Taumata 2022 - Nigel Latta

[Music] nigel is a really special communicator he's a way of communicating in language that people relate to and understand growing up with a dad who teaches others how to parent was mostly pretty normal except occasionally you get this odd kid whose parents had learned off my dad not to give them so much sugar and they'd always have this grudge against me he's really creative he has great ideas and big ideas he thinks big somehow it was my fault that the biscuits were not in his lunchbox anymore he keeps asking questions i think he's always looking for what's what's round the next corner and he won't just stand back and observe it from a distance he wants to get in and have a go i think people respond to nigel's work because he's funny and fun i swear to god he's much less funny in person and it's the way he can communicate complex ideas in this language that just makes sense to people he doesn't purport to be the super expert on anything he just presents as someone who's got an insatiable curiosity for life and everything around him i think most people think their dad's a little bit lame he has all this passion he has all this knowledge and he's a really good guy that likes to kind of share that and support people i think nigel genuinely cares a lot about humanity and that's what makes him such a warm and funny and engaging and relatable person he genuinely cares about human beings and how amazing we can possibly be please welcome distinguished alumnus nigel letter he'll receive his medallion from denise newman denise is a recent doctoral graduate and recipient of the dean's list award [Music] can i just say that's not really yours i've got two kids he was the backup one the good one yeah no he's a good boy really isn't he did you know he was going to say those things no i had no idea but he it surprises me not at all well congratulations anyway um you you're so well known for so many things i thought i'd begin by asking you what you're actually doing and what's getting you out of bed these days so my partner now will be wilting a little bit inside because it doesn't invite a rant um so i'm a little tech startup i'm making we're building a parenting app so yeah i'm writing code really yeah yeah well we got a clever bloke tom tom's lovely tom's like i'm always looking for tom's approval so like i'll do something and then i'll just find a way to leave thompson time i made a button with a little picture in it sounds like quite a good project for a pandemic in some ways like you wouldn't have to have gone anywhere else i'm probably going to ask everyone this but how the past two years been for you um forced you to rethink things change yeah like it's been a bit like everyone it's been weird uh and a bit discombobulating uh and it's just been a strange like the first lockdown was we were all positive and kind and then we got complacent and then the second lockdown just went on didn't know it's like i'm so bored with it and there was nothing on telly that was interesting anymore and then we got out and then those people had their sort of anti-freedom camping protest at wellington and went to all their christmas holiday stuff didn't i yeah well i was going to ask you to put a psychologist sat on actually because it strikes me that you know it's had this intangible effect on all of us a kind of tiredness maybe some other mental state i don't know that any of us have begun to process it properly i just wonder what your feelings about it have been i think it was like variable i think there were lots of different lockdowns like i think there were people who had jobs and homes and food and for them it was you know they made scones and it was great and then there were other people and there was like 12 people living in two rooms and it was really really um and so i think for them it was it was it was it's like everything you know just like if you're on the good side of the hill i sort of feel like even for those of us that were relatively lucky and well well positioned we're still um dealing with something you know like i said intangible a feeling a tiredness a malaise i think what happened is a lot of us felt like we had some certainty in our lives and you know we had plans and we were fine and then covert comes along and it's like oh like we don't you know i mean like there's that everyone's lives turned on a on a press briefing and so it was that level of uncertainty i think that was difficult for people uh and it was just long and stressful and difficult and um yeah it was like yeah do you kind of you mentioned the freedom campers um from wellington did you did you um do you attribute some of that to to what happened there i mean the disinformation and misinformation that we saw and still seeing really how do you explain it everybody just wants community and i think i think for me the most telling comment was the people that said i'm really like i'm gonna be really sad when this ends because it's like we've found a little village of people and it's like i mean i totally get that i remember when i was a clinician seeing this kid who was 13 and he was a white supremacist devil worshiping satanist like him and his friends just used to go and beat up kids that didn't look like him and i just said to him the satan part could you just because i've watched lots of movies about the devil and like whenever people team up with them it goes really bad and this kid well it's true isn't it you think he's not a team player and i said to this kid what's that about and you know what he said he said god loves everyone but for satan to love you you have to be special and it's like i get it like i get it like here's this kid who's never had anyone who cares about him and it's like well satan says if you're like super evil dude you're on my side i mean yeah because the other guy oh i love everyone i can see why you've made a really good career out of psychology not if not theology um yeah they don't the pope doesn't come to me for comment i did i did get we went on a family holiday once and i got super grumpy at the sistine chapel because we were standing there in sistine chapel and like they had their shush police right and they've got their dusty old painting and people would talk too loud and they'd all go shh and i just got really angry because i thought oh yeah cool cool cool so basically you've got shush police that you can put around the place in case we talk too loud and i don't know just do your dusty old painting but you pretty much ship pedophiles around the planet for freaking decades like what's that about well it's definitely why the pope's not calling you um he's probably also not calling you because you actually are a scientist and you began with zoology and marine science and then you switched to psychology yeah do you remember what what was going on when you when you made that switch yeah so like as a kid i used to watch out cousteau on the telly and i thought i want to be a marine scientist and then i discovered science is actually quite it's quite like it's not just swallowing about boats looking at seals it's quite hard um and i thought yes and it was back in the day when it was basically free right so i could i could swan about and do all sorts of different things and so at the end of that i had to decide what to do and i sort of pivoted back to psychology um i guess you didn't assume or realize at the time that you might become something of a celebrity because of this life what's a choice the thing is in new zealand there's about five million of us being a celebrity in new zealand it's like being in a community newspaper in sydney which i mean it's like so don't be so modest no it's not like it really isn't and so like occasionally i've seen a couple of telly people at things and they're quite full of themselves and i just think come on you're in like the sydney south morning herald let's let's get a grip you sure this isn't just a way of deflecting from the fact that you're a very needy person and you like applause well and the strange thing is actually like i'm the the being on tally part of it is the part that i enjoy the least like i think the and of all of it being on telly in and of itself was actually a kind of a vacuous and empty thing right like that that part of it isn't but the stuff that i enjoy the most is are the people that i work with because i've been lucky to work with really great people and also you can do things that are meaningful and important so we made a documentary about suicide and i remember afterwards this bloke so i've known him for years he come this big quite manly bloke he came up to me and he just gave me this great big hug um quite a strong hug quite a crushing hug um and he just talked about he was feeling really depressed at home so and like was having those kind of thoughts that he watched this documentary uh and it and it really helped him but again that wasn't me like it was a a bunch of us worked like tv as a as you know like it's a it's a team pursuit and so if you're the presenter you're often the person who gets all the credit but all of that stuff is just because i work with great people that really give a monkeys about the stuff that they're doing well one of the things you did on tv i was probably when i really first noticed your work was the beyond the darklands stuff which you know like its name takes you to some pretty dark places what draws you to that subject in the first place i mean to begin with it was all parenting and you know it's quite the opposite you've so sort of in my clinical career i kind of both side by side like working with kids and families and doing the forensic stuff um but the forensic stuff i guess what interests me about it is um so i grew up on the east coast of the south island i had like a in a really normal family with my mum's here out there somewhere like with a great mum and dad and i grew up just thinking that was how life was for everyone and then you kind of grab a bit and you go ah like that wasn't what it was like for everyone and so um i just kind of got curious about the other stuff like you know that whole two pass the div like if if there was an actual wood and there were two parts and they said look go that way it's paved there's a little cafe as easy don't go down there there's some up down there i would totally totally want to go down that other one because like you get to be alive once uh and so i kind of thought so what are people like that do that kind of stuff and what i discovered is they're just they're just people they're just people it's just all they are like they're actually more like me than they are not like me i mean this spills over into your real world work as well like in prisons and with social services obviously gives you some insight into you know aspects of new zealand life and society that we perhaps don't talk about enough are you a pessimist as a result of that work order no i'm a huge optimist like i've seen i've seen kids who have um just had the most horrific upbringings and they sort themselves out you know i remember once the first i remember once sitting in this house and the guy was i've seen a few interesting this guy was like he's all mongrel mob he was like full mongrel mob not like just part he was like full and he was like the thing and there's tattoos and all that kind of stuff um and there was a big dog thing up on the wall but it was just before christmas there's also a christmas tree and we were sitting there talking about his daughter who was 13 and wasn't going to school and he was just this dad worried about his kid no i'm really optimistic because actually most people are amazing and and i've seen people come through all sorts of terrible stuff and resilience for some like just the fact that some people get out of bed is pretty in the morning is pretty freaking amazing given the stuff they've been through um last year when i was talking with ashley bloomfield on this stage you know i asked him what he thought the biggest challenge facing the country was and he said entrenched poverty in the wealth gap so i wanted to put that question to you what what do you think is what would you say i think it's the fact that we're just humans and useless it's going to be quite hard to overcome that one and what i mean by that is kind of like we know like we know that stuff and so like we've made tacos on equality and all that kind of and these are like these are big issues but the problem is it's really hard to be a human in the world and and and and do stuff about that because most people are just trying to pay their mortgage and and feed their kids and try to figure out what the hell they're doing with their life and it's really hard to stay connected to all those people whose lives are very different to our own so i think kind of an indifference brought about by busyness is the biggest problem that we face because whenever you actually put people in rooms with people they care i remember once we did this thing it never made telly but we got this guy who was um it was just about what happens when you bring we got this guy he had been unemployed for three years and we interviewed him and he said his thing and we got a woman and she was the um some guy up in the act party and she was all like i had a poor awful and they lazy and uh all that kind of stuff and then we got them together and um we got them together and they just started uh chatting and like and they quite genuinely over the course of the filming like they developed more of an understanding about who the the other person was and stuff and so like whenever you actually get humans together because that's what we've done for the last hundred and twenty thousand years like we kind of want to be with other people we want to be teams and we want to kind of help each other out it's just that we become distanced and we become busy and lives become too separate and so people don't understand the lives of a lot of people they criticize and it's like well go and hang out with them a bit you might yeah i mean this is sort of an argument for um bigger imaginations really isn't it yeah just don't listen to news talks it'd be and i did i was in a taxi once and mike hosking was on the mike hosking mike asking he was on he was on the radio and he's i'm sure mike's a love i haven't met him he's lovely man and he said he said you know what he said you know the thing that people don't understand about poverty the thing that people don't understand with policy is that poverty is not about money poverty is about mindset i remember sitting there thinking i think it's a little bit to do with money like i think i think there's a good i don't think people living in poverty have got stacks of cash they're going you know what i'm just i don't know i'm just against it yeah in principle so i'm just going to sit here in a damn maori house and be hungry i'd quite like to sit here for longer and um you know do some media criticism but where would we stop um let's bring it back to the here and now you had a few accolades in your time and you know you're fairly well known how's it felt being drawn back to the old university this time what's it meant to you what's it made you think how old i am well yeah i know that one yeah i mean it's it's it's strange really i mean um i i to be honest like get like this is this is nice but i like i look at things like this and i think literally everything i've done in my life has been because i've been part of teams of people and it's like and it's not it's it totally isn't false modesty it's like if i have a skill i think it's like finding good people and bringing people together in teams because um nothing i've done nothing of any worth by myself like books you don't write books by yourself like you write books because you know you've got a family that supports you to write those books in the first place you've got a difficult kid who's like oh what would you do with this one i don't know um your polish needs tally's a team sport my clinical stuff was a team stuff like you're working with families you mean other people so so i like and it's not false modesty i just think anyone who thinks they'd do things because they got there themselves you're just an ecosystem with idiots like you didn't you got there because you work with other people like that's the the big thing so yeah i mean the university thing was kind of where i started but i pretty much from the good go i started working with just some really great people and it was people i met because of the stuff i was doing at auckland university in the clinical program so you know it was the um it was a launch pad into a whole bunch of stuff for me well thanks for taking one for the team nigel congratulations thank you um ladies and gentlemen nigel lapper thank you