My seven-year long divorce (in a 20-year long context!)

is going live ah all right we don't get
a countdown when we record these things live off the cup all right i thought i would make a youtube video updating anyone who's interested in the year 2021 and possibly to stand as a monument for my own children or grandchildren to see in the year 2031 or the year 2041 about the seven year long process of my divorce from my first wife as of this date of recording the divorce papers finally are on the desk of the judge so in legal parliaments obviously they're not literally sitting on his desk but all the paperwork is done all the agreements have been signed by both parties and now finally my lawyers in canada will declare us divorce that will declare me single and my ex-wife also now in reality my ex-wife has long since moved in with another man she has had a child with another man i'm happy for her believe me you know go screw up his instead of mine delighting there is absolutely no whinge of envy or jealousy in me believe me and in this video you'll get a sense of the divorce in retrospect interesting that is not just because it has been a seven year process of getting divorced um i'm very happy that she's moved on but my point is uh both her and i our lives have continued to progress for seven years since the start of the on paper divorce process so it's it's a somewhat ridiculous situation um i'm going to talk about the whole context of what went on in my life over 20 years also leading up to the conception of my daughter how i met my wife and then how we split up and i'm gonna be honest with you it's not that long story it's really not and it's always been funny to me whenever people wanted to gossip about this or make up uh make up stories with the internet they were never watching the youtube videos that already disclosed details would happen they also weren't reading the articles on my blog the blog is called a balacial same name as my more popular youtube channel i have a couple youtube channels the best known one is called the palace y'all there's always been a written account of i can't quite say blow by blow what happened in in the divorce uh partly just for concision there are some steps to get there but you know what the truth is the truth is about that written account the main things that are omitted are things that would be unflattering to my ex-wife i have never wanted to come out on the internet and say terrible things with maxwell and and there are terrible things i could tell it's actually really always been my agenda to give a very flattering and that sense like one sided view of the events like i really just don't want to portray her as a bad person honestly that's not even like for my daughter's benefit really it's not it's not really for anyone honestly it just has to do with my own sense of personal integrity like it would be bad for me it would be irresponsible for me for who i am to not even to slander her to tell the truth about terrible this i really just don't think you know and just say for any of you in the audience everyone is six degrees separated from somebody you probably know somebody's in that situation whether they were famous or infamous or unknown you know so anyway i will answer questions in the audience guys so uh one person asked when's the next discord link okay so we'll digress this will be fun we're doing this live so we're gonna get some get some other topics so uh someone with the catchy name verplex asks when's the next discord lick um there was one morning when i woke up and sat down at this very desk i think melissa was not awake yet i routinely wake up earlier than melissa does and i didn't just sit down on my computer but i started doing the computer and i started cooking my breakfast and i went to the bathroom i was you know i was kind of moving around the apartment but i was back and forth to my computer for 40 minutes responding to the stupidest nonsense imaginable on this discord server it was it was exactly the kind of conversation that many years ago already i said i would not have this conversation with somebody unless i were being paid you know look you know there's ethics and integrity and there's there's money involved like if you think about yourselves uh would you you know under what circumstances would you really be someone's therapist would you really help someone and guy i know what you're thinking it would be wonderful to be someone's therapist that's not who i'm talking about someone you don't sympathize with someone you don't like someone you consider stupid and dishonest and maybe even evil you know therapists have to be kind and sympathetic that terrible human beings who have no friends a therapist is someone you are paying to pretend to be your friend quote me on that um you know part of being a therapist is that you get paid and i'm sitting here after 40 minutes at my computer answering this imbecile on discord who isn't even showing any signs of good will or intelligence and again i wasn't sitting continuously for the 40 minutes i'm sure i would have changed my attitude happened i was kind of getting up moving around getting ready for my day and maybe you know stacking up the books on the table so to speak i look at the clock and realize it's been 40 minutes never again not another four minutes not like this is exactly what i swore i was never gonna do on the internet not unless i'm being paid i mean you have to ask yourself then well if i'm being paid 300 an hour am i going to talk to this person for hours you know maybe that's different maybe if you take on the role of a therapist or something it's like i cannot believe i gave this anonymous stranger 40 minutes of my life and and that particular morning i was writing my book as of this moment i still haven't finished writing my book a lot of time goes into writing the book it's like wow i don't need the intellectual exhaustion i don't really need the emotional energy to go in this is just terrible and that very that minute i mean the people other people were on the discord the other people there were witnesses maybe some of them are in the in the audience now it was gone like guess what guys this is being deleted from my life and look there's a listen there's a lesson here for for all y'all you know you got to make those decisions in life i think about really seriously you know how i spend time and how to waste time most you guys know this from talking about quitting video games but even talking about exercise at the gym and stuff i had a period of not going to the gym i am again now but you can let it get out of control you can spend three hours a day at the gym you've got to think about it am i going to listen to podcasts or not i take those things very seriously and by the way anyone who really reads books oh i've still got the books on camera if you want to read just one of these books um the number of hours you spend reading the number of hours you spend running the number of hours you spread spend talking to your friends about their emotional problems you know melissa my girlfriend is a huge priority in my life i basically do talk to her about every little thing that's on her mind and all of her problems but how many people can you have that kind of relationship with like maybe maybe it's just one you know i mean um how you take on those things what have you so yeah uh oh and we've got some people there who are reading some of the books that i've uh have endorsed lately so james mentions that he's got salvation so okay the digression from a digression i am picky about which translation of salas i've got to say okay bless you autograph for me yeah i i actually have a photograph of a bad translation of soloist on cataline i translation that i purchased and i returned i got a refund for it and then i bought this one with a much more much more horrifying cover there i look you know what me and this guy we're the same age with the same it's a vegan diet that's why i've aged so well do you know that we're the same age you know this image crunchy black if you don't know the rapper crunchy black looking same age crunchy black's looking worse than this guy seriously it's it's amazing vegan diet guys i'm not vegan for vanity i'm vegan for ethics and ecological reasons all right this is good talking to the audience this way will break up what otherwise could be kind of a boring story so i'll tell you the story i'm here to tell today one reason i don't talk more about it is because it's boring because nobody's interested like that's and that's a real authentic thing another thing is my tendency to censor myself because i don't really want any say anything uh that condemns uh harshly my ex-wife that kind of says she's a bad person and this is all her fault and we are talking about a story in which you know my ex-wife was a bad person and these things are all her fault i mean that's real there are things where you know you sometimes you've got to talk about that in life if you're going to tell the story so you know there's one carefully worded that way there's also you guys might remember this in some of my videos talking about my parents uh like my relationship with my parents when i have life i've always said look this is my story to tell and this is like my father's story to tell and it's it's not my father's dead you know it's not self-censorship it's like look i feel it's appropriate to tell my sorry my story was over here right my story and talk about what i know and what i'm authoritative about but i'm not i'm not going to try to tell his story even though he he can't tell a story he never will there's also you know kind of a sense of that all right and look you know um a lot of people go through this somebody asked or i can scroll up somebody asked so frida in the audience asked would you recommend anyone to get married say yes say yes absolutely sure no i'm you know on a pragmatic level and very pro-marriage you guys probably know i'm not religious i'm an atheist i don't believe in christian marriage whatever um you know i think it is similar to asking would you join the army well it's very hard to make that decision at age 18. right now i think this is speculative maybe i'm wrong i think if i joined the army at age 18 it would have been a disaster i wouldn't have had the self-knowledge and i wouldn't have had the discipline you know what i mean i wouldn't have been able to make that work now any of you in the audience who are over the age of 18 can ask yourselves what if you had gotten married at 18. and many of you probably were in love with someone at 18. who's that that uh famous singer britney spears okay many of you either had a crush on britney beerus herself when you were 18 or you wanted to be with someone very much like britney spears now here we are in the year 2021 and you can look at the life britney spears has lived and you could you can reflect on what your own life would have been like if you had married britney spears you know it's one of those things it's not really that marriage is bad it's that it's very very hard for people to make that decision and deal with it at age 18. and in terms of human fertility you know what i mean so someone just wrote in from the audience that he or she got married at age 20 and is now getting divorced this year so you know they but look talking about human fertility women you can't wait till you're 35 you can't and in terms of men in terms of your desirability there is this myth that men remain attractive till they're 50 or 55 years old let me tell you something let me tell you you know as a man when you are 25 you got options everywhere i went in the world women were crawling out of the woodwork to sleep with me when i was doing are you kidding women i remember a woman who was 10 years old and me hitting on me and trying to get laid with me in a hotel lobby i was checking into a hotel room so yeah she was she was a white business woman she was wearing a power suit so like i was like no melissa made a joke this was good no she wasn't because you know how young i was she wasn't he wasn't that old anyway you know what i'm saying like yes you know there's a sentiment in which men can remain presentable into their 50s or whatever but no i mean there is a lot of uh there was a lot of uh pressure on both men and women to get married young and reproduce young and it is very hard to have the self-knowledge and the self-discipline you know so so lydia is in the audience uh and what do you complain lydia you have another channel that's blocked i have no i have no memory of this maybe one of my old mods block you lydia or maybe you were really correct maybe you were disrupting the channel five years ago or something last time i don't know sorry lydia i've any other questions about things that happened five years ago anyone want to talk about vegan cheetah no anyone anyone want an update on durianrider and the lawsuit in thailand technically legally it's still an open case in chiang mai guides and when was about a year ago i last got no update from the the lawyer i got an email i think i think about one year ago we moved into this apartment but yeah yeah yeah so you know in in theory there could be hey there could be more progress on my court case with durianrider than in my court case with my ex-wife so right uh uh first things we'll talk about we're gonna do this real real postmodern all right so uh present tense i am employing two lawyers i have a lawyer in canada and have a lawyer in france so this is how the story ends is that you ended up dealing with one political process just to deal with the divorce in canada and then one political process to deal with custody now i just want to clarify custody legally at least in france means seeing your kids at all so in some cultures or some countries people talk about visitation as something different than custody or whatever not the case in this context custody means like if i get to see my daughter for one day that's custody legally in france so negotiating custody means negotiating spending time with your kid at all now i wanted to avoid this and you know we live our lives in the sunlight of positive expectations about the future and in the shadow cast by disappointments we've had in the past all of my sorrow and all of my suffering in this divorce in this court case in this struggle that spend time with my daughter it's really been created by false expectations about what the legal system could or couldn't do for me so my current two lawyers i'm very happy with one very straightforward guy in canada who has had a very straightforward job the canadian side this in this phase of the case the end of the story has not been complex and i have a a a very sophisticated lawyer in france but who is also very blunt and honest with me in a way that none of my other lawyers in france were i don't i don't want to count how many lawyers i went through in france we could in this video i've been through a series of lawyers in france some of which were really terrible and really dishonest with me um another interest an interesting story worth telling for some i mean this is the kind of thing like i don't come on youtube and say hey let me tell you the story about this terrible lawyer i had in the past uh just because i think nobody's interested which is it is for the right person that could be a really valuable youtube video to make if the right person sees it hey here are some problems i've had with lawyers here's what went wrong and here's what you can do here's what i wish i knew before i got in situation but in terms of the sorrow and suffering in terms of the emotional reality of going through this process uh the worst thing was the false hope presented to you by the legal system so this is vegan by the way um my current lawyer in france just says to me straight up like nope all this is hopeless like absolutely nothing positive is possible like the best possible deal you can get out of the french legal system is like what you had before which basically just means you're going to see your daughter at christmas and maybe on one other vacation of the year and that's it like you can see her during christmas break and during the kind of a middle of the summer holiday there are some little minor differences there but nothing the french legal system for you as the father is going to give you nothing more and possibly less like that's how the french legal system so if someone said that to me straight up the beginning i would not have been tormenting myself for example about joining the french military right i you guys know i've talked about my channel more i did look at joining the canadian army i actually went through the applications process and took the intelligence test and went to a bunch of meetings with people you know so i got fairly deep into that but another possibility would have been for me to join the french foreign legion and you're cut off from that i think age 36 and a half it's a very peculiar it's not an even number it's not 30 or 40. it's like it's 36 and a half or 37 and a half or something you know what i mean and you know there was this sense of like oh if only i had joined the french war legion another moment i used to regret was i was living in china this was when i just moved from kunming china to dohan china and there was this one court hearing so some of you guys already know the story so hearing these things that a border won't be won't be that's confusing for you but this was the period when i had been declared legally dead in france and the term used in france in french is that you are missing without a trace so in english we say missing in action we have different idioms for this kind of status but you are declared missing and presumed dead under the law and then you lose all your legal rights and there can be a court case against you where you have no representation and where nobody uh you know uh whatever where other lawyers speak on your behalf and where nobody's there to represent you you're not there and your lawyers out there and anyway in the united states of america um if you google around there are cases where people have their house taken from them or their car taken from this kind of thing like there are fraudulent papers suggesting they're already dead they disappeared without a trace so in my case my ex-wife was relocating from france to germany which i would have no problem with by the way i wouldn't oppose her but i am guessing speculatively that that spurred her to get her act together because she was afraid and it has been expressed she had fears to me that when she crossed some of these borders when she went from france to germany or from france the united states of america this kind of thing that i would be able to intercede and say hey wait that's my daughter i have legal rights over her and this woman is in effect like kidnapping my daughter or something i could cause a problem now the thing is guys morals i've got them from day one in this divorce it has been completely clear i would never do anything to hurt maxwell i would do never do anything even make her life difficult so again i think it's cool to tell the story how to order this way but we'll jump back to this this period when i was legally dead legally declared missing that dress in just a sec you know but like right from the beginning uh my whole attitude was well my ex-wife at the beginning said that she wanted to move to the united states of america that she would either be based in new york city or in seattle and my perspective was okay well i will move somewhere that's far enough away that we don't go to the same grocery store like we don't bump into each other but where i'm close enough that i can be there and help like you know i can both take the kid on alternating weekends or whatever like you know we can we can do co-parents and we cooperate but also like if she had an emergency where she went to the hospital she meant to get there right away where i could get there quickly so in case you guys don't know the geography is a little bit confusing where i'm living now and where i moved at that time victoria british columbia canada you can take a direct ferry from victoria to seattle now it's not ins what takes three hours or something for i don't know it takes a few hours but for sure you know if you've got a kid in a divorce that links uh victoria to uh seattle that's a good combination now another combination like that you know i could have moved to montreal if she were going to be in new york you can take a bus between uh you know montreal and new york you know pretty quickly and easily so this was the kind of thing i was looking to do and it's 100 just to support her so if my ex-wife had said she wanted to go to new york city i'd say hey that's great i'm so happy for you she has different again i'm not telling her story she has reasons why she would want to be in new york city uh if she decided to be in seattle again she has reasons there's nothing to do with me nothing new with microsoft she wanted to live in seattle i would say hey that's great i'm happy for you and i'm not gonna move in next door i'm not gonna move i'm not gonna be looking over the backyard fence over you i'm gonna be a three hour drive away or something i'm gonna be a respectful distance you got to live your life we're divorced we don't want to be together but i'm also close enough that when you need help you know because things happen you go to the hospital with a broken leg you know i really need someone to help me out something like that things things happen you have a problem you can you can call me and i can show up no and also generally we could co-parent on a schedule but like whatever she wanted to do if she wanted to go to berlin germany because there was something positive to do there i'd be happy for her and that's you know there i would not have stopped her moving to germany or hawaii or thailand i mean if she had some positive reason to anything in her life i would have been positive about it and for many years my schedule was open in case you guys haven't noticed before i've been doing youtube my schedule was open and i could have moved almost anywhere in the world to make it work but for her it was really the united states of america specifically new york and seattle that we talked about all right so this was a digression from a digression but step by step we're getting the whole story told and i was digressing from the point about the period in which i was declared legally dead missing without a choice so you know at that stage of the story um there was this haunting possibility because i was in de hong yunnan china i was in a remote part of southwestern china and there was this one hearing where my lawyer briefly spoke before a judge and where basically all he had to get across was this guy is not dead this guy is alive he's well he wants to exercise his rights and there was inappropriate paperwork presented to the french government now this is haunting him anyway so i could have been there i would have just stood there and said nothing it would have been a huge amount of money and at that time i couldn't do it in terms of so is which airlines you can use and so on you had to do something like getting from yunnan to hong kong and then from hong kong to paris or you had to get from yunnan to bangkok and then flipping but at that time and the situation i was in it was not just a lot of money and a lot of jet lag i was just about to start my new job there were a lot of kind of concerns and the particular situation i had with the airlines like which airlines you could use and which you can't because of the point system it's like oh well you can fly with emirates air or they do that but you can't use emirates you have to use this other you have to use cathay pacific it's like they're all these kind of weird rules at that time it didn't work and but no that doesn't mean it was impossible right like if i could have taken a train across russia right like you couldn't say you could have gone to beijing and taken the train from you know beijing to moscow and moscow to paris like it wasn't impossible but it seemed it seemed almost impossible it seemed so hard to do and as far as i knew from the lawyer all you were going to do was stand there and say yeah i'm not dead guys yeah hi this is me this like i've never been dead and there wouldn't have been any other possibility but for so i didn't get there in person my lawyer represented me and what haunted me for years was the possibility that everything could have been better with the divorce and the custody arrangement if only i had made it there if only i'd gotten there to be there in person i'd just be here but now i know so to say you live your life you know in the sunlight of positive assumptions of the future and the shadow cast by positive assumptions you used to have about the future that have been shattered that have proven to be false so you know um i now know from my current lawyer's advice that absolutely nothing more is possible that that what as as nasty as the writ i got from the judge was i got the writ from the judge and i read it in french you know and in french i could tell it was insulting towards me like my knowledge of french is you know i have high school level french or something you know i have some level of literacy in french but i did actually pay a translator to translate in english at least one year later maybe one i forget it was a year later year and half some of that but some time later i got the money to get there and paid a translator to translate the judge's judgment and then only then that i was actually really insulting against both myself and my ex-wife the judge had a really low opinion of both of us she thought we were both losers said all this nice stuff but uh so that too gave me the impression like oh if only i'd been there i've only been able to plead my own case everything could have turned it better but what i now know is that if i'd been there in person it could not have made any difference at all it wouldn't have helped that that you know the outcome the actual so there's a series of these things where it's like oh if only i joined the army if only i had gone to france to attend that day in core maybe i'd think of that now another one so some of you guys might have guessed this i don't know how attentive or i don't know how much you guys read between us you know i had lawyers telling me and again i now know this is completely false they say well if you can just get a regular low-paying job that's going to help with this going through the courts so that was one of the reasons to go to baking school and become a baker it's like you have a path opening in front of you and it's like well i can get a master's degree and a phd i can stay in academia but that's many years of work leading to uncertain employment if at all and like the type of employment you get it's kind of bits and pieces here and there i can become a baker and then have a regular contract and a regular i was going to say nine to five job but it's probably like a four a.m to 11 a.m job or something you know can work at a uh i got a question from the audience is this cranberry juice so this is in fact a low sugar cranberry juice this is one of those calorie reduced cranberry juices which uh and it's diluted and of added water so this is maybe three quarters or four fifths uh water among my talents is actually not forgetting the topic i was on while digressing to answer questions in the audience so thanks thanks for that that question for you um yes where were we uh there were these haunting possibilities that everything could have turned out better for me and my daughter if only i had joined the army if only i had become a baker if only i had managed to make it to this court date and then also i've alluded to the fact i'm happy with the lawyers i have today but i had several really bad lawyers and then there's a haunted question of well what if i'd had a better lawyer what if this lawyer hadn't let me down what if it hadn't been so hard to find a new lawyer after that lawyer quit you know what i mean instead of these gaps in the schedule where you're sending emails every day trying to hire a new lawyer and nobody who wants the case you know what uh these are sorry these are also big problems with the american legal system the canadian legal system but i have learned with the french you know legal system it's it's really ridiculous you can talk about you know equal rights for all humanity well guess what humanity does not enjoy the equal right even to get divorced you know so it says you know look guys i i know i'm not poor um and just to mention you know my parents started having money really when i was in university um when i was in high school they were still pretty broke and that's related to the fact that my father had nine kids with innumerable different women i'm not all with one mother but you know i didn't grow up rich and my parents didn't have money when i was in primary school and uh even high school really but i am aware today i am enjoying the privilege of money earned kind of before i was born wherever you want to put it you know and uh you know that my parents my parents success in their careers even though that success came as they say more like at the very end of high school than when i was in university or something uh they started making money uh you know even someone in my position can't get a lawyer and can't get divorced in france you know where you can't at any price like even when you're saying to these look i have money i can put cash on the table today and you still can't get a lawyer you still can't get it done you know so how much worse is it for people who don't have that kind of money now i said to my mother at one point and she did not enjoy me saying this term but sometimes my mother and i joke around we do we have a much better relationship today than we had 10 years ago or something believe me no comparison but this this was a circumstance in which she she did not uh from my perspective i was joking around she did not take this job i said so tell me you know tell me gail gail's appeared on my youtube channel by the way there are a couple videos calendar says tell me gail you're a member of the order of canada you're a knight because she's been knighted can't she's received a knighthood and you'll member of the what is it called the honor guard in france she's a chevalier in france she's a knight in france forget what they call it the order of the chevaliers chevrolet is literally like horsemen you know it's literally she's a knight yeah okay you are you have been knighted in both france and canada and you are not in a position to be able to find a lawyer for your own son to get divorced like there is no favor you can call in there's no email you can't there's nobody i just need a normal confident lawyer for a very simple divorce you know my ex-wife and i we didn't own a business together you know we don't have any property we didn't own a car together there's nothing to divide to speak of right and i mean you know i just mentioned it is also uh interesting um you know in the only divorce papers we have from france my ex-wife says she's going to pay me several tens of thousands of dollars in settlement which is for a real reason legally so legally at the time of separation under french law she did owe me money uh that is basically because of the laws against abandonment uh in france that the situation was you know the months leading up to my daughter being born and us separating this is interesting in many ways you know she was a university professor and i had been a university student so she was financially the sole provider in the relationship and when we broke up in taiwan she just abandoned me without even enough money to buy an airplane ticket to go back to canada so you know that is exactly what french law is supposed to prevent like if you decide to split up if you get divorced even if you both have an income but one of you guys more income you are supposed to take the time and spend the money to make sure that the other person you know moves into a new apartment or moves moves back in with their parents and they can get to where they need to go there is actually a legal obligation the other person so that is probably in the paperwork several points including the judge saying it the judge comments on it i'm forgetting but several tens of thousands of euros my ex-wife was supposed to pay me now the amount of money that has been spent on lawyers and airplane tickets and vacations to see my daughter says that so much money has been wasted in seven years for nothing that obviously that some my ex-wife promised to pay me which i didn't negotiate with her science states in the legal doctrine states that she's about to pay me this amount of money but she never did there was never any promise made between the lawyers but it's she said it to the judge said to the judge that hearing and it's in the record of the court documents she was going to pay the settlement probably she said that the judge so that the judge wouldn't evaluate the case in terms of abandonment in terms of that uh that moral obligation you know um yeah i'll just trail off and leave that leave that paragraph uh i'm finished so much money was wasted over that seven year period someone's writing in saying do more live streams uh that's my plan so i know there were a lot of people who were live streams back when i did them on younow um i've been thinking a lot coming back something talked about um whatever 30 minutes ago or something earlier you know i think a lot about how i use my time and i think the channel i'm thinking about making more of my content live stream discussions of what i've been reading what research i've been doing what i'm writing about what i care about in politics uh what's happening in the news in that sense so you know shifting to a mode where i'm living my life and then i'm talking about it on youtube instead of really creating content for youtube now the problem with that is twofold one not that many people are interested in what i'm reading i mean it's important stuff it really is let me just give you an example here this is the kind of this is the kind of digression that makes it more interesting to listen to what i talk about his divorce i think yes this is this is a book titled the machiavellian moment from about 1975 uh won a bunch of awards back then this is about the extent to which the political philosophy of machiavelli was much much more important to the writing the american constitution and uh the history of politics in england and western europe than anyone today realizes or gives credit for okay for me to make a youtube video on it it's very daunting and it's going to be counterproductive it's not even going to reach 500 viewers it's important yeah that's why i bought the i paid money for this book it's not a library book you know it's important it's meaningful i want to put some time into it but you think well maybe this can reach an audience if i'm just coming on and doing a live stream and i'm answering your questions i'm interacting with you guys uh talking about this and that but i'm also talking about hey guys here's something i've been reading here's something really interesting about political history united states and western europe and machiavelli maybe that can work but you know the question is when you do that kind of mixed format where the format is i'm an intellectual living my life as an intellectual who wants to come along with me you know i mean this is the research i'm doing this is what i'm learning this is what i'm working on and you know even a lot of the time there's stuff going on in the news and politics i have a lot to say about currently melissa here's what i have a lot to say about politics every day i do paul it's sometimes it's contemporary politics sometimes it's history sometimes it's world war ii or ancient athens or whatever i mean i'm talking about you know i'm talking about uh historical uh politics all the time too but you know the problem is you will be making youtube videos where the title of the video doesn't have any particular hook for any particular audience you know as a as opposed to you know if you pick a okay so someone just suggested israel-palestine video right okay well if you have a video that's just about israel-palestine maybe someone googles that and maybe they choose your channel and maybe they give you a chance to say oh okay that's a perspective maybe it's not you're not going to reach very big audience that way if you do a video something i've done many many times and you talk about jake paul or onision i would love to imagine that 10 years from now in the future 20 31 someone's going to watch this video they're going to say who is jake paul who is an issue it's very unlikely to be watching this and saying where is israel what is palestine i think that conflict will still be going on 10 years ago i think they'll know exactly what we mean by that but yeah you know where you you you make a video where there's a clear hook okay people are interested in this people are googling this and then they're gonna see my video they're gonna hear what i have to say about political philosophy morality or what have you so you know this is this is for me it will be a big change and look you know i'm i'm not complaining but you know i have to take this on with the humility of knowing you know there are really only a few dozen people who will be there when you're when you're broadcasting live and how many people am i going to reach with that content later a lot of my viewers do like to listen to my stuff while they're washing the dishes or while they're doing stairmaster a lot of people do like it when i have long format one hour two hour videos so they're advantages advantages i know i mean a lot of my they'll be fine oh okay one hour talking about various political and philosophical and historical and ethical and current investing okay some some people will be down for it but i think all of you might be surprised at how small the instead is currently in the last couple of months you know about 50 percent of my viewers are new which is surprising to me uh and a lot of people probably don't like my content they're probably people who come watch a video hate it never come back but you might think that all my views are from regular viewers and they're not in any given like if i have 80 000 views in a month according to youtube 40 000 of them are new so either 40 000 of them are actually new or i have a lot of viewers who are using uh software that doesn't let youtube track them you know i mean they're people who care about their privacy and they're using the kind of setup where youtube regards them as a new viewer every time they come back as they're getting rid of their cookies they're using one of those privacy rules this is possible that's something we can't measure so yeah with all due humility we're probably going to be looking at a period of time on the channel where the quality of the content is going to increase the depth and meaningfulness of the content is going to increase the amount of interaction i have with you guys in the audience i'm reading what you're saying right now will increase but probably my audience is going to fall in half that's that's my prediction maybe we come back three months from now and say oh no you were wrong this is way more approachable that's you know that is a question because i know not everyone has the self-confidence to sit down and watch a video that opens with me in this very confident very masculine way these are not my words people write and complain i've seen complaints that my style is too macho how how can i be more effeminate come on come on guys but people are and also people think i'm right wing for that reason this is very confident heterosexual presence on camera coming down and saying look guys you think you understand what's happening in xinjiang china but you're wrong and now for the next 15 minutes i'm gonna tell you how wrong and ignorant you are you know i i get it that's not so approachable so it is possible that the more relaxed joking format of these live streams that you're experiencing right now it is possible that will reach a larger audience but if i'm making bets i gotta say i i kind of doubt it all right so you know first things last let me tell you a little bit about my life and you know some of you guys won't know this um and some of you will probably stop and wonder why it is you have never asked so in the year 2001 so we're going to bring up go up to the birth of my daughter the divorce real quick there is not that much to say in the year 2001 i started studying pali and cambodian in canada now still to this day i believe if you google it there are things posted on the internet maybe a couple from late in the year 2000 there are things on the internet from 2001 of me uploading and scanning things reflecting the fact that at that time i was studying the cambodian language and pali in canada so already back in uh 2001 i was studying those languages and thinking about pursuing a life that combined humanitarian work and research in the field um you know i was reacting against the kind of intellectual and moral inertia of my professors at the university of toronto i saw how those guys had lived their lives i thought i'm not going to end up like you and i was again i was looking at studying the ancient classical literary language of buddhism and buddhist philosophy pali and also the modern language of cambodia i was interested in the the reality of uh of life cambodia was today as well as the history so that's 2001. we were recording this now in 2021 so it's my it's my 20-year anniversary i should also mention i am going to respond to some of these things in the comments guys i should mention at that time i considered seriously not doing pali not doing cambodia instead doing ojibwe cree first nations languages in canada and committing to that political scene and there were different reasons why i didn't uh take that path at that time i i would later as it will unfold in this uh 20 years uh resume in my life um but you know one of them was having to move out of my parents house immediately um my relationship with my parents was bad to say the least and we had a period of fully 10 years of not talking to each other to jump ahead now it probably didn't start from that moment in 2001 probably something like 2003 to 2014 or something we didn't i'd figure out exactly what tenures were but i remember when i finally did talk to my father again after after 10 years this is just a little anecdote that's illustrated he was very much in denial that we hadn't spoken for 10 years he would he would talk to me like he just talked to me two weeks ago or something you know and i said to him right at the beginning of the conversation his first time talking over the phone in more than ten years really really i think maybe been 11 or 12 years but for since a phone conversation been a long time uh maybe i'm wrong anyway i've been a long since jennifer and i said well look can you hear me okay you know the last time i talked to you you were really going deaf and you had a hearing aid and like is this like is this okay or should we be typing like you know how how deaf are you now and he got furious at me and he started yelling at me that you know he had had this surgery to improve his hearing more than 10 years ago and how could i say that and that was totally wrong i told her like he was kind of like are you delusional and so after he yelled at me this way it tells you tell me what kind of comment that was um i said to him yeah we haven't talked in more than 10 years the last time i talked to you was before you had that surgery and you had a hearing aid and you were going down you know and he just said he just wanted he said whoa i guess it really has been 10 years he's still uh he's still you know he was still kind of small town canadian already said that the same way it's kind of canadian uneducated canadian stereotype he was still a guy who grew up in him oh i guess you guys we really haven't dog daddy that's right so anyway one of the reasons why i did want to commit to doing there were many reasons but one of the reasons to get out and go to cambodia now instead of taking some other path again was i gotta move out of the house and never attack my parents again and that was one way to do it so another solution i could have joined the army or something didn't even consider it i talked about that with my girlfriends the other day after september 11 2001 joining the army would have led to a whole different life for me did not even consider it i did uh just to tell you a little bit more about my life 2001 i did apply for and start the process of joining the police police officer um again that's not a big deal you don't really go to training sessions that's it you go to information sessions but go to the police station and talk to people and find them so i considered you know quite a few very fundamentally different paths in life but in 2001 i was already studying the ancient philosophical language pali and the modern language cambodian and i was assuming i was going to move to cambodia forthwith i ended up eventually in cambodia but i lived in quite a number of other countries in asia first all right nacho business says uh did you ever regret the decision to cut contact with your parents no um you know okay there is this illusion in western culture that you only mature between like ages 11 and 18 or something or even let's say between 11 and 24. you know people mature all the time you guys are getting more mature today you're going to feel 10 years older by the end of this live stream anyone who stays here for the whole live stream will feel 10 years older you know my father changed between age 50 and 60 and between 60 and 70 my mom changed between 50 and 60 and 60 and 70. and no um the decision to stop talking to my parents was good for me um you know was it good for them is actually a very very different question i think there are a lot of people who would benefit a lot from cutting off their parents for 10 years a lot of people in western culture certainly like i don't know if we're talking about i mean like it's really different i have some friends who are muslim who are from you know muslim family they're atheists because they're my friend you know they're my friends but you know people who are born and raised in in muslim families that's a very different question you know do you cut your parents off and stop talking to them whatever there are different cultural situations but if you were growing up speaking english in the western world i think there were a lot of people for whom a ten-year hiatus or a 10-year silence italian is is really the right decision and it can help you mature and can help them mature and i mean something i had to say to my parents again and again over those years was um actions have consequences you know if you do this to me there are consequences and everybody's parents are different but i'd say with my parents and with a lot of parents uh it can be a real challenge for the child to lay down the law that way and to draw the chocolate and say no there are limits there are rules and there are consequences for you if you break your word to me if you let me down if you lie to me if you manipulate me if you abuse me let's use a really vague word you know actions have consequences and there are a lot of children you know who grow up at some age or another and they have to in that way laid on law now you know um when i started talking to my father again he already knew he was gonna die well i think he thought he was going to die within a year he actually lasted a couple years two years or three years after that uh sorry i should be more precise for maybe it was even five years it was he died several years but you know the doctors told them you are gonna die like now and he thought he was going to die soon and he admitted to me openly at that time when he was talking to me he was expecting to be on his deathbed he had some operations and things that extended him for he got like an extra three years out of an operation that he didn't know he was going to get kind of thing but um you know he admitted to me that he really missed you know my friendship he missed having conversations with me about politics having a conversation with history and so on that he really valued that that he really you know he really appreciated having someone in his life who could challenge him intellectually and whatever and i can certainly see it from his perspective his life must have gotten a lot lonelier when i disappeared from it uh you guys you guys know i like to talk about politics yes but you know my father had such extreme and eccentric use on politics i mean he he would tell these anecdotes not getting the irony many people if he tried to talk about politics with him they would just humor him they would regard him as crazy and oh yeah you know you know they would kind of smile at him and chuckle but wouldn't really respond they would regard him as someone who was trapped in a dream and in some ways he was i mean to talk to him you had to kind of drag him out of that dream world and say no this is this is reality in front of that and i think you know i will say this i don't believe my father ever had another friend as as good as me that during the years i talked to him i was more of a friend to him than than anyone else he'd ever had now after we stopped talking he might claim he had other friends who were that good but what he mostly had around him were flatterers and syncophants and uh people who didn't really probably mr sycophant sycopheth flatwares and sycophants there's a little audio typo for you um and you know that's partly because of who he chose to spend time with who who chose to spend time with him there there's a lot of different kind of filtering factors that way but no i don't think he had anyone else who really sat down with them and said no like you know what you're saying about joseph stalin is wrong and what you're saying about yugoslavia is wrong what you're saying about economics is wrong and what you're saying about population and demographics as well and really talking about those things and kind of very you know you know caring but aggressively i did i did care about him i didn't talk to him in a cruel way or rarely rarely was i was that cool and you know he he laughed a lot in those conversations too in case you guys are thinking this is this is just fighting and he was able to laugh at and enjoy that stuff but no i definitely before i came into his life my father did not have anyone he could talk about that stuff with and i would suspect that after i left his life he didn't have anyone i could talk to that way um even though because of his ego he would probably claim that he did and i saw the way he interacted with other people and yeah it was sad so anyway i say this now this is now 2021 and we have no idea what's going to happen with me and my daughter this way will we move on if you guys are all watching this youtube channel in 2031 will my daughter be a character on this channel or maybe more likely maybe my daughter sends me emails and then i answer for questions oh my daughter wrote in asking about politics or philosophy that's conceivable to me that my daughter could become a character in my life that way she could be someone who challenges me about politics and disagrees maybe my daughter will be right-wing maybe she'll be left-wing who knows you know we don't know about what my own interactions my daughter are going to be in the future yeah anyway so there you go heavy heavy answer to a heavy question the original question was is it a good idea to to cut off you know your own parents for for ten years but yeah you know in my case for me it was the right thing to do and i was saying was it really a good thing for you know for my father or for my mother it would have been a lot of work for me to get through with them get for me to get through to them in those years you know what really helped was that when i came back decades later various things had really humbled them and it was hard but you could get through to them oh it was real my girlfriend seen some of that is not easy but you know when you talk to people who don't care about the difference between true and false the difference between right and wrong it's very very hard very very hard to address anything whether it's pragmatic things in your personal life or political things it's a very very hard situation to deal with um and that is my situation with my parents and it has been my whole life since i was a child you know and i say that there are people who will tell you my parents are brilliant there are people tell you my parents are geniuses or at least that they're highly accomplished and so on i know that they're not you know that was also what was i think valuable for my father was someone who could really challenge him on his i knew like i knew the difference between what he had read like what if he'd actually read a book or if he had just read something in a newspaper being said about it but i knew that difference and i could tell even from the way he was thought i could catch those things but he was able to go into the world talk to his own employees he just his own employees were afraid of him they didn't want to be fired whatever they you know they wouldn't want to talk back to him and you know he'd be able to just you know dilate on any issue he'd be able to speechify on issues he really didn't know anything about and there wasn't there wasn't any pushback that way so yeah i mean i think also um you know look it's an interesting question different people ask me i've got some very flattering email lately from a professor a guy with a phd in a traditional i got an email professor and the main thing he was writing back okay he wrote to me about the substance of my videos but he said again and again that he's so impressed with just the quality of my performance so to speak he said your manner of speaking and talking about ideas and philosophy and history and so on you know i think the extreme hostility of the house i grew up in i think it really does explain that why from an early age it's like i had to adapt i had to develop my ability to argue my own case or die you know like it was really growing up in a very very hostile um household where you had to argue on your father it's something i've said to different i've said to kind of many different people in my life like people i've known intimately and personally when they have their own problems there are no challenges but some of that to say again again people is if you don't argue your own case who will if you don't stand up for yourself who will and a lot of those people in my life whether these are kind of girlfriends or just men who are my friends whatever but they're people who know me personally i think a lot of them grew up with very protective parents and on a deep level they assume there's someone else to argue their case there's someone else to stand up for them maybe because their own parents did that maybe their older brother did or not too but you know i grew up really knowing and feeling an understanding if i don't argue my case nobody will and you've got i've got to be prepared you know to deal with anything and everything deep or shallow you know profound or you know um you know i've i've got to be ready really 24 7. um and i am and i live that way to this day and you know again i know you guys only see me on youtube you might think i do a lot of preparation for me because i don't i put in the camera and go and i sometimes i just i've thought about something for two minutes while i was in the shower and then i go and that's it but if you guys ever meet me at an airport or at a at a conference at a political event you will see i am ready to go at any time you can talk to me about aristotle or you can talk to me about you know buddhist philosophy absolutely anything i am ready to lecture at a university professor level on all topics at any time and other people like when i was at cambridge and so on they noticed that they noticed the difference well there are these other guys who can go away for two weeks and prepare and then say something halfway intelligent but this guy with no preparation you know he can he can deliver you know this kind of stuff so that's that's the difference and it's reflected in the whole way of life okay frida asked a question some number of minutes ago she asks did your father ever get disillusioned with communism okay so it's an interesting question because of the wording there's a difference between being disillusioned with something and ceasing to believe in it so you see what i mean you can be disillusioned with the catholic church and still be a true believing catholic like okay you realize the catholic church is totally corrupt but you might even become more committed to it because you're trying to redeem it you know what i'm saying in that sense you know my father was a uh you know my father was a combination of both like you know you so if you're asking was he disillusioned with communism yes but you know he never lost his grip on communism whether or not communism you know lost its grip on him to my knowledge right up to the end as an old old man wearing black leather pants and driving a bright yellow sports car he went to communist party meetings in downtown toronto canada where he would have stood out like a sore thumb what a bad idiom to standalone he certainly would have been a prominent eminence this elderly man wearing these ridiculous pants and stepping out of a bright yellow sports car obviously not part of the proletariat of the poor and attending communist meetings downtown now why did he do that you know um was it because he had something to give or something to get or both you know anyway okay so a question some really simple questions here which is fine uh plant-based howard asked are you a university teacher no when i lived in china i did have a job as a university professor but i was the english language professor which is a lower rank than you know being a phd welding professor but no i'm here in canada as a university student i have a bachelor's degree in political science and my second bachelor's degree which is not yet complete is basically in chinese in asian studies chinese japanese the politics and history of asia so that's some real basic information and part of the context for that goes back to your 2001. okay as i say i'm happy to answer these questions audience because the story i have to tell here is not that long so all right there were some other language questions here about language learning i can't really do everything in in one video guys um you know another time let's do a video talking about uh language learning but i think if you guys don't know just look in the description below any of my videos and there's a link to a special channel that is just the language learning advice and that channel is basically called isil mazard it's my name as opposed to a balacial so there is a special youtube channel that and probably your questions about learning languages honestly probably most of them are answered there i've i've said i've said almost everything you probably want to hear me say about learning languages if you if you scroll through those videos all right so already in the year 2001 i had started studying both modern cambodian and pali and their stuff on the internet still to prove it whoo that's embarrassing so i remember myself as moving to live in asia permanently in 2003 maybe soon as i even missed members do this i actually did not get to hong kong until january of 2004 so it was just when the year 2004 says so there you go in my own memory i remember that being soon after 2001. so my you know so during 2001 2002 2003 i was in toronto uh trying to get my diploma from university i'd finished the courses i needed quite a long time before they gave me the diploma that's stupid bureaucracy and this kind of thing so i was technically still a student at the university of toronto finished all the course i needed to do i was studying british philosophy or studying these languages i was trying to find a way forward in my life i applied to go to school to become an emt i formally enrolled like i paid the application fee in philadelphia to become an emergency medical technician which is basically to say a type of special nurse that works in the back of a uh an ambulance i applied to become a police officer i applied to work in construction and my father stopped me my father wouldn't let me get a job as a bricklayer a working construction so in those years there's a lot of suffering and a lot of agony uh say 2001 2002 2003 but my life in asia actually began in january of 2004. uh it felt like a million years but uh soon enough i moved from hong kong to taiwan so i don't know exactly how many months it was it was obviously less than one full year that i was living in downtown hong kong so it was six months or eight months or two i don't know um uh i moved from hong kong to taiwan got a horrible apartment in taiwan was living in taiwan moved from taiwan to bangkok so apparently i was already in oh wow that's hard to believe before 2004 it ended i was already in bangkok maybe i was just visiting that damn wow sorry it was a lot of living it was a very intense period of my life one date that is certain was that i started living in the capital city of laos on march 3rd 2005. so maybe january february march how long was i living in bangkok before i moved to vienna laos i don't know so in a pretty tight succession in a very intense period of my life i moved in to hong kong then taiwan then bangkok thailand all in between 2004 and the very start of january 2004 through to you know the end of 2005 and then in march 2005 i'm in vientiane so guys sorry this really is part of the background how i ended up married to my first wife who i'm now getting divorced from in case you missed the start of this video or the the topic of this video um you know uh all right i pursued a combination of humanitarian work and research in these places when i was living in bangkok i was relatively cash rich and time poor so i had money but not time because i had a very exhausting full-time job and i several times flights within thailand were very very cheap at that time an interesting story there was actually a scandal and people i think went to jail for it but there was kind of a price fixing scheme within thailand to make these these flights really cheap i read about in the newspapers i'm not an expert but flights were like it was like taking an airplane was like the same amount of taking a bus kind of thing but i can remember several times i took flights from bangkok out to remote places in northeastern thailand and i was really i was living in bangkok i was thinking do i want to make my future my immediate future and my scholarly future do i want to make that cambodia do i want to make that myanmar or do i want to make that laos so we've had some questions from the audience um like you know do you regret making this decision of that decision one of the biggest decisions i made in my life was standing at that fork of the road look and really four ways one option was just to stay in thailand there was no reason to leave thailand stay in thailand move to myanmar move to cambodia move to laos and for different reasons including my blonde canadian girlfriend who had dragged over from canada that time she felt she was not tough enough for cambodia and laos by contrast would be easy would be survivable and that was one of the decisive factors now you know what i mean sorry i'll just include this so i don't believe in any supernatural things i have no superstitious beliefs but you know i did once uh no i've got a question but when is this book coming out stay tuned follow me on youtube and instagram i'm basically uh i'm busily writing the last drafts of the book the book is titled no more manifestos we had a great question earlier is no more manifesto it's going to be a manifest though great question uh some of my earlier writing i was writing manifestos in the past and no i feel i feel that this is not a manifest it would be an interesting criticism of the book if someone would like to write a book review attacking no more manifestos as just being another manifesto that'd be a very incisive criticism but i think you will see the book uh in parts it's deadly serious but you know in parts it is uh humorous too i mean there's joking around there too i i feel it's a roller coaster it's emotionally exhausting for me to read it when i read it and i'm doing it like just just going through one chapter like i feel i feel tired obviously it won't be so gripping for everyone but if you care about those political and philosophical issues um i think it covers issues honestly that everyone kind of cares about it's hard it's hard not to care most fundamental issues in in politics then maybe it'll be gripping and exhausting for you for you too all right so there's a question can you release the other chapters uh well it will be published as a book one way or another ultimately worst case scenario it'll just be a kindle doc on on amazon you know it'll be the cheap self but we'll see um but you can get chapters the pdf now if you join my patreon which is one dollar a month so it's it's really a kind of okay so this person asking us already that's a funny comment someone someone comments they're keeping it real and losing friends as a result yeah that's a great great job for youtube anyway yeah you can uh get many of the chapters of the book but not the whole book right now if you join my my patreon and i can send you a link or you can just search for it but yeah it's there chapter one two three four five maybe up to chapter ten that you can get okay um so yeah how did i end up with my first wife this really is part of the answer to the question so my first wife when i met her was a phd student getting a phd in anthropology now if you don't know this many areas of phd studies do not keep you a prisoner on the university campus but send you out in the field to do research and then you come back at some point you come back to present your thesis or write your uh right exams or what have you so you know she was someone who was in asia living in asia and in theory doing research in asia but she was on paper still a student at her university in england getting this phd so she was you know a field researcher some people already don't understand that so she's not in class she's not attending lectures or anything like that she's out doing whatever anthropological research is uh there were actually a couple of newspaper articles that referred to me as an anthropologist i think just one did it and then another newspaper article copied the first one it was just amused me i did not consider myself an anthropologist but i was pursuing a combination of research and humanitarian work and the research research was partly modern and political about the real world now as it really is what's really going on poverty and war and revolution and politics all that stuff and it was partly ancient and philosophical and you know and archaeological even you know dealing with ancient so i was having a very mentalist in my life and she was someone who had come out to young and china you know signed up for a similar sort of course of research but when i met her my ex-wife had actually totally lost faith in that course of action she had totally lost hope and she had basically decided to drop out of her phd um i think she hadn't fully decided as to whether she was going to drop out permanently or if she was just gonna many universities allow you to kind of put your phd on pause like where she just kind of quit for five years and then maybe come back five years later but she had actually decided to give up on her research she'd given up on a lot of things in life just at that time just in kind of a couple months before she met me including significantly that she had given up on vegetarianism she had gone back to eating meat after many many years of being a vegetarian so i was at that time what i called strictly vegetarian the word vegan was not that common back then i know you guys won't believe me but if you're talking about whatever 2001 2005 i was a vegetarian but i refused to eat eggs i tried to refuse to own or use leather living in places like laos and cambodia i could now tell you a bunch of stories about how i did end up using leather because i had no better alternative good luck buying boots in cambodia in 2004 or something with our native leather but anyway um i lived a life but before i met my ex-wife i did have parmesan cheese on pasta for example but i lived a life that was pretty uh close to vegan so i came into her life at a time when she had really lost a sense of hope and purpose about her own research about her own life as an intellectual and then she meets me and i'm this very self-disciplined very serious very inspired and inspirational and very hard-working you know self-made intellectual i don't have no phd program i'm not signed up with anybody i'm writing and doing research and publishing articles completely dolo completely independently complete with nobody i don't have a teacher i live for another i never had a teacher for pally i never had a teacher for lotion you know like oh i taught myself lotion while boiling my own porridge you know over a wood fire in northwestern laos and you know she came from a field she came from anthropology where they kind of worship or valorize going out and living with poor people in remote villages whether those be tribal people or what have you and living with them and studying their cultures that's what anthropologists especially respect it's like oh well i've just been doing that and you know i'm not i'm not even part of a phd this is the stuff i've been doing because this is what i care about this is what's meaningful to me in life uh which by the way i'm totally self-critical about too i mean it's not like i'm glorifying this i don't encourage my viewers to go through that stuff either you know but it's like oh yeah i've just been out doing exactly the stuff my ex-wife you know was kind of supposed to be doing but wasn't my ex-wife was in this kind of downcast demoralized state she was talking about dropping out of her phd program to become a jazz singer to sing jazz full-time in beijing china and i came into her life and as soon as she meets me like you know these were not hostile conversations but it's just like she meets me and says well what what are you talking about you know you are in a phd program at one of the most prestigious the most desirable institutions in the world and you're throwing it away to sing jazz you know and you know you're maybe it's different if you're signed up to be a jazz singer in los angeles with some big you know record label but this is you know this is this is not the big time or something is being a lounge singer in somewhere in beijing where you know it's probably just to have an exotic foreigner who speaks english fluently singing jazz that's obviously what the what the deal is here you know what i mean um i've got some questions audience i do want to answer but i don't want to drop myself too much but anyway i see you guys uh you know and i came into her life and then all of a sudden it's like no look this is what it is to me lead a meaningful life this is what it is to wake up and be positive and motivated every day and this is what it's like to now be in love with somebody she fell in love with me immediately someone who's really interested in your research and i like i'm interested in what she's reading and i'm interested in what she's writing and i'm encouraging her that way you know someone you're talking to about these ideas day by day and you know you become a kind of power couple okay even if it's just listening i mean a lot of you guys might underrate that you whatever field you work at but okay if you're working in something like anthropology and you're all alone and nobody else thinks that what you do is interesting you don't know what the point is and the university degree is never going to earn you any money and you feel and if she did feel correctly that her university was corrupt and that it was all that is true and you know she meets someone like me and my attitude is like yeah yeah the university is corrupt the university is but not you you're gonna be real in the way that they are fake like you know you are gonna do for yourself and buy yourself everything they're not doing for you like you're going to be an auto diet act you know like here's how to do it here's that i just didn't make it happen so she had someone who was in that way a very positive influence on her suddenly come into her life and i was coming out of the background i just described uh from 2001 to 2005 right so oh yeah there is a trip in there to sri lanka some of the photographs of me that are still floating around the internet are from that time sri lanka so that was december through january 2006. i was in sri lanka i have a lot of memories from that short trip i continued living in laos uh 2005 all the way through to september 7th of 2007 so i haven't told it in all that amusing away on youtube but i believe twice i've told the story of how i was suddenly exiled from laos um and it's a funny story to tell in a funny way and it's a sad story of telling a sad way but i was doing humanitarian work again this combination of humanitarian work and research went out to these remote villages where in theory people were starving in reality they were what's called food insecure so if they didn't have this kind of uh support from charities and the government they would have run away to thailand they wouldn't have just sat there and starved to death that's ridiculous but it was this politically and ecologically complex situation frankly so it was out doing humanitarian work and that was with a european uh humanitarian agency and a member of the lotion government uh threatened to kill me there were a lot of funny details to her threats too um they were gonna kill me and my parents would never find my corpse and then i'd never have a traditional jewish funeral i was like you know geez you've really thought this through you know what i i laughed at the time i laughed in her face i thought it was hilarious oh no i'm not going to have a jewish funeral wow you you don't know too did she get this out of the like communist party emmanuel of how to be threatening to white foreigners is like had she been trained and what you're supposed to say we're trying to intimidate someone it was a really ridiculous uh situation but yeah i i was i was given you know death threats and then the other thing that was said the situation was and you know and i could laugh at it you you guys know me some people maybe this is their first video uh watching on my channel i don't know anyone in the audience if this is your first time ever watching a video on my channel say so okay i'd be surprised but you know i'm a very self-disciplined very detached person if you've uh if you don't i was able to remain calm and attached and and cool but you know uh you know even under fire even when you're literally being threatened with death and these things you know uh but my co-workers were not and my co-workers they were taken in and uh interrogated by the communist party and so on there was this whole serious thing so you know i feel sorry for them i feel sorry for everyone involved and so i ended up suddenly exiled from laos and you know i was told i could never return or if i did return i could maybe sneak in and not be noticed but if if i come back you know there the equivalent to the cia is going to be watching me there's secret service is watching me which they did eventually i had to go back because the only money i had in the world was in a bank account i mean it was only i had a couple thousand dollars i figured what i had two thousand dollars to me or something and uh there the secret service guys did uh you know they did follow me and stuff uh you know not a big deal i'm just being honest with you i don't think that's even you know inappropriate or something but yeah i had one i had one encounter so to be clear it's not that they walk down the street next to me in this day and age you don't need to do that for surveillance but i remember when i went to a bus station the intercity bus station there were intelligence guys there who were who were watching me and commenting on me and they were speaking in code openly this was a surreal experience to hear people like hear people speaking out loud and what's supposed to be a secret code bizarre anyway and i went over i went over and intimidated them too i don't know if i already told that story on youtube i don't think so anyway funny story anyway uh and look i just want to say i don't i don't blame those guys i don't have this kind of hysterical anti-cia anti-secret service attitude uh there was one point when i was in yunnan with my first wife not any divorce from the top of the video there was one point when we were there together and uh the chinese government had their secret service checkup on us a couple times i think i remember three times them them coming and checking up on us and you know i mean you know it's their job you know i i i don't see it as such a negative thing you know and uh i you know i'm obviously i'm not a threat to anyone or whatever but you know they must have a list and how dangerous you are as a foreigner is ranked from one to ten and we were probably a one or a two or something for suspicious people but we were more than a zero so you get you get checked up on to some extent and if you guys were following my youtube career while i was in uh china most recent when i was there as a professor you know i had some problems with computer surveillance um but the chinese government was very actively reading and filtering my emails and they intervened in what i was doing on my computer and stuff so in that more impersonal way you deal with it so that's part of life in the 21st century and i i accepted it i'm not i'm not hysterical about it okay so we have gone over from 2001 to september 7th of 2007 when my combination of humanitarian work and research in laos suddenly comes to an end now i was again very suddenly unexpected crossroads and the only things i owned in the world were on my back i could have gone to myanmar i could have gone to cambodia i could have just stayed in thailand there are arguments for and against there um if they if the government of laos was really going to kill me or if sorry i shouldn't even say the government that's not the way communism works if some people within the government wanted to kill me because there were little gangs within the government they're little groups it's not one government that way and it's not like it's not like the president of the country has to secure there could be five guys who want to kill you and you're dead you know in one of these little groups but if if anyone was gonna follow through with that threat then thailand was the most dangerous place you're gonna be because that's where they can kill you with impunity um it's easier for them to kill you in thailand than deal with in-laws uh being real with you so there were that's one if you take the threat seriously and if you don't you know you've got other questions but hey so you know i could have gone anywhere and i went to of all places yanan china and yunnan china was exactly where my ex-wife was doing her phd research that was where we ended up meeting in person for the first time so there are no i could tell a whole long story here i could make this funny story i could make it a sad story i could make it a romantic story i mean i could kind of glorify the the kind of following love element but this is the 21st century so of course email was a fact there was a professor a white american he could have been canadian now that i'm forgetting anyway i believe he was a white american university professor living in hong kong and he found out about my story in laos and he shared an email i honestly don't know i believe it was the email an email i wrote myself that i sent to my friends but i believe he shared my email describing my being kicked out of laos and giving death threats and all this stuff and he shared it with his circle of colleagues and friends and one of his colleagues and friends a guy who had gotten a phd studying in hong kong but he was an old man he was like a 60 year old guy if he wasn't 60 he looked 60. he was a white man who went out to of all places jing hong yunnan laos where he met me sitting in a cafe so this guy with a phd sits down in a cafe in jing hong yin and china and he meets me and uh i started to talk to him and he he is the guy who ends up sending an email to the woman who become my first wife saying hey you guys should meet up to talk you guys so this was the fateful email that eventually uh brought us together so yeah i then had a period of time at the time of my life living back and forth between uh thailand and yunnan and my wife sorry we weren't married yet but the woman who would later become my life was living back and forth between uh yunnan and england where she was earning her phd she's in the process of finishing her phd so i remain living this very strange life i could obviously i have a lot more to say about these very eventful and dressing time in my life but this is uh 2007 on february 18th of 2008 i meet my first wife uh face to face boy let me tell you something that was a long year 2017 that was that was a long year uh so she is in my life in asia uh we then moved to england together on march 23rd of 2009 we're together in england and france and europe uh throughout 2009 on january 21st of 2010 i moved to phnom penh cambodia now this part of the story i'm telling quickly we got a great question from the audience where is yanan but young is correctly spelled that's the problem you spelled it correctly you can spell it you can find it where it is so anyway someone else says wow that's a cool meetup story that it's it's cooler than you know it's okay i'll say a little bit more about the geography of this because it's because it's so crazy so what the first time she and i met i was in bangkok thailand and i remember messaging her and emailing back and forth and i was like okay let's do it there was a gap in our schedule that was just barely possible and if if you if you haven't been to google maps in a while go to google maps and put in bangkok and then put in kunming okay the other end of the world and uh well we didn't even couldn't make that we met in jing hong and then we went to kunman so that amazing bus ride between hong kong that that's a life-altering bus ride in itself so i said okay let's do it we have this gap in your schedule before you've got to fly back to england i took the bus i was i was poor and was in a very desperate and uncertain situation after this whole situation being exiled from laos whatever okay let's this is worth it let's make it happen let's fall in love i took the bus from bangkok thailand all the way north through thailand all the way north through laos over the border into china met in jingong sleep deprived she took the bus and her bus ride was actually longer even though it was entirely within china she took a bus from her remote field site where she was doing research all the way to kunming and then all the way from kunming to jing hong it sounds less impressive that's really mountainous terrain it was actually a really really long trip even though she didn't follow it in them and then we met in person so that was one really fateful meeting and then later several chapters later in the story we had a situation where she came back from france and she couldn't get into china that was again a time of epic bus journeys i had to come all the way down from a yunnan to meet her in bangkok and then uh had to get her back into china at a time when french citizens were not being allowed to re-enter china for uh for political reasons so yeah there were there were sweeping elements uh to their romance and yeah i mean this is another reason why i still really do try to be nice to my ex-wife on the internet and i'm again it's just a commitment to my own personal sense of integrity she really loved me she really fell in love with me she did terrible things to me i thought the whole relationship was terrible for me i am i am not joking i mean i'll say a little bit more about that just a moment but like i respect the fact that she is a woman who from the first day she met me fell in love with me this was her dream this was her fantasy she wanted to make this work and you know in her way she tried hard to make this make this marriage work or make this relationship work now that having been said um we'll just tell a really brief anecdote that illustrates how bad the relationship was for me because it was bad for me from the first day the last day uh it really was it was it was good for her at least in some ways but it was really really terrible for me when when we were getting close to breaking up we were kind of negotiating at the end of the relationship we were we were talking about what's wrong i remember she went on this kind of wrong long rant talking about the different phases the relationship been through you guys have gotten some sense of this video like okay we use first we lived in this city then we lived in this city then like you know it breaks itself in it she was saying well during this period this was really great but this is the problem and then we moved this place and this was good and this was good but this was bad she was kind of and it went on and on but you know it's you got to do a lot of listening you know listen she might have talked for 40 minutes uninterrupted or something it's this kind of long rant about i said okay pardon me you know do you mind if i interrupt you okay it sounds to me like you are reviewing the relationship phase by phase and commenting on you know the ways in which you were happy and the ways which you weren't happy the way which is good for you is that is that a fair and she was like yeah yeah i guess you know she was just being very specific yeah i guess yeah that's good so well look got to tell you something for me there has been no period of this relationship that has been good like i can't do what you've just done like i can't go over the relationship and talk about pluses and minuses like for me this relationship has been one in which you made commitments to me and you let me down in which i have been disappointed in which i have had to lower my standards again and again and again it's been one crushing heartbreaking disappointment after another it's been me weeping and having a broken heart and being broken down and ruined by this relationship again and again again and just be honest like there's a set in which i can say it didn't get worse like it was bad from the beginning and it stayed bad um now i'm going to say this partly to put some younger guys on so ah here's someone who knows what's up mercia says did you see the red flags question mark that is the right question so you mercy or whoever you are you've been through some stuff in your life that is exactly that's exactly our question when did you see the flag what i was just gonna say for younger people who don't who don't know what's up you know what changes over time for you subjectively is how well you understand the other person how well how you evaluate the other person i'm someone who's very very hard to manipulate it's it's very very hard for women to lie to me or manipulate me and most of the time my ex-wife just didn't try like early on in the relationship she did try i was just like what are you doing this is ridiculous you know it's it's hard to lie to me or at least it was from ex-wife uh she is not a good liar she's not she's not good at lying but i can remember what she tried to do that so it wasn't it wasn't anything so crude as that but as time goes on you understand that person's motivations better you understand why they're saying what they're saying and what they mean and what they're upset about you you understand them better so even if the relationship doesn't get worse like if the relationship is just equally bad over time you subjectively understand what's wrong with the relationship more and more accurately so for you subjectively it becomes more and more hopeless like early in the relationship you see this problem or she she does this thing to you she doesn't think that it's horrifying and harrowing and heartbreaking for you but you think okay but now i've explained to her the problem with that so she can change so it's going to change right like it's going to change next month and you're with someone for years and you you both see you see what they can change and what they can't change what they can do and what they can't do and i gotta tell you this this is true for everyone for you you see what's real and what's fake um one of the things you have to get a sense of in a relationship is what is authentic and what is the other person just doing because they think it's what's going to make you happy it's what you want to perceive what you want to hear now that's very alien for me on my youtube channel i've talked about the fact that i don't feel jealousy like in some ways i'm a very unusual person like i just don't feel things other people feel um i do do have all the other emotions frankly but you know i would never think that way or actually with anyone in my life we were talking earlier about my relationship with my parents like i never say anything to my parents just saying oh this is what you want to hear like i i just don't act that way i just think oh well i'm gonna dissimulate i'm gonna i'm gonna behave in a way that's what i think this person wants to see from me or hear me i never do that i'm very authentic and very raw and honest with people and some people hate me for it somebody said earlier um that they're keeping it real with people and they're they're losing friends results sure so really briefly i had a friend we weren't super tight but i had a distant friend you know i had a friend and he started working at a an alcohol factory a distillery you could say you know he started he started a job in albuquerque i said i wasn't offensive i said look i gotta tell you something i'd sign up to join the army to shoot people but i would never work in the alcohol business like to me this is really dishonorable and this is really immoral to get into marketing and selling brain damage in a bottle to people lying to people and saying hey drink this poison it's fun i wouldn't do that but i joined the army you know i joined the army and fight for democracy in afghanistan which is morally very murky but like saying to him you know honestly look i see this is much more morally murky than joining so i'm i'm really honest with my friends i didn't i didn't once think talking to my friend well how should i so in this way in this context you know it was very unusual to me that with my first wife i was dealing with someone who would say things and would do things and would act in certain ways because she thought it was what i wanted to see she would to simulate things you know um oh that's weird it's weird what this is what this is censoring so all right so suleiman uh your your comment was censored and i just unsensitive i know it wasn't me it's the automatic system they thought that was too hot for youtube i see why okay i guess i guess it had one because i had one pg-13 word in it okay so we are being censored automatically by youtube as we go here uh try not to mention the war anyone all right so yeah you know my relationship with my ex-wife and i remember saying that to her in that uh in that conversation um you know it was bad for me from day one but what i had on day one was hope hope that it would get better and obviously part of that hope and optimism was based on the idea that this woman was a real intellectual this was someone you know studying for a phd in anthropology and this is someone i was going to have this kind of really productive intellectual partnership with as well as a romantic partnership right and you can look at what my ex-wife has done with her life since we've broken up and you can look at what she was doing immediately before we got together that actually she had lost all interest in finishing her phd and she wasn't living like an intellectual and she never had before she got with me and you realize that the wind in her sails and her positive motivation and sense of purpose and stuff a lot of that came from her romance with me that you know there was a sense in which she never was that real intellectual that i wanted her to be and that she tried to be for me and i i would just say i feel that both what she did before we got together with her life and what she did after we broke up i think that really shows that so to give a much simple example a lot of you guys know some people are vegan while they are in love with somebody and when they break up they stop being vegan well gee why did that happen well is this who you really are or is this someone you're pretending to be for the person you're in love with okay while my ex-wife was with me again she had she was eating me when we met she was eating meat she was eating pork she was eating dead pig flesh when we got together okay she meets me she becomes strictly vegetarian by my standard of the time which was like 90 vegan but not 100 percent oh i mean we did i'm sorry i won't get into our diet at the time it's probably because you're living in places like cambodia yeah cheese is not a significant part of your diet but i did i mean during those years i refuse to eat eggs and try to avoid using leather but i was eating cheese and dairy occasionally it was just small part of my diet i wasn't 100 and then together my ex-wife and i made that when we returned to canada when we return to the western world because again partly you don't think about it that much you're living in laos in cambodia it's a vegetable and rice and beans diet you know what i mean it's like okay we're going back to canada we're going to switch to being 100 vegan let's do it so she went from strictly vegetarian to vegan with me and for some reason after we broke up she stopped being vegan so from my perspective we broke up she stopped being a real intellectual stop being a real author stop being a real researcher stop being a real vegan and of course it's very sad for me now that my daughter was growing up in a non-vegan household not even vegetarian absolutely that's that is really segmented household you know i'm also against drinking alcohol on things i don't i don't believe in any of that and also you know another thing is um uh you know uh sorry some interesting comments here in the comment section that are a little bit a little bit distracting it's good though it's good guys it's not a criticism thanks thanks for i appreciate having this audience who's interested in asking these questions and uh making these songs you know so the other thing is the chinese language right well my ex-wife also completely gave up studying chinese and gave up teaching my daughter chinese and the deal was she was supposed to be raising my daughter with chinese second language that's why that's a big part of why i started learning chinese myself was that was for my daughter and that together we were going to give the next generation ability in you know english and french and chinese she'd have this kind of combo coming up you know so yeah um the last time we spoke to my first wife face to face that was me my current girlfriend and my first wife all the same together she said openly she was astonished when i spoke chinese and she said you now speak chinese better than i do i don't know if that's true um [Music] but she said that she had totally given up studying and practicing chinese and she had lost whatever ability she had um that's that part is certainly believable um anyway we will see if in the next few months i'm getting back into studying chinese seriously we'll see what i can do with it but i do not boast about or exaggerate my ability in chinese which is certainly certainly unlimited so look as someone in the in the audience is raising the issue of narcissism look up you know the myth of narcissus okay narcissism is a cultural concept it's not medically real the way diabetes is real and it's never gonna be you know words like narcissism they describe patterns of behavior um some specialists say you can do an mri scan and you can identify certain abnormalities of the brain that correspond to narcissistic personality disorder i'm open to the possibility that something like that some diagnosis like that that's medically real may one day exist um one thing that is certain that i've made youtube videos talking about this is that my ex-wife does identify her own father as having narcissistic personality disorder and i made a video pointing out that if you even just look at some things my ex-wife has said publicly on twitter and so on now you know um why should anyone have a theory like narcissism or narcissistic personal disorder it's only useful if it's uh if it's an analysis that reveals something productive you know what i mean like in this situation like i'm sorry i'm not saying this to insult the person who said it you they said it in a totally uh productive and respectful way by the way many people use the word narcissist as an insult you know i understand this is a problem it's become a fad you should only bring this kind of jargon into a situation if it really explains something if you have a friend who really has a lot of trouble losing weight the concept of diabetes isn't just an abstract oh well it turns out we measured your blood sugar and your pre-diabetic or something you know like oh okay this is a factor in your okay so this is meaningful this is an analysis that really reveals something the question i have to ask is what is revealed by narcissism as an analysis in what way does it uh in what way does it solve any problem or even present a problem to us in a more useful manner and look guys i mean i've i've been through the checklist for narcissism i've taken the test racism and i score like a zero i score incredibly low i'm way below what's normal or average so i'm an anti-narcissist according to the test i mean you know you can say but i've had other youtube channels attack me and call me a narcissist and if you actually just unpack what do they mean in calling me narcissist that i seem self-confident when i'm talking about topics i'm really confident about so right now nobody is asking me about the politics of jamaica can you name the prime minister of jamaica can you tell me about what happened in the last two or three elections and jamaica i can't if we talk about jamaican politics i'm not going to be self-confident but sure when i come on youtube and talk about things i'm really that i really know about i seem so confident and that doesn't make me a narcissist and it's this very sad thing but yeah i have taken those diagnosed tests and i'm not a narcissist at all for whatever that means even if it's just a cultural concept but uh for people who do take that test or do get that diagnosis you know i'm just i'm just asking you to reflect on this hypothetically what is that what does it do for you how does it help you in life you know maybe it helps maybe there's something liberating or helpful or empowering but um you know i i doubt it and you know the thing is again with i see i really do try to say this stuff in a in a sympathetic way i'm not here to present my wife as a terrible person my first wife um you know what if she's not a narcissist but she grew up with a father who was one okay i've met her father he's a terrible human being and i know what my ex-wife told me about her father and her relationship like i know it from her perspective and i know my own contact with him and my own emails back and forth then many of which are here on youtube and you can read for yourself if you want to dig into that it's not that interesting but you know what does that tell you like what if her tragedy is that she doesn't have that condition or that pattern of behavior but she grew up around it so it's what's familiar now you know a lot of people their mannerisms and behavior imitates their parents down to your accent and cadence and how you solve certain problems or you behave in a fight or something you know i mean there's there's more than one possible view to take this but i've got to tell you i've just talked through a big part of our personal history together and i don't think adding the word narcissism i don't think it really adds a lot to the story you know i don't think it really explains much or helps much for us to understand so like here's here's a version of the story that doesn't have any narcissism in it at all okay my ex-wife was someone who lived a very mundane and depressing life uh doing odd jobs like being a waitress she got through she graduated from high school very early because she skipped grades that she went into different kind of nondescript work like waitressing her life didn't have a lot of meaning in it she wasn't satisfied she decided to live a more meaningful life to enroll in anthropology at university to get on the path to getting a degree in anthropology okay and she gets the university and she finds it depressing and corrupt and awful and pathetic and none of these people are real intellectuals they're all very shallow and you know kind of the system is broken it doesn't give her the meaning of life she wanted it all right she starts to get demoralized uh she gives up being vegetarian starts eating meat again um you know she [Laughter] i judge very harshly things like drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana probably most of you in the audience don't but i also see that as a symptom of losing this sense of purpose and meaning and positive motivation right not i'm not saying she she started to do the things normal people do in our culture when they've lost their sense of purpose in your life and then she meets me and she falls in love with me and she starts doing everything she can to make this relationship work and she wants so much to be the woman that i need her to be you know she she all of a sudden you know and all of a sudden she also doesn't really need her university in the same way anymore there were a lot of we went to the library together you know what i mean we went and got the books out of the library and now all she needs is a desk and library and i'd i'd cook for her and make her coffee and she's in this very warm and positively reinforcing and collaborative relationship right and in so many ways it's so you know loving and wonderful you know um you know but the problem is you know her the problem is she's the wrong person you know and she's not really who she's pretending to be and on the one hand she's constantly disappointing me and the other hand she's constantly afraid of disappointing me even when she isn't and there's a kind of straining and internal not like that and i'm unhappy not because i'm unhappy with my life you know i'm unhappy because of her like during those years i know especially where i didn't really have other problems that made me unhappy yes there's a simplification i had different jobs by the way that are not being mentioned here you know but like it doesn't depress me it doesn't hurt me it doesn't break my heart to have a job as an english teacher or the job in publishing i had you know i had struggles at work or whatever none of that surprised me my problem was the way my first wife treated me my problem was her my problem with what she did to me every day she made my life miserable every day and as heartbreaking as the divorce has been there have been many contacts in which i've said to people just including friends who ask you because there were people who like assumed i wanted to get together with her and i say no no no no i dumped her and as hard as it has been as heartbreaking as the divorce process has been every day that i wake up i'm so happy that i don't have to deal with her just even if i'm waking up alone just to wake up and not have to deal with my first wife it's so wonderful and living with her was so terrible for me for you know really every day for that whole relationship all right so i gotta say you know that's now this is just a sketch the overarching you know picture for for the relationship and you know i don't really think there's any kind of psychological jargon you can bring in that's going to have any great um analytical or curative value you know what i mean it doesn't solve anything to start bringing in that jargon and uh to be clear before we broke up by the way guys she and i we did go and see a therapist together i forget exactly what his title was whether it was a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist but you know um you know we did try doing that stuff and it was just as useless as everyone knows it is uh you know so we we gave it the old uh college try okay so coming uh to the end of the story rapidly um there's are very memorable years for me so i met my wife face to face after having email contact before that february 18th 2008 we were in asia together we moved to europe together i believe in march 23 of 2009 we're then back and forth between england and france until we moved to cambodia in 2010 right we then returned to canada interestingly via taiwan so we had two and a half months together in taiwan in the year 2011 again very memorable and then we returned to canada june 27 2011 so now 10 years ago where she takes up work as a university professor and where i unexpectedly become a university student again so there are many reasons that are already obvious to you all for the divorce but one of the most obvious that people keep overlooking is this in 2011 when i made the commitment to move to canada we made the decision okay we're going to stop this life we're living in asia go move to canada she committed that i would be able to return to university i would be able to get my own phd i'd be allowed to catch up with her in effect and we talked through in detail what that would mean it was going to mean that for significant periods of time we were not in the same city student vision canada is a really big country so if my ex-wife was a professor in regina saskatchewan the capital city of saskatchewan it might be that i would have to go for my own master's degree or phd to one of the nearest adjacent cities like saskatoon or edmonton alberta or calgary alberta so those are the closest cities to regina but they're still really far i just bet canada it's spread out you know what i mean and one of the crucial reasons for the marriage ultimately failing is that you know my wife broke all of her promises on that um there were a lot of ways in which she just never really let my career and my education become the priority that it needed to be in those years 2011 2012 2013 that we needed to start making decisions that that put me first whereas up until now i've been moving all around the world for her and i've moved to saskatchewan forever it's like well now i'm at a crossroads in my own career for what i'm going to do and i've got to catch up and i've got to have a career too i've got to get my own education and someone and she was very selfish she was very self-centered she was very mean and petty and the more you know palpable human side to that was she said and you know i can sympathize but it's it's really not reasonable she said that she loved me so much and she needed me to be in the same apartment with her and wake up in the same bed with her every day and she could not stand to have me you know going back and forth to another city that was a couple hours away because i had to get a master's degree or phd that i thought i couldn't do this and i said to her every time they came i said you promised me this was the commitment you made that if i moved here for you you were going to accept this job and move here that you would in this way support me i don't mean supporting me financially like you would tolerate and be positive and supportive you know like emotionally as i went through the process of of getting my own phd and she reneged not that she absolutely could not do that so look my ex-wife had conflict with her boss on that job funny and interesting story frankly but not one that we really need to tell so quite soon after she started working as a university professor uh in regina saskatchewan she was looking for the exit switch she was looking to quit that job and move on and do something else she also felt understandably that the window of opportunity for a baby was limited um just as the years go by biologically for a woman so the plan shaped up i'm leaving out a lot of drama that was really harrowing for me as i hit a terrible personal low in this period my own life was just really really terrible and again really my problem was how my ex-wife treated me um but the plan came together for her to uh quit her job get pregnant have a baby and then relocate to a new city and move on to a new chapter in life and there were some ways in which that was a good plan i just mentioned in terms of when you get pregnant and when you quit the job there were some clever things you know you're gonna be pregnant for nine months and things were nicely timed up and i've got to tell you something um we sat down with like a blank sheet of paper and we talked about moving to and giving birth in an amazing list of cities all around the world but just to give one example we seriously talked about having my daughter born in mexico just just to mention an example of doing a couple years of her life in mexico um but obviously talked about thailand and everything else and i think we would have been much better off in thailand than where we ended up but maybe i'm wrong um you know but we really talked through an amazing array of possible strategies like okay if you're unhappy with your job and you're going to quit and you want to have a baby simultaneously there are like there aren't just two ways we can do this there were a hundred ways we could do this and we talked through and i did all this research there's a lot of google searching involved i i google researched such a list of of options and possibilities all right now i think enough has been said to adam right why this relationship eventually had to end uh january 22nd 2013. we moved to purpley and france march of 2013 i'll leave out the day i suppose march 2013 my daughter is born in the south of france um [Music] we moved to taiwan together in november of 2013. that's the final phase of my relationship with my ex-wife and we split up in taiwan we decide verbally to get divorced january 10th of 2014. so the relationship went from february of 2008 to january 10th of uh 2014 and she got on an airplane and left with my daughter january 14th of 2014. okay so early in this video i explained that what i know today thanks to the bluntness of my lawyer is that basically under the french legal system as soon as we got divorced i could not win absolutely nothing positive uh could come out of the divorce process too and if i had known that at the beginning that would simplify things she and i did talk in the beginning we did have a kind of cooperative strategy so i did not expect and there was no reason to expect that at the end of the relationship um you know we just kind of slam the door and never talk again or something or slam the door and i'd never seen what are that wasn't what i expected at all i thought she'd have a short period of time kind of recovering emotionally just from the actual separation but then we'd start talking it would be a bunch of again we talked about the stuff before we split up including on the day where we went to the airport i mean i was positive and encouraging and cooperative right at the end right you know i helped her pack and i carried her suitcases and went to the airport and you're on the train talking and stuff all that time going to the airport and helping her go and obviously in the days before they're talking about where you're going to move and what you're going to do and stuff and um you know again my attitude was okay well that's you know like if you're gonna move to new york i'll move to montreal or something like that so that's you know across the border from new york and you know we can co-parent i can support you in this sense but you know i won't be too close you won't like you won't see me sometime when you don't want to see me but i can come over every second weekend or whatever's appropriate whether it's once a month or whatever you want and you know then if and when you have a problem if you need me suddenly i'll be able to quickly come or it can be victoria in seattle or vancouver in seattle or something this was talked about before we split up and you know obviously if she was going to be in europe it would be different she didn't want to live it i mean she was not planning to live in france or germany at that time but i was generally just positively and encouragingly you know disposed towards whatever it was she wanted to do in life and the other attitude i could have had was that i needed to make my own career in education my top priority which is what we needed back in 2011 as mentioned that was a problem throughout well just be honest here it wasn't a problem throughout the whole relationship it wasn't it was a problem from 2011 until the end of the relationship like it was a problem for the the last phase the issue of saying look i keep being made priority number five or number 10 here like what matters to me is the lowest priority and i'm married to someone who's incredibly self-centered and self-serving and selfish and it's not just ruining my life short term because it is short term it's making everything in my life miserable but there's ruining my life long term so i could have come out of that with a sort of resolute sense of i need to do what's best for me long term like never before but honestly i didn't i loved my daughter i still love my daughter and i was certainly comfortable making seeing my daughter my top priority you know what i mean like that was totally reasonable to me and in terms of the legal situation um [Music] we talked about it and she and i talked about it before we split up and and at the time we split up you know i mean what made sense was for us to be 100 cooperative it was just like look however many thousands of dollars we've got why spend them on lawyers there is no point like again we don't own a business together we don't own a car together there's nothing to split up like let's just talk to each other and cooperate and you know and get divorced you know i do want to legally get divorced but have a collegial divorce and then like let's not have a lawyer force us to have joint custody let's just actually positively co-parent and you know you get on with your life i don't know and again i am not a person who feels jealousy if you know i am not i i'm so happy that she's sleeping with someone else i'm so happy that she's in love with someone else if she gets married to someone else i'm so happy for i am just not it's not my problem i don't have any problem i'm not a controlling person i'm not a jelly jealous person it's just like great you do something positive your life i'm gonna do something positive and let's co-parent i was not just willing to make co-parenting my top priority um i was eager to do so you know but instead i found myself put into this surreal position where after a long period of silence where again i was i can all my emails that time i'm writing to my wife saying look you know we have to cooperate you have to think positively about the future like you have to think about this stuff positively think about our daughter like we have to work out whatever the co-parenting is going to be or like we have to work out how this we have to cooperatively get divorced or something there was this long period of silence and then suddenly all of the skullduggery that had gone on behind my back was revealed so in fact my ex-wife hadn't just been conspiring with lawyers she had been conspiring with my own parents behind my back and she had been trying to put together this dossier that said all these terrible things about me and ultimately she got me declared missing without a trace legally dead and carried out legal procedures against me where i wasn't represented now at the time that felt terrible in part because i thought i was being cut off from my daughter right what i know now is the french legal system is such nonsense that i would have been cut off from my daughter anyway that all this crap my ex-wife did it made no difference and you know she didn't just she didn't just gather legal documents from my uh from my parents like she she had photographs of my parents and my parents meeting with her she did all this stuff to make it seem like i'm some kind of psycho and it's i just say it's not convincing it's just bs it's just nonsense she got in touch with my former employers my former bosses and like interviewed them i don't know if they managed to make it sound more menacing translating into into french she put together this hit piece about what a psychologically disturbed and disturbing character i am and how i disappeared in taiwan she paid a private investigator in taiwan to investigate how i had disappeared during a period of time when i can prove in my lawyer improvement court she had constant email contact with me she like quoted one email out of context where i just say like i'm unhappy and i'm happy because i'm thinking about seeing my daughter again how hard it's going to see my daughter again and like she quoted one other email out of context like you know we'd be having a fight honestly these emails aren't even rude i'm not ashamed of what i said these emails are i'm really i'm really not a lot of them are really well written to be honest i feel very well written emails maxwell but it was like you know one email account and said look i'm not going to talk to you about this again and like presents this like oh you see like she received these emails then he disappeared like even if you read the emails before and after that they're like all these positive emails saying look we need to cooperate we need to think about the future it's like if you just read what was said like the day before and the day after that it's obvious there was an ongoing conversation i hadn't disappeared and like you know what was the meaning of like you have one email saying i'm gonna have you of course i'm happy i'm thinking how much i miss my daughter like what you know this was like to insinuate to the court that i had committed suicide when i was in taiwan and i disappeared without a trace and then they can carry so then there were a lot of other false expectations moving forward so as i said at the very end of the story i've ended up having one legal team in france to deal with custody and one legal team in canada just to deal with a divorce divorce and custody being separate but i tried so hard to do all of the legal paperwork in france to have the divorce and everything just done by lawyers in france in part because guys a crime was committed here it's like we have proof on paper that my ex-wife did something criminal against me you know to deprive me of my rights in court like i was never dead and what she said about these emails is a lie if you go through this stuff in detail there were a lot of lies in here and lying to the court as a crime there's also this weird admission that my ex-wife owes me this money and i don't care about the money but legally all these things are leveraged like okay you're guilty of several crimes i'll mention another one just a moment you admit that you owe this guy money so can we sit down and have a settlement finally and set up a normal co-parenting can we have a normal divorce and co-parents can we just use this as leverage to get on with signing a reasonable agreement here and as time went so there was all this pressure on me to try to solve this in france to just have teams of french lawyers with you one after another at one point at a very expensive canadian international legal team which is a canadian law firm but that was working with an office in france they accomplished nothing and you know with each lawyer you know thousands and thousands of dollars get wasted and months and months go by and nothing is accomplished i mean i could get into here a critique of the french legal system and let's just give you one surreal example this is several lawyers ago this is not my current lawyer but remember a lawyer asking me like oh well why didn't you keep all the family identity papers so in france there's like vivret de femi like these are these are identity documents that you need often for example when accessing medical care or government services you need these kinds of government it's not a driver's license but it's it's one of those it's like i'm sitting there like what kind of psychopath when breaking up from his ex-wife would be like oh and i'm keeping all the government id documents like what that would be so crazy and abusive what do you mean like she of course i want to support her i want her to have a good life of course i'm going to let her have the government id documents i'm not going to try to keep that for myself oh well guess what in the french legal system you can't do any of this stuff you have no rights if you don't have those doc if you didn't hold on to if you didn't physically like mess up your ex-wife's life if you didn't mess up her life by keeping those documents then you can't go to court you can't do this you oh it's such a bad system in the french legal system and particularly the divorce system i learned all the ways in which it is just a hilariously awful system so the sense of shock and sadness and betrayal when my ex-wife's kind of scheme was revealed in these legal documents so like what she did took up a lot of time and it included her writing to me at one point this is evidently part of the scheme she was writing me saying she was going to move here she was going to move and join me in victoria canada and she said you know so you know where do you live she was asking for different details and i was like oh okay and i started describing to her and again we still have all these emails email was never disappears you know what i mean she said okay well this is the neighborhood i live in and this is whatever and so we have all this discussion about her allegedly possibly moving to victoria canada to join me here with my daughter which again had a big uh emotional impact okay so you're offering to move to the same city so we can co-parent okay well that's positive right and then you know couple months later you find out okay she's taking this stuff just a dishonest stupid bunch of legal documents and you're claiming i disappeared way back when i was in taiwan and you haven't heard from me since then you think i'm dead i'm missing and i have emails to prove you were talking to me about what neighborhood i was living in and what i was studying at university and i was doing with my life we have all these like positive and cooperative emails again i'm keeping it uh polite in these emails and so on you know oh and instead you're gonna present to the court like i get the word even bad it's like oh you have one quote from me in one email saying that i'm feeling sad and one saying like hey don't talk to me like that after she said something hurtful to me you know like it's you know uh and if you don't if you can't represent yourself in court if you've been declared missing without a trace you don't have a lawyer there and you're not there if i had been there i could open up my laptop and look honor you're on it look you want to read the rest of the email conversation what are you talking about whoa um you know the impact of the time was the sense that oh something better was possible i could have been part of my daughter's life if only my ex-wife hadn't done this to me legally if only this if only that was like oh god you know something better is possible but what i know now is nothing better was ever possible because the french legal system has always been broken and is broken and it is this broken for each and every man who gets a divorce in france if you do not have positive voluntary cooperation from the woman in france you don't have an amiable divorce the french divorce system is broken so just two of the crimes that exist on paper i don't mention this real briefly in france for my ex-wife to have sex with another man and get pregnant with another man's baby and give birth to another man's baby while she is legally married to me is a crime now that may sound old-fashioned but it makes sense because the government is trying to avoid exactly these situations now also legally if she has sex with another man and gives birth to another child while she is legally married to me it is presumed to be my child right so that's their that's their legal system it's like okay so look so a crime has been committed here i'm not jealous i'm not angry but again so can we use this as leverage in court say look we need to settle this case this is ridiculous they've already been separated for five six seven years they're living separate lives she's giving birth to another man's child like give this guy his divorce give him his rights of custody and visitation like can't we and it is it's a crime right on paper the lies that were told in those legal documents are crimes right this is a type of procedural fraud but what i found out is and again my current lawyer is very honest yes you're correct these are fr these are crimes this is fraud and you have all the evidence it's not there's no matter of opinion you have exact dates for all the emails you have you can prove everything you can show exactly what was said in the earlier court documents none of that stuff can change but guess what in the french legal system there is no justice for anyone nobody cares nothing's gonna change and so you know the fraud the dishonesty the misconduct the backstabbing the scheming you know during a time during a time when i really depended on my parents not so much for money but for advice and encouragement you know after i had broken up with my wife and i was trying to start a new life i was trying to decide what that new life should be you know it just i could do anything but you know i was i decided not to go back to laos or not to go back to thailand or not to work on lotion as a language and not to work on cree or ojibwe's language i had a lot of big decisions to make with long-term implications you know i really relied on my parents to have someone in my corner to talk to about like you know like questions like what should i be studying university that really mattered to me during that time my parents were behind my back conniving with and plotting with my own ex-wife against me and they were meeting up with her in secret and meeting my daughter in secret and they were lying but they they concealed it from me and they were i mean my father was a very stupid very crazy guy and i was wondering why he said something he said well he was saying those things because he was on her side and you know my ex-wife is a very bad liar my mother also is not very good at lying i must say you know i i don't even think my ex-wife really lied to my parents like i don't think she really sold them some kind of complex parallel reality i think my parents just made up in their own minds what they want to believe and i've seen them do that in many different points in their life like i don't really blame my ex-wife for this i really blame my parents um but devastating emotionally devastating to see that and i've said to my own parents many times i didn't see my daughter for two years because of you if you had just done the right thing and stood by your own son and we had gone through a normal divorce and custody procedure in these two years if you had just been honest with me instead of conspiring against my own ex-wife against me i would have seen my daughter in these two years or even if you allow one year for lawyers and paperwork it would have been one year i got to see my daughter or something you know that that had these terrible long-term contracts so there's been a lot of uh sorrow for me to carry but that sorrow largely exists because of and arises from and begins and ends with this idea of the possibility that there could have been something better what i've learned the moral of the story is that the french system is so badly broken that i no longer believe anything more positive was possible there never was a better possibility of how things could end up for me and my daughter and that's sad for me but let me tell you something it's really sad for my daughter we saw my daughter four times in two years and that was thanks to a writ of mandated writ of mandinus pardon me a court decision a very peculiar court decision not a divorce settlement not a separation agreement this bizarre writ we got from a court when i was declared not to be dead and not to be uh missing so we got four trips in two years where we saw my daughter for just a few days on each trip huge amount of money huge amount of time huge huge had a huge impact on my life yeah we're stopping this story we're not going all the way to the present day but this had a huge impact on what i was doing with my studies my life my career and of course my my youtube channel right um you know even just seeing her four times in two years basically spaced out every six months we had a big positive impact on her life for her to spend those vacations with us was really important and you know i got the funniest email imaginable for my ex-wife after one of those trips i think maybe it was the second trip i forget where she came back and she said well our daughter has come back to me and now she wants to be vegan and she's talking about how she wants to eat broccoli and all this stuff and things she was blaming it on me she like had all these complaints like as if i'd programmed my other stuff and i said to her look you have to understand our doc she's a very strong willed kid our daughter look she has a mind of rome i didn't tell her any of this stuff like this is really like what you're reporting me this is her she's making this stuff up like she you know this is her own initiative you know i we didn't we didn't program her to be vegan or something but we had discussions with her about veganism we had discussions with her about uh christianity and judaism history and socrates so you guys know we challenged socrates with sacmas um we played video games with her we went swimming in the ocean we did tour stuff but like i've got to tell you for those two years we just got to see her four times tears we were a very meaningful part of her life that had a really big impact and yes it is very sad for me that the french legal system has made it impossible no matter how much money i spent or no matter how much money my mother spends it has made it impossible for me to be a part of her life but it's really sad for my daughter you know and in terms of my ex-wife's motivations you know something i've often said when i talk to other parents not even single parents when i talk to their married parents a lot of time it's like can can't you just imagine you're in her position even if you have some kind of grudge against your ex-husband wouldn't you like to take a vacation once in a while wouldn't you like to leave your kid for a few days with your ex-husbands you could just have a few days off wouldn't you rather cooperate with your ex-husband if it's someone like me who's really positively motivated and really wants to be a father and really really a moral upstanding person i get it the morality the morality can bore some people but in someone who drinks zero alcohol does zero drugs is really committed to a life of sobriety and hard work and intellectual endeavor and charity and politics and a pause that's like i've got all this kind of positive love and influence to give and share and i want to do it it's like and you are telling me you're shutting that guy down and you know like if my ex-wife allowed me to just take care of my daughter for one month a year that would give my ex-wife one month in which she could do her own research she could pursue her own career she could go on vacation sure but if her phd is worth anything to her she can write a book you can take one month and write an article or write a book i mean if i were taking care of my daughter for just one month a year that would be such a benefit to mac's wife as well as being such a benefit uh to my daughter so yes it's sad for me but it is not sad for me only [Laughter] junebug asks what chapter is this now or are we just at the blurb well guys from my perspective uh the topic of this video is now over uh we've come to the conclusion thank you all for for uh being here um i don't think there are any any questions here i'm i'm just scrolling through i don't think there's anything i've got to jump back to ask i totally understand but uh that you know some people are interested in learning languages and some people are interested in talking about veganism uh okay sorry so here here's a quote i just mentioned this briefly because this is still a fact in my life so i'm a canadian but i'm uh in love with an america so someone asked what was your reason for not wanting to live in new york if your ex-wife and child were there well sorry if you guys don't know the bus between montreal and new york is pretty quick so i said i'd be it somewhere like uh montreal um where you can take a bus to new york pretty quickly and easily well you know the difference between being canadian and american really matters the legal difference matters i don't have the right to live in the united states american i don't have the right to work in the united states america so that is that is one of the big fundamental factors and again so i think this has been the light motif for the whole video there have been many times where i was beating myself up thinking oh if only i can get french citizenship if only get french residency even so i've applied for a lot of jobs in france melissa's been through this where i was applying for jobs in france and when we were thinking what if we moved to greece uh like if we just get permanent residency or citizenship in greece then we're a citizen of an eu country then i could see my life there were all a lot of time and energy and work went into what if i live in france what if i live in europe what if i live in greece what if i have legal status doing this whether that was as a baker we talked about we talked about moving to europe i went into a lot of detail i looked into opening a bakery in ireland to become a permanent resident of ireland because ireland is in the european union and we looked at all kinds of stuff in france opening an english language school in france starting a business in france opening a small hotel in greece you're like i went through a lot of options and it was all for my daughter and about my thinking well then maybe i can have legal status and now i know i mean look guys if you want to move to greece move to greece if you want to move to ireland move to ireland but if i had done any of that if any of those plans had worked out i would have been doing it for nothing because nothing would have helped me with illegal situations there was no hope there was no reason for hope there is never going to be justice about the crimes my ex-wife committed there is never the courts are never going to care nothing is going to be on my side ever and even though you know i can blame like some of the lawyers i had in the past were bad again my current lawyer i like i like my current lawyer in france but i've had bad lawyers in the past but the tragic truth is even if i'd had better lawyers uh it wouldn't have made a difference so yeah and um you know and look guys some of you know what my daughter looks like and some some don't yeah she has she's spent so little time with me growing up i spent the first year of her life with her when she was a small baby i took over every day and i haven't talked about that that chapter in this video but there was a time uh there was a time when you know uh you know anyway there was a time when my whole life consisted of waking up in the morning and playing with my daughter and feeding my daughter and taking care of her and then when we saw her a couple years later when i went to visit her with uh with melissa there was a time when my daughter didn't believe that i was her father she liked me but she didn't think i was her father and i showed her the photographs and videos of me playing with her as a as a baby i was like no no i really like and you know i look the same i look the same now and when she was a baby i she doesn't look the same she looks totally different because she was a tiny baby i was like no like this was my life like during the first year of your life and i was there when she took her first steps and i had no job in that time i was a 24 7 stay-at-home parent and i uh i cleaned the uh we had one of those plastic soft mats you sit on the floor in pieces we sit down these these kind of marshmallow like uh layer of padding on the floor and every night i wiped uh because sanitize the floor with with soap and water with you know antibacterial stuff and i was with her when she was playing on the mat i cleaned up mad i rocked her to sleep and so i had a very intense first year of her life with her and then the legal apparatus you know uh separated me from her and you know um yeah given that i spent so little time with her during those years it is striking how much of her character just genetically seems to resemble me so yeah she does resemble the way i looked when i was a small child in terms of her her hair especially i had big curly hair there are ways in which she resembles me in her face but most striking is the resemblance in character and you know my mom has met her and my mother also commented that i was a very strong-willed child and if i wasn't by the way i would have ended up a broken person like some of my brothers and sisters my father had nine kids eight nine of them turned out like me guys uh not everyone's strong enough to thrive on what i had to come through in life you know but i was this very strong-willed curious pugnacious kid but also just kind of very sure of himself and morally and so on and feeling what's right wrong and even you know my mom commented this like wow you know there's this there's this really strange continuity of character between you and your daughter where she also has these you know these qualities that come out even as a even as a small child so yeah i mean that's very striking and you know um you know i i gotta say this guys i don't believe in genius in the way that other people you know talk about genius but i mean when my daughter was like three years old she was talking at such a high level was that the first trip was she still three four okay she had right she had just turned four right like that no okay okay okay she turned my before a few months i don't know why i remember that i guess because i was worrying about that when i was worrying about planning the trip she was three but she turned four uh that but i mean when she was four years old her speaking ability in english and french were amazingly high um for a four-year-old she really spoke at such a high level um you know i mean she is a normal kid but she could speak english and french really well at that age and you know you wonder you know there's always this awareness when you know guys um i did a video recently talking about homosexuality i'm freaking what's the guy's name though right milo iannopolis right so i did a video a critique of milo yiannopoulos who currently claims that he's ex-gay but you know there's a funny moment in that video where i quoted milo yiannopoulos and he's talking about how handsome he's been all his life and he says well you know some people they're gay but they represent the fact they never really had the kind of romantic life they wanted to have they never you know uh you know they never had the kind of love life they wanted to have they felt rejected a lot they felt they weren't attractive enough he said well that's that's not my experience he said and he talks about the fact that he considers himself tremendously attractive and that he's always had plenty of people falling in love with him and so on and the other the person interviewing him seems kind of taken aback by this lack of humility or whatever and milo yiannopoulos just says look you know still look i'm telling my story like you know this is like this is the truth of my you know some people are good looking and have a lot of you know some people are ugly you know i mean just say milo yiannopoulos he's a deeply dishonest person in many ways but that was an interesting you know honest moment you know i'm someone who uh i'm someone who was seen as extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily intelligent from a very early age by very many people who should have known you know who were in a position to know what they were evaluating and i didn't feel that way about myself and i didn't see it in myself and i didn't understand the difference to me and other children and i'll be honest i still don't and i think i don't understand it because i don't want to you know it's it's possible i've told this story before this may be something my daughter relates to one day um i switch between schools in what we call the senior kindergarten year so you guys can look at is that four years old something like that was young for my grade so most of the time i was a year younger you know i was six months younger than other people whatever but you know so i was maybe three and a half or something i was at three and a half or four thing with this third so i was a really little kid um senior credit card year and i switched schools and uh it was it wasn't the first day of school it was like you know and so the kids they already had their routine like they weren't like they weren't like being shown like this is the gym this is the classroom um anyway i'm sorry this was either senior kindergarten or it was the very start of grade one for me but i believe this was senior kindergarten here when this happened the story uh yeah i'm certain of now senior kindergarten i was taking to the gym and all the other kids just started screaming like animals and running in a circle the teacher just said free run and the kids were screaming and the gym was echoing and this was horrifying and i i walked up to the teacher who was an idiot by the way i remember that from realtyjugg i said why are they doing this like what's wrong with them why are they screaming and running and they're like what again i was this is my first day you know and um she said oh they like it yeah you should try it yeah they scream right it's like this this was kind of demarco lay with you the rest of my life and like you know what i'm looking at these kids it's like what is wrong with you like how can you be so stupid like how can you imagine what are you doing right and i tried it for a minute it's like well okay the teacher told me to everyone's i put my hands up and i i i yelled and shared and after like i don't know i did it for like 60 seconds or what but after sure and i watched them she's gonna say i can't do this like what do you think like i'm not an animal like i'm not like like i can't just scream and run as what like like i'm not a dog in the park running after a frisbee or something that would be better i mean catching a frisbee is not that much like it was really disturbing you know what i mean and uh look you know i i don't believe in genius and there's a sense in which i'm discussing my channel i don't even believe in talent you know like people see you in a situation where you're really good at something and so yeah well guess what i've been working on this for the last five years or something whatever it is well it seems to you like i'm just naturally talented but actually five years of hard work led up to this you know the way people perceive talent the way people are teaching look i don't know but i am someone who from kindergarten through to the end of university you know you know people were taking me aside again and again and telling me that they really thought i was a genius that i they really thought i had something something special and you know i remember one professor his way of learning it they said in different ways but one professor he said to me in every generation there are only a few guys born like you and what i said back to him just interesting is what i said in that one i i smiled at him ironically because i was uh be honest i was kind of sick of hearing it i i kind of had a scorn for people who told me that they thought i was a genius i felt that a lot of the time for them it was an excuse for why they were so bad at their job like well i'm not really gonna help you i'm not gonna really teach you anything but you're special you can go teach yourself and i kind of stay back look i'm not flattered i actually want you to step up and do your job you know it was kind of how i felt about the situation but this this particular professor he really meant it i mean you know and i uh i know he didn't say it to other people um not gonna sort of tell the whole story here but you know um when he said that to me my answer in the moment was to smile at him kind of ironically and i said to him are you sure that we're so rare or is it just that so many of us commit suicide and he that that that really meant a lot to him that answered was very moving for the professor it was kind of an interesting moment for him and you know he was reflecting on his life now i learned more about his story later but uh i he apparently was a very gifted young man who was also very suicidal during those years of his own stroke and felt nobody understood him but yeah anyway um so yeah you know um i think if you're a basketball player you have a kid and you wonder are they gonna be six foot or seven foot tall like me are they gonna be as tall as me are they going to be as good a basketball are they going to inherit some of the gifts that define my life and sure you know you wonder uh you know with my daughter is she going to have some of the talents that define my life and could it be that she really has a better shot at using those talents than i had because in a lot of ways i was born into uniquely disadvantageous circumstances uh in toronto having frankly insane communists for parents and being in a really terrible education system that was going through a period of really difficult transition uh just to say if i had been born 20 years earlier in canada in many ways i would have had a better education uh interesting thing to reflect on too um but yeah so it was a bad political period bad institutional period and you know i had a lot of disadvantaged life and i didn't really have the encouragement and the advice i needed if some of my older brothers had not been completely worthless and offered me advice that could help me but like a lot of you people i just grew up playing video games and completely ignorant and with nobody to help me or advise me when i considered things like you know i considered going into studying you know latin and greek and i thought it was impossible for me now i know it would have been incredibly easy for me you know um and nobody nobody ever talked me through you know i didn't have someone sane and helpful to talk to studying latin i didn't have someone saying helpful talk through joining the army or any other career options and that was covered in this video if you go back and watch you know that i talked about around the year 2001 when i was considering and actually applied for becoming a police officer uh becoming a type of emergency a nurse emergency medical technician you know when a lot of different career paths were really being seriously considered in research and even applied for i was getting the books and studying for them and stuff but i had no idea what to do next because in the ways that really matter my own family had failed me and the canadian education system had failed me so yeah there's that sense of um could i help my daughter in exactly the way that i needed help as an intellectually inclined you know young man and of course i want to be there for her emotionally and personally in every other way but yes um you know i i have said to melissa it's just the sort of thing you gotta talk about look if our was gonna say if our daughter she doesn't she my daughter refers to most as her mom and she was very very loving she really really loved melissa intensely it made me sad she liked melissa more than she liked me actually that's okay uh i have more in common with her than melissa does but she really did love melissa and she really she said many times that she wanted melissa to be her mom and she wanted most of the beer real mom and so on and we tried to get her said look you know that's going to hurt it's going to upset your your own mom it's going to upset my ex-wife you say that so don't don't say that we like thank you but you know we shouldn't talk that way we were really trying to scourge but she was very very enthusiastic about melissa as a second uh mother figure there was a there's a big connection there that that mattered to both of them um [Music] but it meant a lot to my daughter but anyway i have said to uh melissa look if my daughter grows up and wants to go into wrestling we have to support her like it we can't railroad her or presume that she wants to be an intellectual or wants to be involved in politics it she could become a long distance bicycle athlete or she could be or she could become a police officer or go into the military she could join the french foreign legion you know i don't know if they take women in any case she could become you know whatever uh she could join the u.s marine corps whatever you know um you know we have to be prepared to love her and support her and be understanding if she wants to do something that seems totally out of character you know for me because she's not me however yes it is very striking how much she had in common with me when i was a child like that without spending time with me it's not that she's learned from my example or from my behaviors now it really does just seem to be genetic it seems to be despite her upbringing you know with her mother and yeah you know you really wonder when you look at your own life and you know you know um i know what held me back it's like can i be there can i help this kid who maybe has some of the same talents and inclinations um to to provide the encouragement and guidance that i lacked and again if she decides to be a wrestler [Laughter] i don't know what's another good example i don't know uh women's basketball i don't know you know if she decides to go in some totally different direction of course you know i'm committed that i can you know i could be there for her that way too um but sure when you see someone who's strikingly so much going with you you wonder if if maybe that's the most important okay guys great talking with you and uh i think now week by week uh let's say next tuesday i'll put up warnings next time you're going to see more of me streaming live and uh you're going to see more of intellectual and political substance as i live my life and then share it with you on youtube rather than necessarily producing content for youtube that might in a sense subtract from the rest of my life