Eddie Robertson

But I'd get a lot of DMs and not the kind of DMs people are probably sitting there hoping I'm going to say, like not good-looking young women or anything like that.

A lot of the time it was just sort of young dudes that were, like, wanting to ask questions about joining the Defence Force, you know, like joining the Army.

And you could tell by the way they'd written these messages that they – it was genuine inquiry and –

I sort of took it upon myself to reply to these guys and say, look, you know, if you're interested, you know, I'd always direct them to the Defence Force recruiting, you know, I'd do the right thing and I'd answer whatever questions I could.

But then sometimes, you know, by opening that channel of communication, sometimes then a lot of these young blokes would then sort of want to offload and, you know, they want to tell me why they wanted to join the Army or whatever.

Um, you know, they had stuff going on at home and things like, and look, I consider myself a bit of a, you know, like I wouldn't say an empath, but like, I do care about people like genuine people.

And if they're suffering or struggling or whatever, I'd like to help them if I could.

And I found I was sort of taking on a lot of this, like, you know, I was kind of going, I don't have the capacity to- Like a psychologist.

Yeah, 100%, man.

A, I'm not trained to do this, and B, like, I shouldn't.

And so I just made the decision.

I told the stories about the 40 guys that had been killed, a few funny stories, you know, funny posts, whatever, and I just made the decision to shut it down.

um and for my own mental health um and at the time it was the right thing for me to do because I needed to devote my time into other things um and it was taking up a lot of time man and and it was never about money but it was kind of like geez I'm putting a lot of time into this and it's like it's not it's not it's it's actually making me like you know it's bringing me down a little bit um because I'm

I was thinking like, shit, you know, like I'm not answering all these quick, like I'm not, and these, these people, these young blokes are going to be going, oh, this bloke's a prick, you know, like he's, he's not going to give me a hand or help me out.

And so I just shut it down, man.

But I can give you what you want, but like just – Yeah, and sometimes it's good to get a bit of life advice from people who have made mistakes along the way.

But doing it in a –

That's more so I think if, you know, it's a family friend and they've got a teenage son that's off the rails and they say, look, do you mind having a chat to young Jono or whatever?

And, you know, I've tried to teach him, you know, he's on the wrong path but maybe he'll have a listen to you, you know, and that's a different scenario.

But when it's like, you know, you're dealing with anonymous parties online and you don't know who and I think it can potentially go into a space where you don't want it to go.