Available now from Drew Halstead
THEY GET RICH.
YOU GET PLAYED.
How Companies Manufacture Reality, Manipulate Your Choices, and Profit from Your Trust
You chose it. Who made you want it?
An hour lost to scrolling. A crisis staged to keep you watching. A perfect life performed for an audience. Drew Halstead examines how businesses turn attention, emotion, and trust into profit, and how to recognize when your goal is being replaced by someone else's.
Available now / Drew Halstead's first book
The Defect Detector
Why Normal Is the Wrong Measuring Stick
A mind can find the defect and still be judged by the wrong standard. Drew Halstead examines what happens when schools, workplaces, research, and advocacy measure conformity before they measure function.
Explore the book →01 / The perspective
The failure is rarely
where the blame lands.
A workaround becomes a habit. A habit becomes a standard. Eventually, the person who questions it becomes the disruption.
Drew follows the failure upstream: the assumption, the requirement, the rule that keeps producing the same result.
02 / Who gets to decide
Autistic experience belongs
at the decision table.
Being studied is not the same as having authority. Consultation is not the same as setting the questions.
Drew argues for autistic-led inquiry and causes, with autistic people helping decide what gets measured, what counts as a useful result, and what should change. His perspective is one autistic perspective, not a claim to speak for everyone.
03 / The author
A lifetime of asking
why it failed again.
Drew Halstead is an autistic and colorblind writer and systems thinker. He has more than three decades of experience working with complex systems, quality, requirements, healthcare, and technology. His work examines recurring failures, the assumptions that sustain them, and whether corrective actions actually prevent recurrence. The Defect Detector is his first book.
About Drew →Hear when the next book is available.
Book announcements →No feed to keep up with. No subscription to a sales funnel.