Dr Gabor Maté is a world-renowned author and physician, best known for his work on trauma, addiction, and childhood development. His books bring together science, myth, case studies, and his own personal history — from his beginnings in Nazi-occupied Budapest, to his participation in the radical student movements of the 1960s, to his experience working with drug addiction and mental illness in Vancouver’s most distressed communities. Gabor’s perspective on medicine is dialectical and holistic, emphasizing the social as much as the individual when considering disease and dysfunction.

His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, is cowritten with his son Daniel Maté, a musical theater playwright based in New York City. In it, the Matés examine the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, shattering the myths of a system that makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.

In this interview, Gabor and Daniel speak with American psychotherapist Chandler Dandridge about their new book, capitalism’s ability to absorb challenges and resist change, the trauma of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 defeat, the genius of Michael Brooks, and finding ways to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the political.