Fight the New Drug (00:50)
Well, Ore thank you for joining us today on Consider Before Consuming. I’m so honored to be able to have this conversation with you and excited for our listeners to hear your story.

Ore Oduba (01:00)
Thank you so much for having me on. I’ve got to be honest, Natale I’ve just got to know some of your work in the last few weeks. And what I’ve been doing over the last couple of months is seeing so much of the work that is being done globally to help people trying to navigate this world. And so I want to thank you for what you do, the voice that you’re giving.

Ore Oduba (01:23)
what fight the new drug is, is contributing to so many people who need the help, some of which don’t even know that they need the help. And so to be able to contribute to that conversation for me is huge. So I’m really honored to be here as well.

Fight the New Drug (01:37)
Thank you so much. really appreciate your support. And I’m so grateful that you’ve been able to learn a bit about our work. Your story is so powerful in this. And so before we dive into your story, for any of our listeners who are less familiar with you and your amazing body of work, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you’ve spent your career doing?

Ore Oduba (01:56)
I mean, I look in the mirror most mornings, and I haven’t got a clue who I am, so I’ll try to recall. I guess I an actor and a broadcaster, a podcaster. I’ve been a TV host and a radio host. I’ve spent nearly the last decade on stage in predominantly musical theater. But I guess most people will probably know me here in the UK for having won the UK version of Dancing with the Stars. So I won in 2016, I won Strictly Come Dancing. And so I guess I’ve kind of lived the last 10 years of my life pretty heavily in the public eye, which has come with some wonderful highs and some pretty strong negatives. I do feel often quite uncomfortable with living.

Especially when it becomes like scrutiny of you personally, I feel that it’s quite uncomfortable. So actually, there’s quite an odds about me having gone so public with something so personal that is my addiction and what was the last 30 years. But I guess I wanted to use the platform that I have to bring awareness to something that I think is a huge, huge issue.

Fight the New Drug (03:12)
And you know, it’s for so many people, it’s difficult to share their personal experiences, but especially when you’re in such a public spotlight as you have been. And I really commend you for choosing to use your personal platform in this way. And I would love to ask you a little bit about that experience. It was very recent, actually, that you first shared publicly for the first time about the struggle that you’ve had that began when you were just nine years old. And so, you know, what was that moment like when you decided after a couple of decades now to share this publicly and that you wanted to speak out?

Ore Oduba (03:46)
Yeah.

Well, there was a combination of things really. I personally had been celebrating, this is only early this year, this summer, 2025, I’d been celebrating a year of sobriety. And I’d come through the other side of, you, and thank you, Natale, thank you so much. We really do need to…

Fight the New Drug (04:03)
Congratulations.

Ore Oduba (04:09)
applaud people who go through difficult things and come out the other side and are able to share it in order to help other people. So I appreciate that wholeheartedly. And I was quite silently celebrating it because even at this time I had started to share it with friends, but it was still very much just something that I kept very personal. And then I guess from the beginning of this year there had been a couple of societal conversations.

I think the Adolescence movie that aired on Netflix brought a lot of conversation around what it meant to be a young man and a lot of the broken parts of that world, a lot of dissonance that came with that age group, and especially boys. Toxic masculinity became a conversation, certainly over here and I’m sure very much in the US. And then there was a combination of things that happened this summer.

I mean, I’ve been listening to a lot of conversations, things that had helped me get through my addiction from the work of the likes of Esther Perel, Gabor Mate, so many podcasts, and I would say reading, but I don’t read very much. I’m an audiobooks kind of guy. But a lot of this learning had helped me. And some of the conversations that I was hearing about, the discussion around pornography and adult imagery kept coming up as something that was very present in today’s world. So I had this consciousness.

And then in the summer, there were two things that happened back to back that changed everything. In the UK, the government agreed a law, they agreed an online safety bill. The idea being that, I think the biggest headline was that they were gonna bring in the over 18 age restrictions on external browsers, on internet browsers. And with that, the VPN rates for people subscribing and purchasing these apps spiked through the roof.

And I remember thinking, having been an addict myself, thinking, okay, you’re trying to bring in stuff that’s going to stop people doing things. If that had been me, I would have just found a way around it and, you know, there we go, here come the VPN rates. And then within a couple of weeks of that, maybe a month, the Children’s Commission here in the UK, they are a team, an organisation that feed the government with issues surrounding children. And they published a report essentially saying that children as young as six years old here in the UK are being exposed to harmful adult explicit content that 80% of children access social media that by 11, 12 is the average age for people to see this kind of content and that it is normal and this is what was really quite harrowing that it is normal for children to see violent content and I remember this hitting the news and thinking surely this is going to be enough for people to stop and go okay well now children are kind of in the eye of the storm here. And I remember it coming, maybe 24 hours worth of a bit of coverage, and then it was gone. And I thought, we can’t, surely not. People are letting this come past. And I recognized a lot of things that happened in my personal life. Bereavements, people very close to me. My sister lost their life through suicide earlier this year. And there are a number of things that helped me understand that if I was gonna do something bold, that I needed to find the courage. And for me, I was prepared to save my own children, to to be able to protect them for when they came across this content as they grew up. But knowing what I knew, the platform that I had, and having seen in black and white now the figures that this commission’s report had published. I knew that the risks for anybody to say something, certainly over here I know that you’ve had some amazing people who’ve talked on your podcast about it, but over here in the UK had not been a conversation and I knew that the risk for people from a personal point of view, from a career point of view, they just would not say anything. And I knew that I was willing to put that on the line because I knew that the issue…without intervention would create an existential public health crisis for a generation of young people. And I thought, if I can say something and put my head on the chopping block, that might be the end of life as far as I know it. But I think it will start a new conversation. And my goodness me, it definitely did that. I prayed. I prayed to be able to survive that storm.

I could not have been prepared for the change, for the conversation, for the messages, for the resonance amongst so many different areas of communities, of schools, of families, of professionals, of employers, of friends. It really did blow up in the most unbelievable way.

I guess that’s what’s brought me to you guys today, and I feel very lucky to be able to continue this conversation. I I guess I started it thinking I was going to, I sat down with Paul Brunson who your audience may know as Oprah’s right-hand man and has made a huge career for himself over here in the UK as a go-to guy for relationships and he is all about creating safe space. And I thought I would say what I had to say, leave it there and go on with my life and allow people to look inward. I realised I’d picked up a baton, Natale, and I knew that I had to carry on this conversation. So I’m thrilled that I’m able to keep doing it with you today.

Fight the New Drug (09:49)
Yeah, thank you so much. for any of our listeners who haven’t yet heard your interview with Paul Brunson that you just mentioned, we would love to direct anyone to that. It’s such a beautiful conversation. And really, as you mentioned, the beginning of what opened this door for us to hear from you. I think I’m grateful that you brought up some of the response that you’ve had, because I think that just really speaks to how much this conversation is needed, right? And how much people

aren’t used to hearing about this in their regular platforms or from the people that they’ve followed for years. When this is in reality something so many people are dealing with and navigating. So again, it’s so powerful to have your voice alongside many others who are speaking about these issues. And it’s still not enough, right? This really takes all of us. So I would love to talk a little bit more about your experience. And I do just want to say, I’m so sorry for your loss with your sister, as you mentioned earlier this year.

Ore Oduba (10:48)
Thank you. Thank you. Do you know what Natale, my sister is with me every day and actually in many ways I don’t think I would have been able to be here doing this had it not been for them. You know, think pain and grief does a lot of things to us and there’s this very painful irony that especially when we lose people that we love.

If we are in any way able to grow and carry that legacy of that person with us, that desperately wish that they could have met that person. But of course, we would not be that person had it not been for us having to fill the void. And in my case, my sister showed me courage. So I’m doing this with them. So I’m grateful for that.

Fight the New Drug (11:36)
Yeah, that’s so beautifully said. And I’m sure that they would be proud of you for using your voice and your platform in this way. Or I hope, I didn’t know your sister, but I hope they would be proud of you for using your platform in this way.

Ore Oduba (11:50)
Thank you Natale. They would. They would.

Fight the New Drug (11:53)
If we can talk a little bit more about your experience, you mentioned this data that came out this year and was shared in the media, and then kind of was a blip on the radar. And that so often happens with news about the harms of pornography or the way that this is affecting children. And you were just nine years old when you were first exposed. When you think back on your earliest encounters with sexualized content, with pornography, what stands out to you now as an adult that you couldn’t have understood at the time?

Ore Oduba (12:26)
Gosh, yeah. I guess that’s why that report coming out was so pertinent to me because I was one of these children. I had been, and not in today’s world, not in the digital world, not in the smartphone world where the asymmetry is at the palm of your hands and at the swipe of a finger.

But I guess I’ve only come to understand it now as an adult through a lot of the reading and a lot of the listening and the understanding because two years ago I was still blind to the reality of what this had been doing to me. But I guess what I’ve come to realize is that from a very early age, my brain was being rewired. Certainly sexually, it was coming to understand what I believed was…sexual, what I believe was arousing, what I believe was normal. It was creating a socio-sexual mapping in my mind from a very early age. In many ways, I’ve come to realizing that my relationship with adult imagery was actually the very first relationship I ever had. To this point, Natale, that I actually remember, and I haven’t said this into one other person, as I’ve been having these conversations since I first started talking about this. I remember being nine or 10 years old and having an imaginary friend, which isn’t abnormal for anybody, but of course this is pre-adolescence, that I actually understand now that that friend, imaginary friend, was actually a woman. It wasn’t a ⁓ child, a peer, it was a woman, and I remember being able to create the feelings that I was getting from imagery by creating this image in my mind of this person. And I would put this friend under the bed and I knew where they were and it was very cerebral. And this is a child trying to navigate a lot of these things in their world, they’re just trying to understand them.

So yes, this was something that I would go to as a friend to feel in any kind of way and it’s only now that I’ve come to understand that this was me as a trauma response, this was me going to something that in my household and growing up there were lot of things that were difficult and it became a default setting in order to feel something, in order to escape something I would go or find or dial into this kind of imagery that had already started to take a hold. You we know about prefrontal cortexes and they’re developing at age 25 and all these kinds of statistics. At nine years old you are searching for meaning and very early being allowed to discover this content, but then harbour it and keep it completely secret because I certainly knew in my world, if I shared it with anybody from a caregiver’s perspective, then life as I knew it would be over. Culturally, religiously, generationally in my world, anything that’s strayed away from the straight and narrow within the tram lines would have been, you know, that would have been punished pretty severely. And you know as a kid that this isn’t necessarily right.

You’ve found a way to discovering it and naturally there’s a curiosity about it. You know, I don’t think kids are going into this content necessarily thinking that they’re trying to do something malicious or harmful. I equate it in the same way that if you’re on the motorway and you see a crash on the side of the road, you’re not looking because you want harm for anybody. You’re looking because there’s a curious part of your mind. There is an appeal and attraction to wanting to see it. Developed over time, adding, you know, increasing of dopamine and then synaptic response, you find your way into something that you now start craving and that’s where addiction starts forming. yeah, all of this stuff, mainly that kind of neurological aspect of it is what I’ve come to understanding today. Because it has been a through line through my life from nine years old to today, even as an addict. You are still addicted, or you are still an addict, I should say, but you’re in recovery. So I still have to today use these cognitive tools to try to find ways to get around behaviors that have been formed for three decades, as you say.

Fight the New Drug (16:33)
And how did that exposure at the time, you mentioned, you know, this was shaping your sexual template, but how did this influence your understanding of intimacy and sexuality or sex and love? How is that influenced by pornography?

Ore Oduba (16:50)
Huge. I mean, I remember having my first sex ed lesson at 14 years old. By this time, I’d already had five years of exposure to this world. And I think a lot of people have asked me since, what was the kind of things that you were looking at? At this time and at that, in those…in those years, mean, we’re looking back at the 90s and early noughties, it would have been magazines, it might have been the odd VHS. But everything becomes quite sexualized. You you’ve seen the content and now you’re trying to navigate it around in your real world.

And I, as well, I remember being young adolescent, a young teenager.and being a huge romantic. I loved love. I was a huge Disney fan. I loved rom-coms, obsessed with love songs. I loved love. I loved women. loved, the idea of falling in love was everything I ever wanted. And actually, it was something that never really came my way. I went to an all-boys school growing up and in many ways, the only girls that I knew were my sisters.

But on the flip side, there was this other world that was able to create that feeling of what I believed as love. It created connection. It created, you know, it gave you that happiness. It gave you that warmth, that warm hug that people talk about when it comes to addictive substances. And I was able to create it in a world that very, very similarly mirrored what I thought to be adult relationships.

And so there’s this kind of conflict that starts very early because there is this real world and the one that you’re kind of looking to create. And then there’s this virtual world that is giving you everything that you need. And I see it today. I know that Scott Galloway has been doing a lot of talk about the crisis surrounding young men now. And the issue that we have today that was an issue for me 20, 30 years ago, but now…that synthetic relationship creation is so straightforward. In fact, it’s actually, in many ways, it’s a default setting. Why go through the bother? Why go through the bother of real relationships? The rejection, the lack of connection, the humiliation, the embarrassment, when you can get everything that you curated perfectly to whatever those inner desires are online or in the palm of your hand. And I had begun seeing that in my world as a young person to the point that…actually meeting people online. I remember, you know, early days of social media. I remember meeting people online as you would do. It was MSN Messenger at the time, if we can throw it back to that, Natale. And you’re looking to connect in the same way that kids are doing exactly the same way now, and just getting chatting. And I remember meeting someone and talking and talking for hours. And then we ended up moving to another social media site. And Natale, that…

Ore Oduba (19:56)
became a relationship, it became an online relationship, I remember being 18 at the time, to the point that as we continue to converse, and I have, you know, I have behaviors of my own, but I’m also communicating with this real life person, that we ended up deciding to meet. And this person lived hundreds of miles away from me, we met somewhere in the middle. And essentially we met to have a sexual relationship together. It happened on a one-off occasion.

Fight the New Drug (20:20)
Yeah, wow.

Ore Oduba (20:23)
But it happened under the roof of my parents, absolutely shrouded in secrecy. They had no idea where I was going. And I look back at that now as a parent, and I am terrified. Because whilst I believed as a kid that I was talking with somebody who was real, and I had enough evidence that I was going to go and make this connection.

In today’s world, we know about catfish. We know about all of the worries, all of the things that that person could have come with another person. That could have not been a girl at all. It could have been a group of adults. It could have been a predator. And the fact that there was no thread, no trace at all to people, to anybody to know where I was. I was creating a secret world here that I couldn’t share with anybody in my real life because I knew it would come with punishment. It would come with scorn. It would come with shame.

But I was able to realize it, now I was 18, I’ve got a car, I can make those things real. And so we see it with the gamification of dating apps and like I said, these synthetic relationships. I was doing it from a very early age because the middle bit, the real life connection bit was missing. I had what I needed when it came to stuff online and I was missing something when it came to the real life stuff. So I was able to create it.

Fight the New Drug (21:47)
You know, for many people who are experiencing pornography as kind of, as you mentioned, it became a coping mechanism or something that was kind of there for you to rely on. What role did that play in your inner worlds and…

Do you feel like that influenced the way that you kind of became isolated in this, right? You weren’t talking to your parents about this. You weren’t talking to others about what you were experiencing going so far as to meet up with someone. What role did that kind of coping mechanism and the reliability of that coping mechanism play in your life?

Ore Oduba (22:18)
Yes, I mean, we’re talking about this kind of imagery as escape, we’re talking about addiction. And this is the Dr. Gabor Mate wheelhouse here, you know, when he talks about addiction being any behavior repeated that creates a craving, a negative consequence that you can’t give up. And there’s this kind of perpetual cycle of trying to escape something, trying to run away from whatever it is. And actually to the point that I don’t even know why I’m using it anymore. It’s just something that becomes my identity in many ways. And he always talks about not treating the symptom, but actually treating the pain. This would have always been there until a point at which I am. I went into myself to try to uncover it. In my life, you know, the secrecy, the shame had taken such a hold.

There was a lot of things that were going on in my world that the cracks started to appear. Anxiety became a daily occurrence. I began having panic attacks because I think there was…there was these two worlds that had emerged from a very early age of trying, in my life, from childhood through school through work, it was essentially creating a perfectionism. You know, I was always a school prefect and I was always a school captain and I was, you when I worked in television, I worked in children’s broadcasting. It was all very much about becoming a role model.

Then when Dancing with the Stars or Strictly Come Dancing, and it’s very much, you know, you need to create a persona that is unbreakable. Meanwhile, there’s this other world that’s now taken hold. There’s this underground. I never shared this with any single partner my entire life.

So there’s a part of you that you never want to bring to the surface. And in many ways, the shame is so damaging because you think, if I ever shared this with anybody, they would reject me out of hand, whether that was family or friends or partners. And so you know that you’re the bottom of the barrel. You know that you’re the worst. And that shame is really destructive. And it does, you know, I think we know scientifically that again, this continuous overexposure to this kind of content, the dopamine flooding, again, is addiction and it creates this change in your neurological mapping, that actually you stop doing the things that you like doing, you stop doing the things that you want to do, you stop doing the things that make you feel alive in other parts of your life because this has taken such a hold So it is completely isolating. You know, the very idea that you can go in a conversation back at work on a Monday and somebody asks you what have you been doing for the weekend, you’re not going to tell them that you’ve been spending 12 hours watching adult content.

And so you have to shelf that life away. You have to kind of siphon it off, knowing full well that that is who you were. You already got the excuses prepared. You’ve already got the reasons to, you know, the fake options or the falsehoods in order to keep that life secure, because if it ever came to light, it would be the worst version of you. And so that is incredibly isolating. And over time, as it was the case for me, it became so destructive. I wouldn’t necessarily say that my addiction was the main reason. There are a number of things in my arc, but I’ve said it before and I said it on that podcast, the conversation with Paul Brunson, that it got to a point of suicidal ideation. This was a huge part of it because there was this life that I just could not break free from. And I didn’t know why, I didn’t know why it had such a hold on me until I started digging and doing that really difficult work. And here we are 18 months later, able to talk about what was really going on.

Fight the New Drug (26:06)
I’m sure that’s not easy to talk about, you know, your experience kind of taking you to that place, but I appreciate you sharing it because

You know, we hear from so many people who do experience something similar, trying to reconcile these two lives that they’re experiencing and one that is so isolating because there is this secret. And for many people, it leads to so much disconnection, not just romantically, but in friendships or familial relationships or with coworkers. And so I think that I’m curious to know, looking back, when you were a child or when you were first exposed when you were younger, is there support that you wish you had or earlier intervention you wish you had or something you think could have or would have been helpful for you at the time?

Ore Oduba (26:50)
Wow, I mean, we’re talking totally hypothetically here, Natale, because this just would never have happened. But I think as I have the conversations that I do have with potential change makers here in the UK, it’s really helpful to have that understanding because hopefully, as we’re all trying to do, we can prevent other people falling into the same trap. I think it starts at home, really. I wish I could have had the conversations at a young age with my…

Ore Oduba (27:18)
parents without judgement, without shame and from what I know from some of these organisations, there’s a report coming out soon from the Children’s Commissioner that’s going to talk about things that kids wish their parents knew and essentially whilst there is, children will talk to their parents if something is really bad. They don’t talk to their teachers, but they will talk to their parents. The biggest reason for them not to speak to their parents isn’t because of embarrassment, it’s because fear of punishment.

And with something like this, if it means that if I tell my parents they’re gonna take my computer games away, they’re gonna take my iPhone, my smartphone away, they’re gonna, you know, I’m gonna be grounded, all of those reasons. That’s absolutely the reason why young people aren’t gonna tell their parents about stuff. So I wish I could have had an open communication with those parents, even if it was the idea of a parent coming to me as a 14-year-old saying, have you been watching pornography? Would have been the most…soul-destroying conversation potentially, but at least I would have known that if I needed to raise it, then I can go to them about it. And then I think it’s probably, from an educational point of view, I think 14 years old is a ridiculous age today to be having sexual education. If young people are self-educating, self-medicating with this kind of imagery, by that point, everything that a teacher is saying is completely obsolete. What we want to be able to do is give kids a better chance of making better choices. Because in the same way that we talk about alcohol dependency or drug addiction or the dangers of food disorders and self-harm, you know, we’re not worried about children when they are under our roof or they’re under the care of teachers at school.

The worry comes when they’re not with us. Have we done enough? Have we given them enough tools so that when they’re not with us, we’ve got a really good idea that they’re gonna make a really good choice? It’s like crossing the road. We can’t be with them every time they cross the road, but we really hope we’ve done enough to help them make a better choice. And we need to know that these kids are gonna come across this content sooner rather than later, just are. Here in the UK, 90 % of 12-year-olds have a smartphone. We know that between 11, 13 is the average age that they’re gonna come across this content. Have we given them the tools by having those open, non-judgmental conversations about the harm, storytelling almost, that…by going down these routes, there’s gonna be a harm that comes to it. The reason why it doesn’t seem as obvious, I think, from a societal level is because we can’t see it. We kind of think we know what an alcohol addict looks like. We know what a drug addict looks like. We can see that physical harm that happens, and as a result, that’s where the mental health problems come. But with this, so silent, so secretive, so prevalent, and so normalized, that whole cocktail of things is a reason why we don’t see it as damaging an issue, but if we are able to understand it better as caregivers, as parents, as teachers, then we can give the children a better story of how this activity, this behaviour is going to cause harm to them and people around them. And then hopefully we can give them the opportunities to make better choices because it’s only getting worse. There’s only more of this stuff here. I certainly wish that that be my case.

I said this to my mum ahead of that interview with Paul. I spoke to her on the eve of my 40th birthday, Natale, and it was an emotional conversation. My mother is a hugely religious person, you know. We’ve been through a lot of difficult things as a family, but when my mum heard what I had to say, her mouth dropped to the floor, almost like a Looney Tunes character. Like it didn’t move back up until I finished talking about an hour and a half later, but she listened. And I said to her that I was having the conversation with her at 40 that I wish I’d had at 14, you know.

Ore Oduba (31:23)
And had I had that conversation at 14, we might have been able to change that graph. Might have been able to change that behavior in this kind of, this sharp drop into this kind of abyss.

Because the way I see generations now, is such a normalcy, there’s such a prevalence of this content. The way they’re interacting with each other from WhatsApp and sending nudes and the onset of OnlyFans. it’s because pornography, as we know, isn’t people flicking the pages of Penthouse as it was before. I think when we talk about whatever pornography is, there’s such a breadth of adult explicit imagery that that is flooding into young people’s feeds and threads and the way that they’re sharing and interacting with other people, other genders in relationships, what they think is normal and consensual. I think it’s a little bit like that story, Lord of the Flies, because without the guidance, it’s like we’re sending them to an island, literally on their own devices. And I think the consequences of it are harrowing, really harrowing if we don’t collectively intervene because they’re going to fall into a trap not of their own making and it’s our job to protect them from it.

Fight the New Drug (32:40)
Yeah, that’s…I love how powerfully you’ve been able to illustrate that it’s not really that we’re just you got to take care of your kids until they’re 18 and out of the house with the internet with the way pornography is available today at the outside world is brought into the home, right and and made accessible anywhere and everywhere. And so having these conversations, having this support is so important. And I’m so glad to hear that you were able to have the conversation with your mom, even if it was, you know, a few decades late.

And I’m curious to know what really led you to that point. What was the impetus that led you to say, you know, I think it’s time for me to make a change regarding pornography.

Ore Oduba (33:21)
Well, like I said, I think there was this kind of dissonance in my life. I wouldn’t say necessarily that the adult imagery was the fulcrum of the change. I think that had over time, maybe probably since COVID, we know everybody stops in COVID times. Everything that we thought was our normal, then kind of the textbook was ripped up. And I guess.things that were, had been very quiet voices started to get very loud. You know, I think I would not have been the only person, when we’re talking about working from home, that changed their behavior when it came to adult imagery online. And for me, I started spending a lot of money, a lot of money on this world. This is what I mean, it’s not just about these free sites, it’s not just about…you know, social media, X.

This particular Children’s Commissioner report said 45% of children finding it on X. It’s just a wild west of this damaging stuff. But from these subscriber sites like OnlyFans, just became, and I remember just kind of occasionally waking up to these moments and going, what am I doing? What am I doing? I hate it. I hate this person that I’ve become, but for some reason I cannot stop but I know it’s going to harm me and I cannot share it with anybody. I guess there came a point, was having therapy, I had a wonderful therapist who still I talk to routinely today and having never spoken about it to anyone, I guess it was just kind of desperation. They talk about you’re only gonna get over addiction when the pain of carrying on becomes greater than just getting out of it, or at least trying. And I think I just said to my therapist, said, almost nonchalantly, considering this has been three decades, said, I think I’m addicted to pornography.

And she said, that’s okay. It’s actually more normal than you think. And immediately, immediately, I’d never mentioned this to anybody, but this had become my whole life. went, I’m sorry, say that again. She said, it’s really quite normal that a lot of people are addicted to pornography. You just wouldn’t know because it’s a solitary practice, a solitary behavior.

And immediately, the relief that something that I thought was me was a personality disorder immediately became a little bit more tangible. And that’s when things started unraveling, was able to find these ways out. We spoke about it often. I then started speaking about it with friends. And my goodness me, just, every single conversation started lifting this kind of layering of shame that had just kept me so suppressed. And, you know, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of introspection and a lot of tools.

The change of a time and things, know, if a trigger comes in, I’d have a way of being able to find a way of managing it and going a different direction. But very slowly, it started lifting. It didn’t own me anymore. And when that became the change, I knew that it wasn’t gonna be long before I found myself on the other side.
And so I started counting the days, counting the weeks, the months. And I didn’t want to go back to being that person. It was as simple as that. And when I knew what the risks were, and I knew so much of myself was coming back, I reconnected with friendships. I found passion and purpose and just a love for the great outdoors and nature and wanting to begin again that became way more powerful than falling into that trap all over again. So it is a daily practice still, but I know what’s at stake. And again, being open with these conversations like we’re having today, it kind of puts that shame into the corner and sticks it one. So yeah, it’s very powerful.

Fight the New Drug (37:26)
Yeah, I’m so glad that you had such a wonderful therapist and you were met with such a compassionate response. I think for so many people who struggle, despite how normalized pornography consumption is, because it’s so normalized, there’s this idea that’s like, everyone does it. And so for someone who develops a compulsive habit or an addiction, they think, well, I’m the only one that has a problem with it if everyone does it. I’m different.

I’m the only one who can’t handle this. And I want to ask you, what do you think the harm is in the way that society normalizes pornography consumption without discussing the harms of it as well?

Ore Oduba (38:05)
Well, if I may just going back to the point that you were saying about the normalisation of it, preventing people from raising it because they don’t think it’s an issue. I think the reason why especially men don’t share about their issues is because, you know, we’ve been conditioned from a very early age, if the exposure has been early, to one, know that it’s wrong, but know that everybody’s doing it. So the very idea of raising it is please don’t bring your sordid life into my world. Keep that to yourself. And I also, I think there is a misconception about what certainly pornography addiction looks like. I think that misconception is really dangerous because…

You know, and I’ve had partners talk about it in the past where it’s, they think that it’s a kink or they think that it’s a fetish or actually as I’ve come to understand and I know that you and your audience will know this very well, it’s really not about the material. There is something that happens with flooding of dopamine where the intensity of what you’re looking at rises exponentially, but actually it is about connection, it’s about a deficiency of something that is in here and we’re trying to fill that void. And so you’re not gonna share it because there is this misunderstanding. But I think the danger of not discussing it as serious and harmful does two things. I think one, it, especially for young people, it allows that normalcy to…predicate further. It allows that map of the way adult and sexualized imagery has just become so prevalent in society to continue to flood our threads and our streams and the way that we interact with each other. So that when young people are growing up, and especially when we’re talking about the violence of a lot of this content, the way that it’s being shared and WhatsApping clips, know, strangulation and a lot of, you know, whether it is a coercion or rape victims and all of this stuff is just being sent.

If we think that that is normal, then any kid growing up in that world is going to take that as their benchmark. That’s how they’re to react. That’s how they’re going to relate with other people. That’s how they’re going to go into relationships. And that’s where we’re going to get. And I see this. Spool this forward. And this is part of my intervention.

If a 10 year old has seen adult content and they think that some of violent stuff is normal, if you fast forward 10 years of that continuous exposure to that kind of content and they’re now 20 years old, we cannot be surprised if some of the behaviour becomes the worst of what we see and understand in society. We’re talking about sexual crime.

They are looking at it as mapping, they’re looking at it as it’s creating pictures in their brains as what is normal, what is consensual, and what is acceptable. So we can’t be surprised if that stuff happens. So surely we want to stop it at source, or at least give those young people better options. But the other thing, and I think this really does come down to when it comes to social media, smartphones, and this kind of imagery, is there are a number of people at the top. Big tech, like Big Porn, is allowed to farm our attention. They’re allowed to use algorithmic science, behavioral science, AI to understand how we behave as human beings we have a sexual nature. They have all of the data to be able to understand if they put enough material in the right places that we are going to navigate our world in a certain way. And when it comes to this world of adult imagery, if left untouched, secret and shameful.

They have a full monopoly over our behavior because nobody’s going to bring it up. Nobody’s going to see it as harmful. And so I just, when I think about from a young people’s perspective, if you are a multi-billion dollar industry and you understand behavioral technology, you understand AI, you understand how people, we can manipulate people’s behavior through algorithms. If we understand how marketable young people are.

Over here in the UK, there’s been a big clamp down on vapes because in many ways vapes are being advertised for children. They look like bubble gum, they’re like sweets, they’re like confectionery. Add all of those things together. It would be naive to think that a multi-billion dollar industry isn’t going to use that information to be able to create their next generation of consumer. We’re talking about young people. They are literally…funneling them in to a world not of their own making. And if we say that that is normal, we know that we’re not putting children’s safety at the forefront of our minds. And that’s why people are allowed to make their choices. Adults, they might think, we know that not every adult is making their own conscious choice, but what they’re allowed to. But surely we have to make sure that we know that children should not be exposed to this content and certainly that they should be protected and at the time that it comes to making their own choices that we’ve given them the tools to make better choices that don’t harm themselves and others.

Fight the New Drug (43:28)
I truly couldn’t have said it better myself.

As a parent now, having had the personal experience that you’ve had, how is the knowledge from your own experience shaping the way that you are choosing to parent in this digital age and informing the decisions that you’re making and the conversations that you’re having with your children?

Ore Oduba (43:48)
Wow, thank you for that question, Natale. I’ll be honest, it is the thing that keeps me up most at night. Like I said at the very beginning, I was one of those children. My son is eight years old in January. He’ll be a year younger than I was when I was first exposed. And I was not living in the world that he is today.

So there is an inevitability about my daughter and my son coming across this world. And I guess, you know, he does have access to devices. He’s really good at navigating the remote controls for the television and various things. This is just their world. They have EdTech at school, you know. We’re teaching them to be able to navigate online, to be able to click the X, to able to find their way through browsers and drop-down menus at a really early age.

You know, there was a point, he was at my house the other day, and I had five minutes for him to watch a little bit of telly before we headed out for the morning. And I don’t have Netflix in the house. So as far as I thought I didn’t have Netflix, naturally, he created his own profile.

He’s seven years old. He said, I’m on and found it. And as it was, found a children’s show, he was watching it with his sister, and I found myself boiling up inside. The issue wasn’t him. He just did what a curious seven-year-old is gonna do, given the access. The boiling point for me was like, that is the perfectly innocent, innocuous way of letting a young person with a device, left to their own devices. I was right there. He could have clicked on anything.

And so, that was just a recent example and I’m already trying to put in the modes and methods so that we have an open means of communication, but that just hit me as a, gosh, I’m trying to do all of this work and just like that, he found his way into something that I did not know he’d found. And then the emails came through from Netflix telling me that a new profile had been set up and I was like, wow, that’s really quite scary. It was that easy.

But you know, in and around me, having this conversation and bringing this to public light, I wanted to start speaking to him. Not specifically about adult imagery, but about how he uses things online. If there are things that he thinks are strange or he’s scared of or confused about, that he’s always safe to talk to me about it.

And you know what, we had a real breakthrough this week because he was telling me about this secret that he wasn’t ever going to tell anybody. And I just, I could have left it because he literally said he wasn’t going to tell anybody, but there was something in my mind that made me think he does want to say something because he said he’s never going to tell anyone. So I just kind of gently nudged him over the next couple of days and it might have actually been a week. And in the end I said, you know, if you want to, you safe to tell me that secret. You know, I’m your dad. I’m not going to be mad at you. I know that you know that my job is to protect you. So he knelt down. said, you can whisper it to me if you like. And he told me what the secret was. And I held his hands and I said, you’ve been so brave, son. Thank you so much for telling me. It was actually about a game that he knew he wasn’t allowed to play. And immediately he said, he shrugged his shoulders, he sighed, went, I’m so glad I told you now. And I burst into floods of tears. Because one, we had this breakthrough, father-son moment, but then it was everything I’d been talking about. A lesson that we between us had learned from him at seven years old, that if he had held onto this, and he could well have done, because I might not have intervened, I might not have thought it serious enough.

Or just thought it’s a difficult conversation. He’s probably got it covered. I know if there’ll be an issue. He might have held on to whatever that secret is for the rest of his life and into adulthood and missed the opportunity to intervene. And so from that to actually I actually spoke to the teachers at his school. I’ve got a really lovely relationship with some of the early learning teachers at the school to the point that I was then invited to the head teacher’s office.

One, probably the biggest conversation, I’ve had conversations with people over here in the House of Laws and UK government, but for me the biggest conversation, as well as you guys here, was speaking to the head teacher of my child’s school, who accepted what I had been through, and didn’t discard me and didn’t throw me to the dogs as I had previously feared might be the case, but actually wanted to investigate what I knew and how we could address that within the faculty and then within conversations that they speak to with the children. And actually, that allowed me to feed some of the conversations that I’m having with, hopefully with government over here in the UK as things move forward. And so it really is a collective thing. You know, I find the conversations that I have, and I don’t know you might find this with some of the contributors you’ve had in your podcasts, is that we all want to do better.

We know that the world that we’re living in is so much more different, so much more…the pitfalls and the potholes are everywhere, especially for young people. We all want to do better, but we’re kind of like, they’re doing it differently over there, and, you know, if I do something, they’re going to probably look down on me, and, you know, there’s a collective approach that we have to take, and we all have to know in the data the information that we have. We have to do it and find a way to guide these kids through it in the same way that we do with them, everything else historically. This is one of the biggest side effects of the digital world that they’re living in right now. That hasn’t been, hasn’t kind of had the monitoring and the data that you would have had with something that you can see physically. But like I said, this is a huge side effect and potentially without intervention, a gigantic and existential public health crisis for a whole generation. And we need to tune into it.

Otherwise, the consequences could be quite harrowing. Yeah, it’s the thing that keeps me up. It keeps me up at night, but you know, I’m on a mission. As parenthood is, this is a lifelong mission. I just never knew if I could have told that kid that I was, that I would be here talking to you guys over in the States, that the conversations I would have had with people around here in the UK, with friends, family.

Ore Oduba (50:08)
You know, with National Press, that that kid would have been accepted, would have escaped addiction, and be able to make even the smallest bit of change to one person. I wouldn’t have believed it. But if I can do it, then I know we all can. And, hopefully, that will start to change things slowly. But the possibility for huge changes is definitely worth it.

So, this is the fight, this is the fight, and I’m here with you all the way.

Fight the New Drug (50:37)
Yeah, thank you. And I’m so grateful that you shared that anecdote with your son because ultimately, I think for so many parents this, this topic feels so difficult because it feels like you have to do so much and have these big uncomfortable conversations. And really what it comes down to is we need parents to make sure that their kids know that they’re a safe person to talk to so that whatever comes up, they feel comfortable, as your son did to go to their parents and to ask the questions or to disclose these things rather than harboring that secret.

I think beyond parent-child relationships, societally, we need safety for people to speak out about these issues as well and to be met with compassion and understanding rather than shame, which we know keeps people stuck in cycles, right? And so I think it’s so beautiful that you’ve been able to share this story so bravely and undoubtedly the ripple effect that you speaking out will cause from individuals who’ve heard your story and gained the courage to speak to someone else or who heard your story and gained the courage to be a safe person, to listen to someone else when they speak out will continue to create change.

Ore Oduba (51:20)
Mm-hmm.

Fight the New Drug (51:42)
And I’m so grateful to hear of the work you’re doing in your son’s school or with the government to be able to pursue solutions that help protect kids and keep them safe from having to experience what you have. So thank you.

Ore Oduba (51:42)
Thanks, Natale I mean, it’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s crazy when you think about it that there was a time when speaking about drug addiction would have been as taboo as this is today. But today, you can say that you are a drug addict, and there is a ready-made, default, warm blanket ready to welcome you in. People know where to go. There’s almost a hallelujah. We found another one. What can we do to get them to recovery? Which is incredible.

Fight the New Drug (52:01)
Right?

Ore Oduba (52:18)
Wild is it that you’re more accepted to say that you have a drug addiction than it is to say that you have an addiction to adult imagery. There’s this kind of lack of acceptance here. And I hope that, you know, we’re just at a seed point here that things start changing because in the same way that, yeah, drugs were so taboo. I think this is the last taboo. ⁓

I think this is the one topic, and you guys have been doing work for such a long time on it, which is, just am so grateful to discover it and want to share it and want the world to dial into it. That this is the one thing that I really believe that so far we just haven’t precisely found a way to kind of agree that this is how we raise our children.

This is how we make them aware and here’s how we send them off.

Fight the New Drug (53:08)
That’s so well said. And in the same vein, it’s not just having the healthy conversations about, you know, alcohol or sex in this case, but it’s also having conversations about healthy coping mechanisms, about, processing those things that, you mentioned, were underneath what was driving, the need for pornography, right? It’s having those conversations about, processing the things that we feel like we need to keep secret and, having safe places to do that and healthy ways to do that.

I know it’s something that’s so intimidating for so many parents, but I think this is something that, as a podcast guest once say, this is a human problem with a human solution. And it really does take all of us being willing to break this taboo, as you said, to be able to, as a society, have some momentum to move forward. And I want to thank you again for sharing your story so bravely, so courageously, and continuing, you know, after the initial sharing and then getting the feedback that you did and, kind of white knuckling your way through that. I commend you for continuing to speak up boldly and bravely. And I want you to know I’m 100 % sure that it is making a difference in this movement. And I’m so grateful.

Ore Oduba (53:52)
Thank you, Natale. I, like I said, I’m taking that baton as the fight. I think it is a fight. You’re doing such admirable stuff. Work over there. That, you know, that we’re going to be part of that human solution. And I really pray for that day. We can’t see that utopia just yet, but I know that if we keep doing what we’re doing, you know, we’re getting that little bit closer. So thank you for your time. It’s been a real pleasure, a real honour.

Fight the New Drug (54:39)
I agree. Thank you so much, Ore