jerry turner and victoria gerrick brown, founder of the hidden opponent and host of real pod thank you much for being here, for this really important conversation congressman kennedy, i want to start with you you have been open about your struggles with addiction and you write about the fact that your late father, the late senator ted kennedy, was not pleased with your decision to speak out. how did you push past that fear? >> like a lot of his generation, these were shameful issues he suffered terribly from the trauma of seeing both of his brothers assassinated. my mother suffered from terrible alcoholism and it wasn't anything we felt we could address because, frankly, it's the attitude that we can't really fix this problem. and that's the difference between our attitudes from yesterday to today we can make an enormous difference we can reduce the number of suicides, dramatically, if we have this sense of public health approach we can reduce overdoses. we had 200,000 overdoses last year we never kept in touch with any one of them. and 90% of those people are the ones that are success