But something was missing.

For many years, I’ve avoided going to Remembrance Sunday events because I would feel uncontrollable fury.

Out-of-control, inexplicable, total red-hot fury.

This year was different. This year I didn’t feel it. And it was a big realization, that I had pivoted my awareness away from my victim mindset of blame and complaint.

And in that moment, I had this flash of inspiration. I realised that my previously inexplicable sense of fury was inherited, it was not mine. It was my family’s fury. I realized that I was integrating not just my own shadow of victimization but that of my entire ancestors.

Subscribe now

Read more

The Roots of Political Discontent

“Creative rebellion? Not-love? What the f*** does that all mean?” my mate Graham* asked me. (*name changed to protect privacy)

“And what does that have to do with the piss-poor state of politics in the UK?”

We were sitting outside Alibarbar in the sweltering dusk of Singapore sipping dark potent Belgian beer.

Graham had been moaning for a good ten minutes about how he was never going to settle back in the UK because of the appalling politics that has been destroying the country since the 1970s.

“If we are to meet the world with love, then we really need to know what not-love looks like,” I had said to him - and he was not impressed. Graham was calling ‘bullshit’. I pointed out to him that terrible politics have been going on a lot longer than the last 50 years that he remembers.

“The industrial age that started in the late 1700s is coming to an end, and we don’t get any changes for the better until we’ve seen the worst of what man can do with greed and scarcity.”

Subscribe now

Industrial Age Exploitation and Its Legacy

I continued, “In the town where I was born, the Egerton family are the descendants of the family of the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. The beginning of the industrial age in the West started in Manchester. The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater was the first man to build a canal to move coal from his coal-mines into Manchester.

In the 1700s, the Duke employed four-year-old children to work in his coal-mines, and more than 80% of them didn’t survive to six years old. They were kept underground naked and barefoot, except for a rope tied around their waist. They hauled large chunks of coal out of the mine that was tied to the rope, seven days-a-week, 12 hours a day. And when they died, their lifeless small bodies were discarded like trash into the river next to the new canal.

As a consequence of this, and many other terrible exploitations, Manchester was the birthplace of trade unions that fought for freedom - the five-day week, the 8 hour day, paid leave, low-cost healthcare. Cooperative societies were formed that provided basic food at low-prices, and not-for-profit banking to counter the exploitation of loan-sharks.

These are things that everyone takes for granted today that were born out of love, in the face of not-love.”

Subscribe now

Read more

At the very same time I was listening to Andrew, there was a man attempting to burn down a synagogue in East Melbourne while some of my friends were inside. Having received a message during the lecture, I left very quickly afterwards to talk to them.

The lecture was short but powerful. Andrew made three points that got my attention around being responsible with AI: 1. Data privacy; 2. Energy consumption; and, 3. Media clickbait BS about the AI ‘singularity’. WE have to be responsible for data privacy, WE have to be responsible about the energy consumption of the AI solutions, and WE have to be responsible for rejecting the media BS about the AI singularity.

This ‘AI singularity’ is a story about the fear that AI will become conscious and take control of humanity.

It was this point when Andrew made his point about WE being responsible for rejecting the media BS that directly-linked these two completely disparate events for me.

Then it occurred to me that all three points were related to the attack - and that it is our quality of consciousness in how we apply AI that we have to take responsibility for.

• AI and Data Privacy

Andrew made the important point that we have to be responsible for respecting data privacy and making sure that the vast amount of data being shipped into the cloud does not contain personal identity information.

It was only a small point in Andrew’s presentation but for me it was a key one - and he talked about the fact that the engineers he talked to were generally good people and they were careful to take responsibility to make sure that people’s privacy was respected.

I’m sure the German engineers of the mechanical punched-card systems at Hollerith that the Nazis used one-hundred-years-ago to track the Jews, the communists, socialists and the “undesirables” (homosexuals, people with Down Syndrome and Freemasons) had no idea that the data would be used to send these people to their death in the gas-chambers.

 They were very-likely very-responsible in their engineering diligence, but they had no idea what the data of the new technology was gonna be processing and the final solution that it was being intended for.

The engineering disciplines underpinning the management of structured-data on punched-cards that were used to select people for extermination are still alive and well in the IBM mainframes of today.

The massive advantage of AI is that we train the LLMs to read and interpret vast amounts of unstructured documents rather than structured data.

In my latest book, I talk about how AI data has been used by the healthcare industry to automate insurance claim processing by reading vast amounts of claims documents and making automated decisions.

This week Bupa Australia was fined US$23 million for “unconscionable conduct” in denying healthcare claims and in-effect letting people die without getting the treatment that they were entitled to.

In my view, this is not a dissimilar use-case to the use of punched-card technology in the 1930s, but in this case it was a misuse of data and AI technology to process the claims documents that caused people to die.

The management of Bupa Australia took a conscious decision to use AI data processing to deny legitimate claims for healthcare treatment.

This is why Andrew’s point really stood out for me - not only we HAVE to be responsible for the AI data and how it is used, we also have to be responsible for the impact.

If we are incompetent in our quality of consciousness about the human impact, how can we be trusted to responsibly govern the application of AI?

When we are addicted to drama we are reckless and this makes us incompetent.

• Energy Consumption

Andrew made the point that the cost of the “pipes” that we use to ship the data to the lowest-cost location for AI data processing is now negligible compared to the cost of AI. And that the energy consumption by AI is being driven by our vast appetite for AI.

At the same time, the productivity and the efficiency of AI processing is exponentially increasing driven by the hyperscalar cloud providers at Amazon, Google and Azure.

The nascent arrival to the market of quantum computing from these vendors will again drive down the energy demands of AI processing - and we’re already seeing the experiments on this deliver good results here in Singapore.

This is good news because it has the potential to rapidly reign-in the vast amounts of energy that our growing appetite for AI consumes.

While we do need to be mindful of the energy consumption that our appetite for AI can consume - Andrew made a key point that learning to engineer for the efficient use of AI resources is as important as learning to code to leverage the AI.

Later in his talk, Andrew chose to go off-topic from the energy consumption of AI technology to talk a little about geo-engineering experiments to address climate change.

The simple fact is that the amount of energy consumed in deploying AI technology in hyper-scaling data-centres is negligible when compared to the amount of energy being consumed by the military across the globe killing civilians and fighting wars for no good reason.

I would contend that developing novel and interesting experiments in how we use AI to stop wars would be a great place to start to reduce our energy consumption on the planet, rather than geo-engineering experiments.

While we chose to continue to ignore the killing of families and children and not use every means available, including applying AI, to stop doing that then this would also indicate that our capacity for consciousness is also stunted?

When we deliberately choose to ignore what is going wrong around us then this is entitlement.

• The “AI Singularity” - who’s afraid of the big bad wolf of AI?

Andrew spoke to the fear-uncertainty-and-doubt story in the media that talks about the “AI Singularity” where AI takes control of the human population within 5 years.

Andrew has done a fair amount of research into the negative press about AI, and has yet to find evidence that this hypothesis is real.

All the negative doom-mongering bullshit about the “AI singularity” is deliberately designed to speak to our fears.

It really is a case of “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf of AI?” propaganda.

Andrew’s point was that we have to be discerning and exercise discrimination when listening to the drama being created around AI and, in my words not his, learn to recognise the BS for what it is.

Given this fear-mongering, how long do we think it will be before we hear about someone trying to burn down a datacentre because they’re afraid of AI? Like they did for 5G mobile phone base-stations in the UK?

And this is where I made the connection between the two disparate events of Andrew’s lecture and what went off in East Melbourne at the same time.

In effect the fear-based clickbait about AI that is stoking the fires of drama today, is no different to the right-wing fascist propaganda published by the Daily Mail in the 1930s. We regularly see echoes of 1930s Nazi propaganda about the Rothschilds, Jews and the Freemasons exerting control over global geo-politics on repeated social media today. With the results that we have firebomb attacks on a synagogue in East Melbourne on a Friday night.

While we remain addicted to drama, then we will continue to allow ourselves to be distracted and overwhelmed by the bullshit propaganda that is being delivered by the big media corporations in the same way they did one-hundred-years-ago when supporting the fascists.

This isn’t just about AI, we need discernment and discrimination across ALL of the drama generated by media corporations that deliberately write their propaganda to stoke fears.

We have to fight to outwit our addiction to drama if we are to gain the discernment necessary to say ‘no’ to the fear-based bullshit.

When we choose to buy-in to the BS instead of actively saying ‘no’ to it, then we are choosing to be cruel to ourselves.

And that, my friends, is exactly what my latest book is about - about the fears that hold us trapped in our addiction to drama and allow us to be vulnerable to recklessness, entitlement and cruelty.

I will be launching the audio-edition of my new book “Fight for your freedom or die trying” on Saturday 13 September in Singapore, and I’ll be raising funds for charity by signing a limited number of paperback & hardback copies at the event.

RSVP if you want to be there, or you would like to buy a signed-copy then head to my website justinlodge.com

Recently I learned that Simon on the left, passed away from Multiple Sclerosis, a condition that he had been diagnosed with just after he returned to the UK from our road-trip across Ontario, Quebec and NY state. When I saw the picture and heard the news, it reminded me of chapter 12 from The Book of Ecclesiastes.

And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.

To me, seeing this picture reminded me of how much we forget that our lifetime here is limited, and that for most of us by the time we get an inkling of mortality that shakes us out of our shadow of vanity, then we find it’s too late to take action for us.

Death is the great leveller of vanities. Our addiction to drama hides in our shadow of vanity.

My latest book has the title, “Fight for your freedom or die trying” because I’m making a call to action to invest in your emotional health and wellbeing.

Hearing that we had lost Simon to MS triggered me off.

I felt outrage, blame and frustration that there was nothing we could do, to make it right for the family he left behind.

The drama hidden in my shadow of vanity had jumped out at me, and I couldn’t sleep properly for a couple of nights.

The fears in my shadow of vanity had me in their grip of outrage, rescuing and blaming. Outrage that his life had been cut short, frustration that there was nothing I could do to help his family and blaming the disease.

These are the fears that are hidden in our “shadow of vanity” - and if they remain unchecked then we become reckless, entitled and cruel.

Anger makes us reckless and impulsive, frustration drives us to blame ourselves and others, and entitlement drives us to be heartless and cruel to ourselves and others.

The fears I’m talking about here are fear of rejection, fear of being wrong and fear of being excluded.

• Fear of rejection taught me to stay quiet when my mother or grandmother were triggered into outrage. But the suppressed anger drove me to be reckless.

• Fear of being wrong taught me that my mother and grandmother were entitled to sacrifice my emotional health and wellbeing in order for them to be ‘right’. I spent years blaming myself by asking “what the f*** is wrong with me?”

• Fear of being excluded taught me that cruel and unusual punishments by my mother or grandmother were ‘good for me’. I believed that they were entitled to punish me, and I stopped loving myself because I thought I wasn’t good enough and deserved to be punished. I was cruel to myself and others.

When we realise that these fears are what trigger us into our drama - then we become more self-aware and we improve our quality of consciousness simply by observing how we are triggered off.

What enables us to expand our capacity for consciousness is by philanthropy. Getting involved in supporting those in the community suffering from hardship exposes us to a whole set of problems that we don’t have. In the realisation that we’re able to make a difference to someone else’s life, we also get to level-set our own problems and realise how they’re much more problems of our own vanity.

This expands our capacity for consciousness, and gives us the license to choose our problems. The anger that triggers us to be reckless, the frustration that triggers us to blame and the entitlement we have to punish ourselves and others melts away.

I’m raising money for charity right now - through selling signed-copies of my latest book. If you’d like a signed copy mailed to you anywhere in the world, then they will be available until 13 September when I’m launching the audio-edition of my new book.

To buy a copy, head to my website www.justinlodge.com

I was at the request of my housekeeper who I’ve known for over 2 years now. My housekeeper is from Myanmar, and she’s been interested in the books that I write. I told her the stories of my grandmother and how two generations ago, my grandmother was a housekeeper in a big country house…

Read more

We live in a society that is addicted to drama.

Our addiction to drama is so strong that we are unconsciously incompetent in the quality of our consciousness.

And there are many individuals, politicians and corporations that take advantage of that.

We sacrifice our health and wellbeing because our addiction to drama is so strong that we neglect to be benev…

Read more

Help me make it an Amazon #1 bestseller by buying the eBook edition

On Sunday - go to http://justinlodge.com/buy-my-latest-book-now/ and buy it from Amazon.

Thanks so much for your support!

Share

This addiction caused so much unnecessary upheaval and stress. Ultimately I had to choose to save myself first.

Over a 5 year journey of self discovery, healing and personal empowerment I transitioned from burned-out and broke in Melbourne to living, working and thriving in Singapore.

💌 YOU’RE INVITED TO THE BOOK LAUNCH EVENT IN MELBOURNE

Held at a gorgeous waterfront venue, on a (hopefully) sunny Sunday morning I will be sharing this latest creation with you and the world.

I will be reading from some of my favourite sections of the book, demonstrating the emotional clearing tools that I use and signing first edition copies for purchase (via a donation to charities that are dear to my heart)

📆 Sunday 25 May 2025

⏰ 10am – 12pm

📍 South Melbourne Life Saving Club

Coffee, Tea, Pastries and Fruit will be provided

🔗 Register here - https://justinlodge.com/launch

Subscribe now

This addiction caused so much unnecessary upheaval and stress. Ultimately I had to choose to save myself first.

Over a 5 year journey of self discovery, healing and personal empowerment I transitioned from burned-out and broke in Melbourne to living, working and thriving in Singapore.

💌 YOU’RE INVITED TO THE BOOK LAUNCH EVENT IN MELBOURNE

Held at a gorgeous waterfront venue, on a (hopefully) sunny Sunday morning I will be sharing this latest creation with you and the world.

I will be reading from some of my favourite sections of the book, demonstrating the emotional clearing tools that I use and signing first edition copies for purchase (via a donation to charities that are dear to my heart)

📆 Sunday 25 May 2025

⏰ 10am – 12pm

📍 South Melbourne Life Saving Club

Coffee, Tea, Pastries and Fruit will be provided

🔗 Register here - https://justinlodge.com/launch

Subscribe now

This is my personal story about how I fought to outwit my own addiction to drama. An inherited addiction from my family.

This addiction caused so much unnecessary upheaval and stress. Ultimately I had to choose to save myself first.

Over a 5 year journey of self discovery, healing and personal empowerment I transitioned from burned-out and broke in Melbourne to living, working and thriving in Singapore.

💌 YOU’RE INVITED TO THE BOOK LAUNCH EVENT IN MELBOURNE

Held at a gorgeous waterfront venue, on a (hopefully) sunny Sunday morning I will be sharing this latest creation with you and the world.

I will be reading from some of my favourite sections of the book, demonstrating the emotional clearing tools that I use and signing first edition copies for purchase (via a donation to charities that are dear to my heart)

📆 Sunday 25 May 2025

⏰ 10am – 12pm

📍 South Melbourne Life Saving Club

Coffee, Tea, Pastries and Fruit will be provided

🔗 Register here - https://justinlodge.com/launch

Subscribe now

Hope to see you there!

Subscribe now

I almost died twice trying to sacrifice myself to save my first wife and family, and I had absolutely no idea why I was doing it. I didn’t want to see someone else doing the same thing.

I realised that no-one was going to come to f**king save me. I had to save myself.

In my new book I tell the stories of how my family was impacted by violence, famine, genocide, war and heartbreak, and how I inherited my addiction to drama from my family.

I inherited outrage from my grandmother, and survivor’s guilt from my grandfather.

I have fought for ten years to outwit my own addiction to drama and despite having failed many times in the process, I now have succeeded.

To succeed I had to evolve: to grow a spine; step into my power; and, then open my heart. It’s taken me five years of adventures to do this, and my clients have had amazing results too.

My purpose for writing remains the same but my scope has evolved to educating and informing on how we are all addicted to drama - so that people can choose to save themselves.

And, with my own evolution, my call to action has also evolved into a call to fight.

A call to fight by outwitting our addiction to drama.

This is why I call it a ‘velvet revolution’ because in choosing to fight to outwit our addiction to drama, we choose to fight for our freedom:

• Choosing to save ourselves first is how we grow a spine through self-knowledge.

• Learning to say no to bullshit is how we step into our power through self-benevolence.

• Opening our hearts gives us the courage to take risks and make mistakes, without blaming and shaming ourselves. This is self-sovereignty.

It all starts with a velvet revolution for conscious leadership.

The revolution I want to initiate you into, is to direct you away from force towards strength, away from victimization towards freedom and away from entropy towards freshness.

• Instead of forcing yourself to comply with the expectations of your upbringing, self-knowledge becomes your strength.

• Instead of blaming and shaming ourselves and others, self-benevolence becomes your freedom.

• Instead of numbing yourself with entertainment and alcohol, self-sovereignty becomes your fresh creative new lifeforce.

I want to impregnate your mind with the desire to become a ‘conscious leader’ for yourself, your family and your community. A conscious leader that knows that:

• Benevolence only starts when you learn to treat yourself with compassion.

• Power only starts when you learn to say ‘no’ to bullshit.

• Leadership only starts when you reject the messages of politicians selling ’salvation’.

Because we don’t just inherit our addiction-to-drama from our families

We also inherit our talents of courage, fortitude and leadership from our families.

A velvet revolution #2 - outwitting the neo-fascists

Through the lens of addiction-to-drama, my book ALSO tells the stories of how my family was impacted by fascism during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

My book is also a call to fight with cunning and fortitude to outwit the evolution of the politicians who call themselves patriots and are selling salvation.

These politicians sell ‘salvation’ to the masses, take all their money and then leave them to die having milked them and their family for every dollar.

Working until it is no longer profitable to keep us alive is the industrialization of genocide.

This is not capitalism, it is neo-fascism. To illustrate this evolution of neo-fascism, I make the case that the healthcare insurance system in the USA has become industrial genocide.

The US healthcare insurance system has evolved to embody the very same ethos as the message above the gate at Auschwitz that says ‘work will set one free’ - and then the AI decides when you will die.

My velvet revolution #2 is written to impart the lesson that it is far better to outwit the fascists long before they try to kill you.

Whether it be on the end of a fascist’s bayonet like my grandfather, or by having your healthcare insurance claim denied by an AI.

It all starts with you choosing to save yourself first, because no-one is coming to f**king save you.

You have to fight for your freedom, or die trying.

There will be a number of personally signed-copies available for sale before the launch of my new book in May.

Join the VIP Waitlist here if you want to order one of these signed copies.

Subscribe now

This clickbait illustrates how easily we are drawn in by our addiction to drama.

The credit for it goes to the amazing Mr Stephen Fry, and it is expertly-crafted.

The message written above the gates at Auschwitz that says “Work will set us free” was too an expertly-crafted message to the masses that passed underneath.

It told them that they were going into…

Read more

When I first started to write books, I thought that if I could stop one man from harming someone else or himself then it would have been all worthwhile. I almost died twice trying to sacrifice myself to save my wife, and I had no idea why I was doing it. And, I didn’t want to see someone else doing the same.

I’m still leaning into that after seven years,…

Read more

No one was coming to fucking save me.

It was down to me to outwit my own internal gollum of self-hatred and my own internal dragon of addiction to drama.

No one is coming to fucking save you.

Hidden in our shadows of vanity and unease are our unconscious set of limited beliefs that we all carry with us that have us addicted to drama and numbing ourselves …

Read more

It's gone to the editor.

The read review is underway.

I got up at three o'clock this morning because I was inspired to write.

And I really enjoyed it.

I've really enjoyed the writing process this time.

And the book is a cracker.

You're going to love it.

If you want to be on the VIP list, subscribe to my Substack!

Help support me to get this to another Amazon number-one bestseller.

To get perspective, we have to look down on the drama triangle from above and see how we bounce from role to role in our addiction to drama; victim, rescuer and aggressor. 

The drama triangle is a meta-model for fear-based behaviours.…

Read more

Five years to the very day since I arrived and started work here in Singapore.

Arriving was the beginning of the end for me. 

The ending of the drama that I was addicted to. Killing the drama stone dead.

Because that’s what I’ve been working on every single day for every one of those five years. 

• Killing the drama that hel…

Read more

My first wife hated it. She decided the best course of action was to tell me stories of why she thought my Dad was a bully and a poor husband. My wife told me how she thought that my mother was a victim to him because she could not stand to see me vulnerable. She had no idea that during my chil…

Read more