I'm David. And for a long time, I felt like nobody.
Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet way.
The way that happens when you grow up without a foundation, when you learn early that love isn't guaranteed, and belonging can be taken away without explanation.
This channel isn't here to impress strangers. It exists because I want my own family to finally understand me. And because I'm trying to understand myself, properly, for the first time.
The beginning wasn't "character building." It was survival.
I grew up as a mixed-race child in a mostly white society. That meant daily racism. Not always loud, not always obvious, but constant.
The kind that teaches you to monitor yourself.
The kind that makes you careful.
The kind that convinces you you're "too much" and "not enough" at the same time.
I didn't grow up with a normal family. There was abandonment. There was instability. There were years where I learned more about staying safe than being a child.
And then, on top of all of that, there was something nobody saw: ADHD. I didn't find out until I was forty.
So instead of support, I got labels:
Lazy. Stupid. Idiot. Difficult. Not trying hard enough.
When you grow up hearing that often enough, you start building your life around one goal: Prove them wrong.
The strange truth is… I did.
I joined the British Military. Then the Police. I learned discipline, pressure, authority. I learned how people behave when the stakes aren't theoretical.
I learned how easily humans follow systems, even when the system is wrong.
And somehow, and I know how ridiculous this sounds on paper, I ended up at two world-class universities: Oxford and Nottingham. I eventually earned an MBA.
That's the part people see and think: "Well, he's fine." But success doesn't erase the past. Sometimes it just becomes a cleaner suit to wear over it.
I left the UK and built a life across the world. I ended up in South America working in the mining industry. I started in Health, Safety, and Social: the parts of a business where you see what really happens, not what gets written in the reports.
Over eighteen years, I moved from Superintendent level to Senior VP of Sustainability in a company valued at over $10 billion. I worked across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa.
It looks like an adventure from the outside. But what it really was… was movement.
And if you've lived the kind of childhood I lived, you know what movement can become:
A way to outrun yourself.
A way to stay useful so nobody can discard you.
A way to avoid stillness. Because stillness is where your thoughts catch up.
My wife kept the family together
I married an incredible woman. And I don't say that lightly.
She kept the family together. In the early years, she raised our children almost single-handedly while I was building, travelling, chasing, providing. She saw things in our kids early, including ADHD, and she helped them in ways I never had.
Our daughter has been to university. Our son is about to go. And that should feel like a victory, shouldn't it?
But here's the truth I'm not proud of: I thought providing things was the foundation. I thought stability was money and safety and opportunity. And I was wrong. Or at least… I was incomplete.
What this channel really is
This channel is me doing something I avoided for most of my life: Standing still. Looking directly at my own flaws and regrets. Trying to understand how my past shaped me, and how that shaped the people I love.
Because I discovered some things too late. Patterns. Blind spots. Defences that kept me alive once… but hurt people later.
And I need my family to know this: If I failed you at times, it wasn't because I didn't love you. It was because I didn't understand what I was carrying. And I didn't know how it leaks.
Why "Applied Social Psychology"?
Because social psychology isn't just academic. It explains families. It explains conflict. It explains why we obey, why we withdraw, why we explode, why we go silent, why we repeat.
It explains why a person can be strong in public and lost at home. It explains why the past doesn't stay in the past.
This channel is a personal documentary journey through those truths. Using research when it helps, stories when they hit harder, and honesty even when it costs me.
Come with me
If you want perfect people, you won't find them here.
If you want a man trying to finally understand himself, so his family can understand him, and so maybe you can understand yourself too… Come with me on this journey.
Because the biggest question isn't what happened. It's why it's still happening now.