In turn, that was a continuation of the tailings thread started with John Metzger:

Michael makes meaningful progress for us on tailings dams because he used to lead a bond trading desk and is now an ESG analyst. Hence, we can connect three threads: how money markets work, how a disaster reaches a stock price, and where geospatial data fits in. We start by walking through the basics of equity versus credit markets. Equity holders bet on growth, while bondholders prioritize getting their principal back. This is why bondholders sit higher in the capital stack and recover more when a company fails.

The conversation then follows a concrete case: the 2019 Brumadinho tailings dam collapse in Brazil, and the 28% drop in Vale’s share price that followed:

This is measured from the closing price of the prior week, a Thursday, because the event happened on a Monday. The comparison period ends February 8th 2019, as shown above. Over those 10 trading days, the value of the company went from $USD77B to 58B:

A nigh on 30% drop in the value of a company, especially when it amounts to $20B lost, warrants attention. Michael explains how a rating agency’s event-scoring system can trigger institutional investors’ committees to sell, and how the resulting selling pushes the price down. Event-driven selling, not only the disaster itself, is what moves the market.

The discussion then turns to what this means for mining oversight. Pension funds in the UK and Sweden pushed listed miners to disclose tailings facility locations, creating a dataset of roughly 2,000 sites. The discussion covers how geospatial analysis could go further: measuring proximity to communities, density changes, and early signs of instability.

The episode closes on conflict risk. Michael’s master’s research connected mining to conflict, and he points to cases where armed groups take over mines, drop maintenance, and leave tailings unmonitored. He also suggests that satellite imagery could help track armed group movements, and that geospatial intelligence tools might give investors earlier warning.

Listen to the full episode for the worked examples and the discussion of how to turn these risks into decisions.

We cover why utilities should separate their systems of record, engagement and monitoring, and how AI changes who builds geospatial tools. We also look at GIS Map Online, Silas's open-source, browser-based replacement for Google Earth:

Stick around to the end for a 10 minute demo.

INTRODUCTION

An emerging market is a term in western finance for more advanced developing countries like China, India and South Korea.Kevin Carter is today’s guest, and he has a couple of decades of experience investing in emerging markets as founder of EMQQ Global and EMXETF. He appeared on CNBC talking about some of this last year:

He has been prolific starting exchange traded funds, Wikipedia explains what they are:

These are the ones he started that still operate:

1. - Chinese tech equities

2. - India’s digital consumption and online commerce

3. - online consumption platforms across developing nations

4. - tech, digital payment, and e-commerce in frontier markets

5. - China's broader AI ecosystem

6. - Chinese AI "unicorns" + tech giants with LLMs

And here he is ringing the bell at the NYSE launching EMQQ:

Cool, so what did we talk about?

1. MAG 3. You’ve probably heard of the Magnificent 7. If not, Fidelity to the rescue:

   

   These are stocks from what the West calls Developed Markets. Kevin talked about applying the same idea to emerging markets, he found The MAG 3.

2. Then we moved on to China’s AI Tigers. Kevin challenged our assumptions about US AI leadership with stories from China.

3. Finally, we covered how to create an exchange traded fund or ETF. This matters because there isn’t one for geospatial yet.

Burton Malkiel is an advisor to Kevin’s EMQQ Global ETFs. He wrote the famous book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Kevin was nice enough to send me a copy before this episode:

Something Kevin was impressed with was spontaneously showing him my global stock exchange Google Maps list:

I’ve since classified this into various types of markets, keep reading.

IMPLICATIONS

So what’s the obvious thing to do inspired by Kevin’s work? You guessed it, I classified the GEO500 into frontier, emerging and developed markets using MSCI’s latest classification. This joins the ranks of many other classification layers. The ones added before this are leadership type, being an Esri partner, being in the Geoawesome Top 100, pureplay vs adjacent geospatial, not to mention the 29 geospatial industry verticals I have assigned. All offer useful insights on the GEO500, let’s look into the details of the new developed, emerging and frontier markets classification.

Developed Markets

The results for developed markets were 12% capital growth per annum, on average the past decade. Best performing country was Spain at 38% annually. Holland was the worst at -5% annually.

Emerging Markets

For emerging markets it was vastly less, 5% per annum. Best country was Saudi Arabia at 35% annually but this was just one stock, Al Moammar Information Systems. The next best performing country was Taiwan, at 24% annual growth. The worst was the United Arab Emirates at -14% annually.

Frontier Markets

It was a much better picture for Frontier Markets, with 24% growth per year on average the past decade. Best country was Nigeria at 38%, worst was Serbia at -8%. I only cover 3 frontier markets countries though, the third is Vietnam, whose geospatial stocks grew at 9% annually in the past decade.

Emerging markets being worst of all is an interesting outcome for the GEO500. Kevin’s comment seems to apply here about the risks of former state owned enterprises on emerging markets stock exchanges. For example, there are upwards of 50 Chinese companies, together they have only grown at 3% though. This implies we need to pay some attention to selection of emerging markets stocks and not just buy them all.

We have come full circle. Kevin sent me a book about picking stocks and the author is an advisor to one of his investment funds. Is this enough to avoid the default outcome of low returns from emerging markets?

I am reminded of another podcast guest, Henk van Houtum:

He also sent me a book, one he wrote called Free the Map. It challenges the validity of national borders as the default map of the world. He reflects that having national borders as the primary image of the world reduces our ability to humanise everyone to the same degree.

Via finance, of all things, I see Kevin doing the same thing.

Kevin has been nothing but a cheerleader of emerging and frontier markets for decades. He was a pioneer in making them easy to invest in via an exchange traded fund. His marketing activity around his funds, evident in this podcast, show nothing but admiration for these countries and a celebration of the incredible companies they can produce. The recent dominance of the Magnificent 3, all from outside what the West calls the developed world, is an emphatic endorsement of his long term commitment to finding investment ideas outside traditional markets.

It is funny then to see that via finance, Kevin effectively endorses the work of a Dutch political geographer on the other side of the world. Through the earlier episode with Henk, you saw that he does not mince words spotlighting the humanity of people regardless what border they happen to have been born within. Henk asks us to produce maps that offer everyone humanity. Kevin echoes this in saying he looks at the WHOLE map of the world in his investment search.

Once again, this episode isn’t investment advice.

You should consider other options: , .

1. We cover WHY he made Dekart, the relationship with Kepler, who he competes with and some discussion of specific geospatial needs of mobility companies like Wayve.

2. He then steps through use of a new Claude skill he made called geoSQL.

3. This skill uses a map in the loop, yes Claude checks images of its own maps in the course of producing a final Dekart output.

4. We finish the discussion by looking at how geospatial business models may evolve in the context of Claude native GIS.

It was nice to do another live episode and I appreciated the bravery of Sarah and Roca in asking their own questions. I want to give a shoutout regarding Sarah’s new business, StillPointGeospatial.com. I also really encourage you to test out this new geosql Claude skill. I did so myself. Here is the full prompt:

It then helped me to connect to a Dekart trial account and stood processing the prompt for several minutes. The result was a decision to get all Overture Maps Foundation building footprints with a class of ‘cabin’,’dormitory’,’hut’,’bunkhouse’, or ‘static_caravan’. For the particular bounding box specified, no such footprints were returned. It also made a second decision to use the Overture Maps Foundation camp points of interest layer to find any campgrounds or educational camps. Once it had those, it returned any building footprints within 250 meters. It found several, the largest of which was a gym. Note the overall requirement that all records must be in the 100 year flood zone. So yes, it did find something that could ostensibly be used to house children overnight as camp sleeping quarters, with that building being a flood zone.

Access: https://cloud.dekart.xyz/reports/117eae0a-6617-4bba-8f05-32da243b5343?

I then prompted a re run but using a bounding box across the whole of Georgia and honestly the results were hard to interpret. What I began to see were hundreds of static_caravan building footprints. I had the feeling that these would rarely serve as sleeping quarters for children’s summer camps. That is where I left it. Nevertheless, it was an incredibly compelling demonstration of what we can now do in Claude native GIS.

To be fair, let’s contrast this with the efficiency of FEMA’s Flood Map Service Center. It promptly loads with a location search box. Putting in just the words Camp Mystic, the site of the tragedy driving this example, immediately shows that it is in a flood zone.

What neither the geoSQL skill output shown in this episode or the FEMA solution do though is give a parent an immediate, plain, yes/no answer on whether a specific location is in a flood zone. On one hand you have to do Claude native GIS. On the other you have to interpret an ugly map legend.

Who is going to build this solution that simplifies the answer?

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1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out.

6. Chapter 6: Leadership, Relationships and Moral Repair.

Introduction

Two important conversations have happened since the last chapter 2 months and 20 days ago. One about excavation safety. The other about persistence. I reflect on these below in the context of leadership, relationships and moral repair.

Excavation Safety

An individual told me recently about a risk of field-based colleagues dying in collapsed excavations. They said their efforts to raise this risk had so far fallen on deaf ears. I was reminded of a couple of excavation safety related incidents in my own career. One was an unshored 10m deep manhole excavation on Public Works Authority ‘Ashghal’ – Qatar‘s drainage network:

When employed at Jacobs a year after recording this video, I took up the issue of this safety hazard because Ashghal was a client of theirs and they had a contract on the drainage system. They were not responsible for the excavation in the video. Nevertheless, I wanted to use the influence of Jacobs to bring attention to the hazard. It led to an investigation by the ethics team where some staff of the company in Qatar were interviewed to get an honest impression of safety standards for that client regarding excavations. That was as far as the company was prepared to take the matter, given they were not responsible for the particular hazard I’d given evidence of. I was not fully satisfied with this resolution, but at least they knew someone was watching.

The second excavation related matter from my career was the death of two men simultaneously, crushed in a trench under a fallen concrete beam. This happened when I was in Kuwait at Amec Foster Wheeler on a Kuwait Oil Company project. Using the moral injury definition discovered in Chapter 2, we can say this contributed to a moral injury via omission, due to bearing witness to (rather than commission of) a transgressive event. I witnessed two such moral transgressions in relation to this event. The first was the men dying in a preventable workplace safety breach. The second was when the leadership called a town hall meeting to celebrate us being nominated as the best project management consultancy by the client, only for the meeting to start with a sombre speech about those deaths. Whereupon the leadership breezily carried on with celebrating our award. Someone in the stunned crowd asked if they would spend money on a rigorous safety training course. The operations director refused to do so, saying it was too expensive. 5 minutes earlier they were talking about 2 dead men in a trench under a concrete beam, then effectively invited us to forget it by continuing blithely on to celebrate our being the best PMC. I was not able to separate the deaths of those men from the failure to spend money on that training. Or from the risk of more deaths. As such, the experience also earned me a check in the box of ‘failure to prevent’ from the overall moral injury definition:

...the functionally impairing psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or being a victim of acts that transgress deeply-held moral beliefs and expectations (emphasis mine)

In the leadership refusing to fund appropriate extra training, I and others in the crowd who cared to think or ask about the need for it ran the risk of concluding they had failed to prevent further fatalities. In writing this it is the first time I have revisited this matter in detail. It is 9 years later. It has given me some time to think. I will use this moment to state the point of this chapter: appropriate distribution of whose weight it is to carry when a moral transgression must be addressed. I am not directly responsible for the death of these men. I am also not directly responsible for the morally transgressive leadership response to those deaths. There is some resonance for me as I write that statement.

It is a simple remark above from Wendy Dean MD, which I have repeated in each chapter summary. Whose weight to carry was the death of those men? Whose weight to carry was the resulting change to training? The momentum put on a person with a moral injury by omission is that the weight is entirely theirs. This powerful quote from Professor Zachary Steel, also repeated from Chapter 2, explains the resonance:

Acts of omission have a lot of interpretive confusion around them. It’s ‘I wasn’t able to do something. I didn’t do something I thought I should do.’ And you know what? It’s invisible to everybody else. It’s invisible to your colleagues. It’s invisible to the people around you. And yet the moral burden that comes from perceived acts of omission - of a failure to do what you thought you should have done - are [associated] with very high levels of ongoing distress.

Yes, a high level of ongoing distress because a regular person will not be familiar with death. Naturally such a person will have an extreme reaction to a preventable one. I was unfamiliar with death when I went to work in Cambodia, where a lot of preventable deaths occurred historically. Then when I went to work in Kuwait straight after, where they happened regularly right around me in the oilfield.

I can say here that preventable deaths will elicit a great deal of sensitivity and feverish reflection on any possible mistake made. Naturally, every last effort must be made never to participate in someone losing their life. The potential for such rumination is endless in the context of a moral transgression by omission. This is because one was not in control, one only witnessed it, learnt of it, or failed to prevent it. Perversely, that certainty is only available to the person involved in a moral transgression by commission. And Professor Steel’s research shows that this certainty regarding responsibility torments people who commit transgressions less than those involved by omission. They are left without the certainty regarding degree of responsibility. It is remarkably perverse. Basically one may forever be haunted by the thought one didn’t shout loud enough. Or wasn’t aware enough to see the need to shout. And endless variations thereof.

We began above to address the question of whose weight it was to carry the responsibility for these deaths. And the lack of improved training after they happened. Let’s finish addressing the subject of whose weight this was to carry. The weight of those two deaths was carried by the project engineer, the safety engineers, those who participated in the toolbox talk to start the day, and those who incorrectly loaded, or handled, the beam before it crushed the two men. In turn, the weight of the training improvement is carried by the leadership, such as the operations director who refused in front of us to spend money on it. Now, what about the rest of us in that town hall meeting? I will never forget an outspoken colleague. She was an African American woman, who had the courage to speak up for us all and point out that these were not the only deaths. Indeed they were occurring with alarming frequency. What weight does she carry? What about me? What about the other 300 staff standing in shock witnessing all this in that town hall meeting?

I have to be honest with you. We still carried some of the weight. Because if the wrong thing happens, something must be said. Until it is set right, more must be said. If you do not speak, you have said you agree with such moral transgressions. There is more here, but let me make an aside about justice being served.

It was never set right. What followed was a kind of justice though. Due to that and several other deaths met with similar indifference, I resigned from Amec Foster Wheeler. Months later, Wood bought them. Toward the end of the same year Wood was set upon by regulators both sides of the Atlantic due to past bribery at Amec Foster Wheeler to get Brazilian government oil contracts. Not too long afterward, Wood’s stock price traded below the IPO price, undoing all investor gains over more than 2 decades. It never recovered and was bought on the verge of collapse by a consultancy in Dubai, Sidara.

I will return again to the subject of who carries the weight. The point I got to was that several people were responsible for carrying it ahead of me. If it was just me, this is me saying there was no leadership. But there was. I am taking too much responsibility if I ignore them. This sounds elementary. Simultaneously it is hideous to philosophise about how much weight to carry in the face of preventable death. As you watch me ricocheting about here though, you see how severe the unresolvable emotional turmoil is of moral injury by omission. One is reduced to having to spell out the most basic things. It curdles the mind so much that you neglect doing so, possibly for years. Here I am sorting this out once and for all as I write, 9 years later.

An excessive appetite for penance may be taken as a sign of decency. One has to ask though whether effectively removing oneself from circulation through a vast sense of guilt is the kind of justice those who died would want. I actually do think it is possible to say that the decent thing is to be driven insane by such a circumstance. We are then at Alina Bennett’s talk on moral injury, also mentioned in Chapter 2. She spoke of the berzerk state. In witnessing a moral transgression, a person may lose inhibitions in seeking to right the wrong. But let’s continue the thought of what a person who died under preventable circumstances would want. Yes, a form of honouring them is to lose one’s mind with guilt and rage. Honouring them is also possible, however, in appropriately distributing the weight of responsibility, with this guiding acts of change.

We have a final problem. What if the weight of responsibility is rejected, an example of leadership malpractice?

That is what drove me nuts. For in front of me stood white male English, Portuguese and American-accented leaders. They were speaking to a multiracial workforce, the majority of whom were from fragile states with poor employment prospects back home. They failed to step up regarding preventable deaths of two brown men also from a fragile country.

My error here was, in seeing them shirking responsibility, I allowed mine to grow proportionately. Why is that an error? The tools, influence and network available to me were not up to the job. I was a mere GIS Specialist. I was not an executive. For an issue that required executive attention. Simple as that. But because of an overbearing sense of duty I consigned myself to the torture of failing to see progress on this issue due to the total lack of effective tools I had at my disposal.

I now have a story to tell. I was destroyed. It was not the right thing to do to throw myself into the flames of that situation. It might have looked heroic but only one outcome was certain: bent and broken tools and the hands and body wielding them. That was me. Until 30 sessions of therapy.

So then what is the story really? It is a tale of caution about leadership malpractice. Effective leadership is vital. Its absence risks devastation. It cannot be fixed by people without the tools and power of a leader trying to step in. They will end up somewhere between frustrated and broken. It is then on everyone to diagnose good leaders early and get them a position where they’ll be useful. It goes the other way too, identify the potential for leadership malpractice early, implement mitigations.

Unfortunately, the world does not provide a perfectly uniform mechanism to create useful leaders. Importantly, in some places, bad leaders encounter ineffective protections against them gaining a position of responsibility. I am reminded of a piece by Rory Jones about NEOM in The Wall Street Journal with an apt title “The World’s Biggest Construction Project Is a Magnet for Executives Behaving Badly: Saudi Arabia’s Neom project contends with corruption, worker deaths, racism and misogyny“.

This is my international career in a nutshell. I spent half of it in places where protections against bad leaders are poor. The results in that article speak for themselves: gang rapes, plural, in worker camps. According to hospital records examined by the reporter. A joyous job.

So, it has been a long story. We started with someone recently telling me their attempts to improve excavation safety at work have fallen on deaf ears. I make these public statements to ensure this individual does not feel alone in challenging an employer to do better in its management of excavation safety risk.

Persistance

A second meaningful conversation happened today. I have a friend in the UK whom I met when working at Arup. He rang me out of the blue this morning from an office in Canary Wharf, London. He proudly showed the view and talked about finally getting a job he had been working towards the past four years. Canary Wharf is London’s new financial district and an elite place to work. It was gratifying to me to receive that call and see the pride on his face, and the nice office design behind him. This is because he is an incredibly talented, hardworking man who was clearly underpaid and under-utilized in the roles he had between when I met him and before today. Whilst I have since moved to a new country, my repeatedly saying a better job was possible meant enough to him that he call me about achieving it on his first day working there.

I am reminded of my own process underway in these chapters to find a better situation myself. Someone whom I had encouraged now serves as encouragement for me.

Moral Repair and Relationships

Here’s to success in the process of moral repair. The previous chapter mentioned a video about this and I will include it again:

The video is useful as it distinguishes between moral reassurance, a common treatment component, and a new treatment approach centred on moral repair. The method is called Adaptive Disclosure - Enhanced. The researcher responsible for it is Brett Litz and his most recent publication on the subject appears to be Service members’ exposure to potentially morally injurious events: Intimate partner knowledge and response. This is apt, given the last chapter concluded with impact on my own relationships.

I am glad to have shown a couple of examples of functional relationships in this chapter. Whilst the first individual confronts a difficulty, what is good is that he saw in me someone he could confide in. This in turn means I have not become a cynic due to what I have both witnessed and failed to prevent. I continue to be someone who speaks up and is then an example to others. I have been taught a valuable lesson though. The role in a team of a leader is a legitimate one. It can be glamorous. The role carries a weight ready to cause an unglamorous descent, however, if we don’t get the choice of leader right through appropriately robust tests.

Neom, for example, incinerated $50 billion before being, according to Mark Heine (CEO of Fugro), cancelled. Bad leaders can cost 10s of billions. And, according to a former colleague, the life of at least one construction worker in, you guessed it, a poorly managed excavation.

Finally, we turn our attention to the problem of mismanaged mine tailings storage facilities. Or tailings dams. Every year there is a notable collapse of one. An example he gives is from last year where a Sino-Metals Leach Zambia tailings dam collapsed in Zambia. Toxic waste hit the Mwambashi River. This flows into the Kafue River and 60% of Zambians live in its river basin. Roughly 45% of Zambia's population relies directly on the Kafue River for their drinking water. That is 10 million people.

Join us today to contribute to the development of a global, authoritative, continuously updated dataset of tailings dam boundaries. Your expertise is sought in creating it, then standing up a tailings dam runout modelling engine. Its outputs regarding predicted lives lost and critical infrastructure damage will incentivise appropriate action by leaders. Or attention on those leaders by the population.

QuantAgri: Predictive Agricultural Insights Report

QuantAgri delivers quantitative analytics and market intelligence for agricultural commodities. Trading these markets involves substantial risk. This publication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

By Ryan Kmetz

…with . I will be incorporating Quant Agri GEOINT-based commodity trading performance going forward, based on a $1,000 starting position.

Slides:

1. marimo joining Coreweave: https://marimo.io/blog/joining-coreweave

2. marimo repo: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

3. marimo pair - for helping pair with an AGI: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo-pair

4. A related blog post: https://marimo.io/blog/claude-code

5. Evidence marimo uses Leafmap: https://docs.marimo.io/api/plotting/?h=map#other-plotting-libraries

6. Anywidget: https://anywidget.dev/ and its dev: https://github.com/manzt

7. Notebooks in Wherobots: https://wherobots.com/blog/wherobots-notebook-environment-getting-started-with-wherobots-cloud-sedonadb-part-2/

8. Vincent's Wiggly Stuff: https://koaning.github.io/wigglystuff/

9. marimo recently ended competition: https://marimo.io/pages/events/notebook-competition-2

We are now discussing the next competition and adding a geospatial theme to it!

Introduction

In the past week I watched this speech:

It was by Air Force Major Jason Watson. In response to unlawful commands issued to the US Air Force, he called for the impeachment of the president. He has inspired me to engage in some disobedience of my own. Finally I have the wherewithal to write the next chapter in this series.

This chapter is about recovery. It will not be the last. After hesitating for a significant period of time hoping to reach a point of complete recovery, I have realised this process involves several stages. So I will document them chapter by chapter. I will start with the headline for my recovery. I can say I have proof that I have mentally recovered. Funnily enough, there is a connection I can make to this guy being from the Air Force.

FAA Medical

The proof of recovery is in a somewhat curious form! In the past month I passed the US Federal Aviation Administration Class 1 Medical Exam. Should I wish to pursue this career, it means I am fit to be an airline pilot. It was not the plan to certify my recovery in this way. For starters, it cost hundreds of dollars. But I was interested in becoming a pilot and so I did the medical exam. 12 days later I heard back saying I’m fit to fly. It’s opportunistic but I’ll take it also as evidence of a recovery step. Full recovery? Honestly I don’t feel it. But this makes me seem like an idiot. If someone is deemed mentally fit to fly an airliner full of passengers around, shouldn’t I just accept I’m ok?

Let me think about this as I write the background on how I got here.

Therapy

So what happened before the FAA medical? From February to May I completed 20 sessions of psychotherapy. I did this because of watching the presentations by psychologists shown in Chapter 2. As such, I’m putting myself before you not just as someone who’s written some stuff, but using what I discover. I was particularly struck with so reached out to him first. He was gracious enough to have a brief call with me but advised that he is not licensed to practice where I live. Nevertheless, he did recommend that I find a therapist who measured progress with each session. He also said to seek a 5 minute call with several clinicians to check the vibe before spending money. I dutifully then scoured my health insurer’s list of clinicians and tried to call them. This proved tough going. Surprisingly few of their offices picked up the phone. I think I left about 10 voicemails. Only one discussion resulted. It was with a trauma specialist who, amongst other things, administered psychedelics. I am a huge fan of rebellious, indeed disobedient, forms of treatment. When I asked him about having a habit of measurement, though, he said that he didn’t believe in it.

Then I discovered Happier Living, an online therapy service thankfully covered by my insurer. I was able to use their system to find someone with a PhD in psychotherapy. A major source of credibility. Happier Living comes with its own formal measurement system that shows an average state. It has a cheesy name, PERFiC and here is the current state of my dashboard:

It is relatively rigorous, taking 10 minutes each time if you really think about each item. Importantly it is solely based on what I reported, not also the clinician. It turned out my clinician added two more questionnaires about anxiety and depression on top of that, so measurement was pleasantly thorough. Seeing his training and the facilitation of measurement by Happier Living, I eagerly made my first booking without even seeking out an initial 5 minute chat.

The result of that is captured in Figure 1:

I love the clarity of seeing my experience from session to session as two simple lines on a chart. It tracks depression and anxiety, based on tests I took before each session. After requesting my medical records, I laboriously went through and got all the results for the chart. It shows that, for depression, symptoms were minimal with a temporary spike to moderate in late April. For anxiety, there was a prolonged stretch in the mild zone from early March to late May. This meant a generally higher baseline than depression. Recently, both are tailing off toward minimal. Depression on the last measurement was mild but there was a distinct drop from moderate symptoms end of April to between minimal and mild at the end of May. Anxiety for the first time in two months dropped to minimal.

This can be contrasted with my PERFiC score above, C+, after 16 measurements (yes, I missed 4). One might expect a higher subjective rating via the PERFiC scores to accompany the improvement in anxiety and depression measured by the other two instruments the clinician used. Mental and emotional life is messy. It seems useful to have multiple ways to examine it. Perhaps, also, my PERFiC scores measure life satisfaction and this can remain low despite clinical symptoms being low or absent. My impression is that with consistent achievements in lowering clinical symptoms, life satisfaction will eventually pick up. My beginning to go test the waters of a new career as a pilot is an example here.

It was a great experience having a therapist and surprisingly cheap - only $40 a session for me to pay with the rest covered by insurance. In May I chose to increase the frequency to twice a week as I wanted to start going through a moral injury treatment protocol developed by Brett Litz. This paper describes it as Adaptive Disclosure - Enhanced. He gave a useful lecture on it. Wrote a book. Even did a podcast. This video is an easily understood summary, contrasting mere moral reassurance with moral repair:

A figure from the paper linked to above sums up the advantage of Adaptive Disclosure-Enhanced (AD-E) over another treatment, Present-Centered Therapy (PCT):

From this it was clear to me I should pursue this type of treatment. So I kept the regular weekly session to discuss whatever came at me in every day life and added another to start AD-E. How did that go? Honestly not very well. As in, the clinician saw that I was too activated by the moral transgressions I’d come across in my career, and the result of that ricocheting around my relationships, to move beyond the first stage of AD-E. So the sessions revolved around developing skills to register emotional effects, and notice how those propagated through my responses to people and situations. This doesn’t sound like a lot. But it is powerful.

It helps if it is not a surprise when it starts raining. You can take an umbrella. Then you are more comfortable by not getting wet so much. It wasn’t just me sensing the rain and hoisting the umbrella though. It was helpful having a therapist there twice a week giving me a space to name what was going through me. And for coaching and challenging me on beliefs.

Through all this, the focus of the sessions became relationships. That is where I struggle most in life. The sessions served as a regular check in point to anchor or baseline on the state of them. They functioned as a regular sampling event. Through this, I saw a cycle which I hadn’t been aware of before. With this awareness I was able to begin to anticipate things. And the result? The reduction in anxiety from persistently mild to minimal at the end of the chart above. I recognised a cycle for the first time, and began to anticipation the results of it. I was no longer in a state of surprise every couple of weeks about the state of my relationships. In one of the last couple of sessions the clinician commented observing a new feeling of calm and confidence in me. That is what it looks like going from 2 months of mild anxiety to minimal on the dotted pink line of the above chart.

Am I Satisfied?

I said above I would think about whether having the Federal Aviation Administration say I’m mentally fit to pursue a career as a pilot means I am satisfied that I’ve recovered. I should not take their opinion lightly. It is exciting to know I’ve satisfied them. It is thrilling to think about being a pilot. I have to share a story here. The medical examiner was a woman who herself had a pilot license and her own plane. One of her lines of business is FAA medical exams. She flew her plane multiple times a week between two airports where she had clinics. What a career! In her I have inspiration to give my daughter about what is possible in life. The doctor also introduced me to a pilot who did a career transition out of engineering. This is similar to what I am considering. I will be calling him this week as inspiration for myself.

Ok, so that’s undeniably uplifting. But there are a couple of things I’ve written above that a rigorous reader would be asking questions about.

1. Adaptive Disclosure-Enhanced enables not only moral reassurance but moral repair. I admitted that I did not get far with this therapy as the moral transgressions were too activating for me to progress beyond simply naming and observing the emotions that came up, and relationship impacts.

2. On relationships, I mentioned becoming aware of a cycle that regularly, negatively affects my life. Only through an intense 20 sessions of therapy at a rate of twice a week did I bring mild anxiety down to minimal in this context.

So, let’s be honest. An effective therapy for moral injury, Adaptive Disclosure-Enhanced, has only been started, not completed. Being about moral repair, it offers a powerful identity rebuilding function. This is necessary in the face of repeated and grave moral transgressions that I have variously witnessed, failed to prevent or been the victim of. As you are aware from Chapters 1 and 2, these transgressions occurred during an international career in Kuwait in 2013-2017. But what I haven’t told you is that these continued in the UK when I worked at Jacobs in 2022-2024. This is recent, and gives context for the discovery through therapy of a regular impact on my life driven by relationships.

I have not only got a repair job to do on my identify, but also my relationships because of the impact of moral transgressions put upon me by leaders engaging in malpractice. This means any other career, not just being a pilot, is attractive. The thought of dropping out of the engineering consulting industry is a relief due to all of its moral terrors.

Why?

Jacobs is a NEOM delivery partner. It is a project involving human rights abuses. Like putting tribal landowners on death row to make way for the project. I fought Jacobs and lost when trying to get them to help take these guys off death row. The fight had straightforward consequences for my marriage and being a great father. In other words, a moral injury at Jacobs deeply affected my most important relationships.

See you in the next chapter.

Best wishes to Major Jason Watson.

With his teeth and tongue encased in mud, his body entirely covered in wounds, and his left ankle broken, 24-year-old Weslei Isabel heard his 2-year-old son, Nicolas, who had just been rescued, ask a question to which, two days later, he still had no answer: “Daddy, what about Manu?”. Pulled from the mud thanks to the help of a family friend, the little boy was puzzled by the absence of his 5-year-old sister, Emanuele Vitória. Affectionately known as Manu.

I rested his head on my chest and said, “It’s in God’s hands.”

Lying in a hospital bed in Santa Bárbara, a city neighboring Mariana, Emanuele’s father yesterday described the despair that began when he saw enormous waves of mud, pieces of concrete, cars, fences, rocks, and trees hitting him after the collapse of the tailings and water dams. The maintenance worker was at home with his two children when the three were engulfed by the avalanche.

Weslei managed to grab them, but saw his children slip from his arms after being knocked down by a wall. Amidst the torrent, he held his breath once, twice, three times as he watched the waves of mud approaching. He knew that staying calm was his only hope for survival. Only after managing to free himself, after being thrown into a ravine, did he find a friend. With difficulty, he walked for half an hour along the edge of the affected area. Then, he heard a child crying.

“I don’t know how, but I recognized it was one of my children. My friend rescued Nicolas, and I thought: Oh my God, at least I managed to catch one,” said Emanuele’s father, who had not been located by the time this edition went to press.

This was reported in O Globo by DANDARA TINOCO AND MARIANA SANCHES on 08/11/2015 in the País section, page 7. It was translated by Google from Portuguese.

5 days later Emanuele was found dead. This was the Bento Rodrigues, or Mariana, dam disaster. It killed 19 people. The mine was owned by Vale and BHP. As found in a wire from Associated Press,

At the time it was therefore referred to as Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.

4 years later, another dam collapsed. This was the Brumadinho Dam Disaster of 2019, killing 272 people including a family of 5, one of which was a pregnant mother. It was only 70km west of Mariana. It was also owned by Vale. Due to the number of lives lost, it is Brazil’s worst industrial disaster.

Here is an interactive map.

When ore is extracted from a mine, waste is produced. This goes into a tailings dam. If the dam is not well designed, built, monitored and maintained, it can collapse. The fate of those in the way of the mud at Bento Rodrigues and Brumadinho awaits when that happens. Today’s guest, John Metzger, is an expert on monitoring systems for tailings dams. He has led an incredible life through many countries. We are privileged to have his attention.

I was riveted by this story. I had to get some more numbers for you so I went to https://www.worldminetailingsfailures.org which estimates there are 29,000-35,000 existing active, inactive and abandoned tailings storage facilities (TSF) globally. These contain approximately 223 billion tonnes of waste. Of these, 16,000 are currently active, with 85% of dam failures occurring in active facilities. You are wondering about Brazil given the chaos from 2015 to 2019 described in the introduction. Well, according to Agencia Brazil, as of November 2025:

Brazil has 916 dams, 74 of which are at higher risk of collapse and 91 are on alert. The activist believes that disasters like this could still happen again, particularly in Minas Gerais (where there are 31 dams). "That's where Vale started what it calls the Southern Mining System."

Minas Gerais is the state where the two dams collapsed that are mentioned in the introduction.

A loose end to tie up about the Brumadinho Dam Disaster is that an alarm installed to warn of a collapse did not go off. This recalls the episodes recorded after the Camp Mystic flood where an alarm system also malfunctioned. Another wonderful prior guest, Juliette Murphy of Floodmapp, spoke of how we need a regulation for flood alarms just like we have one for fire alarms:

It is a tragedy that humanity continues to fail to properly deploy such alarm systems as the precious few minutes they offer to escape could save many lives.

So where does this episode leave us? It was about monitoring systems. It just so happens that the Brumadinho monitoring system had issues 2 days before the collapse. As such, critical data on an acceleration in movement of the tailings dam wall may have been missed with this malfunctioning. This acceleration could signal an imminent collapse. Another matter is pressure by the client, Vale, on the safety certification firm, Tuv Sud. As reported by mining.com, Namba, a Tuv Sud employee, said he felt “pressured” by Vale employees to certify the dam that later burst in Brumadinho was stable.

As such, we are confronted by the age old feebleness of humanity.

A couple of rays of hope:

1. Last year the UN created a new organisation, Global Tailings Management Institute. This organisation is staffed by mining, engineering and community representatives to put a stop to the unnecessary, large loss of life at the hands of a poorly managed global set of tailings dams.

2. I am also happy to say that I’ve found another expert to talk to on this matter - Ankur Shah of PlanetSapling. I reached out to him because Lindsay Newland Bowker, the actuary behind woldminetailingsfailures.org passed away only last month, May 2026. Her incredible global database of tailings dams must not be lost to time. I look forward to seeing what Ankur has as a continuation of her work.

The opportunity here to do good is immense.

I am joined again by Robert Cheatham of ⁠Japan Earth Observer⁠ for a GEO500 Weekly Wrap. Provisionally, also the PhysicalAI Weekly Wrap. I’ll think about it.

GEO500 weekly roundup

Sheet

⁠https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AVbN5pQ9kiRmC0Iw2H8stoPJUngrqntA5DRU3Wll2aE/edit?usp=sharing⁠

Notable index announcements

TacticAI: Google’s AI system that can help simulate field scenarios and predict open play dynamics up to 8 seconds in advance. ⚽ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7470859786159370240/⁠

Google Earth infrastructure layers: ⁠

Oracle’s disastrous quarter resulted in a 20% loss for the week: ⁠https://www.tradingview.com/news/zacks:a8c6c958c094b:0-oracle-shares-tank-despite-q4-earnings-beat-hold-the-stock-now/⁠

Other significant geospatial market developments

CAD/BIM vertical destruction

Unpacking why this vertical collapsed 14% the past week.

Claude Fable 5 has solved CAD: ⁠

Nvidia is coming for Autodesk: ⁠

Claud Fable 5 makes 3D/FPS video games in minutes: ⁠

SpaceX IPO

SpaceX jobs: ⁠https://www.spacex.com/careers/jobs. This company matters to the GEO500 on 3 fronts:

1. Relevant to the positioning, navigation and timing vertical because Starlink can be used to achieve 1m positioning:

2. Grok in its own words saying how it does geospatial analysis:

   1. My geospatial capabilities are strong for analysis, mapping, and calculations using code execution, data tools, and web integration (no full desktop GIS like ArcGIS).Core strengths:

      1. Coordinate math (distances, bearings, Haversine, projections, point-in-polygon, buffering).

      2. Spatial analysis (clustering, routing, interpolation, hotspots).

      3. Handle GeoJSON, CSV lat/lon, KML, and limited rasters; merge and analyze datasets.

      4. Create static + interactive maps (Plotly choropleths, scatter maps, etc.).

   2. Tools: NumPy/SciPy, Pandas, Plotly, NetworkX for math, visualization, and optimization. I can pull real-world data from OSM, government APIs, etc.

   3. Limitations: No GeoPandas/Shapely/Rasterio by default; heavy raster or advanced 3D work is constrained.

   4. Examples: Distance/bearing between points, cluster mapping, country choropleths, facility location optimization.

3. Starshield - the main reason why they’re in the index. This is a government defense contract and involves SAR and optical satellites for spooks. It is worth billions in income so far for them. Nice one.

Over and out, glad to be back on the weekly updates.

1. Terra Drone (125% annually),

2. Synspective (71%) and

3. QPS (59%).

The top 3 in terms of value are

1. Sony ($1100 - bear in mind the $100 starting position, equating to a 20% annual growth rate since entering the index in 2013),

2. NEC ($960, 10%) and

3. Raito Kogyo ($760, 11%).
   

Note that the 3 fastest growers are all earth observation companies, and 2 of those are synthetic aperture radar satellite constellations. This is an exciting part of our industry to watch and I have recorded a couple of great episodes on the power of it. For example,

- Jamon Van Den Hoek's work as an academic partnering with some of the world's largest media organisations to monitor building destruction in warzones and after fires:

- Umbra, a pioneering American SAR satellite manufacturer, they also operate their own constellation:

- Iceye, the equivalent from Finland:

- Ursa Space Systems, a commodity intelligence firm that uses SAR to monitor everything from iron ore stockpiles at ports to oil farm tank lids around the world:

- SeerAI, another analytical platform where I coaxed the guest to use SAR as a way to detect surface change on the NEOM excavation, the world's largest (now abandoned) building site:

But this wasn't just about current companies. We were privileged in this episode to be given a history of Japan's trading houses since the 1860s to today:

This led to several insights around the longevity, for example, of the social groups that comprise such firms and how they can persist even through a trust busting effort by the winning country after a world war. Another insight was the benefit to society of trust busting and how it unleashed a wave of new companies and from that household names such as Honda and Sony. Honda recently launched a rocket that was able to land itself. This has relevance to possible future earth observation constellation launches. Sony released LiDAR solution in 2013 and also sells other geospatial products like a GNSS chip. We have come full circle.

There is rising social unrest due to monopolies in the US. Robert’s comments help us to see the benefit of a round of trustbusting to solve it.

A final note about Robert himself. We are presented here with a cultivated and successful entrepreneur. He grew a geospatial software development firm to 50 people then sold it. He has learnt a foreign language well enough to spontaneously translate things for me during a podcast recording without warning. He also is able to offer a comprehensive historical view on the emergence, development, setbacks and modern day expression of several dominant companies in a vibrant foreign economy, Japan.

He shows us the way then, on multiple fronts. I am grateful for the chance to put an inspiring industry figure in front of you today.

Thanks Robert.

Mark Baumgartner is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Back in 2011 he and Sarah Mussoline published a paper on how to use computer science to classify whales from sound recordings. This episode is about an evolution of that software by Atle Borsholm from NV5 Geospatial.

GEO500 CONTEXT

NV5 Geospatial is owned by TIC Solutions, a $1.85B publicly traded company: . As such, it is a huge achievement for the podcast to be profiling a component of the GEO500. Like a lot of these companies, there is a convoluted acquisition history. They were under the ticker NVEE as the fast growing engineering consultancy NV5. NV5 purchased Quantum Spatial in 2019. As that was a geospatial acquisition by a non geospatial company prior to this, NVEE went into the GEO500 under Rule 3. Unfortunately this meant the index didn’t get the full stellar NVEE compounding run from 2013:

More M&A happened: 4/8/2025 Acuren bought NVEE for $1.7B. The combination was then renamed TIC Solutions and I kept them in the Consultancy vertical on account of the kind of work the guest tells us about today. They have since dropped 30%:

Over the same period, the S&P 500 has gained 24%, the GEO500 gained 29% and the GEO100 gained 27%. TIC Solutions is overall mostly an instrument testing company. 2025 revenue was $1.5B and $1B of that was in the Inspection and Mitigation segment. Consulting Engineering: $300M. Geospatial? Only $100M. For the purposes of the GEO500 then, TIC Solutions is a consultancy. Since TIC was listed, the consultancy vertical of the GEO500 has lost 6%.

So TIC Solutions have underperformed in all respects.

What is the upside here? Learning. IPOs almost always lose money in the first year. TIC Solutions is no exception. Let us use this to put ourselves in an informed position about the SpaceX IPO set for 2 weeks from now, 6/12/2026. Not worth listening to some random Substacker? How about Buffett making the same point about IPOs, with regard Uber’s:

, as shown below, was underwater from its IPO for fully 18 months, at one point down 67%:

Buffett:

We like to buy things where nobody’s making a dime selling them to us.

Ok, back to the show.

HYDROPHONES

At the beginning of the episode you will hear a sound recording. Take a listen and attempt to classify the whale making the calls in it. In my comments at the end of this I’ll tell you what whale that was. It was an easy one to process - the recording was just 7 seconds long and a whale sound was present immediately. Consider if I instead gave you another one lasting a day and most of it was just ocean noise. This leads to the challenge discussed in today’s episode.

Imagine I have 100 microphones under the ocean. These are called hydrophones. These hydrophones record for 24 days. The scientists managing them will say they now have 2400 days of data to process. Well, that is nowhere near how big of a challenge this episode is about. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had 217,197 days of hydrophone recordings going back 20 years. Whilst Mark’s software was available, it needed to be made more efficient to process all this data.

It was worth the effort. It turned out that only 24,000, or 11%, of those days involved a whale being detected. All of it is shown on NOAA’s Passive Acoustic Cetacean Map. Atle starts by discussing a web application, Mark’s Robots4Whales website, in our episode today.

AGI

The whale at the start? It was a humpback whale. I tested the most popular 3 AGI platforms with this whale call, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Only Gemini managed to classify it correctly. Nevertheless, it makes one expect that in another few months probably the other 2 will start getting the classification correct as well. This is a threat to the geospatial consulting industry. I expect NV5 made a decent amount of money enhancing Mark’s code. If they’re going to get eaten up by a free AGI platform, however, then their leadership must be having some robust discussions about the future at the moment.

Thanks Atle for the stimulus and for NOAA signing off on the publication of this episode. It is a privilege to have reached the point of sharing this kind of work.

Links for further reading

1. NV5 article on Harnessing Data Science for Marine Conservation

2. NV5 article on IDL® Software Extract Meaningful Visualizations From Complex Numerical Data

3. Slocum glider from Teledyne Marine

4. Woods Hole article on whale sound detection and classification

Rebel. Lead. Thrive.

Rebel. Lead. Thrive. Intentional Leadership for a Thriving, Connected World.

By Karolina

… and codes:

I REALLY recommend this tool, it reviews your repo and provides useful insights.

On that basis alone I would want to record an episode. Even better though, she is an alumnus of the European Space Agency and Iceye, meaning she has a huge amount to contribute on the subject of earth observation.

Iceye, by the way, have already come on the show:

So, we covered:

- How her background created an appetite for demand side thinking.
- The defence pivot in commercial EO — why it's happening, what it's costing the climate/humanitarian side, and whether there's a structural way back.
- Why "strong technology" keeps getting cited as the reason companies don't scale, and why that's usually wrong.
- Her views on the Geoawesome Top 100.

There were some issues with the internet, please forgive us for the occasional bad sound.

So, my main reflection here is that it is possible to pivot out of industry into strategy consulting. Karolina had a great sense of humor and used this to deliver sensible points about the need for a constant focus on current problems in the industry you want to serve. Your product needs to help customers with those problems to make progress. She accompanied this message with another constant - stop focusing on the amazing technology involved in launching a satellite. This does not automatically mean you are solving someone’s problem. Earth observation satellites in fact deliver mostly noise. She reinforced this idea to the end, with a straightforward message about the limits of industry awards. Instead of the Geoawesome Top 100, we should instead focus on other industries identifying something great about a geospatial product. Then wait for that industry outside geospatial give an award to the company that makes this useful product.

Why as-builts lag years:

Stop selling raw EO data:

Mapping revenue by building:

When maps win — and when they lose:

EPISODE⁠

Abdulfatai Sanusi⁠ is a geospatial developer at ⁠Proforce Galaxies⁠. He tells us the story of an MS Azure to Esri Enterprise migration at a power utility that covers several states in Nigeria. He then moves on to the next phase of his career at Proforce. They are an earth observation satellite design and data pipeline company. He described being a member of a talented team that also develops software. For example they have their own mobile data collection app and we discussed how this could actually be used in a utility context as part of the System of Monitoring.

Overall it was a very eye opening discussion and showed us that the geospatial industry is alive an well in Nigeria! I was inspired, and went fishing in the Nigerian Stock Exchange for geospatial stocks to add to the GEO500.

I found 3:

1. ⁠Julius Berger⁠

2. ⁠Caverton Offshore⁠

3. ⁠MTN Nigeria⁠

So it was a fruitful exercise on all fronts, thank you Abdulfatai and please remember me for the Proforce IPO!

QuantAgri: Predictive Agricultural Insights Report

QuantAgri delivers quantitative analytics and market intelligence for agricultural commodities. Trading these markets involves substantial risk. This publication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

By Ryan Kmetz

This initiative began in January 2026. It is about analyzing satellite data to predict the monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) reports. Ryan proposes a novel approach and shares some eye raising stats about lead times and profitability. This episode is inspiration for how we are all equipped to process the world using free data and AI. What can you do with your geospatial basic training?

Links to items discussed:

1. SatYield https://www.satyield.com/

2. Sentinel

   1. ESA https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/web/sentinel/copernicus/sentinel-2

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/COPERNICUS_S2_SR_HARMONIZED#description

3. Landsat

   1. NASA https://science.nasa.gov/mission/landsat/

   2. Google Earth Engine https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/landsat

4. Taylor Geospatial Engine field boundaries

   1. Background https://taylorgeospatial.org/agricultural-field-boundaries-mapped-globally-for-the-first-time/

   2. Web app https://fieldsofthe.world/

5. Field boundaries from Planet https://docs.planet.com/data/planetary-variables/field-boundaries/

6. ‘As the world turns’ Blackrock geospatial podcast https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/podcasts/the-bid/geospatial-data

7. Novi

This episode elsewhere:

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

6. Chapter 6: Leadership, Relationships and Moral Repair.

Subscribe now

INTRODUCTION

This has been tough going so far. In Chapter 1 I hit you with a couple of memorable moral transgressions in my career. Then in Chapter 2 I ran through definitions of moral injury. That helped determine the worst kind is what was put upon me - where I witnessed and/or failed to prevent such a transgression. Then in Chapter 3 we looked at tools to diagnose the severity of the injury. We also looked at the latest study I could find, it showed a significant drop in ability to reason. Something else stuck out though. A scoring item on the test was ‘I keep myself from having success’.

In the last chapter I called this the ‘moral immune response’. Having witnessed and failed to prevent horrific things happening to people, I have assumed the next step is to stop engaging. Without thinking about it anymore, that’s what my life would have been for the long term. In Chapter 1 though we came across saying these injuries are put upon us by other people (go to ~12:25):

I didn’t consent to it, and, in the context of moral injury, I understand from Dr Shay that it was leadership malpractice:

So this means the decision to disengage is subject to revision. Let’s do that revision. I will start though by witnessing the power of being in the grip of this moral immune response by looking at a string of failed initiatives in 2025. There are six meaningful examples here of keeping myself from having success.

FAILED INITIATIVES

1: FloodGPT

The first started 8 months ago with my most popular ever LinkedIn post (>300k views). It proposed a web map showing all summer camp building footprints in flood zones. The system was to automatically identify electorate boundaries owning those affected buildings and contact details of politicians. A custom GPT would consume all this location and politician information and assist the user to write to their local representative to fund flood warning systems. I had a couple of enthusiastic meetings with and Piergiorgio (PJ) Roveda. It was also a topic in a couple of Spatial Lab office hours calls and a live coding session with . Hell, even a 3D modelling guy for documentary films in Portugal reached out to me after seeing how popular the post was.

But then I stopped.

2: Enthusiastically Hosting a #NYClimateWeek Event

Second, another thing was my lacking enthusiasm as the host of a Geospatial Risk #NYClimateWeek event in September. It was supposed to be something really special: hosting an event in New York City! Hell, anything organised by Priscilla Cole, the goddess of NY GIS, is automatically cool.

But I couldn’t feel it.

3: Geospatial Stock Write Up for Yahoo Finance

Third, around the same time, invited me to submit a geospatial stock analysis for Yahoo Finance. I was initially very enthusiastic, inspecting the market for companies with low multiples and profitability combined with signs of operating leverage.

But then I stopped.

By the way, a geospatial stock that that bubbled up was which has done very well in the 6 months since I mentioned it, up 50%:

4: Follow-on Geospatial FM Episode after Spatial Stack Appearance

Fourth, after recording a Spatial Stack episode about Geospatial FM‘s World Model 500:

...I was going to then release an episode on my podcast giving more detail on what I’d discovered. I spent WEEKS preparing the slide deck.

But then I stopped.

5: Data Engineering Course

Fifth, I started doing the Spatial Lab geospatial data engineering training courses. This is an incredible resource with great tutorials and a supportive, active group sharing the journey. I have developed bonds with some group members already. I did the intro course. It was fascinating and inspiring.

But then I stopped.

6: Project Management Course

Sixth, I started Google Project Management Professional Certificate training. It is relevant to a job I had. Project managers enjoy a high entry-level salary of $107k. The instructor is charismatic. He is inspiring. He is approachable. I was building momentum. I completed 21% of the Foundations of Project Management module.

But then I stopped.

REFLECTIONS

What I have on my hands then is a multifaceted, florid display of a moral injury putting the brakes on a life. This is critical because I need to perform highly in my work. Yet I have abandoned two important, relevant training courses. I need to capitalise on networking opportunities. Yet I did not wholeheartedly embrace even New York Climate Week. In fact, and I do not resent this - it is just apt, the most meaningful connection I made was with someone from Bellingcat. We talked, in the office of an investment firm during a Data and Dumplings event no less, about FOIAs I’d submitted prompted by my moral injuries. He gave me really sensible advice on which organizations to approach next in spinning up a campaign that stock analysts may ultimately be forced to take into account when projecting income about companies involved in what I had been injured by.

It is intensely personally and professionally fulfilling to engage in projects that improve society such as a national spatial analysis about flood awareness. Or analysing the returns that we as professional, intellectual labourers deliver for investors. Critically, in turn this work enables a full recognition of our value as labourers. An important benefit is permitting a better position negotiating a salary. Yet I have abandoned three such projects.

This is the result of bearing witness to, failing to prevent and being the victim of several moral transgressions in 5 countries. At significant cost to myself and relationships important to me, I tried, but was unable to stop them. Due to naïveté, I then permitted the attachment of those transgressions to my identity. Even though I was not the legitimate authority perpetrating the transgression.

The result has been depression.

No one wins here. For example the above-mentioned failed initiatives.

These are all really great initiatives. They involve connections with great people and organisations. So it’s important they don’t fail. It is also important that I regain the reasoning capacity that Vartanian’s research indicates I have lost. This means I need to get out my mind mechanic tool kit, put my brain up on a jack, and check how many screws are loose. If I don’t, there’s always YouTube’s endless supply of car mechanic videos with literal tool kits and literal jacks and literal loose screws:

As satisfying as it is to watch Sreten from Germany repair a Bentley on a budget, unwarping an engine block and all ... I can tell you that despite watching this video and several others the joy of old vehicle restoration has not transferred to a durable repair of my moral injury.

And I have not been winning since 2012. Yeah it really is that far back. Basically the year after my international career began. Cambodia showed me how the rest of the world really lives outside the heaven on earth that is Australia. Sounds so cliched and possibly prejudiced. It is also tragic that it is true. I speak so plainly to realise a target for agency:

So that’s a taste of what tests like the Moral Injury Outcome Scale tap into. It has been real for me.

SUMMARY

Writing these chapters is useful, although the effect has taken a while to materialize. This is the second time I’m publishing them. Three months ago I began the same series on LinkedIn. It is only now after months of reflection and going over the same material again that ’s blunt email to me is getting through:

Any well-trained therapist can help you work through the sense of betrayal that drives moral injury and the responsibility you assumed that wasn’t actually your weight to carry.

I assumed a responsibility that wasn’t my weight to carry. This very simple sentence has finally begun to have an impact on me. Three months after receiving it. I confess I have assumed a responsibility that is beyond what I am capable of bearing. I did so because I saw leaders failing to bear their responsibility. Because what I observed was so bad, out of a sense of duty I decided to try to do something. It has not gone well.

I happen to agree with a February comment piece in Nature that we have achieved artificial general intelligence. As an example of its revelatory impact, here is Gemini summarizing the impact of these chapters.

With that, it is time to figure out how to respond. That will start with examining who should really bear responsibility for all this. Given it was not right to have the responsibility being on me. I will center my next steps on an invitation last month from the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights:

NAVIGATION

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

6. Chapter 6: Leadership, Relationships and Moral Repair.

INTRODUCTION

The brain is only capable of processing so much at once. When I grew up as a young psychology bachelors student we were told working memory could hold 7 ± 2 items at once. In 2010 a researcher revised this limit down to:

3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults (Cowen, 2010).

This chapter is about how these limited brain resources are consumed, through the lens of moral injury. With inevitable impact on reasoning ability. I discuss an amateur effort to administer a couple of psychological tests to measure moral injury severity and post traumatic stress disorder. I’m not a clinician. So don’t put too much stock in it. I also discuss Oshin Vartanian et al’s study, mentioned in the previous chapter. They found that moral injury causes a reduction in reasoning ability and map the brain whilst it happens.

A note on disclosure. I thought about it and decided not to tell you my results. I don’t want this to be some awkward, performative thing. Heaven forbid I come across as seeking clout by oversharing about a trauma. I don’t want to be an internet whore like Alex Jones mining a tragedy for content. Another thing. The moral injury test is not, in fact, a test about me anyway. Apart from my capacity for horror. It is a test about those who put the psychological injury on me. This concept is pivotal. A quote from Dr Kuelker’s talk mentioned in the last chapter:

You’re psychologically injured. You didn’t choose this for yourself. You didn’t sign up for it. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Someone else inflicted it on you. The hypercritical mother, the bullying boss, they put a psychological injury on you. Without your consent. Without your agreement or understanding. So, acknowledge your psychological injuries without any shame.

But it wasn’t only me the psychological injury was put upon. In fact, thousands of others in the two cases I’ve described the past 2 chapters about Kuwait Gulf Oil Company oilfield projects. I am a mirror. The test result is just a measure of the degree of their leadership malpractice.

MIOS F

The MIOS F is the full version of the Moral Injury Outcome Scale. I came upon it from MacDonald Franklin OSI Research and Innovation Centre. They mention the Moral Injury Outcome Consortium as having produced it. Visit that page for the full test and scoring instructions. Needless to say, you should use it via a clinician. What I’m doing here is to satisfy my curiosity and to detect if it looks like I should use a clinician. This is my choice and not a recommendation. I do it partly to expose as much of the mechanics of moral injury recovery as possible. Namely, going from definitions to diagnosis to impact description to healing. I want to bring as many others along with me as I can. I encourage you to click through the link above, it will take you to a PDF with a page where you can see 14 items across 2 sub-scales. This measures your moral injury severity overall and against shame and mistrust components. It then has 9 additional items afterward, the Brief Inventory of Psychosocial Functioning (B-IPF; Kleiman et al., 2020).

Vartanian et al (2026) mention a clinical threshold of ≥31 on the MIOS. In the 14 items at the top, I scored above the clinical threshold. I scored higher on the mistrust sub-scale than that for shame. An example of an item was “I keep myself from having success”. I scored the maximum on that, 4. I will go into that in detail in the next chapter. The impact then, of my moral injuries appear to have had a large impact. The effect is strongest from the perspective of trust in others.

POST-TRAUMATIC CHECKLIST(PCL-5)

Participants of Vartanian et al (2026) were also checked for post traumatic stress disorder using the PCL-5, so I went ahead and took that too:

They state the clinical significant level on this is ≥33. I scored below that. I can tell you, however, that my score would have been a lot higher years ago when the event was happening or during the ensuing 3 years. Yep. Nightmares and a state of stress for that long.

IMPORTANCE OF REASONING ABILITY

Vartanian’s study is about reasoning performance. Reasoning capacity is central to professional success. They found it deteriorates in those with moral injury. Their’s is the first study about impact on reason, with this rationale:

...we suspected that participants with higher MIOS (and perhaps also PCL-5 scores) might be more sensitive to the presence of MI-related content during reasoning, which could serve to amplify its effects on accuracy.

So what are they saying? They’re limiting their predictions. They’re not anticipating a broad impact on all reasoning. Basically they’re thinking people will be triggered when they have morally transgressive material put in front of them. This will disturb them emotionally. This distraction will make them bad at reasoning. This returns us to the issue of limited working memory resources at the top. They’re saying that thinking about memories of moral transgressions may compete with resources that could otherwise be devoted to reasoning. They expect this will reduce reasoning ability.

It lead them to these 2 hypotheses:

[Hypothesis 1] ...compared to structurally identical arguments with neutral content, participants would exhibit lower accuracy on arguments that reference [moral injury]-related content...

[Hypothesis 2] ...compared to reasoning about structurally identical arguments with neutral content, reasoning about arguments that reference [moral injury]-related content would engage regions of the brain that underlie the experience of emotions and/or episodic memory...

A quote from the study linking working memory to reasoning and how reasoning is a window on intelligence:

...there is a large literature that has shown that individual differences in intelligence and cognitive ability are correlated with reasoning ability, and that working memory in particular is a strong predictor of performance on such tasks (De Neys, 2006; Kyllonen and Christal, 1990; Süß et al., 2002).

So there we have it, they’re linking working memory directly to reasoning performance, hence my flagging that to you at the beginning.

So why should we care? Most of us need a job to live. Most jobs require us to reason. If we’re bad at reasoning, we’ll lose the job or not get promoted. Maybe even demoted. We might struggle to get a job requiring high performance. This will cap our earnings. Bluntly put, in a meritocracy we may make less money if we can’t reason well. So we should care about this study because it could tell us about how our ability to provide for ourselves and our families is affected by our moral injuries. It could tell us that we should expect to perform less well at work if we’re thinking about a moral transgression. And that the performance impact could be even stronger if we have suffered a moral injury ourselves in the past, with a triggering effect from thinking about morally transgressive things.

Again, this is a narrow prediction. It is not about reasoning under normal circumstances where one hasn’t been primed by morally transgressive stimuli.

REASONING EXAMPLES FROM THE STUDY

These are examples of what people had to reason through, which I have used Gemini to evaluate.

Moral Injury Related

Victims and Sufferers

• Premise 1: All victims are angry. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: All sufferers are victims. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, all sufferers are angry.

Evaluation: Valid. While this might feel more subjective in a real-world context, logically it is perfectly sound. The structure mirrors the athlete example exactly: if “Sufferers” is a subset of “Victims,” and the entire “Victims” set is “Angry,” the conclusion is inescapable.

Institutions and Leaders

• Premise 1: All people trust institutions. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: Some people are leaders. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, some leaders do not trust institutions.

Evaluation: Invalid (Formal Fallacy). If all people trust institutions, and leaders are a sub-set of “people,” then logic dictates that every single leader must trust institutions. You cannot derive a “do not” from a universal “all” unless one of your premises is negative.

Neutral

Athletes and Olympians

• Premise 1: All athletes are fit. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: All Olympians are athletes. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, all Olympians are fit.

Evaluation: Valid. This is a classic nested hierarchy. If the entire group of “Athletes” is contained within the “Fit” category, and the “Olympians” are entirely contained within “Athletes,” then every Olympian must, by definition, be fit.

Miners and Men

• Premise 1: All miners are tall. (Universal set)

• Premise 2: Some miners are men. (Subset)

• Conclusion: Therefore, some men are not tall.

Evaluation: Invalid (Formal Fallacy). While this might be true in the real world, it does not follow from these specific premises. We know that the men who are miners are definitely tall (because all miners are tall). However, the premises tell us nothing about the men who are not miners. They could all be tall, or they could all be short; the logic provided doesn’t give us enough information to conclude that “some are not tall.”

Control

The study also included control arguments which did not invoke the person’s reasoning capacity. They used a non-sequitur. The reason for a group of participants to take control arguments is because this was not only a study about impact of moral injury on reasoning ability, it was a brain imaging study too:

Because by definition these control arguments do not necessitate the engagement of the reasoning system to be deemed invalid, they can be contrasted with regular arguments to elucidate the neural systems that underlie reasoning.

They had moral injury related and neutral control arguments for participants to evaluate.

Moral injury related control argument example about citizens and residents:

• Premise 1: All citizens have trust issues.

• Premise 2: No residents have trust issues.

• Conclusion: Therefore, some offenders are not guilty people. (Non-sequitur)

Evaluation: Invalid (Non-sequitur) The premises establish a relationship between “Citizens,” “Residents,” and “Trust Issues” (concluding that no resident is a citizen). However, the conclusion jumps to “Offenders” and “Guilty people.” Because these terms appear nowhere in the premises, the conclusion is logically orphaned.

Neutral argument example about jury members and judges:

• Premise 1: All jury members are citizens.

• Premise 2: No judges are citizens.

• Conclusion: Therefore, some popes are not Catholics. (Non-sequitur)

Evaluation: Invalid (Non-sequitur) Similar to the previous example, the premises define the relationship between “Jury Members,” “Judges,” and “Citizens.” While we can validly conclude that “No judges are jury members,” we cannot say anything about “Popes” or “Catholics” based on this information.

It goes without saying that I need a keen reasoning capacity. Otherwise my capacity to work and to combat life’s challenges diminishes. And, like anyone else, I need all self imposed limits on success removed to the maximum extent possible. An involuntary limit on success arrests the attention. But my research on healing suggests I have the agency to remove it. Anyway, what were the results of the study? Did moral injury really affect reasoning ability? What about post traumatic stress?

RESULTS

First of all, this circumstance is funny. I’m someone apparently with a moral injury trying to understand a scientific study about it. The results of which say I should find it difficult to understand the paper because my ability to reason is diminished. I confirm this. It was hard to reason through the syllogisms. I had to turn to Gemini to help understand why each one was right or wrong. What are the headline results then?

Participants who performed highest were the ones confronted with syllogisms about neutral content that concluded with non-sequiturs. This is the ‘neutral control accuracy’ group above which got their answers right 75% of the time on average. Those who performed the worst were the ones confronted with syllogisms about morally transgressive content that did not conclude with non-sequiturs. Hence, they actually had to engage their reasoning capacity.

Returning to the start of this article, the morally transgressive content of the syllogism likely preloaded their working memory system with competing material from the emotional activation of a past moral injury. Hence, the study hypothesised, they would have less working memory available than a non-injured person to perform the actual task, reasoning through the syllogism. This played out in the results. See the ‘MI accuracy’ line in the above table. These people had an average of 52% correct. Their reasoning ability was 20% less than those presented with the nonsense arguments.

Let’s look at this as a graph:

Just look at the vertical dotted lines. What happens to the blue line after those on all plots? It drops off. What we are seeing here is the results for participants with MIOS F and PCL5 scores above the clinical thresholds of 31 and 33, respectively. This means the decline in reasoning accuracy is most pronounced for those with significant moral injury and post traumatic stress.

This makes sense. Recall the post WW2 early definition of moral injury presented in the last chapter:

unresolvable emotional conflict

One may expect individuals with significant moral injuries and post traumatic stress to come to the experiment with their minds primed to flood working memory with thoughts about what they failed to prevent. At the slightest reminder of it. Such as reasoning about a morally transgressive situation. This flood of memories will compete for slots in working memory that a reasoning process will need for stepping through a syllogism. There are only 4-5 slots available. The study says reasoning goes more smoothly with all of them devoted to it: 75% accuracy on average. This is when reasoning about neutral syllogisms that don’t apparently evoke a self reflection about the past in parallel with a reasoning effort. When this self reflection is evoked in parallel: a 20% performance drop.

I said they mapped the brain as participants did this reasoning and it is telling.

Above is the right posterior parahippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for contextual associations in episodic memory. Vartanian et al:

Regarding the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) specifically, there is converging evidence to suggest that it plays a critical role in contextual associations—defined as the “link between objects strongly associated with the same context, or the spatial relation between items, or the configuration associated with a context” (Aminoff et al., 2013).

Gemini:

System Disruption: While neutral reasoning typically engages executive control [brain] regions ... the emotional/memory weight of moral injury shifts brain activity toward regions associated with internal distress and memory, leading to logical errors.

CONCLUSION

So there we have it. Reading the brain itself shows how the load of a moral injury primes the brain to lose working memory slots when there is a reasoning task that itself has a moral weight. It’s not only that though. The researchers also found a generalised drop in reasoning performance amongst study participants who said they had been exposed to some form of morally injurious event in the past.

This only increases our concern about having a moral injury put upon us. It appears we will struggle to reason in all circumstances compared to those who have not had one put upon them. Not just morally triggering circumstances.

With this study out of the way, let’s turn next to a specific example of how a moral injury can affect a person: holding oneself back from success. Or this strange phenomenon of what I am calling the ‘moral immune response’.

CAUTION

This article contains graphic descriptions in text and video of workplace safety breaches.

NAVIGATION

1. Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

6. Chapter 6: Leadership, Relationships and Moral Repair.

INTRODUCTION

First up, writing about this is extremely hard. I’ve been the kind of person who viewed the word ‘trigger’ as something snowflakes used. Well, in trying to write this, I was triggered. It’s real. I am trying again for the second time to write about this after getting nowhere a couple of hours ago. This is because I watched too many videos of broken soldiers crying about trauma. So, heads up, you’ll be seeing some of those videos below as part of exploring this topic.

In the introduction I gave two example events that lead to moral injuries for me. Let’s get some more material in front of us to motivate thinking about a definition. I will start actually by adding some extra details to the second example I gave in the last piece. In short, I bore witness to no one saving a likely indebted young Indian from getting fired in Kuwait after evacuating a work site because of an H2S gas leak. He and others had to go to hospital to save their lives. I also missed the chance to save him myself due to not being informed before he was sent back to India. Despite everything I tried to do anyway, such as an ethics report to the PMC (resulting in the Global Compliance Officer James B. Walker telling me he flew down to Kuwait from London), contacting Kuwait Oil Company leadership and appealing to Bibi Nasser Alsabah, a Kuwaiti princess, no justice was served. On June 29, 2017 I even emailed British Safety Council about the case (happy to provide the evidence if you ask). This is because the manpower company that fired him, NBTC Group, displayed a membership certificate on their website, signed by Lynda Armstrong and Alex Botha:

I got no response.

Once again I had the feeling of failing to be able to do anything to help. And that continued in one final fashion, 7 years later in 2024:

Source: Google Maps before NBTC Camp 4 was removed some time in 2025. At the end of the video you can see where the place mark used to be.

This video is NBTC Camp 4 burning, 50 men died. It was living quarters for employees of NBTC. Men like the fired electrician slept there. I could not escape feeling that if this company had been disciplined in the way I tried to cause in 2017, then the lax safety standards leading to this fire in 2024 killing 50 men may not have happened. For example, if British Safety Council made them take down the membership certificate after I contacted them. Until they improved their safety standards. Instead, I discovered there was an updated version of the certificate valid through March 2026, then one till 2027 currently on their website! They are signed by Mike Robinson and Peter McGettrick:

Try that for a compounding, years long moral injury. Hell, I didn’t even know about the fire until I had the bad luck of trying to put all of this behind me last year in a series of video testimonies:

... only to come across this fire in the course of researching NBTC. I felt connected to the fire. I literally felt that my failure to cause justice for this man was part of the train of events to lead up to those men dying. Really what happened though is that I failed in fighting through all the other disinterested, negligent people who lead the organisations involved. On proper reflection, they bear true responsibility for this appalling scene. Speaking of which, whilst we’re on Kuwait, try reading about this other major fire in the country’s history:

That’s right, Kuwait’s approach to marital relationships produced an enraged first wife who set 57 women and children on fire during the husband’s wedding to a second wife. The first wife was then executed. After having a miscarriage in prison. The execution happened during the last year I was there and it is only today I’m finding out about it. I believe you now have a wholistic understanding of how Kuwait is a robust, high velocity production line for moral injuries. And how an institution from another country, British Safety Council, has failed to put a stop to some of them. A quote from all membership certificates:

[NBTC Group] is committed to keeping people safe and healthy at work.

These membership certificates, over a 10 year period, have accompanied the unjust firing of a vulnerable young staff member for following his safety training, and the subsequent deaths of 50 men after my efforts to blow the whistle fell on deaf ears.

Now, I was going to diligently put before you examples from other people of traumas that lead to moral injuries but I think I have enough material to move directly to definitions. What I will do though is throw a few videos in front of you. If you want to watch soldiers testify so you understand the meaning of grit and a sense of humanity:

A telling quote from Joshua: “Shame, powerlessness, betrayal and guilt. When those emotions are allowed to manifest, they can do so in a catastrophic fashion that can have devastating consequences on your personal life, your families, your friends and your loved ones.” Oh how I know. He now runs West Breath.

One final dose of soldier testimony:

We will use a slide from Steve’s talk below when discussing definitions. This gentle man.

DEFINITIONS

As stated by Joshua above, moral injury creates a profound drain on a person. You would not believe how much enthusiasm it can snuff out (this will be detailed in part 4). The definition of moral injury has evolved over time, this is from Dr Shay, responding to traumatized veterans:

Source: (now shuttered) Shay Moral Injury Center started by Rita Nakashima Brock at Volunteers of America:

In further work with veterans, a new definition was offered by Professor Brett Litz (source):

You can see this newer definition lacks the punch and pragmatic language of Dr Shay’s one. It offers acknowledgement, however, that such an injury can happen to unexpected groups: those who fail to do something in response to, or who witness betrayals of what’s right. On the cause, see below quote from Professor Litz. It appeared in Steve’s talk shown above, source:

The concept ‘failing to prevent’ is exactly what happened to me. You can see it in my repeated failures to help a young man who was fired under circumstances that were a textbook betrayal of what is right. The item ‘bearing witness to’ also applies to me and hundreds of others at the PMC where I worked. This occurred when we got news of the man who hung himself at a worksite in combination with the leadership betraying what is right by saying it was not a workplace incident. Oh, along with the simple horror of knowing that we worked for an organisation that did not shutdown the worksite in the presence of a hanging body.

Looking at the most up to date definition I can find, the latest study on moral injury is The impact of moral injury-related content on reasoning and its neural correlates: Data from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). It was lead by Oshin Vartanian. It begins with this definition:

...the functionally impairing psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or being a victim of acts that transgress deeply-held moral beliefs and expectations.

We are at a definition resonates with me. As already stated, the ‘failing to prevent’ and ‘bearing witness to’ aspects speak to my injury. Over a 16 year multinational career in some terrible places I have, it is important to say, not been a soldier. I do not wish to steal any valour. Shay’s definition does not therefore apply to me. I had a choice to disobey orders. And I vigorously did so. Soldiers cannot disobey orders. This puts them at the mercy of leadership malpractice: legitimate authority figures betraying what is right in high stakes situations.

What does apply to me is the evolution of the definition by Professor Litz and applied here by Vartanian. Regarding acts that transgress moral beliefs and expectations about the dignified treatment of others that any person would have, I have variously failed to prevent them (despite desperately trying), and I have born witness to them. I saw this in the guilt and shame I experienced in failing to prevent the Indian electrician getting fired and sent home. You can also see this in the traumatic horror I experienced as a witness to the shocking case of a man hanging himself on a worksite and its not being shut down for the day. Whilst the body swung from a pipe rack waiting for the police to pick it up.

In the course of failing to prevent a moral betrayal affecting others, I have also experienced moral betrayal against myself by those in a position of authority during 2023-2024. Yes, I was victimised in standing up for others. Hence the aspect ‘being a victim of acts’ applies to me also. I am still figuring out how to write about this. I’ll leave it for now. I have at least begun by recording a couple of videos about NEOM and and a couple of Dallas cowboy engineering outfits, AECOM/Jacobs:

Right, so now that we’ve gotten through some definitions and identified the parts of a contemporary one that relate to me, it’s worth turning our attention to a talk by Professor Zachary Steel:

An incredible amount of work has gone into this presentation, such as the slide on definitions that he pulled from Moral Injury and Definitional Clarity: Betrayal, Spirituality and the Role of Chaplains (J Relig Health (2017) 56:1212-1228):

This shows the broad range of work conducted in this field and it is gratifying to reach each definition to see which resonates. What is not included in that table is Steel’s delivery during the presentation of the most efficient definition -

unresolvable emotional conflict

He said this was one of the themes that emerged in a summary of psychiatric literature about WW2 veterans. Really, these three words speak well to the generalised sense of emotional torture and limping through life unable to get away from it.

Regarding treatment efficacy for psychological conditions involving guilt, depression, dissociation and anger, he offered this slide lifted from Key patterns and predictors of response to treatment for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder: a growth mixture modelling approach (Psychol Med 2018 Jan;48(1):95-103):

He observes that the chart shows these conditions are the most treatment resistant. He also observed that guilt, depression, dissociation and anger are particularly strongly activated in moral injuries where people failed to prevent, or bore witness to, a betrayal of what’s right. Zeroing in then on the significance of bearing witness to or failing to prevent betrayals of what’s right, he provides the next slide lifted from Distinct Trauma Types in Military Service Members Seeking Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (J Trauma Stress 2018 Apr;31(2):286-295):

It shows that 7% of soldiers do seek treatment for PTSD when they committed a moral betrayal. Notably, however, more than twice as many seek treatment where they witnessed the commission by others, a category of involvement in moral transgressions by omission. Professor Steel advises that

a lot of what we talk about trauma is witnessing things or being unable to do things yourself

So, there is both commission and omission in relation to an event involving a moral transgression. Commission is where you committed the transgression. Circumstances are clear. The mind is not left to worry about responsibility. Curiously, the intensity of guilt or shame is higher amongst those who found themselves involved by omission. Quoting from his presentation again:

Acts of omission have a lot of interpretive confusion around them. It’s ‘I wasn’t able to do something. I didn’t do something I thought I should do.’ And you know what? It’s invisible to everybody else. It’s invisible to your colleagues. It’s invisible to the people around you. And yet the moral burden that comes from perceived acts of omission - of a failure to do what you thought you should have done - are [associated] with very high levels of ongoing distress.

This is EXACTLY what happened to me. I have only nightmares, sleepless nights, and a toiling rage that developed its own personality, determined to rout every single positive experience it could find ever since 2017.

SIDE QUEST 1: MEDICAL PROFESSION

We have come full circle. I came across the concept of moral injury only 3 months ago when Steve Eisman interviewed Warris Bokhari, MD about Claimable, Inc.:

It is interesting to observe this concept making its way around the medical profession in America. It appears to provide doctors with the power to name what is wrong with the lack of universal healthcare. It causes them to betray what is right by, for example, sending patients home before they’ve recovered. Here is Elisabeth Potter, MD going viral about it:

There is an element of leadership malpractice or a legitimate authority directing the betrayal also. For example medical administrators, politicians and insurance executives producing a system that is too hard for doctors to fight in trying to uphold what is right for patients. It is a high stakes situation also - simply put, Americans have a shorter lifespan than those in other rich countries with universal healthcare:

Needless to say, it is really important that doctors are finally able to uphold their oath to care for the sick in America. It is gratifying then to see doctors summoning the rage with this concept, such as Zubin Damania, MD:

Another is Wendy Dean, MD who started Moral Injury of Healthcare. As an indication of her dedication to the cause, she even traded a couple of emails with me and was very straightforward:

Any well-trained therapist can help you work through the sense of betrayal that drives moral injury and the responsibility you assumed that wasn’t actually your weight to carry.

It really helps having a leader not engaging in malpractice! Just reading that simple statement helps me recognise I did in fact attempt to carry a weight that wasn’t mine to carry.

The final stop on this brief tour of moral injury in health care is an exquisite talk by Alina Bennett on Moral Injury on the Front Lines: Lessons From Healthcare:

Two points about helping people recover stood out for me in this excellent talk:

1. Communalise the trauma - sharing with others who’ve experienced something similar. Trusted listeners are required. These are willing and able to be transformed by a story of someone being sent berserk by a dramatic moral transgression left unmitigated by an authority figure. Why is it necessary that there is willingness to be transformed? She doesn’t make that clear but due to personal experience I understand why. A moral transgression by an authority figure in a high stakes situation REQUIRES CHANGE. That is why someone goes berserk - a loss of inhibition occurs in seeking to cause change because the situation is an emergency. So, the person ideally needs listeners from the community performing the moral transgression who are willing to be transformed.

2. Ethical listening - others who demonstrate a will and willingness to hear the story. Google DeepMind provides a definition:

...[listening] to grasp meaning, intent, and underlying values, fostering connection and preventing misunderstandings by focusing on the speaker, considering diverse perspectives, and withholding judgment. It involves being present, attentive, and open-minded, recognizing that true understanding serves collective goals and builds stronger relationships and communities.

I have a career of failing to encounter ethical listeners when it comes to leadership malpractice and its attendant moral injuries. I look forward to finding better people through this writing.

SIDE QUEST 2: ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

During this research another side quest emerged from Nadine Burke Harris (first to serve in the Office of the California Surgeon General). It is about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) explaining disease in adulthood:

A great psychologist, Dr. Eric Kuelker, reinforces her points:

I strongly recommend watching both brief talks and then measuring how many ACEs you’ve had using this resource. It. is based on this incredible research by the CDC. A further incredible piece of work by Dr Kuelker is his newsletter about one of the physical illnesses that can result from psychological injury, cancer:

Unknown Weapon

A psychologist equips you with an unknown weapon in your struggle against cancer.

By Eric Kuelker, Ph.D. R.Psych.

CONCLUSION

So, I have taken you on quite a tour. Let’s distil it. I promised a definition. Moral injury is

...the functionally impairing psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or being a victim of acts that transgress deeply-held moral beliefs and expectations.

Unexpectedly, it is acts by omission such as failing to prevent or bearing witness to a betrayal of what is right that produce the most intense psychological injuries. Boy do I know this. And how incredibly useful it has been to conduct this research and write about it. For, finally, after 9 years, I am getting a handle on this situation.

Indeed, what I witnessed and failed to prevent did not produce transgressions that were my weight to bear. Leaders engaging in malpractice were everywhere to be seen. The only relevance to me is that, should I ever be required to lead, I will do so in a way that affords emotional equanimity. Importantly, if I cannot achieve this affordance for those whom I lead, I will give up my leadership.

See you in the next one about diagnosis using the MIOS F.

NAVIGATION

1. YOU’RE HERE > Chapter 1: Introduction.

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several moral injury definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

6. Chapter 6: Leadership, Relationships and Moral Repair.

INTRODUCTION

Let me describe one of several moral injuries that has happened in my career. It was 2017 on a construction site for a Middle East country’s national oil company. The project management consultancy that employed me was a top 5 multinational engineering firm. A large, multi-storey, factory-sized oil processing facility was being built. One weekend, a construction worker hung himself on it. When his body was discovered, the worksite was not shut down. Staff were invited to leave if they wished to. Unthinkably, not all did. A perimeter was put up around the body. Whilst they waited for the police to arrive that afternoon. Despite that, from some parts of the site, workers could still see his hanging body. Compounding the moral transgression, it was declared by the oil company not to be a safety incident. Justified as occurring on the weekend. The operations director at the project management consultancy (PMC) stated, during a subsequent town hall in front of 300 people, that the company would not contest this assessment. The thought of a swinging dead body at a site where one might be working haunts me to this day.

By the way, if you want more detail on all of this you’re in luck. Here is my earlier testimony about the parts of my career in Phnom Penh and Kuwait:

The link should start the video at 42:22. Skip forward to that point if it doesn’t. The testimony continued here:

Let me describe another moral injury. Same year. Same client. Same project management consultancy. There was a young Indian electrician employed by a staffing agency. He’d only been in the country 4 months. As his training required, he caused an evacuation of 160 workers due to detecting an H2S gas leak. If you don’t understand the significance, Landman explains:

He and 4 others went to hospital on account of beginning to choke on the gas. His life was saved. He was then fired. When I checked, there was no record of the incident put in the client’s safety database.

Using his personal email account, he appealed the injustice of his dismissal to client, PMC and staffing agency leadership. He attached hospital records verifying he would have died without treatment. The buck was passed around. He was deported from Kuwait back to India. 20 days later his email made its way to me via safety staff colleagues. I was mindful that most Indians go to Kuwait with a debt to Indian recruiters of a year’s anticipated salary in Kuwait. Far higher than in India. I was haunted for years by his never replying to my several attempts to reach out via his personal email address. I was mindful of his being confronted with having to repay that debt on a pitifully low salary back in India. Further, I was mindful of his likely being ashamed of returning home merely 4 months after departing. With nothing, indeed less than nothing, to show for it. The thought crossed my mind, with his failure to respond to my emails, that this young man may have chosen to end his life. Like several others had during my time at that PMC.

If you want extra detail on this, skip forward to 8:09 here:

These are just two of several moral injuries that have occurred in a career spanning 6 countries since 2011. A moral injury is haunting and life destroying. Its impact on me has been powerful and complex. I was not the only one affected. Therefore, another reason to spend the time here to speak out publicly is that it may benefit more than just myself. I have a 5 part plan and, don’t worry, the definition of moral injury is next:

1. Chapter 1: Introduction (you’re here).

2. Chapter 2: Definitions: several definitions exist based on the horrors confronted by soldiers and medical workers, I find the one that resonates.

3. Chapter 3: Diagnosis: I take the MIOS F to score my moral injury severity, and discuss the implications of a study showing a drop in reasoning capacity for those with moral injury.

4. Chapter 4: The Moral Transgression Immune Response: reflections on keeping myself from success.

5. Chapter 5: The Way Out: working through the sense of betrayal that drove my moral injuries and the responsibility I assumed that wasn’t actually my weight to carry (hat tip Wendy Dean, MD of Moral Injury of Healthcare).

Thanks for joining in, see you in the next part.