← The Journey On Podcast
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- [00:07]
Warwick Schiller
Journey on Magic lies within the trails we ride. You're listening to the Journey On Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warrick is a horseman trainer, international clinician and author who helps empower horse people from all over the world with the skills, knowledge and mindsets needed to create trusting partnerships with their horses. Warrick offers a free seven day trial to his customers comprehensive online video library that includes hundreds of full length training videos and several home study courses@videos.war schiller.com.
- [00:41]
Shane Healy
Just because you see what it shows G'day everyone. Welcome back to the Journey On Podcast. I'm your host Warwick Schiller and my special guest this week. Guests there's two of them this week on the podcast are Shane Healy and Peter Low. So Shane and Peter co founded Pegasus connections in 2023 to provide veterans suffering with mental health issues some support, equine assisted therapy and advocacy and the qualifications that both Shane and Peter bring to the table for this particular thing are amazing. Shane first enlisted in the Australian army in 1995, serving in an elite infantry parachute regiment and a reserve Special forces soldier. Between 2004 and 2008, Shane was a private military contractor in Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Kurdistan and the United Arab Emirates where he initially trained Iraqi Special Forces. Shane was involved in many combat engagements. During the second Battle of Fallujah, Shane was also involved in a number of US Government programs throughout the Middle East. Shane was deployed twice through Afghanistan 2010 to 2011 and in 2012 as part of Special Operations Task Force 66 where he provided insurgent threat assessments. Shane's analytical efforts enabled numerous successful targeting operations of key leaders and disruption operations of IED networks. And that last sentence right there. Shane's analytical efforts enabled numerous successful targeting operations of key leaders and disruption of operations of IED networks. Basically Shane was in military intelligence and his job was to locate bomb makers people that that made like the IEDs, the roadside bombs and and Shane's story was actually featured in a book called Find Fix Finish by a guy named Ben McKelvey and it was about how Australia's Special Forces became enmeshed with the US Capture Kill program. But the title of the book Find Fix Finish basically sums up Shane's role there. Find find a target generated through human and signals intelligence. And that's what Shane did was the intelligence finding out where these guys were fix fix the target in a geographical or temporal location. So Shane did a lot of intelligence work figuring out daily patterns of these guys and where they might be and then finish, which is finish the target through Killer Capture. And the book starts out actually with Shane capturing one of the major bomb makers in the Middle East. And it ends up with Shane, after he was out of the army, admitting himself to a mental health facility suffering with severe ptsd. And since then, Shane's been quite an advocate of really being able to help veterans with ptsd. Peter, however, Peter has a master. This is. Peter's got something that I. She's got a list of qualifications that you probably may be the only person in the world that have these two, but she has a master's in social work and a master's in terrorism and security. And she spent many years doing social work in the juvenile justice system. And it was in the juvenile justice system she first came across some kids had been put in there on terrorism charges, and that kind of led her to investigate that. And these days she's really into helping, like I said, the veterans with the ptsd. And she's actually in later this year, she's. Well, actually next week she's going to either Iraq or Afghanistan. I can't remember. She says it in the interview. And then later in the year, she's heading to Ukraine to develop and train practitioners to deliver an equine assisted support and peer support program for veterans and their families in a number of locations in the Ukraine. So they're both doing great work. And I, both. I met both Peter and Shane at a thing I did in Australia this year at Outback Spectacular on the Gold coast called Mastery of the Horse. And Shane. And they talk about Shane. Both Shane and Peter in this interview talk about that. But, yeah, they walked up to the. I had a little booth there. They were selling the books and the Principles of Training book, and they both came up and introduced themselves and started telling me their story. And immediately I thought, oh, I've got to get these guys in the podcast. They know their stuff in. In the areas of expertise, probably as much as good as anybody in the world could. And, yeah, so glad to have on the podcast. I hugely enjoyed this conversation with them. I could have talked to him. You know, this is probably one of the longer podcasts I've done. It's two and a half hours and I usually try to pull it up around two hours and, you know, they're both on a roll and I just kind of let them go. But I could have talked to him for five hours, just. Shane's got some amazing stories and Peter has such a depth of knowledge in the social work sphere that, yeah, it was just so good to talk to him. And I, and I hope you guys enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Shane Healy and Peter Lowe, welcome to the Journey on podcast.
- [06:07]
Warwick Schiller
Hey, Warwick, how you doing?
- [06:09]
Peter Low
Thank you.
- [06:10]
Shane Healy
Good, good. So, you know, I don't know much about you guys. I met you briefly at Outback Spectacular at mastery of the horse and the little brief time I spent with you, I thought, wow, these guys have got terribly interesting stories to tell and how I might unravel, that is, let's, let's talk about what are you guys doing? What do you guys currently do at the moment? And then I want to unravel the path to how you got there. And let's start with you, Peter. Just, I've. I've had. I've had a couple, two couples on here before and I found it's easier if I can badger the witness, you know. You're up, Peter.
- [06:54]
Peter Low
Go for it. Yeah, I don't really know how to give a short answer to that. So I guess a good friend of mine once talked about when, when he was leaving public service for a while, the idea of a portfolio career. And I quite like that because I feel like that's what I have right now, a bit of a portfolio career. So I do a whole bunch of random things, it seems. Obviously Shane and I together have started Pegasus Connections, which is an equine therapy program. So that's one of the things that I'm really focused on at the moment, is pursuing more of that sort of work. I also have my own consultancy where I work mostly internationally, but also domestically on countering violent extremism mostly. But I also end up a little bit in legal, in the legal space, giving reports for court for terrorism offenders and things like that. And then I do some random stuff just I guess to keep myself connected. So, as a social worker by trade and spending most of my career working with juveniles and young people, I am now an official community visitor. So I visit kids in out of home care facilities and just, I guess it's just that independent oversight to make sure that they've got what they need and that things are happening for them. And I do a bit of teaching at TAFE in youth work just to, I guess, share some of my skills and experience with up and coming youth workers, kind of it in a nutshell.
- [08:20]
Shane Healy
Yeah, well, you kind of gave the game away there because I was just going to go with the equine assisted therapy thing and then I was going to get into all the terrorism stuff. But anyway, you've mentioned it already. Press. Hold on that for a Second, Shane, tell us what you're up to. I guess you're up to the same thing.
- [08:35]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So I come at things a little bit differently. After spending over 20 years in the military, spending the majority of it in the Middle east, either in Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other countries, I had a lot of difficulties in transition, both with identity and injury. And then that led me on a new journey, which wound up in the Pegasus connections, where I decided when I was in hospital, if I could use my story and to tell it to help others to get better, other veterans, then that's what I would do. And I first kind of spoke to a journalist in August 2022, and literally my phone blew up. That guys that I'd worked with saying I thought it was only me asking about hospital. And that really lit the fuse to actually get in and roll my sleeves up and start helping. So that's really kind of my drive and passion now, is getting out there and giving a lot of veterans a voice that don't have it or just a phone call. Again, I get a lot of messages and calls from either guys that I serve with or just other veterans and just asking questions about how was. How was hospital or DVA or the veteran assistance. And so that's really kind of my drive. And then I actually found going bush again. I grew up in the country, really cleared my head up. Getting away from blue light, getting away from communication devices, falling asleep by a campfire, waking up with cows and horses really fixed me up internally, really regrounded me. And then I saw the difference in myself and realized that's the future. And that was kind of, for me, the start of if I've got to start telling everyone, you know, just sit by a campfire, just come out, just immerse yourself with around cows, horses, the outdoors. And that's where we are now.
- [10:43]
Shane Healy
Tell us a bit more. You dove in the deep end right there. There's so much to unpack there. But tell us about Pegasus connections. How long's that been going for? And is it just for veterans?
- [11:00]
Warwick Schiller
Officially, it's still a few months, really probably six, seven months, start of the year, unofficially, kind of longer, because a lot of it is based on our experience, what we know through meeting people and talking to people that found similar peace, similar quiet, that look for a similar outlet or that have been through, you know, like I tell a lot of people a couple of things. One, you don't know what you don't know. So you need people that you trust in a safe environment to help you with anger or other things. That was one of my big issues. Or a lot of guys like myself don't want to sit in a room with four white walls and talk to a stranger. They would prefer to get out. And I know for me, and it's really starting to work is, you know, working with a horse or working in the outdoors is much more peaceful than sitting with a stranger in a room. And you know, you're not open to that environment. So. And then once me and Peter don't do anything by halves. So once we're in, we're right in. Which is I guess what led us to meet you. Reading, researching. We went to the opera house. What's that? What's his name? He's coming back out.
- [12:24]
Shane Healy
Oh, okay.
- [12:25]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. You know.
- [12:25]
Shane Healy
Yeah, buddy keeps.
- [12:26]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, went and saw him. Yeah. Read all these stuff. So when we say we don't do anything by halves, we are all in and seek out others, other experiences, others for advice.
- [12:41]
Peter Low
So Shane's right. We've been going, I guess officially now for about 12 months in terms of actually delivering, but it's been a project that's been in the work for us for some time. Obviously lots of work stuff has got in the way. Our focus is primarily veterans and their families. So Shane obviously comes from being a veteran himself. But my dad's a 50 year Air Force veteran, so I was what's called an Air Force brat. So I grew up moving around a lot. My dad was away a lot. So really recognizing that it's not just veterans, that it impacts their families as well and that a lot of the reasons that so many of our veterans find themselves in separated relationships and children find themselves with, you know, attachment issues. And that's not to put a judgment on it, but a lot of children have those kinds of issues in terms of relationships where parents are gone for periods of time. So we really want to focus on that. I guess the work extends a little bit. Like that's our primary focus, but we don't want to turn anyone away. So we have recently run a group for neurodivergent kids. We're getting a bit more involved and we'll be attending a police and emergency services equine games. So really recognizing that while first responders can be similar to veterans in a lot of ways in the sense that they are under a lot of the same pressure in their, in their work environments, there are some very distinct differences. And we've attended a few groups now that's had veterans and first responders together and I think both of those groups feel like while there are some similarities, there's actually a lot of differences. So we're looking at managing that separately. And Shane's right. When we do things, we don't do things by half. So we've joined with a couple of other equine therapy services across Australia to create a charity called who's to Healing. The purpose of that charity is that we recognise that a lot of funding and resourcing goes to charitable organisations in this country, but also that just in starting what we've been doing, we've had people contact us from all around Australia and we don't want to turn anyone away, but we can't provide services everywhere, so we're looking to join with like minded services. A big thing for me is quality of service, so I don't ever want to refer someone to a service if I'm not convinced that they're offering a certain standard. So one of the things that Hooves to Healing is looking to do is to set a bit of a standard and to do some research. So we're actually looking at getting some unis on board to evaluate effectiveness, because that is something that's missing in this space is actually, you know, what is the effectiveness of this and how can we make sure that we're delivering to a particular standard, that we're doing no harm, but also that we're making sure people get the very best they can out of services. So we've sort of taken quite a diversion on the way there, but our primary focus is definitely veterans and families. It's both of our lived experience, so.
- [15:29]
Shane Healy
Right. And I want to talk about those lived experiences. Why don't we start with you, Peter? Because you've got. You've got a couple of degrees that I've never actually heard of anybody having both of those degrees. One of those degrees, I've probably never heard of many people having it, but having the one and the other one. What are the. What are these degrees you have?
- [15:49]
Peter Low
So I have a Master's in social work, couples and family therapy, and then I have a master's in Terrorism and Security studies.
- [15:57]
Shane Healy
I've had a number of people on the podcast who have masters in social work, but I don't think I've ever had someone has a degree in. What was it? Terrorism and.
- [16:07]
Peter Low
And security studies.
- [16:09]
Shane Healy
Security studies. And so what led you into that?
- [16:13]
Peter Low
That's such a great question. Look, there's two things fundamentally, context. So I was working for New South Wales Youth justice at the time. I'd done my master's in social work. And I'd progressed through the ranks and I was in a director role. And at the time we had a number of young people that had been charged with terrorism offences in New South Wales in the directorate that I was working for. And somehow I kind of got allocated this small piece of work to look at and sort of think about what we might do with them, recognizing that there was maybe similarities and differences with our general population. And I guess then the other reason is inherent to me, I guess, that striving for sort of doing things well, you know, some people would say perfectionism, but I've walked away from that a little bit. Um, and so I wanted to know. I wanted to know that the decisions that I was going to make about this were well informed. Um, and so I went back and did a master's. Um. People say it's really challenging, but I kind of. Honestly, I look at it as a lazy way to learn because someone gives you the kind of information that you need and you just kind of have to, you know, deal with that information. There's such a vast amount out there that someone was going to feed me what I needed to know basically to get up to speed really quickly. So, yeah, that kind of led me to thinking I really need to have this grounded in theory and evidence. And so I did the masters as a way of making sure that when I was making these decisions or directing this sort of work, I was doing it from a place of being informed about it and not just sort of guessing. So, yeah, it sort of doesn't seem like they go together, but actually, the more I learn about terrorism and the space of violent extremism, the more I realize that it is so connected to everything I know about social work, about relationships, about belonging, about social systems. So, you know, Brofenbrenner's ecological theory underpins what I do in both social work and in the terrorism space. So I find it quite a nice connection between the two of them. And I think it's really helped me to bring a different perspective to a space of terrorism that's been so law enforcement, so intelligence, so military led for a while and really starting to look at the more human connectedness, social side of it.
- [18:30]
Shane Healy
And are you looking more at, like, the social side of it? You're looking more at the social side of it. That's the causes of radicalization.
- [18:40]
Peter Low
So I look at it, I guess, in my work and I can probably just talk about it from the things that I've done. I've looked at it from a more strategic and systemic level, but I'm also looking at it from an individual level. So I do actually do assessments on individuals, I do work on intervention with people whether they've committed terrorism offences, whether they're vulnerable, whether people are concerned about them. So I work at an individual level but also I've done a lot of work in countries at more strategic, systemic kind of change that needs to happen to address the more macro drivers of violent extremism. And it's one of those really interesting things that the interplay is so very context specific. There are macro drivers, things like justice and a sense of injustice or grievance and then there are sort of more micro drivers or internal drivers and it's a very distinct interplay for each person. So just because you're in a context where there is lots of injustice or grievance doesn't necessarily mean you're going to go on to be a violent extremist and vice versa. So for me it's fascinating because every single person that I've talked to has a very different sort of mix of all of these drivers. What has happened to them at different points in their life that has created the kind of belief structure that they see the world through now. And that's really all I'm looking at for them. Yeah.
- [19:59]
Shane Healy
Right. Sounds like you started out with youth offenders and now you've worked with all ages.
- [20:06]
Peter Low
Pretty much, yes, pretty much.
- [20:08]
Shane Healy
Shane, you know a little bit about terrorism. You've had some first hand experience. Let's start with, let's start with that because there's something you said in Indigo I want to get to, but I think I want to go to your military experience. So when did you first join the military?
- [20:28]
Warwick Schiller
1995, little 19 year old.
- [20:32]
Shane Healy
And at the time, what did you think you were going to do?
- [20:36]
Warwick Schiller
So ever since I can remember I wanted to be a soldier and go to war, test myself. So that was always the goal. So joining the army was always the dream. So. And it was just about, I had some excellent instructors initially and so it was just about becoming the best soldier every day that I could. And I woke up every day happy.
- [21:02]
Shane Healy
Okay. And then somehow you ended up spending a few years in Iraq and Afghanistan. How did you, how did it, how did it go from joining the army as a 19 year old? And what was your progression from there to ended up, we're going to talk about what you ended up doing.
- [21:19]
Warwick Schiller
So like everyone, 911 was the pivotal driver. We had the Sydney Olympics prior to that in 2000, so that was my first exposure to counterterrorism and anti terrorism. Then there was actually a prominent terrorist group that had a bit of a footprint in Sydney. So in 99, going to some of those briefs, I started to learn about Jamar Islamina and Al Qaeda then. And then obviously 911 was a pivotal moment. You know, I just remember getting some messages and it was weird because text messaging was new back at 01. So reading a message on a phone and it was like, turn the telly on. And so I still remember being at work, watching the second plane hit the twin tower. And then everyone just went to work, you know, and the boss just went, we're at war. Because the Australian Prime Minister was in New York on 9 11. And so it really hit John Howard because he could see it and smell it. He got rushed to a bunker. So he pledged the Australian Defence Force to George Bush straight away. So we were the first country in a coalition that we were at war under the Anzus treaty. And so they locked a lot of Sydney down and we were on kind of a footage to see what was next. Then when the guys went into Afghanistan, I missed that. I got injured and then I missed the initial push into Iraq and thought I'd miss my opportunity to go to war. And then I was actually at a barbecue with some guys that I did some commando training with and they were getting ready to go to train Iraqi commandos in as private contractors. And they said that there was a couple of spots still up and did I want to go. And that was on the Saturday night and I flew out to Iraq on the Thursday.
- [23:20]
Shane Healy
Were you still in the army then?
- [23:23]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I had to take leave without pay. And you have to take leave without paid.
- [23:29]
Shane Healy
You also tell them what you're going to do or you don't tell them what. Yeah, you asked for permission.
- [23:35]
Warwick Schiller
There was a lot of. Yeah, there was a lot of guys. Well, all the guys that I went were Australian military and there were a number of Australians, because again, at that stage, no one foresaw the long global war on terror. Afghanistan in 04 had was pretty quiet. And I really mean quiet because. And that's why they got to pull all those troops out. And if you remember, George Bush called, you know, mission accomplished pretty quick in Iraq. So that's why it was. We were going in to train the Iraqi army because they were going to take over and the wars were done. So I looked at it like, if I'd have known that we were going to spend the next 10 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, I probably wouldn't have gone and do the contracting initially, but at that stage I thought that was going to be my only opportunity. We had the Commonwealth Games coming up in Melbourne, so a lot of us knew that we were going to come back and get ready for that. But I wound up getting recruited across to a US government contract and stayed in that area for about four years.
- [24:40]
Shane Healy
So that was back in the army.
- [24:43]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I end up working with the US Joint Special Operations and some of their other intelligence agencies and then did some other private contracting. And then I found my, I actually found my niche. What I really wanted to do in the army, which was intelligence. So I applied to service transfer across to Australian Army Intelligence Corps and then as soon as that got approved, I came back to Australia and went back into the army.
- [25:13]
Shane Healy
We started out, you're a 19 year old going in the army and then we're working with the Americans. You sound like you might have been in some sort of a group by then.
- [25:25]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, so I went up in the Second Battle of Fallujah working with US Navy SEALs and some other, other guys. It's, it was an interesting time because I had initially no idea about US politics, but it was when the John Kerry, George Bush 04 election was coming up. So John Kerry said he was going to pull all troops out of Iraq. So George Bush had to see like, you know, mission accomplished, the war's over. He was restrict reducing the troop numbers but increasing the contracting roles. So in that 05 period I was doing stuff that I would wind up doing later in an army context, but it was purely so he could tell the American public that he was pulling troops out. So I was in the right place at the right time and really got exposed to some like real tip of the speed, human intelligence kind of targeting operations. And then that just lit the fuse for what I wound up doing for the next 15 years in the Australian Special Operations.
- [26:32]
Shane Healy
Why don't you, why don't you tell us about what you ended up doing for the next 15 years?
- [26:37]
Warwick Schiller
So I came back and I was in the Australian Special Operations Command as a intelligence operator, targeting analyst. So I would go out and identify key insurgent leaders, bomb makers, facilitators, and then build a target, pack up, build a pattern of life up and then brief to the boss. Then we'd go and execute an operation. Sometimes I'd go, sometimes I wouldn't and then I'd come back and do the interviews and debriefs of the those terrorists. So initially in Afghanistan it was Taliban, but I was the first intelligence operator into Iraq in 2014 for the counter ISIS mission. I was the first intelligence operator into the Caliphate, recruiting sources from ISIS to start those operations. We retook Al Assad air base in early 15, which was, you know, ISIS territory. So. Yeah, so that's when I really got into that tip of the spear of counterterrorism operations.
- [27:49]
Shane Healy
I just wrote down some things, but I can't read my own writing. You said something about his. You said some terms in there about, like, assembling, like a. Like, intel on someone, and there was something about a brief. What was that? Yep, because that sounded fascinating.
- [28:06]
Warwick Schiller
So. So because we work very surgically, it's not. It's you. We've got to affect a network. So there's no point just getting the little fighters. You're not going to shake the battle space. You're not going to affect anything. How so my job was to find out who, how are they getting their ammunition, how are they getting their explosives, how are they recruiting, who the commander is, who's instructing them on how to use their weapons, who's making decisions, identify those people, and then put that together in a brief, which was called a chapel, joint priority effects list. And then that would get approved and put on a matrix. And then we would go out. And then I would also have to build up a pattern of life study. So where is this individual? Where does he live, what's his phone number, you know, what's his family links, where does he go during the day, where does he sleep? All these kind of things. It's called a pattern of life study. And then we would look at how we can interdict him, where it was the safest to do, and then conduct those operations.
- [29:14]
Shane Healy
So a pattern of life study. How. How are you getting that information if you're not boots on the ground? Is this drone stuff? Is this informants? Are you?
- [29:28]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So I would. I would have some local sources to get information off I would use. So one of the things I would have to do is essentially build a spreadsheet of what do I want to know and how can I find it, and who might have that information. So if I'm trying to lock down what compound he lives in, I might task a drone to fly over and look for movement in compound. So you're counting men, women, children, things like that. I might want to try to talk to the local police chief, to anyone who has. Is in the vicinity of that village or goes into that village. But you want to do it so it's not out of the ordinary. Like if I just get someone. So if I'm trying to find something about where you live or what you do in your place, if I just get someone from New York to go there, it's straight away you go, who's this bloke? I don't know him, he's new. And you're. Yeah. Whereas if I find out, you know, you might have a farrier that comes in once every two weeks and does your horses. So in that person's pattern of life mixes in to understand what your pattern of life is. So I might have a chat with him and go, so, you know, who do you go to? So don't just ask about you. I might ask about his whole job. And then he would go, oh, yeah, you know, I, Warwick Schiller and Fred and Barney and I go, yeah, so. And ask some questions about all of them. But really I'm just trying to identify about you because I'm trying to confirm that that's where you live and that you're there at night and what time of day or night are the least amount of people in that location.
- [31:11]
Shane Healy
And these, these guys do these. All these guys all have one particular function because you ended up focusing on one thing. And these were kind of a bit of everybody.
- [31:23]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, so what we had a bit of a. Or the whole community had rid of a shift in 2010, where it used to be called cutting their head off the snake. And what they realized, like, even when they got bin Laden or whatever, that someone just takes over. So it was about who do you. Who's the most influential person in a network? And they looked at. When Rudy Giuliani took out the Mafia in New York, they went after the logisticians, the. That middle management who actually get things done, because the bosses of any organization really just give directions to someone who then tasks people to get the job done. So if you take the workers out, they just find more workers. If you take the boss out, they're just a new boss. But who is the key people in that network that have the influence, that give the direction, not just the instruction, the direction. And if we can target them, so the people that give them the weapons, the people that give them their training, the people that give them their orders, then we're going to have an effect on that whole network. And once we started doing that, both in Afghanistan, Iraq, globally, things changed.
- [32:35]
Shane Healy
So, yeah, I remember the story about the Mafia. They'd locked the Mafia boss up and he would just run the whole operation from jail. And you haven't really?
- [32:43]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, that's right.
- [32:43]
Shane Healy
You haven't really got anywhere.
- [32:46]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So the key book for that is Rudy Giuliani's Zero Tolerance, which is a shame to what's happened to him now. But if you really want to understand, even if in business, if you want to understand how business dynamics or influence, That's a great book because there's, you know, micromanagers. And at the end of the day, like, I remember being in a meeting once and there was all these senior army officers and right through the ranks, and they said, like, who's actually in charge? Like, who's the commanders? And all these officers put their hands up, and he goes, well, you're not. You actually don't do anything. You're just a manager. Your job is to ensure that they, pointing to us at the back, can get the job done because they're the ones that are ensuring that the actual job gets completed. And so that's. You've got to identify what a leader is and what a manager is and where you sit in that organization.
- [33:40]
Shane Healy
And so you ended up, in the end, targeting bomb makers. How did. How did all that come about? How did you end up focusing on that?
- [33:49]
Warwick Schiller
So again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that was the key piece because it became an IED battle. So they were the most dangerous and lethal people in the battle space. And if you could take out either them or their effect, then that. It's called freedom of movement. So there they were trying to IED or put bombs on roads and stuff, which would restrict our and the normal armies and the Afghan army's freedom of movement. If we can take that out, then we can get around. And because it became about hearts and minds. So we're trying to empower the Afghans, build them villages, build them schools, give them things. And the Taliban's trying to restrict that so then they can say to the villagers, they're lying. They're not doing anything. You really want us to do it. And so when the bomb makers became that key piece in the battle space, they were our number one targets. And it really ramped up in 2011 to a point where in early 2011, I actually caught a senior bomb maker by myself.
- [35:00]
Shane Healy
Like, so, okay, let's differentiate from that, because. So what you had been doing was locating them and have, like, a drone strike or a team going, is that what you were doing?
- [35:15]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everything is different because you got to look at. It's like a game of chess. So if you take this piece out, what's the board going to look like and what's the effect we're trying to have? So one of the operations I did was literally starting a rumor amongst the Afghan army that we were going to go to a certain location and we knew that the Afghan army in this area was talking to the Taliban. That rumor got to the Taliban and that leader left and went to Pakistan. So it's what effect we're trying to have in that area at that time. So in certain times it would be to stand back and. And build those briefs, and at other times it would be to get your hands on and actually get in there, because I had the information, I had the fidelity, and I knew what we were trying to achieve.
- [36:06]
Shane Healy
Right, so the senior bomb maker that you actually. Did you capture him, I guess. Yep, yep, yep.
- [36:14]
Warwick Schiller
Went up to Bellucci Valley and literally. Yeah, got him myself.
- [36:20]
Shane Healy
Was it nighttime? Daytime, can you say? I mean, no, no, it was day.
- [36:23]
Warwick Schiller
So I'd been trying to get our guys to go up to there to get him for about two days. He was planting bombs targeting the conventional Australian soldiers up there. His name was Haji Hamdullah. And again, you know, I was trying to get our guys to go there, and they went to another location to do something else. And one of the guys, the Australian army guys from that patrol base rang me up and he said, mate, you know, he's here again. He's driving around, he's yelling at the locals because he was really putting a fear campaign on the locals, telling him not to talk to the Australians. Anyway. So, yeah, he said, this is where he's at. He's in his compound. Gave me the pattern of life and that. And I kind of got a bit angry. And my boss goes, what's up? And I said, look, our mates up there and they've gone off. And anyway, the boss left and about five minutes later came in and goes, all right, well, off you go. And I said, what do you mean? They said, go and get your mate. There's a helicopter waiting for you. And I was like, what? And they said, go and get your gear and go and get your mate. So 10 minutes later, I'm in a helicopter flying up to Baloochee Valley, and 10 minutes later I've got him cable tied and hooded and in the back of a helicopter flying him back to the detention facility.
- [37:42]
Shane Healy
Just like that?
- [37:44]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, well, yeah, pretty much. He was. He was big as about 6 foot 3 and 120, 25 kilos. But yeah, literally we landed. He wasn't expecting it. No one really knew about it. And we landed probably 30 meters from him. He's turned around. I've come over and then taken him down, cable tied him and then. Yeah, Frog marched him back to helicopter. We were on the ground for no more than six minutes.
- [38:08]
Shane Healy
So he's basically watched the helicopter land and thought, what are these blokes doing?
- [38:12]
Warwick Schiller
Yep. Yeah. He was like. And he had a bit of an attitude because he'd been detained once before by the local soldiers and released and that was a big part of his thing. He thought he was a bit untouchable because in Afghanistan you've only got four days from the moment you detained someone to prove in an Afghan court that they were a member of the insurgency and they couldn't get assets up there to get him removed so they had to let him go. So he was a bit like on untouchable. And normally there's some indicators if there's going to be an operation like. And there was nothing going on so there was nothing to make him think that there was a helicopter coming up to detain him. So when we landed, yeah, it was. And I knew speed and surprise is the key so he was going to have some shock and it's to really take advantage of that. And yeah, it wasn't until we were about half an hour later, we're in an interview room and he goes, is it a dream? Will I wake up? Like it happened that quick. So. And that's the end. That's the aim you're trying to achieve.
- [39:22]
Shane Healy
And he was a kind of a key figure in the bomb making thing, was he?
- [39:27]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, yeah. So he was in that area. He was the number one. But. But the interesting thing about that was he started just spilling his guts in the interview room and he gave us up. The next day there was a senior A leader meeting for a lot of the senior leaders and he gave us that location. So the next day we were able to capture three more Taliban leaders on the. As a result of that.
- [39:54]
Shane Healy
Wow. You know, I'm sorry, I'm going to speeches. So you're thinking of something. I don't know much about the Middle. I mean I, I was going to say I don't know much about the Middle East. Sorry, I shouldn't say it that way. The only thing I know about the Middle east is what gets reported in our news and I don't believe any of it. I don't believe anything that's in the news really, because you can look at the same story and it's two different stories and what's the real one? What Was the, on the ground? What, what, what was the, the feeling of the, the local Afghans? Did they want you guys there? Did they want the Taliban out of there? Were they just want to get on with their life? What's, what was, what's the average Afghan at the time? Because who knows what it is now? But what was the average.
- [40:46]
Warwick Schiller
So I, yeah, I love history, so. Which is actually what made me very good at that job because I'm naturally very inquisitive and one of my jobs is to go and have those meetings with those senior leaders. And it was funny when I was there the first time I was clean shaven all the time and they were really kind of standoffish when I went back in 2012 and I had a beard and I had gray in my beard. They loved it. And I said to one of the interpreters, what's going on? And he said, oh well, because you've got gray in your beard, they think that you're old and wise now and have chats with you. So I thought that was funny. But because in their world that's one of their indicators is when you've got gray, you've lived around and because their quality of life and you know, not many of them do reach, you know, their 40s or 50s, you know, you are one of the older and they're usually the elders of the tribe. So I remember sitting in a village of Kalitak up in between Kandahar and Aruzgan. Now the other key piece is this is where the Taliban was born. This is where Al Qaeda's training camps were and this is where the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai came from too. So it was very central area and especially the tribal dynamics. And we're sitting in having a chat and one of the leaders, the village elders goes and gets, tells the little kid to run off. He comes back with this old rifle and they're pointing over the hill and it's called a balazan. And it was an Old English 303. And he's telling me about like when the troops come over that hill. And the way he's saying it, it was like it happened last week. It was 1890s when the English redcoats came over that hill and this is one of their rifles.
- [42:32]
Shane Healy
And.
- [42:32]
Warwick Schiller
But he was telling it like you were telling me what happened last week. And then my interpreter goes to me, Mr. Shane, like you got to remember you might wear a watch, but we have time. And that's the biggest thing that I got out of the Middle east is there. To them, 100 years is yesterday. Like to say, something's going to happen tomorrow. And in their culture, and this was the hardest thing I had to explain to the Americans, Even Back in 05 is in our culture. If I say, yeah, Warwick, I'll get it tomorrow, promise you I'll do it. If I don't do it, it's just kind of whatever. In our culture, in the Muslim culture, a promise is a blood oath. So if I say to you, Warwick, you know, I need you to do that new promise, if you don't do it, I'll never believe you again. So they have this built in clause called inshallah. So I'll say, you know, Warwick, I need you to do this inshallah, which means it's God's will. If I get there, I get there because God wanted me there. And if you don't understand that, then it becomes a bit frustrating. But I fell in love with the culture, I fell in love with the history of the place, which made my experience much enjoyable. Where others got frustrated by it, I would sit there for two hours and have a chat with. I might only want a little bit of information, but I was actually fascinated about the history lesson I was getting. Or I remember when the Russians did this or this happened and I enjoyed that. So for me, talking even Iraq to the Bedouins, I was in heaven. I could do that all day. And I just found them extremely hospitable and amazing people. And the other interesting thing about, you know, the Afghanistan, Iraq, those villages, it's like the place that time forgot and they're all happy.
- [44:26]
Shane Healy
I was going to ask you about that because the third world countries I've been to, people that had the least, were the happiest people I've ever seen.
- [44:35]
Warwick Schiller
Yep, they're all smiling, they're giggling, they're laughing, they're having an absolute like, and, and it's such a. Like, I remember we were sitting there watching a compound once and it was in the snow and the guy we're watching gets up, it's about 5:30 in the morning, walks through the snow barefoot, goes to the toilet and walks back. And one of the guys sitting there goes, did you see that? And we're like, yeah. And he goes, we've never beaten them. Like that was out of control. But that's their life, that's how, that's what they do. Like, and, and they get up and they farm their dates or they, you know, they're goat herders and they're, they take Great pride in it. They're proud of it and they're happy. And there's so many takeaways to that when you think having an iPhone and Internet, you're supposed to be happy. But I just think there's a happy medium, and I think they're on the better side of it in some ways now.
- [45:28]
Shane Healy
You know, I saw a really interesting. It was a reel on Instagram the other day. Instagram is so good with the algorithm. Like, the stuff that I get now, I only get one type of stuff, and it's usually personal growth type stuff, whatever. But this guy was saying, if you have a guy who's a. He's got an addiction to gambling, and he's gambling all the time. And you say, why are you gambling? No, because I want to win a million dollars. You said, or $10 million. Let's go with something hefty. They said, okay, well, we'll give you $10 million, but you can. You got two choices. We'll either give you $10 million and you can never gamble ever again, or you can gamble all you like, but you are guaranteed not to win $10 million. And he won't. He won't take either. Neither option is good for him, because there's something to that. There's something to the uncertainty of it.
- [46:23]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I think there's definitely that dopamine dump that people get addicted to, which, you know, this is really Peter's area. But it was understanding their happiness that helped me realize that my happy place, too, is that outdoor environment. Like, the more you take away, the better it is for you. And. Yeah, I just. Yeah, but that was the biggest thing for me is. And it's the biggest misrepresentation of those areas, of just how amazing they are.
- [46:59]
Shane Healy
You know, that was one of the things I was really interested to talk to you about was, you know, this is not Fox News or cnn. This is someone who's actually been there, lived there. It's not a version, you know, it's. Yeah, it's. I feel like there's no spin on this. So I was really interested to know what. What they were like, because I have enjoyed the time I've spent in countries that, you know, could be a bit Third world Ish. Peter, when Shane was talking there for a little while and he talked about culture, can you. Can you talk to how much, say, culture impacts terrorism?
- [47:48]
Peter Low
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's probably a whole nother podcast, right?
- [47:51]
Shane Healy
I don't know how. I don't know if that story is an inch Deep and a mile wider or an inch wide and a mile deep. I just, it was. It's just something that when Shane said that, I'm like, yeah, that's got to be a part of it.
- [48:03]
Peter Low
So I guess distilling it down for me. And I'm always trying to break all of this kind of theory and like messaging and all the information down to, as Shane would call it, the. So what, right? Like what does it actually mean and what do we learn from it? And I think when you say culture, I mean really it's about how we as individuals view the world, isn't it? And that is shaped by all of our experiences. So all the things that happened to us over our lifetime, but also intrinsically what we're like as a person inside. So which is also to some extent modeled by some of our experiences as well. So it's this complex interplay between the world around us and the person that we are.
- [48:44]
Shane Healy
Nature versus nature.
- [48:45]
Peter Low
And we're constantly. Yeah, but I don't think it's. It's not, it's not a set position. It fluctuates over time and you learn more about what happens to you internally, which impacts the way you engage with the unit, with the world around you, which impacts the way the world around you influences. So it's this complex and dynamic interplay all the time, I think, the way we view the world. And it's interesting, you know, listening to Shane talk about that. I lived in Iraq for about six months last year and I'm about to go back on Sunday for a while and, you know, hearing all of Shane's stories in the years before that about his experiences over there and having, you know, this idea of what it's going to be like and getting there and realizing. And it's funny when you use the word third world countries because some like, to me, I already start to think there's a lot of value in that. And who's. Whose term is that and who owns it? I'm very Foucault a little bit in a language with that sort of stuff. It's like we own that term as though third world is a bad thing. And from what Shane, and exactly what Shane was saying, you know, the majority of people that I engage with in all kinds of places in Iraq who have been through all kinds of things throughout their life, the way they view the world is not the same as the way we view it. And so, you know, the things that impact on them in their daily life and how they experience and enjoy life and Their notion of what success is. You know, there's a very good book called the Four Agreements. And it was one of those moments in time where, I guess for me, that was sort of the start of me trying to understand all of this a bit better from my personal perspective. It was all very theoretical to me and I could apply it to other people. But, you know, I just left 15 years in government, you know, it hadn't ended well. My 14 year marriage had ended. I'd owned a really lovely home and had all these plans for the future. It was all in the toilet. And I was really starting to, I guess, doubt who I was and all the things I knew and my place in the world and all of that sort of stuff. And it really didn't make much sense to me. And I hit a kangaroo. As Shane will tell you, I can do when I'm driving on roads and I had to take my car to get serviced. I managed to get an Uber.
- [50:47]
Shane Healy
Can you just stop there for a second? Because this is not just an Australian podcast. So for the rest of the world, when Peter said, I hit a kangaroo, that doesn't mean she walked up, up to kangaroo and punched it. I mean, she was driving on the road and a kangaroo jumped out in front of her.
- [51:03]
Peter Low
They do. And they don't always jump out in front of you. They can jump out beside you. They're tricky little creatures. Yeah.
- [51:08]
Warwick Schiller
When she says she can find a kangaroo, Warwick, I am not lying. I can. We can drive down the same road to where we do our work at Chapman. I cannot see kangaroos for 30 trips. Yeah, she can do a trip and there'll be 20.
- [51:23]
Peter Low
He spanned me from driving kangaroo magnet.
- [51:26]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, it's funny.
- [51:28]
Shane Healy
Okay, sorry to interrupt your story. So he hit a kangaroo. You didn't punch him in the nose. You actually ran into.
- [51:32]
Peter Low
He didn't punch him in the nose. But my car had to go to get fixed and. And I got an Uber and the Uber driver. And as I do, I'm a bit like Shane. I'm inquisitive, not so much about history, but about people. I really like to understand people. And I was just chatting to him and he was a veterinarian who had ended up very seriously addicted. As he was telling me, is quite common for vets. There's quite some significant mental health issues in the veteran veterinarian space as well as veteran space. Anyway, long story short, he happened to say, you know, you should get this book. And normally I would pay something like that off, but I did, and I got it. And I read it and I. It made so much sense to me about the different ways that we view the world and how. How easy it is to take on these other expectations, whether they be family, friends, society, community, culture that we don't necessarily agree to, but we take them on. And it's sort of insidious in some ways. The expectations in other countries, and maybe even some of, you know, we talk about those less developed or perhaps less Western might be a nice way of saying it, countries is that they. The agreements that they have that are intrinsic to them, that are intrinsic to the way they view the world, are not the same as the agreement agreements we have. And, you know, for them, it's about the way they live their life, how they engage with others. Are they meaningful and purposeful? Do they add value? They are not. And, you know, this is my very Western perspective of what I have seen. They are not as individualistic in nature, much more collective and community. And I look at the similarities in some of them. I mean, you know, I've been to Iraq. I've done extensive work in. In Kenya. I've been there very many times. Love the culture, love the community, love the people. My eldest daughter is Polynesian. So again, very strong culture. Shane's got indigenous Australian heritage. Again, very strong cultural connection. And they view the world as connectedness. They don't view the world as individualistic. And we were driving along one day in a car with a. With a girlfriend of mine who I met in Iraq, and there were all these kids with their heads. They're standing up in the back of a vehicle with their heads out the sunroof. And she. She's from Switzerland and she said to me, you'd be surprised how many kids die that way in Iraq, which to us is sort of. We would put in many rules and regulations and we would make sure that that's outlawed, and we would put in all these control mechanisms because we value every individual life the way they see it. And it's kind of that. That theme that Shane was saying, it's. It's God's will. They live their life and they live it in a way that they enjoy. And there's a freedom in knowing that whatever's happening is meant to happen because it's destined to be. I'm not religious, but I appreciate the spirituality of that. And they also are very connected to each other. So it's. The relationships are important. The relationships that they have with their families, with others, with people in their communities, the way they're viewed by Other people in their communities is very important. So I think this worldview is very different. And the work that I've been doing in Iraq is working on repatriating Iraqi citizens from camps in northeast Syria. So the Iraqi government is working very hard on that. So I'm working with them to try and support that repatriation and how that works internally. When a lot of these people come back to Iraq and looking at the sorts of drivers that, you know, that cause the kind of fracture in society. And like Shane was saying, you know, it's intergenerational in a way that we can't possibly understand, especially in Australia. We don't have that length of history in our Western culture. We certainly have it in our indigenous culture, but we don't see the kind of length of history of some of those issues and those kind of cultural and community sort of, I guess, disputes, really. But we see the world very differently. We're very focused on each individual and each individual's rights and maybe less focused on individual responsibility. And I think if I was going to boil it down, I think sometimes there's these groups of people who look more at their individual responsibility as being most important, and there's other groups of people who look at their individual rights as being most important. And I think sometimes when those two things don't work, like when you get one particular view impacting on another, and they're fundamentally different, I think that's when we get a lot of conflict.
- [55:55]
Warwick Schiller
I think the biggest difference is the west has forgotten. There's that saying it takes a village to raise a child.
- [56:01]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [56:02]
Warwick Schiller
And that's still very strong in those areas. The west has forgotten that.
- [56:08]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [56:09]
Warwick Schiller
The child gets raised by an institution or online now, you know, where you still go to India, you go to Afghanistan, you go to Iraq, you go to Northern Territory with the indigenous communities. The grandparents raised the kids so the parents can work, and that brings you family values. That brings that connection, that brings that history, that brings that culture together. And we don't do that in the west, and that's why we're so fractured, because you're not grounded in any sort of family ideology or family.
- [56:40]
Peter Low
Yeah, well, it's connection, isn't it? And I mean, you know, just to sort of bring it back, Warwick, the first few. Few podcasts of yours, and the reason that we were so drawn to you is you're. You're constantly talking about connection. And for me, I mean, even in the work that I do, and I've, you know, I've interviewed certainly Some of Australia's most significant terrorists, convicted terrorists. And I'm a white woman. How do I do that? Effectively, because I believe in connection. I mean, it doesn't matter to me whether I like you or like what you've done or dislike you. I mean, as humans, we connect. That's what it's based on, right? It's based on that ability to connect with someone. I don't agree with what they've done. I don't. I don't condone it, but I can understand it. And I think unless we can get to a point where we can appreciate that. I don't agree with what you've done and I certainly don't support it. But I can understand from your perspective how you got to be in a position where this is the way you view the world. And for me, that's connection. That's that connection and attunement that you talk about, especially when you're talking about it in terms of working with horses. You know, it's about not seeing them how we want them to be, but seeing them how they are and understanding them how they are for the things that make them who they are. And I think that that's sometimes what we miss a little bit is. And it's hard for me because I look at this in a big context and I don't see one as better than the other. I can hold two things and not have to have judgment about what right or wrong, good or bad. It's just seeing it as it is. It's just being able to observe it for what it is. And that's definitely my observation at the moment, is that a lot of the issues are coming because there's this group that, you know, for them individual responsibility is really important, and a group that, for them, individual rights is important. And they're clashing, they're trying to impose their view on someone else.
- [58:35]
Warwick Schiller
Taking this to how it links with Pegasus connections. When you join the army or the military, I talk about the me we environment. So most people live in a me centric environment. What do I need? What do I want? How do I get it? When you join a military, that's what recruit school is all about, is putting you in a we centric environment. You know, you're there to serve the collective, the team. What's the end? What's the goal? What's the mission? So, and then all of a sudden, you leave that, that military and you're back into a me centric environment. And this is where a lot of veterans really struggle with that transition piece, because they've been selfless and they've, you know, been told what to do because it's the collective, take yourself out of the equation. We all wear a uniform, We've all got a common goal. Where do they find that in the civilian street? And a lot of it was they didn't understand it. So once you explain, you know, like you do two years, you go recruit school, your initial training and all that stuff to, quote, unquote, indoctrinate, you know, that ME centric environment, then for me, I got discharged via an email. Where's the training? And help to get back into that ME centric environment. And so with Pegasus, we identified that from our. Both our lived experience and our observations. And it's about giving those veterans reconnection with their families, their new life. And that's where. Yep, yep. And that's the biggest piece. And again, I agree with Peter. That's why a lot of what you say, and especially at Mastery, that where we, you know, connected and with you was. It's that same message, that same understanding and that same theme of where a lot of people are missing is the understanding of what they're missing. Because one I talk about, a lot of people don't know what they don't know. So there's things we know we know, and there's things we know we don't know. And that's when you can go and learn something. But it's what we don't know, we don't know. And a lot of it is this. Like, I don't feel I don't fit in there anymore. I don't fit in there anymore. Why is it. And it's about, well, you don't feel connected to anything.
- [60:59]
Peter Low
And so awareness too, isn't it? I mean, it's building that awareness. So often we get a bit, I think, as humans, a little bit robotic. Sometimes we go through the motions. I certainly know that. That was my experience for a long period of time. Left foot, right foot. And I was very successful at doing that. And that's not to say you don't do it without purpose, but you do it without introspection, and you do it without awareness of the things that are happening for you and inside you and your knowledge of that. And awareness doesn't fix those things, but it gives you conscious choice. So it allows you, once you're aware of that. Okay, this is. And I think, you know, this was. If I can speak to Shane's journey just a little bit, it was kind of the Very beginning for him to understand the sorts of things that were happening for him was building the awareness that that was happening. Now, that doesn't make it not happen, but what it did in those moments was he could go, okay, I know what this is. Now I can just choose to ride this out. I can choose to do something differently, but I'm now aware of what it is that's going on. And I think, you know, one of the things that we've been working on, we've got an off the track thoroughbred who I've not had much to do with before, but we've had lots of work with him. And one of the things that you sort of talked about, which we've since done really successfully with him, is bringing his awareness back. He kind of gets out of his body, he gets over there, he's looking at everything, he sees everything that happens, but he's not aware of where he is. So we've really done a lot of work to bring his awareness back. And it's funny because, you know, I've worked with. I've been with horses my whole life, but that really helped me apply what I know about humans to working with horses. And the change that we've seen in him, just helping him to just be a bit more present in his body and to recognize, you know, I mean, a lot of the work that we do, especially in the, in the veteran space, is getting them to recognize and helping them to tolerate those things that they become aware of. So not even fix them in the first instance, just be able to tolerate them, to recognize they're there, to become aware of them and to tolerate them, because otherwise what you get. And I certainly know I was very. I'm very conscious that I've done this a lot of my life and my perfectionism stems from running away. So, you know, not being able to tolerate in the moment how I was feeling. So focusing all of that energy on moving forward and achieving and running away from. And I always felt like I was running, you know, not in a bad way, but just in a way that it helped me to keep moving. And our thoroughbreds like this can't stand still. He's got to keep moving. So bringing that presence back to him, that, yes, you're going to feel this way, but that's okay. And how do we tolerate that and how do we learn to live in that moment? How do we help regulate through that? And I think so there's a lot of similarities there that, like Shane's saying, once you build that awareness, then you can start to take the next few steps. But I feel like so many people. And it goes back to what you were talking about before. We're so overstimulated with everything from our environment coming in, we have very little time to actually work on what's actually already in there. And I saw this a lot working in Youth justice because I spent a lot of time in custody with kids with very complex trauma histories. And you get a lot of explosive behavior. You get a lot of struggle just being able to ground them in the present moment. And for them to feel like they can be in that space is such a like it for them. It's such a massive opening to the beginning of what might be. And so even if we don't achieve anything but that with our veterans, it's such a huge goal to get them to be able to build that awareness. Yeah. Yeah.
- [64:28]
Warwick Schiller
It's interesting when Peter talks about that thoroughbred overthink. He's teaching us so much about every behavior because. And I got this from you on the Gold coast, work with a horse you've got today. So it's not about his overall behavior. It's like we had him at Charity Ride at Denman on the weekend and he was really anxious. But then we worked out. Why is that? Because to him it's race day again. He's in stores with all these other horses. So it's. It's the horse we've got that day and then going with the veterans. Why is that veteran anxious today? Ask him about his day. Ask him about did he sleep last night? So that was a massive takeaway that I got across the board both with horses and with people is every day is different in everyone's journey. Understand where they are on that day and then work with that, not your perceived or pre planned ideas and don't overlap that. And it makes things so much easier. Like Tink went crazy for the morning and if you didn't understand that, you would have just locked him up for the day. But because we were able to understand that his behavior was based around what he perceived, it was race day again, he was brilliant for the rest of the day. We didn't lock him down. He went on the ride and he was one of the best horses on the ride.
- [65:55]
Peter Low
And he learned something new about himself, which I think is amazing too, because.
- [65:58]
Warwick Schiller
We didn't judge him on the behavior. We understood it and accepted it.
- [66:01]
Shane Healy
Well, the thing is that if you judge them on that behavior, then you know, this is your, you know, you create your own reality. You know if you judge that behavior is bad and you treat it a certain way, then the response back from him will be based on the way you treated him. And then your response to his response to you will be another of the same. And you just go down that. Yeah, just go down that path. You know, it's interesting you were saying about that off the track, thoroughbred. I'm in the middle of. It's been quite a while now doing some parts work, you know, like inner child stuff. And yeah. It's funny how resolving like childhood wounds, you just got to reparent yourself. You know what I mean? And if you think about that horse's behavior that he's not in his body, that's a very juvenile behavior that before the foal is weaned from the mother, the mother starts to say, hey, pay attention. Bring your attention back over here where your body is. You don't need to be gawking around all the time sort of thing. And it's almost like reap what you have to do with him is almost reparent him. You know, you almost have to go through. Back through what hopefully his mother would have taught him. But yeah, that's super cool, Peter. I wanted to go back a bit to the. The third world country thing. That's the only name I have for it. But and as I was saying, I was thinking there's got to be a better way of saying that.
- [67:29]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [67:29]
Shane Healy
And I imagine when I first everyone, you know, however older, was when I first heard the term third world country. It was. It was probably the mental image of oh yeah, that hole sort of thing. Whereas nowadays I think of third world countries of. I think of them as people who are living the way we're supposed to live.
- [67:50]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [67:50]
Shane Healy
In the. In the types of communities we're supposed to be in that we. That we just don't have anymore. And what was fascinating was when you were talking about the Iraqi people, maybe Afghanistan, I can't remember which you were referring to, but it doesn't matter if you took us. If you just took that bit and you didn't say who you were talking about, where people were from, but you had that clip and you showed it to people and you asked a thousand people. I don't think anybody would guess the countries that they're actually from because our perception from the media and this is one. One of the reasons I was fascinated to talk to Shane. I didn't realize you'd spent time over there too. But our perceptions from the media and not anything like what it's like on the ground. And yeah, those people are amazing. I. A few years ago, we went to Morocco and. Which is a very moderate Muslim country, but so we stayed with the. The British ambassador and his wife in the ambassador's. British ambassador's residence there was pretty cool. But the British ambassador, Tom, he's Catholic, and he was the British ambassador to Egypt before that. But he. Where there wasn't a Catholic church, he would go and pray in a mosque. And I said, well, you know, I grew up Catholic. And when you go to Mass, I think everybody's thinking about, ah, what time's this thing finished? I want to go to the pub. Like, no one's connecting with the divine. You know what I mean? But Muslims connect with the divine. They're not just going there to spend the time. Like, they connect. They're deeply connected to something. And I said to Tom, what's it like? What's it like going and praying in a mosque with, like, all these people who are devout to. You know, you talked before about spirituality versus religion. I think they have both. They're very spiritual about their religion. Whereas I think, at least in my experience, a lot of Catholics are just culturally Catholic. You know, Mass on Sundays, Easter, Christmas, Ash Wednesday. You got it. And asked Tom, what's it like to go and pray in a mosque? And he goes, oh, the energy is off the charts because these people are connected to. They're connected to the divine, whatever name they want to give the divine. But like, there's some real belief there, you know, which I think. And would you say there's a part of that that ends up with the extreme? You know, that, that that multiplied ends up in the extremism. Like, they, they're super committed.
- [70:24]
Warwick Schiller
Well, so it's interesting because when you started and said that we should go back to live how they live in those third world countries, that's a lot of at the core of their ideology. So they believe, you know, your terrorist groups believe that the world. So in the Quran, the world became corrupt and God gave humans one more chance and chose the most pure man, Muhammad, to put his message through. And so your terrorist groups and your Salafists believe that the world's lost its way again and we need to go back and live as we lived in the time of Muhammad. So that's. And where they believe that they can use violence to achieve that, but that's their belief structure is that we've lost their way again.
- [71:20]
Peter Low
Yeah. I would also add to that. I think it's an interesting question that you Ask. And it's obviously one that comes up a lot. But my comment is always an extreme of anything can be dangerous. Yeah. So religion is one thing, of course, but extreme of anything can be dangerous. And especially, and most importantly, when violence is either supported or condoned or advocated to achieve that goal. And I do a lot of talking about this because it's really important that we move away from thinking that one particular belief structure is the problem. There are definitely people in different religious belief structures that can be problematic, but there are people all around the world who can be problematic. And we have to start to see this for what it is, which is a structured set of beliefs that dictates the way we view the world. I often talk when I'm training people on this stuff about the suffragette movement, and if we looked at that movement, by today's sort of definition, we'd start to look at them as a violent extremist group. Yeah, they definitely advocated for and used violence as a way of bringing about change in the society. They wanted to change the laws. They wanted to give women the vote. They. They protested violently, they damaged property. It was all advocated by today's standards. They would be someone that we would look at as a violent extremist group. But I don't think anyone would say what they did was bad for society in the sense that we now women have the vote and women's equality and things like that. So, again, we have to be careful because sometimes, you know, and it's human nature. And for me, it all fundamentally comes back to what you were saying before about the foal and the adult horse. As humans, we are animals. We're actually much more like horses than we think we are. We're prey animals as well, which they are. I mean, apart from our capability to build mechanisms to help us, like, we don't kill anything. Most things kill us. Our brain is hardwired to see everything as a threat, the same as the horse's brain is hardwired to see everything as a threat. So we always see things that don't look like us as a threat, first and foremost, until we learn that they aren't a threat. And if we never bother to take the time to learn they aren't a threat, we will always see them as a threat. And that's where this awareness comes in. Am I seeing that as a threat because it truly is, or just because my brain's hardwired to see it that way? But like, I talk about Greenpeace for an example. I mean, they absolutely use Violence, they ram Japanese whaling ships and they do it to change the way Japan goes about what it does. Now, just because we might think that our view might be that that's more of a valuable idea or we might align more with that idea, doesn't change the fundamental thing that we're talking about. So I'm always conscious to try and take this out of a religious or political debate and kind of put it in what is it that we're worried about, about this? What is it that we worry about about right wing or left wing or you know, religious or, you know, all of those sorts of different things that can motivate violent extremism. And the reality is it's because it's a set of beliefs or ideas, doesn't matter what it is, that advocates for the use of violence as the way of bringing about what they want to see in the world or the way the world should work. And that's where we really should be focused because there are very many incredibly devout Salafists who live their life without going around killing other people. Oh yeah, you know, the same as there are a great many, you know, right wing extremists who believe in certain things that don't go around advocating for the use of the justification for violence. And so we have to really come back to what is it that worries us about that? And we get blurred sometimes because we see we can tend to see the world through our perspective and oh, that's legitimate and justified and that's not. I mean, that's really just our perspective of things. But we also have to, I guess, put it in the context of violence. And for me, most importantly, where is the world going in terms of violence and what have we forgotten about our history? I mean, I don't think this point in time of history is the most violent point that has ever existed. So I think sometimes where our memory is short, but also our ability to, I guess, see threat as being far more present and concerning than it is has grown so much over the years. I don't think Covid helped. I think that entire period of complete uncertainty is not optimal functioning conditions for humans. And we're still very much feeling the aftermath, individually and collectively of what that time was like for us. So it's about how do we kind of get back onto, get back onto some level of equilibrium as humans where we're able to tolerate a little bit of risk and threat in our life without this kind of overreaction and over response that we seem to be in. And this, in this phase Quite a lot of things rolled into one there.
- [76:07]
Shane Healy
I think there's a lot of stuff, you know, you probably go, I'm really big on talking about mental health. So Shane, when you, you know, you are now into the, you know this outdoor assisted therapy, equinoxes therapy with veterans and you've got a bit of a story about how you ended up there. So you, you came back, did you get discharged?
- [76:32]
Warwick Schiller
So not in it. So initially I got back from Iraq in the middle of 2015 and I had a number of surgeries. They didn't go well and I actually wound up with chronic pain and the loss of some of my function in my shoulders and my arms. And then I was transitioning out of defense and it was a bit of a snowball effect. And again when you don't know and this is the biggest thing that I learned, if I could have one thing again it would be awareness because you don't know. Like I didn't know I was getting angry. Having chronic pain issues, it's hard. You can't explain it to anyone because you know, and then you know, insomnia and tinnitus and you know a number of things and, and you know, people, you get judged in some ways. But for me I just started unraveling which culminated in going to hospital and it was, you know, the best thing. Like it saved me on a number of levels but I didn't find it as hard a step as a lot of others do partly because I've always been my harshest critic and I've always taken on advice from trusted people and it was quite obvious to everyone that I was sick. Like, you know, you just get to a point where you know, are you.
- [78:24]
Shane Healy
Talking about when you said you went to hospital, you're talking about a hospital for people with broken legs or are you talking about a mental health care facility?
- [78:33]
Warwick Schiller
Mental health hospital, yeah. I won't use the reference I usually do but yeah, I wound up going to a mental health facility in October 2019.
- [78:42]
Shane Healy
Can I ask you, did you self admit or did you have an episode where they came. Gotcha.
- [78:49]
Warwick Schiller
No, no, I self admitted again. So the. I remember watching my, one of my young sons get angry at my ex wife and I just knew that that wasn't him, it was me. And I rang DVA like our veteran affair straight up said I need help then. So I've always been very good at that awareness and. But you still got to make the choice. Like I've got mates that have committed suicide because they hit it and didn't make that decision to get help. Probably too many mates, to be honest. And that was a driver. I didn't want to be that. You know, for a lot of people, suicide is the last resort. And others is it to cry for help. And others is. It's actually they want to reset. I knew that I wanted the reset. And that's a massive thing. And that's the biggest thing I do now in the advocacy and support space with other veterans is that's the conversation, like, you know, I can't deal with anymore. Well, what can't you deal with? And it's the amount of times I've had. I can't believe you went to hospital. I never thought you would go to hospital. I'm like, why not? It's no different to if you break your arm. It's no different to getting your surgery. Like, it's just because the stigma is not on getting sick. The stigma is getting better. Like, I just had a conversation with a psychologist and I was explaining about post traumatic growth, and he's like, so what's that? And I go, well, I know my triggers. I know. And I'm okay with being sad. I'm okay with having a bad day. I'm okay with crying. And he was dumbfounded. He's like, why is that? And I said, because I know that this is what my triggers are. This is what will upset me, this is what my issues are. And on these certain dates, for these reasons, I know it's going to be rough. I'm okay with that. And that's not where we are in. It's like you break your ankle, you get a cast for four weeks, you go to some physio, you run again. We've got it dialed down with every injury except for mental health. And that's one of my biggest things I'm really trying to advocate now is post traumatic growth. Like, you're never going to get better. And this is why the diagnosis with TBI and operator syndrome is really important. Because what's the effect on the brain? What's the effect on what is actually the problem? And so it's a bit of a bandaid approach, but the first is acknowledging that you're sick, owning that you're sick, and being okay with being sick. Because, for example, with my arms, I can't put my hands above my head or behind my back. It hurts, it sucks. But now I'm okay with it because what choice have I got? I just can't do it. And so that's the same approach I have with my mental health, there are going to be times where I'm going to be sad. There's going to be times where my nervous system's fried. It doesn't stop me doing things because of. So, for example, because of my hyper vigilance and stuff, going in massive crowds can really wear me out at a central nervous system level. Do I not want to do that and avoid or do I want to go to the football but know that the next day is going to be tiring? That's the conversation that people don't understand and I'm talking to this psychologist about it and he just couldn't comprehend it. And the other thing I'm. I don't want to do and I don't do. I don't take SSRIs. And because it's the first, the first go to is let's give you some anti. Any depressants. Well, what they don't tell you in the fine print is they also rob you of your highs, they keep you in a bandwidth. So the problem is if you are on antidepressants, you don't know your good days. So if I go to someone and go, how are you? Nah. Because literally that's what the drugs are keeping them in now. They're not upset and they're not happy. I want to be happy, I want to have good days. But to have a good day, I've got to have a bad day and I'm okay with that. And that's what the conversation isn't happening because you've actually got to do some work behind it.
- [83:23]
Peter Low
It's funny because when Shane says that, we've talked a lot about this, people getting stuck in the system, haven't we? And it's one of the reasons that we're really keen to make sure that what we're doing is effective because what we see is people stuck in the system. So when Shane says mental health treatment, and I saw this working with young people as well, you know, we're good at diagnosing. It's a very medical model. We're good at diagnosing and treating. Sometimes I think our diagnosis is about just an incorrect assessment. And so, you know, when Shane talks about, especially mtbi, so the minor tbi, which doesn't necessarily have to happen through a large kind of injury, but can be repetitive, smaller injuries which can cause the same outcome. And so it's sometimes hard because, you know, if I'm screening a young person, for example, we'll ask about head injuries, we'll ask about. But that's not the case for a lot of soldiers. They've never really lost consciousness, they've never really been hit in the head, but they've been exposed to lots of that blast concussion, which can have a cumulative effect. But I think sometimes we get the assessment wrong and we don't look enough, like, we don't look enough back far enough to try and understand what's actually happening. And if we get the assessment wrong, we're going to get the treatment wrong. And if we're treating something, and I'm a bit different than Shane, I see the place of medication, especially for people who are acutely unwell, and it can actually just help to stabilize them for a period of time. But very unfortunately, we now just see it as the cure. And it's not. Because if we're not addressing all of those other things, and obviously having done a lot of work in trauma spaces before, a medical model doesn't resolve the issues that lead to a lot of the symptoms that we see in the world today. A lot of the things that we see around behaviors and how people are behaving, what we'd. How we'd like them to behave, are a bit like you were talking about the foal and the mum. You know, sometimes we're not understanding that these things, while they might present in a particular way, are actually caused by something else. You know, that kind of attachment can be really important, that attachment trauma. And when I say attachment trauma, I don't mean you have to have been in a bad relationship, but it's just little things that have happened at a certain period of time that change the way that you interact and engage with each other. And we don't look enough at the impact that that has or that kind of early experiences of childhood and then how those sorts of traumas can impact and compound. So, you know, Shane's military experience was. Was one thing, but if we don't understand what his life was like growing up, then we're not going to understand how that actually does impact on him in holistically as a human, not just with the symptoms that he's showing. And I think that's the one thing that we've been focused on. It's like. Like how do we look at people holistically and not just see them for how they show up? And also how do we recognize that people grow and change and develop and you can get better. You. You. There isn't wellness.
- [86:06]
Warwick Schiller
That's a key piece that Peter just spoke about because I didn't understand this at all. A big part of like people who like me did went into special operations and that actually a screen because of some of our childhood trauma.
- [86:21]
Shane Healy
Oh yeah.
- [86:22]
Warwick Schiller
And that, that's not, that's only just being known and acknowledged. Right. That there's a high functioning trauma that makes certain people very good at operating alone and operating high resilience. But that's not, that's never told about. So then all of a sudden you get out and you take a similar test for different reasons. You screen off the board. But they're not saying that. Well, it's always been there. Like if it wasn't for Peter explaining this to me, I would have been a lot further down a different track because she was able to say, well that was actually what they wanted you for, for that, that that reason. And there's a, you know, now that start. The information starting to come out that probably 80% of the military, especially at that special operations level all got screened because they have that similar childhood.
- [87:21]
Shane Healy
Right. Actually I was just talking to someone recently about this who's in the mental health space. I can't remember who it was but they were talking about working with veterans and, and I said, and I may be totally wrong on this, but I've read somewhere that like in the US a lot of times people that might go in the military may have had like a lack of community in their family and this is going to be like the brotherhood they've never had sort of thing. And so if they haven't had that, so they've had, you know, some sort of a traumatic childhood, then you go into the military, then you, you pile those experiences on top of the previous experiences and unraveling that has. Because if you think about. But what if that person didn't go in the military? I guarantee you they still can have some mental health issues.
- [88:11]
Peter Low
Absolutely.
- [88:12]
Shane Healy
So then you take that childhood, then they go in the military, then they have all sorts of traumatic things happen there. That's so much unraveling that.
- [88:20]
Warwick Schiller
But so it's interesting, right. So a lot of the guys that I worked with and this again is not known, they go, oh yeah, it makes sense. You went to Iraq a lot in Afghanistan. Why you've got trauma. Nothing about that is where my trauma comes from. In fact, my psychologist years ago said I could put you back in a Baghdad and you'd be the happiest place on earth.
- [88:41]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [88:41]
Warwick Schiller
But it goes back to that Me we, I'm in a lot of ways not built to actually be in civilian life.
- [88:49]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [88:49]
Warwick Schiller
And that's what the military knew when I first joined and I. They screened, they went, yep, we got one. But they don't do that work. They didn't tell me that when I was getting out. They didn't do the work with me getting out. They spent years giving me skill sets on top of that natural thing. But they didn't explain that at the back end. And that happens a lot. And unlike, for example, the. You know, in the DSM 5, on some of the screenings for PTSD and stuff, there's one of the boxes, because it's so black and white, it'll say, do you have dreams about combat? And I tick, yes, because to me, combat and being with my brothers, and that was fun. And I think about it all the time. But on that medical form, it's very negative. As nightmares, has night terrors. There's no gray in that. So there's. And then that starts a misdiagnosis, and then it starts misconfusion. Because they go, are you very. You got all this trauma from your combat? Where actually, for some of us, combat was very easy.
- [89:56]
Peter Low
Well, I think it's the same thing that we talk about all the time, isn't it like your worst day is your worst day. It's all relative. And what. I hate it now that this. It was a traumatic event. That this. This keeps getting said and the media say it a lot. And it bothers me. It's not the event that's traumatic. It's whether you have the internal and external capabilities to deal with it. And so what someone might experience as traumatic is not the same as someone else. But now we're traumatizing people if they're not traumatized by what we think should be a traumatic event. So it's almost like we're not able to recognize that people have resilience for different things based on who they are and the kinds of supports they've got around them and how they view the world. And that's right. Like everyone thinks Shane's trauma came from combat. None of that was traumatic. He was actually very well committed to what he did. He enjoyed it. He operates best in that environment. His trauma came from something else. But while ever we see trauma as this must be traumatic, then we don't allow for individual experiences. And also, I think we take away people's ability to be able to respond in their own way to their environment. We say, that was traumatic. You must be traumatized by that, which is just not the way that it operates.
- [91:05]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So when I'm now, you know, veterans Come to me. They're more concerned about how do they get a bank account, how do they find a physiology, how do they do this? Because their whole life, it's all been done for them.
- [91:19]
Peter Low
Yeah.
- [91:20]
Warwick Schiller
To them, that's more scary. How do I see a doctor, how do I see a dentist? But that's not the perceived issues in a veteran's gonna have when he gets out.
- [91:31]
Peter Low
Yeah. Because I talk about it a lot in terms of public speaking. Right. Because, you know, some people are scared of public speaking and some people aren't. And it's sort of like our brains haven't evolved as much as we think they have. And it all still comes. We all, we still see the. Be the bear outside the cave is the threat. Public speaking for some people is the bear outside the cave. So that might be traumatic for them because they don't have the capability to deal with it. Being shot at might not be. And that is the bear outside the cave. Their physical safety is at danger. But our sense of who we are and our sense of how we fit into the world and whether people like us or not, therefore we're safe, I mean, if people don't like us, we're not safe. So that might be what. What it is that causes the trauma for someone if they feel their sense of who they are is challenged or threatened. And so that is just as the exact same thing happens in our brain with our fight, flight, or freeze response, whether it's a physical threat or it's that emotional sense of self, sense of who I am, sense of how connected I am in the world threat. And I think this is what at the moment we're failing to recognize with a lot of our veterans very unfortunately is a lot of their trauma isn't actually the physical stuff. They've actually been trained very well for it. And for most of them, they wouldn't have got to where they were. For most of them, in terms of being at that pointy end if they didn't have the kind of personality that had resilience for that. So it's not just the selection, it's also all the training that they go through. And they don't get to be in that kind of environment unless they have those particular traits about the way they view the world and the resilience that they have physically. But it's often other things. And it's funny, because this idea of moral injury is sort of coming up a lot more now. And the idea that that can actually be what causes a lot of veterans to experience those kind of traumatic symptoms, because it's not about the conflict that I was in. It's now about the way people are perceiving it, and we don't learn anything. Right. We knew this after the Vietnam War. That actually, that was much more traumatic for a lot of veterans than the conflict they were actually in, which is no doubt was challenging and stressful and all of that sort of stuff. And they probably wouldn't choose to do it again, some people. But in terms of what it was, it was their sense of self. I thought I was doing something that was valuable and I thought I was committed to a cause, and clearly I wasn't. This idea of moral injury, I think, is really circling a lot more, particularly in today's society. I guess the really important thing for us in the work that we're doing is, I mean, and we take this approach in everything that we do, I guess it's just our combined backgrounds is we just really want to understand the individual story. And so I often get asked what program we run. We don't run a program. There is no one thing that we can do for everyone that will fix everyone. What we can do is best understand the person before us and then figure out what they need and what they need from us and what they need from others in order to support them in their journey.
- [94:22]
Warwick Schiller
And this is why we.
- [94:24]
Peter Low
Yeah, sorry, Shane.
- [94:25]
Warwick Schiller
Well, I was about to say this is why we connected so well with you on the Gold Coast, Warwick, because our philosophy is a philosophy you were teaching with horses. Work with the horse you got today. Don't impose bias on this horse. From the last horse, we were sitting there going, yep, like, that's the philosophy that we've already got in with what we're doing and what we. How we want Pegasus connections to be. And that's the biggest takeaway I know for me, I got from you in those four days was, you know, you'd get an email about this horse is having tantrums or whatever. You'd get that horse in and it'd be completely different. And I know it frustrated you a little bit, but I'm like watching you deal with, this is a horse I've got today. Let's look at what's going on. Is that cemented in that every day is different for everyone and take them on how they're presenting and go with that rather than putting some sort of template or some sort of predator?
- [95:27]
Peter Low
Yeah, we don't have an agenda for that. Yeah, yeah.
- [95:30]
Shane Healy
And you get. You get to see it in all its glory. Then because, you know, I I re for these few guys listen at home for horse expos and things. I will recruit a horse that, that the owner says has a certain problem. And I've had a bad year recruiting horses because.
- [95:47]
Peter Low
Or a good year, depending on which way you look at it.
- [95:50]
Shane Healy
The thing is, if you've got an hour to make a point, I really like to have a horse that has a concern and you can come in and mostly through some sort of connection, resolve the problem in front of people in an hour. And so I usually try to recruit horses. I think that's going to work for. And this year I've had a lot of horses that were really complex, like, okay, here's our starting point. Oh, no, that's not working. Now I've got another starting point. Oh, no, that's not working. And it might take me 45 minutes to actually get to a good starting point. And I think for people watching who maybe this is the first time they've seen, you know, this perspective, they might be a bit like, I'm not sure. The people that come up afterwards that really like it are the people who are very experienced. They go, hey, I love the way you kind of had to switch there and switch there and switch there. But for the most part, I like them to be pretty simple. Not because it makes my job easier, it's this. I'm trying to get a message across in a short period of time. And those ones up there on the Gold coast, you know, the horses were supposed to be a certain way and they came in and there's nothing wrong with them. And I've got to stand in front of 500 people for an hour with nothing to do with the horse and try to keep everybody in a tank.
- [97:05]
Warwick Schiller
But I think the biggest takeaways, and even from the ladies sitting around us, was straight away we realized the horse was reacting to the owner. Like, I think the second horse, the owner literally roofed it up right under the halter. And there was a bit, as soon as you relax the horse, it relaxed. And it was like, it relaxed. And that was the biggest. And we were talking about that, and then you said, too many people have a preconceived, I'm going to do this with my horse today. I'm going to achieve this, rather than getting there and looking at what kind of mood the horse is.
- [97:39]
Peter Low
But I guess that's what really spoke to us about it was like this idea of an agenda. Like, we want someone to achieve something, or by the end of this, you need to have Done, done. And you can get sometimes caught up in that, in your own wants. And this is where I go back to what I really liked about you, because it's the exact way I've ever engaged with anyone, in all the work that I've done, even some of the most challenging young people who have had some of the worst histories of connection with people all the way through to like, as I'm saying, like convicted terrorists who should have no reason to want to talk to me. But if I focus on my connection and my attunement with them, and I have a real desire to want to understand them, I really want to know them and understand them, and I think that genuineness comes off, then all the rest happens for itself. I'll get a good understanding of who they are. I'll be able to understand what the risk factors are. I don't have to go in with an agenda of I need to know this person. I just go in and genuinely want to understand. And the journey sort of goes wherever it goes in terms of learning about them. But I think that there's that connection and attunement that's the baseline for everything that we can achieve. And especially when we're working with veterans who have been through systems both in their. In their service career and now outside, where they're always trying to jam them into something. You've got to fit into this. You've got to have this, you've got to do that. This is our program. It runs for this long. You've got to, you know, whereas what we're, what we're about is actually how do we fit to you? Not how do you fit to us? So how do we actually just connect with you?
- [99:10]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So our initial approach is come and sit by a fire.
- [99:13]
Peter Low
Yeah, that's it.
- [99:15]
Warwick Schiller
Come and sit by fire, unwind and just, just. That's the start point. So it's not even a sell of you're gonna do some equine therapy with a horse, you're not going to do some DBT or Gastol, nothing. It's come and sit by fire and hang out.
- [99:31]
Peter Low
Problem is we have to, we have to sell it a certain way.
- [99:34]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah.
- [99:36]
Peter Low
Otherwise you don't get. You don' get the funding, for example.
- [99:38]
Warwick Schiller
It takes the, it takes the mystique away and it's just because from there.
- [99:47]
Peter Low
You can build everything about them and not what they've got. It makes them about them as a person and not what they've been diagnosed with.
- [99:53]
Warwick Schiller
They have the control because you're trying To a lot of it is that control. I'm trying to take control of who I am and of myself. And it's the fear of when you're getting sick and you've got that. That anxiety. And so when you're having something so small of. All you've got to do is sit by a fire, mate. What we go, where we go, how we have the conversation from there is really up to you. They feel a bit empowered and they respond really positively to it. Whereas if you say, you know, be here at this time, we're going to do this X, Y and Z, they kind of all of a sudden can be overwhelmed and push back on it.
- [100:30]
Peter Low
It.
- [100:31]
Warwick Schiller
And I know for me, it happened organically and accidentally for me by just going up to the farm and, you know, getting in a muster and, you know, catching horses and stuff. And then there was that penny drop moment of I did it without thinking about it. And it's what made it so easy and the growth and from there is just because there's no. No pushbacks. And yeah, I just think, like I said, the biggest pushback is in the veteran space. I don't want to sit in a white walled room with a stranger. And, you know, I've done a lot of research into the mindfulness and the calming effect of a fire.
- [101:19]
Shane Healy
Oh, there's something primal about a fire sitting around.
- [101:22]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, that's right. So quite often I'll just take a photo of the fire and put it on social media with a little bit of a blurb and people just jump into it because everyone has that same feeling of they've all sat by a fire or sat in a room with a log fire and relaxed and they can connect with that.
- [101:42]
Shane Healy
Yeah. And it's. And it's. I think a fire is really good at filling in the gaps. Like you're in a white room with someone and no one's talking. Like someone feels like they need to say something. Whereas a fire, the crackling of the fire, like someone says something, then there's just some quiet and it almost like filled in that. That's that space, you know. Yeah.
- [102:05]
Warwick Schiller
And it's. Again, it's comfortable with, like, sometimes it's what's not being said. You know, I've had. I've been in situations where, you know, like I said, I've had to have three hours of conversation for a sentence of information. And so allowing that person to. Because end of the day, it's their journey. They're the ones that have got to be in charge of it. You know, and a lot of the systems, as Peter said, take that away. They kind of force things on you. Like, I remember when I was. I was going through a pain clinic and they just said, we're going to do this and do this. I said, whoa, hang on. No, you're not. And then they'd push back on it. And I'm like, it's my body. Why can't I be in charge of my treatment? And so with us, it's about empowering the individual. There's no time limit. You can come for a month every weekend and sit by the fire until you're ready to. And they just jump in. Whereas from my experience and people that I work with or know, they jumped out because they felt coerced or they felt rushed, or they felt there was no. Who's this bloke? You know, he's just some doctor or whatever. We want it to be about you because it's your life, your journey, your healing, you know, your everything. So. So I think that's what is missing with a lot of programs. And one of the things that we learned from personal experience that we want to make it about them.
- [103:45]
Peter Low
And I just think I've learned over the years, in terms of actually doing therapy, that, I mean, honestly, with all the models that are out there and all the things that we can do to someone, the single most important and impactful thing. Actually, only about a month ago, I got a phone call from a kid who I worked with, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, and he just rang me up. I'd worked with him when he was a young person in the community, and I'd helped him with his relationship with his mum. Didn't even touch his offending. That was a single important thing for him. And he called me. He saw me on the TV and he just called me and he just wanted to say thank you. I didn't do anything wonderful with that kid, but I connected with him. And I feel like we don't spend enough time recognizing how valuable and important it is to make those true and honest connections with people. And that. That is really the single most important thing we can do with our time every day, is to connect with people on a genuine level. And if we can all do that a little bit more consciously and presently, then actually everyone has a better day. We have a better day, they have a better day. The community is more connected. It seems so simple. And I don't. You know, I know there's complexity in life, but actually that's a. That's a pretty easy thing for us all to do is to just spend a bit of time connecting properly with people, whether it's our family, our friends, someone we pass by on the street, or people that we're trying to actually help. And I feel like the systems are all designed now to make us sort of conform to delivering a certain thing or having a timeframe or. And we miss the criticalness of that true, genuine connection. And I spent many, many years connecting with lots of difficult young people, and, you know, I'll never know the impact that I've had on a lot of those young people's lives. So the only way I could approach it and know I was doing the best I could with every moment was to be genuine in those connections. I feel like that kind of idea of, I'm transparent, so I show up the way that I am every day, and I genuinely do want to connect with you, no matter how bad your behavior or what other people might have said about you or like, you know, when you're talking about a horse and you're thinking about how do they show up in the day? I kind of feel like we're missing a lot of that basic stuff and to sort of circle back to the beginning. I feel like that's kind of what happens in some of those places where they have much more of that community feel is they can genuinely connect with each other a bit better each day, and maybe we could do a little bit more of that.
- [106:07]
Shane Healy
Yeah, most certainly. You know, you said something funny at the. At the beginning of that long soliloquy about the kid who rang you up. You said. You said, I didn't do anything wonderful. I just connected with him. I think that's pretty wonderful. You know, you think about 15 years later, the kid calls you up and said, you know, basically, that had a profound impact on his life. And then you said, you know, I don't know how I've affected these. These other kids. I think when you're in the healer space, that you don't. There isn't like, you don't keep tabs on that. You just go and spread magic through the world. And, you know, you just, you know, it's not a. There's no scoreboard for it because the ripple effect you have. Think about. The ripple effect you have. Think about, like, childhood trauma, okay? And especially little T trauma. Not so much the big T's, but little T trauma. When you. When you can have someone who's had a lot of little T trauma that's affected him a Great deal. And you can unravel that and get them to understand why they feel the way they feel and about the things that happened to them that weren't that big a thing. If they ever have a family, they're going to be so cognizant of that. You know what I mean? I mean, you know, it's generational. Like you change when you do things like that. Those little. I didn't do anything wonderful things, you know, 300 years from now there's going to be a knock on effect from that. So. But I do think you do have to not keep score because it's not about otherwise you're doing it for the wrong reason. But you know what I mean.
- [107:50]
Peter Low
Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, very sort of short, I guess about my journey into that. I've become more conscious of why I do it in the, in the last few years. I mean you talk about little tea trauma. I had a bit of that. Not that I had a bad upbringing, but I certainly miss my dad a lot. We moved around a lot. You know, being a rough brat is difficult. Right. And those connections are hard and you have a parent go and come back and that sort of adjustment and parental separation. And I had my own sorts of experiences when I was younger of sexual assault and things that I never really addressed when I was younger. I moved out really young, had babies really young. And it isn't until I've got older that I sort of understood that intuitively along the way. That idea of just wanting to be seen that. That notion of wanting to be seen and valued. And I think that's why it's so important for me, because it. I've been caught in a system obviously doing social work and engaging particularly with offenders where there's quite a lot of measurements that have to happen and assessments and justifications and you know, you're very stuck on the outcome of everything. You know, you need to do these things for probably all the right reasons. But all of that along the way, just recognizing that each of those individuals has had a journey and that for a lot of them that when it comes down to it, it's that idea of just being seen, just being seen and valued. Even for all the things that you do that other might say are bad or that other people have judgment about having someone who's willing to just show up and see that, I think that's really powerful. And I've learned particularly in the last few years that that's a challenging thing for us all to do because we all bring Our own stuff. So I'm trying to see you for who you are, but seeing you for who you are impacts on some of me, seeing me for who I am. And so it's really important that I. I come back to that awareness. It's really important that we become aware then of how that impacts on us, too. So, like, it's easy to say see people for who they are, but actually it starts with seeing yourself for who you are and then being able to engage with people on a more genuine level because you can see how that it's, it's.
- [109:57]
Warwick Schiller
It.
- [109:57]
Peter Low
It sort of goes both ways, isn't it? That relationship and those interactions are always reciprocal. So what you give out comes back, and it's understanding how that comes back to you. I think that's something that I've only just learned in the last few years, is really understanding how all of that has touched on all of the things about myself that I didn't maybe understand so well. And so I feel like, you know, for me, I'm getting as much as I'm giving out of this journey, and that's the value in it, right? It's just kind of paying that forward a little bit. It's certainly the thing. I mean, I think when Shane and I were talking about starting this in the first place, it's like. Like we can help. We don't know how, but we can help. And it's kind of grown and developed over the time and who knows where it'll end up. So it's exciting to be on that journey and to touch into it with other people as well, to be a part of that. So, yeah, I agree with you. It's not about keeping school, but there is always that benefit in it. There is always that notion of if it's helping me, if it's helping someone else, if it's helping the community, you know, all of those sorts of things are beneficial.
- [111:01]
Shane Healy
You kind of touched on it in there. But, you know, don't you find that when you do your own healing, you understand where some of your stuff comes from, it gives you a lot more grace with other people because, you know, I kind of no longer view people's bad behavior, whatever behavior, something that doesn't appeal to me or whatever as well. I tell you what, a few years ago, when the east coast of Australia was on fire, how many years ago Was that?
- [111:30]
Peter Low
That 20. 19.
- [111:33]
Shane Healy
I was doing some clinics in Australia and there was a. There was that town down the New South Wales coast that they had to evacuate him by boat. Or something or other they couldn't get out. And there was a young couple, man and a woman who were caught looting at the time, and they were stealing a TV from Harvey Norman or something or other. You know what I mean? And, you know, the whole of Australia was up in arms, you know, the news headlines, dog act, whatever. And my first thought was, I wonder what life experiences led those two to thinking that was a good idea at that point in time. You know what I mean? It just. Instead of going straight to that judgment, they shouldn't be doing that. They're bad people. How could you. Whatever. My first thought was, I wonder what, What? I wonder what their life's been like to lead them to that point. And I think. I think understanding your own stuff and realizing that, oh, some of my stuff is cultural conditioning, and that's not actually me. Cultural conditioning or trauma or whatever, but that's not actually me. And underneath that me is pretty cool person, then you start to see it in others too. You know what I mean?
- [112:54]
Peter Low
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, sorry, Shane.
- [112:58]
Warwick Schiller
No, that cultural conditioning, that's a really interesting term because it's so prevalent now, you know, the. And I think Covid really brought that on, that mob mentality, that. That pick a camp, fit into a camp, that decisiveness. I think that's what we've got to get away from.
- [113:20]
Peter Low
Well, that polarization provides certainty, right? You're with us, you're against us. You're right, you're wrong. And in particularly during COVID people were looking for certainty because at no time, really had we been as uncertain in recent history anyway, had been as uncertain about every single part of our lives, you know, what we could do at home in our private life and our work life and our community life and the world. The whole thing was uncertain. So. So it's not surprising to me that we saw an increase in polarization, because polarizing literally means us and them. So you can very, very distinctly put things into right and wrong, good and bad, us and them. And if you pick a side, then you just know how that works. And that little bit of certainty is what people were after at that point in time. Yeah, it's been a challenge and a challenge because I don't feel like we've done a very good job of un. Coviding bit like what Shane was saying about, you know, they spend all this time getting them into the military and then don't spend enough time un militaris them. We covered everyone for a long period of time and quite strictly and, you know, with all of this information about why we had to do it, taking all of that away and just expecting people to go back to normal really doesn't recognize that as humans lived experience impacts the way we view the world as well. So we're never just going to remove that from our memory. What we should have done is a process of uncovering to allow us to go back to what the new world looks like. Post that event of COVID And we haven't done that. We just took everything away and said, right, everyone go back to life. We're seeing it in Australia. I mean the huge numbers of kids suspended and expelled since school has gone back. It just shows you we didn't do a good job of that.
- [114:57]
Warwick Schiller
The fear in the elderly. I just remember the February, March, April of 2020. They looked at everyone like, you could kill me at any stage. Like I had. Like you had a gun. I remember I had my two young boys and we're at a shopping center and waiting for a lift and this old lady just pushed in front of us. Now we were going to let her in anyway, but it was that I. That fear. I've got to get in there and not let you in there because you might. And I think that. And then it was used as a tactic. If you weren't vaccinated, you were the enemy that uncovered in. I think is going to have so much ramifications down the line. And I think with the space that we're all in, everyone's running for the bush now. They realized that they got boxed up and how vulnerable they were in the city that they're looking for that. That escape, that back to the future, that. That environmental and yeah, I think that it's. Yeah. We're just at the tip of the iceberg of that covert issue.
- [116:04]
Shane Healy
Yeah, yeah. They didn't uncover this. And Shane, you were talking about you got discharged by an email.
- [116:15]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah.
- [116:16]
Shane Healy
So getting out of the military, is there any. Is there any mental health help initially or it's only if you. You crack your egg sort of thing. Then there's some available. How does that work?
- [116:32]
Warwick Schiller
So there's a couple of things with that. The actual. The military have a pretty good mental health identification process. The problem is if I. Even if I'm anxious and I go to the doctor, I'm taken away from my job. So I'm ostracized straight away. And that you don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So there's a lot of unreported mental health issues in. And then. So you wait till you're out and you've probably got all those other identity and other issues compounded on what might have been taking place. But like in my case, I. They never. So when you come back from a deployment, you do a post operational site screening ops and they picked up in some of my pops in like 2011, 2012, it actually says on my psych records is a psychological wreck. And they kept deploying me. They never told me once until I got that information in when I was actually in the mental health facility. That defense thought that I was a psychological wreck like eight years earlier. And they kept it from me. So they definitely can do things much better. And then when you're out, it's very cookie cutter ish. You fit into this box, we'll give you some compensation, some meds, and off you go. It's. Which is why organizations like us and others are really needed because there's not even gaps to fall between. There's just no real process in place.
- [118:19]
Shane Healy
So how do you. How do. How do veterans find you or how do you find them?
- [118:27]
Warwick Schiller
So initially there was an article done in the Daily Telegraph in August 2021 and it was actually about that. It was about how defense never told me about my mental health issues and deployed me with some physical issues. And so on the back of that I had a heap of people contact me then and that kind of lit the fuse of wanting to do something formal. And that's when me and Peter started talking about Pegasus. But I was still on my own journey then. Like I hadn't really found my tools and my processes. So once then, then I started going with Peter out to the farm and had that digital detoxification and started feeling better myself. Then I realized this is the magic sauce, so to speak. This is where and that I just again, I'm very active in the veteran community and I do podcasts and stuff and was just talking about my experience because my main driver in hospital was telling my story. And so that's never wavered. And as my stories evolved, so is this. And so then at the end of last year, there was another story in the news about veteran suicides and they dovetailed it again with my story. And. But we'd had Pegasus at that stage. So the bottom part was talking about Pegasus connections and that asked Peter. The response to that story was amazing but shocking. Like one, one guy rang Peter up because Peter's number was on the website. Literally like, where's Shane? If I don't speak to Shane, I'm going to kill myself. So we Went to a crisis hotline I had relatives of veterans, you know, mothers, sisters contacted me saying like my brother, my husband's really bad, can you help? So, so overnight we went from 0 to 100 simply because of an article and it was, there was connection. People could see he's going through what my brother's going through how. And then I'm in a book called Find Fix Finish which starts off with that story about how I went up and got the bomb maker by myself. So it makes me out to be like Rambo but it ends with me in the mental health facility and so I use that as people come to me and go my husband, my son won't go and get help. And I go well use the book like and the amount of people that contact me. I read your book mate, like how I can't believe that you got sick. How do I get better?
- [121:15]
Peter Low
So so far it's been pretty ad hoc. We've waited for people to contact us or we've done some ad hoc kind of groups for people that we've recognized. We are looking to work more with the return Services League so we've met with them a little bit because I guess funding is a big issue. We don't want veterans to pay.
- [121:31]
Warwick Schiller
Just was there's been the royal commission in a veteran suicides going on in Australia waiting for that. That has just finished in the.
- [121:41]
Shane Healy
I think Shane's frozen.
- [121:42]
Peter Low
Oh no, I think it kicked him out. It just said yeah so as he was saying we've sort of been waiting for the royal commission which the report's just been tabled to see what that does for the actual veterans based landscape in terms of services and service delivery. So we are looking at working with return services Lead week I go to Ukraine in at the end of October so I'm doing a project with the United nations over there to develop a veteran peer support equine program for veterans and their families in Ukraine and then yeah we're going to look at, I mean obviously the biggest issue for us is to try and find the funding so veterans don't pay anything. So we're anticipating that as the Royal commission findings start to become I guess a bit more digestible and people start to think about what does this actually look like. And that's another reason that we started the charity so that we can actually raise funds to fund services for veterans and their families because one of the biggest issues for us is to make sure the veterans don't actually have to pay for their own wellbeing. I don't believe that they should have to. But then it is also about how do we make sure that we're doing it in the right way and trying to get the support of other veterans organisations as well.
- [122:56]
Shane Healy
Didn't you say you're going to Iraq or Afghanistan next week?
- [123:00]
Peter Low
I do, yeah. This trip is quite a quick trip. I'm going to deliver some training and I'm doing a review of the whole UN approach to repatriation and reintegration for the resident coordinator in Iraq. So it'll only be a couple of weeks but the project in Ukraine is a bit longer than that. I'm going first to look at a few of the. There's a few stables in different areas with a few stable managers who are willing to use their facilities. So going to have a look at that and meet with some veterans and their families and some people who are already delivering veterans services. In Ukraine there's quite a lot of delivery of veteran services already because they've got such a growing number of not just veterans but also families of veterans. So they're really working to support them now and then. Yeah. To work to deliver that sort of program and teach people how to deliver that program so that it's something that they can integrate into the broader sort of mental health and psychosocial support that's being offered for veterans in Ukraine. So yes, there's a couple of trips before the end of the year.
- [123:55]
Shane Healy
Wow.
- [123:56]
Peter Low
Which is why Shane. Shane gets the running job of Pegasus Connections for the next little bit.
- [124:03]
Shane Healy
Wow, that's amazing work. Shane, couple of questions. What was the name of your book or the book? Find, Fix, Finish and is that book solely about you?
- [124:14]
Warwick Schiller
No, no, no. So it's bookended with my story but gets into the complexities of leadership and politics of why we were in Afghanistan.
- [124:23]
Shane Healy
Okay. Something that's very topical right now. As a former bomb maker hunter, how, how big a. How complex an operation is these exploding pages and walkie talkies that' like mind boggling, like something you would see in a movie and you go, that would never happen.
- [124:49]
Peter Low
He was blowing up about this yesterday. So you're going to get the continuation.
- [124:54]
Warwick Schiller
So it's a long process. I worked with the Israeli intelligence in 05. It's not a new thing in military circles. So in the world that I came from, this isn't new. Like we've been doing this for a lot of the global war on terror. It's just the scale that it's done on and that it was so public is why everyone's freaking out about it. But it starts with again like I was talking about human sources and an end state. So in the intelligence world you have a thing called the detection threshold. And these devices let everyone know where we are because they ping off towers. So when I was talking about pattern of life, if I'm looking for a Hezbollah commander or something, I'm trying to get their phone number, then I'm looking at their cell phone towers to build up a pattern of life to work out where they live, you know, where they sleep to target them. Pages work off a radio frequency so they don't hit cell towers. So they're not geolocatable. So therefore it's harder to build up a pattern of life on someone who's not not walking around with a GPS on them. So that's why they went to that pages system and icon radios. Israel kind of did a psyop campaign to push them that way in some way because they already had an emphasis. So they were already in their supply chain with the ability to win that order for 4,000 pages. And new radios went in, they were already upstream of that order to then be able to put the 20 grams of PETN and switches in the pages and phones and yeah, so you're talking.
- [126:42]
Shane Healy
About playing chess before. So you're saying that they set the situation up so that these guys would have to go to pages and walkie talkies, but they had the supply of the pages and okay, mind blown.
- [126:58]
Warwick Schiller
So if you think about, yeah, three weeks ago they targeted a Hezbollah leader in Iran. He was in a room going to bed because they knew where he was because he used his mobile phone. So they knew. So then they said as. So then they, then they announced through the media and Al Jazeera, as long as you use your phone, we're going to know where you are and we're going to keep taking you out with drone strikes. So then Hezbollah go, well let's ditch our phones and go to this old tech, go back to the past and use pages and Israel have already in that logistic supply chain upstream.
- [127:36]
Peter Low
But it sort of goes back to what Shane was saying before about, you know, we have watches, but they have time. I mean this is a long standing far out. Do any of our conflicts that is so ingrained in who they are that the time is nothing for them to spend on something like this. Like a friend of mine says Chestnut checkers. And I think sometimes in this, in, in our world we're so, we're so focused on checkers, we want the quick win. We Want the easy thing we want, we just want to get it over and done with. We want to get out. Especially in the Middle East. You know our, our thing is go in, do what we need to do, get out. For them it's their life, it's their future, it's their history, it's everything. So a long con like that is, is nothing.
- [128:16]
Warwick Schiller
We work political cycle to political.
- [128:18]
Peter Low
So yeah, that's true too.
- [128:19]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, that's, they, they, they, they work and they actually function better under a dictatorship because it's all they've ever known. So they have that ability to play that. And so even I didn't completely understand it at the time but when I was In Israel in 05, David, one of the guys I was working with goes, you've got to understand Shane, there's 7 million of us and there's 400 million of them and all they want to do is push us into the water. They want to kill us. So to them every day is a fight for their very existence. So they don't look at Gaza and the west bank and Lebanon and Hezbollah as a little skirmish like we might when you know we're going to go in Iraq, we're pulling out. They look at it as their very fight for their existence as a country. And that's their footing, you know, ever since.
- [129:14]
Peter Low
And we don't know that level of commitment, we just don't know it in our, in our conscious collective as a, as a culture. We just don't know that level of absolute commitment. And like Shane said, the biggest issue for us in some of our democracies is we live, we live in election cycles. And you know we were talking about this the other day in terms of mental health, veterans mental health. And at the moment we're having so many issues in this country on youth offending and youth issues. And the biggest issue is our politicians will only see something that's deliverable from this election to when I go to my next election. And what we're talking about actually is complex intergenerational issues which just don't get funded by a politician because it's not.
- [129:51]
Warwick Schiller
Going to get unfund the previous politicians program because it doesn't have my name on it. Like I talked to people in Sydney about going do you, do you realize in our grandparents lifetime there was barbed wire on Bondi beach, that Japanese submarines got attacked in Sydney harbor less than 100 years ago. Like they can't fathom that in Australian society anymore. The bar one that Darwin got bombed, right. Because war has Always been over there. Where in the Middle East. It's all they've known. Like, there's people that I fought against in O4 that their grandkids are now fighting in Iraq. That's how intergenerational in Afghanistan, it goes all the way back to the Russians in the 70s. That's intergenerational combat conflict. We just can't understand that. Like in America, 9 11. Most Americans don't even resonate with 911 anymore and how impactful that was on American society when it happened. Kids don't even get that. They don't. Which is why it's not. You know, I've always said there's nothing more scary than united America because of what I witnessed on 9 11. 9 12, 9 13. These countries that we. That we read about in the news, that's been their history. Conquerors, invaders and, you know, caliphates, all this. That's just their history. And they just roll with the punches. And it's why, in a lot of ways, they're better equipped than we are, because we're clickbait media now.
- [131:27]
Peter Low
Like.
- [131:27]
Warwick Schiller
Like there used to be that saying, today's front page is tomorrow's chip wrapper. Yes. Ten minutes ago's topic is forgotten because of the next, you know, tweet or whatever. So.
- [131:37]
Shane Healy
Right.
- [131:38]
Warwick Schiller
And I think that's playing into a lot of people's anxiety and fears, how they can ramp people up into a frenzy online. So quick. Yeah, yeah.
- [131:49]
Shane Healy
Interesting times. Very interesting times. Yeah. Like the whole. You were talking about polarization before Peter, and. And, you know, I don't know if you ever watched. What was it called? It was a. It was a Netflix documentary on. It was called the Social Dilemma, and it was on social media. And the polarizing effects of that. I saw something recently. Someone had. They were on their phone. They looked at something on Facebook, I think it was, and there was a list. You know, there was all the replies to it. But then they got on their husband's phone and they looked at the same thing, and the replies were all different because the algorithm was different for each person. And most relevant, they put the answers that would most are most polarizing in the direction that you're already leaning first.
- [132:41]
Peter Low
Absolutely.
- [132:41]
Shane Healy
Put those first. And so you. This is in the same house.
- [132:46]
Peter Low
Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that. And, you know, this idea of polarization. And I wrote an assessment for a guy who was convicted of terrorism offences in Australia who did his time, and they were looking at a continuing detention order for him. And we ended up talking, you Know, for me, these assessments are quite lengthy, and I'd like to go back a second time and those sorts of things. We ended up talking, and he was explaining to me, you know, he had some questions about the world. You know, he had his own kind of history and experiences of the world, and he was. He was interested, and he went online to research a little bit more about a particular belief. And he said to me, you know, he said, that was the moment for me where I wish I had the awareness I have now that I had then, because I got lots of information. He said, I got lots of information about this and why this was right and why this was the true way and why this was the only way. And it kept coming. And, you know, we are. We are by nature, we are vulnerable to a whole bunch of biases. Yeah, a whole bunch of them. The psychological theories, which, you know, it's interesting, but how they impact us is what's really important. And so the more we see something, the more we believe it to be true. And then we start looking for things that reaffirm that belief. We no longer are willing to accept anything that doesn't agree with that information bias. And he said to me, you know, if. If I. If it had been 10 years ago and I hadn't have had social media, I would have gone to a library. And he said, you know, what would have happened in that library? I would have gone to the section and I would have seen this book, and I would have seen the shelves of books all around it. He didn't get that perspective because what he only saw was the book and just more of that same book. So it completely skewed his perspective that this must be right, because this is what I'm getting. And this. Look at all these articles, look at all these people. Look at all these things that are saying the same thing. He said, if I walked into a library, I would have seen with my own eyes all of these different books about all of these different religions. And just that perspective that we don't get on social media because, as you say, we're funneled to get the same stuff. We're funneled to get the same information, or that information keeps coming to us whether we want it or not. And I think of online bullying and how immersive that can be for a young person who can't step back. I mean, one of the things that I've always done with my children is we travel a lot, and I like to go different places, and I like them to see how large the world Is because that perspective is really important when you feel like you're consumed by this thing that's right here in front of me. If you have the ability to go, well, actually this is a tiny little dot of a place of a group of people in this whole bigger area of the world or my country or the state or whatever it is, that perspective can help you to really shift some of those bias because you have that lived experience of a whole different place. And if this place is shitty, well, I'll just go some other place. So. So I think, you know, what he said was really, to me that stuck with me, the lessons that I've learned from people along the way. And it stuck with me what he said about. He just lost the capacity for that perspective was taken away because of where we now find all of our information. And it was just, it's one of those things that's. That's continually stuck with me when I think about how do people end up on that pathway. And very many years ago I adopted, as I said before, I'm not religious, but I really like this one part, part of the Bible that talks about there but for the grace of God go I. And I'm always trying to imagine. And you know, I know in my life, if it hadn't have been for particular people at particular points of time, who knows where I'd be? I never can I never judge or condemn anyone because until, you know, we know what it's like for them to have walked a mile in their shoes, which is often what I say. Empathy is not just about understanding, you know, you know, someone walking a mile in their shoes, it's like, what is it like for that person? Because your shoes are going to feel very different to me. But I always look at that guy and that story and I'm reminded of how incredibly important it is that for any one of us at any point in time, those culmination of things can just set us on a very different trajectory and any one of us could end up anywhere. And he very unfortunately didn't have the external things in his life, the people he could go to, talk to that he could trust to even raise this with, that wouldn't condemn him or judge him. So he felt like he only had himself to find this information. And it's always such a great example for me of those kind of internal and external factors that mean that any one of us could be anywhere at any point in time. So it's funny that that idea of the social media is now it's an Ease of information. It's not always the best information. It's not always the right information. And unless we're very critical about that information, it's impacting most of us in such a negative way. I mean, for me, that the benefits are far outweighed by the negativity of it. All.
- [137:26]
Shane Healy
Right.
- [137:27]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. I was very lucky that in my. When I got into human intelligence, the main emphasis on reversing every perspective. Look through their lens, look through their eyes. So I constantly take the opposite position out of the gates. And so one of the conversations I always have with people is why? So, like, Trump's a great example. They'll go, I hate Trump. Why? And might come across as a Trump lover, but in reality, I'm just trying to understand where are you getting your position from. It's so staunch. You've never met this guy, but you convinced you hate him. Why? Oh, because of. And it's always very surface level these days, because that's all social media is. It's that click, it's that headline. We don't take the time we used to to go the next level, to read the book, to get the information. We're just taking what other people are giving us and not questioning it anymore. There's no longer those robust discussions, which I love. I love finding someone who doesn't think like me and having the conversation because to me, I was always taught, every day you learn something new is a great day. And, you know, why do you. Whether it be you're an expert in your field and I want to learn, come and teach me, or you got a very hard position. Why do you have that? What's. Is it. There's always usually information and bias. Is it your. What are they when you. When you look for information to confirm your confirmation bias, confirmation bias, Is it. Are you affected from that? Or have you looked at both sides of an argument and came up with your decision? And I always find it because these days people get quite offended when I go, why? There was. Peter was doing a muster recently and there was some people on there. There's a lady talking about Trump and I just literally did that. What is it about that? And she was flustered at the fact that I actually asked, why did she hate Trump? And I go, look, I don't like the. Like, I'm not a follower. I'm just. You have so much passion in that comment. It's like, he's wronged you personally. What is it? And she had nothing. And that fascinates me because it's a New human trait. Ten years ago, people could sit down and would argue a position with you. Now they won't. And I just find that sad in the evolution of humans.
- [140:06]
Peter Low
I very unfortunately watched the Senate Question Time yesterday. Every now and then, I tune in just to remind me of lots of things. But it's very clear to me that we've lost the ability for conversation. And it's funny, growing up, you know, my grandmother used to say to me, you never bring up politics or religion at the dinner table. And now all I do is speak about both of them most of the time. But the capacity for people to have that conversation and to be able to discuss ideas in a respectful way that they don't agree with, I think is. It's really. We're losing that ability. We're losing the ability. And we get ourselves in these binary positions of I either have to like this or not like it. Whereas there's a lot of things that in different circumstances and, you know, I'm taken back to my days at uni when. When I was introduced to ethics and singer and the train on the tracks, you know, and the context that goes into that ethical dilemma and how people answer that question and where people sit, and if the conditions are different, they change their position. It's almost like we're not allowed to change our position anymore. We have to come. We have to come up with where we sit on something, and that's all we can believe, and we have to consistently believe those things. And no longer as humans can we evolve and change. I believe things very different now to what I did starting out as a very young social worker, you know, know, and my ideas about the world and how it all works then and all of my lived experience along the way and the things that I've learned now, of course, my ideas are different. They should be. If I'm the exact same person I am now as I was when I was 20, I'm not doing something right. I mean, you should grow and change and develop and evolve. And if presented with new information, I should have the tolerance to integrate that, to think about. How does that sit with my beliefs and my values? To change some of my beliefs and my values, if I'm challenged in that, and I think that they are all normal things that we should be actually, I don't know, embracing much more than we do. It's almost like we expect people to sit in a position and stay there. Now. It's very.
- [142:02]
Warwick Schiller
That's what's missing in mental health because, yeah, it's so Rigid, okay, You've got ptsd. That's you for life. There's no at, no understanding of, of you can get better. It's, you know, or that your better.
- [142:17]
Peter Low
Is not going to look the same as it did before, or your better might not look like my normal. I think that's the other thing.
- [142:23]
Warwick Schiller
Like, I was talking to someone the other day and I said, with amputation, if someone loses a leg, you look at them like they've lost a leg. They're not the same, but that's all that's different. They're still functioning. But your moment, you hear someone's got a mental health injury, you don't look at them that same way. It's. They're different, they're tainted. And that was a big thing that I strive to change is that attitude that you're not, you don't have, you know, an incurable disease. You can be better, you can function, you know, but you're going to have bad days and that's okay.
- [143:00]
Peter Low
And I think this is, I have this debate all the time, Shane and I talk a lot about it in terms of labeling. And I've gone through various iterations in my career of whether I believe labeling is helpful or not. And I can see the benefits and challenges of it, you know, for individuals, for society. It's a bit the same as where I sit on statistics. You know, I think statistics are great and they can help inform us and they tell us about en masse, good policy making and things like that, but they don't help you understand an individual story. And sometimes we get swayed by statistics to believe certain things. And that, that doesn't necessarily help us when we need to be more flexible in that kind of rigid, well, this is the way that it is because this is what statistics tell us. And I'm a bit the same with labeling. I'm at a stage now where I think we shouldn't have to get labeled to get access to services, but we do so therefore we exist in a society where labeling is actually beneficial because it opens the door for you to get access to what you need. The problem then is that label is something that you carry with you, and how you then are able to get rid of that label is someone else's determination of what normal might look like for them. So we haven't become flexible enough to be able to say, well, you may have at some point had some symptoms that were representative of this, which meant that you needed this level of support and you got that level of support. And now I'M looking at it, that's not the support you need anymore for a whole bunch of reasons. And you might not need any support or you might need different support. We're not as flexible in the way that we see it. And I think that's because we try and take these really complex problems and distill them down to, you have this set of symptoms, you have this label, therefore there's that treatment. And that's just. And while you ever. You have those symptoms or you have that treatment, and that's just the way that it goes. And I think until we become. Become a little bit more. And it's funny because there's a contradiction, isn't it? Because in the. In the health helping space, we're always talking about being client focused. Well, surely client focused means that we don't have to go through all of these systemic hoops so that someone can actually get what they need. So we're contradicting ourselves in that space. But I think, you know, until we can get to the point, which is where we're hoping to drive Pegasus, it's our underlying theory of change for Pegasus is that actually that we are responsive to individual need. And so we need to make sure that we don't fall into this case of going, oh, I've seen 10 people like this before and this is what they had, so this is what will work for you. It's really being conscious for us to stay always on connecting with the individual and looking at them through what's showing up for them today, not what sort of symptoms they have, not how it's categorized, not the label, but what's showing up for them today. And how can that be best supported in the moment? Because that's going to be different every day. Yeah, it's such a challenge, isn't it? Because at the same time that I see that, I understand structurally why we need these certain things to be able to implement services and to be able to make sure that people get access to what they need, but it sort of gets in the way sometimes as well.
- [145:51]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I remember I changed GPS and I was having a really bad. I hadn't slept for a couple of days and was in a lot of pain. And I went and saw him, he goes, what's up? I said, nothing, I just need you to see me at. When I at it, when I'm having bad. So when I come up, you've got the context. Because he was struggling with. He would look at me and go, how does somebody looks like you have that wrong with him that it wasn't computing until he saw me in pain and that. And then he actually read the book. I bought him the book and he read it and it changed his whole dealing with me because he was dealing with actually dealing with me, not with what he was seeing at that time. And I think that's one thing that I promised with asking with Pegasus I'll never do to someone is no preconceived ideas. And that's again goes back to what I got from you about not having a plan. It's dealing with who you've got at that day. Because when you're dealing with mental health, someone's good days and other like you don't know what someone's bad experiences, you don't know what someone's good experience is. So don't judge them, work with them. And I don't think there's. From my personal experience, there's not enough of that. That like when I was in hospital, I, I was dumbfounded. You know, you'd line up at night on that for your pills or your medication. And there were some patients that was like Skittles and I was like, holy. Like, whoa. Like I'm. And so I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to be that person, which helped me be okay with, you know, there's a, there's a cost to everything. So I don't again when I say I don't mind being having a bad day or don't mind whatever, that's the cost. I could take that pill and not suffer like that or not take that. And yeah, so I think. But they were into me every time I saw a psychiatrist. We'll just give you Zolof. I don't want to do that, mate. What do you mean you don't want to do that? Well, I don't want to go down that road. And then you're the problem child.
- [148:07]
Peter Low
You're very used to that.
- [148:08]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, but, but it shouldn't be that because you won't take a medication and they might actually have to roll their sleeves up and do some work, that you're the problem child. And that for me was a big driver with the methodology of Pegasus is you are in charge of you. And one of the things I got with Peter is case management. No one understands how to do that themselves. Keep a diary, you know who you know. Especially when you're dealing with people that are anxious, are depressed, have short term memory loss, you know, you can't say to someone you've got all this Wrong with you. Then blame them for forgetting something. Then blame them for not making a phone call. Oh, hang on. You're treating them for that exact thing, right? There's a lot of that that goes on in the space too. So there's. There's guys that I talk with that they just want to vent. You know, I'm having issues with X, you know, bank or whatever, and they don't get that. They. They're having a gut me for being angry, but I'm hyper vigilant. I've got ptsd. Like, they're actually dealing with me for these issues, but getting angry with me because of what my issues are. And there's a lot of that in. In the space.
- [149:25]
Shane Healy
Right. Well, it sounds like you guys are going to do some amazing stuff with Pegasus. How. How do people find out more about Pegasus Connection?
- [149:37]
Peter Low
So We've got a LinkedIn page, we've got a website. We are starting on social media. Neither one of us are very good at that. So the website we're building out, what's the website?
- [149:48]
Shane Healy
Is it WW Pegasus connection?
- [149:50]
Peter Low
WW pegasusconnections.org.
- [149:58]
Shane Healy
No. Okay.
- [149:59]
Peter Low
Not a year.
- [149:59]
Shane Healy
Pegasusconnections.org okay. Well, I. You guys are fascinating. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours.
- [150:09]
Warwick Schiller
Careful. I'll hold you out at Ecuatana.
- [150:11]
Shane Healy
Hey. Hey. You guys are going to Ecuatana. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys there. That'll be super cool.
- [150:17]
Peter Low
Yeah, it'll be good for.
- [150:18]
Warwick Schiller
Gonna hijack you and drag you out to Chapman.
- [150:20]
Shane Healy
Yeah. Yeah. Sit around a campfire. I'm down for that.
- [150:25]
Warwick Schiller
And meet our anxious racehorse.
- [150:26]
Shane Healy
Yeah. You'll have him reparented by then.
- [150:31]
Peter Low
Hopefully.
- [150:31]
Shane Healy
Yeah. Okay.
- [150:32]
Warwick Schiller
Well, he's. He's actually. His dad won the cox plate twice, so he's. He's got a very. Yeah. And he's an amazing horse.
- [150:40]
Peter Low
He is. He's very willing.
- [150:41]
Shane Healy
Yeah. Sounds like you guys are doing a great job with him. Well, thanks so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you guys on here and good luck in the future with the Pegasus Connections. I think it sounds like it's some amazing work that's sorely needed in the world.
- [150:56]
Peter Low
Thanks, Warwick. Thank you so much for the time too. It's really nice to be able to unpack stuff. It's nice to have a good conversation.
- [151:04]
Shane Healy
And you guys at home. Thanks for joining us and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Journeyon podcast.
- [151:11]
Warwick Schiller
Thanks for being a part of the journey on podcast with Warrick. Schiller. Warrick has over 850 full length training videos on his online video library@videos.warwickshiller.com Be sure to follow Warrick on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to see his latest training advice and insights.