Tommy Tiernan Show recap: GAA player on his recovery from a cocaine and gambling addiction
Westmeath footballer Luke Loughlin on The Tommy Tiernan Show. Picture: RTÉ
The Tommy Tiernan Show returned on Saturday night, exploring addiction, an ADHD diagnosis at 30, and the future of AI.
Tommy Tiernan’s guests on Saturday night included football player Luke Loughlin, musician and presenter Jesse Grimes, and broadcaster Mark Little.
Tiernan’s first guest of the night was Luke Loughlin, a footballer for Westmeath who is currently in recovery from addiction.
He spoke with Tiernan about his addiction to cocaine and gambling, and about his journey of documenting his experience online over the last couple of years.
“I didn’t really plan it, but it has grown and I went with it,” he said of his social media growth.
Loughlin, who has been sober for almost five years, spoke about growing up just outside Mullingar, opening up about never meeting his father.
He said that as a teenager, he found it very hard to be himself and spoke about his fear of rejection and abandonment, and how he turned to sport for what he described as a “release”.
He spoke about how he longed, when he was younger, for a father-son connection and said he was in his own head from a young age.
“I was always thinking about why me. Why is this happening to me, what did I do? And the feeling of not being good enough,” he said.
He described his mother as “a saint” and spoke about how she didn’t have it easy when her kids were young.
Loughlin said he was about 14 when he and his friends began drinking socially, saying drinking gave him a boost in his confidence.
He spoke about how a night in the casino, where he won a sum of cash, led to an addiction to playing Blackjack at home.
When he moved for a time to America, he said the Blackjack was replaced by alcohol and drugs.
He spoke about how things got worse, but that his mother, a nurse, was always the person to be there to offer advice and support.
“I disrespected her to the highest point,” he acknowledged, speaking about how, regardless of what went on, she always had his back.
“Even if we wouldn’t be talking, she’d still somehow help me get out of whatever I had got into,” he said.
He spoke about how an experience with a grief counsellor changed his life and touched on how he stays clean.
“I suppose sometimes I still get a craving from time to time, and I just fast forward five hours and usually when I think about where I’ll be, that usually helps. I suppose I just know the life I have now, and it’s amazing.” He said that exercise has also been massive in his recovery, as well as getting to play football for Westmeath, which he said is “huge” for him.
When asked by Tiernan if he will ever meet his father, he said: “I think I know his name, I think I know where he’s from. But as I said, my mom was my mom and my dad…. It’s just not where I’m at right now. It’s not just me now, it’s her life as well, and I know for a fact that wasn’t easy for her.” Loughlin wrapped up his conversation with Tiernan by touching again on his gratitude for football, acknowledging the management.
Tiernan’s second guest of the night was musician and presenter Jesse Grimes.
Grimes described her role as the National Concert Hall's discover artist in residence, explaining that she writes and presents shows with the National Symphony Orchestra Ireland to make classical music, orchestral music, fun, vibrant, and exciting.
She spoke with Tiernan about her struggles with perfectionism and self-criticism, her ADHD diagnosis, and her complex relationship with classical music.
Grimes also touched on her personal life, including her non-binary partner Brogan, their IVF experiences, and their plans for starting a family.
She spoke of losing her brother, which motivated her to strive for brilliance and described her efforts to excel in music and academics as a way to gain love and attention at a young age.
She described the conveyor belt system in classical music, from grades to competitions and her realisation at age 39 that she was not happy and perpetually burnt out.
Reflecting on her time in school, Grimes touched on feeling like she didn’t fit in, and the relief she felt when diagnosed with ADHD because it made things make sense.
Speaking about her relationship with her trans non-binary partner, Brogan, she said: “Well, Brogan is just a Brogan.. They like sit right in the middle. They don't feel particularly male or particularly female. They just feel like Brogan.” She also touched on their desire to have children together, their failed IVF attempt, and the decision to change their lives for a slower pace.
The conversation ended with a performance from Grimes, with Tiernan chiming in for what was a lovely coming together in music.
Tiernan’s final guest of the night was broadcaster and author Mark Little, who discussed his career transitions from journalism to entrepreneurship, highlighting his role as a Washington correspondent and the formation of Storyful in 2009 to verify social media content.
He recounted his experience covering the ceasefire in Belfast and the impact of a skiing accident that led him to start Storyful, which became a primary verification service for major news outlets.
He then joined Twitter's media department, witnessing the platform's shift towards algorithmic curation, and later developed an AI-based app to combat dangerous content on apps.
Little emphasised the dual potential of Al, advocating for its positive use to augment human intelligence, but also noted some issues.
“This is where we get into the two different futures that we face. On the one hand, the algorithm itself, now artificial intelligence itself, has the capacity to be augmenting us.. intelligence. Think about nurses being able to help out more directly in the health service, or the ability to run the trial and error on the new drug much quicker than in the past, or the ability to make sure that we can actually have more environmentally friendly food production.
"AI has the capacity to do all of that, but meanwhile, the big capitalist corporations in Silicon Valley are using it to trap people in chatbots. So, keep them coming back to the Chatbot every day.
“So we do have these two alternative realities of AI as a potential for human flourishing, the augmentation of human intelligence. But over here, the people making the money from it and making the big investments have a very narrow application of the technology.” Little highlighted how there are no limits on safety or guardrails, explaining that we don't know how these AI are being trained.
“They're being controlled in the background by a small group of engineers. I mean, the number of people who know what's going on inside the black box where all the data goes and all the system prompts, as they call them, maybe a couple of 100 people in the world know what's going on inside that,” he said.
“And that's essentially where we have the problem, because if a tiny elite are controlling how this all works and keeping it to themselves, then there's no way we get that brighter future of flourishing, because it's all in the hands of a tiny group in Silicon Valley.”
Closing out the show on Saturday, all the way from California and Scotland, the band DUG performed their song
