We were there to remember the fallen. Thousands of men died defending the causeway in 1942, as the Japanese overran their positions with ease. Singapore had been abandoned by the British and the military defences were woefully in-adequate, and the supplies of ammunition were quickly exhausted. The Eastern Gate to the British Empire fell easily to the Japanese army and the citizens of Singapore were slaughtered, raped and beaten.

As we remembered the fallen, the choir sang ‘Abide with Me’ at the Remembrance Day Service. The tears ran down my face, as I recalled singing this same hymn at my father’s and my mother’s funerals.

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.

It was a big realisation, that I had pivoted away my awareness from my victim mindset of fury, blame and complaint.

At that moment, I had this flash of inspiration.

What I realised was that my previously inexplicable sense of fury was inherited, it was not mine.

It was my families’ fury at the betrayal of their sacrifice in World War I.

I was integrating the shadows of my family. Shadows that I had inherited from my ancestors.

So where did my fury come from? Remembering the fallen used to trigger me into out-of-control fury? And why did I KNOW it wasn’t mine?

I realised that doing the shadow-work had evolved my identity.

I had expanded the quality of my consciousness

I had turned the lead in my inherited emotional baggage into gold.

My conscious leadership had been alchemised.

I was living from my patterns of survival identity that I had inherited.

I was being the good son that my Dad was proud of, but I wasn’t living my life for me.

My inherited ancestral power had produced amazing results for me in my life.

I had been using my obligation to honour my Dad, and the sacrifices that had been made by my ancestors for a long time.

But copying that sacrifice had cost me two divorces and twenty-five unhappy years by modelling the avoidance that had kept my ancestors safe.

Chasing safety had got me absolutely f’ing nowhere when it came to creating a life that I was happy with.

Because what we inherit from our ancestors are the shadows as well as the gifts - and they all have power.

And unless we awaken to our ancestral power, we remain unconscious of what’s driving us. Unconscious of the shadows and the gifts.

The awakening in our ancestral power is what we need to activate our genius, and learn how to outwit the dragon in our DNA rather than appeasing it.

What I mean by that is we cannot directly confront our inherited patterns of identity - we have to learn to outwit them.

The reason that we’re unconscious of them is because we’ve embodied them in our muscle-memory.

It’s the same muscle memory that we have for keeping us safe while driving a car, or playing tennis.

With tennis, we don’t consciously position ourselves for the return shot, we just move without thinking about it.

With driving a car, we don’t consciously steer, brake and (if you have a stick-shift) change gears - we do it all without consciously thinking about it.

We unconsciously learn to model our parents and grandparents before we can talk, and neuroscience research has proven that we inherit their risk-avoidance epigenetically in our DNA going back seven generations or more.

We do this because safety has not been a feature of our world for generations.

Yet we’ve come to expect it in our privileged first-world.

But what is safety? And why do we avoid things that are ‘not safe’ for us?

Someone once said “You cannot teach accountability to someone whose entire identity is built on avoidance.”

The thing is that our relationships, and the culture we operate in is a mirror for the psychology of the people who are in them.

What I came to realise is that my ancestors were at their most powerful when they gave themselves permission to say ‘no’ to being sacrificed. And when they did that, they found very creative ways to rebel and not just survive but to find ways for the family to thrive.

But if safety isn’t the absence of danger, but the “presence of connection”, then what does that mean? And connection to what specifically?

Awakening to my presence of connection

Kranji was the first time I had really noticed I was actually missing a trigger.

One that used to be huge for me.

The presence of connection to myself, and my ancestral power, is what had carried me through and allowed me to be successful and achieve many things. That deep internal knowing that whatever happens to me, that thriving is possible in absolute chaos because my ancestors lived through far worse than what is going on now.

But this gift had come with the shadow of massive self-sacrifice. This was the dragon in my DNA.

I hadn’t discovered this awakening about myself by confrontation, I had done it by training myself to observe my triggers, investigating them and clearing the emotions that were there. The fear, the shame, the guilt… had gone.

Over the last 18 months, I had outwitted the dragon in my DNA, rather than confront it.

What I had experienced at Kranji was the death of the connection to the shadow of sacrifice of my ancestors.

But there was still a part of me that was the ‘good boy making his Dad proud.’

This part of me that needed to die was that part that was honouring his death, and his sacrifice and the sacrifice of my ancestors by playing it safe.

And it wasn’t the only inherited ancestral shadow in me that needed to die.

All the shadow parts that had been keeping me playing safe needed to die too.

I awakened to my presence of connection to my true-identity.

The tears that I had cried were in grief for the death of my old-identity.

This was the psychological alchemy that was defined by the ancient Greeks in their word ‘metanoia’.

It had taken 18 months, a deep healing journey to India, and it was completed on the hillside at Kranji.

I began to understand too that alchemy is not just about healing ourselves, but about healing our ancestral family too.

My alchemy & yours

Now it is my biggest wish and desire that:

• We all CHOOSE to take the journey of the creative rebel that outwits the dragon in our DNA that is keeping us safe, and playing small.

• We understand and forgive our family inheritance of fears, intolerance and sacrifice and create a legacy of presence and freedom for ourselves and our future.

• We alchemise our inherited ancestral shadows.

My questions for you are:

• Where are you playing small?

• Why are you still hiding out?

• What are the fears and concerns that are stopping you from choosing a life of delicious adventure?

• What is it costing you not to tap into your ancestral power, and live a life of conscious leadership?

• And, what is it costing our children?

Or do you want to be like me, and transform the inherited shadows of your ancestors into gifts?

It is time for you to put down the burden of all the expectations of being safe and look into where you’ve been relying on your survival-identity and your avoidant psychology that is keeping you ‘safe’.

My new book “The Alchemist” is launching at 10.30am on Monday 6 July

In my new book “The Alchemist - Activate your true identity and surrender to your highest purpose,” I document in detail the seven inherited shadows, and the seven gifts that I integrated as a result of awakening my ancestral power and activating my true-identity.

My new book is being launched live on Facebook, Monday 6th of July at 10.30am Sydney time.

The eBook edition will be $1.00 only on Amazon during the launch.

I want you to help me get it to a #1 Amazon bestseller - put it in your diary!

The connectivity to my ancestral power that my father had shown me, gave me the presence that allowed me to navigate my way through two marriages, two divorces and a career of successful delivery in high-risk corporate technology transformations over 30 years.

My achievements, and my ability to recover from hitting rock bottom a number of times, are primarily because of the ancestral power I was gifted by my family ancestors.

In my last transformation project, I was leading 120 engineers and technicians to deliver a $140m new platform where we had a drop dead date that if we missed it would cause the bank to lose its license to operate in 44 countries.

In the last six years I’ve written and published 5x Amazon #1 best-selling books, each of which I wrote the first draft manuscript in just one week.

My personal clients are entrepreneurs and leaders who have achieved lives of delicious adventures through working with me.

It is the presence of connection to the true self within us, and our gifts, that is the foundation of ancestral power.

And it is that ancestral power that I have been drawing on to deal with working in enterprises and corporations for all those years since my Dad died.

It has been keeping me ‘safe’ while allowing me to continue to avoid dealing with my shadows by working there.

I once heard it said in the 1990s that “working in financial services is like being in a sheltered workshop for the middle-class insane.”

If we swap out the phrase ‘middle-class’ and replace it with the word ‘privileged’ then we bring that quote up-to-date.

Awakening to the culture of avoidance in corporations

What does ‘safety’ mean in the context of the privileged masses, like myself, that work in enterprises and corporations?

Safety is not the absence of danger it is the presence of connection.

Safety has not been a feature of our world for generations.

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It is a mistaken assumption of modern privilege that we have that “safety” is a necessary condition for high performance in our enterprises and corporations.

In every enterprise I’ve worked in since 1990 there have been toxic managers who have exhibited what could be described as ‘borderline personality disorders’.

What I’m happy to say is that the frequency of the occurrence of these individuals has been reducing over time, but they’re still around.

There’s no doubt that removing the toxic individuals that demonstrate what looks like borderline personality disorders is a good thing. That goes for any organisation.

That’s a moral and ethical expectation around a code of conduct that has a higher bar of expectation for the leaders in the organisation.

And there’s a conflict of interest there that the HR team has to manage with respect to the reputational risks of allowing toxic individuals to continue to operate because the ‘optics’ of removing them may also look bad for the share-price.

Every organisation struggles with this - particularly those that have a culture of avoiding confrontation that these toxic individuals take advantage of.

The low level of authenticity on LinkedIN is a direct reflection of this culture of avoidance in our corporations.

Awakening the ancestral power of creative rebellion

Who has read the book “The Hobbit” by JRR Tolkien? How does Bilbo Baggins operate in the story to save the team?

In this story, Bilbo outwits Gollum, he outwits the wood-elves, he outwits the dragon and in the end he also outwits the leader of the dwarves to create the joint-alliance to defeat the orc army.

Where do you imagine that JRR Tolkien experienced this outwitting approach to dealing with toxic individuals?

He served in the British army in WWI and survived the industrialised slaughter, like my great-grandfathers did.

His underlying message in the plot was “Why slay the dragon when you can outwit it?”

The reason that Tolkien and my great-grandfathers survived WWI is not because they got lucky, it is because they were really good at avoiding the risks that got many thousands of their brothers-in-arms killed.

The issue that we have today, like 100 years ago on the front-line of WWI, is that our corporate culture of “avoidance”, requires that in order to ‘survive’ one has to have the hypervigilance and cunning of a shithouse rat, and in order to thrive it appears to require a borderline personality disorder.

Corporate culture has been avoiding conflict for a very long time, and we really need to emphasise that the change that is needed in our enterprises and corporations is to find our permission to say ‘no’ to the toxic individuals that exploit the conflict-avoidance.

And we need to see real action from the board members of enterprises and corporations in enforcing the code of conduct on themselves first and foremost, and then seeing that properly delegated.

The era of tolerating poor conduct of directors and board-members because of ‘optics’ needs to finish.

Time and time again, the big audit firms have been hammered for ‘sweeping issues under the rug’ and exploiting inside knowledge.

It was KPMG’s turn to get hammered last week.

But these audit firms didn’t do that without collusion from those that engaged with them.

We need to be asking the people that engaged these firms what they knew and when.

If we can ask that question of the King of the United Kingdom about his brother’s disgusting behaviours - then we need to be doing this too with boards of corporations.

Talking about ‘safety’ in enterprises and corporations is a true expression of avoidance. What they really need to be saying is ‘we need to get rid of toxic individuals from the board downwards’.

Mirror-mirror on the wall, who is the most avoidant of them all?

Someone once said “You cannot teach accountability to someone whose entire identity is built on avoidance”.

This person was a clinical professional psychologist, and in my humble opinion, it was an admission of defeat for their modalities.

Or maybe they just had been working with my ex-wife for way too long. :)

The thing is that our relationships, our enterprises and our corporations are a mirror for the psychology of the people who are in them.

My relationship with my ex-wife and my relationship with the enterprises I have worked in were a mirror of my own avoidance.

I had been using this obligation to honour my Dad, and the sacrifices of my ancestors for a long time - and it was empowering both my avoidance and my creative rebellion.

Awakening to the power of the permission to say ‘no’

The plotlines in The Hobbit are Tolkien’s metaphor to describe how we deal with toxic individuals without confronting them.

Tolkien was in the British army during WWI, like my great-grandfathers were. Outwitting toxic individuals in the officer corps is a long-standing tradition in the non-commissioned-officers in the British army. The officers are there to drive the strategic outcomes, and the NCOs are there to ensure that the soldiers survive engagement for as long as possible, and look after each other. Officers that don’t understand this don’t last very long.

In WWII, my grandfather carried on the family tradition of outwitting his superiors, and spent some time in military jail awaiting a court-martial when eventually the charges were dropped. Once the information appeared in the National Archives became public 50 years after the end of the war, then the stories came out about what had been really going on.

As one of my mentors once advised about how to deal with toxic individuals in corporations, “Don’t wrestle with pigs. You’ll get covered in shit, and the pig loves it.”

This is why I call giving ourselves permission to say “no”: creative rebellion.

Because being powerful doesn’t require confrontation, it just requires the inner permission to say ‘no’.

What would change for you, your family, your enterprise, your corporation and your community if you chose to awaken your ancestral power?

My Dad and I were talking over a glass of wine on a Saturday afternoon, looking across the misty rooftops from my fifth floor walk-up apartment and reflecting on life in general while my Mum was exploring the shops with my wife.

I was unloading the stress of the bullshit I had encountered at my consulting role.

I was living in Metz in Eastern France, doing my very first freelance consulting gig for an investment bank in Luxembourg. It was hugely political and very disappointing, and the boss was a massive a-hole.

Everyone there hated my boss, and his director was cutting his budget in half at every annual review in an effort to get him to leave.

I got along so well with everyone that colleagues had started to call me to politely apologise in-advance before deliberately fucking things up for me just to get at my boss.

Someone once said that working in financial services is like working in a sheltered workshop for the middle-class insane. And, being a freelance consultant in that industry in the 1990s paid insanely well.

Taking the gig in Luxembourg as a freelance consultant had doubled my income, but it was also a very disappointingly hard lesson in what I call “corporate fuckery”.

My Dad looked at me and said “I’ve got a few things to tell you son.”

He told me how proud of me he was - I was 27 years old doing my first freelance international consulting gig for one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, working in a foreign language and making more than 50000 pounds a year in consulting revenue. Wealth that previous generations that my family could never conceived-of.

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He apologised for the abuse and pain that he, and my mother, had put me through in my childhood. He had come to realise just how much he and my mother had projected their own fears and shadows onto me.

It showed me that he had integrated enough of his shadows to reach a position of understanding on the sacrifices he had made and how that sacrifice had impacted our family.

In that long conversation, he also told me about the conversations that he had with his own father, and about the sacrifices that my family had endured during WW1 and WW2, and the death and disaster which had killed many others, yet my family had the power to survive despite this.

I felt like I had been truly seen by my father for the very first time, and how proud he was of me.

I understood for the very first time that I had inherited amazing powerful gifts as well as shadows from my ancestors.

I felt loved by him like I had never felt love before.

My father had awakened me to the idea that I had inherited powerful gifts from my ancestors.

I quit the consulting gig that I hated a few months later and found a new consulting gig in New Zealand.

Paid half as much in NZ dollars, but was ten times more fun.

My gifts had been consciously awakened and I relocated to the other side of the planet, knowing that not one challenge I would find would be anywhere as difficult as the challenges that my ancestors had already overcome.

I’ve lived in five different countries and been to rock bottom a number of times - financially, spiritually and emotionally.

Three days before we were due to fly to Wellington, New Zealand, my father was gone. He was killed in a car accident late on a Thursday night on the road between Carnarvon and Bangor in North Wales. Losing him broke my heart, I was numb with depression for 2 years afterwards and it was the beginning of the end of my first marriage.

The connectivity to my ancestral gifts that my father had shown me, gave me the presence that allowed me to navigate my way through two marriages, two divorces and a career of successful delivery in high-risk corporate technology transformations over 30 years.

My achievements, and my ability to recover from hitting rock bottom a number of times, are primarily because of the ancestral power I was gifted by my family ancestors.

In my last transformation project, I was leading 120 engineers and technicians to deliver a $140m new platform where we had a drop dead date that if we missed it would cause the bank to lose its license to operate in 44 countries.

In the last six years I’ve written and published 5x Amazon #1 best-selling books, each of which I wrote the first draft manuscript in just one week.

My personal clients are entrepreneurs and leaders who have achieved lives of delicious adventures through working with me.

It is the presence of connection to the true self within us that is the foundation of ancestral power.

I’m running a 4-week transformation program starting this week on 24-June called Awaken Your Ancestral Power - if you’re interested message me.

These gifts help them succeed not just in their businesses & professional occupations but in all areas of their life, including with their families and with their children, and supporting them through separation and divorce with far more powerful awareness and consciousness than they ever had before.

Conscious leadership that sets them up to thrive and grow, and activates their genius.

The transformation program is a 4-week online group program, and at the end of the 4 weeks you will be able to:

✅ Lead from conscious conviction;

✅ Elevate the quality of your relationships;

✅ Shine with a fresh clarity of purpose;

✅ Deepen the quality of your authority; and,

✅ Take off your ‘perfomance’ mask and feel comfortable being seen.

The program starts on 24th June 2026

• Group size limited to 20 people only

• Small intimate group

• WhatsApp support

Wednesday weekly group session for 4 weeks

• Start time 8pm Sydney time

• Sessions will be recorded, and a link will be sent to you if you miss a call

Duration

• Allow 2 hours

• 90 mins for the group call, then put aside 30 mins following each call for you to quietly contemplate afterwards

• On-going support for 4 weeks following the program in the WhatsApp group

VIP

• I have a small number of VIP seats available if you want a personal 1:1 experience in addition to the group program calls.

• There are additional bonuses for VIP clients

Why is ‘Awakening your Ancestral Gifts’ so powerful?

In 2019, after five years of being a divorced single Dad with three teenage boys in Melbourne, I knew I wanted to create a life of adventures. Not just any adventure. Delicious adventures.

Food, culture, people, places, experiences, challenges, growth.

But I had commitments - family commitments. And I was burnt out. And I was broke. And I was in debt. I was heading for rock bottom. Not just financially, I was emotionally and spiritually broke having performed “good boy” for decades.

Then I discovered emotional clearing, and I was awakened yet again.

Within six months, I was living in the amazing vibrant city of Singapore, and I had written my first Amazon #1 bestselling book. Within 12 months I was debt free and had published two bestsellers.

We ALL have emotions that we don’t know are blocking our power.

Emotions with hidden triggers that propel us into drama before we’re even aware of them being there.

Drama that drains us. Drama that we just don’t need anymore but we can’t seem to shake off.

My clients are travelling the world, running & creating multiple businesses and having delicious adventures.

All at the same time. New delicious adventures without the drama.

My Offer Promise

My promise to you is that by working together we will change the direction of your life by just one degree.

By just one degree. No more and no less. Because that’s what is appropriate.

• I don’t let my clients quit their jobs and run-off into the sunset chasing some big hairy goal driven by hype and ego.

• I want my clients to be trusted custodians of their own lives, living with compassion and respect for themselves and the ecology of their lives.

• I create CONSENTING partnership and intimacy that creates the connectivity and safe space we need to journey together. With prior consent, we can confront taboo subjects, such as sexuality, without having to disclose intimate details.

• AND a small one-degree change in direction will over time take you thousands of kilometres to a new place where you are creating the vibrant, juicy life of delicious adventures. A place that you just can’t see right now, because you’re limited by your current horizons

GUARANTEES

• There really are no guarantees, conditional or unconditional.

• Be committed to being uncomfortable, because the expansion happens when we get out of our comfort zone.

• Safety is not the absence of threat - it is the presence of connection, the one guarantee we can give is that this program will be a safe space for you to get uncomfortable and do the work you need to do.

Perhaps you have experienced the following:

• You have already talked or worked with other mindset coaches and it just didn’t work out, and you really don’t know if you can EVER trust a coach again.

• You’re really not sure that you want to take the risk of investing a large sum of money without getting some concrete results first, and some valuable takeaways.

• You don’t have the time to spend six months in therapy to learn how to rapidly and effectively clear your emotions, or three years studying to become a yogi with a perfect ass to learn how to meditate and connect into your body.

How this all gets delivered…

ALL GROUP CALLS ARE ON ZOOM AND WILL BE RECORDED IN CASE YOU MISS A CALL

Group Program

✅ Starts 8pm Sydney time, 24 June 2026

✅ One Weekly 90 minute Group call for 4 Weeks - Value USD 3000

✅ Set aside 2 hours so you have some peaceful time to integrate following the call.

Ongoing Support for 8 Weeks - Value USD 750

✅ A safe-place for support in a WhatsApp group.

TOTAL VALUE of the group program is USD3750

VIP Program

✅ All of the above

✅ PLUS an additional 90 minute 1:1 individual call for 4 weeks - Value USD 4000

VIP Bonuses

✅ BONUS: 90 min “Dealing with Drama” Group Session

✅ Limited to max 4 participants - Value USD 1500

• We all have an inner victim that keeps us stuck in drama cycles and holds us back from living and making decisions from a place of sovereignty. In this 90 minute call we will release our inner victims’ limiting beliefs and integrate our inner power so we can move forward from a place of authority and fierce empowerment.

• In this 60-90 min group call we’ll learn how to deal with these, release the ties to the victim archetype that has these beliefs and integrate our new power.

TOTAL VALUE OF VIP PROGRAM PLUS THE VIP BONUSES = USD 9250

Pricing

If you want to join the group program, then the price is AUD $500

If you want dedicated 1:1 VIP transformation time with me then the VIP price is AUD $2000

Both of these are limited in numbers, buy here on my website → https://justinlodge.com/awaken

Or scan here on your mobile phone →

Terms and conditions and privacy policy can be found at justinlodge.com

But they’ve only just realised that they’ve lost their internal sense of direction and purpose.

That is what awakening looks like. A paradox that we cannot solve by thinking …

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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…

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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…

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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!

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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…

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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,…

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