Speaker 1: We'd like to acknowledge that traditional custodians of the land
Speaker 1: on which this podcast was produced, the Galliger people of
Speaker 1: the Orination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
Speaker 2: It's twenty fifteen and we're in London with journalist Joanne Harvey.
Speaker 2: He's about to take to the stage and for the
Speaker 2: next twenty minutes he'll explain that everything you know about
Speaker 2: addiction is wrong.
Speaker 3: He should know.
Speaker 2: He's spent the last three years conducting research around the
Speaker 2: world trying to answer the core questions on addiction. This
Speaker 2: topic is one close to his heart. One of his
Speaker 2: earliest memories is trying to wake up a family member
Speaker 2: and not being able to. A room full of people
Speaker 2: watching his Ted Talk will hang on to his every word,
Speaker 2: and they aren't the only ones. This Ted Talk, along
Speaker 2: with another four years later, will go on to be
Speaker 2: viewed more than ninety million times. I'm at Middleton and
Speaker 2: this is head Game today, Joann Hari on making an
Speaker 2: impact by investigating life's biggest issues. Thank you ever so
Speaker 2: much for coming on my podcast, head Game. Fascinated with
Speaker 2: getting into an in depth conversation. You've just got a.
Speaker 3: Nose for knowing what you want.
Speaker 2: It's almost that you have an addiction for a certain subject,
Speaker 2: knowing what you want and then going after it tenfold
Speaker 2: and getting the best out of not only yourself, but
Speaker 2: out of other people and out of a situation.
Speaker 3: So talk to me about your upbringing.
Speaker 4: I cover from a fucking weird background. So my parents
Speaker 4: met here in London. They were both run away. It's
Speaker 4: my dad had run away from the Swiss mountains, who
Speaker 4: grew up in a tiny, little wooden hut on the
Speaker 4: side of a mountain, where like, from the age of
Speaker 4: five you'd be working with the pigs, you'd be working
Speaker 4: in the fields. And when he was seventeen, he's like,
Speaker 4: there's got to be more to life than this, and
Speaker 4: he heard there was something going on. It was the
Speaker 4: sixties in London, so ran away came here. And my
Speaker 4: mum was a run away. She grew up in a
Speaker 4: very poor working class family in Scotland, you know, where
Speaker 4: life for women was not that good. And with her
Speaker 4: best friend Mary, she ran away and they met in
Speaker 4: a nightclub just off Carnaby Street when my dad spoke
Speaker 4: literally ten words of English and my mum only spoke English,
Speaker 4: and they had what my mum calls a series of
Speaker 4: one night stands, which I've tried to explain is not
Speaker 4: a concept that makes sense if there's more than one
Speaker 4: of them, it's not a one night stand. You know,
Speaker 4: the family I grew up in, there was a lot
Speaker 4: of without going into too much detail, because it's their story,
Speaker 4: other people's story, not just mine, but it's a lot
Speaker 4: of addiction, a lot of madness. Really. I was mostly
Speaker 4: raised by my grandmother, my Scottish grandmother, and it was
Speaker 4: weird because they were you know that everyone in my
Speaker 4: family left school when they were Like my grand left
Speaker 4: when she was thirteen, most of them they were fifteen.
Speaker 4: And it's really weird. If you watch our home videos.
Speaker 4: Even when I'm a little kid, I have this weird
Speaker 4: posh voice. I'm like Stewy from Family Guy, right, So
Speaker 4: like my mom was like, why Cheah fat Sam, And
Speaker 4: I'm like, really, mother, I find this most It's just bizarre.
Speaker 4: And I don't know what edgeway. Where I grew up,
Speaker 4: no one, no one had this weird posh voice that
Speaker 4: I have. I must have got it off the TV
Speaker 4: because I can't think no one spoke like that. So
Speaker 4: it was this weird even when I was very young,
Speaker 4: I had this slight kind of I had a great
Speaker 4: love for the place I was from and the people
Speaker 4: I grew up with. I also had this weird kind
Speaker 4: of doubleness about it.
Speaker 3: Do you yeah, I can see that in you. Where
Speaker 3: did you think that? Because it certainly didn't come from
Speaker 3: your mum? And where do you think it that came from?
Speaker 4: I genuinely don't know. It's a really strange thing. I
Speaker 4: don't know it was. I think because they were not
Speaker 4: from the place we were from, right, and they felt
Speaker 4: very alienated from the place My dad couldn't. My dad's
Speaker 4: English was, you know, imperfect, Like, yeah, I could sort
Speaker 4: of navigate that world better than they could in a way, right,
Speaker 4: So I was sort of translating for them, and my
Speaker 4: mum was from a very you know, working class Scottish background.
Speaker 2: Between the two, sort of merging the two together, translating.
Speaker 4: For them, but also figuring out how this place worked. Right.
Speaker 4: So I didn't have this, Yeah, they didn't, and in
Speaker 4: a way, as a kid, I understood it better than
Speaker 4: they did.
Speaker 2: And you're trying to figure it out for them as well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what's figuring out your journey?
Speaker 4: And I think one of the reasons I think, really,
Speaker 4: the only talent I have that's not being forced to
Speaker 4: abduplicating it is a real talent, but it's the only
Speaker 4: one I've got is communication. Right, I'm good at communication.
Speaker 4: I think it's partly because of that early experience of oh, right,
Speaker 4: they don't know how this works, right, I've got to
Speaker 4: figure out how this works. And also that thing if
Speaker 4: you grew up in chaotic environments. Lots of people who
Speaker 4: grew up in chaotic or violin or environments where his
Speaker 4: addiction or mental health problems or whatever. This is really
Speaker 4: amazing statistic. I can't make the exact figure, people can
Speaker 4: look it up, but something like sixty percent of the
Speaker 4: presidents and prime ministers US presidents and British prime ministers
Speaker 4: of the twentieth century grew up in a family where
Speaker 4: one of their parents either died, became disabled, or became
Speaker 4: bankrupt when they were a kid. And there's a big
Speaker 4: debate about why that might be. Right, it's an incredibly
Speaker 4: high figure compared to the general population, right, and I
Speaker 4: think an extreme incredible You just do the prime ministers backwards,
Speaker 4: you can do it right and the presidents, and I
Speaker 4: think that must be something about if you grew up
Speaker 4: in a chaotic environment, you've got to be the grown up.
Speaker 4: You've got to be the adult very quickly, right, And
Speaker 4: it's a thing about you want to make it all okay,
Speaker 4: you know, you want to solve the problem.
Speaker 3: Or make sense of it.
Speaker 2: I suppose as well, wasn't it You know, try and
Speaker 2: try and try and make sense of it so it's
Speaker 2: not as chaotic. And I suppose it just takes a
Speaker 2: different way of thinking, different way of problem solving, different
Speaker 2: way of tackling a situation that your parents or the
Speaker 2: people around you don't use, but you sort of adapt
Speaker 2: as you go along.
Speaker 4: Well, you've got to be the problem solver from a
Speaker 4: very young age and that becomes your skill set. Not clearly,
Speaker 4: not everyone. Some people it just breaks them and fucks
Speaker 4: them up. But a lot of people, I think it
Speaker 4: means that you become the person who then thinking about okay,
Speaker 4: from a very young age, you're like, Okay, no one's
Speaker 4: going to come and solve this for me. I've got
Speaker 4: to solve this situation. And I think that that becomes
Speaker 4: a habit you can take over to other things. Right, Okay,
Speaker 4: there's this other chaotic thing going on in the world.
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna wait for someone else to solve it.
Speaker 4: What's going on here, Let's figure out what's going on.
Speaker 4: Let's figure out how we can sort it out. So
Speaker 4: I think that was very deep in me that, you know.
Speaker 4: I think the Persian poet Roomy said the wound is
Speaker 4: where the light enters you. It's something I think about
Speaker 4: all the time, right. I'm sure it was somewhere and
Speaker 4: Leonard Cohen's heart when he wrote this famous line about
Speaker 4: there's a crack in everything. It's how the light gets in. Right.
Speaker 4: I think it's the thing about if you have very
Speaker 4: a very extreme childhood, or extreme experiences in general, you
Speaker 4: can see that as a curse and it can just
Speaker 4: fuck you, right, And of course that does have to
Speaker 4: many people, it does have terrible effects on them. Or
Speaker 4: you can say, Okay, this is not good. It's not good.
Speaker 4: This happened. I wish it hadn't. But given that, what
Speaker 4: strength can I take from this? What have I learned
Speaker 4: from this experience that can be used to help other
Speaker 4: people or to go forward? So I think it's always
Speaker 4: you know, we talk a lot about post traumatic stress, right,
Speaker 4: which is a real of course, a real thing, But
Speaker 4: there's also a lot of scientific evidence for something called
Speaker 4: post traumatic growth. Right some people go through like for example,
Speaker 4: you can look at survivors of plane crashes. For example,
Speaker 4: right now, no one is ever glad they've been in
Speaker 4: a plane crash, just to be clear, But some people go, oh,
Speaker 4: I was in a plane crash. It fucked me up.
Speaker 4: It was the worst thing that ever happened. I've been
Speaker 4: traumatized ever since. But a lot of people who've been
Speaker 4: in playing crashes, so you know, it was a terrible
Speaker 4: thing that I was in that plane crash. But after
Speaker 4: I survived, I quit that job I hated, and I
Speaker 4: left the husband who was treating me like shit, and
Speaker 4: actually it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Speaker 2: Going back to your childhood, it was addiction that really
Speaker 2: sort of highlighted one of your first memories when you
Speaker 2: tried to wake up a family member from I don't
Speaker 2: know if it's an overdose. Can you just take me
Speaker 2: back to that moment, because you know, it's it's fascinating
Speaker 2: how you've you talk about this but you've actually been
Speaker 2: through it yourself, don't.
Speaker 4: I don't remember the exact age I was. I've tried
Speaker 4: to figure it out with my sister, but I am
Speaker 4: so one of my relatives was using a lot of
Speaker 4: most prescription drugs and was just out of it a
Speaker 4: lot of the time. So I have these kind of
Speaker 4: formative memories of trying to wake up this relative and
Speaker 4: just not being able to because they were just out.
Speaker 3: Just on the bed or on the couch.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and both. And one of the reasons
Speaker 4: I spent so much time researching addiction for a book
Speaker 4: I wrote called Chasing the Screen was because these addiction
Speaker 4: problems continued in my family, actually more than my member
Speaker 4: of my family. And also, I think, like with a
Speaker 4: lot of people who grew up with addiction, it was
Speaker 4: a thing that was very if that feels like home
Speaker 4: to you, I ended up being in a relationship with
Speaker 4: someone who had a very bad crack and hero in addiction.
Speaker 4: It's like, weird, we're shortage. And this was where I
Speaker 4: lived at the time, and it's a place I really
Speaker 4: associate with that relationship. So I could tell you the
Speaker 4: map of all the dealers he went to, and there's
Speaker 4: a in a mile radius of here, but the and
Speaker 4: and I think that one of the reasons I wrote
Speaker 4: the book is every book I ever write. For me,
Speaker 4: it's because there's got got to be I'm not an
Speaker 4: expert on anything, right, I'm a journalist. For me, it's
Speaker 4: got to be that there's a mystery that I don't
Speaker 4: understand and I want to understand, right, so I then
Speaker 4: go on this kind of journey all over the world.
Speaker 2: You said, would you say you get addicted to a topic?
Speaker 2: Were we talk about? Because there's multiple forms of addiction, right,
Speaker 2: and we talk about the obvious ones, which are alcohol, drugs,
Speaker 2: from drugs, But you know, for you and having read
Speaker 2: you know your backstory and meeting you, I think addiction
Speaker 2: sort of runs in the family. Is it Is it
Speaker 2: something that that has passed down from generation to generation
Speaker 2: or do you just have an acute sort of curiosity
Speaker 2: you need to know everything about that topic?
Speaker 3: Is that an addiction?
Speaker 4: You know? It's interesting sad because that actually the research
Speaker 4: I did for Chasing the Screen completely changed how I
Speaker 4: understood what addiction is. I wanted to figure this out
Speaker 4: because I could see nothing I was doing was helping
Speaker 4: right with these people that I loved, I couldn't solve
Speaker 4: the problem. And I also had that if I'm honest,
Speaker 4: I was quite angry with them, right, And everyone has
Speaker 4: ever loved someone who'st an addiction problem has got a
Speaker 4: bit of voice in the head that's like, why don't
Speaker 4: just fucking stop right fuck saying put yourself together? Right?
Speaker 3: Natural?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the natural sort of thought process to have.
Speaker 2: You're ruining yourself, you're running the people around you. You know,
Speaker 2: your your waste of space.
Speaker 4: You know, I could see that. I think almost everyone
Speaker 4: has two natural impulses. They have that voice, yeah yeah,
Speaker 4: and they have the voice like I can see you're
Speaker 4: really suffering and in pain, and that this is not
Speaker 4: just you know, you're not just partying hard and indulging yourself.
Speaker 4: There's something really deep going on here that you need
Speaker 4: help for. So I think almost everyone has those two things, right.
Speaker 4: But I wanted to understand what was really going on here.
Speaker 4: So I ended up, I mean, it ended up being
Speaker 4: this kind of insane journey all over the world, like
Speaker 4: thirty thousand miles, ended up meeting a crazy mixture of people,
Speaker 4: from a you know, getting to know rot so right
Speaker 4: aback in the book, from a transcrack dealer in Brooklyn
Speaker 4: is one of the smartest people I know, to a
Speaker 4: hit man for the deadlist Mexican drug cartel, who actually
Speaker 4: is not one of the smartest people I know, to
Speaker 4: the only country that's decriminalized all drugs with incredible effects
Speaker 4: we can talk about. But that actually in relation to
Speaker 4: your Christian it was just tranges think because I realized,
Speaker 4: I mean, I learned so much writing Chasing the Screen,
Speaker 4: but one of the things I learned is that actually
Speaker 4: I had profoundly misunderstood what I had seen in front
Speaker 4: of me for so long. So let's talk about let's
Speaker 4: say heroin addiction for example, right, because that's something it
Speaker 4: was close to me. So if you'd asked me thirteen
Speaker 4: years ago, when I started doing the research on this, Johan,
Speaker 4: what causes heroin addiction? I would have looked at you
Speaker 4: like you were muppet and I would have said, well, mate,
Speaker 4: the clues in the name man right, obviously exactly. We've
Speaker 4: been told this story for one hundred years. That's become
Speaker 4: totally part of our common sense about addiction. Right when
Speaker 4: I was in this story about the earliest story about
Speaker 4: addiction that we've all been told, which has some truth
Speaker 4: in it. Right, So we think we're sitting here in
Speaker 4: Shoreditch if we kidnapped the next twenty people to walk
Speaker 4: past this recording studio and.
Speaker 3: Can make that happen.
Speaker 4: You are one of the few people I don't. We
Speaker 4: could actually do it right, and we held the more
Speaker 4: hostage and it's weird fucking little room, you know, like
Speaker 4: a villain in a Saw movie. And we injected them
Speaker 4: all with heroin three times a day for a month.
Speaker 4: At the end of that month, they'd all be heroin addicts.
Speaker 4: For a simple reason. There's chemical hooks in heroin, and
Speaker 4: if you're exposed to them for long enough, your body
Speaker 4: would start to desperately crave these chemical hooks. Right. That's
Speaker 4: why in English another word for being addicted is being hooked. Right.
Speaker 4: It turns out that is a very small part of
Speaker 4: what's going on in addiction. Right. It's some role, but
Speaker 4: it's very small. And the first thing that alured to
Speaker 4: me to the fact there's something missing in that story
Speaker 4: is when it was explained to me by lots of doctors.
Speaker 4: If you or me, if we stepped out of this
Speaker 4: studio now and we got hit by a truck and
Speaker 4: you broke your hip or I broke my hip, we'd
Speaker 4: be taken to the Royal London Hospital of the Road,
Speaker 4: and they give us a lot of a drug called diamorphine.
Speaker 4: Diamorphine it's much better than the ship my ex exactly.
Speaker 4: It's medically pure heroine. It's the best heroine you can get. Right,
Speaker 4: If anyone listening, if you've got a grandmother who's ever
Speaker 4: had a hip replacement operation, your NaNs take lots of
Speaker 4: heroin right now. If what we think about addiction is right,
Speaker 4: that is caused primarily or entirely by exposure to the
Speaker 4: chemical hooks, what should be happening to all these grandmothers
Speaker 4: having hit replacement operation. They should be leaving and trying
Speaker 4: to score on the streets. Right, This has been studied
Speaker 4: very carefully. It never happens with hit replacements, right, never. Right.
Speaker 4: And you hear that, you think what I remember when
Speaker 4: I first learned this from a brilliant doctor call Gable Marte,
Speaker 4: just saying, well, gabble, that can't be right. How could
Speaker 4: you have a situation where you've got someone in hospital
Speaker 4: bed they're be giving loads of medically pure, strong heroine.
Speaker 4: They don't become addicted. Yeah, the best grade of it really,
Speaker 4: if you put it in Layman's terms, exactly, the best shit,
Speaker 4: and you've got someone in the alleyway outside, you know,
Speaker 4: shooting up actually a weaker form of the drug, and
Speaker 4: they do become adicted. What's going on? And I only
Speaker 4: began to understand it when I went to Vancouver and
Speaker 4: an interview an incredible man named Professor Bruce Alexander, who
Speaker 4: did an experiment that has really transformed how we understand
Speaker 4: addiction all over the world. See explained to me this
Speaker 4: story we've got in our heads that addiction is caused
Speaker 4: primarily or entirely by the chemical hook comes from a
Speaker 4: series of experiments that were done earlier in the twentieth century.
Speaker 4: You take a rap, you put it in a cage,
Speaker 4: and you give it two water bottles. One is just water,
Speaker 4: the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.
Speaker 4: If you do that, the rat will try both. Almost
Speaker 4: always prefers the drug water, and it almost always kills
Speaker 4: itself by overdosing pretty quickly. Right, So there you go.
Speaker 4: That's our story. The rat tries the drug, it needs
Speaker 4: more and more of.
Speaker 3: The chemists all it has to do, that is right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: That's our story. But in the seventies, Bruce, Professor Alexander
Speaker 4: was working with people addiction problems in Vancouver. He's he
Speaker 4: looks at these experiments and he said, what happened a minute?
Speaker 4: You put the rat alone in an empty cage. It's
Speaker 4: got nothing that makes life worth living. For rats, all
Speaker 4: it's got is the drugs. What would happen if we
Speaker 4: did this differently? So he built a cage called rat Park,
Speaker 4: which is basically like fucking heaven for rats. Right, They've
Speaker 4: got loads of friends, they got loads of cheese, they
Speaker 4: got loads of colored balls. Anything a rat likes is
Speaker 4: there in rap Park. It's got its needs met, right,
Speaker 4: psychological needs. And then it gives them both the water bottles,
Speaker 4: the normal water and the drug water, and of course
Speaker 4: they try both. This is the fascinating things have fun
Speaker 4: well in rap Park. They don't like the drug water
Speaker 4: that much. Right, they don't use it compulsively. None of
Speaker 4: them music compulsively. None of them die by overdose, because
Speaker 4: they've got The way I would think about it is
Speaker 4: everyone knows you've got physical needs. You need food, you
Speaker 4: need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If
Speaker 4: I took those things away from you, you'd be fucked.
Speaker 4: But it's equally strong evidence that all human beings have
Speaker 4: natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You
Speaker 4: need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You
Speaker 4: need to got people see you and value you. You
Speaker 4: need to for your love, you feel, got a future,
Speaker 4: you understand right, And this culture we've built is good
Speaker 4: at many things. I'm glad to be alive today, but
Speaker 4: we have been getting less and less good at meeting
Speaker 4: these deep underlying psychological needs. So the reason I wouldn't
Speaker 4: put it as because you asked it totally understandably, and
Speaker 4: it's the way I used to think about it is
Speaker 4: oh can these can you override the chemical thing? I
Speaker 4: would put it differently, The core of addiction is about
Speaker 4: not wanting to be present in your life because your
Speaker 4: life is too big a place to be exactly right.
Speaker 4: And when you understand that, you begin to see. Firstly,
Speaker 4: for me, the first thing you see is how what
Speaker 4: we do it's a value.
Speaker 2: You start to value yourself, start to value things around you,
Speaker 2: and you know your product. And again that excuse a cliche,
Speaker 2: I'm sure you hate it.
Speaker 3: But your product is your environment exactly.
Speaker 4: It's not you, it's your cage. Right now, there's other
Speaker 4: factors going on as well. It's not the only rap
Speaker 4: park doesn't explain everything about drug use, obviously there's lots
Speaker 4: of other things going on, but it explains a really
Speaker 4: big missing part of the picture, and it can lead
Speaker 4: you to quite pangful and difficult realizations. I mean, the
Speaker 4: most important thing though, and the really powerful realization, is
Speaker 4: what it made me realize. I never forget when I
Speaker 4: interviewed Bruce the first time, and I went and sat
Speaker 4: in a We were in this area called the downtown
Speaker 4: Eings side of Vancouver, which has a lot of chaotic
Speaker 4: street addiction, and I went and sat in a pigeon park,
Speaker 4: which is a park with loos of pigeons in it
Speaker 4: and where people are. You know, it's pretty free for
Speaker 4: all chaotic drug scene. And I remember thinking, I right,
Speaker 4: so the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite
Speaker 4: of addiction is connection. That's what you're saying, right. I'm
Speaker 4: never get that moment because now like people put that
Speaker 4: on t shirts and things since I wrote about it
Speaker 4: and totalk on it. But but the core of it is,
Speaker 4: and it's why when when you asked, is this an
Speaker 4: addiction for me? I don't think of it as it
Speaker 4: may have elements of addiction because I do overwork, But
Speaker 4: for me, this is not a way of not being
Speaker 4: present in my life. It's actually a way of being
Speaker 4: more present in my life. So it's a it's a
Speaker 4: healthy obsession rather than an addiction, is how I would
Speaker 4: think of it, right, if it would be an addiction,
Speaker 4: if it was actually I was avoiding being present by
Speaker 4: doing this stuff right and super present of what you do. So, yeah,
Speaker 4: there are moments like that. I massively over work. I
Speaker 4: tend to get burned out because I'm very bad at
Speaker 4: taking breaks or pacing myself. So I wouldn't want to
Speaker 4: totally rule out the kind of implicit thought in your question.
Speaker 4: But yeah, but when you understand addiction in this different way,
Speaker 4: you understand firstly why that natural angry, why are you
Speaker 4: fucking doing this? Doesn't get us very far? Right? But
Speaker 4: also for me that the most important thing about it
Speaker 4: is you realize how what we do as a society,
Speaker 4: why it has so catastrophically failed when it comes to addiction.
Speaker 4: The US at the moment, for example, has the biggest
Speaker 4: addiction crisis in its entire history, right, horrendous, And obviously
Speaker 4: I live after the U in the US, because what
Speaker 4: we do is we think about addiction totally differently. The
Speaker 4: theory of the War on drugs, right is, people who
Speaker 4: addicted need to have pain inflicted on them to give
Speaker 4: them an incentive to stop. Right, So we make them suffer,
Speaker 4: give them criminal records, we imprison and then but then
Speaker 4: you realize it. Then we pigeonhole them exactly and fuck
Speaker 4: them over. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And then you realize. But
Speaker 4: once you understand that pain is the fuel, is the driver,
Speaker 4: is the cause of addiction, suddenly realize. Sometimes we go, oh,
Speaker 4: it doesn't work. It's not you know, that model doesn't work.
Speaker 4: The answer is much worse. It makes the problem worse, right,
Speaker 4: and never forget. I had a moment about this. I
Speaker 4: went to lots of places for the for the book, obviously,
Speaker 4: for you know, the killing fields in northern Mexico and
Speaker 4: all sorts of places. But I think the place that
Speaker 4: most haunts me was there's this place called Tense City
Speaker 4: in Phoenix in Arizona, Maricopa County in Arizona. So it's right.
Speaker 4: It was at the time run by a guy called
Speaker 4: Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who we got a whole conversation about
Speaker 4: childhood trauma and Joe ol Pio. But that is a
Speaker 4: fucked up guy who was really at war with people
Speaker 4: with addiction problems, and he opened this prison where bran
Speaker 4: in mind, this is the desert is Arizona. People were
Speaker 4: made to sleep in tents in the desert and they
Speaker 4: were deliberately maximally humiliated. He you might have heard this
Speaker 4: because Mike Tyson was sent there. I've talked to Mike
Speaker 4: about it. They make the people with the diction problems
Speaker 4: go out on chain gangs wearing t shirts saying I
Speaker 4: was a drug addict on members of the public mock them.
Speaker 4: So I went out one day with this group of women.
Speaker 4: You only have to speak to this women for five minutes.
Speaker 4: Their lives have been fucking horrendous, right, They'd all been
Speaker 4: fucking abused in one way or another. And so we
Speaker 4: go out and they were made to literally on a
Speaker 4: chain gang and they're made to collect little while members
Speaker 4: of public mock them. Right, and what was that?
Speaker 2: In order to hopefully make them realize the errors of
Speaker 2: their ways through that type of treatment.
Speaker 3: So they go, oh, oh that's me cured. I'm good.
Speaker 2: I won't do that again. Exactly, old Tom. What you're
Speaker 2: doing is you're getting slashamer. You're just driving them further
Speaker 2: into the ground, right.
Speaker 4: I think you put it perfectly. So they had a block,
Speaker 4: an isolation block this prison, in which people were put
Speaker 4: in for the tiniest infringements like having a cigarette. And
Speaker 4: I went and saw, I said to them, and it
Speaker 4: was a weird thing most prisons. Obviously visits a lot
Speaker 4: of prisons as a journalist. Most prisons don't want to
Speaker 4: show you they're bad stuff. They try to steer away
Speaker 4: from it. But this prison, because the whole point of
Speaker 4: it is to humiliate people. It's like a pantomime of
Speaker 4: fucking sadism, they actually want to show to you. So
Speaker 4: I said, oh, we show me the isolation block. Thinking
Speaker 4: they go, no, no, that's you know, like most prisons
Speaker 4: with that, I shall come along. Yeah, yeah, So go along.
Speaker 4: And the first thing happens. So the women are in tiny, little,
Speaker 4: bare stone cells in the middle of the desert. It's
Speaker 4: unbelievably hot. They're completely on their own. They've got nothing
Speaker 4: in this cell. Literally, you're in a stone It's about
Speaker 4: the size of this room we're in. We're in a
Speaker 4: tiny little podcast studio, right, And so they open the
Speaker 4: little flat and a woman starts immediately screaming at me,
Speaker 4: showing me that she's been cutting herself, just screaming and screaming.
Speaker 4: It's one of the worst things I've seen, right, And
Speaker 4: I looked at this woman and I thought, this is
Speaker 4: the closest you could get to a literal human replica
Speaker 4: of the cages that guaranteed addiction in rats. And this
Speaker 4: is what you're doing to this poor fucking woman thinking
Speaker 4: it will stop her being addicted. Now, Okay, that's very extreme, right, Okay,
Speaker 4: that's that's the hardest edge, the tip of the spear.
Speaker 4: But actually, most eighty percent of the money we spend
Speaker 4: in some countries, actually it's more, but eighty percent of
Speaker 4: the money we spend on drug policy is enforcement, punishing people,
Speaker 4: shaming people, fucking them up more right. The other twenty percent,
Speaker 4: by the way, about ten percent is treatment, and ten
Speaker 4: percent is the ridiculous, fucking fantasy we can keep drugs
Speaker 4: out of the country. You know, if you want to
Speaker 4: think about how well that's going to work. We can't
Speaker 4: even keep drugs out of our prisons, where we pay
Speaker 4: people to walk around the fucking wall. The whole time,
Speaker 4: so good, like we're keeping them out of the United
Speaker 4: States with two three thousand mile borders or Britain, which
Speaker 4: is an island, ridiculous, insane fantasy.
Speaker 2: And this is like the human rat cage that you
Speaker 2: talk about, right, This is the human form of the
Speaker 2: rack age where all they have to do is shoot
Speaker 2: up and drug. So the addiction gets worse and worse
Speaker 2: and worse because because of their environment and where they're around,
Speaker 2: they've got no no one, if anything, people are belittling them,
Speaker 2: punishing them, fucking limiting them, telling them that they're fucking
Speaker 2: no good that then you know they're waste of space
Speaker 2: that they belong down there. You're almost amplifying that problem tenfold,
Speaker 2: right exactly.
Speaker 4: And the reason that is so fucking enraging it's because
Speaker 4: somebody will hear that and gut, isn't it sad? Isn't
Speaker 4: it bad? Yeah? I get it. But the thing that
Speaker 4: is so fucking enraging about that is I went to
Speaker 4: places where they tried completely different approaches that actually do
Speaker 4: reduce addiction, and where all these people I knew in
Speaker 4: that tunnel, or the vast majority of them, would have
Speaker 4: lived and had decent lives and not fucking died. Right.
Speaker 4: Give an example of Portugal. So the year two thousand,
Speaker 4: Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in the
Speaker 4: whole world. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin,
Speaker 4: which is kind of mind blowing right when you think
Speaker 4: about it. Every year they tried the American way more,
Speaker 4: they arrested more people, they imprison more people, they shame
Speaker 4: more people, and every year the problem got worse, until
Speaker 4: finally the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition
Speaker 4: got together and they were like, look, we can't go
Speaker 4: on like this with ever more people dying and getting addicted.
Speaker 4: What are we going to do? So they decided to
Speaker 4: do something really radical, something no one had done in
Speaker 4: nearly one hundred years since the War on drugs globally began.
Speaker 4: They were like, should we like ask some scientists what
Speaker 4: to do? So they set up a panel of scientists
Speaker 4: and doctors led by an amazing.
Speaker 3: Manner common sense exactly.
Speaker 4: This amazing guy became friends with called doctor Juaugulau, and
Speaker 4: they said to them, you guys go away figure out
Speaker 4: what would genuinely solve this fucking massive crisis. And we've
Speaker 4: agreed in advance we'll do whatever you recommend, right, So
Speaker 4: the goal was to just take it out of politics.
Speaker 4: So the panel went away, they looked at all the evidence,
Speaker 4: including rat Park, and they came back and they said, okay,
Speaker 4: here's what we're going to do. We're going to decriminalize
Speaker 4: all drugs, from cannabis to crack, the whole fucking lot.
Speaker 4: But the probably didn't say fucking can not as me,
Speaker 4: But we're going to decriminals the whole lot. But and
Speaker 4: this is the crucial next step, we're going to take
Speaker 4: all the money we currently spend on screwing people up,
Speaker 4: on shaming them, imprisoning them, and we're going to spend
Speaker 4: all that money instead on turning their lives around. And
Speaker 4: what's interesting was when they did it, a lot of
Speaker 4: it was not what we think of as drug treatment
Speaker 4: in Britain, right, So it was they did a lot
Speaker 4: of a rehab, right, they did do that. But the
Speaker 4: main stuff they spent money on was housing, because you're
Speaker 4: not going to fucking sober up when you're living in
Speaker 4: a tunnel under a.
Speaker 3: Bridge ground here.
Speaker 4: And the biggest thing was the big programmer job creation.
Speaker 4: So say you used to be a mechanic, you've got
Speaker 4: a smack addiction. They'll go to a garage. They'll say,
Speaker 4: if you employed this guy for a year, we'll pay
Speaker 4: half his wages. So it was a huge program of reconnection,
Speaker 4: getting people reconnected because you're a junkie, you've got a
Speaker 4: criminal record, you're you're not getting a job, you're not
Speaker 4: getting trusted, you are you looked at as the scum
Speaker 4: of society. And instead of that, they wanted to take
Speaker 4: all that message you and go, actually, we love you,
Speaker 4: we value you, here's a job, we're on your side,
Speaker 4: we want you back. Right. And by the time I
Speaker 4: went to Portugal it was and when was this They
Speaker 4: started the decriminalization in two thousand and one, and when
Speaker 4: I went there it was for the first time. It
Speaker 4: was twenty twelve. I must have gone there maybe twenty eleven,
Speaker 4: think twenty twelve. And the results were in best research
Speaker 4: on it is in the British journal Criminology. They had
Speaker 4: a massive fall in addiction. They went from having the
Speaker 4: highest level of overdoses in the European Union to almost
Speaker 4: the lowest. They had a massive fall in street crime,
Speaker 4: massive fall in street prostitution, massive full in HIV transmission,
Speaker 4: and one of the ways you know it worked is
Speaker 4: that no one in Portugal wants to go back. I
Speaker 4: went and interviewed one of the leading opponents of the
Speaker 4: drug decriminalization at the time, a guy called schul Figuera.
Speaker 4: He was the top drug cop in the country when
Speaker 4: they did it, and he said, totally understandably, he said,
Speaker 4: this is fucking madness, right, we can't decriminalize all drugs.
Speaker 4: We'll have an explosion drug use, will have an explosion
Speaker 4: in kids using drugs, We'll hav an explosion in drug tourism.
Speaker 4: This is a nightmare. And when I met raw he
Speaker 4: said to me, everything I said would happen didn't happen,
Speaker 4: and everything the other side said would happen did And
Speaker 4: he said he felt really ashamed now when you look
Speaker 4: back on it, that he'd spent twenty years making people's
Speaker 4: lives worse when they could have been helping people turn
Speaker 4: it around. Now, drug decorverisation hasn't worked everywhere. Public hasn't
Speaker 4: been done on the Portuguese model. The Portuguese model was
Speaker 4: stop punishing people. That's the first step. It's the equivalent
Speaker 4: of stopping kicking them in the head. But then crucially,
Speaker 4: take all the money we spent screwing them up and
Speaker 4: spend it.
Speaker 3: Helping them right, get them out of their box exactly.
Speaker 4: So the core of it actually is the social change, right,
Speaker 4: the reconnection, the getting people back to a.
Speaker 3: Decent life, my changing that stigma exactly.
Speaker 4: And also people, especially when you undo the stigma, people
Speaker 4: are more likely to come forward for help. Right. It's
Speaker 4: interesting if you in Portugal's one thing was fascinating me
Speaker 4: going out with some of the social workers. If you
Speaker 4: go out with the authorities, people with addiction problems fucking
Speaker 4: run away from you. Right in Portugal, they run towards you.
Speaker 4: It changes the whole dynamic. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, So again talking on either said, is that drastic
Speaker 2: change of flipping on its head.
Speaker 4: And this is true for loads of the topics that
Speaker 4: I write about. Where you know, my book's Chasing the
Speaker 4: Scream is about addiction obviously in the war on drugs. Actually,
Speaker 4: there are even worse things about the War on drugs,
Speaker 4: like the violence it causes, which we can talk about
Speaker 4: as well. It's why I spend a lot of time
Speaker 4: with dealers and cartels. But you know, my second book,
Speaker 4: Lost Connections, was about why so many people are depressed
Speaker 4: and anxious My third book, Stolen Focus, was about why
Speaker 4: some people are struggling to pay attention. My most recent
Speaker 4: but Magic Pill, is about these new weight loss drugs,
Speaker 4: what they're going to mean for all of us. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but with all of them, I think there's a thing
Speaker 4: about reframing what the problem is really about. If you're
Speaker 4: stuck in a mindset where you just think, I'm a
Speaker 4: fuck up, there's something wrong with and there's definitely individual responsibility,
Speaker 4: and I'm in favor of individual responsibility passionately. But if
Speaker 4: you're stuck in a model where you just think, oh,
Speaker 4: I'm a fuck up, and it's like if you're the
Speaker 4: rat in the isolated cage, but you're not thinking about
Speaker 4: the environment. So many our problems are a combination of
Speaker 4: you know, our individual psyches, our biology, and our environments. Right,
Speaker 4: And if we're stuck in just thinking as an isolated individual,
Speaker 4: it's usually pretty fucking hard. It's not impossible. Some people
Speaker 4: can do it. You get heroic individuals who can do it,
Speaker 4: and all credit to them, right, I've got nothing but
Speaker 4: praise for them. But actually, at the moment, we've got systems.
Speaker 4: For example, with addiction, I would argue with depression and
Speaker 4: attention as well and with wait, actually, where the system
Speaker 4: is rigged against you. Right, It's like you're having to
Speaker 4: run up and down escalator to get to be healthy. Right.
Speaker 4: Some people can do it something run up and down escalator.
Speaker 4: I fucking can't. Yeah, there's a few. But what I
Speaker 4: would do is, let's get the escalator carrying you in
Speaker 4: the right direction. Let's make it easy for you to
Speaker 4: make the positive changes in your life, not to make
Speaker 4: it hard.
Speaker 2: Right, because a lot of people want to do that, right,
Speaker 2: A lot of people do that. They realize the areas
Speaker 2: of their ways, they get so down and but there's
Speaker 2: there's just not the support, support element of being able
Speaker 2: to for someone offering their hand.
Speaker 3: It's like, no, no, it's too late.
Speaker 2: Now you're you're a druggie, you're you're you're you're an addict,
Speaker 2: you're a criminal. You know, you're tarnished with so many
Speaker 2: black brushes that because ultimately, let's be honest, they've made
Speaker 2: a mistake, they've sucked up in life.
Speaker 3: We all do it.
Speaker 2: We failed in life up to now. So you meet,
Speaker 2: all of us in this room have and we're going
Speaker 2: to fail to the day we die. We're going to
Speaker 2: make mistakes, right, But it's just that stigma of addiction,
Speaker 2: of being a crackhead, of being a junkie, of being
Speaker 2: a fucking criminal. It's like that, you know, it's that's
Speaker 2: that's almost like not the impossible task, but it sounds
Speaker 2: like it is.
Speaker 4: I think it's partly. I think you put it brilliantly,
Speaker 4: and I think it's partly about undoing stigma, but it's
Speaker 4: also about knowing where your power lies. Right. So we
Speaker 4: talk a lot when we're trying to help people, and
Speaker 4: this is not just true addictions, true people who've got
Speaker 4: all sorts of problems. We talk absolutely rightly about what
Speaker 4: you can do as an isolated individual to change your life.
Speaker 4: You can change your mindset also, and I'm passionately favorite that.
Speaker 4: A lot of my book about Attention is about how
Speaker 4: we can get our attention back through doing these individual
Speaker 4: things as well. But I also would want to add
Speaker 4: a prong to it, which doesn't take away anything from
Speaker 4: the individual responsiblity back. Then it adds to it, which
Speaker 4: is there's another source of your power, which is you
Speaker 4: can change yourself better when you change with other people,
Speaker 4: and you change with the cage.
Speaker 2: When I sat down with you I thought you had an,
Speaker 2: let's call it a healthy obsession with the topic addiction.
Speaker 2: But it seems like that you've got an obsession with
Speaker 2: helping people. Everything that I try and put back on you,
Speaker 2: you put back on other people. And I'm just like, Wow,
Speaker 2: you have got a nate just obsessional passion to want
Speaker 2: to help people.
Speaker 3: Where did that come from?
Speaker 4: I mean everyone listening has people who helped them. Because
Speaker 4: you didn't raise yourself as a baby, right you didn't.
Speaker 4: So if I think about my grandmother who helped you?
Speaker 4: Think about my grandmother for example. So my grandmother, my
Speaker 4: Scottish grandmother, was who brought me up, basically me and
Speaker 4: my sister, and some agree my brother who's a bit older. Yeah,
Speaker 4: my grandmother was an amazing person. My grandmother left school
Speaker 4: when she was thirteen. She went to work in a laundry.
Speaker 4: Her husband died when he was very young. She she
Speaker 4: had a very so she raised her kids on her own.
Speaker 4: She had job was to clean toilets. She did every
Speaker 4: job she could do. I think about my grandmother, she
Speaker 4: was just an amazing person, incredibly loving person, and you know,
Speaker 4: she'd had this fucking hard life. And then when I'm
Speaker 4: a kid, you know, she must have had a million
Speaker 4: she wanted to relax, right, and then she suddenly got
Speaker 4: these this kind of looking after these kids, I think.
Speaker 4: I think my grandmother was a great example. I had
Speaker 4: so many teachers who were really good to me, had
Speaker 4: just so many people in my life have been really
Speaker 4: really good to me. Have been mean to me as well, obviously,
Speaker 4: But the but.
Speaker 2: Is that compassion to want to help others, which are
Speaker 2: is evident for me, that sits at the forefront of everything,
Speaker 2: that almost that is at the forefront, and everything trickles
Speaker 2: down your topics of addiction, your topics of wanting to
Speaker 2: really you know, your journalism, and that sort of filters
Speaker 2: down where a lot of people put journalism at the top.
Speaker 2: You're maybe interested for me, I see your compassion to
Speaker 2: want to help people, because ultimately that's where your journalism
Speaker 2: fits in. You're not going out of I can trying
Speaker 2: to bring down criminals. You're trying to say, why are
Speaker 2: these people like this? Why do people get addicted? What
Speaker 2: can we do to better? You know, the human side
Speaker 2: of it is so fucking present and obvious, but it
Speaker 2: must have something must have happened.
Speaker 3: I think I think we all have that compassion comes
Speaker 3: from I.
Speaker 4: Think everyone is. We all exist, and we all see
Speaker 4: saw around a spectrum between concern for other people and
Speaker 4: narcissistic concern for the self. Right, And of course you
Speaker 4: should be concerned for yourself to some degree as well.
Speaker 4: That's important. It's not we don't want people to be
Speaker 4: totally self sacrificing. And the truth is, so we live
Speaker 4: in this culture which is constantly pushing people to be
Speaker 4: self obsessed. Think about yourself, to be narcissistic. Think about
Speaker 4: how you feel after half an hour looking at Instagram,
Speaker 4: right like the So we live in this culture that
Speaker 4: is constantly pushing us towards the ego and self obsession.
Speaker 4: And I'm probably more vulnerable than that to that than
Speaker 4: most people. And the truth is that will make you
Speaker 4: feel like shit, whereas moments of openness and love towards
Speaker 4: other people will make you feel better. So in some sense,
Speaker 4: there's a kind of selfish impulse behind my desire to
Speaker 4: be compassionate because I think about this a lot in
Speaker 4: relation to this guy I interviewed a lot, amazing man.
Speaker 4: You should have a your podcast called Professor Tim Kassa.
Speaker 4: So when I think about his work, is everyone knows
Speaker 4: junk food has taken over our diets and made us
Speaker 4: physically sick, right, but actually a kind of junk values
Speaker 4: have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. Right,
Speaker 4: And Professor Kassa was the first person to really research this.
Speaker 4: So for thousands of years, philosophers have said, you know,
Speaker 4: if you think life is about money and status and
Speaker 4: showing off, you're going to feel like shit. Right. It's
Speaker 4: not an exact quote from Confucius, but it's basically what
Speaker 4: he said, right. But weirdly, no one actually scientifically investigated
Speaker 4: it until Professor Cassio did all this amazing psychological research
Speaker 4: over forty years, and basically he proved, to give you
Speaker 4: the headline, the philosophers were right, the more you think
Speaker 4: life is about money and status and showing off and ego,
Speaker 4: the worse you will feel. Right, And the way we
Speaker 4: began to think of it, it's almost like, just like junk
Speaker 4: food has taken over our diets, are kind of junk
Speaker 4: values have taken over our minds, right, rained to look
Speaker 4: for happiness in all the wrong places. It's like we're
Speaker 4: fed a kind of KFC for the salt. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: we're you know if you think about there's a really
Speaker 4: a bit interesting bit of research. It was done by
Speaker 4: lots of scientists, but one of them was Dr Brett Ford,
Speaker 4: who I interviewed about it. Really simple research. They looked
Speaker 4: at four countries. It was the United States, Japan, Taiwan
Speaker 4: and Russia. And they want to figure out, let's imagine
Speaker 4: you deliberately wanted to make yourself happier. Right, so you said,
Speaker 4: right from now and I'm going to spend two hours
Speaker 4: a day deliberately making myself happier. Would you actually become happier? Right?
Speaker 4: I wrote about some my book Los Connections, and what
Speaker 4: they found at first seems really weird. In the United States,
Speaker 4: if you try to make yourself happier in the main
Speaker 4: you do not become happier. But in Russia, Taiwan and Japan,
Speaker 4: if you try to make yourself happier, it works. You
Speaker 4: do become and they're like, what's weird, what's going on?
Speaker 4: So it did more research on it. I discovered was
Speaker 4: in the US. I'm sure it's true of ours in
Speaker 4: Britain and Australia as well. If you try to make
Speaker 4: yourself hap you do something for you, You work harder
Speaker 4: to get a promotion. You buy a load of shit.
Speaker 4: You don't need to display it on Instagram to make
Speaker 4: people go OMG so jealous. You do you right, you
Speaker 4: treat yourself. So we have that. The fancy weight putting
Speaker 4: it would be we have an individualistic conception of happiness.
Speaker 4: You think your happiness stems from your ego and you
Speaker 4: doing well, you as an isolated individual. In the other places,
Speaker 4: when you try to make yourself happier, you did something
Speaker 4: for someone else, your friends, your family, your community. Right,
Speaker 4: So they have an instinctively kind of collective idea of happiness, right,
Speaker 4: that happiness comes from being part of a group, from
Speaker 4: being part of a group that rises with you or
Speaker 4: falls with you. Right, And we've moved way too far.
Speaker 4: I'm in favor of some level of individualism. Individuals is
Speaker 4: a good thing to some degree. I don't want to
Speaker 4: go back to them. But the village of my dad
Speaker 4: lived in where there was no room for individual expression.
Speaker 4: But we've gone so far towards that, and it trains
Speaker 4: us to look for happiness in all the wrong places.
Speaker 4: You are not to fix right totally, or even a
Speaker 4: slow fix in the wrong direction, Like you're not gonna
Speaker 4: lie on your deathbed and think about all the likes
Speaker 4: you've got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought. Right,
Speaker 4: you're going to think about moments of love and meaning
Speaker 4: and connection in your life. But the way Professor Kassa
Speaker 4: put it to me is we live in a machine
Speaker 4: that is designed to get us to neglect what is
Speaker 4: important about life. Right, We live in a machine that
Speaker 4: is constantly pushing us towards Yeah, these these individualistic, narcissistic
Speaker 4: forms of.
Speaker 3: Expression almost like synthetic highs, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It's like you're getting these synthetic highs because they're boosting
Speaker 2: you in the moment, you feel good about yourself.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, like I said, strip all that away. It's just
Speaker 3: been thought.
Speaker 2: But I think society has a huge part to play
Speaker 2: on that because you know, these big companies, and we
Speaker 2: can we can get into the politics of you know,
Speaker 2: big fire, big companies, et cetera, et cetera, but they're
Speaker 2: ultimately what's feeding these these addictions in order to keep
Speaker 2: us in that state.
Speaker 4: Of mind totally. So there's a lot for all of
Speaker 4: the things we're talking about, whether it's addiction, where it's
Speaker 4: attention problems, all the stuff I wrote my books spout.
Speaker 4: There's sort of two levels of which I think we've
Speaker 4: got to defend. We've got to respond to this, right.
Speaker 4: I think of them as defense and offense. There are
Speaker 4: loads of things we can do at an individual level
Speaker 4: to defend ourselves, right, but also we've got to go
Speaker 4: on offense against the forces that are doing this to us. Right.
Speaker 4: You mentioned some of the companies big tech. We've got
Speaker 4: to regulate those fuckers. Right. There's all sorts of things
Speaker 4: that we can do, Like think about the fact that
Speaker 4: more three year old children know what the McDonald's m
Speaker 4: means than know their own last name. Right now, you
Speaker 4: don't put that in your head when you were three
Speaker 4: years old. I didn't put that in my head. That's
Speaker 4: a machine doing that to us. Well, some countries have
Speaker 4: banned advertising junk food to children.
Speaker 3: It's fucking bad brands washing.
Speaker 4: Basically, don't fucking poison your kids' brains to then want
Speaker 4: to poison their bodies. Right, there's all sorts of things
Speaker 4: we can do that regulate the environment. Now, you can't
Speaker 4: do that on your own. There's lots of things you
Speaker 4: can do individually on your own, and we should do
Speaker 4: both and the individual stuff makes you stronger to fight
Speaker 4: for the collective stuff, and the collective stuff makes you
Speaker 4: more likely succeeded in the individual stuff. So it's actually
Speaker 4: very happy kind of.
Speaker 3: How do you do it because you can't?
Speaker 2: Because you can't do it, especially now when we thought
Speaker 2: we had this free voice of social media platforms are
Speaker 2: now and we talk about big tech that's so controlled nowadays.
Speaker 2: If you actually speak out the trivia, you're you're restricted,
Speaker 2: or your your shadow band or your ghost band, whatever
Speaker 2: it may be. So but it's like we're fighting an
Speaker 2: almost impossible task. Because you mentioned big tech, big fun
Speaker 2: they rule the world.
Speaker 4: I understand why it feels that way, but I would
Speaker 4: just tell you two stories. I think that answer that.
Speaker 4: So whenever I feel hopeless, and there are days when
Speaker 4: I feel.
Speaker 3: That way're the same.
Speaker 4: That's natural. I think a lot about a really close
Speaker 4: friend of mine called Andrew Sullivan. He's a British American writer.
Speaker 4: So nineteen ninety four, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive.
Speaker 4: It's the height of the age crisis. It's best friend
Speaker 4: Patrick had just died. As far as anyone knew, there
Speaker 4: was no hope in sight. He's like fuck' whatever. He
Speaker 4: was in his thirties. I've got a couple of years
Speaker 4: to live. Fuck. And he decided I need to do
Speaker 4: a completely crazy thing. He quit his job and he
Speaker 4: went to a little place called Provincetown and he decided
Speaker 4: he was going to write a book about a crazy
Speaker 4: utopian idea that no one had ever written a book
Speaker 4: about before. Right, And he was like, Okay, no one
Speaker 4: alive today is ever going to see this put into practice.
Speaker 4: I'm clearly not going to live to see it put
Speaker 4: into practice. Maybe somewhere down the line someone's going to
Speaker 4: find this fucking crazy book. Right. The idea he wrote
Speaker 4: the first of a book advocating for was gay marriage. Right.
Speaker 4: She got a picture craze. It was, You've got two
Speaker 4: thousand years of gay people being fucking burned, imprisoned, hated,
Speaker 4: every religious text in the world, every country in the world.
Speaker 4: And he's like, no, let gave you all get married, right,
Speaker 4: And this is the height of gay people being hated.
Speaker 4: There's this paranoia about AIDS and fear about AIDS, and
Speaker 4: so he writes this book. And when I get pessimisty,
Speaker 4: I'll try to imagine, right, Okay, tried to imagine going
Speaker 4: back in time to nineteen ninety four when Andrew's writing
Speaker 4: virtually normal and going, Okay, Andrew, you're not going to
Speaker 4: believe me. But twenty six years for now, A you'll
Speaker 4: be alive. That would have fucking blow in his mind.
Speaker 4: B you'll be married to a man because that will
Speaker 4: be legal. See, I'll be with you when the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court of the United States quotes this book you're writing,
Speaker 4: when it makes it mandatory for every state in the
Speaker 4: United States to introduce gay marriage, and the next day
Speaker 4: you'll be invited to have dinner with the President in
Speaker 4: a white house lit up in the colors of the
Speaker 4: rainbow flag to celebrate what you and millions of other
Speaker 4: people have achieved. Oh and by the way, that president
Speaker 4: he's going to be black. Right, it would have sounded
Speaker 4: like there was fucking crazy science fiction, right me go right,
Speaker 4: So twenty six years from now and you and me
Speaker 4: are trans Prime Minister's gonna invite us to smoke cracking
Speaker 4: downing Street where there? Right, it would have sounded not
Speaker 4: that we want that, but you see what I mean? Right,
Speaker 4: two thousand years fucking horrific homophobia. It falls in us
Speaker 4: A generation or two is hope and so and you
Speaker 4: think about that in relation to tech, I give you
Speaker 4: know a story, right, tech is so powerful, and of
Speaker 4: course it's enormously powerful. But I'll give you example of
Speaker 4: someone I would never normally praise. Let's do the spirit
Speaker 4: of Philippo in and I'll praise someone that I fucking
Speaker 4: hate ninety percent of the time. Scott Morrison. Right. So
Speaker 4: Scott Morrison did something really good. So, as a lot
Speaker 4: of people will know, the media is being bankrupted by
Speaker 4: these social media platforms because you know, twenty five years
Speaker 4: ago you were put an advert in the Sydney Morning
Speaker 4: Herald and now you put an advert on Facebook. So
Speaker 4: people get their news from Facebook, but the advertising money
Speaker 4: goes to Facebook, not to the Sydney Morning Herald. Right.
Speaker 4: So they're losing their print readers and they're losing all
Speaker 4: their advertising revenue and this is happening all over the
Speaker 4: world and it's very bad for democracy if you don't
Speaker 4: have media. Right. So Scott Morrison, not manadament, only praise
Speaker 4: entirely to his credit, said to Facebook, you're going to
Speaker 4: have to give some of your advertising revenue to the
Speaker 4: Australian media. People go to your website for the news.
Speaker 4: I heard about this, you got from this, and you
Speaker 4: remember at the time, that's a Facebook shit. The BED
Speaker 4: Australia often key functions. They cut them off completely right
Speaker 4: and what happened quietly they gave in right now. Some
Speaker 4: of that money goes to the Australian media. We are
Speaker 4: so much stronger than they are. They are really fucking unpopular,
Speaker 4: musk mat Zuckerberg. We are much stronger than they are.
Speaker 4: They want to project this image that they're you know,
Speaker 4: and there's good things and bad things about them.
Speaker 3: Of course I agree. I know exactly where you're coming from.
Speaker 4: If you think about the history of collective struggle, if
Speaker 4: you think about the power we can claim together against
Speaker 4: these forces that are fucking us up. My bookst On
Speaker 4: Focus is about how these forces are sucking up attention
Speaker 4: and actually lots of other forces are sucking up our
Speaker 4: attention as well, and how we can reclaim our minds.
Speaker 4: But we don't have to accept being fucked over when
Speaker 4: it comes to addiction, when it comes to depression, when
Speaker 4: it comes to attention, when it comes to the obesity crisis.
Speaker 4: We don't have to accept this. Right. It's not a
Speaker 4: force in nature, it's not inevitable to living in a
Speaker 4: modern society. It is a result of very particular, powerful
Speaker 4: forces that we can take on and change. But it
Speaker 4: requires a shift in mindset. Right. You obviously talk a
Speaker 4: lot about mindset, quite rightly. We need to realize we
Speaker 4: are not medieval peasants begging fucking Mark Zuckerberg and King
Speaker 4: Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table.
Speaker 4: We are free people. We are the free citizens of democracies.
Speaker 4: We own our own minds. We can take our minds
Speaker 4: back from these forces if we want to, but we've
Speaker 4: got to understand what's being done to them. We've got
Speaker 4: to understand it in a wider context. We've got understand
Speaker 4: the cage we've been put in, and together we can
Speaker 4: dismantle that cage. Right.
Speaker 2: I love that, you know what I'm going to finish
Speaker 2: on that because that was super powerful.
Speaker 3: Absolutely love this conversation.
Speaker 4: Mate.
Speaker 2: There's so much more to you than meets the eye,
Speaker 2: and I think you know, talk about humanity. That's all
Speaker 2: we can do is be there for each other, lift
Speaker 2: each other other, and if we can be there to
Speaker 2: show a bit of love, a bit of guidance, and
Speaker 2: to push people on the wide direction. Then you know
Speaker 2: the world is a powerful place that we can control
Speaker 2: right exactly, We not me and.
Speaker 4: We not me.
Speaker 3: I love that. Thank you, mate, Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for joining me on Headgame. If you enjoyed this.
Speaker 2: Episode, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any
Speaker 2: of our incredible stories, and leave me a review wherever
Speaker 2: you're listening.
Speaker 3: I'm Att Middleton. Catch you again next time.