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Feb. 12, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:36
978 DeFOO Decision (listener convo)

shouldishouldn'tishouldishouldn'tishouldishouldn'tishouldishouldn'ti..?

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Time Text
Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, I can. Can you hear me?
Yes. Sorry, I had to go to the bathroom real quick.
No problem. Alrighty.
Well, I've got a couple things for you.
I've been having a little bit of feedback from the Foo lately.
Right. Sorry. Well, I know we missed – I wanted to do a conversation I think a couple months ago or about two or three months ago, something like that, but I didn't go through.
And that was when I talked about – talked with my stepdad and kind of gave him the final boot.
Yeah. And kind of more recently, I've been thinking about giving my bio dad the boot, at least for a while at least, or possibly permanently.
And my mom's been emailing me again.
So I guess the reason I wanted to chat was that I was listening to another podcast.
I think it was 7-24.
And it was with you and Christina.
And Christina was talking about her parents.
And I think that conversation was around her not really wanting to engage with her parents.
And I guess what you said afterwards was that I think the ultimate revenge of a wisdomist person is to not engage, essentially.
Sorry, the ultimate revenge of a what person?
Of a wisdomist person.
A wise person? A wise person, sorry.
Is that incorrect? As long as we get the idea, it's okay.
Okay, sorry about that. I don't know if that was stupid or not, but anyways.
So, sorry, the most wise response I said in that podcast is to not engage.
And there's an element of vengeance in it as well.
Yeah, I think the way you put it was the ultimate vengeance is to not engage, essentially.
It's to not confront them, essentially.
I think it was because they were talking about confrontation.
I think, you know, like, should I... I guess it's choosing who to confront or who not to, and you know you really hate somebody when you don't want to confront them, essentially.
You don't want to...
Well, you just don't want to interact with them at all, right?
Yeah, essentially.
And that's kind of the feeling I'm getting with my mom.
And I guess kind of the fork in the road that I'm dealing with is whether to kind of engage for closure or to not engage at all and just kind of take the pressure off myself and Part of me really likes that idea, and then there's also the part of me that says, well, is that cowering away, or is that...
Well, for sure you don't have closure yet.
Yeah, it doesn't seem that way, no.
Well, it's not even a seem that way.
I mean, how do I know that you don't have closure?
Because I still have these thoughts.
No. Oh, all right.
It's even more obvious than that.
It's not even remotely subjective.
All right.
What is it, and just what you've told me over the last few minutes, it lets me know that you don't have closure.
I can't say no.
I mean, it's just that I still have these questions that I still feel like...
You're still receiving emails from your mother.
All right. Right.
Right. And what does that mean exactly?
Do you mean, like, I should have...
Well, if you had closure, then you would either have a relationship with your mother, or you would change your email, block her email, block her IP, report her as spam, like, whatever you had to do.
Or if you did receive an email from your mother, God knows how, after taking all of these preventative measures, you would simply delete it, right, without reading it.
Yeah. I also did kind of want to talk about, I mean, I've been reading this.
Hang on, hang on. Sorry, just before we move on, because, I mean, that's important, right?
Yep. Because if you have closure with someone, you don't want to talk to them.
You don't want to hear from them.
You're done, right? Yeah.
So why is it that you, and I'm not saying you should have, right?
I just want to know why you have, why have you not blocked your email?
Yeah. Again, it's not bad, or it's not bad, right?
No, I understand that.
It's the choice I made, so I have to live with that.
Well, you don't have to live with it?
Well, no. I'm just curious what your thinking was, right?
At least as far as it is at this moment.
Of course, I don't have to live with it in the future if I choose not to.
Right. I acknowledge that.
I guess the reason I haven't blocked them...
It's rather because there's still a part of me that thinks that the relationship can be saved, or there's also a part of me that...
I've kind of observed the same phenomenon in some of my past relationships.
I was always that guy that would say, oh, let's be friends and things like that.
And then I would still read emails from ex-girlfriends and engage with them and things like that, even on certain times when I felt it was pretty unjust what the girlfriend did to me.
And even after all that, even after going through it, Pain and things like that.
I still chose to engage with them, so there's definitely something about my personality that likes to give these second chances to people that may not deserve it or don't deserve it.
Well, I would say just as a point of clarification, and I totally understand that impulse and that feeling, and I think everyone's gone down that road to one degree or another.
So, I mean, this is totally, totally understandable.
It's not part of your personality, though.
It's part of your thinking, right?
Because if it was part of your personality, you know, like being bright or verbal or something, then you couldn't get rid of it, right?
But if it's part of your thinking, then you can change it, right?
Yeah. A sense of humor is part of your personality, right?
And you can either say jokes or not, but you can't get rid of it, right?
Sure, sure. So I wouldn't say that it's as embedded as that.
And the reason that I would sort of ask about that, and the reason, hopefully it'll become clear while we'll pause on this point, is let's just deal with something a little less volatile, like your ex-girlfriend.
What would it... What would it feel like to you, or how would it feel to you, to say to an ex-girlfriend, no, we're broken up.
I don't want to have any contact again in the future.
We try to take our relationship to a 10.
We can't take it back down to a 2.
At least I'm not interested in that.
I don't want to use you.
I want to get closure here so that I can get on with whatever's going to be next in my life.
I don't want this to drag on.
So what would it feel...
What would it feel for you to say that?
To my ex-girlfriend right now?
Well, when we were breaking up or whatever, right?
When we were breaking up.
I suppose I would have felt a lot of anxiety in certain ways just because I would feel like I was almost being mean by doing that.
Even though today I would acknowledge that, well, that's self-protection.
I mean, I'm trying to So if I say that's a bad relationship, then I should set a better standard for future relationships.
Well, okay.
I think I can understand where you're coming from, because there's a reason you brought up the vengeance thing earlier, too, and we'll dip into that.
Have you listened to RTR yet, by chance?
Yes. I have, like, maybe 15 minutes left at the end.
Good for you. And you're enjoying it?
Yes, I am. And actually, I've talked to Allison a bit about some of the concepts and things like that.
And so that's something I'd like to bring into my relationships if I can.
And definitely in the Oh, sure.
Of re-evaluating my relationships.
This is just going to help more.
I certainly think, and I know it doesn't matter to me what the book sales say.
It certainly helped me, given me a lot of tools to help.
To better evaluate those relationships, because Untruth did give me some good tools to do that, but certainly not in the detail that real-time relationships has.
Right. Now, you said that you'd like to bring this into your relationships.
I would sort of say, with no modicum of false modesty, that if sort of the honesty and openness in the moment is the definition of a relationship, then RTR can't be brought into a relationship, because if it's not there, there is no relationship.
Oh, yeah. Well, sure.
I guess what I meant...
No, I know what you mean.
The thing is, me and Allison, I mean, I would consider our relationship very open.
I would say so.
I mean, to the ability that I have.
And I guess more what I meant is...
This is more for, like, my future relationships more, is that I like the ability...
To be able to better filter the people that will be in my life in the future.
Sure, sure. And I guess more what I meant is that I like that idea of telling Allison how I feel.
And I feel I've done that in the past, but I think it's more of a concept.
I think when I brought it up to her and we had a conversation, it's more like...
How can we, you know, if our relationship's at an 8.5 right now, how can we bring it to a 10?
You know what I mean? Right, right, right.
That's more what I meant, and she's really excited about it, and she's reading on truth right now, so...
I'm thrilled. I'm really thrilled, and I'm glad that it's something that you can apply.
This was supposed to be the rubber meets the road book, so I'm glad that it can be put into practice.
Well, yeah, and it's certainly like that, but it's...
There is certainly a degree of volatility with RTR because there's friends that I've kept around in my life where I'm just like...
Actually, for instance, the other night I was going to go hang out with a friend I've had for a couple years and we were really good friends for quite a while and on Sunday night I was planning to come over and stuff and I cancelled because I had a thought inside me that said,
well... The truth is that this friend has enormously low self-esteem, and if I feel like I need this person, then that's certainly a poor reflection of my self-esteem.
So there's things like that, there's choices that I've been making to try to put an end to those things so my future relationships are going to be a lot better.
Right, right. So I appreciate that, and I'm obviously thrilled that you've gotten it.
I'm not particularly concerned about the sales insofar as, oh, I must eat, right?
I mean, because that's fine.
I've saved some money up.
But I know that it's just a real challenge.
It's a real big leap for people to learn.
Oh, yeah, sure. When I was reading it, I will fully admit there's many, many times in the book, and I talked about this with Alison.
This is what I told Alison.
It's that there's many times in the book where I've read, you know, rather about some of your examples about relationships, rather it's something I've done in the past and I'm completely guilty of, or it's something where I'm wondering, like, is this something I've done in relationships recently?
You know, I mean, because if it is, then, you know...
It's pretty obvious this is something that I need to face and change.
There's been many times in real-time relationships where that definitely came into my mind and invoked some anxiety and things like that.
But I think I've came far enough in this conversation to realize that that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, no. You can't know before you know, right?
I don't look at my relationships in my 20s and say, what a dunderhead I was, right?
I mean, you don't know before you know.
The only thing that you can have is a commitment to truth and learning, but you just, you can't know what you don't know.
And to blame yourself for that is, you know, it's just self-castigation for no purpose other than putting yourself down.
Oh, yeah, sure. Okay, so sorry, let me, I want to, because these things with your mom and these things with your ex-girlfriends in a non-creepy, non-Freudian way are highly related.
And in my opinion, this is, again, I have no doubt of that.
I'm just going to say at the beginning it's my opinion and then I'm going to talk in absolutes and you can throw out whatever doesn't make sense, of course, right?
That sounds fine to me.
Give me an example of an ex-girlfriend that you broke up with where she did, or she broke up with you where she did something wrong and what did she do?
Well, that would definitely be my last long-term relationship, which was about two years or so.
Well, the end of the relationship was very, very shady.
Essentially, she...
Well, this was right when I started college, so not only was I starting college, but I also broke up with my long-term girlfriend, so this was a really pretty hard part of my life.
But essentially what she did is that she pretended like she cheated on me, apparently.
I don't even know if this is even the truth or not.
But she lied to me in the end, essentially saying, like, she told me she cheated on me so I would break up with her.
And then at the end of the relationship, she told me all these things that she hated about me during the relationship.
And... With small things and large things, tons of insults that kind of came out of nowhere at the end of the relationship.
Like, you know, I hated these jokes you would make.
I hated how, you know, X, Y, or Z. But there were things that I never had any...
The thing that screwed me up the most for a while was that, you know, these are things that I didn't know about.
During the relationship, these were things that she didn't bring up.
These weren't things that she brought up.
Oh, you're having this problem with things and it makes me feel this bad.
Yeah, she brings it up at the end as a series of parting shots, right?
Exactly, and that's what's happened.
That has had an impact on even my current relationship with Allison because I've had to tell her a couple times that says, well, I can't say this fear that I have In regards to our relationship, it's necessarily your fault, because I have no evidence to base this on.
But in my past, with relationships, I've always had the girlfriend that, at the end of the relationship, will say, Oh, I hated it when you did this.
I hated it when you did that.
And they never tell you at the time.
Left you in the dark. And it's just...
It's undermining in a couple ways because you think about when I was in the relationship, I would be like, well, she was lying to me in the relationship, and then she relies to me at the end.
So, yeah, so in the next relationship, you don't know whether or not the woman has problems that she's not telling you.
It's really toxic and vicious to do that, right?
Absolutely. Talk about putting minefields and time bombs into your soul, right?
Certainly, and I remember the first semester of college being a pretty dark period.
Sure, sure. And look, I'm going to tell you something which is maybe surprising to you, but you were as cruel in your way.
And I'm totally willing to accept that.
But not based on anything that you've told me other than what you've told me already.
Like, I don't need to know anything more about the breakup other than what you've told me already to say that you got your own back.
Don't worry about that. Okay.
What do you mean?
Well, the...
Because you said that you were willing to stay friends to women, right?
Yep. This is absolutely the most vengeful and cruel, and I don't mean cruel like you just woke up one day with a cruel streak, but that's your vengeance.
Yep. And how is that your vengeance?
Because it denies her of closure.
No. No. First of all, you can't deny her closure, right?
It's impossible to deny somebody else closure.
You can't. Like, if you say, well, I'm not going to give her closure, and then you hang up and you don't yell at her, say stop calling, you're still going to give her closure.
No matter what you do, she's going to get closure.
So you can't deny somebody closure.
You can deny talking to them, which just gives them closure in a different way.
I would say that the reason it is vengeful is because I say we're breaking up because I have a standard that says lying is bad, but yet I want to be your friend, and you're a liar.
So it's setting up this contradiction, essentially.
I have a standard of relationships, and you don't fit it, but I'm being your friend, so you must fit it in some way.
Yeah, the kindest thing that we can do to people who do bad things is to let the natural consequences accrue to them, right?
Yeah. Right, so, I mean, the kindest...
This is something that's pretty advanced.
It's not in RTR, but obviously...
Well, not obviously, but the kindest thing that I can do to the trolls is ban them, right?
Yeah. Even all other considerations aside in terms of disruption of the board or the chat room or the conversations or whatever, the very kindest things that I can do to destructive people, the very kindest thing that I can do is to ban them.
Yeah. And how is that the case?
Because if you were...
I mean, if they came on the board being all aggressive and just being a jerk or lecturing whatever they might be doing...
Then, if you were to accept them on the board, then you would say, well, you know, I have the standard, you know, because, I mean, of course, real-time relationships on truth, all the, I mean, the entire, pretty much everything in FDR is about personal, everything in pretty much about personal relationships.
And if you say, I have a standard of personal relationships that says, you know, this type of aggression is bad, and, you know, or you're being insulting.
Insulting is bad. But yet, you know, you're It would be a contradiction to say, but you can still hang out on the board, you know, whatever.
Yeah, I would be saying to them, not only do I not believe my own values, but I have no fundamental or practical problem with what you're doing, and also I'm going to communicate to you that values fundamentally are meaningless.
Yep. And when you communicate to bad people that their actions, their difficult or hostile or negative or destructive actions, have no consequences and that there is no values that can have any effect on them and that all values that might contradict their actions, the value of their actions, all of those values are meaningless or mere posturing.
Yeah, it's just opinion then.
Yes. Well, what you do, of course, is you trap them in their own behavior.
Yeah, exactly. Because that gives them – it's just like hanging out with a war supporter or something like that.
It legitimizes what they do.
It's sanctioned. And so when you say to an ex-girlfriend or a girlfriend who broke up with you in a manipulative and destructive and vicious and sadistic way, you say, but hey, let's be friends, right?
That's the ultimate cruelty.
And again, I'm not saying that you're a cruel person.
I don't believe that you are.
This is the vengeance of the slave, right, as I talk about in the book.
The vengeance of the slave is to enable the worst habits of the master, right?
Yeah. I can definitely see that here.
And I will admit that in this relationship, I certainly wasn't acting virtuous all the time either.
You mean in your relationship with the girl prior to?
With the ex-girlfriend, yeah.
I understand that.
But we just didn't talk about the breakup part of it, right?
Because this is highly related to your mom.
The worst thing that you can do to a corrupt person is give them what they want, right?
Yep. So, it was your...
I mean, I don't believe, fundamentally, I don't believe that it was your desire to stay friends with your girlfriend, your ex-girlfriend.
Not particularly, no.
Yeah, I would say definitely no.
Right. Whose desire was it?
It was hers.
Right. Now, what were you afraid of?
And we talked about this earlier, but let's just touch on it again.
What were you afraid of?
If you were to say to her, are you crazy?
Friends? You basically tore through my life like a Scud missile, and I'm happy to be standing after you're out of here.
The idea, I'd rather go and get my teeth drilled out than stay friends with you.
Well, one answer I could give, I would think, is that if I were to, the fear that I think gets invoked by that, Would be that if I were to expel her, then I'm going to have to face myself.
I'm going to have to face my...
I don't think that's the case.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but just empirically, right?
Because you're able to face the possibility that you were acting in a destructive manner at the moment, right?
And you've had the capacity to do that throughout the course of our conversations to be self-critical.
So that's just not true based on the evidence that at least I have, which is not fake, right?
Sure. Well, I mean, I guess, I don't think I was as introspective at the time at all.
No, but you always had the capacity for that, right?
I mean, these things don't just come out of nowhere.
But I think it's interesting that you did, I mean, I think as we play this out, I think you'll see why I'm spending so much time on this release, but I hope you will.
But when I said, what would happen if you said that, what happened was you kind of attacked yourself, right?
That's true. Right, so where's that coming from?
Definitely the parentals.
Well, sure, but I'm talking about in this interaction with the woman.
I'm sorry to be cutting you off so much.
Oh, no worries. I'm trying to answer the best I can.
No, no, I appreciate it. I mean, the problem is that I'm trying to go through a narrow focus here, and then we'll relax and be more chatty, but...
But when you were to say to this girl, no, I mean, to whatever you felt, I really feel like the idea of keeping you in my life in any way, shape, or form is repulsive to me.
What would she do if you were sitting across the coffee table saying that to her?
Oh, she probably would have yelled at me.
Yeah, she would have attacked you, right?
So when I said what would happen, the first thing you did was self-attack, right?
Yeah. And say, well, I wouldn't have the guts to face my own corruption.
That's what she would say, right?
And that's slave talk.
Yeah, the slave that can't fight back will get back in other ways, right?
Yeah. So she can be a bully to you, right?
And she can be a total bitch in the breakup and she can attack your self-esteem and so on.
And then she can bully you into remaining, quote, friends with her because you're afraid of how she's going to attack you if you stand up for yourself.
She can do all of that, right?
And all you do is you turn around and you say, fine, absolutely, you're a wonderful girl in many ways.
It's a shame that things didn't work out.
I like apples, you like oranges, no biggie, no big difference, everything's wonderful, right?
Which means that she gets to continue, or she basically is cornered or forced or suckered into continuing to be a bitch, which is your ultimate revenge, because you move on to a happy relationship, and she stays in the quagmire of her own bitchiness, right? So you win. Yep.
Slaves always win. Yeah, I can definitely see that.
You're enabling the worst aspects of her personality.
Now, the reason that I say that you're not a cruel person, I mean, you're cruel to yourself, obviously, that's why you had this person in your life, but you're not cruel because this is all self-defense, right?
Yeah. It's like, hey, in order to get you to not attack me, I have to say and read a couple of your emails, fine, I'll do that.
And I'll do that like you really are a valuable person, right?
Which means that she doesn't get the feedback that she needs to change, right?
Sure, yeah. The only way I could have helped her is to say that it's not acceptable in my life, you know, and therefore get out.
As opposed to saying it's acceptable enough, because all it takes is that little bit.
It's just like a minarchist.
It's just that little bit of violence that throws it into this realm of the unprovable, this realm of opinion that nothing's productive.
That's all it takes is that little bit of like, I think your behavior is just a little acceptable.
A little bit of your manipulation is okay.
Sorry, you wouldn't have had to confront her at all, right?
Because you could have just said, oh yeah, we'll be friends and then just have her email get deleted from your server and never return her phone calls or whatever, right?
I mean, so there's lots of things that you could have done, because, I mean, obviously when you're breaking up with someone, no one wants to sit there and get yelled at after the end of a relationship, right?
It's bad enough during it, right?
But afterwards, it's like, what the hell's the point?
It's like going to get thrown out of a club you got thrown out of before, right?
I mean, there's no point doing that.
Ask the bouncer to beat you up a little bit more.
Right, so she wanted your sanction, and you gave it to her because you were angry at her.
Yep. And I would say that that is very likely, if not most likely, exactly what is going on with your mother.
I didn't see it from that point of view.
Well, the patterns are the same, right?
Who is it who wants you to not block her email?
Is it you or your mother who doesn't want you to block her email?
I think that's pretty obvious.
Sure. And that's what I mean when I say you don't have closure because you still can't differentiate between your desires and your mother's desires.
Between healthy desires and unhealthy desires.
Yeah. And so you're not quite peeled away.
You're not separated. You're not individuated yet.
Because you can't say, well, what benefit does it have?
Like, how does it benefit me to think that I can have a good relationship with my mom after all this time?
Does it benefit you at all to think that?
Most definitely not.
And I think we touched on that in our last conversation where it's following the benefit.
Right, right. So it doesn't benefit you to not block your mom's email and to sort of think maybe, maybe there's some chance, blah, blah, blah.
It clearly benefits her, right?
Most definitely.
Right. And the fact that you are keeping in a long orbit from your mom is indication to me of how much you dislike her.
Yep. Because it's enabling, right?
Right. Sure.
I'm not responding to her emails at least, but I am reading them, which is definitely an indication of that.
Right. And whether you respond to her or not, she knows you well enough that she knows what's going on.
So it means that you're still being run by what she wants and not what you want.
And that you're fighting against what she wants, right?
You know how I say that if a slave is commanded, he will just do the job badly?
Yeah, exactly.
I read that. If your mom commands you to not leave, you'll just stay really badly.
Yeah. And I've thought about that before.
It's like, well, what if I were to, you know...
I guess the best metaphor I could use would be...
I puke out the red pill...
And turn everything backwards, which would probably make me extremely miserable.
And I always thought, well, what if I were to just be that, like most market anarchists do, to be that crazy market anarchist at the Thanksgiving table?
What if I were to go and choose that life?
Then it wouldn't be pleasurable for me, nor would it be pleasurable for anybody else.
And it would be undermining everything that I believe in, pretty much.
I'm really, really sorry.
I got a PM pop-up and it distracted me.
I'm so sorry. Very rude.
But if you could just repeat that last sentence, I'd appreciate it.
I just want to make sure I don't lose the thread of what you're saying.
Oh, no worries.
I was saying that if I were to, like I said, puke the...
The red pill up and do a 180 on my current path and hang out with my parents or possibly be that crazy market anarchist at the Thanksgiving table.
That would be, like you said, that would be vengeance towards them and it would also be destructive towards myself because I know I would be pretty damn miserable.
Yeah, it's like, I'll burn down the house even if I'm inside, right?
Yeah. I think that was only where I was going with that.
Right, so then the question is, if you do dislike your mother to the point where you are holding a long orbit from her, then you either need to...
Discover that your dislike is unjust and she's actually a good mom, right?
Like in the same way that the...
I was just looking at the stats for the Freedom Aid Radio website.
And, you know, like a good percentage of the people who come to the site come from a forum where people just hate my guts, right?
Yeah. So,
in the same way, if your mom was actually a good person and it was her virtue that was enraging you and so on, or making you feel anxiety, then you would need to spend time with your mom and not attack her in order to figure that out, right?
I mean, if your dislike of her was unjust.
Because when you dislike someone, you're either right or you're wrong.
There's no middle ground, right?
You either dislike them because they're not likable, or you dislike them because they are likable and you're not, right?
Yep. So it's either envy or it's affection, right?
Or it's whatever, some sort of twisted, you know, borderline personality fusion bond or it's actual honorable and respectful admiration.
So with your dislike of your mom, the closure comes from figuring out whether it's just or not, right?
Now, you, I would suspect, believe, based on our prior conversations, that your feelings about your mom are just, right?
I would say so.
And I've even kind of, when I got this email, it kind of invoked a lot of thoughts in the past.
So it's kind of adding to my list of, that's making me feel more confident about that decision.
Right, but of course, what does your mom think about your dislike of her?
What does she think about that?
What does she feel about it?
What does she believe about it?
I think she believes it's just a phase that I'm going through.
Does she believe it just?
Oh, no. If she did, I mean, throughout reading her emails and things like that, I mean, there's not even a smidgen of curiosity about how I'm feeling and why I'm not talking to them.
That question has not even came up, so...
Obviously, she feels it must not be just.
Right, right, right.
And of course, the lack of curiosity means that deep down she knows it is perfectly just.
What do you mean by that?
Well, if...
I don't mean to be dense here. No, that's fine.
If Christina were to leave me a note saying, Steph, I have decided I can't live with your unbearable, endless, fake British accent pomposity and tangents anymore, and I'm leaving, right?
Yep. Then I would go and throw myself in front of the car, beg and plead for her to stay, even if it were five minutes, to talk to me about it.
I would ask her all the questions in the world to try and figure out how she got there.
I would be... You know, entirely committed and focused on figuring out how she felt and what happened.
Because for my own sake and for hers as well, right?
Because either she was being just, in which case she had information that I really needed to know about myself and how I showed up for her in her life.
Or she was being unjust, right?
In which case she still had very important information that I needed to find out about myself, which is how did I let it get to this point where my wife is like walking out on me or whatever.
But if I really and genuinely and truly wanted to know, then I would genuinely and truly ask, right?
Like, I mean, if your mom got a letter and said, come to this address to pick up your million-dollar check, but they forgot to include the address, what would she do?
Sorry, just to say that, right?
So your mom gets a letter and says, go to this address or come to this address to pick up your free million-dollar check.
And they forgot to include the address, but they included a phone number, what would she do?
What would she do?
Yeah. Is this something being offered to her or me?
To her. Okay.
I guess she would call.
Would you guess she'd call, or do you think she'd say, oh, there's no address, I'll throw it out?
Yeah, she would call. Of course she would, right?
So if your mom wanted to know something, she would find it out, right?
Yes. Yeah, if she felt there was value in it, of course, a million bucks, then, yeah, she would be very curious about what the address was.
Yeah, she would find out.
She would ask. And she wouldn't take no for an answer, right?
Yeah. Like, if she wouldn't call once, and they'd say, oh, we're out for lunch, and she'd say, oh, well, forget that million dollars, right?
She'd call back, right? Yeah, definitely.
Right. So she would pursue...
That million dollar check, or she would pursue the address until she got her million dollar check, right?
Yep. So, if she wanted to find out something, she would find it out.
Yep. If she wanted to find out why you're not talking to her, what would she do?
She would find out. Yep.
She would send you emails.
She would go into counseling herself and she would say, look, obviously our relationship has reached a point where something has blown a fuse for you.
I'm really sorry. I genuinely don't know what it is.
I am not going to, but I'm going to assume, because you're a good kid, I'm going to assume that you're totally right, that I've done some things that I can't figure out.
So I'm going to go into therapy and I will be back in touch with you in six months and I'm going to go twice a week to therapy until I figure all this stuff out.
Yeah, and I would say that...
I'm going to ask everyone that I know what their experience of me is like.
And I'm going to do everything that I'm going to keep a journal.
I'm going to read these books on psychology.
I'm going to really, really strive to work to achieve greater self-knowledge so that I can come back to you with some understanding of what has alienated you so that I don't put the whole ball in your court, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's possible for her to do, right?
Most certainly. Very much in her means.
Christina's parents last Christmas, not this last Christmas, the Christmas before, they sent a note to Christina saying that they were going to go to Greece for a month, right?
Yep. And what I said to her was, they're not saying to you we're going to Greece for a month, what they're saying is we're going to take the money that we could have spent on figuring out what was wrong with our family and we're going to spend it on a trip to Greece instead.
Yeah. Right?
I mean, your parents are not without money, right?
Oh, no. No, not at all.
Right, so... They're well off.
So, if she wanted to know the truth, then she would find the truth, right?
Yeah. Nothing could stop her?
Yeah, definitely not.
Right, and sorry, I'll just put one last metaphor in and then I'll turn it over to you, but in the same way, and I've used this before, but it's very relevant to this situation.
If your mother is passing off $100 bills and she knows that they're genuine, then she is actually going to be happy if stores around her neighborhood put in a counterfeit bill detector, right? Yes.
Because it means that then the prices of everything is going to go down.
She's going to get a better deal because they won't have to charge her for all the money they lose on counterfeit money, right?
Yep. So if she knows that her currency is genuine, so to speak, she's going to be very happy to have the counterfeit.
Now, if she's passing out fake $100 bills, she's not going to feel very happy if the store's put in counterfeit detectors, right?
Right. No.
And she's going to actively avoid the counterfeit detection machines, right?
Yes. Now, so when we avoid something, when we avoid knowing something, it's because we already know it, right?
And we don't, it's not good, right?
Yep. So she already knows.
Like if she just had, sorry to overcomplicate the metaphor, but if she had 10 bills and one of them just happened to be a fake bill, then she would still hand all 10 over.
If she thought they were all genuine, she'd still hand all those 10 over to the counterfeit machine, right?
Detector.
But if she knows that they're fake or some of them are fake, she's going to avoid that, right?
So when I say that by her lack of curiosity is because she already knows, that's the metaphor that I would use.
Like she already knows that you have every damn reason in the world to be unhappy with her as a mother, right?
Yeah, sure.
And she knows exactly why, and that's why she's not asking.
I I would say that has to be.
I mean, anybody that you claim to love, I think, would be worth finding out, if that's really a genuine feeling that you have for that person.
So, I mean, I think your metaphor works pretty well in this case.
Because essentially, if she didn't know that she had counterfeit bills, she would just give it up and say, oh, well, these two bills were counterfeit.
Oh, sorry! And then corrects herself by saying, oh, here's two other bills.
You know what I mean? And then she'd buy herself a counterfeit detector so she wouldn't get fooled again, right?
Yeah. And so she would start listening to FDR and she would go through this whole process and she'd try and figure things out.
Right? Whatever. I can't remember if all of your stuff's in the premium section, but she'd pay the 50 bucks or whatever to get there.
She'd listen to... I mean, this is totally available to her.
Public phone calls are totally available to her if she wants them.
Uh-huh. Right?
Yeah. I mean, if she was really curious about my feelings and where these feelings came from, I mean, certainly she could.
I mean, like you've said, with people who claim that their parents are really into people's interests, you say, well, why don't you come on the Colin show?
Why don't you invite them on the Colin show?
Yeah.
And it's kind of putting skin in the game.
Yeah, I mean, if my kid really got into a philosophy and was changing his life and his way of thinking, I would love to get involved.
I'd love to.
I mean, like, hey, you know, if Christina reads a book that she says, man, this book blew my mind and I really, I mean, just this fantastic stuff, I'd be like, I couldn't wait for her to give it to me to read it, right?
Yeah, definitely.
So, I mean, the amazing thing about this conversation, just by the by and using the larger telescope here, is that parents who complain about the influence that this conversation has on their kids are, it's free. It's free.
It's available. If they're not technically adept, they can hire someone to burn the CDs for them.
There's any number of things that they can do.
But this is a free, public, perfectly available conversation.
So you have to work really hard to not listen to this stuff if you claim to care about someone, right?
Yeah.
I would say that's true.
So the last thing that I'd say then is that you're strung between these two poles, right?
The one pole is yourself, right?
And remembering that inaction tells a whole lot more sometimes than action, right?
And looking at the gap between what people could be doing if they objectively really loved you and what they are doing is highly instructive, right?
When people don't do something...
They are telling you an enormous amount.
Like if I walk down the hallway of my house, hum to myself and go and make a pot of tea, that's an innocuous action, right?
But if Christina is writhing in pain and I step over her body and I hum to myself and I go and make a cup of tea, that is no longer an innocuous action, right?
No.
So when you don't see your mom and she sends you emails that don't address that, that is not an innocuous action.
Thank you.
No, she's avoiding...
She's stepping over the body.
Yep. That's cold.
That's cold, right?
And that's angry.
Yep. And it's not like she doesn't know...
That the body's on the floor.
I mean, it's been pretty obvious because it's not every day that your kid will email you and say, I don't want to hang out with you guys for Thanksgiving or Christmas or any of those things.
Exactly. And I mean, that's pretty obvious, I think.
Right, so the fact that she's not addressing it is totally, totally evident of where she's at, right?
There's a lot of, I mean, if I did step over Christina's right, she's having an appendicitis attack or something, and I did step over her body, what would you assume about my mind?
Certainly would undermine your credibility in pretty much every way.
Well, but what would you assume if I see, like, if I'm stepping over my wife's writhing body in pain or whatever, right?
What would you assume that I felt about her?
Um, you didn't care enough.
You didn't love her.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
It's much, much more than that.
Well, uh, okay.
I would have to actively hate someone to step up for their body and go and make tea.
That wouldn't just be the difference.
See, if I'm walking down the street and somebody I don't even know collapses in pain, I would do something, right?
I would phone, I'd call 911, whatever, right?
I wouldn't just walk away, right?
So that's someone I don't even care about.
I would do that service for them, right?
Sure, I would too.
Yeah, I know you would, right?
So, if I won't help my wife when she's writhing in pain, but instead go and make a cup of tea, that's near bottomless hatred, right?
Yeah, certainly. Ah, she's faking it just to get attention.
I'm not going to give her what she wants.
Like, that's just cold, cruel, baseline ass-hollery, right?
And the comparison would be my parents not caring about...
I mean, they know the body's on the floor, and not being curious about it, essentially.
That's saying... Not only is it...
Well, sorry, I got sidetracked here.
Okay. Sorry, still trying to think here.
Oh, no problem. I could mention one thing while you're collecting your thoughts, which is that your parents know that you're in a great deal of pain.
This was not easy, right?
Not any stretch of the imagination.
I know, I know.
This is about the hardest thing that you can do, right?
Sure. So they know that you're writhing in pain.
They know that you are experiencing an extraordinary amount of pain in relation to your family, right?
Yep. I think the comparison that I was going to draw before I went into my convoluted ramble there is that essentially you walking over the body Or saying that,
oh, she's just faking it to get attention or something like that, is essentially the same thing as my parents telling me, oh, well, this whole thing about you wanting to improve your relationships thing is just a phase.
You'll get over it.
That kind of thing. Right.
You're over-dramatizing it.
It's a complete dismissal of your...
And see, the thing that I would communicate to my wife who's writhing on the ground is that Yes, she might be dying, but I really want a cup of tea.
Yep. Do you know how humiliating that would be to her?
Where she stood on my hierarchy of values, that her death is not even slightly less, but infinitely less important than me getting a cup of tea.
So every time your mom sends you an email that is not directly addressing these issues, she is saying to you that your pain, your agony...
Is infinitely less important than the contents of this email.
Yeah. Most definitely.
Well, but see, if you got, right, like, if you got that, then you would already have blocked her email in the course of this conversation.
If you really got how insulting this was to you.
I think I'm starting to get it now.
Right. Because you said, well, I have this friend who's got low self-esteem.
I decided not to hang out with him, right?
But I haven't blocked my mom's email yet.
Although she is directly attacking me with far more historical power.
Infinitely more. Yeah.
I'm not willing to give up the big things.
I'm willing to give up these little things, but the most important things I'm afraid of.
Yeah, and the reason that you don't want to block your mom's email is the same reason that you didn't want to say to this bitch who you broke up with, and maybe you were a total bastard too, but we're just talking about her, right?
Sure. It's the same reason, which is that you don't want to be attacked, right?
Yeah. I mean, the reason you don't block your mom's email is you don't want to be attacked.
If she gets a bounce back, she's going to escalate, right?
Yeah. She's going to, you know, so for you it's like this uneasy truce, right?
Mm-hmm. But it's costing you, right?
Certainly. Right, like the fact that you decided to stay, agreed to stay friends with your ex-girlfriend cost you months of self-doubt, right?
Yeah. I'd say more than a year, actually.
Right. That's a year of your life that you can't get back, right?
And sacrificing the truth of your experience for the sake of avoiding attack, you know, it's like, for me, it's just like, just do it.
Get it over with. You know, I'll take the couple of days of being attacked and feeling wretched over a year of feeling doubt and insecurity.
Yeah. I'd say that's...
Probably a pretty good cost-to-benefit analysis there.
Right, and this is going to be much worse than your ex-girlfriend.
This is going to stall your relationship with Allison.
This is going to stall your progress in the conversation.
This is going to stall your security and self-esteem, right?
This conversation is a lot about showing the hidden costs of our decisions, right?
Like, if you want welfare, you get warfare, right?
It's all the things that I've talked about, right?
And if you want to avoid being attacked by your mom, you don't end up not being attacked by your mom.
It just goes on a lot longer.
Yep. Yeah, it's definitely by just keep reading your emails like this.
It's just prolonging it.
Well, it's either a slap across the face, which stings and goes away, or it's a slow drip debilitating poison.
Yeah. Just take the slap, right?
And look, again, it's all just my thoughts, right?
If you mull it over, you want to get in touch with your mom and go for more closure, that's, I mean, whatever.
That's totally fine. Not that my opinion even matters as far as that goes.
I'm just pointing out to you that there is an enormous, hidden, slow drip, poison cost.
Every time one of these emails lands in your inbox, how do you feel?
That's lots of fear and anxiety.
Yeah. Anger. It's like you get it anyway.
It just keeps going. Whereas if you just block the email and she doesn't have to get a bounce back, you can just set up your client to delete it from the server or whatever, right?
But you don't ever have to read these emails because right now the email comes in and you're like, oh shit, right?
And that's going to go on and that's going to go on and that's going to go on month after month after month.
Or you can roll the dice, block the email, and say, well, if she escalates, I'm getting closure.
She can't withhold closure from you, no matter what she does.
If she dies tomorrow, she can't withhold closure from you.
So you're either going to get that slow drip.
For me, that's the case.
This is a stupid example, but bear with me.
When somebody becomes a jerk on the board...
Then I'm like, okay, well I can either feel nervous every time this person posts, and this can go on for months, and it's going to be that much harder to get rid of them after months, because then they're going to say, what have I done that's different?
Yeah, exactly. Like your girlfriend, right, later.
She's saying all these things, ex-girlfriend, right?
So I can either say, well, every time this person emails me, Or every time this person posts on the board, I'm going to feel nervous or anxious, right?
And they say, well, of course, if I ban them, then they're going to run over to Limey, and it's going to escalate, and blah, blah, blah, right?
But it's like, fuck it.
I'm not sitting there logging on to my own board, which I'm paying for, feeling nervous and scared about other people, right?
This is your inbox.
This is your email. This is your computer, your house, your life, right?
Anybody who's making you feel scared, anxious, angry, or nervous...
Fuck them. Life's too short.
Yeah. Certainly.
And if I accept these poor standards of relationships, it's just going to...
I mean, the part I'm not...
You know, being in a bad relationship with my mom is just part of the fear.
The main fear, I think, in the future, is that then my relationships in the future won't have any higher standards.
Because I never set any higher standards in the past.
Or... Well, they will.
I mean, again, if it were that simple, then it would be much easier.
I mean, have an understanding that it's very hard to make these decisions, right?
Because it's not obvious what happens, right?
If it's like, well, if I don't block my mom's email, my finger's going to fall off tomorrow, that's testable, right?
That's easy. But the immediate anxiety of blocking the email is high, but the slow drip poison that shows up in totally unrelated ways, that's hard to follow, right?
It's like government job creation programs, like the jobs that get created are really obvious, but the jobs that never come into being are totally not obvious, right?
Right? So, have some, you know, gentleness with yourself that, in many ways, until you understand the costs, it's really hard to make the decision.
And the costs aren't that obvious.
Like, all my future relationships will be bad because I haven't blocked my mom's email.
It's not that obvious. It comes up in other different, strange ways, right?
Professional insecurity, or sometimes it shows up as body image problems.
Do I feel fat? You know, like, am I handsome?
Like, All these other kinds of things, right?
There's lots of other things, ways that it can show up, but it's not obvious what it does.
Or it can just show up like you can have light sleep, you know, once.
Like, there's lots of things that can happen, but definitely having your autonomous nervous system cranked up randomly into fight or flight, depending on when your mom emails you, does have effects.
They're hard to tell, and nobody can tell for sure, but you can certainly see how you feel after a week or two of not reading these emails and knowing that they can't land in you.
And then she'll try and come around, right?
So she'll get someone else to send you an email from her, right?
And then just block that person.
You're just constantly building the fence, right?
Yep. Yeah, I can certainly see that.
I guess the question that has been kind of left open for me is that I think I asked this before.
You know how you recommend that people, when they first decide that they probably want to try to jump ship, as far as the family thing goes, to tell them, you know, I want to take a break, and then that buys you about six months or so.
I guess it's kind of that...
I'm at that impasse about six months later, almost.
It's about been four months or so, actually.
About what to do now, essentially.
Or is it just as simple as me blocking my mom's email?
What do you want to do? Do you miss them?
Well, the honest answer is that I don't want to re-engage with my mom.
I really, really don't. But at the same time, I'm thinking, am I cowering away?
Or am I... I mean, but then again, it's kind of like saying, well, you put your...
I know, sorry to interrupt.
I know this can be complicated, right?
And I know we just did a Sunday show with multiple rods, right?
Multiple personality rods.
If you haven't heard it, it'll make sense.
But I can guarantee you this, my friend, for sure, that any input...
To this decision-making process that is abusive towards you, not coming from you.
Right, because you said, well, I don't want to see her, but maybe I'm cowering, right?
Well, cowering is a highly pejorative statement, right?
Yeah. If somebody is cowering from their mom, right, then they're a chicken, right?
Yeah, I'm putting myself down again.
Right. So I can tell you for sure that any time you feel that you should insult yourself into seeing your mom, that's not coming from you.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah, certainly. Maybe I'm afraid to face my own dark side.
Maybe I'm chicken about this.
Maybe all of these things that you can come up with that are hostile towards you or put you down.
Mm-hmm. That is not a viable addition to the debate.
It doesn't mean you shut all these things down, but I mean, you can listen to and reason with these voices or whatever, but if you're tempted to see your mom because you'll self-attack if you don't, that's just your mom, right?
That's just the time bombs the landmines put in you, right?
Yep. I can see that.
See, even when I acknowledge it, it's hard to change it.
Well, you can't change these inner voices.
Again, I don't know if you've listened to last Sunday's show.
I just posted it yesterday. But have a listen to it, and sorry for the intermittent audio quality problems.
I'm working to solve it. But you are an ecosystem, right?
Plus and minus voices about your family, and you need to get them all together and And reason together around a table, so to speak, right?
But for sure, you don't want to be making decisions to get involved in people because you're afraid of self-attack if you don't.
Yeah. Yeah, that wouldn't be a good motivation to do that.
Well, I mean, how would you feel saying to your girlfriend, you better come out with me or you're just a chicken?
Yeah, that's...
There are no Hallmark cards like that.
Be my Valentines or you're a chicken shit, right?
Yeah. I can see that.
So if it's not valid for you to do to her, why would it be valid for you to do to yourself?
It's not.
Ah, you BB. Into the bitch.
Yeah, that damn consistency thing.
I know. It's going up to bother me all the time.
Oh, well. Yeah.
Yeah, I can see that, definitely.
I mean, I think some of this is coming from...
I know I've heard in past podcasts where you've said to speak the truth as much as you can with your family until you can't do it anymore.
And I know this might be self-attacking and everything, but it just feels like I didn't do that with my mom.
And my reasoning for that is that, I mean, the bare truth is that I'm terrified of my mom.
Well, but you see, if you were really terrified of your mom, you'd have blocked her email, right?
Yeah, that's true.
Like, I mean, if there's, if you're, I don't know, if you're some woman and some guy stalking you, you block the email, right?
Yeah. You change email addresses, you change phone numbers, you move if you have to, right?
Keep yourself safe. Right?
So you're afraid of your mom, and I totally get that, and she sounds pretty damn scary.
I don't blame you for that at all.
It seems like a perfectly healthy response.
But she wants you to read her email, so you're still running her agenda, right?
Yep. And you just have to will yourself over that hump of saying, I'm worth not being frightened.
Right? Yeah, certainly.
I am worth living a life free from being attacked.
Yeah, certainly.
I deserve peace and security in my personal relations.
We can't fight taxation and blah, blah, blah, right?
But we deserve peace, serenity, and security in our personal relationships.
And that doesn't mean relationships without any kind of challenge or any kind of...
But we deserve not being attacked by people who are in our lives, right?
Yeah, I've gone through that phase right now with a lot of different categories of people where it says, you know, well, why should I have friends that are war supporters?
Why should I have, you know, whatever it might be, violence supporters, or even people that are obviously...
Sociopathic, which is some of my past friends, I would say.
Well... It's almost...
Sorry, you can have... I mean, my opinion is the issue of whether your friends are war supporters or not is not the key issue.
The issue is, can I be honest and open about what I think and feel without them attacking me?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
And perhaps that's...
And that's what's happened in the past.
Anytime I've tried to throw some reason into one of their fantasies.
There was this time a couple months ago where one of my now former friends sent out this MySpace bulletin talking about how the soldiers are heroes and they're saving Iraq and la la la la la.
And I mean...
I kind of went to town on her a little bit because, I mean, I did ask her questions and things at the beginning and stuff, but the resulting end of that conversation after I told her, oh, well, you know, about a million people have died because of this.
Are you feeling okay about supporting that and things like that?
And I bring up those issues, and at the end she says, Sean, I don't think you're happy unless you're disagreeing with somebody.
And that was where I said, well, I'm not going to talk to her anymore.
Right, right. That tells you everything that you need to know about how she's going to deal with conflict.
Yep. So perhaps I shouldn't have said it's because she's a war supporter.
I mean, it's because she attacks me if I question her beliefs in that realm.
Right. Right.
I mean, life is short, and we can either spend it being frightened of bullies that we invite into our lives, or we can say, I am worth not being attacked.
I don't attack other people.
I am worth not being attacked.
And if you attack me, you're an asshole.
I mean, a lot of what's behind FDR is, like, good people need a spine.
And I say that as somebody who did not have much of a spine for a good portion of his early life.
So, I mean, this is preaching by the Reformed, right?
Not preaching by the innately spine-worthy.
But, you know, good people gotta have a spine.
Good people are going to say, you know what?
What you're doing is really negative, destructive, and hostile, and you're not going to be part of my life.
And if that's true in terms of me banning people from the board and from the site, I've got no problem with that.
I don't have any addiction to managing difficult people.
If you invite difficult people into your life, your life will just become difficult and ugly.
And it's entirely voluntary.
Certainly. I'm digging my own grave if I do that.
Right, right. So does that give you some useful stuff to work with?
I mean, I know we haven't answered the question of whether you get back in touch with your mom or not, but of course nobody else, but you can.
Yeah, I know that hasn't been answered, but I'm the only one that can answer that, and that's scary.
Sure, sure. But I mean, you need to reason these things through yourself, right?
Yeah. But like I said, I mean, my leaning right now is just to blocker and not go down that route.
Yeah, I mean, the way that I would, I mean, the way that I tried to work with it in my own mind was something like this.
And I said, okay, well... If I found out tomorrow that my mom had been hit by a bus, what would my first feeling be?
Would my first feeling be regret because I still had so much that I wanted to share with her?
No. Right?
My feeling would be...
Yeah.
Right? And that says a lot, right?
right i mean obviously if christina were hit by a bus i would be inconsolable for years and uh so that's you know when you need to get back in touch with people it's because you feel like if you suddenly found out they were dead you'd feel regret because there were things you still needed to talk about with them then you should go talk about it with them but if you just feel like either relief or somewhat indifferent then obviously there's not much point because nothing else you need to say yeah uh
And, I mean, my strong feeling is if I try to do that with my mom, that it's going to end in disaster.
I mean, I think my greatest fear with my mom is that she'll lure me back in, you know what I mean, somehow.
Well, yeah, she's got control, right?
She's got the power. Yeah, and then I'll feel like, well, what the hell kind of self-esteem am I trying to build here?
You know what I mean? Well, but see, again, this is a little bit close to, just from my mind, it's a little bit close to self-castigation to say, well, what kind of self-esteem am I trying to build here anyway, right?
And then you're sort of bullying yourself with rules in a sense, right?
But just to say, look, I mean, I don't want to have people in my life who attack me.
I mean, it really does come down to something that simple.
I don't want people in my life who punch me.
I don't want people in my life who call me names.
I don't want people in my life who insinuate that I'm a bad guy, who call me hypocritical.
Like, I just don't want those people in my life.
That's not too much to ask, I don't think.
It's not an unreasonable thing to say, you know, if you want to be in my life, be respectful towards me.
And if you can't be respectful towards me, I'm not going to try and bully you or control you.
You're just not going to be in my life, right?
Rather than, how does this fit into the general plan of improving my self-esteem?
Yeah. Yeah, I can see that.
Right, and you've got to have an empathy in yourself, right?
Because that's how you were raised. Yeah.
The improvements of self-esteem is the effect of that, of making those choices.
Right, right. I mean, you put, it's like climbing a glacier with those crampons, right?
You put your thing up there, which is like, I deserve better, and then you clamber your way up, right?
Yeah, certainly.
Yeah, I can see that.
And have a listen to this a couple more times, right?
Because, I mean, that will also help you with that decision.
Oh, certainly. It has to be because you want to get something out of the interaction, not just because you feel you should or you're a bad person if you don't.
Yeah, if I feel I should, then that's a red flag.
Yeah, then it's not your desire, right?
Yeah, or if I feel fear, that's a big red flag.
Yeah, if you feel like, well, I better do it or she'll attack me if I don't, right, that's also a red flag for sure.
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, I think that was a good comparison between my ex and my mom.
It actually doesn't particularly surprise me that that was a big connection there, but I didn't really see it before.
Yeah, no, that's why we need each other, right?
It's always hard to see yourself in those blind spots that we all have.
Indeed. All right, well, I think that's good for now.
All right, I'll toss this your way.
Have a listen to it and let me know what you think.
I think it would be a useful podcast for other people, but you can have a listen and let me know what you think.
Certainly, and you don't have to particularly worry about editing out my name or anything like that.
I don't really care so much anymore.
So are you okay with it going out, or would you like to listen to it first?
I'm totally fine with it going out.
I would think so.
If anybody wants to track me down about it, I'm certainly more than willing to talk to them about it.
I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed about in any way.
Okay, fantastic. Well, I appreciate it.
Obviously, as always, I appreciate your honesty and openness and, of course, your trust in philosophy, I guess, which is not always the easiest thing in the world, but I appreciate the chat.
That's certainly where I'm building towards.
That's something really important to me.
Have a good one, Steph.
Thanks so much for your help.
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