"Drug-dealers, wannabe gangsters, thugs and criminals. This is a common theme you see," Mubin Shaikh says.
He's talking about the starting point of many Western-raised jihadists, including at least one of the Paris attackers and many of Australia's most notorious radicals.
Shaikh's own journey into Islamic extremism was different. He was raised in a middle-class Indian family in Canada, did well at school and served in the military. But he went through an "identity crisis" and fell in with a network of extremists in the mid-1990s.
"I took these guys as heroes," he  says from his home in Toronto. "They resonated with me as a young male with a sense of adventure and a sense of religious fervour ... For me, the political grievances came afterwards. For some people, the journey is different, the political grievances come first. And then there are the thugs who find a cause." 
Shaikh, 40, pulled himself out of the jihadist scene after the   September 11 attacks and went undercover for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the famous Toronto 18 plot, eventually becoming the star witness in the country's largest ever Islamic terrorism trials.
Today he's a scholar of radicalisation, trying to understand what motivates the tens of thousands of mostly young men across Western countries who pursue violent Islamic extremism.
But as his story and its contrast with the likes of Australia's thuggish Khaled Sharrouf shows, radicalisation doesn't always follow a predictable path. Fourteen years after   September 11, it's still early days for the study of Muslim radicalisation in the West.
Accordingly, programs to counter it are works in progress, though many people, including within government and the security services, believe that amid a doubling of ASIO's priority cases to 400, and a startling drop in the ages of young Muslims being radicalised, more needs to be done to head off radicalisation before it takes hold.
The previous Labor government had a program called Building Community Resilience, which focused on social cohesion and broad prevention. But, as a recent paper by Monash and Australian National University researchers argued, the heavy emphasis on such "primary" programs - which actually went back to the Howard era - had "created serious problems".
There was little evidence that such approaches had reduced violent extremism anywhere in the world and in fact had the danger of stigmatising communities they targeted.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan, in a newspaper column this week, distanced the government from the Labor programs and said the new approach was "more targeted" towards people who were at risk of radicalisation.
A $13.4 million program introduced under the Abbott government funds "intervention and diversion", with $11 million over four years going to state-led programs, and $1.9 million for one-off grants to community groups.
The Monash paper branded this a "modest" commitment of finances.
Labor responded angrily, with shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus saying: "It's disgraceful that Mr Keenan would try to score political points in this area. We should all be working together to prevent the radicalisation of our young people."
Meanwhile,  Victoria's   May budget included $25 million over four years to counter violent extremism. Daniel Andrews also announced a $49 million anti-terror boost for Victoria Police.
One program being federally funded is the Australian Multicultural Foundation's "Building Resilience in Your Community" which trains people to go out into communities and teach others how to recognise warning signs of some dark path, whether it's extremism, drugs or crime.
 The foundation's executive director, Hass Dellal, explained that the programs also build local networks to "identify who in the community you feel confident going to with a particular concern you have".
That might be an extended family member, a counsellor, a religious leader, a teacher, a sporting coach, or local police.
"Let's be realistic. Not many people are going to ring up the [national security] hotline and dob in a son," he said.
Consistent with Malcolm Turnbull's gentler approach compared with his predecessor Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister is expected to discuss next month with state and territory leaders establishing new phone numbers, websites and apps that allow people to seek the help of authorities through a less daunting avenue than the Howard-era national security hotline.
If a person starts to look dangerous, police can intervene and talk to them. The Australian Federal Police have community liaison teams - state and territory forces have the equivalent - part of whose job it is to do this early intervention. Teams involving everyone from imams to psychologists to big-brother or big-sister style mentors are then brought in to help get the person back on track. It's resource-hungry because it has to be tailored to each case, but  the numbers of people who get to that stage are relatively small.
The system is already evolving, Dellal points out.Greater attention has fallen on the role of women given that mothers are "often the trusted anchors and the first to notice changes in their family".
Another success story is "peer to peer" work - troubled young people being counselled by others their own age.
"People who are attracted to ISIS are talking to other young people. It's no longer those old blokes with the beards ranting and raving," Dellal said.
One thing everyone agrees on is that governments can't do it on their own. In fact taxpayer-supported work is most effective when the government stays at arm's length to avoid tainting the program's credibility.
That is why the Living Safe Together program does not actually name most of the recipients of the funding.
Trust and goodwill hit a nadir under Abbott because of his harsh language and the sheer volume of counter-terrorism measures introduced.
"At the beginning it was very difficult," Dellal said. "Communities felt that the way these programs were branded or portrayed meant that they were targeted at Muslims. Now, with the change of language and the more inclusive approach, there's a lot more confidence."
It's also generally agreed that in the past few years, Muslim communities have come to properly grasp that they have a problem.
Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who has travelled the length and breadth of the country talking to communities, said she'd seen "a lot of good things happening" in mosques, community halls, sports clubs.
"There are local sheikhs getting kids back on the straight and narrow without any government funding, women's groups surviving on little grants."
She said there was a growing realisation that more work needed to be done to help Muslim communities intervene early to prevent members becoming radicalised.
"It's about empowering people whether it's mums, teachers or community leaders, to recognise when there's a problem, and seek help when they do.
She hoped all governments would explore what more could be done to support such programs.
Back in   May, ASIO boss Duncan Lewis said only "social cohesion" - likely to be a generational project - could be the "silver bullet" that would stamp out violent jihadism.
Mubin, who has the cut-through eloquence of a man who's been talking about these issues for years, says that responsibility is everyone's.
To Muslims he says: "In the end there are some realities that the Muslim community need to respect. In a country that gives you freedom to worship, to build mosques ... you have to obey the laws and give loyalty and respect."
And to everybody else: "Go and visit the Muslims instead of harbouring these fears of who they might be and what they might be doing in those mosques of theirs. Just go and visit. Be good neighbours."