 One thing you mentioned is coping mechanisms, so the Watson that I'm putting on is an alcoholic, for example. Would you care to try it? No, indeed. I speak not only as your friend, but as a medical man. How can you risk such damage? The character Sherlock Holmes is such a high functioning mind that remembers everything, how he would explore, or how his mind would explore stuff. I can't tell you how it clarifies and stimulates the mind. Yes, and destroys it in time. You know, they'll be sat there knowing that they're doing a bottle of wine every night. Friends, hello. I'm chatting with Kyle. Is it Kyle McTye, Kyle? Kyle McTye, yeah. Yeah, and you're from elementary five, is that? Elementary five productions on the artistic director of that. Brilliant. Congratulations. Friends, Kyle's just approached me to ask for some advice on all things drug related. We've referenced to a Sherlock Holmes production that elementary five are putting together. And we were talking about trauma and PTSD, Kyle, weren't we? We were indeed. Yeah. And I was saying that the important thing there, from my understanding, especially from what I see with veterans, is for the most part we're talking unresolved childhood trauma, which then stays with a person for life, and then surfaces after subsequent, a subsequent catalyst. So this can be a secondary event like you might see in combat or a traffic accident or an abusive relationship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that triggers off all the pain and the unresolved healing that you've got from childhood. I'm saying this because it's quite misunderstood. I think people think PTSD is something that just soldiers get and you've got to go to war and see stuff blown up. When you go off to war or you're involved in a car accident or an abusive relationship or I've met people that got beaten up, although that's not a pleasant experience, you have the cognitive capacity as an adult to make sense of it and to enter into, for example, some form of therapy to overcome it. Whereas childhood trauma, especially early childhood trauma, you experience at an age where you can't make sense of it. And I would say you internalize it. You internalize this set of feelings which then become incredibly difficult to shake. Not to say you don't develop coping mechanisms and the more that you work on it, the better you get at dealing with the repercussions of this. But when a child, let's say two or three years old or even four or five, they can't make sense of, say, for example, abuse. How could you? You don't know what it is. You don't know why it's happening to you. You probably think it's your fault and therefore you internalize it and it becomes that thing that you hope doesn't happen again, whether that might be sexual or might be physical, kind of key in the door for understanding substance misuse. Yeah, because that's something that I think, especially on the PTSD side of things, that's something that in the show we is kind of a key for a lot of the characters. Well, with the kind of past traumas. Dr. Watson, for example, in the original books and in every kind of representation, he's come back from war and they always have him kind of struggling with PTSD. But I didn't want to just have him struggling with PTSD. I wanted to get the reasons why he's actually struggling with PTSD so then we can kind of explore that. And one thing you mentioned is coping mechanisms. So the Watson that I'm putting on is an alcoholic, for example, because it's something that obviously distracts him from his reality and that his abuse is through alcohol and then other characters like Sherlock Holmes as his abuse is drugs. And yeah, I think that's really interesting that how it's almost a secondary event that can kind of trigger the PTSD. So that's something I'll explore as a childhood then of Dr. Watson. You don't want to be using words like alcoholic. You want to say experiences, alcohol, addiction. Just try to avoid labelling people with stigmatising labelling because you've got to remember, if this is going out in the UK, then probably 40 to 60 percent of your audience are alcoholics. They'll be sat there knowing that they're doing a bottle of wine every night or a couple of cans of beer that sometimes goes to three, four or five. It's not helpful as a community if we use these words that then make people feel that they can't discuss their issues because of stigma. You know, people call, say, when they say to me, you're a drug addict, which is fine. I mean, I like I get it. But it's like, yeah, but I'm, you know, I'm also a father and I'm also a best friend. I'm also a popular YouTuber. I've also traveled more than anybody else that I've ever met with the exception of David Attenborough, but I've never met him. Addiction is a, it's a learned psychological behaviour. Okay. Right. So you do it, you get a reward, which is the feel good factor, the dopamine or the serotonin or whatever it might be. And you like that reward because it's called a reward. So you do the action again and you get the reward, then you do the action again and you get the reward. And what this does is creates a cycle of dependence on that substance to feel, to what at first feels good, then just starts to become, that's my normal. And the issue is because it's, it's actually taking you away from normal. You stop getting the things done in your day that you should be getting done. It starts to become, your life starts to spiral downwards because that behaviour becomes more, it becomes more important to feel high above your problems than it does to deal with, to deal sort of with them. So that's, it's a learned psychological behaviour. And we've got, you know, it's really important that we see it as that because otherwise labels like addiction and illness and this sort of stuff don't really have much, much meaning. This is making sense, Carl. Let me know if it's not. I think it's kind of especially when as someone for me personally I've not got any experience of drugs. So entering that kind of whole, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I need to know before you can even think to put that or address the problems in my show. So the terms around it, especially because I'm hoping for when we'll do programs and then the advertisement is the issues that people see. I want to be able to then put support streams, attach them to what we're doing as well. So knowing all the terms and how to kind of talk to people and connect to people. Because even in the show for Sherlock, so he's the he takes in the show. That's something that he is very aware of what he's doing and why he's doing it, but it doesn't change the fact he's doing it. I'd like to discuss is psychosis because I could do research on the Internet about psychosis, whatever, read a bunch of words, but you can't really describe an experience of psychosis. And especially if I'm wanting to again address that in the show and put that on stage, I want to do it as really stick as possible. And because because I don't want it to be this massive, dramatized piece of of acting that goes on, the people who might have experience with it are going to go away and think, well, what does that help? I don't help anything. So I was hoping you could enlighten me a little bit on psychosis and kind of how that affected you and maybe affected other people that you you might know. So kind of like your first experience of psychosis what was what was that like? So this I wrote about this in my memoir. Excuse me, in my memoir, Eating Smoke. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and I was just habitually daily addicted to Christopher F. Yeah, as a matter of course. I mean, it was 24 seven if I could get hold of this stuff. And it was all fine in the initial like I was saying earlier in the initial honeymoon period. You learn a lot about yourself and you realize you've got a lot of skills that you know, you've got a lot of skills that you know, you've got a lot of skills that you've got yourself and you realize you've got a lot of skills that latent skills that school didn't discover and and and and you bury that trauma. You know, you bury that childhood trauma, the feelings of anxiety and not not not that I ever knew I had these. But I realize now when you feel so bloody good about yourself and yet someone else takes the drug and they're like, yeah, well, yeah, it's all right. Do it once in a blue and you're like, hang on, how come you're just like once in a blue moon for me? It's like, I cannot wait to get some more. Yeah. And you know, I could say that's a dangerous thing and I'd gone downtown to buy a blanket for a new flat, a new apartment that I had. It was a very old apartment, but yeah. And as I went into the market in a place called Wanchai in Hong Kong, I saw these blankets stacked up in a sort of open-fronted shop and I picked up the label on one just to see what the price was and it was a little red label and it physically had the word waste on there. To my knowledge, I mean, I don't think I was hallucinating or anything, although that is a possibility. It just had the word waste and immediately my mind put two and two together and came up with five, which is basically psychosis. Right, okay. You know, instead of looking at it and going weird, don't know what that means, these waste blankets, you know, pass, you know. Yeah. My mind told me almost like viscerally like I could see it, that these blankets were the blankets that the American settlers gave to the indigenous Indians, like allegedly, right, infected with smallpox and this sort of you familiar with this, right? Yeah. I just want to say for the record, I've heard this part of history is inaccurate and it's not true. That's not the point. That's nothing, you know, that doesn't help me. I'm there, I grew up with that history and I'm there in the market and that word waste, it just triggered something in my mind that I thought there's like, you know, these waste blankets are full of disease and they're these blankets that the American settlers gave to the, you know, indigenous Americans, what we call red Indians when we were kids. Yeah. And in my mind, it was as clear as day. That's what they were and in that moment, it really did feel like there was a big conspiracy which tied in with all my experience of some weird stuff I saw living in Hong Kong. Yeah. You know, and I'm sort of looking up and down the street and just wondering like who's in on there, who gets this, you know? Yeah. Who else and and I'm looking at the woman on who owns the shop and I'm thinking, Oh, okay. Yeah. And it sounds, it sounds bizarre Kyle, but that's psychosis. It's just and it developed from there that that every time I took this drug, which I would say it kind of like overloaded my brain and my brain, the signals in my brain weren't firing properly anymore. They was all getting skewed. Right. Although there are some people genuinely believe that no, it's that you let demons in when you when you take, you know, substances. Hence why they call spirit spirit. Right. Oh, right. You know, I kind of get that metaphorically, but I don't know how true that is. Yeah. As far as I'm concerned, I just overloaded my brain every time I took this stuff. And I just started to enter this double world and this conspiracy just got bigger and bigger and bigger every time I was off my head. And then when I came off the stuff, like I didn't even think about it. Not, not, I couldn't. It was like I didn't remember it. I didn't look back and go bloody hell. I stared at six cats yesterday for about four hours trying to work out if they were puppets puppetry originated in Asia. These cats that I was staring down from the, I was like a 20 floor up in my building and I just trying to work out if they were puppets or not. And if the guy chopping the meat outside the restaurant is here puppet. It just seems to have this mechanical action. And that's the world I lived in. And it and it and I just thought everything was a huge conspiracy. You know, a big healthy tinge of paranoia running through that experience. Yeah. I thought everyone sort of in on it except me that everyone seems to know what's going on and your mind just reads wrong stuff into everything. Yeah, you look at the back of, you know, instructions on a battery pack and you'll be like triple A batteries last up to four times. And your mind just starts conjuring up this weird basically, you know, tying stuff into stuff that it was not meant to ask just weird. Definitely be good for Sherlock Holmes production. Well, no, definitely. I think because that's that's something that one thing that you kind of said in there was the puppetry that kind of originated in that area that it's almost like it was based in some form of reality what you were going through. Like you said that with the blankets as well, it's stuff that's already there in your head that you know, but that that you kind of then whatever's going on your mind that you mind the drugs, whatever it's bringing it to life for you almost and then like working overtime trying to come off with different branches on on on that because as well on the Sherlock Holmes, I think one thing that I found quite interesting with the character Sherlock Holmes is that such a high functioning mind that remembers everything how he would explore or how his mind would explore stuff in that same sort of sort of way through psychosis. I would imagine it would be a nightmare for him. It depends which which version of Sherlock Holmes you watch or read. But there's one version where he used to take cocaine. Yeah. There's the one version where he takes opiates. So I mean, some people can just develop psychosis. Yeah. Through, for example, stress and this kind of thing. Yeah. I would imagine for someone like Sherlock, it would just I mean, it's a living nightmare for anyone. This is why you get people in Thailand climbing up, you know, they climb up lamp pylons and stuff and end up grabbing and a live electric cable, convinced that I don't know. I don't know what what you just don't know. It's it's just weird. I mean, I was hallucinating a lot as well. But I don't know if that's because I didn't sleep for days on end. That's the side effect of the crystal meth. You wouldn't really have that with opiates or cocaine. Not not not. For example, I didn't sleep for five days. I mean, I didn't sleep for nine days once. And then I would stare at things. Yeah, I'd look in a shot window and I just become fixated because everything was moving and everything was not what what it was. I was looking through one. I think there's an empty shot. I thought it was like a Western going on in there and I can see stuff happen. You know, someone's playing the piano and and and I'm just staring for it and it's weird. Men's will stop saying it's weird because it is weird. You know, it's like it's just it's it's really hard. It's like your brain is putting two and two together and coming up with five. I ended up so and for me it was so much I would say a result of my childhood trauma. That's why I started taking the drug. I would say looking back. Yeah, it was giving me something that I obviously felt I was missing in my life. Probably a bit of escapism from from from from my reality. And then in the end when there's when when the psychosis kicked in, almost become like a a quest to prove myself to everyone as if like everyone's in on this except me. And I'm you know, I'm always different and I'm always the odd one out and you know, I will I'll suss this out. And and it was weird because I was working when I was like this. Yeah. I was in psychosis not sleeping for days and I was working as a nightclub dormant. And I'd be stood on the door with was another South African guy and he's saying stuff and I'm just giving him these short clip answers because I'm thinking he's like testing me, you know, yeah, he'd say, you know, Chris, did you did you see that and I'll be like, is it like a club dormant? No, he's probably just meaning, you know, that that guy walking down a road slipped on a banana or something and I'm like, right, what, what, what does he mean by that? Did you see that? Did you see that? Yeah. No, he's probably just meaning, you know, that that guy walking down a road slipped on a banana or something and I'm like, right, what, what, what does he mean by that? Did you see that? Did you see that? What is that a sign? Is that a clue? You have like two voices in your head. So you have your thoughts, but then you have your, I don't know if psychotic is the right word, but your psychosis thoughts. So if I've got a drink, my thought is, ah, should I have some of that drink? And then there's the psychosis thought like comes over the top and goes, yeah, if you have some of that drink, you know, it's the elixir of life. It's, it's got all the, and you're like, ah, elixir of life. Okay. Oh, wow. You know, you're thinking this in your head. You've got to, it's like your thoughts have separated into two and they're talking to each other. And one of them's not good. Yeah. You know, one of them's leading you down a garden path. So the whole kind of two voices split into your own and like psychosis. And it's not like your own is rational and the psychosis voice is irrational. It's like they're both stupid. They're having a stupid converse, you know, I wrote a nursery rhyme on the wall of my apartment after I descended into chaos. Yeah. Yeah, that's another sign of psychosis is you're, you're so preoccupied with trying to work out this conspiracy that everything goes by the by. So, you know, things just become messy, like really messy and like, dangerously so. Yeah. I don't know how that fits with Sherlock because he's got a, he's got a housekeeper, isn't he? Yeah, she, she doesn't make an appearance in the show, but she's referenced. So I wouldn't, even through stage, you know, I wouldn't really represent that as kind of like a natural mess, but things kind of going by the by is, I think his relationships, everything that's kind of to someone that's living your normal everyday life, then relationships will be fine. But for him, they, they're almost not in his mind, because it kind of everything that he's going through goes hand in hand with this whole mental battle with Moriarty, who is going to be in the show. And, and his kind of reality becomes wrapped in that. So his psyche that, and I think something that fits with the paranoia that you've described and the conspiracy theories is that he believes that Moriarty is essentially everywhere. And, and everything becomes about Moriarty. Everything that happens is about Moriarty. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Yeah. So to the point where the audience, I want the audience to question exactly what they're seeing, because they're seeing it through Sherlock's eyes, everything that's going on. But towards the end of it, because it's going to become so kind of jumbled, there's no natural flow of things that you'd seen a normal performance, everything is just so bam, bam, bam time flying by. And I want the audience to kind of question these events, whether they've actually seen Moriarty, whether what Sherlock's on about is actually true, because he's such a normally rational thinker that the idea of him being irrational is almost dangerous at the same time, I think. So that explanation that you've given of your experiences, it really helps with where I'm hoping to go with the character of Sherlock. And it means I've already kind of been heading in the right direction, just without a knowledge of where that direction is exactly going. Yeah, it's kind of weird, because now I realise life is a massive conspiracy. It's just not the way that I thought, you know, I used to think people were talking to each other with car horns and like signaling down the road and that street signs were really encoded symbols and, and, and, well, and, and, and yet now I kind of find out a lot of stuff is happening. It's, it's, it's a bit, it's a bit weird. It makes me feel as I sat here now, like am I, am I still, am I still a bit mad? You've taken some of it with you. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, sort of going off on a bit of a tangent here, but like, I'm just throwing this at you to say that even though like what I experienced back then was a lot of it was false, some of it, you know, was, I mean, I worked for the Hong Kong Triads, and that is a conspiracy. It's a, it's an underground brotherhood, a crime, a crime network. Everything they do is under the radar of society. Yeah. You know, they communicate through hand signals. Well, your Freemasons communicate through hand signals. So there were aspects of my experience, which anchored me in reality. That made it worse. The point I was just trying to get to back then is it is kind of weird now that now I look at the world and I realize it is just one big inconspiracy, you know, and they're all in on it. The media companies are just working for the big corporations. The big corporations are all controlled by, you know, their shareholders, BlackRock and Vanguard. BlackRock and Vanguard probably sit down at, you know, a meeting council of, they call it the table of 300. Yeah. They control, it's crazy. It's crazy, you know. It's a funny old life, you know, because I don't think I'm in psychosis now. I see all this shit, you know. I mean, I've got a lot of people around with the exact same with it all. It's like something that happened recently is the Matt Hancock messages that got released where he's essentially saying, you know, let's release this one and then scare the people even more. Yeah. That barely got picked up. The way that COVID was spread around and people were told what to do and people spread that around saying we can't go out, we can't do this. And these messages come out and it just feels like silence. Yeah. Because everybody's, I call it living in a matrix. They're all brain, they're all brainwashed from birth and they haven't shaken it free. And I was, I've been sort of lucky, even though I've been through some severe, what some would say are severe experiences. It's, it's, it's woken me up at least, you know, I see it all. I see it all now. I see it walking down the street how damaged people are. You know, people just can't say hello anymore. It's weird that we can even like do business because people won't say hello in the street. They're too, they're too messed in the head to just like look down or look away or and they're bringing their kids up this way. Yeah. You know, is this going to be a stage production? It is. Yeah. It's going to be performed. I can give you more dates of the email but performed in November and then it's going to go touring around the UK after that. I'll let you get off your meeting but thank you so much for your time. It's been real educational. Yeah. I, I, it's such a weird thing to try to, you know, I mean, I ended up really, I mean, one day on what I'd smashed my apartment, not intentionally. I was just trying to fix things all the time and I'd try and fix something and I'd just end up like, all right, if I take that bit off and then I'll take that and the next thing I just like trash something that was perfectly bloody good. Yeah. And, and I'm wallowing on the floor and I didn't even go to work. I was working as a school teacher then and the kids loved me at the school. And I'm so confused. I'm scrabbling, looking through all my books looking for, hang on, this, this makes, ah, this makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, right. Oh, something good is coming in the future. Ah, it's coming to me. Right. And I'm so absorbed. I've been going to school. The phone rang. It was the guy that implored me as an, my agent went, Chris, why didn't you go to school today? I'm like, well, I didn't answer him, Carl, because I thought, well, it's obvious. Is it not obvious? I'm, I'm like doing all this work, this research. Surely, surely someone's told you that because everyone's in on this conspiracy. Anyway, yeah. Okay, bye. I put the phone down. I knew I'd lost that job, but, and then I set out on this walk. And this walk was going to bring me all the answers, all the answers in life, which I would say goes back to childhood trauma. Right. I want my beat down. I had a yearning to be accepted. And, and make sense of it all. And I was going to go for what I was going to find a crane in the harbor, these big huge cranes that lift the stuff off the chips. And I was going to climb up it and jump off into the harbor. And in my mind, if I do that, right. Fuck the haters, you know, that was how my mom and I walk and it was really sad. And I, I took my boogie box with me and I took this book, this Anthony Robbins book and it sounds weird. But when, when you, when I look at that behavior now, fuck me, how mad was that really is like a mad person. I'm using that term inappropriately, but I was fucking mad person, you know, just, just bizarre, just bizarre, just bizarre. And then just so you know, for me, as soon as I stopped taking the drugs, you know, as soon as I came down off them, the psychosis disappeared. So it was very attached to the drugs. Yeah. I mean, the doctors thought I was damaged for life and I'd have to be in a mental institution and da da da da da da da. And I'm like, no, I'm fine. I'm, you know, it, it, it, um, it was weird and it only reoccurred twice in my life. And bearing in mind that like the, the amphetamine in England is just, you know, when you can't get, you couldn't really buy crystal meth in England. Yeah. The next thing I could get was just speed, you know, base, or we called it base back in a day, strong speed. And it wasn't strong enough to make me lose my mind if it makes sense. But there was two times. There was one, I was at a party at my house and a load of, load of friends that, that I knew from all around the place. And we'd all popped pills. And I just remember turning my friend and I said, I said something like, so is she down at the petrol station then? And my friend looked at me and went, what? I said, is she dead? And I realized in that moment, I said something that didn't make sense. And I went, and it was like, fucking hell. That was embarrassing. You know, just, it's just like come out and, and, and, you know, it's, it's, it's like a, not like, not a flashback, but something that. But, you know, twiddling me off again, it was like, yeah. Was there even a thought behind that? Was it something that just kind of almost fell out? Just, just like, I think it was just random. Wow. You know, it just, just, just, you know, just random. Yeah. I had a friend that was taking LSD once at a party and, and we were in a car together with another mate and this other mate went. Tell him what you did. What you did, Lee. I'm like, Lee, what, what did you do? We're at a party. He's a, he's a Northern. He said, we're at a party the other night. And it was off me, Ed. And I thought I was on the prices right. And I'd won a car. Wow. He said, so I burst in the room where everyone was like, you know, partying. And I went, I've won. And they looked at me and we're like, one, what? And then I realized I didn't want to, you know, it did. You just see what I mean. It is get like these sort of intrusive thoughts. Say again. Those intrusive thoughts and just take over, take control almost for that, that second. Yeah. Just bizarre, just bizarre. Wow. That's interesting. I've got a lot of notes here. Yeah. I'm sure you'll come up with something just, just, you know, it's not, it's not as cliche as I think people think. No, no. That's why, that's why I wanted to research into it. Yeah. Psychosis is an actual physical imbalance in the chemicals in your brain that makes you put two and two together and come up with five. Yes. This whole like kind of craziness or whatever people associate it with. It's, it's a lot deeper than that. There's like a lot more functional than that by the sounds of things. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's where the brain, like you say it's disinbalancing your brain, makes your brain kind of, it works just not in the, maybe, maybe the right way, right way, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Kyle, listen, I'm just going to, thanks for, you know, I really appreciate you. You've got in contact. I'm just going to stop recording here. I hope, I hope you enjoyed that one.