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Dec. 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:08:59

1231 Globe and Mail Interview, November 20 2008

The original interview with the Globe and Mail reporter Tu Thanh Ha, which resulted in a recent profile on Freedomain Radio.

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	I guess the easiest thing for us is to start chronologically from the beginning and tell me how you became a public person and decided to become an online figure.
	Well, I mean, that's not, the goal isn't, you know, become an online figure.
	I mean, but I have been completely fascinated by philosophy since, I guess, since I first read, started reading philosophy as a teenager.
	I was 16 when I, somebody who was a big fan of the group Rush, the drummer is really into Ayn Rand, who's a Russian-American philosopher.
	So I started reading philosophy when I was 16, and I just found it completely absorbing.
	And so, Oh Lord, some horrible number of years.
	So I studied it quite a bit.
	I did two years. Well, I actually was originally going to go into English literature because I very much like to write.
	And so I went to York University for two years.
	And then I went to the National Theatre School as a playwright and as an actor.
	And then I went and finished an undergraduate degree in history at McGill.
	And then I did a master's degree in history, focusing really on the history of philosophy at U of T, and I did a master's thesis on...
	It was Plato, Locke, Hegel and Kant, for which I got an A, right?
	So I just want to say, like, I'm not falling out of the trees a self-proclaimed philosopher.
	I mean, I've done a lot of work, both in terms of personal study and graduate work.
	And, of course, U of T is a pretty mainstream school.
	So from there, I went into the business world, and I co-founded a software company, grew it and sold it, and then I took some time off, and I studied fiction writing.
	What was the name of that book?
	It was called Caribou, a nice Canadian name.
	Caribou Systems. It's still running, actually.
	It's still a viable company.
	I worked there as the Chief Technical Officer for seven years.
	Then the company was sold, and entrepreneurial stuff is very tiring, and it's a lot of travel, so I traveled to all throughout the United States, Western Europe, China, so I did a lot of travel.
	It wears you down after a little while, so I wanted to take some time off, so I took some time off.
	Then I started working again in the software industry about a year and a half later.
	I got into some debates with some people at work, which began to rouse my interest in philosophy, which had been dormant to some degree for some time.
	And I started writing up some philosophical articles.
	But they were arguments from first principles.
	Do you want me to put that even closer?
	I think that should be good, yeah.
	I just want to make sure. So just like while you were at work, starting getting into discussions?
	Yeah, if I remember rightly, there was an election.
	And whenever there's an election, of course, philosophical principles, whether we like it or not, are lurking underneath the political discussions.
	Do you remember around what time?
	Yeah, that was 2005.
	Remember, my first article was published when we were in Florida?
	That was 2005.
	The Bush re-election.
	Yeah, I think it was after that, and of course there was still a lot of debate about this war, the war, the invasion, not a war, the invasion of Iraq.
	So I started writing articles, philosophical articles, and I began to get them published on websites.
	And then I began to...
	I got into a lot of very interesting debates with people.
	And there's lots of people online who are very smart and good writers, and so we got into some very engaging debates.
	And so when you engage in debates with people, you get more ideas, right?
	Because you either solve problems or you find problems in your earlier solutions.
	So that began to roll out more and more articles.
	And I'd heard about this podcasting thing.
	And my experience, I guess I was a DJ in...
	University, right? So, I mean, I had a little bit of experience with that.
	And, of course, I studied a lot of voice at theatre school and so on.
	But, yeah, we have a shy one.
	A not-so-shy one. So, I started to read my articles as podcasts.
	And, I mean, again, it was very early on in the whole podcasting thing.
	I didn't know anything about it.
	I just gave it a shot.
	And they began to be quite popular.
	But of course, I was still working full-time as a software executive at this point.
	I was the director of technology.
	I found like on iTunes you have a few podcasts.
	Yes. And then there's one for...
	That's right. I sort of always moved between technology, marketing and sales.
	Because I'm a core technologist, but I think I have a fairly good way of communicating to people.
	So I've always sort of had that.
	You found some very dry stuff about profit maximization in the manufacturing sector.
	Yeah, I didn't listen to that.
	No, I don't blame you.
	So what happened was I began to do these podcasts and they began to become, I mean, I can't even say famous or even notorious, but relatively successful for a show entirely about philosophy and so on.
	And so then what happened was I have a long commute.
	And I began to...
	I had a little...
	It was just a little microphone that sort of came out from the neck.
	If it looked like an easy drive, there was no bad weather or anything, then I would talk into a recorder during my drive.
	And that really was, and I had no idea that I had any particular skill or ability in spontaneous speechifying, you could say.
	And you would post them online?
	Yes. Oh, I forgot to mention, I also was, I mean, I don't want to give you, you know, like any kind of, you know, sell your resume, but I was a top...
	I was a top 7 debater in Canada when I was in university.
	I did a lot of debating through those big debating clubs and so on.
	You owned a debating club? Yeah, I was quite successful.
	And that was my first year. I didn't do it after that because I got more into acting.
	So I began to post these and then what happened, and I didn't charge anyone anything, of course it's podcasting, and I knew that the stuff that I was talking about was not going to attract any advertisers, core philosophy and economics and politics and stuff, it's not that gripping for people.
	So I wasn't charging anything for these things.
	That was like a hobby? Yeah, it was a total hobby.
	And it's very gratifying, of course, when you can do whatever you can to stimulate people's thinking.
	And really the goal of a philosopher is not to teach people what to think, but how to think.
	To reason from first principles, like the job of a scientist is not to teach another scientist what to do, but rather how to be a scientist, how to think according to the scientific method.
	So that's the goal of a logician or a philosopher, is to give people the tools to think.
	So when that happens, it's very gratifying.
	And it began to become more interesting to me than my work, but of course I had no way of knowing whether it could ever be A job, right?
	Because there's no way to monetize this stuff, and you can throw some ads on a blog, but it gets you like five bucks a month, right?
	So then what happened was people began to say, I'm enjoying what you're doing so much, I would like to donate.
	Because so far, the cost, the server cost, the bandwidth cost, all of which were pretty expensive back then, I mean, I was doing myself, right?
	You could say start-up costs.
	Did you have your own website at the time?
	Yeah, I started with my own website and then I had to get my own server.
	Originally I was a shared server, then I had to get my own full server because the load was becoming so heavy.
	I spent a lot of money for this hobby, which is fine.
	People into model railroading spend money on that too.
	People then began to say, I would like to donate.
	You've been generous with your money, with your time, with your energy, and so on, so I'd like to donate.
	I put a PayPal thing up there, thinking maybe I would get a couple hundred dollars a month.
	Maybe I would pay for some of the server costs, or the bandwidth costs, or that kind of stuff.
	But it began to become more of that.
	Now, this was nothing that I could live on.
	I was making quite good money in the software field.
	Ah, the software field.
	It was fun. But it began to grow, and it began to grow.
	And then, at some point, my wife and I sat down and I said, you know, call me crazy, but I would like to...
	To take a step at this, at making this an income-generating to the point that it's not beer money, so to speak.
	We talked about it and we worked out the finances and then I took my 75% pay cut to start running this from an entrepreneurial standpoint.
	And that's really, the whole business model has been try to be as relevant a thinker to people as possible.
	If they donate, great.
	I used to sell books, now I just give them away.
	Because I really want people to get a hold of as much material that fires up their mind as possible.
	And I didn't want, and of course a lot of people who are interested in philosophy tend to be younger.
	They have the time, they're in university and that sort of stuff.
	So I didn't want there to be a cost barrier to entry, if that makes any sense.
	You had started writing.
	You mentioned that you were a playwright.
	I presume you started writing fiction at first?
	Oh yeah. I wrote plays and produced plays and wrote fiction.
	As a fiction writer, apparently, I make a very good philosopher.
	You wrote a movie. I wrote a movie, that's right.
	I wrote and produced a short film as well, which was a finalist in the Hollywood Film Festival in 1997.
	So when did it start shifting into essays and libertarian stuff, if I'm understanding it correctly?
	Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't characterize myself as a libertarian anymore, more as a voluntarist, because libertarians generally are for a small state, and I'm exploring how a society could work in the absence of a government, which of course is a pretty crazy idea, nothing that I will live to see, but to me it's a very fascinating So you say not anymore, so at one point you kind of moved in that stream?
	Yeah, I mean, certainly the first sites that published me were libertarian sites.
	Because the essays were originally around stateless societies.
	You may have seen the first podcast around stateless societies.
	I mean, boy, if we could, wouldn't that be great, right?
	A society without war and taxation would be great.
	Of course, we don't want it to be a pipe dream.
	So I've gone, most libertarians are sort of for small government.
	A government that is law courts, military, police, and nothing else.
	But I'm very much interested in exploring the possibility that society could run with the absence of a coercive monopoly called a state.
	Which again, I mean, it's completely abstract and a pipe dream, but I'm willing to be patient, I guess you could say.
	I've talked to people who've been reading your stuff from the beginning, and they said that at first it was philosophical, but it started turning into things that were more into human relationships as opposed to relationships between people and the state.
	Right, that's very true. Isn't that fair?
	That's very fair. That's very fair.
	How did that come about?
	Well, because I started writing about politics, economics, and philosophy, people thought that I was a libertarian thinker.
	The labels didn't really matter to me, but of course, as a philosopher, there's really nothing that's off limits.
	A philosopher can't say, at least I don't think a good philosopher can say, I'm going to go here, but then we're not going to go any further.
	So I will talk about abuses of power in politics, But I'm not going to talk about abuses of power in personal relations.
	And so, what happened was, I did get questions about how this philosophy would apply to personal relations, because I used to do an email of the week.
	I would read emails, I'd just get too many to do it now, but I would get the email, and a lot of these questions would be, well, if you're into voluntarism, how does this apply to my marriage, or my relationship with my family, or my relationship with my boss, or that kind of stuff.
	So, I mean, I went through years of therapy in my 30s, right?
	So, this does not make me a therapist, I'm not a psychologist, I've been reclaimed to be, and I don't do therapy, I don't do psychology, or anything like that.
	But, when people ask how the philosophy of voluntarism applies to personal relationships, I would attempt to provide an answer about how what I talk about would apply to personal relationships.
	And that very quickly, I mean, now I understand the Dear Abby thing, so to speak, right?
	But that very quickly became the dominant topic for the conversation.
	I run a message board, there's a chat room, I do a Sunday show, which is entirely listener-driven, right?
	I might have a short thing at the beginning, but basically it's like, what do listeners want to talk about?
	And definitely over the last year or two, it's been almost exclusively about People's own lives, right?
	People don't do much metaphysics or epistemology or ethics or any of the sort of standard topics of philosophy, but they really do talk about how rational moral principles would be applied within their own lives.
	And that, to me, Is good, right?
	I mean, people may disagree with my answers, of course, or my suggestions or my analysis, but it is good that people are attempting to put philosophy into practice in their own life, because if it remains an abstract discipline, it's...
	To have it as a purely abstract discipline would be like creating a nutritional guide composed entirely of imaginary foods.
	It might be intellectually vaguely interesting, but nobody would be able to put it into practice.
	So it really was listener-driven.
	The listeners wanted to talk about how to apply philosophical principles to the issues they had.
	In their own lives. And I mean, I'm not going to say I was dragged along unwillingly, but I've been an entrepreneur long enough to know that you don't productively say no to customers in your business, in my business, in anyone's business.
	You can't productively say no to what the customers want for very long.
	So that's what people wanted to talk about the most.
	And they found the conversations that I had with people or the responses that I had to be helpful.
	So it tended to go more that way.
	Did you find time to just like For lack of a better verb, decant and just think out these theories that you have and how they apply in all the myths of typing, talking, taping.
	Well, yeah, I mean, but it's not, you know, it's what they say, it's the 10-year overnight success phenomenon.
	I mean, I've had, as I say, been really interested in philosophy for 25 years, and very much into Austrian economics, free market economics.
	So I've had a lot of time to think about various issues.
	I have friends that we talk philosophy all night and have for decades.
	So it's not like I'm just sort of popping out, you know, like some Greek god, you know, popping out of nowhere and spouting off with no forethought.
	As I say, I've studied philosophy at the graduate school level for years.
	So, you know, I guess I come well prepared.
	Of course, that doesn't mean I'm right, but it means that I put some thought into it prior to the start of this endeavor.
	And I guess, like, the most controversial I guess the most controversial, the most contentious part of what you talk about is the de-fooing issue.
	And I understand from, maybe I misunderstand, that it is something that has happened in your own personal experience too, that you have applied?
	Yes, yes.
	Yeah, through, I mean, I come from a very dysfunctional family.
	Through therapy, and this was not something that I did on my own, and it's nothing that I suggest anybody does on their own.
	I'm always suggesting people who have very difficult family relations to talk to a therapist.
	I'm not a therapist. But yes, it is something that, unfortunately, I did end up having to separate from my family of origin because of dysfunction and toxicity.
	And I understand that you two have Yes, I have.
	I also have some severe dysfunction in my family as well.
	Sorry, just to put that in context, I mean, nobody wakes up one day and says, these people are terrible, I'm never going to talk to them again, right?
	It's a very painful process. It really is horrible.
	And it is something that...
	It's not a new concept. I mean, there are books about divorcing your family, and it's not a light decision, and I certainly never suggest that it's a light decision.
	And it's not something that people should ever do without attempting to, as hard as possible, as much as possible, to work it out with their family.
	Right?
	I mean, so that's, but philosophically speaking, I mean, from a, you know, we are involuntarily affected by gravity.
	We don't have a choice about gravity, but personal relationships are chosen, are optional.
	We're not bound by umbilical cords.
	In reality, our relationships are optional, are choice-based.
	They're not so much when we're children, but when children become adults.
	They are choice. And the reason that I don't...
	Because when people talk about the DFU, they talk about it like it's the point of the site or it's what I think people should do.
	And I think the woman who talked to this Guardian reporter I have the idea that I'm saying that the path to individuation is through family separation, and I do not believe that to be the case at all.
	There's no reason that anybody should not be free and be in a family.
	We're having a baby, but the baby is not choosing to be here.
	The baby is not choosing us as parents, which means that we have to be Great parents, right?
	Because even choose, right? I mean, my wife can walk out the door tomorrow, so I have to be a great husband.
	The more that we remember that relationships are voluntary, the better we can make those relationships.
	But if relationships become automatic, you know, I just have to go over there, I just have to be here.
	There's no life to those relationships.
	And my entire goal is to try and remind people that relationships are voluntary and we should be open and honest about what we think and feel with people.
	Most times that works.
	You can take this with you if you want.
	This was just a few numbers that I put together, because I don't want the quality of what I do to be, hopefully the quality of what I do, or what I do at all, to be eclipsed by something relatively minor.
	And you can take this with you, but I just wanted to step you through the logic.
	So, since I began, there have been about 50,000 consistent listeners.
	You've read this, maybe. Yeah, you've estimated in 20...
	Yeah, I know of about 20 DFUs.
	And this is nothing, because they said, oh, there's this letter on the site saying, here's how to DFU with your family.
	No, people were asking me.
	Say, well, you've experienced this.
	I have tried to work things out with my family.
	I continue to be in a situation of abuse and humiliation or violence sometimes.
	What is it that you suggest as the easiest way to take a trial separation?
	Because, I mean, I can't make decisions for anyone, but if people do ask me for help in getting out of a difficult or abusive situation, you know, as an ethicist, it would be kind of churlish, I think, to say no.
	The way you describe it, I would call it a relationship euthanasia at a certain point where you pull the plug.
	I would just say that the language might be a bit dramatic because nobody's dying.
	It's like a divorce.
	A divorce is a tragedy.
	We should do as much as we can to avoid family breakups, family separations.
	In the book that people, well, I wrote and had a lot of demand for this, the Real Time Relationships book, I really do try and talk about how you communicate with people without jumping to conclusions, without blame, just openly and honestly and vulnerably.
	And a lot of times that works, right?
	And of course, I do get emails and there are people who post it on the web who've said, my relationship with my family has improved as a result of applying this philosophy.
	That's wonderful, but of course those people don't call up reporters and complain.
	The only people who call up the reporters and complain are the people who feel very hard done by the volunteerism that I talk about.
	Now, what about people who say that what you have done instead is scratch onto an itch and make it worse and make it bleed rather than peel it and let it go away?
	Right. Well, I'm not sure what to say to things like that.
	I mean, I can respond to criticisms that have, you know, facts and evidence, but I can't respond to criticisms which say, you're just making things worse, right?
	I mean, if people can provide evidence that I'm making things worse, I would be very happy to discuss that, but people don't.
	Well, I mean, like, for example, I'm listening to that podcast that you had with Tom.
	Mm-hmm. It was an interesting experience where And then it went into his relationship with his father.
	Ah, but you have to listen carefully, right?
	And you have some pretty harsh words about his parents.
	Very harsh words, absolutely. For somebody who presumably has not met them.
	Right, absolutely. Well, to be precise, he asked me, because I hadn't listened to that conversation, but because of the controversy, I mean, since that first came out in April, but I did listen to it again yesterday.
	To be precise, he said, can you help me understand why I'm obsessed with veganism to the point where I can only talk about that with people who then reject me.
	So he wasn't talking about veganism and I said, no, this is about your family.
	He said to me, help me understand, if you can, why I might be obsessed with veganism.
	It wasn't me hijacking a conversation to redirect it to some nefarious end.
	I was actually responding to what he asked about.
	I don't know if you've heard that. Absolutely, I've not met his parents, and I'm simply going over the emotional report of his father terrorizing him and bullying him for all of his childhood, and I think he's 18 or 19 years old now.
	You know, where he says that his father would kick in windows, which would have to regularly be replaced.
	At one point he said, my father could trash a room in 15 seconds.
	I mean, for a child, it's unbelievably terrifying.
	It's like being in a bombing raid.
	I mean, to see a completely out-of-control, enraged parent destroying your environment, I mean, how absolutely terrifying.
	I mean, the emotion that he talked about this with left me in no doubt that he had experienced it this way.
	Of course, I mean, that's not the same as an objective fact, but the fact that he had experienced this bullying.
	Now, what I then asked was, did your father have the capacity to control his temper when he was...
	Did he ever rage in front of a cop?
	Did he ever rage in front of a teacher?
	Did he ever, right? Because if the father is suffering from a physical mental ailment, schizophrenia or something like that, then that's terrifying and terrible, but there's no moral content to people who are mentally ill.
	They're not responsible for their actions.
	But if you do have the capacity to control your temper, but you instead focus your rage on bullying your child, yeah, I gotta tell you, I think that's pretty bad behavior.
	I mean, to me, if bullying and terrorizing and abusing a child is not wrong, then there's no such thing as wrong.
	For example, when you started imputing motives to why his mother became pregnant, that's a rather touchy place to go.
	Absolutely. And you will remember, I said at least three or four times in the course of that conversation, this is all theory.
	This is not proven, this is all theory.
	But it is the case, and this is not just me making things up, this is fairly well established, that people do know other people's characters, and Malcolm Gladwell has a book out called Blink about this, which is pretty well researched and pretty well documented, that people have a very good ability to size up personalities and personality types.
	So the idea that you would get married to a man capable of this kind of destructive and abusive rage, and that you would then have children, she simply can't claim that she had no idea.
	Of course she would, right? Because people have a conscience and they feel bad, right?
	But it's not possible.
	And again, I put this forward as a theory, right?
	But to me it would not be logically possible to say, He was a completely wonderful man, and then he just developed this rage.
	People's personalities usually are set by about the age of five, so they don't just flip, if that makes any sense, later on in life.
	Again, I did put it forward as a theory, and the whole time during the conversation I kept asking him, does this make sense to you?
	Does this fit with your experience?
	Does this fit for you?
	Because all of this is just a theory.
	So I wasn't telling him what his experience was.
	But the idea that his mother would claim that she was a victim and had no capacity to do anything about it is just not true.
	Is it like...
	I guess it's like an exercise in empathy, trying to put yourself in the other person's context, what you do?
	Empathy is certainly very important.
	And when...
	I wasn't expecting this, right?
	Because I just put it forward as a theory that maybe there had been somebody cruel to animals in his past who had treated him cruelly as well.
	It turned out to be true, which was great.
	It is around empathizing, but it's very hard to be objective about your own history and your own familiar circumstances.
	That doesn't mean that I'm objective, which is of course why I say it's just a theory and does it make sense to you and so on.
	But I genuinely believed him that he had experienced this terrorizing abuse for many years as a child.
	That's wrong. I mean, that's so wrong that words can't even describe it.
	Now, people can say, well, we forgive the father, or we should not condemn the father, and so on.
	I mean, that's fine.
	But then what they're saying is, there's no such thing as wrong, right?
	Because terrorizing a child is not wrong.
	There's no such thing as wrong. But then they can't criticize me, because if there's no such thing as wrong, then I can't have done anything wrong.
	Would you think things could have been different if perhaps he had taken a less abrupt break?
	Well, I mean, obviously, in the call, I said to him, I'm not saying you should stay, I'm not saying you should go, but you are free to leave.
	And that's a fact, right?
	I mean, people are free to leave relationships.
	People are free to leave marriages, people are free to leave your job, you're free to leave my house at any time.
	I don't mean that as a suggestion, but...
	But you know what I mean is that, I mean, people do leave their families.
	It's not the first time in the truth of humankind, but...
	When an 18-year-old leaves with just a one-paragraph letter, it strikes one's imagination.
	Sure. Well, I'm sure you've read the Guardian article, right?
	Yes, I have, yeah. Well, in the Guardian article, the mother says that there was a month of negotiation.
	There had been... I spoke with her, and she said there had been frictions, which she kind of wrote off as...
	Teenage grumpiness.
	And then she said at some point he became more relaxed and then he left.
	It's as if he had to be made of his mind.
	Well, I mean, I wasn't privy to that conversation, of course, and I'm sure you're telling me the absolute truth, but all I can say is what she reported to Kate Hilpern in The Guardian, which was that she attempted for, I think, about a month to talk things over.
	The other thing that I would mention, and this of course wouldn't be available as knowledge to people who were just listening to their conversation, but he did mention that he'd read The book, Real Time Relationships, that I had out.
	The reason I didn't say to him, you need to sit down and work it out with your family, is that he already knew that, because that's what I talk about in the book.
	So I didn't need to reiterate that for him.
	But that really is what I say.
	When people say sometimes to me, I want to leave my family, and I'm so mad, and this and that, I say, well, if you're mad, sit down and talk with them.
	I mean, because if you're upset, you don't just walk out of people's lives because you're mad.
	Even if you're right to leave, it doesn't give you any closure, it doesn't give you any real knowledge or understanding about the relationship.
	And then the problem is, it can recur if it was a negative relationship.
	To sit down and to talk with people and to do your absolute best to work it out, which is what I tried, what my wife tried, what other people have tried, and which works in the majority of cases, which is wonderful, but it doesn't in some.
	So out of the 80,000 or 90,000 families whose members have been part of what we do here, there have been about 20 that I know of that have split up for some time.
	Not permanent, because you never know.
	But that's a very, very small percentage.
	Because people say, well, the goal is the DFU. Well, if that's my goal, I'm failing miserably.
	Because the vast majority of families' relationships end up better off, not separating.
	I guess what sticks in my mind after looking at your writing and at these events is that everyone is aware that families can be dysfunctional and relationships can be strained, but you use pretty strong language to talk about it because you speak in parables, but when these parables involve concepts such as slavery or rape, Yes.
	To apply them to something which is so traditionally considered sacred, such as family.
	Right, right. It sticks out in the reader's mind.
	Absolutely. And in my view, family is a kind of sacred institution, right?
	Which is why when parents violate and abuse children, it is such a violation.
	I mean, I'll give you a...
	Tell me if this parable makes any sense to you.
	If I were running a feminist show and a woman called up and she said, I was brought to this country, it was an arranged marriage and my husband is brutally violent and has been for the last 18 years.
	And if I said, he's a jerk for being brutally violent to you because you didn't have any say in the relationship.
	And I said, you don't have to leave him, you don't have to stay, it's totally up to you.
	But you're free to leave.
	That is a basic factual reality, that you are not in chains, you are free to leave.
	And I suggest working it out with him if you can, but if you can't, you're free to leave.
	That would not be a controversial conversation, I think.
	I guess, I mean, if she was with a partner who was physically or sexually abusive, There wouldn't be a need for negotiation, right?
	I mean, you just work out.
	But sometimes, in a regular relationship, it can be strained too when you try to work it out.
	But the physical violence you're saying, right?
	I mean, this guy trashed rooms with his kid in the room.
	That's physical endangerment.
	I've seen other default cases on your website where there's no clear examples of abusive.
	It's more like, well, I don't get along with them.
	Do you know, in that gray zone in between, where do you establish for break?
	Well, see, I never tell people to break, right?
	I don't. And how could I? I mean, you can't, right?
	Wrong choice, but where do you establish for cut-off point?
	Like, is there one...
	Well, sure. I mean, isn't it happiness?
	I mean, if you can have a relationship with someone, which is...
	I mean, all relationships have conflicts and challenges, right?
	Because, I mean, I'm an Aristotelian this way.
	The purpose of philosophy is happiness, right?
	Like, the purpose of medicine is health, and the purpose of shipbuilding is to build ships, and the purpose of philosophy is happiness.
	So, if someone can be in a relationship And to negotiate and be open and vulnerable and not defensive and not attack and not jump to conclusions and not call names and so on, right?
	Then that's wonderful. But if you strive to have a quality relationship in your life and it makes you more and more unhappy and every time you try to make it better you get worse, you feel worse, Then you have to remember that you're free not to be in the relationship.
	Because if you're not free to not be in it, you're not actually there any more than any prisoner, so to speak.
	To use an extreme metaphor, a prisoner doesn't choose to sell.
	He's just there. And so if you think that you have to be there, you can't actually be there because it becomes an obligation, not something that you're chosen and committed to.
	So I never say to people what is good and bad in their relationships as far as you should stay or you should go, but if somebody is miserable or is unhappy and has tried for a long time to solve the problems, and I do say go to therapy, you can go to therapy with the person you have the relationship with, these are all, because I'm not a therapist, right, so I don't help people process any of that stuff, but it is...
	It's your choice. You are free to not be there if you can't make it better.
	So I can't tell people what the breaking point is for when their relationship is so unhappy that they don't want to be there anymore.
	But I can't tell people you should stay there even if you're miserable.
	That would not be the purpose of helping people try to become happier.
	Sorry, that's a long answer.
	No, but they're interesting.
	You mentioned in your answer the purpose of philosophy being happiness, and it just reminded me of something you wrote, and actually it was presented as fiction, but it's felt autobiographical.
	There was that piece you did about the bedrooms of your childhood.
	The thing that struck me was that you described your happiness and the happiness of your brother once you're If I understand correctly, your ailing mother was out of the picture, and you enjoyed a measure of freedom.
	Okay, and you only have the source of that as a story.
	Ailing. She wasn't ailing.
	I mean, you could say that she has certain kinds of mental issues.
	Of course, she was institutionalized, so yes.
	But she went to Vancouver because she wanted to do things in Vancouver.
	She had friends there. She wanted to go to school there.
	So when I was, I think, 15 or 16, she left, and then we were fending for ourselves.
	And yes, having my mother was a huge negative in my teenage years.
	I mean, I don't know if you've ever been in close proximity with a A very disturbed person, but it's exhausting.
	And so yes, that relief was considerable, for sure.
	And you mentioned that you even helped her financially to facilitate.
	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted her to leave because it was easier for us to have two or three jobs and to take in roommates and to do school and to get ready for university and all.
	It was easier for us to do that than to have her in the house, right?
	Because it was absolutely unbearable.
	When you started hearing other people talking to you, as you started doing your podcast and you started hearing other people talking to you about the relationships, did your own experience, like you said, it had been kind of incubating there for a while with these thoughts?
	Well, yeah, I mean, that wasn't the end of my relationship with my mother.
	I mean, she was gone for a year or two and then she showed.
	She showed up back in Toronto and we were in contact while she was away.
	I actually didn't break with my mother until my early 30s.
	That was about 10 years ago that I last saw my mother.
	So there was my 20s and all of that time where I attempted to really have a relationship with my mother and through therapy and through attempting to have conversations with my mother to try and have the relationship be somewhat more reciprocal, it was simply impossible.
	We become violent, and so there was just no way to have a relationship.
	And so that was the break.
	And after that, and I know that this all sounds terrible, and I wish it wasn't the case.
	I mean, obviously I would have wished for better parents, right?
	I hope that our kid doesn't have to wish for better parents.
	But when I did eventually separate from my family, my life Began, in a way.
	And I don't know how to put that.
	My relationships improved.
	I met my wife. I have just an absolutely wonderful marriage.
	We've been married for six years.
	And I mean, every day I tell her just how much other for how wonderful she is.
	And so I'm not trying to peddle a path that I haven't walked, if that makes sense.
	I'm telling other people to do things that I haven't done.
	A lot of people do say that if you don't see your family, it's bad.
	And I agree that if you just storm out, yeah, that's bad.
	But if you get the right therapeutic help, which is not me, right?
	If you get the right therapeutic help and you really try to work out these relationships, and you can't, I found that on the other side of that, the myths were not true.
	It's like, you know, over that hill is hell, right?
	And you go over that hill and it's not.
	It's a better life. So, obviously, that was my situation, right?
	And obviously, I want people to be close to their families because I'm having a family.
	But if it is the case that If you are in an abusive situation and you simply can't have a non-traumatic interaction with someone, and you have tried, and you've talked to therapists, then it's like a marriage, right?
	I mean, you have the right to not be there.
	Because if you don't have that right, then freedom doesn't really mean very much.
	But your website and your Sunday shows have become kind of like an outlet for people to let out their frustrations and their pent-up.
	Yeah, I mean, I hear that, you know, and people say, well, the chat room is just people complaining about their families and so on.
	I have conversations with people who have met someone great, you know, through using philosophy to openness and honesty and so on, right?
	So we have shows where, I just did a show recently where a guy was telling me how he proposed to his now fiancé.
	So that stuff is a little less, you know, nobody calls to complain about that stuff, right?
	There are people who have A difficult time with their family.
	We just know that. Unfortunately, it is the case.
	It's not my invention.
	I'm not creating these things.
	I simply respond to what people talk about.
	I try to remind them that life is short and they have choices.
	They should try to work things out.
	If they can't, they're free.
	To not be in those relationships if they can't make them productive.
	I think that's a little too rare in society, because in society it's like the family is everything and you can't ever have choices.
	I'm not saying you, but there's this Christian thing, and it's not just Christian, but it's Old Testament religiosity, which is honor their mother and their father, and there's a grand tradition in the West of familial piety and so on.
	So it's a bit of a taboo topic, right?
	I mean, as I mentioned with this woman who was a child bride, if a feminist said, leave an abusive marriage, that would actually be considered a good thing to do.
	And if a feminist called a husband who beat up a helpless child or a helpless bride a jerk, people would not be shocked, right?
	Or if they were, they would be more shocked by the fact that he was violent towards his wife.
	But when you take that same situation, right, of a husband and a wife, and you move it into a family context, Of course, an adult wife in a marriage has many, many more options than a child in a family.
	A child in a family can't leave.
	There's no shelters.
	I guess you can go and try the orphan system or go to child services or whatever, but children have much less freedom in the family than any adult married person has.
	So when we take that same situation, which we would recognize as, I think, positive and good and maybe even heroic, not on my part, but on the part of the person getting out of that abusive relationship, when we move that into the family, Suddenly, people get very, very tense.
	And I understand why, because it's a taboo topic, right?
	Talking about the ethics of child treatment in the family is a very, very...
	It's an explosive topic, and I'm aware of that, right?
	But the ethics...
	To me, again, the universality of the ethical approach, I think, needs to be respected.
	But you never felt like the urge to tell people this, and like, I haven't met you in person, I haven't met your parents, and maybe I shouldn't Get involved in this, go sort it out.
	But you're quite active.
	Absolutely. We've had them actually come here, parents with children who have some friction with the philosophy that we talk about here.
	We've actually had them over to the house and had shows about that.
	So I'm happy to talk with parents if they want to talk.
	When a child, well I shouldn't say a child, when a young man is literally sobbing about the trauma of his childhood To me, that's like stepping over someone on a sidewalk who's collapsed and saying, I don't want to get involved. That, to me, is not a valid option.
	Now, it's not a valid option to tell him what to do.
	I am absolutely going to get behind the suffering that he has experienced and validated because it is terrifying to be brutalized in this way over many years.
	I'm not going to tell him he's wrong for feeling that.
	I'm going to absolutely support What he's feeling.
	It doesn't make it true, but it's validating that it is terrifying to be in that kind of situation.
	And to remind him that he should negotiate and he's free to stay or to go.
	From the point of view of that young man's mother, what she sees is him in his bedroom listening to some guy overseas talking.
	And then, do you know what happens next?
	Well, what happens next, according to her report, is that they attempt to negotiate their relationship.
	Right? Because she portrays it, well, she portrays it sometimes as, you know, he just was beamed up by some evil cult in Canada.
	But can you see where she would see you as like an interloper who was not invited into the family living room?
	Absolutely. I can completely understand why she would feel very upset with me.
	No question. No question.
	But I would say, and unfortunately she never did decide to have a conversation with me, though I'm easy to contact, but what I would say, if I were to talk to her, is I would say, Barbara, your husband terrorized this young man with extreme violence, trashing rooms, kicking in windows, terrifying this child for many, many, many years.
	I showed him a lot of sympathy and supported his feelings, recognized and supported his feelings.
	If people look at the four participants in this controversy, if that makes any sense, we have Barbara, whatever her husband's name is, Tom, and myself.
	We have the father who traumatized, terrified, brutalized, and bullied his son, according to the son's very emotional and, I believe, true report, but again, I can't verify.
	We have a mother who failed to protect her child from this rampant abuse.
	We have me, who has a 50-minute conversation, saying that it's wrong what was done to you, and that your parents are jerks for letting it happen.
	So, in these four people, we have one active child abuser, one complicit and enabling child abuser, we have the abused child, and we have the guy who showed him a lot of sympathy for 50 minutes.
	Out of these four people, to focus on me as the problem, It's, to me, hard to process, if that makes any sense.
	I mean, the abuse that happened in the family is the problem, not the sympathy and support that I showed for Tom.
	So, is Tom still in contact with you?
	I haven't talked to Tom.
	I think that was the only combo.
	We may have talked once, or I don't recall.
	I did email him saying the article was out, because I didn't want it to come from someone else.
	I don't talk to people on a regular basis.
	They can call in the shows if they want, but I didn't talk to him after that.
	I think he was around on the board, and he posted that he was doing fine in school, and his school confirmed that he's doing fine.
	But no, I don't have any contact with him.
	He did write to me to tell me that he was fine, though it was upsetting, of course.
	This was my major concern, right?
	I thought the article was very destructive towards Tom.
	It could very easily have been anonymous.
	You have been quite busy.
	I think in technical times, you have the forum, you have the podcast, the videos, you write books, and you also have had a symposium.
	Yes, we did actually. We did have a symposium in January.
	This is January in Florida.
	I listened to that podcast where you said you were taking the big leap, then you were still talking about working.
	No, I didn't.
	And I mean, not to sound like Joe Workaholic, but I'm recognizing that the pace that I'm doing things can't be sustained with a baby in the house, right?
	So I'm trying to get stuff that I want to get out there before the baby blanket comes down and smothers me, so to speak.
	What do you mean by stuff?
	Well, I mean, there's...
	Oh, sorry. There's certain ideas, and I'm actually...
	Because I've started this thing on YouTube called True News, where I'm trying to take current events and put them through a philosophical perspective.
	Because, of course, everyone focuses on the psychological stuff, but I really do a lot of current events in economics and politics as well.
	So I wanted to get...
	And those have really been...
	Successful in YouTube. I mean, no one's as successful as a cat playing the piano, but relatively successful to stuff that I've done before.
	So I wanted to get a number of those out, particularly to do with the election and some of the aftermath, because we've got four weeks.
	And maybe less, because the babies, they run on their own train schedule.
	And then after that, what happens?
	I don't know. I don't know.
	We're both self-employed, so it's very exciting from an income standpoint.
	But after that, We'll see.
	I'll see. I mean, Christina has an office, so maybe I'll go and do some work there from time to time, but I certainly won't be able to do what I'm doing now.
	Because, I mean, you...
	I don't know, it's just exhausting for me just to read stuff without having to compose it.
	Right, right, right.
	And you, I mean, you're being modest here, but you do participate in...
	You put in your grain of salt on various postings.
	I've certainly had to since the weekend, for sure, yeah.
	But even before that, you were there telling people, either encouraging them or disagreeing with people.
	Yeah, no, it is work.
	I love philosophy.
	I remember when Kate was talking to me, she really wanted to know how much money I was making.
	I'm not going to talk about that.
	I'm British, right? We don't talk that.
	I certainly took a 75% pay cut to do this.
	This is not a part of the riches. This is a labor of love.
	Fundamentally, I think that there's nothing more important for people to talk about than truth and virtue.
	And maybe I do it right, maybe I do it wrong sometimes, but it is an essential thing for people to talk about.
	But you make a living out of this, right?
	Absolutely, for sure.
	But so did Socrates, right?
	I mean, he would talk and people would buy him lunch.
	I mean, that's not unprecedented, right?
	And so do academic philosophers, right?
	Oh, in fact, you want to use a more lowbrow example, so does Dr.
	Hill, too. So does Dr.
	Phil, right? Absolutely. And so does L. Ron Hubbard, or I guess the Scientology guy, right?
	So it doesn't mean good or bad as far as that goes, right?
	But yeah, I do, for sure.
	But I think that the general relationship is that people find what I'm doing important, not just for themselves, but for others, right?
	I mean, one of the big tasks that I set myself, which is the holy grail of philosophy, is to try to To create a rational or philosophical proof of secular ethics, which is why should we be good?
	What is morality in the absence of a religious justification, in the absence of a Dawkins-style development of biologically productive altruism, in the absence of we pass a law and we have to obey the law and that is virtue, which of course is a positive law doctrine that I strongly disagree with, to try and come up with a way to prove Why we should be good and what virtue is, without reference to governments or gods.
	I think that I've done it.
	Lord knows, maybe that made six million errors in it as well, and that's the springbook, universally preferable behavior.
	Is that a legacy?
	Does the word apply to what you're doing?
	A legacy? I'm only 42.
	I don't know. I mean, I'd rather people be interested in the work and not me, because I don't actually.
	It sounds weird. I'm a bit of a private person that way.
	I want to put the ideas out there.
	I know. Maybe it's a paradox, right?
	But, you know, I felt a bit nervous about this interview, right?
	I mean, because... I don't have any experience.
	This is your job, not mine, in terms of media interactions.
	But I would rather people focus on the work and not on me.
	The only thing that justifies what I do is the quality and rigor of the arguments.
	And anyone can listen to a particular show or this conversation in midstream and not look at it in context.
	I'm not saying you're doing that, but then they'll sort of say, well, this is whatever.
	But I would rather people look at it.
	That's why I made the books free, particularly the one on ethics, which I really wanted people to To get a hold of.
	Because I think that, and this is the old Socratic argument, right, which is that reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	And the goal of philosophy is happiness.
	But if you don't have reason, you can't have virtue.
	And if you don't have virtue, you can't have happiness in the long run.
	That's the general. And that's as old as Socrates or Plato or Aristotle.
	And so I've always tried to really start what I'm doing from first principles, reasoning from first principles.
	So I started with a blank slate, and I have an introduction to philosophy series that's on YouTube that, I don't know, it's relatively popular, maybe 80,000 people, 60,000 people or so have gone through it.
	No, actually, that's not that many.
	It's just a few of them, I can't remember the number.
	So I started, you know, what is philosophy, what is truth, what is reality, all of the basics from metaphysics all the way up to the highest abstractions of ethics.
	I may have completely failed in that task, because it is a monumental task, but I've always tried to work from a blank slate, to say, assume nothing, and start reasoning from first principles up.
	And at the same time, you have to deal with more pedestrian concerns, such as selling subscription.
	Well, to be annoyingly precise, and maybe you feel it's not precise, I don't sell subscriptions, if that makes sense.
	True, but I've heard you mention the t-shirts, though.
	Yeah, and actually the t-shirts were a complete bust.
	I've made a grand total of $12 off t-shirts in the last year or so.
	And that was listener-generated, right?
	Yes, it was. The listeners, and you can go and find this on the board, the listeners were saying, I want t-shirts, I want t-shirts.
	Actually, I got kind of mad at them because I spent all this time designing and getting t-shirts ready and then nobody bought them.
	Do you have a lot of subscribers?
	It varies. I tell you, some people have been cancelled after the weekend with this Guardian article.
	No, I don't have a lot of subscribers.
	I'm not even back to half what I used to make as a software entrepreneur.
	I will tell you that I'm still not up to half what I used to make as a software entrepreneur, which was a job I enjoyed as well.
	Do you want to give me a ballpark figure?
	No, because that would also be to reveal my former salary as a software guy, but it's not yet hard.
	But I'm not, oh lord, someone sent me 10 bucks or I can't eat.
	But I also can't afford to hire anyone and I can't afford PR or media.
	I mean, it's still a complete one-man show.
	Okay. So, let's just say that would it be right in estimating that you make something that you can put food on your table, but obviously by Toronto standards, you're not rolling anymore?
	No, and it's entirely donations, because I don't sell anything.
	Now, just to clarify, because apparently people find this a bone of contention, there are podcasts, relatively few, because as you say, there's a ridiculous amount of content that's already out there, which I've tried to organize.
	I have this... A wizard of this way of searching through the podcast.
	So if people don't like the psychology podcast or they don't like the podcast about economics, they can create their own feeds which just have all the economics podcasts.
	I'm not trying to mix in things that people aren't interested in.
	So there's ways that people can completely bypass the stuff they're not interested in.
	No, it's not lucrative, for sure.
	And it is very much up and down.
	But people who have found it valuable for themselves, they like the idea that other people will find the site.
	And of course, I mean, you listen or you don't.
	You come or you don't. There's nothing that keeps anybody there.
	Are there misconceptions about what you do that you want to clarify or think, but you think, okay, this is totally wrong about me?
	The C word? Well, of course, this color thing is thrown around a lot, and it was very much insinuated in Kate's article, though she had no proof, of course, whatsoever, right?
	She's like... FDR has a chat room.
	The Cult Information Center has had some complaints from a few people that chat rooms can be used to recruit people into cults.
	But it has nothing to do.
	I mean, I don't know, Disney has a chat room, right?
	Does that mean that Disney's a cult?
	So I think that...
	I think there is a misconception about About that.
	You know, that there's some nefarious plan, that I'm aiming to separate people, that I'm aiming to break up families and, I don't know, lock people in the basement and take their kidneys or something, and that to me is just complete hysteria.
	And there's no basis whatsoever for that, in fact.
	I provide a service where I attempt to bring philosophical principles to bear on people's lives.
	That is... I think an ancient and noble profession.
	I may be doing it well, I may be doing it badly, but I absolutely am trying to do it with the very best intentions and with the very greatest integrity and rigor that I can summon.
	I put my arguments forward very often in syllogistical terms so that people can see them.
	Yes, I am passionate.
	I am not The Kirk-Spock dichotomy, the mind-body dichotomy, that if you're really rational, you can't be emotional, and anybody who's emotional can't be rational, I don't believe.
	I think that's a false dichotomy.
	Absolutely, I will do whatever I can to keep people interested in philosophy.
	I sing goofy songs, I will make faces, I will make jokes.
	Whatever can be engaging to help people stay interested in philosophy, I think is wonderful.
	People can disagree with my arguments, and people have, and I've had to correct myself when I've made mistakes.
	That's part of any rational enterprise.
	People can say that I've made these mistakes or that mistakes, and I will attempt to correct them if I find that that's the case.
	But, I mean, the accusations that float around from a grieved people, I think that's kind of baseless.
	I mean, I'm happy to...
	People say, oh, it's cult, and it's like, well, where's the evidence?
	Well, some people have left their families.
	Well, you know, when feminists first came onto the scene, they said to women, you're equal to men.
	I'm sure a few marriages broke up through feminism.
	That doesn't make feminism a cult, right?
	I mean, so it's not my fault that families are precarious and that when children or siblings or parents even attempt to more openly negotiate those relationships, those relationships crumble.
	That's not my fault. It's not my fault that there are really precarious families out there and negotiation causes them to split up.
	I would love it if that weren't the case, but the moral responsibility for the status of a family lies primarily with the parents, not with some podcaster in Canada.
	Well, you said there's nobody locked up, and I can brush the fact that we're not in a compound somewhere.
	Please do, yeah. But I mean, that's the image one that associates with religious cult, but there's such thing too as a therapeutic cult, where people are urged to share their Past traumatic experiences where you developed a separate set of values and a separate vocabulary.
	That's perhaps why people are raising that C-word when they see what they're doing.
	I'm perfectly open to that.
	Let me start that again.
	I'm perfectly open to criticisms of what I'm doing.
	Absolutely. I'm just a guy talking the best he can about the truth, about the truth that I feel that I've developed.
	But when people say, and I'm not describing this to you, but when people say, well, Steph, you have created a therapeutic cult where people are forced or compelled or encouraged to express trauma and so on, You know, listen to a Sunday call-in show.
	I don't say to people who want to talk about economics, no, it's about your dad.
	Tell me how he hurt you.
	I mean, I don't. And all of the material that I've produced, and as you know, there's a godforsaken amount of avaricious material out there.
	You'd think that at least one time people could find a place where I'd interrupt someone talking about something else and browbeat them into talking about something traumatic.
	But it doesn't occur, right?
	I say to people, what do you want to talk about?
	And they say, I'm having this issue with my mom, or my son, or my dad, or whatever, right?
	But that's not, I mean, that's not me controlling anyone.
	That's me saying, what do you want to talk about?
	And people bringing up what they want to talk about.
	That's not me doing anything nefarious, if that makes sense.
	Well, perhaps you'll probably, but by nature, if I'm in a happy family situation, I wouldn't have a need to talk about it with a stranger.
	I think that's true. Or, if somewhere in your extended family or your friendships there was that kind of open and sympathetic listening space, then yeah, why would you call a podcaster in Canada?
	But there is an isolation that these people feel.
	I'm not responsible for that, of course, right?
	I'm not... I mean, they call because they feel...
	I'm guessing, I don't know.
	But they call because they feel that this is a place where they can talk and they will be sympathetic.
	And, of course, I cuss and I get angry at abusive people and so on, for sure.
	But it's not my fault that they're...
	I don't create the isolation, if that makes sense.
	And I certainly don't exacerbate the isolation.
	Because what I do is I say to people, go to therapy, work out your issues, be open and honest with people, talk about what you think and feel in the moment, be vulnerable.
	Be sensitive, be compact.
	In fact, I'm doing everything I can to not isolate people because isolation is a core component of abuse.
	That's a fairly well-known psychological fact.
	I'm really trying to get people into contact with therapists, into contact with others to talk openly about their relationships.
	Is that one thing that you're proud of?
	That you've let people know that you're not alone in feeling crappy?
	I would certainly say that I'm proud of the number of people who've gotten help through the show.
	Like, not help for me, right?
	Because I'm not a therapist, right?
	But who've gone into therapy.
	And there are hundreds that I know of who've initiated conversations with counselors, with therapists.
	If you count the people who've initiated conversations with friends and family, it goes into the thousands.
	I'm very proud of that, which is ridiculous, because they're doing the hard work.
	I'm just telling them that it's important, at least according to the way I look at things.
	So, I mean, when people do feel lonely, when they do feel isolated, when they do feel disconnected, I'm thrilled that they get help.
	Not that you mention therapy, you just reminded me of something, in those numbers I would have to get you the reference for that, and I will email it to you.
	I have it somewhere on my computer.
	But I tried to go to a pretty well-established website.
	It wasn't sort of, you know, elves told me that there are 4%.
	I can't remember the website. And when you say sociopath, what do you understand a sociopath to be?
	Well, people who have a great deal of difficulty empathizing with others.
	People who are very volatile emotionally.
	People who tend to view other people as tools to satisfy their own needs or their own ends.
	So, antisocial personality disorders, that kind of stuff.
	How do you know that necessarily the parents who've been defaulted fit into those categories?
	I don't. And I don't.
	And I say, I said even in the conversation with Tom, it's a completely amateur nonsense Word.
	I'm not a diagnostician.
	I don't, right? I do think that it's psychotic.
	If you have a child in the room, to destroy a room, that to me seems psychotic.
	Now, I'm using that, and I tell people I use these in completely amateur ways.
	It is not a diagnosis.
	I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a diagnostician.
	But it is very disturbed to be violent with a child in such a way.
	Let's assume that I'm unhappy with my parents.
	And I decided to sever my ties with them.
	Would it be wise for me, necessarily, to talk about it publicly on the air?
	I can't make that decision for people.
	I certainly do suggest that they keep things anonymous, right?
	And, of course, it wasn't me who blew Tom's cover, right?
	All he was was a guy.
	I don't even remember if he used his first name in that call.
	I think he did. But he was a guy named Tom, right?
	That's all he was, right?
	There was no identification.
	But what about yourself?
	I mean, you have made no secrets about that.
	Secrets about? About severing or ending your relationship with your respective families.
	How do they feel about that?
	Well, I couldn't tell you because I'm not in contact with them.
	I think that honesty is important.
	I think that I am honest about the reasons that occurred.
	I think that if you want to look at, I mean, let's just talk about my mother, right?
	If you want to look at, we have two parties in the relationship, and again, I always try to go back to this, right?
	Two parties in the relationship, one of whom was, you know, violent, abusive, destructive, screaming, humiliating, and so on.
	The other of whom is honest about it as an adult.
	If we're going to stop looking at faults, I don't think that I'm even in the picture as far as that goes.
	So I think it's okay to be honest about what has happened if people want to know, and I don't mean people did want to know because it's a startling thing to talk about.
	I'm sure she doesn't like it, to have it talked about openly.
	But, you know, the best thing to do then is to not abuse your children, right?
	That to me is where the real moral crime lies not in the honesty about it.
	I think that's about it, unless there's something that you think I totally missed.
	I don't want to drain your will to write, you know, you have so much material.
	Okay. And is there anything else that you have?
	I can't think of anything else, but if I do, I shall contact you.
	And was this a worthwhile visit for you?
	It's always worthwhile to visit somebody who Well, I hope that good stuff comes out of it.
	I am sorry for the families who are so precarious.
	I really do hope, and it is my intention, to make families better.
	It's a ridiculous and grandiose goal, as is everything that I do.
	I'm completely aware that it's ridiculous and grandiose, but I think it's better to fail at a big thing than to aim at a small thing.

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