Q & A 2018 01 January New Year

Hi everyone! So here we are for the first QA for 2018. There's five hundred and fourteen questions lined up. I don't think I'm gonna get to all of them, so it's been a busy time since the last time I did a QA. Some of you probably know about the Lindsay Shepherd affair at Wilfrid Laurier University, where a teaching assistant was brought in front of a tribunal because she had the temerity to play a video where I was discussing Bill C-16 on a public television show. That's been quite the national and international scandal, I would say.

And so I made a bit of a video about that today, which I haven't launched yet. It contains a message to junior high and high school students. I'm recommending to them that they... Well, I guess you'll have to watch the video. I didn't mean to make it a cliffhanger like that, but then as soon as I said that, I thought better of it and thought maybe I'll just wait. But anyways, let's take a look here.

Steve A has the first question: How can we know the difference between unhealthy repression and healthy self-restraint of sexuality? Well, I would say, you know, part of what constitutes ethics—let's say first of all, let's start, let's think about ethics to begin with. So what's the point of conducting your life ethically? The answer to that isn't so that you follow the proper rules precisely—the answer to that is so that you balance your life so that it's as productive and meaningful as it can possibly be.

And that would be productive and meaningful for you, with any luck, but also for people around you. That would even be better. And for you now, next week, and into the future. So it's sort of a variation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's moral dictum, which was to act such that your action becomes a moral universal—something like that. Although I think that it's better phrased across time and across people like that.

So when you're thinking about an ethic that has to do with any fundamental motivation, like sexual, you have to think about it in the context of the rest of your life. The question is whether or not... But what did I say? What did I read at one point that I really liked with regards to sexuality? Who's in control? That's the issue. Is it you, or is it the sexuality that's in control? Have you integrated your sexual life into the rest of your life so that the whole thing makes a harmonious balance? Are you in charge, or is it in charge, so to speak?

Because if you're not in charge with that harmonious balance, then things are going to waver wildly out of control, and you're going to find yourself in dreadful trouble. That happens whenever any given drive or really any given value predominates to the exclusion of all else. Now, it seems to me that sexuality is best handled within the confines of a relationship. That's the classic ethical solution to the problem. It's because sexuality brings with it a tremendous amount of responsibility.

Now, people don't like to think that, especially people who I would say are low in conscientiousness, let's say, or high in impulsivity. It's easy for people to believe in what would you call it? Casual sex, which is not something that I think exists because I don't think you can divorce sex from its sociological, or political, or economic, or psychological consequences. And I would say the endless scandals that have plagued the United States in particular in the last year with regards to sexual behavior are proof positive that there's no such thing as casual sex. I think the reason for that is that the consequences of sex are too dramatic.

It's not just pregnancy and disease, let's say, which are both as dramatic as consequences can be in life, but also the fact that there's no disentangling sexual behavior from emotional behavior. Or maybe you could say even worse: if you try to disentangle your sexual behavior from your emotional behavior, then I think what happens is that you end up cynical. I mean, if you're, let's say, a serial... if you have a lot of one-night stands and a lot of casual partners, then first of all, there's not much discrimination between one partner and the other.

And so in some sense, you're in a loop and just repeating the same act over and over. But you can't... there's nothing deep about it. There's nothing that enables you to establish a relationship with another person. And I think that you corrupt your soul in that way, and that you hurt yourself across time. And of course, you're going to hurt other people as well. So I'm not a big admirer of the casual sex idea. I think it's a demented adolescent fantasy fundamentally. It just doesn't work out in the real world now.

Healthy self-restraint—well, with regards to sexuality, it's the same with everything else, is that there's the necessity to forego immediate gratification for the purpose of medium to long-term thriving, let's say. So if your sexuality is integrated into an ethic that encompasses the rest of your life and if it serves that ethic, then I would say it's properly restrained. If it's unhealthily repressed, well then you're angry and bitter and resentful and cursing the opposite sex, or perhaps the same sex if you happen to be gay, for failing to recognize your particular form of sexual... what would you call it? Attractiveness. I think resentment and anger are a good indication that there's something wrong with the manner in which your sexuality is restrained.

So I hopefully that's a decent answer. Trevor Mooc says, "Why are dragons in Western culture bringers of death and destruction that must be slain? Well in the East, they're portents of good fortune to be revered." Well, that's a great question, by the way—the dragon. The dragon—I already defined the dragon at some point partly from a book I read a while back on dragons as a tree-cat, snake, bird. The idea in the book was that the dragon was an imagistic representation of the class of all predators, which means also might be why dragons also breathe fire, because fire was undoubtedly a common destructive agent in our evolutionary past.

But the dragon is the most primordial symbol of that which lurks beyond, which is known—in fact, it's even more primordial than that because it even is that which lurks beyond what is unknown in some sense. Remember Don Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns? Well, that's basically the dragon. There are some unknowns that pop up that you can master right away, and you could kind of think of those as known unknowns. But unknown unknowns are those things that pop up that you don't know—how you didn't even—you had no idea whatsoever that they even existed.

Anyways, what's the character of an unknown unknown? Well, part of it's terrifying because it can do you in, right? But part of it's also positive. Because anything that's truly unknown brings with it a tremendous amount of new possibility. That's why dragons hoard gold or why they also hoard princesses or guard princesses—hoard, I would say, is the right word. So I don't think the dragon in the West is a fully negative symbol because the dragon has gold associated with it or virgins.

And the reason for that is that the hero who confronts the dragon gets the virgin, and that hasn't changed—that's a story as old as time. And I don't think it'll ever change as long as there are human beings. Now, why the Chinese put stress on the positive side, and the West put stress on the negative side, is difficult to say. I might say because the Chinese got organized so early. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was easier for them to see a little bit of chaos as something positive—something necessary and positive, as a counterbalance to the tremendous organizational weight of their state.

That's the best answer that I've been able to formulate. So anyways, the dragon is a very complex and ambivalent symbol. It combines everything into one symbol—positive and negative. And then you can stress the positive or you can stress the negative. You could also say, to some degree, that whether a dragon is positive or negative depends to some degree on the manner in which you approach it, because the psychological reality is that dragons approached voluntarily, well, small, are most likely to be positive.

And that's a really good thing to know in your life. It's a good reason—it's a good rule of thumb to help you stop avoiding things that you shouldn't avoid, so that they don't grow and magnify beyond your capacity to deal with them. You often mention disciplining children so they behave. What is your advice for making them behave without resorting to corporal punishment?

Well, first of all, it depends on what you mean by corporal punishment. Timeout could be regarded as corporal punishment. It also depends very much on the age of the child. Let's say a two-year-old. Well, in my new book, by the way, I have a chapter in there called "Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them." And the reason that I wrote a chapter about that is because people who let their children do things that make them dislike them end up disliking them.

And because there's a huge power differential, generally speaking, between adults and children, if you end up disliking your children because they're not behaving well—they're behaving disgracefully, say, or they're challenging your position in the authority hierarchy too regularly—something you won't put up with, by the way, even if you think you will. It's necessary to get your disciplinary routine straight. So the first thing I would say is figure out what the rules are. There shouldn't be too many for two-year-olds; basically, they have to know what "no" means, and they also have to learn, as they approach three, not to kick, hit, bite, or steal, essentially.

Now, it's easy to train a two-year-old, but knowing "no" means you can actually start with a child that's only 13 months old—a child that can cry, let's say. Or that can crawl—let's say that you have a child who is starting to crawl and wants to explore the house. So the first thing you do, if you have any sense, is try to get rid of most things that the child could cause a tremendous amount of trouble with. To the things— or to the chair—so that it's reasonably safe. And then the child is gonna want to crawl around and get into everything. But maybe there are things you don't want him or her to get into—like maybe there's a, oh, what would we say? Maybe there's a tablecloth, and on top of the tablecloth there's a plant, or maybe there's some plants on the floor.

And when the child is crawling and goes off to do something that he or she shouldn't, you can just grab his leg and, you know, gently but firmly, and say, "No." And the child will keep trying to move forward because they're stubborn little blighters, and you can continue to say "no." And if you persist with saying "no," then the child will eventually give up and sort of go limp. Now, often the child will cry when you do that, and of course that might make you feel guilty. But what that means is that you've effectively brought the behavior to a halt, and if you do that ten times—you've got to watch your child and don't stop them from exploring things that they need to explore.

And you want to use this sort of thing judiciously. You can grab them by the leg and say "no," and "no, no," and wait until they give up. Usually, they'll cry, and then you can let them go. And then soon after you do that about ten times, soon then if you just say "no," with the same tone of voice, the child will generally—what happens? The child will immediately cry and then stop.

And then after about ten repeats of "no," without having the leg grabbed, then "no" will just produce stopping of the behavior. And that's unbelievably useful because as soon as you train your child to understand what "no" means, then they really have free rein of the house in some sense, with relatively minimal supervision from you. First of all, they can learn what things they're not supposed to get into. And it's amazing how fast children can learn that and how fast they can generalize to the class of things that they shouldn't get into—like you don't have to teach them every single thing; they can generalize very rapidly.

That's not much different than thinking— but also, once they are capable of understanding what "no" means, you have an extremely potent means of helping them regulate their behavior with a minimum of intervention. So that's unbelievably useful. So now let's say you have a two-year-old who's pretty contentious, and two-year-olds are pretty contentious. Some of them in particular, because about 5% of two-year-olds, most of them are male, are quite aggressive by temperament. And those are the ones that, if you put with other two-year-olds, will frequently kick, hit, bite, or steal—not all kids are like that, but some are. And most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're about four.

Now let's say you have—and at two, they also start to experiment with saying "no" back and also with misbehaving, although they can do that even younger than that. So if you have a two-year-old who's particularly rambunctious and who decides he isn't going to listen to you—we use "he" in this example because it's boys that are more likely to misbehave and not listen—you can pick them up, and, you know, by the arms. Now, you've got to get your attitude right because you don't want to be stupid.

You don't want to let your kid make you mad, especially when they're really little because you're really big and you can hurt them. And so you've got to have a clue! That's why you want to get the rules of discipline and order—the minimum rules of discipline and why you want to have a strategy. But let's say your two-year-old is insisting upon doing something that you don't want them to do, like inserting a fork into an electrical outlet, and you just can't have that.

And so you can say "no." Hopefully, you've already done the "no" training that I recommended, and if that doesn't work, what I recommend doing is picking the child up by the arms and then putting them on the steps. Say, "Look, you sit there until you're ready to listen." Now, usually, the child will sit there, and then the rule has to be something like, "You can get up as soon as you're ready to be a civilized human being again."

And you can refer to yourself—your own attitude during a process like that because if the child does comply and sits on the steps and then comes and says, "I'm ready to be good," and you like him again, you've got to be honest about this. Then you can tell that he's honest in his decision to rejoin the civilized world. Now sometimes if you put a two-year-old that's particularly rambunctious on the staircase, that as soon as you let go of their arms, they'll run off. And that can be a game, or it can just be an act of defiance.

And in that case then you go get him, and put him back on the steps, and you do that several times if necessary. And if that becomes a game, then you sit on the step and you hold him by the arms. Remember: no anger because he's just a— for God's sake. You know, you don't have to be angry, just put him on the steps and hold him and say, "Look, I'm not letting you go until you sit there and behave." And so if you hold him for a while, he'll squirm and look away and so forth.

But you can get his attention if you're a little bit stubborn. You hold him there and say, "You're gonna sit there till I decide that you can leave." And so you hold him, and he'll squirm. But you can outweigh them if you're patient, but you got to make the time. And then eventually, he'll stop squirming, and you can let him go.

And then you can sit there and watch him, and when you think he's, you know, decided that he's going to be a civilized creature, then you can say, "That's good," and you can give him a pat on the head and you can say, "Let's go back and do what we're doing." And the rule has to be, you see, that the punishment not only has to bring the behavior to a halt in the most merciful manner possible, but that still is effective. But it also has to satisfy your need for order and justice so that you don't carry resentment and irritation about the child's misbehavior forward with you, because you don't want to kid yourself about what sort of nice person you are.

You're not nearly as nice a person as you think. And no one likes to be brought down the authority hierarchy by a recalcitrant two-year-old. So in almost all circumstances, those processes will suffice.

There's other disciplinary strategies that you can use too that are more positive. I mean, one of the things that you can do, for example, if you're—let's say you want to get your child to go to bed—which is a really good idea—you should set a stable bedtime for your child. And I would say if they're under four, it should be around 8 or 7 or something like that because you want to have a life and you want to have a life with your wife so that you don't end up hating your child.

And so one of the things you can do if you want to train your child to go to bed at 8:00—so maybe he's not going to bed until 10:00 right now, and you want to fix that. So you say, "Okay, go to the grocery store or a little convenience store, buy ten little gifts, and it can be cheap. Kids don't care; they're not very bright, you know. You can fool them." So by 10:00, things that you think your kid would like and wrap them up and then put them up on the shelf where he can see them but can't get them.

Then you say, "Look, kid, I'm gonna put you to bed at 9:30 tonight. And if you don't get out of bed, then I'm gonna give you one of these. I'm gonna give you one of these gifts in the morning." Or if the—or you can do it another way too. If the child is always giving you a rough time about getting ready for bed and going to bed, you can say, "Look, if you put on your pajamas without fussing and you climb into bed, then you’ll give you one of these little gifts." And so then if that works, then the child can have a little gift, and he's in bed at 9:30.

And then you can make it 9:00, and then you can make it 8:30, and then you can make it 8:00. And those are called—that's called successive approximation, right? You hit the target, you specify the target that you want the child to achieve. And then use small rewards—not too often—in order to attain that goal. And those are unbelievably effective strategies, and they can actually be pretty fun.

But I would say the advice to not let your child do anything that makes you dislike them is really, really useful. You want to talk this over with your partner too so that you have your disciplinary strategies and your rules talked out so that you don't work across purposes to one another.

So, okay, so that's probably good enough for that. Can we take the biblical? Andrew Wells asks, "Can we take the biblical story seriously enough with us without also keeping biblical traditions? What's the psychological impact of group gathering, church-going?" I think we could take the biblical stories seriously enough, but I don't think that it's particularly easy. The traditions bind the community together now. I'm saying now, and I don't go to church, you know.

And the reason I don't go to church is because, well, it drives me crazy, to speak frankly. I haven't been able to sit in a situation like that ever since I was—well, ever really, that's really the truth. And I don't—I'm not convinced that that's a good thing, because I do believe—and I've had good conversations about this with Jonathan Pajot—I do believe that communal return to the source of the community's ethics is actually a necessary thing.

And maybe I'm atoning for my past sins by doing these biblical lectures at the moment, which is something that's communal. And then because there's also something about going where a bunch of other people are to reaffirm your commitment to the good that you're also all aiming at—that's got some power in it. And I don't think that that's something that we should forego. I think it's dangerous.

I mean, look, even if you're cynical about church—and I guess I would put myself in that category—it's certainly the case that communal church-going in the 1950s provided the average person with at least an hour a week where they were contemplating, no matter how poorly, the purpose of ethics in life and the idea of a higher purpose and a higher meaning in life.

And you've got to think that spending an hour a week thinking about that is better than never doing it at all. So I don't know how that tradition can be revivified in a meaningful way, but I really do think it's a catastrophe that we've lost it, because we don't have a center—an ethical center that holds our community together. And the consequence of that is that we're fragmenting quite badly.

So, Edwin Rajkumar says, "I was wondering what your thoughts are on meditation and if you practice it yourself." Well, that's a good question. I think I practice it a lot. And look, when I listen to someone—or even when I listen to myself—but let's say when I listen to someone in my clinical practice, I think I do it in a meditative way in that I sit and listen and I wait for thoughts to appear rather than voluntarily thinking.

So I clear my mind. I try to keep my agendas off the table—my agendas, whatever they are, except that I want the best for my client in this hour and the best, say, by their definition and mine, jointly decided, because that's all part of discussion. And then I listen very carefully, and I wait for the reactions that occur within me, and then I share them. And I think that's a meditative exercise.

I think it's different than voluntary thinking. It's like, you know, there's a statement in the New Testament that says, "Knock, and the door will open; ask, and you will receive." Now, that's a meditative—that's a call to a meditative mode of existence. It's like, well, often what I do, for example, if I want to solve a problem, is I—if I have a problem with my own behavior, maybe I'm having problems in my family, is I'll go sit on a bed or a chair, and I'll think, "Okay, I would like an answer to this. I would like to know what the answer to this is, and I'm willing to accept whatever answer is appropriate."

Because usually you get an answer that you don't like, right? If it's a real answer, it's not something that you're gonna be all that happy about. And then magically, so to speak, an answer appears. And I think that's a meditative practice. And the meditative practice is part to clear your mind of your proximal concerns and to concentrate more deeply on what might be regarded as eternally true and to open yourself up for a revelation in relationship to what is eternally true.

And I've found that incredibly effective, and I think that you can live like that. You just have to abandon your proximal pursuits. Now, in my new book, again, I wrote a chapter about that called "Do What is Meaningful and Not What is Expedient." And it's a bit of a meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, I would say, because the essential message in the Sermon on the Mount—which is the foundational document of Western civilization as far as I'm concerned—essentially is that you should orient yourself ultimately toward the highest good that you can conceive.

And I've tried to formulate that, and I mentioned it earlier in this Q&A, that the highest good that you can conceive should be something like what would be good for you now and good for you tomorrow and next week and next month and next year—so good for you and all the future yous that might exist. And also, at the same time, good for your family and good for the community, you know, conceptualized narrowly and broadly and good now for your family in the community and then also into the future.

So it's something like that. It's a balance of goods that stretches across time. You have to decide if that's what you really want, and my sense would be you haven't got anything better to aim at and that you should aim at the best thing that you can aim at for a whole bunch of reasons. One is if you don't aim at something, you're certainly not going to attain it. And if you're going to aim at something, why not aim for the best thing that you can think of?

And if you do aim for the best thing that you can think of and you make any progress whatsoever, it's extremely exciting. And if you do aim for the best thing you can think of and you make some progress, then it's very life-affirming and validating, and that sort of quells your anxiety and your existential pain. And so you get yourself properly oriented. And the Sermon on the Mount basically suggests that you do that by orienting yourself towards God.

And for the psychological purposes, we can conceptualize God as the highest good that you can conceive of. And then you concentrate on the day. And so you can get up in the morning, and you can think, "Well, I want the best possible thing to happen." And so what is it that I should do to serve that? And if you ask that genuinely—and that's in a meditative way, I will say you get an answer to that right away.

Now, the problem is that it's usually an answer that involves some kind of sacrifice. It means that instead of doing what you would like to do impulsively right now, you're more likely to have to go do something, you know, that you've been avoiding and that's difficult. But if you do that, then you'll have some... you can also leave in your day with some pleasure to reward yourself for doing something difficult.

But if you live that way, then I think that your house stays clean and your family stays organized and the state doesn't rock and all that. And all that's extremely, extremely good. So, Anonymous says, "How do I deal with the fact that I'm a pedophile and should I tell my family and friends?" I can't answer the second part of that—should I tell my family and friends—because I don't know your family and friends and I don't know how you would go about telling them.

So I can't offer you any advice about that. I would say that if you have the opportunity, you should probably go speak to a counselor or priest or someone that you trust because you're going to have to figure out how to deal with that. But you should also... maybe—and that's about the best I can do with that. I'm not an expert in the treatment of pedophilia, and so I can't offer you any great clinical wisdom.

But I would say that you need a plan. You need to plan, and you have to—and I would include in that plan the absolutely catastrophic consequences of not regulating that behavior properly. And you should really think it through. Because that pedophilic impulse, let's say, could lead you into seven different sorts of Hell—you and whoever you happen to tangle up in it.

And you might want to avoid—if you might want to avoid seven different forms of Hell, then in order to do that, given the proclivity that you describe, then you're gonna have to have a plan. Now, look, lots of people have impulses that they have a hard time controlling. You know, alcoholics can't drink alcohol, and cocaine addicts can't take cocaine, and most people can't manifest untrammeled sexual behavior.

And certainly, within the capacity of human beings to regulate impulses that aren't in their or others' best interests. So I wouldn't regard it as a hopeless pursuit, but it does seem to me that it's something that you might want to talk to someone you trust about, because it's a complicated issue, and it's a proclivity that's likely to lead you in a direction that would be, let's call it, suboptimal.

I was wondering what you thought of Santa Claus—if it's a healthy thing for parents to practice. What's the psychological impact of lying to your child? Look, I think that— I think lying is the wrong way of thinking about this. Santa Claus is a game. It's a game of pretend, and children play games of pretend all the time, you know?

So I don't see any harm in it at all. Now, you know, you don't want to prolong that belief beyond its natural endpoint, but it's a massive game, and it's a lovely game, and I don't believe that there's anything harmful in it in the least. So now, what's the psychological impact of lying to your child?

Let's— we can think about that more generally—don't lie to your children. Don't lie, period. Lying is a really bad idea. It's a really bad idea—it never works. You might think it works, but that's only because you're blind to the consequences—it's probably willfully blind. Plus, it's a terrible weight.

You know, if you don't lie, there's a lot fewer things to keep track of. Your life is a lot more pristine and crystalline. And then things that come your way, maybe you deserve in some small measure, and it's a bad idea to lie. Now, but I don't think it's a bad idea to play pretend games with your children. I think that's okay.

You once mentioned you were planning on making an IQ test available alongside the Big Five aspects scale. Is that in the works? Yes, we have an IQ test that we use for business testing, although we haven't made it available publicly yet. It is in the works, but not for a while. What we're doing instead—and that's because there has to be—well, there's a bunch of work we still have to do on it to generate the reports, so that they're going to be truly usable to people now.

I would say is about three or four months' work is necessary to do that. What we are doing right now with the Big Five aspect scale, though, is that understandmyself.com is producing a dyad version. And so we're working on the boyfriend-girlfriend version right now.

So what that'll mean is that when you go there and you do your personality test and your girlfriend, say, does her personality test, that you'll both be able to generate a dual report that describes the similarities and differences between you and your partner and where you're likely to see eye-to-eye on things, where you're likely to differ, and what that's going to mean and what you might want to do about it, if you know what you might be able to do about it. And this—we're hoping this will be really useful because temperamental differences are a lot of the reason that people have a hard time getting along.

That and a complete inability whatsoever to state what they actually want and to negotiate, which is a completely different issue. I want to build a program to help people negotiate at some point in the future—that's part of our future plan. But the next development plan is to—well, there are two of them.

Is to get the high school version of the self-authoring program up and running, and my programmer keeps promising it in two weeks—and these things always take longer than expected. But I'm sure we'll get it out in the first quarter of 2018. And then also the dyad version of the Big Five aspect scale—that should be out in the first quarter of 2018 as well.

And then I'm not sure if the IQ test will be next on the development track. See, one of the things we'd like to do with Understand Myself is to expand it out into a career planning process. Because look at it this way: you know, if you have an IQ of a hundred—which is the average IQ—so that would place you sort of in the middle of the average high school class—being a lawyer is probably not a great career choice for you unless you're unbelievably conscientious, because you're going to be competing with people who have verbal facility, say, and a problem-solving capacity that far exceeds yours.

And you're gonna have to work like mad too to just be reasonably competent. And so what seems to be more logical is to take a good look at your intellectual prowess as given, because it's very powerfully biologically influenced, and to pick a domain of career that you could excel in.

Because why not pick a domain that you can excel in? There's lots of different things that you can be. And so you want to consult your temperament. So if you're agreeable, then you probably want to work with people. And if you're disagreeable, you probably want to work with things. And if you're extroverted, you want to have a job that involves sales and social activities. If you're introverted, you want to work alone. And if you're open, you need to do something creative and entrepreneurial, and so on.

So you have to consult your temperament to see where you would be properly slotted. And then you have to consider your intelligence, so you can find a niche where you're most likely to excel. And those niches exist. So we'd like to combine the IQ test with the Big Five aspect scale so that we can give people reasonable career advice—it's being a long-term goal. And so those are all on the table, and I have a good program team working on them, but they're very complicated things, and they take a lot of time, and we don't want to make a mistake in all of that.

So but maybe the couple's version and the high school version of the self-authoring program and the high school version of the self-authoring program in this quarter, and maybe the career counseling version of the Big Five aspect scale in the next year—that would be lovely! That's probably overly optimistic for the second part.

But you often give advice to young adults to help them avoid some of the pitfalls of life. Any advice for those of us who are 40-plus who have already faltered? Look, first, Graham—this is Graham—everybody who is 40-plus has already faltered. But I'm presuming that you mean faulted in a manner that appears to you to be above the average, right?

Well, what I would really recommend is, I think that you should—if you haven't already, you should go do the future authoring program and maybe the past authoring program, too—because you should figure out exactly how you faltered. Like, what exactly did you do wrong by your own analysis, right? I'm not saying, well, what social rules did you break. Although that's not a bad initial guideline, it's like, so in the self-authoring suite, there's a past authoring module, and it asks you to break your life into seven epochs and then to consider the emotionally significant or practically significant events within each epoch and detail out their emotional nature and their consequences and so on.

And one of the things you might want to figure out is, well, when you say that you faltered—like, what do you mean exactly? And I mean exactly. Go over your life with a fine-tooth comb. This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, by the way, in the Gulag before he wrote the Gulag Archipelago. He went over his life and said, "Okay, well, like where did I go wrong? What did I squander? What mistakes did I make? And what did I do right?"

So that you can orient yourself now. And then you want to think—and this is why we built a future authoring program—well, look, you got 40 years left, man! So what do you want them to be like? So what do you want to emad, at least? How are you gonna minimize the misery, if nothing else? And so you need a plan.

And then what you need to do is to figure out how to work day to day so that you incrementally approach that plan. So I have another chapter in this new book called "Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday Rather Than to Who Someone Else Is Today." That's really a useful psychological stance for someone who's thirty and over in particular.

Talk twenty-year-olds can still kind of compare themselves to other twenty-year-olds, because all twenty-year-olds in some way are the same. But forty-year-olds are really different from each other; and so are thirty-year-olds, for that matter. So you might think, okay, well, here's a meditative strategy for ceasing to falter. You could wake up in the morning, or you could do this at night before you go to bed, and you could think, "Okay, look, I want to structure my day tomorrow, so that when I'm done with the day, my life is in slightly better order than it was when I woke up this morning."

It's just slightly better. Because incremental progress is massively, massively effective, because it bears exponential fruit, just like a bank account compounds. Incremental progress compounds with time. So you can get up in the morning and you can think, "Okay, there's some things in my life that I could put in order today." There are usually things you don't want to do, as I mentioned earlier.

What could I do today that would help put my life in order that I would do? You have to ask yourself; you can't tell yourself—you have to ask yourself. What would you do? And then maybe you have to say, "Well, or maybe you have to say, under what conditions would I be willing to do something to put my life in further order today? What little reward would I need to give myself?"

And these have to be questions—you can't take out the whip and boss yourself around, because you'll find that you're a terrible master and a worse slave. And so you can get a long way if you look low enough. One of the things Carl Jung said I really liked was that modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough—they don't have the humility.

Now, you said that you have already faulted, so it sounds like you've got the humility already intact. So I would say think about what you want, think about what you know around you isn't set right because you'll know it. Make a list of things that are around you that aren't right, and then start thinking about small things you can do—like trivial things that even a fool like yourself could manage—that would orient you in the right direction and help straighten out your life.

And try that for a year before you decide that you're a failure, you know? Because you'll find that if you put that into practice for a year, that things will be a lot better. And like I said, you've got 40 years left, so you're not done yet.

And so the other thing I would say too is it isn't exactly that I would say forgive yourself, because, you know, that's just a cliché. But I would say that once you've decided once you've done wrong and you've put into practice some strategies to rectify that, don't—you don't have to beat yourself any more than is necessary for you to learn, which is a good rule of thumb with regards to treating yourself and also to treating other people.

So I don't think my wife loves our internationally adopted daughter, and she won't go to counseling with me. My house is filled with tyranny and anger. Any advice? Anonymous, wow, that's a loaded— that's a set of loaded questions, man! I don't think my wife loves our internationally adopted daughter.

Well, the first question would be: why not? But she in on the adoption, for example? Was it partly her decision? Here's a possibility—maybe you could ask her under what conditions. Ask her more specifically why she doesn't like your internationally adopted daughter. It's too vague. I don't think my wife loves our internationally adopted daughter—break it down.

Maybe it's something like there are 15 things about our life with our internationally adopted daughter that my wife does not appreciate. Now maybe some of those things are the way that the daughter behaves, so I don't know how old she is or anything else about her. Differentiate your problem—it's too vague! You'll never solve it this way, because love isn't the right word.

See if you can write down thirty reasons why your wife is annoyed about your current situation, and maybe you'll have to differentiate each of those thirty into ten more, right? Maybe there's 300 reasons. And then see if you can start asking her about fixing some of the reasons that you differentiate, because obviously you can't go up to her and say, "You have to start loving our internationally adopted daughter." That's just not going to work, and you already know that.

But if you break that down into the twenty reasons why she doesn't like your daughter, then maybe you can figure out a way that some progress might be made on one of those problems. And maybe if you take that approach for a whole year, then she'll go from, like—she'll at least hit neutral or something like that. That's the best I can do, given that I only have three sentences to go on.

So differentiate the problem and then solve the smaller problems. You have talked about the difference between intelligence and wisdom, Jason Clarke. You have talked about the difference between intelligence, and I'm saying intelligence isn't a shortcut to wisdom. Well, let's point something else out, man—stupidity isn't a shortcut to wisdom either. What is your definition of wisdom?

Well, there's the Old Testament view—that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. That's a good one! I think wisdom is in part the willingness to come to terms with the knowledge of your own capacity for malevolence. That's wisdom. The desire to rectify that—the wish to set the world on a pathway that leads it closer to heaven and farther away from hell—that's wisdom.

The humility to know that there are more things that you don't know than that you know, and that you should be open to what you don't know when people inform you of it, because it's better to learn than it is to walk nose-first into a wall or blindfolded off a cliff. The knowledge that you don't have the right to be a judge of being without having given it your utmost—that's wisdom.

What else? The knowledge—wisdom is also the knowledge that hell is real enough so that you should do everything you can to avoid either inhabiting it or producing it. That's what I learned from the psychological analysis of the history of the 20th century—hell's real enough. And you—you're duty-bound, let's say, you're honor-bound, you're ethically bound to do the opposite of whatever produces those hellish circumstances.

Ami Pellegrini says, "Why is self-sabotage such a feature in human life?" You know what? I have a chapter about that in my new book—too, which chapter is it now? I think it's—I can't always match the content with the chapter title, oddly enough. I think it's the chapter about picking friends that are good for you.

See, oh yes, I have it right here. And I didn't set that up, by the way—I genuinely did remember. Make friends with the people who want the best for you—was that it? No, treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. There we go! Why is self-sabotage such a feature?

Okay, here's a couple of reasons. The first is that there's a lot of responsibility with success, right? So if you say yes to things and you do a good job and you bear a large burden, then you have to carry it. A lot of that might be success, but you know, failure is a lot easier than success. Plus, you can complain about it and whine about it and be a victim and, you know, garner all sorts of kudos from yourself and others that way.

So there's that—it's just failure to adopt responsibility. But then I would say, too, there's also revenge on the self. And God, that's partly why I like the Cain and Abel story so much—once I sort of figured out what it meant. People have a hard time not having the kind of contempt that borders on self-hatred for themselves, partly because, you know, we are fragile and mortal creatures and prone to error and malevolence.

And we know that of ourselves better than anyone else. And because we know that we're prone to punish ourselves and to think ill of ourselves. And you know, one of the things I learned from Jung was that the injunction to do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you was an equation rather than a statement about how to be nice to people and that you have an ethical obligation to treat yourself as if you’re some person of value—even if you don't really feel that—that you owe yourself the same treatment that you would give someone that you cared for and loved.

That's a really hard thing to learn, you know? Because you kind of have to detach yourself from your knowledge of all your insufficiencies and your flaws and treat yourself with dignity and respect—at least the dignity and effect you owe someone who's faulty, that could conceivably learn. And that's a very difficult ethical lesson to learn.

It's easier to beat yourself continually on the head back of the head with a club and to feel it's justified given how much you know about how wretched and useless you are. So let's say there's two reasons. One is that you don't want the responsibility, so it's not really self-sabotage—it's just avoidance of responsibility and consequent failure.

And the second is punishment—self-punishment that seems only just, given what you know about all your pathology and errors and insufficiencies. So I would say that's the big two there. Hmm, any advice for a grieving parent who lost a child unexpectedly?

Well, one, I would say make sure that you turn to the people that you have left that you love. The second I would say is don't be guilty about grieving, you know? And if you have friends, you could tell them, you could let them do something nice for you, because they would like that. You could figure out something they could do that would be nice that you would appreciate.

And let them do it, because you know, other people are going to grieve at some point in the future too, and maybe they'll be able to ask you for help if you do that. And then, well, I would—the next thing I would say is give yourself time. You know, it takes a year, maybe longer, to adapt to adjust even reasonably to such a catastrophic loss.

And then I would say try not to allow that terrible wound to make you bitter, because then not only will you have lost your child and grieve, but you'll be bitter, and then you'll be resentful, and then you'll be hateful. And that'll be like a terrible—not allowed insult to injury. So that's too bad.

Are there ever situations where you should hold your tongue and not speak what you believe? Yeah, most of the time. Look, it's really a tricky thing to figure out when to say what you have to say, but I can give you a couple of rules of thumb—it's a general question, and I can't list all the situations, but I can give you some strategic advice.

So for example, if someone has said rude things to you, for example, says a rude thing to you, maybe you shouldn't respond immediately, even though you're very irritated. Because maybe that's just an impulsive response and one that you'll regret—one you make in anger that you'll regret. So I would say when you're dealing with someone and you want to chastise them, then you should wait for them to sin three times, right?

So the first time they're rude to you, you think, "Oh, well, they're probably having a bad day, or I misunderstood, or I'm rude sometimes too, and you know, I'll just let it go." But you don't forget and you don't pretend it didn't happen. And then it happens again. And you think, "Well, that could still be fluke. That could still be that could still be situational, so maybe I'll just hold my damn tongue. But I'll remember that—I'll remember."

And then the third time they do it, then you think, "No, no, three times—that's a pattern." And so then you can go to them and you can say, "Look, this happened," and then maybe they die. And you say, "Well, yeah, you can deny it, but then this happened," and maybe they die. "I need to say why—you can deny that, but then this happened, and you know, three times the charm."

And that's the time when you should stand up for yourself and say what you have to say. Look, you have to put yourself in a position where you can say what you have to say. You have to think it through, you have to have a plan, and you can't just launch yourself off the edge of a cliff and hope that God's gonna catch you on the way down.

And I'm saying, you know, it's definitely the case that if you have something to say—like if you’re being oppressed at work, if you've got a horrible tyrant as a boss, or maybe that's happening to you in your marriage. Or maybe you're the horrible tyrant—God only knows. There's things that have to be said, but that doesn't mean you can just blurt them out. You have to have a plan—you have to figure out what you want to say.

You have to make it as minimally troublesome as possible; you have to have the goal that you want in mind, and you have to have a backup plan—like this is the sort of thing that you're talking about, you know, where you need to say something that's like a little war. You don't want to walk into that unarmed and unprepared.

And now that doesn't mean that you should— that means that you should set up your life so that you're firmly enough anchored in a variety of different ways, so that you can say what you need to say without dying as a consequence. So, yo, Josh Gates. Oh good, Josh asked me an easy question!

Young suggested that the Christian myth failed to articulate Christ's descent into hell, and that this resulted in the mass shadow projection of the West's thoughts. Yeah, well, I'm gonna refer to my book again. I talked about this in Rule 7—pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. In that chapter, I discussed this idea in Christianity that Christ took the sins of the world onto himself, and I think that's very much related to the idea of descent into hell.

They're not exactly the same thing, but I'm gonna address the first one, and it'll shed light on the second. So what does it mean that the Messiah is archetypally the figure who takes the sins of the world onto himself? What it means, practically speaking, or psychologically speaking—and I've tried this with some of my clients who were very naive—is that it means to read the history of the world as if you were the perpetrator of the evils that you read about instead of the victim or the noble intervener.

You know, I talked to somebody the other day about the movie Schindler's List. Schindler was this German industrialist who saved a very large number of Jews that were in danger of, well, in danger of the final solution. And one of the things he said was, "Well, you know, when people watch Schindler's List, they always think they'd be Schindler. And if they don't think they'd be Schindler, maybe they think maybe the Jewish victim of the Nazis, but they almost never think that they'd be the Nazi persecutor." And that's a big mistake, because when you read about history, then you're reading about you— even if the "you" is the perpetrator.

And unless you understand that, then someone else has to be the perpetrator. And if someone else is the perpetrator, well, then you have a devil that you can chase. And you know, maybe you've identified the devil properly, because you know now and then it's like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy or someone like that. And you've actually, you know, you've identified a perpetrator, but so often, far too often, the best way to constrain the malevolence outside is to constrain the malevolence within.

And so if you don't have a locale for the evil of the world, then you have to externalize it, because the evil of the world certainly exists. Now, it's a better solution to assume that you're fully capable of the terrible things that people have been capable of throughout the history of humanity and to contend with that genuinely and there's massive advantages to that.

I mean, first of all, it can actually produce a remarkable increment in self-esteem, because you know if you're just a rabbit and you freeze whenever a wolf looks at you, then you're just a frozen rabbit, and that's not so good. You're just a scared rabbit. But maybe you learn one day that you're not a rabbit—that you're actually quite the damn monster and you've got teeth and you could really use them in an underhanded and horrible way.

This is why people like antihero movies so much. Because they go and see the villains, the Mafia guys and these tough guys and the antiheroes that populate our imagination and think, "Oh yeah, well, I’d really, really like to be someone like that." And the thing is that being useless and weak—it's better to be a monster than to be useless and weak.

And that's because being useless and weak makes you a worst monster than a monster. That's why it's not like being a monster is good, but a weak, useless monster is the worst kind of monster, because that's the sort of monster that'll jump you in the dark and sink its teeth into the back of your neck instead of confronting you forthrightly in the alley.

And so if you start to see yourself as the perpetrator of historical malevolence—if you can imagine yourself as an Auschwitz camp guard—if you see yourself as the vicious villain of the human story, then all of a sudden you've got a lot more respect for yourself, and you can unlock that internal monster. And that internal monster—and then maybe you contain the damn thing or at least bring it into some sort of partnership with yourself.

And then when someone pushes you around, you can let a little bit of that out in your eyes—just a little bit. And you can say, "It would be better for you and for me if you didn't continue to do that." And you can actually mean it—and then actually, it will stop! Because if you let a little bit of that out when you tell someone, just—the probability that they'll stop is extremely high.

And then just a tiny vision of the monster you could become is enough to keep order in your house and maybe in your state. And so the mass shadow projection of the West, well, you know, here's another thing. So one of the things the Christians figured out was that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan.

I can't get into that—it's too complicated. You'll have to read chapter 7 if you want a full explication of that idea. That's as good an answer to the question as I can manage tonight.

I spent all day—let's see—all day I got up at 7 and I worked all day till 5:00 on this video I told you about, so I made about 400 edits or something like that. So I'm a little bit on the burnt-out side tonight. So let's see—let's take a couple of questions from the live chat, and it's zooming along here.

So how should one deal with recurring self-pity, and why is it so gripping? Well, it can be gripping for a variety of reasons. It can be gripping because you are, let's see—because you are high in neuroticism, that's a possibility, and why is it so gripping? Well, that's another potential reason—it’s hard for me to say.

Let's see, I have another chapter like that—what's it called? Yeah, again, it's Rule 2—treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Well, why the hell wouldn't you pity yourself? I mean, people are life is tragic. Everything ends in death. Everything that you have will be taken away from you. You're weak and breakable and prone to fits of impulsivity and malevolence. How could you not have self-pity?

Well, that's really the answer, but the next answer is: yeah, well, despite that, it's not good enough—you have to rise above all that, even though you have every reason for it. That's the thing that's so paradoxical: you have to rise above it even though you have every reason for it. And part of the reason you have to rise above it is because if you don't, it makes everything worse—you and everything—and being itself.

And so it's gripping because, well, it does grip you. You know, malevolence and tragedy and vulnerability and mortality—they're gripping. And I would say, well, you have to find something that's even more gripping than that. And I would say the most—the thing that's most gripping—the only thing that's more gripping than that, in truth, is to live a good life.

To live the best life you possibly can—to live a life that's so noble that all of those things are justifiable. Uriel 333, he says, "JP thinks he is a monster." Lu l—I don't know what "lu l" means, but I don't actually think I'm a monster. There's a difference between thinking you're a monster and knowing you're a monster.

Alright, Foglight says, "I love this guy." Well, thank you, Foglight! I would probably love you too if I knew you. Let's see, who's that—? Santa Christ says, "I'm a monster." Well, good! That's a good start, man!

That's a good start—practice that roar and get good at it because there'll be times when you need it. So DJ Chronic says, "I let myself be that weak monster for so long." Yeah, well maybe you know what it's like, man, down in your basement fantasizing about revenge—that's no bloody fun. But you know this is something Alfred Adler knew too—he's worth reading. Those fantasies of revenge, you know, they have the seeds within them.

You knew this as well—the seeds within them of the new you—you can let those—what would you say—manifest themselves and see what seeds of potential future development are harbored within them. That's also extremely useful. Ethan Fergal says, "How do you boost your confidence talking to people and get rid of the paranoid that people hate you and don't like you and think you're trash?"

That's how I feel. Okay, well the first thing is—let me tell you a little bit about courage—know a little bit about trust. Sorry. When you're a naive person, you trust people because you think that people are good. And then, maybe someone comes along and hurts you, and you go, "Oh no, people aren't good. I can't trust anyone."

And then maybe you're paranoid and you think that people hate you and don't like you and think you're trash and so forth. You know, trust people. But then you figure out—Jesus, this whole not trusting people isn't working out very well because now I can't get anywhere.

And if I ever do meet someone who's trustworthy and I don't trust them, then they're not gonna get an opportunity to show me that they're trustworthy. And so then what happens is that you replace naive trust with courageous trust. And you put yourself out there, despite the fact that people might hate you and don't like you and think you're trash, you know?

So the other thing I would say that's more practical, Ethan, I think you'd find that you only think that when you run away. My suspicions are, if you went out and talked to people, it's like you'd have to have something to talk about, you know? But if you went out and talked to people, you'd find that those thoughts only bothered you for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then you would get over them.

You know, a lot of that's high neuroticism. And that— in the Big Five aspect scale, that's withdrawal. You're experiencing a lot of withdrawal related negative emotions—anticipatory anxiety. And the best way to overcome that is to not avoid.

So if you find yourself avoiding social situations, then you have to formulate a plan to stop doing that. And then over time, your confidence will be boosted. Let's see, that guy asked, "When I watched those movies, I always liked the bad guys. I knew they were evil, but they just seemed cool."

Yeah, well, the thing is there's nothing cool, and there's also nothing good about naive harmlessness. You know, this is one of the things I really liked about learning what I learned from you. It's like naive harmlessness is—it's worse than monstrosity! Because the problem is if you're naive and harmless, then someone else has to be the monster.

And that's not good because you are the monster. So the bad guys are cool because they're cooler than the people who think they're good, but who are just cowardly and naive. That's why people like bad guys in movies.

So David Jackson, what are your thoughts on Sofia's citizenship status? That's the robot. I believe that the Saudi or the Saudis made it into a citizen. Here I've got a thought: wouldn't it be nice if the Saudis actually let their women be citizens?

That's what I— that's my thoughts! So I don't think that the rest of the world is in any position to take any lessons on whatsoever on what constitutes citizenship from the Saudis. That's my feeling about that. I'm not a fan of Saudi Arabian culture; I'm not a fan of the way that they treat their women; I'm not a fan of the way that they disseminate Wahhabi propaganda into the West; I'm not a fan of the way that they despise work; and I'm not a fan of the Saudi Arabians.

And the fact that they granted Sofia citizenship status is a publicity stunt of the worst form, as far as I'm concerned. So hello, Dr. Peterson! Do you ever fear that your psychological reading of the Bible is wrong? Well, I'm sure it's wrong in some ways.

Even Satan can use scripture for his own purpose. What if you're just using the word for your own gain? Well then, God help me, I guess! That's what I would say. What if I'm just using the word for my own gain? I guess it would depend on what you think of as gain.

I am using it for my own gain, but I would say that I've aligned my own gain with the gain of others. And that's made my own gain—a weird thing, right? Because if I'm, see that way I can have my cake and eat it too. I can do what I think is best for me, but at the same time I can do what is best for others, and I've also defined what is best for me as what is simultaneously best for others.

And I believe that—I truly believe that. I think I'm fully convinced of that because I've thought it through. So that's my answer to that. Ellen Wilson, how do I tell my half-brother 14 and 17 that their father didn't leave three years ago but that we kicked him out because he's a pedophile who targeted my sister?

I'm tired of lying. Jesus, Ellen, that's a rough one. I can't tell you—I can't help you; it's too—I need to know way more details. I can imagine you're tired of lying; the 14-year-old might be a little young.

I don't know, Ellen. It's too complicated. I can't come up with a good answer for you, I'm sorry. Alright, I'd have to know more details in order not to botch the job.

Okay, let's see here. I'm a British Conservative millennial training to be a schoolteacher. How can I protect children aged five to eleven from post-modernism, which is everywhere in school? God, that's a good question.

That's Freya Hanna—that was the me video I was making today was about that. Teach them what you believe to be true, right? Formulate for yourself a philosophy of education—a serious one! Write it down! You can think about it as a mission statement, but write it down.

Spend some time on it, man, because you're devoting your whole life to that—figuring out what kind of teacher you want to be. And come up with articulated reasons why you're going to be that sort of teacher, and then do it, come hell or high water. You know, like often there's kids out there that only have to run into one good adult, and that will set them on the proper course through their life, and you could be that one good adult.

So I would say learn everything you can about possible post-modernism so you're a master of it. Decide what sort of teacher you want to be—implement that, and you'll be a bulwark against that kind of catastrophic foolishness and help many, many people.

If the right to identify with certain arguments has to be earned, how does one earn it? How do we truthfully discuss ideas for which we have not earned it? That's Ben Wood. If the right to identify with certain arguments has to be earned, how does one earn it?

Well, I think you start by feeling out physiologically what arguments you do have the right to make and win. And that's that meditative consultassins practice that we talked about earlier. You have to pay attention to your words and see that when you utter them, they put you in a solid place—that's the line between chaos and order, as far as I'm concerned.

And you can test continually the extensibility of your arguments by doing so. You can implement more and more sophisticated arguments as you get better and better at finding that place to stand; and take on larger and larger problems.

I guess that's the other part of it is, you know, how do you earn the right to an argument—to a position? Pick a small problem—one that you think you could solve, but that's a little more than you can chew. You know, that—bite off a little more than you can chew, but not too much. Then see if you can be successful at solving it, and then that'll strengthen you and put things in order a little bit, and then that'll entitle you to the use of certain arguments, and those arguments will be related to what you've just done.

And then as soon as you've done that, you'll be a little stronger and more put together. Then you can take on a little bit bigger problem and fix that, and then the same thing will happen, and you just keep doing that. It's like progressive weightlifting.

And that—and you can't truthfully discuss ideas that you haven't yet earned—you can't! You have to be quiet, you have to listen, or you have to think about something else. You have to use something else—there's lots to do, you know? You don't have to engage in arguments that you don't have any right to engage in when there's all sorts of things you can engage in right in front of you that would fully engage you, that would be very useful, and that you could contribute to.

You know, I really like this idea of incremental improvement—it's such a good idea. You look around, like I have this room that I'm in right now, and it's kind of messy. I know I tell people to keep my their room clean, and I've been trying to clean up this room since like last January, but I guess because so much chaos has been rated around me in some sense that some of it's flooded into this room.

The rest of the house is in really good order, but the residual chaos is still in this room. But when I come in here, you know, I try to spend five minutes to clean up a bit of correspondence or something, and I'm definitely making progress. The room is in much better shape than it was.

Don't underestimate the utility of incremental improvement. And you strengthen yourself by doing that, and then you can talk about the things that you've actually done, you know, in detail—in the kind of detail that would convince someone who is skeptical and knowledgeable that you or someone who knew what they were talking about.

And then if you do that over ten years, like you'll be solid. You'll—the breadth of argumentation that you'll have at your fingertips will vastly improve. I'm a female student in STEM, and I feel bombarded by all the feminist groups trying to infantilize me. How do I prevent them from turning me into an adult child?

You know, one of the things that's really useful to do in university is to pick your peer group. When I went to university, I made new friends in university, and that was really useful. So I had my personal friends, and they were people who were trying to aim at something better than what they had—something better than what they had left, and that was a real relief to me. I wrote about that in my new book too, called "Make Friends with People Who Want the Best for You." That's Rule 3.

But I also realized that when you went to university, you picked your peers. And in the STEM fields, what you should do is pick some great scientists. And those could be people that you just read books about—pick some great scientists, men, or some great engineers, or some great mathematicians.

Because I don't know where you are in the STEM fields—pick a hero or two or three and then make those your peers, right? And now, pay attention to all the noise and ruckus that you hear around you—it's all nonsense anyways. Partly what should happen when you go to university is that you should be introduced to great people.

And those can be great people of the past—their spirits still live on in their work and books, and you can pick them as peers and just ignore all that idiot political nonsense while you straighten your cell phone and learn to be great at what you do. Develop a philosophy of greatness and that will keep the social justice warriors at bay.

What books aren't we reading to our young children? Well, it depends on how young, really young. There's this book called "How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." I'll type that now. I've done something technical—it's called "How to Teach," meaning something technically poor "your child to read in 100 easy lessons."

That is an excellent book because you can actually teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons—very smart, very, very smart book, very well developed psychologically. Older kids—I really like the Harry Potter books. I think that Rowling nailed the mythological structure. What else? I'm in collaboration with my daughter; I'm putting together a reading list for young people—for kids and young adults.

So I guess I'll have to answer it that way. I can't bring it to mind on—I can't bring it to mind. Daniel, how to be a good partner to someone suffering from depression? That's a tough one, man. It's very hard to live with someone who's suffering from depression. We're helping without enabling and pushing without being too judgmental.

Well, again, the Devil's in the details. Is the person seeing a counselor? Because if they're depressed, then they need to talk to someone. Have they tried antidepressants? Because if they're depressed, they should try antidepressants and they should be strongly encouraged to do so, and maybe that encouragement should even border on a demand because depression is just—it's terrible.

It's terrible for the person who's experiencing it, like unutterably terrible. And it's terrible for the person who is living with the person who has depression. And so it's incumbent on the person who has depression to do everything they possibly can in order to set it straight, and it's hard.

But you know, there's lots of potential treatments for depression that have some efficacy. And antidepressants really do work wonders on people. You can try 5-hydroxytryptamine too; you could look that up—5-HTP. It's usually three times 100 milligrams, and you can—if you try that sometimes, you can find out if antidepressants will work for you without having to resort to the antidepressants themselves.

You can also help the depressed person make a plan in the morning; that can be really useful or maybe a plan the night before if they're just not in any shape to do it in the morning, to sit down and say, "Okay, well, you have to get through tomorrow." And that's another good piece of advice.

And so in Rule 12 I talk about that sometimes in relation to depression. Rule 12 is "Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street." And it's a bit of a meditation about what to do when your life is in absolute crisis. But one of the things you can do with someone who's depressed is narrow—and this is what I discuss in this chapter—is narrow their time frame.

You know, maybe a depressed person can't think a week ahead, but maybe they can think about tomorrow. And you can sit down and say, "Okay, well, you have to get through tomorrow. And so how are we going to structure tomorrow so that it will be okay, and so that you'll be able to sleep reasonably soundly when you go to bed tomorrow night?" And then tomorrow night we'll do the same thing.

And helping someone come up with a daily plan can help a lot. Now, they might object and squawk and complain about it, but you should be, I would say, relatively persistent about that. And you can say, "Look, let's just try it for a week." And if they say no, then you say, "Well, let's try it for one day."

You know, guys, the person's got to be pretty unreasonable if they... "Let's plan for 10 minutes just for tomorrow and see if that's helpful." You know, if the person objects, you can keep cutting the magnitude of what you're asking down until you finally get a bit of agreement from them.

But helping someone depressed plan can help a lot. You, Philip, you said you don't go to church because the pastors are lying most of the time. What do you mean by lying in this instance? I don't—my experience has been that they don't believe what they're saying. That's what it sounds like to me. That's what I mean by lying. They say these things, and they tell people to believe them, but they don't believe them themselves.

And so—and they're actually not listening to them. They're not listening to what they're saying—that's the thing that I've always had this experience in church. And there's lots of other reasons I don't go to church, and a lot of them have to do with me—not with the insufficiency of church—but you know, a lot of the scriptural writings really have really hit me. And I do understand some of them, I think, to some degree.

And it's kind of painful to hear them utilized by people who are doing it formulaically or without conviction, or even worse, knowing full well that they don't believe what they're saying. And so that's what I mean by lying. My first-ever girlfriend of three months is pregnant and keeping the baby. She said I can walk away or marry her—no in between. I don't love her. What do I do?

Well, I guess you have to figure out what you want. Maybe you could sit down and write out what you would like in terms of your relationship with this child. You know, you've got a child coming—that's really something. That's someone that could actually like you! You know, maybe you could write down, and you could sit down and write out and offer, "Here's what I could offer to this child. Here's what I would like to offer to this child."

Think about it, because you know, maybe you want to have a relationship with this person. You know that person might be around when you're like 70—so does somebody you could have a relationship with for the rest of your life. What do you want that person to think about you? Now, you don't love her mother—that's a real complication and you know, I would say, well that's a real complication. So you're in quite the fix.

But you could decide what you're willing to offer, and then you could—and do it in detail, right? Not just, "Well I'd like to help." It's like, Jesus, that's not helpful! You're way past "I'd like to help." You know, here is an amount of money I'd like to contribute; here's an amount of time I’d like to spend with the child; here's an amount of time I would spend babysitting—make differentiated, make a real plan like you're someone with a clue and offer that to your girlfriend and see what she says and give her some time to think about it.

You know, because maybe this could be a blessing instead of a curse. So and she said I can walk away or marry her—no in between! Well, that's what she says. But you know, maybe if you made her a concrete offer she'd be willing to reconsider. Often, like, a new mother completely use help with the baby—could really use help with the baby.

So even just being a babysitter, if you were committed to it and made the real offer like you'd thought about—think about it for a whole week. It's like, "Okay, here comes this baby—if I was being a civilized, useful person, but I don't love the