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Hi, Nick here from Pods with Nick and James. Just a quick one before we get into this podcast.

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I want to say a massive thank you for the support that we've received since starting these podcasts.

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We thoroughly enjoy it and we look forward to creating more.

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If you want to have your say on any topics that we've discussed or suggest future topics,

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you can do so at www.reddit.com.com.au.

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And if you want to support us, you can do so from as little as £1 a month.

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You can do that at www.patreon.com.au.

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Anyway, back to the podcast.

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Hi, welcome to Pods with Nick and James.

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Today's subject is going to be about heroes.

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I've asked Nick to think about somebody he'd like to bring to the table.

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I'm going to be bringing someone to the table as well,

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and then we're going to talk about just have a discussion about why we like them, prompt each other with questions,

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and just try and have a bit of a backwards and forwards.

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So rather than it being a information dump, I'm hoping it's going to go more like a dialogue,

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which is what we'd always, I'm pretty sure both of us had always intended the podcast to be more like that.

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Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

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Yeah. So without further ado, let's get into it.

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So what I want us to focus on today is one person who has inspired us.

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Nick, who is the person who has inspired you?

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Well, I've mentioned this person on the podcast before, and it should be no surprise that I mention him again.

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It's Jacques Fresco.

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OK, fantastic. All right.

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The individual I've chosen is the artist Joseph Mollard William Turner.

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We'll start, though, with Nick, your one.

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What can you tell me about Jacques Fresco and why has he inspired you?

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Well, Jacques Fresco was born in 1916.

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He died in 2017.

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He grew up in New York around the time of the Great Depression.

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And he was massively influenced by the impact that it had on his family.

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And to him, all that he really noticed changed was that people stopped going to work.

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The factories were still there. The materials were still there.

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But for some reason, sociological input dictated that you couldn't work anymore.

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And it caused massive outlay that impacted how he saw the world for the rest of his life

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to the point where he endeavored to design a social system to move us on from previous social systems.

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He came up with the idea for a resource-based economy.

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And what I love about the way that he designed this entire social system is that he didn't just go,

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I think this would be a great idea.

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He literally designed the resource-based economy, political and sociological system, from the ground up,

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ironing out all of the kinks and all the flaws that may well come with it.

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But the best thing about his mentality throughout it all is that he didn't do it for personal gain.

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He did it for the good of humanity, shall we say.

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There was no agenda towards any particular race. It was for everybody as a human race.

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He even says that his system doesn't work with borders.

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It doesn't work with divides between humanity. It's either all or nothing.

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And yeah, I mean, it really is an incredible piece of work that he designed during his time alive.

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And he kept professing it all the way up to 2017 when he died.

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Well, you know what? You've got to respect some, although there is some respect for people who are able to change,

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there's even more respect for people who stick to their guns. So that's, yeah, fair play to him.

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I also love the fact that what you've said there is that he made something for everybody else that doesn't benefit him.

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Like even heroes like Alexander Hamilton, who invented a lot of the financial systems within the New York stock market.

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He was the treasurer of the United States.

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So, you know, you could argue that their work was still had some self-interest.

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Whereas what you said about Jacques is that just he wouldn't have been able to benefit from it at all.

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Like what is with the resource based economy?

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Does it have other than a resource based economy? Does it have any other names that people might have heard of?

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There's, he's designed almost like, so the resource based economy comes hand in hand with almost like convents.

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I suppose is one way that you would see them now, but they're not designed like that at all.

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Where instead of having humans in little pockets all over the countryside in order to live in a symbiotic relationship with the planet,

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you have a mass city hub of human and then nothing. All the rest is given back to nature and nature just consumes it and flourishes.

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And then you interconnect all of these hubs, these cities with transport between all of them across the world.

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And so it went way beyond from way beyond just a resource based economy.

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It went into like designing a holistic social system that encompassed, as I said, a symbiotic relationship with nature,

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which he fully accepted was the only way that we were going to be able to survive without self-annihilation.

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So that's through working within the laws of nature and not trying to manipulate nature and make nature mold to you.

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That's interesting. And like that isn't something that I'd necessarily thought about when designing a social system from the ground up.

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OK, what can you tell me about about Shaken, about his, I don't know, like, although he invented this, did he was he university educated or like?

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Yeah, I mean, he had he was a social engineer. He called himself a social engineer.

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He worked as an inventor, but his first actual job was working with a company, an aircraft company. I did make a note of it earlier.

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One second. It was completely lost in the midst of all of my notes now, but he worked for an aircraft company.

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They thought that his ideas were too out there and he didn't last.

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He's the best thing about his designs where they were all like engineered within reason.

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None of them were like not achievable, but they certainly weren't mainstream.

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So which is why he he flourished, I think, mostly through freelance work, inventing things and designing things for people specifically.

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OK, that's interesting. And like, yeah, it's well, it's good to know that he was able to get the freelance work after being ostracized from a company.

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I know that that's from my own personal experiences recently that that's not necessarily easy.

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So, yeah, fair play to him. OK, brilliant. All right.

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So he worked as a as a would you call it an aeronautics engineer?

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Yeah, designer aeronautics engineer and designer on some of the aircraft.

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Still. Yeah, and still kept on kind of working in that field.

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Yeah, freelance freelance work. OK.

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What do you think he would like if he was born later and kind of stayed in that field?

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Do you think he would have worked on like the Sabre engines, which kind of take jets into space or like kind of worked on any of the SpaceX stuff?

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No, I don't. I don't think so, because a lot of what he and a lot of what he designed later on was with the mind to have mass production and with the mind to have ease of production and re remanufacturer remanufacturability.

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And so it wouldn't be like, oh, we'll design this machine that's going to go up once or twice.

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And he designed something in 19 just after the Second World War called the Trend House, which was designed entirely out of aluminium and glass with them with the mindset for it to be mass produced and for it to be able to be put up in like two week time in a two week time scale.

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And it was one of the first of its kind was revolutionary at the time and everything that he designed in all of the city structures that he built or designed for a couple of projects later on in life, one of which is the Venus project, was about creating easy to produce and and almost modular dwellings

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and and and shops and things like that that if we needed another one, they could just be pumped out of the factory and then delivered to the location and just dumped into place.

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And they didn't look terrible. Just to just to clear that up before anybody goes getting it all that must that must look terrible. No, no, no. His his designs were beautiful. And the way that they look in in some of the videos that you can you can see they literally just get plugged into the side of a of an upright building.

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And when when you need more when you need more dwellings for more be more people, you just plug another set of dwellings in the side of a building.

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And it was incredible. It was revolutionary. But like I said, it would it wouldn't have worked along the mentality of like aerospace engineering or anything like that because it tends to be quite disposable. And he was very much about mass produce and recyclable and, and like I said about creating a symbiotic relationship with nature.

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And you can't do that in quite a disposable mentality. Is that the. Okay, so you've really been inspired by his, his thinking process and the way that he does things like.

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I don't know. Is there anyone else that you can compare him to in history who's been particularly holistic or is this the thing that kind of like sets him apart as a designer as a thinker as a social engineer is this kind of almost all angles kind of covered.

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If that makes sense, Ness of his. I think there's philosophers, there's philosophers that have ticked the boxes, much the same as Jacque Fresco has.

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And but what you get with Jacque Fresco is, like you said, it's the whole, it's the whole system. It's, it's not just it's the way of thinking it's the way of living.

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Developing this this mentality of symbiosis and the idea of there not being the need for money.

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And as a matter of fact, money tends to hold back quite a lot of our development, a lot of our ability as a race.

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And he won't he won't he wanted to like abolish any kind of system that was centered around debt or subservants or servitude.

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It was if if the resource is required and with the resources available, then the resource should be used.

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Otherwise, it shouldn't.

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You know,

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No, that's fair, because it's you know, it's very it's very difficult to argue against.

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If there's a need, there's a way to do it and the resources are there, then it is simply the ideas of ownership, the ideas of debt and the ideas of profit that stop it from happening,

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which I imagine is the very things that kind of like he witnessed during that during the depression in New York.

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Okay.

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Is there any any materials that you'd recommend people people watch or people people check out in order to get an idea of?

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Well, I first I first heard about Jacque Fresco as he appeared at the end of the Zeitgeist, the movie kind of documentary docu film and in for documentary.

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I don't know what you call it and where they discuss a lot of I suppose some people might call it conspiracist propaganda.

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But it's it's quite I find it quite an interesting topic actually about the beginnings of religion across the planet and the similarities across most religions.

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And then the impact that money has had across all of the world and how that that goes hand in hand quite often with with financial leverage.

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And then right at the end of it, they what they did was they posed a solution and the solution was the Venus project that was designed by Jacque Fresco.

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Now he had no hand in the Zeitgeist movie, but the people that did that came up with the Zeitgeist movie asked if they could ask if they could advocate the Venus project because they thought this is the future.

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This is where we should be going. And he was more than happy for that to be added into the end of this film.

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So if anybody's got time and you want to have a look, there's a few of them, but definitely start with Zeitgeist, the movie.

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Otherwise, there is a lot of material on the Venus project, which is a project that he started in in Florida with his partner,

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which is like the startings of this resource based economy and all of the designs for the cities and things like that.

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There is actually a place in Florida you can go and see all of the models and everything that he designed personally, which would be like that that set up as it were.

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Well, it's always good to have something physical that you can go to.

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Weirdly enough, although I, you know what, I watched the Zeitgeist movie and I was inspired at the time, although I disagree with a fair amount of it now and like just looking at how some of the facts that are shown.

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But I will admit the quotes from Jacque Fresco that they used, I'm assuming he was the elderly gentleman.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Okay. All right. So although I disagree with the way a number of facts and a number of statements within the Zeitgeist film, the stuff that I can't argue with or a lot of the stuff that I can't argue with is weirdly enough.

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The stuff from Jacque Fresco, like I will admit that it's.

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Yeah, it's it's it's pretty it's pretty solid stuff.

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Yeah, I mean, you can see that he he spent a lot of time thinking out all of the the follyballs and all of the flaws of his his plan is his system.

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And when he talks, it's with real conviction.

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Yeah, exactly. Conviction.

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And I agree that the Zeitgeist movie itself, there's it peppers a lot of what I can only describe as propaganda with liberal fact and and with with poignant ideas just to kind of back up this.

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This unjustified propaganda that it's replete with.

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But like I said, it is really interesting. There is a there is a lot of stuff in there that does kind of provoke thought.

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Well, this is the thing as well. Like, I will freely admit like for as a as a conversation starter or as a basis.

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I think it's actually fantastic that because at least it does ask the questions. Well, how did religion come about in the first place? What are some of the problems with it? What are some of the you know, like I think.

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Even though I don't necessarily agree with maybe where it goes or with the what or with some of the things that it says.

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And you know what? Like we could even do another podcast or just on that film on the whole.

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But like the very fact that it at least bothers to ask the questions or at the very least bothers to put a view or some historical context in like I think if you watch it and don't question it.

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Then I don't think you've got the point of it. If that makes sense. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I've watched all of the Zeitgeist movies purely because it does provoke the thought.

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Even if the questions it's asking are one sided.

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What it does for me is it provokes the thought process that allows me to then think for myself and find my own answers where I I'm not just taking it for granted that that is how things are.

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And I think that's very important. I personally like I'm agnostic. I don't I don't necessarily follow a religion. I'm not really sure that I necessarily believe in what the common conception of God is.

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But I do believe there's there's something more.

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And however, the thing that really made me go hold on that's really interesting with the Zeitgeist movie is where it goes into the money side of things and the very construct of money and how highly flawed that is.

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I'm very logic driven and the whole monetary system is highly illogical.

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And having that all made very plain and clear in front of me in a movie was like what why how how has nobody noticed this before. Why is nobody asking this question when it comes to money.

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When it came to the banks again although there was some stuff in there that I disagreed with like I did love the fact that they look at how if you create value out of out of nothing either you're saying you're well first off you are saying that everyone else's money is now worth less because the amount of resources in the world doesn't change which is why they then moved on to the VHS.

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They moved on to the Venus project and it is it's actually quite you know a logical step it does make sense.

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But I did like how

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they kind of looked at how just the immorality of creating nothing and then just creating this circulation.

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Money in itself is just a tool for the circulation of goods and services.

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But if you if you make money too much of a thing.

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Then I don't know. Yeah, I did like the the the historical examples they use like with the court case where somebody

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refused to pay the mortgage in that on on the house in America and I think this was in the 1800s and the judge actually went rather than on the side of the banks actually went on the side of the the individual because the individual pointed out that the money is bookkeeping money and is therefore

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not not not really theirs not really real not really anything and the person made such a good defense for why what the banks were doing was immoral that literally the judge had to end the conversation or end the case with.

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Yep, you guys have literally just lied.

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Only God can make something out of nothing. He doesn't owe you anything. Yeah, which is interesting. Yeah, which I wouldn't go nowadays.

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You are you most definitely wouldn't like I'm to be fair I'm surprised it happened at all.

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But I'm still happy that it did. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

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Okay. All right. Well, I'm with you know like what what changes have you do you feel you've made in your life due to your, your appreciation and respect for Jacques Krus. Sorry, Jacques Krus. Is that the

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I'm a Fresco Fresco Fresco. God damn it. That's fine. And so there's not it's difficult because when you think about the monumental task of changing a social system.

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Despite how how right it feels and how right it it seems to everybody I talked to the power that one person has is minute.

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So what I tend to do is I say, like knowing is enough. If you understand the system, and you know that it's the right decision to make, then all the choice that you have is to continue in the system that we're in until an opportunity presents itself to make the change.

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That's necessary to like to move humanity forwards. Because there are too many people that are set on a monetary system. Now, too many people in positions of power because money gives power and therefore the people in the greatest positions inside the monetary system are the people with the greatest power.

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And therefore the people most reluctant to make the changes, and the people most most likely to make the changes are actually the people with the lowest amount of power because they're the people with the lowest amount of money.

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And so I quite often when I when I talk to people about it I say look, just talking about it amongst yourselves is enough. Knowing that this is the change that needs to happen within the world is enough. And that eventually, the monetary system will collapse, there will be a massive occurrence, a situation that occurs that allows for a choice to be made.

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And it's at that moment when enough of us will need to stand up and say this is what we are going to do and this is how we are going to do it in order for that change to take place.

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Other than that, you still have to survive within the system that is present on earth today. So survive. Survive in the best way that you can. Meld, mix, be part of the system because to go against the system, you render yourself completely helpless and completely powerless.

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You can do nothing. You have to adjust for now at least.

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I love that because that's literally kind of the opposite that Karl Marx would say, but I actually respect your way a lot more because he, you know, he lived within a capitalist system, made money through capitalism through the selling of papers, but then said that everyone else needs to

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give up all safety for their families, give in to a huge revolution and make, you know, kill, be killed, make horrible sacrifices.

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I mean, if what you want is war.

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And then he just said good luck with it.

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Yeah, I mean, if what you want is war, if what you want is death, then absolutely take Karl Marx's way. Like ball fist your way or ball head your way right into the revolution.

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But you will meet immense resistance. What you like the only real way that you'll move away from the system that we're in is when it is clearly apparent to everybody that the system is highly flawed and broken and needs a radical change.

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In which case, upstand the people with the knowledge that have a ready made system to walk into.

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At that moment, you make a peaceful transition away from a broken system into what could potentially be a great system.

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But one thing that Jacque Fresco says, which I've repeated in numerous podcasts in the past, is that every social system that has existed has existed for a reason and has had to exist in order for us to appreciate where we are now and where we need to go.

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That does not mean that the resource based economy is the final product.

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It just means that it's a viable next step.

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And there may well be further revolutions that we take down the road.

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But comparative to the system that we currently exist within.

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It is the next step, it is the right step forwards. We just need to make sure we take that step at the right time.

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That's a very, again, this kind of seems to be something that seems to be a thing with Jacque's thought is that that's incredibly enlightened in that saying that this is the solution to the current problem, but it's not the solution to all problems and therefore will not be perfect in and of itself.

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Like just that's from a salesman's point of view, that's self defeating from a realistic point of view and from a integrity point of view.

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That's flawless. And that's the point, isn't it? He was not about doing anything for personal gain.

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It was about social gain. It was about global gain.

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It was about everybody benefiting from the effort that he put in and therefore he was free to say those things because they were the right things to say.

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Yeah, that's fair.

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Okay, well, thank you for explaining a little bit about one of your heroes there.

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That's yeah, that feel that's helped me understand a little bit more where you're coming from. And well, actually, to be fair, we've already spoken a bit about this before, but I think it was worth including on the podcast.

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So, yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. What about yourself?

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Yeah, so I'm going to be honest with you. I think my one is not quite as impressive. He definitely wasn't as holistic.

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But I do appreciate the moral stands that this person took.

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So my one of my heroes is the painter Joseph Mollard William Turner, who was born in 1775 in London and died in 1851.

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Although it's weird because like I've just heard that he died in 1851. The books that I used to read said that he died in 1850. But regardless, you get an idea at least of the period of his life.

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Maybe he died on New Year's Eve.

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Well, he did die late December. You're right. So like it just do yeah, I don't know.

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It's a gray area. It's a gray area. That's it, which is weird because he was the upper class of English society by the end of his life.

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But some of the reasons why I liked him was first off, I think I like his work. I like his paintings.

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I specifically like his later life, work and romantic paintings. I also like the morality behind his work, which we'll go into in a little bit.

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And then when with artists, you some of the you know, with any bunch of famous people, you get a variety of what they were like in real life. And

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when compared to other artists whose work I enjoyed like Paul Gargan, Gorgan, sorry, this Turner actually seems like a complete saint by comparison.

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One of the things that I liked was that he came from a working class family and worked his way up.

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When asked what his secret was, he literally said, my only secret is hard work.

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He was obsessive and dedicated to just as Jacques was dedicated to the Venus Project and a resource based economy.

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Turner was always obsessed with painting, like it's what he did from the age of a child to when he was a apprentice to an architect,

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to when he got his own studio, to when he became part of the Royal Academy, to when he became professor at the Royal Academy, professor of perspective at the Royal Academy.

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All of these things were pursuing excellence in one field, in one thing, which to him was landscape painting.

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He overcame a number of obstacles in his life. His mum, unfortunately, ended up going to St. Mary Bethlehem, sorry, the famous asylum.

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St. Mary Bethlehem or Bedlam, which is where the word Bedlam comes from when he was still a young man.

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I just really respect that pursuit of excellence, the fact that he founded the Turner Prize,

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that he invested his money in a number of charities for supporting under successful artists.

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Also, I hate to say it, the fact that he was English-born and bred, had travelled all across Europe,

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and yet said that the best skies in all of Europe are those in Margate, which is not something you'll hear repeated nowadays.

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No, I bet it's not.

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Which is why the Turner Contemporary is built in Margate.

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Do you think that's why they built Dreamland in Margate?

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I think Margate was something else in his time.

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The short answer is no, the more I dig on this one, the more I'm going to be digging down.

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What he inspired me to do was to paint and try new things, to work hard at achieving goals.

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He's one of the reasons why I did an art degree and why I worked hard like I'd show up to the studio space,

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no one else was around and I'd be writing in my textbooks, I'd be painting, I'd be doing all sorts of stuff.

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A lot of other people still got better grades than me because genuinely they were better and more talented.

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He had a good work ethic and I felt he was a really good example of somebody who's dedicated to a single thing.

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I'm a terrible artist myself and I can barely draw a stickman without feeling like I've done a terrible job.

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However, my three daughters are all incredible artists.

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My wife is an incredible artist and they all can see things in images,

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in their head even before they even put it on paper that I can't.

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I can appreciate art that has been drawn and that has been painted

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and I'm one of those people that will stare at a painting for hours and lose myself in all the intricacies of the brush strokes etc.

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But could I achieve it? I think maybe that's why I find it so remarkable is because I know it's beyond my capabilities.

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Well, this is another thing that I loved about him. At several points he saw other artists work.

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Okay, so I guess this is the weird thing about Turner. I'm looking back at how he was with people.

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I'm pretty sure he was autistic, not just mildly, massively autistic if I'm honest with you, high-functioning autistic.

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He is reported to have broken down in tears when going to particular shows as a teenager and seeing certain works.

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When asked why, he would say things like, well, because I know that I can't do that and never will be.

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He proved himself wrong on several occasions. I doubt he thought that.

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Well, he may not have thought it eventually but I don't know, I'm just going by the reports of things.

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What I will say is going back and researching him in his private life, I will admit he was not a perfect person.

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I don't know, it's almost not even worth mentioning nowadays. He never married but he put on a pseudo-name.

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So he pretended to be married but never did.

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Maybe it was to save himself from the embarrassment of not being married in a society where it wasn't normal to not be married.

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I get that sense with him. He was ahead of his time and he was a devout atheist as well.

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He was a patriot, an atheist, not necessarily a revolutionary. He did have an appreciation of technology.

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I guess one of the reasons why I also really respect him is the one thing that he did speak up on massively in at least one of his works.

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My favourite work of his is Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, which is a massive 75cm high to 1.5m wide protest about slavery.

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Although his mum was put into a sane asylum, he didn't make works about mental health.

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He didn't make works about individual government policies that he disagreed with.

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He didn't make works about the degradation of London life or about the struggles of the working man even though he never lost his own working class accent.

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He made one major political work and one major political statement and that was to do with the events of slavers whose slaves were covered for drowning,

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but not for sickness, throwing sick slaves overboard and just the moral repugnant of it.

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The image is quite repugnant, quite violent in itself, but it's a very captive image.

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If you chuck me the title for the piece in a message after I will post it on the Reddit.

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If you're listening head over to the Reddit and there will be a link for the works on there.

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The work itself is one of the few ones that was sold to America despite Turner being English and a lot of his work being in the National Gallery and in the Turner Contemporary.

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Unfortunately this one is in the New York National Gallery.

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Well, sorry, New York isn't a city, but you know what I mean.

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The National Gallery in New York has this painting and it is, I guess, you know what it's to do with the slave trade.

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So it is to do with American history.

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Yeah.

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So, yeah.

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All right. That's why that's my guy.

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Thank you for listening to that little rant.

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No, no.

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I can see why he was quite obviously somebody that walked his own path and wasn't afraid to support those around him.

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And I can see the effect that he's had on you. I know from personal experience that I personally account my aptitude with my current job.

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I'm partly culpable to yourself so I can see that that helping mentality has been probably quite heavily inspirational for yourself.

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But also, yes, a bit of a visionary part of it as well.

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Just to be fair, although we won't go too much backwards and forwards on this whilst we're recording, you're good at your job because you're good at your job, Nick.

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I might have done my best to show you what I know, but your talent is very much your own.

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Although I do appreciate the shout out all the same.

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No, the point is that you didn't think of it as a hardship.

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As a matter of fact, you trained a number of staff whilst I was working and you never once complained about having to train a new member of staff.

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And that in itself is reflective of the influence that Turner had on you.

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True, true. Although I will admit I also personally enjoy sharing information.

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It's another reason why we're doing this podcast. Absolutely, absolutely.

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So are there other pieces by Turner that you would suggest that the listeners...

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Oh, absolutely. Although I'm not a massive fan of his earlier work as you can still see the architectural draftsman in him.

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The Fighting Timurera is an amazing piece.

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The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, The Fall of Carthage, a couple of kind of sister pieces which are historical as historical painting had more elevation back in the 1800s.

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Annabelle Crossing the Alps isn't necessarily my favourite piece of his, but it's another very famous one of his.

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I'd recommend any of his later work if you're looking for amazingly expressive but not quite surreal paintings. I'd recommend any of those.

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Yeah, in fact I'd say the Fighting Timurera is possibly my second favourite of his.

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Yeah, just the colours. That one is in the National Gallery.

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So if you have the chance to go to the National Gallery then go check that out.

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I, as I said, I can appreciate... I don't know a lot of Turner which probably shows my lack of culture.

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But I personally... Van Gogh is probably one of my favourite artists.

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Oh, absolutely.

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His story as well as the art he presented is absolutely fantastic.

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The man was replete with mental health problems and displayed that within his work so beautifully.

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He was a very troubled man.

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You're absolutely right. There's still mystery around Van Gogh's death. Yes, the police report says that he shot himself, but then ballistic experts have looked at it and looked at the angle of the shot.

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Some people have said that he couldn't have done that without breaking his hand using the weapon that was used. So it's like, was he shot and then covered up for the people who shot him?

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Knowing the mental health troubles he had, he may well have asked somebody to take care of business for him. Knowing that he wasn't able to do it himself. This is the same man that cut his ear off and gave it to his love.

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Just so that she had a piece of him. Incredibly twisted but at the same time incredibly beautiful. You can't understand the mind, especially given the fact that it's long gone.

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What is left behind is some of the most incredible artwork.

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Absolutely. I do love his skyscapes. Then again, I'm a sucker for the skyscapes which also feature heavily in Turner's work.

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I do wonder whether or not there was a lot of drug use when it came to Van Gogh though. Not because I think of him as a drug user, but because the imagery is highly hallucinogenic.

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It's incredibly hallucinogenic. If you stare at a Van Gogh piece for long enough, you almost feel like you're falling into it.

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That I think has got some kind of hallucinogenic effect. The fact that he was able to capture that. If that was what he saw whilst he was under the influence of hallucinogenics and he was able to capture that in art form, that's absolutely amazing.

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Absolutely right. Although Turner is my favourite painter, Van Gogh is up there as well.

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Also, I think a lot of people did take drugs. I don't think there was quite the same stigma. I think if you let your life fall apart, then there was stigma attached to that. Turner was actually an opium addict, but handled his addiction and kept it mostly out of the public eye.

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I don't know, I think part of the war on drugs has been this demonising of its use by people or making it... you know what? That in itself is also another topic.

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Absolutely. I'm really happy with this conversation. I've definitely learnt a thing or two. I'm probably am going to go back and watch some of the Zeitgeist movies. I'll send you some of the titles of Turner's work and we'll take it from there.

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Listeners, I hope you've learnt something too. Send us a comment. If there are any topics you would like to hear us talk about, please let us know. Have a good evening and have a good week.

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Thank you for listening. Take care.

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Thanks for listening.