Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 4, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:44:12

WORST. ROMANCE. EVER!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	So, James, it's not often I get this kind of urgent question.
	What's on your mind?
	This has been ongoing for about five years now and I just continue to suppress it and put it in the back of my mind and think, you know, it's just me and I need to change or whatever it is.
	But last night I got an ultimatum from my partner just asking, you know, either marry me or get out.
	Just really reflecting on what she's asking and being respectful of that, but at the same time not dismissing the aspects that make me not want to marry her.
	And what's your age range, James?
	33.
	And she's similar?
	No, she's 40.
	She's 40?
	Yeah.
	How long?
	Six years you've been dating, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, dude.
	What are you doing?
	Does she want kids?
	No, she's had kids.
	She she's mentioned having kids with me, but I think that's more of a... And the ship has probably sailed away.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That is something to think about.
	And she's had three children.
	She lost one.
	And it was a tragic accident when the child was a few years old.
	She's still living with that trauma.
	What happened when the child was a few years old?
	She was living on a farm with her husband and there was a hunting dog that came onto the property and attacked her son.
	How old was he?
	He was three.
	It was known all over.
	Everyone knew about it and everyone still knows about it.
	It was a big deal.
	It's a huge deal, my God.
	This is about two decades ago, maybe less.
	It just kind of destroyed her marriage.
	The two of them just fell into deep grief and they went to drugs and alcohol and became different people.
	Here we are.
	How did you guys meet?
	I was looking to get away from the current living situation I was in in California.
	And I'll leave it at that.
	But I decided to move somewhere else that was much more hospitable.
	And she met me at an event and saw my potential.
	That's how I see it.
	And just kind of swooped me up.
	And I was flattered by the charm and I was flattered by the What I was providing, just by being kind of a, you know, Prince Charming, you know, White Knight type of thing.
	I was raised by a single mom, so it was just this instinctual thing.
	Raised by a single mom and now hesitating to marry a single mom.
	Heck yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I, you know, thanks to your shows, I've really seen this and, you know, just trying to figure out what to do.
	What's the best approach for this?
	Because, you know, like my question, I don't know if I can make this work.
	And deep down, I don't think I can.
	And I don't want to utterly just destroy... I just feel like it would just destroy her and everyone around her.
	And I've been helping to raise her... So you don't have a lot of respect for her.
	Like, you can't be with someone because you feel they're going to be destroyed if you're not, right?
	I mean, that's really being held hostage by a perception of someone else's weakness, right?
	Yeah.
	Then she doesn't have strength to bring to you that's going to support you in your life goals.
	It's just this fragile house of cards, and if you make a sudden move, kaboom!
	That's not a sustainable model for love, respect, and cherishing, right?
	Well, there's just so much hypocrisy in the relationship, and it's compounding over and over again.
	Oh boy.
	You listened to the show for a while, right?
	Too long, yes.
	A, that's impossible.
	B, do you know how good I am at noticing when people aren't answering the question?
	You're pretty good at that.
	Can you repeat the question?
	Sure, no problem.
	If you feel that she's this house of cards and if you make a move that's in your best interest that goes against what she wants, she's going to kind of collapse, that's not a good foundation for love and respect and cherishing someone, right?
	No, it's not.
	Right.
	So when you first met her, you said that she and her husband got into drugs and alcohol after the death of their son.
	What state was she in when you met her?
	Overweight, drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, nothing beyond that from what I know, but just angry.
	Sorry James, let me just interrupt you for a sec.
	I apologize for that.
	So is that your Skype picture?
	Yes.
	The fuck?
	A few months ago.
	So you're a very good-looking guy.
	Slender, athletic, full head of hair, clear skin.
	I don't know how tall you are, but you look kind of gangly to me, so... Six-two.
	Six-two!
	And what do you weigh?
	About 190.
	190, okay.
	You got two inches taller than me and five pounds lighter.
	Good for you.
	So, did you have an extra arm growing out of your forehead at the time?
	Did you have something surgically removed that a space alien laid in your lungs?
	No, I was a catch and I knew that from the beginning when I saw what she was trying to do.
	It really felt... Fast, older, smoker, drinker, druggie.
	Single mom, seven years older, and you're like, oh yeah.
	Oh, this mama got it going on.
	The intertwining moment, I mean, I could have walked away from the beginning, but when I decided to move.
	Why walk when you can run?
	Anyway, sorry, go on.
	Well, I did at one point, when I found, I didn't know, this is just for your show, but I found, I didn't know that she was still married.
	And I got a call from her husband at the time going, where's my wife?
	Not knowing.
	Oh, so she's also a rancid liar.
	Yeah.
	And turning you into an unwitting homewrecker.
	Well, I got I got real scared because I didn't know the impact that that would have and I just felt horrible.
	You know, my family was separated.
	Let me understand.
	Yeah.
	Is she like, does she suck a golf ball through a garden hose?
	And is that what got you going?
	I mean, what the hell?
	Is she big on armpit sex and that's like a big thing for you or is there something going on that I'm like, what the hell?
	I think it goes back to the single mom thing and just being a provider for women and it's really a draining aspect of something and that's why... So you can't have any self-interest in your relationships, you scan for the woman in most need and then you conform to her requirements at your own expense?
	I'm noticing that the last five years, and it's a big weakness in me actually living a fulfilled life.
	Yeah.
	And when I moved out here, I found an amazing place.
	Okay, hang on.
	We're jumping around in time too much.
	I'm going to get confused.
	I'm over 50 here.
	That's fine.
	Okay, so you meet her.
	Yes.
	And what do you find attractive about her?
	Uh, pretty shallow, but how much she was attracted to me.
	Right.
	So she's turning on the old charm because mama needs a provider.
	Okay.
	How old were her kids?
	And don't give me the exact ages, but how old were her kids when, like sort of like late single digits, middle single digits, teens, like what, what ages were they at?
	She had two kids left over.
	Is that right?
	Early single digits.
	Oh, so really young, right?
	And later teens.
	So, she had her other son when she was older.
	Sorry, younger.
	So, was it one who was older and then two who were younger?
	Yes.
	And she lost the one.
	Who was younger?
	Now, was that from a first marriage or what?
	The same marriage.
	Do you know why there was this giant baby donut hole in the middle?
	No.
	She's really ostracized me from her ex, and I think it's just a tactic of hers, just to not showcase it.
	Okay, so she was really attracted to you, he's a very attractive guy, well-spoken, intelligent, listens to this show, I assume, Alpha, if you want it, and she wanted you, she needed you, like, I mean, do you smoke yourself?
	I do a lot more with her around.
	I look at my past.
	Total fatal attraction.
	This could end up with you with lungs like oven mitts grabbing road tar, right?
	I don't smoke cigarettes.
	Just cannabis.
	That's a huge weakness in my part.
	I reflect on it constantly and I do my best to pull away.
	But you can.
	If you're addicted to something, hanging out with people who are also addicted to it is a surefire way of just continuing the addiction, right?
	Yeah, I see it all the time.
	Even with alcohol, as much as I try and pull away, it's, you know, I'm ostracized for not, you know how it is.
	So, when you first met her, who asked who out to begin with?
	It wasn't really a dating scenario.
	She saw me and she saw who I was and found out I was single and put her claws in me.
	What do you mean, put her claws in you?
	You're like a baby goat with a condor or something.
	What are we talking here?
	How did she get her oats into you?
	Well, I was trying to put the pieces together and I'm trying to go back in time just for my own growth and look at where this kind of stemmed was.
	I found a When I moved, I found a place out here where I'm currently living, where we're living, and it was an ideal situation.
	It was work, it was a great spot to live, I was really happy with it, and she knew the people who live there, so she decided to leave her marriage and move with me.
	No, no, no, that's after she gets her hooks in you.
	Like, how did you go from meeting her to being in a sexual relationship with her?
	That's the tipping point I'm looking for here.
	It was the move, because I distanced myself, she found out where I was going, and decided to move in to the same property under the umbrella of her friends.
	I was just someone from the outside moving in as a worker.
	Do you think she was stalking you?
	Oh, absolutely.
	And you found this flattering because you've never heard of Jodie Foster.
	It was, I could have made the right choice and...
	Decide to leave that situation.
	That would have been... Okay, so she moves there.
	I'm still trying to figure out how did you end up in her bed?
	Seduction, low self-esteem on my part.
	Wait, she like comes over and you chat and you know, you curl up and watch something and next thing you know, that kind of stuff?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	As high of a rating as I am in the male department, I've got low self-esteem.
	No, it doesn't matter what it looks like on the outside, it only matters how you feel on the inside, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay, so she gets into your pants, so to speak, and then do you guys move in together?
	I do my best to keep a distance in the same area where we're living, but we eventually, out of convenience, on her part and my part.
	We move in and there were good times and she was, I was a little optimistic but deep down I knew and I, Steph, I talked to all my friends and family and they all gave me the red flag warnings.
	So everyone told you this woman is bad news, right?
	Yeah, get out!
	Okay, what are you doing?
	The longer you stay, the harder it's going to be for both of you.
	And did you talk to any of your friends or family before you went in?
	As it was happening, yeah.
	And what did they say?
	Obvious.
	Hey, whoa, whoa, hang on.
	What are you doing here?
	Fat, lying, home-wrecking, drug-addicted woman with babies.
	Not first choice.
	Not top shelf, as they would say.
	No.
	And then, you know, in that process of not taking the advice of people you respect, you start to lose those people.
	That was a hard part, too.
	You can't watch someone feed themselves into a vagina woodchipper and keep a strong stomach, right?
	No.
	All right.
	So what did your mom say about all of this?
	She was defensive and angry that this woman was doing this to me.
	What do you mean defensive?
	Defenses of me.
	Oh, sorry, I thought you meant emotionally defensive.
	So your mom tried to defend you?
	Yeah, my mom saw what was happening and she, you know, did her best to warn me and tell me to get out and do all this stuff and she was getting extremely frustrated and she eventually just kind of said, well, I guess you're making money and you're happy, I guess.
	So there's nothing more I can say to you.
	So I rarely talk to her anymore and that's hard for me.
	And what was it like for you growing up, James?
	I had an OK life.
	I look back and I didn't have any massive tragedies.
	I didn't have any abusive fathers or mothers or my parents did what they could.
	They didn't love each other.
	And that's that's the stem from this question about marriage and of like they never they never got married and they were together out of necessity for each other.
	My dad provided resources for my mom, and my mom provided home security for my dad.
	So they never got together?
	No.
	Never got married?
	No.
	Your father provided resources, never consummated the relationship from a legal standpoint, and ended up breaking up.
	So you really don't want to live your own life, you just want to live your parents' life over again, right?
	You just want to be your dad, round two, right?
	I feel it, and I desperately want this moment to, you know, the term is, you know, a walkabout.
	The idea of stepping out of the boyhood and going into manhood, and I'm kind of late for that, but I... Well, no, it's good.
	It's good that you're freaking out.
	It's great that you're panicking, because now, as I've said before on this show, James, now is an excellent time to panic.
	Been panicking for a while and running out of friends to talk to you about it because you know I don't have the courage or the confidence or the clarity to make the move and that's that's the double-edged sword and I And I wanted to share this topic, you know, because I know you have so many listeners and I'm sure more people are going through this and while you're smoking and drinking good luck trying to have the clarity to get out of something so complex and emotionally charged such as this and How often are you smoking and drinking?
	What's your consumption per week?
	Let's just be frank.
	If I'm not aware of it, I'll like to smoke cannabis once a day, in small amounts, but it's still there.
	It still affects me.
	And drinking, I mean, my dad, he owned a liquor store and I saw the worst.
	People so I never I got real lucky and I never had a desire to drink.
	I had my first beer when I was 22 and I was very responsible.
	I was taking care of the household.
	So I never went down that path, but I don't drink much and But with her we drink once a day, you know, and if I'm stepping out and Well, she'll drink a six-pack a night And a bottle of wine.
	Wait, she'll drink a six-pack and a bottle of wine?
	Six-pack during the day and then a bottle of wine.
	A six-pack during the day?
	Doesn't she have kids?
	Yeah, I raise them.
	Okay, now is an excellent time to not giggle about this, right?
	She's a drunk mom?
	Oh, so you're responsible for that.
	You bonded with the kids, right?
	And you're terrified to leave the kids with a drunk mom.
	I'm not terrified.
	Why not?
	She's a drunk mom.
	She smokes cannabis.
	She drinks a six-pack during the day and a bottle of wine at night.
	Can't parent like that.
	Do you think she'll stop being an alcoholic and a drug addict if you leave?
	I don't know.
	I don't know if she'd be able to keep this going.
	Well, then are you bonded with the 8-year-old?
	I don't quite understand.
	You said you weren't, right?
	I am, but what I realized in being, you know, like a surrogate stepfather is that I'm number six on the totem pole when it comes to, you know, life decision-making and responsibilities and all that stuff.
	Do you get the, oh, he's not my dad stuff?
	Not yet.
	He has a lot of respect for me.
	I've been with him since he was two.
	And I treat him with respect, and he'd rather hang out with me than his mom.
	You think he has respect for you?
	I'm not sure I follow.
	How could he, given that you're with his mom?
	I'm sorry, like, how could he have respect for you?
	He might have dependence upon you, he might need you, but as far as respect goes, I'm not sure how he could have respect for you, since his mom seems barely functional and you're peddling for two.
	She's pretty high functioning.
	I mean, he's a little too young to, I mean, I can't say for him, but to truly comprehend.
	I mean, it's a mess.
	It's a big mess and I'm panicking and I'm talking to you.
	Right.
	So if she wants you to marry her, or leave?
	Yeah, and when I try and bring up the key points, the things that repulse me from the idea of marriage... And what are those things?
	I mean, she's never wrong.
	It's never her fault.
	I've never heard her say, I'm sorry.
	Ever.
	And that's a huge red flag.
	That's a molten lava flag for me.
	Do you have any familiarity with that growing up?
	My mom a little bit, but she was humble.
	She realized that she made a lot of mistakes.
	But she always did blame my dad for things, and that was the hard part living with a single mom.
	You start to hate your dad, even though there's nothing to hate him for.
	I have a great relationship with my dad now.
	Now that, you know, she's out of the picture and I can talk to him freely.
	What kind of stuff did your mom say about your dad?
	Oh, he had abandoned us.
	He kicked us out on the streets.
	He never showed me affection.
	A bunch of stuff that I can't validate because I was a child.
	I never saw photos of them, you know, hugging or kissing.
	I never saw affection on their part.
	So I don't know.
	It's a biased story on both their ends and I'm just trying to put the pieces together and see where I fit in all this.
	All right, so your girlfriend, partner, whatever the hell, I mean, so she can't admit that she's wrong?
	No.
	Which means that you don't get to exist unless you conform with her?
	Yeah, she's very controlling.
	I've been in this situation, like you have disputes with someone And the disputes will remain and escalate until you cave, until you give in.
	Right?
	Which you do just to keep the peace and move things forward, but of course the little piece of you gets chipped away every time, right?
	Yeah, and it's scary to see the shell forming.
	Well, you're losing yourself.
	It's like that song, right?
	Every night and every day, a little piece of you is falling away.
	There's like a hammer and a chisel, right?
	People who can't admit they're wrong, they just pound, pound, pound, and you just chip away until there's nothing left but dust.
	And then, you know what they say?
	You're not emotionally present.
	It's like, well, because you chased me into the stratosphere, you crazy loon.
	Yeah.
	All right, so she can't admit she's wrong.
	What else?
	I've found a lot of relief in my life through exercise when it comes to stress relief, and she is completely against it.
	I mean, every time I try and get her off alcohol and try and curb away that stress that she has of life or whatever she's battling, I say, let's do some yoga.
	Let's go for a run.
	Let's go for a swim.
	Let's do something.
	There's always an excuse.
	She never wants to do it.
	Is she still overweight or more overweight or what?
	She's fluctuated.
	She's overweight at this point, in my opinion.
	How much?
	Maybe 50-60 pounds overweight.
	I assume she's not 7 feet tall, so this is hanging a little heavy.
	No, and it's hypocritical, because we advocate a very healthy lifestyle to a lot of people publicly, yet, you know, look at her.
	Right.
	I'm just waiting for her to eat the bird I hear in the background, but all right.
	And so she's 40 and she's, what you said, 60 pounds overweight or more?
	At her peak, yes.
	Yeah, it becomes almost impossible to lose weight, particularly after 40, right?
	Because your metabolism is slow, like the amount of work you have to do to wrestle your weight down when you get older is pretty, it's prodigious to put it mildly.
	Yeah.
	And she'll always have those fat cells just waiting to be reactivated, right?
	Yeah, with no activity.
	Nothing.
	Maybe once a month she might get a little bit of inspiration and do some yoga in the living room for like 10 minutes.
	Yeah, okay.
	So she's very unhealthy, she's overweight, and the health problems will start to multiply from here.
	Right?
	You start to get the joint pain, you know, you start to get the irregular periods, you start to get back pain.
	I mean, it becomes, you know, like the sexy big woman who's younger is like, yeah, okay, I guess if that's your thing, if you like climbing on the old overstuffed couch for your one-two johnsies, but it gets progressively less You know, it's like the jolly fat man is a whole lot less jolly when he's got gout.
	I mean, it's just, I don't mean to laugh, but it's rapidly downhill from 40 if you're overweight and you're going to have to pay for healthcare issues, you're going to have to pay for consultation, chiropractors, joint specialists, I mean, it just starts to become Very expensive and then she starts to be in chronic discomfort or chronic pain, which means there's no sex if there is anything anyway.
	So yeah, eventually it's just like taking care of your grandmother, but with fewer mint juleps.
	Yeah, I see it coming and I've chosen to have company of older people and knowing what they go through and just listening to what their life's like.
	I've done my best to really mitigate what's going to happen as I age, you know, looking at my dad and looking at my genealogy and what conditions, you know, are kind of lined up for me if I don't take care of myself.
	Yeah, I remember reading a book.
	I think it was an article by some woman years ago who said, yeah, I wanted to write a great comedy about getting older, but now that I'm older, it isn't so fucking funny.
	Yeah, it really isn't.
	I assume that the substance abuse is an issue, although I know that you're abusing substances as well, but your perception is that it's partly you're being dragged along under her motorboat like some unwilling smoked-bloomed water skier?
	Yeah, I've wanted time alone just to clean up my head, clean up my body, and not have the constant temptation around.
	My hope was to do it collectively.
	You know, I've come this far, and... Now, do you know what the opposite of love is?
	It's another four-letter word.
	Fear?
	No.
	Fear gets you out.
	The opposite of love is hope.
	Fingers crossed.
	I hope she'll change.
	I hope she'll... because that keeps you around, and your hope is constantly destroyed.
	The opposite of love is whatever destroys love within you.
	Now, fear gets you out of a relationship and allows you to open up your heart over time to someone else, right?
	So fear is great!
	Right?
	Did you know who gets the most mauled by the lion?
	It's the lion tamer who hopes this time it's different, who hopes that the lion is going to be trainable today, who hopes that the lion is going to be in a better mood today.
	That's the guy who keeps going back in and getting mauled Las Vegas style, right?
	And so hope is the opposite of love.
	Because you want someone to change to the point where you're willing to stick around and have your heart Horse-hooved every single day, right?
	Oh, I hope it's going to change!
	But once you give up hope, which is hopefully where you are, right?
	Once you give up hope, then you can make more rational decisions to protect your heart and over time make yourself available to someone else.
	But yeah, the opposite of love is hope because if you're in a relationship with someone you genuinely love, you don't have hope.
	You don't need hope because you have, right?
	I don't hope my wife is nice to me tomorrow because she's nice to me today, right?
	I don't hope I like what I do tomorrow because I like what I do today.
	So I don't need hope when I actually have.
	But hope keeps you in a tortured orbit with what you're not getting.
	And it doesn't allow you to break free of that orbit to get something better.
	And that's what truly destroys not just your love for this woman, but your entire capacity to love at all.
	Fuck hope.
	No, seriously, when it comes to relationship, fuck hope!
	I hope this government program works, no!
	To hell with that!
	I hope this person is nice to me tomorrow, no!
	I hope they'll change the day after that, no!
	Fuck hope!
	Hope is like a disease, hope is like a manacle, hope is like a giant tar pit that the mastodon of your mighty heart gets stuck in to expire and be studied by paleontologists a hundred thousand years from now.
	Hope is death.
	Yeah, if her life circumstances and her friends that are around her, her deep friends that have known me much longer than I have, if they haven't made an impact on her, I don't know what I'm going to do.
	No, she doesn't even admit there's a problem, right?
	No.
	Nothing's going to change if people don't... You know this, right?
	This is as common as dirt, this idea.
	If people don't even admit that there's a problem... I mean, if they admit that there is a problem, their odds of changing are still in the single digits, percentage-wise, in my experience.
	Like, even if someone says, wow, I'm really overweight, I've really got to lose weight.
	Do you know the number of people who lose weight and successfully keep it off?
	It's 2 to 3%.
	The whole diet industry is just a complete lie.
	It's hope!
	I hope this diet works!
	It's like, no, no it won't.
	First thing, just try not to gain weight.
	And secondly, if you do gain weight, and I've been through this, I lost about 20-25 pounds about 10 years ago.
	If you do gain the weight, then you have to say, okay, well, if I want to lose this weight, I have to change everything about my lifestyle and I can never change back.
	And then I have to escalate that changing as I age Because I was trying to lose weight in my 40s.
	This is damn hard.
	So you have to say, okay, no cookies, no chips, no chocolate, no whatever, right?
	Like no... none of that kind of... no candy, no like... It's just that you have to change everything.
	You have to change the people you hang out with, you have to change the places that you go, you have... and you just have to say, okay.
	And this is not like, well, I'll do it for a couple of weeks till I lose some weight and then I can just slide back.
	It's like, nope, this is a permanent change.
	It's a permanent change.
	You know, when I met my wife, I used to have, after dinner, I'd have an orange and a Mr. Big.
	Now I have an orange and I haven't had a Mr. Big in 10 years.
	And you just have to change and it has to be permanent.
	And that's if you admit that there's a problem and you're willing to do all of that, then maybe, but very, very few people do that.
	And 100% of people who never admit that there's a problem fail to change.
	They all fail to change.
	Why would you change?
	There's nothing to change, right?
	There's nothing wrong with who you are, right?
	According to them.
	So, the question is, sorry, I'm sorry, we were in the middle of, we've got a couple of things that you find repulsive about marrying this woman.
	That's enough right there.
	I mean, her inability to see the problem and admit, you know, responsibility for her actions, or lack thereof, that's huge.
	Inability or unwillingness?
	You know, and it scares me financially too.
	I mean, she loves debt.
	She loves free money.
	Oh my God, you're trolling me at this point, aren't you?
	And she has machine gun legs, Tarantino style.
	You've got to be trolling me at this point.
	Because I'm trying to think of any other negatives.
	Is she a feminist?
	Like, things that you could pile on.
	that would make this call unbelievable to people and everything you've listed, James, plus she loves to overspend.
	No, you are.
	You're not trolling me, are you?
	She had a good long period of time where she had wealth and she got used to that.
	And then she lost it when she left the marriage.
	Go figure.
	And now she's when we do.
	I mean, I do my best.
	I feel I'm talented and skilled.
	You know, your line of deferred gratification has really helped me out to save my own money and put away things and prepare for that.
	But I'm financially secure in that way.
	But her choices, just irresponsible.
	Like the other day, she wanted to go out for lunch.
	We had plenty of food at home and it was $130.
	And work that out to the hourly rate it takes to make that.
	It's like digging yourself to the center of the earth.
	I think that all the time.
	I think, what would that cost in hours?
	I mean, I do a lot of side jobs and random stuff, so it's hard to do an hourly.
	And alcohol, it's such a waste.
	It's such a waste of energy and time and money.
	And it's so debilitating and taxing on your organs and kidneys.
	Cannabis?
	Yeah.
	That's it.
	No, nothing.
	Nothing synthesized, nothing, no stimulants in that sort.
	Cannabis is still pretty bad for you.
	It is.
	And, you know, I'm in a culture that thinks it's cool and thinks it's okay.
	But it's not.
	I mean... No, it's like someone tweeted today about, here are all the essential drinks you need in your cabinet to live an excellent life.
	It's like, or, or, or, you could be comfortable in your own skin and not need alcohol to socialize.
	I never liked to have to depend on anything.
	That was something I saw the flaw in most of my... Wait, dependence is bad, James?
	Hypocritical.
	There you go.
	Dependence is bad, but you can't leave because your girlfriend depends on you.
	You know, I've been rationalizing this for a long time.
	All right, so let's find out what the fuck is going on down here, because this is some strange machinery deep down.
	Okay.
	And the reason that I'm pausing here and we're going back is you said something earlier, James, which was you had a pretty good childhood, no major trauma, and so on.
	But I don't know if you've read my book Real-Time Relationships, but in it, There's the parable of Simon the Boxer.
	Simon the Boxer grew up being beaten up by his father, so he could not master his father, he could not master the beatings.
	The only thing that he could master was his emotional response to the beatings.
	That's the only control that he could have, was his emotional response to the beatings.
	So his only sense of efficacy requires that he be beaten.
	Without being beaten, his sense of control over his environment doesn't exist, and that's why he becomes a boxer.
	So that he can manage his response to being beaten, which is the only control he's ever known in his life.
	So, you are in a situation where your will is thwarted.
	You know, like tilting at windmills from the old Don Quixote story that he charges at a windmill because he thinks it's a dragon or something and his lance just splinters?
	So you're tilting at windmills, which means that you are in a situation Where your will is being daily destroyed and shredded by the indifference and selfishness of your girlfriend, right?
	So, here's the question.
	What in your childhood conditioned you to need this?
	Because if you don't solve this, you can run away from this woman.
	You know what's going to happen?
	The next.
	Yeah, you're gonna run into the same damn woman over and over again, until we read about you in the newspapers, and probably not in a positive way, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so, as a child, what was your sense of your ability to will things and make things happen?
	To will things and make things happen?
	What was the gap between what you wanted and what you were able to achieve?
	The gap was, I think, focus.
	I'm a very spontaneous person, and that's been a big flaw of mine, and I gravitate towards people who have focus.
	All right, dude.
	You are jumping right out of the childhood hole that I put you in.
	Now you're talking about you and the people you surround yourself with.
	I'm talking about when you were a child.
	You didn't choose your family.
	You didn't choose to surround yourself with your mother and your father and any siblings that you had.
	And if you start focusing on yourself rather than your environment, it tells me that you're protecting someone in your childhood.
	So, when you were a child, James, how able were you to achieve the change you wanted in your environment?
	How able was I to change my environment?
	I don't know.
	I'm trying to recall.
	Let me give you an example.
	Please.
	When I was 11 or 12, I mean, I used to love going to the swimming pool.
	And I loved in particular diving.
	This is back before everyone got so worried that you can't have diving boards anymore.
	I blame America's Funniest Home Videos, but that's a topic for another time.
	And I used to love doing these flips, these backflips, these flip-and-a-half.
	So they would open from 7.30 to 9.30 or something.
	I'd spend two hours diving off the diving board, mostly swimming.
	I did swim team, and I did water polo, and I was basically a fish.
	Now, when I was 11 or 12, I left my bathing suit.
	Of course, I had only one, and it was one of these Speedos that had little balls, little hard... Sorry, that sounds bad.
	It was one of these Speedos.
	It had these little knotty, rolled up bits of fabric on the outside, because it was kind of old and all that.
	But I had some... Because we were poor, right?
	So I had only one bathing suit.
	Now, I left my bathing suit in school, in my locker.
	Because I think I'd had swim team that morning or something, and I always remember, yeah, I would come home from swim team, I'd come home to get something to eat before going back to school and my hair would freeze.
	That was the case.
	But I also remember being, I used to get these student haircuts, you know, they would train people.
	And I remember one of the students saying, oh, you swim a lot, don't you?
	It's like, because I can feel it in your hair.
	And I remember the instructor said, yeah, yeah, come back later and she'll tell you your personal fortune for the year or something like that.
	It's very, very funny.
	So, one Friday I left my bathing suit in my locker and Friday nights there was swimming and I think Sunday afternoons or something and I used to look forward to that at that age.
	Now, I've complained about my mom, but I'll give her credit where credit is due.
	I desperately wanted to go swimming that Friday night and then that Sunday afternoon, and I didn't have... So my mother did actually take me across to the mall and get me a bathing suit.
	I really, really wanted it.
	Now I couldn't say, I certainly couldn't have a tantrum, neither would I. I couldn't pressure her.
	I couldn't bully her.
	I didn't like whining.
	So I just tried to really, really make the case.
	And my mom, to her credit, did take me and go and get me a bathing suit.
	Yeah, it was cheap.
	Yes, it was bottom of the line.
	Yes, it was a banana hammock.
	But nonetheless, it wasn't much of a banana at 11.
	So that's an example.
	That I remember very, very clearly because it was rare.
	But that's an example where I wanted something as a child and I was actually able to achieve it, to will something that I couldn't do myself, if that makes any sense.
	I don't think I had... I think my first job I got when I was 11, but I think what happened was the banks were closed.
	There was no such thing as bank machines back then.
	I'd have to wait till Monday to get the money to buy the bathing... It was one of these things where if my mom, who had the money, wasn't going to buy me the bathing suit, I wasn't going to get one.
	Now this may sound like a trivial example, and for a lot of people I'm sure it is, but for whatever reason, the planets aligned in my family.
	I wanted something.
	I was actually able to achieve it.
	And I remember that very, very clearly.
	So that's just an example of being able to will something.
	I can play off that, yeah.
	I loved video and photo.
	That was a big outlet for me, because when I was a kid I was pretty much deaf, from clogged eardrums and everything, and about seven.
	Apparently this is a common thing for kids that eat the Western diet and You know, artificial ingredients and everything.
	It's just, I had very inflamed, you know, lymph nodes and tonsils, tubes and adenoids.
	That was a very common procedure back in the day.
	Where did you get your tonsils at?
	In the 80s.
	Yeah, and they cleared my, the tubes in my ears and I was able to hear again.
	It was just... Your lymph nodes were swollen?
	That doesn't seem good.
	I don't know the backstory on that, but I... How old were you at that time?
	Pretty much from when I was a child until about seven is when the final surgery happened and everything opened up.
	I just remember it so clearly.
	It cleared up my ears, I was able to hear, and I could hear the clock ticking.
	Mind you, I had like 70% hearing loss in both my ears, so I could hear until I was about seven.
	From what age to seven?
	I was... a child?
	A baby?
	I don't know.
	I mean... So you had 70% hearing loss from day one-ish to the age of seven?
	Yeah.
	From what my mom and dad tell me.
	And... didn't... I mean, didn't they notice?
	Oh, they knew, and they did their best to try and resolve it, and... at the... you know, they were... they were... they were not well off, you know.
	And finally, they were able to find out what could be done about it.
	And one surgery when I was five, and another surgery later, and then finally when I was seven.
	And I remember waking up hearing the clock ticking.
	And it was the loudest thing.
	I just, I was like, whoa.
	And my mom just, you know, she was crying and she was just so happy.
	But that really shifted my perception of the world to visual.
	Sorry, was that, I mean, was it tough to learn... Oh my God, yeah.
	...subtle piece of language?
	I mean, was it tough to be in school?
	I mean, this must have been a very, very big deal.
	Yeah, it was huge, you know, being kept back a few grades.
	A few?
	Yeah.
	So they thought you were learning disabled, you just couldn't hear a damn thing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it reminds me of a girl I knew when I was younger, And she was kind of spaced out.
	And, you know, you think it's all philosophical, and some of it was for sure, but she also desperately needed glasses and didn't get them until she was about seven.
	And basically the world was just one big, smeared, post-modernist, Paul Klee impressionistic blur to her.
	So she had a little bit of trouble focusing on the outside world that became very introspective.
	Yeah, I eventually needed to get glasses when I was in my later teens, and then I got LASIK, so double whammy.
	But yeah, it was a big hindrance.
	Wait, so double whammy is your vision was also, but not at seven, wasn't a problem, right?
	No, it got worse as I got older, but you know, I could read and do everything.
	But I became very visual, and that was kind of the point of that story.
	We were talking about will and I love photo and video.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	How was your bad hearing explained to you?
	Was it considered like, well, this is permanent or what? - I never, I mean, you know, I never really got a detailed doctor's description when I was seven, nor do I remember, but, you know, I never really got a detailed doctor's description when I was seven, nor do I remember, but, you know,
	It was dietary, you know, lots of cheeses and hormones and, you know, inflammatory foods that are just abundant in, you know, the impoverished Western diet.
	I mean, we didn't really have... Sorry, neither of your parents had health insurance through work, is that right?
	No, my dad worked at the liquor store and didn't really have an insurance plan there.
	And my mom, you know, she did later on.
	And as soon as she did, I mean, she did her best to provide for me and my sister and But but yeah, that was that was a big big pivoting point in my life, you know just how I see the world and You know, even now it's really difficult for me to hear lyrics.
	I can hear fine.
	My hearing's great But but there's some practice that was missing back in the day, right?
	yeah, I just you know how to how to sift through language and everything and It was just a it was a big turning point for me Yeah I knew a woman who, this is an old song, she thought it was, every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you.
	I do that sometimes.
	That song lyrics are actually pretty funny.
	Excuse me while I kiss this guy.
	Alright.
	So, as far as Will goes in your household, that's not primarily a story that I'm looking for.
	Well, to wrap that up, the way I would get something wasn't by tantrums, wasn't by manipulation.
	It was by logic.
	It was by doing my homework.
	It was by proving that if I got this thing, I would use it to the best of its abilities.
	And I had a good track record of treating things well.
	I was a dumpster diver as a kid.
	Oh, yeah.
	I used to do that, too.
	Yeah, there's great stuff in there and from that I learned a lot of great skills about how to repair electronics and how to recycle.
	People just are lazy and I turned that to my advantage and had access to abundance.
	Would you say that you had a fairly good ability to affect your will, to affect your environment as a child?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so then something must have happened between then and your girlfriend because otherwise it would be unbearable for you to be in a situation where your will is constantly being thwarted.
	Something must have happened to blunt your will because otherwise you couldn't stand it where you are, right?
	Certainly not for six years, right?
	No.
	It's like if If a cow is born into a stall, then it will stay in the stall, right?
	But you take some wild horse and you put it in a stall, that's going to kick the damn walls down, right?
	It has no stomach for that kind of confinement, right?
	So something has happened between your childhood and your adulthood to the point where your will was willing to be kicked and laid dormant for more than half a decade, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so what happened between childhood and meeting this woman where you felt that your will had been diminished or its muscularity had faded?
	If this thesis is true, I could be completely wrong, I'm just telling you what I think.
	Well, I'm going through my memory Rolodex and trying to pull up a moment, but I I feel I transitioned from being a child to being a man with no real rites of passage.
	I was the provider as early as I could.
	At what age?
	Oh my gosh, thirteen I started working.
	Anything I could.
	Did you want to?
	Well, I had a great amount of pride in it and satisfaction.
	No, but did you want to?
	In other words, when your friends didn't have to have jobs, is that what you wanted to do?
	You know, being in the echo chamber of the single mom household, it wasn't really... I didn't have that resentment or bitterness of like, oh, I'm missing out on all these things.
	It seemed like a necessity.
	No, no, I get that.
	But the moment you say necessity, you're saying you didn't want to do it, but you muscled up and manned up and did it, because you had to, right?
	Well, I had a lot of pride and I enjoyed everything I did.
	All these jobs, you know, there's rarely a moment where I was like, oh, I hate this, you know.
	It was either working for friends and different family members and learning new skills.
	It was a great learning experience for me.
	It provided for my mom and sister and I. It gave me a great work ethic.
	You loved your work when you were 13.
	So you'd have done it if you weren't paid.
	You'd have paid to do it.
	The way some kids love Disney World, right?
	Sorry, dude.
	I don't buy it.
	There was...
	You know, I had resentment that, I mean, looking back when I realized, like, Mom, why'd you leave?
	Why'd you leave Dad?
	Yeah, why'd you leave Dad?
	He wasn't Prince Charming, but he wasn't mean, abusive.
	I never heard him yell.
	There was never a moment where he struck her or did anything abusive.
	So, like, why?
	Why would you go?
	Like, it was such a struggle.
	We were living in a van for a year.
	Living in a van?
	Yeah, I was living in a Volkswagen camper for six months to a year until we finally found a stable spot in a new neighborhood.
	The fuck did your dad let his kids live in a van?
	What the hell happened between your parents, dude?
	I mean, holy shit!
	That's a great question I'm going to have with him.
	Why not?
	I'll throw one in.
	Once in a while I'll try to throw one into the mix, but what the hell?
	Did she get feministed?
	Maybe.
	You don't know, right?
	My dad ended up cheating on another woman.
	I think that was the splitting point.
	Cheating with another woman?
	Yes.
	Cheating on your mom with another woman?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And this, oddly enough, if we're digging deep, and we are, that woman who swept in on my dad fit many similar archetypes as my current partner.
	When did you first realize that?
	A few years ago, just little hints, when I look back at how it happened and what she did and the manipulative nature and her ability to destroy a relationship for her own survival.
	And was she desperate and in need in the way that your girlfriend is?
	Or was?
	Or is?
	Yeah.
	Was she a single mom?
	No.
	No.
	No children, and they never had children.
	Are they still together?
	No, my dad got fed up.
	This happened years ago, and they finally split up.
	They were never married either, so there's another track record of not having solid marriage relationships to base anything off of.
	She found God.
	She went to the church more and more.
	My dad was never really a religious man.
	He said that's the reason why.
	She would dedicate more of her time and energy into helping out the church than him.
	He didn't like that.
	He provided everything.
	He's a financially frugal and smart guy.
	He made a quality life for her.
	I don't want to dive too deep into that, because I was never really ingrained.
	So he cheated on your mom with her, then she cheated on him with God.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now, you say you have a great relationship with your dad, but didn't he kind of bust up the whole family by having an affair?
	Putting you in a trailer?
	A van, sorry, van.
	Camper!
	Camper.
	Camper.
	I think the relationship was eroding for a long time.
	My mom just wasn't there for him, you know, so naturally he would... I don't want to say naturally, I don't want to make cheating on the mother of your children a commonplace thing, but I mean... Is it like as basic as a man has his needs?
	I never want to ever use that excuse in my life.
	I mean, I'm trying my best to live in integrity even though I'm not, and that's really eroding me.
	No, because it's shitty.
	I mean, if you're married to a woman and then she just stops having sex with you, you're kind of not fucked, right?
	I mean, it's rough.
	It's rough because, you know, you kind of still have to provide for her.
	I mean, if she's a stay-at-home mom.
	No, she worked.
	I mean, they split.
	Like, he would work during the day and she'd work at night.
	Right.
	And how old were you when they split?
	Ten.
	It's a common age.
	Everyone I talk to, it's usually a really common age.
	I don't know why.
	Maybe just because they fill up a bit.
	It depends where you are in the birth order.
	Do you have siblings?
	I have a younger sister, three years younger.
	Yeah, so ten.
	I mean, I'll tell you my theory.
	So, ten is the age at which children begin the teen storms, or I guess the tween storms at that point, right?
	The hormones start kicking in a little bit, the desire for separation, the desire to distinguish, and the desire to criticize your parents gets pretty strong around the age of ten and starts to ramp up from there.
	And if the parental bond is not strong, if the parent-child bond is not strong, it usually can't handle the increasing criticism.
	And I had a word for it when I was at that age.
	I called it my grumble brain.
	My grumble brain was... I remember when we first moved to Canada, we lived with my mother's half-brother in Whitby.
	And I was in grade... I was put in grade 8 and Whitby did okay.
	When we came to Toronto, I was put back two grades into grade 6.
	Which was age-appropriate, but really boring.
	And I remember when we first came to Canada, I used to sleep on a little couch in the basement.
	And this was not a finished basement, this was like with old bikes and he was a painter and he would paint portraits and copy pictures and so on.
	And I remember I used to wake up Almost always tired because I'm a night owl, but you have to get up and go to school or whatever.
	So I'd wake up and I'd go walking up the stairs, step by step, and I'd be sitting there.
	My grumbled brain would wake up before I did.
	I'd be walking up the stairs and I'd be sitting there.
	I've got to go and say, everyone's going to say good morning, and I'm going to say good morning to everyone, and it's going to be annoying.
	I'm already annoyed at the beginning of the day.
	It's just grumbled brain.
	It's something to do with the tween storms.
	I was 11 at this point.
	A lot of family structures, there's latency, right?
	So there's a lot of stress, the terrible twos they call it, right?
	When you first learn to say no as a kid.
	And you can will that.
	And then it kind of goes from 3 to 4 to 5 into like 7, 8, 9.
	It's called latency.
	It's pretty mellow, pretty relaxed kind of time.
	And then the teen storms start to spike up.
	And usually, if the marriage is weak and the parent-child bond is weak, that's a huge stressor for the family as a whole, and that could be one of the reasons why 10 is kind of a common... Like, they instinctively know how the teen years are going to go, and maybe they don't want to be there.
	Yeah, and I kind of thought, too, just trying to deconstruct, because my dad's not that As you and I are trying to have this conversation, so it's difficult to get the full side of his story because, you know, a little limited, but... A little taciturn?
	A little monosyllabic?
	A little basic.
	Yeah, yeah.
	A little basic.
	And I think he thought, he's like, well, I'm doing good.
	I'm making money.
	And if she goes, I can still provide.
	And, you know, she's still working.
	Wait, if she goes, if your mom, like if the marriage splits up?
	Well, I'm like, why didn't he contest more?
	Why didn't he compromise?
	Why didn't he shift and change?
	I mean, stubborn, I guess.
	He didn't want to shift his attitude and change who he was and compromise like you do in a healthy relationship.
	You compromise to come to some level playing field.
	But I thought, I think he just thought, eh, not the worst thing.
	You know, I get what I want.
	She gets what she wants.
	They didn't, they didn't get divorced.
	They weren't married.
	Right, but you know what I mean.
	Let's just call it a divorce if you've been together and have kids.
	It's the same damn thing.
	Sure.
	Alright, so did you want them to split up?
	No, they were a lot happier.
	Did you want them to split up?
	As a child?
	As a child, yeah, but I had a narrow perception on things.
	Wait, as a child, I'm not sure I got that answer correct from you.
	Maybe I misheard.
	As a child, did you want them to split up?
	It's hard to remember.
	Well, given what happened afterwards and you're living in a camper, I'm sure you had some opinion about it.
	Well, if my goal was comfort, then yeah, I wanted them to stay together, but I didn't like our neighborhood.
	No, no, just your perceptions as a child, not this big overarching Dr. Phil perspective you have from the low orbit of middle adulthood, but as a child, it was not a plus for you that they split up, right?
	Plus, then you had to get a job soon after, right?
	And you had to turn over your money to the family, right?
	Yeah.
	So, not a plus?
	In the moment, no.
	Well, it was more than a moment, right?
	It was years.
	Years.
	But, looking back... The birds are chirping.
	Looking back, I mean, I really have tried to rewrite my story.
	I know, I can hear this frantic scribbling going on.
	You've got a whole team of monks in your head, purging and rewriting.
	This is like history 1984 style.
	And yeah, I mean, that reflection right there, I don't know if that's hindering me from growing or if it's helping me to heal.
	No, no, no, it's terrible.
	It's terrible.
	It's not factual.
	The only thing that helps you grow is the truth.
	Right?
	And you did not want your parents to split up, you did not want to get a job that young.
	It's one thing if you get a job that young and you get to keep your money and do cool things with it, but you basically got to fire this cannon full of youthful cash into the open and bottomless moor of family requirements, right?
	So you become a wage serf for your parents' screw-ups.
	You lose your childhood because your father couldn't keep it in his fucking pants.
	And your mother did whatever she did, right?
	Well, I mean, I hear my perception on this, because if I were to... No, fight me away.
	It's your life, man, so I'm just telling you what I think.
	Fight me away.
	If I were to be, I don't want to say bitter, because that's a harsh thing, but if I have these upset feelings towards my parents for what they chose to do, I mean, at the time, all my other friends were doing drugs.
	They were going to jail.
	They were getting in fights.
	A few got killed.
	A few committed suicide.
	These were poor kids, and so was I. And the fact that I had a place, a job, several jobs over my youth, that kept me aligned and kept me going and built these skills that just made me rocket over all my other peers.
	I look at my alumni from... But that's your IQ.
	That's not your parents.
	That's your IQ.
	No, listen, they know that there are these bulletproof children out there who go through the most unbelievable levels of trauma.
	And it sounds like you grew up in a freaking war zone.
	You've got kids dying and committing suicide and drug addicted and so on.
	It's bloody awful.
	But you're very high IQ.
	And what happens is, I'm going to give us the we here, assuming we're both high IQ, Is that we sit there with this incredible bulletproof genetics and we say, wow, my parents did a great job, or they must have done something right, and it's like, nope!
	Sometimes your parents hold you down, inject you with an illness, but you're just one of these freaks who doesn't get sick from it.
	Doesn't mean your parents did a good job keeping you healthy.
	It's an extreme analogy, but you know what I mean.
	Yeah, I do, I do.
	I can't go backwards, though.
	I can't change the past.
	I can't change who they are.
	Wait, don't insult my intelligence here.
	We just talked about being high IQ.
	So please, please, James, do not remind me that we have not yet perfected time travel.
	Because I'm aware, I'm aware we have not yet perfected time travel and I'm aware that the past is a fixed thing.
	That's not the point.
	Right?
	That's not the point.
	The point of the past is to help you tomorrow.
	In the decision you know you have to make, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so do you want that help from your past?
	Then you're going to have to be honest.
	Because whatever perspective you've had on the past has led you to this place where you've pissed away more than half a decade in pursuit of raising another man's child.
	Children.
	with a fat, drug-addicted woman who's immature and won't change, and won't ever admit that she's wrong.
	So, whatever perspective you've had on the past, James, has led you exactly here.
	So you have to change your perspective about the past, otherwise your tomorrow is going to be pretty much the same as the last six years.
	Right?
	Because you get a message out of the past, and that message, that story, out of the past, has got you exactly where you are right now.
	So the whole point of understanding the truth about the past is to let you change your course now in the future, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I'm just going to give you a hypothesis and you can tell me if it makes any sense or not.
	You did not want your parents to split up and they split up.
	You did not want to go and get these jobs And you had to go and get these jobs.
	You did not want your friends to die, yet they died.
	You did not want your friends to get into fights, yet they got into fights.
	You did not want your friends addicted to drugs, yet they were addicted to drugs.
	You did not want your friends to go to prison, but they went to prison.
	Suicide.
	Can't stop it.
	Can't stop it.
	Didn't want to live in this neighborhood.
	Didn't want to go to this school.
	As a smart, sensitive child, you were actually in hell.
	Hell.
	Didn't want to live in a camper.
	Didn't want to turn over all of your money to the endless more of a single mom, just as you're doing now.
	You didn't want to do these things, but you had no choice.
	You had no choice about your parents being divorced.
	You had no choice about living in the camper.
	You had no choice about your friends being killed, dying, suiciding, drug addicted, prison.
	No choice about these things.
	Could not control the damn thing.
	And you made the best of it.
	I understand that and I sympathize and I think that was probably a pretty good idea at the time because you needed to be able to get out of bed and get your day done so you could get to adulthood, right?
	But here's the thing.
	What works in war does not work in peacetime.
	That's PTSD.
	PTSD is, well, you know, he's kind of jumpy.
	The jumpy nervous shit, that works really well when you're in a combat zone.
	In fact, if you don't adopt that attitude, you tend not to last very long, right?
	So, the perspective that you had of like, I loved going to work, you know, I was fine with my parents getting divorced because, you know, they really weren't that happy.
	That's what you tell yourself to get through the day in the moment.
	But it's not true.
	You wanted your parents to stay together.
	You didn't want to live in that neighborhood.
	You certainly didn't want to live in the camper.
	You didn't want to watch your friends drop down like they were wheat in a combine harvester's ass.
	So you had to pretend that what you didn't want was actually what you wanted in order to maintain Any sense of control over your environment, you could not control your environment, you could only control your response to your environment, and the most rational response in order to maintain your spirits was to believe that you had chosen that which was inflicted upon you.
	No.
	The belief that you have chosen that which is inflicted upon you is the definition of where you are in your relationship.
	She inflicted herself upon you, and when I asked earlier about how you met, it was very vague and very foggy, because I think that you like to believe that you should make the best out of that which is inflicted upon you.
	And that's what you've been doing for six long years.
	This woman inflicted herself upon you, and because you celebrated the inefficacy of your will in the past, you could not will her away in the present, because the way that you survived your childhood was to celebrate your lack of willing in your environment, your lack of strength of will in your environment.
	Not that you didn't have a strong will, but there was no...
	you had to go to work, you couldn't stop your parents' divorce, couldn't stop anything that was bad that was happening.
	And so when this woman comes along and inflicts herself upon you, you don't have the will to push back because you have praised and made a virtue out of a lack of willpower.
	You say, oh well, you know, it's better if my parents broke up because they weren't happy.
	Well, why the hell should they have ended up that unhappy?
	Right?
	You don't just wake up and you're unhappy.
	These are just steps that people take.
	Like, you don't just wake up and you're fat one day.
	You don't just wake up and you're unhealthy one day.
	These are all tiny steps.
	A thousand miles, a single step, step by step.
	Because you're missing your willpower.
	And you tell me you did not go through much trauma as a child, James?
	Are you freaking kidding me?
	Your dad slept around on your mom.
	Your parents got divorced.
	You're living in a camper.
	Your friends are dying like you're in a war zone.
	Your friends are going to prison.
	They're getting into fights.
	You're in that shitty a neighborhood?
	All over time.
	Hey, if you want to start minimizing this shit, I'll hang up on you right now.
	I'm not kidding.
	You want to minimize this shit?
	Do you genuinely think that you had a reasonably decent childhood?
	Because you can minimize all this if you want and you can go back to your drug-addicted fat girlfriend if you want.
	I'm just being blunt with you.
	Because if you think your childhood was normal, you have no chance of changing your present.
	None.
	That's the price.
	The price you pay for normalizing your incredibly dysfunctional childhood is that you don't have the will to change your present or your future.
	Because if that's normal, then it's normal where you are.
	If that's normal where you were, then it's normal where you are.
	If you denormalize where you were, then you will have the strength to revolt against where you are.
	It's not normal to have friends die around you.
	It's not normal to have to go and get a job at the age of 13 because your mom can't afford to pay the bills.
	It's not normal to live for a year in a camper.
	It's painful.
	And it blunts the will.
	Yeah, I've had that band-aid on for a long time.
	You certainly have.
	It's getting stinky.
	Well, you could say obsessed or whatever it is, right?
	Sure.
	You have to normalize that stuff.
	Listen, if I thought that my childhood was normal, do you think I could have the family life that I have now?
	No.
	Of course not.
	We are drawn to and we repeat what is normal to us.
	What we define as normal is like a train track that we have to follow.
	Because who wants to wake up and say, well, I think I'd really like to do something abnormal and against normality and anti-normal today?
	Nobody does that.
	Even the rebellious punks.
	For them, mindless rebellion is normal.
	So what is normal for you?
	Having no willpower and responding to the needs of the woman, even though it's against your self-interest, because you have to.
	As you did with your mom getting a job.
	You had to.
	Listen, I sympathize.
	You had to get a job, right?
	I was in the same boat.
	I had to get a job.
	Yeah.
	But you like praising it, like, oh, it was great, and I got to learn all these skills, and it was wonderful.
	It's messed up when I say it out loud.
	Well, you wait till you listen back to this, man.
	That's why it's so good to have these things recorded, right?
	You wait till you listen back to this.
	You'll be like, yeah, you know, it's pretty good childhood.
	I mean, I did lose a number of friends to drugs and suicide and murder and prison, but you know, other than that, pretty much Mr. Rogers' neighborhood in flames.
	You know, I think what kept me in this It's one thing to say I'm a victim and therefore other people should give me resources.
	And I never wanted to fall into that because it's a very, it's a closed loop.
	You know, you don't grow from being a victim.
	You have to step out of it.
	And I tried to make the best of my situation.
	But you're right.
	But what if you were a victim?
	See, it's one thing to say I'm a victim and therefore other people should give me resources.
	It's one thing to play the victim in order to manipulate other people.
	But it's another thing, if you were a victim, it's another thing to say I was a victim.
	That is an accurate and true statement of my history.
	It's not all I am and it's certainly not all I ever will be.
	But you have to build a house on rock and not sand and you have to build your identity on the truth and not what was emotionally necessary for survival, which is never the truth at the time.
	So, in my mind, I mean, I've thought about this for a long time, leaving this relationship and doing it with the most grace, because, Stephan, I've said yes up until this point, so I'm taking responsibility for continuing this relationship when I could have ended it a long time ago.
	What relationship?
	I don't understand.
	With my partner.
	No, but what relationship?
	She doesn't listen to you?
	She doesn't admit that you were wrong?
	She stalked you?
	I assume it's net you paying, right?
	No, it's 50-50, but a lot of... I mean... Well, not if she likes dead, it ain't!
	No, no.
	So, it ain't 50-50.
	Nice try.
	No, it's not.
	Nice try.
	But I'm a good listener, so it was a good try, though.
	No, what is the relationship?
	A relationship is when you both have impact on each other, and you both listen to each other, you both respect each other, and you both grow from each other.
	What is the relationship here?
	We work together.
	We have a few home-based businesses and we have... That's a partnership.
	I'm not talking about a partnership in a financial sense.
	You keep talking about this relationship and I haven't heard that it's a relationship.
	I've heard that you live together.
	I'm sure you occasionally have sex.
	I'm sure you have conversations and you pay bills.
	But if she never admits that she's wrong, If she doesn't listen to coaching about being ridiculously unhealthy, if she doesn't respect you enough to follow your advice, where's the relationship?
	We don't leave relationships.
	Why would we?
	They're great.
	We leave hollow shams and shells and pretend relationships.
	We leave manipulative exploiters.
	We leave people who don't listen.
	We leave people who are unhealthy.
	We leave people who insult us through their indifference.
	We leave people who are mean to us.
	We don't leave relationships.
	we leave exploitation and indifference because they're not relationships so as i'm leaving this exploit If we're being transparent on what this is, my focus is the exit strategy.
	Not only, not technicals, but my own personal, like you brought up, how do I not allow this to happen again?
	What is that cleansing process that I can apply to myself when I leave this Well, that's denormalizing your childhood.
	That's for sure.
	And that would be therapy, I would assume, and I would certainly recommend it, but it can be journaling.
	You've just got to denormalize all the shit that went down with you as a child.
	Once you've denormalized that, then you won't be attracted to repeating it.
	Because you've got to repeat it to justify it, you understand?
	It's all about protecting your parents, it's all about protecting your mom in particular, your dad to some degree.
	And protecting them is costing you your life, though.
	It could cost you being a father.
	It could cost you falling in love.
	Yeah.
	It will, if things don't change.
	You can protect all the bad people.
	I'm not saying your parents were all bad, but there was some bad shit that went down.
	with you as a child.
	And in some of it, I don't really understand this whole, my kid is 70% deaf for seven years but we finally got it sorted out.
	I don't know about any of that.
	It doesn't make any sense to me at all.
	You do whatever it takes to fix that.
	You do whatever it takes.
	If you've got to take out a loan, if you've got to join a church, if you've got to Go begging to charity if you've got anything.
	Set up a GoFundMe.
	I mean, I know this is a while ago, but you know what I mean.
	You just do whatever it takes.
	You don't let your kid be 70% deaf and held back a number of grades for seven years.
	You don't do that.
	You find a way.
	There's government programs that can get you the resources that you need.
	You just don't let it happen.
	You don't let your child stagger through their first seven years like they got a fishbowl full of oil stuck around their head.
	Yeah, it was really hard.
	Yes, it was.
	It's not normal.
	And even if that had been completely outside of their control, for whatever reason, you had an illness, it couldn't be cured, a cure came along, that's still difficult.
	Though, no one's to blame.
	You can have difficulty without blaming anyone.
	Kids can be ill, it's difficult.
	Tennessee Williams, a great playwright, he had an illness that kept him confined to bed for like, what, one year or two years?
	The same thing happened with Robert Louis Stevenson, the guy he wrote Kidnapped and Treasure Island, someone just stuck in bed!
	And the moms were like, write stories, do something!
	That's one of the reasons they became writers!
	Now, it's not anyone's fault that they got ill, but it's still traumatic.
	So you've got to denormalize that stuff.
	Yeah, denormalize and stop rationalizing things to cope with it.
	Well, you're praising them.
	You're praising them.
	Yeah, in a weird way, yeah.
	It was better for my parents to get divorced.
	No, it's not better for your parents to get divorced.
	It's never better for your parents to get divorced.
	Because at one time, they liked each other.
	At one time, they loved each other.
	And they screwed up that love.
	They let it slip through their fingers.
	They were petty, they were mean, they were stupid, they were selfish, they were dumb, they slept around, they took this great glorious treasure of love like a fire in the backyard and they pissed on it from a great height until it just went out.
	It's not better for parents to get divorced.
	They say, oh well they were fighting all the time.
	Well they were stupid for fighting all the time.
	They were dumb and reactive and selfish and mean And abusive, maybe, and horrible to each other.
	My parents got divorced.
	Were they happy together?
	Of course not.
	Was it an absolute that they had to be mean to each other and therefore get divorced?
	No!
	Because there's free will in this world and we can always do better.
	Unless we actually have a giant iron spike through our head, in which case personality changes are a tragedy.
	So no, it's not better that your parents got divorced.
	It's not better that anyone's parents get divorced.
	It's better that they wake the hell up, and grow the hell up, and deal with each other in a decent manner, and not blame, and not attack, and not vilify, and not call names.
	Just grow the hell up, recognize you're two adults, solve your issues, and find a way back to love, because your kids need you.
	And you are standing on the precipice now, and your justification of history, James, is pulling you to repeat exactly what happened with your parents.
	How long were your parents together? - I don't even remember.
	I mean, it is such a sour... At least 10 years, right?
	I mean, assume that they were together when... Maybe 12.
	12 years, right?
	So, you know exactly what's going to happen is you're going to get married to this woman, you're going to be married for a couple of years, you're going to get divorced.
	Just like that.
	I tell you, these patterns are everywhere, man.
	I was in a long-term relationship until this went on for seven years, off and on, my 20s to my early 30s.
	I'll tell you something man, do you know, I didn't realize this till afterwards, that I was, I finally left that relationship the same month of the same year of the length of time that my mother had been with my father.
	So my father had been with my mother.
	That when my father left my mother was the same year, the same month, in length of time as when I left this relationship.
	I had paid my penance, I had done my fucking time and I got to get out.
	Ah, my father had left at this time, so I gave myself permission.
	I didn't know this at the time, obviously, right?
	Like I used to suck my thumb as a kid until I spent my first night in my father's house.
	I lost the desire, never came back, ever.
	This shit is everywhere.
	It's deep.
	It's powerful.
	You want to escape this, you've got to look at the past.
	And you've got to denormalize the stuff that was messed up.
	And that involves blaming some people.
	It may involve just blaming the fates or circumstance or whatever it is.
	But whatever interfered in the exercise of your will that you justify, blunts and diminishes and destroys your will in the here and now.
	And your will is your most essential possession.
	You understand?
	What you can affect, what you can control.
	is your most essential possession because it's what gives you reality.
	It's what gives your mind scope and form in the world.
	If you can't will anything, you don't really exist.
	It's like that NPC thing, like the computer-programmed robots.
	They don't really exist in a moral sense.
	What you can control, what you can affect, what you can will, is who you are.
	They say the will's a power.
	Will is the only power you have.
	And you feel, at the moment, if I understand it correctly, powerless.
	Because you are.
	because you have praised the absence of will in your past, which costs you your will in the present.
	You did not want what happened in your childhood.
	But you could not Except that we shy away from where our will ceases to exist.
	And as a child you wanted things to be different and they weren't.
	And now you want things to be different but you have to believe that they can be.
	But that goes right back to your childhood and the conclusions you came to about what you could affect in the world when you were a child.
	I don't have much willpower But I will think it's great when people need me.
	I will think it's great when I have to do stuff.
	Because adults are incompetent.
	And that's where you are, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	I was just conditioned to be in service, and that service nature is really driving me into a spot where... No!
	No, no, no!
	It's not the service nature.
	It's your praising of the service nature that keeps you in chains.
	The fact that you were impressed into gynocentric servitude as a child is not why you are with.
	That's causal and again that's taking the will out of it.
	Your choice about how you process what happened is what keeps you there.
	If you praise as a child, it was great That I had to go work at the age of 13 and turn my paycheck over to my mother.
	It was great that my parents split up.
	It was great.
	All of it was great.
	What happened in our past does not dictate what happens in our present or our future.
	It is our thoughts about what happened in our past that are the only thing alive from the past.
	You understand, right?
	Your parents' divorce is dead and dust.
	It's a piece of yellow document somewhere in someone's paper in the basement.
	But your thoughts about that divorce are currently in your mind and manifesting in the reality of what you do today and tomorrow.
	So, I don't want you to go from, well, my past was great, to now, well, because of this, I am where I am.
	No!
	The intervention of thought, the intervention of judgment, of evaluation, of meaning that you can extract out of your past.
	No, no, no, that is what gives you the strength.
	So, my mother never admitted that she was wrong, ever, ever.
	It was impossible.
	She would go to literally, literally insane lengths.
	I mean, she was institutionalized.
	She would literally go to insane lengths to not be wrong about anything.
	Why was she a terrible mom?
	The doctors made her sick, don't you know?
	She couldn't even, like, any of that.
	I remember watching some show with her when I was in my early 20s at her place, and it was this woman who was kind of going crazy and terrifying her children.
	My mom got quite emotional.
	I said, what's going on for you?
	She said, it's so terrifying for her.
	What's happening?
	Very illuminating moment, right?
	Because she didn't process how terrifying it was for the children.
	I shouldn't laugh, but you know, she could only process how terrifying it was for her that she was going crazy, which it was, I get that.
	But she couldn't process how terrifying it was for me, for the children.
	So my mother wouldn't admit that she was wrong.
	So what I could do now is I could say, well, you know, I could make up all these justifications, and she was tough.
	It was a single mother.
	And what I'd be doing is I would be saying, it's fine to not admit that you're wrong.
	It's okay.
	It's understandable.
	It can be a good thing to make you strong, to make you tough.
	But then all that would happen is, that would translate into, like what we value in the past is what we manifest in the present or the future.
	What we praise in the past is what we become in the present or the future.
	So I could say all of that about my mom and the next thing that would happen is, I would no longer be able to admit that I was wrong.
	Why?
	It's fine for my mom!
	It's like saying, well the word tree meant tree for my mom but I'm gonna make it mean something opposite for me.
	No!
	The word tree is good enough for my mom, it's good, I'm gonna look at something and call it a tree.
	So, what I did was I looked and I said, ah, so if you don't admit that you're wrong when you're wrong, that's really terrible.
	It's horrible.
	People flee you.
	You end up surrounded by the most garbage denizens of the underworld that you can imagine.
	Your life becomes hell itself.
	You lose control out of your life.
	You become reactive.
	You become defensive.
	You become paranoid.
	Your mental health decays, your sense of reality decays.
	It's horrible.
	It's a living death to not admit that you're wrong when you're wrong, which is one of the reasons why I have so many videos called, Why I was wrong about X. So I can look at my mother never admitting that she's wrong and I can say, well, that's really terrible.
	I really better not do that.
	You know, it's like the old saying about the twins, right?
	The father was an alcoholic.
	One twin becomes an alcoholic and says, well, I'm an alcoholic because my dad was an alcoholic.
	So what can I do?
	It's genetics, right?
	The other twin is not an alcoholic and he says, I never touched alcohol because I saw what it did to dad, right?
	Yeah.
	So I don't want you to go from, well, now you're dominoes from the past.
	It's your thoughts and interpretation.
	And if your thoughts and interpretation about the past are morally accurate and true and valid, then you gain a kind of power over the present and over the future that can scarcely be imagined.
	But if they're false, you're just another leaf on the stream of history, photocopying illusion and error until the day you die.
	I greatly appreciate that perspective.
	That was a struggle I've always had, is not trusting my own judgment of my past.
	And, you know, I'd seek dialogue between people I admired to you know bear it out be like here's what happened and getting their judgment on my perception like we're having this conversation now and I think that key of not rationalizing trauma and bad choices on my parents part and my part and everything and just
	But, you know, the decisions that you make about your past are never your own, when you're in a family situation, if it's dysfunctional.
	Your perspective of your parents' marriage isn't even your perspective of your parents' marriage, it's your parents' perspective of their marriage.
	It is.
	And your perspective of going to work is your mother's needs, it's not your own thoughts.
	Like, the reason why your willpower is controlled by other people is because you have internalized other people's perspectives rather than your own perspective, And therefore you just exist to conform to other people's needs.
	And you're coming to crisis at this point after the six year time with this harridan of a woman that you're with.
	But it's not even your perspectives on your history.
	You know, my mom has a perspective on my dad.
	It's just my mom's perspective.
	It's not the truth.
	I'll never get the truth.
	I have to accept that.
	I could stand excavating my history from here to eternity.
	I'm never going to get the truth, because the people who are around are generally liars.
	So, I'm just not going to get the truth.
	Yeah, I feel that with talking with both of them.
	It's like, why go deep when It's a completely biased perception.
	Yeah, and they may even be able to pass a polygraph.
	It doesn't mean that they're telling the truth, because you can convince yourself of some crazy shit after a while, right?
	Oh yeah, oh yeah.
	Yeah, so just forget about the judgments.
	They're never yours when you're a kid, unless you're in a truly functional household.
	They're other people's, and they're defensive, and they're justifying their positions, which is why it eats away at your life so much.
	If your parents justify their divorce, Rather than say, I had love and I shit on love and I spit on love and I pissed on love and then it just died in my head.
	I did a terrible thing.
	I had children with someone.
	I did not protect my love with that person.
	I destroyed a family.
	I did such great wrong that I can't stand it.
	Can't stand it.
	Well, that would be to take on a burden.
	That would be to take on a burden.
	I did have a, I don't know if the correct word is empathy for my parents because I do realize that I have so much access to so many brilliant people, yourself included, where I can listen to a podcast and I can hear a dialogue between you and someone else who's going through something similar and get a completely refreshing perspective on a similar situation.
	They didn't have that.
	When they were younger, When they were developing, going from their teens, their 20s to 30s, and they had children, they didn't have the abundance of perception.
	What are you talking about?
	They had their neighborhoods.
	They had the... They didn't have a fucking library?
	They didn't have a bookstore?
	There were no self-help books around?
	How old are these people?
	Are they pre-Jung?
	Pre-Freud?
	Pre-any introspection?
	Pre-ethics?
	Pre-Christian wisdom?
	Pre-Greek philosophy?
	Pre-anything?
	Sensible?
	Well, it goes back to discluding yourself from the church.
	I mean, we only went to just show face.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I get it.
	I get it.
	Thou shalt not bear false witness.
	Did your parents ever get mad at you for lying?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so they knew.
	It's important to tell the truth.
	It's morally important to tell the truth.
	So, what are you talking about?
	They didn't have access to Jordan Peterson's podcast, therefore nobody had to be moral before he started podcasting?
	Are you kidding me?
	No, this is helpful.
	They didn't have the desire.
	Yeah, of course they knew.
	Look, whatever your parents punish you for, they're a hundred times more responsible for, because they're the adults, right?
	My mom used to get mad at me if I told a lie.
	But then I found out how much she was lying about.
	I don't have to say, well, you know, I guess she didn't listen to a whole lot of Molyneux, the younger, so she didn't have her son's podcast thrown back in a time capsule from the future, so she wasn't responsible for a damn thing.
	No!
	She's responsible because she punished me for lying, and therefore she can't say, well, but I had to tell you that because I never got that excuse when I was six.
	Why the hell should she have it when she's 40?
	Shouldn't we give six-year-olds a little bit more latitude than a 40-year-old?
	Come on.
	Your parents were completely responsible.
	See, this is what you have to give them, James.
	You have to give them the gift of 100% willpower, of 100% autonomy, of 100% responsibility.
	Do you know why?
	So I can move forward?
	So you get that gift, too.
	You want control over your life?
	You give your parents control over their lives all the way back.
	All the way back.
	100% responsibility for everything they did.
	Nothing less.
	Unless they were unjustly imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, in which case, absolutely, that sucks.
	But if they were in the West, and they were pretty damn free, 100% responsibility for parents.
	Otherwise every excuse you give to them is an excuse that will undermine your life, your willpower, your autonomy.
	Everything you diminish in them, you diminish in yourself, except their major days of responsibility and choices are over because they're old.
	Yours are still underway.
	So stripping them of responsibility is far less harmful than the effect it has on you.
	They are 100% responsible because that's the only way that you can be free.
	If you give them deterministic excuses, you give yourself deterministic excuses.
	Everything we ascribe to our parents, we ascribe to ourselves.
	My mother went crazy, and if I said she had nothing to do with it, I would have gone crazy too, because it would have been inevitable.
	But if I say my mother went crazy because she did not take responsibility and because her thoughts were disorganized and she blamed other people and she refused to accept self-ownership, I have a path out of the madhouse that awaits me otherwise.
	I get to take a turn off from the one-way train ticket to the asylum.
	And you get to have the kind of willpower and the kind of choice that has you not repeat the family smash-up that your parents went through that is absolutely inevitable if you don't change course.
	I need you to understand that very clearly.
	You will end up separating from this woman.
	It will either be now or later.
	But you will end up.
	It's guaranteed.
	Absolutely guaranteed.
	I'm in no delusion that that would happen.
	I feel it.
	When I first moved out here, my intent was a little bit of solitude, because I wanted that time to distance myself from them, and my mom and dad, and just the life that I lived.
	Because it just felt like there was no going back to the idea of the walkabout, the transition time.
	to step into adulthood.
	There was never that.
	It was this one continual chapter and it was so long and it was so over read and I wanted a break and just to come here and just to kind of reflect.
	And that never happened.
	And that's where some of this resentment comes in because I felt like I was on a good path to really deconstruct this and become my own man.
	And then day freaking two, You know, she comes in, and there's never that moment.
	And you say that your parents talked about her negatively, but she served your parents' needs as well, because that introspection would have led you to some criticism of your parents, which they didn't want.
	So let's, I know we've been going for a long time, let's just spend one or two more minutes on, because we've skipped over the most essential part of this breakup, which is not you and the adult, but you and the child.
	Right?
	It's going to be very, very painful, right?
	Yeah, and I rationalize that too, but deep down I know it's going to be very hard on both of us.
	And that's the price you pay for not critically examining your history.
	And it is a price that actually this boy is going to pay, right?
	This eight-year-old boy.
	Because he's gone, right?
	And now this bond is broken.
	Yeah, and I feel that she would Talk very ill of me to him.
	Well, I mean, you're not even married, so what the hell, are you going to try and get joint custody?
	I mean, this, like, what?
	You're probably going to vanish from the kid's life, like... Yeah.
	You were never there.
	You won't be able to call him, you won't be able to mentor him, you won't have a continuation of the relationship, probably.
	I don't know, right?
	Maybe.
	But if she can't admit that she's wrong, and you break up with her, what that means is it's all your fault!
	You're the bad guy and that's going to be poured, like vomit, into the brain and heart and mind and soul of the boy.
	Yeah.
	That's the story.
	Right.
	And I won't get a chance to rebuttal.
	I've tried to have closure with this already, just thinking of what it would be like and Trying to, again, rationalize and just hope that I did the best I could.
	You won't really get it until you become a father yourself.
	You won't really get it and it'll be very tough.
	You'll have to be careful.
	No.
	No.
	When you become a father, when your child gets to be about seven or eight, you're going to find yourself feeling depressed.
	Why?
	Because that's the age of this boy when you leave.
	Yeah.
	And you're going to recognize just what that is.
	It's hard to see now, but it's just something to bookmark for the future.
	Hopefully I've dealt with all these things up until that point, but I do feel the deep desire, because what's the point?
	What's the point of continuing on and being a single guy?
	No, no, you should definitely have kids.
	You're a smart guy, you're a sensitive guy.
	I want to.
	Then you gotta get out sooner rather than later, because, you know, it takes a long time to recover from a relationship.
	Yeah, and the last thing I want is to bring this vile conditioning into the next one.
	Right.
	But you'd be surprised at how quickly you can deal with this stuff if you throw yourself into it.
	And if you're not paying for alcohol, and you're not paying for her debts, and you're not paying for weed, you can pay for therapy.
	Yeah.
	Alright.
	Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
	No, I deeply appreciate your time.
	I know you're trying to save civilization over there.
	Well, you're part of civilization, man.
	And was it a useful convo?
	Did it get you helpful places?
	It did.
	It really allowed me to focus on my parents and my past and the things I'm justifying.
	And I think for me, just to share, you know, anyone else that's listening, going through something similar, Staying clean, clean-headed, staying healthy and physically fit, and really being accountable for, you know, what I want and what I'm not going to put up with.
	Because I really, I fold very easily and that folding really doesn't get me anywhere.
	Right.
	Might get you older.
	Well, listen, thanks for the call.
	I appreciate it.
	Will you drop me a line and let me know how it goes?
	Absolutely.
	Thank you so much for your time.
	Thanks, man.
	Take care.
	Take care, Stephen. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen.
	Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy, and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
	And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.

▲