A good a team.

I hope you will.

So those of you who know me pretty well know that I share a lot of stuff, obviously through the podcast, but also on social media.

I pump out a lot of stuff on Instagram.

Sometimes it's a thought, one thought, one idea, or a couple.

Sometimes it's a story.

Sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's silly, and sometimes it's funny, and sometimes it's philosophical.

And you know how it kind of works with me is I don't really have a strategy or a plan.

I don't get up every day and think, what did I share the last ten days, What topics have I covered recently?

What does the world need to hear?

Or what do I think I should you know?

Or it's very organic, And what happens quite often is I'll have a thought or an idea, and I'll just come up with one or two sentences that kind of capture that idea or that message, and it might be in a funny way or a cheeky way or a sweary way.

And quite often the one to two to three to four sentence just have the most impact, get the most traction, get the most eyes, get the most attention, and so on and so there's a real, I guess, a real attraction to writing stuff that's short, cheeky, funny, I guess, and impactful in that way.

But I also there's another part of me that thinks deeply, very deeply.

Some people would say too deep, and that's okay, And for better or worse, my mind really is always thinking about all the stuff we talk about, you know, other people, human behavior, us as a species and as a world, as a planet full of eight billion or so human beings, and you know, the dichotomies and the division and the love and the hate and the and sometimes I'll write something deep and I'll turn into not a few words, but a paragraph, and then two paragraphs, and then I've written this thing that's like probably too long to share anywhere, and it's It's what interests me is some of the things that I can write in two or three minutes seem to get the most attention and traction and to me are very you know, that not that impressive, If I'm going to be honest, I don't think they're that impressive.

I don't think they're that clever or funny.

But some of the things that and you know, the things that I'm talking about the things that are often cheeky or sweary or inappropriate get sometimes you know, like I've written one many many of my whiteboards have got well over a million views.

One of them's got somewhere close to twenty million, and when I read it, I'm like, yeah, it's kind of interesting and a bit funny, but it's not that fucking good, right And then and then when I opened the door, and this is I guess, this is the dichotomy of like trying to be real and be authentic and share your thoughts and ideas, but also, you know, have have an audience and and share content that people want to read and is relevant and connects in a way that's not going to take people an hour to read, and it's not overly complicated, and it's relevant and it's all of the things that people want.

Anyway, with that long winded intro, so I started just thinking out loud, writing some stuff, well, thinking to myself, I guess, and then with the idea of potentially sharing it, and I just wrote a few things and that became a paragraph, and then that became a bigger paragraph, and my intention was to share it on social media.

Then it ended up being probably you know, I could definitely share it as a post, but whether or not anyone would read it, and to be honest, I don't even know if sharing it here is a great idea.

I think some of you will resonate with what I'm about to share with you, some of you won't.

And my intention is not to change the world or push anyone in a direction, or to highlight any specific cause or but rather just to think deeply and to try to turn down the emotion.

I understand the emotion.

I understand the anger, I understand I understand the outrage.

I understand all of it, and I was all of it as well, and I still feel those things.

But I am fascinated with the why behind it all.

And I just think that sometimes it's worth trying to understand the things that we hate, and I'll explain why in a moment.

So what I'm about to share with you, I'm going to read.

I don't often read, you know.

I just riff and freestyle, as I'm doing right now.

I just talk off the cough normally, which doesn't always produce a good outcome, as you know.

But I'm going to read for the next few minutes.

I'm going to read you what I wrote, because I think some of you will find it may be helpful, maybe a little bit enlightening, or maybe worth exploring a little further.

Some of you won't, And that's okay, of course.

Alrighty, so here we go.

Like most of you, Like most dozzies, I was shocked, saddened, and if I'm being honest, I was angry about what transpired at Bondai on Sunday.

And I'm also well aware that my shock and my sadness and anger doesn't change anything.

It doesn't fix anything, it doesn't help anyone, and I'm well aware it's not a solution to anything.

And typically I don't really like to.

I don't feel compelled to.

I tend not to comment on such significant public events or tragedies because in the grand scheme of things, really, who needs to hear what I think?

Honestly, and the complete overwhelm of media and social media commentary in the middle of all of that, and the outcry and the newspapers and the stuff on repeat on TV.

I don't think I'm important in that.

I know I'm not important than that.

And maybe another person just sharing their feelings isn't particularly helpful.

So rather than reiterate and revisit the obvious tragedy, devastation, and sadness of what happened, I thought I would think out loud about what's actually happening underneath the behavior, what's happening underneath the violence, Like what's psychologically and sociologically and culturally and emotionally happening behind that behavior, that violence, and that terror.

In simple terms, I want to explore the unseen behind the scene.

I want to explore the psychology that drives the action, the thinking that drives the behavior.

But before I open this door, I want to say something really clearly, and that is to understand hatred and to understand evil and violence is not to condone it.

I'm of the opinion that we need to understand the minds and the motivation and the beliefs and the ideology of people who perpetrate horrible acts, who do horrible things, who hurt people, so that we can better prepare and combat and protect ourselves and others, protect the people we love.

To not understand the enemy in inverted commas is an overwhelming psychological and strategic disadvantage.

We need to understand them and if we don't, we are way behind.

As I said, it's a disadvantage, and not only in war, but also in life, the life that we saw or the lives that we saw torn apart Sunday past.

In fact, it's in our interest and the interest of everyone that we love and want to protect, to understand what we hate and to understand those who would seek to do us harm.

How can we overcome what we don't understand, How can we anticipate the potential actions and attacks if we don't seek first to understand and to begin to understand.

It's really important to realize that most people who do evil things, they don't believe they are either evil or evil doers.

And as uncomfortable as that makes us, and as deluded and indoctrinated as they may be, most terrorists absolutely believe they are doing the right thing.

They believe they're doing the good thing.

Bad people doing bad things don't think they are bad people doing bad things.

They can't see that.

They don't have that level of self awareness.

They live in that confirmation bias, They live in that echo chamber of belief and ideology that says that you and I, in this case are the enemy.

Consider a teenager.

Think about this.

Think about a teenager walking into a marketplace strapped with a vest that's full of explosives, ready to kill himself because of the belief of a way of thinking that he had programmed into him since he could walk.

Not only is the killing of innocence not evil in his mind, it's noble, it's courageous, it's a higher calling.

And in his group and with his indoctrination, he's actually becoming a martyr.

He'll be celebrated for his sacrifice and courage by his family, by those in his group, and of course to you and I this thinking is fucking horrible, and it is fucking horrible.

It is pure evil.

But to them and to him, it is not.

And this is where we can seek to understand so that we can perhaps prepare, we can perhaps anticipate.

And this doesn't just correlate to you know, big horrible, devastating events like we saw on the weekend.

This correlates and relates to life.

You need to understand, even in the context of what I'm talking about.

I believe it's important for you and I to understand the sociopaths that surround us that we work with that, we know that we need to interact with them so that we can prepare ourself, so that we can protect ourself and others for what might be the consequences of interacting with or being around that person, and what sits beneath this kind of violence, the violence we saw on Sunday, it is rarely just an impulse or momentary madness, or a single bad decision.

It's almost always the end point of a long psychological conveyor belt identity fused with ideology, belonging tied to belief meaning outsourced to a cause, and moral responsibility handed over to a narrative.

I've spoken about this before, but when a person's sense of self, when their identity, when their version of who they are becomes inseparable from an ideology, a tribe, or, in some religions, a promised future of eternal bliss, then critical thinking no longer plays a role in the decision making and the action taking process.

Nuance dies first, being able to make nuanced decisions in the middle of a programmed mind doesn't happen.

Nuance dies, then empathy dies, Then the humanity of the other person dies, and at that point, violence is an experienced by them as violence.

It's experienced by them as obedience and necessity and duty and even destiny.

And this is how ordinary human psychology, under the right or perhaps more accurately wrong conditions, can produce extraordinary cruelty, not because the brain suddenly stops working, but because it starts working exactly the way it was programmed to.

The uncomfortable truth is that the psychological ingredients that make this possible are not exotic or rare.

They're human.

Our brains crave certainty and belonging, meaning and identity.

And when fear, grievance, humiliation, or perceived in justice are layered on top of those needs, and then exploited by simplistic narratives that divide the world into good and evil, us and them, heroes and enemies, then that slope becomes dangerously slippery.

Most of us will never commit violence.

But the mechanisms of dehumanation, tribal thinking, and moral outsourcing exist on a spectrum, and they don't begin with bombs or bullets.

They begin with stories.

We stop questioning people, we stop humanizing, and beliefs we stop holding lightly.

Now, having said all of that, I fully acknowledge that these are just words.

These are just my words, these are just my thoughts, and I'm just a flawed bloke trying to figure stuff out like you.

I'm just a guy trying to understand human behavior and how the world works, and hopefully to do some good and to share some love and to encourage some of you to think critically.

I want to support you along the way, and maybe I can shine of the light in the darkness of what's going on at the moment.

Love harps