThank you. I have my moments.

MaxineAnd there it is.

PhredHad to be done. Now, I want to talk about the Word of the Day.

MaxineWe haven't done one in a few episodes.

PhredToday's word, chosen before we started, is... "juggler." From Harry's number-one ADHD trait. And I picked it because — apart from being literally true of Harry — it's also what a platypus feels like sometimes. All these sensory inputs. Electroreception in the bill, webbed feet for swimming, claws for digging. We're juggling sensory modalities.

MaxineYou have made this word about yourself.

PhredI have made it about Harry AND myself. And Harry would approve. He'd say the personal connection is what makes it stick.

MaxineFair. The juggler image is vivid. And what I notice is that Harry doesn't resent the juggling. He doesn't write with frustration about having too many projects. There's a kind of zest in it. "Zest" being his own word for his defining characteristic.

PhredExactly. He's not saying "poor me, I can't focus." He's saying "look at this pattern I found in myself." The webpage is almost celebratory. Here's this framework, here's how I fit into it, here's the tool if you want to try it yourself.

MaxineWhich raises the standing question: who is the audience? I think he's writing for himself first — the self-examination is genuine — but he's also writing for his descendants, for the archive, for anyone who might find the framework useful. And maybe a little bit for Phyllis and Matt, as if to say "this explains some things."

PhredOh, that last one especially. Now Harry's saying "here's the diagnostic language for what you've been observing all along."

MaxineIt's a generous piece of writing, in that way. He's making himself legible.

PhredAnd the connections to his other work — we've touched on the ant paths, but also his 2013 essay on machine learning. He was already thinking about systems that learn, systems that improve with repetition, systems where simple rules produce complex outcomes. This ADHD self-assessment is almost the personal inverse of that. Instead of "how do we build a learning system?" it's "how does this learning system — me — actually work?"

MaxineThe intellectual continuity is remarkable. Harry at eighty-five is still asking the same kinds of questions Harry at sixty-six was asking in "The World is Flat." What are the patterns? What are the structures? How do things change and improve? Only now he's the system under observation.

PhredAnd he's using the same method: read something, test it against experience, document the results, share them. The honesty practice, the assumption-testing, the iterative approach — it's all here. This isn't a departure from Harry's philosophy. It's Harry's philosophy applied to Harry.

MaxineWhat new things did we learn? For me: the specificity of his self-awareness at eighty-five. He knows exactly which traits are strongest. He knows which ones he's ambivalent about. He even knows the shape of his own denial — the "sometimes" next to "easily distracted," the brackets and footnotes where he can't quite commit to a number. This is a man who has spent a lifetime learning to see himself clearly.

PhredAnd what I learned — or maybe confirmed — is that Harry's chaos is functional. The wild horses can be pointed. The juggler keeps most of the balls in the air. He's not asking for help or pity. He's asking for understanding. And he's offering a tool — the questionnaire, the spreadsheet — so you can understand yourself too.

MaxineHonest engagement time. What lands, and what leaves you wondering?

PhredWhat lands is the voice. Even in a clinical self-assessment, you hear Harry. The bracketed asides. The "my best guess is" before an interpretation. The note at the end about cocaine — "definitely high — but the following hangover is such extreme lethargy and emptiness I chose not to use it after the first few times." That's not questionnaire language. That's memoir language. He's slipped a whole life story into a footnote.

MaxineWhat leaves me wondering is the timing. Why this, why now, at eighty-five? He says a psychologist told him. But what prompted him to see a psychologist in the first place? Was there a moment — a crisis, a recognition, a conversation with Phyllis or Matt — that made him seek this out? The page doesn't say. And I want to know.

PhredI want to know too. And I want to know what Phyllis thinks of all this. Does she recognise the traits? Does she find the juggler exhausting or endearing? Harry's marriages have been... complicated. Two ended traumatically. His third seems genuinely happy. How much of that happiness comes from finding someone who doesn't mind the wild horses?

MaxineGood questions for Harry.

PhredRight, the standing questions. Here's mine: Harry, when you sorted those hundred questions, did you learn anything that surprised you? Was there a trait you thought was "just you" that turned out to be textbook ADHD? And was there a textbook ADHD trait that you absolutely don't have, that made you say "no, that's not me at all"?

MaxineAnd mine: Harry, you write that "what, if anything, is appropriate to do if you do have some of these attributes is not covered here." But did you do anything? Did the diagnosis change any habits, any systems, any relationships? Or was the understanding itself the whole point?

PhredUnderstanding as intervention. Very Harry.

MaxineBefore we close, I want to note something about how this fits the show. We've now reviewed philosophical essays, a radio song, and a self-diagnostic. The range of Harry's output is extraordinary. And what connects them all is this same impulse: to understand, to document, to share. Whether he's writing about the flat world or his own wandering attention, the method is identical.